(Business travelers are apparently the highest margin passenger class becuase they tend to book nicer seats and fly on shorter notices so they're higher up the essentially exponentail cost function correlating time-to-flight-from-ticket-booking and ticket price.)
The reason business travellers are willing to pay for better seats is that they have the room to work on board the plane! There are other advantages too (fully flexible ticket, greater cabin allowance so you don't have to check luggage and can avoid reclaim queues, etc) but really, what matters is being able to work on board. You can get an awful lot done with no distractions between London and San Francisco, especially if you can time the flight to coincide with a working day - that's one of the reasons that companies foot the bill for business class. Work that you can do on board these days pretty much demands a computer. Ban laptops and two things will happen: business people who really need to be there will be sent coach, and everyone else will invest in videoconferencing.
The one airline that's smart enough to train its cabin crew in what is acceptable or not is going to own the market.
Not that I care though. If it's good for safety it's beyond question.
What's "good for safety" is the plane never taking off. There is always a compromise between expediency and safety.
And honestly, if you don't have your work done by the time you catch the plane to your distant meeting, the chances of you being ready are slim-to-none anyway
That's not true either. Ever done business travel? It's common to get a template done at the office, get the very latest figures as assumptions that morning, and work them into your document on the plane. If it's just a transatlantic flight, you'll probably have to deliver that document or presentation as soon as you can get to the client's office from the airport.
Mocha P4 is a PC that is so flexible, efficient, compact and portable technically knocks down all existing desk top PCs. Choosing a big and bulky inappropriate PC has become an obsolete way of thinking. The over all technology of other mini-book PCs around is still far from our achievement today. Take advantage of the new breed PC of tomorrow and experience the next generation way of computing."
Why not make him buy a banner ad like everyone else? This isn't a product review or even an annoucement, it's blatant, and unsubstantiated, hype.
Telecommuting isn't being used mainly to save on transportation or infrastructure costs. Transport is borne by the worker, but the authority to telecommute is with the worker's management. Telecommuters also tend to have their own desks, cubes or offices at the company workplace.
Yes and no. Hot desking/hoteling is the best example of telecommuting/road working saving money on real estate. But those workers are more expensive to support, since a laptop in a bag is more fragile than a PC on a desk.
Note well how call centers are filled with people who must commute every workday to do a job that is structurally well suited to working at home over the telephone. But that's not telecommuting as currently practiced -- that's for privileged types and not for the sweatshop laborers no matter how heavily the system revolves around pure telephony.
Call center staff don't just answer the phone, they also have to do stuff on behalf of the customer. In essence, a call center may be viewed as a "black box" voice recognition system. You connect one end to the phone system, and the other end to your corporate IT infrastructure. Assuming that the cost of its external voice and data links are the same, a call center can be located anywhere in the world, so you put it where the internal mechanism (i.e. the people) can be sourced most cheaply.
The reason that it's difficult for call center staff to work from home is that the technology is not quite there yet to allow them to securely run the applications that do the call center's real work (manipulating data in a corporate database), even though the technology to link them to voice networks does exist. Once this problem is solved, you simply pay operators by calls answered satisfactorily, and then they can telecommute to their heart's content.
Work-from-home schemes are rife; they are always scams when advertised remotely, or half-scams when advertised by a local office; and the popular perception of telecommuting is equally out-of-touch with reality
Telecommuting works if its an occasional thing. For example, an on-call sysadmin can RAS into the office if their pager goes off, or perform routine maintenance from home (say, checking the backup completed). But if people want to work from home then they need a job structured in such a way that all resources are available at home and contact with the outside world can be asynchronous for most of the time. Examples of this are writing books or articles, many types of art, even shareware developer.
I find it kinda cool that nobody (*in recorded history*) has ever been killed by a meteorite.
I guess that depends if you buy into the theory that a meteorite caused the last ice age and wiped out most life on the planet...
Re:This guy will start hollering for a human soon.
on
Shop Till It Drops
·
· Score: 2
Just wait until this fellow puts in five dollars only to see it disappear without a trace, or until that packet of Pop-Tarts gets stuck halfway off its little rack and won't drop however much he kicks the machine. He'll start looking for someone to whine to about getting his money back.
If that were a problem, payphones would never have taken off, nor indeed any other sorts of vending machines. There's probably a label on the front giving a number to call if there are any real problems. Route this number to a depot and one maintenance man's territory is simply a function of how frequently the machine fails.
My point is that you are liar. You were lying when you said there are more people who know oracle then mysql.
I didn't say it; Chanc_Gorkon did. Go back and read the original parent.
Re:Stop nit-picking and just enjoy the damn film
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
·
· Score: 3, Funny
On the other hand, come to think of it, one of the biggest goofs in the movie was Magneto's assertion that a lightning bolt to the copper structure in the Statue would be dangerous, when in fact it would have safely been conducted away.
Most likely, he knew that the X-men specialized in lookin' good and left all the thinking to the Professor, who wasn't present, and he was bluffing.
Just from the whining posts of "OS X is cool but Apple is a big, mean, evil proprietary hardware manufacturer", you can see that O'Reilly is completely wrong in suggesting Linux users are a perfect niche target
What you are saying might be true for Linux hobbyists, but it doesn't apply to corporates who might be considering a Unix desktop, especially one to unify their former Mac and Windows users. Only one of those groups is willing to spend money on an operating system. Apple could well enjoy much greater success than Sun on the desktop of non-technical users.
Then it wouldn't "just work". Say what you like about Microsoft, they support a vast range of hardware, and that's one of the reasons they software is sometimes unreliable. The only way Apple products can "just work" is if Apple maintains absolute control over the hardware their software runs on.
When they can lift this payload with a fully reusable SSTO (single stage to orbit) vehicle, that will be newsworthy. What we see here is merely the next gradual refinement of a technology that is basically unchanged since the 1940s.
How are they going to graduate well-rounded people who still want to be engineers?
You're moderated as funny, but it's an excellent point. I studied Mech Eng at undergrad, and quickly came to realize that the engineering profession was for people who couldn't find anything better to do. An engineering degree gives you the tools for almost any technical or quantitative role, most of which are better paid and have better career prospects than engineering itself. People with lives and interests outside of engineering leave the field in droves for IT, finance, etc. If I'd known back then what I know now about by career path, I'd have chosen something with a much lighter core course load (say, physics) and spent the rest of the time on history of art courses or something similar.
or does the notion of playing a game of simulating a terrorist attack seem sick?
Game is just the term used to describe a simulated situation in which all variables are free to move within constraints and the outcomes, combinations and emergent properties aren't scripted or known in advance. There branch of math for studying systems like this is called game theory.
It's not a "game" in that it's played for fun, although it has characteristics in common with games that are played for fun. After all, something like this is really just chess on a grand scale.
You have your causal relationship backwards. Consider: people are made of food, we are literally what we eat. Every molecule in your body is there because at one point or another, it was eaten.
Therefore, altho' it looks like food production must be expanded to cope with larger populations, in fact, increased food production has created the increase in population!
This is why I am so skeptical of "famines" in Africa. No matter how much financial and material aid the West sends, it makes no difference. There are no food shortages - it's solely corrupt governments starving their populations deliberately.
Re:They Are Pbly in India
on
Working Abroad?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Just a heads up, MOST Tier 1 support for Dell and Compaq has gone to India these days. Its actually a "premium" job over their to do tech support. I heard an article on NPR a couple of weeks ago about this (can't find the link). So if the people you are talking to have a funky accent, they pbly live overseas (god bless IP telephony)
Actually, Indians speak superb English. Indian call centers take it very seriously, and coach their workers to learn accents that are almost identical to the Home Counties. The reason is simply that with what most of the world recognises as a "proper" English accent, they can communicate easily with most of the world which translates directly into happier customers and winning more business for their call center. Some go even further, they pay their staff to read Western newspapers and keep up to date on current affairs and soap operas so they can make smalltalk with customers who want to chat. If you call an Indian call center, you are likely to get a graduate who is well-paid in the local currency and smart enough and trusted enough to actually solve your problem then and there. If you call a British call center, you will probably get a temp on an hourly wage with an impenetrable Northern or Welsh accent who has to get a supervisor to do the most trivial tasks. Having dealt with both, all I can say is the British and American call centers seriously need to get their act together because at the moment they are lagging India in both cost and quality.
No I am making the assumption that people who can not open up a text file and edit it are idiots. I'd say that was a reasonable assumption
Doctor: anyone who can't set a broken bone is an idiot! Mechanic: anyone who can't replace their own gearbox is an idiot! Musician: anyone who can't play the violin is an idiot!
See where I'm going with this? Geeks simply happen to have a few technical skills, that's all. Guess what, so do a lot of other people. Plenty of very, very smart people can't do so-called simple things on their computers, because to the vast majority of the population, computers are just a tool.
Perfect examples of this are found in the engineering fields. People who can use very sophisticated design software might not know how to, say, create a new user, something that a sysadmin would take for granted. But, see, in an engineering company, sysadmins are a cost center and engineers actually generate revenue. In almost any company in fact, sysadmins simply look after the technology so the real workers can get their jobs done. Remember that.
That was your original point and I want you to repeat it so I can call you a liar again.
There are more people who can ride a pushbike than can fly an F22. What's your point?
So.. Why not just install XP then PGP? I've been using PGP 6.5.8 since XP release and it works just dandy. The OE plugin is a bit shaky but it does work. Encrypted volumes (mounted files) works flawless.
I've experienced issues with PGP and XP's fast user switching. I guess that the PGP services aren't sure what to do with >1 interactive user logged on.
Oracle has been used for a lot of projects where it doesn't really need to be used, usually because the company already had a licence, but sometimes because the project was way over-spec'd
When you've got a bit more experience you'll realize that software is often extended well beyond its original spec, and it pays to make sure that you aren't locked into a limited technology that will require starting again from scratch if you need more. That's why people start on Oracle before they need all its features.
It's true that most windows users are idiots. Windows is written for idiots and appeals to idiots. Most people who run web sites however are smarter then your average windows idiot luser.
Ah, you are making the classical geek mistake of assuming that people who don't share your particular narrow technical specialty are idiots.
Let me give you an example. You ever watch TV? Are you an idiot because you don't know at least one of: UHF electronics, electricity generation, orbital mechanics, injection moulding, copper mining or driving a forklift truck in a warehouse? Because all of those skills are needed before you can watch TV.
No, I'd say it is far more idiotic to adopt a Linux-uber-alles attitude and not consider that there are many, many things that modern Windows does very well indeed.
The reason Oracle DBAs cost a lot of money is because they are rare and oracle is extrememly difficult to install, configure and run.
The reason we are expensive is because we can do things that MySQL admins can't even imagine.
Agreed -- your prior degree may make a lot of difference. Most academic science jobs are going to require a Ph.D in the relevant field, so you may have a lot of school ahead of you.
It's not clear if the question is about actually working as an academic, or working as a sysadmin in a university. A compromise might be to work as a sysadmin in a biotech company. Experience of warehousing and mining financial data would be easily transferrable.
1. Microsoft lobbyist 2. Microsoft license sweeps 3. Microsoft Strongarm tactics 4. [insert your own M$ reason]
Idiot. The US doesn't more readily adopt Linux because Joe User and his Grandma don't want to mess around with recompiling their kernels and editing text based configuration files and bitching to hardware manufacturers about device drivers in order to write letters, play games and email pictures of their kids and puppies to each other. If Microsoft didn't exist, Linux would still be confined to the tech community, and Apple (or Commodore or Acorn or whoever) would dominate the consumer and desktop space.
Face it, for 99% of computer users, Linux simply isn't suitable, at least not at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
(Business travelers are apparently the highest margin passenger class becuase they tend to book nicer seats and fly on shorter notices so they're higher up the essentially exponentail cost function correlating time-to-flight-from-ticket-booking and ticket price.)
The reason business travellers are willing to pay for better seats is that they have the room to work on board the plane! There are other advantages too (fully flexible ticket, greater cabin allowance so you don't have to check luggage and can avoid reclaim queues, etc) but really, what matters is being able to work on board. You can get an awful lot done with no distractions between London and San Francisco, especially if you can time the flight to coincide with a working day - that's one of the reasons that companies foot the bill for business class. Work that you can do on board these days pretty much demands a computer. Ban laptops and two things will happen: business people who really need to be there will be sent coach, and everyone else will invest in videoconferencing.
The one airline that's smart enough to train its cabin crew in what is acceptable or not is going to own the market.
Not that I care though. If it's good for safety it's beyond question.
What's "good for safety" is the plane never taking off. There is always a compromise between expediency and safety.
And honestly, if you don't have your work done by the time you catch the plane to your distant meeting, the chances of you being ready are slim-to-none anyway
That's not true either. Ever done business travel? It's common to get a template done at the office, get the very latest figures as assumptions that morning, and work them into your document on the plane. If it's just a transatlantic flight, you'll probably have to deliver that document or presentation as soon as you can get to the client's office from the airport.
Mocha P4 is a PC that is so flexible, efficient, compact and portable technically knocks down all existing desk top PCs. Choosing a big and bulky inappropriate PC has become an obsolete way of thinking. The over all technology of other mini-book PCs around is still far from our achievement today. Take advantage of the new breed PC of tomorrow and experience the next generation way of computing."
Why not make him buy a banner ad like everyone else? This isn't a product review or even an annoucement, it's blatant, and unsubstantiated, hype.
Personally, I think Apple will,very soon, tell Motorola to go piss up a rope (and I say, it's about time!).
Well, if Apple hadn't screwed Motorola on the whole Mac-clone issue, they'd be a lot friendlier today. What goes around, comes around.
Telecommuting isn't being used mainly to save on transportation or infrastructure costs. Transport is borne by the worker, but the authority to telecommute is with the worker's management. Telecommuters also tend to have their own desks, cubes or offices at the company workplace.
Yes and no. Hot desking/hoteling is the best example of telecommuting/road working saving money on real estate. But those workers are more expensive to support, since a laptop in a bag is more fragile than a PC on a desk.
Note well how call centers are filled with people who must commute every workday to do a job that is structurally well suited to working at home over the telephone. But that's not telecommuting as currently practiced -- that's for privileged types and not for the sweatshop laborers no matter how heavily the system revolves around pure telephony.
Call center staff don't just answer the phone, they also have to do stuff on behalf of the customer. In essence, a call center may be viewed as a "black box" voice recognition system. You connect one end to the phone system, and the other end to your corporate IT infrastructure. Assuming that the cost of its external voice and data links are the same, a call center can be located anywhere in the world, so you put it where the internal mechanism (i.e. the people) can be sourced most cheaply.
The reason that it's difficult for call center staff to work from home is that the technology is not quite there yet to allow them to securely run the applications that do the call center's real work (manipulating data in a corporate database), even though the technology to link them to voice networks does exist. Once this problem is solved, you simply pay operators by calls answered satisfactorily, and then they can telecommute to their heart's content.
Work-from-home schemes are rife; they are always scams when advertised remotely, or half-scams when advertised by a local office; and the popular perception of telecommuting is equally out-of-touch with reality
Telecommuting works if its an occasional thing. For example, an on-call sysadmin can RAS into the office if their pager goes off, or perform routine maintenance from home (say, checking the backup completed). But if people want to work from home then they need a job structured in such a way that all resources are available at home and contact with the outside world can be asynchronous for most of the time. Examples of this are writing books or articles, many types of art, even shareware developer.
I find it kinda cool that nobody (*in recorded history*) has ever been killed by a meteorite.
I guess that depends if you buy into the theory that a meteorite caused the last ice age and wiped out most life on the planet...
Just wait until this fellow puts in five dollars only to see it disappear without a trace, or until that packet of Pop-Tarts gets stuck halfway off its little rack and won't drop however much he kicks the machine. He'll start looking for someone to whine to about getting his money back.
If that were a problem, payphones would never have taken off, nor indeed any other sorts of vending machines. There's probably a label on the front giving a number to call if there are any real problems. Route this number to a depot and one maintenance man's territory is simply a function of how frequently the machine fails.
My point is that you are liar. You were lying when you said there are more people who know oracle then mysql.
I didn't say it; Chanc_Gorkon did. Go back and read the original parent.
On the other hand, come to think of it, one of the biggest goofs in the movie was Magneto's assertion that a lightning bolt to the copper structure in the Statue would be dangerous, when in fact it would have safely been conducted away.
Most likely, he knew that the X-men specialized in lookin' good and left all the thinking to the Professor, who wasn't present, and he was bluffing.
Just from the whining posts of "OS X is cool but Apple is a big, mean, evil proprietary hardware manufacturer", you can see that O'Reilly is completely wrong in suggesting Linux users are a perfect niche target
What you are saying might be true for Linux hobbyists, but it doesn't apply to corporates who might be considering a Unix desktop, especially one to unify their former Mac and Windows users. Only one of those groups is willing to spend money on an operating system. Apple could well enjoy much greater success than Sun on the desktop of non-technical users.
Let me build my own box.
Then it wouldn't "just work". Say what you like about Microsoft, they support a vast range of hardware, and that's one of the reasons they software is sometimes unreliable. The only way Apple products can "just work" is if Apple maintains absolute control over the hardware their software runs on.
I tried to surf the sites to find information on the cargo. Any pointers?
A EUTELSAT satellite. Wonder why they didn't launch it on our own Ariane?
Why is this such a big deal?
When they can lift this payload with a fully reusable SSTO (single stage to orbit) vehicle, that will be newsworthy. What we see here is merely the next gradual refinement of a technology that is basically unchanged since the 1940s.
How are they going to graduate well-rounded people who still want to be engineers?
You're moderated as funny, but it's an excellent point. I studied Mech Eng at undergrad, and quickly came to realize that the engineering profession was for people who couldn't find anything better to do. An engineering degree gives you the tools for almost any technical or quantitative role, most of which are better paid and have better career prospects than engineering itself. People with lives and interests outside of engineering leave the field in droves for IT, finance, etc. If I'd known back then what I know now about by career path, I'd have chosen something with a much lighter core course load (say, physics) and spent the rest of the time on history of art courses or something similar.
or does the notion of playing a game of simulating a terrorist attack seem sick?
Game is just the term used to describe a simulated situation in which all variables are free to move within constraints and the outcomes, combinations and emergent properties aren't scripted or known in advance. There branch of math for studying systems like this is called game theory.
It's not a "game" in that it's played for fun, although it has characteristics in common with games that are played for fun. After all, something like this is really just chess on a grand scale.
More mouths = more food consumed
You have your causal relationship backwards. Consider: people are made of food, we are literally what we eat. Every molecule in your body is there because at one point or another, it was eaten.
Therefore, altho' it looks like food production must be expanded to cope with larger populations, in fact, increased food production has created the increase in population!
This is why I am so skeptical of "famines" in Africa. No matter how much financial and material aid the West sends, it makes no difference. There are no food shortages - it's solely corrupt governments starving their populations deliberately.
Just a heads up, MOST Tier 1 support for Dell and Compaq has gone to India these days. Its actually a "premium" job over their to do tech support. I heard an article on NPR a couple of weeks ago about this (can't find the link). So if the people you are talking to have a funky accent, they pbly live overseas (god bless IP telephony)
Actually, Indians speak superb English. Indian call centers take it very seriously, and coach their workers to learn accents that are almost identical to the Home Counties. The reason is simply that with what most of the world recognises as a "proper" English accent, they can communicate easily with most of the world which translates directly into happier customers and winning more business for their call center. Some go even further, they pay their staff to read Western newspapers and keep up to date on current affairs and soap operas so they can make smalltalk with customers who want to chat. If you call an Indian call center, you are likely to get a graduate who is well-paid in the local currency and smart enough and trusted enough to actually solve your problem then and there. If you call a British call center, you will probably get a temp on an hourly wage with an impenetrable Northern or Welsh accent who has to get a supervisor to do the most trivial tasks. Having dealt with both, all I can say is the British and American call centers seriously need to get their act together because at the moment they are lagging India in both cost and quality.
No I am making the assumption that people who can not open up a text file and edit it are idiots. I'd say that was a reasonable assumption
Doctor: anyone who can't set a broken bone is an idiot!
Mechanic: anyone who can't replace their own gearbox is an idiot!
Musician: anyone who can't play the violin is an idiot!
See where I'm going with this? Geeks simply happen to have a few technical skills, that's all. Guess what, so do a lot of other people. Plenty of very, very smart people can't do so-called simple things on their computers, because to the vast majority of the population, computers are just a tool.
Perfect examples of this are found in the engineering fields. People who can use very sophisticated design software might not know how to, say, create a new user, something that a sysadmin would take for granted. But, see, in an engineering company, sysadmins are a cost center and engineers actually generate revenue. In almost any company in fact, sysadmins simply look after the technology so the real workers can get their jobs done. Remember that.
That was your original point and I want you to repeat it so I can call you a liar again.
There are more people who can ride a pushbike than can fly an F22. What's your point?
So.. Why not just install XP then PGP? I've been using PGP 6.5.8 since XP release and it works just dandy. The OE plugin is a bit shaky but it does work. Encrypted volumes (mounted files) works flawless.
I've experienced issues with PGP and XP's fast user switching. I guess that the PGP services aren't sure what to do with >1 interactive user logged on.
Oracle has been used for a lot of projects where it doesn't really need to be used, usually because the company already had a licence, but sometimes because the project was way over-spec'd
When you've got a bit more experience you'll realize that software is often extended well beyond its original spec, and it pays to make sure that you aren't locked into a limited technology that will require starting again from scratch if you need more. That's why people start on Oracle before they need all its features.
1. Small, lite-duty engine mostly for embedded or small-footprint apps. Subset of lanugage of #2.
Oracle Lite.
2. Full language, but lacking performance tuning. Mostly for development and smaller shops.
Oracle Workgroup Edition.
3. "Big-iron" version that has full language and performance tuning features.
Oracle Enterprise Edition.
It's true that most windows users are idiots. Windows is written for idiots and appeals to idiots. Most people who run web sites however are smarter then your average windows idiot luser.
Ah, you are making the classical geek mistake of assuming that people who don't share your particular narrow technical specialty are idiots.
Let me give you an example. You ever watch TV? Are you an idiot because you don't know at least one of: UHF electronics, electricity generation, orbital mechanics, injection moulding, copper mining or driving a forklift truck in a warehouse? Because all of those skills are needed before you can watch TV.
No, I'd say it is far more idiotic to adopt a Linux-uber-alles attitude and not consider that there are many, many things that modern Windows does very well indeed.
The reason Oracle DBAs cost a lot of money is because they are rare and oracle is extrememly difficult to install, configure and run.
The reason we are expensive is because we can do things that MySQL admins can't even imagine.
Agreed -- your prior degree may make a lot of difference. Most academic science jobs are going to require a Ph.D in the relevant field, so you may have a lot of school ahead of you.
It's not clear if the question is about actually working as an academic, or working as a sysadmin in a university. A compromise might be to work as a sysadmin in a biotech company. Experience of warehousing and mining financial data would be easily transferrable.
Er, pardon my ignorance, but who is Wil Wheaton?
He's a songwriter on Not That Kind by Anastacia. No, really he is.
Choise Linux - a billion Chinese can't be wrong
I wonder, given China's record on Human Rights, whether the Linux community will find itself in a similar situation to IBM?
1. Microsoft lobbyist
2. Microsoft license sweeps
3. Microsoft Strongarm tactics
4. [insert your own M$ reason]
Idiot. The US doesn't more readily adopt Linux because Joe User and his Grandma don't want to mess around with recompiling their kernels and editing text based configuration files and bitching to hardware manufacturers about device drivers in order to write letters, play games and email pictures of their kids and puppies to each other. If Microsoft didn't exist, Linux would still be confined to the tech community, and Apple (or Commodore or Acorn or whoever) would dominate the consumer and desktop space.
Face it, for 99% of computer users, Linux simply isn't suitable, at least not at the moment.