So, now my #1 concern when looking for a new job is, "am I interested in what I will be programming?" If the answer is no, then no amount of "cool technology" or "cool workplace environment" can make it worthwhile.
Ah yes, but can no amount of money make it worthwile?
Right. No amount of money can make it worthwhile. Eventually you will feel miserable about the job you are doing and yourself. The worst part is, the more they pay you, the more you will feel obligated to give the job more than its really worth.
My own feelings are now that I have no intention of taking a job that will only make me miserable. I say this even though I've been unemployed for almost five months (which is by far a new record for me).
To put the answer in a less volatile frame (although I'm not sure why I bother when the original post has "flamebait" in the subject;-), the carbon sequestered in fossil fuels represents millions of years of accumulated organics. We have released all of that carbon back into the biosphere in a very short length of time. It may even be reasonable to think of the process as reverting the atmosphere to a Pre-Cambrian state, but I don't think that is in any way a desireable thing.
Your fuel tank isn't under pressure like a hydro tank would be. A puncture in your fuel tank won't cause a massive explosion. Besides, a bowl of gasoline on fire doesn't cause a violent explosion, say, compared to a bowl/whatever of hydrogen.
Using monolithic, it means that it is a single entity, not easily separated into modules.
Monolithic when talking about kernels refers to a "kitchen sink" approach, where the kernel supplies many functions. This is opposed by the "micro kernel" model, where the kernel provides minimal services, and many of the functions provided by the kernel in a monolithic model are instead supplied by user level programs. Monolithic vs. micro-kernel has nothing whatsoever to do with the modularity of the code.
Most UNIX derivitives (including Linux) fall into the monolithic model, while many of them have had loadable modules for many years. However, modular source has been a feature of UNIX since the beginning, and has always been one of the attractions of UNIX.
How modular is Linux?
How easy is it to pull apart the pieces?
(I honestly don't know the answers, so input would be great).
Pretty easy, depending on how you define Linux. The kernel is a monolithic kernel made from many modules. The rest of the system is just a bunch of programs that depend on various shared libraries. In this regard Windows is essentially identical, other than the fact that MSFT refuses to distribute various key components independant of particular applications, even though other applications use those components. This is why MSFT continues to maintain that Windows would be crippled if IE were removed. They are claiming that components such as the html renderer cannot be distributed without IE. This is contradicted by the fact that many applications use that component and no other part of IE.
Honestly, coders strive for modularity on almost every project. Theory says its possible, but anyone that's worked on a large OO project knows that there is always an exception (usually a dozen) to the rule, and "seperating" the modules is a lot more work than you'd think.
MSFT uses COM to export various modules from programs like IE. All of these modules have well-defined interfaces that can be used by other programs. By definition these parts are modular, and have no dependenciels other than (perhaps) on other COM modules. Any spaghetti is hidden behind the COM interface. In the UNIX world we sort of do the same thing, in that code that is meant to be shared is put into shared libraries and usually packaged separately from the main application.
Perhaps these bright folks can come up with something to fix my tinnitus. I can't even stay in a truly quiet room without going half mad from the ringing in my ears.
If Sony tried to market this thing in the U.S. they would probably run afoul of state and Federal Consumer Protection Agencies. In spite of what Sony may claim, any sudden crash of a computer has the potential to cause irrepairable harm. I seriously doubt that any company can dodge responsibility with a printed disclaimer. Which of course explains why this copy protection (ha!) is only being sold in Europe. In the litigious U.S. they would very likely get into trouble very quickly.
Burbank is home to Der Mouse. He isn't just dependant on Disney for money, but for votes.
Re:How many do you think Two Towers is going to wi
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
·
· Score: 2
Watching the Oscars(r) last night, I was really impressed by how the Academy(tm) managed to recognize a number of very good films and actors that in past years would have been neglected.
I was very pleased to see Jim Broadbent finally get recognized for years of excellent work. In past years a black actress would never have received an Oscar(r) nomination, let alone an award, for a film like "Monster's Ball."
"The Dish" was nice, but in no way Oscarworthy. As others have noted, the other films were recognized with nominations, but didn't win. Its hard to compete with mental illness when playing for sympathy from the Academy;-).
This is very old news. The NMP has been known to drift for pretty much as long as there have been compasses. The magnetic declination on topo maps has always been out of date, usually from the moment they've been printed. For example, I've had people tell me that the magnetic declination in the Rocky Mountain Front Range is 17 deg E (based on topos), when in fact it is currently close to 0 (I'm too lazy to look up current coordinates;-). It may very well have been 17 deg in 1903, but the pole has drifted considerably since then!
The article also makes it clear that the odds are poor that it will actually end up in Siberia, as the pole has never followed a straight line, and the rate of movement has always been unpredictable.
As long as they are attempting to re-invent the PC, they should loose the floppy drive. It takes up a lot of space and isn't even used most of the time. They need to have a built-in 802.11b and net-booting. That would be cool.
Desktop system support required for S3 and Fast Boot capabilities, based on Windows XP advances for ACPI-compliant power management.
The implication of this statement is that Windows XP ACPI is not the same as ACPI. This explains a few things, like why every d**n ACPI BIOS out there violates the ACPI specs and must be patched in order to have a prayer of working with Linux. Of course, even when patched most laptops are working poorly at best.
This is clearly a ploy by MSFT to subvert a standard (of which they are a primary sponsor!) to the detriment of competing operating systems. I'm glad that they've stated it so clearly. Forward this to Bill Lockyer.
Isn't the.net framework an ECMA standard now?
Isn't someone working on a free implementation [go-mono.org] of that standard?
Are you calling it proprietary just because it comes from billy boy?
It is proprietary. The C# language and CLR are indeed both ECMA standards, but so is Javascript, and look how "standard" that is.
More importantly, many of the run-time libraries used by CLR are not ECMA standards, and will not be made available to the development community except as MSFT products. We can safely assume that many web-based products built on.NET will depend on these libraries, and thus be portable to any platform that MSFT wishes to support. Take a guess as to how many platforms that will be.
MSFT doesn't seem to object to the server side of.NET running on platforms other than Windows. After all, even they must realize that Windows doesn't cut it for Enterprise level servers, so they still need to play in that world until such time as they can eliminate Solaris and AIX. But I seriously doubt that they will ever give up control of the client short of the entire management team at MSFT being replaced by Pods.
For many acts, suddenly there appears to be little difference between the illicit file-sharing system and record-label services.
This one line really stood out for me. I think that it means the revival of Napster in all its glory. At least with Napster, artists can actually connect with their audience without the intermediary of a bunch of real pirates.
For most artists, the real threat to their attempt at a livelyhood aren't the people swapping 64kbit MP3 files, its the recording industry.
First, the copy protection makes only works on Windows. What if you use a Mac and want to listen on your computer? Linux is obviously right out.
What if you want to a legitimate copy on your hard drive? Sounds like that won't work, either.
Looks like it might be time to dig out ye olde Indigo in the basement and use the SPDIF inputs to rip CD's so that I can get a clean copy for encoding. What a hassle. Too bad Joe Sixpack doesn't have digital ins on his machine.
Good, but not golden ear good. Analog tape is about 105 db
Really? What deck and what tape? I'd really like to hear 105db on a consumer tape deck.
I hadda chuckle though, the heading here says "any audio connector you can think of".... No balanced 1/4", no XLR, no bantam jacks, not to mention no external 5 pin DIN for midi. Still, not bad for consumer gear
It does have MIDI, but yeah, no balanced guzzintas or guzouttas. Its not a piece of pro gear. I'd love to see something like this that uses 1394 and has multiple digital and balanced connectors. That really would be cool.
How can anyone think that using CGI would add value to Curious George, or especially to Where the Wild Things Are. Both of these are books, and quite frankly will be impossible to make into a compelling motion pictures.
I can just imagine the pitch session:
Producer:
Ok, we can do Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak has agreed to supervise an army of sensitive consumptive artists to hand paint every cel. It'll be beautiful, and about 10 minutes long, but it'll be a shoe-in to win Best Animated Short.
Studio Exec: No way. Its gotta be feature length CGI or nothing! I can't put out a family film that isn't CGI! Not after Shrek!
It took years for DVD to finally be accepted, and only recently has become cheap enough for the average home user.
DVD has had the fastest adoption rate of any new media technology, ever. Faster even than CD. The industry has been astonished by how quickly it took over.
To me, this indicates that perhaps consumers aren't as uncaring about video quality as we all though. Or maybe its just a case of "Give Me Convience, Or Give Me Death!" as Jello put it so aptly. DVD's are more convienent than VHS tapes.
The question is whether or not there will be any tolerance or demand for lower quality video on a DVD. My guess is no, although I could see a market for a non-computer playback of home videos processed and compressed on a PC. Perhaps this is the real market MSFT is going after. Yeah, right.
That's ~300$US for 60GB of backup. Given that 60GB hard drives go for about $140, that's pretty bad. The tapes by themselves cost nearly as much per GB as hard drives, and then you add in an additional $200 for the tape drive on top of that.
This misses the point. As has been pointed out, hard drives are not a backup medium. If you need to actually have a chance at restoring data, tape is still king, albeit perhaps King Lear in his dotage.
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Right. No amount of money can make it worthwhile. Eventually you will feel miserable about the job you are doing and yourself. The worst part is, the more they pay you, the more you will feel obligated to give the job more than its really worth.
My own feelings are now that I have no intention of taking a job that will only make me miserable. I say this even though I've been unemployed for almost five months (which is by far a new record for me).
To put the answer in a less volatile frame (although I'm not sure why I bother when the original post has "flamebait" in the subject ;-), the carbon sequestered in fossil fuels represents millions of years of accumulated organics. We have released all of that carbon back into the biosphere in a very short length of time. It may even be reasonable to think of the process as reverting the atmosphere to a Pre-Cambrian state, but I don't think that is in any way a desireable thing.
And your evidence that this would happen is...?
Monolithic when talking about kernels refers to a "kitchen sink" approach, where the kernel supplies many functions. This is opposed by the "micro kernel" model, where the kernel provides minimal services, and many of the functions provided by the kernel in a monolithic model are instead supplied by user level programs. Monolithic vs. micro-kernel has nothing whatsoever to do with the modularity of the code.
Most UNIX derivitives (including Linux) fall into the monolithic model, while many of them have had loadable modules for many years. However, modular source has been a feature of UNIX since the beginning, and has always been one of the attractions of UNIX.
Pretty easy, depending on how you define Linux. The kernel is a monolithic kernel made from many modules. The rest of the system is just a bunch of programs that depend on various shared libraries. In this regard Windows is essentially identical, other than the fact that MSFT refuses to distribute various key components independant of particular applications, even though other applications use those components. This is why MSFT continues to maintain that Windows would be crippled if IE were removed. They are claiming that components such as the html renderer cannot be distributed without IE. This is contradicted by the fact that many applications use that component and no other part of IE.
MSFT uses COM to export various modules from programs like IE. All of these modules have well-defined interfaces that can be used by other programs. By definition these parts are modular, and have no dependenciels other than (perhaps) on other COM modules. Any spaghetti is hidden behind the COM interface. In the UNIX world we sort of do the same thing, in that code that is meant to be shared is put into shared libraries and usually packaged separately from the main application.
Perhaps these bright folks can come up with something to fix my tinnitus. I can't even stay in a truly quiet room without going half mad from the ringing in my ears.
If Sony tried to market this thing in the U.S. they would probably run afoul of state and Federal Consumer Protection Agencies. In spite of what Sony may claim, any sudden crash of a computer has the potential to cause irrepairable harm. I seriously doubt that any company can dodge responsibility with a printed disclaimer. Which of course explains why this copy protection (ha!) is only being sold in Europe. In the litigious U.S. they would very likely get into trouble very quickly.
Burbank is home to Der Mouse. He isn't just dependant on Disney for money, but for votes.
Watching the Oscars(r) last night, I was really impressed by how the Academy(tm) managed to recognize a number of very good films and actors that in past years would have been neglected.
;-).
I was very pleased to see Jim Broadbent finally get recognized for years of excellent work. In past years a black actress would never have received an Oscar(r) nomination, let alone an award, for a film like "Monster's Ball."
"The Dish" was nice, but in no way Oscarworthy. As others have noted, the other films were recognized with nominations, but didn't win. Its hard to compete with mental illness when playing for sympathy from the Academy
This is very old news. The NMP has been known to drift for pretty much as long as there have been compasses. The magnetic declination on topo maps has always been out of date, usually from the moment they've been printed. For example, I've had people tell me that the magnetic declination in the Rocky Mountain Front Range is 17 deg E (based on topos), when in fact it is currently close to 0 (I'm too lazy to look up current coordinates ;-). It may very well have been 17 deg in 1903, but the pole has drifted considerably since then!
The article also makes it clear that the odds are poor that it will actually end up in Siberia, as the pole has never followed a straight line, and the rate of movement has always been unpredictable.
As long as they are attempting to re-invent the PC, they should loose the floppy drive. It takes up a lot of space and isn't even used most of the time. They need to have a built-in 802.11b and net-booting. That would be cool.
The implication of this statement is that Windows XP ACPI is not the same as ACPI. This explains a few things, like why every d**n ACPI BIOS out there violates the ACPI specs and must be patched in order to have a prayer of working with Linux. Of course, even when patched most laptops are working poorly at best.
This is clearly a ploy by MSFT to subvert a standard (of which they are a primary sponsor!) to the detriment of competing operating systems. I'm glad that they've stated it so clearly. Forward this to Bill Lockyer.
It is proprietary. The C# language and CLR are indeed both ECMA standards, but so is Javascript, and look how "standard" that is.
More importantly, many of the run-time libraries used by CLR are not ECMA standards, and will not be made available to the development community except as MSFT products. We can safely assume that many web-based products built on .NET will depend on these libraries, and thus be portable to any platform that MSFT wishes to support. Take a guess as to how many platforms that will be.
MSFT doesn't seem to object to the server side of .NET running on platforms other than Windows. After all, even they must realize that Windows doesn't cut it for Enterprise level servers, so they still need to play in that world until such time as they can eliminate Solaris and AIX. But I seriously doubt that they will ever give up control of the client short of the entire management team at MSFT being replaced by Pods.
This one line really stood out for me. I think that it means the revival of Napster in all its glory. At least with Napster, artists can actually connect with their audience without the intermediary of a bunch of real pirates.
For most artists, the real threat to their attempt at a livelyhood aren't the people swapping 64kbit MP3 files, its the recording industry.
What if you want to a legitimate copy on your hard drive? Sounds like that won't work, either.
Looks like it might be time to dig out ye olde Indigo in the basement and use the SPDIF inputs to rip CD's so that I can get a clean copy for encoding. What a hassle. Too bad Joe Sixpack doesn't have digital ins on his machine.
Really? What deck and what tape? I'd really like to hear 105db on a consumer tape deck.
It does have MIDI, but yeah, no balanced guzzintas or guzouttas. Its not a piece of pro gear. I'd love to see something like this that uses 1394 and has multiple digital and balanced connectors. That really would be cool.
I can just imagine the pitch session:
Producer: Ok, we can do Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak has agreed to supervise an army of sensitive consumptive artists to hand paint every cel. It'll be beautiful, and about 10 minutes long, but it'll be a shoe-in to win Best Animated Short.
Studio Exec: No way. Its gotta be feature length CGI or nothing! I can't put out a family film that isn't CGI! Not after Shrek!
This little feature also has the effect of killing third party debugging tools for Windows. How amusing.
DVD has had the fastest adoption rate of any new media technology, ever. Faster even than CD. The industry has been astonished by how quickly it took over.
To me, this indicates that perhaps consumers aren't as uncaring about video quality as we all though. Or maybe its just a case of "Give Me Convience, Or Give Me Death!" as Jello put it so aptly. DVD's are more convienent than VHS tapes.
The question is whether or not there will be any tolerance or demand for lower quality video on a DVD. My guess is no, although I could see a market for a non-computer playback of home videos processed and compressed on a PC. Perhaps this is the real market MSFT is going after. Yeah, right.
This misses the point. As has been pointed out, hard drives are not a backup medium. If you need to actually have a chance at restoring data, tape is still king, albeit perhaps King Lear in his dotage.