The movie was certainly about 10 years ahead of its time.
(I can't stand watching it now, because of the nasty 1980's rock-video hairstyles and costumes. But the dialog was some of the funniest stuff in cinema history - - big boo TAY!)
If we are, then oil and gas prices will trend upwards for the forseeable.
It could really go either way.
But if prices go up - alternatives will come on line, and demand for petroleum will drop (or level off). The impact on the global economy could be catastrophic - and billions may starve, hundreds of millions may lose their jobs, and with that, there could be a long tail of trailing-off demand. In that kind of environment, will "being a rich country" matter?
Strategically speaking, a rich country would better prepare itself for this post-peak-oil future by being a leader in energy efficiency and alternatives. As a way to invest that wealth, in future prosperity and security. But that's just an offhand observation.
...but now we're getting the best of both worlds and it's still improving. Putin can do whatever he wants if he keeps this track going.
Personally, I suspect that the recent demonization of Putin in the press has a lot more to do with the petroleum business than anything else. I think it was three years ago or so that he had some oil company CEO arrested for massive tax fraud, and there was a big hullabaloo in the press over that - and IIRC, Russia actually took national ownership of that oil company.
This is a BIG no-no in the eyes of the powers-that-be. It's what got Chavez in trouble. It's what got Saddam in trouble. It's what got Mosadegh (democratically-elected leader of Iran; replaced by the Shah in a CIA-backed coup) in trouble. It's what got Gray Davis (California governor - was planning on a buyout of utilities in California in the wake of the Enron power-market manipulation scam of 2000) in trouble. I was wondering when the other shoe was going to drop on Putin.
I think that troubleshooting is often more of a talent than a learned skill.
You can teach it - but it takes strong deductive reasoning, curiosity, and imagination. They probably need to bring those things to the table, because training those skills takes longer than it's probably worth. If someone has those three things, and NO knowlege, but access to information, then that person will make a good PC tech. Training them in the knowledge and domain experience is more practical.
That's basic troubleshooting. At higher levels, of course, you want someone to be able to make decisions like "how to I fix this spyware problem; google to find out which regkey to delete? or reinstall the OS? - if someone always takes the harder approach, that can affect how fast they are at digging through a pile of trouble-tickets.
The minotaur IIRC, is basically a repurposed minuteman III.
The nice thing about solid fuel rockets (as opposed to liquid-fuel), is that they leave a nice, visible trail as they ascend, which often persists for 30 minutes or more. Here on the W/C, we get to see minuteman missile tests out of Vandenberg 2-3 times a year. (mostly in the middle of the night, though).
When you see something like an Atlas or Delta go up, there isn't much of a trail at all, so if you aren't watching closely, you can miss it.
Of course, there are some bad things about solid-fuel rockets; the exhaust is often pretty nasty stuff, corrosive, and toxic. Plus, you can't throttle them back or shut them off if something goes wrong. On the other hand, they're so simple, mechanically, you're not likely to need to throttle them back.
But the best thing about solids, is that they usually supplement the larger Atlas and Delta vehicles, and you get to hear rocket scientists talk about "strap-ons".
I keep hearing people talk about "non-production hardware" - and it sounds like gibberish.
I asked my manager about this, and he snapped the pencil he was holding and started muttering something about "damn commies.". . .
Yes - there is a "Fantasy World" - it's where people are promoted into management for competence, and allocate sufficient resources for projects, and blue fairies ride on rainbows throwing bags of candy.
In the real world, we "test" - hell, we DEVELOP on production systems, that are mission-critical 24x7, with people's lives on the line. We get the axe when it doesn't work, and manager gets the bonus and the promotion when it does.
Well, looks like you fared better with the karma farming in this thread.
I only got 2 points, and you got 4!
I was disappointed to see "insightful" mods for my post, because; "Honest honey, it was a joke!" "I'm not laughing." "I was just kidding. I didn't MEAN it literally!"
(sometimes, winning karma means sleeping on the couch. . . )
You see, I'm married. I don't have ANY opinion on women. ESPECIALLY other women.
So, your wife doesn't cajole you into dissing other women? ("gawd she's fat." "why, yes, honey, I agree completely!")
The solution is to have a preference set somewhere in the OS. (overwrite, or drop changes).
Have a timeout on that dialog (with a visible count down timer - like the OS X logout dialog), and when the user does not respond in X minutes, force the save (or drop) and shut the fuck down.
EVERY choice a user has to make, is an opportunity for a saved preference to automate that task. The choice won't always be the right one - sometimes data will be lost. But it is the USER'S mistake to make. And if they don't like it, then they'll learn after the first data loss, and change the preference back, and they'll blame only themselves - not the arrogant (or craven) programmer who made the choice (or failed to make any choice) for them.
Because people will go from one store to another and compare prices, and decide which store to shop at based on a 2-3 penny price difference per pound of cheese.
Few people will go from one store to another, and stopwatch the lines over a period of several hours to get an average wait-time to compare with.
There's no competitive pressure on this aspect of your shopping. Therefore, there's no incentive for management to do anything about it (only when the lines start trailing back into the aisles and blocking traffic).
To be fair, if you google some of the Mac tech sites on "wake from sleep" - you'll find that, at least the desktop machines (power macs/mac pro) have had some issues with the video cards futzing out during wake. I had a friend who had a G5 power mac, bought hers at the same time I bought my dual. She had the problem, I didn't. Seemed linked to an OS X update. Anyhoo- She came to me for help, initially, our power macs had the SAME damn video card. I'd put mine into hers, and the problem went away. I put hers in mine, and I didn't have the problem on my system. I swapped em back, and her problem came back. We tried OS-reloads, battery swaps, PRAM resets. The problem would go away and come back.
Eventually, she had to take it back to Apple - and they gave her a new video card - and the problem came back. Glad it never happened to me; though I did have a spate of issues one time where the machine would just die during sleep - I thought it was a bad logic board, but I rolled back the update, and the problem went away, and reinstalled the update, and it never happened again. Weird. - so, Apple is not PERFECT when it comes to sleep/hibernate issues. But a damn-sight better than effing Windows, in my experience. (odd though; Windows seems to suspend just fine in VPC on my Mac).
in Finland we don't throw "illegal" evidence out of court. Instead we just punish the person(s) who did this illegal activity.
This sounds like a much better approach.
In the US, if a professional truck driver breaks the speed limit, he is ticketed by police, and suffers the consequences of breaking the law during the performance of his duties.
If a professional cop breaks the law - the criminal goes free. That's just ass-backwards, and WORSE, it drives the public's sense that the system is broken, and that we should just do away with rights (instead of incompetent or crooked cops).
I think that it has a lot to do with the personality-type of the person involved.
I've been a "computer professional" for 15 years now. I started out in a software company's shipping and receiving. I moved to a hardware-assembly/quality-control position. From there, to tech support. In that era of computing, you generally had to really monkey around with DOS's startup files to get things to actually work. I think this is what really got me started sharpening my skills.
But there are different personality-types in this field. There are people who are generally more on the "business-side" whose skills focus more on network design, ordering hardware, working with vendors, etc. There are people who are more oriented towards system-admin tasks, including security, configuring network applications, accounts, etc. Some of these people take "the next step" and get into a lot of scripting and integration of systems. Then some of those people grasp that there's more to life than VBS and/or Perl, and dabble in programming. For me, this has been the most difficult step - and I feel like I've been struggling along this path for 15 years.
There's a lot to this that I just never "got" no matter how much I hacked around or scripted. There's always a "black-box-ish" element to the OS that you're dependent on, and you try to look into that black box and figure out what it's doing, so you can bend it to your will. API's are a path to that black box. You tend to select a tool based on it's ability to use a given API to talk to that one aspect of the OS you need to use. The scripting languages tend to cover about 70%. (at least on the Windows side).
Then there are people who somehow "get it" - they are programmers, they were programmers from the start. I don't really know what they "get" that I don't get. When I was 12, I just could not grasp C. I didn't really figure C out until I was about 25. And even since then, I've never encountered a situation where I could use C to solve a problem, that some other solution (scripting) couldn't solve for me. I'm sure there are situations, I just never encountered them. At certain times, I'd even look at the source code our coders were writing, in C++, and while I always felt that there was no way in hell I could ever write that stuff, I could "follow it" - and from time to time, I could spot places where mistakes were made.
Now, I'm going to school to get a CIS degree. And what I'm learning is that, you can learn to write a Java "Hello World" program in an hour or two. But diving in and writing a GUI application, or a game, something like that can take years of 10-hour-day experience. And then there's the Discrete Math. This is a class I just took, and a lot of bits and pieces that I've come to understand about software development really comes together under the ideas taught in this class. Set theory, functions, directed graphs and trees, logic, etc. Stuff I would never ever use in any kind of admin scripting. Sure - if I had to figure out a sorting algorithm for a report generator, or text-parsing, I might use that; but these are problems that have been canned and pre-packaged for script writers for decades. There's probably almost no benefit for me learning these things to keep the job I've been doing for the past 15 years. And most career-paths for higher level programmers START here - it's not a place for me to move to (as far as I can see) more of a place to start from.
So, among the programmers, there are many, many specializations. There's people who write microcode for hardware. There's people who write forms for database front-ends. There's database back-end folks. I could go on and on. There is not a lot of cross-fertilization among these disciplines.
Bottom line; for you to come out of school with some c/c++ experience and wonder where you're going to go - I suppose is probably natural. You find a job. Water flows downhill. You'll eventually settle into your niche, and apply your skillset, and your way of t
Are you talking about the NeurosDAC? Their page is a little vague - this is a portable MP3 player? Why are they calling it a "Digital Audio Computer" - and why is Windows listed under System Requirements? Is this a Windows device?
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The movie was certainly about 10 years ahead of its time.
(I can't stand watching it now, because of the nasty 1980's rock-video hairstyles and costumes. But the dialog was some of the funniest stuff in cinema history - - big boo TAY!)
If we are, then oil and gas prices will trend upwards for the forseeable.
It could really go either way.
But if prices go up - alternatives will come on line, and demand for petroleum will drop (or level off). The impact on the global economy could be catastrophic - and billions may starve, hundreds of millions may lose their jobs, and with that, there could be a long tail of trailing-off demand. In that kind of environment, will "being a rich country" matter?
Strategically speaking, a rich country would better prepare itself for this post-peak-oil future by being a leader in energy efficiency and alternatives. As a way to invest that wealth, in future prosperity and security. But that's just an offhand observation.
...but now we're getting the best of both worlds and it's still improving. Putin can do whatever he wants if he keeps this track going.
Personally, I suspect that the recent demonization of Putin in the press has a lot more to do with the petroleum business than anything else. I think it was three years ago or so that he had some oil company CEO arrested for massive tax fraud, and there was a big hullabaloo in the press over that - and IIRC, Russia actually took national ownership of that oil company.
This is a BIG no-no in the eyes of the powers-that-be. It's what got Chavez in trouble. It's what got Saddam in trouble. It's what got Mosadegh (democratically-elected leader of Iran; replaced by the Shah in a CIA-backed coup) in trouble. It's what got Gray Davis (California governor - was planning on a buyout of utilities in California in the wake of the Enron power-market manipulation scam of 2000) in trouble. I was wondering when the other shoe was going to drop on Putin.
A Person of the Year is YOU.
Yes, yes. It's all just a big conspiracy of evil Irrational Bush Haters. Nothing more.
Fun Fact: Dan Quayle "served" in the same Texas Air National Guard unit as George W Bush did.
I ain't no privileged son.
I think that troubleshooting is often more of a talent than a learned skill.
You can teach it - but it takes strong deductive reasoning, curiosity, and imagination. They probably need to bring those things to the table, because training those skills takes longer than it's probably worth. If someone has those three things, and NO knowlege, but access to information, then that person will make a good PC tech. Training them in the knowledge and domain experience is more practical.
That's basic troubleshooting. At higher levels, of course, you want someone to be able to make decisions like "how to I fix this spyware problem; google to find out which regkey to delete? or reinstall the OS? - if someone always takes the harder approach, that can affect how fast they are at digging through a pile of trouble-tickets.
The minotaur IIRC, is basically a repurposed minuteman III.
The nice thing about solid fuel rockets (as opposed to liquid-fuel), is that they leave a nice, visible trail as they ascend, which often persists for 30 minutes or more. Here on the W/C, we get to see minuteman missile tests out of Vandenberg 2-3 times a year. (mostly in the middle of the night, though).
When you see something like an Atlas or Delta go up, there isn't much of a trail at all, so if you aren't watching closely, you can miss it.
Of course, there are some bad things about solid-fuel rockets; the exhaust is often pretty nasty stuff, corrosive, and toxic. Plus, you can't throttle them back or shut them off if something goes wrong. On the other hand, they're so simple, mechanically, you're not likely to need to throttle them back.
But the best thing about solids, is that they usually supplement the larger Atlas and Delta vehicles, and you get to hear rocket scientists talk about "strap-ons".
If the company can't figure that out, they deserve everything they get.
. . . million-dollar defense contracts. . .
What is this "test system" of which you speak?
I keep hearing people talk about "non-production hardware" - and it sounds like gibberish.
I asked my manager about this, and he snapped the pencil he was holding and started muttering something about "damn commies.". . .
Yes - there is a "Fantasy World" - it's where people are promoted into management for competence, and allocate sufficient resources for projects, and blue fairies ride on rainbows throwing bags of candy.
In the real world, we "test" - hell, we DEVELOP on production systems, that are mission-critical 24x7, with people's lives on the line. We get the axe when it doesn't work, and manager gets the bonus and the promotion when it does.
Welcome to the desert of the Real.
The problem is; my cat smells bad whether it's dead or alive.
Well, looks like you fared better with the karma farming in this thread.
I only got 2 points, and you got 4!
I was disappointed to see "insightful" mods for my post, because;
"Honest honey, it was a joke!"
"I'm not laughing."
"I was just kidding. I didn't MEAN it literally!"
(sometimes, winning karma means sleeping on the couch. . . )
You see, I'm married. I don't have ANY opinion on women. ESPECIALLY other women.
So, your wife doesn't cajole you into dissing other women? ("gawd she's fat." "why, yes, honey, I agree completely!")
The solution is to have a preference set somewhere in the OS.
(overwrite, or drop changes).
Have a timeout on that dialog (with a visible count down timer - like the OS X logout dialog), and when the user does not respond in X minutes, force the save (or drop) and shut the fuck down.
EVERY choice a user has to make, is an opportunity for a saved preference to automate that task. The choice won't always be the right one - sometimes data will be lost. But it is the USER'S mistake to make. And if they don't like it, then they'll learn after the first data loss, and change the preference back, and they'll blame only themselves - not the arrogant (or craven) programmer who made the choice (or failed to make any choice) for them.
Because people will go from one store to another and compare prices, and decide which store to shop at based on a 2-3 penny price difference per pound of cheese.
Few people will go from one store to another, and stopwatch the lines over a period of several hours to get an average wait-time to compare with.
There's no competitive pressure on this aspect of your shopping. Therefore, there's no incentive for management to do anything about it (only when the lines start trailing back into the aisles and blocking traffic).
Macs (at least desktop models) still burn significant amounts of energy while sleeping. I wish this were not so. But it is.
To be fair, if you google some of the Mac tech sites on "wake from sleep" - you'll find that, at least the desktop machines (power macs/mac pro) have had some issues with the video cards futzing out during wake. I had a friend who had a G5 power mac, bought hers at the same time I bought my dual. She had the problem, I didn't. Seemed linked to an OS X update. Anyhoo- She came to me for help, initially, our power macs had the SAME damn video card. I'd put mine into hers, and the problem went away. I put hers in mine, and I didn't have the problem on my system. I swapped em back, and her problem came back. We tried OS-reloads, battery swaps, PRAM resets. The problem would go away and come back.
Eventually, she had to take it back to Apple - and they gave her a new video card - and the problem came back. Glad it never happened to me; though I did have a spate of issues one time where the machine would just die during sleep - I thought it was a bad logic board, but I rolled back the update, and the problem went away, and reinstalled the update, and it never happened again. Weird. - so, Apple is not PERFECT when it comes to sleep/hibernate issues. But a damn-sight better than effing Windows, in my experience. (odd though; Windows seems to suspend just fine in VPC on my Mac).
Dude, that's not Russian Women.
That's ALL women.
in Finland we don't throw "illegal" evidence out of court. Instead we just punish the person(s) who did this illegal activity.
This sounds like a much better approach.
In the US, if a professional truck driver breaks the speed limit, he is ticketed by police, and suffers the consequences of breaking the law during the performance of his duties.
If a professional cop breaks the law - the criminal goes free. That's just ass-backwards, and WORSE, it drives the public's sense that the system is broken, and that we should just do away with rights (instead of incompetent or crooked cops).
A $40 jacket would have helped a lot more.
I find it depressing that the poor guy only made it 16 miles before he succumbed to hypothermia.
I work in a cube farm too, and I too, agree with everything he said. In fact, I think he's pitching softball.
I think that it has a lot to do with the personality-type of the person involved.
I've been a "computer professional" for 15 years now. I started out in a software company's shipping and receiving. I moved to a hardware-assembly/quality-control position. From there, to tech support. In that era of computing, you generally had to really monkey around with DOS's startup files to get things to actually work. I think this is what really got me started sharpening my skills.
But there are different personality-types in this field. There are people who are generally more on the "business-side" whose skills focus more on network design, ordering hardware, working with vendors, etc. There are people who are more oriented towards system-admin tasks, including security, configuring network applications, accounts, etc. Some of these people take "the next step" and get into a lot of scripting and integration of systems. Then some of those people grasp that there's more to life than VBS and/or Perl, and dabble in programming. For me, this has been the most difficult step - and I feel like I've been struggling along this path for 15 years.
There's a lot to this that I just never "got" no matter how much I hacked around or scripted. There's always a "black-box-ish" element to the OS that you're dependent on, and you try to look into that black box and figure out what it's doing, so you can bend it to your will. API's are a path to that black box. You tend to select a tool based on it's ability to use a given API to talk to that one aspect of the OS you need to use. The scripting languages tend to cover about 70%. (at least on the Windows side).
Then there are people who somehow "get it" - they are programmers, they were programmers from the start. I don't really know what they "get" that I don't get. When I was 12, I just could not grasp C. I didn't really figure C out until I was about 25. And even since then, I've never encountered a situation where I could use C to solve a problem, that some other solution (scripting) couldn't solve for me. I'm sure there are situations, I just never encountered them. At certain times, I'd even look at the source code our coders were writing, in C++, and while I always felt that there was no way in hell I could ever write that stuff, I could "follow it" - and from time to time, I could spot places where mistakes were made.
Now, I'm going to school to get a CIS degree. And what I'm learning is that, you can learn to write a Java "Hello World" program in an hour or two. But diving in and writing a GUI application, or a game, something like that can take years of 10-hour-day experience. And then there's the Discrete Math. This is a class I just took, and a lot of bits and pieces that I've come to understand about software development really comes together under the ideas taught in this class. Set theory, functions, directed graphs and trees, logic, etc. Stuff I would never ever use in any kind of admin scripting. Sure - if I had to figure out a sorting algorithm for a report generator, or text-parsing, I might use that; but these are problems that have been canned and pre-packaged for script writers for decades. There's probably almost no benefit for me learning these things to keep the job I've been doing for the past 15 years. And most career-paths for higher level programmers START here - it's not a place for me to move to (as far as I can see) more of a place to start from.
So, among the programmers, there are many, many specializations. There's people who write microcode for hardware. There's people who write forms for database front-ends. There's database back-end folks. I could go on and on. There is not a lot of cross-fertilization among these disciplines.
Bottom line; for you to come out of school with some c/c++ experience and wonder where you're going to go - I suppose is probably natural. You find a job. Water flows downhill. You'll eventually settle into your niche, and apply your skillset, and your way of t
History shows that the majority of "consolidation" will eventually. . . .
Does it?
Examples?
doh!
Right you are. Wrong I was.
I wasn't intending to be insulting.
I agree with you on what "keeping it simple" means.
I just wish Microsoft's Marketing agreed with you and I.
Are you talking about the NeurosDAC?
Their page is a little vague - this is a portable MP3 player? Why are they calling it a "Digital Audio Computer" - and why is Windows listed under System Requirements? Is this a Windows device?