...and manned space-flight missions can be mailed straight to your in-box by e-mailing majordomo@listserver.jsc.nasa.gov any typing "subscribe hsfnews" in the body of your message.
The news bulletins keep you informed of the progress of the various human space flight projects underway, and are certainly a lot more timely than this slashdot posting;-)
We've already heard that OEMs are no longer allowed to ship the Windows CDROM with a PC and yet on this page MS claims the benefit of a non-Naked PC is that : Customers have the original CD so they can reload the software!
The incredible cheek of these people!
Cheeky and, more importantly, totally hypocritic. So much so that I've just e-mailed Micro$oft to point out this obvious 'error' on their web site. Feel free to do the same:)
DeCSS isn't strictly speaking illegal yet (as far as I know, and let's face facts here - I'm pretty clueless!) I believe that TRAFFIKING in circumvention technology is still illegal though, and I believe this is the charge being brought right now.
--
Re:qualified vs. unqualified stock options?
on
Sizing Up a Start-Up
·
· Score: 3
Ok...I'll bite. What's the difference?
The difference is basically when and how much tax you pay. Practially it can mean the difference between making money or losing your shirt.
With a non-qualified stock option, the IRS doesn't take its slice until you exercise the option (turn it into stock, in laymans terms). Income tax is payable based on the difference between the exercise price and the fair market value of the stock at exercise.
Qualified, or Incentive, stock options are basically not taxes as ordinary income on exercise, and are therefore far 'kinder' on your tax situation.
Be warned about non-qualified stock options. There have been situations where an IPO has collapsed and owners of non-qualifies stock options in the company have been left with stock which had a considerably lower market value than the tax bill they were presented with (which, of course, is calculated from the stock price at IPO).
The damn RAM pack was the worst POS I ever saw. After a few hours plucking away at assembly language, one false wobble would make the whole thing crash (hmmm, is there a RAM pack in WindowsÉ heheh).
It things like this that epoxy resin was invented for:) I'm not kidding - the join between my ZX81 and 16K RAM pack looked like Ridley Scott's Alien had built a nest around it!
Wow, this was the computer that started it all for me. My parents purchased one for me when I was the grand old age of eleven, and I guess it all went downhill from there:) I still remember purchasing the 16K RAM pack for it a couple of months later, and being completely frustrated at the fact that if you pressed the keyboard too hard the RAM pack edge connector would flex and cause the machine to crash. I tell you, it's amazing what a liberal application of epoxy resin can fix:)
Anyway, enough of my misty-eyed reminiscing and on to my real comment:
Has anyone ever over-clocked one of these babies? I'd love to see how fast some psychopath could get one going with some extreme refrigeration / cryogenics thrown in!
It sounds like you could just bolt this new device to the floor of a shuttle's cargo bay and have yourself an interplanetary cruiser. That would make shuttle trips to places like L1 or a lunar base not only viable, but downright dirt cheap, and missions to Venus, mars and the asteroids well within reach. I am not too sure on how it works, but there is a technique that sailing ships used to travel into the wind (tacking?) for the return journeys. The biggest concern would become cargo space for life support: air, food and water, rather than fuel. The future is finally with us!
Hmmm - I think the mass of the Shuttle would be a little too large for this accelerative force to have enough of an effect. Of course, everything will be fine with this as long as the astronauts are willing to wait a few months to get up to speed:) As for tacking, as has been mentioned in numerous posts so far that only works because the interaction of the keel and the ocean coupled with a directional planar sail can translate the head-on force of the wind into forward momentum. Until we invent ourselves a spaceship 'keel' that can interact with the space-time continuum (I always enjoy it when I can crowbar that phrase into a sentence:) we're pretty much stuffed.
One really exciting use for this would be to attach drives like this to asteroids. This would first and foremost serve to save the Earth from any imminent collisions but would also allow you to re-position juicy asteroids closer to home, etc. All you need to do is bolt the coil and a power generator to the surface, and voila'! the rock will be moving 180,000 km/sec within umpteen units of time.
...where 'umpteen' is unfortunately an unfeasibly long time due to the fact that an Asteroid is n orders of magnitude more massive than the 200kg spacecraft NASA is talking about.
It wouldn't really work within the Earth's magnetosphere, as that already deflects the 'solar wind' the sun aims at us. Either way, I don't think that an accelerative force of 3N is going to be getting us off the surface of this ball of rock any time soon;-)
Well fungi initially burns with a dull red/yellow flame, but then starts to cycle through an entire rainbow of colors. That's when things started to get REALLY trippy.
There's also the fear that "if not you, who else?" It's quite often the case that if 'you' don't step up to the plate and manage a project, the f**kwit that management decides to put in instead will drive the project to self-destruction within a few months.
I'd class it as beaurocracy-gone-mad rather than bad management, but ultimately it's a semantic point. The fact is that in many large organisations the process is sadly letting us on the project teams down.
You know, it's quite often a case that (at least in large corporations) Steph knows how to play the political games required to get noticed by higher management, whereas our faithful coder keeps his head down, doing excellent work, never 'networking' (ugh) with management from other business areas, and consequently never being noticed.
It's a little too much of a generalisation to state that "management is composed of people who were too dumb to be passed up for promotion." I've been working in the industry for well over a decade, and I've had some excellent technical managers (OK, OK, I've had the completely f*ckwitted PHB's too, I admit it!)
Why move people into job positions where they get to do less of what they do best?
Because sometimes it's necessary to have someone who knows and understands a product and a set of technologies running a project in order to avoid the wholesale destruction that a clueless PHB can wreak on it in what is often a remarkably short amount of time.
You know, quite often the problem is the ridiculous recruitment hoops that large corporations make you jump through to get staff through the door.
First, there's the fact that you're only allowed to either recruit through an H.R. department, or from a small selection of 'corporate sanctioned' recruitment companies. I actually had the case (in a previous job, I might add) where we found someone to hire through a friend of a current employee. When we submitted his application for employment we found that we had to pay a 15% finders fee to the 'sanctioned' recruitment agency, even though they had never been involved in any part of the recruitment process. All part of the "back scratching" contract that some H.R. PHB had managed to work out, I suppose.
Next there's the fact that H.R. can quite often interview a candidate before the department that actually wants them gets a chance to interview. How many good people get rejected by H.R.'s "quality assurance / psychometric profiling / " before having the chance to prove themselves with the recruiting team? Sadly, I'd bet more candidates than I'd like to think about.
Finally, a group of completely non-technical H.R. people get to decide what technical projects a candidate is really suitable to interview with. Please!
Maybe it's the marketplace or maybe it's the daft recruitment procedure, but there certainly seems to be a lack of good quality I.T. personnel in our local market. We're not looking for anything too advanced - just some working exposure to Java development, maybe some basic understanding of Investment Banking. We're more than happy to train people up, but can't seem to find anyone worth training right now. The level of mis-representation that we're finding in submitted resume's is disturbing, to say the least (see my various rants in the HB-1 Visa discussion a couple of days ago for further details).
And the moment that we actually DO find someone worth training, we take them on and train them. We already have two trainees under our wing - to be honest we don't have enough experienced staff at the moment to complete current deliverables AND correctly train and mentor the new starters. Bear in mind that it's not just technical skills that we need to train new starters in; they also have to learn a huge amount about Credit Risk management, Derivatives trading and Investment Banking too. The candidates that we've been seeing lately just aren't worth investing the time and money in, to be quite honest.
We've had people fail a gamut of technical questions, including the REALLY easy ones like "what are some of the basic differences between Java and C++", "what's pass-by-reference/value", "What's single/multiple inheritance, and which one does Java have" etc. Really simple stuff that people who claim to be 'Java experts' should probably know!
Only last week we had a 'security/cryptography' expert in (fantastic Resume) who couldn't tell me the basic Java cryptography architecture (JCE), didn't know the difference between a symmetric and an asymmetric cipher, and handn't even heard of the Wassenaar Aggreement (allegedly he'd been developing global security/cryptographic solutions in Java for over a year.)
The skills 'claimed' on the resume's that we're receiving and the demonstrated skill-set at interview are, at least for us, showing HUGE discrepancies.
In my interviewing experience with my current company (conducting the interviews rather than sitting them!) there is a fairly severe lack of good quality software engineers in the market at the moment.
We are a large Investment Bank that uses Java almost exclusively for our development. Our project is expanding and we need another four or so Java developers onboard. We're offering top-tier salary, and indeed receive many impressive CV's through the door. Unfortunately when these people eventually turn up to interview, they are more often than not completely ignorant of the technologies that they claim to know. I have, on more than one occasion, been embarassed for one of my interviewees when he/she hasn't been able to adequately answer one technical question put to them.
There is certainly a large pool of potential I.T. employees out there, but certainly in the Chicago area the average quality is low.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't on the show, but it WAS the theme track to "Monty Python's Meaning Of Life"
--
Actually, in my mind, I think of the ISS as being kind of like "Babylon 0.5"
Woohoo! I bet you'd get WAY more congressional funding if NASA whacked a couple of those massive rail-gun things onto the ISS!
--
...and manned space-flight missions can be mailed straight to your in-box by e-mailing majordomo@listserver.jsc.nasa.gov any typing "subscribe hsfnews" in the body of your message.
;-)
The news bulletins keep you informed of the progress of the various human space flight projects underway, and are certainly a lot more timely than this slashdot posting
Enjoy...
--
What do private UK insurers offer that the government doesn't?
Typically much shorter waiting lists.
--
...you receive a diploma with REALLY tiny writing!
--
The first time I get a phone call from someone inadvertantly dialling me while masturbating, DoCoMo is going to have a lot to answer for!
--
We've already heard that OEMs are no longer allowed to ship the Windows CDROM with a PC and yet on this page MS claims the benefit of a non-Naked PC is that : Customers have the original CD so they can reload the software!
:)
The incredible cheek of these people!
Cheeky and, more importantly, totally hypocritic. So much so that I've just e-mailed Micro$oft to point out this obvious 'error' on their web site. Feel free to do the same
--
Well, you might want to upgrade to DirectX 7. DirectX 6.x was embarrasingly buggy, even by Micto$oft's standards.
--
DeCSS isn't strictly speaking illegal yet (as far as I know, and let's face facts here - I'm pretty clueless!) I believe that TRAFFIKING in circumvention technology is still illegal though, and I believe this is the charge being brought right now.
--
Ok...I'll bite. What's the difference?
The difference is basically when and how much tax you pay. Practially it can mean the difference between making money or losing your shirt.
With a non-qualified stock option, the IRS doesn't take its slice until you exercise the option (turn it into stock, in laymans terms). Income tax is payable based on the difference between the exercise price and the fair market value of the stock at exercise.
Qualified, or Incentive, stock options are basically not taxes as ordinary income on exercise, and are therefore far 'kinder' on your tax situation.
Be warned about non-qualified stock options. There have been situations where an IPO has collapsed and owners of non-qualifies stock options in the company have been left with stock which had a considerably lower market value than the tax bill they were presented with (which, of course, is calculated from the stock price at IPO).
--
Most of the people cannot even try it! it requires 384MB RAM (minimum!), 4GB Disk space and a good 700+Mhz Processor
Wow, what a coincidence! The exact same minimum requirements as Windows ME!
--
The damn RAM pack was the worst POS I ever saw. After a few hours plucking away at assembly language, one false wobble would make the whole thing crash (hmmm, is there a RAM pack in WindowsÉ heheh).
:) I'm not kidding - the join between my ZX81 and 16K RAM pack looked like Ridley Scott's Alien had built a nest around it!
It things like this that epoxy resin was invented for
--
Wow, this was the computer that started it all for me. My parents purchased one for me when I was the grand old age of eleven, and I guess it all went downhill from there :) I still remember purchasing the 16K RAM pack for it a couple of months later, and being completely frustrated at the fact that if you pressed the keyboard too hard the RAM pack edge connector would flex and cause the machine to crash. I tell you, it's amazing what a liberal application of epoxy resin can fix :)
Anyway, enough of my misty-eyed reminiscing and on to my real comment:
Has anyone ever over-clocked one of these babies? I'd love to see how fast some psychopath could get one going with some extreme refrigeration / cryogenics thrown in!
--
It sounds like you could just bolt this new device to the floor of a shuttle's cargo bay and have yourself an interplanetary cruiser. That would make shuttle trips to places like L1 or a lunar base not only viable, but downright dirt cheap, and missions to Venus, mars and the asteroids well within reach. I am not too sure on how it works, but there is a technique that sailing ships used to travel into the wind (tacking?) for the return journeys. The biggest concern would become cargo space for life support: air, food and water, rather than fuel. The future is finally with us!
:) As for tacking, as has been mentioned in numerous posts so far that only works because the interaction of the keel and the ocean coupled with a directional planar sail can translate the head-on force of the wind into forward momentum. Until we invent ourselves a spaceship 'keel' that can interact with the space-time continuum (I always enjoy it when I can crowbar that phrase into a sentence :) we're pretty much stuffed.
...where 'umpteen' is unfortunately an unfeasibly long time due to the fact that an Asteroid is n orders of magnitude more massive than the 200kg spacecraft NASA is talking about.
Hmmm - I think the mass of the Shuttle would be a little too large for this accelerative force to have enough of an effect. Of course, everything will be fine with this as long as the astronauts are willing to wait a few months to get up to speed
One really exciting use for this would be to attach drives like this to asteroids. This would first and foremost serve to save the Earth from any imminent collisions but would also allow you to re-position juicy asteroids closer to home, etc. All you need to do is bolt the coil and a power generator to the surface, and voila'! the rock will be moving 180,000 km/sec within umpteen units of time.
--
It wouldn't really work within the Earth's magnetosphere, as that already deflects the 'solar wind' the sun aims at us. Either way, I don't think that an accelerative force of 3N is going to be getting us off the surface of this ball of rock any time soon ;-)
--
Well fungi initially burns with a dull red/yellow flame, but then starts to cycle through an entire rainbow of colors. That's when things started to get REALLY trippy.
--
There's also the fear that "if not you, who else?" It's quite often the case that if 'you' don't step up to the plate and manage a project, the f**kwit that management decides to put in instead will drive the project to self-destruction within a few months.
--
I'd class it as beaurocracy-gone-mad rather than bad management, but ultimately it's a semantic point. The fact is that in many large organisations the process is sadly letting us on the project teams down.
--
You know, it's quite often a case that (at least in large corporations) Steph knows how to play the political games required to get noticed by higher management, whereas our faithful coder keeps his head down, doing excellent work, never 'networking' (ugh) with management from other business areas, and consequently never being noticed.
It's a little too much of a generalisation to state that "management is composed of people who were too dumb to be passed up for promotion." I've been working in the industry for well over a decade, and I've had some excellent technical managers (OK, OK, I've had the completely f*ckwitted PHB's too, I admit it!)
--
Why move people into job positions where they get to do less of what they do best?
Because sometimes it's necessary to have someone who knows and understands a product and a set of technologies running a project in order to avoid the wholesale destruction that a clueless PHB can wreak on it in what is often a remarkably short amount of time.
--
You know, quite often the problem is the ridiculous recruitment hoops that large corporations make you jump through to get staff through the door.
First, there's the fact that you're only allowed to either recruit through an H.R. department, or from a small selection of 'corporate sanctioned' recruitment companies. I actually had the case (in a previous job, I might add) where we found someone to hire through a friend of a current employee. When we submitted his application for employment we found that we had to pay a 15% finders fee to the 'sanctioned' recruitment agency, even though they had never been involved in any part of the recruitment process. All part of the "back scratching" contract that some H.R. PHB had managed to work out, I suppose.
Next there's the fact that H.R. can quite often interview a candidate before the department that actually wants them gets a chance to interview. How many good people get rejected by H.R.'s "quality assurance / psychometric profiling / " before having the chance to prove themselves with the recruiting team? Sadly, I'd bet more candidates than I'd like to think about.
Finally, a group of completely non-technical H.R. people get to decide what technical projects a candidate is really suitable to interview with. Please!
Maybe it's the marketplace or maybe it's the daft recruitment procedure, but there certainly seems to be a lack of good quality I.T. personnel in our local market. We're not looking for anything too advanced - just some working exposure to Java development, maybe some basic understanding of Investment Banking. We're more than happy to train people up, but can't seem to find anyone worth training right now. The level of mis-representation that we're finding in submitted resume's is disturbing, to say the least (see my various rants in the HB-1 Visa discussion a couple of days ago for further details).
--
And the moment that we actually DO find someone worth training, we take them on and train them. We already have two trainees under our wing - to be honest we don't have enough experienced staff at the moment to complete current deliverables AND correctly train and mentor the new starters. Bear in mind that it's not just technical skills that we need to train new starters in; they also have to learn a huge amount about Credit Risk management, Derivatives trading and Investment Banking too. The candidates that we've been seeing lately just aren't worth investing the time and money in, to be quite honest.
--
We've had people fail a gamut of technical questions, including the REALLY easy ones like "what are some of the basic differences between Java and C++", "what's pass-by-reference/value", "What's single/multiple inheritance, and which one does Java have" etc. Really simple stuff that people who claim to be 'Java experts' should probably know!
Only last week we had a 'security/cryptography' expert in (fantastic Resume) who couldn't tell me the basic Java cryptography architecture (JCE), didn't know the difference between a symmetric and an asymmetric cipher, and handn't even heard of the Wassenaar Aggreement (allegedly he'd been developing global security/cryptographic solutions in Java for over a year.)
The skills 'claimed' on the resume's that we're receiving and the demonstrated skill-set at interview are, at least for us, showing HUGE discrepancies.
--
In my interviewing experience with my current company (conducting the interviews rather than sitting them!) there is a fairly severe lack of good quality software engineers in the market at the moment.
We are a large Investment Bank that uses Java almost exclusively for our development. Our project is expanding and we need another four or so Java developers onboard. We're offering top-tier salary, and indeed receive many impressive CV's through the door. Unfortunately when these people eventually turn up to interview, they are more often than not completely ignorant of the technologies that they claim to know. I have, on more than one occasion, been embarassed for one of my interviewees when he/she hasn't been able to adequately answer one technical question put to them.
There is certainly a large pool of potential I.T. employees out there, but certainly in the Chicago area the average quality is low.
--
There have been quite a few 'visa' news topics on /. lately, and many misconceptions spoken about what you are/are not entitled to on certain visas.
To clear it up, here's a site that may be of use. It gives details of each of the different visas required for entry/employment in the U.S.
--