Don't misunderstand, I used to build and sell OEM AMD based systems religiously for years and what did it get me? I've had more dead boards and more dead CPUs than I ever had with Intel stuff. And it's not like I was using crap mobos either, I was using Asus and MSI. I was using Kingston RAM, Antec PSUs and these things were still falling over left and right. I've lost so much money servicing the warranty on their platform it's embarrassing. Intel, out of the hundreds I've assembled, I've seen less than a dozen back. They just work, no complaints, no problems.
I'm not sure what 'customer experience' is supposed to mean, but me not going out of business matters to me somewhat more. There is a reason why they sell their CPUs for $99 these days: because they are slow and shitty and no one with any brains wants to buy them.
"It is so boring and un-stimulating that I usually skip it entirely, pass the testing off to someone else, or even worse, if I absolutely have to test, I do a very poor job at it."
Which sums up why software is so shitty today. I seriously hope that you don't write software for the areospace industry because I don't feel like falling out of the sky because you were too bored to test your code.
Every job has its boring moments, testing your code is one of those things that programmers must do. Should do, it encourages discipline and discipline is what makes good code. You can automate the testing to some degree but at some point you've got to poke it and prod it yourself because computers are stupider than even we are. If you can't hack that, find a different line of work.
Would be my first pick. You're in a fairly enclosed space with hundreds of other people who have any number of diseases. It's not like they sterilize the desks after every class. Even in a typical office you tend to sit at the same desk; school kids are all over the place. A public school is like a virus playground.
Having said that, maybe someone should do a big study on exposure to non-natural electromagnetic fields. Humans evolved exposed to the sun and the planet, etc... it makes sense to me that we evolved to deal with that. But it's only been in the last 100 years or so that our technology has exposed us to high power radio stations, wireless access points, even keeping a little radio in your pocket so you can call your friends. Who doesn't have a cell these days? High tension power lines have only really existed for 100 years too, the tin-foil hatters say they cause cancer, but the reality is that no one really knows.
The problem with freedom is that it never seems to involve corporations or governments.
The the solution to this particular problem is easy, simply let the users run their own encryption with their own software and own keys on their own hardware. I'm surprised such a thing doesn't exist now for the Blackberry. Oh wait, it does. All RIM has to do is tell these dumb governments that "yep, you can read the stuff on our servers," while at the same time paying bloggers under the table to spread word on how to install third party encryption.
If these governments are still really pissed off about it, they can start arresting users for having encryption software and they can keep on doing that until people finally get the notion they are living in a police state and maybe want to do something about it.
"Where do you back it up?" is what I ask my customers. If you buy a terabyte sized hard drive, what's your solution if it fails? Presumably you bought it so you could store zillions of pictures, MP3s and movies on the thing... how badly will your day be ruined if it fails?
Drives that big, you buy them in pairs, one mirrored to the other.
Not wanting to be captain obvious here, but there is a mostly covered pile of radioactive crap at the centre of it all. Humans don't live there, maybe the animals figured that out too.
As far as I'm concerned COBOL is the perfect programming language. I'm a little biased as I worked as a COBOL programmer for a time, but you have to admit the syntax is very easy to read.
A well written COBOL program is like reading a little battle plan. It tells you, in plain English, what it intends to do and the ruthlessness of a COBOL compiler forces you to create readable, structured code.
Every COBOL programmer knows where the period is supposed to be. C programmers still haven't figured out where the braces should be. It says a lot about a language when you have decades-long debates about punctuation in your code. It encourages a lack of programming discipline which I feel is the leading reason why software is so buggy today.
Yep. I'm sure feeling a bit of heat is really going to work on a Taliban fellow who grew up in a desert. When guys like that are picking a fight, there are two things they understand: dead and not dead. If not dead, keep fighting.
Heaven forbid a government finding new and innovative ways to deliver services to its people. Maybe the iPhone is not the best platform, but at least they are trying.
I'm a self employed computer technician, and in addition to being in a dying field, the amount of bullshit I have to put up with is astounding. They tell me, "But I really need it this afternoon!" So I flex nuts and get it ready that afternoon and then they freak out when I hand them the bill. I once had a dude threaten me with death because it was going to take a week to get the parts to fix his hunk of crap laptop. They lose it when I tell them their hard drive is toast and all their data is gone. I ask them about their backups and they say they have none. What am I supposed to do?
Society in general has developed a rather unhealthy obsession with always available computer technology, but yet are unwilling to pay for it. Women seem to have a better bullshit filter than men, so I'm not surprised they are giving up on this field. I should have quit long ago and become a plumber or something.
Sure there is a lot of waste in a government funded system, but I'll bet that is balanced out nicely because the government never intends to make a profit. Space X intends to make a profit. Is there even profit to be made going into space? Right now, not really. A profit opportunity exists for them, not because of anything valuable up there we can get to, but because we need to keep the ISS going.
Another reason why NASA has blown through so much money over the years is they were inventing, from the ground up, the entire technological base to get humans into space. Not cheap.
Space X has done what exactly? Create a LEO capable rocket. Yay! Something NASA pulled off in the 50s. NASA had man-rated boosters by 1960 and had people on the moon by '69. They also came up with the STS, which is so far beyond anything the private sector can possibly fund.
I'm not saying that having private contractors do the space thing is bad, but I'll bet even if you handed over all of the plans for a Space Shuttle or an Apollo system the mission costs would be similar.
If they are willing to go to the trouble of a polygraph test it means they've got some dirt on you or are looking to get some more, or whatever they think is more. Truth is not the goal, only verifiability, and the little wiggles on the paper supply this.
It would be interesting to take one of these and consistently lie throughout to see how well the examiners do.
The real problem is the U.S., for all its military might, doesn't have the stomach for war. The insurgents do. They are willing to go all the way for their cause, as twisted as it might seem to us. It's the same problem as Vietnam. That war was half a dozen nukes away from being solved. Afghanistan and Iraq are easy to solve too: nuke the place until everyone you don't like is dead. Or everyone is dead. Al Qaeda would do it if they could.
But oh we can't use those horrid nukes, etc, etc... OK, fine, this shows upstanding moral character and this is commendable, but it then begs a more pertinent question: "if you weren't willing to utterly exterminate your enemies with the resources you have, why did you bother to invade in the first place? Why not just stay home?"
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You're on glue mate. Selling AMD is a ghetto.
Don't misunderstand, I used to build and sell OEM AMD based systems religiously for years and what did it get me? I've had more dead boards and more dead CPUs than I ever had with Intel stuff. And it's not like I was using crap mobos either, I was using Asus and MSI. I was using Kingston RAM, Antec PSUs and these things were still falling over left and right. I've lost so much money servicing the warranty on their platform it's embarrassing. Intel, out of the hundreds I've assembled, I've seen less than a dozen back. They just work, no complaints, no problems.
I'm not sure what 'customer experience' is supposed to mean, but me not going out of business matters to me somewhat more. There is a reason why they sell their CPUs for $99 these days: because they are slow and shitty and no one with any brains wants to buy them.
...can be a real bitch, especially when everyone wants to drive a car.
"It is so boring and un-stimulating that I usually skip it entirely, pass the testing off to someone else, or even worse, if I absolutely have to test, I do a very poor job at it."
Which sums up why software is so shitty today. I seriously hope that you don't write software for the areospace industry because I don't feel like falling out of the sky because you were too bored to test your code.
Every job has its boring moments, testing your code is one of those things that programmers must do. Should do, it encourages discipline and discipline is what makes good code. You can automate the testing to some degree but at some point you've got to poke it and prod it yourself because computers are stupider than even we are. If you can't hack that, find a different line of work.
Would be my first pick. You're in a fairly enclosed space with hundreds of other people who have any number of diseases. It's not like they sterilize the desks after every class. Even in a typical office you tend to sit at the same desk; school kids are all over the place. A public school is like a virus playground.
Having said that, maybe someone should do a big study on exposure to non-natural electromagnetic fields. Humans evolved exposed to the sun and the planet, etc... it makes sense to me that we evolved to deal with that. But it's only been in the last 100 years or so that our technology has exposed us to high power radio stations, wireless access points, even keeping a little radio in your pocket so you can call your friends. Who doesn't have a cell these days? High tension power lines have only really existed for 100 years too, the tin-foil hatters say they cause cancer, but the reality is that no one really knows.
It comes with a mix for a caffeinated meatloaf LOL.
The problem with freedom is that it never seems to involve corporations or governments.
The the solution to this particular problem is easy, simply let the users run their own encryption with their own software and own keys on their own hardware. I'm surprised such a thing doesn't exist now for the Blackberry. Oh wait, it does. All RIM has to do is tell these dumb governments that "yep, you can read the stuff on our servers," while at the same time paying bloggers under the table to spread word on how to install third party encryption.
If these governments are still really pissed off about it, they can start arresting users for having encryption software and they can keep on doing that until people finally get the notion they are living in a police state and maybe want to do something about it.
Let's nuke the bastard. That'll take care of it. It worked in Armageddon.
"Where do you back it up?" is what I ask my customers. If you buy a terabyte sized hard drive, what's your solution if it fails? Presumably you bought it so you could store zillions of pictures, MP3s and movies on the thing... how badly will your day be ruined if it fails?
Drives that big, you buy them in pairs, one mirrored to the other.
Yeah, but it could still make for an interesting movie plot, you have to admit. People were all over the Bourne movies, yes?
I happen to have the phone number for a Mr.Les Grossman and I'm calling his office right now.
Not wanting to be captain obvious here, but there is a mostly covered pile of radioactive crap at the centre of it all. Humans don't live there, maybe the animals figured that out too.
As far as I'm concerned COBOL is the perfect programming language. I'm a little biased as I worked as a COBOL programmer for a time, but you have to admit the syntax is very easy to read.
A well written COBOL program is like reading a little battle plan. It tells you, in plain English, what it intends to do and the ruthlessness of a COBOL compiler forces you to create readable, structured code.
Every COBOL programmer knows where the period is supposed to be. C programmers still haven't figured out where the braces should be. It says a lot about a language when you have decades-long debates about punctuation in your code. It encourages a lack of programming discipline which I feel is the leading reason why software is so buggy today.
Yep. I'm sure feeling a bit of heat is really going to work on a Taliban fellow who grew up in a desert. When guys like that are picking a fight, there are two things they understand: dead and not dead. If not dead, keep fighting.
I've got a bat. Feel like going on a road trip to play a little baseball?
...and no other galaxy wants to be in the room.
Naw, it's millions of people checking to see if Ashton Kutcher is wiping his butt.
Heaven forbid a government finding new and innovative ways to deliver services to its people. Maybe the iPhone is not the best platform, but at least they are trying.
And the sooner the world figures this out the better we'll all be.
Good on you.
I'm a self employed computer technician, and in addition to being in a dying field, the amount of bullshit I have to put up with is astounding. They tell me, "But I really need it this afternoon!" So I flex nuts and get it ready that afternoon and then they freak out when I hand them the bill. I once had a dude threaten me with death because it was going to take a week to get the parts to fix his hunk of crap laptop. They lose it when I tell them their hard drive is toast and all their data is gone. I ask them about their backups and they say they have none. What am I supposed to do?
Society in general has developed a rather unhealthy obsession with always available computer technology, but yet are unwilling to pay for it. Women seem to have a better bullshit filter than men, so I'm not surprised they are giving up on this field. I should have quit long ago and become a plumber or something.
No seriously! There's radiation!
Dunno about solar physicists, but astrophysicists did get their Top Gun movie. It was called "Contact".
I disagree.
Sure there is a lot of waste in a government funded system, but I'll bet that is balanced out nicely because the government never intends to make a profit. Space X intends to make a profit. Is there even profit to be made going into space? Right now, not really. A profit opportunity exists for them, not because of anything valuable up there we can get to, but because we need to keep the ISS going.
Another reason why NASA has blown through so much money over the years is they were inventing, from the ground up, the entire technological base to get humans into space. Not cheap.
Space X has done what exactly? Create a LEO capable rocket. Yay! Something NASA pulled off in the 50s. NASA had man-rated boosters by 1960 and had people on the moon by '69. They also came up with the STS, which is so far beyond anything the private sector can possibly fund.
I'm not saying that having private contractors do the space thing is bad, but I'll bet even if you handed over all of the plans for a Space Shuttle or an Apollo system the mission costs would be similar.
Foo and Bar, only names you need. Besides, Foo is a pretty name for a girl!
If they are willing to go to the trouble of a polygraph test it means they've got some dirt on you or are looking to get some more, or whatever they think is more. Truth is not the goal, only verifiability, and the little wiggles on the paper supply this.
It would be interesting to take one of these and consistently lie throughout to see how well the examiners do.
The real problem is the U.S., for all its military might, doesn't have the stomach for war. The insurgents do. They are willing to go all the way for their cause, as twisted as it might seem to us. It's the same problem as Vietnam. That war was half a dozen nukes away from being solved. Afghanistan and Iraq are easy to solve too: nuke the place until everyone you don't like is dead. Or everyone is dead. Al Qaeda would do it if they could.
But oh we can't use those horrid nukes, etc, etc... OK, fine, this shows upstanding moral character and this is commendable, but it then begs a more pertinent question: "if you weren't willing to utterly exterminate your enemies with the resources you have, why did you bother to invade in the first place? Why not just stay home?"
...just saying.