If Armstrong comes back for another try next year, he'd have to worry about giving some of the spectators his exact coordinates. Today: spit, tomorrow: precision guided munitions.
I've been hunting for OLED displays for a prototype that needs the low power and extended temperature range (LCD displays are useless below about 10-20 C, unless they have special fluid, which takes them down to around 0 C), and there isn't much out there. Pacific Display Devices is about the only supplier I found where an order for just a couple of displays wouldn't be met with gales of laughter or spittle. Anyone know of any others?
The only reason I'm still using Linux is because I have a crapload of things I need to backup before I can reinstall Windows. Around 20 gigs worth of stuff, and all of it goes on CD's (no DVD burner).
Any time I have a ton of stuff to back up, I just go buy another hard drive and removeable tray and copy the stuff that way. They're getting so cheap that the convenience is worth the cost.
Overall, the results are pretty clear: Mac users might not actually be smarter than PC users, but they certainly use better English and a larger vocabulary to express more complex thinking.
Or stated another way, Mac users' writing is harder to read and understand.
There are certain military facilities I visit where I have to surrender my calculator "because it has memory and you might use it to remove classified communications." Meanwhile, the local support staff is wheeling entire desks and filing cabinets in and out without the guards looking at them twice.
Bill Gates is a big contributor to Democrat politicians and causes. So are a number of other big-software moguls. If I were a Republican, I'd be going open source wherever possible, even if a number of its adherents are somewhere to the left of the Communists.
I used to have a giant CRT monitor that generated losts of heat. My cat loved to lie on top of it because it was so nice and toasty. One day when I was out of the room, she vomited up a hairball into it and destroyed it. Luckily it was in power-save mode at the time, so she didn't get fried herself. Six or seven hundred bucks down the tubes. Nowadays I have a great LCD monitor, and she still goes up to it with the obvious intent of jumping on top, only to realize that there's no room. I now know what disappointment looks like in a cat.
Those 'propeller-beanie techies', as you put it, are often more grounded in reality than the marketing and advertising liars that incompetent management often attempt to 'put in charge'.
I like marketing types. They're a fun-loving crowd, plus they have expense accounts. Whenever I've been on a project where they're involved, it's been a blast, since we go out at night and drink Courvosier on the company's dime, and get neato stuff like fancy coffee mugs with the project name. You have to curb their instincts to overpromise (and, yes, lie), but that comes with the territory. Plus, they're usually more in tune with what the customers want than a bunch of us sitting in our cubicles getting monitor tans. Overall they're a positive force.
And on a related point, do you notice how you feel quite happy using abusive terms for those with technical skill? Do you ever call marketing and advertising 'liars' (as I did above)? If not, why not? It's an apt description - but maybe they would complain to much, it wouldn't be socially acceptable.
Hey *I'm* a propeller-head. I claim my God-given American right to use disparaging terms toward my peeps while forbidding that right to those outside the group.
Philip describes the disasters that happen when marketing and advertising people rule the software development
As opposed to a bunch of propeller-beanie techies who wouldn't know what a customer wants if he was screaming it in their faces? I've worked on projects where the technologists were in charge, and it's equally ugly. The best result seems to come from collaborative efforts where the marketing types say, "We need X," and the tech heads tell them why it's lame, derivative, and technologically uncool. The two sides squabble for a while, then someone in management threatens both sides with unemployment and it gets done.
If you do more work with fewer people and/or resources, that's a good thing. It's why we don't have elevator operators or icemen any longer. I'm old enough to remember when banks opened at 10am and closed at 3pm because the human beings had to do the backoffice paperwork by hand. Does anyone mourn the loss of those jobs? Stopping or inhibiting technological progress in the name of "saving our jobs" is just dumb.
If someone's a REAL master criminal, then he doesn't get caught and you never hear about him. Therefore, the only criminals you hear about are the dumb ones who get caught. Or at least that's my theory. Seems worthy of a $100 million research grant. (And there you have my template for becoming a master criminal. Enjoy.)
(And heck, at least they were upgrading facilities that the county might not otherwise budget for.)
The problems is, you're taxing people in other areas to pay for your school's facilities. Schools are, and should be, local entities. If the local taxpayers don't want to spend the money to maintain the infrastructure, then why should you and I, who don't even benefit? Then there's the whole issue of dishonesty - claiming the funds will be used for one purpose, while secretly doing something else with them. We have a highway "trust fund" that officially has billions in it, but has been borrowed against by Congress so that most of the money will never lay a single square foot of road. My local municipality has systematically looted the sewer fund. Now that routine pipeline breaks are dumping raw sewage into the ocean, they're screaming that the fund is broke and rates have to go up. Think of that next time some politician talks about another "trust fund" for some great purpose.
Yes, I know E-Rate is not funded by property taxes: that was my point. The school used E-Rate to fund infrastructure improvements that were completely unrelated to the internet wiring. If by "over hear," you mean the US, "ratepayer" is the proper term. "Ratepayer," because it's the people paying their phone bills that pay the tax that funds this effort. Sure, they're taxpayers too, but "ratepayer" has the connotation that it's an avoidable expense (all you've got to do is go without phone sevice - which most people won't do, but is nevertheless an option).
Shortly after this program started, one of our local schools wired itself, and oh-so-coincidentally did it in a way that required recarpeting and painting the entire place to repair the "construction damage". All paid for out of the fund of course. I'll bet there are ten times more little scams like this that add up to way more than the big noticable ones.
One day a while back, my outgoing email suddenly stopped functioning. Came to find out that Cox decided to block port 25 access to any but its own SMTP servers, and that if you want to send anything, it's got to go thru them. They said they'd remove that restriction if I wanted to "upgrade" my service to business class. For more money of course. This on top of an earlier fiasco in which they falsely accused me and a few hundred other people of running Napster servers, and threated to shut us down if we didn't desist. (They implemented a scanning script which was miscoded and thought a firewall was evidence of Napster for some reason. Evidently they didn't test it, so it automatically generated hundreds of nasty emails to customers. The resulting meltdown of their inbox and subsequent groveling apology was a glorious thing.)
I never saw the point of learning French, the effort required was vastly disproportionate to the benefit, and I have lived in the country for two years.
Ah. I was wondering about the gratuitous Bush bashing in an otherwise on-point post. You may not speak French, but propinquity has given you some of their attitudes.
To this day nobody can make a positive argument as to why we went there, why this was the only solution, or why we had to do it now.
Sure they can. What you mean is that you don't accept those arguments.
What nobody has bothered to explain is why the iraqis deserved to be freed more then the palestenians, chechnians, taiwanese, chinese, tibetians, east timorese, north koreans or any other long suffering opressed people of the world.
You have to start somewhere. If we'd attacked North Korea, people would be asking why not Iraq. That question is just a stand-in for saying that you don't want to go to war anywhere, anytime, for anything, against anyone. It's a valid point of view, so why don't you just come right out and say it?
As innumerable posters have noted, the electricity for these things has to come from somewhere. A lot of those same posters then take the position that human-powered cycles are the true "green" transportation. If by "green" one means "nonpolluting and not consuming resources," then no, they're not. The extra energy the human expends has to come from food, which has to be grown, harvested, transported, stocked, and sold, all of which takes energy. The waste produced by the rider has to be transported and disposed of, which takes energy and may add to pollution itself, depending on how finicky the rules for pollution are in the rider's community. Additionally, the rider is producing increased levels of carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming according to some people. Energy has to be expended in the making and distribution of the bicycle. Face it, one's mere existence is a drain on the resources of the universe, so if you want to be completely "green," killing yourself is about the only way to spare nature your wear and tear (and even then your decomposing corpse will contribute your final donation of pollutants to the planet). Personally, I'm going to impose myself on nature, and damn the consequences.
Looks like I need to point out for the emotionally unstable personality types who read this that I started the post with the words, "if I were someone interested in reducing the impact..." That isn't an advocacy position on the issue, just my pointing out a strategy that might one day be employed (and in fact, might already be in play), and that one could watch for. Get a grip, idiots. (This isn't directed at you, Rxke.)
If I were someone interested in reducing the impact of these and future pictures, I'd create a bunch of outrageous-but-more-or-less-easily-detected fakes and flood the system with them. As the fakes were discovered and debunked, suspicion would arise regarding any still photograph, until Gresham's Law takes effect and the bad eliminated the good. If there were scores of "war crimes" photos released each day, soon no one would pay attention any more, and the real ones would likely be ignored or at least be strongly doubted.
Slashdot Mirror
If Armstrong comes back for another try next year, he'd have to worry about giving some of the spectators his exact coordinates. Today: spit, tomorrow: precision guided munitions.
I've been hunting for OLED displays for a prototype that needs the low power and extended temperature range (LCD displays are useless below about 10-20 C, unless they have special fluid, which takes them down to around 0 C), and there isn't much out there. Pacific Display Devices is about the only supplier I found where an order for just a couple of displays wouldn't be met with gales of laughter or spittle. Anyone know of any others?
Any time I have a ton of stuff to back up, I just go buy another hard drive and removeable tray and copy the stuff that way. They're getting so cheap that the convenience is worth the cost.
Or stated another way, Mac users' writing is harder to read and understand.
There are certain military facilities I visit where I have to surrender my calculator "because it has memory and you might use it to remove classified communications." Meanwhile, the local support staff is wheeling entire desks and filing cabinets in and out without the guards looking at them twice.
Don't think about it, it'll just make you crazy.
Bill Gates is a big contributor to Democrat politicians and causes. So are a number of other big-software moguls. If I were a Republican, I'd be going open source wherever possible, even if a number of its adherents are somewhere to the left of the Communists.
I used to have a giant CRT monitor that generated losts of heat. My cat loved to lie on top of it because it was so nice and toasty. One day when I was out of the room, she vomited up a hairball into it and destroyed it. Luckily it was in power-save mode at the time, so she didn't get fried herself. Six or seven hundred bucks down the tubes. Nowadays I have a great LCD monitor, and she still goes up to it with the obvious intent of jumping on top, only to realize that there's no room. I now know what disappointment looks like in a cat.
I like marketing types. They're a fun-loving crowd, plus they have expense accounts. Whenever I've been on a project where they're involved, it's been a blast, since we go out at night and drink Courvosier on the company's dime, and get neato stuff like fancy coffee mugs with the project name. You have to curb their instincts to overpromise (and, yes, lie), but that comes with the territory. Plus, they're usually more in tune with what the customers want than a bunch of us sitting in our cubicles getting monitor tans. Overall they're a positive force.
And on a related point, do you notice how you feel quite happy using abusive terms for those with technical skill? Do you ever call marketing and advertising 'liars' (as I did above)? If not, why not? It's an apt description - but maybe they would complain to much, it wouldn't be socially acceptable.
Hey *I'm* a propeller-head. I claim my God-given American right to use disparaging terms toward my peeps while forbidding that right to those outside the group.
As opposed to a bunch of propeller-beanie techies who wouldn't know what a customer wants if he was screaming it in their faces? I've worked on projects where the technologists were in charge, and it's equally ugly. The best result seems to come from collaborative efforts where the marketing types say, "We need X," and the tech heads tell them why it's lame, derivative, and technologically uncool. The two sides squabble for a while, then someone in management threatens both sides with unemployment and it gets done.
If you do more work with fewer people and/or resources, that's a good thing. It's why we don't have elevator operators or icemen any longer. I'm old enough to remember when banks opened at 10am and closed at 3pm because the human beings had to do the backoffice paperwork by hand. Does anyone mourn the loss of those jobs? Stopping or inhibiting technological progress in the name of "saving our jobs" is just dumb.
If someone's a REAL master criminal, then he doesn't get caught and you never hear about him. Therefore, the only criminals you hear about are the dumb ones who get caught. Or at least that's my theory. Seems worthy of a $100 million research grant. (And there you have my template for becoming a master criminal. Enjoy.)
Well, I say we inject them with motivation drugs. Where to find them is left as an exercise to the reader.
The problems is, you're taxing people in other areas to pay for your school's facilities. Schools are, and should be, local entities. If the local taxpayers don't want to spend the money to maintain the infrastructure, then why should you and I, who don't even benefit? Then there's the whole issue of dishonesty - claiming the funds will be used for one purpose, while secretly doing something else with them. We have a highway "trust fund" that officially has billions in it, but has been borrowed against by Congress so that most of the money will never lay a single square foot of road. My local municipality has systematically looted the sewer fund. Now that routine pipeline breaks are dumping raw sewage into the ocean, they're screaming that the fund is broke and rates have to go up. Think of that next time some politician talks about another "trust fund" for some great purpose.
Great summary of why diversion of funds is a bad idea.
Yes, I know E-Rate is not funded by property taxes: that was my point. The school used E-Rate to fund infrastructure improvements that were completely unrelated to the internet wiring. If by "over hear," you mean the US, "ratepayer" is the proper term. "Ratepayer," because it's the people paying their phone bills that pay the tax that funds this effort. Sure, they're taxpayers too, but "ratepayer" has the connotation that it's an avoidable expense (all you've got to do is go without phone sevice - which most people won't do, but is nevertheless an option).
Shortly after this program started, one of our local schools wired itself, and oh-so-coincidentally did it in a way that required recarpeting and painting the entire place to repair the "construction damage". All paid for out of the fund of course. I'll bet there are ten times more little scams like this that add up to way more than the big noticable ones.
One day a while back, my outgoing email suddenly stopped functioning. Came to find out that Cox decided to block port 25 access to any but its own SMTP servers, and that if you want to send anything, it's got to go thru them. They said they'd remove that restriction if I wanted to "upgrade" my service to business class. For more money of course. This on top of an earlier fiasco in which they falsely accused me and a few hundred other people of running Napster servers, and threated to shut us down if we didn't desist. (They implemented a scanning script which was miscoded and thought a firewall was evidence of Napster for some reason. Evidently they didn't test it, so it automatically generated hundreds of nasty emails to customers. The resulting meltdown of their inbox and subsequent groveling apology was a glorious thing.)
Ah. I was wondering about the gratuitous Bush bashing in an otherwise on-point post. You may not speak French, but propinquity has given you some of their attitudes.
Wow. Who could have anticipated that a multinational megacommitee of squabbling factions would produce something so flawed?
Sure they can. What you mean is that you don't accept those arguments.
What nobody has bothered to explain is why the iraqis deserved to be freed more then the palestenians, chechnians, taiwanese, chinese, tibetians, east timorese, north koreans or any other long suffering opressed people of the world.
You have to start somewhere. If we'd attacked North Korea, people would be asking why not Iraq. That question is just a stand-in for saying that you don't want to go to war anywhere, anytime, for anything, against anyone. It's a valid point of view, so why don't you just come right out and say it?
Why be vague on this detail? Is the reward a fixed number of shares, a dollar figure translated into stock, or what?
As innumerable posters have noted, the electricity for these things has to come from somewhere. A lot of those same posters then take the position that human-powered cycles are the true "green" transportation. If by "green" one means "nonpolluting and not consuming resources," then no, they're not. The extra energy the human expends has to come from food, which has to be grown, harvested, transported, stocked, and sold, all of which takes energy. The waste produced by the rider has to be transported and disposed of, which takes energy and may add to pollution itself, depending on how finicky the rules for pollution are in the rider's community. Additionally, the rider is producing increased levels of carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming according to some people. Energy has to be expended in the making and distribution of the bicycle. Face it, one's mere existence is a drain on the resources of the universe, so if you want to be completely "green," killing yourself is about the only way to spare nature your wear and tear (and even then your decomposing corpse will contribute your final donation of pollutants to the planet). Personally, I'm going to impose myself on nature, and damn the consequences.
Looks like I need to point out for the emotionally unstable personality types who read this that I started the post with the words, "if I were someone interested in reducing the impact ..." That isn't an advocacy position on the issue, just my pointing out a strategy that might one day be employed (and in fact, might already be in play), and that one could watch for. Get a grip, idiots. (This isn't directed at you, Rxke.)
If I were someone interested in reducing the impact of these and future pictures, I'd create a bunch of outrageous-but-more-or-less-easily-detected fakes and flood the system with them. As the fakes were discovered and debunked, suspicion would arise regarding any still photograph, until Gresham's Law takes effect and the bad eliminated the good. If there were scores of "war crimes" photos released each day, soon no one would pay attention any more, and the real ones would likely be ignored or at least be strongly doubted.
We pretty much expect things to get increasingly bigger and faster, so is another RAM-based pseudo-disk that big a deal?