The part where you said you would give it back to him if only he votes the way you want him to on a particular bill... (Or are you going to try to claim that was not what you were implying by your quotation marks around "appropriate steps"?)
So what you're saying is that you tried to buy a senator's vote on legislation (for a meager $100, no less), and you're now surprised that it didn't work?
Maybe you should have considered posting that anonymously.
So put a battery on your end, and you've got exactly the same level of protection as your POTS line.
$100 got me a UPS that keeps my FiOS ONT and Vonage adapter running for almost two days without power
Land-lines aren't "self-powered". They're powered off the grid just like your house. The phone company just has a big battery pack or generator at their end for the equipment.
Regardless, the chances that the power will be out, you'll *need* to use the phone, and the phone won't be out too is ridiculously slim.
It's the justice system, not the vengeance system. Our society is supposedly built on the idea that nobody can be stripped of their rights. As punishment, he is relieved of his privileges and freedoms. It is unjust to go further than that, even if it would make you feel good.
Something tells me that if the vast majority of people involved in bitter divorces thought they could get away with murder, the occurrence would be a *lot* higher.
I've watched lots of people go through bitter divorces, and in every case I've seen both sides break every law they could get away with in dealing with their ex during the divorce process. Perjury to obtain restraining orders (to use to obtain custody of children, not 'cause there was actual abuse or threats of abuse), vandalism, theft, harassment...
For being a little strange... And the whole other improbably large pile of circumstantial evidence suggesting he might have killed his wife...
Saying there was "reasonable doubt" here is the same as saying that it's reasonably likely that you might win the lottery. The only thing that would have gotten him out of this was another suspect with equivalent or more evidence suggesting the other person had done it. Of course, the odds are that he would have had to have not actually done it for that to have happened.
People here, subconsciously, are worried that they may be thrown in jail for something they didn't do just because they're a geek like Hans is. It's not going to happen. Chances are that you're not going to have all that circumstantial evidence leading anybody to even accuse you of such a thing unless you actually did something wrong.
In the company I work for, seniors are a lot less expensive than interns (though their salaries are much higher). Interns need guidance, taking away productivity from other seniors. Interns make fuckups, which again cost precious senior's time. Not to mention a senior gets done way, way more in the same amount of time an intern does. Therefore yes, we are mostly focused on "hiring nothing but experienced senior developers", and we believe it's a good thing to do.
I find that in these types of companies (I try to avoid them now), you always end up in a situation where nobody wants to do the shit work, thus stuff that *needs* to be done either doesn't get done, or causes strife.
A well managed development team is made up of senior and junior developers. The good manager knows to give tasks to the junior developers that won't require much hand holding from the senior developers. The good manager knows the difference between the types of tasks too. Most managers fail at this and end up thinking their junior team members are worthless after they're given something that is over their head. A manager that doesn't understand the complexity or difficulty of a task will almost always underestimate.
Senior developers also make fuckups. They're just generally the kind that you don't notice until they bite you in the ass after you ship instead of the kind where you look at the code and say "what were you thinking?"
Invariably, companies think that their practices are a "good thing to do". You'd be an idiot if you were doing something that you didn't think was good... It doesn't really lend any credibility to the practice though.
If anyone thinks that limiting a computer scientist's choice of tools is a good idea, you should kick that manager to the curb.
If anyone thinks that hiring computer scientist's to do anything other than research and theory is a good idea, you should kick that manager to the curb.
Anybody who thinks your development team shouldn't include computer scientists (no grocer's apostrophe, thank you) is likely doomed to write poorly performing code without understanding why it performs poorly, or breaks.
Programmers generally suck at designing software that does anything novel... Cookie cutter database applications and websites, sure... Other than that you end up with people calling member functions, using overloaded operators, and running nested loops with no understanding of the computational complexity of the operations (It pays to know when the += operator kicks off an expensive sorting algorithm behind the scenes, etc...). You end up with people synchronizing atomic operations. You end up with race conditions. Programmers, after all, are expertly trained in the how, and the what of creating software, but not the why.
I do agree with part of your point, though. Many computer scientists are not very good programmers. They tend to get so wrapped up in the 'why' that they ignore many of the team-friendly programming practices that come with the 'how'.
If the people who sign my paycheck stop respecting my professional opinion and do whatever the management book-of-the-week-club's latest title says instead, it won't be long before somebody else is signing my paycheck. There is a time and a place for shutting up and doing what the authority figure tells you to do. If what they're saying is in contrast with your responsibilities, you should stand up and say something. Partially because it's your responsibility to get the job done, but mostly because if you're forced into a position where you can't do your job to the best of your ability it will reflect poorly on you and have a negative impact on your career.
Of course, if your job doesn't involve recommending tools, or making design decisions, then yeah. Shut up and use the tools you've been given or you're going to get fired.
Their motivation is that they are getting their asses kicked by more fuel efficient vehicles from other manufacturers.
You're right about one thing though... A lower MPG *wouldn't* increase sales.
His logic was spot on. The reason they don't magically increase their fuel efficiency with a $10 part is because they can't. Which, incidentally, is why there aren't tons of mainstream, credible media outlets telling you where to get the $10 part to increase your gas mileage either.
You can't reasonably expect children to povide for themselves, so let's say we give children full coverage (still issues with this, but let's throw it out there as a hypothetical)...
You're living *right now* in a time where economic weakness is causing people to declare bankruptcy and lose their homes. Universal coverage will not prevent that from happening. It will merely shift the problem around a bit... And given the stellar lack of efficiency that many governments (especially our own, which covers more people as employees as there are residents in canada) have shown in providing coverage, the economic issues are likely to be huge.
Then you get to the bigger problem. The one that people in canada, france, etc... always complain about. What is worth coverage? What level of cost causes your government to let you die?
That decision should be left in the private sector. The outcome (in terms of dying) is the same anyway.
You say people "aren't buying that baloney", but that's mostly because they want a handout. They think that universal coverage means one less expense that they're responsible for, and all that money is back in their pocket. That's not how it works.
The comment was off-topic in context (the parent didn't make any claim that economics governs the laws of physics), and inflammatory in style. It also left the realm of "scientific response" when he started with the name calling. It deserves to be modded all the way down.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand.
Wow. Not only were you immature and obnoxious about it, but you also argued against something he didn't say. (He said the increasing costs would increase access to materials that already exist, not that increased demand would magically make more materials.)
Even if you're right about no additional materials becoming available, you still came off as a total jerk. Not to mention that saying things like "almost certainly feeble", and baseless things like "implies the universe responds like a rational actor," implies (in the former case), and proves (in the latter case, since you're putting words into the parent's post to bridge your logical chasm) that you're a complete idiot.
Do you also buy Monster(tm) cables and pay more for Chevron with Techron?
No. But there are measurable, noticeable, and obvious differences between an high-end and a low-end monitor... Unlike with a Monster cable..
Number of inputs, contrast ratio, refresh rate/response time (depending on if it's a CRT/LCD), image quality at non-native resolutions, color rendition, size, and length of warranty, for example.
If you haven't had one dead pixel, you've been really lucky (and perhaps haven't purchased many LCDs). Though recently the occurance of dead pixels has been less, they still occur and most manufacturers don't replace the display if you have one. It's highly unlikely that you have even a single LCD display without at least one dead sub-pixel (though unless it was stuck bright you'd likely have to display a special test image to notice them).
You're right that price doesn't imply quality. You can easily buy a crappy display for too much money... But that's why I't a rule of thumb... It's rare to be able to get a quality display for very little money. I wouldn't, for example, buy an Apple display. They're too expensive for what they are. You can get a monitor of equal quality for less money (They're essentially Dell UltraSharp monitors with a fancy Apple bezel.)
$700 isn't all that much for a quality monitor. Why does that number seem so ridiculous? It's easy to spend over $1000 on a display. Were I picking a display for a long-term investment right now, I'd be getting something in the Samsung XL Series or the ViewSonic VLED221 (the only standalone LCDs on the market right now with an LED backlight). My experiences with ViewSonic monitors I've supported in the field aren't that great though, so I'd likely wait until the Samsung dropped below $1000, or Dell gets around to putting an LED backlight in their UltraSharp series.
You could spend less on a quality monitor if you compromise on size, but then you can also spend less on a PC... (The typical entry level dell being sub-$500 these days...)
Also, please point out where I told you what to buy ("Stop buying [...] and [...]" was describing an action and effect, not telling you what to do. Though that should have been obvious.)
Also, since I'm a "fucking retard", I'll continue buying four or five PCs without replacing my monitor, instead of replacing the monitor every time. That way I can either save money in the long run, or have higher-end PC components on average than I would have been able to afford on the same budget.
Instead, it sounds like you yourself have been buying "cheap piece[es] of shit" and have not been enjoying your monitors, so you decide to bury your shame and buyer's remorse by pretending you buy only the best.
Oooohh-kay... Somebody's been smoking a little too much of something. Sorry if I insulted your stuff by saying "cheap piece of shit". Getting all defensive about it by slinging groundless speculation won't solve anything. You should have dropped it after calling me out on the 'decades' bit, 'cause at least you had some straws to grasp at in that argument...
If the mass of a sphere containing (x) atoms of silicon-28 isn't the same as the mass of (insert favorite shape here) containing (x) atoms of silicon-28, we've got problems...
I haven't had the backlight go on an LCD yet, but I do have some 18" LCDs from the late '90s which had their inverters die. The manufacturer sold me a replacement, and they are working again.
I have a release-day PSP which still has the 1.50 firmware on it. My lack of desire to "upgrade" to more restrictive firmware led me to put it away for a while... I haven't used it in over a year...
Now I want to pick it back up and try some of these new custom firmwares, and all of the documentation assumes you've been following the 'scene' the whole time. If you don't know what something is for already, you're left to either follow over a year of 1337-sp33k forum posts to get caught up.
So, no... You don't necessarily know what this means already if you care. After not paying attention for a year, though, coming back to it gives me a new appreciation for why most people think that PSP hackers are a bunch of kids trying to pirate software.
Screens cost more than the rest of the system? What?
Stop buying cheap-ass displays, and they will far outlast the rest of your system. Unless you're building a gaming rig, the display should be half, or more than half the cost... It should also last you through several future machines. Not only that, but if you buy a quality display instead of a cheap piece of shit, you'll actually enjoy your display for the entire time you own it.
I know of plenty of businesses still using black & white VGA displays from the early '90s with upgraded systems behind them.
I have a 19" trinitron display from 1995 that I'm posting this from right now, which I expect to last several more years at the very least. I have two 18" 1280x1024 LCD monitors that will be coming up on 10 years old in a few months which I have no intention of retiring soon (yes, they were absurdly expensive when they were purchased. Luckily I wasn't the one paying)...
Regardless, my comment was clearly indicating that "decades" is a reasonable unit to use to measure the lifespan of displays, since the number would typically be greater than '1'. I'm not sure what your point is at all, other than letting us all know that you're pedantic.
Re:I understand why you`d want to go pre-built
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 1
That's a good reason not to use recycled hardware, but not a good reason to buy an off-the-shelf NAS.
For the same price as the typical NAS, you can build your own, choose power-efficient parts, and underclock. You'll get the low power utilization of a pre-built NAS, but you can build in features you wouldn't have gotten from the store-bought device.
Like tons of extra memory, redundant disks, and the ability to run arbitrary server applications...
I'm currently running with a mobile AMD CPU in my file server. Most of the time it's running at 700 MHz. With 1 drive I was at 17 watts idle. I now have 5 disks and it's at about 38 watts idle.
The hardware paid for itself in power savings over the old dual-P3 server I was using before in less than a year, and the machine is faster too.
Slashdot Mirror
As of the most recent PS3 firmware, you can play any background music you'd like off the console hard drive regardless of what game you're playing.
On the Wii, there are games that allow custom MP3 soundtracks played off the SD card.
I'm guessing you have a 360, but not a Wii or PS3?
The part where you said you would give it back to him if only he votes the way you want him to on a particular bill... (Or are you going to try to claim that was not what you were implying by your quotation marks around "appropriate steps"?)
So what you're saying is that you tried to buy a senator's vote on legislation (for a meager $100, no less), and you're now surprised that it didn't work?
Maybe you should have considered posting that anonymously.
So put a battery on your end, and you've got exactly the same level of protection as your POTS line.
$100 got me a UPS that keeps my FiOS ONT and Vonage adapter running for almost two days without power
Land-lines aren't "self-powered". They're powered off the grid just like your house. The phone company just has a big battery pack or generator at their end for the equipment.
Regardless, the chances that the power will be out, you'll *need* to use the phone, and the phone won't be out too is ridiculously slim.
It's the justice system, not the vengeance system. Our society is supposedly built on the idea that nobody can be stripped of their rights. As punishment, he is relieved of his privileges and freedoms. It is unjust to go further than that, even if it would make you feel good.
Something tells me that if the vast majority of people involved in bitter divorces thought they could get away with murder, the occurrence would be a *lot* higher.
I've watched lots of people go through bitter divorces, and in every case I've seen both sides break every law they could get away with in dealing with their ex during the divorce process. Perjury to obtain restraining orders (to use to obtain custody of children, not 'cause there was actual abuse or threats of abuse), vandalism, theft, harassment...
For being a little strange... And the whole other improbably large pile of circumstantial evidence suggesting he might have killed his wife...
Saying there was "reasonable doubt" here is the same as saying that it's reasonably likely that you might win the lottery. The only thing that would have gotten him out of this was another suspect with equivalent or more evidence suggesting the other person had done it. Of course, the odds are that he would have had to have not actually done it for that to have happened.
People here, subconsciously, are worried that they may be thrown in jail for something they didn't do just because they're a geek like Hans is. It's not going to happen. Chances are that you're not going to have all that circumstantial evidence leading anybody to even accuse you of such a thing unless you actually did something wrong.
In the company I work for, seniors are a lot less expensive than interns (though their salaries are much higher). Interns need guidance, taking away productivity from other seniors. Interns make fuckups, which again cost precious senior's time. Not to mention a senior gets done way, way more in the same amount of time an intern does. Therefore yes, we are mostly focused on "hiring nothing but experienced senior developers", and we believe it's a good thing to do.
I find that in these types of companies (I try to avoid them now), you always end up in a situation where nobody wants to do the shit work, thus stuff that *needs* to be done either doesn't get done, or causes strife.
A well managed development team is made up of senior and junior developers. The good manager knows to give tasks to the junior developers that won't require much hand holding from the senior developers. The good manager knows the difference between the types of tasks too. Most managers fail at this and end up thinking their junior team members are worthless after they're given something that is over their head. A manager that doesn't understand the complexity or difficulty of a task will almost always underestimate.
Senior developers also make fuckups. They're just generally the kind that you don't notice until they bite you in the ass after you ship instead of the kind where you look at the code and say "what were you thinking?"
Invariably, companies think that their practices are a "good thing to do". You'd be an idiot if you were doing something that you didn't think was good... It doesn't really lend any credibility to the practice though.
If anyone thinks that limiting a computer scientist's choice of tools is a good idea, you should kick that manager to the curb.
If anyone thinks that hiring computer scientist's to do anything other than research and theory is a good idea, you should kick that manager to the curb.
Anybody who thinks your development team shouldn't include computer scientists (no grocer's apostrophe, thank you) is likely doomed to write poorly performing code without understanding why it performs poorly, or breaks.
Programmers generally suck at designing software that does anything novel... Cookie cutter database applications and websites, sure... Other than that you end up with people calling member functions, using overloaded operators, and running nested loops with no understanding of the computational complexity of the operations (It pays to know when the += operator kicks off an expensive sorting algorithm behind the scenes, etc...). You end up with people synchronizing atomic operations. You end up with race conditions. Programmers, after all, are expertly trained in the how, and the what of creating software, but not the why.
I do agree with part of your point, though. Many computer scientists are not very good programmers. They tend to get so wrapped up in the 'why' that they ignore many of the team-friendly programming practices that come with the 'how'.
If the people who sign my paycheck stop respecting my professional opinion and do whatever the management book-of-the-week-club's latest title says instead, it won't be long before somebody else is signing my paycheck. There is a time and a place for shutting up and doing what the authority figure tells you to do. If what they're saying is in contrast with your responsibilities, you should stand up and say something. Partially because it's your responsibility to get the job done, but mostly because if you're forced into a position where you can't do your job to the best of your ability it will reflect poorly on you and have a negative impact on your career.
Of course, if your job doesn't involve recommending tools, or making design decisions, then yeah. Shut up and use the tools you've been given or you're going to get fired.
Aaah, the old "Americans are idiots" argument.
Their motivation is that they are getting their asses kicked by more fuel efficient vehicles from other manufacturers.
You're right about one thing though... A lower MPG *wouldn't* increase sales.
His logic was spot on. The reason they don't magically increase their fuel efficiency with a $10 part is because they can't. Which, incidentally, is why there aren't tons of mainstream, credible media outlets telling you where to get the $10 part to increase your gas mileage either.
You can't reasonably expect children to povide for themselves, so let's say we give children full coverage (still issues with this, but let's throw it out there as a hypothetical)...
You're living *right now* in a time where economic weakness is causing people to declare bankruptcy and lose their homes. Universal coverage will not prevent that from happening. It will merely shift the problem around a bit... And given the stellar lack of efficiency that many governments (especially our own, which covers more people as employees as there are residents in canada) have shown in providing coverage, the economic issues are likely to be huge.
Then you get to the bigger problem. The one that people in canada, france, etc... always complain about. What is worth coverage? What level of cost causes your government to let you die?
That decision should be left in the private sector. The outcome (in terms of dying) is the same anyway.
You say people "aren't buying that baloney", but that's mostly because they want a handout. They think that universal coverage means one less expense that they're responsible for, and all that money is back in their pocket. That's not how it works.
Actually, yes. If those people are in public, or easily visible from a public place.
Or do you think Google should be subjected to anti-photography rules that many people are fighting against for other photographers?
The comment was off-topic in context (the parent didn't make any claim that economics governs the laws of physics), and inflammatory in style. It also left the realm of "scientific response" when he started with the name calling. It deserves to be modded all the way down.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand.
Wow. Not only were you immature and obnoxious about it, but you also argued against something he didn't say. (He said the increasing costs would increase access to materials that already exist, not that increased demand would magically make more materials.)
Even if you're right about no additional materials becoming available, you still came off as a total jerk. Not to mention that saying things like "almost certainly feeble", and baseless things like "implies the universe responds like a rational actor," implies (in the former case), and proves (in the latter case, since you're putting words into the parent's post to bridge your logical chasm) that you're a complete idiot.
You mean like publicly supported nuclear power?
Do you also buy Monster(tm) cables and pay more for Chevron with Techron?
No. But there are measurable, noticeable, and obvious differences between an high-end and a low-end monitor... Unlike with a Monster cable..
Number of inputs, contrast ratio, refresh rate/response time (depending on if it's a CRT/LCD), image quality at non-native resolutions, color rendition, size, and length of warranty, for example.
If you haven't had one dead pixel, you've been really lucky (and perhaps haven't purchased many LCDs). Though recently the occurance of dead pixels has been less, they still occur and most manufacturers don't replace the display if you have one. It's highly unlikely that you have even a single LCD display without at least one dead sub-pixel (though unless it was stuck bright you'd likely have to display a special test image to notice them).
You're right that price doesn't imply quality. You can easily buy a crappy display for too much money... But that's why I't a rule of thumb... It's rare to be able to get a quality display for very little money. I wouldn't, for example, buy an Apple display. They're too expensive for what they are. You can get a monitor of equal quality for less money (They're essentially Dell UltraSharp monitors with a fancy Apple bezel.)
$700 isn't all that much for a quality monitor. Why does that number seem so ridiculous? It's easy to spend over $1000 on a display. Were I picking a display for a long-term investment right now, I'd be getting something in the Samsung XL Series or the ViewSonic VLED221 (the only standalone LCDs on the market right now with an LED backlight). My experiences with ViewSonic monitors I've supported in the field aren't that great though, so I'd likely wait until the Samsung dropped below $1000, or Dell gets around to putting an LED backlight in their UltraSharp series.
You could spend less on a quality monitor if you compromise on size, but then you can also spend less on a PC... (The typical entry level dell being sub-$500 these days...)
Also, please point out where I told you what to buy ("Stop buying [...] and [...]" was describing an action and effect, not telling you what to do. Though that should have been obvious.)
Also, since I'm a "fucking retard", I'll continue buying four or five PCs without replacing my monitor, instead of replacing the monitor every time. That way I can either save money in the long run, or have higher-end PC components on average than I would have been able to afford on the same budget.
Oooohh-kay... Somebody's been smoking a little too much of something. Sorry if I insulted your stuff by saying "cheap piece of shit". Getting all defensive about it by slinging groundless speculation won't solve anything. You should have dropped it after calling me out on the 'decades' bit, 'cause at least you had some straws to grasp at in that argument...
If the mass of a sphere containing (x) atoms of silicon-28 isn't the same as the mass of (insert favorite shape here) containing (x) atoms of silicon-28, we've got problems...
I haven't had the backlight go on an LCD yet, but I do have some 18" LCDs from the late '90s which had their inverters die. The manufacturer sold me a replacement, and they are working again.
I have a release-day PSP which still has the 1.50 firmware on it. My lack of desire to "upgrade" to more restrictive firmware led me to put it away for a while... I haven't used it in over a year...
Now I want to pick it back up and try some of these new custom firmwares, and all of the documentation assumes you've been following the 'scene' the whole time. If you don't know what something is for already, you're left to either follow over a year of 1337-sp33k forum posts to get caught up.
So, no... You don't necessarily know what this means already if you care. After not paying attention for a year, though, coming back to it gives me a new appreciation for why most people think that PSP hackers are a bunch of kids trying to pirate software.
One line in your entire post explains the rest:
Stop buying cheap-ass displays, and they will far outlast the rest of your system. Unless you're building a gaming rig, the display should be half, or more than half the cost... It should also last you through several future machines. Not only that, but if you buy a quality display instead of a cheap piece of shit, you'll actually enjoy your display for the entire time you own it.
I know of plenty of businesses still using black & white VGA displays from the early '90s with upgraded systems behind them.
I have a 19" trinitron display from 1995 that I'm posting this from right now, which I expect to last several more years at the very least. I have two 18" 1280x1024 LCD monitors that will be coming up on 10 years old in a few months which I have no intention of retiring soon (yes, they were absurdly expensive when they were purchased. Luckily I wasn't the one paying)...
Regardless, my comment was clearly indicating that "decades" is a reasonable unit to use to measure the lifespan of displays, since the number would typically be greater than '1'. I'm not sure what your point is at all, other than letting us all know that you're pedantic.
That's a good reason not to use recycled hardware, but not a good reason to buy an off-the-shelf NAS.
For the same price as the typical NAS, you can build your own, choose power-efficient parts, and underclock. You'll get the low power utilization of a pre-built NAS, but you can build in features you wouldn't have gotten from the store-bought device.
Like tons of extra memory, redundant disks, and the ability to run arbitrary server applications...
I'm currently running with a mobile AMD CPU in my file server. Most of the time it's running at 700 MHz. With 1 drive I was at 17 watts idle. I now have 5 disks and it's at about 38 watts idle.
The hardware paid for itself in power savings over the old dual-P3 server I was using before in less than a year, and the machine is faster too.
$13,989 - $6799 = $7190 more.
7190 / 6799 = 1.058 = 106% more
Where does the extra 94% come from?