Re:Ok take a look at the life of John Brown
on
Sizing Up a Start-Up
·
· Score: 1
Damn. I'm torn between both of your arguments. Both hit home, and feel 'true' to me. But both can not be true at the same time. Or can they?
This is like trying to decide whether or not fate exists. It's the quesy feeling most of us get when we hear the phrase that "whether you realize it or not, the world is proceeding exactly as it should".
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. What proportion of failures and pain is worth what proportion of success, and what are the real odds anyways?
Most games of craps are a lot more predictable, and it's the rare game of craps where you're life is on the line.
The cable co should have provided a tool (on by default) that warns you every time you use an extra $50 of bandwidth. Or they should e-mail you every $xx or so. Then they just need to allow users to disable these warnings in their account/profile or something...
Yeah yeah, 'they should know better', but the problem is the *average* person, you know, your mother or grandfather, don't have anywhere near enough techie knowledge. We can do better for them.
The patent system exists for a reason. Would
their (or anyone) getting or not getting this patent actually change anyone's business plans? Would it accelerate progress?
I think the answer is clear.
No. Whether they got this patent or not, their business would not change. They haven't "given the world" anything such that we should give them exclusive use of this "discovery".
Holy shit. I can't believe I just talked casually and seriously about burning A HALF A TERRABYTE of data.
Is that cool or what:):)
It was only 5+ or so years ago I saw a company demoing their big huge cabinet sized optical tape thingie, that held a terrabyte of data. It was two huge 1.5-2 foot diamager reels of shiny optical tape. One minute seek time to any point. At the time I just boggled at the idea of a terrabyte of data. And now my home computer has 0.06 terrabytes of disk space, and if I spent another $1200-$1500 CDN and filled up the other ide channels with modern drives and replaced one of the older drives, I'd have 0.30 terrabytes.
I could do that right now.
This instant.
Walk down to the local shop and say 'gimme 4 65 gig disks please' and walk out.
The mpeg of my Brothers wedding will go on one DVD*, the reception on another, and the hijinks before and after on a third. And then there are 20-30 copies of all three for everyone who wants one.
What am I up to now? 468 Gigabytes?
(*) - Yeah that's right, I need raw mpeg. If you've used it you know that DivX-; has an 'upper quality limit' that prevents it from using any more bandwidth to increase quality. Even though you're telling it to use more than 1500-2000 kbps, your filesize doesn't increase and quality doesn't go up. (It's just the way it's quality settings/algorithm are currently built, not that it couldn't be changed to just isn't good enough for something like this.) And even if I were to use DivX;) at 2000 kbps, the 6 hours would add up to around 5 Gig, a full DVD.
Definitely, and the price would have to continue to increase as time went on, seeing as more and more people would have karma due to the 'injection' of karma into the system from it's current source.
I mean, undermoderation is really bad, but overmoderation would also be bad.
It would also help to stifle abuses. If the price of moderator points to karma is not 1-1, then nobody can set up a 'karma circle', which would be a very bad thing indeed.
Yes, that's right. No longer will you have to walk into the small computer shop and wonder whether they are reliable. Whether the clerk is an idiot or a liar. No longer will you run into that person in the bar and wonder "is this person a wierdo, or should I keep talking". The fools, idiots, liars, and cheats of the world would quickly be recognized, and the rest of us would bask in our magnificance.
Yes, I'm talking about implementing a Karma system in Real Life.
Ok, ok, here's my real suggestion: I'd like to see a person's Karma stats subdivided by 'type'. How funny are they. How insightful are they. How often are they off-topic.
Hey, we'll need this for our RL Karma System ( RLKS(tm)* ), so might as well get the bugs worked out of it now.
(*) Hmm, looks like we're going to have to fight a squatter for our domain name.
> but if Gnutella, which has some of the best open-source programmers
> on the Net behind it, can't survive the technical or legal challenges
> of critical mass, how will the other programs be any better prepared?
Mr. Fenning created Napster with the help of a few people.
Justin Frankel created Gnutella with the help of a few people in a few days.
The other programs don't have to be better prepared. They simply have to be better.
We've seen the best application that the Net has yet to provide.(*) We'll never forget what can be. What should be. What must be.
I'm itching all over, and some day, I'm going to scratch.
(*)- Admit it, when you first used Napster you said to yourself: "Holy shit, this thing is fast and does EXACTLY what I want it to, unlike 99% of every other piece of software and place on the net. This is EXACTLY how the world should be. This is spectacular."
>..filed several more continuations and divisions..
>.. reinterpreting the original art to look even more and more like SDRAM and DDR.
> The sleazy trick of all this... it's a way to make a patent last well beyond it's lifetime.
> in the case of the Rambus patents, the original teachings have to contain all material claimed later.
Thanks for the info AC. I'd sure like to be able to listen in on all the discussions (arguments) between the engineers, lawyers, and bean counters at all the places Rambus has/is-trying-to collect royalties. I bet it's tons more frustrating than the simple engineer/marketing issues I've seen (medium size firm).
Ok, I know the standard story being repeated here, they were a member of that working group, patented stuff when they were under ?contract? not to, left group, blah blah blah. And I know that they are currently an IP only company.
But I want to know from someone authoritative, whether or not they actually did any real work upon which their patents or based, or did they fund work that helped develop the tech that their patents are based on, OR (and these are the most likely ones in my mind) were they founded by other tech companies to manage their jointly shared IP, OR did they buy out the IP from other companies.
I mean, if they had outright stolen ideas then presumably there would be someone out there who would be suing them, or if anyone else had developed the tech, surely they would have had the patents and such.
There has GOT to be something that isn't mentioned. I mean, I don't like Rambus simply because they are trying to force feed us crappy technology, but that's a Management thing. Are we certain that they don't deserve to have the patents?
If that working group was collaborating on stuff, and if Rambus was contributing information but patenting it behind everyone's backs, that's one thing.(*) But it's not quite the same thing as patenting something one didn't develop. And I think in our zeal to hate Rambus ( it's easy to do, with them being such idiots ), we're assuming the worst.
I mean, sometimes it sounds like a small town telephone gossip circle in here.
Psst, did you hear so and so was making out with so and so?
Psst, did you hear so and so was fooling around with so and so?
Psst, did you hear that so and so was screwing around with so and so?
Psst, did you hear that so and so was screwing so and so?
TTFN
(*) - Ok, we all agree it sucks for consumers and for the other companies that were in the working group that ended up adopting the tech and then get screwed 10 years later paying royalties.
Silly developer. Don't you know the fastest way to concat big strings in VB* is to write to a file and then slurp it back in? It only took me an hour to figure out this workaround the first time I came across this.
You gotta think out of the box.:)
Ah yes. MS came so close and yet so far.
(chuckle)
(*) Yes, I'm serious. For those big 1/2-100MB strings it's 100 times as fast. Literally 100.
Let's be logical - Re:BASIC???
on
KBasic
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· Score: 1
I'd like to see a real study on this.
I mean, when we're starting out, learning our first programming language, you remember, when you were 12 or 15, do we read books that teach us good software construction techniques and all about software engineering, or do we just RTFM until we can make something neat?
Is there a difference between the amount of good code construction taught in books that teach other languages as compared to Basic? So maybe it's not Basic itself, but the place and time you learn it.
I remember learning Basic on the C64. The manual didn't do anything except tell you syntax and stuff, the same went for all the best C64 Basic books available at the time. If there had been chapters on 'writing good code', 'writing re-usable code', 'writing more code faster with fewer bugs', I would have read them, and I imagine I would have taken pride in following them! Hell, it would have made life SOooo much easier (no matter what language you're starting out with). Have you ever gone back 15 years and looked at the code you wrote when you were 15? The 10-20,000 lines you wrote to create your first (simple) video game or graphics editor? I have. (shudder)
It takes time to learn good software construction techniques the hard way, and the easy way requires instruction, whether by people more experienced than you or by well written books. By the time I had learned a bit the hard way I was programming as a job, and we weren't using Basic.(*) The easy way didn't occur until I had a job with other programmers.
To refute some of the specific claims:
> writing anything longer.. is very painful
Is it because it's Basic, or because the person using it is often inexperienced and hasn't been taught any better? Because the books they learned it from didn't teach them any better? Because they didn't have anyone more experienced looking over their shoulder telling them what they need to know? (which doesn't come until later in life when you're working for someone, and then you're likely *not* using basic).
I know lots other languages which can be frustrating until you've used them for months on end. I think if I had started out with C and only Kernighan and Ritche, I'd have quit the first month. As it was I devoured every C64 Basic book I could find, and I got a lot done, and I did successfully write some nice long pieces of software. It wasn't as painful as anyone thinks. I remember having fun adding more and more and more functionality.
> it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.
It did not. It kept me interested when I was young, later on I was taught "the way", and here I am.
- CKEdge
Oh wait, except for the year I spent in California doing MS Visual Basic* for that Bank system tracking a half trillion dollars in US Domestic equities. A lot of the code I wrote was top notch, and made me proud. Clean interfaces, debugging channels, library re-use, documentation, full sub-routine headers explaining everything, flexible, expandable, optimized for speed. It didn't matter that I was using Basic, what mattered was that by that point in my life I had learned good Software Engineering, and I applied it. ( * - We used it for front ends (buh) and also back end/server process stuff. I mean hey, if you want to script something, VB was the most painless quickest way to do it.)
Now, on the other hand I'm currently working on a development project that is a mission critical piece of software (runs on the biggest servers in the most sensitive places of e-commerce and financial institutions). It's a lot of C, heirarchical configuration files, and a popular scripting language. I'm proud of the code I write. I'm terrified and horrified by the code I see some others writing. It didn't matter that they were using C or the popular OO scripting language.
Re:Is this kind of security needed for IRC?
on
IRC Improvements
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· Score: 1
> wouldn't sending encrypted data be terribly inefficient for this kind of task?
I don't think so. If you've got good compression the numbers comprising your compressed file is statistically random. If you've got good encryption, the same is true.
> I would absolutely love a patch that would go on my shirt or the edge of
> my pillow that would let me turn on and off lights, dial phone
> numbers (speakerphone required, of course) browse the web, etc,
I'd like to be a fly on the wall the first night you're fitfully tossing and turning in your sleep:)
Somebody give this guy some karma, because he's got a good point!
Seriously, I know of some big name corporations who are writing software, and because their turnover is 50% every 3-6 months, their code is 100% crap and unbelievably expensive to maintain and extend, and 25% of their people are always getting up to speed on the code base and architecture. (This turnover is in Silicon Valley mind you, and the most extreme case I've heard of).
More code re-use, better requirements and design, take fewer shortcuts, better end-user support and buy in. And of course better management.
A project I am working on right now is going swell simply because it's well engineered, and the main people working on it have been with us for years and know thier shit. If we had too bad a turnover rate, we wouldn't be able to do this anywhere near as efficiently.
Hmmm, I seem to have worked myself right back around to the position proposed elsewhere in this story!
(I'm mostly talking to the companies/Madman/etc here)
...and Madman isn't likely to hire you, because he want's someone with all the experience and credentials.
What the hell ever happened to apprenticeship, and entry level positions? The company I work for (~100 people, growing with no problems finding people) trains our own. The key is to hire smart people, who show a little spark.
Nortel, IBM, and everyone else wouldn't touch me with a 10 foot pole when I finished my hard science grad degree, but my current employer did. Now they have an engineer with 3 years experience in a dozen of the most sought after skills. Now they don't have to go screaming all the way to the feds with a crybaby story about not being able to find anyone.
Quit crying and invest something in people. Quit asking for the feds to import your gold for you.
I can easily see how people leave the field completely.
Of the people at the company I'm at, a large number go back to school to do grad degrees in engineering or science, or business degrees. Some leave for personal reasons (well paid, they can afford to take a year or two off to travel the world, or go back home and be with family during a tough year (loss of a loved one, etc) ).
There must be lots of tech support people who get utterly frustrated, and drop out. And there must be a decent number of people who just don't make the grade as a real developer, and get canned after being at each job for a few months. I imagine they don't do that forever. Either they find an IT job they don't suck at and stick, or they drop out.
When they showed one single run of the British show, they didn't run it under it's original name, NOR under it's Americanized name. They put it "inside" one of their other 'techie' shows... I mean, you'd watch TV and it would say "Junkyard Wars", and there'd be no hint of anything else, but when you went to the TV schedule, it was under one of TLC's regular weekly show names..
Did my explanation make sense?
Sure hope they don't do that next time, or it will be impossible to watch for in the schedules, one will just have to hope they catch the commercials or keep an eye out on certain newsgroups and such...
Hmmm, maybe slashdot will announce it!
Re:Another particpant opens his big mouth.
on
More Junkyard Wars
·
· Score: 1
> and they replaced Robert with an American comic.
Now I must say, that's a damn shame. He was a great host. It's not like he has a hard to understand accent. I think it would have been perfect to have him do the American version as well.
For the hyperlink impaired (and a smaller more concise list as well, although mistakes made are all mine, and there are a lot of funny numbers in the main list...):
So that makes it 100 times as powerful as my home computer. Let's see. My home computer does 133,000 times as many bogoMips as my home computer in 1985, and it does 10 times as many bogoMips as the desktop I used for my masters degree 5 years ago.
So... you only have to wait another 5-10 years, and yes, you too will have a home PC that does 50,000 bogoMips.
Shit. Another bozo to be aware of and avoid? Now I remember why I got frustrated so long ago and gave up my previous high karma userID to the trolls.
> I appear to have lost the +2 bonus now; thank you.
Ahhhh:) Satisfaction.
Hey Taco!: We need a 'permanent bozo alert' icon to appear near some of these people's names. It's much to much of a pain to memorize all the bozo's names and remember to check the poster-name before responding to a post.
I yearn for the day when I could respond solely to the content of a post, and not have to 'be on the lookout' for trolls.
> neither the silicon chip nor the heart transplant were patented.
That is incorrect. The Integrated Circuit was most definitely patented. And I quote:
"Robert Noyce took the helm of the new enterprise and it was his invention of the integrated circuit
that same year (along with Jack Kilby of TI who shared the patents) that would make Fairchild's fortune"
> If an order preventing someone from making others aware they're being sued doesn't scare the knickers off you, then I don't know what would.
The 'others' were not being sued. They were being investigated in a criminal matter. No one tells the Hells Angels or the Cali Cartel when an application to tap their phones is being made.
> Also, coolness does not begin and end at the doorstep of your opinion.
Actually, it does. Whether or not anyone else agrees with me is a completely different matter. What I think is cool or not cool is not determined by what you and everyone else tell me should be cool, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Damn. I'm torn between both of your arguments. Both hit home, and feel 'true' to me. But both can not be true at the same time. Or can they?
This is like trying to decide whether or not fate exists. It's the quesy feeling most of us get when we hear the phrase that "whether you realize it or not, the world is proceeding exactly as it should".
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. What proportion of failures and pain is worth what proportion of success, and what are the real odds anyways?
Most games of craps are a lot more predictable, and it's the rare game of craps where you're life is on the line.
I hate this world.
The cable co should have provided a tool (on by default) that warns you every time you use an extra $50 of bandwidth. Or they should e-mail you every $xx or so. Then they just need to allow users to disable these warnings in their account/profile or something...
Yeah yeah, 'they should know better', but the problem is the *average* person, you know, your mother or grandfather, don't have anywhere near enough techie knowledge. We can do better for them.
The patent system exists for a reason. Would their (or anyone) getting or not getting this patent actually change anyone's business plans? Would it accelerate progress?
I think the answer is clear.
No. Whether they got this patent or not, their business would not change. They haven't "given the world" anything such that we should give them exclusive use of this "discovery".
Holy shit. I can't believe I just talked casually and seriously about burning A HALF A TERRABYTE of data.
Is that cool or what :) :)
It was only 5+ or so years ago I saw a company demoing their big huge cabinet sized optical tape thingie, that held a terrabyte of data. It was two huge 1.5-2 foot diamager reels of shiny optical tape. One minute seek time to any point. At the time I just boggled at the idea of a terrabyte of data. And now my home computer has 0.06 terrabytes of disk space, and if I spent another $1200-$1500 CDN and filled up the other ide channels with modern drives and replaced one of the older drives, I'd have 0.30 terrabytes.
I could do that right now.
This instant.
Walk down to the local shop and say 'gimme 4 65 gig disks please' and walk out.
- - boggle - -
The mpeg of my Brothers wedding will go on one DVD*, the reception on another, and the hijinks before and after on a third. And then there are 20-30 copies of all three for everyone who wants one.
What am I up to now? 468 Gigabytes?
(*) - Yeah that's right, I need raw mpeg. If you've used it you know that DivX-; has an 'upper quality limit' that prevents it from using any more bandwidth to increase quality. Even though you're telling it to use more than 1500-2000 kbps, your filesize doesn't increase and quality doesn't go up. (It's just the way it's quality settings/algorithm are currently built, not that it couldn't be changed to just isn't good enough for something like this.) And even if I were to use DivX;) at 2000 kbps, the 6 hours would add up to around 5 Gig, a full DVD.
Definitely, and the price would have to continue to increase as time went on, seeing as more and more people would have karma due to the 'injection' of karma into the system from it's current source.
I mean, undermoderation is really bad, but overmoderation would also be bad.
It would also help to stifle abuses. If the price of moderator points to karma is not 1-1, then nobody can set up a 'karma circle', which would be a very bad thing indeed.
Yes, that's right. No longer will you have to walk into the small computer shop and wonder whether they are reliable. Whether the clerk is an idiot or a liar. No longer will you run into that person in the bar and wonder "is this person a wierdo, or should I keep talking". The fools, idiots, liars, and cheats of the world would quickly be recognized, and the rest of us would bask in our magnificance.
Yes, I'm talking about implementing a Karma system in Real Life.
Ok, ok, here's my real suggestion: I'd like to see a person's Karma stats subdivided by 'type'. How funny are they. How insightful are they. How often are they off-topic.
Hey, we'll need this for our RL Karma System ( RLKS(tm)* ), so might as well get the bugs worked out of it now.
(*) Hmm, looks like we're going to have to fight a squatter for our domain name.
Anything else, and I don't pass go.
> but if Gnutella, which has some of the best open-source programmers
> on the Net behind it, can't survive the technical or legal challenges
> of critical mass, how will the other programs be any better prepared?
Mr. Fenning created Napster with the help of a few people.
Justin Frankel created Gnutella with the help of a few people in a few days.
The other programs don't have to be better prepared. They simply have to be better.
We've seen the best application that the Net has yet to provide.(*) We'll never forget what can be. What should be. What must be.
I'm itching all over, and some day, I'm going to scratch.
(*)- Admit it, when you first used Napster you said to yourself: "Holy shit, this thing is fast and does EXACTLY what I want it to, unlike 99% of every other piece of software and place on the net. This is EXACTLY how the world should be. This is spectacular."
>
>
> The sleazy trick of all this... it's a way to make a patent last well beyond it's lifetime.
> in the case of the Rambus patents, the original teachings have to contain all material claimed later.
Thanks for the info AC. I'd sure like to be able to listen in on all the discussions (arguments) between the engineers, lawyers, and bean counters at all the places Rambus has/is-trying-to collect royalties. I bet it's tons more frustrating than the simple engineer/marketing issues I've seen (medium size firm).
Ok, I know the standard story being repeated here, they were a member of that working group, patented stuff when they were under ?contract? not to, left group, blah blah blah. And I know that they are currently an IP only company.
But I want to know from someone authoritative, whether or not they actually did any real work upon which their patents or based, or did they fund work that helped develop the tech that their patents are based on, OR (and these are the most likely ones in my mind) were they founded by other tech companies to manage their jointly shared IP, OR did they buy out the IP from other companies.
I mean, if they had outright stolen ideas then presumably there would be someone out there who would be suing them, or if anyone else had developed the tech, surely they would have had the patents and such.
There has GOT to be something that isn't mentioned. I mean, I don't like Rambus simply because they are trying to force feed us crappy technology, but that's a Management thing. Are we certain that they don't deserve to have the patents?
If that working group was collaborating on stuff, and if Rambus was contributing information but patenting it behind everyone's backs, that's one thing.(*) But it's not quite the same thing as patenting something one didn't develop. And I think in our zeal to hate Rambus ( it's easy to do, with them being such idiots ), we're assuming the worst.
I mean, sometimes it sounds like a small town telephone gossip circle in here.
Psst, did you hear so and so was making out with so and so?
Psst, did you hear so and so was fooling around with so and so?
Psst, did you hear that so and so was screwing around with so and so?
Psst, did you hear that so and so was screwing so and so?
TTFN
(*) - Ok, we all agree it sucks for consumers and for the other companies that were in the working group that ended up adopting the tech and then get screwed 10 years later paying royalties.
Silly developer. Don't you know the fastest way to concat big strings in VB* is to write to a file and then slurp it back in? It only took me an hour to figure out this workaround the first time I came across this.
You gotta think out of the box. :)
Ah yes. MS came so close and yet so far.
(chuckle)
(*) Yes, I'm serious. For those big 1/2-100MB strings it's 100 times as fast. Literally 100.
I'd like to see a real study on this.
I mean, when we're starting out, learning our first programming language, you remember, when you were 12 or 15, do we read books that teach us good software construction techniques and all about software engineering, or do we just RTFM until we can make something neat?
Is there a difference between the amount of good code construction taught in books that teach other languages as compared to Basic? So maybe it's not Basic itself, but the place and time you learn it.
I remember learning Basic on the C64. The manual didn't do anything except tell you syntax and stuff, the same went for all the best C64 Basic books available at the time. If there had been chapters on 'writing good code', 'writing re-usable code', 'writing more code faster with fewer bugs', I would have read them, and I imagine I would have taken pride in following them! Hell, it would have made life SOooo much easier (no matter what language you're starting out with). Have you ever gone back 15 years and looked at the code you wrote when you were 15? The 10-20,000 lines you wrote to create your first (simple) video game or graphics editor? I have. (shudder)
It takes time to learn good software construction techniques the hard way, and the easy way requires instruction, whether by people more experienced than you or by well written books. By the time I had learned a bit the hard way I was programming as a job, and we weren't using Basic.(*) The easy way didn't occur until I had a job with other programmers.
To refute some of the specific claims:
> writing anything longer .. is very painful
Is it because it's Basic, or because the person using it is often inexperienced and hasn't been taught any better? Because the books they learned it from didn't teach them any better? Because they didn't have anyone more experienced looking over their shoulder telling them what they need to know? (which doesn't come until later in life when you're working for someone, and then you're likely *not* using basic).
I know lots other languages which can be frustrating until you've used them for months on end. I think if I had started out with C and only Kernighan and Ritche, I'd have quit the first month. As it was I devoured every C64 Basic book I could find, and I got a lot done, and I did successfully write some nice long pieces of software. It wasn't as painful as anyone thinks. I remember having fun adding more and more and more functionality.
> it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.
It did not. It kept me interested when I was young, later on I was taught "the way", and here I am.
- CKEdge
Oh wait, except for the year I spent in California doing MS Visual Basic* for that Bank system tracking a half trillion dollars in US Domestic equities. A lot of the code I wrote was top notch, and made me proud. Clean interfaces, debugging channels, library re-use, documentation, full sub-routine headers explaining everything, flexible, expandable, optimized for speed. It didn't matter that I was using Basic, what mattered was that by that point in my life I had learned good Software Engineering, and I applied it. ( * - We used it for front ends (buh) and also back end/server process stuff. I mean hey, if you want to script something, VB was the most painless quickest way to do it.)
Now, on the other hand I'm currently working on a development project that is a mission critical piece of software (runs on the biggest servers in the most sensitive places of e-commerce and financial institutions). It's a lot of C, heirarchical configuration files, and a popular scripting language. I'm proud of the code I write. I'm terrified and horrified by the code I see some others writing. It didn't matter that they were using C or the popular OO scripting language.
I don't think so. If you've got good compression the numbers comprising your compressed file is statistically random. If you've got good encryption, the same is true.
QED?
God damn that was funny. I didn't figure it out and start laughing until I had reached the canteloupe part
> my pillow that would let me turn on and off lights, dial phone
> numbers (speakerphone required, of course) browse the web, etc,
I'd like to be a fly on the wall the first night you're fitfully tossing and turning in your sleep :)
Somebody give this guy some karma, because he's got a good point!
Seriously, I know of some big name corporations who are writing software, and because their turnover is 50% every 3-6 months, their code is 100% crap and unbelievably expensive to maintain and extend, and 25% of their people are always getting up to speed on the code base and architecture. (This turnover is in Silicon Valley mind you, and the most extreme case I've heard of).
More code re-use, better requirements and design, take fewer shortcuts, better end-user support and buy in. And of course better management.
A project I am working on right now is going swell simply because it's well engineered, and the main people working on it have been with us for years and know thier shit. If we had too bad a turnover rate, we wouldn't be able to do this anywhere near as efficiently.
Hmmm, I seem to have worked myself right back around to the position proposed elsewhere in this story!
Guess they must be on to something :)
(I'm mostly talking to the companies/Madman/etc here)
What the hell ever happened to apprenticeship, and entry level positions? The company I work for (~100 people, growing with no problems finding people) trains our own. The key is to hire smart people, who show a little spark.
Nortel, IBM, and everyone else wouldn't touch me with a 10 foot pole when I finished my hard science grad degree, but my current employer did. Now they have an engineer with 3 years experience in a dozen of the most sought after skills. Now they don't have to go screaming all the way to the feds with a crybaby story about not being able to find anyone.
Quit crying and invest something in people. Quit asking for the feds to import your gold for you.
I can easily see how people leave the field completely.
Of the people at the company I'm at, a large number go back to school to do grad degrees in engineering or science, or business degrees. Some leave for personal reasons (well paid, they can afford to take a year or two off to travel the world, or go back home and be with family during a tough year (loss of a loved one, etc) ).
There must be lots of tech support people who get utterly frustrated, and drop out. And there must be a decent number of people who just don't make the grade as a real developer, and get canned after being at each job for a few months. I imagine they don't do that forever. Either they find an IT job they don't suck at and stick, or they drop out.
When they showed one single run of the British show, they didn't run it under it's original name, NOR under it's Americanized name. They put it "inside" one of their other 'techie' shows... I mean, you'd watch TV and it would say "Junkyard Wars", and there'd be no hint of anything else, but when you went to the TV schedule, it was under one of TLC's regular weekly show names..
Did my explanation make sense?
Sure hope they don't do that next time, or it will be impossible to watch for in the schedules, one will just have to hope they catch the commercials or keep an eye out on certain newsgroups and such...
Hmmm, maybe slashdot will announce it!
> and they replaced Robert with an American comic.
Now I must say, that's a damn shame. He was a great host. It's not like he has a hard to understand accent. I think it would have been perfect to have him do the American version as well.
See this sub-reference taken from this document
For the hyperlink impaired (and a smaller more concise list as well, although mistakes made are all mine, and there are a lot of funny numbers in the main list...):
386DX/40...........7
486DX2/66.........33
P90...............36
P133..............53
P200..............80
PII/400..........400
AMD K6/233.......466
PIII/600.........600
Athlon 600.......600
Duron 700.......1400
Alpha 21264/730.1500
31 CPU Alpha...41000
So that makes it 100 times as powerful as my home computer. Let's see. My home computer does 133,000 times as many bogoMips as my home computer in 1985, and it does 10 times as many bogoMips as the desktop I used for my masters degree 5 years ago.
So... you only have to wait another 5-10 years, and yes, you too will have a home PC that does 50,000 bogoMips.
> I appear to have lost the +2 bonus now; thank you.
Ahhhh :) Satisfaction.
Hey Taco!: We need a 'permanent bozo alert' icon to appear near some of these people's names. It's much to much of a pain to memorize all the bozo's names and remember to check the poster-name before responding to a post.
I yearn for the day when I could respond solely to the content of a post, and not have to 'be on the lookout' for trolls.
> neither the silicon chip nor the heart transplant were patented.
That is incorrect. The Integrated Circuit was most definitely patented. And I quote:
"Robert Noyce took the helm of the new enterprise and it was his invention of the integrated circuit that same year (along with Jack Kilby of TI who shared the patents) that would make Fairchild's fortune"
Taken from this article.
Here are a few other references:
http://inv entors.about.com/science/inventors/library/weekly/ aa080498.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyb er/tech/ctb218.htm
Poor SOBs. Their patents ran out in 81. But it looks like they got to have a good run of it with the screwed up Japanese patent system!
The 'others' were not being sued. They were being investigated in a criminal matter. No one tells the Hells Angels or the Cali Cartel when an application to tap their phones is being made.
> Also, coolness does not begin and end at the doorstep of your opinion.
Actually, it does. Whether or not anyone else agrees with me is a completely different matter. What I think is cool or not cool is not determined by what you and everyone else tell me should be cool, eh?