I don't know what the magnetic tape people have been doing while the hard drive engineers have been working, but they really haven't kept up very well.
How big are your drives? 400GB native (800GB compressed) on Ultrium G3 is larger than any of my disks and at 68MB/sec it's about as fast to write as most consumer hard drives can read. The drives are bloody expensive though.
Who is he speaking for? The whole Linux kernel community? I didn't think it worked that way. Even Linus is as much a cat herder as a boss, once you get beyond a few core people. The population of kernel developers who can be ordered (the difference between "might get a driver" and "will get a driver") to write drivers for obscure hardware they have no interest in must surely be fairly small. Who's actually in on this? Are there a few hundred kernel devs who've agreed to work on whatever they are assigned? I'm worried that this will backfire when they can't actually find anybody who wants to write the driver for a engraving machine that sells 400 units per year and has a particularly baroque interface. I don't expect there will be a problem for WiFi, TV or video cards, but there's a whole lot of hardware out there and not all of it is interesting.
Those are some pretty big promises he's making. I'm wondering what's there to back them up.
BTW, why is it that software is the only product where supply and demand and mass production rules don't apply? Everything else that is mass produced comes down in price, software stays the same or gets more expensive.
I see you've never tried to buy a bit of niche-market professional software. For example, the cheap pro optical design software is Zemax at $4000. The expensive one, Code V, costs more than that per year. AutoCAD costs much more than Office, Matrox Imaging Library costs much more than Photoshop etc. etc.
Thank god we don't have ridiculous shit like that in the UK. We don't have the kind of speculative warrants common in the US. Most of our police officers don't carry firearms and any who did turn up in relation to a civil matter would be unarmed and there at the request of bailifs (which would only happen if the bailifs thought there was a risk of violence). The bailifs only arrive after you have failed to cough up the judgement awarded in a court case, a case which would get nowhere without any evidence.
Bailifs have some faily wide-ranging powers, but they can only operate with a court order. The BSA would need to win its court case first, which isn't likely to happen unless they have some actual evidence.
Peer review isn't perfect, but do you have a better suggestion? Publish everything and have every working scientist spend most of their time reviewing every one of the papers published in their field every month to see if there is anything relevant to their work? I don't think that's very pracical. Peer review is the best filter anyone has so far invented for scientific publishing, despite its flaws.
This kind of bullshit is endemic to a company [...]
Do companies large enough to have HR departments never have any bad employees? Never have communications problems? Never make mistakes? Everybody screws up some time. Don't you think it's worth finding out if it was an abberation?
I second that motion. While this certainly smells bad for the company as a whole, it's quite possible you've just got a jobsworth or jackass in HR dealing with you, so don't write the whole company off just yet. HR never made a penny of profit for any company, their job is to save money by ensuring staff retention and quality recruitment. In this instance, they are not doing either and are just getting in the way, so bypass them. Speak (as in phone, not email - practice what you need to say and make notes if you're not great on the phone) to whoever actually wants you to work at the company - the person who gave you the technical interview. Let them know you're unhappy with the situation (you evidently are) and how significant a factor the relocation package was in your decision to take the job (it evidently was significant), then give them some time to deal with the situation. Expect to have to negotiate to some extent - the person who hired you will likely be negotiating within the company too (it may have been their screw-up giving you incorrect information or exceeding their power).
I'm assuming, as you've posted to slashdot, that this is a technical job. If it's HR or admin take the job anyway - you'll have more power than you deserve and will enjoy weilding it! But let us know where it is your new job is, so the rest of us can avoid it:)
The problem I see with this, is that there is no point in fighting a war with robots, because the point of a war is to weaken your enemy, by killing off their people (soldiers). However, with robots, all that will be destroyed is robots and resources. No one cares.
No one cares? Over here, the memories of the hardships the whole of the UK went through in WWII haven't faded away quite yet. They weren't unique to the UK of course, many applied to other countries too. I'm not talking about the hardships of those in the military or who were bombed directly, but those on rations for a decade; those working long hours in munitions factories; those for whom new clothes, let alone the equivalents of PS3s and HDTVs, were rare luxuries; those who had their homes, businesses and careers comandeered for the war effort. They cared.
Are you really sure you wouldn't care if you couldn't fix your car because the factory that used to make the parts was making parts for killer robots? Are you really sure you wouldn't care if you couldn't afford a holiday because of the 78% tax rate to pay for all the killer robots? Are you really sure you wouldn't care if you were sent to work on software for killer robots in a strange city hundreds of miles from your friends and family? I would.
Try web developer, former Microsoft Certified Professional (I might still be one; I know my NT4 stuff has expired but I don't know about the 2k and SQL stuff - I don't do MS-specific these days) and former developer at a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer. I didn't do much ActiveX, mostly web stuff so cross-platform was the order of the day, but I saw what the guys building intranets did, worked with a good range of MS technology and read a whole load of MSDN junk. This was all few years ago now, but judging by press reports things haven't changed much. I'm no ActiveX expert, but I'm not your average user either.
ActiveX is (perhaps was, now MS seem to be losing interest) a prety cool technology. Combined with other Microsoft technologies like Exchange and Office it lets you build proper distributed, interactive applications that do cool stuff with the data you already have. For intranets, an all-Microsoft shop lets you do stuff you can only do in a clumsy way with other offerings. ActiveX is one of the tools to do that cool stuff. But the intranet is where is should stay. It's not standards-compliant, it's not cross-platform and it's so full of security holes that using it outside of a corporate intranet is barking mad.
There are two flaws with your experiment. First, I wouldn't expect a physician to study string theory. Suture theory, perhaps, but not string theory. They leave that to the physicists. And second, physicists don't get dates.
I cant believe it, 99% of the comments are negative
Oh come on, stop exaggerating. At the time of writing, there are a total of 14 comments in this story. I can't find the 1/7th of one comment which you claim was not negative.
Or ATI and NVidia could negotiate their patent licensing deals so that the patent license goes with the card, not the drivers, even if it's partially implemented in the drivers. They could even license software-only patents that way, but I don't think they would. It wouldn't be full-on free-as-in-speech, but it could still be open source in the literal sense.
We can already reshape ourselves at will. Want to be thinner? Eat less, excercise more. The technologies of diet and physical fitness are more than advanced enough to give you pretty much whatever body shape you desire (though we can't do much about bone structure yet). I think when you say 'at will' you really mean 'without having to change your lifestyle'.
"We're skeptical, number one, because of leakage," says Miller, explaining that high-voltage ultracaps have a tendency to self-discharge quickly. "Meaning, if you leave it parked overnight it will discharge, and you'll have to charge it back up in the morning."
The Jim Miller quote above confuses me, as Maxwell Technologies advertises a 125V output power module which is spec'd to only lose 70% of its charge after 30 days. So why is he contradicting his own company's products?
That module is made up of 'normal' 2.7V ultracapacitors. These new folks are claiming 1000x that voltage per capacitor.
The point is that the infrastructure for rapid charging, like the infrastructure for filling your car with petrol doesn't need to be at your house. Slow charge with kilowatts at home at your leisure, or fast charge with hundreds of kilowatts from the local 'filling station'.
Uh, OK, re-reading your post, that wasn't your point. Oh well. And I actually weighed my laptop battery and everything (data point: 12" iBook batteries weigh 324g).
my car battery is cheap, lasts longer than 5 years and just works.
My laptop battery however is a piece of expensive useless junk.
My 4.2Ah lead-acid battery weighs 1.6kg, my 4.4Ah lithium-ion laptop battery weighs 324g. You might want to carry around an extra three pounds in order to save $150 every couple of years, but the market seems to indicate you are in a very small minority.
there's also a technique called double-de-clutching, which is where one 'blips' the gas/accelerator when changing between gears so that the engine speed matches the road wheels when lifting the clutch up.
Double-declutching is about matching the rotational speeds of the gears inside the gearbox. In the days before synchromesh was invented, it wasn't optional. These days, it's only advantage (unless you're driving a racing car or truck without synchromesh) is speed - double-declutching can get the gears to mesh in less time than synchromesh, which makes changes faster. Note can be faster - you have to do quite a lot in very little time for it to actually be faster. Blipping the throttle (which is what the 'heel' [actually more like the side] of my right foot is doing when heel-and-toeing) is used in double-declutching, mainly because it's required to match the speeds of the gears in the gearbox, but also eliminates the jerk as the engine revs change rapidly to match the road speed with synchromesh gearboxes. You can just smear it out with the clutch, but fast, smooth downshifts are so much more satisfying.
That was the first thing I thought of...of all the people who pirate Windows, how many ever subject themselves to WGA? I suspect it is a relative small fraction of them.
But how many people running pirated Windows actually know they are? I suspect a fair number of pirated copies are machines built by the local geek / computer shop who decided to save a few bucks by not buying a Windows license and glossed over that fact with their customers. Perhaps not a majority, but I do know that few computer owners (much less than 1/5, IME) would even contemplate installing an OS themselves.
I never bothered with XP at all, precisely because of this product activation crap. But I too did the right thing, and legally bought a Mac. Curiously, I then started paying for all my (commercial) software - perhaps because I am older and richer than I was, but I think not having an adversarial relationship with my computer and not feeling like I was being fucked over by an abusive monopolist helped too.
It seems to me (NOT an EE) that the efficiency of these devices must be poor when compared to a single large rectifier.
Efficiencies of over 80% are easy, over 90% with a little more effort - regardless of size. I don't know how they compare in terms of efficiency when you consider the cost of manufacture, installation etc. but you shouldn't worry that small switching regulators are inherently energy inefficient in use.
One of the big electricity hogs in our house is the pool pump, and there's not much you can do about that; if you don't pump long enough on the pool every day, it turns green.
I can just see a couple of Bangladeshis in 2020 wondering why their farms have been devastated one again by massive floods:
Farmer A: Couldn't the West have done more to combat global warming? They knew for sure excessive comsumption of energy produced from unrenewable sources was a problem a long time ago.
Farmer B: Nah, apparently they couldn't cut consumption too much, or their swimming pools would have turned green.
Farmer A: Swimming what?
Farmer B: Never mind.
Slashdot Mirror
How big are your drives? 400GB native (800GB compressed) on Ultrium G3 is larger than any of my disks and at 68MB/sec it's about as fast to write as most consumer hard drives can read. The drives are bloody expensive though.
Who is he speaking for? The whole Linux kernel community? I didn't think it worked that way. Even Linus is as much a cat herder as a boss, once you get beyond a few core people. The population of kernel developers who can be ordered (the difference between "might get a driver" and "will get a driver") to write drivers for obscure hardware they have no interest in must surely be fairly small. Who's actually in on this? Are there a few hundred kernel devs who've agreed to work on whatever they are assigned? I'm worried that this will backfire when they can't actually find anybody who wants to write the driver for a engraving machine that sells 400 units per year and has a particularly baroque interface. I don't expect there will be a problem for WiFi, TV or video cards, but there's a whole lot of hardware out there and not all of it is interesting.
Those are some pretty big promises he's making. I'm wondering what's there to back them up.
I see you've never tried to buy a bit of niche-market professional software. For example, the cheap pro optical design software is Zemax at $4000. The expensive one, Code V, costs more than that per year. AutoCAD costs much more than Office, Matrox Imaging Library costs much more than Photoshop etc. etc.
Thank god we don't have ridiculous shit like that in the UK. We don't have the kind of speculative warrants common in the US. Most of our police officers don't carry firearms and any who did turn up in relation to a civil matter would be unarmed and there at the request of bailifs (which would only happen if the bailifs thought there was a risk of violence). The bailifs only arrive after you have failed to cough up the judgement awarded in a court case, a case which would get nowhere without any evidence.
Bailifs have some faily wide-ranging powers, but they can only operate with a court order. The BSA would need to win its court case first, which isn't likely to happen unless they have some actual evidence.
Peer review isn't perfect, but do you have a better suggestion? Publish everything and have every working scientist spend most of their time reviewing every one of the papers published in their field every month to see if there is anything relevant to their work? I don't think that's very pracical. Peer review is the best filter anyone has so far invented for scientific publishing, despite its flaws.
Do companies large enough to have HR departments never have any bad employees? Never have communications problems? Never make mistakes? Everybody screws up some time. Don't you think it's worth finding out if it was an abberation?
I second that motion. While this certainly smells bad for the company as a whole, it's quite possible you've just got a jobsworth or jackass in HR dealing with you, so don't write the whole company off just yet. HR never made a penny of profit for any company, their job is to save money by ensuring staff retention and quality recruitment. In this instance, they are not doing either and are just getting in the way, so bypass them. Speak (as in phone, not email - practice what you need to say and make notes if you're not great on the phone) to whoever actually wants you to work at the company - the person who gave you the technical interview. Let them know you're unhappy with the situation (you evidently are) and how significant a factor the relocation package was in your decision to take the job (it evidently was significant), then give them some time to deal with the situation. Expect to have to negotiate to some extent - the person who hired you will likely be negotiating within the company too (it may have been their screw-up giving you incorrect information or exceeding their power).
I'm assuming, as you've posted to slashdot, that this is a technical job. If it's HR or admin take the job anyway - you'll have more power than you deserve and will enjoy weilding it! But let us know where it is your new job is, so the rest of us can avoid it :)
No one cares? Over here, the memories of the hardships the whole of the UK went through in WWII haven't faded away quite yet. They weren't unique to the UK of course, many applied to other countries too. I'm not talking about the hardships of those in the military or who were bombed directly, but those on rations for a decade; those working long hours in munitions factories; those for whom new clothes, let alone the equivalents of PS3s and HDTVs, were rare luxuries; those who had their homes, businesses and careers comandeered for the war effort. They cared.
Are you really sure you wouldn't care if you couldn't fix your car because the factory that used to make the parts was making parts for killer robots? Are you really sure you wouldn't care if you couldn't afford a holiday because of the 78% tax rate to pay for all the killer robots? Are you really sure you wouldn't care if you were sent to work on software for killer robots in a strange city hundreds of miles from your friends and family? I would.
Try web developer, former Microsoft Certified Professional (I might still be one; I know my NT4 stuff has expired but I don't know about the 2k and SQL stuff - I don't do MS-specific these days) and former developer at a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer. I didn't do much ActiveX, mostly web stuff so cross-platform was the order of the day, but I saw what the guys building intranets did, worked with a good range of MS technology and read a whole load of MSDN junk. This was all few years ago now, but judging by press reports things haven't changed much. I'm no ActiveX expert, but I'm not your average user either.
ActiveX is (perhaps was, now MS seem to be losing interest) a prety cool technology. Combined with other Microsoft technologies like Exchange and Office it lets you build proper distributed, interactive applications that do cool stuff with the data you already have. For intranets, an all-Microsoft shop lets you do stuff you can only do in a clumsy way with other offerings. ActiveX is one of the tools to do that cool stuff. But the intranet is where is should stay. It's not standards-compliant, it's not cross-platform and it's so full of security holes that using it outside of a corporate intranet is barking mad.
There are two flaws with your experiment. First, I wouldn't expect a physician to study string theory. Suture theory, perhaps, but not string theory. They leave that to the physicists. And second, physicists don't get dates.
Oh come on, stop exaggerating. At the time of writing, there are a total of 14 comments in this story. I can't find the 1/7th of one comment which you claim was not negative.
Or ATI and NVidia could negotiate their patent licensing deals so that the patent license goes with the card, not the drivers, even if it's partially implemented in the drivers. They could even license software-only patents that way, but I don't think they would. It wouldn't be full-on free-as-in-speech, but it could still be open source in the literal sense.
Does London's Congestion Charge not count?
We can already reshape ourselves at will. Want to be thinner? Eat less, excercise more. The technologies of diet and physical fitness are more than advanced enough to give you pretty much whatever body shape you desire (though we can't do much about bone structure yet). I think when you say 'at will' you really mean 'without having to change your lifestyle'.
That module is made up of 'normal' 2.7V ultracapacitors. These new folks are claiming 1000x that voltage per capacitor.
The point is that the infrastructure for rapid charging, like the infrastructure for filling your car with petrol doesn't need to be at your house. Slow charge with kilowatts at home at your leisure, or fast charge with hundreds of kilowatts from the local 'filling station'.
Uh, OK, re-reading your post, that wasn't your point. Oh well. And I actually weighed my laptop battery and everything (data point: 12" iBook batteries weigh 324g).
My 4.2Ah lead-acid battery weighs 1.6kg, my 4.4Ah lithium-ion laptop battery weighs 324g. You might want to carry around an extra three pounds in order to save $150 every couple of years, but the market seems to indicate you are in a very small minority.
Double-declutching is about matching the rotational speeds of the gears inside the gearbox. In the days before synchromesh was invented, it wasn't optional. These days, it's only advantage (unless you're driving a racing car or truck without synchromesh) is speed - double-declutching can get the gears to mesh in less time than synchromesh, which makes changes faster. Note can be faster - you have to do quite a lot in very little time for it to actually be faster. Blipping the throttle (which is what the 'heel' [actually more like the side] of my right foot is doing when heel-and-toeing) is used in double-declutching, mainly because it's required to match the speeds of the gears in the gearbox, but also eliminates the jerk as the engine revs change rapidly to match the road speed with synchromesh gearboxes. You can just smear it out with the clutch, but fast, smooth downshifts are so much more satisfying.
But how many people running pirated Windows actually know they are? I suspect a fair number of pirated copies are machines built by the local geek / computer shop who decided to save a few bucks by not buying a Windows license and glossed over that fact with their customers. Perhaps not a majority, but I do know that few computer owners (much less than 1/5, IME) would even contemplate installing an OS themselves.
I never bothered with XP at all, precisely because of this product activation crap. But I too did the right thing, and legally bought a Mac. Curiously, I then started paying for all my (commercial) software - perhaps because I am older and richer than I was, but I think not having an adversarial relationship with my computer and not feeling like I was being fucked over by an abusive monopolist helped too.
Efficiencies of over 80% are easy, over 90% with a little more effort - regardless of size. I don't know how they compare in terms of efficiency when you consider the cost of manufacture, installation etc. but you shouldn't worry that small switching regulators are inherently energy inefficient in use.
I can just see a couple of Bangladeshis in 2020 wondering why their farms have been devastated one again by massive floods:
Farmer A: Couldn't the West have done more to combat global warming? They knew for sure excessive comsumption of energy produced from unrenewable sources was a problem a long time ago.
Farmer B: Nah, apparently they couldn't cut consumption too much, or their swimming pools would have turned green.
Farmer A: Swimming what?
Farmer B: Never mind.