When my wife asks for the 'cute little Mac', what PC can I buy instead that will take up as little space and do as much for the same price (or less)?
With that kind of attitude you might as well get the cheapest House-o-Crap PC you can find: you'll need every extra penny you've got for a good divorce lawyer.
Seriously, if your wife asks for anything and you can satisfy that request for as little as 500 smackers, just do it and don't look back. Anything that makes her happy makes your life easier. Trying to cheap out on something like this is a recipe for disaster.
So it is "Safer" and "easier" to "shut the hell up" about something that is politically incorect if the price is a large amount of suffering?
In this case, yes.
When you are the president of an expensive and respected university it is your job to ensure that no harm comes to the institution and that the donations keep rolling in from your well heeled alumni, not to prance about making jackass statements about things well outside your field of expertise.
It appears this fellow not only doesn't understand what his job is, but he is both stupid and bad at math as well: it only takes a few dozen alumni to get offended at his assinine statements and withhold their annual checks to the university to make him a net liability to the institution. (Of course, this shouldn't be news to anyone familiar with the sort of people who become economists: in general, economists think that sums are hard math and derivatives are high magic.)
So, no, it doesn't matter whether there was any factual merit in his statements or not: that the statements would offend a large number of people was certain and he should have kept his stupid opinions to himself (at least while he was acting in his official capacity as president of the university).
I wonder what would have happened to the Civil Rights movement and Womens Sufferage (among other movements) if people thought that way in the 20's and 50's/60's.
The situations are not comparable: members of the civil rights movements didn't have anything to lose by speaking out, whereas this fellow has endangered the welfare of the institution he is employed to represent and protect. What's worse, this fellow isn't on any sacred cursade to liberate the opressed, he is just stroking is own, already ponderous, ego. He deserves to be sacked.
Creative have been at this for long enough, and I don't see why they don't just channel all this hype up into a bloody good product rather than releasing products which try and keep up with what Apple are doing. Nothing of theirs that I have seen so far has been particularly innovative - just one big game of catchup.
Maybe Creative doesn't have any real engineering capability: maybe they just buy their tech from others and rebrand it with the Creative logo and custom platics. There are lots of 'tech' companies that do this -- Gateway and Dell spring to mind -- and their products are, without exception, uninspired.
Having said that, however, I have two disclaimers: first, I don't actually know what kind of engineering capability Creative does or doesn't have. Second, it is an ironic fact that, unlike most of Apple's products, the iPod is (or at least was at first) not designed by Apple, but was licensed from another company that did all the basic research and development.
This is what made us balk at using XML for storing NMR spectroscopy data...The current textual form is whitespace-separated, little short numbers less than 5 digits long, for hundreds of thousands of rows...
...we can't find an in-memory representation of the data as a table which is more compact than the ascii file is. The original ascii file is even more compact than a 2-D array in RAM. (because it takes 4 bytes to store an int even when that int is typically just one digit and is only larger on rare occasions.)
Huh? It should be trivial to devise a more compact memory structure for that data. Given only a few minutes of thought I came up with this:
Every value gets a single byte in a big 2D array. All bytes values but one are valid data values. The remaining byte value (the key value) is used for large data values (greater than can be encoded in a single byte). For these data values, we look in a second array which contains entries only for the large values. Assuming we need a 1024x1024 matrix, the C declarations are:
char matrix[1024][1024]; int *big_value[1024]; #define KEY_VALUE 0xff
Each row of big_value corresponds to one row in matrix and has one element for each element in matrix that contains the key value. In order to find the value of any data point (x,y), first look it up in matrix: if the value matrix[x][y]is not the key value, you have the actual data value. If the value matrix[x][y]is the key value: find out how many key values preceed this data point in row x (call that n) and then get the value at big_value[x][n] which is the actual value.
The C function to get a value from this data structure is:
The code to insert into the data structure is left as an exersise for the student (it will require some dynamic memory allocation and an initialization routine).
This should be about 1/4 the memory requirement of a simple 2D array of integers (assuming 32-bit integers), so long as most of the values in data set can be represented in 1 byte.
Other, more exotic, data structures could be used to get even better memory efficiency: they are called sparse matrices and have been well understood for decades. Do a google search, go to the library or ask a computer scientist for advice.
(Thank-you, thank-you. I'll be here all week. I do weddings and bar-mitzvahs and am available for hire)
While the day may have gotten shorter, the orbital period of the Earth didn't change, so you get the time back over the entire millennium as an extra leap-second.
While all the folks saying the computers perfer the cold are correct, there is one thing you will need to consider: LCD monitors don't like to be frozen.
Most LCD panels have an operating temperature range of 0 to 50 degrees C (32 to 140 degrees F). The upper end of the range is unlikely to be a problem, but if your workshop is likely to get below freezing in the winter an LCD monitor will likely get damaged: use a conventional CRT based monitor instead.
First, you've set your lifetime goals way too low. If you are any good at all, you will have achieved this in less than a decade (probably half that) and then it's crisis time. Set your lifetime goals higher, the higher the better.
Second, while you do need to know this technical stuff, that's not all there is to it. On top of HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, PHP/ASP and SQL, you will need to understand (and be good at) graphic design, and have some other domain knowledge that gives you insight into the business reasons for the web design work you do. You can't get most of this knowledge quickly or easily, some of it you simply must be born with and some of it will only come after decades of experience.
Your best bet is to go straight to your local community college and enroll in the Web Design or Web Programming certificate course. While you're at it, think about enrolling in some other, largely unrelated major (business management, visual arts, chemistry, psychology, english literature, whatever) which will give you some outside perspective to ground your technical skills. You can finish up both the certificate and the AA in two or three years as a full-time student, or four years of part-time school/part-time work. While you're there, take advantage of an internship or cooperative education program.
If you're feeling really energetic, replace community college and AA in the above paragraph with university and BA or BSc. Lather, rinse, repeat.
You can't say MS's office integration doesn't work, or that it merely ticks a box on some notional feature list.
That's odd, I thought I just did.
The level integration and interoperability of the Office suite is something that most other software vendors aspire to, but few (if any) have achieved.
I'm not really sure what you mean here. What do you allege Microsoft Office interoperates with? I haven't noticed that it operates very well with other vendors software, or that it even operates very well with different versions of itself. As for integration, it seems to be a middling effort, at best. The total integration, between both the office suite elements and between the suite and the OS, seems to be stuck at the level achieved by other vendors back around 1995.
It's not an easy thing to acomplish. Which is why MS Office is as popular on the Mac platform as it is on Wintel.
Gosh, and I thought that illegal bundling arrangements and abuse of monopoly power might have had something to do with it. I realize that I hold and unpopular opinion, and that all right-thinking computer users recognize Microsoft for the innovative and benevolent capitalist they are, but I guess I just like being an iconoclast and a parriah.
Does nobody remember the origins of the personal computer?!? Back in the mid-seventies most computing was done in business and institutions on terminals connected to large, centralized computing systems: time-shared mainframes or mini-computers. To a large degree, personal computing was a backlash against these centrally controlled systems and the managerial structures built up around them: system administrators who decreed what software would and would not be installed, billing systems that accounted for every fractional second of computing time, computer operators who controlled which users jobs would run and when, etc. Inexpensive, single-user computers (starting with mini-computers like the PDP-8 and PDP-11, but continuing with the Apple II and IBM-PC) represented a revolution for end users control of their own systems.
Every decade or so, since the rise of the personal computer, we see some attempt to re-impose the rule of centralized systems, usually under the guise of 'easing the burden on end-users' but always including an increased financial burden on those same end-users. The simple economic facts are that computer power (by any measure: instructions per second per dollar, main-memory bytes per dollar, on-line storage bytes per dollar, etc.) has become so inexpensive that all the old reasons for centralized computing systems no longer apply (and haven't applied for at least 20 years). The only reason these new centralization schemes is to find some way to extract money from existing computer users, whether or not the users actually want the sevice being provided. The idea that people will willingly give up control of their own systems and pay for the privilage may be a wet dream for companies hoping to collect the money, but it doesn't sound like a very good business plan.
The solution to the increasing administrative burden on computer users is not hire someone to do the administration: instead, we need computers that actually reduce amount of administration required or make the task of administration markedly easier. This is what personal computers did 40 years ago, and it can be done again.
I live in the USA and live off nothing but my own income. 7k a year is minimum wage, 27 hours a week. It pays rent, water, electric, food, and gas to get to work/school. No government support aside from subsidization of my student loan interest ($150/yr?), no family (ha!) support at all. Like I said, youre spoiled. If you were a child I would say spoiled rotten, but that doesnt sound right applied to someone who presumably works for a living. If you are making more than me (or more than double what i make if you support a child, i concede that) and cant make ends meet then youre doing something wrong.
Well, you must live in a part of the country that has a lot lower cost of living than where I live. I can trim the cost of living down to about $19.2k (gross) if I assume a shared apartment or no car (with both a shared apartment and not car, the gross drops to $17.6k). About half of the cost comes from rent+food. Rent could easily be cut in half by not living in the D.C. metro area (the fourth or fifth most expensive location in the country) and you could do without A/C, which would drop the utility bill a bit. When all is said and done, I can't see how to get the gross much below $12k.
Still, we're talking a pretty spartan existance. I didn't even include money for clothes or health insurance in the above calculations. You could pull through like that for a few years, but you'd be totally screwed if anything unexpected came up.
Lots of us folk making $50k/year have to live in an expensive location just to be where the jobs are. We probably also need a degree to get those jobs, which means we are paying off college tuition. Were I live (D.C. metro) the public transportation sucks, so a car is pretty much required: add back car insurance and some kind of car payment (either a loan on a new car or upkeep on an old one). When all is said and done, you can just get by on $35k. If you want to sock a little bit away for a rainy day (or, heaven forbid, retirement) and, maybe, have a tiny bit of a social life, the cost jumps to $45k. We've pushed up against that magical $50k number and we aren't even considering supporting kids or a spouse!
Finally, I've used a pretty rough model for taxation (always 30%) in my calculations, but the reality is that, as your income gets up into the $50k range, you actually pay more like 50%, unless you have a mortgage and kids as writeoffs. In the D.C. area, you'll be hard pressed to find a house you can afford on a measely $50k salary, so you're stuck renting, which has no tax advantages.
I'm not saying it's impossible to make ends meet on $50k in the D.C./New York/L.A./SanFrancisco areas, I'm just saying it isn't a given and could take a bit of effort: it's certainly no cake walk. Now, if you can get a job paying $50k in upstate New York or Iowa or Ohio, you'll be fat and happy, but those kinds of salaries are harder to come by out there.
advisory locks suck, let's get real file locking. (either you can't open a locked file, or, having opened the locked file, writes to file should fail)
(as others have said) reorganize the filesystem, make it simpler and more logical. (What's the fscking difference between/bin and/usr/bin? What about/usr/local/bin and/opt/bin?)
crib some stuff from VMS: my pick is logical names. (logical names are names that don't physically appear in the file system but which can be referenced through the file system as if they physically existed).
(also as others have said) get a better file system. ReiserFS is a start, but we need more policy as well as well as mechanism.
As long as we're on the mechanism/policy thing, we need more standardised policy for user interfaces and UI APIs. KDE and Gnome are bad starts in the right direction.
UNIX configuration sucks. It's so bad that I don't even know where to begin. We need to have, at least, some configuration system that is simple enough for regular mortals to deal with (especially if we want to see Linux on home desktops). As I said, this is such a mess that I don't even know where to start.
I'm wondering why so many people are still loyal to the Alpha and speak of it as if it were a current design. Sure it was faster than a P2 233 way back when, but why does that matter now?
Mainly because the Alpha was a nice ISA. It didn't suffer from some of the residual mistakes of MIPS (load and branch delay slots) or Sparc (register windows) and didn't have a bunch of the cruft other most other designs (special purpose registers for counted loops [Power], special registers for high- and low-words in multiplies and divides [MIPS and, I think, Sparc], condition code flags [Power again], etc.). It did a good job of keeping silliness out of the ISA that made fast implementations more difficult. Also, it wasn't just faster than the competitors way-back-when, the current implementation is still competitive, and would remain so if it were still funded.
I'm not too attached to Alpha, however. I'm perfectly happy to use any reasonable RISC design (Power/PowerPC, MIPS or ARM are all good), or even the current extention to x86 (since we finally have enough registers to do real work). I'm just sad that such a good design was brought down by such bad business decisions.
If you want to convert an old electric typewriter into a USB input/output device you will face a few challenges.
First, traditional electric typewriters were mostly mechanical beasts (electric, not electronic) actauted by springs and levers with the user's finger motion enhanced by a flywheel. Only the flywheel was driven electrically, all the rest was mechanical. This means that there are no electical siganls generated when the user presses a key, just a series of levers and catches that connect the flywheel with a typearm and some mechanism to advance the carriage. Even the carriage return and platen advance was mechanical: as the carriage advanced a spring was stretched. The carriage return released the carriage, which was pulled rapidly to the right by the carriage return spring. When the carriage slams into the stop at the rightmost end of travel, a pin or wedge caused the platen to advance to the next line. The driving force for the platen advance was the momentum of the returning carriage.
In theory, you could instrument the typewriters mechanics with sensors to detect key presses and carriage return events using optical or electronic sensors. The sensor states would be fed into a microcontroller which would format them for communication over the USB port. This would allow you to use the typewriter as an input device.
Using the typewriter as an ouput device, however, is more complicated. You would actually have to add a bunch of actuators (solenoids, for example) to the typewriter's mechanism. I can think of a few ways to do this, but they are all labor intensive (I'd mount the solenoids vertically beneath the typewriter and connect each solenoid to the actual key it drives by a wire or shaft. When the soleniod is activated, the key is physically pulled down, just as if the key had been pressed normally.) and power hungry. Again, a microcontroller would be used to accept data from the USB port and translate it into signals to actuate the solenoids. The MCU would need to keep track of, or be able to sense, carriage position and put suitable delays between keystrokes to prevent jamming the device.
It all sound quite fascinating, but of very little practical value. It is likely to be a bit costly as well, but that shouldn't stop the dedicated hobbyist. Of course, for a lot less effort and money you may still be able to find an old ASR-33teletype with an optional RS232 interface (most ASR-33's used current-loop interfaces, which are not directly compatible with RS232). These old teletypes are pretty much what you are looking for, ready-made. You may freely substitute a DECwriter for the ASR-33 and I think there may be some versions of the IBM selectric that also fit the bill.
Sparc. Power/PowerPC AMD's Opteron and Athlon64 Some form of Pentium with 64 bits lashed on.
You forgot MIPS and ARM (I don't think they have a 64-bit extension at the moment, but nothing's stopping them). The only real losses are PA-RISC and Alpha, both of which could be resucitated: HP could reinvest in PA-RISC and Samsung could take up the Alpha banner. I'm not saying it's likely, but there are still plenty of options if the market demands them.
I think that by "computing" they meant doing the theoretical physics necessary to figure out what was and was not theoretically possible. A "computer" used to mean "one who computes".
No, by computing they meant managing a room full of keyboardists with adding machines and figuring out how to structure the calculations to get the maximum amount of work done in the minimum time with minimum errors and mistakes. This is, essentially, the same sort of thing that modern computer scientists do in the field of numerical methods. The only real difference in what Feynman was doing was that he didn't have the benefit of automated mechanisms for the majority of the algorithm: raw calculation was done by machine, but all data movement was done by human hands.
Richard Feynman? I have an enormous amount of respect for the man, but he was not a software person, or even anything close to a CS person.
Richard Feynman was head of Computing for the Manhattan Project. I'm not sure that really qualifies him to be on the this list either, but he does have a direct connection to the subject.
While the computation was not done with binary computers, many of the same numerical methods we use today were used in the days when the term computer referred to a person rather than a machine. Off the top of my head, however, I don't know of any particular advancement in numerical methods for which the esteemed Dr. Feynman was responsible.
The written word is the basis for the entirety of civilization. Without the written word we would still be wandering around looking for food for a living.
This is, most likely, untrue: Written language is only known to date back about 5,500 years while agriculture is thought to date back 10,000 years or more. The written word can hardly be the basis of agriculture if it post dates it.
As an aside, how often do you have secretaries and public clerk type people (ie, the DMV) freak out on you because you write dates like that?
I often get "How long did you serve", since apparently the military (only some branches? no clue, just speculation) encourages that date format.
I have learned that any answer involving the phrase "lexical order" will only result in blank stares.
I get very little freak-back from my idiosyncratic date formatting, and I use the other common military format, dd month yyyy, which isn't even numeric. While it doesn't sort correctly, at least it removes all ambiguity. When sorting is a consideration, however, I revert to YYYY-MM-DD.
Oddly enough, when I do get freak-back, I find that a blank stare of my own is the most productive response.
Actually, learn how to say "Go to hell and leave me and my programmers alone.".
I'll second this, but it is only half the story: A good project manager has to be able to say "no" to everyone. You have to say "no" to unreasonable requests from clients/superiors in order to keep your team-member's plates clear to work on the important stuff. You also need to say "no" to your team-members when they either want to go off the reservation for whatever reason.
A good manager, of any kind, acts as a wall between their people and the rest of the organization. They take care of conflicts and keep the team from getting distracted. They get the team what it needs to do it's job, and keep everything else out as much as possible.
Read Slack and Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.
Many people, including Tucker "bowtie-boy" Carlson just don't understand what Jon Stewart and the Daily Show are really about. They think that the point of the Daily Show is to make fun of events and politicians covered by news programs. In fact -- and this is subtly alluded to in the Daily Show tag line "The best fake news show on TV" which implies the existance of other fake news shows: the punch-line is that the other fake news shows are CNN, Fox News, 20/20, 60-Minutes, etc. -- the actual target of the Daily Show is television journalism itself! To some extent this is also true of the late-night comedy revues like SNL and MadTV, though they seem to lose sight of this, frequently.
Until Stewart's appearance on Crossfire, the Daily Show had been playing their punch-line pretty quietly: the punch-line only really works when the butt of the joke doesn't realize what's going on. Tucker Carlson's comparison of Crossfire to the Daily Show is proof that he, at least, didn't realize that the joke was on him and not on George Bush or John Kerry. Unfortunately, Jon Stewart actaully explained the joke: and, of course, once you explain a joke, it's not funny anymore.
Fortunately, it's unlikely that the news media will give Stewart's explanation much play, since it can only make them look bad. The only power the new media has is based on some minimal level of public trust. Running with a story that essentially reads "FLASH: TV News is Bullshit!" just isn't in their self-interest. So long as TV journalism is controlled by a few large corporate interests, we should be able to enjoy the Daily Show's joke at their expense for a good while yet.
I keep "proposing" zero emmisions plants all the time, but as soon as I type the word "nuclear" around here, everyone gets all squirrly...
Oh, that's just because you keep misspelling nucular. You know, the safe nucular power that our President likes to talk about, usually in the same sentence as clean coal.
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With that kind of attitude you might as well get the cheapest House-o-Crap PC you can find: you'll need every extra penny you've got for a good divorce lawyer.
Seriously, if your wife asks for anything and you can satisfy that request for as little as 500 smackers, just do it and don't look back. Anything that makes her happy makes your life easier. Trying to cheap out on something like this is a recipe for disaster.
In this case, yes.
When you are the president of an expensive and respected university it is your job to ensure that no harm comes to the institution and that the donations keep rolling in from your well heeled alumni, not to prance about making jackass statements about things well outside your field of expertise.
It appears this fellow not only doesn't understand what his job is, but he is both stupid and bad at math as well: it only takes a few dozen alumni to get offended at his assinine statements and withhold their annual checks to the university to make him a net liability to the institution. (Of course, this shouldn't be news to anyone familiar with the sort of people who become economists: in general, economists think that sums are hard math and derivatives are high magic.)
So, no, it doesn't matter whether there was any factual merit in his statements or not: that the statements would offend a large number of people was certain and he should have kept his stupid opinions to himself (at least while he was acting in his official capacity as president of the university).
The situations are not comparable: members of the civil rights movements didn't have anything to lose by speaking out, whereas this fellow has endangered the welfare of the institution he is employed to represent and protect. What's worse, this fellow isn't on any sacred cursade to liberate the opressed, he is just stroking is own, already ponderous, ego. He deserves to be sacked.
Maybe Creative doesn't have any real engineering capability: maybe they just buy their tech from others and rebrand it with the Creative logo and custom platics. There are lots of 'tech' companies that do this -- Gateway and Dell spring to mind -- and their products are, without exception, uninspired.
Having said that, however, I have two disclaimers: first, I don't actually know what kind of engineering capability Creative does or doesn't have. Second, it is an ironic fact that, unlike most of Apple's products, the iPod is (or at least was at first) not designed by Apple, but was licensed from another company that did all the basic research and development.
Huh? It should be trivial to devise a more compact memory structure for that data. Given only a few minutes of thought I came up with this:
This should be about 1/4 the memory requirement of a simple 2D array of integers (assuming 32-bit integers), so long as most of the values in data set can be represented in 1 byte.
Other, more exotic, data structures could be used to get even better memory efficiency: they are called sparse matrices and have been well understood for decades. Do a google search, go to the library or ask a computer scientist for advice.
(Thank-you, thank-you. I'll be here all week. I do weddings and bar-mitzvahs and am available for hire)
While the day may have gotten shorter, the orbital period of the Earth didn't change, so you get the time back over the entire millennium as an extra leap-second.
Most LCD panels have an operating temperature range of 0 to 50 degrees C (32 to 140 degrees F). The upper end of the range is unlikely to be a problem, but if your workshop is likely to get below freezing in the winter an LCD monitor will likely get damaged: use a conventional CRT based monitor instead.
First, you've set your lifetime goals way too low. If you are any good at all, you will have achieved this in less than a decade (probably half that) and then it's crisis time. Set your lifetime goals higher, the higher the better.
Second, while you do need to know this technical stuff, that's not all there is to it. On top of HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, PHP/ASP and SQL, you will need to understand (and be good at) graphic design, and have some other domain knowledge that gives you insight into the business reasons for the web design work you do. You can't get most of this knowledge quickly or easily, some of it you simply must be born with and some of it will only come after decades of experience.
Your best bet is to go straight to your local community college and enroll in the Web Design or Web Programming certificate course. While you're at it, think about enrolling in some other, largely unrelated major (business management, visual arts, chemistry, psychology, english literature, whatever) which will give you some outside perspective to ground your technical skills. You can finish up both the certificate and the AA in two or three years as a full-time student, or four years of part-time school/part-time work. While you're there, take advantage of an internship or cooperative education program.
If you're feeling really energetic, replace community college and AA in the above paragraph with university and BA or BSc. Lather, rinse, repeat.
That's odd, I thought I just did.
I'm not really sure what you mean here. What do you allege Microsoft Office interoperates with? I haven't noticed that it operates very well with other vendors software, or that it even operates very well with different versions of itself. As for integration, it seems to be a middling effort, at best. The total integration, between both the office suite elements and between the suite and the OS, seems to be stuck at the level achieved by other vendors back around 1995.
Gosh, and I thought that illegal bundling arrangements and abuse of monopoly power might have had something to do with it. I realize that I hold and unpopular opinion, and that all right-thinking computer users recognize Microsoft for the innovative and benevolent capitalist they are, but I guess I just like being an iconoclast and a parriah.
No. When Apple does it, it works. When Microsoft does it, it satisfies the feature list.
Every decade or so, since the rise of the personal computer, we see some attempt to re-impose the rule of centralized systems, usually under the guise of 'easing the burden on end-users' but always including an increased financial burden on those same end-users. The simple economic facts are that computer power (by any measure: instructions per second per dollar, main-memory bytes per dollar, on-line storage bytes per dollar, etc.) has become so inexpensive that all the old reasons for centralized computing systems no longer apply (and haven't applied for at least 20 years). The only reason these new centralization schemes is to find some way to extract money from existing computer users, whether or not the users actually want the sevice being provided. The idea that people will willingly give up control of their own systems and pay for the privilage may be a wet dream for companies hoping to collect the money, but it doesn't sound like a very good business plan.
The solution to the increasing administrative burden on computer users is not hire someone to do the administration: instead, we need computers that actually reduce amount of administration required or make the task of administration markedly easier. This is what personal computers did 40 years ago, and it can be done again.
Well, you must live in a part of the country that has a lot lower cost of living than where I live. I can trim the cost of living down to about $19.2k (gross) if I assume a shared apartment or no car (with both a shared apartment and not car, the gross drops to $17.6k). About half of the cost comes from rent+food. Rent could easily be cut in half by not living in the D.C. metro area (the fourth or fifth most expensive location in the country) and you could do without A/C, which would drop the utility bill a bit. When all is said and done, I can't see how to get the gross much below $12k.
Still, we're talking a pretty spartan existance. I didn't even include money for clothes or health insurance in the above calculations. You could pull through like that for a few years, but you'd be totally screwed if anything unexpected came up.
Lots of us folk making $50k/year have to live in an expensive location just to be where the jobs are. We probably also need a degree to get those jobs, which means we are paying off college tuition. Were I live (D.C. metro) the public transportation sucks, so a car is pretty much required: add back car insurance and some kind of car payment (either a loan on a new car or upkeep on an old one). When all is said and done, you can just get by on $35k. If you want to sock a little bit away for a rainy day (or, heaven forbid, retirement) and, maybe, have a tiny bit of a social life, the cost jumps to $45k. We've pushed up against that magical $50k number and we aren't even considering supporting kids or a spouse!
Finally, I've used a pretty rough model for taxation (always 30%) in my calculations, but the reality is that, as your income gets up into the $50k range, you actually pay more like 50%, unless you have a mortgage and kids as writeoffs. In the D.C. area, you'll be hard pressed to find a house you can afford on a measely $50k salary, so you're stuck renting, which has no tax advantages.
I'm not saying it's impossible to make ends meet on $50k in the D.C./New York/L.A./SanFrancisco areas, I'm just saying it isn't a given and could take a bit of effort: it's certainly no cake walk. Now, if you can get a job paying $50k in upstate New York or Iowa or Ohio, you'll be fat and happy, but those kinds of salaries are harder to come by out there.
Do you mean, maybe, Emacs rather than eMacs?
Nah, Steve already fired the real culprits.
Mainly because the Alpha was a nice ISA. It didn't suffer from some of the residual mistakes of MIPS (load and branch delay slots) or Sparc (register windows) and didn't have a bunch of the cruft other most other designs (special purpose registers for counted loops [Power], special registers for high- and low-words in multiplies and divides [MIPS and, I think, Sparc], condition code flags [Power again], etc.). It did a good job of keeping silliness out of the ISA that made fast implementations more difficult. Also, it wasn't just faster than the competitors way-back-when, the current implementation is still competitive, and would remain so if it were still funded.
I'm not too attached to Alpha, however. I'm perfectly happy to use any reasonable RISC design (Power/PowerPC, MIPS or ARM are all good), or even the current extention to x86 (since we finally have enough registers to do real work). I'm just sad that such a good design was brought down by such bad business decisions.
First, traditional electric typewriters were mostly mechanical beasts (electric, not electronic) actauted by springs and levers with the user's finger motion enhanced by a flywheel. Only the flywheel was driven electrically, all the rest was mechanical. This means that there are no electical siganls generated when the user presses a key, just a series of levers and catches that connect the flywheel with a typearm and some mechanism to advance the carriage. Even the carriage return and platen advance was mechanical: as the carriage advanced a spring was stretched. The carriage return released the carriage, which was pulled rapidly to the right by the carriage return spring. When the carriage slams into the stop at the rightmost end of travel, a pin or wedge caused the platen to advance to the next line. The driving force for the platen advance was the momentum of the returning carriage.
In theory, you could instrument the typewriters mechanics with sensors to detect key presses and carriage return events using optical or electronic sensors. The sensor states would be fed into a microcontroller which would format them for communication over the USB port. This would allow you to use the typewriter as an input device.
Using the typewriter as an ouput device, however, is more complicated. You would actually have to add a bunch of actuators (solenoids, for example) to the typewriter's mechanism. I can think of a few ways to do this, but they are all labor intensive (I'd mount the solenoids vertically beneath the typewriter and connect each solenoid to the actual key it drives by a wire or shaft. When the soleniod is activated, the key is physically pulled down, just as if the key had been pressed normally.) and power hungry. Again, a microcontroller would be used to accept data from the USB port and translate it into signals to actuate the solenoids. The MCU would need to keep track of, or be able to sense, carriage position and put suitable delays between keystrokes to prevent jamming the device.
It all sound quite fascinating, but of very little practical value. It is likely to be a bit costly as well, but that shouldn't stop the dedicated hobbyist. Of course, for a lot less effort and money you may still be able to find an old ASR-33 teletype with an optional RS232 interface (most ASR-33's used current-loop interfaces, which are not directly compatible with RS232). These old teletypes are pretty much what you are looking for, ready-made. You may freely substitute a DECwriter for the ASR-33 and I think there may be some versions of the IBM selectric that also fit the bill.
You forgot MIPS and ARM (I don't think they have a 64-bit extension at the moment, but nothing's stopping them). The only real losses are PA-RISC and Alpha, both of which could be resucitated: HP could reinvest in PA-RISC and Samsung could take up the Alpha banner. I'm not saying it's likely, but there are still plenty of options if the market demands them.
No, by computing they meant managing a room full of keyboardists with adding machines and figuring out how to structure the calculations to get the maximum amount of work done in the minimum time with minimum errors and mistakes. This is, essentially, the same sort of thing that modern computer scientists do in the field of numerical methods. The only real difference in what Feynman was doing was that he didn't have the benefit of automated mechanisms for the majority of the algorithm: raw calculation was done by machine, but all data movement was done by human hands.
While the computation was not done with binary computers, many of the same numerical methods we use today were used in the days when the term computer referred to a person rather than a machine. Off the top of my head, however, I don't know of any particular advancement in numerical methods for which the esteemed Dr. Feynman was responsible.
cubicledrone wrote:
This is, most likely, untrue: Written language is only known to date back about 5,500 years while agriculture is thought to date back 10,000 years or more. The written word can hardly be the basis of agriculture if it post dates it.
I get very little freak-back from my idiosyncratic date formatting, and I use the other common military format, dd month yyyy, which isn't even numeric. While it doesn't sort correctly, at least it removes all ambiguity. When sorting is a consideration, however, I revert to YYYY-MM-DD.
Oddly enough, when I do get freak-back, I find that a blank stare of my own is the most productive response.
I'll second this, but it is only half the story: A good project manager has to be able to say "no" to everyone. You have to say "no" to unreasonable requests from clients/superiors in order to keep your team-member's plates clear to work on the important stuff. You also need to say "no" to your team-members when they either want to go off the reservation for whatever reason.
A good manager, of any kind, acts as a wall between their people and the rest of the organization. They take care of conflicts and keep the team from getting distracted. They get the team what it needs to do it's job, and keep everything else out as much as possible.
Read Slack and Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.
Until Stewart's appearance on Crossfire, the Daily Show had been playing their punch-line pretty quietly: the punch-line only really works when the butt of the joke doesn't realize what's going on. Tucker Carlson's comparison of Crossfire to the Daily Show is proof that he, at least, didn't realize that the joke was on him and not on George Bush or John Kerry. Unfortunately, Jon Stewart actaully explained the joke: and, of course, once you explain a joke, it's not funny anymore.
Fortunately, it's unlikely that the news media will give Stewart's explanation much play, since it can only make them look bad. The only power the new media has is based on some minimal level of public trust. Running with a story that essentially reads "FLASH: TV News is Bullshit!" just isn't in their self-interest. So long as TV journalism is controlled by a few large corporate interests, we should be able to enjoy the Daily Show's joke at their expense for a good while yet.
it did and I didn't. If it did again: again I wouldn't.
Oh, that's just because you keep misspelling nucular. You know, the safe nucular power that our President likes to talk about, usually in the same sentence as clean coal.