The tariff on potable alcohol is very expensive. It is much cheaper to produce denatured alcolhol for industrial purposes. All you have to do is add something poisonous to the alcohol to keep folks from drinking it:)
College is definitely the way to go to help ensure success later in life. The education you gain is nice; the experiences and connections you will make are even more important. When you are looking for that first job you can rely on you personal network established through dorm roommates, lab partners, summer internships, grad students, professors, etc.
The college question is difficult to answer without context. Are you rich? Did you have good grades/test scores in high school? Where do you live? The answers to these questions determine which schools are affordable and attainable. After you have answered these pick the best one available and check to see if it has a program that meets your needs. It appears that you want a CS program that you don't have to commit to right away.
Lastly don't spend tens of thousands of dollars on a general liberal arts degree. I think the college experience is very valuable, but if you are not going to have a marketable degree in the end then it would be much cheaper to go to a state school. Otherwise you will have huge student loans to pay off after graduation and no money to pay them with.
I agree that a college education should be more general than most engineering programs, but if the guy is interested in computers he should focus there. UC Berkeley had two CS programs, one from the College of Engineering and one from the College of Letters and Science. I chose the latter because it was easier to get into:) I was able to take classes in history, classics, geology, linguistics, and other random fields because of the lower number of prereqs in the College of L&S. And I was still able to take enough CS classes to earn a degree in my chosen field.
One of the best things about going to a school like Harvard or Stanford is that many of your classmates are wealthy and connected. During your program at school you will have many opportunities to form networks with fellow students, their parents, and alumni who later in life will be able to get you a job.
job != perfect happiness is a tautology
on
Dream Jobs of 2004
·
· Score: 1
I have met and heard of people who say they love their jobs, but they generally break down into two categories:
1. People who strangely love their weekends more. 2. People who have really awful problems in their personal lives.
Your job cannot be the funnest thing in your life for two reasons:
1. No one will demand to be paid to do the one thing in life that makes them happiest. Eventually employers will refuse to to pay for something if they know their employees will do it for free.
2. If you have to do it at a particular time at a particular place then it loses a lot of the fun factor. Writing emails at home after a couple of beers can be fun; writing emails at 9am after an hour long commute usually isn't.
I was using a sparc 2 as a workstation for about a month in '97 and it was a very poor experience. That box just couldn't keep up with the graphical apps of the time, expecially Netscape. Then I got an Ultra 1 and that was worlds better. But by 2000 or so that machine was virtually unusable for graphical apps (especially Netscape), so I got an Ultra 10. That machine was worlds better than the Ultra 1, and by inference at least two orders of magnitude better than the sparcstation.
Maybe a sparcstation is OK for some extremely computationally efficient server tasks but for workstation use I'll take a faster CPU, more memory and a better graphics card every time.
The only Sun workstations at my school that had those funky metal optical mousepads were a lab full of original Sparcstations and another lab full of Sun 3/50s. The Sparcstations seemed OK at the time, but an Ultra 5 would run circles around either machine. Those goddamn Sun 3/50s were painful to use, and that was back in '94.
The first show was on for what, 3 years before it was cancelled? The last four series have been on continually for the last 16 years! Maybe viewers are just burnt out. The producers should take a break for a while. They can explore a few ideas through books and video games to assess interest in new themes and come back with something fresh in a decade or so.
A global economy is the only way for a developing nation to substantially improve the standard of living. Any government that stands in the way of globalization will eventually face a revolt as the local populace realizes through TV, radio the Internet and the telephone that everyone else has a lot more stuff than they do.
Some governments have tried to reduce this effect by controlling the mass media, but that won't work forever. Mass media devices are so small that they can easily be smuggled anywhere, and "information wants to be free".
I totally agree with the grandparent post. Lost jobs are rough for the locals but necessary at a global level. The US lost a lot of manufacturing jobs in the 80's but bounced back with high-tech in the 90's. We'll find something else to do for the next decade.
CPU instruction sets are always designed around the software that will run on them. CISC instruction sets were popular because it made assembly programming possible; RISC only gained in popularity when compilers got good enough to produce optimal code.
Ah, the tired old "Hollywood movies suck, let's see more foreign films". I don't think it's fair to compare dozens of US made movies to the one or two best movies made in every other nation in the world for the year. I think there were more than half a dozen Hollywood flicks I enjoyed this year. I doubt I can name that many from anywhere else. Of course there are dozens more crappy US movies as well, but you have to take the bad with the good.
These technologies help China produce things that people want to buy, which brings in money and improves the standard of living. These technologies also improve the informational infrastructure of the country. Essentially the Chinese government is giving its citizens rope to hang itself with. History shows that an affluent, well-informed citizenry will not tolerate a dictatorship forever.
American multi-national corporations have to go to developing nations to get away with that. Check out the movie "Missing" if you want to see the dark underbelly of the American dream.
Flexible officing is not necessarily about cramming folks into cubes. My building is almost entirely flex, and just about everyone gets a closed office with a door and everything.
To make this work you have to have the right technology. You need fixed phone numbers that follow you wherever you go, and we have that. You need an easy way to access your computing work environment; our work sessions come up in a few seconds after the insertion of our employee ID into our terminals. It helps to have the ability to access work from outside the office, and we have that as well through VPN. You also need a reservation system to tell you which workspace you are using (so people can find you) and which workspaces you want to use in the future.
For some folks who come into the office every day like clockwork and always reserve the same office this system doesn't make much sense. But most people aren't really like that. People move around inside a company and sometimes need to change location. People have car repairs, kids, doctors appointments and other things that take them away from the office during work hours. Here in the Bay Area many people have awful commutes that are ameliorated by working from home on occasion.
Buildings change too; sometimes workspaces are reconfigured or upgraded. Equipment breaks, making the office unusable. New buildings are built, leased or bought and old ones are decommissioned for the same reasons.
Flexible officing makes it easier to accomodate all of these things because a flex worker can just show up at their new office and they will have a computer, phone, printer, etc ready and waiting for them with no red tape or extra service. And if space is planned properly you can save costs by buying less total space.
Solving flexible officing problems also helps you with other emerging trends, like distributed workgroups and working from home. Ideally you don't just save money on real estate. You also make your workers happier by allowing them to work where they want.
This is true in my office. However as people learn more about the available offices and their neighbors their patterns can change. Maybe an office that was unbearably hot in the summer due to sun exposure is now comfy in the winter. Or you change departments and want to sit near your new coworkers. Or a new neighbor likes to yell into their speakerphone. The advantage of flexible officing is all of these things can be accomodated without changing the system.
1. Online docs are easier to update. The author changes the source and if you are pointed at that source you have the update immediately.
2. Online docs are more portable between work environments. I could lug around 50 pounds worth of docs between my work and home offices; instead I can access onlines docs from either with any computing device.
3. Books can be loaned but not copied too easily.
4. Online docs are much cheaper than books.
Books are fine if you are working in a relatively static environment. When your technology and your location changes though books can be a hassle.
Every movie, song, painting, sculpture or other work of art contributes nothing to the bottom line of society. Yet few would argue that the resources spent on art are wasted; art feeds our heads and makes life worth living.
While sport is not an art it fills a similar need. Athletes redefine the limits of human ability and serve as role models of physical fitness. Amateur athletes can relate to professional sports in a direct way through their chosen sport. Professional sports also serve as a model which the rest of us can use to improve our own physical endeavors.
Some might argue that sports are useless, but I would retort that they serve society better than endless hours of sitcoms or video games. People cannot perform at their peak unless their minds and bodies are fit, and this includes exercise. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy".
Agreed that the article is crap, but the S3 Virge was famous for being a 3D deccelerator due to its poor 3D performance.
The only thing this article does get right is that the 3dfx Voodoo was the first important consumer level 3D accelerator card. The Verite had comparable performance and the Virge certainly sold well in OEM boxes. However only the Voodoo had the necessary performance and developer support to put consumer 3D software on the map.
Republican policies support companies like Microsoft. They prevent the regulation of industries, which leads to monopolies that enter other markets with an unfair advantage. They support property rights over the freedoms of the individual, which promotes ridiculous licensing schemes. Every large monopolistic corporation has the Republicans to thank for their privileges and Microsoft is no exception.
I have watched anime without any translation, with subtitles and overdubbed. Subtitles are definitely better than no translation at all; you can still hear every original sound and you get the dialog, which is important if you want to know what the hell is going on.
I kinda prefer overdubs though. The translations are obviously screwed up and sometimes the voice characterizations are ridiculous, but most anime is extremely visual and reading subtitles diverts one's attention away from the cinematography. An overdub allows the viewer to concentrate on the video component of the movie yet still get enough info from the audio to follow the narrative thread.
Morbid obesity is not a good example for your argument. There are probably genetic tendencies toward obesity with regards to impulse control and depression. However nothing is forcing these people to eat insane amounts of food. If morbidly obese people have kids the chances that their kids are also morbidly obese are not significantly swayed by genetics.
get rid of "radio", keep content
on
Who Needs Radio?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember listening to a professor of mine discuss the problem with TV with his head teaching assistant, and it boiled down to this: the simultaneous images and sound of TV are so overwhelming to the senses that it is very difficult to think about what you are watching while you are viewing it. OTOH one can think critically about a show on the radio. This is why talk radio is so popular.
Additionally it is nice to listen to something new; this is impossible if you are creating your own tracklists. Listing to someone else's tracklists can lead to interesting new music.
Finally there are many situations where video is not feasible. The car is a great example; other sitatuations may involve a lack of space or funds for a video screen.
However radio is not without problems. There are many times when we cannot get the content we want due to the physics of broadcasting. Only a very limited number of channels are available, and if we are in the wrong place we cannot tune in our favorites. And the costs and licensing required to broadcast mean that only a select few get on the air.
The solution is to keep our favorite radio shows, but change the delivery mechanism. It would work like the internet; all our favorite shows would be sites with streaming content that we tune in over a wireless network. Of course we would need to find bandwidth to provide nearly everyone with a hi-fi channel, but that is just a matter of time. Then almost anyone could broadcast content, there would be no geographical barriers to reception and we could have virtually unlimited channels.
Slashdot Mirror
The tariff on potable alcohol is very expensive. It is much cheaper to produce denatured alcolhol for industrial purposes. All you have to do is add something poisonous to the alcohol to keep folks from drinking it :)
Give me that Ol' Janx Spirit thank you very much.
College is definitely the way to go to help ensure success later in life. The education you gain is nice; the experiences and connections you will make are even more important. When you are looking for that first job you can rely on you personal network established through dorm roommates, lab partners, summer internships, grad students, professors, etc.
The college question is difficult to answer without context. Are you rich? Did you have good grades/test scores in high school? Where do you live? The answers to these questions determine which schools are affordable and attainable. After you have answered these pick the best one available and check to see if it has a program that meets your needs. It appears that you want a CS program that you don't have to commit to right away.
Lastly don't spend tens of thousands of dollars on a general liberal arts degree. I think the college experience is very valuable, but if you are not going to have a marketable degree in the end then it would be much cheaper to go to a state school. Otherwise you will have huge student loans to pay off after graduation and no money to pay them with.
I agree that a college education should be more general than most engineering programs, but if the guy is interested in computers he should focus there. UC Berkeley had two CS programs, one from the College of Engineering and one from the College of Letters and Science. I chose the latter because it was easier to get into:) I was able to take classes in history, classics, geology, linguistics, and other random fields because of the lower number of prereqs in the College of L&S. And I was still able to take enough CS classes to earn a degree in my chosen field.
The male/female ratio was 85/15 last time I checked, and it is damn near the hardest school in the US to get into.
One of the best things about going to a school like Harvard or Stanford is that many of your classmates are wealthy and connected. During your program at school you will have many opportunities to form networks with fellow students, their parents, and alumni who later in life will be able to get you a job.
I have met and heard of people who say they love their jobs, but they generally break down into two categories:
1. People who strangely love their weekends more.
2. People who have really awful problems in their personal lives.
Your job cannot be the funnest thing in your life for two reasons:
1. No one will demand to be paid to do the one thing in life that makes them happiest. Eventually employers will refuse to to pay for something if they know their employees will do it for free.
2. If you have to do it at a particular time at a particular place then it loses a lot of the fun factor. Writing emails at home after a couple of beers can be fun; writing emails at 9am after an hour long commute usually isn't.
Good point, I will never use these features since I already have a phone with a calendar/contact list/games :)
I was using a sparc 2 as a workstation for about a month in '97 and it was a very poor experience. That box just couldn't keep up with the graphical apps of the time, expecially Netscape. Then I got an Ultra 1 and that was worlds better. But by 2000 or so that machine was virtually unusable for graphical apps (especially Netscape), so I got an Ultra 10. That machine was worlds better than the Ultra 1, and by inference at least two orders of magnitude better than the sparcstation.
Maybe a sparcstation is OK for some extremely computationally efficient server tasks but for workstation use I'll take a faster CPU, more memory and a better graphics card every time.
The only Sun workstations at my school that had those funky metal optical mousepads were a lab full of original Sparcstations and another lab full of Sun 3/50s. The Sparcstations seemed OK at the time, but an Ultra 5 would run circles around either machine. Those goddamn Sun 3/50s were painful to use, and that was back in '94.
The first show was on for what, 3 years before it was cancelled? The last four series have been on continually for the last 16 years! Maybe viewers are just burnt out. The producers should take a break for a while. They can explore a few ideas through books and video games to assess interest in new themes and come back with something fresh in a decade or so.
A global economy is the only way for a developing nation to substantially improve the standard of living. Any government that stands in the way of globalization will eventually face a revolt as the local populace realizes through TV, radio the Internet and the telephone that everyone else has a lot more stuff than they do.
Some governments have tried to reduce this effect by controlling the mass media, but that won't work forever. Mass media devices are so small that they can easily be smuggled anywhere, and "information wants to be free".
I totally agree with the grandparent post. Lost jobs are rough for the locals but necessary at a global level. The US lost a lot of manufacturing jobs in the 80's but bounced back with high-tech in the 90's. We'll find something else to do for the next decade.
CPU instruction sets are always designed around the software that will run on them. CISC instruction sets were popular because it made assembly programming possible; RISC only gained in popularity when compilers got good enough to produce optimal code.
Ah, the tired old "Hollywood movies suck, let's see more foreign films". I don't think it's fair to compare dozens of US made movies to the one or two best movies made in every other nation in the world for the year. I think there were more than half a dozen Hollywood flicks I enjoyed this year. I doubt I can name that many from anywhere else. Of course there are dozens more crappy US movies as well, but you have to take the bad with the good.
These technologies help China produce things that people want to buy, which brings in money and improves the standard of living. These technologies also improve the informational infrastructure of the country. Essentially the Chinese government is giving its citizens rope to hang itself with. History shows that an affluent, well-informed citizenry will not tolerate a dictatorship forever.
American multi-national corporations have to go to developing nations to get away with that. Check out the movie "Missing" if you want to see the dark underbelly of the American dream.
Flexible officing is not necessarily about cramming folks into cubes. My building is almost entirely flex, and just about everyone gets a closed office with a door and everything.
To make this work you have to have the right technology. You need fixed phone numbers that follow you wherever you go, and we have that. You need an easy way to access your computing work environment; our work sessions come up in a few seconds after the insertion of our employee ID into our terminals. It helps to have the ability to access work from outside the office, and we have that as well through VPN. You also need a reservation system to tell you which workspace you are using (so people can find you) and which workspaces you want to use in the future.
For some folks who come into the office every day like clockwork and always reserve the same office this system doesn't make much sense. But most people aren't really like that. People move around inside a company and sometimes need to change location. People have car repairs, kids, doctors appointments and other things that take them away from the office during work hours. Here in the Bay Area many people have awful commutes that are ameliorated by working from home on occasion.
Buildings change too; sometimes workspaces are reconfigured or upgraded. Equipment breaks, making the office unusable. New buildings are built, leased or bought and old ones are decommissioned for the same reasons.
Flexible officing makes it easier to accomodate all of these things because a flex worker can just show up at their new office and they will have a computer, phone, printer, etc ready and waiting for them with no red tape or extra service. And if space is planned properly you can save costs by buying less total space.
Solving flexible officing problems also helps you with other emerging trends, like distributed workgroups and working from home. Ideally you don't just save money on real estate. You also make your workers happier by allowing them to work where they want.
This is true in my office. However as people learn more about the available offices and their neighbors their patterns can change. Maybe an office that was unbearably hot in the summer due to sun exposure is now comfy in the winter. Or you change departments and want to sit near your new coworkers. Or a new neighbor likes to yell into their speakerphone. The advantage of flexible officing is all of these things can be accomodated without changing the system.
1. Online docs are easier to update. The author changes the source and if you are pointed at that source you have the update immediately.
2. Online docs are more portable between work environments. I could lug around 50 pounds worth of docs between my work and home offices; instead I can access onlines docs from either with any computing device.
3. Books can be loaned but not copied too easily.
4. Online docs are much cheaper than books.
Books are fine if you are working in a relatively static environment. When your technology and your location changes though books can be a hassle.
Every movie, song, painting, sculpture or other work of art contributes nothing to the bottom line of society. Yet few would argue that the resources spent on art are wasted; art feeds our heads and makes life worth living.
While sport is not an art it fills a similar need. Athletes redefine the limits of human ability and serve as role models of physical fitness. Amateur athletes can relate to professional sports in a direct way through their chosen sport. Professional sports also serve as a model which the rest of us can use to improve our own physical endeavors.
Some might argue that sports are useless, but I would retort that they serve society better than endless hours of sitcoms or video games. People cannot perform at their peak unless their minds and bodies are fit, and this includes exercise. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy".
Agreed that the article is crap, but the S3 Virge was famous for being a 3D deccelerator due to its poor 3D performance.
The only thing this article does get right is that the 3dfx Voodoo was the first important consumer level 3D accelerator card. The Verite had comparable performance and the Virge certainly sold well in OEM boxes. However only the Voodoo had the necessary performance and developer support to put consumer 3D software on the map.
Republican policies support companies like Microsoft. They prevent the regulation of industries, which leads to monopolies that enter other markets with an unfair advantage. They support property rights over the freedoms of the individual, which promotes ridiculous licensing schemes. Every large monopolistic corporation has the Republicans to thank for their privileges and Microsoft is no exception.
I have watched anime without any translation, with subtitles and overdubbed. Subtitles are definitely better than no translation at all; you can still hear every original sound and you get the dialog, which is important if you want to know what the hell is going on.
I kinda prefer overdubs though. The translations are obviously screwed up and sometimes the voice characterizations are ridiculous, but most anime is extremely visual and reading subtitles diverts one's attention away from the cinematography. An overdub allows the viewer to concentrate on the video component of the movie yet still get enough info from the audio to follow the narrative thread.
Morbid obesity is not a good example for your argument. There are probably genetic tendencies toward obesity with regards to impulse control and depression. However nothing is forcing these people to eat insane amounts of food. If morbidly obese people have kids the chances that their kids are also morbidly obese are not significantly swayed by genetics.
I remember listening to a professor of mine discuss the problem with TV with his head teaching assistant, and it boiled down to this: the simultaneous images and sound of TV are so overwhelming to the senses that it is very difficult to think about what you are watching while you are viewing it. OTOH one can think critically about a show on the radio. This is why talk radio is so popular.
Additionally it is nice to listen to something new; this is impossible if you are creating your own tracklists. Listing to someone else's tracklists can lead to interesting new music.
Finally there are many situations where video is not feasible. The car is a great example; other sitatuations may involve a lack of space or funds for a video screen.
However radio is not without problems. There are many times when we cannot get the content we want due to the physics of broadcasting. Only a very limited number of channels are available, and if we are in the wrong place we cannot tune in our favorites. And the costs and licensing required to broadcast mean that only a select few get on the air.
The solution is to keep our favorite radio shows, but change the delivery mechanism. It would work like the internet; all our favorite shows would be sites with streaming content that we tune in over a wireless network. Of course we would need to find bandwidth to provide nearly everyone with a hi-fi channel, but that is just a matter of time. Then almost anyone could broadcast content, there would be no geographical barriers to reception and we could have virtually unlimited channels.