Welcome to realizing that life is complex. You don't go into a field and then stagnate at the "cool underling" stage forever. You get more responsibility, you understand more than just your little field you studied in school. You have the ability to take in the bigger picture. And you get promoted and coach the younglings, or you shift your career to what you're really good at, or what interests you now. Not surprisingly, it's usually not what you were doing when you left school.
Sure, there are exceptions. But, really, for most of us we are constantly refining who we are, and that rarely is a static job that matches what we were doing when we were 25. Don't worry, if you play your cards right and make careful decisions, you'll end up really liking your new, post thirty-something world.
It will come, but it doesn't make the wait less frustrating. I'm an aerospace engineer, and I remember building and preparing structural finite element models by hand on virtual "cards" (I'm not old enough to have used actual cards), and trying to plan my day around getting 2-3 alternate models complete so that I could run the simulations overnight. In the span of 5 years, I was building the models graphically on a PC, and runs were taking less than 30 minutes. Now, I can do models of foolish complexity and I fret when a run takes more than a minute, wondering if the computer has hung on a matrix inversion that isn't converging.
You should, in some ways, feel lucky you weren't trying to do this twenty years ago. I understand your frustration, though.
Just think - in twenty years, you'll be able to tell stories about hand coding optimizations and efficiencies to accommodate the computing power, as you describe to your intern why she's getting absolute garbage results from what looks like a very complete model of her project.
It matters in enforcing labor laws. They're clarifying who they consider to be a "professional" in information technology. It just means more the the IT world is considered to do job similar to most college graduates with a BS or BA in nearly any field doing anything other than grunt work for $10-12/hr.
I find it interesting that, when discussing salary, benefits, and status, IT workers consider themselves professionals, but when they are eye-to-eye with being officially recognized as professionals (also known as "Exempt" personnel under the Fair Labor Standards Act), now it's some kind of slap in the face.
And they know that small operators don't have the resources to do that. The NAR and Tripoli (model/amateur rocket organizations) sued the BATFE for classifying Ammonium Perchlorate based propellants as explosives, when the BATFE's own testing showed that the burn rate was a small fraction of their _own_ limit for what constitutes and explosive. It took a decade and a six figure legal bill to beat them in court.
Take a basketball with you and toss it into the street first, then you can safely step out and dribble the rest of the way to the other side. If there's a car with even a mildly attentive driver they'll screetch to a halt to avoid the ball. Or, just cross in the middle of the street like everyone else, that way there's no worry about the corner.
Yeah, but Livedrive makes dialup look fast. Slow doesn't even begin to cover it. Also, they have essentially negative tech support - not only does it take an appointment and a minimum of three days to get tech help, they "moderate" their forums so that new posts show up every 2-3 DAYS.
It's fine when it works, though horribly kludgy to work with, but for $150/yr I'm on the old "all you can eat" plan, and I've backed up about 1.3TB of stuff (only 250-300GB of which is real data, the rest is media). I also have two live and one offline backup locally. I trust them almost zero for real backup, but their sync software is cheap and works well enough for collaboration over a 250GB dataset (with 200MB/day total changes).
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
And, let's face it, punishment may be what he's after. Just as long as he remembers the safe word.
Yes, but what are the chances this will be around for 50 years so that the charging stations can become as ubiquitous as gas stations.
This completely overlooks the problem that cars are like laptops, not desktops - every manufacturer wants to have a "custom" case, and those are not terribly useful when producing easily-swappable, standard batteries.
It's a nice idea that will need massive funding or very, very limited production to achieve. With the mobility of people and the cost of obtaining a car without a battery still excessively high (for anyone who is not independently wealthy), the only way to make this work would be to lease the vehicle and the batteries.
As others have pointed out, there is no viable substitute for pencil and paper, unless she happens to be taking a class where drawings and diagrams will not be used and everything can be typewritten and she had excellent keyboarding skills. Get a good ADF scanner and a good PDF program (such as Bluebeam for the desktop - about $150, but $100 for students) and for her portable (any reader for laptop or something like Goodreader with a dropbox sync account for iPad). Know that finding information in a tablet PDF quickly is an exercise in frustration. Doubly so if that data is in the cloud.
It was my preference in school to use plain copier paper with a sheet of cardstock behind it printed with heavy lines or grid. I've scanned a bunch of notes, but I'll be honest - I keep a paper copy of my "test" sheets in a three ring binder next to my desk for reference. They condense a semester of graduate course work into about 8 very well organized notes per class.
You would think there would be data, but until someone suggests a correlation it's unlikely that the research exists. It certainly isn't in the interest of the extraction companies to find a link, and when you send somebody looking for something you don't want them to find, any evidence (even unrelated) is damning.
There was talk about this when the Virginia earthquake hit earlier this summer, too. It's the largest since 1897, and not on a particularly well-known fault (like the Narrows fault where the 1897 EQ hit).
Don't know if there's any correlation, but since USGS tracks these things, the data should be available from the EQ side - just need to time correlate it to when/where extraction operations occurred.
So, would that mean iCloud, Amazon, LiveDrive, Carbonite and other services would be illegal, as they have commercialized backing up your copyrighted works? (I know, probably not, but it's interesting to see)
For all the good HW pricing we get in the states, we take it in the rear for data pricing.
Seriously...the fastest I can buy from my two providers (Verizon and Comcast) are 4Mb/0.8Mb for $37/mo and 12Mb/2Mb for $60/mo., and this is in a fairly well wired (short of FiOS) college town. I actually had someone recently offer to switch me to T1 'cause they were running new lines on my street - symmetric 1.5Mb for ONLY $70/mo.
I'd jump at 50Mb or 100Mb service for under $100, but - if they were even available (which they're not) - those two speeds are $200 and $290 per month. And they're still not symmetric (5Mb or 10Mb upload).
Camp 1: People who want an information stream - turn on a "channel" and it plays in the background for hours, always there as a comforting sound and intermittent entertainment whenever you happen to look. My wife falls into this camp. Sure, she uses a DVR to record programs she likes, but she is just as happy turning on a channel and watching whatever is on. In fact, she PREFERs this mode for most of her daily viewing - she's only half watching but she likes the noise. No, I have no idea why. This is what we have with current providers.
Camp 2: People who want to watch "their" programs. It could be reality TV, it could be history, it could be sit coms, it could be movies. Doesn't matter what it is, they want to see the latest (or old) episodes of TV on their schedule.
The latter are the new TV watchers who are being targeted. Thing is, we've been conditioned by the status quo to believe the TV is free (or all you can eat for a monthly fee, which counts as free for many Americans). Camp 2 wants to watch the Camp 1 stuff for free, but on their own schedule, and preferably without commercials. Except that Sony and Apple want you to pay for this convenience. And Sony, along with all the other current broadcasters, want to to watch commercials, too. (That's what killed Hulu+ for me; well, that and the new Roku boxes can't stream for shit, and the AppleTV2, which can stream, doesn't offer Hulu...but I digress).
Those of us in the "middle class" are kind of pissed that we're forking over $2500-3000+ a year for "information services" and getting, well, what we're getting. Until there's a true clearing house for content (Apple and Amazon are close for music), the prices are reasonable (i.e. less than a cable bill for content for a family of 4-5), and the delivery is instant (sux if you don't have FiOS or expensive cable and are in the US), I don't see much of a change.
The searches that don't show the words in the page are the most annoying. I search like a programmer (though I'm not one) because I learned searching on alta vista and previous search engines that required more careful queries and ordering. Natural language is great, but sometimes I want to be a bit more specific.
I've gotten useful answers from expert sex change in the past - I just hit the cached link and scroll to the bottom for the answer. Sometimes it's crap, but as often as not there's something useful in there.
While the AI aspect is interesting, the accurate voice recognition is at least a large a hurdle - and Google (via Voice and the Android search) has been collecting more data than Apple can even dream of for the past couple of years.
We just switched from you to your competitor because they offer their service for free. It turns out, though, that their product sucks and we like yours better. Would you consider giving us your superior product for free. You've already granted us free access to some of your other products, and we use an absolute boatload of those, taxing your infrastructure far more than you allow for normal entities. We'd like to do that for all of your other pay services.
Thinking of the children, Your local non-profit
(Sorry, your letter struck me a bit odd. In full disclosure, I offer professional services and am asked from time to time to provide my services for free. I also happen to sit on three non-profit/charity board of directors, so I'm keenly aware of n-p finances.)
They expect Google to be free. Except for the non-existent customer support (and by customer, I mean users, not advertisers), many of their products are better than paid alternatives. And when it comes down to it, many other pay providers have lousy CS, too. At least at Google, you're not paying for lousy support.
It's been pretty nice of them to keep the interface free for so long (first hit is always free, right?) - making this in-house would require a significant outlay of cash.
You can pay for extra space in gmail, too, but we don't hear to many complaints about that (I'm rapidly approaching my limit). They are, admittedly, providing a service for which you would otherwise have to pay. If it's big deal, link your map to the plain Google site. Oh, you don't want to un-brand your map and keep people captured on your site? Excuse my while I shed a tear.
Slashdot Mirror
Naw, the exchange rate sucks.
Welcome to realizing that life is complex. You don't go into a field and then stagnate at the "cool underling" stage forever. You get more responsibility, you understand more than just your little field you studied in school. You have the ability to take in the bigger picture. And you get promoted and coach the younglings, or you shift your career to what you're really good at, or what interests you now. Not surprisingly, it's usually not what you were doing when you left school.
Sure, there are exceptions. But, really, for most of us we are constantly refining who we are, and that rarely is a static job that matches what we were doing when we were 25. Don't worry, if you play your cards right and make careful decisions, you'll end up really liking your new, post thirty-something world.
It will come, but it doesn't make the wait less frustrating. I'm an aerospace engineer, and I remember building and preparing structural finite element models by hand on virtual "cards" (I'm not old enough to have used actual cards), and trying to plan my day around getting 2-3 alternate models complete so that I could run the simulations overnight. In the span of 5 years, I was building the models graphically on a PC, and runs were taking less than 30 minutes. Now, I can do models of foolish complexity and I fret when a run takes more than a minute, wondering if the computer has hung on a matrix inversion that isn't converging.
You should, in some ways, feel lucky you weren't trying to do this twenty years ago. I understand your frustration, though.
Just think - in twenty years, you'll be able to tell stories about hand coding optimizations and efficiencies to accommodate the computing power, as you describe to your intern why she's getting absolute garbage results from what looks like a very complete model of her project.
It matters in enforcing labor laws. They're clarifying who they consider to be a "professional" in information technology. It just means more the the IT world is considered to do job similar to most college graduates with a BS or BA in nearly any field doing anything other than grunt work for $10-12/hr.
I find it interesting that, when discussing salary, benefits, and status, IT workers consider themselves professionals, but when they are eye-to-eye with being officially recognized as professionals (also known as "Exempt" personnel under the Fair Labor Standards Act), now it's some kind of slap in the face.
And they know that small operators don't have the resources to do that. The NAR and Tripoli (model/amateur rocket organizations) sued the BATFE for classifying Ammonium Perchlorate based propellants as explosives, when the BATFE's own testing showed that the burn rate was a small fraction of their _own_ limit for what constitutes and explosive. It took a decade and a six figure legal bill to beat them in court.
Take a basketball with you and toss it into the street first, then you can safely step out and dribble the rest of the way to the other side. If there's a car with even a mildly attentive driver they'll screetch to a halt to avoid the ball. Or, just cross in the middle of the street like everyone else, that way there's no worry about the corner.
More to the point, anyone skilled in the art should have know of such things - including any competent patent reviewer.
"If you owe a country a billion dollars, you have a problem;
If you owe a country a trillion dollars, they have a problem"
-Jon Stewart
Yeah, but Livedrive makes dialup look fast. Slow doesn't even begin to cover it. Also, they have essentially negative tech support - not only does it take an appointment and a minimum of three days to get tech help, they "moderate" their forums so that new posts show up every 2-3 DAYS.
It's fine when it works, though horribly kludgy to work with, but for $150/yr I'm on the old "all you can eat" plan, and I've backed up about 1.3TB of stuff (only 250-300GB of which is real data, the rest is media). I also have two live and one offline backup locally. I trust them almost zero for real backup, but their sync software is cheap and works well enough for collaboration over a 250GB dataset (with 200MB/day total changes).
And, let's face it, punishment may be what he's after. Just as long as he remembers the safe word.
Yes, but what are the chances this will be around for 50 years so that the charging stations can become as ubiquitous as gas stations.
This completely overlooks the problem that cars are like laptops, not desktops - every manufacturer wants to have a "custom" case, and those are not terribly useful when producing easily-swappable, standard batteries.
It's a nice idea that will need massive funding or very, very limited production to achieve. With the mobility of people and the cost of obtaining a car without a battery still excessively high (for anyone who is not independently wealthy), the only way to make this work would be to lease the vehicle and the batteries.
As others have pointed out, there is no viable substitute for pencil and paper, unless she happens to be taking a class where drawings and diagrams will not be used and everything can be typewritten and she had excellent keyboarding skills. Get a good ADF scanner and a good PDF program (such as Bluebeam for the desktop - about $150, but $100 for students) and for her portable (any reader for laptop or something like Goodreader with a dropbox sync account for iPad). Know that finding information in a tablet PDF quickly is an exercise in frustration. Doubly so if that data is in the cloud.
It was my preference in school to use plain copier paper with a sheet of cardstock behind it printed with heavy lines or grid. I've scanned a bunch of notes, but I'll be honest - I keep a paper copy of my "test" sheets in a three ring binder next to my desk for reference. They condense a semester of graduate course work into about 8 very well organized notes per class.
You would think there would be data, but until someone suggests a correlation it's unlikely that the research exists. It certainly isn't in the interest of the extraction companies to find a link, and when you send somebody looking for something you don't want them to find, any evidence (even unrelated) is damning.
There was talk about this when the Virginia earthquake hit earlier this summer, too. It's the largest since 1897, and not on a particularly well-known fault (like the Narrows fault where the 1897 EQ hit).
Don't know if there's any correlation, but since USGS tracks these things, the data should be available from the EQ side - just need to time correlate it to when/where extraction operations occurred.
So, would that mean iCloud, Amazon, LiveDrive, Carbonite and other services would be illegal, as they have commercialized backing up your copyrighted works? (I know, probably not, but it's interesting to see)
For all the good HW pricing we get in the states, we take it in the rear for data pricing.
Seriously...the fastest I can buy from my two providers (Verizon and Comcast) are 4Mb/0.8Mb for $37/mo and 12Mb/2Mb for $60/mo., and this is in a fairly well wired (short of FiOS) college town. I actually had someone recently offer to switch me to T1 'cause they were running new lines on my street - symmetric 1.5Mb for ONLY $70/mo.
I'd jump at 50Mb or 100Mb service for under $100, but - if they were even available (which they're not) - those two speeds are $200 and $290 per month. And they're still not symmetric (5Mb or 10Mb upload).
There are two camps here:
Camp 1: People who want an information stream - turn on a "channel" and it plays in the background for hours, always there as a comforting sound and intermittent entertainment whenever you happen to look. My wife falls into this camp. Sure, she uses a DVR to record programs she likes, but she is just as happy turning on a channel and watching whatever is on. In fact, she PREFERs this mode for most of her daily viewing - she's only half watching but she likes the noise. No, I have no idea why. This is what we have with current providers.
Camp 2: People who want to watch "their" programs. It could be reality TV, it could be history, it could be sit coms, it could be movies. Doesn't matter what it is, they want to see the latest (or old) episodes of TV on their schedule.
The latter are the new TV watchers who are being targeted. Thing is, we've been conditioned by the status quo to believe the TV is free (or all you can eat for a monthly fee, which counts as free for many Americans). Camp 2 wants to watch the Camp 1 stuff for free, but on their own schedule, and preferably without commercials. Except that Sony and Apple want you to pay for this convenience. And Sony, along with all the other current broadcasters, want to to watch commercials, too. (That's what killed Hulu+ for me; well, that and the new Roku boxes can't stream for shit, and the AppleTV2, which can stream, doesn't offer Hulu...but I digress).
Those of us in the "middle class" are kind of pissed that we're forking over $2500-3000+ a year for "information services" and getting, well, what we're getting. Until there's a true clearing house for content (Apple and Amazon are close for music), the prices are reasonable (i.e. less than a cable bill for content for a family of 4-5), and the delivery is instant (sux if you don't have FiOS or expensive cable and are in the US), I don't see much of a change.
The searches that don't show the words in the page are the most annoying. I search like a programmer (though I'm not one) because I learned searching on alta vista and previous search engines that required more careful queries and ordering. Natural language is great, but sometimes I want to be a bit more specific.
I've gotten useful answers from expert sex change in the past - I just hit the cached link and scroll to the bottom for the answer. Sometimes it's crap, but as often as not there's something useful in there.
Greece?
While the AI aspect is interesting, the accurate voice recognition is at least a large a hurdle - and Google (via Voice and the Android search) has been collecting more data than Apple can even dream of for the past couple of years.
Dear Business,
We just switched from you to your competitor because they offer their service for free. It turns out, though, that their product sucks and we like yours better. Would you consider giving us your superior product for free. You've already granted us free access to some of your other products, and we use an absolute boatload of those, taxing your infrastructure far more than you allow for normal entities. We'd like to do that for all of your other pay services.
Thinking of the children,
Your local non-profit
(Sorry, your letter struck me a bit odd. In full disclosure, I offer professional services and am asked from time to time to provide my services for free. I also happen to sit on three non-profit/charity board of directors, so I'm keenly aware of n-p finances.)
They expect Google to be free. Except for the non-existent customer support (and by customer, I mean users, not advertisers), many of their products are better than paid alternatives. And when it comes down to it, many other pay providers have lousy CS, too. At least at Google, you're not paying for lousy support.
It's been pretty nice of them to keep the interface free for so long (first hit is always free, right?) - making this in-house would require a significant outlay of cash.
Better that I pay for it than it go away entirely.
You can pay for extra space in gmail, too, but we don't hear to many complaints about that (I'm rapidly approaching my limit). They are, admittedly, providing a service for which you would otherwise have to pay. If it's big deal, link your map to the plain Google site. Oh, you don't want to un-brand your map and keep people captured on your site? Excuse my while I shed a tear.