You said you put a UPS before the power supply, but you never said you replaced the power supply itself. Did you? Most likely, the power supply is faulty and is frying all the rest of the components. The PS is the first thing you should look at in cases like this.
The problem here is that guarantees are useless when they're from the government. If some business gives you a guarantee which is legally backed, that's worth something because you can take them to court if they don't uphold it--this is basic contract law. If the court finds against them, the government will enforce your claim against them. However, when it's the government making the guarantee, that's worth nothing, because if they change their mind later (which they do every 2-4 years, depending on the election cycle), all they have to do is write a new law revoking the old law.
There's a slight problem with this theory, from what I've seen: There isn't a single jQuery out there, instead there's between 5-10 versions of it floating around. Not all sites bother to update to the latest version, probably thinking that since the latest version takes up much more space than earlier versions that it'll put more load on their webserver and use more bandwidth (or, the site author hasn't bothered to keep up with jQuery development and releases since they just spent a little time one day adding it to their site, and then moved on to other work and haven't bothered updating their site in a while and as long as the jQuery-related stuff works fine, they're not going to bother with it any more). So you're not amortizing a 100KB download over 100 sites, you're amortizing at least 5 different downloads of 30-100KB over, say, 100 sites, making it an average of only 20 sites using each version, and less chance of the browser cache having the version you need at the time you need it.
Ok, most of the space in the middle of Australia is a giant desert. Better?
Looking at Google Maps, Alice Springs and the surrounding area does look like a nice little oasis, next to some nice nature preserves. Zoom out a little and you'll see nothing but red, barren desert surrounding the area and covering most of the western 2/3 of the continent.
I have asked people with C++ on their resumes to explain to me what 'virtual' means and the success rate is 50%.
That's nothing, and actually it may very well be irrelevant to peoples' expertise with C++. In a prior job years ago, I participated in some phone interviews of contractors; we were looking for people who could do both Perl and C++ programming. I'm no C++ expert (and was even less so at the time, more like a junior programmer), but I made up some ridiculously simple questions, such as: "What is a class? Please describe a class and what it's for." The success rate on that question, for people claiming "C++ expert" on their resumes, was much less than 50%, probably less than 25%.
This doesn't show that C++ programmers don't understand C++ well. This just shows that there's a bunch of liars out there who claim to be experts in things they have zero experience or expertise in, just so they can get a job.
Of course, the last time I wrote this little anecdote on Slashdot, I had a bunch of people telling me that there's lots of perfectly good reasons a C++ expert wouldn't be able to tell me what a "class" is (just like an expert auto mechanic might not be able to tell me what a "piston" or a "steering wheel" is when grilled on it in an interview). Let's see what happens today.
You can implement classes and objects and what's more, you can actually understand how they work when you do. A true object can be built in C without any of the cruft or "mommy" limits; it can be highly efficient in terms of both memory used and execution time. It won't end up being megabytes just to get a basic UI going.
You can do all this in assembly language too. But it won't be very readable or maintainable, and the source code will be enormous. The whole point of a higher-level language is to make your source code shorter and simpler, so you have to do less work to get the same result (though it may not be as efficient in terms of memory or execution speed, though then again, it may be better depending on how good the compiler is and how good your HLL code is, versus how good your ASM coding is).
Sure, you can do classes and polymorphism in straight C, but it's a PITA and not nearly as simple as in C++, since those things are not built into the language. The Linux kernel is a great example of C code that uses these features, but again, it's not that simple or readable, since you have to make your own function tables and such. It may or may not be more efficient "rolling your own" in C, and in a kernel the readability trade-off is arguably worth it, but most of us aren't writing kernels, we're working on higher-level applications where performance isn't quite so critical, and knowing everything that's going on at the machine level isn't very important the way it is in a kernel or device driver.
Maybe the hope that someone else had thought of it before me and had already done it, and I just never heard of it? I'm under no illusion that all my ideas are totally original.
I wish they had taken a look at Qt instead. Qt is pretty similar in that it's C++ metaprogramming, and adds a bunch of libraries on top of C++ and new keywords and such (like foreach for dealing with container classes). However, the resulting code is extremely easy to read, unlike the Boost examples I've seen.
What I'd like to see is some way of automatically creating a custom, minified jQuery which only has the parts that your website actually uses. Suppose for instance you only use a handful of jQuery functions to do some cool effects; you don't need the entire library, just a small part of it. Why not make a custom version that's only ~10KB, just for your website?
Sorry, I meant bias-ply. Anyway, no, the rest of my post is correct. A few psi is not going to make a difference in tire wear, but it will make a difference in fuel efficiency and handling (higher pressures = better handling and better economy, at the expense of comfort).
All that "space" in the middle of Australia is a giant desert with no water, no food, and really no civilization of any kind. What are you going to do, stick thousands of refugees in the middle of a desert and watch them die of exposure in a day or two? Bulding the civilization necessary to sustain all those people (not to mention getting enough freshwater to the region for them) would be a giant and expensive project.
Just because there's a bunch of open land somewhere doesn't mean it's usable for people to live on. Desert cities in the USA like Phoenix require tons of water from nearby rivers, and are in danger currently of exhausting their freshwater supplies.
Bullshit; the b43 drivers were reverse-engineered by the community and are better than Broadcom's own drivers. Granted, WiFi drivers are a little more complex than a serial port driver, but they're nowhere near as hard as GPU drivers.
Only 1psi? Depending on your tires and what the recommendation is (and if you're going by the tire's recommendation or the carmaker's recommendation, which are two drastically different things), you can probably add 5-10psi without any trouble. Most carmaker recommendations are very low, to achieve a more comfortable ride. The number to go by is the tiremakers' max inflation psi; subtract maybe 5 or so psi from that (to account for the air heating up while driving and in hot weather) and you'll have a better number to go by.
These aren't radial tires; they don't have the problems with treadwear at different inflation pressures that they used to. There's a very wide window in modern tires of acceptable pressures without getting uneven wear (of course, beyond that window you will get wear either in the middle or on the edges, for high and low inflation, respectively).
How do you figure? Sure, maybe playing videos or certain games remotely doesn't work, but lots of applications work just fine over X11 remote connections (aside from the shitty performance, but if you're doing it over a fast LAN it's not that bad usually). I have no problem running various KDE applications remotely, for instance.
If you're just looking at windows full of text, you don't need RDP or X, you just use SSH and bash. That'll always be faster than any remote GUI software.
Network transparency in X is pretty much useless these days because it has no compression, so it's uselessly slow, since no one uses X drawing primitives or font servers any more. If you want network transparency, you need to use a protocol like NX. And it's not hard to add this into Wayland, in fact I'm pretty sure that's the plan.
I don't see how that situation is going to change much. The people who are really into things like building their own 3D printers or PnP machines are not the type of people interested in being high school teachers and dealing with unruly teenagers. Just take a look at the video; does that guy look like someone who could (or would want to) handle a classroom full of disrespectful teens? Maybe if they stopped mainstreaming everyone and separated kids into different schools, the way they do in Germany, so that the nerdy kids go to one school and the jocks and assholes go to a different school.
There's a couple of places that make laser-cut Kapton stencils for pretty cheap prices: ohararp.com and polulu.com. But for a one-off board, it is a significant cost (usually about $25).
Exactly; this is the story as it was told to me too. There were other airplanes before the Wrights', but they took off, flew a bit, and then crashed. The Wrights' was the first one that was decently controllable in flight, and amazed the crowds in Paris by turning and banking and landing safely, rather than just crashing like the others. The Wrights didn't invent heavier-than-air powered flight, they made the first controllable airplance.
So why do you stay? MS/AL are probably two of the absolute worst states to have a tech job in; there aren't many jobs there to begin with, and those that are there pay shit, as you've found out. This phenomenon is pretty common in all places where there aren't many tech jobs: employers think that because there isn't much local competition, that they can get people to work for pennies, touting the supposedly "low cost of living" as making up for it (it doesn't). Usually, the only reason people stay in these areas with these shit-paying jobs is because they have some odd allegiance to the place, perhaps because all their dumb family members live there. (And if this is the case for you, then your family should be paying you the difference in yearly salary between what you make now and what you can make elsewhere, if they really want you to stay so badly.)
They should change the name of that city to just "DC", and drop the "Washington" part. If he were alive now, George Washington would be utterly ashamed of the city that's named after him.
There's quite a few open-source/FOSS jobs out there (or, at least, "quasi-open-source"), largely thanks to the rise of Android and embedded Linux systems. The pay is quite good since there's not that many people available who can do Linux device drivers and other embedded development.
(I say "quasi-open-source" because these jobs, IME, will usually have you working on closed-source Linux(/Android) drivers and other closed-source software that runs on embedded Linux and Android systems. So you'll be working with Linux in some way, whether it's a full-blown Linux system or Android which is a Linux kernel plus a bunch of other crap, but you won't be developing actual FOSS software for it. But it's still a whole lot better than working with Windows.)
I am 45 and really good at what I do (building web apps), but I'm not good at self-promotion. I'm pretty quiet and just keep my nose to the grindstone to avoid office politics. Any advice on getting _recognition_ for being good at what I do?
Look for another career. This career is for highly outgoing people who are really good at self-promotion. There's a reason the term "brogrammer" has risen so much in the last decade. As you've probably found, you can get by pretty well when you're younger based solely on your ability to perform, without having to be really good at socialiaing and promoting yourself, but after you reach a certain age, age discrimination sets in and if you're the quiet type who isn't good at tooting your own horn like all the brogrammers, then you're screwed.
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You said you put a UPS before the power supply, but you never said you replaced the power supply itself. Did you? Most likely, the power supply is faulty and is frying all the rest of the components. The PS is the first thing you should look at in cases like this.
The problem here is that guarantees are useless when they're from the government. If some business gives you a guarantee which is legally backed, that's worth something because you can take them to court if they don't uphold it--this is basic contract law. If the court finds against them, the government will enforce your claim against them. However, when it's the government making the guarantee, that's worth nothing, because if they change their mind later (which they do every 2-4 years, depending on the election cycle), all they have to do is write a new law revoking the old law.
There's a slight problem with this theory, from what I've seen: There isn't a single jQuery out there, instead there's between 5-10 versions of it floating around. Not all sites bother to update to the latest version, probably thinking that since the latest version takes up much more space than earlier versions that it'll put more load on their webserver and use more bandwidth (or, the site author hasn't bothered to keep up with jQuery development and releases since they just spent a little time one day adding it to their site, and then moved on to other work and haven't bothered updating their site in a while and as long as the jQuery-related stuff works fine, they're not going to bother with it any more). So you're not amortizing a 100KB download over 100 sites, you're amortizing at least 5 different downloads of 30-100KB over, say, 100 sites, making it an average of only 20 sites using each version, and less chance of the browser cache having the version you need at the time you need it.
Ok, most of the space in the middle of Australia is a giant desert. Better?
Looking at Google Maps, Alice Springs and the surrounding area does look like a nice little oasis, next to some nice nature preserves. Zoom out a little and you'll see nothing but red, barren desert surrounding the area and covering most of the western 2/3 of the continent.
I have asked people with C++ on their resumes to explain to me what 'virtual' means and the success rate is 50%.
That's nothing, and actually it may very well be irrelevant to peoples' expertise with C++. In a prior job years ago, I participated in some phone interviews of contractors; we were looking for people who could do both Perl and C++ programming. I'm no C++ expert (and was even less so at the time, more like a junior programmer), but I made up some ridiculously simple questions, such as: "What is a class? Please describe a class and what it's for." The success rate on that question, for people claiming "C++ expert" on their resumes, was much less than 50%, probably less than 25%.
This doesn't show that C++ programmers don't understand C++ well. This just shows that there's a bunch of liars out there who claim to be experts in things they have zero experience or expertise in, just so they can get a job.
Of course, the last time I wrote this little anecdote on Slashdot, I had a bunch of people telling me that there's lots of perfectly good reasons a C++ expert wouldn't be able to tell me what a "class" is (just like an expert auto mechanic might not be able to tell me what a "piston" or a "steering wheel" is when grilled on it in an interview). Let's see what happens today.
You can implement classes and objects and what's more, you can actually understand how they work when you do.
A true object can be built in C without any of the cruft or "mommy" limits; it can be highly efficient in terms of both memory used and execution time. It won't end up being megabytes just to get a basic UI going.
You can do all this in assembly language too. But it won't be very readable or maintainable, and the source code will be enormous. The whole point of a higher-level language is to make your source code shorter and simpler, so you have to do less work to get the same result (though it may not be as efficient in terms of memory or execution speed, though then again, it may be better depending on how good the compiler is and how good your HLL code is, versus how good your ASM coding is).
Sure, you can do classes and polymorphism in straight C, but it's a PITA and not nearly as simple as in C++, since those things are not built into the language. The Linux kernel is a great example of C code that uses these features, but again, it's not that simple or readable, since you have to make your own function tables and such. It may or may not be more efficient "rolling your own" in C, and in a kernel the readability trade-off is arguably worth it, but most of us aren't writing kernels, we're working on higher-level applications where performance isn't quite so critical, and knowing everything that's going on at the machine level isn't very important the way it is in a kernel or device driver.
Maybe the hope that someone else had thought of it before me and had already done it, and I just never heard of it? I'm under no illusion that all my ideas are totally original.
I wish they had taken a look at Qt instead. Qt is pretty similar in that it's C++ metaprogramming, and adds a bunch of libraries on top of C++ and new keywords and such (like foreach for dealing with container classes). However, the resulting code is extremely easy to read, unlike the Boost examples I've seen.
What I'd like to see is some way of automatically creating a custom, minified jQuery which only has the parts that your website actually uses. Suppose for instance you only use a handful of jQuery functions to do some cool effects; you don't need the entire library, just a small part of it. Why not make a custom version that's only ~10KB, just for your website?
Sorry, I meant bias-ply. Anyway, no, the rest of my post is correct. A few psi is not going to make a difference in tire wear, but it will make a difference in fuel efficiency and handling (higher pressures = better handling and better economy, at the expense of comfort).
All that "space" in the middle of Australia is a giant desert with no water, no food, and really no civilization of any kind. What are you going to do, stick thousands of refugees in the middle of a desert and watch them die of exposure in a day or two? Bulding the civilization necessary to sustain all those people (not to mention getting enough freshwater to the region for them) would be a giant and expensive project.
Just because there's a bunch of open land somewhere doesn't mean it's usable for people to live on. Desert cities in the USA like Phoenix require tons of water from nearby rivers, and are in danger currently of exhausting their freshwater supplies.
Bullshit; the b43 drivers were reverse-engineered by the community and are better than Broadcom's own drivers. Granted, WiFi drivers are a little more complex than a serial port driver, but they're nowhere near as hard as GPU drivers.
Only 1psi? Depending on your tires and what the recommendation is (and if you're going by the tire's recommendation or the carmaker's recommendation, which are two drastically different things), you can probably add 5-10psi without any trouble. Most carmaker recommendations are very low, to achieve a more comfortable ride. The number to go by is the tiremakers' max inflation psi; subtract maybe 5 or so psi from that (to account for the air heating up while driving and in hot weather) and you'll have a better number to go by.
These aren't radial tires; they don't have the problems with treadwear at different inflation pressures that they used to. There's a very wide window in modern tires of acceptable pressures without getting uneven wear (of course, beyond that window you will get wear either in the middle or on the edges, for high and low inflation, respectively).
How do you figure? Sure, maybe playing videos or certain games remotely doesn't work, but lots of applications work just fine over X11 remote connections (aside from the shitty performance, but if you're doing it over a fast LAN it's not that bad usually). I have no problem running various KDE applications remotely, for instance.
If you're just looking at windows full of text, you don't need RDP or X, you just use SSH and bash. That'll always be faster than any remote GUI software.
Network transparency in X is pretty much useless these days because it has no compression, so it's uselessly slow, since no one uses X drawing primitives or font servers any more. If you want network transparency, you need to use a protocol like NX. And it's not hard to add this into Wayland, in fact I'm pretty sure that's the plan.
He looked to me like he'd make an excellent Vulcan.
I don't see how that situation is going to change much. The people who are really into things like building their own 3D printers or PnP machines are not the type of people interested in being high school teachers and dealing with unruly teenagers. Just take a look at the video; does that guy look like someone who could (or would want to) handle a classroom full of disrespectful teens? Maybe if they stopped mainstreaming everyone and separated kids into different schools, the way they do in Germany, so that the nerdy kids go to one school and the jocks and assholes go to a different school.
There's a couple of places that make laser-cut Kapton stencils for pretty cheap prices: ohararp.com and polulu.com. But for a one-off board, it is a significant cost (usually about $25).
I have actually found a company that will assemble 50 boards for a reasonable price
Which company is that? I've been looking for such a place and haven't found much, only places with ridiculous prices.
Exactly; this is the story as it was told to me too. There were other airplanes before the Wrights', but they took off, flew a bit, and then crashed. The Wrights' was the first one that was decently controllable in flight, and amazed the crowds in Paris by turning and banking and landing safely, rather than just crashing like the others. The Wrights didn't invent heavier-than-air powered flight, they made the first controllable airplance.
So why do you stay? MS/AL are probably two of the absolute worst states to have a tech job in; there aren't many jobs there to begin with, and those that are there pay shit, as you've found out. This phenomenon is pretty common in all places where there aren't many tech jobs: employers think that because there isn't much local competition, that they can get people to work for pennies, touting the supposedly "low cost of living" as making up for it (it doesn't). Usually, the only reason people stay in these areas with these shit-paying jobs is because they have some odd allegiance to the place, perhaps because all their dumb family members live there. (And if this is the case for you, then your family should be paying you the difference in yearly salary between what you make now and what you can make elsewhere, if they really want you to stay so badly.)
They should change the name of that city to just "DC", and drop the "Washington" part. If he were alive now, George Washington would be utterly ashamed of the city that's named after him.
There's quite a few open-source/FOSS jobs out there (or, at least, "quasi-open-source"), largely thanks to the rise of Android and embedded Linux systems. The pay is quite good since there's not that many people available who can do Linux device drivers and other embedded development.
(I say "quasi-open-source" because these jobs, IME, will usually have you working on closed-source Linux(/Android) drivers and other closed-source software that runs on embedded Linux and Android systems. So you'll be working with Linux in some way, whether it's a full-blown Linux system or Android which is a Linux kernel plus a bunch of other crap, but you won't be developing actual FOSS software for it. But it's still a whole lot better than working with Windows.)
I am 45 and really good at what I do (building web apps), but I'm not good at self-promotion. I'm pretty quiet and just keep my nose to the grindstone to avoid office politics. Any advice on getting _recognition_ for being good at what I do?
Look for another career. This career is for highly outgoing people who are really good at self-promotion. There's a reason the term "brogrammer" has risen so much in the last decade. As you've probably found, you can get by pretty well when you're younger based solely on your ability to perform, without having to be really good at socialiaing and promoting yourself, but after you reach a certain age, age discrimination sets in and if you're the quiet type who isn't good at tooting your own horn like all the brogrammers, then you're screwed.