If they can make the thing dirt and water resistant (almost essential, and ideally even waterproof, in the humid Indian climate), I would say it's a better solution for India than books and paper. Some of the OLPC ideas for making it cheap, robust and usable would be beneficial. Books may cost as much as several days pay for an average poor Indian just for the printing. If a single 'book' can be downloaded 100,000,000 times to simple tablets, it's much cheaper than printing the necessary books to educate 100,000,000 students for, say eight years. I would estimate that counting distribution and other factors, a tablet is probably cheaper after the first year.
Yeah, troll, but... I was working on $40,000 workstations in the late 1970s and early 1980s - 768x1024 or 1280x1024 displays, both monochrome (bit-mapped) and color (pixel-mapped). The fastest one (see Perq) had a 1MHz CPU, processing on a 64-bit memory pipeline. It had a pretty good window manager (with a mouse that worked on a special tablet), a programmable microprogram store, and an OS written in a systems-capable variant of Pascal. (Perq didn't come out with color till later.)
The hard drive was IIRC up to 24 MB, and the memory was up to 2 MB.
All in all, performance of the user interface was as good as anything we have now, not counting compositing and other compute-intensive functions.
Much later (into the beginning of this century) I had a NextStation 25MHz. It was also pretty good as far as the user interface was concerned due to the use of the TI 9900 signal processor for drawing the display, but compiling anything significant could take all night. Ray tracing an image was a multiple-week project for anything complicated.
Hmm. I wonder if the standard code include processing instructions or branches. If so, the code itself could be a program to do something. I would like to see a QR code that is also a Piet program!:D
Actually on paper most films never make a profit. The costs are structured so that various parental entities (production houses, etc.) charge huge fees so the actual film loses money but everybody who matters walks away with lots of cash. That's why smart and lucky actors always try to get a percentage of the gross, not the net. Many blockbuster films and TV shows have never made a profit, even after 30 years of syndication.
And (IIRC) Steven Spielberg complained a couple of years ago that the sound and video systems in most theaters are not as good as a reasonably good home theater system.
I think there is something to do with perception. In fact, if you look at most large highway signs (everywhere I've lived), the actual sign board is still the full rectangle; only the painted outline is rounded. And the rounded windows certainly look better.
Your comment was posted in a rounded rectangle. Please stop that you are violating Apple's patents.
Interestingly, this was one of Steve Jobs' early contributions. There was famously an argument when they were designing the first Macs (having licensed the windowing system from Xerox PARC) - he insisted on including rounded rectangles in the design. His head designer (whose name I forget - Parkhurst?) could not figure why he wanted rounded rectangles. Jobs took him outside, and showed how every rectangular road sign was a rounded rectangle.
Which shows that all things old are new again. It's worth noting that nobody ever patented rounded rectangles on road signs - it was just a useful design, not a 'world-shaking invention' in the world view of that time.
Both can be used for criminal purposes, but one is particularly well suited to those purposes while only having minor benefits for legal purposes.
I don't know, assault rifles can be very useful - especially when the bunnies fight back - I don't know where they get their armament, but with the whole 'pop up out of a hole, spray the attackers, dive back down the hole and show up at another one' tactic, they can really decimate my team. Bunnies - they're a lot more hard core than that cute+fuzzy image!! It's a good idea to enlist a few former SEALs to lead the penetration tem, just to assure you can get through their lines and into the inner sanctum. Peter Cottontail, my ass!
I worked in Sugar Land and lived in west Houston (off Bissonet), in a very mixed neighborhood - all colors, creeds, nationalities, etc. I enjoyed it. I'm kind of a 'white bread suburban' guy by nature, but I got along fine with everybody. One of the running jokes around the apartment complex was whenever I came out to the pool with my Scottish-extraction lily-white skin, everyone would cover their eyes from the glare!:D
Maybe you can explain to me - why in God's (or your favorite deity or whatever) name would anybody stay that hellhole of NYC? Too loud, too rude, too smelly, too lots of other things. I'm making a lot more than $75K, and I just bought a house on a private lake, with woods and forest critters all around, for $150,000n- my house payment is going to be well under $1000/month. I have a pleasant 4 mile drive, bike or walk to work on a country road with actual birds, deer, foxes and turkeys.
I remember when I saw Midnight Cowboy (yes, I'm a geezer geek), and I wondered, "Why this idea that it's impossible to get out of the city? Just catch the bus to the edge of town, and see what happens!"
Our company is in New England, an hour or so from Boston. We recently advertised for a PHP-savvy web developer. We got a grand total of one applicant from the ad, and another (who we hired) who is a cousin of one of our employees, who happened to be a great fit. One of the recruiting consultants we worked with showed us a report about hiring in our area. According to the study, there was a total of 0.21 qualified applicants per job posting in this area - IOW one applicant for every _five_ vacancies. I don't know how real this was, but those were the numbers.
I'm paid pretty well - I just got recruited for a job in Silicon Valley, and when they found out what I was making, and how much my rent was ($650 per month for 1/2 a house), they basically threw up their hands.
Funny, I spent many years in the tech startup world, mostly in CA but one stint in some high tech spinoffs from Carnegie Mellon, so I have long been used to crazy hours (I worked 36 hours straight on more than one occasion - and at the time I was VP of R&D). Now I work for a small company in the hinterlands of New England, where the IT folks work 9 to 5 (with paid hour for lunch, but also on rotating on-call status two or three nights per week), and the rest of the company mostly works 9 to 5:30 or 6 or thereabouts. But I have no family, and I like working longer, so I tend to average about 45 to 50 hours/week most weeks. I had the choice of being on salary or paid by the hour, and I took the latter so I take home more money. I am often the first one to arrive and the last one to leave. Then I can take a day or two off pretty much on a day's notice and I don't feel like I'm messing up my budget since I'm ahead on hours.
I have found that most East Coast companies in my experience think of an eight hour day as including lunch, while West Coast companies think of an eight hour day as 8.5 or 9 hours with a 1/2 hour or 1 hour unpaid lunch break. I can use the extra money and I'm enjoying what I do. And the folks are all nice - from the top down. Oh yeah - pretty much everybody is on flex time, and can and does work from home occasionally. I worked from home for about half a year, but I needed to get more social and intellectual contact, and I get more done in the office. Interestingly, I've now been at this company over five years - the longest I've ever been at any company except when I had my own consulting business. And I just bought a house nearby. I guess I'm getting settled in at last.
You need to google for how Xerox tried to screw over its manufacturing staff in Wilsonville. 50% pay cuts? The workers got a clue and unionised before it was too late.
Ha, funny. I used to work in Wilsonville, when it was new, owned by Tektronix, and primarily full of engineering staff (Information Display Division).:D My group was the first one from that facility that got laid off - but I saw it coming and had already accepted a job elsewhere.
I bought a Palm Treo in early 2007. At last it's starting to do strange things - thinking buttons were pushed when they weren't, etc. But four and one-half years isn't too bad. Verizon has been trying to get me to upgrade for more than three years now. Perhaps with ICS, it's time.
When every device you're near, from your car to your watch to your tv to the display on the shopping cart at the mall can route your calls and handle all the functionality of a smartphone (your data and applications just "follow you around" like a loyal puppydog)
By then, I hope I'll be living in a boat, far, far away from shore.
Not to mention, according to a study I read about a few years ago, the average systems administrator make more than the average lawyer. And just this week I read some data about recruiting a web developer here in Mass - there is an average of 0.21 applicants per job. It's not always that way, but from what I'm hearing it's getting pretty hard to find folks who can write code, at least in the range of entry level to two years' experience.
Somebody once said, "The problem with trying to make things foolproof is that the universe keeps coming up with bigger fools".:D
And, as the wiser ones of us eventually find, "Quite often the fool is me". Nowadays I am resigned to the fact that I _will_ soon do something really dumb. My only hope is that it doesn't end up on YouTube.
OTOH, imagine how many people have been entertained by all those YouTube clips - like this one: How to test an air bag.
Well maybe it was the emergency flashers. And it might have been a year or two older or younger. But I recall seeing the PCB, and listening to him swear about the $100+ it cost to fix his ^*(&(&(*&(* turn/flasher lights, whichever it was. Also, (just in case) it wasn't the switch/relay to turn them on, it was the thing that made them flash. I had a $35 Ford station wagon that burned equal parts gas and oil at the time, so I dunno.;)
It's just getting really annoying when I go abroad, mention I'm Canadian, then have people assume I'm American.
From my recollection, that's been true for a long time, before any recent wars - at least back to the 1950s. Folks elsewhere, especially uneducated ones, are a bit unclear on the geography. Kinda like folks here confusing various Asian countries. It's probably a bit over the top to use "Japan? Isn't that part of China?" as an example, but you get the idea. Big, white guy from North America == 'American' for lots of people. Sorry!:P
Yes, mainly because it pays really, really well compaired to other jobs in the IT industry for the same level of work. Granted the hours are usually horrible (12 on/12 off for months at a time).
Before I really got into IT, I worked as a deckhand on an offshore oil exploration (seismic) crew. We worked 12 hrs/day 14 days straight, then 7 days off (including transport back to home base). The company put us up in motels every night, everything was paid for. The hourly rate didn't seem too great - but I got time and a half for 4 hours a day, and had nothing to spend money on but the beer after work. For a single guy it was great - you didn't really even need a place to live, just go on vacation every third week.
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If they can make the thing dirt and water resistant (almost essential, and ideally even waterproof, in the humid Indian climate), I would say it's a better solution for India than books and paper. Some of the OLPC ideas for making it cheap, robust and usable would be beneficial. Books may cost as much as several days pay for an average poor Indian just for the printing. If a single 'book' can be downloaded 100,000,000 times to simple tablets, it's much cheaper than printing the necessary books to educate 100,000,000 students for, say eight years. I would estimate that counting distribution and other factors, a tablet is probably cheaper after the first year.
Yeah, troll, but ... I was working on $40,000 workstations in the late 1970s and early 1980s - 768x1024 or 1280x1024 displays, both monochrome (bit-mapped) and color (pixel-mapped). The fastest one (see Perq) had a 1MHz CPU, processing on a 64-bit memory pipeline. It had a pretty good window manager (with a mouse that worked on a special tablet), a programmable microprogram store, and an OS written in a systems-capable variant of Pascal. (Perq didn't come out with color till later.)
The hard drive was IIRC up to 24 MB, and the memory was up to 2 MB.
All in all, performance of the user interface was as good as anything we have now, not counting compositing and other compute-intensive functions.
Much later (into the beginning of this century) I had a NextStation 25MHz. It was also pretty good as far as the user interface was concerned due to the use of the TI 9900 signal processor for drawing the display, but compiling anything significant could take all night. Ray tracing an image was a multiple-week project for anything complicated.
Hmm. Is QR Turing complete?
Hmm. I wonder if the standard code include processing instructions or branches. If so, the code itself could be a program to do something. I would like to see a QR code that is also a Piet program! :D
This is usually the part where I make a joke, but somehow I just feel lonely and sad now.
Maybe this will do - one of my old sigs:
"Space - it's really big. I mean, really, really, really big. Better pack a lunch."
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
The three major philosophies: :D
(1) Capitalists think you can win.
(2) Socialists think you can break even.
(3) Mystics think you can quit the game.
Which probably says something good about Kevin Costner, who IIRC was the producer. (I liked the movie too, actually)
I saw in the Wikipedia article that 95% of movies - including Forrest Gump and Rainman - still haven't made a profit.
Actually on paper most films never make a profit. The costs are structured so that various parental entities (production houses, etc.) charge huge fees so the actual film loses money but everybody who matters walks away with lots of cash. That's why smart and lucky actors always try to get a percentage of the gross, not the net. Many blockbuster films and TV shows have never made a profit, even after 30 years of syndication.
And (IIRC) Steven Spielberg complained a couple of years ago that the sound and video systems in most theaters are not as good as a reasonably good home theater system.
I think there is something to do with perception. In fact, if you look at most large highway signs (everywhere I've lived), the actual sign board is still the full rectangle; only the painted outline is rounded. And the rounded windows certainly look better.
Your comment was posted in a rounded rectangle. Please stop that you are violating Apple's patents.
Interestingly, this was one of Steve Jobs' early contributions. There was famously an argument when they were designing the first Macs (having licensed the windowing system from Xerox PARC) - he insisted on including rounded rectangles in the design. His head designer (whose name I forget - Parkhurst?) could not figure why he wanted rounded rectangles. Jobs took him outside, and showed how every rectangular road sign was a rounded rectangle.
Which shows that all things old are new again. It's worth noting that nobody ever patented rounded rectangles on road signs - it was just a useful design, not a 'world-shaking invention' in the world view of that time.
Both can be used for criminal purposes, but one is particularly well suited to those purposes while only having minor benefits for legal purposes.
I don't know, assault rifles can be very useful - especially when the bunnies fight back - I don't know where they get their armament, but with the whole 'pop up out of a hole, spray the attackers, dive back down the hole and show up at another one' tactic, they can really decimate my team. Bunnies - they're a lot more hard core than that cute+fuzzy image!! It's a good idea to enlist a few former SEALs to lead the penetration tem, just to assure you can get through their lines and into the inner sanctum. Peter Cottontail, my ass!
I worked in Sugar Land and lived in west Houston (off Bissonet), in a very mixed neighborhood - all colors, creeds, nationalities, etc. I enjoyed it. I'm kind of a 'white bread suburban' guy by nature, but I got along fine with everybody. One of the running jokes around the apartment complex was whenever I came out to the pool with my Scottish-extraction lily-white skin, everyone would cover their eyes from the glare! :D
Maybe you can explain to me - why in God's (or your favorite deity or whatever) name would anybody stay that hellhole of NYC? Too loud, too rude, too smelly, too lots of other things. I'm making a lot more than $75K, and I just bought a house on a private lake, with woods and forest critters all around, for $150,000n- my house payment is going to be well under $1000/month. I have a pleasant 4 mile drive, bike or walk to work on a country road with actual birds, deer, foxes and turkeys.
I remember when I saw Midnight Cowboy (yes, I'm a geezer geek), and I wondered, "Why this idea that it's impossible to get out of the city? Just catch the bus to the edge of town, and see what happens!"
Our company is in New England, an hour or so from Boston. We recently advertised for a PHP-savvy web developer. We got a grand total of one applicant from the ad, and another (who we hired) who is a cousin of one of our employees, who happened to be a great fit. One of the recruiting consultants we worked with showed us a report about hiring in our area. According to the study, there was a total of 0.21 qualified applicants per job posting in this area - IOW one applicant for every _five_ vacancies. I don't know how real this was, but those were the numbers.
I'm paid pretty well - I just got recruited for a job in Silicon Valley, and when they found out what I was making, and how much my rent was ($650 per month for 1/2 a house), they basically threw up their hands.
Funny, I spent many years in the tech startup world, mostly in CA but one stint in some high tech spinoffs from Carnegie Mellon, so I have long been used to crazy hours (I worked 36 hours straight on more than one occasion - and at the time I was VP of R&D). Now I work for a small company in the hinterlands of New England, where the IT folks work 9 to 5 (with paid hour for lunch, but also on rotating on-call status two or three nights per week), and the rest of the company mostly works 9 to 5:30 or 6 or thereabouts. But I have no family, and I like working longer, so I tend to average about 45 to 50 hours/week most weeks. I had the choice of being on salary or paid by the hour, and I took the latter so I take home more money. I am often the first one to arrive and the last one to leave. Then I can take a day or two off pretty much on a day's notice and I don't feel like I'm messing up my budget since I'm ahead on hours.
I have found that most East Coast companies in my experience think of an eight hour day as including lunch, while West Coast companies think of an eight hour day as 8.5 or 9 hours with a 1/2 hour or 1 hour unpaid lunch break. I can use the extra money and I'm enjoying what I do. And the folks are all nice - from the top down. Oh yeah - pretty much everybody is on flex time, and can and does work from home occasionally. I worked from home for about half a year, but I needed to get more social and intellectual contact, and I get more done in the office. Interestingly, I've now been at this company over five years - the longest I've ever been at any company except when I had my own consulting business. And I just bought a house nearby. I guess I'm getting settled in at last.
You need to google for how Xerox tried to screw over its manufacturing staff in Wilsonville. 50% pay cuts? The workers got a clue and unionised before it was too late.
Ha, funny. I used to work in Wilsonville, when it was new, owned by Tektronix, and primarily full of engineering staff (Information Display Division). :D My group was the first one from that facility that got laid off - but I saw it coming and had already accepted a job elsewhere.
I bought a Palm Treo in early 2007. At last it's starting to do strange things - thinking buttons were pushed when they weren't, etc. But four and one-half years isn't too bad. Verizon has been trying to get me to upgrade for more than three years now. Perhaps with ICS, it's time.
When every device you're near, from your car to your watch to your tv to the display on the shopping cart at the mall can route your calls and handle all the functionality of a smartphone (your data and applications just "follow you around" like a loyal puppydog)
By then, I hope I'll be living in a boat, far, far away from shore.
Not to mention, according to a study I read about a few years ago, the average systems administrator make more than the average lawyer. And just this week I read some data about recruiting a web developer here in Mass - there is an average of 0.21 applicants per job. It's not always that way, but from what I'm hearing it's getting pretty hard to find folks who can write code, at least in the range of entry level to two years' experience.
Heaven or Hell - that was the demo.
Somebody once said, "The problem with trying to make things foolproof is that the universe keeps coming up with bigger fools". :D
And, as the wiser ones of us eventually find, "Quite often the fool is me". Nowadays I am resigned to the fact that I _will_ soon do something really dumb. My only hope is that it doesn't end up on YouTube.
OTOH, imagine how many people have been entertained by all those YouTube clips - like this one: How to test an air bag.
Well maybe it was the emergency flashers. And it might have been a year or two older or younger. But I recall seeing the PCB, and listening to him swear about the $100+ it cost to fix his ^*(&(&(*&(* turn/flasher lights, whichever it was. Also, (just in case) it wasn't the switch/relay to turn them on, it was the thing that made them flash. I had a $35 Ford station wagon that burned equal parts gas and oil at the time, so I dunno. ;)
It's just getting really annoying when I go abroad, mention I'm Canadian, then have people assume I'm American.
From my recollection, that's been true for a long time, before any recent wars - at least back to the 1950s. Folks elsewhere, especially uneducated ones, are a bit unclear on the geography. Kinda like folks here confusing various Asian countries. It's probably a bit over the top to use "Japan? Isn't that part of China?" as an example, but you get the idea. Big, white guy from North America == 'American' for lots of people. Sorry! :P
Yes, mainly because it pays really, really well compaired to other jobs in the IT industry for the same level of work. Granted the hours are usually horrible (12 on/12 off for months at a time).
Before I really got into IT, I worked as a deckhand on an offshore oil exploration (seismic) crew. We worked 12 hrs/day 14 days straight, then 7 days off (including transport back to home base). The company put us up in motels every night, everything was paid for. The hourly rate didn't seem too great - but I got time and a half for 4 hours a day, and had nothing to spend money on but the beer after work. For a single guy it was great - you didn't really even need a place to live, just go on vacation every third week.