Recordable Media a Bigger Threat Than Filesharing?
It's interesting to see that most people from the corporate world view new emerging technologies and change in general as a threat rather than an opportunity.
I suggest you to read the Wikipedia's page on HST just to see how long it took various committees and subcommittees to get this thing funded and then launched. It's a miracle it got there after all!
And not denying the great scientific significance of the HST tell me how good it will be at, say, deflecting incoming asteroids or getting significant number of people into space or mining for resources missing on Earth (and I bet there are some out there we don't even know about, because not everything can be learned about astronomical bodies by just looking at them from a distance).
Seriously, we need a new power source. As long as we're burning shit to get into space we're never going to be able get anywhere.
You're dead right here, mate. Unless we, as a species, manage to jump onto the next energy level we won't do much.
However, it has been technically possible to do a lot more in space than what has been achieved. It seems that serious exploration, be it scientific or any other, was just in the minds of sci-fi visioners and scientists. Politicians and the general TV watching public they serve were satisfied with simple flag-planting to show the Russia who has the bigger one.
Your fucking post is full of fucking bold f*** words, but in all your fucking rage you missed the fucking point. Which is that we haven't progressed a fucking bit in the fucking space at least since the fucking eighties.
If you REALLY want to do the Earth a BIG FAT FAVOUR go and recycle your body by disposing of yourself using a tree branch and a piece of rope made of natural, recyclable fibers. And, for Gaia's sake, don't procreate before you do!
Well, a 30MHz speed upgrade isn't worth waiting another month when I really need a laptop to get up to speed with a project from the beginning of September.
This whole thing helped me decide to buy a Mac. You see, I have a two year 1.3 Gig Athlon based PC, so to really benefit from this hack I would have to upgrade it. That would mean I would have to spend about a $100 on a new processor, like AMD 64, and a new motherboard, possibly new memory and another hard-disk (to move stuff from my older, smaller drives to make room for the OSx86 image). I think I would reach $500, maybe less, but what I really need at this point is a laptop, not a beefed up desktop. So, I would be looking for laptops with Centrino Pentium 4M, like the Vaio they run it on, that would be at least $1000, but closer $1400 - $1500 I think. Whatever I choose I would be left with a PC while what I really want is a Mac, not a PC, I want to have a stable workstation, Unix based and pleasing to use - that's why I bother at all with OS-X.
So, in the end, I'm just buying a PowerBook next week. Unless I hear a really good rumor that a new major version of these would be coming out in Paris next month.
Do We Really Need Space Weapons?
[...]
He argues that developing space weapons is a surefire way to launch a new space weapon race.
We might not need weapons in space. But we surely need a space race, desperately. The last one is over for almost twenty years now and we didn't move a bit since then. What we are left with is a space station that serves no real purpose and a bunch of used, aged shuttles (which, BTW, didn't match their requirements, as their operation is more expensive than Saturn V's has been). Russia doesn't look much better.
And we need space race desperately as a species, because we need to be able to do something if a rock large enough would happen to be on a collision course with us. And we need it in the long run because we need to get out of this single planet and spread.
Go into space or perish, it's as simple as that. And it's a harsh reality, so, please, let's dispose of stupid idealistic pacifism.
It's great it is reported here but I would like to see events like these announced here early enough so I could have a real chance of going there. I was at the HEU in 1993, it was truly great and I'm kind of annoyed I didn't know about this one coming.
OK, so - layoffs, like the one at HP - Slashdot complains. Outsourcing to India (being one of the few economical chances for this country and giving lots of IT related jobs to bright people who didn't have the luck of being born in the US) - Slashdot cries out loud and blames everyone.
Google and Yahoo are hiring. It means there are jobs in the industry, because someone will have to fill the positions vacated by those hired by Google and other someones would join the startups teams. What does Slashdot do - complain, calling it "brain drain".
Come on, think about it for a split second before you blame the corporations or cry out how bad it is that some people got new jobs.
Well, that attitude expains why I've been out of work for three years at the age of 54.
You tried to get a job as a programmer at the age of 54? Tough luck. I wouldn't hire you too. Not because you are necessarily stupid or unable to learn something new, no. Because you are old and as such know more about life than the youngsters. Therefore you are much less likely to spend twelve hours a day coding including weekends for extended periods of time (overtime pay or not) because:
a) your organism won't support that anymore and a couple of all-nighters could kill you,
b) you know there are better things to do with your time like, say, spend it with your family.
In other words you are unlikely to work as hard as they do, no matter how bright you are. And long time experience is worth nothing in programming as you know very well. You should have seen this comming and moved to management where your experience would be valuable. It is good to have a manager who has a lots of experience in dealing with people and projects (hence age counts as a plus) yet still knows whet the hell they are doing.
Yeah, most of them holding respectable CS, marketing or management degrees. Degrees prove nothing, except that someone was grown up enough at the right time to understand that he won't live through database hiring without some papers (or just listened to his parents).
Neat idea, but I wonder how long before someone cries out it would render jobless all those fearless people cleaning the skyscrapers from the outside on those tiny scaffolds.
Lesson from that is (again): never entrust your life and career to a corporation, never give in to this false sense of loyalty that internal-PR types try to push into heads of their "human resources" by "team building" and other tricks. Work for them, if you have to, but never ever believe you've got a "safe job". Never forget that it's just a business deal in which you sell a given amount of work hours for a given amount of monthly payments.
And if you have a really brilliant idea don't tell anyone, go out and sell it on your own. Because as this story proves those who did the other way round didn't get much for their thinking and are being pushed aside as "human resources".
By the way: this dreadful, denigrating them - "human resource" - tells loads about the way corporate world functions, really. I don't want to say it's all bad, devil inspired and so forth - but at least you have to realize the rules of the game.
There is a simple solution to this problem: the off button.
And, btw, as many did point out already: why people still insists on offices, huh? Offices are great for meeting and discussing, but really creative thinking is never done by a committee. It's done by individuals, alone with no one talking to them, on the bus, on a walk, in the car, while walking, bathing or even sleeping.
Yeah, money is evil, it destroys communities and pretty much everything.
But seriously, you exaggerate. Only few would make any money from their blogging or sites yet many sites appear. For most of the bloggers I know putting an ad link is something extra, something that you do just for the heck of it. You can easily tell those who blog for money (or try to) from those who blog to express themselves - the former usually don't have anything to say. And if someone has something to say that is so interesting to people that he is able to get real readership and thus ad revenue then what's wrong with that?
Same goes for forums etc. - no one forces you to post on a form whose policies you don't accept. And if there is no forum/community that would suit you start one with the policies exactly the way you want them to be.
Too much time....
on
Real Wood iPod
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Some people have clearly too much time on their hands. Some of those put it to good use and we call them "artists".:)
I wonder, how much further did we get in science, especially physics since Einstein?
Isn't that the right question to ask instead of celebrating past glory or worrying about some freaks deliberating on Noah's ark being attacked by dinosaurs?
They want. Hm... I just noticed that in recent years somehow less of what they want happens. They'll have to come to terms with that. Kind of hard after the ride to the top Darth Gates and his apprentices enjoyed...
Blogs are just a way for someone to avoid the confrontation of dealing with it in real life.
Same may be said of other forms of writing and of art. What does it change? If I like what I read that's fine. Author's real life (or lack of thereof) has nothing to do with it.
So, we get more and more data to support the view, that planetary systems are almost as common in the Universe as stars. Therefore the "fraction of stars which have planets" in the Drake Equation can be now assumed to be more close to 1 than 0. And that's good.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting to see that most people from the corporate world view new emerging technologies and change in general as a threat rather than an opportunity.
I suggest you to read the Wikipedia's page on HST just to see how long it took various committees and subcommittees to get this thing funded and then launched. It's a miracle it got there after all!
And not denying the great scientific significance of the HST tell me how good it will be at, say, deflecting incoming asteroids or getting significant number of people into space or mining for resources missing on Earth (and I bet there are some out there we don't even know about, because not everything can be learned about astronomical bodies by just looking at them from a distance).
You're dead right here, mate. Unless we, as a species, manage to jump onto the next energy level we won't do much.
However, it has been technically possible to do a lot more in space than what has been achieved. It seems that serious exploration, be it scientific or any other, was just in the minds of sci-fi visioners and scientists. Politicians and the general TV watching public they serve were satisfied with simple flag-planting to show the Russia who has the bigger one.
USPTO informed? About real inventions operating in the real world? Surely you're kidding?
Your fucking post is full of fucking bold f*** words, but in all your fucking rage you missed the fucking point. Which is that we haven't progressed a fucking bit in the fucking space at least since the fucking eighties.
If you REALLY want to do the Earth a BIG FAT FAVOUR go and recycle your body by disposing of yourself using a tree branch and a piece of rope made of natural, recyclable fibers. And, for Gaia's sake, don't procreate before you do!
Yes, that's a great policy. This way you motivate librarians to spy on patrons. They then become your agents, your pair of eyes in each library.
Well, a 30MHz speed upgrade isn't worth waiting another month when I really need a laptop to get up to speed with a project from the beginning of September.
So, in the end, I'm just buying a PowerBook next week. Unless I hear a really good rumor that a new major version of these would be coming out in Paris next month.
(I would love to upgrade to a Powerbook instead, but I don't have spare $2000 at the moment)
[...]
He argues that developing space weapons is a surefire way to launch a new space weapon race.
We might not need weapons in space. But we surely need a space race, desperately. The last one is over for almost twenty years now and we didn't move a bit since then. What we are left with is a space station that serves no real purpose and a bunch of used, aged shuttles (which, BTW, didn't match their requirements, as their operation is more expensive than Saturn V's has been). Russia doesn't look much better.
And we need space race desperately as a species, because we need to be able to do something if a rock large enough would happen to be on a collision course with us. And we need it in the long run because we need to get out of this single planet and spread.
Go into space or perish, it's as simple as that. And it's a harsh reality, so, please, let's dispose of stupid idealistic pacifism.
It's great it is reported here but I would like to see events like these announced here early enough so I could have a real chance of going there. I was at the HEU in 1993, it was truly great and I'm kind of annoyed I didn't know about this one coming.
Google and Yahoo are hiring. It means there are jobs in the industry, because someone will have to fill the positions vacated by those hired by Google and other someones would join the startups teams. What does Slashdot do - complain, calling it "brain drain".
Come on, think about it for a split second before you blame the corporations or cry out how bad it is that some people got new jobs.
You tried to get a job as a programmer at the age of 54? Tough luck. I wouldn't hire you too. Not because you are necessarily stupid or unable to learn something new, no. Because you are old and as such know more about life than the youngsters. Therefore you are much less likely to spend twelve hours a day coding including weekends for extended periods of time (overtime pay or not) because:
a) your organism won't support that anymore and a couple of all-nighters could kill you,
b) you know there are better things to do with your time like, say, spend it with your family.
In other words you are unlikely to work as hard as they do, no matter how bright you are. And long time experience is worth nothing in programming as you know very well. You should have seen this comming and moved to management where your experience would be valuable. It is good to have a manager who has a lots of experience in dealing with people and projects (hence age counts as a plus) yet still knows whet the hell they are doing.
Yeah, most of them holding respectable CS, marketing or management degrees. Degrees prove nothing, except that someone was grown up enough at the right time to understand that he won't live through database hiring without some papers (or just listened to his parents).
Neat idea, but I wonder how long before someone cries out it would render jobless all those fearless people cleaning the skyscrapers from the outside on those tiny scaffolds.
And if you have a really brilliant idea don't tell anyone, go out and sell it on your own. Because as this story proves those who did the other way round didn't get much for their thinking and are being pushed aside as "human resources".
By the way: this dreadful, denigrating them - "human resource" - tells loads about the way corporate world functions, really. I don't want to say it's all bad, devil inspired and so forth - but at least you have to realize the rules of the game.
And, btw, as many did point out already: why people still insists on offices, huh? Offices are great for meeting and discussing, but really creative thinking is never done by a committee. It's done by individuals, alone with no one talking to them, on the bus, on a walk, in the car, while walking, bathing or even sleeping.
But seriously, you exaggerate. Only few would make any money from their blogging or sites yet many sites appear. For most of the bloggers I know putting an ad link is something extra, something that you do just for the heck of it. You can easily tell those who blog for money (or try to) from those who blog to express themselves - the former usually don't have anything to say. And if someone has something to say that is so interesting to people that he is able to get real readership and thus ad revenue then what's wrong with that?
Same goes for forums etc. - no one forces you to post on a form whose policies you don't accept. And if there is no forum/community that would suit you start one with the policies exactly the way you want them to be.
Some people have clearly too much time on their hands. Some of those put it to good use and we call them "artists". :)
Isn't that the right question to ask instead of celebrating past glory or worrying about some freaks deliberating on Noah's ark being attacked by dinosaurs?
They want. Hm... I just noticed that in recent years somehow less of what they want happens. They'll have to come to terms with that. Kind of hard after the ride to the top Darth Gates and his apprentices enjoyed...
Same may be said of other forms of writing and of art. What does it change? If I like what I read that's fine. Author's real life (or lack of thereof) has nothing to do with it.
So, we get more and more data to support the view, that planetary systems are almost as common in the Universe as stars. Therefore the "fraction of stars which have planets" in the Drake Equation can be now assumed to be more close to 1 than 0. And that's good.
Sure. But probably not in IT. This field is now in transition to becoming what, say, railways are now.