I was just about to say the same thing. Every time I've quit, I've been asked to pass my work on to someone else because in my field there's a lot of independent work at every level of a project. Without my notebooks and in some cases direct guidance, my successor would have lost months of time and cost the projects many thousands of dollars.
Giving notice is polite and helps keep from burning bridges should you ever want to return to an employer (or work for the same person at another company).
There's already a childrens series of books based on the lead character being the seventh son of a seventh son. Go figure, it's fantasy and the kid is a sorcerer. The book is called Septimus Heape, and the sequel is Flyte. My daughter really enjoyed them and is waiting for the third to come out.
Any novel that is written for modern comsumption is completely predictable. Who cares? What makes a novel is either the people or the setting, because let's face it, plots have all been done before. This is the same story told in a different way, just like every other book you read.
Mediocre writing, maybe, but debatable. Great plot, no. Good character development, possibly, depending on the character. A lot of them are two dimensional stereotypes, but the core "good guys" have taken on some depth over the last few books.
The real point that makes these books important is the simple fact that so many people are reading them. Whether you think they're crap or not, it's bringing a lot of people into a new era of reading, if you will. Sure some people will continue to read mediocre stuff, but many (in the hundreds of thousands most likely) will start to read other things. Things with a different depth, things with a different genre.
As for Douglas Adams, yeah he was funny, but the books weren't that memorable. I've read both Harry Potter and four of the Douglas Adams books to my children and we all generally liked them both, but I remember the characters from Harry Potter far more than the characters from Hitchhiker.
Call it grafitti but it's also very telling. I was annoyed by some grafitti at Angkor Wat until I started thinking a bit more. The year was 1942 or something like that and it made me realize just how many people really had witnessed the place. Obviously for some of the grafitti "artists" it wasn't a big deal, but for some of those people recording their names or whatever was important because the place was important to them.
I guess it's all about perspective. All told, I'd rather people didn't do that, but it's not always just for childishness.
You actually made my point. Right now the systems are ridiculously expensive (though solar panels are typically rated for longer life than water heaters) but they will eventually get cheaper, then everyone will see the cost benefits.
We get days and occasionally weeks of hot and humid (90% @ 90 degrees F) but not something I find unbearable without AC except for a handful of days in the summer months. I live near DC and heavily limit my AC use, because I simply don't like it. You would obviously save even more money than I would (assuming you could power that much draw) so it would take even less time for the system to pay for itself.
But we're not talking about a prius. They article said the guy runs his car on hydrogen, created (or distilled from or whatever) by his system. At that point, he's paying $0 for gasoline. Did I read the article incorrectly and miss that his car is some sort of hybrid?
As for the "real world" miles, I based my numbers on my own expenses. Still, 27 years is a long time to wait for a return on investment.
Uh, maybe you live somewhere else, but where I live, gas prices aren't falling. Their rising again. They dipped for a little while, but now they're going back up.
No one said it would cost Apple $60 an hour. The original post said it would cost the end-user $60 an hour for the support call. If you've ever called any of the big support lines, you'll know that while that might be a slight exageration, it's not too far off the mark for some of them.
All standard heating and cooling requirements need maintenance and upgrade. You really think your hot water heater is going to last 50 years either?
$100K is still too high, but it's a start. As someone else pointed out, computers used to cost upwards of 10K for a "Personal Computer" but now they can be had for just a couple hundred dollars. The market just needs to be created to drive the prices down. That's essentially what the guy in the article is doing, trying to create a market. Sure the market is there, but he's trying to expand it to include those of us who know it's better but aren't willing (or are incapable) to pay initial outlay.
I spend approximately $150 per month in electricity for heating my 1700 square foot house. Probably a third of that can be eliminated with better insulation so let's say $100. I spend another $40 every week on gas not counting any big trips. So let's say $2500 annually. So we're looking at $3700 annually with no increase in prices for conventional fuels. That's 27.02 years to pay the difference, according to my math, with no fuel price changes. If we look at gas prices from 27 years ago, I'm betting they weren't average of $2.15/gallon. According to the web sites I've found, they were about $1.20/gallon in California in 1980. (http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/statistics/gaso line_cpi_adjusted.html)
So obviously, it's not 5-10 times the current prices over a 25 year life-span. I agree, at $100K it's still too expensive to be reasonably cost-effective, but you can do it for less, if you're willing to do a lot of the work yourself. And if you produce enough power you can actually sell it back to the electric company in some places. I know of someone here in Virginia doing that every month, not a lot of money, but getting paid for electricity is far better than paying for electricity.
So putting better insulation in your house won't save you on electricity/heating/cooling? Maybe I'm mising something, but that doesn't add up. Same with hybrid vehicles. Granted, most don't get the 50-60 mpg they claim but I haven't met an owner yet who didn't say they get at least 40 mpg. Not too many standard gas vehicles getting that mileage right now. Close, maybe, but not that good.
Sure, there's no immediate "payback" but your overall cost down the line is reduced. Even if you offset it with slightly higher (I believe but don't quote me on it) maintenance costs, you eventually make up the price difference. And you will likely be able to sell at a higher price, at least for housing, because you can use the environmental friendliness of the place as a selling point.
Record labels have literally thousands of artists under contract. Not many of them "make it big." There are plenty of artists who don't get any promotion other than what they do themselves, even when they have a contract with a major label. These are likely the artists described in the summary. Effectively the artist is trying to promote their work because the record labels simply don't. They send the work to the mix DJ who gets it to a new audience. The problem is, the DJ is then reselling the work instead of the "authorized" (by the label) CDs that the original artist actually paid the record label for. They don't get them for free, just at a "reduced" fee so they can sell them slightly cheaper at live shows. The artist still doesn't have the right (in most cases) to allow someone else to make additional copies though.
what organizations are those? I've never worked at any company that I couldn't directly contact IT for support. Contacting supervisors first is simply a waste of their time.
You don't have to be a prolific drinker to enjoy a guiness now and then. Everything is bad in too large a quantity, even water. Get over it, enjoy your life. Lighten up.
Perhaps for the hordes of slashdot dorks without kids. For those of us that do have them, this is in fact news. Maybe not important news but certainly as good as any book reviews about obscure code languages.
Thank you. Though I think only the images from pictures in the headmaster's office have that special ability...communication I mean.
Dumbledore is dead. That doesn't mean he's not a part of the next book. He had to die to force the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort, otherwise it would always be Dumbledore saving Harry from his own fate.
Now, just to be devil's advocate here, what's wrong with how MS Office or OOo interfaces do things? Maybe I've been using them too long, but I think most things the "standard" user will do are fairly intuitive. I think we here tend to forget that the "standard" user doesn't produce 200+ page documents, or need highly specific formatting, so we bash MS (and OOo) for these faults. But the fact is, both do a pretty decent job for 90% of their user base, so they've effectively accomplished the task they were designed for accomplishing.
So what would you change about the way these interfaces work, if you could?
I don't know about size and complexity, but I routinely write, edit, and use alrge documents in Word with three and four page Tables of Content, Tables of Figures, and Tables of Tables. Formatting them is a nightmare, but I've only had one get corrupted and I still don't know why. Most of the documents I work with run between 60 and 250 pages or so, and are all done start to finish in MS products. We embed pictures from Visio, spreadsheets from Excel, etc. all with a lot of work to get the formatting even close, and sometimes it still doesn't work quite right. But corruption from size and complexity, I've never had that happen.
They have group accounts, and they are simple to administer. I just set one up for my daughter and myself. You can set up call limits for each user (so the kids don't run up ridiculous phone bills for example) and automatic "top up" levels so that a particular user never runs out of credit. Or you can leave everything manual...
And skype doesn't charge any of it. I never (at least not yet) have to have any skypeout credit to call other skype users online. I make voice calls to my daughter overseas all the time, using skype and only recently started keeping money in a "group account" so we can call each other's landlines and she can call her friends back here in the USA.
Calls to most landline destinations are less than 2 cents per minute, though some are quite a bit more. I think I paid some 20 cents per minute to call Tibet last year. But to Europe, the USA and most of Asia (I haven't called Africa so I can't speak to that) it's still very cheap to call landlines using skype. I can also get a skypein number for a few dollars a month and have people call computer or leave me voicemail, or even forward that to my cell phone or whatever.
It's easy to use, has no setup issues that I've heard of, and is cross-platform, while maintaining a respectable price. What more can you ask for?
There are no passages in the Bible that "very clearly condemn homosexuality" as each passage can be interpreted in several different ways, as the parent suggested. You will also find most of those passages up for debate are from the Old Testament, which isn't from the teachings of Jesus. You will find much in the New Testament that directly contradicts the Old Testament.
So if I read you correctly, he's not a Christian worthy of your disdain because he bothers to think for himself (as the New Testament suggests he should) and not simply "obey the word"? That's very tolerant of you.
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I was just about to say the same thing. Every time I've quit, I've been asked to pass my work on to someone else because in my field there's a lot of independent work at every level of a project. Without my notebooks and in some cases direct guidance, my successor would have lost months of time and cost the projects many thousands of dollars.
Giving notice is polite and helps keep from burning bridges should you ever want to return to an employer (or work for the same person at another company).
There's already a childrens series of books based on the lead character being the seventh son of a seventh son. Go figure, it's fantasy and the kid is a sorcerer. The book is called Septimus Heape, and the sequel is Flyte. My daughter really enjoyed them and is waiting for the third to come out.
Any novel that is written for modern comsumption is completely predictable. Who cares? What makes a novel is either the people or the setting, because let's face it, plots have all been done before. This is the same story told in a different way, just like every other book you read.
Mediocre writing, maybe, but debatable. Great plot, no. Good character development, possibly, depending on the character. A lot of them are two dimensional stereotypes, but the core "good guys" have taken on some depth over the last few books.
The real point that makes these books important is the simple fact that so many people are reading them. Whether you think they're crap or not, it's bringing a lot of people into a new era of reading, if you will. Sure some people will continue to read mediocre stuff, but many (in the hundreds of thousands most likely) will start to read other things. Things with a different depth, things with a different genre.
As for Douglas Adams, yeah he was funny, but the books weren't that memorable. I've read both Harry Potter and four of the Douglas Adams books to my children and we all generally liked them both, but I remember the characters from Harry Potter far more than the characters from Hitchhiker.
Call it grafitti but it's also very telling. I was annoyed by some grafitti at Angkor Wat until I started thinking a bit more. The year was 1942 or something like that and it made me realize just how many people really had witnessed the place. Obviously for some of the grafitti "artists" it wasn't a big deal, but for some of those people recording their names or whatever was important because the place was important to them.
I guess it's all about perspective. All told, I'd rather people didn't do that, but it's not always just for childishness.
You actually made my point. Right now the systems are ridiculously expensive (though solar panels are typically rated for longer life than water heaters) but they will eventually get cheaper, then everyone will see the cost benefits.
We get days and occasionally weeks of hot and humid (90% @ 90 degrees F) but not something I find unbearable without AC except for a handful of days in the summer months. I live near DC and heavily limit my AC use, because I simply don't like it. You would obviously save even more money than I would (assuming you could power that much draw) so it would take even less time for the system to pay for itself.
But we're not talking about a prius. They article said the guy runs his car on hydrogen, created (or distilled from or whatever) by his system. At that point, he's paying $0 for gasoline. Did I read the article incorrectly and miss that his car is some sort of hybrid?
As for the "real world" miles, I based my numbers on my own expenses. Still, 27 years is a long time to wait for a return on investment.
Uh, maybe you live somewhere else, but where I live, gas prices aren't falling. Their rising again. They dipped for a little while, but now they're going back up.
No one said it would cost Apple $60 an hour. The original post said it would cost the end-user $60 an hour for the support call. If you've ever called any of the big support lines, you'll know that while that might be a slight exageration, it's not too far off the mark for some of them.
All standard heating and cooling requirements need maintenance and upgrade. You really think your hot water heater is going to last 50 years either?
$100K is still too high, but it's a start. As someone else pointed out, computers used to cost upwards of 10K for a "Personal Computer" but now they can be had for just a couple hundred dollars. The market just needs to be created to drive the prices down. That's essentially what the guy in the article is doing, trying to create a market. Sure the market is there, but he's trying to expand it to include those of us who know it's better but aren't willing (or are incapable) to pay initial outlay.
I spend approximately $150 per month in electricity for heating my 1700 square foot house. Probably a third of that can be eliminated with better insulation so let's say $100. I spend another $40 every week on gas not counting any big trips. So let's say $2500 annually. So we're looking at $3700 annually with no increase in prices for conventional fuels. That's 27.02 years to pay the difference, according to my math, with no fuel price changes. If we look at gas prices from 27 years ago, I'm betting they weren't average of $2.15/gallon. According to the web sites I've found, they were about $1.20/gallon in California in 1980. (http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/statistics/gaso line_cpi_adjusted.html)
So obviously, it's not 5-10 times the current prices over a 25 year life-span. I agree, at $100K it's still too expensive to be reasonably cost-effective, but you can do it for less, if you're willing to do a lot of the work yourself. And if you produce enough power you can actually sell it back to the electric company in some places. I know of someone here in Virginia doing that every month, not a lot of money, but getting paid for electricity is far better than paying for electricity.
So putting better insulation in your house won't save you on electricity/heating/cooling? Maybe I'm mising something, but that doesn't add up. Same with hybrid vehicles. Granted, most don't get the 50-60 mpg they claim but I haven't met an owner yet who didn't say they get at least 40 mpg. Not too many standard gas vehicles getting that mileage right now. Close, maybe, but not that good.
Sure, there's no immediate "payback" but your overall cost down the line is reduced. Even if you offset it with slightly higher (I believe but don't quote me on it) maintenance costs, you eventually make up the price difference. And you will likely be able to sell at a higher price, at least for housing, because you can use the environmental friendliness of the place as a selling point.
Record labels have literally thousands of artists under contract. Not many of them "make it big." There are plenty of artists who don't get any promotion other than what they do themselves, even when they have a contract with a major label. These are likely the artists described in the summary. Effectively the artist is trying to promote their work because the record labels simply don't. They send the work to the mix DJ who gets it to a new audience. The problem is, the DJ is then reselling the work instead of the "authorized" (by the label) CDs that the original artist actually paid the record label for. They don't get them for free, just at a "reduced" fee so they can sell them slightly cheaper at live shows. The artist still doesn't have the right (in most cases) to allow someone else to make additional copies though.
what organizations are those? I've never worked at any company that I couldn't directly contact IT for support. Contacting supervisors first is simply a waste of their time.
You don't have to be a prolific drinker to enjoy a guiness now and then. Everything is bad in too large a quantity, even water. Get over it, enjoy your life. Lighten up.
Or you could just test drive it.
Perhaps for the hordes of slashdot dorks without kids. For those of us that do have them, this is in fact news. Maybe not important news but certainly as good as any book reviews about obscure code languages.
Thank you. Though I think only the images from pictures in the headmaster's office have that special ability...communication I mean.
Dumbledore is dead. That doesn't mean he's not a part of the next book. He had to die to force the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort, otherwise it would always be Dumbledore saving Harry from his own fate.
Now, just to be devil's advocate here, what's wrong with how MS Office or OOo interfaces do things? Maybe I've been using them too long, but I think most things the "standard" user will do are fairly intuitive. I think we here tend to forget that the "standard" user doesn't produce 200+ page documents, or need highly specific formatting, so we bash MS (and OOo) for these faults. But the fact is, both do a pretty decent job for 90% of their user base, so they've effectively accomplished the task they were designed for accomplishing.
So what would you change about the way these interfaces work, if you could?
I don't know about size and complexity, but I routinely write, edit, and use alrge documents in Word with three and four page Tables of Content, Tables of Figures, and Tables of Tables. Formatting them is a nightmare, but I've only had one get corrupted and I still don't know why. Most of the documents I work with run between 60 and 250 pages or so, and are all done start to finish in MS products. We embed pictures from Visio, spreadsheets from Excel, etc. all with a lot of work to get the formatting even close, and sometimes it still doesn't work quite right. But corruption from size and complexity, I've never had that happen.
Then don't use Word. Or anything else for that matter. Word isn't even Word compatible half the time. There's no such thing as 100% in this game.
True. My 11 year old daughter even knows when to use "then" and "than". I hope that was intentional.
They have group accounts, and they are simple to administer. I just set one up for my daughter and myself. You can set up call limits for each user (so the kids don't run up ridiculous phone bills for example) and automatic "top up" levels so that a particular user never runs out of credit. Or you can leave everything manual...
And skype doesn't charge any of it. I never (at least not yet) have to have any skypeout credit to call other skype users online. I make voice calls to my daughter overseas all the time, using skype and only recently started keeping money in a "group account" so we can call each other's landlines and she can call her friends back here in the USA.
Calls to most landline destinations are less than 2 cents per minute, though some are quite a bit more. I think I paid some 20 cents per minute to call Tibet last year. But to Europe, the USA and most of Asia (I haven't called Africa so I can't speak to that) it's still very cheap to call landlines using skype. I can also get a skypein number for a few dollars a month and have people call computer or leave me voicemail, or even forward that to my cell phone or whatever.
It's easy to use, has no setup issues that I've heard of, and is cross-platform, while maintaining a respectable price. What more can you ask for?
There are no passages in the Bible that "very clearly condemn homosexuality" as each passage can be interpreted in several different ways, as the parent suggested. You will also find most of those passages up for debate are from the Old Testament, which isn't from the teachings of Jesus. You will find much in the New Testament that directly contradicts the Old Testament.
So if I read you correctly, he's not a Christian worthy of your disdain because he bothers to think for himself (as the New Testament suggests he should) and not simply "obey the word"? That's very tolerant of you.