It's about time this was submarined. I don't know what kind of craziness has led to the obsession with fuel cells. Not only is there no hydrogen distribution infrastructure of any kind, but fuel cells still haven't gotten out of the spaceship era.
We'll be driving cars on Mr. Fusion power before we drive them on fuel cells, unless someone gets fuel cells that use something other than hydrogen working in a way that's suitable for automotive use.
If you have a problem with collisions on a protocol newer 802.11a/b, then it's a problem with your equipment, not the channels your neighbors select. g and n get along fine with other devices sharing frequencies. Anyway, base stations channel hop all on their own.
We had a couple with a newborn living a building away from us. One day, around the time of the new arrival, our wireless, which had worked fine for a couple of years, essentially stopped working. This is despite a high gain omni on the base station. Even 10 feet from the base station the signal (on whatever channel) was unusable. Even after I swapped the router/base station.
Funny thing, the neighbors are gone now, and our signal is once again wall-to-wall and ten feet tall.
At one point I was going to buy directional antennas and failing that a (thoroughly illegal) high power repeater, but never got around to it. Thank God I don't need it now.
Or you could be reading a book, or napping, or using a laptop on the train/bus, while "missing" time spent on the sofa watching TV and drinking beer.
If you have important family stuff to do, the best way to resolve a commuting time problem is to find a job closer to home. Of the various things about raising children, finding a job closer to home (or moving home closer to work) is not one of the harder ones.
Another thing: You can receive up to $230/month for public transit as a tax-free employment benefit. Many employers will provide this benefit in one way or another. (Currently I get Caltrain and MUNI passes and a high value BART card each month. So my commuting cost: $0.)
But no one provides a car commuting benefit for ordinary employees, and the expense of commuting to your regular place of work is NOT tax deductible.
In the San Francisco Bay area, which is not exactly a low cost of living area, a monthly Caltrain parking permit costs $20. This is assuming you use a car to commute to your train, which the majority of commuters do not.
It costs $.30-.50 per mile to drive a car. Really, who thinks that you can own and operate a car for 4 years, in whatever condition, and spend less than $12,000? You have to buy the car, you have to pay for repairs, you have to pay for gas, you have to pay to register it, you have to pay for insurance....
I remember writing Joerg a couple of times asking where could we (a university) send him money for a license for dvdrecord, so our dvd burning chain didn't abruptly break every time one of his temporary keys expired. Did I get a response? Of course not!
Heck of a business plan, writing non-free software but not accepting orders for it.
I won't open the can of worms of addressing your case (although I wish I could), but I am using Fusion every time I open my MacBook Pro, and I don't see that kind of instability. I run a mixture of Windows and Linux and "other" VMs simultaneously, and I haven't had the sort of problem you describe since, oh, I stopped doing exciting stuff like running daily builds. I haven't experienced a guest OS crash or freeze in anything resembling recent history.
That's not to say it isn't possible to have an environment that produces crashes, just that my experience isn't like that at all.
I'd use ESX at home if I had the hardware sitting around... but... even though SC1430s (for example) are fairly cheap, I don't want to pay to keep them running (or deal with power cycling).
But, agreed, IF you are one of that tiny number of people who can afford or justify HW/license/electricity, then it can be very useful at home.
ESX[i] will run on a variety of unsupported hardware (don't ask me, we don't even keep a list around here because no one really knows), so it is possible to run it on cheap, low-power commodity hardware if you're willing to experiment.
You can move VMs from Fusion to Workstation to ESX to Fusion too, with Converter or by copying files (depending). It's handy and I do it regularly. Often it's more convenient for me to build VMs on Fusion and then move them to ESX, even when I'm intending to use the VM only on ESX.
That would be 99.99% of home users. It's hard to conceive of an application for ESX[i] at "home," given Fusion and Workstation. ESX is heavyweight and particular in its hardware requirements, nontrivial to manage (especially with the free license), and just generally not the right thing if you don't have a spare tower server or DC handy, a full license, and someone else to pay your power bill. Although, in those circumstances, it's pretty cool.
(A bunch of the remaining.01% are going to explain why I'm wrong now.)
Disclaimer: I work for VMware. (And I would run ESX at home if there was a reason to.)
True, at least our Supreme Court hasn't decided the government can randomly censor publications, the Interwebs, or even the *possession* of fairly pedestrian knowledge. (As in, having your own copy of a how-to guide for suicide.) And unlike Canada, the UK, and almost every other country, our courts don't allow "prior restraint" on publication.
Australia was an awesome country back in the 70s, before seemingly everyone in Australia became afraid of seemingly everything.
A friend of mine from AU found work in Canada and then a couple of years later in San Francisco, not far from where I live. But the employment climate is grimmer now.
...He robbed my righteous thunder when he got a desperate look in his eyes and pleaded with me, "Look, if he gets fired he can just get another job. If I get fired, they'd make me go back...
And this is a good thing for everyone except the unethical asshat. Well, maybe not for his future coworkers back in Elbonia.
You would think people would learn from EA's horrific and sustained mistreatment of its formerly OT-exempt creative people. EA subjected employees to tens of hours of required overtime per week, continuously, for months and even years. Following years of litigation, California found this to be a violation of labor law and required them to be reclassified as hourly employees. Whether they make more money now, who knows, but at least EA's employees are treated in accordance with the way they are managed.
Don't think the same horror can't happen to you, because it can and will.
There was a time, and I lived during it, when hiring people was a sign of corporate success. Today, a company's success is measured by how many people they can lay off, how many plants they can close. It doesn't take a genius (which means the above commenters have a chance here) to see that this is a recipe for a very bad situation.
I'm not familiar with this practice of "[firing] incompetent employees." I am familiar with the practice of "firing expensive employees."
*American unions are the antithesis of a meritocracy - they make it absolutely impossible to fire incompetent employees, and negotiate for pay based on time served as opposed to skill. Both tend to rankle Americans (such as myself) who believe in working hard to make something of yourself.
I've been a software developer for 20 years (or more if you count jobs when I was in my teens) and while I ridiculed the thought of engineering unions for most of that time, I've recently come around to the completely opposing view. I am an unqualified supporter of union organization in the software and IT industry.
Professional white collar unions work well and are present in almost every type of professional situation. Airline pilots and flight attendants are unionized. University faculty and staff are unionized. Doctors are unionized. A limited number of software professionals are unionized, mostly in Washington state (thanks, Microsoft, for inspiring this!).
I've changed my mind about unionizing because as the industry has "progressed," software engineers, even (especially) exempt employees whose work is not closely overseen, have become units of resource to management. They - we - are no longer individuals with a recognized continuum of expertise and intelligence. Instead, we are "Java programmers," "familiar with LAMP stack," "experienced with Scrum and XP." We are defined by acronyms (misspelled like PERL), and not our experience, creativity, and problem solving skills. And as much as people like to say "we are looking for a good team member who will fit in," and give us detailed personal interviews, we don't get to that point without passing through the dehumanizing hoops that recruiters and managers use.
The past 25 years of development methodologies have focused almost exclusively on predictability. Management wants to quantify us, to be able to say that X programmers * Y skill level * Z days = 1 product. Quality and creativity are secondary unless they can also be quantified. *Reviewers*, not management, are the people who wind up saying "This is an AWESOME product."
It's dehumanizing, and three decades after "The Mythical Man-Month," the treatment of programmers as numerical resources on Gantt charts still doesn't work. You don't write a certain number of lines of good code each day, or a certain number of subroutines or tests, the same way that you pour a certain number of yards of concrete per day. And yet that's how we are treated.
We shouldn't have a working environment that corresponds to our fantasy of how we should be treated. We should have a working environment that corresponds to how we *are* treated. When we are functionally equated with people whose work is interchangeable and quantifiable, we should have the same benefits that those developed over the past century that *PROTECT* them from the impersonal abuse that naturally follows.
We need job security, because we have none.
We need work rules, because we have none.
We need protection from vendor and offshore outsourcing, because we have none. Nor do the vendor (contractor) temps have protection from the whims of management.
We need people to speak for us and our rights and dignity and who can do it with force and authority.
I'm sick of being treated like a number and increasingly sick of it as I've gained experience and flexibility over the years.
I could argue that unionization is good for companies too, in that it imposes a longer-term view and responsibility on them. But frankly I don't care. I care about my workplace, my livelihood, and the same for my fellow employees and all software professionals.
The only thing more fun than setting up a winner is killing him with a thousand cuts. "Obama, promising change, hires from Clinton staff," "Nonpartisan politics not Rahm Emanuel's style," "Obama staff cautions, change will come slowly"...
Assuming that the student didn't do anything destructive, relay the password(s) to others, and so on, a first offense should be an infraction, not a criminal offense.
Meanwhile, when a public employee or official fails to adequately secure sensitive data, that should be a misdemeanor or felony, and civil awards should be doubled or tripled by statute.
I'm getting sick and tired of people who are obligated to protect sensitive information from misuse shifting blame to others for their own fundamental failure. I'm also sick of the lack of legislative response to this problem. If you leave a folder of classified information lying in the open, that's a crime. If you are someone entrusted with the security of a building, you leave it unlocked, and an intruder kills someone inside, you have both civil and criminal liability (you could easily be charged with involuntary manslaughter). If you leave private data that is protected by statute in the clear online or otherwise improperly protected, that should be a serious crime.
Slashdot Mirror
"What they need to work on is a cheaper way to generate electricity."
Which of course you could just put into batteries.
It's about time this was submarined. I don't know what kind of craziness has led to the obsession with fuel cells. Not only is there no hydrogen distribution infrastructure of any kind, but fuel cells still haven't gotten out of the spaceship era.
We'll be driving cars on Mr. Fusion power before we drive them on fuel cells, unless someone gets fuel cells that use something other than hydrogen working in a way that's suitable for automotive use.
If you have a problem with collisions on a protocol newer 802.11a/b, then it's a problem with your equipment, not the channels your neighbors select. g and n get along fine with other devices sharing frequencies. Anyway, base stations channel hop all on their own.
We had a couple with a newborn living a building away from us. One day, around the time of the new arrival, our wireless, which had worked fine for a couple of years, essentially stopped working. This is despite a high gain omni on the base station. Even 10 feet from the base station the signal (on whatever channel) was unusable. Even after I swapped the router/base station.
Funny thing, the neighbors are gone now, and our signal is once again wall-to-wall and ten feet tall.
At one point I was going to buy directional antennas and failing that a (thoroughly illegal) high power repeater, but never got around to it. Thank God I don't need it now.
On the train, I feel safer knowing an accident probably won't happen and that if it does, it probably won't kill me.
# of passenger fatalities in the entire history of Japan's high speed train system: 0.
Or you could be reading a book, or napping, or using a laptop on the train/bus, while "missing" time spent on the sofa watching TV and drinking beer.
If you have important family stuff to do, the best way to resolve a commuting time problem is to find a job closer to home. Of the various things about raising children, finding a job closer to home (or moving home closer to work) is not one of the harder ones.
Please explain to me why, when a car that is "paid for" and worth $X in year Y, becomes worth $X/2 in year Y+4, there was no "cost."
It has the same effect on your assets as if you take money out of your bank account.
But, okay, whatever, about 30% of people in introductory Economics flunk it, and why should you be part of the special %70.
Another thing: You can receive up to $230/month for public transit as a tax-free employment benefit. Many employers will provide this benefit in one way or another. (Currently I get Caltrain and MUNI passes and a high value BART card each month. So my commuting cost: $0.)
But no one provides a car commuting benefit for ordinary employees, and the expense of commuting to your regular place of work is NOT tax deductible.
In the San Francisco Bay area, which is not exactly a low cost of living area, a monthly Caltrain parking permit costs $20. This is assuming you use a car to commute to your train, which the majority of commuters do not.
It costs $.30-.50 per mile to drive a car. Really, who thinks that you can own and operate a car for 4 years, in whatever condition, and spend less than $12,000? You have to buy the car, you have to pay for repairs, you have to pay for gas, you have to pay to register it, you have to pay for insurance ....
Ulrich, TuomoV and Joerg Schilling.
I remember writing Joerg a couple of times asking where could we (a university) send him money for a license for dvdrecord, so our dvd burning chain didn't abruptly break every time one of his temporary keys expired. Did I get a response? Of course not!
Heck of a business plan, writing non-free software but not accepting orders for it.
I won't open the can of worms of addressing your case (although I wish I could), but I am using Fusion every time I open my MacBook Pro, and I don't see that kind of instability. I run a mixture of Windows and Linux and "other" VMs simultaneously, and I haven't had the sort of problem you describe since, oh, I stopped doing exciting stuff like running daily builds. I haven't experienced a guest OS crash or freeze in anything resembling recent history.
That's not to say it isn't possible to have an environment that produces crashes, just that my experience isn't like that at all.
Disclaimer: I work for VMware.
I'd use ESX at home if I had the hardware sitting around ... but ... even though SC1430s (for example) are fairly cheap, I don't want to pay to keep them running (or deal with power cycling).
But, agreed, IF you are one of that tiny number of people who can afford or justify HW/license/electricity, then it can be very useful at home.
ESX[i] will run on a variety of unsupported hardware (don't ask me, we don't even keep a list around here because no one really knows), so it is possible to run it on cheap, low-power commodity hardware if you're willing to experiment.
Disclaimer: I work for VMware.
You can move VMs from Fusion to Workstation to ESX to Fusion too, with Converter or by copying files (depending). It's handy and I do it regularly. Often it's more convenient for me to build VMs on Fusion and then move them to ESX, even when I'm intending to use the VM only on ESX.
Disclaimer: I work for VMware.
That would be 99.99% of home users. It's hard to conceive of an application for ESX[i] at "home," given Fusion and Workstation. ESX is heavyweight and particular in its hardware requirements, nontrivial to manage (especially with the free license), and just generally not the right thing if you don't have a spare tower server or DC handy, a full license, and someone else to pay your power bill. Although, in those circumstances, it's pretty cool.
(A bunch of the remaining .01% are going to explain why I'm wrong now.)
Disclaimer: I work for VMware. (And I would run ESX at home if there was a reason to.)
True, at least our Supreme Court hasn't decided the government can randomly censor publications, the Interwebs, or even the *possession* of fairly pedestrian knowledge. (As in, having your own copy of a how-to guide for suicide.) And unlike Canada, the UK, and almost every other country, our courts don't allow "prior restraint" on publication.
Australia was an awesome country back in the 70s, before seemingly everyone in Australia became afraid of seemingly everything.
A friend of mine from AU found work in Canada and then a couple of years later in San Francisco, not far from where I live. But the employment climate is grimmer now.
...He robbed my righteous thunder when he got a desperate look in his eyes and pleaded with me, "Look, if he gets fired he can just get another job. If I get fired, they'd make me go back...
And this is a good thing for everyone except the unethical asshat. Well, maybe not for his future coworkers back in Elbonia.
You think it's hard coming here, you should try immigrating to Australia.
Anyway, call back when we have 4% unemployment again.
....
I appreciate foreign students for supporting our schools with their tuition.
I also appreciate them going back home to work, rather than hanging around here on H1-Bs at lower pay than American citizens would tolerate.
*NO* H1-B workers should be allowed to remain in the US when unemployment is high in their corresponding industries.
You would think people would learn from EA's horrific and sustained mistreatment of its formerly OT-exempt creative people. EA subjected employees to tens of hours of required overtime per week, continuously, for months and even years. Following years of litigation, California found this to be a violation of labor law and required them to be reclassified as hourly employees. Whether they make more money now, who knows, but at least EA's employees are treated in accordance with the way they are managed.
Don't think the same horror can't happen to you, because it can and will.
There was a time, and I lived during it, when hiring people was a sign of corporate success. Today, a company's success is measured by how many people they can lay off, how many plants they can close. It doesn't take a genius (which means the above commenters have a chance here) to see that this is a recipe for a very bad situation.
I'm not familiar with this practice of "[firing] incompetent employees." I am familiar with the practice of "firing expensive employees."
*American unions are the antithesis of a meritocracy - they make it absolutely impossible to fire incompetent employees, and negotiate for pay based on time served as opposed to skill. Both tend to rankle Americans (such as myself) who believe in working hard to make something of yourself.
I've been a software developer for 20 years (or more if you count jobs when I was in my teens) and while I ridiculed the thought of engineering unions for most of that time, I've recently come around to the completely opposing view. I am an unqualified supporter of union organization in the software and IT industry.
Professional white collar unions work well and are present in almost every type of professional situation. Airline pilots and flight attendants are unionized. University faculty and staff are unionized. Doctors are unionized. A limited number of software professionals are unionized, mostly in Washington state (thanks, Microsoft, for inspiring this!).
I've changed my mind about unionizing because as the industry has "progressed," software engineers, even (especially) exempt employees whose work is not closely overseen, have become units of resource to management. They - we - are no longer individuals with a recognized continuum of expertise and intelligence. Instead, we are "Java programmers," "familiar with LAMP stack," "experienced with Scrum and XP." We are defined by acronyms (misspelled like PERL), and not our experience, creativity, and problem solving skills. And as much as people like to say "we are looking for a good team member who will fit in," and give us detailed personal interviews, we don't get to that point without passing through the dehumanizing hoops that recruiters and managers use.
The past 25 years of development methodologies have focused almost exclusively on predictability. Management wants to quantify us, to be able to say that X programmers * Y skill level * Z days = 1 product. Quality and creativity are secondary unless they can also be quantified. *Reviewers*, not management, are the people who wind up saying "This is an AWESOME product."
It's dehumanizing, and three decades after "The Mythical Man-Month," the treatment of programmers as numerical resources on Gantt charts still doesn't work. You don't write a certain number of lines of good code each day, or a certain number of subroutines or tests, the same way that you pour a certain number of yards of concrete per day. And yet that's how we are treated.
We shouldn't have a working environment that corresponds to our fantasy of how we should be treated. We should have a working environment that corresponds to how we *are* treated. When we are functionally equated with people whose work is interchangeable and quantifiable, we should have the same benefits that those developed over the past century that *PROTECT* them from the impersonal abuse that naturally follows.
We need job security, because we have none.
We need work rules, because we have none.
We need protection from vendor and offshore outsourcing, because we have none. Nor do the vendor (contractor) temps have protection from the whims of management.
We need people to speak for us and our rights and dignity and who can do it with force and authority.
I'm sick of being treated like a number and increasingly sick of it as I've gained experience and flexibility over the years.
I could argue that unionization is good for companies too, in that it imposes a longer-term view and responsibility on them. But frankly I don't care. I care about my workplace, my livelihood, and the same for my fellow employees and all software professionals.
The only thing more fun than setting up a winner is killing him with a thousand cuts. "Obama, promising change, hires from Clinton staff," "Nonpartisan politics not Rahm Emanuel's style," "Obama staff cautions, change will come slowly" ...
Sit back and watch!
The majority of them, that is, you know, the ones with 400+ days of uptime.
Assuming that the student didn't do anything destructive, relay the password(s) to others, and so on, a first offense should be an infraction, not a criminal offense.
Meanwhile, when a public employee or official fails to adequately secure sensitive data, that should be a misdemeanor or felony, and civil awards should be doubled or tripled by statute.
I'm getting sick and tired of people who are obligated to protect sensitive information from misuse shifting blame to others for their own fundamental failure. I'm also sick of the lack of legislative response to this problem. If you leave a folder of classified information lying in the open, that's a crime. If you are someone entrusted with the security of a building, you leave it unlocked, and an intruder kills someone inside, you have both civil and criminal liability (you could easily be charged with involuntary manslaughter). If you leave private data that is protected by statute in the clear online or otherwise improperly protected, that should be a serious crime.