I've got a 70's era tube FM tuner that works fine. It doesn't have the original tubes in it but it's normal to replace those. The capacitors in these things can go bad but it's pretty common to have ancient ones that still work. Old military electronics is even more likely to be all in good order: it was made with higher grade parts and often built to take vibration and other abuse.
Well, I bought a video recorder recently and tried to get it at a CC.. they had several models on display but everything in the price range I was looking at was out of stock. So it starts to look like bait & switch to me: the sales person keeps saying, we don't have that one, and it's discontinued anyway, but you can buy this one for $50 more. Granted this was fairly recently, so they may have been having inventory issues already. But I walked out and got a similar model at Best Buy.
On the contrary, many companies, especially larger ones, actively recruit from university engineering schools (especially local ones) and have openings that are intended for recent grads. Having work experience will help, but experience isn't actually required.
That's in normal times, though. The current hiring environment is truly awful and has gotten worse in the past 1-2 months - at least from what I hear and have experienced. Expect delays. Expect to get one foot in the door and then have the door closed (ouch). I'd expect some betterment later in the year.
I use "cash" here non-literally to mean liquid immediately redeemable investments such as a money market account. They are safe but as you note the interest rate is practically zero.
Sucks for the people who were going to retire soon but if they were going to retire next year why the hell did they have so many investments in equities?
That's a good question. The general answer is that most retired investors need their portfolio to generate a return at least equal to inflation, over time. Historically cash has a negative return after inflation and bonds are maybe break-even at best. But last year all that went out the window. Stocks have had a 1-year negative return that's almost unprecedented and even high-grade bonds have taken a hit. Plus markets over the world are down, not just the U.S. So, while generally cash is a bad place to be, long-term, last year nothing else was any good. That still doesn't mean, though, that you should keep your nest egg under the mattress: over the long term you'll see no net growth and your retirement income will shrink, net inflation.
Right. It's quite possible to be hired part-time as a consultant, especially if your hourly rate is high enough that clients think twice about a 40hr/week engagement. But there are downsides. You don't get to keep all of that high hourly billing (taxes take a lot of it, maybe half). And consultants are typically the first to go if the company is cutting back.
I have a consumer grade DSL line and it's unacceptably slow. I tried to use it for backup of a large set of files (audio, family pictures and some video) and it was running for days, and finally timing out or failing (don't remember how large the batch I tried, but it was at least 20GB in many small files). Even if the cost was fine that's not ok. (And of course if you lose your home disk then you have to do this in reverse to restore; if you can't restore it's no good).
My solution so far is to put it on a portable hard drive and store it offsite, encrypting anything that's sensitive.
I actually have experience teaching a 13-14 year old some programming (my daughter). We downloaded Netbeans to her Mac and I helped her create some simple Java programs - first just console programs then an Applet. Ok, Java is not the latest cool thing anymore, but NetBeans does syntax checking as you type so it's easy to get going with. She liked it. And if we want to move on to creating a web app (JSP for example) that's certainly possible. No, she doesn't understand the whole language or even all the concepts, but she learned something.
Another reason not to publish prices is that it facilitates unfair comparisons. An analyst firm or a competitor comes out with a report that says your software is 30% more expensive than a competitor's. That's probably bogus because of discounting and most people will realize that. But it can hurt you anyway.
Every time this topic comes up I hear a list of excuses for speeding. But IMHO speeding is just a bad habit and most of the excuses are lame. And none of them will fly if you find yourself in front of a traffic court judge.
Opening knowledge is essential if your opponent is an equally prepared player, and is especially helpful if you know that player's preferred systems and can prepare something to win against them.
But amateur players tend to spend way too much time memorizing openings, and it actually doesn't help your game much. First, you'll forget this stuff. Second, your opponent is likely another amateur and so will play something oddball or not in the books and you'll have to think anyway. Third, all the prep in the world won't help if you drop pieces or lose to shallow tactics, so studying to avoid that helps you more. Finally, lots of games are won or lost in the endgame, where specialized knowledge and skills will help, but few low-level players spend time in endgame study (which is less about memorizing than knowing rules and principles).
But modularity and de-coupling are key to building large scale maintainable systems. Language features like strong typing, compile-time checking, exception handling, help too.
I think the real problem with Perl and its kin are that they're great for single-purpose scripts that just get the job done, but over time the system grows and pretty soon you've got tens of thousands of line of script code and it's a monster.
There are better languages for big systems like that. But yours is in Perl, so you're stuck. That's why they call it "legacy".
> Performing artists with a good income will be exactly that again, performing artists, not studio artists.
We're actually already there, for artists at the top of the income scale, anyway. Very successful acts (like the Rolling Stones) make by far the bulk of their income from touring, not from CDs or downloads. The labels would lose on a "recordings for free" model, but artists like these would survive just fine.
Liberal is not the opposite of conservative, Progressive is. Liberal refers to a belief in individual liberty.
That's a good correction to the parent poster.
In addition the "left" side of the political spectrum has historically emphasized egalitarianism, both in the political sense (equal rights for all) and in an economic sense (opposition to vast disparities in wealth). The hard left (Communism) wanted to establish economic equality forcibly (through confiscation) while the moderate left favors achieving it through tax and social policies.
For most of the last 50-60 years, Conservative in the US has implied strong opposition to Communism (while that was still a going concern) and pretty rigid opposition to even the moderate left program (what Europeans term social democracy).
JBoss Studio is not a bad piece of work and they support it. I have some reservations about Seam, but you don't have to use it. I've also used NetBeans recently and that's come a long way - the first iterations of it were awful, but it's better now.
The problem I had with GWT is that it just doesn't seem to have the depth of functionality and community support that other frameworks have. I don't know what your beef is with JSF, but fundamentally it does much the same thing as GWT - abstracts the JavaScript layer so as a developer you don't have to deal with it (at least if you have a decent IDE). JSF frameworks and tools are getting better and it's not just one vendor behind them.
Right. You could argue that insurgents with low- to medium-tech weapons are making a pretty good go of holding off the U.S. army in Iraq. But of course we've killed maybe as many as a million Iraqis (counting all those who died from collateral damage, sectarian violence, and increased crime), and they've killed a few thousand American soldiers. That's not exactly victory for the insurgents, and doesn't really bode well for a rebellion with guns.
I'm sure there are bad guys in Guantanamo who have harmed Americans, or who wanted to and were preparing to. But we have weak to no evidence against many of the prisoners at Guantanamo. In fact, most of them were not captured by Americans, but were turned over to us by third parties, for whatever reason. Murat Kurnaz, who was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to American forces for a bounty payment, for example. At worst, you have to consider such a person a suspect, not a convicted criminal. And of course we decided to torture and punish these prisoners first and then, maybe later, give them a trial. Not exactly a shining example for the world.
From the Microsoft side, I think they were right to realize that Google was a strategic threat. If you are getting services and apps from Google over the net and they don't even care what desktop OS you have, then Microsoft's OS *and* desktop app businesses are going to suffer, most likely. But would Yahoo really address that threat and was it worth the price? Pretty doubtful on both counts I think.
From the Yahoo side, turning down what most observers thought was too much to pay seems like a bad move, and they're probably going to have to face a stockholder suit, if one hasn't been launched already.
That works, although if you're in an engineering school you have to go off campus. And you have to lose the $5 haircut, coke bottle glasses and the calculator you carry in your shirt pocket (in my day, it was a slide rule).
Well, some of the things I'd like to see: tightening of requirements for communication providers (ISPs & telcos) to keep your communications private. Fix FISA so it is very narrowly allowing surveillance of foreign targets, after court review (I personally don't see why this couldn't be prior review only - no retroactive approvals). Make the "national security letter" and other noxious provisions of the Patriot act clearly illegal (they may be unconstitutional even under current law). Tighten requirements on banks and other financial institutions to secure and prevent disclosure of sensitive information such as SSNs and credit cards. Require in most cases an "opt-in" for disclosure of even non-sensitive personal information such as name & address. None of this by a long shot completely prevents the erosion of privacy and possible leakage of your personal data that comes from your using a global communications net, but it would help.
A good guess, although ROR is also a good one. Actually, as far as I can tell (and from limited experience) ROR looks a whole lot like Cold Fusion. It lets you code up a bunch of scripts and get data out of databases onto your web page. What's really different, except ROR is new and trendy and Cold Fusion is old and not trendy any more?
The US doesn't use its military to apply imperialistic pressure. The U.S. military occupied the Philippines and Haiti early in the 20th century. Later, during the Cold War, we used our military, and also our special ops and intelligence agencies, to build a network of client states, not as firmly under our thumb as the Soviet satellites, but still useful to us and intended as a direct counter to the USSR's own imperial ambitions. Iran (under the Shah), Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile (under Pinochet), etc. We even supported Saddam Hussein for a while, when it served our interests, and now we occupy Iraq. Most of our client states had undemocratic and oppressive governments and we propped them up for years, with direct military intervention, covert aid, training of local military forces, economic support, and/or diplomatic recognition. When people talk about American imperialism, this is what they mean.
Seriously, compact digital cameras have gotten a lot better lately. I got my wife a Canon PowerShot SD600 a little while ago, which is purse-sized, and takes very acceptable photos. The main differences between this and a DSLR are: first, the DSLR has a much faster shutter speed so can take much better action photos; second, the SD600 has a small non-replaceable lens with a limited zoom, so it is not much good for wildlife or sports where you can't get up close. But for landscapes, it is hard to distinguish its photos from those made with a high-end camera.
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I've got a 70's era tube FM tuner that works fine. It doesn't have the original tubes in it but it's normal to replace those. The capacitors in these things can go bad but it's pretty common to have ancient ones that still work. Old military electronics is even more likely to be all in good order: it was made with higher grade parts and often built to take vibration and other abuse.
Well, I bought a video recorder recently and tried to get it at a CC .. they had several models on display but everything in the price range I was looking at was out of stock. So it starts to look like bait & switch to me: the sales person keeps saying, we don't have that one, and it's discontinued anyway, but you can buy this one for $50 more. Granted this was fairly recently, so they may have been having inventory issues already. But I walked out and got a similar model at Best Buy.
On the contrary, many companies, especially larger ones, actively recruit from university engineering schools (especially local ones) and have openings that are intended for recent grads. Having work experience will help, but experience isn't actually required.
That's in normal times, though. The current hiring environment is truly awful and has gotten worse in the past 1-2 months - at least from what I hear and have experienced. Expect delays. Expect to get one foot in the door and then have the door closed (ouch). I'd expect some betterment later in the year.
I use "cash" here non-literally to mean liquid immediately redeemable investments such as a money market account. They are safe but as you note the interest rate is practically zero.
Sucks for the people who were going to retire soon but if they were going to retire next year why the hell did they have so many investments in equities?
That's a good question. The general answer is that most retired investors need their portfolio to generate a return at least equal to inflation, over time. Historically cash has a negative return after inflation and bonds are maybe break-even at best. But last year all that went out the window. Stocks have had a 1-year negative return that's almost unprecedented and even high-grade bonds have taken a hit. Plus markets over the world are down, not just the U.S. So, while generally cash is a bad place to be, long-term, last year nothing else was any good. That still doesn't mean, though, that you should keep your nest egg under the mattress: over the long term you'll see no net growth and your retirement income will shrink, net inflation.
Right. It's quite possible to be hired part-time as a consultant, especially if your hourly rate is high enough that clients think twice about a 40hr/week engagement. But there are downsides. You don't get to keep all of that high hourly billing (taxes take a lot of it, maybe half). And consultants are typically the first to go if the company is cutting back.
I have a consumer grade DSL line and it's unacceptably slow. I tried to use it for backup of a large set of files (audio, family pictures and some video) and it was running for days, and finally timing out or failing (don't remember how large the batch I tried, but it was at least 20GB in many small files). Even if the cost was fine that's not ok. (And of course if you lose your home disk then you have to do this in reverse to restore; if you can't restore it's no good).
My solution so far is to put it on a portable hard drive and store it offsite, encrypting anything that's sensitive.
I actually have experience teaching a 13-14 year old some programming (my daughter). We downloaded Netbeans to her Mac and I helped her create some simple Java programs - first just console programs then an Applet. Ok, Java is not the latest cool thing anymore, but NetBeans does syntax checking as you type so it's easy to get going with. She liked it. And if we want to move on to creating a web app (JSP for example) that's certainly possible. No, she doesn't understand the whole language or even all the concepts, but she learned something.
Another reason not to publish prices is that it facilitates unfair comparisons. An analyst firm or a competitor comes out with a report that says your software is 30% more expensive than a competitor's. That's probably bogus because of discounting and most people will realize that. But it can hurt you anyway.
Every time this topic comes up I hear a list of excuses for speeding. But IMHO speeding is just a bad habit and most of the excuses are lame. And none of them will fly if you find yourself in front of a traffic court judge.
I used it ages ago and remember thinking it was the most broken software with a version number past 3 I had ever seen. Non-standard and quirky, too.
The 'closing' date of a transaction is always seven business days after execution,
It's 3 days, currently. Used to be 7.
Opening knowledge is essential if your opponent is an equally prepared player, and is especially helpful if you know that player's preferred systems and can prepare something to win against them.
But amateur players tend to spend way too much time memorizing openings, and it actually doesn't help your game much. First, you'll forget this stuff. Second, your opponent is likely another amateur and so will play something oddball or not in the books and you'll have to think anyway. Third, all the prep in the world won't help if you drop pieces or lose to shallow tactics, so studying to avoid that helps you more. Finally, lots of games are won or lost in the endgame, where specialized knowledge and skills will help, but few low-level players spend time in endgame study (which is less about memorizing than knowing rules and principles).
Certainly you can over-engineer.
But modularity and de-coupling are key to building large scale maintainable systems. Language features like strong typing,
compile-time checking, exception handling, help too.
I think the real problem with Perl and its kin are that they're great for single-purpose scripts that just get the job done, but over time the system grows and pretty soon you've got tens of thousands of line of script code and it's a monster.
There are better languages for big systems like that. But yours is in Perl, so you're stuck. That's why they call it "legacy".
> Performing artists with a good income will be exactly that again, performing artists, not studio artists.
We're actually already there, for artists at the top of the income scale, anyway. Very successful acts (like the Rolling Stones) make by far the bulk of their income from touring, not from CDs or downloads. The labels would lose on a "recordings for free" model, but artists like these would survive just fine.
That's a good correction to the parent poster.
In addition the "left" side of the political spectrum has historically emphasized egalitarianism, both in the political sense (equal rights for all) and in an economic sense (opposition to vast disparities in wealth). The hard left (Communism) wanted to establish economic equality forcibly (through confiscation) while the moderate left favors achieving it through tax and social policies.
For most of the last 50-60 years, Conservative in the US has implied strong opposition to Communism (while that was still a going concern) and pretty rigid opposition to even the moderate left program (what Europeans term social democracy).
JBoss Studio is not a bad piece of work and they support it. I have some reservations about Seam, but you don't have to use it. I've also used NetBeans recently and that's come a long way - the first iterations of it were awful, but it's better now.
The problem I had with GWT is that it just doesn't seem to have the depth of functionality and community support that other frameworks have. I don't know what your beef is with JSF, but fundamentally it does much the same thing as GWT - abstracts the JavaScript layer so as a developer you don't have to deal with it (at least if you have a decent IDE). JSF frameworks and tools are getting better and it's not just one vendor behind them.
Right. You could argue that insurgents with low- to medium-tech weapons are making a pretty good go of holding off the U.S. army in Iraq. But of course we've killed maybe as many as a million Iraqis (counting all those who died from collateral damage, sectarian violence, and increased crime), and they've killed a few thousand American soldiers. That's not exactly victory for the insurgents, and doesn't really bode well for a rebellion with guns.
I'm sure there are bad guys in Guantanamo who have harmed Americans, or who wanted to and were preparing to. But we have weak to no evidence against many of the prisoners at Guantanamo. In fact, most of them were not captured by Americans, but were turned over to us by third parties, for whatever reason. Murat Kurnaz, who was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to American forces for a bounty payment, for example. At worst, you have to consider such a person a suspect, not a convicted criminal. And of course we decided to torture and punish these prisoners first and then, maybe later, give them a trial. Not exactly a shining example for the world.
Well, right. It could be good or bad.
From the Microsoft side, I think they were right to realize that Google was a strategic threat. If you are getting services and apps from Google over the net and they don't even care what desktop OS you have, then Microsoft's OS *and* desktop app businesses are going to suffer, most likely. But would Yahoo really address that threat and was it worth the price? Pretty doubtful on both counts I think.
From the Yahoo side, turning down what most observers thought was too much to pay seems like a bad move, and they're probably going to have to face a stockholder suit, if one hasn't been launched already.
That works, although if you're in an engineering school you have to go off campus. And you have to lose the $5 haircut, coke bottle glasses and the calculator you carry in your shirt pocket (in my day, it was a slide rule).
Well, some of the things I'd like to see: tightening of requirements for communication providers (ISPs & telcos) to keep your communications private. Fix FISA so it is very narrowly allowing surveillance of foreign targets, after court review (I personally don't see why this couldn't be prior review only - no retroactive approvals). Make the "national security letter" and other noxious provisions of the Patriot act clearly illegal (they may be unconstitutional even under current law). Tighten requirements on banks and other financial institutions to secure and prevent disclosure of sensitive information such as SSNs and credit cards. Require in most cases an "opt-in" for disclosure of even non-sensitive personal information such as name & address. None of this by a long shot completely prevents the erosion of privacy and possible leakage of your personal data that comes from your using a global communications net, but it would help.
A good guess, although ROR is also a good one. Actually, as far as I can tell (and from limited experience) ROR looks a whole lot like Cold Fusion. It lets you code up a bunch of scripts and get data out of databases onto your web page. What's really different, except ROR is new and trendy and Cold Fusion is old and not trendy any more?
Seriously, compact digital cameras have gotten a lot better lately. I got my wife a Canon PowerShot SD600 a little while ago, which is purse-sized, and takes very acceptable photos. The main differences between this and a DSLR are: first, the DSLR has a much faster shutter speed so can take much better action photos; second, the SD600 has a small non-replaceable lens with a limited zoom, so it is not much good for wildlife or sports where you can't get up close. But for landscapes, it is hard to distinguish its photos from those made with a high-end camera.