Now tell me, why exactly do you need nuclear power if there is so much wind, water, sun, biomass etc. around?
For one, building such a huge solar plant would have enormous environmental impacts, including raising the local temperature several degrees. (think: a dark solar cell absorbs much more heat than a white dessert.) Not to mention that environmentalists would never allow a huge tract of land to be industrialized.
Then we have storage. The sun doesn't shine at night. There are some solutions, like compressed air and fly wheels, but that would take even more space. Plus, the there are clouds. Granted, not many in the dessert.
And while a nuclear power plant is expensive, covering a huge area in silicon solar cells would be even more expensive (within limits.) And cells don't last forever, they degrade, so each year, you'd have less power. And our current power grid couldn't handle such a solution without billions in investment (since the sunny parts of the US are where few people live.)
And while Uranium is limited, modern reactors can make more fuel and run for decades without refueling. Giving us time to perfect Mr. Fusion. Speaking of which, almost all electronics, including solar cells, regulators, etc, require scarce metals and environmentally toxic production methods.
Energy isn't free or unlimited. We need to use it wisely, building a variety of generation methods including nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, etc. All the while, focusing on conservation, otherwise the eventual heat load will affect the environment even more than CO2. (Since ultimately, almost every bit of power we generate ends up as heat and the world uses more and more power.) Other "clean" sources also affect the environment, including wind, hydro and geothermal (which is ultimately nuclear anyway!) Nothing is free.
You are thinking of a deduction, they reduce your income. A tax credit counts toward the taxes you pay, not your income. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_credit
That's what I was thinking, but it would likely be expensive to get it through customs. Or put all your data and OS on a SSD and rent or borrow a laptop on whatever country you are going to. Swap the hard drives and you are good to go.
This is no great mystery. A test message can just sit in a buffer until your phone is within broadcast distance, and then it's sent. But a call has to be done in realtime; if reception is poor the caller gets a busy signal (and then send a text instead).
And they require much less bandwidth and don't tie up a phone line out of the cell tower. Just data, which can go over a shared data line asynchronously.
Run with more threads than processors
on
Clean Code
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Run with more threads than processors
Funny, I've found more problems by running with fewer threads than processors. Otherwise, you aren't necessarily getting true concurrency. Running ten threads on a single processor isn't going to help you find some of the pesky concurrency issues that arise from true parallel execution. Of course, one should run with more threads than processors to test that as well.
Either way, writing non-trivial parallel code isn't easy.
I've had plenty of regular contract-based jobs as a second job. I made clear from the beginning that my primary job comes first. What I do for them will be in off hours, e.g. after dinner. I don't answer support calls for the contract jobs while at my primary job.
I've never had a problem with this. I earned up enough to pay off all of my debts and put a down payment on a house in better shape than the original poster. Then, as the market changed, I stopped.
I don't do it now, since the opportunities stopped finding me (I never went out and looked), but that's fine, since I'm way too busy with other stuff now.
That's basically my experience. I got a free quote, and they were 20% higher than I was paying to Amica. I never heard of Amica until a friend got rear ended by one of their customers. We were both shocked at how professional and decent they were. So, almost everyone we knew switched. They said they get a lot of new customers that way. As I recall, they were higher than Farmers when I was with them as well.
I've had the misfortune of purchasing a few Worx titles, and they are indeed incoherent, gigantic and largely useless. I've generally had good experiences with O'Reilly books, however.
But the most useful has really just been google. Finding interesting examples and work through stuff, as most books on modern Web technology tends to be rather out of date by the time it hits the bookstore.
IM is, IMHO, but Bluetooth is a killer. WIthout that, no one I know would even consider getting an Android phone.
Sounds like Google can really only do search and nothing else.
Except I've noticed that people will bit up to some maximum, and if you bid higher well before the auction ends, they will up their bid. Your model only really works if everyone follows it. Sniping can result in a lower cost because people constantly bid up just by the minimum or slightly over. By bidding at the last second, you prevent them from re-bidding. I've used it many times to get items for less that what they sold for previously for on closed listings.
Lastly, for rare items, I may not so much be concerned about the price. I just want the item, and there aren't many. In this case, you can often get a lower price sniping.
Another good reason is for very common items. I can snipe, and if I miss, go to the next one instead of worrying about multiple bids and the like.
Sniping is generally the best bid method on eBay, and that's why I hate eBay (that and it's become a retched hive of scum and villainy.
Perhaps white on black is "bad", but I prefer it for terminal / command line based work. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's all those years working on an Apple//e or maybe using a Wyse terminal in school. I can't focus on a purely white screen for very long periods of time, but I have problem with a dark screen. Actually, I tend to use off-white text, but it's rather close to white.
As for depth of field, in a reasonably bright room, unless you move your head a lot, I can't see that being much of an issue. (Pun intended.)
That is probably the best explanation I've seen, thanks! And it makes use of LEGO, another plus!
Re:You've been working for 12 years, right?
on
Disillusioned With IT?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's amazing how little you actually NEED, as opposed to how much you want. Once you differentiate between the two, a complete career change won't look nearly as daunting.
Indeed, since in a first world country like the US or most of Europe, you don't need a place to live, a job or anything really else. You can beg for food or dumpster dive and live under a bridge or in shelter. That will pretty much bring you down to an income of a few dollars a month that you find while walking around all day. That's all you strictly need: a place to keep out of the rain and food.
In fact, he may want the two cars and large screen TV more than he hates his job. It's all a trade off. They wouldn't call it work if it was always entertaining and fun. Perhaps a small change is in order, like moving to a different area or changing industries (while remaining in IT.)
Secondly, pedigree matters. No matter what people say, it is very important, especially down the line if you wish to go to business school, or pursue higher education.
And more than for just that. My old company wouldn't hire recent grads except if they went to a school on the blessed list. Good idea? Maybe, maybe not, but that was the reality. On rare times when we considered expanding and I went to some lesser institutions to recruit for them, I could see why. There really is a significant difference in the output from top-tier CS schools and the others, and it shows in average salary and demand for students. This isn't Soviet Russia.:)
As a fellow CMU alum, I concur. I received my degree in CS (the first graduating class, which wasn't as long ago as you might think.) I only once pulled an all nighter, and that was purely for extra credit on an assignment for my Operating Systems class. It was fun hacking in the cluster with friend, but was wasted the next day.
I didn't particularly find things super difficult to the point of affecting my health. If you go to class (sock!) and to the homework, most classes aren't too bad. And don't wait for the day before to start a major project for the class. There are reasons some classes have relatively few programming assignments TOTAL per class: they are meant to take a long time. Start early.
The required minor came a little later and is a very good idea. My de facto minor was in mathematics, which was fine with me because I really liked math. But, I also had to take at least one humanities class per semester, so it wasn't just all CS/Math.
When it came time to find a job, we generally had more companies recruiting than total graduates. That's a great position to be in, and why going to a technically-focused school is a good idea if you want to hit the ground running with a good position.
I took a class in Ada for a previous employer. I found it a lot like Pascal and not all that difficult. The main issue was the cost of compilers which had to go through an expensive certification process. I did find the language a but verbose for many things, e.g. here
The real issue isn't that it's hard to learn, it's that it's a little cumbersome, but more importantly, not many people know it and they typical clueless manager wants to see 10+ years of Ada experience on the resume/cv before hiring someone. Those people are few and far between, but and competent software developer can learn it.
And that's why when I've talked with folks they say they won't even get involved if a child seems to be in trouble in public except by calling the police. The laws implicitly state, "don't get involved with kids." Discipline is abuse, too, so let 'em do whatever. No wonder they end up as screwed up teenagers.
I have outside of Philadelphia, and we get 15/2 as part of the triple pay for $100/mo including unlimited phone and more channels that Comcast is offering for much more. Although it almost doesn't matter, since Comcast in my area is pathetic and their support is the worst I've ever seen from any company. They actually seemed happy I left so they didn't actually have to fix their network.
On an eight bit display, each pixel is made of three sub pixels, each with one of 256 possible values. These displays only have 766 different colours (3 x 256 = 768, but that counts the colour black three times, so there are only 766 colours). The 16.7 million colours are just created by dithering.
Check your math. Eight bits per color component per pixel is 24 bits, or 16.7m colors. It's 256 * 256 * 256, not 3 * 256 (or alternately 256^3). These el-cheapo monitors are 6 bit per color component per pixel, or 64 * 64 * 64 or 262144 colors. Each component's is independent of the other two, so you have to multiple the maximum values of each. Simple combinatorics.
A true 8-bit display (color mapped) would have 256 colors, or 2^8. No one really uses 8-bit anymore since you need a color palette and memory is cheap. I've seen 12-bit displays, though, which give you 4096 colors (e.g. Apple II gs.) Eight isn't divisible by three, so can't represent a directly mapped, uniform color scheme. (One could dedicate extra bits to one color component, but this is pretty rare in the RGB space.) So using dithering at this 18-bit or an 8-bit palette can approximate true color, but not very well (particularly with 8-bit.)
Slashdot Mirror
Now tell me, why exactly do you need nuclear power if there is so much wind, water, sun, biomass etc. around?
For one, building such a huge solar plant would have enormous environmental impacts, including raising the local temperature several degrees. (think: a dark solar cell absorbs much more heat than a white dessert.) Not to mention that environmentalists would never allow a huge tract of land to be industrialized.
Then we have storage. The sun doesn't shine at night. There are some solutions, like compressed air and fly wheels, but that would take even more space. Plus, the there are clouds. Granted, not many in the dessert.
And while a nuclear power plant is expensive, covering a huge area in silicon solar cells would be even more expensive (within limits.) And cells don't last forever, they degrade, so each year, you'd have less power. And our current power grid couldn't handle such a solution without billions in investment (since the sunny parts of the US are where few people live.)
And while Uranium is limited, modern reactors can make more fuel and run for decades without refueling. Giving us time to perfect Mr. Fusion. Speaking of which, almost all electronics, including solar cells, regulators, etc, require scarce metals and environmentally toxic production methods.
Energy isn't free or unlimited. We need to use it wisely, building a variety of generation methods including nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, etc. All the while, focusing on conservation, otherwise the eventual heat load will affect the environment even more than CO2. (Since ultimately, almost every bit of power we generate ends up as heat and the world uses more and more power.) Other "clean" sources also affect the environment, including wind, hydro and geothermal (which is ultimately nuclear anyway!) Nothing is free.
You are thinking of a deduction, they reduce your income. A tax credit counts toward the taxes you pay, not your income. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_credit
And, of course, you can prefix them with a number to repeat that action "n" times, e.g. 20dw to delete 20 words.
I use S a lot to replace the entire current line. and z. to center the current line in the middle of the screen.
Ah, and since cameras won't show data, it looks clean! Good idea!
That's what I was thinking, but it would likely be expensive to get it through customs. Or put all your data and OS on a SSD and rent or borrow a laptop on whatever country you are going to. Swap the hard drives and you are good to go.
This is no great mystery. A test message can just sit in a buffer until your phone is within broadcast distance, and then it's sent. But a call has to be done in realtime; if reception is poor the caller gets a busy signal (and then send a text instead).
And they require much less bandwidth and don't tie up a phone line out of the cell tower. Just data, which can go over a shared data line asynchronously.
Run with more threads than processors
Funny, I've found more problems by running with fewer threads than processors. Otherwise, you aren't necessarily getting true concurrency. Running ten threads on a single processor isn't going to help you find some of the pesky concurrency issues that arise from true parallel execution. Of course, one should run with more threads than processors to test that as well.
Either way, writing non-trivial parallel code isn't easy.
I've had plenty of regular contract-based jobs as a second job. I made clear from the beginning that my primary job comes first. What I do for them will be in off hours, e.g. after dinner. I don't answer support calls for the contract jobs while at my primary job.
I've never had a problem with this. I earned up enough to pay off all of my debts and put a down payment on a house in better shape than the original poster. Then, as the market changed, I stopped.
I don't do it now, since the opportunities stopped finding me (I never went out and looked), but that's fine, since I'm way too busy with other stuff now.
That's basically my experience. I got a free quote, and they were 20% higher than I was paying to Amica. I never heard of Amica until a friend got rear ended by one of their customers. We were both shocked at how professional and decent they were. So, almost everyone we knew switched. They said they get a lot of new customers that way. As I recall, they were higher than Farmers when I was with them as well.
I've had the misfortune of purchasing a few Worx titles, and they are indeed incoherent, gigantic and largely useless. I've generally had good experiences with O'Reilly books, however.
But the most useful has really just been google. Finding interesting examples and work through stuff, as most books on modern Web technology tends to be rather out of date by the time it hits the bookstore.
IM is, IMHO, but Bluetooth is a killer. WIthout that, no one I know would even consider getting an Android phone. Sounds like Google can really only do search and nothing else.
Have you seen those toll tags? I have an EZPass, and it's larger than my iPhone. They could put all sorts of stuff in that thing.
Except I've noticed that people will bit up to some maximum, and if you bid higher well before the auction ends, they will up their bid. Your model only really works if everyone follows it. Sniping can result in a lower cost because people constantly bid up just by the minimum or slightly over. By bidding at the last second, you prevent them from re-bidding. I've used it many times to get items for less that what they sold for previously for on closed listings.
Lastly, for rare items, I may not so much be concerned about the price. I just want the item, and there aren't many. In this case, you can often get a lower price sniping.
Another good reason is for very common items. I can snipe, and if I miss, go to the next one instead of worrying about multiple bids and the like.
Sniping is generally the best bid method on eBay, and that's why I hate eBay (that and it's become a retched hive of scum and villainy.
Making that post a meta-dup?
As for depth of field, in a reasonably bright room, unless you move your head a lot, I can't see that being much of an issue. (Pun intended.)
That is probably the best explanation I've seen, thanks! And it makes use of LEGO, another plus!
Indeed, since in a first world country like the US or most of Europe, you don't need a place to live, a job or anything really else. You can beg for food or dumpster dive and live under a bridge or in shelter. That will pretty much bring you down to an income of a few dollars a month that you find while walking around all day. That's all you strictly need: a place to keep out of the rain and food.
In fact, he may want the two cars and large screen TV more than he hates his job. It's all a trade off. They wouldn't call it work if it was always entertaining and fun. Perhaps a small change is in order, like moving to a different area or changing industries (while remaining in IT.)
And more than for just that. My old company wouldn't hire recent grads except if they went to a school on the blessed list. Good idea? Maybe, maybe not, but that was the reality. On rare times when we considered expanding and I went to some lesser institutions to recruit for them, I could see why. There really is a significant difference in the output from top-tier CS schools and the others, and it shows in average salary and demand for students. This isn't Soviet Russia. :)
As a fellow CMU alum, I concur. I received my degree in CS (the first graduating class, which wasn't as long ago as you might think.) I only once pulled an all nighter, and that was purely for extra credit on an assignment for my Operating Systems class. It was fun hacking in the cluster with friend, but was wasted the next day.
I didn't particularly find things super difficult to the point of affecting my health. If you go to class (sock!) and to the homework, most classes aren't too bad. And don't wait for the day before to start a major project for the class. There are reasons some classes have relatively few programming assignments TOTAL per class: they are meant to take a long time. Start early. The required minor came a little later and is a very good idea. My de facto minor was in mathematics, which was fine with me because I really liked math. But, I also had to take at least one humanities class per semester, so it wasn't just all CS/Math.
When it came time to find a job, we generally had more companies recruiting than total graduates. That's a great position to be in, and why going to a technically-focused school is a good idea if you want to hit the ground running with a good position.
I took a class in Ada for a previous employer. I found it a lot like Pascal and not all that difficult. The main issue was the cost of compilers which had to go through an expensive certification process. I did find the language a but verbose for many things, e.g. here
The real issue isn't that it's hard to learn, it's that it's a little cumbersome, but more importantly, not many people know it and they typical clueless manager wants to see 10+ years of Ada experience on the resume/cv before hiring someone. Those people are few and far between, but and competent software developer can learn it.
Apparently a good reason to post such a link is to be modded 5 Informative. :)
And that's why when I've talked with folks they say they won't even get involved if a child seems to be in trouble in public except by calling the police. The laws implicitly state, "don't get involved with kids." Discipline is abuse, too, so let 'em do whatever. No wonder they end up as screwed up teenagers.
I have outside of Philadelphia, and we get 15/2 as part of the triple pay for $100/mo including unlimited phone and more channels that Comcast is offering for much more. Although it almost doesn't matter, since Comcast in my area is pathetic and their support is the worst I've ever seen from any company. They actually seemed happy I left so they didn't actually have to fix their network.
Check your math. Eight bits per color component per pixel is 24 bits, or 16.7m colors. It's 256 * 256 * 256, not 3 * 256 (or alternately 256^3). These el-cheapo monitors are 6 bit per color component per pixel, or 64 * 64 * 64 or 262144 colors. Each component's is independent of the other two, so you have to multiple the maximum values of each. Simple combinatorics.
A true 8-bit display (color mapped) would have 256 colors, or 2^8. No one really uses 8-bit anymore since you need a color palette and memory is cheap. I've seen 12-bit displays, though, which give you 4096 colors (e.g. Apple II gs.) Eight isn't divisible by three, so can't represent a directly mapped, uniform color scheme. (One could dedicate extra bits to one color component, but this is pretty rare in the RGB space.) So using dithering at this 18-bit or an 8-bit palette can approximate true color, but not very well (particularly with 8-bit.)
And here I thought it was some really clever use of pigs to generate random binary numbers. Alas.