I think this is still called a strike. Sounds like you are forming a Union. Nothing new here, factory workers and dock workers and all kinds of people have been doing this for a long time.
Re:Origami + Math = Tom Hull
on
Origami and Math
·
· Score: 2, Informative
First, I did read the article. I chose to comment on Biodeisel because it doesn't require modifications to your car.
The rest of this post is offtopic but I think relevant.
I do however agree that I should not have been moderated +5. It was an experiement, and I was sadly proven correct. When I post real insightful comments they never get moderated up, because by the time I finish writing them there are already lots of the level you and I posted here (crap). So this time I just took the most recent article on Slashdot and posted the first thoughts that came to my mind, no references or elaboration. After a couple short poorly formed paragraphs I pressed submit. This drivel got moved to +5 because it was there fairly early and not obviously incorrect.
What I would like to point out is that Slashdot is not the only place where comments tend to have little substance, and feedback (moderation in this case) also has little substance. While I have done very little research on this I see two possible reasons for the lack of substance.
The first guess at a reason is that the medium (ie the web, internet, pseudononomous posting, etc) causes otherwise rational people to take on the intelligence of monkeys throwing feces at eachother. Maybe this is because there is no link to the real person's reputation. Maybe just becaues the barriers of entry are too low. I'm not sure.
The second guess is that people as a whole are not very intelligent reasonable people. I mean we are the same group that has actually watched Survivor, American Idol, Joe Millionare, The Bachelor, and Austin Powers. We continue to drink and drive. We think that Iraq caused the twin towers to explode. We refuse to open a piece of empty tundra the size of a moderate airport in ANWR to oil exploration because we are going to conserve our way out of foreign oil exploration by buying cars that have ever decreasing fuel efficiency. Meanwhile we buy oil from Canada who pumps it from the same region just across the border. And we all do our taxes on the last possible day. The list of stupid things we do as a society goes on and on, why should Slashdot be any different?
People have been making "Biodesiel" for years now. This is nothing new. A little lye and some vegetable oil is all it takes.
What is interesting is that it is still cheaper to buy real desiel than vegetable oil. Where biodesiel has an advantage is in recycling used vegetable oil that is no longer food quality but is with a little work good enough to burn in your car/airplane. Unfortunatly there is not enough of this to make a real dent in the American desiel usage.
Reading Wired the other day I saw the term disposable printers. Printers where it is cheaper to buy a new one than to replace the ink cartridges.
I confirmed this at Fry's, where you can get a printer for about $30 complete with ink cartridges. However the ink cartridges (when you combine the black and color) cost more than $30.
So my question is has anybody ever bought a printer and thrown it away without using it just to get cheaper ink?
As an Apple stockholder I am shocked! I mean sure the guy is intelligent and all, but this is just crazy. Other than coining the term "information superhighway" which is a lousy term Gore is unqualified for this position.
SMP scalability is feature #1. Linux simply cannot run on a 16 way, let along 32,64,128,256. There is lots of work being done in this area, but it is not a real concern for the majority on Intel hardware, so it is slow progress.
Dynamic resource allocation/deallocation for processors/memory/io. This will happen in the next few years.
Hot patchable kernel. That's right, being able to apply kernel patches without rebooting the kernel.
Logical Volume Manager and a Journaled File System. These are technically on Linux, but are poorly supported.
Checkpoint/Restart of programs. Long running programs can be stopped, stored away, and started where they left off.
Support for NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture). This has been done in Linux by SGI for their Altix3000, but certainly is not a mainstream kernel feature.
Decent thread support. Again there are prototypes for this, but actual kernel support?
Kernel dump facilities, like coredump but for the kernel.
NVRAM based error logging.
Backward binary compatibility. Really, it's nice to run your application on the next version without recompiling it. This includes kernel extensions.
Work Load Managers. You can control your applications/threads/groups of applications by cpu time, cpu %, memory, etc, etc, etc.
Really this list could keep going. And to be fair the real selling point is the hardware the OS comes with.
The foam is not a lot heavier than styrofoam. And as for ice, they have ice teams that inspect the foam before takeoff. Plus as mentioned before the tank is going the same speed as the shuttle, so it doesn't hit very fast. NASA does frame by frame reviews of the tapes after liftoff. They saw a white puff they thought was the foam hitting the wing. They had a whole team do an analysis of it and determined that even if it had a decent amount of ice it wasn't a risk. These guys aren't slakers.
The problem is that going Mach 18 not a lot has to be wrong to take a plane down.
All that anybody knows at this point is that something caused increased drag and heat on the left wing right before the plane got scattered over Texas. For all we know it could have been a metiorite that hit the wing, or Elvis returning. Maybe some tile glue was bad, or maybe there was more ice on the foam than the inspection team should have allowed. It is very hard to say because the evidence became a ball of fire which fell very hard over like a thousand miles.
You guys should really watch less CNN and more CSPAN.
Oh yeah India is leading the way in supercomputing (laugh laugh). They took some p630s or something similar from the p series
Then they hooked them together with a "native" switch. The details on the switch start to get fuzzy, for all we know it is a Cisco 1000/T Ethernet switch. Then they build an MPI stack (probably a port of an open source one from an American University).
So you now have an expensive slower version of what IBM would be happy to sell you for half the price if you lived in America. Yet it is still half the price of what you can get in an export restricted country. So we hold them to paying 2 - 4 times as much for a much less capable machine, that's ok with me. They built it by cobbling together scraps from American technology. It sounds like the supercomputer export restrictions are having some effect.
As far as the US leading technology I just have to say damn straight. Any Indian programmer worth his salt is living in the US, working for a US company. Same goes for most other countries. Plus, the world sends its brightest here for our great University education. Once we have them living in the US do you think they want to return to their home country for poor wages and oppresive governments? Think again.
Anybody here read the Foundation series by Asimov? This is on subject really. The series talks about the fall of civilization, and one of the key measurements is the quality of stuff made. At it's high point a civilization will produce its best quality products. As the civilization becomes stagnant it will still produce the same products, they will just break more, and nobody will know how to fix them. So one theory on our crappy products is that society is becoming stagnant.
Another theory is that the economic gap is growing. There are good quality products, but a shrinking part of the population can afford them. If you have $100 dollars you can't afford $200 in quality.
Of course the theory that consumers are all ignorant fools who buy more on marketing than quality does hold some water. Maybe companies have less scruples now, and will take their money without giving them a quality product.
My theory is quality is getting better. Cars definatly last longer now than they used to. At any given price point you will get a better quality product than you did 10 years ago in almost any product. Oh wait, you want to pay $50 instead of $500 and expect better quality. You are living in a dream world.
...WE continue to PERPETUATE practices we don't agree with? Furthermore, we all understand that paying the bills is sometimes more important than righting the wrongs of corporations, yet our dialogues on Slashdot, in the breakroom, at the bars, and in our living rooms suggest that we care deeply about protecting our civil liberties.
As a whole we care a great deal. I'd say 99% of us would not sign up for this job. However that other 1% adds up to a lot of people who really don't have convictions other than money.
This is like saying if we were against murder than murder wouldn't happen anymore. Well, most of us are against murder. We have laws for those of us who are not, and those people go to jail for the rest of their lives.
That is why we need laws to protect us, because there is always somebody who will do the wrong thing.
For parts I like to try Computer Geeks first. I have ordered from them many times in the past. One time they sent me the wrong scsi card, I told them about it and they sent out the new one immediatly. I had two cards for a few weeks until UPS came to pick up the old one. I just thought it was nice that 1. they sent out the new one before receiving the old one and 2. They paid shipping to return the old one.
My latest server I built from Google Gear After shopping around I decided it was cheaper to ship it all from one place, and Goole Gear had the best all around prices I found.
Where I work we do code reviews. Small changes are reviewed by at least 1 person, and large changes are reviewed by many people. Because the reviewer is also responsable for any bugs this code creates we spend a great deal of time reviewing the code in depth.
We catch really picky stuff like variable names that aren't descriptive, doing the same thing in both the if and the else case instead of once outside the condition, taking locks a few lines earlier than necessary, indentation, etc. I've had code rejected for mispelling in a comment.
Because we pay such careful attention to details really serious things that would actually be bugs rarely make it past us. It still happens, but usually the really subtle bugs are all that remain. The kind that out of your thousands of customers one will have occur every month or so of constant run.
We do all the testing too. Heck, we have a huge testing organization. They even find bugs. But they miss a higher percentage than code review.
They have to spend it to continue to grow. This
is diversification plain and simple. Sure they can help ensure the mac is top of digital video. Sure they gain developers who can add features to iMovie and Final Cut Pro.
All of that is a bonus to the fact that they now have more revenue stream not tied to the macintosh. Apple's software house has been growing steadily in case there is a day where the macintosh stops selling. With the fate of Motorola's processor group on unsure footing, and with IBM not embracing AltiVec Apple has a lot to be nervous about. Right now the G4 is behind the P4 in performance (except a few benchmarks).
Apple is becoming a software house the same way Sega did. Sega used to make hardware, but they lost that battle. Now they only make games. They don't make as much money as they used to, but at least they are still in business and still making money.
Of course I think Apple will stick around in hardware, but it never hurts to have a backup plan.
The company gave you a pay cut because they thought they could get away with it given the current economy. So let's clear the air and say they already don't care about you. Most companies view employees as "resources" not as people anyway.
No company expects loyalty when they aren't loyal. So don't refuse the counter offer on the grounds they will look for revenge. They won't. Nobody gives you a 50% raise then fires you. It just doesn't make economic sense. And co-workers won't hate you because you make more money, they would do the same in your position.
What it comes down to is where you would like working better. If you like your current job and the people you work with stay. If you think the new company looks like a better place to work then go there.
However if you air condition that room a really effecient air conditioner at 25% would cost $490.56/year to run.
Add infastructre cost for a larger air conditioner, extra electrical wiring and equipment, larger UPS, and your system just got very expensive. I don't have any solid numbers here but guessing $1000 per 1U doesn't seem unreasonable.
While we are on cost savings these things pack more into a 1U than I've ever seen. 2 processors and 4 hot swappable drives is usually a 2U feature. So figure you are saving half the floorspace. What does good data center floor space cost? Again I don't have any numbers, but it's certainly expensive. This might even be the overriding cost in a place like San Francisco.
What I'm getting to is that these things really can make economic sense. Let me keep going.
Easier administration than Linux. I administer linux machines, I know it's time consuming. SysAdmins don't come cheap. 1 Admin = $60,000 year.
The G4 Vector processor kicks butt for scientific workloads, really kicks butt. 300% performance improvement is not abnormal. The main reason physics guys don't use macs now is that they don't fit in a rack very well. Cut the number of servers down by 1/3, that's money in the bank.
Finally, these are just too cool whatever the cost. I mean that case looks sweet.
It's not explaining the GPL to non-lawyers that is the problem, it is explaining it to lawyers.
The company I work for employes a lot of Open Source Lawyers. All of the lawyers hate the GPL. They all love the idea and hate the wording. It was obviously not written by a lawyer, and hence though clear to you and me is not clear to a judge who actually has to enforce it.
Also the GPL has not been tested in court.
Admittidly most of the confusion involves interaction with non GPL code. For instance if you worked on a Linux device driver for product x under the GPL could you then work on a BSD device driver for product x? The answer is probably not, the BSD device driver could be seen as a derivitave work and you would have to release it under the GPL, which wouldn't fly very well at the BSD distributions who like to release under the BSD liscense.
You see we usually think of GPL infecting closed source, which most people would argue is a good thing. But the downside is that closed source developers cannot contribute to GPL projects because it might look like some of what they did under GPL was done under closed source, if it was or not.
Then even worse the same applies to devlopers under BSD or public domain type of liscences. This decreases sharing, it does not increase it.
I went to a University that had a 10% graduation rate for CS majors. Meaning that out of every 10 people who were at one time CS majors 1 would graduate.
The University became concerned, so we had to show where the other 9 of 10 people went. It turns out that students who had at one time been CS majors had a much higher graduation rate than average, just not as CS majors. They went to business, electronic publishing, etc. They basically decided it wasn't worth it or they weren't smart enough.
A friend of mine who graduated business gave me a good quote once. He said, "I started out a C.S. major, but I wasn't smart enough so I switched to business."
If you look at the number of CS graduates at any level: bachelors, masters, Ph.D you will find that since the early 80s the numbers all go down.
Meanwhile every company that wishes to not go out of business uses computers more and more. The number of jobs naturally goes up.
Now supply and demand says that there are not enough qualified people to fill the jobs. Managers will hire people who are highly underqualified because they are desperate.
Why we think this is a dead end job is because companies try to get their few competant employees to get all the work done, an impossible task. The result is lots of overtime which salaried workers don't see any extra money for. There is also a lot of pressure and stress.
What employees don't realize is that it doesn't have to be this way. We have what they need. Say "if I have to work overtime on a regular basis I will find another job" and you'd be suprised how scared they are of losing you.
I work 40 hours a week most weeks. I don't think I've ever put in more than 50, ever. I am paid better than my manager. My company needs me. Your company needs you as well.
It's interesting to speculate that Intel might lose the processor war because Compaq bought DEC.
When DEC folded many of its employees (who really knew their stuff) bailed and went to Microsoft and AMD. The AMD x86-64 movement is run by mostly former DEC Alpha engineers. No suprise that former DEC software engineers at Microsoft prefer the design of former DEC hardaware engineers now at AMD.
I know Intel owns the Alpha technology now, but really that doesn't mean much. They bought the tech after they already had the Itanic at full steam so the Alpha hasn't affected the Itanic much. Besides, by the time they bought the tech all the good chip designers were at AMD. The reason Compaq gave the Alpha the ax is that they had already lost all the good chip designers to AMD.
The IA-64 came straight from the PA-RISC chip designers at HP, with some help from Intel. Nobody defected from HP to Microsoft, so nobody at Microsoft is partial to the Itanic.
Any practical naming convention will not work. Sorry. So instead of trying to be practical have some fun.
For example the University I attended named all computers after biblical characters. Giving them memorable names usually made them easier to remember and therefore locate. Goliath, David, Tabitha, Timon, Melchizedek, etc.
If you aren't into the bible you could use Simpson characters or Star Trek characters, etc.
This certainly doesn't look like 3 times, but 3.009 digits. So a 59 bit key instead of a 56 bit key. I'm still confident that a 2048 bit key just doesn't make sense to attack directly.
The regulations do state that if you use a more
powerful gain antenna that you have to reduce your
power from the maximum by a certain amount for
each dBi above the allowed limit.
So in a sense the amount of focusing is limited.
However the Orinoco (Lucent) cards are not anywhere near the maxiumum power, so with a stock
card you just can't get an antenna that will make you break the law.
To really do this right you need a bidirectional amplifier like made at hyperlink. A commercial antenna, lightning protector, low impedence cable, and professional adapters are handy too. Hyperlink sells nice kits with all of that.
I think there are two types of workers. There are those who work as little as they can get away with. With these types of people they probably do work better unhappy and under pressure, the pitchfork in the butt style of management. In my opinion the easier thing to do is fire them and hire self motiveated people. I have seen some skilled groups who are lazy, but they are a minority. However, many non skilled employees are like this.
With skilled employees (not just programmers but Physicists, Chemists, Doctors, etc) the majority want to do interesting work. They will do things without being told. They will even do the crappy assignments now and then without grumbling because they know that doing boring work now and then is necessary to be able to do interesting work. If you say "We need componant X, and we'd like to have it in testing by Month, Day" (note, do not let schedules drive work, it sometimes takes more time than estimated) a self motivated person usually will get it done. They also are likely to finish any pet projects they had going during the time the finished componant X.
1)Managers are supposed to help make sure resources are available and used to drive the technical direction. They are not supposed to set the technical direction.
2)I'm not saying somebody should be able to put in 20 hours a week. I'm saying that some flexability in the number of hours is ok. If he puts in say 30-60 hours that's fine. I'm not saying to let it go unchecked. And if there is a problem with an employee only putting in 30 hours and not getting his work done then that employee should be talked to, maybe he should work more hours.
3) Very much so. It is important to strike a balance between team building and independent dedicated time without distractions. That balance is hard to find, and it is a managers job to make sure that time away from independent work is time well spent.
4) Yes
5)It's happened before. I agree, the manager should be fired.
I think facilitator is a better word than leader, but I won't quibble over the language.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if it is original to the movie, but it appeared in Liar Liar.
I think this is still called a strike. Sounds like you are forming a Union. Nothing new here, factory workers and dock workers and all kinds of people have been doing this for a long time.
Tom is definatly one of the leaders in this field. Those who haven't read his paper The Combinatorics of Flat Folds: a Survey are missing out.
You might also check out Robert Lang's upcoming book Origami Design Secrets: Mathematical Methods for an Ancient Art
First, I did read the article. I chose to comment on Biodeisel because it doesn't require modifications to your car.
The rest of this post is offtopic but I think relevant.
I do however agree that I should not have been moderated +5. It was an experiement, and I was sadly proven correct. When I post real insightful comments they never get moderated up, because by the time I finish writing them there are already lots of the level you and I posted here (crap). So this time I just took the most recent article on Slashdot and posted the first thoughts that came to my mind, no references or elaboration. After a couple short poorly formed paragraphs I pressed submit. This drivel got moved to +5 because it was there fairly early and not obviously incorrect.
What I would like to point out is that Slashdot is not the only place where comments tend to have little substance, and feedback (moderation in this case) also has little substance. While I have done very little research on this I see two possible reasons for the lack of substance.
The first guess at a reason is that the medium (ie the web, internet, pseudononomous posting, etc) causes otherwise rational people to take on the intelligence of monkeys throwing feces at eachother. Maybe this is because there is no link to the real person's reputation. Maybe just becaues the barriers of entry are too low. I'm not sure.
The second guess is that people as a whole are not very intelligent reasonable people. I mean we are the same group that has actually watched Survivor, American Idol, Joe Millionare, The Bachelor, and Austin Powers. We continue to drink and drive. We think that Iraq caused the twin towers to explode. We refuse to open a piece of empty tundra the size of a moderate airport in ANWR to oil exploration because we are going to conserve our way out of foreign oil exploration by buying cars that have ever decreasing fuel efficiency. Meanwhile we buy oil from Canada who pumps it from the same region just across the border. And we all do our taxes on the last possible day. The list of stupid things we do as a society goes on and on, why should Slashdot be any different?
People have been making "Biodesiel" for years now. This is nothing new. A little lye and some vegetable oil is all it takes.
What is interesting is that it is still cheaper to buy real desiel than vegetable oil. Where biodesiel has an advantage is in recycling used vegetable oil that is no longer food quality but is with a little work good enough to burn in your car/airplane. Unfortunatly there is not enough of this to make a real dent in the American desiel usage.
Reading Wired the other day I saw the term disposable printers. Printers where it is cheaper to buy a new one than to replace the ink cartridges.
I confirmed this at Fry's, where you can get a printer for about $30 complete with ink cartridges. However the ink cartridges (when you combine the black and color) cost more than $30.
So my question is has anybody ever bought a printer and thrown it away without using it just to get cheaper ink?
As an Apple stockholder I am shocked! I mean sure the guy is intelligent and all, but this is just crazy. Other than coining the term "information superhighway" which is a lousy term Gore is unqualified for this position.
SMP scalability is feature #1. Linux simply cannot run on a 16 way, let along 32,64,128,256. There is lots of work being done in this area, but it is not a real concern for the majority on Intel hardware, so it is slow progress.
Dynamic resource allocation/deallocation for processors/memory/io. This will happen in the next few years.
Hot patchable kernel. That's right, being able to apply kernel patches without rebooting the kernel.
Logical Volume Manager and a Journaled File System. These are technically on Linux, but are poorly supported.
Checkpoint/Restart of programs. Long running programs can be stopped, stored away, and started where they left off.
Support for NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture). This has been done in Linux by SGI for their Altix3000, but certainly is not a mainstream kernel feature.
Decent thread support. Again there are prototypes for this, but actual kernel support?
Kernel dump facilities, like coredump but for the kernel.
NVRAM based error logging.
Backward binary compatibility. Really, it's nice to run your application on the next version without recompiling it. This includes kernel extensions.
Work Load Managers. You can control your applications/threads/groups of applications by cpu time, cpu %, memory, etc, etc, etc.
Really this list could keep going. And to be fair the real selling point is the hardware the OS comes with.
The foam is not a lot heavier than styrofoam. And as for ice, they have ice teams that inspect the foam before takeoff. Plus as mentioned before the tank is going the same speed as the shuttle, so it doesn't hit very fast. NASA does frame by frame reviews of the tapes after liftoff. They saw a white puff they thought was the foam hitting the wing. They had a whole team do an analysis of it and determined that even if it had a decent amount of ice it wasn't a risk. These guys aren't slakers.
The problem is that going Mach 18 not a lot has to be wrong to take a plane down.
All that anybody knows at this point is that something caused increased drag and heat on the left wing right before the plane got scattered over Texas. For all we know it could have been a metiorite that hit the wing, or Elvis returning. Maybe some tile glue was bad, or maybe there was more ice on the foam than the inspection team should have allowed. It is very hard to say because the evidence became a ball of fire which fell very hard over like a thousand miles.
You guys should really watch less CNN and more CSPAN.
Oh yeah India is leading the way in supercomputing (laugh laugh). They took some p630s or something similar from the p series
Then they hooked them together with a "native" switch. The details on the switch start to get fuzzy, for all we know it is a Cisco 1000/T Ethernet switch. Then they build an MPI stack (probably a port of an open source one from an American University). So you now have an expensive slower version of what IBM would be happy to sell you for half the price if you lived in America. Yet it is still half the price of what you can get in an export restricted country. So we hold them to paying 2 - 4 times as much for a much less capable machine, that's ok with me. They built it by cobbling together scraps from American technology. It sounds like the supercomputer export restrictions are having some effect.
As far as the US leading technology I just have to say damn straight. Any Indian programmer worth his salt is living in the US, working for a US company. Same goes for most other countries. Plus, the world sends its brightest here for our great University education. Once we have them living in the US do you think they want to return to their home country for poor wages and oppresive governments? Think again.
Anybody here read the Foundation series by Asimov? This is on subject really. The series talks about the fall of civilization, and one of the key measurements is the quality of stuff made. At it's high point a civilization will produce its best quality products. As the civilization becomes stagnant it will still produce the same products, they will just break more, and nobody will know how to fix them. So one theory on our crappy products is that society is becoming stagnant.
Another theory is that the economic gap is growing. There are good quality products, but a shrinking part of the population can afford them. If you have $100 dollars you can't afford $200 in quality.
Of course the theory that consumers are all ignorant fools who buy more on marketing than quality does hold some water. Maybe companies have less scruples now, and will take their money without giving them a quality product.
My theory is quality is getting better. Cars definatly last longer now than they used to. At any given price point you will get a better quality product than you did 10 years ago in almost any product. Oh wait, you want to pay $50 instead of $500 and expect better quality. You are living in a dream world.
As a whole we care a great deal. I'd say 99% of us would not sign up for this job. However that other 1% adds up to a lot of people who really don't have convictions other than money.
This is like saying if we were against murder than murder wouldn't happen anymore. Well, most of us are against murder. We have laws for those of us who are not, and those people go to jail for the rest of their lives.
That is why we need laws to protect us, because there is always somebody who will do the wrong thing.
For local shops I like Fry's. They are just huge.
For parts I like to try Computer Geeks first. I have ordered from them many times in the past. One time they sent me the wrong scsi card, I told them about it and they sent out the new one immediatly. I had two cards for a few weeks until UPS came to pick up the old one. I just thought it was nice that 1. they sent out the new one before receiving the old one and 2. They paid shipping to return the old one.
My latest server I built from Google Gear After shopping around I decided it was cheaper to ship it all from one place, and Goole Gear had the best all around prices I found.
Where I work we do code reviews. Small changes are reviewed by at least 1 person, and large changes are reviewed by many people. Because the reviewer is also responsable for any bugs this code creates we spend a great deal of time reviewing the code in depth.
We catch really picky stuff like variable names that aren't descriptive, doing the same thing in both the if and the else case instead of once outside the condition, taking locks a few lines earlier than necessary, indentation, etc. I've had code rejected for mispelling in a comment.
Because we pay such careful attention to details really serious things that would actually be bugs rarely make it past us. It still happens, but usually the really subtle bugs are all that remain. The kind that out of your thousands of customers one will have occur every month or so of constant run.
We do all the testing too. Heck, we have a huge testing organization. They even find bugs. But they miss a higher percentage than code review.
Apple has $4.3 billion in extra cash
They have to spend it to continue to grow. This is diversification plain and simple. Sure they can help ensure the mac is top of digital video. Sure they gain developers who can add features to iMovie and Final Cut Pro.
All of that is a bonus to the fact that they now have more revenue stream not tied to the macintosh. Apple's software house has been growing steadily in case there is a day where the macintosh stops selling. With the fate of Motorola's processor group on unsure footing, and with IBM not embracing AltiVec Apple has a lot to be nervous about. Right now the G4 is behind the P4 in performance (except a few benchmarks).
Apple is becoming a software house the same way Sega did. Sega used to make hardware, but they lost that battle. Now they only make games. They don't make as much money as they used to, but at least they are still in business and still making money.
Of course I think Apple will stick around in hardware, but it never hurts to have a backup plan.
The company gave you a pay cut because they thought they could get away with it given the current economy. So let's clear the air and say they already don't care about you. Most companies view employees as "resources" not as people anyway.
No company expects loyalty when they aren't loyal. So don't refuse the counter offer on the grounds they will look for revenge. They won't. Nobody gives you a 50% raise then fires you. It just doesn't make economic sense. And co-workers won't hate you because you make more money, they would do the same in your position.
What it comes down to is where you would like working better. If you like your current job and the people you work with stay. If you think the new company looks like a better place to work then go there.
The raw electricity is only part of the equation.
175Wh/hr * 1kWh/1000Wh * 24hr/day * 365days/yr * $0.08/kWh = $122.64/year.
However if you air condition that room a really effecient air conditioner at 25% would cost $490.56/year to run.
Add infastructre cost for a larger air conditioner, extra electrical wiring and equipment, larger UPS, and your system just got very expensive. I don't have any solid numbers here but guessing $1000 per 1U doesn't seem unreasonable.
While we are on cost savings these things pack more into a 1U than I've ever seen. 2 processors and 4 hot swappable drives is usually a 2U feature. So figure you are saving half the floorspace. What does good data center floor space cost? Again I don't have any numbers, but it's certainly expensive. This might even be the overriding cost in a place like San Francisco.
What I'm getting to is that these things really can make economic sense. Let me keep going.
Easier administration than Linux. I administer linux machines, I know it's time consuming. SysAdmins don't come cheap. 1 Admin = $60,000 year.
The G4 Vector processor kicks butt for scientific workloads, really kicks butt. 300% performance improvement is not abnormal. The main reason physics guys don't use macs now is that they don't fit in a rack very well. Cut the number of servers down by 1/3, that's money in the bank.
Finally, these are just too cool whatever the cost. I mean that case looks sweet.
It's not explaining the GPL to non-lawyers that is
the problem, it is explaining it to lawyers.
The company I work for employes a lot of Open Source Lawyers. All of the lawyers hate the GPL. They all love the idea and hate the wording. It was obviously not written by a lawyer, and hence though clear to you and me is not clear to a judge who actually has to enforce it.
Also the GPL has not been tested in court.
Admittidly most of the confusion involves interaction with non GPL code. For instance if you worked on a Linux device driver for product x under the GPL could you then work on a BSD device driver for product x? The answer is probably not, the BSD device driver could be seen as a derivitave work and you would have to release it under the GPL, which wouldn't fly very well at the BSD distributions who like to release under the BSD liscense.
You see we usually think of GPL infecting closed source, which most people would argue is a good thing. But the downside is that closed source developers cannot contribute to GPL projects because it might look like some of what they did under GPL was done under closed source, if it was or not.
Then even worse the same applies to devlopers under BSD or public domain type of liscences. This decreases sharing, it does not increase it.
I went to a University that had a 10% graduation rate for CS majors. Meaning that out of every 10 people who were at one time CS majors 1 would graduate.
The University became concerned, so we had to show where the other 9 of 10 people went. It turns out that students who had at one time been CS majors had a much higher graduation rate than average, just not as CS majors. They went to business, electronic publishing, etc. They basically decided it wasn't worth it or they weren't smart enough.
A friend of mine who graduated business gave me a good quote once. He said, "I started out a C.S. major, but I wasn't smart enough so I switched to business."
If you look at the number of CS graduates at any level: bachelors, masters, Ph.D you will find that since the early 80s the numbers all go down.
Meanwhile every company that wishes to not go out of business uses computers more and more. The number of jobs naturally goes up.
Now supply and demand says that there are not enough qualified people to fill the jobs. Managers will hire people who are highly underqualified because they are desperate.
Why we think this is a dead end job is because companies try to get their few competant employees to get all the work done, an impossible task. The result is lots of overtime which salaried workers don't see any extra money for. There is also a lot of pressure and stress.
What employees don't realize is that it doesn't have to be this way. We have what they need. Say "if I have to work overtime on a regular basis I will find another job" and you'd be suprised how scared they are of losing you.
I work 40 hours a week most weeks. I don't think I've ever put in more than 50, ever. I am paid better than my manager. My company needs me. Your company needs you as well.
It's interesting to speculate that Intel might lose the processor war because Compaq bought DEC.
When DEC folded many of its employees (who really knew their stuff) bailed and went to Microsoft and AMD. The AMD x86-64 movement is run by mostly former DEC Alpha engineers. No suprise that former DEC software engineers at Microsoft prefer the design of former DEC hardaware engineers now at AMD.
I know Intel owns the Alpha technology now, but really that doesn't mean much. They bought the tech after they already had the Itanic at full steam so the Alpha hasn't affected the Itanic much. Besides, by the time they bought the tech all the good chip designers were at AMD. The reason Compaq gave the Alpha the ax is that they had already lost all the good chip designers to AMD.
The IA-64 came straight from the PA-RISC chip designers at HP, with some help from Intel. Nobody defected from HP to Microsoft, so nobody at Microsoft is partial to the Itanic.
Any practical naming convention will not work. Sorry. So instead of trying to be practical have some fun.
For example the University I attended named all computers after biblical characters. Giving them memorable names usually made them easier to remember and therefore locate. Goliath, David, Tabitha, Timon, Melchizedek, etc.
If you aren't into the bible you could use Simpson characters or Star Trek characters, etc.
This certainly doesn't look like 3 times, but 3.009 digits. So a 59 bit key instead of a 56 bit key. I'm still confident that a 2048 bit key just doesn't make sense to attack directly.
The regulations do state that if you use a more powerful gain antenna that you have to reduce your power from the maximum by a certain amount for each dBi above the allowed limit.
So in a sense the amount of focusing is limited.
However the Orinoco (Lucent) cards are not anywhere near the maxiumum power, so with a stock card you just can't get an antenna that will make you break the law.
To really do this right you need a bidirectional amplifier like made at hyperlink. A commercial antenna, lightning protector, low impedence cable, and professional adapters are handy too. Hyperlink sells nice kits with all of that.
Good feedback. Let me reply.
I think there are two types of workers. There are those who work as little as they can get away with. With these types of people they probably do work better unhappy and under pressure, the pitchfork in the butt style of management. In my opinion the easier thing to do is fire them and hire self motiveated people. I have seen some skilled groups who are lazy, but they are a minority. However, many non skilled employees are like this.
With skilled employees (not just programmers but Physicists, Chemists, Doctors, etc) the majority want to do interesting work. They will do things without being told. They will even do the crappy assignments now and then without grumbling because they know that doing boring work now and then is necessary to be able to do interesting work. If you say "We need componant X, and we'd like to have it in testing by Month, Day" (note, do not let schedules drive work, it sometimes takes more time than estimated) a self motivated person usually will get it done. They also are likely to finish any pet projects they had going during the time the finished componant X.
1)Managers are supposed to help make sure resources are available and used to drive the technical direction. They are not supposed to set the technical direction.
2)I'm not saying somebody should be able to put in 20 hours a week. I'm saying that some flexability in the number of hours is ok. If he puts in say 30-60 hours that's fine. I'm not saying to let it go unchecked. And if there is a problem with an employee only putting in 30 hours and not getting his work done then that employee should be talked to, maybe he should work more hours.
3) Very much so. It is important to strike a balance between team building and independent dedicated time without distractions. That balance is hard to find, and it is a managers job to make sure that time away from independent work is time well spent.
4) Yes
5)It's happened before. I agree, the manager should be fired.
I think facilitator is a better word than leader, but I won't quibble over the language.
The last paragraph was dead on