You know, intelligent people keep backups of important data... ever wonder why you were laid off?
You know, intelligent people often get hit with several hardware failures all at once because they haven't upgraded anything in 3yrs (the security job was not my first resort after getting laid off). I still have all the data. I have the program. It was only the key that hit the great bit bucket in the sky.
Governments are not businesses. They do not produce a product for sale. ROI (RETURN on investment) presupposes a return. Government has none that can be reliable measured in dollars.
If municipalities have to spend a few extra dollars today to insure that the data will be available two years form now, it will be money well spent (especially considering that they won't have to pay again to upgrade later).
I spent about 200hrs drawing my airplane in ProEngineer's "free" 3D CAD program, ProDesktop. Then they quit giving away the "free" version, and left me with a key that would keep the program working for 5-years. It was very kind of them, but I've lost the key and now I have several megs of very detailed and very useless CAD files.
At least now I can look forward to redrawing the design in an open format.
That said, I think that this is all a PR thing to get MS to lower their price. I don't believe that a government bureaucracy will make this step for real. Next thing you'll tell me that they've decided to run Linux.
Maybe so, but consider the long term effects. Mass. has now brought attention to the issue. Microsoft, like mildew, doesn't like to much light shined on them.
This time it is open file formats. Next time it will be code transparencies (to check for backdoors). The time after that will be a demand not to be forced into an upgrade. And just wait till all the other municipalities see it working and jump on the bandwagon, too. MS stock begins to slip, making stock option bonuses less attractive, causing MS to lose some of their top talent and emptying the coffers they use to buy other's technology and maintain their monopoly. The MS technology starts to slip, takes longer to deliver, Linux/Max/BSD/etc begin to look more attractive.
Look at it as an exponentially slippery slope, or a feedback loop. Microsoft is basically a one horse show, and the age of that horse is starting to show.
When I was laid off, I spent nearly a year working as a security guard. ProEngineer was giving away a 3D CAD program, ProDesktop, so I thought I'd use all that late night desk time to draw up my airplane.
Fast forward a few months, ProEngineer decides the giveaway didn't make them much money, so they kill the program. They were nice though, and gave all the current users a 5-year liscense key to use their current copy.
Fast forward a year. My laptop crashes, and I have to wipe and re-install. My ProDesktop key is gone. I now have several megs of very detailed and very useless drawings.
This is the reason that governments should be using open formats. Thank you, Massachusetts....and all those Slashdotters claimed there wasn't a God.
Maybe because the 3D operations take a lot more processing power than 2D. There isn't all that messy z-buffer interpolation and such on a 2D screen.
There comes a point where an algorithm is as optimized as it can ever be without losing information...the same way it works for compression. After 20yrs if intense development, 2D graphics have reached the point where adding transistors will not speed the process. 3D graphics are exponentially more difficult and require more transistors (and we haven't even finished adding all the features, let alone the optimizations, yet).
I'll believe a 3D pipe is faster than a 2D pipe on 2D graphics when I see the benchmarks.
Whoever it was has never had children. Some babies require quite a bit of coxing (sp?) before they understand what going on with that thing being shoved in their faces.
So you're laid off, along with all the other people in America that got hit by the DotBomb. The State has a program for you to get certifications as a part of your unemployment. Every job you see advertised specifically requests said certifications.
You may be prejudiced against a great many decent employees who've been struggling to do the best they could with what they were offered.
Problem number two: You're assuming cheap chinese takeout which may or may not work. I'm thinking that the well-paying IT job affords us to take a woman out for $200 sushi, not $20 chinese. Try it and be amazed at the difference; even if you have to order something that isn't raw fish --teriyaki chicken or something-- your date will feel special if you go to a nice place.
$200, just for a chance of getting laid? Dude, if I have to fork over that much cash, then I'm setting the terms up front.
The original concorde had a failed business model (granted, noise regulation around some American airports didn't help).
No. The original business model of the Concorde was never tried. The original model was for Paris/London to Las Angelous,California (and I believe Houston, Texas) flight.
What happened was that Boeing, which did not have a supersonic carrier and did not want to lose the valuable transatlantic routes, bought a few Congresspeople and got a bill rammed through that forbade SS flight over the Continental US. Ignore the fact that a SS flight at altitude would barely make the sound of very distant thunder on the ground, the used terms like dangerous and shattering windows. You'd have to be in a very remote area to pick it out of background noise, but Boeing got everyone running scared of the vast destruction those horrendous sound waves would propogate.
The Paris/London to New York route was just barely profitable, but Concorde was looking to clean up on the premium it could charge for the longer route. It was Boeing that cooked its goose, AFTER the plane was commissioned.
Someone posted a story from one of the SR-71 test pilots just a few days ago to my local EAA chapter's mail list. The pilot was recanting a test in the early days of the test program, when the engine stall was still a major problem. His engine stall on a maneuver, and the result hard yaw put him into a spin.
To make a long story short, the wind forces shredded the airplane from around him and he landed with his ejection seat intact from an initial altitude of 78,000 ft. He gave a lot of credit to his altitude suit for saving his life. His co-pilot died with a broken neck before reaching the ground.
Now imagine your knowledge being implanted at one time without a chance to challenge and discover for yourself. Clones.. Scary..
You have a point, but there are some things I just don't want to discover for myself.
-The proper way to configure an NIS+ domain. Who cares. I just want my desktop from any computer in the house.
-The intricacies of filling out income tax return form. Just tell me how much I have to pay so that I don't have to go to jail. OK. I already concede that I'm going to lose, and the rules will change so that I lose even more next year. Studying the tax code enough to constantly stay on top of it and win would take more time than if I just got a second job and paid in everything I earned.
-The proper way to do the Waltz, the Tango, and the Electric Slide. I just want the girls to think I'm way cool. I don't actually want to know how to dance.
-The proper way to rebuild a Chevy short block. Hell, everyone wants to polute and make some useless noise sometimes.
The point is, there is a lot of knowledge that would be cool to pick off of a shelf, use once and throw away. Self guided learning is slow and expensive in time and effort. The point of the Borg system was that you don't learn just from the extremist, you learn from everyone.
What you've described as a solar generator is actually a solar sail. Why you don't put it together, I can't understand, because you even expound on the benefits of a solar sail later in the article. How will you keep the solar sail from blowing in the wind?
There's lots of evidence that global warming and cooling is determined more by Sun activity than anything happening on Earth. Today, you only dump and extra TW of energy into our atmosphere. But then energy gets so cheap that no one will see a reason to conserver anything. And other countries, not just the US, will want in on the game. Of course, as the Earth warms we will all want to crank up the air conditioning...which will require another solar generator, which will, warm the Earth even more...which will...
People are talking about saving the MegaFauna from being erased from the earth, and somehow you guys get personally offended.
It's nothing personal. Try to reintroduce these animals that died out is just a stupid idea. The extremely large animals died out because they were not fit to survive. Their breeding cycle was too damn slow for their environment. Their breeding cycle was great for their former environment, but that it a moot point, unless you consider humans to be unnatural.
I don't have to guess about "Shotgun's" thoughts on global warming.
My ideas about global warming is that I need to be just as concerned about it as I am about the next mega-earthquake and Earth killing asteroid, ie, I'm not hiding in my basement worrying about it. I don't polute and try to keep my car tuned because I abhor trying to live in a stinkin' cesspool.
I'd like to see elephants around. Just shield your eyes and pretend the offensive animals aren't there--
You've never been driving along and hit a deer have you? They are overruning the east coast (territory encroachment and restricted hunting). It'd be a little difficult to ignore rampaging elephants in the street.
it works with Global Warming, doesn't it?
Just like it works for the asteroids and the aliens that I'm sure you worry yourself over.
Is this the same crew who was pushing for reanimation of that wooly mammoth a while back?
If these animals died out 13,000 years ago, doesn't the secular world view this as a mistake on the part of natural selection? Are we really going to second-guess that?
You see, the thing you forget is that the mammoth was killed off by overhunting from pre-historic men. Since men aren't natural, expecially the prehistoric type, we have to undo anything they've done. The world has to exist as if men were never here, because men are evil and vile.
Death to the human race (except for me, of course) so that the world can be a natural place!!
IMO, it is vital to make homework not feel like homework in order to get children interested in their schooling again and combat their growing apathy.
Bullocks. How will you make the hamburger-flipping jobs they get after graduation not feel like hamburger-flipping? Will EA create a hamburger-flipping game to make minimum wage exciting. This is nothing but a total abdication of responsibility by the teacher organizations.
People need to get it through their thick skulls that success depends not on what happens to a person, but how they react to it. Apathy doesn't come from the homework being boring. It comes from the lack of a connection between the work and the real world. Teaching is the art/science of helping students make that connection, and then standing back while the student does the rest. Once the children discover that the games are pointless, the apathy will be just as deep. Except now we'll be further along the path of convincing ourselves that it is the world, not ourselves, that is screwed up, and that everything would be more exciting if we could just change the color of the virtual armor to make life not feel like work.
Dude, 1930 is calling. They want to tell you to wake the fuck up. They said you might want to pull your head out of your ass and look up the word 'fallow'
Farming converts vast tracts onto a monoculture completely replacing the natural environment. North America used to have vast amounts of grasslands and millions of Bison.
So we've replaced a vast monoculture with a vast monoculture. Forgive me if I don't get excited.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, intelligent people keep backups of important data ... ever wonder why you were laid off?
You know, intelligent people often get hit with several hardware failures all at once because they haven't upgraded anything in 3yrs (the security job was not my first resort after getting laid off). I still have all the data. I have the program. It was only the key that hit the great bit bucket in the sky.
Ask them for a licence key?
The answer is a clear and resounding NO!
I can guarantee that the ROI will be $0.
Governments are not businesses. They do not produce a product for sale. ROI (RETURN on investment) presupposes a return. Government has none that can be reliable measured in dollars.
If municipalities have to spend a few extra dollars today to insure that the data will be available two years form now, it will be money well spent (especially considering that they won't have to pay again to upgrade later).
I spent about 200hrs drawing my airplane in ProEngineer's "free" 3D CAD program, ProDesktop. Then they quit giving away the "free" version, and left me with a key that would keep the program working for 5-years. It was very kind of them, but I've lost the key and now I have several megs of very detailed and very useless CAD files.
At least now I can look forward to redrawing the design in an open format.
That said, I think that this is all a PR thing to get MS to lower their price. I don't believe that a government bureaucracy will make this step for real. Next thing you'll tell me that they've decided to run Linux.
Maybe so, but consider the long term effects. Mass. has now brought attention to the issue. Microsoft, like mildew, doesn't like to much light shined on them.
This time it is open file formats. Next time it will be code transparencies (to check for backdoors). The time after that will be a demand not to be forced into an upgrade. And just wait till all the other municipalities see it working and jump on the bandwagon, too. MS stock begins to slip, making stock option bonuses less attractive, causing MS to lose some of their top talent and emptying the coffers they use to buy other's technology and maintain their monopoly. The MS technology starts to slip, takes longer to deliver, Linux/Max/BSD/etc begin to look more attractive.
Look at it as an exponentially slippery slope, or a feedback loop. Microsoft is basically a one horse show, and the age of that horse is starting to show.
When I was laid off, I spent nearly a year working as a security guard. ProEngineer was giving away a 3D CAD program, ProDesktop, so I thought I'd use all that late night desk time to draw up my airplane.
...and all those Slashdotters claimed there wasn't a God.
Fast forward a few months, ProEngineer decides the giveaway didn't make them much money, so they kill the program. They were nice though, and gave all the current users a 5-year liscense key to use their current copy.
Fast forward a year. My laptop crashes, and I have to wipe and re-install. My ProDesktop key is gone. I now have several megs of very detailed and very useless drawings.
This is the reason that governments should be using open formats. Thank you, Massachusetts.
It's going to take a fair amount of genetic engineer to get those deer to be born with a transponder.
Maybe because the 3D operations take a lot more processing power than 2D. There isn't all that messy z-buffer interpolation and such on a 2D screen.
There comes a point where an algorithm is as optimized as it can ever be without losing information...the same way it works for compression. After 20yrs if intense development, 2D graphics have reached the point where adding transistors will not speed the process. 3D graphics are exponentially more difficult and require more transistors (and we haven't even finished adding all the features, let alone the optimizations, yet).
I'll believe a 3D pipe is faster than a 2D pipe on 2D graphics when I see the benchmarks.
Whoever it was has never had children. Some babies require quite a bit of coxing (sp?) before they understand what going on with that thing being shoved in their faces.
Just a counterpoint.
I visited the Fog-X factory once.
Lots of Mexicans chewing gum and spitting into bottles.
So you're laid off, along with all the other people in America that got hit by the DotBomb. The State has a program for you to get certifications as a part of your unemployment. Every job you see advertised specifically requests said certifications.
You may be prejudiced against a great many decent employees who've been struggling to do the best they could with what they were offered.
Problem number two: You're assuming cheap chinese takeout which may or may not work. I'm thinking that the well-paying IT job affords us to take a woman out for $200 sushi, not $20 chinese. Try it and be amazed at the difference; even if you have to order something that isn't raw fish --teriyaki chicken or something-- your date will feel special if you go to a nice place.
$200, just for a chance of getting laid?
Dude, if I have to fork over that much cash, then I'm setting the terms up front.
The original concorde had a failed business model (granted, noise regulation around some American airports didn't help).
No. The original business model of the Concorde was never tried. The original model was for Paris/London to Las Angelous,California (and I believe Houston, Texas) flight.
What happened was that Boeing, which did not have a supersonic carrier and did not want to lose the valuable transatlantic routes, bought a few Congresspeople and got a bill rammed through that forbade SS flight over the Continental US. Ignore the fact that a SS flight at altitude would barely make the sound of very distant thunder on the ground, the used terms like dangerous and shattering windows. You'd have to be in a very remote area to pick it out of background noise, but Boeing got everyone running scared of the vast destruction those horrendous sound waves would propogate.
The Paris/London to New York route was just barely profitable, but Concorde was looking to clean up on the premium it could charge for the longer route. It was Boeing that cooked its goose, AFTER the plane was commissioned.
Never say never.
Someone posted a story from one of the SR-71 test pilots just a few days ago to my local EAA chapter's mail list. The pilot was recanting a test in the early days of the test program, when the engine stall was still a major problem. His engine stall on a maneuver, and the result hard yaw put him into a spin.
To make a long story short, the wind forces shredded the airplane from around him and he landed with his ejection seat intact from an initial altitude of 78,000 ft. He gave a lot of credit to his altitude suit for saving his life. His co-pilot died with a broken neck before reaching the ground.
Is basically a story about amateurs using technology,
They're charging about $30 for the DVD, right? Doesn't that, by definition, disqualify them from amateur status?
Now imagine your knowledge being implanted at one time without a chance to challenge and discover for yourself. Clones.. Scary..
You have a point, but there are some things I just don't want to discover for myself.
-The proper way to configure an NIS+ domain. Who cares. I just want my desktop from any computer in the house.
-The intricacies of filling out income tax return form. Just tell me how much I have to pay so that I don't have to go to jail. OK. I already concede that I'm going to lose, and the rules will change so that I lose even more next year. Studying the tax code enough to constantly stay on top of it and win would take more time than if I just got a second job and paid in everything I earned.
-The proper way to do the Waltz, the Tango, and the Electric Slide. I just want the girls to think I'm way cool. I don't actually want to know how to dance.
-The proper way to rebuild a Chevy short block. Hell, everyone wants to polute and make some useless noise sometimes.
The point is, there is a lot of knowledge that would be cool to pick off of a shelf, use once and throw away. Self guided learning is slow and expensive in time and effort. The point of the Borg system was that you don't learn just from the extremist, you learn from everyone.
By the time slave labor was outlawed in the US, mechanization was already well on the way to making it an unproductive endeavor.
What you've described as a solar generator is actually a solar sail. Why you don't put it together, I can't understand, because you even expound on the benefits of a solar sail later in the article. How will you keep the solar sail from blowing in the wind?
There's lots of evidence that global warming and cooling is determined more by Sun activity than anything happening on Earth. Today, you only dump and extra TW of energy into our atmosphere. But then energy gets so cheap that no one will see a reason to conserver anything. And other countries, not just the US, will want in on the game. Of course, as the Earth warms we will all want to crank up the air conditioning...which will require another solar generator, which will, warm the Earth even more...which will...
People are talking about saving the MegaFauna from being erased from the earth, and somehow you guys get personally offended.
It's nothing personal. Try to reintroduce these animals that died out is just a stupid idea. The extremely large animals died out because they were not fit to survive. Their breeding cycle was too damn slow for their environment. Their breeding cycle was great for their former environment, but that it a moot point, unless you consider humans to be unnatural.
I don't have to guess about "Shotgun's" thoughts on global warming.
My ideas about global warming is that I need to be just as concerned about it as I am about the next mega-earthquake and Earth killing asteroid, ie, I'm not hiding in my basement worrying about it. I don't polute and try to keep my car tuned because I abhor trying to live in a stinkin' cesspool.
I'd like to see elephants around. Just shield your eyes and pretend the offensive animals aren't there--
You've never been driving along and hit a deer have you? They are overruning the east coast (territory encroachment and restricted hunting). It'd be a little difficult to ignore rampaging elephants in the street.
it works with Global Warming, doesn't it?
Just like it works for the asteroids and the aliens that I'm sure you worry yourself over.
Put a lion and a wolf or two in a pen. Don't add any food for a day or two. See which one survives after all the 'natural' hunting.
The only difference with a man in the mix, is that the man can see the food shortage coming, vs waiting for it to happen.
Eventually you will have to intervene...
Oh, my bad. So sorry.
It was actually 2000BC calling. They'd like you to look up the word 'farming'.
Is this the same crew who was pushing for reanimation of that wooly mammoth a while back?
If these animals died out 13,000 years ago, doesn't the secular world view this as a mistake on the part of natural selection? Are we really going to second-guess that?
You see, the thing you forget is that the mammoth was killed off by overhunting from pre-historic men. Since men aren't natural, expecially the prehistoric type, we have to undo anything they've done. The world has to exist as if men were never here, because men are evil and vile.
Death to the human race (except for me, of course) so that the world can be a natural place!!
That's funny. The picture I see on a buffalo nickle always looks like the second picture that you call a bison.
Why do people always try to show how smart they are by declaring it's invalid to use a word or name in the way a it's been used for a hundred years.
You say tomato, I say tamahto...get a life.
IMO, it is vital to make homework not feel like homework in order to get children interested in their schooling again and combat their growing apathy.
Bullocks. How will you make the hamburger-flipping jobs they get after graduation not feel like hamburger-flipping? Will EA create a hamburger-flipping game to make minimum wage exciting. This is nothing but a total abdication of responsibility by the teacher organizations.
People need to get it through their thick skulls that success depends not on what happens to a person, but how they react to it. Apathy doesn't come from the homework being boring. It comes from the lack of a connection between the work and the real world. Teaching is the art/science of helping students make that connection, and then standing back while the student does the rest. Once the children discover that the games are pointless, the apathy will be just as deep. Except now we'll be further along the path of convincing ourselves that it is the world, not ourselves, that is screwed up, and that everything would be more exciting if we could just change the color of the virtual armor to make life not feel like work.
No farm will sustain itself forever
Dude, 1930 is calling. They want to tell you to wake the fuck up. They said you might want to pull your head out of your ass and look up the word 'fallow'
Farming converts vast tracts onto a monoculture completely replacing the natural environment. North America used to have vast amounts of grasslands and millions of Bison.
So we've replaced a vast monoculture with a vast monoculture. Forgive me if I don't get excited.