After 16 years in the IT industry I got tired of contracting out to pointy haired bosses. So when the market crashed I left the industry and became a starving Nursing student this summer.
On one of my classes I turned in a paper one day late and the teacher got all hardcore and wanted to lower my grade from an A to a C. So I used my former $70/hr sales and programming skills to offer her a class web page if she would settle on a B. So she did and I did and that's how I kept my GPA up this summer. Took me just a few hours work and I photoshopped her picture to make her look fatter (Ha HA!)
Allen Varney writes "According to a story on EurekAlert, an arXiv preprint server paper titled 'Scattering of atoms on a Bose-Einstein Condensate' reports that atoms striking a BEC sometimes appears to leave before they enter.
Umm, If you actually read the article you'd find out that it was a theoreical study, a prediction, rather then an actual observation.
Actual observations of this mathematicaly predicted phenomonen have yet to occur.
The science was WAY out of the league for 99% of all/. users - myself included - fortunately I understood the first paragraph:)
The Segway is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Imagine getting hit by someone running at 12 mph...
The company's marketing strategy is doomed to fail. If they succeed in getting the Segway approved on the sidewalk then they'll be sued out of business their first couple years of operation.
One of teh other posters had it right - it makes sense for the Segway to be used in the bike lane.
Unfortunately corporate greed says "Hey - if we get this thing approved on the sidewalk then we'll sell a lot more to people afraid of riding in the street". Just the kind of people you want rolling up behind you on the sidewalk at 12 mph.
The Segway is doomed just like all the greedy dotcoms were. Pass on this one's stock IMHO.
OK First dirty secret (more to come)..... I'm over 40 (but not by much!)
I've been coding professionally since '86 (non professionally since I was 13 - can you say "hacker" on a PDP-8S;) )
I've coded via contracts for Wells Fargo, Boeing and Intel. I've worked for Borland and Nantucket (remember them ). A year and a half ago my going rate was $65-$70 and hour and I've been pulling in 10K-12K a month for the last two years I've been contracting.
Now here's my second dirty secret: For the last nine months I haven't been able to get a programming job to save my life! I'm actually on unemployment now - the first time since '92 (!!) and I've now been unemployed for the longest period in my entire life
The contracts I priced out on at $70 an hour are now paying $30-$35 for a senior developer position! and I can't even get those because of the influx of overseas programmers and younger ones who would be willing to do it for $20-25 an hour!
I had a Corvette last year and had to sell it to pay the rent (Yeah I know don't cry for me Argentina ). I had to move out of my nice 2 bedroom apartment in L.A. and into a weekly hotel (Ibid). Well I've been poor before so it's cool....but I really would like the 'Vette back:(.
Now here's my third dirty little secret.... I've just said f*ck it last month and decided to get out of the profession. I used to be a paramedic way back when so I signed up at the local community college and in two semesters I'll be a nursing assistant and EMT and in three years I'll be an RN - I'd like to do Emergency Room work. Maybe I'll go on to get a P.A after that I suppose.
But the point is that it's friggin hard for a 40+ year old coder to get a job in todays market. WHen I heard the same story from people back around 5 or 6 years ago I though "What a bunch of whining lusers!"
Now I are one:(
The freaking establishment has suceeded via blatent lies about a shortage of programmers and an overabundence of programming work visas to drive the salary levels down to ONE HALF of what they were 18 months ago. It is NO coincidence that the job market crash happenned within ONE YEAR of the new programming visa "reforms".
So I go back to college for a new carreer...it's all good...
One last dirty secret though.... While I'm waiting for the summer semester to begin I've stocked up on Jolt Cola and O'Reilly Books. I'm learning Internet protocols and some linux. Now that I'm not burning up my brain writing useless software for fatcat corps I have a few ideas of my own about some communications software that maybe I can market.
It's a scam. There are engineering and metelurgical reasons why subs have he shapes that they have. The large portal windows seals for one thing wouldn't stand the pressure at the depth the sub claims to go.
One clue to the scam is that there is no actual sub just "artist's conceptions". Another is that for someone seling a 78 million dollar product, their website design is amateurish.
Gotta love the internet though...the web of a million lies...
Obscurity is the first line of defense. The building is unmarked, its address unspecified in company literature and its managers tight-lipped about disclosing driving directions or identifying markings to strangers.
Gosh....then maybe they should take this ( http://www.verisign-grs.com/partner.html ) cocktail party invitation down from their web site?
VeriSign Registrar Partner Reception: A cocktail party to showcase VeriSign's Network Operations Center (NOC). VeriSign will provide tours of our NOC, complimentary beverages and heavy appetizers will be served.
Date: Friday, February 15th Time: 7:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. ET Location: VeriSign Network Operations Center 21345 Ridgetop Circle Sterling, VA 20166 Dress: Business Casual
Complimentary transportation will be provided by VeriSign. A bus will pick up guests in front of the Dulles Marriott at 7:00 pm ET. Return transportation will leave VeriSign facilities at 9:30pm ET.
R.S.V.P. to cbinko@verisign.com or Tel. +1-703-948-3877.
Now that we've all sucessfully complained to Google to right this wrong it would be great for future problems like this if we wrote them something supportive for doing the right thing in the end.
>People who only accept PayPal are likely to be >trouble because they know that there can't be a >USPS inspector knocking on their door if they >exclude that mechanisim for payment.
I must disagree. I *only* accept Paypal because:
1. I'm a verified Paypal member and the customer is fully protected. The customer can request and receive a FULL chargeback from paypall if I do not ship merchandise.
2. It's fast and I know there will be no BS regarding payment.
I was especially concerned in reading the article to see that AMD is requiring board/bios makers to NOT display the chip speed on startup.
I was all set to go AMD in the next month or so in my next machine but with this kind of thinking I might as well stay Intel... better the devil you know then....
Re:Never send in a nice guy t do a Woman's job....
on
Super Hard Steel
·
· Score: 1
You have diverted from the main point
From the orignal press reease release (helps to read the linked articles):
Branagan sees the possibilities for coatings like his to be nearly endless because all areas of industry experience wear and corrosion problems.....Over the next year, Branagan will work with a range of industrial partners to conduct proof-of-concept tests, putting his coating through extensive erosion, corrosion, and fatigue testing.
This is where it gets fun. You're confusing hardness or strength (they ARE interchangable ask ASM or your favorite Mechanics of Materials textbook), and Toughness. Toughness is the ability of a material to resist cracking, or if you prefer how brittle it is.
Asking ASM as you suggest is dufficult because that website that you posted contains no facility at all for such definitions. I do not understand why you referred me to it.
However this materials site:
http://web.singnet.com.sg/~elite74/Glossary.htm
Clearly defines hardness as :
The measure of a material's resistance to deformation by surface indentation or by abrasion.
You will note there is no reference to structural stregnth here as you suggest.
Further more a simple search of that page will reveal that several definitions givin clearly differentiate between the terms hardness and strength by using them as follows:
Overaging.:During precipitation hardening, aging beyond the point at which strength and hardness are at their maxima.
Additionally, the second link that gave to support your argument was merely a link to Powells Book Store providing a list of books about Engineering and their prices which has nothing at all to do with the definitions of hardness or strength
SO I am afraid that, dispite the useless links that you posted the terms hardness and strength are clearly two different things.
I am sorry but clearly you are wrong and were just posting wild goose chase links in an effort to cover this up. As an Engineer, and I can see clearly that you are not, I tend to follow up on such things when warrented - which I can also see they no longer are.
My original assertion still stands, that the article was innacurate in maintaining that a "stronger steel" has been created - it was merely a harder coating bonded to steel.
>The nanotechnology in question is the production >of nanoscale materials. But it can also refer to >the thermal spray process which is used to form >the nanoscale materials.
Just because something has the prefix "nano" in it does not mean it is related to nano technology. Whereas nanotechnology concerns itself with the manufacture of ultra small machines, both the article and the links that you provided merely refer to the production of nonometer sized particles used as a coating. This is not nanotechnology.
>As far as hardness and strength. They harder a >material is the stronger it is.
I am afraid that you are incorrect. Diamonds for examply are incredibly hard but are also extremely brittle and hence are not used in places where structural strength is required.
>Yeah I would say this is front page stuff. >Getting a metal to come near the theoretical >ideal in strength is pretty impressive
I agree. Unfortunately the actual article made no such claims. They did not invent a stronger steel. They merely invented an extremely durable coating which bonds to steel. Sort of like a "super paint" actually.
The lead in story here contains some innacuracies:(
1. The actual press release mentions nothing about nanotechnology, it simply mentions units of size as follows:
Alternatively, for specific applications researchers can heat the coating to create a stable structure made up of crystal grains from 2 to 75 nanometers in size, only slightly larger than a single atom. "This approach is a much more robust route to forming nanoscale crystalline structure...."
2. The process does make steel harder but only in the sense that it makes the **surface of the steel** harder via a bonded coating. The process does not make the steel structurally stronger according to the article. It just makes for corrosion resistence and such.
Ummm I've never modded anything here or voted but is this really front page stuff???
Actually fairly recently both measurements of space-time dragging effectsas well as the accretion disk around several black holes. Plus the BH at the center of our galaxy has recently been pinpointed by observing several start orbiting around it waiting to be gobbled up. This pretty much makes them an observational reality
Not only is this article completely true but did you know the FCC i strying to put a tax on modems again??! Not only that but if you get an email that says "Open Me Now" it will destroy your hard drive if you read it?
I saw this stupid joke on the internet several years ago something called "how to make an atomic bomd out of household materials". It was supposed to be a parody of an Amateur Scientist article in SciAm. And now some joker sold it to Reader's digest??? I hope they paid him a lot - he deserves it?
FPGAs aren't new. It is the new uses that are noteworthy.
You're right of course...I wasn't making myself clear. It's not the FPGA devices which I doubt but rather the alleged cpapbilities of the Starbridge computers. Smells like too much hype...seems like too little (if any ) product.
The Moeller Flying car allegedly uses a Wankel engine in a new way....they keep getting a dribble of investors...but the cars never get off the ground.:(
This is the third article in a month on these FPGA devices and as yet I haven't heard of one actual real world device. Apparently the initial press release sent out regarding the "supercomputer" sent to NASA was frought with...well let's be kind and say "forward thinking" ideas.
I've been seeing this FPGA hype for a few of years now but nothing's ever seems to come of it - unlike Transmeta which out out product within a few years of the initial hype.
I'm remimded of the "Moeller Flying Car Company" which has been around for nearly 30 years now, puts out massive press releases every 5 years or so and draws a steady stream of investors - and yet never seems to (literally) get off the ground.
Hmmmmmmm.......
That this is not new! A monkey brain transplant was conducted back in the 70's or 80's. But afterwards, no follow up research was done because of the "moral" implications. I saw footage from the opperation on The Learning Channel like two years ago!
This guy's right! I saw that too!
Furthermore the brain stayed alive for more then just a little while after the original operation and in point of fact Rush Limbaugh is still alive and well today.
>Is there any place I can find cookie cutter IT >contracts online that I could start using to >protect myself?
Yes there is!
I couldn't recommend more the following series of books by Nolo Press. Check out these links from them:
http://www.nolopress.com/product/ic_sub85.html
http://www.nolopress.com/product/tc_sub8.html
Worth their weight in gold...and oh yes...corporations are (generally) soulless (and IMHO evil) entities run by people who put profit above the good of any one person other then themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
After 16 years in the IT industry I got tired of contracting out to pointy haired bosses. So when the market crashed I left the industry and became a starving Nursing student this summer.
On one of my classes I turned in a paper one day late and the teacher got all hardcore and wanted to lower my grade from an A to a C. So I used my former $70/hr sales and programming skills to offer her a class web page if she would settle on a B. So she did and I did and that's how I kept my GPA up this summer. Took me just a few hours work and I photoshopped her picture to make her look fatter (Ha HA!)
It means.....
You better start polishing up your resume *NOW*
Umm, If you actually read the article you'd find out that it was a theoreical study, a prediction, rather then an actual observation.
Actual observations of this mathematicaly predicted phenomonen have yet to occur.
The science was WAY out of the league for 99% of all /. users - myself included - fortunately I understood the first paragraph :)
Bad /. article - NO Doughnut :(
Check out www.technogirls.org . Barbara is an Anime Goddess and can hook you up with whatever you want. Trust me!
The Segway is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Imagine getting hit by someone running at 12 mph...
The company's marketing strategy is doomed to fail. If they succeed in getting the Segway approved on the sidewalk then they'll be sued out of business their first couple years of operation.
One of teh other posters had it right - it makes sense for the Segway to be used in the bike lane.
Unfortunately corporate greed says "Hey - if we get this thing approved on the sidewalk then we'll sell a lot more to people afraid of riding in the street". Just the kind of people you want rolling up behind you on the sidewalk at 12 mph.
The Segway is doomed just like all the greedy dotcoms were. Pass on this one's stock IMHO.
OK First dirty secret (more to come).....
;) )
....but I really would like the 'Vette back :( .
:(
I'm over 40 (but not by much!)
I've been coding professionally since '86 (non professionally since I was 13 - can you say "hacker" on a PDP-8S
I've coded via contracts for Wells Fargo, Boeing and Intel. I've worked for Borland and Nantucket (remember them ). A year and a half ago my going rate was $65-$70 and hour and I've been pulling in 10K-12K a month for the last two years I've been contracting.
Now here's my second dirty secret:
For the last nine months I haven't been able to get a programming job to save my life! I'm actually on unemployment now - the first time since '92 (!!) and I've now been unemployed for the longest period in my entire life
The contracts I priced out on at $70 an hour are now paying $30-$35 for a senior developer position! and I can't even get those because of the influx of overseas programmers and younger ones who would be willing to do it for $20-25 an hour!
I had a Corvette last year and had to sell it to pay the rent (Yeah I know don't cry for me Argentina ). I had to move out of my nice 2 bedroom apartment in L.A. and into a weekly hotel (Ibid). Well I've been poor before so it's cool
Now here's my third dirty little secret....
I've just said f*ck it last month and decided to get out of the profession. I used to be a paramedic way back when so I signed up at the local community college and in two semesters I'll
be a nursing assistant and EMT and in three years I'll be an RN - I'd like to do Emergency Room work. Maybe I'll go on to get a P.A after that I suppose.
But the point is that it's friggin hard for a 40+ year old coder to get a job in todays market. WHen I heard the same story from people back around 5 or 6 years ago I though "What a bunch of whining lusers!"
Now I are one
The freaking establishment has suceeded via blatent lies about a shortage of programmers and an overabundence of programming work visas to drive the salary levels down to ONE HALF of what they were 18 months ago. It is NO coincidence that the job market crash happenned within ONE YEAR of the new programming visa "reforms".
So I go back to college for a new carreer...it's all good...
One last dirty secret though....
While I'm waiting for the summer semester to begin I've stocked up on Jolt Cola and O'Reilly Books. I'm learning Internet protocols and some linux. Now that I'm not burning up my brain writing useless software for fatcat corps I have a few ideas of my own about some communications software that maybe I can market.
I want my Corvette back Damn it !!
It's a scam. There are engineering and metelurgical reasons why subs have he shapes that they have. The large portal windows seals for one thing wouldn't stand the pressure at the depth the sub claims to go.
One clue to the scam is that there is no actual sub just "artist's conceptions". Another is that for someone seling a 78 million dollar product, their website design is amateurish.
Gotta love the internet though...the web of a million lies...
WoW!
Can't get into either my email or personal prefs in yahoo. First time this has happenned - the power of Slashdot!
Gosh....then maybe they should take this ( http://www.verisign-grs.com/partner.html ) cocktail party invitation down from their web site?
VeriSign Registrar Partner Reception: A cocktail party to showcase VeriSign's Network Operations Center (NOC). VeriSign will provide tours of our NOC, complimentary beverages and heavy appetizers will be served.
Date: Friday, February 15th
Time: 7:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. ET
Location:
VeriSign Network Operations Center
21345 Ridgetop Circle
Sterling, VA 20166
Dress: Business Casual
Complimentary transportation will be provided by VeriSign. A bus will pick up guests in front of the Dulles Marriott at 7:00 pm ET. Return transportation will leave VeriSign facilities at 9:30pm ET.
R.S.V.P. to cbinko@verisign.com or Tel. +1-703-948-3877.
Now that we've all sucessfully complained to Google to right this wrong it would be great for future problems like this if we wrote them something supportive for doing the right thing in the end.
OK, Since you liked this I'll admit that the Anonymous coward was me
Sorry, I just couldn;t resist.
>People who only accept PayPal are likely to be >trouble because they know that there can't be a >USPS inspector knocking on their door if they >exclude that mechanisim for payment.
I must disagree. I *only* accept Paypal because:
1. I'm a verified Paypal member and the customer is fully protected. The customer can request and receive a FULL chargeback from paypall if I do not ship merchandise.
2. It's fast and I know there will be no BS regarding payment.
What??
:(
x t
You mean that you haven't read the entire script yet?
And you call yourself a Geek
Available here:
www.btinternet.com/~harrymudd/imudd/BrokenBow.t
I was especially concerned in reading the article to see that AMD is requiring board/bios makers to NOT display the chip speed on startup.
....
I was all set to go AMD in the next month or so in my next machine but with this kind of thinking I might as well stay Intel... better the devil you know then
From the orignal press reease release (helps to read the linked articles):
Branagan sees the possibilities for coatings like his to be nearly endless because all areas of industry experience wear and corrosion problems. ....Over the next year, Branagan will work with a range of industrial partners to conduct proof-of-concept tests, putting his coating through extensive erosion, corrosion, and fatigue testing.
Asking ASM as you suggest is dufficult because that website that you posted contains no facility at all for such definitions. I do not understand why you referred me to it.
However this materials site:
http://web.singnet.com.sg/~elite74/Glossary.htm
Clearly defines hardness as :
The measure of a material's resistance to deformation by surface indentation or by abrasion.
You will note there is no reference to structural stregnth here as you suggest.
Further more a simple search of that page will reveal that several definitions givin clearly differentiate between the terms hardness and strength by using them as follows:
Overaging.:During precipitation hardening, aging beyond the point at which strength and hardness are at their maxima.
Additionally, the second link that gave to support your argument was merely a link to Powells Book Store providing a list of books about Engineering and their prices which has nothing at all to do with the definitions of hardness or strength
SO I am afraid that, dispite the useless links that you posted the terms hardness and strength are clearly two different things.
I am sorry but clearly you are wrong and were just posting wild goose chase links in an effort to cover this up. As an Engineer, and I can see clearly that you are not, I tend to follow up on such things when warrented - which I can also see they no longer are.
My original assertion still stands, that the article was innacurate in maintaining that a "stronger steel" has been created - it was merely a harder coating bonded to steel.
>The nanotechnology in question is the production >of nanoscale materials. But it can also refer to >the thermal spray process which is used to form >the nanoscale materials.
Just because something has the prefix "nano" in it does not mean it is related to nano technology. Whereas nanotechnology concerns itself with the manufacture of ultra small machines, both the article and the links that you provided merely refer to the production of nonometer sized particles used as a coating. This is not nanotechnology.
>As far as hardness and strength. They harder a >material is the stronger it is.
I am afraid that you are incorrect. Diamonds for examply are incredibly hard but are also extremely brittle and hence are not used in places where structural strength is required.
>Yeah I would say this is front page stuff. >Getting a metal to come near the theoretical >ideal in strength is pretty impressive
I agree. Unfortunately the actual article made no such claims. They did not invent a stronger steel. They merely invented an extremely durable coating which bonds to steel. Sort of like a "super paint" actually.
The lead in story here contains some innacuracies :(
...."
1. The actual press release mentions nothing about nanotechnology, it simply mentions units of size as follows:
Alternatively, for specific applications researchers can heat the coating to create a stable structure made up of crystal grains from 2 to 75 nanometers in size, only slightly larger than a single atom. "This approach is a much more robust route to forming nanoscale crystalline structure
2. The process does make steel harder but only in the sense that it makes the **surface of the steel** harder via a bonded coating. The process does not make the steel structurally stronger according to the article. It just makes for corrosion resistence and such.
Ummm I've never modded anything here or voted but is this really front page stuff???
"Engage Scott!...Ohhh Scott...Scott make it so...MAKE IT SO! OHhh!"
Actually fairly recently both measurements of space-time dragging effectsas well as the accretion disk around several black holes. Plus the BH at the center of our galaxy has recently been pinpointed by observing several start orbiting around it waiting to be gobbled up. This pretty much makes them an observational reality
s .h tml
m l
/ ou r_black_hole_000920.html
You can find the articles here:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/1997/blackhole
and here:
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/blackhole/release.ht
and here:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy
Not only is this article completely true but did you know the FCC i strying to put a tax on modems again??! Not only that but if you get an email that says "Open Me Now" it will destroy your hard drive if you read it?
I saw this stupid joke on the internet several years ago something called "how to make an atomic bomd out of household materials". It was supposed to be a parody of an Amateur Scientist article in SciAm. And now some joker sold it to Reader's digest??? I hope they paid him a lot - he deserves it?
You're right of course...I wasn't making myself clear. It's not the FPGA devices which I doubt but rather the alleged cpapbilities of the Starbridge computers. Smells like too much hype...seems like too little (if any ) product.
The Moeller Flying car allegedly uses a Wankel engine in a new way....they keep getting a dribble of investors...but the cars never get off the ground.
This is the third article in a month on these FPGA devices and as yet I haven't heard of one actual real world device. Apparently the initial press release sent out regarding the "supercomputer" sent to NASA was frought with ...well let's be kind and say "forward thinking" ideas.
I've been seeing this FPGA hype for a few of years now but nothing's ever seems to come of it - unlike Transmeta which out out product within a few years of the initial hype.
I'm remimded of the "Moeller Flying Car Company" which has been around for nearly 30 years now, puts out massive press releases every 5 years or so and draws a steady stream of investors - and yet never seems to (literally) get off the ground.
Hmmmmmmm.......
This guy's right! I saw that too!
Furthermore the brain stayed alive for more then just a little while after the original operation and in point of fact Rush Limbaugh is still alive and well today.
>Is there any place I can find cookie cutter IT >contracts online that I could start using to >protect myself?
Yes there is!
I couldn't recommend more the following series of books by Nolo Press. Check out these links from them:
http://www.nolopress.com/product/ic_sub85.html
http://www.nolopress.com/product/tc_sub8.html
Worth their weight in gold...and oh yes...corporations are (generally) soulless (and IMHO evil) entities run by people who put profit above the good of any one person other then themselves.