Just some back of the napkin calculations: So with 44 chanels (4.7% of the spectrum) they could host 575 callers. If they had the 59.7% of the spectrum allocated to TV, they could have hosted around 650 channels, which, by extension would support about 8000 callers. In New York City, a city with more than 7 million people in 1940. So, no, we couldn't have had everyone using cell phones in the 1940's even without FCC meddling. *AT BEST* it would have increased the cellphone user base from 0.01% of the population to 0.11% of the population. Without the geographic cells and spectrum switching tech that AT&T brought about in the 1980s, cell phones would have remained toys of the very wealthy and lucky.
It's pretty simple... Most software users don't see the software as an abstract thing that can be better or worse, they see it as a tool they use to perform a task. Their goal isn't to use the software, it's to get their task done, and any change to the software (even a small one that benefits lots of other people) means that they will have to invest time in learning this new feature, which will take away from the time that they have to do the task that they want to get done.
It's a pretty straight forward calculation: I use Word to write school reports. I don't care that adding a step to the save dialog which other users (or even me) to do things in a more "logical" fashion. I've got my process, and I've probably even got some procedure in place to deal with the "inefficiency" that this new feature fixes. So if you make that change, then suddenly my old process will stop working, and i'll have to take an unplanned hour or two out of my day to learn how to use this new feature that you've implemented, when I was already on a time crunch for the thing I was doing. Sure, maybe your new feature will save me 8 hours over the course of the year, but the short term impact to my schedule is *really* frustrating.
And now that we know how you feel about podcasts, have you heard of this "Twitter" thing? or "Facebook"? I keep hearing people talk about them, and I'm thinking it might be a big new thing...
I like the idea of suing people who sit on their patents without bringing them to market, but yeah, this was solely the driver's fault, not Apple's.
I would imagine it's been tested in court, but since Patents are intended to protect the ability of the inventor to sell their invention, why aren't patents that the inventor fails to bring to market within a reasonable time inherently invalidated? What's the rationale behind allowing companies to sit on patents that they aren't actively marketing?
TFA doesn't seem to have anything to do with Scrum, except to say that they don't like it, and are proposing a working group be gathered from Open Source developers to come up with something to replace it.
I've never been at a company that actually "does" scrum, they all just use Scrum, and Kanban and Toyota Lean, and Continuous Deployment and 100 other buzzwords in various combinations. Rallying against Scrum is like complaining about companies using YAML instead of JSON in their config files for their Enterprise CRM system. It's missing the whole point, and nitpicking at what's probably the least important part of the whole process.
Generally, yes, but Methane has a far stronger Greenhouse Effect (IR Radiation absorption rate) than Carbon Dioxide. If we can convert the methane into CO2, that's actually probably going to reduce overall global warming.
There are basically two things that make a job pay well: Rarity of the skill, and complexity of the task. Back in the day, computer programmers were a very obscure and rare trade. Nobody knew much about the arcane inner workings of computers, so the few people who did know something about it were able to extract a good hefty paycheck without having to do anything particularly complex.
However, now there's a flood of people on the market who are reasonably well informed as to how to make a computer do what they want. 100 line C programs can be cranked out by outsourced Chinese workers for pennies on the dollar. You can probably even find a college intern to do it for free if all you want is someone to read a spec, and produce code that works. So, "simple" programming is not well paying anymore.
Now, if you want a career with reasonable pay, you have to start tackling the "complex" tasks. Sure, writing thread locking is fun and all, but nobody really cares how your semaphore code is working, what they care about is whether the website properly shows your profile picture on the next screen after you upload a new one, and that their 600 friends all see the new picture in their stream too within a minute. That's not a "simple problem" so if you want good pay, that's the kind of problem that you're going to be asked to tackle.
I don't think I would say "Enthusiast Computing" are limited to people who upgrade their processor to the latest and greatest every 6 months. I would rather call those folks "PC Game Enthusiasts". I would call Enthusiast Computing things more like building Beagle Bone/Raspberry Pi clusters, or people doing more interesting things than just installing new motherboards constantly.
Whew, I'm glad we managed to get everyone to switch off of memory-leaking and CPU intensive Flash stuff over to standards compliant HTML5 and JavaScript then!
*shrug* my current plan is actually to spend some quality time figuring out how to use Ruby this summer. Though to be fair, I'm skipping Rails and going straight to Sinatra.
When?
I think it's interesting how BB touts to it's developers that 90% of it's users upgrade to the newest OS within a month of it's release. The reason seems to be because they can't download any good apps for it, so they're desperately hoping to get some functionality out of the Base OS.
Which is a good part of the reason that dieting and exercise are so hard to get into for a lot of people. We have deeply ingrained evolutionary drives to eat whatever food is available to us, and conserve our calories as much as possible, because as animals, we never knew when our next meal would be available, so you darn well better eat as much of that deer carcass as you can before it goes bad, or some bigger predator tries to take it from you.
Actually, drone planes are the first step in making sure that we don't even need unskilled workers for fighting wars. We'll have Robotic cannon fodder.
You have apparently never been to Los Angeles.
The 110 Freeway (Pasadena Freeway) is one of the oldest freeways in the country, and was designed before "on ramps" were really a thing. At one point, there is literally a stop sign on the on ramp:
http://maps.google.com/?ll=34.092524,-118.206208&spn=0.00122,0.001446&t=h&z=20
I think that fraud has to include some element of secrecy. Gerrymandering is not secretive, it's practiced openly, and in full public view. The voting district lines are available to anyone who wanders in to your county offices.
Don't like my medical advice? Fine, go somewhere else. Seems perfectly reasonable and rational. If I were these doctors, I wouldn't want to feel responsible for the health of a child whose parents were demonstrably not interested in keeping their child healthy.
(In some varieties of English 'object lesson' is used.) This idiom is Indian English
So given that it was an article about US government, it's fair to assume that the writer was trying to use American English idioms, rather than Indian English ones.
Sure, $10-$15k may be "the cheapest part of running a datacenter", but for someone starting a new business, bootstrapping themselves up, A $10-$15k up front expense can be pretty prohibitive. Let's say you buy a pair of $4000 servers, (Web and DB) and drop them in a colo charging somewhere around $700-$1000 a month. With open source software, you can be up and working on about 10 grand initial investment, plus $1000 a month. After the first year, you're at $22k. Now, Let's look at microsoft licensing: SQL Server Web is ~$4.5k per processor, plus $1k for the OS so my dual core DB machine is $10k up front. The web server is cheaper, ~$500 up front for the OS, and that includes IIS. Then add in two Developers with MSDN Professional, Microsoft list price of $1,200 each ($800 might be possible with "volume licensing", but probably not for 2 developers) and you're looking at a total of $13k.
So: to sum up, Open source/free tools: $10k first month, $21k for a year. $33k for a second year, and $45k for a third year. Microsoft toolstack: $23k for the first month, $34k for the year, $46k for the second year, $58k for the third. So, basically, buying Microsoft for a small shop ends up costing you about 1 year of your hosting budget.
And sure, forums with the MS Professionals are useful, but as a secondary form of documentation. When I'm the only person at my shop, and I'm trying to solve a problem, if I have to pause my dev process for 2 days to wait for a response, that's cutting 1% off of my profit margin.
Slashdot Mirror
"The majority of humans read silently by rendering a simulation of the printed words as if they were being spoken."
Wait? Seriously? That sounds awful! How do you get through a whole book that way?
Just some back of the napkin calculations: So with 44 chanels (4.7% of the spectrum) they could host 575 callers. If they had the 59.7% of the spectrum allocated to TV, they could have hosted around 650 channels, which, by extension would support about 8000 callers. In New York City, a city with more than 7 million people in 1940. So, no, we couldn't have had everyone using cell phones in the 1940's even without FCC meddling. *AT BEST* it would have increased the cellphone user base from 0.01% of the population to 0.11% of the population. Without the geographic cells and spectrum switching tech that AT&T brought about in the 1980s, cell phones would have remained toys of the very wealthy and lucky.
It's pretty simple... Most software users don't see the software as an abstract thing that can be better or worse, they see it as a tool they use to perform a task. Their goal isn't to use the software, it's to get their task done, and any change to the software (even a small one that benefits lots of other people) means that they will have to invest time in learning this new feature, which will take away from the time that they have to do the task that they want to get done.
It's a pretty straight forward calculation: I use Word to write school reports. I don't care that adding a step to the save dialog which other users (or even me) to do things in a more "logical" fashion. I've got my process, and I've probably even got some procedure in place to deal with the "inefficiency" that this new feature fixes. So if you make that change, then suddenly my old process will stop working, and i'll have to take an unplanned hour or two out of my day to learn how to use this new feature that you've implemented, when I was already on a time crunch for the thing I was doing. Sure, maybe your new feature will save me 8 hours over the course of the year, but the short term impact to my schedule is *really* frustrating.
And now that we know how you feel about podcasts, have you heard of this "Twitter" thing? or "Facebook"? I keep hearing people talk about them, and I'm thinking it might be a big new thing...
I like the idea of suing people who sit on their patents without bringing them to market, but yeah, this was solely the driver's fault, not Apple's.
I would imagine it's been tested in court, but since Patents are intended to protect the ability of the inventor to sell their invention, why aren't patents that the inventor fails to bring to market within a reasonable time inherently invalidated? What's the rationale behind allowing companies to sit on patents that they aren't actively marketing?
TFA doesn't seem to have anything to do with Scrum, except to say that they don't like it, and are proposing a working group be gathered from Open Source developers to come up with something to replace it. I've never been at a company that actually "does" scrum, they all just use Scrum, and Kanban and Toyota Lean, and Continuous Deployment and 100 other buzzwords in various combinations. Rallying against Scrum is like complaining about companies using YAML instead of JSON in their config files for their Enterprise CRM system. It's missing the whole point, and nitpicking at what's probably the least important part of the whole process.
Generally, yes, but Methane has a far stronger Greenhouse Effect (IR Radiation absorption rate) than Carbon Dioxide. If we can convert the methane into CO2, that's actually probably going to reduce overall global warming.
There are basically two things that make a job pay well: Rarity of the skill, and complexity of the task. Back in the day, computer programmers were a very obscure and rare trade. Nobody knew much about the arcane inner workings of computers, so the few people who did know something about it were able to extract a good hefty paycheck without having to do anything particularly complex. However, now there's a flood of people on the market who are reasonably well informed as to how to make a computer do what they want. 100 line C programs can be cranked out by outsourced Chinese workers for pennies on the dollar. You can probably even find a college intern to do it for free if all you want is someone to read a spec, and produce code that works. So, "simple" programming is not well paying anymore. Now, if you want a career with reasonable pay, you have to start tackling the "complex" tasks. Sure, writing thread locking is fun and all, but nobody really cares how your semaphore code is working, what they care about is whether the website properly shows your profile picture on the next screen after you upload a new one, and that their 600 friends all see the new picture in their stream too within a minute. That's not a "simple problem" so if you want good pay, that's the kind of problem that you're going to be asked to tackle.
I have lots of electric fans in my house... They're not very quiet.
The plastic dust is probably what makes up the Plastiglomerate
I don't think I would say "Enthusiast Computing" are limited to people who upgrade their processor to the latest and greatest every 6 months. I would rather call those folks "PC Game Enthusiasts". I would call Enthusiast Computing things more like building Beagle Bone/Raspberry Pi clusters, or people doing more interesting things than just installing new motherboards constantly.
Whew, I'm glad we managed to get everyone to switch off of memory-leaking and CPU intensive Flash stuff over to standards compliant HTML5 and JavaScript then!
I was trying to draw on my OpenGL 1.x knowledge a few months ago when building an Android app... Damn, OpenGL has changed a lot since 1999 :)
*shrug* my current plan is actually to spend some quality time figuring out how to use Ruby this summer. Though to be fair, I'm skipping Rails and going straight to Sinatra.
I have yet to meet anyone who admits to having used BBM...
When? I think it's interesting how BB touts to it's developers that 90% of it's users upgrade to the newest OS within a month of it's release. The reason seems to be because they can't download any good apps for it, so they're desperately hoping to get some functionality out of the Base OS.
Which is a good part of the reason that dieting and exercise are so hard to get into for a lot of people. We have deeply ingrained evolutionary drives to eat whatever food is available to us, and conserve our calories as much as possible, because as animals, we never knew when our next meal would be available, so you darn well better eat as much of that deer carcass as you can before it goes bad, or some bigger predator tries to take it from you.
Actually, drone planes are the first step in making sure that we don't even need unskilled workers for fighting wars. We'll have Robotic cannon fodder.
You have apparently never been to Los Angeles. The 110 Freeway (Pasadena Freeway) is one of the oldest freeways in the country, and was designed before "on ramps" were really a thing. At one point, there is literally a stop sign on the on ramp: http://maps.google.com/?ll=34.092524,-118.206208&spn=0.00122,0.001446&t=h&z=20
I think that fraud has to include some element of secrecy. Gerrymandering is not secretive, it's practiced openly, and in full public view. The voting district lines are available to anyone who wanders in to your county offices.
Fortunately, for every 2cm of ocean rise, the manatees get roughly 32 square centimeters more of surface to breath at...
Don't like my medical advice? Fine, go somewhere else. Seems perfectly reasonable and rational. If I were these doctors, I wouldn't want to feel responsible for the health of a child whose parents were demonstrably not interested in keeping their child healthy.
If only there weren't a half dozen other companies like Xamarin, Appcelerator and PhoneGap already doing the same thing, this might be impressive.
From the site you linked to:
(In some varieties of English 'object lesson' is used.)
This idiom is Indian English
So given that it was an article about US government, it's fair to assume that the writer was trying to use American English idioms, rather than Indian English ones.
Sure, $10-$15k may be "the cheapest part of running a datacenter", but for someone starting a new business, bootstrapping themselves up, A $10-$15k up front expense can be pretty prohibitive. Let's say you buy a pair of $4000 servers, (Web and DB) and drop them in a colo charging somewhere around $700-$1000 a month. With open source software, you can be up and working on about 10 grand initial investment, plus $1000 a month. After the first year, you're at $22k. Now, Let's look at microsoft licensing: SQL Server Web is ~$4.5k per processor, plus $1k for the OS so my dual core DB machine is $10k up front. The web server is cheaper, ~$500 up front for the OS, and that includes IIS. Then add in two Developers with MSDN Professional, Microsoft list price of $1,200 each ($800 might be possible with "volume licensing", but probably not for 2 developers) and you're looking at a total of $13k.
So: to sum up, Open source/free tools: $10k first month, $21k for a year. $33k for a second year, and $45k for a third year. Microsoft toolstack: $23k for the first month, $34k for the year, $46k for the second year, $58k for the third. So, basically, buying Microsoft for a small shop ends up costing you about 1 year of your hosting budget.
And sure, forums with the MS Professionals are useful, but as a secondary form of documentation. When I'm the only person at my shop, and I'm trying to solve a problem, if I have to pause my dev process for 2 days to wait for a response, that's cutting 1% off of my profit margin.