OK, if we're going to do a large scale (cultural) space exploration and exploitation, fine, it's tenable. But for the purposes of getting it back to the planet?
Either way you slice it, you're going to have to build multiple refineries (ore, fuel, etc.), foundries, factories, and power generation facilities IN SPACE to make it work at any commercially reasonable scale. Those facilities will need to either be built in place or launched from the planet, which will cost massive, massive money.
In all likelihood, it would have to be done in several progressive phases, with small "John Deere" size refinery/factory/etc. facilities launching from the planet to make the larger facilities from space-refined materials - and then they'd have to actually find all the necessary materials in space to build said refineries. And at that point, before even half way to making money or getting raw materials planet side to be manufactured into goods, you're talking about several times the GDP a fairly wealthy nation. You might as well put an iPad factory up there.
Let's not forget, this is all going to take people. Very little of this work will be able to be done 'remotely', planetside, especially at first. There is no knowledge of how it's supposed to work so that we can automate it; automation takes experience with how the routine of a system works. If you think that the eg. temporary housing, and employment of workers in eg. inhospital places like the Bakken reserve area is expensive (it is: living in a camper in -20F weather using portable propane heaters becomes financially "reasonable" due to lack of availability of anything else) or that employing a lot of people in a locale without any pre-existing infrastructure to speak of is cheap (it isn't - people are pulling down hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for uneducated, OTJ training work, often without a sound drug background/check vetting), how do you think it would be for space mining? Probably not that different, just markedly more expensive with fewer hookers.
I like OpenNebula as well, in part because the setup and installation of nodes is so trivial (the agent is so well implemented). I can turn anything into a node, more or less.
The progress bar should not advance unless something has been completed. If you have it go back or have to rescale, then you should be using a different mechanism for determining completion.
A more ideal way to do it would be with multiple process bars: a 'step' bar, and an overall progress bar. Step bars would be solely progressively linear. The progress bar would measure the steps. There are some tools which do this. The key point, I think, is that the overall progress bar should not move until both the 20 minute step and the determination telling us we've got to go another 20 minutes is completed - and the progress bar should be initially scaled for the full maximum period of time. If it's got to race to the end, so be it; it's better than being stuck at 99% for half an hour.
You've got to keep in mind that a progress bar should serve only a couple of purposes: * indicate actual progress * indicate the process in question has not failed and is continuing
In the quest to abstract data and provide the user with a 'pretty interface', hiding what's actually going on, #2 is often the only information being conveyed on any process which takes more than one step, takes a long time, or may be impacted by other tasks.
Overall, I'd say most progress bars suck primarily because the developers are lazy and don't want to take the time to actually quantify how long a given task will take or how much work is involved in said step. These are not tasks programmers seem to be good at; they're better suited to people who actually understand how their systems are working (and sadly, most programmers don't seem to understand that anymore).
And how is "all about sales" any different than Sony or Nintendo's gaming platforms?
It isn't. For that matter, how can gaming platforms like PCs with Steam be wildly popular and expanding into the platform market with the Steambox (while remaining wildly more popular than game platforms in general right now, I might add) exist when they are, essentially, JUST game sales and delivery systems?
Sorry, the Xbox is floundering for the same reason that things like capable entry level Android tablets come to market at $100 and smartphones sell for $500+ and people barely even blink at the price. The truth is that platform gaming is dying, even with the novelty of things like Kinect. People don't really want to game on their TVs anymore, they want something personal. The TV has become peripheral to home/personal entertainment, not central, and when people can get 90% of the same thing with any given game console, or 70% of what those consoles offer and a little bit more with a modern set-top box, it makes very little financial sense to continue with the "sell the console at a loss" model that Microsoft popularized, never mind anything between that and the Nintendo approach. (Look at sales models - hardly any console did well this past Christmas.)
The entire commercial idea of console gaming needs to be rethought and revitalized or it's simply not going to make a hill of beans how innovative they are.
It seems to me that the biggest bottleneck in making a ROI for something like this isn't even so much the logistics of getting up there, mining it, and bringing it back down gracefully. It's the fuel consumption. Short of nuke power, we haven't got anything approaching the energy requirements to make this efficient.
I haven't looked into Deep Space Industries all that much or what their business plan is, but what I understand seems kind of pie in the sky and unrealistic. Mining operations are huge capital investments. So would be the infrastructure necessary to bring the materials down here once they're harvested, and getting the equipment up there.
Granted, you'd not have to worry about the ecological impact mining on the planet causes or the associated government regulation, but short of establishing a fairly large extraplanet base where most operations, including smelting, occur, with massive space mining ships like what you'd see in science fiction movies, I can't imagine this being profitable anytime soon... Don't get me wrong, but how are these guys NOT some sort of "dotcom company" selling vaporware?
No, of course it won't be funny when the dead start rising from their graves.
Now, about a week or two in, when there are shamblers and the general panic will be replaced with 'most of us are undead or eaten'? The zombie victim-bating and misc. mutilation games will be INSANELY funny.
I'm also appalled at how bad the Minecraft server is. It's one resource hungry beast, easily eating through multiple GB for just one or two people playing on a fairly 'vanilla' map without too large a world.
Indeed. We just got a chassis of roughly the same footprint for a customer; there is 524GB of RAM available per "blade", of which there are 6.
Honestly, I have a hard time seeing this as that old. It wasn't that long ago that 2GB of RAM was still considered a huge amount for a common server, either - not anything you'd see in a large budget environment, but certainly commonplace.
Personally, I've got equipment predating this millennium which is not only still plugged in and powered, but in actual regular use and continues to do its job just fine. The power bill from it is not as bad as one might think. And I'm not -that- old. 2001 certainly doesn't seem like something for an 'oldtimer', not unless you were already past mid-career at the time... we sysadmins have a pretty decent shelf life, vs. a programmer.
Kids these days...
(The pre-millennium system in question is a ULV-style 733MHz P3 Cely with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB IDE drive - a Compaq iPAQ desktop, a last ditch effort to remain relevant by Compaq. In all honesty, it was a good and under-appreciated effort. It's been running Debian since 2000, uninterrupted but upgraded to the latest without issues. It uses 36 watts of power under load (markedly less than a 2nd gen Atom or a Bobcat, I might add), has a parallel port and a real serial port with good port timing. It is more responsive over SSH and for basic home server silliness than either the Bobcat or Atom as well.)
A decade is a long time in computing, yes; but the modern systems we run are, in many ways, an exercise in self-perpetuation. (If it wasn't for the exponential RAM capacity we've run into along side CPU capability, there's absolutely no way we'd be offshoring half of what we are to India. Our systems wouldn't be able to run their shit code.)
Your comment is either willful ignorance or intentional skew. There's more security-functional variety in Android than there is iOS or Windows Phone. There's also more intrinsic security.
Yeah, and? Wake me up when this is actually a commonplace problem, and even all that noticeable amongst the storm of problems with iOS devices. I don't really follow handheld security like I should, but even I have heard of and experienced the fallout of multiple different iOS exploits and vulnerabilities in the past week - email spamming, sms spamming, and appointment deletions on Exchange amongst them.
I've heard of nothing like this happening on Android, even though most of the people I know use Android devices. Anecdotal? Sure. But it isn't half as anecdotal as 'fragmentation'. I'm sorry, when apps -mostly- work cross device as well as cross device generation, there's a unified app market, and efforts are being undertaken to scale the OS to handle device feature differences (eg. screen resolution) arbitrarily, I'm not sure exactly what kind of 'fragmentation' we're talking about. Especially when we've got efforts like Cyanogenmod which are starting to serve as a shared base for vendors while maintaining a high quantity of cross-commits with ASOP.
This combo allows you to have the best of all worlds on one computer...OSX, Windows (your fav. flavor) and Linux...etc.
If he's going to do that, he might as well just buy an old laptop on with w7 on it from ebay.
No, I'm not dissing Apple hardware. I'm saying his performance will be similar to if he were on an older device due to the relative performance (disk, memory, ipc, context switching, etc.) of OS X compared to, well, pretty much anything else at this point.
I'd be more accurate to say, 'If you really want a Mac that performs well, wipe the Mac and put linux on it... then install OS X in a hackintosh VM under either vmware or virtualbox." Performance will be better than bare metal.
Yet, people were shouting that the Reds were trying to infiltrate our society, and here we are with an overtly Marxist president, proletariat-focused state run industry, healthcare, and unions, and a thoroughly Marxist education system. People were saying that the military industrial complex was trying to control the country, and here we are where our military and foreign policy is run by military equipment purchase decisions. People were saying that Islamic terrorism (aka jihad) was culturally resurgent globally, and here we are in the midst of it. People were saying that Bill Clinton was selling secrets to the Chinese, and here we are with multiple military vehicles of US design being produced by the Chinese. There are other instances a plenty.
The Internet also didn't exist much prior to 1995, either. It's easy to dismiss things of not happening in the past when you're operating from a platform of willful ignorance.
If it's a bunch of stories that teach a moral message, fine, but why adhere to that moral message? Lots of the moral messages in the Bible are good, but lots are absolutely abhorrent by today's standards.
And by actual standards, many of today's standards are abhorrent and intrinsically repulsive to many people. (That should answer your question.)
Questioning your faith is a central tenant of Christianity, according to many Christians. Faith isn't blind and illogical. It's supposed to be wrought, like iron is forged into a finer material. "If it's easy, it's not worth having."
I had to interview someone a while back for implementation of a (consultant) project on a very specific technology, and also to idiot check my 'design' work. It was straight forward enough in the interview (explain x to me, explain y to me, how does z work). It was a fairly specialized technology stack and there are not many people who know the specifics, so not many candidates applied. The key candidate interview had a lot of back and forth with me picking his brain, largely out of curiosity. I liked the guy (more or less), and he seemed like he'd be able to get it done in the necessary timeframe with the level of quality and thoroughness I was expecting (ie in strong contrast to what most contractors and developers put out).
My boss also sat through the interviews. These consultants weren't "cheap" in his mind, this one in particular - and I was 'available'. After asking me what I thought of the interview and other "should we hire this guy?" kind of questions, he moved on to where I saw it going: "So, after this interview, do you think you can do this project so I don't have to hire a contractor?" - not like he wouldn't have billed the client full "specialist contractor" type rates on top of my normal hourly rate, anyway.
I could've done it myself to begin with; that wasn't the point. I just couldn't do it with the time or resources I'd been given, while maintaining my other obligations. That's kind of why we went after a contractor in the first place...
But I can certainly see how someone would buckle under that burden and say, "Sure thing boss, I'll get right on it, sir." and cut corners to come out looking like a rockstar. Judging by most environments I've seen, this is surely the case. (Unlike my sentiments for my predecessors, I am proud to say that I have had several of my successors state to me that they thought I did a bang up job and were glad I'd come before them to clean up the mess. It'd not have been possible if I'd done what is apparently common practice and 'steal' knowledge at interviews.)
Or, stated another way (and as I think is more likely to happen, given personalities), someone with a correct but minimalist answer gets turned down for the position in favor for the trainwreck of a candidate who provides an elegant, creative, orchestral answer which more closely coincides with the solution the company's best and brightest already came up with and implemented...
It's not that nobody would demonstrate interest in the device if there wasn't a pair of tits in a tight dress demoing the device, it's that the common person - nerds included - are more likely to at least take a look at an unknown product from an unknown company if there is said tits + short dress pictures. What other incentive would they have when the company is (basically) just selling yet another futuristic vaporware?
Unless the product or company is known and can muster interest on the strength of their brand alone, they need something - anything - to gain them eyeballs. Something like a pair of breasts on an attractive woman is going to be a fairly easy and inexpensive advertising campaign. (For instance, the "BSD Girl" pictures from what, 12+ years ago? Those are still traveling the Internet. So much so that they've become a convention meme for attractive women. And I dare say that I'd wager money on at least a couple lonely geeks risking their hard drives for the lustre of tight red spandex.)
It's a wonder anyone ever visits websites that aren't porn really.
I imagine that for every normal page that's loaded in a tab at home, there are 2 pages of porn loaded. That'd just be a guess.
How about, "I don't see how that is relevant, I wasn't doing the same thing for them that you want me to do for you, not exactly. And they weren't the same company you are, thus why I am not working for them anymore. If you really need an answer to that question, I don't need to work for you."
And honestly, an employer that asks you what you're currently making is not an employer you'd want to work for. They're already looking to fuck you over before you're even hired; what are your chances of getting a "fair shake" - aside from what they're legally required to do for you? As someone who's been "let go" at Christmas twice and has had his good name fraudulently smeared up and down the halls of different institutions with no legal recourse due to the law not protecting me, I think it's important that we - as citizens - need to not have faith in the humanity of our employers. They're there for their own selfish interests and sadly, this culture has become dog eat dog.
I've gotten at least a 10% increase with each position change (more, if you consider relative cost of living). Granted, I've never gotten a raise (and thus why I've even bothered moving positions - if the employer won't treat you right, you've got no obligation to them). But a big part of this was because I was insistent upon my worth, after starting off at a very, very low salary for the work I was doing.
This database is going to be a problem. It's going to cause salary stagnation, and possibly even salary decline. Employers will love it, because they'll receive an 'edge' over their competitors (or so they think) in the ever-declining market. The market decline will give employers incentive to offer less than employees are currently making, leading to people not hopping jobs, leading to a stagnation of talent.
Really, what we're looking at with something like this is a collapse of what remains of the middle class, followed shortly after by a collapse of pay on the incomes padding that demographic...
SSDs actually aren't all that much more expensive, particularly for "just another drive" drop in replacement.
Consider: the low price for SSDs on newegg is around $50 (give or take $10 depending on brand, etc.). That'll get you a 30GB SSD, which is more than enough for pretty much anything you would want to install or produce on a low end system, like a laptop. The cheaper replacement hard drives at 350GB or so all fall in that price range and offer astoundingly bad performance, even for hard drives. Worst case scenario, you're probably spending $15 more than you would on a hard drive for a 60GB SSD. (Until about a year ago, my 'download dump' drive was a 100GB drive and I don't recall ever having it get full. 60GB can take a while to fill.)
Jump up to the $100 price point and, for an even greater number, the more expensive hard drive offers no benefit in increased capacity; the increased capacity of the SSD, however, is going to likely be enough for even a great number of people who save media on their machines. (You know, that 5% who still bothers with anything other than Netflix/Amazon/etc.)
The scenario is different if I'm looking for something for media storage/pirating, but for all intents and purposes, that's not going to really be all that necessary. I now have 3 systems in use with "hard drive failed, SSD replaced" and I know a local repair guy does SSD replacements exclusively at the low end (because it offers the most bang for the buck, particularly when you consider that the performance on laptop drives is horrrrrible).
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You're not thinking it through.
OK, if we're going to do a large scale (cultural) space exploration and exploitation, fine, it's tenable. But for the purposes of getting it back to the planet?
Either way you slice it, you're going to have to build multiple refineries (ore, fuel, etc.), foundries, factories, and power generation facilities IN SPACE to make it work at any commercially reasonable scale. Those facilities will need to either be built in place or launched from the planet, which will cost massive, massive money.
In all likelihood, it would have to be done in several progressive phases, with small "John Deere" size refinery/factory/etc. facilities launching from the planet to make the larger facilities from space-refined materials - and then they'd have to actually find all the necessary materials in space to build said refineries. And at that point, before even half way to making money or getting raw materials planet side to be manufactured into goods, you're talking about several times the GDP a fairly wealthy nation. You might as well put an iPad factory up there.
Let's not forget, this is all going to take people. Very little of this work will be able to be done 'remotely', planetside, especially at first. There is no knowledge of how it's supposed to work so that we can automate it; automation takes experience with how the routine of a system works. If you think that the eg. temporary housing, and employment of workers in eg. inhospital places like the Bakken reserve area is expensive (it is: living in a camper in -20F weather using portable propane heaters becomes financially "reasonable" due to lack of availability of anything else) or that employing a lot of people in a locale without any pre-existing infrastructure to speak of is cheap (it isn't - people are pulling down hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for uneducated, OTJ training work, often without a sound drug background/check vetting), how do you think it would be for space mining? Probably not that different, just markedly more expensive with fewer hookers.
I like OpenNebula as well, in part because the setup and installation of nodes is so trivial (the agent is so well implemented). I can turn anything into a node, more or less.
Sorry, that's the wrong approach.
The progress bar should not advance unless something has been completed. If you have it go back or have to rescale, then you should be using a different mechanism for determining completion.
A more ideal way to do it would be with multiple process bars: a 'step' bar, and an overall progress bar. Step bars would be solely progressively linear. The progress bar would measure the steps. There are some tools which do this. The key point, I think, is that the overall progress bar should not move until both the 20 minute step and the determination telling us we've got to go another 20 minutes is completed - and the progress bar should be initially scaled for the full maximum period of time. If it's got to race to the end, so be it; it's better than being stuck at 99% for half an hour.
You've got to keep in mind that a progress bar should serve only a couple of purposes:
* indicate actual progress
* indicate the process in question has not failed and is continuing
In the quest to abstract data and provide the user with a 'pretty interface', hiding what's actually going on, #2 is often the only information being conveyed on any process which takes more than one step, takes a long time, or may be impacted by other tasks.
Overall, I'd say most progress bars suck primarily because the developers are lazy and don't want to take the time to actually quantify how long a given task will take or how much work is involved in said step. These are not tasks programmers seem to be good at; they're better suited to people who actually understand how their systems are working (and sadly, most programmers don't seem to understand that anymore).
And how is "all about sales" any different than Sony or Nintendo's gaming platforms?
It isn't. For that matter, how can gaming platforms like PCs with Steam be wildly popular and expanding into the platform market with the Steambox (while remaining wildly more popular than game platforms in general right now, I might add) exist when they are, essentially, JUST game sales and delivery systems?
Sorry, the Xbox is floundering for the same reason that things like capable entry level Android tablets come to market at $100 and smartphones sell for $500+ and people barely even blink at the price. The truth is that platform gaming is dying, even with the novelty of things like Kinect. People don't really want to game on their TVs anymore, they want something personal. The TV has become peripheral to home/personal entertainment, not central, and when people can get 90% of the same thing with any given game console, or 70% of what those consoles offer and a little bit more with a modern set-top box, it makes very little financial sense to continue with the "sell the console at a loss" model that Microsoft popularized, never mind anything between that and the Nintendo approach. (Look at sales models - hardly any console did well this past Christmas.)
The entire commercial idea of console gaming needs to be rethought and revitalized or it's simply not going to make a hill of beans how innovative they are.
It seems to me that the biggest bottleneck in making a ROI for something like this isn't even so much the logistics of getting up there, mining it, and bringing it back down gracefully. It's the fuel consumption. Short of nuke power, we haven't got anything approaching the energy requirements to make this efficient.
I haven't looked into Deep Space Industries all that much or what their business plan is, but what I understand seems kind of pie in the sky and unrealistic. Mining operations are huge capital investments. So would be the infrastructure necessary to bring the materials down here once they're harvested, and getting the equipment up there.
Granted, you'd not have to worry about the ecological impact mining on the planet causes or the associated government regulation, but short of establishing a fairly large extraplanet base where most operations, including smelting, occur, with massive space mining ships like what you'd see in science fiction movies, I can't imagine this being profitable anytime soon... Don't get me wrong, but how are these guys NOT some sort of "dotcom company" selling vaporware?
I guess you'll just have to try it yourself?
It's crap for visual stuff but context switches are faster/more responsive and take less real overhead... not sure I get it, but there it is.
Don't be silly. By 2014, there won't be any Republicans... only survivors.
No, of course it won't be funny when the dead start rising from their graves.
Now, about a week or two in, when there are shamblers and the general panic will be replaced with 'most of us are undead or eaten'? The zombie victim-bating and misc. mutilation games will be INSANELY funny.
And just where do you think zombies come from, hmm? You don't really think its from hell being full now, do you?
Vaccine-laced pot? Wait until they run out of munchies food...
Yeah, it's kind of a joke.
I'm also appalled at how bad the Minecraft server is. It's one resource hungry beast, easily eating through multiple GB for just one or two people playing on a fairly 'vanilla' map without too large a world.
Indeed. We just got a chassis of roughly the same footprint for a customer; there is 524GB of RAM available per "blade", of which there are 6.
Honestly, I have a hard time seeing this as that old. It wasn't that long ago that 2GB of RAM was still considered a huge amount for a common server, either - not anything you'd see in a large budget environment, but certainly commonplace.
Personally, I've got equipment predating this millennium which is not only still plugged in and powered, but in actual regular use and continues to do its job just fine. The power bill from it is not as bad as one might think. And I'm not -that- old. 2001 certainly doesn't seem like something for an 'oldtimer', not unless you were already past mid-career at the time... we sysadmins have a pretty decent shelf life, vs. a programmer.
Kids these days...
(The pre-millennium system in question is a ULV-style 733MHz P3 Cely with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB IDE drive - a Compaq iPAQ desktop, a last ditch effort to remain relevant by Compaq. In all honesty, it was a good and under-appreciated effort. It's been running Debian since 2000, uninterrupted but upgraded to the latest without issues. It uses 36 watts of power under load (markedly less than a 2nd gen Atom or a Bobcat, I might add), has a parallel port and a real serial port with good port timing. It is more responsive over SSH and for basic home server silliness than either the Bobcat or Atom as well.)
A decade is a long time in computing, yes; but the modern systems we run are, in many ways, an exercise in self-perpetuation. (If it wasn't for the exponential RAM capacity we've run into along side CPU capability, there's absolutely no way we'd be offshoring half of what we are to India. Our systems wouldn't be able to run their shit code.)
Your comment is either willful ignorance or intentional skew. There's more security-functional variety in Android than there is iOS or Windows Phone. There's also more intrinsic security.
Yeah, and? Wake me up when this is actually a commonplace problem, and even all that noticeable amongst the storm of problems with iOS devices. I don't really follow handheld security like I should, but even I have heard of and experienced the fallout of multiple different iOS exploits and vulnerabilities in the past week - email spamming, sms spamming, and appointment deletions on Exchange amongst them.
I've heard of nothing like this happening on Android, even though most of the people I know use Android devices. Anecdotal? Sure. But it isn't half as anecdotal as 'fragmentation'. I'm sorry, when apps -mostly- work cross device as well as cross device generation, there's a unified app market, and efforts are being undertaken to scale the OS to handle device feature differences (eg. screen resolution) arbitrarily, I'm not sure exactly what kind of 'fragmentation' we're talking about. Especially when we've got efforts like Cyanogenmod which are starting to serve as a shared base for vendors while maintaining a high quantity of cross-commits with ASOP.
This combo allows you to have the best of all worlds on one computer...OSX, Windows (your fav. flavor) and Linux...etc.
If he's going to do that, he might as well just buy an old laptop on with w7 on it from ebay.
No, I'm not dissing Apple hardware. I'm saying his performance will be similar to if he were on an older device due to the relative performance (disk, memory, ipc, context switching, etc.) of OS X compared to, well, pretty much anything else at this point.
I'd be more accurate to say, 'If you really want a Mac that performs well, wipe the Mac and put linux on it... then install OS X in a hackintosh VM under either vmware or virtualbox." Performance will be better than bare metal.
Yet, people were shouting that the Reds were trying to infiltrate our society, and here we are with an overtly Marxist president, proletariat-focused state run industry, healthcare, and unions, and a thoroughly Marxist education system. People were saying that the military industrial complex was trying to control the country, and here we are where our military and foreign policy is run by military equipment purchase decisions. People were saying that Islamic terrorism (aka jihad) was culturally resurgent globally, and here we are in the midst of it. People were saying that Bill Clinton was selling secrets to the Chinese, and here we are with multiple military vehicles of US design being produced by the Chinese. There are other instances a plenty.
The Internet also didn't exist much prior to 1995, either. It's easy to dismiss things of not happening in the past when you're operating from a platform of willful ignorance.
Stop it! It's too early for recursion!
If it's a bunch of stories that teach a moral message, fine, but why adhere to that moral message? Lots of the moral messages in the Bible are good, but lots are absolutely abhorrent by today's standards.
And by actual standards, many of today's standards are abhorrent and intrinsically repulsive to many people. (That should answer your question.)
Questioning your faith is a central tenant of Christianity, according to many Christians. Faith isn't blind and illogical. It's supposed to be wrought, like iron is forged into a finer material. "If it's easy, it's not worth having."
I had to interview someone a while back for implementation of a (consultant) project on a very specific technology, and also to idiot check my 'design' work. It was straight forward enough in the interview (explain x to me, explain y to me, how does z work). It was a fairly specialized technology stack and there are not many people who know the specifics, so not many candidates applied. The key candidate interview had a lot of back and forth with me picking his brain, largely out of curiosity. I liked the guy (more or less), and he seemed like he'd be able to get it done in the necessary timeframe with the level of quality and thoroughness I was expecting (ie in strong contrast to what most contractors and developers put out).
My boss also sat through the interviews. These consultants weren't "cheap" in his mind, this one in particular - and I was 'available'. After asking me what I thought of the interview and other "should we hire this guy?" kind of questions, he moved on to where I saw it going: "So, after this interview, do you think you can do this project so I don't have to hire a contractor?" - not like he wouldn't have billed the client full "specialist contractor" type rates on top of my normal hourly rate, anyway.
I could've done it myself to begin with; that wasn't the point. I just couldn't do it with the time or resources I'd been given, while maintaining my other obligations. That's kind of why we went after a contractor in the first place...
But I can certainly see how someone would buckle under that burden and say, "Sure thing boss, I'll get right on it, sir." and cut corners to come out looking like a rockstar. Judging by most environments I've seen, this is surely the case. (Unlike my sentiments for my predecessors, I am proud to say that I have had several of my successors state to me that they thought I did a bang up job and were glad I'd come before them to clean up the mess. It'd not have been possible if I'd done what is apparently common practice and 'steal' knowledge at interviews.)
I really hope you sent them a consultancy bill. They deserved it.
Or, stated another way (and as I think is more likely to happen, given personalities), someone with a correct but minimalist answer gets turned down for the position in favor for the trainwreck of a candidate who provides an elegant, creative, orchestral answer which more closely coincides with the solution the company's best and brightest already came up with and implemented...
It's not that nobody would demonstrate interest in the device if there wasn't a pair of tits in a tight dress demoing the device, it's that the common person - nerds included - are more likely to at least take a look at an unknown product from an unknown company if there is said tits + short dress pictures. What other incentive would they have when the company is (basically) just selling yet another futuristic vaporware?
Unless the product or company is known and can muster interest on the strength of their brand alone, they need something - anything - to gain them eyeballs. Something like a pair of breasts on an attractive woman is going to be a fairly easy and inexpensive advertising campaign. (For instance, the "BSD Girl" pictures from what, 12+ years ago? Those are still traveling the Internet. So much so that they've become a convention meme for attractive women. And I dare say that I'd wager money on at least a couple lonely geeks risking their hard drives for the lustre of tight red spandex.)
It's a wonder anyone ever visits websites that aren't porn really.
I imagine that for every normal page that's loaded in a tab at home, there are 2 pages of porn loaded. That'd just be a guess.
So, they're porting R and Perl PDL to Python, then?
How about, "I don't see how that is relevant, I wasn't doing the same thing for them that you want me to do for you, not exactly. And they weren't the same company you are, thus why I am not working for them anymore. If you really need an answer to that question, I don't need to work for you."
And honestly, an employer that asks you what you're currently making is not an employer you'd want to work for. They're already looking to fuck you over before you're even hired; what are your chances of getting a "fair shake" - aside from what they're legally required to do for you? As someone who's been "let go" at Christmas twice and has had his good name fraudulently smeared up and down the halls of different institutions with no legal recourse due to the law not protecting me, I think it's important that we - as citizens - need to not have faith in the humanity of our employers. They're there for their own selfish interests and sadly, this culture has become dog eat dog.
I've gotten at least a 10% increase with each position change (more, if you consider relative cost of living). Granted, I've never gotten a raise (and thus why I've even bothered moving positions - if the employer won't treat you right, you've got no obligation to them). But a big part of this was because I was insistent upon my worth, after starting off at a very, very low salary for the work I was doing.
This database is going to be a problem. It's going to cause salary stagnation, and possibly even salary decline. Employers will love it, because they'll receive an 'edge' over their competitors (or so they think) in the ever-declining market. The market decline will give employers incentive to offer less than employees are currently making, leading to people not hopping jobs, leading to a stagnation of talent.
Really, what we're looking at with something like this is a collapse of what remains of the middle class, followed shortly after by a collapse of pay on the incomes padding that demographic...
SSDs actually aren't all that much more expensive, particularly for "just another drive" drop in replacement.
Consider: the low price for SSDs on newegg is around $50 (give or take $10 depending on brand, etc.). That'll get you a 30GB SSD, which is more than enough for pretty much anything you would want to install or produce on a low end system, like a laptop. The cheaper replacement hard drives at 350GB or so all fall in that price range and offer astoundingly bad performance, even for hard drives. Worst case scenario, you're probably spending $15 more than you would on a hard drive for a 60GB SSD. (Until about a year ago, my 'download dump' drive was a 100GB drive and I don't recall ever having it get full. 60GB can take a while to fill.)
Jump up to the $100 price point and, for an even greater number, the more expensive hard drive offers no benefit in increased capacity; the increased capacity of the SSD, however, is going to likely be enough for even a great number of people who save media on their machines. (You know, that 5% who still bothers with anything other than Netflix/Amazon/etc.)
The scenario is different if I'm looking for something for media storage/pirating, but for all intents and purposes, that's not going to really be all that necessary. I now have 3 systems in use with "hard drive failed, SSD replaced" and I know a local repair guy does SSD replacements exclusively at the low end (because it offers the most bang for the buck, particularly when you consider that the performance on laptop drives is horrrrrible).