... a propulsion system that uses the natural surface tension that is present on the water's surface and an electric pulse to move the boat... </blockquote>
An electrical pulse?!? In the water? What effect must this have on nearby aquatic life? I'm guessing this will revolutionize fishing...
Despite never getting my BSEE degree, I have been able to work more or less continually since I decided to switch careers from engineering into computers.
Originally, I was living at home and taking classes for my BSEE, when I had to start working part time jobs for tuition. Gradually, my interest in having money in my pocket began to occlude my vision of graduating, and I went from one job to the next, each time taking steps and making decisions designed to increase my income, at the ultimate expense of my education. I went from full-time classes to three-quarter load to half as my hours and responsibilities at work increased.
Eventually, I got a job as an electronic technician and ratcheted my engineering classes down to part-time. After that, it was merely a matter of time (and a series of jobs as an electronic technician) before I eventually landed a job as a junior engineer while attending night classes. It was there that I first came into contact with professional programming.
It was the early 80's and an idle Apple ][ computer was in the engineering lab, so I started tinkering with machine code and Applesoft BASIC on it and eventually produced an automated testing tool for my company's photocells (the kind that are used to turn on/off streetlights). A rack of photocells was placed on the roof of the building and a cable brought down and connected to two add-on parallel i/o ports; the software would periodically scan the ports and record the time when the photocells switched; this could be correlated against sunrise/sunset times, indicating which cells were defective. Although a simple project, I loved it.
When it became time to look for my next job, I completely eschewed anything related to electrical engineering in favor of writing code, and took an interview for a position that would have made it geographically impossible to continue taking classes without spending an inordinate amount of time traveling. I got the job, and simply stopped taking engineering classes, presumably to continue at some point in the future.
At that time, in 1983, microcomputers, although starting to be widely used, were just emerging from the cachet of being largely hobbyist devices in the eyes of the general public. There was no real specialization yet; we techies did everything, not just programming, but also building them, upgrading them (hardware and software) connecting them to each other over point-to-point serial (RS232), modems, networks, etc.
In the succeeding twenty-five years, I never returned to finishing my electrical engineering degree. Partly this was because it was largely irrelevant for the work I was doing and also because at that time, the alternative, computer science, was practically in its infancy; programming was considered simply an adjunct to what was then referred to as "data processing", which meant COBOL. No one had really even heard of structured, much less object-oriented programming. By the time those concepts started to be widely taught, my own level of experience far surpassed them. Of course, eventually the discipline caught up and passed me, but by then finishing my BSEE would not have positively affected my earning potential in any real way.
Regardless, my lack of degree has never been much of an issue and I've had a reasonably successful career as a computer consultant developing software for hire, until I recently succumbed to the constant pressure of consulting and found a job with a good company.
I wonder if the same kind of career could happen today. I've gone from having to do everything from installing hardware and configuring machines and software to now where I am only writing code for specific PARTS of a subsystem and not allowed near other parts, while NEVER being allowed to so much as install a memory card (Sys Admins do that).
Not sure if I have any direct advice for you beyond perhaps to say that it was once possible to do well without a degree and perhaps by avoiding the "fall-line" of mainstream IT, to borrow a skiing expression, maybe it still is.
So far from a knockout punch, I think OpenOffice barely registers in terms of it's disruptive influence
At home, we have one Windows PC (with MSOffice) and three Macs of varying pedigree, only one of which came with MS Office for the Mac. The other two Macs have OO.o because I am basically a cheapskate and refuse to pay for Word, let alone Office. The Windows box also has OpenOffice 2.x for document interchange purposes.
Given the choice (on a machine that has both), I will ALWAYS choose Word over OO.o, simply because it seems to follows a philosophy I first heard in relation to Perl: it makes easy things easy and hard things possible. As for the functionality that is duplicated in OO.o, Word (and Excel) are usually noticeably faster. I think the rest of my family concurs with me on this.
Also, importing Office documents (from a Windows machine) into OO.o (on a Mac) seems to ALWAYS result in formatting problems with any formatting more complex than font attributes, which seem to render differently in OO.o, particularly tables and columns in Word docs.
Having said all that, there is a distinct advantage to being able to edit complex documents at all on a machine without MS Office, however slow and cumbersome it may be. Also, document formatting that originates in OO.o seems to survive importation into MS OFfice better than in the opposite direction.
Also, I've noticed that OO.o Calc supports twice as many spreadsheet rows as does Excel. Last time I looked, Excel's limit was 16,384 rows and Calc's was 65,536 rows. (Not an issue unless you find yourself trying to import a 18,000 line CSV file.)
In addition, all OO.o can directly convert into PDF format with no additional software. Admittedly, this is no big deal since there are a number of free packages for Windows that support "printing" to PDF form, and also MacOSX directly supports built-in PDF functionality in the print dialog box, but at least in the Windows environment, there's one less thing to install if you need this functionality.
So I guess my point is, what's all the fuss about? OO.o does for free what would cost at least in the $300 range (for MSOffice) and that's pretty good.
Also, for Windows only, Google Pack offers a free full install of StarOffice, the commercial version of OO.o ($70 from Sun, I think, but noticeably quicker).
In his SF novel, "Earth", David Brin had one of his principal characters interacting with a computer using a nearly identical mechanism. Brin referred to it in the book as "sub-vocalization." See this: http://www.davidbrin.com/earth1.html
I've been waiting for this for almost twenty years.
...flying is going to be 10 times safer for me than driving.
Unlikely you'll be 10 times safer: don't forget to account for the driving time to and from the two airports involved, and whether any of those legs involves riding in a taxi near a major population center.
Just curious: anyone see how OpenOffice.org stacks up against StarOffice (Sun's for-pay version)?
Recently, Google Apps started offering StarOffice as a freebie, so I tried running it on my PC, but it seemed, if anything, no faster than OO.o. I removed it eventually, to reclaim the 300+ MB.
BTW, in my family we use OO.o on all our macs (only of our machines is Windows based, the rest are Macs running OSX 10.4), and I refuse to buy MS Office for the Mac, even at the educational price (both my kids are in Middle School and my wife's a teacher).
Apart from performance and VERY FEW MISSING FEATURES (none of which I can recall right now), OO.o Writer is absolutely interchangeable with MS Word.
Slashdot Mirror
This post is 13 days late, right?
...if you consider total cost of ownership.
Even a $600 Windows PC will eventually require spending $200-400 on malware cleanup once or twice in its lifetime.
Compare this to a $1200 Macbook that will require NOTHING.
A question that has been keeping me up nights my whole life.
Despite never getting my BSEE degree, I have been able to work more or less continually since I decided to switch careers from engineering into computers.
Originally, I was living at home and taking classes for my BSEE, when I had to start working part time jobs for tuition. Gradually, my interest in having money in my pocket began to occlude my vision of graduating, and I went from one job to the next, each time taking steps and making decisions designed to increase my income, at the ultimate expense of my education. I went from full-time classes to three-quarter load to half as my hours and responsibilities at work increased.
Eventually, I got a job as an electronic technician and ratcheted my engineering classes down to part-time. After that, it was merely a matter of time (and a series of jobs as an electronic technician) before I eventually landed a job as a junior engineer while attending night classes. It was there that I first came into contact with professional programming.
It was the early 80's and an idle Apple ][ computer was in the engineering lab, so I started tinkering with machine code and Applesoft BASIC on it and eventually produced an automated testing tool for my company's photocells (the kind that are used to turn on/off streetlights). A rack of photocells was placed on the roof of the building and a cable brought down and connected to two add-on parallel i/o ports; the software would periodically scan the ports and record the time when the photocells switched; this could be correlated against sunrise/sunset times, indicating which cells were defective. Although a simple project, I loved it.
When it became time to look for my next job, I completely eschewed anything related to electrical engineering in favor of writing code, and took an interview for a position that would have made it geographically impossible to continue taking classes without spending an inordinate amount of time traveling. I got the job, and simply stopped taking engineering classes, presumably to continue at some point in the future.
At that time, in 1983, microcomputers, although starting to be widely used, were just emerging from the cachet of being largely hobbyist devices in the eyes of the general public. There was no real specialization yet; we techies did everything, not just programming, but also building them, upgrading them (hardware and software) connecting them to each other over point-to-point serial (RS232), modems, networks, etc.
In the succeeding twenty-five years, I never returned to finishing my electrical engineering degree. Partly this was because it was largely irrelevant for the work I was doing and also because at that time, the alternative, computer science, was practically in its infancy; programming was considered simply an adjunct to what was then referred to as "data processing", which meant COBOL. No one had really even heard of structured, much less object-oriented programming. By the time those concepts started to be widely taught, my own level of experience far surpassed them. Of course, eventually the discipline caught up and passed me, but by then finishing my BSEE would not have positively affected my earning potential in any real way.
Regardless, my lack of degree has never been much of an issue and I've had a reasonably successful career as a computer consultant developing software for hire, until I recently succumbed to the constant pressure of consulting and found a job with a good company.
I wonder if the same kind of career could happen today. I've gone from having to do everything from installing hardware and configuring machines and software to now where I am only writing code for specific PARTS of a subsystem and not allowed near other parts, while NEVER being allowed to so much as install a memory card (Sys Admins do that).
Not sure if I have any direct advice for you beyond perhaps to say that it was once possible to do well without a degree and perhaps by avoiding the "fall-line" of mainstream IT, to borrow a skiing expression, maybe it still is.
Anyone remember [expletive deleted], circa Watergate?
Could this be another version of Einstein's "spooky action at a distance"?
At home, we have one Windows PC (with MSOffice) and three Macs of varying pedigree, only one of which came with MS Office for the Mac. The other two Macs have OO.o because I am basically a cheapskate and refuse to pay for Word, let alone Office. The Windows box also has OpenOffice 2.x for document interchange purposes.
Given the choice (on a machine that has both), I will ALWAYS choose Word over OO.o, simply because it seems to follows a philosophy I first heard in relation to Perl: it makes easy things easy and hard things possible. As for the functionality that is duplicated in OO.o, Word (and Excel) are usually noticeably faster. I think the rest of my family concurs with me on this.
Also, importing Office documents (from a Windows machine) into OO.o (on a Mac) seems to ALWAYS result in formatting problems with any formatting more complex than font attributes, which seem to render differently in OO.o, particularly tables and columns in Word docs.
Having said all that, there is a distinct advantage to being able to edit complex documents at all on a machine without MS Office, however slow and cumbersome it may be. Also, document formatting that originates in OO.o seems to survive importation into MS OFfice better than in the opposite direction.
Also, I've noticed that OO.o Calc supports twice as many spreadsheet rows as does Excel. Last time I looked, Excel's limit was 16,384 rows and Calc's was 65,536 rows. (Not an issue unless you find yourself trying to import a 18,000 line CSV file.)
In addition, all OO.o can directly convert into PDF format with no additional software. Admittedly, this is no big deal since there are a number of free packages for Windows that support "printing" to PDF form, and also MacOSX directly supports built-in PDF functionality in the print dialog box, but at least in the Windows environment, there's one less thing to install if you need this functionality.
So I guess my point is, what's all the fuss about? OO.o does for free what would cost at least in the $300 range (for MSOffice) and that's pretty good.
Also, for Windows only, Google Pack offers a free full install of StarOffice, the commercial version of OO.o ($70 from Sun, I think, but noticeably quicker).
Google Docs notwithstanding.
In his SF novel, "Earth", David Brin had one of his principal characters interacting with a computer using a nearly identical mechanism. Brin referred to it in the book as "sub-vocalization." See this: http://www.davidbrin.com/earth1.html
I've been waiting for this for almost twenty years.
Unlikely you'll be 10 times safer: don't forget to account for the driving time to and from the two airports involved, and whether any of those legs involves riding in a taxi near a major population center.
Just curious: anyone see how OpenOffice.org stacks up against StarOffice (Sun's for-pay version)?
Recently, Google Apps started offering StarOffice as a freebie, so I tried running it on my PC, but it seemed, if anything, no faster than OO.o. I removed it eventually, to reclaim the 300+ MB.
BTW, in my family we use OO.o on all our macs (only of our machines is Windows based, the rest are Macs running OSX 10.4), and I refuse to buy MS Office for the Mac, even at the educational price (both my kids are in Middle School and my wife's a teacher).
Apart from performance and VERY FEW MISSING FEATURES (none of which I can recall right now), OO.o Writer is absolutely interchangeable with MS Word.