So the irony is that I actually worked for Disney for a few years. So yes, I did go to the theater to see some of their stuff in the past decade, but only because the company gave us tickets for lack of any other perks in our area. And yes, I do get caught up by watching movies on long airplane trips every so often, so I did see parts of Gravity and Elysium and Transformers and the thing with Smaug. But the discount airline we fly has a really crappy DVR system that apparently can't handle VBR streams very well, so it would just start stuttering and skipping over any action sequences with lots of motion.
Yeah, I don't have a TV either, so the other irony is that I worked on designing and building multi-million dollar AV systems for distributed Command and Control theaters.
But whatever, it doesn't count since we spent plenty of time binge-watching serials back when we had Netflix, so just forget I said anything that might have obliquely supported the bit about the PR move:P
I don't know what this movie is, and I don't follow or watch movies in general, but I suddenly almost want to find out more about this movie is all about now.
I hate to bring politics into a science discussion, but unfortunately politics is what determines funding. And politics is what put humans on the moon.
Yes, putting humans anywhere in space (or anywhere hostile to biological habitation) is basically a super-expensive camping trip. That never stopped us in the past from building capsules that can take humans to the bottom of the oceans or hurtling across the skies or stationed at the south pole and other places where robots could do the job just as well or better.
Politically, will countries / corporations be able to "own" the resources (or even just the science / IP) discovered in space without a human presence to plant a flag and occupy? I mean, we're not to that level of competition yet, but say sometime in the future when we're mining asteroids and there's a really valuable asteroid that everyone's trying to claim. Would we consider it legal for the first mining robot to arrive to claim the entire thing? Or is it fair game for whichever robot gets there first to take their fill? Is it an act of war for a robot to knock out / disable a competing country's robot? It obviously is if you're knocking out a human-inhabited space colony, but otherwise you're just squabbling over money.
Anyway, I'm glad that NASA is doing the math on what is at this point just a proposal / thought exercise. No harm in having thought things through, in the off-chance that Venus was suddenly struck with a strong case of unobtanium-fever.
Huh, well, I learned something... I always thought they were getting their "checks" for free.... I'm still working on building up that minimum average daily balance so I qualify for free or reduced orders on checkbooks... must be nice to have enough to go platinum and not have to worry about that.
Ugh. Never played with Rails, but I've had to convert a lot of bash / python cluster management work into Chef / Ruby and it's been awful. I easily spend 10x longer doing trivial tasks, and in the end, I have to write a bash ssh job to verify that chef did the right thing anyway.
To be fair, there's a lot in the framework that I do like... the somewhat built-in unit and integration testing (which, for some reason, is surprisingly absent in production where you'd most want it). I sort of like the RuboCop coding convention watchdog, mostly due to the irony of it making ruby even more sensitive to whitespace formatting than python ever was. But for the most part, all this stuff just adds more pieces that randomly breaks things every 3 months, and most people trying to get actual work done end up disabling and ignoring all of it, which is a shame because doing things in The Chef Way(TM) also balloons every little 10-line bash/sed script into a monstrosity spanning multiple overlapping files, attributes, templates, and data bags. It's also dog slow and wasteful to nuke-n-pave for every little change, and/or inconsistent about deploying rolling updates and giving you no mechanism to roll back (OK, so it does provide some backup of some configuration files it touches, whooop-dee-doo).
I left my old job largely because the new tech manager wanted to introduce Chef as the silver bullet that would launch them into the next phase of their career, and forced hundreds of prod machines to start using it while they were still figuring out all of its vagaries. Of course the final straw was that we weren't allowed to in any way blame Chef on any outages or project delays, since the execs were already breathing down his neck for the ham-fisted migration.
Got another job still doing Chef-based work, but at least now I have support from management to take as much time as it needs to maintain things properly. Still spend way more time maintaining the tool instead of plying our trade, but whatever, it pays the bills. OpsCode has really got a little cottage industry going in maintaining DevOps job security, and I get a lot of coffee breaks while "waiting for my ruby scripts to converge in test-kitchen".
Some of the best IT workers I've known were originally English majors. A STEM worker that doesn't communicate well can be just as bad or worse than a less-technical worker with some decent collaboration skills.
So you have a BA degree... Use it to get a technical writing or training job in some field you would enjoy. Then use the tuition benefits / training provided by your employer to get a BS / MS in something. From there you'll be able land a whole bunch more jobs that require a technical degree.
The hardest part is getting your foot in the door... unfortunately, it's usually easier to have the BS / STEM degree first, and then using your employer's continuing education benefits to study whatever the hell you like. But it can work the other way around too.
Seriously, GTA III:SA did an awesome job putting you in the shoes of a black kid from the hood. Character development was amazing, as you start out on bikes doing jobs for your moms, dealing with corrupt cops (both white and black), getting trapped in drug & gang wars, losing everything, rebuilding yourself as a lackey for a gangsta rapper and the CIA... it really makes you want to rage.
GTA IV, OTOH, was pretty lame in comparison... zero character development (certainly didn't help that the main voice actor was the only one who could pull off a convincing Russian immigrant accent, esp. compared to the "extras" like the Thai prostitute in the opening sequence). It just didn't make me feel anything for his plight or his family, and when bad things happened to him I was like "good!".
But anyway, to go off on a tangent, where was the/. coverage of the Car2Go outage from Friday? The one caused by the meltdown of their "German-based" mobile carrier due to some network roaming bug? I assume they're trying to deflect the blame to T-mobile without directly impacting their stock price... http://www.thetruthaboutcars.c...
Eh, you're not on the hook for paying taxes with a babysitter if it's under $1900/yr. or $1000 per quarter http://www.forbes.com/sites/an... So I guess if you have a pool of different babysitters, you're all set.
Though more likely what will happen is that we'll go back to the dark ages and live with family members who can take care of our kids for us instead of entrusting them to near-total strangers, and, like, maybe learn how to get along while living in close proximity of our in-laws and stuff. You know, like the way things work in the third world.
Nah, I'm probably expecting too much from US society.
Plus, there's plenty of alternatives in the Seattle area. Most tech workers get a monthly bus pass for free through their work. Since Seattle doesn't really have a "major" mass transit network yet, the bus service it actually pretty good (as long as you're commuting to/from Seattle -- good luck if you're trying to commute between suburbs). The city of Seattle paid for everyone to get Car2Go memberships, and ZipCar has a pretty good presence here too. The airport shuttles are great if I have more luggage than I care to lug on transit, and they're cheaper than cabs since you can share the ride with others on the van. I have and use all of these things, but never used a cab or any of these new unlicensed / unregulated cab-like services. That's just not how I roll.
Having lived in the third world, I think the only way taxi (and taxi-like services) will get cheaper is through a glut of competition through the right amount of regulation/deregulation (like the licensed taxis in Thailand, which are everywhere and you can summon them in minutes with a wave of your hand, yet metered so they don't rip off tourists as much as they used to), and shared jeepney services (like those used in Puerto Rico and the Philippines) which essentially work like airport shuttles. Both of these could be much improved and optimized with information technology, and large employers like Microsoft and Google already run their own intelligent taxi/vanpool services for their commuters and on campus, so it's likely just a matter of time before they start offering some of that publicly... if there wasn't so much competition from public transit.
Huh interesting points... I would have guessed that this might be a ploy for Apple to grab some of the military-industrial complex work. I've never seen apple junk in the defense sector before, but if they can get security officers to begin insisting on using US-sourced electronics, then Apple has a honey pot of high margin contracts to reap.
Still looking for a political solution? Look for the silver lining... if everyone KNOWS that the government is mining your communications for whatever ends they see fit, then that's all the more reason to apply technical solutions to the problem. We've been trying forever to get people to start encrypting their emails and stuff, this might be the thing that finally gets everyone to accept real technological measures for achieving encryption and anonymization on the internet.
I, for one, am kinda glad that this type of thing is out in the open so we can deal with it more effectively with technological measures... vs. before where we would say "well, I'll just conduct all of my communications out in the open since the Constitution said the government guarantees our privacy without their fingers crossed behind their backs"
Yeah, that was my first thought too... TFA is behind a paywall, so can't really scan for it, but I bet they included the Cash for Clunkers program as a mitigating factor... maybe even projections on how things could have been much worse.
I live in Redmond. Microsoft has enough coders. They just laid a bunch of them off. What they want are cheaper coders to throw at their projects. That's why they're working so hard to bring in lots of H1Bs. Many of the H1Bs are not earnestly brought here to do the work. They're just here to flood the market with tech workers to reduce tech wages for everyone.
Many of the MS H1Bs do end up leaving/escaping MS and working elsewhere in the region. Still, it isn't enough to get Seattle Tech wages down low enough (though they certainly are competitive vs. Silicon Valley wages). A big reason why Boeing has pushed hard to leave the Puget Sound region is because their engineering wages simply can't compete with the relatively high MS and Amazon wages for tech work.
OTOH, MS has done much to improve the quality of life here in Seattle, investing in infrastructure and museums and businesses and other perks to attract top programmers. Boeing has always sorta taken the opposite approach, opening their factories in the crappiest, drug-infested neighborhoods in a effort to keep costs down and making their quality-of-living investments elsewhere if possible.
Get a less noisy system. How hard is that to figure out?
Married 15 years. After I had spent the money on quieter fans, it turned out she just didn't like the look of the computer in the living room, with its wires and peripherals and stuff.
Go the man cave route with an extra room (or even a closet). You get to spend the money on bigger speakers instead of quieter fans. She gets to decorate the living room to her liking, and you get major points for being so accommodating. It will come in handy later when you have kids, so you can lock out all your little ones from the Dangerous Stuff, and it's even more handy later when you can let your bigger kids play in them while you and the Mrs. enjoy some sanity time in the nice living room.
Yes, business and finance can make more money than engineers. It's much easier to rake in the profits by convincing people to pay 2x - 4x more for crap than it is to make the crap 5% cheaper. Still, I'd rather do the engineering work. $100k+ is way more than enough to lead a happy life. My financial advisors look way the fuck stressed out.
OTOH I don't think the conventional wisdom has changed much from when I graduated.... companies still seem to prefer to hire STEM engineers, and then put them through business school to make managers and, er, "financial manufacturers" and whatnot out of them. The math is all the same, it's easier to train them, they're more ethical and loyal, so they won't steal from you and don't mind if you work them like dogs. Pure businessheads are probably going to be looking out for their own interests first and will take advantage of the company as much as they can get away with.
Pretty impressive finding results from LinkedIn back in 2000, considering it didn't launch until 2003.
Heh, if you were really Dr. Who, you could find a way to make that happen:D
To be fair, LinkedIn has appeared to reach critical mass just within the past year or two (at least my account is finally exploding with people I've worked with in the past, similar to when I begrudgingly realized that people actually use Facebook way back when).
Also, if you RTFS, they address that in their research bias section. And if you're a LinkedIn luser, you might realize that eventually they goad you into uploading most of your employment history, so that's what they're probably digging into to get pre-2003 data.
Heh, for one of the hack days at work I totally recreated that scene in minecraft... used the python plugin to attach switches to scripts, so we could turn services off and on and use glowstone to monitor health checks. Had a sheep dispenser hooked up to drop sheep into a glass-encased river every time user traffic hit the website.
Also was working on some kind of pipeline deployment visualization involving minecarts, but it was difficult to restock the carts and load livestock reliably at the time.
That's cool... is there some sort of OKCupid interface to it yet, so you can see which representatives match your interests the best, and alerts you when they vote against what you say you're interested in?
For example, the cloned sheep Dolly was born after 277 eggs were used for SCNT, which created 29 viable embryos. Only three of these embryos survived until birth, and only one survived to adulthood.[11]
I think it's still worthwhile... not getting 'ethics' confused with 'morality'. But anyone who was bothered by Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion may have an issue with this.
Slashdot Mirror
So the irony is that I actually worked for Disney for a few years. So yes, I did go to the theater to see some of their stuff in the past decade, but only because the company gave us tickets for lack of any other perks in our area. And yes, I do get caught up by watching movies on long airplane trips every so often, so I did see parts of Gravity and Elysium and Transformers and the thing with Smaug. But the discount airline we fly has a really crappy DVR system that apparently can't handle VBR streams very well, so it would just start stuttering and skipping over any action sequences with lots of motion.
Yeah, I don't have a TV either, so the other irony is that I worked on designing and building multi-million dollar AV systems for distributed Command and Control theaters.
But whatever, it doesn't count since we spent plenty of time binge-watching serials back when we had Netflix, so just forget I said anything that might have obliquely supported the bit about the PR move :P
I don't know what this movie is, and I don't follow or watch movies in general, but I suddenly almost want to find out more about this movie is all about now.
Almost.
I hate to bring politics into a science discussion, but unfortunately politics is what determines funding. And politics is what put humans on the moon.
Yes, putting humans anywhere in space (or anywhere hostile to biological habitation) is basically a super-expensive camping trip. That never stopped us in the past from building capsules that can take humans to the bottom of the oceans or hurtling across the skies or stationed at the south pole and other places where robots could do the job just as well or better.
Politically, will countries / corporations be able to "own" the resources (or even just the science / IP) discovered in space without a human presence to plant a flag and occupy? I mean, we're not to that level of competition yet, but say sometime in the future when we're mining asteroids and there's a really valuable asteroid that everyone's trying to claim. Would we consider it legal for the first mining robot to arrive to claim the entire thing? Or is it fair game for whichever robot gets there first to take their fill? Is it an act of war for a robot to knock out / disable a competing country's robot? It obviously is if you're knocking out a human-inhabited space colony, but otherwise you're just squabbling over money.
Anyway, I'm glad that NASA is doing the math on what is at this point just a proposal / thought exercise. No harm in having thought things through, in the off-chance that Venus was suddenly struck with a strong case of unobtanium-fever.
Huh, well, I learned something... I always thought they were getting their "checks" for free. ... I'm still working on building up that minimum average daily balance so I qualify for free or reduced orders on checkbooks... must be nice to have enough to go platinum and not have to worry about that.
Ugh. Never played with Rails, but I've had to convert a lot of bash / python cluster management work into Chef / Ruby and it's been awful. I easily spend 10x longer doing trivial tasks, and in the end, I have to write a bash ssh job to verify that chef did the right thing anyway.
To be fair, there's a lot in the framework that I do like... the somewhat built-in unit and integration testing (which, for some reason, is surprisingly absent in production where you'd most want it). I sort of like the RuboCop coding convention watchdog, mostly due to the irony of it making ruby even more sensitive to whitespace formatting than python ever was. But for the most part, all this stuff just adds more pieces that randomly breaks things every 3 months, and most people trying to get actual work done end up disabling and ignoring all of it, which is a shame because doing things in The Chef Way(TM) also balloons every little 10-line bash/sed script into a monstrosity spanning multiple overlapping files, attributes, templates, and data bags. It's also dog slow and wasteful to nuke-n-pave for every little change, and/or inconsistent about deploying rolling updates and giving you no mechanism to roll back (OK, so it does provide some backup of some configuration files it touches, whooop-dee-doo).
I left my old job largely because the new tech manager wanted to introduce Chef as the silver bullet that would launch them into the next phase of their career, and forced hundreds of prod machines to start using it while they were still figuring out all of its vagaries. Of course the final straw was that we weren't allowed to in any way blame Chef on any outages or project delays, since the execs were already breathing down his neck for the ham-fisted migration.
Got another job still doing Chef-based work, but at least now I have support from management to take as much time as it needs to maintain things properly. Still spend way more time maintaining the tool instead of plying our trade, but whatever, it pays the bills. OpsCode has really got a little cottage industry going in maintaining DevOps job security, and I get a lot of coffee breaks while "waiting for my ruby scripts to converge in test-kitchen".
Mod parent AC up.
Some of the best IT workers I've known were originally English majors. A STEM worker that doesn't communicate well can be just as bad or worse than a less-technical worker with some decent collaboration skills.
So you have a BA degree... Use it to get a technical writing or training job in some field you would enjoy. Then use the tuition benefits / training provided by your employer to get a BS / MS in something. From there you'll be able land a whole bunch more jobs that require a technical degree.
The hardest part is getting your foot in the door... unfortunately, it's usually easier to have the BS / STEM degree first, and then using your employer's continuing education benefits to study whatever the hell you like. But it can work the other way around too.
EDIT: *couldn't* pull off a convincing accent. It was like listening to Borat make a fool of himself, except without any humor.
Seriously, GTA III:SA did an awesome job putting you in the shoes of a black kid from the hood. Character development was amazing, as you start out on bikes doing jobs for your moms, dealing with corrupt cops (both white and black), getting trapped in drug & gang wars, losing everything, rebuilding yourself as a lackey for a gangsta rapper and the CIA... it really makes you want to rage.
GTA IV, OTOH, was pretty lame in comparison... zero character development (certainly didn't help that the main voice actor was the only one who could pull off a convincing Russian immigrant accent, esp. compared to the "extras" like the Thai prostitute in the opening sequence). It just didn't make me feel anything for his plight or his family, and when bad things happened to him I was like "good!".
Heh, I lol'd .
But anyway, to go off on a tangent, where was the /. coverage of the Car2Go outage from Friday? The one caused by the meltdown of their "German-based" mobile carrier due to some network roaming bug? I assume they're trying to deflect the blame to T-mobile without directly impacting their stock price...
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.c...
Eh, you're not on the hook for paying taxes with a babysitter if it's under $1900/yr. or $1000 per quarter
http://www.forbes.com/sites/an...
So I guess if you have a pool of different babysitters, you're all set.
Though more likely what will happen is that we'll go back to the dark ages and live with family members who can take care of our kids for us instead of entrusting them to near-total strangers, and, like, maybe learn how to get along while living in close proximity of our in-laws and stuff. You know, like the way things work in the third world.
Nah, I'm probably expecting too much from US society.
Plus, there's plenty of alternatives in the Seattle area. Most tech workers get a monthly bus pass for free through their work. Since Seattle doesn't really have a "major" mass transit network yet, the bus service it actually pretty good (as long as you're commuting to/from Seattle -- good luck if you're trying to commute between suburbs). The city of Seattle paid for everyone to get Car2Go memberships, and ZipCar has a pretty good presence here too. The airport shuttles are great if I have more luggage than I care to lug on transit, and they're cheaper than cabs since you can share the ride with others on the van. I have and use all of these things, but never used a cab or any of these new unlicensed / unregulated cab-like services. That's just not how I roll.
Having lived in the third world, I think the only way taxi (and taxi-like services) will get cheaper is through a glut of competition through the right amount of regulation/deregulation (like the licensed taxis in Thailand, which are everywhere and you can summon them in minutes with a wave of your hand, yet metered so they don't rip off tourists as much as they used to), and shared jeepney services (like those used in Puerto Rico and the Philippines) which essentially work like airport shuttles. Both of these could be much improved and optimized with information technology, and large employers like Microsoft and Google already run their own intelligent taxi/vanpool services for their commuters and on campus, so it's likely just a matter of time before they start offering some of that publicly... if there wasn't so much competition from public transit.
Huh interesting points... I would have guessed that this might be a ploy for Apple to grab some of the military-industrial complex work. I've never seen apple junk in the defense sector before, but if they can get security officers to begin insisting on using US-sourced electronics, then Apple has a honey pot of high margin contracts to reap.
Still looking for a political solution? Look for the silver lining... if everyone KNOWS that the government is mining your communications for whatever ends they see fit, then that's all the more reason to apply technical solutions to the problem. We've been trying forever to get people to start encrypting their emails and stuff, this might be the thing that finally gets everyone to accept real technological measures for achieving encryption and anonymization on the internet.
I, for one, am kinda glad that this type of thing is out in the open so we can deal with it more effectively with technological measures... vs. before where we would say "well, I'll just conduct all of my communications out in the open since the Constitution said the government guarantees our privacy without their fingers crossed behind their backs"
Yeah, that was my first thought too... TFA is behind a paywall, so can't really scan for it, but I bet they included the Cash for Clunkers program as a mitigating factor... maybe even projections on how things could have been much worse.
I live in Redmond. Microsoft has enough coders. They just laid a bunch of them off. What they want are cheaper coders to throw at their projects. That's why they're working so hard to bring in lots of H1Bs. Many of the H1Bs are not earnestly brought here to do the work. They're just here to flood the market with tech workers to reduce tech wages for everyone.
Many of the MS H1Bs do end up leaving/escaping MS and working elsewhere in the region. Still, it isn't enough to get Seattle Tech wages down low enough (though they certainly are competitive vs. Silicon Valley wages). A big reason why Boeing has pushed hard to leave the Puget Sound region is because their engineering wages simply can't compete with the relatively high MS and Amazon wages for tech work.
OTOH, MS has done much to improve the quality of life here in Seattle, investing in infrastructure and museums and businesses and other perks to attract top programmers. Boeing has always sorta taken the opposite approach, opening their factories in the crappiest, drug-infested neighborhoods in a effort to keep costs down and making their quality-of-living investments elsewhere if possible.
Yeah, we have one of those too. She has the reading root / guest room right next to the man cave. And she does go nuts every time I turn up the bass.
Get a less noisy system. How hard is that to figure out?
Married 15 years. After I had spent the money on quieter fans, it turned out she just didn't like the look of the computer in the living room, with its wires and peripherals and stuff.
Go the man cave route with an extra room (or even a closet). You get to spend the money on bigger speakers instead of quieter fans. She gets to decorate the living room to her liking, and you get major points for being so accommodating. It will come in handy later when you have kids, so you can lock out all your little ones from the Dangerous Stuff, and it's even more handy later when you can let your bigger kids play in them while you and the Mrs. enjoy some sanity time in the nice living room.
The moral of the story is: don't be poor.
Yes, business and finance can make more money than engineers. It's much easier to rake in the profits by convincing people to pay 2x - 4x more for crap than it is to make the crap 5% cheaper. Still, I'd rather do the engineering work. $100k+ is way more than enough to lead a happy life. My financial advisors look way the fuck stressed out.
OTOH I don't think the conventional wisdom has changed much from when I graduated.... companies still seem to prefer to hire STEM engineers, and then put them through business school to make managers and, er, "financial manufacturers" and whatnot out of them. The math is all the same, it's easier to train them, they're more ethical and loyal, so they won't steal from you and don't mind if you work them like dogs. Pure businessheads are probably going to be looking out for their own interests first and will take advantage of the company as much as they can get away with.
Nice quote:
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."
From the movie "Primer" see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/P...
Yeah, that's one of my favorite movies. And it had a production value of what, $10k?
http://www.explainxkcd.com/wik...
Pretty impressive finding results from LinkedIn back in 2000, considering it didn't launch until 2003.
Heh, if you were really Dr. Who, you could find a way to make that happen :D
To be fair, LinkedIn has appeared to reach critical mass just within the past year or two (at least my account is finally exploding with people I've worked with in the past, similar to when I begrudgingly realized that people actually use Facebook way back when).
Also, if you RTFS, they address that in their research bias section. And if you're a LinkedIn luser, you might realize that eventually they goad you into uploading most of your employment history, so that's what they're probably digging into to get pre-2003 data.
Eh, I find edited comments annoying, just post your corrections in a child post, like you almost did.
Also, brilliant props to the mod who modded "Laidoff tech worker Barbie" with "Redundant" flag.
Heh, for one of the hack days at work I totally recreated that scene in minecraft... used the python plugin to attach switches to scripts, so we could turn services off and on and use glowstone to monitor health checks. Had a sheep dispenser hooked up to drop sheep into a glass-encased river every time user traffic hit the website.
Also was working on some kind of pipeline deployment visualization involving minecarts, but it was difficult to restock the carts and load livestock reliably at the time.
I used to use synesthesia, but since I started using Clementine the nyanalyzer cat has become the main music visualization for me.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=113&session=2&vote=00282
That's cool... is there some sort of OKCupid interface to it yet, so you can see which representatives match your interests the best, and alerts you when they vote against what you say you're interested in?
I don't understand... what would be unethical about this?
Forcing an Asian elephant to be a "mother" to another species, one that might harm her.
Forcing solitary existence on what appears to be a highly social species.
That, and often you'd need 100s of zygotes to create a few viable organisms that survive to adulthood.
Excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
For example, the cloned sheep Dolly was born after 277 eggs were used for SCNT, which created 29 viable embryos. Only three of these embryos survived until birth, and only one survived to adulthood.[11]
I think it's still worthwhile... not getting 'ethics' confused with 'morality'. But anyone who was bothered by Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion may have an issue with this.