When I do occasionally see a Garfield strip nowadays it's just about the cat being mean to the guy and the guy's social incompetence. Nothing else. It's been *years* like that.
I know! Remarkable, such consistency! Jim Davis still hasn't lost a beat after all these years.
In all seriousness, though, Garfield has been executed by a team of assistants for decades now. I once saw a bit on TV about it. They even showed the guy who airbrushes all the Garfields for kids' school folders, etc. Davis was smart -- he made a business out of it. He realized that if he just played ball, he didn't have to have an ounce of Charles Schulz's talent to make Charles Schulz's money. Honestly, I don't fault him for it at all -- Garfield has always been harmless enough.
BTW, you must be younger than me, because in my mind Garfield "peaked" as a comic strip in the early 1980s. Its popularity grew as an effect of merchandising, but I don't think it was ever remotely funny in the 90s.
I really wish Breathed had Bloom County in him, even if he dribbled it out as a book every couple of years. I wish that Bill Watterson had more Calvin and Hobbes in him. But evidently, they don't. These were personal works, and people change; they move on.
Or rather, some do... and some just keep lingering around, even after their creative wells have run dry.
I'm with the people who say they've read this exact same story about Breathed before. He keeps saying he's "giving up comics to focus on children's books," as if we're supposed to read that as some kind of catharsis moment in the life of an artist... and then he describes his latest children's book, which is about a depressed pig tending the grave of his dead wife. Breathed paved over the field after Bloom County, and for the rest of his career he's just been doing donuts on the asphalt.
You have succinctly summed up the opinion of most of the network-engineer types that I have spoken to on the subject. Especially the part about "breaking the Internet" -- that's a very familiar refrain.
And you know what? You're probably right, in a hypothetical, pie-in-the-sky network engineer's world. But the rest of us have already accepted the fact that, as with so many other things in life, we're going to have to put up with what we get. I don't own an ISP. You don't own an ISP. So what are we going to do? Write letters? Threaten to take our business -- where? To the ISP down the block? Which has the exact same policies as the one I subscribe to now?
Telling the major telcos that they need to convert their entire infrastructures to IPv6 is like telling America it needs to switch to the metric system. Again, quite astute -- so where are we on that? The engineers have pretty much gone over to metric, but the rest of us are still counting rods to the hog's-head. Think it's going to change?
It takes force to overcome inertia. The more inertia, the more force to overcome it. In this case, the "force" is going to have to be a market force. Until the telcos see a real problem with IPv4 -- a business problem, such as being unable to reach new customers, or their services not being perceived as competitive -- they won't change. Network engineers are demanding change, but they aren't offering any reasons -- not reasons of the type that businesses understand.
And not the type of reasons that customers understand, either. I get my email, I get my Web, I get my movies and MP3s and chat rooms and everything else. In 1988 I had a 1200 baud modem. In 2008 I have a 6 megabit dedicated Internet feed. "Waah waah," indeed! Your response? "I have my head in the sand/my ass." Well, again -- as well-reasoned and cogent an argument as that may be, it's just not a compelling reason to go IPv6, in my opinion.
...to say nothing of the influence of external agents -- viruses, in particular, which are now believed to have played an incredibly important role in evolution throughout history. Remember, viruses can only grow and propagate inside of host cells. Retroviruses often integrate portions of their own DNA with the host genome, and retrovirus material is in fact believed to constitute at least 5 percent of the human genome.
Sure, an Amiga was a bit different from an Atari, which was a bit different from a PC, which was a bit different from a Mac, which was a bit different from an Archimedes... but so what? People coped
And how did they cope? Mainly by buying PCs and a few Macs, while Commodore, Atari, and Acorn all went out of business.
Seriously. My first reaction was, "Hey buddy -- how's about you negotiate the fscking contract so that the terms aren't so skewed against you?" I hope everybody on Slashdot does realize that when somebody hands you a piece of paper and says that they'll pay you a certain amount of money if you sign it, it is possible to sign a completely different piece of paper and still get the same amount of money.
Oh noes, my netbook is underpowered for video editing. How many people thought otherwise?
This is becoming standard notebook-vendor marketing B.S. Think up some activity that used to require the full processor power of a desktop PC but can now be done with the specs of your average laptop. Advertise, explaining that beginning this year the top of your line of laptops can do everything that a desktop can. Next year, pretend everybody has been clamoring to do this activity on their laptops and that they will no longer settle for less. Never mind whether anybody really wants to do it or not.
I mean, seriously. You've just shot a digital video of your niece cutting her birthday cake. And while everybody else is sitting down for a much-needed glass of wine, you scuttle off to the den to trim off the botched shots, add a 3-D rendered credits sequence to the video in Adobe Premiere, and burn DVDs for the other parents. All before 6pm. Right?
Plus they all could benefit from a higher vertical resolution (or a rotatable screen).
I don't know if this is widely known, but the Asus Eee PC (at least the 901, the first Atom processor model) has a "rotatable screen," at least in the software sense. Hit Ctrl-Alt-RightArrow and it goes into portrait mode. Hit Ctrl-Alt-DownArrow and it will even flip upside-down. Unfortunately, it's pretty difficult to use in these modes because the screen itself has no pivot. The fact that the touchpad doesn't change orientation makes it doubly difficult. It is handy for viewing certain kinds of documents, however.
That said, I don't think I'd recommend an Eee PC for any kind of serious coding. The braces and brackets are in the right places, but the keyboard is unbearably small for most people. I can type on it well enough, and I've used it to compose long documents, but I do not recommend it to other people sight-unseen. Worse, the Atom processor really is poky, and the solid-state drives perform poorly. I imagine that compiling something on the scale of a Linux kernel on a Eee PC would be pretty arduous and frustrating.
If I were you, I'd look into more traditional subnotebooks if you want a small laptop for coding. I've been very happy with models from Fujitsu in the past -- you don't find them in stores often, but Fujitsu makes a quality product. Mine took to Linux effortlessly. Sony also makes some very nice small machines, but I am suspicious of them because of Sony's poor track record with hardware support (short product lifespan, lots of proprietary drivers that can't be duplicated, etc). Panasonic might have something for you, also -- in any event, if you'll be running compilers I think you'll find that a more traditional processor and standard hard drives are what you'll want.
They use solid-state drives (except some 1000-series models and the 904), which are faster than mechanical devices but can be rewritten fewer times.
Actually, on my Eee PC 901 they're not even faster than normal drives. The stock Eee PC comes with one boot drive that seems to run at more-or-less "normal" speed, and one larger "data drive" that seems... slow. The slowness is especially noticeable during writes. For example, when I stored my Firefox profile on the data drive, I could expect a 1-4 second pause every time I loaded up a Web page, during which the program would be unresponsive. Presumably this happened when Firefox was writing to its cache, history, etc. Moving the profile to the boot drive cut that time in half. Also, when downloading to the data drive over a 6Mbps cable line, I can't saturate the line. The drive is the bottleneck. Some people have suggested that Asus's drivers for the controller may be flawed. All I can say is, don't believe [all of] the hype about SSDs.
The main thing that bothers me is the cultural framework this creates of closing science into dogma. Since we currently can do genetic engineering, and there's some possibility that intelligent life will be discovered as having existed in the past nearby, maybe some civilization nearby visited Earth and, since we can already do it, went ahead and... oops. Can't propose that, and since I can't propose it, can't ever investigate it. Academic crimestop.
That's just silly. Of course you can propose it. Who's stopping you? For the sake of argument, let's assume you have proposed the idea that aliens from a nearby planet came to Earth and genetically modified early organisms to turn them into people. Now what? What form of "investigation" do you propose?
Scientists are actively searching for nearby planets that are capable of supporting life, and if they find any they will actively investigate whether any life exists on them, intelligent or not. So in a way, that part of your hypothesis is already being tested. The problem is, so far we have found absolutely no evidence of life anywhere else in the universe.
You could propose the theory that mermen from beneath the sea created humans, and suggest that if we searched the vast expanse of the oceans for long enough we might actually encounter evidence of these mermen -- fine. It's plausible enough; the oceans certainly are huge and there's a lot in them that we don't know about. But this is really two theories in one. So far, there is no evidence to support your first premise -- mermen created humans -- because we have never seen evidence of any mermen. And in fact, insofar as we have undersea craft roaming the Earth at all times, we are constantly conducting experiments to locate mermen (much in the same way that the LHC will search for the Higgs boson) -- and, unfortunately, we have not found any. No mermen, no mermen creating humans. Simple as that.
Just because scientists choose not to pursue certain experiments doesn't mean they are closed-minded or involved in some conspiracy. Suppose I have a piece of paper in my hand. I tell you that if I let go of this piece of paper, it will descend to the ground at exactly the same rate of speed every time. That's my theory. To prove this theory to you, I drop the piece of paper. Then I repeat the experiment. In total, I drop the piece of paper 1,134 times. Upon examining the data, I find that the paper hit the ground after roughly the same interval, repeatedly, 1,133 times. But one time, the paper flew out of my hand and landed on the other side of my room. Is this evidence that my theory about gravity is unsound? By strict scientific method, yes is is -- but which is the more likely explanation? That the action of gravity has changed, or that the front door blew open when I was conducting that one trial? Which "investigation" into those results will be more fruitful?
Scientists are expected to conduct their research with rigor and detachment, and not bias their research based on ideology. But nothing in the handbook says they have to act as if they're stupid.
Yeah, but it seems to me the whole concept was that these are ultra-cheap PCs that aren't really good for a whole lot of serious computing, but are perfectly fine for surfing the net. Hence, "netbook."
If this thing is even half good enough for its intended purpose, isn't it sort of a... gamebook, or something?
Further, I always thought "gamer PC" meant "tricked-out, high performance machine with emphasis on the graphics card and a bunch of blue LEDs in the case." The concept of marketing a "gamer system" that explicitly scrapes the bottom of the barrel seems odd.
For the record, I rent an apartment in the City of San Francisco. But I don't see what that has to do with labor laws. Why should the government force companies to pay additional compensation to one category of workers that they don't pay to any other employees? All I still hear is a lot of complaining about how hard life is for IT people. At $75,000 per year your life really isn't that hard -- even in the Bay Area. (And most employers pay skilled IT workers higher salaries than that.) True, $75,000 isn't enough to raise a family on -- but that's a factor of your choice to live in an expensive real estate market, not the value of your work. Do you think your office manager makes $100,000 and up? Why shouldn't he/she be entitled to raise a family, if you are? What I detect in this thread is a lot of subtle elitism and a sense of self-entitlement, and I don't see how it's justified. Fiddling with computers ain't brain surgery.
Title IX says (paraphrasing, don't have reference in front of me) that any exempt, hourly wage earner should be compensated by means determined for working more than 40 hours in a week.
But I've never met an IT worker in California who is paid an hourly wage. Pretty much everybody who has a job in an office building is paid a flat monthly salary. (If you're a contractor and you're billing hours, that's different -- it's up to you to negotiate your own rates.)
The bill explicitly exempts those "computer professionals" who make at least $75,000 annually doing full-time work. I should be heartbroken that they're not entitled to overtime pay?
Yes, yes, we all know that IT guys toil long hours in the datacenter. Guess what? Salespeople have to travel all the time and often spend weeks away from their families. Operations managers need to crunch budgets and give presentations at the last minute. Team leaders are expected to spend their weekends doing "team-building exercises." Everybody has to work a lot in today's America.
Don't like it? Negotiate yourself a better deal. Being exempt from overtime status is a two-way street. On the one hand, you don't get paid for the long hours you put in. On the other hand, your employer can't make you report how many hours you worked. If you find you're working too many hours, maybe the problem is you. Either you're playing the game of "I don't want to be the first one to leave," or maybe you're working too much because you're not accurately budgeting your workload, or maybe you're just not that good at your job. If they're paying you $75,000 a year, you ought to be smart enough to figure out how to fix the problem.
I personally think it'll be extremely difficult to turn it into a movie with losing its essential character and merely ripping some broadly painted ideas and a few very specific references.
And nobody could be planning that.;-)
Seriously, the friend who loaned it to me thought it was brilliant, I thought it was pretty thin and unenlightening. If not a "movie book" then an airplane novel at best. But, as someone else said, to each his own.
It's a hella good book. No doubt Hollywood will fuck it up.
It was a mediocre book that was obviously written with a movie deal in mind. So the movie ought to be OK. (Is this where I'm supposed to say "there, fixed that for you"?)
Perhaps reporting on the kind of cookies being consumed in my smart cookie jar, and my toothbrush can email my dentist if it detects a filling from too many cookies? Maybe they can work together?
My degree's in chemistry, and the classes got a lot more fun and interesting once the pre-meds got shunted off into the "lite" track of classes like P-chem. We could have actual discussions about concepts for a change.
Ah! See, whereas I was stupid enough to take general chemistry as somebody who has no intention of getting an advanced degree in the sciences, but who is just interested in them. I was naïve enough to expect a class that taught concepts. Instead, I got a rigorous boot camp consisting of pages and pages of rote math problems based on nebulous ideas with no practical application (example: "Imagine a universe where the lowest element on the periodic table is helium...").
I spent more hours studying for this one chemistry class than my four other classes combined. I got A's on the other four classes. I got a C in chem. The entire purpose of the class seemed to be to "shake out the whiny, grade-grubbing pre-[whatever]". I went to office hours with my instructor at midterm, concerned that my grade was suffering, and was cautioned in no uncertain terms that I should not entertain the thought of dropping the class, and by no means should I consider re-taking it, because if I re-took it I would get a C again. "We don't just hand out C's to anybody," the instructor told me. "If you're getting a C then you're doing OK." This was the same teacher who announced to the class at Thanksgiving time: "I know a lot of you like to leave town to be with your families during the holidays, but you need to understand, when you're studying chemistry that's really not possible." Seriously. (Hint: I'm 35. My mother's pushing 70. Fuck you.) Result? I have no intention of ever setting foot in the chemistry department again. (I tried o. chem but dropped the class -- it was even worse.)
we really should temper our response with the realization that there are a ton of people failing high school algebra right now that would benefit a lot more by being offered some technical courses that lead to jobs
And BTW -- sorry to reply twice -- here I totally disagree. Have you looked around lately? What kind of jobs are there going to be in the United States for people who can't pass "high school algebra"? I'm not saying everybody needs to learn Trigonometry and up, but algebra is REALLY basic and REALLY essential to numeracy (which equals common sense in things like, oh, making the best of a low-paying job).
And the reason I put "high school algebra" in quotes is because my state, California, disagrees with you also. Beginning this year, California students must pass algebra to graduate from the eighth grade. Of course, the requirement is being challenged in court, and will probably fall -- and even I think 8th grade might be early -- but clearly there are a lot of people in California who do not think it's acceptable to give up on educating kids because don't like doing algebra homework when they're 14.
Kids go through a ton of crap when they're school age. What happens at that age, however, shouldn't determine their destinies for the rest of their lives just because some school board paper-pusher decides they should be fast-tracked to trade school instead of being challenged to learn.
Bottom line, I do not believe in closing doors to education at any level. There is no reason we should "temper our response" to what is an entirely altruistic gesture from Stanford. None at all. It should be applauded wholeheartedly.
Guess what - even really smart people fail out of engineering degrees
Yeah, but most people with that problem switch majors to English or Psychology. Seriously -- did you even go to college?
Think about it: A bachelor's degree in the sciences gets you... nothing. With a B.S. in Organic Chemistry -- as goddamn hard as undergraduate organic chemistry classes may be -- you're qualified to get a job rinsing test tubes with acetone, and that's about it. Likewise, with a B.S. in Engineering you are not going to be designing any major components for Boeing. Fortunately, the first two years of college leave students with a lot of flexibility. If it turns out that you're not equipped to go all the way with a certain course of study, taking a broad range of classes (as students are generally forced to do by general-education requirements) enables you to better judge the courses that you can succeed in.
Besides, as has been pointed out elsewhere, these free Stanford classes don't confer credit. They are not for people who dream of getting a degree from Stanford. Mostly they are for private individuals who wish to further their own understanding -- people who don't see the purpose of education as "getting a job," because they already have jobs.
The vast majority of people would be much better served with an education focused on practical application of the knowledge humanity has accumulated over the last couple thousand years.
Er, you mean like a bachelor's degree? Or are you seriously implying that everyone who graduates from four years at Stanford goes directly to independent research on some "impractical" topic?
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Galloping Christ on the cross, that stuff is freakin' hilarious!
When I do occasionally see a Garfield strip nowadays it's just about the cat being mean to the guy and the guy's social incompetence. Nothing else. It's been *years* like that.
I know! Remarkable, such consistency! Jim Davis still hasn't lost a beat after all these years.
In all seriousness, though, Garfield has been executed by a team of assistants for decades now. I once saw a bit on TV about it. They even showed the guy who airbrushes all the Garfields for kids' school folders, etc. Davis was smart -- he made a business out of it. He realized that if he just played ball, he didn't have to have an ounce of Charles Schulz's talent to make Charles Schulz's money. Honestly, I don't fault him for it at all -- Garfield has always been harmless enough.
BTW, you must be younger than me, because in my mind Garfield "peaked" as a comic strip in the early 1980s. Its popularity grew as an effect of merchandising, but I don't think it was ever remotely funny in the 90s.
I really wish Breathed had Bloom County in him, even if he dribbled it out as a book every couple of years. I wish that Bill Watterson had more Calvin and Hobbes in him. But evidently, they don't. These were personal works, and people change; they move on.
Or rather, some do ... and some just keep lingering around, even after their creative wells have run dry.
I'm with the people who say they've read this exact same story about Breathed before. He keeps saying he's "giving up comics to focus on children's books," as if we're supposed to read that as some kind of catharsis moment in the life of an artist ... and then he describes his latest children's book, which is about a depressed pig tending the grave of his dead wife. Breathed paved over the field after Bloom County, and for the rest of his career he's just been doing donuts on the asphalt.
You have succinctly summed up the opinion of most of the network-engineer types that I have spoken to on the subject. Especially the part about "breaking the Internet" -- that's a very familiar refrain.
And you know what? You're probably right, in a hypothetical, pie-in-the-sky network engineer's world. But the rest of us have already accepted the fact that, as with so many other things in life, we're going to have to put up with what we get. I don't own an ISP. You don't own an ISP. So what are we going to do? Write letters? Threaten to take our business -- where? To the ISP down the block? Which has the exact same policies as the one I subscribe to now?
Telling the major telcos that they need to convert their entire infrastructures to IPv6 is like telling America it needs to switch to the metric system. Again, quite astute -- so where are we on that? The engineers have pretty much gone over to metric, but the rest of us are still counting rods to the hog's-head. Think it's going to change?
It takes force to overcome inertia. The more inertia, the more force to overcome it. In this case, the "force" is going to have to be a market force. Until the telcos see a real problem with IPv4 -- a business problem, such as being unable to reach new customers, or their services not being perceived as competitive -- they won't change. Network engineers are demanding change, but they aren't offering any reasons -- not reasons of the type that businesses understand.
And not the type of reasons that customers understand, either. I get my email, I get my Web, I get my movies and MP3s and chat rooms and everything else. In 1988 I had a 1200 baud modem. In 2008 I have a 6 megabit dedicated Internet feed. "Waah waah," indeed! Your response? "I have my head in the sand/my ass." Well, again -- as well-reasoned and cogent an argument as that may be, it's just not a compelling reason to go IPv6, in my opinion.
...to say nothing of the influence of external agents -- viruses, in particular, which are now believed to have played an incredibly important role in evolution throughout history. Remember, viruses can only grow and propagate inside of host cells. Retroviruses often integrate portions of their own DNA with the host genome, and retrovirus material is in fact believed to constitute at least 5 percent of the human genome.
Ah, sorry -- I assume you're right about Xorg, but I'm running Windows on my Eee PC. There the feature is somewhat unusual.
Sure, an Amiga was a bit different from an Atari, which was a bit different from a PC, which was a bit different from a Mac, which was a bit different from an Archimedes... but so what? People coped
And how did they cope? Mainly by buying PCs and a few Macs, while Commodore, Atari, and Acorn all went out of business.
Seriously. My first reaction was, "Hey buddy -- how's about you negotiate the fscking contract so that the terms aren't so skewed against you?" I hope everybody on Slashdot does realize that when somebody hands you a piece of paper and says that they'll pay you a certain amount of money if you sign it, it is possible to sign a completely different piece of paper and still get the same amount of money.
Oh noes, my netbook is underpowered for video editing. How many people thought otherwise?
This is becoming standard notebook-vendor marketing B.S. Think up some activity that used to require the full processor power of a desktop PC but can now be done with the specs of your average laptop. Advertise, explaining that beginning this year the top of your line of laptops can do everything that a desktop can. Next year, pretend everybody has been clamoring to do this activity on their laptops and that they will no longer settle for less. Never mind whether anybody really wants to do it or not.
I mean, seriously. You've just shot a digital video of your niece cutting her birthday cake. And while everybody else is sitting down for a much-needed glass of wine, you scuttle off to the den to trim off the botched shots, add a 3-D rendered credits sequence to the video in Adobe Premiere, and burn DVDs for the other parents. All before 6pm. Right?
Plus they all could benefit from a higher vertical resolution (or a rotatable screen).
I don't know if this is widely known, but the Asus Eee PC (at least the 901, the first Atom processor model) has a "rotatable screen," at least in the software sense. Hit Ctrl-Alt-RightArrow and it goes into portrait mode. Hit Ctrl-Alt-DownArrow and it will even flip upside-down. Unfortunately, it's pretty difficult to use in these modes because the screen itself has no pivot. The fact that the touchpad doesn't change orientation makes it doubly difficult. It is handy for viewing certain kinds of documents, however.
That said, I don't think I'd recommend an Eee PC for any kind of serious coding. The braces and brackets are in the right places, but the keyboard is unbearably small for most people. I can type on it well enough, and I've used it to compose long documents, but I do not recommend it to other people sight-unseen. Worse, the Atom processor really is poky, and the solid-state drives perform poorly. I imagine that compiling something on the scale of a Linux kernel on a Eee PC would be pretty arduous and frustrating.
If I were you, I'd look into more traditional subnotebooks if you want a small laptop for coding. I've been very happy with models from Fujitsu in the past -- you don't find them in stores often, but Fujitsu makes a quality product. Mine took to Linux effortlessly. Sony also makes some very nice small machines, but I am suspicious of them because of Sony's poor track record with hardware support (short product lifespan, lots of proprietary drivers that can't be duplicated, etc). Panasonic might have something for you, also -- in any event, if you'll be running compilers I think you'll find that a more traditional processor and standard hard drives are what you'll want.
They use solid-state drives (except some 1000-series models and the 904), which are faster than mechanical devices but can be rewritten fewer times.
Actually, on my Eee PC 901 they're not even faster than normal drives. The stock Eee PC comes with one boot drive that seems to run at more-or-less "normal" speed, and one larger "data drive" that seems ... slow. The slowness is especially noticeable during writes. For example, when I stored my Firefox profile on the data drive, I could expect a 1-4 second pause every time I loaded up a Web page, during which the program would be unresponsive. Presumably this happened when Firefox was writing to its cache, history, etc. Moving the profile to the boot drive cut that time in half. Also, when downloading to the data drive over a 6Mbps cable line, I can't saturate the line. The drive is the bottleneck. Some people have suggested that Asus's drivers for the controller may be flawed. All I can say is, don't believe [all of] the hype about SSDs.
I know you're a troll, but...
The main thing that bothers me is the cultural framework this creates of closing science into dogma. Since we currently can do genetic engineering, and there's some possibility that intelligent life will be discovered as having existed in the past nearby, maybe some civilization nearby visited Earth and, since we can already do it, went ahead and... oops. Can't propose that, and since I can't propose it, can't ever investigate it. Academic crimestop.
That's just silly. Of course you can propose it. Who's stopping you? For the sake of argument, let's assume you have proposed the idea that aliens from a nearby planet came to Earth and genetically modified early organisms to turn them into people. Now what? What form of "investigation" do you propose?
Scientists are actively searching for nearby planets that are capable of supporting life, and if they find any they will actively investigate whether any life exists on them, intelligent or not. So in a way, that part of your hypothesis is already being tested. The problem is, so far we have found absolutely no evidence of life anywhere else in the universe.
You could propose the theory that mermen from beneath the sea created humans, and suggest that if we searched the vast expanse of the oceans for long enough we might actually encounter evidence of these mermen -- fine. It's plausible enough; the oceans certainly are huge and there's a lot in them that we don't know about. But this is really two theories in one. So far, there is no evidence to support your first premise -- mermen created humans -- because we have never seen evidence of any mermen. And in fact, insofar as we have undersea craft roaming the Earth at all times, we are constantly conducting experiments to locate mermen (much in the same way that the LHC will search for the Higgs boson) -- and, unfortunately, we have not found any. No mermen, no mermen creating humans. Simple as that.
Just because scientists choose not to pursue certain experiments doesn't mean they are closed-minded or involved in some conspiracy. Suppose I have a piece of paper in my hand. I tell you that if I let go of this piece of paper, it will descend to the ground at exactly the same rate of speed every time. That's my theory. To prove this theory to you, I drop the piece of paper. Then I repeat the experiment. In total, I drop the piece of paper 1,134 times. Upon examining the data, I find that the paper hit the ground after roughly the same interval, repeatedly, 1,133 times. But one time, the paper flew out of my hand and landed on the other side of my room. Is this evidence that my theory about gravity is unsound? By strict scientific method, yes is is -- but which is the more likely explanation? That the action of gravity has changed, or that the front door blew open when I was conducting that one trial? Which "investigation" into those results will be more fruitful?
Scientists are expected to conduct their research with rigor and detachment, and not bias their research based on ideology. But nothing in the handbook says they have to act as if they're stupid.
Yeah, but it seems to me the whole concept was that these are ultra-cheap PCs that aren't really good for a whole lot of serious computing, but are perfectly fine for surfing the net. Hence, "netbook."
If this thing is even half good enough for its intended purpose, isn't it sort of a ... gamebook, or something?
Further, I always thought "gamer PC" meant "tricked-out, high performance machine with emphasis on the graphics card and a bunch of blue LEDs in the case." The concept of marketing a "gamer system" that explicitly scrapes the bottom of the barrel seems odd.
I hope you don't live in the SF Bay Area.
For the record, I rent an apartment in the City of San Francisco. But I don't see what that has to do with labor laws. Why should the government force companies to pay additional compensation to one category of workers that they don't pay to any other employees? All I still hear is a lot of complaining about how hard life is for IT people. At $75,000 per year your life really isn't that hard -- even in the Bay Area. (And most employers pay skilled IT workers higher salaries than that.) True, $75,000 isn't enough to raise a family on -- but that's a factor of your choice to live in an expensive real estate market, not the value of your work. Do you think your office manager makes $100,000 and up? Why shouldn't he/she be entitled to raise a family, if you are? What I detect in this thread is a lot of subtle elitism and a sense of self-entitlement, and I don't see how it's justified. Fiddling with computers ain't brain surgery.
$75k is barely making it in most markets (especially California). Rent in most places in California is 1 bed room for $1k+.
Which is then, what -- 16% of your income? At that rate you can live quite comfortably on $75K.
Title IX says (paraphrasing, don't have reference in front of me) that any exempt, hourly wage earner should be compensated by means determined for working more than 40 hours in a week.
But I've never met an IT worker in California who is paid an hourly wage. Pretty much everybody who has a job in an office building is paid a flat monthly salary. (If you're a contractor and you're billing hours, that's different -- it's up to you to negotiate your own rates.)
The bill explicitly exempts those "computer professionals" who make at least $75,000 annually doing full-time work. I should be heartbroken that they're not entitled to overtime pay?
Yes, yes, we all know that IT guys toil long hours in the datacenter. Guess what? Salespeople have to travel all the time and often spend weeks away from their families. Operations managers need to crunch budgets and give presentations at the last minute. Team leaders are expected to spend their weekends doing "team-building exercises." Everybody has to work a lot in today's America.
Don't like it? Negotiate yourself a better deal. Being exempt from overtime status is a two-way street. On the one hand, you don't get paid for the long hours you put in. On the other hand, your employer can't make you report how many hours you worked. If you find you're working too many hours, maybe the problem is you. Either you're playing the game of "I don't want to be the first one to leave," or maybe you're working too much because you're not accurately budgeting your workload, or maybe you're just not that good at your job. If they're paying you $75,000 a year, you ought to be smart enough to figure out how to fix the problem.
I personally think it'll be extremely difficult to turn it into a movie with losing its essential character and merely ripping some broadly painted ideas and a few very specific references.
And nobody could be planning that. ;-)
Seriously, the friend who loaned it to me thought it was brilliant, I thought it was pretty thin and unenlightening. If not a "movie book" then an airplane novel at best. But, as someone else said, to each his own.
It's a hella good book. No doubt Hollywood will fuck it up.
It was a mediocre book that was obviously written with a movie deal in mind. So the movie ought to be OK. (Is this where I'm supposed to say "there, fixed that for you"?)
Perhaps reporting on the kind of cookies being consumed in my smart cookie jar, and my toothbrush can email my dentist if it detects a filling from too many cookies? Maybe they can work together?
Just block cookies.
If you don't understand this stuff, you really shouldn't be prescribing drugs.
And if you can't solve the energy crisis, you really shouldn't be allowed to be an auto mechanic.
My degree's in chemistry, and the classes got a lot more fun and interesting once the pre-meds got shunted off into the "lite" track of classes like P-chem. We could have actual discussions about concepts for a change.
Ah! See, whereas I was stupid enough to take general chemistry as somebody who has no intention of getting an advanced degree in the sciences, but who is just interested in them. I was naïve enough to expect a class that taught concepts. Instead, I got a rigorous boot camp consisting of pages and pages of rote math problems based on nebulous ideas with no practical application (example: "Imagine a universe where the lowest element on the periodic table is helium...").
I spent more hours studying for this one chemistry class than my four other classes combined. I got A's on the other four classes. I got a C in chem. The entire purpose of the class seemed to be to "shake out the whiny, grade-grubbing pre-[whatever]". I went to office hours with my instructor at midterm, concerned that my grade was suffering, and was cautioned in no uncertain terms that I should not entertain the thought of dropping the class, and by no means should I consider re-taking it, because if I re-took it I would get a C again. "We don't just hand out C's to anybody," the instructor told me. "If you're getting a C then you're doing OK." This was the same teacher who announced to the class at Thanksgiving time: "I know a lot of you like to leave town to be with your families during the holidays, but you need to understand, when you're studying chemistry that's really not possible." Seriously. (Hint: I'm 35. My mother's pushing 70. Fuck you.) Result? I have no intention of ever setting foot in the chemistry department again. (I tried o. chem but dropped the class -- it was even worse.)
One less science student in America. Happy now?
we really should temper our response with the realization that there are a ton of people failing high school algebra right now that would benefit a lot more by being offered some technical courses that lead to jobs
And BTW -- sorry to reply twice -- here I totally disagree. Have you looked around lately? What kind of jobs are there going to be in the United States for people who can't pass "high school algebra"? I'm not saying everybody needs to learn Trigonometry and up, but algebra is REALLY basic and REALLY essential to numeracy (which equals common sense in things like, oh, making the best of a low-paying job).
And the reason I put "high school algebra" in quotes is because my state, California, disagrees with you also. Beginning this year, California students must pass algebra to graduate from the eighth grade. Of course, the requirement is being challenged in court, and will probably fall -- and even I think 8th grade might be early -- but clearly there are a lot of people in California who do not think it's acceptable to give up on educating kids because don't like doing algebra homework when they're 14.
Kids go through a ton of crap when they're school age. What happens at that age, however, shouldn't determine their destinies for the rest of their lives just because some school board paper-pusher decides they should be fast-tracked to trade school instead of being challenged to learn.
Bottom line, I do not believe in closing doors to education at any level. There is no reason we should "temper our response" to what is an entirely altruistic gesture from Stanford. None at all. It should be applauded wholeheartedly.
Guess what - even really smart people fail out of engineering degrees
Yeah, but most people with that problem switch majors to English or Psychology. Seriously -- did you even go to college?
Think about it: A bachelor's degree in the sciences gets you ... nothing. With a B.S. in Organic Chemistry -- as goddamn hard as undergraduate organic chemistry classes may be -- you're qualified to get a job rinsing test tubes with acetone, and that's about it. Likewise, with a B.S. in Engineering you are not going to be designing any major components for Boeing. Fortunately, the first two years of college leave students with a lot of flexibility. If it turns out that you're not equipped to go all the way with a certain course of study, taking a broad range of classes (as students are generally forced to do by general-education requirements) enables you to better judge the courses that you can succeed in.
Besides, as has been pointed out elsewhere, these free Stanford classes don't confer credit. They are not for people who dream of getting a degree from Stanford. Mostly they are for private individuals who wish to further their own understanding -- people who don't see the purpose of education as "getting a job," because they already have jobs.
The vast majority of people would be much better served with an education focused on practical application of the knowledge humanity has accumulated over the last couple thousand years.
Er, you mean like a bachelor's degree? Or are you seriously implying that everyone who graduates from four years at Stanford goes directly to independent research on some "impractical" topic?