I've got one piece of advice for fresh IT graduates looking at the quoted $50k-$60k salaries:
Go back and live with mom and dad for a few years while you work. If the job won't let you stay in town, find a distant relative, or a friend of a friend to take you in for cheap.
Seriously.
If you need one, buy a car with 2-3 years of use on it, pay your taxes and loans, and then put the rest of your first year's pay in a trust fund where no one can touch it. (Talk to a lawyer about this. You can make the money all but bullet-proof, guaranteed to pay your retirement.)
Take the money you earn over the next four years, invest until you have a hefty down-payment on a house. Be sure to do the math on the interest your investments earn minus the interest on your debts, and give yourself a safety margin.
You'll be 27, own your home and your car and have your retirement assured.
After that, no job is a dead end job, because no employer will have anything to hold over your head. They won't pay you what you want? You can leave. They want you to work too many hours? You can leave. Personal conflicts? You can leave.
People in this position do what they want to, and they do it well. They do not have to deal with "burnout" or "overwork".
You've just worked your ass off for four years. Another five aren't going to kill you.
I thought the analogy with 1950s comptuers was interesting, but I think a more appropriate analogy would be 1930s computing -- we're still a long way off.
Equally interesting, the advances that occured between the 1930s and the 1950s were spurred on by the encrytion/decryption races of the second world war. That's what established computer science as the field we know today.
Anybody care to speculate on what would have to happen to drive nanotechnolgy into a similar frenzy of advancement?
A bad programmer clings to one solution in the face of every possible situation. A good programmer uses the best tool for the problem, and constantly expands his tool set.
There are a few reasons to fear a particular solution: 1) technical inadequacy 2) a single point of failure inherent to the system, such as a proprietary identification system. 3) submarine patents & copyrights
.Net seems to be a technically viable solution & Hailstorm has been withdrawn. That leaves #3, and that's being attacked by better minds, as we sit on our asses reading/.
Use thin layers of materials with indices of refraction that start near zero at the surface and increase gradually toward the center (or wearer's skin, in this case).
The result is that light coming in almost tangential to the surface is deflected very little, while light coming in perpendicular to the surface is gradually deflected around the center.
It's the same principle used in no-glare camera lenses. The math is a bitch, but it's soluable.
And I have no doubt whatsoever that the material science is moving right along to make this possible.
Why on Earth would you worry about somebody peeking in the window or sniffing with a tempest receiver, when you're already broadcasting your signal across kilometers of open wire?
We'll eventually be able to create our own "virtual" universes, which are infinitly more interesting, since WE'RE effectively Gods there.
Perhaps this is presumptuous on my part, but as someone who has played with religion, lucid dreaming, deep hypnosis, and biofeedback, I find the world around me to be far more challenging, entertaining, varied and surprising than anything my nervous system can put together on its own.
Did I mention meaningful?
The prospect of a virtual apotheosis bores me.
Give me real problems to solve, real experiences to explore, real tools to use in implementing solutions.
I'll make my own apotheosis.
There's another darker prospect that doesn't require a robot holocaust to come into being: maybe the effective Gods have been plugged into their realities involuntarily, as a means of pacification. Maybe a population that can wire their pleasure centers for constant activity doesn't feel the need to explore.
So if AOL bought Red Hat and poured a lot of money into development of a GPL OS, would they fight against legislation that might outlaw that OS on DRM grounds?
Because I can think of no better way to waste a whole lot of processor time, and a whole lot of bandwidth. (Did I mention user time?)
Far more efficient would be to compile the code once for every possible configuration store it on a central server, and let the users download according to preference.
The research may be directed toward a particular problem (and it is, or the grant money gets a lot tighter), but what results is not so much a product as a method.
Therefore, software research is closely akin to research into utilities construction methods, or highway construction methods, or direction and editing techniques, or photography methods.
Bob Maplethorpe kept his negatives. He couldn't stop people from mimicking his style, nor his method. (Good taste on the other hand...)
I find it offensive that we can even discuss limitations on duplicating method.
Or algorythm.
Or "look and feel".
Re:How does this thing move the operator's mass?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
Granted, when we walk we're falling forward in a controlled fashion, as Kamen states in the Time article, but we then lift ourselves back up and fall again to sustain the walk.
But you answer your own question. If it's rolling, it doesn't have to lift you back up.
Physically speaking, Work = Mass * Acceleration * Distance (Accelleration and Distance are vector quantities. Horizontal distance doesn't count against gravity. On a flat surface, Distance up and down = 0.)
Hence (theoretically) no work is done in the process of gliding at constant speed.
Realistically, that leaves accelleration, friction, and uphill travel. I suspect that the device can recover some of the energy of momentum from coasting downhill.
I did something like this in high school.
Try looking into the sequencing circuitry for a magnetic railgun. There's cheap silicon that can handle this kind of problem pretty easily.
Slashdot Mirror
Go back and live with mom and dad for a few years while you work. If the job won't let you stay in town, find a distant relative, or a friend of a friend to take you in for cheap.
Seriously.
If you need one, buy a car with 2-3 years of use on it, pay your taxes and loans, and then put the rest of your first year's pay in a trust fund where no one can touch it. (Talk to a lawyer about this. You can make the money all but bullet-proof, guaranteed to pay your retirement.)
Take the money you earn over the next four years, invest until you have a hefty down-payment on a house. Be sure to do the math on the interest your investments earn minus the interest on your debts, and give yourself a safety margin.
You'll be 27, own your home and your car and have your retirement assured.
After that, no job is a dead end job, because no employer will have anything to hold over your head. They won't pay you what you want? You can leave. They want you to work too many hours? You can leave. Personal conflicts? You can leave.
People in this position do what they want to, and they do it well. They do not have to deal with "burnout" or "overwork".
You've just worked your ass off for four years. Another five aren't going to kill you.
I thought the analogy with 1950s comptuers was interesting, but I think a more appropriate analogy would be 1930s computing -- we're still a long way off.
Equally interesting, the advances that occured between the 1930s and the 1950s were spurred on by the encrytion/decryption races of the second world war. That's what established computer science as the field we know today.
Anybody care to speculate on what would have to happen to drive nanotechnolgy into a similar frenzy of advancement?
oh... DAMN!
Like running Linux, doing it yourself is only cheaper if your time is worth suuficiently little.
There are a few reasons to fear a particular solution:
1) technical inadequacy
2) a single point of failure inherent to the system, such as a proprietary identification system.
3) submarine patents & copyrights
.Net seems to be a technically viable solution & Hailstorm has been withdrawn. That leaves #3, and that's being attacked by better minds, as we sit on our asses reading
... because they write THML...
I'd like to nominate this as the official name of the Microsoft-Only version of HTML.
I'm submitting an RFC to the W3C right now.
Why people feel that the grokster 24/7 kid should be punished is beyond me.
Uh, maybe because if the contract his parents signed looks like the one I signed, it explicitly forbids running a server of any kind.
Frankly, the ISP wouldn't have a problem with excess bandwidth usage if they'd shut down access to exerything but outgoing port 80.
I hoped the linked site would be run off the Game Boy.
Fastest Slashdotting ever.
Scroll back to 1995, or the like
Dude, how does your browser cache handle that much data?
these are yoga practitioners supporting Fritz Hollings' CBDTPA...
Sure there is.
Use thin layers of materials with indices of refraction that start near zero at the surface and increase gradually toward the center (or wearer's skin, in this case).
The result is that light coming in almost tangential to the surface is deflected very little, while light coming in perpendicular to the surface is gradually deflected around the center.
It's the same principle used in no-glare camera lenses. The math is a bitch, but it's soluable.
And I have no doubt whatsoever that the material science is moving right along to make this possible.
Stand back for a while and resume the fight when the tide is more favorable.
Yeah. The political tide will be turned by all concerned standing back and waiting.
Right.
Why on Earth would you worry about somebody peeking in the window or sniffing with a tempest receiver, when you're already broadcasting your signal across kilometers of open wire?
Nanotube technology is big now
logically inconsistent! 3 points!
Perhaps this is presumptuous on my part, but as someone who has played with religion, lucid dreaming, deep hypnosis, and biofeedback, I find the world around me to be far more challenging, entertaining, varied and surprising than anything my nervous system can put together on its own.
Did I mention meaningful?
The prospect of a virtual apotheosis bores me.
Give me real problems to solve, real experiences to explore, real tools to use in implementing solutions.
I'll make my own apotheosis.
There's another darker prospect that doesn't require a robot holocaust to come into being: maybe the effective Gods have been plugged into their realities involuntarily, as a means of pacification. Maybe a population that can wire their pleasure centers for constant activity doesn't feel the need to explore.
My God! I think we've just solved NASA's budget problems!
I'd tune in to see who got voted out of the airlock!
It's also very difficult to see, as suggested by the fact that it doesn't have a Messier number.
That extension off to the left, that's a tail.
So if AOL bought Red Hat and poured a lot of money into development of a GPL OS, would they fight against legislation that might outlaw that OS on DRM grounds?
Far more efficient would be to compile the code once for every possible configuration store it on a central server, and let the users download according to preference.
watching boxes powered by You Know Who drop like flies.
Voldemort does software too? Man, you'd think he'd have his hands full with that Potter kid...
Actually, there is a difference: functionality.
The research may be directed toward a particular problem (and it is, or the grant money gets a lot tighter), but what results is not so much a product as a method.
Therefore, software research is closely akin to research into utilities construction methods, or highway construction methods, or direction and editing techniques, or photography methods.
Bob Maplethorpe kept his negatives. He couldn't stop people from mimicking his style, nor his method. (Good taste on the other hand...)
I find it offensive that we can even discuss limitations on duplicating method.
Or algorythm.
Or "look and feel".
But you answer your own question. If it's rolling, it doesn't have to lift you back up.
Physically speaking, Work = Mass * Acceleration * Distance (Accelleration and Distance are vector quantities. Horizontal distance doesn't count against gravity. On a flat surface, Distance up and down = 0.)
Hence (theoretically) no work is done in the process of gliding at constant speed.
Realistically, that leaves accelleration, friction, and uphill travel. I suspect that the device can recover some of the energy of momentum from coasting downhill.
Really, that doesn't leave a lot for it to do.
I did something like this in high school.
Try looking into the sequencing circuitry for a magnetic railgun. There's cheap silicon that can handle this kind of problem pretty easily.
*Those* are what I'd be selling on eBay.