I lose electrical power at least once a year. Sometimes it's just a few blocks, sometimes it's a quarter of the city. It usually happens during thunder storms, but once in a while it happens for no apparent reason. It usually takes several hours for it to be restored. This is in a city of 200,000 in the Midwest. Several decades ago, this was acceptable; electricity was a convenience that gave us light and maybe ran some of our home appliances. But today it is essential to our daily lives; too many things now require electricity to work. And yet... we're still using the same basic infrastructure that my grandparents got their electricity from during the Great Depression.
Do I have to spell this out for you? Two young adult males hiding in a cave, one of them with some kind of hunter-gatherer "ornament"? Too bad we haven't identified the genes for homosexuality yet, or we could test these boys' DNA for it.:)
This is essentially the system used by the original iPhone, before it had proper GPS. Using data from Skyhook Wireless about the location of wifi APs (identified by MAC), combined with the data from its phone transceiver about "visible" cell towers, it inferred the phone's position. It works, but (as shown by the fact that Apple added true GPS in the iPhone 3G) not as accurately as GPS. (I think the iPod Touch still gets by using just the wifi data, which makes it susceptible to confusion if someone with a wifi AP in their home moves to another city.) It's possible that by going broadband (in the original sense of the word) with its radio sniffing, and using all available data sources, this system might overcome the weakness of the iPhone gen1 system.
Haha! I just asked it to tell me where to go for a drink, and it gave me directions to a gay bar. Probably because I'm on a DSL line (i.e only city-level location ID), and it's the closest bar to the geographic center of the city (where the street numbers go to Zero)... not because it knows that I'd like the place.;)
The Atari 400 was the first computer I owned, purchased with money saved from my job delivering magazines (a glorified paperboy). The TRS-80 didn't do color, the Apple ][ was too expensive, the C=64 didn't exist yet, and IBM's new Personal Computer - no sound, no graphics, no effing way - was ridiculously overpriced. But the Atari 400 could play Asteroids and Star Raiders, and opened the door to printers and modems and bears, oh my! It was oh so much more than the Atari 2600 game machine that every upper-middle-class kid in the neighborhood had. I replaced the Atari a couple years later with a C=64 (when I went off to college for CS degree) in part because that had a proper keyboard and a growing software library, but Atari is largely responsible for me being the geek I am today.
Q: Have you ever been in a cockpit before? A: No, never. By the way, what's your occupation? I mean - could you tell me about your work?
Q: Have you ever seen a grown man naked? A: Yes, twice, but I barely remember. Why do you ask me about it? And I forgot to ask you where you are from...
Q: Do you like movies with gladiators? A: My favorite type is comedy. I like the "Naked Gun" series best. Heck, any movie with Leslie Nielsen it is tops in my book!
Q: Have you ever been in a Turkish prison? A: Oh, nope. I guess is a nice place.
How old are you... 12? I'm 47 (not young, but still not quite ready to be lumped into "old people" just yet) and I grew up in an environment when "install" still implied the use of a screwdriver. Seriously: I first encountered the word in reference to software when I was 19 years old; I remember that it struck me as a rather odd use of the verb.
Please mod parent up. These are just a right-wing think tanks fantasizing in their spare time about scenarios in which the executive branch of the federal government gets knocked off. While it can make for entertaining fiction (e.g. Battlestar Galactica 2.0, Y: the Last Man) it isn't something to get worked up about in the real world.
This cannot be a surprise to anyone familiar with either the Dunning-Kruger effect, or the tendency of adolescents/young adults to act in denial of their own mortality.
Young people (as a group) do not understand technology better than older people (as a group) do; they just aren't afraid of it. That makes them better at figuring out how to use it, but worse at figuring out how to use it wisely.
I've had those "vacations" too, but they aren't the same. A high school grad who's been accepted at a college knows how long he has for it, and what he'll be doing when it's over. He doesn't have to spend time every day looking for work, not knowing if he has a week or a year left, fearing what will become of him, etc.
Don't "further your career or education". Go do something else!
The summer I graduated from high school my parents lined up a job for me, working with computers for a small business, giving me a great opportunity to start building professional credentials. I appreciated it, but I turned it down. Instead a friend and I got on a plane, and set off on a 6-week tour of England, Wales, and Scotland, camping at caravan parks in a 1.5-man tent, and getting from place to place by bicycle and by train. It was an extraordinary experience. Some bad, some good, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.
There will be another summer next year, which you can spend working on cool programming projects or whatever, and there will be year after year and decade after decade in which you can do that sort of thing as much as you please. You have a whole lifetime of formal education and career ahead of you. But you will never have another entire summer in which you have entirely closed the book on one phase of your life, but the next phase is patiently waiting for you unopened, a few months off in the future. You have the freedom to do damn near anything you are capable of doing. This is a once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity. Do something worthy of that.
People with full-time jobs spend more waking time during the week with their coworkers than with anyone else, usually including their spouse (whom they presumably love and chose to spend their life with). I'd prefer those people to be ones I like.
I'm guessing that the answer is "everyone except the following....." and that list would immediately put those few dozen people under a spotlight, destroying their privacy.
I was hoping that "Power Over the Internet" was analogous to "Power Over Ethernet". That would've been cool, especially if the protocol was compatible with wireless.
"most people that I know play games of some type nowadays"
Fixed that for you.
There is a large cohort of people over 50 who never played video games as a kid, and still don't. In fact, even after the dawn of the video game in the 1980s, there was still a period when it was mostly (male) geeks playing them, so I think you'd even find a pretty large number of over-40s who never got into gaming when they were young, which is the strongest predictor of whether someone plays games today: aside from people encountering a Wii in their assisted-living facility, you don't see a lot of people getting into gaming for the first time in middle age or later.
This should be obvious that gamers would be mostly uninterested in tech careers. It'd be like people who watch television all wanting to go into theater, or people who like to drive going into automotive mechanics, or people who like to eat pursuing a career in culinary arts. Liking to use something is very different from wanting to be one of the people who make it work.
Slashdot Mirror
I lose electrical power at least once a year. Sometimes it's just a few blocks, sometimes it's a quarter of the city. It usually happens during thunder storms, but once in a while it happens for no apparent reason. It usually takes several hours for it to be restored. This is in a city of 200,000 in the Midwest. Several decades ago, this was acceptable; electricity was a convenience that gave us light and maybe ran some of our home appliances. But today it is essential to our daily lives; too many things now require electricity to work. And yet... we're still using the same basic infrastructure that my grandparents got their electricity from during the Great Depression.
Example #3,573 of why asking for life advice on Slashdot is like asking for technical assistance on Yahoo Answers.
Do I have to spell this out for you? Two young adult males hiding in a cave, one of them with some kind of hunter-gatherer "ornament"? Too bad we haven't identified the genes for homosexuality yet, or we could test these boys' DNA for it. :)
This is essentially the system used by the original iPhone, before it had proper GPS. Using data from Skyhook Wireless about the location of wifi APs (identified by MAC), combined with the data from its phone transceiver about "visible" cell towers, it inferred the phone's position. It works, but (as shown by the fact that Apple added true GPS in the iPhone 3G) not as accurately as GPS. (I think the iPod Touch still gets by using just the wifi data, which makes it susceptible to confusion if someone with a wifi AP in their home moves to another city.) It's possible that by going broadband (in the original sense of the word) with its radio sniffing, and using all available data sources, this system might overcome the weakness of the iPhone gen1 system.
Haha! I just asked it to tell me where to go for a drink, and it gave me directions to a gay bar. Probably because I'm on a DSL line (i.e only city-level location ID), and it's the closest bar to the geographic center of the city (where the street numbers go to Zero)... not because it knows that I'd like the place. ;)
When these are invented, I intend to retire for the rest of my unnaturally extended life on my share of the patent royalties. :)
Once we figure out how to make nanobots out of stem cells and graphene, every problem known to humanity will be solved!
The Atari 400 was the first computer I owned, purchased with money saved from my job delivering magazines (a glorified paperboy). The TRS-80 didn't do color, the Apple ][ was too expensive, the C=64 didn't exist yet, and IBM's new Personal Computer - no sound, no graphics, no effing way - was ridiculously overpriced. But the Atari 400 could play Asteroids and Star Raiders, and opened the door to printers and modems and bears, oh my! It was oh so much more than the Atari 2600 game machine that every upper-middle-class kid in the neighborhood had. I replaced the Atari a couple years later with a C=64 (when I went off to college for CS degree) in part because that had a proper keyboard and a growing software library, but Atari is largely responsible for me being the geek I am today.
Well of course: that's how the subconscious of a superficially-programmed chatbot works!
Q: Have you ever been in a cockpit before?
A: No, never. By the way, what's your occupation? I mean - could you tell me about your work?
Q: Have you ever seen a grown man naked?
A: Yes, twice, but I barely remember. Why do you ask me about it? And I forgot to ask you where you are from...
Q: Do you like movies with gladiators?
A: My favorite type is comedy. I like the "Naked Gun" series best. Heck, any movie with Leslie Nielsen it is tops in my book!
Q: Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?
A: Oh, nope. I guess is a nice place.
Ask it why America is the greatest country in the world.
This is undoubtedly a precursor to Hyronaline.®
How old are you... 12? I'm 47 (not young, but still not quite ready to be lumped into "old people" just yet) and I grew up in an environment when "install" still implied the use of a screwdriver. Seriously: I first encountered the word in reference to software when I was 19 years old; I remember that it struck me as a rather odd use of the verb.
Please mod parent up. These are just a right-wing think tanks fantasizing in their spare time about scenarios in which the executive branch of the federal government gets knocked off. While it can make for entertaining fiction (e.g. Battlestar Galactica 2.0, Y: the Last Man) it isn't something to get worked up about in the real world.
You need to adjust those figures up by 30-50% to accommodate the delay of social maturity in modern times, but yes, it's still true.
This cannot be a surprise to anyone familiar with either the Dunning-Kruger effect, or the tendency of adolescents/young adults to act in denial of their own mortality.
Young people (as a group) do not understand technology better than older people (as a group) do; they just aren't afraid of it. That makes them better at figuring out how to use it, but worse at figuring out how to use it wisely.
I pity you.
I've had those "vacations" too, but they aren't the same. A high school grad who's been accepted at a college knows how long he has for it, and what he'll be doing when it's over. He doesn't have to spend time every day looking for work, not knowing if he has a week or a year left, fearing what will become of him, etc.
Don't "further your career or education". Go do something else!
The summer I graduated from high school my parents lined up a job for me, working with computers for a small business, giving me a great opportunity to start building professional credentials. I appreciated it, but I turned it down. Instead a friend and I got on a plane, and set off on a 6-week tour of England, Wales, and Scotland, camping at caravan parks in a 1.5-man tent, and getting from place to place by bicycle and by train. It was an extraordinary experience. Some bad, some good, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.
There will be another summer next year, which you can spend working on cool programming projects or whatever, and there will be year after year and decade after decade in which you can do that sort of thing as much as you please. You have a whole lifetime of formal education and career ahead of you. But you will never have another entire summer in which you have entirely closed the book on one phase of your life, but the next phase is patiently waiting for you unopened, a few months off in the future. You have the freedom to do damn near anything you are capable of doing. This is a once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity. Do something worthy of that.
People with full-time jobs spend more waking time during the week with their coworkers than with anyone else, usually including their spouse (whom they presumably love and chose to spend their life with). I'd prefer those people to be ones I like.
I'm guessing that the answer is "everyone except the following....." and that list would immediately put those few dozen people under a spotlight, destroying their privacy.
I was hoping that "Power Over the Internet" was analogous to "Power Over Ethernet". That would've been cool, especially if the protocol was compatible with wireless.
Fun Fact: In some parts of the US, the pronunciations of "privatization" and "profitization" are nearly indistinguishable.
"most people that I know play games of some type nowadays"
Fixed that for you.
There is a large cohort of people over 50 who never played video games as a kid, and still don't. In fact, even after the dawn of the video game in the 1980s, there was still a period when it was mostly (male) geeks playing them, so I think you'd even find a pretty large number of over-40s who never got into gaming when they were young, which is the strongest predictor of whether someone plays games today: aside from people encountering a Wii in their assisted-living facility, you don't see a lot of people getting into gaming for the first time in middle age or later.
This should be obvious that gamers would be mostly uninterested in tech careers. It'd be like people who watch television all wanting to go into theater, or people who like to drive going into automotive mechanics, or people who like to eat pursuing a career in culinary arts. Liking to use something is very different from wanting to be one of the people who make it work.