I work at a research lab of roughly 2000 people or so. The majority of employees are engineers (all kinds), math, phyics, chemistry, etc, majors. We have a lot of opportunities for education including on-site masters programs in Computer Science, Electrical Engineer, and Ocean Acoustics.
There are also long term offsite programs where you can go get a Ph.D. and this is also popular. However, of all the people that I know here with Ph.D's the majority seem to migrate into project management, essentially doing nothing but running a small team, writing proposals and giving presentations. Eventually they move into fulltime management where they even give up driving the technical direction of the programs they may at one time have created.
I started down this same road shortly after seeing the/. article mentioned by the poster. I have nearly identical hardware too with an EPIA 800 and a laptop drive. Since drive space and memory were not at a premium I decided to not go with an anorexic installation but rather just a trim one.
I chose to use Fedora. I did not load X Windows and instead used fbv from an autologin console. I found it very useful to have lots of console tools (lynx, wget, gcc) available to me. And basically there was no benefit in trying to trim disk usage by a few hundred Meg.
My Father in law has had an 04 Prius for about 5 months. In the current, warmer weather of the past few weeks he's been getting 57 MPG. Over the very cold winter, I think he was in the low 40's or possibly even the upper 30's.
His driving habits didn't change at all during these periods. Exclusively putting around a small town and not plowing into farmers markets as happens occasionally with old men!
I have just de-crapped my 4th computer of the week. Yet another 2.4+ GHz consumer box completely ridden with ad/spy/crap-ware.
For Sun to be viewed as "fast" by these unfortunate souls that cannot learn rudimentary do's and don'ts (and recovery) all they have to do is block invasive software.
I strongly suspect that if my friend installed JD on their systems they'd say "boy that is fast!"
Several years ago I worked on a well funded ($1M+) software development project that was specified with a handful of requirement statements. Those requirements basically all fit on two sheets of paper. "The user will be able to import XYZ..." etc.
There was a little back and forth discussion, but basically the requirements were hammered out in a few days. The development team of about 5 coders took these requirements and over the next 6-8 months we used a "release early, release often" strategy. We called it "Build a little - Test a little", basically we had a GUI designer cranking out do-nothing screens, while the rest filled in the guts one function at a time.
We ended up essentially almost on time and almost on budget. The project was WILDLY successful and still in use 7 years later.
We have been funded now to produce Version 3 of this product. Most of the team has moved on, including the chief architect who drove the implementation philosophy and he's been replaced by someone who has embraced specifications like a baby marmoset clings to it's mother.
Since December, we have done NOTHING but attend meetings and write excruciatingly detailed requirements documents, and crank out UML diagrams. Not a line of code has been written (besides a bit of prototyping).
I'm doing it because I have to. I see a lot of extra labor cost (I estimate at least $250k so far) and I don't think this process has helped us. I think we could have created an entire prototype since December and thrown it all away and been ahead of the game (assuming we'd learned valuable info from our mistakes)
The cost of constructing has not risen nearly as fast as the sale prices of the houses. So the general contractors can make more per house and they are lining up to apply for building permits.
Swansea MA is a relatively small Massachusetts community of about 19,000 people. Our town has historically had outstanding water quality from deep artesian wells but we have faced summertime drought conditions most of the past 8 years and once, part of the town water reserves were pumped completely dry.
Add to that the fact that we are experiencing a building boom due to high house prices (think 900 square foot house for $250k) and we anticipate extensive demands on town water services.
That is why our water commissioner formally proposed a desalination plant for our town.
Despite the fact that the state has cut funding for just about everything, our kids are asked to bring paper, tissues and other basic supplies to school, and we had to shut off the town street lights and close a library to save money the town focus seems to be upon building our way out of this hole:(
At least elections are next tues.
Oh and on a related note, I took a vacation recently to the Carribean and the place we stayed had desalinated water....it tastes awful.
In the next 5 years we will see cars introduced with viable "autofollow" where a car will know it's relative position in traffic and be able to safely autopilot itself. Toyota is already demonstrating it here
I realize this is not for everyone, but I solve the problem through apathy. Regardless of my rating, I do the best job that I can on any task that I am assigned.
When I was actually in the middle of a business embroglio but remained steadfast in my particular conviction I was told "this will not look good on your performance review" I used a line that I'd been waiting for years to say in just this situation:
"The only way you can hurt me with a performance review is to roll it up and poke me in the eye"
I've been at this job 22 years, and fully expect to be here for many to come (by choice).
I have a VERY short attention span ("that dog has a puffy tail! c'mere puff!!" [Homer]) but right now I'm focused completely on MythTV
I'm actually in the middle of installing and tweaking it right now, it mostly runs now. If I get it working seamlessly (meaning that it passes The Wife Test (tm)) then it will be the uberdevice in my house.
Onscreen news and local weather
Stream MP3s
Play/Rip/Burn DVDs
Timeshift TV and skip commercials
Yes, quite uber.
I have 3 kids that have gone through our local elementary and middle schools. Our schools use Accelerated Reader extensively. My wife and 3 friends have been active volunteers helping administer these reading tests and they all feel that it dramatically helps basic reading skills (no, not scientific, but there are some classes with more motivated teachers that encourage it more and the difference is obvious).
This is the ONLY good use of the 50 or so computers in the school. I think having 9 year olds use powerpoint is useless, and their limited web access is an equal waste.
Accelerated reader is a database of multiple choice questions for each book in the school library. I've started to write an apache/php equivalent....if I get any feedback here, it may encourage me to start a project on sf.net!
I'm not sure I really want a magnetic field around my head. I recall an episode of "Scientific American Frontiers" (no energy to find link, Alan Alda, PBS, etc) with a physiologist investigating the brains ability to adapt and allocate bored portions of the brain for other tasks. They blinfolded a volunteer and showed how her optical cortex began processing tactile rather than visual inputs.
THEN, they used a magnetic field (applied via wand to the back of her head) to essentially erase/shut off/disable this new function. They were quite casual about it, and it was pretty obvious that the erasure was well established.
This is a good opportunity for me to try to get rid of my old alpha XL 266'es. Free to good home to anyone in the southeastern Mass area who wants to come pick them up.
I had two of them running, the third was basically spare parts. Two booted Redhat 6.0 (might have been 6.2) and were running PostgreSQL quite happily. Specs? um... beyond the fact that they are 266 MHz Alphas, I have basically no idea on memory or hard drive space.
If you're interested, email me at ghuntress at com cast dot net and I'll make the effort to go into my basement and dig them out of the boneyard and get better specs....other than that, they are bound for the landfill eventually.
I'm not sure of actual numbers, but I recall that IBM is heavily invested in Diebold, a major ATM manufacturer. I also recall that a large percentage of ATM machines run OS/2.
If this is true, I would expect IBM to be pushing a linux-based solution.
But then again, who knows what the banks want to buy? I just got a letter last week from my bank informing me that "for my security" they will be requiring online banking customers to use 128 bit encryption. Ack! 1998 called, they want their security back!
"Probable view: If they show the code, it would be out of the kernel in 4 hours, and re-written in a day, their case would collapse"
Is there a legal basis for this? I do not doubt for a minute that any infringing code could be rewritten quickly, but why would an otherwise legitamite SCO case collapse?
As an analogy, my neighbor breaks into my house and infringes upon (steals) my tv, I sue him and he says "ok I'll put it back". It seems to me that he is still guilty of a crime.
Suppose I want to be a freelance tech support / Windows Superman who can swoop into peoples homes and repair their neglected boxes. By the letter of the MS law...errr...license....what can I actually do?
Will the typical user be able to produce any OS media whatsoever? Full version (ha!) Upgrade? (possibly)... recovery cd?
If not what am I left with? Windows Update? perhaps. The admins in my office carry a pack labeled "CDs to Fix Most Anything" and these include our corporate ver of various MS products.
If I went to Staples and purchased a full ver of XP Pro, could I use it to repair existing broken installations. I do not mean a complete reinstallation, rather, I suppose it would be the/i386 stuff, cabs and infs.
SCO current market cap is just over $100M, but thats with a significant current spike, within the last year they were under a buck a share with a book value of under $15M.
Not that he would, or would want to, but I'll bet Linus could write a check for that.
Slashdot Mirror
I work at a research lab of roughly 2000 people or so. The majority of employees are engineers (all kinds), math, phyics, chemistry, etc, majors. We have a lot of opportunities for education including on-site masters programs in Computer Science, Electrical Engineer, and Ocean Acoustics.
There are also long term offsite programs where you can go get a Ph.D. and this is also popular. However, of all the people that I know here with Ph.D's the majority seem to migrate into project management, essentially doing nothing but running a small team, writing proposals and giving presentations. Eventually they move into fulltime management where they even give up driving the technical direction of the programs they may at one time have created.
Your roaming policy was just too restrictive.
I chose to use Fedora. I did not load X Windows and instead used fbv from an autologin console. I found it very useful to have lots of console tools (lynx, wget, gcc) available to me. And basically there was no benefit in trying to trim disk usage by a few hundred Meg.
His driving habits didn't change at all during these periods. Exclusively putting around a small town and not plowing into farmers markets as happens occasionally with old men!
I have just de-crapped my 4th computer of the week. Yet another 2.4+ GHz consumer box completely ridden with ad/spy/crap-ware.
For Sun to be viewed as "fast" by these unfortunate souls that cannot learn rudimentary do's and don'ts (and recovery) all they have to do is block invasive software.
I strongly suspect that if my friend installed JD on their systems they'd say "boy that is fast!"
There was a little back and forth discussion, but basically the requirements were hammered out in a few days. The development team of about 5 coders took these requirements and over the next 6-8 months we used a "release early, release often" strategy. We called it "Build a little - Test a little", basically we had a GUI designer cranking out do-nothing screens, while the rest filled in the guts one function at a time.
We ended up essentially almost on time and almost on budget. The project was WILDLY successful and still in use 7 years later.
We have been funded now to produce Version 3 of this product. Most of the team has moved on, including the chief architect who drove the implementation philosophy and he's been replaced by someone who has embraced specifications like a baby marmoset clings to it's mother.
Since December, we have done NOTHING but attend meetings and write excruciatingly detailed requirements documents, and crank out UML diagrams. Not a line of code has been written (besides a bit of prototyping).
I'm doing it because I have to. I see a lot of extra labor cost (I estimate at least $250k so far) and I don't think this process has helped us. I think we could have created an entire prototype since December and thrown it all away and been ahead of the game (assuming we'd learned valuable info from our mistakes)
The cost of constructing has not risen nearly as fast as the sale prices of the houses. So the general contractors can make more per house and they are lining up to apply for building permits.
Add to that the fact that we are experiencing a building boom due to high house prices (think 900 square foot house for $250k) and we anticipate extensive demands on town water services.
That is why our water commissioner formally proposed a desalination plant for our town.
Despite the fact that the state has cut funding for just about everything, our kids are asked to bring paper, tissues and other basic supplies to school, and we had to shut off the town street lights and close a library to save money the town focus seems to be upon building our way out of this hole :(
At least elections are next tues.
Oh and on a related note, I took a vacation recently to the Carribean and the place we stayed had desalinated water....it tastes awful.
In the next 5 years we will see cars introduced with viable "autofollow" where a car will know it's relative position in traffic and be able to safely autopilot itself. Toyota is already demonstrating it here
I have to deal with a similar ranking.
I realize this is not for everyone, but I solve the problem through apathy. Regardless of my rating, I do the best job that I can on any task that I am assigned.
When I was actually in the middle of a business embroglio but remained steadfast in my particular conviction I was told "this will not look good on your performance review" I used a line that I'd been waiting for years to say in just this situation:
"The only way you can hurt me with a performance review is to roll it up and poke me in the eye"
I've been at this job 22 years, and fully expect to be here for many to come (by choice).
I bought a 100 oz bar, just cuz.
Most very large banks have a "metals window" where you can get gold, silver, or platinum at current market prices.
I have a VERY short attention span ("that dog has a puffy tail! c'mere puff!!" [Homer]) but right now I'm focused completely on MythTV I'm actually in the middle of installing and tweaking it right now, it mostly runs now. If I get it working seamlessly (meaning that it passes The Wife Test (tm)) then it will be the uberdevice in my house. Onscreen news and local weather Stream MP3s Play/Rip/Burn DVDs Timeshift TV and skip commercials Yes, quite uber.
Kobold Hunter on Galahad?
I have 3 kids that have gone through our local elementary and middle schools. Our schools use Accelerated Reader extensively. My wife and 3 friends have been active volunteers helping administer these reading tests and they all feel that it dramatically helps basic reading skills (no, not scientific, but there are some classes with more motivated teachers that encourage it more and the difference is obvious).
This is the ONLY good use of the 50 or so computers in the school. I think having 9 year olds use powerpoint is useless, and their limited web access is an equal waste.
Accelerated reader is a database of multiple choice questions for each book in the school library. I've started to write an apache/php equivalent....if I get any feedback here, it may encourage me to start a project on sf.net!
I'm not sure I really want a magnetic field around my head. I recall an episode of "Scientific American Frontiers" (no energy to find link, Alan Alda, PBS, etc) with a physiologist investigating the brains ability to adapt and allocate bored portions of the brain for other tasks. They blinfolded a volunteer and showed how her optical cortex began processing tactile rather than visual inputs.
...Likes! brain!"
THEN, they used a magnetic field (applied via wand to the back of her head) to essentially erase/shut off/disable this new function. They were quite casual about it, and it was pretty obvious that the erasure was well established.
So, count me out!
[Kent Brockman] "...ahem....Little girl
This is a good opportunity for me to try to get rid of my old alpha XL 266'es. Free to good home to anyone in the southeastern Mass area who wants to come pick them up.
I had two of them running, the third was basically spare parts. Two booted Redhat 6.0 (might have been 6.2) and were running PostgreSQL quite happily. Specs? um... beyond the fact that they are 266 MHz Alphas, I have basically no idea on memory or hard drive space.
If you're interested, email me at ghuntress at com cast dot net and I'll make the effort to go into my basement and dig them out of the boneyard and get better specs....other than that, they are bound for the landfill eventually.
One of the most useful features of my ancient HP-48 was the equation solver and various calculus simplifications.
while the beast is no Macsyma or Maple, it served me well.
It is now 15 years later...what is the state of computer algebra systems (CAS) like macsyma, maple and mathematica?
Are there no rough equivalents to the functions of the HP available?
I'm not sure of actual numbers, but I recall that IBM is heavily invested in Diebold, a major ATM manufacturer. I also recall that a large percentage of ATM machines run OS/2.
If this is true, I would expect IBM to be pushing a linux-based solution.
But then again, who knows what the banks want to buy? I just got a letter last week from my bank informing me that "for my security" they will be requiring online banking customers to use 128 bit encryption. Ack! 1998 called, they want their security back!
Is there a legal basis for this? I do not doubt for a minute that any infringing code could be rewritten quickly, but why would an otherwise legitamite SCO case collapse? As an analogy, my neighbor breaks into my house and infringes upon (steals) my tv, I sue him and he says "ok I'll put it back". It seems to me that he is still guilty of a crime.
Here he is
But he's only a crappy level 23 wizard.
Suppose I want to be a freelance tech support / Windows Superman who can swoop into peoples homes and repair their neglected boxes. By the letter of the MS law...errr...license....what can I actually do?
/i386 stuff, cabs and infs.
Will the typical user be able to produce any OS media whatsoever? Full version (ha!) Upgrade? (possibly)... recovery cd?
If not what am I left with? Windows Update? perhaps. The admins in my office carry a pack labeled "CDs to Fix Most Anything" and these include our corporate ver of various MS products.
If I went to Staples and purchased a full ver of XP Pro, could I use it to repair existing broken installations. I do not mean a complete reinstallation, rather, I suppose it would be the
SCO current market cap is just over $100M, but thats with a significant current spike, within the last year they were under a buck a share with a book value of under $15M.
Not that he would, or would want to, but I'll bet Linus could write a check for that.
SuperID
I use digitemp too to monitor the temperature of my basement....errrr...server room. It works very well and yes, Dalsemi does have one wire humidity sensors
I can't find it in the article, I'll read it again, it was probably obvious....Does Apple get a cut of that buck?
That was a very cromulent post.