Nice anecdote. I'm past suprise in finding a liberal offering up information intended to generate an emotional reaction rather than inform. Jobs have been lost in every year and under all economic circumstances.
Yeah, CURSE those GODLESS LIBERALS.
They're always looking for an EMOTIONAL reaction, because they want to MOVE TO SOCIALISM. They want to OUTLAW religion. They want to make abortions MANDATORY.
Worst of all, these liberals want to hand Osama bin Laden the keys to the castle so he can attack America again, because the "Blame America First" crowd gets off on that sort of thing.
(I'm sorry, I'm revelling in the irony. It's politics, and a lefty attacking a righty over appeals to emotion is just as ignorant as a righty attacking a lefty)
Since the only growing industries seem to have been weapons and war, it's only natural that when you take the influence of government debt out of the picture, the economy has been shrinking for a long time.
There are some people who think you can replace economic growth in the private sector with economic growth in the public sector and it's the same thing. That may be true in Soviet Russia, but in the free world, pork financed with debt is an inflationary measure that doesn't increase the actual size of the economy.
What's worse, this 3.4% growth in the economy financed by debt is going to cause a cascade plunge. Right now we're like a family using debt to pay off debt (the growth in the national debt is equal to the money spent maintaining the current debt). What always happens in cases like these is the debt supply runs out, and the family goes bankrupt. If you think we're seeing hard times today, just wait. Paying back this 10 trillion is going to send the US back to the stone age by comparison.
The inflation adjusted debt accrual rate for the US government in the past 8 years has been about 380 billion dollars per year. This is equal to 3.4% of the total size of the economy.
Ignoring inflationary measures by the US government, the GDP has shrunk, not grown, for quite some time.
It's easier than a lot of stuff out there. For example, when I tried, I couldn't buy "The Daily Show" off of iTunes. By contrast, running a savegame in Splinter Cell was very easy.
The irony being that historically, coca-cola was named after cocaine, because it contained (allegedly non-addictive) parts of the cocaine plant.
The name being a portmanteau of the two main ingredients, it's funny that they managed to trademark the street name of the same drug it got it's name from.
There. Happy?
It's not my fault the assholes running these sites can't bother to standardize on one markup language for post markup.
After all, it is not an unreasonable expectation to leave money you earned during your own lifetime as an inheritance to your children. I mean, everyone else does.
The irony being that historically, [url=http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cocaine.asp]coca-cola was named after cocaine[/url], because it contained (allegedly non-addictive) parts of the cocaine plant.
The name being a portmanteau of the two main ingredients, it's funny that they managed to trademark the street name of the same drug it got it's name from.
Depends how you define "the year of linux on the desktop", doesn't it?
The fastest growing segment of the PC market, netbooks, are split between Windows XP and linux. That, along with reaching mature status on important projects like web browsers, office software, media players, and Instant Messagers, is slowly making linux a viable alternative to Windows, as the netbook market is showing.
Similarly, depends how you define "death knell". I don't think any one of these bad things is going to spell the end of the RIAA crusade against their customers. I do think, however, that the slow build-up of legal ways to avoid being attacked will make their crusade more effort than it's worth. They'll go from being able to sue 3000 people in a single lawsuit to having to focus on a few, then maybe one. At that point, it's not economical to sue potential customers anymore, and they'll just have to figure out ways to make money instead.
So I'll have a big laptop-like device with an incredibly confined proprietary OS I can't change, and that has a tightly controlled application base?
Great! Sign me up! I totally hate how I can run any OS I please, any application I please. I want to have an OS that locks me into using the applications the manufacturer tells me I may use on my hardware!
You know, sarcasm aside, the linux versions of these netbooks have a much higher return rate than the Windows versions. If you make your device around an iPhone, you're looking at the same higher return rate for a confined OS that isn't windows, but you're also disregarding the benefits of an OS that costs about 5 bucks per machine. Basically, you're taking the worst of both worlds, and you don't even have a Windows XP version to sell to the masses when they realise that's what they really want.
Are they selling it to you? It's probably way more powerful than you'll need for a long time. Go with the cheapest one you can get on the newest architecture you can find.
You said it yourself, your ancient processor overclocked slightly (it does matter whether it's AMD or Intel to know how ancient that is) is almost enough to play today's games. No matter what you buy today it'll be way more powerful than either an Athlon XP 2000+ or a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz, probably 2-4 times before counting the dual-core aspect.
Good processors are getting so fast and so cheap, it's not really even worth figuring out. Go with the one that gives you the most warm fuzzy feeling inside.
All things considered, I think you'll have to be pretty cheap to care all that much about the power dissipation of your CPU. Even if it's 100W greater, you're looking at about 50 bucks a year at 6c/kWh if you're maxed out every day. That seems to me like the smallest cost involved.
Likewise, continuing your battle against Teh Critek that is the joke you did not get, makes you a complete and utter tool, especially since your handicap did not seem to stop you rating your own comedic talent, like a deaf person who thinks he can write an orchestra. Some people...
An article I read in Scientific American Mind basically suggests that the key to above-average or genius level intelligence is that sort of laziness.
It suggested that in mental tests given by researchers among two groups; one group of people with average intelligence and one group of people with above average or genius level intelligence, the difference seemed to be maximizing the resources we're all born with by minimizing the things they had to do in order to come to a solution.
If you make it through more than 1-2 projects before realising you should pad your time estimates appropriately, you've got bigger problems than experience.
Fundamentally, learning from mistakes shouldn't take 30 years.
Most coders I've met actually have derision for people who 'waste' time learning how to do the things underneath. I'm an indie game developer as a hobby, and when I tell coders I want to learn about ray-casting and rendering triangles before I use OpenGL, they act like I just raped their dog. It seems only natural to me though; I could code SDL(admittedly without the excellent design and speed), and that helps me understand when something breaks. It only seems natural that I'd want to learn about actual 3d rendering before using OpenGL or DirectX so I could similarly understand it enough that when something breaks it's not "Oh, the black box exploded".
Back on topic, the problem with most IT programs is they work the opposite direction than anything else.
When I went to school as an engineer, they taught us basic electronics first, then semiconductors, then AC circuits, then they taught us how to apply basic electronics to create logic circuits, then how AC circuits can drive a motor, then how to use basic electronics and semiconductors to create an AC waveform, etc etc etc. By the time I got to actually controlling a process, I could design and build every part in the chain. I understood the terminology because it was all a natural consequence of understanding the concepts that built the terminology. When we needed a specific piece of vendor information, they'd teach us to get the data sheet or manual rather than forcing us to memorize the data sheet of a 741 op-amp.
By contrast, when I studied to become a Cisco CCNA, I found they'd throw concepts at us without bothering to base it on anything. We knew the physical layer, data-link layer, network layer, transport layer, session layer, presentation layer, and application layer existed, but because we never bothered learning any fundamentals, the only way anyone knew where the demarcation was is memorizing sentences from the curriculum for the test. We spent hours memorizing data packets for some reason, insane amounts of incredibly specific vendor information that immediately fell out of our heads after the test was over.
If your experience is worth anything, then you've got results to show for it and you don't need to talk about experience.
You obviously paid attention to the presidential election, so I'll hold that as an example. The other two candidates were ostensibly more experienced at running campaigns, but the guy who won was the person who ran his campaign the best, not the guy with the most experience.
Experience is a means to an end. If someone else can better achieve that end through different means, more power to 'em.
That said, there are plenty of 25 year olds who have 15 years of experience since computers aren't exactly rare or reliable. I've been building computers since I was 10, running servers in one form or another since I was 12, and programming since I was 15.
I got my first job in IT at 15, got my first job in corporate IT at 17, got out of the field entirely, now I'm a washed up old fogey whose experience isn't worth all that much next to the young brats right out of college who haven't even had to calibrate the interleave on a 5MB MFM hard disk that took up TWO 5 1/4" drive bays and who have never had a monochrome monitor and a CGA side by side for early dual monitors.
Every generation tends to have a piece of advice they try to pass on to the next, a piece of wisdom to take from them about the path to happiness, what they would have done differently, what they wouldn't have changed a bit.
My grandfather, a foreman in a mine, told my father "Don't become like me. Get an education, get a job where you don't have to shovel shit for 30 years". Songs were written with this message, an entire generation was passed down the idea that you ought to strive for higher station in life to be happier.
The time in my life has come, and he has given me the lessons he's learned, the wisdom he can pass on based on the time he's spent on this earth. His advice to me? "Live. Don't wait until you're an old man to get what makes you happy. If you want a nice sports car, buy it. If you want to travel, do it. If you want to do anything, do it. You've sacrificed a lot to get to where you are. Now reap the rewards." Movies, TV Shows, music have all been written around this message, an entire generation has been passed down the idea that you've got to live and be alive and not make work TOO high a priority.
At the end of the day, the person who comes in from 9-5 and the person who goes insane working crazy hours are probably not going to make that much of a difference in terms of their lot in life. The difference is, the person who works at their job and is at home when at home is going to be alive, where the person who works at their job and is constantly looking for ways to make their home life their job too is going to find their lives empty.
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Nice anecdote. I'm past suprise in finding a liberal offering up information intended to generate an emotional reaction rather than inform. Jobs have been lost in every year and under all economic circumstances.
Yeah, CURSE those GODLESS LIBERALS.
They're always looking for an EMOTIONAL reaction, because they want to MOVE TO SOCIALISM. They want to OUTLAW religion. They want to make abortions MANDATORY.
Worst of all, these liberals want to hand Osama bin Laden the keys to the castle so he can attack America again, because the "Blame America First" crowd gets off on that sort of thing.
(I'm sorry, I'm revelling in the irony. It's politics, and a lefty attacking a righty over appeals to emotion is just as ignorant as a righty attacking a lefty)
Since the only growing industries seem to have been weapons and war, it's only natural that when you take the influence of government debt out of the picture, the economy has been shrinking for a long time.
There are some people who think you can replace economic growth in the private sector with economic growth in the public sector and it's the same thing. That may be true in Soviet Russia, but in the free world, pork financed with debt is an inflationary measure that doesn't increase the actual size of the economy.
What's worse, this 3.4% growth in the economy financed by debt is going to cause a cascade plunge. Right now we're like a family using debt to pay off debt (the growth in the national debt is equal to the money spent maintaining the current debt). What always happens in cases like these is the debt supply runs out, and the family goes bankrupt. If you think we're seeing hard times today, just wait. Paying back this 10 trillion is going to send the US back to the stone age by comparison.
The inflation adjusted debt accrual rate for the US government in the past 8 years has been about 380 billion dollars per year. This is equal to 3.4% of the total size of the economy.
Ignoring inflationary measures by the US government, the GDP has shrunk, not grown, for quite some time.
Oh no! Someone made fun of me! On the Internet!
Goodbye, cruel world!
Attention ladies and gentlemen.
You should all commit suicide, because someone on the internet is about to say something mean to you.
You -- not the parent poster (Though he's included), YOU the person reading this, are really stupid. You're probably ugly too. And fat.
Don't bother arguing that you shouldn't. Somebody you don't know MADE FUN OF YOU. ON THE INTERNET. This is serious business.
It's easier than a lot of stuff out there. For example, when I tried, I couldn't buy "The Daily Show" off of iTunes. By contrast, running a savegame in Splinter Cell was very easy.
I remember when the Karma Kap was still fresh.
Now we don't even get to see what our Karma is. "Your karma is lightly hazy with a touch of rain in the southern reigons"
Wow, I could have sworn somebody just mentioned the Xbox. Runs linux, connects to the internet, can run multiple services.
My little beast will have a place next to my TV set for many years.
The irony being that historically, coca-cola was named after cocaine, because it contained (allegedly non-addictive) parts of the cocaine plant.
The name being a portmanteau of the two main ingredients, it's funny that they managed to trademark the street name of the same drug it got it's name from.
There. Happy?
It's not my fault the assholes running these sites can't bother to standardize on one markup language for post markup.
How about 20 years?
After all, it is not an unreasonable expectation to leave money you earned during your own lifetime as an inheritance to your children. I mean, everyone else does.
The irony being that historically, [url=http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cocaine.asp]coca-cola was named after cocaine[/url], because it contained (allegedly non-addictive) parts of the cocaine plant.
The name being a portmanteau of the two main ingredients, it's funny that they managed to trademark the street name of the same drug it got it's name from.
Depends how you define "the year of linux on the desktop", doesn't it?
The fastest growing segment of the PC market, netbooks, are split between Windows XP and linux. That, along with reaching mature status on important projects like web browsers, office software, media players, and Instant Messagers, is slowly making linux a viable alternative to Windows, as the netbook market is showing.
Similarly, depends how you define "death knell". I don't think any one of these bad things is going to spell the end of the RIAA crusade against their customers. I do think, however, that the slow build-up of legal ways to avoid being attacked will make their crusade more effort than it's worth. They'll go from being able to sue 3000 people in a single lawsuit to having to focus on a few, then maybe one. At that point, it's not economical to sue potential customers anymore, and they'll just have to figure out ways to make money instead.
You want a record label from the future?
I think we should call PETA. No bear deserves that fate.
So I'll have a big laptop-like device with an incredibly confined proprietary OS I can't change, and that has a tightly controlled application base?
Great! Sign me up! I totally hate how I can run any OS I please, any application I please. I want to have an OS that locks me into using the applications the manufacturer tells me I may use on my hardware!
You know, sarcasm aside, the linux versions of these netbooks have a much higher return rate than the Windows versions. If you make your device around an iPhone, you're looking at the same higher return rate for a confined OS that isn't windows, but you're also disregarding the benefits of an OS that costs about 5 bucks per machine. Basically, you're taking the worst of both worlds, and you don't even have a Windows XP version to sell to the masses when they realise that's what they really want.
Would it be mean to point out that MacOSX is a bunch of OSS software supporting a slim proprietary GUI and a few APIs?
Good work, man. I was afraid you'd go for something lame, but great way to finish a hilariously ludicrous exchange.
Simple test:
Are they selling it to you? It's probably way more powerful than you'll need for a long time. Go with the cheapest one you can get on the newest architecture you can find.
You said it yourself, your ancient processor overclocked slightly (it does matter whether it's AMD or Intel to know how ancient that is) is almost enough to play today's games. No matter what you buy today it'll be way more powerful than either an Athlon XP 2000+ or a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz, probably 2-4 times before counting the dual-core aspect.
Good processors are getting so fast and so cheap, it's not really even worth figuring out. Go with the one that gives you the most warm fuzzy feeling inside.
All things considered, I think you'll have to be pretty cheap to care all that much about the power dissipation of your CPU. Even if it's 100W greater, you're looking at about 50 bucks a year at 6c/kWh if you're maxed out every day. That seems to me like the smallest cost involved.
Likewise, continuing your battle against Teh Critek that is the joke you did not get, makes you a complete and utter tool, especially since your handicap did not seem to stop you rating your own comedic talent, like a deaf person who thinks he can write an orchestra. Some people...
An article I read in Scientific American Mind basically suggests that the key to above-average or genius level intelligence is that sort of laziness.
It suggested that in mental tests given by researchers among two groups; one group of people with average intelligence and one group of people with above average or genius level intelligence, the difference seemed to be maximizing the resources we're all born with by minimizing the things they had to do in order to come to a solution.
If you make it through more than 1-2 projects before realising you should pad your time estimates appropriately, you've got bigger problems than experience.
Fundamentally, learning from mistakes shouldn't take 30 years.
Most coders I've met actually have derision for people who 'waste' time learning how to do the things underneath. I'm an indie game developer as a hobby, and when I tell coders I want to learn about ray-casting and rendering triangles before I use OpenGL, they act like I just raped their dog. It seems only natural to me though; I could code SDL(admittedly without the excellent design and speed), and that helps me understand when something breaks. It only seems natural that I'd want to learn about actual 3d rendering before using OpenGL or DirectX so I could similarly understand it enough that when something breaks it's not "Oh, the black box exploded".
Back on topic, the problem with most IT programs is they work the opposite direction than anything else.
When I went to school as an engineer, they taught us basic electronics first, then semiconductors, then AC circuits, then they taught us how to apply basic electronics to create logic circuits, then how AC circuits can drive a motor, then how to use basic electronics and semiconductors to create an AC waveform, etc etc etc. By the time I got to actually controlling a process, I could design and build every part in the chain. I understood the terminology because it was all a natural consequence of understanding the concepts that built the terminology. When we needed a specific piece of vendor information, they'd teach us to get the data sheet or manual rather than forcing us to memorize the data sheet of a 741 op-amp.
By contrast, when I studied to become a Cisco CCNA, I found they'd throw concepts at us without bothering to base it on anything. We knew the physical layer, data-link layer, network layer, transport layer, session layer, presentation layer, and application layer existed, but because we never bothered learning any fundamentals, the only way anyone knew where the demarcation was is memorizing sentences from the curriculum for the test. We spent hours memorizing data packets for some reason, insane amounts of incredibly specific vendor information that immediately fell out of our heads after the test was over.
Talk is cheap.
If your experience is worth anything, then you've got results to show for it and you don't need to talk about experience.
You obviously paid attention to the presidential election, so I'll hold that as an example. The other two candidates were ostensibly more experienced at running campaigns, but the guy who won was the person who ran his campaign the best, not the guy with the most experience.
Experience is a means to an end. If someone else can better achieve that end through different means, more power to 'em.
That said, there are plenty of 25 year olds who have 15 years of experience since computers aren't exactly rare or reliable. I've been building computers since I was 10, running servers in one form or another since I was 12, and programming since I was 15.
I got my first job in IT at 15, got my first job in corporate IT at 17, got out of the field entirely, now I'm a washed up old fogey whose experience isn't worth all that much next to the young brats right out of college who haven't even had to calibrate the interleave on a 5MB MFM hard disk that took up TWO 5 1/4" drive bays and who have never had a monochrome monitor and a CGA side by side for early dual monitors.
Likewise, whining about someone who took a poorly presented joke at face value because you lack comedic talent is a really stupid thing to do.
Every generation tends to have a piece of advice they try to pass on to the next, a piece of wisdom to take from them about the path to happiness, what they would have done differently, what they wouldn't have changed a bit.
My grandfather, a foreman in a mine, told my father "Don't become like me. Get an education, get a job where you don't have to shovel shit for 30 years". Songs were written with this message, an entire generation was passed down the idea that you ought to strive for higher station in life to be happier.
The time in my life has come, and he has given me the lessons he's learned, the wisdom he can pass on based on the time he's spent on this earth. His advice to me? "Live. Don't wait until you're an old man to get what makes you happy. If you want a nice sports car, buy it. If you want to travel, do it. If you want to do anything, do it. You've sacrificed a lot to get to where you are. Now reap the rewards." Movies, TV Shows, music have all been written around this message, an entire generation has been passed down the idea that you've got to live and be alive and not make work TOO high a priority.
At the end of the day, the person who comes in from 9-5 and the person who goes insane working crazy hours are probably not going to make that much of a difference in terms of their lot in life. The difference is, the person who works at their job and is at home when at home is going to be alive, where the person who works at their job and is constantly looking for ways to make their home life their job too is going to find their lives empty.