I once got a titanium drill bit stuck in my tooth at a university dental clinic. Didn't hear any radio stations (at least not when awake or asleep), but my tooth would heat up when I used the mobile phone.
Definitely get a pair of wireless headphones - no more cables for the dog to trip over, or to get pulled out when there's a sudden emergency downstairs. But the only problem is charging via USB.
Microsoft has a subscription model. You buy a new version of Windows every one or two years. Except they blew that one up by constantly changing the GUI layout rather than simply polishing the fonts and theme to take advantage of higher resolutions.
In many of those companies I was thinking of, managers are either sitting right next to you. Some places just employ entry-level graduates, so they pack everyone from the project manager to the team and tech leads in together in school desks sitting together in one group. There's only been a couple of companies where managers had their own room and everyone else had cubicles.
Game and animation companies are more fun and creative than general IT software houses who use Jira, Agile and Scrum. But the downside is that you have producers who will break up a task into separate stages but won't tell everyone what all the task are; implement a basic single-threaded animation system. Get the parallel processing guy to make use of multi-threading on the CPU. Get the GPU engineer to optimize it to use the GPU. Now get the VFX artist to add more functionality.
Compared to the early desktop PC's back then, the high-end print workstations that ran PostScript natively in true-color 24-bit mode window display. Hundreds of fonts to choose from of any size and italic slant angle, and in any size. What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get was the rule with a color laser printer. Steve Jobs had attended a talk on display systems and fonts and saw that as the future. Instead of having 50+ different binary files of the same font, each at a different size, a font engine could store a single font, and generate the character bitmaps on the fly only when needed.
Previously, everyone else had to either hand-draw everything or use Letraset catalogs and buy individual fonts at a particular size on transfer sheets, light boxes, stanley knives, scissors, colored filters and any other arts/crafts tool they could find. Early film special effects involved physically editing the film frames on a editing table.
The smartphone combined the portability of a mobile phone with the internet access of a desktop PC. Being able to send and receive emails, view web pages (and then view maps, book taxis, train journeys and hotel stays) are the *must have* functionality for someone working.
The biggest improvements would be longer battery life and more CPU/GPU power. Something that could be worn like a pair of sunglasses with headphones and could provide augmented reality but without looking like Joe 90. So you could find your way around a large city without having to stop and look at your phone. The most annoying thing is being caught in the rain and being unable to use the screen because the rain keeps scrambling the touch screen. The only shelter is standing under the porch of the building with the nanocell tower, which cuts you off from data services.
Or maybe Apple could bring out the iTelevision. I've seen Android Smart TV's, but Apple doesn't seem to have a iTelevision, even though the supermarkets only seem to stock Apple iPhone USB charger cables.
Small companies and startups tend to be more "playful". The only two things they care about are that you have the skills to do the job and you can get the work done on time. if you want to put up pictures of your family/girlfriend on your cube wall, that's OK. One trend with employers is that of "hot desking". You just go into the building, find a free desk/computer, login and start working. Then you leave at the end of the day. Others give you your own desk. Some places just give you a desk that is 1 meter wide and you are sitting side by side with ten other people. Some companies have a "no personal belongings" rule in your workspace (avoids problems with theft). Animators/artists like to surround themselves with action figures, furry toys like giant penguins or spiders, so that rule would drive them nuts. Others have recreation areas like ping-pong tables, console systems, have after-hours Chess clubs, card games, and even Yoga clubs.
If you're late in by 15 minutes because of bad traffic, they understand, so long as you make up the time. Some large corporations expected you to be in by 8am on the dot, no excuses, with the result that everyone leave at 4pm on the dot. For lunch, some companies take a dim view of you going outside/away somewhere for lunch, they expect you to use the work canteen. Other employers are located right downtown, so going to a different eatery each day is expected since they don't have their own food service. And there will be team parties every quarter. You might just get 15 minutes to eat your lunch at your desk, or you get flexitime for lunch.
Some companies dislike employees socializing outside of work, and might just send a couple of "heavies" to keep an eye on you.
With project management, you might have the freedom to view all tasks in the current sprint using Jira, and the whole team gets to decide what the objective will be. Other companies, only the producer gets to see all the tasks and hands them out one by one in no particular order.
There was a battle between CRT and LCD screen makers. CRT manufacturers first tried making their screens that little bit more flatter, then they tried adding concave filters to try and make the screen that bit more flatter. Then they tried reducing the space of the case, so that the tube stuck out at the back rather than a big box. Then they gave up.
If you want an pure natural ocean view of just the sea, the horizon and the sky, then yes they will ruin the view. There are hotels that are on the coast which can charge £150 night for a sea facing view, while rooms facing inland are only £100 night.
There should be a compromise. The wind turbines get painted gold and have his company logo on the blades. Maybe somebody else can do advertising on them.
The most fun part of getting the first 8-bit home computers were the graphics functions. In just 10 lines of code, you could visualize all the trigonometric functions and then draw graphs. More advanced functions included calculating the date of Easter, and even the phase of the moon using code out of the Astronomy books.
Or maybe increased amounts of spam helps sell more higher performance hardware? Some UNIX workstations vendors had a "slow software is good for business" mentality because it kept demand for new CPU's up. They absolutely hated it when developers starting optimizing code rather than adding new features.
I looked at their copiers and there wasn't anything that really stood out. Just lots of standalone light beige photocopiers and what looked a like mad experiment to create a photocopier caterpillar with all sorts of intrays sticking out and paper bays in random places. Visually I think those machines need to look more organized rather than "it was the only space available when we designed the system".
I don't remember a PC having a NTSC, PAL or SECAM port. It either had a DE-9 connector for EGA/CGA (easy to mix up with RS232 cables), or a DE-15 VGA connector. Even DisplayPort and DVI is being replaced with HDMI. There were some USB connectors you can get for smartphones that connect them up to HDMI.
They do that in Norway too. It can generate a rather awkward moment and funny look when you are presented with a bill for 12,500 Kroner, (about $150) and tell them they can keep the change from a 500 Kroner note.
I don't believe the Great Flood was a myth. The "world" at that time was centered around the Euphrates river. Going by the description in some of the clay tablets, it would seem that someone upstream may have decided to destroy a natural dam out of revenge right when the mountain snow was melting in Spring (The Epic of Gilgamesh). That would have unleased a torrent of water 40x that of normal, and led to up to 11 feet of mud being deposited on the lower plains.
Photocopiers are still around. They usually seem to be HP though. The industrial sized ones have the ink cartridges the size of a console system and a half-dozen bays for paper sheets of all sizes, as well as doing stapling, multiple runs, bluetooth and wifi connection, HP are bringing out 3D printers this year:
So Xerox now has to compete in at least two places; existing 2D technologies and 3D technologies. There's going to be some lucky kids who get to visit their parents workplace and get to print out something in 3D.#
A long time ago, I was job hunting around Christmas back in the 1990's. Sending off my resume off to all sorts of places. For some strange mystical reason, our cable conduit suddenly became "flooded" and all telephone connections for that last week of work before the holiday were down. Missed a couple of job offers. After that I make it a priority to have multiple communication methods (landline, mobile, spare SIM cards).
BT are doing something similar with residental wi-fi. If someone nearby is a BT customer, then their wifi provides a pay-as-you-go wifi zone where anyone can connect to that router, provide either their BT account number or just make a payment to connect for a few hours. Something on range of £25/week, £10/day.
The only problems? It may be the only wifii free-zone connection point within range, and that owner at any time may decide to switch their router off if they see activity when they are not using their PC. So then you have been ripped off by whatever amount of money you paid.
It wouldn't make any difference. They are constantly upgrading their algorithms, looking for faster hardware, flaying device drivers down to the bare bones, moving to colocation facilities, making use of multi-core CPU's, GPU's servers, clusters and farms that the algorithm itself wouldn't be enough.
There was a reason they used to call the underfloor cabling in a machine room, the "snake pit". It was impressive. You lifted up a floor tile with a spike clamp, and there are hundreds of cables of all lengths and colors just stretched, coiled and bundled up together.
Yes, looks like they are going to need to hire contractors to do cable-jiggling. I worked in a company that was replacing their old funky official yellow and blue ethernet cables with vampire taps. Staff had to go round in pairs in order to slowly replace the network. One jiggled the cable that was being removed from inside the eaves, basement or the attic of the building, then the other disconnected it and tied string to the end, so that they could then haul the new cable across.
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I once got a titanium drill bit stuck in my tooth at a university dental clinic. Didn't hear any radio stations (at least not when awake or asleep), but my tooth would heat up when I used the mobile phone.
Definitely get a pair of wireless headphones - no more cables for the dog to trip over, or to get pulled out when there's a sudden emergency downstairs. But the only problem is charging via USB.
Microsoft has a subscription model. You buy a new version of Windows every one or two years. Except they blew that one up by constantly changing the GUI layout rather than simply polishing the fonts and theme to take advantage of higher resolutions.
In many of those companies I was thinking of, managers are either sitting right next to you. Some places just employ entry-level graduates, so they pack everyone from the project manager to the team and tech leads in together in school desks sitting together in one group. There's only been a couple of companies where managers had their own room and everyone else had cubicles.
Game and animation companies are more fun and creative than general IT software houses who use Jira, Agile and Scrum. But the downside is that you have producers who will break up a task into separate stages but won't tell everyone what all the task are; implement a basic single-threaded animation system. Get the parallel processing guy to make use of multi-threading on the CPU. Get the GPU engineer to optimize it to use the GPU. Now get the VFX artist to add more functionality.
That's what state-of-the-art of the window systems were in the late 1980's.
http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/t...
Compared to the early desktop PC's back then, the high-end print workstations that ran PostScript natively in true-color 24-bit mode window display. Hundreds of fonts to choose from of any size and italic slant angle, and in any size. What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get was the rule with a color laser printer. Steve Jobs had attended a talk on display systems and fonts and saw that as the future. Instead of having 50+ different binary files of the same font, each at a different size, a font engine could store a single font, and generate the character bitmaps on the fly only when needed.
Previously, everyone else had to either hand-draw everything or use Letraset catalogs and buy individual fonts at a particular size on transfer sheets, light boxes, stanley knives, scissors, colored filters and any other arts/crafts tool they could find. Early film special effects involved physically editing the film frames on a editing table.
The smartphone combined the portability of a mobile phone with the internet access of a desktop PC. Being able to send and receive emails, view web pages (and then view maps, book taxis, train journeys and hotel stays) are the *must have* functionality for someone working.
The biggest improvements would be longer battery life and more CPU/GPU power. Something that could be worn like a pair of sunglasses with headphones and could provide augmented reality but without looking like Joe 90. So you could find your way around a large city without having to stop and look at your phone. The most annoying thing is being caught in the rain and being unable to use the screen because the rain keeps scrambling the touch screen. The only shelter is standing under the porch of the building with the nanocell tower, which cuts you off from data services.
Or maybe Apple could bring out the iTelevision. I've seen Android Smart TV's, but Apple doesn't seem to have a iTelevision, even though the supermarkets only seem to stock Apple iPhone USB charger cables.
Small companies and startups tend to be more "playful". The only two things they care about are that you have the skills to do the job and you can get the work done on time. if you want to put up pictures of your family/girlfriend on your cube wall, that's OK. One trend with employers is that of "hot desking". You just go into the building, find a free desk/computer, login and start working. Then you leave at the end of the day. Others give you your own desk. Some places just give you a desk that is 1 meter wide and you are sitting side by side with ten other people. Some companies have a "no personal belongings" rule in your workspace (avoids problems with theft). Animators/artists like to surround themselves with action figures, furry toys like giant penguins or spiders, so that rule would drive them nuts. Others have recreation areas like ping-pong tables, console systems, have after-hours Chess clubs, card games, and even Yoga clubs.
If you're late in by 15 minutes because of bad traffic, they understand, so long as you make up the time. Some large corporations expected you to be in by 8am on the dot, no excuses, with the result that everyone leave at 4pm on the dot. For lunch, some companies take a dim view of you going outside/away somewhere for lunch, they expect you to use the work canteen. Other employers are located right downtown, so going to a different eatery each day is expected since they don't have their own food service. And there will be team parties every quarter. You might just get 15 minutes to eat your lunch at your desk, or you get flexitime for lunch.
Some companies dislike employees socializing outside of work, and might just send a couple of "heavies" to keep an eye on you.
With project management, you might have the freedom to view all tasks in the current sprint using Jira, and the whole team gets to decide what the objective will be. Other companies, only the producer gets to see all the tasks and hands them out one by one in no particular order.
There was a battle between CRT and LCD screen makers. CRT manufacturers first tried making their screens that little bit more flatter, then they tried adding concave filters to try and make the screen that bit more flatter. Then they tried reducing the space of the case, so that the tube stuck out at the back rather than a big box. Then they gave up.
If you want an pure natural ocean view of just the sea, the horizon and the sky, then yes they will ruin the view. There are hotels that are on the coast which can charge £150 night for a sea facing view, while rooms facing inland are only £100 night.
There should be a compromise. The wind turbines get painted gold and have his company logo on the blades. Maybe somebody else can do advertising on them.
The most fun part of getting the first 8-bit home computers were the graphics functions. In just 10 lines of code, you could visualize all the trigonometric functions and then draw graphs. More advanced functions included calculating the date of Easter, and even the phase of the moon using code out of the Astronomy books.
Or maybe increased amounts of spam helps sell more higher performance hardware? Some UNIX workstations vendors had a "slow software is good for business" mentality because it kept demand for new CPU's up. They absolutely hated it when developers starting optimizing code rather than adding new features.
That's leftists for you. "Why is the other party in power when we have more supporters and membership than they do....."
I looked at their copiers and there wasn't anything that really stood out. Just lots of standalone light beige photocopiers and what looked a like mad experiment to create a photocopier caterpillar with all sorts of intrays sticking out and paper bays in random places. Visually I think those machines need to look more organized rather than "it was the only space available when we designed the system".
Looks like Xerox is splitting from ACS:
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat...
That was a gamble to try and get into business services.
I don't remember a PC having a NTSC, PAL or SECAM port. It either had a DE-9 connector for EGA/CGA (easy to mix up with RS232 cables), or a DE-15 VGA connector. Even DisplayPort and DVI is being replaced with HDMI. There were some USB connectors you can get for smartphones that connect them up to HDMI.
They do that in Norway too. It can generate a rather awkward moment and funny look when you are presented with a bill for 12,500 Kroner, (about $150) and tell them they can keep the change from a 500 Kroner note.
I don't believe the Great Flood was a myth. The "world" at that time was centered around the Euphrates river. Going by the description in some of the clay tablets, it would seem that someone upstream may have decided to destroy a natural dam out of revenge right when the mountain snow was melting in Spring (The Epic of Gilgamesh). That would have unleased a torrent of water 40x that of normal, and led to up to 11 feet of mud being deposited on the lower plains.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/...
https://newrepublic.com/articl...
The layout of some of these clay tablets looks like someone invented the spreadsheet before the computer:
http://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibition...
http://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibition...
They even invented a tablet with round corners before Apple:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
Photocopiers are still around. They usually seem to be HP though. The industrial sized ones have the ink cartridges the size of a console system and a half-dozen bays for paper sheets of all sizes, as well as doing stapling, multiple runs, bluetooth and wifi connection, HP are bringing out 3D printers this year:
http://www.copierguide.com/new...
So Xerox now has to compete in at least two places; existing 2D technologies and 3D technologies. There's going to be some lucky kids who get to visit their parents workplace and get to print out something in 3D.#
A long time ago, I was job hunting around Christmas back in the 1990's. Sending off my resume off to all sorts of places. For some strange mystical reason, our cable conduit suddenly became "flooded" and all telephone connections for that last week of work before the holiday were down. Missed a couple of job offers. After that I make it a priority to have multiple communication methods (landline, mobile, spare SIM cards).
BT are doing something similar with residental wi-fi. If someone nearby is a BT customer, then their wifi provides a pay-as-you-go wifi zone where anyone can connect to that router, provide either their BT account number or just make a payment to connect for a few hours. Something on range of £25/week, £10/day.
The only problems? It may be the only wifii free-zone connection point within range, and that owner at any time may decide to switch their router off if they see activity when they are not using their PC. So then you have been ripped off by whatever amount of money you paid.
Wow! So they are 95% of the way to having a working time machine. That's progress...
It wouldn't make any difference. They are constantly upgrading their algorithms, looking for faster hardware, flaying device drivers down to the bare bones, moving to colocation facilities, making use of multi-core CPU's, GPU's servers, clusters and farms that the algorithm itself wouldn't be enough.
There was a reason they used to call the underfloor cabling in a machine room, the "snake pit". It was impressive. You lifted up a floor tile with a spike clamp, and there are hundreds of cables of all lengths and colors just stretched, coiled and bundled up together.
Yes, looks like they are going to need to hire contractors to do cable-jiggling. I worked in a company that was replacing their old funky official yellow and blue ethernet cables with vampire taps. Staff had to go round in pairs in order to slowly replace the network. One jiggled the cable that was being removed from inside the eaves, basement or the attic of the building, then the other disconnected it and tied string to the end, so that they could then haul the new cable across.