I had 15 years in IT (Systems Admin, network design, etc). And walked away from it. I found another industry where my skills would be applicable, advertising in my case, and jumped into it.
I've found that my skill set helps when trying to make things live online that aren't stupid or annoying.
I recommend you take a look around and see what's out there. Maybe you just need to change the context/business sector you're in to one where your skills are needed and can have an impact.
There's this new technology that's been around since the 1800's. It's called running a ground wire. You're supposed to connect it to ANY conductive cable that spans the distance between buildings.
When it was first implemented in the 1800's, it was considered demonic, since the wrath of God was no longer taking out church steeples.
If you're doing this sort of stuff without following code, you shouldn't be doing it.
A.22 LR frequently doesn't do enough damage to actually kill. The bullet's too small and moving at too high of a velocity to get stopped by anything inside your skull.
Usually, it just ricochets around inside your skull, moving the grey matter around, but not causing actual death. The condition of the victims after this varies, from being relatively unaffected, to severe brain damage.
If you want to do it that way, you need a much bigger gauge weapon. Or a shotgun. Just make sure you point it in the right direction. It's quite common to miss. Especially with people that have never fired guns before.
It could be argued that in the days of "wooden ships and men" the men were less expendable than they are now.
We're nearing a world population of 7 billion. If you think a few thousand of those aren't "expendable" as long as they enter into the deal knowing all the risks, then you need to do some math.
They're far more "expendable" than they were back when the world population was only a few tens of millions.
We're becoming progressively more worthless.
And the "Wooden ships" part being more expensive is because we've placed opportunity costs on the materials needed to build ships. We can build one rocket out of aluminum, or we can build another million iPhones. Sadly these days, we're choosing the iPhone.
Some people are color blind. Some people see 4 colors (tetrachromat).
Professional baseball players can see the stitches on a ball when it's coming at them, and see which way they're turning. Odds are you probably cant. Some people see 15 fps as persistent vision, almost everyone else needs 24 fps.
They test pilots by showing a silhouette of a plane on a screen for 1/220th of a second. The ones that can see it, and identify the plane become pilots. The ones that can't see it and/or can't identify it don't. Many people can't.
Read up on it. There's been a LOT of testing on it. Especially around the time of the creation of films and automobiles.
Taillights are red because it doesn't destroy our night vision once we've adapted to the dark. Blue and green light does. Lots of research into how much color we can see, and which ones work well next to each other and don't. It's fund stuff to read up on.
Because, unlike the eye, your Samsung isn't a constant display device.
Your eye captures a stream of video information with no frames. It's just a persistent sine wave. There's no "blanking interval" like there is in TVs (I know LCDs don't have a blanking interva, but there's still an equivalent where a pixel isn't being addressed and is sitting idle, slowly dimming), they constantly send a sine wave. Similar to how the difference between an original analog music waveform (our eyes) and the cd sampling rate (digital displays) work. Each rod and cone has it's own nerve signaling path to send down the optic nerve. (it's about 1.2 million nerve fibers.)
Sadly, your TVs pixels are not persistently individually addressed. They have a refresh rate as the system walks through each pixel in the grid. The key is to do the pixel update before it fades so much that we notice it. On larger LCDs, the panels are broken up into multiple panels, so it does multiple panels at once. Our eyes on the other hand, each cone/rod is constantly sending information. Somehow our brain stitches it into our perception of the world around us.
You will also note that the Samsung site says this:
The 2233RZ starts with a 120 Hz signal to create 3D with two fully 60 Hz images.
You're not really seeing 120 Hz. And you have processing circuitry in there to deal with that mucking with it all. If the LCD runs at 60 Hz, and you feed it a 100 Hz signal, that's not an even multiplier of 60, so the panel circuitry has to do some sort of pulldown to sync it with the display. Pull-down circuitry frequently leads to visible judder in images, that's why DVDs mastered at 24 fps don't look right if your TV doesn't have good 3:2 pulldown software. 120Hz is very easily mapped to a 60Hz panel (it just drops every other frame). Since it's a consistent drop-frame effect, your eye smooths it out easily. If it dropped every other frame for 10 frames, then dropped two frames for the next two frames, then back to 1 in 10, etc, your eye would see that. It may even be what's happening.
Sorry it's google books. I remember reading the statistic somewhere during the refresh rate wars on monitors during the early 2000's. I had a 17" Monitor, and anything less than 75 Hz gave me massive headaches. So I started doing research and found out the optic nerve can only handle about 100 Hz. It varies by person a little up and down. We are analog machines after all.
It may be higher, the linked book mentions a consistent rate of 200 pulses per second. Which might give rise to a 200 fps measurement, depending on if a "pulse" is both the top and bottom half of the sine wave. The book also states that it can max out at 1000 pulses per second, but it can't maintain it before nerve degradation happens.
I bet if you saw a very fast motion scene, you'd be able to tell the difference between 100 and 200fps, and even between 200 and 500fps.
I've heard just once in my life that about 500fps is the true perceptible limit. I think that figure is more realistic.
It varies from person to person. There are people who see 15 fps as continuous. There are those who have to cross the 24 fps threshold. 500 fps may be perceivable with a burst of adrenaline. The human visual cortex is still largely a mystery to scientists.
OK, here's a revision. With a week's training, I'll bet the 1869 man could drive a car, use a cell phone, or browse the internet. Could you, with a week's training, learn algebra, geometry, trig, history (in depth), geography, Latin and Greek?
You mean they're overbilling and using the overage to fund black ops projects like unmanned shuttles.
"You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?"
Having worked for the government, yes, I do. If it's a one off project. Or only a handful.
There's no "open market" for the government to allow to absorb research and development costs or to achieve economies of scale.
If you need a special inertialess (non-rebounding, not physics-violating) sparkless hammer that can be used in an explosive gas-filled environment, and you need, say, 3. The government will commission and buy 10. The initial development and testing costs all get rolled into the cost of those 10 hammers, no matter how many man hours and resources it takes.
And, having watched the USMC test a piece of equipment in a "shaker box" designed to imitate driving a HumVee over rough terrain, hearing the salesperson from the company say, "Oh shit, there's no way this is going to....." and watching the piece of equipment explode 6 seconds into the test, there's a lot of engineering involved in meeting weird military requirements.
Is there money hidden and wasted in there? Yes, probably.
Does that hammer really cost $20,000 to develop? Yes, probably.
Do any of these offer baseline measurements as a control?
I look at some of those maps and think, "Man, 25's a big number. I mean, that's a lot of whatever. I should probably think about what to with my family/pets/tape backups." (Hardcore slashdotters can reverse that order.)
But, what if before the big scary nuclear steam cloud, the number was 24 already? Is an increase in 1 really worth worrying about?
What if it was 30?
What if it was 5?
How do I know?
It seems that most of this info might not be that helpful without pre-nuclear-plant-explosion numbers.
It also highlights the brain's ability to adapt to ludicrously high speeds, which has come in handy as we've gone further up the technological progress curve.
The most important thing you need is every copy of the keys to that space. Don't even let the janitor have one.
If people have keys to it, eventually someone will open the door when they're doing a building inspection, and think, "Man, this is a great place for a closet. Clear all this random junk (read: your in progress project) out of here, and we'll be able to claim X amount of square feet back on the management floor, where it clearly goes to better use."
Seriously. Keys. Everything else is nice, but you need to control the space that was built reluctantly.
You're looking at short term savings to inflate long term expenses.
Sure, it seems like it'll save you money in the beginning, but then components start to fail, and you can't find exact replacements. Then components that you bought to work with the old system don't work with the new motherboard/videocard/something. Then you think "we'll have two disk images". Then, a few months down the road, something else becomes hard to buy. Three disk images.... and so on. And you have to remember the quirks of each system as you set work with them.
Assuming you don't buy 1000 groups of parts immediately. (You won't, no accountant out there will approve it. Basic business needs say that's a bad management of cash flow.), You'll be spreading that purchase over 6 months or a year. I don't know if you've noticed how often basic components get refreshed, but by the end of the year, you won't have 1000 identical PCs.
I know calling support for Dell is a pain in the butt, but try calling tech support for Asus. In Taiwan. During business hours EDT. Plus, you can't expect them to keep spares for the time you need them, where most OEMs keep spares on the shelf for 3 years. Do you have the warehouse space for that? What if there's another run of bad capacitors, and all components manufactured during a time period are bad.
And... then there's your time. At my peak, I could assemble and build a PC in about 3 hours. Multiply that by 1000. That's 3000 hours. Non-stop building. There are only 2080 working hours in a year. When are you going to have time to do your actual job, that of system administration? Yes, you can hire someone, but so you want to hire a person who assembles PCs, or do you want to another system admin, which will actually make your job easier?
We're not even talking about the government's needs to track where money is spent. How are you going to stick asset tags on a random bunch of assembled components? What happens when most of the guts of a PC get put into a case where it already has an existing asset tag?
Man... I've beendown this road. We got about 18 months down it and we went back to the OEMs. Dell, HP, etc.
If you're going down to the local PC store, or buying direct from Dell's retail side, STOP. Look into Dell's corporate line of PCs and the HP's corporate line. I just checked HP's government purchasing site, and you can get a small form factor PC for about $350. I'm sure RAM isn't that expensive, and the three year service contract in bulk won't be that bad. If you're in the state of Virginia (and if you're working for the government, there's a high likelihood that you are), consult an eVA price list. Or go off the VITA contract. The amount of PC you can get for very little money at government pricing is somewhat ridiculous.
Just, please, no, don't go down the path you're going. If you really really really want to, do it in one department only, for 18 months. See if it's worth the hassle. I'm betting it's not.
These thoughts are all just dashed off. I'm willing to go into more specific detail if needed. I just remember how happy we were to get out last HP Vectra machine in to replace the custom built pieces of crap we had before. It was nice in so many ways. I could actually go back to administration and not construction.
It's like writing on the word processor from the Apple II days, it clear all the modern OS widgets out of the way so you're not constantly distracted, and you can edit in any combination of background/text colors you want.
I prefer bold blue text on a black background. None of the formatting is saved in the document, it's only done in presentation by the app and you get modern features like word count and what not.
I can't recommend it high enough.
But hey, I'm an oldster around here, what do I know?
I counter your vegetarianism with GMO crops, pesticides and the subsequent run-off, monocultures, exploitation of third world labor to provide us with out of season vegetables.
Slashdot Mirror
I had 15 years in IT (Systems Admin, network design, etc). And walked away from it. I found another industry where my skills would be applicable, advertising in my case, and jumped into it.
I've found that my skill set helps when trying to make things live online that aren't stupid or annoying.
I recommend you take a look around and see what's out there. Maybe you just need to change the context/business sector you're in to one where your skills are needed and can have an impact.
One thing?
Hook a debugger/stack trace software up to iTunes to see what's going on.
There's this new technology that's been around since the 1800's. It's called running a ground wire. You're supposed to connect it to ANY conductive cable that spans the distance between buildings.
When it was first implemented in the 1800's, it was considered demonic, since the wrath of God was no longer taking out church steeples.
If you're doing this sort of stuff without following code, you shouldn't be doing it.
-----
A .22 LR frequently doesn't do enough damage to actually kill. The bullet's too small and moving at too high of a velocity to get stopped by anything inside your skull.
Usually, it just ricochets around inside your skull, moving the grey matter around, but not causing actual death. The condition of the victims after this varies, from being relatively unaffected, to severe brain damage.
If you want to do it that way, you need a much bigger gauge weapon. Or a shotgun. Just make sure you point it in the right direction. It's quite common to miss. Especially with people that have never fired guns before.
-RT
They want royalties on your browser wars/standards argument.
You can deposit it in the account of one honorable Nelson Malambe, somewhere in Nigeria. Check your spam for the address and account number.
-R
(sorry for the double post, I accidentally posted as an AC.)
It could be argued that in the days of "wooden ships and men" the men were less expendable than they are now.
We're nearing a world population of 7 billion. If you think a few thousand of those aren't "expendable" as long as they enter into the deal knowing all the risks, then you need to do some math.
They're far more "expendable" than they were back when the world population was only a few tens of millions.
We're becoming progressively more worthless.
And the "Wooden ships" part being more expensive is because we've placed opportunity costs on the materials needed to build ships. We can build one rocket out of aluminum, or we can build another million iPhones. Sadly these days, we're choosing the iPhone.
With a hammer. $6 and I got vent some job frustration at the same time.
I can buy a lot of hammers for 2000 euro.
Or one hammer, and some other cool tech toys.
DVDs cost between $1 and $15.
Most Blu-Rays cost around $24 to $30.
The picture quality isn't worth the doubling in price. Especially when for $9 a month, I can stream Netflix to my TV in better than DVD resolution.
I was hoping the price of BluRay would drop as fast as the price on DVDs has, but it hasn't happened.
Mine too.
Both ATT and Verizon will sell you a cellular access point that plugs into your regular internet connected network.
We are analog machines. It varies.
Some people are color blind. Some people see 4 colors (tetrachromat).
Professional baseball players can see the stitches on a ball when it's coming at them, and see which way they're turning. Odds are you probably cant. Some people see 15 fps as persistent vision, almost everyone else needs 24 fps.
They test pilots by showing a silhouette of a plane on a screen for 1/220th of a second. The ones that can see it, and identify the plane become pilots. The ones that can't see it and/or can't identify it don't. Many people can't.
Read up on it. There's been a LOT of testing on it. Especially around the time of the creation of films and automobiles.
Taillights are red because it doesn't destroy our night vision once we've adapted to the dark. Blue and green light does. Lots of research into how much color we can see, and which ones work well next to each other and don't. It's fund stuff to read up on.
Because, unlike the eye, your Samsung isn't a constant display device.
Your eye captures a stream of video information with no frames. It's just a persistent sine wave. There's no "blanking interval" like there is in TVs (I know LCDs don't have a blanking interva, but there's still an equivalent where a pixel isn't being addressed and is sitting idle, slowly dimming), they constantly send a sine wave. Similar to how the difference between an original analog music waveform (our eyes) and the cd sampling rate (digital displays) work. Each rod and cone has it's own nerve signaling path to send down the optic nerve. (it's about 1.2 million nerve fibers.)
Sadly, your TVs pixels are not persistently individually addressed. They have a refresh rate as the system walks through each pixel in the grid. The key is to do the pixel update before it fades so much that we notice it. On larger LCDs, the panels are broken up into multiple panels, so it does multiple panels at once. Our eyes on the other hand, each cone/rod is constantly sending information. Somehow our brain stitches it into our perception of the world around us.
You will also note that the Samsung site says this:
The 2233RZ starts with a 120 Hz signal to create 3D with two fully 60 Hz images.
You're not really seeing 120 Hz. And you have processing circuitry in there to deal with that mucking with it all. If the LCD runs at 60 Hz, and you feed it a 100 Hz signal, that's not an even multiplier of 60, so the panel circuitry has to do some sort of pulldown to sync it with the display. Pull-down circuitry frequently leads to visible judder in images, that's why DVDs mastered at 24 fps don't look right if your TV doesn't have good 3:2 pulldown software. 120Hz is very easily mapped to a 60Hz panel (it just drops every other frame). Since it's a consistent drop-frame effect, your eye smooths it out easily. If it dropped every other frame for 10 frames, then dropped two frames for the next two frames, then back to 1 in 10, etc, your eye would see that. It may even be what's happening.
I've heard how many can tell the difference between 100 and say, 160fps on CRT monitors. Do you have a reference?
Here's the best reference I can find to date:
http://books.google.com/books?id=-e9PqP8_CA0C&pg=PA213&lpg=PA213&dq=data+rate+of+optic+nerve&source=bl&ots=8SxM6u24BQ&sig=G_KBapsdppnZSRFAKxj8JKylzwY&hl=en&ei=7R2lTeWeNOa_0QGRhtDwCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCsQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=data%20rate%20of%20optic%20nerve&f=false
Sorry it's google books. I remember reading the statistic somewhere during the refresh rate wars on monitors during the early 2000's. I had a 17" Monitor, and anything less than 75 Hz gave me massive headaches. So I started doing research and found out the optic nerve can only handle about 100 Hz. It varies by person a little up and down. We are analog machines after all.
It may be higher, the linked book mentions a consistent rate of 200 pulses per second. Which might give rise to a 200 fps measurement, depending on if a "pulse" is both the top and bottom half of the sine wave. The book also states that it can max out at 1000 pulses per second, but it can't maintain it before nerve degradation happens.
I bet if you saw a very fast motion scene, you'd be able to tell the difference between 100 and 200fps, and even between 200 and 500fps.
I've heard just once in my life that about 500fps is the true perceptible limit. I think that figure is more realistic.
It varies from person to person. There are people who see 15 fps as continuous. There are those who have to cross the 24 fps threshold. 500 fps may be perceivable with a burst of adrenaline. The human visual cortex is still largely a mystery to scientists.
24 fps isn't arbitrary. It's the result of a lot of research.
It's the minimum number of frames that trick 99.9% of people into seeing a constant image on screen.
Slower rates result in flicker.
Higher rates, on 1920's technology, were progressively prohibitively expensive.
48 Fps is great. It's roughly half the maximum frame rate of we can see (the optic nerve refreshes at approximately 100Hz).
We'll get too 100fps soon. Anything over that isn't worth it.
This doesn't apply to LCD TVs and what not.
OK, here's a revision. With a week's training, I'll bet the 1869 man could drive a car, use a cell phone, or browse the internet. Could you, with a week's training, learn algebra, geometry, trig, history (in depth), geography, Latin and Greek?
Yes. That's how I got through high school.
You mean they're overbilling and using the overage to fund black ops projects like unmanned shuttles.
"You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?"
Having worked for the government, yes, I do. If it's a one off project. Or only a handful.
There's no "open market" for the government to allow to absorb research and development costs or to achieve economies of scale.
If you need a special inertialess (non-rebounding, not physics-violating) sparkless hammer that can be used in an explosive gas-filled environment, and you need, say, 3. The government will commission and buy 10. The initial development and testing costs all get rolled into the cost of those 10 hammers, no matter how many man hours and resources it takes.
And, having watched the USMC test a piece of equipment in a "shaker box" designed to imitate driving a HumVee over rough terrain, hearing the salesperson from the company say, "Oh shit, there's no way this is going to....." and watching the piece of equipment explode 6 seconds into the test, there's a lot of engineering involved in meeting weird military requirements.
Is there money hidden and wasted in there? Yes, probably.
Does that hammer really cost $20,000 to develop? Yes, probably.
Do any of these offer baseline measurements as a control?
I look at some of those maps and think, "Man, 25's a big number. I mean, that's a lot of whatever. I should probably think about what to with my family/pets/tape backups." (Hardcore slashdotters can reverse that order.)
But, what if before the big scary nuclear steam cloud, the number was 24 already? Is an increase in 1 really worth worrying about?
What if it was 30?
What if it was 5?
How do I know?
It seems that most of this info might not be that helpful without pre-nuclear-plant-explosion numbers.
Maybe it's just me?
This is the first time I've ever asked for Slashdot to dupe a story.
But, post this again, in 60 days, when the movie is out so I can get it.
It also highlights the brain's ability to adapt to ludicrously high speeds, which has come in handy as we've gone further up the technological progress curve.
The most important thing you need is every copy of the keys to that space. Don't even let the janitor have one.
If people have keys to it, eventually someone will open the door when they're doing a building inspection, and think, "Man, this is a great place for a closet. Clear all this random junk (read: your in progress project) out of here, and we'll be able to claim X amount of square feet back on the management floor, where it clearly goes to better use."
Seriously. Keys. Everything else is nice, but you need to control the space that was built reluctantly.
That the Milky Way is the only galaxy with balls big enough to create humans.
Wow. If that worked, we'd all be using really spiffy versions of Windows 3.11, on a 3 GHz 386.
Lots of heartache and pain.
You're looking at short term savings to inflate long term expenses.
Sure, it seems like it'll save you money in the beginning, but then components start to fail, and you can't find exact replacements. Then components that you bought to work with the old system don't work with the new motherboard/videocard/something. Then you think "we'll have two disk images". Then, a few months down the road, something else becomes hard to buy. Three disk images.... and so on. And you have to remember the quirks of each system as you set work with them.
Assuming you don't buy 1000 groups of parts immediately. (You won't, no accountant out there will approve it. Basic business needs say that's a bad management of cash flow.), You'll be spreading that purchase over 6 months or a year. I don't know if you've noticed how often basic components get refreshed, but by the end of the year, you won't have 1000 identical PCs.
I know calling support for Dell is a pain in the butt, but try calling tech support for Asus. In Taiwan. During business hours EDT. Plus, you can't expect them to keep spares for the time you need them, where most OEMs keep spares on the shelf for 3 years. Do you have the warehouse space for that? What if there's another run of bad capacitors, and all components manufactured during a time period are bad.
And... then there's your time. At my peak, I could assemble and build a PC in about 3 hours. Multiply that by 1000. That's 3000 hours. Non-stop building. There are only 2080 working hours in a year. When are you going to have time to do your actual job, that of system administration? Yes, you can hire someone, but so you want to hire a person who assembles PCs, or do you want to another system admin, which will actually make your job easier?
We're not even talking about the government's needs to track where money is spent. How are you going to stick asset tags on a random bunch of assembled components? What happens when most of the guts of a PC get put into a case where it already has an existing asset tag?
Man... I've beendown this road. We got about 18 months down it and we went back to the OEMs. Dell, HP, etc.
If you're going down to the local PC store, or buying direct from Dell's retail side, STOP. Look into Dell's corporate line of PCs and the HP's corporate line. I just checked HP's government purchasing site, and you can get a small form factor PC for about $350. I'm sure RAM isn't that expensive, and the three year service contract in bulk won't be that bad. If you're in the state of Virginia (and if you're working for the government, there's a high likelihood that you are), consult an eVA price list. Or go off the VITA contract. The amount of PC you can get for very little money at government pricing is somewhat ridiculous.
Just, please, no, don't go down the path you're going. If you really really really want to, do it in one department only, for 18 months. See if it's worth the hassle. I'm betting it's not.
These thoughts are all just dashed off. I'm willing to go into more specific detail if needed. I just remember how happy we were to get out last HP Vectra machine in to replace the custom built pieces of crap we had before. It was nice in so many ways. I could actually go back to administration and not construction.
I don't know what OS the author of the original post is using, but if he's using a Mac, he should look into WriteRoom.
http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
It's like writing on the word processor from the Apple II days, it clear all the modern OS widgets out of the way so you're not constantly distracted, and you can edit in any combination of background/text colors you want.
I prefer bold blue text on a black background. None of the formatting is saved in the document, it's only done in presentation by the app and you get modern features like word count and what not.
I can't recommend it high enough.
But hey, I'm an oldster around here, what do I know?
I counter your vegetarianism with GMO crops, pesticides and the subsequent run-off, monocultures, exploitation of third world labor to provide us with out of season vegetables.
And crunchy tomatoes, dammit.
Vegetarians are no longer getting off scott free.