I wanted to bitch about that 'twice as hot' stupidity but you beat me to it. To add another layer, it's just as idiotic as saying "it's twice as July 11th"
I do wedding photography on the side. And the way most pros work has always looked like a scam to me and I'm pretty sure it will change in the future. Think of it this way: the photographer is hired to provide a service (take the pictures). When a company does that, the pictures belong to the company. That's how I work: you pay for my day of work, my films (yes, still trad), my time processing films and prints, my time scanning and retouching. What you get: the negatives, contact prints, a set of decent 10x15, a set of good 20x30, a CD with high res scan, a quick webpage for relatives and the fact that you never need to see me again.
I don't say that to put myself forward, but to give an example of how pros should work in that case. As hired contractors. Not as artists with a god given talent.
Could you please provide an example. I fail to see how version control can be used in sysadmin tasks. Yes, I'm a sysadmin (Linux/Windows) and a programmer who uses Subversion for my programs. If it's used as a kind of replication tool, why not use rsync ? Enlighten me please.
And more important, which of those mailing lists can be viewed on the gmane email to usenet portal ? Mailing lists are such a pain to manage and attract so much spam to your account...
I couldn't find an easier job, so I just signed up for the first winter over at Dome C on the high Antarctic Plateau, only 550km from Vostok. On the program of the fun will be: reaching ground level with a 3200m ice core (they are almost there), temperatures of -84C in winter and lots more. Unlike Vostok, Dome C doesn't have a lake underneath. I'll try to keep my site updated.
I've worked in research in France, Italy and the US. I can tell you that work conditions and slaries in the US are heaven compared with the others. You may have heard about the strike of the scientists in France for the last year.
Let me give you another example. I interviewed for a job as a computer scientist to work on advanced cluster architectures. In Nice, probably the most expensive city in France. The salary for 10 years experience in that field was a ridiculous 17000 Euros, with still taxes to pay off that. I was making 3 times that in the US last year. For this once I told them to shove it, but do I really have a choice ? You do make more waiting tables.
Yes, but if you have a loop of wire around the equator with a current running on it, the resulting magnetic field is perpendicular to the plane of the circle. In other words, in the proper North-South direction. Granted, what is important is the distribution of that field outside of the loop, in the atmosphere or above and I don't know what shape it would take with a big stone (Mars) inside the loop.
Okay, stupid question, particularly coming from a (rusty) electrical engineer, but would it be possible to generate a sufficiant magnetic field with a simple (supraconducting) wire running around the equator ? Or two smaller wires circling each pole ? How much power would be necessary to do that ?
The Art of War reminded me too much of many of those self improving books that pile high in any US bookstore. I wasn't too impressed, most of it is just common sense. If you want to read an old book that is breathtaking, read the Iliad by Homer. It's the mother of all action stories. And very deep and touching at the same time. Make sure you get a freeform translation (avoid verses) and you'll read it in one sitting.
I landed my first summer job as a VAX programmer at NASA back in '86 as a student. They sat me at a terminal under the documentation. I was terrorized at first by the 20 thick orange volumes and the bending shelf supporting them, afraid that they were going to collapse on me and kill me. I woould move away each time someone came to pick a volume up. When I started using Unix, I couldn't figure anything out in their 'help' system. Man pages ?!? Hah ! Gimme VMS help anytime. A few VAX quotes:
"Most of the VAX instructions are in microcode, but HALT and NO-OP are in hardware for efficiency."
"VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix." --W. Davidson.
"The big difference between UNIX and VMS:
To do anything on UNIX, you need to know an obscure command. To do anything on VMS, you need to know an obscure option to SET."
I did 4 missions to Antarctica. Several months are spent beforehand to prepare all the equipment, computers, etc. Including some spares. Except for the printer which wasn't crucial.
The equipment is shipped in strong crates inside large containers. 3 months at see, 3 weeks dragged behind monster Caterpillars to reach the scientific station deep on the high Antarctic Plateau.
So when I get there months later, I start setting everything up. The HP laserjet printer comes up with weird LEDs lit up. Nonsensical messages on the LCD. None of it is in the manual. I try to troubleshoot by sending PCL commands direct to the printer port. Nonsense. Finally I open it up and find...
...the mummy of a tiny tiny mouse, droppings all over the inside, all the inner cables and some of the electronics eaten up... Must have been a long trip for one lonely mouse.
There are foreign editions of SciAm and they are better. The traductors select key articles, add articles from local scientists and extra stuff. For instance in the french edition there's a monthly scientific cooking paper (heh!), a monthly economics paper (the first time I was able to read something that made sense out of economics), a monthly art and science paper, and above all a monthly theorical computing paper written by Delahaye, on esotheric subjects like how to use the entire universe to break cryptography, quantum computing and much more.
Alosa lately (last 6 months) I've noticed that they began re-printing many articles from other foreign magazines, not just SciAm. The american edition is fairly boring in comparision.
Don't like taxes? Move. But good luck finding some place to move to. Globally speaking, US citizens pay a relatively low amount of income tax
Yup. I recently moved to France and heard the recently on the radio that of all countries, last year France had the highest tax in the world (all taxes like income, VAT... put together). Yup, even more than the notorious scandinavian countries. And I've lived in various countries.
My last paycheck in Italy was taxed at... 70%. Yup, I got to keep only 30% of what I made and there's not even any unemployement protection in Italy. Note: I never figured out why that last paycheck tax was so high, the others were more around 45%.
For more reading about living and working in Antartica... ...also take a look at my site. I spent a winter and 3 summers at Dumont d'Urville, probably the windiest place on Earth; and 2 summer campaigns at the new continental station of Dome C.
And right now I'm pondering whether or not to sign up for the 1st winterover down there. Temperature below -80C guaranteed...
FOr micropayment to gain wide acceptance, there needs to be an integration within the browsers. I researched that for a while because my website has some value but not enough to warrant pulling a CC out. Imagine if you get to a site and you have a little icon on your task bar that start flashing a bit for attention. You pass your mouse above and it asks: "do you agree to pay 0.005$ per page while you visit this site ?" With an optional cgi being called back on the site in case you aswer yes. And somewhere within the browser options lie the CC reference (or paypal or whatever). It would make it convenient to use, which is the main things missing from all current micropayment choices. The time it takes to enter registation, value, references, etc... is not worth 0.005$.
I found this movie unwatchable. Litterally. The shaky animation made my eyes drool. I had to close my eyes after 10 minutes and I had to leave the theatre after 20 minutes or I would have gone blind. That's how bad I found it. And the philosophy in it can be had in any "philosophy for dummies" 5$ high school book.
I followed those experiments somewhat, but what has actually been teleported is the information on the quantum state of the particle, not its energy. In other words, you take the original electron/photon/particle, measure its quantum state (destroying it in the process) and apply it to another remote particle which indeed becomes the original since it now possesses the same quantum state.
No transfer of energy here, move along. But IANAQP
I'm betting than 20 (or even 10 or 5) years from now, Moore's film will be to political documentaries what Hackers now is to hacking movies
I kind of hope you are correct, but the world will need to change to such an extend for your words to become true that a true revolution will need to start. Just like the computers we use today are 100x those that were in Hackers, the political honesty of our govermin will need to do the same.
Thin clients are very interesting in some kind of settings (schools, libraries, even office workers), but I'm more interested in something different that we don't read much about: the Cluster Of Workstations (COW). It uses the processing power of a bunch of normal PCs to run a cluster while the users are going to their everyday tasks.
This would be invaluable in scientific research for instance: every person in a lab has at least one PC. Put some clustering software on them. If one runs several big jobs, they get distributed to the other PCs.
I did some trials with OpenMosix but there are several downfalls, mainly reliability (if a machine goes down unexpectedly it can bring the entire COW dow), security (if a machine is compromised, they all are) and users (make sure the default is not to migrate jobs otherwise you end up with a cluster of mp3 converting machines and a network on its knees).
You know, you should really give a shot to cygwin then. grep, find and locate/updatedb are relevant to the current discussion and combined with sed, awk and many other traditional posix tools make for a wonderful work environment. Or almost.
I had a 6502 based computer (not the Apple II). When it went into reset mode after an assembly screw up, I could hear the different sound coming from the CPU. I had exactly 3 seconds to press the NMI button or the machine would do a hard reset. The NMI button was under the keyboard so it was a quickdraw to turn it over and grab a pen to press it. I eventually rewired it on top of the keyboard because if I missed the 3 seconds window I had to reload 20 minutes of tape into the machine. It was an Oric 1 in 1981.
Yes, and strip down naked so you can pass through a metal detector... And I wonder what kind of induced current you get inside those near a moving magnetic field (yes, I'm an EE).
It seems like a good idea if you need to share with other machines. But something even quicker to setup is a USB/Firewire to IDE enclosure. Put whatever drive you want in it (I usually put the biggest IDE on the market, currently waiting for the 400Gb Hitachi) and use it to backup all the internal drives.
But I could also leave several plugged in as movable storage media. Just setup the share so others have access to it and you'll save money, even if the performance isn't that great.
Slashdot Mirror
I wanted to bitch about that 'twice as hot' stupidity but you beat me to it. To add another layer, it's just as idiotic as saying "it's twice as July 11th"
I don't say that to put myself forward, but to give an example of how pros should work in that case. As hired contractors. Not as artists with a god given talent.
Could you please provide an example. I fail to see how version control can be used in sysadmin tasks. Yes, I'm a sysadmin (Linux/Windows) and a programmer who uses Subversion for my programs. If it's used as a kind of replication tool, why not use rsync ? Enlighten me please.
And more important, which of those mailing lists can be viewed on the gmane email to usenet portal ? Mailing lists are such a pain to manage and attract so much spam to your account...
I couldn't find an easier job, so I just signed up for the first winter over at Dome C on the high Antarctic Plateau, only 550km from Vostok. On the program of the fun will be: reaching ground level with a 3200m ice core (they are almost there), temperatures of -84C in winter and lots more. Unlike Vostok, Dome C doesn't have a lake underneath. I'll try to keep my site updated.
Let me give you another example. I interviewed for a job as a computer scientist to work on advanced cluster architectures. In Nice, probably the most expensive city in France. The salary for 10 years experience in that field was a ridiculous 17000 Euros, with still taxes to pay off that. I was making 3 times that in the US last year. For this once I told them to shove it, but do I really have a choice ? You do make more waiting tables.
Yes, but if you have a loop of wire around the equator with a current running on it, the resulting magnetic field is perpendicular to the plane of the circle. In other words, in the proper North-South direction. Granted, what is important is the distribution of that field outside of the loop, in the atmosphere or above and I don't know what shape it would take with a big stone (Mars) inside the loop.
So it means that current blu-ray devices cannot read/write standard DVD, DCD-R nor DVD+R, right ?
Okay, stupid question, particularly coming from a (rusty) electrical engineer, but would it be possible to generate a sufficiant magnetic field with a simple (supraconducting) wire running around the equator ? Or two smaller wires circling each pole ? How much power would be necessary to do that ?
The Art of War reminded me too much of many of those self improving books that pile high in any US bookstore. I wasn't too impressed, most of it is just common sense. If you want to read an old book that is breathtaking, read the Iliad by Homer. It's the mother of all action stories. And very deep and touching at the same time. Make sure you get a freeform translation (avoid verses) and you'll read it in one sitting.
The equipment is shipped in strong crates inside large containers. 3 months at see, 3 weeks dragged behind monster Caterpillars to reach the scientific station deep on the high Antarctic Plateau.
So when I get there months later, I start setting everything up. The HP laserjet printer comes up with weird LEDs lit up. Nonsensical messages on the LCD. None of it is in the manual. I try to troubleshoot by sending PCL commands direct to the printer port. Nonsense. Finally I open it up and find...
...the mummy of a tiny tiny mouse, droppings all over the inside, all the inner cables and some of the electronics eaten up... Must have been a long trip for one lonely mouse.
Alosa lately (last 6 months) I've noticed that they began re-printing many articles from other foreign magazines, not just SciAm. The american edition is fairly boring in comparision.
My last paycheck in Italy was taxed at... 70%. Yup, I got to keep only 30% of what I made and there's not even any unemployement protection in Italy. Note: I never figured out why that last paycheck tax was so high, the others were more around 45%.
For more reading about living and working in Antartica...
...also take a look at my site. I spent a winter and 3 summers at Dumont d'Urville, probably the windiest place on Earth; and 2 summer campaigns at the new continental station of Dome C.
And right now I'm pondering whether or not to sign up for the 1st winterover down there. Temperature below -80C guaranteed...
FOr micropayment to gain wide acceptance, there needs to be an integration within the browsers. I researched that for a while because my website has some value but not enough to warrant pulling a CC out. Imagine if you get to a site and you have a little icon on your task bar that start flashing a bit for attention. You pass your mouse above and it asks: "do you agree to pay 0.005$ per page while you visit this site ?" With an optional cgi being called back on the site in case you aswer yes. And somewhere within the browser options lie the CC reference (or paypal or whatever). It would make it convenient to use, which is the main things missing from all current micropayment choices. The time it takes to enter registation, value, references, etc... is not worth 0.005$.
I found this movie unwatchable. Litterally. The shaky animation made my eyes drool. I had to close my eyes after 10 minutes and I had to leave the theatre after 20 minutes or I would have gone blind. That's how bad I found it. And the philosophy in it can be had in any "philosophy for dummies" 5$ high school book.
I concur. After reading your message, I decided to give Blosxom a shot. 15 minutes later I had a bunch of entries running in my first blog ever.
No transfer of energy here, move along. But IANAQP
This would be invaluable in scientific research for instance: every person in a lab has at least one PC. Put some clustering software on them. If one runs several big jobs, they get distributed to the other PCs.
I did some trials with OpenMosix but there are several downfalls, mainly reliability (if a machine goes down unexpectedly it can bring the entire COW dow), security (if a machine is compromised, they all are) and users (make sure the default is not to migrate jobs otherwise you end up with a cluster of mp3 converting machines and a network on its knees).
You know, you should really give a shot to cygwin then. grep, find and locate/updatedb are relevant to the current discussion and combined with sed, awk and many other traditional posix tools make for a wonderful work environment. Or almost.
I had a 6502 based computer (not the Apple II). When it went into reset mode after an assembly screw up, I could hear the different sound coming from the CPU. I had exactly 3 seconds to press the NMI button or the machine would do a hard reset. The NMI button was under the keyboard so it was a quickdraw to turn it over and grab a pen to press it. I eventually rewired it on top of the keyboard because if I missed the 3 seconds window I had to reload 20 minutes of tape into the machine. It was an Oric 1 in 1981.
Yes, and strip down naked so you can pass through a metal detector... And I wonder what kind of induced current you get inside those near a moving magnetic field (yes, I'm an EE).
But I could also leave several plugged in as movable storage media. Just setup the share so others have access to it and you'll save money, even if the performance isn't that great.