As I already posted, Byrd's the exception. How about Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms to name just two? The Republicans, quite aggressively, went after conservative Democrats as part of Nixon's Southern Strategy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Strategy
Sure, but if you're going to cherry pick, how about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond
or this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Helms
to name just two instances of conservative Democrats who jumped parties.
Anyway, my original points are still salient in that a) you can't conflate liberals and Democrats -- especially historically and b) party beliefs change over time -- sometimes drastically.
You're conflating "liberal" with "Democrat". The OP made no such connection so what he states is still true despite your attempt to redefine and drift his meaning.
Besides, these terms lose their meaning over time. Yes, the Republicans freed the slaves, but that was almost 150 years ago -- I'd say the GOP's more than a little different now. In fact, all of those Democrats who sought to maintain segregation? They've long since switched parties and are Republicans now.
I think they intended those measurements to mean they are capable of manufacturing an aggregate number of solar panels capable of generating X megawatts in total annually. In other words, they're stating the total amount of power output they can output in a year.
The confusion arises when the writer attempts to equate the annual output by a CIGS factory (measured in megawatts of power) with the annual output of a coal power plant (measured in megawatt-hours of work). My guess is that they are really stating that a coal power plant can produce 500 MW of power.
Of course this indicates a deeper flaw in the discussion in that a coal power plant can continuously produce 500MW of power (presuming a constant supply of coal). Whereas a solar plant can only produce 500MW of power for half the day.
I'd be curious to hear about what the entire hiring process entailed. Interestingly, I thought 10% was ridiculously low as it is. I'd guess that most traditional organizations might have up to half their staff being unmotivated and/or untalented. Besides, one's level of motivation in life does not stay the same. Just because you interviewed well one year ago, it doesn't mean that you're going to still be a bubbly source of inspiration when you've had a divorce and your close-friend dies in a freak accident.
Such a model can't succeed without the right type of people: intelligent workers who take pride in the quality of their work and who are self-motivated. And I don't care what company we're talking about -- you're never going to bat anywhere near 1.000 when it comes to hiring people with all three traits. I contend (with no supporting evidence whatsoever, but Yegge doesn't offer much other than anecdotal evidence either) that Yegge is wearing rose-colored glasses and there's either a good segment of the workforce at Google that still needs to be micro-managed or Google is quietly firing 10% of their staff every quarter to keep trimming out the slackers.
There are also countless OSS projects that either barely get started or are simply two paragraphs on sf.net with big dreams and no work.
That said, I agree that it's all about its hiring practices. The talented and self-motivated person is a rare and special thing to find and hire. The Google Agile practices would never work at any company I've ever worked at because most of the engineers (yes, most) at those companies would end up day-trading, playing Quake, or gambling online (or even, *gasp*, posting replies like this on/.)
Ah, you're right. I'm sure I'd be thoroughly aggravated if a bunch of 12 year-olds started maniacally running around my gym.
Well if I were a fitness entrepreneur, I'd start introducing gaming machines into my adult-only gyms slowly. But I'm not, which means I'll have to keep my mad-DDR-skillz at home.
For starters, you could buy a DDR pad and hook it up to the computer then map the front/back/left/right arrows appropriately and perhaps use the corner arrows for particular talents associated with foot movement (like Charge for Warriors). Maybe use a second DDR pad mounted in front of you that you can hit with your hands to trigger other talents associated with hand movements. The only really tricky thing is figuring out how to implement mouse-look -- a handheld mouse might work or perhaps some gigantic adjustable resistance joystick.
Why restrict access to this club to kids? I'll bet there are plenty of adults who'd pay to use a gym like this. In fact, if my gym plopped me in front of a treadmill and a DDR machine, I know I'd go for the DDR machine.
It's always easier to remember what something does rather than what something is named. Besides, at the time, my hormonally-activated 12 year-old mind picked up on anything sex-related no matter how, uh, alien.
I vaguely recall there being an alien race in Piers Anthony's Cluster series that balanced and moved on a single large ball. Anyone remember the name of the race? It'd be wonderfully nerdy if the CMU folks renamed their robot after these aliens. I also vaguely recall these aliens having sex by going around and around in a circle rolling continuously over a trail of slime. Maybe the CMU robots can do that too...
The lack of routing doesn't really bother me so much though. Do I really want to send raw drive data through my router?
I figure I can use this to build a low-cost NFS cluster -- but instead of having to invest in a dedicated SAN or a differential SCSI bus, I can just share drives over my existing Ethernet switch.
I work in a small company with employees in both Boston and New York City. We used IM to link the two offices together when we first started six years ago. Logging into AIM in the morning became the equivalent of showing up at work.
A few years ago one of the devs here in Boston moved to New York and started working in the sales office there. For the fun of it, we picked up a couple web cams and fired up an RTP reflector at our datacenter to redistribute a video feed of each office. We now have two cameras in each office running continuously.
Amazingly we've come to rely on these video feeds. We originally toyed with video conferencing but found it to be pretty useless; once you're already on the phone with someone, you don't need the extra visual cues that come with looking them in the eye. However, having the feeds going 7/24 provided presence detection and opportunities for incidental communication. These little interactions have a huge impact on office culture. When I have a stupid question to ask someone in New York I can take a quick peek at the video feed to see if they're busy and decide on whether to question them now or later. If I get a package of nifty hardware for my workstation, I can wave it in front of my cam to make the dev in NY jealous and our CFO cringe.
Figured I'd dig up a means of communicating with Utah's Lt. Gov. Office in case anybody wants to let them know how misguided they are:
Lieutenant Governor's Office
I tried exposing my MythTV box to the Internet last summer so I could reach it with a frontend-only box at my office and watch a Red Sox day game. My upstream bandwidth from Comcast is around 300kbps so I set my MPEG-4 settings down as low as I could (I think it was 240). If it weren't for the stuttering, the game would've been just passable. As it was, it kept on freezing and restarting so I gave up.
I have read that the Myth protocol relies on virtually unbuffered streams since the assumption is that all of the elements of your Myth system would reside on the same LAN.
I'm in agreement. I love playing the game but I don't have the time or patience for the administrivia involved in doing a raid. Implicit in these massive 20- to 40-person raids is that one's administrative effort in the "real" world is the price you have to pay to get those rare items. Plus the expectation that I must have a large contiguous block of time to kill in order to complete said raid.
Let's say doing a raid takes 3 hours of planning and 7 hours to complete. That's 10 hours of time expended. Couldn't Blizzard provide some kind of end game content that leads to rare items similar to what you'd get from a raid that would take me 10 hours to complete without requiring me to organize a bunch of wankers while ignoring my wife for a whole day? Heck, make it 20 hours of my time -- as long as it's possible to do some end game content solo.
Plus, part of the enjoyment of these games is socializing with people you're grouping with. It's a lot more fun to group with someone who has a command of the English language and who's witty, clever, and funny than it is to group with a donkey with no language skills and writes in crappy 1337-speak.
I always thought gasoline was considered volatile in that it readily evaporated into those fumes of which you speak. I don't have any numbers (or any facts beyond high school chemistry really) but it seems like you'd have to keep the case very tightly sealed or else it'll leak flammable gasoline fumes constantly. Anyway, this is all pretty moot since I'm certainly not filling my ATX case with gasoline any time soon.
Ah, but that's only if you're using vegetable oil. How about switching to other non-conductive oils? Plain glycerine perhaps? It'll be clear instead of yellow.
Wait, I've got a better idea, let's convince Tom's Hardware to try out kerosene or gasoline. Though I imagine the volatility of gasoline would be a problem (well that and flammability issues...)
I've been trying to use AIM mail for the past couple weeks and have found its spam filtering to be abysmal. I really wanted to have IMAP support, but at this point, I'll just live with Gmail.
So what kind of service plan do you need to pull this off and what kind of bandwidth do you get? I wouldn't mind having a nice small phone with bluetooth for my PDA and my laptop to get out to the net with.
While we're on the topic of portable SSH devices, what sort of experiences have people had with the different wireless providers out there? T-mobile, for instance, has an exclusive on the Sidekick II, but their coverage in the northeast is complete crap now. Any one have an opinion about data coverage from Verizon? Sprint? Cingular?
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As I already posted, Byrd's the exception. How about Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms to name just two? The Republicans, quite aggressively, went after conservative Democrats as part of Nixon's Southern Strategy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Strategy
Sure, but if you're going to cherry pick, how about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Helms to name just two instances of conservative Democrats who jumped parties. Anyway, my original points are still salient in that a) you can't conflate liberals and Democrats -- especially historically and b) party beliefs change over time -- sometimes drastically.
You're conflating "liberal" with "Democrat". The OP made no such connection so what he states is still true despite your attempt to redefine and drift his meaning. Besides, these terms lose their meaning over time. Yes, the Republicans freed the slaves, but that was almost 150 years ago -- I'd say the GOP's more than a little different now. In fact, all of those Democrats who sought to maintain segregation? They've long since switched parties and are Republicans now.
I think they intended those measurements to mean they are capable of manufacturing an aggregate number of solar panels capable of generating X megawatts in total annually. In other words, they're stating the total amount of power output they can output in a year. The confusion arises when the writer attempts to equate the annual output by a CIGS factory (measured in megawatts of power) with the annual output of a coal power plant (measured in megawatt-hours of work). My guess is that they are really stating that a coal power plant can produce 500 MW of power. Of course this indicates a deeper flaw in the discussion in that a coal power plant can continuously produce 500MW of power (presuming a constant supply of coal). Whereas a solar plant can only produce 500MW of power for half the day.
I'd be curious to hear about what the entire hiring process entailed. Interestingly, I thought 10% was ridiculously low as it is. I'd guess that most traditional organizations might have up to half their staff being unmotivated and/or untalented. Besides, one's level of motivation in life does not stay the same. Just because you interviewed well one year ago, it doesn't mean that you're going to still be a bubbly source of inspiration when you've had a divorce and your close-friend dies in a freak accident.
Such a model can't succeed without the right type of people: intelligent workers who take pride in the quality of their work and who are self-motivated. And I don't care what company we're talking about -- you're never going to bat anywhere near 1.000 when it comes to hiring people with all three traits. I contend (with no supporting evidence whatsoever, but Yegge doesn't offer much other than anecdotal evidence either) that Yegge is wearing rose-colored glasses and there's either a good segment of the workforce at Google that still needs to be micro-managed or Google is quietly firing 10% of their staff every quarter to keep trimming out the slackers.
There are also countless OSS projects that either barely get started or are simply two paragraphs on sf.net with big dreams and no work.
/.)
That said, I agree that it's all about its hiring practices. The talented and self-motivated person is a rare and special thing to find and hire. The Google Agile practices would never work at any company I've ever worked at because most of the engineers (yes, most) at those companies would end up day-trading, playing Quake, or gambling online (or even, *gasp*, posting replies like this on
Ah, you're right. I'm sure I'd be thoroughly aggravated if a bunch of 12 year-olds started maniacally running around my gym.
Well if I were a fitness entrepreneur, I'd start introducing gaming machines into my adult-only gyms slowly. But I'm not, which means I'll have to keep my mad-DDR-skillz at home.
For starters, you could buy a DDR pad and hook it up to the computer then map the front/back/left/right arrows appropriately and perhaps use the corner arrows for particular talents associated with foot movement (like Charge for Warriors). Maybe use a second DDR pad mounted in front of you that you can hit with your hands to trigger other talents associated with hand movements. The only really tricky thing is figuring out how to implement mouse-look -- a handheld mouse might work or perhaps some gigantic adjustable resistance joystick.
Why restrict access to this club to kids? I'll bet there are plenty of adults who'd pay to use a gym like this. In fact, if my gym plopped me in front of a treadmill and a DDR machine, I know I'd go for the DDR machine.
It's always easier to remember what something does rather than what something is named. Besides, at the time, my hormonally-activated 12 year-old mind picked up on anything sex-related no matter how, uh, alien.
I vaguely recall there being an alien race in Piers Anthony's Cluster series that balanced and moved on a single large ball. Anyone remember the name of the race? It'd be wonderfully nerdy if the CMU folks renamed their robot after these aliens. I also vaguely recall these aliens having sex by going around and around in a circle rolling continuously over a trail of slime. Maybe the CMU robots can do that too...
The lack of routing doesn't really bother me so much though. Do I really want to send raw drive data through my router? I figure I can use this to build a low-cost NFS cluster -- but instead of having to invest in a dedicated SAN or a differential SCSI bus, I can just share drives over my existing Ethernet switch.
I work in a small company with employees in both Boston and New York City. We used IM to link the two offices together when we first started six years ago. Logging into AIM in the morning became the equivalent of showing up at work. A few years ago one of the devs here in Boston moved to New York and started working in the sales office there. For the fun of it, we picked up a couple web cams and fired up an RTP reflector at our datacenter to redistribute a video feed of each office. We now have two cameras in each office running continuously. Amazingly we've come to rely on these video feeds. We originally toyed with video conferencing but found it to be pretty useless; once you're already on the phone with someone, you don't need the extra visual cues that come with looking them in the eye. However, having the feeds going 7/24 provided presence detection and opportunities for incidental communication. These little interactions have a huge impact on office culture. When I have a stupid question to ask someone in New York I can take a quick peek at the video feed to see if they're busy and decide on whether to question them now or later. If I get a package of nifty hardware for my workstation, I can wave it in front of my cam to make the dev in NY jealous and our CFO cringe.
Figured I'd dig up a means of communicating with Utah's Lt. Gov. Office in case anybody wants to let them know how misguided they are: Lieutenant Governor's Office
I tried exposing my MythTV box to the Internet last summer so I could reach it with a frontend-only box at my office and watch a Red Sox day game. My upstream bandwidth from Comcast is around 300kbps so I set my MPEG-4 settings down as low as I could (I think it was 240). If it weren't for the stuttering, the game would've been just passable. As it was, it kept on freezing and restarting so I gave up.
I have read that the Myth protocol relies on virtually unbuffered streams since the assumption is that all of the elements of your Myth system would reside on the same LAN.
Sure, but the really good/rare items are only available in raid dungeons.
I'm in agreement. I love playing the game but I don't have the time or patience for the administrivia involved in doing a raid. Implicit in these massive 20- to 40-person raids is that one's administrative effort in the "real" world is the price you have to pay to get those rare items. Plus the expectation that I must have a large contiguous block of time to kill in order to complete said raid.
Let's say doing a raid takes 3 hours of planning and 7 hours to complete. That's 10 hours of time expended. Couldn't Blizzard provide some kind of end game content that leads to rare items similar to what you'd get from a raid that would take me 10 hours to complete without requiring me to organize a bunch of wankers while ignoring my wife for a whole day? Heck, make it 20 hours of my time -- as long as it's possible to do some end game content solo.
Plus, part of the enjoyment of these games is socializing with people you're grouping with. It's a lot more fun to group with someone who has a command of the English language and who's witty, clever, and funny than it is to group with a donkey with no language skills and writes in crappy 1337-speak.
I'd like to suggest a minimum of $75.00. I have to pay for tickets at Fenway...
I always thought gasoline was considered volatile in that it readily evaporated into those fumes of which you speak. I don't have any numbers (or any facts beyond high school chemistry really) but it seems like you'd have to keep the case very tightly sealed or else it'll leak flammable gasoline fumes constantly. Anyway, this is all pretty moot since I'm certainly not filling my ATX case with gasoline any time soon.
Ah, but that's only if you're using vegetable oil. How about switching to other non-conductive oils? Plain glycerine perhaps? It'll be clear instead of yellow.
Wait, I've got a better idea, let's convince Tom's Hardware to try out kerosene or gasoline. Though I imagine the volatility of gasoline would be a problem (well that and flammability issues...)
I've been trying to use AIM mail for the past couple weeks and have found its spam filtering to be abysmal. I really wanted to have IMAP support, but at this point, I'll just live with Gmail.
So what kind of service plan do you need to pull this off and what kind of bandwidth do you get? I wouldn't mind having a nice small phone with bluetooth for my PDA and my laptop to get out to the net with.
While we're on the topic of portable SSH devices, what sort of experiences have people had with the different wireless providers out there? T-mobile, for instance, has an exclusive on the Sidekick II, but their coverage in the northeast is complete crap now. Any one have an opinion about data coverage from Verizon? Sprint? Cingular?