The only get rich quick scheme that works is selling get rich quick schemes to idiots.
Sounds funny, but that's what some people over here actually do. They post one of those "Work from home, set your own hours, make up to $4000 a month" ads. You contact them (usually on a cell phone nr.) and they'll ask you to send them $100 for a Starter Kit. This kit basically contains instructions on setting up your own "Work from home" scheme to scam others, by selling them your Starter Kits. In a strange recursive way, this scheme is not illegal here (NL) because the advice in the kit is sound and delivers exactly what was promised in the ad, namely a legal way to make money working from home.
try a wiki, a forum, a social-networking solution akin to facebook, IMs or other online chats, extranets, online live documents (like writely/google docs), whatever. email is an outdated medium. try "collaborative software" in ask.com
This is what one of my clients (a large corporation) has done. They have a Wiki, a forum, IM, and yes: email and phones too. They also educate employees on the proper use of each, with a few simple rules. Examples for email:
- To: people who need to take action. Cc: people who need to know. Be careful with the Reply-All button
- If you suspect that your reply to an email will prompt further questions, or if you have questions about the email, it is probably better to call the originator rather than continue mailing him.
Those two rules alone go a long way towards preventing discussions by email.
By the way, I do not consider email to be an outdated medium. It is still the person-to-person communication method of choice for us... don't forget that emails get through even if the addressee is not at his desk, and emails can be stored easily in personal, corporate or project archives. Email is a good "push" medium in the sense that it prompts the addressee for action. It is also a good medium to reach people outside the company, and unlike forums, IM or Wikis it is truly universal. The mail gets there no matter if the user uses Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo or whatever.
I don't know if it was by accident or on purpose but we are using up china's steel.
Why do you think China is getting into Africa in a big way? While we are dicking around with vague sanctions, humanitarian missions and pointless aid programs, China is working hard to secure a ncie chunck of the abundant natural resources in the continent.
This seems like a reasonable idea if there's not enough power to go around.
It seems like a good idea, and like the reader from NZ, we in the city of Delft had water boilers that were switched on by the power company twice daily (we could switch them on ourselves, but if we let them do it they charged peanuts for the power). Note that the article mentions that this would only occur rarely, perhaps a few times a year, and probably not for hours on end either.
But the potential danger is that power companies will see this as an excuse to cut investment in the grid and generating capacity even further, much like government opened up "peak hour lanes" (i.e. the hard shoulder) on our freeways instead of adding proper lanes or new roads. These solutions squeeze a few extra percent of the total theoretical capacity out of the system, and they appear to work a treat... until you hit the limit again. And the crunch will be much, much worse then.
[...] I think courts and juries simply aren't up to determining reliably when a computer crime has been committed, and until they are, they shouldn't have that power.
How is this any different from complex fiscal issues, medical malpractise cases, or claims arising from alleged building construction errors? Courts and jurors are no experts in any of these fields, that's why they (or rather, the plaintiff and defense) bring in expert witnesses.
I suppose that you could fairly assert that the law itself in many countries is not (yet) adequately equiped to distinguish between deliberate sabotage and legitimate or msotly harmless acts. For instance, The first Dutch law on computer crime and cracking made it a felony to change someone else's electric alarm clock. But these laws have been greatly improved since, and I daresay that they can adequately distinguish between lawful acts and sabotage in case a disgruntled sysop decides to wipe the servers and backups.
Umm... is that why the Bush administration decided to remove every reference to manmade global warming, as well as projections of all negative effects of global warming from the last NOAA (or whatever it's called) reports?
I don't doubt for a second that they did, and I never claimed that politicising the debate happened on only one side of the argument.
Yes, just like the 99.9% of scientists in relevant fields who accept atomic theory, general relativity, and the heliocentric solar system are just doing so to make themselves rich and powerful at the public's expense.
Do you perhaps mean 99.9% of the scientists who are actually quoted when the climate issue comes up? There are many who are not heard. And what is it that these 99.9% of them actually agree on?
1 - The earth is getting warmer on average (probable, even though temperature statistics alone fail to significantly indicate this as yet)
2 - CO2 levels are up (very certain).
3 - CO2 is the leading cause for this temperature increase (uncertain, some have suggested solar activity, and others suggest that increased CO2 is the result of an increasing temperature rather than the cause of it. It could be both cause and effect as well)
4 - CO2 produced by burning of fossil fuels are a significant factor in the temperature increase (this seems likely if (and that's a big if) point 3 turns out to be true.
You cannot simply say that since most scientists agree on point 1, they therefore agree on points 2-4 as well. But that's exactly the sort of sloppy reporting we see so often on TV. The IPCC report did the same thing by the way: the science itself in the report is reasonably sound, but the summary and conclusion draw some rather wild and rash conclusions from the data. There was some last-minute "political" editing going on to make things seem more dire, and more certain, than the research actually indicated. This is why a bunch of scientists who collaborated on the IPCC report did not stand behind it when they read the conclusion. By no means do 99.9% of the experts in the field agree on point 3, not even close.
I stand by my previous statement: while we may be the actual cause of global warming, most of the debate is political rather than scientific, and scientists are not nearly as unanimous in their conclusions as is suggested in the media.
Let me guess.
You're part of the "9-11 Truth" committee... you think HIV doesn't cause AIDS... you think MMR vaccine causes autism... and your presidential candidate of choice is Ron Paul.
Regardless of the GPs other beliefs, he's right about the climate debate. Whether or not climate change is actually happening, whether or not the change is caused largely by man, the public debate on this matter has been thoroughly perverted from a scientific into a political debate, by all sides involved. Believers of global warming may well be right, and there is some evidence that they are (though not nearly as overwhelming as Gore would have you believe). But when the debate is no longer about science but about agendas, power and money, you'll have a hard time getting anyone accept proof that would run counter to the belief that we are the cause of global warming. Even just publishing that proof to the masses may prove hard.
It'll take a miracle to get politicians and environmentalists of the global warming bandwagon; it's the perfect pretext to further their agendas. Well, a miracle, or half a decade of moderate weather. Remember how fast the fears of an oncoming ice age melted under a few warm summers?
The moment something is taken out of the science basket and put back into the god basket, you let me know, ok?
That is precisely what the creationists are trying to accomplish: putting the question of the origin of species back into the god basket. Don't let these people out of your sight...
Oh, and all the power sockets in the house are at floor level, not convenient waist or hand height.
Most modern houses these days have power sockets at ground level, whereas it's the older ones that have them at hand height. Why? I suppose the universal truth in construction was that having them up high is convenient, just as you suggest. Then some "outsider" appeared, perhaps a housewife who sat down with a contractor to have her house redone, and asked "Can we move these unsightly power sockets to the floor, so that they'll be hidden from view behind the furniture?". Perhaps her friends came to visit and thought "That looks really tidy" and had it done in their homes as well.
My own apartment still has them at hand height, and I'd move them all to the floor if I could... but these concrete walls are so hard, I think I can ride out a nuclear war in this place. Anyway, my point is that the article points out a way to avoid the trap into which you seem to have stepped: don't take your own knowledge and wisdom for universal truths.
You can get valuable feedback by having outsiders review your products, but this goes a bit further. They're talking about having outsiders in on actual design meetings and brainstorming sessions.
Reviews after production (or design) tend to only scratch the surface; you'll get comments on your almost-finished work, maybe you'll make a few changes but rarely will you come up with something completely different because the tester thought your product sucked. In contrast, getting an outsider in on brainstorming sessions forces you to get back to the basics, and when you propose something from your arsenal of tried-and-true industry-standard solutions, you'll often hear "why like that?" or "how does that work then?", and you'll be surprised at how hard it is to come up with a good answer. The chance of striking out succesfully in a radically new direction is much larger if you stop taking the fundamental "thruths" in your industry for granted, and the outsider will force you to do that.
[quote]Invest the time and a small amount of cash. Rediscover your music. You just might be surprised.[/quote]
I've done this. I had a fairly good turntable in the basement, from way back when. Still got some music on LP as well, both "modern" (80s) and classical music. Lugged it all up and hooked it up to my audio system, which isn't up to Audiophile standards ($1000/m monster cable and gold plated mains leads and such rubbish), but it is a good system with decent floor standing speakers, no Bose milk cartons for me no siree.
Surprise, surprise... some records sound better, some sound worse than the CD or MP3 versions I have. The 80s music sounds mostly the same, I imagine because both versions came from the same master. In some cases they seem to have screwed aroind with an additional filter or compression on the CD, or messed with the stereo some.
Classical music turned out to be a very mixed bag, sometimes the recording is poo (on either the CD or LP version), and the lower bitrate MP3s are noticably worse than the CD or LP versions. But the only thing that makes the LP versions "warmer" or "more alive" is the occasional random tick or pop. Maybe that's what the CD versions are missing, just like a good master recording will not have the occasional cough from someone in the audience. Maybe CD is too perfect.
As a listening test, see if you can find a modern recording on both LP and CD, and both produced from the same analog master. I have a few such suspects in my collection but I can't be sure about the masters.
The turntable has already been banished back to the basement where it belongs.
dont we have more pressing issues as humanity to worry about (take a pick: global warming, george bush, global recession, peak oil)?
"Will you stop tinkering with that 'the wheel' thingy? We have more pressing issues to worry about, such as making a new flint axe to kill that mammoth, so we can get through the winter".
What an ignorant statement. First: who is "we"? I think there are already plenty of people worrying over those issues you mention. In some cases the number of worriers is entirely too much. Meanwhile, other people worry about other stuff, like progressing science. Besides, these theorists are just guys trying to figure out how stuff works; they are not worrying about the future, nor are they political activists looking for something new to whine about.
It is our understanding of the universe that brought humanity to what it is today. Science and its products made it possible for you to have the leisure to worry about Bush or Global Warming. And in case you think it's science and industry that got us into trouble in the first place: we would have managed to screw up the planet just fine without it, vigorous breeding and slash-and-burn farming will go a long way to accomplish that. Science is our best hope of turning the tide. And yes, understanding the life cycle of the universe has its practical uses in that endeavour too.
Yes they were rather dear, and I never owned one. I had some luck though; a department store near my high school had set up 12 or so Vectrexes (Vectrices?) in the electronics section, with different games on all of them. A few of us would get on our bikes and go there when we had an hour between classes; the store would be quiet and they'd let us play on the machines. Basically we had a more or less private, free Vectrex arcade. *sigh* Those were the days.
I can see it now: people will just insert stubs (or copy articles from other sources) for subjects that are likely to be popular search terms, for the sole purpose of reaping the ad revenues.
Also, will we see a new form of "typo squatting", where people create articles with titles like "Slahsdot", linking to the correct article but again generating ad revenue? Meh. (Or worse, the typo page comes up like the real, incorrect slahsdot url with the words I loathe most on any web page "sponsored links", or "popular searches", and a bunch of link spam).
Specialized robots work better than general-purpose ones (DUH!). Creating a robot that is as capable at general tasks as a human is pointless, at least from the economic standpoint (unless you need a Terminator).
My Roomba does a good job of vacuuming the floor. However, it does an awful job at loading the dishwasher or changing the cat's litter box. How is that "working better"? General purpose, humanoid robots have many advantages. They can go where humans go, use tools that humans use, but they are stronger and (some day) will be more dextrous and accurate. Also, they don't unionize (well, hopefully...).
In my own household I'd prefer a general purpose robot that loads the dishwasher, cleans and vacuums, does grocery shopping, instead of having a specialised robot for each task. If I need a hole drilled in my wall, I can just ask the robot, and he will be able to use my tools. If my neighbour sprains her ankle, the robot can help her up the stairs. That sort of thing... versatility goes a long way.
I wish it was just savvy business types taking over Greenpeace. But it isn't. As one of the organisation's founders said, it's activists with a political agenda who have taken over, and that agenda is not the environment. It's the same tired old enemies of the left: big business and right wing government. It's easy to see when you look at their "business practices": lazy research (as in this case), outright lying and falsification (Brent Spar), picking easy targets who aren't actually doing wrong (logging industry), and unwavering dogma (No nukes, ever).
I do love the environment. But Greenpeace is not about saving the environment anymore. Please send your donations elsewhere.
As the famous architect Weeber once told a complaining customer: "Good architecture leaks".
Another reason for not hiring famous architects is that they'll sue you into oblivion if you change anything about the building. Even something as silly as painting the walls in a theater's foyer a different color has resulted in a lawsuit, and the architect won.
1) make a file named "99-hdd-spin-fix.sh". The important thing is starting with "99".
2) make sure the file contains the following 2 lines (fix it if you have PATA HDD):
#!/bin/sh
hdparm -B 255/dev/sda
3) copy this file to 3 locations:/etc/acpi/suspend.d//etc/acpi/resume.d//etc/acpi/start.d/
so why not just buy a console if you can play all the same games anyway (at least all the ones people talk about).
One word: mice.
Playing FPS games with a joystick sucks. Maybe it doesn't have to suck, but the games I've played, including recent titles, feel like they've been designed for playing with a mouse, and the converted to joystick.
What surprised me (and the homeowners participating in the show) was that the thief would take seemingly worthless stuff from the bedrooms and children's rooms. Toys, stuffed animals, photographs in nice frames, even items of clothing. Thieves will often take things that they think are nice for themselves, their wife or kids, and cheap USB sticks or drives are very much in that category.
In Europe, we too hear the argument that outsourcing killed the domestic market for engineers. It's a gross oversimplification. Outsourcing may have scared off a few prospective students, but it has a lot more to do with the general image of the engineering profession.
If you go to technical uni, you're a sucker. The study is long and difficult, has little prestige, and the jobs pay crap. That is the image of ordinary people... how often have we heard some dad in a movie lament to his son: "you could have been a doctor or a lawyer"? Never "an engineer". And it is this image that contributes to the crap pay, actually. I've met plenty of manager who were aghast at the realisation that some engineers, even experienced ones, actually made more than they did, mid level project managers.
The result is that enrollment is down, shockingly so. In my old department at uni, there are no postgrad students from my own country. And companies are indeed complaining about the lack of engineers, and they are right. What with all this outsourcing and lowish pay (compared to other graduate employees), the prospects of actually landing a job have rarely been better than they are today.
Slashdot Mirror
- To: people who need to take action. Cc: people who need to know. Be careful with the Reply-All button
- If you suspect that your reply to an email will prompt further questions, or if you have questions about the email, it is probably better to call the originator rather than continue mailing him.
Those two rules alone go a long way towards preventing discussions by email.
By the way, I do not consider email to be an outdated medium. It is still the person-to-person communication method of choice for us... don't forget that emails get through even if the addressee is not at his desk, and emails can be stored easily in personal, corporate or project archives. Email is a good "push" medium in the sense that it prompts the addressee for action. It is also a good medium to reach people outside the company, and unlike forums, IM or Wikis it is truly universal. The mail gets there no matter if the user uses Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo or whatever.
But the potential danger is that power companies will see this as an excuse to cut investment in the grid and generating capacity even further, much like government opened up "peak hour lanes" (i.e. the hard shoulder) on our freeways instead of adding proper lanes or new roads. These solutions squeeze a few extra percent of the total theoretical capacity out of the system, and they appear to work a treat... until you hit the limit again. And the crunch will be much, much worse then.
I suppose that you could fairly assert that the law itself in many countries is not (yet) adequately equiped to distinguish between deliberate sabotage and legitimate or msotly harmless acts. For instance, The first Dutch law on computer crime and cracking made it a felony to change someone else's electric alarm clock. But these laws have been greatly improved since, and I daresay that they can adequately distinguish between lawful acts and sabotage in case a disgruntled sysop decides to wipe the servers and backups.
1 - The earth is getting warmer on average (probable, even though temperature statistics alone fail to significantly indicate this as yet)
2 - CO2 levels are up (very certain).
3 - CO2 is the leading cause for this temperature increase (uncertain, some have suggested solar activity, and others suggest that increased CO2 is the result of an increasing temperature rather than the cause of it. It could be both cause and effect as well)
4 - CO2 produced by burning of fossil fuels are a significant factor in the temperature increase (this seems likely if (and that's a big if) point 3 turns out to be true.
You cannot simply say that since most scientists agree on point 1, they therefore agree on points 2-4 as well. But that's exactly the sort of sloppy reporting we see so often on TV. The IPCC report did the same thing by the way: the science itself in the report is reasonably sound, but the summary and conclusion draw some rather wild and rash conclusions from the data. There was some last-minute "political" editing going on to make things seem more dire, and more certain, than the research actually indicated. This is why a bunch of scientists who collaborated on the IPCC report did not stand behind it when they read the conclusion. By no means do 99.9% of the experts in the field agree on point 3, not even close.
I stand by my previous statement: while we may be the actual cause of global warming, most of the debate is political rather than scientific, and scientists are not nearly as unanimous in their conclusions as is suggested in the media.
It'll take a miracle to get politicians and environmentalists of the global warming bandwagon; it's the perfect pretext to further their agendas. Well, a miracle, or half a decade of moderate weather. Remember how fast the fears of an oncoming ice age melted under a few warm summers?
My own apartment still has them at hand height, and I'd move them all to the floor if I could... but these concrete walls are so hard, I think I can ride out a nuclear war in this place. Anyway, my point is that the article points out a way to avoid the trap into which you seem to have stepped: don't take your own knowledge and wisdom for universal truths.
You can get valuable feedback by having outsiders review your products, but this goes a bit further. They're talking about having outsiders in on actual design meetings and brainstorming sessions.
Reviews after production (or design) tend to only scratch the surface; you'll get comments on your almost-finished work, maybe you'll make a few changes but rarely will you come up with something completely different because the tester thought your product sucked. In contrast, getting an outsider in on brainstorming sessions forces you to get back to the basics, and when you propose something from your arsenal of tried-and-true industry-standard solutions, you'll often hear "why like that?" or "how does that work then?", and you'll be surprised at how hard it is to come up with a good answer. The chance of striking out succesfully in a radically new direction is much larger if you stop taking the fundamental "thruths" in your industry for granted, and the outsider will force you to do that.
[quote]Invest the time and a small amount of cash. Rediscover your music. You just might be surprised.[/quote] I've done this. I had a fairly good turntable in the basement, from way back when. Still got some music on LP as well, both "modern" (80s) and classical music. Lugged it all up and hooked it up to my audio system, which isn't up to Audiophile standards ($1000/m monster cable and gold plated mains leads and such rubbish), but it is a good system with decent floor standing speakers, no Bose milk cartons for me no siree.
Surprise, surprise... some records sound better, some sound worse than the CD or MP3 versions I have. The 80s music sounds mostly the same, I imagine because both versions came from the same master. In some cases they seem to have screwed aroind with an additional filter or compression on the CD, or messed with the stereo some.
Classical music turned out to be a very mixed bag, sometimes the recording is poo (on either the CD or LP version), and the lower bitrate MP3s are noticably worse than the CD or LP versions. But the only thing that makes the LP versions "warmer" or "more alive" is the occasional random tick or pop. Maybe that's what the CD versions are missing, just like a good master recording will not have the occasional cough from someone in the audience. Maybe CD is too perfect.
As a listening test, see if you can find a modern recording on both LP and CD, and both produced from the same analog master. I have a few such suspects in my collection but I can't be sure about the masters.
The turntable has already been banished back to the basement where it belongs.
What an ignorant statement. First: who is "we"? I think there are already plenty of people worrying over those issues you mention. In some cases the number of worriers is entirely too much. Meanwhile, other people worry about other stuff, like progressing science. Besides, these theorists are just guys trying to figure out how stuff works; they are not worrying about the future, nor are they political activists looking for something new to whine about.
It is our understanding of the universe that brought humanity to what it is today. Science and its products made it possible for you to have the leisure to worry about Bush or Global Warming. And in case you think it's science and industry that got us into trouble in the first place: we would have managed to screw up the planet just fine without it, vigorous breeding and slash-and-burn farming will go a long way to accomplish that. Science is our best hope of turning the tide. And yes, understanding the life cycle of the universe has its practical uses in that endeavour too.
Yes they were rather dear, and I never owned one. I had some luck though; a department store near my high school had set up 12 or so Vectrexes (Vectrices?) in the electronics section, with different games on all of them. A few of us would get on our bikes and go there when we had an hour between classes; the store would be quiet and they'd let us play on the machines. Basically we had a more or less private, free Vectrex arcade. *sigh* Those were the days.
I can see it now: people will just insert stubs (or copy articles from other sources) for subjects that are likely to be popular search terms, for the sole purpose of reaping the ad revenues.
Also, will we see a new form of "typo squatting", where people create articles with titles like "Slahsdot", linking to the correct article but again generating ad revenue? Meh. (Or worse, the typo page comes up like the real, incorrect slahsdot url with the words I loathe most on any web page "sponsored links", or "popular searches", and a bunch of link spam).
In my own household I'd prefer a general purpose robot that loads the dishwasher, cleans and vacuums, does grocery shopping, instead of having a specialised robot for each task. If I need a hole drilled in my wall, I can just ask the robot, and he will be able to use my tools. If my neighbour sprains her ankle, the robot can help her up the stairs. That sort of thing... versatility goes a long way.
I wish it was just savvy business types taking over Greenpeace. But it isn't. As one of the organisation's founders said, it's activists with a political agenda who have taken over, and that agenda is not the environment. It's the same tired old enemies of the left: big business and right wing government. It's easy to see when you look at their "business practices": lazy research (as in this case), outright lying and falsification (Brent Spar), picking easy targets who aren't actually doing wrong (logging industry), and unwavering dogma (No nukes, ever).
I do love the environment. But Greenpeace is not about saving the environment anymore. Please send your donations elsewhere.
America won the war in Iraq, that was the easy part. Winning the peace is harder, and that's where they are failing.
As the famous architect Weeber once told a complaining customer: "Good architecture leaks".
Another reason for not hiring famous architects is that they'll sue you into oblivion if you change anything about the building. Even something as silly as painting the walls in a theater's foyer a different color has resulted in a lawsuit, and the architect won.
I agree. Product of the year, yes perhaps, but it's not an invention or even a significant innovation.
Fine.... now explain this to my mum.
One word: mice.
Playing FPS games with a joystick sucks. Maybe it doesn't have to suck, but the games I've played, including recent titles, feel like they've been designed for playing with a mouse, and the converted to joystick.
What surprised me (and the homeowners participating in the show) was that the thief would take seemingly worthless stuff from the bedrooms and children's rooms. Toys, stuffed animals, photographs in nice frames, even items of clothing. Thieves will often take things that they think are nice for themselves, their wife or kids, and cheap USB sticks or drives are very much in that category.
In Europe, we too hear the argument that outsourcing killed the domestic market for engineers. It's a gross oversimplification. Outsourcing may have scared off a few prospective students, but it has a lot more to do with the general image of the engineering profession.
If you go to technical uni, you're a sucker. The study is long and difficult, has little prestige, and the jobs pay crap. That is the image of ordinary people... how often have we heard some dad in a movie lament to his son: "you could have been a doctor or a lawyer"? Never "an engineer". And it is this image that contributes to the crap pay, actually. I've met plenty of manager who were aghast at the realisation that some engineers, even experienced ones, actually made more than they did, mid level project managers.
The result is that enrollment is down, shockingly so. In my old department at uni, there are no postgrad students from my own country. And companies are indeed complaining about the lack of engineers, and they are right. What with all this outsourcing and lowish pay (compared to other graduate employees), the prospects of actually landing a job have rarely been better than they are today.