A friend of mine had this problem. In a small company, one of the vice presidents would scribble some horrible code and force the programming staff to use it as a foundation for a product. It was then her job to debug and rearchitect the whole thing to make it work. The catch was she had to do it in such a way that the guy still thought his stuff was useful.
NSF is total bullshit. Its basically a random award for anyone who can respond to a solicitation. They don't expect results, the research is often so far fetched. Usually NSF works like this, "in 50 years we want robot soliders" so they fund problems associated with robot soliders. Vision, mechanics, etc.
But yea there are lots of unethical grad studenst directed by unethical advisors.
I am currently preparing a (non-evil) proposal for SBIR.
the "first" videogame generation is about 40 right now (people who had atari's in their teens). In another 20 years *THEY* will be the people in charge and this nonsense will go away.
a "lumen" is defined as "One lumen is equal to the amount of light emitted by one candle that falls on one square foot of surface located one foot away from one candle."
And yes, lightbulbls are extremely inefficent. They work by heating a fillament until it glows white hot. A standard 100w lightbulb which rated at 1750 lumens, achieves 17.5 lumens per watt, whereas the "ideal" efficency (100% conversion of electricity to energy) is 242.5 lumens/watt for white light. Most of the power goes to keeping the fillament warm.
1. Employers seeking ridiculously diverse skill sets. What do you want, a software developer with ten years experience, or a GIS specialist with database skills? Pick ONE!
A friend of mine (postdoc) recently got a job for a company who wanted a researcher with experience in the fields of: Image Processing, Sensor Fusion, and Infrared imaging, as WELL as a PHD in computer science, and additionally he would have to do some light Unix administration. They did 5 interviews, wanted him to fly up twice. I helped him cheat on the Unix portion...he got th job for 100k in the palo alto area... its realy crazy. Those of us who merely have experience in 2 or 3 areas are out of luck
Yep, Citrix was looking at me and they said what would be my salary requirements, I said, "in santa barbara, 150k/year" they said they were willing to go to 70k (dirt poor in SB).
This doesn't mean Republicans hate clean air and throw
They don't hate it, they just don't care. The Republicans are controlled by fundie philosophy right now, because Bush himself is a fundie. If you're a fundie, you believe THE END TIMES ARE COMING (bush has publically stated he thinks the end times will occur within his lifetime) -- so why bother not polluting? They believe they're leaving the earth to be with god, so they don't care if they fuck it up.
You know that the diebold machines use ACCESS as their "central DB"? If thats not scary, nothing is.
The reason they dno't have paper trails is they were designed from the begining to be tampered with from the begining.
Think about how *perfect* everything went for the republicans. They won the presidency, they emasculated the democrats (won key senate seats, tom daschle, etc). And they did it by rigging the system, and *NOBODY* can prove it. There's no paper trail. Without a paper trail you can't prove anything, can't get to court, can't even get the machines replaced so it doesn't happen again!
I used to buy a lot of hardware for a university in the first part of this decade... Here's a phonecall: "Hi, we need 3TB of storage and a computer server. What can you put together for us?" "I'll have one of my engineers draw something up. Tell me about your network." "We have X workstations, Y NFS servers, Z mail servers, P linux web servers..." "Ah, I'll throw in a couple workstations to replace those web servers."
Luckily, the average slashdotter weighs twice that at least.
Re:This is interesting...
on
Internet Hunting
·
· Score: 2, Funny
yep. My great grandfather hunted his own food with a BOW AND ARROW well into his 60's because "guns didn't give the animal a chance." Oddly enough, this was in the California desert.
It's because the federal government is stealing all our money. California recieves something like 40% of the tax money it pays to the federal governemnt, back. Which means we're financing quite a lot of the federal government. In addition, the cost of illegal aliens to the state is about ~8 billion a year, which california legally can do nothing about since the borders are a federal problem. Personally, I think a revolt is coming. Id like to see the entire state stop paying its income taxes until washington gets the picture.
Yea, when I did a lot of assembly programming I had a number of "slogans" written on my monitor which said things like "Dec for len" (reminding me to decrement a "length" before using it in a loop), truth tables, etc etc... I don't think these guys are onto something.
If they *REALLY* want to improve programming... come up with methodology for designing unifrom API's.
Yep. I kissed off the article after reading the first few paragraphs where they claimed looping structures were responsible for a lot of errors... If you're unable to understand the most fundamental concepts of computer languages such as the do/while, while, and for loops, you just shouldn't be a programmer.
This is a crappy area of research admonoshing people for not drinking their koolaide.
When I was in highschool (long ago), I was active in the music programs... Our jazz instructor was famous for saying "Strong and Wrong Baby!" Which was to remind the students that it was more important to play with confidence then to play the right notes. Of course you got your ass kicked if you played the wrong ones:)
Yep, I worked at a walmart and it was rediculous. Unemployed with an engineering degree for a year and a half, I decided it was time to get a move on it. They hired me as a "shipping manager" for the shoe department. Little did I know that "shipping manager" was actually -- the guy who PUT AWAY all the shipments, and was *THE* most hated job in the entire store -- the janitors ("cleanup crew") even told me they wouldn't do my job.
The Walmart shipping system is was very efficent, but it was designed to serve walmart, not the individual stores. We had an extremely finite space in which to store things, and an extremely finite shoe department, yet the thing shipped us INCREDIBLE ammounts of shoes. And you'e been to a walmart right? They were *EXTREMELY* ugly, horrible shoes.
One night I recall the system sent me *5* palettes of shoes (1-2 is normal) which took a herculean effort to find *somewhere*, *anywhere* to store them.
And that was the job, every night. Somehow put away the incredible ammount of shoes that come. Every night, re-arrange "the stacks", re-arrange "the steel" to fit shoes that nobody wanted, that nobody could stop from coming.
One morning the manager walks up to me and says "Good news, they've decided to keep you full time!" to which I replied "Oh no dont you dare".
Yep, I hardly ever goto walmart. Rarely see movies, buy films. Buy mostly indie music... I buy my groceries at Vons and Stater Brothers and pay more then at walmart... I stopped buying from buy.com because they outsource their call centers. I did buy a HP laptop even though I swore I'd quit with their products after their president said the problem with highly skilled american tech workers was they weren't willing to work for minimum wage.
But I don't feel like Im saving the world or even making a dent in any of these companies:)
hehehe, allow me to digress, I did not say XP looks cool, I said, the selling point was "it looks cool!!". I agree that XP is fugly:) I used to run windowmaker until I got sick of how primitive it was:) Now its gnome with the Aero theme, but I feel like a pansy for waisting more resources painting the screen then my first computer had (a vic-20):)
Basically what MS is going to do is employ their new strategy of only offering updates to the newest OS's. Want Windows Media Player 10? Too bad, only runs on XP (personally I prefer Win2k -- the multitasking in 2k is *SO* much better then XP, anyone know how to fix it?).
MS's problem for many years has been they are competing with themselves. Office 2000, and Win2k are cheap and *very* functional. There's almost no difference in the functionality. What was the big selling point of XP do you recall? IT LOOKS COOL!
They do it on purpose... I believe the rules to get an H1B visa worker approved is they have to advertise the position for a length of time, to prove they can't find any qualified american supplicants errr applicants.
Then they can hire someone at half the already depressed wage.
The first time I saw Office Space I thought it was retarded. I saw it on a weekend... Then, at some point during the next week it dawned on me that I was *living* office space, except unlike the movie I didn't have a gorgeous g/f, and there would be no escape.
People love the movie because its a story about people in their situation. If you haven't had that kind of job then I could see how you could understand. If you have that kind of job, and don't understand, then, you don't have much of a sense of humor:)
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A friend of mine had this problem. In a small company, one of the vice presidents would scribble some horrible code and force the programming staff to use it as a foundation for a product. It was then her job to debug and rearchitect the whole thing to make it work. The catch was she had to do it in such a way that the guy still thought his stuff was useful.
But yea there are lots of unethical grad studenst directed by unethical advisors.
I am currently preparing a (non-evil) proposal for SBIR.
Thats true, as ghallagher said, "This generation went from 'Do your own thing' to 'Just say no.'"
the "first" videogame generation is about 40 right now (people who had atari's in their teens). In another 20 years *THEY* will be the people in charge and this nonsense will go away.
Not to mention most contractors are paid on schedule 1099 which is taxed at a rate of your income tax level + 14%. BRUTAL
And yes, lightbulbls are extremely inefficent. They work by heating a fillament until it glows white hot. A standard 100w lightbulb which rated at 1750 lumens, achieves 17.5 lumens per watt, whereas the "ideal" efficency (100% conversion of electricity to energy) is 242.5 lumens/watt for white light. Most of the power goes to keeping the fillament warm.
I have seen the firefox zombie problem on systems with spyware. I suggest you reinstall :)
A friend of mine (postdoc) recently got a job for a company who wanted a researcher with experience in the fields of: Image Processing, Sensor Fusion, and Infrared imaging, as WELL as a PHD in computer science, and additionally he would have to do some light Unix administration. They did 5 interviews, wanted him to fly up twice. I helped him cheat on the Unix portion...he got th job for 100k in the palo alto area... its realy crazy. Those of us who merely have experience in 2 or 3 areas are out of luck
Yep, Citrix was looking at me and they said what would be my salary requirements, I said, "in santa barbara, 150k/year" they said they were willing to go to 70k (dirt poor in SB).
They don't hate it, they just don't care. The Republicans are controlled by fundie philosophy right now, because Bush himself is a fundie. If you're a fundie, you believe THE END TIMES ARE COMING (bush has publically stated he thinks the end times will occur within his lifetime) -- so why bother not polluting? They believe they're leaving the earth to be with god, so they don't care if they fuck it up.
The reason they dno't have paper trails is they were designed from the begining to be tampered with from the begining.
Think about how *perfect* everything went for the republicans. They won the presidency, they emasculated the democrats (won key senate seats, tom daschle, etc). And they did it by rigging the system, and *NOBODY* can prove it. There's no paper trail. Without a paper trail you can't prove anything, can't get to court, can't even get the machines replaced so it doesn't happen again!
Not Kidding
Luckily, the average slashdotter weighs twice that at least.
yep. My great grandfather hunted his own food with a BOW AND ARROW well into his 60's because "guns didn't give the animal a chance." Oddly enough, this was in the California desert.
It's because the federal government is stealing all our money. California recieves something like 40% of the tax money it pays to the federal governemnt, back. Which means we're financing quite a lot of the federal government. In addition, the cost of illegal aliens to the state is about ~8 billion a year, which california legally can do nothing about since the borders are a federal problem. Personally, I think a revolt is coming. Id like to see the entire state stop paying its income taxes until washington gets the picture.
If they *REALLY* want to improve programming ... come up with methodology for designing unifrom API's.
This is a crappy area of research admonoshing people for not drinking their koolaide.
When I was in highschool (long ago), I was active in the music programs... Our jazz instructor was famous for saying "Strong and Wrong Baby!" Which was to remind the students that it was more important to play with confidence then to play the right notes. Of course you got your ass kicked if you played the wrong ones :)
The Walmart shipping system is was very efficent, but it was designed to serve walmart, not the individual stores. We had an extremely finite space in which to store things, and an extremely finite shoe department, yet the thing shipped us INCREDIBLE ammounts of shoes. And you'e been to a walmart right? They were *EXTREMELY* ugly, horrible shoes.
One night I recall the system sent me *5* palettes of shoes (1-2 is normal) which took a herculean effort to find *somewhere*, *anywhere* to store them.
And that was the job, every night. Somehow put away the incredible ammount of shoes that come. Every night, re-arrange "the stacks", re-arrange "the steel" to fit shoes that nobody wanted, that nobody could stop from coming.
One morning the manager walks up to me and says "Good news, they've decided to keep you full time!" to which I replied "Oh no dont you dare".
But I don't feel like Im saving the world or even making a dent in any of these companies :)
hehehe, allow me to digress, I did not say XP looks cool, I said, the selling point was "it looks cool!!". I agree that XP is fugly :) I used to run windowmaker until I got sick of how primitive it was :) Now its gnome with the Aero theme, but I feel like a pansy for waisting more resources painting the screen then my first computer had (a vic-20) :)
Basically what MS is going to do is employ their new strategy of only offering updates to the newest OS's. Want Windows Media Player 10? Too bad, only runs on XP (personally I prefer Win2k -- the multitasking in 2k is *SO* much better then XP, anyone know how to fix it?).
MS's problem for many years has been they are competing with themselves. Office 2000, and Win2k are cheap and *very* functional. There's almost no difference in the functionality. What was the big selling point of XP do you recall? IT LOOKS COOL!
Um, apparently you don't work in the US? Part of the grand vision for our country is an infinitely abusable work-force.
Then they can hire someone at half the already depressed wage.
The first time I saw Office Space I thought it was retarded. I saw it on a weekend ... Then, at some point during the next week it dawned on me that I was *living* office space, except unlike the movie I didn't have a gorgeous g/f, and there would be no escape.
People love the movie because its a story about people in their situation. If you haven't had that kind of job then I could see how you could understand. If you have that kind of job, and don't understand, then, you don't have much of a sense of humor :)