It's all theatre for the folks that don't do it every day. Six years ago I watched as two bus loads of paratroopers went through the screening program and put their rifles through the xray machines at a UK regional airport before mounting C130s to do some parachuting.
Someone was satisfied but it was a pile of poo.
For DEC they could have gone downscale to PCs, but the profit margins are too low: it's a commodity item. IBM doesn't build PCs anymore; they sold their PC business to Lenovo. Or they could have gone upscale, to compete with IBM mainframes.
Unfortunately they tried both at once with the 72" tall VAX9000 (standard VAXen were 60") and the various Crapavetti and DECMate PCs, both were hailed as the future of computing. Oh and the started promoting Unix/RISC platforms as well. Oh and then the Alpha arrived and sort of made it a bit trickier to describe the product lineup.
Confused does not even begin to describe the state of the customers or the sales teams.
I thought school was about learning the principles about how to do things like build, count, draw, read.
I feel you are missing the point if you start training them on specific tools. Would a craft teacher agonise over using a particular make of lathe?
After years of getting it wrong as an interviewer I now insist that all job interviews must include a written exam as a major part of it. The candidate is told that they had 30 minutes, that no one has ever finished it, and that it is designed to allow us to verify how accurate their CV claims about knowledge/experience are and so includes questions that not all candidates might be able to answer. Any dept head that claims they can't produce an exam paper is told that until they do they clearly don't know what the job entails. (they also get marked down come their next review)
After they have completed the test we go through the answers with them which allows the interviewer to develop a greater understanding of the applicant's ability and thinking. As this is done "out loud" the applicant should go home with some understanding of the what we were looking for.
When we come to choose a candidate the process is a lot more reliable than the normal "tell me why we should hire you" routine.
That said it is pretty hard when you walk in after 30 mins, skim through their answers, and realise that you've got a complete bullshitter sitting opposite you. Your want to say "Mr Blogg, either you dreamt this CV whilst on drugs or you stole it, good bye", but your actually thinking "How can I get rid of this guy asap without pissing him off?".
Most folks just use two applications; wordprocessor, and spreadsheet. They do so at the most basic levels, no embedded objects, no live links, only a couple of fonts at most. So with the addition of file manager and no windows manager therefore no mousepad it get a lot less complex. They also don't need a lot of storage.
What they do want from the device are two basics: Fast boot and long battery life. Remove the HDD and replace with ROM/Flash and cut down the size of the processor/memory and hey presto you have something a lot of people would buy.
I realise cutting off the gadgets is heresy to most of the Slashdot crowd, but it is the same thinking that is behind the boom in sales of minimal feature mobile phones.
Provide a foc cross-complier and some APIs and folks would be kicking down the doors to buy the obvious successor to the Apple lle for all those "We need something programmable but simple to control this" jobs.
One of the chaps in the VMS team at spitbrook had his cube "roofed" with a model of Mt Everest constructed entirely of green and white listing paper. Very pretty indeed. That would be circa 1989.
I guess everything about VMS was ahead of the game....;^)
Funny enough I was reading yesterday (Total Telecom - subscription only, sorry) that the UK is regarded as the odd man in Europe as it does not charge on a per byte basis. For most operators less than 5% of the subscribers eat more than 80% of the bandwidth. In the long run it's uneconomic not to charge for usage.
The buffet model takes a hammering in food outlets from the odd glutton, but on the Internet it gets trashed by folks swapping DVDs and Warez.
I hate to ask the blindingly obvious, but if you have a roll of this super sticky tape how do you un-roll it?
If it is strong enough to stick me to the roof I would have thought that if I exerted enough force to unstick it the ceiling board would come down too.
Anything this powerful would be banned before the end of the first week. I can see the fun to be had with a roll of double-sided tape; almost as much fun as the original strength super glue and a telephone handset. Oooh I'm getting all excited now, I can feel the dark side coming closer....
which reminds me, whatever happened to the definition of RAMBOTRAN, the guide fro real men who use FORTRAN?
I used to have a copy, but even google can't find it now.
IF you go to any location where NATO or UN troops are operating you will find a "CD alley" either just outside or even inside the camp.
Last place they were selling DVDs for 5USD. why don't the RIAA go after the UN and NATO, that would be more fun to watch.
I'd second this, I started coding in FORTRAN/RAMBOTRAN many years ago and now use c/c++/php. The book is a very good read with some good anecdotes and worked examples. The best bit is that it is fairly language independent.
You could always try what they did in the UK, force them to share towers. Apart from cutting down the blight of towers it did mean the network rolled out a whole lot quicker than it would otherwise.
It makes me laugh when I hear something like this; our politicos are always telling us how the USofA is so far ahead of us and how we should all ape your economic models. Yeah just like our rugby team apeing the kiwis is so succesful.
I still can't get over coming off a US military transport in the far east and firing up my mobile to check in with the family. Forty folks with jaws on the floor - "how come your cellphone works here? Where did you get that?"
This was done in the UK some years ago by Prof Eric Laithwaite of Imperial college, London. They even went as far as to put a magnetic catapult on a Royal Navy aircraft carrier to test it out.
The good bit was that you could have the sledge return to its start point all on its own. The bad bit was that without the steam the track closed up in cold weather.
Prof E. R. Laithwaite had a bit of a bee his bonnet about electro-magnets. Try and get a copy of "The linear motor and its application to tracked hovercraft" or "Propulsion without wheels"
Slashdot Mirror
It's all theatre for the folks that don't do it every day. Six years ago I watched as two bus loads of paratroopers went through the screening program and put their rifles through the xray machines at a UK regional airport before mounting C130s to do some parachuting. Someone was satisfied but it was a pile of poo.
For DEC they could have gone downscale to PCs, but the profit margins are too low: it's a commodity item. IBM doesn't build PCs anymore; they sold their PC business to Lenovo. Or they could have gone upscale, to compete with IBM mainframes.
Unfortunately they tried both at once with the 72" tall VAX9000 (standard VAXen were 60") and the various Crapavetti and DECMate PCs, both were hailed as the future of computing. Oh and the started promoting Unix/RISC platforms as well. Oh and then the Alpha arrived and sort of made it a bit trickier to describe the product lineup. Confused does not even begin to describe the state of the customers or the sales teams.
I thought school was about learning the principles about how to do things like build, count, draw, read. I feel you are missing the point if you start training them on specific tools. Would a craft teacher agonise over using a particular make of lathe?
After years of getting it wrong as an interviewer I now insist that all job interviews must include a written exam as a major part of it. The candidate is told that they had 30 minutes, that no one has ever finished it, and that it is designed to allow us to verify how accurate their CV claims about knowledge/experience are and so includes questions that not all candidates might be able to answer. Any dept head that claims they can't produce an exam paper is told that until they do they clearly don't know what the job entails. (they also get marked down come their next review) After they have completed the test we go through the answers with them which allows the interviewer to develop a greater understanding of the applicant's ability and thinking. As this is done "out loud" the applicant should go home with some understanding of the what we were looking for. When we come to choose a candidate the process is a lot more reliable than the normal "tell me why we should hire you" routine. That said it is pretty hard when you walk in after 30 mins, skim through their answers, and realise that you've got a complete bullshitter sitting opposite you. Your want to say "Mr Blogg, either you dreamt this CV whilst on drugs or you stole it, good bye", but your actually thinking "How can I get rid of this guy asap without pissing him off?".
Most folks just use two applications; wordprocessor, and spreadsheet. They do so at the most basic levels, no embedded objects, no live links, only a couple of fonts at most. So with the addition of file manager and no windows manager therefore no mousepad it get a lot less complex. They also don't need a lot of storage.
What they do want from the device are two basics: Fast boot and long battery life. Remove the HDD and replace with ROM/Flash and cut down the size of the processor/memory and hey presto you have something a lot of people would buy.
I realise cutting off the gadgets is heresy to most of the Slashdot crowd, but it is the same thinking that is behind the boom in sales of minimal feature mobile phones.
Provide a foc cross-complier and some APIs and folks would be kicking down the doors to buy the obvious successor to the Apple lle for all those "We need something programmable but simple to control this" jobs.
One of the chaps in the VMS team at spitbrook had his cube "roofed" with a model of Mt Everest constructed entirely of green and white listing paper. Very pretty indeed. That would be circa 1989. I guess everything about VMS was ahead of the game....;^)
Funny enough I was reading yesterday (Total Telecom - subscription only, sorry) that the UK is regarded as the odd man in Europe as it does not charge on a per byte basis. For most operators less than 5% of the subscribers eat more than 80% of the bandwidth. In the long run it's uneconomic not to charge for usage.
The buffet model takes a hammering in food outlets from the odd glutton, but on the Internet it gets trashed by folks swapping DVDs and Warez.
I hate to ask the blindingly obvious, but if you have a roll of this super sticky tape how do you un-roll it? If it is strong enough to stick me to the roof I would have thought that if I exerted enough force to unstick it the ceiling board would come down too. Anything this powerful would be banned before the end of the first week. I can see the fun to be had with a roll of double-sided tape; almost as much fun as the original strength super glue and a telephone handset. Oooh I'm getting all excited now, I can feel the dark side coming closer....
If you search deep enough you also find this: http://mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archive s/book.reviews/navigating.internet-gibbs
which reminds me, whatever happened to the definition of RAMBOTRAN, the guide fro real men who use FORTRAN? I used to have a copy, but even google can't find it now.
IF you go to any location where NATO or UN troops are operating you will find a "CD alley" either just outside or even inside the camp.
Last place they were selling DVDs for 5USD. why don't the RIAA go after the UN and NATO, that would be more fun to watch.
I'd second this, I started coding in FORTRAN/RAMBOTRAN many years ago and now use c/c++/php. The book is a very good read with some good anecdotes and worked examples. The best bit is that it is fairly language independent.
You could always try what they did in the UK, force them to share towers. Apart from cutting down the blight of towers it did mean the network rolled out a whole lot quicker than it would otherwise.
It makes me laugh when I hear something like this; our politicos are always telling us how the USofA is so far ahead of us and how we should all ape your economic models. Yeah just like our rugby team apeing the kiwis is so succesful.
I still can't get over coming off a US military transport in the far east and firing up my mobile to check in with the family. Forty folks with jaws on the floor - "how come your cellphone works here? Where did you get that?"
This was done in the UK some years ago by Prof Eric Laithwaite of Imperial college, London. They even went as far as to put a magnetic catapult on a Royal Navy aircraft carrier to test it out. The good bit was that you could have the sledge return to its start point all on its own. The bad bit was that without the steam the track closed up in cold weather. Prof E. R. Laithwaite had a bit of a bee his bonnet about electro-magnets. Try and get a copy of "The linear motor and its application to tracked hovercraft" or "Propulsion without wheels"