Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I agree, I got my 11 year old daughter a Nook for Christmas (the Nook is not ad-supported). We talked about multi-tasking and I told her a got her the Nook specifically because it's a SINGLE-tasking device, and she got it.
I hope the next generation develops some sort of immunity to distraction because, whoops, here I am on slashdot again.
Re:What no Guantanamo Bay for him?
on
GitHub Hacked
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The real question is whether other more nefarious individuals preceded him undetected.
That's a continuing education thing, and quite frankly, I wouldn't want anyone on my staff who isn't interested in increasing their skillset over the time they work for me.
Those are good words and may be true in your case. I work at a place that actually invested in my education. But if you look at job listings objectively, most are focused on very narrow, specific skills/tools. What does that mean? It means the employer is not migrating their existing staff to those skills, or at least are not interested in talented people that might require a little spin-up time. They are a hire-and-fire shop. This type of job listing is the norm.
I disagree. For many software fields, there's tons of jobs out there. I have tons of recruiters chasing after me every day for my skills. The problem is that these jobs are very trendy.
Which is exactly what the GP meant saying that "few real jobs offered by real employers -- it is much easier to use this gun is for hire contractors." So maybe they're staff jobs instead of contractor gigs. But if somebody is hiring you to use a specific tool, don't you wonder what's happening to the people they hired 4 years ago to use some other specific tool that's now uncool? And what becomes of those used-up people?
It is extremely difficult to spend a full career surfing short-term trends. Fall off the wave for a short while, then how do you get back on? Start a family, how can your spouse have a career if you're job-chasing to a new city every other year?
And what about career progression? If your skillset recycles every 4 years, you're no more valuable after 25 years than you were after 4. And then there's ageism. Many people find it tiring to chase after the latest craze eventually. Even if you're an exception, many employers simply won't see you as the picture of what they have in mind for an infusion of new tech to help them stay up-to-date.
Shale isn't becoming viable just due to new technology, but also because less efficient sources become economically viable when the price of gas is higher. In other words, no amount of shale oil is bringing back $1.25 gasoline, because it costs more than that to produce.
As for Sec. Chu advocating higher gas prices, the time to do that was when prices were lower. Paying extra money to your own government - i.e. to yourself - in taxes is quite different than paying it to OPEC or Venezuela where you will never see it again. The extra gas tax could have been used to provide more efficient transportation options so higher gas prices were more tolerable. But of course this talk is all nonsense - politically, the US is nowhere anywhere near any sort of planning or sacrifice for the future. We're not even close to paying for our own current expenses. Despite all the vitriol, Obama nor Chu haven't done jack to increase gas prices. You can put your finger on a couple things like the Keystone pipeline but the figures don't add up to anything significant.
It's just pathetic to watch us go through this cycle of high gas prices and incessant whining again and again, like clockwork, each time being shocked and outraged, and doing nothing substantial about it.
I agree, I have nothing against the idea of cloud services, but they do need to work and reputations are based on events like this. After an outage this long, it takes a LOOONG time to earn your way back to five nines (which works out to 5.5 minutes of downtime per year).
Yes, I like working up from pseudocode. I like commenting code, including basic javadoc. I think self-documenting code is is good (but doesn't live up to its name), and literate programming (and emacs' DocStrings) are interesting ideas. But I don't think those are what people mean by "system documentation." In other words, I'm extremely skeptical of taking a few days before leaving a job and "documenting everything" in Word or on a Wiki. If it isn't integral to the code and integral to the work process, then it will only happen if it's somebody's job, and will only be useful if it's really needed (e.g. big commercial products that are targeted at developers).
I hate to say this, but my experience with writing documentation has been very unrewarding. Nobody reads it; you still get the same questions. Inevitably it goes out of date. And almost invariably, whoever comes next has their own way of doing things they want to impose anyways. I wonder if it isn't better to just document the high points (high-level structure, where to find stuff).
I suppose I will just be told that my documentation must be crap. Ok, I'm here to learn, IF you've got relevant long-term experience and aren't just spouting off.
You think safety equipment increases the overall costs of transportation? The medical bills, liability lawsuits, and lost productivity of vehicle injuries are incredibly expensive. And pro-safety measures of all sorts have been extremely effective.
pfff, more people die at railroad crossings in the USA, and we're not going to do anything about those.
What an absurd statement. There are all kinds of flashing lights and gates that raise and lower at railroad crossings. Probably billions are spent on installing and maintaining them every year.
Arbitration (not arbitrage) occurs in various contexts all the time. The same people who freak out about Muslims doing this among themselves, of course, have no qualms about this common practice in business, for example. Or maybe they are just mad because they assume the Muslims stole the idea from 1 Corinthians Chapter 6 in the New Testament (yes, secular courts are clearly unbiblical).
But it might be better to just settle on electricity as the distribution mechanism, since it is readily produced from any source. Granted, there's a solid case for liquid fuels because they're so energy-dense. But not natural gas.
So, what specifically makes a drone more hackable than a human crew? People go bananas and attack their masters sometimes. People can be deceived by fake orders.
I have a hard time believing that minor increases in extraction costs because of safety and equipment improvements would massively increase the costs of finished products
But that's just it - even if drastically improving the workers' health adds just a few cents per ton, and even if it saves a hundred times that in health care costs down the road, the market will still drive production to whoever does NOT do those things, because they'll be two cents cheaper.
Applications aside for the moment, I am absolutely amazed that the propagation of RF energy through the body was so wrongly understood previous to this.
With all the types of imaging and treatments that involve radiation, from x-rays to airport mm wave scanners to radiotherapy, how can it be nobody had tested frequencies in this range? I'm sure the cellphones-cause-cancer crowd will be fascinated to hear that the optimum frequency for tissue penetration is around 1 GHz, which just happens to be in the middle of cellphone spectrum.
Most of the rest of us in the corporate world have regular evaluations, sometimes against unrealistic metrics and could lose our job based on the results.
...and those evaluations are publicly released for all the world to see, including your co-workers, friends, and families.
You say government is damage to business, but it is no coincidence that the cutting edge of international regulation is not in protecting human rights, not protecting the environment, nor disrupting organized crime... When the US throws its weight around these days, it's twisting arms for the signing of treaties to protect intellectual property.
What is the value of a piece of software, or music, or film, with nobody to enforce the copyright? Nothing. What is the value of an NFL jersey, or Nike shoe, or Luis Vitton handbag, when it's suspected to be "phony"? A fraction. If manufacturers could freely share designs and churn out items without paying royalties, what would be the profit margin on an iPhone? Negligible. Business needs protection more than it needs tax havens. It wants both, but will settle for one in the end.
You are right, I don't have that data. The link I suspect between linux and old hardware is first the low cost, and second the lack of suitability for gaming and third poor linux support for the latest hardware.
But who knows, probably linux is used more by computer enthusiasts, and computer enthusiasts may tend to have newer hardware. (Although I think enthusiasts are marked more by their ability to nurse old hardware. I mean, if you see somebody driving a nice new Lexus, it could be a car enthusiast, but is probably a real estate agent. If somebody is driving a '67 mustang, they're an enthusiast).
I suppose we are inching towards it, unavoidably. As the world "shrinks" due to better communications and transportation, the scope of business and government grows. In the time of the Roman Empire it was almost impossible to maintain an empire that encompassed just the greater Mediterranean region. Just within the recent past - the lifespan of the US - look at how the primary unit of government has transitioned from the city/county, to the state, to the nation. Governance is always lagging commerce. Nowadays, commerce is global, whereas global governance is weak, resulting (predictably) in people jurisdiction-shopping to sue people one place, pay taxes in another, and have their manufacturing done in a third. It's a huge free-rider problem that is crying for legislation. I say none of this to advocate it, only that global government isn't some closed ring of conspirators, it's mainly economics.
I'll bet Linux' share of the "7 year old desktop computer market" (if you can even call it a market) is larger than Linux' share of the desktop market overall. The top-grossing game of 2005 (7 years ago) was World of Warcraft, so it's not like a computer from 2005 is crap. The XBox 360 was also released in 2005, so there are a great many people playing on 2005-era 3d capabilities.
That said, a 3d-accelerated desktop is not a necessity; really not an advantage at all. fvwm and fluxbox don't need any version of openGL and work just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope the next generation develops some sort of immunity to distraction because, whoops, here I am on slashdot again.
The real question is whether other more nefarious individuals preceded him undetected.
Those are good words and may be true in your case. I work at a place that actually invested in my education. But if you look at job listings objectively, most are focused on very narrow, specific skills/tools. What does that mean? It means the employer is not migrating their existing staff to those skills, or at least are not interested in talented people that might require a little spin-up time. They are a hire-and-fire shop. This type of job listing is the norm.
Which is exactly what the GP meant saying that "few real jobs offered by real employers -- it is much easier to use this gun is for hire contractors." So maybe they're staff jobs instead of contractor gigs. But if somebody is hiring you to use a specific tool, don't you wonder what's happening to the people they hired 4 years ago to use some other specific tool that's now uncool? And what becomes of those used-up people?
It is extremely difficult to spend a full career surfing short-term trends. Fall off the wave for a short while, then how do you get back on? Start a family, how can your spouse have a career if you're job-chasing to a new city every other year? And what about career progression? If your skillset recycles every 4 years, you're no more valuable after 25 years than you were after 4. And then there's ageism. Many people find it tiring to chase after the latest craze eventually. Even if you're an exception, many employers simply won't see you as the picture of what they have in mind for an infusion of new tech to help them stay up-to-date.
As for Sec. Chu advocating higher gas prices, the time to do that was when prices were lower. Paying extra money to your own government - i.e. to yourself - in taxes is quite different than paying it to OPEC or Venezuela where you will never see it again. The extra gas tax could have been used to provide more efficient transportation options so higher gas prices were more tolerable. But of course this talk is all nonsense - politically, the US is nowhere anywhere near any sort of planning or sacrifice for the future. We're not even close to paying for our own current expenses. Despite all the vitriol, Obama nor Chu haven't done jack to increase gas prices. You can put your finger on a couple things like the Keystone pipeline but the figures don't add up to anything significant.
It's just pathetic to watch us go through this cycle of high gas prices and incessant whining again and again, like clockwork, each time being shocked and outraged, and doing nothing substantial about it.
I agree, I have nothing against the idea of cloud services, but they do need to work and reputations are based on events like this. After an outage this long, it takes a LOOONG time to earn your way back to five nines (which works out to 5.5 minutes of downtime per year).
Yes, I like working up from pseudocode. I like commenting code, including basic javadoc. I think self-documenting code is is good (but doesn't live up to its name), and literate programming (and emacs' DocStrings) are interesting ideas. But I don't think those are what people mean by "system documentation." In other words, I'm extremely skeptical of taking a few days before leaving a job and "documenting everything" in Word or on a Wiki. If it isn't integral to the code and integral to the work process, then it will only happen if it's somebody's job, and will only be useful if it's really needed (e.g. big commercial products that are targeted at developers).
I suppose I will just be told that my documentation must be crap. Ok, I'm here to learn, IF you've got relevant long-term experience and aren't just spouting off.
You think safety equipment increases the overall costs of transportation? The medical bills, liability lawsuits, and lost productivity of vehicle injuries are incredibly expensive. And pro-safety measures of all sorts have been extremely effective.
What an absurd statement. There are all kinds of flashing lights and gates that raise and lower at railroad crossings. Probably billions are spent on installing and maintaining them every year.
Arbitration (not arbitrage) occurs in various contexts all the time. The same people who freak out about Muslims doing this among themselves, of course, have no qualms about this common practice in business, for example. Or maybe they are just mad because they assume the Muslims stole the idea from 1 Corinthians Chapter 6 in the New Testament (yes, secular courts are clearly unbiblical).
But it might be better to just settle on electricity as the distribution mechanism, since it is readily produced from any source. Granted, there's a solid case for liquid fuels because they're so energy-dense. But not natural gas.
What's the point of having a speedometer if the driver can still break the speed limit?
So, what specifically makes a drone more hackable than a human crew? People go bananas and attack their masters sometimes. People can be deceived by fake orders.
I don't see how a manned crew is any different than a drone in the ability to receive an abort message.
But that's just it - even if drastically improving the workers' health adds just a few cents per ton, and even if it saves a hundred times that in health care costs down the road, the market will still drive production to whoever does NOT do those things, because they'll be two cents cheaper.
Interesting, thanks.
Cute, except currency represents an IOU - an obligation on the part of somebody to do something. That's what it is. And what a song is not.
Applications aside for the moment, I am absolutely amazed that the propagation of RF energy through the body was so wrongly understood previous to this. With all the types of imaging and treatments that involve radiation, from x-rays to airport mm wave scanners to radiotherapy, how can it be nobody had tested frequencies in this range? I'm sure the cellphones-cause-cancer crowd will be fascinated to hear that the optimum frequency for tissue penetration is around 1 GHz, which just happens to be in the middle of cellphone spectrum.
If something like this did conk out somewhere in the body, perhaps you could prevent it from circulating with an external magnet.
Oh, wait, no they're not.
What is the value of a piece of software, or music, or film, with nobody to enforce the copyright? Nothing. What is the value of an NFL jersey, or Nike shoe, or Luis Vitton handbag, when it's suspected to be "phony"? A fraction. If manufacturers could freely share designs and churn out items without paying royalties, what would be the profit margin on an iPhone? Negligible. Business needs protection more than it needs tax havens. It wants both, but will settle for one in the end.
But who knows, probably linux is used more by computer enthusiasts, and computer enthusiasts may tend to have newer hardware. (Although I think enthusiasts are marked more by their ability to nurse old hardware. I mean, if you see somebody driving a nice new Lexus, it could be a car enthusiast, but is probably a real estate agent. If somebody is driving a '67 mustang, they're an enthusiast).
I suppose we are inching towards it, unavoidably. As the world "shrinks" due to better communications and transportation, the scope of business and government grows. In the time of the Roman Empire it was almost impossible to maintain an empire that encompassed just the greater Mediterranean region. Just within the recent past - the lifespan of the US - look at how the primary unit of government has transitioned from the city/county, to the state, to the nation. Governance is always lagging commerce. Nowadays, commerce is global, whereas global governance is weak, resulting (predictably) in people jurisdiction-shopping to sue people one place, pay taxes in another, and have their manufacturing done in a third. It's a huge free-rider problem that is crying for legislation. I say none of this to advocate it, only that global government isn't some closed ring of conspirators, it's mainly economics.
That said, a 3d-accelerated desktop is not a necessity; really not an advantage at all. fvwm and fluxbox don't need any version of openGL and work just fine.