RIGHT NOW, the single-copy United States price for Matlab for commercial use is $1900. The various add-on toolboxes cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars.
Those are ONE-TIME purchase prices, not annual license fees. Annual maintenance contracts, which get you upgrades as they become available, are typically around 1/5 of the purchase price.
As for US programmers costing $15/hour, GET REAL. Last time I looked, minimum rate for an entry-level new college grad was $50K, or $25/hr. Furthermore, you have to add overhead to that hourly rate: the guy typically will cost the company his raw salary AGAIN, in benefits, physical plant, support resources (desk, power, light, PC, network, copy paper...).
Figure a quarter of a million dollars a year per programmer or engineer, total burdened cost, and you aren't that far off.
There is an easy cross-check for this. Look at a healthy technology company, one whose principal product is software development, so that cost of good sold (raw materials, subcontract, etc., is negligible. Divide total sales by number of employees, and that gives you an upper bound on what the employees are costing the company. Look at an UNHEALTHY company, do the same calculation, observe that the unhealthy company is NOT succeeding in making enough money to cover the cost of the employees, and you have a lower bound. When I did this exercise in Dallas a few years ago, I found that the magic number was somewhere between $200,000/yr and $300,000/yr. That's $100/hr-$150/hr. At that rate, $1900 for a copy of Matlab, amortized over 2000 hours, is $1/hr: less than 1% of the total.
And, if you want to get picky, figuring maintenance at 20% of purchase price per year, you're looking at $4000/5 years, or $800/year, or about forty cents an hour, or about three dollars a day. Bathroom breaks cost more.
If you want to do cost arguments, always start with real numbers, not made-up ones.
Requiring the ability to work bizarre hours strongly indicates incompetence in program planning and program management. If you did the planning and management properly, you wouldn't HAVE to be working bizarre hours. Read DeMarco's "The Deadline", and think about it.
Requiring a willingness to endure shitty conditions of employment is even worse. Companies that do this invariably find themselves functioning as unpaid training departments for their competitors.
And you leave out a very important point: You want all these specialist-level skill sets. You don't say whether you are willing to PAY for them. Some years ago, I had to explain to an acquaintance that the reason he couldn't hire programmers was that he wasn't willing to pay them enough money to make it worth their bother.
Depending on what you're doing, for an FFT, you probably don't need 64-bit floating point, and you DON'T need full IEEE-754 compliance.
If you are taking data off of some kind of sensor, there are damned few sensors with 24 good bits of data out of the noise floor. Radars work just fine with 16-bit A/D converters.
IEEE-754 compliance helps you in the ill-defined corners of the number space. FFTs inherently work in the well-behaved arena of simple trig functions and three-function (add/subtract/multiply) math.
I'm currently doing FFTs with 16-bit fractional arithmetic in Blackfin DSP. For what I'm doing with the results, it is good enough.
Not to mention you could use a "GPU farm" to do a fast search, and take any "interesting" data regions and feed those to a 64-bit, fully-IEEE-754 compliant, slow-as-molasses-in-January x86 FFT.
Eventually, with some more articles like this one and yesterday's Cell piece, people will start to figure out that the x86 architecture is brain-dead and needs to be put out of its misery.
Irrelevant to most C/C++ code wallahs doing yet another Web app, perhaps.
Irrelevant to people doing serious high-performance computing, not hardly.
I am currently doing embedded audio digital signal processing, On one of the algorithms I am doing, even with maximum optimization for speed, the C/C++ compiler generated about 12 instructions per data point, where I, an experienced assembly language programmer (although having no previous experience with this particular processor) did it in 4 instructions per point. That's a factor of 3 speedup for that algorithm. Considering that we are still running at high CPU utilization (pushing 90%), and taking into account the fact that we can't go to a faster processor because we can't handle the additional heat dissipation in this system, I'll take it.
I have another algorithm in this system. Written in C, it is taking about 13% of my timeline. I am seriously considering an assembly language rewrite, to see if I can improve that. The C implementation as it stands is correct, straightforward, and clean, but the compiler can only do so much.
In a previous incarnation, I was doing real-time video image processing on a TI 320C80. We were typically processing 256x256 frames at 60 Hz. That's a little under four million pixels per second. The C compiler for that beast was HOPELESS as far as generating optimal code for the image processing kernels. It was hand-tuned assembly language or nothing. (And yes, that experience was absolutely priceless when I landed on my current job.)
The engineer's salary is just the beginning. You also have to figure in taxes, Social Security, cost of benefits, how much it costs to pay for the engineer's desk, light, heating and air conditioning, computer, and all the other things.
Most places, overhead cost for an engineer runs around 100% of his/her salary, meaning that an engineer whose gross salary (before taxes and other deductions) is $60K/year actually costs the employer ca. $120K/year.
Give your stepfather a copy of "Hypnotherapy", by the late Dave Elman. (Amazon is your FRIEND.)
Elman's primary focus was on hypnosis for medical applications. He went to some trouble to develop rapid induction techniques, on the principle that doctors and dentists couldn't AFFORD to spend hours hypnotizing patients; they HAD to be able to do it in minutes.
Pretty much anyone can be hypnotized, if they have enough functioning brain cells to hypnotize in the first place. The fact that you are able to operate a PC well enough to post on Slashdot pretty well indicates that you should be able to pass that particular criterion.
However, hypnosis is a consent state. You have to want to go into trance, you have to go along with it, you have to CHOOSE to follow the hypnotist's instructions. If you don't want to be hypnotized, there is not a lot that I, or anyone else, can do about it.
Further, even if you have agreed to go into hypnosis, even if you have gone into hypnosis, neither I nor anyone else can make you do anything you don't want to do. If a hypnotist tries to give someone a suggestion that they really don't want, they pop out of trance. Depending on the suggestion the hypnotist attempted, their first reaction on coming out may very well be to deck the hypnotist.
The guy who trained me mentioned that he learned VERY quickly to stand on the side of the subject where the guy COULDN'T deck him easily if this happened. He admitted to having learned this the hard way.
People naturally go into hypnosis, on their own, a minimum of twice a day: on their way to falling asleep, and on their way from sleeping to wide awake. It is an absolutely natural state of mind.
As a matter of fact, the United States is *ALREADY* importing nurses from literally every country on the planet.
The problem is that, due to managed care, nursing wages are low, nursing workloads are high, wards are running on skeleton crews, and the nurses aren't stupid. They're getting out of nursing faster than the domestic nursing schools can graduate new ones.
There have already been a couple of cases of U.S. hospital wards where the operating language was Tagalog, not English. This is OK as long as all the nurses speak both languages, not so good if the Filipino nurses only speak halting English, and pure hell for any US-born nurses who don't speak Tagalog. Not to mention the effects on quality of patient care...
Incidentally, the foreign-born nurses aren't entirely happy with the situation, either. Yes, the money is good, but they really don't like some of the things they see happening with quality of care and nursing workload any more than the US nurses do. (I had a very interesting chat one night, while I was hospitalized, with a Filipino nurse some years ago.)
You write letters, as in black print on white paper, in a real envelope, with a real stamp, to your Congresscritters, explaining that you oppose this, you think it is a really bad idea, and you want them to vote AGAINST it.
You send three letters, at a minimum: one to each Senator from your state, and one to the Congressman who represents you.
You get all your friends to do the same thing.
E-mail WON'T CUT IT. They KNOW that e-mail takes no effort, compared to sending an actual physical letter.
If any of the Congresscritters sponsoring this travesty are from your state, whether they represent you or not, you also send them letters.
The letters should be short, polite, to-the-point. They should not use profanity, they should not use 1337-speak, they should not make any kind of threat, not even the threat to vote against them in the next election if they support this. (That last threat is implicit in the fact that you sent the letter.)
The vast majority of Congresscritters *NEVER* hear from "The Folks Back Home". The corollary is that every actual physical letter they receive indicates at least 100 voters who feel the same way, but didn't bother to write a letter. (Every phone call is assumed to indicate 10 voters.)
You almost certainly will receive a reply to your letter. It may or may not indicate that anyone actually read it. If you do not receive a reply, you send more letters, to the State party headquarters, complaining about that clown in Washington who can't be bothered to answer mail from constituents. Those letters also get read, and said clown will hear about it from the guys who made his election happen.
And anyone who thinks that these things can't be fixed should re-read the results of the 1994 mid-term elections.
Background: I attended UT Austin as a professional student 1973-1981, and did refresher work in 2003-2004.
First, it was officially named the Academic Center since at least 1973. It was known informally as the Undergraduate Library. Renaming to "Peter T. Flawn Academic Center" occurred much later.
Second, what is really happening here is that the Academic Computing and Information Technology Services organization is growing, and needed space. Rather than build a building, it was far cheaper to take the remaining space in an existing building. The ground floor was computer labs, magazines, and study carrels. The second floor was ACITS offices, a huge open lab, and a large open space. While I was there, ACITS filled the open space with support offices, and also took some of the open lab for office space. The computers that had been located in that part of the open space were relocated elsewhere in the building, mainly to the third floor. The third floor contained what few books were left, along with the media library (formerly the audio library).
Finally, there is one question I haven't seen addressed, and I really wish I was a student so I could get the question asked in public. The library system had always paid for the guards for the building. Library system budget cuts forced the Academic Center to remove the guards on third shift. When the guards went away, ACITS closed the open lab on that shift, because there was now no one to make even nominally certain that hardware didn't walk out the door. There were some loud grumbles about closing the biggest 24-hour open lab on campus, but nothing ever came of it. Now that the building is entirely an ACITS facility, will ACITS find the money for guards to have the building open for students 24 hours a day?
And I should mention that I spent a LOT of time studying in the Academic Center and using that open lab.
The two-hour security buffer time can be reduced to a lot less than that, if the Pointy-Headed Powers That Be want to do it.
Not much over 48 hours ago, I transited through Tokyo Narita airport, on a forced march from JL 708 to AA 60, on my way from Bangkok back to Dallas. We had less than 60 minutes to get off the 747, clear X-ray and metal detector at Narita, and get on the 777. AA was boarding the 777 as I arrived at the gate, and I still had to get my boarding pass.
It wasn't a problem. The Japanese security people are both polite and professional, and Narita designed the security facility to handle the crowds easily. Security at Dallas, after clearing immigration and customs, to catch the MD-80 to Huntsville AL, was a nightmare by comparison.
Second, if you spend a few minutes with a globe, or actually fly the route, as I did TWICE in the last ten days, you will discover that the great circle course, the shortest distance, between Dallas and Tokyo just barely impinges on Canada, and it does that at Vancouver, and spends the majority of the flight over water. Take off from San Francisco, and you are feet wet the whole time.
Immigration and customs at Bangkok was tedious, but absolutely not a problem. They have LOTS of lines. Immigration and customs at Dallas was not a problem, because they have enough lines for US citizens (but not enough for noncitizens). I had to declare and pay duty on three custom suits, so my customs walk took a few more minutes than normal. Assuming a minimum of an hour for customs and immigration is overly pessimistic.
He said "Like it or not, our economy and ultimately our way of life is, for the foreseeable future, completely dependent upon foreign oil."
This statement is false. The evidence is actually easy to find.
Some months ago, "USA Today" of all places ran an interesting chart. It showed the growth in total US oil consumption, total domestic production, and total imports, over the last few years.
What is interesting about that chart is that current domestic oil production was EQUAL to total US oil consumption a few years ago. Translation: find a way to roll back consumption a few years, and you put Middle Eastern Oil Inc completely out of business in the US market.
As to how to roll back oil consumption, the easiest way I know to do that involves construction of pressurized water reactors for generation of electrical power, and using some of that power to refine the oil shale deposits that we weren't touching thirty years ago and still aren't touching today.
To those who say "That's expensive", I point out that the current mess in the Middle East isn't exactly cheap.
First, they're going to get the capital gains (profit) from sale of stock ANYWAY.
Second, you routinely hear about CEOs at "troubled" companies agreeing to take $1/yr salaries until the problem is fixed. (They still get their bonuses.)
Third, on the books, if they're only drawing $1/yr, that frees up salary money to pay employees.
Fourth, in the United States at least, it is absolutely legal to arrange your financial affairs to minimize your tax burden. There are a LOT of charities out there doing a lot of good who spend a lot of time and effort arranging things so that donors get the maximum tax deduction for their donation. (Review Bill Clinton's tax returns, where he deducted something like four bucks a pair for donating his old knickers to charity.)
Having said all that, this does raise some interesting questions about employee benefits at Google. Normally, in this day and age, the employee most places is required to kick in part of the costs of, for example, medical insurance. If the Google guys are only getting $1/yr, does that mean that Google doesn't offer employee health insurance (BAD!), does it mean that Google pays ALL of the costs of employee health insurance (GOOD!), or does it mean that Google is separately ponying up for their insurance (legally very questionable)?
We know what the climate for the Earth was over the last few hundred years.
Can you model it with this program, using only historical data? That is, can you successfully model the climate on, say, 23 October 1859, using only data from before that date?
Can you model TODAY'S climate, using only data collected up to yesterday?
If you can't do this, what might this suggest about the program's actual ability to predict climate in the future?
For extra credit: Can you run the model backwards? Knowing today's climate, can you tell what yesterday's climate must have been?
(Note for the Judges: No climate-modelling package has EVER successfully done either of these things. So far, no one has produced a climate model that can be run forward with known data to arrive at a known condition, and no one has ever managed to run one backwards.)
The conventional wisdom is that the Iranian people overthrew the Shah back in the late 1970s, when his regime became too secular and too iron-handed. They then established an Islamic republic, under the ayatollahs.
A few years later, when there were still Iranian students in US colleges and universities, the students whose predecessors had been frantically demonstrating against the Shah were themselves frantically demonstrating against Ayatollah Khomeini and his cronies. Some things don't change.
When, and if, the Persians decide they are sick and tired of oppressive government in the name of religious purity, they will remember how to fix that problem. Until they do that, it is THEIR problem, not ours.
IF you are a high-SEI-level shop, and have some SERIOUS line-by-line source code control and configuration management practices in place, then you might be able to compile a "Stupid's Greatest Hits" compendium by looking at modules he changed that someone else subsequently had to change again.
The idea being that you look at Software Change Requests that he authored, claiming a bug fix. You note the modules or lines of code he changed. You then look for later changes to those same modules.
If you have an INDEPENDENT Software Quality Assurance group, that can do this kind of searching for you, your odds of living through this are a lot better. They can claim they were looking for "hot spots", modules that seemed to require a LOT of changes and that could probably benefit from a serious redesign/rework aimed at making them less obscure, and they noticed that some modules were getting double-tapped a lot.
Yes, it would, but you'd get into some pretty hairy heat transfer problems moving the heat to your generator. (By the way, the word is "cogeneration" and the big companies who have to run big thermal generators for other reasons do it all the time, and sell the power back to the local utility, or use it themselves.)
It was easier in the old days, when computers were a lot bigger. Commercial Information Corporation of Woburn MA used to heat their building in winter with the waste heat from their Xerox Sigma 6. It required (I think) five tons of air conditioning plant to keep the processor cool; they ran an extra duct from the outflow to the building HVAC ducts, and put a valve there so they wouldn't heat the building in summer.
I worked a summer job with them, after they moved to Austin and changed the name to Charter Information; I heard the story from them.
However, they were doing some very nice work with antisatellite lasers.
Av Week ran some BEAUTIFUL satellite photos of their Sary Shagan facility quite a few years ago.
This was at the time when the Russians were swearing up and down that they were working on no such thing and that Strategic Defense was impossible and... and...
Come to think of it, that laser battle station was about the same time. Would the Russians REALLY *GASP* LIE to us about what they thought was possible or feasible, so they could maybe talk us out of it while they were going balls-to-the-wall to make it work?
Also, the radiation damage usually does not show up in people for years. Then they get cancer earlier and at a higher percentage than the rest of the population.
MAYBE. Depends on the exposure. There was an accidental long-term human experiment in the Far East not long ago: some medical radiation sources got mixed in with the wrong batch of scrap steel, the steel got melted down and remanufactured into girders, and built into apartments. The residents of those apartments then lived in a low-level radiation bath (significantly higher than recommended exposures, however) for YEARS, and had significantly FEWER cancers than the general population.
This experimental result of course trashes the linear risk model for radiation exposure.
I believe the previous story made it onto Slashdot. Someone else can do the search.
Well, it all depends on how you define "best healthcare in the world".
If you define it as "having universal healthcare", then no, we don't.
If you define it as "actually being able to get treatment in a timely fashion", then that is a different story.
In Canada, which has universal healthcare, a diagnosis of cardiac disease is virtually a death sentence. Most Canadian heart patients die while sitting on the waiting list for the next available OR, for surgery that is absolutely routine. The ones who can afford it, or have friends, simply cross the border into the United States, and they generally are rolling into an OR less than 24 hours after they clear customs.
Some years ago, I had to have both hips replaced. The orthopaedic specialist broke the news to me on Thursday. The first non-emergency OR we could get was Tuesday morning. This was OK, as it gave the rest of my doctors a few days to get my strength back up for the surgery. In Canada, the AVERAGE wait for hip replacement surgery is THREE YEARS.
For a while, I was on a mailing list for asthmatics. The list moderator was a wonderful woman in Canada. She was dying. Her regional healthcare administrators were killing her, one day at a time, by refusing to let real specialists look at her and maybe make a difference in her life. That would have cost money.
Canadian hospitals ROUTINELY close to all but emergency cases for the last couple of months of the year, when they run out of money. If you have a non-emergency in November, you will just have to wait until January and the new fiscal year. Or you could wait for it to become an emergency, and gamble your life on being able to make it to the hospital... Having lived through an asthma exacerbation that should have killed me, having survived ONLY because I was already in the hospital when I crashed, I'm not too keen on this approach.
Uhhh, actually, CO2 does explode, if you confine it, pressurize it, liquify (or solidify) it, and then allow it to absorb heat from the surrounding environment.
Here's an experiment you can do.
Start with one each SEALED carbonated beverage, at room temperature. Shake it. This simulates heating it, by injecting mechanical energy rather than thermal. Now open the beverage container and see what happens.
Or you could heat the beverage and then open it. Same effect.
If you are adventurous, you can do this experiment with dry ice and an empty beverage container. I strongly recommend using a plastic container, as they are less likely to create seriously hazardous shrapnel. With dry ice, you don't have to shake it; you can just let it lie out in the sun.
First: Where are you going to get the methane, in quantity, in conveniently-transportable containers? How are you going to transport the methane?
Second: Where does the power come from to capture the exhaust, and cool it down AND compress it enough to get a liquid? AND *KEEP* it cooled AND pressurized. Nuclear material is stable at room temperature and pressure: you don't have to cool it and you don't have to pressurize it. You do have to keep it in storage casks, but the casks don't require continuous (second by second) supervision AND POWER to maintain cooling and pressurization.
Here's an experiment. Take a 2- or 3-liter plastic soda bottle. Put a chunk of dry ice inside. Seal the bottle, set it down, stand WAY back, and watch what happens. You will get an explosion, as the dry ice absorbs heat, sublimes to vapor, expands, and overstresses the plastic bottle.
Google "carbon dioxide phase diagram" and consider the implications. (Freshman chemistry, people.)
Third: the energy density of chemical reactions is well-known. No matter how much you wave your hands, you are still talking single-digit electron volts (also freshman chemistry, people, or you might have seen it in sophomore semiconductor materials). Compare with nuclear reactions. Any way you look at it, you are going to have to build a LOT bigger plant if you run it off of chemical reactions than if you run it off of nuclear.
The nursing schools are running at full capacity. New nurses are entering the job market every year.
Yet the shortage persists, and the hospitals import nurses from everywhere on the planet.
There has been at least one case of a US hospital ward where the operating language was Tagalog, not English, and the few nurses on those wards who didn't speak Tagalog were at a severe disadvantage getting patient care information from the Filipino nurses.
When the faucet is turned on, full force, and the basin continues to be empty, you have to wonder why the drain isn't closed.
The underlying problem is that nurses are overworked and underpaid, across the board, in the name of cost control and managed health care. The nurses get disgusted, realizing in many cases that overwork, exhaustion, and, oh by the way, SKELETON CREWS ON THE WARDS, is making it impossible for them to provide quality patient care, and they quit.
I believe it was Milton Friedman who said "If you have a shortage of people willing to do a job, it is usually because you aren't paying enough."
The hidden danger of the situation is that it is the experienced nurses who are leaving, and being replaced by inexperienced nurses. Or, in a lot of cases, not replaced, and the ward runs shorthanded.
I had occasion to observe some of this firsthand, in the course of several hospital stays over a period of some years.
The nurses are dedicated, they try HARD to do the best they can, but there is only so much one person can do.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's start with facts, shall we?
t /Download/33872_91012v25_NA_INDV.pdf
Here's the price sheet: https://tagteamdbserver.mathworks.com/ttserverroo
RIGHT NOW, the single-copy United States price for Matlab for commercial use is $1900. The various add-on toolboxes cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars.
Those are ONE-TIME purchase prices, not annual license fees. Annual maintenance contracts, which get you upgrades as they become available, are typically around 1/5 of the purchase price.
As for US programmers costing $15/hour, GET REAL. Last time I looked, minimum rate for an entry-level new college grad was $50K, or $25/hr. Furthermore, you have to add overhead to that hourly rate: the guy typically will cost the company his raw salary AGAIN, in benefits, physical plant, support resources (desk, power, light, PC, network, copy paper...).
Figure a quarter of a million dollars a year per programmer or engineer, total burdened cost, and you aren't that far off.
There is an easy cross-check for this. Look at a healthy technology company, one whose principal product is software development, so that cost of good sold (raw materials, subcontract, etc., is negligible. Divide total sales by number of employees, and that gives you an upper bound on what the employees are costing the company. Look at an UNHEALTHY company, do the same calculation, observe that the unhealthy company is NOT succeeding in making enough money to cover the cost of the employees, and you have a lower bound. When I did this exercise in Dallas a few years ago, I found that the magic number was somewhere between $200,000/yr and $300,000/yr. That's $100/hr-$150/hr. At that rate, $1900 for a copy of Matlab, amortized over 2000 hours, is $1/hr: less than 1% of the total.
And, if you want to get picky, figuring maintenance at 20% of purchase price per year, you're looking at $4000/5 years, or $800/year, or about forty cents an hour, or about three dollars a day. Bathroom breaks cost more.
If you want to do cost arguments, always start with real numbers, not made-up ones.
Requiring the ability to work bizarre hours strongly indicates incompetence in program planning and program management. If you did the planning and management properly, you wouldn't HAVE to be working bizarre hours. Read DeMarco's "The Deadline", and think about it.
Requiring a willingness to endure shitty conditions of employment is even worse. Companies that do this invariably find themselves functioning as unpaid training departments for their competitors.
And you leave out a very important point: You want all these specialist-level skill sets. You don't say whether you are willing to PAY for them. Some years ago, I had to explain to an acquaintance that the reason he couldn't hire programmers was that he wasn't willing to pay them enough money to make it worth their bother.
Depending on what you're doing, for an FFT, you probably don't need 64-bit floating point, and you DON'T need full IEEE-754 compliance.
If you are taking data off of some kind of sensor, there are damned few sensors with 24 good bits of data out of the noise floor. Radars work just fine with 16-bit A/D converters.
IEEE-754 compliance helps you in the ill-defined corners of the number space. FFTs inherently work in the well-behaved arena of simple trig functions and three-function (add/subtract/multiply) math.
I'm currently doing FFTs with 16-bit fractional arithmetic in Blackfin DSP. For what I'm doing with the results, it is good enough.
Not to mention you could use a "GPU farm" to do a fast search, and take any "interesting" data regions and feed those to a 64-bit, fully-IEEE-754 compliant, slow-as-molasses-in-January x86 FFT.
Eventually, with some more articles like this one and yesterday's Cell piece, people will start to figure out that the x86 architecture is brain-dead and needs to be put out of its misery.
Irrelevant to most C/C++ code wallahs doing yet another Web app, perhaps.
Irrelevant to people doing serious high-performance computing, not hardly.
I am currently doing embedded audio digital signal processing, On one of the algorithms I am doing, even with maximum optimization for speed, the C/C++ compiler generated about 12 instructions per data point, where I, an experienced assembly language programmer (although having no previous experience with this particular processor) did it in 4 instructions per point. That's a factor of 3 speedup for that algorithm. Considering that we are still running at high CPU utilization (pushing 90%), and taking into account the fact that we can't go to a faster processor because we can't handle the additional heat dissipation in this system, I'll take it.
I have another algorithm in this system. Written in C, it is taking about 13% of my timeline. I am seriously considering an assembly language rewrite, to see if I can improve that. The C implementation as it stands is correct, straightforward, and clean, but the compiler can only do so much.
In a previous incarnation, I was doing real-time video image processing on a TI 320C80. We were typically processing 256x256 frames at 60 Hz. That's a little under four million pixels per second. The C compiler for that beast was HOPELESS as far as generating optimal code for the image processing kernels. It was hand-tuned assembly language or nothing. (And yes, that experience was absolutely priceless when I landed on my current job.)
You have to figure in overhead cost.
The engineer's salary is just the beginning. You also have to figure in taxes, Social Security, cost of benefits, how much it costs to pay for the engineer's desk, light, heating and air conditioning, computer, and all the other things.
Most places, overhead cost for an engineer runs around 100% of his/her salary, meaning that an engineer whose gross salary (before taxes and other deductions) is $60K/year actually costs the employer ca. $120K/year.
Well, if you REALLY want the answers to these questions, do what I did: go find out.
Take a year off, and go back to school.
You will be AMAZED at how hot the coeds are the second time around.
The "preppy boytoy BMOC" still exists. He was the captain of the sailing team at my school. He was also really good people.
Give your stepfather a copy of "Hypnotherapy", by the late Dave Elman. (Amazon is your FRIEND.)
Elman's primary focus was on hypnosis for medical applications. He went to some trouble to develop rapid induction techniques, on the principle that doctors and dentists couldn't AFFORD to spend hours hypnotizing patients; they HAD to be able to do it in minutes.
First, full disclosure: I am a trained hypnotist.
Pretty much anyone can be hypnotized, if they have enough functioning brain cells to hypnotize in the first place. The fact that you are able to operate a PC well enough to post on Slashdot pretty well indicates that you should be able to pass that particular criterion.
However, hypnosis is a consent state. You have to want to go into trance, you have to go along with it, you have to CHOOSE to follow the hypnotist's instructions. If you don't want to be hypnotized, there is not a lot that I, or anyone else, can do about it.
Further, even if you have agreed to go into hypnosis, even if you have gone into hypnosis, neither I nor anyone else can make you do anything you don't want to do. If a hypnotist tries to give someone a suggestion that they really don't want, they pop out of trance. Depending on the suggestion the hypnotist attempted, their first reaction on coming out may very well be to deck the hypnotist.
The guy who trained me mentioned that he learned VERY quickly to stand on the side of the subject where the guy COULDN'T deck him easily if this happened. He admitted to having learned this the hard way.
People naturally go into hypnosis, on their own, a minimum of twice a day: on their way to falling asleep, and on their way from sleeping to wide awake. It is an absolutely natural state of mind.
As a matter of fact, the United States is *ALREADY* importing nurses from literally every country on the planet.
The problem is that, due to managed care, nursing wages are low, nursing workloads are high, wards are running on skeleton crews, and the nurses aren't stupid. They're getting out of nursing faster than the domestic nursing schools can graduate new ones.
There have already been a couple of cases of U.S. hospital wards where the operating language was Tagalog, not English. This is OK as long as all the nurses speak both languages, not so good if the Filipino nurses only speak halting English, and pure hell for any US-born nurses who don't speak Tagalog. Not to mention the effects on quality of patient care...
Incidentally, the foreign-born nurses aren't entirely happy with the situation, either. Yes, the money is good, but they really don't like some of the things they see happening with quality of care and nursing workload any more than the US nurses do. (I had a very interesting chat one night, while I was hospitalized, with a Filipino nurse some years ago.)
You write letters, as in black print on white paper, in a real envelope, with a real stamp, to your Congresscritters, explaining that you oppose this, you think it is a really bad idea, and you want them to vote AGAINST it.
You send three letters, at a minimum: one to each Senator from your state, and one to the Congressman who represents you.
You get all your friends to do the same thing.
E-mail WON'T CUT IT. They KNOW that e-mail takes no effort, compared to sending an actual physical letter.
If any of the Congresscritters sponsoring this travesty are from your state, whether they represent you or not, you also send them letters.
The letters should be short, polite, to-the-point. They should not use profanity, they should not use 1337-speak, they should not make any kind of threat, not even the threat to vote against them in the next election if they support this. (That last threat is implicit in the fact that you sent the letter.)
The vast majority of Congresscritters *NEVER* hear from "The Folks Back Home". The corollary is that every actual physical letter they receive indicates at least 100 voters who feel the same way, but didn't bother to write a letter. (Every phone call is assumed to indicate 10 voters.)
You almost certainly will receive a reply to your letter. It may or may not indicate that anyone actually read it. If you do not receive a reply, you send more letters, to the State party headquarters, complaining about that clown in Washington who can't be bothered to answer mail from constituents. Those letters also get read, and said clown will hear about it from the guys who made his election happen.
And anyone who thinks that these things can't be fixed should re-read the results of the 1994 mid-term elections.
Background: I attended UT Austin as a professional student 1973-1981, and did refresher work in 2003-2004.
First, it was officially named the Academic Center since at least 1973. It was known informally as the Undergraduate Library. Renaming to "Peter T. Flawn Academic Center" occurred much later.
Second, what is really happening here is that the Academic Computing and Information Technology Services organization is growing, and needed space. Rather than build a building, it was far cheaper to take the remaining space in an existing building. The ground floor was computer labs, magazines, and study carrels. The second floor was ACITS offices, a huge open lab, and a large open space. While I was there, ACITS filled the open space with support offices, and also took some of the open lab for office space. The computers that had been located in that part of the open space were relocated elsewhere in the building, mainly to the third floor. The third floor contained what few books were left, along with the media library (formerly the audio library).
Finally, there is one question I haven't seen addressed, and I really wish I was a student so I could get the question asked in public. The library system had always paid for the guards for the building. Library system budget cuts forced the Academic Center to remove the guards on third shift. When the guards went away, ACITS closed the open lab on that shift, because there was now no one to make even nominally certain that hardware didn't walk out the door. There were some loud grumbles about closing the biggest 24-hour open lab on campus, but nothing ever came of it. Now that the building is entirely an ACITS facility, will ACITS find the money for guards to have the building open for students 24 hours a day?
And I should mention that I spent a LOT of time studying in the Academic Center and using that open lab.
The two-hour security buffer time can be reduced to a lot less than that, if the Pointy-Headed Powers That Be want to do it.
Not much over 48 hours ago, I transited through Tokyo Narita airport, on a forced march from JL 708 to AA 60, on my way from Bangkok back to Dallas. We had less than 60 minutes to get off the 747, clear X-ray and metal detector at Narita, and get on the 777. AA was boarding the 777 as I arrived at the gate, and I still had to get my boarding pass.
It wasn't a problem. The Japanese security people are both polite and professional, and Narita designed the security facility to handle the crowds easily. Security at Dallas, after clearing immigration and customs, to catch the MD-80 to Huntsville AL, was a nightmare by comparison.
Second, if you spend a few minutes with a globe, or actually fly the route, as I did TWICE in the last ten days, you will discover that the great circle course, the shortest distance, between Dallas and Tokyo just barely impinges on Canada, and it does that at Vancouver, and spends the majority of the flight over water. Take off from San Francisco, and you are feet wet the whole time.
Immigration and customs at Bangkok was tedious, but absolutely not a problem. They have LOTS of lines. Immigration and customs at Dallas was not a problem, because they have enough lines for US citizens (but not enough for noncitizens). I had to declare and pay duty on three custom suits, so my customs walk took a few more minutes than normal. Assuming a minimum of an hour for customs and immigration is overly pessimistic.
He said "Like it or not, our economy and ultimately our way of life is, for the foreseeable future, completely dependent upon foreign oil."
This statement is false. The evidence is actually easy to find.
Some months ago, "USA Today" of all places ran an interesting chart. It showed the growth in total US oil consumption, total domestic production, and total imports, over the last few years.
What is interesting about that chart is that current domestic oil production was EQUAL to total US oil consumption a few years ago. Translation: find a way to roll back consumption a few years, and you put Middle Eastern Oil Inc completely out of business in the US market.
As to how to roll back oil consumption, the easiest way I know to do that involves construction of pressurized water reactors for generation of electrical power, and using some of that power to refine the oil shale deposits that we weren't touching thirty years ago and still aren't touching today.
To those who say "That's expensive", I point out that the current mess in the Middle East isn't exactly cheap.
There are multiple pieces to the answer.
First, they're going to get the capital gains (profit) from sale of stock ANYWAY.
Second, you routinely hear about CEOs at "troubled" companies agreeing to take $1/yr salaries until the problem is fixed. (They still get their bonuses.)
Third, on the books, if they're only drawing $1/yr, that frees up salary money to pay employees.
Fourth, in the United States at least, it is absolutely legal to arrange your financial affairs to minimize your tax burden. There are a LOT of charities out there doing a lot of good who spend a lot of time and effort arranging things so that donors get the maximum tax deduction for their donation. (Review Bill Clinton's tax returns, where he deducted something like four bucks a pair for donating his old knickers to charity.)
Having said all that, this does raise some interesting questions about employee benefits at Google. Normally, in this day and age, the employee most places is required to kick in part of the costs of, for example, medical insurance. If the Google guys are only getting $1/yr, does that mean that Google doesn't offer employee health insurance (BAD!), does it mean that Google pays ALL of the costs of employee health insurance (GOOD!), or does it mean that Google is separately ponying up for their insurance (legally very questionable)?
We know what the climate for the Earth was over the last few hundred years.
Can you model it with this program, using only historical data? That is, can you successfully model the climate on, say, 23 October 1859, using only data from before that date?
Can you model TODAY'S climate, using only data collected up to yesterday?
If you can't do this, what might this suggest about the program's actual ability to predict climate in the future?
For extra credit: Can you run the model backwards? Knowing today's climate, can you tell what yesterday's climate must have been?
(Note for the Judges: No climate-modelling package has EVER successfully done either of these things. So far, no one has produced a climate model that can be run forward with known data to arrive at a known condition, and no one has ever managed to run one backwards.)
Short answer: Who cares?
The conventional wisdom is that the Iranian people overthrew the Shah back in the late 1970s, when his regime became too secular and too iron-handed. They then established an Islamic republic, under the ayatollahs.
A few years later, when there were still Iranian students in US colleges and universities, the students whose predecessors had been frantically demonstrating against the Shah were themselves frantically demonstrating against Ayatollah Khomeini and his cronies. Some things don't change.
When, and if, the Persians decide they are sick and tired of oppressive government in the name of religious purity, they will remember how to fix that problem. Until they do that, it is THEIR problem, not ours.
IF you are a high-SEI-level shop, and have some SERIOUS line-by-line source code control and configuration management practices in place, then you might be able to compile a "Stupid's Greatest Hits" compendium by looking at modules he changed that someone else subsequently had to change again.
The idea being that you look at Software Change Requests that he authored, claiming a bug fix. You note the modules or lines of code he changed. You then look for later changes to those same modules.
If you have an INDEPENDENT Software Quality Assurance group, that can do this kind of searching for you, your odds of living through this are a lot better. They can claim they were looking for "hot spots", modules that seemed to require a LOT of changes and that could probably benefit from a serious redesign/rework aimed at making them less obscure, and they noticed that some modules were getting double-tapped a lot.
Yes, it would, but you'd get into some pretty hairy heat transfer problems moving the heat to your generator. (By the way, the word is "cogeneration" and the big companies who have to run big thermal generators for other reasons do it all the time, and sell the power back to the local utility, or use it themselves.)
It was easier in the old days, when computers were a lot bigger. Commercial Information Corporation of Woburn MA used to heat their building in winter with the waste heat from their Xerox Sigma 6. It required (I think) five tons of air conditioning plant to keep the processor cool; they ran an extra duct from the outflow to the building HVAC ducts, and put a valve there so they wouldn't heat the building in summer.
I worked a summer job with them, after they moved to Austin and changed the name to Charter Information; I heard the story from them.
Dude, lighter fluid is a combination of various light hydrocarbons, most probably produced from natural gas.
It *IS* fossil fuel.
There are other processes for making the hydrocarbons, but they require a LOT more energy input than refining natural gas.
And natural gas is too damn' valuable as a chemical process feedstock to waste it in a fricking fire!
I don't know.
However, they were doing some very nice work with antisatellite lasers.
Av Week ran some BEAUTIFUL satellite photos of their Sary Shagan facility quite a few years ago.
This was at the time when the Russians were swearing up and down that they were working on no such thing and that Strategic Defense was impossible and... and...
Come to think of it, that laser battle station was about the same time. Would the Russians REALLY *GASP* LIE to us about what they thought was possible or feasible, so they could maybe talk us out of it while they were going balls-to-the-wall to make it work?
Nahhhhh. Never happen!
MAYBE. Depends on the exposure. There was an accidental long-term human experiment in the Far East not long ago: some medical radiation sources got mixed in with the wrong batch of scrap steel, the steel got melted down and remanufactured into girders, and built into apartments. The residents of those apartments then lived in a low-level radiation bath (significantly higher than recommended exposures, however) for YEARS, and had significantly FEWER cancers than the general population.
This experimental result of course trashes the linear risk model for radiation exposure.
I believe the previous story made it onto Slashdot. Someone else can do the search.
Well, it all depends on how you define "best healthcare in the world".
If you define it as "having universal healthcare", then no, we don't.
If you define it as "actually being able to get treatment in a timely fashion", then that is a different story.
In Canada, which has universal healthcare, a diagnosis of cardiac disease is virtually a death sentence. Most Canadian heart patients die while sitting on the waiting list for the next available OR, for surgery that is absolutely routine. The ones who can afford it, or have friends, simply cross the border into the United States, and they generally are rolling into an OR less than 24 hours after they clear customs.
Some years ago, I had to have both hips replaced. The orthopaedic specialist broke the news to me on Thursday. The first non-emergency OR we could get was Tuesday morning. This was OK, as it gave the rest of my doctors a few days to get my strength back up for the surgery. In Canada, the AVERAGE wait for hip replacement surgery is THREE YEARS.
For a while, I was on a mailing list for asthmatics. The list moderator was a wonderful woman in Canada. She was dying. Her regional healthcare administrators were killing her, one day at a time, by refusing to let real specialists look at her and maybe make a difference in her life. That would have cost money.
Canadian hospitals ROUTINELY close to all but emergency cases for the last couple of months of the year, when they run out of money. If you have a non-emergency in November, you will just have to wait until January and the new fiscal year. Or you could wait for it to become an emergency, and gamble your life on being able to make it to the hospital... Having lived through an asthma exacerbation that should have killed me, having survived ONLY because I was already in the hospital when I crashed, I'm not too keen on this approach.
So you tell me who has the better healthcare.
Uhhh, actually, CO2 does explode, if you confine it, pressurize it, liquify (or solidify) it, and then allow it to absorb heat from the surrounding environment.
Here's an experiment you can do.
Start with one each SEALED carbonated beverage, at room temperature. Shake it. This simulates heating it, by injecting mechanical energy rather than thermal. Now open the beverage container and see what happens.
Or you could heat the beverage and then open it. Same effect.
If you are adventurous, you can do this experiment with dry ice and an empty beverage container. I strongly recommend using a plastic container, as they are less likely to create seriously hazardous shrapnel. With dry ice, you don't have to shake it; you can just let it lie out in the sun.
First: Where are you going to get the methane, in quantity, in conveniently-transportable containers? How are you going to transport the methane?
Second: Where does the power come from to capture the exhaust, and cool it down AND compress it enough to get a liquid? AND *KEEP* it cooled AND pressurized. Nuclear material is stable at room temperature and pressure: you don't have to cool it and you don't have to pressurize it. You do have to keep it in storage casks, but the casks don't require continuous (second by second) supervision AND POWER to maintain cooling and pressurization.
Here's an experiment. Take a 2- or 3-liter plastic soda bottle. Put a chunk of dry ice inside. Seal the bottle, set it down, stand WAY back, and watch what happens. You will get an explosion, as the dry ice absorbs heat, sublimes to vapor, expands, and overstresses the plastic bottle.
Google "carbon dioxide phase diagram" and consider the implications. (Freshman chemistry, people.)
Third: the energy density of chemical reactions is well-known. No matter how much you wave your hands, you are still talking single-digit electron volts (also freshman chemistry, people, or you might have seen it in sophomore semiconductor materials). Compare with nuclear reactions. Any way you look at it, you are going to have to build a LOT bigger plant if you run it off of chemical reactions than if you run it off of nuclear.
You haven't carried your analysis far enough.
The nursing schools are running at full capacity. New nurses are entering the job market every year.
Yet the shortage persists, and the hospitals import nurses from everywhere on the planet.
There has been at least one case of a US hospital ward where the operating language was Tagalog, not English, and the few nurses on those wards who didn't speak Tagalog were at a severe disadvantage getting patient care information from the Filipino nurses.
When the faucet is turned on, full force, and the basin continues to be empty, you have to wonder why the drain isn't closed.
The underlying problem is that nurses are overworked and underpaid, across the board, in the name of cost control and managed health care. The nurses get disgusted, realizing in many cases that overwork, exhaustion, and, oh by the way, SKELETON CREWS ON THE WARDS, is making it impossible for them to provide quality patient care, and they quit.
I believe it was Milton Friedman who said "If you have a shortage of people willing to do a job, it is usually because you aren't paying enough."
The hidden danger of the situation is that it is the experienced nurses who are leaving, and being replaced by inexperienced nurses. Or, in a lot of cases, not replaced, and the ward runs shorthanded.
I had occasion to observe some of this firsthand, in the course of several hospital stays over a period of some years.
The nurses are dedicated, they try HARD to do the best they can, but there is only so much one person can do.