If you're going to be a volunteer, then your first goal should be to give service. Put away all twinkle-of-the-eye notions of saving the great masses problems through IT. If you have IT skills, then throw them in the mix, but they won't always be the most important. Remember that the other volunteers also have skills: that woman filling out forms might be a teacher, that guy moving boxes might be a lawyer. You should be prepared to provide service in other ways too: help do cleaning, change light bulbs, run errands, whatever.
If you're not prepared to do these other things too, then you must seriously doubt your commitment to the cause.
Remember, half the point of doing volunteer work is to meet and serve to and with a broader range of people and help develop yourself as a more compassionate person. That isn't going to happen if you just do the IT stuff and not the other.
This was really just a marketiung exercise with just enough technical mumbo-jumbo to make it sound real.
If you consider that the primary goal was really to make people *think* that they were doing something useful, then , yes, the exercise was successful.
It all depends on where you live. I live in an area that was once old river bed and there is a lot of water movement through the old gravels just 5-10 metres below the surface. For me, drilling to 20 metres would be almost as good as placing the heat exchanger in the river.
Sales in the last two years were driven largely by Vista: either purchasing a Vista-ready machine or a Vista machine. Apple too came to the party, pushing their new lines of computers. People also transitioned to broadband. This motivated buying new PCs and MS put huge resources into hyping that.
This year MS did pretty much nothing and there was very little motivation to buy anything new. Apple had not announced anything amazing for at least a year now.
Therefore sales drop off. Wow: who'd have thought that?
d) People viewed the war as a temporary thing and spoke of hope ("After the war we'll...."). People were prepared to make personal sacrifices because there was a war on. Nobody talks of the current US wars in that way and never has personal consumerism and self-absorbtion been any higher.
e) People were generally more frugal back then and did not just thow their money (and credit) around. They tended to save more and spend more wisely and acted for the longer term. Today's people are different: they have credit cards and do everything for instant gratification. Today's people are not prepared to cut their consumerism to rebuild the economy over a 5 or 10 year period. That's why it has been a lot easier to just print more money and increase the national debt than it has been to pushing up taxes or interest rates or whatever is really required to improve true economic health.
With zero G etc it will be very hard to farm silkworm food. Algae is a lot easier to groaw and is more efficient and contains a huge amount of protein etc.
Carbon offsets != carbon credits. Gore buys his carbon credits from... HIMSELF!
Carbon credits are basically at tradeable "carbon ration": want to use fore than your fair share then buy from some else or someone that is sinking carbon.
Carbon offsetting is a much easier concept to scam as no carbon trading needs to happen.
No need to choose. QR for static data that does not change and URLs for dynamic data.
What would be cool would be some sort of route planner that caches extra info for you. eg. If you're going on vacation, cache all the QR codes for the airports you're going to. eg2. Going to a convention, cache all the info on the various booths etc.
If you're going on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity like this then why waste the time doing internet stuff that you can do for the rest of your life.
Use the opportunity wisely. Soak up the new experiences. DOn't be one of those fools that travel halfway around the world to sit in a McDonalds or an internet cafe.
Forget about the internet, email, wikipedia etc.They'll all still be there when you're done.
As parent says, nobody worthwhile is going to do these projects for the money. Even if you're earning only $20/hr (big money in some parts of the world), then $1k is just 50 hours - hardly worth doing for the money. For most higher paid programmers $1k is less than 20 hours.
That means you're really going to be doing it for the honor. In that case forget the money and rather make a "hall of fame", something like: http://armlinux.simtec.co.uk/whoswho.html . That's worth more for a good consultant and costs almost nothing to give out as a prize.
Sure, schools have very strict budgets, but they are very cautious too and will not take risks. Moving to Linux is perceived as very high risk. Teachers are already overworked and also don't want change that they see little benefit in doing.
Saving money through fund raisers etc is seen to be low risk and a proven way to get money to flow the right way. An experiment in Linux is perceived to be a lot more risky and harder. The school's computers are often seen to be very high expense items and there is a preception that running Linux lowers their value or might even cause damage. Don't want to take any risks with that!
Revising silicon has got cheaper and the cost of delaying shipping has got bigger. Most significant (and even many simple) parts these days are shipped on almost the same basis as software with a range of bugs. Look up the errata sheet for almost any microcontroller etc and some will have numerous bugs (20+ bugs in a reasonable complexity chip are not unknown).
The difference is that most hardware engineers are a pragmatic lot and will work around the bugs as they need to to build a shipping product. The hardware rarely interacts directly with an uncontrolled environment (ie a user) and this makes work-arounds a realistic strategy.
There are even hacks in gcc to work around CPU bugs in various micros.
TFA has absolutely nothing of substance. Looks like they're just trying to attract click revenue.
If Apple did release the Nanophone elsewhere then it would be the first time they'd done a product launch that excluded USA.
Of course it would not be surprising if competitors are pushing the concept to create demand which they can fill with a "me too" product. "Me too" that is, except that the original does not exist. Various Chinese companies make a bundle out of "me toos", so this strategy could appeal there.
Actually, some companies don't mind being ripped off. MS for one. Look at how they were quick to pay unnecessary licensing from SCO. By doing so, MS give SCO some funding for their warchest and gave SCO's case some credibility thereby undermining Linux for a while and doing MS competition more damage than the amount they paid. ie. Net win for MS.
No doubt MS will do the sums here and do the same thing if the spreadsheet tells them to. They'll happily pay up if it puts more hurt on their rivals.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're not prepared to do these other things too, then you must seriously doubt your commitment to the cause.
Remember, half the point of doing volunteer work is to meet and serve to and with a broader range of people and help develop yourself as a more compassionate person. That isn't going to happen if you just do the IT stuff and not the other.
The fire was probably due to a well known fact that DeLorians leaked fuel and oil badly. That's why they quit making them.
Don't worry about carrying a 1% gene. Carrying a BigMac bag is far more likely to lead to heart attacks than genetics.
If you consider that the primary goal was really to make people *think* that they were doing something useful, then , yes, the exercise was successful.
It all depends on where you live. I live in an area that was once old river bed and there is a lot of water movement through the old gravels just 5-10 metres below the surface. For me, drilling to 20 metres would be almost as good as placing the heat exchanger in the river.
If one person presses pause then it freezes for everybody!
That costs a lot less than rolling out new hardware/software.
This year MS did pretty much nothing and there was very little motivation to buy anything new. Apple had not announced anything amazing for at least a year now.
Therefore sales drop off. Wow: who'd have thought that?
This policy was also used in the last three companies I worked for. AFAIK, it is also used in HP, Apple, Intel and just about all similar companies.
patented of course!
Having some deniability was pretty handy too.
Is that really so bad?
It's not like he got a blowjob or anything!
e) People were generally more frugal back then and did not just thow their money (and credit) around. They tended to save more and spend more wisely and acted for the longer term. Today's people are different: they have credit cards and do everything for instant gratification. Today's people are not prepared to cut their consumerism to rebuild the economy over a 5 or 10 year period. That's why it has been a lot easier to just print more money and increase the national debt than it has been to pushing up taxes or interest rates or whatever is really required to improve true economic health.
With zero G etc it will be very hard to farm silkworm food. Algae is a lot easier to groaw and is more efficient and contains a huge amount of protein etc.
How fucked is the selection process if senators this useless get elected in?
Carbon credits are basically at tradeable "carbon ration": want to use fore than your fair share then buy from some else or someone that is sinking carbon.
Carbon offsetting is a much easier concept to scam as no carbon trading needs to happen.
What would be cool would be some sort of route planner that caches extra info for you. eg. If you're going on vacation, cache all the QR codes for the airports you're going to. eg2. Going to a convention, cache all the info on the various booths etc.
Use the opportunity wisely. Soak up the new experiences. DOn't be one of those fools that travel halfway around the world to sit in a McDonalds or an internet cafe.
Forget about the internet, email, wikipedia etc.They'll all still be there when you're done.
That means you're really going to be doing it for the honor. In that case forget the money and rather make a "hall of fame", something like: http://armlinux.simtec.co.uk/whoswho.html . That's worth more for a good consultant and costs almost nothing to give out as a prize.
Anyone who's been in a cave where bats live won't go anywhere near the airport.
Saving money through fund raisers etc is seen to be low risk and a proven way to get money to flow the right way. An experiment in Linux is perceived to be a lot more risky and harder. The school's computers are often seen to be very high expense items and there is a preception that running Linux lowers their value or might even cause damage. Don't want to take any risks with that!
The difference is that most hardware engineers are a pragmatic lot and will work around the bugs as they need to to build a shipping product. The hardware rarely interacts directly with an uncontrolled environment (ie a user) and this makes work-arounds a realistic strategy.
There are even hacks in gcc to work around CPU bugs in various micros.
If Apple did release the Nanophone elsewhere then it would be the first time they'd done a product launch that excluded USA.
Of course it would not be surprising if competitors are pushing the concept to create demand which they can fill with a "me too" product. "Me too" that is, except that the original does not exist. Various Chinese companies make a bundle out of "me toos", so this strategy could appeal there.
No doubt MS will do the sums here and do the same thing if the spreadsheet tells them to. They'll happily pay up if it puts more hurt on their rivals.
No he's just crap!