I suggest using the tacky attention-getting techniques of 1998-era Web ads (rapid flashing alternating red background / green text and vice versa), and punch-the-monkey animation, as a reminder that a few specific topics are not as useless as they first seem in high school math, and will in fact be required repeatedly by at least the second semester of calculus:
1) The quadratic formula
2) Factoring of polynomials
3) Polynomial long division
4) Completing the square (which I still cannot remember).
Everything else is better handled with a whiteboard and enough colored markers. At least until you get to slope fields, where Mathematica is a very welcome
aid.
If technology is used in the classroom, it needs to be ready and reliable. Even the time spent waiting for a projector to warm up, is a large loss from 50 classroom minutes.
The above is from the perspective of an adult university student.
Scared failing business hires a mythic figure who has made big money for them in the past, to somehow bring miracles in a new world that they no longer understand.
Mythic figure has momentary crisis of conscience due to evil-doing by failing business, resolved in the usual way by a combination of seduction and graft.
Mythic figure has gone brain dead at age 44, now listening to the never-talented Rod Stewart, and Frank Sinatra in his talent-gone alcoholic later years. Retains impressive beard to remind people of his past successes.
Mythic figure somehow thinks that helping failing business to shop for Los Angeles real estate (whose most likely fate is seismic annihilation), will have anything to do with motivating people to buy more of their stale and overpriced product.
Proposed miraculous solution is to have people pay a monthly fee for a virtual boxload of industry-decided crap that they most likely don't want, which is essentially the same business model that record "clubs" operated on decades ago, except the boxloads arrived physically by mail rather than virtually by wire.
Conjecture:
Public have finally noticed, in the aftermath of an orgy of cheap credit, that they are deeply in the hole because they have fallen for a whole bunch of supposed essentials, each of which requires some sort of monthly fee: $1300 for rent, $300 for car payment, $150 for car insurance, $60 for cable TV, $40-80 for cell phone, $24 for landline phone to give to credit card companies to keep from getting dunning calls on cell phone, $700 for a shakedown shell game that calls itself "health insurance", and $60 for DSL or cable Internet. That's $31608 per year in after tax cash. Food, water/sewage, clothing, and energy not included.
Public have also finally noticed that they listen to only 1-2 songs on a typical CD, and that entire CDs often have nothing worthwhile on them.
Meanwhile, industry tries to sell CDs for upwards of $27. Because industry executives live in Los Angeles and eat in Beverly Hills, they believe that $27 is the cost of two hamburgers, and is therefore reasonable.
Compare and contrast to movie "The 11th Hour":
Expensive Hollywood actor relieves anxieties about trying to live in now-insufferable Los Angeles, by showing lots of pictures of it and reading from a script written by New York liberal arts majors with huge Rolodexes and a good understanding of fictional literature and of little else, who either are on meth or have very short attention spans, or who believe that their audience is or does.
Surely this audience will be motivated and inspired to deeply understand and solve difficult problems, by being bombarded by seemingly hundreds of talking head clips pasted together with lots of stock footage of disasters, wars, and poverty, plus some whales and penguins (exactly why were these penguins being released from mass confinement in cardboard cartons?), in a vast wallow of nightmarish scattershot incoherence.
Our salvation lies in a locomotive with the conventional large diesel-electric system, replaced by a CAD cartoon of a system with 1/10 the prime mover power, and some mysterious purple boxes. What may or may not be the realization of this design, is shown hauling exactly zero payload above its own mass, across level ground.
I for one look forward to the superior alternative of Definitive Biometric Real ID for air travel.
Undressing in front of the uniformed agent, undergoing endoscopy with low-bid lubricant, then going through the rotating-brushes Lockheed Martin AlloScrub body wash to remove all possible caches and residues of others' DNA before having the blood draw, is the highlight of any ordinary business trip. The $635 airport security fee is a bit of a burden, though, as are the 12 hour fast and prep. enema.
Waiting 24 hours for DNA sequencing results, in the departure hall with monopoly $3.75 bottled water, $9 greenish-ham sandwiches, Soviet-grade customer service, and incessantly repeated shrieky PA announcements, always makes me feel good because I am doing my part for national security.
Eventually however, I might have to face the question of efficiency, and be compelled to move to some other country where I can inch through massive traffic congestion, then pay a fixer to have me waved into the squalid and grimy departure hall for a mere 2 hours, while watching the unsmiling gentlemen with the submachine guns make their frequent rounds. This followed by very close scrutiny of the rubber stamps on incomprehensible forms stamped only 45 seconds earlier by the person one floor below, as my luggage was being X-rayed to make certain that I was not trying to dodge both the stiff export tax on livestock and poultry, and the consequent opportunity to make a "facilitating payment".
The component in question is anything but cheap. As others have pointed out, there is nothing else in the cabinet which 1) stored that much energy, and 2) had any possibility of releasing it that quickly.
Historically, outside plant equipment cabinets have used lead-acid batteries. These have their own problems, but they are physically quite robust, and do not explode unless they are grossly abused. Yes, they do release H2 under some conditions, but this is a known factor in the cabinet design space.
One might examine the wisdom of serving lifeline POTS over DSL or cable, which require close-in standby power due to limited reach. I cannot see anything else which would compel batteries in the cabinet. If the power is out in the neighborhood, not many people will be watching TV or using the Internet. I doubt that this cabinet itself contained any equipment to directly serve traditional baseband POTS, and DSL splitter/combiners typically are passive; the POTS circuit will function even if the DSL equipment loses power.
Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned, but under classic Carrier Serving Area design rules, digital loop carrier (POTS remote equipment) cabinets can be located 9000-12000 wire-feet away from the subscribers. With that working distance, size constraints on the cabinet are somewhat relaxed, and the cabinet does not need to be sited next to someone's garage.
Perhaps I am just bitter (and I had a direct stake, so this is a biased claim) that better structures for delivering VDSL triple-play alongside backup-powered lifeline baseband POTS, were available by 1999. Sadly, amidst the bursting bubble, these were mostly bypassed by the telcos in favor of waiting for what turned out to be this amazingly silly eyesore of an energetic kludge, plopped within striking distance of someone's garden fence and garage.
How many times have you actually counted the cash that you received from an ATM? I just stuff it in my pocket as quickly as possible, and scurry off and try to blend in with the crowd, and not look like an especially inviting target.
I have outlasted every bank, save one, in which I have held a deposit account. Banks at irregular intervals hand down ex cathedra changes, nearly always one-sided, and at times egregiously in the bank's favor, to the terms of the "contract" under which an account relationship is maintained.
When customers are treated as contemptible commodities, it is easy to see how the treatment is returned on the rare occasion when an opportunity arises to do something by doing nothing.
What do people feel their most likely treatment would be if they were to come forward and try to return the extra cash? Skepticism, outright suspicion, entanglement in hours of bureaucracy and forms-filling, or complete indifference. This is a Californian perspective; perhaps there is still some other place which has not degenerated so thoroughly.
> Personally I want a brick of $2.00 bills to seed around my town.
On a recent visit to Seattle, while waiting on the sidewalk one morning for the monorail to begin service, I had an Australian tourist show me a $2 note and ask "is this genuine?"
I explained that, while genuine, the $2 note is quite uncommon, that many Americans also would be skeptical of it, and that people typically keep these as souvenirs rather than spending them.
I do not believe I have ever seen anything other than $20 note dispensed by major bank ATM machines in California. The weekend before last, I saw my first $50 note from an ATM, in of all places, the airport at Siem Reap, Cambodia. In fact I believe this was the first time that I had even touched a new 2004 series $50 note. It seems that nearly all currency in California cycles first through Asia, Colombia, Mexico, and perhaps Iraq, before making it to our banks. I certainly was unable to obtain any new notes for travel.
I wrote a significant fraction of the embedded software in Citibank's first widely deployed (beginning in 1977) ATMs (which Citibank at the time called "CAT"). The currency dispensing mechanism in these machines (made by De La Rue, UK) had two tracks into which stacks of notes were loaded. If I recall correctly, each track would hold around 1000 notes.
When first deployed, we set the machines up so that one track would contain $20 notes and the other would contain $5 notes. I set the dispense counts to give closest-feasible to equal numbers of $20 and of $5 notes for a given withdrawal amount.
We found that in many locations (given NYC prices and 70s inflation), the total amounts that customers were withdrawing, were exhausting the cash supplies too quickly. We ended up having to change the software and the operating procedures to use $20 notes in both tracks (giving $40,000 vs. $25,000 cash per full load of the dispenser).
The predictable effect: turning terrorist mobility, into vehicle or number plate theft followed by terrorist mobility. The only way to rebut the presumption of guilt upon the vehicle or plate owner, will be to have GPS recorders running on Trusted Computing Platforms, embedded in all driving licenses.
In fact the classic Coca Cola bottle (thick green glass, collected and reused a number of times) that I remember from the 1950s through early 1960s, was not 8 oz., but 6.5 oz.
I gained weight from the time that I began elementary school, even without drinking many sodas. In grade 7 I went to a school with soda vending machines (drop down cup type), and after school would hang around one or another place with vending machines for bottled soda. I drank a lot of this, no doubt addicted to sugar and caffeine (and of course cold sodas are even more inviting in Houston's climate in the summer time). My weight gain accelerated. I gained the nickname "Coke Bottle", both for the fact that I had one in my hand more often than not, and for the fact that I was shaped like one.
Based upon an uncontrolled experiment with a sample size of one, I'll say that sodas contribute to obesity, but are not likely to be the principal cause. Soda at that time was sweetened with cane sugar, not HFCS. Perhaps HFCS is a little worse than sucrose, but the real problem is much more likely to be the greater picture of American diet and low-exercise living.
I'm in Vietnam right now. Obesity appears to be very uncommon here, though it may be on the increase. Most of the even marginally obese males that I have seen, have body forms which suggest high alcohol consumption. My understanding is that the cultural perception of obesity in males is even more negative than it is in the US.
In TV drama shows, (the few) obese male characters either are playground bullies when young, or alcoholic or corrupt when older. Of course many of the TV drama shows here have some military element of "revolutionary struggle" to them, and fat people objectively do make lousy soldiers.
Does this mean that I can recharge my bank account by plugging my phone into a wall outlet, or even better, by connecting it to solar panels?
Suppose I am on assignment in Vietnam. Does this mean that my phone will be inviting me to increase my dong, and that these will actually be legitimate investment opportunities rather than something sleazier?
Planck says that your electricity is cheaper because it is green, and therefore inferior in energy. If you put enough of our better, higher-energy American electricity into one place, it tends to be blue or purple.
I recall extensive diagrams of some systems of several nuclear power plants, being on open shelves at one university's engineering library in the early 80s.
If it's not on the NYT best sellers list or Oprah's list, it should probably be locked up. A population who have actual interests and capabilities, apart from one closely monitored and soon-to-be-offshored job in a major corporation or institution, followed by watching television and buying imported plastic crap at big box stores, is a population of suspects.
Today I helped some university students to MAKE something out of small cheap components and scraps of wire, the old-fashioned way. It felt mildly subversive by be-a-consumer-only standards, and it felt good.
Adblock is great. No more audio and video surprises, and no more hanging on page loads waiting for some stalled ad server, especially at the worst chronic offender: questionmarket.
Anything which leaves large, numerous, or mysterious cookies like 2o7 and pointroll: GONE. Unless someone explains exactly what "tracking" means and why I should subject myself to it, or anything else from a site with "track" in the name, it stops NOW.
Any site whose name reflects a certain you-are-there-for-us-to-exploit mindset, like yieldmanager: GONE. Anything with Real or Flash content: GONE. Any pop-up or pop-under ads: GONE.
I don't mind ads, but I will not tolerate unsolicited audio or video, nor anything which gives any impression of invasion of privacy or "tracking", nor anything which has ever made me wait more than a fraction of a second for something that I am not interested in.
One problem with the NYT article is that it is easy to misinterpret. The first clue comes by doing a simple piece of math: divide 11M students by 18K "colleges and universities". Result: 611 students per institution.
The greater number of "colleges" must, by this reckoning, be very small outfits, most likely private business and technology schools. These would be more comparable to trade schools or "business colleges" (the sort which used to teach shorthand, typing, and basic bookkeeping), than to what most of the world would
call a university.
My own six-figure software job was sent to India several months ago. The transition was (typically for this large American-origin company) ineptly handled. I took the initiative to travel to India (and had to argue for it) to give what training I could to my replacements. My principal motivation, of course, was to go see the situation in person, and to do it on luxe business class tickets scammed off the bums who were throwing me out.
I came away reasonably impressed by the curiosity and attitude of the engineers there, but skeptical about their readiness to take on product development in any comprehensive sense. The skepticism comes not from an assessment of basic abilities, but rather from the fact that the specific skill base developed from sustaining support of someone else's work, is not sufficient to allow most engineers to take on independent new product development. I feel that this capability will arrive eventually, but slowly, unless experienced developers return from abroad to bring and spread those specific skills.
For the India operations of the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, I would like to imagine that strategic thinking somewhere in the company exists, recognizes this fact, and does something about it. For outsource contract companies, I am less optimistic. I stated this frankly to all who would listen, and noted that what most urgently needs to be outsourced from American companies, is the management.
Alternatively, and better in the long run, will be for local entrepreneurship to arise and to develop products which meet specific local needs.
One form of entrepreneurship which does appear to have arisen, is that of small private schools. In the newspaper, one can find several ads for training in "embedded VxWorks programming". At face value it's an intriguing prospect, but one is left wondering what sort of student goes into one of these programs, and what sort of engineer comes out.
I suspect that the people who I was working with, came out of top- and near-top-tier universities, so I was looking at a very biased sample. I don't see any reason to doubt the facts presented in the NYT article, except to caution that "college" can mean one thing in one place, and quite a different thing in another place.
Keep in mind that India has had a long road toward developing even basic literacy, especially for women. The problems of education in a still-poor country of 1 billion people, go far beyond what this article describes.
It was encouraging to see a greater proportion of women among the engineers in my host company, than I typically see in the U.S. It was also encouraging to see children coming out of poor-looking neighborhoods in the mornings, on their way to school. I realize that I saw only the ones who were going to school, and not those who were not, but it still appeared that people recognized the necessity of an education, and were willing to work and sacrifice to obtain one. Meanwhile, back at home we have... spinner rims.
Worse, the commonly used (and cheaper) Z5U dielectric ceramic capacitors (a typical board is peppered with these between the various power rails and ground, for high frequency bypass) are entirely useless by 0C.
1) the memory leak problem is irritating and has remained unfixed for ages. The claimed workaround of editing a cache size setting, simply does not work.
2) pop-ups have started to appear which somehow bypass Firefox popup blocking.
3) many Web pages do not work correctly on Firefox, or specifically require IE, or have browser checks which recognise some Netscapes but not Firefox.
I am not advocating for IE; I use Firefox for about 90% of my browsing.
I had forgotten about Yggdrasil, but now that you remind me, it was a good bit easier than trying to put together a runnable 0.97 out of dozens of bits and pieces. Especially when one had no live Internet connectivity and had to uucp or email archive fetch the pieces from somewhere or other.
I did get a runnable 0.97, and it was a revelation. A 486/25 which was nearly unusable under Windows, made a very speedy compile machine under Linux.
I have one one occasion in the late 80s or early 90s seen (barely) an aurora display from Northern California (around 50 miles north of San Francisco).
This past July, near Moscow, Idaho, on a trip to a very dark rural roadside to watch stars, several of us unexpectedly saw an aurora display. There were no real colors in this - just a hazy white, with an occasional greenish tinge.
The headline title use of "aluminum" was a slip as inexcusable as the use of "silicone" in reference to semiconductor substrates, and "silicon" in reference to adhesives and breast implants.
Punishment for the original poster: oxygen deprivation.
This is not an uncommon problem when a start-up prepares for an IPO. They will need to pay attorneys to write an offer of rescission to all of the people who got unregistered shares.
This delivers a litany of securities regulations and mea culpas, then offers to buy back the shares at some nominal and typically low price. In the face of an impending IPO, few but the insane, or determined masochists, will do anything besides put the letter into a drawer. I have one somewhere.
It's an appetizer from the menu of silly rituals required to peddle stock.
As someone who actually wrote some of the earliest (1977) widely deployed ATM software, on an 8080 in assembly code, trust me on this: it can be done, but you would be a fool to do so today.
Whether more or less of a fool than doing it on XP with 256MB of memory as one set of photos in this thread illustrates; we'll leave that question open to lively debate.
I believe we started with a whopping 24KB of memory. And, of course, the 2MHz 8080 processor.
I doubt that XP, or modern pigware programming in general, would be able to cope with the multiple serial ports, and the 2ms interrupt tick on which we ran the state machines for the electromechanical stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, I was not subjected to extra-scrutiny security screening on any of those occasions.
I did see a couple of people giving prolonged sideways glances as they walked by.
1) The quadratic formula
2) Factoring of polynomials
3) Polynomial long division
4) Completing the square (which I still cannot remember).
Everything else is better handled with a whiteboard and enough colored markers. At least until you get to slope fields, where Mathematica is a very welcome aid.
If technology is used in the classroom, it needs to be ready and reliable. Even the time spent waiting for a projector to warm up, is a large loss from 50 classroom minutes.
The above is from the perspective of an adult university student.
Synopsis:
Scared failing business hires a mythic figure who has made big money for them in the past, to somehow bring miracles in a new world that they no longer understand.
Mythic figure has momentary crisis of conscience due to evil-doing by failing business, resolved in the usual way by a combination of seduction and graft.
Mythic figure has gone brain dead at age 44, now listening to the never-talented Rod Stewart, and Frank Sinatra in his talent-gone alcoholic later years. Retains impressive beard to remind people of his past successes.
Mythic figure somehow thinks that helping failing business to shop for Los Angeles real estate (whose most likely fate is seismic annihilation), will have anything to do with motivating people to buy more of their stale and overpriced product.
Proposed miraculous solution is to have people pay a monthly fee for a virtual boxload of industry-decided crap that they most likely don't want, which is essentially the same business model that record "clubs" operated on decades ago, except the boxloads arrived physically by mail rather than virtually by wire.
Conjecture:
Public have finally noticed, in the aftermath of an orgy of cheap credit, that they are deeply in the hole because they have fallen for a whole bunch of supposed essentials, each of which requires some sort of monthly fee: $1300 for rent, $300 for car payment, $150 for car insurance, $60 for cable TV, $40-80 for cell phone, $24 for landline phone to give to credit card companies to keep from getting dunning calls on cell phone, $700 for a shakedown shell game that calls itself "health insurance", and $60 for DSL or cable Internet. That's $31608 per year in after tax cash. Food, water/sewage, clothing, and energy not included.
Public have also finally noticed that they listen to only 1-2 songs on a typical CD, and that entire CDs often have nothing worthwhile on them.
Meanwhile, industry tries to sell CDs for upwards of $27. Because industry executives live in Los Angeles and eat in Beverly Hills, they believe that $27 is the cost of two hamburgers, and is therefore reasonable.
Compare and contrast to movie "The 11th Hour":
Expensive Hollywood actor relieves anxieties about trying to live in now-insufferable Los Angeles, by showing lots of pictures of it and reading from a script written by New York liberal arts majors with huge Rolodexes and a good understanding of fictional literature and of little else, who either are on meth or have very short attention spans, or who believe that their audience is or does.
Surely this audience will be motivated and inspired to deeply understand and solve difficult problems, by being bombarded by seemingly hundreds of talking head clips pasted together with lots of stock footage of disasters, wars, and poverty, plus some whales and penguins (exactly why were these penguins being released from mass confinement in cardboard cartons?), in a vast wallow of nightmarish scattershot incoherence.
Our salvation lies in a locomotive with the conventional large diesel-electric system, replaced by a CAD cartoon of a system with 1/10 the prime mover power, and some mysterious purple boxes. What may or may not be the realization of this design, is shown hauling exactly zero payload above its own mass, across level ground.
The music's pretty good though.
Actually, Chertoff has an eerie resemblance to V.I. Lenin.
Undressing in front of the uniformed agent, undergoing endoscopy with low-bid lubricant, then going through the rotating-brushes Lockheed Martin AlloScrub body wash to remove all possible caches and residues of others' DNA before having the blood draw, is the highlight of any ordinary business trip. The $635 airport security fee is a bit of a burden, though, as are the 12 hour fast and prep. enema.
Waiting 24 hours for DNA sequencing results, in the departure hall with monopoly $3.75 bottled water, $9 greenish-ham sandwiches, Soviet-grade customer service, and incessantly repeated shrieky PA announcements, always makes me feel good because I am doing my part for national security.
Eventually however, I might have to face the question of efficiency, and be compelled to move to some other country where I can inch through massive traffic congestion, then pay a fixer to have me waved into the squalid and grimy departure hall for a mere 2 hours, while watching the unsmiling gentlemen with the submachine guns make their frequent rounds. This followed by very close scrutiny of the rubber stamps on incomprehensible forms stamped only 45 seconds earlier by the person one floor below, as my luggage was being X-rayed to make certain that I was not trying to dodge both the stiff export tax on livestock and poultry, and the consequent opportunity to make a "facilitating payment".
Historically, outside plant equipment cabinets have used lead-acid batteries. These have their own problems, but they are physically quite robust, and do not explode unless they are grossly abused. Yes, they do release H2 under some conditions, but this is a known factor in the cabinet design space.
One might examine the wisdom of serving lifeline POTS over DSL or cable, which require close-in standby power due to limited reach. I cannot see anything else which would compel batteries in the cabinet. If the power is out in the neighborhood, not many people will be watching TV or using the Internet. I doubt that this cabinet itself contained any equipment to directly serve traditional baseband POTS, and DSL splitter/combiners typically are passive; the POTS circuit will function even if the DSL equipment loses power.
Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned, but under classic Carrier Serving Area design rules, digital loop carrier (POTS remote equipment) cabinets can be located 9000-12000 wire-feet away from the subscribers. With that working distance, size constraints on the cabinet are somewhat relaxed, and the cabinet does not need to be sited next to someone's garage.
Perhaps I am just bitter (and I had a direct stake, so this is a biased claim) that better structures for delivering VDSL triple-play alongside backup-powered lifeline baseband POTS, were available by 1999. Sadly, amidst the bursting bubble, these were mostly bypassed by the telcos in favor of waiting for what turned out to be this amazingly silly eyesore of an energetic kludge, plopped within striking distance of someone's garden fence and garage.
At least no nipples were damaged in this incident, as compared to: http://believe-or-not.blogspot.com/2007/07/cell-ph one-explodes-and-burns-off.html
I have outlasted every bank, save one, in which I have held a deposit account. Banks at irregular intervals hand down ex cathedra changes, nearly always one-sided, and at times egregiously in the bank's favor, to the terms of the "contract" under which an account relationship is maintained.
When customers are treated as contemptible commodities, it is easy to see how the treatment is returned on the rare occasion when an opportunity arises to do something by doing nothing.
What do people feel their most likely treatment would be if they were to come forward and try to return the extra cash? Skepticism, outright suspicion, entanglement in hours of bureaucracy and forms-filling, or complete indifference. This is a Californian perspective; perhaps there is still some other place which has not degenerated so thoroughly.
On a recent visit to Seattle, while waiting on the sidewalk one morning for the monorail to begin service, I had an Australian tourist show me a $2 note and ask "is this genuine?"
I explained that, while genuine, the $2 note is quite uncommon, that many Americans also would be skeptical of it, and that people typically keep these as souvenirs rather than spending them.
I wrote a significant fraction of the embedded software in Citibank's first widely deployed (beginning in 1977) ATMs (which Citibank at the time called "CAT"). The currency dispensing mechanism in these machines (made by De La Rue, UK) had two tracks into which stacks of notes were loaded. If I recall correctly, each track would hold around 1000 notes.
When first deployed, we set the machines up so that one track would contain $20 notes and the other would contain $5 notes. I set the dispense counts to give closest-feasible to equal numbers of $20 and of $5 notes for a given withdrawal amount.
We found that in many locations (given NYC prices and 70s inflation), the total amounts that customers were withdrawing, were exhausting the cash supplies too quickly. We ended up having to change the software and the operating procedures to use $20 notes in both tracks (giving $40,000 vs. $25,000 cash per full load of the dispenser).
Reader's Digest used these in the 60s and early 70s. I have not seen a copy since that time, so I do not know if this is still the case.
The predictable effect: turning terrorist mobility, into vehicle or number plate theft followed by terrorist mobility. The only way to rebut the presumption of guilt upon the vehicle or plate owner, will be to have GPS recorders running on Trusted Computing Platforms, embedded in all driving licenses.
In fact the classic Coca Cola bottle (thick green glass, collected and reused a number of times) that I remember from the 1950s through early 1960s, was not 8 oz., but 6.5 oz.
I gained weight from the time that I began elementary school, even without drinking many sodas. In grade 7 I went to a school with soda vending machines (drop down cup type), and after school would hang around one or another place with vending machines for bottled soda. I drank a lot of this, no doubt addicted to sugar and caffeine (and of course cold sodas are even more inviting in Houston's climate in the summer time). My weight gain accelerated. I gained the nickname "Coke Bottle", both for the fact that I had one in my hand more often than not, and for the fact that I was shaped like one.
Based upon an uncontrolled experiment with a sample size of one, I'll say that sodas contribute to obesity, but are not likely to be the principal cause. Soda at that time was sweetened with cane sugar, not HFCS. Perhaps HFCS is a little worse than sucrose, but the real problem is much more likely to be the greater picture of American diet and low-exercise living.
I'm in Vietnam right now. Obesity appears to be very uncommon here, though it may be on the increase. Most of the even marginally obese males that I have seen, have body forms which suggest high alcohol consumption. My understanding is that the cultural perception of obesity in males is even more negative than it is in the US.
In TV drama shows, (the few) obese male characters either are playground bullies when young, or alcoholic or corrupt when older. Of course many of the TV drama shows here have some military element of "revolutionary struggle" to them, and fat people objectively do make lousy soldiers.
Suppose I am on assignment in Vietnam. Does this mean that my phone will be inviting me to increase my dong, and that these will actually be legitimate investment opportunities rather than something sleazier?
Planck says that your electricity is cheaper because it is green, and therefore inferior in energy. If you put enough of our better, higher-energy American electricity into one place, it tends to be blue or purple.
If it's not on the NYT best sellers list or Oprah's list, it should probably be locked up. A population who have actual interests and capabilities, apart from one closely monitored and soon-to-be-offshored job in a major corporation or institution, followed by watching television and buying imported plastic crap at big box stores, is a population of suspects.
Today I helped some university students to MAKE something out of small cheap components and scraps of wire, the old-fashioned way. It felt mildly subversive by be-a-consumer-only standards, and it felt good.
It requires only a simple normalization constant: 1/sqrt(football_field).
Adblock is great. No more audio and video surprises, and no more hanging on page loads waiting for some stalled ad server, especially at the worst chronic offender: questionmarket.
Anything which leaves large, numerous, or mysterious cookies like 2o7 and pointroll: GONE. Unless someone explains exactly what "tracking" means and why I should subject myself to it, or anything else from a site with "track" in the name, it stops NOW.
Any site whose name reflects a certain you-are-there-for-us-to-exploit mindset, like yieldmanager: GONE. Anything with Real or Flash content: GONE. Any pop-up or pop-under ads: GONE.
I don't mind ads, but I will not tolerate unsolicited audio or video, nor anything which gives any impression of invasion of privacy or "tracking", nor anything which has ever made me wait more than a fraction of a second for something that I am not interested in.
The greater number of "colleges" must, by this reckoning, be very small outfits, most likely private business and technology schools. These would be more comparable to trade schools or "business colleges" (the sort which used to teach shorthand, typing, and basic bookkeeping), than to what most of the world would call a university.
My own six-figure software job was sent to India several months ago. The transition was (typically for this large American-origin company) ineptly handled. I took the initiative to travel to India (and had to argue for it) to give what training I could to my replacements. My principal motivation, of course, was to go see the situation in person, and to do it on luxe business class tickets scammed off the bums who were throwing me out.
I came away reasonably impressed by the curiosity and attitude of the engineers there, but skeptical about their readiness to take on product development in any comprehensive sense. The skepticism comes not from an assessment of basic abilities, but rather from the fact that the specific skill base developed from sustaining support of someone else's work, is not sufficient to allow most engineers to take on independent new product development. I feel that this capability will arrive eventually, but slowly, unless experienced developers return from abroad to bring and spread those specific skills.
For the India operations of the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, I would like to imagine that strategic thinking somewhere in the company exists, recognizes this fact, and does something about it. For outsource contract companies, I am less optimistic. I stated this frankly to all who would listen, and noted that what most urgently needs to be outsourced from American companies, is the management.
Alternatively, and better in the long run, will be for local entrepreneurship to arise and to develop products which meet specific local needs.
One form of entrepreneurship which does appear to have arisen, is that of small private schools. In the newspaper, one can find several ads for training in "embedded VxWorks programming". At face value it's an intriguing prospect, but one is left wondering what sort of student goes into one of these programs, and what sort of engineer comes out.
I suspect that the people who I was working with, came out of top- and near-top-tier universities, so I was looking at a very biased sample. I don't see any reason to doubt the facts presented in the NYT article, except to caution that "college" can mean one thing in one place, and quite a different thing in another place.
Keep in mind that India has had a long road toward developing even basic literacy, especially for women. The problems of education in a still-poor country of 1 billion people, go far beyond what this article describes.
It was encouraging to see a greater proportion of women among the engineers in my host company, than I typically see in the U.S. It was also encouraging to see children coming out of poor-looking neighborhoods in the mornings, on their way to school. I realize that I saw only the ones who were going to school, and not those who were not, but it still appeared that people recognized the necessity of an education, and were willing to work and sacrifice to obtain one. Meanwhile, back at home we have ... spinner rims.
Worse, the commonly used (and cheaper) Z5U dielectric ceramic capacitors (a typical board is peppered with these between the various power rails and ground, for high frequency bypass) are entirely useless by 0C.
2) pop-ups have started to appear which somehow bypass Firefox popup blocking.
3) many Web pages do not work correctly on Firefox, or specifically require IE, or have browser checks which recognise some Netscapes but not Firefox.
I am not advocating for IE; I use Firefox for about 90% of my browsing.
I had forgotten about Yggdrasil, but now that you remind me, it was a good bit easier than trying to put together a runnable 0.97 out of dozens of bits and pieces. Especially when one had no live Internet connectivity and had to uucp or email archive fetch the pieces from somewhere or other. I did get a runnable 0.97, and it was a revelation. A 486/25 which was nearly unusable under Windows, made a very speedy compile machine under Linux.
This past July, near Moscow, Idaho, on a trip to a very dark rural roadside to watch stars, several of us unexpectedly saw an aurora display. There were no real colors in this - just a hazy white, with an occasional greenish tinge.
The headline title use of "aluminum" was a slip as inexcusable as the use of "silicone" in reference to semiconductor substrates, and "silicon" in reference to adhesives and breast implants.
Punishment for the original poster: oxygen deprivation.
This delivers a litany of securities regulations and mea culpas, then offers to buy back the shares at some nominal and typically low price. In the face of an impending IPO, few but the insane, or determined masochists, will do anything besides put the letter into a drawer. I have one somewhere.
It's an appetizer from the menu of silly rituals required to peddle stock.
Whether more or less of a fool than doing it on XP with 256MB of memory as one set of photos in this thread illustrates; we'll leave that question open to lively debate.
I believe we started with a whopping 24KB of memory. And, of course, the 2MHz 8080 processor.
I doubt that XP, or modern pigware programming in general, would be able to cope with the multiple serial ports, and the 2ms interrupt tick on which we ran the state machines for the electromechanical stuff.