This question is not off-topic. They talk about being able to do optical switching at consumer prices.
So the immediate question that I have is, "Why would I, a consumer, want that?" One possible answer is that I have fiber to my house.
Short of that, why would I want it? Would I want to convert my existing network to optical. Nope, I want less wires instead of more wires. One of the quotes even talks about people being able to watch multiple views of the Superbowl.
No, the mod that said this was on topic is full of crap.
Not so fast, Skippy. I've been in the computer industry for a long time. Make good money (I can't give an indication of how much because coworkers read and know my ID) -- just for the logic impaired, having coworkers implies that I'm employed. Oh, I also did it without a degree.
However, I've been slowly picking away at a math degree while putting my spouse through law school.
BTW, if J > W and J is false, then J > W is true. I know it seems strange but true. It's really there to catch invalid logic when the premise doesn't say anything about the conclusion.
So the table should be:
J W J > W F F T F T T T F F T T T
Anyway, it doesn't matter because in order to have a logical argument you must have at least one premise and a conclusion. You've only made one statement with a logical connective (J > W) which seems like a premise.
Just for your information, I waste time on slashdot because I like messing with ACs and am waiting on a requirements review.
BTW, most colleges offer courses in smbolic logic in both the Math department (Usually a mathematical reasoning class) and in the Philosophy department. Usually the Philosphy version is quite a bit easier. You might want to check into it.
It seems like your grounding in logic is a little weak. You sure you write software for a living?
So lets look at this from a logic point of view. I'm going to try to validate your argument through use of formal logic. As a refresher, an argument is valid when, if all the premises are true, the conclusion must be true.
So let's translate the first premise:
To think if I only made $53k out of college, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. (O, P)
That's: O > P (this notation means if O then P)
Now the conclusion:
Good thing I didn't waste my time and energy on a useless college education. (W, C)
C > W Conclusion (If I go to college, I was time)
Now, there's an implied premise: If I went to college, I'd be making straight out of school money. (C, O)
C > 0
Okay, now let's look at the truth table:
O P W C O > P C > O C > W 1) F F F F 2) F F F T F F 3) F F T F 4) F F T T 5) F T F F 6) F T F T F F 7) F T T F 8) F T T T 9) T F F F 10) T F F T F T F 11) T F T F 12) T F T T 13) T T F F 14) T T F T T T F 15) T T T F 16) T T T T
Oops! It appears that line 14 has a false conclusion but has all true premises. This means the logic is invalid. Roughly translated, this say that you can go to college, make out of school money, *AND* have it not be a waste. Gee, who would have thunk it.
Now, if you had added the premise that the only reason to go to school is not make more money then you'd have a technically valid argument. However, I would you and I would still disagree that the only reason to go to school is to make more money. In other words, having a valid argument doesn't mean the premises are true, just that the line of reasoning beginning with the premises is good.
Now, I might suggest that going to school might help you either articulate your arguments better or realize that money is not the only reason why you'd want to learn. Maybe that's a set of life-skills that would be useful for you.
I went to a casting plant that was closing to help auction off some of the equipment over the Internet (back in the boom days).
I was amazed! We had to inventory stuff in storage rooms that had literally 6 inches of ultra-fine black power over everything. It was even 3 inched deep in low-traffic areas of the main floor.
When I was in the plant, it was shut down. But I could just imagine this place running full tilt in the summer. Must have been pretty bad -- probably 100+ degrees, lifting hot castings, breathing in this fine, black crap. Yech.
The thing about it was that we met a bunch of the workers that stayed to help out. If they were trusted to stay and help they must of been some of the better, more loyal workers. Even these guys seemed sorta happy that the plant was closing.
Friday was code complete and I made it (after a hard push -- late nights, week-ends). So, my motivation is just low enough today to actually whip out the calculator.
"Fax.com's Katz called the practice "blackmail and extortion," among other choice words. On the other hand, Fax.com didn't exactly help its cause when it sent 1,634 junk faxes in one week in 2001 to the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling, resulting in yet another successful lawsuit against the company."
Wow, let's assume that each fax page takes about 6-seconds (because you want high quality) and that each fax consists of a cover page and one page of content. Further that each fax transmission requires a 3-second handshake - 15 seconds phone time per fax. That means that 15 * 1634 = 24510 seconds or 7.8 hours of tied up phone lines. Yeah, if someone, over the course of the wee decided to tie up one of my phone lines for an entire workday, I'd be upset too.
If it were actually legal, there would be at least six other companies doing the same thing. With all that traffic, it would be hard for anyone to get a legitimate fax through.
All these comments saying "What do you expect from a 3+ foot-drop" Valid point but it doesn't change the fact that I will never own another Sony. The one that I had (also an ultra-portable or whatever they call it these days) would drop screws like crazy. The battery went kaput very fast. The hard-drive made that terrible "I'm about to fail noise". Bad, bad product.
So, how about the service. Non-existent. I was promised shipping boxes and RMA tags on no less that four occasions and never received a single one.
There is good news though, someone broken into out house a stole this piece of shit. Our insurance paid replacement cost, which allowed me to get a Dell. Been pretty happy with that.
For another thread of unhappy Sony owners check this out.
If you actually go out and buy a CD then you get 2-3 good tracks, 4-5 filler, and 2-3 complete turds. It's nice to be able to punch the "Oh, yuck!" button, then go back later and clean out the yuck.
I haven't bought a new CD in a long time but I have been converting a lot of old CDs to MP3.
I was a slut back in those days. My uncle had a TRS-80 so I would desk-assemble Z-80 code and poke it into memory using a basic routine that would then call it.
The school had an Apple with integer basic. It turns out there was a mini-assembler in there. I would write graphics routine in assembly and another guy wrote the game logic in basic.
Another friend had an Atari 800. No assembly there, we'd just stupid graphics demos in basic.
I had a VIC-20 with the assembler cartidge -- it rocked beause it had labels. (The built-in Apple assembler didn't).
Anyway, back then I was a slut. I guess I still am. Currently write code for Sun, HP, Windows, Linux, and a little 8051 assembly on the side.
I was surprised to see video cards, mice and keyboards covered at all. Then the author spends literally two sentences on the IDE controller.
This seems more like a general-purpose machine that happens to have a lot of storage. Why's that a big deal? Maybe I should have written up my Dual AMD, SCSI RAID development/gaming box -- nah. Why spend time on something that's really not that interesting.
30K + 200 days * 300/day = $90K. I know a lot of techies (i.e. people with advanced degrees) that make about that and are expected to bust hump 60-70 hours a week.
This opposed to a job that is probably 8 hours a day and prolly doesn't require anything beyond a GED.
Yep, that's overpaid. Actually seems like a really sweet gig.
The funny thing is that "Writing Secure Code", a book published by MS Press and written by one of their internal security gurus talks about "defens in depth" a lot.
Bill is spinning their poor record and my bet is that Michael Howard (the author of this book) has been told to lie low for a while.
In economic terms, this is a shortage. People want to "buy" more roadspace at the current price than is available. When there's a shortage, queuing costs dominate but the queuing costs benefit nobody. There's really only one solution -- make buying roadspace more expensive.
That means some sort of usage fee -- tolls. The problem with old-style tolls is that the transaction costs were too high (i.e. there's always a backup at the tollbooth). What we need is anonymous, electronic cash-based tolls.
Electronic tolls also make it easy to charge an arm and a leg during peak times and "bargain rates" at other times.
There is a problem. How do you deal with people who are out of electronic cash? Don't really know because it has to be anonymous.
I've seens this as well. I find it hugely interesting that Microsoft has stayed away from the 2.5D trend. Check out the home page here for convenience Have you seen anything this plain come out of a customer review? I like simple. Simple means that a customer can get chages made to the website in almost no time.
Novel isn't good enough because novel can't be quantified by the business types who are leery of revolutionary products after the.com crash. However, it's easy to quantify improved productivity through better operations can. The types of things that you'd do to improve operations aren't novel and can be done anywhere by anybody with the right information.
The right technical information is available on the web or through some of the overseas schools (which are quite good). The only problem is getting the right business information to overseas workers. There are two ways to do that -- extensive training or ship more and more of your operation overseas.
That's what I see American companies doing. They are slowly squirting out of the US because the US no longer has the most favorable business climate. (Do you really think that after manufacturing, tech support, and software that it's going to end?)
So, what's an American software developer to do? I've decided that my best bet is to put my wife through law school.;-) That way, at least one of us has a bright future.
I remember seeing that Americans work longer and have a greater revenue/employee per year number than Europeans. However, Europeans had better revenue/hour.
I'm an American, salaried worker. Guess which one I would rather be (hint it doesn't include working an arbitrary number of hours for my salary)
Yeah, I have to admit that I have no direct experience running Linux on 64-way boxes. However, if it's marketing hype then judging by the amount of it that either this is already a reality or it will be soon.
As far as hardware, how about Dolphin? I can think of many bits of hardware available for the OSX that don't either support Windows or Linux as well. Those that I can think of have direct replacements.
Myrinet is nice but improved interconnects are here or are coming -- Linux and Windows will be the first to get them.
Slashdot Mirror
This question is not off-topic. They talk about being able to do optical switching at consumer prices.
So the immediate question that I have is, "Why would I, a consumer, want that?" One possible answer is that I have fiber to my house.
Short of that, why would I want it? Would I want to convert my existing network to optical. Nope, I want less wires instead of more wires. One of the quotes even talks about people being able to watch multiple views of the Superbowl.
No, the mod that said this was on topic is full of crap.
Not so fast, Skippy. I've been in the computer industry for a long time. Make good money (I can't give an indication of how much because coworkers read and know my ID) -- just for the logic impaired, having coworkers implies that I'm employed. Oh, I also did it without a degree.
However, I've been slowly picking away at a math degree while putting my spouse through law school.
BTW, if J > W and J is false, then J > W is true. I know it seems strange but true. It's really there to catch invalid logic when the premise doesn't say anything about the conclusion.
So the table should be:
J W J > W
F F T
F T T
T F F
T T T
Anyway, it doesn't matter because in order to have a logical argument you must have at least one premise and a conclusion. You've only made one statement with a logical connective (J > W) which seems like a premise.
Just for your information, I waste time on slashdot because I like messing with ACs and am waiting on a requirements review.
BTW, most colleges offer courses in smbolic logic in both the Math department (Usually a mathematical reasoning class) and in the Philosophy department. Usually the Philosphy version is quite a bit easier. You might want to check into it.
It seems like your grounding in logic is a little weak. You sure you write software for a living?
So lets look at this from a logic point of view. I'm going to try to validate your argument through use of formal logic. As a refresher, an argument is valid when, if all the premises are true, the conclusion must be true.
So let's translate the first premise:
To think if I only made $53k out of college, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. (O, P)
That's:
O > P (this notation means if O then P)
Now the conclusion:
Good thing I didn't waste my time and energy on a useless college education. (W, C)
C > W Conclusion (If I go to college, I was time)
Now, there's an implied premise: If I went to college, I'd be making straight out of school money. (C, O)
C > 0
Okay, now let's look at the truth table:
O P W C O > P C > O C > W
1) F F F F
2) F F F T F F
3) F F T F
4) F F T T
5) F T F F
6) F T F T F F
7) F T T F
8) F T T T
9) T F F F
10) T F F T F T F
11) T F T F
12) T F T T
13) T T F F
14) T T F T T T F
15) T T T F
16) T T T T
Oops! It appears that line 14 has a false conclusion but has all true premises. This means the logic is invalid. Roughly translated, this say that you can go to college, make out of school money, *AND* have it not be a waste. Gee, who would have thunk it.
Now, if you had added the premise that the only reason to go to school is not make more money then you'd have a technically valid argument. However, I would you and I would still disagree that the only reason to go to school is to make more money. In other words, having a valid argument doesn't mean the premises are true, just that the line of reasoning beginning with the premises is good.
Now, I might suggest that going to school might help you either articulate your arguments better or realize that money is not the only reason why you'd want to learn. Maybe that's a set of life-skills that would be useful for you.
I went to a casting plant that was closing to help auction off some of the equipment over the Internet (back in the boom days).
I was amazed! We had to inventory stuff in storage rooms that had literally 6 inches of ultra-fine black power over everything. It was even 3 inched deep in low-traffic areas of the main floor.
When I was in the plant, it was shut down. But I could just imagine this place running full tilt in the summer. Must have been pretty bad -- probably 100+ degrees, lifting hot castings, breathing in this fine, black crap. Yech.
The thing about it was that we met a bunch of the workers that stayed to help out. If they were trusted to stay and help they must of been some of the better, more loyal workers. Even these guys seemed sorta happy that the plant was closing.
Careful, logic like this eventually leads to massive Joe Job's.
This kind of logic has also been known to cause my size 12 combat boot to become lodged up the offending party's <painful location deleted>.
6.53 reams.
Friday was code complete and I made it (after a hard push -- late nights, week-ends). So, my motivation is just low enough today to actually whip out the calculator.
From the article:
"Fax.com's Katz called the practice "blackmail and extortion," among other choice words. On the other hand, Fax.com didn't exactly help its cause when it sent 1,634 junk faxes in one week in 2001 to the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling, resulting in yet another successful lawsuit against the company."
Wow, let's assume that each fax page takes about 6-seconds (because you want high quality) and that each fax consists of a cover page and one page of content. Further that each fax transmission requires a 3-second handshake - 15 seconds phone time per fax. That means that 15 * 1634 = 24510 seconds or 7.8 hours of tied up phone lines. Yeah, if someone, over the course of the wee decided to tie up one of my phone lines for an entire workday, I'd be upset too.
If it were actually legal, there would be at least six other companies doing the same thing. With all that traffic, it would be hard for anyone to get a legitimate fax through.
All these comments saying "What do you expect from a 3+ foot-drop" Valid point but it doesn't change the fact that I will never own another Sony. The one that I had (also an ultra-portable or whatever they call it these days) would drop screws like crazy. The battery went kaput very fast. The hard-drive made that terrible "I'm about to fail noise". Bad, bad product.
So, how about the service. Non-existent. I was promised shipping boxes and RMA tags on no less that four occasions and never received a single one.
There is good news though, someone broken into out house a stole this piece of shit. Our insurance paid replacement cost, which allowed me to get a Dell. Been pretty happy with that.
For another thread of unhappy Sony owners check this out.
If you actually go out and buy a CD then you get 2-3 good tracks, 4-5 filler, and 2-3 complete turds. It's nice to be able to punch the "Oh, yuck!" button, then go back later and clean out the yuck.
I haven't bought a new CD in a long time but I have been converting a lot of old CDs to MP3.
I was a slut back in those days. My uncle had a TRS-80 so I would desk-assemble Z-80 code and poke it into memory using a basic routine that would then call it.
The school had an Apple with integer basic. It turns out there was a mini-assembler in there. I would write graphics routine in assembly and another guy wrote the game logic in basic.
Another friend had an Atari 800. No assembly there, we'd just stupid graphics demos in basic.
I had a VIC-20 with the assembler cartidge -- it rocked beause it had labels. (The built-in Apple assembler didn't).
Anyway, back then I was a slut. I guess I still am. Currently write code for Sun, HP, Windows, Linux, and a little 8051 assembly on the side.
Now, it's pretty bad to write macros this way, but if you're going for portability, it's equally bad to count on good macros.
This bit about being threadsafe was in reference to using local temporaries -- theres an example in Linus' original mesage.
As an aside, take a look at iTunes. It demonstrates clearly that there is no enforcement of toolkit choices.
I was surprised to see video cards, mice and keyboards covered at all. Then the author spends literally two sentences on the IDE controller.
This seems more like a general-purpose machine that happens to have a lot of storage. Why's that a big deal? Maybe I should have written up my Dual AMD, SCSI RAID development/gaming box -- nah. Why spend time on something that's really not that interesting.
30K + 200 days * 300/day = $90K. I know a lot of techies (i.e. people with advanced degrees) that make about that and are expected to bust hump 60-70 hours a week.
This opposed to a job that is probably 8 hours a day and prolly doesn't require anything beyond a GED.
Yep, that's overpaid. Actually seems like a really sweet gig.
Get a fucking clue.
1. There are standard C++ constructs that won't compile to managed code.
2. Yep, most of the COBOL code I've run across just needs a good compiler. Get a fucking clue.
The funny thing is that "Writing Secure Code", a book published by MS Press and written by one of their internal security gurus talks about "defens in depth" a lot.
Bill is spinning their poor record and my bet is that Michael Howard (the author of this book) has been told to lie low for a while.
The interstate commerce clause is how we got the civil rights legislation that we have. Here's some info on findlaw.
In economic terms, this is a shortage. People want to "buy" more roadspace at the current price than is available. When there's a shortage, queuing costs dominate but the queuing costs benefit nobody. There's really only one solution -- make buying roadspace more expensive.
That means some sort of usage fee -- tolls. The problem with old-style tolls is that the transaction costs were too high (i.e. there's always a backup at the tollbooth). What we need is anonymous, electronic cash-based tolls.
Electronic tolls also make it easy to charge an arm and a leg during peak times and "bargain rates" at other times.
There is a problem. How do you deal with people who are out of electronic cash? Don't really know because it has to be anonymous.
They should be able to pronounce "Linux" properly as well as its originator's name.
I've seens this as well. I find it hugely interesting that Microsoft has stayed away from the 2.5D trend. Check out the home page here for convenience Have you seen anything this plain come out of a customer review? I like simple. Simple means that a customer can get chages made to the website in almost no time.
Tell me about it. I took a lot of heat for deciding not to support WAP. Then again the CFO's wife was an employee of one of the orignal WAP companies.
It's nice to see it die.
Novel isn't good enough because novel can't be quantified by the business types who are leery of revolutionary products after the .com crash. However, it's easy to quantify improved productivity through better operations can. The types of things that you'd do to improve operations aren't novel and can be done anywhere by anybody with the right information.
;-) That way, at least one of us has a bright future.
The right technical information is available on the web or through some of the overseas schools (which are quite good). The only problem is getting the right business information to overseas workers. There are two ways to do that -- extensive training or ship more and more of your operation overseas.
That's what I see American companies doing. They are slowly squirting out of the US because the US no longer has the most favorable business climate. (Do you really think that after manufacturing, tech support, and software that it's going to end?)
So, what's an American software developer to do? I've decided that my best bet is to put my wife through law school.
I remember seeing that Americans work longer and have a greater revenue/employee per year number than Europeans. However, Europeans had better revenue/hour.
I'm an American, salaried worker. Guess which one I would rather be (hint it doesn't include working an arbitrary number of hours for my salary)
Upgrading commodity parts -- 0%. We don't upgrade machines. We rotate them to other uses.
Windows exploits -- too much time. I'd like to dump them, but I don't think I can get away with it from a political standpoint.
Yeah, I have to admit that I have no direct experience running Linux on 64-way boxes. However, if it's marketing hype then judging by the amount of it that either this is already a reality or it will be soon.
As far as hardware, how about Dolphin? I can think of many bits of hardware available for the OSX that don't either support Windows or Linux as well. Those that I can think of have direct replacements.
Myrinet is nice but improved interconnects are here or are coming -- Linux and Windows will be the first to get them.