True. Judging from this guy's story, he's not been treated fair.
>Blaming it on other people just isn't going to help.
True. It's not going to help in the short term in a society governed by capitalists. Things need to get much worse before they get any better.
But it is my belief that in the end, the social nature of human beings will prevail, and democratic values will be restored. Look at Europe: having a better social system benefits the poor as well as society in general - and thus the corporations and milionaires.
-- Money is the root of all evil (Send $30 for more info)
True: energy consumption is growing while many new machines use less energy than they used to do. (Modern PCs are an exception, in that new models require far more energy than their ancestors.)
The main point, however, is not the machines themselves, but the way we use them. 20 years ago, the majority of the western hemisphere hardly new what to use a micro for. Today many households have two or more PC's, with at least one switched on (or "suspended") night and day. Most people don't know a TV isn't switched off when it's switched off.
>support local economy, like that, tax money is re-entering the economic system of the country/region
I agree. However, a EU company is not forced (luckily) to invest the money it collects from IP into the EU or -- for that matter -- invest into innovation at all. If the company never "owned" the source code in the first place, a second company can pick up innovation where the first left off. This will benefit the product, make governments less reliable on a single vendor and benefit itself, its citizens as well as the rest of the world.
More importantly, governments will sponsor the innovation process rather than the end result of innovation.
-- If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress?
Exactly. IMHO it's impossible to become "Elite" without breaking an egg. But its your call: think than shoot (at least initially). This judgement *does* add value to gameplay, isn't that his point?
> I hope they put quite some stress and effort in the "open standard" parts. I don't care which software is being used.
That's fine for me and you, but look at it from the government's perspective. Don't you think it's silly for different (local) governments to collaborate in (software) development, build stuff for common use and then have the IP -- and thus the (taxpayer's money) -- go into some corporate sink?
Do you think the North Americans would be so concerned about Microsoft if it were a German or French company? This is pure politics folks, nothing to be proud about here.
The good/bad issue is not about politicians doing politics. It is about selecting the right/wrong policy.
-- And -- to quote Remco Campert -- politics is far important a matter to be left merely to politicians.
ILOG Solver & Scheduler are mainstream commercial thrid party libraries in C++ based on the constraint programming paradigm. One of the major features is ILOG's automatic garbage collection heap, which is automatically deallocates memory (based on assumptions on program flow). To make this efficient, they skip all deallocations (using a longjump, rather than a return).
At first this may look like an elegant way to get rid of complicated memory management & garbage collection without loosing efficiency. However, in my personal experience, it is completely horrible when combined with pats that use the normal system heap. Specifically, when writing your own constraints, goals or deamons, it is practically impossible to use anything but ILOG's solver heap.
I gues this is one of the mayor reasons why they recently made a technology change and launched JSolver, a Java based counterpart.
-- Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.
Unfortunately, you'll also be forced to call everyone you know (or at least, everyone you like) to tell them to update their addressbooks. Personally, I prefer to minimize the update frequency to less than once a year. Moreover, I've changed phone model as well as provider while sticking to my old phone number. How's number portability in the US, by the way?
Smoking kills; if you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life -- Brooke Shields
> 1. As a hiring manager, unless you go to a school I've heard of, in an English-speaking country, I'm probably not going to think very highly of your degree.
Your loss, but no offence. How many schools have you heard of? A major difference between universities in the US and in some European coutries, is that European universities have to meet some standards to call themselves "University". The US has the best universities in the world as well as the worst. Countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium try hard to prevent self-proclaimed so-called universities from giving the official -- usually state sponsored -- universities a bad name. This knowledge may help unexperienced hiring managers to judge foreign degrees.
Of course, what ultimately matters is a person's skills - which are only indirectly related to the person's school. IMHO it's not too hard to get a degree on a "good" university with average skills while I've met several excellent techies with an MA degree from a "dubious" university.
If you're a techie already, go to a place where they don't teach "just" software engineering or computer science. Learn to do something useful with it. I'd go to oneoftheEdniburgh departments if I had a chance (sniff). Tubingen has a briliant group cognitive science / language. Amsterdam has rising star Johan van Benthem.
IMHO even a very small gyroscope seems pretty impractical wrt. (innertial) forces, size and battery life. How about simply using mercury switches to measure/estimate the cell phone's position?
True. But I suppose it could be usefull when the computers are used mutually exclusive. Another use would be to connect the computers to each other, as a kind of a NULL modem Hub.
Newbie programmers look down on technical writers with distain, the same distain they have for anybody that writes HTML and calls it programming.
Experienced programmers LOVE technical writers because we hate writing the documentation and are happy to have you do it for them. We will generally bring you cheesecake.
I work in a company where - unfortunately - neither newbe nor experienced programmers appreciate the tech writers. Although I consider myself a fairly inexperienced programmer (5 years commercial C++ development, 15 years of hobbyism) I believe I'm accurate in saying none of my colleagues is able to write comprehensible inline comments, leave alone write a useful piece of documentation on a higher level. The're very good coders, but they just don't have any writer skills.
The lack of appreciation for tech writers (as well as sys admins and testers, for that matter) is shared by management. After all, a software company makes money through sales (short term) and R&D (long term) and the rest is "overhead". Consequently, most recent sacks concerned "overhead" departments, not us programmers.
The morale: My company (or at least the product I'm working on) may not be around in 10 years, leaving a bunch of "core-employees" wondering how the hack a 1.000.000 code base became unmaintainable all of a sudden. But in the mean time, I'd advice you to stick to programming if you want to earn a good buck in companies like mine.
-- The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in: we're computer professionals, we cause accidents -- Nathaniel Borenstein
> > They are not in business to make a better browser, GUI, search engine or anything like that. They are in business to make money...
> What are you in business to do?
There's a difference between doing business to "make the world a better place" and being interested in world-aspects only if they relate in some way to your wallet.
Furthermore, in the end language is only a carrier of meaning and meaning ultimately refers to non-linguistic objects. Therefore, you can't understand language (fully) without understanding reality (at least partially).
And while machine translation is a relatively hard job, there are examples that suggest that automated insertion of hyphens ultimately need extralinguistic knowledge!
> Of course, Linus works for a chip maker... > So he is more likely to know what he's talking about.
Briliant thought. Along the same lines:
Of course, a soldier works for a war maker... So he is more likely to know what he's talking about.
Sure - ask a soldier what it's like to kill people; he'll spell out the details. Now ask him to give a balanced and unprejudiced account of the pros and contras of attacking - say - Iraq... Even an answer from the current Bush administration would make more sense!
No doubt Linus is not doing a PR campaign while actually believing in Itanium's superiority, but your critique againts "cynicism" and "reflective commentary" just doesn't make sense.
Hmm. If only some people would reflect...
-- If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress?
Wireless Leiden is the first Dutch free (libre/gratis) wireless internet facility to cover a complete city. It was engineered by a couple of amateur enthousiast and financially backed by individual donations as well as sponsoring from University and municipal office.
Lots of howtos and faqs (though probably less accessible to non-Dutch speakers)
Linux scales: From mainframes to microprocessors. Windows can't do that. There isn't a single Windows CE/ PocketPC that does anything useful in less than 8MB. This may not look like a problem since memory and processing power are getting cheaper, but remember that Moore's law applies only to silicon, not to the batteries powering the silicon.
PalmOS and Symbian have good playing cards as well, being lean and mean and having a relatively large number of PDA applications ready for use, but they may lack portability of some typical desktop applications.
As for the phones; Can I run bash using voice commands?
OK. The point I was trying to make is that with many disasters, people tend to come and look in great numbers, thus obstructing people that might have done something useful. Mass media don't help prevent this and neither do personal communications. It's nothing bad, it's just human curiosity.
Now telephone, cell, cable, HAM and other networks may not be the emergency service's primary way of communicating. In fact, their network is built to withstand the high load under these circumstances. But one can never be prepared for fully exceptional circumstances - that's why they're exceptional. Falling back to an inferiour infrastucture is quite common. (In fact, the military's interest in arpanet, and later internet, was to develop a robust redundant fall-back infrastructure.)
Even with small traffic accidents there are typically one or two phone calls to the police, while there may be dozins originating from bystanders calling friends and family to tell they'll be late, to tell they're OK, or to tell they saw something spectacular.
Afterall, it's hard to imagine the internet overload during 9/11 was caused by the 2000 people communicating something that might have saved their lives, the lives of others, or - including your last point - might have been of some comfort to loved ones.
Yes. You have a good point that I'm making a lot of assumptions - I'm oversimplifying. But people - please think for a moment and stay off the air in life threatening situations unless there is something you can do about it.
(Also - in case of a hostage situation or bomb attack - think for a while about radio signals setting off remote devices.)
Why would I try to overpopulate yet another medium to tell mom and dad I'm OK while there are emergency sevices that might have used the bandwidth to communicate something more meaningful? I mean: If I'm OK, I will be OK, so I might as well tell mom & dad tomorrow. If I'm not OK, or if I get killed before tomorrow, it might take a while longer for this news to reach them, but it won't change the fact that I'm not OK. OK?!? Either way it is less likely I will communicate something useful than it is for emergency services.
-- Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death -- G.W. Bush
Slashdot Mirror
>In short, life isn't fair.
True. Judging from this guy's story, he's not been treated fair.
>Blaming it on other people just isn't going to help.
True. It's not going to help in the short term in a society governed by capitalists. Things need to get much worse before they get any better.
But it is my belief that in the end, the social nature of human beings will prevail, and democratic values will be restored. Look at Europe: having a better social system benefits the poor as well as society in general - and thus the corporations and milionaires.
--
Money is the root of all evil (Send $30 for more info)
True: energy consumption is growing while many new machines use less energy than they used to do. (Modern PCs are an exception, in that new models require far more energy than their ancestors.)
The main point, however, is not the machines themselves, but the way we use them. 20 years ago, the majority of the western hemisphere hardly new what to use a micro for. Today many households have two or more PC's, with at least one switched on (or "suspended") night and day. Most people don't know a TV isn't switched off when it's switched off.
>support local economy, like that, tax money is re-entering the economic system of the country/region
I agree. However, a EU company is not forced (luckily) to invest the money it collects from IP into the EU or -- for that matter -- invest into innovation at all. If the company never "owned" the source code in the first place, a second company can pick up innovation where the first left off. This will benefit the product, make governments less reliable on a single vendor and benefit itself, its citizens as well as the rest of the world.
More importantly, governments will sponsor the innovation process rather than the end result of innovation.
--
If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress?
>Unless you'd chosen the path of a pirate
Exactly. IMHO it's impossible to become "Elite" without breaking an egg. But its your call: think than shoot (at least initially). This judgement *does* add value to gameplay, isn't that his point?
Aww, I don't remember how these were called
Harmless, Mostly Harmless, Poor, Average, Above Average, Competent, Dangerous, Deadly, Elite!
Guess you must have been Dangerous
> I hope they put quite some stress and effort in the "open standard" parts. I don't care which software is being used.
That's fine for me and you, but look at it from the government's perspective. Don't you think it's silly for different (local) governments to collaborate in (software) development, build stuff for common use and then have the IP -- and thus the (taxpayer's money) -- go into some corporate sink?
Analogously...
Do you think the North Americans would be so concerned about Microsoft if it were a German or French company? This is pure politics folks, nothing to be proud about here.
The good/bad issue is not about politicians doing politics. It is about selecting the right/wrong policy.
--
And -- to quote Remco Campert -- politics is far important a matter to be left merely to politicians.
Some links:
KI7cx dish
Primestar dish
Bi-Quad feed for primestar DIY
10 Euro dish with biquad feed
Modifying Confier Antennas for Wireless Networking
More info: Wireless Leiden
ILOG Solver & Scheduler are mainstream commercial thrid party libraries in C++ based on the constraint programming paradigm. One of the major features is ILOG's automatic garbage collection heap, which is automatically deallocates memory (based on assumptions on program flow). To make this efficient, they skip all deallocations (using a longjump, rather than a return).
At first this may look like an elegant way to get rid of complicated memory management & garbage collection without loosing efficiency. However, in my personal experience, it is completely horrible when combined with pats that use the normal system heap. Specifically, when writing your own constraints, goals or deamons, it is practically impossible to use anything but ILOG's solver heap.
I gues this is one of the mayor reasons why they recently made a technology change and launched JSolver, a Java based counterpart.
--
Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.
Unfortunately, you'll also be forced to call everyone you know (or at least, everyone you like) to tell them to update their addressbooks. Personally, I prefer to minimize the update frequency to less than once a year. Moreover, I've changed phone model as well as provider while sticking to my old phone number. How's number portability in the US, by the way?
Smoking kills; if you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life -- Brooke Shields
Jeff Minter rules! Afterall, what's a 2D / 3D shoot-'m-up worth without:
- halucifying sounds and graphics
- gameplay
- sheep!
And now, for something completely different. Go XCruise your filesystem!
> 1. As a hiring manager, unless you go to a school I've heard of, in an English-speaking country, I'm probably not going to think very highly of your degree.
Your loss, but no offence. How many schools have you heard of?
A major difference between universities in the US and in some European coutries, is that European universities have to meet some standards to call themselves "University". The US has the best universities in the world as well as the worst. Countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium try hard to prevent self-proclaimed so-called universities from giving the official -- usually state sponsored -- universities a bad name. This knowledge may help unexperienced hiring managers to judge foreign degrees.
Of course, what ultimately matters is a person's skills - which are only indirectly related to the person's school. IMHO it's not too hard to get a degree on a "good" university with average skills while I've met several excellent techies with an MA degree from a "dubious" university.
If you're a techie already, go to a place where they don't teach "just" software engineering or computer science. Learn to do something useful with it. I'd go to one of the Edniburgh departments if I had a chance (sniff). Tubingen has a briliant group cognitive science / language. Amsterdam has rising star Johan van Benthem.
Could anybody please make sense of this?
IMHO even a very small gyroscope seems pretty impractical wrt. (innertial) forces, size and battery life. How about simply using mercury switches to measure/estimate the cell phone's position?
[Last sentence top thread]
...Wouldn't it be cool to build a terminal by connecting a modded version of device X through the serial port to a terminal...
It would make a nice cheap terminal with its own built in connections.
Summarizing:
Sure. But why not just use the terminal as a terminal?
True. But I suppose it could be usefull when the computers are used mutually exclusive. Another use would be to connect the computers to each other, as a kind of a NULL modem Hub.
I find a computer most practical when it's connected both to a keyboard and a display...
--
Everything that can be invented, has been invented -- Charles H. Dueel, 1899
Newbie programmers look down on technical writers with distain, the same distain they have for anybody that writes HTML and calls it programming.
Experienced programmers LOVE technical writers because we hate writing the documentation and are happy to have you do it for them. We will generally bring you cheesecake.
I work in a company where - unfortunately - neither newbe nor experienced programmers appreciate the tech writers. Although I consider myself a fairly inexperienced programmer (5 years commercial C++ development, 15 years of hobbyism) I believe I'm accurate in saying none of my colleagues is able to write comprehensible inline comments, leave alone write a useful piece of documentation on a higher level. The're very good coders, but they just don't have any writer skills.
The lack of appreciation for tech writers (as well as sys admins and testers, for that matter) is shared by management. After all, a software company makes money through sales (short term) and R&D (long term) and the rest is "overhead". Consequently, most recent sacks concerned "overhead" departments, not us programmers.
The morale: My company (or at least the product I'm working on) may not be around in 10 years, leaving a bunch of "core-employees" wondering how the hack a 1.000.000 code base became unmaintainable all of a sudden. But in the mean time, I'd advice you to stick to programming if you want to earn a good buck in companies like mine.
--
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in: we're computer professionals, we cause accidents -- Nathaniel Borenstein
> > They are not in business to make a better browser, GUI, search engine or anything like that. They are in business to make money...
> What are you in business to do?
There's a difference between doing business to "make the world a better place" and being interested in world-aspects only if they relate in some way to your wallet.
I totally agree.
Furthermore, in the end language is only a carrier of meaning and meaning ultimately refers to non-linguistic objects. Therefore, you can't understand language (fully) without understanding reality (at least partially).
And while machine translation is a relatively hard job, there are examples that suggest that automated insertion of hyphens ultimately need extralinguistic knowledge!
> Of course, Linus works for a chip maker...
> So he is more likely to know what he's talking about.
Briliant thought. Along the same lines:
Of course, a soldier works for a war maker...
So he is more likely to know what he's talking about.
Sure - ask a soldier what it's like to kill people; he'll spell out the details. Now ask him to give a balanced and unprejudiced account of the pros and contras of attacking - say - Iraq... Even an answer from the current Bush administration would make more sense!
No doubt Linus is not doing a PR campaign while actually believing in Itanium's superiority, but your critique againts "cynicism" and "reflective commentary" just doesn't make sense.
Hmm. If only some people would reflect...
--
If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress?
Wireless Leiden is the first Dutch free (libre/gratis) wireless internet facility to cover a complete city. It was engineered by a couple of amateur enthousiast and financially backed by individual donations as well as sponsoring from University and municipal office.
Lots of howtos and faqs (though probably less accessible to non-Dutch speakers)
Linux scales: From mainframes to microprocessors. Windows can't do that. There isn't a single Windows CE/ PocketPC that does anything useful in less than 8MB. This may not look like a problem since memory and processing power are getting cheaper, but remember that Moore's law applies only to silicon, not to the batteries powering the silicon.
PalmOS and Symbian have good playing cards as well, being lean and mean and having a relatively large number of PDA applications ready for use, but they may lack portability of some typical desktop applications.
As for the phones; Can I run bash using voice commands?
OK. The point I was trying to make is that with many disasters, people tend to come and look in great numbers, thus obstructing people that might have done something useful. Mass media don't help prevent this and neither do personal communications. It's nothing bad, it's just human curiosity.
Now telephone, cell, cable, HAM and other networks may not be the emergency service's primary way of communicating. In fact, their network is built to withstand the high load under these circumstances. But one can never be prepared for fully exceptional circumstances - that's why they're exceptional. Falling back to an inferiour infrastucture is quite common. (In fact, the military's interest in arpanet, and later internet, was to develop a robust redundant fall-back infrastructure.)
Even with small traffic accidents there are typically one or two phone calls to the police, while there may be dozins originating from bystanders calling friends and family to tell they'll be late, to tell they're OK, or to tell they saw something spectacular.
Afterall, it's hard to imagine the internet overload during 9/11 was caused by the 2000 people communicating something that might have saved their lives, the lives of others, or - including your last point - might have been of some comfort to loved ones.
Yes. You have a good point that I'm making a lot of assumptions - I'm oversimplifying. But people - please think for a moment and stay off the air in life threatening situations unless there is something you can do about it.
(Also - in case of a hostage situation or bomb attack - think for a while about radio signals setting off remote devices.)
Why would I try to overpopulate yet another medium to tell mom and dad I'm OK while there are emergency sevices that might have used the bandwidth to communicate something more meaningful? I mean: If I'm OK, I will be OK, so I might as well tell mom & dad tomorrow. If I'm not OK, or if I get killed before tomorrow, it might take a while longer for this news to reach them, but it won't change the fact that I'm not OK. OK?!? Either way it is less likely I will communicate something useful than it is for emergency services.
--
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death -- G.W. Bush