I was at a very small startup a year ago, and now I'm at a Fortune 15 company. At the startup, we supported one product on windows, SunOS and Linux. Here, we support dozens of products on windows, linux, AIX, HP and any number of handhelds, but our office is mainly a UNIX shop. My office machine is a winXP laptop, but the real technical work I do is all performed through xterms to the big UNIX servers in the data center. Being able to get around and do what you need to do on all platforms your company uses seems to be a thread I've recognized in my last three jobs.
Where I've found that I've been able to demonstrate the most value is in those situations where we need to get something done on a platform that nobody on the team has used before. I don't have a whole lot of fear of alternate platforms -- their really just new learning opportunities. Sure, I have assumptions and preferences about what one can do better than another, but these become more educated opinions the more I have to work in alternative platform contexts. For example, I have to drive a continuous integration project for some development teams that use C# and.Net, when most of my experience has been with Sun Java and Web Services. I recognize that I don't know diddly about how to do the job under the new conditions, but I'll have more value (I hope (crosses fingers)) when I get to the end because of what the challenge will force me to learn.
As a rule, I'd say that being adaptable, and willing to accept the challenge of learning new stuff has been more important to me (and how I think I'm being valued) than being (and staying) the uber-733+ lord of one platform or technology. Then again, I also have a lot more resources to draw upon at the current job. At the last one, I'd have to buy the necessary books and learn it all on my own. Were I still there, I might think differently.
You've made some great observations. I don't think that I'd come to the same conclusion as the courts, either. The free market should have been able to entice the more stubborn landowners to sell by offering a price that they's accept. Here in Denver, where they had to demolish a bunch of inner-city buildings to make room for Coors Field, there were a few holdouts who just would not budge. Finally, millions of dollars greased the wheels and the holdouts eventually "sold out".
In that case, the ballpark was the great precipitating event that spawned a lot of community revitalization and some gentrification of what had been one of the least appealing areas of the inner city. The city helped with a lot of the planning but the conflict over the land was settled by business -- as it should be.
As for your characterization of the liberal and conservative agendas, I can't say that I agree. Maybe 20 years ago, that was more true, but it doesn't seem that way any more. Sure, there is still the liberal philosophy that government can play a positive role in peoples' lives, and the conservative philosophy that the government should play as little a role as possible in people's lives. In the practice of these philosophies, oddly enough, liberals seem now to be on the side of fiscal responsibility, investing in homeland security and states rights. Conservatives seem to be on the side of a big federal government (by that I mean denying states rights), unchecked borrowing and spending, and underfunding homeland security. I can't recall a "conservative" administration that took away as many rights as the present one. Likewise, I can't recall a liberal opposition that has fought so hard for state and individual rights.
I sit on the fence, myself, but I've had difficulty reconciling what labels like "liberal" and "conservative" are supposed to mean, and what they actually mean when practiced in the present day.
I get your point, but I know that there have been times when I wanted to share some small bit of information about a former employer (my NDA had expired in these cases), or my experience with something that I'd rather not associate my name anymore. In those cases, I've found that posting as AC was a way to contribute to the discussion without having to attach my monicker to those experiences.
I've never trolled as an AC, mostly because it's a cheap shot way of arguing with someone. I've been tempted to bash other trolls as an AC, but in the end my better judgement wins out and I either find a constructive way to post as myself or just not post at all.
So I do think there's value in having an AC. It ends up that you have to tolerate a bunch of yayhoos, but I think that what you get out of anonymous posts has some positive value, too.
I used to write documentation for APIs, years ago, which meant that to explain what a given hook was doing or to offer some insight as to why something behaved the way it did, I would have to reach back into a heap of very old legacy code.
There were a couple developers who were no longer at the company who left somewhat monstrous comment blocks of 100 lines or so in the more important sources. These guys had built the framework from the bottom-up and had clearly been asked to explain what was going on to a great many newcomers.
The comments read like fairy tales, featuring the exploits of the data structures and objects in anthropomorphic terms. (One was something like "Ten Little Endians and their Big Brothers".) It actually helped me a great deal in understanding what was going on. I felt as if I had uncovered a marvelous little secret. (Gosh, I wish I'd made copies of some of them, because they were wildly entertaining.)
Every now and again I'd ask some of the longtime pros about these guys who left the great narrative comments behind, figuring that they must have been very outgoing and lighthearted guys. More often than not, I'd find out that these were the quiet unassuming old-guy types that didn't suffer fools lightly. The comments gave an entirely different impression.
None of it was especially dirty or nasty or foul, but I've never seen anything like it since, which leads me to believe that the lengthy amusing and informative comment block has become unpopular, or maybe just squashed in code review.
Uh. In all fairness? What fairness is that? I'm not sure how you got modded "informative" on that one, but slashdot moderations are kind of arbitrary, and maybe there aren't enough categories to mod to.
I started to write about what Jewish beliefs are, but I found myself rewriting a bunch of stuff that's already laid out in the first five books of the bible, the books of the prophets and some selected bits from the Talmud, but I figured that you could do that reading yourself if you were interested. I've taken the time to read the holy books of several religeons and I've found it pretty interesting in a broad sense. Give it a shot... you might be surprised at what you learn.
Jews do not believe that "they are worse than others". Not in the least. There's no proscription that G-d will make everything right on earth if they "behave well for a year". G-d challenges everyone to follow The Law, but not everyone does. In fact, hardly anyone does. Even the most ascetic Jews find something to atone for on Yom Kippur. The arrival of the messiah is a great topic of debate among Jews, and it's hardly as simple as your characterization of it.
It's a good question. Actually, any Jew is "Jewish enough" for Israel. For decades, any self-described Jew from the Soviet Union or present-day Russia is welcome to emigrate. Many of these Jews from Russia were not practicing, had not been consecrated, Bar/Bat Mitzvahed or confirmed after a course of Torah and/or Talmudic study. If you're a Jew, you're in. For one Jew to deprive another of the ability to live in Israel is to deprive that person of their ability to perform that mitzvah ("good deed", more or less), which is an unconscionable act.
What you may be referring to is the preference among the orthodoxy that you be Jewish by decent -- that is, an unbroken line of matrilinear Jewish heritage. Some temples are more strict about this than others, but if you're willing to live by the law, study and keep the mitzvot, there are many orthodox temples that will welcome you.
What sometimes gets lost in the news about settlements and such in Israel is that there are A LOT of Jews there that might be more accurately described as reform or conservative, and many that do not practice at all. There's this assumption that everyone in Israel is tied to the orthodoxy, but it's not true. The orthodoxy does have a lot of power in the knesset -- it is a Jewish state, after all -- but Christains and Moslems of all types are also Israeli citizens even if they're not equally represented at the highest levels of government.
I so hated those stoopid names, and continue to hate them, that every time I get a new machine at work or at home (with windows installed, anyway) I rename "my computer" to something more intuitive -- like the name of the machine, for example. I've always also renamed "network neighborhood" to "NETWORK", and "my documents" to "DORKUMENTS".
What I'm getting at is that this change by microsoft is so superfluous as to be rediculous. Sure, people who buy and own computers these days probably don't require as much "personalization" of the names of things, but these names have always been changeable, at least since Win95, afaik.
I'd be fifty times enthused if they could just make it possible for me to uninstall IE, frankly.
I think it's a very ambitious goal. The physical attributes of a humanoid robot have been developing quite rapidly... stuff like running, walking, arm & hand movement, etc. On the other hand, the AI and machine vision components would seem to be developing less slowly, and these are precisely the things that one would consider important for adoption in the target markets.
I confess that I don't have much deep knowledge of advancements in AI and machine vision. Anytime we've had robot articles posted on slashdot lately they've been about advancements in the physical attributes of humanoid robots. Perhaps someone out there can fill me in on what I've been missing.
Anyhow, on a lighter note, as I was reading the "trends" article, I could not help noticing this paragraph:
The statement goes on to say that Toyota will make partner robots that "have human characteristics, such as being agile, warm and kind and also intelligent enough to skillfully operate a variety of devices in the area of personal assistance, care for the elderly, manufacturing and mobility." The statement continues, "since each area requires a special set of skills, Toyota is promoting the development of three different types of partner robots - walking, rolling and mountable - each with its own areas of expertise."
WARNING: BAD JOKE AHEAD
I like "agile, warm and kind", and the article stressed the advancements in the lips on certain robots such that they can play the trumpet, but if it's going to be "mountable", shouldn't there be some work on robots that are "moist" in addition to being "agile, warm and kind"? I mean, can you imagine the chafing?
IT WAS A BAD JOKE, BUT YOU -=WERE=- WARNED, AFTER ALL
ok, I'm breaking the rule about replying to one's own posts. Please forgive me, 'cause I just wanted to thank all the nice people for posting the whole article in just a couple seconds after I hit 'submit'.
Well, the source engine in HL2 was designed to run acceptably on middle-of-the-road hardware. The excellent performance of your card may be, in part, due to efficiencies in the underlying engine. In my game group, the most GPU-taxing game has been Doom3, hands down. Also, speed isn't everything. There's better-quality lighting, shading, texture/bump mappings, AA, and all the rest. It may be overkill today, but I'd really like to see how much better things could look -- regardless of speed -- when platforms like this become cheaper and more widespread.
My own experience has led me to buy just a little under the top-shelf of consumer graphics cards (I'm running an AGP Radeon 9800XT (8x) on a 4x moboard), and as time marches on and new games come along, I just throttle back on the effects enough to keep the frame rates high on whatever I happen to be playing. My hope is that I can squeeze out another year with it before I'm ready to jump to PCI-express and build an all-new box in the process. That said, I'm not sure that I'd even consider buying a platform like this one -- it's just so much more than I'd need.
I see the professional animator/CG market as being a good launchpad for this configuration. I used to dabble in it (long ago, using Maya and Poser, on less powerful hardware than I use today), and having to wait for an hour for some scene to render was a little rough on my creativity. I ended up doing other things while the images were baking, but I wished very much for a platform that could give me quick rendering with all the detail I wanted.
Huh? Alan Greenspan? What exactly did he do, again?
Say what you want about the president, but Alan Greenspan is the chairman of the federal reserve, and he served under Clinton, too. His job is to oversee the operation of the federal reserve banks and to set interest rates for borrowing (usually overnight) activities between banks. Sure, he guides interest rates that are fundamental to the very basic underlying economics of business and investment, but to say that he's responsible for people losing their jobs is a bit of a stretch.
If you're just looking at how he makes rate adjustments, he's actually got a very soft touch. If you disagree with his reasons for periodically adjusting the federal funds rate in one direction or the other, you have to admit that he's been able to control inflation very very well during his tenure, and aid in increasing the supply of cheap capital that individuals and businesses use to create jobs rather than destroy them.
I would add, and it does not seem to be widely recognized here for some reason, that Microsoft is saying these things in order to make them happen.
It's a bit like self-fulfilling prophecy. If a person or entity of some publicly-accepted authority says that the something will fail or company X will go out of business, it plants a seed in the minds of the people that hear it. When said twice, it re-enforces the prediction, making it acceptable. Repeated often enough it becomes believable. Once believeable, it is close to becoming fact. The whole process takes a long time, but the effects can last even longer.
Politicians are famous for doing this. There are a couple examples in recent history:
There was the resurgence of economic optimism in the US after the great depression not so much because the economics of the new deal were having a fantastic immediate effect, but because the Roosevelt administration was consciously making positive and hopeful economic statements for years. Attitudes and perceptions were changed more than the underlying economic conditions.
The.com bubble of the late 90s had already popped and recovery was in effect, yet the 2000 Bush campaign made great strides against Gore by repeating gloomy statements about the health of the economy and the fiscal condition of the federal government. The underlying economic conditions did not match up. Yet, after the election, when administration statements about the economic conditions suddenly became rosy and hopeful, the rhetoric of 1.5 years worth of doom and gloom was still sticking in the minds of investors and corporations.
People and companies in positions of public authority know that their rhetoric has this slow, creeping power to influence attitudes and perceptions, and it gets used because it works. Most people don't even realize that their thoughts are being shaped. It can be very blunt, like what Mssrs. Ballmer and Gates are doing, or it can be achieved with simple word choice. I recently re-read 1984. The devices of newspeak are now much more starkly evident for me in contemporary efforts to shape public opinion around things like the changing of senate rules for confirmation of judicial nominees and the reformation of the Social Security system, for example.
I'm actually surprised that very few slashdotters make mention of these devices, or appreciate their strength.
I'd only add that (in the US anyway), unions have also protected and maintained standards for telephony, safe and reliable electrical service, quality ironwork in skyscrapers, steamfitting, safe and reliable trucking and plumbing -- just to name a few. Oftentimes unions are simply characterized as special interest groups that do nothing more than protect the wages and benefits of their membership, which is true, but they've made many contributions to the general welfare, too.
It was one of those documentaries about the 777. I later learned that these types of tests, with ice in particular, were done by the defense department, too, when they were getting jets rolling in high altitudes. Rolls Royce and GE both have done testing of foreign bodies through jets, mostly because birds can be around at takeoff and landing, both at sea and on land.
Jet turbines run really hot, too, and they chop anything (mostly air) into little tiny pieces that can be burned very quickly in the presence of jet fuel under very high compression and then the gases get exhausted along with a bunch of steam. Intake-compression-burn-blow, all in linear arrangement. It's like an incinerator that chews its food beforehand. Birds and ice (which are less-quickly burnable than fuel and oxygen) may come in very quickly, but they also come right out the other end even faster, after having been chopped up into ridiculously tiny pieces, impregnanted by hot jet fuel under high compression, vaporised and easily exhaused in less than 100th of a second.
It's amazing, really. Whenever I fly in a jet, at 30K+ abobe the surface, at a pokey-slow 475 miles per hour, I'm absolutely astounded by how cool it all is.
You gotta admire these guys. I mean, starting from scratch and really doing a great job with the equipment (nevermind that their GPS would not register altitudes higher than 9999 meters -- one would probably need a specialized product for that, at a much greater cost), it was pretty well planned.
Some of the posts have talked about what would happen if a jet sucked the thing in, but as a balloon gets higher and higher, it also gets REALLY REALLY big and much easier to see. If "sucked in", it's more likely that it'll get chewed to pieces and incinerated. The heat of the engine is more than high enough to reduce the whole thing to ashes, and the inertia of the engine would probably blow it right out the other end as dust. The engine might hiccup a bit, but it'd probably still keep rolling.
My boss is an ex Air Force guy that used to ride the B-52, and he's heard of much larger and stranger crap getting forced down jet engines without them quitting. Apparently the worst part isn't so much the thing that goes through, but cracks and imbalance in the fan blades and turbine that force engines to be shut down after the fact. The engine is still running, but shutdown is one of those better-safe-than-sorry kind of things. Losing an engine because of shutdown (only to have it dismantled and fixed on the ground) is better than losing an engine by having it vibrate itself out of its housing and plummet to earth.
Remember, jet engines are tested at some point by throwing big chunks of ice, broken fan blades and frozen chickens down them -=while operating=-. In any event, if an engine were to stop, all commercial passenger jet planes are more than able to control flight for a landing with the remaining engine(s).
Actually, I was at the Berkshire Hathaway meeting a couple weeks ago and was pleased to see him nominated and confirmed to the board. I was some 75 feet away from Bill and Melinda -- close enough to witness his curious rocking behavior, anyway.
I can say with authority that Warren and Charlie don't pay much attention to technology companies and do not invest in them, as a rule, because they don't understand them. The level 3 thing, incidentally, was a favor for a friend and not part of their investment mix.
One indicator of a mature company is the paying of dividends, which is something that MS has only recently started to do. By maturity, I mean that the company has reached (or is very close to reaching) the peak of it's growth phase. The paying of dividends is a sign that the management has no worthy place to put its cash, in R&D, expansion into new products, or extension into new markets. If there is growth in any of those areas, dividends are a logical step in companies where the associated costs of the growth are not oustripping gains in net income enough to slow the growth of cash.
I don't think that MS is looking at any decline in their cash flow or profitability -- they're so bloated with cash that they can't find enough places to spend it -- hence the dividends. As for losing market share, they may lose some in a couple market segments, but they're expanding wildly into other new ones and making a number of strategic partnerships along the way. Market share and CompAd would both grow, even if things didn't go perfectly for them in the new areas they're moving into.
I spent a few years in J-school, and I can only add that quotes can come from any number of places. If it comes from another publication or article in the past, you give attribution akin to "Mr. X, in a 2002 interview with Joe Blow at the St. Louis Dispatch-Courier, was quoted as saying "insert-quote-here"." If you can't get someone you're interviewing to be quoted by name, you say something like "One source close to the controversy, who wished to remain anonymous, said "insert-quote-here"." If you're talking to a specialized group of people, like firemen, you can give group attribution, a la: "Out of all the Cleveland firefighters we spoke to, only a few liked burritos more than spaghetti. "I've just never liked mexican food, I guess" said one pasta fan."
The odd thing is that I never had any problem getting a quote for any article I ever wrote. If you can't talk to the person, you can almost always find an attributable, published source for the content. I wrote some articles for a weekly music mag when I got out of college, and most folks were pleased to be quoted. One thing that gets overlooked is that editors sometimes want to see your notes. If you are quoting a source that wants to remain anonymous, you should always feel comfortable with sharing that person's identity with your editor. Taking good notes is really important, too, especially if you want to write a followup piece or get back in touch with a source again later. Respectful quoting of sources makes it all easier.
Quoting can be a rather touchy business, with grey areas, though. Sometimes you can give a full quote, but your editor will trim it back to save space or make it leaner. Regardless, getting quotes is just a matter of doing the legwork, making some cold calls, or developing sources that can hook you up with other sources. With deadline pressure, you may run the risk of not having enough meat in your story and having it miss press-time, but most writers learn the lesson and work hard at getting the necessary meat in at the next go-round.
Yunno, it didn't occur to me until you said it, but the character development of Anakin was exactly what I found so irritating. The Anakin backstory in EpI was just so kidsy, and the subsequent adolescense of Anakin in EpII was so racked with stereotypical teen angst -- it was just more maudlin than I could take.
That said, it was still quite interesting to see the evolution of obi-wan and get a better feel for who the jedi were, generally, in both EpI and EpII.
Yunno, I hear what you're saying about how contemporary republicans have expoited popular notions of morals and cultural values, but to me it seems that this kind of activity is NOT in what I know as a conservative spirit, or one that the conservatives of 20-50 years ago would agree is valid.
What I hear from my conservative pals is that they really don't want one person's morals to intrude on the quality or safety of someone else's idea of moral behavior, as long as everyone's not breaking any laws. They seem to be bothered that religion is a defining factor, too.
I made my post because I'm having trouble figuring out what conservatism means, and how that is reconciled with the way republicans are interpreting it. Right now I know more democrats than republicans who ascribe to what seem to me to be genuinely conservative initiatives.
I'd welcome the input of a conservative on my question, if only to help clarify this ironic discrepancy that I'm noticing.
I've been keeping track of this legislation for a few months, now, and I can't believe the irony of it.
My gun club is populated by a lot of right-wingers, some of whom are pretty far right. The guy I buy my ammo from used to regale me (because he knows I'm a lefty) with tales of how the liberals were trying to institute national IDs which would stomp on states rights. He used to say stuff like "The liberals are gonna take away our freedom to go where we please when we please without having to show papers. It'll be illegal to just be walking down the street without anything in your pockets. Then they'll take away our guns." I laughed at him then and I confess that it's still pretty funny to me. Nobody's going to take away our guns, after all.
It's especially funny that the same righties that used to holler and crow about how those liberal treehugging twits were gonna take away our rights are now the same ones that want national ID cards. Now that's ironic.
It's funny also because I used to think that conservatives were for smaller federal government that leaves more responsibilities to individual states and doesn't spend so much money. Yet, these IDs are very much a big-government imposition on the states, the federal ban on gay marriage is one more such example, the Terry Schiavo fiasco proves that the fed is even willing to bypass the states to step on individual rights, and I've never seen an administration spend so much borrowed money since the Reagan years. Do republicans stand for anything conservative anymore?
I'll probably garner some flame for this post, but there just seem to be so many examples over the past couple years where the supposed "conservative" parts of the legislature and the admittedly conservative executive branch have taken stands that are so completely at odds with conservatism as I've always understood it. Honestly, I'm not intending to start a right-left flame war -- some of my best friends are republicans, not to mention folks in my family -- I'm just trying to figure out what being a conservative means at this time.
Slashdot Mirror
Where I've found that I've been able to demonstrate the most value is in those situations where we need to get something done on a platform that nobody on the team has used before. I don't have a whole lot of fear of alternate platforms -- their really just new learning opportunities. Sure, I have assumptions and preferences about what one can do better than another, but these become more educated opinions the more I have to work in alternative platform contexts. For example, I have to drive a continuous integration project for some development teams that use C# and .Net, when most of my experience has been with Sun Java and Web Services. I recognize that I don't know diddly about how to do the job under the new conditions, but I'll have more value (I hope (crosses fingers)) when I get to the end because of what the challenge will force me to learn.
As a rule, I'd say that being adaptable, and willing to accept the challenge of learning new stuff has been more important to me (and how I think I'm being valued) than being (and staying) the uber-733+ lord of one platform or technology. Then again, I also have a lot more resources to draw upon at the current job. At the last one, I'd have to buy the necessary books and learn it all on my own. Were I still there, I might think differently.
Hope it helps,
In that case, the ballpark was the great precipitating event that spawned a lot of community revitalization and some gentrification of what had been one of the least appealing areas of the inner city. The city helped with a lot of the planning but the conflict over the land was settled by business -- as it should be.
As for your characterization of the liberal and conservative agendas, I can't say that I agree. Maybe 20 years ago, that was more true, but it doesn't seem that way any more. Sure, there is still the liberal philosophy that government can play a positive role in peoples' lives, and the conservative philosophy that the government should play as little a role as possible in people's lives. In the practice of these philosophies, oddly enough, liberals seem now to be on the side of fiscal responsibility, investing in homeland security and states rights. Conservatives seem to be on the side of a big federal government (by that I mean denying states rights), unchecked borrowing and spending, and underfunding homeland security. I can't recall a "conservative" administration that took away as many rights as the present one. Likewise, I can't recall a liberal opposition that has fought so hard for state and individual rights.
I sit on the fence, myself, but I've had difficulty reconciling what labels like "liberal" and "conservative" are supposed to mean, and what they actually mean when practiced in the present day.
I ended up just putting a computer with some decent speakers in each room I wanted music and accessing my music files over my existing network.
One thing in Sonos' favor is that their system is a lot more consumer-accessible.
Very neat.
I've never trolled as an AC, mostly because it's a cheap shot way of arguing with someone. I've been tempted to bash other trolls as an AC, but in the end my better judgement wins out and I either find a constructive way to post as myself or just not post at all.
So I do think there's value in having an AC. It ends up that you have to tolerate a bunch of yayhoos, but I think that what you get out of anonymous posts has some positive value, too.
There were a couple developers who were no longer at the company who left somewhat monstrous comment blocks of 100 lines or so in the more important sources. These guys had built the framework from the bottom-up and had clearly been asked to explain what was going on to a great many newcomers.
The comments read like fairy tales, featuring the exploits of the data structures and objects in anthropomorphic terms. (One was something like "Ten Little Endians and their Big Brothers".) It actually helped me a great deal in understanding what was going on. I felt as if I had uncovered a marvelous little secret. (Gosh, I wish I'd made copies of some of them, because they were wildly entertaining.)
Every now and again I'd ask some of the longtime pros about these guys who left the great narrative comments behind, figuring that they must have been very outgoing and lighthearted guys. More often than not, I'd find out that these were the quiet unassuming old-guy types that didn't suffer fools lightly. The comments gave an entirely different impression.
None of it was especially dirty or nasty or foul, but I've never seen anything like it since, which leads me to believe that the lengthy amusing and informative comment block has become unpopular, or maybe just squashed in code review.
I started to write about what Jewish beliefs are, but I found myself rewriting a bunch of stuff that's already laid out in the first five books of the bible, the books of the prophets and some selected bits from the Talmud, but I figured that you could do that reading yourself if you were interested. I've taken the time to read the holy books of several religeons and I've found it pretty interesting in a broad sense. Give it a shot... you might be surprised at what you learn.
Jews do not believe that "they are worse than others". Not in the least. There's no proscription that G-d will make everything right on earth if they "behave well for a year". G-d challenges everyone to follow The Law, but not everyone does. In fact, hardly anyone does. Even the most ascetic Jews find something to atone for on Yom Kippur. The arrival of the messiah is a great topic of debate among Jews, and it's hardly as simple as your characterization of it.
What you may be referring to is the preference among the orthodoxy that you be Jewish by decent -- that is, an unbroken line of matrilinear Jewish heritage. Some temples are more strict about this than others, but if you're willing to live by the law, study and keep the mitzvot, there are many orthodox temples that will welcome you.
What sometimes gets lost in the news about settlements and such in Israel is that there are A LOT of Jews there that might be more accurately described as reform or conservative, and many that do not practice at all. There's this assumption that everyone in Israel is tied to the orthodoxy, but it's not true. The orthodoxy does have a lot of power in the knesset -- it is a Jewish state, after all -- but Christains and Moslems of all types are also Israeli citizens even if they're not equally represented at the highest levels of government.
What I'm getting at is that this change by microsoft is so superfluous as to be rediculous. Sure, people who buy and own computers these days probably don't require as much "personalization" of the names of things, but these names have always been changeable, at least since Win95, afaik.
I'd be fifty times enthused if they could just make it possible for me to uninstall IE, frankly.
I confess that I don't have much deep knowledge of advancements in AI and machine vision. Anytime we've had robot articles posted on slashdot lately they've been about advancements in the physical attributes of humanoid robots. Perhaps someone out there can fill me in on what I've been missing.
Anyhow, on a lighter note, as I was reading the "trends" article, I could not help noticing this paragraph:
The statement goes on to say that Toyota will make partner robots that "have human characteristics, such as being agile, warm and kind and also intelligent enough to skillfully operate a variety of devices in the area of personal assistance, care for the elderly, manufacturing and mobility." The statement continues, "since each area requires a special set of skills, Toyota is promoting the development of three different types of partner robots - walking, rolling and mountable - each with its own areas of expertise."
WARNING: BAD JOKE AHEAD
I like "agile, warm and kind", and the article stressed the advancements in the lips on certain robots such that they can play the trumpet, but if it's going to be "mountable", shouldn't there be some work on robots that are "moist" in addition to being "agile, warm and kind"? I mean, can you imagine the chafing?
IT WAS A BAD JOKE, BUT YOU -=WERE=- WARNED, AFTER ALL
Well, the source engine in HL2 was designed to run acceptably on middle-of-the-road hardware. The excellent performance of your card may be, in part, due to efficiencies in the underlying engine. In my game group, the most GPU-taxing game has been Doom3, hands down. Also, speed isn't everything. There's better-quality lighting, shading, texture/bump mappings, AA, and all the rest. It may be overkill today, but I'd really like to see how much better things could look -- regardless of speed -- when platforms like this become cheaper and more widespread.
My own experience has led me to buy just a little under the top-shelf of consumer graphics cards (I'm running an AGP Radeon 9800XT (8x) on a 4x moboard), and as time marches on and new games come along, I just throttle back on the effects enough to keep the frame rates high on whatever I happen to be playing. My hope is that I can squeeze out another year with it before I'm ready to jump to PCI-express and build an all-new box in the process. That said, I'm not sure that I'd even consider buying a platform like this one -- it's just so much more than I'd need.
I see the professional animator/CG market as being a good launchpad for this configuration. I used to dabble in it (long ago, using Maya and Poser, on less powerful hardware than I use today), and having to wait for an hour for some scene to render was a little rough on my creativity. I ended up doing other things while the images were baking, but I wished very much for a platform that could give me quick rendering with all the detail I wanted.
Say what you want about the president, but Alan Greenspan is the chairman of the federal reserve, and he served under Clinton, too. His job is to oversee the operation of the federal reserve banks and to set interest rates for borrowing (usually overnight) activities between banks. Sure, he guides interest rates that are fundamental to the very basic underlying economics of business and investment, but to say that he's responsible for people losing their jobs is a bit of a stretch.
If you're just looking at how he makes rate adjustments, he's actually got a very soft touch. If you disagree with his reasons for periodically adjusting the federal funds rate in one direction or the other, you have to admit that he's been able to control inflation very very well during his tenure, and aid in increasing the supply of cheap capital that individuals and businesses use to create jobs rather than destroy them.
I would add, and it does not seem to be widely recognized here for some reason, that Microsoft is saying these things in order to make them happen.
It's a bit like self-fulfilling prophecy. If a person or entity of some publicly-accepted authority says that the something will fail or company X will go out of business, it plants a seed in the minds of the people that hear it. When said twice, it re-enforces the prediction, making it acceptable. Repeated often enough it becomes believable. Once believeable, it is close to becoming fact. The whole process takes a long time, but the effects can last even longer.
Politicians are famous for doing this. There are a couple examples in recent history:
People and companies in positions of public authority know that their rhetoric has this slow, creeping power to influence attitudes and perceptions, and it gets used because it works. Most people don't even realize that their thoughts are being shaped. It can be very blunt, like what Mssrs. Ballmer and Gates are doing, or it can be achieved with simple word choice. I recently re-read 1984. The devices of newspeak are now much more starkly evident for me in contemporary efforts to shape public opinion around things like the changing of senate rules for confirmation of judicial nominees and the reformation of the Social Security system, for example.
I'm actually surprised that very few slashdotters make mention of these devices, or appreciate their strength.
I'd only add that (in the US anyway), unions have also protected and maintained standards for telephony, safe and reliable electrical service, quality ironwork in skyscrapers, steamfitting, safe and reliable trucking and plumbing -- just to name a few. Oftentimes unions are simply characterized as special interest groups that do nothing more than protect the wages and benefits of their membership, which is true, but they've made many contributions to the general welfare, too.
It was one of those documentaries about the 777. I later learned that these types of tests, with ice in particular, were done by the defense department, too, when they were getting jets rolling in high altitudes. Rolls Royce and GE both have done testing of foreign bodies through jets, mostly because birds can be around at takeoff and landing, both at sea and on land.
Jet turbines run really hot, too, and they chop anything (mostly air) into little tiny pieces that can be burned very quickly in the presence of jet fuel under very high compression and then the gases get exhausted along with a bunch of steam. Intake-compression-burn-blow, all in linear arrangement. It's like an incinerator that chews its food beforehand. Birds and ice (which are less-quickly burnable than fuel and oxygen) may come in very quickly, but they also come right out the other end even faster, after having been chopped up into ridiculously tiny pieces, impregnanted by hot jet fuel under high compression, vaporised and easily exhaused in less than 100th of a second.
It's amazing, really. Whenever I fly in a jet, at 30K+ abobe the surface, at a pokey-slow 475 miles per hour, I'm absolutely astounded by how cool it all is.
Some of the posts have talked about what would happen if a jet sucked the thing in, but as a balloon gets higher and higher, it also gets REALLY REALLY big and much easier to see. If "sucked in", it's more likely that it'll get chewed to pieces and incinerated. The heat of the engine is more than high enough to reduce the whole thing to ashes, and the inertia of the engine would probably blow it right out the other end as dust. The engine might hiccup a bit, but it'd probably still keep rolling.
My boss is an ex Air Force guy that used to ride the B-52, and he's heard of much larger and stranger crap getting forced down jet engines without them quitting. Apparently the worst part isn't so much the thing that goes through, but cracks and imbalance in the fan blades and turbine that force engines to be shut down after the fact. The engine is still running, but shutdown is one of those better-safe-than-sorry kind of things. Losing an engine because of shutdown (only to have it dismantled and fixed on the ground) is better than losing an engine by having it vibrate itself out of its housing and plummet to earth.
Remember, jet engines are tested at some point by throwing big chunks of ice, broken fan blades and frozen chickens down them -=while operating=-. In any event, if an engine were to stop, all commercial passenger jet planes are more than able to control flight for a landing with the remaining engine(s).
I can say with authority that Warren and Charlie don't pay much attention to technology companies and do not invest in them, as a rule, because they don't understand them. The level 3 thing, incidentally, was a favor for a friend and not part of their investment mix.
One indicator of a mature company is the paying of dividends, which is something that MS has only recently started to do. By maturity, I mean that the company has reached (or is very close to reaching) the peak of it's growth phase. The paying of dividends is a sign that the management has no worthy place to put its cash, in R&D, expansion into new products, or extension into new markets. If there is growth in any of those areas, dividends are a logical step in companies where the associated costs of the growth are not oustripping gains in net income enough to slow the growth of cash.
I don't think that MS is looking at any decline in their cash flow or profitability -- they're so bloated with cash that they can't find enough places to spend it -- hence the dividends. As for losing market share, they may lose some in a couple market segments, but they're expanding wildly into other new ones and making a number of strategic partnerships along the way. Market share and CompAd would both grow, even if things didn't go perfectly for them in the new areas they're moving into.
The odd thing is that I never had any problem getting a quote for any article I ever wrote. If you can't talk to the person, you can almost always find an attributable, published source for the content. I wrote some articles for a weekly music mag when I got out of college, and most folks were pleased to be quoted. One thing that gets overlooked is that editors sometimes want to see your notes. If you are quoting a source that wants to remain anonymous, you should always feel comfortable with sharing that person's identity with your editor. Taking good notes is really important, too, especially if you want to write a followup piece or get back in touch with a source again later. Respectful quoting of sources makes it all easier.
Quoting can be a rather touchy business, with grey areas, though. Sometimes you can give a full quote, but your editor will trim it back to save space or make it leaner. Regardless, getting quotes is just a matter of doing the legwork, making some cold calls, or developing sources that can hook you up with other sources. With deadline pressure, you may run the risk of not having enough meat in your story and having it miss press-time, but most writers learn the lesson and work hard at getting the necessary meat in at the next go-round.
That said, it was still quite interesting to see the evolution of obi-wan and get a better feel for who the jedi were, generally, in both EpI and EpII.
What I hear from my conservative pals is that they really don't want one person's morals to intrude on the quality or safety of someone else's idea of moral behavior, as long as everyone's not breaking any laws. They seem to be bothered that religion is a defining factor, too.
I made my post because I'm having trouble figuring out what conservatism means, and how that is reconciled with the way republicans are interpreting it. Right now I know more democrats than republicans who ascribe to what seem to me to be genuinely conservative initiatives.
I'd welcome the input of a conservative on my question, if only to help clarify this ironic discrepancy that I'm noticing.
I agree that our vocabulary for political stances has become kinda muddied. I'd like to know what the new terms are, frankly.
Anyhow, I see it as more Orwellian than Huxley-like, but terms like "Orwellian" seem to cross into politically incorrect territory these days.
My gun club is populated by a lot of right-wingers, some of whom are pretty far right. The guy I buy my ammo from used to regale me (because he knows I'm a lefty) with tales of how the liberals were trying to institute national IDs which would stomp on states rights. He used to say stuff like "The liberals are gonna take away our freedom to go where we please when we please without having to show papers. It'll be illegal to just be walking down the street without anything in your pockets. Then they'll take away our guns." I laughed at him then and I confess that it's still pretty funny to me. Nobody's going to take away our guns, after all.
It's especially funny that the same righties that used to holler and crow about how those liberal treehugging twits were gonna take away our rights are now the same ones that want national ID cards. Now that's ironic.
It's funny also because I used to think that conservatives were for smaller federal government that leaves more responsibilities to individual states and doesn't spend so much money. Yet, these IDs are very much a big-government imposition on the states, the federal ban on gay marriage is one more such example, the Terry Schiavo fiasco proves that the fed is even willing to bypass the states to step on individual rights, and I've never seen an administration spend so much borrowed money since the Reagan years. Do republicans stand for anything conservative anymore?
I'll probably garner some flame for this post, but there just seem to be so many examples over the past couple years where the supposed "conservative" parts of the legislature and the admittedly conservative executive branch have taken stands that are so completely at odds with conservatism as I've always understood it. Honestly, I'm not intending to start a right-left flame war -- some of my best friends are republicans, not to mention folks in my family -- I'm just trying to figure out what being a conservative means at this time.
Thanks,
You can see it here:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/atom-smasher2.htm
Anyhoo, while I find the experiment and subsequent discovery kind of interesting, it isn't anything terribly exciting.