Minimum MUST HAVE requirements:
5 Years Oracle
5+ Years Windows System Admin
5 years Help Desk
5 years Citrix
7 Years C++, VB, (and a few others)
Salary Range: $20,000 - $25,000/year (Canadian)
They are trying to fill 4 jobs with 1 person who would work for $10/hour!
Perhaps. Although it sounds to me like you may be reading too much into this. Reading this, it sounds like a not-for-profit community hospital (or something similar) seeking desktop support. In affect, they want somebody with 3 or 4 years of help-desk support. Because of the oracle and citrix requirements, you can pretty much tell that the database is remote hosted. The 'windows system admin' requirement tells you that they have a bunch of desktops with citrix clients they're wanting support for.
Basically, they're asking for 5 years experience, and are going to probably settle for 3. Considering the salary, I'd say that this is a Jr. level desktop admin position. They're not expecting a database administrator, or a programmer, or they would have asked for 7 to 10 years of experience, or more. And if you knew how Oracle and Citrix setups are run, odds are that this company has outsourced their IT anyhow. The clueless HR people are just trying to find a warm body to do some tech support. Had it been a real programming job or networking job, they would have been listing other obscure stuff.
Also, I would recommnd remembering that there are people in this field that have 20, 30 or 40 years of experience. When you get into the higher salary levels, the requirements get more rediculous, like:
> 10+ years architecture experience
> your own patent portfolio
> programming code samples
> masters degree in CS/IT, etc.
> # of shipped products
etc. etc.
The point is, it appears as though you might not be thinking big enough. You're thinking of having 5 to 7 years experience, as opposed to having 20 years of experience. A small company of 20 somethings that's been around for 10 years might offer a $50K to $80K salary, and advertise '5 years Windows Admin, C++, Oracle, Citrix' experience, expecting to get a programmer to develop new applications. A 100 year old community hospital would offer $30K to $50K and advertise exactly the same thing, '5 years Windows Admin, C++, Oracle, Citrix', and expect a jr. level desktop support engineer. The difference is the first is thinking narrowly, in the.com mode, and is thinking in a 10 year span, whereas the later is thinking more broadly, in a 100 year span.
And you never know. That $20,000 - $25,000/year job might have *the* best damn medical benefits, pention plan, and related benefits that you can find in your area.
On the other hand, you're looking at working for somebody else, rather than for yourself. That, in of itself, is going to put you at the disadvantage, economically speaking.
If "Interpersonal and group work skills" are so important, why aren't they taught? They are not really taught at school - the sports field is not the office environment (sports metaphors not withstanding) and where the environment is closest to the office (ie, classwork) working together can bring allegations of plagarism and cheating. They're not a part of any university classes I've seen either.
I had extensive communication skills taught to me in highschool and college. It was called the 'speech and debate' team. Oh, there was also 'model congress' and 'model united nations'. And the 'student newpaper' and the 'student radio station'. Being a good communicator isn't about being introverted or extroverted (witness the overbearing, obnoxious extrovert types that everybody wishes would shutup, and the introverted, introspective quite types that everybody listens to when they speak up). Interpersonal skills, communication skills, and work group skills have far more to do with understanding meanings and modes, as well as signs and symbols. Being able to select the appropriate mode of communication for the situation at hand, and to send a clear message who's meaning is understood by the recipient... much more important than merely being extroverted.
And these things are taught in college and highschool. You just have to show up to the Communications 101 courses, and start from there. Like all majors, they tend to have weed out courses to narrow the applicant pool. Which would you rather do: programming or public speaking? Reason that you probably think that interpersonal and group work skills aren't taught is because you were avoiding the public speaking classes.
Not saying there's anything wrong with avoiding the public speaking classes. It's just that they're often unpopular for obvious reasons. Just don't confuse absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
Note: Granted, I have to admit that some universities are set up completely different than others. My university, for example, didn't offer degrees in Engineering, Forensic Science, Computer Science, Nursing, Journalism, and the like. It did, however, offer degrees in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Humanities, and 'Law Letters and Society'. Instead of 'Communication' classes, we had 'Theory of Media' classes, and the like. But they were essentially the same thing. A rose by any other name...
My dad once told me 'Don't go into computers, because it's all going to be outsourced to India'. In my opinion, not necessarily the best advice he's ever given me. Consider:
> Don't go into mathematics, because it's all going to be outsourced to India.
> Don't go into business, because it's all going to be oursourced to China.
> Don't go into operations, because it's all going to be oursourced to Brazil.
If you notice the pattern here, you'll see that these claims are each in the form of:
> Don't go into $DIFFICULT_SUBJECT, because it's all going to be oursourced to $COUNTRY.
In my opinion, this attitude is caused by fear of competition. The same kind of fear that prevents perfectly qualified applicants from applying to college because 'there are more qualified people who will get picked before me', or that prevents people from running marathons because 'its difficult and i might not finish the race'. If you want to take this kind of fear to the extreme, let us consider the absurd examples:
> Don't go into reading, because it's all going to be outsourced to India.
> Don't go into writing, because it's all going to be oursourced to Europe.
> Don't go into storage, because it's all going to be outsourced to China.
> Don't go into thinking, because it's all going to be oursoured to Japan.
> Don't go into algorithms, because it's all going to be oursoured to Germany.
> Don't go into logic, because it's all going to be outsourced to those damn Vulcans.
etc. etc.
Ignore this kind of thinking. It's fear mongering, defeatist thinking, and anti-intellectualism held by people who don't understand computers.
However, that being said, I would also point out that just going into computers for computers sake is quite possibly not what you want to do. Rather, having a strong foundation in comptuter science, coupled with skills in mathematics, algorithms, business, operations, and $OTHER_SUBJECT is what you want to have. Whether $OTHER_SUBJECT is healthcare (i.e. genomics research, hospital operations, etc) or entertainment (i.e. 3D effects, video production) or whatever else, the idea is to be able to use computers to achieve other tasks. When you are able to use computers to achive results in other fields, that's a powerful combination, and sets you apart from others when a) you have core IT skills that the rest of your applications department doesn't have, and b) you have application specific skills which your IT department doesn't have.
Agreed. Interestingly enough, the evidence towards the Singularity lays in accelerating growth of technological change. So, it's pretty nifty to see not just a linear or geometic change in technology, but a change which appears to be networked, neural, and therefore, exponential in nature.
If you're looking for a good book that deals with cyberpunk, the Singularity, and transhumanism, I highly recommend Accelerando by Charles Stross. Note: It's a very post-modern, post-millennial, post-cyber kind of book (it seems to aim to be post-homosapien, if possible). It comes off as strange reading, unless you're familiar with the basic primise of the Singularity Conjecture.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. Nice to see that I'm not the only one that's putting the pieces of this puzzle together in the same way. I've got to admit that I'm also rather interested in in the results of the new neutrino decector down in antartica ('icecube', i think they're calling it?) Between a) some new, more accurate, measurements of the mass of the neutrino and b) a verifiable, repeatable experiment that demonstrates the gravito-electrical linkage, there could be a major shift towards research in Heim Theory. And that means the possibility of a viable field drive. yay!
There are still many Next Big Things that we have yet to achieve (though the ability to achieve such may or may not exist, but we won't know till we try.)
A short list:
- Hovering vehicles
- Anti gravity (which is probably related to the above)
- hand held energy weapons
- teleportation
- economical space travel (think "to mars", or, at the least, consumer viability for going to the moon)
- curing cancer
- controlling computers with our brains
- mechanical prostetics that respond either to brain waves or nerves (we're right on the edge of this one- I believe someone had a really basic, bulky unit working, it just has to become available for the common man)
- growing of artificial organs for transplants (goodbye organ donors!)
- interactive holographic interfaces
- solar energy that's +60% effecient
as other posters have pointed out, controlling electron spin is quite feasible. all it requires is a magnetic field and a radio frequency pulse, actually. nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy (acronyms: NMR, MRI, MRS), use this exact methodology. having worked as an MRI operator, I can personally vouch that we would regularly set the magnet to adjust all the electron spins in a person's body to, say, a 90 degree flip angle, and we'd watch as though spins decayed back to 'zero'. we knew the time, for instance, that water would decay back to zero, and would take a snap-shot of the anatomy being scanned at the precise moment that the spin decay should have resulted in the electron spin going back to zero. we'd look for any electrons that were still in the process of decaying, and we'd know that those were areas of interest (metoboloic activity, flowing blood, tissue type differences, etc).
of course, the electron will eventually decay back into a random orientation, and the whole subject of flip angles and electron spin has alot of particulars that i'm not able to cover in a single slashdot pot. suffice it to say however, that you can definately control the electron spins for short periods of time (on the order of a couple of seconds, usually).
of course, you need a really good magnetic field (preferably a superconducting cryomagnet, ala an MRI magnet), high precision radio transmitters (and receivers if you want to measure the spin), and a hunk of machinery just to process the data (results have to go through a fair bit of gaussian analysis and fourier transforms to translate from K space to normalized x,y,z vector space.) there's a reason why MRI magnets cost so much ($1M+). however, the physics and principles for controlling electron spin are fairly well known, and are utilized whenever you get an MRI scan conducted (the scan detects electron spin changes in water molecules in your body).
now, regarding changing an individual electron's spin... well, all you would really need to do is use a wave in the electromagnetic spectrum that was on the order of a couple nanometers... that is, precise enough to affect a single atom. normally, MRI uses radio waves, although i would suspect that light amplification (e.g. laser) could also do the trick. maybe an x-ray laser with a tungsten source? i would think that you could use a tungsten x-ray laser in a MRI magnet field and reliably affect the electron spin of a single atom. granted, there are plenty of calibration issues necessary with performing such an experiment, although they really aren't any more difficult than operating a scanning electron microscope.
of course, i'm just interested in seeing all of that equipment shrunk down to the size of a hard-drive. however, i could imagine something of that sort being built. perhaps if you could come up with a micro-cryomagnet that would fit inside a CD jukebox and calibrate it to an x-ray laser.
Alas, this is only a rehash of the Crystal Eyes / Barco solution, which has been around for years. Granted, it's over an order of magnitude cheaper in price than it was in the mid-90s (these systems used to run around $60K for the projection monitor and $3K for each pair of glasses). Probably a bit less durable though.
And unfortunately, the writer of the article is a bit new to the 3D monitor industry also, or he would have given the Synthagram lenticular monitor a mention at the end of the article (mention of an affordable, glasses-free, 3D monitor).
It's a Good Thing this is going to happen. Why? Well, for one thing, it will also push the Tablet's into getting a little bigger. Oddly enough, Laptops and Tablets still don't screens that are big enough to fit an 8.5x11" full-size 1:1 ratio image of a piece of paper! People ask me if I find my Tablet too bulky (same problem with Laptop, essentially), and I tell them... actually, no, I want a bigger screen so I can write papers in real ratio format. Expect with this increase in size for some manufacturers to also start playing around with swivel screens to allow putting the screen in either landscape or portrait mode.
Of course, it's also great to have a portable movie playing machine. Nothing wrong with the entertainment side of the equation. I'm just saying that this is also going to push the adoption of swivel displays and increased tablet screens sizes.
really large monitors. most of the coders and developers at microsoft are using dual or three head displays, with high-resolution monitors. they're anticipating computers with 4 and 6 megapixel screen resolutions at 1200x3200 and 3600x1600. with that much real estate, the extra pixels don't make as much difference.
The solution, of sorts, is that the president shouldn't be micromanaging, although should be 1. aware of all the goings-on in the company, and 2. able to excersize veto power. It's the middle managers responsibility to both make business decisions as per their standing within the company and their authority, and to forward a carbon copy of said decisions to the boss so that the boss is kept in the loop and can excersize veto power as necessary.
From the article:
Finally, Horst Uwe Keller of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and co-workers used the Rosetta mission - which is on its way to another comet called Churyumov Gerasimenko - to survey the collision at from a distance of 80 million kilometres over a period of 17 days. Again they found that the relative amount of organic material being ejected increased following the impact. Keller and co-workers also observed a dip in brightness about 200 seconds after the impact, which they say is related to the formation of a city-sized crater on the comet (Sciencexpress 1119020).
Uh... that last sentance raises some interesting questions. Exactly what was in that impactor that could create a city-sized crater?
i was thinking along the problem more along terms of texture mapping. a 3D engine typically has massive libraries of images which it uses to map onto 3D skeletons and polygons. Those textures are typically stored as 128x128 or 256x256 images. With HDTV, those texture libraries need to be bumped up to 256x256 minimum, with some going as high as 1024x1024 probably. Point being, the texture libraries scale geometrically to the HDTV requirements at the same rate that the MPEG2 streams scale.
So, my response would be: why would you assume that the game would need the MPEG2 streams? The texture mapping libraries would need to be triple or quadruple the size also.
So, its the same net difference. Whether you manipulate the images dynamically (texture mapping) or linearly (MPEG), you still need to scale the library of 2D images up by a factor of three or four.
What people are forgetting about here is the HDTV specs, which roughly triple or quadruple the memory requirements of video footage stored on a game cartridge/disk. Forgetting about the dual layer capabilities in the future, a 24G Blu-Ray disk, divided by 4, equals 6G. Approximately the size of a standard DVD. "But wait!" you say, "A DVD already can play HDTV!" Ah yes, but a typical game with multiple avenues of game play doesn't record the content of a single linear gameplay... it records many different avenues of gameplay. Which winds up tripling or quadrupling the storage requirements.
My two cents worth of opinion? With this decision, Sony is going to have a much better HDTV compatible offering.
please. get a dose of reality. he *is* supporting the government/military/Red Cross. he's supporting a data backbone, for christ's sake. have you actually read the damn blog? they're wading through the water setting up links to the city hall. they're coordinating between deisel runs, city hall, and the police force to make sure that people can keep in contact with the outside! do you know what the hell an OC3 even is? for christs sake, get a grip on reality and get over yourself.
he's getting fuel runs because the police precincts are *abandoned*, and his office *isn't*. he's getting fuel runs because his infrastucture is *still intact*. the police and military are helping *him*, because he's got his shit together and is keeping data trunk lines running.
and just for the record, blogging, as a one-to-many means of communication, is the most efficient way that these folks are able to communicate to everybody else. they don't have time to sift through emails and make phone calls, so they're using their blogs as a broadcasting mechanism.
God, I hate self-possessed tards who don't appreciate the work that other people do, and don't know what an OC3 or a metro-area disaster recovery plan is.
for someone with such a low UserID and who, apparently, has been around here for a long time, I'm surprised that you don't understand the importance of keeping telephone lines up in emergency situations.
To any moderators reading, please mod parent post as Troll.
We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.
-- Mark Twain
You can derive density from the ideal gas law (n/V), as well as density/temperature ratios. The Ideal Gas Law is routinely used to calculate these kinds of observations. The stumbling block in this particular situation, however, is that the atmosphere of a planet is a non-closed system. Therefore, you have to model a series of cubic boxes around the planet and use integral calculus to determine the solutions to the equations.
When I was in the Honors General Chemistry class at the University of Chicago, the final for our thermodynamics class asked us to calculate the gas law constant (R) of another galaxy using the observation of the speed of a certain class of particles escaping from said galaxy, along with basic knowledge of the volume of said galaxy, mean temperature of hard vacumn, etc. etc. That's where I learned about that use of the gas law constant in calculating celestial constants, in measuring atmospheric pressures, atmospheric composition, and so forth. Hanging out with the Ryerson Astronomical Society confirmed that approach.
It's postively freakin amazing what all you can calculate with the ideal gas law. (You could also claim that the Ideal Gas Law was absolutely nothing to do with the Stock Market, and I could point you towards the Black and Scholes Option Pricing Model. The point is, the Ideal Gas Law is a usefull heuristic because it can be applied to a lot of different things.)
PV=nRT
because the pressure is very low, the freezing point and boiling point lower. out there in hard vacumn, the boiling point of water is only a few degrees kelvin.
i would point out that it being less cold (e.g. warmer) would result in your balls freezing off in a slightly *longer* amount of time... say, 2.45 seconds. just sayin...
precision laser arrays? a coiling mechanism that condences water at a constant rate in a non-closed system? integrated motion sensors? this is a very slick piece of equipment, who's complexity is on par, at the very least, with an ultrasound machine or an xray machine. also, i imagine that this thing's resolution is more accurately measured in voxels, rather than pixels.
So, if it's 800x600 resolution, then it's actually 800x600x600 resolution; which makes it more like 600 times the resolution of an HDTV screen.
I agree that the concept of these displays has been around for some time. Actually implementing them has been much, much harder than initially anticipated. And each method has strengths and drawbacks. And none of them are implemented in the exact same way... Lenticular screens (ala the Synthagram), rotated projection screens (ala the Perspecta), active matrix shutter goggles (ala CrystalEyes + Barco)... for high-res "HDTV" quality stereoscopics, you're investing a tidy sum of change for the optics and control mechanisms.
The real reason that these things are still so costly is that no single solution has 1) been easy enough to use that home consumers could use it, 2) had high enough image quality, 3) had useable, 'real' depth, and 4) been reprogramable so that multiple video channels can be subscribed to. Since no solution has been able to meet all these requirements, the technology hasn't entered mass production. When it does, you can expect the prices to drop an order of magnitude as the laws of economic production and the markets take over. Until then, these are specialty items, reserved for scientific industries (healthcare, air traffic control, computer auotmated design, niche-advertising at amusement parks, etc).
That's a real difficult question. Regarding costs, I can pretty much guarantee that this thing isn't being mass produced yet... it's just now coming out of the prototype stage, and probably has alot of quality control issues that the engineers are working to resolve. However, going by competing technologies in this field, you can safely assume from the get go that it's *at least* $40,000 (the cost of a Perspecta monitor). More likely, it's being sold on a contract by contract basis, meaning that each contract ranges, depending upon the bundled in service agreement, warranty, and software applications. My suspicion is that, at the low end, it's being licensed around $40,000 for a year of warranty and with a simple video player. At the high end, contracts are probably being developed around $250,000 for a 3 year warranty, on-site service support, and an integrated surgical navigation or air-traffic control application. That's generally the industry average for this kind of equipment. It's not at the scale of an MRI scanner or a VR-CAVE ($1M each), but it's definately a cut above your typical gamer's station ($5K - $10K). My guess is that the average price for one of these things is around $100,000.
by keeping the 'beta' term, they avoid the problem of shipping a final product with flaws in it. the software industry has, somehow, managed to convince people that it's okay to sell products which regularly crash and have bugs in them. if the automotive industry or airline industry sold products that had the same types of problems as software, people would be screaming bloody murder. somehow, the software industry gets away with it though. the 'beta' signifier merely puts google's offerings in a more realistic development cycle, on par with other industries.
consider this: perhaps google isn't keeping their products in 'beta' testing overly long. rather, perhaps the rest of the software industry has adopted a poor practice of shipping software too early under the guise of a 'working product'. maybe google is just being honest about the state of their products, unlike the rest of the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Minimum MUST HAVE requirements:
.com mode, and is thinking in a 10 year span, whereas the later is thinking more broadly, in a 100 year span.
5 Years Oracle
5+ Years Windows System Admin
5 years Help Desk
5 years Citrix
7 Years C++, VB, (and a few others)
Salary Range: $20,000 - $25,000/year (Canadian)
They are trying to fill 4 jobs with 1 person who would work for $10/hour!
Perhaps. Although it sounds to me like you may be reading too much into this. Reading this, it sounds like a not-for-profit community hospital (or something similar) seeking desktop support. In affect, they want somebody with 3 or 4 years of help-desk support. Because of the oracle and citrix requirements, you can pretty much tell that the database is remote hosted. The 'windows system admin' requirement tells you that they have a bunch of desktops with citrix clients they're wanting support for.
Basically, they're asking for 5 years experience, and are going to probably settle for 3. Considering the salary, I'd say that this is a Jr. level desktop admin position. They're not expecting a database administrator, or a programmer, or they would have asked for 7 to 10 years of experience, or more. And if you knew how Oracle and Citrix setups are run, odds are that this company has outsourced their IT anyhow. The clueless HR people are just trying to find a warm body to do some tech support. Had it been a real programming job or networking job, they would have been listing other obscure stuff.
Also, I would recommnd remembering that there are people in this field that have 20, 30 or 40 years of experience. When you get into the higher salary levels, the requirements get more rediculous, like:
> 10+ years architecture experience > your own patent portfolio
> programming code samples
> masters degree in CS/IT, etc.
> # of shipped products
etc. etc.
The point is, it appears as though you might not be thinking big enough. You're thinking of having 5 to 7 years experience, as opposed to having 20 years of experience. A small company of 20 somethings that's been around for 10 years might offer a $50K to $80K salary, and advertise '5 years Windows Admin, C++, Oracle, Citrix' experience, expecting to get a programmer to develop new applications. A 100 year old community hospital would offer $30K to $50K and advertise exactly the same thing, '5 years Windows Admin, C++, Oracle, Citrix', and expect a jr. level desktop support engineer. The difference is the first is thinking narrowly, in the
And you never know. That $20,000 - $25,000/year job might have *the* best damn medical benefits, pention plan, and related benefits that you can find in your area.
On the other hand, you're looking at working for somebody else, rather than for yourself. That, in of itself, is going to put you at the disadvantage, economically speaking.
If "Interpersonal and group work skills" are so important, why aren't they taught? They are not really taught at school - the sports field is not the office environment (sports metaphors not withstanding) and where the environment is closest to the office (ie, classwork) working together can bring allegations of plagarism and cheating. They're not a part of any university classes I've seen either.
I had extensive communication skills taught to me in highschool and college. It was called the 'speech and debate' team. Oh, there was also 'model congress' and 'model united nations'. And the 'student newpaper' and the 'student radio station'. Being a good communicator isn't about being introverted or extroverted (witness the overbearing, obnoxious extrovert types that everybody wishes would shutup, and the introverted, introspective quite types that everybody listens to when they speak up). Interpersonal skills, communication skills, and work group skills have far more to do with understanding meanings and modes, as well as signs and symbols. Being able to select the appropriate mode of communication for the situation at hand, and to send a clear message who's meaning is understood by the recipient... much more important than merely being extroverted.
And these things are taught in college and highschool. You just have to show up to the Communications 101 courses, and start from there. Like all majors, they tend to have weed out courses to narrow the applicant pool. Which would you rather do: programming or public speaking? Reason that you probably think that interpersonal and group work skills aren't taught is because you were avoiding the public speaking classes.
Not saying there's anything wrong with avoiding the public speaking classes. It's just that they're often unpopular for obvious reasons. Just don't confuse absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
Note: Granted, I have to admit that some universities are set up completely different than others. My university, for example, didn't offer degrees in Engineering, Forensic Science, Computer Science, Nursing, Journalism, and the like. It did, however, offer degrees in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Humanities, and 'Law Letters and Society'. Instead of 'Communication' classes, we had 'Theory of Media' classes, and the like. But they were essentially the same thing. A rose by any other name...
For more information on telerobotic surgery systems (they're a few years old now):
= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1471286 6
http://www.teleroboticsurgeons.com/
http://www.teleroboticsurgeons.com/davinci.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
My dad once told me 'Don't go into computers, because it's all going to be outsourced to India'. In my opinion, not necessarily the best advice he's ever given me. Consider:
> Don't go into mathematics, because it's all going to be outsourced to India.
> Don't go into business, because it's all going to be oursourced to China.
> Don't go into operations, because it's all going to be oursourced to Brazil.
If you notice the pattern here, you'll see that these claims are each in the form of:
> Don't go into $DIFFICULT_SUBJECT, because it's all going to be oursourced to $COUNTRY.
In my opinion, this attitude is caused by fear of competition. The same kind of fear that prevents perfectly qualified applicants from applying to college because 'there are more qualified people who will get picked before me', or that prevents people from running marathons because 'its difficult and i might not finish the race'. If you want to take this kind of fear to the extreme, let us consider the absurd examples:
> Don't go into reading, because it's all going to be outsourced to India.
> Don't go into writing, because it's all going to be oursourced to Europe.
> Don't go into storage, because it's all going to be outsourced to China.
> Don't go into thinking, because it's all going to be oursoured to Japan.
> Don't go into algorithms, because it's all going to be oursoured to Germany.
> Don't go into logic, because it's all going to be outsourced to those damn Vulcans.
etc. etc.
Ignore this kind of thinking. It's fear mongering, defeatist thinking, and anti-intellectualism held by people who don't understand computers.
However, that being said, I would also point out that just going into computers for computers sake is quite possibly not what you want to do. Rather, having a strong foundation in comptuter science, coupled with skills in mathematics, algorithms, business, operations, and $OTHER_SUBJECT is what you want to have. Whether $OTHER_SUBJECT is healthcare (i.e. genomics research, hospital operations, etc) or entertainment (i.e. 3D effects, video production) or whatever else, the idea is to be able to use computers to achieve other tasks. When you are able to use computers to achive results in other fields, that's a powerful combination, and sets you apart from others when a) you have core IT skills that the rest of your applications department doesn't have, and b) you have application specific skills which your IT department doesn't have.
Agreed. Interestingly enough, the evidence towards the Singularity lays in accelerating growth of technological change. So, it's pretty nifty to see not just a linear or geometic change in technology, but a change which appears to be networked, neural, and therefore, exponential in nature.
If you're looking for a good book that deals with cyberpunk, the Singularity, and transhumanism, I highly recommend Accelerando by Charles Stross. Note: It's a very post-modern, post-millennial, post-cyber kind of book (it seems to aim to be post-homosapien, if possible). It comes off as strange reading, unless you're familiar with the basic primise of the Singularity Conjecture.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. Nice to see that I'm not the only one that's putting the pieces of this puzzle together in the same way. I've got to admit that I'm also rather interested in in the results of the new neutrino decector down in antartica ('icecube', i think they're calling it?) Between a) some new, more accurate, measurements of the mass of the neutrino and b) a verifiable, repeatable experiment that demonstrates the gravito-electrical linkage, there could be a major shift towards research in Heim Theory. And that means the possibility of a viable field drive. yay!
There are still many Next Big Things that we have yet to achieve (though the ability to achieve such may or may not exist, but we won't know till we try.)
;)
A short list:
- Hovering vehicles
- Anti gravity (which is probably related to the above)
- hand held energy weapons
- teleportation
- economical space travel (think "to mars", or, at the least, consumer viability for going to the moon)
- curing cancer
- controlling computers with our brains
- mechanical prostetics that respond either to brain waves or nerves (we're right on the edge
of this one- I believe someone had a really basic, bulky unit working, it just has to become available for the common man)
- growing of artificial organs for transplants (goodbye organ donors!)
- interactive holographic interfaces
- solar energy that's +60% effecient
Has someone been watching StarTrek recently?
as other posters have pointed out, controlling electron spin is quite feasible. all it requires is a magnetic field and a radio frequency pulse, actually. nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy (acronyms: NMR, MRI, MRS), use this exact methodology. having worked as an MRI operator, I can personally vouch that we would regularly set the magnet to adjust all the electron spins in a person's body to, say, a 90 degree flip angle, and we'd watch as though spins decayed back to 'zero'. we knew the time, for instance, that water would decay back to zero, and would take a snap-shot of the anatomy being scanned at the precise moment that the spin decay should have resulted in the electron spin going back to zero. we'd look for any electrons that were still in the process of decaying, and we'd know that those were areas of interest (metoboloic activity, flowing blood, tissue type differences, etc).
of course, the electron will eventually decay back into a random orientation, and the whole subject of flip angles and electron spin has alot of particulars that i'm not able to cover in a single slashdot pot. suffice it to say however, that you can definately control the electron spins for short periods of time (on the order of a couple of seconds, usually).
of course, you need a really good magnetic field (preferably a superconducting cryomagnet, ala an MRI magnet), high precision radio transmitters (and receivers if you want to measure the spin), and a hunk of machinery just to process the data (results have to go through a fair bit of gaussian analysis and fourier transforms to translate from K space to normalized x,y,z vector space.) there's a reason why MRI magnets cost so much ($1M+). however, the physics and principles for controlling electron spin are fairly well known, and are utilized whenever you get an MRI scan conducted (the scan detects electron spin changes in water molecules in your body).
now, regarding changing an individual electron's spin... well, all you would really need to do is use a wave in the electromagnetic spectrum that was on the order of a couple nanometers... that is, precise enough to affect a single atom. normally, MRI uses radio waves, although i would suspect that light amplification (e.g. laser) could also do the trick. maybe an x-ray laser with a tungsten source? i would think that you could use a tungsten x-ray laser in a MRI magnet field and reliably affect the electron spin of a single atom. granted, there are plenty of calibration issues necessary with performing such an experiment, although they really aren't any more difficult than operating a scanning electron microscope.
of course, i'm just interested in seeing all of that equipment shrunk down to the size of a hard-drive. however, i could imagine something of that sort being built. perhaps if you could come up with a micro-cryomagnet that would fit inside a CD jukebox and calibrate it to an x-ray laser.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/02/16/dual_displa y_gaming_bigs_up/
Alas, this is only a rehash of the Crystal Eyes / Barco solution, which has been around for years. Granted, it's over an order of magnitude cheaper in price than it was in the mid-90s (these systems used to run around $60K for the projection monitor and $3K for each pair of glasses). Probably a bit less durable though.
And unfortunately, the writer of the article is a bit new to the 3D monitor industry also, or he would have given the Synthagram lenticular monitor a mention at the end of the article (mention of an affordable, glasses-free, 3D monitor).
It's a Good Thing this is going to happen. Why? Well, for one thing, it will also push the Tablet's into getting a little bigger. Oddly enough, Laptops and Tablets still don't screens that are big enough to fit an 8.5x11" full-size 1:1 ratio image of a piece of paper! People ask me if I find my Tablet too bulky (same problem with Laptop, essentially), and I tell them... actually, no, I want a bigger screen so I can write papers in real ratio format. Expect with this increase in size for some manufacturers to also start playing around with swivel screens to allow putting the screen in either landscape or portrait mode.
Of course, it's also great to have a portable movie playing machine. Nothing wrong with the entertainment side of the equation. I'm just saying that this is also going to push the adoption of swivel displays and increased tablet screens sizes.
really large monitors. most of the coders and developers at microsoft are using dual or three head displays, with high-resolution monitors. they're anticipating computers with 4 and 6 megapixel screen resolutions at 1200x3200 and 3600x1600. with that much real estate, the extra pixels don't make as much difference.
The solution, of sorts, is that the president shouldn't be micromanaging, although should be 1. aware of all the goings-on in the company, and 2. able to excersize veto power. It's the middle managers responsibility to both make business decisions as per their standing within the company and their authority, and to forward a carbon copy of said decisions to the boss so that the boss is kept in the loop and can excersize veto power as necessary.
That's my two cents, anyhow.
How does this compare to FinalCut or Avid?
From the article: Finally, Horst Uwe Keller of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and co-workers used the Rosetta mission - which is on its way to another comet called Churyumov Gerasimenko - to survey the collision at from a distance of 80 million kilometres over a period of 17 days. Again they found that the relative amount of organic material being ejected increased following the impact. Keller and co-workers also observed a dip in brightness about 200 seconds after the impact, which they say is related to the formation of a city-sized crater on the comet (Sciencexpress 1119020). Uh... that last sentance raises some interesting questions. Exactly what was in that impactor that could create a city-sized crater?
you have a fairly decent point.
i was thinking along the problem more along terms of texture mapping. a 3D engine typically has massive libraries of images which it uses to map onto 3D skeletons and polygons. Those textures are typically stored as 128x128 or 256x256 images. With HDTV, those texture libraries need to be bumped up to 256x256 minimum, with some going as high as 1024x1024 probably. Point being, the texture libraries scale geometrically to the HDTV requirements at the same rate that the MPEG2 streams scale.
So, my response would be: why would you assume that the game would need the MPEG2 streams? The texture mapping libraries would need to be triple or quadruple the size also.
So, its the same net difference. Whether you manipulate the images dynamically (texture mapping) or linearly (MPEG), you still need to scale the library of 2D images up by a factor of three or four.
What people are forgetting about here is the HDTV specs, which roughly triple or quadruple the memory requirements of video footage stored on a game cartridge/disk. Forgetting about the dual layer capabilities in the future, a 24G Blu-Ray disk, divided by 4, equals 6G. Approximately the size of a standard DVD. "But wait!" you say, "A DVD already can play HDTV!" Ah yes, but a typical game with multiple avenues of game play doesn't record the content of a single linear gameplay... it records many different avenues of gameplay. Which winds up tripling or quadrupling the storage requirements.
My two cents worth of opinion? With this decision, Sony is going to have a much better HDTV compatible offering.
please. get a dose of reality. he *is* supporting the government/military/Red Cross. he's supporting a data backbone, for christ's sake. have you actually read the damn blog? they're wading through the water setting up links to the city hall. they're coordinating between deisel runs, city hall, and the police force to make sure that people can keep in contact with the outside! do you know what the hell an OC3 even is? for christs sake, get a grip on reality and get over yourself.
he's getting fuel runs because the police precincts are *abandoned*, and his office *isn't*. he's getting fuel runs because his infrastucture is *still intact*. the police and military are helping *him*, because he's got his shit together and is keeping data trunk lines running.
and just for the record, blogging, as a one-to-many means of communication, is the most efficient way that these folks are able to communicate to everybody else. they don't have time to sift through emails and make phone calls, so they're using their blogs as a broadcasting mechanism.
God, I hate self-possessed tards who don't appreciate the work that other people do, and don't know what an OC3 or a metro-area disaster recovery plan is.
for someone with such a low UserID and who, apparently, has been around here for a long time, I'm surprised that you don't understand the importance of keeping telephone lines up in emergency situations.
To any moderators reading, please mod parent post as Troll.
We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read. -- Mark Twain
I beg to differ. =)
You can derive density from the ideal gas law (n/V), as well as density/temperature ratios. The Ideal Gas Law is routinely used to calculate these kinds of observations. The stumbling block in this particular situation, however, is that the atmosphere of a planet is a non-closed system. Therefore, you have to model a series of cubic boxes around the planet and use integral calculus to determine the solutions to the equations.
When I was in the Honors General Chemistry class at the University of Chicago, the final for our thermodynamics class asked us to calculate the gas law constant (R) of another galaxy using the observation of the speed of a certain class of particles escaping from said galaxy, along with basic knowledge of the volume of said galaxy, mean temperature of hard vacumn, etc. etc. That's where I learned about that use of the gas law constant in calculating celestial constants, in measuring atmospheric pressures, atmospheric composition, and so forth. Hanging out with the Ryerson Astronomical Society confirmed that approach.
It's postively freakin amazing what all you can calculate with the ideal gas law.
(You could also claim that the Ideal Gas Law was absolutely nothing to do with the Stock Market, and I could point you towards the Black and Scholes Option Pricing Model. The point is, the Ideal Gas Law is a usefull heuristic because it can be applied to a lot of different things.)
PV=nRT because the pressure is very low, the freezing point and boiling point lower. out there in hard vacumn, the boiling point of water is only a few degrees kelvin.
i would point out that it being less cold (e.g. warmer) would result in your balls freezing off in a slightly *longer* amount of time... say, 2.45 seconds. just sayin...
precision laser arrays? a coiling mechanism that condences water at a constant rate in a non-closed system? integrated motion sensors? this is a very slick piece of equipment, who's complexity is on par, at the very least, with an ultrasound machine or an xray machine. also, i imagine that this thing's resolution is more accurately measured in voxels, rather than pixels.
So, if it's 800x600 resolution, then it's actually 800x600x600 resolution; which makes it more like 600 times the resolution of an HDTV screen.
I agree that the concept of these displays has been around for some time. Actually implementing them has been much, much harder than initially anticipated. And each method has strengths and drawbacks. And none of them are implemented in the exact same way... Lenticular screens (ala the Synthagram), rotated projection screens (ala the Perspecta), active matrix shutter goggles (ala CrystalEyes + Barco)... for high-res "HDTV" quality stereoscopics, you're investing a tidy sum of change for the optics and control mechanisms.
The real reason that these things are still so costly is that no single solution has 1) been easy enough to use that home consumers could use it, 2) had high enough image quality, 3) had useable, 'real' depth, and 4) been reprogramable so that multiple video channels can be subscribed to. Since no solution has been able to meet all these requirements, the technology hasn't entered mass production. When it does, you can expect the prices to drop an order of magnitude as the laws of economic production and the markets take over. Until then, these are specialty items, reserved for scientific industries (healthcare, air traffic control, computer auotmated design, niche-advertising at amusement parks, etc).
That's a real difficult question. Regarding costs, I can pretty much guarantee that this thing isn't being mass produced yet... it's just now coming out of the prototype stage, and probably has alot of quality control issues that the engineers are working to resolve. However, going by competing technologies in this field, you can safely assume from the get go that it's *at least* $40,000 (the cost of a Perspecta monitor). More likely, it's being sold on a contract by contract basis, meaning that each contract ranges, depending upon the bundled in service agreement, warranty, and software applications. My suspicion is that, at the low end, it's being licensed around $40,000 for a year of warranty and with a simple video player. At the high end, contracts are probably being developed around $250,000 for a 3 year warranty, on-site service support, and an integrated surgical navigation or air-traffic control application. That's generally the industry average for this kind of equipment. It's not at the scale of an MRI scanner or a VR-CAVE ($1M each), but it's definately a cut above your typical gamer's station ($5K - $10K). My guess is that the average price for one of these things is around $100,000.
by keeping the 'beta' term, they avoid the problem of shipping a final product with flaws in it. the software industry has, somehow, managed to convince people that it's okay to sell products which regularly crash and have bugs in them. if the automotive industry or airline industry sold products that had the same types of problems as software, people would be screaming bloody murder. somehow, the software industry gets away with it though. the 'beta' signifier merely puts google's offerings in a more realistic development cycle, on par with other industries.
consider this: perhaps google isn't keeping their products in 'beta' testing overly long. rather, perhaps the rest of the software industry has adopted a poor practice of shipping software too early under the guise of a 'working product'. maybe google is just being honest about the state of their products, unlike the rest of the industry.