Whenever I shop online, I will use a virtual/throwaway number (from citibank, in particular). The virtual number is different than the regular card number, expires in one month and (AFAIK) only allows one charge; any further ones get refused. I saw a demonstration of this restriction early on when I began using the feature, I made a mistake--generated three different virtual numbers but sent the same one to three different merchants I ordered from. The first one was accepted and the other two got refused.
I'm wondering now,,,, (with this particular card issuer/feature) if any merchant would have a way to put a second charge on?...
~
All these people bitching about "kids these days don't want to learn math" need to get a clue: what got me [and a lot of other students] off that career track after getting an associates was the huge amount of outsourcing being done.
All the jobs in the want ads that I saw called for "senior-level" people with 5-7 years of enterprise experience, and outsourcing was marching steadily onward, to places even cheaper than India.
Why bother with slogging through school racking up debt when there's no jobs?
~
Yeah, fat genes. Good one. There is no such thing. If there were such a thing, we could breed a race of superfat humans who can exercise constantly and still gain weight. Second law, eat your heart out!...
...I'm sorry to hear that you hate real cities. I know that culture and the arts can be a pain in the ass and are best eradicated. And I hate having to see all those interesting people all over the place. Man, I wish I could move back to Midwest City so I could drive everywhere and never interact with anybody....
Firstly you need to keep in mind the fact that different people desire different surroundings, and that the sort of people who would be very happy living in a remote location would be horribly unhappy forced to live in a city. There is a matter of personal choice here, and although you may wish to assign blame for all the world's problems on people who don't think like you, that doesn't make it true.
Secondly there are lots of people who view big cities with a fair amount of disdain.
When they think of "big city arts" they think of things like murder, assault, muggings and auto theft.
When they think of big-city culture they think of street gangs, and news images of the anarchic mess of New Orleans as the waters rose and the police fled.
~
This incident generated a LOT of talk on many of the various athletic forums and newsgroups. Especially those activities like bicycling, where you have the potential capacity to carry a lot more than two liters of water.
Most people who responded knew lots of facts of their performance and they knew lots of OTHER risks, but not very many seemed to be aware that drinking two liters of water [literally] at a sitting could kill a person.
This is particularly sobering when you realize that the largest Camelback pack has a 100-oz bladder (3 liters), and especially sobering to me because when I go out on long rides, I will drink TWO of those bladders....
~
In one of William Poundstone's Big Secrets books, he notes in a chapter on fast-food that the CEO of a major US chain (Burger King, IIRC) once said in an interview that the "secret" to their fries was that after the potatoes were cut, they were sprayed with a sugar-water solution before freezing.
In the fryer the sugar quickly carmelizes and turns crisp, while the inside is still left soft and white. This CEO said he did not know for certain that every other fast-food chain did it that way, but that was the only way they'd ever found that worked right.
~
Is there a good phot of this anywhere, with a helpful set of outlines or what? I am seeing the news article photo, and yet somehow I see a bunch of craggy areas, a bunch of brown areas, a bunch of snow.
Oh the horror!!!
Which way is anything here?
Somebody please draw a diagram on this image which indicates 1) the north pole, or the direction it is in, 2) the island, 3) the shelf, and 4) the direction of said shelf's geologically-sudden departure....
~
Well, okay:
--if adding an electric motor to a petroleum-fuelled vehicle can "boost" the vehicle's overall efficiency, then that would have to mean that overall, the electric motor+batteries would need to be more-efficient overall than the petroleum engine, right? Because if you add a worse-efficiency engine, then that would only drag the vehicle's overall efficiency down. There is nothing magical that happens when you combine a petroleum and an electric engine into the same vehicle; both engine systems keep their relative efficiencies.
I compared two roughly-equivalent engines (one gasoline and one electric) and found that overall, the electric had NOT ONLY a much-higher initial purchase cost, but also had a significantly higher cost-per-mile. I do not see any reason that the results would change if I had compared small engines on a bicycle, or if I had compared large engines on a car, or massive engines in a container ship. If you know of an explanation as to why the results would invert, please say so, and state at which point in engine size this would happen.
Also, if you can find any electric car that has a operating cost (charging+battery replacements) that is lower per-mile than any comparablby-sized petroleum-fuelled car, I'd love to see the info it.
Lastly I note--that big fleet operators (-you know, small-fry outfits like the US Postal Service, DHL, United Parcel Service and FedEx-) still use petroleum-fuelled vehicles. These companies know very accurately what their delivery vehicles' costs-per-mile are, and they are always on the lookout for anything to lower these costs. If electric (or even "half-electric") vehicles were more efficient overall, I would *bet* that these companies would have moved to them, or would be making plans to do so. Are they? I haven't heard anything to that end.
If you are one for conspiracy theories you can have a grand old time debating who is keeping electric vehicles "down"--but the simple fact is that when you start comparing dollars and cents, at this point in time gasoline engines are still cheaper to operate than electrics--and the only definite advantage that hybrids have been shown to offer is that (previously) they could game the EPA's M.P.G. rating system.
~
Yea, well,,, just keep sucking and I promise I'll shave next time.
-Bike weighs about 30 lbs, if I was in -good- shape I'd probably still weigh 220 lbs. Even at 220 lbs most cycling clothes would not fit me (most seem to be made for 150-lb featherweights).
Just stay in the shallow end of the gene pool and you should be okay.;)
~
...What you need to realize is that cost, weight, energy usage, etc. don't all scale at the same rate. Adding a $200, 10 lb. motor to a $200, 20 lb. bike represents a 100% increase in cost and a 50% increase in weight. Adding a $2000, 300 lb. hybrid system to a $20000, 3000 lb. car represents a 10% increase in cost and a 10% increase in weight. See the difference?...
-No, I do not.
Firstly--the bicycle (unmotored) and rider probably weigh 275 lbs together, and the engine kits weigh perhaps 10-20 lbs... And the power outputs of these engines was not even very equivalent; the gasoline engine produces about 800+ watts normally and can peak at over 1200 watts. The electric setup likely doesn't produce over 600, and most of the time runs at less than 400 watts.
The electric setups DO accellerate better, but then,,, they cost five times as much per-mile. As far as a "hybrid" goes, it would be more energy-efficnent to have a car with two gasoline engines {one big and one small} and switch the big one on and off accordingly.
Secondly, what I see is that if an electric motor system has a higher cost-per-mile to operate than a gasoline engine, then you're not going to lower a gasoline-engine vehicle's cost-per-mile by adding an an electric motor--especially if the only way the battery is ever charged is off the gasoline engine. Part of the time the electric motor will run, but there is a higher cost per mile when that happens, as well as conversion losses of gasoline energy to electrical energy. Others have already pointed out that there have already been developed gasoline-only cars that could produce comparable results.
If electric drive systems really are more efficient overall, then it should be possible to demonstrate that they have a lower total-cost-per-mile than comparable internal cumbustion engine setups. The observation that "the gas engine doesn't even run part of the time" isn't enough. That's the problem I saw with most of the [bicycle] people who are in love with the electric motor setups--they rave about how "their motor doesn't produce any smog" and conveniently never bother to figure out the actual total costs, and when you ask for estimates they conveniently leave out the cost of replacing the batteries, which is the biggest cost of running an electric vehicle.
~
When gasoline hit $3/gal in the US, I decided to buy a motor kit for a bicycle (that I already had).
I had decided to get a 4-cycle gasoline engine kit, as I presumed that the electrics wouldn't have the range I desired,,, but I kept reading where electric-owners claimed that although the electrics were more expensive to buy, they polluted less and cost less to operate over the long run.
...the question of "environmental friendliness" is difficult as well.
Seeing this result, I find it tough to believe that you can currently "improve" a gasoline engine by making it "a little bit electric".
~
Why not just order them online, and know what you're getting?
A 50-ct spindle pack costs about 25 cents per disk (plus shipping) as I've seen it.
...In any case, I have had better luck with the consistency of Taiyo Yudens than any other brand of DVD+R....
Taiyos do work well, but then--have you ever try Mitsui golds?
At roughly a dollar a disk for a 50-pack spindle, not many people have. The last tests I was (a year or so ago) MAM-A still edged out Taiyo in long-term reliability. ~5 years back there used to be issues with early CD-R drives not burning them well, but that isn't a problem with current hardware.
And yes, I do need to order them online, noplace local carries disks so expensive.
~
What's interesting is how (in the US)--the easiest way to correlate how much violent crime an area has is not by how many citizens own firearms, but by how many citizens collect welfare payments. In fact, a lot of common social problems seem to follow welfare recipients: unwed births, drug and alcohol addition, petty crime, auto theft, assault, rape, and so on. Has the NAACP ever tried to outlaw welfare programs?
Also we note,,, -that the World Bank has extended massive amounts of money to various third-world shit holes, and many are still shit holes, 30+ years later. Rampant crime and corruption were the original reason for the loans--and yet those things still occur....
Could it be that giving money to people who haven't earned it is not the wisest course of action?
~
I use Virgin too. It was my understanding that you were required to buy at least $15 of minutes every three months to keep the phone activated.
I rarely use the phone, so my costs stay pretty small. The phones aren't that great, but they do well enough for talking and texting, and voicemail is included. The cheaper phones SELL for ~$35 at Wal-Mart, and Virgin will switch your old phone number to a new phone in 24 hours for free. Considering that, the phones are practically disposeable.
(-Matter of fact, I have a Kyrocera K-10 phone about eight months old now, that cost me $32 at a local Wal-Mart. Recently it seemed as though the battery wasn't holding a charge--so I looked up online how much a new battery would cost. A new battery alone, bought online, would cost $40 + shipping...-)
Another feature about them I like is that I have mine linked to one of my credit cards, so that I never have to "buy" minutes or phone cards. If you sign up for it, they will automatically re-charge you $20 of time whenever you run down to 5 minutes of time, or at the end of the 3-month period. So as long as that credit card is good, you won't ever "run out" of minutes.
At least one drawback I have seen mentioned is that if you are out of your home calling area, they don't guarantee that you'll be able to access your voice mail. I drove from the midwest US across several of the western states however and I did not have this problem (-where I could get a signal of course-).
~
The common particleboard housing materials in broad use today (in the USA) are decreasing rapidly in quality to the point that they'll soon need to be glued anyway.
I think a far more important question here is why are we (at least in the US) building houses much the same as we did 300 years ago?
Why bother with cutting a tree up into little pieces, and then paying some people to nail the pieces back together in the shape of a house.
There have been a number of more-efficient means to build houses found in the last 50 years alone--blown foam domes are probably the ultimate in simplicity, but there are lots of various prefab methods,,, -but oddly enough, most places (at least in the US) have housing codes banning them.
~
With all due respect--I think the main qualification that US employers are looking for is someone on the masters' level with ten years experience, who is willing to work for minimum wage and no benefits.
My take on it: watch the military, and then watch the military gut the B1B program.
Once there are so few US engineers that the military is forced to pay six-digit re-enlistment bonuses, congress is going to get the shit out of their ears (for a moment) and start slashing.
~
I can't find it because I dunno what username I was loggin in with at the time--but-
In one of the other stories on this (here on/.) I posted a price estimate of $5-$7 for each OLED key. I think at that time, I said I'd be surprised if they could get it out for under $500. I expected it to be further towards $700.
OLEDs have dropped in price somewhat but not that much, and only for bulk production (which is cell-phone sized displays). I'll stay with my original estimates.
---------------
I think it has its uses, but not as a general-use, full-size keyboard. It'll be fabulously expensive, and people who use keyboards a lot don't need what it can do anyway.
Maybe as a extra special-function keypad, with 12-16-20 keys on it for special programs. For multilanguage support it would work nicely--except that very few people need that on a regular basis, and for those things that do (such as airport info kiosks) we have fairly-cheap touch screens already for this sort of thing.
~
... To ensure job security, students must learn business, communication and interpersonal skills, Vardi recommended. The personal touch will become as important as technological expertise, he said....
So,,, what he's really saying is, , , -that a Computer Science degree is still worth a lot in the job market--but you should also have a MBA, a degree in English and a degree in Business Communications as well.
All this from a "business alliance"? Wow, I'd have never expected that....
~
... I will say this though: some of the folks that came through were clearly very smart, but just lacked the experience we were looking for. We needed somebody that could step in and contribute right away, and we didn't have any budget for hiring junior level people and grooming them. That would
have been a good thing to do, if we could have gotten the money approved. But that issue is somewhat orthogonal to the original point anyway...
--------------
-Is it?
It used to be (in the US) that you could find people with the experience--but guess what? US companies largely stopped hiring US workers, and decided to outsource to foreign nations instead. So who is getting experience now? Not US entry-level IT workers. Unless you want to count doing 10-key data entry as "IT work".
Like it or not--US companies gave the golden goose to India--and US companies are going to be stuck dealing with Indians for a long time.
US companies (collectively) are going to have to start throwing money around and actually hiring again if they want US students to take IT majors at anywhere near the rates like they used to.
~
How good the tech market is depends much on where you are located. In the midwest US for example, it's still a shambles. The only places still saying "there's lots of opportunity" are the schools that want you to pay them to learn this stuff.
If you lived near me, I'd tell you not to bother with continuing school at all for a tech career. As I've seen it, what you know (or how well you do in school) doesn't matter anywhere near as much as WHO you know. If you know someone high up in a BIG company who can push your resume, then go for some schooling. If you don't have anyone like that but you have your heart set on a tech career anyway, then mod games (or write whatever it is you like) for fun and post them online, sell iPods at Best Buy and try to bullshit your way into a job you'll like. You'll have more fun than the people cracking books in college, you'll have about a good a chance of landing a job as most of them do, you might even get that job faster than they do and the entire attempt will cost you a lot less money.
There once was a time when going to school in some capacity would make it pretty easy to find some kind of tech job, but those days are gone for most of the US. Unless you get a masters' in math, then most of the "tech" jobs you find will want you to do 10-key entry, and it's stupid to ruin your hands for what is often only a part-time minimum/wage position.
~
A few years back there was a newspaper article about (my) local airport: St Louis International--and how the pay phones were vanishing. With the arrival of cheap cellphones, the once-numerous pay phones were going mostly unused. Over a period of two years, they had removed almost 95% of the phones, and had plans to keep removing phones, because the revenues they were seeing were not covering the lease costs.
The airport management said that this wouldn't be a problem except that it was the revenue from the pay phones that used to pay for internal maintenance--that is, the phones paid the janitors. Most (US) airports were managed this way, and they didn't have anything else to shift funding from to allow for this loss. All the other fee structures they charged were to other companies, that were only for use related to what those companies did. The terms of these charges are set in contracts that cannot usually be easily, or immediately, changed.
Charging for 802.x was assumed to be the next internal maintenance income stream--but now, we see that it is not so.
....So then,,, (looking around),,, what else can they charge travelers for?....
~
Slashdot Mirror
"It's Our Computer, You're Only Using It">
~
Whenever I shop online, I will use a virtual/throwaway number (from citibank, in particular). The virtual number is different than the regular card number, expires in one month and (AFAIK) only allows one charge; any further ones get refused. I saw a demonstration of this restriction early on when I began using the feature, I made a mistake--generated three different virtual numbers but sent the same one to three different merchants I ordered from. The first one was accepted and the other two got refused.
I'm wondering now,,,, (with this particular card issuer/feature) if any merchant would have a way to put a second charge on?...
~
So does this mean that Jobs also supports selling software with no anti-copying protections?.... Or is that different somehow?
{It's like comparing Apples and oranges. As in "orange you glad we're fighting for your music rights?"....}
~
All these people bitching about "kids these days don't want to learn math" need to get a clue: what got me [and a lot of other students] off that career track after getting an associates was the huge amount of outsourcing being done.
All the jobs in the want ads that I saw called for "senior-level" people with 5-7 years of enterprise experience, and outsourcing was marching steadily onward, to places even cheaper than India.
Why bother with slogging through school racking up debt when there's no jobs?
~
Here's one link-
http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2001-06/dr
Here's another-
http://www.hhmi.org/genesweshare/d130.html
OMG! Google-osity:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=obesity+gene
Firstly you need to keep in mind the fact that different people desire different surroundings, and that the sort of people who would be very happy living in a remote location would be horribly unhappy forced to live in a city. There is a matter of personal choice here, and although you may wish to assign blame for all the world's problems on people who don't think like you, that doesn't make it true.
Secondly there are lots of people who view big cities with a fair amount of disdain.
When they think of "big city arts" they think of things like murder, assault, muggings and auto theft.
When they think of big-city culture they think of street gangs, and news images of the anarchic mess of New Orleans as the waters rose and the police fled.
~
This incident generated a LOT of talk on many of the various athletic forums and newsgroups. Especially those activities like bicycling, where you have the potential capacity to carry a lot more than two liters of water.
Most people who responded knew lots of facts of their performance and they knew lots of OTHER risks, but not very many seemed to be aware that drinking two liters of water [literally] at a sitting could kill a person.
This is particularly sobering when you realize that the largest Camelback pack has a 100-oz bladder (3 liters), and especially sobering to me because when I go out on long rides, I will drink TWO of those bladders....
~
If I can't get the crack printed as a Perl script on a T-shirt, I ain't interested.
~
What's wrong with "security through obscurity" and closed-source code?
After all, they wouldn't try to make a bad product (or a product that does things you don't like), would they?
~
In one of William Poundstone's Big Secrets books, he notes in a chapter on fast-food that the CEO of a major US chain (Burger King, IIRC) once said in an interview that the "secret" to their fries was that after the potatoes were cut, they were sprayed with a sugar-water solution before freezing.
In the fryer the sugar quickly carmelizes and turns crisp, while the inside is still left soft and white. This CEO said he did not know for certain that every other fast-food chain did it that way, but that was the only way they'd ever found that worked right.
~
Is there a good phot of this anywhere, with a helpful set of outlines or what? I am seeing the news article photo, and yet somehow I see a bunch of craggy areas, a bunch of brown areas, a bunch of snow.
Oh the horror!!!
Which way is anything here?
Somebody please draw a diagram on this image which indicates 1) the north pole, or the direction it is in, 2) the island, 3) the shelf, and 4) the direction of said shelf's geologically-sudden departure....
~
Well, okay:
--if adding an electric motor to a petroleum-fuelled vehicle can "boost" the vehicle's overall efficiency, then that would have to mean that overall, the electric motor+batteries would need to be more-efficient overall than the petroleum engine, right? Because if you add a worse-efficiency engine, then that would only drag the vehicle's overall efficiency down. There is nothing magical that happens when you combine a petroleum and an electric engine into the same vehicle; both engine systems keep their relative efficiencies.
I compared two roughly-equivalent engines (one gasoline and one electric) and found that overall, the electric had NOT ONLY a much-higher initial purchase cost, but also had a significantly higher cost-per-mile. I do not see any reason that the results would change if I had compared small engines on a bicycle, or if I had compared large engines on a car, or massive engines in a container ship. If you know of an explanation as to why the results would invert, please say so, and state at which point in engine size this would happen.
Also, if you can find any electric car that has a operating cost (charging+battery replacements) that is lower per-mile than any comparablby-sized petroleum-fuelled car, I'd love to see the info it.
Lastly I note--that big fleet operators (-you know, small-fry outfits like the US Postal Service, DHL, United Parcel Service and FedEx-) still use petroleum-fuelled vehicles. These companies know very accurately what their delivery vehicles' costs-per-mile are, and they are always on the lookout for anything to lower these costs. If electric (or even "half-electric") vehicles were more efficient overall, I would *bet* that these companies would have moved to them, or would be making plans to do so. Are they? I haven't heard anything to that end.
If you are one for conspiracy theories you can have a grand old time debating who is keeping electric vehicles "down"--but the simple fact is that when you start comparing dollars and cents, at this point in time gasoline engines are still cheaper to operate than electrics--and the only definite advantage that hybrids have been shown to offer is that (previously) they could game the EPA's M.P.G. rating system.
~
-Bike weighs about 30 lbs, if I was in -good- shape I'd probably still weigh 220 lbs. Even at 220 lbs most cycling clothes would not fit me (most seem to be made for 150-lb featherweights).
Just stay in the shallow end of the gene pool and you should be okay.
~
Firstly--the bicycle (unmotored) and rider probably weigh 275 lbs together, and the engine kits weigh perhaps 10-20 lbs... And the power outputs of these engines was not even very equivalent; the gasoline engine produces about 800+ watts normally and can peak at over 1200 watts. The electric setup likely doesn't produce over 600, and most of the time runs at less than 400 watts.
The electric setups DO accellerate better, but then,,, they cost five times as much per-mile. As far as a "hybrid" goes, it would be more energy-efficnent to have a car with two gasoline engines {one big and one small} and switch the big one on and off accordingly.
Secondly, what I see is that if an electric motor system has a higher cost-per-mile to operate than a gasoline engine, then you're not going to lower a gasoline-engine vehicle's cost-per-mile by adding an an electric motor--especially if the only way the battery is ever charged is off the gasoline engine. Part of the time the electric motor will run, but there is a higher cost per mile when that happens, as well as conversion losses of gasoline energy to electrical energy. Others have already pointed out that there have already been developed gasoline-only cars that could produce comparable results.
If electric drive systems really are more efficient overall, then it should be possible to demonstrate that they have a lower total-cost-per-mile than comparable internal cumbustion engine setups. The observation that "the gas engine doesn't even run part of the time" isn't enough. That's the problem I saw with most of the [bicycle] people who are in love with the electric motor setups--they rave about how "their motor doesn't produce any smog" and conveniently never bother to figure out the actual total costs, and when you ask for estimates they conveniently leave out the cost of replacing the batteries, which is the biggest cost of running an electric vehicle.
~
When gasoline hit $3/gal in the US, I decided to buy a motor kit for a bicycle (that I already had).
i nanities/recumbent/moto_bike_page/episode005/episo de005.html
...the question of "environmental friendliness" is difficult as well.
I had decided to get a 4-cycle gasoline engine kit, as I presumed that the electrics wouldn't have the range I desired,,, but I kept reading where electric-owners claimed that although the electrics were more expensive to buy, they polluted less and cost less to operate over the long run.
When I compared cost-per-mile figures for one of the best electric kits on the market, I found that the cost-per-mile was between five and ten times higher than a comparable-power 4-cycle gasoline engine:
http://www.norcom2000.com/users/dcimper/assorted/
Seeing this result, I find it tough to believe that you can currently "improve" a gasoline engine by making it "a little bit electric".
~
A 50-ct spindle pack costs about 25 cents per disk (plus shipping) as I've seen it.
Taiyos do work well, but then--have you ever try Mitsui golds?
At roughly a dollar a disk for a 50-pack spindle, not many people have. The last tests I was (a year or so ago) MAM-A still edged out Taiyo in long-term reliability. ~5 years back there used to be issues with early CD-R drives not burning them well, but that isn't a problem with current hardware.
And yes, I do need to order them online, noplace local carries disks so expensive.
~
What's interesting is how (in the US)--the easiest way to correlate how much violent crime an area has is not by how many citizens own firearms, but by how many citizens collect welfare payments. In fact, a lot of common social problems seem to follow welfare recipients: unwed births, drug and alcohol addition, petty crime, auto theft, assault, rape, and so on. Has the NAACP ever tried to outlaw welfare programs?
Also we note,,, -that the World Bank has extended massive amounts of money to various third-world shit holes, and many are still shit holes, 30+ years later. Rampant crime and corruption were the original reason for the loans--and yet those things still occur....
Could it be that giving money to people who haven't earned it is not the wisest course of action?
~
I use Virgin too. It was my understanding that you were required to buy at least $15 of minutes every three months to keep the phone activated.
I rarely use the phone, so my costs stay pretty small. The phones aren't that great, but they do well enough for talking and texting, and voicemail is included. The cheaper phones SELL for ~$35 at Wal-Mart, and Virgin will switch your old phone number to a new phone in 24 hours for free. Considering that, the phones are practically disposeable.
(-Matter of fact, I have a Kyrocera K-10 phone about eight months old now, that cost me $32 at a local Wal-Mart. Recently it seemed as though the battery wasn't holding a charge--so I looked up online how much a new battery would cost. A new battery alone, bought online, would cost $40 + shipping...-)
Another feature about them I like is that I have mine linked to one of my credit cards, so that I never have to "buy" minutes or phone cards. If you sign up for it, they will automatically re-charge you $20 of time whenever you run down to 5 minutes of time, or at the end of the 3-month period. So as long as that credit card is good, you won't ever "run out" of minutes.
At least one drawback I have seen mentioned is that if you are out of your home calling area, they don't guarantee that you'll be able to access your voice mail. I drove from the midwest US across several of the western states however and I did not have this problem (-where I could get a signal of course-). ~
My geek bicycle is vindicated: http://www.cyclegenius.com/ltx.html
-------
(-not that I had much doubt, but anyway-)
~
The common particleboard housing materials in broad use today (in the USA) are decreasing rapidly in quality to the point that they'll soon need to be glued anyway.
I think a far more important question here is why are we (at least in the US) building houses much the same as we did 300 years ago?
Why bother with cutting a tree up into little pieces, and then paying some people to nail the pieces back together in the shape of a house.
There have been a number of more-efficient means to build houses found in the last 50 years alone--blown foam domes are probably the ultimate in simplicity, but there are lots of various prefab methods,,, -but oddly enough, most places (at least in the US) have housing codes banning them.
~
With all due respect--I think the main qualification that US employers are looking for is someone on the masters' level with ten years experience, who is willing to work for minimum wage and no benefits.
My take on it: watch the military, and then watch the military gut the B1B program.
Once there are so few US engineers that the military is forced to pay six-digit re-enlistment bonuses, congress is going to get the shit out of their ears (for a moment) and start slashing.
~
I can't find it because I dunno what username I was loggin in with at the time--but-
/.) I posted a price estimate of $5-$7 for each OLED key. I think at that time, I said I'd be surprised if they could get it out for under $500. I expected it to be further towards $700.
In one of the other stories on this (here on
OLEDs have dropped in price somewhat but not that much, and only for bulk production (which is cell-phone sized displays). I'll stay with my original estimates.
---------------
I think it has its uses, but not as a general-use, full-size keyboard. It'll be fabulously expensive, and people who use keyboards a lot don't need what it can do anyway.
Maybe as a extra special-function keypad, with 12-16-20 keys on it for special programs. For multilanguage support it would work nicely--except that very few people need that on a regular basis, and for those things that do (such as airport info kiosks) we have fairly-cheap touch screens already for this sort of thing.
~
All this from a "business alliance"? Wow, I'd have never expected that....
~
... I will say this though: some of the folks that came through were clearly very smart, but just lacked the experience we were looking for. We needed somebody that could step in and contribute right away, and we didn't have any budget for hiring junior level people and grooming them. That would have been a good thing to do, if we could have gotten the money approved. But that issue is somewhat orthogonal to the original point anyway...
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-Is it?
It used to be (in the US) that you could find people with the experience--but guess what? US companies largely stopped hiring US workers, and decided to outsource to foreign nations instead. So who is getting experience now? Not US entry-level IT workers. Unless you want to count doing 10-key data entry as "IT work".
Like it or not--US companies gave the golden goose to India--and US companies are going to be stuck dealing with Indians for a long time.
US companies (collectively) are going to have to start throwing money around and actually hiring again if they want US students to take IT majors at anywhere near the rates like they used to.
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How good the tech market is depends much on where you are located.
In the midwest US for example, it's still a shambles. The only places still saying "there's lots of opportunity" are the schools that want you to pay them to learn this stuff.
If you lived near me, I'd tell you not to bother with continuing school at all for a tech career. As I've seen it, what you know (or how well you do in school) doesn't matter anywhere near as much as WHO you know. If you know someone high up in a BIG company who can push your resume, then go for some schooling. If you don't have anyone like that but you have your heart set on a tech career anyway, then mod games (or write whatever it is you like) for fun and post them online, sell iPods at Best Buy and try to bullshit your way into a job you'll like. You'll have more fun than the people cracking books in college, you'll have about a good a chance of landing a job as most of them do, you might even get that job faster than they do and the entire attempt will cost you a lot less money.
There once was a time when going to school in some capacity would make it pretty easy to find some kind of tech job, but those days are gone for most of the US. Unless you get a masters' in math, then most of the "tech" jobs you find will want you to do 10-key entry, and it's stupid to ruin your hands for what is often only a part-time minimum/wage position.
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A few years back there was a newspaper article about (my) local airport: St Louis International--and how the pay phones were vanishing. With the arrival of cheap cellphones, the once-numerous pay phones were going mostly unused. Over a period of two years, they had removed almost 95% of the phones, and had plans to keep removing phones, because the revenues they were seeing were not covering the lease costs.
The airport management said that this wouldn't be a problem except that it was the revenue from the pay phones that used to pay for internal maintenance--that is, the phones paid the janitors. Most (US) airports were managed this way, and they didn't have anything else to shift funding from to allow for this loss. All the other fee structures they charged were to other companies, that were only for use related to what those companies did. The terms of these charges are set in contracts that cannot usually be easily, or immediately, changed.
Charging for 802.x was assumed to be the next internal maintenance income stream--but now, we see that it is not so.
....So then,,, (looking around),,, what else can they charge travelers for?....
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