Here in Washington, DC, the same thing happened in mid-2001: it wasn't a dump, it was a veritable sh*tstorm. The market was *flooded* with thousands of ASP coders and wannabe SQL admins. Then The WTC disaster happened in September, which made the market deflate even faster. Lucky for me, the local Ruby Tuesday was still hiring waiters come October...
Taking inflation into account (read: USD is in free-fall ATM), we were all making absolutely silly amounts of money in the 90's thanks to the bubble (like 'will_die' said). So looking at your dot-com-bubble paycheck as anything other than a high-water mark in your career is an exercise in self loathing. Trust me, none of us are going to see that kind of money again unless there's another bubble to ride.
Anyway, if you go back and re-adjust your numbers for what IT commanded circa 1993 (along with what goods and services cost then), I think you might find a little more hope in your current salary. Or more succinctly: realSalary = bubbleSalary/hype. As you say, it's all relative.
The funny thing is that the subtext of the story practically pokes said counterculture in the eye with a pointy stick.
Don't get me wrong, I love that book and agree that it was influential. But having read it for the first time about a year ago, I was left with the notion that the whole work was as much about Heinlein's social commentary of the time, as it was about men from Mars that hail from an alien utopia. That commentary seems to extend both to both parts of the establishment/government, and hippie (and former beatnik?) culture clash.
That said, I hear that the story looses much in it's translation from the original Martian edition.
Interstellar dust? Rotten spoiled brats. Back in my day, we had to fuse hydrogen atoms ourselves, by hand!
All you whipper-snappers and your stable baryonic matter: you're spoiled rotten! When I was just a lad, all we had were muons, quarks and neutrinos and we liked it. Then some Mr. fancypants came along and invented the lepton, which was a big deal at the time.
That was my first thought as well. I think the tech is really better suited for just increasing the overall reliability of spacecraft electronics, since they have to be ridiculously hot/cold tolerant. Typically, it's not in the nature of aerospace guys to shake up an entire mode of engineering on a single discovery; so if anything, this stuff is going to be phased in nice and slow starting with everything staying the same except for the chip substrate (SiC instead of plain Si).
But in order for this to open the door for the entire craft to run at a higher temperature, you'd have to change a bunch of things. Obviously, most plastics are out of the question. Others, in this thread, have mentioned using ceramic component carriers - this may well be the case for chip packaging as well. I'd wager that you'd also have to use wire-wrap instead of solder, unless there's something else that has a suitable melting point and conductivity for welding components together (aluminum perhaps).
IIRC, the drive stacking technology that wound up in DOS 6.2, was acquired from another company prior to release. I believe that technology was available for DOS 5 from the original vendor.
Of course the fact that my latest computer doesn't even have a floppy drive, let alone ISA slots, reminds me of how long ago this all was...
I've often wondered why more parks don't bring on goat-herders to help manage this stuff - I've seen trial runs and some local news blips about testing it, but nothing permanent. It seems like once you get it down off the tree canopy, a smallish herd would be plenty to manage a rather sizable area.
I like to posit that Keanu Reeves is a fantastic actor, provided his character has no idea whats going on around him, see Bill and Ted, the original Matrix, and A Scanner Darkly, (possibly also the Lake House, but I'm not about to subject myself to that to find out.)
I agree completely: you're dead on about the clueless thing. But no slashdot conversation about Keanu Reeves is complete without mentioning Johnny Mnemonic.
Honestly, I think that one has the best and worst of what that man can do on film. It's a great example of how he is believably stupid and clueless to the benefit of direction: his character's only internal drive is to be free of his voluntary state of anmesia after all. And after halfway decent supporting performances (hey, they don't have to try too hard with a cast like this), he manages to ruin the climax of the film by attempting to act heroic. His delivery is so bad in the last moments of the film that it completely overshadows things that should utterly destroy our suspension of disbelief: like a computer-hacking dolphin in a fish-tank. Fortunately, the Gibsonian heroine at his side makes sure he doesn't have to do anything too clever up to that point, so it kinda works insofar as being close to the source material.
I have the same problem. While watching it, I kept expecting to have scenes like this:
Neo: I totally had this dream where I woke up in a bathtub full of snot, and my head had this gnarly plug hooked into it. Then I went down this awesome waterslide. It was like waterloo, only totally metal. Neo: [does air guitar]
Morpheus: That was no dream. The world as you understand it exists only as a massive simulation, designed and built by the machines, to deceive mankind while harnessing their body heat for energy. You were plugged into the matrix like the others, but we rescued you.
Neo: [Looks painfully confused]
Morpheus: [sighs] Up until now, you were a lot like that dude in that song "One" by Metallica.
I'd say that's the tip of the iceberg. Real-time video manipulation has all kinds of crazy implications for various impairments.
Being able to simulate various types of color-blindness, or color-shift the real world to assist the color-blind are two possibilities. You could also use edge enhancement for people that can't focus too well, brightness enhancement for people who can't see in moderate light, gamma correction for night-blindness, and maybe some kind of stylized "cell shading" for people who have trouble discerning shapes and depth cues (shadows, etc).
Now, add on some binocular optics (read: conventional glasses) and you can further push the envelope by compensating for astigmatism, lazy eye, and all the rest.
Also, a lot of CCDs can see in to the near-infrared. So IR-enhanced viewing is also a distinct possibility.
... to have my sarcasm detector checked. Well played.
"So we should all thank our friends in the Government, for helping [to] insure that competition in the marketplace does not create unfair competition."
Hey now, some businesses poured lots of their hard-earned money into the pockets of Lobbyists so that they could, in turn, make sure that their elected representative truly represents their voice. Hotels and dining in DC isn't cheap.
Besides, what's good for them, is good for their employees and unions, right?
What about dark matter, non-luminous dust, or a large number of small black holes?
The "void" cited in the article is a "hole" in the cosmic microwave background, and is not necessarily related to any lack of matter in a particular region of space.
The possibility that this may be related to a large vaccuum in the universe really isn't as obvious as it seems.
FWIW, I've seen house cats do this kind of patterned behavior as well. Typically it's when attempting to get food (rub on owner's leg, wait for can-opener, jump on counter, meow, food goes into dish...) even though it's arriving on schedule - a side-effect of Pavlovian conditioning perhaps?
TROY, N.Y., Aug. 14 (UPI) -- U.S. nanoscientists have developed an energy storage device that resembles a sheet of black paper and might power tomorrow's electronics. [...] Another key feature is the capability to use human blood or perspiration to help power the battery.
Imagine the implications for prosthetics, pacemakers and hearing aids; throw in your double-whammy insulin pump and blood glucose regulator/burner while you're at it. All that's needed are some man-made materials that are resistant to the highly-corrosive environment that is the human body, and we're all set.
Thank you for this delightfully sane post. Please write more often; slashdot needs this.
But, let me ask you guys this: sn't it just possible that the cold spot *is* related to the void...
I'd go as far as to say that they're right, and that the void *is* a positive indication that there is a big (mostly and unusually) empty spot out there.
While I'm not as deeply read as yourself in these matters (as your post strongly suggests), I've always been skeptical about the Big Bang as proposed, largely because matter in the universe is... well... lumpy. The obviousness of the world we live in, clinging to this sizable chunk of baryonic matter we call Earth, just seems to tell me that the true origin of things isn't going to be that simple, nor elegant.
Moreover, I find myself leaning more toward the concept of "mutliple, not so big bangs" being responsible for the observable universe.
So when I first read about this, I wasn't really suprised at all, since everything else is clustered in the Universe, from atoms all the way up to strings of galaxies. I think this lends weight to the argument that the CMB is radiation that originates from the excitation of matter as something close to what we observe now, which would explain it's "lumpyness" as well as the correlation cited in the article. Less matter nearby, less CMB.
"... and that the Big Bang is a paradigm in its death throws?"
I think we're going to be stuck with it for a long time, in one way or another.
If the current understanding of quantum mechanics is any indication of what to expect, the machinery of the universe may very well continue to be a mysterious thing, no matter how deep we dig. Or, it there could be a very "elegant" unified theory that exists, but only so within a number of dimensions well beyond any one person's comprehension. Either way, I think we're going to be stuck with progressively better, yet partially incomplete theories for the foreseeable future. So the "Big Bang" is going to endure since it's mostly right, plus it's easy to get your head around, even if it's going to be constantly proven as inaccurate.
It's going to take a long time, and something much, much better to supplant it before it'll completely go away as a good theory, or even as a teaching tool. Chemistry class still references the Bohr model, to help illustrate the relationship between electrons and the atomic nucleus; it's not 100% accurate anymore, but we still use it. On the other hand, I don't think "the four humors" comes up in biology class as anything more than a footnote.
Seriously. If a game console can do DVR and Tuner stuff, then just add a CableCard slot and the days of the proprietary cable-co. box are numbered. Microsoft, are you listening?
Then again, if they can manage to get the price-point down a tad, maybe they can just make an OEM deal with Comcast or Cox, and be done with it. It would have to be better than the POS boxes they're using now.
Quoth the GP: "Thermal Image [blogsforcompanies.com]"
Depth-map or not, I still stand by my sentiment; an inch can be a lot at re-entry speeds. Other slashdotters have noted that this is in a "colder" area of the heat shield during re-entry, so there's not much to worry about were it left alone. I'm doubtful that's a risk worth taking.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in Washington, DC, the same thing happened in mid-2001: it wasn't a dump, it was a veritable sh*tstorm. The market was *flooded* with thousands of ASP coders and wannabe SQL admins. Then The WTC disaster happened in September, which made the market deflate even faster. Lucky for me, the local Ruby Tuesday was still hiring waiters come October...
Taking inflation into account (read: USD is in free-fall ATM), we were all making absolutely silly amounts of money in the 90's thanks to the bubble (like 'will_die' said). So looking at your dot-com-bubble paycheck as anything other than a high-water mark in your career is an exercise in self loathing. Trust me, none of us are going to see that kind of money again unless there's another bubble to ride.
Anyway, if you go back and re-adjust your numbers for what IT commanded circa 1993 (along with what goods and services cost then), I think you might find a little more hope in your current salary. Or more succinctly: realSalary = bubbleSalary/hype. As you say, it's all relative.
Awesome idea. If the bean counters at your job use Excel 2007, you could wind up with an automatic $40k raise on top of that:
http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/09/24/2339203.shtml
Er... "loses" much. Way to blow the punchline there Pragma.
The funny thing is that the subtext of the story practically pokes said counterculture in the eye with a pointy stick.
Don't get me wrong, I love that book and agree that it was influential. But having read it for the first time about a year ago, I was left with the notion that the whole work was as much about Heinlein's social commentary of the time, as it was about men from Mars that hail from an alien utopia. That commentary seems to extend both to both parts of the establishment/government, and hippie (and former beatnik?) culture clash.
That said, I hear that the story looses much in it's translation from the original Martian edition.
Well, that was before they became a publicly held company.
All you whipper-snappers and your stable baryonic matter: you're spoiled rotten! When I was just a lad, all we had were muons, quarks and neutrinos and we liked it. Then some Mr. fancypants came along and invented the lepton, which was a big deal at the time.
That was my first thought as well. I think the tech is really better suited for just increasing the overall reliability of spacecraft electronics, since they have to be ridiculously hot/cold tolerant. Typically, it's not in the nature of aerospace guys to shake up an entire mode of engineering on a single discovery; so if anything, this stuff is going to be phased in nice and slow starting with everything staying the same except for the chip substrate (SiC instead of plain Si).
But in order for this to open the door for the entire craft to run at a higher temperature, you'd have to change a bunch of things. Obviously, most plastics are out of the question. Others, in this thread, have mentioned using ceramic component carriers - this may well be the case for chip packaging as well. I'd wager that you'd also have to use wire-wrap instead of solder, unless there's something else that has a suitable melting point and conductivity for welding components together (aluminum perhaps).
IIRC, the drive stacking technology that wound up in DOS 6.2, was acquired from another company prior to release. I believe that technology was available for DOS 5 from the original vendor.
Of course the fact that my latest computer doesn't even have a floppy drive, let alone ISA slots, reminds me of how long ago this all was...
Thank you for posting this.
I've often wondered why more parks don't bring on goat-herders to help manage this stuff - I've seen trial runs and some local news blips about testing it, but nothing permanent. It seems like once you get it down off the tree canopy, a smallish herd would be plenty to manage a rather sizable area.
You definitely need to listen to the intro on this song then:
m acy-hybrid.mp3
http://music.machinaesupremacy.com/machinae_supre
I'm still waiting for the potential hilarity when people start mashing up other movies Weaving has done, like "Transformers".
I agree completely: you're dead on about the clueless thing. But no slashdot conversation about Keanu Reeves is complete without mentioning Johnny Mnemonic.
Honestly, I think that one has the best and worst of what that man can do on film. It's a great example of how he is believably stupid and clueless to the benefit of direction: his character's only internal drive is to be free of his voluntary state of anmesia after all. And after halfway decent supporting performances (hey, they don't have to try too hard with a cast like this), he manages to ruin the climax of the film by attempting to act heroic. His delivery is so bad in the last moments of the film that it completely overshadows things that should utterly destroy our suspension of disbelief: like a computer-hacking dolphin in a fish-tank. Fortunately, the Gibsonian heroine at his side makes sure he doesn't have to do anything too clever up to that point, so it kinda works insofar as being close to the source material.
I have the same problem. While watching it, I kept expecting to have scenes like this:
Neo: I totally had this dream where I woke up in a bathtub full of snot, and my head had this gnarly plug hooked into it. Then I went down this awesome waterslide. It was like waterloo, only totally metal.
Neo: [does air guitar]
Morpheus: That was no dream. The world as you understand it exists only as a massive simulation, designed and built by the machines, to deceive mankind while harnessing their body heat for energy. You were plugged into the matrix like the others, but we rescued you.
Neo: [Looks painfully confused]
Morpheus: [sighs] Up until now, you were a lot like that dude in that song "One" by Metallica.
Neo: Excellent!
I'd say that's the tip of the iceberg. Real-time video manipulation has all kinds of crazy implications for various impairments.
Being able to simulate various types of color-blindness, or color-shift the real world to assist the color-blind are two possibilities. You could also use edge enhancement for people that can't focus too well, brightness enhancement for people who can't see in moderate light, gamma correction for night-blindness, and maybe some kind of stylized "cell shading" for people who have trouble discerning shapes and depth cues (shadows, etc).
Now, add on some binocular optics (read: conventional glasses) and you can further push the envelope by compensating for astigmatism, lazy eye, and all the rest.
Also, a lot of CCDs can see in to the near-infrared. So IR-enhanced viewing is also a distinct possibility.
[takes off goggles]
I know... Gimp-fu.
The summary was too long to bother... what is this story about anyway?
... to have my sarcasm detector checked. Well played.
:-)"
"So we should all thank our friends in the Government, for helping [to] insure that competition in the marketplace does not create unfair competition."
Hey now, some businesses poured lots of their hard-earned money into the pockets of Lobbyists so that they could, in turn, make sure that their elected representative truly represents their voice. Hotels and dining in DC isn't cheap.
Besides, what's good for them, is good for their employees and unions, right?
"Sometimes you can't tell spoof from reality.
Indeed!
Did you even RTFA?
What about dark matter, non-luminous dust, or a large number of small black holes?
The "void" cited in the article is a "hole" in the cosmic microwave background, and is not necessarily related to any lack of matter in a particular region of space.
The possibility that this may be related to a large vaccuum in the universe really isn't as obvious as it seems.
FWIW, I've seen house cats do this kind of patterned behavior as well. Typically it's when attempting to get food (rub on owner's leg, wait for can-opener, jump on counter, meow, food goes into dish...) even though it's arriving on schedule - a side-effect of Pavlovian conditioning perhaps?
Imagine the implications for prosthetics, pacemakers and hearing aids; throw in your double-whammy insulin pump and blood glucose regulator/burner while you're at it. All that's needed are some man-made materials that are resistant to the highly-corrosive environment that is the human body, and we're all set.
I thought SCO already switched from "UFIA" to "FUBR"?
Java: Brand Once, Market Everywhere.
I'd go as far as to say that they're right, and that the void *is* a positive indication that there is a big (mostly and unusually) empty spot out there.
While I'm not as deeply read as yourself in these matters (as your post strongly suggests), I've always been skeptical about the Big Bang as proposed, largely because matter in the universe is... well... lumpy. The obviousness of the world we live in, clinging to this sizable chunk of baryonic matter we call Earth, just seems to tell me that the true origin of things isn't going to be that simple, nor elegant.
Moreover, I find myself leaning more toward the concept of "mutliple, not so big bangs" being responsible for the observable universe.
So when I first read about this, I wasn't really suprised at all, since everything else is clustered in the Universe, from atoms all the way up to strings of galaxies. I think this lends weight to the argument that the CMB is radiation that originates from the excitation of matter as something close to what we observe now, which would explain it's "lumpyness" as well as the correlation cited in the article. Less matter nearby, less CMB.
I think we're going to be stuck with it for a long time, in one way or another.
If the current understanding of quantum mechanics is any indication of what to expect, the machinery of the universe may very well continue to be a mysterious thing, no matter how deep we dig. Or, it there could be a very "elegant" unified theory that exists, but only so within a number of dimensions well beyond any one person's comprehension. Either way, I think we're going to be stuck with progressively better, yet partially incomplete theories for the foreseeable future. So the "Big Bang" is going to endure since it's mostly right, plus it's easy to get your head around, even if it's going to be constantly proven as inaccurate.
It's going to take a long time, and something much, much better to supplant it before it'll completely go away as a good theory, or even as a teaching tool. Chemistry class still references the Bohr model, to help illustrate the relationship between electrons and the atomic nucleus; it's not 100% accurate anymore, but we still use it. On the other hand, I don't think "the four humors" comes up in biology class as anything more than a footnote.
... CableCard support.
Seriously. If a game console can do DVR and Tuner stuff, then just add a CableCard slot and the days of the proprietary cable-co. box are numbered. Microsoft, are you listening?
Then again, if they can manage to get the price-point down a tad, maybe they can just make an OEM deal with Comcast or Cox, and be done with it. It would have to be better than the POS boxes they're using now.
Get your coat. It's time to go to the hospital.
Quoth the GP: "Thermal Image [blogsforcompanies.com]"
Depth-map or not, I still stand by my sentiment; an inch can be a lot at re-entry speeds. Other slashdotters have noted that this is in a "colder" area of the heat shield during re-entry, so there's not much to worry about were it left alone. I'm doubtful that's a risk worth taking.