Are you suggesting that employers don't do plenty to snoop on a prospective employee's health (and that of his family)? Or, to hound out people with a sick child who run up the group plan costs? Yes, it's illegal. And it happens every single day in this country.
Demanding US workers in the deal might mean more 'trained and skilled'. Many, many jobs are looking for "3 years this, 5 years that, plus the degree", and uninterested in growing in-house talent. Employers don't do that, since workers aren't loyal anymore, because employers aren't loyal, and so the cycle goes. A demand for US IT workers might mean more companies willing to hire a fresh face and do more training.
With the layoffs out there there are *plenty* of IT people who will work for $30k or $35k if you won't. Maybe not in California or New York. But, if work could be outsourced (badly) to India, it can be outsourced (with better oversight) to Sioux City or Tuscaloosa. $35k, plus a part-time-working spouse, means you can afford a $100k house (which is perfectly believable in most of the country), pay off reasonable student loans, and eat. People will take that. Plus, you're working indoors in a nice office, not busting your back in the cold.
Yeah, it's Walmart wages. There are people lining up for those jobs, too.
I have Kinesis Essential keyboards at work and home. Mapped Dvorak (yes, I am a geek). I have to agree with the annoying Esc chicklet. I eventually swapped it for CapsLock. Really, how damned often do I need CapsLock? And, that's in a very handy spot. I've done that swap on most computers I use, now.
I'm going to agree with that. I had programmed in an imperative to mildly GOSUBby way in various microcomputer BASICs, Pascals, and standard Cs since pre-Kindergarten. However, one of the best college classes I had was the one where we were given a 6800 (later classes it was an 68HC11) on a board, with a few external circuits, and we learned every single op-code. Then, I knew what a computer (and a compiler) was doing.
They'll have plenty of time to learn paradigms. Make them appreciate what those paradigms actually accomplish.
At least when I took CS (a decade ago) at a big middling midwest state school, there were very few US-born females. Classes tended to be about 2/5s US-born males (in-state), 2/5s foreign men (Asia, India, South America), and about 1/5 foreign women. By senior year, US-born females were one-per-class at most.
Is there a general slowdown in foreign attendance? Is there something sending fewer foreign females? Economic slowdown meaning fewer women are get the chance? Foreign universities getting more female-friendly? (I know Korean women who said they'd never get an academic job back home). Are there other degree programs attracting foreign females?
The real beauty (okay, there are several) in the air-car is in its relation to intermittent sources of energy.
That is, compressed air is a pretty reasonable storage mechanism for solar or wind energy. Also, for excess grid energy at night, when we ramp down some baseload power generators. When the wind goes down, you stop compressing as much. Comes up, compress some more. As long as you have enough wind over enough time, it averages out. Beautiful.
The dream of the battery-electric car is that the owners will plug in at night to recharge their batteries. A home with an air compressor, where an unfilled air tank is permanently mounted, and charges, based upon pricing signals from the power company, would be even better.
Plus, the larger on-the-road compressed vendors (gas stations) would also be getting compress/no-compress signals from the power company. This ability for a major consumer to follow the load, near instantly, should make electrical engineers giddy.
30,000 feet gives you a lot of horizon and unobstructed path.
I have a friend who launches amateur weather balloons that get up to over 100,000 feet. We track them by a GPS and a 300mW ham radio data transmitter. At 300mW and 100,000 feet, we're regularly lighting up every repeater within 400 to 500 miles. A cell phone can run at 1 or 2 watts, depending on the band.
Obviously, it does work, to a fashion (9/11), but the system will not handle very many of those calls at all.
I'm wondering if the vaporware of cars like the Volt and other plug-ins are starting to eat at the sales of current cars. I can think of a few well-off lefty people (yes, a tweed jacket wearing university dean among them) who used to be new-every-two people. But, now, they're staying tight in their 1st-gen Priuses, waiting for the next... something. CNG? Fuel-cell? Volt? Who knows.
Everybody is starting to sense "the gasoline car has to go". All the automakers are working to get to the next option, and trying to assure the public that it's right around the corner if they just keep getting tax breaks and government loans. But it isn't, unfortunately.
One could hope that Apple might expand a little from the MacbookAir.
A lot of its compromise are exactly the compromises I've always preferred. Over the years, I've had old Powerbook Duos, Toshiba Porteges, Dell "X" series, and now, a couple of generations of IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad "X" series. I keep coming back to 12" screen, one-spindle laptops. They're perfect, especially since WiFi.
But, the MBAir is too far. Give me even two USB ports and a docking port, and it might very well be my next laptop. Apple were the kings of Docking back in the Duo days. It's still a good idea.
My thought is that, just maybe, Apple should consider a license of Mac OS for Virtualizations. Pick one platform... VMWare, xVM, whatever.
This would solve the "but there are a billion network cards and a billion video cards out there" argument. Inside the VM, there is only the one configuration.
Sure, it wouldn't be the world's speediest thing. But, it would get a lot of people thinking about Mac OS part-time. Some of us Linux people who have a Windows window in the corner (when absolutely necessary) would ditch it most of the time for a legit copy of Mac. If I had to run a shrink-wrap app, I'd buy the Mac version if it ran well. I'd also be more willing to develop and test for Mac.
Too cannibalistic of their hardware sales, though?
High on the list of Microsoft's greatest fears is virtualization.
I'm seeing *lots* of Intel Macs with one of Parallels/VirtualBox/VMWare. More than half, I'd estimate. Almost all with XP.
Virtualization, while it means an upgrade path for Microsoft, also means that people can upgrade to another OS. And, when they specify their next round of software, it's going to be software that runs natively on Mac or Linux.
Also, people are finding hardware without XP drivers (elsewhere in this thread). Virtualization can get around that. If Linux runs on it, xVM will.
Vista is bloated for many reasons, but the fact that its bulk and overhead make it a poor choice for virtual machines is surely considered a real positive around Redmond. That is, if they can make enough software *not* work in XP, people will stay in Windows, rather than Windows becoming a little legacy corner of their screen (Right now, I'm watching Olympic coverage in Silverlight in a corner of my Linux desktop).
CANDU-style technology can be used to make nuclear weapons. India's nuclear weapons come from similar heavy-water, natural uranium plants. Actually, so does most of the US arsenal. The Savannah River Site reactors were of that configuration, with on-power loading (like a CANDU) for producing weapons-grade Plutonium-239. We also got plutonium from the graphite-moderated reactors at Hanford. They also ran on unenriched uranium.
Enriching uranium is *not*, necessarily, a step in building a nuclear weapon. Certainly not a requirement. Plutonium from natural uranium has always been much more common.
Perhaps the only country you can think of. But, countries with commercial nuclear power but no nuclear weapons program are:
Japan (your caveat noted) South Korea (including domestic designs) Canada (including domestic designs) Spain Belgium Germany Taiwan (similar to your caveat on Japan, though) Ukraine (built in Soviet days, though) Czech Republic Switzerland Bulgaria Finland Slovakia Brazil South Africa (they had nuclear weapons at one time, though) Hungary Romania Mexico Lithuania (again, built in Soviet days) Argentina Slovenia Netherlands and Armenia
The Economist did not mention the names of Microsoft's old and bad marketers? Chief among them, a company named Burson-Marsteller. CEO? Mark Penn. Strike a bell? He has spent most of the last year running Hillary Clinton's absolutely terrible campaign.
Does anyone else see the similarities between the "Hillary. She's inevitable." campaign and the "Vista. It's inevitable." campaign?
First, if people aren't using Vista, there will be very few Vista-only (DX10, etc) apps. Thus, people that already have WinXP machines will be less likely to buy a new computer, if everything on the shelf still works fine in XP.
Also, the longer the market stays in XP, the longer island of stability groups like WINE have to catch up to "current".
And, as hardware progresses apace while software remains XP friendly, the more people are going to try Macs and Linux on the desktop with a virtualized Windows install. Lots of people buying Macs with VMWare/Parallels/xVM. Vista, needing 2 or 3 gig of RAM and lots of cycles to run happily, was an attempt to forestall that movement.
If the cycle of dependency is broken, and people use more and more apps in the host (Mac/Linux) environment, sales for Windows 7 will be even worse.
Sure, caveat emptor. Mark it one star on Newegg. But there are huge problems with that.
Foxconn makes bits for hundreds of rebranders, so it's harder than you think to avoid it. And, whose mobo is in yeah random OEM PC?
Then there is the problem with evangelism. Joe comes to you and says "Vista sucks". You hand him a Hardy Heron disk? Or, do we ask him for a BIOS dump because Linux works with some Windows PCs, but has random reboots with others?
I'm curious how many old kinds of code we're still communicating with. FTA, Cassini is ADA-based. I know the Voyager craft are in FORTH (my first programming love).
Some are just digital packrats. Some get far more out of their Netflix subscription that way (i.e., they have hours and hours to watch things, but only on two days a month). And, while I agree on movies (I know plenty of people who re-watch movies, but I can't stand to), DVDs are more than movies. TV series, Anime, and particularly music/concert vids have much higher rewatchability (to me).
I doubt that the customers using this feature are the ones they would like to eliminate from their customer base. It's possible that, in aggregate, they are.
They've kept the profiles feature pretty unadvertised and hidden. Lots of Netflix users seem to have never heard of it.
Perhaps the profiles users are, statistically, the people most likely to rent, rip, and return the next day. The not-terribly-savvy users are, possibly, the ones who've never heard of ripping a DVD, and rent the same mass-market movie over and over, then forget to send it in for weeks at a time.
Back in undergrad, I helped my AtmoSci Masters' roommate out with several projects. At least in his case, the problems involved a lot of comma or space separated text files and mostly just limited data manipulation. Students had all been taught FORTRAN, weakly, and most classmates were trying to do it in FORTRAN. Several times, we created 20 line not-terribly-obfuscated Perl programs that worked much better than pages of FORTRAN for the task at hand.
Probably Python would be the 'cooler' kit these days. But, my former roommate, now with the National Weather Service, says it's all command-line Perl scripts there and working with me to learn Perl was one of the best things he got in college.
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Are you suggesting that employers don't do plenty to snoop on a prospective employee's health (and that of his family)? Or, to hound out people with a sick child who run up the group plan costs? Yes, it's illegal. And it happens every single day in this country.
Demanding US workers in the deal might mean more 'trained and skilled'. Many, many jobs are looking for "3 years this, 5 years that, plus the degree", and uninterested in growing in-house talent. Employers don't do that, since workers aren't loyal anymore, because employers aren't loyal, and so the cycle goes. A demand for US IT workers might mean more companies willing to hire a fresh face and do more training.
With the layoffs out there there are *plenty* of IT people who will work for $30k or $35k if you won't. Maybe not in California or New York. But, if work could be outsourced (badly) to India, it can be outsourced (with better oversight) to Sioux City or Tuscaloosa. $35k, plus a part-time-working spouse, means you can afford a $100k house (which is perfectly believable in most of the country), pay off reasonable student loans, and eat. People will take that. Plus, you're working indoors in a nice office, not busting your back in the cold.
Yeah, it's Walmart wages. There are people lining up for those jobs, too.
I have Kinesis Essential keyboards at work and home. Mapped Dvorak (yes, I am a geek). I have to agree with the annoying Esc chicklet. I eventually swapped it for CapsLock. Really, how damned often do I need CapsLock? And, that's in a very handy spot. I've done that swap on most computers I use, now.
I'm going to agree with that. I had programmed in an imperative to mildly GOSUBby way in various microcomputer BASICs, Pascals, and standard Cs since pre-Kindergarten. However, one of the best college classes I had was the one where we were given a 6800 (later classes it was an 68HC11) on a board, with a few external circuits, and we learned every single op-code. Then, I knew what a computer (and a compiler) was doing.
They'll have plenty of time to learn paradigms. Make them appreciate what those paradigms actually accomplish.
At least when I took CS (a decade ago) at a big middling midwest state school, there were very few US-born females. Classes tended to be about 2/5s US-born males (in-state), 2/5s foreign men (Asia, India, South America), and about 1/5 foreign women. By senior year, US-born females were one-per-class at most.
Is there a general slowdown in foreign attendance? Is there something sending fewer foreign females? Economic slowdown meaning fewer women are get the chance? Foreign universities getting more female-friendly? (I know Korean women who said they'd never get an academic job back home). Are there other degree programs attracting foreign females?
The real beauty (okay, there are several) in the air-car is in its relation to intermittent sources of energy.
That is, compressed air is a pretty reasonable storage mechanism for solar or wind energy. Also, for excess grid energy at night, when we ramp down some baseload power generators. When the wind goes down, you stop compressing as much. Comes up, compress some more. As long as you have enough wind over enough time, it averages out. Beautiful.
The dream of the battery-electric car is that the owners will plug in at night to recharge their batteries. A home with an air compressor, where an unfilled air tank is permanently mounted, and charges, based upon pricing signals from the power company, would be even better.
Plus, the larger on-the-road compressed vendors (gas stations) would also be getting compress/no-compress signals from the power company. This ability for a major consumer to follow the load, near instantly, should make electrical engineers giddy.
30,000 feet gives you a lot of horizon and unobstructed path.
I have a friend who launches amateur weather balloons that get up to over 100,000 feet. We track them by a GPS and a 300mW ham radio data transmitter. At 300mW and 100,000 feet, we're regularly lighting up every repeater within 400 to 500 miles. A cell phone can run at 1 or 2 watts, depending on the band.
Obviously, it does work, to a fashion (9/11), but the system will not handle very many of those calls at all.
I'm wondering if the vaporware of cars like the Volt and other plug-ins are starting to eat at the sales of current cars. I can think of a few well-off lefty people (yes, a tweed jacket wearing university dean among them) who used to be new-every-two people. But, now, they're staying tight in their 1st-gen Priuses, waiting for the next... something. CNG? Fuel-cell? Volt? Who knows.
Everybody is starting to sense "the gasoline car has to go". All the automakers are working to get to the next option, and trying to assure the public that it's right around the corner if they just keep getting tax breaks and government loans. But it isn't, unfortunately.
One could hope that Apple might expand a little from the MacbookAir.
A lot of its compromise are exactly the compromises I've always preferred. Over the years, I've had old Powerbook Duos, Toshiba Porteges, Dell "X" series, and now, a couple of generations of IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad "X" series. I keep coming back to 12" screen, one-spindle laptops. They're perfect, especially since WiFi.
But, the MBAir is too far. Give me even two USB ports and a docking port, and it might very well be my next laptop. Apple were the kings of Docking back in the Duo days. It's still a good idea.
My thought is that, just maybe, Apple should consider a license of Mac OS for Virtualizations. Pick one platform... VMWare, xVM, whatever.
This would solve the "but there are a billion network cards and a billion video cards out there" argument. Inside the VM, there is only the one configuration.
Sure, it wouldn't be the world's speediest thing. But, it would get a lot of people thinking about Mac OS part-time. Some of us Linux people who have a Windows window in the corner (when absolutely necessary) would ditch it most of the time for a legit copy of Mac. If I had to run a shrink-wrap app, I'd buy the Mac version if it ran well. I'd also be more willing to develop and test for Mac.
Too cannibalistic of their hardware sales, though?
In the case of the touch, you'd mail it to yourself, save it as a Text note, view it from a temporary webpage, or something similar.
A real geek has a long random key for WPA, and passes it around on a pen drive.
Except the time I brought a Touch home from work for a while.
Copy and paste? What do you mean, no copy and paste? One of the key "insanely great" f'ing innovations of the 1984 Macintosh, and it can't be done?
Shook my head at that one.
High on the list of Microsoft's greatest fears is virtualization.
I'm seeing *lots* of Intel Macs with one of Parallels/VirtualBox/VMWare. More than half, I'd estimate. Almost all with XP.
Virtualization, while it means an upgrade path for Microsoft, also means that people can upgrade to another OS. And, when they specify their next round of software, it's going to be software that runs natively on Mac or Linux.
Also, people are finding hardware without XP drivers (elsewhere in this thread). Virtualization can get around that. If Linux runs on it, xVM will.
Vista is bloated for many reasons, but the fact that its bulk and overhead make it a poor choice for virtual machines is surely considered a real positive around Redmond. That is, if they can make enough software *not* work in XP, people will stay in Windows, rather than Windows becoming a little legacy corner of their screen (Right now, I'm watching Olympic coverage in Silverlight in a corner of my Linux desktop).
CANDU-style technology can be used to make nuclear weapons. India's nuclear weapons come from similar heavy-water, natural uranium plants. Actually, so does most of the US arsenal. The Savannah River Site reactors were of that configuration, with on-power loading (like a CANDU) for producing weapons-grade Plutonium-239. We also got plutonium from the graphite-moderated reactors at Hanford. They also ran on unenriched uranium.
Enriching uranium is *not*, necessarily, a step in building a nuclear weapon. Certainly not a requirement. Plutonium from natural uranium has always been much more common.
Perhaps the only country you can think of. But, countries with commercial nuclear power but no nuclear weapons program are:
Japan (your caveat noted)
South Korea (including domestic designs)
Canada (including domestic designs)
Spain
Belgium
Germany
Taiwan (similar to your caveat on Japan, though)
Ukraine (built in Soviet days, though)
Czech Republic
Switzerland
Bulgaria
Finland
Slovakia
Brazil
South Africa (they had nuclear weapons at one time, though)
Hungary
Romania
Mexico
Lithuania (again, built in Soviet days)
Argentina
Slovenia
Netherlands
and Armenia
The Economist did not mention the names of Microsoft's old and bad marketers? Chief among them, a company named Burson-Marsteller. CEO? Mark Penn. Strike a bell? He has spent most of the last year running Hillary Clinton's absolutely terrible campaign.
Does anyone else see the similarities between the "Hillary. She's inevitable." campaign and the "Vista. It's inevitable." campaign?
Yes. It matters quite a damned bit to Microsoft.
First, if people aren't using Vista, there will be very few Vista-only (DX10, etc) apps. Thus, people that already have WinXP machines will be less likely to buy a new computer, if everything on the shelf still works fine in XP.
Also, the longer the market stays in XP, the longer island of stability groups like WINE have to catch up to "current".
And, as hardware progresses apace while software remains XP friendly, the more people are going to try Macs and Linux on the desktop with a virtualized Windows install. Lots of people buying Macs with VMWare/Parallels/xVM. Vista, needing 2 or 3 gig of RAM and lots of cycles to run happily, was an attempt to forestall that movement.
If the cycle of dependency is broken, and people use more and more apps in the host (Mac/Linux) environment, sales for Windows 7 will be even worse.
He could switch to a patched server (OpenDNS?). That's what I did when it appeared AT&T wasn't being proactive about the DNS patch.
/ Sadly AT&T is still better than the local independent cable company.
Sure, caveat emptor. Mark it one star on Newegg. But there are huge problems with that.
Foxconn makes bits for hundreds of rebranders, so it's harder than you think to avoid it. And, whose mobo is in yeah random OEM PC?
Then there is the problem with evangelism. Joe comes to you and says "Vista sucks". You hand him a Hardy Heron disk? Or, do we ask him for a BIOS dump because Linux works with some Windows PCs, but has random reboots with others?
I'm curious how many old kinds of code we're still communicating with. FTA, Cassini is ADA-based. I know the Voyager craft are in FORTH (my first programming love).
McCain didn't vote for FISA. That's because he didn't vote at all (98 Senators did). Worse record than Ted Kennedy this year, brain tumor and all.
Doesn't mean I like McCain, but I fully expect him to say "But I didn't vote for FISA" some time in the next few months.
Some are just digital packrats. Some get far more out of their Netflix subscription that way (i.e., they have hours and hours to watch things, but only on two days a month). And, while I agree on movies (I know plenty of people who re-watch movies, but I can't stand to), DVDs are more than movies. TV series, Anime, and particularly music/concert vids have much higher rewatchability (to me).
They've kept the profiles feature pretty unadvertised and hidden. Lots of Netflix users seem to have never heard of it.
Perhaps the profiles users are, statistically, the people most likely to rent, rip, and return the next day. The not-terribly-savvy users are, possibly, the ones who've never heard of ripping a DVD, and rent the same mass-market movie over and over, then forget to send it in for weeks at a time.
Back in undergrad, I helped my AtmoSci Masters' roommate out with several projects. At least in his case, the problems involved a lot of comma or space separated text files and mostly just limited data manipulation. Students had all been taught FORTRAN, weakly, and most classmates were trying to do it in FORTRAN. Several times, we created 20 line not-terribly-obfuscated Perl programs that worked much better than pages of FORTRAN for the task at hand.
Probably Python would be the 'cooler' kit these days. But, my former roommate, now with the National Weather Service, says it's all command-line Perl scripts there and working with me to learn Perl was one of the best things he got in college.