The pool's not at all fixed -- people can stay in grad school or get a job, undergrads can choose CS or something else. Managers with programming skills can return to hacking. People who are working on something that is "interesting" but not very lucrative might have their head turned by a higher salary. There's companies out there doing stupid stuff; hire their programmers away from them.
Sounds like the problem at your end is that you need a better filter to sort good from bad.
Beats me, but if someone is complaining about a lack of employees, simple economics suggests that they should offer more money. Bid salaries up, you'll get more people interested in working for you. We want the best people working where they'll produce the highest value, and they way we get there is through market mechanisms. That's the capitalist way -- not bribing politicians for special favors.
If the talented tech workers are not looking for work (at your company), perhaps you are not making them an offer they find interesting. Perhaps your company looks like it has a dubious business plan, and they see no reason to hitch their wagons to your ailing horse.
Study does not mention water inputs to grow -- that's relevant in California. Google was not initially helpful (lots of advice on gardening and beets).
Another way (at least on a Mac) is that you uninstall Flash altogether, and use Chrome (has built-in Flash) for the sites where you really want to see some animation or movie.
No basement, because you're likely to hit water within the first 10 feet of digging. That floor collapse sounds a bit dodgy even for Florida (there's supposed to be steel reinforcing that concrete), but I did get to see a lot of modern Florida homebuilding techniques when I was a kid, so it's not a complete surprise.
Lightning (especially Florida lightning -- higher frequency AND higher currents) makes Florida special for two reasons. #1, though we can mitigate power failures, it's not a risk-free operation; increase the rate of power failures, and sooner or later there will be a mistake. #2, if the lightning actually hits your facility all bets are off, and lightning strikes buildings at a decent rate (my parents' house got struck every couple of years when I was a kid -- it was on high ground) and hit my in-laws in Tampa at least once. Once it hits, you get random electrical violence -- in one memorable strike, it got in the fuse box, and blew screw-in fuses straight out of their sockets hard enough to dent the door and knock it off its hinges. Also took out the compressor on a freezer with fish in it, discovered two weeks later.
To make me certain of surviving a strike, I'd want a beefy Faraday cage with power supplied through a motor-generator with a non-conductive transfer shaft. Cooling water would need to traverse an air gap on entry and exit.
So what's available in Poland? How much do they mark it up? CREE is American, which I think is wonderful and amazing, but I don't think the Chinese stuff will be crap for long. And how much does power cost in Poland, per kwH? That's what makes all the difference.
Where the heck are you? Home Depot stocks the Phillips LEDs, and all the parts I use are available mail order from an outfit in Vermont. There are others, these are just the guys I stumbled across when I first set out to build bike lights.
The biggest problem is that the design point for incandescent bulbs is all different from LEDs, and trying to put LEDs into a compatible package in a compatible fixture is a PITA. When you can avoid that (under cabinets, for example) results are far better.
Power cycling does NOT kill LEDs dead. Where do you get this information? LEDs are installed on bicycles running on one phase from a bicycle hub generator; at low speeds, it is flicker-flicker-flicker. Chopping LEDs at a kHz is a recommended way of modulating their power. LEDs are used for brake lights (and now, headlights) in modern cars; those are cycled frequently.
The Phillips bulbs are notably NOT harsh; they're a low-color temperature light. I personally like a hotter (bluer) light, but that's not available yet in a good screw-in bulb (Home Depot has some other high-powered brand X that does a nice impersonation of a welding arc; THAT is harsh. Don't buy that one.)
The neighbor post is an idiot. Modern high power white LEDs deliver a much more even spectrum than your standard fluorescent bulb. It's not black-body, but the LED I can buy at Home Depot is far better than any CFL or fluorescent tube I have ever bought anywhere (someone elsewhere asserts that very good fluorescents can be had, and I'm willing to believe it). If it's my own work -- mixed color temperature mounted under cabinets over a counter, I beat that handily. For example: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/undercabinet-lights-basement-kitchen/ Yes, there is a bit of a dropout at 480nm -- I know that was immediately obvious to you -- but if I cared, I would fill in with blue+cyan.
A crazy subset of US people are hoarding those light bulbs. Home Depot had the Phillips LED screw-in replacements on sale for $13 yesterday. No mercury, decent color temperature, expect them to last at least 25000 hours if you don't use them in a closed-up fixture, and probably longer.
And you can always find some fool, ignorant of heat pumps and the inefficiencies of generating electricity, defending crappy old incandescent bulbs as a good source of heat.
I know it's done that way now, I was wondering if there are any advantage from the POV of delivering a diffuse light, moderating the blue peak, choice of phosphors, or improved cooling. I'd be surprised if being on the substrate didn't bring some constraints with it. This would be useless for the handy-flashlight market, but that's a tiny market compared to lighting in general, and once LEDs take over we might change how things are done.
I think you're being misled by the height of the spike at the blue end, versus the (lack of) width. And if you had a powerful need to fill that gap around 480nm, they make LEDs around that color, called "blue" (470nm center) and "cyan" (505nm), so you could mix 5 (cool, neutral, warm, blue, cyan) and get pretty good coverage. In particular, Luxeon Rebel, Blue, bin codes 4 and 5 -- 475-480 and 480-485. This is really, truly, not an insurmountable problem, if you really want quality.
Fluorescent bulbs, even high-quality ones (see below) have the problem that their basic light is not just "around" particular frequencies, it *IS* a small set of particular frequencies. You can see this with a diffraction grating: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/spectrum-led-vs-fluorescent/ Interestingly, you can see the 480nm dropout in the LED spectrum (narrower part of the smear) and you can get a feel for what color that is -- truly, blue-cyan.
I am a little curious whether it would be possible to make a two-part "white" LED for diffuse light; have a separate glass with phosphors on it, and illuminate that with royal blue.
Thank you for that, and I think I need to retract my remark somewhat. I may be buying some of those, because screw-in LED is picky about being in some ceiling fixtures (because LEDs really don't like to be hot). It's damn annoying that the market for lights is so heavily skewed towards "cheap".
In reply to a previous Slashdot article on LEDs, this minor effort: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/led-color-rendering/ The summary is, if you take decent LEDs (CREE or Luxeon) and mix the color temperatures (warm/neutral/cool) it's not bad. Your eyes adapt; the camera is much less forgiving.
You could go look at the data sheet, and see that these LEDs don't emit any wavelengths shorter than about 410nm, and the primary color appears to be "royal blue" (445nm).
You have to be a little careful about the skew from urban heat islands (yes, I know this is a denialist meme, but it is also a real effect, and you would not hear "white roofs" and "white parking lots and streets" proposed as a mitigation if it weren't) but we're getting many more high temperature records broken than low temperature records. You would expect these to occur in about equal number on a yearly basis (strictly speaking, on an 11-yearly basis because of sunspot issues, and there's also weighting that comes from El Nino/La Nina events, but the guys who report all this data are experts and take this into account).
You've got to be careful about interpreting a lot of this data casually; flooding has been observed to get worse in urban areas, and (according to a presentation I attended recently) this has almost everything to do with pavement and not much to do with climate change. A few years ago we had a 50-year rainfall paired with a 200-year flood.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless deficit spending were a good idea, and right now, it is.
The pool's not at all fixed -- people can stay in grad school or get a job, undergrads can choose CS or something else. Managers with programming skills can return to hacking. People who are working on something that is "interesting" but not very lucrative might have their head turned by a higher salary. There's companies out there doing stupid stuff; hire their programmers away from them.
Sounds like the problem at your end is that you need a better filter to sort good from bad.
Beats me, but if someone is complaining about a lack of employees, simple economics suggests that they should offer more money. Bid salaries up, you'll get more people interested in working for you. We want the best people working where they'll produce the highest value, and they way we get there is through market mechanisms. That's the capitalist way -- not bribing politicians for special favors.
If the talented tech workers are not looking for work (at your company), perhaps you are not making them an offer they find interesting. Perhaps your company looks like it has a dubious business plan, and they see no reason to hitch their wagons to your ailing horse.
Study does not mention water inputs to grow -- that's relevant in California. Google was not initially helpful (lots of advice on gardening and beets).
If we were serious about ethanol as a fuel, we would ride bikes more. Yum.
If you moved to Boston, you kinda missed the "move to someplace cheap to live" part.
Don't forget the mercury.
http://www.fda.gov/food/foodsafety/product-specificinformation/seafood/foodbornepathogenscontaminants/methylmercury/ucm115662.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_in_fish
Another way (at least on a Mac) is that you uninstall Flash altogether, and use Chrome (has built-in Flash) for the sites where you really want to see some animation or movie.
No basement, because you're likely to hit water within the first 10 feet of digging. That floor collapse sounds a bit dodgy even for Florida (there's supposed to be steel reinforcing that concrete), but I did get to see a lot of modern Florida homebuilding techniques when I was a kid, so it's not a complete surprise.
mod parent up, please. Though in either case (truck or rail) the government's power of eminent domain is required to connect the dots.
Lightning (especially Florida lightning -- higher frequency AND higher currents) makes Florida special for two reasons. #1, though we can mitigate power failures, it's not a risk-free operation; increase the rate of power failures, and sooner or later there will be a mistake. #2, if the lightning actually hits your facility all bets are off, and lightning strikes buildings at a decent rate (my parents' house got struck every couple of years when I was a kid -- it was on high ground) and hit my in-laws in Tampa at least once. Once it hits, you get random electrical violence -- in one memorable strike, it got in the fuse box, and blew screw-in fuses straight out of their sockets hard enough to dent the door and knock it off its hinges. Also took out the compressor on a freezer with fish in it, discovered two weeks later.
To make me certain of surviving a strike, I'd want a beefy Faraday cage with power supplied through a motor-generator with a non-conductive transfer shaft. Cooling water would need to traverse an air gap on entry and exit.
"just how to fill some downtime at a desk."
Reading Slashdot, of course.
Better get in touch with those researchers, I'm sure they never considered this possibility.
"Here's that car battery you ordered. Catch!"
So what's available in Poland? How much do they mark it up? CREE is American, which I think is wonderful and amazing, but I don't think the Chinese stuff will be crap for long. And how much does power cost in Poland, per kwH? That's what makes all the difference.
Where the heck are you? Home Depot stocks the Phillips LEDs, and all the parts I use are available mail order from an outfit in Vermont. There are others, these are just the guys I stumbled across when I first set out to build bike lights.
This stuff is not-not-not prototype -- I built my first set of lights in 2008 or earlier: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/more-undercabinet-lights/
The biggest problem is that the design point for incandescent bulbs is all different from LEDs, and trying to put LEDs into a compatible package in a compatible fixture is a PITA. When you can avoid that (under cabinets, for example) results are far better.
Power cycling does NOT kill LEDs dead. Where do you get this information? LEDs are installed on bicycles running on one phase from a bicycle hub generator; at low speeds, it is flicker-flicker-flicker. Chopping LEDs at a kHz is a recommended way of modulating their power. LEDs are used for brake lights (and now, headlights) in modern cars; those are cycled frequently.
The Phillips bulbs are notably NOT harsh; they're a low-color temperature light. I personally like a hotter (bluer) light, but that's not available yet in a good screw-in bulb (Home Depot has some other high-powered brand X that does a nice impersonation of a welding arc; THAT is harsh. Don't buy that one.)
The neighbor post is an idiot. Modern high power white LEDs deliver a much more even spectrum than your standard fluorescent bulb. It's not black-body, but the LED I can buy at Home Depot is far better than any CFL or fluorescent tube I have ever bought anywhere (someone elsewhere asserts that very good fluorescents can be had, and I'm willing to believe it). If it's my own work -- mixed color temperature mounted under cabinets over a counter, I beat that handily. For example: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/undercabinet-lights-basement-kitchen/ Yes, there is a bit of a dropout at 480nm -- I know that was immediately obvious to you -- but if I cared, I would fill in with blue+cyan.
A crazy subset of US people are hoarding those light bulbs. Home Depot had the Phillips LED screw-in replacements on sale for $13 yesterday. No mercury, decent color temperature, expect them to last at least 25000 hours if you don't use them in a closed-up fixture, and probably longer.
And you can always find some fool, ignorant of heat pumps and the inefficiencies of generating electricity, defending crappy old incandescent bulbs as a good source of heat.
I know it's done that way now, I was wondering if there are any advantage from the POV of delivering a diffuse light, moderating the blue peak, choice of phosphors, or improved cooling. I'd be surprised if being on the substrate didn't bring some constraints with it. This would be useless for the handy-flashlight market, but that's a tiny market compared to lighting in general, and once LEDs take over we might change how things are done.
I think you're being misled by the height of the spike at the blue end, versus the (lack of) width. And if you had a powerful need to fill that gap around 480nm, they make LEDs around that color, called "blue" (470nm center) and "cyan" (505nm), so you could mix 5 (cool, neutral, warm, blue, cyan) and get pretty good coverage. In particular, Luxeon Rebel, Blue, bin codes 4 and 5 -- 475-480 and 480-485. This is really, truly, not an insurmountable problem, if you really want quality.
Fluorescent bulbs, even high-quality ones (see below) have the problem that their basic light is not just "around" particular frequencies, it *IS* a small set of particular frequencies. You can see this with a diffraction grating: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/spectrum-led-vs-fluorescent/ Interestingly, you can see the 480nm dropout in the LED spectrum (narrower part of the smear) and you can get a feel for what color that is -- truly, blue-cyan.
I am a little curious whether it would be possible to make a two-part "white" LED for diffuse light; have a separate glass with phosphors on it, and illuminate that with royal blue.
Thank you for that, and I think I need to retract my remark somewhat. I may be buying some of those, because screw-in LED is picky about being in some ceiling fixtures (because LEDs really don't like to be hot). It's damn annoying that the market for lights is so heavily skewed towards "cheap".
In reply to a previous Slashdot article on LEDs, this minor effort: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/led-color-rendering/
The summary is, if you take decent LEDs (CREE or Luxeon) and mix the color temperatures (warm/neutral/cool) it's not bad. Your eyes adapt; the camera is much less forgiving.
And decent LED kicks the crap out of fluorescent.
You could go look at the data sheet, and see that these LEDs don't emit any wavelengths shorter than about 410nm, and the primary color appears to be "royal blue" (445nm).
No need to be "concerned".
You have to be a little careful about the skew from urban heat islands (yes, I know this is a denialist meme, but it is also a real effect, and you would not hear "white roofs" and "white parking lots and streets" proposed as a mitigation if it weren't) but we're getting many more high temperature records broken than low temperature records. You would expect these to occur in about equal number on a yearly basis (strictly speaking, on an 11-yearly basis because of sunspot issues, and there's also weighting that comes from El Nino/La Nina events, but the guys who report all this data are experts and take this into account).
You've got to be careful about interpreting a lot of this data casually; flooding has been observed to get worse in urban areas, and (according to a presentation I attended recently) this has almost everything to do with pavement and not much to do with climate change. A few years ago we had a 50-year rainfall paired with a 200-year flood.