it won't be an SUV, becuase we *never* go offroading, and frankly, a minivan gets better mileage
You might be suprised to learn that most minivans have poor gas mileage - they're actually on par with a mid-sized SUV in terms of gas consumption.
As for off-road use, most SUVs perform quite poorly as off-road vehicles, especially in comparision to purpose-built off-road vehicles (e.g. Jeep TJ, not that many of these are used off-road either...).
The conclusion? SUVs are minivans for people's whose ego cannot handle having a minivan.
The problem with software development as a long term career is that after a certain point, experience isn't really worth much -- after about 5 years in a particular technology, you'll be about as good as you'll ever be. Given this, it makes little business sense to hire a 40 year old with 25+ years of experience for $100+K when you can get a 26 year old who is just as good, possibly even better, for $60K.
In other words, don't expect to be a pure code monkey for 20 years. Yes, it can happen - but thats the exception rather than the norm. You need to find a way to provide value from your experience - value that the business is prepared to pay for. There are various ways of doing this, typically they involve moving into management.
By the way: if you expect to be mentoring, then you'd better get cracking on that "3 year old" skillset of yours. Nobody would want a mentor that doesn't bother to keep up with their field.
According to this interview with David Duchovny, it sounds like they want to do a "Monster of the Week" movie rather than something based on the mythology story arch (ie. aliens + government conspiracy). I'm glad to hear that, because despite the fact that I'm an X-Files fan I found that the mythology episodes got old in a hurry.
Let's hope they shoot it in Vancouver, because California doen't have that authentic spooky feel that the X-Files used so well in its first few seasons.
Isn't this sort of what IBM's VisualAge tried to do?
It never really caught on because it basically locked you into the one tool suite and was generally a pain to deal with. The argument was "programming in a text editor is like doing an accountant doing spreadsheets in a text editor".
Newspapers and TV news aren't really just about news - they're a form of entertainment. In a sense, when you buying a newspaper you're really paying for the editors to sift through all the crap and present you with a mix of stories that - hopefully - largely interest you.
It's almost traditional to spend a lazy saturday or sunday morning on the couch/deckchair/stardeck with the weekend edition of your paper of choice. You can't really do that with internet news sources, and especially not automatically aggregrated news sources such as google news. Perhaps one day when wireless electronic paper devices becomes reality, there will be an equivilent, but I get the feeling that's a few years away yet.
Ever notice how the most medicore companies with the least to offer potential customers are the worst abusers of marketing-speak? Marketing speak is a sign that the company or its products have nothing unique or particularly compelling about them. In many cases, it also means that the marketing people in the company have little or no technology background and are simply unable to articulate any sort of benefit, because they don't understand their target audience or their product.
I find that the level of marketing-speak is a great way to separate the bad potential employers from the more interesting ones. Unfortunately the world I work in (Java, especially server-side stuff) is particularly rife with companies that use copious amounts of marketing-speak. (speaking of which - anyone hiring in the PNW or BC?).
"...the Hart research found that 79 percent of all game players report exercising or playing sports at an average of 20 hours a month.
...but only if Dance Dance Revolution counts as exercising.
In all seriousness though, I remember someone on slashdot reported successfully using DDR as a way to work off some excess fat. What I'm *really* waiting for though, is a full body motion simulator so I can play Counter Strike "in game". There's no better form of exercise than running for your dear life.
TV Series DVDs?
on
Top 50 DVDs
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Where are the TV series DVDs? Many of those are way better than some of the movies on that list ("Escape from New York"? Did they even watch this stuff?)
The number one all-time DVD set of any kind is, of course - utterly and indisputably: Firefly.
I don't question the generosity of spirit behind this kind of effort, but lets focus on the reality here: many of the worst hit areas barely even have telephones, let alone IT infrastructure.
What they really need is: Good government, education, sanitation and medical expertise, communication infrastructure and civil engineers - roughly in that order. Even with early warning systems, Aceh would have still been completely devasted - the water went roughly 9 MILES inland in some places. In any case, Sumatra was hit within minutes of the quake. Granted, Sri Lanka, India and Thialand would have benefited greatly from an early warning system (as illustrated by one family had one of their own - a 10 year old girl who paid attention to her geography lessons - story here)
It's only sort of a dupe. The timeline wasn't *directly* mentioned in the original article.
That said, I think we need to award a 5 yard penalty against the editor for not following the proper rules when posting a dupe (i.e. one must post blatant dupes - any attempt to be clever is against the rules and is very much frowned upon).
I RTFA, and those FED monitors sound pretty nice. The only problem is they require diamonds or carbon nanotubes to manufacture. Last I heard, carbon nanotubes are quite expensive to manufacture in any quantity (wikipedia seems to confirm this). I'm not sure about the cost of the small syntehtic diamond that FEDs require, but I imagine they aren't cheap to make either (does anyone know?).
Hopefully a breakthrough will come along and make these things cheap to manufacture though, because FEDs sound like very cool technology.
What is the aim of this merger? To take over the world by their sheer weight of mediocrity?
Whenever I come across one of those incredibly dull angst-laden emo blogs in which the bloggers keep you informed about riveting topics such as their cat's bowel movements -- they're almost always either a LiveJournal or MT blog. And of course, there's the design issues with MT that have lead to it being disallowed by some hosts.
I haven't used del.icio.us myself - can anyone tell me if it's prone to being spammed or not? If not, what do they do to prevent it from being overrun by link whores and the like? (it's sad that we even have to think about that, but the brutal reality seems to be if anything can be ruined in the name of a making money, it will be)
Quite a few posters have been commenting that these labour practices violate US laws. Most of EA's workforce is in Canada (in fact, I'm just across the street from their head office right now), so they're likely here in Vancouver. I have friends who have worked there, and I can vouch for the authenticity of this story.
How it is legal to do this, I have absolutely no idea. Even in a non-litigious society like Canada, it seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
IANCE (Chassis Engineer), but I have an interest in suspension systems as applied to motor racing. The suspension in the vehicle depicted as having a "conventional" system a very poor choice for comparision since it appears to be a medicore suspension system at best. A conventional suspension system with stiffer springs, anti-roll bars, and better dampers would perform drastically better under those types of conditions.
The vehicle pictured appears to be a Lexus LS400, which of course is a luxury barge that sacrifices handling for comfort. I realise Bose is claiming you can have your cake and eat it too - but I'd like to see a more valid comparision before drawing any conclusions - for example, a comparision with a BMW 5-series
This system looks like it would be quite heavy - and I bet you need extra batteries to provide adequate current too. Another question is how much heat the system generates, and how well it performs when hot (any electrical engineers care to comment on that?)
Spoken words collected by the cameras with speech-recognition software are transcribed into text
Last I looked, speech to text technology wasn't even close to being capable of "transcribing" speech from arbritary speakers (i.e. not trained for that speaker, uncontrolled volcabulary, etc) - let alone a number of them simultaneously in a noisy environment. No doubt the NSA does have some impressive technology in this area that is far ahead of what is publicaly known about. Is there some recent advance in this area I'm not aware of? This particular technology is something I'm extremely interested in, and I would dearly love to know how well this system of theirs works (if it even exists - I'm highly skeptical). Can anyone shed more light on this?
He mentions in the article that induction loops don't work well because of EM interference, lack of clarity, etc. I can attest to this myself - try using your induction coil while sitting in front of a large monitor and you'll see what I mean.
I've been wondering lately if one could have a hearing aid that uses bluetooth to allow the battery, DSP, etc all to be in a device separate from the what one wears in the ear (or on the ear in the case of the more powerful behind the ear aids).
There's a few reason this would be useful. A key reason is that the unit in the ear could be made cheaply enough that it is virtually disposable. This is important when you realise that the device is exposed to sweat, rain, etc - all very bad things when your aid is worth $3000+ (that's what they cost - sometimes more!). The other reason is that larger batteries and more complex signal processing would be possible in the external unit - and as a bonus, it would be easier to connect external devices such as cell phones, two-way radios, iPods, etc.
Then again, maybe the latency introduced by the bluetooth link would be too great?
Of course, my REAL dream is a PDA-sized real-time speech-to-text device, but that is a long, long, loooong way off yet.
Slashdot Mirror
it won't be an SUV, becuase we *never* go offroading, and frankly, a minivan gets better mileage
You might be suprised to learn that most minivans have poor gas mileage - they're actually on par with a mid-sized SUV in terms of gas consumption.
As for off-road use, most SUVs perform quite poorly as off-road vehicles, especially in comparision to purpose-built off-road vehicles (e.g. Jeep TJ, not that many of these are used off-road either...).
The conclusion? SUVs are minivans for people's whose ego cannot handle having a minivan.
The problem with software development as a long term career is that after a certain point, experience isn't really worth much -- after about 5 years in a particular technology, you'll be about as good as you'll ever be. Given this, it makes little business sense to hire a 40 year old with 25+ years of experience for $100+K when you can get a 26 year old who is just as good, possibly even better, for $60K.
In other words, don't expect to be a pure code monkey for 20 years. Yes, it can happen - but thats the exception rather than the norm. You need to find a way to provide value from your experience - value that the business is prepared to pay for. There are various ways of doing this, typically they involve moving into management.
By the way: if you expect to be mentoring, then you'd better get cracking on that "3 year old" skillset of yours. Nobody would want a mentor that doesn't bother to keep up with their field.
... they'll all be dupes.
Apparently this photo is an example of the button that was "accidently" pressed.
I'd love to hear the explanation for this "accident".
According to this interview with David Duchovny, it sounds like they want to do a "Monster of the Week" movie rather than something based on the mythology story arch (ie. aliens + government conspiracy). I'm glad to hear that, because despite the fact that I'm an X-Files fan I found that the mythology episodes got old in a hurry.
Let's hope they shoot it in Vancouver, because California doen't have that authentic spooky feel that the X-Files used so well in its first few seasons.
Isn't this sort of what IBM's VisualAge tried to do?
It never really caught on because it basically locked you into the one tool suite and was generally a pain to deal with. The argument was "programming in a text editor is like doing an accountant doing spreadsheets in a text editor".
Newspapers and TV news aren't really just about news - they're a form of entertainment. In a sense, when you buying a newspaper you're really paying for the editors to sift through all the crap and present you with a mix of stories that - hopefully - largely interest you.
It's almost traditional to spend a lazy saturday or sunday morning on the couch/deckchair/stardeck with the weekend edition of your paper of choice. You can't really do that with internet news sources, and especially not automatically aggregrated news sources such as google news. Perhaps one day when wireless electronic paper devices becomes reality, there will be an equivilent, but I get the feeling that's a few years away yet.
Ever notice how the most medicore companies with the least to offer potential customers are the worst abusers of marketing-speak? Marketing speak is a sign that the company or its products have nothing unique or particularly compelling about them. In many cases, it also means that the marketing people in the company have little or no technology background and are simply unable to articulate any sort of benefit, because they don't understand their target audience or their product.
I find that the level of marketing-speak is a great way to separate the bad potential employers from the more interesting ones. Unfortunately the world I work in (Java, especially server-side stuff) is particularly rife with companies that use copious amounts of marketing-speak. (speaking of which - anyone hiring in the PNW or BC?).
All in all, a stupid article from a moron too lazy to do any research.
You mean people like the target customers of these companies?
I hereby nominate Jay Maynard for the lead role.
Of course, that would guarantee that the remake would have an R rating...
"...the Hart research found that 79 percent of all game players report exercising or playing sports at an average of 20 hours a month.
...but only if Dance Dance Revolution counts as exercising.
In all seriousness though, I remember someone on slashdot reported successfully using DDR as a way to work off some excess fat. What I'm *really* waiting for though, is a full body motion simulator so I can play Counter Strike "in game". There's no better form of exercise than running for your dear life.
Where are the TV series DVDs? Many of those are way better than some of the movies on that list ("Escape from New York"? Did they even watch this stuff?)
The number one all-time DVD set of any kind is, of course - utterly and indisputably: Firefly.
I don't question the generosity of spirit behind this kind of effort, but lets focus on the reality here: many of the worst hit areas barely even have telephones, let alone IT infrastructure.
What they really need is: Good government, education, sanitation and medical expertise, communication infrastructure and civil engineers - roughly in that order. Even with early warning systems, Aceh would have still been completely devasted - the water went roughly 9 MILES inland in some places. In any case, Sumatra was hit within minutes of the quake. Granted, Sri Lanka, India and Thialand would have benefited greatly from an early warning system (as illustrated by one family had one of their own - a 10 year old girl who paid attention to her geography lessons - story here)
It's only sort of a dupe. The timeline wasn't *directly* mentioned in the original article.
That said, I think we need to award a 5 yard penalty against the editor for not following the proper rules when posting a dupe (i.e. one must post blatant dupes - any attempt to be clever is against the rules and is very much frowned upon).
I RTFA, and those FED monitors sound pretty nice. The only problem is they require diamonds or carbon nanotubes to manufacture. Last I heard, carbon nanotubes are quite expensive to manufacture in any quantity (wikipedia seems to confirm this). I'm not sure about the cost of the small syntehtic diamond that FEDs require, but I imagine they aren't cheap to make either (does anyone know?).
Hopefully a breakthrough will come along and make these things cheap to manufacture though, because FEDs sound like very cool technology.
What is the aim of this merger? To take over the world by their sheer weight of mediocrity?
Whenever I come across one of those incredibly dull angst-laden emo blogs in which the bloggers keep you informed about riveting topics such as their cat's bowel movements -- they're almost always either a LiveJournal or MT blog. And of course, there's the design issues with MT that have lead to it being disallowed by some hosts.
Blogs: The Reality TV of the Internet.
I don't think she's missing you very much. She emails me several hundred times a day.
I do get a bit tired of her hints that I'm not, ahem... virile enough for her though.
I haven't used del.icio.us myself - can anyone tell me if it's prone to being spammed or not? If not, what do they do to prevent it from being overrun by link whores and the like? (it's sad that we even have to think about that, but the brutal reality seems to be if anything can be ruined in the name of a making money, it will be)
Quite a few posters have been commenting that these labour practices violate US laws. Most of EA's workforce is in Canada (in fact, I'm just across the street from their head office right now), so they're likely here in Vancouver. I have friends who have worked there, and I can vouch for the authenticity of this story.
How it is legal to do this, I have absolutely no idea. Even in a non-litigious society like Canada, it seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
IANCE (Chassis Engineer), but I have an interest in suspension systems as applied to motor racing. The suspension in the vehicle depicted as having a "conventional" system a very poor choice for comparision since it appears to be a medicore suspension system at best. A conventional suspension system with stiffer springs, anti-roll bars, and better dampers would perform drastically better under those types of conditions.
The vehicle pictured appears to be a Lexus LS400, which of course is a luxury barge that sacrifices handling for comfort. I realise Bose is claiming you can have your cake and eat it too - but I'd like to see a more valid comparision before drawing any conclusions - for example, a comparision with a BMW 5-series
This system looks like it would be quite heavy - and I bet you need extra batteries to provide adequate current too. Another question is how much heat the system generates, and how well it performs when hot (any electrical engineers care to comment on that?)
From the article:
Last I looked, speech to text technology wasn't even close to being capable of "transcribing" speech from arbritary speakers (i.e. not trained for that speaker, uncontrolled volcabulary, etc) - let alone a number of them simultaneously in a noisy environment. No doubt the NSA does have some impressive technology in this area that is far ahead of what is publicaly known about. Is there some recent advance in this area I'm not aware of? This particular technology is something I'm extremely interested in, and I would dearly love to know how well this system of theirs works (if it even exists - I'm highly skeptical). Can anyone shed more light on this?
He mentions in the article that induction loops don't work well because of EM interference, lack of clarity, etc. I can attest to this myself - try using your induction coil while sitting in front of a large monitor and you'll see what I mean.
I've been wondering lately if one could have a hearing aid that uses bluetooth to allow the battery, DSP, etc all to be in a device separate from the what one wears in the ear (or on the ear in the case of the more powerful behind the ear aids).
There's a few reason this would be useful. A key reason is that the unit in the ear could be made cheaply enough that it is virtually disposable. This is important when you realise that the device is exposed to sweat, rain, etc - all very bad things when your aid is worth $3000+ (that's what they cost - sometimes more!). The other reason is that larger batteries and more complex signal processing would be possible in the external unit - and as a bonus, it would be easier to connect external devices such as cell phones, two-way radios, iPods, etc.
Then again, maybe the latency introduced by the bluetooth link would be too great?
Of course, my REAL dream is a PDA-sized real-time speech-to-text device, but that is a long, long, loooong way off yet.
Or it could be shortened to "OpenBrowser"
However, the Mozilla people probably want to brand it, so perhaps it should simply be:
"MozillaBrowser"