I have to wonder why companies like Google whose servers don't have to sit where the headquarters is don't relocate them to a state or region where power is cheap. Supposedly if you are within a certain distance of a nuke plant, power is very cheap. Why not build a data farm there?
This is unfortunately VERY typical of mucky-mucks who don't know squat about technology. It's also a case of using FUD to exercise control over people. "Oh, cellphone cause the avionics to go haywire!" Yeah right, that's bullshit. How many people have left their cellphones on in their carry-ons? Can you document ONE case where a cellphone screws up the avionics? Aside from the fact that above a certain altitude you get no signal and end up draining your battery. "Oh, cellphones cause gasoline pumps to explode." Oh, really? Are there ANY spark-inducing components in a cellphone? That went out with rotary dial phones. More likely some schmuck was smoking right next to the filler.
There's a really cool derelict facility about an hour north of Great Falls Montana. It's in the middle of stinking nowhere but the place is HUGE. The part that's above ground has steel-reinforced concrete about 5-6 feet think with rebar about 3 inches in diameter. Rumor has it that there are numerous subterrainean level but there isn't any exposed access.
Okay so if BOFA saved $100 mill, why do they keep screwing me with fees? And where's my higher interest rate, thank you?
Of course the domestic BOFA workers could always pull an "Warp drive problems. All systems inoperative." i.e. "Four hundred years ago, workers who felt threatened by automation (aka outsourcing) flung their wooden shoes called Sabot into the machines to stop them...hence the term Sabotage." What I mean is, they could deliberately teach their replacements wrong. How many times have you convinced your younger brother to do something that would get him into trouble? I recall a guy in college who was taking french but couldn't speak a word. When asked for help translating a paragraph about how great his teacher was, the guy gave him the french words for "She's got big maguffies."
Apple has had job offerings listed for OpenGL and game-oriented programmers for a month or two now. The expense of marketing a game in the current business model is what kills most companies second only to TECH-SUPPORT (ooooooo). Tech-support on PCs is a nightmare. On Macs it's practically non-existent. Why? Consistency of hardware. So in theory gaming companies could eliminate a large percentage of their overhead. As for marketing, there is all that packaging and fighting over shelf space at your local Fry's (the electronics store not the supermarket). Apple and gaming companies could eliminate all of that by distributing games via iTunes. Apple gets a little piece of the action and gaming companies reduce their costs.
This doesn't surprise me at all. You can file chemistry sets along with model rockets and marksmanship as things that used to make being a kid cool but are no longer "acceptable normal behavior". We're reduced to parking the kids in front of the American Idol. I'm off to buy my own island country where I don't have to be politcally correct. Who's with me?
Well, it doesn't surprise me a bit. My nephew who is just 10 is obsessed with sports to the point of taping the NFL draft proceedings...several hours worth. Beyond that I have a friend whose daughter was failing math in high-school. She was already an accomplished equestrian and was trying out for the cheerleading squad. The mother actually encouraged her to drop riding in favor of cheerleading. I told her that in the first place there was no olympic medal for cheerleading and in the second place these are both EXTRA-curricular activities. Now to add insult to injury, I was driving on I-40 and saw a very large official road sign proclaiming the the town was the home of what's-her-face American Idol 2005. This sign wasn't small. It was HUGE and I'm sure it cost the taxpayers money. Hell, even people with stars on Hollywood Blvd have to pay for it themselves. And why don't we have big audacious signs proclaiming the home town of Jonas Salk or William Shockley or people who actually accomplish something intelligent?
The bottom line in this country is it's all about image and popularity. I'm reminded of an episode of the original Connections series where James Burke explains why the British blew a golden opportunity to dominate the new chemical industries because the Germans let people into universities on merit whereas in England you got accepted to a university based on your family background. Nowadays the tables have turned. Merit doesn't get you very far but if you're the star running back on some podunk high-school football team, you get a full scholarship to USC even though you can't even read your own letter of acceptance (that's a "Friday Night Lights" reference, btw). What this translates to is an inflation of the value of a college degree. A bachelor's degree doesn't carry as much weight as it used to when they're given away.
Not to be a kill-joy or anything but why is it that when any group of scientists goes out to some obscure wilderness they always say they're looking for cancer treatment stuff? These guys seem to have been doing this for bunchteen years and have yet to come up with squat. Instead they always seem to come back with yet another global warming doom-and-gloom prediction. I'll bet they'd get more mileage (so-to-speak) if they said they were off looking for treatments for male-pattern baldness or childhood/adulthood obesity.
I've been using Vonage for the past 8-9 months now with no show-stopper problems. I went to them because I was moving my business from California to Arizona and wanted to maintain the same numbers I'd been using for the past ten plus years. Customer service was very helpful during the initial setup. Transfer of both my voice line and fax line number from Verizon went without a hitch. I haven't noticed any issues with latency or poor sound quality. My cellphone has far crappier performance and cellphone companies screw you eight ways to Sunday.
Now from a application software-developer/user standpoint, their interface leaves a few things to be desired and really these are easy things to implement. 1) When you're in the voicemail web-page (aside from it being dog slow), they need to add a button to download all messages or all new messages at once. 2) Be able to see the caller ID floating text in the voicemail page just like you can in the Dashboard page. Duh. 3) When they send you an e-mail telling you that you have a new voicemail, they include the phone number but not the caller ID text. Duh. 4) In the above e-mail, the phone number should be formatted so that you could easily do a Google search on it or better yet add a hyperlink to do this automagically. 5) There's a bug somewhere that leaves the "You have voicemail" light on your phone blinking even after you've listened to the message. You have to delete all the messages before the light will go out.
All of these things should be fairly easy to implement/fix. Why they're not doing that (I've sent this list to them twice) is beyond me. Other than that, things work well. I use their hardware as a router with an Airport Extreme on it. I also forward fax calles to the free eFax service.
That's because this bass-ackwards country is more interested in giving American Idol winners taxpayer-funded road signs on the side of Interstate 40 (no, I'm not frigging kidding) than in showering the country's best engineers and theoreticians with accolades.
How about A) teaching engineers or all scientists for that matter to write papers such that others can actually reproduce the results or B) teaching engineering professors to teach PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS of all the theory so you might actually be able to graduate and get a job?
Gee, maybe if Google/Earthlink buys up Metricom's rights-of way, my shares would be worth something.
And my erstwhile stock broker told me not to sell...what the hell was I thinking.
Humans can't navigate traffic circles (at least here in the U.S.), why should we expect robot to be able to? Then again, robots don't have "a**hole driver" functionality and generally are far better trained than human drivers.
Ummm..."Members of society"??? Just wait till they unionize and start demanding health care. Or would that be maintenance? Hmm...have you signed up for your MMO plan yet? (Machine Maintenance Organization) Open enrollment ends today.
I'd hardly call "a four-year degree in programming or engineering" I.T.. When I was in college and graduate school, IT (aka MIS) was for people who couldn't cut it as real Computer Science or Engineering majors. IMHO, true CompSci and Engineering careers are still available here in the US although they're grossly underpaid people. IMHO, IT has become so commonplace that it's no longer the exclusive domain of highly trained professionals. In the film industry, wire removal used to be a well-paid job here in the U.S. but with the advent of fancy tools (developed by CompSci & Engineers, BTW) it's no longer a highly paid skill and can therefor be sent overseas.
So wait, they looked on his laptop to find these files but couldn't. So now they're saying the guy used secure delete to get rid of them. Ummmm...yeah ok, prove it, pal. How do you know they existed in the first place, hmmmm??? Lack of evidence is not evidence.
Honestly I just don't like the current animation style. It doesn't have that hand-crafted feel to it like Akira or something similar does. IMHO when a story has as big a scope as Clone Wars, the medium should match it.
Well, the People's Republic of California used those dumb punchcards for YEARS and nobody every whined about hanging or dimpled chads there.
Oh and while we're on the subject, Clinton didn't win the popular vote but happened to win enough electoral votes to get elected. Can we have a do-over for that too?
One of my more down-to-earth professors at B.U. Engineering had a great analogy. I asked him one day what he thought of headhunters. His response was "You mean the kind that find you a job or the kind that kill you and shrink your head?" He then went on to say "You know when you have a barrel of apples and on the bottom there's this layer of crud? You scrape off that layer and underneath are headhunters. What that means is that they'll work hard to find you a job but they'll work even harder to make you take a job." My personal experience has confirmed that in spades. I had several recruiters blow me off because I didn't take the first job they sent me to.
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I have to wonder why companies like Google whose servers don't have to sit where the headquarters is don't relocate them to a state or region where power is cheap. Supposedly if you are within a certain distance of a nuke plant, power is very cheap. Why not build a data farm there?
This is unfortunately VERY typical of mucky-mucks who don't know squat about technology. It's also a case of using FUD to exercise control over people. "Oh, cellphone cause the avionics to go haywire!" Yeah right, that's bullshit. How many people have left their cellphones on in their carry-ons? Can you document ONE case where a cellphone screws up the avionics? Aside from the fact that above a certain altitude you get no signal and end up draining your battery. "Oh, cellphones cause gasoline pumps to explode." Oh, really? Are there ANY spark-inducing components in a cellphone? That went out with rotary dial phones. More likely some schmuck was smoking right next to the filler.
There's a really cool derelict facility about an hour north of Great Falls Montana. It's in the middle of stinking nowhere but the place is HUGE. The part that's above ground has steel-reinforced concrete about 5-6 feet think with rebar about 3 inches in diameter. Rumor has it that there are numerous subterrainean level but there isn't any exposed access.
First, kill all the lawyers.
If you guys really want to know about gun statistics and I mean ALL of the statistics not just the ones the liberal media chooses to look at, read this book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0895261146/sr=8-2 /qid=1151439719/ref=pd_bbs_2/103-7021289-8079008?i e=UTF8
See? That's what happens when you piss off Steve Jobs.
Okay so if BOFA saved $100 mill, why do they keep screwing me with fees? And where's my higher interest rate, thank you?
Of course the domestic BOFA workers could always pull an "Warp drive problems. All systems inoperative." i.e. "Four hundred years ago, workers who felt threatened by automation (aka outsourcing) flung their wooden shoes called Sabot into the machines to stop them...hence the term Sabotage." What I mean is, they could deliberately teach their replacements wrong. How many times have you convinced your younger brother to do something that would get him into trouble? I recall a guy in college who was taking french but couldn't speak a word. When asked for help translating a paragraph about how great his teacher was, the guy gave him the french words for "She's got big maguffies."
Apple has had job offerings listed for OpenGL and game-oriented programmers for a month or two now.
The expense of marketing a game in the current business model is what kills most companies second only to TECH-SUPPORT (ooooooo).
Tech-support on PCs is a nightmare. On Macs it's practically non-existent. Why? Consistency of hardware. So in theory gaming companies could eliminate a large percentage of their overhead.
As for marketing, there is all that packaging and fighting over shelf space at your local Fry's (the electronics store not the supermarket). Apple and gaming companies could eliminate all of that by distributing games via iTunes. Apple gets a little piece of the action and gaming companies reduce their costs.
This doesn't surprise me at all. You can file chemistry sets along with model rockets and marksmanship as things that used to make being a kid cool but are no longer "acceptable normal behavior". We're reduced to parking the kids in front of the American Idol. I'm off to buy my own island country where I don't have to be politcally correct. Who's with me?
Well, it doesn't surprise me a bit. My nephew who is just 10 is obsessed with sports to the point of taping the NFL draft proceedings...several hours worth. Beyond that I have a friend whose daughter was failing math in high-school. She was already an accomplished equestrian and was trying out for the cheerleading squad. The mother actually encouraged her to drop riding in favor of cheerleading. I told her that in the first place there was no olympic medal for cheerleading and in the second place these are both EXTRA-curricular activities. Now to add insult to injury, I was driving on I-40 and saw a very large official road sign proclaiming the the town was the home of what's-her-face American Idol 2005. This sign wasn't small. It was HUGE and I'm sure it cost the taxpayers money. Hell, even people with stars on Hollywood Blvd have to pay for it themselves. And why don't we have big audacious signs proclaiming the home town of Jonas Salk or William Shockley or people who actually accomplish something intelligent?
The bottom line in this country is it's all about image and popularity. I'm reminded of an episode of the original Connections series where James Burke explains why the British blew a golden opportunity to dominate the new chemical industries because the Germans let people into universities on merit whereas in England you got accepted to a university based on your family background. Nowadays the tables have turned. Merit doesn't get you very far but if you're the star running back on some podunk high-school football team, you get a full scholarship to USC even though you can't even read your own letter of acceptance (that's a "Friday Night Lights" reference, btw). What this translates to is an inflation of the value of a college degree. A bachelor's degree doesn't carry as much weight as it used to when they're given away.
Not to be a kill-joy or anything but why is it that when any group of scientists goes out to some obscure wilderness they always say they're looking for cancer treatment stuff? These guys seem to have been doing this for bunchteen years and have yet to come up with squat. Instead they always seem to come back with yet another global warming doom-and-gloom prediction. I'll bet they'd get more mileage (so-to-speak) if they said they were off looking for treatments for male-pattern baldness or childhood/adulthood obesity.
I've been using Vonage for the past 8-9 months now with no show-stopper problems. I went to them because I was moving my business from California to Arizona and wanted to maintain the same numbers I'd been using for the past ten plus years. Customer service was very helpful during the initial setup. Transfer of both my voice line and fax line number from Verizon went without a hitch. I haven't noticed any issues with latency or poor sound quality. My cellphone has far crappier performance and cellphone companies screw you eight ways to Sunday.
Now from a application software-developer/user standpoint, their interface leaves a few things to be desired and really these are easy things to implement.
1) When you're in the voicemail web-page (aside from it being dog slow), they need to add a button to download all messages or all new messages at once.
2) Be able to see the caller ID floating text in the voicemail page just like you can in the Dashboard page. Duh.
3) When they send you an e-mail telling you that you have a new voicemail, they include the phone number but not the caller ID text. Duh.
4) In the above e-mail, the phone number should be formatted so that you could easily do a Google search on it or better yet add a hyperlink to do this automagically.
5) There's a bug somewhere that leaves the "You have voicemail" light on your phone blinking even after you've listened to the message. You have to delete all the messages before the light will go out.
All of these things should be fairly easy to implement/fix. Why they're not doing that (I've sent this list to them twice) is beyond me. Other than that, things work well. I use their hardware as a router with an Airport Extreme on it. I also forward fax calles to the free eFax service.
That's because this bass-ackwards country is more interested in giving American Idol winners taxpayer-funded road signs on the side of Interstate 40 (no, I'm not frigging kidding) than in showering the country's best engineers and theoreticians with accolades.
How about A) teaching engineers or all scientists for that matter to write papers such that others can actually reproduce the results or B) teaching engineering professors to teach PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS of all the theory so you might actually be able to graduate and get a job?
Gee, maybe if Google/Earthlink buys up Metricom's rights-of way, my shares would be worth something. And my erstwhile stock broker told me not to sell...what the hell was I thinking.
Humans can't navigate traffic circles (at least here in the U.S.), why should we expect robot to be able to? Then again, robots don't have "a**hole driver" functionality and generally are far better trained than human drivers.
Ummm..."Members of society"??? Just wait till they unionize and start demanding health care. Or would that be maintenance? Hmm...have you signed up for your MMO plan yet? (Machine Maintenance Organization) Open enrollment ends today.
Oh sure...the cure for N.A.S. is...drumroll please...go for a friggin' walk!!!
I'd venture to say that what's going to be on the tests is what the prof yaks about in class so transcribing would give you a better edge.
I'd hardly call "a four-year degree in programming or engineering" I.T.. When I was in college and graduate school, IT (aka MIS) was for people who couldn't cut it as real Computer Science or Engineering majors. IMHO, true CompSci and Engineering careers are still available here in the US although they're grossly underpaid people. IMHO, IT has become so commonplace that it's no longer the exclusive domain of highly trained professionals. In the film industry, wire removal used to be a well-paid job here in the U.S. but with the advent of fancy tools (developed by CompSci & Engineers, BTW) it's no longer a highly paid skill and can therefor be sent overseas.
So wait, they looked on his laptop to find these files but couldn't. So now they're saying the guy used secure delete to get rid of them. Ummmm...yeah ok, prove it, pal. How do you know they existed in the first place, hmmmm??? Lack of evidence is not evidence.
"Oh, that's gonna replace CDs soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White album again."
Honestly I just don't like the current animation style. It doesn't have that hand-crafted feel to it like Akira or something similar does. IMHO when a story has as big a scope as Clone Wars, the medium should match it.
Well, the People's Republic of California used those dumb punchcards for YEARS and nobody every whined about hanging or dimpled chads there. Oh and while we're on the subject, Clinton didn't win the popular vote but happened to win enough electoral votes to get elected. Can we have a do-over for that too?
One of my more down-to-earth professors at B.U. Engineering had a great analogy. I asked him one day what he thought of headhunters. His response was "You mean the kind that find you a job or the kind that kill you and shrink your head?" He then went on to say "You know when you have a barrel of apples and on the bottom there's this layer of crud? You scrape off that layer and underneath are headhunters. What that means is that they'll work hard to find you a job but they'll work even harder to make you take a job." My personal experience has confirmed that in spades. I had several recruiters blow me off because I didn't take the first job they sent me to.