About 40 years ago, sitting US President Richard Nixon went to China. The plane landed in Shanghai China and there Nixon did some business regarding the Shanghai Accords. The Shanghai accords were a written document that organized or stabilized the enormous gap between Communist Chinese political ideology and American political ideology.
I highly recommend John Adam's opera Nixon In China. Fragments are available on Youtube and Wikipedia has a very helpful series of entries that describe the historical visit to China.
The opera reveals a series of cultural mysteries: The oblique standoffish ideas of Kissinger, the amazing cultural impact of the wife of Chairman Mao, the feelings and warmth that developed as Pat Nixon visited a poultry farm, the frankness of Nixon and Mao realizing their own limitations as leaders.
What is happening today with theft of secrets, electronic intrusion, removal of manufacturing to China needs to be balanced with the realization that the white hot ideological differences between the US and communist countries has developed into a new oblique engagement where the line of contact has become a huge blur.
If anything, the joke is on both parties. Coming up on both the American and Chinese societies is a threat that both societies are equally completely unable to defend against, namely global warming.
I give the Slashdot posters a collective D- failing grade.
The early posters get a D- for their really weird inability to say three fresh and funny things about the OP.
The middle posters, get a D- because 90% of the posts are tired sighs.
The tired sighs of many previous posts are an important sign that the global warming problem is a slow moving massive event where the principal indicator of it's progress ( CO2 levels) has not gone down even though we have been through a 5 year economic depression. The abating economic depression did not slow down society enough to affect CO2 levels. (There was a little decrease in the rate of increase, but not in the fact of increase.) The sighs reflect the disappointment and fatigue of many people on this list who have tried to reduce their CO2 footprint and see that all the effort produced no result. CO2 increase is an intractable, slow moving, massive problem.
And lets issue another D- to everybody that cites an expert and therefore excuses themselves from engaging with the global warming problem. If you live a typical drive to work life you are contributing 3,000 to 10,000 pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere every year. Could you possibly reduce your CO2 emission to the level of a 1776 pre steam engine individual? In this case, the phrase "massive problem" means exactly that: a large amount of human generated mass. No matter how subtle the argument, 3000 pounds turned into infra-red absorbing Carbon oxygen bonds is about the mass of your car. Rhetoric is not enough.
Welcome to the lonely world of social change. The problem in front of us is still how to emit 1/2 as much CO2 every day for you, your wife and your kids without losing the happy and fun mechanical conveniences we enjoy and maintaining economic and social stability.
(I am not a chemist, but 2 gallons of gasoline x 7 lb per gallon x 365 days => about 5000 lbs, not counting the weight of Oxygen from air making CO2.)
Here are some pieces of a scan to ocr script I am developing. First I am scanning a multicolumn document and to preserve the sense of the document text, I scan even pages twice and odd pages twice. Second, the scanned images must be rotated. Pieces of the "convert" command appear in the perl fragments here. Third, I am using the open source tesseract OCR program. Some of my documents have grayed areas that contain text. So I am running tesseract twice on the source files and picking the output file with the most text characters. Forth, the basic program is just a big loop with a menu where I input file names or page numbers.
Here goes: # my $scanprog = "/usr/bin/scanimage --resolution 400 >";# print "$scanprog \n"; # Scanner settings for pages top of book at left of scanner StylusScan 2500 my $scanoddleft = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 30mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for odd pages my $scanoddright = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 0mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for odd pages my $scanevenleft = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 30mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for even pages my $scanevenright = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 0mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for even pages # OCR commands and parameters #tesseract test1.tif test1 -l eng; #scanimage -l 26mm -x 166mm -t 10mm -y 125mm --brightness 3 --resolution 400 | pnmtotiff>test1.tif;eog test1.tif;convert -rotate 90 test1.tif test1.tif; eog test1.tif; tesseract test1.tif test1 -l eng my $tesseract = " tesseract "; my $language = " -l eng "; my $brightness2 = " --brightness 2 "; my $brightness3 = " --brightness 3 "; my $convert90 = " convert -rotate 90 "; my $eog = " eog " ; my $charcount = " wc -c " ; my $scanpage = 1; # Range is 1 to 183
Super simple scanning system using Linux. Make directory called scans, make another called taxes Have a text file of scanning hints with an easy to remember name. in a terminal, print the scanning hints file and use the Linux mouse copy feature to construct a scan instruction The scanimage application requires sudo or you can find a tweak using google search to alter the scanner's USB files and make it run from an unprivileged user. cd scans cat filewitheasycommandstocopy.txt
Typical contents of my hint file: sudo scanimage -l 0mm -x 90mm -y 66mm --resolution 400 | pnmtojpeg >cprcard.jpg # make files non-overwritable # chmod -w ~/scans/*.jpg
Verify each scan with eog viewer. Organize scans like this: Make long filenames with agencynames, recipientnames, and documentnames all in lower case. use the mouse to copy an old file name for re-use.
this groups similar documents together. use ls -lr to show most recently scanned items. use ls -lr *keyword*.jpg to show selected classes of scanned items. use locate in the distant future to find those oddball items like certificates or letters of recommendation.
As I read the posts, one of the sub texts is that there are a bunch of career opportunities for you.
The opportunities are geographically spotty and some of the opportunities might be within the company you work for now.
One way of looking at the problem is first is one of your underlying assumptions that you are going to stay in your present home? OK yes. So how many companies within a reasonable drive are there and why not make a sorted list of the nearest and most desirable. Out of that list pick a few companies to use for practice. Research the companies and slowly do one informational interview. Solve the problem of being well dressed, driving up in a presentable car, knowing all kinds of stuff about the company, and developing a model of what kind of automation strategy they are following, what equipment and software they have used, and how strong they feel about their success in automating. Then, having researched the kind of stuff the company ought to be doing or having determined how the implementation process is going, seek an informational interview with an internal affairs executive.
When you have the small things working, like having some printouts and flow charts in a briefcase. Do an informational interview with a high value candidate for your next career move. There are two reciprocal motions taking place, you are solving the problem of presenting yourself as a plausible high and equal status problem solving player on a specific field of activity. Yes I said 'status'. See the last quarter NY Review of Books article reviewing Tom Wolfe's books for a discussion of status. Or this article http://observer.com/2012/10/tom-wolfe-has-blood-on-his-hands-back-to-blood-reviewed/ The second problem is having well tuned and thought provoking questions for your interviewee.
I am 65 and I transitioned out of a lacklustre computer career and I am holding a low pay school aide job for at least 4 more years and probably as long as I can keep working. Well money isn't going to be my legacy for the kids so I have compromised for a dual strategy: I am going to be an aide of excellence and then to give my kids something to be proud of, I am running for a minor elected position in my community. The HR departments can take their age bias and eat it. Changing your status and acquiring the competence to support work at that level you can do.
There is always the z axis if you want to change your plane of operation.
What early great software programs have died or buried in the proprietary cemetary?
At the top of my list of "never escaped" is AutoCad and it's family of file formats that are still proprietary. I feel this is a real loss to the whole world that this important suite of file formats and set of command and control conventions continues to be expensive and closed.
For "almost escaped" I would place Turbo Pascal and a pair of books by Nicolas Wirth. I used Turbo Pascal for a fun self education in data structures and linked lists. Then it withered with high prices and lack of a free library movement.
Another "almost escaped" program is Dbase II and Dbase III+. The latter program had several outstanding reference and guide books. But there has never appeared a free or open source database interpreter (afaik) I quit looking years ago. These days I just grep a subdirectory to find things.
Finally on my list of great ideas that have never escaped the proprietary clinch is the HP3000 Image database file system and the amazing elegant Cognos Powerhouse report language. Image could do a whole bunch of indexing and searching forwards and backwards and it had super duper business security and permissions. The Powerhouse report language could throw together the equivalent of a tedious and patiently developed SQL query in a way I can best describe as elegant and intuitive. The last I saw of Cognos Powerhouse was a 3 month old non-resellable $30,000 cardboard box of tape reels I handed to the president of the company as a merger-liquidation was finally winding up.
I work with severely disabled people as an aide. For about 2 weeks at a time I learn how an individual works at the simplest motor skill level. I have also been studying quadrature phase demodulation in connection with doing an amateur radio project. As pointed out earlier, humans start out with an extremely dense neural structure. The neural structure has a fascinating cellular development path that starts as a tube (a topologically interesting thing) that gets folded, extruded, wrapped, pinched and wrinkled.
I have recently been practising assisting my people by waiting longer periods of time and watching for coarse movements, trying to see if motions or simple movements are going a long way and returning as motions quite a bit different than what one would conventionally expect. Sometimes I see facial expressions reflecting interest in what we are doing.
The thought has been puzzling me, the nerves receiving messages from the body might be undergoing quadrature phase demodulation when they enter the dense packed structure of the brain. Brains have rhythmic electrical waves; music, dance and movement are sometimes associated with effective mentation. The quadrature phase demodulation process, when repeated in layers causes certain neural states to persist because many stimuli is repetition.
Also as pointed out earlier, conventional electronics does not have the connection versatility of nerve tissue. Programming using the strengths of conventional electronics can imitate the high symbolic level of mentation. The manmade project, unless designed to be, doesn't have the profound rapid convergence or similarity of infant neural development. Also note that adult mentation has great variety in its' specifics. It is a very adult thing to say YMMV.
I went to Stanford University bookstore to see if I could purchase a few graduate level textbooks in human motor development, neurology and (a separate interest) particle physics (easy stuff like alpha particles).
Wikipedia beat Stanford University Bookstore on each of these topics. I walked in with $200 plus a credit card and spent only $.75 on parking.
Eventually, my daughter who is in college got me an old edition of the motor development book I needed.
The paper book is shrinking due to the economics of printing: The weight and cost of paper, the taxes on unsold book inventory, the system change where fine printing is typeset in USA and printed in China. In contrast, electronic books are 2% for the webserver, 49% to the publisher and 49% to the author.The markup or profit on an electronic book is basically set by the marketing skill and chutzpah of the publisher. You can weigh a book and look up the wholesale price of paper and see that relatively little is left for the publisher and author.
I recently converted a 2008 vintage Compaq and a newer AMD 64+Nvidia graphics laptop to Ubuntu.
The older laptop required editing a file in/etc to force an alternate video driver to load. The other laptop works best with a driver named nvidia.
What worked for me was refreshing my memory by reading the classic explanation of how a Debian Linux loads drivers, noting a few key filenames, and doing the few simple steps to switch video drivers and restart the computer. After writing it down on a sheet of paper, switching drivers was easy and picking the video driver that worked best was easy after I had confidence I was actually switching drivers and seeing the freshly rebooted video display.
What are the fundamental limits of travel by flying? Does the physics of flight require an unavoidable use of a certain amount of energy, per ton, per kilometre flown? What’s the maximum distance a 300-ton Boeing 747 can fly? What about a 1-kg bar-tailed godwit or a 100-gram Arctic tern?
Just as Chapter 3, in which we estimated consumption by cars, was followed by Chapter A, offering a model of where the energy goes in cars, this chapter fills out Chapter 5, discussing where the energy goes in planes. The only physics required is Newton’s laws of motion, which I’ll describe when they’re needed.
This discussion will allow us to answer questions such as “would air travel consume much less energy if we travelled in slower propellor-driven planes?” There’s a lot of equations ahead: I hope you enjoy them!
If the original poster has read this far, I am sure you have received at least one book recommendation phrased in a way that speaks to your personal condition.
Your original post question asked about books. My comment is: The commonplace American university book store, the previous best source for any self-education program is paralysed and undergoing price inflation and culling of all books on the shelf for more than 2 years.
The entire mechanism of knowledge on paper organized into journals, magazines, books, reference books and textbooks is caught between the dirt cheap publishing and indexing capabilities of the Internet (with a huge contribution from the big name in search engine) and the always unrealistically expensive terms of copyright permission. Caught means the printed material can't be republished on the Internet for reading at file transfer prices per megabyte and books over three years old are leaving commercial book stores due to taxes and rents.
Suppose I told you that Science Magazine, 1974, page 1118 had a discussion of systems engineering and chaos theory you really should read. Thanks to the insane over pricing of everything under any copyright, you could read this article in 15 seconds for a cost of $.0019... oh wait... no after satisfying the publisher's idea of what it is worth, you will pay $30 for Internet access or you must burn $20 in gas and parking driving to a University library.
The whole scheme of going and getting a printed paper book for learning is freezing. The large organizations are cannibalizing the business of the smaller book organizations. I call this "freezing". The order of freezing is: Book stores, university book stores, Internet book stores, public libraries, university libraries.
When you do set out to acquire the books recommended, watch how well the printed paper information system works. What are the forces pushing the books you want out of reach? That is the American way: figure out what is going on with the system that is supposed to help you figure out what is going on.
I am exploring the hypothesis that motor skill development in children, and in particular, the failure of certain children to learn certain motor skills lays the groundwork for the later development of toxic and unhealthy behaviours such as harassment described in the original post and related behaviours such as bullying, a recently widely reported socially destructive behaviour.
What do I mean by "explore a hypothesis"? I work with severely disabled kids. Kids that have huge time delay around a simple task like holding a pencil and making a mark on a sheet of paper. This has lead me to observe non-disabled elementary school kids and the extreme rapidity where every month every child develops new abilities to play games. Kids quickly move from "throw it to me" to performing screen passes and showing new control as they play basketball.
The same learning process, in public school, trails off into disorder and incompleteness in matters of moving from motor skills to social skills like befriending and interacting socially in a group at lunch. Some kids stand in clusters, trying to figure out how to get and give attention. Other kids are silent. All of them floundering around gradually falling into a gelled relationship. Whatever that relationship is, it is not formally a part of "school" (but I see the same processes taking place as when I went to elementary school some 50 years ago). The capability of making a friend, being a friend and being able to keep becoming socially healthy is something of great importance and real delicacy.
The hypothesis applies to this kid and this cruel trolling or harassment like this: many years beforehand this person failed to learn some motor skill, then failed to pick up the game, then failed to learn the ideas and rules embedded in the game. When his motor skill apparatus had matured to the point where he was able to engage in sophisticated motor skill planning he lacked an adequate experience and capability base to conduct himself in a constructive manner.
The past few years it seems like lots and lots of kids are getting to their high school and college years and displaying highly developed motor skills and planning skills with a really grave absence of the high level part of culture. Are the number of socially deficient young people greater now than in past years? I don't know.
I feel tracing the bad social behaviour back to motor skill acquisition in elementary school points to a way to address the behaviour problem at it's inception.
My advice to you is avoid Linux training courses that have a published failure rate and a high cost of retaking the exam.
Back in 2000, having had experience being a system manager for the now long gone Hewlett Packard MPE and MPEix systems and having installed and used several early Linux distributions, I decided to take the Red Hat CNE one week certification course.
I failed the final CNE exam and the result was a half assed resume entry and a blow to my career energy. Computers are fun and interesting, and you can better develop your career than walking into a running chop saw.
Regarding the exam, it was a bucket load of stupid dorm tricks that I have never encountered in the real world. The bugs that had been introduced on the test computer were really interesting and I would have liked to study what exactly the bugs were doing, but a short time limited exam just isn't the place to explore.
The problem is the course said "Some or substantial Linux experience required." and the course description addressed to companies said in effect, this is not a creampuff Microsoft type "everybody passes" course. In fact the Red Hat CNE pass ratio for persons who took the 5 day long course was about 50%.
Note, the institutional priority for Red Hat was to prove how valuable and challenging the training was by holding the pass ratio to 50%. From the point of view of a hapless fellow trying to establish a career, the Red Hat priority is akin to generals proving their courage by telling all their soldiers to charge, at Verdun in WWI.
I wonder how the original poster is handling the flood of impressive comments from many highly qualified respondents?
Which respondent you have read so far speaks to your condition?
Which respondent sounds to you like what you will say and do regarding mathematics in five years from now?
I have an idea for the original poster. Print out the single item in this Slashdot column that you regard as the advice you want to take. Come back to Slashdot in five years and tell us (might not be me) how your next phase in math learning worked out.
The posted question doesn't provide enough information about the age or background of the person for whom we are making suggestions.
It seems the presumption is the person for whom we are making suggestions is a child or youth between 9 and 16 years old. The person has disassembled, repaired, and programmed a moderate number of gadgets.
The suggestions being offered are really good suggestions from a number of Slashdot readers who have experience as each poster suggests.
As an amateur radio arduino electronics hobbyist "fix anything" mechanic for way more than 20 years I would add, a good part of this hobbyist activity is about dreams and self-education. Figure out ways to expose the person to the larger world of works and ideas while the person is young enough to slip in and be a spectator or helper or bystander without attracting too much attention.
If the person is a young person consider finding ways to give him a chance to be around an artist or a scientist or an engineer or a graduate student or a farmer or a composer or a musician. Got theatre or opera? Let him be an assistant stage hand during a rehearsal.
From the wider worlds of interesting things to do as an adult during the current great American bobsled ride into ecological disaster he or she will get plenty of interesting ideas for gadgets to build and things to learn.
Any Linux you are familiar with is fine for installing on other people's computers. Do the install with a working wired ethernet connection. Allow time for you to test the installation and fix the occasional driver installation problem.
I administer a email group and I have a steady stream of people who get spontaneously unsubscribed due to various combinations of Windows browser automation, multiple home users sharing one account and a multitude of creepy things that happen on Windows computers.
I am inclined to offer to install Linux on home computers. I figure, each install should have 1 hour install, 1 hour orientation to making a password file and using a password manager and 1 hour to set up Evolution Mail and a gmail address. It also seems to me that I should supply a slim 3-ring binder with printed cheat sheets
I just added the latest Ubuntu 12 to a 2008 vintage Compaq laptop that came with Windows 7 installed.
The situation is Linux still requires an occasional administrator level intervention. My latest installation required internet research and manual editing of a/etc file.
The Ubuntu installation required a manual intervention to prevent a Broadcom 43xx wireless driver from loading and I had to force an alternate driver to load by editing a file in/etc. The problem became a 20 minute permanent fix once I remembered how Debian Linux boots and loads drivers and I found a web page reminding me of the/etc file area that had to be edited.
I'll add, reading Ubuntu forums and those cryptic two line Linux guru solutions was a waste. I learned how Linux works so long ago that the cryptic guru remarks are not useful. I just needed reminders how to load and unload drivers, the driver names and how to edit/etc to force the correct driver to always load.
I don't say Ubuntu is the best. I have used the unetbootin bootable flash drive utility and there are lots of great distributions.
One reason to not install Ubuntu is the file swapping subsystem hasn't been working for several years. You can see swap does not work by firing up the performance tool top or the utility free. Yeah, go look for yourself. It has been broken for several years!
If you look at the "...losing its' toolbox" article you will see the browser sidebar in the right lists twelve articles about real estate, finance, debt, American finance laws and international debt and finance problems. Finance is the engine of force driving many decisions regarding home built versus store bought projects.
Most build or buy decisions regarding a home are affected by a desire to keep the home resale price as high as possible. Mortgage debt and resale price considerations drive most home project decisions. Regarding craftsmanship or the lack of it, mortgage debt and resale price considerations drive the priorities and choices made when projects are undertaken.
I bring this up on Slashdot to propose that a better America is an America with 40% less debt. Herewith begins a radical proposition:
What I would like to see is an America with about 40% lower prices for homes and apartments. Houses should sink down to "fire insurance bare shell rebuild price" and mortgage debt shouldn't go on for more than 16 years and all the repair and maintenance work should be done with a 100 year lifetime.
In that kind of an economic setting there would be plenty of room for a wide variety of super quality beautiful projects and there would also be plenty of room for people using their homes as simply a place to live while they do their writing, composing, painting, pottery, gardening, child raising and retireing.
Writing computer software and doing things in the computer business has a huge labour content. It has been really difficult (in the past) to figure out how long a software project would take. Projects have been repeatedly dumped because there have been volcanic explosions as new, startlingly cheap and stunningly attractive technologies have replaced the beautifully crafted heavy metal business machines and software of the last decades.
Stack ranking is an ugly way to force employee turnover.
So I propose what is going on at Microsoft is that Stack Ranking is Microsoft's way of forcing employee turnover. The business idea is "manage the company to reduce costs before the employee has a future interest or stake in the company".
There is a theme of love-it/hate-it between American big businesses and American workers. Consider General Motors. In the late 1950's General Motors began paying a pretty good wage to it's unionized labour force. By the 1990's the result was a lot of automobile workers that needed their benefits (working on an assembly line is physically demanding, over 20 years) and an entire manufacturing and marketing structure that spiraled downward when gasoline prices went past what was it... $2 dollars a gallon?
The shifts in market are much faster in the computer software and hardware business. There is no union and no guarantee of continuing employment these days. So in this setting, labour is a commodity but what the labour produces is extremely difficult to measure. Into the fog of software and support Stack Ranking is not-unfair to the lucky 9/10 of the employees.
Bioterrorism does not fit because the introduction of eucalyptus pests is not the generation of fear in human beings for the purpose of starting a war or causing political instability.
Eucalyptus has become an established plant in California. The word "established" catches the idea that grown eucalyptus trees in some settings provide shade and screening benefits. They have attained the status of having a social value.
The word "antiestablishmentism" catches the idea that the introduced pests are launching another kind of destruction.
About 140 feet away from my house grow several 240 foot tall Eucalyptus trees. They are shallow rooted plants on a steam bank. Whenever we have a storm, I always worry about which way the wind is blowing. The trees also block my satellite dish, block direct sun and plug up my roof gutters.
Yeah, biological antiestablishmentism at work. Don't infect these please. Can't afford the consequences.
I prefer the Yahoo groups email service over the Google version. I have started several email groups and the Yahoo version is better because of little administrative advantages and easier subscription management.
The whole world of email groups, blogs and web forums most emphatically does not work in the long run for organizing crowd learning. (I recently waded through hours worth of Ubuntu Forums looking for a wireless connection bug fix. Twenty posts by twenty relative newcomers is not as good as two posts and a good index maintained by two thoughtful knowledgeable editors.)
How about this: Wouldn't it be neat if you as the email group administrator could add to each email a footer. The footer would be links to web pages or "best of" summary pages. I don't think you can do that with Yahoo groups.
I think a very interesting email group processing engine would be some way to organize the semantic confusion that always develops when many people post writings about the same thing. The reciprocal thought for you to consider is what is the underlying off stage issue that your entire message experience supports.
But the email group can enable small groups to coordinate themselves faster than a newsletter.
An email group needs an external leadership. I set up an email group that was parallel to a ham radio club's established monthly PDF newsletter and established culture of a monthly meeting and interpersonal project making. The email group is mostly unused. The kind of dialogue the club engages in doesn't fit with what an email group does best.
Here is a thought: An email group works best if the "who" and "what" of an email message can be expressed in 9 words or less. The "when" of an email group message is always "soon".
The charm of a Yahoo group is they are free, very reliable, have good controls to exclude spam, diplomatic ways to constrain individuals with content quality problems. One weakness is users with email readers that open all links in every email message can unsubscribe themselves accidentally. There is no way in Yahoo groups for the group administrator to find the names of those who unsubscribe themselves.
What kind of software did you use for your analysis?
What kind of chord information do you see when you analyze something like one of the sections of Vivaldi's For Seasons pieces? I'd say borrow a Vivaldi score and then run your analyzer on those blocks of violins that are sawing away in something like the Summer or Winter pieces. The Vivaldi tunes are really "wall of sound" or "wall of musical excitement" pieces. But underneath all the flashy richness of multiple violins playing I wonder would your analysis system find just one simple chord progression, just like a popular tune?
Can your analysis software output detail about what specific musical notes are being played and when one note stops but other notes continue?
Regarding the Vivaldi and other classical tunes I hear on the local radio station, sometimes I just stop and say wow that sounds just like a Jazz riff. Where did I hear that before? I don't understand... I just started hearing things differently lately or else the 8 am DJ on KDFC is an imp.
One interesting aspect of your post is the way you have summarized your ethical restrictions and constraints.
Another interesting aspect of your post is the implied view that you feel many jobs are available to you and these jobs are not OK because of your ethical restrictions.
The Slashdot editorial format is very limited but it sounds like you are using ethics as a way to wall yourself off from several classes of employment.
I would say, revisit your ethical ideas. Ethics is more than a process to wall yourself off from the ambiguities and pain of the world. Ethics is a search for truth. Search is a verb. Go to job interviews, find out all about the kind of projects you might work on. Continue your search for truth.
Click and clack have done 25 years of persuading Americans that the American suburban culture built around the gasoline burning passenger car is OK.
As the years of the program went by, the program went from saying something serious and important every now and then to never saying anything of a serious, important or critical nature. They never had any guest of any status ever: No Ralph Nader, no critics, no real mechanic.
That is the nature of mass media. Car Talk has been facilitating the acceptance of American automobile based culture for 25 years.
Despite a series of really big cultural shocks, and ignoring some small and constructive changes in cultural direction, Car Talk has been selling acceptance of the status quo.
I have been fixing my own car and my family's cars for 40+ years. I do everything except tires and smog certificates. I operate with a split between a radical '60s social change interest and accepting compliance with the status quo and it's comfort. The time and money economics of automobile based society are really hard to beat. http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/2010/03/found-linear-regression-data-from-los.html
The commercial world of business software maneuvers and tactics is described in this 1999 vintage economics book: "Information Rules A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy" by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian. The book has a website, http://www.inforules.com/
I recommend you get the book from the library. The way this book answers the original post is disappointing and mundane. Microsoft implemented a vendor lock in and pricing strategy and packaging strategy that elbowed Linux into the bushes. Microsoft also elbowed CPM86 and a third proprietary PC operating system into the bushes also.
Mr. Varian, one of the authors, now lists himself as employed by Google as chief economist. It would be interesting to know who in Google is listening to Mr. Varian. I have noted a number of Google business changes that seem to be a retreat from free software ideas: For instance, Google will not release the file specification of Sketchup (Google has cut out a big chunk of the AutoCAD market and now they are going to monetize their win with by selling a $200 version of Sketchup).
I would place the Varian Shapiro book as an example expressing the American tradition of a business seeking market supremacy and sales advantage.
Linux has a different economic ideal embedded in its' existence: To make an extremely good general purpose computer operating system available to anybody and everybody for free. An aspect of Linux worth savoring is it's Fininsh-marxian-equalitarian dedication to non-advertised excellence.
Having heard the warnings about Epson printers clogging up, I still bought a yard sale 13" wide Epson Photo 1280 ($5) and I purchased a set of inks ($66).
My thinking has been to look really closely at the clogging problem, and search the web for other clogging problem results. The clogging problem could be solved and then I could do quality color printing at home.
I hear the advice "go to Costco" quite loudly. It strikes me that something is really wrong about the personal inkjet printer business when virtually everybody commenting here is essentially saying home printing of quality color photos does not work.
The printhead has a bunch of.002" diameter holes, maybe 48 of them, maybe spaced 1 mm apart in staggered rows. When just one of those holes plug up, then a color print begins to show horizontal bands of no-ink.
So far, I have made a cotton twill device for wiping the bottom of the printhead. It does not work very well.
Just for laughs, suppose one had a printer test utility that would show exactly which ink-jet holes are plugged? The same page could print out a map of the printhead showing rows, columns, dimensions and colors on the bottom of the ink-jet unit. The test page could organize cleaning work by showing which row and which column is not squirting ink. The really valuable trick would be to test and clean individual ink jet orifices without disassembling the printer.
Now what is needed is an alignment jig and a cleaning tool for cleaning exactly one print head ink jet orifice at a time. The alignment jig could be a piece of electronics perf board or a drilled plate. The cleaning tools would be a wet cotton swab and a suction or water pressure device using 1 mm diameter vinyl tube. It would be really nice if Epson would publish the command language for addressing the print head and carriage machinery.Then you could send the printer a command like "move the printhead so ink-jet number 3 in row 4 is 90 mm from the left edge of the printer. That position lines up with the handy dandy alignment jig. You just thread the cleaning swab up, wet the crusties, then send the printer a command to fire number 3 in row 4 and find out if the opening has cleared.
The moral of the story is: I would love to fix the inkjet printer and I wish Epson would do the quality thing of publishing the control codes and print head dimensions to enable writing a diagnostic program and fabricating a cleaning jig. The umteen million dollar failure of quality home color printing could be greatly eased if Epson would do the right thing and disclose the control language for addressing the printer at the single inkjet level.
Slashdot Mirror
About 40 years ago, sitting US President Richard Nixon went to China. The plane landed in Shanghai China and there Nixon did some business regarding the Shanghai Accords. The Shanghai accords were a written document that organized or stabilized the enormous gap between Communist Chinese political ideology and American political ideology.
I highly recommend John Adam's opera Nixon In China. Fragments are available on Youtube and Wikipedia has a very helpful series of entries that describe the historical visit to China.
The opera reveals a series of cultural mysteries: The oblique standoffish ideas of Kissinger, the amazing cultural impact of the wife of Chairman Mao, the feelings and warmth that developed as Pat Nixon visited a poultry farm, the frankness of Nixon and Mao realizing their own limitations as leaders.
What is happening today with theft of secrets, electronic intrusion, removal of manufacturing to China needs to be balanced with the realization that the white hot ideological differences between the US and communist countries has developed into a new oblique engagement where the line of contact has become a huge blur.
If anything, the joke is on both parties. Coming up on both the American and Chinese societies is a threat that both societies are equally completely unable to defend against, namely global warming.
I give the Slashdot posters a collective D- failing grade.
The early posters get a D- for their really weird inability to say three fresh and funny things about the OP.
The middle posters, get a D- because 90% of the posts are tired sighs.
The tired sighs of many previous posts are an important sign that the global warming problem is a slow moving massive event where the principal indicator of it's progress ( CO2 levels) has not gone down even though we have been through a 5 year economic depression. The abating economic depression did not slow down society enough to affect CO2 levels. (There was a little decrease in the rate of increase, but not in the fact of increase.) The sighs reflect the disappointment and fatigue of many people on this list who have tried to reduce their CO2 footprint and see that all the effort produced no result. CO2 increase is an intractable, slow moving, massive problem.
And lets issue another D- to everybody that cites an expert and therefore excuses themselves from engaging with the global warming problem. If you live a typical drive to work life you are contributing 3,000 to 10,000 pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere every year. Could you possibly reduce your CO2 emission to the level of a 1776 pre steam engine individual? In this case, the phrase "massive problem" means exactly that: a large amount of human generated mass. No matter how subtle the argument, 3000 pounds turned into infra-red absorbing Carbon oxygen bonds is about the mass of your car. Rhetoric is not enough.
Welcome to the lonely world of social change. The problem in front of us is still how to emit 1/2 as much CO2 every day for you, your wife and your kids without losing the happy and fun mechanical conveniences we enjoy and maintaining economic and social stability.
(I am not a chemist, but 2 gallons of gasoline x 7 lb per gallon x 365 days => about 5000 lbs, not counting the weight of Oxygen from air making CO2.)
Here are some pieces of a scan to ocr script I am developing.
First I am scanning a multicolumn document and to preserve the sense of the document text, I scan even pages twice and odd pages twice.
Second, the scanned images must be rotated. Pieces of the "convert" command appear in the perl fragments here.
Third, I am using the open source tesseract OCR program. Some of my documents have grayed areas that contain text. So I am running tesseract twice on the source files and picking the output file with the most text characters.
Forth, the basic program is just a big loop with a menu where I input file names or page numbers.
Here goes:
# my $scanprog = "/usr/bin/scanimage --resolution 400 >";# print "$scanprog \n";
# Scanner settings for pages top of book at left of scanner StylusScan 2500
my $scanoddleft = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 30mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for odd pages
my $scanoddright = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 0mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for odd pages
my $scanevenleft = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 30mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for even pages
my $scanevenright = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 0mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for even pages
# OCR commands and parameters
#tesseract test1.tif test1 -l eng;
#scanimage -l 26mm -x 166mm -t 10mm -y 125mm --brightness 3 --resolution 400 | pnmtotiff>test1.tif;eog test1.tif;convert -rotate 90 test1.tif test1.tif; eog test1.tif; tesseract test1.tif test1 -l eng
my $tesseract = " tesseract ";
my $language = " -l eng ";
my $brightness2 = " --brightness 2 ";
my $brightness3 = " --brightness 3 ";
my $convert90 = " convert -rotate 90 ";
my $eog = " eog " ;
my $charcount = " wc -c " ;
my $scanpage = 1; # Range is 1 to 183
Super simple scanning system using Linux.
Make directory called scans, make another called taxes
Have a text file of scanning hints with an easy to remember name.
in a terminal, print the scanning hints file and use the Linux mouse copy feature to construct a scan instruction
The scanimage application requires sudo or you can find a tweak using google search to alter the scanner's USB files and make it run from an unprivileged user.
cd scans
cat filewitheasycommandstocopy.txt
Typical contents of my hint file:
sudo scanimage -l 0mm -x 90mm -y 66mm --resolution 400 | pnmtojpeg >cprcard.jpg
# make files non-overwritable
# chmod -w ~/scans/*.jpg
Verify each scan with eog viewer.
Organize scans like this:
Make long filenames with agencynames, recipientnames, and documentnames all in lower case.
use the mouse to copy an old file name for re-use.
this groups similar documents together.
use ls -lr to show most recently scanned items.
use ls -lr *keyword*.jpg to show selected classes of scanned items.
use locate in the distant future to find those oddball items like certificates or letters of recommendation.
locate certificate | grep rabies
As I read the posts, one of the sub texts is that there are a bunch of career opportunities for you.
The opportunities are geographically spotty and some of the opportunities might be within the company you work for now.
One way of looking at the problem is first is one of your underlying assumptions that you are going to stay in your present home? OK yes. So how many companies within a reasonable drive are there and why not make a sorted list of the nearest and most desirable. Out of that list pick a few companies to use for practice. Research the companies and slowly do one informational interview. Solve the problem of being well dressed, driving up in a presentable car, knowing all kinds of stuff about the company, and developing a model of what kind of automation strategy they are following, what equipment and software they have used, and how strong they feel about their success in automating. Then, having researched the kind of stuff the company ought to be doing or having determined how the implementation process is going, seek an informational interview with an internal affairs executive.
When you have the small things working, like having some printouts and flow charts in a briefcase. Do an informational interview with a high value candidate for your next career move. There are two reciprocal motions taking place, you are solving the problem of presenting yourself as a plausible high and equal status problem solving player on a specific field of activity. Yes I said 'status'. See the last quarter NY Review of Books article reviewing Tom Wolfe's books for a discussion of status. Or this article http://observer.com/2012/10/tom-wolfe-has-blood-on-his-hands-back-to-blood-reviewed/ The second problem is having well tuned and thought provoking questions for your interviewee.
I am 65 and I transitioned out of a lacklustre computer career and I am holding a low pay school aide job for at least 4 more years and probably as long as I can keep working. Well money isn't going to be my legacy for the kids so I have compromised for a dual strategy: I am going to be an aide of excellence and then to give my kids something to be proud of, I am running for a minor elected position in my community. The HR departments can take their age bias and eat it. Changing your status and acquiring the competence to support work at that level you can do.
There is always the z axis if you want to change your plane of operation.
What early great software programs have died or buried in the proprietary cemetary?
At the top of my list of "never escaped" is AutoCad and it's family of file formats that are still proprietary. I feel this is a real loss to the whole world that this important suite of file formats and set of command and control conventions continues to be expensive and closed.
For "almost escaped" I would place Turbo Pascal and a pair of books by Nicolas Wirth. I used Turbo Pascal for a fun self education in data structures and linked lists. Then it withered with high prices and lack of a free library movement.
Another "almost escaped" program is Dbase II and Dbase III+. The latter program had several outstanding reference and guide books. But there has never appeared a free or open source database interpreter (afaik) I quit looking years ago. These days I just grep a subdirectory to find things.
Finally on my list of great ideas that have never escaped the proprietary clinch is the HP3000 Image database file system and the amazing elegant Cognos Powerhouse report language. Image could do a whole bunch of indexing and searching forwards and backwards and it had super duper business security and permissions. The Powerhouse report language could throw together the equivalent of a tedious and patiently developed SQL query in a way I can best describe as elegant and intuitive. The last I saw of Cognos Powerhouse was a 3 month old non-resellable $30,000 cardboard box of tape reels I handed to the president of the company as a merger-liquidation was finally winding up.
I work with severely disabled people as an aide. For about 2 weeks at a time I learn how an individual works at the simplest motor skill level. I have also been studying quadrature phase demodulation in connection with doing an amateur radio project. As pointed out earlier, humans start out with an extremely dense neural structure. The neural structure has a fascinating cellular development path that starts as a tube (a topologically interesting thing) that gets folded, extruded, wrapped, pinched and wrinkled.
I have recently been practising assisting my people by waiting longer periods of time and watching for coarse movements, trying to see if motions or simple movements are going a long way and returning as motions quite a bit different than what one would conventionally expect. Sometimes I see facial expressions reflecting interest in what we are doing.
The thought has been puzzling me, the nerves receiving messages from the body might be undergoing quadrature phase demodulation when they enter the dense packed structure of the brain. Brains have rhythmic electrical waves; music, dance and movement are sometimes associated with effective mentation. The quadrature phase demodulation process, when repeated in layers causes certain neural states to persist because many stimuli is repetition.
Also as pointed out earlier, conventional electronics does not have the connection versatility of nerve tissue. Programming using the strengths of conventional electronics can imitate the high symbolic level of mentation. The manmade project, unless designed to be, doesn't have the profound rapid convergence or similarity of infant neural development. Also note that adult mentation has great variety in its' specifics. It is a very adult thing to say YMMV.
I went to Stanford University bookstore to see if I could purchase a few graduate level textbooks in human motor development, neurology and (a separate interest) particle physics (easy stuff like alpha particles).
Wikipedia beat Stanford University Bookstore on each of these topics. I walked in with $200 plus a credit card and spent only $.75 on parking.
Eventually, my daughter who is in college got me an old edition of the motor development book I needed.
The paper book is shrinking due to the economics of printing: The weight and cost of paper, the taxes on unsold book inventory, the system change where fine printing is typeset in USA and printed in China. In contrast, electronic books are 2% for the webserver, 49% to the publisher and 49% to the author.The markup or profit on an electronic book is basically set by the marketing skill and chutzpah of the publisher. You can weigh a book and look up the wholesale price of paper and see that relatively little is left for the publisher and author.
I recently converted a 2008 vintage Compaq and a newer AMD 64+Nvidia graphics laptop to Ubuntu.
The older laptop required editing a file in /etc to force an alternate video driver to load. The other laptop works best with a driver named nvidia.
What worked for me was refreshing my memory by reading the classic explanation of how a Debian Linux loads drivers, noting a few key filenames, and doing the few simple steps to switch video drivers and restart the computer. After writing it down on a sheet of paper, switching drivers was easy and picking the video driver that worked best was easy after I had confidence I was actually switching drivers and seeing the freshly rebooted video display.
Here is a snippet from:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/cC/page_269.shtml
What are the fundamental limits of travel by flying? Does the physics of
flight require an unavoidable use of a certain amount of energy, per ton,
per kilometre flown? What’s the maximum distance a 300-ton Boeing 747
can fly? What about a 1-kg bar-tailed godwit or a 100-gram Arctic tern?
Just as Chapter 3, in which we estimated consumption by cars, was
followed by Chapter A, offering a model of where the energy goes in cars,
this chapter fills out Chapter 5, discussing where the energy goes in planes.
The only physics required is Newton’s laws of motion, which I’ll describe
when they’re needed.
This discussion will allow us to answer questions such as “would air
travel consume much less energy if we travelled in slower propellor-driven
planes?” There’s a lot of equations ahead: I hope you enjoy them!
If the original poster has read this far, I am sure you have received at least one book recommendation phrased in a way that speaks to your personal condition.
Your original post question asked about books. My comment is: The commonplace American university book store, the previous best source for any self-education program is paralysed and undergoing price inflation and culling of all books on the shelf for more than 2 years.
The entire mechanism of knowledge on paper organized into journals, magazines, books, reference books and textbooks is caught between the dirt cheap publishing and indexing capabilities of the Internet (with a huge contribution from the big name in search engine) and the always unrealistically expensive terms of copyright permission. Caught means the printed material can't be republished on the Internet for reading at file transfer prices per megabyte and books over three years old are leaving commercial book stores due to taxes and rents.
Suppose I told you that Science Magazine, 1974, page 1118 had a discussion of systems engineering and chaos theory you really should read. Thanks to the insane over pricing of everything under any copyright, you could read this article in 15 seconds for a cost of $.0019 ... oh wait... no after satisfying the publisher's idea of what it is worth, you will pay $30 for Internet access or you must burn $20 in gas and parking driving to a University library.
The whole scheme of going and getting a printed paper book for learning is freezing. The large organizations are cannibalizing the business of the smaller book organizations. I call this "freezing". The order of freezing is: Book stores, university book stores, Internet book stores, public libraries, university libraries.
When you do set out to acquire the books recommended, watch how well the printed paper information system works. What are the forces pushing the books you want out of reach? That is the American way: figure out what is going on with the system that is supposed to help you figure out what is going on.
I am exploring the hypothesis that motor skill development in children, and in particular, the failure of certain children to learn certain motor skills lays the groundwork for the later development of toxic and unhealthy behaviours such as harassment described in the original post and related behaviours such as bullying, a recently widely reported socially destructive behaviour.
What do I mean by "explore a hypothesis"? I work with severely disabled kids. Kids that have huge time delay around a simple task like holding a pencil and making a mark on a sheet of paper. This has lead me to observe non-disabled elementary school kids and the extreme rapidity where every month every child develops new abilities to play games. Kids quickly move from "throw it to me" to performing screen passes and showing new control as they play basketball.
The same learning process, in public school, trails off into disorder and incompleteness in matters of moving from motor skills to social skills like befriending and interacting socially in a group at lunch. Some kids stand in clusters, trying to figure out how to get and give attention. Other kids are silent. All of them floundering around gradually falling into a gelled relationship. Whatever that relationship is, it is not formally a part of "school" (but I see the same processes taking place as when I went to elementary school some 50 years ago). The capability of making a friend, being a friend and being able to keep becoming socially healthy is something of great importance and real delicacy.
The hypothesis applies to this kid and this cruel trolling or harassment like this: many years beforehand this person failed to learn some motor skill, then failed to pick up the game, then failed to learn the ideas and rules embedded in the game. When his motor skill apparatus had matured to the point where he was able to engage in sophisticated motor skill planning he lacked an adequate experience and capability base to conduct himself in a constructive manner.
The past few years it seems like lots and lots of kids are getting to their high school and college years and displaying highly developed motor skills and planning skills with a really grave absence of the high level part of culture. Are the number of socially deficient young people greater now than in past years? I don't know.
I feel tracing the bad social behaviour back to motor skill acquisition in elementary school points to a way to address the behaviour problem at it's inception.
My advice to you is avoid Linux training courses that have a published failure rate and a high cost of retaking the exam.
Back in 2000, having had experience being a system manager for the now long gone Hewlett Packard MPE and MPEix systems and having installed and used several early Linux distributions, I decided to take the Red Hat CNE one week certification course.
I failed the final CNE exam and the result was a half assed resume entry and a blow to my career energy. Computers are fun and interesting, and you can better develop your career than walking into a running chop saw.
Regarding the exam, it was a bucket load of stupid dorm tricks that I have never encountered in the real world. The bugs that had been introduced on the test computer were really interesting and I would have liked to study what exactly the bugs were doing, but a short time limited exam just isn't the place to explore.
The problem is the course said "Some or substantial Linux experience required." and the course description addressed to companies said in effect, this is not a creampuff Microsoft type "everybody passes" course. In fact the Red Hat CNE pass ratio for persons who took the 5 day long course was about 50%.
Note, the institutional priority for Red Hat was to prove how valuable and challenging the training was by holding the pass ratio to 50%. From the point of view of a hapless fellow trying to establish a career, the Red Hat priority is akin to generals proving their courage by telling all their soldiers to charge, at Verdun in WWI.
I wonder how the original poster is handling the flood of impressive comments from many highly qualified respondents?
Which respondent you have read so far speaks to your condition?
Which respondent sounds to you like what you will say and do regarding mathematics in five years from now?
I have an idea for the original poster. Print out the single item in this Slashdot column that you regard as the advice you want to take. Come back to Slashdot in five years and tell us (might not be me) how your next phase in math learning worked out.
The posted question doesn't provide enough information about the age or background of the person for whom we are making suggestions.
It seems the presumption is the person for whom we are making suggestions is a child or youth between 9 and 16 years old. The person has disassembled, repaired, and programmed a moderate number of gadgets.
The suggestions being offered are really good suggestions from a number of Slashdot readers who have experience as each poster suggests.
As an amateur radio arduino electronics hobbyist "fix anything" mechanic for way more than 20 years I would add, a good part of this hobbyist activity is about dreams and self-education. Figure out ways to expose the person to the larger world of works and ideas while the person is young enough to slip in and be a spectator or helper or bystander without attracting too much attention.
If the person is a young person consider finding ways to give him a chance to be around an artist or a scientist or an engineer or a graduate student or a farmer or a composer or a musician. Got theatre or opera? Let him be an assistant stage hand during a rehearsal.
From the wider worlds of interesting things to do as an adult during the current great American bobsled ride into ecological disaster he or she will get plenty of interesting ideas for gadgets to build and things to learn.
Any Linux you are familiar with is fine for installing on other people's computers. Do the install with a working wired ethernet connection. Allow time for you to test the installation and fix the occasional driver installation problem.
I administer a email group and I have a steady stream of people who get spontaneously unsubscribed due to various combinations of Windows browser automation, multiple home users sharing one account and a multitude of creepy things that happen on Windows computers.
I am inclined to offer to install Linux on home computers. I figure, each install should have 1 hour install, 1 hour orientation to making a password file and using a password manager and 1 hour to set up Evolution Mail and a gmail address. It also seems to me that I should supply a slim 3-ring binder with printed cheat sheets
I just added the latest Ubuntu 12 to a 2008 vintage Compaq laptop that came with Windows 7 installed.
The situation is Linux still requires an occasional administrator level intervention. My latest installation required internet research and manual editing of a /etc file.
The Ubuntu installation required a manual intervention to prevent a Broadcom 43xx wireless driver from loading and I had to force an alternate driver to load by editing a file in /etc. The problem became a 20 minute permanent fix once I remembered how Debian Linux boots and loads drivers and I found a web page reminding me of the /etc file area that had to be edited.
I'll add, reading Ubuntu forums and those cryptic two line Linux guru solutions was a waste. I learned how Linux works so long ago that the cryptic guru remarks are not useful. I just needed reminders how to load and unload drivers, the driver names and how to edit /etc to force the correct driver to always load.
I don't say Ubuntu is the best. I have used the unetbootin bootable flash drive utility and there are lots of great distributions.
One reason to not install Ubuntu is the file swapping subsystem hasn't been working for several years. You can see swap does not work by firing up the performance tool top or the utility free. Yeah, go look for yourself. It has been broken for several years!
If you look at the "...losing its' toolbox" article you will see the browser sidebar in the right lists twelve articles about real estate, finance, debt, American finance laws and international debt and finance problems. Finance is the engine of force driving many decisions regarding home built versus store bought projects.
Most build or buy decisions regarding a home are affected by a desire to keep the home resale price as high as possible. Mortgage debt and resale price considerations drive most home project decisions. Regarding craftsmanship or the lack of it, mortgage debt and resale price considerations drive the priorities and choices made when projects are undertaken.
I bring this up on Slashdot to propose that a better America is an America with 40% less debt. Herewith begins a radical proposition:
What I would like to see is an America with about 40% lower prices for homes and apartments. Houses should sink down to "fire insurance bare shell rebuild price" and mortgage debt shouldn't go on for more than 16 years and all the repair and maintenance work should be done with a 100 year lifetime.
In that kind of an economic setting there would be plenty of room for a wide variety of super quality beautiful projects and there would also be plenty of room for people using their homes as simply a place to live while they do their writing, composing, painting, pottery, gardening, child raising and retireing.
Writing computer software and doing things in the computer business has a huge labour content. It has been really difficult (in the past) to figure out how long a software project would take. Projects have been repeatedly dumped because there have been volcanic explosions as new, startlingly cheap and stunningly attractive technologies have replaced the beautifully crafted heavy metal business machines and software of the last decades.
Stack ranking is an ugly way to force employee turnover.
So I propose what is going on at Microsoft is that Stack Ranking is Microsoft's way of forcing employee turnover. The business idea is "manage the company to reduce costs before the employee has a future interest or stake in the company".
There is a theme of love-it/hate-it between American big businesses and American workers. Consider General Motors. In the late 1950's General Motors began paying a pretty good wage to it's unionized labour force. By the 1990's the result was a lot of automobile workers that needed their benefits (working on an assembly line is physically demanding, over 20 years) and an entire manufacturing and marketing structure that spiraled downward when gasoline prices went past what was it ... $2 dollars a gallon?
The shifts in market are much faster in the computer software and hardware business. There is no union and no guarantee of continuing employment these days. So in this setting, labour is a commodity but what the labour produces is extremely difficult to measure. Into the fog of software and support Stack Ranking is not-unfair to the lucky 9/10 of the employees.
This event needs better language.
Bioterrorism does not fit because the introduction of eucalyptus pests is not the generation of fear in human beings for the purpose of starting a war or causing political instability.
Eucalyptus has become an established plant in California. The word "established" catches the idea that grown eucalyptus trees in some settings provide shade and screening benefits. They have attained the status of having a social value.
The word "antiestablishmentism" catches the idea that the introduced pests are launching another kind of destruction.
About 140 feet away from my house grow several 240 foot tall Eucalyptus trees. They are shallow rooted plants on a steam bank. Whenever we have a storm, I always worry about which way the wind is blowing. The trees also block my satellite dish, block direct sun and plug up my roof gutters.
Yeah, biological antiestablishmentism at work. Don't infect these please. Can't afford the consequences.
I prefer the Yahoo groups email service over the Google version. I have started several email groups and the Yahoo version is better because of little administrative advantages and easier subscription management.
The whole world of email groups, blogs and web forums most emphatically does not work in the long run for organizing crowd learning. (I recently waded through hours worth of Ubuntu Forums looking for a wireless connection bug fix. Twenty posts by twenty relative newcomers is not as good as two posts and a good index maintained by two thoughtful knowledgeable editors.)
How about this: Wouldn't it be neat if you as the email group administrator could add to each email a footer. The footer would be links to web pages or "best of" summary pages. I don't think you can do that with Yahoo groups.
I think a very interesting email group processing engine would be some way to organize the semantic confusion that always develops when many people post writings about the same thing. The reciprocal thought for you to consider is what is the underlying off stage issue that your entire message experience supports.
But the email group can enable small groups to coordinate themselves faster than a newsletter.
An email group needs an external leadership. I set up an email group that was parallel to a ham radio club's established monthly PDF newsletter and established culture of a monthly meeting and interpersonal project making. The email group is mostly unused. The kind of dialogue the club engages in doesn't fit with what an email group does best.
Here is a thought: An email group works best if the "who" and "what" of an email message can be expressed in 9 words or less. The "when" of an email group message is always "soon".
The charm of a Yahoo group is they are free, very reliable, have good controls to exclude spam, diplomatic ways to constrain individuals with content quality problems. One weakness is users with email readers that open all links in every email message can unsubscribe themselves accidentally. There is no way in Yahoo groups for the group administrator to find the names of those who unsubscribe themselves.
What kind of software did you use for your analysis?
What kind of chord information do you see when you analyze something like one of the sections of Vivaldi's For Seasons pieces? I'd say borrow a Vivaldi score and then run your analyzer on those blocks of violins that are sawing away in something like the Summer or Winter pieces. The Vivaldi tunes are really "wall of sound" or "wall of musical excitement" pieces. But underneath all the flashy richness of multiple violins playing I wonder would your analysis system find just one simple chord progression, just like a popular tune?
Can your analysis software output detail about what specific musical notes are being played and when one note stops but other notes continue?
Regarding the Vivaldi and other classical tunes I hear on the local radio station, sometimes I just stop and say wow that sounds just like a Jazz riff. Where did I hear that before? I don't understand... I just started hearing things differently lately or else the 8 am DJ on KDFC is an imp.
One interesting aspect of your post is the way you have summarized your ethical restrictions and constraints.
Another interesting aspect of your post is the implied view that you feel many jobs are available to you and these jobs are not OK because of your ethical restrictions.
The Slashdot editorial format is very limited but it sounds like you are using ethics as a way to wall yourself off from several classes of employment.
I would say, revisit your ethical ideas. Ethics is more than a process to wall yourself off from the ambiguities and pain of the world. Ethics is a search for truth. Search is a verb. Go to job interviews, find out all about the kind of projects you might work on. Continue your search for truth.
Click and clack have done 25 years of persuading Americans that the American suburban culture built around the gasoline burning passenger car is OK.
As the years of the program went by, the program went from saying something serious and important every now and then to never saying anything of a serious, important or critical nature. They never had any guest of any status ever: No Ralph Nader, no critics, no real mechanic.
That is the nature of mass media. Car Talk has been facilitating the acceptance of American automobile based culture for 25 years.
Despite a series of really big cultural shocks, and ignoring some small and constructive changes in cultural direction, Car Talk has been selling acceptance of the status quo.
I have been fixing my own car and my family's cars for 40+ years. I do everything except tires and smog certificates. I operate with a split between a radical '60s social change interest and accepting compliance with the status quo and it's comfort. The time and money economics of automobile based society are really hard to beat. http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/2010/03/found-linear-regression-data-from-los.html
The commercial world of business software maneuvers and tactics is described in this 1999 vintage economics book:
"Information Rules A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy" by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian.
The book has a website, http://www.inforules.com/
I recommend you get the book from the library. The way this book answers the original post is disappointing and mundane. Microsoft implemented a vendor lock in and pricing strategy and packaging strategy that elbowed Linux into the bushes. Microsoft also elbowed CPM86 and a third proprietary PC operating system into the bushes also.
Mr. Varian, one of the authors, now lists himself as employed by Google as chief economist. It would be interesting to know who in Google is listening to Mr. Varian. I have noted a number of Google business changes that seem to be a retreat from free software ideas: For instance, Google will not release the file specification of Sketchup (Google has cut out a big chunk of the AutoCAD market and now they are going to monetize their win with by selling a $200 version of Sketchup).
I would place the Varian Shapiro book as an example expressing the American tradition of a business seeking market supremacy and sales advantage.
Linux has a different economic ideal embedded in its' existence: To make an extremely good general purpose computer operating system available to anybody and everybody for free. An aspect of Linux worth savoring is it's Fininsh-marxian-equalitarian dedication to non-advertised excellence.
Having heard the warnings about Epson printers clogging up, I still bought a yard sale 13" wide Epson Photo 1280 ($5) and I purchased a set of inks ($66).
My thinking has been to look really closely at the clogging problem, and search the web for other clogging problem results. The clogging problem could be solved and then I could do quality color printing at home.
I hear the advice "go to Costco" quite loudly. It strikes me that something is really wrong about the personal inkjet printer business when virtually everybody commenting here is essentially saying home printing of quality color photos does not work.
The printhead has a bunch of .002" diameter holes, maybe 48 of them, maybe spaced 1 mm apart in staggered rows. When just one of those holes plug up, then a color print begins to show horizontal bands of no-ink.
So far, I have made a cotton twill device for wiping the bottom of the printhead. It does not work very well.
Just for laughs, suppose one had a printer test utility that would show exactly which ink-jet holes are plugged? The same page could print out a map of the printhead showing rows, columns, dimensions and colors on the bottom of the ink-jet unit. The test page could organize cleaning work by showing which row and which column is not squirting ink.
The really valuable trick would be to test and clean individual ink jet orifices without disassembling the printer.
Now what is needed is an alignment jig and a cleaning tool for cleaning exactly one print head ink jet orifice at a time. The alignment jig could be a piece of electronics perf board or a drilled plate. The cleaning tools would be a wet cotton swab and a suction or water pressure device using 1 mm diameter vinyl tube.
It would be really nice if Epson would publish the command language for addressing the print head and carriage machinery.Then you could send the printer a command like "move the printhead so ink-jet number 3 in row 4 is 90 mm from the left edge of the printer. That position lines up with the handy dandy alignment jig. You just thread the cleaning swab up, wet the crusties, then send the printer a command to fire number 3 in row 4 and find out if the opening has cleared.
The moral of the story is: I would love to fix the inkjet printer and I wish Epson would do the quality thing of publishing the control codes and print head dimensions to enable writing a diagnostic program and fabricating a cleaning jig. The umteen million dollar failure of quality home color printing could be greatly eased if Epson would do the right thing and disclose the control language for addressing the printer at the single inkjet level.