Re:I read this and found it to be terribly funny
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Microsoft in 2008
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· Score: 1
Simply put, dress codes are unprofessional. It's classic function follows form. By having strick dress codes, companies exclude parts of the talent pool who might are willing to work elsewhere at places without dress codes. Those employees who do take the jobs must use their own finances to buy said clothing and must pay more than companies that don't to make up for the difference. The only reason for dress codes is to make the MBAs feel good aobut themselves. I'm unaware of any study that says you get better productivity out of employees who must wear ties. The only excuse I've heard is so that people don't cause a distraction or cause friction within their workgroup. Thing is that if people in a workgroup can't overcome the way somebody else dresses, then they're really not going to be able to overcome any actual personel issues that may hinder a project.
Apple updated things on a Monday? We knew it was coming quickly because they End Of lifed the earlier models a week and a half ago, but they usually only update on Tuesday.
This sounds like a cool feature, can anyone confirm from personal experience that it really works?
Somewhat unrelated story. Back in the day when I was in college, they had computer fairs where companies would hawk their new products. A freind of mine was looking for a laptop and went to all of them. He was sold on the Apple after the presentation went something like this:
Guy comes in. He boots up the Apple laptop. introduces it as the new DuoDock and then shuts it down. Then he threw it against the wall and let it hit the ground. After picking it up and confidently pressed the on button with the reasuring startup *bong*, he asked "Any questions?"
Re:I read this and found it to be terribly funny
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Microsoft in 2008
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· Score: 1
You forgot to mention that there's no dress code. I've had plenty of friends who have worked there either party all night and have to show up at work in "club clothes" or get dressed so they could head straight out to a concert after work. Others tell me how people show up every day in everything from dirty slackwear to high goth attire.
... but it can't be any of those, including 6 4, because that's not how roman numerals are composed. VIIV is nonsense as a roman numeral.
And that is why they'd be able to trademark it. Can't trademark a number IIRC, which is why they opted for the Pentium name instead of 586. If it were actual Roman numerals, it would be a number and untrademarkable. Since it is nonsence, they can trademark it.
Who's going to pay for it? Hospitals have no money at all. To get them to spend money you have to go through so many committees and red tape its crazy. And anyone that can make a decision is already in bed with a different company and gets a kick back to only use them. Even if the product is crap and doesn't actually help patient care. There will never be a standard or open way for moving data around the healthcare environment.
The hospitals don't care about providing the best tools to the doctors to provide the best care. They care more about charging higher fees and lining their individual pockets. I see in 10-15 years or so the entire US medical industry crashing under its own weight. It is being run as a big business instead of putting the patients first.
I was about to mod you informative for the first paragraph, then I read the second. IME, yes, hospitals have no money. Yes, there is usually to much management and red tape to get anything done quickly. Getting caught with a single vendor is usually a result of vendor lockin but even then there is review of other products. Price is a main concern and the price for upgrading with the same company is almost always cheaper than adopting a completly new system, converting all the data, and training the entire hospital to use a new product. There are already ways such as HL7 to move stuff around between vendors and they already do it for the most part because until recently few people made all the parts needed to run a single hospital. Even then, all the different parts from the same vendor rarely work well together with eachother any better than they work with systems from other companies. This is usually because fewer people have all one company because they're not willing to change vendors for existing systems, and because half those systems were a different companies product a year ago. Communication between systems is a big issue and what the hospitals are demanding, but the problem lies with the vendors not providing it because they spend all their time getting their own systems to talk to eachother (and can't even get that right half the time).
Lining out pockets? Half the people who walk through our doors never even pay their bills. Any hospital with an ER is taking tons of people with no insurance and probably not even a job. The city and state help some but not enough. Only two departments at my hospital can even turn a profit due to this and they still have millions of dollars in bills that they know they'll never see payment for every year. We'd love to upgrade our systems to something new that was a better clinical tool for the doctors, but were are we going to find the money? I'm still supporting Pentium I computers because we don't have the funds to replace them. Our budget barely allows us to keep our 10 year old systems upgraded to the point that they're still supported. Then there's the issue that even if we had the money, the newer systems are a newer OS and on newer hardware, but they don't have any added functionality nor are they better at providing care than the older systems.
My personal belief is:
"It is who you know that gets you in the door. It is what you know that keeps you there."
I wish I could agree with you, but not seen this in action. Once you're hired, you're pretty much in. They've made their choice and are going to stick to it. To fire that person, even if inept, would mean the hirer admitting they made a mistake, which doesn't happen that often, as well as the politics of firing "so-and-so's friend". More ofthen than not, IMHO, they'll make due unless you're not just worthless but detrimental to the entire company. So far, I've yet to even see them send a contractor back for somebody better when I'm telling them "this person is inept and we should send him back for somebody else because we're not going to get any work out of him by the end of his contract". Get the job and they'll cover up and train you as much as possible.
Of course, if they end up having to fire somebody due to financial reasons, the dead wood is usually the first to go.
Oops! Above should read "higher costs of manufacturing and transportaiton." rather than "higher costs of energy."
Another issue that I've head about but can't testify to would be that petroleum is used to make many of the fertilaizers that we use to maintain our current food crops. Once oil gets more expensive or harder to find, food prices start getting higher and we may not even be able to grow enough. That would also hurt the biodiesel prospects.
You're gonna have to sometime, the oil will not last forever. And without oil, no electricity, little economy and yep, grass huts and beans. Spend your children's inheritance, so long as you had fun in your Hummer, right?
Actually, oil makes up less than 2% of the US electricity generation. Much less than natural gas which could be said to be linked. Still, IIRC, 53% comes from coal and around 20% from hydro. Coal is much worst for the envronment than the burning of oil and if weather patterns change, we may see our current hydro system in for a shock. But without oil, I imagine that we'll be changing over to biodiesel or some such for autos, but it's not like the oil will run out all at once. Easy to get to and cheap to pump oil will start going away and the price of oil will grow hirer and hirer. We'll start using lower grade oil and switching to other energy sources as it does. The major effect of running low on oil is that our economy will slow due to the higer costs of energy.
Nobody seems to be interested in career employees these days. The few people that are career seem to have settled into their jobs over many years and have stability due to politics rather than skill or even need. If you're looking for stability, you might try to look for a job in a city, state or national government. They're about the only ones that expect to be around later without mergers, buy outs or out sourcing(well, they do look at that but not as much as normal companies).
For your decreased skill set, wrist problems, and unhappyness with your job, I'd say you need to look at management. You're experienced and if you're a people person, you could take a few Project Management classes to impress the suits, brush up on your power point and become one of those people that go to meetings all day so the people who do the actual work don't have to.
By the time you are old enough to want to make a list of things to tell young people they need to do to be happy, you are too old to relate to any young person in a meaningful or influential way. But inevitably, generation after generation, the old people are compelled to spew advice which the young will absorb, but ignore, until they themselves are old and ready to acknowledge its correctness (and then to futilely victimize that generation with advice).
I was the exact opposite. Believed everything I was told and took it to heart. Worked away. Worried about high school grades. Worried about college and prepared for "the real world" in the manner they told me. Once got old enough to gain my own experience and go into the real world, I realized it was all not true, and if it was ever true, it belonged to a world that hadn't existed for several decades. It's good that kids ignore or take what they're told with a grain of salt. Nothing about the wisdom my father gave to me about the white collar business world of the 60's pertains to the casual dress IT world of the 00's. There are no life long careers. Kissing ass just makes you the butt of office jokes. Unless you're looking at a really good college and scholarships, high school grades or even graduating don't matter. Once you have the piece of paper for your degree, your college grades don't matter unless you're attempting grad school. Once you have experience, your piece of paper doesn't matter unless it' used as a bullet item to impress some MBA. The most important thing to getting a job on your resume is the reference who turns it in to the person hireing and says "this is a friend of mine."
No doubt, when I pass this wisdom to my own children, it will be irrelevant to the new world they live in.
The thing I don't get about this is why bother getting an iPod at all? So you can say "I have an iPod"? The reason people love the iPod is because it's control is so intuitive. With this, there's no control, so why not bother getting a cheaper 3rd party brand (if one exists)?
1. It doesn't really exist. When I was looking for an MP3 player, a 128 meg was $150. A quick survey seems to show that the price for those has dropped to $99 and some under $150 with 256 meg. Apple with 512 meg at $99 undercuts at least some of the competition.
2. It syncs with iTunes and gives you ability to develop your playlists with the application you use to listen to and organize your music on your computer (assuming you do).
3. It's a name brand and if nothing else, it's pretty easy to find out where to take it if it breaks. You might save money on a no-name mp3 player of equal ability, but without name recognition you have no idea if their product is crap or not.
IIRC, it's because processors are getting so fast that distance is actually becoming important also. Longer path means the longer the signal takes to get down that path. Also, longer path means more heat because resistance is per length. You might make is somewhat easier to disapate heat by spreading out the chip, but you'll cripple it due to travel times and causing more heat by making paths longer. Making things smaller cuts the distance between the circuits and causes less heat due to less material being used. allowing for the increase in speeds. Now that things are so small that the physics of that scale are preventing us from going further, we need another solution. One is making the chips larger by putting more stuff on them so that work can be handled by specialized circuit sets rather than one generic set to handle everything.
IANACE (I Am Not A Compter Engineer) and it's been ten years since my last electronics class, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
This is very tangential to the subject, but I'll ask anyway. America fought a two-fronted war very successfully in WWII. How come the "two-fronted war" is so obviously dumb when Germany did it? I think it's as much 20/20 hindsight as anything else.
Well, first off, one of Hitler's rules that he stated in Mein Kaumpf was to never fight on two fronts. So, in that light, it's him breakign his own rules.
Reality was that every day he did not attack the USSR, was a day closer to the USSR attacking him. His error was not attacking the USSR but in trusting Mussolini. It was Italy's attack on Greece which delayed Hitler's push into the USSR by several months because Germany had to go to their aid. It was that several months that made the winter an issue in invading the USSR. Another was declaring war on the US. Since Japan had attacked the US, Germany was under no obligation to declare war on the US, especially not so soon, but Hitler didn't hesitate and allowed the US to operate in the European theater immediatly. There as also the change of bombing tactics in England that gave England tim to rebuid and defend herself.
Re:Shoot me for my ignorance...
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Sin City Trailer
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· Score: 1
Yes, but as I said, TMNT was a parody of Frank Millar's Daredevil. teh bar of radioactive stuff that hit Matt Murdock across the face crashed into their jar and caused their mutation. Instead of "The Hand" there was a ninja clan called "The Foot". instead of a teacher alled "Stick", there was "Splinter". IIRC, the cover was even a parody of FM's Ronin series. Don't get me wrong, it was good and had some original ideas, but it was still mainly a parody of Miller's work.
Another comic which parodied Miller's work which was good was the Tick.
Re:Shoot me for my ignorance...
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Sin City Trailer
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Frank Millar was alreayd one of the most important peopel in comicdom before Dark Knight. he came on and did Ronin whcih not only was one of the first introductions of Japanese style and flavor (ninjas!) to the West but was also one of the first limited series. He went on to write Daredevil and create Electra which reshaped the character and again was one of the first introductions of ninjas to the West, especially in comics. Where he really becomes important is with Teenage Mutant ninja Turtles which was originally a parody of Frank Miller's Daredevil. With the wild success of that book and the specualtion on others that it caused along with the blooming of non-newstand comic sales, spurred the market to a point where new, independant comic companies had a chance to succeed. The new breed of comicbook stores (and their patrons) couldn't afford to not order first issues of unknown comics and possibly miss out on the next TMNT success story. This paved the way for both indepednat comics and comic book stores. Then he wrote Dark Knight and just as he did with Daredevil rewrote the character with such a vision that the mainstream storyline had to march to his new beat. It also spwned the first Batman movie in style and probably gave the Hollywood another look at using comics as source materials for movies.
Although his contributions may not be as great as someone like Stan Lee, without Frank Miller, the comic industry would be much different today.
All of this was written up one year and explained in much more detail in one of the copies of the Comic Price Guide.
Having read the article in the Post, the guy the story is about is an ex-mechanic who got into IT during the boom. He live in the Midwest (not exactly a hotbed of IT jobs). A perfect analogy would be someone looking for water in the desert. He isn't moving to one of the coasts, so he's kind of stuck. Living in the DC area, there are loads of jobs, but you have to get here. He'd be better off signing up with one of the big contracting firms (EDS, SAIC, etc.) if he's looking.
Having moved from the midwest to the west coast during the boom, I'd say he has a better chance of finding a job there than here. Seems everybody wit half a brain moved out of the midwest to the coasts to get a job during the boom. Now that the boom has bust, the coasts are filled with tons of unemployed IT workers. yes, there's plenty of jobs but there are way more people applying for them than there are jobs. I spent a year a half unemployed and without a face to face interview after about 400 resumes. HR was literally getting thousands of resumes for entry level positions and not even looking at them all. meanwhile, my parents kept informing of IT jobs back home in the midwest and I kept telling them I'd rather starve than move back to BFE.
From Dictionary.com, piracy is "2. The unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material: software piracy." Physical CD pirates are the ones that buy one CD, make their own master, or just make CDR copies, make color copies of the label art and then just produce their own CDs which get sold all over the place. Go to flea markets, roadside shops, or guys that sell CDs on the street corner and I'm sure you'll run across physical copies of pirated CDs. If they're doing a good job of it, you might not even be able to tell that it's a pirated copy.
It happens to software all the time too. that's why MS spends all that time to include holograms on their CDs and packaging materials, to make it harder to copy.
Rutan's accomplishment was impressive, but as has been pointed out in other discussions, it was essentially a high-flying airplane rather than a true spaceship, and doesn't scale well. Anyone who wins this prize will have built something much more directly applicable to real space travel.
Sorry, but high-flying airplanes are the way to go. Being able to fly into space and use the atmosphere's oxygen to do so has great advantages. The ideal orbital craft will probalby end up being some sort of plane/ramjet/scramjet/rocket combo. Pure rockets are the brute force method that the US had to use to match the Russians rather than continue with their own X planes. Until then, it was thought that we'd simply go higher and faster till we got there. Now that the Cold War is over, we're back on that track because that will be the cheapest and easiest way in the long run.
Pure rockets will be used when they're the only things that will work. Once in space, you'll get on board a space station and change over to a space craft rather than an orbital craft. Even then, they'll be used for quick trips with other solutions used for many unmanned trips. Solar sails, ion drives, etc., although slower, will be perfectly fine for things like probes and freight shipments. Once we can get into orbit successfully, then it wil be the time to research true spaceships.
Hey, it falls under "ongoing trainging" and "being aware of current technology". The same what playing networked games falls under "testing network load capabilities".
Really though, when big virus' hit, I usually find out about them via/. or similar websites before our IT Security team manages to inform me. This gives me an extra couple of hours to start patching before it hits our computers. If I didn't read/. at least once a day, I'd be putting my departments security at risk.
The difference, I think, is that our technology does what it's supposed to do. I mean, I look at an abacus or slide rule and I don't think, "Oh, hah hah, those silly pre-computer people, what cute toys they had!" I think, "Wow, that's a really elegant solution to a difficult problem... but I'm glad I don't have to use that thing." Our cars and trains and ships and planes do move us around; our computers do crunch numbers; our space technology did (and hopefully someday will again) get us to the Moon. There's a difference between doing the best you can with what you've got, and flights of fancy.
Not too much difference. it was a hypothesis that would have failed and was revised later as more information was gathered. There are plenty of failed hyothesis' around by notable scientists to discuss. From "wackos" like William Reich to respected scientists such as Tesla, there are plenty of ideas that later turn out to be funny or wrong. Even Einstein is saddled with the Cosmological Constant which was added at a whim and later claimed to be his biggest blunder. People are still debating if it was useless or genius.
There are lots of things that Apple builds but never end up surfacing. They have a large R&D as well as design group who do lots of stuff. They build working models of items for display and testing. It's not too surprising that many rumors, no matter how credible, never end up coming true. It won't be till five years later, while reading a book on Apple design and history, that you find out the rumors were pretty much true but the product was killed at the last minute.
40 gigs may be enough right now, but as HD space increases then peope will go for better quality sound and music files will grow in size.
This is not mentioning things like "Home on iPod". "Home n iPod" was an announced feature for a few hours on the Apple website. Basically, your home directory on your iPod. Go anywhere, plug in your iPod to any mac and you can log on from it just like it was your own computer at home with all your files and everything.
After reading the article I fail to see what difference it makes. So Intel used something "similar" to a dual core to demonstrate how a dual core CPU would perform. What's the big deal?
Say I wanted to invest in a company that is going to put out dual core chips. Intel says they've got chips so I invest. Later turns out that they don't actually have chips ready and ran into issues that kept them from getting them out. Due to their misrepresentation of what they've accomplished, I invested in them instead of the company that actually has the chips ready. My money, even if not lost, did not make as much as it could have.
Repeat senario for a hardware company looking for a partner to supply chips. If I've signed contracts with Intel to supply chips and can't switch, other companies that went with the chip manufactuer who was ahead of Intel are now ahead of me.
Alright, so how do you figure this is good again? It sounds like another crappy big-budget *cough*Matrix Reloaded*cough* sci-fi *cough Episodes I & II*cough* that won't be even slightly entertaining beyond the initial awe of the special effects.
That's just it. It isn't a big budget move, under 50 million which is half the cost of the average Hollywood movie. Most of what they did have was spent on actors. It was mostly done using new techniques developed by the director. According to a friend who also saw a sneak preview earlier this week, it rocks and is what sci-fi geeks have been waiting for.
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Simply put, dress codes are unprofessional. It's classic function follows form. By having strick dress codes, companies exclude parts of the talent pool who might are willing to work elsewhere at places without dress codes. Those employees who do take the jobs must use their own finances to buy said clothing and must pay more than companies that don't to make up for the difference. The only reason for dress codes is to make the MBAs feel good aobut themselves. I'm unaware of any study that says you get better productivity out of employees who must wear ties. The only excuse I've heard is so that people don't cause a distraction or cause friction within their workgroup. Thing is that if people in a workgroup can't overcome the way somebody else dresses, then they're really not going to be able to overcome any actual personel issues that may hinder a project.
Apple updated things on a Monday? We knew it was coming quickly because they End Of lifed the earlier models a week and a half ago, but they usually only update on Tuesday.
This sounds like a cool feature, can anyone confirm from personal experience that it really works?
Somewhat unrelated story. Back in the day when I was in college, they had computer fairs where companies would hawk their new products. A freind of mine was looking for a laptop and went to all of them. He was sold on the Apple after the presentation went something like this:
Guy comes in. He boots up the Apple laptop. introduces it as the new DuoDock and then shuts it down. Then he threw it against the wall and let it hit the ground. After picking it up and confidently pressed the on button with the reasuring startup *bong*, he asked "Any questions?"
You forgot to mention that there's no dress code. I've had plenty of friends who have worked there either party all night and have to show up at work in "club clothes" or get dressed so they could head straight out to a concert after work. Others tell me how people show up every day in everything from dirty slackwear to high goth attire.
And that is why they'd be able to trademark it. Can't trademark a number IIRC, which is why they opted for the Pentium name instead of 586. If it were actual Roman numerals, it would be a number and untrademarkable. Since it is nonsence, they can trademark it.
Sound like an explanatio to anybody else?
Who's going to pay for it? Hospitals have no money at all. To get them to spend money you have to go through so many committees and red tape its crazy. And anyone that can make a decision is already in bed with a different company and gets a kick back to only use them. Even if the product is crap and doesn't actually help patient care. There will never be a standard or open way for moving data around the healthcare environment.
The hospitals don't care about providing the best tools to the doctors to provide the best care. They care more about charging higher fees and lining their individual pockets. I see in 10-15 years or so the entire US medical industry crashing under its own weight. It is being run as a big business instead of putting the patients first.
I was about to mod you informative for the first paragraph, then I read the second. IME, yes, hospitals have no money. Yes, there is usually to much management and red tape to get anything done quickly. Getting caught with a single vendor is usually a result of vendor lockin but even then there is review of other products. Price is a main concern and the price for upgrading with the same company is almost always cheaper than adopting a completly new system, converting all the data, and training the entire hospital to use a new product. There are already ways such as HL7 to move stuff around between vendors and they already do it for the most part because until recently few people made all the parts needed to run a single hospital. Even then, all the different parts from the same vendor rarely work well together with eachother any better than they work with systems from other companies. This is usually because fewer people have all one company because they're not willing to change vendors for existing systems, and because half those systems were a different companies product a year ago. Communication between systems is a big issue and what the hospitals are demanding, but the problem lies with the vendors not providing it because they spend all their time getting their own systems to talk to eachother (and can't even get that right half the time).
Lining out pockets? Half the people who walk through our doors never even pay their bills. Any hospital with an ER is taking tons of people with no insurance and probably not even a job. The city and state help some but not enough. Only two departments at my hospital can even turn a profit due to this and they still have millions of dollars in bills that they know they'll never see payment for every year. We'd love to upgrade our systems to something new that was a better clinical tool for the doctors, but were are we going to find the money? I'm still supporting Pentium I computers because we don't have the funds to replace them. Our budget barely allows us to keep our 10 year old systems upgraded to the point that they're still supported. Then there's the issue that even if we had the money, the newer systems are a newer OS and on newer hardware, but they don't have any added functionality nor are they better at providing care than the older systems.
My personal belief is: "It is who you know that gets you in the door. It is what you know that keeps you there."
I wish I could agree with you, but not seen this in action. Once you're hired, you're pretty much in. They've made their choice and are going to stick to it. To fire that person, even if inept, would mean the hirer admitting they made a mistake, which doesn't happen that often, as well as the politics of firing "so-and-so's friend". More ofthen than not, IMHO, they'll make due unless you're not just worthless but detrimental to the entire company. So far, I've yet to even see them send a contractor back for somebody better when I'm telling them "this person is inept and we should send him back for somebody else because we're not going to get any work out of him by the end of his contract". Get the job and they'll cover up and train you as much as possible.
Of course, if they end up having to fire somebody due to financial reasons, the dead wood is usually the first to go.
Oops! Above should read "higher costs of manufacturing and transportaiton." rather than "higher costs of energy."
Another issue that I've head about but can't testify to would be that petroleum is used to make many of the fertilaizers that we use to maintain our current food crops. Once oil gets more expensive or harder to find, food prices start getting higher and we may not even be able to grow enough. That would also hurt the biodiesel prospects.
You're gonna have to sometime, the oil will not last forever. And without oil, no electricity, little economy and yep, grass huts and beans. Spend your children's inheritance, so long as you had fun in your Hummer, right?
Actually, oil makes up less than 2% of the US electricity generation. Much less than natural gas which could be said to be linked. Still, IIRC, 53% comes from coal and around 20% from hydro. Coal is much worst for the envronment than the burning of oil and if weather patterns change, we may see our current hydro system in for a shock. But without oil, I imagine that we'll be changing over to biodiesel or some such for autos, but it's not like the oil will run out all at once. Easy to get to and cheap to pump oil will start going away and the price of oil will grow hirer and hirer. We'll start using lower grade oil and switching to other energy sources as it does. The major effect of running low on oil is that our economy will slow due to the higer costs of energy.
Nobody seems to be interested in career employees these days. The few people that are career seem to have settled into their jobs over many years and have stability due to politics rather than skill or even need. If you're looking for stability, you might try to look for a job in a city, state or national government. They're about the only ones that expect to be around later without mergers, buy outs or out sourcing(well, they do look at that but not as much as normal companies).
For your decreased skill set, wrist problems, and unhappyness with your job, I'd say you need to look at management. You're experienced and if you're a people person, you could take a few Project Management classes to impress the suits, brush up on your power point and become one of those people that go to meetings all day so the people who do the actual work don't have to.
By the time you are old enough to want to make a list of things to tell young people they need to do to be happy, you are too old to relate to any young person in a meaningful or influential way. But inevitably, generation after generation, the old people are compelled to spew advice which the young will absorb, but ignore, until they themselves are old and ready to acknowledge its correctness (and then to futilely victimize that generation with advice).
I was the exact opposite. Believed everything I was told and took it to heart. Worked away. Worried about high school grades. Worried about college and prepared for "the real world" in the manner they told me. Once got old enough to gain my own experience and go into the real world, I realized it was all not true, and if it was ever true, it belonged to a world that hadn't existed for several decades. It's good that kids ignore or take what they're told with a grain of salt. Nothing about the wisdom my father gave to me about the white collar business world of the 60's pertains to the casual dress IT world of the 00's. There are no life long careers. Kissing ass just makes you the butt of office jokes. Unless you're looking at a really good college and scholarships, high school grades or even graduating don't matter. Once you have the piece of paper for your degree, your college grades don't matter unless you're attempting grad school. Once you have experience, your piece of paper doesn't matter unless it' used as a bullet item to impress some MBA. The most important thing to getting a job on your resume is the reference who turns it in to the person hireing and says "this is a friend of mine."
No doubt, when I pass this wisdom to my own children, it will be irrelevant to the new world they live in.
The thing I don't get about this is why bother getting an iPod at all? So you can say "I have an iPod"? The reason people love the iPod is because it's control is so intuitive. With this, there's no control, so why not bother getting a cheaper 3rd party brand (if one exists)?
1. It doesn't really exist. When I was looking for an MP3 player, a 128 meg was $150. A quick survey seems to show that the price for those has dropped to $99 and some under $150 with 256 meg. Apple with 512 meg at $99 undercuts at least some of the competition.
2. It syncs with iTunes and gives you ability to develop your playlists with the application you use to listen to and organize your music on your computer (assuming you do).
3. It's a name brand and if nothing else, it's pretty easy to find out where to take it if it breaks. You might save money on a no-name mp3 player of equal ability, but without name recognition you have no idea if their product is crap or not.
Why the size restraints on processors?
IIRC, it's because processors are getting so fast that distance is actually becoming important also. Longer path means the longer the signal takes to get down that path. Also, longer path means more heat because resistance is per length. You might make is somewhat easier to disapate heat by spreading out the chip, but you'll cripple it due to travel times and causing more heat by making paths longer. Making things smaller cuts the distance between the circuits and causes less heat due to less material being used. allowing for the increase in speeds. Now that things are so small that the physics of that scale are preventing us from going further, we need another solution. One is making the chips larger by putting more stuff on them so that work can be handled by specialized circuit sets rather than one generic set to handle everything.
IANACE (I Am Not A Compter Engineer) and it's been ten years since my last electronics class, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
This is very tangential to the subject, but I'll ask anyway. America fought a two-fronted war very successfully in WWII. How come the "two-fronted war" is so obviously dumb when Germany did it? I think it's as much 20/20 hindsight as anything else.
Well, first off, one of Hitler's rules that he stated in Mein Kaumpf was to never fight on two fronts. So, in that light, it's him breakign his own rules.
Reality was that every day he did not attack the USSR, was a day closer to the USSR attacking him. His error was not attacking the USSR but in trusting Mussolini. It was Italy's attack on Greece which delayed Hitler's push into the USSR by several months because Germany had to go to their aid. It was that several months that made the winter an issue in invading the USSR. Another was declaring war on the US. Since Japan had attacked the US, Germany was under no obligation to declare war on the US, especially not so soon, but Hitler didn't hesitate and allowed the US to operate in the European theater immediatly. There as also the change of bombing tactics in England that gave England tim to rebuid and defend herself.
Another comic which parodied Miller's work which was good was the Tick.
Frank Millar was alreayd one of the most important peopel in comicdom before Dark Knight. he came on and did Ronin whcih not only was one of the first introductions of Japanese style and flavor (ninjas!) to the West but was also one of the first limited series. He went on to write Daredevil and create Electra which reshaped the character and again was one of the first introductions of ninjas to the West, especially in comics. Where he really becomes important is with Teenage Mutant ninja Turtles which was originally a parody of Frank Miller's Daredevil. With the wild success of that book and the specualtion on others that it caused along with the blooming of non-newstand comic sales, spurred the market to a point where new, independant comic companies had a chance to succeed. The new breed of comicbook stores (and their patrons) couldn't afford to not order first issues of unknown comics and possibly miss out on the next TMNT success story. This paved the way for both indepednat comics and comic book stores. Then he wrote Dark Knight and just as he did with Daredevil rewrote the character with such a vision that the mainstream storyline had to march to his new beat. It also spwned the first Batman movie in style and probably gave the Hollywood another look at using comics as source materials for movies. Although his contributions may not be as great as someone like Stan Lee, without Frank Miller, the comic industry would be much different today. All of this was written up one year and explained in much more detail in one of the copies of the Comic Price Guide.
From Dictionary.com, piracy is "2. The unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material: software piracy." Physical CD pirates are the ones that buy one CD, make their own master, or just make CDR copies, make color copies of the label art and then just produce their own CDs which get sold all over the place. Go to flea markets, roadside shops, or guys that sell CDs on the street corner and I'm sure you'll run across physical copies of pirated CDs. If they're doing a good job of it, you might not even be able to tell that it's a pirated copy.
It happens to software all the time too. that's why MS spends all that time to include holograms on their CDs and packaging materials, to make it harder to copy.
Sorry, but high-flying airplanes are the way to go. Being able to fly into space and use the atmosphere's oxygen to do so has great advantages. The ideal orbital craft will probalby end up being some sort of plane/ramjet/scramjet/rocket combo. Pure rockets are the brute force method that the US had to use to match the Russians rather than continue with their own X planes. Until then, it was thought that we'd simply go higher and faster till we got there. Now that the Cold War is over, we're back on that track because that will be the cheapest and easiest way in the long run.
Pure rockets will be used when they're the only things that will work. Once in space, you'll get on board a space station and change over to a space craft rather than an orbital craft. Even then, they'll be used for quick trips with other solutions used for many unmanned trips. Solar sails, ion drives, etc., although slower, will be perfectly fine for things like probes and freight shipments. Once we can get into orbit successfully, then it wil be the time to research true spaceships.
Hey, it falls under "ongoing trainging" and "being aware of current technology". The same what playing networked games falls under "testing network load capabilities".
Really though, when big virus' hit, I usually find out about them via /. or similar websites before our IT Security team manages to inform me. This gives me an extra couple of hours to start patching before it hits our computers. If I didn't read /. at least once a day, I'd be putting my departments security at risk.
Not too much difference. it was a hypothesis that would have failed and was revised later as more information was gathered. There are plenty of failed hyothesis' around by notable scientists to discuss. From "wackos" like William Reich to respected scientists such as Tesla, there are plenty of ideas that later turn out to be funny or wrong. Even Einstein is saddled with the Cosmological Constant which was added at a whim and later claimed to be his biggest blunder. People are still debating if it was useless or genius.
There are lots of things that Apple builds but never end up surfacing. They have a large R&D as well as design group who do lots of stuff. They build working models of items for display and testing. It's not too surprising that many rumors, no matter how credible, never end up coming true. It won't be till five years later, while reading a book on Apple design and history, that you find out the rumors were pretty much true but the product was killed at the last minute.
40 gigs may be enough right now, but as HD space increases then peope will go for better quality sound and music files will grow in size.
This is not mentioning things like "Home on iPod". "Home n iPod" was an announced feature for a few hours on the Apple website. Basically, your home directory on your iPod. Go anywhere, plug in your iPod to any mac and you can log on from it just like it was your own computer at home with all your files and everything.
After reading the article I fail to see what difference it makes. So Intel used something "similar" to a dual core to demonstrate how a dual core CPU would perform. What's the big deal?
Say I wanted to invest in a company that is going to put out dual core chips. Intel says they've got chips so I invest. Later turns out that they don't actually have chips ready and ran into issues that kept them from getting them out. Due to their misrepresentation of what they've accomplished, I invested in them instead of the company that actually has the chips ready. My money, even if not lost, did not make as much as it could have.
Repeat senario for a hardware company looking for a partner to supply chips. If I've signed contracts with Intel to supply chips and can't switch, other companies that went with the chip manufactuer who was ahead of Intel are now ahead of me.
Alright, so how do you figure this is good again? It sounds like another crappy big-budget *cough*Matrix Reloaded*cough* sci-fi *cough Episodes I & II*cough* that won't be even slightly entertaining beyond the initial awe of the special effects.
That's just it. It isn't a big budget move, under 50 million which is half the cost of the average Hollywood movie. Most of what they did have was spent on actors. It was mostly done using new techniques developed by the director. According to a friend who also saw a sneak preview earlier this week, it rocks and is what sci-fi geeks have been waiting for.