Ok, I didn't do the whole degree thing. Part of the reason was that I felt what was being taught in the computer science classes was out of date and often flat out wrong.
You should write about your discoveries. Is the big-O notation for quicksort memory usage flat out wrong? Did you find a new mistake in Knuth, or just rediscover one of the handful of known ones? Did you conclusively prove/disprove P=NP? Did you dislike your CA textbook being Wolfram's ANKOS? (that last question will get some folks wound up, for and against...)
Or when you say CS, do you mean vocational code monkey classes? (COBOL? eek) Those vocational training classes are legendarily bad across the entire educational system, but my real Computer Science classes were pretty good, and useful on the job. Just hold your nose in COBOL class and you'll be OK once you get to Discrete Math, CA, AI, all the higher level stuff. I even enjoyed systems analysis which could be pretty much be described as an interesting way to solve problems despite never being used in the real world.
My database theory class was interesting and thought provoking. Vocational DB2 training would not have been quite as interesting.
Have you seen how they build the average home? A normal priced home in my area is around $300k and if you see how they build them I don't see how these cheap structures could be much worse and remain standing.
Can't compare US housing bubble peak prices with india. For example, normal lending limits are around 3 times yearly income. My wife and I bought before the bubble around 1:1 ratio. But at the peak of the bubble, banks were loaning at 10 times income. So, that would imply a median income in your area around 30K, and if we loaned like they do in India at a 1:1 limit, our housing would only cost about 30K, not too far from their prices. Supply and Demand, if the banks will loan 10 times, then the price will rise to ten times... Alternately, if they loaned in India like they did in the US in recent years, at ten times income instead of one times income, they would price around the 1/8 of a million range, which is vaguely similar to our prices, relative to what you get.
Another way to compare is to drive down the to local home depot/menards/lowes/whatever and check out their "garden shed" display. For about the same money in the US or in India you can get a building with very similar specs... Of course they call it luxury middle class housing and we'd call it a garden shed, but the numbers match up regardless of the marketing.
You get a bunch of idiots with little understanding of physics haphazardly building from poorly conceived plans using the cheapest building materials they can find.
You talking American or Indian home building industry... Its pretty much the same everywhere. They have a huge advantage over us in that they mostly speak the same language, mostly, whereas here there is a mishmash of younger HS dropouts, older meth users, and illegals, none of home can usefully communicate with each other.
Debian (as a stock install, I don't include remastered lightweight Knoppix variants in that category) does not have a significant presence in the embedded device market.
I guess you'd be surprised then. If an embedded developer wants a small, stable, flexible supported distro that works on a dozen or so archs, Debian's #1.
The fundamental problem is you don't understand what Debian is. It's not a top down corporate structure devoted to next quarters results. If a developer volunteers to work on embedded systems, how to you intend to stop them merely because you don't think he/she has been successful in the past? Good luck stopping them.
Such uses either involve a platform-specific lightweight distro where available, or the devs take a roll-your-own approach.
Big mistake. An embedded dev's job is to write a nice UI for their NAS box, not to replicate all the work of the Debian security team, or attempt to replicate the work the Debian sysadmin team did to set up the world wide mirror network.
Getting in a pissing match over support for an irrelevant feature doesn't inspire me with confidence in Debian's leaders.
You must not know much, if anything, about Debian. It's not a company. Its sort of an organized free software uniculture that operates in near total anarchy. Trust me, he's not going to get "fired" or written up.
When you can perform an infinite number of operations in an arbitrarily short amount of time, quite a stupid algorithm can produce some pretty smart results.
A programmer would agree with you. A computer scientist would disagree.
So, here's how computers get massively smarter than us really fast. 10-20 years AFTER the first sentient AIs are created, we'll have sentient AIs that can operate at tens to hundreds of times faster than real time. Now, imagine you create a group of "research brains" that all work together at hundreds of times real time. So in a year, for example, this group of "research brains" can do the thinking that would require a group of humans to spend at least a few hundred years doing.
Ah, but then you'll likely need tens to hundreds of times the input bandwidth to keep the processors cooking, yet, it seems information overload at a much smaller scale jams up current biological intelligences. Just like cube-square scaling applies firm limits to what genetic engineering can do to organisms, although cool stuff can be done inside those limits, some similar bandwidth vs storage vs processing scaling laws might or might not limit intelligence. Too little bandwidth makes insane hallucinations? Too much bandwidth will make something like ADD? Proportionally too little storage gives absent minded professor in the extreme, continually rediscovering what it forgot yesterday. I think there is too much faith that intelligence in general, or AI specifically, must be sane and always develops out of the basic requirements, because of course AI researchers are sane and their intelligence more or less developed out of their own basic biological abilities (as opposed to the developers becoming crazy couch potatoe fox-news watching zombies).
Then too, its useless to create average brain level AIs, even if they think really fast, even if there is a large group. All you'll get is myspace pages, but faster. Telling an average bus full of average people to think real hard, for a real long time, will not earn a nobel prize, any more than telling a bus full of women to make a baby in only two weeks will work. Clearly, giving high school drop outs a bunch of meth to make them "faster" doesn't make them much smarter. Clearly, placing a homeless person in a library doesn't make them smart. Without cultural support science doesn't happen, and is the culture of one AI computer more like a university or more like an inner city?
It's not much of an extension to tie the AI vs super intelligent AI competition in with contemporary battles over race and intelligence. Some people have a nearly religious belief that intelligence is an on/off switch and individuals or cultures whom are outliers above and below are just lucky or a temporary accident of history. Those people, of course, are fools. But they have to be battled thru as part of the research funding process.
I remember turbo pascal / borland pascal. I never liked Pascal, and it took 25 years to figure out why.
Do you remember "Second Life"? I guess it still is operating. For awhile they had weekly/daily slashvertisements but they seem to have gone away. Anyway, SL would not allow arbitrary usernames, you had to select one of their predefined last names. Pascal was available. Unfortunately someone already selected first name "GNU" and "Turbo" was long gone... I thought it would be funny to be called "Borland Pascal"
Now if there was one thing SL was famous for (other than the furries, their own little housing bubble, and their gambling establishments) it was creepy men "wearing" teen girl avatars trying to pick up other men.
Every time I logged in to SL, it was creepy how these "teen girl" avatars all came up to me to mention, "hey, did you know there used to be a computer language with your name? I used to use that in college"... etc etc.
So, yes indeed, in SL, alot of the women are not only men, but are old male Pascal programmers. So, after a quarter century, I finally figured out why I didn't like Pascal.
Indeed, there's a famous story about a guy calling SCO from his tank during the first Iraq War and downloading a patch.
I tried googling for it (in english) and found nothing.
Was it an iraqi tank? That would explain alot about SCO, and the iraqi armies performance during the war, and my inability to find an english language version of that story...
Low interest rates are not an issue if you buy a house you can afford.
Very bad, terrible, awful, financial life destroying advice.
Income spent on housing is basically fixed. Therefore low interest rate = high price, and high interest rate = low price.
Say you spend $1K/month on a low rate loan. That means when the rates go up to normal, the price will implode, and you'll be upside down. So, your choices are pay off a huge loan on a house that is just not worth it, or foreclose/bankruptcy. Basically this is the situation now.
On the other hand, say you spend $1K/month on a high rate load. That means you pay a very low price for that home and on average the price of the home will always be much higher in the future. When the rates go to normal, you refinance your itty bitty mortgage to a normal/low rate, lets say $500/month. So you pay practically nothing and you can sell at a profit at (almost) any time.
Low interest rate means the buyer is screwed, high interest rate means good times ahead!
So, if you look at interest rates from 1980-now, its a steady decline to the lowest rates seen in many decades. The result is fairly obvious.
In fact, renting is even more expensive than owning when you consider that you don't get to keep any of the equity, and the landlord needs to make a profit.
Actually, no. The whole point of the psychological aspect of the bubble was/is that "housing only goes up". Therefore landlords didn't care that the typical rental cost was a fraction of their mortgage payment.
For example, say the cost was $500K. That would imply, at a reasonable rent to cost ratio of 100, a rental cost of $5000 per month. But the going rental rate for a SFR is only $1800. Thus each month a landlord loses $3200 in cashflow.
However the whole point of the bubble is to mix up cash flow and balance sheets. So, if that $500K house cost $250K two years ago, it's gonna double in two years, right? Because housing only goes up, right? So, if you expect to gain $500K on the balance sheet in two years, that is simplistically a monthly gain of $20833. A new car each and every month....
So, the bubblehead thinks he gains $1800 a month from rent, lost $3200 a month in expenses, and gains $20833 per month in bubble prices. Sounds highly profitable. Now what happens when real estate no longer goes up? What if it drops by half, thus a balance sheet loss of 10K per month, every month? Ooops. Mail the keys back to the bank and tell the bank, tough luck. Don't worry about the bank, taxpayers will bail them out.
Another way renting can be cheaper is looking at opportunity costs. If the "savings" of ownership are less than the money lost thru peasant work of maintaining the house, then you're better off outsourcing property management to the landlord. People whom get alot of money by working crazy hours are far better off outsourcing toilet plunging and lawnmowing to a landlord. Also some people are willing to pay alot for someone else to handle the hassles for them.
The final way renting can be cheaper, is if you know anything about economics, and see whats going on in the inflation adjusted prices over the long term over the last century, in the ratio of house prices to rent over the last century, in the ratio of median income to median home price, in the ratio of median home price to... heck just about any commodity, in the historical graph of interest rate vs house price with attention given to the current temporarily multi-generationally low interest rate implying a very temporarily multi-generationally high house price, in the trends of median middle class income over the years, in the demographics of baby boomers flaming out with not enough younger folks to move in/up, in the graphs of house construction vs population change (supply vs demand), it's not too hard to see whats going to happen to prices. On one side you've got all the math and graphs that are worth considering, and on the other side, you've got slogans like "real estate only goes up", pretty easy to evaluate what will happen soon. So, pay a small rent to the landlord whom will take a staggering huge capital loss. Some homes in CA have been/are dropping in the high five figures per month, an order of magnitude larger than their rent...
You must not be from around these parts... We've merged our government and multinational corporations together. There is no separation. Otherwise known as Fascism or Corporatism.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.
It's not totaly impossible that whoever is responsible managed to disrupt the back-up procedure. They sound fairly confident that the backups won't work. Perhaps they managed to intercept the treansmission of the backup data, or destroy or steal the physical media that the backups are stored on.
I've had to set up backup systems like this. I have a better imagination, so I found several more problems I was able to avoid in my actual deployed systems.
No need for such complicated mission impossible stuff. Merely gain access to the backup server. You know, the server that everyone in IT needs access to, so they made the password "Password1". Everyone having access is a bad idea.
Then using the handy web console that requires no training or skill, instead of backing up/dev/sda1, backup/dev/random or even better, some large temp file. dd if=/dev/random of=/temp/blah bs=1k count=1M and then backup/temp/blah instead of/dev/sda1. Or, if the backup system insists on backing up ext2 filesystem, do similar with mke2fs. Or if the backup system insists on backing up "a" sql database, change it from backing up "sekret_perscription_db" to backing up "test". Or execute some simple SQL commands to create a db with the same name with "_test" or perhaps "_version2" suffixed, then stop backing up the real one and start backing up the fake one. Simple web consoles are a bad idea. Putting a fisher-price interface on a nuclear reactor doesn't magically make it suitable for toddlers to play with.
My backup routine encrypts everything with mcrypt. Using the handy dandy web interface, simply change the password thats passed to mcrypt. For extra bonus fun make is look similar, like "ell" for "one" and "Oh" for "Zero".
Or, even more fun, if you have a centralized backup server tape farm, simply delete the entire database backup routine. I'm sure the simple web console has a simple interface to remove stuff just as easily as adding it. Its certain that someone was assigned the job of setting up a centralized backup system. Its possible, although there are numerous exceptions, that someone was assigned the job of maintaining the system on a day to day basis when it breaks. Its very unlikely anyone was assigned the job of verifying restores work, verifying actual data is being written, etc. No one is going to notice that the centralized backup server takes 1 minutes less or the tape is 1% less full...
You can also have fun like configure the server to write 160 GB of data to each... 20 GB tape.
Name: cult of debian Established: 1993 Major Deity(s): Bruce Perens & people called Ian Sacred relic: Debian 1.0 discs Antichrist: ubuntu
Bzzzt fail.
I was "around" back then (although I didn't join until a couple years later) and the 1.0 disks were an epic fail. Not a sacred relic at all. If anything, the opposite of a sacred relic...
Debian 1.0 was never released: Accidently InfoMagic, a CD vendor, shipped the development release of Debian and entitled it 1.0. On December 11th 1995, Debian and InfoMagic jointly announced that this release was screwed. Bruce Perens explains that the data placed on the "InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource 5-CD Set November 1995" as "Debian 1.0" is not the Debian 1.0 release, but an early development version which is only partially in the ELF format, will probably not boot or run correctly, and does not represent the quality of a released Debian system. To prevent confusion between the premature CD version and the actual Debian release, the Debian Project has renamed its next release to "Debian 1.1". The premature Debian 1.0 on CD is deprecated and should not be used.
Also if anything would be Debian's "antichrist" it would be Debian's own non-free repository of software with licenses too icky to be in the real "main" Debian. The fact that I like the devilish non-free repository probably means I listened to too much heavy metal in the 80s.
Soy based toner cartridges are probably ok, but I'd want to see the nutritional composition clearly labeled so we can compare the carbohydrate content with other equipment, such as our roughage-based fax machine.
My son is allergic to soy. It's not as bad as a peanut allergy (those are like sniff it and die) but he does get very sick from soy. I cannot imagine why a company would want to open itself to immense legal liability by forcing employees to use one of the most common allergens.
As the wikipedia article says "The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America estimates soy is among the nine most common food allergens for pediatric and adult food allergy patients"
Now it doesn't matter if its a real problem, but if you ever have semi-unrelated "employee legal problems" with an employee whom is allergic to soy, and the jury hears about a corporate policy of intentionally exposing that allergic employee... "Yes your honor I did (fill in the blank w/ fireable offense) but I did it because I was miserable due to my medically documented allergy to the soy ink my boss made me use, after all everyone snaps after enough torture, can't blame me"
The other area of immense legal liability is biodegradability. The whole purpose of soy ink is to have it degrade, right? I'm sure the court will love to hear how management insisted that all sexual harassment, discriminatory actions, and tax evasion evidence, was printed using biodegradable link. Basically, using soy inks means any illegal action that was merely an accident or at worst an oversight is now carefully premeditated, because the perpetrator planned ahead to use special weird biodegradable ink. Even if the ink didn't "properly degrade" before the court date, merely using that kind of "sekret agent ink" implies premeditated criminal intent. Even if there is no evidence at all, the fact biodegradable ink was used does indicate that evidence probably was intentionally destroyed.
The final area of concern is frankly you cannot make a workplace cleaner than the biggest slob. See any shared refrigerator. So, all workplaces have some mice, rats, roaches, etc. Maybe you haven't noticed, but trust me, they all do, at one level or another. Now soy is edible. So, as if rats don't like chewing on paper enough as it is... Which also opens areas of legal liability, since after management policy feeds the pests, you force your workers to either work in rodent infested filth (ranging from "merely" asthma problems up to and including fatal hantavirus) or force them to work in areas filled with toxic rat poisons (better hope no employees EVER get any form of cancer or their kids get any form of birth defect).
The whole idea just seems utterly insane from a legal standpoint.
Remember the pre-internet BBS days, like Compuserve, Prodigy, etc? Selling tiny little low res newspaper readers, would be like in the 90s when the pre-internet BBSes were going down, trying to boost subscriber numbers by selling a tiny low res fisher-price laptop that can only connect to Prodigy, while the rest of the market moves to the internet on their PC.
In reality, their biggest mistake was not containing costs 10 years ago (slowly) to reflect the structural shift of information to a different medium
No, their biggest mistake was not focusing on what their ink on paper product can do that new mediums like the internet can not do. Cars do not have "car-type buggy whips". The whip manufacturers have moved on to entirely new fields of endeavor mostly not involving transportation. Ink on paper newspapers have to do the same.
They have lost the "textual news/agitprop" business by being obsolete. OK fine. Now what can you do with ink on paper that a computer cannot do.
The average inet user supposedly has a 14 inch monitor running 800x600 or whatever. On the other hand a newspaper can print out freaking huge graphics if they want. Take advantage of that.
1) Show the news in graphical form on a map. I'd like a map of all "major" road construction projects each day. Oh, and gimme a big ole map with all police/fire/ambulance activity marked and maybe a short comment. And I'd like maps for activities going on over the next couple days, you know, like festival here, museum thing here, etc. Maybe mix and match so you get a couple pages of maps, one for each day yesterday, today, and one for each day going a couple days in the future.
2) Do some news in big ole timelines. Not a simplistic lame graph, but something big and cool.
3) Giant pages of tabular data. Gimme a TV-guide grid style listing of all local movie theaters and what they're showing at each time. Take advantage of those huge pages!
4) Whatever you do, don't screw up the giant comics pages and giant TV schedule grids. Err, thats exactly what they're doing, so cut it out.
5) A page needs to be devoted to kids coloring projects, etc.
6) Stop distributing text products and go graphical. Any website can provide a textual astrology report. But only a newspaper can provide a daily giant 1 foot on a side astrological reading thingy. Yes I know astrology is for fools, but the point remains that some data needs to go graphical. Years ago, last time I read a paper, I recall seeing a regular column of bridge tournament puzzle things that was done entirely in text... Geeze guys go graphical.
7) Focus on stuff that can't be done online very conveniently, like crosswords, wordsearchs, etc. Anything that involves scribbling on the paper (as opposed to scribbling on the monitor)
8) get some "only in physical paper" features. Don't care what it is, pictures of attractive people, dilbert cartoons, oragami patterns, paper airplane patterns, silly picture frames, funny flowcharts, or whatever, but you gotta orient it around encouraging the readers to cut it out of the paper, then stick it on the cube wall or do something with the cutout. Can't do that online (well, yeah you can print out, but this thing is already printed out...) You may need better paper and printing than cruddy old newsprint.
Another thing they could do is find bloggy info and push the limits of fair use by quoting them. The only useful information is on blogs now... the problem is its buried under junk. Find the good stuff and highlight it in the paper.
Finally, if there is one special industrial connection that newspapers have, its the book publishing industry. So, in each daily paper, publish 5 minutes worth of reading of some hot new novel. Your options are subscribe to the paper to read the whole thing 5 minutes at a time, or cough up the bucks at Amazon to read it all today. I think this will burn up alot of paper space, but if it brings in the readers... Do fiction and nonfiction. I'd think an appropriate nonfiction would be Galbraith's 1929 Great Depression, or for a paper with real guts, how about "the creature from jekyll island"
Instead of doing something special or unique with their media, they are trying to do the same old thing but cheaper... that isn't going to work in the long run.
Obviously cube farms can never go wireless due to density. There is no way, no how, you can simultaneously run hundreds of personnel at densities approaching one per square meter. Way too much interference.
So, just wire in more lower powered access points.
You will never run wireless faster than the copper line to its access point. The staggering labor cost of slowing down the LAN cannot be adsorbed. So, the obvious solution is to buy something like micro-access points that only have a range of perhaps 7 feet, you know, like a patch cable, and then install one in every single cube. Then the users can be wireless. Of course it takes exactly the same amount of CAT5 in the walls to run all those APs. And of course once the bean counters figure out you've replaced a $1.50 1000M patch cord with a $150 10 meg access point that only works when its not being interfered with, you'll be unemployed. But, have fun while it lasts!
Most gardeners are familiar with the concept of a weed barrier.
Now that we're on the topic of a "weed barrier", how does it work when THC can be detected in human hair for drug testing purposes, then the hair is used to grow "innocent" corn flakes or something?
I wonder if the THC in the hair breaks down, or, is concentrated in the plant thats grown in it? There could be a market for this. Probably, due to solubilities, in oil bearing seeds? Or is that weed bearing oil bearing seeds?
While we do have the programs your talking about on TV on the discovery and History channel's other than a very select few of the people i know no one i know really watchs them.
Also from the peoples republic of the united states of america here. The problem is those shows are really boring. 30 minutes of commercials for "greatest generation" era viewers, 25 minutes of intros, credits, fade in and out from commercials, and 1984 style "two minutes hate", and maybe 5 minutes of actual real information.
But its not for lack of coverage. You do realize that 1/4 of history channel is like, hitlers hairpiece, hitler A-Z, secret story of hitlers abomb, hitlers last stand, hitlers jet aircraft, the hitler conspiracy, city of the underground hitler edition, etc. That guy gets more media attention in 2009 than he got in the 40s, because there is much more media in total now.
In comparison, the hitler programs make the other 3/4 of the history channel, which is mostly blue collar documentaries (ax men, ice road truckers, tougher in alaska, that train show, etc) and fantasy reality TV (UFO hunters, monsterquest, etc), appear almost exciting.
Once in a rare while, something like a historical documentary sneaks through onto the H channel, but that is at least as rare as seeing science fiction on the scifi channel.
I would like a science fiction channel, and I would like a history channel, but they are not available. Oh well, maybe on youtube.
SuperKendall is trying to be funny, I think. Everyone knows hydrogen comes from turning huge amounts of electricity (or steam and coal, or cracked crude oil, etc) into small amounts of burnable hydrogen. Hydrogen storage is quite a bit less efficient than just storing the electricity in a (lithium?) battery.
No one consumes lithium except in some weird fusion/fission reactor designs. It's all out there, somewhere.
The sea is full of lithium. Of course it would be stupid to refine sea water if there is a much higher concentration in Bolivian salt. Therefore no one refines sea water to make lithium.
Is it possible that the shape of their vehicle has a relatively slow terminal velocity, so that the rockets don't have to do *that much* braking at the end?
Yes, and not only that, you can take an off the shelf survivable roll cage and crunch zone design from a race car, and build the capsule around it. So, if the rocket doesn't work, the vehicle is an utter total loss, but the crew walks away basically unscratched, more or less.
Take a simple, cheap, reliable solution (parachute) and replace it with an expensive, complicated and less robust solution (retro rockets).
Parachutes are by no means as simple and cheap (or reliable) as you'd think.
On the other hand, for a bunch of "rocket scientists" whats just one more rocket? If there's one thing rocket scientists know, its rockets.
Bonus points if you could use the "other half" of the final ascent stage. Of course no vacuum nozzles allowed, would need a ground pressure (or higher) rated nozzle to eliminate flow separation.
That, or to keep taking advantage of the viscous gas you'll find on the way down to brake, where available.
Oh, they're doing that... Its not like you'll decelerate from orbital to rest in just 600 meters above the surface. Heck I don't know if you'd decelerate from orbital to reset going 600 meters below the surface.
I did enjoy the funny slashdot headline, if you emphasize the word "may" as in possibly or maybe.
Braille on drive-through ATMs is for blind passengers, not blind drivers.
Are you saying that a blind person can't use the ATM if they are a driver? Nonsense! How would the machine know if they are a driver or not?
Want to really screw around with people, try driving thru an ATM backwards so the passenger can use the ATM. Some of the driveway clearances and curves can be challenging when done in reverse. Also as a bonus you get to stare at the driver behind you, which can vary from pleasant (if they're hot), to disturbing (if they continue to pick their nose anyway despite being face to face).
What about the people that very intentionally win that game, by flooding the internet with their open source contributions, public helpful participation in highly technical forums, somewhat brag-y blog posts about their technical achievements, well written technical documentation, etc?
Believe it or not, it is possible to have a blog and even a facebook account that isn't just a bunch of weed legalization stickers and pictures of vomiting after the keg party.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I didn't do the whole degree thing. Part of the reason was that I felt what was being taught in the computer science classes was out of date and often flat out wrong.
You should write about your discoveries. Is the big-O notation for quicksort memory usage flat out wrong? Did you find a new mistake in Knuth, or just rediscover one of the handful of known ones? Did you conclusively prove/disprove P=NP? Did you dislike your CA textbook being Wolfram's ANKOS? (that last question will get some folks wound up, for and against...)
Or when you say CS, do you mean vocational code monkey classes? (COBOL? eek) Those vocational training classes are legendarily bad across the entire educational system, but my real Computer Science classes were pretty good, and useful on the job. Just hold your nose in COBOL class and you'll be OK once you get to Discrete Math, CA, AI, all the higher level stuff. I even enjoyed systems analysis which could be pretty much be described as an interesting way to solve problems despite never being used in the real world.
My database theory class was interesting and thought provoking. Vocational DB2 training would not have been quite as interesting.
Have you seen how they build the average home? A normal priced home in my area is around $300k and if you see how they build them I don't see how these cheap structures could be much worse and remain standing.
Can't compare US housing bubble peak prices with india. For example, normal lending limits are around 3 times yearly income. My wife and I bought before the bubble around 1:1 ratio. But at the peak of the bubble, banks were loaning at 10 times income. So, that would imply a median income in your area around 30K, and if we loaned like they do in India at a 1:1 limit, our housing would only cost about 30K, not too far from their prices. Supply and Demand, if the banks will loan 10 times, then the price will rise to ten times... Alternately, if they loaned in India like they did in the US in recent years, at ten times income instead of one times income, they would price around the 1/8 of a million range, which is vaguely similar to our prices, relative to what you get.
Another way to compare is to drive down the to local home depot/menards/lowes/whatever and check out their "garden shed" display. For about the same money in the US or in India you can get a building with very similar specs... Of course they call it luxury middle class housing and we'd call it a garden shed, but the numbers match up regardless of the marketing.
You get a bunch of idiots with little understanding of physics haphazardly building from poorly conceived plans using the cheapest building materials they can find.
You talking American or Indian home building industry... Its pretty much the same everywhere. They have a huge advantage over us in that they mostly speak the same language, mostly, whereas here there is a mishmash of younger HS dropouts, older meth users, and illegals, none of home can usefully communicate with each other.
Check out easynews before you commit to a NNTP provider.
Debian (as a stock install, I don't include remastered lightweight Knoppix variants in that category) does not have a significant presence in the embedded device market.
I guess you'd be surprised then. If an embedded developer wants a small, stable, flexible supported distro that works on a dozen or so archs, Debian's #1.
The fundamental problem is you don't understand what Debian is. It's not a top down corporate structure devoted to next quarters results. If a developer volunteers to work on embedded systems, how to you intend to stop them merely because you don't think he/she has been successful in the past? Good luck stopping them.
Such uses either involve a platform-specific lightweight distro where available, or the devs take a roll-your-own approach.
Big mistake. An embedded dev's job is to write a nice UI for their NAS box, not to replicate all the work of the Debian security team, or attempt to replicate the work the Debian sysadmin team did to set up the world wide mirror network.
Getting in a pissing match over support for an irrelevant feature doesn't inspire me with confidence in Debian's leaders.
You must not know much, if anything, about Debian. It's not a company. Its sort of an organized free software uniculture that operates in near total anarchy. Trust me, he's not going to get "fired" or written up.
When you can perform an infinite number of operations in an arbitrarily short amount of time, quite a stupid algorithm can produce some pretty smart results.
A programmer would agree with you. A computer scientist would disagree.
Check out the bogosort, to get what I'm saying...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort
So, here's how computers get massively smarter than us really fast. 10-20 years AFTER the first sentient AIs are created, we'll have sentient AIs that can operate at tens to hundreds of times faster than real time. Now, imagine you create a group of "research brains" that all work together at hundreds of times real time. So in a year, for example, this group of "research brains" can do the thinking that would require a group of humans to spend at least a few hundred years doing.
Ah, but then you'll likely need tens to hundreds of times the input bandwidth to keep the processors cooking, yet, it seems information overload at a much smaller scale jams up current biological intelligences. Just like cube-square scaling applies firm limits to what genetic engineering can do to organisms, although cool stuff can be done inside those limits, some similar bandwidth vs storage vs processing scaling laws might or might not limit intelligence. Too little bandwidth makes insane hallucinations? Too much bandwidth will make something like ADD? Proportionally too little storage gives absent minded professor in the extreme, continually rediscovering what it forgot yesterday. I think there is too much faith that intelligence in general, or AI specifically, must be sane and always develops out of the basic requirements, because of course AI researchers are sane and their intelligence more or less developed out of their own basic biological abilities (as opposed to the developers becoming crazy couch potatoe fox-news watching zombies).
Then too, its useless to create average brain level AIs, even if they think really fast, even if there is a large group. All you'll get is myspace pages, but faster. Telling an average bus full of average people to think real hard, for a real long time, will not earn a nobel prize, any more than telling a bus full of women to make a baby in only two weeks will work. Clearly, giving high school drop outs a bunch of meth to make them "faster" doesn't make them much smarter. Clearly, placing a homeless person in a library doesn't make them smart. Without cultural support science doesn't happen, and is the culture of one AI computer more like a university or more like an inner city?
It's not much of an extension to tie the AI vs super intelligent AI competition in with contemporary battles over race and intelligence. Some people have a nearly religious belief that intelligence is an on/off switch and individuals or cultures whom are outliers above and below are just lucky or a temporary accident of history. Those people, of course, are fools. But they have to be battled thru as part of the research funding process.
I remember turbo pascal / borland pascal. I never liked Pascal, and it took 25 years to figure out why.
Do you remember "Second Life"? I guess it still is operating. For awhile they had weekly/daily slashvertisements but they seem to have gone away. Anyway, SL would not allow arbitrary usernames, you had to select one of their predefined last names. Pascal was available. Unfortunately someone already selected first name "GNU" and "Turbo" was long gone... I thought it would be funny to be called "Borland Pascal"
Now if there was one thing SL was famous for (other than the furries, their own little housing bubble, and their gambling establishments) it was creepy men "wearing" teen girl avatars trying to pick up other men.
Every time I logged in to SL, it was creepy how these "teen girl" avatars all came up to me to mention, "hey, did you know there used to be a computer language with your name? I used to use that in college"... etc etc.
So, yes indeed, in SL, alot of the women are not only men, but are old male Pascal programmers. So, after a quarter century, I finally figured out why I didn't like Pascal.
Indeed, there's a famous story about a guy calling SCO from his tank during the first Iraq War and downloading a patch.
I tried googling for it (in english) and found nothing.
Was it an iraqi tank? That would explain alot about SCO, and the iraqi armies performance during the war, and my inability to find an english language version of that story...
Low interest rates are not an issue if you buy a house you can afford.
Very bad, terrible, awful, financial life destroying advice.
Income spent on housing is basically fixed.
Therefore low interest rate = high price, and high interest rate = low price.
Say you spend $1K/month on a low rate loan. That means when the rates go up to normal, the price will implode, and you'll be upside down. So, your choices are pay off a huge loan on a house that is just not worth it, or foreclose/bankruptcy. Basically this is the situation now.
On the other hand, say you spend $1K/month on a high rate load. That means you pay a very low price for that home and on average the price of the home will always be much higher in the future. When the rates go to normal, you refinance your itty bitty mortgage to a normal/low rate, lets say $500/month. So you pay practically nothing and you can sell at a profit at (almost) any time.
Low interest rate means the buyer is screwed, high interest rate means good times ahead!
So, if you look at interest rates from 1980-now, its a steady decline to the lowest rates seen in many decades. The result is fairly obvious.
In fact, renting is even more expensive than owning when you consider that you don't get to keep any of the equity, and the landlord needs to make a profit.
Actually, no. The whole point of the psychological aspect of the bubble was/is that "housing only goes up". Therefore landlords didn't care that the typical rental cost was a fraction of their mortgage payment.
For example, say the cost was $500K. That would imply, at a reasonable rent to cost ratio of 100, a rental cost of $5000 per month. But the going rental rate for a SFR is only $1800. Thus each month a landlord loses $3200 in cashflow.
However the whole point of the bubble is to mix up cash flow and balance sheets. So, if that $500K house cost $250K two years ago, it's gonna double in two years, right? Because housing only goes up, right? So, if you expect to gain $500K on the balance sheet in two years, that is simplistically a monthly gain of $20833. A new car each and every month....
So, the bubblehead thinks he gains $1800 a month from rent, lost $3200 a month in expenses, and gains $20833 per month in bubble prices. Sounds highly profitable. Now what happens when real estate no longer goes up? What if it drops by half, thus a balance sheet loss of 10K per month, every month? Ooops. Mail the keys back to the bank and tell the bank, tough luck. Don't worry about the bank, taxpayers will bail them out.
Another way renting can be cheaper is looking at opportunity costs. If the "savings" of ownership are less than the money lost thru peasant work of maintaining the house, then you're better off outsourcing property management to the landlord. People whom get alot of money by working crazy hours are far better off outsourcing toilet plunging and lawnmowing to a landlord. Also some people are willing to pay alot for someone else to handle the hassles for them.
The final way renting can be cheaper, is if you know anything about economics, and see whats going on in the inflation adjusted prices over the long term over the last century, in the ratio of house prices to rent over the last century, in the ratio of median income to median home price, in the ratio of median home price to... heck just about any commodity, in the historical graph of interest rate vs house price with attention given to the current temporarily multi-generationally low interest rate implying a very temporarily multi-generationally high house price, in the trends of median middle class income over the years, in the demographics of baby boomers flaming out with not enough younger folks to move in/up, in the graphs of house construction vs population change (supply vs demand), it's not too hard to see whats going to happen to prices. On one side you've got all the math and graphs that are worth considering, and on the other side, you've got slogans like "real estate only goes up", pretty easy to evaluate what will happen soon. So, pay a small rent to the landlord whom will take a staggering huge capital loss. Some homes in CA have been/are dropping in the high five figures per month, an order of magnitude larger than their rent...
Microsoft isn't the government
You must not be from around these parts... We've merged our government and multinational corporations together. There is no separation. Otherwise known as Fascism or Corporatism.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
It's not totaly impossible that whoever is responsible managed to disrupt the back-up procedure. They sound fairly confident that the backups won't work. Perhaps they managed to intercept the treansmission of the backup data, or destroy or steal the physical media that the backups are stored on.
I've had to set up backup systems like this. I have a better imagination, so I found several more problems I was able to avoid in my actual deployed systems.
No need for such complicated mission impossible stuff. Merely gain access to the backup server. You know, the server that everyone in IT needs access to, so they made the password "Password1". Everyone having access is a bad idea.
Then using the handy web console that requires no training or skill, instead of backing up /dev/sda1, backup /dev/random or even better, some large temp file. dd if=/dev/random of=/temp/blah bs=1k count=1M and then backup /temp/blah instead of /dev/sda1. Or, if the backup system insists on backing up ext2 filesystem, do similar with mke2fs. Or if the backup system insists on backing up "a" sql database, change it from backing up "sekret_perscription_db" to backing up "test". Or execute some simple SQL commands to create a db with the same name with "_test" or perhaps "_version2" suffixed, then stop backing up the real one and start backing up the fake one. Simple web consoles are a bad idea. Putting a fisher-price interface on a nuclear reactor doesn't magically make it suitable for toddlers to play with.
My backup routine encrypts everything with mcrypt. Using the handy dandy web interface, simply change the password thats passed to mcrypt. For extra bonus fun make is look similar, like "ell" for "one" and "Oh" for "Zero".
Or, even more fun, if you have a centralized backup server tape farm, simply delete the entire database backup routine. I'm sure the simple web console has a simple interface to remove stuff just as easily as adding it. Its certain that someone was assigned the job of setting up a centralized backup system. Its possible, although there are numerous exceptions, that someone was assigned the job of maintaining the system on a day to day basis when it breaks. Its very unlikely anyone was assigned the job of verifying restores work, verifying actual data is being written, etc. No one is going to notice that the centralized backup server takes 1 minutes less or the tape is 1% less full...
You can also have fun like configure the server to write 160 GB of data to each... 20 GB tape.
Name: cult of debian
Established: 1993
Major Deity(s): Bruce Perens & people called Ian
Sacred relic: Debian 1.0 discs
Antichrist: ubuntu
Bzzzt fail.
I was "around" back then (although I didn't join until a couple years later) and the 1.0 disks were an epic fail. Not a sacred relic at all. If anything, the opposite of a sacred relic...
Check out:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releases.en.html
Debian 1.0 was never released: Accidently InfoMagic, a CD vendor, shipped the development release of Debian and entitled it 1.0. On December 11th 1995, Debian and InfoMagic jointly announced that this release was screwed. Bruce Perens explains that the data placed on the "InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource 5-CD Set November 1995" as "Debian 1.0" is not the Debian 1.0 release, but an early development version which is only partially in the ELF format, will probably not boot or run correctly, and does not represent the quality of a released Debian system. To prevent confusion between the premature CD version and the actual Debian release, the Debian Project has renamed its next release to "Debian 1.1". The premature Debian 1.0 on CD is deprecated and should not be used.
Also if anything would be Debian's "antichrist" it would be Debian's own non-free repository of software with licenses too icky to be in the real "main" Debian. The fact that I like the devilish non-free repository probably means I listened to too much heavy metal in the 80s.
Soy based toner cartridges are probably ok, but I'd want to see the nutritional composition clearly labeled so we can compare the carbohydrate content with other equipment, such as our roughage-based fax machine.
My son is allergic to soy. It's not as bad as a peanut allergy (those are like sniff it and die) but he does get very sick from soy. I cannot imagine why a company would want to open itself to immense legal liability by forcing employees to use one of the most common allergens.
As the wikipedia article says "The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America estimates soy is among the nine most common food allergens for pediatric and adult food allergy patients"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soy_allergy
Now it doesn't matter if its a real problem, but if you ever have semi-unrelated "employee legal problems" with an employee whom is allergic to soy, and the jury hears about a corporate policy of intentionally exposing that allergic employee... "Yes your honor I did (fill in the blank w/ fireable offense) but I did it because I was miserable due to my medically documented allergy to the soy ink my boss made me use, after all everyone snaps after enough torture, can't blame me"
The other area of immense legal liability is biodegradability. The whole purpose of soy ink is to have it degrade, right? I'm sure the court will love to hear how management insisted that all sexual harassment, discriminatory actions, and tax evasion evidence, was printed using biodegradable link. Basically, using soy inks means any illegal action that was merely an accident or at worst an oversight is now carefully premeditated, because the perpetrator planned ahead to use special weird biodegradable ink. Even if the ink didn't "properly degrade" before the court date, merely using that kind of "sekret agent ink" implies premeditated criminal intent. Even if there is no evidence at all, the fact biodegradable ink was used does indicate that evidence probably was intentionally destroyed.
The final area of concern is frankly you cannot make a workplace cleaner than the biggest slob. See any shared refrigerator. So, all workplaces have some mice, rats, roaches, etc. Maybe you haven't noticed, but trust me, they all do, at one level or another. Now soy is edible. So, as if rats don't like chewing on paper enough as it is... Which also opens areas of legal liability, since after management policy feeds the pests, you force your workers to either work in rodent infested filth (ranging from "merely" asthma problems up to and including fatal hantavirus) or force them to work in areas filled with toxic rat poisons (better hope no employees EVER get any form of cancer or their kids get any form of birth defect).
The whole idea just seems utterly insane from a legal standpoint.
Remember the pre-internet BBS days, like Compuserve, Prodigy, etc? Selling tiny little low res newspaper readers, would be like in the 90s when the pre-internet BBSes were going down, trying to boost subscriber numbers by selling a tiny low res fisher-price laptop that can only connect to Prodigy, while the rest of the market moves to the internet on their PC.
It kind of makes me laugh.
In reality, their biggest mistake was not containing costs 10 years ago (slowly) to reflect the structural shift of information to a different medium
No, their biggest mistake was not focusing on what their ink on paper product can do that new mediums like the internet can not do. Cars do not have "car-type buggy whips". The whip manufacturers have moved on to entirely new fields of endeavor mostly not involving transportation. Ink on paper newspapers have to do the same.
They have lost the "textual news/agitprop" business by being obsolete. OK fine. Now what can you do with ink on paper that a computer cannot do.
The average inet user supposedly has a 14 inch monitor running 800x600 or whatever. On the other hand a newspaper can print out freaking huge graphics if they want. Take advantage of that.
1) Show the news in graphical form on a map. I'd like a map of all "major" road construction projects each day. Oh, and gimme a big ole map with all police/fire/ambulance activity marked and maybe a short comment. And I'd like maps for activities going on over the next couple days, you know, like festival here, museum thing here, etc. Maybe mix and match so you get a couple pages of maps, one for each day yesterday, today, and one for each day going a couple days in the future.
2) Do some news in big ole timelines. Not a simplistic lame graph, but something big and cool.
3) Giant pages of tabular data. Gimme a TV-guide grid style listing of all local movie theaters and what they're showing at each time. Take advantage of those huge pages!
4) Whatever you do, don't screw up the giant comics pages and giant TV schedule grids. Err, thats exactly what they're doing, so cut it out.
5) A page needs to be devoted to kids coloring projects, etc.
6) Stop distributing text products and go graphical. Any website can provide a textual astrology report. But only a newspaper can provide a daily giant 1 foot on a side astrological reading thingy. Yes I know astrology is for fools, but the point remains that some data needs to go graphical. Years ago, last time I read a paper, I recall seeing a regular column of bridge tournament puzzle things that was done entirely in text... Geeze guys go graphical.
7) Focus on stuff that can't be done online very conveniently, like crosswords, wordsearchs, etc. Anything that involves scribbling on the paper (as opposed to scribbling on the monitor)
8) get some "only in physical paper" features. Don't care what it is, pictures of attractive people, dilbert cartoons, oragami patterns, paper airplane patterns, silly picture frames, funny flowcharts, or whatever, but you gotta orient it around encouraging the readers to cut it out of the paper, then stick it on the cube wall or do something with the cutout. Can't do that online (well, yeah you can print out, but this thing is already printed out...) You may need better paper and printing than cruddy old newsprint.
Another thing they could do is find bloggy info and push the limits of fair use by quoting them. The only useful information is on blogs now... the problem is its buried under junk. Find the good stuff and highlight it in the paper.
Finally, if there is one special industrial connection that newspapers have, its the book publishing industry. So, in each daily paper, publish 5 minutes worth of reading of some hot new novel. Your options are subscribe to the paper to read the whole thing 5 minutes at a time, or cough up the bucks at Amazon to read it all today. I think this will burn up alot of paper space, but if it brings in the readers... Do fiction and nonfiction. I'd think an appropriate nonfiction would be Galbraith's 1929 Great Depression, or for a paper with real guts, how about "the creature from jekyll island"
Instead of doing something special or unique with their media, they are trying to do the same old thing but cheaper... that isn't going to work in the long run.
You forgot capacity.
Obviously cube farms can never go wireless due to density. There is no way, no how, you can simultaneously run hundreds of personnel at densities approaching one per square meter. Way too much interference.
So, just wire in more lower powered access points.
You will never run wireless faster than the copper line to its access point. The staggering labor cost of slowing down the LAN cannot be adsorbed. So, the obvious solution is to buy something like micro-access points that only have a range of perhaps 7 feet, you know, like a patch cable, and then install one in every single cube. Then the users can be wireless. Of course it takes exactly the same amount of CAT5 in the walls to run all those APs. And of course once the bean counters figure out you've replaced a $1.50 1000M patch cord with a $150 10 meg access point that only works when its not being interfered with, you'll be unemployed. But, have fun while it lasts!
Most gardeners are familiar with the concept of a weed barrier.
Now that we're on the topic of a "weed barrier", how does it work when THC can be detected in human hair for drug testing purposes, then the hair is used to grow "innocent" corn flakes or something?
I wonder if the THC in the hair breaks down, or, is concentrated in the plant thats grown in it? There could be a market for this. Probably, due to solubilities, in oil bearing seeds? Or is that weed bearing oil bearing seeds?
While we do have the programs your talking about on TV on the discovery and History channel's other than a very select few of the people i know no one i know really watchs them.
Also from the peoples republic of the united states of america here. The problem is those shows are really boring. 30 minutes of commercials for "greatest generation" era viewers, 25 minutes of intros, credits, fade in and out from commercials, and 1984 style "two minutes hate", and maybe 5 minutes of actual real information.
But its not for lack of coverage. You do realize that 1/4 of history channel is like, hitlers hairpiece, hitler A-Z, secret story of hitlers abomb, hitlers last stand, hitlers jet aircraft, the hitler conspiracy, city of the underground hitler edition, etc. That guy gets more media attention in 2009 than he got in the 40s, because there is much more media in total now.
In comparison, the hitler programs make the other 3/4 of the history channel, which is mostly blue collar documentaries (ax men, ice road truckers, tougher in alaska, that train show, etc) and fantasy reality TV (UFO hunters, monsterquest, etc), appear almost exciting.
Once in a rare while, something like a historical documentary sneaks through onto the H channel, but that is at least as rare as seeing science fiction on the scifi channel.
I would like a science fiction channel, and I would like a history channel, but they are not available. Oh well, maybe on youtube.
SuperKendall is trying to be funny, I think. Everyone knows hydrogen comes from turning huge amounts of electricity (or steam and coal, or cracked crude oil, etc) into small amounts of burnable hydrogen. Hydrogen storage is quite a bit less efficient than just storing the electricity in a (lithium?) battery.
No one consumes lithium except in some weird fusion/fission reactor designs. It's all out there, somewhere.
The sea is full of lithium. Of course it would be stupid to refine sea water if there is a much higher concentration in Bolivian salt. Therefore no one refines sea water to make lithium.
Is it possible that the shape of their vehicle has a relatively slow terminal velocity, so that the rockets don't have to do *that much* braking at the end?
Yes, and not only that, you can take an off the shelf survivable roll cage and crunch zone design from a race car, and build the capsule around it. So, if the rocket doesn't work, the vehicle is an utter total loss, but the crew walks away basically unscratched, more or less.
Take a simple, cheap, reliable solution (parachute) and replace it with an expensive, complicated and less robust solution (retro rockets).
Parachutes are by no means as simple and cheap (or reliable) as you'd think.
On the other hand, for a bunch of "rocket scientists" whats just one more rocket? If there's one thing rocket scientists know, its rockets.
Bonus points if you could use the "other half" of the final ascent stage. Of course no vacuum nozzles allowed, would need a ground pressure (or higher) rated nozzle to eliminate flow separation.
That, or to keep taking advantage of the viscous gas you'll find on the way down to brake, where available.
Oh, they're doing that... Its not like you'll decelerate from orbital to rest in just 600 meters above the surface. Heck I don't know if you'd decelerate from orbital to reset going 600 meters below the surface.
I did enjoy the funny slashdot headline, if you emphasize the word "may" as in possibly or maybe.
Braille on drive-through ATMs is for blind passengers, not blind drivers.
Are you saying that a blind person can't use the ATM if they are a driver? Nonsense! How would the machine know if they are a driver or not?
Want to really screw around with people, try driving thru an ATM backwards so the passenger can use the ATM. Some of the driveway clearances and curves can be challenging when done in reverse. Also as a bonus you get to stare at the driver behind you, which can vary from pleasant (if they're hot), to disturbing (if they continue to pick their nose anyway despite being face to face).
conciously use it during the job interview
What about the people that very intentionally win that game, by flooding the internet with their open source contributions, public helpful participation in highly technical forums, somewhat brag-y blog posts about their technical achievements, well written technical documentation, etc?
Believe it or not, it is possible to have a blog and even a facebook account that isn't just a bunch of weed legalization stickers and pictures of vomiting after the keg party.