I keep thinking to myself: "I know all this stuff. I can't be the only one out there who does."
I know all this stuff too. I've done device drivers, XML, Perl, assembly, system admin, realtime (OK, that was only in school), modifying Linux kernels, extensive Makefile work, Java, (no Eclipse! oops), GUIs, shell scripts, lots of C and C++, and, well, everything!
Where are the people with well-rounded computer careers? Where are the people posessing a broad range of expertise?
We're already employed! We're just too valuable to let go.:)
The two hiring managers I've interviewed with most recently both told me the same thing: there are a lot of people looking for work, but not a lot of good people looking for work. That's because companies that find the good people try to keep them. You are struggling with an inverse self-selection problem: the majority of people looking for work, and therefore coming to you with resumes, are out of work for some reason. And although highly qualified developers do lose their jobs, companies with any amount of rational self-interest tend to shed less-skilled employees before letting go of the good ones. So, the type of person you want is, by definition, much more likely to be already employed than the type of person you don't want.
I know this isn't very helpful to you - all I can really suggest is to put the word out among your social network and see if you can offer someone who's already got steady (and probably fulfilling) employment, something better at your company. Poach. Headhunt. It's a time-honoured tradition. Of course it comes with the caveat that anyone you successfully poach is also, by definition, susceptible to being poached away from you in the fullness of time...
When I worked at AOL a few years ago (ack!) I heard that AOL Canada was doing quite poorly due to the negative associations that Canadians have with "America", notwithstanding the elsewhere-mentioned point that, technically, "America" != "USA"...
Side note on working at AOL: All AOL employees are (or at least were) required to have AOL accounts. There's no such thing as a free AOL account, even for employees (!), so when the company I worked for was acquired, we were told that we had to sign up for AOL accounts with our own personal credit cards. The vague plan was that we would be reimbursed by the company for the bills. Several of my co-workers believed them, signed up with their personal credit cards, and were then stuck with the well-known hassle of trying to get out of paying AOL once they have your credit information. Some of us, including myself, knew about AOL's legendary billing exploits, and signed up with a dummy credit account that was created for this purpose. I've never had any billing problems with my AOL account.:)
I ran this port on my Motorola PowerStack (PowerPC 604 @ 100MHz). As others have mentioned, the response time was blazingly fast (as was AIX on the same system). I've never seen anything like it, and don't expect that I ever will, the way things are going. Unfortunately my PowerStack was stolen by some clueless morons who probably thought it was some kind of cool new PC, despite the big crossed-out Intel logo I had on the front.
'Linux violates 283 U.S. software patents.' How does the Linux community respond to these claims?
Well, IANAL, but WHEREAS:
as others have pointed out, this claim is almost certainly not original with Mr. Florian Muller but rather comes from OSRM; and
therefore the claim is not "Linux violates 283 U.S. software patents", but rather "Linux potentially violates 283 patents, none of which have been tested in court"; and
U.S. software patents are just so much toilet paper until they are tested in court, and approximately half fail the test;
THEREFORE, I respond with a resounding: So what?
Points of interest from the OSRM news story: In the U.S., you apparently cannot be penalized for infringing on a software patent if you didn't know about it. Thus Linus recommends to all Linux engineers not to investigate any potential patent infringements, for legal safety. For this reason, OSRM is not releasing the list of its 283 patents, so it is futile to ask Florian or the OSRM what they are. Those who wish to know what the patents are will have to do their own research - but remember that doing this research exposes the researcher to legal liability in case of infringement!
I thought of it as a play on words. That is, "fixing" the broken way we voted last time.
Sure, the main title is a straightforward play on words as you note. That's how you're meant to read it. But when I first saw the page, and I'm sure I'm not alone, I didn't read the main title first and then the subtitle - I read in standard English left-to-right, top-to-bottom order. And the sentence I got that way was almost certainly not the intended one, but just as clearly could not have escaped the notice of the page's graphic designer. I have to wonder what that person was thinking!
Scientific American is running a great article in their 10/2004 issue.
They are, and the title page for the article is great. It says:
Electronic Voting Machines Promise To Make
F I X I N G
Elections More Accurate Than Ever Before
I wanted to scan in the image and post it, or at least post a link to the graphic on SciAm's site, but the former is not currently practical on/. and SciAm does not have the current issue freely available on their site yet.
What they're really saying is two things, interleaved with different colours and fonts. The title of the article is "FIXING THE VOTE". Interleaved is the subtitle, "Electronic Voting Machines Promise To Make Elections More Accurate Than Ever Before, But Only If Certain Problems - With The Machines And The Wider Electoral Process - Are Rectified."
The way they chose to interleave the title and the subtitle results in what I consider to be a much more accurate statement! I almost can't believe that they didn't see this as they were designing the page, and so maybe they are putting out their own subliminal opinion on e-voting without necessarily having to take a lot of heat for it if anyone complains.
1) There seems to be evidence that flouride helps.
This evidence is dodgy at best. For every study that shows a (nearly negligible) improvement in DMFT (decayed, missing, filled teeth) in a fluoridated area compared to a nonfluoridated one, there's an equal and opposite study that shows a lack of improvement or worsening of dental health in a fluoridated area.
2) There is NO evidence it causes any harm.
This is actually false. Fluoride is highly toxic and it accumulates in your bones over your lifetime. At very very small concentrations in bones, it makes them slightly stronger; but any more than that, and they get quite brittle, resulting in hip fractures etc. Fluoride is also linked to other health problems such as cancer and brain damage.
3) It's cheap as hell to do.
Well, it's certainly cheaper for companies that produce it as an industrial byproduct if they can sell it to municipal governments as a water additive rather than having to pay to dispose of it. It certainly isn't free for municipalities to buy it and add it - being highly toxic it requires considerable handling precautions, among other things.
So basically, why not?
For the same reason we don't routinely add other toxic chemicals like lead or arsenic to our drinking water, that's why not. Fluoride has a similar toxicity to those chemicals, and in fact in combination with them, is substantially more toxic than the individual components separately. I hope your drinking water doesn't have any lead in it that may have leached out of the pipes. Not that that would ever happen.
Either way, it isn't some vast multi-national conspiracy
This is a straw man. It doesn't have to be a vast multi-national conspiracy to be more detrimental than beneficial. My experience with my local government's fluoride conspiracy is quite interesting, actually. I called my health department representative in my city government to ask why our drinking water was being fluoridated for no good reason and at considerable taxpayer (i.e. my) expense. She said she'd get back to me, and after doing her own research, she did. She said that I was right, fluoride was toxic and not dentally beneficial, and there was no reason to be adding it to the drinking water. But she also said that her superiors had told her to drop the matter immediately. I was told never to mention her name.
Tin-foil hat? Maybe. To me it is quite clear that fluoride is more of a (yet another) political boondoggle than a carefully researched scientifically backed example of mass medication. I now drink bottled fluoride-free spring water on the (extremely unofficial) recommendation of my city government.
My Mr. Fusion powering my Delorean is right around the corner...
Let me know when you get that 500-ton DeLorean accelerated up to 88 mph! You might need a bit more than 1.21 jiggawatts. (insert physics calculations here)
I've always wondered about the stupid "My" labels on things.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that idea was inane. My?? What's wrong with attaching a user ID to all your files and folders, like real OS's have done since, oh, about the mid-1970's? And what was wrong with just calling it "Documents"? Were they afraid that [l]users might not realize that "Documents" were, in fact, their documents and not some other random person's documents?
And did you see the crazy hoops they (MS) had to jump through once they realized that a computer might, just might, be used by more than one person? (Something else they were about 30 years late understanding!) Now the name of a folder varies wildly depending on exactly who is looking at it! Whose idea of a consistent, easy-to-understand UI is this, anyway?? A quantum mechanic's??
I can still buy gas, and it's 1/2 the price here as in any other country.
You sound a lot like a canoeist on the Niagara River just upstream of the falls. "Crisis? What crisis? I can still paddle my canoe! What roaring sound are you talking about?"
Are you saying that B. That no form of energy will ever be able to take over for oil?
Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about the things we use oil for other than gasoline. It forms the basis for the entire plastics industry, most of the pharmaceuticals industry, most of the lubrication industry (think motor/machine oil), and most of the pesticides industry.
So the answer is no, there is no form of energy that will be able to take over for oil, because oil is not just energy. Even as energy, there is no alternative to oil that has anywhere near its energy profit ratio.
We live in an oil age, and the oil is running out. Now what do we do?
While we're at it, neither is "backseat". You don't have a frontseat, you have a front seat. Therefore you also have a back seat. Just like you have a back yard, a back window, a back pocket, a backhoe... oh wait... dammit... stupid English...
What political and economic factors originating in the last three years are you refering to?
Well, I'm not an electrical grid professional by any means, but that statement was paraphrased from the article in the Industrial Physicist by Eric Lerner (referenced elsewhere in this discussion thread). Basically it refers to the deregulation and subsequent energy trading which started in the early 1990s and went into top gear with the legal validation of FERC Order 888 in 2000. (Alright, it's four years ago now, but it was three years prior to the blackout.) Anyhow, these politico-economic changes resulted in using the entire grid as a permanent energy "superhighway" for interstate/international energy traffic, something it was never meant to do. Along with the deregulation which created economic incentives to run the generation and distribution facilities as near to maximum capacity as possible, this created perfect conditions for instability and lack of resilience for dealing with local problems, such as occurred at First Energy. The problems there, while certainly acknowledged as the proximal cause of the blackout, were by no means a unique situation, and are apparently also a result of economic pressures to minimize costs and maximize profits at the expense of reliability and safety.
Well, that's my understanding of the situation anyway. (I have left out a number of even more complex factors - see the original article(s) for more details.)
2 or 3 regional blackouts lasting over 24 hours in the past 30 years or so
That's not the point. According to TFA, the 2003 blackout was not just another every-15-years-or-so random statistical occurrence. It was specifically caused by political and economic factors that have been created in the last 3 years, and another such blackout is more or less certainly going to occur every summer from now on until these problems are fixed.
This leaves electricity users with the options of paying higher prices to improve the stability of the grid, reducing power consumption to reduce overall grid load, implementing local power generation backup systems, hanging about in the dark whenever the grid goes down, or all of the above. Personally I have my UPS and backup gas generator ready to roll, along with candles, batteries, etc. I use a variety of energy-reducing measures, but I am also willing to pay higher prices for more reliability, if anyone were to offer me the option.
To get back to the subject line of this subthread, I thought it was quite amusing that the first reaction of the U.S. media was to blame us Canadians for their problems... not that our power systems are necessarily better by any means! (Here in Ontario we have our own power shortages every summer as well, largely for the same reasons as in the U.S.)
In fact, this is what the blank media tax in various countries was supposed to do, and how it does work in canada, if I'm not mistaken.
Well, this is what the blank media levy in Canada is ostensibly supposed to do, but in fact all of the money collected is spent by the organization which does the collecting. Not only do the artists not see any of it, but even the CRIA (Canadian RIAA) doesn't see any of it.
I complained to EMI as well, and they also told me to take it back, but I had bought it online from Amazon.ca - and they wouldn't take it back under any circumstances after it had been opened. (How was I supposed to know it was broken until I opened it??)
Bastards.
Oh, and did I mention that both EMI Canada and Amazon.ca are bastards?
I buy very few CDs as it is, and now none of them will be from EMI. That must be a great marketing tactic on their part.
This tax benefits mainly folks like Celine Dion and Brian Adams
No, it doesn't. Artists get none of the blank media levy. Even the Canadian recording industry gets none of the blank media levy, surprisingly enough. The CPCC (organization responsible for collecting and distributing the levy) keeps all of it for internal uses (salaries, administration, and advertising).
The thing that gets me about the media levy we have here in Canada is that although we get the right to legally copy copyrighted music in exchange for the levy (which is an improvement over the more usual practice of having our rights gradually and unilaterally removed), none of the levy goes to benefit the artists. This is not news for people familiar with RIAA/CRIA/etc. However, not only does the levy not go to benefit the artists, it does not go to benefit the CRIA member companies either, who might have some legitimate (if immoral) claim to it. Nor does it go to benefit the CRIA itself, the umbrella organization, which has an even more tenuous claim on the proceeds. No, all of the levy is being collected AND SPENT by the Canadian Private Copying Collective, an organization formed solely to collect and distribute the levy. It is spending the ENTIRE take on its own salary, administrative, advertising, and related expenses. It forecasts that it will continue to spend all of its income on "overhead" for at least the next few years. It does not promise to ever actually pay anything to artists or their recording companies. It does not publish any financial plan to reduce its overhead to the point that it can start to execute its mission.
CPCC Business Plan:
Enact laws to skim money from sales of blank media.
Collect money.
Profit!
There isn't even a ??? step. It's a great business plan.
And of course with this arrangement, it is not at all easy to opt out of the government/CRIA scheme - all blank media sold in Canada have this levy applied. The only alternative we have is to import blank media from other countries and "forget" to pay the levy at import time. Unfortunately it is not obvious that this is a cheaper solution due to shipping, duty, exchange, and other fees related to buying foreign products.
Slashdot Mirror
I know all this stuff too. I've done device drivers, XML, Perl, assembly, system admin, realtime (OK, that was only in school), modifying Linux kernels, extensive Makefile work, Java, (no Eclipse! oops), GUIs, shell scripts, lots of C and C++, and, well, everything!
Where are the people with well-rounded computer careers? Where are the people posessing a broad range of expertise?
We're already employed! We're just too valuable to let go. :)
The two hiring managers I've interviewed with most recently both told me the same thing: there are a lot of people looking for work, but not a lot of good people looking for work. That's because companies that find the good people try to keep them. You are struggling with an inverse self-selection problem: the majority of people looking for work, and therefore coming to you with resumes, are out of work for some reason. And although highly qualified developers do lose their jobs, companies with any amount of rational self-interest tend to shed less-skilled employees before letting go of the good ones. So, the type of person you want is, by definition, much more likely to be already employed than the type of person you don't want.
I know this isn't very helpful to you - all I can really suggest is to put the word out among your social network and see if you can offer someone who's already got steady (and probably fulfilling) employment, something better at your company. Poach. Headhunt. It's a time-honoured tradition. Of course it comes with the caveat that anyone you successfully poach is also, by definition, susceptible to being poached away from you in the fullness of time...
When I worked at AOL a few years ago (ack!) I heard that AOL Canada was doing quite poorly due to the negative associations that Canadians have with "America", notwithstanding the elsewhere-mentioned point that, technically, "America" != "USA"...
Side note on working at AOL: All AOL employees are (or at least were) required to have AOL accounts. There's no such thing as a free AOL account, even for employees (!), so when the company I worked for was acquired, we were told that we had to sign up for AOL accounts with our own personal credit cards. The vague plan was that we would be reimbursed by the company for the bills. Several of my co-workers believed them, signed up with their personal credit cards, and were then stuck with the well-known hassle of trying to get out of paying AOL once they have your credit information. Some of us, including myself, knew about AOL's legendary billing exploits, and signed up with a dummy credit account that was created for this purpose. I've never had any billing problems with my AOL account. :)
I ran this port on my Motorola PowerStack (PowerPC 604 @ 100MHz). As others have mentioned, the response time was blazingly fast (as was AIX on the same system). I've never seen anything like it, and don't expect that I ever will, the way things are going. Unfortunately my PowerStack was stolen by some clueless morons who probably thought it was some kind of cool new PC, despite the big crossed-out Intel logo I had on the front.
Well, IANAL, but WHEREAS:
- as others have pointed out, this claim is almost certainly not original with Mr. Florian Muller but rather comes from OSRM; and
- therefore the claim is not "Linux violates 283 U.S. software patents", but rather "Linux potentially violates 283 patents, none of which have been tested in court"; and
- U.S. software patents are just so much toilet paper until they are tested in court, and approximately half fail the test;
THEREFORE, I respond with a resounding: So what?Points of interest from the OSRM news story: In the U.S., you apparently cannot be penalized for infringing on a software patent if you didn't know about it. Thus Linus recommends to all Linux engineers not to investigate any potential patent infringements, for legal safety. For this reason, OSRM is not releasing the list of its 283 patents, so it is futile to ask Florian or the OSRM what they are. Those who wish to know what the patents are will have to do their own research - but remember that doing this research exposes the researcher to legal liability in case of infringement!
Sure, the main title is a straightforward play on words as you note. That's how you're meant to read it. But when I first saw the page, and I'm sure I'm not alone, I didn't read the main title first and then the subtitle - I read in standard English left-to-right, top-to-bottom order. And the sentence I got that way was almost certainly not the intended one, but just as clearly could not have escaped the notice of the page's graphic designer. I have to wonder what that person was thinking!
They are, and the title page for the article is great. It says:
Electronic Voting Machines Promise To Make
F I X I N G
Elections More Accurate Than Ever Before
I wanted to scan in the image and post it, or at least post a link to the graphic on SciAm's site, but the former is not currently practical on /. and SciAm does not have the current issue freely available on their site yet.
What they're really saying is two things, interleaved with different colours and fonts. The title of the article is "FIXING THE VOTE". Interleaved is the subtitle, "Electronic Voting Machines Promise To Make Elections More Accurate Than Ever Before, But Only If Certain Problems - With The Machines And The Wider Electoral Process - Are Rectified."
The way they chose to interleave the title and the subtitle results in what I consider to be a much more accurate statement! I almost can't believe that they didn't see this as they were designing the page, and so maybe they are putting out their own subliminal opinion on e-voting without necessarily having to take a lot of heat for it if anyone complains.
This evidence is dodgy at best. For every study that shows a (nearly negligible) improvement in DMFT (decayed, missing, filled teeth) in a fluoridated area compared to a nonfluoridated one, there's an equal and opposite study that shows a lack of improvement or worsening of dental health in a fluoridated area.
2) There is NO evidence it causes any harm.
This is actually false. Fluoride is highly toxic and it accumulates in your bones over your lifetime. At very very small concentrations in bones, it makes them slightly stronger; but any more than that, and they get quite brittle, resulting in hip fractures etc. Fluoride is also linked to other health problems such as cancer and brain damage.
3) It's cheap as hell to do.
Well, it's certainly cheaper for companies that produce it as an industrial byproduct if they can sell it to municipal governments as a water additive rather than having to pay to dispose of it. It certainly isn't free for municipalities to buy it and add it - being highly toxic it requires considerable handling precautions, among other things.
So basically, why not?
For the same reason we don't routinely add other toxic chemicals like lead or arsenic to our drinking water, that's why not. Fluoride has a similar toxicity to those chemicals, and in fact in combination with them, is substantially more toxic than the individual components separately. I hope your drinking water doesn't have any lead in it that may have leached out of the pipes. Not that that would ever happen.
Either way, it isn't some vast multi-national conspiracy
This is a straw man. It doesn't have to be a vast multi-national conspiracy to be more detrimental than beneficial. My experience with my local government's fluoride conspiracy is quite interesting, actually. I called my health department representative in my city government to ask why our drinking water was being fluoridated for no good reason and at considerable taxpayer (i.e. my) expense. She said she'd get back to me, and after doing her own research, she did. She said that I was right, fluoride was toxic and not dentally beneficial, and there was no reason to be adding it to the drinking water. But she also said that her superiors had told her to drop the matter immediately. I was told never to mention her name.
Tin-foil hat? Maybe. To me it is quite clear that fluoride is more of a (yet another) political boondoggle than a carefully researched scientifically backed example of mass medication. I now drink bottled fluoride-free spring water on the (extremely unofficial) recommendation of my city government.
Let me know when you get that 500-ton DeLorean accelerated up to 88 mph! You might need a bit more than 1.21 jiggawatts. (insert physics calculations here)
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that idea was inane. My?? What's wrong with attaching a user ID to all your files and folders, like real OS's have done since, oh, about the mid-1970's? And what was wrong with just calling it "Documents"? Were they afraid that [l]users might not realize that "Documents" were, in fact, their documents and not some other random person's documents?
And did you see the crazy hoops they (MS) had to jump through once they realized that a computer might, just might, be used by more than one person? (Something else they were about 30 years late understanding!) Now the name of a folder varies wildly depending on exactly who is looking at it! Whose idea of a consistent, easy-to-understand UI is this, anyway?? A quantum mechanic's??
You sound a lot like a canoeist on the Niagara River just upstream of the falls. "Crisis? What crisis? I can still paddle my canoe! What roaring sound are you talking about?"
12 parsecs from Kessel.
Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about the things we use oil for other than gasoline. It forms the basis for the entire plastics industry, most of the pharmaceuticals industry, most of the lubrication industry (think motor/machine oil), and most of the pesticides industry.
So the answer is no, there is no form of energy that will be able to take over for oil, because oil is not just energy. Even as energy, there is no alternative to oil that has anywhere near its energy profit ratio.
We live in an oil age, and the oil is running out. Now what do we do?
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
While we're at it, neither is "backseat". You don't have a frontseat, you have a front seat. Therefore you also have a back seat. Just like you have a back yard, a back window, a back pocket, a backhoe... oh wait... dammit... stupid English...
Is a vetinerary what you get when your veterinarian has an itinerary?
Well, I'm not an electrical grid professional by any means, but that statement was paraphrased from the article in the Industrial Physicist by Eric Lerner (referenced elsewhere in this discussion thread). Basically it refers to the deregulation and subsequent energy trading which started in the early 1990s and went into top gear with the legal validation of FERC Order 888 in 2000. (Alright, it's four years ago now, but it was three years prior to the blackout.) Anyhow, these politico-economic changes resulted in using the entire grid as a permanent energy "superhighway" for interstate/international energy traffic, something it was never meant to do. Along with the deregulation which created economic incentives to run the generation and distribution facilities as near to maximum capacity as possible, this created perfect conditions for instability and lack of resilience for dealing with local problems, such as occurred at First Energy. The problems there, while certainly acknowledged as the proximal cause of the blackout, were by no means a unique situation, and are apparently also a result of economic pressures to minimize costs and maximize profits at the expense of reliability and safety.
Well, that's my understanding of the situation anyway. (I have left out a number of even more complex factors - see the original article(s) for more details.)
That's not the point. According to TFA, the 2003 blackout was not just another every-15-years-or-so random statistical occurrence. It was specifically caused by political and economic factors that have been created in the last 3 years, and another such blackout is more or less certainly going to occur every summer from now on until these problems are fixed.
This leaves electricity users with the options of paying higher prices to improve the stability of the grid, reducing power consumption to reduce overall grid load, implementing local power generation backup systems, hanging about in the dark whenever the grid goes down, or all of the above. Personally I have my UPS and backup gas generator ready to roll, along with candles, batteries, etc. I use a variety of energy-reducing measures, but I am also willing to pay higher prices for more reliability, if anyone were to offer me the option.
To get back to the subject line of this subthread, I thought it was quite amusing that the first reaction of the U.S. media was to blame us Canadians for their problems... not that our power systems are necessarily better by any means! (Here in Ontario we have our own power shortages every summer as well, largely for the same reasons as in the U.S.)
Well, this is what the blank media levy in Canada is ostensibly supposed to do, but in fact all of the money collected is spent by the organization which does the collecting. Not only do the artists not see any of it, but even the CRIA (Canadian RIAA) doesn't see any of it.
Bastards.
Oh, and did I mention that both EMI Canada and Amazon.ca are bastards?
I buy very few CDs as it is, and now none of them will be from EMI. That must be a great marketing tactic on their part.
No, it doesn't. Artists get none of the blank media levy. Even the Canadian recording industry gets none of the blank media levy, surprisingly enough. The CPCC (organization responsible for collecting and distributing the levy) keeps all of it for internal uses (salaries, administration, and advertising).
"So, you are interested in one of our acting positions are you?"
"Yes, I saw your advert in the Bollywood supplement..."
(Ob. Monty Python Reference)
CPCC Business Plan:
There isn't even a ??? step. It's a great business plan.
And of course with this arrangement, it is not at all easy to opt out of the government/CRIA scheme - all blank media sold in Canada have this levy applied. The only alternative we have is to import blank media from other countries and "forget" to pay the levy at import time. Unfortunately it is not obvious that this is a cheaper solution due to shipping, duty, exchange, and other fees related to buying foreign products.