. . . is it *really* that hard to get to the gym or outside to exercise? Sometimes a break away from your desk is a good thing. Stuff like this just preserves the sweatshop mentality already too prevalent in many IT shops. Just my.02.
If you could get a lot of IT workers together and establish an "Information Technologists Guild" and bribe enough politicians into making it illegal for anyone not in the guild to open the case of a computer, then turn around and make it nearly impossible to join the guild, you'd probably make a fortune, too.
Here IRL and the 21st century, such institutions are called "unions." Quite honestly, I can't think of a faster way to give IT outsourcing a huge boost. Look at the US auto and airline industries to get a view into the consequences of implementing a union. Unions were originally a great idea before government regulation, OSHA, etc., but post the inevitable corruption by those "in charge," now they all they do is add useless overhead and create artificially high prices for their respective mediocre products and services. Anyone who's ever worked at an IT tradeshow and has had to deal with the teamsters will attest to this. Eight hours to run an electric line for a simple booth? Three hours to hang a sign from the freakin' ceiling? It's really sad that the American union has become a symbol of such laziness -- the originators of the union "ideal" would no doubt be horrified by what they'd see today. Sounds like another recipe for taxpayer bailout to me.
Yep, seems like pretty much every "new" generation gets the slam from the ones who came before. Us Gen X'ers were cast off as a bunch of slackers IIRC. In ten years we'll have some snotty Gen Y writer blasting the lazy post-college Gen Z's and ranting how the greedy Gen X'ers will consume the last remaining Social Security resources. Definitely nothing new to see here.
As someone who travels quite regularly for their job, I avoid the airports whenever possible because of this type of crap. These days, if it's under 500 miles each way, I'll drive it. I used to wish for the airlines to all go out of business, hoping that they'd be forced to figure out a business model that was actually profitable, but gave up on that after we (US taxpayers) were forced to bail them out after 9/11. It's a mess with no easy fix in sight, unless someone can magically make all of the airline lobbyists disappear.
Agreed. Additionally, I think it's time to once again post a link to Roger Russell's excellent site completely debunking the "audiophile" speaker cable mythos.
The sun produces about a bazillion gazillion megagiga superwatts
But the sun isn't the only factor working to dry the clothes thru evaporation. If you hang your clothes out to dry at night, or in a dark basement, they still get dry, don't they? (albeit not as fast as outside during a sunny day)
Dude, after awhile you've gotta stop making excuses for someone because you just look silly. There's no law that says you have a right to do whatever you want in an airport. If you don't like it, don't go there. I fly every week and if you want to go there and make trouble for people just trying to fly and earn a living, fuck you too. She's just a slightly naive whitebread chick who tried to make an "artistic statement" and shit her pants when surrounded by automatic weapons. Period. Her 15 minutes of fame are up and you'll see a nice post on/. in 25 years commemorating her event. That's it.
Which is more likely, explosive disguised as sign carried by "chauffeur" or a "suspicious" looking T-shirt with a circuit board openly displayed on the front?
Far more likely than either of these is some dumbass trying to draw attention to themselves. She deliberately tried to provoke a response and got one. Why else would she not answer pointed questions about what was attached to her chest?
If anything, this is a 1st Amendment / freedom of speech issue. It's not about "wearing homemade electronics" . . . it's about bringing something into an airport which many people initially thought had the appearance of a bomb. She would have gotten the exact same response if she would have been holding the device in her hands instead of wearing it. The same thing would happen if you brought one of those novelty blower-powered illuminated devices (which simulate an open flame) into a theater. The 1st Amendment does not classify either of these examples as free speech because of the potential danger to others.
(as an MIT student, she probably doesn't have a lot of day-to-day contact with morons)
So she's so elite that she shouldn't be burdened with understanding how the unwashed commoners live their pathetic lives? Or perhaps she thought it would be delightfully witty to tweak a few of the retarded serfs at the airport with some highbrow MIT humor? Please. She deliberately set out to provoke a response and got one. Why else wouldn't she respond when questioned about what was on her chest?
I've seen this sorta stuff on the runway in some fashion shows and always thought it was pretty cool.
Dude, are you on crack? Airport != South Beach runway with anorexic supermodels. Not even the same as a public park or sidewalk. Just like you don't have a right to wear a shirt that says "I HAVE A BOMB!!!" in a airport or even mention bombs or guns around airport personnel, you're not allowed to wear anything that looks like a bomb. It's never been allowed -- not even in the 1970s. Period. If you don't get this, maybe you need to take Common Sense 101 along with all your Course VI EE at MIT. What's next, some "art student" strapping on a bunch of wires and toilet papers tubes and running around Logan screaming, "I'm Al Qaida! AL QAIDA!!!!"? I guess you'd defend their fashion sense too and participate in protesting the gross violation of their right to political free speech after their brains got splattered all over the terminal.
There may come a time to fight for freedom of speech and self-expression -- but let's reserve that fight for causes that really matter, not for some dumbass trying to make it on the 6 o'clock news.
Since when has it been an unalienable right for you as a US citizen to wear, say or do anything you wanted in a place like an airport? Where in the Constitution are you granted those rights? Heck, even back in the 1970s they had signs like "Please no jokes about guns / bombs," and if you wore a T-shirt that said "I HAVE A BOMB!!!" in big letters on it back then, you'd be arrested and taken in for some serious questioning. Granted, what this chick did was more like wearing a T-shirt that says, "IS THIS A BOMB?!?!?", but there's not much difference, and I'd wager that the 1970s airport police would have done the same thing. It's not "cute," it's not about trying to reclaim any lost "rights," it's about her getting on the news. Period. What they should really do is send her a bill for the resources (our tax money) that were wasted reacting to her childish, "artistic" cry for attention.
I travel more weeks than not, and I think TSA absolutely sucks (last week I was disallowed boarding and then secondarily screened because my license says "James" and my boarding pass says "Jim"), but defending this chick for being a complete retard is certainly not a fight for which I'll sign up.
She did not try to get through a security checkpoint
So what? These guys didn't try to get through a checkpoint either. Like it or not, airports continue to be targeted by extremists, and therefore a certain level of personal responsibility and common sense is required from anyone who visits one (as well as special procedures for those who work there). This chick just plain acted stupidly and is damn lucky she wasn't shot on the spot.
Why is it that airports have special significance?
9/11. Plain and simple. It's common knowledge that that attack was the most successful terror attack in history, and extremists continue to target airports and aviation. Period.
This is NOT a violation of free speech, any more than it's a violation of free speech to disallow driving in front of thousands of Jena demonstrators with nooses tied to your pickup truck, or disallowing yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. This chick thought it would be "cute" to push airport workers' buttons and is damn lucky she didn't end up on the slab.
As for your task, it may not have been done on single machine in a reasonable timeframe and certainly not in a point and click fashion. However you could have easily integrated the ABBY engine into a networked batch OCR solution and then hired the capacity to run it (eg: a renderfarm).
Ahhh, spoken like someone who's never done a project like this before. So easy to plan in your head on Slashdot in 30 seconds, isn't it?
If creating the required integration work to ABBYY's OCR engine to some sort of distributed processing farm wasn't cost-prohibitive (which it is -- historical societies aren't exactly made of money), how would you suggest I upload over a terabyte of raw image data in a timely fashion to said render farm? And then download it again once completed (not as big of a problem, but still an issue)?
The bigger question is whether or not to take on OCR in-house at all. If you want to sub-out OCR, then you have to wait until the scanning is complete (weeks) -- sending partial jobs via hard drive is more expensive than sending everything at once at the end. It's still too much money at the end of the day -- much, much cheaper to keep it in-house, and the QA process is better. The cheapest option is to buy the fastest server your budget permits and run it 24x7 in parallel with scanning and final PDF assembly / burning. ABBYY FineReader multithreads on recognition, but NOT on opening batches or writing out PDFs. That is the real bottleneck, and the reason it's necessary to run multiple instances.
Strictly speaking, there are no tasks I do today that I couldn't do in 1997.
Speak for yourself. Just because *you personally* don't use the extra processing power, memory, and storage that are available doesn't mean that lots of others don't. For example, I'm in the middle of digitizing and OCRing 110 years of local newspapers from microfilm into archival-quality PDFs for an historical society. Quite simply, you *cannot* have too much processing power when doing OCR -- I'm running multiple instances of ABBYY FineReader Corporate on a 2x Quad Core Xeon that has been pegged for two weeks now. It's quick, multithreads across all 8 cores and does a great job, but there's simply too much data. Note that this project would have been completely impossible in 1997 -- there simply wasn't enough processing power, memory or storage available to do it on anything less than a supercomputer. And that's not even considering truly bandwidth- and processor-intensive tasks related to video, weather meodeling, etc.
The US isn't civilized and hasn't been for a long time. If you look away, you should have the expectation that whatever it was you're not looking at will disappear, because it will.
Well, perhaps New York / LA / DC / etc. (name your inner city of choice) aren't "civilized," if that's your pet definition, but just about everywhere outside of the 'hood is. Here in suburban MD, only about 10 miles north of inner city Baltimore (one of the most violent inner cities in the world), we can leave our doors unlocked and can sleep with first floor windows open at night without fear of being slaughtered in our sleep. People generally know how to treat each other decently around here despite what goes on downtown. You certainly should not generalize the entire population of a country because those in its inner cities have a perchant for committing crimes.
I'd also wager that there are parts of Japan where you'd have experienced the disappearing bags phenomenon, or worse. Japan is not some mystical fairy land of do-gooders -- quit kidding yourself. Seoul, South Korea is the only place I've ever seen a homeless, legless amputee literally dragging himself along in a public market, begging for help, while people completely passed him by as if he didn't exist.
Go. No, really, please go right ahead. I can't tell if you're just being melodramatic to glean mod points or not, but if you're serious, then you have no spine. Go ahead -- get out. If you don't care about your own country enough to stay and fight for your rights when you need to, if you're not willing to actually do something to affect change, you're not the kind of person I want as a neighbor anyway. You're even worse than the clueless unwashed masses -- you actually know there's a problem, but are too scared / don't care enough to even try to make a difference, and prefer the lazy, easy way out. I wonder how you would have done in the Continental Army, when things were really tough. Oh yeah, you're the guy who fled for French Canada when the redcoats approached.
in addition to considering Transparent Cable interconnects and speaker cables
No! No! No! Don't waste your money on ultra-expensive "interconnects" (audiophile marketing droid speak for RCA cables) and speaker cables such as Transparent, Monster, etc. It's been well documented time and again in double-blind listening tests that these wires don't do anything *at all* to improve the sound. Heck, the President of Transparent wouldn't even agree to a double-blind test, after initially saying he'd do one.
I'm not saying that the 24-gauge zip speaker wire and cheap molded RCAs that come with most audio components are worth anything, or should ever be used; but you don't have to pay thousands to get suitable cables. Just make sure they're of a suitable gauge for the length of the run you need (to overcome the wire's resistance), and that they have decent insulation and they're not so cheap that the terminators are likely to short out on the ends when bent etc.
For a thorough de-bunking of the audiophile claims of "cable superiority," see Roger Russell's excellent site. The lamp cord versus Monster Cable speaker cable comparison is a classic.
The bottom line is that you can't cheat physics, though the "expensive is best" crowd would love to believe it, and continues to pay thousands unnecessarily. But hey, it ain't my money.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . is it *really* that hard to get to the gym or outside to exercise? Sometimes a break away from your desk is a good thing. Stuff like this just preserves the sweatshop mentality already too prevalent in many IT shops. Just my .02.
Someone should email them an apology. ;-)
If you could get a lot of IT workers together and establish an "Information Technologists Guild" and bribe enough politicians into making it illegal for anyone not in the guild to open the case of a computer, then turn around and make it nearly impossible to join the guild, you'd probably make a fortune, too.
Here IRL and the 21st century, such institutions are called "unions." Quite honestly, I can't think of a faster way to give IT outsourcing a huge boost. Look at the US auto and airline industries to get a view into the consequences of implementing a union. Unions were originally a great idea before government regulation, OSHA, etc., but post the inevitable corruption by those "in charge," now they all they do is add useless overhead and create artificially high prices for their respective mediocre products and services. Anyone who's ever worked at an IT tradeshow and has had to deal with the teamsters will attest to this. Eight hours to run an electric line for a simple booth? Three hours to hang a sign from the freakin' ceiling? It's really sad that the American union has become a symbol of such laziness -- the originators of the union "ideal" would no doubt be horrified by what they'd see today. Sounds like another recipe for taxpayer bailout to me.
I agree 100% -- though I shudder in combined horror, pity and hilarity imagining a generation who thinks that today is the "best music era." :-)
Yep, seems like pretty much every "new" generation gets the slam from the ones who came before. Us Gen X'ers were cast off as a bunch of slackers IIRC. In ten years we'll have some snotty Gen Y writer blasting the lazy post-college Gen Z's and ranting how the greedy Gen X'ers will consume the last remaining Social Security resources. Definitely nothing new to see here.
As someone who travels quite regularly for their job, I avoid the airports whenever possible because of this type of crap. These days, if it's under 500 miles each way, I'll drive it. I used to wish for the airlines to all go out of business, hoping that they'd be forced to figure out a business model that was actually profitable, but gave up on that after we (US taxpayers) were forced to bail them out after 9/11. It's a mess with no easy fix in sight, unless someone can magically make all of the airline lobbyists disappear.
Just because some people are (by common custom) materialistic, elitist assholes doesn't mean you have to be too.
Then why bother to speak at Yale at all? ;-)
Agreed. Additionally, I think it's time to once again post a link to Roger Russell's excellent site completely debunking the "audiophile" speaker cable mythos.
The sun produces about a bazillion gazillion megagiga superwatts
But the sun isn't the only factor working to dry the clothes thru evaporation. If you hang your clothes out to dry at night, or in a dark basement, they still get dry, don't they? (albeit not as fast as outside during a sunny day)
The relevant quote from Destination Moon is "If we ask for permission, they'll find a way to tax us.
There -- fixed that for you.
Dude, after awhile you've gotta stop making excuses for someone because you just look silly. There's no law that says you have a right to do whatever you want in an airport. If you don't like it, don't go there. I fly every week and if you want to go there and make trouble for people just trying to fly and earn a living, fuck you too. She's just a slightly naive whitebread chick who tried to make an "artistic statement" and shit her pants when surrounded by automatic weapons. Period. Her 15 minutes of fame are up and you'll see a nice post on /. in 25 years commemorating her event. That's it.
Dude, can you lay off the dope, please?? Unicorns? Second Life? I'm trying to understand but none of what you posted makes any fucking sense.
Can you pass the Cheetos? Thanks . . .
Number of real, no bullshit attacks on Western airports by terrorists in the last 90 days: 1
Which is more likely, explosive disguised as sign carried by "chauffeur" or a "suspicious" looking T-shirt with a circuit board openly displayed on the front?
Far more likely than either of these is some dumbass trying to draw attention to themselves. She deliberately tried to provoke a response and got one. Why else would she not answer pointed questions about what was attached to her chest?
If anything, this is a 1st Amendment / freedom of speech issue. It's not about "wearing homemade electronics" . . . it's about bringing something into an airport which many people initially thought had the appearance of a bomb. She would have gotten the exact same response if she would have been holding the device in her hands instead of wearing it. The same thing would happen if you brought one of those novelty blower-powered illuminated devices (which simulate an open flame) into a theater. The 1st Amendment does not classify either of these examples as free speech because of the potential danger to others.
(as an MIT student, she probably doesn't have a lot of day-to-day contact with morons)
So she's so elite that she shouldn't be burdened with understanding how the unwashed commoners live their pathetic lives? Or perhaps she thought it would be delightfully witty to tweak a few of the retarded serfs at the airport with some highbrow MIT humor? Please. She deliberately set out to provoke a response and got one. Why else wouldn't she respond when questioned about what was on her chest?
I've seen this sorta stuff on the runway in some fashion shows and always thought it was pretty cool.
Dude, are you on crack? Airport != South Beach runway with anorexic supermodels. Not even the same as a public park or sidewalk. Just like you don't have a right to wear a shirt that says "I HAVE A BOMB!!!" in a airport or even mention bombs or guns around airport personnel, you're not allowed to wear anything that looks like a bomb. It's never been allowed -- not even in the 1970s. Period. If you don't get this, maybe you need to take Common Sense 101 along with all your Course VI EE at MIT. What's next, some "art student" strapping on a bunch of wires and toilet papers tubes and running around Logan screaming, "I'm Al Qaida! AL QAIDA!!!!"? I guess you'd defend their fashion sense too and participate in protesting the gross violation of their right to political free speech after their brains got splattered all over the terminal.
There may come a time to fight for freedom of speech and self-expression -- but let's reserve that fight for causes that really matter, not for some dumbass trying to make it on the 6 o'clock news.
and at worst we've given up basic civil liberties
Since when has it been an unalienable right for you as a US citizen to wear, say or do anything you wanted in a place like an airport? Where in the Constitution are you granted those rights? Heck, even back in the 1970s they had signs like "Please no jokes about guns / bombs," and if you wore a T-shirt that said "I HAVE A BOMB!!!" in big letters on it back then, you'd be arrested and taken in for some serious questioning. Granted, what this chick did was more like wearing a T-shirt that says, "IS THIS A BOMB?!?!?", but there's not much difference, and I'd wager that the 1970s airport police would have done the same thing. It's not "cute," it's not about trying to reclaim any lost "rights," it's about her getting on the news. Period. What they should really do is send her a bill for the resources (our tax money) that were wasted reacting to her childish, "artistic" cry for attention.
I travel more weeks than not, and I think TSA absolutely sucks (last week I was disallowed boarding and then secondarily screened because my license says "James" and my boarding pass says "Jim"), but defending this chick for being a complete retard is certainly not a fight for which I'll sign up.
She did not try to get through a security checkpoint
So what? These guys didn't try to get through a checkpoint either. Like it or not, airports continue to be targeted by extremists, and therefore a certain level of personal responsibility and common sense is required from anyone who visits one (as well as special procedures for those who work there). This chick just plain acted stupidly and is damn lucky she wasn't shot on the spot.
Why is it that airports have special significance?
9/11. Plain and simple. It's common knowledge that that attack was the most successful terror attack in history, and extremists continue to target airports and aviation. Period.
This is NOT a violation of free speech, any more than it's a violation of free speech to disallow driving in front of thousands of Jena demonstrators with nooses tied to your pickup truck, or disallowing yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. This chick thought it would be "cute" to push airport workers' buttons and is damn lucky she didn't end up on the slab.
As for your task, it may not have been done on single machine in a reasonable timeframe and certainly not in a point and click fashion. However you could have easily integrated the ABBY engine into a networked batch OCR solution and then hired the capacity to run it (eg: a renderfarm).
Ahhh, spoken like someone who's never done a project like this before. So easy to plan in your head on Slashdot in 30 seconds, isn't it?
If creating the required integration work to ABBYY's OCR engine to some sort of distributed processing farm wasn't cost-prohibitive (which it is -- historical societies aren't exactly made of money), how would you suggest I upload over a terabyte of raw image data in a timely fashion to said render farm? And then download it again once completed (not as big of a problem, but still an issue)?
The bigger question is whether or not to take on OCR in-house at all. If you want to sub-out OCR, then you have to wait until the scanning is complete (weeks) -- sending partial jobs via hard drive is more expensive than sending everything at once at the end. It's still too much money at the end of the day -- much, much cheaper to keep it in-house, and the QA process is better. The cheapest option is to buy the fastest server your budget permits and run it 24x7 in parallel with scanning and final PDF assembly / burning. ABBYY FineReader multithreads on recognition, but NOT on opening batches or writing out PDFs. That is the real bottleneck, and the reason it's necessary to run multiple instances.
Strictly speaking, there are no tasks I do today that I couldn't do in 1997.
Speak for yourself. Just because *you personally* don't use the extra processing power, memory, and storage that are available doesn't mean that lots of others don't. For example, I'm in the middle of digitizing and OCRing 110 years of local newspapers from microfilm into archival-quality PDFs for an historical society. Quite simply, you *cannot* have too much processing power when doing OCR -- I'm running multiple instances of ABBYY FineReader Corporate on a 2x Quad Core Xeon that has been pegged for two weeks now. It's quick, multithreads across all 8 cores and does a great job, but there's simply too much data. Note that this project would have been completely impossible in 1997 -- there simply wasn't enough processing power, memory or storage available to do it on anything less than a supercomputer. And that's not even considering truly bandwidth- and processor-intensive tasks related to video, weather meodeling, etc.
The US isn't civilized and hasn't been for a long time. If you look away, you should have the expectation that whatever it was you're not looking at will disappear, because it will.
Well, perhaps New York / LA / DC / etc. (name your inner city of choice) aren't "civilized," if that's your pet definition, but just about everywhere outside of the 'hood is. Here in suburban MD, only about 10 miles north of inner city Baltimore (one of the most violent inner cities in the world), we can leave our doors unlocked and can sleep with first floor windows open at night without fear of being slaughtered in our sleep. People generally know how to treat each other decently around here despite what goes on downtown. You certainly should not generalize the entire population of a country because those in its inner cities have a perchant for committing crimes.
I'd also wager that there are parts of Japan where you'd have experienced the disappearing bags phenomenon, or worse. Japan is not some mystical fairy land of do-gooders -- quit kidding yourself. Seoul, South Korea is the only place I've ever seen a homeless, legless amputee literally dragging himself along in a public market, begging for help, while people completely passed him by as if he didn't exist.
Go. No, really, please go right ahead. I can't tell if you're just being melodramatic to glean mod points or not, but if you're serious, then you have no spine. Go ahead -- get out. If you don't care about your own country enough to stay and fight for your rights when you need to, if you're not willing to actually do something to affect change, you're not the kind of person I want as a neighbor anyway. You're even worse than the clueless unwashed masses -- you actually know there's a problem, but are too scared / don't care enough to even try to make a difference, and prefer the lazy, easy way out. I wonder how you would have done in the Continental Army, when things were really tough. Oh yeah, you're the guy who fled for French Canada when the redcoats approached.
in addition to considering Transparent Cable interconnects and speaker cables
No! No! No! Don't waste your money on ultra-expensive "interconnects" (audiophile marketing droid speak for RCA cables) and speaker cables such as Transparent, Monster, etc. It's been well documented time and again in double-blind listening tests that these wires don't do anything *at all* to improve the sound. Heck, the President of Transparent wouldn't even agree to a double-blind test, after initially saying he'd do one.
I'm not saying that the 24-gauge zip speaker wire and cheap molded RCAs that come with most audio components are worth anything, or should ever be used; but you don't have to pay thousands to get suitable cables. Just make sure they're of a suitable gauge for the length of the run you need (to overcome the wire's resistance), and that they have decent insulation and they're not so cheap that the terminators are likely to short out on the ends when bent etc.
For a thorough de-bunking of the audiophile claims of "cable superiority," see Roger Russell's excellent site. The lamp cord versus Monster Cable speaker cable comparison is a classic.
The bottom line is that you can't cheat physics, though the "expensive is best" crowd would love to believe it, and continues to pay thousands unnecessarily. But hey, it ain't my money.