"Retards" with college degrees who call themselves engineers are only breaking a rule in countries (like Canada) where "engineer" is a protected term. For countries (like the US) where engineer just means "someone who has training and responsibility in an engineering role", you're being a pompous ass. Your title does not make you a better problem solver.
I know a few senior retired chemical engineers that don't have college degrees in engineering, because they got their start in an apprentice program years and years ago. They did good work as engineers and problem solvers, and the lack of a cert labeling them as officially-minted and approved by the ABCDEF certification board doesn't make them any less qualified.
A trade group camping on a title and claiming legal ownership of it doesn't make them better at their job. And for what it's worth, train operators have a legit claim on the phrase "engineer" that predates any of our modern professions.
Most of the posts so far are of the "you have the upper hand; demand compensation or bail" variety. While this is reasonably sound advice, it all comes down to your current situation. I'd say:
if you're comfortable changing jobs and potentially moving to a new city {
Propose that you deserve a share in the company, and as a fallback refuse the overtime.
if that conversation gets adversarial {
Smile, agree to do your best, and look for a new job.
} else {
sweet. You got what you want, make sure its a project you're willing to love and put your heart into it.
}
} else {
Suck it up, you're stuck where you are until you find your confidence and feel comfortable with the nuclear solution. }
I'm not sure I'd call Buran a symbol of Soviet power. If i remember correctly, it never had a manned flight and the only fully completed orbiter got just one unmanned flight.
Sure, a complete unmanned demonstration of a return-to-earth spaceship is impressive, but I'd hardly call this thing a "symbol" of anything outside of the Soviet Union's passion for the me-too copycat Space Race.
If I were nominating symbols of the Soviet space program, I'd go with Mir, Sputnik, Venera, Soyuz, Progress, the Proton rocket - all groundbreaking projects and far more important than Buran.
The one constant truth of all zealots is that obedience to the rules they fight for is far more important to them than the reason for the rules' existence.
The Forrest Mims books were great when I was a kid. I found them hanging in the back at Radio Shack.
It's worth noting that you'll often hear "The Art of Electronics" referred to as "Horowitz and Hill". I would second this book as a great way to start learning electronics as an adult, though it is a bit more theory and less practice. I would argue that if you're just "building stuff" without really understanding the principles behind it all, you're not really "learning electronics" any more than building a model kit airplane is "learning aerodynamics".
But as far as learning the implementation goes, yeah, I would say just start building stuff. Hit up Instructables and start small.
As crappy as business model patents are, I think I like product development process patents even less.
Is there some sort of public RFC system on patents? Is there a "write your senator" sort of mechanism for the scenario where the public hears about a patent application before it's awarded and wants to make sure the patent investigator understands the situation? If not, it seems like that would be a worthwhile tool to have.
Certainly people are still free to learn Morse. I would support an additional certification along the lines of "I'm also Morse code proficient."
But requiring people to learn Morse in order to get into ham radio just provides an unnecessary barrier-to-entry. The quickest way to kill newcomer interest in any hobby is to make it clear that the insiders don't care about or even resent newcomers. If a kid gets the impression that ham is just a bunch of old-timers reliving their glory days and bitching about how they just let anyone in here these days, they'll move right on by.
And that'd be a shame. Ham, is just about the only infrastructure-less communications tech we have. And whether it's earthquakes or dictators, you can't always rely on infrastructure.
Sure, they're free to do whatever they want; it is after all their project. And it sounds like they intend to keep their project under the GPL, so if anyone really really wants this thing on Linux, I'm sure they're free to fork and maintain it.
I think most of the disapproval here is a general distaste for an open-source project choosing to exclude the principal open-source OS from support, and only support closed-source operating systems. It seems like a pretty poor decision, but if there's some project goal of theirs for which maintaining Linux support was a major obstacle.... hey, it happens.
One has to wonder how much intersection there is between the set of Mac/Windows users and the set of people that choose Songbird over itunes, WMP, or winamp. Does the world really need another do-everything media center?
I've seen how NASA operates. It's bloated, undirected, and political. Maybe in 1960 they were the premiere organization for space technology, but that was 50 years ago.
Saying that the government is going to stop directly operating the US space program is great news. It's time for the private sector to pick up where the government is leaving off, and turn a bloated inefficient contractor feeding trough into a viable commercial industry.
I can agree with that. Process control (watering the yard when it's dry, keeping the indoor temperature controlled, etc) is a great place to remove the need for regular human attention.
The issue there, though, is that the available dedicated systems for handling those tasks are way cheaper than a general-purpose property-wide controller. And there's little substantial gain in value by having these dedicated-handlers integrated into a larger controller framework. Yes, allowing my sprinkler system to talk to the internet and adjust it's watering based on the weather report is pretty sweet. But a 2 dollar soil-moisture gauge gets the same job done. It's good enough.
The consumer market agrees that thermostats are in general a good thing. But consumers don't see the advantage in integrating the thermostat into a more complex system.
I've thought about this repeatedly and I agree with some of the above posters: there's no good reason to use the current systems (other than geek factor) and here's why:
The sort of 'automation' that is available today is almost entirely information handling. It is simply the modification of manually-operated devices to let them take information from and give information to the other devices in your home. But moving information around isn't the only thing your house chores require; you also have to load the dishwasher, move clothes from the washer to the dryer, get the mail, cook the dinner, water the plants, mow the yard, and feed the dog.
Yes, it's neat to be able to set the temperature on your hot water heater from your iphone. But these sorts of flag-setting and value-editing and stream-routing tasks don't actually remove the more burdensome aspects of home operation. Just the easiest-to-automate.
Setting your DVR from your phone isn't effective automation. The Roomba is.
According to the BN website ( http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/features/ ) you're also invited to "Protect your Nook". Sage advice, you should always keep your nook protected.
I live in New Orleans. from the article, this was filed "on behalf of the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops". If you've never been here, Catholicism is huge in south Louisiana.
This bill has nothing to do with any sort of research or proposed research in the state. There are no biomedical companies here threatening to build mutant humans. Louisiana doesn't generally have the sort of biomedical research centers that would do work of that sort. We're happy if the Germans build a steel mill here.
This is just another one of those ideas based on a garbled sci-fi fear of Science, made by people who'd rather not have to learn anything before forming an opinion, and who have far too much access to lawmakers.
I have no doubt the law will pass, the religious community here will crow about it for a few days, and then absolutely nothing tangible will have changed. Except that a few hundred thousand more of my state tax dollars will have been spent on bullshit.
This isn't just about MMORPGs; written literature has a similar issue.
As some have pointed out above, it's far easier to invent a story-framework when you don't have to deal with plausibility.
In our technologically sophisticated world, and especially among gamers, we have a territorial claim on technology and scientific plausibility. We're much more critical of sci-fi, because we feel comfortable judging sci-fi settings. In contrast, fantasy is allowed and expected to exhibit arbitrary rules like magic, and to develop romantic stories involving heroes.
If, in a fantasy setting, I'm jumped by rabid fairies from the Underworld, I can buy it. If they cast eternal drowsiness on me and limit my mobility for 10 seconds... OK that's fine. If, in retaliation, I cast a spell to call down meteoric fire from the sky, that's totally believable (not to mention awesome). Fantasy doesn't invite us to call bullshit.
But if, in a sci-fi setting, I'm attacked by robots, well OK that's plausible. Maybe they're programmed to attack outsiders, I can buy that. They hit me with their laser guns... OK, I can buy that that's possible in the future with advances in battery technology. And I guess I didn't get cut in half because I was wearing special nano-armor that, ummm, absorbs laser light. But in retaliation I cast my hacker-spell and... wait... I smell bullshit.
It's easier as an author to just cut yourself loose from present-day reality. It's far more challenging to write in a future-of-now setting, and deal with the annoyances of the real world's rules and history.
The good ole' 5-year technology promise. Close enough to be exciting and get attention, but far enough away that you'll forget about their claim before they miss their deadline.
It's time for the government to implement some documentation upgrades.
With open-source collaborations, the code has to be easily accessible and clearly documented if you have any hope of bringing new contributors up to speed. Dense projects with bad documentation fail.
A member of the public that wants to research existing law and proposed changes has no effective tools on hand. This THOMAS thing is a joke compared to other documentation search systems.
I don't have to get a doctorate in computer science to read the Firefox source code, and I shouldn't have to get a doctorate in law to understand what the senate voted on this week.
As long as we're blowing tax money like a coke-fueled Vegas bender, we should develop a strategy for semantic markup of legal documents, and bring legal documention into the 21st century. Ideally:
a) Legal documents should be revised data, with diff revision histories instead of separate amendments. Try searching THOMAS for a document, and see how many amendments you get. Now go look at the revision history of any Wikipedia article.
b) Legal documents should be machine readable. If they're too complicated to search effectively, then they're not semantic enough. If google can index an internet's worth of websites, then the government should be able to build a searchable legal structure.
This isn't even discussing realtime data access like budget or spending reporting. It's all in a computer somewhere, why can't I see it? If google can show me the trends of a world-full of internet search requests, why can't I see a real-time report of money flow at all levels of the government? Why can't I see a list of all the assets the government owns?
I think when all's said and done, you'll find an awful lot of resistance from any given politician to any idea of over-the-shoulder oversight from the public. Bad documentation and eye-glazing legal syntax is their obscurity blanket.
Anyone remember this one by Harlan Ellison?
The general idea is that everyone has a literal kill-switch installed in their body. Waste too much time, and the government takes it off the end of your life.
I think Ellison was probably going for a scare distopia. and I think he was more talking in metaphors rather than warning us against a future rife with kill-switches.
Still, kill switches as a concept is something we should develop a civil rights position on. It is, after all, just another form of enforced socialism. These things usually work out if we see them coming ahead of time.
- TP
I was about to say the same thing. How is an expanding material like a muscle again?
One of the nice things about contracting actuators is that they don't buckle under load. This goes back to the 'pushing rope' concept.
I'm calling "good work, but don't call it a muscle".
Slashdot Mirror
"Retards" with college degrees who call themselves engineers are only breaking a rule in countries (like Canada) where "engineer" is a protected term. For countries (like the US) where engineer just means "someone who has training and responsibility in an engineering role", you're being a pompous ass. Your title does not make you a better problem solver.
I know a few senior retired chemical engineers that don't have college degrees in engineering, because they got their start in an apprentice program years and years ago. They did good work as engineers and problem solvers, and the lack of a cert labeling them as officially-minted and approved by the ABCDEF certification board doesn't make them any less qualified.
A trade group camping on a title and claiming legal ownership of it doesn't make them better at their job. And for what it's worth, train operators have a legit claim on the phrase "engineer" that predates any of our modern professions.
Most of the posts so far are of the "you have the upper hand; demand compensation or bail" variety. While this is reasonably sound advice, it all comes down to your current situation. I'd say:
if you're comfortable changing jobs and potentially moving to a new city {
Propose that you deserve a share in the company, and as a fallback refuse the overtime.
if that conversation gets adversarial {
Smile, agree to do your best, and look for a new job.
} else {
sweet. You got what you want, make sure its a project you're willing to love and put your heart into it.
}
} else {
Suck it up, you're stuck where you are until you find your confidence and feel comfortable with the nuclear solution.
}
I'm not sure I'd call Buran a symbol of Soviet power. If i remember correctly, it never had a manned flight and the only fully completed orbiter got just one unmanned flight.
Sure, a complete unmanned demonstration of a return-to-earth spaceship is impressive, but I'd hardly call this thing a "symbol" of anything outside of the Soviet Union's passion for the me-too copycat Space Race.
If I were nominating symbols of the Soviet space program, I'd go with Mir, Sputnik, Venera, Soyuz, Progress, the Proton rocket - all groundbreaking projects and far more important than Buran.
Wait, wasn't there a story a few days ago about OpenGL 4.1? What's with the 3.0?
Check out High Performance MySQL by Schwartz, Zaitsev, Tkachenko, Zawodny, Lentz and Balling
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101718
A couple of the authors are the guys that run http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/, which is itself a good resource for MySQL scaling.
The one constant truth of all zealots is that obedience to the rules they fight for is far more important to them than the reason for the rules' existence.
The Forrest Mims books were great when I was a kid. I found them hanging in the back at Radio Shack.
It's worth noting that you'll often hear "The Art of Electronics" referred to as "Horowitz and Hill". I would second this book as a great way to start learning electronics as an adult, though it is a bit more theory and less practice. I would argue that if you're just "building stuff" without really understanding the principles behind it all, you're not really "learning electronics" any more than building a model kit airplane is "learning aerodynamics".
But as far as learning the implementation goes, yeah, I would say just start building stuff. Hit up Instructables and start small.
As crappy as business model patents are, I think I like product development process patents even less.
Is there some sort of public RFC system on patents? Is there a "write your senator" sort of mechanism for the scenario where the public hears about a patent application before it's awarded and wants to make sure the patent investigator understands the situation? If not, it seems like that would be a worthwhile tool to have.
Certainly people are still free to learn Morse. I would support an additional certification along the lines of "I'm also Morse code proficient."
But requiring people to learn Morse in order to get into ham radio just provides an unnecessary barrier-to-entry. The quickest way to kill newcomer interest in any hobby is to make it clear that the insiders don't care about or even resent newcomers. If a kid gets the impression that ham is just a bunch of old-timers reliving their glory days and bitching about how they just let anyone in here these days, they'll move right on by.
And that'd be a shame. Ham, is just about the only infrastructure-less communications tech we have. And whether it's earthquakes or dictators, you can't always rely on infrastructure.
Sure, they're free to do whatever they want; it is after all their project. And it sounds like they intend to keep their project under the GPL, so if anyone really really wants this thing on Linux, I'm sure they're free to fork and maintain it.
I think most of the disapproval here is a general distaste for an open-source project choosing to exclude the principal open-source OS from support, and only support closed-source operating systems. It seems like a pretty poor decision, but if there's some project goal of theirs for which maintaining Linux support was a major obstacle.... hey, it happens.
One has to wonder how much intersection there is between the set of Mac/Windows users and the set of people that choose Songbird over itunes, WMP, or winamp. Does the world really need another do-everything media center?
I thought the mig 31 was the so called "raptor killer". What ever happened to that?
Who even needs to counter the f22 these days? I guess this thing is pretty much meant for export.
I've seen how NASA operates. It's bloated, undirected, and political. Maybe in 1960 they were the premiere organization for space technology, but that was 50 years ago.
Saying that the government is going to stop directly operating the US space program is great news. It's time for the private sector to pick up where the government is leaving off, and turn a bloated inefficient contractor feeding trough into a viable commercial industry.
I can agree with that. Process control (watering the yard when it's dry, keeping the indoor temperature controlled, etc) is a great place to remove the need for regular human attention.
The issue there, though, is that the available dedicated systems for handling those tasks are way cheaper than a general-purpose property-wide controller. And there's little substantial gain in value by having these dedicated-handlers integrated into a larger controller framework. Yes, allowing my sprinkler system to talk to the internet and adjust it's watering based on the weather report is pretty sweet. But a 2 dollar soil-moisture gauge gets the same job done. It's good enough.
The consumer market agrees that thermostats are in general a good thing. But consumers don't see the advantage in integrating the thermostat into a more complex system.
I've thought about this repeatedly and I agree with some of the above posters: there's no good reason to use the current systems (other than geek factor) and here's why:
The sort of 'automation' that is available today is almost entirely information handling. It is simply the modification of manually-operated devices to let them take information from and give information to the other devices in your home. But moving information around isn't the only thing your house chores require; you also have to load the dishwasher, move clothes from the washer to the dryer, get the mail, cook the dinner, water the plants, mow the yard, and feed the dog.
Yes, it's neat to be able to set the temperature on your hot water heater from your iphone. But these sorts of flag-setting and value-editing and stream-routing tasks don't actually remove the more burdensome aspects of home operation. Just the easiest-to-automate.
Setting your DVR from your phone isn't effective automation. The Roomba is.
According to the BN website ( http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/features/ ) you're also invited to "Protect your Nook". Sage advice, you should always keep your nook protected.
Couldn't've said it better.
We're hit with media stories every day, and it's important to build a set of add-on attachments for your Bullshit Meter.
The one on display here is "if the source is using an exciting fantasy to sell you on their premise, there might be bullshit"
Also, "If the source is speaking in general terms about technology, there might be bullshit"
There is an ArrayObject class in PHP http://us2.php.net/manual/en/class.arrayobject.php
But like a lot of the stuff in the SPL, no one ever uses it (including me). I'm not sure why.
I live in New Orleans. from the article, this was filed "on behalf of the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops". If you've never been here, Catholicism is huge in south Louisiana.
This bill has nothing to do with any sort of research or proposed research in the state. There are no biomedical companies here threatening to build mutant humans. Louisiana doesn't generally have the sort of biomedical research centers that would do work of that sort. We're happy if the Germans build a steel mill here.
This is just another one of those ideas based on a garbled sci-fi fear of Science, made by people who'd rather not have to learn anything before forming an opinion, and who have far too much access to lawmakers.
I have no doubt the law will pass, the religious community here will crow about it for a few days, and then absolutely nothing tangible will have changed. Except that a few hundred thousand more of my state tax dollars will have been spent on bullshit.
This isn't just about MMORPGs; written literature has a similar issue.
As some have pointed out above, it's far easier to invent a story-framework when you don't have to deal with plausibility.
In our technologically sophisticated world, and especially among gamers, we have a territorial claim on technology and scientific plausibility. We're much more critical of sci-fi, because we feel comfortable judging sci-fi settings. In contrast, fantasy is allowed and expected to exhibit arbitrary rules like magic, and to develop romantic stories involving heroes.
If, in a fantasy setting, I'm jumped by rabid fairies from the Underworld, I can buy it. If they cast eternal drowsiness on me and limit my mobility for 10 seconds... OK that's fine. If, in retaliation, I cast a spell to call down meteoric fire from the sky, that's totally believable (not to mention awesome). Fantasy doesn't invite us to call bullshit.
But if, in a sci-fi setting, I'm attacked by robots, well OK that's plausible. Maybe they're programmed to attack outsiders, I can buy that. They hit me with their laser guns... OK, I can buy that that's possible in the future with advances in battery technology. And I guess I didn't get cut in half because I was wearing special nano-armor that, ummm, absorbs laser light. But in retaliation I cast my hacker-spell and... wait... I smell bullshit.
It's easier as an author to just cut yourself loose from present-day reality. It's far more challenging to write in a future-of-now setting, and deal with the annoyances of the real world's rules and history.
The good ole' 5-year technology promise. Close enough to be exciting and get attention, but far enough away that you'll forget about their claim before they miss their deadline.
It's time for the government to implement some documentation upgrades.
With open-source collaborations, the code has to be easily accessible and clearly documented if you have any hope of bringing new contributors up to speed. Dense projects with bad documentation fail.
A member of the public that wants to research existing law and proposed changes has no effective tools on hand. This THOMAS thing is a joke compared to other documentation search systems.
I don't have to get a doctorate in computer science to read the Firefox source code, and I shouldn't have to get a doctorate in law to understand what the senate voted on this week.
As long as we're blowing tax money like a coke-fueled Vegas bender, we should develop a strategy for semantic markup of legal documents, and bring legal documention into the 21st century. Ideally:
a) Legal documents should be revised data, with diff revision histories instead of separate amendments. Try searching THOMAS for a document, and see how many amendments you get. Now go look at the revision history of any Wikipedia article.
b) Legal documents should be machine readable. If they're too complicated to search effectively, then they're not semantic enough. If google can index an internet's worth of websites, then the government should be able to build a searchable legal structure.
This isn't even discussing realtime data access like budget or spending reporting. It's all in a computer somewhere, why can't I see it? If google can show me the trends of a world-full of internet search requests, why can't I see a real-time report of money flow at all levels of the government? Why can't I see a list of all the assets the government owns?
I think when all's said and done, you'll find an awful lot of resistance from any given politician to any idea of over-the-shoulder oversight from the public. Bad documentation and eye-glazing legal syntax is their obscurity blanket.
Anyone remember this one by Harlan Ellison? The general idea is that everyone has a literal kill-switch installed in their body. Waste too much time, and the government takes it off the end of your life. I think Ellison was probably going for a scare distopia. and I think he was more talking in metaphors rather than warning us against a future rife with kill-switches. Still, kill switches as a concept is something we should develop a civil rights position on. It is, after all, just another form of enforced socialism. These things usually work out if we see them coming ahead of time. - TP
Zebra striping ineffective? Preposterous! What sort of Game is this Jessica Enders playing?
I was about to say the same thing. How is an expanding material like a muscle again? One of the nice things about contracting actuators is that they don't buckle under load. This goes back to the 'pushing rope' concept. I'm calling "good work, but don't call it a muscle".