Simple, you don't answer the porn charge directly. You instead talk about how Android is about user choice and user freedom, rather than what putzfuck Jobs decrees "acceptable" for you to use.
One of the systems I've worked on in the last year used Microchip PIC12C508s as signal converters to interface one part to another. Basically the function could have been done with discrete logic, but why when a 25 cent, 8 pin micro will do just as well. Those bad boys have 25 bytes of RAM (yes, 200 bits, folks) and they're still an actively produced, useful part.
Actually, no, I used to use gcc against an m68k embedded target as part of my daily job writing firmware, and 11k does matter when your total program space is only about 256k.
Even today, I'd much rather compromise compile time for smaller, faster code on the output side. I live in the small embedded realm, though, and size is often directly related to speed due to the sloth-like nature of the memory bus.
Yeah, not sure what part of Middle America the grandparent poster is thinking of, but any part I've been to (including 22 years as an Iowan, now ten in Colorado as an Iowan in Exile) would love to have real manufacturing and basic industry jobs - good, relatively stable work with an actual product. Midwesterners tend to be pragmatists, and realize that industry=jobs=money, but that there are tradeoffs. I'd say you'd be much more likely to throw a rock and hit a NIMBY on the coasts than you would in the Midwest.
Yes, however, it would still be my physical item that I control. Maybe, if I'm an asswipe of huge proportions, I judge the risk to my item greater than the value I get by allowing others to do their thing with it (which is, for the owner, essentially squat).
I don't agree with CBS's actions. I think they're being royal jackasses over something that is truly a classic part of TV history. Their bullshit about lawyers is just that. I'm sure, like most large companies, they have a small army of lawyers, and I'm sure one of them could find some spare time to do this. I do, however, support their right to control the physical media they own, no matter what sort of asinine things they want to do with it. Just because it's in the public domain doesn't mean I have to let anybody else play with the stuff I own.
Should you be completely dismissed because you don't have a PhD?...no and to suggest it is irresponsible and idiotic.
I'd mod the parent up if there was any further to go. Instead I'll just agree with him. Many of the smartest people I've known have a BS or no degrees at all, because they skipped straight into the private sector (because they were just that damn good). Skipped the academic bullshit and go straight to profit, because that's what motivated them. I likewise respect those who do work in the academic sector, but to denounce anyone who didn't spend half their life in college accumulating letters after their name is just stupid and elitist.
The thing is, you don't need the specifications on what Honda did. You need to calculate the limits at which the part needs to perform plus safety margin and work from there. Honda engineers obviously have the advantage of exact numbers and thousands of man-years of research and testing on their specific platform, and thus can get away with a much lower safety margin (because they know *exactly* what it must do), but that doesn't stop your a decent ME from figuring out roughly the same thing.
Car modifications over the years have traditionally been done by backyard mechnics with no ME degree. It can be done. It just can't be done with such a high degree of certainty as would be required for any engineered solution. Being able to construct something that works vs. something that's compact, inexpensive to manufacture, and reliable over the long term is the difference many times between amateurs and professionals. Often times rather than working through the calculations, it's much easier for the amateur to just way overbuild something and learn through trial and error.
Typically my rule when re-engineering car bits is to figure out the worst case and add a large margin if the part is subject to significant stresses. Then again I'm primarily working in the electrical side of things, as I'm an EE and my ME friends have made me swear off ever touching mechnical bits.
Salaried doesn't mean indentured servitude, though. Yes, I agree, if it was part of your initial employment that you will be on call for 24x7 support, you'd better figure that into your salary and just shut your piehole. However, many of us either a) used to be compensated separately for on call time or b) used to not have a 24x7 system, and were charged with one while maintaining the same position in the company. I'm actually at the unique intersection of both of these. I used to not have any 24x7s when I took this job, and once I agreed to take one on, there was compensation for disrupting my life for the weeks I got stuck with the pager (1 hour comp for every 8 hours on call, plus 1 for 1 recall time)
About two months ago, we all just got totally boned by a policy shift. Now they expect me to do it for nothing, and where I work, that means I'm no more than 15 minutes from being able to log in and I'm dead stone sober (meaning, a BAC of as close to 0.00% as you can get...). The only upside is that I get a minimum of 4 hours comp for every call. It certainly hasn't encouraged me to fix any bugs, since I enjoy the extra vacation and they're usually quite easy to deal with.
Ever seen the Dilbert where the boss offers an incentive payment for every bug fixed? Wally wanders off saying something about writing himself a new minivan. That's basically what they've created around here, and pissed us all off in the process. It's certainly not an incentive to make the pager quiet, just to make the bugs require minimal attention.
I agree - ethical, legal, or not, they'll find a way to get rid of you. Or at least make working there so intolerable you quit (better for them, btw, so I'd expect this). So secure another job or be ready to tough it out until you do.
But yes, as much as I hate them, it's time to document, document, document and then call the BSA. Your business is blatantly violating licensing terms. Declaring compliance by fiat - aka, "we don't pirate software, therefore violating the license terms isn't piracy" - is somewhat like trying to declare yourself a virgin when you're already pregnant.
Actually I only drive mine about 6,000mi per year. The rest of the miles are soaked up by what I deem "disposable" cars - used Civics and the like that I can buy for cheap, rack up a ton of commuter miles, and then either sell for close to what I bought them for or haul them down to the junkyard.
I agree. I'll kill and eat anyone who wants to eat my dog then. That should strike enough fear into would be dog eaters to leave my dog alone. (sarcasm)
Likewise for those who want my cats. I like them far more than I've ever liked 99.99999% of humanity. No sarcasm intended.
- A large portion of the energy dissipated in modern ICs involves leakage through increasingly small insulating layers, in addition to energy already dissipated through capacitive effects (energy stored on FET gates being dumped). Superconductive materials do very little to help this, as the losses aren't resistive in nature. What you really need are superinsulators that have desirable electric field properties to deal with this... Look up high k dielectrics.
- The physics and industrial processes of manufacturing ICs from the usual suspects (Si, SiGe, GaAs, etc...) is very well understood. While I know superconductive transistors have been developed, actually figuring out how to build them and all of the supporting structures in a size process similar to silicon may not work.
Within the US, MTR mining is almost entirely an eastern thing, and for the most part, eastern coal has nastily higher sulfur levels than western coal.
Almost everything out west is either underground mines (as is true for the mine that feeds the Cameo plant in the article) or strip mines out in the middle of flat boring nowhere Wyoming. Compared with the destruction caused by MTR mining, neither of these is particularly objectionable.
Better yet, pursue the prototype where each tab/window is its own process. Then when one crashes, it doesn't take everything with it. For that matter, it's usually not FF that I blame, it's usually the @#$%ing plugins in linux (particularly flash).
Wish I had mod points, because you've hit it on the head. Seriously, what's the current obsession with getting rid of a simple UI metaphor that's worked very well for several decades, and replacing it with shiny, yet less consistent things?
I will accept the argument that netbooks have less vertical space, so this allows the use as much of it for productive stuff as possible. But still, it'd be nice if it was an option.
Seriously, depending on where you work and what you want to do, you don't have to keep on top of every new fad. I'm a few years younger than you, but have largely considered most of the recent trends to be fads, or niche things. I'm a happily employed electrical engineer who does C, Forth, and 68k ASM programming and embedded work, and I've crafted my position to be as much business analysis as technical. I'm lucky enough to work for a department where I could basically morph my job duties to fit my talents. I considered management for a while for many of the same reasons that other posts suggest - that it has a further career track, and that I wouldn't be outpaced by the younger people coming in. In the end, I realized that there will always (or at least for the foreseeable future) be a place for programmers who have a greater understanding of the business their code supports, and have the skills to maintain and upgrade legacy systems. C isn't going anywhere for a few decades at least - it's still by far the most portable thing on the planet. I also realized that while I'm good at motivating and organizing good people, I suck horribly at dealing with the problem ones and therefore, I'm not management material.
Don't give up the technical side just because you're afraid of learning new fad X, Y, or Z. If you're a technical type where software is not the end product but supporting a larger business, the ability to understand and solve business problems in a consistent, efficient, and rational manner is much more important that whatever the hell trend Infoweek is pushing this week. Give up the technical side because you honestly think you'd make a better contribution as a manager. In the end, doing what you enjoy and providing real value to the company will likely make you happy.
There are also limits to the amount of energy that can be extracted from matter so it's unlikely that a single ship can take control of the entire earth (an army could but as what price?).
This assumes the goal is domination, not destruction. Domination of a resistant planet is likely very, very hard. Destruction on a planetary scale is likely pretty easy, and could be fitted into the cargo hold of a large interstellar ship with a hundred or so large fusion bombs. Or just find a few local asteroids and toss them our way - don't even carry the munitions with you.
I really doubt that many civilizations enlightened and advanced enough to go exploring through space would be initially hostile. That doesn't mean that humanity's stupidity wouldn't provoke them, however.
everyone will be driving efficient cars if they're driving at all.
Or they'll be driving something that's not running on oil-based fuels... Everybody assumes that peak oil will cause the car culture to collapse. It won't - it'll just provide the economic impetus to set up the next fueling infrastructure, whatever that might be.
I'm merely pointing out that there are cases (and this is one of them) where democracies fail.
Depends on what you mean by fail. In one sense, sure, it didn't go for the academically optimal solution for the assumed problem (burn less oil, presumably with an ideal solution of smaller, hyper-efficient cars driven less, possibly powered by non oil-based fuel).
I'd argue that this was a shining example of democracy working. The populous did not want this solution, therefore it did not come about. What they got has other problems, but it's what the majority of people wanted. I'd much rather have that than an autocratic government forcing their idea of optimal solutions on me.
If we want people to use less gas, why not just raise the darn price?
Or possibly because some of us think punitive taxes are an inappropriate use of government power, and only serve to distort the market?
Despite being a hardcore fiscal conservative, I have no problem with taxing something that has a real, direct, tangible, accountable cost to cover. What I do have a problem with is setting up taxes to cover the "environmental damage" of doing things, such as releasing a ton of CO2. Exactly what is that cost? Is Mother Nature going to send me a bill at the end of the month? Not only that, but is the government going to use those tax revenues to somehow pay that cost so that there's no net impact of me polluting? It's all a sham pyramid scheme.
I'm actually all for raising the gas tax to actually cover the cost needed to keep the highway system in excellent repair. Our infrastructure is going to hell and our politicians don't have the balls to do what needs to be done. The problem is that politicians as a group are a lying, sleazy bag of weasels, and the minute they see tax dollars coming in for roads, they'll try to either call everything a road or start cleverly siphoning off part of the cash.
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Because if little Johnny sees a boobie, it'll trigger the apocalypse. I thought everybody knew that?
Simple, you don't answer the porn charge directly. You instead talk about how Android is about user choice and user freedom, rather than what putzfuck Jobs decrees "acceptable" for you to use.
One of the systems I've worked on in the last year used Microchip PIC12C508s as signal converters to interface one part to another. Basically the function could have been done with discrete logic, but why when a 25 cent, 8 pin micro will do just as well. Those bad boys have 25 bytes of RAM (yes, 200 bits, folks) and they're still an actively produced, useful part.
Actually, no, I used to use gcc against an m68k embedded target as part of my daily job writing firmware, and 11k does matter when your total program space is only about 256k.
Even today, I'd much rather compromise compile time for smaller, faster code on the output side. I live in the small embedded realm, though, and size is often directly related to speed due to the sloth-like nature of the memory bus.
Yeah, not sure what part of Middle America the grandparent poster is thinking of, but any part I've been to (including 22 years as an Iowan, now ten in Colorado as an Iowan in Exile) would love to have real manufacturing and basic industry jobs - good, relatively stable work with an actual product. Midwesterners tend to be pragmatists, and realize that industry=jobs=money, but that there are tradeoffs. I'd say you'd be much more likely to throw a rock and hit a NIMBY on the coasts than you would in the Midwest.
Yes, however, it would still be my physical item that I control. Maybe, if I'm an asswipe of huge proportions, I judge the risk to my item greater than the value I get by allowing others to do their thing with it (which is, for the owner, essentially squat).
I don't agree with CBS's actions. I think they're being royal jackasses over something that is truly a classic part of TV history. Their bullshit about lawyers is just that. I'm sure, like most large companies, they have a small army of lawyers, and I'm sure one of them could find some spare time to do this. I do, however, support their right to control the physical media they own, no matter what sort of asinine things they want to do with it. Just because it's in the public domain doesn't mean I have to let anybody else play with the stuff I own.
I'd say an explosive laxative might dislodge their heads...
Should you be completely dismissed because you don't have a PhD?...no and to suggest it is irresponsible and idiotic.
I'd mod the parent up if there was any further to go. Instead I'll just agree with him. Many of the smartest people I've known have a BS or no degrees at all, because they skipped straight into the private sector (because they were just that damn good). Skipped the academic bullshit and go straight to profit, because that's what motivated them. I likewise respect those who do work in the academic sector, but to denounce anyone who didn't spend half their life in college accumulating letters after their name is just stupid and elitist.
The thing is, you don't need the specifications on what Honda did. You need to calculate the limits at which the part needs to perform plus safety margin and work from there. Honda engineers obviously have the advantage of exact numbers and thousands of man-years of research and testing on their specific platform, and thus can get away with a much lower safety margin (because they know *exactly* what it must do), but that doesn't stop your a decent ME from figuring out roughly the same thing.
Car modifications over the years have traditionally been done by backyard mechnics with no ME degree. It can be done. It just can't be done with such a high degree of certainty as would be required for any engineered solution. Being able to construct something that works vs. something that's compact, inexpensive to manufacture, and reliable over the long term is the difference many times between amateurs and professionals. Often times rather than working through the calculations, it's much easier for the amateur to just way overbuild something and learn through trial and error.
Typically my rule when re-engineering car bits is to figure out the worst case and add a large margin if the part is subject to significant stresses. Then again I'm primarily working in the electrical side of things, as I'm an EE and my ME friends have made me swear off ever touching mechnical bits.
Salaried doesn't mean indentured servitude, though. Yes, I agree, if it was part of your initial employment that you will be on call for 24x7 support, you'd better figure that into your salary and just shut your piehole. However, many of us either a) used to be compensated separately for on call time or b) used to not have a 24x7 system, and were charged with one while maintaining the same position in the company. I'm actually at the unique intersection of both of these. I used to not have any 24x7s when I took this job, and once I agreed to take one on, there was compensation for disrupting my life for the weeks I got stuck with the pager (1 hour comp for every 8 hours on call, plus 1 for 1 recall time)
About two months ago, we all just got totally boned by a policy shift. Now they expect me to do it for nothing, and where I work, that means I'm no more than 15 minutes from being able to log in and I'm dead stone sober (meaning, a BAC of as close to 0.00% as you can get...). The only upside is that I get a minimum of 4 hours comp for every call. It certainly hasn't encouraged me to fix any bugs, since I enjoy the extra vacation and they're usually quite easy to deal with.
Ever seen the Dilbert where the boss offers an incentive payment for every bug fixed? Wally wanders off saying something about writing himself a new minivan. That's basically what they've created around here, and pissed us all off in the process. It's certainly not an incentive to make the pager quiet, just to make the bugs require minimal attention.
Yup, just like my flying purple baboon repellent worked. I haven't seen any flying purple baboons in the last week,so clearly the stuff's effective.
I agree - ethical, legal, or not, they'll find a way to get rid of you. Or at least make working there so intolerable you quit (better for them, btw, so I'd expect this). So secure another job or be ready to tough it out until you do.
But yes, as much as I hate them, it's time to document, document, document and then call the BSA. Your business is blatantly violating licensing terms. Declaring compliance by fiat - aka, "we don't pirate software, therefore violating the license terms isn't piracy" - is somewhat like trying to declare yourself a virgin when you're already pregnant.
There's at least one counterexample for your line of reasoning: there are still Mormons. Case closed.
Hold on a sec: There's at least one counterexample for your line of reasoning: people other than Mormons still live in Utah. Case closed. There, FTFY.
Actually I only drive mine about 6,000mi per year. The rest of the miles are soaked up by what I deem "disposable" cars - used Civics and the like that I can buy for cheap, rack up a ton of commuter miles, and then either sell for close to what I bought them for or haul them down to the junkyard.
I agree. I'll kill and eat anyone who wants to eat my dog then.
That should strike enough fear into would be dog eaters to leave my dog alone. (sarcasm)
Likewise for those who want my cats. I like them far more than I've ever liked 99.99999% of humanity. No sarcasm intended.
A couple problems with your theory:
- A large portion of the energy dissipated in modern ICs involves leakage through increasingly small insulating layers, in addition to energy already dissipated through capacitive effects (energy stored on FET gates being dumped). Superconductive materials do very little to help this, as the losses aren't resistive in nature. What you really need are superinsulators that have desirable electric field properties to deal with this... Look up high k dielectrics.
- The physics and industrial processes of manufacturing ICs from the usual suspects (Si, SiGe, GaAs, etc...) is very well understood. While I know superconductive transistors have been developed, actually figuring out how to build them and all of the supporting structures in a size process similar to silicon may not work.
Within the US, MTR mining is almost entirely an eastern thing, and for the most part, eastern coal has nastily higher sulfur levels than western coal.
Almost everything out west is either underground mines (as is true for the mine that feeds the Cameo plant in the article) or strip mines out in the middle of flat boring nowhere Wyoming. Compared with the destruction caused by MTR mining, neither of these is particularly objectionable.
Better yet, pursue the prototype where each tab/window is its own process. Then when one crashes, it doesn't take everything with it. For that matter, it's usually not FF that I blame, it's usually the @#$%ing plugins in linux (particularly flash).
Wish I had mod points, because you've hit it on the head. Seriously, what's the current obsession with getting rid of a simple UI metaphor that's worked very well for several decades, and replacing it with shiny, yet less consistent things?
I will accept the argument that netbooks have less vertical space, so this allows the use as much of it for productive stuff as possible. But still, it'd be nice if it was an option.
Seriously, depending on where you work and what you want to do, you don't have to keep on top of every new fad. I'm a few years younger than you, but have largely considered most of the recent trends to be fads, or niche things. I'm a happily employed electrical engineer who does C, Forth, and 68k ASM programming and embedded work, and I've crafted my position to be as much business analysis as technical. I'm lucky enough to work for a department where I could basically morph my job duties to fit my talents. I considered management for a while for many of the same reasons that other posts suggest - that it has a further career track, and that I wouldn't be outpaced by the younger people coming in. In the end, I realized that there will always (or at least for the foreseeable future) be a place for programmers who have a greater understanding of the business their code supports, and have the skills to maintain and upgrade legacy systems. C isn't going anywhere for a few decades at least - it's still by far the most portable thing on the planet. I also realized that while I'm good at motivating and organizing good people, I suck horribly at dealing with the problem ones and therefore, I'm not management material.
Don't give up the technical side just because you're afraid of learning new fad X, Y, or Z. If you're a technical type where software is not the end product but supporting a larger business, the ability to understand and solve business problems in a consistent, efficient, and rational manner is much more important that whatever the hell trend Infoweek is pushing this week. Give up the technical side because you honestly think you'd make a better contribution as a manager. In the end, doing what you enjoy and providing real value to the company will likely make you happy.
There are also limits to the amount of energy that can be extracted from matter so it's unlikely that a single ship can take control of the entire earth (an army could but as what price?).
This assumes the goal is domination, not destruction. Domination of a resistant planet is likely very, very hard. Destruction on a planetary scale is likely pretty easy, and could be fitted into the cargo hold of a large interstellar ship with a hundred or so large fusion bombs. Or just find a few local asteroids and toss them our way - don't even carry the munitions with you.
I really doubt that many civilizations enlightened and advanced enough to go exploring through space would be initially hostile. That doesn't mean that humanity's stupidity wouldn't provoke them, however.
Well said - this is not a feature I think we'd ever see in Linux, so finally it's an MS patent that's of absolutely no threat to us.
everyone will be driving efficient cars if they're driving at all.
Or they'll be driving something that's not running on oil-based fuels... Everybody assumes that peak oil will cause the car culture to collapse. It won't - it'll just provide the economic impetus to set up the next fueling infrastructure, whatever that might be.
I'm merely pointing out that there are cases (and this is one of them) where democracies fail.
Depends on what you mean by fail. In one sense, sure, it didn't go for the academically optimal solution for the assumed problem (burn less oil, presumably with an ideal solution of smaller, hyper-efficient cars driven less, possibly powered by non oil-based fuel).
I'd argue that this was a shining example of democracy working. The populous did not want this solution, therefore it did not come about. What they got has other problems, but it's what the majority of people wanted. I'd much rather have that than an autocratic government forcing their idea of optimal solutions on me.
If we want people to use less gas, why not just raise the darn price?
Or possibly because some of us think punitive taxes are an inappropriate use of government power, and only serve to distort the market?
Despite being a hardcore fiscal conservative, I have no problem with taxing something that has a real, direct, tangible, accountable cost to cover. What I do have a problem with is setting up taxes to cover the "environmental damage" of doing things, such as releasing a ton of CO2. Exactly what is that cost? Is Mother Nature going to send me a bill at the end of the month? Not only that, but is the government going to use those tax revenues to somehow pay that cost so that there's no net impact of me polluting? It's all a sham pyramid scheme.
I'm actually all for raising the gas tax to actually cover the cost needed to keep the highway system in excellent repair. Our infrastructure is going to hell and our politicians don't have the balls to do what needs to be done. The problem is that politicians as a group are a lying, sleazy bag of weasels, and the minute they see tax dollars coming in for roads, they'll try to either call everything a road or start cleverly siphoning off part of the cash.