Kurt Vonnegut wrote an excellent short story on this theme of equality that one of my better high school teachers used to make the distinction between equality of opportunity versus equality of results.
Modern day catalytic converters have such a low flow impedance as to practically be straight-through pipes. Auto companies have been working for decades to make this the case as the original (read 20+ year s ago) cats & smog pumps were so terribly restrictive.
This comes up all the time, but it's really not an issue. Your catalytic converter is both not "robbing" you of any power nor is it "decreasing" your gas mileage.
I don't know if you've ever noticed, but due to the great-arc flight paths trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights tend to take, they spend very little time over open water and are in fact over land for most of the flight. The days of Lindbergh's straight-line trans-Atlantic flights are long gone.
While I'm not sure there wasn't actually a book called Ice 9, it was Cat's Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut Jr.) that contained a storyline revolving around Ice 9.
No, the problem is that you don't have the slightest understanding of the "oil industry", or what is required to deliver to you this "staple" of modern life.
Quite simply put it's supply and demand on more levels than you have considered. Your gas prices are high not just because it's DIFFICULT and DANGEROUS to produce, but it's in DEMAND. Gas prices are driven primarily by REFINERY CAPACITY, something which we have been reluctant to increase here because they are DIRTY, DANGEROUS, and EXPENSIVE. You also have to contend with the fact that China, India, and a number of other countries are now coming "on-line" and we now have 1+ billion more people wanting cars and plastics and all the other nice things petroleum gives us.
We are also entering an era where recovery mechanisms required to extract said petroleum from the ground are becoming more and more esoteric and expensive. We are moving off-shore more and more because we have drained a significant portion of our on-shore reserves. The Saudis have produced over 50% of their entire capacity. The North Sea has seen a production decline of over 35% in FIFTEEN YEARS.
And then there's the demand in the workforce marketplace. Fewer and fewer people are interested in jobs in the oil field, and we are paying higher and higher wages to those who will do the job. And then there's the retiring set, because of the lack of a "sexy" image, the industry is predominantly over 50 which has led to an increasing amount spent on technology to try and replace what they can before they all retire.
You also have to take into account the absolutely enormous size and scope of the industry, which reaped such record profits due to an OBSCENE amount of money spent in R&D, as well as production and exploration.
Take off the blinders. Gas is expensive because it SHOULD be. The only market manipulation here has been to drive the price down artificially. Oil is expensive, period. It always has been and it always will be. There is less of it now, it's harder to extract, and there are more than an order of magnitude more customers for it. Suck it up buddy and quit your whining. You haven't even seen $8.00/gallon yet. It's coming.
Some crazy Japanese company (Sony I believe) released a product called a "Compact Disc" Player (CD Player for short) in the early 80's that implements a scheme vaguely like what you describe. A laser pickup ("needle" if you will) runs over tracks ("grooves"), looking for divots on the surface.
I agree with this completely. I got into computers at 10, started working at 16, and was a paid PC tech by 17. I worked in various tech positions until I got into software at 20. I spent 6 years in school, working full-time doing development for four of them. I am now 27 years old, and have been employed in technology full-time for almost 9 years. I have been doing software exclusively for seven of those years, and now have my own software business.
I had fun in school, but I often look back and regret not having taken more time to just do young things. It was always about getting ready for tomorrow, the future, the career, whatever. Well I tell you what, if you're 17 and already trying to get ahead you'll have no problems being better than your peers at 25, enjoy your youth. You have plenty of years to build your skillset and work your ass off.
I write software for directional drilling, and we interface with a number of down-hole steering and gamma probes that are just as sensitive as these things. This is exactly what we do -- we apply one of a number of differen filters to gamma probes (as they are all over the place in count). It is usually required that drilling stops while taking a "survey" from a steering (telemetry) device because the shaking of the drill pipe around the probe sends it into a fit and they will pump up all kinds of bad data.
You fail to realize that a lot of state schools, particularly in Texas are located in areas which make it difficult, if not impossible to support yourself w/o using part of your aid for living expenses on top of school. I made about $30k a year while in school, which made living bearable, but only barely so. The town I lived in provided very little work for its permanent residents, let alone the transients that were most of the student body. I had no medical insurance, and paid out of pocket for any and all doctor and hospital visits.
I thought quite long and hard about what I did, and I do not think it was the wrong decision. I know that I am not alone in my current situation, as many of the working people I have met over the last few years are in the exact same. Try looking beyond the end of your own nose. I went to a cheap school in a small town unable to support most of its own residents. Shit happens, but it would not have been substantially different anywhere else.
Did you even have to pay your own way? Or did mom and dad foot the bill for the rest of your living expenses not paid by the government?
$700/mo for $30k of debt to a state-run school. That's how much. I too "made too much" and qualified for _zero_ subsidies, grants, etc. I paid my way, or rather, am still paying my way through and I finished almost three years ago.
You don't even know the difference between communism and socialism. I would hardly call this insightful, but then most of you fuck-wits don't know the difference between up or down just whether or not you live in a "red" or "blue" state.
Sure, a lot of people have problems with it - and businesses have to kick back a rather large percentage to them for the ability to accept the card but it's worth it. No questions asked, they will immediately chargeback the payment, and open their own fraud investigation into the matter. I have had a number of VISA and MC cards, but once I got the AMEX I just cut them all up.
Actually, it's not always $notnerd vs. $nerd. I am a nerd in every sense of the word. I understand the technology as well, if not better than any other nerd. I also understand that in my company, my technical talents are better used to _produce new products_ for us to sell to our clients and thus make more money. Screwing around with configuration files, etc. is a _waste of my time_. I just want a directory service that allows single sign-on so I can easily add resources and people to the organization without having to freaking script my own mgmt console around some lame-ass command line tools because someone out there thinks that you have to use a CLI to "understand technology".
Yes, so the prices of our own domestically developed products will rise in price.
What does this rise in price result in?
Probably the increase in importation of cereal grains, produce, and "assembled" food products. How, exactly does this help in any way prevent the economic collapse of our largely agrarian-based economy?
I am awaiting your obviously more highly-enlightened economic explanation.
Guess what: the invisible hand only cares about itself, but I suppose that's all we Americans are expected to give a shit about so it doesn't matter anyway.
It only normalizes itself to the "proper" price of production+ for that particular product. And that "proper" price is only what the market will bear. It does not normalize to a price that lends itself to the continued existence of the union. That's why we regulate and subsidize. There are "standards of living" and the market doesn't care. It's in our best interest to prevent the (wild guess) 60% of rural US from turning into a poverty-stricken no-man's land.
The windows driver model (WDM), is, quite frankly, one of the most impressive parts of the entire operating system. It is quite a bit more flexible and a lot easier to use than the unix model, and is so simply because there are so many cheap-ass broken devices out there.
I'm sorry, but you are just wrong. The parent is correct, and obviously you've never tried to develop a device driver and in fact are an end-user at best. I have done drivers, and let me tell you - unix is a pain in the ass to develop for. There are no standard classes, interfaces, or architectures for developing a device - simply "is this a block or character device". How quaint. You get to jump through hoops and develop the entire thing yourself, with no real framework to work in. At least Microsoft provides you that much.
Microsoft blames device drivers for a simple reason: 99% of them suck ass and are written by hardware hacks who just don't understand software and can't write it to save their lives. The only reason a BSD/Unix/Linux driver will be any better is because someone more familiar with _software_ will be writing it.
Visual Studio.NET is HARDLY re-written in.NET. In fact, they merely host the CLR so you can set properties and such with the GUI when you are editing forms.
THEY DID NOT RE-WRITE VISUAL STUDIO IN.NET, THEY JUST RENAMED IT AND WORKED OVER THE GUI.
XCode will work with any GCC-based cross compiler with little trouble. It can cross-compile for X86, the problem is using the system libraries (and thus, Cocoa).
Look at the XGrid "client" for linux. This could be ported to windows, and as long as you ship the proper bins to the proper clients you could use XGRid on windows, though totally unblessed.
You are quite correct. You don't run autoconf without cygwin, basically. Which is pretty much going to guarantee a stillborn project on windows. jam, on the other hand, is not quite so painful to distribute and use.
The view up there must be nice. I imagine all us lowly and less-capable peons must look pretty small.
"With older windows systems..". Right, and I'm sure that's because you have little or no practical development experience under windows. aka the current versions.
Jam is a fairly easy to use tool that is good at what it does. It's freely available from their public depot that can be accessed at no charge to you! Those who really develop software know that sentimentality and bullshit rhetoric should be put aside and decisions made on technical merits. You want your project to be the best and succeed? Use the best methodologies as well as the BEST TOOLS. If you're not on Unix using gcc autoconf/make suck. While your experience may be vast, it would seem to me that it's particularly shallow.
2002 Nissan Sentra (Spec V). In stock form it had ~170hp/~185tq (crank) with a 6 speed. I got about 24/28 with it, which is what it was rated it. Three years and 50k miles later I've replaced the factory intake and header for increased power (~180hp/195tq) and now I get about 25/30. I would also say I'm an aggressive driver and don't baby the car at all.
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Kurt Vonnegut wrote an excellent short story on this theme of equality that one of my better high school teachers used to make the distinction between equality of opportunity versus equality of results.
Harrison Bergeron. A must read.
Modern day catalytic converters have such a low flow impedance as to practically be straight-through pipes. Auto companies have been working for decades to make this the case as the original (read 20+ year s ago) cats & smog pumps were so terribly restrictive.
This comes up all the time, but it's really not an issue. Your catalytic converter is both not "robbing" you of any power nor is it "decreasing" your gas mileage.
I don't know if you've ever noticed, but due to the great-arc flight paths trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights tend to take, they spend very little time over open water and are in fact over land for most of the flight. The days of Lindbergh's straight-line trans-Atlantic flights are long gone.
Dogs probably don't like you much either. :P
Typically dog height is measured to the "withers", that is from the ground to the highest point on the front shoulders when standing up straight.
While I'm not sure there wasn't actually a book called Ice 9, it was Cat's Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut Jr.) that contained a storyline revolving around Ice 9.
No, the problem is that you don't have the slightest understanding of the "oil industry", or what is required to deliver to you this "staple" of modern life.
Quite simply put it's supply and demand on more levels than you have considered. Your gas prices are high not just because it's DIFFICULT and DANGEROUS to produce, but it's in DEMAND. Gas prices are driven primarily by REFINERY CAPACITY, something which we have been reluctant to increase here because they are DIRTY, DANGEROUS, and EXPENSIVE. You also have to contend with the fact that China, India, and a number of other countries are now coming "on-line" and we now have 1+ billion more people wanting cars and plastics and all the other nice things petroleum gives us.
We are also entering an era where recovery mechanisms required to extract said petroleum from the ground are becoming more and more esoteric and expensive. We are moving off-shore more and more because we have drained a significant portion of our on-shore reserves. The Saudis have produced over 50% of their entire capacity. The North Sea has seen a production decline of over 35% in FIFTEEN YEARS.
And then there's the demand in the workforce marketplace. Fewer and fewer people are interested in jobs in the oil field, and we are paying higher and higher wages to those who will do the job. And then there's the retiring set, because of the lack of a "sexy" image, the industry is predominantly over 50 which has led to an increasing amount spent on technology to try and replace what they can before they all retire.
You also have to take into account the absolutely enormous size and scope of the industry, which reaped such record profits due to an OBSCENE amount of money spent in R&D, as well as production and exploration.
Take off the blinders. Gas is expensive because it SHOULD be. The only market manipulation here has been to drive the price down artificially. Oil is expensive, period. It always has been and it always will be. There is less of it now, it's harder to extract, and there are more than an order of magnitude more customers for it. Suck it up buddy and quit your whining. You haven't even seen $8.00/gallon yet. It's coming.
Some crazy Japanese company (Sony I believe) released a product called a "Compact Disc" Player (CD Player for short) in the early 80's that implements a scheme vaguely like what you describe. A laser pickup ("needle" if you will) runs over tracks ("grooves"), looking for divots on the surface.
I wonder whatever happened to it..
I agree with this completely. I got into computers at 10, started working at 16, and was a paid PC tech by 17. I worked in various tech positions until I got into software at 20. I spent 6 years in school, working full-time doing development for four of them. I am now 27 years old, and have been employed in technology full-time for almost 9 years. I have been doing software exclusively for seven of those years, and now have my own software business.
I had fun in school, but I often look back and regret not having taken more time to just do young things. It was always about getting ready for tomorrow, the future, the career, whatever. Well I tell you what, if you're 17 and already trying to get ahead you'll have no problems being better than your peers at 25, enjoy your youth. You have plenty of years to build your skillset and work your ass off.
I write software for directional drilling, and we interface with a number of down-hole steering and gamma probes that are just as sensitive as these things. This is exactly what we do -- we apply one of a number of differen filters to gamma probes (as they are all over the place in count). It is usually required that drilling stops while taking a "survey" from a steering (telemetry) device because the shaking of the drill pipe around the probe sends it into a fit and they will pump up all kinds of bad data.
ClearType is for LCDs, not CRTs. I hope you realize this as a quick look at how ClearType works will make it painfully obvious why it looks bad.
You fail to realize that a lot of state schools, particularly in Texas are located in areas which make it difficult, if not impossible to support yourself w/o using part of your aid for living expenses on top of school. I made about $30k a year while in school, which made living bearable, but only barely so. The town I lived in provided very little work for its permanent residents, let alone the transients that were most of the student body. I had no medical insurance, and paid out of pocket for any and all doctor and hospital visits.
I thought quite long and hard about what I did, and I do not think it was the wrong decision. I know that I am not alone in my current situation, as many of the working people I have met over the last few years are in the exact same. Try looking beyond the end of your own nose. I went to a cheap school in a small town unable to support most of its own residents. Shit happens, but it would not have been substantially different anywhere else.
Did you even have to pay your own way? Or did mom and dad foot the bill for the rest of your living expenses not paid by the government?
$700/mo for $30k of debt to a state-run school. That's how much. I too "made too much" and qualified for _zero_ subsidies, grants, etc. I paid my way, or rather, am still paying my way through and I finished almost three years ago.
You don't even know the difference between communism and socialism. I would hardly call this insightful, but then most of you fuck-wits don't know the difference between up or down just whether or not you live in a "red" or "blue" state.
Jesus.
Uhm, Revenge of the Nerds was more like 20 years ago.
We will create an race of SUPER-MEN.
Courtesy Bela Lugosi in "Ed Wood".
Sure, a lot of people have problems with it - and businesses have to kick back a rather large percentage to them for the ability to accept the card but it's worth it. No questions asked, they will immediately chargeback the payment, and open their own fraud investigation into the matter. I have had a number of VISA and MC cards, but once I got the AMEX I just cut them all up.
Actually, it's not always $notnerd vs. $nerd. I am a nerd in every sense of the word. I understand the technology as well, if not better than any other nerd. I also understand that in my company, my technical talents are better used to _produce new products_ for us to sell to our clients and thus make more money. Screwing around with configuration files, etc. is a _waste of my time_. I just want a directory service that allows single sign-on so I can easily add resources and people to the organization without having to freaking script my own mgmt console around some lame-ass command line tools because someone out there thinks that you have to use a CLI to "understand technology".
Yes, so the prices of our own domestically developed products will rise in price.
What does this rise in price result in?
Probably the increase in importation of cereal grains, produce, and "assembled" food products. How, exactly does this help in any way prevent the economic collapse of our largely agrarian-based economy?
I am awaiting your obviously more highly-enlightened economic explanation.
Guess what: the invisible hand only cares about itself, but I suppose that's all we Americans are expected to give a shit about so it doesn't matter anyway.
It only normalizes itself to the "proper" price of production+ for that particular product. And that "proper" price is only what the market will bear. It does not normalize to a price that lends itself to the continued existence of the union. That's why we regulate and subsidize. There are "standards of living" and the market doesn't care. It's in our best interest to prevent the (wild guess) 60% of rural US from turning into a poverty-stricken no-man's land.
The windows driver model (WDM), is, quite frankly, one of the most impressive parts of the entire operating system. It is quite a bit more flexible and a lot easier to use than the unix model, and is so simply because there are so many cheap-ass broken devices out there.
I'm sorry, but you are just wrong. The parent is correct, and obviously you've never tried to develop a device driver and in fact are an end-user at best. I have done drivers, and let me tell you - unix is a pain in the ass to develop for. There are no standard classes, interfaces, or architectures for developing a device - simply "is this a block or character device". How quaint. You get to jump through hoops and develop the entire thing yourself, with no real framework to work in. At least Microsoft provides you that much.
Microsoft blames device drivers for a simple reason: 99% of them suck ass and are written by hardware hacks who just don't understand software and can't write it to save their lives. The only reason a BSD/Unix/Linux driver will be any better is because someone more familiar with _software_ will be writing it.
Visual Studio .NET is HARDLY re-written in .NET. In fact, they merely host the CLR so you can set properties and such with the GUI when you are editing forms.
.NET, THEY JUST RENAMED IT AND WORKED OVER THE GUI.
THEY DID NOT RE-WRITE VISUAL STUDIO IN
XCode will work with any GCC-based cross compiler with little trouble. It can cross-compile for X86, the problem is using the system libraries (and thus, Cocoa).
Look at the XGrid "client" for linux. This could be ported to windows, and as long as you ship the proper bins to the proper clients you could use XGRid on windows, though totally unblessed.
You are quite correct. You don't run autoconf without cygwin, basically. Which is pretty much going to guarantee a stillborn project on windows. jam, on the other hand, is not quite so painful to distribute and use.
The view up there must be nice. I imagine all us lowly and less-capable peons must look pretty small.
"With older windows systems..". Right, and I'm sure that's because you have little or no practical development experience under windows. aka the current versions.
Jam is a fairly easy to use tool that is good at what it does. It's freely available from their public depot that can be accessed at no charge to you! Those who really develop software know that sentimentality and bullshit rhetoric should be put aside and decisions made on technical merits. You want your project to be the best and succeed? Use the best methodologies as well as the BEST TOOLS. If you're not on Unix using gcc autoconf/make suck. While your experience may be vast, it would seem to me that it's particularly shallow.
How fucking arrogant can you be?
2002 Nissan Sentra (Spec V). In stock form it had ~170hp/~185tq (crank) with a 6 speed. I got about 24/28 with it, which is what it was rated it. Three years and 50k miles later I've replaced the factory intake and header for increased power (~180hp/195tq) and now I get about 25/30. I would also say I'm an aggressive driver and don't baby the car at all.