The Samsung model that came out late last year is quite nice. It's a small, light, inexpensive web terminal on something approximating hardware designed to be a Chromebook. Other Chromebooks have been older, heavier, weaker, and bad battery life laptops that aren't a good hardware fit. And the Pixel is probably too high end to justify right now with the limitations on the software. But I find the Samsung hardware quite nice, and the system is perfect for my family. We all have google accounts, can switch seamlessly between them, and I don't have to worry about any of the things you need to worry about with a Windows or Linux box. We keep it's charging station on a table next to the TV next to a Nexus 7. At any given time one of the devices is usually in use by somebody. I highly recommend this for anybody who doesn't need more than a web terminal and doesn't need MS Office. It's all my kids will need for most of their schooling.
Also, at $250 I don't mind letting my 5 and 7 year olds operate it all over the house. If it breaks, I'll just buy another one. Same with the N7.
Most of the people who complain about the Chromebook are trying to use it for the wrong thing. This is a spare computer you have sitting around for ANYBODY to pick up and use for 15 minutes, including guests. For power users it's not a primary computer.
We have had good success with retail "slat-wall" mounted on the walls all the way to the ceiling above our workbenches. It can support a lot of weight and there are a lot of ways to attach shelving or mount equipment using widely available brackets. And it will not deteriorate over time like pegboard. Also, it's attractive, which will help make your space look clean to passers by.
Also, have them give you lots of network and power drops spread around the room, you will constantly run out. Attach a lot of power strips to your furniture, etc.
You may want your own physical network separate from the rest of the building as well.
Why is there not an On-Demand (DirecTV, Cable, etc.), Download Service (Amazon), etc. that will offer movies for the same price that Redbox does at my local Walmart or Grocery Store?
I can go rent one from the Redbox vending machine for $1.00/day, yet download prices are still artificially inflated to match the old fashioned video store price of $3.99? This is ridiculous.
If Redbox or anyone else offered a download service for $1.00 or even $2.00 the total volume of rentals would go way up.
I don't mind grabbing 3 movies at $1.00/day on the hope that 2 of them might be watchable. At $3.99 it's just too expensive so I rent far fewer movies.
If you have a CS degree you must have some technical understanding. If you also have the ability to explain a technical thing to a non-technical person you may also be a good candidate for a Technical Sales or Application Engineering position with a software or hardware company.
This is what I do...I too have a CS degree- but no longer am in active development. I found out that my skill was to translate the technical to the non-technical and have been doing it ever since. If you have good people skills, the sales part is pretty easy. And if the target of your sale understands you are an engineer and not just another sales guy- you will be listened to.
Your post was very informative, and I do not disagree. I guess why the 3 days bugs me is because these numbers are designed to set advertising rates, but are used to make decisions about content. Due to the business model, this sort of thing is going to happen- but I really get frustrated when good shows with reasonable, stable, viewing audiences get cancelled because they are no longer growing, or aren't a hit on the scale of Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, or American Idol. The 7-10 day number I think would be more effective to judge the quality of a series and determine it's fate.
I don't like that networks are able to make the same amount of money throwing inexpensive to produce crappy reality shows on the air instead of well-written higher budget scripted shows.
Farscape was killed because they could make more money with a collection of really bad reality shows.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip wasn't a runaway hit, but it was cancelled despite having a solid viewership. It was expensive to produce.
Battlestar Galactica has been under pressure from day one despite it's near-universal critical praise, solid acting, and good writing. Mainly because it's expensive to produce.
There are lots of shows with more universal appeal than sci-fi fare that fall into this category.
If they are going to change their methadology to include DVR statistics, why do they limit it to 3 days? I watch 95% of my non-live-sports TV on DVR, and most of the time I'm about 5-7 days behind. There must be some industry reason for the 3 day number- is somebody aware of the reason for that number?
Also, are Dish and DirecTV users still left out of Nielson ratings?
No offense to the submitter of course, but the combination of all of those crazy named watchdog groups sounds like either something out of a comic book, Star Trek, or B movie.
But it's not the first time I've noticed such editorial decisions. And I felt it needed discussion.
I have noticed that another poster *did* submit the story subsequently. We'll see what happens. However, the real test is what happens the next time, and the time after that, etc.
Re:What about DNC orders to claim voter intimidati
on
RNC and Voter Suppression
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That is sort of like telling the cop who pulled you over for doing 50 in a 35 that the other cars on the road were going 60. Well, that doesn't make what you were doing any less wrong.
I do agree however on your point that we should know of shenanigans from both sides. Which is why I started this thread in the first place. There needs to be balance.
In general, I agree with a previous poster who stated that this is all part of a campaign to set the stage so that if the Democrats lose they can claim the election was stolen like they did last time. Even though all the independant investigations (Miami Herald, Civil Rights Commission, Justice Department, CNN-) into voter intimidation claims, etc. could find no major problems with the Florida results nor any substantiation to claims of police using dogs and firehoses, etc. to suppress minority votes. In fact they found that most of the problems were due to voter error.
I enjoy the style and humor applied to the daily news and commentary around the web and in the media at the Wall Street Journal's Best Of The Web put together by James Taranto and others.
At first I was a little surprised when reading this thread that it wasn't mentioned- then I thought of the typical reader around here and realized it's probably not frequented that often...
Anyways, it's a good round-up, funny, and it's new every weekday. And I figured that it deserved mention here.
I don't have any mod points today, or I'd mod this up. The Electoral System, whatever it's weaknesses, is one of the mechanisms that gives small states like Colorado an actual voice in national elections.
If this system didn't exist, as many people have pointed out above, a persons vote in a populous state has a much bigger impact.
The argument I am trying (obviously not very effectively!) to make is that marraige is primarily a legal construct to define the family unit that is integral to societal stability (now there is a mouthful!). So, the scenario you lay out above is not an unjustified marraige, because they still could adopt children and become a family unit oriented towards procreation. Until that point however they would not be fundamentally different from a civil union.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating anything like making contraceptives illegal. I just believe that marraiges and civil unions are different and should not be confused for the good of societal stability.
It's been an enjoyable discussion, but I have too much work to do to continue right now.
IANAL, so no I cannot off the top of my head come up with anything applicable. I'm sure that someone who *is* a lawyer could come up with something given enough time. I would be interested to see such results.
Common sense tells me that lots of people arguing or hearing such cases at the state or federal level will have friends who might occupy the office that is the issue in the case. I'm guessing that it is so common that nobody makes a big deal about perceived conflicts of interest in practice.
The Supreme Court, and particularly anything involving a justice distinctly on one or the other side of the spectrum will naturally get much more political attention.
In any case, the impact that the case might have on Cheney personally is negligable since the case concerns the independence of the executive branch and in particular the office of the vice president.
I won't deny there are problems with that line of argument, but fundamentally marraige is NOT about love, intimacy, or sex. It is a legal definition of the family unit that society has depended on for stability (mainly in matters of procreation) for many thousands of years, no matter what human society you are talking about.
Marraige is a matter of law in this case. That's not to say that you shouldn't marry someone with whom you also have a relationship built on love, intimacy, and sex. Doing so will contribute positively to the stability of the marraige and in turn society when it comes to procreation.
I suppose the main difference that justifies (in my mind) a law defining marraige as only between members of the opposite sex as oppsed to a law that would define marraige as between members of the same sex is that the former case has to do with procreation. Now, that may be proved irrelevant at some point in the future- but all indications to this point are that there is societal benefit in a two parent male-female household.
So the crux is that it benefits the stability of society to define marraige this way. By contrast, there was no benefit to society in the laws that until the 1960s denied inter-racial marraige in parts of the US. All that did was ensure that children of such a union remained illegitimate and made it challenging for such a family to participate positively in society.
On the other hand, I see no societal harm to civil unions, as long as those civil unions are not formed for the purpose of procreation, as most marraiges are.
As romantic as it might sound, it's not fundamentally an equal rights issue. The law (in most states) defines marraige as between a man and a woman. Therefore, regardless of one's sexual orientation everyone has an equal right to marry someone of the opposite sex. If I am a gay man I can marry a woman, just like a straight man can. If I am a straight man, I am still prohibited by law from marrying another man.
The issue is not really about equal rights, the issue is about the legal (under state laws) definition of marraige. Currently the vast majority of laws on the issue define marraige as between members of the opposite sex. This is the same whether the people getting married are straight or not.
Now, the issue of whether or not marraige SHOULD be defined this way up for reasonable discussion; but it is NOT an issue of equal rights. That is just a hot-button phrase used to gin-up outrage.
Scalia is not the only person who has social relationships in Washington with "players". Most of the justices regularly can be found at Beltway social events. It's unreasonable to require the justices to limit their social contact or to recuse themselves for having proper social relationships with other Beltway personalities.
In Scalia's case, his limited socialization with Cheney has no impact on his hearing of the case because the case has nothing to do with Cheney himself, only the office of the vice president in the abstract.
...but I do remember it's fairly different from standard TCP/IP. Which would make it quite a useful platform to teach concepts, as there would almost certainly be a dedicated TCP/IP class in most curriculums anyways. It's good to demonstrate different (if unusual) concepts.
This is why CS curriculums include not widely used in industry languages such as LISP; just because they do things radically different.
It's not about whether or not you have experience in the latest tools and technologies. It's whether you have the fundamentals in place to allow you to apply that fundamental knowledge to any other system.
In the specific case of serial interfaces, there really isn't all that much different between RS-232, RS-485, and USB or Firewire. They are all serial interfaces that employ the same fundamental concepts. In the real world you'll have to apply that knowledge to any number of serial interfaces.
The same logic can be applied to a discussion yesterday about using MS or open source programming environments in a CS department.
The show was put out to pasture to give it an excuse to be cancelled. They moved it's start time back 1 hour to 10pm, and plugged the HELL out of Stargate which they ran right before it. Farscape received little to no promotion, not even during Stargate (which you think is why they would have put Stargate first).
So Farscape survived it's start time adjustment with only a negligable decrease in ratings from it's previous prime-time spot.
The brass at Sci-Fi used this as a primary excuse to cut the show. But the REAL reason was that they could make a weaker show for much less money that appealed to a mass market that would get only slightly weaker ratings.
So in my opinion it was a calculated move to kill off the expensive (but still profitable) show.
It's well known that the new head-honcho of sci-fi doesn't like space shows and prefers paranormal ones. But the reason why is paranormal shows are CHEAP.
Many others have already detailed the downside of unions. I would add that jobs that require higher intelligence and greater individual motivation to learn and better themselves (such as Engineering, IT, and other high-tech industries) do not lend themselves well to unionization. The members are simply too intelligent to put up with the expense, corruption, and BS of "Big Labor".
Todays labor unions are less about improving the fate of their members and more about increasing the funds in their pension accounts and gathering political power.
For instance, the largest teachers union may as well just be a fundraising wing of the DNC.
Even if the device is truly inefficient, it's usage will be many orders of magnitude lower than the devices that will be monitored by such equipment.
Rooftop units, cooling towers, boilers, lighting grids, and other items are actually worth measuring on a building-wide scale. You would never bat an eye at the kind of usage associated with computers *much* larger than the device in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
The Samsung model that came out late last year is quite nice. It's a small, light, inexpensive web terminal on something approximating hardware designed to be a Chromebook. Other Chromebooks have been older, heavier, weaker, and bad battery life laptops that aren't a good hardware fit. And the Pixel is probably too high end to justify right now with the limitations on the software. But I find the Samsung hardware quite nice, and the system is perfect for my family. We all have google accounts, can switch seamlessly between them, and I don't have to worry about any of the things you need to worry about with a Windows or Linux box. We keep it's charging station on a table next to the TV next to a Nexus 7. At any given time one of the devices is usually in use by somebody. I highly recommend this for anybody who doesn't need more than a web terminal and doesn't need MS Office. It's all my kids will need for most of their schooling.
Also, at $250 I don't mind letting my 5 and 7 year olds operate it all over the house. If it breaks, I'll just buy another one. Same with the N7.
Most of the people who complain about the Chromebook are trying to use it for the wrong thing. This is a spare computer you have sitting around for ANYBODY to pick up and use for 15 minutes, including guests. For power users it's not a primary computer.
We have had good success with retail "slat-wall" mounted on the walls all the way to the ceiling above our workbenches. It can support a lot of weight and there are a lot of ways to attach shelving or mount equipment using widely available brackets. And it will not deteriorate over time like pegboard. Also, it's attractive, which will help make your space look clean to passers by.
Also, have them give you lots of network and power drops spread around the room, you will constantly run out. Attach a lot of power strips to your furniture, etc.
You may want your own physical network separate from the rest of the building as well.
Why is there not an On-Demand (DirecTV, Cable, etc.), Download Service (Amazon), etc. that will offer movies for the same price that Redbox does at my local Walmart or Grocery Store?
I can go rent one from the Redbox vending machine for $1.00/day, yet download prices are still artificially inflated to match the old fashioned video store price of $3.99? This is ridiculous.
If Redbox or anyone else offered a download service for $1.00 or even $2.00 the total volume of rentals would go way up.
I don't mind grabbing 3 movies at $1.00/day on the hope that 2 of them might be watchable. At $3.99 it's just too expensive so I rent far fewer movies.
If you have a CS degree you must have some technical understanding. If you also have the ability to explain a technical thing to a non-technical person you may also be a good candidate for a Technical Sales or Application Engineering position with a software or hardware company.
This is what I do...I too have a CS degree- but no longer am in active development. I found out that my skill was to translate the technical to the non-technical and have been doing it ever since. If you have good people skills, the sales part is pretty easy. And if the target of your sale understands you are an engineer and not just another sales guy- you will be listened to.
Your post was very informative, and I do not disagree. I guess why the 3 days bugs me is because these numbers are designed to set advertising rates, but are used to make decisions about content. Due to the business model, this sort of thing is going to happen- but I really get frustrated when good shows with reasonable, stable, viewing audiences get cancelled because they are no longer growing, or aren't a hit on the scale of Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, or American Idol. The 7-10 day number I think would be more effective to judge the quality of a series and determine it's fate.
I don't like that networks are able to make the same amount of money throwing inexpensive to produce crappy reality shows on the air instead of well-written higher budget scripted shows.
Farscape was killed because they could make more money with a collection of really bad reality shows.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip wasn't a runaway hit, but it was cancelled despite having a solid viewership. It was expensive to produce.
Battlestar Galactica has been under pressure from day one despite it's near-universal critical praise, solid acting, and good writing. Mainly because it's expensive to produce.
There are lots of shows with more universal appeal than sci-fi fare that fall into this category.
If they are going to change their methadology to include DVR statistics, why do they limit it to 3 days? I watch 95% of my non-live-sports TV on DVR, and most of the time I'm about 5-7 days behind. There must be some industry reason for the 3 day number- is somebody aware of the reason for that number?
Also, are Dish and DirecTV users still left out of Nielson ratings?
No offense to the submitter of course, but the combination of all of those crazy named watchdog groups sounds like either something out of a comic book, Star Trek, or B movie.
Where's Will Wheaton when you need him?
But it's not the first time I've noticed such editorial decisions. And I felt it needed discussion.
I have noticed that another poster *did* submit the story subsequently. We'll see what happens. However, the real test is what happens the next time, and the time after that, etc.
That is sort of like telling the cop who pulled you over for doing 50 in a 35 that the other cars on the road were going 60. Well, that doesn't make what you were doing any less wrong.
I do agree however on your point that we should know of shenanigans from both sides. Which is why I started this thread in the first place. There needs to be balance.
In general, I agree with a previous poster who stated that this is all part of a campaign to set the stage so that if the Democrats lose they can claim the election was stolen like they did last time. Even though all the independant investigations (Miami Herald, Civil Rights Commission, Justice Department, CNN-) into voter intimidation claims, etc. could find no major problems with the Florida results nor any substantiation to claims of police using dogs and firehoses, etc. to suppress minority votes. In fact they found that most of the problems were due to voter error.
I'm not disputing that this is news, but is it not also news that the DNC has issued marching orders to it's operatives that instruct them to claim voter intimidation even if no such evidence exists?
I like the new politics section, but at least have some semblance of balance about what stories get posted.
Numerous reports state that the company that sent out the ballot already mailed corrections. Also, it appears to be limited in scope.
This is coming from the man who never met a dictator he didn't like. :)
He just recently sanctioned the obviously fraudulent elections in Venezuela as fair and we're supposed to believe what he's saying about Flordia?
GTWreck
I enjoy the style and humor applied to the daily news and commentary around the web and in the media at the Wall Street Journal's Best Of The Web put together by James Taranto and others.
At first I was a little surprised when reading this thread that it wasn't mentioned- then I thought of the typical reader around here and realized it's probably not frequented that often...
Anyways, it's a good round-up, funny, and it's new every weekday. And I figured that it deserved mention here.
I don't have any mod points today, or I'd mod this up. The Electoral System, whatever it's weaknesses, is one of the mechanisms that gives small states like Colorado an actual voice in national elections.
If this system didn't exist, as many people have pointed out above, a persons vote in a populous state has a much bigger impact.
GTWreck
The argument I am trying (obviously not very effectively!) to make is that marraige is primarily a legal construct to define the family unit that is integral to societal stability (now there is a mouthful!). So, the scenario you lay out above is not an unjustified marraige, because they still could adopt children and become a family unit oriented towards procreation. Until that point however they would not be fundamentally different from a civil union.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating anything like making contraceptives illegal. I just believe that marraiges and civil unions are different and should not be confused for the good of societal stability.
It's been an enjoyable discussion, but I have too much work to do to continue right now.
IANAL, so no I cannot off the top of my head come up with anything applicable. I'm sure that someone who *is* a lawyer could come up with something given enough time. I would be interested to see such results.
;)
Common sense tells me that lots of people arguing or hearing such cases at the state or federal level will have friends who might occupy the office that is the issue in the case. I'm guessing that it is so common that nobody makes a big deal about perceived conflicts of interest in practice.
The Supreme Court, and particularly anything involving a justice distinctly on one or the other side of the spectrum will naturally get much more political attention.
In any case, the impact that the case might have on Cheney personally is negligable since the case concerns the independence of the executive branch and in particular the office of the vice president.
But, as I said, IANAL.
I won't deny there are problems with that line of argument, but fundamentally marraige is NOT about love, intimacy, or sex. It is a legal definition of the family unit that society has depended on for stability (mainly in matters of procreation) for many thousands of years, no matter what human society you are talking about.
Marraige is a matter of law in this case. That's not to say that you shouldn't marry someone with whom you also have a relationship built on love, intimacy, and sex. Doing so will contribute positively to the stability of the marraige and in turn society when it comes to procreation.
I suppose the main difference that justifies (in my mind) a law defining marraige as only between members of the opposite sex as oppsed to a law that would define marraige as between members of the same sex is that the former case has to do with procreation. Now, that may be proved irrelevant at some point in the future- but all indications to this point are that there is societal benefit in a two parent male-female household.
So the crux is that it benefits the stability of society to define marraige this way. By contrast, there was no benefit to society in the laws that until the 1960s denied inter-racial marraige in parts of the US. All that did was ensure that children of such a union remained illegitimate and made it challenging for such a family to participate positively in society.
On the other hand, I see no societal harm to civil unions, as long as those civil unions are not formed for the purpose of procreation, as most marraiges are.
As romantic as it might sound, it's not fundamentally an equal rights issue. The law (in most states) defines marraige as between a man and a woman. Therefore, regardless of one's sexual orientation everyone has an equal right to marry someone of the opposite sex. If I am a gay man I can marry a woman, just like a straight man can. If I am a straight man, I am still prohibited by law from marrying another man.
The issue is not really about equal rights, the issue is about the legal (under state laws) definition of marraige. Currently the vast majority of laws on the issue define marraige as between members of the opposite sex. This is the same whether the people getting married are straight or not.
Now, the issue of whether or not marraige SHOULD be defined this way up for reasonable discussion; but it is NOT an issue of equal rights. That is just a hot-button phrase used to gin-up outrage.
Scalia is not the only person who has social relationships in Washington with "players". Most of the justices regularly can be found at Beltway social events. It's unreasonable to require the justices to limit their social contact or to recuse themselves for having proper social relationships with other Beltway personalities.
In Scalia's case, his limited socialization with Cheney has no impact on his hearing of the case because the case has nothing to do with Cheney himself, only the office of the vice president in the abstract.
...but I do remember it's fairly different from standard TCP/IP. Which would make it quite a useful platform to teach concepts, as there would almost certainly be a dedicated TCP/IP class in most curriculums anyways. It's good to demonstrate different (if unusual) concepts.
This is why CS curriculums include not widely used in industry languages such as LISP; just because they do things radically different.
It's not about whether or not you have experience in the latest tools and technologies. It's whether you have the fundamentals in place to allow you to apply that fundamental knowledge to any other system.
In the specific case of serial interfaces, there really isn't all that much different between RS-232, RS-485, and USB or Firewire. They are all serial interfaces that employ the same fundamental concepts. In the real world you'll have to apply that knowledge to any number of serial interfaces.
The same logic can be applied to a discussion yesterday about using MS or open source programming environments in a CS department.
The show was put out to pasture to give it an excuse to be cancelled. They moved it's start time back 1 hour to 10pm, and plugged the HELL out of Stargate which they ran right before it. Farscape received little to no promotion, not even during Stargate (which you think is why they would have put Stargate first).
So Farscape survived it's start time adjustment with only a negligable decrease in ratings from it's previous prime-time spot.
The brass at Sci-Fi used this as a primary excuse to cut the show. But the REAL reason was that they could make a weaker show for much less money that appealed to a mass market that would get only slightly weaker ratings.
So in my opinion it was a calculated move to kill off the expensive (but still profitable) show.
It's well known that the new head-honcho of sci-fi doesn't like space shows and prefers paranormal ones. But the reason why is paranormal shows are CHEAP.
Many others have already detailed the downside of unions. I would add that jobs that require higher intelligence and greater individual motivation to learn and better themselves (such as Engineering, IT, and other high-tech industries) do not lend themselves well to unionization. The members are simply too intelligent to put up with the expense, corruption, and BS of "Big Labor".
Todays labor unions are less about improving the fate of their members and more about increasing the funds in their pension accounts and gathering political power.
For instance, the largest teachers union may as well just be a fundraising wing of the DNC.
Even if the device is truly inefficient, it's usage will be many orders of magnitude lower than the devices that will be monitored by such equipment.
Rooftop units, cooling towers, boilers, lighting grids, and other items are actually worth measuring on a building-wide scale. You would never bat an eye at the kind of usage associated with computers *much* larger than the device in the article.
But think in more broad terms...
:)
how about a device for walking
or even broader
a device for transportation
now we're getting somewhere.
It's not foolproof, but it does get you in the neighborhood.