It bugs me no end that years after album info exists, and most cd players will pick it up, that i've yet to buy a cd which actually displays it or has it on the cd. WTF? it isn't as if those extra bits will weigh down the cd and add to freight. Added value people. Added value.
I am not supporting piracy in terms of the mass distribution of movies, but i'd really rather not have all discs that i post / courier opened or examined for content. I don't send any objectionable material, or possess any. Like anyone, there are times when the material i send may be copyright (academic journals or the like), but i don't expect my paper mail to be opened without a warrant, and would expect that i'd not get unreasonable searches of my other mail.
From my recollection of HHGTG, replacement with "Belgium" was only done in the USA, and readers from elsewhere in the world could cope with the original text.
my girlfriend works for a company that makes medical implant devices, and they ahve to go through extensive testing for all the materials and parts of the equipment that is implanted. The body does degrade the materials over time (plastics or similar synthetics), and the various bits of kit are rated for various durations. the stuff that stays in you until you die (heart implants etc) are the highest rating from the little i have been able to gauge.
The ethics of RFID and privacy aside, i'd only trust an implant of any sort after the medical fraternity had done testing to make sure that the materials weren't going to get horribly rejected by the body, or the materials corroded or otherwise compromised by the body. Certainly wouldn't be getting it done for fun or in a lighthearted manner.
Love my 3310 as well, but the "2" button is getting a bit sticky as it is the most commonly used button for texting. the contacts for the charger are a little picky as to which of the standard nokia chargers they'll accept, but i figure it's going ok for an old phone
batteries are cheap to buy when they get a little tired as well.
Most of the article was referring to art, but my $0.02 as someone who draws on a daily basis as part of my professional work:
As an engineer, the ability to be able to come up with a hand sketch at a meeting to explain to a client or an architect how you plan to solve a problem is important. being able to draw clearly enough that someone can go from having no idea what you are conveying, to understanding it to the point where they can suggest changes or alternatives is the goal.
You may well be able to drive a CAD machine to make a perfect drawing of the detail, but unless you can sketch it up in the first place, it is hard to sell the concept.
In some cases, freehand sketches are enough for something substantial to be built from, and there may be little benefit in transferring the drawing to CAD. Some engineers wont use rulers in their hand sketches (using tracing paper laid over grid paper), as the eye will more readily read an almost straight hand line as straight, but will look at a ruled line and compare it against other ruled lines, and spot any minor discrepencies in being parallel, or the like. It is counter intuitive, and took me a while to adjust to it, but my sketches are looking better for not using a ruler to get straight lines.
There is a place for both computer generated drawings as well as hand drawn, and the balance needs to be found in the training of professionals who will need to be familiar with both.
fair call. most of my time has been on the shorter haul itnernational flights, which warped my view of travel proportions.
I'd be more keen to find more fuel efficient ways of getting transatlantic in a plane with hundreds of people than just as fast as we can. I'm not a tree hugger, but with limited resources in terms of fossil fuel, it would be a good thing if we could accept a few more hours in the plane with less fuel burned per person carried. Is our collective time really that valuable that we can't relax and enjoy a journey?
Then again, this is the same civilisation that has developed the hummer, and all manner of SUVs rather than working on efficiency on other forms of transport.
not many of us have charge out rates which would have allowed us to fly on the concorde to save the few hours in the transatlantic run for the huge price premium. Those on holiday wouldn't typically be that desperate to save a couple of hours flying when it would cost far more than taking a bit longer on a conventional jet.
mod parent up. Even on relatively short international flights (new Zealand to Australia for instance), with the two hour checkin, the 30 minute luggage claim at the other end, you get very quickly into a position where almost more travel time is in the terminal rather than in the air.
some of our guys run massive computational fire dynamics models (multiple Gigs) which take a long time to load up and run. For the same reason they are left on the local machine, but IT have installed external hard drives on those machines that back up every night so that there is still some backing up of the data.
I think that they might periodically copy across to the server to be part of the groupwide backing up of all data as well.
You do have to hate it when there are cascades of failures in bits of equipment (your RAID array) that are supposed to be uber redundnant. pity that there isn't something to cover you for this sort of problem (I'm not in IT - am a professional engineer) that is commonly used.
set down what is reasonable in terms of expectations (not more than "x" minutes of downtime during business hours every "y" weeks, scheduled downtime compared to unscheduled downtime. I would have thought that data storage would be part of your record keeping requirements for your Quality management system, just as the system should spell out how you should be filing your correspondence, verifying your work, and all the other mundane bits of Quality in a business
I think that if your IT team have been beaten into submission by a tight-fisted upper management, they may well know that things are not as they should be, but know that no matter how hard they push, upper managemtn wont do anything until it becomes a crisis. More of a sense of resignation, and coping from day to day rather than implementing the best practise they know that they should have
my old office had a server die and take down all the files for a day or so during business hours due to a faulty power supply. no hot swappable power supply on that server. They were continually running out of server space for files (not due to massive mp3 libraries sitting on the server either), which seemed mad to an end user who just wanted to know that things would be able to be saved.
They also had two email gateway servers (i'm not in IT so i may be using jargon incorrectly) and periodically one would fall over, and every other email would fall into a black hole, with no bounceback or indication your email wasn't lost. It got so bad that i would phone people when critical emails were coming through so i could be sure that they were receieved.
the firm I am with right now has a really good internal help desk system which quickly answers user queries, and the system is set up so well that you become oblivious as to the system because you can just get down to doing your work rather than worrying about how stable things are.
Re:Have you ever missed meals or been hungry?
on
The Year in Ideas
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· Score: 2, Interesting
it's totally off topic from the main discussion, but i just wanted to put in my $0.02 worth of encouragement. The wrong woman is far far worse than no woman. Alone does suck, but the misery that you could go through with the wrong person is indescribable.
In a month or so, things will proabbly look better.
I'm a christian. you might not be. I had a similar thing happen to me just under a year ago, and for me, getting the signals that this was not the right woman was the best thing that happened to me for a very long time. I count myself blessed for getting that heads up about her.
Thanks for that - insightful and useful comment on a religious matter. have to agree with you, in retrospect.
the general concept of papal infallibility and the passing of peter's mantle onto successive bishops of rome may have been there, it was only cemented in the first vatican council of 1870.
have to say that while there are some bad apples among the priesthood, there are inordinately more good and decent priests who get tarred with the same brush despite their living moral, Godly, and upright lives.
The pope is only infallible when he prefaces his statement that he is invoking in infallibility clause. It is a very recent addition to the catholic set of beliefs (i recall it was in the 20th century, or just before it)
It is the company founded by Ove Arup. I work for them in Australia. We get to work on some very cool projects, and almost without exception, the people in the company are really passionate about engineering, and making the world better. Not in the hippy commune type way, but looking at the practicalities of how cities can work with fewer cars, how buildings can appear to be like a regular office block, but use less electricity to operate.
We don't only do Rolls Royce projects, but they're the projects that get our name out there.
It is a great firm to work for, and in the engineering field has experts in most areas.
i live in queensland, and despite a great deal of business being done with the southern states, you wont get the farmers or hicks in the backwaters dealing with changing their clocks twice a year. Having the sun get up at 4-30am is not as useful to 99% of the people as having a few hours to do stuff in the evening after work. WTF is with getting home from work at 6pm and it being dark?
I like my music to sound like it was when it was recorded, not "better". That is why i took a cd i like to a bose dealership, listened to it, and found that my older, cheaper (NAD + B&W) unit gave cleaner, crisper music, and that the bose sounded muddy.
the sound card should be transparent, and play the music as it gets it, not engage in low-brow tom-foolery.
then again, the masses like brittney. abandon hope.
The level of intimidation, when a company or body can sue you to oblivion / ruin your reputation is pretty high.
not quite on par with blowing things up, but in terms of how it can make your day less filled with sunshine, it is a little more scary than finding decaf in the kitchen at work.
sorry - we DON'T have daylight savings, hence possible evening activities don't happen, and frustration at the backwardness of the locals.
Other bits of australia do, and we in queensland also could well benefit from year round daylight savings to get the sun rising close to when people wake up, and going down with some time for a barbecue on the back yard after work, or a game of football with the kids.
Slashdot Mirror
police state is about the measure of it.
It bugs me no end that years after album info exists, and most cd players will pick it up, that i've yet to buy a cd which actually displays it or has it on the cd.
WTF? it isn't as if those extra bits will weigh down the cd and add to freight. Added value people. Added value.
I am not supporting piracy in terms of the mass distribution of movies, but i'd really rather not have all discs that i post / courier opened or examined for content. I don't send any objectionable material, or possess any. Like anyone, there are times when the material i send may be copyright (academic journals or the like), but i don't expect my paper mail to be opened without a warrant, and would expect that i'd not get unreasonable searches of my other mail.
Big brother, anyone?
From my recollection of HHGTG, replacement with "Belgium" was only done in the USA, and readers from elsewhere in the world could cope with the original text.
Have to agree on that point. All the other reasons aside, that's enough for me to not do it.
my girlfriend works for a company that makes medical implant devices, and they ahve to go through extensive testing for all the materials and parts of the equipment that is implanted. The body does degrade the materials over time (plastics or similar synthetics), and the various bits of kit are rated for various durations. the stuff that stays in you until you die (heart implants etc) are the highest rating from the little i have been able to gauge.
The ethics of RFID and privacy aside, i'd only trust an implant of any sort after the medical fraternity had done testing to make sure that the materials weren't going to get horribly rejected by the body, or the materials corroded or otherwise compromised by the body. Certainly wouldn't be getting it done for fun or in a lighthearted manner.
Love my 3310 as well, but the "2" button is getting a bit sticky as it is the most commonly used button for texting.
the contacts for the charger are a little picky as to which of the standard nokia chargers they'll accept, but i figure it's going ok for an old phone
batteries are cheap to buy when they get a little tired as well.
Most of the article was referring to art, but my $0.02 as someone who draws on a daily basis as part of my professional work:
As an engineer, the ability to be able to come up with a hand sketch at a meeting to explain to a client or an architect how you plan to solve a problem is important. being able to draw clearly enough that someone can go from having no idea what you are conveying, to understanding it to the point where they can suggest changes or alternatives is the goal.
You may well be able to drive a CAD machine to make a perfect drawing of the detail, but unless you can sketch it up in the first place, it is hard to sell the concept.
In some cases, freehand sketches are enough for something substantial to be built from, and there may be little benefit in transferring the drawing to CAD. Some engineers wont use rulers in their hand sketches (using tracing paper laid over grid paper), as the eye will more readily read an almost straight hand line as straight, but will look at a ruled line and compare it against other ruled lines, and spot any minor discrepencies in being parallel, or the like. It is counter intuitive, and took me a while to adjust to it, but my sketches are looking better for not using a ruler to get straight lines.
There is a place for both computer generated drawings as well as hand drawn, and the balance needs to be found in the training of professionals who will need to be familiar with both.
fair call. most of my time has been on the shorter haul itnernational flights, which warped my view of travel proportions.
I'd be more keen to find more fuel efficient ways of getting transatlantic in a plane with hundreds of people than just as fast as we can. I'm not a tree hugger, but with limited resources in terms of fossil fuel, it would be a good thing if we could accept a few more hours in the plane with less fuel burned per person carried. Is our collective time really that valuable that we can't relax and enjoy a journey?
Then again, this is the same civilisation that has developed the hummer, and all manner of SUVs rather than working on efficiency on other forms of transport.
not many of us have charge out rates which would have allowed us to fly on the concorde to save the few hours in the transatlantic run for the huge price premium. Those on holiday wouldn't typically be that desperate to save a couple of hours flying when it would cost far more than taking a bit longer on a conventional jet.
too true. far far too true. Their terrible social engineering was a large part of why i choose to live on the sunnier side of the Tasman.
I think that it is more the labour party than wellington per se though which causes the problems
mod parent up.
Even on relatively short international flights (new Zealand to Australia for instance), with the two hour checkin, the 30 minute luggage claim at the other end, you get very quickly into a position where almost more travel time is in the terminal rather than in the air.
some of our guys run massive computational fire dynamics models (multiple Gigs) which take a long time to load up and run. For the same reason they are left on the local machine, but IT have installed external hard drives on those machines that back up every night so that there is still some backing up of the data.
I think that they might periodically copy across to the server to be part of the groupwide backing up of all data as well.
You do have to hate it when there are cascades of failures in bits of equipment (your RAID array) that are supposed to be uber redundnant. pity that there isn't something to cover you for this sort of problem (I'm not in IT - am a professional engineer) that is commonly used.
set down what is reasonable in terms of expectations (not more than "x" minutes of downtime during business hours every "y" weeks, scheduled downtime compared to unscheduled downtime. I would have thought that data storage would be part of your record keeping requirements for your Quality management system, just as the system should spell out how you should be filing your correspondence, verifying your work, and all the other mundane bits of Quality in a business
I think that if your IT team have been beaten into submission by a tight-fisted upper management, they may well know that things are not as they should be, but know that no matter how hard they push, upper managemtn wont do anything until it becomes a crisis. More of a sense of resignation, and coping from day to day rather than implementing the best practise they know that they should have
my old office had a server die and take down all the files for a day or so during business hours due to a faulty power supply. no hot swappable power supply on that server. They were continually running out of server space for files (not due to massive mp3 libraries sitting on the server either), which seemed mad to an end user who just wanted to know that things would be able to be saved.
They also had two email gateway servers (i'm not in IT so i may be using jargon incorrectly) and periodically one would fall over, and every other email would fall into a black hole, with no bounceback or indication your email wasn't lost. It got so bad that i would phone people when critical emails were coming through so i could be sure that they were receieved.
the firm I am with right now has a really good internal help desk system which quickly answers user queries, and the system is set up so well that you become oblivious as to the system because you can just get down to doing your work rather than worrying about how stable things are.
it's totally off topic from the main discussion, but i just wanted to put in my $0.02 worth of encouragement. The wrong woman is far far worse than no woman. Alone does suck, but the misery that you could go through with the wrong person is indescribable.
In a month or so, things will proabbly look better.
I'm a christian. you might not be. I had a similar thing happen to me just under a year ago, and for me, getting the signals that this was not the right woman was the best thing that happened to me for a very long time. I count myself blessed for getting that heads up about her.
Thanks for that - insightful and useful comment on a religious matter. have to agree with you, in retrospect.
the general concept of papal infallibility and the passing of peter's mantle onto successive bishops of rome may have been there, it was only cemented in the first vatican council of 1870.
have to say that while there are some bad apples among the priesthood, there are inordinately more good and decent priests who get tarred with the same brush despite their living moral, Godly, and upright lives.
all the best.
The pope is only infallible when he prefaces his statement that he is invoking in infallibility clause. It is a very recent addition to the catholic set of beliefs (i recall it was in the 20th century, or just before it)
how about canberra, in australia? highly planned. albeit a little boring, but still a pretty good city none the less.
It is the company founded by Ove Arup. I work for them in Australia. We get to work on some very cool projects, and almost without exception, the people in the company are really passionate about engineering, and making the world better. Not in the hippy commune type way, but looking at the practicalities of how cities can work with fewer cars, how buildings can appear to be like a regular office block, but use less electricity to operate.
We don't only do Rolls Royce projects, but they're the projects that get our name out there.
It is a great firm to work for, and in the engineering field has experts in most areas.
nice thought, but that's not how it's working.
sun up at 4-30 or so, sun down at six or so.
same in queensland (australia), and they seriously did say it would confuse the cows and fade the curtains.
g i-bin/Petitions.cgi?PetNum=553
petition to get it changed at
http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/EPetitions_QLD/c
i live in queensland, and despite a great deal of business being done with the southern states, you wont get the farmers or hicks in the backwaters dealing with changing their clocks twice a year. Having the sun get up at 4-30am is not as useful to 99% of the people as having a few hours to do stuff in the evening after work. WTF is with getting home from work at 6pm and it being dark?
g i-bin/Petitions.cgi?PetNum=553
there is an e-petition being circulated at the moment at
http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/EPetitions_QLD/c
to try and get rid of this nonsense.
It is a good date dvd / play, and slashdotters need (from all accounts) all the help they can get on that front.
Preach it, brother.
I like my music to sound like it was when it was recorded, not "better".
That is why i took a cd i like to a bose dealership, listened to it, and found that my older, cheaper (NAD + B&W) unit gave cleaner, crisper music, and that the bose sounded muddy.
the sound card should be transparent, and play the music as it gets it, not engage in low-brow tom-foolery.
then again, the masses like brittney. abandon hope.
The level of intimidation, when a company or body can sue you to oblivion / ruin your reputation is pretty high.
not quite on par with blowing things up, but in terms of how it can make your day less filled with sunshine, it is a little more scary than finding decaf in the kitchen at work.
sorry - we DON'T have daylight savings, hence possible evening activities don't happen, and frustration at the backwardness of the locals.
Other bits of australia do, and we in queensland also could well benefit from year round daylight savings to get the sun rising close to when people wake up, and going down with some time for a barbecue on the back yard after work, or a game of football with the kids.