Same thing here in the Columbia Gorge. I used to love the drive out to NE Oregon where for long stretches the freeway was the only sign of human activity or development anywhere. You could stop on the side of the highway, walk up over a hill, and suddenly it was nothing but grassland and sky all the way to the horizon, exactly as my ancestors might have seen it from a wagon train 150 years ago.
Now it's miles and miles of huge white windwills. They are pretty in a way, but it kind of broke my heart the first time I saw it, knowing I'd never get to see that uninterrupted expanse again. However graceful, they are undeniably mechanical and human, and they change the landscape in a very real way. I think it's also the inescapably huge scale of these farms that makes people like me hate them. You can (visually speaking) get away from a big cooling tower or even a dam. But these stretch on for hundreds of miles and remind you, every direction you turn, that humans have turned the wind and the landscape into yet another resource to be harvested and sold.
If your managers are really complaining about spending a few grand for real GIS and database software, then it's time to either smack these guys hard, or fire them. For something this trivial it should take any good manager a few hours research to find an off the shelf solution rather than a homemade kludge. Basically it sounds like these guys aren't willing to spend a little capital, and are far too used to throwing developer hours at a problem others have solved instead of paying for something standard and letting their developers work on real problems. Projects live and die by organizations willingness to actually invest in them.
Except, those unemployed workers aren't unemployed because their skills are out of date, they're unemployed because outside IT (and a very short list of other healthy industries) there aren't any jobs. Automation, outsourcing, overseas competition aren't just IT problems. You can be as skilled and up-to-date as you want at mechanical engineering, or office management, or loan underwriting. If nobody is hiring in the first place, it doesn't matter.
The point is that there seem to be a lot of techies out there like yourself that have put a big Somebody Else's Problem Field up, and are pretending it's their innate specialness and not just dumb luck that's kept our sector employed for the last couple years. I'm not sure what we're supposed to do about it, but a little humility would be a good start.
As I understand it, the current Lotus Elise, on which the Tesla is based, is also being discontinued. In Lotus case, they're replacing it with a brand new Elise built on a slightly larger chassis - and they can afford to do this because (compared to Tesla at least) they're high volume.
Tesla on the other hand doesn't have the time & money to reengineer the Roadster to work with the new Elise chassis at the same time they're trying to launch their sedan model. And they certainly don't have the clout to force Lotus to keep churning out an obsolete chassis for them.
End result: they disco'd an old model to focus on a new model. For every other car company on the planet this is called "Business As Usual", but apparently when you're Tesla it's a sign of impending collapse.
Yes - the Japanese as a rule will not speculate on worst case scenarios the way westerners do. They will say what they know has happened or is wrong, not what could be wrong or might have happened. This is often perplexing to both sides, so that they'll think we're being hyperactive or paranoid, and we'll assume they're being obfuscatory or secretive.
Sure, fast cars are fun. I've owned my share, and they have their place. There's no replacement for displacement, as they say.
But it's like volume: if the only thing that makes your music listenable is to turn it up louder, you're probably listening to bad music. If the only thing that makes your car enjoyable is adding horsepower, you're probably driving a crap car.
BS. This is always the next argument - "I can't get on the freeway without a billion horsepower!" or "An underpowered car is too unsafe. I once had to outrun an avalanche while driving a carload of orphans down a mountain pass, and my bi-turbo V8 saved our lives!".
Speed is not a safety feature, and if slow acceleration was all it took to keep vehicles off the highway, interstate trucking and Greyhound would have collapsed a long time ago. It's not that fast cars aren't fun - they're incredible fun. But we've let ourselves be sold the idea that they're a necessity instead of a luxury, and it's costing us dearly.
No, it's because for the last 25 years automakers have catered to people's very marketable desire to go faster over their only recently discovered desire to go "green". Fuel was more expensive in Europe, and money less plentiful in the rest of the world, so they focused more on efficiency. Over here in the states we had plenty of money, and plenty of cheap gas, so we designed our cars for that environment. All engines have gotten more efficient over the years, but where a Euro might use that extra efficiency to save gas, we used it to go faster. What's worse is that American drivers now think that if their basic commuter car can't outrun a sports car from 25 years ago, they're getting cheated somehow.
There's zero reason for a commuter car to have a 0-60 time 8 seconds, or a top speed of 120mph+, yet that's become a totally normal performance envelope. You have to push boundaries that would have been muscle car territory not that long ago to officially be considered "sporty".
You have that backwards. If the guy in the spacecraft is going a tiny bit below the speed of light, he'll get there in a tiny bit more than 4.3 years, Earth time. From his frame of reference it will have taken only a few weeks or even just a split second, depending on how close to C he got.
Fer sure. Far to many programmers write SQL off as not really being a programming language. They're half right, and completely wrong. A solid understanding of set theory, normalization, and transactional isolation can turn pages of byzantine procedural code into a single elegant (and fast) stored procedure. The inverse is doubly true.
And if you don't think it's worth learning from an academic point of view, take a look at the base salaries for database developers in your area. There are few other additions to your resume that will net you the same bump in salary.
And everyone else has been perfect little angels the last half century? Maybe you should reread my post. World politics have always been a mess, and will always be a mess. This is not a new phenomenon. The end of the Cold War just brought it all back into the open. 50 years of operating with a nuclear threat meant making some very ugly decisions by everyone involved, and it will be a very long time before anyone can unravel all the repercussions. Welcome to the 3rd millennium.
Please, drop the simplistic let-he-who-is-without-sin crap. The world is not black and white, and history is the story of thousands of years of lesser evils. There isn't a nation or a people on earth without blood so deep in the seams of their hands they can't tell it from their own. Grow some perspective and stop reading so much Chomsky.
I call BS. I worked Windows 95 support around that time ('98), and while we did often call people back to check on problems, it didn't work the way this guy imagines. Calls logged in workbench that we wanted to follow up on were just left open. Each morning you checked your open tickets, and called the ones that needed calling. No automated dialer either, as some have suggested. If something was left open to long your supervisor would check on it with you, and it would get closed or escalated posthaste.
If this guy really did get a call, my guess is he got a wrong number when a tech was following up on somebody else's problem. Maybe his customer record got mistakenly linked to somebody else's ticket. Maybe he's making the whole story up.
Not even close to the 1996 floods. We have storms like this every few years, always have, always will. This was a particularly nasty one in some places, but hardly an apocalyptic event. Welcome to the Pacific Northwest.
Now the Columbus Day Storm, I've only heard tell, but I shudder to think of the day that happens again.
It came in declined on my WSUS server, even though I have the auto approval for revisions to previous updates option enabled. I'm guessing there was a bug that rolled the revision to Approved status on systems that had it floating as "Not Approved" rather than Declined. Those of us that made of point of declining Desktop Search 3.01 originally were fine, and those that (rightly) thought they'd be safe just leaving it with no approval setting got burned. Still sucks, but it feels like a classic Microsoftian bug rather than something sinister or malicious.
The sail is being used as a rocket engine. That is not too helpful, as the exhaust speed of the paint is still limited by chemical bonds (it's hard to make individual paint molecules leave with more kinetic energy than is contained in a chemical bond). That means you would need just as much propellant (in the form of paint) for this scheme as you would need for a normal chemical rocket engine.
I'm no rocket scientist, but I don't agree. In a rocket engine, the energy pushing your particles out the exhaust has to come from that chemical reaction, and so be stored in the molecules somehow. But here, the energy is coming from some external source, like a solar powered orbital maser. You only need enough bond strength in the paint to hold the mass there while you heat it, and chemical energy stored in the paint doesn't matter at all.
It's not gas pressure, it's still just Newton and his equal and opposite reactions. You've just preloaded the sail with mass (the gasses in the paint) which you energize with a maser. The gases
fly away from the sail, and Newton does the rest.
Except all newer Mercedes have mercury switches that detect tow-away. Won't stop you putting it on the flatbed, but you still have to disable the security system before the car calls home and gives the cops a nice sub-meter fix on your chop-shop.
My understanding is that the handful of high-dollar Mercedes that get stolen every year are almost always taken by carjackers. With all the security measures, it's much simpler to just box somebody in at an intersection, put a big gun against the glass, and ask politely for the keys.
Their FAQ says you can expect a framerate between 15fps and 2fps. So I could see using it in a pinch, but not every day.
I want to be able to use my Thinkpad as the head for a Mac mini, dammit!
I've got an older Thinkpad I could see carving up to experiment a little - anybody know how the LCD interfaces work? Is there a point someplace you could splice in the guts of a cheap old A/B VGA switch between the integrated video and the LCD controller? I know there's a ribbon cable between them that could be molested, but is the signalling just VGA, or is some proprietary thing?
I carry my Thinkpad in a Chrome bag. It's comfy, it's cool, it carries lots of other things besides laptops. If I leave the laptop at home, I can get a half rack of beer in there with room to spare. It's waterproof. It has an ingenius seatbelt-buckle mechanism for the strap. It has a secret stash pocket for your, umm, stash.
I bought it for commuting by bike, I kept it for the all-around usefulness.
What that argument misses entirely is that if we had an unemployed US citizen in that same job, they would ALSO pay the SAME taxes and buy stuff, and NOT send money to a foreign country
But, the H1-B is paying social security, which he'll never collect if he goes back to India. So he's much more likely to put more money into the system than he takes out in the form of government services over his lifetime than the unemployed (or even happily employed) American.
Hell, if we could encourage massive immigration, permanent or temporary, it could be enough to correct the current fiscal/demographic imbalance of the boomer generation hitting retirement.
Don't want Mom and Dad coming to live with you in a few years? Thank an H1-B!
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Same thing here in the Columbia Gorge. I used to love the drive out to NE Oregon where for long stretches the freeway was the only sign of human activity or development anywhere. You could stop on the side of the highway, walk up over a hill, and suddenly it was nothing but grassland and sky all the way to the horizon, exactly as my ancestors might have seen it from a wagon train 150 years ago.
Now it's miles and miles of huge white windwills. They are pretty in a way, but it kind of broke my heart the first time I saw it, knowing I'd never get to see that uninterrupted expanse again. However graceful, they are undeniably mechanical and human, and they change the landscape in a very real way. I think it's also the inescapably huge scale of these farms that makes people like me hate them. You can (visually speaking) get away from a big cooling tower or even a dam. But these stretch on for hundreds of miles and remind you, every direction you turn, that humans have turned the wind and the landscape into yet another resource to be harvested and sold.
This is why I take my horse to work.
If your managers are really complaining about spending a few grand for real GIS and database software, then it's time to either smack these guys hard, or fire them. For something this trivial it should take any good manager a few hours research to find an off the shelf solution rather than a homemade kludge. Basically it sounds like these guys aren't willing to spend a little capital, and are far too used to throwing developer hours at a problem others have solved instead of paying for something standard and letting their developers work on real problems. Projects live and die by organizations willingness to actually invest in them.
Except, those unemployed workers aren't unemployed because their skills are out of date, they're unemployed because outside IT (and a very short list of other healthy industries) there aren't any jobs. Automation, outsourcing, overseas competition aren't just IT problems. You can be as skilled and up-to-date as you want at mechanical engineering, or office management, or loan underwriting. If nobody is hiring in the first place, it doesn't matter.
The point is that there seem to be a lot of techies out there like yourself that have put a big Somebody Else's Problem Field up, and are pretending it's their innate specialness and not just dumb luck that's kept our sector employed for the last couple years. I'm not sure what we're supposed to do about it, but a little humility would be a good start.
As I understand it, the current Lotus Elise, on which the Tesla is based, is also being discontinued. In Lotus case, they're replacing it with a brand new Elise built on a slightly larger chassis - and they can afford to do this because (compared to Tesla at least) they're high volume.
Tesla on the other hand doesn't have the time & money to reengineer the Roadster to work with the new Elise chassis at the same time they're trying to launch their sedan model. And they certainly don't have the clout to force Lotus to keep churning out an obsolete chassis for them.
End result: they disco'd an old model to focus on a new model. For every other car company on the planet this is called "Business As Usual", but apparently when you're Tesla it's a sign of impending collapse.
Yes - the Japanese as a rule will not speculate on worst case scenarios the way westerners do. They will say what they know has happened or is wrong, not what could be wrong or might have happened. This is often perplexing to both sides, so that they'll think we're being hyperactive or paranoid, and we'll assume they're being obfuscatory or secretive.
Sure, fast cars are fun. I've owned my share, and they have their place. There's no replacement for displacement, as they say.
But it's like volume: if the only thing that makes your music listenable is to turn it up louder, you're probably listening to bad music. If the only thing that makes your car enjoyable is adding horsepower, you're probably driving a crap car.
BS. This is always the next argument - "I can't get on the freeway without a billion horsepower!" or "An underpowered car is too unsafe. I once had to outrun an avalanche while driving a carload of orphans down a mountain pass, and my bi-turbo V8 saved our lives!". Speed is not a safety feature, and if slow acceleration was all it took to keep vehicles off the highway, interstate trucking and Greyhound would have collapsed a long time ago. It's not that fast cars aren't fun - they're incredible fun. But we've let ourselves be sold the idea that they're a necessity instead of a luxury, and it's costing us dearly.
No, it's because for the last 25 years automakers have catered to people's very marketable desire to go faster over their only recently discovered desire to go "green". Fuel was more expensive in Europe, and money less plentiful in the rest of the world, so they focused more on efficiency. Over here in the states we had plenty of money, and plenty of cheap gas, so we designed our cars for that environment. All engines have gotten more efficient over the years, but where a Euro might use that extra efficiency to save gas, we used it to go faster. What's worse is that American drivers now think that if their basic commuter car can't outrun a sports car from 25 years ago, they're getting cheated somehow.
1984 Porsche 944 - 150hp, 2900lbs
2011 Honda Accord EX - 190hp, 3300lbs
There's zero reason for a commuter car to have a 0-60 time 8 seconds, or a top speed of 120mph+, yet that's become a totally normal performance envelope. You have to push boundaries that would have been muscle car territory not that long ago to officially be considered "sporty".
You have that backwards. If the guy in the spacecraft is going a tiny bit below the speed of light, he'll get there in a tiny bit more than 4.3 years, Earth time. From his frame of reference it will have taken only a few weeks or even just a split second, depending on how close to C he got.
Or, again, they could just exercise.
Fer sure. Far to many programmers write SQL off as not really being a programming language. They're half right, and completely wrong. A solid understanding of set theory, normalization, and transactional isolation can turn pages of byzantine procedural code into a single elegant (and fast) stored procedure. The inverse is doubly true.
And if you don't think it's worth learning from an academic point of view, take a look at the base salaries for database developers in your area. There are few other additions to your resume that will net you the same bump in salary.
And everyone else has been perfect little angels the last half century? Maybe you should reread my post. World politics have always been a mess, and will always be a mess. This is not a new phenomenon. The end of the Cold War just brought it all back into the open. 50 years of operating with a nuclear threat meant making some very ugly decisions by everyone involved, and it will be a very long time before anyone can unravel all the repercussions. Welcome to the 3rd millennium.
Please, drop the simplistic let-he-who-is-without-sin crap. The world is not black and white, and history is the story of thousands of years of lesser evils. There isn't a nation or a people on earth without blood so deep in the seams of their hands they can't tell it from their own. Grow some perspective and stop reading so much Chomsky.
As someone who has been kicked, trampled, and bitten by a wide variety of horse breeds, I can tell you your math looks fine to me.
Nice to meet you. Glad I could provide a new experience for you today.
I call BS. I worked Windows 95 support around that time ('98), and while we did often call people back to check on problems, it didn't work the way this guy imagines. Calls logged in workbench that we wanted to follow up on were just left open. Each morning you checked your open tickets, and called the ones that needed calling. No automated dialer either, as some have suggested. If something was left open to long your supervisor would check on it with you, and it would get closed or escalated posthaste.
If this guy really did get a call, my guess is he got a wrong number when a tech was following up on somebody else's problem. Maybe his customer record got mistakenly linked to somebody else's ticket. Maybe he's making the whole story up.
Not even close to the 1996 floods. We have storms like this every few years, always have, always will. This was a particularly nasty one in some places, but hardly an apocalyptic event. Welcome to the Pacific Northwest. Now the Columbus Day Storm, I've only heard tell, but I shudder to think of the day that happens again.
It came in declined on my WSUS server, even though I have the auto approval for revisions to previous updates option enabled. I'm guessing there was a bug that rolled the revision to Approved status on systems that had it floating as "Not Approved" rather than Declined. Those of us that made of point of declining Desktop Search 3.01 originally were fine, and those that (rightly) thought they'd be safe just leaving it with no approval setting got burned. Still sucks, but it feels like a classic Microsoftian bug rather than something sinister or malicious.
I'm no rocket scientist, but I don't agree. In a rocket engine, the energy pushing your particles out the exhaust has to come from that chemical reaction, and so be stored in the molecules somehow. But here, the energy is coming from some external source, like a solar powered orbital maser. You only need enough bond strength in the paint to hold the mass there while you heat it, and chemical energy stored in the paint doesn't matter at all.
It's not gas pressure, it's still just Newton and his equal and opposite reactions. You've just preloaded the sail with mass (the gasses in the paint) which you energize with a maser. The gases fly away from the sail, and Newton does the rest.
Except all newer Mercedes have mercury switches that detect tow-away. Won't stop you putting it on the flatbed, but you still have to disable the security system before the car calls home and gives the cops a nice sub-meter fix on your chop-shop.
My understanding is that the handful of high-dollar Mercedes that get stolen every year are almost always taken by carjackers. With all the security measures, it's much simpler to just box somebody in at an intersection, put a big gun against the glass, and ask politely for the keys.
Their FAQ says you can expect a framerate between 15fps and 2fps. So I could see using it in a pinch, but not every day.
I want to be able to use my Thinkpad as the head for a Mac mini, dammit!
I've got an older Thinkpad I could see carving up to experiment a little - anybody know how the LCD interfaces work? Is there a point someplace you could splice in the guts of a cheap old A/B VGA switch between the integrated video and the LCD controller? I know there's a ribbon cable between them that could be molested, but is the signalling just VGA, or is some proprietary thing?
I bought it for commuting by bike, I kept it for the all-around usefulness.
But, the H1-B is paying social security, which he'll never collect if he goes back to India. So he's much more likely to put more money into the system than he takes out in the form of government services over his lifetime than the unemployed (or even happily employed) American.
Hell, if we could encourage massive immigration, permanent or temporary, it could be enough to correct the current fiscal/demographic imbalance of the boomer generation hitting retirement.
Don't want Mom and Dad coming to live with you in a few years? Thank an H1-B!