Mods - parent is Wishful Thinking (-1) not Insightful (+1).
Consumers will typically continue to do what they are comfortable with. Most use their computers as tools for a limited number of tasks and really don't want to think about the computer too much. As such, when they finally have to abandon XP, they will go with Vista (or whatever is current from MS then). To switch to Apple means a significant UI and paradigm shift which is work for little perceived benefit. They will also be concerned about the migration issues (how do I get all my email from XP to OS/X for example) - even though these things may not be technically difficult in reality. Mostly likely, their friends who help them w/MS will not be able to help them with Apple (and the odds of finding a friend who knows BOTH to help with the migration issue is slim).
Apple is going to need to rely on younger users to gain market share. They can do this, for example, if they can get more universities to require an Apple notebook rather than a MS based notebook. I don't think it's likely that they will be successful at this though -- at least not at large multi-disipline universities.
I do know of some people who might switch if Apple offered them a 45-day trial on a new system box/keyboard/mouse (or entire laptop) AND included an inexpensive service to transition their old stuff from their PC to the new trial box AND training - with a FULL money-back guarantee. (At the end of 45 days of course, the person would have begun to build up a bit of data on the new machine and, if everything had gone smoothly, would be hesitant to abandon this data or figure out how to get it back to their old, slow system). However, I have NO idea how Apple could afford to do this and remain cost competitive.
I actually don't classify myself as a little OR big L libertarian. I'm too far to the "center" for the tastes of L/libertarians (most L/libertarians seem to think I'm almost a socialist!).
One particular problem L/libertarians have with my views is that I'm very strict about Federal incursions, somewhat strict about State incursions, rather casual about city/county incursions, and downright apathetic about private organization's incursions on individual rights. This is on my theory that one can always move or vote out the thugs on a local level much easier than at the Federal level (the Feds also have a lot more gunpowder than any individual).
And, I don't think any individual has the god given right to build an atomic bomb in their back yard - for the simple reason that it's hard to see how one would effectively use it to protect oneself against the government AND because if a big one is set off w/o justification, it would be impossible for anyone (even Bill Gates) to BEGIN to compensate for the damage done. I've known several l/Libertarians that think building an atomic bomb in one's back yard IS the right of any citizen.
I agree that little L libertarians do have a big problem with defining themselves. At least big L Libertarians can look at the party platform to see what the big L means this year.
From glancing at Conestoga's course descriptions for Programmer/Analyst coursework, it seemed to be more comprehensive than what I would expect a community college (in U.S. terms) to offer. This makes me wonder if the analogy that others have made between Canadian "colleges" and U.S. "community colleges" is apt for all fields of study.
To understand better, I wonder what the Conestoga coursework does expose the student to. For example, are the following taught as part of coursework (i.e., if one earned at least a "B" in all their courses, did all the work, did all the required reading, but did no more, would they know these things upon graduation):
Complexity of algorithms - at least being comfortable with O notation.
Memory coherence models on SMPs - at least to understand the issues if not a survey of specific architectures.
Formal Languages.
Floating Point concepts (for example - what is a hidden bit, what is normalization and what is good about it).
My expectation is that Computer Science BSc grads from universities can at least discuss most of these things intelligently. Depending on the job, many of these may be completely irrelevant, but as a hiring manager I don't want to figure out what I may need one to know for the next project. Also, I want the person to be able to read the more practical papers from the academic world in order to use the ideas in the real world - and these types of topics crop up in these papers (sometimes in somewhat unexpected ways).
Unfortunately, degrees/schools are useful for quick screening even though the best person with no degree is going to be much better than the "B" student from most universities (that is, assuming the student was applying themselves). The problem for hiring managers is they can't explore (phone screen etc) more than a tiny fraction of the candidates that come their way. The good news for resumes I screen is that if someone has more than six or so years of directly applicable experience, I've pretty much made up my mind by the time I get to the bottom of the resume (where the education is) -- even then though, there are some "wobblers" and a lesser degree or GPA will drop some then.
Of course, how one gets those six years of directly applicable experience is left up to the reader to solve:(
But... If you threw them out instead (assuming you live where the trash goes to a modern landfill), you would sequester the carbon in them within a landfill for a few years and delay all of us dying due to global warming.
Ah, be a sport, invite a Libertarian into your basement sometime - if your parents will let you.
It's remarkable that you have never met a Libertarian - you must live a pretty sheltered life - which may explain your closed minded response and your toddler like (or sociopathic) desire to punch someone for "fun". (I don't know how you would know that you never have, but I'll have to take your word for it.) Branch out and meet more people -- I've met Communists, Socialists, Green Party members, Peace and Freedom Party members, Republicans, Democrats, and others. Engaging in conversation and debate with these people is really useful. I recognize that it may shatter your world to actually consider others views rather than simply dismiss them as "stupid", but you probably should grow up sometime and join the adult world.
I honestly think it would be fun to just up and punch him (or her) in the mouth and drive him to the ground, with no warning or discussion.
By the way, if you do meet a Libertarian and are unable to control your childish impulses, I suggest you might want to rethink the order in which you assault them. Keep in mind that Libertarians don't think that the Second Amendment is an accidental ink splotch on a scrap of paper called the Constitution here in the States. Also, keep in mind that Libertarians believe in personal responsibility and the right to defend themselves. Thus you may want to spit first (most people won't kill you for that) and sucker punch second -- otherwise you may never get the chance to exercise that ever so sophisticated and intellectually stimulating act of spitting.
Libertarians are such a joke... it's like they have blinders on. I'll tell you, the first thing I would do if they ever managed to tear the government down is find myself a nice big house owned by a libertarian and go kick him out of it and take it at gunpoint.
The Libertarian party believes that the
only justified function of government is the protection of the lives, rights and property of its citizens. Thus, your strategy might not work too well as the local police would come and remove you, the local judiciary would try and convict you of trespass and/or assault and/or theft, and the punishment would probably be a bit unpleasant. Of course, the home's owner might have saved the government a lot of trouble by dispatching you him/herself.
This is not to say that Libertarians don't support privatization of some law enforcement (i.e., I may contract my law enforcement needs to a private firm if I want a higher quality service - such as a full-time body guard).
This is of course the Libertarian view -- in my experience it's hard to determine what the libertarian view is as they range from anarchists to those who don't seem all that unlike some of the creeps we routinely elect under the Republican or Democrat banner.
If you are trying to imply that the COE lied or was incompetent your logic leaves something to be desired. It seems most likely that barge traffic had been decreasing in the canal because barges were getting bigger and would not fit. That makes increased barge traffic on the river and a simultaneous decrease of barge traffic in the canal perfectly logical.
You are correct - and additional investigation indicates that at a minimum the article I referenced didn't present the ACE position - which is pretty much exactly what you suppose. At first I wondered the same thing you did, but since a reporter failing to mention such an obvious and documented reason (even if just to refute it) would have been such irresponsible reporting, I incorrectly assumed that it wasn't the case.
The ACE claim is that the new larger locks will decrease the waits for barges and support vessels with deeper drafts. I've now got no idea who is right on this, but certainly the reporter didn't do a good job. The project appears to be quite unpopular among some local residents and some environmentalists but I've not determine why. Anyway, the ACE position is here.
Until a bipartisan investigation is complete, I'm hesitant to draw conclusions, but this article discussing Army Corps of Engineers funding in Louisiana makes some interesting points.
For example:
The Corps had been studying the possibility of upgrading the New Orleans levees for a higher level of protection before Katrina hit, but Woodley [administration official overseeing the Corps] said that study would not have been finished for years.
Since a "study" does not upgrade a levee, it seems like perhaps some previous administration didn't provide enough funding and insight to get the "study" complete to get construction started in time.
and...
Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic.
Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing.
Makes one wonder where the Louisiana's US Senators and Representatives priorities were - sounds like they may not have been all that focused.
The uptime metric alone seems fairly useless past the point where it's a few weeks on a particular HW platform or with a particular device because the uptime of an idle machine (or one that is just running cc or emacs) should be so long (months depending on the quality of the local power infrastructure) that it's more likely to be rebooted to install a new OS revision than because the OS failed. Anything less is so far from production quality it should never have gotten out of alpha.
Coupled with meaningful "stress" metrics, "uptime" might be more useful. I don't know the Linux kernel terminology, but internal stats capturing information (averages, min, max, rate or whatever makes sense for the particular case) about run queue lengths, number of threads transitioning from blocked to run, number of threads suspended for a page fault, number of preemptive and non-preemptive thread context switches might be useful. In every OS there are odd edge cases which "hardly ever happen" except in rather unusual cases and stats on some of these may be useful (since they usually are "under tested" and often reflect a stressful or unusual application load).
Where is the "No Paragraphs (-1)" mod when you need it:)
I'll bet there's all sorts of info in the post - but it's just too hard to read:(
(Although I noted "pork" mentioned - brings to mind the "Big Dig")
In my fantasy world, some company (perhaps a new entrant) will come up with a printer where they find the correct balance of printer cost vs. ink cost that works for ma and pa kettle and accept something less than an absurd profit margin. This has to be coupled with an aggressive advertising campaign. Obviously this won't be HP because they have a completely fucked business model that depends on milking the golden goose of ink jet cartridges (why people buy HP enterprise servers knowing the viability of the entire company is built on the fickle and irrational willingness of consumers to buy list price HP ink carts at Worst Buy perplexes me to this day - I suppose this is because I didn't get an MBA which would have masked absurdity from my mind).
Such a company would assume that people are willing to pay an extra five bucks per cartridge (as I am) for a "safe" alternative to avoid getting completely fucked and also willing to pay an extra 50 to 75 bucks for a printer (perhaps based on advertising that emphasises the "per page cost") that has reasonable 'per page costs' and will last for 4+ years.
Everyone feels vaguely fucked (or even visibly angry) when they buy their ink jet (or, for the less insightful, their first full-price cartridges) - just like people used to (before cars.com and similar sites) when they bought a car (of course, on those, you can do a little better by negotiating if you figure out which dealers are cars.com dealers and which are not and bypass cars.com and keep the negotiations REALLY crisp with the fleet manager - give me another "$200 off and the deal is closed - else, NO deal and "have a nice day" - my experience is that fleet managers get this and have no problem with it [but, if they can't do it, you MUST walk and use the pricing information you learned on another local dealer -- of course this is useless if you're in a rural area where there is one zzz dealer within 100 miles], unlike the idiots on the retail sales floor)
I suspect that the $200 (and ultimately less) color laser printers will eventually be the death of the absurd ink jet prices. Printing a yahoo map on a color laser works fine. No, you probably won't print hard-copy pictures of the new baby on the laser for your two geriatric relatives (you will send these to snapfish.com and wait three days or two hours at WalMart), but ultimately what we want is a bit of color for productivity - which is only available at at rational price w/color laser
Unfortunately, the Intelligent Designer Program (IDP) will be patched to prevent the weaker from dying off and to kill off the stronger. I imagine this will be part of patch #9756483 to IDP 1.0 which will be downloaded via AutoUpdate on a Tuesday soon (since it is a critical fix). Then the evolutionists will be wrong (the strongest didn't survive) and the IDers will cover their tracks. Wait... my brain hurts - maybe the download is happening early... NO, NO... IT'S NOT OKAY TO INST.........
Are you nuts?:) Here in Los Angeles we lock our car doors when we go inside to pay for gas (fortunately, pretty rarely needed nowadays) - the thought of leaving the front door to the house unlocked is difficult to grok!
True, but I think I'd want something a bit more water resistant, a bit more shock resistant, a bit less dependent on the whims of Verizon cell sites, and with a bit less marketable value for this application.
Seriously, any and every job that can be outsourced, eventually will be. I can't think of many that could not be.
A couple of other jobs that are hard to outsource include plumbers and UPS delivery people. Of course, plumbers may be needed less frequently as building materials improve. UPS delivery people may, to some extent, indirectly fall victim to outsourcing (if consumers don't have jobs, they can't buy as much stuff and as business moves more activites offshore, the demand for domestic B2B deliveries obviously goes down). Interesting, none of these "safe" jobs actually require "highly marketable skills".
...push them to a significant majority over Intel. I've always personally favoured AMD chips, simply because they're damn good value...
Of course, if AMD beats out Intel, then we can forget the "good value" part because AMD will also have the pricing power that Intel currently has. Sigh - can't win...
I'd rather compete with an Indian making $150K in the U.S. than with the same engineer making $50K in India. In a shortsighted attempt to "reduce unemployment" the U.S. Congress limits the number of work visas available each year and requires the "we can't find a resident to do this job" dance. This is just stupid - kinda like a airline mechanic's union going on strike against a company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. This helps save jobs in the short term (1-2 years), but it reduces the chances in the long term of the U.S. continuing to be a (perhaps "the") major player in the world.
I'd let anyone into the U.S. on two conditions. First, they are not an evil person (criminal, terrorist etc). Second, they have no rights to any free societal financial assistance (i.e. welfare, free treatment in the E.R., medicare, education etc.) for a substantial period of time (perhaps 10-15 years).
Sure, this would result in lower salaries in the U.S., but at least the U.S. would remain relevant by having a base of intellectual capital on a par with the "best of the best" among other countries. It also may wake up our public education system in this country before it's too late (although, I fear, it's already too late because by the time it is repaired, the game will be over).
Though if you bought a dot bomb at $100/share, you could sell it on the way down (if you were smart enough) at $80 - and recover 80% of your investment (ignoring capital loss tax benefits) and still have a place to live. If you believed the stock price would recover, you didn't have to make monthly payments (at a level related to your purchase price) in order to keep the stock (yes, there is a potential opportunity loss, but only if you're wrong about the recovery and speed of the recovery).
With housing, if you buy a house for $1,000,000 -- putting down 20% ($200,000) and taking a $800,000 loan, a drop of 20% or more results in complete loss of your investment and you're left making payments on your ARM (which, if interest goes up, actually gets more expensive while probably depressing the housing market and driving the value of your house down yet further). This ends up with loan payments which are potentially higher than what it would cost to rent the same house. At some point, "hanging on" gets very expensive and people, very rationally, let the bank have the house (if they are clever, they first buy a replacement house at the new lower prices and sit out the bad credit blues in the replacement house). This wasn't all that uncommon in Southern California in the early 90's.
Of course the ridiculous government tax subsidy that favors home borrowers (and helps lock first time buyers out of the market by driving housing prices up) affects some of this calculation.
Somewhat unrelated (probably will get me modded down - oh well).
When you put your trash in your driveway (not even on public property) for collection, the police can in some cases search it without a warrant (U.S. v. Redmon, No. 96-3361, 7th Cir., March 10, 1998 - http://lw.bna.com/lw/19980331/963361.htm). Seemingly (if my skimming of the opinion was adequate) in part because you intended it to be taken away by another party and didn't expect to retain control of it.
It seems logical to assume the same applies to any signals you are transmitting outside your house and/or property lines if you intentionally allowed others to access them. Hmmm... would this same logic apply if you by accident let others access them w/o a password and the police intercepted them.
The patterns are also nice because if everyone on a project uses them as applicable (rather than inventing their own solution), it makes it substantially easier to follow each other's code. In part because the comments can often reference the pattern used (if this is even needed) and perhaps any oddities about how it is used rather than reexplaining the wheel each time; in part because code just looks familiar when the standard patterns are utilized (of course, minor errors may be less visible because it's easier to not actually read the code if you think you know what it does!).
Isn't that why most places have 5-6 hour interviews?
Except for the places that do gangbang interviews, a 5-6 hour interview usually means talking to a series of people, each for 45 minutes to an hour. Thus each interviewer really doesn't have enough time in many cases. Some companies of course address this with "return" interviews - so the first interview is more of a screening process.
In my experience, the 45 minutes can seem like hours in the case of candidates that I've decided are clueless after just five minutes - this is usually a screening failure (usually a poor phone screen), but I still have to use up my time slot (although, if the schedule is behind, I use this as an opportunity to "catch up the schedule"). On the other hand, 45 minutes is way too short when the candidate is compelling to me, but not in a classical way - meaning that in the post interview roundup, I may need to be the candidate's champion and sell at least some of the other interviewers on the candidate.
Interestingly, when I'm near the end of the interview schedule and the candidate comes to my office right on schedule, I can't avoid assuming that those before me had found the person so uninteresting that they just used up their time slot to be polite - but YMMV because places I work are very flexible on interview schedules and candidates are usually warned that the interview may extend well past its scheduled termination and should plan accordingly.
I'm not a fan of written pre-interview tests for my hiring, although this is partially because of the nature of my orgs over the years. Most of my hires have been from technical areas a bit distant from the technical area that my org was responsible for. For most positions I'd rather have a stellar developer with great focused curiosity, persistence, work ethic, and deep technical skills in SOME vaguely related area than merely a very good developer from the domain that my work is in. This make testing very difficult because when I interview someone, I find out what they claim to know and drive to the ground in that area - learning a lot about the person's skills and interests in the process. The number one thing I look for is how well the candidate knows the systems s/he HAS worked on. If the candidate is an internally acknowledged expert or "go to person" on the large complex systems they have worked on (and, of course, didn't design the systems!), they get a lot of karma points.
(Tip to candidates - when I ask in the second or third minute of the interview: "Emily, I see you have a diverse background and have worked on a number of systems over the years. I'd like to you to select a couple of these to focus on. Which of these positions do you think your work best reflected your skills and interests?", you should think very carefully before answering because I'm asking you how you would like to spend the next 41 minutes of your life and your answer can either make these 41 minutes enjoyable or wasteful.)
NEWS FLASH: everyone can't hire the top five percent. I'd say a good 99.9% of startups wouldn't know a good tech guy if he rewrote the Linux kernel as a Perl one-liner.
In my experience true startups (which, of course, neither Google or Yahoo have been for a very long time) hire almost exclusively by personal referrals - in part because this way they know what they are getting. I've haven't taken a job anywhere but at a startup for over 20 years and every product I worked on is still being sold. If you ever get an opportunity to even talk to a true startup for a low-senior or higher position and it was not through a personal referal, be suspicious, be very suspicious -- the company likely lacks talent and therefore lacks contacts with talent and is likely to be in the category of startups who never deliver a meaningful product to anyone. Unfortunately, it is very hard to evaluate a senior developer based on a 45 minute interview - there's a lot more to maintainable production quality products than puzzles, programming problems, and passing knowledge of this week's TLAs. As Thomas Edison is purported to day "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent prespiration"
They do run a risk of having a lot of PhD's who want to be top dog but are surrounded by other good PhD's with similar goals. This may not be a problem now, but when their stock bubble bursts and layoffs begin, it will be interesting to watch.
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Consumers will typically continue to do what they are comfortable with. Most use their computers as tools for a limited number of tasks and really don't want to think about the computer too much. As such, when they finally have to abandon XP, they will go with Vista (or whatever is current from MS then). To switch to Apple means a significant UI and paradigm shift which is work for little perceived benefit. They will also be concerned about the migration issues (how do I get all my email from XP to OS/X for example) - even though these things may not be technically difficult in reality. Mostly likely, their friends who help them w/MS will not be able to help them with Apple (and the odds of finding a friend who knows BOTH to help with the migration issue is slim).
Apple is going to need to rely on younger users to gain market share. They can do this, for example, if they can get more universities to require an Apple notebook rather than a MS based notebook. I don't think it's likely that they will be successful at this though -- at least not at large multi-disipline universities.
I do know of some people who might switch if Apple offered them a 45-day trial on a new system box/keyboard/mouse (or entire laptop) AND included an inexpensive service to transition their old stuff from their PC to the new trial box AND training - with a FULL money-back guarantee. (At the end of 45 days of course, the person would have begun to build up a bit of data on the new machine and, if everything had gone smoothly, would be hesitant to abandon this data or figure out how to get it back to their old, slow system). However, I have NO idea how Apple could afford to do this and remain cost competitive.
One particular problem L/libertarians have with my views is that I'm very strict about Federal incursions, somewhat strict about State incursions, rather casual about city/county incursions, and downright apathetic about private organization's incursions on individual rights. This is on my theory that one can always move or vote out the thugs on a local level much easier than at the Federal level (the Feds also have a lot more gunpowder than any individual).
And, I don't think any individual has the god given right to build an atomic bomb in their back yard - for the simple reason that it's hard to see how one would effectively use it to protect oneself against the government AND because if a big one is set off w/o justification, it would be impossible for anyone (even Bill Gates) to BEGIN to compensate for the damage done. I've known several l/Libertarians that think building an atomic bomb in one's back yard IS the right of any citizen.
I agree that little L libertarians do have a big problem with defining themselves. At least big L Libertarians can look at the party platform to see what the big L means this year.
To understand better, I wonder what the Conestoga coursework does expose the student to. For example, are the following taught as part of coursework (i.e., if one earned at least a "B" in all their courses, did all the work, did all the required reading, but did no more, would they know these things upon graduation):
- Floating Point concepts (for example - what is a hidden bit, what is normalization and what is good about it).
My expectation is that Computer Science BSc grads from universities can at least discuss most of these things intelligently. Depending on the job, many of these may be completely irrelevant, but as a hiring manager I don't want to figure out what I may need one to know for the next project. Also, I want the person to be able to read the more practical papers from the academic world in order to use the ideas in the real world - and these types of topics crop up in these papers (sometimes in somewhat unexpected ways).Unfortunately, degrees/schools are useful for quick screening even though the best person with no degree is going to be much better than the "B" student from most universities (that is, assuming the student was applying themselves). The problem for hiring managers is they can't explore (phone screen etc) more than a tiny fraction of the candidates that come their way. The good news for resumes I screen is that if someone has more than six or so years of directly applicable experience, I've pretty much made up my mind by the time I get to the bottom of the resume (where the education is) -- even then though, there are some "wobblers" and a lesser degree or GPA will drop some then.
Of course, how one gets those six years of directly applicable experience is left up to the reader to solve :(
But... If you threw them out instead (assuming you live where the trash goes to a modern landfill), you would sequester the carbon in them within a landfill for a few years and delay all of us dying due to global warming.
Ah, be a sport, invite a Libertarian into your basement sometime - if your parents will let you.
It's remarkable that you have never met a Libertarian - you must live a pretty sheltered life - which may explain your closed minded response and your toddler like (or sociopathic) desire to punch someone for "fun". (I don't know how you would know that you never have, but I'll have to take your word for it.) Branch out and meet more people -- I've met Communists, Socialists, Green Party members, Peace and Freedom Party members, Republicans, Democrats, and others. Engaging in conversation and debate with these people is really useful. I recognize that it may shatter your world to actually consider others views rather than simply dismiss them as "stupid", but you probably should grow up sometime and join the adult world.
I honestly think it would be fun to just up and punch him (or her) in the mouth and drive him to the ground, with no warning or discussion.
By the way, if you do meet a Libertarian and are unable to control your childish impulses, I suggest you might want to rethink the order in which you assault them. Keep in mind that Libertarians don't think that the Second Amendment is an accidental ink splotch on a scrap of paper called the Constitution here in the States. Also, keep in mind that Libertarians believe in personal responsibility and the right to defend themselves. Thus you may want to spit first (most people won't kill you for that) and sucker punch second -- otherwise you may never get the chance to exercise that ever so sophisticated and intellectually stimulating act of spitting.
The Libertarian party believes that the only justified function of government is the protection of the lives, rights and property of its citizens. Thus, your strategy might not work too well as the local police would come and remove you, the local judiciary would try and convict you of trespass and/or assault and/or theft, and the punishment would probably be a bit unpleasant. Of course, the home's owner might have saved the government a lot of trouble by dispatching you him/herself.
This is not to say that Libertarians don't support privatization of some law enforcement (i.e., I may contract my law enforcement needs to a private firm if I want a higher quality service - such as a full-time body guard).
This is of course the Libertarian view -- in my experience it's hard to determine what the libertarian view is as they range from anarchists to those who don't seem all that unlike some of the creeps we routinely elect under the Republican or Democrat banner.
You are correct - and additional investigation indicates that at a minimum the article I referenced didn't present the ACE position - which is pretty much exactly what you suppose. At first I wondered the same thing you did, but since a reporter failing to mention such an obvious and documented reason (even if just to refute it) would have been such irresponsible reporting, I incorrectly assumed that it wasn't the case.
The ACE claim is that the new larger locks will decrease the waits for barges and support vessels with deeper drafts. I've now got no idea who is right on this, but certainly the reporter didn't do a good job. The project appears to be quite unpopular among some local residents and some environmentalists but I've not determine why. Anyway, the ACE position is here.
Until a bipartisan investigation is complete, I'm hesitant to draw conclusions, but this article discussing Army Corps of Engineers funding in Louisiana makes some interesting points.
For example:
Since a "study" does not upgrade a levee, it seems like perhaps some previous administration didn't provide enough funding and insight to get the "study" complete to get construction started in time.and...
Makes one wonder where the Louisiana's US Senators and Representatives priorities were - sounds like they may not have been all that focused.Coupled with meaningful "stress" metrics, "uptime" might be more useful. I don't know the Linux kernel terminology, but internal stats capturing information (averages, min, max, rate or whatever makes sense for the particular case) about run queue lengths, number of threads transitioning from blocked to run, number of threads suspended for a page fault, number of preemptive and non-preemptive thread context switches might be useful. In every OS there are odd edge cases which "hardly ever happen" except in rather unusual cases and stats on some of these may be useful (since they usually are "under tested" and often reflect a stressful or unusual application load).
Where is the "No Paragraphs (-1)" mod when you need it :)
I'll bet there's all sorts of info in the post - but it's just too hard to read :(
(Although I noted "pork" mentioned - brings to mind the "Big Dig")
In my fantasy world, some company (perhaps a new entrant) will come up with a printer where they find the correct balance of printer cost vs. ink cost that works for ma and pa kettle and accept something less than an absurd profit margin. This has to be coupled with an aggressive advertising campaign. Obviously this won't be HP because they have a completely fucked business model that depends on milking the golden goose of ink jet cartridges (why people buy HP enterprise servers knowing the viability of the entire company is built on the fickle and irrational willingness of consumers to buy list price HP ink carts at Worst Buy perplexes me to this day - I suppose this is because I didn't get an MBA which would have masked absurdity from my mind).
Such a company would assume that people are willing to pay an extra five bucks per cartridge (as I am) for a "safe" alternative to avoid getting completely fucked and also willing to pay an extra 50 to 75 bucks for a printer (perhaps based on advertising that emphasises the "per page cost") that has reasonable 'per page costs' and will last for 4+ years.
Everyone feels vaguely fucked (or even visibly angry) when they buy their ink jet (or, for the less insightful, their first full-price cartridges) - just like people used to (before cars.com and similar sites) when they bought a car (of course, on those, you can do a little better by negotiating if you figure out which dealers are cars.com dealers and which are not and bypass cars.com and keep the negotiations REALLY crisp with the fleet manager - give me another "$200 off and the deal is closed - else, NO deal and "have a nice day" - my experience is that fleet managers get this and have no problem with it [but, if they can't do it, you MUST walk and use the pricing information you learned on another local dealer -- of course this is useless if you're in a rural area where there is one zzz dealer within 100 miles], unlike the idiots on the retail sales floor)
I suspect that the $200 (and ultimately less) color laser printers will eventually be the death of the absurd ink jet prices. Printing a yahoo map on a color laser works fine. No, you probably won't print hard-copy pictures of the new baby on the laser for your two geriatric relatives (you will send these to snapfish.com and wait three days or two hours at WalMart), but ultimately what we want is a bit of color for productivity - which is only available at at rational price w/color laser
Oh well, back to reality...
Unfortunately, the Intelligent Designer Program (IDP) will be patched to prevent the weaker from dying off and to kill off the stronger. I imagine this will be part of patch #9756483 to IDP 1.0 which will be downloaded via AutoUpdate on a Tuesday soon (since it is a critical fix). Then the evolutionists will be wrong (the strongest didn't survive) and the IDers will cover their tracks. Wait... my brain hurts - maybe the download is happening early... NO, NO... IT'S NOT OKAY TO INST.........
Are you nuts? :) Here in Los Angeles we lock our car doors when we go inside to pay for gas (fortunately, pretty rarely needed nowadays) - the thought of leaving the front door to the house unlocked is difficult to grok!
True, but I think I'd want something a bit more water resistant, a bit more shock resistant, a bit less dependent on the whims of Verizon cell sites, and with a bit less marketable value for this application.
No, for that, you have to pay 4 times as much.
A couple of other jobs that are hard to outsource include plumbers and UPS delivery people. Of course, plumbers may be needed less frequently as building materials improve. UPS delivery people may, to some extent, indirectly fall victim to outsourcing (if consumers don't have jobs, they can't buy as much stuff and as business moves more activites offshore, the demand for domestic B2B deliveries obviously goes down). Interesting, none of these "safe" jobs actually require "highly marketable skills".
I think the point was that one born in space would not have had to (at least not as a multicelled entity with all the usual human characteristics).
Of course, if AMD beats out Intel, then we can forget the "good value" part because AMD will also have the pricing power that Intel currently has. Sigh - can't win...
I'd let anyone into the U.S. on two conditions. First, they are not an evil person (criminal, terrorist etc). Second, they have no rights to any free societal financial assistance (i.e. welfare, free treatment in the E.R., medicare, education etc.) for a substantial period of time (perhaps 10-15 years).
Sure, this would result in lower salaries in the U.S., but at least the U.S. would remain relevant by having a base of intellectual capital on a par with the "best of the best" among other countries. It also may wake up our public education system in this country before it's too late (although, I fear, it's already too late because by the time it is repaired, the game will be over).
With housing, if you buy a house for $1,000,000 -- putting down 20% ($200,000) and taking a $800,000 loan, a drop of 20% or more results in complete loss of your investment and you're left making payments on your ARM (which, if interest goes up, actually gets more expensive while probably depressing the housing market and driving the value of your house down yet further). This ends up with loan payments which are potentially higher than what it would cost to rent the same house. At some point, "hanging on" gets very expensive and people, very rationally, let the bank have the house (if they are clever, they first buy a replacement house at the new lower prices and sit out the bad credit blues in the replacement house). This wasn't all that uncommon in Southern California in the early 90's.
Of course the ridiculous government tax subsidy that favors home borrowers (and helps lock first time buyers out of the market by driving housing prices up) affects some of this calculation.
When you put your trash in your driveway (not even on public property) for collection, the police can in some cases search it without a warrant (U.S. v. Redmon, No. 96-3361, 7th Cir., March 10, 1998 - http://lw.bna.com/lw/19980331/963361.htm). Seemingly (if my skimming of the opinion was adequate) in part because you intended it to be taken away by another party and didn't expect to retain control of it.
It seems logical to assume the same applies to any signals you are transmitting outside your house and/or property lines if you intentionally allowed others to access them. Hmmm... would this same logic apply if you by accident let others access them w/o a password and the police intercepted them.
The patterns are also nice because if everyone on a project uses them as applicable (rather than inventing their own solution), it makes it substantially easier to follow each other's code. In part because the comments can often reference the pattern used (if this is even needed) and perhaps any oddities about how it is used rather than reexplaining the wheel each time; in part because code just looks familiar when the standard patterns are utilized (of course, minor errors may be less visible because it's easier to not actually read the code if you think you know what it does!).
Except for the places that do gangbang interviews, a 5-6 hour interview usually means talking to a series of people, each for 45 minutes to an hour. Thus each interviewer really doesn't have enough time in many cases. Some companies of course address this with "return" interviews - so the first interview is more of a screening process.
In my experience, the 45 minutes can seem like hours in the case of candidates that I've decided are clueless after just five minutes - this is usually a screening failure (usually a poor phone screen), but I still have to use up my time slot (although, if the schedule is behind, I use this as an opportunity to "catch up the schedule"). On the other hand, 45 minutes is way too short when the candidate is compelling to me, but not in a classical way - meaning that in the post interview roundup, I may need to be the candidate's champion and sell at least some of the other interviewers on the candidate.
Interestingly, when I'm near the end of the interview schedule and the candidate comes to my office right on schedule, I can't avoid assuming that those before me had found the person so uninteresting that they just used up their time slot to be polite - but YMMV because places I work are very flexible on interview schedules and candidates are usually warned that the interview may extend well past its scheduled termination and should plan accordingly.
I'm not a fan of written pre-interview tests for my hiring, although this is partially because of the nature of my orgs over the years. Most of my hires have been from technical areas a bit distant from the technical area that my org was responsible for. For most positions I'd rather have a stellar developer with great focused curiosity, persistence, work ethic, and deep technical skills in SOME vaguely related area than merely a very good developer from the domain that my work is in. This make testing very difficult because when I interview someone, I find out what they claim to know and drive to the ground in that area - learning a lot about the person's skills and interests in the process. The number one thing I look for is how well the candidate knows the systems s/he HAS worked on. If the candidate is an internally acknowledged expert or "go to person" on the large complex systems they have worked on (and, of course, didn't design the systems!), they get a lot of karma points.
(Tip to candidates - when I ask in the second or third minute of the interview: "Emily, I see you have a diverse background and have worked on a number of systems over the years. I'd like to you to select a couple of these to focus on. Which of these positions do you think your work best reflected your skills and interests?", you should think very carefully before answering because I'm asking you how you would like to spend the next 41 minutes of your life and your answer can either make these 41 minutes enjoyable or wasteful.)
In my experience true startups (which, of course, neither Google or Yahoo have been for a very long time) hire almost exclusively by personal referrals - in part because this way they know what they are getting. I've haven't taken a job anywhere but at a startup for over 20 years and every product I worked on is still being sold. If you ever get an opportunity to even talk to a true startup for a low-senior or higher position and it was not through a personal referal, be suspicious, be very suspicious -- the company likely lacks talent and therefore lacks contacts with talent and is likely to be in the category of startups who never deliver a meaningful product to anyone. Unfortunately, it is very hard to evaluate a senior developer based on a 45 minute interview - there's a lot more to maintainable production quality products than puzzles, programming problems, and passing knowledge of this week's TLAs. As Thomas Edison is purported to day "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent prespiration"
They do run a risk of having a lot of PhD's who want to be top dog but are surrounded by other good PhD's with similar goals. This may not be a problem now, but when their stock bubble bursts and layoffs begin, it will be interesting to watch.