You're absolutely right. The volunteers doing coding and testing, and the staff at the Perl Foundation, are doing great things. But volunteers don't (usually) pay for office or rack space.
The past two years I've personally sent the Perl Foundation a check. Last year I used my company's matching funds to double my contribution.
They're not infinitely dense. After all, if they were, they would've already sucked the entire universe in. And density may be the wrong way to think about it.
Instead think of them as having high, but not infinite, gravitational fields due to high (not infinite) quantities of mass. That can be achieved with even a "low" density (i.e. mass per volume) - such as galactic superclusters. The amount of bending that occurs when the light passes one of these strong gravitational fields depends on how strong the gravity field is, and the angle of approach for the light.
A couple of examples:
Light pointing at a black hole's event horizon will be pulled in and disappear. It wouldn't make a U-turn and come back toward us.
Light going near a black hole - but never crossing the event horizon - will be bent. How much bending depends on how close to the event horizon the light comes. Someone more knowledgeable than me can advise whether it could make a U-turn, but I guess that's possible.
On the other hand,
Light pointing toward the center of mass of a galactic cluster could go straight through, assuming no one in that galaxy pulls down a curtain that blocks the way.
Light going near a galactic cluster would be bent, once again proportionally to how close it was to the center of mass of the cluster.
All this is from memory from my bachelor's, which was a long time ago. I apologize in advance if I got something wrong.
Einstein's Telescope, by Evalyn Gates, has a very good entry-level discussion of how gravitational lensing of galactic clusters and superclusters is being used to investigate dark matter. She wrote the book so that it'd be accessible to people without a science background. Friends who aren't scientists have read it and learned a lot from it, although they may have had to read some sections two or three times for some of the concepts to sink in.
Please. Parsecs are a unit of length, not of time. It'll be 18 parsecs (something upwards of 10^17 meters) until expansion of the universe makes it something else.
"The researchers were also able to tell the children's genders from the shape of the fingers."
I remember a story about the famous pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. When told that a child's gender could be determined by the shape of the skull at birth, he replied "I prefer the traditional methods..."
15 years ago I left development, to take an offer to become an (Oracle) DBA. Intelligent employers, while hard to find, recognize that DBA's with dev background bring a wealth of knowledge about what works and what doesn't. And the specialized skills of DBA's can demand a premium in the job market.
Walking away from development and into production-side database work was probably the best career move I've made in 30 years.
And there are still opportunities to get your hands dirty. I'm constantly creating Perl scripts for monitoring...coworker DBA's set up web pages...some DBA's do hardware configuration (servers, SANs)...
Diehard touch typists using English-language keyboards actually use the little dimples on the F and J keys. Feeling them under your index fingers confirms that your hands are correctly positioned. While this is a noteworthy advance on IBM's part, I doubt that a keyboard which morphs keys - but lacks a way to ensure your fingers are where they're expected to be - will get much traction in the marketplace.
Electronics prices are constantly dropping. The Roadster came out a few years ago. They're probably saving a lot simply by getting the same (or better) electronics for a lot less money.
No computer can help a human understand a simile, much less an abstraction that's often in the guise of a complex historical or literary reference (i.e. metaphor).
IBM might dispute that, now that Watson's won at Jeopardy.
I spent 13 years working in development. I survived matrix management, interchangeable plastic people, managers who couldn't prioritize work, managers who couldn't understand the purpose of a Gantt chart, senseless incentive plans and other IT management disasters. At 45 (a little late, I guess) I realized that I was simply sick of the BS that comes with being a drone in IT. 13 years ago I was offered a job in 3rd-level tech support (production DBA, in the trenches every day), and took it.
The politics is much lower on the production support side, which gets you out of most of the BS. No requirements drift, fewer communications problems, no crunch-to-meet-the-deadline, etc. So the move's been good for me.
But I've also noticed that my tolerance for BS in every area of my life has dropped as I've aged. Like the time when a grocery clerk had some apples and a box of cereal on the weigh station while she was weighing the apples. I pointed out to her that she was weighing the cereal at the same time as the apples and the weight / price would be wrong. "No," she indicated, "the scanner will read the cereal and get the price right." After a couple of minutes a manager came over, removed the cereal and weighed the apples. I left before she explained the issue to the clerk, who was still wondering how the apples dropped by a pound.
It's become quite a struggle, as I grow older, not to stand up and shout whenever someone makes a decision solely for political reasons, or when they don't understand the value of training employees of any age bracket, or when I work for someone who's incapable of making a decision. In my younger days it was easier simply to ignore it, but now in my late-50's it's sometimes quite an effort to ignore the BS that comes my way.
People talk about how you should "pick your battles." Walking away from the BS, on my terms, was my way to pick my battles.
This was one of the first technical books I purchased when I started in this crazy business. It's one of the best books I've ever read on how to think like a tester. Following Myers' principles will make any developer's or tester's life better.
/snip/ Is there a scientific reason why looking at a monitor would decrease eyesight?/snip/
From another long-term eyeglass wearer: my ophthalmologist constantly reminds me to keep the monitor at least 12" away from my eyes, hopefully more like 18" (30 or 45 cm for our metric friends). I would think that they say that because they've seen problems with people who stay too close to their reading material. Apparently computer users have a habit of getting way too close to their work. All the more reason to get up and walk around occasionally.
20 years ago my doc said "get glasses with UV block in them, we're seeing a correlation between UV and cataracts". Apparently this has been confirmed since then. And fluorescent lighting is usually extremely high in UV content. You might as well get glasses that help you see now and also 20 years from now.
It's a very powerful tool but it doesn't see around corners. Since the light and the projector are at different locations they see the scene differently due to parallax. If you stood at the projector, you'd see different words blocked out by the top of the bottle - yet in the reconstruction the same words are blocked out.
You can prove it to yourself: Hold your arm out and use one finger to block a distant object from view. Then alternately close your right eye, then your left. The background scene will shift slightly due to parallax.
So it can't "see around the corner" of the bottle. It's a very impressive tool nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
The past two years I've personally sent the Perl Foundation a check. Last year I used my company's matching funds to double my contribution.
Just sayin'.
And how many other companies making extensive use of Perl will pony up?
Instead think of them as having high, but not infinite, gravitational fields due to high (not infinite) quantities of mass. That can be achieved with even a "low" density (i.e. mass per volume) - such as galactic superclusters. The amount of bending that occurs when the light passes one of these strong gravitational fields depends on how strong the gravity field is, and the angle of approach for the light.
A couple of examples:
Light pointing at a black hole's event horizon will be pulled in and disappear. It wouldn't make a U-turn and come back toward us.
Light going near a black hole - but never crossing the event horizon - will be bent. How much bending depends on how close to the event horizon the light comes. Someone more knowledgeable than me can advise whether it could make a U-turn, but I guess that's possible.
On the other hand,
Light pointing toward the center of mass of a galactic cluster could go straight through, assuming no one in that galaxy pulls down a curtain that blocks the way.
Light going near a galactic cluster would be bent, once again proportionally to how close it was to the center of mass of the cluster.
All this is from memory from my bachelor's, which was a long time ago. I apologize in advance if I got something wrong.
hth.
Einstein's Telescope, by Evalyn Gates, has a very good entry-level discussion of how gravitational lensing of galactic clusters and superclusters is being used to investigate dark matter. She wrote the book so that it'd be accessible to people without a science background. Friends who aren't scientists have read it and learned a lot from it, although they may have had to read some sections two or three times for some of the concepts to sink in.
Please. Parsecs are a unit of length, not of time. It'll be 18 parsecs (something upwards of 10^17 meters) until expansion of the universe makes it something else.
I remember a story about the famous pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. When told that a child's gender could be determined by the shape of the skull at birth, he replied "I prefer the traditional methods..."
15 years ago I left development, to take an offer to become an (Oracle) DBA. Intelligent employers, while hard to find, recognize that DBA's with dev background bring a wealth of knowledge about what works and what doesn't. And the specialized skills of DBA's can demand a premium in the job market.
Walking away from development and into production-side database work was probably the best career move I've made in 30 years.
And there are still opportunities to get your hands dirty. I'm constantly creating Perl scripts for monitoring...coworker DBA's set up web pages...some DBA's do hardware configuration (servers, SANs)...
Diehard touch typists using English-language keyboards actually use the little dimples on the F and J keys. Feeling them under your index fingers confirms that your hands are correctly positioned. While this is a noteworthy advance on IBM's part, I doubt that a keyboard which morphs keys - but lacks a way to ensure your fingers are where they're expected to be - will get much traction in the marketplace.
Electronics prices are constantly dropping. The Roadster came out a few years ago. They're probably saving a lot simply by getting the same (or better) electronics for a lot less money.
IBM might dispute that, now that Watson's won at Jeopardy.
The article never mentions a sink. Does this mean that Victoria BC has given up on convincing men to wash after their pit stops?
One in three can actually farm, since they travel with their bacteria.
I guess that means that two in three are accepting agricultural subsidies instead of farming?
Now I can fit ten times as many documents on my hard drive!
Most ships wouldn't turn. But they would send out a rescue helicopter. My guess is that the 'copter crews will see this as a great new tool.
The politics is much lower on the production support side, which gets you out of most of the BS. No requirements drift, fewer communications problems, no crunch-to-meet-the-deadline, etc. So the move's been good for me.
But I've also noticed that my tolerance for BS in every area of my life has dropped as I've aged. Like the time when a grocery clerk had some apples and a box of cereal on the weigh station while she was weighing the apples. I pointed out to her that she was weighing the cereal at the same time as the apples and the weight / price would be wrong. "No," she indicated, "the scanner will read the cereal and get the price right." After a couple of minutes a manager came over, removed the cereal and weighed the apples. I left before she explained the issue to the clerk, who was still wondering how the apples dropped by a pound.
It's become quite a struggle, as I grow older, not to stand up and shout whenever someone makes a decision solely for political reasons, or when they don't understand the value of training employees of any age bracket, or when I work for someone who's incapable of making a decision. In my younger days it was easier simply to ignore it, but now in my late-50's it's sometimes quite an effort to ignore the BS that comes my way.
People talk about how you should "pick your battles." Walking away from the BS, on my terms, was my way to pick my battles.
This was one of the first technical books I purchased when I started in this crazy business. It's one of the best books I've ever read on how to think like a tester. Following Myers' principles will make any developer's or tester's life better.
From another long-term eyeglass wearer: my ophthalmologist constantly reminds me to keep the monitor at least 12" away from my eyes, hopefully more like 18" (30 or 45 cm for our metric friends). I would think that they say that because they've seen problems with people who stay too close to their reading material. Apparently computer users have a habit of getting way too close to their work. All the more reason to get up and walk around occasionally.
20 years ago my doc said "get glasses with UV block in them, we're seeing a correlation between UV and cataracts". Apparently this has been confirmed since then. And fluorescent lighting is usually extremely high in UV content. You might as well get glasses that help you see now and also 20 years from now.
It's a very powerful tool but it doesn't see around corners. Since the light and the projector are at different locations they see the scene differently due to parallax. If you stood at the projector, you'd see different words blocked out by the top of the bottle - yet in the reconstruction the same words are blocked out. You can prove it to yourself: Hold your arm out and use one finger to block a distant object from view. Then alternately close your right eye, then your left. The background scene will shift slightly due to parallax. So it can't "see around the corner" of the bottle. It's a very impressive tool nonetheless.