... why SCO can even sue Linux users at this point?
Exactly. If Ford makes an illegal car (think Pinto--violated all kinds of federal regulations) and *I* bought one, would the Fed be able to sue ME or throw me in jail??
(side note: if I did buy a Pinto, I'd deserve to be thrown in jail.)
I'm speaking on behalf of my dad, but we've talked about this a lot, actually. He is a senior-level manager for Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, and has worked there for about 30 years. (Since he graduated--does anyone do that anymore??)
In his career, he has hired, and fired, hundreds of people for management positions down to the ordinary/. coder. He has a masters in Engineering himself.
Basically, he's found that hiring a PhD usually is not worth the bang for the buck. PhDs expect a higher pay grade and salary for their education, which they deserve. However, his experience has been that PhDs are usually overqualified for the positions they are seeking--mid-career codeslinger, supervision, etc. The PhD should be looking for an R&D position or at the directorate level, depending on experience. In addition, my dad has interviewed people who are fresh out of school, and with a PhD. A specific example from the U of Michigan was a guy who had his BSE, MSE and a PhD in Systems Engineering, but had no work experience aside from summertime jobs and internships. As a result, this kid wanted a 6-figure salary for having his degree, but had no experience. My dad ended up hiring a guy with a BSE who had worked in the biz for a couple of years. He has never hhired a PhD as a coder, but has hired them as business unit managers, etc.
The moral of his story was that a PhD isn't required for most coding jobs, and it will hurt you if you try to apply to a job that pays $50k for a BSE but you as a PhD want $100k to pay off that PhD.
You're better off working for a few years, having the company pay for your PhD, and then once you've gotten the experience as a coder, then ultimately a manager, go for the PhD-paying jobs. In business, people are looking at PhDs either for R&D (and that is mostly manufacturing/industry, not software) or for senior/executive management. Remember to expect pay based on what the competitive job market has to pay, not on what education you have. If you want to code, then do it. Don't expect the big bucks until you move into that position that you hate: your boss.
Impressive as the gains have been, it isn't quite clear yet that the wind can
blow a fat cock up the ass of the developed world's fossil-fuel dependence. (emphasis mine)
Using Sprint, this weekend I was in: Detroit Pittsburg New York Washington DC And in all those sites I got the infamous "Signal Faded" (the other end was usually a landline). Are the other carriers as bad as Sprint?
Nope. I use Nextel, and it would take a miracle to pry my i90 from my hands. I used Sprint PCS phones since I was a Junior in college (roughly 1999) and I hated it.
The handset was OK, but service was atrocious, between Troy (my hometown) and Ann Arbor at Umich.edu, I was lucky to be able to make calls. I thought "Signal Faded/Call Dropped" was the home screen on my phone for a while. Then there were probably a half dozen billing snafus, an finally I was fed up when my last phone, a StarTAC, would refuse to ring (calls went to voicemail) and my voicemail notification would come maybe 48 hours after they were left with me.
I swicthed to Nextel in 2001 since that is what everyone in my company had--plus, they were buying. I've had 3 phones (all upgrades, no failures!) and I couldn't be happier. I pay $54/month for 1000 peak minutes, and unlimited off-peak and weekends. The only disadvantages is that wireless internet costs an extra $10 which I don't use anyways, and because the phones are higher-power than typically cell phones, the battery usually only lasts me a day with moderate talk time. But for quality and reliability, I can't beat Nextel in the Detroit Metro area.
They're getting the idea now. The market has established exactly what it wants:
easy access to media. Not free access, because many people pay for high-bandwidth connections for this purpose.
Here here!! You hit the nail on the head with this one. I am not a lazy person. I chose to be an efficient person. In my industry (automotive) efficiency is our livelihood. I don't want to spend a minute more of my free time at work than I do want to spend it perusing the shelves at my local RIAA store. If I find something in one of my Mozilla tabs or elsewhere that I want, then I want it now.
I will PAY for the convenience of being able to get what I want while I am using my laptop or PDA at home, playing with my cats.
I think I may have the same laptop and 3-disk set. They key that I've found is that the executables and installable programs are actually there, they are just fairly-well obfuscated so that only the setup script can read it. Click through some of the directories and I assure you that you will find some of your useful utilities (Norton A/V, etc.) Some quick Googling should help.
Personally, while I was at the University of Michigan in Engineering, I just had a Desktop. I graduated in 2001, and most of the kids I knew had desktops, only a couple with laptops.
As I went forward in my geekiness^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H career, I bought my first PDA, which was a Handspring Visor (because I couldn't afford a Palm.) I was a Franklin user before that, and I actually used my Visor quite a bit for organizing and scheduling, but never for note-taking. It is just so much easier to write by hand when you're taking notes in electrical engineering classes with schematics and j-omega terms, etc.
I also bought my first laptop, a Compaq Presario with an AMD K6-2. It wasn't a bad machine, but I kicked myself in the pants after a week because it was too damn heavy to lug around--10 pounds plus for just a measely 12.1" screen and a DVD drive. If I had a lighter one, I still doubt I'd take it to class for note taking (have you tried to write down diff. Eq's in standard office applications?)
I probably would have taken it to the libraries and such if it wasn't so heavy. Umich has wired 10/100 almost everywhere, with WiFi coming soon supposedly. If I could have done it again ( and could afford it), I would have gone with a laptop+docking station. Keep it light, a smaller screen would be ok, with decent battery life and a combo DVD/CD-RW.
As a side note, I also began using AMD products in college, and now I buy only AMD processors. For me, they were all I could afford at the time, and now I appreciate the bang/buck ratio. I encourage college students, especially the geeks, to experiement. Since we don't experiment in sex or drugs (being geeks), try a different hardware, OS (I also became a Linux user in school), and different gadgets, ie Audiotron for your huge frat part works great!
Re:Star Trek style communicators on the way?
on
Cisco's Wi-Fi Phone
·
· Score: 1
Right now my company's building a couple of systems and we've got ppl running around all over the place. It's hard to reach people at their desks. It'd be kinda cool if we had a form of walkie talkie with a list of ppl we wanna talk to on it, tap their name and start talking. Beats using cell phones, plus we only bug the particular person we wanna bug. (as opposed to having broadcast convos over a walkie-talkie...)
This raises an interesting point. why should the state finance the unemployed? At the end of the day most people are unemployed because they don't want to apply for the jobs that are available.
In the state I live in (Michigan) the company that laid you off/canned you is responsible for paying for "unemployment insurance" that goes to you. It's not a burden on the state.
So? If you spin a wheel in space, it'll rotate forever. Same concept, perpetual motion, but it isn't a machine because there is no energy conversion - part of the definition of a machine is (afaik) that it converts energy.
That is not true. What allows the wheel to continue to spin is its inertia (ref. Newton's first law of motion). There is certainly enough "outside force" in the depths space to accelerate the wheel and change its rotation or motion.
In this case, the perpetual motion machine expends none (or only a fixed amount) of energy to continue, in theory because of Newton's first law. However, we have yet to theorize, let alone prove, that there exists a single system in the universe that has *0* quantifiable outside force, be it gravitation, electrictomagnetic, etc.
I see how this could actualy benifit microsoft in some ways. It would certainly make them look better to the general public.
The thing is, Microsoft does look good to the general public. How many corporations, let alone the general public, uses MSFT software in a blind way? Most everyone (except perhaps this/. community) sees Microsoft as a company that brings them a tool every time they fire up their PC.
I am possibly one of the few people on earth that ever had a K6-3 450 (K6-III to be polite.) AMD brought out what was at the time their best (and quite possibly, THE best as it killed the P-2) processor without any hype, and then dumped it just as quickly. I use my -450 as my primary linux box (RH8) and it plugs along serving up this and that very merrily.
I wonder if anyone knows for sure why the K6-3 came and went so quickly, and why AMD dropped the -3 in favor of just boosting CPU speed on the -2? The only think I can think of is that what was the K6-3 became the first iteration of the Athlon, since AMD knew it beat the pants off the P2: why not start a new processor line?
I find it also really interesting that we are willing to exchange a good warranty for quality.
That reminds me of my favorite line from Tommy Boy... "Cause they know all they sold you was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed I will. I got spare time."
I came to this conclusion when in my parent's cottage house I discovered that all the switches that never needed fixing/replacing were Siemens-made during the 1930's.
I found a similar thing is the cottage my parents recently bought. It was a house, built in the 1940s in Sterling Heights, MI then was transported to a rather remote waterfront lot. We recently did some renovations, and found a 45W light bulb in the master suite of the cottage--with Detroit Edison stamped on the bulb! I found out that "back in the day", you bought light bulbs from the power company (Det Edison) and returned them--for free--when they burnt out for a replacement. They stopped doing this over 50 years ago! That is quality.
If a company produces 50,000 items and 100 fail, that's not bad. But if all of those 100 come onto slashdot to bitch (pretend it was sold at ThinkGeek) then the perception of lower quality will be stronger among their target audience because of the ability for a few people to communicate directly with a larger number of others.
100 units that fail out of 50,000 built is 2000 PPM failure rate. I work in the automotive industry, and the best-in-class suppliers have to run below 25 PPMs--thats only 1 failure in 50,000 parts (roughly.) My plant ships out almost 1,000,000 parts PER MONTH and we are under 25 PPM, so I feel no sympathy (especially considering that I am the Quality supervisor for the plant) when I find 1 bad VCR out of 100. That's WAY too many bad products.
The power supplies, the drives themselves, etc...Power and heat are huge issues in these boxes...think of the heat the average hard drive throws off now put 100+ in a box the size of the average home refrigerator...
Hmm... considering all that heat, putting it in a fridge just MAY be a good idea! Plus, think how cool it would be to be able to store beer INSIDE your server room!!
Rip your CDs with Exact Audio Copy (win32) or cdparanoia (Linux, et al.). Encode them with oggenc (or LAME if you need MP3 for portable devices). Share them with your friends.
The problem is that it takes me ~30 minutes to rip a CD using EAC, wheras Adaptec CD5 will do it in about 5 minutes. Does EAC work better...perhaps, but since I'm encoding lossy anyways, I haven't ever noticed a difference.
I used to have AT&T BroadBand, but I found out that they sold the service to Comcast in Michigan. My comcast service does not say @Home, however... I suspect that we will be fine.
I wonder if Taco has seen the size of the 4th book? All I can say is I hope its a very long flight.
The hardback looks long, but remember its still a child's book. The print is large, and it reads very fast, like th rest of them. I finished it in about 3 hours or so.
Um, get your facts straight dude, the wing didn't separate, and there was clearly an outboard explosion of the engine. Reports state that smoke was seen on takeoff, and that the aircraft reported a mechanical problem after takeoff.
A commercial jet is able to withstand the physical (separate) and thrustwise loss of an engine. In fact, aircraft engines are designed deliberately to "fall off" from the wing. Imagine for the sake of argument, that the turbine blades are turning at around 10,000 RPM. Now, stick a Canadian Goose in front of it, so that some of the blades break of an jam the engine so the blades no longer turn. Can you imagine how much momentum (gyroscopic) that these blades have? Suddenly stopping them instantaneously would create so much of an impulse that the engine will twist itself right off. No damage is done to the wing (less some drag) and there is plenty of thrust from N2.
The tricky part is, if (as is in this case) the engine explodes, THEN falls off, there is likely damage done to the wings (likely the flaps on takeoff as may be the case here) and possibly the hydraulic systems, etc.
Bottom line is, the plane can withstand flying literally without an engine, but any collateral damage can change the situation.
Here's my solution. Buy yourself a cheap old box (I a P3 350 on ebay for under $100), throw a big HD and a CD-RW on it, and hide it in your entertainment system. Not as pretty, sure, but cheap, and no big brother RIAA.
I have a similar setup, but I've found that a true 1U rack computer with a CD-RW and an SB Live works terrific, and looks really awesome on your stereo rack. I can't afford it by any means, but a local HiFi outfit had a rig setup with one (on a Tag/McLaren setup no less) that was just kick ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. If Ford makes an illegal car (think Pinto--violated all kinds of federal regulations) and *I* bought one, would the Fed be able to sue ME or throw me in jail??
(side note: if I did buy a Pinto, I'd deserve to be thrown in jail.)
I'm speaking on behalf of my dad, but we've talked about this a lot, actually. He is a senior-level manager for Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, and has worked there for about 30 years. (Since he graduated--does anyone do that anymore??)
/. coder. He has a masters in Engineering himself.
In his career, he has hired, and fired, hundreds of people for management positions down to the ordinary
Basically, he's found that hiring a PhD usually is not worth the bang for the buck. PhDs expect a higher pay grade and salary for their education, which they deserve. However, his experience has been that PhDs are usually overqualified for the positions they are seeking--mid-career codeslinger, supervision, etc. The PhD should be looking for an R&D position or at the directorate level, depending on experience. In addition, my dad has interviewed people who are fresh out of school, and with a PhD. A specific example from the U of Michigan was a guy who had his BSE, MSE and a PhD in Systems Engineering, but had no work experience aside from summertime jobs and internships. As a result, this kid wanted a 6-figure salary for having his degree, but had no experience. My dad ended up hiring a guy with a BSE who had worked in the biz for a couple of years. He has never hhired a PhD as a coder, but has hired them as business unit managers, etc.
The moral of his story was that a PhD isn't required for most coding jobs, and it will hurt you if you try to apply to a job that pays $50k for a BSE but you as a PhD want $100k to pay off that PhD.
You're better off working for a few years, having the company pay for your PhD, and then once you've gotten the experience as a coder, then ultimately a manager, go for the PhD-paying jobs. In business, people are looking at PhDs either for R&D (and that is mostly manufacturing/industry, not software) or for senior/executive management. Remember to expect pay based on what the competitive job market has to pay, not on what education you have. If you want to code, then do it. Don't expect the big bucks until you move into that position that you hate: your boss.
Really? Hmm... these must be Germans?
The handset was OK, but service was atrocious, between Troy (my hometown) and Ann Arbor at Umich.edu, I was lucky to be able to make calls. I thought "Signal Faded/Call Dropped" was the home screen on my phone for a while. Then there were probably a half dozen billing snafus, an finally I was fed up when my last phone, a StarTAC, would refuse to ring (calls went to voicemail) and my voicemail notification would come maybe 48 hours after they were left with me.
I swicthed to Nextel in 2001 since that is what everyone in my company had--plus, they were buying. I've had 3 phones (all upgrades, no failures!) and I couldn't be happier. I pay $54
Here here!! You hit the nail on the head with this one. I am not a lazy person. I chose to be an efficient person. In my industry (automotive) efficiency is our livelihood. I don't want to spend a minute more of my free time at work than I do want to spend it perusing the shelves at my local RIAA store. If I find something in one of my Mozilla tabs or elsewhere that I want, then I want it now. I will PAY for the convenience of being able to get what I want while I am using my laptop or PDA at home, playing with my cats.
I think I may have the same laptop and 3-disk set. They key that I've found is that the executables and installable programs are actually there, they are just fairly-well obfuscated so that only the setup script can read it. Click through some of the directories and I assure you that you will find some of your useful utilities (Norton A/V, etc.) Some quick Googling should help.
Personally, while I was at the University of Michigan in Engineering, I just had a Desktop. I graduated in 2001, and most of the kids I knew had desktops, only a couple with laptops.
As I went forward in my geekiness^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H career, I bought my first PDA, which was a Handspring Visor (because I couldn't afford a Palm.) I was a Franklin user before that, and I actually used my Visor quite a bit for organizing and scheduling, but never for note-taking. It is just so much easier to write by hand when you're taking notes in electrical engineering classes with schematics and j-omega terms, etc.
I also bought my first laptop, a Compaq Presario with an AMD K6-2. It wasn't a bad machine, but I kicked myself in the pants after a week because it was too damn heavy to lug around--10 pounds plus for just a measely 12.1" screen and a DVD drive. If I had a lighter one, I still doubt I'd take it to class for note taking (have you tried to write down diff. Eq's in standard office applications?)
I probably would have taken it to the libraries and such if it wasn't so heavy. Umich has wired 10/100 almost everywhere, with WiFi coming soon supposedly. If I could have done it again ( and could afford it), I would have gone with a laptop+docking station. Keep it light, a smaller screen would be ok, with decent battery life and a combo DVD/CD-RW.
As a side note, I also began using AMD products in college, and now I buy only AMD processors. For me, they were all I could afford at the time, and now I appreciate the bang/buck ratio. I encourage college students, especially the geeks, to experiement. Since we don't experiment in sex or drugs (being geeks), try a different hardware, OS (I also became a Linux user in school), and different gadgets, ie Audiotron for your huge frat part works great!
Right now my company's building a couple of systems and we've got ppl running around all over the place. It's hard to reach people at their desks. It'd be kinda cool if we had a form of walkie talkie with a list of ppl we wanna talk to on it, tap their name and start talking. Beats using cell phones, plus we only bug the particular person we wanna bug. (as opposed to having broadcast convos over a walkie-talkie...)
Ever heard of Nextel?
This raises an interesting point. why should the state finance the unemployed? At the end of the day most people are unemployed because they don't want to apply for the jobs that are available.
In the state I live in (Michigan) the company that laid you off/canned you is responsible for paying for "unemployment insurance" that goes to you. It's not a burden on the state.
That is not true. What allows the wheel to continue to spin is its inertia (ref. Newton's first law of motion). There is certainly enough "outside force" in the depths space to accelerate the wheel and change its rotation or motion.
In this case, the perpetual motion machine expends none (or only a fixed amount) of energy to continue, in theory because of Newton's first law. However, we have yet to theorize, let alone prove, that there exists a single system in the universe that has *0* quantifiable outside force, be it gravitation, electrictomagnetic, etc.
The thing is, Microsoft does look good to the general public. How many corporations, let alone the general public, uses MSFT software in a blind way? Most everyone (except perhaps this
I am possibly one of the few people on earth that ever had a K6-3 450 (K6-III to be polite.) AMD brought out what was at the time their best (and quite possibly, THE best as it killed the P-2) processor without any hype, and then dumped it just as quickly. I use my -450 as my primary linux box (RH8) and it plugs along serving up this and that very merrily.
I wonder if anyone knows for sure why the K6-3 came and went so quickly, and why AMD dropped the -3 in favor of just boosting CPU speed on the -2? The only think I can think of is that what was the K6-3 became the first iteration of the Athlon, since AMD knew it beat the pants off the P2: why not start a new processor line?
It may be possible to make 16-bits worth of drinks, but many people wouldn't consider a whiskey-bailey's-tequila-rum-gin-pineapple-sour a drink...
That reminds me of my favorite line from Tommy Boy... "Cause they know all they sold you was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed I will. I got spare time."
I found a similar thing is the cottage my parents recently bought. It was a house, built in the 1940s in Sterling Heights, MI then was transported to a rather remote waterfront lot. We recently did some renovations, and found a 45W light bulb in the master suite of the cottage--with Detroit Edison stamped on the bulb! I found out that "back in the day", you bought light bulbs from the power company (Det Edison) and returned them--for free--when they burnt out for a replacement. They stopped doing this over 50 years ago! That is quality.
100 units that fail out of 50,000 built is 2000 PPM failure rate. I work in the automotive industry, and the best-in-class suppliers have to run below 25 PPMs--thats only 1 failure in 50,000 parts (roughly.) My plant ships out almost 1,000,000 parts PER MONTH and we are under 25 PPM, so I feel no sympathy (especially considering that I am the Quality supervisor for the plant) when I find 1 bad VCR out of 100. That's WAY too many bad products.
The power supplies, the drives themselves, etc...Power and heat are huge issues in these boxes...think of the heat the average hard drive throws off now put 100+ in a box the size of the average home refrigerator...
Hmm... considering all that heat, putting it in a fridge just MAY be a good idea! Plus, think how cool it would be to be able to store beer INSIDE your server room!!
Rip your CDs with Exact Audio Copy (win32) or cdparanoia (Linux, et al.). Encode them with oggenc (or LAME if you need MP3 for portable devices). Share them with your friends.
The problem is that it takes me ~30 minutes to rip a CD using EAC, wheras Adaptec CD5 will do it in about 5 minutes. Does EAC work better...perhaps, but since I'm encoding lossy anyways, I haven't ever noticed a difference.
I have been putting up a suspended ceiling over the vacation... I went there at 4:45pm to buy more ceiling tiles.
I used to have AT&T BroadBand, but I found out that they sold the service to Comcast in Michigan. My comcast service does not say @Home, however... I suspect that we will be fine.
I wonder if Taco has seen the size of the 4th book? All I can say is I hope its a very long flight.
The hardback looks long, but remember its still a child's book. The print is large, and it reads very fast, like th rest of them. I finished it in about 3 hours or so.
Um, get your facts straight dude, the wing didn't separate, and there was clearly an outboard explosion of the engine. Reports state that smoke was seen on takeoff, and that the aircraft reported a mechanical problem after takeoff.
A commercial jet is able to withstand the physical (separate) and thrustwise loss of an engine. In fact, aircraft engines are designed deliberately to "fall off" from the wing. Imagine for the sake of argument, that the turbine blades are turning at around 10,000 RPM. Now, stick a Canadian Goose in front of it, so that some of the blades break of an jam the engine so the blades no longer turn. Can you imagine how much momentum (gyroscopic) that these blades have? Suddenly stopping them instantaneously would create so much of an impulse that the engine will twist itself right off. No damage is done to the wing (less some drag) and there is plenty of thrust from N2.
The tricky part is, if (as is in this case) the engine explodes, THEN falls off, there is likely damage done to the wings (likely the flaps on takeoff as may be the case here) and possibly the hydraulic systems, etc.
Bottom line is, the plane can withstand flying literally without an engine, but any collateral damage can change the situation.
Nah... 4 years of college and a degree in EE makes me see that, too. Maybe this is an excuse for us to turn Stallman into a phasor...
Here's my solution. Buy yourself a cheap old box (I a P3 350 on ebay for under $100), throw a big HD and a CD-RW on it, and hide it in your entertainment system. Not as pretty, sure, but cheap, and no big brother RIAA.
I have a similar setup, but I've found that a true 1U rack computer with a CD-RW and an SB Live works terrific, and looks really awesome on your stereo rack. I can't afford it by any means, but a local HiFi outfit had a rig setup with one (on a Tag/McLaren setup no less) that was just kick ass.