No, but my Matrox Video card was choosen back in its day because it had the best 2D video output. Of course now it is obsolete, but it still works great, and my text looks good. (Good enough that I can tell my cheap monitor is the limit) Other video cards have not looked as sharp.
Other things I want in a video card: support for high resolutions and color (at least 1600x1200x24bpp), and fast output. With onboard video I'm stuck with whatever they decide
I want a $200 computer because frankly my dual ppro system is still plenty fast for my needs, but it isn't in my livingroom when I'm there. I also have this silly idea that I wouldn't mind messing with my filesystem drivers if I knew the machine didn't also have those personal files I need all the time. (Backups are not a solution, it takes too long to restore a comptuer to a good configuration everytime I want to check my email)
In any OS it's easy to migrate personal data, if you know what you are doing and where the data is stored.
But that is the point, in windows you don't know where the #@%^^%* data is stored. In linux your data is in/home/username, and you don't have the ability to write to much else (/tmp, which could perhaps be renamed to temperary_data, but I think that is clear enough already). Unfortunatly writing to floppies isn't as easy, and syncing for a laptop users is a pain. At least the data is easy to find, compare that to a Windows machine that several people will use.
I just helped a Windows XP user try to find some data. She opens WordPerfect (came with the comptuer), writes something, saves it, and then can't find it again. I eventially found it, but not in her directory, in some other users directory. Worse, I couldn't even figgure out how to make it start saving HER files to her directory. And this is a simple singer user computer. I challenge you to setup a typical windows machine on a network enviroment where the users won't know in advance which machine they will use on any given day.
What do you mean, when I give my code away under the GPL (or a BSD license which I prefer, but I'll use either) some other programer soon gives me back more code that makes the program more useful to me than if I had kept it all to myself. More than that, I have an excellent web browser (Konqueror) that I didn't contribute a thing to, but some of those who did write it might be useing code I wrong someplace else.
Okay, I'll admit that I haven't actually got code I wrote intigrated into any source tree, but I could have.
Sure, a niche is a small thing, but there are many different niches. I think just about everything is a small niche, once you go byond the surface. News from Sweden isn't of interest to me, it is a niche that only Swedish, and a few others are interested in. (Which amounts to less than 10 million people if I remember right)
Personally I'm interested in metal foundry work, and I know and visit a number of niche sites. I'm also interested in "geek" topics, so I visit/. regularly, but that is a small niche compared to the number of people with web access. (much less in the world, which contains a lot of people that don't know english)
Not to mention miscommunications to salesmen, , and outright lies (marketing) to the salesmen. I've seen the entire chain of emails a couple times that led a salesman to believe I would soon have something ready that would help make a big sale. Saddly, what I was doing had nothing to do with what the salesman needed, it didn't take me long to explain why. (I didn't even have to get out of engineering speech mode)
Even better, forget buying it at a garrage sale. I want those who hold garrage sales to identify this item and not throw away something that looks useless, but infact is valuable to the right person. Perhaps it could even notify (Not via spam, but something similear) those who are interested in such a thing that it is for sale.
I know of several people who got rid of a lot of 'junk' that I would have been interested in. They didn't know what it was, but I did on hearing them laughing about the 'junk' dad kept all those years and just about killed them for throwing away some good thing.
Too many Chiefs spoil the broth. Or in this case, too many scientists spoil the program. Look at ISS, it is there and it works, but it is expensive and took a long time to get there. (Note that the goal of ISS was never science, but a way for the US to keep smart russian scientists from selling their abilities to "bad nations" after the Soviet breakup)
There are many ways to make a rocket. The principal is similear, but there are many possibal designs. Getting everyone togather tends to result in choosing one early, and then working hard to make it work instead of figguring out which is worth making. Generally the early one is choosen more because it has enough picese to divi up between all the parties.
Much better for China, India, Russia, Japan, and US to go it alone and develope all concepts seperately, and then step back and note what worked why and build something better on all of that.
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.
I don't mind helping a poor person who gets into trouble get out of trouble. However giving a poor person an endless supply of food doesn't help that poor person get richer. He may eat, but he will never contribute to socity. He ends up being a drain on resources that I would prefer to spend other places.
The theory of space programs is they require jobs to achive. So you hire and pay some smart people, who then have money to hire other (not so smart?) people to do things, and your ecconomy improves. India has plenty of smart people who don't have good jobs, so a space program will help them out. Once they get bootstraped out of the situation they are in, they can drop the space program and go to things they would rather have. (or not, there is nothing wrong with a space program other than the money it costs, and they might come up with a good reason to keep it)
I doupt it. The private key is a PRIME number, and by multiplying by 5 you by definition eliminate all chances of finding the private key. So if you ever get the private key it means that your calculator got a wrong result. This could happen in the case of radiation striking at the right time, but I have never seen a calculator give a wrong result so the odds are extreemly rare.
The point of good crypto systems is that despite knowing the public-key, crypto-code, plain text and encrypted text, you cannot determin the private key used to encrypt it easially.
A mod chip is a lot easier to produce, because the xBox by design uses mostly off the shelf componants that anyone can buy. MS replced one chip (the BIOS) with one they modified to require some encryption (amoung a lot of other thing different from a normal bios). Take their BIOS out and put in a standard one and you have a standard PC. (More or less, MS used a lot of parts not normally on a PC, and in any case a BIOS has to be changed for each different chipset)
I guess you have already blocked me then, even though I've never sent spam. Someone else however has sent SPAM using my name, something I don't find out about until I get bounce messages. I know that I'm not the only person to be victom of this.
Mostly I agree, the clothes I buy at walMart are just as good, and cost a lot less. The difference in material quality, if any, is more than made up by the lower cost.
However, when you get byond the $1000 suits there is a marked improvement. At $3000 you can get one made that fits you exactly, once my dad spent the money for it, he cannot go back to a cheap suit that fits but not well. He is more comfortable in his suit than in jeans and a t-shirt, not because he feels important, but because it fits that much better. Note however that $3000 is the cost of a custom suit in a third world country, in the US expect to pay 10 times that because our labor is that much more.
True, if a police office orders you to do stay and talk, you must stay. However there is no requirement to talk. If the officer demands identification and doesn't need it (He must charge you for a crime unless you are in a car, or other situation where you must present id, not all of which I know), you should not give it. You should however demand his badge id, which he is required to give you. If the officer needs identification, which will be most of the time they ask, provide it.
Anytime you think a cop is doing something wrong, or even questionable, get his badge id. Write it down. If the cop has a pen and refuses to lend it to you to write his id number down, that is his right, but be sure your complaint includes how unhelpful he is. The badge id is the best way to ensure that the cop causing you trouble gets into trouble. Trouble that appears on his record. It may or may not result in action, but it normally stays on the record. If this is an isiolated incidence we can all forgive it, if this is not, eventially someone will make a big stink about it, and then all the other incidences will come to light.
BTW, make sure you save those badge ids yourself, along with a note on exactly what happened. If you hear about some officer doing "bad things" (which normally means bad enough that it gets attention, may or may not be really bad), contact a reporter, and suggest that they examiningg that officers files to make sure your report is there. They might not be able to, but it makes a really good follow up story to be able to say that the officer did "bad things, of other nature" before and nothing was done about it. Makes a local story into headline news all over the state, and reporters love that.
What do you mean just enough to know I could finish it if I wanted to? I will finish that project I started 3 years ago, someday, unless I die first. First though I have this new project that is more important...
Seriously, yes. It is a big problem, I know several open source programs I have the smarts to contribute to, and they have the need. I just don't have the motivation to get far enough along with any of them to do make a contribution. I once got so far as to not crash when I compiled my stuff into the kernel. (never used it though, so I don't know if it would have worked. Eventially someone else did the same thing, but finished the job)
Re:I've filled my time with things I'd rather do.
on
Robots Without a Cause
·
· Score: 1
If you have a full time job, and it takes up too much time, then you need to change your priorities. I know someone who while working 40 hours a week at McDonalds paid for his own schooling (tech school, not as good as a college) and supported his wife and kid. They believe someone should always be home for the kid, so she didn't work. Money wasn't the problem, and McDonalds is known for low pay. If they can do it, how many people working a better job could cut back and spend more time with the family. If they are willing.
I'm not saying that you need to follow the standard of living they had (I'm not sure exactly, but presumably a small apartment, one old car, hand me down TV with no cable, etc) but I am saying that you can choose the life you live, and if you work a lot of hours it is by your choice.
You could be right about modern computers taking care of the long idleing problem. I don't keep up.
The company driver I talked to had a speed limiter installed exactly as described. The driver doesn't care about fuel costs, but the company sure does, and that was their way to prevent it. (Note, there were several tricks to get around it)
Your premis is wrong. You claim that timesavings devices cannot save time, because we do not have lots of time. You are wrong. Timesavings devices save time, leaving more time for tasks that you would prefer to do. Right now I am getting hungry, I could go to the river and catch supper, and cook it up. Once in a while I do that, but today I have decided that reading and posting on/. is a better use of my time. (And because I often make this choice I have food in my fridge, but I could also make the choice to go to a resteraunt)
What people forget when making your arguement is that people cannot sit around doing nothing for long. Try it, take a week off work and resolve to do nothing you can avoid. lie in bed all day long, except for bathroom breaks, and to answer the doorbell when pizza arives. You are also allowed to go to a fast food drive through for your meals, but be sure to use the drive thru. (if you need gas go full service) I'll bet that none of you make it. A few of you will make it if you have books, video games, TV or drugs. Not many even then. You need something to do with your time, but with robots you can choose what you do.
Sure that was the case in the old days. However modern diesels have things like glow plugs to get them warm enough to start, ether (starting fluid) injection, or engine heaters.
Note that last winter I had to start a diesel when it was -15F, and without any of the above I got it started. The battery was big enough that we could crank it for half an hour, and eventially it started. Most people just consider 30 minutes longer than they are willing to wait to start an engine. (since my other option was carrying 50 sheets of plywood across the street by hand I had pleny of patience)
Not only is that a common myth, but it is 100% backwards. It is harder on those diesel engines to let them idle than to start them. Modern diesel engines are so efficent that when ideling they do not generate enough heat to keep the engine warm, a cold diesel engine is a polutining diesel engine, and worse than that for the engine, the soot that would burn in a warm engine collects inside the engine shortening the life of the engine.
However truckers typically get 500,000 miles out of an engine before they consider it broken in, and this never shutting it off, so the difference isn't all that significant in their minds. What they do notice is that diesel engines are very hard to start. They also notice that their air condidtioning or heater doesn't work unless the engine is on, and that is more important to the driver that engine life or fuel useage. To the company owners it is a different matter though, and to encourage the truckers to not idle the engine all night the comptuer holds them to 55mph unless they are getting 7 mpg or better. (works out to a couple hours in the morning, and the drivers are paid by the mile so that difference hits them in the wallet)
My religion does not allow me to work on Sundays. It isn't extreemly strict, as the preacher say, illness doesn't wait, so if I need an emergency room I don't want the doctors to wait until monday to do surgery. So we cannot tell doctors to not work sundays. And there are many other reasons that you may have to work sundays. However if your job isn't critical to life in some way (you know if your job is really critical to life) and you have to work a lot of sundays, then there is a problem. Doctors are encouraged to find some other doctor who doesn't care about working sundays and switch, but that isn't normally possiable.
More improtantly, about half the people in the US belong activly to a religion that prohibits working on a Holly day. (normaly sunday, but some saterday, and I think Muslims have a different day) You should have no problem telling your boss that your religious health is more important than anything on earth. (in most religions anyway).
p.s. check your local unemplyment laws. In Minnesota the law allows you to get unemployment if quit for a reason that would cause a normal person to quit, and a change in working conditions is one example givin. You should seriously check this option out. Unfortunatly it is a tight market, I've been looking for a programing job for almost a year, which is longer than unemployment lasts. Consider it, but I don't know your situation, or your local laws.
Well, I live 5 miles from a nuke power plant, and yet my power comes from about 600 miles away because the owner of the nuke is not my power company. I still get a discount, not on power, but that plant pays a lot of taxes, so I don't have to pay a lot to get benifits.
Really, it is the best neighbor we have, quiet, provides jobs, is invisable, and pays taxes. In fact it is so invisable that most people in town who are asked to point to it will point to the coal power plant 15 miles away!
The DoD buys a lot of stuff. If they say they are not going to buy your stuff unless you support IPv6, then you will support IPv6. Of course the little guy can afford to not go IPv6, but the big players can't afford it.
In theory they can get togather and all refuse, leaving the DoD to change the policy or unable to buy anything. However IPv6 isn't a hard change, nor is it a diaster in the making so I don't expect anyone to try it. Some suppliers will wait to impliment it, but I expect all suppliers will be putting pressure on their suppliers to support IPv6. Expect a lot of embedded devices to support IPv6 out of the box shortly as manufactures realise there is big customer demand for it.
Yes and no. Glass is not just any fine sand, but silica sand, which is not something you want to breath. (the grains are sharp and do bad thing to the lungs) Most of your everyday sand has lots of things other than silica, which reduces the danger. Of course glass can also be made into more glass.
A good programer is 10 times the average
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
I think you are right, but exploring the wrong topic. Sure you get better as you get older, but the more important issue is how good you are. A good programer is 10 times the programer an average one is. (is 10x a bad one...) I've seen a young fresh out of school programer take 20,000 lines of code, and in 3 months output 3,000 lines that did the exact same thing, plus a few features that we desperitly needed, but had no clue how to fit into those 20,000 lines. The programer who wrote those 20,000 lines was one of the oldest programers on the team. (In his defense he did admit the program grew byond the origional specifications, and as it is needed for bootstrap it had to be ready fast, that doesn't excuse not refactoring it into something better)
I've considered getting a picture phone, because often a picture now is better. However it always happens at work, and so I figgure it is the boss's problem to buy a picture phone. I work construction, just today we had a situation that I can't describe with any hope that most of you will understand the problem, but a picture would make you all see it. (This is partially my inability to explain and partially the difficulty in explaining it to those who don't know the rest of the project)
I've always looked as a pciture phone as more a camera that I always have with me, whereas my camera is something I normaly leave on the table. Sure if I know I will want to take a picture I'll bring a camera, but if a situation pops up during the day I won't have it. (Nobody believes the girl two houses away was topless...) If it works and I can afford it I will get one. Right now I can't justify the cost, even though they are fairly cheap. It seems like an idea that could be useful though.
I play games on my cell phone once in a while, as does everyone I know with games. Everyone sits in a doctors waiting room once in a while. What else are we supposed to do when we get back from lunch 5 minutes before we have to start? Sure it isn't to the level of MYST or Doom, but it passes the time.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but my Matrox Video card was choosen back in its day because it had the best 2D video output. Of course now it is obsolete, but it still works great, and my text looks good. (Good enough that I can tell my cheap monitor is the limit) Other video cards have not looked as sharp.
Other things I want in a video card: support for high resolutions and color (at least 1600x1200x24bpp), and fast output. With onboard video I'm stuck with whatever they decide
I want a $200 computer because frankly my dual ppro system is still plenty fast for my needs, but it isn't in my livingroom when I'm there. I also have this silly idea that I wouldn't mind messing with my filesystem drivers if I knew the machine didn't also have those personal files I need all the time. (Backups are not a solution, it takes too long to restore a comptuer to a good configuration everytime I want to check my email)
In any OS it's easy to migrate personal data, if you know what you are doing and where the data is stored.
But that is the point, in windows you don't know where the #@%^^%* data is stored. In linux your data is in /home/username, and you don't have the ability to write to much else (/tmp, which could perhaps be renamed to temperary_data, but I think that is clear enough already). Unfortunatly writing to floppies isn't as easy, and syncing for a laptop users is a pain. At least the data is easy to find, compare that to a Windows machine that several people will use.
I just helped a Windows XP user try to find some data. She opens WordPerfect (came with the comptuer), writes something, saves it, and then can't find it again. I eventially found it, but not in her directory, in some other users directory. Worse, I couldn't even figgure out how to make it start saving HER files to her directory. And this is a simple singer user computer. I challenge you to setup a typical windows machine on a network enviroment where the users won't know in advance which machine they will use on any given day.
What do you mean, when I give my code away under the GPL (or a BSD license which I prefer, but I'll use either) some other programer soon gives me back more code that makes the program more useful to me than if I had kept it all to myself. More than that, I have an excellent web browser (Konqueror) that I didn't contribute a thing to, but some of those who did write it might be useing code I wrong someplace else.
Okay, I'll admit that I haven't actually got code I wrote intigrated into any source tree, but I could have.
Sure, a niche is a small thing, but there are many different niches. I think just about everything is a small niche, once you go byond the surface. News from Sweden isn't of interest to me, it is a niche that only Swedish, and a few others are interested in. (Which amounts to less than 10 million people if I remember right)
Personally I'm interested in metal foundry work, and I know and visit a number of niche sites. I'm also interested in "geek" topics, so I visit /. regularly, but that is a small niche compared to the number of people with web access. (much less in the world, which contains a lot of people that don't know english)
Not to mention miscommunications to salesmen, , and outright lies (marketing) to the salesmen. I've seen the entire chain of emails a couple times that led a salesman to believe I would soon have something ready that would help make a big sale. Saddly, what I was doing had nothing to do with what the salesman needed, it didn't take me long to explain why. (I didn't even have to get out of engineering speech mode)
Even better, forget buying it at a garrage sale. I want those who hold garrage sales to identify this item and not throw away something that looks useless, but infact is valuable to the right person. Perhaps it could even notify (Not via spam, but something similear) those who are interested in such a thing that it is for sale.
I know of several people who got rid of a lot of 'junk' that I would have been interested in. They didn't know what it was, but I did on hearing them laughing about the 'junk' dad kept all those years and just about killed them for throwing away some good thing.
Too many Chiefs spoil the broth. Or in this case, too many scientists spoil the program. Look at ISS, it is there and it works, but it is expensive and took a long time to get there. (Note that the goal of ISS was never science, but a way for the US to keep smart russian scientists from selling their abilities to "bad nations" after the Soviet breakup)
There are many ways to make a rocket. The principal is similear, but there are many possibal designs. Getting everyone togather tends to result in choosing one early, and then working hard to make it work instead of figguring out which is worth making. Generally the early one is choosen more because it has enough picese to divi up between all the parties.
Much better for China, India, Russia, Japan, and US to go it alone and develope all concepts seperately, and then step back and note what worked why and build something better on all of that.
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.
I don't mind helping a poor person who gets into trouble get out of trouble. However giving a poor person an endless supply of food doesn't help that poor person get richer. He may eat, but he will never contribute to socity. He ends up being a drain on resources that I would prefer to spend other places.
The theory of space programs is they require jobs to achive. So you hire and pay some smart people, who then have money to hire other (not so smart?) people to do things, and your ecconomy improves. India has plenty of smart people who don't have good jobs, so a space program will help them out. Once they get bootstraped out of the situation they are in, they can drop the space program and go to things they would rather have. (or not, there is nothing wrong with a space program other than the money it costs, and they might come up with a good reason to keep it)
I doupt it. The private key is a PRIME number, and by multiplying by 5 you by definition eliminate all chances of finding the private key. So if you ever get the private key it means that your calculator got a wrong result. This could happen in the case of radiation striking at the right time, but I have never seen a calculator give a wrong result so the odds are extreemly rare.
The point of good crypto systems is that despite knowing the public-key, crypto-code, plain text and encrypted text, you cannot determin the private key used to encrypt it easially.
A mod chip is a lot easier to produce, because the xBox by design uses mostly off the shelf componants that anyone can buy. MS replced one chip (the BIOS) with one they modified to require some encryption (amoung a lot of other thing different from a normal bios). Take their BIOS out and put in a standard one and you have a standard PC. (More or less, MS used a lot of parts not normally on a PC, and in any case a BIOS has to be changed for each different chipset)
I guess you have already blocked me then, even though I've never sent spam. Someone else however has sent SPAM using my name, something I don't find out about until I get bounce messages. I know that I'm not the only person to be victom of this.
Mostly I agree, the clothes I buy at walMart are just as good, and cost a lot less. The difference in material quality, if any, is more than made up by the lower cost.
However, when you get byond the $1000 suits there is a marked improvement. At $3000 you can get one made that fits you exactly, once my dad spent the money for it, he cannot go back to a cheap suit that fits but not well. He is more comfortable in his suit than in jeans and a t-shirt, not because he feels important, but because it fits that much better. Note however that $3000 is the cost of a custom suit in a third world country, in the US expect to pay 10 times that because our labor is that much more.
True, if a police office orders you to do stay and talk, you must stay. However there is no requirement to talk. If the officer demands identification and doesn't need it (He must charge you for a crime unless you are in a car, or other situation where you must present id, not all of which I know), you should not give it. You should however demand his badge id, which he is required to give you. If the officer needs identification, which will be most of the time they ask, provide it.
Anytime you think a cop is doing something wrong, or even questionable, get his badge id. Write it down. If the cop has a pen and refuses to lend it to you to write his id number down, that is his right, but be sure your complaint includes how unhelpful he is. The badge id is the best way to ensure that the cop causing you trouble gets into trouble. Trouble that appears on his record. It may or may not result in action, but it normally stays on the record. If this is an isiolated incidence we can all forgive it, if this is not, eventially someone will make a big stink about it, and then all the other incidences will come to light.
BTW, make sure you save those badge ids yourself, along with a note on exactly what happened. If you hear about some officer doing "bad things" (which normally means bad enough that it gets attention, may or may not be really bad), contact a reporter, and suggest that they examiningg that officers files to make sure your report is there. They might not be able to, but it makes a really good follow up story to be able to say that the officer did "bad things, of other nature" before and nothing was done about it. Makes a local story into headline news all over the state, and reporters love that.
What do you mean just enough to know I could finish it if I wanted to? I will finish that project I started 3 years ago, someday, unless I die first. First though I have this new project that is more important...
Seriously, yes. It is a big problem, I know several open source programs I have the smarts to contribute to, and they have the need. I just don't have the motivation to get far enough along with any of them to do make a contribution. I once got so far as to not crash when I compiled my stuff into the kernel. (never used it though, so I don't know if it would have worked. Eventially someone else did the same thing, but finished the job)
If you have a full time job, and it takes up too much time, then you need to change your priorities. I know someone who while working 40 hours a week at McDonalds paid for his own schooling (tech school, not as good as a college) and supported his wife and kid. They believe someone should always be home for the kid, so she didn't work. Money wasn't the problem, and McDonalds is known for low pay. If they can do it, how many people working a better job could cut back and spend more time with the family. If they are willing.
I'm not saying that you need to follow the standard of living they had (I'm not sure exactly, but presumably a small apartment, one old car, hand me down TV with no cable, etc) but I am saying that you can choose the life you live, and if you work a lot of hours it is by your choice.
You could be right about modern computers taking care of the long idleing problem. I don't keep up.
The company driver I talked to had a speed limiter installed exactly as described. The driver doesn't care about fuel costs, but the company sure does, and that was their way to prevent it. (Note, there were several tricks to get around it)
Your premis is wrong. You claim that timesavings devices cannot save time, because we do not have lots of time. You are wrong. Timesavings devices save time, leaving more time for tasks that you would prefer to do. Right now I am getting hungry, I could go to the river and catch supper, and cook it up. Once in a while I do that, but today I have decided that reading and posting on /. is a better use of my time. (And because I often make this choice I have food in my fridge, but I could also make the choice to go to a resteraunt)
What people forget when making your arguement is that people cannot sit around doing nothing for long. Try it, take a week off work and resolve to do nothing you can avoid. lie in bed all day long, except for bathroom breaks, and to answer the doorbell when pizza arives. You are also allowed to go to a fast food drive through for your meals, but be sure to use the drive thru. (if you need gas go full service) I'll bet that none of you make it. A few of you will make it if you have books, video games, TV or drugs. Not many even then. You need something to do with your time, but with robots you can choose what you do.
Sure that was the case in the old days. However modern diesels have things like glow plugs to get them warm enough to start, ether (starting fluid) injection, or engine heaters.
Note that last winter I had to start a diesel when it was -15F, and without any of the above I got it started. The battery was big enough that we could crank it for half an hour, and eventially it started. Most people just consider 30 minutes longer than they are willing to wait to start an engine. (since my other option was carrying 50 sheets of plywood across the street by hand I had pleny of patience)
Not only is that a common myth, but it is 100% backwards. It is harder on those diesel engines to let them idle than to start them. Modern diesel engines are so efficent that when ideling they do not generate enough heat to keep the engine warm, a cold diesel engine is a polutining diesel engine, and worse than that for the engine, the soot that would burn in a warm engine collects inside the engine shortening the life of the engine.
However truckers typically get 500,000 miles out of an engine before they consider it broken in, and this never shutting it off, so the difference isn't all that significant in their minds. What they do notice is that diesel engines are very hard to start. They also notice that their air condidtioning or heater doesn't work unless the engine is on, and that is more important to the driver that engine life or fuel useage. To the company owners it is a different matter though, and to encourage the truckers to not idle the engine all night the comptuer holds them to 55mph unless they are getting 7 mpg or better. (works out to a couple hours in the morning, and the drivers are paid by the mile so that difference hits them in the wallet)
My religion does not allow me to work on Sundays. It isn't extreemly strict, as the preacher say, illness doesn't wait, so if I need an emergency room I don't want the doctors to wait until monday to do surgery. So we cannot tell doctors to not work sundays. And there are many other reasons that you may have to work sundays. However if your job isn't critical to life in some way (you know if your job is really critical to life) and you have to work a lot of sundays, then there is a problem. Doctors are encouraged to find some other doctor who doesn't care about working sundays and switch, but that isn't normally possiable.
More improtantly, about half the people in the US belong activly to a religion that prohibits working on a Holly day. (normaly sunday, but some saterday, and I think Muslims have a different day) You should have no problem telling your boss that your religious health is more important than anything on earth. (in most religions anyway).
p.s. check your local unemplyment laws. In Minnesota the law allows you to get unemployment if quit for a reason that would cause a normal person to quit, and a change in working conditions is one example givin. You should seriously check this option out. Unfortunatly it is a tight market, I've been looking for a programing job for almost a year, which is longer than unemployment lasts. Consider it, but I don't know your situation, or your local laws.
Well, I live 5 miles from a nuke power plant, and yet my power comes from about 600 miles away because the owner of the nuke is not my power company. I still get a discount, not on power, but that plant pays a lot of taxes, so I don't have to pay a lot to get benifits.
Really, it is the best neighbor we have, quiet, provides jobs, is invisable, and pays taxes. In fact it is so invisable that most people in town who are asked to point to it will point to the coal power plant 15 miles away!
The DoD buys a lot of stuff. If they say they are not going to buy your stuff unless you support IPv6, then you will support IPv6. Of course the little guy can afford to not go IPv6, but the big players can't afford it.
In theory they can get togather and all refuse, leaving the DoD to change the policy or unable to buy anything. However IPv6 isn't a hard change, nor is it a diaster in the making so I don't expect anyone to try it. Some suppliers will wait to impliment it, but I expect all suppliers will be putting pressure on their suppliers to support IPv6. Expect a lot of embedded devices to support IPv6 out of the box shortly as manufactures realise there is big customer demand for it.
Yes and no. Glass is not just any fine sand, but silica sand, which is not something you want to breath. (the grains are sharp and do bad thing to the lungs) Most of your everyday sand has lots of things other than silica, which reduces the danger. Of course glass can also be made into more glass.
I think you are right, but exploring the wrong topic. Sure you get better as you get older, but the more important issue is how good you are. A good programer is 10 times the programer an average one is. (is 10x a bad one...) I've seen a young fresh out of school programer take 20,000 lines of code, and in 3 months output 3,000 lines that did the exact same thing, plus a few features that we desperitly needed, but had no clue how to fit into those 20,000 lines. The programer who wrote those 20,000 lines was one of the oldest programers on the team. (In his defense he did admit the program grew byond the origional specifications, and as it is needed for bootstrap it had to be ready fast, that doesn't excuse not refactoring it into something better)
I've considered getting a picture phone, because often a picture now is better. However it always happens at work, and so I figgure it is the boss's problem to buy a picture phone. I work construction, just today we had a situation that I can't describe with any hope that most of you will understand the problem, but a picture would make you all see it. (This is partially my inability to explain and partially the difficulty in explaining it to those who don't know the rest of the project)
I've always looked as a pciture phone as more a camera that I always have with me, whereas my camera is something I normaly leave on the table. Sure if I know I will want to take a picture I'll bring a camera, but if a situation pops up during the day I won't have it. (Nobody believes the girl two houses away was topless...) If it works and I can afford it I will get one. Right now I can't justify the cost, even though they are fairly cheap. It seems like an idea that could be useful though.
I play games on my cell phone once in a while, as does everyone I know with games. Everyone sits in a doctors waiting room once in a while. What else are we supposed to do when we get back from lunch 5 minutes before we have to start? Sure it isn't to the level of MYST or Doom, but it passes the time.