I don't work with teenagers or worse- toddlers. The only time I have problems at work is when someone's child is between 3 and 5. Then the adult is constantly coming to work sick.
Because they can't make a profit off of it, BigEvilCo doesn't spend a dime finding out plant "A"'s benefits.
As a result, people in country "B" have no need to pay for the plant, because they still think it is a useless weed. So they die, or are obese, or go blind, because they were so bloody careful about protecting "their" property that no one wanted to develop it in the first place.
--- I agree that BigEvilCo is being slimy and the people of Country "B" need a cut of the action. I agree that the people of Country "B" have the right to deny BigEvilCo's any ability to develop the resources in Country "B". I don't agree that they can wait until those resources are developed and -then- call foul after BEC has invested cash in developing a product.
4 hours of my life were spent watching Star Wreck instead of Hollywood Dreck.
That's 4 hours.. at least... that I didn't consume hollywood product. And I turned my buds on to it too.
It's just starting- but there is a lot of good stuff out there. Jeez- at least 20 hours of solid star wars stuff. Also a lot of non-hollywood songs (magnatune.com for one) that are inexpensive compared to label stuff and really professional.
I don't think TV/Movie folks care yet- but I do think that the music folks care.
Feel free to tell him he's being stupid- that he won't be playing this game in 5 years because it will be obsolete- or any other facts you want to tell him as long as he will listen.
BUT
It is his life.
If he wants to get a tattoo (and risk hep) he can. If he wants to rock-climb (and risk dying) he can. If he wants to bungie jump he can. If he wants to join the french foriegn legion he can. If he wants to quit his job he can.
If he wants to play WOW then -he can-.
It's also -his responsibility-.
That means- you don't give him money for electricity, to fix his computer, to eat, or any kind of support for the habit.
Since most of these movies will never show in a theatre again, 1080 is probably fine for the vast majority of movies.
It's probably a combination of How big and How far
Just for grins... I calculated the pixel sizes for a various height (not diagonal) screens.
3 6 20 40 80 feet high (not diagonal) 12 36 72 240 480 960 inches high 1080 3.3% 6.7% 22.2% 44.4% 88.9% % of an inch size 4096 0.9% 1.8% 5.9% 11.7% 23.4% % of an inch size
That means on a 3' screen the pixels are 1/33 of an inch. 4096 pixels would be about 1/100 of an inch ir roughly the thickness of this bar | .
On an 40' high screen (most typical), the pixels would be 1/2 and 1/10 of an inch roughly respectively. The question is what distance that makes a difference. Even a 10th of an inch is pretty chunky if you are 3' away.
I don't know how much resolution we lose over distance.
Using an eye chart... Distance (feet) 70 60 50 40 30 20 15 10 7 4 letter ht (mm) 31 27 22 18 13 9 7 4 3 2
It looks like if you are sitting 20' away that a letter needs to be 9mm high to be readable by most. So logically, below 5mm it probably stops looking like a letter and is greeked at 20' In a typical theatre, you sit about 40' away from a 40' high screen. At 40', letters would need to be 18mm high so probably go blurry/dottish at 9mm.
At 25mm to the inch... at 40' away and 9mm, it looks like most people wouldn't be able to distinguish below.40 inch pixels. It looks like 1080 pixels are slightly larger than that. So, it seems reasonable that most people could tell the difference between 1080 and anything higher than 1400ish lines at a distance of 40'.
In back of the theatre, 80' away, most could not tell the difference between 1080 and 4096 however.
I can see some tiny scam court in a poor county where people contest something and play these songs into evidence.... and then someone selling the recordings of the court proceedings.
In the case of J. vs D.
J: The music was too loud Yesterday, sir.
Play "Yesterday Album" into court record.
C: The court finds that the music was not too loud. Next case!
Well.. since your company could some day cease to exist- I recommend you keep up on requirements in the field and make sure you get trained in any new technologies- and use popular techlogies at your company at least at some level.
You may already have that and just not realize it.
Many hospitals now send tests, xrays, catscans, etc. overseas where very inexpensive doctors analyze them and return the results by the next morning.
Radiologists make over 200k here so there is a strong incentive to offshore the work to someone equally smart and experienced who happens to cost under 20% of the cost.
Likewise, there are now lawfirms where the paralegals are greatly reduced. Contracts are prepared by indian legal professionals trained in state and federal law. Because lawyers created the system, they are protected by the requirement that these papers can only be presented in court by an attorney who has passed the local bar. Still it greatly reduces the number of lawyers needed to do a given amount of work.
You would be much better served with many much easier degrees.
An IT degree is much harder, just as expensive, mostly robs you of the college experience.
But in return, you get: A good starting salary- and it stays there- others start lower but go higher. Blatant age discrimination- it starts about 45 and gets really bad about 55. Constant change- other careers you can master- in IT you can be an expert and then be unemployable 3 years later. And now... Offshoring. A company I'm associated with "saved" 30 million bucks recently. How? By paying 70 million dollars to have work done by indians instead of paying (by their own figures) 100 million dollars to have it done by americans.
Let's see... 100 million / 3 years * 100,000 (salary & bennies) =~ 330 american programmers that were not hired (and that did -not buy the companies products, or new houses, cars, etc. Basically about 50 million was shipped overseas and 20 million paid locally to the local indian staff).
Offshoring and h1b visas-- where they bring in someone willing to work for 60k when it takes you 80k just to get the degree (but the same degree at the same quality is a lot cheaper in india until salaries catch up over there).
So I don't know what planet Mr. Mitchell is on- but entering the IT field would be one of the most boneheaded moves anyone could make until indian salaries come up to at least 50% of what american salaries are.
Sure- you -can- make a good income at it for 10 to 20 years. But --clue-- you r working lifespan is more like 43 to 45 years.
If you are a superbrain genius for whom IT comes very easily, then enter the field. Superbrain geniuses are always in demand.
If you are reasonably smart and a hard worker then -enter a different field. You will not be hired because there are millions of reasonably smart hard workers around the world who you will be directly competing with for a job.
$1000 next year. $500 in two years. $250 in three years. $125 in four years.. getting VERY interesting here... $63 in five years.
How I would design my laptop that used this...
1) put in multiple standard SD plugs. 2) have builtin copy function to backup card to another card.
Easy to upgrade as the ram gets larger and cheaper.
I thougth SD ram was small- but a guy at work got a memory card for his cell phone (something like 512mb to hold mp3's) that has an SD card ADAPTER that this teeny cell phone mp3 memory slides into. The darn thing is about.25" x.375" x almost 0 thickness. That kinda blew me away.
Close but not quite. Those are really companies that the government is reimbursing for preparing your taxes.
But it is very close and it's hard to know if might be more efficient this way vs having a purely government organization doing it (with the resulting government bureaucracy)
We never know if we got all deductions-- we don't know that if we use an accountant, a tax program, or a tax service either. Frequently different accountants or different programs get slightly different results.
I can prove that the deductions I took are valid, but there is no way I can prove I got all possible valid deductions.
I agree with you on the conservative side. B)
Best tax deduction is to be a subchapter-S corporation self employed. I'm not now but that period where I was totally rocked.
It's interesting to be since I have a fairly complicated return (including long and short term gains on taxable stock sales), I live in a sales tax state so I had that, I have accounts with interest income, my income is decent so I run it through the AMT (apparently I don't know what "decent" really is since AMT doesn't apply to me), I have a mortgage and school taxes. I'm reasonably smart but basically a "B" type not some superbrain.
My 2006 taxes took me about 100 minutes to complete from start to finish- by hand- without a program. The only thing I needed a calculator for was the sales tax thing (for the love of god could they have made it more complicated-- multiply the base amount by something like 1.337?).
Besides you only use tax software once a year as it is. Most people who would be interested in free software won't make enough that tax software would matter anyway.
Personally, I think the -government- should be required to produce a generic "C" program or web page that calculates your taxes according to the tax code and if it is wrong, you only pay interest- no penalties. Tax collection is a government function- it's insane that we have these huge industries built around calculating your taxes.
Sure-- 10% of the population would still need accountants and so on but 90% really don't need these things.
I'm moving pretty aggressively towards opensource software and mildly aggressively towards linix. It won't be because of the cost- I can buy a complete windows system at Fry's for $369 - slap in a hot video card and a cool quiet power supply and match 90% of the score of any single card $1800 system on the plant. How they do this when the operating system alone costs me $99 and the bloody hardware in the computer is worth over $369 purchased piecemeal is beyond me. Microsoft must be giving the OEM folks OS's for almost free.
No- the reason I will leave windows (and not go to mac) is because of DRM.
It's MY COMPUTER. Unless they are going to BUY it for me and give it to me free, I'm not going to give them money for a system that is going to snoop and report on what I'm doing, tell me what software I can and can't run, and tell me what content I can and cannot play.
Sure- I may have a $379 special version of whatever windows is out there the rest of my life- I also might have a PS2 or XBOX for the same reason- to play games (Tho there is a ton of MAME content out there these days for linux).
The interesting thing about the kinko's notice is that it is false one multiple levels.
The statement is purely there to protect kinko's from the fact that their business model is based on large amounts of people coming in and copying copyrighted material. I imagine a lot of text books are copied at kinko's and then returned.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't work with teenagers or worse- toddlers. The only time I have problems at work is when someone's child is between 3 and 5. Then the adult is constantly coming to work sick.
You get sick from being around sick people.
My only issue with this position is this:
Plant "A" sits in country "B" forever.
Because they can't make a profit off of it, BigEvilCo doesn't spend a dime finding out plant "A"'s benefits.
As a result, people in country "B" have no need to pay for the plant, because they still think it is a useless weed. So they die, or are obese, or go blind, because they were so bloody careful about protecting "their" property that no one wanted to develop it in the first place.
---
I agree that BigEvilCo is being slimy and the people of Country "B" need a cut of the action. I agree that the people of Country "B" have the right to deny BigEvilCo's any ability to develop the resources in Country "B". I don't agree that they can wait until those resources are developed and -then- call foul after BEC has invested cash in developing a product.
I'm glad you don't view your own backyard as private any more.
Next time you trot out there naked behind your 8' high fences, we'll send someone by to pick you up-- pervert.
You have no idea of what may be retroactively defined as a crime.
Hopefully I am old enough that I'll die before it gets really bad.
I can back it up to this extent.
4 hours of my life were spent watching Star Wreck instead of Hollywood Dreck.
That's 4 hours.. at least... that I didn't consume hollywood product. And I turned my buds on to it too.
It's just starting- but there is a lot of good stuff out there. Jeez- at least 20 hours of solid star wars stuff. Also a lot of non-hollywood songs (magnatune.com for one) that are inexpensive compared to label stuff and really professional.
I don't think TV/Movie folks care yet- but I do think that the music folks care.
Feel free to tell him he's being stupid- that he won't be playing this game in 5 years because it will be obsolete- or any other facts you want to tell him as long as he will listen.
BUT
It is his life.
If he wants to get a tattoo (and risk hep) he can.
If he wants to rock-climb (and risk dying) he can.
If he wants to bungie jump he can.
If he wants to join the french foriegn legion he can.
If he wants to quit his job he can.
If he wants to play WOW then -he can-.
It's also -his responsibility-.
That means- you don't give him money for electricity, to fix his computer, to eat, or any kind of support for the habit.
But it's HIS BLOODY LIFE- NOT YOURS.
Hmm we have records showing you were within 20' of suspected terrorists 15 times in the last 12 days. We'll lock you up... just in case.
Oh.. and now you are a suspected terrorist as well so lets resweep for more suspects.
a set of battery boosted earbuds with an independent volume control....
The off comment about robots was the most interesting thing to me combined with the reduced number of employees.
As robots get better, they are going to increasingly challenge humans for low skill (and some high skill) jobs.
Since most of these movies will never show in a theatre again, 1080 is probably fine for the vast majority of movies.
.40 inch pixels. It looks like 1080 pixels are slightly larger than that. So, it seems reasonable that most people could tell the difference between 1080 and anything higher than 1400ish lines at a distance of 40'.
It's probably a combination of
How big
and
How far
Just for grins... I calculated the pixel sizes for a various height (not diagonal) screens.
3 6 20 40 80 feet high (not diagonal)
12 36 72 240 480 960 inches high
1080 3.3% 6.7% 22.2% 44.4% 88.9% % of an inch size
4096 0.9% 1.8% 5.9% 11.7% 23.4% % of an inch size
That means on a 3' screen the pixels are 1/33 of an inch. 4096 pixels would be about 1/100 of an inch ir roughly the thickness of this bar | .
On an 40' high screen (most typical), the pixels would be 1/2 and 1/10 of an inch roughly respectively. The question is what distance that makes a difference. Even a 10th of an inch is pretty chunky if you are 3' away.
I don't know how much resolution we lose over distance.
Using an eye chart...
Distance (feet) 70 60 50 40 30 20 15 10 7 4
letter ht (mm) 31 27 22 18 13 9 7 4 3 2
It looks like if you are sitting 20' away that a letter needs to be 9mm high to be readable by most. So logically, below 5mm it probably stops looking like a letter and is greeked at 20' In a typical theatre, you sit about 40' away from a 40' high screen. At 40', letters would need to be 18mm high so probably go blurry/dottish at 9mm.
At 25mm to the inch... at 40' away and 9mm, it looks like most people wouldn't be able to distinguish below
In back of the theatre, 80' away, most could not tell the difference between 1080 and 4096 however.
Interesting.
Oh my... another legal hole.
I can see some tiny scam court in a poor county where people contest something and play these songs into evidence.... and then someone selling the recordings of the court proceedings.
In the case of J. vs D.
J: The music was too loud Yesterday, sir.
Play "Yesterday Album" into court record.
C: The court finds that the music was not too loud. Next case!
Yu think?
Well.. since your company could some day cease to exist- I recommend you keep up on requirements in the field and make sure you get trained in any new technologies- and use popular techlogies at your company at least at some level.
I think we need a line item veto to get back to original intent personally.
Right now they combine 13,000 laws into one 7' thick book and tell the president "sign or veto it".
You need to start looking for a new job after two to three years.
See what skills the market requires and trick/force your current company to train you in them.
You definately need to quit and move on after five years. Almost every decent raise I ever got came because I quit and went to a new company.
Once you are over 50- then you need to find some place you can hopefully make it to the end of the road at.
You may already have that and just not realize it.
Many hospitals now send tests, xrays, catscans, etc. overseas where very inexpensive doctors analyze them and return the results by the next morning.
Radiologists make over 200k here so there is a strong incentive to offshore the work to someone equally smart and experienced who happens to cost under 20% of the cost.
Likewise, there are now lawfirms where the paralegals are greatly reduced. Contracts are prepared by indian legal professionals trained in state and federal law. Because lawyers created the system, they are protected by the requirement that these papers can only be presented in court by an attorney who has passed the local bar. Still it greatly reduces the number of lawyers needed to do a given amount of work.
IT -is- a dead end career.
You would be much better served with many much easier degrees.
An IT degree is much harder, just as expensive, mostly robs you of the college experience.
But in return, you get:
A good starting salary- and it stays there- others start lower but go higher.
Blatant age discrimination- it starts about 45 and gets really bad about 55.
Constant change- other careers you can master- in IT you can be an expert and then be unemployable 3 years later.
And now... Offshoring.
A company I'm associated with "saved" 30 million bucks recently. How? By paying 70 million dollars to have work done by indians instead of paying (by their own figures) 100 million dollars to have it done by americans.
Let's see... 100 million / 3 years * 100,000 (salary & bennies) =~ 330 american programmers that were not hired (and that did -not buy the companies products, or new houses, cars, etc. Basically about 50 million was shipped overseas and 20 million paid locally to the local indian staff).
Offshoring and h1b visas-- where they bring in someone willing to work for 60k when it takes you 80k just to get the degree (but the same degree at the same quality is a lot cheaper in india until salaries catch up over there).
So I don't know what planet Mr. Mitchell is on- but entering the IT field would be one of the most boneheaded moves anyone could make until indian salaries come up to at least 50% of what american salaries are.
Sure- you -can- make a good income at it for 10 to 20 years. But --clue-- you r working lifespan is more like 43 to 45 years.
If you are a superbrain genius for whom IT comes very easily, then enter the field. Superbrain geniuses are always in demand.
If you are reasonably smart and a hard worker then -enter a different field. You will not be hired because there are millions of reasonably smart hard workers around the world who you will be directly competing with for a job.
Yea- I noticed that on processor speed- we should have been at about 10ghz now and instead we seem stalled at 3ghz with some 4ghz/dual processors.
I remember in the 90's you could never get in at the right time, because almost as soon as you bought it, a clearly faster version would come out.
That was it-- it was a transflash. It's too small in my opinion! Almost need a tool of some kind to hold it to put in the slot.
$1000 next year. .. getting VERY interesting here...
.25" x .375" x almost 0 thickness. That kinda blew me away.
$500 in two years.
$250 in three years.
$125 in four years
$63 in five years.
How I would design my laptop that used this...
1) put in multiple standard SD plugs.
2) have builtin copy function to backup card to another card.
Easy to upgrade as the ram gets larger and cheaper.
I thougth SD ram was small- but a guy at work got a memory card for his cell phone (something like 512mb to hold mp3's) that has an SD card ADAPTER that this teeny cell phone mp3 memory slides into. The darn thing is about
Come on Alias... let's turn that frowny face upside down!
I salute the parent post's attempt at humor.
The world has few enough smiles.
Close but not quite. Those are really companies that the government is reimbursing for preparing your taxes.
But it is very close and it's hard to know if might be more efficient this way vs having a purely government organization doing it (with the resulting government bureaucracy)
And then to defeat New! Ad-blocker-autorespondo-preventer-curcumvent-o-tro n(tm) ! ...
Ah.. computers...
We never know if we got all deductions-- we don't know that if we use an accountant, a tax program, or a tax service either. Frequently different accountants or different programs get slightly different results.
I can prove that the deductions I took are valid, but there is no way I can prove I got all possible valid deductions.
I agree with you on the conservative side. B)
Best tax deduction is to be a subchapter-S corporation self employed. I'm not now but that period where I was totally rocked.
Or get the new smarter adblocker that detects those queries and gives the appropriate response.
It's interesting to be since I have a fairly complicated return (including long and short term gains on taxable stock sales), I live in a sales tax state so I had that, I have accounts with interest income, my income is decent so I run it through the AMT (apparently I don't know what "decent" really is since AMT doesn't apply to me), I have a mortgage and school taxes. I'm reasonably smart but basically a "B" type not some superbrain.
My 2006 taxes took me about 100 minutes to complete from start to finish- by hand- without a program. The only thing I needed a calculator for was the sales tax thing (for the love of god could they have made it more complicated-- multiply the base amount by something like 1.337?).
Besides you only use tax software once a year as it is. Most people who would be interested in free software won't make enough that tax software would matter anyway.
Personally, I think the -government- should be required to produce a generic "C" program or web page that calculates your taxes according to the tax code and if it is wrong, you only pay interest- no penalties. Tax collection is a government function- it's insane that we have these huge industries built around calculating your taxes.
Sure-- 10% of the population would still need accountants and so on but 90% really don't need these things.
I'm moving pretty aggressively towards opensource software and mildly aggressively towards linix. It won't be because of the cost- I can buy a complete windows system at Fry's for $369 - slap in a hot video card and a cool quiet power supply and match 90% of the score of any single card $1800 system on the plant. How they do this when the operating system alone costs me $99 and the bloody hardware in the computer is worth over $369 purchased piecemeal is beyond me. Microsoft must be giving the OEM folks OS's for almost free.
No- the reason I will leave windows (and not go to mac) is because of DRM.
It's MY COMPUTER. Unless they are going to BUY it for me and give it to me free, I'm not going to give them money for a system that is going to snoop and report on what I'm doing, tell me what software I can and can't run, and tell me what content I can and cannot play.
Sure- I may have a $379 special version of whatever windows is out there the rest of my life- I also might have a PS2 or XBOX for the same reason- to play games (Tho there is a ton of MAME content out there these days for linux).
The interesting thing about the kinko's notice is that it is false one multiple levels.
The statement is purely there to protect kinko's from the fact that their business model is based on large amounts of people coming in and copying copyrighted material. I imagine a lot of text books are copied at kinko's and then returned.