As a former Marine who qualified high expert for all but one year (missed by one point my first time to the range), including multiple 'possibles' (10/10 rapid fire at 200 and 300 yards) and consistently going 9/10-10/10 at the 500 yard slow fire, I'm going to say that the M16-A2 is quite capable at 500+ yards. I never had a chance to sight in on an 800 yard range, but given the rifle's accuracy at 500 yards, I would fully expect to be able to continue shooting with a very high degree of confidence at a point target from 800 yards.
Now, it's quite possible that some POG Army-soldier might not be able to hit the broad side of a barn with out sand bags at BZO range (30 yards), but in the Marine Corps, EVERY Marine is a rifleman first. You learn how to shoot and care for your weapon the correct way.
Yeah, you can drag an AK through the mud, piss on it, pick it up, and fire off a magazine with out a problem (other than the smell). Those things were built tough, and the chamber size allowed them to fire both American and Soviet ammo.
But between you and me, I'd rather take an M-16A2 at 500 yards than an AK at 200 yards. The same clearances that let them run while mud packed and never cleaned also drops their accuracy to crap. An M-16 will reach out and touch someone from 800 yards where the AK was designed to put a wall of lead down range while massive blocks of infantry were advancing.
For the.Net job? Absolutely. The current position vacates in 8 days. And the brass has already signaled their willingness to bring in a junior person as long as they are eager and have a drive to learn both technology and business. Will we pay for a senior developer with out specific experience in the target technology what they are worth? Doubtful. But it could be a great opportunity for someone looking to start out with VB.Net/C#, web development and Silverlight in LOB application development. Or, if we can find a more seasoned person with experience in the specific technologies and an eye for design and the big-picture, they'd have an equally good chance. This position is likely to be our easiest to fill.
The DBA is likely going to be a bit more selective. The DBA that left was a great guy, good at working with all the other teams and with the guys in Europe. I think that the position there is going to be 50% SQL Server implementation/architecture/maintenance knowledge and 50% interpersonal skills. So there will likely be a number of people with the technical skills required that might not be a good fit for the position. So far though, I haven't seen any interviews going on (I have been in Ireland for the last 2 weeks though, so I may have missed one).
The Sharepoint position is still a bit cloudy on specifics at this point. It's not like we're going to look for someone with 10 years of sharepoint experience:P. So we'll probably look at getting a junior person in to join the team, or possible someone with more experience with CMS and Knowledge Management (for example; leveraging data for networking and communications)
Not a sweat shop, but I wouldn't call it the luxury life. No micro-managers, 8' cubes, decent laptops w/ dual monitors, good on-site cafeteria and gym. Pretty standard 8-5 with an hour lunch, business casual dress, etc... IT shop is probably 40+ in the US, and another set of teams in different sites in Ireland, UK, and APAC.
I am not arguing for more H1B visas. I am just saying that there are plenty of jobs in IT that need bodies, that people shouldn't be afraid of going into comp-sci and networking majors in colleges and tech schools. And it definately doesn't make sense to charge more for these degrees when we need more people with this knowledge.
If you look at the trends, birth rates in the US have been inversely proportional to the rate of womens' education. It doesn't work for everyone, but on average, college educated women have less children.
Unemployment in the IT industry is still under 5%. I'm sitting here with 2 backfill positions (DBA and.Net Developer) and a new position (Sharepoint config/admin) that we are trying to fill. We just managed to get a decent person in for a BI position after over 2 months of looking.
I'm not sure how the other knowledge worker industries are doing, but IT could do with a bit more of a labor pool.
Sparkplugs only get gummed up when something else is wrong. A Spark plug with 50,000 miles on it in a well running engine will come out with a bit of wear on the electrod and some browning of the porcelin, but all in all, it should be clear of all sludge. If your vehicle is burning oil, or has a leaking injector, or is venting coolant into the combustion chamber, yeah, this thing is going to stop working. But really, if your car is burning oil, has a leaking injector, or is venting coolant, you shouldn't be driving it.
Also, these won't be needed in Diesels. Diesel engines have no spark plugs. They run at a much higher compression ratio and it is the heat of the compression stroke that ignights the air/fuel mix. Diesel engines do have glow plugs, but their purpose is limited to warming the combustion chamber BEFORE the engine is engaged. Glowplugs are disabled while the engine is running.
They look absolutely identical on a 48" standard def TV.
When my TV dies, I might be slightly interested. But at this point, I have a hard drive and a DVD drive in a media PC that can stream Netflix and Hulu. I have no reason to buy a blue ray player and I would only find motivation to buy a blue-ray drive if Netflix stopped shipping DVDs.
I tend to avoid taking scientific consultation from anyone claiming to be a "true believe".
-Rick
Re:Dramatic effect and scientific precision
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
That's beacuse in the US, corn is subsidized. In the UK and most of the EU, small grains are subsidized. If someone figures out how to get sweeteners from wheat for less than beats/sugar cane, you'll be consuming HFWS just as American's consume HFCS. It's all about price, and subsidies have as huge impact on it.
-Rick
Re:Dramatic effect and scientific precision
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
It is amazing that a company can get away with selling mineral water that... contains minerals. Although, at a whopping 23.9mg/liter, I'd have to drink a LOT of this mineral water to have the salt it contains have any diaretic effect on me.
-Rick
Re:Dramatic effect and scientific precision
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
Explorers, traders, and conquerors have done an excellent job of documenting their travels. Everywhere cane sugar has been introduced, the top fifty to hundred diseases of modern times have exploded; without fail.
I would venture a guess that the spread of those "top fifty to hundred diseases" has a lot more to do with "Explorers, traders, and conquerors" moving to new geographic areas and carrying a wide variety of germs and bacteria with them to a completely unexposed and defenseless population.
His concept is effectively a free-form multi-document interface where hyperlinks open into a new window. That description doesn't do it justice though. Think of it like each block of content, each paragraph, each page, each image, is not limited to the context which it is in. You can do, as the quote suggest, strike out some content that is between the two pieces you want, or branch out diagnally.
Think if it more like a 6 degrees of Kevin Baccon interface, only for every piece of content. Wikipedia is the most obvious example of where it would be useful. Being able to see the content of mid-sentence links with out having to leave the page you are on.
It's a pretty cool concept, but not big enough (IMO) to displace the current browsing experience.
Which is a great point for using the correct tool for the job. If your goal is 100% market penetration, you'll be writing HTML4 for years to come, so the debate over HTML5 vs Flash vs Silverlight is entirely moot anyway.
If you're willing to drop some small percent in favor of a more robust interface, you can switch to Flash. Drop some more and you're in HTML5/Silverlight penetration range.
But clearly, if your target audience is Linux users, you'll either not want to use Silverlight, or limit your functionality to that covered by Moonlight.
HTML5 is not a Flash/Silverlight replacement. It does some things better, it does somethings worse, but for the majority of the functionality of Flash and Silverlight, HTML5 just doesn't do it.
There is awesome stuff you can do in HTML5 and Javascript, but it's still no replacement for a dedicated sandbox. Especially with the new hardware accelerated XNA 3-d graphics and sound coming from Silverlight 5.
From my time working in the cell phone industry, I'd say "fooie!" to this being a problem at all. Atleast with cell towers, metal objects created almost no interfierance. Water was the devil. A huge chunk of metal in from of an antena had only a tiny impact, but fill that chunk of metal with water, say like a water tower, and it's like a giant black hole for radio signals. We also had issues with small lakes bouncing signals like crazy. You could be driving around a lake, have a tower 100 feet away from you, and another 12 miles away across the lake, and we'd have to put them on no-handoff lists, because a little bit of waves in the water can give the CC the impression that you are getting a better signal from across the lake.
A think layer of tin on the back of your insulation, that has been being used for decades, isn't going to cause any issue that hasn't already been dealt with.
If you had condensation (water) that was dense enough to sink in your oil, you were using the wrong type of oil.
Mineral oil is way more dense than water. And condensation that occurs should sit at the top of the pool and never create an issue (and it should be pretty easy to skim off).
Having worked in a fair number of server rooms, I'd say that the freequency of needing to service equipment has been dropping significantly over the lat 15 years. These days, it's almost a non-issue. I don't think I've pulled a single server for anything but replacement in the last 4 years.
Transfering heat to fluids is significantly more efficient, both on the recieving site (in the server) and the giving side (in the cooling tower). It requires less energy to transfer heat from components to the water (ie: no fans or heat sinks). And it requires less energy to transfer heat from the water in the cooling tower (ie: much smaller chiller/AC unit). So it is more efficient. Acording to the article, their solution consums 50% less energy than the traditional air conditioning and fans.
I think you are pointing out a flaw in the vocational programs more so than a pro in the university program.
For instance, I took a fair number of classes from a tech school (and many from a university). At the tech school, while we focused very much on work-level knowledge (in VB.Net, HTML, ASP.Net, C#, Java, PHP, etc...) we also had classes where we were working with pointers, linked lists, and sorts.
So, if you are talking about those types of efficiencies NOT being taught at your local tech college, I would seriously complain to the faculty.
Conversely, if you are developing a LOB application and you are dealing with performance issues, you are likely doing it wrong. Users can only see so much data at a time, if you are trying to find efficient ways to have users interact with huge data sets, there is likely a better way to do it. One that has a significantly better user experience. Data paging, lazy loading, filtering, searching, something. We don't go to Google, see all trillion entries, and try to filter it down. And any LOB developer that is attacking the performance issues of trying to sort a trillion items for a user interface is doing just that.
On the other hand, many universities still teach low level classes. I remember the old "but can he write his own compiler?" jokes. And here's the deal, in 99.999999% of all LOB jobs, you will never, ever, come anywhere remotely close to having to do that ever again. Yes, it does require a type of thinking, but it is the samy 'type of thinking' that can be pulled out of any number of languages given a specific project, as demonstrated by the other 4 years of college;) BUT! Knowledge of low level architecture is critical in some jobs. I can't imagine even thinking about getting into hardware design with out that knowledge, or any low level development.
In my personal experience, when it comes to hiring college grads, I've almost always had better luck with tech school grads than university grads. Not because they are better or smarter, but because they typically don't come with a chip on their shoulder and a "my professor says..." record on repeat. We still absolutely need them, just not necesarily for LOB jobs.
I think it matters on your goal. If you want skills for a job, go to a vocational school and get a tech degree.
If you want to be doing non-line of business work, go to a university and get a comp sci degree.
But there are a LOT more jobs that demand CS tech knowledge than CD university knowledge. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it's just the market.
Slashdot Mirror
We invaded Afghanistan because we demanded that they turn over Osama bin Laden, and they demanded we follow an extradition process.
-Rick
"efficiency doesn't matter to me at all. "
To prove you wrong, I will quote... you.
"But show me one that is cheap enough to afford to cover my roof with "
That is Price / watt.
"that the end total wattage is enough to cover something close to my power use "
That is Watt / m^2.... also know as Efficiency.
As you have correctly, and incorrectly pointed out, efficiency does matter.
$/kWh determines market adoption.
Watt/m^2 (after market adoption) determines sales channels and installation sites.
-Rick
It's $/kWh that is the primary measure. kWh/m^2 is important for site installation, but not nearly so critical as $/kWh for market entry.
If it's cheaper per watt, someone will find a site for it.
-Rick
As a former Marine who qualified high expert for all but one year (missed by one point my first time to the range), including multiple 'possibles' (10/10 rapid fire at 200 and 300 yards) and consistently going 9/10-10/10 at the 500 yard slow fire, I'm going to say that the M16-A2 is quite capable at 500+ yards. I never had a chance to sight in on an 800 yard range, but given the rifle's accuracy at 500 yards, I would fully expect to be able to continue shooting with a very high degree of confidence at a point target from 800 yards.
Now, it's quite possible that some POG Army-soldier might not be able to hit the broad side of a barn with out sand bags at BZO range (30 yards), but in the Marine Corps, EVERY Marine is a rifleman first. You learn how to shoot and care for your weapon the correct way.
-Rick
Yeah, you can drag an AK through the mud, piss on it, pick it up, and fire off a magazine with out a problem (other than the smell). Those things were built tough, and the chamber size allowed them to fire both American and Soviet ammo.
But between you and me, I'd rather take an M-16A2 at 500 yards than an AK at 200 yards. The same clearances that let them run while mud packed and never cleaned also drops their accuracy to crap. An M-16 will reach out and touch someone from 800 yards where the AK was designed to put a wall of lead down range while massive blocks of infantry were advancing.
-Rick
For the .Net job? Absolutely. The current position vacates in 8 days. And the brass has already signaled their willingness to bring in a junior person as long as they are eager and have a drive to learn both technology and business. Will we pay for a senior developer with out specific experience in the target technology what they are worth? Doubtful. But it could be a great opportunity for someone looking to start out with VB.Net/C#, web development and Silverlight in LOB application development. Or, if we can find a more seasoned person with experience in the specific technologies and an eye for design and the big-picture, they'd have an equally good chance. This position is likely to be our easiest to fill.
The DBA is likely going to be a bit more selective. The DBA that left was a great guy, good at working with all the other teams and with the guys in Europe. I think that the position there is going to be 50% SQL Server implementation/architecture/maintenance knowledge and 50% interpersonal skills. So there will likely be a number of people with the technical skills required that might not be a good fit for the position. So far though, I haven't seen any interviews going on (I have been in Ireland for the last 2 weeks though, so I may have missed one).
The Sharepoint position is still a bit cloudy on specifics at this point. It's not like we're going to look for someone with 10 years of sharepoint experience :P. So we'll probably look at getting a junior person in to join the team, or possible someone with more experience with CMS and Knowledge Management (for example; leveraging data for networking and communications)
Not a sweat shop, but I wouldn't call it the luxury life. No micro-managers, 8' cubes, decent laptops w/ dual monitors, good on-site cafeteria and gym. Pretty standard 8-5 with an hour lunch, business casual dress, etc... IT shop is probably 40+ in the US, and another set of teams in different sites in Ireland, UK, and APAC.
I am not arguing for more H1B visas. I am just saying that there are plenty of jobs in IT that need bodies, that people shouldn't be afraid of going into comp-sci and networking majors in colleges and tech schools. And it definately doesn't make sense to charge more for these degrees when we need more people with this knowledge.
-Rick
If you look at the trends, birth rates in the US have been inversely proportional to the rate of womens' education. It doesn't work for everyone, but on average, college educated women have less children.
-Rick
Unemployment in the IT industry is still under 5%. I'm sitting here with 2 backfill positions (DBA and .Net Developer) and a new position (Sharepoint config/admin) that we are trying to fill. We just managed to get a decent person in for a BI position after over 2 months of looking.
I'm not sure how the other knowledge worker industries are doing, but IT could do with a bit more of a labor pool.
-Rick
Or you sell a free game with $1 episodic content.
-Rick
Sparkplugs only get gummed up when something else is wrong. A Spark plug with 50,000 miles on it in a well running engine will come out with a bit of wear on the electrod and some browning of the porcelin, but all in all, it should be clear of all sludge. If your vehicle is burning oil, or has a leaking injector, or is venting coolant into the combustion chamber, yeah, this thing is going to stop working. But really, if your car is burning oil, has a leaking injector, or is venting coolant, you shouldn't be driving it.
Also, these won't be needed in Diesels. Diesel engines have no spark plugs. They run at a much higher compression ratio and it is the heat of the compression stroke that ignights the air/fuel mix. Diesel engines do have glow plugs, but their purpose is limited to warming the combustion chamber BEFORE the engine is engaged. Glowplugs are disabled while the engine is running.
-Rick
They look absolutely identical on a 48" standard def TV.
When my TV dies, I might be slightly interested. But at this point, I have a hard drive and a DVD drive in a media PC that can stream Netflix and Hulu. I have no reason to buy a blue ray player and I would only find motivation to buy a blue-ray drive if Netflix stopped shipping DVDs.
-Rick
I tend to avoid taking scientific consultation from anyone claiming to be a "true believe".
-Rick
That's beacuse in the US, corn is subsidized. In the UK and most of the EU, small grains are subsidized. If someone figures out how to get sweeteners from wheat for less than beats/sugar cane, you'll be consuming HFWS just as American's consume HFCS. It's all about price, and subsidies have as huge impact on it.
-Rick
It is amazing that a company can get away with selling mineral water that... contains minerals. Although, at a whopping 23.9mg/liter, I'd have to drink a LOT of this mineral water to have the salt it contains have any diaretic effect on me.
-Rick
Explorers, traders, and conquerors have done an excellent job of documenting their travels. Everywhere cane sugar has been introduced, the top fifty to hundred diseases of modern times have exploded; without fail.
I would venture a guess that the spread of those "top fifty to hundred diseases" has a lot more to do with "Explorers, traders, and conquerors" moving to new geographic areas and carrying a wide variety of germs and bacteria with them to a completely unexposed and defenseless population.
-Rick
Correction, what Xanadu "is" ;)
http://www.xanadu.com/
It's basically an MDI for browsing where links open horrizontally and scroll with the page. It's a clugy attempt at what he is talking about.
-Rick
His concept is effectively a free-form multi-document interface where hyperlinks open into a new window. That description doesn't do it justice though. Think of it like each block of content, each paragraph, each page, each image, is not limited to the context which it is in. You can do, as the quote suggest, strike out some content that is between the two pieces you want, or branch out diagnally.
Think if it more like a 6 degrees of Kevin Baccon interface, only for every piece of content. Wikipedia is the most obvious example of where it would be useful. Being able to see the content of mid-sentence links with out having to leave the page you are on.
It's a pretty cool concept, but not big enough (IMO) to displace the current browsing experience.
-Rick
Which is a great point for using the correct tool for the job. If your goal is 100% market penetration, you'll be writing HTML4 for years to come, so the debate over HTML5 vs Flash vs Silverlight is entirely moot anyway.
If you're willing to drop some small percent in favor of a more robust interface, you can switch to Flash. Drop some more and you're in HTML5/Silverlight penetration range.
But clearly, if your target audience is Linux users, you'll either not want to use Silverlight, or limit your functionality to that covered by Moonlight.
-Rick
HTML5 is not a Flash/Silverlight replacement. It does some things better, it does somethings worse, but for the majority of the functionality of Flash and Silverlight, HTML5 just doesn't do it.
There is awesome stuff you can do in HTML5 and Javascript, but it's still no replacement for a dedicated sandbox. Especially with the new hardware accelerated XNA 3-d graphics and sound coming from Silverlight 5.
-Rick
From my time working in the cell phone industry, I'd say "fooie!" to this being a problem at all. Atleast with cell towers, metal objects created almost no interfierance. Water was the devil. A huge chunk of metal in from of an antena had only a tiny impact, but fill that chunk of metal with water, say like a water tower, and it's like a giant black hole for radio signals. We also had issues with small lakes bouncing signals like crazy. You could be driving around a lake, have a tower 100 feet away from you, and another 12 miles away across the lake, and we'd have to put them on no-handoff lists, because a little bit of waves in the water can give the CC the impression that you are getting a better signal from across the lake.
A think layer of tin on the back of your insulation, that has been being used for decades, isn't going to cause any issue that hasn't already been dealt with.
-Rick
I stand corrected. I was thinking that heavy mineral oil was ~1.1-1.2, but it's only .9. Whoops!
luckily, it would still be easy to skim, you'd just have to pull off the bottom instead of the top.
-Rick
If you had condensation (water) that was dense enough to sink in your oil, you were using the wrong type of oil.
Mineral oil is way more dense than water. And condensation that occurs should sit at the top of the pool and never create an issue (and it should be pretty easy to skim off).
-Rick
Having worked in a fair number of server rooms, I'd say that the freequency of needing to service equipment has been dropping significantly over the lat 15 years. These days, it's almost a non-issue. I don't think I've pulled a single server for anything but replacement in the last 4 years.
Transfering heat to fluids is significantly more efficient, both on the recieving site (in the server) and the giving side (in the cooling tower). It requires less energy to transfer heat from components to the water (ie: no fans or heat sinks). And it requires less energy to transfer heat from the water in the cooling tower (ie: much smaller chiller/AC unit). So it is more efficient. Acording to the article, their solution consums 50% less energy than the traditional air conditioning and fans.
-Rick
I think you are pointing out a flaw in the vocational programs more so than a pro in the university program.
For instance, I took a fair number of classes from a tech school (and many from a university). At the tech school, while we focused very much on work-level knowledge (in VB.Net, HTML, ASP.Net, C#, Java, PHP, etc...) we also had classes where we were working with pointers, linked lists, and sorts.
So, if you are talking about those types of efficiencies NOT being taught at your local tech college, I would seriously complain to the faculty.
Conversely, if you are developing a LOB application and you are dealing with performance issues, you are likely doing it wrong. Users can only see so much data at a time, if you are trying to find efficient ways to have users interact with huge data sets, there is likely a better way to do it. One that has a significantly better user experience. Data paging, lazy loading, filtering, searching, something. We don't go to Google, see all trillion entries, and try to filter it down. And any LOB developer that is attacking the performance issues of trying to sort a trillion items for a user interface is doing just that.
On the other hand, many universities still teach low level classes. I remember the old "but can he write his own compiler?" jokes. And here's the deal, in 99.999999% of all LOB jobs, you will never, ever, come anywhere remotely close to having to do that ever again. Yes, it does require a type of thinking, but it is the samy 'type of thinking' that can be pulled out of any number of languages given a specific project, as demonstrated by the other 4 years of college ;) BUT! Knowledge of low level architecture is critical in some jobs. I can't imagine even thinking about getting into hardware design with out that knowledge, or any low level development.
In my personal experience, when it comes to hiring college grads, I've almost always had better luck with tech school grads than university grads. Not because they are better or smarter, but because they typically don't come with a chip on their shoulder and a "my professor says..." record on repeat. We still absolutely need them, just not necesarily for LOB jobs.
-Rick
I think it matters on your goal. If you want skills for a job, go to a vocational school and get a tech degree.
If you want to be doing non-line of business work, go to a university and get a comp sci degree.
But there are a LOT more jobs that demand CS tech knowledge than CD university knowledge. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it's just the market.
-Rick