Back when I was in college, I made infrequent use of labs my first three years of school. My desktop was more reliable, had an environment that I was used to, and in a quiet location. The computer science department had no dedicated labs, thus if I wanted to work with my peers, we had to use the general-purpose computers that were set up for performing word processing. I only made heavy use of the labs when I was pledging my fraternity and "voluntarily" could not return to my dorm room.
During my senior year, the Computer Science department opened a lab for exclusive CS student use. It had a small collection of old computers dug up from basements; and it was WONDERFUL! I would walk in with my shiny new laptop, and meet project partners who had shiny new laptops, and we had the best workspace that I used throughout my college career!
IMO, the best "lab" for computer science students is a set of dedicated rooms for the department. There should be a few inexpensive computers around for students who's laptops might be malfunctioning. These computers could be recovered from other departments as they upgrade, therefore keeping the cost of a lab down.
You hit on the real reason in your post, even if you didn't realize it. The fact is that wind/solar power is not economically viable right now. It makes little sense for Shell to spend tons of money that it will never recover.
However, once it becomes viable, energy becomes a commodity that keeps getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. This isn't the case today where energy really doesn't get cheaper.
I think Shell just doesn't want to play that game.
After reading the article; my conclusion is that Josh isn't as smart as the manager thought he was. His manager was just deluded into thinking he was smart. I've had to clean up messes from developers like this guy; and it's shocking when I realize that it's a manager's delusion that the quirky guy is writing brilliant code that is what made a particular project fail.
It takes a variety of people to accomplish large tasks. Often this requires putting up with peoples' shortcomings in order to take advantage of their talents. Management typically has to figure out how to work around each team members' shortcomings and/or how to improve on these shortcomings.
I know I can be quirky at times; and I've had to work with quirky people. In all cases, it requires patience and empathy from all people involved. I've always told my teammates that the success or failure of a project ultimately depends on the quality of management; and not the quality of the individual team members. This is because management needs to guide interactions among team members; if the quirky guy is so bad that he's wearing offensive T-Shirts and taking dumps in the lobby flowerpots; it's just as much a failure of management as a failure of the quirky guy. The same can be said if "normal" engineers just can't write working code; it's a failure of management to recognize and rectify the situation.
Why do I say this? Every member of a team has its faults. Quality management knows when to say, "dude, you need to brush up on your SOAP skills," just like it knows when to say, "dude, you need to bathe with soap before coming to work."
I don't know about you, but given that my computer is 10 times faster then the one I had 3 years ago; I'd like the software to run 10 times as fast as well!
I work in media. The future of television is YouTube or similar. We know this. It'll take a few years before the Internet is a better television than television, i.e. when your connection is a better delivery mechanism than DVB-T over the air. OTOH, convenience beats quality every time.
I just canceled cable TV and upgraded my cable modem to the fastest speed possible. Hulu is so much better, and cheaper, then cable TV. Two weeks ago I watched some high-definition documentary on Hulu, and it was just as good as my local broadcast of American Idol, which is 780P.
Speaking of American Idol, I use a USB TV receiver for over-the-air TV. Pretty much anything worth watching live comes in over-the-air; however, it's the minority of my viewing habits.
Everything that isn't on Hulu is on iTunes. For less money then I spent on cable, I can buy season passes for each show that I used to watch. It's a win-win situation.
I suspect digital broadcast TV is going to swing the pendulum back a bit.
Actually, digital broadcast TV is a lot easier to handle on a computer then analog broadcast TV. The reception equipment is simpler and cheaper, because there doesn't need to be any complicated analog to digital circuitry. All the hardware does is send an MPEG stream straight to the hard drive!
With the way that computers are going now, a built-in digital-only receiver might quickly become standard on inexpensive computers as a way to try and get people to buy them instead of a TV.
And, in case you're curious, I canceled Cable (with HD DVR) and hooked up my computer to my fancy TV. Hulu and over-the-air TV are, for all intents and purposes, perfect.
Both products fail miserably at running anything older than XP. VMWare still wins here, since at least it manages to install and run 98SE successfully, while Parallels install suffers from endless crashes. But even a trivial DX game like "Lose your marbles" results in a blank screen, while it works perfectly fine in VPC for Mac on 5 year old hardware. There are many older applications and games that do not run on XP. Just how hard would it be to emulate an S3 video card and SB16 so that we can run whatever we fill like in the VM?
If it's a DOS program, you'll have much better luck with DosBOX then using a VM. It's so good compared to using VMs that there really isn't a business case for commercial VMs to emulate legacy hardware.
If insufficient numbers of people vote for a pay-cut,
It's not a vote, nor did the letter make it sound like one. The word "vote" comes from a misleading summary.
What's more likely happening is that Microsoft pays $X / hour, and each contractor fills out a timecard at the end of the week. Volt then pays each contractor something like 0.75 * $X / hour; although the difference is used for things like social security taxes (about 6 percent), benefits, and overhead. Volt isn't making much profit through skimming; thus, when Microsoft said to Volt, "We are now going to only pay 0.90 * X / hour / contractor," Volt could not shield their contractors from the hit.
Shell scripting isn't going away if you have to tie together lots of different programs. Bash and the other variants are still quite powerful; and are well-supported on Windows. (To be frank, I learned shell scripting on Windows years ago, yet I'm just starting to dip my toe in the Unix waters.)
Today, a lot of tools are moving to use XML. I have mixed feelings about this; as some tools use very weird schemas. However, being well-versed in XML is a "portable" skill.
Then why is IE still by far the most used browser?
Exactly, because it's bundled and because a lot of people wouldn't know how to get on the net without it unless they're offered a 1-click option.
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to let the PC vendor choose the default browser? Many Windows applications depend on parts of IE, just like Mac applications depend on parts of Safari. I would think that a PC vendor should have free reign to choose icons on the desktop, default browser, ect, ect.
I wish that more development environments had usable autocomplete. As much as I love to use Ruby for writing scripts, my main complaint about the IDE I use for it (netbeans) is that it *doesn't* have autocomplete for Ruby unless they've come out with a new version recently that does.
I've been playing with Eclipse (Java IDE) for the past few months. Not only does it have a comparable autocomplete; it also has some simple auto-correct of syntax errors!
At a prior job, we used to use IDE hard drives in caddies. When we wanted to change the operating system, we'd slip out the old drive and slip in the new one.
My goodbye emails are short and sweet: "thanks, you can reach me at XXX, good luck in all your future endeavors." If I have any gripes; I handle them verbally. This is the same approach I take with my current colleagues; gripes are handled verbally.
it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached? Including Linux users? Including users at work? Including brand-new systems?"
Flash came pre-installed on my Mac, and it appears to be installed by default in Ubuntu. I'm not sure about Vista, but I always have to install it when I set up Windows XP
Set up your own website which includes your latest resume, info about you and examples of your work if appropriate
I find it's best to keep resumes off of the web. All they do is invite SPAM. I removed my resume and for many years continued to get SPAM directed towards the special email address I used for the resume.
Frankly, when I had my resume on the open web, it only gave me ONE relevant lead; which boiled down to a request to network. The rest of them were get-rich-schemes or completely unrelated to my career.
Admittedly, in tough financial times switching to just a few local channels for free would be an option - until you look at unbundling your catv from internet and phone etc
It costs me less then half after I canceled HDTV cable + DVR and just went to a high speed internet connection.
There ARE far better designs though and rabbit ears will not make a return.
But the better designs are more expensive, bigger, bulkier, ect. Where I live, I get everything with a $16 set of rabbit ears. Why would I bother with anything else?
Our philosophy is: If it works in PostgreSQL, it will even do wonders on DB2 or Oracle. I do not see how we can do away with the relational DB. Whoever designed it in the beginning did a marvelous job.
Let's face it, programming a relational database is hard for the run-of-the-mill, copy & paste coder! I find the move away from relational databases to be a naive path taken by those who don't understand the value of what they do... It's like trying to turn lead onto gold.
This is horrible! It teaches their children to value practically worthless amounts of money over their time. It's one thing to pick up loose change as you see it, (which I do,) but it's another thing to devote precious hours of one's life to an activity with such little economic gain. Once those children realize that a McJob paying minimum wage makes more money; they'll resent their parents for being crazy and undervaluing a dollar.
For example, I used to put away Final Fantasy when I'd have to spend 10 hours earning experience just to fight some boss. That's just silly.
Super Paper Mario had a stupid part where you had to hold a button down on the controller for 5 minutes. That was disrespectful to me, the paying customer. I looked up a cheat code on the internet.
Zelda on the Wii has a silly part where you need to go fishing. It doesn't really do anything but kill 3 hours of the game when you just want to have fun.
The net emissions from a biomethane operated bus are zero, because the carbon originally came from the atmosphere rather than fossil fuels, but electricity is used at the sewage plant to convert the gas from the waste into fuel for the buses. Oslo city council is taking the electricity used to generate the fuel into consideration and calculate that carbon emissions per bus are 18 tonnes per year, a saving of 44 tonnes of C02 per bus per year.
Why not generate electricity from the Biogas? If it's so easy to modify a diesel engine to use the gas, couldn't they just use an ordinary diesel generator?
In a decade, I can see handhelds having so much storage and so much processing power, that we'll all just carry around our PC-on-a-phone and just use a standard interface to put that PC on any external monitor and keyboard. Hell, I can USB boot Ubuntu from my Blackberry, already.
There are already USB -> DVI "adapters" that work if you have the right Windows drivers. I haven't tried one yet, but I find the prospect of plugging a single USB hub into a tiny computing package to be quite lucrative.
Frankly, I'm tempted to try one of these so I can have a HTPC from a VM.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when I was in college, I made infrequent use of labs my first three years of school. My desktop was more reliable, had an environment that I was used to, and in a quiet location. The computer science department had no dedicated labs, thus if I wanted to work with my peers, we had to use the general-purpose computers that were set up for performing word processing. I only made heavy use of the labs when I was pledging my fraternity and "voluntarily" could not return to my dorm room.
During my senior year, the Computer Science department opened a lab for exclusive CS student use. It had a small collection of old computers dug up from basements; and it was WONDERFUL! I would walk in with my shiny new laptop, and meet project partners who had shiny new laptops, and we had the best workspace that I used throughout my college career!
IMO, the best "lab" for computer science students is a set of dedicated rooms for the department. There should be a few inexpensive computers around for students who's laptops might be malfunctioning. These computers could be recovered from other departments as they upgrade, therefore keeping the cost of a lab down.
You hit on the real reason in your post, even if you didn't realize it. The fact is that wind/solar power is not economically viable right now. It makes little sense for Shell to spend tons of money that it will never recover.
However, once it becomes viable, energy becomes a commodity that keeps getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. This isn't the case today where energy really doesn't get cheaper.
I think Shell just doesn't want to play that game.
After reading the article; my conclusion is that Josh isn't as smart as the manager thought he was. His manager was just deluded into thinking he was smart. I've had to clean up messes from developers like this guy; and it's shocking when I realize that it's a manager's delusion that the quirky guy is writing brilliant code that is what made a particular project fail.
It takes a variety of people to accomplish large tasks. Often this requires putting up with peoples' shortcomings in order to take advantage of their talents. Management typically has to figure out how to work around each team members' shortcomings and/or how to improve on these shortcomings.
I know I can be quirky at times; and I've had to work with quirky people. In all cases, it requires patience and empathy from all people involved. I've always told my teammates that the success or failure of a project ultimately depends on the quality of management; and not the quality of the individual team members. This is because management needs to guide interactions among team members; if the quirky guy is so bad that he's wearing offensive T-Shirts and taking dumps in the lobby flowerpots; it's just as much a failure of management as a failure of the quirky guy. The same can be said if "normal" engineers just can't write working code; it's a failure of management to recognize and rectify the situation.
Why do I say this? Every member of a team has its faults. Quality management knows when to say, "dude, you need to brush up on your SOAP skills," just like it knows when to say, "dude, you need to bathe with soap before coming to work."
Moore's Law makes some problems easy, yay. :)
I don't know about you, but given that my computer is 10 times faster then the one I had 3 years ago; I'd like the software to run 10 times as fast as well!
I work in media. The future of television is YouTube or similar. We know this. It'll take a few years before the Internet is a better television than television, i.e. when your connection is a better delivery mechanism than DVB-T over the air. OTOH, convenience beats quality every time.
I just canceled cable TV and upgraded my cable modem to the fastest speed possible. Hulu is so much better, and cheaper, then cable TV. Two weeks ago I watched some high-definition documentary on Hulu, and it was just as good as my local broadcast of American Idol, which is 780P.
Speaking of American Idol, I use a USB TV receiver for over-the-air TV. Pretty much anything worth watching live comes in over-the-air; however, it's the minority of my viewing habits.
Everything that isn't on Hulu is on iTunes. For less money then I spent on cable, I can buy season passes for each show that I used to watch. It's a win-win situation.
I suspect digital broadcast TV is going to swing the pendulum back a bit.
Actually, digital broadcast TV is a lot easier to handle on a computer then analog broadcast TV. The reception equipment is simpler and cheaper, because there doesn't need to be any complicated analog to digital circuitry. All the hardware does is send an MPEG stream straight to the hard drive!
With the way that computers are going now, a built-in digital-only receiver might quickly become standard on inexpensive computers as a way to try and get people to buy them instead of a TV.
And, in case you're curious, I canceled Cable (with HD DVR) and hooked up my computer to my fancy TV. Hulu and over-the-air TV are, for all intents and purposes, perfect.
Both products fail miserably at running anything older than XP. VMWare still wins here, since at least it manages to install and run 98SE successfully, while Parallels install suffers from endless crashes. But even a trivial DX game like "Lose your marbles" results in a blank screen, while it works perfectly fine in VPC for Mac on 5 year old hardware. There are many older applications and games that do not run on XP. Just how hard would it be to emulate an S3 video card and SB16 so that we can run whatever we fill like in the VM?
If it's a DOS program, you'll have much better luck with DosBOX then using a VM. It's so good compared to using VMs that there really isn't a business case for commercial VMs to emulate legacy hardware.
If insufficient numbers of people vote for a pay-cut,
It's not a vote, nor did the letter make it sound like one. The word "vote" comes from a misleading summary.
What's more likely happening is that Microsoft pays $X / hour, and each contractor fills out a timecard at the end of the week. Volt then pays each contractor something like 0.75 * $X / hour; although the difference is used for things like social security taxes (about 6 percent), benefits, and overhead. Volt isn't making much profit through skimming; thus, when Microsoft said to Volt, "We are now going to only pay 0.90 * X / hour / contractor," Volt could not shield their contractors from the hit.
Shell scripting isn't going away if you have to tie together lots of different programs. Bash and the other variants are still quite powerful; and are well-supported on Windows. (To be frank, I learned shell scripting on Windows years ago, yet I'm just starting to dip my toe in the Unix waters.)
Today, a lot of tools are moving to use XML. I have mixed feelings about this; as some tools use very weird schemas. However, being well-versed in XML is a "portable" skill.
Then why is IE still by far the most used browser? Exactly, because it's bundled and because a lot of people wouldn't know how to get on the net without it unless they're offered a 1-click option.
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to let the PC vendor choose the default browser? Many Windows applications depend on parts of IE, just like Mac applications depend on parts of Safari. I would think that a PC vendor should have free reign to choose icons on the desktop, default browser, ect, ect.
I wish that more development environments had usable autocomplete. As much as I love to use Ruby for writing scripts, my main complaint about the IDE I use for it (netbeans) is that it *doesn't* have autocomplete for Ruby unless they've come out with a new version recently that does.
I've been playing with Eclipse (Java IDE) for the past few months. Not only does it have a comparable autocomplete; it also has some simple auto-correct of syntax errors!
At a prior job, we used to use IDE hard drives in caddies. When we wanted to change the operating system, we'd slip out the old drive and slip in the new one.
My goodbye emails are short and sweet: "thanks, you can reach me at XXX, good luck in all your future endeavors." If I have any gripes; I handle them verbally. This is the same approach I take with my current colleagues; gripes are handled verbally.
it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached? Including Linux users? Including users at work? Including brand-new systems?"
Flash came pre-installed on my Mac, and it appears to be installed by default in Ubuntu. I'm not sure about Vista, but I always have to install it when I set up Windows XP
OTOH, my iPhone doesn't handle Flash.
Set up your own website which includes your latest resume, info about you and examples of your work if appropriate
I find it's best to keep resumes off of the web. All they do is invite SPAM. I removed my resume and for many years continued to get SPAM directed towards the special email address I used for the resume.
Frankly, when I had my resume on the open web, it only gave me ONE relevant lead; which boiled down to a request to network. The rest of them were get-rich-schemes or completely unrelated to my career.
Al Gore would be proud.
Vint Cerf credits Al Gore as being instrumental in securing funding to develop the Internet.
Admittedly, in tough financial times switching to just a few local channels for free would be an option - until you look at unbundling your catv from internet and phone etc
It costs me less then half after I canceled HDTV cable + DVR and just went to a high speed internet connection.
There ARE far better designs though and rabbit ears will not make a return.
But the better designs are more expensive, bigger, bulkier, ect. Where I live, I get everything with a $16 set of rabbit ears. Why would I bother with anything else?
Our philosophy is: If it works in PostgreSQL, it will even do wonders on DB2 or Oracle. I do not see how we can do away with the relational DB. Whoever designed it in the beginning did a marvelous job.
Let's face it, programming a relational database is hard for the run-of-the-mill, copy & paste coder! I find the move away from relational databases to be a naive path taken by those who don't understand the value of what they do... It's like trying to turn lead onto gold.
This is horrible! It teaches their children to value practically worthless amounts of money over their time. It's one thing to pick up loose change as you see it, (which I do,) but it's another thing to devote precious hours of one's life to an activity with such little economic gain. Once those children realize that a McJob paying minimum wage makes more money; they'll resent their parents for being crazy and undervaluing a dollar.
Boring parts
For example, I used to put away Final Fantasy when I'd have to spend 10 hours earning experience just to fight some boss. That's just silly.
Super Paper Mario had a stupid part where you had to hold a button down on the controller for 5 minutes. That was disrespectful to me, the paying customer. I looked up a cheat code on the internet.
Zelda on the Wii has a silly part where you need to go fishing. It doesn't really do anything but kill 3 hours of the game when you just want to have fun.
This is my New Year's Resolution: "If it's not on the internet, it doesn't exist." I think the same applies to ESPN; it doesn't exist.
The net emissions from a biomethane operated bus are zero, because the carbon originally came from the atmosphere rather than fossil fuels, but electricity is used at the sewage plant to convert the gas from the waste into fuel for the buses. Oslo city council is taking the electricity used to generate the fuel into consideration and calculate that carbon emissions per bus are 18 tonnes per year, a saving of 44 tonnes of C02 per bus per year.
Why not generate electricity from the Biogas? If it's so easy to modify a diesel engine to use the gas, couldn't they just use an ordinary diesel generator?
In a decade, I can see handhelds having so much storage and so much processing power, that we'll all just carry around our PC-on-a-phone and just use a standard interface to put that PC on any external monitor and keyboard. Hell, I can USB boot Ubuntu from my Blackberry, already.
There are already USB -> DVI "adapters" that work if you have the right Windows drivers. I haven't tried one yet, but I find the prospect of plugging a single USB hub into a tiny computing package to be quite lucrative.
Frankly, I'm tempted to try one of these so I can have a HTPC from a VM.