I think that's true of the Mac hardware, but I'll take Ubuntu over any recent Mac OS. I'd say the same thing of the iPhone - my T-Mobile G1 hardware sucks in comparison, but the Android OS is a fine competitor.
I think Dell loves to compare their products to Macs. Same features, at half the price.
I agree, though Apple naturally dropped the opportunity to really take on Microsoft. If Apple would simply allow their OS to run on generic PCs, Microsoft would have a true competitor. As is, all Microsoft has to do is change their look every so often, and they'll maintain their monopoly. Steve Jobs is extending this stupidity to the iPhone, which I predict will lose the market-share wars to Android over the next few years. It's Mac vs Windows 3.1 all over again.
Re:Nerds will be nerds
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Wikipedia has good article on the evolution of the term "geek." Often important issues are decided by the terms used by both sides to define the issue. For example, "pro-life" is used rather than "anti-abortion." Americans have a huge problem: we aren't learning enough science, math, and technology skills. This is especially true for our daughters. In other countries, like China and India, such skills are encouraged and respected.
The battle for the definition of the term "geek" is the same battle. If we want to put America back on track, we need to respect intelligence again, and push all our children to excel in learning science, math, and technology. Like it or not, "geek" is the label for all children who excel in these areas. If we can win the battle over the connotations of being a geek, it will be much easier to properly educate our kids.
Re:Revenge of the Nerds...
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"Computer geek" "Can't spell geek without a double-E" and so on...
I agree. The red-necks I went to school with in Stone Mountain Georgia may still think football and cheerleading are more important than math, science, and computer skills, but they can go suck my ever-hard wang. I've started a software company, own a nice boat, house, and car, while working from home and enjoying the country club. And, I married a brilliant woman with an MBA. Sweet revenge.
Re:Nerds will be nerds
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 1
Academics seem to want to go against common usage and define "nerd" as someone truly interested in knowledge, and "geek" as someone without social skills. This is total BS. The term "computer geek" implies intelligence, and "Revenge of the Nerds" defined nerd as people without social skills.
Parent may be a nerd, and I hope he finds a way to start dating girls, but if he's posting semi-intelligent comments on slaskdot, he's also a huge geek, academics be damned. He should be proud to be a geek, and should work on those social skills.
Easy. If we accept "soul" means "consciousness", then naturally we can agree that we are both conscious, self-aware, and that there's something going on here which is so-far unexplained by science. This is no proof of a Christian "soul", but it is strong evidence of something extremely important, if we could just figure out what.
Grr. Parent is about as on-topic as most posts below...
The EFF has been suing AT&T for piping all our location information directly to the NSA, while Bush has claimed it to be perfectly legal. Can we stay on topic for a change? This is important.
Suspend to RAM works out-of-the-box on my Dell Inspiron 9400, in Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04). I've found that the long-term-support releases are far more likely to support suspend and other commonly difficult features to get working.
For the first time ever, I'm strongly considering sticking with my old version of Ubuntu (8.04) until the next long-term support version. Are there any great features in 8.10 that would cause you to recommending the upgrade? Thanks.
Yep, it's a damned fine phone. If it were also an open platform, it'd dominate forever. I guess I should be happy that Apple's too dumb to turn their dominance into a Microsoft-like monopoly. I'm pretty confident that Google Android will win out in the end, simply because it is a free open platform. Apple on the other hand, continues to insist on owning all the software and hardware.
The iPhone has that huge display, way better than the G1, and it's super thin, like a razor. I've owned an iPhone and now own a G1, so I'm no Apple fan, but the iPhone is simply better hardware.
There are good reasons iPhone is on top. However, I'm putting my money in Andriod phones from now on. The software is pretty comparable from an average user point of view, and better for developers.
My sister-in-law worked for a huge company, one very similar to Dilbert's employer. She was at least partly, if not fully, in charge of the decision to reject all open-source software. I had a long debate with her on this topic, but she's completely unwilling to move. She firmly believes software is worth no more than what you pay for it, and those promoting free software are dangerous socialists, anti-free-market crusaders trying to tear down America.
I've also tried to convince her over the years that George Bush is a poor president, who has in fact made some mistakes. While she's a super-bright energetic well educated woman, my sister-in-law is incapable of thinking any republican president has ever done any wrong.
I think people like my sister-in-law are firmly planted in important corporate positions throughout our country, insuring that Dilbert-Land will continue unimpeded. To them, free-as-in-speech is a silly concept for children. You give it lip-service, but never put any money there! What counts is free-as-in-market. These free-as-in-speech programmers are just more Vietnam protesting nit-wits who will ruin the country.
There's much disinformation below, so I'm posting way up here to save you time. First, magnetic poll reversal is a chaotic process. It's simply not predictable, and these 2012 guys are buffoons. Second, poll reversal will not cause electronics to blow up due to a rapid change in magnetic fields - the change will be far too slow and weak in strength. It takes a thousand years or more for a pole reversal. However, during that time will likely be a short period of little or no magnetic field, and we will be showered with far higher radiation from the Sun, causing us to design radiation tolerant electronics and likely increasing cancer rates. Given all the other way's humanity is currently trying to kill itself, magnetic pole reversal shouldn't even be on our radar.
However, it's still a fun topic for discussion. There's a spot in the Atlantic called the South Atlantic Anomaly, with is viewed by many to be a new North Pole trying to form. If it breaks through, we're in for a few very interesting thousand years or so.
As uncle poster points out, oil isn't used in America to generate electricity, so it helps reduce oil imports dramatically as well. I wouldn't count "green" power out. Enhanced geothermal, for example, could provide all the power we need, just not as cheaply as dirty coal. If we're willing to pay around $0.20/KWh, rather than $0.10/KWh, there are many ways to provide green alternative energy, including solar, geothermal, wind, and nuclear. Solar alone is projected to reach 23GW/year of production capacity, or around 10 nuclear plant equivalents per year, and rising exponentially. Building a HVDC power grid has already been done in Brazil... imagine Brazil leading the US in such a useful technology, and they built it in 1987!
Thanks for the info. However, going plug-in-hybrid, or as GM calls the Volt, E-REV, does several wonderful things. First, it shifts energy to domestic supplies, rather than foreign oil. It allows us to use coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, or whatever the heck we like for power. By my calculations, at $4/gal gas, you save somewhere around $5K if you do most of your driving on electric power for 100K miles. That pays for the battery. With modern battery technology, there's also little reason to ever drive a wimpy powered car again. I think GM is probably right: by 2020, around half of new cars will be electric or hybrid.
That alone would reduce our oil imports 20-30%. Combined with Picken's push for wind and natural gas, as well as the exponential explosion in other alternative energy technologies, plug-in-hybrids begin to look like a compelling part of the solution.
Yes, I agree (I am OP). Democrats are also to blame, like that guy with $200K cash in his freezer who just got re-elected... if not in jail, he should certainly be kicked out of the party. However, this specific need for secret communication seems particularly republican, and I feel it is due to Nixon getting caught.
I respect your opinion on this issue, though I don't agree. Sarah Palin has done the exact same thing that Bush did - hide governing related communications on non-government servers. I believe this is illegal. I also think republicans have been doing this since Nixon got caught with tapes. Rather than reform their integrity, they reformed their communication systems to illegally hide their activities. Sarah Palin is scary, and Anonymous is doing us a favor. Only the light of scrutiny will reform our government.
I got a good laugh out of that... they're sicking the "Secret Service" on Anonymous... guys with dark glasses and big guns. Yeah, those guys will track down these hackers pronto! NOT!
I'm fighting the urge to post an e-mail of an enemy, claiming it's a tip that should be followed. The only problem is, I don't hate anyone that much... too bad! It would have been fun. Any of you guys up for some random dead-end lead generation, just for some good-old immature back-to-college-like hacks? Here, I'll start: I'm 100% sure this is the A-hole who gave Anonymous Sarah's password. She's an insider with confidential info: roseanne.hughes@alaska.gov.
No. This isn't even close to EEStor's claimed energy density. I personally put EEStor in the BS bucket a long time ago, but last week I found some very interesting news on wikipedia's EEStor page: competitors. It seems that several companies now have patents on materials they claim are similar in energy density to EEStor's claims. We may not get ultra-cheap batteries for electric cars any time soon, but at least the raw science seems to be real.
I completely agree. My first job as a programmer was while in high school, in 1981, a bit after your first. I programmed a PDP-11/45 in Fortran IV, and thought I was in heaven. I did a log of wirewrap, when into chip design, and then into chip design software, where I've been happy since about 1989.
I work to avoid my weaknesses, like managing people, and found a spot where I'm happy to have my talents exploited fully. It turns out, much to my surprise, that I like sales as well, and have some talent for cold-calls. My experience as a consultant was humbling, and taught me to strive to know and avoid my own limitations. Finding the right team to work with is the hardest part of the game, though at them moment, I'm feeling pretty good in that department.
This guy poses a legit question, and one that often poses ethical issues. Not only have I done a bit of moonlighting in my past, but I've always encouraged my best programmers to do a bit on the side. Without sampling that grass on the other side of the fence, those talented programmers I train are likely to hop over.
As an old programmer (I'm 44), I've got a few stories. When I worked for David Burns at HP, my previous company, National Semiconductor, needed my help badly. The work David assigned was mind-numbingly boring, and the LM628/LM629 (motor controllers) I'd worked on at National were in serious trouble without me, and frankly they were fun (my old boss, David Squires, was about the best ever). I asked Mr Burns if I could do the project as a favor to old friends at National, and he said it was up for the HP *Board of Directors* to decide! So, if HP/Burns was going to be a PITA, without any pangs of lack of integrity, I stopped asking Burns what I could or could not do.
I helped National push the LM628/LM629 into the market. Then, I quit working for Burns. As a consultant for a while, I wrote the original Simple Switcher design code (National did most of the work - bench validation). If you haven't heard of this line of products, you obviously aren't in power electronics. I enjoyed the consulting, but basically I sucked. I have this terrible desire to call stupid people stupid. It's *really* bad for consultants. So, now I'm CTO of a small company I founded, and I can't complain. Again, when my programmers feel the need for some moonlighting, I'm fully supportive. I've never lost a good one because of it.
NAT traversal is the death of SIP, and SIP is the worst thing that ever happened to VoIP. Standards are great so long as they're not incredibly stupid and impossible to use. There should be a concerted effort to switch to something less stupid, like IAX2.
Since this is his actual name, it's technically not domain squatting. Here's what I'd do. Just ask for a few thousand dollars. It's not enough to piss off the buyer, or to convince him to send lawyers to take the domain by force.
I know someone here in Chapel Hill, NC who realized how slow the South was picking up on the web. He bought several domain names, of local businesses, and asked for $2,000 any time they asked for the domain. The amount was too low to bother with lawyers, so they just paid it. It's slimy, and I wouldn't do such a thing, but in this case, the guy's just being asked for his personal domain.
Well said. At 44 years old, I expect to work until 70, and I expect to pay higher Social Security taxes along the way. It's not good or bad policy, just reality.
There is only one thing that could help make a difference for most Americans - owning lot's of foreign investments that we could sell off for a while during crunch time. Unfortunately, we've become a debter nation, so that plain went to Hell in a hand basket.
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I think that's true of the Mac hardware, but I'll take Ubuntu over any recent Mac OS. I'd say the same thing of the iPhone - my T-Mobile G1 hardware sucks in comparison, but the Android OS is a fine competitor.
I think Dell loves to compare their products to Macs. Same features, at half the price.
I agree, though Apple naturally dropped the opportunity to really take on Microsoft. If Apple would simply allow their OS to run on generic PCs, Microsoft would have a true competitor. As is, all Microsoft has to do is change their look every so often, and they'll maintain their monopoly. Steve Jobs is extending this stupidity to the iPhone, which I predict will lose the market-share wars to Android over the next few years. It's Mac vs Windows 3.1 all over again.
Wikipedia has good article on the evolution of the term "geek." Often important issues are decided by the terms used by both sides to define the issue. For example, "pro-life" is used rather than "anti-abortion." Americans have a huge problem: we aren't learning enough science, math, and technology skills. This is especially true for our daughters. In other countries, like China and India, such skills are encouraged and respected.
The battle for the definition of the term "geek" is the same battle. If we want to put America back on track, we need to respect intelligence again, and push all our children to excel in learning science, math, and technology. Like it or not, "geek" is the label for all children who excel in these areas. If we can win the battle over the connotations of being a geek, it will be much easier to properly educate our kids.
"Computer geek"
"Can't spell geek without a double-E"
and so on...
I agree. The red-necks I went to school with in Stone Mountain Georgia may still think football and cheerleading are more important than math, science, and computer skills, but they can go suck my ever-hard wang. I've started a software company, own a nice boat, house, and car, while working from home and enjoying the country club. And, I married a brilliant woman with an MBA. Sweet revenge.
Academics seem to want to go against common usage and define "nerd" as someone truly interested in knowledge, and "geek" as someone without social skills. This is total BS. The term "computer geek" implies intelligence, and "Revenge of the Nerds" defined nerd as people without social skills.
Parent may be a nerd, and I hope he finds a way to start dating girls, but if he's posting semi-intelligent comments on slaskdot, he's also a huge geek, academics be damned. He should be proud to be a geek, and should work on those social skills.
Easy. If we accept "soul" means "consciousness", then naturally we can agree that we are both conscious, self-aware, and that there's something going on here which is so-far unexplained by science. This is no proof of a Christian "soul", but it is strong evidence of something extremely important, if we could just figure out what.
Grr. Parent is about as on-topic as most posts below...
The EFF has been suing AT&T for piping all our location information directly to the NSA, while Bush has claimed it to be perfectly legal. Can we stay on topic for a change? This is important.
In Cincinati, I saw many yard signs advertising this adultery web site. Gotta hate yard spam.
Suspend to RAM works out-of-the-box on my Dell Inspiron 9400, in Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04). I've found that the long-term-support releases are far more likely to support suspend and other commonly difficult features to get working.
For the first time ever, I'm strongly considering sticking with my old version of Ubuntu (8.04) until the next long-term support version. Are there any great features in 8.10 that would cause you to recommending the upgrade? Thanks.
Yep, it's a damned fine phone. If it were also an open platform, it'd dominate forever. I guess I should be happy that Apple's too dumb to turn their dominance into a Microsoft-like monopoly. I'm pretty confident that Google Android will win out in the end, simply because it is a free open platform. Apple on the other hand, continues to insist on owning all the software and hardware.
The iPhone has that huge display, way better than the G1, and it's super thin, like a razor. I've owned an iPhone and now own a G1, so I'm no Apple fan, but the iPhone is simply better hardware.
There are good reasons iPhone is on top. However, I'm putting my money in Andriod phones from now on. The software is pretty comparable from an average user point of view, and better for developers.
My sister-in-law worked for a huge company, one very similar to Dilbert's employer. She was at least partly, if not fully, in charge of the decision to reject all open-source software. I had a long debate with her on this topic, but she's completely unwilling to move. She firmly believes software is worth no more than what you pay for it, and those promoting free software are dangerous socialists, anti-free-market crusaders trying to tear down America.
I've also tried to convince her over the years that George Bush is a poor president, who has in fact made some mistakes. While she's a super-bright energetic well educated woman, my sister-in-law is incapable of thinking any republican president has ever done any wrong.
I think people like my sister-in-law are firmly planted in important corporate positions throughout our country, insuring that Dilbert-Land will continue unimpeded. To them, free-as-in-speech is a silly concept for children. You give it lip-service, but never put any money there! What counts is free-as-in-market. These free-as-in-speech programmers are just more Vietnam protesting nit-wits who will ruin the country.
There's much disinformation below, so I'm posting way up here to save you time. First, magnetic poll reversal is a chaotic process. It's simply not predictable, and these 2012 guys are buffoons. Second, poll reversal will not cause electronics to blow up due to a rapid change in magnetic fields - the change will be far too slow and weak in strength. It takes a thousand years or more for a pole reversal. However, during that time will likely be a short period of little or no magnetic field, and we will be showered with far higher radiation from the Sun, causing us to design radiation tolerant electronics and likely increasing cancer rates. Given all the other way's humanity is currently trying to kill itself, magnetic pole reversal shouldn't even be on our radar.
However, it's still a fun topic for discussion. There's a spot in the Atlantic called the South Atlantic Anomaly, with is viewed by many to be a new North Pole trying to form. If it breaks through, we're in for a few very interesting thousand years or so.
As uncle poster points out, oil isn't used in America to generate electricity, so it helps reduce oil imports dramatically as well. I wouldn't count "green" power out. Enhanced geothermal, for example, could provide all the power we need, just not as cheaply as dirty coal. If we're willing to pay around $0.20/KWh, rather than $0.10/KWh, there are many ways to provide green alternative energy, including solar, geothermal, wind, and nuclear. Solar alone is projected to reach 23GW/year of production capacity, or around 10 nuclear plant equivalents per year, and rising exponentially. Building a HVDC power grid has already been done in Brazil... imagine Brazil leading the US in such a useful technology, and they built it in 1987!
Thanks for the info. However, going plug-in-hybrid, or as GM calls the Volt, E-REV, does several wonderful things. First, it shifts energy to domestic supplies, rather than foreign oil. It allows us to use coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, or whatever the heck we like for power. By my calculations, at $4/gal gas, you save somewhere around $5K if you do most of your driving on electric power for 100K miles. That pays for the battery. With modern battery technology, there's also little reason to ever drive a wimpy powered car again. I think GM is probably right: by 2020, around half of new cars will be electric or hybrid.
That alone would reduce our oil imports 20-30%. Combined with Picken's push for wind and natural gas, as well as the exponential explosion in other alternative energy technologies, plug-in-hybrids begin to look like a compelling part of the solution.
Yes, I agree (I am OP). Democrats are also to blame, like that guy with $200K cash in his freezer who just got re-elected... if not in jail, he should certainly be kicked out of the party. However, this specific need for secret communication seems particularly republican, and I feel it is due to Nixon getting caught.
I respect your opinion on this issue, though I don't agree. Sarah Palin has done the exact same thing that Bush did - hide governing related communications on non-government servers. I believe this is illegal. I also think republicans have been doing this since Nixon got caught with tapes. Rather than reform their integrity, they reformed their communication systems to illegally hide their activities. Sarah Palin is scary, and Anonymous is doing us a favor. Only the light of scrutiny will reform our government.
I got a good laugh out of that... they're sicking the "Secret Service" on Anonymous... guys with dark glasses and big guns. Yeah, those guys will track down these hackers pronto! NOT!
I'm fighting the urge to post an e-mail of an enemy, claiming it's a tip that should be followed. The only problem is, I don't hate anyone that much... too bad! It would have been fun. Any of you guys up for some random dead-end lead generation, just for some good-old immature back-to-college-like hacks? Here, I'll start: I'm 100% sure this is the A-hole who gave Anonymous Sarah's password. She's an insider with confidential info: roseanne.hughes@alaska.gov.
Of course, they could just combine this with the cell-phone data they already track... I mean don't track.
No. This isn't even close to EEStor's claimed energy density. I personally put EEStor in the BS bucket a long time ago, but last week I found some very interesting news on wikipedia's EEStor page: competitors. It seems that several companies now have patents on materials they claim are similar in energy density to EEStor's claims. We may not get ultra-cheap batteries for electric cars any time soon, but at least the raw science seems to be real.
I completely agree. My first job as a programmer was while in high school, in 1981, a bit after your first. I programmed a PDP-11/45 in Fortran IV, and thought I was in heaven. I did a log of wirewrap, when into chip design, and then into chip design software, where I've been happy since about 1989.
I work to avoid my weaknesses, like managing people, and found a spot where I'm happy to have my talents exploited fully. It turns out, much to my surprise, that I like sales as well, and have some talent for cold-calls. My experience as a consultant was humbling, and taught me to strive to know and avoid my own limitations. Finding the right team to work with is the hardest part of the game, though at them moment, I'm feeling pretty good in that department.
This guy poses a legit question, and one that often poses ethical issues. Not only have I done a bit of moonlighting in my past, but I've always encouraged my best programmers to do a bit on the side. Without sampling that grass on the other side of the fence, those talented programmers I train are likely to hop over.
As an old programmer (I'm 44), I've got a few stories. When I worked for David Burns at HP, my previous company, National Semiconductor, needed my help badly. The work David assigned was mind-numbingly boring, and the LM628/LM629 (motor controllers) I'd worked on at National were in serious trouble without me, and frankly they were fun (my old boss, David Squires, was about the best ever). I asked Mr Burns if I could do the project as a favor to old friends at National, and he said it was up for the HP *Board of Directors* to decide! So, if HP/Burns was going to be a PITA, without any pangs of lack of integrity, I stopped asking Burns what I could or could not do.
I helped National push the LM628/LM629 into the market. Then, I quit working for Burns. As a consultant for a while, I wrote the original Simple Switcher design code (National did most of the work - bench validation). If you haven't heard of this line of products, you obviously aren't in power electronics. I enjoyed the consulting, but basically I sucked. I have this terrible desire to call stupid people stupid. It's *really* bad for consultants. So, now I'm CTO of a small company I founded, and I can't complain. Again, when my programmers feel the need for some moonlighting, I'm fully supportive. I've never lost a good one because of it.
NAT traversal is the death of SIP, and SIP is the worst thing that ever happened to VoIP. Standards are great so long as they're not incredibly stupid and impossible to use. There should be a concerted effort to switch to something less stupid, like IAX2.
Since this is his actual name, it's technically not domain squatting. Here's what I'd do. Just ask for a few thousand dollars. It's not enough to piss off the buyer, or to convince him to send lawyers to take the domain by force.
I know someone here in Chapel Hill, NC who realized how slow the South was picking up on the web. He bought several domain names, of local businesses, and asked for $2,000 any time they asked for the domain. The amount was too low to bother with lawyers, so they just paid it. It's slimy, and I wouldn't do such a thing, but in this case, the guy's just being asked for his personal domain.
Here's my favorite domain related suit. This guy's name is Nissan, and so is his business.
Well said. At 44 years old, I expect to work until 70, and I expect to pay higher Social Security taxes along the way. It's not good or bad policy, just reality.
There is only one thing that could help make a difference for most Americans - owning lot's of foreign investments that we could sell off for a while during crunch time. Unfortunately, we've become a debter nation, so that plain went to Hell in a hand basket.