The point about giving is that the recipient should actually (ideally) want the item they receive. It shouldn't be used as a platform for promoting your own opinions of what you think that person should have, and presuming that you know better than they do what software they should use.
While giving tech is never the best gift if the individual in question is not technically orientated (and if they are, they're perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what free stuff to d/l), the OP should at least demonstrate some degree of sensitivity and make the gift relevant to each of the recipients. Otherwise you might as well just give each of them a box of batteries as a socking filler - utilitarian, completely impersonal, cheap and more likely to get used than any strange software.
Your inability to be able to differentiate between the two situations is mind numbing.
You don't seem to have much of a clue about how the real world works. As soon as a job can be computerised and automated, that's what happens. It's then up to the machine to fulfill its inflexible and pre-programmed function - no commonsense necessary.
if you want an example, take speed cameras (or "safety cameras" as we're told to call them now). They clock your car, flag an offence, issue a fixed penalty notice and then go on to the next one. No leeway, no distinction whether it was you speeding or the vehicle overtaking you (which is neatly cropped out of the "evidence" photo for "privacy" reasons).
As another example - clocking on/off. Either you're on time or you aren't. No saying "sorry boss, there was some faulty traffic lights" or "the train was delayed". it's the same pattern with any automated system, it diminshes the people who are subjected to it's oversight.
In this particular case the attributes the system flags are arbitrary (for example, consider an international conference call between branches of the same company. Should the employees at the remote end be subject to the etiquette and customs of one locations? no, of course not - but this sort of system would enforce that.
If you're so in favour of this sort of system I would laugh long and hard if the first time you encountered it was when an Arab employer started to penalise its foreign workers who didn't comply with their dress codes and behavioural standards. Don't imagine everything will be set up to fit your view of the world.
then we would have expected the neutrino burst from the 1987a supernova to arrive months, rather than hours, before the light came.
In the experiment, the neutrinos traveled through rock, not the vacuum of space. Maybe they can only exhibit their FTL behaviour when travelling through dense material (and no, don't ask me to explain how/why - I just do the ideas) or within gravity fields.
How much rock did the supernova neutrinos travel through?
Nonsense. C is simple and, while some smart programmers think it's necessary to over-use the preprocessor (even the Linux kernel is sometimes guilty), it's a language you can learn once and apply productively for the rest of your life.
Contrast this with the ten dozen other fly-by-night half-baked languages which have flooded the marketplace over the past year.
This clearly shows you simply don't understand the problem. A good programmer can (and does) write well structured, clean, DOCUMENTED and maintainable product in any language. The issue has nothing to do with the language used and everything to do with lack of discipline, inexperience and a slapdash and unprofessional attitude. Usually the worst programmers are the ones who think that once the code is written and compiles clean, the job is done. For most of these people there is little hope of educating them as they are incapable of seeing the bigger picture.
There are lots of people coming and going in care homes. The elderly are easy prey for "losing" things and are in no position to make accusations. Whatever you get, make sure it's strongly attached to something immovable.
Yes, but that metadata (name, size, creation/modification etc.) are attributes held outside of the file. The file itself is just pure data and I believe should stay that way.
As soon as you start defining a format for files, you run into trouble when someone wants to add another another feature/attrib. Do you maintain backwards compatability with "old" file formats, do you need to create a new format and go through a standards definition process?
Then you find that different people interpret the file-attributes in different ways. Even if there are standards (which Microsoft is so, so wonderfully good at adhering to, they never add their own proprietary extensions at all;)) they will get buggy implementations that will need fixing or working around.
But now it looks like I cannot afford them and will have to look into buying refurbished hdds.
Why ever not. Unless your income has dropped dramatically a 1TB or 2TB disk is no less affordable today than it was a year or two ago. All that's happened is that prices have gone BACK to the levels they were at some point in the past. If they were affordable then, they still are today.
A file is essentially just a collection of data - no more and no less. To try and add attributes to that makes little sense and seems as futile as trying to say that each collection of molecules should have a tag saying what it is, who it belongs to and what it's for. Sure, you can add abstractions and structure on top of the basic form, but when you do that you are adding a layer - not redefining the basic building block.
So your argument is that you should pay for it because you can afford to. Not because you have costed the benefits or one solution or another, but simply to "reward" RH because your company is in a position to pay.
On that basis your CIO is making the right decision for the company and its shareholders.
If you want a manned mission the whole spacecraft has to be built to a higher standard of safety. That makes it heavier and more expensive. If you can get the fuel that would be needed for most of the mission into orbit (that's the hardest part) in a cheaper, lighter, unmanned rocket that's a more efficient use of resources. Once the fuel is up, providing it stays up and doesn't leak away - a hard task with liquid H2 - then you only need the expensive craft to be capable of lifting itself to meet the fuel dump. That makes the overall cost a lot less. (It also means you have some margin built in. If one of your fuel "tankers" fails in flight, you haven't lost the whole mission - you can just launch another one to replace it before the precious cargo is sent up).
Quite right. A more reliable interview technique would be to fill you up with coffee and see how long you hold out before needing a break. That's the best way to get agreements in meeting: out-bladder everyone else there. By the end, they'll agree to anything just to get to the bathroom.
Yes, while this sort of screening can identify some incredibly bright individuals, that's a secondary quality. Much more important for a company is the knowledge that its employees can be relied upon: both to deliver (and not flit, butterfly-like, from once interesting looking idea to another - without ever finishing anything) what they've been told to do and act with the maturity needed to do stuff that they don't find interesting, but is needed for the company to flourish.
So a bunch of universities have got together and decided it would be a nice idea to let people play with some of their telescopes. They held a meeting in Madrid a couple of weeks ago and... that's it.
The website contains a lot of "will" and "going" but no "is" or "does", so personally I'll give it a year or two and see if it ever gets beyond a few meetings and some nice ideas. In the meantime, there's always the commercial outfits (e.g. GRAS, no association) that ARE actually connecting eyeballs with telescopes, via the web.
Clarke's book was Fountains of Paradise and it was set (so Wiki says) in the 22nd century. I don't recall the passage you cite, but I'm sure you're right.
On a more philosophical point, I'd say that the difference between a prediction and a guess is that a prediction "shows the working" behind how the author arrived at the description of his/her future world. Just saying "in the year X we'll have <wonderful technology>" isn't really that helpful.
SF authors only remember (and publicise) their successes. They like to bury all their many, many failures - both things they predicted that didn't come to pass, and things we made for ourselves that they completely missed (computers, home PCs and the internet being prime examples).
Although books like Shockwave Rider described a fair implementation of the internet, it only managed it a short time before it actually arrived, so merely describing things that occur within 10 years don't really count as "SF predictions".
NASA isn't there to find extraterrestrial life, it's there to get funds to do exploration. On that basis, do you think it will be easier for them to finance a mission to Mars or one to some distant rock that nobody outside the scientific community has heard about, cares about or could find on a map?
If they fail to find life on Mars (despite the David Bowie song), they can recover by saying "we haven't failed, we just haven't succeeded YET". However if they "waste" billions on a mission to one of the more likely, but unpronounceable candidates, then "the public" will start asking questions about why they were looking there, when everybody knows Mars is a better bet.
NASA's main goal is to secure its own future. It won't achieve that by trying to spend money on unpopular things that taxpayers aren't prepared to fund.
His contributions to computing have been effecting us all for nigh on 40 years and that effect has been overwhelmingly beneficial. It's extremely likely (barring anything bad happening in 2038) that we will all continue to reap the benefit of DMR's existence for many decades to come.
If NASA do want this camera, they should be duty bound to follow through and restore it to the place they think it should be: on the Moon. If they're not willing to do that, and just want to piss the guy off, they don't have the moral authority to claim ownership.
Either it goes back to it's rightful resting place, or the guy who brought it back gets to keep it. Choose.
I expect that would be WIPO's goal. The idea that people give stuff away, particularly intellectual property, undermines their whole existence. That something could become a standard, ubiquitous and free is their worst nightmare and they probably feel that the web's success is their failure.
So you ask for a pay rise, almost certainly the response will be:
"well, we don't have the budget to do anything now, but I'll <ahem> make sure you are rewarded when you review comes round in X months time."
You're now in the worst possible situation. You've played your hand and got a commitment that almost certainly won't match the offer you have; either financially or in terms of commute, or wider opportunities in the new place. But it gets worse. You've also told your employer that you're willing to dump them - so you're now top of the list of people to sack - especially as the guy is at present training 2 more people (his replacements).
Also, the "I've got a better offer" is only a ploy you can use once. So if you do stay, you are unlikely to ever get the chance to bluff for another payrise - and you can bet that in years to come any above-average rise will get brought back into line with below-par awards in coming years.
Companies expect (or demand) it from their employees, but are incapable of showing any, themselves. It's not that companies are evil, it's just that an inanimate object or entity does not have feelings. If you ever anthropomorphise one you're making a mistake. They can only ever act for their own good - which may coincide with benefits for employees, but that's just a lucky side-effect.
While you can get, and sometimes do get decision-making employees who act for the benefit of their subordinates that's rarely done with the company's sanction. If that benevolence leads to improved employee performance, then that's nice for all concerned but you can't rely on the next guy in the job (as nice guys rarely last long) having the same enlightened attitude.
I'd say: get out now, while the offer still stands. You have no idea whether this new product will succeed or bomb and you can't owe you existing company anything (see anthropomorphising it, above). So go for the larger, more secure and more convenient option. If you still feel a pull towards your existing company, you could always moonlight for them!
Rather than make pie in the sky plans for moon missions or asteroid missions, how about a good, solid foundation of getting people the first 100 miles. Plan for that. Achieve that goal and THEN see about trying to get further out, based on an actual, sensible reason for going.
Will that be a return to turbo-props and a wooden frame.
What NASA appear to be saying is that they've made no significant progress in spacecraft or engine design over the past 40 years.
If all they've done is stagnate, then the NEXT iteration after that can only be the start of the slide backwards.
(Note to self: start learning to ride a horse and hunt with a bow.)
Slashdot Mirror
The point about giving is that the recipient should actually (ideally) want the item they receive. It shouldn't be used as a platform for promoting your own opinions of what you think that person should have, and presuming that you know better than they do what software they should use.
While giving tech is never the best gift if the individual in question is not technically orientated (and if they are, they're perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what free stuff to d/l), the OP should at least demonstrate some degree of sensitivity and make the gift relevant to each of the recipients. Otherwise you might as well just give each of them a box of batteries as a socking filler - utilitarian, completely impersonal, cheap and more likely to get used than any strange software.
Your inability to be able to differentiate between the two situations is mind numbing.
You don't seem to have much of a clue about how the real world works. As soon as a job can be computerised and automated, that's what happens. It's then up to the machine to fulfill its inflexible and pre-programmed function - no commonsense necessary.
if you want an example, take speed cameras (or "safety cameras" as we're told to call them now). They clock your car, flag an offence, issue a fixed penalty notice and then go on to the next one. No leeway, no distinction whether it was you speeding or the vehicle overtaking you (which is neatly cropped out of the "evidence" photo for "privacy" reasons).
As another example - clocking on/off. Either you're on time or you aren't. No saying "sorry boss, there was some faulty traffic lights" or "the train was delayed". it's the same pattern with any automated system, it diminshes the people who are subjected to it's oversight.
In this particular case the attributes the system flags are arbitrary (for example, consider an international conference call between branches of the same company. Should the employees at the remote end be subject to the etiquette and customs of one locations? no, of course not - but this sort of system would enforce that.
If you're so in favour of this sort of system I would laugh long and hard if the first time you encountered it was when an Arab employer started to penalise its foreign workers who didn't comply with their dress codes and behavioural standards. Don't imagine everything will be set up to fit your view of the world.
it's potentially useful for insulation, battery electrodes
Sounds like a neat trick if you can do it.
then we would have expected the neutrino burst from the 1987a supernova to arrive months, rather than hours, before the light came.
In the experiment, the neutrinos traveled through rock, not the vacuum of space. Maybe they can only exhibit their FTL behaviour when travelling through dense material (and no, don't ask me to explain how/why - I just do the ideas) or within gravity fields.
How much rock did the supernova neutrinos travel through?
So it's "bad behaviour" to wear dark glasses during a videoconference. Is it also "bad behaviour" to bring your guide-dog into the v/c, too?
A lot of these attributes seem to be culturally insensitive and would be prohibited in many workplaces as being discriminatory
Nonsense. C is simple and, while some smart programmers think it's necessary to over-use the preprocessor (even the Linux kernel is sometimes guilty), it's a language you can learn once and apply productively for the rest of your life.
Contrast this with the ten dozen other fly-by-night half-baked languages which have flooded the marketplace over the past year.
This clearly shows you simply don't understand the problem. A good programmer can (and does) write well structured, clean, DOCUMENTED and maintainable product in any language. The issue has nothing to do with the language used and everything to do with lack of discipline, inexperience and a slapdash and unprofessional attitude. Usually the worst programmers are the ones who think that once the code is written and compiles clean, the job is done. For most of these people there is little hope of educating them as they are incapable of seeing the bigger picture.
There are lots of people coming and going in care homes. The elderly are easy prey for "losing" things and are in no position to make accusations. Whatever you get, make sure it's strongly attached to something immovable.
As soon as you start defining a format for files, you run into trouble when someone wants to add another another feature/attrib. Do you maintain backwards compatability with "old" file formats, do you need to create a new format and go through a standards definition process?
Then you find that different people interpret the file-attributes in different ways. Even if there are standards (which Microsoft is so, so wonderfully good at adhering to, they never add their own proprietary extensions at all ;)) they will get buggy implementations that will need fixing or working around.
But now it looks like I cannot afford them and will have to look into buying refurbished hdds.
Why ever not. Unless your income has dropped dramatically a 1TB or 2TB disk is no less affordable today than it was a year or two ago. All that's happened is that prices have gone BACK to the levels they were at some point in the past. If they were affordable then, they still are today.
A file is essentially just a collection of data - no more and no less. To try and add attributes to that makes little sense and seems as futile as trying to say that each collection of molecules should have a tag saying what it is, who it belongs to and what it's for. Sure, you can add abstractions and structure on top of the basic form, but when you do that you are adding a layer - not redefining the basic building block.
We are not those people. We have money.
So your argument is that you should pay for it because you can afford to. Not because you have costed the benefits or one solution or another, but simply to "reward" RH because your company is in a position to pay.
On that basis your CIO is making the right decision for the company and its shareholders.
If you want a manned mission the whole spacecraft has to be built to a higher standard of safety. That makes it heavier and more expensive. If you can get the fuel that would be needed for most of the mission into orbit (that's the hardest part) in a cheaper, lighter, unmanned rocket that's a more efficient use of resources. Once the fuel is up, providing it stays up and doesn't leak away - a hard task with liquid H2 - then you only need the expensive craft to be capable of lifting itself to meet the fuel dump. That makes the overall cost a lot less. (It also means you have some margin built in. If one of your fuel "tankers" fails in flight, you haven't lost the whole mission - you can just launch another one to replace it before the precious cargo is sent up).
Quite right. A more reliable interview technique would be to fill you up with coffee and see how long you hold out before needing a break. That's the best way to get agreements in meeting: out-bladder everyone else there. By the end, they'll agree to anything just to get to the bathroom.
Yes, while this sort of screening can identify some incredibly bright individuals, that's a secondary quality. Much more important for a company is the knowledge that its employees can be relied upon: both to deliver (and not flit, butterfly-like, from once interesting looking idea to another - without ever finishing anything) what they've been told to do and act with the maturity needed to do stuff that they don't find interesting, but is needed for the company to flourish.
So a bunch of universities have got together and decided it would be a nice idea to let people play with some of their telescopes. They held a meeting in Madrid a couple of weeks ago and ... that's it.
The website contains a lot of "will" and "going" but no "is" or "does", so personally I'll give it a year or two and see if it ever gets beyond a few meetings and some nice ideas. In the meantime, there's always the commercial outfits (e.g. GRAS, no association) that ARE actually connecting eyeballs with telescopes, via the web.
On a more philosophical point, I'd say that the difference between a prediction and a guess is that a prediction "shows the working" behind how the author arrived at the description of his/her future world. Just saying "in the year X we'll have <wonderful technology>" isn't really that helpful.
Although books like Shockwave Rider described a fair implementation of the internet, it only managed it a short time before it actually arrived, so merely describing things that occur within 10 years don't really count as "SF predictions".
NASA isn't there to find extraterrestrial life, it's there to get funds to do exploration. On that basis, do you think it will be easier for them to finance a mission to Mars or one to some distant rock that nobody outside the scientific community has heard about, cares about or could find on a map?
If they fail to find life on Mars (despite the David Bowie song), they can recover by saying "we haven't failed, we just haven't succeeded YET". However if they "waste" billions on a mission to one of the more likely, but unpronounceable candidates, then "the public" will start asking questions about why they were looking there, when everybody knows Mars is a better bet.
NASA's main goal is to secure its own future. It won't achieve that by trying to spend money on unpopular things that taxpayers aren't prepared to fund.
Apart from personal loss.
His contributions to computing have been effecting us all for nigh on 40 years and that effect has been overwhelmingly beneficial. It's extremely likely (barring anything bad happening in 2038) that we will all continue to reap the benefit of DMR's existence for many decades to come.
Either it goes back to it's rightful resting place, or the guy who brought it back gets to keep it. Choose.
web might not have grown quite so popular
I expect that would be WIPO's goal. The idea that people give stuff away, particularly intellectual property, undermines their whole existence. That something could become a standard, ubiquitous and free is their worst nightmare and they probably feel that the web's success is their failure.
"well, we don't have the budget to do anything now, but I'll <ahem> make sure you are rewarded when you review comes round in X months time."
You're now in the worst possible situation. You've played your hand and got a commitment that almost certainly won't match the offer you have; either financially or in terms of commute, or wider opportunities in the new place. But it gets worse. You've also told your employer that you're willing to dump them - so you're now top of the list of people to sack - especially as the guy is at present training 2 more people (his replacements).
Also, the "I've got a better offer" is only a ploy you can use once. So if you do stay, you are unlikely to ever get the chance to bluff for another payrise - and you can bet that in years to come any above-average rise will get brought back into line with below-par awards in coming years.
Companies expect (or demand) it from their employees, but are incapable of showing any, themselves. It's not that companies are evil, it's just that an inanimate object or entity does not have feelings. If you ever anthropomorphise one you're making a mistake. They can only ever act for their own good - which may coincide with benefits for employees, but that's just a lucky side-effect.
While you can get, and sometimes do get decision-making employees who act for the benefit of their subordinates that's rarely done with the company's sanction. If that benevolence leads to improved employee performance, then that's nice for all concerned but you can't rely on the next guy in the job (as nice guys rarely last long) having the same enlightened attitude.
I'd say: get out now, while the offer still stands. You have no idea whether this new product will succeed or bomb and you can't owe you existing company anything (see anthropomorphising it, above). So go for the larger, more secure and more convenient option. If you still feel a pull towards your existing company, you could always moonlight for them!
Rather than make pie in the sky plans for moon missions or asteroid missions, how about a good, solid foundation of getting people the first 100 miles. Plan for that. Achieve that goal and THEN see about trying to get further out, based on an actual, sensible reason for going.
Every journey starts with a first step.
Will that be a return to turbo-props and a wooden frame.
What NASA appear to be saying is that they've made no significant progress in spacecraft or engine design over the past 40 years.
If all they've done is stagnate, then the NEXT iteration after that can only be the start of the slide backwards.
(Note to self: start learning to ride a horse and hunt with a bow.)