Seriously, having one email address is just as dumb as only having one front-door key. If you lose it you're screwed. Everybody with any sense or experience has more than one, a backup, a fallback. In fact the more email accounts you have the greater is your ability to tip the social media power in your favour, rather than the advertisers.
where do you get your information about the lifespan of these newer sets from
From direct personal observation. 3 * 20 y/o CRT TVs that went to the recycling centre in perfect working order, 2 LCD TVs that followed in the next 5 years. One that simply stopped working - the standard "2 second turn-off" which was not caused by bulging capacitors, but appeared to be a dead CCFL or two and the other was a victim of video gaming (you know the sort: where players are supposed to pretend to throw controllers at the TV screen - and sometimes accidentally do).
It's not scientifically rigorous but since this is the internet it's more than enough to form an opinion from. Especially when backed up by evidence from friends, family and colleagues who tell similar stories of touch-me-and-I-break fragility in screens that break when moved, banged, tipped over or just when they feel like it.
This summary seems to be a rather misleading collection of confused data.
So far as electronics goes, the main board is pretty much the same. The power supply is less beefy, due to not having to provide an EHT supply, though there is an inverter which to some extent takes its place. The CRT is mostly just glass - lots and lots of glass so that doesn't add much to the electronics waste and may have just as many toxic chemicals in it as the CCFLs and TFT of a flat-screen TV.
So, on balance I doubt that there's much in it on a unit-by-unit basis. One thing that does seem to me is that CRT TVs last longer than LCD ones. Our CRTs were bought in the early 90s and only tossed when they were replaced - still working. However, the lifespan of an LCD TV doesn't appear to be much longer than a few years, driven often by the limited number of hours that the CCFLs run for, or the fragility of the screens. Since they're not economic to repair, an LCD TV becomes waste much sooner than a CRT TV ever did.
It's fairly obvious what cats want. They want their servants to understand their needs and fulfill their wishes before they have realised what they want, themselves. If you're not doing this, the fault is yours, not theirs. Maybe you're mixed up about who is in charge in that relationship?
While those discoveries and innovations are nice, they were simply side effects of the primary intention, so can't really be used as a justification for it. Merely as a rationalisation after the fact (which is exactly what they ARE being used for). If the space programme had declared "we are going to do all these space-y things AND develop the following new technologies that will have some real benefits" then that's a different goal. But they didn't.
What we will never know is what would have happened if the same money, talent, resources and political will had been used in directed towards stated, non-space related problems. Since we won't ever know, there's little point in speculating.
<sadly my suspicion is that it would just have been used for another pointless war, so for that reason alone the space programme was probably a good thing>
The one question that should be asked is "If we knew back when it all started, how much (or little) usable science and benefit to humanity would come out of the programme, would we have taken the same route?" But since we can't go back and ask that, the question is moot - as is trying to retroactively justify the programme on the back of some random discoveries and development it happened to make.
Most companies want employees who are cheap, easily coerced into working late/weekends and who won't answer back or rock the boat. It helps if they feel insecure about the work environment, don't know their rights and haven't built up enough savings that a period "on the bench" would be financially ruinous to them.
That neatly describes new, young, callow graduates coming into their first job. It doesn't describe many people over 35 with family commitments, a good network of professional contacts and an impressive array of successes under their belts. Hence, companies are not very likely to rate "experience" highly as it tends to make employees who will question decisions, undermine authority with "suggestions", know what their employment record is worth and have developed the ability to promote their skills.
Never mind that experienced people can produce better results. The quality of their product is ultimately defined by the quality of the design decisions - good implementations don't matter if the underlying basis of the product is rocky - either from a technical point of view or that it simply doesn't address any needs that would make it sell profitably. Companies would argue that it's better to have fast workers, doing 60 hour weeks with no time off and get a shaky design out the door quickly, since then the failure comes to light sooner. That the young workers also get paid a lot less helps too as it makes the failures even cheaper - though it does make them a lot more probable, too.
You have to be careful when you talk about "experience". Some people who have been working for 20 years genuinely have 20 years of experience. Others just have 1 years experience, that they've repeated 19 times. Typically where experience matters, it's not in the ins-and-outs of a particular product/language/method as most of these haven't been around for long enough to gain any impressive amount of experience in - and probably won't be around for long enough in the future to make it worthwhile, anyway.
Where experience counts is in the "soft" areas: recognising approaches that will or will not work, as they have or haven't in the past. Knowing where your limits are and knowing being able to tell when others need help (even if they don't have the experience, or are too vain to know or ask, themselves). And knowing whether an unknown problem will take a couple of days to solve or a couple of years.
The problem with experience is that those who have it frequently end up working for those who don't, but who display the "can do" attitude that attracts lots of employers - as opposed to the "that'll never work" which can be the voice of experience, itself. As there's nobody as unswervingly certain as the truly ignorant, the experienced people have learned not to try to "advise" these individuals as they will only resent it, feel threatened by it and become even more steadfast in their refusal to accept advice.
That the phone records also show you taking it to the courier's office. Explain that one to the police.
Better to tape it to your neighbour's car just before he/she/it goes out - providing they aren't similarly criminally minded!
And there's supposed to be free speech too. However, say things that people don't like and you will rapidly discover that is not true. Free markets only operate among the big players - and even then the freedom is really only a freedom to make their lawyers richer as they all sue each other over minor variations of insignificant products.
I think the publications in question thought that the Google News syndication was taking hits away from their own websites. That people were reading "their" articles on GN, without visiting the newspapers' own sites and benefiting from the advertising on them. So they were losing revenue from reduced numbers of visitors. Just how they would deal with the subsequent issue of people reading the articles from Google's cached content is debatable - but the same principle may apply there, too.
Whether this action amounts to punishment, or is a rational conclusion drawn from the demands of the newspapers will never be known. It could be both. However, the newspapers will soon learn a lesson: don't honk off the people who send all your visitors your way. Without Google websites have nothing.
It's China - which isn't a problem militarily now but certainly could be
I think you'll find that China has discovered a much easier and more profitable way to conquer the USA. A strategy they've been using successfully against America for 20+ years. They're simply buying the country.
Why bother risk getting nuked when you can simply accumulate debt from your adversary. At some point in the future the amount of american IOUs that China holds will exceed the GDP. After all, America bought Alaska off the Russians, so why shouldn't the chinese simply cash in their markers, for (say) everything west of the Rockies. Some might even be glad to see that bit go.
Say I dd if=/dev/random... a couple of GB into a file. Someone then assumes that file contains encrypted data and requires I enter the password to decrypt it. ISTM they've missed a step: namely proving that the data they have in front of them is, actually, encrypted in the first place. Once they can prove it's encrypted I would be willing to provide the password, but if it isn't encrypted and is just random 0's and 1's there is no possibility no matter how much I would want to, that I could provide a key to unlock it.
What would be worse is if I placed that block of data on someone else's machine. Come the time they get busted there is no possibility that the data could be decrypted and therefore the only option is jail - even though no crime has been commited since owning random data is not illegal.
it is always played out in the bodies of children and women,
This sounds like "I'm not worried for myself, but I am concerned of the effect <whatever> could have on other people". So men would transfer their fears, ignorance and paranoia onto concern for womem. Women would transfer it onto children (and presumably children would transfer it onto the family dog).
I'd guess that a significant proportion of people are simply resitant to change. Not because they necessarily like living in the dark, suffering from deficiency diseases or being socially isolatedd. It's just that they've learned to cope with those conditions (and more importantly: they recognise that everyone else is no better off than they are). When change happens, it's possible that other people will get to grips with it, or exploit it's value before they do - or they are shown up to be stupid by their lack of understanding - sooner than they do, leaving them at a disadvantage.
Since they can't admit their own fears, they express them as concern for others. Presumably people whom they consider inferior (physically, or in some other way) and can therefore show their compassion and concern, while still pursuing their intention of preventing other people from gaining an advantage over themselves.
No, you're completely wrong there. It sounds like you've very really worked with any true professionals. A professional knows that the single top priority is to ensure that those who need to know, have access tot he information they need. They make time to ensure that everything is written down and that the other team members know where - and how to execute the procedures they've written.
People who don't do this are NOT acting professionally. They usually have poor self-discipline and even worse time management skills (but will spend half a day chasing a trivial bug, that nobody cares about because that's "fun") and don't know how to prioritise the "fires", or can even distinguish the important ones from the irrelevant. They waste so much time because they have no clue about how to delegate all the stuff they have documented, to the people who could do it instead of them.
The true mark of a professional is someone who gets all their work done in a 40 hour week - not someone who works 60 and spends half of that time bleating about how busy they are. When they say "busy" they simply mean "disorganised".
I don't think so. I think a lot of the time the techies get caught up in their own self-image. They are often quite impressionable types and see techies in films and on TV - which almost always involves a lone uber-geek who single-handedy runs a billion $$ operation. Just like cops watch cop shows and "learn" how to behave from them, so it is with techies: they try to emulate what they see on TV or in films in some delusional idea that the programme shows how people think they *should* behave. Basically, they're just acting out their own fantasies. It's quite sad to watch as they are so obviously completely out of their depth - and end up utterly overwhelmed by it all.
The solution is a degree of trust and the maturity to realise that you won't get thrown out on your ear if you are delivering the goods and you're good at your job. You don't need to be a superhero - and you almost certainly aren't. Especially if you're regularly working more than 40 hours a week, the chances are a large proportion of those extra hours are spent fixing screwups caused by poor quality decisions or mistakes; made through tiredness.
Sure, in some places I've done the work of 3 people (though confidentiality prevents me from naming the other two), but I've done that within the bounds of a normal working week. The key is to realise that half the stuff you're asked to do is unnecessary or the result of chinese-whispers. Once you get back to the source and actually talk to the people involved I often find that what has filtered through to me via the chain of command is nothing like what they actually need, wanted or asked for.
Add to that the problem when people are judged by the quality of product (code) they produce. When that quality is measured solely by the other members of their "team" (and by team, I mean direct competitors for promotions, pay rises, plum assignments, cushy training courses, recognition and the corner cubicle) you will very soon have a war on your hands.
You find a bug in MY code - I'll find two in yours. You criticise my variable naming style, I'll tear apart your class design choices. You cause me to work late on a friday night, I'll make you come in at the weekend.
Alternatively, you can get the opposite: I'll scratch your back....
Code reviews are all very well when there's an infinite amount of time and no pressure to deliver, but today? No ore.
holy crap, you've "wasted" 25% of your standard 40 hour work week
Few people have the luxury to spend 100% of their work-time writing code. They have other duties, such as attending meetings, answering email/administrivia, office compliance (timesheets etc.) reporting progress and updating project documentation, budgets, timescales and a horde of other non-core, but required responsibilities, such as inputting to the next project's design, tracking bugs in previous work and keeping up to date with developments.
Once all of those are taken care of, you're lucky to spend 50% of your working time in front of a screen developing code. Once you require people to do code reviews, then not only do you have all the overheads you mention for THEM to review YOUR code, but you have the reciprocal overheads of YOU reviewing THEIR code. Add on to that, that one single reviewer is not enough - like having 2 clocks: which one is correct?, you need a third leg for the stool, so add another 10 unproductive hours a week.
Bingo! Your 20 productive hours have now become 0. Although by making all your developers too busy with distractions to produce any code, I suppose you do remove the need for code reviews.
Slashdot Mirror
used for email and other essential services
Seriously, having one email address is just as dumb as only having one front-door key. If you lose it you're screwed. Everybody with any sense or experience has more than one, a backup, a fallback. In fact the more email accounts you have the greater is your ability to tip the social media power in your favour, rather than the advertisers.
where do you get your information about the lifespan of these newer sets from
From direct personal observation. 3 * 20 y/o CRT TVs that went to the recycling centre in perfect working order, 2 LCD TVs that followed in the next 5 years. One that simply stopped working - the standard "2 second turn-off" which was not caused by bulging capacitors, but appeared to be a dead CCFL or two and the other was a victim of video gaming (you know the sort: where players are supposed to pretend to throw controllers at the TV screen - and sometimes accidentally do).
It's not scientifically rigorous but since this is the internet it's more than enough to form an opinion from. Especially when backed up by evidence from friends, family and colleagues who tell similar stories of touch-me-and-I-break fragility in screens that break when moved, banged, tipped over or just when they feel like it.
How much is that in football fields?
it's 12 square buses, or 3.1 olympic sized swimming pools - though I don't know how many of them you'd have to lay end-to-end to get to the moon.
So far as electronics goes, the main board is pretty much the same. The power supply is less beefy, due to not having to provide an EHT supply, though there is an inverter which to some extent takes its place. The CRT is mostly just glass - lots and lots of glass so that doesn't add much to the electronics waste and may have just as many toxic chemicals in it as the CCFLs and TFT of a flat-screen TV.
So, on balance I doubt that there's much in it on a unit-by-unit basis. One thing that does seem to me is that CRT TVs last longer than LCD ones. Our CRTs were bought in the early 90s and only tossed when they were replaced - still working. However, the lifespan of an LCD TV doesn't appear to be much longer than a few years, driven often by the limited number of hours that the CCFLs run for, or the fragility of the screens. Since they're not economic to repair, an LCD TV becomes waste much sooner than a CRT TV ever did.
Someone's found the universe's plug-hole. The only question is: does the water go down it clockwise or anticlockwise?
I have a vague memory of Sun producing an NFS accelerator about 20 years ago. This worked by caching remote file data in non-volatile memory.
It's fairly obvious what cats want. They want their servants to understand their needs and fulfill their wishes before they have realised what they want, themselves. If you're not doing this, the fault is yours, not theirs. Maybe you're mixed up about who is in charge in that relationship?
I'd post a link to Amazon..... but I'd rather you buy a copy from your local independent bookshop
Who will, in turn merely place an order with Amazon and charge you a premium for your laziness.
You can't run an empire with no gold
Empires are run off the gold of the subjugated peoples. That's the main reason for wanting them.
What we will never know is what would have happened if the same money, talent, resources and political will had been used in directed towards stated, non-space related problems. Since we won't ever know, there's little point in speculating.
<sadly my suspicion is that it would just have been used for another pointless war, so for that reason alone the space programme was probably a good thing>
The one question that should be asked is "If we knew back when it all started, how much (or little) usable science and benefit to humanity would come out of the programme, would we have taken the same route?" But since we can't go back and ask that, the question is moot - as is trying to retroactively justify the programme on the back of some random discoveries and development it happened to make.
That neatly describes new, young, callow graduates coming into their first job. It doesn't describe many people over 35 with family commitments, a good network of professional contacts and an impressive array of successes under their belts. Hence, companies are not very likely to rate "experience" highly as it tends to make employees who will question decisions, undermine authority with "suggestions", know what their employment record is worth and have developed the ability to promote their skills.
Never mind that experienced people can produce better results. The quality of their product is ultimately defined by the quality of the design decisions - good implementations don't matter if the underlying basis of the product is rocky - either from a technical point of view or that it simply doesn't address any needs that would make it sell profitably. Companies would argue that it's better to have fast workers, doing 60 hour weeks with no time off and get a shaky design out the door quickly, since then the failure comes to light sooner. That the young workers also get paid a lot less helps too as it makes the failures even cheaper - though it does make them a lot more probable, too.
Where experience counts is in the "soft" areas: recognising approaches that will or will not work, as they have or haven't in the past. Knowing where your limits are and knowing being able to tell when others need help (even if they don't have the experience, or are too vain to know or ask, themselves). And knowing whether an unknown problem will take a couple of days to solve or a couple of years.
The problem with experience is that those who have it frequently end up working for those who don't, but who display the "can do" attitude that attracts lots of employers - as opposed to the "that'll never work" which can be the voice of experience, itself. As there's nobody as unswervingly certain as the truly ignorant, the experienced people have learned not to try to "advise" these individuals as they will only resent it, feel threatened by it and become even more steadfast in their refusal to accept advice.
That the phone records also show you taking it to the courier's office. Explain that one to the police.
Better to tape it to your neighbour's car just before he/she/it goes out - providing they aren't similarly criminally minded!
And there's supposed to be free speech too. However, say things that people don't like and you will rapidly discover that is not true. Free markets only operate among the big players - and even then the freedom is really only a freedom to make their lawyers richer as they all sue each other over minor variations of insignificant products.
Whether this action amounts to punishment, or is a rational conclusion drawn from the demands of the newspapers will never be known. It could be both. However, the newspapers will soon learn a lesson: don't honk off the people who send all your visitors your way. Without Google websites have nothing.
It's China - which isn't a problem militarily now but certainly could be
I think you'll find that China has discovered a much easier and more profitable way to conquer the USA. A strategy they've been using successfully against America for 20+ years. They're simply buying the country.
Why bother risk getting nuked when you can simply accumulate debt from your adversary. At some point in the future the amount of american IOUs that China holds will exceed the GDP. After all, America bought Alaska off the Russians, so why shouldn't the chinese simply cash in their markers, for (say) everything west of the Rockies. Some might even be glad to see that bit go.
fronk (at) gmx.com Much appreciated
What would be worse is if I placed that block of data on someone else's machine. Come the time they get busted there is no possibility that the data could be decrypted and therefore the only option is jail - even though no crime has been commited since owning random data is not illegal.
it is always played out in the bodies of children and women,
This sounds like "I'm not worried for myself, but I am concerned of the effect <whatever> could have on other people". So men would transfer their fears, ignorance and paranoia onto concern for womem. Women would transfer it onto children (and presumably children would transfer it onto the family dog). I'd guess that a significant proportion of people are simply resitant to change. Not because they necessarily like living in the dark, suffering from deficiency diseases or being socially isolatedd. It's just that they've learned to cope with those conditions (and more importantly: they recognise that everyone else is no better off than they are). When change happens, it's possible that other people will get to grips with it, or exploit it's value before they do - or they are shown up to be stupid by their lack of understanding - sooner than they do, leaving them at a disadvantage.
Since they can't admit their own fears, they express them as concern for others. Presumably people whom they consider inferior (physically, or in some other way) and can therefore show their compassion and concern, while still pursuing their intention of preventing other people from gaining an advantage over themselves.
Currently the humidity in Cairo is 89%. I doubt that the solutions used in one, very dry location in another country would work there.
People who don't do this are NOT acting professionally. They usually have poor self-discipline and even worse time management skills (but will spend half a day chasing a trivial bug, that nobody cares about because that's "fun") and don't know how to prioritise the "fires", or can even distinguish the important ones from the irrelevant. They waste so much time because they have no clue about how to delegate all the stuff they have documented, to the people who could do it instead of them.
The true mark of a professional is someone who gets all their work done in a 40 hour week - not someone who works 60 and spends half of that time bleating about how busy they are. When they say "busy" they simply mean "disorganised".
I wonder if part of the culture of ' ...
I don't think so. I think a lot of the time the techies get caught up in their own self-image. They are often quite impressionable types and see techies in films and on TV - which almost always involves a lone uber-geek who single-handedy runs a billion $$ operation. Just like cops watch cop shows and "learn" how to behave from them, so it is with techies: they try to emulate what they see on TV or in films in some delusional idea that the programme shows how people think they *should* behave. Basically, they're just acting out their own fantasies. It's quite sad to watch as they are so obviously completely out of their depth - and end up utterly overwhelmed by it all.
Sure, in some places I've done the work of 3 people (though confidentiality prevents me from naming the other two), but I've done that within the bounds of a normal working week. The key is to realise that half the stuff you're asked to do is unnecessary or the result of chinese-whispers. Once you get back to the source and actually talk to the people involved I often find that what has filtered through to me via the chain of command is nothing like what they actually need, wanted or asked for.
You find a bug in MY code - I'll find two in yours. You criticise my variable naming style, I'll tear apart your class design choices. You cause me to work late on a friday night, I'll make you come in at the weekend.
Alternatively, you can get the opposite: I'll scratch your back ....
Code reviews are all very well when there's an infinite amount of time and no pressure to deliver, but today? No ore.
holy crap, you've "wasted" 25% of your standard 40 hour work week
Few people have the luxury to spend 100% of their work-time writing code. They have other duties, such as attending meetings, answering email/administrivia, office compliance (timesheets etc.) reporting progress and updating project documentation, budgets, timescales and a horde of other non-core, but required responsibilities, such as inputting to the next project's design, tracking bugs in previous work and keeping up to date with developments.
Once all of those are taken care of, you're lucky to spend 50% of your working time in front of a screen developing code. Once you require people to do code reviews, then not only do you have all the overheads you mention for THEM to review YOUR code, but you have the reciprocal overheads of YOU reviewing THEIR code. Add on to that, that one single reviewer is not enough - like having 2 clocks: which one is correct?, you need a third leg for the stool, so add another 10 unproductive hours a week.
Bingo! Your 20 productive hours have now become 0. Although by making all your developers too busy with distractions to produce any code, I suppose you do remove the need for code reviews.