...to be dropped off in Whereisthatistan in the middle of the night with a GPS, submachine gun and a million dollars in cash.
I am sure this is why army recruiters concetrate their efforts on the poorest neighborhoods: they are searching for folks with excellent credit to deliver a million dollars to Whereisthatistan. And if they can afford their own funeral expenses, then it's an added bonus.
Our past president smoked weed and only God knows how many laws our current president broke. Why should anyone care if some nuclear physicist at Los Alamos smoke pot? The man is obviously smart enough to control himself and obviously reliable enough to have been hired in the first place.
The other day at ShopRite I've seen a package of green bacon. I was worried it went bad (you know, "manager's special"). Silly me. Now I know green bacon comes from green fluorescent transgenic pigs, of course.
Russians developed several versions of the GLONASS satellite. The original model was designed for three years. The first satellite of this type was launched in 1992. GLONASS-M is designed for 7 years (first one launched in 2005), and GLONASS-K - for 12 years (to be launched in 2008).
Let's leave flexibility, weed, beer, and other such academic predicaments for the college, and make sure that kids in school learn as much as they can. Their minds are naturally flexible at their age, so no need to fill 'em with extra chaos.
Lately the quality of education in Russia has been dropping. This is a direct result of many newly-formed private schools deviating from the old guidelines in the most ridiculous ways. In most cases they introduce changes to their curricula and methodology for no reason other than to advertise their "individuality". These elite schools are a bad joke and have little to do with the Russian education system. And as far as individuality goes, schools should be more like the army and less like the college.
People have come to expect that the government is going to do that job for them...
Sweden and Russia and two good examples of how a government can achieve excellent results by actively developing and implementing common standards in education. Parents, who themselves grew up in the TV-watching culture, are unlikely to encourage their children to read. Only the government, through a well-planned national campaign, can break this cycle. The way to a better public education system is not throwing more money at the problem. I agree with you here. I think the answer is in further standardization of curricula, textbooks, teaching and testing methods, introduction of uniforms in public schools, and a better system for evaluating professional competency of the faculty. Higher salaries for teachers is where the extra money should go.
What makes Russia different from, say, Saudi Arabia, is the country's scientific and technological capacity. Unlike your common oil-based soap-bubble economy of the Middle East, Russia has other things going for it, like the aerospace and defense industries, to name the top two. It also helps that none of Russia's democracy-conscious neighbors can take its natural resources by force, like they did in Iraq and may try to do in Venezuela and Iran.
Russia is involved in alternate fuel research - perhaps not as actively as it should be, but, I am sure, this involvement will grow with time. Three projects immediately come to mind: Russia's increased attention to the nuclear power industry, continuing active participation in the ITER project, and the recent partnerships between Norilsk Nickel and several hydrogen fuel cell research companies in the US. One has to keep in mind that USSR was one of the leading countries in fuel cell research going as far back as forty years. One of the first hydrogen-air ECGs used in a car was developed and successfully tested by "Kvant" back in 1982. Today there is a significant resurgence of interest in fuel cell technologies in Russia.
Also, notice how Russia directs the biggest chunk of its defense spendings toward beefing up the Northern and Caspian fleets. Not to mention active military cooperation with Venezuela and Iran. So I don't think the Russian leadership is being particularly shortsighted. We can alway criticize them for not doing enough and not quickly enough. However, this is a matter of opinion - our opinion, which is clearly not based on the full knowledge of everything that's going on.
That's what they've been saying about Yeltsin: that he's gonna change the constitution and remain in power. Well, he didn't. And he didn't want to. Moreover, he resigned early and appointed Putin as acting President, thus assuring his own worry-free retirement. Yeltsin's approval ratings at the time were extremely low. Nevertheless, during the early presidential elections a few months later a vast majority of Russians voted for Yeltsin's appointee - Putin, even though most Russians knew nothing about the man.
Now Putin, with his near-80% approval rating (stop and think about this number for a moment), can probably chose his Labrador named Koni as the next presidential candidate, and Russians will vote for the dog. Why? Russians want stability. They are tired of revolutions, wars, and Perestroikas. Now they want a decent paycheck, a car, and a house. Don't misunderstand me, Russians have nothing against democracy, freedom of speech, and human rights. However, history taught them to be a bit more cynical and pragmatic than some of their Western neighbors.
"Give me liberty or give me death," said Patrick Henry. It just so happened that every time Russians adopted this approach, they got the shitty end of the stick. I can't blame them for playing it safe now. Today's Russia is a huge improvement over the bloody chaos of Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's era. Things in Russia will improve over time. And, since we are talking about Russia, it may take awhile. For everyone's benefit, Washington and London should keep their dirty snouts out of Russia's business and be happy with the gas and oil they are getting.
Maybe I am wrong, but I see no technical reason why an unlocked phone would not pick up the same network frequencies as the same model of the locked phone you got from your service provider. I am using an unlocked Motorola L6 with a Cingular SIM I took out of my old Cingular Motorola flip phone. Sound quality and reception are better with the new phone, even though it has an internal antenna.
I have a family plan with three phones under the same account. Calls between phones under the same account are free, but this is where I (and many other, as far as I can tell) get the most dropped calls. Seems to me that, when Cingular network get overloaded, these "free" calls are the first to drop. I doubt this is a coincidence.
With Microsoft bleeding billion into the Xbox, a billion into the Zune, and with Vista set up for failure...
Oh, please... That poor, poor Microsoft. What I find mildly amusing on Slashdot are all these young and idealistic IT "professionals" pretending to be cynical realists; talking about Linux this and Linux that, and about Microsoft's impeding demise (if not next week, then by Christmas for sure). These are the kind of boys and girls who get their first real job and think that somebody actually gives a rat's ass about their opinions and their wonderful programming skills.
It takes years in the IT field to finally realize that smart ideas and good products don't sell. What sells? Entirely random stuff. Some of it turns out to be not bad, but most of it is crap. Why does it sell? Because people running Microsoft and such know just a bit more about selling stuff than an entire army of twenty-year-old comp sci graduates. Reading all this excited chatter about how badly Windows suck make me feel like I am in a twilight zone. C'mon people, pull your heads out of your asses and try to understand that Windows is not a computer operating system. It IS the computer, as far as the vast majority of PC users understand it.
So current DRM schemes run into some issues with Vista. Big deal. The entertainment industry will comply with Microsoft, because Windows is how people watch their stupid movies and play their stupid MP3s. What about Linux, you ask? Well, most PC users think that linux is a kind of a wild cat with pointy ears.
They better have a state-of-the-art air purification system in this elevator. And make sure there are no Taco Bells anywhere within a 500km radius of the base station. I love Taco Bell and I have to ride an elevator to the 24th floor to work every day. I have first-hand knowledge of potential problems in such a situation.
Well, if all cars in that expensive class can go 200+ mph, still it would be very unusual to see one go almost 600mph. Here we have world's #2 supercomputer barely breaking 100tflops, and the world's #1 supercomputer pushing 300tflops. Quite a gap here.
I read "Troopers" right before seeing the movie. I found that it was a rather close adaptation: true to much of the detail and the spirit of the book.
Details, I think, they got a fair amount of and then some. As to the spirit of it, seems to me the spirit got lost under all the details. For me watching this movie was like watching "Jurassic Park" after reading Crichton's work: a hopeless disparity between a literary masterpiece and a Hollywood action flick.
Or next Thursday Russia will bomb everybody back into the Stone Age, when during lunch in his Kremlin office Putin spills some borscht on his nuclear suitcase.
Well, today it's 300-foot resolution and tomorrow they'll deploy some new electronic gadget and it'll be 3-foot resolution. By that time this cell phone-snooping practice will be established and in use by your friendly neighborhood Homeland Security folks, among others. So we are talking about a general principle here, not about the performance of specific hardware they have today for tracking cell phones. Who knows, they may already have equipment capable of higher accuracy, but they choose to keep it under wraps for now, until the method gets legally established and accepted by the public.
I am a senior Unix sysadmin for a large company with a huge and diverse IT infrastructure. Name OS type, version and patch level and there's a good chance we'll have an exact match. Obviously, it takes a huge IT organization to support this inefficient diversity. Best and brightest IT infrastructure consolidation experts hired by our company over the years have failed to make any difference. There's is no way to get the worms back into the can, if they just got out of the biggest can there is. Don't be greedy chasing after clients and try to avoid too much diversity.
Hire experts. You don't want to save money on the quality of your IT staff. One grossly overpaid expert can do the work of twenty point-and-click "sysadmins" and still save you money. Train your staff. Regularly send them to training classes. Don't be afraid that they may leave you. Eventually most of them will leave you no matter how well you treat them. But try to keep them for as long as possible. Training is the key. There is no substitute for a sysadmin who knows what he's doing.
To summarize: stick to Solaris and hire Russians:-)
Or you can do what one of our developers did with all the extra cash: buy an RV and park it on the company lot to save a couple of hours of driving every day. Everyone thought it was a brilliant idea (and he wrote it off as a business expense too).
I think being a small company has nothing to do with this. I work for a rather large company and your story applies to a number of people I had to deal with. The funny part is that, looking at some people "work", you think to yourself not "this guy doesn't know Solaris", but "how exactly is this guy a sysadmin?" I mean there are people who don't know something. There are plenty of things I don't know. However, some of the guys the company hires for its IT department simply don't know anything about computers and, most importantly, do not care to learn.
I know that our engineers have management with engineering background; our finance people have management with background in finance, etc. Our distributed servers department has management with background in... management. Anybody who knows how to use Outlook and Excel can manage IT guys. I mean, how hard can it be? Computers either work, or they don't. And if they don't, you just reboot them.
I seriously doubt comparisons to any such memorable historical characters are called for in the case of our fearless leader. The man is a dangleberry soon to disappear into the ass crack of history.
If life existed on Mars, and if it was intelligent life, and if they developed to the point of creating computers, I would like to know what OS they used and whether it was open source or not.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sure this is why army recruiters concetrate their efforts on the poorest neighborhoods: they are searching for folks with excellent credit to deliver a million dollars to Whereisthatistan. And if they can afford their own funeral expenses, then it's an added bonus.
Did you know that the US army cares about an applicant solider's credit rating and family history?
Obviously, it easier to recrut poor immigrants.
Our past president smoked weed and only God knows how many laws our current president broke. Why should anyone care if some nuclear physicist at Los Alamos smoke pot? The man is obviously smart enough to control himself and obviously reliable enough to have been hired in the first place.
The other day at ShopRite I've seen a package of green bacon. I was worried it went bad (you know, "manager's special"). Silly me. Now I know green bacon comes from green fluorescent transgenic pigs, of course.
Russians developed several versions of the GLONASS satellite. The original model was designed for three years. The first satellite of this type was launched in 1992. GLONASS-M is designed for 7 years (first one launched in 2005), and GLONASS-K - for 12 years (to be launched in 2008).
Let's leave flexibility, weed, beer, and other such academic predicaments for the college, and make sure that kids in school learn as much as they can. Their minds are naturally flexible at their age, so no need to fill 'em with extra chaos.
Lately the quality of education in Russia has been dropping. This is a direct result of many newly-formed private schools deviating from the old guidelines in the most ridiculous ways. In most cases they introduce changes to their curricula and methodology for no reason other than to advertise their "individuality". These elite schools are a bad joke and have little to do with the Russian education system. And as far as individuality goes, schools should be more like the army and less like the college.
People have come to expect that the government is going to do that job for them...
Sweden and Russia and two good examples of how a government can achieve excellent results by actively developing and implementing common standards in education. Parents, who themselves grew up in the TV-watching culture, are unlikely to encourage their children to read. Only the government, through a well-planned national campaign, can break this cycle. The way to a better public education system is not throwing more money at the problem. I agree with you here. I think the answer is in further standardization of curricula, textbooks, teaching and testing methods, introduction of uniforms in public schools, and a better system for evaluating professional competency of the faculty. Higher salaries for teachers is where the extra money should go.
What makes Russia different from, say, Saudi Arabia, is the country's scientific and technological capacity. Unlike your common oil-based soap-bubble economy of the Middle East, Russia has other things going for it, like the aerospace and defense industries, to name the top two. It also helps that none of Russia's democracy-conscious neighbors can take its natural resources by force, like they did in Iraq and may try to do in Venezuela and Iran.
Russia is involved in alternate fuel research - perhaps not as actively as it should be, but, I am sure, this involvement will grow with time. Three projects immediately come to mind: Russia's increased attention to the nuclear power industry, continuing active participation in the ITER project, and the recent partnerships between Norilsk Nickel and several hydrogen fuel cell research companies in the US. One has to keep in mind that USSR was one of the leading countries in fuel cell research going as far back as forty years. One of the first hydrogen-air ECGs used in a car was developed and successfully tested by "Kvant" back in 1982. Today there is a significant resurgence of interest in fuel cell technologies in Russia.
Also, notice how Russia directs the biggest chunk of its defense spendings toward beefing up the Northern and Caspian fleets. Not to mention active military cooperation with Venezuela and Iran. So I don't think the Russian leadership is being particularly shortsighted. We can alway criticize them for not doing enough and not quickly enough. However, this is a matter of opinion - our opinion, which is clearly not based on the full knowledge of everything that's going on.
That's what they've been saying about Yeltsin: that he's gonna change the constitution and remain in power. Well, he didn't. And he didn't want to. Moreover, he resigned early and appointed Putin as acting President, thus assuring his own worry-free retirement. Yeltsin's approval ratings at the time were extremely low. Nevertheless, during the early presidential elections a few months later a vast majority of Russians voted for Yeltsin's appointee - Putin, even though most Russians knew nothing about the man.
Now Putin, with his near-80% approval rating (stop and think about this number for a moment), can probably chose his Labrador named Koni as the next presidential candidate, and Russians will vote for the dog. Why? Russians want stability. They are tired of revolutions, wars, and Perestroikas. Now they want a decent paycheck, a car, and a house. Don't misunderstand me, Russians have nothing against democracy, freedom of speech, and human rights. However, history taught them to be a bit more cynical and pragmatic than some of their Western neighbors.
"Give me liberty or give me death," said Patrick Henry. It just so happened that every time Russians adopted this approach, they got the shitty end of the stick. I can't blame them for playing it safe now. Today's Russia is a huge improvement over the bloody chaos of Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's era. Things in Russia will improve over time. And, since we are talking about Russia, it may take awhile. For everyone's benefit, Washington and London should keep their dirty snouts out of Russia's business and be happy with the gas and oil they are getting.
Maybe I am wrong, but I see no technical reason why an unlocked phone would not pick up the same network frequencies as the same model of the locked phone you got from your service provider. I am using an unlocked Motorola L6 with a Cingular SIM I took out of my old Cingular Motorola flip phone. Sound quality and reception are better with the new phone, even though it has an internal antenna.
I have a family plan with three phones under the same account. Calls between phones under the same account are free, but this is where I (and many other, as far as I can tell) get the most dropped calls. Seems to me that, when Cingular network get overloaded, these "free" calls are the first to drop. I doubt this is a coincidence.
With Microsoft bleeding billion into the Xbox, a billion into the Zune, and with Vista set up for failure...
Oh, please... That poor, poor Microsoft. What I find mildly amusing on Slashdot are all these young and idealistic IT "professionals" pretending to be cynical realists; talking about Linux this and Linux that, and about Microsoft's impeding demise (if not next week, then by Christmas for sure). These are the kind of boys and girls who get their first real job and think that somebody actually gives a rat's ass about their opinions and their wonderful programming skills.
It takes years in the IT field to finally realize that smart ideas and good products don't sell. What sells? Entirely random stuff. Some of it turns out to be not bad, but most of it is crap. Why does it sell? Because people running Microsoft and such know just a bit more about selling stuff than an entire army of twenty-year-old comp sci graduates. Reading all this excited chatter about how badly Windows suck make me feel like I am in a twilight zone. C'mon people, pull your heads out of your asses and try to understand that Windows is not a computer operating system. It IS the computer, as far as the vast majority of PC users understand it.
So current DRM schemes run into some issues with Vista. Big deal. The entertainment industry will comply with Microsoft, because Windows is how people watch their stupid movies and play their stupid MP3s. What about Linux, you ask? Well, most PC users think that linux is a kind of a wild cat with pointy ears.
They better have a state-of-the-art air purification system in this elevator. And make sure there are no Taco Bells anywhere within a 500km radius of the base station. I love Taco Bell and I have to ride an elevator to the 24th floor to work every day. I have first-hand knowledge of potential problems in such a situation.
Well, if all cars in that expensive class can go 200+ mph, still it would be very unusual to see one go almost 600mph. Here we have world's #2 supercomputer barely breaking 100tflops, and the world's #1 supercomputer pushing 300tflops. Quite a gap here.
I read "Troopers" right before seeing the movie. I found that it was a rather close adaptation: true to much of the detail and the spirit of the book.
Details, I think, they got a fair amount of and then some. As to the spirit of it, seems to me the spirit got lost under all the details. For me watching this movie was like watching "Jurassic Park" after reading Crichton's work: a hopeless disparity between a literary masterpiece and a Hollywood action flick.
Or next Thursday Russia will bomb everybody back into the Stone Age, when during lunch in his Kremlin office Putin spills some borscht on his nuclear suitcase.
In other news: a computer glitch may elect a President.
Well, today it's 300-foot resolution and tomorrow they'll deploy some new electronic gadget and it'll be 3-foot resolution. By that time this cell phone-snooping practice will be established and in use by your friendly neighborhood Homeland Security folks, among others. So we are talking about a general principle here, not about the performance of specific hardware they have today for tracking cell phones. Who knows, they may already have equipment capable of higher accuracy, but they choose to keep it under wraps for now, until the method gets legally established and accepted by the public.
I am a senior Unix sysadmin for a large company with a huge and diverse IT infrastructure. Name OS type, version and patch level and there's a good chance we'll have an exact match. Obviously, it takes a huge IT organization to support this inefficient diversity. Best and brightest IT infrastructure consolidation experts hired by our company over the years have failed to make any difference. There's is no way to get the worms back into the can, if they just got out of the biggest can there is. Don't be greedy chasing after clients and try to avoid too much diversity.
:-)
Hire experts. You don't want to save money on the quality of your IT staff. One grossly overpaid expert can do the work of twenty point-and-click "sysadmins" and still save you money. Train your staff. Regularly send them to training classes. Don't be afraid that they may leave you. Eventually most of them will leave you no matter how well you treat them. But try to keep them for as long as possible. Training is the key. There is no substitute for a sysadmin who knows what he's doing.
To summarize: stick to Solaris and hire Russians
Microsoft COBOL, naturally.
Or you can do what one of our developers did with all the extra cash: buy an RV and park it on the company lot to save a couple of hours of driving every day. Everyone thought it was a brilliant idea (and he wrote it off as a business expense too).
Obviously she needed a computer, not a fruit. Latest Sun Blade would do nicely.
I think being a small company has nothing to do with this. I work for a rather large company and your story applies to a number of people I had to deal with. The funny part is that, looking at some people "work", you think to yourself not "this guy doesn't know Solaris", but "how exactly is this guy a sysadmin?" I mean there are people who don't know something. There are plenty of things I don't know. However, some of the guys the company hires for its IT department simply don't know anything about computers and, most importantly, do not care to learn.
... management. Anybody who knows how to use Outlook and Excel can manage IT guys. I mean, how hard can it be? Computers either work, or they don't. And if they don't, you just reboot them.
I know that our engineers have management with engineering background; our finance people have management with background in finance, etc. Our distributed servers department has management with background in
I seriously doubt comparisons to any such memorable historical characters are called for in the case of our fearless leader. The man is a dangleberry soon to disappear into the ass crack of history.
If life existed on Mars, and if it was intelligent life, and if they developed to the point of creating computers, I would like to know what OS they used and whether it was open source or not.