Mobile, Alabama. I can't explain why but at Target and Wal-Mart the 2% store brand milk is $4.50-4.75 and name-brand ("Barber" or "Berber"?) is slightly higher. I recall Bruno's and Winn Dixie showing prices of $5.25 for a gallon. It's irrational. And we have 10% sales tax. Maybe distance from dairy central is a factor. I don't think we have much of a dairy industry here, but I could be wrong.
... and milk, now at $5/gallon in the cheap south. Eggs are $1.50+/dozen.
Five years ago those were half that price. Food staples shouldn't double in 5 years. Cost increases like that hurt the poor who buy more food than fuel more than the rich who buy more fuel than food.
Strangely enough, Horizon organic milk is still $3/half gallon, same as it was 5 years ago. Maybe their cows are grass fed.
I think it was Mother Earth News where I read of a study done (circa 2000) to compare organic and chemical fertilization of crops. Purely organic took longer to establish a routine but over time yielded the most among pure organic, pure chemical and a mix. Any land that didn't get rotated simply didn't produce; crop rotation should be a standard practice for the last 100 years or so. Anyone that isn't rotating had better know a secret or they're seriously missing out. Also, some of the grasses reach their roots hundreds of feet if you let them grow wild for a few years. Thin grass roots loosen up the soil over time.
... never needs to be touched...... voodoo to everyone...
Advice: Don't ever put these phrases on a resume.
An employer wants longevity and maintainability in addition to everything else.
Here's a phrase to remember: If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
I see every day people who have a lock on a particular project; if they get hit by a bus, the project suffers greatly or even dies. If your code is voodoo to a 3-year "veteran" that replaces you after your funeral, they'll reverse engineer what they can and throw it out, to start over. That costs time and money, and the employer translates that to risk. Funeral too extreme an example? OK, consider this: my current employer has had a dozen highly qualified programmers not document a darn thing, and leave. These highly qualified guys have gone on to bigger and better things, but they have a reputation for writing bad code because they didn't document. That reputation follows them everywhere they go.
While a team that understands each other's styles fluently is a good thing, even better is for everyone to have a common base of documenting everything from intent to risk and test results. Even a simple, "Function A needs to accomplish B and C. I tried X and it didn't work. Trying Y and Z next week." is better than nothing.
For the record, all I do is code. I've suffered the lock-in effect I described. For years I spent my whole day explaining what I'd written in those 5 years or tweaking it slightly for someone else's preferences. After being held back from the new toys, I learned to document and train. It makes a huge difference.
Mind you, I'm not necessarily knocking the Rubble telescope - Sure sounds like it to me...
Maybe private industry doesn't have the resources to spend $9 billion on a new way to detect cancer. If they had it, they would have spent it. Several times over, by different companies, in different ways, and lead to just one solution at several times the total cost.
Cost is a barrier to some things, and in some cases the massive government budget is best suited to these things. High risk, high cost projects like space exploration. Projects that have a ROI of 30 or 50 years... find just one private company that'll spend $10-20 billion to get it back over 3 decades. That's massive... who has that kind of money? And is willing to risk total failure?
Interoperability between games... Has this even been done yet? Imagine a multi-game environment that combines:
Some flight simulator Sim (Whatever) or Second Life Halo Scorched3D (my personal favorite)
You can fly in, watch three or four tanks bomb the hell out of someone's SL pad whilst another team of commandos storms the tanks. Meanwhile, in the SL pad they're partying like it's 1973 and don't know what hit them. Great fun.
Technically you'd need some API interface to send messages and each game would have to cooperate and render what the foreign game told it to. Flight sim says "Plane X entering airspace at coord Lat/Long, heading, bearing, etc" and SL would render that using its own low-res plane-forming API. Not one game with everything; 4 games running on their own infrastructures; they just talk to each other.
That's been fixed in Vista. Now it just starts out with an hour and counts down as it finds success. Like Scotty on the Enterprise - tell 'em it'll take an hour, so when it finishes sooner they're impressed.
Would somebody please forward a copy of that study to my employer... in triplicate?
Seriously, profit sharing is one reason Google and Microsoft have grown to take over their markets. My employer has 30% of the market share in its industry. If our employees had the motivation the Googlers do, we could have 80%. We have profit sharing, but it's something like 1% divided among the workers, until it's diluted down to a few hundred bucks a year. Maybe I shouldn't complain, but if I knew I had more than 0.002% share of the profits I might work harder to meet that client's deadline.
* Google and MS are used as the Goliath examples of proven success, but I bet a good number of the companies on the Inc 500 Fastest Growing Companies list have stock options.
a) the Department of Defense (only functions in or near U.S. borders)
Department of Homeland Security b) the Department of Securing Cheap Oil
Department of Defense c) the Department of Get Them Before They Get Us.
CIA d) the Department of Team America, World Police.
FBI
In the future, you could use this as a painful lesson that sometimes Google is a great source of information on the random link posted by an unknown person. I speak from experience as one who has been burned in a similar manner.
A Google search for the domain name reveals a warning that even I won't ignore.
Digg - Funny reaction to 2Girls1Cup Warning: DO NOT visit 2girls1cup.com to see what they are watching. Seriously. Don't. Some things, once seen, cannot be unseen....
Keep every disk less than 70% full and you'll cut way down on fragmentation. Go above 85% full even once, and Windows will hold a grudge. Diskeeper helps calm it down.
Get two or more drives (budget permitting). Partition drives into fast/slow areas. Thousands of small files (random seeks) are a lot faster on the first partition of the second drive (i.e. temp files incl. web browser cache). For Windows, set up the TEMP and TMP environment variables to that partition. I usually do 20-50% for random seeks on the outside of the platter and the rest for larger files that don't seek a lot.
Split the swap across all drives, and increase RAM out the wazoo; file cache is always good. Windows still uses the swap file even with 1GB free... I don't understand why, but the guys in Redmond thought it was a good idea. Caveat: Move stuff back to the primary drive if you ever need to remove that second drive, or you may get boot time errors.
Pay attention to your own usage patterns (i.e. random or sequential)... if your disk is busy a lot, consider moving an app or two to another physical disk. Development environments can be heavy on random seeks.
I run Visual Studio 2005 Team System at my office; load times with a two-drive setup like that are about 3x faster than a one-drive setup. If your work is video editing or large sequential reads, a RAID setup might be better.
Don't upgrade a 4-year old machine to Vista. If you want Vista, just buy a new one.
Where are the mod points when I need them? I guess you'll have to imagine +5 Insightful from me.
Thank you for posting that. I'm sick of hearing people talk about getting hammered, or "letting off steam" at a restaurant or bar after work... only to drive themselves home. Every drink impairs a person even slightly. The legal limit is there for the average person and to not provoke a prohibition style response, but people need to realize that choosing to drink just enough to be under the limit is still an intentional choice to be impaired to that specific level.
When a driver kills someone because they took 0.75 seconds too long to hit the brakes, is it any comfort that their alcohol level was 0.01 under the legal limit? Two to four tons of steel is a huge responsibility at any speed. Alcohol, changing the radio station, talking on a cell phone, whatever distraction there may be... it's best to focus on the task at hand: driving.
Slashdot Mirror
Mobile, Alabama. I can't explain why but at Target and Wal-Mart the 2% store brand milk is $4.50-4.75 and name-brand ("Barber" or "Berber"?) is slightly higher. I recall Bruno's and Winn Dixie showing prices of $5.25 for a gallon. It's irrational. And we have 10% sales tax. Maybe distance from dairy central is a factor. I don't think we have much of a dairy industry here, but I could be wrong.
... and milk, now at $5/gallon in the cheap south. Eggs are $1.50+/dozen.
Five years ago those were half that price. Food staples shouldn't double in 5 years. Cost increases like that hurt the poor who buy more food than fuel more than the rich who buy more fuel than food.
Strangely enough, Horizon organic milk is still $3/half gallon, same as it was 5 years ago. Maybe their cows are grass fed.
I think it was Mother Earth News where I read of a study done (circa 2000) to compare organic and chemical fertilization of crops. Purely organic took longer to establish a routine but over time yielded the most among pure organic, pure chemical and a mix. Any land that didn't get rotated simply didn't produce; crop rotation should be a standard practice for the last 100 years or so. Anyone that isn't rotating had better know a secret or they're seriously missing out. Also, some of the grasses reach their roots hundreds of feet if you let them grow wild for a few years. Thin grass roots loosen up the soil over time.
... never needs to be touched... ... voodoo to everyone ...
Advice: Don't ever put these phrases on a resume.
An employer wants longevity and maintainability in addition to everything else.
Here's a phrase to remember:
If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
I see every day people who have a lock on a particular project; if they get hit by a bus, the project suffers greatly or even dies. If your code is voodoo to a 3-year "veteran" that replaces you after your funeral, they'll reverse engineer what they can and throw it out, to start over. That costs time and money, and the employer translates that to risk. Funeral too extreme an example? OK, consider this: my current employer has had a dozen highly qualified programmers not document a darn thing, and leave. These highly qualified guys have gone on to bigger and better things, but they have a reputation for writing bad code because they didn't document. That reputation follows them everywhere they go.
While a team that understands each other's styles fluently is a good thing, even better is for everyone to have a common base of documenting everything from intent to risk and test results. Even a simple, "Function A needs to accomplish B and C. I tried X and it didn't work. Trying Y and Z next week." is better than nothing.
For the record, all I do is code. I've suffered the lock-in effect I described. For years I spent my whole day explaining what I'd written in those 5 years or tweaking it slightly for someone else's preferences. After being held back from the new toys, I learned to document and train. It makes a huge difference.
Maybe private industry doesn't have the resources to spend $9 billion on a new way to detect cancer. If they had it, they would have spent it. Several times over, by different companies, in different ways, and lead to just one solution at several times the total cost.
Cost is a barrier to some things, and in some cases the massive government budget is best suited to these things. High risk, high cost projects like space exploration. Projects that have a ROI of 30 or 50 years... find just one private company that'll spend $10-20 billion to get it back over 3 decades. That's massive... who has that kind of money? And is willing to risk total failure?
Kind of like that promotion I supposedly got a couple months ago.
I'm sensing a doppler shift...
I hear the sun's been doing it for years. Maybe we should ask it for advice.
So... hack-and-slashed?
I think that's a light bulb over my head...
Interoperability between games... Has this even been done yet?
Imagine a multi-game environment that combines:
Some flight simulator
Sim (Whatever) or Second Life
Halo
Scorched3D (my personal favorite)
You can fly in, watch three or four tanks bomb the hell out of someone's SL pad whilst another team of commandos storms the tanks. Meanwhile, in the SL pad they're partying like it's 1973 and don't know what hit them. Great fun.
Technically you'd need some API interface to send messages and each game would have to cooperate and render what the foreign game told it to. Flight sim says "Plane X entering airspace at coord Lat/Long, heading, bearing, etc" and SL would render that using its own low-res plane-forming API. Not one game with everything; 4 games running on their own infrastructures; they just talk to each other.
Like Alien vs. Predator ---> Halo vs. Second Life
That's been fixed in Vista. Now it just starts out with an hour and counts down as it finds success. Like Scotty on the Enterprise - tell 'em it'll take an hour, so when it finishes sooner they're impressed.
Would somebody please forward a copy of that study to my employer... in triplicate?
Seriously, profit sharing is one reason Google and Microsoft have grown to take over their markets. My employer has 30% of the market share in its industry. If our employees had the motivation the Googlers do, we could have 80%. We have profit sharing, but it's something like 1% divided among the workers, until it's diluted down to a few hundred bucks a year. Maybe I shouldn't complain, but if I knew I had more than 0.002% share of the profits I might work harder to meet that client's deadline.
* Google and MS are used as the Goliath examples of proven success, but I bet a good number of the companies on the Inc 500 Fastest Growing Companies list have stock options.
Please, someone create a window manager named Salamander.
There, fixed that for ya.
I don't know about coffee, but there's an official standard for IP datagram transmission via carrier pigeon:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
Ah, but we do:
a) the Department of Defense (only functions in or near U.S. borders)
Department of Homeland Security
b) the Department of Securing Cheap Oil
Department of Defense
c) the Department of Get Them Before They Get Us.
CIA
d) the Department of Team America, World Police.
FBI
Mmmmm... poutine...
In the future, you could use this as a painful lesson that sometimes Google is a great source of information on the random link posted by an unknown person. I speak from experience as one who has been burned in a similar manner.
...
A Google search for the domain name reveals a warning that even I won't ignore.
Digg - Funny reaction to 2Girls1Cup
Warning: DO NOT visit 2girls1cup.com to see what they are watching. Seriously. Don't. Some things, once seen, cannot be unseen.
640 bytes ought to be enough for anybody. Or strokes, if you prefer the GUI.
Keep every disk less than 70% full and you'll cut way down on fragmentation. Go above 85% full even once, and Windows will hold a grudge. Diskeeper helps calm it down.
Get two or more drives (budget permitting). Partition drives into fast/slow areas. Thousands of small files (random seeks) are a lot faster on the first partition of the second drive (i.e. temp files incl. web browser cache). For Windows, set up the TEMP and TMP environment variables to that partition. I usually do 20-50% for random seeks on the outside of the platter and the rest for larger files that don't seek a lot.
Split the swap across all drives, and increase RAM out the wazoo; file cache is always good. Windows still uses the swap file even with 1GB free... I don't understand why, but the guys in Redmond thought it was a good idea.
Caveat: Move stuff back to the primary drive if you ever need to remove that second drive, or you may get boot time errors.
Pay attention to your own usage patterns (i.e. random or sequential)... if your disk is busy a lot, consider moving an app or two to another physical disk. Development environments can be heavy on random seeks.
I run Visual Studio 2005 Team System at my office; load times with a two-drive setup like that are about 3x faster than a one-drive setup. If your work is video editing or large sequential reads, a RAID setup might be better.
Don't upgrade a 4-year old machine to Vista. If you want Vista, just buy a new one.
How about...
Leaky Source
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/03/177248&from=rss
Sounds like "Leaky Spice," actually. That's just creepy.
No, the editor just kept thinking of "venereal."
Where are the mod points when I need them? I guess you'll have to imagine +5 Insightful from me.
Thank you for posting that. I'm sick of hearing people talk about getting hammered, or "letting off steam" at a restaurant or bar after work... only to drive themselves home. Every drink impairs a person even slightly. The legal limit is there for the average person and to not provoke a prohibition style response, but people need to realize that choosing to drink just enough to be under the limit is still an intentional choice to be impaired to that specific level.
When a driver kills someone because they took 0.75 seconds too long to hit the brakes, is it any comfort that their alcohol level was 0.01 under the legal limit? Two to four tons of steel is a huge responsibility at any speed. Alcohol, changing the radio station, talking on a cell phone, whatever distraction there may be... it's best to focus on the task at hand: driving.
Already got mine well padded. Papa John's, Pizza Hut, Mickey D's...
Nah, that's when you get to say "A'ight Bill, on three, JUMP!"
I don't suppose, by chance, that you're a consultant?
Paid by the hour?