Normal behavior for a skydiver is to fall out of a plane, accellerate up to terminal velocity, maintain that speed for a while, then open your parachute, which slows you down to a lower terminal velocity, then hit the ground and (hopefully) stop.
If this is a troll, I'll bite, but since there are two comments in the same vein, I don't think it is. Unless the trolls are teaming up.. dear god..
Speaking from skydiving experience, if you open your parachute at 360kph, the parachute will be ripped right off your back and probably break a few bones in the process.
Even during a "normal" skydive the diver can accelerate to around 160mph (sorry for the sudden unit switch) by falling vertically. However, before deploying the parachute, the skydiver must slow themselves down by going into the "neutral" position: arched back, hands and legs out. This will slow the diver down to around 120mph, which is safe to deploy the canopy.
This was probably said before, but every situation is different. Everything must be looked at, balanced and decided as they come. But the best thing you can do is always keep a "paper" trail of every decision made. By paper I mean email, your notebook, anything written that you can reference later on. And if you have something to say such as a suggestion, the best way to do it is in email. If you made a suggestion verbally during a brainstorming, make sure to follow it up by email. It sounds very impersonal, but it's the only way to show that you're doing your part when the heat starts coming.
And always carry around a notebook. Anytime any verbal agreement is made, or you produce something in a brainstorming section, write it down, with the date.
Deciding where to draw the line between getting it out the door and getting it right is tricky, but whatever you suggest or decide will be written down, so you'll always be on the "I didn't slack, I did my job" side....
Excuse my hard drive manufacturing ignorance, but isn't it possible that these drives could be made in China, sold in Taiwan, and then resold in the States? If all the Maxtor drives sold in the US are made in the US from parts not made in this Chinese plant, fine, but I don't know that do I?
The article is VERY light in exact details. I have a Maxtor 80Meg drive with lots of valuable data (please spare me the "back your sh!t up, you weenie!" speeches). Until I hear from Maxtor EXACTLY which drives are affected (with serial #s!!) I WILL be worried and a little freaked...
Now, while I'm on the soapbox, I'd like to ask something slightly, but not much, off-topic: I'm thinking of adding a RAID card and two drives to my penguin system. I want that 80 meg drive to be backed up. (I was planning this for a long time, this article has just sped up the process a little bit) Can anyone reccommend which IDE or SCSI raid cards work well with Linux? I've read through some how-tos on adding RAID, but they focus mainly on "how to" as opposed what's best for the job (imagine that...;-)) Thanks!
Why two devices? Phones and PDA's have different technical requirements taht don't easily combine. A cell phone uses a minimal screen, needs about 12 buttons, uses audio and has a short battery ilfe. 2-5 hours talk time.
You should take another look at the phone store, the new SonyEricsson p800 has a screen almost the size of the phone itself and instead of buttons has a touch-sensative screen a la Palm. Yet it acts and feels just like the cell phones that you use right now.
If it had G3 support and didn't cost almost three months rent, I'd buy one....
I have to say I have more respect when people have a little backbone and say "No, I requested this time off under the company policies" than "Okay boss, I'll cancel my wedding to reboot the server."
Interesting, and what happens when something really important comes up and you ask an employee to work late and he says "I'm sorry, I have plans tonight. I cannot work late for you" and then walks away leaving you with the work.
As a manager, are you going to respect them or be ticked off because they can't see the gravity of the situation and aren't taking the job seriously?
I love it when people give wise statements where everyone says "wow, he's right", while ignoring the other side of the equation.
You certainly DO have a very valid point, but you're not talking about the other side of the coin....
come over here to France. They love pinball over here. You can find a pinball machine in every single brasserie (French bar). Of course, they're all old American machines, but the love is there....
But a lot of the stuff I read in the article doesn't bother me.
-My boss reading my email?? At work, it's not my email!
-My boss reading my IMs at work? It's not my network!
-Cameras on the street? It's a public place, they can film if they want!
-If I go to a bar and they keep my name on record, well, it's their bar. I can buy a beer and go home and drink. Now if they sell that information, that's something else...
Don't get me wrong, I'm not agreeing with everything....
-Collecting and selling my medical records? That's shameful and these people should be castrated.
-Forcing my ISP to release information is also shameful. My personal surfing habits are my business.
I just feel that you can't expect to have complete privacy everywhere you go. Your personal life is your own, but anything you do in public is exactly that, public.
"A lot more credit card numbers are stolen than ever used, but you should assume that right now, in your wallet, there's a credit card number that has been stolen off the Net."
I'd really like to see some information to back this up. It seems kinda of like a manipulation of numbers to scare people. It seems very unlikely to me that EVERYONE has a number floating around the 'net....
I'm starting to see your reasoning. I guess I was a little clouded by the venom of the original post.:-)
I still stand by my statement about trusting new linux kernels, even given the hiccups with the last couple of kernels. To me, the reputation of Linux is such that I would trust a new kernel to fix whatever recent problems have been found, even if the last few still had bugs. I do admit though, that after a few of these kernels, maybe he should have waited for the kernel to run its course on a production server. He did say that he was wary of 2.4.17xxx though, better late than never, eh?
"Hopelessly incompenetent"??? Are you kidding? You think he has shortcomings because he was doing what every single rational person does when encountering a software problem? When a program that I buy/download doesn't work, I immediately search for a patch. VERY reasonable behaviour.
Far be it for me to criticize Linus, et. al as I could never do what they do, but the shortcomings are not with this guy, but with the buggy kernels. These are release kernels, they are not beta kernals. I think, considering the reputation of Linux, that a release kernel should be stable. Yes, bugs happen, and when they do, you would expect a patch to fix these problems.
If everyone did as you suggested and rolled back to 2.2.x at the first whiff of trouble, who would be out using these "bleeding edge kernels"??
"But it will be far too difficult for the average user. For them, the CD-ROM in their computer -- the nemesis of the recording industry -- just won't play our CDs."
I don't HAVE a CD player.... I have a CD ROM in my computer connected to really nice speakers that functions as my stereo. I know MANY people who have this setup. If I cannot play CDs in my CDROM, like the article suggests, why should I bother to pay for any CDs????? I am NOT going to buy a stereo just because the RIAA has a burr up their a$$.....
Wake up record companies! You're not shutting out hackers! You're shutting out legit customers who buy CDs and play them on their computer!!!!
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
I've only been using Linux for about two years, and have not explored every last facet nor read every last scrap of documentation and lore.
What, pray tell, do/etc and/var stand for?
I assume that etc means "et cetera", but if that is the case, why are the most important system files placed in a directory named for misc stuff???
Don't want to guess what/var stands for.....
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
Unfortunately, this action, if approved by the Music companies, will mean that the RIAA will focus their attentions on the other file sharing apps on the 'net.....
What I don't understand is why the music industry hasn't gone against IRC at all. A lot of the music on Napster is iffy, recorded through a microphone or just sounds bad for some reason.
On IRC there are plenty of channels where I can download entire albums ripped at 192bps+ straight from the CD without hassle or payment. These channels take pride in their music, they WANT to know if an album has mistakes or is incomplete. The people who server the music do it for no gain except to be involved in something cool.
Maybe this is all a secret and the RIAA doesn't know about it. Maybe it's because IRC is very complicated to use. Even so, I would say more people use IRC to get music than OpenNap, or Gnutella, yet I have not seen the letters IRC come from any RIAA statement at all.
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
I read alot about SW patents on/. and while they do upset me for sheer stupidity, I have a hard time getting exciting about these patents.
I always read about companies patenting obvious things and demanding big sums of money from everyone.
Can someone give me some examples of how people have actually COUGHED up money for these BS patents?? I already know about Apple doing the click-through shopping thing, but there are a lot more patents that I haven't read anything since their posting on/.
I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm just curious.....
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
I can't speak to the salary issues, but I do know that there are tax issues involved in getting paid by a company outside the US.
I'm working now in France, so I did a little research.
You can earn up to $80,000 USD of tax-free income. By tax-free I mean the US won't tax you for that amount. Anything over, the US Gov't will start digging in. Of course, you have to pay any applicable tax in the country you are working in.
Technically, you pay taxes in both the US and wherever you work, but the US Gov't gives you a tax break up to $80 grand. The very long arm of the US.....
Specifically in Paris, France, where I work, the salaries are much less than in the US. I'm making about half what I did in the States, yet I'm making a "very good" salary for a French person, comparable to what a manager or VP would make here.
Hope this helps!
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
The article quotes statistics showing that M$ has a small amount of Black employees.
Hello! This is a market-wide phenomenon!!
There's such a tight market for IT and Engineer people that companies can't AFFORD to be racist. There are so few black people in the IT world because there are so few prospective black employees! It has nothing to do with racism.
I really want to see some proof of this racism. It seems like this is a good way of getting back at M$, if it is indeed false.
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
Each equatorial base site that anchors space elevator
operations would feature a huge tower that is a true
skyscraper at 31 miles (50 kilometers) tall.
A building that's 31 miles high??!? Isn't Everest about 2 miles high? And isn't the Mariana Trench about 5 miles deep? And they say we'll have a man-made building finished "50 years away probably" that will be 31 friggin' miles high?
What kind of bud are these guys smoking?
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
Yeah but we would all be mad if they didn't. Maybe not Johnny Q. WindowsUser but all the geeks and nerds would be.
I think you missed the point of the article. The article was written from the view point of Johnny Q. WindowsUser, not El Geeko Nerdo. The article was a rant about what linux needs to do to get on the desktop of more than the nerds, as well as the problems it faces in trying to do so.
To make us pay for any other things we may need?, or make us download them, some people don't have cable or a T1 running
to their house(but we all should).
Someone else on this discussion made the point that there doesn't need to be a slimmed down distro of linux, the installer just needs to be upgraded with many more options. There should be, at the least, an "install business user" option and a "here's everything, enjoy!" option.
Really though, how much of a full install of Linux do you actually use? People so far have complained alot about the bloat on Window's install, but they should take a look at their own penguin boxes.
Then why do they really want linux?
Sigh.... What do you want Linux to be?? Do you want Linux to succeed on the desktop and oust MS as the premier desktop OS? Then you cannot have this attitude. If you want Linux to be technologicaly superior to MS, but not easier or user-friendly, then ok, this attitude is fine, you care more about the principal of Linux and how it works than with whether or not it it takes over MS.
You cannot have both the attitude and the commercial success though. For Linux to succeed on the desktop (I'm sure this has been said a million times) it has to be simple and userfriendly for all the people who use Winders, but don't know how to REALLY use an OS. It has to boot up and print that spreadsheet, Open Source principles be dammed.
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
I just spent the last two weeks combing through abandonware sites and irc channels for this game. God I loved this game! I spent hours and hours playing, which caused lots of sleeping in school.
The dialogue was great, the humor was amazingly funny, the plot outstanding, the alien races very believeable. You REALLY REALLY got into this game.
I'd reccomend it to anyone.
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
Someone explain this to me! I'm reading this article and it goes into detecting bombs that are supersensitive. It goes like this:
Someone tells you there's a bomb in the room that goes off if a photon hits it. You can't detect it using normal means because you'll set it off.
Enter Quantum Mechanics! You have a room with two mirrors that are perfect. A photon will just bounce back and forth forever. Stick a near-perfect mirror in the middle of the room. Now a photon has a %.000001 chance of going through to the other side every time it hits the mirror. I'm fine with the quantum theory up until here.
Now they say that because of the uncertainity principle, you won't know if a photon has gone through to the other side until you actualy measure the photon and see if its gone over! The article states that if you have still have a photon on the left side, then there must be a bomb in the right side. WTF?!?!
Just because you don't measure the photon doesn't mean it's not doing anything!! My question is, why is it not possible that the photon went over to the other side and set off the bomb while you were waiting?????? Just because I didn't measure the photon, doesn't mean it didn't bounce over!!!
Are they saying that the photon doesn't do anything UNTIL I measure it? Then it determines which path it's going to take??? If they want me to accept it on faith, I can do that. But I just cannot see that happenening!!! So in effect, I'm going back in time measuring this photon!!
They're actually making computers based on this shit?!?!?!!
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
Slashdot Mirror
On a normal skydive, about 90-110mph, depending on the plane. No idea for this jump, considering the special nature....
If this is a troll, I'll bite, but since there are two comments in the same vein, I don't think it is. Unless the trolls are teaming up.. dear god..
Speaking from skydiving experience, if you open your parachute at 360kph, the parachute will be ripped right off your back and probably break a few bones in the process.
Even during a "normal" skydive the diver can accelerate to around 160mph (sorry for the sudden unit switch) by falling vertically. However, before deploying the parachute, the skydiver must slow themselves down by going into the "neutral" position: arched back, hands and legs out. This will slow the diver down to around 120mph, which is safe to deploy the canopy.
FYI, the BBC has a story on this as well, which can be found here.
This was probably said before, but every situation is different. Everything must be looked at, balanced and decided as they come. But the best thing you can do is always keep a "paper" trail of every decision made. By paper I mean email, your notebook, anything written that you can reference later on. And if you have something to say such as a suggestion, the best way to do it is in email. If you made a suggestion verbally during a brainstorming, make sure to follow it up by email. It sounds very impersonal, but it's the only way to show that you're doing your part when the heat starts coming.
And always carry around a notebook. Anytime any verbal agreement is made, or you produce something in a brainstorming section, write it down, with the date.
Deciding where to draw the line between getting it out the door and getting it right is tricky, but whatever you suggest or decide will be written down, so you'll always be on the "I didn't slack, I did my job" side....
Ahem.... cough.. meant to type gig.... sorry...
IDRTFA, and I'm still a little worried.
Excuse my hard drive manufacturing ignorance, but isn't it possible that these drives could be made in China, sold in Taiwan, and then resold in the States? If all the Maxtor drives sold in the US are made in the US from parts not made in this Chinese plant, fine, but I don't know that do I?
The article is VERY light in exact details. I have a Maxtor 80Meg drive with lots of valuable data (please spare me the "back your sh!t up, you weenie!" speeches). Until I hear from Maxtor EXACTLY which drives are affected (with serial #s!!) I WILL be worried and a little freaked...
Now, while I'm on the soapbox, I'd like to ask something slightly, but not much, off-topic: I'm thinking of adding a RAID card and two drives to my penguin system. I want that 80 meg drive to be backed up. (I was planning this for a long time, this article has just sped up the process a little bit) Can anyone reccommend which IDE or SCSI raid cards work well with Linux? I've read through some how-tos on adding RAID, but they focus mainly on "how to" as opposed what's best for the job (imagine that... ;-)) Thanks!
You should take another look at the phone store, the new SonyEricsson p800 has a screen almost the size of the phone itself and instead of buttons has a touch-sensative screen a la Palm. Yet it acts and feels just like the cell phones that you use right now.
If it had G3 support and didn't cost almost three months rent, I'd buy one....
Interesting, and what happens when something really important comes up and you ask an employee to work late and he says "I'm sorry, I have plans tonight. I cannot work late for you" and then walks away leaving you with the work.
As a manager, are you going to respect them or be ticked off because they can't see the gravity of the situation and aren't taking the job seriously?
I love it when people give wise statements where everyone says "wow, he's right", while ignoring the other side of the equation.
You certainly DO have a very valid point, but you're not talking about the other side of the coin....
Everything in moderation...
come over here to France. They love pinball over here. You can find a pinball machine in every single brasserie (French bar). Of course, they're all old American machines, but the love is there....
-My boss reading my email?? At work, it's not my email!
-My boss reading my IMs at work? It's not my network!
-Cameras on the street? It's a public place, they can film if they want!
-If I go to a bar and they keep my name on record, well, it's their bar. I can buy a beer and go home and drink. Now if they sell that information, that's something else...
Don't get me wrong, I'm not agreeing with everything....
-Collecting and selling my medical records? That's shameful and these people should be castrated.
-Forcing my ISP to release information is also shameful. My personal surfing habits are my business.
I just feel that you can't expect to have complete privacy everywhere you go. Your personal life is your own, but anything you do in public is exactly that, public.
I'd really like to see some information to back this up. It seems kinda of like a manipulation of numbers to scare people. It seems very unlikely to me that EVERYONE has a number floating around the 'net....
I still stand by my statement about trusting new linux kernels, even given the hiccups with the last couple of kernels. To me, the reputation of Linux is such that I would trust a new kernel to fix whatever recent problems have been found, even if the last few still had bugs. I do admit though, that after a few of these kernels, maybe he should have waited for the kernel to run its course on a production server. He did say that he was wary of 2.4.17xxx though, better late than never, eh?
Far be it for me to criticize Linus, et. al as I could never do what they do, but the shortcomings are not with this guy, but with the buggy kernels. These are release kernels, they are not beta kernals. I think, considering the reputation of Linux, that a release kernel should be stable. Yes, bugs happen, and when they do, you would expect a patch to fix these problems.
If everyone did as you suggested and rolled back to 2.2.x at the first whiff of trouble, who would be out using these "bleeding edge kernels"??
I think you should cut the boy some slack.....
I don't HAVE a CD player.... I have a CD ROM in my computer connected to really nice speakers that functions as my stereo. I know MANY people who have this setup. If I cannot play CDs in my CDROM, like the article suggests, why should I bother to pay for any CDs????? I am NOT going to buy a stereo just because the RIAA has a burr up their a$$.....
Wake up record companies! You're not shutting out hackers! You're shutting out legit customers who buy CDs and play them on their computer!!!!
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
I assume that etc means "et cetera", but if that is the case, why are the most important system files placed in a directory named for misc stuff???
Don't want to guess what /var stands for.....
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
What I don't understand is why the music industry hasn't gone against IRC at all. A lot of the music on Napster is iffy, recorded through a microphone or just sounds bad for some reason.
On IRC there are plenty of channels where I can download entire albums ripped at 192bps+ straight from the CD without hassle or payment. These channels take pride in their music, they WANT to know if an album has mistakes or is incomplete. The people who server the music do it for no gain except to be involved in something cool.
Maybe this is all a secret and the RIAA doesn't know about it. Maybe it's because IRC is very complicated to use. Even so, I would say more people use IRC to get music than OpenNap, or Gnutella, yet I have not seen the letters IRC come from any RIAA statement at all.
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
I always read about companies patenting obvious things and demanding big sums of money from everyone.
Can someone give me some examples of how people have actually COUGHED up money for these BS patents?? I already know about Apple doing the click-through shopping thing, but there are a lot more patents that I haven't read anything since their posting on /.
I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm just curious.....
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
I'm working now in France, so I did a little research.
You can earn up to $80,000 USD of tax-free income. By tax-free I mean the US won't tax you for that amount. Anything over, the US Gov't will start digging in. Of course, you have to pay any applicable tax in the country you are working in.
Technically, you pay taxes in both the US and wherever you work, but the US Gov't gives you a tax break up to $80 grand. The very long arm of the US.....
Specifically in Paris, France, where I work, the salaries are much less than in the US. I'm making about half what I did in the States, yet I'm making a "very good" salary for a French person, comparable to what a manager or VP would make here.
Hope this helps!
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
Hello! This is a market-wide phenomenon!! There's such a tight market for IT and Engineer people that companies can't AFFORD to be racist. There are so few black people in the IT world because there are so few prospective black employees! It has nothing to do with racism.
I really want to see some proof of this racism. It seems like this is a good way of getting back at M$, if it is indeed false.
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
A building that's 31 miles high??!? Isn't Everest about 2 miles high? And isn't the Mariana Trench about 5 miles deep? And they say we'll have a man-made building finished "50 years away probably" that will be 31 friggin' miles high?
What kind of bud are these guys smoking?
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
I think you missed the point of the article. The article was written from the view point of Johnny Q. WindowsUser, not El Geeko Nerdo. The article was a rant about what linux needs to do to get on the desktop of more than the nerds, as well as the problems it faces in trying to do so.
To make us pay for any other things we may need?, or make us download them, some people don't have cable or a T1 running to their house(but we all should).
Someone else on this discussion made the point that there doesn't need to be a slimmed down distro of linux, the installer just needs to be upgraded with many more options. There should be, at the least, an "install business user" option and a "here's everything, enjoy!" option.
Really though, how much of a full install of Linux do you actually use? People so far have complained alot about the bloat on Window's install, but they should take a look at their own penguin boxes.
Then why do they really want linux?
Sigh.... What do you want Linux to be?? Do you want Linux to succeed on the desktop and oust MS as the premier desktop OS? Then you cannot have this attitude. If you want Linux to be technologicaly superior to MS, but not easier or user-friendly, then ok, this attitude is fine, you care more about the principal of Linux and how it works than with whether or not it it takes over MS.
You cannot have both the attitude and the commercial success though. For Linux to succeed on the desktop (I'm sure this has been said a million times) it has to be simple and userfriendly for all the people who use Winders, but don't know how to REALLY use an OS. It has to boot up and print that spreadsheet, Open Source principles be dammed.
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
Star Control III was ok, but nowhere near the fun that II was.
I agree with you though, that game was absolutely incredible.
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
The dialogue was great, the humor was amazingly funny, the plot outstanding, the alien races very believeable. You REALLY REALLY got into this game.
I'd reccomend it to anyone.
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
To all the people who work in tech support and put up with people screaming at them, I salute you.
You deal with more bullcrap than a farmer. I could never do it....
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
Someone explain this to me! I'm reading this article and it goes into detecting bombs that are supersensitive. It goes like this:
Someone tells you there's a bomb in the room that goes off if a photon hits it. You can't detect it using normal means because you'll set it off.
Enter Quantum Mechanics! You have a room with two mirrors that are perfect. A photon will just bounce back and forth forever. Stick a near-perfect mirror in the middle of the room. Now a photon has a %.000001 chance of going through to the other side every time it hits the mirror. I'm fine with the quantum theory up until here.
Now they say that because of the uncertainity principle, you won't know if a photon has gone through to the other side until you actualy measure the photon and see if its gone over! The article states that if you have still have a photon on the left side, then there must be a bomb in the right side. WTF?!?!
Just because you don't measure the photon doesn't mean it's not doing anything!! My question is, why is it not possible that the photon went over to the other side and set off the bomb while you were waiting?????? Just because I didn't measure the photon, doesn't mean it didn't bounce over!!!
Are they saying that the photon doesn't do anything UNTIL I measure it? Then it determines which path it's going to take??? If they want me to accept it on faith, I can do that. But I just cannot see that happenening!!! So in effect, I'm going back in time measuring this photon!!
They're actually making computers based on this shit?!?!?!!
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.