My issue with it is there's a poor use of resources. Not all glasses, plastics, and papers are created equally. Colored glass doesn't go through exactly the same steps that clear glass does for example. Rather than having knowledgeable and trained people sorting through the chaos they expect every random yahoo (I include myself in the yahoos) to know whether something goes in this bin, that bin, or no bin at all. It's terribly inefficient use of resources using labor this way without specialization. The whole system is a double-charge scam anyways. They charge you to haul off the stuff to be recycled and then they sell the recycled material for profit.. they're charging on both ends. If the post office can sort the random chaos that is mail with some level of quality I don't see why the trash/recycling people can't do it.
I'm in the US and everything our government does is stupid. I don't know what the product labeling requirements are in the UK but in the US not only is there the "recycle" symbol on the bottom of plastics but there's a little number. Well, I have no idea what that little number is but some numbers I can recycle and some numbers I can't. As a result, I don't recycle. I pay for the service (taxes) and have some recycling bins in my garage, but all my plastic goes in with the rest of the trash. Only the newspaper is sorted in the "newspaper" recycling bin.
I would be quite shocked to find that there wasn't constant airflow in the space station. It's not going to be a wind tunnel in there but there's going to be constant circulation from temperature control systems, whatever they use to filter the excess CO2 out of the air, etc.
If you think the MPAA ratings are good I highly recommend you watch the movie "This Film Is Not Yet Rated." The ratings are not so much a "help parents make informed decisions about movies" tool as it is a tool to protect the oligopoly in the movie industry.
Never underestimate the power of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" marketing. It will take a while, maybe even a couple years, but a lobbyist and/or marketing firm will find some kid who played a violent video game and shoots up a school or sees porn or something and the media will get involved, there will be a Congressional hearing, and Apple/Google will cave.
I support less regulation. Deregulate unions. Remove regulations for statutory maximum civil suit liability. While you're at it, tell the TSA to stop groping my grandma at the airport.
I think what you're seeing is that the basic fundamentals of computing concepts (disk IO, networking, sorting algorithms, etc.) are all largely "solved" problems. We'll continue to see evolutionary improvements in these areas but it was very exciting when we went from 0 through the first few generations of PCs. With modern languages, libraries, and frameworks we're actually doing much harder work. You see the low level stuff is all "internal" to the computing system. It's pure math, something the machines are quite good at. What's really difficult is taking business concepts and converting that into a "computer concept" and then turning that information into something that is meaningful to a human on the other end. It's a mixture that includes not just math/logic but also psychology and sociology if you want your software to be useful. IMHO the new cross-domain (domains here being math, psychology and sociology) is much harder than the stuff we did previously which was much more pure math. The more "pure" experiences you're looking for do exist but they're getting to be more and more niche in the areas of large scale simulation, massive databases on the Google/Amazon scale, etc. Admittedly I'm in the relatively young generation of programmers so most of my "low level" work was academic, but I personally found that work much easier to do than the stuff I currently get paid for. Writing software with mass appeal and good usability is quite difficult.
I'm in the same boat. I run a discrete graphics card on my desktop because for about $50 I got a video card that runs all of the games I play (I only buy video games when they hit the $10 bin at [big box store]), while the on-board graphics card won't handle it. Of course, my desktop is about 8-10 years old now so that might be a bad example.
When the PS3 and XBox 360 came out the graphics were of a higher quality than everyone but the most up-to-date PC gamers. Of course these production quality animators are using server farms to render movies so we're really talking apples and oranges here.
Google hasn't (until recently when it purchased Motorola) really had much skin in the game. Do the Nexus phones have this software? Blaming Google is like blaming MSFT for the malware Dell/HP/etc. put on consumer devices.
There's a few small businesses in my city that will root your phone for you, install cyanogenmod, etc. Some of their services are completely legal, some are in the gray area.. but you can get it done by someone for about $100.
Theoretically those people would've been doing productive work. Now, instead of completing productive work, they've spent probably thousands of hours dealing with this. So the nominal cost isn't very high, but the productivity cost is high.. and I presume that some other project(s) will be late due to it.
I think they would have been better off appointing a very charismatic figurehead as CEO (as the *public* face), and then letting the business folks quietly run the show behind the scenes.
You get a few senior level IT people in a room and a single meeting can easily cost $1k. Total time to figure out what happened, track the guy down, etc. could easily cost $500k.
So then you know first hand. I wasn't trying to disagree with you, sorry if it came off that way.. it just doesn't surprise me that astronauts don't have particularly high wages.
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My issue with it is there's a poor use of resources. Not all glasses, plastics, and papers are created equally. Colored glass doesn't go through exactly the same steps that clear glass does for example. Rather than having knowledgeable and trained people sorting through the chaos they expect every random yahoo (I include myself in the yahoos) to know whether something goes in this bin, that bin, or no bin at all. It's terribly inefficient use of resources using labor this way without specialization. The whole system is a double-charge scam anyways. They charge you to haul off the stuff to be recycled and then they sell the recycled material for profit.. they're charging on both ends. If the post office can sort the random chaos that is mail with some level of quality I don't see why the trash/recycling people can't do it.
I'm in the US and everything our government does is stupid. I don't know what the product labeling requirements are in the UK but in the US not only is there the "recycle" symbol on the bottom of plastics but there's a little number. Well, I have no idea what that little number is but some numbers I can recycle and some numbers I can't. As a result, I don't recycle. I pay for the service (taxes) and have some recycling bins in my garage, but all my plastic goes in with the rest of the trash. Only the newspaper is sorted in the "newspaper" recycling bin.
I would be quite shocked to find that there wasn't constant airflow in the space station. It's not going to be a wind tunnel in there but there's going to be constant circulation from temperature control systems, whatever they use to filter the excess CO2 out of the air, etc.
Exclusivity is a very effective marketing tool.
If you think the MPAA ratings are good I highly recommend you watch the movie "This Film Is Not Yet Rated." The ratings are not so much a "help parents make informed decisions about movies" tool as it is a tool to protect the oligopoly in the movie industry.
Never underestimate the power of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" marketing. It will take a while, maybe even a couple years, but a lobbyist and/or marketing firm will find some kid who played a violent video game and shoots up a school or sees porn or something and the media will get involved, there will be a Congressional hearing, and Apple/Google will cave.
I support less regulation. Deregulate unions. Remove regulations for statutory maximum civil suit liability. While you're at it, tell the TSA to stop groping my grandma at the airport.
I randomly generate all of my passwords. http://www.xkcd.com/221/
I think what you're seeing is that the basic fundamentals of computing concepts (disk IO, networking, sorting algorithms, etc.) are all largely "solved" problems. We'll continue to see evolutionary improvements in these areas but it was very exciting when we went from 0 through the first few generations of PCs. With modern languages, libraries, and frameworks we're actually doing much harder work. You see the low level stuff is all "internal" to the computing system. It's pure math, something the machines are quite good at. What's really difficult is taking business concepts and converting that into a "computer concept" and then turning that information into something that is meaningful to a human on the other end. It's a mixture that includes not just math/logic but also psychology and sociology if you want your software to be useful. IMHO the new cross-domain (domains here being math, psychology and sociology) is much harder than the stuff we did previously which was much more pure math. The more "pure" experiences you're looking for do exist but they're getting to be more and more niche in the areas of large scale simulation, massive databases on the Google/Amazon scale, etc. Admittedly I'm in the relatively young generation of programmers so most of my "low level" work was academic, but I personally found that work much easier to do than the stuff I currently get paid for. Writing software with mass appeal and good usability is quite difficult.
I'm in the same boat. I run a discrete graphics card on my desktop because for about $50 I got a video card that runs all of the games I play (I only buy video games when they hit the $10 bin at [big box store]), while the on-board graphics card won't handle it. Of course, my desktop is about 8-10 years old now so that might be a bad example.
I think it has something to do with the Marines.
When the PS3 and XBox 360 came out the graphics were of a higher quality than everyone but the most up-to-date PC gamers. Of course these production quality animators are using server farms to render movies so we're really talking apples and oranges here.
Google hasn't (until recently when it purchased Motorola) really had much skin in the game. Do the Nexus phones have this software? Blaming Google is like blaming MSFT for the malware Dell/HP/etc. put on consumer devices.
There's a few small businesses in my city that will root your phone for you, install cyanogenmod, etc. Some of their services are completely legal, some are in the gray area.. but you can get it done by someone for about $100.
Theoretically those people would've been doing productive work. Now, instead of completing productive work, they've spent probably thousands of hours dealing with this. So the nominal cost isn't very high, but the productivity cost is high.. and I presume that some other project(s) will be late due to it.
I think they would have been better off appointing a very charismatic figurehead as CEO (as the *public* face), and then letting the business folks quietly run the show behind the scenes.
I hear Jerry Sandusky might be looking for work.
/too soon?
You get a few senior level IT people in a room and a single meeting can easily cost $1k. Total time to figure out what happened, track the guy down, etc. could easily cost $500k.
Where do you live that a cop failing to prevent a crime can lead to the city getting sued?
So then you know first hand. I wasn't trying to disagree with you, sorry if it came off that way.. it just doesn't surprise me that astronauts don't have particularly high wages.
It's not clear to me what my liquid propane tank has to do with digital music.
Don't buy a Nook, they don't have much profit in those.. just buy a bunch of ebooks, that's where the money is.
Being an astronaut is like video game programming. Everyone wants to do it so you can still draw some amazing talent with relatively low wages.
A brief google search shows that Evolution claims some level of compatibility with Exchange calendars.
Please don't put the blu-ray/DVR into the TV, when it breaks you'll have an overweight TV.
To be fair, most people had a portable music device of some sort before the ipod came out.