The bankers craved for the respect people wearing lab coats and thick glasses were getting. The bankers wanted in too. But they had no stomach for grueling work, nor for dispassionately declaring who was right and who was wrong without politics and prejudice. When you have that much money and want something badly, you can simply buy it. They pooled enough money and awarded a Nobel prize for the science of economics. Instant credibility. We are scientists too woot!
He should invent a better mouse trap. And the whole world will ring his doorbell. Now what? He is gone and invented a better door bell. Now the whole world has to trap his mouse or what?
Doing well in a test does not by itself mean that person has superior intelligence. This is not sour grapes talk. I have extremely good test taking skills. I got through JEE, and placed in the top 1% of the world in GRE. Still I think there are so many great students who would make better engineers than me, who perform worse than me in tests. These poor students who make 70% would really make better engineers than someone scoring 95%. If the reservation system benefits such students, I will accept it. But what is really going on is that the creamy layer kids who has as much, if not more, advantages than me, all the coaching classes and all the best high schools score 70% and get preferred over me. That is what making us so angry. Both the poor really disadvantaged students and the hard working "upper" caste students are angry. The only people who like this system are the current set of beneficiaries and their shills.
Buddy, when I was in IIT I was part of the National Service Scheme, the student organization, I was the gen sec for a year and joint sec for two years. I taught in a slum all the five years, four days a week, 5 to 7 pm. I had a graduation rate of 70% for my kids. If any of my kids in those classes scored 70% and was preferred over my brother scoring 95%, I would call it fair. I know how poor they were and how difficult it is for those kids to succeed academically. But the ground reality is, those slum kids will stay for ever in the slums. A small section of well connected people that used to belong to those downtrodden classes back in 1940s and 1950s, got on the gravy train of reservation system, their kids, their grand kids and their families are milking the system. The sons and daughters of high level civil servants and rich politicians goof off all through their high schools and manage to barely score 60% in the examns and get preferred over me, and now over my nephews and nieces.
I have a hunch you belong to that creamy layer and you don't really want your kids to compete on a level playing field with my nephews and nieces back in the Desh. I escaped, but only because I perform at mean + 3 sigma in the examns. (Make no mistake. I don't consider my self 3 sigma intellectually. I just have the 3 sigma level test taking skills). My brothers who only perform at mean + 2 sigma level are struggling there, never seeking second amendment remedies, making me a role model for their kids, doing their damndest to make at least their kids reach that level of performance. Many won't make it. Some will. And you and your ilk will just envy the few that succeed despite all this, and rationalize it away.
When India adopted the Constitution it imposed a quota system and "reserved" 20% of the seats in educational institutions, government employment etc for disadvantaged people, (12.5% for people mentioned in the castes in a schedule of the constitution and 7.5% for the tribes in another schedule). These people commonly referred to as Schedule Castes and Tribes got a special Affirmative Action like treatment. It was supposed to be for just 10 years. But politics being politics, that policy was extended again and again and it is still going strong. More more castes pressed to be included in the schedule, which could be amended more easily than the Constitution, created new categories like Backward Castes and Most Backward Castes.
By the time I was finishing high school the situation was so bad that in my State 70% of the seats were reserved for these castes. The remaining 30% was considered to be "open competition", which means any disadvantaged student who scores high will not be counted towards the quota. The closing score for engineering/medical admission for my caste was some 98.5%, that is anyone scoring less would not get admission. The closing score for the ST category was some 45% and SC was 55% and BC was around 75%. The central government did not have the BC category so for IITs 80% of the seats were in play. Some 1350 seats for the entire population of India. If you have been wondering why the IIT alumni of that age (45 to 55 presently) are so strong in academics and engineering, it is because they were the students score above mean+3 sigma.
Over the years a creamy layer has developed and the people who benefited by the reservation policy in 1950s, their children and their great grand children enjoy all the benefits. The benefits do not reach the really stuggling, poor deserving people of these castes. Among the so-called forward castes so many poor rural people have much higher disadvantages. The situation is so bad there, even the corrupt Indian politicians and the corrupt journalists pandering to the semi-literate allegedly suppressed communities are coming out periodically with such band aids to sooth the raging public anger. The really poor disadvantaged people of all castes are pissed off. Only the creamy layer of people belonging to the SC/ST/BC castes likes the present situation.
One good that has happened over the last two decades is the mushrooming growth of private colleges that finally gave all people to get an engineering degree if they wanted it. Now the private colleges are outshining State funded colleges. Now the creamy layer has its eyes on the private colleges. They want in, into that sector too. So this is their way of forcing the private colleges also to impose a reservation system.
Since most of the day time power consumption is air conditioning, we could simply make ice/chill water at night and use it to cool the home during the day.
Now you're talking crazy. Doing that would use more energy on average because you would be running a compressor constantly for a long period of time to cool down a large quantity of water. An AC unit, by comparison only runs intermittently and doesn't need to run as hard because it's only cooling the air 10-25 degrees (Fahrenheit) below ambient temperature rather than 50-70 degrees.
At present only industrial customers pay different rates for their electricity based on the time of day. Domestic electricity prices are constant all day. There is no incentive for anyone to defer their power consumption to off-peak hours, or to invest in any technology to smoothen out their power consumption curve. If we pay one price for the day time electricity and get a deep discount for the night time electricity, these fly wheel storage devices can be used to soak up energy at night and use it during the day. Since most of the day time power consumption is air conditioning, we could simply make ice/chill water at night and use it to cool the home during the day.
. Earth is slowing down That is why they need to add leap seconds, (yes, they effectively stop all the clocks in the world for a second) at the end of every year to sych the clocks with Earth's rotations.
Oil companies are insane. That's why they are paid more. I worked in IT at an oil company, and they hated hiring anyone without oil experience. They wanted secretaries with oil company experience. It was just plain stupid.
That is not really stupid. They want to make sure the people they hire will play ball as per the industry unwritten rules. They are paranoid and they think everyone is out to get them. So being checked and certified by one of their oil club members is very important to them. Why take the risk of bringing in a fresh Mech E or and IT tech from outside, and that guy/gal stumbles on to things they don't publicly acknowledge or talk about, and makes a big stink about it? Being at such and such a level in some oil company means he is one of the boys and will play ball and maximize the "deniability" of upper management.
Put another way, if what you love to do is a soft major, prepare yourself for a life where you will never be tempted by the siren call of enormous wealth.
Some fields share the income in a highly skewed manner. Movie/sports etc pay their top stars orders of magnitude more than the even the second best. Most of the soft major are such fields. A few authors make millions of dollars and most of the other English majors end up as school teachers if they are lucky. Other mundane "hard" majors like engineering, accounting etc share the wealth a tiny bit more equally.
If top 1% of the movie actors or sportsperson^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmen take home 99% of all earnings by all actors and sportsmen, in Engineering, Accounting etc top 10% will take home 90% of all earnings by all engineers/accountants. That is why the median income of engineers is so high compared to the other groups. But as for being enormously wealthy, Engineers are no different from English majors. So many things have to go right and so many stars have to be in alignment odds of ending up enormously wealthy are not dependent on college major or even a college degree.
Say what you want about Asynchronous Transfer Protocol, it ain't gonna do the job of regular Ethernet. Someone along the way is going to nab all the good packets and replace them with fake packets. There is no protection against the man-in-the-middle for ATM.
I have to wear hard (gas perm semi hard) contacts. These things cost about 100$ a pair, but most painfully require cleaning everyday. If only I could print a fresh one once a week...
Wait till the Chinese hackers start printing this tiny 3D printer using the tiny 3D printer! And should these self replicating 3D printers ever become sentient, OMG! all hell would break loose!
My friend owns a company in Chennai, India that does some kind of very heavy video processing/analysis for a major sports league. He ends up collecting hard disks full of video-data fro the ISP's undersea-fiber optic link office and transporting them on a motrocycle across town. He estimates the bandwidth of the motrocycle works out to some 1 DVD per second!
Since the prOn found in Bin Laden compound can not be military secrets it can not be classified. Since there is no trial pending it can not be called evidence of some trial. Sorbanes Oxley act prohibits destruction of electronic records. So it can't be erased either. So if you file a FOIA request for that material, the Government of the United States must provide you with the smut!
People that clever usually have enough smarts to get a decent job, make enough money for maher (bride price) for at least one wife. One bird in the hand is worth a lot more than 72 in the sky after death. So they usually don't turn suicide bombers.
In fact the stark raving lunacy and incompetence of the terrorists, people who could not set their pants on fire, is the reason why we are safe. Our safety is definetly not because of the mass gate rape by the TSA.
BTW we always append the suffix -gate to for any scandal. The TSA scandal at the airport gates would then be gategate?
At the height of hubris on the IPO of Netscape, Marc Andressen was confidently predicting that the browser could become the standard interface for all applications and the underlying operating system would be reduced to some kind of commodity like the beige boxes. We all know what happened after.
This time around, the big difference is, Google has a revenue stream, some independence from Windows and management has some proven track record. But they are not competing against Windows95 either. Every niche from phone size all the way to 35 inch cine screen, from sub Gig memory machines all the way up to 128 GB monsters, are fully populated and variety of processors and OSes and business models proliferate. May be Chromachines will cut through the clutter and succeed. Or not. Only time will tell.
Looks like the other poster in this thread worked in your shop. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2143358&cid=36093330
You seem to have serious angst against managers, my sympathies to your staff, if you are really who say you are.
When it comes to ego, the airforce combat pilots are really in the stratosphere. The ones with 5 or more kills who get to be called ace combat pilots? In the WW-II in the Pacific Theatre, you would find Japaneses aces with tens of kills. On the USAAF hardly anyone scored 10. How come?
In Japanese Imperial Air Force, ace combat pilots stayed in combat, much like star super duper programmers who eschew management promotions with disdain. Often times the ace would actually out rank the base CO-in-C. Even if he does not, he would be treated with so much of deference the ace would act as though he does. On the USArmyAF the moment a combat pilot scores 5 kills, he gets transferred out to Colarado to transfer his skills to a new crop of young pilots. Japanese aces eventually got killed, taking their skills with them.
If we can shoe horn air combat aces into training roles and play guru, we should be able to find enough non-ass***e super programmers to become productive useful gurus. BTW does anyone know the personal temperament of Donald Knuth or Dijkstra?
All these shipping companies register their vessels where the taxes are low, and enforcement of regulations are weak and shipworthiness standards are abysmal to save costs. Then they want the whole world to pitch in and help them solve the problem? Gimme a break. Just announce that no ship registered outside will be protected by US Navy. And use the convoy system developed in WW-II and provide destroyer escort to convoys. The ship owners will save substantially in insurance premia and we can tax a portion of the savings to fund this service.
People who are passionate about coding, rarely make it to the management cadres, partly by choice, partly because they lack the other skills needed to be managers. So the management is filled with folks from sales, marketing and mediocre programmers.
I think may be the guru-disciple system of education practiced (allegedly) in ancient India might bear better fruits. Guru lead teams with disciples learning from them might turn out better quality code, but the system would be expensive in the short run and takes a while to take root. The quarterly bottom line obsessed corporate world is as far away from the system of stoic ascetic guru living in a hut in a jungle accepting princes as students romanticized in Indian mythology.
That Timex Datalink watch had an optical sensor. You download data to the watch by holding it in front of the CRT monitor. The software "blinks" and outputs bars on the screen, that is read by the watch to store phone numbers and reminders. It was a microsoft brandname watch with the Microsoft logo. I used it for some 12 years before it conked out. Came with a huge battery that lasted all 12 years. Everytime someone accused me of being biased against Microsoft, I used to show them my watch. "If I am biased, why would I wear Microsoft brand name on my wrist 24/7?". Curiously absent from this list.
I don't know if there is some issue on my end of the line. But, gosh, these pages take forever to load and it keeps thrusting silverlight on your face. If you cant handle Firefox + NoScript, I am out of here. On second thoughts, add that web page to your collection failed gadgets.
Slashdot Mirror
The goal is to replace the wall switch with a small panel that will contain "sponsored" ads.
The bankers craved for the respect people wearing lab coats and thick glasses were getting. The bankers wanted in too. But they had no stomach for grueling work, nor for dispassionately declaring who was right and who was wrong without politics and prejudice. When you have that much money and want something badly, you can simply buy it. They pooled enough money and awarded a Nobel prize for the science of economics. Instant credibility. We are scientists too woot!
He should invent a better mouse trap. And the whole world will ring his doorbell. Now what? He is gone and invented a better door bell. Now the whole world has to trap his mouse or what?
Doing well in a test does not by itself mean that person has superior intelligence. This is not sour grapes talk. I have extremely good test taking skills. I got through JEE, and placed in the top 1% of the world in GRE. Still I think there are so many great students who would make better engineers than me, who perform worse than me in tests. These poor students who make 70% would really make better engineers than someone scoring 95%. If the reservation system benefits such students, I will accept it. But what is really going on is that the creamy layer kids who has as much, if not more, advantages than me, all the coaching classes and all the best high schools score 70% and get preferred over me. That is what making us so angry. Both the poor really disadvantaged students and the hard working "upper" caste students are angry. The only people who like this system are the current set of beneficiaries and their shills.
I have a hunch you belong to that creamy layer and you don't really want your kids to compete on a level playing field with my nephews and nieces back in the Desh. I escaped, but only because I perform at mean + 3 sigma in the examns. (Make no mistake. I don't consider my self 3 sigma intellectually. I just have the 3 sigma level test taking skills). My brothers who only perform at mean + 2 sigma level are struggling there, never seeking second amendment remedies, making me a role model for their kids, doing their damndest to make at least their kids reach that level of performance. Many won't make it. Some will. And you and your ilk will just envy the few that succeed despite all this, and rationalize it away.
I did. I am a proud citizen of the U S of A since 2003 Sep 23.
By the time I was finishing high school the situation was so bad that in my State 70% of the seats were reserved for these castes. The remaining 30% was considered to be "open competition", which means any disadvantaged student who scores high will not be counted towards the quota. The closing score for engineering/medical admission for my caste was some 98.5%, that is anyone scoring less would not get admission. The closing score for the ST category was some 45% and SC was 55% and BC was around 75%. The central government did not have the BC category so for IITs 80% of the seats were in play. Some 1350 seats for the entire population of India. If you have been wondering why the IIT alumni of that age (45 to 55 presently) are so strong in academics and engineering, it is because they were the students score above mean+3 sigma.
Over the years a creamy layer has developed and the people who benefited by the reservation policy in 1950s, their children and their great grand children enjoy all the benefits. The benefits do not reach the really stuggling, poor deserving people of these castes. Among the so-called forward castes so many poor rural people have much higher disadvantages. The situation is so bad there, even the corrupt Indian politicians and the corrupt journalists pandering to the semi-literate allegedly suppressed communities are coming out periodically with such band aids to sooth the raging public anger. The really poor disadvantaged people of all castes are pissed off. Only the creamy layer of people belonging to the SC/ST/BC castes likes the present situation.
One good that has happened over the last two decades is the mushrooming growth of private colleges that finally gave all people to get an engineering degree if they wanted it. Now the private colleges are outshining State funded colleges. Now the creamy layer has its eyes on the private colleges. They want in, into that sector too. So this is their way of forcing the private colleges also to impose a reservation system.
Now you're talking crazy. Doing that would use more energy on average because you would be running a compressor constantly for a long period of time to cool down a large quantity of water. An AC unit, by comparison only runs intermittently and doesn't need to run as hard because it's only cooling the air 10-25 degrees (Fahrenheit) below ambient temperature rather than 50-70 degrees.
Wonderful theory buddy. Pity, these fools did not listen to you: http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/25352/
At present only industrial customers pay different rates for their electricity based on the time of day. Domestic electricity prices are constant all day. There is no incentive for anyone to defer their power consumption to off-peak hours, or to invest in any technology to smoothen out their power consumption curve. If we pay one price for the day time electricity and get a deep discount for the night time electricity, these fly wheel storage devices can be used to soak up energy at night and use it during the day. Since most of the day time power consumption is air conditioning, we could simply make ice/chill water at night and use it to cool the home during the day.
. Earth is slowing down That is why they need to add leap seconds, (yes, they effectively stop all the clocks in the world for a second) at the end of every year to sych the clocks with Earth's rotations.
Oil companies are insane. That's why they are paid more. I worked in IT at an oil company, and they hated hiring anyone without oil experience. They wanted secretaries with oil company experience. It was just plain stupid.
That is not really stupid. They want to make sure the people they hire will play ball as per the industry unwritten rules. They are paranoid and they think everyone is out to get them. So being checked and certified by one of their oil club members is very important to them. Why take the risk of bringing in a fresh Mech E or and IT tech from outside, and that guy/gal stumbles on to things they don't publicly acknowledge or talk about, and makes a big stink about it? Being at such and such a level in some oil company means he is one of the boys and will play ball and maximize the "deniability" of upper management.
Put another way, if what you love to do is a soft major, prepare yourself for a life where you will never be tempted by the siren call of enormous wealth.
Some fields share the income in a highly skewed manner. Movie/sports etc pay their top stars orders of magnitude more than the even the second best. Most of the soft major are such fields. A few authors make millions of dollars and most of the other English majors end up as school teachers if they are lucky. Other mundane "hard" majors like engineering, accounting etc share the wealth a tiny bit more equally.
If top 1% of the movie actors or sportsperson^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmen take home 99% of all earnings by all actors and sportsmen, in Engineering, Accounting etc top 10% will take home 90% of all earnings by all engineers/accountants. That is why the median income of engineers is so high compared to the other groups. But as for being enormously wealthy, Engineers are no different from English majors. So many things have to go right and so many stars have to be in alignment odds of ending up enormously wealthy are not dependent on college major or even a college degree.
Say what you want about Asynchronous Transfer Protocol, it ain't gonna do the job of regular Ethernet. Someone along the way is going to nab all the good packets and replace them with fake packets. There is no protection against the man-in-the-middle for ATM.
I have to wear hard (gas perm semi hard) contacts. These things cost about 100$ a pair, but most painfully require cleaning everyday. If only I could print a fresh one once a week ...
Wait till the Chinese hackers start printing this tiny 3D printer using the tiny 3D printer! And should these self replicating 3D printers ever become sentient, OMG! all hell would break loose!
My friend owns a company in Chennai, India that does some kind of very heavy video processing/analysis for a major sports league. He ends up collecting hard disks full of video-data fro the ISP's undersea-fiber optic link office and transporting them on a motrocycle across town. He estimates the bandwidth of the motrocycle works out to some 1 DVD per second!
Since the prOn found in Bin Laden compound can not be military secrets it can not be classified. Since there is no trial pending it can not be called evidence of some trial. Sorbanes Oxley act prohibits destruction of electronic records. So it can't be erased either. So if you file a FOIA request for that material, the Government of the United States must provide you with the smut!
In fact the stark raving lunacy and incompetence of the terrorists, people who could not set their pants on fire, is the reason why we are safe. Our safety is definetly not because of the mass gate rape by the TSA.
BTW we always append the suffix -gate to for any scandal. The TSA scandal at the airport gates would then be gategate?
This time around, the big difference is, Google has a revenue stream, some independence from Windows and management has some proven track record. But they are not competing against Windows95 either. Every niche from phone size all the way to 35 inch cine screen, from sub Gig memory machines all the way up to 128 GB monsters, are fully populated and variety of processors and OSes and business models proliferate. May be Chromachines will cut through the clutter and succeed. Or not. Only time will tell.
Looks like the other poster in this thread worked in your shop. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2143358&cid=36093330 You seem to have serious angst against managers, my sympathies to your staff, if you are really who say you are.
In Japanese Imperial Air Force, ace combat pilots stayed in combat, much like star super duper programmers who eschew management promotions with disdain. Often times the ace would actually out rank the base CO-in-C. Even if he does not, he would be treated with so much of deference the ace would act as though he does. On the USArmyAF the moment a combat pilot scores 5 kills, he gets transferred out to Colarado to transfer his skills to a new crop of young pilots. Japanese aces eventually got killed, taking their skills with them.
If we can shoe horn air combat aces into training roles and play guru, we should be able to find enough non-ass***e super programmers to become productive useful gurus. BTW does anyone know the personal temperament of Donald Knuth or Dijkstra?
All these shipping companies register their vessels where the taxes are low, and enforcement of regulations are weak and shipworthiness standards are abysmal to save costs. Then they want the whole world to pitch in and help them solve the problem? Gimme a break. Just announce that no ship registered outside will be protected by US Navy. And use the convoy system developed in WW-II and provide destroyer escort to convoys. The ship owners will save substantially in insurance premia and we can tax a portion of the savings to fund this service.
I think may be the guru-disciple system of education practiced (allegedly) in ancient India might bear better fruits. Guru lead teams with disciples learning from them might turn out better quality code, but the system would be expensive in the short run and takes a while to take root. The quarterly bottom line obsessed corporate world is as far away from the system of stoic ascetic guru living in a hut in a jungle accepting princes as students romanticized in Indian mythology.
That Timex Datalink watch had an optical sensor. You download data to the watch by holding it in front of the CRT monitor. The software "blinks" and outputs bars on the screen, that is read by the watch to store phone numbers and reminders. It was a microsoft brandname watch with the Microsoft logo. I used it for some 12 years before it conked out. Came with a huge battery that lasted all 12 years. Everytime someone accused me of being biased against Microsoft, I used to show them my watch. "If I am biased, why would I wear Microsoft brand name on my wrist 24/7?". Curiously absent from this list.
I don't know if there is some issue on my end of the line. But, gosh, these pages take forever to load and it keeps thrusting silverlight on your face. If you cant handle Firefox + NoScript, I am out of here. On second thoughts, add that web page to your collection failed gadgets.