You can already do searches like this using the "site:" function. For example searching only slashdot on google is easy by adding "site:slashdot.org" to the end of your search.
Even though Google has this function, however, it is not completely useful. Their index isn't updated instantaneously so often it lags behind days or even weeks. Polling sites on the internet is too much and if a provider notices excessive queries from Google it is pretty easy to limit the number of times they can hit your site or even block them all together. So they'd only be doing themselves in if they went too far with keeping their index updated.
Another thing is the Google index method is good for certain things but horrible for others. Say for example you were searching for information regarding a specific model of a TV. Unless you know the exact model number or part number, Google isn't going to give you an answer very fast. In most cases your better off going to the site and finding it yourself.
Another thing that really throws Google off is mailing lists. Anytime I search for freebsd things, I always get a bunch of results from random posts in mailing lists that are something completely irrelevant to what I wanted. In fact, the first page of results is often a little random because the algorithm didn't account for the structure of a mailing list and the purpose of the mailing list.
Google's solution is still probably better than the competition, but there are some pretty big rough edges that they seem to have no idea on how to approach. Some of them are pretty mediocre or not even useful like their shopping search (was called froogle).
Instead of new versions of scripting languages, we should be pushing browser makers to allow scripting to be installed via plug-ins rather than being native to the browser.
I'm afraid of this idea. Partly because it reminds me of Java applets and Flash.
Aptera is already pretty close. Their prototype is real and working and they're claiming a 300mpg rating with 2.5 seats, 3 wheels, and a hybrid electricity/gasoline model. They are building to California's standards so they will probably pass all other standards the US has.
First of all, I am not a manager, I'm a grunt just like most people. I sit in my cube and get told what I'm supposed to be working on. I'll probably get modded down for this considering the overwhelming number of whiners on slashdot, but I really feel like I need to say something when people come to the table whining rather than valid arguments.
Don't even try to claim that this is the way it should be.
A little bitter are we? Executive compensation follows the rules of supply and demand. That is, if you can go out and find me a CEO that has the experience to lead a company with tens of thousands of employees decently over 5 years and he'll be willing to leave his current company for yours, then your argument would hold. But unless you can convince Eric Schmidt to leave Google, you'll probably fail every time.
Furthermore, if you truly believe that CEOs are overpriced, then why is there such a short supply of qualified CEOs? Oh yeah, that's right, because everyone else is too chicken to take on the risk. (And I'm one of those chickens, at least for now.)
I agree that some CEOs are over compensated and that a majority (if not all) of executive management's compensation should be tied to the price of the stock. That is just basic corporate finance logic. But the problem many companies have is that they need to replace their CEO for whatever reason and finding a replacement is hard. If that's the case, the only option may very well be to offer a valid candidate CEO more compensation to get him to make the switch.
I'll tell you what I tell other people that like to sit around and whine about the current situation: if you think you have what it takes and you can do a better job than management, then get off your ass and do it. If management isn't your thing, then go find another job where you can accept management's compensation and interaction. Until then, shut up, because all you are doing is wasting everyone's time by whining and hoping the world will magically change to accommodate your ideals. You decided to accept your current job and work for your boss so obviously you're ok with it.
Take a step back and try to understand what you just said.
Most good software I've ever seen was designed to solve the specific needs of a very few people, often needs the software author h(im/er)self had.
Why is this true? I would suggest that the software is good because both the developer and the customer are the same person. There is no need to argue or communicate because you are the same person in both roles.
I think the focus group method is practically guaranteed to lead to mediocre or poor designs.
I would say poor requirements engineering will lead to poor designs; you cannot design something for which you don't completely understand. To make things worst, most customers do not understand engineering and sometimes they may not even know exactly what it is they want. But they will insist that they need something to solve their problem.
It is practically impossible to get the requirements right the first time. I have found that the only way to remain on track is to continuously verify the resulting implementation against the customers. But this is an expensive process and everyone has been trying to find ways to make this process cheaper or use alternative methods. Apple it seems has an expert customer who happens to also be the CEO. Therefore verifying the design and implementation is actually fairly cheap (or required) for them.
True, but now let's say you agreed that you are going to program in the OO methodology. Which language do you choose?
There are different reasons for choosing one language over another once you get past the classification of a language (procedural, functional, oo, logical). You will also often find that the industry will gravitate toward what has the cheapest cost for their task.
Defrag. If this does not fix the issue, you do not have enough Ram.
Actually, I think the solution is to disable windows defender. I installed vista on a system with 2gb of ram and noticed the high disk utilization. The performance monitor always pointed to a system process. First I tried waiting because I thought it might be the indexer. Disk accesses did slow down, but not completely. So next I started disabling the indexing services, but the disk accesses were still there. So next I was about to go to vista's superfetch stuff but in the process I came across windows defender. I read that windows defender was basically a lame version of antivirus so I disabled it and now there's a whole lot less disk activity.
There isn't much difference. The major difference is that Apple understands how to market products.
I had this same argument with a few different people including one of my friends who actually worked in the cell phone industry. He too thought the iphone "is just another phone". Well yes, it is, but that's because you are a knowledgeable about the topic. Consider joe six-pack who finds fox news more useful than any other media channel. He sees an iphone commercial. So what is he going to do if he gets sold on buying a new phone? Is he going to magically buy the product he doesn't know about (Nokia) or buy what he sees on TV?
You see, when people talk about the iphone, they are not just talking about it from a technological standpoint. When I say, "what about the iphone" I am talking from a business standpoint. That is, Apple is running a successful campaign to the point where they practically get free press on every new product. You are not. How are you going to compete?
Don't get me wrong, I don't like Apple much, in fact I refuse to buy their products because I think they are overpriced. But you can't deny that Steve Jobs understands marketing to the masses. That is ultimately why the iphone will trump all.
Some guy in the comments on the blog downloaded both formats and they came out in exactly the same size. People here are also commenting that they only changed to support H.264. This means that they do not have higher bandwidth needs, but higher processing needs due to a smarter codec (H.264).
Personally I've played around with x264 and the improvements in quality are pretty impressive with enough encoding time and the right encoding parameters thrown at the encoding process.
Tell your tightwad boss to pick someone more suited to the task
And obviously you're not a manager or you're not a good one. If managers lacked trust, confidence, and were not willing to challenge their employees, then their employees would only be as good as the first day they stepped in the door. Unfortunately or fortunately, most employees will stay for a good amount of time, therefore the better you can develop and train your employees, the more satisfied they will be with their job. If you simply sit at let them age (especially in the tech field) they are not improving and probably doing the same thing everyday. For some people, maybe that monotone job life is ideal, but considering the field (tech), I think in a majority of cases it will be the opposite (they want new challenging things).
In my personal experience, I have been challenged in a number of ways that were not explicitly stated in my job description which is your basic Software Engineer. Once I was tasked with defining a new process for managing internal documents. The current process was obviously flawed, and they wanted a better way of doing things. I did my analysis, found all of the issues, and came up with a few solutions. After meeting and presenting the results to my manager, I then asked "who is going to update the documentation, introduce the idea to everyone else, and etc?" And she looked at me and said "You are." Oh no! Shock! Horror! I can't sit behind my computer screen all day writing code! But since then, I have learned an awful lot about the company and more importantly, how to deal with people. To me that is more valuable than anything I could have learned in the technical field because guess what, the world is full of people and people call the shots. If you can't get momentum in other people, you are virtually hopeless in pushing changes in any organization.
Sure, my manager could have sat back in her chair, and picked the most qualified person to do the job and she may have saved money then. But by investing in helping develop and train me even though I would have been more costly, now I have the skills to do the same job as anyone else just as qualified would. That's a win-win: for me I gain new skills, for her she gains an improved employee at the "Software Engineer" rate. The only cost in the deal was time.
Tip: use FTP or something really low level to determine the actual bandwidth you're getting over the wire. There are also some programs that will specifically test bandwidth without other limitations (disk speed).
I've found some protocols like SMB can be really flaky at high speeds. But FTP has reliably been able to hit the hard disk transfer speed limit which is much lower than 1gbps.
I don't necessarily agree with all of the points made because I've seen research show otherwise and have experienced otherwise myself.
The first thing to do is remove arbitrary barriers. IE, "must" have X years of experience, X degree, held X previous positions, must move to our area.
This part I agree with. Many hiring agencies shoot themselves in the foot asking for very specific requirements (must have 5 or so years experience with C++, must know domain specific but stupid tech with buzzword acronym, etc). The problem is you're always going to train an employee and there will always be some sort of lag time to start up. You're rarely going to get an employee who will be spitting out production quality work on day 1. If that was possible we'd all be contractors. What organizations should be after are highly qualified technical learners and a good foundation in software engineering practices.
Secondly, market the job -- make sure people can find out about it. That's perhaps obvious, but I know a lot of companies that try to stick to the back alleys of old boy's clubs, and it's no wonder they can't find anyone. Put an ad, a BIG one, somewhere programmers go a lot. Like slashdot.:-)
This in practice sort of works but not as well as you'd expect. If you post the job, the only people interested will be people actively seeking a job. Everyone else will just gloss over it because it is more of a waste of time than anything else. It's like commercials.
Third, salary, salary, salary, and benefits (particularly insurance and family coverage). Move 'em if you have to. We've even bought houses outright for our programming team members. You can't expect to hire a superstar by treating them like a drone.
There's a limit to how much you can bribe someone. Furthermore, just because you bribed them does not necessarily mean they will perform. You ideally want a match: you like them, they like you, for reasons other than money. For example what if you got paid to hack together open source linux code at home and you just happened to be a kernel dev? What if you got paid to work on your fancy game idea without any restrictions? Most people would rather do the job they enjoy for decent pay rather than get paid a boat load of money to do something they could care less about or worse hate to work with.
The easiest, cheapest, and most reliable way for a company to find quality employees is by word of mouth and employee referrals. This makes sense. If you were to start your own company from scratch, what would you rather do? Dig into the back of your mind across every trust-worthy and awesome programmer you worked with or interacted with and convince them to join you, or go through a lengthy hiring process about people you know jack about? I would rather do the former because I have personal work experience with the people I know that I don't even have to ask for a resume or guess if they're lying or not. I also probably have some sense of their personality and quality of work. In fact, I can easily make a decision in the back of my mind without even contacting them. The only barrier is if they would be willing to accept the offer.
I'm not surprised this is getting asked on slashdot, but I do think that slashdot lacks the expertise to answer it correctly. If you want a better answer to what truly works, you need to get in contact with an HR agency on a personal level rather than a business level. Yes, that's right, you need to know a friend that works in the HR or head-hunter business--if you come to them from the business front they will treat you like a customer rather than a friend so they'll skew everything they say towards supporting their business. But if they are more a friend they will easily be able to tell you things like success rates and employee turn over rates because that is what they deal with. People on slashdot often are just in front of their computers all day and don't g
Go back to artificial intelligence theories and research. It is simple really. If you were able to develop an AI for differentiating between humans and AI, then by definition you have already developed a method for detecting the AI you developed. It is a statement that can never be proven true in the case that we want (an AI not able to detect if a certain type of AI exists). So either you come up with an AI so good that it is impossible to differentiate it from a human or your AI will always be detected. You can't win.
The truth is this is just an arms between the bot/spam developers and the service providers. But that's only because nobody is bothering to tackle the true problem which exists in online identity.
The problem with online identity is it doesn't exist. You may have an email account with google, an ebay account on ebay, and a slashdot account on slashdot. But none of those sites bother to consolidate your identity or even make a good stab at authenticating your identity. Instead it is all disjoint and based on some other equally unreliable identity (email) for verification.
That problem needs to be solved first. There needs to be a number of reasonably reliable identity verification systems that are distributable between services. In the real world we have some of these, they are things like driver's licenses, passports, birth certificates. Online we have half of that. We have efforts like openid which allow you to have a single id that is reusable on different service providers. Great, but that's only step one.
The second step involves verifying that that identity actually belongs to a human. This is where I think the internet has abysmally failed. But it is certainly possible and it is possible today.
Take for example online purchases. A bot cannot make an online purchase without a valid electronic form of payment which is typically a credit card number. AH HA! Why don't we have an id authentication system in place that allows for credit card verification to help ensure that the identity does indeed belong to a human? Of course doing something like this raises other issues which are that the system must maintain that no credit card number be reused on multiple identities and that the credit card number be securely maintained (one way encryption).
Well, you may say "what if I don't have a credit card number?" then you could latch onto other things like a bank account or a drivers license number. The point is you create a verification of a tangible real-world asset to link an online identity to. That then becomes your identity and your online passport.
Now a spammer can't just go and crack your algorithm if he wants free accounts. Instead he has to come up with a reliable source of bank account numbers, drivers license numbers, or other things. But if he was able to do that then he would already be capable of more serious issues.
The final problem is fake identities that exist in the real world like a fake drivers license. That might be possible to reproduce on the internet, but this is why you would need to verify against multiple identity verification systems. So for example if you really wanted to weed bots out, you would require say 3 different types of identity verifications like say a drivers license, a credit card number, and a bank account.
My final rant will be about something else I think the internet and technology has failed abysmally at which are passwords. Obviously fewer passwords would be required if you could have a single identity, but there are still plenty of cases where simply having an online identity wouldn't be enough to get me around other things like say a corporate account password or a atm pin number.
Today I probably have 30 or so different accounts online and offline. And each of those systems has different password requirements and limitations, therefore requiring me to use multiple passwords formats. That BS. I am willing to park my car in a random public area and my car doesn't have a passwo
Re:I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7
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What's New In FreeBSD 7.0
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I was toying around with Freebsd 7.0 RC3 just a few days ago, well actually I was testing it to see if ZFS was really working as claimed. A very basic installation to a 40gb disk went pretty quick (5 to 10 minutes). Rebooted into the installed system and everything was fine. Took an old 1.6gb drive I had and plugged it right in, recognized as/dev/da1 or whatever. Ran "zpool create tank da1" and BAM!/tank already mounted and ready to go. No stupid fdisk, no stupid format command, no fstab nonsense.
Now I wouldn't run out and switch everything to freebsd 7 and zfs because work isn't finished. For example there's no ACL support since ZFS supports NFSv4 ACLs while freebsd only supports Posix1e. My next test will involve getting samba working and this may be a little tricky since there are some reports of issues with running samba on ZFS. But all of the available reports are quite old (half a year or older). I don't really care about the ACLs because I just intend to use the system as a single user and a convenient area to dump my files on a bunch of disks that all conveniently appear as one along with some redundancy (better than just a bunch of disks and raid5).
The ideal solution is to simply find a job that allows you to stay in your basement. I hear that people that have mastered this art seem to have congregated at some website that combines the '/' and '.' characters.
I think there are more serious flaws with this "customizable display on key" concept. One issue is if the keys are dynamic (they change function) then in order for the user to recognize the function of the key, the user has to look at his keyboard. Many typists no longer look at the keyboard when they're typing and even if they do, they don't "hunt" for keys. People can do this and type fast because they have built the necessary mapping in their brain to not have to process things like finding where each key is. So looking at your keyboard can actually hinder your performance if the functions are not consistent or change depending on the inputs.
Another problem is most people don't naturally use the keyboard. They use a pointing device that corresponds to the screen. So for example a touch screen is a pretty dead simple device to use. You can go to the movie theatre and walk up to an automated ticket machine to purchase your ticket without having seen the interface ever before because it is a touch screen and you simply select the choices you want. Now we have the optimus keyboard which has move the display device to the input device rather than move the input device to the display (touch screen). So the assumption here is that people will actually interact with their keyboard as if it were a display device which I honestly don't think it possible. For example how many times have people tried typing on the number pad only to realize that numlock was on despite the numlock light obviously being off. In the case of the optimus, that may not be an issue if the user at least looks at the keys (you can change the labels on the number pad keys), but again I have to stop to look at the keyboard rather than keep my eyes on the screen.
One last thing that is a little off is the use of color OLED displays rather than something simpler or cheaper. Is there a reason why the keys need to display at 10fps and 65k colors? Am I going to be watching porn on my keyboard or something? Why not use something like epaper or a single color display. Even though it is monochrome, 99% of the need is accomplished: the need to display a different label on the key.
I honestly think there are better solutions out there that come closer to meeting the actual usability needs (example the ergodex). Furthermore I think there is still room for other innovations in input devices that are immediately useful, but not so obvious to discover. One of those innovations is the mouse wheel--incredibly useful but not so obvious to think of. Now take away a mouse wheel from a user and they will most likely get annoyed.
I've always thought a refrigerator that could tell you what is inside and for how long it has been in there would be pretty darn useful. In fact, it may even be possible today if you act a little clever.
For example the simplest solution is simply to take the door and make it a window. The problem is the window probably is not good insulation or needs to be designed in such a way that it maintains insulation. With a window, you can now see what's inside without opening the fridge (saves money by preventing unnecessary opens). This doesn't address the issue of how long stuff has been in there though or the issue of stuff getting forgotten and left in the back for years.
With more advanced tech, you could probably come pretty darn close. For example if you attached an RFID to each object the object's container, you could keep a pretty good track of what objects have been in there and for how long. So if Tupperware containers came with RFIDs, the fridge could keep track of the item and display on an LCD on the fridge door "Tupperware (Round, 7 inch, Age: 3 days)". With things like produce and fruits you'd have to put the RFID on the bag. The age of the item alone is probably enough to estimate if the food has spoiled or not. So things in Tupperware or bags would probably be bad after a week or two. Stuff in bottles probably months. The only issue this doesn't solve is determining the exact location of the object inside of the fridge and you'd have to have a pretty clever solution for letting the fridge understand when an object's age should reset. For example if you take the Tupperware out but leave the contents inside and put it back, then the fridge would have to figure out if the age should be reset or if it should continue aging.
Regardless probably the most useful thing about a fridge that understands what is inside is probably the idea that it could automatically generate grocery lists and order items automatically when they're needed. For example if milk bottles had RFIDs embedded and there was a database the fridge could access to determine the expiration date of the milk based on the RFID, then the fridge could order a bottle of milk and have it delivered and arrive just before the old milk bottle expires. Now rather than doing groceries, your fridge is doing groceries for you (and all those "Got Milk" commercials will be a thing of the past).
Another idea is that you can now connect to your fridge from the internet and before you go home or while you're at the grocery store, you can see if it really is worth buying more of what you need or not. So if during work you thought "I'll have lasagna tonight" but I don't know if you have the ingredients, you could just connect to your fridge and see what's inside without being home! Then you find out that the cheese has been in there for a year, so it might be a good idea to stop by the store before heading home.
The only problem with this is that regular people probably are not willing to pay for this kind of tech; people don't want to pay an extra 5 or 10 cents just to have their products tagged and possibly an extra couple hundred or so just to have a smart fridge. So this idea will probably have to be pushed by the supermarket companies. What do companies have to gain? Well the initial thought would be the Google approach and slap a lcd to the fridge, and display something like "$1 off Cheerios if you order it now" if you have a customer that happens to consume a large amount of milk.
But nobody wants their fridge to flash ads in their kitchen, they want their fridge to look beautiful while keeping food fresh. So I say what the grocery companies can benefit from by providing this extra service is an opportunity to change their inventory management and their sales model. This is possible because the companies could have a database of every customer's fridge and their consumption. Based on this data, you could create and inventory and distribution system at the supermarket that would order products just as they'
Re:Too many 'this stuff sucks' moments
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The Future of XML
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· Score: 1
XML was created to solve a set of problems. Unfortunately, like most of tech, it also created new problems of its own.
For example, before XML, there was no good standard for communicating data between very very different pieces of software. So if you had a database here and a fancy tool over there that might find data in your database useful, you were hopeless in getting the two linked together. With everyone jumping on the XML bandwagon, the potential to link things together is much more possible as long as everyone talks XML. You could effectively just go straight to reading or writing the XML rather than attempting to understand how their crazy software tool worked or their undocumented proprietary formats and APIs.
So XML had good intentions, but the inventors were short-sighted. They didn't think of the consequences later on and the later problems that would be present. For example a common application of XML is to go from a relational database, convert the data to XML, then transform the data to something fancy or readable like HTML. But wait! If we have both a database and XML are we not storing the data twice in two different formats!? Ok, easy, get rid of the database. But wait! There is no such thing as a fast XML database!
At some point I hope to have something better than XML. But it has brought some good to software, that being that it is actually a strict standard that everyone is actually adopting. That alone is a really good reason to jump on the bandwagon.
Probably won't change anyone's minds, but it's nice to read something with enjoyable, halfway unbiased prose.
I found the article to be written by someone just out of high school and happened to get A's in his English and writing classes. Half of the article just rambles about facebook. Another good chunk just talks about Virtual PC and the author's lack of knowledge about *nix. And as a reader, I can't be bothered to read commentary about the pronunciation "banal." In fact it is insulting to me because it implies that I cannot pick up and use a dictionary.
The only pieces of Vista (bashing) you can find in this article are the following:
Vista can't access facebook.
Vista got rid of file menus.
Vista's explorer has no parent directory button.
He had a hard time figuring out how to find the system-wide cleartype setting.
telnet isn't available by default.
He couldn't access facebook.
The title of the article should literally be renamed to "Vista Can't Access Facebook:( (I'm Unbiased...Really!:)". I'll admit it, I have a facebook account, but I was dragged into it by a good friend of mine and haven't logged in for months. I don't care about your issues with facebook and I even doubt half of facebook care about your issues with facebook because they're probably inactive like me. If people like me don't care, why should people on Slashdot?
The only reason why Slashdot should like this article is because it puts down Vista. But if you read carefully, you will understand that the guy is actually a Microsoft kid that had a bad experience with one of Microsoft products. What geek doesn't or has never used *nix find? What geek actually prefers Virtual PC to the alternatives? I'm running VirtualBox on Vista with Ubuntu installed on VirtualBox just fine. What geek decides to go to Circuit City when his hard drive dies, buys a Vista PC, and later returns it? Perhaps his motives were to exploit Circuit City's return policy, but I'd rather go computer-less for three days than be bothered with anal Circuit City salesmen...err workers for even for 5 minutes. And real geeks use netcat, not telnet.
Something is seriously wrong with Slashdot if meaningless drivel like this gets on the front-page and categorized as "surveying". Oh silly me, this is Slashdot. Bash Vista = +5 informative. In truth I could probably write just as good of a bullshit article and call my "surveying" polling of random anonymous internet forums. (And for all you kiddies out there that's bullshit, you know the word that's commonly simplified to BS when you can't swear in school.)
There are many honest rants about Vista that I can accept. But this is not one of them.
I wish there was something like spam filters or adblock for telephones and snail mail but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case or will be for quite a while.
So I think the only way is to take things into your own hands and come up with a clever or "home" solution. For example many support desks put you through an automated system or if you call a company an employee might have an extension. Well why not make your own little home automated telephone system that would require say a special key combination before your home phone actually rings? Otherwise it would just push you through to the voice mail. So now when you tell your buddies your home number, you give them the phone number and a special extension to dial to bypass the automated system.
Snail mail is much trickier. I've thought about opening a PO Box to route all legitimate mail to but even then people still send you junk somehow. So the only solution I could come up with is putting down a fake name like "Joe Mama" anytime you are forced to write down your address to a non-critical service. Now when the junk comes in and says "Joe Mama" it immediately goes to the trash, no need to open it.
This is actually a pretty common thing: the user gets used to reading the "broken" interface and then you go and fix it to the "right" interface, then the user comes back and complains that the "broken" one was better without understanding what the issues are.
Sure, the choice of solution could be better, but I'm not sure it's a battle they could have won. XP effectively is lying about file copies. So any correct copy implementation will probably be scoffed at in terms of (fake) performance.
The only right path is to disclose that you made a mistake and that the interface is wrong/lying. People will still laugh at you but it at least sets up a clean slate for the correct solution.
I keep pushing high speed rail for the reason that it would bring affordable long distance state and national transportation. California had/has such a plan for high speed rail but from talking to fellow residents and seeing how the governator has reacted so far, it doesn't look like it is a go.
I think high speed rail is a great way to boost economic activity, encourage more public transportation alternatives, and decrease maintenance/expansion/congestion of the interstate. By linking two big metropolitan cities, you quickly allow the "people" resources to operate in both locations with a much smaller price. For example if there was a high speed train from LA to San Francisco, you could potentially go from LA to SF for a day, do the job, and come back in the same day. Additionally because more people will be displaced without their cars, there will be more demand for good public transit systems. Right now, many areas do not offer good public transportation because there is not enough demand and many cities are not built for it.
But it will be tough to get high speed rail into the US. People right now are stupid and blinded by the luxuries of their cars. When you mention anything relating to them getting on a plane, a train, or a bus, they immediately think of the bad things about public transportation and all the luxuries they'll lose from giving up their car. Some common things I hear are, "it's not convenient," "don't make me sit with strangers," "isn't it just cheaper to pay for gas," and "I don't want to pay for it." Yet they fail to realize the good things, like the fact that you can read a book or the newspaper during your commute instead of staring at traffic, there is no huge upfront cost for the vehicle--instead you pay for a fare as you use the service, and nearly anything is safer than driving your own car in terms of transportation.
It's stupid if you think about it. Everyday a majority of the American population commutes in automobiles to work and they don't carpool. If the average commute in one direction was 20 minutes, and roughly a third of the US population commutes (the other two thirds are senior citizens and children), then every work day 100,000,000 Americans waste 2,000,000,000 minutes commuting. You could even cut that number in half by either claiming the average commute is only 10 minutes or half as many Americans commute, and you'd still get a mind bogglingly stupid number--all wasted in automobile traffic of course. The best part is there is no way to spin this as a "good" thing. If people were forced to walk 15 minutes to the bus stop or train station and back every day, you could at least claim that at least people are getting exercise out of their commute. If people used public transportation it would reduce nationwide consumption and dependency on oil. The only real losers in this scenario are the oil companies and the auto companies, but why should a nation cater to these two businesses?
Give me my high speed rail and public transportation. Cars for work commutes and long distance traveling is overrated.
Slashdot Mirror
You can already do searches like this using the "site:" function. For example searching only slashdot on google is easy by adding "site:slashdot.org" to the end of your search.
Even though Google has this function, however, it is not completely useful. Their index isn't updated instantaneously so often it lags behind days or even weeks. Polling sites on the internet is too much and if a provider notices excessive queries from Google it is pretty easy to limit the number of times they can hit your site or even block them all together. So they'd only be doing themselves in if they went too far with keeping their index updated.
Another thing is the Google index method is good for certain things but horrible for others. Say for example you were searching for information regarding a specific model of a TV. Unless you know the exact model number or part number, Google isn't going to give you an answer very fast. In most cases your better off going to the site and finding it yourself.
Another thing that really throws Google off is mailing lists. Anytime I search for freebsd things, I always get a bunch of results from random posts in mailing lists that are something completely irrelevant to what I wanted. In fact, the first page of results is often a little random because the algorithm didn't account for the structure of a mailing list and the purpose of the mailing list.
Google's solution is still probably better than the competition, but there are some pretty big rough edges that they seem to have no idea on how to approach. Some of them are pretty mediocre or not even useful like their shopping search (was called froogle).
I'm afraid of this idea. Partly because it reminds me of Java applets and Flash.
Aptera is already pretty close. Their prototype is real and working and they're claiming a 300mpg rating with 2.5 seats, 3 wheels, and a hybrid electricity/gasoline model. They are building to California's standards so they will probably pass all other standards the US has.
First of all, I am not a manager, I'm a grunt just like most people. I sit in my cube and get told what I'm supposed to be working on. I'll probably get modded down for this considering the overwhelming number of whiners on slashdot, but I really feel like I need to say something when people come to the table whining rather than valid arguments.
Don't even try to claim that this is the way it should be.A little bitter are we? Executive compensation follows the rules of supply and demand. That is, if you can go out and find me a CEO that has the experience to lead a company with tens of thousands of employees decently over 5 years and he'll be willing to leave his current company for yours, then your argument would hold. But unless you can convince Eric Schmidt to leave Google, you'll probably fail every time.
Furthermore, if you truly believe that CEOs are overpriced, then why is there such a short supply of qualified CEOs? Oh yeah, that's right, because everyone else is too chicken to take on the risk. (And I'm one of those chickens, at least for now.)
I agree that some CEOs are over compensated and that a majority (if not all) of executive management's compensation should be tied to the price of the stock. That is just basic corporate finance logic. But the problem many companies have is that they need to replace their CEO for whatever reason and finding a replacement is hard. If that's the case, the only option may very well be to offer a valid candidate CEO more compensation to get him to make the switch.
I'll tell you what I tell other people that like to sit around and whine about the current situation: if you think you have what it takes and you can do a better job than management, then get off your ass and do it. If management isn't your thing, then go find another job where you can accept management's compensation and interaction. Until then, shut up, because all you are doing is wasting everyone's time by whining and hoping the world will magically change to accommodate your ideals. You decided to accept your current job and work for your boss so obviously you're ok with it.
Take a step back and try to understand what you just said.
Most good software I've ever seen was designed to solve the specific needs of a very few people, often needs the software author h(im/er)self had.Why is this true? I would suggest that the software is good because both the developer and the customer are the same person. There is no need to argue or communicate because you are the same person in both roles.
I think the focus group method is practically guaranteed to lead to mediocre or poor designs.I would say poor requirements engineering will lead to poor designs; you cannot design something for which you don't completely understand. To make things worst, most customers do not understand engineering and sometimes they may not even know exactly what it is they want. But they will insist that they need something to solve their problem.
It is practically impossible to get the requirements right the first time. I have found that the only way to remain on track is to continuously verify the resulting implementation against the customers. But this is an expensive process and everyone has been trying to find ways to make this process cheaper or use alternative methods. Apple it seems has an expert customer who happens to also be the CEO. Therefore verifying the design and implementation is actually fairly cheap (or required) for them.
True, but now let's say you agreed that you are going to program in the OO methodology. Which language do you choose?
There are different reasons for choosing one language over another once you get past the classification of a language (procedural, functional, oo, logical). You will also often find that the industry will gravitate toward what has the cheapest cost for their task.
Actually, I think the solution is to disable windows defender. I installed vista on a system with 2gb of ram and noticed the high disk utilization. The performance monitor always pointed to a system process. First I tried waiting because I thought it might be the indexer. Disk accesses did slow down, but not completely. So next I started disabling the indexing services, but the disk accesses were still there. So next I was about to go to vista's superfetch stuff but in the process I came across windows defender. I read that windows defender was basically a lame version of antivirus so I disabled it and now there's a whole lot less disk activity.
It is powerpoint in a webpage! OH THE HORROR!
Quick, someone patent putting a series of presentation slides into a web page just to prevent it from happening in the future!
There isn't much difference. The major difference is that Apple understands how to market products.
I had this same argument with a few different people including one of my friends who actually worked in the cell phone industry. He too thought the iphone "is just another phone". Well yes, it is, but that's because you are a knowledgeable about the topic. Consider joe six-pack who finds fox news more useful than any other media channel. He sees an iphone commercial. So what is he going to do if he gets sold on buying a new phone? Is he going to magically buy the product he doesn't know about (Nokia) or buy what he sees on TV?
You see, when people talk about the iphone, they are not just talking about it from a technological standpoint. When I say, "what about the iphone" I am talking from a business standpoint. That is, Apple is running a successful campaign to the point where they practically get free press on every new product. You are not. How are you going to compete?
Don't get me wrong, I don't like Apple much, in fact I refuse to buy their products because I think they are overpriced. But you can't deny that Steve Jobs understands marketing to the masses. That is ultimately why the iphone will trump all.
Some guy in the comments on the blog downloaded both formats and they came out in exactly the same size. People here are also commenting that they only changed to support H.264. This means that they do not have higher bandwidth needs, but higher processing needs due to a smarter codec (H.264).
Personally I've played around with x264 and the improvements in quality are pretty impressive with enough encoding time and the right encoding parameters thrown at the encoding process.
And obviously you're not a manager or you're not a good one. If managers lacked trust, confidence, and were not willing to challenge their employees, then their employees would only be as good as the first day they stepped in the door. Unfortunately or fortunately, most employees will stay for a good amount of time, therefore the better you can develop and train your employees, the more satisfied they will be with their job. If you simply sit at let them age (especially in the tech field) they are not improving and probably doing the same thing everyday. For some people, maybe that monotone job life is ideal, but considering the field (tech), I think in a majority of cases it will be the opposite (they want new challenging things).
In my personal experience, I have been challenged in a number of ways that were not explicitly stated in my job description which is your basic Software Engineer. Once I was tasked with defining a new process for managing internal documents. The current process was obviously flawed, and they wanted a better way of doing things. I did my analysis, found all of the issues, and came up with a few solutions. After meeting and presenting the results to my manager, I then asked "who is going to update the documentation, introduce the idea to everyone else, and etc?" And she looked at me and said "You are." Oh no! Shock! Horror! I can't sit behind my computer screen all day writing code! But since then, I have learned an awful lot about the company and more importantly, how to deal with people. To me that is more valuable than anything I could have learned in the technical field because guess what, the world is full of people and people call the shots. If you can't get momentum in other people, you are virtually hopeless in pushing changes in any organization.
Sure, my manager could have sat back in her chair, and picked the most qualified person to do the job and she may have saved money then. But by investing in helping develop and train me even though I would have been more costly, now I have the skills to do the same job as anyone else just as qualified would. That's a win-win: for me I gain new skills, for her she gains an improved employee at the "Software Engineer" rate. The only cost in the deal was time.
Tip: use FTP or something really low level to determine the actual bandwidth you're getting over the wire. There are also some programs that will specifically test bandwidth without other limitations (disk speed).
I've found some protocols like SMB can be really flaky at high speeds. But FTP has reliably been able to hit the hard disk transfer speed limit which is much lower than 1gbps.
I don't necessarily agree with all of the points made because I've seen research show otherwise and have experienced otherwise myself.
The first thing to do is remove arbitrary barriers. IE, "must" have X years of experience, X degree, held X previous positions, must move to our area.
This part I agree with. Many hiring agencies shoot themselves in the foot asking for very specific requirements (must have 5 or so years experience with C++, must know domain specific but stupid tech with buzzword acronym, etc). The problem is you're always going to train an employee and there will always be some sort of lag time to start up. You're rarely going to get an employee who will be spitting out production quality work on day 1. If that was possible we'd all be contractors. What organizations should be after are highly qualified technical learners and a good foundation in software engineering practices.
Secondly, market the job -- make sure people can find out about it. That's perhaps obvious, but I know a lot of companies that try to stick to the back alleys of old boy's clubs, and it's no wonder they can't find anyone. Put an ad, a BIG one, somewhere programmers go a lot. Like slashdot. :-)
This in practice sort of works but not as well as you'd expect. If you post the job, the only people interested will be people actively seeking a job. Everyone else will just gloss over it because it is more of a waste of time than anything else. It's like commercials.
Third, salary, salary, salary, and benefits (particularly insurance and family coverage). Move 'em if you have to. We've even bought houses outright for our programming team members. You can't expect to hire a superstar by treating them like a drone.
There's a limit to how much you can bribe someone. Furthermore, just because you bribed them does not necessarily mean they will perform. You ideally want a match: you like them, they like you, for reasons other than money. For example what if you got paid to hack together open source linux code at home and you just happened to be a kernel dev? What if you got paid to work on your fancy game idea without any restrictions? Most people would rather do the job they enjoy for decent pay rather than get paid a boat load of money to do something they could care less about or worse hate to work with.
The easiest, cheapest, and most reliable way for a company to find quality employees is by word of mouth and employee referrals. This makes sense. If you were to start your own company from scratch, what would you rather do? Dig into the back of your mind across every trust-worthy and awesome programmer you worked with or interacted with and convince them to join you, or go through a lengthy hiring process about people you know jack about? I would rather do the former because I have personal work experience with the people I know that I don't even have to ask for a resume or guess if they're lying or not. I also probably have some sense of their personality and quality of work. In fact, I can easily make a decision in the back of my mind without even contacting them. The only barrier is if they would be willing to accept the offer.
I'm not surprised this is getting asked on slashdot, but I do think that slashdot lacks the expertise to answer it correctly. If you want a better answer to what truly works, you need to get in contact with an HR agency on a personal level rather than a business level. Yes, that's right, you need to know a friend that works in the HR or head-hunter business--if you come to them from the business front they will treat you like a customer rather than a friend so they'll skew everything they say towards supporting their business. But if they are more a friend they will easily be able to tell you things like success rates and employee turn over rates because that is what they deal with. People on slashdot often are just in front of their computers all day and don't g
Go back to artificial intelligence theories and research. It is simple really. If you were able to develop an AI for differentiating between humans and AI, then by definition you have already developed a method for detecting the AI you developed. It is a statement that can never be proven true in the case that we want (an AI not able to detect if a certain type of AI exists). So either you come up with an AI so good that it is impossible to differentiate it from a human or your AI will always be detected. You can't win.
The truth is this is just an arms between the bot/spam developers and the service providers. But that's only because nobody is bothering to tackle the true problem which exists in online identity.
The problem with online identity is it doesn't exist. You may have an email account with google, an ebay account on ebay, and a slashdot account on slashdot. But none of those sites bother to consolidate your identity or even make a good stab at authenticating your identity. Instead it is all disjoint and based on some other equally unreliable identity (email) for verification.
That problem needs to be solved first. There needs to be a number of reasonably reliable identity verification systems that are distributable between services. In the real world we have some of these, they are things like driver's licenses, passports, birth certificates. Online we have half of that. We have efforts like openid which allow you to have a single id that is reusable on different service providers. Great, but that's only step one.
The second step involves verifying that that identity actually belongs to a human. This is where I think the internet has abysmally failed. But it is certainly possible and it is possible today.
Take for example online purchases. A bot cannot make an online purchase without a valid electronic form of payment which is typically a credit card number. AH HA! Why don't we have an id authentication system in place that allows for credit card verification to help ensure that the identity does indeed belong to a human? Of course doing something like this raises other issues which are that the system must maintain that no credit card number be reused on multiple identities and that the credit card number be securely maintained (one way encryption).
Well, you may say "what if I don't have a credit card number?" then you could latch onto other things like a bank account or a drivers license number. The point is you create a verification of a tangible real-world asset to link an online identity to. That then becomes your identity and your online passport.
Now a spammer can't just go and crack your algorithm if he wants free accounts. Instead he has to come up with a reliable source of bank account numbers, drivers license numbers, or other things. But if he was able to do that then he would already be capable of more serious issues.
The final problem is fake identities that exist in the real world like a fake drivers license. That might be possible to reproduce on the internet, but this is why you would need to verify against multiple identity verification systems. So for example if you really wanted to weed bots out, you would require say 3 different types of identity verifications like say a drivers license, a credit card number, and a bank account.
My final rant will be about something else I think the internet and technology has failed abysmally at which are passwords. Obviously fewer passwords would be required if you could have a single identity, but there are still plenty of cases where simply having an online identity wouldn't be enough to get me around other things like say a corporate account password or a atm pin number.
Today I probably have 30 or so different accounts online and offline. And each of those systems has different password requirements and limitations, therefore requiring me to use multiple passwords formats. That BS. I am willing to park my car in a random public area and my car doesn't have a passwo
I was toying around with Freebsd 7.0 RC3 just a few days ago, well actually I was testing it to see if ZFS was really working as claimed. A very basic installation to a 40gb disk went pretty quick (5 to 10 minutes). Rebooted into the installed system and everything was fine. Took an old 1.6gb drive I had and plugged it right in, recognized as /dev/da1 or whatever. Ran "zpool create tank da1" and BAM! /tank already mounted and ready to go. No stupid fdisk, no stupid format command, no fstab nonsense.
Now I wouldn't run out and switch everything to freebsd 7 and zfs because work isn't finished. For example there's no ACL support since ZFS supports NFSv4 ACLs while freebsd only supports Posix1e. My next test will involve getting samba working and this may be a little tricky since there are some reports of issues with running samba on ZFS. But all of the available reports are quite old (half a year or older). I don't really care about the ACLs because I just intend to use the system as a single user and a convenient area to dump my files on a bunch of disks that all conveniently appear as one along with some redundancy (better than just a bunch of disks and raid5).
The ideal solution is to simply find a job that allows you to stay in your basement. I hear that people that have mastered this art seem to have congregated at some website that combines the '/' and '.' characters.
*ducks*
Or use things worth memorizing at an early age:
abc's: abcdefg etc
123's: 123456 etc
prime numbers: 235711 etc
special numbers: 3.14159 etc
birthday (hers, dads, or moms)
phone numbers
address
I think there are more serious flaws with this "customizable display on key" concept. One issue is if the keys are dynamic (they change function) then in order for the user to recognize the function of the key, the user has to look at his keyboard. Many typists no longer look at the keyboard when they're typing and even if they do, they don't "hunt" for keys. People can do this and type fast because they have built the necessary mapping in their brain to not have to process things like finding where each key is. So looking at your keyboard can actually hinder your performance if the functions are not consistent or change depending on the inputs.
Another problem is most people don't naturally use the keyboard. They use a pointing device that corresponds to the screen. So for example a touch screen is a pretty dead simple device to use. You can go to the movie theatre and walk up to an automated ticket machine to purchase your ticket without having seen the interface ever before because it is a touch screen and you simply select the choices you want. Now we have the optimus keyboard which has move the display device to the input device rather than move the input device to the display (touch screen). So the assumption here is that people will actually interact with their keyboard as if it were a display device which I honestly don't think it possible. For example how many times have people tried typing on the number pad only to realize that numlock was on despite the numlock light obviously being off. In the case of the optimus, that may not be an issue if the user at least looks at the keys (you can change the labels on the number pad keys), but again I have to stop to look at the keyboard rather than keep my eyes on the screen.
One last thing that is a little off is the use of color OLED displays rather than something simpler or cheaper. Is there a reason why the keys need to display at 10fps and 65k colors? Am I going to be watching porn on my keyboard or something? Why not use something like epaper or a single color display. Even though it is monochrome, 99% of the need is accomplished: the need to display a different label on the key.
I honestly think there are better solutions out there that come closer to meeting the actual usability needs (example the ergodex). Furthermore I think there is still room for other innovations in input devices that are immediately useful, but not so obvious to discover. One of those innovations is the mouse wheel--incredibly useful but not so obvious to think of. Now take away a mouse wheel from a user and they will most likely get annoyed.
I've always thought a refrigerator that could tell you what is inside and for how long it has been in there would be pretty darn useful. In fact, it may even be possible today if you act a little clever.
For example the simplest solution is simply to take the door and make it a window. The problem is the window probably is not good insulation or needs to be designed in such a way that it maintains insulation. With a window, you can now see what's inside without opening the fridge (saves money by preventing unnecessary opens). This doesn't address the issue of how long stuff has been in there though or the issue of stuff getting forgotten and left in the back for years.
With more advanced tech, you could probably come pretty darn close. For example if you attached an RFID to each object the object's container, you could keep a pretty good track of what objects have been in there and for how long. So if Tupperware containers came with RFIDs, the fridge could keep track of the item and display on an LCD on the fridge door "Tupperware (Round, 7 inch, Age: 3 days)". With things like produce and fruits you'd have to put the RFID on the bag. The age of the item alone is probably enough to estimate if the food has spoiled or not. So things in Tupperware or bags would probably be bad after a week or two. Stuff in bottles probably months. The only issue this doesn't solve is determining the exact location of the object inside of the fridge and you'd have to have a pretty clever solution for letting the fridge understand when an object's age should reset. For example if you take the Tupperware out but leave the contents inside and put it back, then the fridge would have to figure out if the age should be reset or if it should continue aging.
Regardless probably the most useful thing about a fridge that understands what is inside is probably the idea that it could automatically generate grocery lists and order items automatically when they're needed. For example if milk bottles had RFIDs embedded and there was a database the fridge could access to determine the expiration date of the milk based on the RFID, then the fridge could order a bottle of milk and have it delivered and arrive just before the old milk bottle expires. Now rather than doing groceries, your fridge is doing groceries for you (and all those "Got Milk" commercials will be a thing of the past).
Another idea is that you can now connect to your fridge from the internet and before you go home or while you're at the grocery store, you can see if it really is worth buying more of what you need or not. So if during work you thought "I'll have lasagna tonight" but I don't know if you have the ingredients, you could just connect to your fridge and see what's inside without being home! Then you find out that the cheese has been in there for a year, so it might be a good idea to stop by the store before heading home.
The only problem with this is that regular people probably are not willing to pay for this kind of tech; people don't want to pay an extra 5 or 10 cents just to have their products tagged and possibly an extra couple hundred or so just to have a smart fridge. So this idea will probably have to be pushed by the supermarket companies. What do companies have to gain? Well the initial thought would be the Google approach and slap a lcd to the fridge, and display something like "$1 off Cheerios if you order it now" if you have a customer that happens to consume a large amount of milk.
But nobody wants their fridge to flash ads in their kitchen, they want their fridge to look beautiful while keeping food fresh. So I say what the grocery companies can benefit from by providing this extra service is an opportunity to change their inventory management and their sales model. This is possible because the companies could have a database of every customer's fridge and their consumption. Based on this data, you could create and inventory and distribution system at the supermarket that would order products just as they'
XML was created to solve a set of problems. Unfortunately, like most of tech, it also created new problems of its own.
For example, before XML, there was no good standard for communicating data between very very different pieces of software. So if you had a database here and a fancy tool over there that might find data in your database useful, you were hopeless in getting the two linked together. With everyone jumping on the XML bandwagon, the potential to link things together is much more possible as long as everyone talks XML. You could effectively just go straight to reading or writing the XML rather than attempting to understand how their crazy software tool worked or their undocumented proprietary formats and APIs.
So XML had good intentions, but the inventors were short-sighted. They didn't think of the consequences later on and the later problems that would be present. For example a common application of XML is to go from a relational database, convert the data to XML, then transform the data to something fancy or readable like HTML. But wait! If we have both a database and XML are we not storing the data twice in two different formats!? Ok, easy, get rid of the database. But wait! There is no such thing as a fast XML database!
At some point I hope to have something better than XML. But it has brought some good to software, that being that it is actually a strict standard that everyone is actually adopting. That alone is a really good reason to jump on the bandwagon.
I found the article to be written by someone just out of high school and happened to get A's in his English and writing classes. Half of the article just rambles about facebook. Another good chunk just talks about Virtual PC and the author's lack of knowledge about *nix. And as a reader, I can't be bothered to read commentary about the pronunciation "banal." In fact it is insulting to me because it implies that I cannot pick up and use a dictionary.
The only pieces of Vista (bashing) you can find in this article are the following:
The title of the article should literally be renamed to "Vista Can't Access Facebook :( (I'm Unbiased...Really! :)". I'll admit it, I have a facebook account, but I was dragged into it by a good friend of mine and haven't logged in for months. I don't care about your issues with facebook and I even doubt half of facebook care about your issues with facebook because they're probably inactive like me. If people like me don't care, why should people on Slashdot?
The only reason why Slashdot should like this article is because it puts down Vista. But if you read carefully, you will understand that the guy is actually a Microsoft kid that had a bad experience with one of Microsoft products. What geek doesn't or has never used *nix find? What geek actually prefers Virtual PC to the alternatives? I'm running VirtualBox on Vista with Ubuntu installed on VirtualBox just fine. What geek decides to go to Circuit City when his hard drive dies, buys a Vista PC, and later returns it? Perhaps his motives were to exploit Circuit City's return policy, but I'd rather go computer-less for three days than be bothered with anal Circuit City salesmen...err workers for even for 5 minutes. And real geeks use netcat, not telnet.
Something is seriously wrong with Slashdot if meaningless drivel like this gets on the front-page and categorized as "surveying". Oh silly me, this is Slashdot. Bash Vista = +5 informative. In truth I could probably write just as good of a bullshit article and call my "surveying" polling of random anonymous internet forums. (And for all you kiddies out there that's bullshit, you know the word that's commonly simplified to BS when you can't swear in school.)
There are many honest rants about Vista that I can accept. But this is not one of them.
I wish there was something like spam filters or adblock for telephones and snail mail but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case or will be for quite a while.
So I think the only way is to take things into your own hands and come up with a clever or "home" solution. For example many support desks put you through an automated system or if you call a company an employee might have an extension. Well why not make your own little home automated telephone system that would require say a special key combination before your home phone actually rings? Otherwise it would just push you through to the voice mail. So now when you tell your buddies your home number, you give them the phone number and a special extension to dial to bypass the automated system.
Snail mail is much trickier. I've thought about opening a PO Box to route all legitimate mail to but even then people still send you junk somehow. So the only solution I could come up with is putting down a fake name like "Joe Mama" anytime you are forced to write down your address to a non-critical service. Now when the junk comes in and says "Joe Mama" it immediately goes to the trash, no need to open it.
This is actually a pretty common thing: the user gets used to reading the "broken" interface and then you go and fix it to the "right" interface, then the user comes back and complains that the "broken" one was better without understanding what the issues are.
Sure, the choice of solution could be better, but I'm not sure it's a battle they could have won. XP effectively is lying about file copies. So any correct copy implementation will probably be scoffed at in terms of (fake) performance.
The only right path is to disclose that you made a mistake and that the interface is wrong/lying. People will still laugh at you but it at least sets up a clean slate for the correct solution.
I keep pushing high speed rail for the reason that it would bring affordable long distance state and national transportation. California had/has such a plan for high speed rail but from talking to fellow residents and seeing how the governator has reacted so far, it doesn't look like it is a go.
I think high speed rail is a great way to boost economic activity, encourage more public transportation alternatives, and decrease maintenance/expansion/congestion of the interstate. By linking two big metropolitan cities, you quickly allow the "people" resources to operate in both locations with a much smaller price. For example if there was a high speed train from LA to San Francisco, you could potentially go from LA to SF for a day, do the job, and come back in the same day. Additionally because more people will be displaced without their cars, there will be more demand for good public transit systems. Right now, many areas do not offer good public transportation because there is not enough demand and many cities are not built for it.
But it will be tough to get high speed rail into the US. People right now are stupid and blinded by the luxuries of their cars. When you mention anything relating to them getting on a plane, a train, or a bus, they immediately think of the bad things about public transportation and all the luxuries they'll lose from giving up their car. Some common things I hear are, "it's not convenient," "don't make me sit with strangers," "isn't it just cheaper to pay for gas," and "I don't want to pay for it." Yet they fail to realize the good things, like the fact that you can read a book or the newspaper during your commute instead of staring at traffic, there is no huge upfront cost for the vehicle--instead you pay for a fare as you use the service, and nearly anything is safer than driving your own car in terms of transportation.
It's stupid if you think about it. Everyday a majority of the American population commutes in automobiles to work and they don't carpool. If the average commute in one direction was 20 minutes, and roughly a third of the US population commutes (the other two thirds are senior citizens and children), then every work day 100,000,000 Americans waste 2,000,000,000 minutes commuting. You could even cut that number in half by either claiming the average commute is only 10 minutes or half as many Americans commute, and you'd still get a mind bogglingly stupid number--all wasted in automobile traffic of course. The best part is there is no way to spin this as a "good" thing. If people were forced to walk 15 minutes to the bus stop or train station and back every day, you could at least claim that at least people are getting exercise out of their commute. If people used public transportation it would reduce nationwide consumption and dependency on oil. The only real losers in this scenario are the oil companies and the auto companies, but why should a nation cater to these two businesses?
Give me my high speed rail and public transportation. Cars for work commutes and long distance traveling is overrated.
* Two chicks at the same time.