Comment Re:how many scientists are enough? (Score 1) 551
Maybe I should have picked the AMC Gremlin instead. It certainly wasn't "wonderful", if for no other reason than its ghastly appearance.
Maybe I should have picked the AMC Gremlin instead. It certainly wasn't "wonderful", if for no other reason than its ghastly appearance.
I just bought an HP laptop, and these are the observations I have to make.
Bundled software isn't entirely bad. Bundled software that runs automatically is. I will disable this, although even so I might not uninstall it. The first thing I did was make the HP toolbar not run every time the computer boots up.
If it doesn't run automatically, and it performs some useful feature (DVD burning, for instance) which I'll probably use in the future, I'll leave it installed unless or until such a time comes where I try to use it and discover it doesn't work very well or there are better free alternatives. It's just taking disk space. I'm more concerned with RAM and processor use.
If it's something I'll never use, yeah, just uninstall it now.
However, all in all, it's a new computer, and I'm not at all worried about disk space yet. So as long as it's not running, I'm not too worried about it. Sure, in a few years I may begin to run low on disk space, but at that point I'll be better able to determine whether or not I actually need the software anyway – did I use it between now and then?
Dear people bitching about government,
Get a clue.
The government doesn't have a mind of its own, the people you elect to the positions DO.
If you live in America you CAN control the government, you are just too lazy to do so.
Just like corporations do no wrong, they can't, they are not alive.
If you want to fix the problem stop treating these organizations (government and corps) as protection umbrellas for the people operating them. Start actually holding these people responsible.
As long as you let a CEO walk away after screwing people over or polluting the environment because he/she was 'protected under the corparation' then this will continue. You give them a free pass, they'll use it. There are very few people who are qualified for these positions because they will do it 'for the good of the people', and as some citizens realize, the people who will do it 'for the good of the people' don't want anything to do with those jobs because without the bribes and other benefits you can exploit in those positions, the jobs are rather shitty jobs to have.
You can fix this crap with a simple solutions, if you weren't too lazy to look at whos on the ballot rather than checking the box for your favorite team, errrr, political party.
Look at the mess with banking, everyone is upset about these companies paying out huge bonuses and salaries, their excuse is that 'they have contracts with these people', which is funny cause they seemed to ignore all the other contracts they had with the people who invested with them in the first place. Simply make it so in order to get money they have to follow specific rules. If they don't, start putting people in jail, from the CEO all the way down to the accountant who issues the check. EVERY SINGLE ONE of those people can say 'no, I'm not doing it, its wrong'. But they don't, its far easier to just spend my tax dollars and rubber stamp the check than it is to stand up and do the right thing, especially since no one actually holds the people accountable. If you never hold individuals responsible for their actions, theres no reason for them to do the right thing.
Now activist shareholders are pressuring their corporations to oppose Israel's construction of the Apartheid, er Separation, Wall.
Sorry to go off on a tangent here, but I really don't see the problem with Israel putting up a wall. Every other country does it to some extent, and calls it a "national border". The only thing wrong with Israel's activities is that they aren't working more quickly to just sever their ties to the Palestinians, and let them have their own separate country. They'd both be better off if they went their separate ways, with each having their own independent country, and a big wall between the two. It simply isn't possible for them to live together in peace as long as the Islamic religion exists.
When I bought a Lenovo R-series computer with Vista Professional, I didn't notice a lot of crapware that they'd installed. Was it because it was a "professional" computer?
I installed Linux in a few days, so I might not have noticed everything that was there, but I actually liked some of the stuff they installed--like a driver for my hard drive's accelerometer (that would park the heads if needed) and a driver that let me configure Windows not to overcharge my battery.
My experience has been that engineering pays a pretty good starting wage, and then it goes up quite a lot over the next 5-10 years as you become "senior", but then it peaks out and you're done. Even so, you're still making very good money compared to most of the population, though you can obviously do better in middle or upper (not lower) management, or in other fields like law or medicine, or even as a skilled tradesperson who owns his own business.
However, it does seem like salaries have been rising noticeably in the past decade, for certain niches where there's not enough skilled engineers available and companies have gotten desperate. My recommendation is to find a niche that is lucrative and growing and there's not a lot of other engineers that have any expertise in it, and move yourself in that direction.
As for career paths, I really don't care. I have no desire to be anything other than a senior engineer (until I start my own consulting business, that is). I've met corporate executives before, and they're constantly working. They can't even sit down for dinner with their family without their stupid Blackberry buzzing or their cellphone ringing, and they have to stop to talk to someone about something business-related. I'll pass on that lifestyle, thanks.
I think Hodgman has a point. We're steadily embracing geek culture. Interoperable (in an earlier post) also makes a point that we should only take his word so far. Unless we somehow figure out a way to turn geekdom into an ecclesiastical theocracy and imprint our memes upon all of society to forever quash jocks and preppies, there will always be jocks, and there will always be preppies, and there will always be idiots, which is why I'm bringing up Hanlon's Razor here, and General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord's addendum to Hanlon's Razor.
Currently "jocks" are in charge (aka the smart and industrious). Let's face it, jocks are smart in their chosen fields. However, geeks are the smart and lazy segment, and we are running the world now. Jocks will always be smart and they will always do things the hard way and expend the most effort. Geeks on the other hand, will always be smart, but we're always looking for the most efficient way to do things. That's why we're currently becoming dominant IMHO in the American social structure, and probably why we will continue to be dominant for a while to come
Now, does anyone have a better view or a better argument? I need to learn something today and (sadly) lately the only place where I've been able to learn new things or realize that my assumptions are wrong is
yea, I have worked with a lot of them. Guess what, they can not talk to the village next door, and often would prefer to burn the people in the village next door rather than talk to them.
If it was not for Spanish, many villages in Guatemala would not be able to talk to each other at all (many still do not speak Spanish). That is assuming they wanted to talk to them. Other than the artificial boarder drawn on the map, it would be hard to say there is anything like a "Mayan" or "Guatemalan" culture beyond a fairly fuzzy generalization. Most of those cultures where simple farmers and owned by the Mayan. They most likly never knew much about the Mayan written language.
I'm an open source fan personally, so I'd do Misterhouse. My father had a setup a few years back that he home-built with a linux distro that was made for a little headless machine that he stuck in the basement. He got really complex with it and did all the programming himself in Assembly (he's a masochist) instead of making use of the built-in tools. He wanted to do it HIS way. It worked great though. My dad's HA setup was dialed into all of the lighting and thermostat controls for the house and it did some cool stuff. He had a temperature probe on the outside of the house, and the system would decide (based on outside temperature, time of day, and whether anyone was in the house) whether or not to run the A/C to keep the house cool, but first it would spin up all the ceiling fans. In reference to the "serious flaws" and weaknesses...ever wondered why none of the home automation tech we've been promised since 1950 has come to be common in homes? Things like auto-opening drapes, autoadjusting lighting, stuff like that. Ever wished someone would just sell something like that? The reason we don't have all of this cool stuff is that there is a company (can't remember the name off the top of my head) that holds a bunch of over-broad patents on most of what we think of as "duh" innovations in home automation. They don't license or sell their tech. They just sue people who try to make stuff.
Patent Trolls suck! They need to stopped. And, the government needs to step in and stop them. They are killing technology in more areas then just home automation.
The most recent cycle transition was in year 2000 (which was a leap year when it otherwise wouldn't have been).
Just to be extra pedantic, the year 2000 was always going to be a leap year in the Gregorian calendar.
While I'm all for this project - tell me again HOW those books are going to get to an OLPC-using kid's hands?
As other posters have pointed out - there's the issue of indexing this stuff properly.
And there's still distribution to think about.
The standard OPLC deployment includes a school server.
The model used for reference material such as Wikipedia, text books or this is to put the material on the school server. All the XOs in the area have fast wireless access and the school server has the hard drive space to store and serve all the data.
> All it would take is one really bad Windows Update to turn off 70% of the
> Internet.
Yes but we're discussing the part that would actually be missed.
The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine
