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Comment Re:Good! (Score 1) 762

Agreed, this show was just too sophisticated for folks to *get*. Depressing ? fuck what are folks thinking about in the US ? You'd be too if you were running out of food and don't know what the hell is going on next.

So many parallels to real life yet the audience for that show just didn't have the self-awareness to get how identifiably the characters are to actual intelligent people. It might have done better in Europe or another audience.

Comment Re:It was just okay (Score 1) 762

The show was absolutely better than both SG shows and possibly better than BSG in a number of areas regarding per episode human interaction. The problem with the show was the audience. The audience isn't sophisticated enough to *get* the writing for the most part, the depth of the characters and how they're used in the arc.

Keep in mind, instead of watching Charlie Rose for being informed of our of political process folks think that cable news, CNN, FoxNews, etc... is new. That's what the US culturally degraded to, sports and detachment from people and things around them. Same for our own self-awareness. The same crowd complaining probably doesn't have any.

Comment Re:Ridiculous... I hate network execs (Score 1) 762

I like SGU better than both previous SG series in general. What folks called 'soap opera' I call psychological which is something that the normally male dork demographic doesn't connect to. The series is a bit of a mind fuck and you can tell it's converging on something a season or so in the future which is a sign of writing that's better than most on SyFy. The writing has been better overall than the SG[A] shows and has had less filler shows as a percentage than BSG overall.

The only problem here is that I'm one of the few defenders of the show and therefore one of few ardent watchers of it.

Linux

The State of Linux IO Scheduling For the Desktop? 472

pinkeen writes "I've used Linux as my work & play OS for 5+ years. The one thing that constantly drives me mad is its IO scheduling. When I'm copying a large amount of data in the background, everything else slows down to a crawl while the CPU utilization stays at 1-2%. The process which does the actual copying is highly prioritized in terms of I/O. This is completely unacceptable for a desktop OS. I've heard about the efforts of Con Kolivas and his Brainfuck Scheduler, but it's unsupported now and probably incompatible with latest kernels. Is there any way to fix this? How do you deal with this? I have a feeling that if this issue was to be fixed, the whole desktop would become way more snappier, even if you're not doing any heavy IO in the background." Update: 10/23 22:06 GMT by T : As reader ehntoo points out in the discussion below, contrary to the submitter's impression, "Con Kolivas is still actively working on BFS, it's not unsupported. He's even got a patch for 2.6.36, which was only released on the 20th. He's also got a patchset out that I use on all my desktops which includes a bunch of tweaks for desktop use." Thanks to ehntoo, and hat tip to Bill Huey.
HP

HP Shows Off Android 'Printer' Tablet 70

angry tapir writes "Hewlett-Packard showed off a tablet computer that serves as a control panel for its new printer. The tablet browses the Web and can be used as an e-reader. It has a 7-inch screen and can be easily connected to HP's PhotoSmart eStation all-in-one printer. The tablet can be used to move and print documents and images from multiple media devices and can also be used to exchange content between the devices. The display is a larger version of the 3.5-inch control panel screens on HP's earlier Web-connected printers. The device is focused on providing access to content that can be printed, such as photos, articles, e-mail, recipes or e-books."

Comment Re:Somebody call the waaaambulance (Score 1) 1018

The law of averages also produced very average results.

There are simply cases where people and the environment their in don't match up. In the valley there's a sufficient amount of start ups with cash out there that can attract those folks suitable for that kind of environment.

They're often highly technical and leaders in their areas of expertise quite often and have that option of staying with a company or leaving. I value the stability of a job, but in general most of the work is of a 'sustaining engineering' capacity and isn't suitable for very senior level engineers that can do principal engineering of various sorts. Your career stagnates and your overall value as an engineer to other companies declines as you become more and more of a bug monkey.

The strategy of moving from company to company is effective if that can be used as fundamental manner to promote yourself upward in the technical food chain. It's difficult for folks that are risk adverse but I find those folks to be pretty fucking boring.

My two cents

Comment Re:Has anyone ever used the WebOS? (Score 3, Informative) 117

Yes, iPhone & Android fanboys just don't know.

However WebOS has its fair share of nasty bugs that include a system-wide memory that forces you to reboot at some point. The messaging app is barebones and need notifications for when a user comes online.

The cloud aware contact integration is pretty much out of this world at this point. I was able to add a simple Jabber protocol and it was able to 'join' folks I know against all existing contacts intelligently.

The browser could be better as well, fewer bugs. Overclocked kernels running at 720mhz with 24M compcache seems to be the magic sweet spot now for the original Sprint device.

A lot of folks in the homebrew community is pretty hardcore about hacking this device.

Comment Re:The Other Side (Score 1) 565

Yeah, but I'm willing to bet that the cost of living is also much less where you are. San Francisco and other technological cities in the US are often the most expensive places to live in across the country.

Yes, we're paid a lot of money but in the end the living standard is roughly the same in that you can afford this and that in roughly the same way that we can. Can't comment on the infrastructure of your nation, but having food, housing and healthcare are big pieces that make things so much common between both workforces rather than creating a massive difference in living standard.

Comment Re:From My Simpleton Point of View (Score 1) 535

Yes, that kind of thing happens a lot. It's the "blame game". I've been caught in it more than once. The first time was dealing with a manager that was very politically conservative and really clashed with software engineering types.

The times I've been fired to been put into very bad professional situation were with folks that were either completely nuts managing me or were very judgmental and too narrow minded.

For the sane case, they fail to understand that other folks with very good technical backgrounds can do things completely different than they do can also get important work done. There's a loss of mutual respect there out of their own ignorance.

I left a job because of these circumstances where I was blamed for failing to get stuff done in a manner that an enemy faction would have liked. I eventually showed it to them that I didn't fit that negative image of me that they had, but by then I happily had submitted my notice and moved onto an all our better job, higher paying, more interesting work. :)

Education

MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX 674

alphabetsoup writes "Office 2010 Technology preview was leaked a few days back. With its leak, a feature which was rumored to be present can now be confirmed. Office 2010 finally adds support for Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates, etc.) of OpenType, allowing one to create documents so far possible only in TeX or InDesign. Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?"

Comment Silicon Valley versus Institutional Education (Score 1) 834

Depends on the situation. If you can get a good coding job in a good situation where you can learn a lot, then the master's degree isn't worth it.

I'd continue with education if I couldn't find a decent gig. There's something to be said about doing and open source project as well to get experiences that you can't get in either college or a job situation.

These days, if you have the raw skill, say for kernel development, going through a master's degree program at a University of California minimally would be a waste of time even for Berkeley or something like that.

You can even cut that off sooner than that in that a wide variety of folks drop out of college to do the same thing and just do not suffer from not having either degrees.

It's situation sensitive however.

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