Comment Re:Supercharger? (Score 2) 128
Am I the only one who read this initially thinking that "supercharger" meant a pump that forces compressed air into an internal combustion engine?
Am I the only one who read this initially thinking that "supercharger" meant a pump that forces compressed air into an internal combustion engine?
Not my choice, we got them in a deal with a VC. And I will tell you from experience that they're not all great programmers. A *few* of them were very good programmers, most of them were OK, and a few were very *bad* programmers. Just like everyone else. The idea that the H1B program just brings in technical giants is pure fantasy. This isn't 1980; if a CS genius living in Bangalore wants to work he doesn't have to come to the US anymore, there are good opportunities for him at home..
H1B brings in a cross section of inexperienced programmers and kicks them out of the country once they've gained some experience. I have nothing against bringing more foreign talent into the US, but it should be with an eye to encouraging permanent residency. I think if you sponsor an H1B and he goes home, you should have to wait a couple years before you replace him. Then companies will be pickier about who they bring over.
I have to say, managing a team of H1Bs was very rewarding, not necessarily from a technical standpoint but from a cultural standpoint. Because I had to learn about each programmer on my team and the way things are done in his culture, I think I became closer to a lot of them than I would have to a team of Americans.
I feel here are positives and negatives to being older.
The positive is a depth of experience. An inherent patience to work through problems, looking for the right answer. My boss can - and does - tell me "Laura, figure out XYZ and see if we can use it in our company." This will keep me busy for extended periods.
While it's not strictly age-related, I find many "younger" companies have views on work/life balance that are incompatible with my own. I do not eat, live and breathe my work. When I go on vacation I go, and make damned sure I'm out of cellphone coverage when I do.
Also, many "younger" companies have messages I do not believe in. A prime example is local media darlings HootSuite. Since I don't buy the problem, I can't be part of its "solution".
...laura
Bill Gates is far more intelligent than you,
That needs a big 'citation needed' next to it, but:
and has already seen a working plant, which is why he is investing on a technology that is going to displace oil and outright kill renewables.
You don't understand risk analysis. He's investing a very small proportion of his wealth in something that may have massive returns. The probability of said returns may be small, but that doesn't make it a bad investment if the potential payoffs are huge, as long as you can afford to take the loss if it doesn't pan out. Most people with his money will invest a few millions in a few fringe ideas, because it only takes one to pay off to more than make up for your investment. The majority of his portfolio will be in relatively safe investments with a close-to-guaranteed return, a bit will be in risky venture.
Teaching algorithms separately from data structures is one of the biggest flaws in modern computer science education. It's impossible to reason sensibly about one without the other.
And what was the destructive capacity of the Navy in 2006 compared to August 1945? Hell, one Ohio class submarine has more destructive capacity than the entire Navy from 1945
A statistic that floated around earlier in the year when Argentina was grumbling about the Falklands again: one of the battleships that the British were sending to the area could fire, in one minute, more munitions than were fired in the entire 1982 conflict. I'd imagine that the differences between 1945 and now are even more pronounced.
One constant trend has been that soldiers are less expendable. In the first world war, sending men to walk slowly towards machine guns and throw a grenade if they survived to get close enough was their patriotic duty. By Vietnam, having large numbers of soldiers come back in body bags was politically unacceptable.
In the 1940s, Japan was flying aircraft loaded with bombs into American warships. A few years later, people realised that you could design aircraft for this purpose and make them a lot lighter and able to accelerate more if you removed the human pilot. They called them anti-ship missiles.
The fighter screen that fleets needed to protect themselves from aircraft in the '40s is now replaced by anti-aircraft and interceptor missiles (and dumb projectiles). In the next generation of ships a lot of this will be replaced by lasers, which reduces some of the resupply need (you can't run out of laser ammunition on a nuclear carrier unless your ship is so badly damaged that it's not a good idea to be anywhere near it).
Gradually, a lot of the roles for aircraft are being replaced by drones, which means that you need smaller carriers. They don't need to house as many pilots, they don't need as many support staff.
Another part of this trend is to replace reusable vehicles with single-use munitions. Fighters are more expensive than missiles, so you spend a lot on maintaining them. Drones are a lot cheaper, so you can afford to fly them for a couple of missions and then scrap them (explosively, near someone you don't like).
Comparing numbers, as the grandparent did, is completely meaningless. You may as well compare the size of the air force to the number of soldiers Napoleon had.
Oh, and libavcodec / libavformat are used in Android (and in a lot of iOS apps, as AVFoundation doesn't always expose useful APIs), as well as in desktop browsers, so they're a pretty good target to aim for.
As with all legislation, just like contracts, you never know how, good or bad or how they will exactly be interpreted, until they are tested in court. The fun thing about trying to sue them of course is what you are entitled to do under the discovery process. The corporations have no qualms about suing government and try all sorts of things on all of the time. It is about time the electorate did exactly the same thing, form temporary political activism groups and class action sue corporations and the government for all sorts of things. Pretty cheap to try on and by spreading out the cost and using as much volunteer labour as possible, likely reasonable cheap in the long run compared to what they will have to spend.
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.