Posts filed under 'SeriousThoughts'
Slashdot | IBM Training Employees To Leave IBM?
Slashdot | IBM Training Employees To Leave IBM?
wow. talk about far-sighted. this is really really cool… i know IBM is our evil competitor and all, but kudos to them. i think this is a great idea…
4 comments September 16th, 2005
Hitting the High Notes
Found via Slashdot… an excellent piece by Joel entitled Hitting the High Notes talking about why hiring the best programmers is better than hiring cheaper programmers. My first thought was “well…duh.” But go read the article…
Add comment August 4th, 2005
Bill Joy knocked as ‘conspiracy theorist’ by tech zealot | The Register
Bill Joy knocked as ‘conspiracy theorist’ by tech zealot | The Register
Joy, partaking in an AlwaysOn 2005 Innovation Summit panel discussion entitled “Is technology making us safer?”, went on to say global warming and pandemics like Asian bird flue can only be solved using strong public policy.
“Political constipation” and partisanship in Washington meant Non Government Organizations (NGOs) are better placed to tackle these issues, Joy said.
Interesting article at The Register. I would have liked to have heard the debate, or at least read the transcript. Gilder’s counterpoint to Joy’s push for better public-policy & NGO involvement was to say: “What worries me is people today who are worried about global warming. We have these real phobias that distract our attention. The best remedy for Bill’s threat is very fast advances in bio engineering and pharmacology, and an array of scientific advances,” Gilder observed.”
While I agree that advances in bioengineering/pharmacology/science-in-general can help some things like the avian flu/global warming/etc… it’s not the complete solution. We can’t rely on a steady stream of advances. Scientific genius and progress is not always dependable.
We need public policy to try and decrease our emissions to stop the increase in global warming. But we also need science/tech advancement. The two have to go hand in hand. We need pharmacology to help figure out exactly how the avian flu spread to humans, and we need public policy to ensure it doesn’t happen again. (okay, that’s slightly generalising the problem - but you get my picture)
1 comment July 22nd, 2005
our recent crime wave…and debating with my councilmember
my neighbourhood has been hit by a recent crime wave that’s getting really out of hand. some of the recent problems:
- 100+ cars had their windows shot out by 3 idiots with BB guns, and way too much time on their hands
- two neighbours robbed at gunpoint, one of them in front of her own house
- countless cars stolen (i recall at least 6)
- people shooting guns
a bunch of us have been petitioning our councilmember, Jean Quan to do something. if you read the Oakland Tribune article above, you can see her quote:
“It doesn’t appear to be a crime wave statistically,” she said. “I just think awareness is up.”
oh. my mistake. our awareness is just up. that’s all. does this mean that this crime is not any different from previous crime. was i just unaware of the last time 100 cars in my neighbourhood were shot up? was i just oblivious the last time my neighbours were held up at gunpoint?
this is getting ridiculous and out of hand. in an email exchange i had with the councilmember asking to get more frequent police patrols in the neighbourhood temporarily, her answer was:
we will begin to get new officers out of the academy in the fall and through the next two years the number of police will increase.
uh. great. that does NOTHING for me now. i’ll be sure to politely ask all the thieves holding my neighbours up at gunpoint, shooting guns on my street, stealing cars, and damaging our neighbourhood’s property to please come back again in the fall, or better yet… in 2 years time.
4 comments July 22nd, 2005
usb2 host adapter card
If anyone sees a good deal for a free (after rebate) or cheap (< $10) USB2 host adapter card (PCI), please let me know. I'd like to get one for grommit so I can do quicker backups. I'm going to be installing the new 160gb drive as an internal backup drive (w00t goes out to chester, thanks!), and taking out one of the 60gb drives to use as an external backup drive. Right now I'm doing external backups via USB 1.1 ... which means leaving the colocation facility to go get dinner and some boba before coming back. It'd be nice to up the speed a bit. :)
Add comment March 23rd, 2005
new hd for grommit
attn all grommit users. be sure to say a big thank you to chester (or at the very least, buy him a beer next time you see him). why? because he just bought grommit a 160gb hard drive so we can have full nightly system backups again.
cheers chester!
Add comment March 21st, 2005
supersizeing social security
Technology News: News: Scientists Say Life Expectancy To Drop
“One of the consequences of our prediction is that Social Security does not appear to be in nearly as bad a shape as we think,” Olshansky said.
They noted obesity actually could help keep Social Security solvent because people will die younger.
wow. maybe that’s what McDonald’s means by extra value meals. your extra value is the extra social security you’re freeing up each time you eat one of those things.
Add comment March 17th, 2005
real wmds
i’m sure you’ve all heard, so i won’t bother linking any of the thousands of news articles about North Korea having nukes.
- Hrm. a hostile government has nuclear weapons
- Said government has made public announcements decrying our nation
- The same government refuses to give up their nuclear weapons
- The very same government talks about its desire to spread their beliefs to the rest of the world, through military action if need be
That’s what North Korea is thinking of us.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Kim Jong Il is crazy. THHGTTG would probably label him ‘mostly harmless’ though, and I’d like to believe that. I think it’s bad that they have nukes. I think it’s bad, however, that WE continue to have nukes. I just don’t want this to become an excuse for us invading yet another country…
Add comment February 10th, 2005
top down vs. in order replying
Here’s an idea, and I’d like feedback on why this does or doesn’t suck.
I’m torn between whether I should do top down email replies or whether they should be written in order. By this I mean, top down email replies are when a replier prepends his reply before the original body.
Confusing isn't it? > This is. >> What is top down replying?
Whereas chronological replies are:
>> What is top down replying? > This is. Not as confusing... but then you have to scroll
I prefer chronological replying, but it can be annoying to have to scroll through replies to long emails. I try to fix this by trimming emails as I reply to them - but not everybody does this. What’s more annoying is when you get threads with multiple recipients who then do things in different order:
Bush > George Bush >>> Who were the last few before him? >>>>> Who is our current president? >>>> George Bush >>Bill Clinton, and then George Bush before him
yeah. annoying. the thing is, when I’m replying to an email that is recent, I prefer top down because I already have the context of the email conversation in my head (to be geeky: it’s in my cache and hasn’t been paged out). But for looking at older threads (more than a week, let’s say), I prefer chronological ordering because that’s how I can catchup and jog my memory.
What I would really like is to have all replies be attachments with a timestamp, I could then configure my email client to order them top-down if they are less than week old when I view the emails…. but if they’re older than a week, then it can order them in chronological order.
Does this sound like an unreasonable idea? What do you think? If a user prefers one vs. the other, they could opt to always show them in a strict order.
The only problem is you’d never be able to enforce that everybody reply in the proper format (i.e.: replies as attachments)
2 comments January 11th, 2005
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