However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.
Vikram Chandra makes a lot of great points. He definitely is not a "hack first" kind of guy. I am of the opinion you build, then you re-build to be supportable, then you rebuild to be sustainable.
That doesn't always go over well, but if you keep code modular upfront it doesn't add much overhead, and gives you a good blend of Build once, or Build Fast.
The main thing is this ""We hold that when employees must use their personal cell phones for work-related calls, Labor Code section 2802 requires the employer to reimburse them. Whether the employees have cell phone plans with unlimited minutes or limited minutes, the reimbursement owed is a reasonable percentage of their cell phone bills." Even if the employee has purchased a personal cell phone plan that provides the employee with "unlimited" minutes and the employee does not incur any additional expense for his/her work-related calls, the employer must still provide a reasonable reimbursement to the employee."
Doesn't say about Data, which could be the bigger issue, but one would think that would be similar.
The author takes the analogy beyond the logical conclusion.
The saying is simply meant to say "there are things that you can't make happen faster than one person can do them".
There are corollaries that we used at Microsoft. "And you can't assign the baby to a man" and "She can't have it all on her own."
Taking the analogy farther than one should...
Conception is typically a two person activity. But assuming you have a Fertile woman, you can take that 15% that they talk about and up it significantly by trying with 3 different men a day, every day of the month.
So you can "have the baby in 10 months" with enough planning and since you only need each guy for about 5 minutes, you only added 450 Minutes (about 8 man hours) to the process. Less if you stick to 20 days conception can happen.
Bringing that back to Startups/Products:
Let's say you have a startup and you are going to build a Server Farm to support it. It used to be you had to order the servers and Dell would take a month to ship them. You can't speed that up. It is a fixed part of the timeline.
Let's say you want to build a new Electric car, the government testing for crash and safety takes a fixed amount of time you can't speed that up.
The analogy is not just about can you speed something up by putting more people on it, it is meant as a lesson that some processes are beyond your control.
It is also used as a "build vs. buy" argument. "Apple just released a Feature that we don't have" "Oh, no How long will it take us to build?" "9 months" "That's too long we need this out by end of quarter". How do you do that? You buy someone with that feature and you integrate for 45 days. Just like if your rich uncle announces he has a week to live, and each Grand Nephew (I think that is the kid of your Niece or Nephew) will inherit an equal split of his Billion Dollars, so you need a baby tomorrow. You can't try to get your girlfriend pregnant, that won't work in a week. Your only option is to buy or steal a baby.
Correlation and causation can be implied if you have a control. Or if you can rule out external factors. Saying it does not is not accurate.
The parrot wakes and sleeps with the sunrise and sunset. Does the Parrot Cause the sunrise? No. This happened BEFORE the parrot was born. Does the sunset cause the sleep? Throw a blanket over it's cage it goes to sleep. TADA! Causation!
When you have two things which you can't control, and that have been going on longer than you can observe it gets to be harder. Proving the Moon phase causes the Tides, not the Tides cause the moon phase. That's a bit trickier. Not in today's age, but at one point. There is a reason we thought the Earth was flat, and that you could throw a stone in to a pond and get a Turtle.
There is still great pay if you are an AS/400 guru. About 3 years ago I interviewed for a job where I would be maintaining code which was running on an AS/400 running in System 36 emulation mode. The code had been certified by the government for a 50 year contract. The 3 previous employees had all died. Which didn't make me anxious to take the job, but the pay was $450k a year. And with job security through 2030 it had some appeal. But what do you do after?
"I have experience with 50 year old software" is kind of like the resumes people send me saying they know Office XP and Word Perfect.
Sure if you can fix the things nobody else can you can charge top dollar, but eventually the last of those things come out of service.
Do you really need to do something "after" if you earn 450k$/yr for few years?
In an ideal work I'll probably take that job, ask for 80% part-time and use the remaining 20% of the time to maintain my brain active :)
BTW in my previous companies (banks) we were using banking software running on AS/400 (and DB2) and interfacing from IIS/SQL Server via OLEDB for querying the data / executing stored procedures. Actually the service was hosted, but I'm quite sure the AS/400 developers were taking 1/10 of that amount... ;)
OR not AND? Man I guess if I have to choose I'll choose to use it as a key, and pick my room via my laptop.
Now if you could use the smartphone to do both, You might be able to choose the room to have keys to, even if that room was not yours.
Ok, more serious. I like the idea of this. I have several AirBnB properties, and this could make my life a lot easier. Though at the same time my Girlfriend always finishes the night with her iPhone completely dead, so it could also make things a lot more complicated.
All in all I like the convenience, and fear the security.
Baidu will have to go from copy cat to innovator to make this work.
Right now Baidu is missing a differentiatior that shows how it is better. Unlike T-Shirts that you can find a market for knock-offs search engines are free to the end user so you have to compete on quality, or on "default install". Baidu is missing both of those.
Interesting read, especially since today you might be called a "towel head".
I find in my day to day interactions that these days Blacks are less discriminated against than many others, but it seems it is now less about color and more about accent.
Likely what I am seeing is a bias against non-European immigrants.
Being a well spoken Black is fine to hire or hang out with. Someone who looks and sounds like Will I Am, or Quincy Jones, or Colin Powell all good choices. Flavor Flav likely not so much.
The same goes for 3rd generation Hispanic, but not 1st.
Those from India if they grew up in an affluent house hold and sound like they are from England, but those with a heavy accent no.
My home town has no non-white people. We had 2 half native American kids in school, and I think a 1/4 Hispanic girl. As odd as that sounds I think that helped with not being racist. There were no stereotypes because there was no history of seeing anyone of another race.
When I was in the Sudan, I told people I was Canadian, it was safer. That wasn't a Race thing either.
This may have rambled but I think today there is less racism and more Originism (I know that isn't a word) but I think where you come from matters to people more than the race. That's not better. Just different. It is still beyond your control.
> I find in my day to day interactions that these days Blacks are less discriminated against than many others, but it seems it is now less about color and more about accent.
I totally agree with you. I have experienced lot of stuff by myself that you mentioned.
I am living here in US from last 7.5 yrs. I still have very thick accent. I tried a lot to get rid of it. Even hired an accent trainer but due to lack of time could not practice. At the end, my trainer gave up. I have lost lot of opportunities due to my accent. It is not just my accent, my tone is also so rough that when I speak my voice becomes so rough and it sounds so unpleasant. I think I need throat surgery to speak properly.
I don't blame them who show me off faces. My only complain is they don't even try talking with me. I can see the change in their body language when they see me coming.
Not all are bad. Some people are still very welcoming. I wish there were more of them.
I have seen my European friends getting so warm welcome even though they speak more worst than me. I am not jealous about this. Just sharing how people treat others differently who are from different origins
I know you're probably not looking for advice with this post, but hiring an accent trainer or even taking some advanced English lessons would probably help your career (and your quality of life) quite a bit. When I see someone writing "speak more worst" and "living here in US from last 7.5 years", I don't think of someone who has been in the US for seven and a half years, I think of someone who may never have visited the US at all. That sounds very unnatural, and it does throw a lot of people off. It makes a lot of people (unfortunately, myself included) uncomfortable to admit that we didn't understand what you said. I don't talk to people with strong accents on a daily basis, so I'm bad at hearing them. People tend to shy away from awkward encounters, and being unable to understand the person you're talking to is about as awkward as it gets.
It's not malice, it's not racism, it's just really uncomfortable.
"It's not malice, it's not racism, it's just really uncomfortable."
Being "uncomfortable" is one kind of feelings racism stems from, being uncomfortable around people you don't really understand. Not saying your feelings are bad or you are bad, just that people are emotional rather than logical beings. There were definitely some subset of racists who were racists not because they logically analysed the science of race, concluded that their own race was "superior", but rather, they felt uncomfortable being around those they assume is from a particular race. There were establishments that were "whites-only", I assume it's because the owners were afraid its patrons would be uncomfortable eating with "blacks".
While I agree with what you say, I wouldn't draw the same parallel. Its more along the lines of ending a phone call when the other person is in a low-service area. The point of talking is to communicate, and communication only happens when the people understand each other.
I get the same thing with my sometimes spotty grasp on the German language. While, for the most part, I can be understood just fine from Berlin to Munich, eventually people get frustrated and ask me to switch to English. Not because I'm American, but because I'm terrible at speaking German. It just takes too long for me to understand them or to make myself understood.
So I agree that racism sometimes stems from being uncomfortable around people who are different, but I wouldn't go as far as to say being uncomfortable around people who are different is necessarily similar to being racist.
I get this all the time with russian, I can understand basically all russian but my ability to speak it, sucks. So Russians will tell me to just say it in English bec most have a better grasp of English than I have of Russian, they'll speak to me in Russian, and I to them in English.
About the Phone thing: When I get someone from South East Asia for customer support, I ask them to speak phonetically in the most courteous way possible, this was after yelling at a few reps who just didn't understand a word I was saying, nor I them. I felt there had to be a better way than to berate someone for just trying to do his job (somehow the women were easier to understand, probably just the luck of the draw). Anyway I highly recommend it to everyone who complains about bad customer rep phone calls, learn the Phonetic Alphabet (I have a copy taped to my wall for easy access) (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, etc). It may be a little slower but if they don't like it they'll just transfer you to their supervisor or to someone with a better grasp and no one feels bad at the end of the call.
As far as I know racism stems from one race thinking they're more human than the other, which occurs, I think, due to the perception of differences in intelligence when the perceived inferior race is trying to communicate, in a sub-optimal way, to the perceived superior race, and being constantly made fun off in the process.
I imagine a typical racist comment in 18th century America: "There's no point telling the slave, he's not gonna understand anyway.".
It also stems from potential gain, you only have to look to former colonies to see this. It's much harder to subjugate a people if you view them as equals.
There's a practicality aspect to it too. The last team I worked on had 3 brits, 4 indians, 2 pakistanis, 1 greek, 1 portuguese, 1 french, 1 australian, 1 kazakh. The misunderstandings and arguments were incessant and no one was particularly happy.
I saw that he had hired someone. He didn't stick with it, because he was too busy. It's easy to make that excuse, but my point was to do it again, for real this time. The reason being, he's limiting his career opportunities by working in a country where he's only making minimal effort to be understood.
And I didn't know Hacker News was a career for me. Jackass.
The USA has a history of doing racism based only on skin colour. But in many other countries there have been "culture" /"ethnicity" based racism. This is what your noticing. Accent (ie. culture/ethnicity) racism.
Racial/cultural/ethnic prejudice is an attribute of human nature, not US culture, so while not singling out the USA, the USA certainly did also have discrimination not based on skin color (jews, irish and other immigrant groups, catholics, etc. have all suffered discrimination to various degrees). None as overt and officially sanctioned as the segregated South however.
I am well aware other countries have racism problems. I pointed out USA because a lot of people here are for USA, and it's a got a great example of skin colour only racism.
Lasers work well for Projectors in terms of brightness, and Size. There are some downsides though since you don't get the same viewing angle that you do with standard projection.
The reflection off of the screen tends to bounce back almost as straight as it hit, where as a standard beam of light radiates more on the reflection.
My home theater which is about the same as a Movie theater with regard to the seat placement that is fine. You can't get to a spot in the room where you'd be at a 45 degree angle. But in many people's homes, or for outdoor projection in commercial settings it can be an issue.
Laser is also nice because you don't have to deal with focus. The Focus is fixed.
Where you do have issues with Lasers is color. Lasers are harder to get to match the Gamut, and harder still to manipulate to represent all the colors in 10 bit color, (10 bits x 4)
Lasers don't tend to burn out which is nice.
Laser projectors do have to be optimized for the size of the screen more than projection. With traditional projection the size of the pixel scales up. With Lasers the dot doesn't really get larger. This is fine if the projected dot is the right size, or some ratio of the right size.
Say a laser projects a dot, a pixel sort of, that is 1mm in size at a distance of 15 feet. at 1080p you would have no space between the dots if the projection was roughly 2 meters across.
Now you want to project something to the size of 4 meters across. With traditional projection you change the focal length or move the projector back and the dots get bigger.
With a laser you have to put 4 dots (2x2) to do this.
If you want a dot that is only 1.4 times the size you have to use 4 dots and over lap them.
The better Laser Projectors due this. They use up to 9 dots (3x3) and to where each Dot may only be 4 bits, using 9 dots you can fake more colors (3 red, 3 green 3 blue). Cheaper projectors use a technique similar to sub pixels and may use a Line rather than a dot (more like a Dash) for Red, and will have 7 dots 1 Red that is 3x the size, 3 Green, 3 blue.
In any case you have to have enough control over the laser to do the adjustments or you end up with gaps in the dots which are noticeable far more than the space between pixels that show up in DLP and LCD projectors.
Well, almost all of your arguments are true for MEMS based laser projectors from the late 90s only. Today's laser projectors are based on standard DLP, LCD or LCos projectors with the main difference of a laser light engine instead of xenon or uhp light bulbs. So, lets address your arguments one at a time.
>>There are some downsides though since you don't get the same viewing angle that you do with standard projection. The reflection off of the screen tends to bounce back almost as straight as it hit...
This isn't true at all. While Lasers do emit coherent light it doesn't cause laser to be reflected back straight reasonably more than standard light. The only issues with lasers is speckle which is caused by destructive and constructive interference of coherent light on rough surfaces. And as any projection surface is somewhat rough in respect to small wavelength, manufacturers have to take care of this issue by integrating laser over time inside the light engine. They do of course have trouble with green laser speckle due to the eyes higher sensitivity to green light but nevertheless they can reduce speckle by over 95 percent.
>>Laser is also nice because you don't have to deal with focus. The Focus is fixed.
This is also only true for MEMS based laser projectors from the 90s. Today's laser projectors are based on "standard" projection technology and therefore have changing focus over distance.
>>Where you do have issues with Lasers is color. Lasers are harder to get to match the Gamut, and harder still to manipulate to represent all the colors in 10 bit color, (10 bits x 4)
Lasers don't tend to burn out which is nice.
Image reproduction is still based on RGB. As long as you choose primaries that lie well outside the standard color spaces (DCI P3, BTU 709) you can always map colors to fit any colorspace inside this gamut. Colordepth is absolutely unaffected of the Laser itself. Only color derivation technology reduces bit depth. For example time sequential light engines like OSRAMs "Phaser" (phosphor laser) do have the same issues like one chip DLPs. You can not fit enough inter color segmentation inside one frame to get enough bit depth. 3 Chip DLPs with one laser engine per color have 10bit and even more color depth.
>>Laser projectors do have to be optimized for the size of the screen more than projection. With traditional projection the size of the pixel scales up. With Lasers the dot doesn't really get larger. This is fine if the projected dot is the right size, or some ratio of the right size...
You do not shoot the laser "point" directly at the screen as with MEMS based laser projectors. Today's laser projectors replace lamps by laser light engines. You still use DLPs or LCos to reproduce the image.
However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.