No I wouldn't go that far. "Organized Crime" wouldn't dominate because there isn't much money/risk for hacking. A single person may make a good living but organized crime has resources and wouldn't be profitable. And for the most part hackers are able to take a site down and create damage but not really get anything really valuable out of it. It would be like the mafia going around knocking down people mailboxes just for the sake of it.
Those tools while made by someone who isn't a complete idiot, But the tools they get they can probably figure out rather quickly. Then cause damage. Ok they are not idiots but they are not super smart.
We need to stop giving these "Hackers" such press. Oh they broke into a insecure system. They must be real Computer Geniuses. There should be far more press about the state of the hacked sites security, and less on those actual hackers. The hackers are just some dumb kids who did some quick searching around and got some silly tools. The real story is that such organizations have such a poor security.
Governments are failure based organization. They punish failure and ignore success. This leave people to make the safe choice that will reduce failure. The safest choice it to be able to point out to everyone else who is using the product successfully.
Exactly. There is a lot of very poor quality alternatives to commercial software, and a few high quality ones. Also Open Source has a tendency towards "I am going to put features in the code that I wan't" not "I am going to put features that most of my users want", Much the same concept that ended up hurting Novel. Novel was an Engineering based company and it put in a lot of cool features, but most of them their customers didn't really want at the time, so they slowly migrated off of Novel to Windows, Because Microsoft gave them features that the customers wanted.
There is the US Paradox, which has always plagued the US. High Population Low Population Density. This makes any infrastructure policy in the United States very expensive and difficult to implement.
Other countries have higher density that makes serving a large percentage easy and that gains outweighs those few outlying people. Countries with Low Density and Low population is still easier just because there isn't so many end points that you need to go to. And a lower population is easier to come to an agreement if they want it or not, and if they are willing to pay extra taxes or not.
The US in terms of geography is the 3rd/4th largest country (Roughly the same size a China), Covering almost every geographical condition. Rain Forests, Desserts, Mountains....
USPS is probably crossing or have crossed the sustainable line of demand needed to keep USPS going.
There is famboi then there is just being a hater. What will happen is there going to be some arguements and probably an agreement to share their patents.
"2) iPad production in China is making those workers lives worse, instead of better."
I say in an act of kindness we fire all those Chinese workers so they starve to death, that is so much better then having them work in a poor working condition. We see the world in our spoiled American Eyes where Jobs such as working at McDonald and getting paid minimum wage of $6.55 an hour. Is the worse way to live. Well it isn't. For the most part these Jobs that the Chinese are doing while there is massive needs for improvement, is still much better then the alternative.
Sorry to say but it is true. Right when Open Source Started to get popular so did Out Sourcing. It was because these previously poor countries who didn't have the resources of $1000k licenses can now get Open Source Alternatives that would allow them to legally compete with the US.
It is more about value then money. Is someone who gets paid twice as much twice as productive? I worked at a company that dropped the India team because they found that even though they were 1/4 the price they were 1/8 as productive of american developers (This company had Indian bosses). And hired more American Developers. However after you get to a particular price range the value for productivity doesn't match. So if you are paid twice as much and you are 50% more productive then it may not be worth it.
Also a lot of these older developers are getting paid.COM Boom rates, ($65k a year for a Front Page "Developer") and their value in the current market is less.
Managing older workers have some baggage that comes with them. You start out your new job as a manager with a group of people who are already annoyed at you for being younger and having a higher level position then they do. Secondly IT is not like it was 10 years ago. It has became a corporate controlled job and lot of those processes that use to have the seat of the pants solutions too now have best practices and common policies to follow. Yes IT is less fun than it use to be and it is far much more organized. But you have a bunch of people to manage who are hard to mold.
1. I think you are talking about publicly traded corporations. There are also a lot of large Private corporations, that are not covered by such regulation.
2. The rule is in general to show that they are maximizing share holder equity. Or in general if the company goes down the tubes the share holders who have invested their money will get something back. Vs. Running the company with no profit and the investors (who are also anyone who owns stock including average Joe who has a work retirement plan) will be screwed if there is a problem.
3. Companies are not out to abuse their customers. However anyone who has ran a business or has worked with with a small company or is in a high enough position to deal with the Higher Ups know running a company cost more then most people think. Cutting a penny is a big improvement. And you have competition too so you need to keep your prices high enough for you to continue and grow low enough to be on par with your other customers.
The problem is that people don't really know this type of stuff and they push for laws that will hurt the good guys worse then the bad guys.
Raise the taxes on the rich. Well the rich have resources to move money around to make the government see them as poor, so they get away tax free, or if they do pay more taxes then they have the governments ear, as they pay more they will get more. No matter how much democracy goes on. If you pay the government 10 million dollars a year, vs. average Joe who pays $4k. Your opinions will get the ear.
Old TV's are horrible. I don't think you will be doing anyone a favor with the TV hookup. Even Text mode, for it to look good on a TV you will need 40x25 text (320x200) resolution graphics. Unless you are going to emulate Apple ][ apps or some old DOS applications (even a lot of DOS apps will not run well on the TV display).
High Resolution (640x200) is used for the old 80x25 text mode, and if you use that on a TV you get very fuzzy text. (Game makers at the time took advantage of that to increase the color count in their games by manipulating the B&W 640x200 graphics to create 16 color displays.
I don't think I can get the professors wire bound collection of photocopied articles for $25 let alone a published book. 15 years back or so I was writing a program for a publishing company that calculated how much money the company could make off a book. While I was debugging the application I was trying to see how cheap I could make my average textbook. Hard Cover, Color Diagrams, Paper that won't dissolve on a humid day... I couldn't come up with a pricing model where break even wasn't under $50.00 a book. Being that most textbooks only may have a run of maybe 10,000-50,000 or so. It makes it hard for real mass production.
What they really need is to get professors and students to demand cheaper quality books. Soft Cover, B&W and just text, with limited diagrams, done on low quality (brownish, rough) paper. Then you can get the cost of books down. But professors rarely think about that.
I remember one of my CS professors he just had his son start college and he was enlightened at the cost of the books. While he knew the price of the book for his class he rarely stopped to consider that the students also needed 5-6 more classes with books that cost as much or more. Also professors who often show a real interest in the material they are teaching have a hard time realizing that for a lot of the students that class isn't really as interesting to them as it is for the professor, and once they get the grade that book will probably is going to be resold back or never used again.
There aren't to many user replaceable parts on laptops, also the new iPads have less parts that will fail. I remember it was a big thing when Intel started offered motherboards where you can swap out the CPU and put a new one in. Everyone was yea this is way cool... However what happened was people got the mother board and then got the fastest CPU it could support. If you wanted to upgrade your CPU you needed to upgrade your motherboard because it was maxed out.
You are looking at the Design tradeoffs without valuing in the new technology advancements.
Bonds are a form of debt. Right now Bonds are good for the US Government because their interest rates is below average inflation so they are making money, however it is not a way to make money.
Taxes is the key way government collects money. Taxes are collected mostly from the middle class Americans. The poor doesn't have that much money to give. And the rich have the resources to get around it.
Printing it has its limits, as it will lead to inflation, and devalue the dollar.
Carbon Tax will just raise the cost of goods, thus give people less money to buy green tech. In order for people to go green you need the people to have the sweet spot Rich enough to afford green tech and poor enough to not to want to pay for petro.
It sounds like you were the one who got laid off. I am sorry you lost your job, it sucks.
My main thought wasn't that Solar Tech cannot make money but, the guys who run these GreenTech companies are not good managers. For many of these Green companies they are too focused on the Hippy Go Green and not as much as the Yuppy make Green. In the strive of making green tech affordable they will keep their profit margins too small, thus making the company accessible to cash flow problems which can put them out of business.
One of the biggest thing I find with Green Technology is that they are not consumer friendly. I remember a few years back, I wanted to know more information about rigging my house for geothermal heat. No one was really willing to give me a ball park price quote, without the hassle of getting them come in and give me quote, I don't know if it was $5k or $200k give myself geothermal heat. Also I don't know what to expect for improvements. The same with Solar, or Wind. Unless you are willing to get some guy give you a quote and the hard sales pitch you can't get any good data. Or they give you the price in years that it will pay for itself.
There is money in green. But I need green companies who don't feel like flimflam snake oil sales men.
I think a lot of us has forgotten how bad old computers were at with hardware errors, and how much environment can effect the old computers. My old Amstrad CPC1512 use cause programs to crash or odd inputs on the screen when ever I turned on the fan.
No you see. If the marketing does it right, it is both a 3D display and a weight loss tool... Put this on after you finish eating, play a "weight loss video", withing seconds you have cut the consumption of hundreds of Calories, bucket cost extra. And if you want to avoid other illnesses, you may try doing it when you are hungry, it may stop you from feeling hungry.
What I found is most people cannot handle the truth. Early on in my career I have learned that Openness will only lead to pain and suffering, but if you take time to sanitize your information things run much smoother.
Humans have a hard time as thinking other people as humans, especially if they are elevated some how, they could be a religious figure, they can be an expert, or have authority or power.
The truth that all people have failings while known isn't fully expected. If I go to a customer who wants something that requires me to learn something new (Say a new HTML 5 feature that I never needed to use before), I never tell them I don't know how to do it at the time. If I did they will worry, look at my output with an extra critical eye, and possibly search for an other person who does the work, probably one who is better at not telling them that they never did it before.
A lot of the stuff that Wikileaks uncovered wasn't really valuable or insightful. It just uncovered that people are human and make mistakes and are often influenced by animal instincts. We know this, however we often don't see these people as humans but as somehow better then us, then we get outraged. But this outrage is unfounded as it will do nothing to stop the actions from occurring. When people are in war, the military personal will kill civilians because they are so tense that seeing the bad guys from the innocent guys gets blurred. Diplomats are use to a life of luxury and staff letting them do what they want often get hedonistic. However the information wasn't valuable it only caused people to get angry, but without a solution it is just a useless anger.
The thing is everyone wasn't to be the guy on record saying I told you so. And they Giggle in Glee if it does happen, even though it may be quite desasterious. (Think Slashdot when there is a severe Microsoft volnerability)
There is a lot of people saying there is a problem. Not not too many coming with valid solutions to it. And like all solutions they come with tradeoffs so this same group of complainers will complain about the solution.
Nuclear is a good solution, but it has good size tradeoffs.
Winds Solar are still not good replacement solutions, but they have less trade offs so they are not complaining as much.
Can we reduce out carbon output, sure, but it will cost in some other area.
Can we reduce our engergy consumption, probably but it will cost us as well.
The problem is sadly is Climate change is an accecptiable tradeoff for the benefits of energy for most people.
Hey I want that algorithm. In a few years we can have CPUs that can process that stuff in real time. and we can just send a stream of 32 bit pixels over the net and we can watch real time movies.
It reminds me of a compression algorithm I though of when I was a kid, when I only had basic math skills where If I just recorded the number of iterations of a brute force attack and stored it on Base256 then I could save a lot of space... Later on I realized that the data is a base 256 number (in bytes) and the iteration would be exactly the same amount of iterations.
Slashdot Mirror
No I wouldn't go that far.
"Organized Crime" wouldn't dominate because there isn't much money/risk for hacking. A single person may make a good living but organized crime has resources and wouldn't be profitable. And for the most part hackers are able to take a site down and create damage but not really get anything really valuable out of it. It would be like the mafia going around knocking down people mailboxes just for the sake of it.
Those tools while made by someone who isn't a complete idiot, But the tools they get they can probably figure out rather quickly. Then cause damage. Ok they are not idiots but they are not super smart.
We need to stop giving these "Hackers" such press. Oh they broke into a insecure system. They must be real Computer Geniuses. There should be far more press about the state of the hacked sites security, and less on those actual hackers. The hackers are just some dumb kids who did some quick searching around and got some silly tools. The real story is that such organizations have such a poor security.
Governments are failure based organization. They punish failure and ignore success. This leave people to make the safe choice that will reduce failure. The safest choice it to be able to point out to everyone else who is using the product successfully.
Exactly. There is a lot of very poor quality alternatives to commercial software, and a few high quality ones. Also Open Source has a tendency towards "I am going to put features in the code that I wan't" not "I am going to put features that most of my users want", Much the same concept that ended up hurting Novel. Novel was an Engineering based company and it put in a lot of cool features, but most of them their customers didn't really want at the time, so they slowly migrated off of Novel to Windows, Because Microsoft gave them features that the customers wanted.
There is the US Paradox, which has always plagued the US. High Population Low Population Density. This makes any infrastructure policy in the United States very expensive and difficult to implement.
Other countries have higher density that makes serving a large percentage easy and that gains outweighs those few outlying people.
Countries with Low Density and Low population is still easier just because there isn't so many end points that you need to go to. And a lower population is easier to come to an agreement if they want it or not, and if they are willing to pay extra taxes or not.
The US in terms of geography is the 3rd/4th largest country (Roughly the same size a China), Covering almost every geographical condition. Rain Forests, Desserts, Mountains....
USPS is probably crossing or have crossed the sustainable line of demand needed to keep USPS going.
Don't forget he also replaced 2 small(ish) form factor, boxes into one large form factor box. Not really saving any space.
No.
1. Most consumers don't know and don't care.
2. Apple is still turning out high quality.
3. Most consumers feel good about choosing a winner.
There is famboi then there is just being a hater.
What will happen is there going to be some arguements and probably an agreement to share their patents.
"2) iPad production in China is making those workers lives worse, instead of better."
I say in an act of kindness we fire all those Chinese workers so they starve to death, that is so much better then having them work in a poor working condition. We see the world in our spoiled American Eyes where Jobs such as working at McDonald and getting paid minimum wage of $6.55 an hour. Is the worse way to live. Well it isn't. For the most part these Jobs that the Chinese are doing while there is massive needs for improvement, is still much better then the alternative.
Open Source started the problem.
Sorry to say but it is true. Right when Open Source Started to get popular so did Out Sourcing. It was because these previously poor countries who didn't have the resources of $1000k licenses can now get Open Source Alternatives that would allow them to legally compete with the US.
It is more about value then money. Is someone who gets paid twice as much twice as productive?
I worked at a company that dropped the India team because they found that even though they were 1/4 the price they were 1/8 as productive of american developers (This company had Indian bosses). And hired more American Developers. However after you get to a particular price range the value for productivity doesn't match. So if you are paid twice as much and you are 50% more productive then it may not be worth it.
Also a lot of these older developers are getting paid .COM Boom rates, ($65k a year for a Front Page "Developer") and their value in the current market is less.
Managing older workers have some baggage that comes with them. You start out your new job as a manager with a group of people who are already annoyed at you for being younger and having a higher level position then they do. Secondly IT is not like it was 10 years ago. It has became a corporate controlled job and lot of those processes that use to have the seat of the pants solutions too now have best practices and common policies to follow. Yes IT is less fun than it use to be and it is far much more organized. But you have a bunch of people to manage who are hard to mold.
1. I think you are talking about publicly traded corporations. There are also a lot of large Private corporations, that are not covered by such regulation.
2. The rule is in general to show that they are maximizing share holder equity. Or in general if the company goes down the tubes the share holders who have invested their money will get something back. Vs. Running the company with no profit and the investors (who are also anyone who owns stock including average Joe who has a work retirement plan) will be screwed if there is a problem.
3. Companies are not out to abuse their customers. However anyone who has ran a business or has worked with with a small company or is in a high enough position to deal with the Higher Ups know running a company cost more then most people think. Cutting a penny is a big improvement. And you have competition too so you need to keep your prices high enough for you to continue and grow low enough to be on par with your other customers.
The problem is that people don't really know this type of stuff and they push for laws that will hurt the good guys worse then the bad guys.
Raise the taxes on the rich. Well the rich have resources to move money around to make the government see them as poor, so they get away tax free, or if they do pay more taxes then they have the governments ear, as they pay more they will get more. No matter how much democracy goes on. If you pay the government 10 million dollars a year, vs. average Joe who pays $4k. Your opinions will get the ear.
Old TV's are horrible. I don't think you will be doing anyone a favor with the TV hookup. Even Text mode, for it to look good on a TV you will need 40x25 text (320x200) resolution graphics. Unless you are going to emulate Apple ][ apps or some old DOS applications (even a lot of DOS apps will not run well on the TV display).
High Resolution (640x200) is used for the old 80x25 text mode, and if you use that on a TV you get very fuzzy text. (Game makers at the time took advantage of that to increase the color count in their games by manipulating the B&W 640x200 graphics to create 16 color displays.
I don't think I can get the professors wire bound collection of photocopied articles for $25 let alone a published book.
15 years back or so I was writing a program for a publishing company that calculated how much money the company could make off a book. While I was debugging the application I was trying to see how cheap I could make my average textbook. Hard Cover, Color Diagrams, Paper that won't dissolve on a humid day... I couldn't come up with a pricing model where break even wasn't under $50.00 a book. Being that most textbooks only may have a run of maybe 10,000-50,000 or so. It makes it hard for real mass production.
What they really need is to get professors and students to demand cheaper quality books. Soft Cover, B&W and just text, with limited diagrams, done on low quality (brownish, rough) paper. Then you can get the cost of books down. But professors rarely think about that.
I remember one of my CS professors he just had his son start college and he was enlightened at the cost of the books. While he knew the price of the book for his class he rarely stopped to consider that the students also needed 5-6 more classes with books that cost as much or more. Also professors who often show a real interest in the material they are teaching have a hard time realizing that for a lot of the students that class isn't really as interesting to them as it is for the professor, and once they get the grade that book will probably is going to be resold back or never used again.
There aren't to many user replaceable parts on laptops, also the new iPads have less parts that will fail.
I remember it was a big thing when Intel started offered motherboards where you can swap out the CPU and put a new one in. Everyone was yea this is way cool... However what happened was people got the mother board and then got the fastest CPU it could support. If you wanted to upgrade your CPU you needed to upgrade your motherboard because it was maxed out.
You are looking at the Design tradeoffs without valuing in the new technology advancements.
How many trees do you need to knock down to get those solar farms?
What do we do at night? Storing in batteries is quite inefficient.
Oil and Coal are these great portable sources of energy.
Bonds are a form of debt. Right now Bonds are good for the US Government because their interest rates is below average inflation so they are making money, however it is not a way to make money.
Taxes is the key way government collects money. Taxes are collected mostly from the middle class Americans. The poor doesn't have that much money to give. And the rich have the resources to get around it.
Printing it has its limits, as it will lead to inflation, and devalue the dollar.
Carbon Tax will just raise the cost of goods, thus give people less money to buy green tech. In order for people to go green you need the people to have the sweet spot Rich enough to afford green tech and poor enough to not to want to pay for petro.
It sounds like you were the one who got laid off. I am sorry you lost your job, it sucks.
My main thought wasn't that Solar Tech cannot make money but, the guys who run these GreenTech companies are not good managers.
For many of these Green companies they are too focused on the Hippy Go Green and not as much as the Yuppy make Green. In the strive of making green tech affordable they will keep their profit margins too small, thus making the company accessible to cash flow problems which can put them out of business.
One of the biggest thing I find with Green Technology is that they are not consumer friendly. I remember a few years back, I wanted to know more information about rigging my house for geothermal heat. No one was really willing to give me a ball park price quote, without the hassle of getting them come in and give me quote, I don't know if it was $5k or $200k give myself geothermal heat. Also I don't know what to expect for improvements. The same with Solar, or Wind. Unless you are willing to get some guy give you a quote and the hard sales pitch you can't get any good data. Or they give you the price in years that it will pay for itself.
There is money in green. But I need green companies who don't feel like flimflam snake oil sales men.
I think a lot of us has forgotten how bad old computers were at with hardware errors, and how much environment can effect the old computers. My old Amstrad CPC1512 use cause programs to crash or odd inputs on the screen when ever I turned on the fan.
No you see. If the marketing does it right, it is both a 3D display and a weight loss tool... Put this on after you finish eating, play a "weight loss video", withing seconds you have cut the consumption of hundreds of Calories, bucket cost extra.
And if you want to avoid other illnesses, you may try doing it when you are hungry, it may stop you from feeling hungry.
Below.
-The Government
What I found is most people cannot handle the truth. Early on in my career I have learned that Openness will only lead to pain and suffering, but if you take time to sanitize your information things run much smoother.
Humans have a hard time as thinking other people as humans, especially if they are elevated some how, they could be a religious figure, they can be an expert, or have authority or power.
The truth that all people have failings while known isn't fully expected. If I go to a customer who wants something that requires me to learn something new (Say a new HTML 5 feature that I never needed to use before), I never tell them I don't know how to do it at the time. If I did they will worry, look at my output with an extra critical eye, and possibly search for an other person who does the work, probably one who is better at not telling them that they never did it before.
A lot of the stuff that Wikileaks uncovered wasn't really valuable or insightful. It just uncovered that people are human and make mistakes and are often influenced by animal instincts. We know this, however we often don't see these people as humans but as somehow better then us, then we get outraged. But this outrage is unfounded as it will do nothing to stop the actions from occurring. When people are in war, the military personal will kill civilians because they are so tense that seeing the bad guys from the innocent guys gets blurred. Diplomats are use to a life of luxury and staff letting them do what they want often get hedonistic. However the information wasn't valuable it only caused people to get angry, but without a solution it is just a useless anger.
The thing is everyone wasn't to be the guy on record saying I told you so. And they Giggle in Glee if it does happen, even though it may be quite desasterious. (Think Slashdot when there is a severe Microsoft volnerability)
There is a lot of people saying there is a problem. Not not too many coming with valid solutions to it. And like all solutions they come with tradeoffs so this same group of complainers will complain about the solution.
Nuclear is a good solution, but it has good size tradeoffs.
Winds Solar are still not good replacement solutions, but they have less trade offs so they are not complaining as much.
Can we reduce out carbon output, sure, but it will cost in some other area.
Can we reduce our engergy consumption, probably but it will cost us as well.
The problem is sadly is Climate change is an accecptiable tradeoff for the benefits of energy for most people.
Hey I want that algorithm. In a few years we can have CPUs that can process that stuff in real time. and we can just send a stream of 32 bit pixels over the net and we can watch real time movies.
It reminds me of a compression algorithm I though of when I was a kid, when I only had basic math skills where If I just recorded the number of iterations of a brute force attack and stored it on Base256 then I could save a lot of space... Later on I realized that the data is a base 256 number (in bytes) and the iteration would be exactly the same amount of iterations.