If one messes around with a Chromebook, and then some Windows 8 type device, the difference is startling (in favor of the Chromebook).
Chromebooks out-Apple Apple by just making it easy to do the things most people want to do. The voice recognition is really, really good.
Windows makes it surprisingly difficult to do *anything*.
I've been wondering what is up with Slashdot lately, all these fawning articles in support of the astroturf campaign for getting more cheap programmers into the U.S. Despite all evidence to the contrary (good studies by professor Norm Matloff, and quantitative proof at EPI.org) we keep hearing about the horrors of not enough STEM workers....
I just noticed that Slashdot is part of DICE now. Ah..that explains a lot.
Even more than in the U.S., the U.K. has a culture where those with hard skills are dismissed as doing "grunt work."
I think it is part of the unfortunate British heritage of class consciousness, where the ruling class was (and is) proud of their lack of domain specific knowledge and their role as management generalists.
This has been disastrous for the fortunes of the U.K. in general, but culture is hard to change.
Re: he had clearance, and orders, and trusted access...
the U.S. itself insisted in 1945, rightly so, that individuals must listen to their conscience, regardless of their official obligations.
Things that could threaten the ruling elites in the U.S. and U.K. will inevitably have draconian, batshit crazy punishments associated with them. Anything dealing with information security falls under that umbrella.
Things that threaten the physical well being of commoners, such as being raped, or beaten, or breathing poisonous air, etc. is of no consequence to the elites in the English-speaking world, and logically will be assigned relatively light punishments.
It's a question of scarce resources. If you have your police and detectives chasing violent criminals, inevitably you'll have to scale back the hunt for anyone who could threaten the position of the elites.
Ubuntu and *nix in general has been getting better and better....
and then Windows put a shotgun in its mouth and pulled the trigger, becoming "Windows 8".
Look, I am very sympathetic to the guys in California I worked with. It is wrong that the middle class is being gutted in the United States.
Posting here won't help you if you are in the U.S. A lot of paper mail to the senators and representatives might be noticed. You must write!
It was someone else's idea but a good one: U.S. companies should bid for H1b visas in an auction. That would tend to make very clear who really needs what and how badly.
It would also, of course, be extremely unflattering to corporate America so it will never happen.
Alas, it's easy to see that technical workers will soon be in the position of nursing students in the U.S. What was once a "severe shortage" has become a glut. Whatever is a potential good job for Americans will be washed away by a flood of cheap labor in response to whatever large companies tell the U.S. Congress to do.
I have to grudgingly admire the elites in the U.S. and E.U.
They have acting skills second to none. In Brussels and in Washington, people like Bill Gates and various Wall Street bankers can swear in the most solemn tones to tell nothing but the truth, then look people straight in the eye and plead penury and desperation. Please, please, oh member of the Senate, have a heart, give us just a scrap, maybe another 200K visas. Or a tiny, pitiful trillion dollar bailout for our wee little global investment bank. I don't know what else I can do, I am at my wits end , woe is me, so desperate is my company...
This is how the game is played at the top levels. Lying with flair and conviction. I can imagine Gates after his testimony to get more visas a few years back, doing a fist bump with one his corporate legal minions. "Nicely played, sir!"
I've worked in California in the past, so I'm sure my U.S. colleagues would agree: this is all just part of the show to get unlimited visas for large companies.
Rather like the Wall Street banks pleading for a bailout...poor us... then making records profit$ the following years.
It's all part of the game boys. Learning to lie convincingly is how you get to the top.
Honestly this just makes sense to me. I would prefer to know at least at an aggregate level (dots on a map) of things like convicted pedophiles, guns, lethal chemical storage, and so on.
The problem with tech replacing humans in the economy is that the proceeds of machines/AI all go to "owners" (the top 1 percent, in American parlance).
If the "ownership" of civilization's assets (and the associated revenue) is distributed amongst all people as their inheritance (thank you, past generations who slaved in the Industrial Revolution) then we'll be fine. It will in fact be quite a nice world. The idea of an "unconditional citizen's income" is one that has been floated a bit among far-sighted thinkers in Germany.
The status quo assumption is that retirees can only be cared for if there are more people in every generation to tithe.
A far better model is to equitably distribute "ownership" of civilization's resources and technology. Then instead of tithing the young and depending on unsustainable population growth, people would simply earn income from their share of ownership of human civilization.
This should in fact be OK with conservatives, because the principle (passive income received from inheritance) is one of their bedrock principles. We just have to extend it (via redistribution of title to assets) to everyone. This also solves the problem of The Race Against the Machine.
I actually love MySQL, but FWIW, someone noted a while back that Salesforce.com has announced intent to hire about 50 top gun PostgreSQL guys in the coming year. It seems obvious that they are preparing to unhook the money siphon leading to Oracle.
Assuming Salesforce follows through, all the herd-following executives in the U.S. will want to do the same. So I predict that demand for PostgreSQL talent will be pretty good for many years.
The game changing factor that the Internet brings to male-female relations is that for the first time, teenage boys and young men can get the unfiltered truth from married men. In the past all that a 22 year old fellow would hear was a sanitzed, church-approved version of how one should live life according to the Lemming Lifescript(tm) and get married.
Now, the truth about how women change after marriage is all over the Internet, and guys have taken note. Marriage rates are falling steadily, regardless of how the economy is or anything else. This is true I would say in both Northern Europe and the U.S., from what I have seen living in both places.
So the real benefit of the Internet is not helping divorces move smoothly, but in education and marriage prevention.
When I worked in Mountain View in the U.S., I saw this dynamic *all the time*. It is literally the norm in America. When I asked married friends at work why they put up with this they typically offered a limp sounding cliche response, like "I married her for better or for worse"
This is nuts. I will just offer this insight: it took Verdun and Stalingrad for younger men in Europe to realize that marching dutifully into a meatgrinder serves no higher purpose. What is it going to take for American guys to realize that marching into marriage as a "duty" and suffering silently serves no purpose?
Come to Europe and see how we live. No marriage, no games, men and women have to pull their own weight. We have some issues but staying at work to avoid The Marriage Empowered Queen of Consumption is not one of them.
I completely agree, the Anglo-American approach to management is a travesty. Quite honestly it bewilders me that it endures, in the face of pretty brutal evidence that it doesn't work vs. other management cultures. But....
I'm sad to say I see the MBA type culture spreading into Europe as well. The sad truth is that the best managers here are heads down, and spend a lot of time in the trenches with the engineers, workers, and customers. But they are not watching their backs. The MBA-style managers have more time to spend politicking at company HQ, and over time, they start to weasel into influence. This is a mortal threat to the current high competitiveness of German companies but I don't see anyone taking it seriously.
From what I saw the secret to keeping guys in line in the U.S. is getting every man shoehorned into a Marriage+Mortgage trap.
They meekly fall in line and obey after that.
Telling you up front that "I'm a high maintenance woman" is like laying out your negotiating strategy at the beginning of arms reduction talks.
Once the trap is sprung (a signed marriage contract) *then* a woman can let her inner Material Girl out.
This is why marriage is disappearing fast here in Europe. My GF can ask for stuff, and if it is a good idea, I will support. If she is full of @@@@ she has no leverage to *force* me to pay for any whims. If she wants something, she earns the money to buy it, and all is well with the world.
When I worked in NYC and San Francisco, I got to see first hand the extremely short leash that married women keep men on. I'm still in touch with a couple of the guys I worked with in Mountain View, and they bury themselves in work to avoid thinking about the prison marriage has put them in. I never worked in the UK but from what I've heard the situation is similar there. Maybe it's an Anglo-Saxon thing, the whole married man's burden ethic.
The real problem (if you read the article) is not the energy sources themselves, but using up all other other finite resources required to tap the sun, wind, etc.
As long as one accepts infinite economic growth as indispensable, the resource problem won't go away. Happily, there is an answer, and it's been well thought through for over 3 decades: steady state economics. In a nutshell, you stop growing quantitatively (more and more oil burned, people born) but keep growing quantitatively (ever better use of a fixed , sustainable demand on the planet's resources and waste sinks).
This is more widely known here in Europe, where the German federal president recognized the need for qualitative but not quantitative growth a while back. But the English-speaking world has some great intro resources too: check out Wikipedia of course, and a very accessible series of articles is available on http://www.steadystate.org./
There's been more and more discussion in Europe about the end of *quantitative* economic growth, the orthodox stuff we're used to hearing about as a policy goal, and a shift toward *qualitative* economic growth. The latter is the core idea behind "steady state economics", and it's the only economic model that makes sense long term.
The basic idea is sustainable and steady rates of using resources on the planet we can't plan on ditching, and sustainable rates of dumping bad stuff into the planetary waste sinks for absorption. So imagine that every year humankind uses the same x units of iron and y units of hardwood, rather then consuming more and more.
But the *utility* we get from that constant input keeps improving, because knowledge is infinite. It's a beautiful, elegant paradigm that makes more and more sense the more you look at the data. Good intro info at http://www.steadystate.org/
It's been proven that marriage kills off inspiration and productivity in scientists (Google on that , Satoshi Kanazawa was the author of one such study finding that).
Bill got rich, a golddigger latched onto him, and the decline of Microsoft became inevitable. It's a familiar pattern.
Slashdot Mirror
If one messes around with a Chromebook, and then some Windows 8 type device, the difference is startling (in favor of the Chromebook). Chromebooks out-Apple Apple by just making it easy to do the things most people want to do. The voice recognition is really, really good. Windows makes it surprisingly difficult to do *anything*.
I've been wondering what is up with Slashdot lately, all these fawning articles in support of the astroturf campaign for getting more cheap programmers into the U.S. Despite all evidence to the contrary (good studies by professor Norm Matloff, and quantitative proof at EPI.org) we keep hearing about the horrors of not enough STEM workers.... I just noticed that Slashdot is part of DICE now. Ah..that explains a lot.
Even more than in the U.S., the U.K. has a culture where those with hard skills are dismissed as doing "grunt work." I think it is part of the unfortunate British heritage of class consciousness, where the ruling class was (and is) proud of their lack of domain specific knowledge and their role as management generalists. This has been disastrous for the fortunes of the U.K. in general, but culture is hard to change.
Re: he had clearance, and orders, and trusted access... the U.S. itself insisted in 1945, rightly so, that individuals must listen to their conscience, regardless of their official obligations.
Things that could threaten the ruling elites in the U.S. and U.K. will inevitably have draconian, batshit crazy punishments associated with them. Anything dealing with information security falls under that umbrella. Things that threaten the physical well being of commoners, such as being raped, or beaten, or breathing poisonous air, etc. is of no consequence to the elites in the English-speaking world, and logically will be assigned relatively light punishments. It's a question of scarce resources. If you have your police and detectives chasing violent criminals, inevitably you'll have to scale back the hunt for anyone who could threaten the position of the elites.
Ubuntu and *nix in general has been getting better and better.... and then Windows put a shotgun in its mouth and pulled the trigger, becoming "Windows 8".
Look, I am very sympathetic to the guys in California I worked with. It is wrong that the middle class is being gutted in the United States. Posting here won't help you if you are in the U.S. A lot of paper mail to the senators and representatives might be noticed. You must write!
There are just so many better alternatives out there now. At this point, something like Linux Mint is pretty hard to beat for a typical user.
It was someone else's idea but a good one: U.S. companies should bid for H1b visas in an auction. That would tend to make very clear who really needs what and how badly. It would also, of course, be extremely unflattering to corporate America so it will never happen. Alas, it's easy to see that technical workers will soon be in the position of nursing students in the U.S. What was once a "severe shortage" has become a glut. Whatever is a potential good job for Americans will be washed away by a flood of cheap labor in response to whatever large companies tell the U.S. Congress to do.
They have acting skills second to none. In Brussels and in Washington, people like Bill Gates and various Wall Street bankers can swear in the most solemn tones to tell nothing but the truth, then look people straight in the eye and plead penury and desperation. Please, please, oh member of the Senate, have a heart, give us just a scrap, maybe another 200K visas. Or a tiny, pitiful trillion dollar bailout for our wee little global investment bank. I don't know what else I can do, I am at my wits end , woe is me, so desperate is my company ...
This is how the game is played at the top levels. Lying with flair and conviction. I can imagine Gates after his testimony to get more visas a few years back, doing a fist bump with one his corporate legal minions. "Nicely played, sir!"
I've worked in California in the past, so I'm sure my U.S. colleagues would agree: this is all just part of the show to get unlimited visas for large companies. Rather like the Wall Street banks pleading for a bailout...poor us... then making records profit$ the following years. It's all part of the game boys. Learning to lie convincingly is how you get to the top.
Others have pegged it. This is just more breathless shilling for opening torrents of cheap labor to "suppress wages" as Alan Greenspan put it.
Honestly this just makes sense to me. I would prefer to know at least at an aggregate level (dots on a map) of things like convicted pedophiles, guns, lethal chemical storage, and so on.
The problem with tech replacing humans in the economy is that the proceeds of machines/AI all go to "owners" (the top 1 percent, in American parlance). If the "ownership" of civilization's assets (and the associated revenue) is distributed amongst all people as their inheritance (thank you, past generations who slaved in the Industrial Revolution) then we'll be fine. It will in fact be quite a nice world. The idea of an "unconditional citizen's income" is one that has been floated a bit among far-sighted thinkers in Germany.
The status quo assumption is that retirees can only be cared for if there are more people in every generation to tithe. A far better model is to equitably distribute "ownership" of civilization's resources and technology. Then instead of tithing the young and depending on unsustainable population growth, people would simply earn income from their share of ownership of human civilization. This should in fact be OK with conservatives, because the principle (passive income received from inheritance) is one of their bedrock principles. We just have to extend it (via redistribution of title to assets) to everyone. This also solves the problem of The Race Against the Machine.
I actually love MySQL, but FWIW, someone noted a while back that Salesforce.com has announced intent to hire about 50 top gun PostgreSQL guys in the coming year. It seems obvious that they are preparing to unhook the money siphon leading to Oracle. Assuming Salesforce follows through, all the herd-following executives in the U.S. will want to do the same. So I predict that demand for PostgreSQL talent will be pretty good for many years.
The game changing factor that the Internet brings to male-female relations is that for the first time, teenage boys and young men can get the unfiltered truth from married men. In the past all that a 22 year old fellow would hear was a sanitzed, church-approved version of how one should live life according to the Lemming Lifescript(tm) and get married.
Now, the truth about how women change after marriage is all over the Internet, and guys have taken note. Marriage rates are falling steadily, regardless of how the economy is or anything else. This is true I would say in both Northern Europe and the U.S., from what I have seen living in both places.
So the real benefit of the Internet is not helping divorces move smoothly, but in education and marriage prevention.
Yep, I can see it now, U.S. Marines "bringing democracy to Canada" for their own good. Nothing to do with resources. Nothing at all.
This is nuts. I will just offer this insight: it took Verdun and Stalingrad for younger men in Europe to realize that marching dutifully into a meatgrinder serves no higher purpose. What is it going to take for American guys to realize that marching into marriage as a "duty" and suffering silently serves no purpose?
Come to Europe and see how we live. No marriage, no games, men and women have to pull their own weight. We have some issues but staying at work to avoid The Marriage Empowered Queen of Consumption is not one of them.
I completely agree, the Anglo-American approach to management is a travesty. Quite honestly it bewilders me that it endures, in the face of pretty brutal evidence that it doesn't work vs. other management cultures. But ....
I'm sad to say I see the MBA type culture spreading into Europe as well. The sad truth is that the best managers here are heads down, and spend a lot of time in the trenches with the engineers, workers, and customers. But they are not watching their backs. The MBA-style managers have more time to spend politicking at company HQ, and over time, they start to weasel into influence. This is a mortal threat to the current high competitiveness of German companies but I don't see anyone taking it seriously.
From what I saw the secret to keeping guys in line in the U.S. is getting every man shoehorned into a Marriage+Mortgage trap. They meekly fall in line and obey after that.
Once the trap is sprung (a signed marriage contract) *then* a woman can let her inner Material Girl out.
This is why marriage is disappearing fast here in Europe. My GF can ask for stuff, and if it is a good idea, I will support. If she is full of @@@@ she has no leverage to *force* me to pay for any whims. If she wants something, she earns the money to buy it, and all is well with the world.
When I worked in NYC and San Francisco, I got to see first hand the extremely short leash that married women keep men on. I'm still in touch with a couple of the guys I worked with in Mountain View, and they bury themselves in work to avoid thinking about the prison marriage has put them in. I never worked in the UK but from what I've heard the situation is similar there. Maybe it's an Anglo-Saxon thing, the whole married man's burden ethic.
The real problem (if you read the article) is not the energy sources themselves, but using up all other other finite resources required to tap the sun, wind, etc. As long as one accepts infinite economic growth as indispensable, the resource problem won't go away. Happily, there is an answer, and it's been well thought through for over 3 decades: steady state economics. In a nutshell, you stop growing quantitatively (more and more oil burned, people born) but keep growing quantitatively (ever better use of a fixed , sustainable demand on the planet's resources and waste sinks). This is more widely known here in Europe, where the German federal president recognized the need for qualitative but not quantitative growth a while back. But the English-speaking world has some great intro resources too: check out Wikipedia of course, and a very accessible series of articles is available on http://www.steadystate.org./
There's been more and more discussion in Europe about the end of *quantitative* economic growth, the orthodox stuff we're used to hearing about as a policy goal, and a shift toward *qualitative* economic growth. The latter is the core idea behind "steady state economics", and it's the only economic model that makes sense long term. The basic idea is sustainable and steady rates of using resources on the planet we can't plan on ditching, and sustainable rates of dumping bad stuff into the planetary waste sinks for absorption. So imagine that every year humankind uses the same x units of iron and y units of hardwood, rather then consuming more and more. But the *utility* we get from that constant input keeps improving, because knowledge is infinite. It's a beautiful, elegant paradigm that makes more and more sense the more you look at the data. Good intro info at http://www.steadystate.org/
It's been proven that marriage kills off inspiration and productivity in scientists (Google on that , Satoshi Kanazawa was the author of one such study finding that). Bill got rich, a golddigger latched onto him, and the decline of Microsoft became inevitable. It's a familiar pattern.