What we are talking about has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism. Adam Smith was a revolutionary in his time for wanting Kings and state out of the marketplace, and let products and suppliers succeed or fail on their own merits.
If Adam Smith were alive today he would be up in arms about the amount with which large corporations thwart the will of the market. Between volume discounts, incestuous relation between big business and regulators, and corporate empire building.
My question is, whatever happened to hiring starving college students for a startup? I've had a few gigs where I was paid in hosting space, or spare parts. And that experience allowed me to take on far more demanding professional work.
When the bottom rung into IT is halfway around the world, we are going towake up one day and ask why there are no skilled people here.
If the goal is good, homegrown talent that you train yourself is the only answer. If you want cheap you generally get what you pay for. If speed is the issue see 1 and 2.
Yes, but conditioned responses and visual association aren't hokum.
When you are driving down the road and you see the big golden M, do you suddenly get hungry?
When asked for a beverage do you ask for a "Coke" or a "Pepsi" or a "Sprite"? (For giggles I ask for a cola, around my parts people look at me funny.)
When you are buying something at the store, and are presented with 3 options, do you automatically assume the most expensive is the best?
When you need to blow your nose, do you ask for a "Kleenex?"
You may not, but your average Joe on the street does. These are bits of information we picked up from our environment, largely from billboards, commercials, and having certain brands drilled into our heads from birth.
I seem to recall an aphorism about laying down with dogs and contracting fleas. I feel for the guy, don't get me wrong. But it's like feeling sorry for the guy who sunk his retirement account into a Y2k bunker. Or better, actually fell for one of those 409 scammers.
Yes it seemed like a good idea at the time. But the lesson of adulthood is that not everything is as it seems. (Cough). Iraq. (Cough).
And more to the point, I know 4 folks with graduate degrees in EE that are working odd jobs to survive, and I can think of about 1000 experienced engineers who hit the street when the entire R&D section of the company moved to Singapore.
Yes, there were a lot of foriegners that went to school with me. The were no means a majority, though.
You have to read between the lines with what firms are saying. "We can't find any quality engineers [for what we want to pay them.]" And they don't even consider someone with a post-grad degree. They had the same song and dance for the H1B visas too.
I work in networking with mission critical servers. I can tell you that there are certain items you DO replace "just because" or "out of principle."
You have a rough idea of what is going to blow when. It's designed into the product, and it's called the MTFB (Mean Time Before Failure.) The MTBF is when you can expect parts to stop working. It's not perfect because by the time you have hit the MTBF, by definition half the parts have failed.
So what do you do when you have a system that you can't afford to conk out on you? You replace it before it has even the slightest chance of failing. It's called the bathtub curve. You know parts are going to die in the first few time units (crib death, manufacturing flaws, etc) you will have a period of almost no failures, then when you get near the MTBF, you get component failures out the yin-yang. The component failure graph looks like a bath tub on a graph.
Now, in extreme conditions (like the launching of a spacecraft) plays havok with your MTBF. You see the same sort of problems with carrier aircraft. Being subjected to rapid accellerations and decellerations ages stuff quickly. Bolts work loose. Cable junctions disconnect. Pretty much the only way to ensure that everything is working is to remove it, dissassemble it, and re-install.
One thing that becomes apparent is the need to minimize the number of parts. That is certainly something that NEVER crossed the minds of the people designing this turkey.
Ok, this started off as a NASA apologist, and ends up with me shaking my head, and demanding this complete farce stop immediately.
At least the research in university isn't (as) tainted as in the industry. If we can get the top researcher to make great and open contributions to the science, it's all the better.
Don't think for a second that academics are any more or less tainted by money than an industry player. University departments live and die by grants and projects. Only 2 forces in the universe have enough money to attract University's attention: industry and government.
Under Bush it's industry and industry's mouthpeices in government, but that's another story.
Universities horde intellectual property. It's almost schitzophrenic when you see a researcher discussing what to do with a discovery at a meeting. One half says "publish!" the other half says "patent and license!".
Buying out the airline industry isn't all that impressive a feat. Right now they are all trying to starve each other out of business. The stupid feds keep bailing them out, and the battle rages on like a B-Movie.
At least with the railroads, you could buy them up for all of the right-of-ways that they own. Airlines don't own anything. The terminals are rented from the airports. In some cases the planes are leased from other companies. For a "vital industry" nobody seems to want to sink a whole lot of capital into it.
Sad to say, I work for a place that used to do a lot of research. Now it's just a science museum, that will safely remain anonymous, but it's named for a famous printer and founding father of the Constitution.
The labs closed back in 1984. So whatever downward spiral we have been going through has been with us for a while. On a side note, we still have a cool tunnel between our present building and what used to be the lab, but is now an old folks home.
I don't know enough about the reasons why the Labs closed.
But I do know you are hard pressed to find any brain farms like you would find in the 50's. Though the Hess Labs at Drexel were close, back when I was an underground. The friends of mine who went through there described it as a mad scientists playground.
I know the feeling. I was fiddling around with simulations on a spreadsheet on St. Patrick's day. (Doesn't help that we couldn't find a babysitter that night and would up getting drunk at home.)
My head is still stuck on a gravity assisted launch. Tow up to an extremely high orbit, and release. A motor attached to the satellite gently nudges the momentum sideways, shifting from a straight down trajectory to a path that is parallel to the ground.
I know, I know, you can't do that. Travel in the Y axis does not affect the travel in the X axis. Except that the Y-Axis, is spinning at 900 m.p.h. (Who would have thought Monty Python would be helpful?) While you are falling, you aren't ever falling straight down. In a near vacuum, there is not terminal velocity. With the right combination of starting altitude and thrust you can use gravity to pull you into orbit.
I can see the path of the satellite. I just can't think of the math to describe it properly. (Though I could throw together a discrete time simulation in TCL.)
You aren't saving too much energy though. All of the momentum you aren't spending on fuel is spent hoisting your satellite into orbit on the elevator. (E=height*9.8 (m/s^2)). TINSTAAFL.
There is no such thing. Dialup just happens to be cheaper if you don't use the Net heavily, and to be universally available. There ain't anything standard about it.
So PPP and SLIP are all figments of my deranged imagination.
Now, perhaps MS users should be required to have firewalls by default, and to give permission for ISPs to routinely check them for virii, spyware and the such? Perhaps partition all ISPs in MS Windows and the sane world, the MS Windows world being firewalled at the ISP so that MS Windows users can only do so much harm to their fellow sufferers?
No, here is a better thought. How about design something the doesn't become infected as soon as it connects to a network. There is absolutely NO reason why a fresh install of XP needs to have RPC turned on. NONE. You go try to turn it off. It's buried under services. And good luck downloading the "fix" when your machine reboots every 60 seconds.
Here is another idea, stop knitting extraneous crap into the core OS. There is no such thing as an escalation of privilages on a MickeySoft system because all of your apps run as admin! (What security is in place is a shell game.)
There is stuff you can pick up just by viewing a web page in IE. Since outlook/oe use explorer to display html encoded email, and turns preview on by default all you have to do is view a message.
What do you think all of those security updates to Internet Explorer are about? Thanx for knitting the browser into the OS Microsoft.
And then there are the worms that crawl in through RPC bugs. I had a brand new installation of XP become infected the first time it connected to the net. Over dialup, no less.
I have users who have fallen for the sulfenwhatever.exe hoax not once, but twice. I also had users "free up space" by deleting chunks of the win32 directory.
Hey wait a minute there. Jules Verne was also fond of using Canons for inter-planetary travel. Writers in the era just weren't well versed on the forces of rapid accelleration. Come on, do you really think we are right about string theory and artificial intelligence. People 100 years from now are going to look back at our primitive ideas with the same disdain we express about ideas 100 years ago.
Now I definitely hear you on Jaws. Alien was another classic by accident, largely because of costuming problems. (They ran a test of the film with the alien in the scene, and saw that it looked completely fake. They took the alien out and magic happend.)
My concern with modern movie making is the reliance on explicit detail. Look at a modern love scene. There is nothing left to the imagination. Go back to the 50's, you would see him look at her, her look at him, a few waterfalls, some fireworks, and cut to the next morning with everyone in bathrobes and bedroom slippers sipping coffee. And you knew it was good they way they were staring at each other over that coffee.
Mob movies were also good at letting your mind fill in the blanks. They would throw someone in a trunk, and then riddle it with bullets. At a crime scene, you would only see the gruesome expressions on the faces of the detectives.
Of course, you had to have decent actors and a skilled writer back then. Today you just let any hack toss in a few kid's off the street and a set of CGI artists and WHAM! you have a movie.
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If Adam Smith were alive today he would be up in arms about the amount with which large corporations thwart the will of the market. Between volume discounts, incestuous relation between big business and regulators, and corporate empire building.
We don't have capitalism.
When the bottom rung into IT is halfway around the world, we are going towake up one day and ask why there are no skilled people here.
If the goal is good, homegrown talent that you train yourself is the only answer. If you want cheap you generally get what you pay for. If speed is the issue see 1 and 2.
When you are driving down the road and you see the big golden M, do you suddenly get hungry?
When asked for a beverage do you ask for a "Coke" or a "Pepsi" or a "Sprite"? (For giggles I ask for a cola, around my parts people look at me funny.)
When you are buying something at the store, and are presented with 3 options, do you automatically assume the most expensive is the best?
When you need to blow your nose, do you ask for a "Kleenex?"
You may not, but your average Joe on the street does. These are bits of information we picked up from our environment, largely from billboards, commercials, and having certain brands drilled into our heads from birth.
Oh superliminual. I thought you said superluminal.
Black Sabbath albums don't make sense when you play the Mp3s backward! The humanity!
Well, a Farci interface would be better for most international hostspots. Through Pashtun would also be nice.
I didn't even know the Internet had a corner, let alone a dunce cap. (Which RFC handles dunce caps?)
Yes it seemed like a good idea at the time. But the lesson of adulthood is that not everything is as it seems. (Cough). Iraq. (Cough).
Though far more valuable would be folks who can spot trouble BEFORE you ink a deal.
Yes, there were a lot of foriegners that went to school with me. The were no means a majority, though.
You have to read between the lines with what firms are saying. "We can't find any quality engineers [for what we want to pay them.]" And they don't even consider someone with a post-grad degree. They had the same song and dance for the H1B visas too.
You have a rough idea of what is going to blow when. It's designed into the product, and it's called the MTFB (Mean Time Before Failure.) The MTBF is when you can expect parts to stop working. It's not perfect because by the time you have hit the MTBF, by definition half the parts have failed.
So what do you do when you have a system that you can't afford to conk out on you? You replace it before it has even the slightest chance of failing. It's called the bathtub curve. You know parts are going to die in the first few time units (crib death, manufacturing flaws, etc) you will have a period of almost no failures, then when you get near the MTBF, you get component failures out the yin-yang. The component failure graph looks like a bath tub on a graph.
Now, in extreme conditions (like the launching of a spacecraft) plays havok with your MTBF. You see the same sort of problems with carrier aircraft. Being subjected to rapid accellerations and decellerations ages stuff quickly. Bolts work loose. Cable junctions disconnect. Pretty much the only way to ensure that everything is working is to remove it, dissassemble it, and re-install.
One thing that becomes apparent is the need to minimize the number of parts. That is certainly something that NEVER crossed the minds of the people designing this turkey.
Ok, this started off as a NASA apologist, and ends up with me shaking my head, and demanding this complete farce stop immediately.
In software engineering we call it a Schroedinbug [Jargon File]. It happens to the best of them.
Don't think for a second that academics are any more or less tainted by money than an industry player. University departments live and die by grants and projects. Only 2 forces in the universe have enough money to attract University's attention: industry and government.
Under Bush it's industry and industry's mouthpeices in government, but that's another story.
Universities horde intellectual property. It's almost schitzophrenic when you see a researcher discussing what to do with a discovery at a meeting. One half says "publish!" the other half says "patent and license!".
At least with the railroads, you could buy them up for all of the right-of-ways that they own. Airlines don't own anything. The terminals are rented from the airports. In some cases the planes are leased from other companies. For a "vital industry" nobody seems to want to sink a whole lot of capital into it.
In my case to Singapore. Manufacturing moved to the Phillapines. Engineering moved to Singapore. My job went with it back in 1998.
Hey, I did find a better job though.
The labs closed back in 1984. So whatever downward spiral we have been going through has been with us for a while. On a side note, we still have a cool tunnel between our present building and what used to be the lab, but is now an old folks home.
I don't know enough about the reasons why the Labs closed.
But I do know you are hard pressed to find any brain farms like you would find in the 50's. Though the Hess Labs at Drexel were close, back when I was an underground. The friends of mine who went through there described it as a mad scientists playground.
Just remember, it's not your soul you are selling, it's your MSOAL. Apple will have a follow on, the iSoul.
And eventually they will merge with Sony to produce the American-Japanese company Microsoft-Sony. Not to be at all confused with Wayland-Yutani.
But hey, if one lives life afraid to say something stupid, one would find he had nothing to say.
That said, my comment was pretty dumb.
My head is still stuck on a gravity assisted launch. Tow up to an extremely high orbit, and release. A motor attached to the satellite gently nudges the momentum sideways, shifting from a straight down trajectory to a path that is parallel to the ground.
I know, I know, you can't do that. Travel in the Y axis does not affect the travel in the X axis. Except that the Y-Axis, is spinning at 900 m.p.h. (Who would have thought Monty Python would be helpful?) While you are falling, you aren't ever falling straight down. In a near vacuum, there is not terminal velocity. With the right combination of starting altitude and thrust you can use gravity to pull you into orbit.
I can see the path of the satellite. I just can't think of the math to describe it properly. (Though I could throw together a discrete time simulation in TCL.)
You aren't saving too much energy though. All of the momentum you aren't spending on fuel is spent hoisting your satellite into orbit on the elevator. (E=height*9.8 (m/s^2)). TINSTAAFL.
So PPP and SLIP are all figments of my deranged imagination.
Now, perhaps MS users should be required to have firewalls by default, and to give permission for ISPs to routinely check them for virii, spyware and the such? Perhaps partition all ISPs in MS Windows and the sane world, the MS Windows world being firewalled at the ISP so that MS Windows users can only do so much harm to their fellow sufferers?
No, here is a better thought. How about design something the doesn't become infected as soon as it connects to a network. There is absolutely NO reason why a fresh install of XP needs to have RPC turned on. NONE. You go try to turn it off. It's buried under services. And good luck downloading the "fix" when your machine reboots every 60 seconds.
Here is another idea, stop knitting extraneous crap into the core OS. There is no such thing as an escalation of privilages on a MickeySoft system because all of your apps run as admin! (What security is in place is a shell game.)
Pats 784/784 dsl modem
What do you think all of those security updates to Internet Explorer are about? Thanx for knitting the browser into the OS Microsoft.
And then there are the worms that crawl in through RPC bugs. I had a brand new installation of XP become infected the first time it connected to the net. Over dialup, no less.
NEVER underestimate the power of the stupid.
Now I definitely hear you on Jaws. Alien was another classic by accident, largely because of costuming problems. (They ran a test of the film with the alien in the scene, and saw that it looked completely fake. They took the alien out and magic happend.)
My concern with modern movie making is the reliance on explicit detail. Look at a modern love scene. There is nothing left to the imagination. Go back to the 50's, you would see him look at her, her look at him, a few waterfalls, some fireworks, and cut to the next morning with everyone in bathrobes and bedroom slippers sipping coffee. And you knew it was good they way they were staring at each other over that coffee.
Mob movies were also good at letting your mind fill in the blanks. They would throw someone in a trunk, and then riddle it with bullets. At a crime scene, you would only see the gruesome expressions on the faces of the detectives.
Of course, you had to have decent actors and a skilled writer back then. Today you just let any hack toss in a few kid's off the street and a set of CGI artists and WHAM! you have a movie.