Lucas was fine, when he let other people direct and stayed focused on special effects. He's not good at directing people. If you listen to the interviews from Harris Ford and Mark Hamill it's pretty clear Lucas shrugged off simple questions on dialog and motivation. The original movie ended up good because the actors were talented and worked extremely well as an ensemble cast. When you got to Empire and Return you had talented directors set the tone and motivation for the cast.
You go to the prequels and it's uneven mix of amateur hour theatrics mixed in with cameos from talented actors. "I...I killed them. I killed them all. They're dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children too." Anakin Skywalker Episode II. The most cringe worthy scene in the entire series.
1) The ability to off-shore programming jobs has been a reality for 20 years. It's done nothing but increase my bill rate. Here's the deal. Accenture, IBM, Wipro, etc come in to take care of all the IT needs. On paper the costs are cheaper. Five years later the companies that did off-shore development are typically very unhappy with their work product. Too much re-work, not enough velocity of code getting into prod. Once a offshore company has your entire IT process they can turn the screws and increase bill rates.
I come in with teams that kick out the off-shore units, clean house and usually within a year the problem we have is our backlog doesn't have enough work. We're just too efficient. The reason it's increased my bill rate is companies pulled back from college hire programs. It really creates a problem keeping experience developers in the pipeline. I don't have much competition domestically because the ivy league MBAs that decided to offshore decided not to invest in the next generation workforce. I laugh all the way to the bank.
2) Start Up Factor. You don't need to get hired to make money programing. There are hundreds of thousands of developers making money by releasing their own apps.
On a serious note, animated content is much harder for the 8-bit encoding. It's the hard edges with high contrast cell shading. You get a lot more compression artifacts than a typical movie. You can resolve this by using 10-bit encoding, but there's a lot of Netflix devices with embedding video codecs. They really can't change, and almost none of the chipsets out there support 10-bit decoding. So that leaves option two, which is to increase the bitrate.
Most things needed for basic needs are still made in the USA. The US still manufactures more things than China, the vast majority of which are related to agriculture, building materials and petroleum items (gasoline, natural gas, etc.) We'd get along just fine. Electronics would take a hit.
First, "The Kurds" is a pretty wide brush. There are several factions of Kurds that have different agendas. I.e. Iraqi Kurds are not lock step with Turkish Kurds.
Second, it's not like the Turkish Kurdish con flight just started. It's been going on for decades. It was pretty common in the 90s for the US Air Force conducting surveillance on Iraq to bug out when the Turks decided to go on an indiscriminate bombing run. The US has been turning a blind eye to that region for a very long time.
Third, the Turks are doing the same thing as the Russians are doing. For the media they are tough on ISIS, but in reality they are just continuing their Air War on various Kurdish groups.
H1B's contractors now cost more than $100K (although the actual person doing the work gets a fraction of that money). The reason is there's a shortage. Supply and demand. That's why companies are pushing to list the H1B caps.
No one looks at how we go into this situation. Around the 2000s the bean counters had a choice between adding more college hires and H1B/Off-shore resources. They cost a similar amount of money, but a H1B resource can be leveraged because they need an employer to sponsor their visa. Thus begins the cycle. No one is hiring the next generation of workers and the hole gets bigger and bigger.
Between 2005 and 2011 I didn't work in a single shop that had programming Interns or college hires (I consult and see a lot of large IT shops). As H1B and offshore rates ratcheted up companies were forced to look at college hiring again. So naturally the first thing congress wants to do is entirely remove H1B caps* (This by the way has bi-partisan support).
Back in my world I make a crap-ton of money with On-Shoring projects. Companies that tried it the 2000s are pulling development back into the US. We cost a lot more than off-shore workers, but the we get so much more done with a significantly higher degree of success.
In the early age of the auto industry dealer franchise fees were used to fund the start up costs. In exchange for those funds certain rules and agreements were made to ensure those investments were protected. Otherwise a car maker could simply put the dealer out of business once their cars became common place. That's why the auto dealer franchise laws exist in the first place. Even foreign auto makers used the franchise fees to fund their US expansions.
Tesla on the other hand never took a dime of franchise fee. From that standpoint I think they should be exempt.
I certainly would be hard pressed to sign something like that unless it included absolute indemnification of liability. Otherwise you're on the hook for bad advice.
When you compete for remote work you are competing with a global market. Guys in eastern Europe are very good programmers, not too far off on tim zone for west coast work, and want 1/2 your rate.
In the dawn of Silicon Valley the fabs counted on NASA and Military orders. For quite a long time they could count on 70+% of the production going towards NASA and military contracts. Almost no one else could afford the products at the time. Eventually Intel broke that mold by making a huge bet that they could slash the product costs and a wave of volume would follow to make the price point profitable. It was a huge risk.
Payday man. If they don't hire you then grab a lawyer on contingent. If you really want it to stick (and are in a single person notification state) see of you can get the recruiter to admit to it on tape.
One of the Tech Crunch 2015 winners was Voltara V-One. Target price is sub-$2k (eventually) for a machine that will do 2-layer PCB printing, insulation curing, solder paste dispensing and reflow. Might be expensive for the home user, but I can see Maker workshops installing them.
It's not even the first PCB printer, there are several on the market already in the $3K range.
The only thing that's weird about that is that is wasn't while leaving the company. Typically financial advisors do a data dumb of their clients and holding when they decide to switch to a different firm. The moment the advisor puts in notice a whole team of people work to contact customers to get permission to move so that the assets can be re-papered under the new firm. It's not unusual for a team to meet with an advisor and personally fly the paperwork/data back to the home office in order to speed up the transition.
Experts are thinking it has a lot more to do with reducing wear and tear on the very expensive Diesel Particulate Filter (DPS). The majority of states have testing requirements and under the CA 7/70 and Federal 8/80 emissions control warranty rules VW would likely be on the hook to fix any issues.
Why would any retailer sell a digital download only system? The game systems have very little margin. The retailer is counting on the game sales to make up for that.
For at least a decade a number of Chinese Airlines have been doing this for their coach class customers. In particular on domestic segments where the planes are configured to be really tight. There are industry standard weight and balance calculations and they had to be updated in the late 90s because North Americans and Western Europeans all weigh more than they used to.
They are a Taiwanese company and this is hardly the first factory they have opened outside mainland China. They have factories in South America, Mexico, Eastern Europe, USA, India, etc. I would contend they have little allegiance to mainland China and are more than willing to pull up stakes if need be.
I think at best the drone could be impounded. Actually arresting the operator seems unlikely given the current laws. States with hyper aggressive Castle Doctrine laws like AZ might allow you to blow the drone out of the sky though.
There are several Insurance Claims systems are built onto of MUMPS. If they are still active they almost certainly have Intersystems Caché running onto so that the data can be exposed to more modern stuff.
Front end browser development is littered with dozens of front end frame works that have fizzled over the years. YUI, Prototype, script. aculo.us, etc. All popular in their day. jQuery is still active but certainly on the decline.
You want to be a good front end developer? Learn about the DOM model. Learn about HTTP, HTTP/2 and CSS. Learn the fundamentals of how all that stuff works together and then you'll never need to worry about picking up whatever front end framework is used by the cool kids.
Huh? Most contractors don't make time and a half but they are hourly workers. I make a lot of money as a contractor. Substantially more than a FT employee, even covering my own taxes, insurance and PTO days. Because working over 40 costs money they almost never ask for it. No one bothers me at home because they could easily rack up hours they don't have budgeted for.
As far as getting dismissed? Not really a factor. In most markets IT workers are in high demand. Canceling your contract risks being without a worker for weeks if not months. If the consulting firm finds out they dismissed after asking for unpaid hours that's likely to back fire.
Now if you're an H1B contractor? That's a different ball of wax. Employers can leverage your ability to stay in the country. Those guys can get screwed on wages and can be replaced easily.
If you are getting squeezed in your market then maybe it's time to move to a better place.
As we seem to be heading back down into the familiar territory of the cold war I often wonder if nationalism is something we should consider when thinking about security. For instance I believe that Kaspersky is a very talented company but I can't help but to feel that they would be quite willing to turn a blind eye to malware from their own government. I hear commercials for Kaspersky threat detection software all the time but I would be hard pressed to actually use any of it. It certainly seems China, Russia and parts of Europe are taking country of origin into account when evaluating American security products. Am I wearing a tin-foil hat in feeling we should think twice about trusting Kaspersky?
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That sounds like .Net developers to be honest. I run circles around those guys everyday at work.
Lucas was fine, when he let other people direct and stayed focused on special effects. He's not good at directing people. If you listen to the interviews from Harris Ford and Mark Hamill it's pretty clear Lucas shrugged off simple questions on dialog and motivation. The original movie ended up good because the actors were talented and worked extremely well as an ensemble cast. When you got to Empire and Return you had talented directors set the tone and motivation for the cast.
You go to the prequels and it's uneven mix of amateur hour theatrics mixed in with cameos from talented actors. "I...I killed them. I killed them all. They're dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children too." Anakin Skywalker Episode II. The most cringe worthy scene in the entire series.
The BLS stats miss the point.
1) The ability to off-shore programming jobs has been a reality for 20 years. It's done nothing but increase my bill rate. Here's the deal. Accenture, IBM, Wipro, etc come in to take care of all the IT needs. On paper the costs are cheaper. Five years later the companies that did off-shore development are typically very unhappy with their work product. Too much re-work, not enough velocity of code getting into prod. Once a offshore company has your entire IT process they can turn the screws and increase bill rates.
I come in with teams that kick out the off-shore units, clean house and usually within a year the problem we have is our backlog doesn't have enough work. We're just too efficient. The reason it's increased my bill rate is companies pulled back from college hire programs. It really creates a problem keeping experience developers in the pipeline. I don't have much competition domestically because the ivy league MBAs that decided to offshore decided not to invest in the next generation workforce. I laugh all the way to the bank.
2) Start Up Factor. You don't need to get hired to make money programing. There are hundreds of thousands of developers making money by releasing their own apps.
I suggest you google "Why 10-bit anime".
On a serious note, animated content is much harder for the 8-bit encoding. It's the hard edges with high contrast cell shading. You get a lot more compression artifacts than a typical movie. You can resolve this by using 10-bit encoding, but there's a lot of Netflix devices with embedding video codecs. They really can't change, and almost none of the chipsets out there support 10-bit decoding. So that leaves option two, which is to increase the bitrate.
Most things needed for basic needs are still made in the USA. The US still manufactures more things than China, the vast majority of which are related to agriculture, building materials and petroleum items (gasoline, natural gas, etc.) We'd get along just fine. Electronics would take a hit.
First, "The Kurds" is a pretty wide brush. There are several factions of Kurds that have different agendas. I.e. Iraqi Kurds are not lock step with Turkish Kurds.
Second, it's not like the Turkish Kurdish con flight just started. It's been going on for decades. It was pretty common in the 90s for the US Air Force conducting surveillance on Iraq to bug out when the Turks decided to go on an indiscriminate bombing run. The US has been turning a blind eye to that region for a very long time.
Third, the Turks are doing the same thing as the Russians are doing. For the media they are tough on ISIS, but in reality they are just continuing their Air War on various Kurdish groups.
Fourth, you can't win a war using just air power.
H1B's contractors now cost more than $100K (although the actual person doing the work gets a fraction of that money). The reason is there's a shortage. Supply and demand. That's why companies are pushing to list the H1B caps.
No one looks at how we go into this situation. Around the 2000s the bean counters had a choice between adding more college hires and H1B/Off-shore resources. They cost a similar amount of money, but a H1B resource can be leveraged because they need an employer to sponsor their visa. Thus begins the cycle. No one is hiring the next generation of workers and the hole gets bigger and bigger.
Between 2005 and 2011 I didn't work in a single shop that had programming Interns or college hires (I consult and see a lot of large IT shops). As H1B and offshore rates ratcheted up companies were forced to look at college hiring again. So naturally the first thing congress wants to do is entirely remove H1B caps* (This by the way has bi-partisan support).
Back in my world I make a crap-ton of money with On-Shoring projects. Companies that tried it the 2000s are pulling development back into the US. We cost a lot more than off-shore workers, but the we get so much more done with a significantly higher degree of success.
In the early age of the auto industry dealer franchise fees were used to fund the start up costs. In exchange for those funds certain rules and agreements were made to ensure those investments were protected. Otherwise a car maker could simply put the dealer out of business once their cars became common place. That's why the auto dealer franchise laws exist in the first place. Even foreign auto makers used the franchise fees to fund their US expansions.
Tesla on the other hand never took a dime of franchise fee. From that standpoint I think they should be exempt.
I certainly would be hard pressed to sign something like that unless it included absolute indemnification of liability. Otherwise you're on the hook for bad advice.
When you compete for remote work you are competing with a global market. Guys in eastern Europe are very good programmers, not too far off on tim zone for west coast work, and want 1/2 your rate.
In the dawn of Silicon Valley the fabs counted on NASA and Military orders. For quite a long time they could count on 70+% of the production going towards NASA and military contracts. Almost no one else could afford the products at the time. Eventually Intel broke that mold by making a huge bet that they could slash the product costs and a wave of volume would follow to make the price point profitable. It was a huge risk.
Payday man. If they don't hire you then grab a lawyer on contingent. If you really want it to stick (and are in a single person notification state) see of you can get the recruiter to admit to it on tape.
Crickey!
One of the Tech Crunch 2015 winners was Voltara V-One. Target price is sub-$2k (eventually) for a machine that will do 2-layer PCB printing, insulation curing, solder paste dispensing and reflow. Might be expensive for the home user, but I can see Maker workshops installing them.
It's not even the first PCB printer, there are several on the market already in the $3K range.
The only thing that's weird about that is that is wasn't while leaving the company. Typically financial advisors do a data dumb of their clients and holding when they decide to switch to a different firm. The moment the advisor puts in notice a whole team of people work to contact customers to get permission to move so that the assets can be re-papered under the new firm. It's not unusual for a team to meet with an advisor and personally fly the paperwork/data back to the home office in order to speed up the transition.
Experts are thinking it has a lot more to do with reducing wear and tear on the very expensive Diesel Particulate Filter (DPS). The majority of states have testing requirements and under the CA 7/70 and Federal 8/80 emissions control warranty rules VW would likely be on the hook to fix any issues.
Why would any retailer sell a digital download only system? The game systems have very little margin. The retailer is counting on the game sales to make up for that.
For at least a decade a number of Chinese Airlines have been doing this for their coach class customers. In particular on domestic segments where the planes are configured to be really tight. There are industry standard weight and balance calculations and they had to be updated in the late 90s because North Americans and Western Europeans all weigh more than they used to.
They are a Taiwanese company and this is hardly the first factory they have opened outside mainland China. They have factories in South America, Mexico, Eastern Europe, USA, India, etc. I would contend they have little allegiance to mainland China and are more than willing to pull up stakes if need be.
I think at best the drone could be impounded. Actually arresting the operator seems unlikely given the current laws. States with hyper aggressive Castle Doctrine laws like AZ might allow you to blow the drone out of the sky though.
There are several Insurance Claims systems are built onto of MUMPS. If they are still active they almost certainly have Intersystems Caché running onto so that the data can be exposed to more modern stuff.
Front end browser development is littered with dozens of front end frame works that have fizzled over the years. YUI, Prototype, script. aculo.us, etc. All popular in their day. jQuery is still active but certainly on the decline.
You want to be a good front end developer? Learn about the DOM model. Learn about HTTP, HTTP/2 and CSS. Learn the fundamentals of how all that stuff works together and then you'll never need to worry about picking up whatever front end framework is used by the cool kids.
Huh? Most contractors don't make time and a half but they are hourly workers. I make a lot of money as a contractor. Substantially more than a FT employee, even covering my own taxes, insurance and PTO days. Because working over 40 costs money they almost never ask for it. No one bothers me at home because they could easily rack up hours they don't have budgeted for.
As far as getting dismissed? Not really a factor. In most markets IT workers are in high demand. Canceling your contract risks being without a worker for weeks if not months. If the consulting firm finds out they dismissed after asking for unpaid hours that's likely to back fire.
Now if you're an H1B contractor? That's a different ball of wax. Employers can leverage your ability to stay in the country. Those guys can get screwed on wages and can be replaced easily.
If you are getting squeezed in your market then maybe it's time to move to a better place.
As we seem to be heading back down into the familiar territory of the cold war I often wonder if nationalism is something we should consider when thinking about security. For instance I believe that Kaspersky is a very talented company but I can't help but to feel that they would be quite willing to turn a blind eye to malware from their own government. I hear commercials for Kaspersky threat detection software all the time but I would be hard pressed to actually use any of it. It certainly seems China, Russia and parts of Europe are taking country of origin into account when evaluating American security products. Am I wearing a tin-foil hat in feeling we should think twice about trusting Kaspersky?