I'll let you in on a secret. If your plan on getting a degree and going straight into work, you don't really have to concern your self to much with the quality of the course work.
As with in a year or two of starting employment you either have it or you don't. The people with the natural skill always bubble to the top no matter where they are from.
Also on initial employment during the interview phase foreign workers are typically automatically given a leg up on the locals. In most countries employers have figured out the foreign workers work harder.
Oh and the comment about the US having the best CS education. Stop reading American ratings. It's simply not true. The quality of the end result graduate is what matters. I have employed people from many many countries. There is very little that differentiates the quality of the candidate. The biggest issues with foreign workers are 1. English language skills, and the most annoying 2. Culturally indoctrinated fear of failure. ( Fear of failure results in employees lying about skills, completion times, and work completeness. Drives me nuts. If you can't do it SAY SO! we will work around it. )
Simply go to the school you are currently at and ask. The question is. Which schools abroad do you accept course credit from? Then from that short list make your choice.
Took me all of 1 day to figure out where I was going to go when I did it. It costs a fortune to study abroad but it well worth it.
This goes into the pile of obvious scientific discoveries.
Like these notable scientific discoveries: 1. Drunk women are more amorous. 2. Eating Chocolate makes us feel better. 3. People with well proportioned faces are better looking.
Just because the web model doesn't generate any cash is not the reason to disagree with it.
That's like saying people shouldn't drive faster than 55mph/100kph because it's more dangerous. People are going to drive faster simply because they want to. People are going to use the web because they want to.
The web model does make sense and it makes a ton of money. The reason it makes money is the input cost is radically smaller. No infrastructure cost for distribution. Far fewer staff involved in the delivery of content. Physical cost like office and production space are slashed to a fraction. Simple advertising on a web site can be great source of cash. So your input cash stream may be smaller. But your outgoing cash stream is almost zip.
The key challenges with this new medium is that the format of the paper is now turned on it's head. The individual sections of the paper have become industries in their own right. Classifieds are probably the best example. Not only have classifieds become another industry they have further fractured in sub industries. Case in point job adds.
In general the sections of the paper that operated as a middle man between the supply of the information and consumer have now moved directly to the supplier. For example: TV listings.
So basically the portions of the news paper that can be seen as operating as a middle man should be discarded. As these are going to be money pits. The "News Paper" is then basically left with "News". Consider this as a core value product of the industry. This is what print news needs to wrap their head around.
Lets look at a wildly successful on line news source, CNN. What does the site offer? Just News, ( Not the most accurate, but it's news ). That's it. Does it make money. Sure does.
----
As for wireless access to news everyday. It's here. Just the format is not paper like. I currently read the news on the way to work every day on my phone. Nice big screen, no worries about shoving my elbow into the guy next to me as I flip the page. And it's already 100% customized to the stuff I want to read. Around me I see people using EEPC's, Macbook air's, Even some of them subscribe to audio streaming news and listen to that on the way to work. As you see people are choosing the format they like. You may want/like a paper like analogue. But it will come down to personal choice and as such market demand.
First off. The author was clearly asleep from years. 2002 - 2007. As that was the time period of this list.
Secondly where is the drum roll for number 1. David Letterman set the top ten standard and it's a good one. The #1 one slot should definitely be proceeded by:
"and the top Top Tech Breakthrough of 2008 is................." When the LHC on 19 September 2008 had a liquid helium breakthrough saving man kind from the certain oblivion of a black whole on earth.
An in line filter. Well all I see is a massive slow down and halt. Witch is soon followed by a renewed increase in encrypted traffic.
This thing is going to have a dramatic impact on Aussie commerce.
This is such an ill founded idea and complete waste of tax payers funds. This is simply going to start an arms race that the government and the ISP have little chance of winning.
Note in Aus that most Internet plans have byte limit caps. Thus the ISP's have little interest in being in a commanding position of this arms race.
All this is going to do is create a harbor where highly skilled individuals are going to create increasing harder to detect traffic. Which of course is going to ultimately result in increasing clandestine illegal traffic.
All I got to say is this is this is 100% the fault of business not being able to adapt to the capabilities of the Internet. P2P being one of the greatest advances. P2P is easily the greatest example of a missed opportunities. People tried to but the fearful mega-corp entities out there simple curled up in tight ball under there desks and ordered in the legal swat teams.
I have to say a name like Abit to go under. That was a bit of a shock.
I've personally probably built / owned / used a couple of hundred systems based on Abit MB's over the years. However I can't remember actually building or owning an Abit based system in the last 1.5 years.
True enough the last couple of years the company literally had nothing that competed on the MB front. ( Flame away ).
The cash burn must have been something beyond my comprehension.
I truly morn the loss. Less competition is bad. I really don't want to see the price of a main board hit $300. And still suck. If Lenova ends up making the best board on the market I'm going to retire and hide in the bush. ( Personally I don't much care for anything IBM or IBM tainted. )
I spent the better part of the afternoon looking for the ref: Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos. Never found it.
If these men were truly fired for not participating in a religious activity in the office. ( As so often happens on Slashdot not all the facts are in on first posting. ) I hope the Judge slaps them HARD. I also hope this sets precedent in US law. The US seriously needs to ensure that the church, what ever church it may be has no more influence in the affairs of government and business.
The primary issue is that they were employed and later fired for their religious beliefs. It would be morally different if during the employment / interview process that this significant fact regarding employment were put on the table. From what I read here and in the referenced material it was not. This is a clear deception. As a deception it is morally corrupt, unlawful and does not reflect the teachings of any upstanding religion I am aware of.
On the surface auto-scaling is obviously a great thing. But it doesn't take much thought to start punching holes in it.
Lets first look at the Data center that provides such a glorious capability. 1. It is their own best interest for you to scale up. Scale up processing, disk, bandwidth or what ever. For the simple reason it's more money. Since you signed the contract you will probably be scaled well and truly before you know it. Usually you only find out when the bill comes in. 2. The data center has very little incentive to make sure you are notified in a timely manor of autoscaling. As a matter of fact this feature is usually crippled or even broken. I don't care what the contract says. The datacenter rarely honors this part of the contract to anyones satisfaction.
Now lets look at the client and the horrible things that can go wrong. By no means even remotely a complete list.
The new version of the app list. 1. Bob the developer forgets to index that new DB table. Database goes nuts trying to do a simple select. BAM autoscaling of DB CPU resources goes through the roof. 2. New AJAX call is not properly tested. For some reason it now triggers div refreshes as the mouse moves. App server is now flooded. BAM Band Width and CPU autoscale through the roof. 3. App no longer properly caches that all important query. BAM again DB and APP CPU skyrockets. 4. The genius in dev decides to make the jsession stateful. Works fine on the desktop. Works fine when load test hammers only 10 users. Oh Oh real world kicks in, in Prod. We have 10k users. Everything goes through the roof. 5. The list of new version issues goes on.
The bad guys come a knocking. OK so now your a hot property on the net and you sign up for autoscaling so that you don't have to worry about capacity planning. You are focused on that cash machine that is your cool app. 1. You didn't know about that monster hole in the app. The bad guys inject a phishing site onto your Uber site. The phishing site is wildly successful. Oh crap we just paid for the biggest fraud site on the net. 2. The dev team leaves that back door on the site so they can maintain it remotely. Oh Oh all of a sudden you notice port 25 traffic is off the charts from the site. OMG we just uploaded 25Tbtyes in the last 24hours. You have just joined the ranks of the largest SPAM generators on the planet. You have a monster bandwidth bill and a very expensive legal bill. 3. What are these very large globs in the database all of a sudden. OH crap we left a hole and are vulnerable to SQL injection. OH crap it's all encrypted kiddie porn. Bills for bandwidth, disk and legal come a knocking.
I do have experience with this sort of thing. And it always goes sour at some point. The techies are always overruled by the marketing and business types on this. As the deal is always so great on paper. At some point something will go wrong. Software is never perfect. Between defects and bad guys you are a sitting duck for the big man carrying the bill to your door. It's only ever a matter of time.
Oh and lastly. Geuss what some times the autoscaling fails. Make that a lot of the time. And you are then off the air.
The best situation is for you as a customer of scaling is to have a close relationship with the supplier. Once you start to reach certain predefined levels of usage they should contact you and give you the option of an upgrade. Make the scaling feature by human choice. Never let the supplier decide that for you.
When called into help a particular company with it's IIS web systems I was able to bring the site back to life by doing a few simple things.
Of 20 Load balanced IIS servers. 1. Buy from local shop sticks of ram for 2 of the box's bringing total ram to 3Gig. 2. Disabling the Page file. 3. Only load balance the site to those 2 box's. 4. Power off the other 18.
Total time to implement 6 hours. Site performance went from +30 sec per page to around 6 second. ( Heavy pages )
Biggest challenge convincing the architects and management that less was more even after implementation. They simply didn't believe it even after it was working in production.
2 Days after I left they undid what I did for them. The site now sucks again. Apparently I bruised some ego's and that couldn't stand.
Do companies think that the market in China is big enough to justify giving them the source code?
It doesn't really matter what foreign governments think of this. The can scream all they want. If a company thinks the Chinese market is big enough and they want a piece of it. Then they will cough up the code.
Privacy, security and IP rites are second tier considerations when it comes to product sales.
So again. Do companies think that the market in China is big enough to justify giving them the source code?
The issue is that just after early adopters do. They also know that the capital investment for required in order to comply with the DRM is prohibative. As it requires a complete end to end retrofit of entertainment kit. This is a HUGE expense. This is not the DVD upgrade where you upgraded a single or couple of components. This is replace the lot including cables. For a relatively minor quality increase.
Cheap BlueRay players are only part of the dollar equation. There is many more parts to the kit. And these pieces are not cheap.
Now for the normal consumer this is insanely expensive. Normal people hear the list of kit to replace whether it be true or false and simply go "Screw it".
File sharing options that are very easy to use and provide the hi-def experience with the simple purchase of a new UBER TV. These TV's accept input from the crappy work laptop and still manage stunning display and audio with no additional cost. Why in heavens name would you shell out an additional $10k for the other bits.
The industry has completely missed the mark. A prohibative dollar cost to compile with corp defined law. Most consumers feel ZERO guilt or obligation to conform to the debt inducing media industry greed.
1991 mp3 became a standard ( Wikipedia ) 1995 mp3 music hit the net via early file sharing ( Wikipedia ) 2001 P2P was ubiquitous ( My observation )
So somewhere between 1995 and 2001 the music industry instead of embracing P2P and enhancing it to support a business model they instead asked the legal department for help. The legal department then got the green light to turn on the cash tap and drain possibly billions of dollars out of the artists pockets. This was the mistake. Instead of applying some creative thinking to the problem they simply turtled under a legal shell.
Even more amazing when online startups like napster and others popped onto the scene with vision, they freaked even more. They didn't even say "Why didn't we think of that?" Instead of using the vast resources at their command to create a product offering people would want they invented the WDM defense which good old Bush later used as well. As we can see the WDM defense does nothing but create more enemies and bad Karma.
Apple has shown them that money from music on the net is not only viable. It's hugely profitable. No packaging, No shelf space, and instant stock creation. But somehow the music execs still don't get it.
This has left the world in a nasty place. The music artist is loosing, the consumer is loosing, and the production companies are spilling cash to lawyers faster than they can make it. I can only see that this is not going to get better for the artist for possible a decade. And subsiquently the consumer.
Well as a person who now lives and works abroad I can say it something that everyone should do.
It has many benefits. Least of which is cash.
First off and most importantly it opens your eyes to the greater culture of the planet. Being someone from the "new" world this is even more important. As North America suffers from a homoginised culture. Less so Canada.
Secondly the experience both for work and personal. Work wise your experience in different cultures working can only help you back at home. Secondly the experience you gain personally will enhance your life and alter your life priorities.
Now for the tough part the how too.
First off do your research in an area you wish to live. What is the cost of living etc. Secondly start to look at the job market in the region. Google will be your friend here.
For example: Rent in Sydney Aus in the city runs you about $400-$600au a week. That's about $350-$500us. Which for most american's is gigantic cash.
At this time several markets are suffering from a downturn in IT. So be careful. This is a particularily sensitive time for employment. Many regions of the world have laws that prefer citizens over foreign people. Others require lengthy and costly Visa and certification procedures. Also some countries foreign workers are not governed by labor laws no matter what they do. So you may not have the protections the locals do. So again this is a point of research.
If you are going to a non English speaking country. Make sure you have someone translate you CV/resume before you go. And then again when you get there. Make sure they understand the subject matter in the CV/resume. Otherwise you may end up looking like a professional gopher cage cleaner.
Some countries have issues with American's. So be careful. For example a job in Egypt for an American could have personal safety issues. ( I picked a country and random. )
Moving countries is hard work but well worth it. I have been doing it for almost 20 years. So don't be afraid. If your mind is set on it, you can do it.
I could ramble on for hours. But I'll leave it at this.
I gotta say this is something special.
Just imagine having a transcript of Roman Senate debates.
Pictures of Inca ritual.
Blue prints and plans of how they made the monuments of Easter Island.
As almost the complete entire collection of current knowledge and experience will fade in all it's current forms, very little of our lives will survive for 2000 years. Only scraps of buildings and monuments will survive.
Oops I take that all back. I forgot about Google cache.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll let you in on a secret. If your plan on getting a degree and going straight into work, you don't really have to concern your self to much with the quality of the course work.
As with in a year or two of starting employment you either have it or you don't. The people with the natural skill always bubble to the top no matter where they are from.
Also on initial employment during the interview phase foreign workers are typically automatically given a leg up on the locals. In most countries employers have figured out the foreign workers work harder.
Oh and the comment about the US having the best CS education. Stop reading American ratings. It's simply not true. The quality of the end result graduate is what matters. I have employed people from many many countries. There is very little that differentiates the quality of the candidate. The biggest issues with foreign workers are 1. English language skills, and the most annoying 2. Culturally indoctrinated fear of failure. ( Fear of failure results in employees lying about skills, completion times, and work completeness. Drives me nuts. If you can't do it SAY SO! we will work around it. )
This is fairly straight forward.
Simply go to the school you are currently at and ask. The question is. Which schools abroad do you accept course credit from? Then from that short list make your choice.
Took me all of 1 day to figure out where I was going to go when I did it. It costs a fortune to study abroad but it well worth it.
This goes into the pile of obvious scientific discoveries.
Like these notable scientific discoveries:
1. Drunk women are more amorous.
2. Eating Chocolate makes us feel better.
3. People with well proportioned faces are better looking.
Just because the web model doesn't generate any cash is not the reason to disagree with it.
That's like saying people shouldn't drive faster than 55mph/100kph because it's more dangerous. People are going to drive faster simply because they want to. People are going to use the web because they want to.
The web model does make sense and it makes a ton of money. The reason it makes money is the input cost is radically smaller. No infrastructure cost for distribution. Far fewer staff involved in the delivery of content. Physical cost like office and production space are slashed to a fraction. Simple advertising on a web site can be great source of cash. So your input cash stream may be smaller. But your outgoing cash stream is almost zip.
The key challenges with this new medium is that the format of the paper is now turned on it's head. The individual sections of the paper have become industries in their own right. Classifieds are probably the best example. Not only have classifieds become another industry they have further fractured in sub industries. Case in point job adds.
In general the sections of the paper that operated as a middle man between the supply of the information and consumer have now moved directly to the supplier. For example: TV listings.
So basically the portions of the news paper that can be seen as operating as a middle man should be discarded. As these are going to be money pits. The "News Paper" is then basically left with "News". Consider this as a core value product of the industry. This is what print news needs to wrap their head around.
Lets look at a wildly successful on line news source, CNN. What does the site offer? Just News, ( Not the most accurate, but it's news ). That's it. Does it make money. Sure does.
----
As for wireless access to news everyday. It's here. Just the format is not paper like. I currently read the news on the way to work every day on my phone. Nice big screen, no worries about shoving my elbow into the guy next to me as I flip the page. And it's already 100% customized to the stuff I want to read. Around me I see people using EEPC's, Macbook air's, Even some of them subscribe to audio streaming news and listen to that on the way to work. As you see people are choosing the format they like. You may want/like a paper like analogue. But it will come down to personal choice and as such market demand.
I have a few issues with this list.
First off. The author was clearly asleep from years. 2002 - 2007. As that was the time period of this list.
Secondly where is the drum roll for number 1. David Letterman set the top ten standard and it's a good one. The #1 one slot should definitely be proceeded by:
"and the top Top Tech Breakthrough of 2008 is................."
When the LHC on 19 September 2008 had a liquid helium breakthrough saving man kind from the certain oblivion of a black whole on earth.
R.I.P. list:
Beta
HDDVD
VHS
Which one is next?
DVD?
BlueRay?
An in line filter. Well all I see is a massive slow down and halt. Witch is soon followed by a renewed increase in encrypted traffic.
This thing is going to have a dramatic impact on Aussie commerce.
This is such an ill founded idea and complete waste of tax payers funds. This is simply going to start an arms race that the government and the ISP have little chance of winning.
Note in Aus that most Internet plans have byte limit caps. Thus the ISP's have little interest in being in a commanding position of this arms race.
All this is going to do is create a harbor where highly skilled individuals are going to create increasing harder to detect traffic. Which of course is going to ultimately result in increasing clandestine illegal traffic.
All I got to say is this is this is 100% the fault of business not being able to adapt to the capabilities of the Internet. P2P being one of the greatest advances. P2P is easily the greatest example of a missed opportunities. People tried to but the fearful mega-corp entities out there simple curled up in tight ball under there desks and ordered in the legal swat teams.
Nothing to see here.
Move along please.
Move along.
Go back to your homes!
I have to say a name like Abit to go under. That was a bit of a shock.
I've personally probably built / owned / used a couple of hundred systems based on Abit MB's over the years. However I can't remember actually building or owning an Abit based system in the last 1.5 years.
True enough the last couple of years the company literally had nothing that competed on the MB front. ( Flame away ).
The cash burn must have been something beyond my comprehension.
I truly morn the loss. Less competition is bad. I really don't want to see the price of a main board hit $300. And still suck. If Lenova ends up making the best board on the market I'm going to retire and hide in the bush. ( Personally I don't much care for anything IBM or IBM tainted. )
Good find.
I spent the better part of the afternoon looking for the ref: Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos. Never found it.
If these men were truly fired for not participating in a religious activity in the office. ( As so often happens on Slashdot not all the facts are in on first posting. ) I hope the Judge slaps them HARD. I also hope this sets precedent in US law. The US seriously needs to ensure that the church, what ever church it may be has no more influence in the affairs of government and business.
And yes I am a victim of a troll Post.
The primary issue is that they were employed and later fired for their religious beliefs. It would be morally different if during the employment / interview process that this significant fact regarding employment were put on the table. From what I read here and in the referenced material it was not. This is a clear deception. As a deception it is morally corrupt, unlawful and does not reflect the teachings of any upstanding religion I am aware of.
On the surface auto-scaling is obviously a great thing. But it doesn't take much thought to start punching holes in it.
Lets first look at the Data center that provides such a glorious capability.
1. It is their own best interest for you to scale up. Scale up processing, disk, bandwidth or what ever. For the simple reason it's more money. Since you signed the contract you will probably be scaled well and truly before you know it. Usually you only find out when the bill comes in.
2. The data center has very little incentive to make sure you are notified in a timely manor of autoscaling. As a matter of fact this feature is usually crippled or even broken. I don't care what the contract says. The datacenter rarely honors this part of the contract to anyones satisfaction.
Now lets look at the client and the horrible things that can go wrong. By no means even remotely a complete list.
The new version of the app list.
1. Bob the developer forgets to index that new DB table. Database goes nuts trying to do a simple select. BAM autoscaling of DB CPU resources goes through the roof.
2. New AJAX call is not properly tested. For some reason it now triggers div refreshes as the mouse moves. App server is now flooded. BAM Band Width and CPU autoscale through the roof.
3. App no longer properly caches that all important query. BAM again DB and APP CPU skyrockets.
4. The genius in dev decides to make the jsession stateful. Works fine on the desktop. Works fine when load test hammers only 10 users. Oh Oh real world kicks in, in Prod. We have 10k users. Everything goes through the roof.
5. The list of new version issues goes on.
The bad guys come a knocking.
OK so now your a hot property on the net and you sign up for autoscaling so that you don't have to worry about capacity planning. You are focused on that cash machine that is your cool app.
1. You didn't know about that monster hole in the app. The bad guys inject a phishing site onto your Uber site. The phishing site is wildly successful. Oh crap we just paid for the biggest fraud site on the net.
2. The dev team leaves that back door on the site so they can maintain it remotely. Oh Oh all of a sudden you notice port 25 traffic is off the charts from the site. OMG we just uploaded 25Tbtyes in the last 24hours. You have just joined the ranks of the largest SPAM generators on the planet. You have a monster bandwidth bill and a very expensive legal bill.
3. What are these very large globs in the database all of a sudden. OH crap we left a hole and are vulnerable to SQL injection. OH crap it's all encrypted kiddie porn. Bills for bandwidth, disk and legal come a knocking.
I do have experience with this sort of thing. And it always goes sour at some point. The techies are always overruled by the marketing and business types on this. As the deal is always so great on paper. At some point something will go wrong. Software is never perfect. Between defects and bad guys you are a sitting duck for the big man carrying the bill to your door. It's only ever a matter of time.
Oh and lastly. Geuss what some times the autoscaling fails. Make that a lot of the time. And you are then off the air.
The best situation is for you as a customer of scaling is to have a close relationship with the supplier. Once you start to reach certain predefined levels of usage they should contact you and give you the option of an upgrade. Make the scaling feature by human choice. Never let the supplier decide that for you.
When called into help a particular company with it's IIS web systems I was able to bring the site back to life by doing a few simple things.
Of 20 Load balanced IIS servers.
1. Buy from local shop sticks of ram for 2 of the box's bringing total ram to 3Gig.
2. Disabling the Page file.
3. Only load balance the site to those 2 box's.
4. Power off the other 18.
Total time to implement 6 hours.
Site performance went from +30 sec per page to around 6 second. ( Heavy pages )
Biggest challenge convincing the architects and management that less was more even after implementation. They simply didn't believe it even after it was working in production.
2 Days after I left they undid what I did for them. The site now sucks again. Apparently I bruised some ego's and that couldn't stand.
Oh well. Some people will never learn.
Well put.
Do companies think that the market in China is big enough to justify giving them the source code?
It doesn't really matter what foreign governments think of this. The can scream all they want. If a company thinks the Chinese market is big enough and they want a piece of it. Then they will cough up the code.
Privacy, security and IP rites are second tier considerations when it comes to product sales.
So again. Do companies think that the market in China is big enough to justify giving them the source code?
I agree most consumers have no clue what DRM is.
The issue is that just after early adopters do. They also know that the capital investment for required in order to comply with the DRM is prohibative. As it requires a complete end to end retrofit of entertainment kit. This is a HUGE expense. This is not the DVD upgrade where you upgraded a single or couple of components. This is replace the lot including cables. For a relatively minor quality increase.
Cheap BlueRay players are only part of the dollar equation. There is many more parts to the kit. And these pieces are not cheap.
Now for the normal consumer this is insanely expensive. Normal people hear the list of kit to replace whether it be true or false and simply go "Screw it".
File sharing options that are very easy to use and provide the hi-def experience with the simple purchase of a new UBER TV. These TV's accept input from the crappy work laptop and still manage stunning display and audio with no additional cost. Why in heavens name would you shell out an additional $10k for the other bits.
The industry has completely missed the mark. A prohibative dollar cost to compile with corp defined law. Most consumers feel ZERO guilt or obligation to conform to the debt inducing media industry greed.
And honestly why should they?
Some simple facts.
1991 mp3 became a standard ( Wikipedia )
1995 mp3 music hit the net via early file sharing ( Wikipedia )
2001 P2P was ubiquitous ( My observation )
So somewhere between 1995 and 2001 the music industry instead of embracing P2P and enhancing it to support a business model they instead asked the legal department for help. The legal department then got the green light to turn on the cash tap and drain possibly billions of dollars out of the artists pockets. This was the mistake. Instead of applying some creative thinking to the problem they simply turtled under a legal shell.
Even more amazing when online startups like napster and others popped onto the scene with vision, they freaked even more. They didn't even say "Why didn't we think of that?" Instead of using the vast resources at their command to create a product offering people would want they invented the WDM defense which good old Bush later used as well. As we can see the WDM defense does nothing but create more enemies and bad Karma.
Apple has shown them that money from music on the net is not only viable. It's hugely profitable. No packaging, No shelf space, and instant stock creation. But somehow the music execs still don't get it.
This has left the world in a nasty place. The music artist is loosing, the consumer is loosing, and the production companies are spilling cash to lawyers faster than they can make it. I can only see that this is not going to get better for the artist for possible a decade. And subsiquently the consumer.
( Sorry that almost became a full blown rant )
Well as a person who now lives and works abroad I can say it something that everyone should do.
It has many benefits. Least of which is cash.
First off and most importantly it opens your eyes to the greater culture of the planet. Being someone from the "new" world this is even more important. As North America suffers from a homoginised culture. Less so Canada.
Secondly the experience both for work and personal. Work wise your experience in different cultures working can only help you back at home. Secondly the experience you gain personally will enhance your life and alter your life priorities.
Now for the tough part the how too.
First off do your research in an area you wish to live. What is the cost of living etc. Secondly start to look at the job market in the region. Google will be your friend here.
For example: Rent in Sydney Aus in the city runs you about $400-$600au a week. That's about $350-$500us. Which for most american's is gigantic cash.
At this time several markets are suffering from a downturn in IT. So be careful. This is a particularily sensitive time for employment. Many regions of the world have laws that prefer citizens over foreign people. Others require lengthy and costly Visa and certification procedures. Also some countries foreign workers are not governed by labor laws no matter what they do. So you may not have the protections the locals do. So again this is a point of research.
If you are going to a non English speaking country. Make sure you have someone translate you CV/resume before you go. And then again when you get there. Make sure they understand the subject matter in the CV/resume. Otherwise you may end up looking like a professional gopher cage cleaner.
Some countries have issues with American's. So be careful. For example a job in Egypt for an American could have personal safety issues. ( I picked a country and random. )
Moving countries is hard work but well worth it. I have been doing it for almost 20 years. So don't be afraid. If your mind is set on it, you can do it.
I could ramble on for hours. But I'll leave it at this.
I gotta say this is something special. Just imagine having a transcript of Roman Senate debates. Pictures of Inca ritual. Blue prints and plans of how they made the monuments of Easter Island. As almost the complete entire collection of current knowledge and experience will fade in all it's current forms, very little of our lives will survive for 2000 years. Only scraps of buildings and monuments will survive. Oops I take that all back. I forgot about Google cache.
But how much is the new Elephant space toilet going to cost in design and development.