Time for Earth Simulator to make a Walmart run and get some more Athlons to regain the top of the "supercomputer" chart.
The 80's are back
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The last time AT&T was on TV commercials, QA engineers could afford houses, people could retire at 50, and gas was $0.89. Having the word AT&T back on TV is going to remind a lot of people of better times.
It's about time they did something to improve their situation by going back to a name from the 80's. When you're a front end to an Indian outsourcing business whose only product is your name, changing your name has a big impact. Hopefully they'll still have enough money to buy the rasterline globe trademark back from Infosys.
The simplest answer is always the right answer
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
For all the hot air from Bill Clinton about his massive H1-B quotas being good for u.s. and the hot air from current slashdotters about George Bush killing innovation by banning H1-B's, the simple explanation ended up the right one. H1-B's are for making money.
No-one increases H1-B quotas to help u.s. dominate technology. No-one buys technology from India to give us all promotions. No-one raises gas taxes to help the environment. These things are done to make money. That's the only reason they are done.
Technology and the people who implement it are always becoming obsolete. The technology business has been going out of business for most of its history. Only during an extreme recession in Asia and a cold war did that change momentarily.
Seems everyone but u.s. is treating it like a space race. U.s. is happy to let China and France dominate the high ground and buy their services for a premium while it lays off its aerospace engineers. Then again, leaving the stifling culture of American business out of the space race may be a good thing.
The American economy is based on maximum payback for the least amount of investment, unlike most other economies. There aren't incremental rollouts of small improvements in technology, funded by massive government tax increases. There is just one huge rollout into a single huge increase in technology, years after everyone else has done a thousand incremental steps.
Remember when wireless internet access was 45k/sec and other governments raised taxes to implement statewide wireless internet using that technology. Then it got to 128k/sec and their governments raised taxes again to implement that technology. Then it was 256k/sec with another tax increase. Now it's 512k/sec and they're raising taxes again to implement that technology.
Of all the millions of electric propulsion breakthroughs you can read about on the internet, the most promising one is magnetoplasmadynamic propulsion because it's simple, it can use plentiful hydrogen instead of expensive Xenon, and it makes enough thrust to actually do something useful.
Unfortunately, no electric propulsion breakthrough has done a thing for getting off of Earth. They're all for maneuvering in space and they're all roughly the same in terms of benefit.
It's commonly agreed that if Earth was warmer, humans would be better off while many animals would go extinct. Most of the argument now is about how creatures which can't evolve as fast as humans would suffer and less about how humans would suffer because everyone's settled that humans would just evolve out of any problems.
Humans would have to give up their multi billion dollar coastal mansions and their riverboat gambling. Eskimos would have to get real jobs instead of living off welfare in the middle of nowhere. Antarctic scientists would have to shift to rainforest studies. There wouldn't be any more arctic polar bears.
On the other side, we'd consume much less energy for heating. 1000 less marines would die every year extracting heating oil from terrorists. Russia and Canadia would become inhabitable.
Wonder how many NASA unemployees are going to turn up working for China's government. With a manned spaceflight frequency second only to Russia, you'd think China was the place to be for the implementors of space technology. Still think these mass layoffs are part of a plan to buy most of NASA's needs from other countries and manage other space programs from a distance rather than be in the business of building spaceships.
With modern repositories, revision controls, and search engines it's hard to have a main developer. Everyone can contribute just as much as everyone else and know as much. This is the same problem Google had when it was VA I.O.U.. They hired the most well known programmers assuming there was a difference in knowledge level only to get nothing and watch development get done elsewhere.
You can't make people take jobs that won't provide the standard of living they want. Americans simply don't want to live in dumpy apartments and eat sardines their whole lives. As long as their are liberal arts jobs which provide a better life, they're not going to enter science. If you divert more of their incomes into science, they'll just demand higher salaries for their liberal arts jobs and the few that are scientists will be even poorer.
Unlike USSR, people actually believe the Chinese government this time. It shows how far in the past USSR is when kids now believe in such a thing as internet addiction. Or maybe it isn't the distance in time but our dissatisfaction with capitalism that makes us want to believe in China's government.
Maybe the political divisiveness in the western world is so great that we want to believe China's state news is for real and it really doesn't have a terrorist problem. We want to believe that a centrally run economy works and free market economics is the wrong road.
Maybe telling free market economists they have an addiction is the right strategy.
Too bad no-one's ever thought of using the fastest CPUs in these clusters and really doing something useful instead of using a huge number of weak CPUs to gain publicity.
This Allen Telescope Array has been getting advertised for at least 15 years now and all they've gotten is 10% of it erected and not a single bit of data yet. They must be spending $1 a year on it.
Wouldn't it be farther along if they didn't build it on the most expensive real estate in the world? Maybe instead of spending 15 years building 10% of it outside Sacramento they could compromise and build it 1 mile east of Calif* for a trillion dollars less.
Are they ever going to finish it or is it just supposed to be neverending publicity for Paul Allen?
Many programmers like contracting because it's a way to run a business without having to deal with people. They give themselves a company name, write off their apartments as work expenses, and speak to no-one for days at a time even though they occasionally need to win clients.
Most of all the experience of running a company/contracting is fair game for getting into corporate management later on. Most of the managers in multi billion dollar corporations are former contractors who listed their contracting job as "president of X".
Contracting does not produce more income than full time employment. Contractors devote a substantial amount of their income to higher social security tax, medicare tax, health insurance which companies provide their permanent employees. In fact, most contractors are paid less then "permanent" employees because they don't get annual bonuses or severance.
The payoff is the corporate management promotion. The contractors of today may be broke, but in a few year's they'll be multi billion dollar corporation, homeowning, plasma TV watching, managers while the rest of us are still sleeping in shipping containers.
There are many evangelists using the word "singularity" to describe the point at which humans stop dying or the point at which technology creates the promised land. Given the increasing lack of imagination when picking buzwords, we predict another type of singularity when every sentence is composed of exactly one word: singularity.
Besides the obvious 10 year delay mandated by government beaurocracy, they seemed to be running that thing since 2000 without the interferometer. It's hard to believe it took so long to get just one image from the interferometer. Not even going to bother finding the actual image on the internet.
We didn't know if we were going to win the cold war in 1972. We had to prove that USSR could never defeat u.s. by showing a complete dominance of technology. The space station, on the other hand, represents today's political reality.
Political motivations like this are the reason India and China are so important. India and China aren't bound to political constraints. They have the financial independance to do what needs to be done without regard for involving the right people.
Burnout rates between u.s. and t.h.e.m.
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 1
The article keeps saying outsourcing results from high burnout rates. I say it results from lack of opportunity. Let's face it. Most American jobs are symbolic, stationary, and not very rewarding. Most Asian jobs are functional, upwardly mobile, and more rewarding. Of course Americans are going to burn out and have their jobs moved to Asia, because it's easier to do something that pays for your housing and leads to a better life than to do something that just pays the next month's rent.
Where in u.s. can you make enough money for a house or expect to have a bigger title next year? In asia there are just more opportunities.
After hearing Europe's plan to make airlines trade air to reduce pollution, it felt like these Europeans just sat around all day thinking of things to take issue with. But that was just the beginning.
Now the Europeans want to copy Deep Impact right down to having a second probe observing the impact because it "would only result in a miniscule modification". Whatever.
To avoid sounding like immitators, they say its to "rehearse" deflecting an asteroid, but only an asteroid with a specific orbit, specific delta V, shape, density, size, and center of mass.
With such a massive number of selection parameters, it isn't much of a rehearsal for anything is it. If you can't observe the miniscule modification from Earth, how would you know if the asteroid was heading for Earth to begin with?
Hopefully Hillary Clinton won't make u.s. pay for these European grand standings.
Without a tax machine like global warming, how are you going to raise energy taxes? If you can't raise energy taxes you'll give politicians less power. If you politicians have less power, they'll be unhappy. You don't want that to happen, do you?
NASA wrote: > for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near > Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting > a climate change in progress.
Guess we need to raise energy taxes on Mars too. Would be kind of funny if all the other planets were experiencing global warming but no-one said anything about it because of the political inertia behind energy taxes.
The X Prize worked because it lead to something you could build a business on. You could theoretically make money hurling people into low earth orbit for 30 seconds. The NASA prize doesn't seem to lead to anything. Whose going to pay to move lunar regolith to a collection device?
Slashdot Mirror
Time for Earth Simulator to make a Walmart run and get some more Athlons to regain the top of the "supercomputer" chart.
The last time AT&T was on TV commercials, QA engineers could afford houses, people could retire at 50, and gas was $0.89. Having the word AT&T back on TV is going to remind a lot of people of better times.
It's about time they did something to improve their situation by going back to a name from the 80's. When you're a front end to an Indian outsourcing business whose only product is your name, changing your name has a big impact. Hopefully they'll still have enough money to buy the rasterline globe trademark back from Infosys.
For all the hot air from Bill Clinton about his massive H1-B quotas being good for u.s. and the hot air from current slashdotters about George Bush killing innovation by banning H1-B's, the simple explanation ended up the right one. H1-B's are for making money.
No-one increases H1-B quotas to help u.s. dominate technology. No-one buys technology from India to give us all promotions. No-one raises gas taxes to help the environment. These things are done to make money. That's the only reason they are done.
Technology and the people who implement it are always becoming obsolete. The technology business has been going out of business for most of its history. Only during an extreme recession in Asia and a cold war did that change momentarily.
Seems everyone but u.s. is treating it like a space race. U.s. is happy to let China and France dominate the high ground and buy their services for a premium while it lays off its aerospace engineers. Then again, leaving the stifling culture of American business out of the space race may be a good thing.
The American economy is based on maximum payback for the least amount of investment, unlike most other economies. There aren't incremental rollouts of small improvements in technology, funded by massive government tax increases. There is just one huge rollout into a single huge increase in technology, years after everyone else has done a thousand incremental steps.
Remember when wireless internet access was 45k/sec and other governments raised taxes to implement statewide wireless internet using that technology. Then it got to 128k/sec and their governments raised taxes again to implement that technology. Then it was 256k/sec with another tax increase. Now it's 512k/sec and they're raising taxes again to implement that technology.
Of all the millions of electric propulsion breakthroughs you can read about on the internet, the most promising one is magnetoplasmadynamic propulsion because it's simple, it can use plentiful hydrogen instead of expensive Xenon, and it makes enough thrust to actually do something useful.
Unfortunately, no electric propulsion breakthrough has done a thing for getting off of Earth. They're all for maneuvering in space and they're all roughly the same in terms of benefit.
It's commonly agreed that if Earth was warmer, humans would be better off while many animals would go extinct. Most of the argument now is about how creatures which can't evolve as fast as humans would suffer and less about how humans would suffer because everyone's settled that humans would just evolve out of any problems.
Humans would have to give up their multi billion dollar coastal mansions and their riverboat gambling. Eskimos would have to get real jobs instead of living off welfare in the middle of nowhere. Antarctic scientists would have to shift to rainforest studies. There wouldn't be any more arctic polar bears.
On the other side, we'd consume much less energy for heating. 1000 less marines would die every year extracting heating oil from terrorists. Russia and Canadia would become inhabitable.
Wonder how many NASA unemployees are going to turn up working for China's government. With a manned spaceflight frequency second only to Russia, you'd think China was the place to be for the implementors of space technology. Still think these mass layoffs are part of a plan to buy most of NASA's needs from other countries and manage other space programs from a distance rather than be in the business of building spaceships.
I don't want to search through an hour of audio. Why don't you just spell it out.
With modern repositories, revision controls, and search engines it's hard to have a main developer. Everyone can contribute just as much as everyone else and know as much. This is the same problem Google had when it was VA I.O.U.. They hired the most well known programmers assuming there was a difference in knowledge level only to get nothing and watch development get done elsewhere.
You can't make people take jobs that won't provide the standard of living they want. Americans simply don't want to live in dumpy apartments and eat sardines their whole lives. As long as their are liberal arts jobs which provide a better life, they're not going to enter science. If you divert more of their incomes into science, they'll just demand higher salaries for their liberal arts jobs and the few that are scientists will be even poorer.
Unlike USSR, people actually believe the Chinese government this time. It shows how far in the past USSR is when kids now believe in such a thing as internet addiction. Or maybe it isn't the distance in time but our dissatisfaction with capitalism that makes us want to believe in China's government.
Maybe the political divisiveness in the western world is so great that we want to believe China's state news is for real and it really doesn't have a terrorist problem. We want to believe that a centrally run economy works and free market economics is the wrong road.
Maybe telling free market economists they have an addiction is the right strategy.
Too bad no-one's ever thought of using the fastest CPUs in these clusters and really doing something useful instead of using a huge number of weak CPUs to gain publicity.
If you want all your applications provided by a central corporation, then get used to losing them when the corporation gets shut down.
This Allen Telescope Array has been getting advertised for at least 15 years now and all they've gotten is 10% of it erected and not a single bit of data yet. They must be spending $1 a year on it.
Wouldn't it be farther along if they didn't build it on the most expensive real estate in the world? Maybe instead of spending 15 years building 10% of it outside Sacramento they could compromise and build it 1 mile east of Calif* for a trillion dollars less.
Are they ever going to finish it or is it just supposed to be neverending publicity for Paul Allen?
Many programmers like contracting because it's a way to run a business without having to deal with people. They give themselves a company name, write off their apartments as work expenses, and speak to no-one for days at a time even though they occasionally need to win clients.
Most of all the experience of running a company/contracting is fair game for getting into corporate management later on. Most of the managers in multi billion dollar corporations are former contractors who listed their contracting job as "president of X".
Contracting does not produce more income than full time employment. Contractors devote a substantial amount of their income to higher social security tax, medicare tax, health insurance which companies provide their permanent employees. In fact, most contractors are paid less then "permanent" employees because they don't get annual bonuses or severance.
The payoff is the corporate management promotion. The contractors of today may be broke, but in a few year's they'll be multi billion dollar corporation, homeowning, plasma TV watching, managers while the rest of us are still sleeping in shipping containers.
There are many evangelists using the word "singularity" to describe the point at which humans stop dying or the point at which technology creates the promised land. Given the increasing lack of imagination when picking buzwords, we predict another type of singularity when every sentence is composed of exactly one word: singularity.
Besides the obvious 10 year delay mandated by government beaurocracy, they seemed to be running that thing since 2000 without the interferometer. It's hard to believe it took so long to get just one image from the interferometer. Not even going to bother finding the actual image on the internet.
We didn't know if we were going to win the cold war in 1972. We had to prove that USSR could never defeat u.s. by showing a complete dominance of technology. The space station, on the other hand, represents today's political reality.
Political motivations like this are the reason India and China are so important. India and China aren't bound to political constraints. They have the financial independance to do what needs to be done without regard for involving the right people.
The article keeps saying outsourcing results from high burnout rates. I say it results from lack of opportunity. Let's face it. Most American jobs are symbolic, stationary, and not very rewarding. Most Asian jobs are functional, upwardly mobile, and more rewarding. Of course Americans are going to burn out and have their jobs moved to Asia, because it's easier to do something that pays for your housing and leads to a better life than to do something that just pays the next month's rent.
Where in u.s. can you make enough money for a house or expect to have a bigger title next year? In asia there are just more opportunities.
After hearing Europe's plan to make airlines trade air to reduce pollution, it felt like these Europeans just sat around all day thinking of things to take issue with. But that was just the beginning.
Now the Europeans want to copy Deep Impact right down to having a second probe observing the impact because it "would only result in a miniscule modification". Whatever.
To avoid sounding like immitators, they say its to "rehearse" deflecting an asteroid, but only an asteroid with a specific orbit, specific delta V, shape, density, size, and center of mass.
With such a massive number of selection parameters, it isn't much of a rehearsal for anything is it. If you can't observe the miniscule modification from Earth, how would you know if the asteroid was heading for Earth to begin with?
Hopefully Hillary Clinton won't make u.s. pay for these European grand standings.
Without a tax machine like global warming, how are you going to raise energy taxes? If you can't raise energy taxes you'll give politicians less power. If you politicians have less power, they'll be unhappy. You don't want that to happen, do you?
NASA wrote:
> for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near
> Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting
> a climate change in progress.
Guess we need to raise energy taxes on Mars too. Would be kind of funny if all the other planets were experiencing global warming but no-one said anything about it because of the political inertia behind energy taxes.
The X Prize worked because it lead to something you could build a business on. You could theoretically make money hurling people into low earth orbit for 30 seconds. The NASA prize doesn't seem to lead to anything. Whose going to pay to move lunar regolith to a collection device?