How does a web zine run up millions in debt? You have some servers, some writers, and maybe a few people in support such as marketing and ad placement. Teenagers can and do make decent web zines and serve them from cheap $20/month accounts. Companies like this must be doing something crazy to run up that kind of debt.
If the problem is network costs then simply simplify your pages to use less bandwidth and simply make an effort to attract fewer but more dedicated readers.
If the problem is writers then they are probably paying to well or have to many writers. Obviously you can't pay your employees more than your company is making. Freelance writers shouldn't be that expensive. Hire a couple of better more expensive writers and keep the rest to cheaper but decent writers.
If the problem is support staff again you can't be paying more for your employees than what they are worth to your company. It might even be cheaper to outsource the majority of the work. In house programmers for example are often more expensive than a contracted company would offer for the same work.
If the problem is physical expenses such as buildings and such then as others have said cut back and let more people work from home. It saves the company money, it saves, the employee money, and in general reduces stress (such as rush hour driving).
The web is CHEAP. A web zine is CHEAP. If you're lossing money at it then you're doing something wrong. I have clients that spend less than a hundred dollars a month and they manage to run successful web-based businesses. It doesn't take millions of dollars. Anybody should be able to do it.
That's pretty much it. I was getting free cable this way too so I talked to same techs that worked for them (and were friends) and they explained it out in detail (others here have already covered the details).
It's not by design exactly. more because it's hard to stop people from exploiting it without some major design changes so they seem to be putting a happy face on the whole thing (which is good).
If you are already subscribing to cable they still charge you for it though.:)
Kansas City is a pretty good place too. Sprint World Headquarters is there and they have tons and tons of bandwidth that is cheap compared to most places. Again being in the Midwest the costs are all reduced. Land, utilities, cost of living, cost of workers etc is reduced a lot.
I love the coast (Miami is great!) but the Midwest is just a cheaper place to live and own a business.
As someone with experience I'll just say that the US's immigration is screwed up horribly. It isn't just tech workers that get screwed with. They are such a abusive agency that I as a native American was just sick when I started having to be involved with them. IMO they treat people as if they were third rate. It's nothing short of discrimination. It was simply insulting to know our government is sponsoring this sort of filth.
This new thing where all immigrants and suspected as terrorists is just amazing. As if we didn't have a ton of home grown psychos.
Yeah, now that you mention it I remember having some nice ones. Of course CD's have less space for really cool pictures on the disc but you could still do quite a lot with it. I think they are just to cheap/lazy these days to make the effort.
From my own buying habits I know I buy far more movies since the prices started dropping. Walmart has had VHS movies for $5-6 for some time and I've bought most of the ones they've made available. They now also have DVD's for $7-$10 which I've taken to buying instead of the VHS because I like DVD's better. I buy lots of movies because they are cheap and I buy almost no music because it's priced insanely. I actually buy the music videos on DVD for less than I could buy just the music on CD. How does that make sense?
I'll still copy and even share the movies I buy but I buy far more. I have a bootleg copy of Harry Potter but I still plan on buying it on DVD when it's released. Because of the download size of LotR I decided to wait for the DVD rather than downloading it but I wouldn't have had I still had broadband. Not only does price matter but also release schedule. The studios need to understand that the DVD should be available as soon as the movie is in theatures. In many cases we'll still go to the theature.. for the experience.. despite the fact we own the movie already. Afterall many of us go watch good movies more than once at the theature anyway.
One more thing music could learn from movies is that they need to release more than one version of a CD. A cheap version that is nothing but the CD for those who are satisfied with that and something more along the lines of a collectors edition later that might have extras such as a cool box (Rocky Horror Picture Show has an awesome DVD box), lyrics, information about the band, maybe a DVD of the music videos, etc. People will buy a product twice if the first time is a good deal and the second time offers stuff a 'true fan' will crave. Movie studios seem to understand this better than the music industry. The Phantom Menace Collectors Edition was also a nice release.. the inclusion of the film clip etc was very cool IMO and it probably cost them less than a nickle.
If movies, music, and games would drop to $3/each I might buy 10+ a week (I buy 1-2 now) and would be much less likely to bother downloading them. They have to let me play them on whatever device I want though. If I can't play it in Linux and mess around with editing them etc then I'll go back to ripping and burning.
Well 'often' if compared to how many users build or upgrade their own DVD player or microwave as comapred to a PC. If they pass laws forcing all computers to support their copy-protection you run into issues like what types of computers? Does my cars computer need it? How about the computer in my stove? Maybe the one in my watch? My cell phone? My PDA? My camera? My desktop/server machines? My laptop? My Beowulf cluster? My mainframe? A 'computer' is a huge group of products and many of them are not consumer items. Even desktop-class machines are often used as servers these days so just saying desktop machines should not be allowed to be built except by compliant corporations etc would cause a lot of trouble.
If you want an easy place to start where you're likely to find a good job I suggest you pick a web project and offer to maintain the db code of that project especially if you can work with both MySQL and Oracle. Being a DBA might not be the most fun but it seems to pay well and companies seem to always be looking for such help. Having Perl, Python, and PHP are also good languages to make sure you know. Any admin or web programming jobs you take will exercise all three heavily.
Have a web page with your resume and a list of projects you've worked on and examples of your programming. Pick some of your best work.. something of decent size and complexity that's implemented well.. and include it as a tar/gzip file when you submit your resume. Doing so greatly increases responses.
A DVD player is a consumer item. A PC can be but is often put together or upgraded by the end-user themselves. I certainly am not going to pay more for a component I don't need. Are they saying that my web server needs to have this crap built-in? What if I don't put it in there? Then am I breaking some stupid law? They could possibly have this crap built-in for the mass market users but then anyone who didn't want it would just buy a PC from else. Unless it offers some benefit to the enduser it won't go over.
You can get a decent site with Perl/PHP and MySQL support for around $10 a month with enough space and bandwidth for a medium sized site if you keep things like graphics at a minimum. Programming a site is easy and there are even free packages available for most common types of sites for those that aren't good programmers. I think you'll find that as many of the big free sites turn to pay or die that more small sites will show up.
If you remember a few years ago there were lots of small free sites that eventually got ate by the big portal sites or just gave up as they couldn't compete for users attention with so many big name companies giving away the same stuff. Those forces are disappearing so now is your chance to have your own little slice of the Net again.:)
On my projects page you can see that I'm beginning to work on providing easy to use plug-n-play style components to build sites from. If anyone cares to help please do. So far I've used this exact code in several commercial sites and it's working fine so I have no reason to think it won't work for free sites. You don't need to make a profit from a site if it's not costing you a lot of money.
You do realize that a bank can just freeze your account at anytime without reason? They also can happen to lose $100's of dollars of your money without any record of what happened to it. Bank of America has been the worst in my experience but Commerce was almost as bad. Local home town banks have done the best job in my experience.
PayPal hasn't screwed me yet. If they do they I'll add them to my blacklist. Until they do so I have no reason to dislike them.
I'd love to have a good selection of online banks I could use but currently that isn't reality. Probably because so many people have some idea that banks should all live up to federal standards. I'd much rather have banks that were directly responsible to their customers like any other business. If they suck their customers move their money else where and the bank goes under. I'm sick of getting the one finger salute when asking why my money is disappearing from ym account.:)
I've had very good luck buying and selling with PayPal. I just wish I could get a debit card. I have a verified bank account with them but because they require a verified credit card and I don't use credit cards I seem unable to get a debit card. I'd love to be able to use PayPal as my main bank as I do most my shopping online and accept most my payments for my contract work as PayPal payments. It's a pain waiting 3-4 days to transfer to my bank so that I can pay for rent and food.
I've been screwed by every big name bank I've had so I for one don't want PayPal to be more like a normal bank. I'm perfectly satisfied with them so far other than them being to careful with my money.:)
Sadly, even if you work in a field you enjoy there are many things that can ruin the experience for you. In my chosen field of programming and engineering most jobs are frustrating to the extreme. Usually you work on projects that are mismanaged and are treated as 'just a basement troll' so that your advice is ignored. Then if you try to be a contractor you have to deal with customers that don't really know what they want, don't have the budget for what they need, want an unrealistic timeline, etc. What I'd really like is to be able to find a sponsor or business partner to let me work on projects with well defined goals, realistic timelines, etc and then market those products once completed but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
For you to understand working in the software industry I guess I could put it like this. Your employers want you to excavate something but they don't tell you what. Every time you dig about 2 foot into the ground they tell you they've decided that they had you digging in the wrong spot. And oh yeh all they give you to dig with is a plastic sand shovel. Then they blame you that they never got what they wanted.
We recently had an argument very similar to this on my LUG list about web filtering in libraries and schools. Evidently a large portion of Americans don't think censorship of the reader is the same as censorship of the writer and most don't seem to think it's wrong to censor what others can read. Many also seem to feel that it's okay to do something that is wrong if it's their job or to do so is compliant with the law.
I guess in light of those results I'm not at all surprised that corporate America is helping destroy freedom. Hopefully, there is at least enough people that do object to such behavior that we can at least mourn the death of freedom. The experiment the United States played such a large part in seems to be over and it's failed. Rah rah go greed and power.
Using a computer hardly keeps you from exploring the real world. Quite the opposite. I've found use of computers stirs a thirst. If you explore the Internet, a game such as Final Fantasy, or an encyclopedia on cd-rom you encounter new ideas and you want to fill that need anyway you can. It's the same as reading books. Sure you can say that reading to much keeps you from living your life but more often reading leads you to study the world on your own, travel, and in general think about things more.
If you think that computers stifle creativity then obviously you have never created anything on them. It could be true that there are few tools a young child can use to be creative but if that is so the solution is to write more programs children can use in a creative manner. A crayon is not creative but put into the hands of someone it allows them to be creative. A computer should be the same way.
Using a computer should be a social experience. Children should use them together both in person and online. A good deal of the problem is so called protective laws make it difficult to make a child-oriented place for children to be social online. As if by closing all the worlds playgrounds you could stop child abuse.
"At what price learning? At what cost wisdom?"
"The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life."
Kampus, by james e. gunn
Another group of us that it's hitting hard are the techies that didn't happen to live near one of the tech hives. Rather than jump to a much better paying job somewhere else I was happily sitting at a decent paying local tech job that I liked and I still could be close to home. I figured I was young and there would always be time to earn that money later since I'd obviously still have the skills. Boom take away the job and I didn't have $20,000 or $100,000 or anything like mentioned in this article to hold me over. The unemployment money went fast. Here it only lasts for about three months. I've been unemployed for almost a year and getting by on occassional contract work at half what I used to make isn't easy. Even blue collar jobs locally are hard to come by as several big companies have closed or laid off major portions of their workforce. Of course without an income or savings I can't afford to move either.
The only positive thing I can say is that it does give me time to work on personal projects and I've been able to opensource quite a bit of code. I'd really be happy if I could find a job/sponsor that'd pay me to continue writing opensource code even if at a very low wage (~$100/wk).
To me this would cause more piracy. If I rented a disc and knew it was going to expire the first thing I'd do is copy it. Once copied I'd know it couldn't expire so I'd give the original to the kids and put the backup into my own collection.
I do the same thing with CD's now. I make a copy which I use, keep a copy on the hdd, and put the original into a safe spot. I've done the same thing with DVD's from time to time but not as much as the cases for DVD's seem to work better in my experience.
I also know that certain companies that make souch equipment make a nice profit. I have no problem with them making that profit but I'd rather that my ISP spend some of their money to buy into some of their equipment companies enough to exert enough control to lower the equipment costs or better yet pay for research that'd make producing the equipment cheaper. I know some of these companies already do this but I don't know of any that are DSL/cable providers. Anyway my point is there are ways by which such costs can be kept low.
As far as workers go I'd say that right now there is a lot of very talented people that are unemployed. A company could hire these workers cheap right now. That also should help push down the cost. I'm sure you could save some money by reducing overinflated management salaries too.
Sure there are other costs. I'm not suggesting they make the bandwidth free. I'm only suggesting that there is a limit to what customers will pay and raising prices above that is suicide. Better to cut costs where possible first.
I don't mind if ISP's offer a cheaper service for less so that those that don't need as much bandwidth don't have to pay as much but I really think ~ US$40/month for bandwidth that you aren't allowed to run servers on is about as much as I'd pay. I'd pay $80 if the connection was fast both ways and I was allowed to run small home web sites.
Maybe if these companies are hurting for money so much they could take some of the cash they are wasting on cheesy commercials and put it towards reducing the cost of bandwidth. Sure this stuff costs a lot to install but there is a crap load of fiber already installed and just left unused because the companies don't feel the need to switch it on yet. They sit there and make excuses about how they have limited bandwidth and that is why they have to charge so much while at the same time leaving a lot of their capacity left untouched. Sprint for one has installed tons of fiber all over the place and still isn't using it for much of anything. Maybe if your ISP's bandwidth costs are so high they should try complaining to their provider rather than squeezing their customers.
Another solution is to offer proxy servers and make them part of the default install. Include file sharing software that includes a local cache server. I'd imagine those two steps would greatly reduce the ISP's upstream bandwidth usage because a good number of users use the same websites and look for the same files. I'm greatly surprised more ISP's don't offer something like a regional BBS-like interface that lets users chat and trade files with others locally. The cost of an extra webserver in exchange for the saved bandwidth would seem a good bargain to me.
Either way please get rid of those crappy commercials. I'd pay an extra $5/month just to be able not to see those.:)
It really surprises me that they are selling off the studio so quickly. As with any platform the first thing you do on it can be counted as sort of a throw away. You want to do you best with it but you really perfect yourself over two or three releases. FF7 was kind of sucky (both the look and the plot) but FF8 was great and FF9 was really good (it was more polished and easier than 8 but not quite so absorbing). The Spirits Within was an okay movie. It looked great and I found it interesting but it felt as if they wanted to make it longer but instead decided to keep it short and then just ripped large parts of the plot out to make it work. Possibly it was just the fact that it lacked certain essential Final Fantasy elements but it felt artificially simplified. I think they could have done better with a longer medium like a mini-series or even a weekly hour-long television show.
I'd have liked to see a movie that played as a sequel to one of their games. Maybe FF8. Sort of like X-Files that went from weekly to movie to weekly except do a game to movie to game.
It'd make sense for populations to rebuild themselves and mix genes between periods of cutting out the weaker combinations. There is always something that'll hit unexpectedly and change things. Obviously if it's unexpected you aren't expecting it to happen.
I do think we're heading into a period where physical adaption is less important and mental adaption will be the rule. The intelligent and technological savvy will pull further and further away from those that are unable to handle the kind of knowledge needed.
I think we'll see more 'planned evolution' too. Genetics, neural engineering, nanotech, etc. We'll decide to make the changes but we won't know where things will go. I'm sure the guy that learned to make fire probably did better than people eatting raw meat and those that learn to use new technologies now will do better than those that don't.
Gibson has some good stories but really he is not much of a visionary. He admits to a dislike for most technology and I don't think he really understands it.
Stephenson does large amounts of research for his books and they are based largely in fact with a little artistic license to make the stories interesting. Snow Crash foretold the Net and the rise of Multi-player VR enviroments, P2P file sharing, etc. The Diamond Age is a good look at how nanotechnology will effect our society. Of course it keeps within bounds of the near future because nanotech will change us to such a degree that the average person can't even comprehend it. My only complaint is the silly idea that we'll figure out to hack everything in the world but won't be able to generate speech that sounds like a real person.
You might read some of Bruce Sterlings books too. Books like Distraction are good peeks at the possible future. It deals somewhat with genetics and neural hacks but more importantly addresses how society might evolve once everyone can be self-sufficent but can't find work.
If you could take Distraction and The Diamond Age and merge them into a single book and jump 20 years in the future you'd have an excellent story that would sell to nobody but geeks because only geeks could understand it.
Call me precautious but I usually test out everything, including the kernel by running it on clients and development servers before putting it on any mission critical servers. As much as I like the improvements I didn't find it stable enough for heavy usage until recently so I just never upgraded any major servers to use it until now. No pain at all because as an admin I did my job. Anyway it always did pretty good for me unless I put it on a total crap box (of which I have many) and stressed it a lot (which I tend to do) so I don't think it had that big of problems to begin with. In reality Netscape was the only program I found that caused consistant problems with the 2.4 kernels. From time to time programs like Xine would also but that was usually when I did something stupid like trying to run several movies at once on a low end machine with barely enough RAM to breath. My development web servers don't get a lot of traffic but they do some heavy data processing and I never noticed any problem there.
It's their time and money being wasted. let them cheat on homework. i always thought homework should be optional anyway. WE are paying the school. WE should tell them what to do. But then I think testing should be done by independent 3rd parties too.. not the schools themselves. Even within the same school Professor Y can have much easier homework and tests than Professor x.. between schools the difference can be just as huge.. a degree earned by one person isn't equiv to a degree earned by another. I know some CS grads that kick ass and a lot of others who shouldn't be hired to count beans.
I don't know how many times when hauling my VCD, DVD, consoles, etc around that I've wished they could just jack into the local WiFi network and then the tv could pick the feed it wanted to receive by checking a 'Network Neighborhood' type of thing that looked just like picking a channel. You can send video over a WiFi network without any problems so all you need is a tv smart enough to receive it.
Then to be even better they cold make the power cords optional so you could go 'unjacked' for a while and then just plug the system back in later to play/charge. The PS1 already has battery packs so why not DVD players and newer consoles.:)
Not sure why they need a new OS for it. A simple protocol that agrees on the type of video stream and a way to communicate available channels should work. You could even offer encryption of streams if you wanted to make sure your kids couldn't see the porn your watching. Screw the $400 million. Someone hire me for a year and I'll develop it myself using Linux and standard embedded components.:)
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How does a web zine run up millions in debt? You have some servers, some writers, and maybe a few people in support such as marketing and ad placement. Teenagers can and do make decent web zines and serve them from cheap $20/month accounts. Companies like this must be doing something crazy to run up that kind of debt.
If the problem is network costs then simply simplify your pages to use less bandwidth and simply make an effort to attract fewer but more dedicated readers.
If the problem is writers then they are probably paying to well or have to many writers. Obviously you can't pay your employees more than your company is making. Freelance writers shouldn't be that expensive. Hire a couple of better more expensive writers and keep the rest to cheaper but decent writers.
If the problem is support staff again you can't be paying more for your employees than what they are worth to your company. It might even be cheaper to outsource the majority of the work. In house programmers for example are often more expensive than a contracted company would offer for the same work.
If the problem is physical expenses such as buildings and such then as others have said cut back and let more people work from home. It saves the company money, it saves, the employee money, and in general reduces stress (such as rush hour driving).
The web is CHEAP. A web zine is CHEAP. If you're lossing money at it then you're doing something wrong. I have clients that spend less than a hundred dollars a month and they manage to run successful web-based businesses. It doesn't take millions of dollars. Anybody should be able to do it.
That's pretty much it. I was getting free cable this way too so I talked to same techs that worked for them (and were friends) and they explained it out in detail (others here have already covered the details).
:)
It's not by design exactly. more because it's hard to stop people from exploiting it without some major design changes so they seem to be putting a happy face on the whole thing (which is good).
If you are already subscribing to cable they still charge you for it though.
Kansas City is a pretty good place too. Sprint World Headquarters is there and they have tons and tons of bandwidth that is cheap compared to most places. Again being in the Midwest the costs are all reduced. Land, utilities, cost of living, cost of workers etc is reduced a lot.
I love the coast (Miami is great!) but the Midwest is just a cheaper place to live and own a business.
As someone with experience I'll just say that the US's immigration is screwed up horribly. It isn't just tech workers that get screwed with. They are such a abusive agency that I as a native American was just sick when I started having to be involved with them. IMO they treat people as if they were third rate. It's nothing short of discrimination. It was simply insulting to know our government is sponsoring this sort of filth.
This new thing where all immigrants and suspected as terrorists is just amazing. As if we didn't have a ton of home grown psychos.
Yeah, now that you mention it I remember having some nice ones. Of course CD's have less space for really cool pictures on the disc but you could still do quite a lot with it. I think they are just to cheap/lazy these days to make the effort.
From my own buying habits I know I buy far more movies since the prices started dropping. Walmart has had VHS movies for $5-6 for some time and I've bought most of the ones they've made available. They now also have DVD's for $7-$10 which I've taken to buying instead of the VHS because I like DVD's better. I buy lots of movies because they are cheap and I buy almost no music because it's priced insanely. I actually buy the music videos on DVD for less than I could buy just the music on CD. How does that make sense?
I'll still copy and even share the movies I buy but I buy far more. I have a bootleg copy of Harry Potter but I still plan on buying it on DVD when it's released. Because of the download size of LotR I decided to wait for the DVD rather than downloading it but I wouldn't have had I still had broadband. Not only does price matter but also release schedule. The studios need to understand that the DVD should be available as soon as the movie is in theatures. In many cases we'll still go to the theature.. for the experience.. despite the fact we own the movie already. Afterall many of us go watch good movies more than once at the theature anyway.
One more thing music could learn from movies is that they need to release more than one version of a CD. A cheap version that is nothing but the CD for those who are satisfied with that and something more along the lines of a collectors edition later that might have extras such as a cool box (Rocky Horror Picture Show has an awesome DVD box), lyrics, information about the band, maybe a DVD of the music videos, etc. People will buy a product twice if the first time is a good deal and the second time offers stuff a 'true fan' will crave. Movie studios seem to understand this better than the music industry. The Phantom Menace Collectors Edition was also a nice release.. the inclusion of the film clip etc was very cool IMO and it probably cost them less than a nickle.
If movies, music, and games would drop to $3/each I might buy 10+ a week (I buy 1-2 now) and would be much less likely to bother downloading them. They have to let me play them on whatever device I want though. If I can't play it in Linux and mess around with editing them etc then I'll go back to ripping and burning.
Well 'often' if compared to how many users build or upgrade their own DVD player or microwave as comapred to a PC. If they pass laws forcing all computers to support their copy-protection you run into issues like what types of computers? Does my cars computer need it? How about the computer in my stove? Maybe the one in my watch? My cell phone? My PDA? My camera? My desktop/server machines? My laptop? My Beowulf cluster? My mainframe? A 'computer' is a huge group of products and many of them are not consumer items. Even desktop-class machines are often used as servers these days so just saying desktop machines should not be allowed to be built except by compliant corporations etc would cause a lot of trouble.
If you want an easy place to start where you're likely to find a good job I suggest you pick a web project and offer to maintain the db code of that project especially if you can work with both MySQL and Oracle. Being a DBA might not be the most fun but it seems to pay well and companies seem to always be looking for such help. Having Perl, Python, and PHP are also good languages to make sure you know. Any admin or web programming jobs you take will exercise all three heavily.
Have a web page with your resume and a list of projects you've worked on and examples of your programming. Pick some of your best work.. something of decent size and complexity that's implemented well.. and include it as a tar/gzip file when you submit your resume. Doing so greatly increases responses.
A DVD player is a consumer item. A PC can be but is often put together or upgraded by the end-user themselves. I certainly am not going to pay more for a component I don't need. Are they saying that my web server needs to have this crap built-in? What if I don't put it in there? Then am I breaking some stupid law? They could possibly have this crap built-in for the mass market users but then anyone who didn't want it would just buy a PC from else. Unless it offers some benefit to the enduser it won't go over.
You can get a decent site with Perl/PHP and MySQL support for around $10 a month with enough space and bandwidth for a medium sized site if you keep things like graphics at a minimum. Programming a site is easy and there are even free packages available for most common types of sites for those that aren't good programmers. I think you'll find that as many of the big free sites turn to pay or die that more small sites will show up.
:)
If you remember a few years ago there were lots of small free sites that eventually got ate by the big portal sites or just gave up as they couldn't compete for users attention with so many big name companies giving away the same stuff. Those forces are disappearing so now is your chance to have your own little slice of the Net again.
On my projects page you can see that I'm beginning to work on providing easy to use plug-n-play style components to build sites from. If anyone cares to help please do. So far I've used this exact code in several commercial sites and it's working fine so I have no reason to think it won't work for free sites. You don't need to make a profit from a site if it's not costing you a lot of money.
You do realize that a bank can just freeze your account at anytime without reason? They also can happen to lose $100's of dollars of your money without any record of what happened to it. Bank of America has been the worst in my experience but Commerce was almost as bad. Local home town banks have done the best job in my experience.
:)
PayPal hasn't screwed me yet. If they do they I'll add them to my blacklist. Until they do so I have no reason to dislike them.
I'd love to have a good selection of online banks I could use but currently that isn't reality. Probably because so many people have some idea that banks should all live up to federal standards. I'd much rather have banks that were directly responsible to their customers like any other business. If they suck their customers move their money else where and the bank goes under. I'm sick of getting the one finger salute when asking why my money is disappearing from ym account.
I've had very good luck buying and selling with PayPal. I just wish I could get a debit card. I have a verified bank account with them but because they require a verified credit card and I don't use credit cards I seem unable to get a debit card. I'd love to be able to use PayPal as my main bank as I do most my shopping online and accept most my payments for my contract work as PayPal payments. It's a pain waiting 3-4 days to transfer to my bank so that I can pay for rent and food.
:)
I've been screwed by every big name bank I've had so I for one don't want PayPal to be more like a normal bank. I'm perfectly satisfied with them so far other than them being to careful with my money.
Sadly, even if you work in a field you enjoy there are many things that can ruin the experience for you. In my chosen field of programming and engineering most jobs are frustrating to the extreme. Usually you work on projects that are mismanaged and are treated as 'just a basement troll' so that your advice is ignored. Then if you try to be a contractor you have to deal with customers that don't really know what they want, don't have the budget for what they need, want an unrealistic timeline, etc. What I'd really like is to be able to find a sponsor or business partner to let me work on projects with well defined goals, realistic timelines, etc and then market those products once completed but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
For you to understand working in the software industry I guess I could put it like this. Your employers want you to excavate something but they don't tell you what. Every time you dig about 2 foot into the ground they tell you they've decided that they had you digging in the wrong spot. And oh yeh all they give you to dig with is a plastic sand shovel. Then they blame you that they never got what they wanted.
We recently had an argument very similar to this on my LUG list about web filtering in libraries and schools. Evidently a large portion of Americans don't think censorship of the reader is the same as censorship of the writer and most don't seem to think it's wrong to censor what others can read. Many also seem to feel that it's okay to do something that is wrong if it's their job or to do so is compliant with the law.
I guess in light of those results I'm not at all surprised that corporate America is helping destroy freedom. Hopefully, there is at least enough people that do object to such behavior that we can at least mourn the death of freedom. The experiment the United States played such a large part in seems to be over and it's failed. Rah rah go greed and power.
Using a computer hardly keeps you from exploring the real world. Quite the opposite. I've found use of computers stirs a thirst. If you explore the Internet, a game such as Final Fantasy, or an encyclopedia on cd-rom you encounter new ideas and you want to fill that need anyway you can. It's the same as reading books. Sure you can say that reading to much keeps you from living your life but more often reading leads you to study the world on your own, travel, and in general think about things more.
If you think that computers stifle creativity then obviously you have never created anything on them. It could be true that there are few tools a young child can use to be creative but if that is so the solution is to write more programs children can use in a creative manner. A crayon is not creative but put into the hands of someone it allows them to be creative. A computer should be the same way.
Using a computer should be a social experience. Children should use them together both in person and online. A good deal of the problem is so called protective laws make it difficult to make a child-oriented place for children to be social online. As if by closing all the worlds playgrounds you could stop child abuse.
"At what price learning? At what cost wisdom?"
"The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life."
Kampus, by james e. gunn
Another group of us that it's hitting hard are the techies that didn't happen to live near one of the tech hives. Rather than jump to a much better paying job somewhere else I was happily sitting at a decent paying local tech job that I liked and I still could be close to home. I figured I was young and there would always be time to earn that money later since I'd obviously still have the skills. Boom take away the job and I didn't have $20,000 or $100,000 or anything like mentioned in this article to hold me over. The unemployment money went fast. Here it only lasts for about three months. I've been unemployed for almost a year and getting by on occassional contract work at half what I used to make isn't easy. Even blue collar jobs locally are hard to come by as several big companies have closed or laid off major portions of their workforce. Of course without an income or savings I can't afford to move either.
The only positive thing I can say is that it does give me time to work on personal projects and I've been able to opensource quite a bit of code. I'd really be happy if I could find a job/sponsor that'd pay me to continue writing opensource code even if at a very low wage (~$100/wk).
To me this would cause more piracy. If I rented a disc and knew it was going to expire the first thing I'd do is copy it. Once copied I'd know it couldn't expire so I'd give the original to the kids and put the backup into my own collection.
I do the same thing with CD's now. I make a copy which I use, keep a copy on the hdd, and put the original into a safe spot. I've done the same thing with DVD's from time to time but not as much as the cases for DVD's seem to work better in my experience.
I also know that certain companies that make souch equipment make a nice profit. I have no problem with them making that profit but I'd rather that my ISP spend some of their money to buy into some of their equipment companies enough to exert enough control to lower the equipment costs or better yet pay for research that'd make producing the equipment cheaper. I know some of these companies already do this but I don't know of any that are DSL/cable providers. Anyway my point is there are ways by which such costs can be kept low.
As far as workers go I'd say that right now there is a lot of very talented people that are unemployed. A company could hire these workers cheap right now. That also should help push down the cost. I'm sure you could save some money by reducing overinflated management salaries too.
Sure there are other costs. I'm not suggesting they make the bandwidth free. I'm only suggesting that there is a limit to what customers will pay and raising prices above that is suicide. Better to cut costs where possible first.
I don't mind if ISP's offer a cheaper service for less so that those that don't need as much bandwidth don't have to pay as much but I really think ~ US$40/month for bandwidth that you aren't allowed to run servers on is about as much as I'd pay. I'd pay $80 if the connection was fast both ways and I was allowed to run small home web sites.
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Maybe if these companies are hurting for money so much they could take some of the cash they are wasting on cheesy commercials and put it towards reducing the cost of bandwidth. Sure this stuff costs a lot to install but there is a crap load of fiber already installed and just left unused because the companies don't feel the need to switch it on yet. They sit there and make excuses about how they have limited bandwidth and that is why they have to charge so much while at the same time leaving a lot of their capacity left untouched. Sprint for one has installed tons of fiber all over the place and still isn't using it for much of anything. Maybe if your ISP's bandwidth costs are so high they should try complaining to their provider rather than squeezing their customers.
Another solution is to offer proxy servers and make them part of the default install. Include file sharing software that includes a local cache server. I'd imagine those two steps would greatly reduce the ISP's upstream bandwidth usage because a good number of users use the same websites and look for the same files. I'm greatly surprised more ISP's don't offer something like a regional BBS-like interface that lets users chat and trade files with others locally. The cost of an extra webserver in exchange for the saved bandwidth would seem a good bargain to me.
Either way please get rid of those crappy commercials. I'd pay an extra $5/month just to be able not to see those.
It really surprises me that they are selling off the studio so quickly. As with any platform the first thing you do on it can be counted as sort of a throw away. You want to do you best with it but you really perfect yourself over two or three releases. FF7 was kind of sucky (both the look and the plot) but FF8 was great and FF9 was really good (it was more polished and easier than 8 but not quite so absorbing). The Spirits Within was an okay movie. It looked great and I found it interesting but it felt as if they wanted to make it longer but instead decided to keep it short and then just ripped large parts of the plot out to make it work. Possibly it was just the fact that it lacked certain essential Final Fantasy elements but it felt artificially simplified. I think they could have done better with a longer medium like a mini-series or even a weekly hour-long television show.
I'd have liked to see a movie that played as a sequel to one of their games. Maybe FF8. Sort of like X-Files that went from weekly to movie to weekly except do a game to movie to game.
It'd make sense for populations to rebuild themselves and mix genes between periods of cutting out the weaker combinations. There is always something that'll hit unexpectedly and change things. Obviously if it's unexpected you aren't expecting it to happen.
I do think we're heading into a period where physical adaption is less important and mental adaption will be the rule. The intelligent and technological savvy will pull further and further away from those that are unable to handle the kind of knowledge needed.
I think we'll see more 'planned evolution' too. Genetics, neural engineering, nanotech, etc. We'll decide to make the changes but we won't know where things will go. I'm sure the guy that learned to make fire probably did better than people eatting raw meat and those that learn to use new technologies now will do better than those that don't.
Gibson has some good stories but really he is not much of a visionary. He admits to a dislike for most technology and I don't think he really understands it.
Stephenson does large amounts of research for his books and they are based largely in fact with a little artistic license to make the stories interesting. Snow Crash foretold the Net and the rise of Multi-player VR enviroments, P2P file sharing, etc. The Diamond Age is a good look at how nanotechnology will effect our society. Of course it keeps within bounds of the near future because nanotech will change us to such a degree that the average person can't even comprehend it. My only complaint is the silly idea that we'll figure out to hack everything in the world but won't be able to generate speech that sounds like a real person.
You might read some of Bruce Sterlings books too. Books like Distraction are good peeks at the possible future. It deals somewhat with genetics and neural hacks but more importantly addresses how society might evolve once everyone can be self-sufficent but can't find work.
If you could take Distraction and The Diamond Age and merge them into a single book and jump 20 years in the future you'd have an excellent story that would sell to nobody but geeks because only geeks could understand it.
Call me precautious but I usually test out everything, including the kernel by running it on clients and development servers before putting it on any mission critical servers. As much as I like the improvements I didn't find it stable enough for heavy usage until recently so I just never upgraded any major servers to use it until now. No pain at all because as an admin I did my job. Anyway it always did pretty good for me unless I put it on a total crap box (of which I have many) and stressed it a lot (which I tend to do) so I don't think it had that big of problems to begin with. In reality Netscape was the only program I found that caused consistant problems with the 2.4 kernels. From time to time programs like Xine would also but that was usually when I did something stupid like trying to run several movies at once on a low end machine with barely enough RAM to breath. My development web servers don't get a lot of traffic but they do some heavy data processing and I never noticed any problem there.
It's their time and money being wasted. let them cheat on homework. i always thought homework should be optional anyway. WE are paying the school. WE should tell them what to do. But then I think testing should be done by independent 3rd parties too.. not the schools themselves. Even within the same school Professor Y can have much easier homework and tests than Professor x.. between schools the difference can be just as huge.. a degree earned by one person isn't equiv to a degree earned by another. I know some CS grads that kick ass and a lot of others who shouldn't be hired to count beans.
I don't know how many times when hauling my VCD, DVD, consoles, etc around that I've wished they could just jack into the local WiFi network and then the tv could pick the feed it wanted to receive by checking a 'Network Neighborhood' type of thing that looked just like picking a channel. You can send video over a WiFi network without any problems so all you need is a tv smart enough to receive it.
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Then to be even better they cold make the power cords optional so you could go 'unjacked' for a while and then just plug the system back in later to play/charge. The PS1 already has battery packs so why not DVD players and newer consoles.
Not sure why they need a new OS for it. A simple protocol that agrees on the type of video stream and a way to communicate available channels should work. You could even offer encryption of streams if you wanted to make sure your kids couldn't see the porn your watching. Screw the $400 million. Someone hire me for a year and I'll develop it myself using Linux and standard embedded components.