Because not everybody's kids have the ability do those kind of things. You need a complete economic scale of jobs to acheive resonably full employement. If everybody in the world developed battery tech and communication standards, there'd be nothing to eat, no roads to drive on, nowhere to buy stuff. As they say, "The World Needs Ditch Diggers, too..."
The good thing about this will be that eventually all socialism will end....
No it wont. Because some socialism is good. Public schools are good. Public roads are good. Public health initiatives are good. You have some socialist countries now that are highly uncompetitive. And you have highly capitalist countries, such as China, which are highly competitive, but creating externalities that make their current path unsustainable. Somewhere in the middle, a resonably free enterprise system with some government sponsored investment and a public safety net is where you're going to get the best overal quality of life over the span of decades.
How about a car analogy? In a modern car, cruise control is nothing more than a couple of switches that tie back to the engine control computer. In the old days, it was a full blown separate feedback control system. But when it's an option, it's still a couple of hundred dollars. Because people will pay it, and options are where the margins are, especially for dealers. If the extra ram isn't worth 160 pounds to you, don't buy it.
Apple has a premium product, and they can charge a premium price, because people are willing to pay for the experience it brings. The people buying it don't feel like it's a screw job, or they wouldn't buy it.
Some of what we do here is embedded systems, BTW. We had one guy who came in who had made his own flash-drive out of a microchip PIC and an EEPROM. It only held 1 MB of data, but it was more than enough to store a PDF of his resume. Less than $10 worth of parts, including a fabbed PCB with his name on it. It wasn't much more than a reference design with regard to hardware, but demonstrated initiative, and a good helping of "The Knack" which is much harder to find than a particular technology skill.
+1. You're dead on. I actually wrote the same thing about that 2 hours a day a couple of posts down, before I did a refresh of this page and saw your comment.
This is a valid point, and one I had trouble explaining to my wife when I was laid off. The fact is, 90% of the useful job-hunting work can be done in about 2 hours after you get up. Check the job boards--again--then rewrite and reorganize your resume / cover letter again for whatever's new, to highlight what they think would be most relevant. After that, you have to decide how to spend the next 15 hours. Google more, make cold calls, send physical copies, etc. But investment in yourself so that you can add to the alphabet soup of Acronyms on your resume (which is what the filters look for) is also good, and should become more important if you've been unsucessful in the first few months.
Also, all you young kids out there, take note. You need to be saving money. You need to have a war chest available, so that you really can spend a year off of work without becoming destitute, assuming you scrimp by on cereal and ramen noodles like you did in college. If you have an associate's degree, have a plan to get a bachelors. If you have a bachelor's get a masters. If you have a masters, pursue certifications. When you grow up and have a family, don't live a lifestyle that requires you to maintain 100% of your current income over 100% of the next 10 years. Even if this recession didn't get you, the next one may.
Probably so. A universe that had a tendency to become ever more organized would probably be really boring. Although eventually our universe will get that way too, I suppose, when it's all just one perfectly mixed, never-ending sameness. Like driving on I-80 through Iowa.
It's worked out great for Greece for years and years and years. They were able to live far above their means. The problem with Greece isn't the rest of the world, it's their attitudes. Read about their labor laws. Their retirement benefits. The way they utterly screwed up just about every aspect of hosting the Olympics. They have a societal set of expectations that don't match the reality of what they're capable/willing to produce. The fact is, that country is 2000 years past it's prime, and is going to stay that way until the population gets with the program.
You're screaming at the wrong guy, dude. We hire a ton of people who've been out of work. As I said, we bring them in for interviews. Even after we've seen their resume that says they've been out of work for months. You've apparently had two years off to pursue your dream programming assignment. I've been laid off; I know what it's like to have lots of free time and no disposable income. But that's the great thing about being a computer geek. You already have a computer, and many development environments are free. Hell, McDonalds will give you the electricity and wi-fi for the price of a cup of coffee. And you get the cup of coffee.
So, I'll pose the same question to you... In the last two years, what have you accomplished? What non-profit did you help with their IT needs? What open-source software did you contribute to? What project did you begin in the hopes that it will be the next big thing?
Your problem may be your attitude, not your skills.
I'm an older worker (47) and be more than happy to take what I can get. I'd be more than happy to learn a new language, platform, tools, etc.... I'm just a C,C++, Java, SQL guy on UNIX and Windows so my skills are out of date and no one uses those languages and platforms anymore. And I haven't been working for a few years in the industry - just developing software for my businesses that tanked in the economy.
I hear this sort of thing all the time when I'm intervewing candidates. People say to me, Yeah, I'd really like to learn [Java,C#,Ruby,SomeOtherLanguage]. Then I ask them what they think about [FreeDevelopmentEnvironmentForThatLanguage]. And they say "Oh, I haven't downloaded that yet.".
Next...
If you've been unemployed for months and have nothing to show for that time, you're probably not somebody I want to hire.
>Americans ask for more money than they are worth.
No, Americans ask for more money than H1B visa holders are willing to work for.
Isn't this how a free market economy determines prices? The point at which supply and demand meet sets the price. It seems like people are complaining about the supply of labor being made available.
Nothing but market dynamics are forcing anyone to leave India, or China, or any of those places and come over here. It seems to me that if anything, the fact that there is an H1B system, and immigration system at all, is actually a barrier to trade which overvalues American talent versus equivalent talent from other places. Yes, people leave Mumbai or beijing because the conditions are awful, and they aren't here. But that is just part of what factors into that curve.
In the end, as we move to a more and more global economy, the relative value of a certain labor skill will equalize across the globe. The American manufacturing worker has already had to deal with this. I don't see why it won't work it's way up the economic ladder. Basically, it feels to me like the economic equivalent of the Universe's natural tendency to want to disipate any differential of anything.
(Part of this was cut-and paste from an earlier comment of mine, but I still feel this way...)
I don't think so. Right now, RIM is less than the sum of its parts. The patents, in particular, have a substantial market value. The company is now actively losing money, instead of making less money year-over-year. The longer they wait to split it up, the more cash the company will burn through before the end. There is no ending I see with RIM still being a going concern in 5 years. QNX will get spun off again, or sold to someone like Intel (who aquired WindRiver as well, another RTOS maker), or GreenHills.
As a developer who spends most of each day at the same desk in the same chair, I'm concerned about ergonomics and what I can do to keep my body from wasting away while I program.
Our people here pretty much do the same thing. Hours on end in meetings or at a desk. Yet the fitness of the people varies wildly from morbidly obese, to triatheletes. Fixing your work situation may be part of the "wasting away" issue, but it's a small part. What you eat, and what you do during off hours in terms of exercise is likely to be a bigger part. As a desk jockey, you probably should be most concerned with repetitive stress disorders in the office, so your focus on ergonomics is good. Carpal Tunnel and the like. Focus on those first at work, then adopt a healthy lifestyle for your off-work time to solve the rest.
The only thing you can do is NOT MAKE VULNERABILITIES. And actually FIX the ones you find.
I agree with the second part. The first part is probably wishful thinking with the exception of products that are small enough or well funded enough that you can do proofs of their security (such as a couple of the real-time operating systems out there).
I think it's interesting to look at the way that safe vault makers approach this problem. No safe maker ever guarantees their safe to be uncrackable. Rather, they have a standard which basically says "A well qualified attacker with knowledge of the safe's internal workings, but no knowledge of the combination or access to the keys can be expected to breach this safe in X amount of time." They know it's a matter of when, not if. Encryption software people seem to get this as well.
The next time you hear about a site that gets pwned by a buffer overrun exploit, don't think 'stupid developers!', think 'stupid industry!'"
Yeah, yeah. Hate the game, not the player, and all that. If you code a buffer overrun and you get pwned, it may mean the industry is stupid. But that doesn't mean that you're not stupid too.
And, apparently, 15% of the people think so. Damn, we put a lot of effort into an argument whose result, whatever it may be, has so little practical applicaiton.
Maybe nature isn't meant to be in balance. Maybe God likes it this way. It's more interesting to watch.
Did you ever have an ant farm as a kid? Did you shake it? Of course you did. Because balance is boring. Maybe after God got tired of looking at dinosaurs, he flicked a big asteroid this way. Then, he created a special kind of ant that made far more intricate stuff than ever before. Then, when he tires of us, he'll shake things up again.
With modern games weighing in at a hefty 5-20GB (depending, sometimes a bit more, sometimes less), even a fairly high speed connection will take hours to download the whole thing, unless you are running FIOS (which most people aren't). Even a 10Mbs connection will take an hour for a 5GB game, assuming it can max out, and that puts a lot of strain on the servers.
What if you could optimize the stream so that the stuff came down in the order you needed it? For instance, game engine first, with a low-res set of textures, followed by a stream of higher resolution textures in the order they appear in the game? Or maybe everything you need to play one of the multiplayer maps? You might only have to wait 20 minutes for the thing to be playable, then it could download as you played?
Also, most games are ready in advance of their release date. You might make the downloads availible 3 days before the game servers went live. This would make it so that you could start playing at 12:01 on release day. (Unless you're diablo 3... )
I think you're missing my point. Detecting that the tool is compromised is a good thing. I agree with you. It's important that people know it's compromised. But Trying very hard to figure out who did it isn't worth the effort, because it likely will just point back to the bad guys in the first place, who you already know are bad, and against whom you're already doing everything you think is practical. Or, alternatively, they're people like the Saudis, who you'll pretty much give a pass to anyway, because you like them better than whomever you think likely to replace them.
perhaps there may be some useful evidence as to the authors' identity. I'm willing to wager that Citizen Lab and others are working on it now
Who cares, though, really? I mean, if the guy was in the US, I suppose you could prosecute him. Maybe. But in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty clear that Assad is using artillery against civilians on a regular basis, and the Green movement was put down in Iran by force. Given the international response we've seen for these things (I'm not implying that there was a clear course of action to take, just that there was a lot of inaction), who's gonna give a shit about a keylogger?
Obviously, this is Slashdot, and people enjoy thinking through the technical aspect of these things--how to solve the mystery. But even if you solve it, the solution isn't worth much, I'm afraid.
Slashdot Mirror
Because not everybody's kids have the ability do those kind of things. You need a complete economic scale of jobs to acheive resonably full employement. If everybody in the world developed battery tech and communication standards, there'd be nothing to eat, no roads to drive on, nowhere to buy stuff. As they say, "The World Needs Ditch Diggers, too..."
The good thing about this will be that eventually all socialism will end....
No it wont. Because some socialism is good. Public schools are good. Public roads are good. Public health initiatives are good. You have some socialist countries now that are highly uncompetitive. And you have highly capitalist countries, such as China, which are highly competitive, but creating externalities that make their current path unsustainable. Somewhere in the middle, a resonably free enterprise system with some government sponsored investment and a public safety net is where you're going to get the best overal quality of life over the span of decades.
How about a car analogy? In a modern car, cruise control is nothing more than a couple of switches that tie back to the engine control computer. In the old days, it was a full blown separate feedback control system. But when it's an option, it's still a couple of hundred dollars. Because people will pay it, and options are where the margins are, especially for dealers. If the extra ram isn't worth 160 pounds to you, don't buy it.
Apple has a premium product, and they can charge a premium price, because people are willing to pay for the experience it brings. The people buying it don't feel like it's a screw job, or they wouldn't buy it.
This has to be said on every H1-B thread:
Yup. You and I pretty much had the same discussion two weeks ago: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2884131&cid=40157623 . :-)
Some of what we do here is embedded systems, BTW. We had one guy who came in who had made his own flash-drive out of a microchip PIC and an EEPROM. It only held 1 MB of data, but it was more than enough to store a PDF of his resume. Less than $10 worth of parts, including a fabbed PCB with his name on it. It wasn't much more than a reference design with regard to hardware, but demonstrated initiative, and a good helping of "The Knack" which is much harder to find than a particular technology skill.
+1. You're dead on. I actually wrote the same thing about that 2 hours a day a couple of posts down, before I did a refresh of this page and saw your comment.
This is a valid point, and one I had trouble explaining to my wife when I was laid off. The fact is, 90% of the useful job-hunting work can be done in about 2 hours after you get up. Check the job boards--again--then rewrite and reorganize your resume / cover letter again for whatever's new, to highlight what they think would be most relevant. After that, you have to decide how to spend the next 15 hours. Google more, make cold calls, send physical copies, etc. But investment in yourself so that you can add to the alphabet soup of Acronyms on your resume (which is what the filters look for) is also good, and should become more important if you've been unsucessful in the first few months.
Also, all you young kids out there, take note. You need to be saving money. You need to have a war chest available, so that you really can spend a year off of work without becoming destitute, assuming you scrimp by on cereal and ramen noodles like you did in college. If you have an associate's degree, have a plan to get a bachelors. If you have a bachelor's get a masters. If you have a masters, pursue certifications. When you grow up and have a family, don't live a lifestyle that requires you to maintain 100% of your current income over 100% of the next 10 years. Even if this recession didn't get you, the next one may.
Probably so. A universe that had a tendency to become ever more organized would probably be really boring. Although eventually our universe will get that way too, I suppose, when it's all just one perfectly mixed, never-ending sameness. Like driving on I-80 through Iowa.
It's worked out great for Greece for years and years and years. They were able to live far above their means. The problem with Greece isn't the rest of the world, it's their attitudes. Read about their labor laws. Their retirement benefits. The way they utterly screwed up just about every aspect of hosting the Olympics. They have a societal set of expectations that don't match the reality of what they're capable/willing to produce. The fact is, that country is 2000 years past it's prime, and is going to stay that way until the population gets with the program.
You're screaming at the wrong guy, dude. We hire a ton of people who've been out of work. As I said, we bring them in for interviews. Even after we've seen their resume that says they've been out of work for months. You've apparently had two years off to pursue your dream programming assignment. I've been laid off; I know what it's like to have lots of free time and no disposable income. But that's the great thing about being a computer geek. You already have a computer, and many development environments are free. Hell, McDonalds will give you the electricity and wi-fi for the price of a cup of coffee. And you get the cup of coffee.
So, I'll pose the same question to you... In the last two years, what have you accomplished? What non-profit did you help with their IT needs? What open-source software did you contribute to? What project did you begin in the hopes that it will be the next big thing?
Your problem may be your attitude, not your skills.
I'm an older worker (47) and be more than happy to take what I can get. I'd be more than happy to learn a new language, platform, tools, etc .... I'm just a C,C++, Java, SQL guy on UNIX and Windows so my skills are out of date and no one uses those languages and platforms anymore. And I haven't been working for a few years in the industry - just developing software for my businesses that tanked in the economy.
I hear this sort of thing all the time when I'm intervewing candidates. People say to me, Yeah, I'd really like to learn [Java,C#,Ruby,SomeOtherLanguage]. Then I ask them what they think about [FreeDevelopmentEnvironmentForThatLanguage]. And they say "Oh, I haven't downloaded that yet." .
Next...
If you've been unemployed for months and have nothing to show for that time, you're probably not somebody I want to hire.
>Americans ask for more money than they are worth.
No, Americans ask for more money than H1B visa holders are willing to work for.
Isn't this how a free market economy determines prices? The point at which supply and demand meet sets the price. It seems like people are complaining about the supply of labor being made available.
Nothing but market dynamics are forcing anyone to leave India, or China, or any of those places and come over here. It seems to me that if anything, the fact that there is an H1B system, and immigration system at all, is actually a barrier to trade which overvalues American talent versus equivalent talent from other places. Yes, people leave Mumbai or beijing because the conditions are awful, and they aren't here. But that is just part of what factors into that curve.
In the end, as we move to a more and more global economy, the relative value of a certain labor skill will equalize across the globe. The American manufacturing worker has already had to deal with this. I don't see why it won't work it's way up the economic ladder. Basically, it feels to me like the economic equivalent of the Universe's natural tendency to want to disipate any differential of anything.
(Part of this was cut-and paste from an earlier comment of mine, but I still feel this way...)
I don't think so. Right now, RIM is less than the sum of its parts. The patents, in particular, have a substantial market value. The company is now actively losing money, instead of making less money year-over-year. The longer they wait to split it up, the more cash the company will burn through before the end. There is no ending I see with RIM still being a going concern in 5 years. QNX will get spun off again, or sold to someone like Intel (who aquired WindRiver as well, another RTOS maker), or GreenHills.
The iPad.
Oh, and The Cloud. Don't forget about The Cloud.
As a developer who spends most of each day at the same desk in the same chair, I'm concerned about ergonomics and what I can do to keep my body from wasting away while I program.
Our people here pretty much do the same thing. Hours on end in meetings or at a desk. Yet the fitness of the people varies wildly from morbidly obese, to triatheletes. Fixing your work situation may be part of the "wasting away" issue, but it's a small part. What you eat, and what you do during off hours in terms of exercise is likely to be a bigger part. As a desk jockey, you probably should be most concerned with repetitive stress disorders in the office, so your focus on ergonomics is good. Carpal Tunnel and the like. Focus on those first at work, then adopt a healthy lifestyle for your off-work time to solve the rest.
The only thing you can do is NOT MAKE VULNERABILITIES. And actually FIX the ones you find.
I agree with the second part. The first part is probably wishful thinking with the exception of products that are small enough or well funded enough that you can do proofs of their security (such as a couple of the real-time operating systems out there).
I think it's interesting to look at the way that safe vault makers approach this problem. No safe maker ever guarantees their safe to be uncrackable. Rather, they have a standard which basically says "A well qualified attacker with knowledge of the safe's internal workings, but no knowledge of the combination or access to the keys can be expected to breach this safe in X amount of time." They know it's a matter of when, not if. Encryption software people seem to get this as well.
The next time you hear about a site that gets pwned by a buffer overrun exploit, don't think 'stupid developers!', think 'stupid industry!'"
Yeah, yeah. Hate the game, not the player, and all that. If you code a buffer overrun and you get pwned, it may mean the industry is stupid. But that doesn't mean that you're not stupid too.
in other words, 46% of americans are dumb
And, apparently, 15% of the people think so. Damn, we put a lot of effort into an argument whose result, whatever it may be, has so little practical applicaiton.
it would have to be a malicious god as you describe to be congruent with the situation on earth.
You're assuming that you're not insignificant.
Maybe nature isn't meant to be in balance. Maybe God likes it this way. It's more interesting to watch.
Did you ever have an ant farm as a kid? Did you shake it? Of course you did. Because balance is boring. Maybe after God got tired of looking at dinosaurs, he flicked a big asteroid this way. Then, he created a special kind of ant that made far more intricate stuff than ever before. Then, when he tires of us, he'll shake things up again.
You haven't seen a fucking forest fire, have you?
Nope. The people around me cut down all the forests in this area decades ago.
With modern games weighing in at a hefty 5-20GB (depending, sometimes a bit more, sometimes less), even a fairly high speed connection will take hours to download the whole thing, unless you are running FIOS (which most people aren't). Even a 10Mbs connection will take an hour for a 5GB game, assuming it can max out, and that puts a lot of strain on the servers.
What if you could optimize the stream so that the stuff came down in the order you needed it? For instance, game engine first, with a low-res set of textures, followed by a stream of higher resolution textures in the order they appear in the game? Or maybe everything you need to play one of the multiplayer maps? You might only have to wait 20 minutes for the thing to be playable, then it could download as you played?
Also, most games are ready in advance of their release date. You might make the downloads availible 3 days before the game servers went live. This would make it so that you could start playing at 12:01 on release day. (Unless you're diablo 3... )
and how am i supposed to watch blu ray's without an optical drive?
The same way you make toast, despite the fact that your PS3 doesn't have an integrated Toaster slot.
I think you're missing my point. Detecting that the tool is compromised is a good thing. I agree with you. It's important that people know it's compromised. But Trying very hard to figure out who did it isn't worth the effort, because it likely will just point back to the bad guys in the first place, who you already know are bad, and against whom you're already doing everything you think is practical. Or, alternatively, they're people like the Saudis, who you'll pretty much give a pass to anyway, because you like them better than whomever you think likely to replace them.
perhaps there may be some useful evidence as to the authors' identity. I'm willing to wager that Citizen Lab and others are working on it now
Who cares, though, really? I mean, if the guy was in the US, I suppose you could prosecute him. Maybe. But in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty clear that Assad is using artillery against civilians on a regular basis, and the Green movement was put down in Iran by force. Given the international response we've seen for these things (I'm not implying that there was a clear course of action to take, just that there was a lot of inaction), who's gonna give a shit about a keylogger?
Obviously, this is Slashdot, and people enjoy thinking through the technical aspect of these things--how to solve the mystery. But even if you solve it, the solution isn't worth much, I'm afraid.