I have nothing against Celera keeping its results private (though they shouldn't be allowed to publish in a peer-reviewed journal). In fact, I'm all for that business model. There's nothing stopping a public group from duplicating their work and providing a free, open version. Sort of like the effects of the BSD license (a bit in reverse). If the data is patented, it's useless to anyone who can't afford to pay license fees- and there's no way around it.
Quite. The problem is not the legal concept of a patent, it's the incompetent way the system has been administered, granting patents without proper diligence.
AMD and Intel can argue for as long as they like about whose benchmarks are rigged, but it doesn't change the fact that, in the end, they are just that - benchmarks. They bear absolutely no resemblence to real life performance whatsoever. In the end, it doesn't matter what the graphs say or who claims to be faster that whom.
Indeed. If you ever are buying any high-end hardware, you will typically get competing vendors to participate in a bake-off. They will both make hardware comparable to what you want to buy available (possibly they will lend it to you, more likely they will invite you on site or to send them your binaries and some instructions) and then you compare them for exactly what you want to do. Benchmarks are good for marketing headlines to establish that the vendor is in the ballpark, but no-one would make a purchasing decision based on them alone.
patents obstruct biotech in the same way as they obstruct software development. everyone is holding on to their little precious idea and tries to make as much money from it, and if that's not possible, lock up the idea with a patent.
The alternative to patents is secrecy. With the patent system, you have the benefit of access to published research, and the publisher has the right to charge you a fee, NOT for reading the research, but for doing something yourself that uses the idea to make money.
The software industry is unique in that the barriers to entry are low and the distribution os very cheap (like the music industry) but also that it is based on techniques - algorithms - that may also be as easily duplicated. Listening to a professional musician play won't make you a professional musician, but using a developed algorithm can make you an effective programmer. Given that research costs money, there must be a mechanism by which researchers are rewarded, and that's the patent system.
The fact is that big corporations want patents so that they can control everything.
Fact: corporations don't patent things, individuals patent things. If an individual is contractually bound to assign control over the patent to a corporation, that's between the individual and the corporation, no-one else. This is enshrined in the way patents are granted.
A patent doesn't say that no-one else can use an idea. In fact, it mandates publishing your work so that others can benefit from it. Patents merely provide a legal framework that says that you can publish an idea that has cost you time and money to develop into something useful, you can still get some benefit from it, by licensing other people to do things based on your idea. Also, one of the conditions of getting a patent is that your idea must not be one that is obvious to any reasonably experience practitioner in your field - loads of patents have been shot down as "prior art" because a practitioner had already used that idea, but simply not bothered to patent it themselves.
The concept of a patent is all good - it is the current implementation, with the US patent office granting patents where it shouldn't.
This is an Outlook-Plugin for GnuPG. Using this plugin GNUPG is easy as 1-2-3.
Nice. Do you know if it works with XP/Outlook 2002? I had the full commercial version of PGP and the Outlook plugin worked fine on Win2K/Outlook 2000 but was mysteriously broken on the XP versions (something about relying on a Service that didn't understand Fast User Switching).
Re:Why not just order one from the USA instead?
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New Clie Handhelds
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· Score: 2
It's not like the CLIE handheld is a export restricted item, you know?
Yeah, that Dragonball processor could be used to design Weapons of Mass Destruction... NOT!
GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language.
But, MATLAB is a great tool, developed to a high standard, and Mathworks heavily influenced by what the customer actually wants to do with it, and their support is good too. If you need it, it's worth every penny.
A college or university is not, nor should be a place where flavor of the day propritary platform should be taught. The focus of a college should be to give the student a broad enough understanding of the basic workings of programming and computers that the graduate can have enough background to quickly adapt to any platform.
You are absolutely correct. BTW, C# is an ECMA standard, and Windows can be made POSIX and Unix95 compliant (really!). Java-the-standard is proprietary to Sun, and Linux has not been certified as POSIX-compliant.
See, it's not quite as cut-and-dried as you make out.
Our systems here only have 128MB of RAM. I discovered last week that isn't even enough to run Windows 2000 on; I wanted to defrag the disk fully so I removed all paging spaces. I couldn't even open the defragger before it complained about being out of virtual memeory.
Windows will wig out with 2M page file (don't ask me why right now). You should have left it and just defragged away. The result would have been good enough for anyone. And if it wasn't, just create a new contiguous page file, and take off the old one, then defrag the rest.
I'd prefer 256M, but Win2K will be fine with 128M if you're just running Office-type apps. Honestly, it seems to me that people contrive to create situations in which Windows will fail just to complain about it on/.
They'll take one look at a Slackware install, say "WTF this doesn't have AOL", and go back to sacrificing money to the stone idol of Bill Gates.
That's the classic mistake that many technical people make, that if you don't know about computers, you're stupid.
If you do believe it, I expect that you are expert in the electronics in your TV and DVD player, understand the mechanics of launching a satellite to relay phone calls, the chemistry of an oil refinery that fuels your car, all the routes driven by the postal service to deliver packages to and from your door to anywhere in the world, etc...
Of course not. That's why we have specialists. You happen to be a specialist in computer technology, but you'd starve to death without specialists in field-ploughing to feed you. Remember that.
Open source is actually well-synchronized with the changing economic landscape by that standard
I would need some convincing of that, since IT systems within large corporations are largely bespoke, and are a source of competitive advantage. Look up articles in business journals about Cisco's "daily close" of their accounts, for example.
If you buy SAP, then you do get the source for (most of) it, and you customize it to fit your business - this is bread-and-butter work for the "Big 5" consultants. You can't release it, but nor would you want to, since it encodes intimate details of exactly how your business works. If you need code written from scratch, large corporations hire IBS, EDS, CSC et al to do that, the source is right there, but it will never be let out "into the wild".
If code is the source (pun intended) of competitive advantage, and costs a great deal to develop (and/or customise) then that's incompatible with the Open Source tradition of giving it all away for free.
So, people already do make lots of money from services, but that's entirely unrelated to the business of producing free software.
I guess that's their decision, and ya just gotta respect it - some want the money, others just want to help create nice software for everyone.
I see that you're a full time student... but pretty soon, you will realize that in the real world, people need money. Not to flame you, but until someone cracks the problem of making actual cash money, you know, the stuff that buys groceries and houses and cars (spending venture capital is not making money) then there will be no open source industry.
Let me give you an example. ESR drives his pickup truck to the nearest small town (he lives in a log cabin in the woods for the purpose of this story) to pick up some oatmeal, beef jerky, tinned beans and this month's Guns & Brides magazine. But since the NASDAQ crash, he's a little short of money, so he says to the cashier, hey, I wrote a tiny part of the OS that runs your cash register, can I just take this stuff for free? Ummm, no, says the clerk, pushing the button connected to the local Sherriff's office.
See, that why wanting to help create nice software doesn't cut it in the real world. Sorry to have to be the one to break it to ya, kid.
Consider a localised column around the earth in which gravity is lessened.
If you have a column over which gravity is lessened, what happens to the atmosphere above it? Remember since the Earth is spinning, the atmosphere would fly off if not bound by gravity. At worse case, you risk leaking the planet's atmosphere like a slow puncture in a football.
. Not all manufacturing is idiot work - consider logistics, cost control, and automation as three aspects of this market which do promote the knowledge economy.
Quite - which is why I advocate keeping the value-adding "smarts" and moving the physical labor overseas.
There is a *huge* problem with your last statement. You say Americans on minimum wage slotting PCBs together, or Americans buying cheap laptops and starting their own companies, but let's look at this realistically for a second.
There is also a huge problem with a productive sector of an economy subsidising an unproductive or inefficient one. Firstly, it denies capital to the productive sector, and secondly, it gives no incentive for the inefficient sector to improve. This is, for example, while nationalized industries are inefficient, because their purpose is not to be economically productive, it's to provide jobs. But doing so means dragging down productive industries - a spiral of decline. We saw this in Britain until the former nationalized industries were sold off. How do you propose to keep low-margin jobs inside the US apart from with tariffs? They protect the producers, sure, but in commodity industries there are many more consumers than producers, and all the consumers suffer.
Whatever segment of the economy where you could move that huge mass of people, that segment will either reduce in pay to the point of minimum wage, or whatever salary is handed out becomes equivalent to minimum wage. There simply isn't enough out there to go everywhere.
Only if the economy is zero-sum - which it isn't.
The US has acheived it's relatively high standard of living because the US has historically controlled a substantial amount of the world's resources, and has kept the money inside, while other nations have more people than resources to go around.
Again, not true, there are abundant natural resources in Africa, one of the poorest continents. The difference is the American economy which is based on the principle "do what you are good at, outsource the rest".
The easier it is to move jobs out, the more companies can exploit the larger labor force oversees, and slowly equalize the resources between the foreign nation and the US. If the foreign nation had the same amounte of resources per person as the US, the foreign nation would not be nearly as appealing.
It's not about having resources - raw materials are themselves commodities than can be bought. It's about using them, knowing what to do to create something that someone wants to buy - that's why countries are compared by GDP, not by balance-of-payments.
Kicking workers out of manufacturing, and even giving them enough education will not guarantee a better job, it just means the better jobs will get worse and harder to find.
Again, you are assuming that the economy is zero-sum. Remember that new industries and new jobs are being created all the time, and it's not jobs that are lost (US unemployment is still low) it's types of jobs that disappear. That's why in the industrial revolution, there were suddenly few farmers and lots of factory workers. Well, we are in a new industrial revolution - few factory workers, and lots of "knowledge" workers. Every time a shift like this happens, standards of living, health, education go up for everyone involved.
This is the whole thing of switching from manufacturing to service industry. Would you trade your job for flipping burgers at Burger King?
I am always amused by the "flipping burgers" argument, since this is a commodity manufacturing process that simply produces highly perishable goods and needs to be just-in-time. Remember, it is commoditization that is the issue here, not products versus services. Americans are still designing the microprocessors and even the cases for these laptops, it's only the putting-the-bits together that goes overseas.
And don't forget the drain on the US economy from overpriced goods. Bush's tarriffs are great for steel producers - but they are a nightmare for steel users in the auto industry, construction, etc.
So the question is, Americans on minimum wage slotting PCBs together, or Americans buying cheap laptops and starting their own companies?
The implications for the US are interesting. The removal of manufascturing jobs from the US means there are less decent paying jobs in the US, tightening the Job Market.
You've got it backwards. Manufacturing is a commodity industry, assembly line workers are paid hourly and count as semi-skilled at best. The real jobs - rewarding for an individual and value-adding for a company and a nation - are in designing the goods to be manufactured in the first place, and selling them along with services and support.
If anything, the quicker countries like the UK and US can wind down manufacturing of commodity items, the better for their economies it will be.
This is part of a much bigger picture, which includes the HB-1 visas, etc. All of which does not bode well for American technology workers in the long term.
Manufacturing, even of high-tech goods, is not what technology workers do. There is no way an American assembly plant can compete with an offshore one, where the cost of doing business is always going to be lower (in US dollar terms). But it's difficult for an offshore company to compete with the US in value-adding services (such as what Dell offers) because Dell understand the "hearts and minds" of the consumer. All the manufacturing savvy in the world doesn't amount to a hill of beans unless you know what to manufacture.
I would recommend that you begin with "Database Systems" by Connolly and Begg. Read it cover to cover, then read it again. When you're done reading it the second time, skip through to the end of each section and do all the exercises without rereading any of the text. Once you can answer a majority of the questions correctly, then begin to consider designing database layouts. Before you look the book up on fatbrain or amazon, be warned that it is not light reading. It's 1,200+ pages, but is well worth it.
I agree with all the points in the parent post - "knowing" SQL (or indeed, any other programming language) is to software engineering as bricklaying is to civil engineering. SQL is like playing the piano, easy to learn, hard to master. I have personally experienced large scale projects that have literally cost millions of dollars to re-work after someone who "knew SQL" had made a mess of the database. Probably the most laughable was a billing system that updated customers balances in-place (in the same table that stored the customer's name and address!) rather than recording transactions and calculating balances with a roll-up. The front-end software the same team had written was flawed and recording the wrong numbers (in some cases, they had bound the columns to the wrong fields, in others they had added where they meant to subtract, etc), and since no raw data history was recorded anywhere (another bit of bad design was automating dumping the audit logs whenever that disk looked like it was getting full), all that money had simply... disappeared.
The book I recommend is this one. Ignore the reviewer, who has missed the point: good database design is difficult, and this book is for people who can handle the (math) theory behind it.
Re:Being an American, I find _you_ offensive
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Silicon Valley Rebirth?
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· Score: 3, Informative
You mean 80% Black? What's wrong with that? You must be a racist.
No, I mean that like the once-proud American auto industry, high tech will lose out to cheaper imports of equivalent or higher quality. Japanese auto manufacturers ate the lunch of Americans - be careful that Indian and Russian programmers don't do the same.
The reason there are American auto workers still is that the Japanese chose to build manufaturing facilities in the US. So what I'm saying is, get the H1Bs in and make them into Americans, don't drive them overseas to compete on their terms.
Re:Being an American, I find _you_ offensive
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Silicon Valley Rebirth?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This case is cut and dry. H1B workers take American jobs. Period. If all the H1B workers left, there would be more jobs for Americans. And since it is our country, I'm sure you'll understand that we think Americans should have first access to those jobs.
Actually, I'm not sure this is accurate. You are assuming that the American education system provides enough workers of sufficient quality to fill the entire demand for highly skilled workers. That simply isn't true (in Europe, either).
Long term, if you care about American jobs, you are far better importing skilled workers from around the world, making them Americans who spend money in the American economy, pay tax to the American govt. etc, than leaving them in foreign countries where the cost of living is so much lower that they can undercut US companies wholesale, and suck value out of the US economy.
I'll tell you like I told a flock of Europeans I met while traveling: Americans do not care about foreigners. When I say we don't care, I don't mean we hate them. I mean we really don't care. They never enter our minds. I spend more time choosing what movie I'm going to see than I do about the petty causes of some country I've never been to.
Well, good for you. Software is a global business these days. You can't hide you head in the sand and hope that "foreigners" will go away - because if you do, Silicon Valley will end up like Detroit.
It's pathetic that IT worker's are less organized than doctor's, lawyers or even steel workers (who just got a nice present from Bush in terms of tarriffs). Until engineers start educating themselves, and then their fellow engineers, and joining or forming organizations like Washtech, CESO, AEA and the Programmer's Guild, this post-boom slump will last a long, long time. Same old 60 hour weeks and 24/7 oncall, but for less and less pay.
You see the thing with lawyers is that... they're lawyers. By this I mean that, as people who both make and practice the law, they have insinuated themselves into everyday life. For example, it is impossible to buy or sell real estate without a lawyer. There are many other cases in which you have to have a lawyer. Further, the barriers to entry to become a lawyer are quite high; maybe 4 years of work after your bachelors degree.
Incidentally, it's about the same amount of work to become a PE (US) or CEng (UK). And you have to be one of these to, say, sign off on structural drawings. But engineers don't have nearly the same amount of clout with legislators that lawyers do (exercise for the reader: how many of the elected officials in your Congress or Parliament at lawyers?)
The barriers to entry to becoming a programmer are much lower. In fact, I would say that many Slashdotters aren't formally-trained programmers at all, but people who either came into it as a hobby, or program as an aside to their real jobs (say, a physicist who writes numerical code, the code is not the important part of the job, the physics is).
I strongly question whether a return to the days when programmers were "high priests" of technology that was denied to the common man are desirable. Further, competition and innovation are key to the entire high-tech industry, and they would be strangled by heavily regulated committees that "professions" require - see how slowly the legal profession changes, how conservative lawyers have to be to practice, etc.
You mention steelmakers... those people are entirely reliant on government protection, their unions demands have made them uncompetitive with US mini-mills, and with mills in Europe and the UK. A situation in which "foreign code" was taxed before being permitted to be executed in the US would be catastrophic.
Software is rapidly becoming a commodity business, just like steel. That's not a bad thing; it just means that you have to alter the way in which you compete, just like the steel industry's integrated producers can't compete (fairly) with mini-mills.
Re:I saw one of these at the weekend
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Self-Heating Can
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· Score: 2
It looked like a nice idea, but I didn't try it - mainly because of the price: £1.30 IIRC, which is about $2. It seems a bit much IMHO for a normal cup of takeaway coffee, even if it does have a neat self-heating function!
Yeah, they sell these in the WH Smith and Kings X station, but for GBP 1.35 you can get a very nice coffee from AMT just across the concourse.
To get back on topic, self-heating rations have been experimented with by armies for a long time, but have generally been discarded as expensive and very unpopular with soldiers. I cannot see self-heating coffee replacing the vacuum-flask for a very long time.
Re:Easy to scoff until you remember...
on
Soviet Moon Rocket
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· Score: 2
The moon might be a useful source of raw materials, but why the heck would you use it for ship construction?
I don't know whether this is true or not, but I suspect it's easier to build things where there is at least some gravity. Just little things like being able to put your screwdriver down and pick up another one without needing to attach it to something. The question is really whether the benefits of weightlessness (not masslessness, hmm, what an odd looking word) outweigh the difficulties. The moon is a good compromise, lower gravity, but still some.
Why get out of one gravity well just to dump yourself into another? Just build the damn thing in orbit
If the moon can be a source of raw materials, the optimal scenario may well be to do initial construction on the lunar surface before lifting the components to lunar orbit and assembling them there.
It's going to take more than just a majority of non-hewlett shares to swing this one. The Hewlett family's shares account for 18% of the company. It's going to take *61%* of the remaining 82% to make a majority of the total shares.
Yes, but remember that the proxy consultants (SIS I think they're called) have advised the institutional investors to vote for it. That's a large and influential block.
Slashdot Mirror
I have nothing against Celera keeping its results private (though they shouldn't be allowed to publish in a peer-reviewed journal). In fact, I'm all for that business model. There's nothing stopping a public group from duplicating their work and providing a free, open version. Sort of like the effects of the BSD license (a bit in reverse). If the data is patented, it's useless to anyone who can't afford to pay license fees- and there's no way around it.
Quite. The problem is not the legal concept of a patent, it's the incompetent way the system has been administered, granting patents without proper diligence.
AMD and Intel can argue for as long as they like about whose benchmarks are rigged, but it doesn't change the fact that, in the end, they are just that - benchmarks. They bear absolutely no resemblence to real life performance whatsoever. In the end, it doesn't matter what the graphs say or who claims to be faster that whom.
Indeed. If you ever are buying any high-end hardware, you will typically get competing vendors to participate in a bake-off. They will both make hardware comparable to what you want to buy available (possibly they will lend it to you, more likely they will invite you on site or to send them your binaries and some instructions) and then you compare them for exactly what you want to do. Benchmarks are good for marketing headlines to establish that the vendor is in the ballpark, but no-one would make a purchasing decision based on them alone.
patents obstruct biotech in the same way as they obstruct software development. everyone is holding on to their little precious idea and tries to make as much money from it, and if that's not possible, lock up the idea with a patent.
The alternative to patents is secrecy. With the patent system, you have the benefit of access to published research, and the publisher has the right to charge you a fee, NOT for reading the research, but for doing something yourself that uses the idea to make money.
The software industry is unique in that the barriers to entry are low and the distribution os very cheap (like the music industry) but also that it is based on techniques - algorithms - that may also be as easily duplicated. Listening to a professional musician play won't make you a professional musician, but using a developed algorithm can make you an effective programmer. Given that research costs money, there must be a mechanism by which researchers are rewarded, and that's the patent system.
The fact is that big corporations want patents so that they can control everything.
Fact: corporations don't patent things, individuals patent things. If an individual is contractually bound to assign control over the patent to a corporation, that's between the individual and the corporation, no-one else. This is enshrined in the way patents are granted.
A patent doesn't say that no-one else can use an idea. In fact, it mandates publishing your work so that others can benefit from it. Patents merely provide a legal framework that says that you can publish an idea that has cost you time and money to develop into something useful, you can still get some benefit from it, by licensing other people to do things based on your idea. Also, one of the conditions of getting a patent is that your idea must not be one that is obvious to any reasonably experience practitioner in your field - loads of patents have been shot down as "prior art" because a practitioner had already used that idea, but simply not bothered to patent it themselves.
The concept of a patent is all good - it is the current implementation, with the US patent office granting patents where it shouldn't.
This is an Outlook-Plugin for GnuPG. Using this plugin GNUPG is easy as 1-2-3.
Nice. Do you know if it works with XP/Outlook 2002? I had the full commercial version of PGP and the Outlook plugin worked fine on Win2K/Outlook 2000 but was mysteriously broken on the XP versions (something about relying on a Service that didn't understand Fast User Switching).
It's not like the CLIE handheld is a export restricted item, you know?
Yeah, that Dragonball processor could be used to design Weapons of Mass Destruction... NOT!
I doubt most of the brokers were using Solaris 8 (or whatever) on their local handheld.
On the other hand, it's quite likely they were using it on their desktops in dealing rooms. Lots of trading and analytic software is written for Suns.
But, MATLAB is a great tool, developed to a high standard, and Mathworks heavily influenced by what the customer actually wants to do with it, and their support is good too. If you need it, it's worth every penny.
A college or university is not, nor should be a place where flavor of the day propritary platform should be taught. The focus of a college should be to give the student a broad enough understanding of the basic workings of programming and computers that the graduate can have enough background to quickly adapt to any platform.
You are absolutely correct. BTW, C# is an ECMA standard, and Windows can be made POSIX and Unix95 compliant (really!). Java-the-standard is proprietary to Sun, and Linux has not been certified as POSIX-compliant.
See, it's not quite as cut-and-dried as you make out.
Our systems here only have 128MB of RAM. I discovered last week that isn't even enough to run Windows 2000 on; I wanted to defrag the disk fully so I removed all paging spaces. I couldn't even open the defragger before it complained about being out of virtual memeory.
/.
Windows will wig out with 2M page file (don't ask me why right now). You should have left it and just defragged away. The result would have been good enough for anyone. And if it wasn't, just create a new contiguous page file, and take off the old one, then defrag the rest.
I'd prefer 256M, but Win2K will be fine with 128M if you're just running Office-type apps. Honestly, it seems to me that people contrive to create situations in which Windows will fail just to complain about it on
They'll take one look at a Slackware install, say "WTF this doesn't have AOL", and go back to sacrificing money to the stone idol of Bill Gates.
That's the classic mistake that many technical people make, that if you don't know about computers, you're stupid.
If you do believe it, I expect that you are expert in the electronics in your TV and DVD player, understand the mechanics of launching a satellite to relay phone calls, the chemistry of an oil refinery that fuels your car, all the routes driven by the postal service to deliver packages to and from your door to anywhere in the world, etc...
Of course not. That's why we have specialists. You happen to be a specialist in computer technology, but you'd starve to death without specialists in field-ploughing to feed you. Remember that.
Open source is actually well-synchronized with the changing economic landscape by that standard
I would need some convincing of that, since IT systems within large corporations are largely bespoke, and are a source of competitive advantage. Look up articles in business journals about Cisco's "daily close" of their accounts, for example.
If you buy SAP, then you do get the source for (most of) it, and you customize it to fit your business - this is bread-and-butter work for the "Big 5" consultants. You can't release it, but nor would you want to, since it encodes intimate details of exactly how your business works. If you need code written from scratch, large corporations hire IBS, EDS, CSC et al to do that, the source is right there, but it will never be let out "into the wild".
If code is the source (pun intended) of competitive advantage, and costs a great deal to develop (and/or customise) then that's incompatible with the Open Source tradition of giving it all away for free.
So, people already do make lots of money from services, but that's entirely unrelated to the business of producing free software.
I guess that's their decision, and ya just gotta respect it - some want the money, others just want to help create nice software for everyone.
I see that you're a full time student... but pretty soon, you will realize that in the real world, people need money. Not to flame you, but until someone cracks the problem of making actual cash money, you know, the stuff that buys groceries and houses and cars (spending venture capital is not making money) then there will be no open source industry.
Let me give you an example. ESR drives his pickup truck to the nearest small town (he lives in a log cabin in the woods for the purpose of this story) to pick up some oatmeal, beef jerky, tinned beans and this month's Guns & Brides magazine. But since the NASDAQ crash, he's a little short of money, so he says to the cashier, hey, I wrote a tiny part of the OS that runs your cash register, can I just take this stuff for free? Ummm, no, says the clerk, pushing the button connected to the local Sherriff's office.
See, that why wanting to help create nice software doesn't cut it in the real world. Sorry to have to be the one to break it to ya, kid.
Consider a localised column around the earth in which gravity is lessened.
If you have a column over which gravity is lessened, what happens to the atmosphere above it? Remember since the Earth is spinning, the atmosphere would fly off if not bound by gravity. At worse case, you risk leaking the planet's atmosphere like a slow puncture in a football.
. Not all manufacturing is idiot work - consider logistics, cost control, and automation as three aspects of this market which do promote the knowledge economy.
Quite - which is why I advocate keeping the value-adding "smarts" and moving the physical labor overseas.
There is a *huge* problem with your last statement. You say Americans on minimum wage slotting PCBs together, or Americans buying cheap laptops and starting their own companies, but let's look at this realistically for a second.
There is also a huge problem with a productive sector of an economy subsidising an unproductive or inefficient one. Firstly, it denies capital to the productive sector, and secondly, it gives no incentive for the inefficient sector to improve. This is, for example, while nationalized industries are inefficient, because their purpose is not to be economically productive, it's to provide jobs. But doing so means dragging down productive industries - a spiral of decline. We saw this in Britain until the former nationalized industries were sold off. How do you propose to keep low-margin jobs inside the US apart from with tariffs? They protect the producers, sure, but in commodity industries there are many more consumers than producers, and all the consumers suffer.
Whatever segment of the economy where you could move that huge mass of people, that segment will either reduce in pay to the point of minimum wage, or whatever salary is handed out becomes equivalent to minimum wage. There simply isn't enough out there to go everywhere.
Only if the economy is zero-sum - which it isn't.
The US has acheived it's relatively high standard of living because the US has historically controlled a substantial amount of the world's resources, and has kept the money inside, while other nations have more people than resources to go around.
Again, not true, there are abundant natural resources in Africa, one of the poorest continents. The difference is the American economy which is based on the principle "do what you are good at, outsource the rest".
The easier it is to move jobs out, the more companies can exploit the larger labor force oversees, and slowly equalize the resources between the foreign nation and the US. If the foreign nation had the same amounte of resources per person as the US, the foreign nation would not be nearly as appealing.
It's not about having resources - raw materials are themselves commodities than can be bought. It's about using them, knowing what to do to create something that someone wants to buy - that's why countries are compared by GDP, not by balance-of-payments.
Kicking workers out of manufacturing, and even giving them enough education will not guarantee a better job, it just means the better jobs will get worse and harder to find.
Again, you are assuming that the economy is zero-sum. Remember that new industries and new jobs are being created all the time, and it's not jobs that are lost (US unemployment is still low) it's types of jobs that disappear. That's why in the industrial revolution, there were suddenly few farmers and lots of factory workers. Well, we are in a new industrial revolution - few factory workers, and lots of "knowledge" workers. Every time a shift like this happens, standards of living, health, education go up for everyone involved.
This is the whole thing of switching from manufacturing to service industry. Would you trade your job for flipping burgers at Burger King?
I am always amused by the "flipping burgers" argument, since this is a commodity manufacturing process that simply produces highly perishable goods and needs to be just-in-time. Remember, it is commoditization that is the issue here, not products versus services. Americans are still designing the microprocessors and even the cases for these laptops, it's only the putting-the-bits together that goes overseas.
And don't forget the drain on the US economy from overpriced goods. Bush's tarriffs are great for steel producers - but they are a nightmare for steel users in the auto industry, construction, etc.
So the question is, Americans on minimum wage slotting PCBs together, or Americans buying cheap laptops and starting their own companies?
The implications for the US are interesting. The removal of manufascturing jobs from the US means there are less decent paying jobs in the US, tightening the Job Market.
You've got it backwards. Manufacturing is a commodity industry, assembly line workers are paid hourly and count as semi-skilled at best. The real jobs - rewarding for an individual and value-adding for a company and a nation - are in designing the goods to be manufactured in the first place, and selling them along with services and support.
If anything, the quicker countries like the UK and US can wind down manufacturing of commodity items, the better for their economies it will be.
This is part of a much bigger picture, which includes the HB-1 visas, etc. All of which does not bode well for American technology workers in the long term.
Manufacturing, even of high-tech goods, is not what technology workers do. There is no way an American assembly plant can compete with an offshore one, where the cost of doing business is always going to be lower (in US dollar terms). But it's difficult for an offshore company to compete with the US in value-adding services (such as what Dell offers) because Dell understand the "hearts and minds" of the consumer. All the manufacturing savvy in the world doesn't amount to a hill of beans unless you know what to manufacture.
I would recommend that you begin with "Database Systems" by Connolly and Begg. Read it cover to cover, then read it again. When you're done reading it the second time, skip through to the end of each section and do all the exercises without rereading any of the text. Once you can answer a majority of the questions correctly, then begin to consider designing database layouts. Before you look the book up on fatbrain or amazon, be warned that it is not light reading. It's 1,200+ pages, but is well worth it.
I agree with all the points in the parent post - "knowing" SQL (or indeed, any other programming language) is to software engineering as bricklaying is to civil engineering. SQL is like playing the piano, easy to learn, hard to master. I have personally experienced large scale projects that have literally cost millions of dollars to re-work after someone who "knew SQL" had made a mess of the database. Probably the most laughable was a billing system that updated customers balances in-place (in the same table that stored the customer's name and address!) rather than recording transactions and calculating balances with a roll-up. The front-end software the same team had written was flawed and recording the wrong numbers (in some cases, they had bound the columns to the wrong fields, in others they had added where they meant to subtract, etc), and since no raw data history was recorded anywhere (another bit of bad design was automating dumping the audit logs whenever that disk looked like it was getting full), all that money had simply... disappeared.
The book I recommend is this one. Ignore the reviewer, who has missed the point: good database design is difficult, and this book is for people who can handle the (math) theory behind it.
You mean 80% Black? What's wrong with that? You must be a racist.
No, I mean that like the once-proud American auto industry, high tech will lose out to cheaper imports of equivalent or higher quality. Japanese auto manufacturers ate the lunch of Americans - be careful that Indian and Russian programmers don't do the same.
The reason there are American auto workers still is that the Japanese chose to build manufaturing facilities in the US. So what I'm saying is, get the H1Bs in and make them into Americans, don't drive them overseas to compete on their terms.
This case is cut and dry. H1B workers take American jobs. Period. If all the H1B workers left, there would be more jobs for Americans. And since it is our country, I'm sure you'll understand that we think Americans should have first access to those jobs.
Actually, I'm not sure this is accurate. You are assuming that the American education system provides enough workers of sufficient quality to fill the entire demand for highly skilled workers. That simply isn't true (in Europe, either).
Long term, if you care about American jobs, you are far better importing skilled workers from around the world, making them Americans who spend money in the American economy, pay tax to the American govt. etc, than leaving them in foreign countries where the cost of living is so much lower that they can undercut US companies wholesale, and suck value out of the US economy.
I'll tell you like I told a flock of Europeans I met while traveling: Americans do not care about foreigners. When I say we don't care, I don't mean we hate them. I mean we really don't care. They never enter our minds. I spend more time choosing what movie I'm going to see than I do about the petty causes of some country I've never been to.
Well, good for you. Software is a global business these days. You can't hide you head in the sand and hope that "foreigners" will go away - because if you do, Silicon Valley will end up like Detroit.
It's pathetic that IT worker's are less organized than doctor's, lawyers or even steel workers (who just got a nice present from Bush in terms of tarriffs). Until engineers start educating themselves, and then their fellow engineers, and joining or forming organizations like Washtech, CESO, AEA and the Programmer's Guild, this post-boom slump will last a long, long time. Same old 60 hour weeks and 24/7 oncall, but for less and less pay.
You see the thing with lawyers is that... they're lawyers. By this I mean that, as people who both make and practice the law, they have insinuated themselves into everyday life. For example, it is impossible to buy or sell real estate without a lawyer. There are many other cases in which you have to have a lawyer. Further, the barriers to entry to become a lawyer are quite high; maybe 4 years of work after your bachelors degree.
Incidentally, it's about the same amount of work to become a PE (US) or CEng (UK). And you have to be one of these to, say, sign off on structural drawings. But engineers don't have nearly the same amount of clout with legislators that lawyers do (exercise for the reader: how many of the elected officials in your Congress or Parliament at lawyers?)
The barriers to entry to becoming a programmer are much lower. In fact, I would say that many Slashdotters aren't formally-trained programmers at all, but people who either came into it as a hobby, or program as an aside to their real jobs (say, a physicist who writes numerical code, the code is not the important part of the job, the physics is).
I strongly question whether a return to the days when programmers were "high priests" of technology that was denied to the common man are desirable. Further, competition and innovation are key to the entire high-tech industry, and they would be strangled by heavily regulated committees that "professions" require - see how slowly the legal profession changes, how conservative lawyers have to be to practice, etc.
You mention steelmakers... those people are entirely reliant on government protection, their unions demands have made them uncompetitive with US mini-mills, and with mills in Europe and the UK. A situation in which "foreign code" was taxed before being permitted to be executed in the US would be catastrophic.
Software is rapidly becoming a commodity business, just like steel. That's not a bad thing; it just means that you have to alter the way in which you compete, just like the steel industry's integrated producers can't compete (fairly) with mini-mills.
It looked like a nice idea, but I didn't try it - mainly because of the price: £1.30 IIRC, which is about $2. It seems a bit much IMHO for a normal cup of takeaway coffee, even if it does have a neat self-heating function!
Yeah, they sell these in the WH Smith and Kings X station, but for GBP 1.35 you can get a very nice coffee from AMT just across the concourse.
To get back on topic, self-heating rations have been experimented with by armies for a long time, but have generally been discarded as expensive and very unpopular with soldiers. I cannot see self-heating coffee replacing the vacuum-flask for a very long time.
The moon might be a useful source of raw materials, but why the heck would you use it for ship construction?
I don't know whether this is true or not, but I suspect it's easier to build things where there is at least some gravity. Just little things like being able to put your screwdriver down and pick up another one without needing to attach it to something. The question is really whether the benefits of weightlessness (not masslessness, hmm, what an odd looking word) outweigh the difficulties. The moon is a good compromise, lower gravity, but still some.
Why get out of one gravity well just to dump yourself into another? Just build the damn thing in orbit
If the moon can be a source of raw materials, the optimal scenario may well be to do initial construction on the lunar surface before lifting the components to lunar orbit and assembling them there.
It's going to take more than just a majority of non-hewlett shares to swing this one. The Hewlett family's shares account for 18% of the company. It's going to take *61%* of the remaining 82% to make a majority of the total shares.
Yes, but remember that the proxy consultants (SIS I think they're called) have advised the institutional investors to vote for it. That's a large and influential block.