I am currently in the middle of my senior year at Polytechnic University.
The name should have given it away immediately. In Britain at least, the term "polytechnic" is synonymous with poor-quality education - so much so that a few years ago they all renamed themselves to try to blend in with the real universities and colleges. Still, everyone knows which are the ex-polys and the stigma remains. If you want a good education, go to a place with a bit of history, 100 years or more, because you can trust that it knows how to maintain its quality.
Perhaps if we legislate the 8 hour work day, we can immediately bring about that change.
The French tried that, along with other laws that made it very difficult to fire anyone. But, their unemployment is still up near 10%. Why is this? Because making it difficult to fire someone vastly increases the risk of a bad hire, so the effect was simply to lock in the existing jobs and not create any new ones.
But in the US and to a slightly lesser extent the UK, you can get fired easily but on the other hand, unemployment in those countries is around 4% and 2% respectively.
Summary: you cannot protect the good workers by protecting the bad ones.
This was back when art wasn't mass-produced, and when people had an appreciation for the work that went into it (and when the economy, such as it was, wasn't nearly so capitalist).
You say that like it's a good thing - but what actually happened was the local aristocrat would levy taxes on already-impoverished workers through threat of violence from his private army, and spend the money on frivolous baubles and trinkets.
Study the history of the French Revolution and you will understand just why that particular system of patronage is neither economically nor politically sustainable.
It's one of those things that seem self evident on the face of it, and requires a long and fairly complicated argument to dispel. A bit like how the earth obviously is flat - just look out the window!
A good example is the steel industry. Tariffs are good for American steel producers because they keep out foreign steel, right? Wrong, by inflating the price, American steel consumers - auto manufacturers, the construction industry, assorted consumer goods, shipbuilding, etc - all suffer.
The only question that needs to be answered is, is there more benefit to the economy from cheap steel than there is from keeping a few steelworkers (and there are very few relative to the number of steel users) employed? The answer is that free trade is always more efficient than a planned economy.
Your company doesn't care about its employees or about its nation, it cares about profits for its supermen.
That sort of Marxist rhetoric fails to account for the amount of stock owned by mutual funds and 401(k) holders - i.e. ordinary people. There are very few "supermen". It is ironic that sometimes people get laid off in order for the company to do its fiduciary duty and maximize shareholder value, when they are themselves shareholders.
Nations, governments and the electorate gradually lose power, importance and even relevance.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but think about this: it's a lot easier to change your employer if you don't agree with them than it is to change your citizenship if you don't agree with your government.
Isn't seven years an awfully long time to spend in school to be an engineer? Even an MS can be accomplished in 5-6 years if your school has a fast track program.
In Britain to become a Chartered Engineer (equivalent to PE in the US) you would need to do a 4-year degree (was 3-year 'til '95 or so), 2 years work experience under a mentor, then 2 years of experience in a position of responsibility.
When I was a Mechanical Enginnering undergrad I took a look at this career path, took a look at the rewards at the end of it, and went straight into management consulting!
that engineering is the only profession where your value to the company goes down the older you get
For grunt coders, this is very true. Sadly, the "hacker mystique" holds that a "true hacker" only writes code and is actively scornful of business, and that's ended up hurting a lot of people's careers.
In the finance industry, the real complexity is not in the code (although our code is extremely complex), it is in the real-world problems that we solve. The business we develop software for is centuries old and steeped in traditions that still affect the every day running of the business. In country X they do it this way, in country Y they do it that way, no-one knows why anymore but that's the way it is, and you need to understand it to do a cross border deal. The longer you've been around, the better you understand that, the greater the probability that your code will do what it's supposed to first time, the more valuable you are.
With the competition for engineering jobs ramping up in India and other lower cost countries
I don't want to try and predict what will happen 50 years in the future, but for the next 10 years at least, only the grunt coders need to worry about this. People who know their industry as well as they know code have nothing to fear.
Although I have not attended University or College for training in the field, I made a substantial income.
Then you are a part of the problem. If "self taught" civil engineers were allowed to build bridges and skyscrapers, then pretty soon the civil engineering profession would fall into disrepute and people who wanted bridges and skyscrapers would start hiring talent from elsewhere. All these people who flocked to the profession during the boom years, when people who didn't even know what HTML stood for could get $60k for operating Dream Weaver, have just made it worse for all the real professionals.
If Apple had any guts, they'd release an x86 version of OS X. But they know they'd lose, so they won't.
Well, they might, but the fact that it's running on an x86 will be entirely incidental - it will still be a proprietary Apple machine, with a proprietary motherboard and probably a bunch of proprietary ROMs. Apple are a hardware company. It's where they make their money, and they are reliant on controlling the hardware for their "it just works" capability.
The x86 version exists to give Apple leverage over Motorola, not Microsoft.
"Score another one for Linux on the desktop". Maybe. But if you read the article it states that the machines replace both UNIX and Windows boxes, which implies that there was some un*x presence in the first place.
Indeed. Linux is at least as big a threat to Sun as it is to Microsoft. Probably a lot more.
There's almost no reason to have this in an e-mail client at all anyway, except for viruses and spam. This feature is nothing less than a huge blinking neon sign attracting ne'er-do-wells to your front door, and Microsoft was too stupid to see that putting it up would be a hugely bad idea. Oddly enough, they keep up the good work.
Well, remember that Outlook and Exchange were always intended to be more than just a mail client and server, they are meant to be a platform for developing groupware and workflow applications. The scripting support is there so you can send validation logic along with a form, for example.
Microsoft historically have always prioritized features over everything else, but now they are waking up to security. I agree that they are long overdue. But I guess it was just one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time - and probably was a good idea on a LAN without an Internet connection - and once customers started using it, they had to keep it.
I fucking GUARANTEE to you that my son will not get my gun and hurt someone with it. Refute THAT.
Make me the same guarantee about your carving knife and your car, and we're all set.
But then I'm probably some hippy freakazoid liberal whacko gay-lover commie asshole because I don't think every goddamned "responsible" adult should own and carry a gun.
Happily, the First Amendment grants you the right to say so. Pray you won't ever need the Second Amendment to defend it.
Actually, for a ballistic missile you do want fairly intensive computational power, because even a tiny split-second error on engine firing and shutdown sequences will result in a circular error probability (CEP) of over a mile.
No, you would want a ballistic missile to be as simple as possible (that's why they're ballistic and not guided). All the computation would be done in advance, all the onboard system needs to do is execute a very simple program driven by a clock.
The moon mission rocket has less computational power on board than a modern calculator, remember, and even a modern a ballistic missile's a lot simpler.
Also, modern electronic warfare demands huge computational needs; will the Dragon CPU be able to keep up with that type of work?
Yes and no. Logistics needs a lot of raw CPU power, it's like brute-forcing the travelling salesman problem. But a guided missile probably has no more than a 6502- or Z80-equivalent on board.
it doesn't matter who you trust. The chinese govt does not trust MS.
More accurately, the Chinese govt does not trust the US govt, in whose territory Microsoft are based.
There's little reason for the Chinese not to trust MS - after all, corporations are relatively predictable, you can easily recreate their decision making process (how do you think Warren Buffett is so successful? By recreating that process, taking it one step further and being there waiting). Govts are a lot more unpredictable.
So they should study beowulf clusters and the scientific community too?
Neither of those is a good analogy. Beowulf clusters aren't self-organizing, and scientific communities asyncronously pursue open-ended research rather than working towards a specific goal. For example, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things if a professor in Cambridge is a day late posting his article to a journal, but it very much matters if a terrorist in New York doesn't have the van where it's supposed to be at the appointed hour.
anything that will burn off those defense dollars I'm happy with.
Either those dollars should be spent on something useful, or they should returned to their rightful owners. What you're saying is that you both want to be taxed and want that money to be wasted!
This is one of the problems with guns though. People in the house like children using them and getting hurt, or killing someone. Introduce a gun into your home, and you run this risk.
Introduce bleach to your home and you run the risk that a child will drink it.
Introduce stairs to your home and you run the risk that a child will fall down them.
Introduce a kettle to your home and you run the risk that a child will scald themselves with boiling water.
What's your point again? Could it be that responsible parents would keep their guns away from their kids, just like they do all the other dangerous stuff in their houses?
Reliability has always been one thing that Microsoft could never deliver and that is something they have gained and I can agree with them all the way on this.
Really? I can't remember the last time I had Outlook or Word (2000 and XP) actually crash, and I use 'em both every day. The 2000 line of products is a huge leap over the 95 line (which I will agree were pretty crap).
Microsoft do have some unreliable products still - IIS and Exchange spring immediately to mind. But a lot of their stuff now is rock solid. I can honestly say that in the last couple of years I've had more Xemacs crashes than Word.
I know that you can try to lock them out but you never really succeed.
You can turn off VBA with a couple of clicks. Now do you want to talk about buffer overruns in sendmail and named?
I use Evolution instead of Outlook and it is even as good at eye candy. It does every thing and more that I was using Outlook for. The only think Outlook does better is spread virii.
As a straight mail client, Outlook as some competition from Open Source, but for groupware Open Source doesn't have anything to compare.
Think about it, the most often heard comment of chinas amazing recent successes is "cheap labor". Nope, that ain't it,for example the african continent has cheap labor avaialable by the millions and millions, but manufacturing is going to china because they are actually able to *accomplish complex tasks in a very large way* using "cheap labor". There's a BIG difference.
You are correct. China now is analogous to ancient Egypt: they could undertake massive engineering project (i.e. the Pyramids) because they had total State control of everything and could simply mandate that millions of people would work on project X 'til it was done. The difference between China and Africa is that no-one is in control in Africa, and African tradition (tribal) makes it much harder to take control than Chinese tradition (Confucian).
The problem that China faces long-term is maintaining that homogenity (which requires rigid State control) while avoid suppressing innovation (which generally needs a Free Market).
China's sheer size makes it difficult to generalize about its economy. Yes, China as a whole may well count as an major industrial player, but Chinese industrial activity is quite localized, there are going to be massive disparities in "wealth creation" throughout China. This will heavily stress their Communist infrastructure. Maybe we'll see more breakaway republics like Taiwan? Maybe HK will want its independence back? How long will innovation last if the Chinese use their military to prevent devolution?
Why don't they just get some Macs? Then they can do Word/Office in a native environment instead of some Wine-like UNIX hack.
Or run XWin-32, eXceed, or even VNC on ordinary PCs and share a large Unix machine? This is by far the best way to do things; rather than putting a Unix workstation on each desk, buy one much more powerful machine and share it among 30 people. For interactive use, from the machine's perspective, all users have a lot of idle time, whether between keypresses, or while reading what's on screen, etc. By sharing one powerful machine, everyone gets far more peak performance than a workstation can give them, for example for a compile, while getting the same processing power when averaged throughout the day because it's unlikely that all 30 users would want peak performance at the same time.
In such an environment, you just want the PC to run Word and Outlook, and be an X terminal for everything else. What they've done at NASA gives them no real advantage.
Remember, a free market economy's prime benefactor is the consumer, not the company.
Actually, that's entirely incidental. Free markets are designed to favor efficient production and producers. This does make things better for consumers, true, but only to the extent that said consumers are also producers.
When companies become so large that they can influence the consumer's choices no matter what, you lose the benefits of free markets. That is why anti-trust laws were created and one of the reasons you need governments in the first place
Yes, those damn steam engine companies! Using their cursed monopolies and patents to suppress internal combustion and gas turbines! Why, if it wasn't for them, we'd have cars and airliners by now!
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I am currently in the middle of my senior year at Polytechnic University.
The name should have given it away immediately. In Britain at least, the term "polytechnic" is synonymous with poor-quality education - so much so that a few years ago they all renamed themselves to try to blend in with the real universities and colleges. Still, everyone knows which are the ex-polys and the stigma remains. If you want a good education, go to a place with a bit of history, 100 years or more, because you can trust that it knows how to maintain its quality.
Perhaps if we legislate the 8 hour work day, we can immediately bring about that change.
The French tried that, along with other laws that made it very difficult to fire anyone. But, their unemployment is still up near 10%. Why is this? Because making it difficult to fire someone vastly increases the risk of a bad hire, so the effect was simply to lock in the existing jobs and not create any new ones.
But in the US and to a slightly lesser extent the UK, you can get fired easily but on the other hand, unemployment in those countries is around 4% and 2% respectively.
Summary: you cannot protect the good workers by protecting the bad ones.
This was back when art wasn't mass-produced, and when people had an appreciation for the work that went into it (and when the economy, such as it was, wasn't nearly so capitalist).
You say that like it's a good thing - but what actually happened was the local aristocrat would levy taxes on already-impoverished workers through threat of violence from his private army, and spend the money on frivolous baubles and trinkets.
Study the history of the French Revolution and you will understand just why that particular system of patronage is neither economically nor politically sustainable.
It's one of those things that seem self evident on the face of it, and requires a long and fairly complicated argument to dispel. A bit like how the earth obviously is flat - just look out the window!
A good example is the steel industry. Tariffs are good for American steel producers because they keep out foreign steel, right? Wrong, by inflating the price, American steel consumers - auto manufacturers, the construction industry, assorted consumer goods, shipbuilding, etc - all suffer.
The only question that needs to be answered is, is there more benefit to the economy from cheap steel than there is from keeping a few steelworkers (and there are very few relative to the number of steel users) employed? The answer is that free trade is always more efficient than a planned economy.
Your company doesn't care about its employees or about its nation, it cares about profits for its supermen.
That sort of Marxist rhetoric fails to account for the amount of stock owned by mutual funds and 401(k) holders - i.e. ordinary people. There are very few "supermen". It is ironic that sometimes people get laid off in order for the company to do its fiduciary duty and maximize shareholder value, when they are themselves shareholders.
Nations, governments and the electorate gradually lose power, importance and even relevance.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but think about this: it's a lot easier to change your employer if you don't agree with them than it is to change your citizenship if you don't agree with your government.
NineNine. Free porn. Period. [ninenine.com]
Dude, did you ever consider calling your site fleshdot.org? The domain's available.
Isn't seven years an awfully long time to spend in school to be an engineer? Even an MS can be accomplished in 5-6 years if your school has a fast track program.
In Britain to become a Chartered Engineer (equivalent to PE in the US) you would need to do a 4-year degree (was 3-year 'til '95 or so), 2 years work experience under a mentor, then 2 years of experience in a position of responsibility.
When I was a Mechanical Enginnering undergrad I took a look at this career path, took a look at the rewards at the end of it, and went straight into management consulting!
that engineering is the only profession where your value to the company goes down the older you get
For grunt coders, this is very true. Sadly, the "hacker mystique" holds that a "true hacker" only writes code and is actively scornful of business, and that's ended up hurting a lot of people's careers.
In the finance industry, the real complexity is not in the code (although our code is extremely complex), it is in the real-world problems that we solve. The business we develop software for is centuries old and steeped in traditions that still affect the every day running of the business. In country X they do it this way, in country Y they do it that way, no-one knows why anymore but that's the way it is, and you need to understand it to do a cross border deal. The longer you've been around, the better you understand that, the greater the probability that your code will do what it's supposed to first time, the more valuable you are.
With the competition for engineering jobs ramping up in India and other lower cost countries
I don't want to try and predict what will happen 50 years in the future, but for the next 10 years at least, only the grunt coders need to worry about this. People who know their industry as well as they know code have nothing to fear.
Although I have not attended University or College for training in the field, I made a substantial income.
Then you are a part of the problem. If "self taught" civil engineers were allowed to build bridges and skyscrapers, then pretty soon the civil engineering profession would fall into disrepute and people who wanted bridges and skyscrapers would start hiring talent from elsewhere. All these people who flocked to the profession during the boom years, when people who didn't even know what HTML stood for could get $60k for operating Dream Weaver, have just made it worse for all the real professionals.
If Apple had any guts, they'd release an x86 version of OS X. But they know they'd lose, so they won't.
Well, they might, but the fact that it's running on an x86 will be entirely incidental - it will still be a proprietary Apple machine, with a proprietary motherboard and probably a bunch of proprietary ROMs. Apple are a hardware company. It's where they make their money, and they are reliant on controlling the hardware for their "it just works" capability.
The x86 version exists to give Apple leverage over Motorola, not Microsoft.
The trend unit is "how many equivalents of library of congress" does it hold?
Didn't Neal Stephenson use "Boeing 747 full of encyclopaedias"?
No one needs the space because by 2010 all digital material is covered by copyrights - which have been extended for 250 years.
That's why they're using multiple lawyers for storage!
"Score another one for Linux on the desktop". Maybe. But if you read the article it states that the machines replace both UNIX and Windows boxes, which implies that there was some un*x presence in the first place.
Indeed. Linux is at least as big a threat to Sun as it is to Microsoft. Probably a lot more.
The LARGE UNIX machine is a dual P4 w/2GB of ram running RED HAT.
"Large Unix" starts at the level of an Origin or a Sun Fire.. pee cees don't count.
There's almost no reason to have this in an e-mail client at all anyway, except for viruses and spam. This feature is nothing less than a huge blinking neon sign attracting ne'er-do-wells to your front door, and Microsoft was too stupid to see that putting it up would be a hugely bad idea. Oddly enough, they keep up the good work.
Well, remember that Outlook and Exchange were always intended to be more than just a mail client and server, they are meant to be a platform for developing groupware and workflow applications. The scripting support is there so you can send validation logic along with a form, for example.
Microsoft historically have always prioritized features over everything else, but now they are waking up to security. I agree that they are long overdue. But I guess it was just one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time - and probably was a good idea on a LAN without an Internet connection - and once customers started using it, they had to keep it.
I fucking GUARANTEE to you that my son will not get my gun and hurt someone with it. Refute THAT.
Make me the same guarantee about your carving knife and your car, and we're all set.
But then I'm probably some hippy freakazoid liberal whacko gay-lover commie asshole because I don't think every goddamned "responsible" adult should own and carry a gun.
Happily, the First Amendment grants you the right to say so. Pray you won't ever need the Second Amendment to defend it.
Actually, for a ballistic missile you do want fairly intensive computational power, because even a tiny split-second error on engine firing and shutdown sequences will result in a circular error probability (CEP) of over a mile.
No, you would want a ballistic missile to be as simple as possible (that's why they're ballistic and not guided). All the computation would be done in advance, all the onboard system needs to do is execute a very simple program driven by a clock.
The moon mission rocket has less computational power on board than a modern calculator, remember, and even a modern a ballistic missile's a lot simpler.
Also, modern electronic warfare demands huge computational needs; will the Dragon CPU be able to keep up with that type of work?
Yes and no. Logistics needs a lot of raw CPU power, it's like brute-forcing the travelling salesman problem. But a guided missile probably has no more than a 6502- or Z80-equivalent on board.
it doesn't matter who you trust. The chinese govt does not trust MS.
More accurately, the Chinese govt does not trust the US govt, in whose territory Microsoft are based.
There's little reason for the Chinese not to trust MS - after all, corporations are relatively predictable, you can easily recreate their decision making process (how do you think Warren Buffett is so successful? By recreating that process, taking it one step further and being there waiting). Govts are a lot more unpredictable.
So they should study beowulf clusters and the scientific community too?
Neither of those is a good analogy. Beowulf clusters aren't self-organizing, and scientific communities asyncronously pursue open-ended research rather than working towards a specific goal. For example, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things if a professor in Cambridge is a day late posting his article to a journal, but it very much matters if a terrorist in New York doesn't have the van where it's supposed to be at the appointed hour.
anything that will burn off those defense dollars I'm happy with.
Either those dollars should be spent on something useful, or they should returned to their rightful owners. What you're saying is that you both want to be taxed and want that money to be wasted!
This is one of the problems with guns though. People in the house like children using them and getting hurt, or killing someone. Introduce a gun into your home, and you run this risk.
Introduce bleach to your home and you run the risk that a child will drink it.
Introduce stairs to your home and you run the risk that a child will fall down them.
Introduce a kettle to your home and you run the risk that a child will scald themselves with boiling water.
What's your point again? Could it be that responsible parents would keep their guns away from their kids, just like they do all the other dangerous stuff in their houses?
Reliability has always been one thing that Microsoft could never deliver and that is something they have gained and I can agree with them all the way on this.
Really? I can't remember the last time I had Outlook or Word (2000 and XP) actually crash, and I use 'em both every day. The 2000 line of products is a huge leap over the 95 line (which I will agree were pretty crap).
Microsoft do have some unreliable products still - IIS and Exchange spring immediately to mind. But a lot of their stuff now is rock solid. I can honestly say that in the last couple of years I've had more Xemacs crashes than Word.
I know that you can try to lock them out but you never really succeed.
You can turn off VBA with a couple of clicks. Now do you want to talk about buffer overruns in sendmail and named?
I use Evolution instead of Outlook and it is even as good at eye candy. It does every thing and more that I was using Outlook for. The only think Outlook does better is spread virii.
As a straight mail client, Outlook as some competition from Open Source, but for groupware Open Source doesn't have anything to compare.
Think about it, the most often heard comment of chinas amazing recent successes is "cheap labor". Nope, that ain't it,for example the african continent has cheap labor avaialable by the millions and millions, but manufacturing is going to china because they are actually able to *accomplish complex tasks in a very large way* using "cheap labor". There's a BIG difference.
You are correct. China now is analogous to ancient Egypt: they could undertake massive engineering project (i.e. the Pyramids) because they had total State control of everything and could simply mandate that millions of people would work on project X 'til it was done. The difference between China and Africa is that no-one is in control in Africa, and African tradition (tribal) makes it much harder to take control than Chinese tradition (Confucian).
The problem that China faces long-term is maintaining that homogenity (which requires rigid State control) while avoid suppressing innovation (which generally needs a Free Market).
China's sheer size makes it difficult to generalize about its economy. Yes, China as a whole may well count as an major industrial player, but Chinese industrial activity is quite localized, there are going to be massive disparities in "wealth creation" throughout China. This will heavily stress their Communist infrastructure. Maybe we'll see more breakaway republics like Taiwan? Maybe HK will want its independence back? How long will innovation last if the Chinese use their military to prevent devolution?
Why don't they just get some Macs? Then they can do Word/Office in a native environment instead of some Wine-like UNIX hack.
Or run XWin-32, eXceed, or even VNC on ordinary PCs and share a large Unix machine? This is by far the best way to do things; rather than putting a Unix workstation on each desk, buy one much more powerful machine and share it among 30 people. For interactive use, from the machine's perspective, all users have a lot of idle time, whether between keypresses, or while reading what's on screen, etc. By sharing one powerful machine, everyone gets far more peak performance than a workstation can give them, for example for a compile, while getting the same processing power when averaged throughout the day because it's unlikely that all 30 users would want peak performance at the same time.
In such an environment, you just want the PC to run Word and Outlook, and be an X terminal for everything else. What they've done at NASA gives them no real advantage.
Remember, a free market economy's prime benefactor is the consumer, not the company.
Actually, that's entirely incidental. Free markets are designed to favor efficient production and producers. This does make things better for consumers, true, but only to the extent that said consumers are also producers.
When companies become so large that they can influence the consumer's choices no matter what, you lose the benefits of free markets. That is why anti-trust laws were created and one of the reasons you need governments in the first place
Yes, those damn steam engine companies! Using their cursed monopolies and patents to suppress internal combustion and gas turbines! Why, if it wasn't for them, we'd have cars and airliners by now!