Microsoft Virtual PC lets me suspend and resume an entire OS, running whatever applications I want, at any time. I think it's the way things are headed. I've installed separate virtual machines for running Gentoo, Fedora Core and MS Win 2K3 server. Well worth a look. (They have a 45-day free trial).
Once again, we see the old "conservation of jobs" myth that assumes that jobs are a fixed commodity that can be "lost". The reality is that companies that are able to achieve savings by offshoring will have extra capital for other projects. Companies will seldom outsource their core competency, since that's just asking for trouble. So, if a company is able to save money on non-core business process outsourcing, they should have more money to invest in core projects.
It also turns out that offshoring is a complicated business. I have participated as tech lead in three offshored projects. Only one of these ended up "profitable", costing us less than domestic talent would. Even though offshore workers earn a much lower salary than their US counterparts, the markup on their services is not small. We were paying $35/hour for talent that we could get for about $55/hour domestically. I think a lot of companies will experiment with offshoring and quickly discover that there are many sharp rocks under those inviting waters. The companies that are seeing biggest gains are those that set up offices in the offshore countries and hire the locals as employees, rather than consultants.
From a larger view, the baby boomers are starting to retire. If you check your census statistics, that is a huge skill deficit that we just don't have the population to replace in a growing ecomony. Therefore, if we wish to continue similar growth rates to what has happened over the past 50 years, we will need to:
Immigrate
Automate
Offshore
Remember 1999? Companies were recruiting waiters and putting them through IT training, just to make up the shortfall. If you knew where the power switch on your computer was, you could get an IT job. Well, back then, we had a shortfall of 4.7 million skilled workers. If similar growth is projected forward and the baby boomers are subtracted from the labor pool, we're looking at a shortage of over 20 million skilled workers by 2010. This will make the shortage of 1999 look like a picnic.
Some predictions even show us using up all the available offshore talent by 2012 or so.
So whine all you like about offshoring. Soon, it'll be the only thing that keeps our economy growing.
Sort of a combo FPS / Role / Puzzler. Some of the most beautiful and imaginative artwork I've seen in a game. Good soundtrack too. Like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, it's Quake3 engine based. And it's down to $9.99 at ebgames.
As we are quickly discovering, RF isn't the ideal way to shuffle information around. As a result, Earth will soon (within decades) abandon RF in favor of pure optical communications. Assuming most intelligence follows a similar path, we can expect they will emit detectable RF for perhaps a century. On a geologic timescale, this is much less than the blink of an eye. Therefore the odds of us catching another intelligence when it is at the RF stage of tech evolution is vanishingly small. So fugeddaboudit.
Geezers have a chance if they're connected. Most older folks have a much larger network of well-placed friends, and can count on them to help with HR hurdles. And, if there's just no other way in, an older worker who fabricates a long list of "experience" on their resume is more likely to be believed. So not only is it possible for a freshly-minted software geezer to find work, they may have much higher starting salaries.
Spam only works because it makes money. If each of us will dedicate just 10 minutes a day to requesting as many brochures and tying up as many resources of a spaming company as possible, it would quickly become apparent that spam is the most effective way for companies to lose lots of money.
My oldest still running apps are embedded in products that were introduced in 1983, performing oil and gas well monitoring and control. Solar-powered, Z80 microprocessors, deployed waaay out in the middle of nowhere. I suspect this code will continue to run until the hardware fails or the well runs dry.
Spam exists because it is profitable. If we each dedicate just ten minutes a day to order free product literature, tie up spammer's toll-free numbers, or even order a spammer's product on behalf of another spammer, we can cause spam to become unprofitable.
As a programmer, you are a vendor of engineering services. Your much reviled boss is your customer. You should be happy your customer wants to pay you to do things. You should be willing to do a little "extra" to keep your customer happy. You are very fortunate that your customer is willing to provide you with a desk and computer and nice air-conditioned office to work in. Would you, as a customer of a retail store, be willing to supply the store with similar amenities so that they can manufacture and sell you things?
Programming languages are human languages that allow the communication of a solution from one human to another in a langauge that computers are just barely smart enough to understand. As computers grow more complex, we can expect that they will be better able to grasp increasingly human-comfortable languages. It is easy to imagine a programming environment in which a developer talks to the computer, saying "remember that inventory program we did for SparkleCorp last year? Well we need to do one just like it, only they want data warehoused audit trails between them and their sister company." and the computer will hack something up that is a first-order approximation.
Computers double in complexity every 18 months. Programmer productivity doesn't. The only way to get programmer productivity to keep pace is by augmenting programmer intelligence with computer intelligence.
Unless you're pretty sure you have a big winner on your hands, it probably isn't worth patenting. All a patent gives you is the right to ask the courts to stop a competitor from using your invention. Even after you go through all the rigamarole of having a patent granted, you still have to renew the patent and I believe there is a requirement that you show you are actually exploiting the invention toward a real product or service. Overall it's a long costly process that does not create any new wealth, it only gives you a big stick to smack the competition with. As an introduction, I recommend "Patent it yourself" published by Nolo Press.
According to this table, people convicted under DOJ's domestic terrorism program in the US were given a median (half got more, half got less) sentence of 37 months. Do you think the actions you were convicted for are comparable to the actions of those convicted under domestic terrorism?
All that is needed is a test for obviousness of a proposed patent. If a small group of, say, senior CS undergrads can't come up with a solution that would infringe on the proposed patent, then it's not obvious and can be patented. Run every proposed patent through the obviousness test committee, and only allow the ones that some bright kids can't crack in one hour of brainstorming. Require the applicant to post a non-obviousness bounty that gets paid to the kids who crack the problem, but is refunded if the proposed patent is found non-obvious.
Hey, maybe it could become a televised event, sort of a geek brain olympics or something.
If they're hell-bent on patents, please persuade them to come up with some sort of "obviousness test" to rule out patents for things like XORing a cursor to make it apparent over any background.
Perhaps this could take the form of internships for a dozen senior undergrad CS students - put them in a room, tell them the problem that the candidate patent solves, and give them one hour to describe as many solutions as they can come up with. If they can't come up with a solution (or at least not the same solution) then it merits a patent.
My buddy's kid is still in High School. He not only had these same dreams - he actually sat down with his buddy and hacked out about 50K lines of C++ to produce a playable 3D shooter. From scratch, no less. (Krikes - and I thought the 1000 line poker game I wrote in High School was somethin...)
I use IE6 for web browsing and Mozilla for web mail, simply because IE6 has a bug/feature that makes it display a Favorites->Links->Some Folder->Some URL in a different IE6 window. Often, the different window is the one I'm logged into webmail from. Hence Mozilla to avoid such indiscriminate conquering of windows.
Hans Moravec estimates it would take about 100 Trillion instructions per second to emulate the human brain. At 38 Tflops, Earth Simulator is in the ballpark. Maybe they should have called it human simulator, or just "Sim".
All the gummint needs to do is invest heavily in AI "helper" agents that'll assist you with your browsing, finding the best deals, talking to your friends' agents so they can let you know what your friends are doing, etc. Since they do all this for free, these agents should become very popular. Unca Shuga gets to maintain the database the agents need to perform their help, though, so they can see when disaffected youth are studying bomb design, nazism, etc. and can take appropriate pro-active action. They can also see who refuses to use these incredibly helpful little agents, and thereby focus their non-automated energies on those who obviously have something to hide.
Spam only exists because it is profitable. The only effective way to fight spam is to tie up the spammer's resources:
Call any toll-free number they include. If you have a multi-line phone, conference the first line with a second line dialed in. That way, when their recording quits and asks for your contact info, they get a recording of their own drivel.
Set up a free email account for the purpose of cranking spammers. Reply to all spam that includes an email address, asking for more information. If the spammer offers to send you snail-mail brochures or something, excellent! Sign up for it - preferably to the postal address of another spammer's office, so you can also tie up their resources figuring out all the trash they just got.
If the spammer has included a non-toll-free phone number, look it up in a reverse phone directory. Many times, the phone number is residential, not business. In this case you can report the spammer to the telco that provides their service and either get them disconnected or billed at business rates.
Order stuff using bogus names/addresses & CC numbers. This ties up their sales personnel and, if you provided a working phone number that is always busy (many telco exchanges have numbers like XXX-YYY-0008 that are perpetually busy), they'll burn up many minutes trying to get a correct CC number.
The only effective way to combat spam is down at their level. They burn our resources, so we have to burn 'em back.
They may run into legal flack from various state gaming commissions. Here in Colorado, any device which you pay money or other tangible consideration to play and which rewards you with money or other tangible consideration (other than more game play) is considered a slot machine. (Thus, even a pay-to-play Quake tournament which awards prizes to best players is technically illegal in Colorado and most other states with statutes regarding slot machines).
Mag Tape? You young whippersnappers had it easy! You ever have to toggle in a bootstrap loader, then read a core loader from paper tape? Them were the days, I tell ya. Men were men, and bits were things ya could hold in yer hand! (I think I still have a bag of bits somewhere in my basement...)
IMO, the signature of those temps on their contracts was not worth the ink it was written in. I suspect many of them were contractors who were smug about their higher income while doing the work, but became whiney when their cohorts started turning up millionaires.
First rule of business:
No one is paid what they're worth - they are paid what they negotiate.
(Although I suppose "negotiation" through retroactive civil suit might fall under that rule...bleah!)
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Microsoft Virtual PC lets me suspend and resume an entire OS, running whatever applications I want, at any time. I think it's the way things are headed. I've installed separate virtual machines for running Gentoo, Fedora Core and MS Win 2K3 server. Well worth a look. (They have a 45-day free trial).
It also turns out that offshoring is a complicated business. I have participated as tech lead in three offshored projects. Only one of these ended up "profitable", costing us less than domestic talent would. Even though offshore workers earn a much lower salary than their US counterparts, the markup on their services is not small. We were paying $35/hour for talent that we could get for about $55/hour domestically. I think a lot of companies will experiment with offshoring and quickly discover that there are many sharp rocks under those inviting waters. The companies that are seeing biggest gains are those that set up offices in the offshore countries and hire the locals as employees, rather than consultants.
From a larger view, the baby boomers are starting to retire. If you check your census statistics, that is a huge skill deficit that we just don't have the population to replace in a growing ecomony. Therefore, if we wish to continue similar growth rates to what has happened over the past 50 years, we will need to:
- Immigrate
- Automate
- Offshore
Remember 1999? Companies were recruiting waiters and putting them through IT training, just to make up the shortfall. If you knew where the power switch on your computer was, you could get an IT job. Well, back then, we had a shortfall of 4.7 million skilled workers. If similar growth is projected forward and the baby boomers are subtracted from the labor pool, we're looking at a shortage of over 20 million skilled workers by 2010. This will make the shortage of 1999 look like a picnic. Some predictions even show us using up all the available offshore talent by 2012 or so.So whine all you like about offshoring. Soon, it'll be the only thing that keeps our economy growing.
Sort of a combo FPS / Role / Puzzler. Some of the most beautiful and imaginative artwork I've seen in a game. Good soundtrack too. Like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, it's Quake3 engine based. And it's down to $9.99 at ebgames.
In 2020, your average $1000 Wal-Mart Computer will be roughly complex enough to emulate a human brain in realtime. Toss in some cognitive modelling, and you have your new plastic pal who is fun to be with.
As we are quickly discovering, RF isn't the ideal way to shuffle information around. As a result, Earth will soon (within decades) abandon RF in favor of pure optical communications. Assuming most intelligence follows a similar path, we can expect they will emit detectable RF for perhaps a century. On a geologic timescale, this is much less than the blink of an eye. Therefore the odds of us catching another intelligence when it is at the RF stage of tech evolution is vanishingly small. So fugeddaboudit.
Geezers have a chance if they're connected. Most older folks have a much larger network of well-placed friends, and can count on them to help with HR hurdles. And, if there's just no other way in, an older worker who fabricates a long list of "experience" on their resume is more likely to be believed. So not only is it possible for a freshly-minted software geezer to find work, they may have much higher starting salaries.
Spam only works because it makes money. If each of us will dedicate just 10 minutes a day to requesting as many brochures and tying up as many resources of a spaming company as possible, it would quickly become apparent that spam is the most effective way for companies to lose lots of money.
My oldest still running apps are embedded in products that were introduced in 1983, performing oil and gas well monitoring and control. Solar-powered, Z80 microprocessors, deployed waaay out in the middle of nowhere. I suspect this code will continue to run until the hardware fails or the well runs dry.
Spam exists because it is profitable. If we each dedicate just ten minutes a day to order free product literature, tie up spammer's toll-free numbers, or even order a spammer's product on behalf of another spammer, we can cause spam to become unprofitable.
As a programmer, you are a vendor of engineering services. Your much reviled boss is your customer. You should be happy your customer wants to pay you to do things. You should be willing to do a little "extra" to keep your customer happy. You are very fortunate that your customer is willing to provide you with a desk and computer and nice air-conditioned office to work in. Would you, as a customer of a retail store, be willing to supply the store with similar amenities so that they can manufacture and sell you things?
Computers double in complexity every 18 months. Programmer productivity doesn't. The only way to get programmer productivity to keep pace is by augmenting programmer intelligence with computer intelligence.
Unless you're pretty sure you have a big winner on your hands, it probably isn't worth patenting. All a patent gives you is the right to ask the courts to stop a competitor from using your invention. Even after you go through all the rigamarole of having a patent granted, you still have to renew the patent and I believe there is a requirement that you show you are actually exploiting the invention toward a real product or service. Overall it's a long costly process that does not create any new wealth, it only gives you a big stick to smack the competition with. As an introduction, I recommend "Patent it yourself" published by Nolo Press.
According to this table, people convicted under DOJ's domestic terrorism program in the US were given a median (half got more, half got less) sentence of 37 months. Do you think the actions you were convicted for are comparable to the actions of those convicted under domestic terrorism?
Hey, maybe it could become a televised event, sort of a geek brain olympics or something.
Perhaps this could take the form of internships for a dozen senior undergrad CS students - put them in a room, tell them the problem that the candidate patent solves, and give them one hour to describe as many solutions as they can come up with. If they can't come up with a solution (or at least not the same solution) then it merits a patent.
My buddy's kid is still in High School. He not only had these same dreams - he actually sat down with his buddy and hacked out about 50K lines of C++ to produce a playable 3D shooter. From scratch, no less. (Krikes - and I thought the 1000 line poker game I wrote in High School was somethin...)
I wish I had a better reason for running Mozilla.
Hans Moravec estimates it would take about 100 Trillion instructions per second to emulate the human brain. At 38 Tflops, Earth Simulator is in the ballpark. Maybe they should have called it human simulator, or just "Sim".
All the gummint needs to do is invest heavily in AI "helper" agents that'll assist you with your browsing, finding the best deals, talking to your friends' agents so they can let you know what your friends are doing, etc. Since they do all this for free, these agents should become very popular. Unca Shuga gets to maintain the database the agents need to perform their help, though, so they can see when disaffected youth are studying bomb design, nazism, etc. and can take appropriate pro-active action. They can also see who refuses to use these incredibly helpful little agents, and thereby focus their non-automated energies on those who obviously have something to hide.
The only effective way to combat spam is down at their level. They burn our resources, so we have to burn 'em back.
They may run into legal flack from various state gaming commissions. Here in Colorado, any device which you pay money or other tangible consideration to play and which rewards you with money or other tangible consideration (other than more game play) is considered a slot machine. (Thus, even a pay-to-play Quake tournament which awards prizes to best players is technically illegal in Colorado and most other states with statutes regarding slot machines).
Mag Tape? You young whippersnappers had it easy! You ever have to toggle in a bootstrap loader, then read a core loader from paper tape? Them were the days, I tell ya. Men were men, and bits were things ya could hold in yer hand! (I think I still have a bag of bits somewhere in my basement...)
- First rule of business:
- No one is paid what they're worth - they are paid what they negotiate.
(Although I suppose "negotiation" through retroactive civil suit might fall under that rule...bleah!)