That said, we have been calling for the death of the mainframe for years, as well as the death of tape for years, and neither have died. HDDs will continue to have a place in the world, but they will be by and large replaced with flash. In the enterprise space, changes in software also mean that most of this flash will be server attached rather than part of a SAN.
I think the death of tape hasn't happened because there isn't a functional replacement for it for high capacity, long-term archiving. HDDs don't work well in changers, are more fragile and I don't think anyone trusts their powered off shelf life.
I know that clustered/distributed/server-local storage is becoming a competitor to centralized SAN, but I think it will be something of a limited market. Virtualization and CPU improvements have cut node counts significantly, making it harder to obtain redundant node counts necessary for this to see a lot of adoption.
Even the vendors with decent products now charge so much for licensing that they're not remotely competitive on pricing. I saw a price analysis of VMware vSAN that put it more expensive by 2-3x over a conventional SAN. MS Storage Spaces isn't really flexible enough yet although it's clear MS wants it to go this way, but it doesn't seem like it will be there or agnostic enough for heterogeneous workloads for years.
There is an *Apple* app for their own APs that has a scan mode that lets you scan for APs. It's not as fancy as some I've seen for Android, but it's useful enough to have.
I think the enterprise storage vendors *want* to hang onto HDDs as long as possible because it lets them keep marking up SSDs to stratospheric heights, in addition to charging a whole bunch extra for magic tiering/caching systems so the 6 SSDs you can afford to put into the thing will actually have a chance of getting used.
I also think they're somewhat scared of the evidence of greater durability that SSDs seem to have because a big part of their justification for increased cost for their enterprise SSDs involves using SLC flash.
Now, to be fair, based on what I've seen the vendors are right that you only "need" a subset of your data to live on flash because the rest of your data is a lot colder, and yes, SLC flash has a lot more write durability.
That being said, if MLC/TLC flash is generally more durable than we've seen (I've seen an endurance test that put 6+ PB on an 850 Pro) *and* fairly inexpensive, then even if it has double or triple the failure rate of spinning rust the value proposition still leans towards all flash storage because of the huge increase in performance across an array, decreased power consumption, need for fewer hot spares or parity disks due to faster rebuild times.
Overall storage system prices could be lower, too, because all that caching/tiering management takes real CPU/RAM, resulting in more expensive controller hardware with more complex and costly software.
The parent article I originally responded to was describing ERP rollouts or something "well known", so those might also fit the endless spiral definition because any project with sufficient business process penetration is likely to have a broad set of stakeholders (bordering on infinite if you take customers into account) and nearly impossible to scope second-order and beyond consequences.
Now that we've exchanged these messages and I've thought about it, one reason (besides project type) why I can see some of these things spiraling (beyond borderline fraudulent vendor behavior) is that there's almost a prisoner's dilemma trap of circumstances that prevents anyone from stopping.
The vendor can't realistically stop billing and keep working, the client has a sunk cost problem (in addition to even a real need for the finished project), and often there's so many stakeholders and decision makers that stopping the project is a major political problem.
It actually becomes easier to keep spending money on a cancerous project than it is to kill it.
I've installed over a dozen of these without any problems, including as an upgrade in an old Dell laptop that got 2+ years of very mobile use and still works fine AFAICT.
Maybe I'm just lucky (or unlucky, although I'd make no more money personally) that I've never seen this happen, and certainly never deliberately.
The only thing that seems to come close are projects that get strung out over time due to customer cancellations of cutover dates or other scheduling complexities. This just kills project efficiency.
Scoping problems happen, too, where some kind of details are missed or problems that don't turn up until you start an upgrade but usually these get dealt with pretty openly through change orders. We rarely miss key details if given access for proper scoping, but occasionally we don't get access but we build that into the project.
The bottom line, though, is that nobody seems to win when project costs spiral. The customer often has a pretty fixed budget or has to explain any significant cost overruns internally.
Now, I mostly also just deal with infrastructure projects, so the project scopes are pretty limited and well defined. Software development projects seem to be the kind of thing that ends up running on forever with no end in sight.
IT people that will give the business as much rope as they want to hang themselves with without pushing back because they are either working by billable hours or are used to working billable hours and are more than willing to let project costs and timelines spiral out of control because that is what puts the meals on the table and they can just blame the project management and requirements when management suddenly decides they would have rather have a project succeed than get every requirement implemented.
This may be a practice that "big consulting" can get away with, but almost never is it something you can get away with in the SMB sphere. Any project that accrues change orders resulting in cost increases of more than about 10% gets turned into a big pissing match and often resulting in a compromises that make nobody really happy.
I've seen squabbles over $300 worth of travel to get someone on site to fix a problem or 2-3 hours of time.
Nobody wins when projects spiral like this; I've actually seen more "damage" done preventing them for spiraling then letting them spiral.
I find this trend quite strange as well. In the late 90s everyone was going on about how technology would allow us to work from anywhere so we could spread out around the country. Things like cramming into an urban area, and flying to conferences were going to become unnecessary.
This happened, except that instead of the jobs going to Kearney, Nebraska, they went to Bangalore, India, when management sorted out they could amplify the savings by hiring even cheaper workers in even cheaper locations.
I think anything over 4 GB is largely wasted in a ESXi environment, although when I have used them as boot devices I've gone with 8GB models as a kind of future proof as I have bad memories of old ESX default installs using partitions too small to accept upgrades.
There may also be some value to underprovisioning the hardware -- if ESXi only uses the first 4 GB, the thumb drive hardware wear leveling will likely give it a longer lifespan by giving it an actual 8 GB to work against, although writes are so infrequent with ESXi USB flash boot media that it's not something I really worry about. Reliability wise they have been great where I've used them, with zero failures over about 10 combined operational years over several hosts.
The redundant SD card systems are better, but typically I've only employed USB boot media for them where it's been the only alternative, like the client project where the SAN vendor couldn't make FC boot from SAN work and it was the only useful
I don't use them much for data storage, although there are some circumstances where they are useful, like laptops with non-upgradable internal storage where I need offline access to multiple gigabytes of data.
This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.
Who's the "you" in this? Any computer system project that is sufficiently embedded in business process has failure modes so far outside the reach of anyone on the technical side that blaming technical people for it is incredibly myopic. They often end up failing even when the technology works right.
And almost all of this is beyond the reach any single individual who's not a senior manager and then there are still conceptual problems with where blame ought to be assigned. And once you get into "you" as a team/group, often with differentiated roles and responsibilities, where failure modes can vary widely.
I work for a small IT consultancy and I work on projects where all kinds of problems crop up. Most don't cause the project to "fail" (even when they go badly, I think there are various organizational and individual reasons for resisting declaring failure) but even when I'm the sole implementer of the project, there are failure reasons that go beyond me. Poor scoping. Client interference. Unrealistic timelines. Inadequate resources. The list is long and full of things I had no control over.
Now you can say you finally got your 100GB optical discs.
I'd almost wager that the "maximum capacity" of what was talked about in 1999 is largely where BD discs are at today, only they didn't call them Blu-Ray in 1999 and in 2016 100 GB capacity is on the large side of marginally useful.
It's like USB flash drives. The 4 GB size is really only useful for writing CD ISOs for booting CD-less computers. The 8 GB size is really only useful for DVD ISOs. 32 GB and below are pretty much throwaway sizes in general and I don't even buy anything anymore that's not 128GB USB3.
When you take a class or go to conference or have a vendor give away USB drives and they give away like 2 GB USB2 drives it's like an insult. Sometimes I just take them apart and leave them behind in pieces.
Could they apply some kind of filtration film to the inside of cockpit windscreens to block or at least mute the fairly narrow spectrum green lasers use?
I'm only a laser expert to the extent I read the wikipedia laser pointer page, so maybe this doesn't work. I guess I wouldn't expect it to be completely effective, but maybe enough to limit the risk to pilot vision?
You have to get out of the submarine first before you get all that fresh air. You can't just open the door a few hundred feet below the surface.
And even if you get to the surface without suffering from the bends or drowning, you're now facing water temperatures of what -- 70F if you're lucky, and if you're not, much less than that. The same hypothermia that will kill you in space will kill you nearly as fast in the water.
In a value-neutral way, what's basically happening here is that Microsoft is looking to make the education system produce graduates who can work in IT fields.
However, in a less value-neutral way, they're looking to socialize vocational training for future employees by making the educational system turn out graduates skilled in what they believe is useful in their business.
You could possibly view this as a positive -- schools are open to all kinds of criticism for teaching subjects with little practical application, and in the case of colleges, charging a king's ransom for it, only for students to find they can't earn a living with the education they received.
You could look at this as a negative, in that businesses don't really care (and may actually want) ignorant drones who don't ask questions about history or politics or any of those topics, as long as they are up to speed on what business needs to increase profits. 10 dollars spent by a student educating themselves in what the corporation wants is at least 5 dollars into some executives personal bank account.
My guess is MS motivation is less nefarious in this regard, but I think generally speaking corporate America needs to stop expecting that "Filling out TPS Reports" will be learned before an employee starts and that they would benefit greatly from spending some of their own money providing the knowledge and skills they want employees to have, rather than constantly firing and hiring employees and being frustrated that they can't find people with 10 years' experience in a 5 year old technology.
When I've looked into this, it often works just like that (which, in theory, the earned income tax credit is supposed to do, sort of).
What I've read about that stuck in my head is that everyone earns a basic income, whether you have a job or not.
The tax rate goes up to basically negate the basic income at some point, so if you were in some high-income job your tax rate would go up enough that at net you wouldn't be earning the basic income.
The genius I saw was that there was a reasonable threshold, though, on money earned above the basic income to maintain an incentive to work. If the basic income was, say, $20,000 per year and you got a low paying job making another $10,000 per year you would pay something in taxes, but not so much that you didn't end up netting more than the basic income.
This allow for an incentive to work, prevents people from being "working poor" -- ie, people who work full time at low paying jobs but still have trouble feeding themselves or paying rent, and forces businesses to raise salaries and/or improve working conditions to attract workers so that the burden of work is less than the payoff.
I also think it would push other middle-range salaries up, as there may be talented people who would rather work less (at lesser-skilled or less demanding jobs or fewer hours) than work harder at more demanding jobs whose burden exceeded the payoff.
As I read it, the larger goal is to decrease inequality by raising the cost of labor.
While filling the remaining time with volunteering and strengthening the arts is noble, maybe even desirable in some sense; I'm guessing this modification to your work schedule is precisely why the UBI would fail on a larger scale..
How many additional people engaged in volunteer work does it take to make significant improvements in community well being that government could never achieve?
And by volunteering, I don't mean that bullshit volunteering that passes for community involvement at the corporate level -- bagging rice and beans for giveaway meals wearing team t-shirts doesn't count.
I'm thinking of like neighbors who volunteer to overhaul a playground. A lot of community parks in my city are in crappy shape, with equipment in poor repair, peeling paint, etc. Labor is the most significant element of this task and it wouldn't take much in terms of skill to fix up park equipment.
Hell, if the goddamn materials were even available at a discount, I'd volunteer to patch the countless residential potholes in my neighborhood that are never adequately patched.
How about helping people revise resumes and give them career counseling? That's a direct benefit that gets people into productive work that's difficult to get from any government employment program.
I think there's all manner of useful work that volunteers could do that would cost many multiples if done by the usual government mechanisms. It doesn't get done now because those mechanisms have become so expensive and "government spending" is so hated.
I still think you bias the use case to free-roaming, interactive VR environments with a traditional gaming overhead on top of that. In those cases, it is tremendously computationally intensive and requires a significant amount of hardware in addition to requiring a gaming environment at least on par with the best 2D environments.
Stereoscopic still or video imagery would require a much lighter hardware infrastructure while still providing a pretty immersive experience; I would suspect that clever innovations in image capture and interpolation would increase the freedom of virtual movement to provide a fairly compelling use case for a lot of mundane applications, like real estate, tourism, and even motion picture type entertainment.
Something like that could fairly easily be encapsulated in an all-in-one unit with lesser hardware demands and cheaper and wider adoption. I think I read that 1.5 billion ViewMaster reels have been sold -- and that's a really low-tech, marginally immersive system with no degree of movement.
Maybe I just have narrow horizons, but I find Google cardboard with the street view app in cardboard mode to be pretty immersive by itself, and that's 2D-ish content and pretty static.
I think you underestimate the "good enough" types of VR applications like stereoscopic virtual tours and the like. If you set the standard to be fully rendered, free-roaming environments requiring 4k resolution it becomes complex and prohibitive to most people.
I can't see it working in business environments, either, except as being some new twist on the blade center.
Computers that exceed the performance requirements of the typical business user are already so powerful and inexpensive that it's difficult to imagine any reason to expand some user's computer. I think a lot of present day desktops with solid state disks will probably have enough power that they will exceed the supported lifetime of the operating system installed on them.
About the only place this starts to make sense is with a system that might resemble a smartphone core that can be snapped into a laptop which can then be docked into a desktop. But existing mobile processors aren't well suited to desktop usage, the x86 architecture doesn't lend itself to bolting on additional CPUs and RAM in external cabinets, and smartphones don't have the storage capacity to make such a system truly portable if the users regular data isn't stored on the device or in the cloud.
What might make it interesting would be if the modular components were in effect computers in themselves, and a fully stacked system actually resembled a cluster with the "core" working as kind of root OS and hypervisor manager, and the extended blocks able to supply cpu and ram for user processes, but all transparent to the end user who just see it as a unified desktop.
That makes perfect sense and follows the notion that Catholicism inherited or co-opted a large number of the Roman religious festivals and saw them continue well into middle ages.
I think the idea is that the nature of work was different. It may have been more physically demanding (as any kind of outdoor non-mechanized agriculture would have been) but it certainly didn't involve punching a clock, meetings, or thick layers of middle management with personal agendas.
I'm guessing the principal motivation was not starving and exceeding whatever grain quotas were imposed by the landowners with the idea that surpluses could be put to use for personal gains like feeding your own livestock for improved dietary consumption.
What I think makes modern work so bad is that its so relentlessly metered and cost accounted, resulting in never ending work. Modern cost accounting has taken the surplus out of labor and given it exclusively to the owners.
Not all of us are narrowminded basement dwellers... Some of us are actually interested in things beyond neckbeard technology articles. (Which isn't what made Slashdot great in the first place.)
Then find them elsewhere. There's whole Internet out there with all the inclusiveness debate and articles a person interested in them could want, and then some.
This is a technology oriented site, there's only more technology out there and diluting the content to make it some kind of catch-all site for things doesn't make this site better, it makes it worse. What made Slashdot great wasn't stories about hot button social issues, but stories about technology. Technology has only multiplied since I signed up -- there were no tablets, smartphones, solid state disks, etc etc etc" 10+ years ago.
Inclusiveness and other related debates are largely political and sociological -- you could just find-replace "IT" with "law" or "marketing" or "accounting" or any other field and largely have the same debate.
And calling it "a debate" is pretty thin to begin with, it's more of a set of accusations by one side who then use the terms of their own accusations to negate any opposition. 'White males in $field are privileged and use their privilege to suppress $group." "No, they aren't." "Your privilege prevents you from seeing the problem, your arguments are invalid."
I can't provide any citations, but I'm pretty sure I've read that hunter-gatherer societies subsisted on a pretty low number of hours per day. It makes inherent sense if you think about how long you can eat off of one deer-sized killed animal or how easy fishing must have been. I know people who go fly-in fishing to remote Canadian lakes who haul in 10s of pounds of fish *sport fishing* where there's rules to follow, versus just netting fish by the hundreds as you could do if you were just interested in eating and where depopulating a lake of fish just meant moving some few miles to another lake where you could spend another few years eating all the fish.
I also wonder how many hours the typical peasant actually worked. I would have expected a lot of days where some work got done (ie, cows need to be milked), but winter would have had a lot less work just due to the seasonality of agriculture and the diminished daylight available.
I also wonder what role religious practices would have had. Rome, for example, had dozes of religious festivals. Many of these were multi-day and involved feasting and other rituals, most of which would have cut into or eliminated a lot of "regular" laboring. Many of these got co-opted by the Catholic church and turned into various feasts and saints days which were still practiced.
Finally, I also wonder about the nature and intensity of labor. Some labor was very physically intensive, but how much of any of it was done with a harsh and coercive overseer, punitive rules and regulations, or the risk of termination and financial ruin? By today's standards I would imagine that these workers would probably be seen as unproductive, taking too much time for child-rearing or domestic duties, etc.
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I haven't run into it at a client yet, the guy I work who has says it really sucks and he had a lot of problems with it.
I guess I don't see what problems it solves, either, although I think it's an interesting idea.
That said, we have been calling for the death of the mainframe for years, as well as the death of tape for years, and neither have died. HDDs will continue to have a place in the world, but they will be by and large replaced with flash. In the enterprise space, changes in software also mean that most of this flash will be server attached rather than part of a SAN.
I think the death of tape hasn't happened because there isn't a functional replacement for it for high capacity, long-term archiving. HDDs don't work well in changers, are more fragile and I don't think anyone trusts their powered off shelf life.
I know that clustered/distributed/server-local storage is becoming a competitor to centralized SAN, but I think it will be something of a limited market. Virtualization and CPU improvements have cut node counts significantly, making it harder to obtain redundant node counts necessary for this to see a lot of adoption.
Even the vendors with decent products now charge so much for licensing that they're not remotely competitive on pricing. I saw a price analysis of VMware vSAN that put it more expensive by 2-3x over a conventional SAN. MS Storage Spaces isn't really flexible enough yet although it's clear MS wants it to go this way, but it doesn't seem like it will be there or agnostic enough for heterogeneous workloads for years.
There is an *Apple* app for their own APs that has a scan mode that lets you scan for APs. It's not as fancy as some I've seen for Android, but it's useful enough to have.
I think the enterprise storage vendors *want* to hang onto HDDs as long as possible because it lets them keep marking up SSDs to stratospheric heights, in addition to charging a whole bunch extra for magic tiering/caching systems so the 6 SSDs you can afford to put into the thing will actually have a chance of getting used.
I also think they're somewhat scared of the evidence of greater durability that SSDs seem to have because a big part of their justification for increased cost for their enterprise SSDs involves using SLC flash.
Now, to be fair, based on what I've seen the vendors are right that you only "need" a subset of your data to live on flash because the rest of your data is a lot colder, and yes, SLC flash has a lot more write durability.
That being said, if MLC/TLC flash is generally more durable than we've seen (I've seen an endurance test that put 6+ PB on an 850 Pro) *and* fairly inexpensive, then even if it has double or triple the failure rate of spinning rust the value proposition still leans towards all flash storage because of the huge increase in performance across an array, decreased power consumption, need for fewer hot spares or parity disks due to faster rebuild times.
Overall storage system prices could be lower, too, because all that caching/tiering management takes real CPU/RAM, resulting in more expensive controller hardware with more complex and costly software.
The new Intel/Micron "flash successor" that's supposed to be faster and more durable?
We don't need to store data indefinitely, we just need to keep Slashdot up. Any lost information will be duplicated here eventually.
The parent article I originally responded to was describing ERP rollouts or something "well known", so those might also fit the endless spiral definition because any project with sufficient business process penetration is likely to have a broad set of stakeholders (bordering on infinite if you take customers into account) and nearly impossible to scope second-order and beyond consequences.
Now that we've exchanged these messages and I've thought about it, one reason (besides project type) why I can see some of these things spiraling (beyond borderline fraudulent vendor behavior) is that there's almost a prisoner's dilemma trap of circumstances that prevents anyone from stopping.
The vendor can't realistically stop billing and keep working, the client has a sunk cost problem (in addition to even a real need for the finished project), and often there's so many stakeholders and decision makers that stopping the project is a major political problem.
It actually becomes easier to keep spending money on a cancerous project than it is to kill it.
I've installed over a dozen of these without any problems, including as an upgrade in an old Dell laptop that got 2+ years of very mobile use and still works fine AFAICT.
Maybe I'm just lucky (or unlucky, although I'd make no more money personally) that I've never seen this happen, and certainly never deliberately.
The only thing that seems to come close are projects that get strung out over time due to customer cancellations of cutover dates or other scheduling complexities. This just kills project efficiency.
Scoping problems happen, too, where some kind of details are missed or problems that don't turn up until you start an upgrade but usually these get dealt with pretty openly through change orders. We rarely miss key details if given access for proper scoping, but occasionally we don't get access but we build that into the project.
The bottom line, though, is that nobody seems to win when project costs spiral. The customer often has a pretty fixed budget or has to explain any significant cost overruns internally.
Now, I mostly also just deal with infrastructure projects, so the project scopes are pretty limited and well defined. Software development projects seem to be the kind of thing that ends up running on forever with no end in sight.
IT people that will give the business as much rope as they want to hang themselves with without pushing back because they are either working by billable hours or are used to working billable hours and are more than willing to let project costs and timelines spiral out of control because that is what puts the meals on the table and they can just blame the project management and requirements when management suddenly decides they would have rather have a project succeed than get every requirement implemented.
This may be a practice that "big consulting" can get away with, but almost never is it something you can get away with in the SMB sphere. Any project that accrues change orders resulting in cost increases of more than about 10% gets turned into a big pissing match and often resulting in a compromises that make nobody really happy.
I've seen squabbles over $300 worth of travel to get someone on site to fix a problem or 2-3 hours of time.
Nobody wins when projects spiral like this; I've actually seen more "damage" done preventing them for spiraling then letting them spiral.
I find this trend quite strange as well. In the late 90s everyone was going on about how technology would allow us to work from anywhere so we could spread out around the country. Things like cramming into an urban area, and flying to conferences were going to become unnecessary.
This happened, except that instead of the jobs going to Kearney, Nebraska, they went to Bangalore, India, when management sorted out they could amplify the savings by hiring even cheaper workers in even cheaper locations.
I think anything over 4 GB is largely wasted in a ESXi environment, although when I have used them as boot devices I've gone with 8GB models as a kind of future proof as I have bad memories of old ESX default installs using partitions too small to accept upgrades.
There may also be some value to underprovisioning the hardware -- if ESXi only uses the first 4 GB, the thumb drive hardware wear leveling will likely give it a longer lifespan by giving it an actual 8 GB to work against, although writes are so infrequent with ESXi USB flash boot media that it's not something I really worry about. Reliability wise they have been great where I've used them, with zero failures over about 10 combined operational years over several hosts.
The redundant SD card systems are better, but typically I've only employed USB boot media for them where it's been the only alternative, like the client project where the SAN vendor couldn't make FC boot from SAN work and it was the only useful
I don't use them much for data storage, although there are some circumstances where they are useful, like laptops with non-upgradable internal storage where I need offline access to multiple gigabytes of data.
This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.
Who's the "you" in this? Any computer system project that is sufficiently embedded in business process has failure modes so far outside the reach of anyone on the technical side that blaming technical people for it is incredibly myopic. They often end up failing even when the technology works right.
And almost all of this is beyond the reach any single individual who's not a senior manager and then there are still conceptual problems with where blame ought to be assigned. And once you get into "you" as a team/group, often with differentiated roles and responsibilities, where failure modes can vary widely.
I work for a small IT consultancy and I work on projects where all kinds of problems crop up. Most don't cause the project to "fail" (even when they go badly, I think there are various organizational and individual reasons for resisting declaring failure) but even when I'm the sole implementer of the project, there are failure reasons that go beyond me. Poor scoping. Client interference. Unrealistic timelines. Inadequate resources. The list is long and full of things I had no control over.
Isn't BDXL good to 100GB per disc?
Now you can say you finally got your 100GB optical discs.
I'd almost wager that the "maximum capacity" of what was talked about in 1999 is largely where BD discs are at today, only they didn't call them Blu-Ray in 1999 and in 2016 100 GB capacity is on the large side of marginally useful.
It's like USB flash drives. The 4 GB size is really only useful for writing CD ISOs for booting CD-less computers. The 8 GB size is really only useful for DVD ISOs. 32 GB and below are pretty much throwaway sizes in general and I don't even buy anything anymore that's not 128GB USB3.
When you take a class or go to conference or have a vendor give away USB drives and they give away like 2 GB USB2 drives it's like an insult. Sometimes I just take them apart and leave them behind in pieces.
Could they apply some kind of filtration film to the inside of cockpit windscreens to block or at least mute the fairly narrow spectrum green lasers use?
I'm only a laser expert to the extent I read the wikipedia laser pointer page, so maybe this doesn't work. I guess I wouldn't expect it to be completely effective, but maybe enough to limit the risk to pilot vision?
You have to get out of the submarine first before you get all that fresh air. You can't just open the door a few hundred feet below the surface.
And even if you get to the surface without suffering from the bends or drowning, you're now facing water temperatures of what -- 70F if you're lucky, and if you're not, much less than that. The same hypothermia that will kill you in space will kill you nearly as fast in the water.
This, and I'd go a couple further.
In a value-neutral way, what's basically happening here is that Microsoft is looking to make the education system produce graduates who can work in IT fields.
However, in a less value-neutral way, they're looking to socialize vocational training for future employees by making the educational system turn out graduates skilled in what they believe is useful in their business.
You could possibly view this as a positive -- schools are open to all kinds of criticism for teaching subjects with little practical application, and in the case of colleges, charging a king's ransom for it, only for students to find they can't earn a living with the education they received.
You could look at this as a negative, in that businesses don't really care (and may actually want) ignorant drones who don't ask questions about history or politics or any of those topics, as long as they are up to speed on what business needs to increase profits. 10 dollars spent by a student educating themselves in what the corporation wants is at least 5 dollars into some executives personal bank account.
My guess is MS motivation is less nefarious in this regard, but I think generally speaking corporate America needs to stop expecting that "Filling out TPS Reports" will be learned before an employee starts and that they would benefit greatly from spending some of their own money providing the knowledge and skills they want employees to have, rather than constantly firing and hiring employees and being frustrated that they can't find people with 10 years' experience in a 5 year old technology.
When I've looked into this, it often works just like that (which, in theory, the earned income tax credit is supposed to do, sort of).
What I've read about that stuck in my head is that everyone earns a basic income, whether you have a job or not.
The tax rate goes up to basically negate the basic income at some point, so if you were in some high-income job your tax rate would go up enough that at net you wouldn't be earning the basic income.
The genius I saw was that there was a reasonable threshold, though, on money earned above the basic income to maintain an incentive to work. If the basic income was, say, $20,000 per year and you got a low paying job making another $10,000 per year you would pay something in taxes, but not so much that you didn't end up netting more than the basic income.
This allow for an incentive to work, prevents people from being "working poor" -- ie, people who work full time at low paying jobs but still have trouble feeding themselves or paying rent, and forces businesses to raise salaries and/or improve working conditions to attract workers so that the burden of work is less than the payoff.
I also think it would push other middle-range salaries up, as there may be talented people who would rather work less (at lesser-skilled or less demanding jobs or fewer hours) than work harder at more demanding jobs whose burden exceeded the payoff.
As I read it, the larger goal is to decrease inequality by raising the cost of labor.
While filling the remaining time with volunteering and strengthening the arts is noble, maybe even desirable in some sense; I'm guessing this modification to your work schedule is precisely why the UBI would fail on a larger scale..
How many additional people engaged in volunteer work does it take to make significant improvements in community well being that government could never achieve?
And by volunteering, I don't mean that bullshit volunteering that passes for community involvement at the corporate level -- bagging rice and beans for giveaway meals wearing team t-shirts doesn't count.
I'm thinking of like neighbors who volunteer to overhaul a playground. A lot of community parks in my city are in crappy shape, with equipment in poor repair, peeling paint, etc. Labor is the most significant element of this task and it wouldn't take much in terms of skill to fix up park equipment.
Hell, if the goddamn materials were even available at a discount, I'd volunteer to patch the countless residential potholes in my neighborhood that are never adequately patched.
How about helping people revise resumes and give them career counseling? That's a direct benefit that gets people into productive work that's difficult to get from any government employment program.
I think there's all manner of useful work that volunteers could do that would cost many multiples if done by the usual government mechanisms. It doesn't get done now because those mechanisms have become so expensive and "government spending" is so hated.
I still think you bias the use case to free-roaming, interactive VR environments with a traditional gaming overhead on top of that. In those cases, it is tremendously computationally intensive and requires a significant amount of hardware in addition to requiring a gaming environment at least on par with the best 2D environments.
Stereoscopic still or video imagery would require a much lighter hardware infrastructure while still providing a pretty immersive experience; I would suspect that clever innovations in image capture and interpolation would increase the freedom of virtual movement to provide a fairly compelling use case for a lot of mundane applications, like real estate, tourism, and even motion picture type entertainment.
Something like that could fairly easily be encapsulated in an all-in-one unit with lesser hardware demands and cheaper and wider adoption. I think I read that 1.5 billion ViewMaster reels have been sold -- and that's a really low-tech, marginally immersive system with no degree of movement.
Maybe I just have narrow horizons, but I find Google cardboard with the street view app in cardboard mode to be pretty immersive by itself, and that's 2D-ish content and pretty static.
I think you underestimate the "good enough" types of VR applications like stereoscopic virtual tours and the like. If you set the standard to be fully rendered, free-roaming environments requiring 4k resolution it becomes complex and prohibitive to most people.
I can't see it working in business environments, either, except as being some new twist on the blade center.
Computers that exceed the performance requirements of the typical business user are already so powerful and inexpensive that it's difficult to imagine any reason to expand some user's computer. I think a lot of present day desktops with solid state disks will probably have enough power that they will exceed the supported lifetime of the operating system installed on them.
About the only place this starts to make sense is with a system that might resemble a smartphone core that can be snapped into a laptop which can then be docked into a desktop. But existing mobile processors aren't well suited to desktop usage, the x86 architecture doesn't lend itself to bolting on additional CPUs and RAM in external cabinets, and smartphones don't have the storage capacity to make such a system truly portable if the users regular data isn't stored on the device or in the cloud.
What might make it interesting would be if the modular components were in effect computers in themselves, and a fully stacked system actually resembled a cluster with the "core" working as kind of root OS and hypervisor manager, and the extended blocks able to supply cpu and ram for user processes, but all transparent to the end user who just see it as a unified desktop.
That makes perfect sense and follows the notion that Catholicism inherited or co-opted a large number of the Roman religious festivals and saw them continue well into middle ages.
I think the idea is that the nature of work was different. It may have been more physically demanding (as any kind of outdoor non-mechanized agriculture would have been) but it certainly didn't involve punching a clock, meetings, or thick layers of middle management with personal agendas.
I'm guessing the principal motivation was not starving and exceeding whatever grain quotas were imposed by the landowners with the idea that surpluses could be put to use for personal gains like feeding your own livestock for improved dietary consumption.
What I think makes modern work so bad is that its so relentlessly metered and cost accounted, resulting in never ending work. Modern cost accounting has taken the surplus out of labor and given it exclusively to the owners.
Not all of us are narrowminded basement dwellers... Some of us are actually interested in things beyond neckbeard technology articles. (Which isn't what made Slashdot great in the first place.)
Then find them elsewhere. There's whole Internet out there with all the inclusiveness debate and articles a person interested in them could want, and then some.
This is a technology oriented site, there's only more technology out there and diluting the content to make it some kind of catch-all site for things doesn't make this site better, it makes it worse. What made Slashdot great wasn't stories about hot button social issues, but stories about technology. Technology has only multiplied since I signed up -- there were no tablets, smartphones, solid state disks, etc etc etc" 10+ years ago.
Inclusiveness and other related debates are largely political and sociological -- you could just find-replace "IT" with "law" or "marketing" or "accounting" or any other field and largely have the same debate.
And calling it "a debate" is pretty thin to begin with, it's more of a set of accusations by one side who then use the terms of their own accusations to negate any opposition. 'White males in $field are privileged and use their privilege to suppress $group." "No, they aren't." "Your privilege prevents you from seeing the problem, your arguments are invalid."
I can't provide any citations, but I'm pretty sure I've read that hunter-gatherer societies subsisted on a pretty low number of hours per day. It makes inherent sense if you think about how long you can eat off of one deer-sized killed animal or how easy fishing must have been. I know people who go fly-in fishing to remote Canadian lakes who haul in 10s of pounds of fish *sport fishing* where there's rules to follow, versus just netting fish by the hundreds as you could do if you were just interested in eating and where depopulating a lake of fish just meant moving some few miles to another lake where you could spend another few years eating all the fish.
I also wonder how many hours the typical peasant actually worked. I would have expected a lot of days where some work got done (ie, cows need to be milked), but winter would have had a lot less work just due to the seasonality of agriculture and the diminished daylight available.
I also wonder what role religious practices would have had. Rome, for example, had dozes of religious festivals. Many of these were multi-day and involved feasting and other rituals, most of which would have cut into or eliminated a lot of "regular" laboring. Many of these got co-opted by the Catholic church and turned into various feasts and saints days which were still practiced.
Finally, I also wonder about the nature and intensity of labor. Some labor was very physically intensive, but how much of any of it was done with a harsh and coercive overseer, punitive rules and regulations, or the risk of termination and financial ruin? By today's standards I would imagine that these workers would probably be seen as unproductive, taking too much time for child-rearing or domestic duties, etc.