Maybe I will in 10 years, but I doubt I'll ever dabble with CFD, or massive databases on my desktop machine. It's for email, web browsing, and iTunesing. Maybe a little iDVD-ing. The FSB has a huge impact.
I wouldn't pay $20 for a top of the line G4 power mac right now. Not with it's puny FSB.
I have noticed that tech issues, other then cs outsourcing to india, have not been discussed much in the US's presidential races so far. Personally I am upset that politicians think that welfare, tax reform, and social security are more important then the advancement of our society.
The Children of Tomorrow do not vote, and do not contribute huge sums of money to campaigns.
It would be considered false advertising by anyone not directly or indirectly on the payroll (including politicians, judges, and lawyers) of Comcast, or it's parent companies, or any other ISP that would stand to benefit from being allowed to get away with what's blatantly obviously false advertising.
Don't forget the lawyers putting the kibosh on the Babelfish and Learning to Fly, due to potential liability lawsuits ("My son Bobby put a Trout in his ear, and now he's deaf. I want 25 million dollars!" or "My daughter Suzie jumped off the roof trying to miss the ground, and broke her neck, and I want 50 million dollars!")
So, the Babelfish will need to be wrapped in a towel and placed on the head, and Flying? well, with Disney, we're talking about at faerie dust, right?
Unfortunately, you can't have Public Education without it being a lightning rod for politicization.
What exactly do you teach these kids, and who decides how it's taught?
Do you teach them to use condoms? Or to put a padlock on their zipper? Do you teach them that God Created the Earth in 7 days? Or that Accretion process in a primodial solar gas cloud formed the Earth over the space of millions of years? Do you teach them that wantonly dumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere will doom our species to death due to climate change? Do you teach them that anyone who makes more money than the average person is greedy and evil, and should be put to death as a traitor to Humanity?
It quickly becomes a slippery-slope of political indoctrination.
It's pretty much one of the key problems with Democracy, and freedom and "The Open Society". (that's not to say that closed societies and authoritarian or totalitarian regimes don't have their problems - I certainly prefer free and open societies myself!).
A reasonably clueful Windows Admin CAN configure Microsoft products to be reasonably secure.
But it ain't easy. In some cases, it requires automating scripts to do registry hacks. Quite often, developing this kind of thing takes hours and hours of trial-and-error, because Microsoft's documentation is so poor.
Microsoft's excuse for providing insecurely configured defaults is that they don't want customers to have to sacrifice functionality. And that has a degree of truth to it. But why make it so difficult to configure products to be secure? Why require the ugly hacks? Why not just provide a radio button in their installer wizard like they do for other useless options? And WHY do they force the customer to install an Email Client. When you install Office 2000, the default is to install Outlook - and you can shut that off, but you then also have NO CHOICE but to install IE 5.0, and with IE 5.0 comes Outlook Express, like it or not. So when you're done installing Office 2000 on a machine you get a mail client whether you like it or not. Then you must manually uninstall this client. More onerous, in my opinion, than the IE bundling, because the mail client is so insidious in it's ability to wreak havok. IE is bad, but it often requires a determined hacker to abuse it. But Outlook and OE can really screw things up in a big bad way, simply by accident.
Let's just ignore the workers in this calculation, and shoot straight for the big-boss.
I've heard it said that it's not worth Bill Gates' time to bend over and pick up a $1000 bill laying on the ground - because he makes so much money so quickly based on his stock option value. (some ungodly number like $50,000 a second).
So imagine that this worm ONLY resulting in about an hour or so of lost productivity for the CEO. (I know, Gates' is no longer CEO - but just as a general example).
If a corporate lobbyist is looking to create an excuse for legislation or stronger law enforcement, it's a VERY simple matter to produce obnoxiously inflated figures.
But in my mind - it *IS* the fault of the CIO who chose to standardize on Microsoft Products, then hired network admins with MCSE's without bothering to check if they knew jack shit about adminning Windows. (a few basic suggestions - implement Group Policies to configure Outlook to show extensions of ALL attachments, including shell-scrap files and vbs files, etc. and disable the god-damned preview pane, and enable some filtering of attachments, etc. and this is if you absolutely MUST use Outlook instead of a more secure mail client).
I think it's stereotyping to say that "most (criminals) are pretty stupid."
Actually, most PEOPLE are pretty stupid. Criminals and noncriminals alike. Your statement implies that breaking the law is inherently a stupid act. Lex Luthor would beg to differ. Breaking the law and getting caught is stupid.
I'm still waiting for the keyboard that has a ctrl+c (copy) ctrl+v (paste) ctrl+b (bold) ctrl+i (italics) keys.
Talk about commonly-used combinations! Way more frequently used that SysReq or Scroll Lock. Probably way more used than the Windows key on MOST keyboards.
Actually, I prefer Left-Shift+Right-Shift-Alt-Escape.
Novell Debugger.
THAT'S power man! Netware 3.x and 4.x were funky-ass Operating Systems, but if your boss is looking over your shoulder while your're at the console, editing NCF files or poking through the stack, your job was guaranteed. Try THAT with your stinky Microsoft OS.
You can't debug without installing a massive (and massively expensive) IDE, which totally alters the set of libraries on the machine, which means you're now troubleshooting a fundamentally different machine.
Isn't writing specs just a higher-level programming language (UML)?
That's my problem with this article. Telling misplaced IT workers that it's going to be okay if they just learn to program "lower level programmers" in a more abstract language, they'll find work again.
well, in my opinion, it *IS* racist, and I'm sorry my original comment came off that way. But then, look at all the comments that came back defending what I said.
My personal experiences are also the same. Interestingly - when dealing with Americans of Indian Descent - I don't see that same kind of attitude.
Perhaps it serves Indian nationals well, in the economic climate from which they're currently ascending. In the end, perhaps this cultural issue will go away, as the influx of wealth to the workers in India generates some change.
But my point is - even without the unsensitive cultural observation comment, Outsourcing is still going to be a costly mistake for many corporations, and largely a bovine move to not get left out of the migrating herd.
"The gulf between Marx and reality is one of the reasons that whenever Marxism is implemented, you get a situation like Pol Pot's Cambodia.",
well, actually, the reason for that is, when the people are not free, they can't throw off opression, and no matter how good the initial intentions are, some evil opportunistic bastard will come along and take advantage of the situation. Which is what has happened in the latest series of US Elections. ..
The revolving door of corporate welfare and corporate political donations (perpetuated by the propaganda machine of corporate-controlled media) has encroached on our freedom to the point where we're almost powerless to stop it.
What if - Companies only get IP protection, proportional to the percentage of workers who are American Citizens.
ie. If IBM, (for example) outsources enough workers, so that 70% of them are Americans, their patents only extend to 70% of the term to which they'd ordinarily extend. Then expire. Then Americans who are out of work can use the IP that are now public domain, and build their own companies.
100% American, 100% IP protection. But if the company wants to go it alone with Anarcho-Capitalism, then they sure as hell won't have my tax dollars paying government lawyers and police defending their IP rights.
Are there really really good, really smart Indian programmers? Of course there are! But overall, on the average, outsourcing will end up biting most companies in the ass, in the long run. There are hidden costs to it, like the 11 hour time difference, language barriers, cultural differences (anecdotally, from many accounts, Indians tend not to raise questions, or think independently when a design sucks, etc.)
Worse yet, this will bite the US Software industry in the ass when we suffer from brain drain - when software engineering is no longer a sought after degree. Then the Indians will start their own companies, and eat our lunches.
Worse still - with the decimation of these high-paying jobs, comes an overall lowering of the standard of living here in the US. These companies got rich by selling to the richest market in the world - American consumers. By gutting their own customers, these companies are shooting themselves in the foot.
- - - That said - the writing, in big letters, in crayon, is: Investors should believe that a wise company outsources, because it's a move towards efficiency. It will eliminate those overpaid "web designers" that are sapping corporate profits. Companies are "cutting fat". It's perceived as a gutsy move.
Actually, it's the herd mentality. "Oh my god! IBM's outsourcing, they're going to KILL us unless we outsource too."
But mainly - it's a movement designed to lure investment dollars back to the Tech Industry. It's basically hype. Companies who outsource are selling stock. Not products and services. This is their motivation, their drive. And it's very much a herd mentality. Among investors, AND corporations. They may be heading off a cliff. They may be heading to the slaughterhouse. Or perhaps greener pastures. But make no mistake. The Outsourcing Movement is NOT a drive to offer better service, or find better talent, or even save real money. It's a drive to LOOK like they are.
"The problem is, a lot of the time they put the filter on the PRESSURE side of the fuel pump"
Yeah, I've seen that too. I often wonder what these guys are thinking - you want to trap the crud BEFORE it gets into your pump and gums it up. My inline filter is down where the hard line comes out of the tranny fork.
As a favor to a friend with an 88 Camaro, with the V8, I agreed to swap out spark plugs.
I take great pride at my extensive collection of funky extensions and ujoints for my socket wrench, and for the life of me, I just could not get to one of the plugs. And still, I came out of this with cuts and scrapes all up and down my hands and forearms. Very thin sheetmetal shrouding parts, with sharp edges, and little metal tubes (to the oil cooler? Transmission fluid? don't know what they were for - maybe vacuum lines?)
I can take the engine out of my ACVW in 30 minutes. By myself.
Future cars? They may as well weld the goddamned hood shut.
combine a rubber fuel line passing through a sheetmetal firewall, and engine vibrations, and you have a leak, down onto the very hot cylinder heads.
Or better yet - the brass tube on the 34-PICT carb often came loose (again, from the vibrations), and you have a fuel leak - only this time, the fuel would squirt out onto the distributor: high-voltage sparks + gasoline = fire.
Then you add to this mix, the aluminum alloy engine case and transmission, and you have a fire that will quickly escalate to a point where, even if you were smart enough to carry a fire extinguisher, you'd better be fast, or there's no chance of putting it out. Even if you've got a fire truck handy, once that aluminum case catches, you're pretty much screwed.
I'm talking about our Attorney General, (Asshat) who covered up the bare breasts on the statue of Justice in the Foyer of the DOJ building, where press conferences are usually held.
Slashdot Mirror
The G5 is buttloads faster due to the FSB.
I care not for it's 64-bit-ness.
Maybe I will in 10 years, but I doubt I'll ever dabble with CFD, or massive databases on my desktop machine. It's for email, web browsing, and iTunesing. Maybe a little iDVD-ing. The FSB has a huge impact.
I wouldn't pay $20 for a top of the line G4 power mac right now. Not with it's puny FSB.
I have noticed that tech issues, other then cs outsourcing to india, have not been discussed much in the US's presidential races so far. Personally I am upset that politicians think that welfare, tax reform, and social security are more important then the advancement of our society.
The Children of Tomorrow do not vote, and do not contribute huge sums of money to campaigns.
The crochety rich old men of today DO.
It would be considered false advertising by anyone not directly or indirectly on the payroll (including politicians, judges, and lawyers) of Comcast, or it's parent companies, or any other ISP that would stand to benefit from being allowed to get away with what's blatantly obviously false advertising.
I don't have mod points, but I have to say that I agree emphatically (pitchforks and torches) with the parent poster.
Don't forget the lawyers putting the kibosh on the Babelfish and Learning to Fly, due to potential liability lawsuits ("My son Bobby put a Trout in his ear, and now he's deaf. I want 25 million dollars!" or "My daughter Suzie jumped off the roof trying to miss the ground, and broke her neck, and I want 50 million dollars!")
So, the Babelfish will need to be wrapped in a towel and placed on the head,
and Flying? well, with Disney, we're talking about at faerie dust, right?
I've met tons of warm Germans.
I've never met a shy Italian though.
Unfortunately, you can't have Public Education without it being a lightning rod for politicization.
What exactly do you teach these kids, and who decides how it's taught?
Do you teach them to use condoms? Or to put a padlock on their zipper?
Do you teach them that God Created the Earth in 7 days? Or that Accretion process in a primodial solar gas cloud formed the Earth over the space of millions of years?
Do you teach them that wantonly dumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere will doom our species to death due to climate change?
Do you teach them that anyone who makes more money than the average person is greedy and evil, and should be put to death as a traitor to Humanity?
It quickly becomes a slippery-slope of political indoctrination.
It's pretty much one of the key problems with Democracy, and freedom and "The Open Society". (that's not to say that closed societies and authoritarian or totalitarian regimes don't have their problems - I certainly prefer free and open societies myself!).
Here's the deal.
A reasonably clueful Windows Admin CAN configure Microsoft products to be reasonably secure.
But it ain't easy. In some cases, it requires automating scripts to do registry hacks. Quite often, developing this kind of thing takes hours and hours of trial-and-error, because Microsoft's documentation is so poor.
Microsoft's excuse for providing insecurely configured defaults is that they don't want customers to have to sacrifice functionality. And that has a degree of truth to it. But why make it so difficult to configure products to be secure? Why require the ugly hacks? Why not just provide a radio button in their installer wizard like they do for other useless options? And WHY do they force the customer to install an Email Client. When you install Office 2000, the default is to install Outlook - and you can shut that off, but you then also have NO CHOICE but to install IE 5.0, and with IE 5.0 comes Outlook Express, like it or not. So when you're done installing Office 2000 on a machine you get a mail client whether you like it or not. Then you must manually uninstall this client. More onerous, in my opinion, than the IE bundling, because the mail client is so insidious in it's ability to wreak havok. IE is bad, but it often requires a determined hacker to abuse it. But Outlook and OE can really screw things up in a big bad way, simply by accident.
Let's just ignore the workers in this calculation, and shoot straight for the big-boss.
I've heard it said that it's not worth Bill Gates' time to bend over and pick up a $1000 bill laying on the ground - because he makes so much money so quickly based on his stock option value. (some ungodly number like $50,000 a second).
So imagine that this worm ONLY resulting in about an hour or so of lost productivity for the CEO. (I know, Gates' is no longer CEO - but just as a general example).
If a corporate lobbyist is looking to create an excuse for legislation or stronger law enforcement, it's a VERY simple matter to produce obnoxiously inflated figures.
But in my mind - it *IS* the fault of the CIO who chose to standardize on Microsoft Products, then hired network admins with MCSE's without bothering to check if they knew jack shit about adminning Windows. (a few basic suggestions - implement Group Policies to configure Outlook to show extensions of ALL attachments, including shell-scrap files and vbs files, etc. and disable the god-damned preview pane, and enable some filtering of attachments, etc. and this is if you absolutely MUST use Outlook instead of a more secure mail client).
I think it's stereotyping to say that "most (criminals) are pretty stupid."
Actually, most PEOPLE are pretty stupid. Criminals and noncriminals alike. Your statement implies that breaking the law is inherently a stupid act. Lex Luthor would beg to differ. Breaking the law and getting caught is stupid.
I'm still waiting for the keyboard that has a ctrl+c (copy) ctrl+v (paste) ctrl+b (bold) ctrl+i (italics) keys.
Talk about commonly-used combinations! Way more frequently used that SysReq or Scroll Lock. Probably way more used than the Windows key on MOST keyboards.
. . . . with the one-finger salute?
Actually, I prefer Left-Shift+Right-Shift-Alt-Escape.
Novell Debugger.
THAT'S power man!
Netware 3.x and 4.x were funky-ass Operating Systems, but if your boss is looking over your shoulder while your're at the console, editing NCF files or poking through the stack, your job was guaranteed. Try THAT with your stinky Microsoft OS.
You can't debug without installing a massive (and massively expensive) IDE, which totally alters the set of libraries on the machine, which means you're now troubleshooting a fundamentally different machine.
Who came up with that idea? Some S&M freakazoid?
Isn't writing specs just a higher-level programming language (UML)?
That's my problem with this article. Telling misplaced IT workers that it's going to be okay if they just learn to program "lower level programmers" in a more abstract language, they'll find work again.
That's bullshit.
well, in my opinion, it *IS* racist, and I'm sorry my original comment came off that way. But then, look at all the comments that came back defending what I said.
My personal experiences are also the same. Interestingly - when dealing with Americans of Indian Descent - I don't see that same kind of attitude.
Perhaps it serves Indian nationals well, in the economic climate from which they're currently ascending.
In the end, perhaps this cultural issue will go away, as the influx of wealth to the workers in India generates some change.
But my point is - even without the unsensitive cultural observation comment, Outsourcing is still going to be a costly mistake for many corporations, and largely a bovine move to not get left out of the migrating herd.
"The gulf between Marx and reality is one of the reasons that whenever Marxism is implemented, you get a situation like Pol Pot's Cambodia.",
.
well, actually, the reason for that is, when the people are not free, they can't throw off opression, and no matter how good the initial intentions are, some evil opportunistic bastard will come along and take advantage of the situation.
Which is what has happened in the latest series of US Elections. .
The revolving door of corporate welfare and corporate political donations (perpetuated by the propaganda machine of corporate-controlled media) has encroached on our freedom to the point where we're almost powerless to stop it.
That old fascist saw about "not having anything to worry about as long as you don't have anything to hide" is true?
If that's the case, our Founding Fathers must have been absolute perverted freaks.
One more reason to idolize them!
What if -
Companies only get IP protection, proportional to the percentage of workers who are American Citizens.
ie. If IBM, (for example) outsources enough workers, so that 70% of them are Americans, their patents only extend to 70% of the term to which they'd ordinarily extend. Then expire. Then Americans who are out of work can use the IP that are now public domain, and build their own companies.
100% American, 100% IP protection. But if the company wants to go it alone with Anarcho-Capitalism, then they sure as hell won't have my tax dollars paying government lawyers and police defending their IP rights.
Makes sense to me.
That's all this Indian Outsourcing thing is.
Are there really really good, really smart Indian programmers? Of course there are! But overall, on the average, outsourcing will end up biting most companies in the ass, in the long run. There are hidden costs to it, like the 11 hour time difference, language barriers, cultural differences (anecdotally, from many accounts, Indians tend not to raise questions, or think independently when a design sucks, etc.)
Worse yet, this will bite the US Software industry in the ass when we suffer from brain drain - when software engineering is no longer a sought after degree. Then the Indians will start their own companies, and eat our lunches.
Worse still - with the decimation of these high-paying jobs, comes an overall lowering of the standard of living here in the US. These companies got rich by selling to the richest market in the world - American consumers. By gutting their own customers, these companies are shooting themselves in the foot.
- - -
That said - the writing, in big letters, in crayon, is:
Investors should believe that a wise company outsources, because it's a move towards efficiency. It will eliminate those overpaid "web designers" that are sapping corporate profits. Companies are "cutting fat". It's perceived as a gutsy move.
Actually, it's the herd mentality. "Oh my god! IBM's outsourcing, they're going to KILL us unless we outsource too."
But mainly - it's a movement designed to lure investment dollars back to the Tech Industry. It's basically hype. Companies who outsource are selling stock. Not products and services. This is their motivation, their drive. And it's very much a herd mentality. Among investors, AND corporations. They may be heading off a cliff. They may be heading to the slaughterhouse. Or perhaps greener pastures. But make no mistake. The Outsourcing Movement is NOT a drive to offer better service, or find better talent, or even save real money. It's a drive to LOOK like they are.
Hell, I'm down there every 500 miles adjusting the valves anyway.
"The problem is, a lot of the time they put the filter on the PRESSURE side of the fuel pump"
Yeah, I've seen that too. I often wonder what these guys are thinking - you want to trap the crud BEFORE it gets into your pump and gums it up. My inline filter is down where the hard line comes out of the tranny fork.
Wow, do I agree with this one!
As a favor to a friend with an 88 Camaro, with the V8, I agreed to swap out spark plugs.
I take great pride at my extensive collection of funky extensions and ujoints for my socket wrench, and for the life of me, I just could not get to one of the plugs. And still, I came out of this with cuts and scrapes all up and down my hands and forearms. Very thin sheetmetal shrouding parts, with sharp edges, and little metal tubes (to the oil cooler? Transmission fluid? don't know what they were for - maybe vacuum lines?)
I can take the engine out of my ACVW in 30 minutes. By myself.
Future cars? They may as well weld the goddamned hood shut.
Old Beetles commonly caught fire -
combine a rubber fuel line passing through a sheetmetal firewall, and engine vibrations, and you have a leak, down onto the very hot cylinder heads.
Or better yet - the brass tube on the 34-PICT carb often came loose (again, from the vibrations), and you have a fuel leak - only this time, the fuel would squirt out onto the distributor: high-voltage sparks + gasoline = fire.
Then you add to this mix, the aluminum alloy engine case and transmission, and you have a fire that will quickly escalate to a point where, even if you were smart enough to carry a fire extinguisher, you'd better be fast, or there's no chance of putting it out. Even if you've got a fire truck handy, once that aluminum case catches, you're pretty much screwed.
I'm talking about our Attorney General, (Asshat) who covered up the bare breasts on the statue of Justice in the Foyer of the DOJ building, where press conferences are usually held.
I wonder if people will finally get the idea to stop voting for Bush/Ashcroft/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld when they outlaw porn.