I got into computers because in my chosen field, I couldn't make much money. In fact, I'm making about 2/3 of what I was, just two years ago. But I'm certainly enjoying, and have a love of computers and technologies - at least as much as I enjoyed my "chosen field" if not moreso by now. I certainly enjoy computers far more than I imagined I would back when I chose my field.
Since I love it - does that mean I can legitimately be "in" your gang? Even though I originally wanted to be an artist? (actually, I originally wanted to be an Astronaut).
Actually, I work with people who don't really have the love for technology that I do. They don't like to go home and screw around on their home LAN, they don't read Sci Fi books, and wonder about how things will be with their high-tech jobs in the future. They don't go that extra mile to find novel solutions to sticky problems. More often than not - some of these people just try to hide the sticky problems, and hope someone else will have to solve them for them later. Those are the tasks which I especially relish, for some sick reason. . .
In pre-Christian Norway, they had a deal where, you were either a Jarl (Lord), Carl (regular guy), or Thrall (slave). Any Carl who fell on hard times could go to a Jarl, and say "feed me, and I'll be your slave". If the Jarl enters into that agreement, they're obliged to take care of the Thrall. And in return, the Thrall must do anything the Jarl says. The Thrall had few rights, and was essentially property of the Jarl. If the Thrall had any property, the Jarl now owned it.
The only thing that has changed since then, is now, the Jarl no longer has any obligation.
I didn't buy a radar detector and jammer because I'm an idealist about the illegal search and seizure of my private vehicle speed information.
I did it to get out of getting caught speeding. Speeding saves ME time. Time is money. Not paying the fine saves me money. My standard of living is measurably improved by my ability to increase the efficiency of my commute.
Idea #1, people will be apathetic about.
Idea #2, is pragmatism.
I veiw anti-P2P download enforcement as similar to speeding. They can't enforce the law for everyone. Nobody wants to be that unlucky 1 in 1000 who gets sued for $5000 (or more). And downloading music - free or not, is a convenience factor that improves one's standard of living.
Re:How will H usage affect this?
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
Well, in theory, the same amount of moisture will be going BACK into Hydrogen production.
Hydrogen isn't an energy source - it's an energy STORAGE method.
I'd rather be puming water into our atmosphere than CO2. Although I think it would suck to be on the Freeway at Rush Hour in Atlanta on a hot August day with all that steam coming out of all those cars. . . Humid enough there.
From what I can see - this software has a lot of great tools for increasing productivity of a 3d modeller, but in a lot of cases, I saw it making some huge assumptions. Like in the extrusions. How does the software know how to do the rotation, how thick you want the shape, what kind of cross section, how much to curve it. Such assumptions won't make every modeller happy in every case, so they've got to enter this data somehow. So they're only showing half the story here. I assume that the 3rd dimension is just as simple to add in as the other two - but they aren't showing it.
what they're doing in terms of ground-tracking, telemetry, airspace and frequency reservation, etc. This is a not insignificant portion of costs conventional spacelaunch - for the Russians, and the Americans. - you can't just light a fuse, stand back and cheer. Not safely, anyway. And at some point, it's not just the pilot's life and property at stake. Public infrastructure, or even private property (in the case of the crashes on 9/11) can be a significant liability as well.
I mean, sure, it's probably a trivial thing to file a flight path with the FAA to reserve airspace and sit on a radio frequency below 50,000 feet.
But what happens when they get into space? How are they going to tie in with existing safety and space infrastructure? Will their cost savings be the same with that integration? And if they don't how are they going to avoid collisions with existing satellites, etc once regular commercial access is established?
To just change the email system around isn't feasable. The sheer thinking of a WORLDWIDE change to the entire email system is actually quite propsterous.
How is this "Interesting"? At one point in time, there was NO email system. So from that point to this one, everything was "changed around" worldwide. 10 years ago, we were all using DOS/Windows 3.1 - with a few academics and big businesses using Unix and Mainframes. Today, we have Linux on the desktop, a half a dozen flavors of Windows, Unix-based MacOS, etc. A LOT has changed.
It's been said that *THE* killer app of the Internet was email - but since nobody could figure out how to make money off of it, it didn't have the impact that it could have. We're seeing areas where email is weak - and other forms have taken shape in the past 3 or so years (chat, VOIP, etc). And the REAL reason email isn't taking off is because of SPAM - which is caused by an inherent weakness in the system.
I think the time is right - someone out there, right now, (maybe at Apple?) is dreaming up something that will solve the SPAM problem - and allow people to communicate with the best features of Chat, VOIP, and Email. It won't be email - and thus, won't suffer the limitations of email. But it will have all the convenience and utility of email. If it's going to succeed, it'll need to have a FREE (beer and Libre) server, otherwise people will keep deploying sendmail, and we'll keep suffering the indignity of SPAM.
Most likely, people who deploy this will charge money. And sure, the service will be commoditized to death, but not as badly as email. Given the choice of having email for free, and this new "service" for say, $1/month/seat. Or bundled with ISP or a service like Mac.com. Possibly presented with an Ad-Supported free alternative (where SPAMmers PAY the service provider for access to the user's inbox). I think people will choose, over time, to migrate to the alternative.
Wouldn't you PAY for protection from spammers? I know I pay extra money per month to skip commercials on my PVR.
Because the structure of the car physically wraps around the track, a derail is virtually impossible, unless there is severe structural damage to either the car or the track. Unlike conventional rail, where the train sits on top of the track, with 80+ year old systems in place for detecting or acting on faults.
I think that these "flying cars" myths were born as part of a pro-technology PR-campaign. This campaign supports a future where the total population of the Earth is perhaps a few thousand or so, descendents of today's ultra-wealthy. These people will be functionally immortal, through medical technology. All of their needs will be taken care of by self sufficient machines and technology. While the rest of humanity will be wiped out (most likely through starvation, war, possibly even a global plague), since they will no longer be necessary, and are not really the optimal solution for the needs of the Plutocracy.
All of these innovations bring us step by step closer to this future.
Absurd. We are still finding Egyptian mummies and artifacts that are several millenia-old buried in the desert. We could find Saddam's weapons 250 years from now buried somewhere.
The difference is - the people who supposedly buried them are ALIVE TODAY, and it is (should be, if Bush had comitted enough troops) a trivial matter to get these people into custody and question them. And the documentation behind their orders is all sitting in buildings we supposedly control.
If we have not found ANY trace of WMD by now - then there just plain are none.
Instead of punishing an industry for unsafe practices (allowing undocumented foreign nationals to board planes with knives), our supposedly pro-free-market government handed out billions to the airline industry.
And since nearly all business in this country relies strongly on the air-travel industry - it's essentially a subsidization of all business. And we defeated the soviets for what reason?
This isn't any different than how the NeoConservative movement hijacked the Republican party in the 1980's (under the threat of Soviet Nuclear Annihilation), and how the Christian Wackjob movement hijacked the Reform party in 1999 (under threat of the previous Reform party being the only alternative for rational sane Americans).
Dean's hijacked the Democratic party on the basis of the Anti-Plutocrat movement. More power to em. If the internet was a key vehicle for that, I'm not really suprised, but since the internet exists for all people, that sword cuts both ways.
If I were Emporer of Cerritos, I would RIP OUT each and every public phone. I would install VOIP public pay phones using the wireless network.
I would then load all the payphones into the back of a truck, and send them to the local phone company, with a note telling them about how they could have had their business if they would have just built out their network.
Then I'd offer discounts to all residents to sign up for the VOIP service, and ditch their phone company land lines.
Then I'd install Anti-gravity devices under the city, and float it up into the air, and just dump all of the city garbage onto Huntington Beach, or Rolling Hills.
I worked in the backup software industry for 10 years.
There were a couple of vendors that began to address this.
They were bought out by others, and quietly EOL-ed, or market-segmented into uselessness.
The problem is - there's really a bunch of loosely-connected problems that are solved by Tape backup. Or backup, in general. There's backup, disaster recovery, Storage mitigation, like HSM, replication, versioning, open-files, database backup (synchronization of relational files) etc. And differences in OS architecture, and even LAN implimentation make huge differences in how one approaches this problem. (ie. how do you restore an Application? Just it's executable? Libraries? What about shared libraries? How do you talk to the registry? etc. Got a can-opener? How do you restore the OS? is the target system set up and partitioned the same as the system you backed up?) Another problem is the utter stupidity of current file-systems. None of them were really designed with backup in mind, with regard to how metadata is stored.
My opinion, is that, Backup will continue to always be an ugly add-on hack that will never make everybody happy, until it's designed into the OS. Or at the very least, the file-system.
And the way backup software vendors have been dealing with things (ie. it's an opportunity to corner markets and make money off of people desperate to protect their businesses) - I simply don't see ANY vendor today, that's even remotely equipped to rise to the challenge of providing a well-engineered solution. Maybe Microsoft - but despite what Gartner says about them, they just plain don't have the "Vision".
(for those who do not know, "Steve Barkhto" was the alias used by a Microsoft employee back in the late 1980's/early 1990's who went onto newsgroups and slammed OS/2 - the term "Astroturf" as it applies to the computer industry was coined by the folks who figured out Steve Barkhto's real identity).
"Apple isn't perfect, they're just pretty good. Microsoft isn't evil, they're just not as good as they should be. It's perfectly reasonable to use those two facts in making one's security decisions."
And that's the one point I wish could be made to the "single-platform" people.
The people who buy into the philosophy of "trust microsoft, because all the Minicomputer people who fucked us over in the early 80's were evil, and it was confusing supporting all those bizzare unix mutations - let's all standardize on Microsoft, because it's easier, cheaper, and Microsoft doesn't gouge us" While those are fairly valid arguments - they forget that not only from the engineering standpoint of "monoculture is bad" - there's also the economic standpoint that "monopolies INEVITABLY produce mediocre products. Because they CAN."
"So I read the spoiler for Matrix: Revolution, and now I have absolutely no desire to see it. This technique also works for execrable movie adaptations like Timeline.
This saves me: * a metric buttload of money; * from disappointment; * more time for my kids."
You know what? This sounds like the tennents of an absolutely beautiful religion.
I think I'm going to go out and evangelize right now. I think this thing could just sweep the globe.
Next thing you know, they'll start making people sign NDA's for spoilers before seeing a new release. . .
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for me, anyway, there's a big difference:
I got into computers because in my chosen field, I couldn't make much money. In fact, I'm making about 2/3 of what I was, just two years ago. But I'm certainly enjoying, and have a love of computers and technologies - at least as much as I enjoyed my "chosen field" if not moreso by now. I certainly enjoy computers far more than I imagined I would back when I chose my field.
Since I love it - does that mean I can legitimately be "in" your gang? Even though I originally wanted to be an artist? (actually, I originally wanted to be an Astronaut).
Actually, I work with people who don't really have the love for technology that I do. They don't like to go home and screw around on their home LAN, they don't read Sci Fi books, and wonder about how things will be with their high-tech jobs in the future. They don't go that extra mile to find novel solutions to sticky problems. More often than not - some of these people just try to hide the sticky problems, and hope someone else will have to solve them for them later. Those are the tasks which I especially relish, for some sick reason. . .
In pre-Christian Norway, they had a deal where, you were either a Jarl (Lord), Carl (regular guy), or Thrall (slave). Any Carl who fell on hard times could go to a Jarl, and say "feed me, and I'll be your slave".
If the Jarl enters into that agreement, they're obliged to take care of the Thrall. And in return, the Thrall must do anything the Jarl says. The Thrall had few rights, and was essentially property of the Jarl. If the Thrall had any property, the Jarl now owned it.
The only thing that has changed since then, is now, the Jarl no longer has any obligation.
I didn't buy a radar detector and jammer because I'm an idealist about the illegal search and seizure of my private vehicle speed information.
I did it to get out of getting caught speeding. Speeding saves ME time. Time is money. Not paying the fine saves me money. My standard of living is measurably improved by my ability to increase the efficiency of my commute.
Idea #1, people will be apathetic about.
Idea #2, is pragmatism.
I veiw anti-P2P download enforcement as similar to speeding. They can't enforce the law for everyone. Nobody wants to be that unlucky 1 in 1000 who gets sued for $5000 (or more). And downloading music - free or not, is a convenience factor that improves one's standard of living.
Well, in theory, the same amount of moisture will be going BACK into Hydrogen production.
Hydrogen isn't an energy source - it's an energy STORAGE method.
I'd rather be puming water into our atmosphere than CO2. Although I think it would suck to be on the Freeway at Rush Hour in Atlanta on a hot August day with all that steam coming out of all those cars. . . Humid enough there.
From what I can see - this software has a lot of great tools for increasing productivity of a 3d modeller, but in a lot of cases, I saw it making some huge assumptions. Like in the extrusions. How does the software know how to do the rotation, how thick you want the shape, what kind of cross section, how much to curve it. Such assumptions won't make every modeller happy in every case, so they've got to enter this data somehow. So they're only showing half the story here.
I assume that the 3rd dimension is just as simple to add in as the other two - but they aren't showing it.
what they're doing in terms of ground-tracking, telemetry, airspace and frequency reservation, etc.
This is a not insignificant portion of costs conventional spacelaunch - for the Russians, and the Americans. - you can't just light a fuse, stand back and cheer. Not safely, anyway. And at some point, it's not just the pilot's life and property at stake. Public infrastructure, or even private property (in the case of the crashes on 9/11) can be a significant liability as well.
I mean, sure, it's probably a trivial thing to file a flight path with the FAA to reserve airspace and sit on a radio frequency below 50,000 feet.
But what happens when they get into space? How are they going to tie in with existing safety and space infrastructure? Will their cost savings be the same with that integration? And if they don't how are they going to avoid collisions with existing satellites, etc once regular commercial access is established?
IF Walmart joins the fray - expect a quick resolution - for whichever side they choose.
To just change the email system around isn't feasable. The sheer thinking of a WORLDWIDE change to the entire email system is actually quite propsterous.
How is this "Interesting"?
At one point in time, there was NO email system. So from that point to this one, everything was "changed around" worldwide. 10 years ago, we were all using DOS/Windows 3.1 - with a few academics and big businesses using Unix and Mainframes. Today, we have Linux on the desktop, a half a dozen flavors of Windows, Unix-based MacOS, etc. A LOT has changed.
It's been said that *THE* killer app of the Internet was email - but since nobody could figure out how to make money off of it, it didn't have the impact that it could have. We're seeing areas where email is weak - and other forms have taken shape in the past 3 or so years (chat, VOIP, etc). And the REAL reason email isn't taking off is because of SPAM - which is caused by an inherent weakness in the system.
I think the time is right - someone out there, right now, (maybe at Apple?) is dreaming up something that will solve the SPAM problem - and allow people to communicate with the best features of Chat, VOIP, and Email. It won't be email - and thus, won't suffer the limitations of email. But it will have all the convenience and utility of email. If it's going to succeed, it'll need to have a FREE (beer and Libre) server, otherwise people will keep deploying sendmail, and we'll keep suffering the indignity of SPAM.
Most likely, people who deploy this will charge money. And sure, the service will be commoditized to death, but not as badly as email. Given the choice of having email for free, and this new "service" for say, $1/month/seat. Or bundled with ISP or a service like Mac.com. Possibly presented with an Ad-Supported free alternative (where SPAMmers PAY the service provider for access to the user's inbox). I think people will choose, over time, to migrate to the alternative.
Wouldn't you PAY for protection from spammers? I know I pay extra money per month to skip commercials on my PVR.
No, they'll just outsource IP lawyer jobs to India.
Pacbell DSL does not limit my bandwidth.
Pacbell is not a company affiliated with movie studios. Pacbell does not care how many movies I download.
If you go with Cable broadband, you get what you deserve.
Because the structure of the car physically wraps around the track, a derail is virtually impossible, unless there is severe structural damage to either the car or the track. Unlike conventional rail, where the train sits on top of the track, with 80+ year old systems in place for detecting or acting on faults.
Japanese economy problems are mainly stemming from corruption in the major banks that is still being cleaned up
Is that anything like the corruption in the US banks/investment brokers/telecom industry/energy industry/accounting industry/politics industry?
I think that these "flying cars" myths were born as part of a pro-technology PR-campaign. This campaign supports a future where the total population of the Earth is perhaps a few thousand or so, descendents of today's ultra-wealthy. These people will be functionally immortal, through medical technology. All of their needs will be taken care of by self sufficient machines and technology. While the rest of humanity will be wiped out (most likely through starvation, war, possibly even a global plague), since they will no longer be necessary, and are not really the optimal solution for the needs of the Plutocracy.
All of these innovations bring us step by step closer to this future.
Absurd. We are still finding Egyptian mummies and artifacts that are several millenia-old buried in the desert. We could find Saddam's weapons 250 years from now buried somewhere.
The difference is - the people who supposedly buried them are ALIVE TODAY, and it is (should be, if Bush had comitted enough troops) a trivial matter to get these people into custody and question them. And the documentation behind their orders is all sitting in buildings we supposedly control.
If we have not found ANY trace of WMD by now - then there just plain are none.
they used to call it "Death by Power Point".
I'm a whiteboard-man myself.
. . . . and then there are the 1000's of other people while standing in line, decide they need that copy of Weekly World News, and a Snickers bar.
It WAS a subsidy.
Instead of punishing an industry for unsafe practices (allowing undocumented foreign nationals to board planes with knives), our supposedly pro-free-market government handed out billions to the airline industry.
And since nearly all business in this country relies strongly on the air-travel industry - it's essentially a subsidization of all business. And we defeated the soviets for what reason?
This isn't any different than how the NeoConservative movement hijacked the Republican party in the 1980's (under the threat of Soviet Nuclear Annihilation), and how the Christian Wackjob movement hijacked the Reform party in 1999 (under threat of the previous Reform party being the only alternative for rational sane Americans).
Dean's hijacked the Democratic party on the basis of the Anti-Plutocrat movement. More power to em. If the internet was a key vehicle for that, I'm not really suprised, but since the internet exists for all people, that sword cuts both ways.
If I were Emporer of Cerritos, I would RIP OUT each and every public phone. I would install VOIP public pay phones using the wireless network.
I would then load all the payphones into the back of a truck, and send them to the local phone company, with a note telling them about how they could have had their business if they would have just built out their network.
Then I'd offer discounts to all residents to sign up for the VOIP service, and ditch their phone company land lines.
Then I'd install Anti-gravity devices under the city, and float it up into the air, and just dump all of the city garbage onto Huntington Beach, or Rolling Hills.
I worked in the backup software industry for 10 years.
There were a couple of vendors that began to address this.
They were bought out by others, and quietly EOL-ed, or market-segmented into uselessness.
The problem is - there's really a bunch of loosely-connected problems that are solved by Tape backup. Or backup, in general. There's backup, disaster recovery, Storage mitigation, like HSM, replication, versioning, open-files, database backup (synchronization of relational files) etc. And differences in OS architecture, and even LAN implimentation make huge differences in how one approaches this problem. (ie. how do you restore an Application? Just it's executable? Libraries? What about shared libraries? How do you talk to the registry? etc. Got a can-opener? How do you restore the OS? is the target system set up and partitioned the same as the system you backed up?) Another problem is the utter stupidity of current file-systems. None of them were really designed with backup in mind, with regard to how metadata is stored.
My opinion, is that, Backup will continue to always be an ugly add-on hack that will never make everybody happy, until it's designed into the OS. Or at the very least, the file-system.
And the way backup software vendors have been dealing with things (ie. it's an opportunity to corner markets and make money off of people desperate to protect their businesses) - I simply don't see ANY vendor today, that's even remotely equipped to rise to the challenge of providing a well-engineered solution. Maybe Microsoft - but despite what Gartner says about them, they just plain don't have the "Vision".
Must be Steve Barkhto's girlfriend.
(for those who do not know, "Steve Barkhto" was the alias used by a Microsoft employee back in the late 1980's/early 1990's who went onto newsgroups and slammed OS/2 - the term "Astroturf" as it applies to the computer industry was coined by the folks who figured out Steve Barkhto's real identity).
"Apple isn't perfect, they're just pretty good. Microsoft isn't evil, they're just not as good as they should be. It's perfectly reasonable to use those two facts in making one's security decisions."
And that's the one point I wish could be made to the "single-platform" people.
The people who buy into the philosophy of "trust microsoft, because all the Minicomputer people who fucked us over in the early 80's were evil, and it was confusing supporting all those bizzare unix mutations - let's all standardize on Microsoft, because it's easier, cheaper, and Microsoft doesn't gouge us"
While those are fairly valid arguments - they forget that not only from the engineering standpoint of "monoculture is bad" - there's also the economic standpoint that "monopolies INEVITABLY produce mediocre products. Because they CAN."
At this point, I say, FUCK culture.
My culture, your culture, everyone else's culture. Culture is the world's sorriest excuse for bigotry.
Like Bullworth said; let's all keep fucking eachother until we're the same color.
And exactly WHERE is fuckedcompany.com during all of this?
Asleep at the wheel again. . .
"So I read the spoiler for Matrix: Revolution, and now I have absolutely no desire to see it. This technique also works for execrable movie adaptations like Timeline.
This saves me:
* a metric buttload of money;
* from disappointment;
* more time for my kids."
You know what? This sounds like the tennents of an absolutely beautiful religion.
I think I'm going to go out and evangelize right now. I think this thing could just sweep the globe.
Next thing you know, they'll start making people sign NDA's for spoilers before seeing a new release. . .