I admit my projects require more SA than most, but I rather be late than ridiculed by the press because a high-profile project didn't work accordingly to plan.
Bingo. You accept a certain degree of risk in your attempt to maximize your revenue and minimize your costs.
In a business (not necessarily writing the software with the intent to sell it), you have deadlines (which you mention later in your comment), budgets, and available resources. Your goal is to make maximum use of your resources, stay on budget, and ship before the deadline. This almost always means taking on risks of defects, or knowing that there will be defects, but the costs of the defect are less than the costs of delaying the project and fixing them. These costs include implied risks of security issues in poorly tested code.
In other words, the decision to do a good, thorough job with your programming project is frequently a business decision, made by managers, not programmers. A good programmer will see that he's more productive than his peers, and will try to squeeze in some extra quality before checking his work in, but less than half of all programmers are of above-average skill, so at least half of all projects, or at least half of any large project, will meet business requirements, but will be shitty, because your programmers are rushed or specifically told not to do the level of QA that a high-quality project should have.
In these settings, this isn't a programmer problem, it's a business problem.
In some (larger) IT shops, the guys doing the development are never going to be around to do the maintenance. Some outsourcing arrangements actually make that part of the contract. ("We'll write it, but you have to support it after the first N months.") What incentive do they have to produce perfect code? Well-written code?
In my experience, most people in an IT shop that become excellent programmers want to move on to things other than programming. That may not be the case in a company devoted to software development, but an awful lot of software is written by companies that aren't in the business of writing software.
You should write a book. "How to be a perfect programmer that writes code with no bugs in less time than everyone else!" You'd literally revolutionize the software industry. Patent your secret. But get it out there somehow. We need you. Clearly it's not as easy as you suggest, because we have armies of software developers that aren't doing it.
Re:New Update since i submited this yesterday
on
TimeWarner DNS Hijacking
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm part of an organization that works on disabling botnets together with other people from various irc networks. I do not understand why timewarner did not even bother try to contact us - even though I had contact to their abuse desk long time ago.
Perhaps they're simply unaware that you exist? I'm sure the people staffing abuse@ are a bit separated from the people making these types of decisions.
As for EFnet, TW should have told the staff that they suspected a botnet and give details. This would have been way more efficient and not just annoy all affected (and possibly not even infected) users.
You must not be familiar with EFnet. Most operators were former (and not necessarily reformed) packet kiddies running their own botnets. Being an operator is more about the length of your e-penis and giving your friends l33t bogus vanity hostnames than actually doing anything to benefit the users. (Though there are exceptions.)
While I agree that those four issues are relatively weak (but still important when costing solutions for the problem), the biggest problem with parachutes is that exceedingly few air accidents occur in a manner that allows parachutes to be useful. If you suffer a catastrophic failure mid-flight, it's unlikely that you're going to have time to get parachutes on everyone and get them all out the door, even assuming the plane is continuing to fly straight and level (imagine trying to accomplish this while you're spiraling toward the ground). If you do have time to do all of that, then the plane really isn't in that bad of shape and it's more likely that the landing will be safer, even if it's unpowered with some critical systems failed, than throwing everyone out the door to fend for themselves.
For accidents that occur during landing or just after take-off, even ignoring the time factor, your altitude is far too low to safely bail out.
There could be some scenarios where parachutes would save lives, and the crew would be in a position to know that parachutes would be safer than trying to land, but I rather suspect these scenarios are going to be rare.
At some point you have to ask yourself if the odds of this solution saving lives justify the enormous costs of implementing it.
How can you tell, though? You have to have faith that the site/service you're downloading from is authorized to redistribute it. Rather than going after those sharing the materials, the notice would seem to target the downloaders. If I were a student there, does that mean I'm on the hook for verifying that everything I'm about to download is being offered with the permission of the copyright holder? This seems like a large, arbitrary burden to place on consumers of Internet content.
It's possible that they're actually going after those redistributing content, not merely downloading it, since the RIAA has largely succeeded in confusing people into thinking those terms mean the same thing, but who knows?
What does it matter what role the individuals are in?
Machines are different because they aren't agents of the business. If a clerk at a store gave you a free TV every time you came in, you're damn right you'd both be going to jail and you'd almost certainly be required to compensate the store. Just because it's a free soda doesn't make it morally "right", though the loss is so small that it's not worth calling the cops or filing a civil suit. Nobody cares about a free soda.
And here's the other thing: "pay a fine" and "go to jail" are criminal consequences. You have usually to prove intent to be convicted of a crime. But the civil justice system works differently, and if you got the money improperly, regardless of your intentions, you can be compelled to return it. Of course, this would only be worth it if the likely compensation would be more than the costs of bringing a suit, so, again, a free soda isn't worth it, but $1000 might be.
Either way, it seems obvious that the law is on the casino's side, though I think criminal charges might be harder to prove. But you don't need to be convicted of a crime to be required to return money that you obtained improperly.
There's a third option here, in addition to calling someone a criminal and just writing off the loss. If these people were paid money that they were not entitled to, regardless of whether or not they knew it, regardless of whether they intended to exploit the obvious flaw in the machine, regardless of whether they committed a crime, the casino could still be entitled to getting that money back through the civil courts. Is it fair that these people walked out with more money than they walked in with, by virtue of a broken machine? They didn't earn that money and they didn't win it. Why is it fair that they be allowed to keep it? Are we just wanting to punish The Man? Big Business is bad, so they should just drop it?
What if this wasn't a casino and was just some old guy on the street? "That'll be $10!" "OK, I think this is a $10.." (hands over a $100) "Yep, that'll do! Bye!" Is that fair?
I'd probably not drain the ATM, but, I'd go back periodically and try it a few more times for sure. I'd keep the money and see if they ever caught the mistake.
OK, so let's change the scenario a little bit. A salesman is going door-to-door and stops at your grandmother's. She's half blind, and doesn't realize she's handing out $100 bills instead of $10. He snickers quietly to himself, comes back periodically and tries selling her more stuff, keeping the money she's clearly overpaying.
As long as he's not forcing her to give him the money, it's not theft, right? The next time he comes over while you're around, you'll just make him a cup of tea, right?
I was just about to post the same thing. If I needed an artificial hand, I'd want it to look like the Terminator's or Anakin's replacement hand. And maybe it could have a glove or something that you could wear if you didn't want to attract attention, but I want to be able to scare the crap out of kids if I want to.
And while I'm thinking in this direction, why does it have to be shaped like a hand at all? Build a platform out of it with a universal socket that I can put whatever tools I want to on it. A traditional hand could just be one of many attachments. I should be able to swap it out with a chain saw.
There are a lot of different roles in the "IT industry". Since you don't specify what exactly you think you'd like to do, you're going to get a lot of responses that are all over the place.
For getting your first IT job, the nature of your degree doesn't matter a whole lot. Your knowledge, skills and interests do. For getting your second job, your degree matters even less, and your resume and demonstrable skills matter even more.
Choose a degree that is going to give you the knowledge you want for the field you want to enter. Most of the smartest people that I work with, programmers, engineers, system administrators, do not even have a computer- or engineering-related degree. They have degrees in physics, music and meteorology. But these are the guys that have a passion for the type of work they do, so they came into this with a rich skill set and a desire to learn more.
If you don't have this skill set and don't think it's likely you'll pick it up by the time you're ready for a job, I would recommend sticking to an IT-related degree, only because it's going to force you to take the right classes to build that knowledge up. If you're more interested in doing things like management, or the business side, take lots of business classes. If you're more interested in programming and practical implementation (appropriate for most corporate software development), I would encourage engineering classes/degrees over science ones.
I'm afraid I can't give you a specific degree recommendation because your requirements aren't specific enough. But I can say that the degree itself matters less than you might think in IT. (Now, if you were going into business/management, the degree matters a lot more. It's a cultural thing.)
Does your university give you access to a counselor? Make an appointment to see him or her and ask the same question. You might even approach the problem by coming up with a list of classes that you'd like to take, and see what degree naturally lines up with those classes.
Also, if you intend to work IT in a corporate setting, I would definitely pick up some business/finance and maybe even some management classes along the way. Sometimes the best technical solution is not the best solution for the business, and it's irritating to deal with really smart technical people that are really dumb from a finance perspective and don't understand that ("Sunk cost? What's that?").
In many states/municipalities, no they are not allowed to [use the PU rights-of-way granted to the telcos]
I don't have enough information to disagree with this, but one of the provisions in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the requirement that the telcos allow competitors access to their rights-of-way. It's possible some state/local regulations preempt that, I suppose.
This isn't some new isue. It's the law & has been for close to 20 years.
If things were this simple, they'd be breaking the law and all of this discussion is academic and moot.
One of the concessions that the big Telco's made in order to be granted their monopoly status
Either I'm misunderstanding you, or you seem to have your history a bit confused. The major telephone companies had been considered a natural monopoly for the better part of the 20th century. It wasn't until the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that the telcos were forced to allow their competitors access to their lines.
In Chicago, they brought several lawsuits agains the municipalities which were debating municiple loops - claiming their garanteed monopoly status prevented the towns from entering into competition with them. Additionally, they mounted several large shill campaigns to persuade the people to vote against fighting the lawsuits.
So, if I understand what you're saying, the city of Chicago entered into a contract that prevents them from doing their own thing, and the people of Chicago voted to keep it that way. I still say the solution to this problem is in Chicago. You can't just keep escalating to higher levels of government when you don't get your way in your own community. Just because people were misled doesn't mean you need the next-higher-up government to step in and force them to do something they believe they don't want to do. That runs counter to the principles of democracy.
However, if they are going to have a granted monopoly and use PU easments, then they should be held to the rules by which those were granted.
In my opinion, public utility easements should allow access to anyone wanting to provide those telco services, not just the incumbent. That would seem (to me) to be a more logical thing to require than requiring the telcos to "give up" that access. (Then nobody would be able to offer those services, right?) I was actually under the impression that this was the way things were, but you've pointed out that that's not the case, so if that's true, you absolutely have a valid point.
If by "paid for with tax dollars" you mean "paid for as part of a deal to bring those services to that community earlier than they would have otherwise, in exchange for money", yes. And no, I don't think that is a problem. The fact that the community may have less competition than it did before might still be a problem, but there are better solutions to that problem than confiscating this new infrastructure that Verizon is paying to lay down.
It's using PU right of way regulations to drop it's big ass boxes in front of peoples houses.
Are potential competitors not allowed to do this?
The FIOS project is also part of the $9B+ in tax credits & grants that the telcos have received over the last decade with the garuntee that we would all have 40MB service 5 years ago.
So your government made a deal with the telcos, and because they agreed to the deal, there's a hidden provision in there that makes everything they build community property? If you're a budding new community, and there isn't a telco willing to give anybody in your community high-speed Internet, wouldn't you consider giving them deals or concessions to make it happen? Your community is effectively contracting with the telco. The telco isn't "raping" your little town and they don't deserve to automatically have the things that they're building in order to satisfy that agreement simply turned over to the community.
Now, I'm not saying that "last mile" fiber should be entirely under private control, because there are lots of advantages to allowing a variety of service providers using that fiber constructively, but they're in the process of rolling this out to communities today. Now is the time to put these requirements in (or as I suggested in my earlier post, create a municipal entity that either does this work themselves, or contracts out with someone like Verizon with the understanding that it will be publicly-owned). It's completely unreasonable to wait until they've rolled out this new infrastructure and then try to do some hand-waving about the reasons copper was opened up and suggest that the same reasons apply to fiber. One of the big assumptions behind opening up the copper infrastructure was that it was cost prohibitive for anyone to roll out their own infrastructure to parallel copper. Verizon is clearly doing that, so this argument no longer holds a lot of water.
the telco's spend $12M to defeat plans to run Municiple Fiber to EVERY HOME
How do they accomplish this? If your local government is making poor decisions, that's a problem your local government needs to deal with. The solution is not necessarily more government.
After that, they are doing less, charging more, and killing all forms of competition in the process.
I'm not going to disagree with any of this. I don't have all of the facts, but I have no reason to say your conclusions are wrong here. The thing I have a problem with is the idea that any new infrastructure that these guys roll out should automatically be subject to the same "open to competitors" requirement that copper had. There were very specific reasons they did this with copper. I would encourage you to read up on those reasons and ask yourself how many of those apply to this new fiber roll-out.
I agree that the FCC isn't doing the best job with respect to telco vs. cable regulation. It would be far more useful to regulate things based on what services are provided rather than what type of physical connection it is. It's all going to be IP-based in the future, so why treat copper differently from fiber, and fiber differently from coax when it comes to services? Just as you can get homes in many areas with either gas or electric heat, it's still just heat. It shouldn't matter if your home is wired for telephone via copper, fiber or coax. It's still telephone and should be regulated as telephone. But I think the reasons behind opening up copper are largely specific to the fact that it's existing copper infrastructure, and more specifically, that nobody else was likely to be able to parallel it.
If anything, I would even go so far as to say that the presence of satellite, cable and cellular, the convergence of telephony and other services across all of these different providers, is an excellent reason why it's
If not, they are scrapping something that I believe they have a mandate to provide to everyone.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of requiring the telcos to open up their copper infrastructure to competitors. It's not a matter of ensuring equal access to everyone's home, it's a matter of allowing competition to survive where it's impractical to lay down new infrastructure. Here, Verizon *is* laying down new infrastructure, so the case could be made that it's no longer impractical to do so. One of the big arguments made when deciding to require the telcos to lease out their own lines to their competitors was that these lines were in some cases paid for using tax dollars, and there's no way a competitor is going to be able to lay their own lines. While opening up these new lines might still be the right thing to do, it most certainly shouldn't be automatic or implied. If we want to change the way this roll-out works, *now* is the time to do so, either by setting up municipal "last mile" connections that can reasonably be opened up to whoever wants to use them, or by requiring that Verizon do the same up front. Yes, Verizon's sitting on a lot of infrastructure, but, again, this is new stuff. You can't single Verizon out and say their new deployment needs to be opened up to their competitors without applying the same rationale to every new project companies are coming out with. Who wants to tell the satellite companies that? After all, Mom And Pop Telephone isn't going to be able to launch their own satellites. It's only fair, right?
It's my understanding (that I'm having trouble verifying with an official source) is that from a "new tenant"'s point of view, they're eligible for exactly the same standard analog services that they'd otherwise be eligible for. A regular phone line over fiber will work and cost exactly what a regular phone line over copper would. The fact that it's fiber to the building doesn't matter in that respect. It should be a black box as far as the customer is concerned and part of the infrastructure, not CPE.
It's just stuff like DSL, which is copper-specific, that the home will no longer support. But not all homes get DSL today anyway, so if you're a DSL person, that's usually a question that you'd ask when you're looking for a new apartment/house, right? So, "no DSL, but you can get Verizon's new high-speed service," isn't something I would expect people will flip out and cry to the FCC about. If it's a deal-breaker, then it's a deal-breaker. Move on.
So any time somebody runs a new (insert technology name here) line to your house, they should be required to share it with their competitors? I kind of understood why they did this with copper, but this is something completely new.
If you want an "open" last mile of fiber, do it as a municipal project and run it like a public utility. Don't stomp your feet and cry because a private business does it first and won't give it away.
I loved these stories. My greatest fear is that with such lackluster interest from the major studios so far, when it finally does get made, it'll be done on a low budget and end up disappointing.
You're looking for a process that takes water as input, produces only water as output, and, in between, produces energy?
The only practical way water can be used for energy is by splitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen (using electricity), putting the hydrogen in a car, and later burning it in the presence of oxygen to release the same amount of energy you used splitting them up in the first place. This is a "water in, water out" process, but between the two steps, there is no energy surplus (as the laws of thermodynamics predict). The hydrogen is only used to store potential energy that was consumed separating it from the water, to be used later to actually power the car.
Since the energy you get by burning the hydrogen is the same as the energy you had to consume separating it from the water in the first place, anybody telling you that you can use water as fuel in this manner (suggesting that the energy from burning hydrogen can be used to electrolyze even more hydrogen from your "water" fuel, keeping the cycle going indefinitely) is lying and trying to scam you. These are absolutely fraudulent. (Consider that if water vapor is your only exhaust, it should be trivial to reclaim this water vapor and put it back into your water tank, giving you a perpetual motion machine.)
I don't think it's possible to provide an infinite amount of bandwidth. So long as the host from which you are transferring data has more bandwidth than you do, and that extends to every hop between them and you, downloads from that host will always be capable of saturating your own Internet connection.
Haven't you noticed that download times tend to go down the faster your Internet connection is? The speed of your personal Internet connection is almost always the limiting factor in Internet data transfers. If you've been sold a 1Mbit or a 10Mbit connection, and you aren't getting the advertised rate, that's a completely different problem that you need to take up with your ISP. If the ISP were to beef up its internal network and its connections to its Internet peers, but kept its residential connections where they are today, this would actually make the problem worse, because it would be easier for Internet traffic to saturate your personal Internet connection.
The only way you can guarantee that you'll never saturate your Internet connection is to get an Internet connection that is faster than the sum of the upstream Internet connections. But all you're really doing is moving the choke point away from you. If your IPTV stream passes over that same choke point when it's saturated, packets still have to be dropped or delayed, and without QoS letting you prioritize, those IPTV packets will be dropped/delayed equally with your bulk data transfers.
ISPs can implement some QoS (good!) but only based on the type of service, not its source/destination/ownership/content... In sync with this post by jonwil, who I fully agree with.
Except that QoS can only be applied to Internet traffic after it arrives within the ISP's network. How are you going to determine what traffic is IPTV and what traffic is Other Stuff that somebody just wants to see prioritized? I could make a lot of money setting up a content distribution service that took advantage of IPTV prioritization by sending my file transfers over a data transfer protocol that simulated IPTV.
In addition, since QoS flags sent over the public Internet can't be trusted, commercial IPTV providers are putting an awful lot of faith in the ability of the intermediate backbone providers to keep their packets shuffling along. With no business relationship between the content providers and these backbone providers, is it really appropriate to base your entire content distribution model on an entity that you have no control over?
The only sane way to start up an IPTV service that intends to compete with Cable TV (or an ISP-provided IPTV service) is to contract with the ISPs directly and set up a dedicated QoS-aware network connection to the ISP's network, and ask the ISP to respect those QoS flags all the way to the customer's premises. An ISP can do that easily enough in a non-discriminatory manner, but who pays for all of that? If the IPTV providers pay for it, wouldn't that be giving "preference" to those who have done so over those who haven't? That doesn't sound very "neutral" to me. Should the customers pay for it? This legislation says no-way! Should the ISP simply eat the cost? How is that fair?
I agree that QoS itself is fine (and necessary). The problem here is who pays for it.
An IPTV provider (for example) can't just do QoS over the public Internet, and hope that every random ISP will respect the QoS flags and prioritize their IPTV streams over random bulk data transfers. If that were the case, it would be easily abused. The IPTV provider must contract with individual ISPs for dedicated data connections fit to carry QoS-flagged traffic to the ISP's network.
Who pays for that?
If the IPTV provider pays for it (which seems logical, since they're the ones that need the service), doesn't that mean they're paying for "preferential" treatment? If a different IPTV provider saw this arrangement, would they be justified in crying foul because their IPTV packets are treated like other random Internet data and dropped when customers' broadband connections become saturated with file downloads and the like?
If the ISP pays for it instead (thus allowing "equal access" to any content provider that wants a specially-configured data connection directly to the ISP), how can they recover those costs? The legislation here explicitly prohibits them from charging customers.
You can do QoS-enabled traffic on a per-service basis, and be non-discriminatory about it, but there has to be new infrastructure built for every one of those arrangements, and somebody has to pay for it. I'm not convinced any of this is possible with this legislation or the commonly understood definition of "network neutrality".
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Bingo. You accept a certain degree of risk in your attempt to maximize your revenue and minimize your costs.
In a business (not necessarily writing the software with the intent to sell it), you have deadlines (which you mention later in your comment), budgets, and available resources. Your goal is to make maximum use of your resources, stay on budget, and ship before the deadline. This almost always means taking on risks of defects, or knowing that there will be defects, but the costs of the defect are less than the costs of delaying the project and fixing them. These costs include implied risks of security issues in poorly tested code.
In other words, the decision to do a good, thorough job with your programming project is frequently a business decision, made by managers, not programmers. A good programmer will see that he's more productive than his peers, and will try to squeeze in some extra quality before checking his work in, but less than half of all programmers are of above-average skill, so at least half of all projects, or at least half of any large project, will meet business requirements, but will be shitty, because your programmers are rushed or specifically told not to do the level of QA that a high-quality project should have.
In these settings, this isn't a programmer problem, it's a business problem.
In some (larger) IT shops, the guys doing the development are never going to be around to do the maintenance. Some outsourcing arrangements actually make that part of the contract. ("We'll write it, but you have to support it after the first N months.") What incentive do they have to produce perfect code? Well-written code?
In my experience, most people in an IT shop that become excellent programmers want to move on to things other than programming. That may not be the case in a company devoted to software development, but an awful lot of software is written by companies that aren't in the business of writing software.
You should write a book. "How to be a perfect programmer that writes code with no bugs in less time than everyone else!" You'd literally revolutionize the software industry. Patent your secret. But get it out there somehow. We need you. Clearly it's not as easy as you suggest, because we have armies of software developers that aren't doing it.
Perhaps they're simply unaware that you exist? I'm sure the people staffing abuse@ are a bit separated from the people making these types of decisions.
You must not be familiar with EFnet. Most operators were former (and not necessarily reformed) packet kiddies running their own botnets. Being an operator is more about the length of your e-penis and giving your friends l33t bogus vanity hostnames than actually doing anything to benefit the users. (Though there are exceptions.)
While I agree that those four issues are relatively weak (but still important when costing solutions for the problem), the biggest problem with parachutes is that exceedingly few air accidents occur in a manner that allows parachutes to be useful. If you suffer a catastrophic failure mid-flight, it's unlikely that you're going to have time to get parachutes on everyone and get them all out the door, even assuming the plane is continuing to fly straight and level (imagine trying to accomplish this while you're spiraling toward the ground). If you do have time to do all of that, then the plane really isn't in that bad of shape and it's more likely that the landing will be safer, even if it's unpowered with some critical systems failed, than throwing everyone out the door to fend for themselves.
For accidents that occur during landing or just after take-off, even ignoring the time factor, your altitude is far too low to safely bail out.
There could be some scenarios where parachutes would save lives, and the crew would be in a position to know that parachutes would be safer than trying to land, but I rather suspect these scenarios are going to be rare.
At some point you have to ask yourself if the odds of this solution saving lives justify the enormous costs of implementing it.
How can you tell, though? You have to have faith that the site/service you're downloading from is authorized to redistribute it. Rather than going after those sharing the materials, the notice would seem to target the downloaders. If I were a student there, does that mean I'm on the hook for verifying that everything I'm about to download is being offered with the permission of the copyright holder? This seems like a large, arbitrary burden to place on consumers of Internet content.
It's possible that they're actually going after those redistributing content, not merely downloading it, since the RIAA has largely succeeded in confusing people into thinking those terms mean the same thing, but who knows?
What does it matter what role the individuals are in?
Machines are different because they aren't agents of the business. If a clerk at a store gave you a free TV every time you came in, you're damn right you'd both be going to jail and you'd almost certainly be required to compensate the store. Just because it's a free soda doesn't make it morally "right", though the loss is so small that it's not worth calling the cops or filing a civil suit. Nobody cares about a free soda.
And here's the other thing: "pay a fine" and "go to jail" are criminal consequences. You have usually to prove intent to be convicted of a crime. But the civil justice system works differently, and if you got the money improperly, regardless of your intentions, you can be compelled to return it. Of course, this would only be worth it if the likely compensation would be more than the costs of bringing a suit, so, again, a free soda isn't worth it, but $1000 might be.
Either way, it seems obvious that the law is on the casino's side, though I think criminal charges might be harder to prove. But you don't need to be convicted of a crime to be required to return money that you obtained improperly.
There's a third option here, in addition to calling someone a criminal and just writing off the loss. If these people were paid money that they were not entitled to, regardless of whether or not they knew it, regardless of whether they intended to exploit the obvious flaw in the machine, regardless of whether they committed a crime, the casino could still be entitled to getting that money back through the civil courts. Is it fair that these people walked out with more money than they walked in with, by virtue of a broken machine? They didn't earn that money and they didn't win it. Why is it fair that they be allowed to keep it? Are we just wanting to punish The Man? Big Business is bad, so they should just drop it?
What if this wasn't a casino and was just some old guy on the street? "That'll be $10!" "OK, I think this is a $10.." (hands over a $100) "Yep, that'll do! Bye!" Is that fair?
OK, so let's change the scenario a little bit. A salesman is going door-to-door and stops at your grandmother's. She's half blind, and doesn't realize she's handing out $100 bills instead of $10. He snickers quietly to himself, comes back periodically and tries selling her more stuff, keeping the money she's clearly overpaying.
As long as he's not forcing her to give him the money, it's not theft, right? The next time he comes over while you're around, you'll just make him a cup of tea, right?
I was just about to post the same thing. If I needed an artificial hand, I'd want it to look like the Terminator's or Anakin's replacement hand. And maybe it could have a glove or something that you could wear if you didn't want to attract attention, but I want to be able to scare the crap out of kids if I want to.
And while I'm thinking in this direction, why does it have to be shaped like a hand at all? Build a platform out of it with a universal socket that I can put whatever tools I want to on it. A traditional hand could just be one of many attachments. I should be able to swap it out with a chain saw.
There are a lot of different roles in the "IT industry". Since you don't specify what exactly you think you'd like to do, you're going to get a lot of responses that are all over the place.
For getting your first IT job, the nature of your degree doesn't matter a whole lot. Your knowledge, skills and interests do. For getting your second job, your degree matters even less, and your resume and demonstrable skills matter even more.
Choose a degree that is going to give you the knowledge you want for the field you want to enter. Most of the smartest people that I work with, programmers, engineers, system administrators, do not even have a computer- or engineering-related degree. They have degrees in physics, music and meteorology. But these are the guys that have a passion for the type of work they do, so they came into this with a rich skill set and a desire to learn more.
If you don't have this skill set and don't think it's likely you'll pick it up by the time you're ready for a job, I would recommend sticking to an IT-related degree, only because it's going to force you to take the right classes to build that knowledge up. If you're more interested in doing things like management, or the business side, take lots of business classes. If you're more interested in programming and practical implementation (appropriate for most corporate software development), I would encourage engineering classes/degrees over science ones.
I'm afraid I can't give you a specific degree recommendation because your requirements aren't specific enough. But I can say that the degree itself matters less than you might think in IT. (Now, if you were going into business/management, the degree matters a lot more. It's a cultural thing.)
Does your university give you access to a counselor? Make an appointment to see him or her and ask the same question. You might even approach the problem by coming up with a list of classes that you'd like to take, and see what degree naturally lines up with those classes.
Also, if you intend to work IT in a corporate setting, I would definitely pick up some business/finance and maybe even some management classes along the way. Sometimes the best technical solution is not the best solution for the business, and it's irritating to deal with really smart technical people that are really dumb from a finance perspective and don't understand that ("Sunk cost? What's that?").
I wonder what businesses would say if you actually put something like that on your resume:
* Low Slashdot UID
I don't have enough information to disagree with this, but one of the provisions in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the requirement that the telcos allow competitors access to their rights-of-way. It's possible some state/local regulations preempt that, I suppose.
If things were this simple, they'd be breaking the law and all of this discussion is academic and moot.
Either I'm misunderstanding you, or you seem to have your history a bit confused. The major telephone companies had been considered a natural monopoly for the better part of the 20th century. It wasn't until the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that the telcos were forced to allow their competitors access to their lines.
So, if I understand what you're saying, the city of Chicago entered into a contract that prevents them from doing their own thing, and the people of Chicago voted to keep it that way. I still say the solution to this problem is in Chicago. You can't just keep escalating to higher levels of government when you don't get your way in your own community. Just because people were misled doesn't mean you need the next-higher-up government to step in and force them to do something they believe they don't want to do. That runs counter to the principles of democracy.
In my opinion, public utility easements should allow access to anyone wanting to provide those telco services, not just the incumbent. That would seem (to me) to be a more logical thing to require than requiring the telcos to "give up" that access. (Then nobody would be able to offer those services, right?) I was actually under the impression that this was the way things were, but you've pointed out that that's not the case, so if that's true, you absolutely have a valid point.
If by "paid for with tax dollars" you mean "paid for as part of a deal to bring those services to that community earlier than they would have otherwise, in exchange for money", yes. And no, I don't think that is a problem. The fact that the community may have less competition than it did before might still be a problem, but there are better solutions to that problem than confiscating this new infrastructure that Verizon is paying to lay down.
Are potential competitors not allowed to do this?
So your government made a deal with the telcos, and because they agreed to the deal, there's a hidden provision in there that makes everything they build community property? If you're a budding new community, and there isn't a telco willing to give anybody in your community high-speed Internet, wouldn't you consider giving them deals or concessions to make it happen? Your community is effectively contracting with the telco. The telco isn't "raping" your little town and they don't deserve to automatically have the things that they're building in order to satisfy that agreement simply turned over to the community.
Now, I'm not saying that "last mile" fiber should be entirely under private control, because there are lots of advantages to allowing a variety of service providers using that fiber constructively, but they're in the process of rolling this out to communities today. Now is the time to put these requirements in (or as I suggested in my earlier post, create a municipal entity that either does this work themselves, or contracts out with someone like Verizon with the understanding that it will be publicly-owned). It's completely unreasonable to wait until they've rolled out this new infrastructure and then try to do some hand-waving about the reasons copper was opened up and suggest that the same reasons apply to fiber. One of the big assumptions behind opening up the copper infrastructure was that it was cost prohibitive for anyone to roll out their own infrastructure to parallel copper. Verizon is clearly doing that, so this argument no longer holds a lot of water.
How do they accomplish this? If your local government is making poor decisions, that's a problem your local government needs to deal with. The solution is not necessarily more government.
I'm not going to disagree with any of this. I don't have all of the facts, but I have no reason to say your conclusions are wrong here. The thing I have a problem with is the idea that any new infrastructure that these guys roll out should automatically be subject to the same "open to competitors" requirement that copper had. There were very specific reasons they did this with copper. I would encourage you to read up on those reasons and ask yourself how many of those apply to this new fiber roll-out.
I agree that the FCC isn't doing the best job with respect to telco vs. cable regulation. It would be far more useful to regulate things based on what services are provided rather than what type of physical connection it is. It's all going to be IP-based in the future, so why treat copper differently from fiber, and fiber differently from coax when it comes to services? Just as you can get homes in many areas with either gas or electric heat, it's still just heat. It shouldn't matter if your home is wired for telephone via copper, fiber or coax. It's still telephone and should be regulated as telephone. But I think the reasons behind opening up copper are largely specific to the fact that it's existing copper infrastructure, and more specifically, that nobody else was likely to be able to parallel it.
If anything, I would even go so far as to say that the presence of satellite, cable and cellular, the convergence of telephony and other services across all of these different providers, is an excellent reason why it's
I think you misunderstand the purpose of requiring the telcos to open up their copper infrastructure to competitors. It's not a matter of ensuring equal access to everyone's home, it's a matter of allowing competition to survive where it's impractical to lay down new infrastructure. Here, Verizon *is* laying down new infrastructure, so the case could be made that it's no longer impractical to do so. One of the big arguments made when deciding to require the telcos to lease out their own lines to their competitors was that these lines were in some cases paid for using tax dollars, and there's no way a competitor is going to be able to lay their own lines. While opening up these new lines might still be the right thing to do, it most certainly shouldn't be automatic or implied. If we want to change the way this roll-out works, *now* is the time to do so, either by setting up municipal "last mile" connections that can reasonably be opened up to whoever wants to use them, or by requiring that Verizon do the same up front. Yes, Verizon's sitting on a lot of infrastructure, but, again, this is new stuff. You can't single Verizon out and say their new deployment needs to be opened up to their competitors without applying the same rationale to every new project companies are coming out with. Who wants to tell the satellite companies that? After all, Mom And Pop Telephone isn't going to be able to launch their own satellites. It's only fair, right?
It's my understanding (that I'm having trouble verifying with an official source) is that from a "new tenant"'s point of view, they're eligible for exactly the same standard analog services that they'd otherwise be eligible for. A regular phone line over fiber will work and cost exactly what a regular phone line over copper would. The fact that it's fiber to the building doesn't matter in that respect. It should be a black box as far as the customer is concerned and part of the infrastructure, not CPE.
It's just stuff like DSL, which is copper-specific, that the home will no longer support. But not all homes get DSL today anyway, so if you're a DSL person, that's usually a question that you'd ask when you're looking for a new apartment/house, right? So, "no DSL, but you can get Verizon's new high-speed service," isn't something I would expect people will flip out and cry to the FCC about. If it's a deal-breaker, then it's a deal-breaker. Move on.
So any time somebody runs a new (insert technology name here) line to your house, they should be required to share it with their competitors? I kind of understood why they did this with copper, but this is something completely new.
If you want an "open" last mile of fiber, do it as a municipal project and run it like a public utility. Don't stomp your feet and cry because a private business does it first and won't give it away.
I loved these stories. My greatest fear is that with such lackluster interest from the major studios so far, when it finally does get made, it'll be done on a low budget and end up disappointing.
If inflation is 3%, I'd expect a $150 expense to go up nearly $5/year.
You're looking for a process that takes water as input, produces only water as output, and, in between, produces energy?
The only practical way water can be used for energy is by splitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen (using electricity), putting the hydrogen in a car, and later burning it in the presence of oxygen to release the same amount of energy you used splitting them up in the first place. This is a "water in, water out" process, but between the two steps, there is no energy surplus (as the laws of thermodynamics predict). The hydrogen is only used to store potential energy that was consumed separating it from the water, to be used later to actually power the car.
Since the energy you get by burning the hydrogen is the same as the energy you had to consume separating it from the water in the first place, anybody telling you that you can use water as fuel in this manner (suggesting that the energy from burning hydrogen can be used to electrolyze even more hydrogen from your "water" fuel, keeping the cycle going indefinitely) is lying and trying to scam you. These are absolutely fraudulent. (Consider that if water vapor is your only exhaust, it should be trivial to reclaim this water vapor and put it back into your water tank, giving you a perpetual motion machine.)
I don't think it's possible to provide an infinite amount of bandwidth. So long as the host from which you are transferring data has more bandwidth than you do, and that extends to every hop between them and you, downloads from that host will always be capable of saturating your own Internet connection.
Haven't you noticed that download times tend to go down the faster your Internet connection is? The speed of your personal Internet connection is almost always the limiting factor in Internet data transfers. If you've been sold a 1Mbit or a 10Mbit connection, and you aren't getting the advertised rate, that's a completely different problem that you need to take up with your ISP. If the ISP were to beef up its internal network and its connections to its Internet peers, but kept its residential connections where they are today, this would actually make the problem worse, because it would be easier for Internet traffic to saturate your personal Internet connection.
The only way you can guarantee that you'll never saturate your Internet connection is to get an Internet connection that is faster than the sum of the upstream Internet connections. But all you're really doing is moving the choke point away from you. If your IPTV stream passes over that same choke point when it's saturated, packets still have to be dropped or delayed, and without QoS letting you prioritize, those IPTV packets will be dropped/delayed equally with your bulk data transfers.
Except that QoS can only be applied to Internet traffic after it arrives within the ISP's network. How are you going to determine what traffic is IPTV and what traffic is Other Stuff that somebody just wants to see prioritized? I could make a lot of money setting up a content distribution service that took advantage of IPTV prioritization by sending my file transfers over a data transfer protocol that simulated IPTV.
In addition, since QoS flags sent over the public Internet can't be trusted, commercial IPTV providers are putting an awful lot of faith in the ability of the intermediate backbone providers to keep their packets shuffling along. With no business relationship between the content providers and these backbone providers, is it really appropriate to base your entire content distribution model on an entity that you have no control over?
The only sane way to start up an IPTV service that intends to compete with Cable TV (or an ISP-provided IPTV service) is to contract with the ISPs directly and set up a dedicated QoS-aware network connection to the ISP's network, and ask the ISP to respect those QoS flags all the way to the customer's premises. An ISP can do that easily enough in a non-discriminatory manner, but who pays for all of that? If the IPTV providers pay for it, wouldn't that be giving "preference" to those who have done so over those who haven't? That doesn't sound very "neutral" to me. Should the customers pay for it? This legislation says no-way! Should the ISP simply eat the cost? How is that fair?
I agree that QoS itself is fine (and necessary). The problem here is who pays for it.
An IPTV provider (for example) can't just do QoS over the public Internet, and hope that every random ISP will respect the QoS flags and prioritize their IPTV streams over random bulk data transfers. If that were the case, it would be easily abused. The IPTV provider must contract with individual ISPs for dedicated data connections fit to carry QoS-flagged traffic to the ISP's network.
Who pays for that?
If the IPTV provider pays for it (which seems logical, since they're the ones that need the service), doesn't that mean they're paying for "preferential" treatment? If a different IPTV provider saw this arrangement, would they be justified in crying foul because their IPTV packets are treated like other random Internet data and dropped when customers' broadband connections become saturated with file downloads and the like?
If the ISP pays for it instead (thus allowing "equal access" to any content provider that wants a specially-configured data connection directly to the ISP), how can they recover those costs? The legislation here explicitly prohibits them from charging customers.
You can do QoS-enabled traffic on a per-service basis, and be non-discriminatory about it, but there has to be new infrastructure built for every one of those arrangements, and somebody has to pay for it. I'm not convinced any of this is possible with this legislation or the commonly understood definition of "network neutrality".