If he can't have the scantily clad women, feel free to send them to me. For safe-keeping, just in case he does sell the other 89 million, 999 thousand and 901 copies.
Google+ has online documentation, but it sucks, is poorly maintained and/or is grossly incorrect. It's also hard to find anything of any consequence.
I'm using Google+ for one reason only - Picasa won't talk to anything else and I need face recognition for a photo project I'm working on. I'm looking at OpenCV and other software, but writing a wholly new, properly collaborative, version of Google+ Photo will not be a small undertaking. Unlike Linus, I'm not starting with a simple need like a terminal emulator.
Google+ doesn't do even a fraction of what I actually need, but it does do some of it and I really do need to know how to get it to do the few things it can. If Google won't cough up the docs, then it's good someone is.
I'm well-aware of which countries (China isn't alone) have large concentrations of rare earths. I'm also aware that the US has spent many decades dumping electronics and other devices containing rare earths into landfills rather than recycling in any fashion. Further, I'm aware that Planned Obsolescence means that corporations need far more of the rare earths than it should.
So there's a huge amount of waste. Which is getting recycled, sometimes, by other countries. Not the US. Seems that a lot of the recycling takes place in Chinese territories, doesn't it? So if they have a huge surplus, we're in part helping to supply it. How can they be blamed for our actions? They're ours, we should own them.
Last, if they have a surplus then the law of supply and demand states the price will go down. That's not imposed by the Chinese, it's imposed by the Invisible Hand of the markets. We live in a market-driven economy, we do so by our own choice, we should accept responsibility for the consequences.
But as happened with the recent market meltdown, it's soooooo much easier to blame others and deny our own culpability. If recessions are cyclic, it's not because they have to be, it's because people are too stupid to step out the hamster wheel THEY are busy turning.
I would agree with all of that. Well, the incredibly high health care costs are because the US has no national health care and Americans have incredibly unhealthy lifestyles, but the first of those can be fixed any time you want. Not sure about the second, though better education (not just teaching about what is healthy but actually practicing it by having decent phys ed and edible school meals) would likely help some.
(National health doesn't preclude charging people for voluntary, self-inflicted illnesses, whereas modern insurance schemes often do.)
Show me where it did so. Show me proof that any competitor was driven out of business as a result. The only examples I know of in the US collapsed due to dumping radioactive waste in the water supply and you can't blame China for that.
Oh, and show me why any such dumping (if it even happened) had an impact at all. America isn't in a free trade agreement with China as far as I know. I know that America paid workers and jobs to go overseas, outside any controlled market, but that's America's fault, not China's. Blaming China for America's stupidity is merely furthering that stupidity.
China has done a hell of a lot that is wrong and a hell of a lot that is stupid, but America has more than once declared at the UN Security Council that if one party to stupidity is to be blamed then ALL parties to stupidity should be blamed. I hold America to it's word on that. If that's its international stance then China cannot be singled-out. It is in violation of declared US international policy.
Precisely. We are involved, we are responsible and we are accountable, merely by holding free and sort-of honest elections. It goes a little further than simply electing, though, as we're also the ones propping up the corporations that have lobby power. We're the ones that determine what is financially worth the while of the press to report on. We're the ones who determine what skills are available where and therefore what impact a changing market has on jobs. We have all kinds of impact on government.
Responsibility is the one thing modern democracies/republics do not lack. Accepting of it is the problem.
So what? Pi doesn't exist in the real world, but if you want to draw a circle then you do your best to work with it and not draw a square. The real world is immaterial, for the most part.
Grants should be available for everyone, for two reasons:
1. You want the brightest and the best in college regardless of how much disposable income they have or will ever obtain - it is their impact that matters at government level, not their earning power, and the government will ALWAYS profit from greater impact.
2. Taxes ARE how the government recoups the cost of education. College debt is simply taxing people twice for the same thing. That's stupid and inefficient. Give once, tax once. Either raise income tax and abolish loans entirely OR abolish income tax and raise the cost of loans, but DON'T have both.
Free money does NOT cause universities to raise tuitions. In fact, in Britain, more expensive tuition led to universities raising tuitions. In fact, universities shouldn't charge for tuition at all. If everyone gets grants and then those grants are paid to the universities, you have extra layers that cost money and add nothing. Universities should be prohibited for charging students, the government should then give Universities grants that cover the actual cost of tuition for the previous year's students. In other words, the university budgets should be deterministic and realistic. Universities should not be empowered to charge arbitrarily but according to what is spent that is also of value. Emphasis is deliberate. Wasted money should not be reimbursed via the grants, but all money spent that adds value to the education should be. The universities cannot then simply inflate costs, they can only bill for merit earned.
Oh, and I would also recommend the government having a formal list of accredited facilities that is published and well-known, where any university (or any other school) that is demonstrably incompetent should be struck off the list, just as incompetent doctors are - in principle. Grants to universities would then only be to accredited facilities. Lose accreditation (by overcharging, underperforming, etc), lose the money. Those universities would STILL be banned from charging students, however. If an incompetent university wishes to demonstrate competency, it should do so in the marketplace by selling its skills. Money should be from industry in those cases.
Charging students is NOT a method of demonstrating competency, as students have neither the time NOR the knowledge to make that kind of judgement call. What happens is that the level of tuition is seen as a function of desirability. THAT is what raises tuition. It's a total inversion of market forces, which means it is the one place markets should NEVER be permitted.
How did it "seek" such power? By not closing its mines when the US ones were caught dumping illegal waste?
Far as I can see, it sought no such thing. It merely continued to trade when others couldn't be arsed. Now it has a de-facto monopoly and it's abusing the hell out of it. China should pay a very heavy price for that. But equally, so should every other nation that has abused monopolistic powers. Since we know the latter won't happen, it follows that the former should not happen either. One Law, not one for the US and one for everyone else.
China wasn't dumping at the time the mine was closed. The US mine was closed because it was dumping hazardous waste and got caught - an entirely voluntary action on its part. No alternative was set up in the US for the same reason US drug companies test their products in Africa - you make more money by not obeying the rules.
I cannot find it in me to be sympathetic to economic mobsters who get beat up by other economic mobsters. The US created most of the global economy, the US is reaping what it sowed. China is no saint, but I will not cry for Herr Frankenstein. You create the monster, the monster is your problem.
Did I say China was working on a level playing field? Nooooooooooo. Now, go take your cookies and milk then go back to kindergarten until you learn to read.
For the rest of you, a level playing field means you do NOT hand someone the ball and then complain that you've no balls. (Take that as you will.) A level playing field means that you demand of yourself no less responsibility than you demand of others.
A level playing field ALSO demands that ALL sides play by the rules. You know Boeing and Airbus have both been found guilty of getting illegal subsidies, right? That this isn't new and that both blocs have known for over a decade that what they were doing was indeed illegal? Sorry, I have difficulty feeling sympathy for people who are equally corrupt and criminal. Sympathy for the devil is easier to stomach than sympathy for the corporations. It also has a catchier tune.
The US ITAR regulations banning the export of computer systems to China that can - and are - used by US corporations to cut costs -- you think that's a level playing field? When NASA made it possible to turn a pile of PCs into a supercomputer, the software was banned. (Those old enough will remember Slashdot helping smuggle the software to Canada.) Sure, they relented later, but only because they had no choice. The cat was already out of the bag and ripping people's limbs off - as cats formerly in bags tend to do.
The US has been in trade wars with the EU, seeking to cripple EU industries via restricted exports.
Sorry, but the moment the US did that to Europe, it LOST all rights to complain when others do the same to it. Remember, the US may have relented but it never apologized and never changed its attitudes. It grudgingly tolerated obedience to the law, but we all know perfectly well that it will violate that law every chance it has to gain an edge.
As, indeed, it did in the 90s, when the US Government's signals intelligence passed confidential internal documents from Airbus to Boeing. The US Government, involved in industrial espionage in order to profiteer.
A level playing field is where ALL such activity is banned, where ALL such activity leads to more than a gentle slap on the wrist but serious economic consequences, and where ALL countries are required to participate fairly, openly and (above all) honestly. THAT is a level playing field.
College education is so expensive in the US because they can get away with it. Britain's universities get maybe a third as much but have comparable (sometimes superior) rankings on every metric.
3-5 hours a month? You've seen the turnover of software on Freshmeat/Freecode, right? Do you know how many new features are added to critical software in a single WEEK?! You also need to remember that a rusty skill cannot be used in the future. ALL your skills have to be kept active and fresh, not just the ones that are of immediate value.
What do I mean by that? Well, here is a list of computer languages I am proficient in, in no particular order:
I can flat-out guarantee that all of these WILL be needed, but I cannot tell you where, when or how. But I keep the skills fresh, so they're always to hand. I know about 20 different OS', use all of them regularly, and keep fresh in a few thousand applications and software libraries, where "fresh" means within 2 weeks of any given update being released.
And this is supposed to be doable in a couple of hours a month?????! I know more than people who have been in the industry twice as long because I spend FAR more than twice the time on this stuff. As in total. 40 hours a week of "regular" work, and about 50 hours a week of training, honing and accumulating new skills. 200+ hours a month on skill improvement. Not 3, not 5, 200. THAT is what it takes to keep current.
We know it's cost effective because nations with under 40 hour work weeks make more money and have better health (which reduces expenses). Lower expenses and greater profits (even after allowing for the increase in the number of people hired) is proof that it is actually very cost-effective indeed.
Oh, and US college professors are usually moronic imbeciles. Almost any of my family (80% of the past 3 generations, including laterally, have doctorates) could run circles round them. Further, it's well-known that they routinely abuse their sabbaticals and do not use it to develop or enhance skills, but use it to get drunk and waste themselves. I have zero sympathy for losers.
Agreed. The US chose, of their own free will, not to produce Rare Earths. They voluntarily created a bottleneck. China didn't ask for such power. You can't opt for "market forces" only when it's in your interest, and demand powerful central government when market forces are in a competitor's interests. Level playing fields are good, but that means everyone takes responsibility in the same way ALL the time, not just when it's convenient.
Doesn't have to add up to 100%. There's overlap. 57% want to train, 28% would hire new employees. Assuming that NONE of the 38% who would outsource would also train or hire, THEN we know 5% of those who would hire new employees would only do so and that the remainder would do both that AND train.
A skilled employee has WHAT time to keep their skills up-to-date? The unhealthy obsession with "work ethic" (yes, unhealthy, it causes the majority of heart attacks in the US, more than the food) results in bugger all time to stay current. And because the direction of the industry moves fast and shifts direction, you can't just stay current in one thing, you have to stay current in EVERYTHING.
I can manage it. Just, but then I have no life and can afford to spend the extra time on skill building. I sincerely doubt more than 5% of the IT professionals out there come close to being in a position to stay current, and I'm being generous. To achieve that, we'd have to either adopt the French system (30 hour weeks) or the older University system of paid sabbaticals (one year of no work in every seven, for retraining and networking).
You do understand, of course, that anyone who proposes mandating companies class a 30-hour week as "full time" and anything beyond as overtime, or who obliges corporations to provide a paid year's vacation, would be lynched within 5 minutes of the news reaching the Fox studios. It would slash healthcare costs for the nation, boost (yes, boost) productivity and profits, and raise skill levels, but it violates American "work ethic" and would be shot down, to hell with the consequences for employee and employer.
I agree with you that it's not rocket science. I would say, based on what you've described, that you're well above average - that you even know about Webmin puts you well above average. I absolutely agree that the savings become substantial, especially if you get the parts yourself, but I shudder at the thought of some of the admins I've met being asked to build a box.
Virtually all of the firewalls and security gateways I've seen (Cisco excepted) have been repackaged Linux or OpenBSD. Many of the intrusion detection systems (NCircle and a few others excepted) were likewise.
From a technical standpoint, a roll-your-own should be the smart move - you can remove facilities you don't need/want, you can tune with patches like Web100, you can incorporate routing protocols other than RIP, the Linux and pf firewall mechanisms are much more powerful than the cheapo junky frontends suggest, AQM and QOS become practical, you can use the Layer-7 routing patch, because responsiveness is vital you can apply any number of real-time patches, and so on.
From a safety standpoint, most admins aren't capable of rolling their own napkin, never mind their own firewall. I simply wouldn't trust that they would understand how to identify what mechanisms they need, how to ensure those mechanisms are present and no other, why you should understand Linux Capabilities, or how to maximize uptime and minimize outage time from crashes.
I don't see it as a paradox at all. Wave/particle duality invariably involves waves when you're integrating over time and particles when taking instantaneous views. We know from things like quantum tunneling that the particle can exist anywhere along the wave function but we also know that it can only exist at SOME point along the wave function at any given time - it does not exist everywhere.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is ultimately a property of information theory, not physics, but it helps that particles can only exist with position (not velocity) and waves can only exist with velocity (not position), since this gives you what you want.
(Aside: This, to me, proves the primacy of maths - the physics isn't just modeled by the maths but is the way it is because the maths won't let it be anything else.)
The Aluminium Atomic Clock seems to be roughly as accurate (1 second every 3.7 billion years, so at worst 1/20th as good as the accuracy claimed in the article) and doesn't seem to use unstable isotopes. For now, at least, I'm going to say the Aluminium Atomic Clock is the way to go for any actual experimental use at that level of precision.
I agree on the exploration, but it DOES matter that we don't damage/destroy one thing in order to obtain something else of equal merit. By waiting a little longer, you may be able to have both. Further, damage to the hidden painting due to light and the modern atmosphere should be limited as far as possible.
In fact, I'm not sure we have to "wait" in order to obtain an image of what is behind the second wall. There's presumably an airgap, and autonomous robots are quite capable of operating in those kinds of confined environments. Scan the hidden surface and then print out the scan. One hidden painting.
After an unsuccessful attempt to film the sequel of Avatar at a depth of 36,000 feet in 3D resulted in the actors being squished into the ground under the intense pressures, Cameron vowed to continue filming the movie using a mix of scrapers to move the cast and stop-motion cameras to film the sequences.
Less than at present. Currently, they have to hard-code data and pre-render bumpmaps. That's expensive. The more realistic you want to make something, the more abstract you want the model*, which means less work for the designers and less computer time spent pre-generating things.
*An abstract model can be rendered under a wider range of conditions and thus look real under them. A pre-generated bitmap only looks realistic under very specific conditions. At best. Letting the computer do the work, rather than the designer/coder, means getting more out for less development time in.
CAVE systems (such as the "hamster balls" where you have 360/360 vision) offer the best immersive experience. However, I *still* disagree with this "suspension of disbelief" concept. JRR Tolkien described it as being a failure of the person creating the experience and I'll take the opinion of an expert over and above the opinion of just about anyone else.
The number of pixels and the quality of the textures DO matter at this point - you have to cross the Uncanny Valley completely before the perceived quality goes up. The perceived quality will actually FALL until you reach the other side.
Raytracing will help, provided radiosity is added in (raytracing is lousy at diffuse reflections, which matter if you're wanting true realism). Photon tracing and photon mapping are even better, but the computational cost goes up accordingly. To get audio to match video, you really want to use sound tracing techniques too. You have to have the sound (echos included) match expectation or the brain will detect the mismatch and rebel. There's nothing worse than a brain marching up and down the hall making demands.
To get realism to the point where it will be truly "good enough", I would argue that 20,000x current performance is closer to what is required.
Agreed, but most of those will already have been hired for the regular books (you can't bill twice for what you've already paid for and already have), it is only reasonable to charge for new costs. I've already looked up the costs of editors ($80,000 seems average) - link elsewhere as a reply to the post that started this thread - and it shouldn't be hard to look up the costs of the other positions.
This link gives you the net income from e-books. From that, it should be possible to figure the total number of -extra- e-book staff that can be afforded across all publishers whilst maintaining a respectable profit margin AND paying reasonable royalties to authors.
Perhaps, but people generally buy their HQ once. Unless the analyst can find a publisher that relocates every time they publish (other than ones on terror hit lists), the cost of the building is covered. The employees - ok, that's a reasonable claim, but you obviously don't need to hire any more printers, just editors, to cover e-books. How many new editors do they need to hire? Let's say 10 to cover all the additional books they're publishing. How much does an editor earn?
I'd say $80,000 is a good estimate. That means 10 will cost $800,000 per year. Allowing for taxes, and the limitations of my brain, I'll increase the cost to the company to a round million.
114 million e-books were sold in 2010. How much does that actually equate to, given the current costs of e-books? From the publishers.org link above, we can see that publishers earned $878 million from e-book sales (net).
This means you'd need to have 878 publishers of e-books at 2010 level of sales before you eliminate all the profits, assuming each publisher has 10 editors.
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how many publishers the market can support without ANY increase in costs AND with reasonable profit margins being maintained for publisher and author.
Slashdot Mirror
If he can't have the scantily clad women, feel free to send them to me. For safe-keeping, just in case he does sell the other 89 million, 999 thousand and 901 copies.
Google+ has online documentation, but it sucks, is poorly maintained and/or is grossly incorrect. It's also hard to find anything of any consequence.
I'm using Google+ for one reason only - Picasa won't talk to anything else and I need face recognition for a photo project I'm working on. I'm looking at OpenCV and other software, but writing a wholly new, properly collaborative, version of Google+ Photo will not be a small undertaking. Unlike Linus, I'm not starting with a simple need like a terminal emulator.
Google+ doesn't do even a fraction of what I actually need, but it does do some of it and I really do need to know how to get it to do the few things it can. If Google won't cough up the docs, then it's good someone is.
I'm well-aware of which countries (China isn't alone) have large concentrations of rare earths. I'm also aware that the US has spent many decades dumping electronics and other devices containing rare earths into landfills rather than recycling in any fashion. Further, I'm aware that Planned Obsolescence means that corporations need far more of the rare earths than it should.
So there's a huge amount of waste. Which is getting recycled, sometimes, by other countries. Not the US. Seems that a lot of the recycling takes place in Chinese territories, doesn't it? So if they have a huge surplus, we're in part helping to supply it. How can they be blamed for our actions? They're ours, we should own them.
Last, if they have a surplus then the law of supply and demand states the price will go down. That's not imposed by the Chinese, it's imposed by the Invisible Hand of the markets. We live in a market-driven economy, we do so by our own choice, we should accept responsibility for the consequences.
But as happened with the recent market meltdown, it's soooooo much easier to blame others and deny our own culpability. If recessions are cyclic, it's not because they have to be, it's because people are too stupid to step out the hamster wheel THEY are busy turning.
I would agree with all of that. Well, the incredibly high health care costs are because the US has no national health care and Americans have incredibly unhealthy lifestyles, but the first of those can be fixed any time you want. Not sure about the second, though better education (not just teaching about what is healthy but actually practicing it by having decent phys ed and edible school meals) would likely help some.
(National health doesn't preclude charging people for voluntary, self-inflicted illnesses, whereas modern insurance schemes often do.)
Show me where it did so. Show me proof that any competitor was driven out of business as a result. The only examples I know of in the US collapsed due to dumping radioactive waste in the water supply and you can't blame China for that.
Oh, and show me why any such dumping (if it even happened) had an impact at all. America isn't in a free trade agreement with China as far as I know. I know that America paid workers and jobs to go overseas, outside any controlled market, but that's America's fault, not China's. Blaming China for America's stupidity is merely furthering that stupidity.
China has done a hell of a lot that is wrong and a hell of a lot that is stupid, but America has more than once declared at the UN Security Council that if one party to stupidity is to be blamed then ALL parties to stupidity should be blamed. I hold America to it's word on that. If that's its international stance then China cannot be singled-out. It is in violation of declared US international policy.
Precisely. We are involved, we are responsible and we are accountable, merely by holding free and sort-of honest elections. It goes a little further than simply electing, though, as we're also the ones propping up the corporations that have lobby power. We're the ones that determine what is financially worth the while of the press to report on. We're the ones who determine what skills are available where and therefore what impact a changing market has on jobs. We have all kinds of impact on government.
Responsibility is the one thing modern democracies/republics do not lack. Accepting of it is the problem.
So what? Pi doesn't exist in the real world, but if you want to draw a circle then you do your best to work with it and not draw a square. The real world is immaterial, for the most part.
Grants should be available for everyone, for two reasons:
1. You want the brightest and the best in college regardless of how much disposable income they have or will ever obtain - it is their impact that matters at government level, not their earning power, and the government will ALWAYS profit from greater impact.
2. Taxes ARE how the government recoups the cost of education. College debt is simply taxing people twice for the same thing. That's stupid and inefficient. Give once, tax once. Either raise income tax and abolish loans entirely OR abolish income tax and raise the cost of loans, but DON'T have both.
Free money does NOT cause universities to raise tuitions. In fact, in Britain, more expensive tuition led to universities raising tuitions. In fact, universities shouldn't charge for tuition at all. If everyone gets grants and then those grants are paid to the universities, you have extra layers that cost money and add nothing. Universities should be prohibited for charging students, the government should then give Universities grants that cover the actual cost of tuition for the previous year's students. In other words, the university budgets should be deterministic and realistic. Universities should not be empowered to charge arbitrarily but according to what is spent that is also of value . Emphasis is deliberate. Wasted money should not be reimbursed via the grants, but all money spent that adds value to the education should be. The universities cannot then simply inflate costs, they can only bill for merit earned.
Oh, and I would also recommend the government having a formal list of accredited facilities that is published and well-known, where any university (or any other school) that is demonstrably incompetent should be struck off the list, just as incompetent doctors are - in principle. Grants to universities would then only be to accredited facilities. Lose accreditation (by overcharging, underperforming, etc), lose the money. Those universities would STILL be banned from charging students, however. If an incompetent university wishes to demonstrate competency, it should do so in the marketplace by selling its skills. Money should be from industry in those cases.
Charging students is NOT a method of demonstrating competency, as students have neither the time NOR the knowledge to make that kind of judgement call. What happens is that the level of tuition is seen as a function of desirability. THAT is what raises tuition. It's a total inversion of market forces, which means it is the one place markets should NEVER be permitted.
How did it "seek" such power? By not closing its mines when the US ones were caught dumping illegal waste?
Far as I can see, it sought no such thing. It merely continued to trade when others couldn't be arsed. Now it has a de-facto monopoly and it's abusing the hell out of it. China should pay a very heavy price for that. But equally, so should every other nation that has abused monopolistic powers. Since we know the latter won't happen, it follows that the former should not happen either. One Law, not one for the US and one for everyone else.
China wasn't dumping at the time the mine was closed. The US mine was closed because it was dumping hazardous waste and got caught - an entirely voluntary action on its part. No alternative was set up in the US for the same reason US drug companies test their products in Africa - you make more money by not obeying the rules.
I cannot find it in me to be sympathetic to economic mobsters who get beat up by other economic mobsters. The US created most of the global economy, the US is reaping what it sowed. China is no saint, but I will not cry for Herr Frankenstein. You create the monster, the monster is your problem.
Did I say China was working on a level playing field? Nooooooooooo. Now, go take your cookies and milk then go back to kindergarten until you learn to read.
For the rest of you, a level playing field means you do NOT hand someone the ball and then complain that you've no balls. (Take that as you will.) A level playing field means that you demand of yourself no less responsibility than you demand of others.
A level playing field ALSO demands that ALL sides play by the rules. You know Boeing and Airbus have both been found guilty of getting illegal subsidies, right? That this isn't new and that both blocs have known for over a decade that what they were doing was indeed illegal? Sorry, I have difficulty feeling sympathy for people who are equally corrupt and criminal. Sympathy for the devil is easier to stomach than sympathy for the corporations. It also has a catchier tune.
The US ITAR regulations banning the export of computer systems to China that can - and are - used by US corporations to cut costs -- you think that's a level playing field? When NASA made it possible to turn a pile of PCs into a supercomputer, the software was banned. (Those old enough will remember Slashdot helping smuggle the software to Canada.) Sure, they relented later, but only because they had no choice. The cat was already out of the bag and ripping people's limbs off - as cats formerly in bags tend to do.
The US has been in trade wars with the EU, seeking to cripple EU industries via restricted exports.
Sorry, but the moment the US did that to Europe, it LOST all rights to complain when others do the same to it. Remember, the US may have relented but it never apologized and never changed its attitudes. It grudgingly tolerated obedience to the law, but we all know perfectly well that it will violate that law every chance it has to gain an edge.
As, indeed, it did in the 90s, when the US Government's signals intelligence passed confidential internal documents from Airbus to Boeing. The US Government, involved in industrial espionage in order to profiteer.
A level playing field is where ALL such activity is banned, where ALL such activity leads to more than a gentle slap on the wrist but serious economic consequences, and where ALL countries are required to participate fairly, openly and (above all) honestly. THAT is a level playing field.
College education is so expensive in the US because they can get away with it. Britain's universities get maybe a third as much but have comparable (sometimes superior) rankings on every metric.
3-5 hours a month? You've seen the turnover of software on Freshmeat/Freecode, right? Do you know how many new features are added to critical software in a single WEEK?! You also need to remember that a rusty skill cannot be used in the future. ALL your skills have to be kept active and fresh, not just the ones that are of immediate value.
What do I mean by that? Well, here is a list of computer languages I am proficient in, in no particular order:
C, C++, C#, UPC, 80x86 Assembly, x64 Assembly, MIPS Assembly, Perl, Python, LISP, Cobol, Occam, Tcl/Tk, Ruby, Erlang, BCPL, Publicus, Visual Basic, PHP
I can flat-out guarantee that all of these WILL be needed, but I cannot tell you where, when or how. But I keep the skills fresh, so they're always to hand. I know about 20 different OS', use all of them regularly, and keep fresh in a few thousand applications and software libraries, where "fresh" means within 2 weeks of any given update being released.
And this is supposed to be doable in a couple of hours a month?????! I know more than people who have been in the industry twice as long because I spend FAR more than twice the time on this stuff. As in total. 40 hours a week of "regular" work, and about 50 hours a week of training, honing and accumulating new skills. 200+ hours a month on skill improvement. Not 3, not 5, 200. THAT is what it takes to keep current.
We know it's cost effective because nations with under 40 hour work weeks make more money and have better health (which reduces expenses). Lower expenses and greater profits (even after allowing for the increase in the number of people hired) is proof that it is actually very cost-effective indeed.
Oh, and US college professors are usually moronic imbeciles. Almost any of my family (80% of the past 3 generations, including laterally, have doctorates) could run circles round them. Further, it's well-known that they routinely abuse their sabbaticals and do not use it to develop or enhance skills, but use it to get drunk and waste themselves. I have zero sympathy for losers.
Agreed. The US chose, of their own free will, not to produce Rare Earths. They voluntarily created a bottleneck. China didn't ask for such power. You can't opt for "market forces" only when it's in your interest, and demand powerful central government when market forces are in a competitor's interests. Level playing fields are good, but that means everyone takes responsibility in the same way ALL the time, not just when it's convenient.
Doesn't have to add up to 100%. There's overlap. 57% want to train, 28% would hire new employees. Assuming that NONE of the 38% who would outsource would also train or hire, THEN we know 5% of those who would hire new employees would only do so and that the remainder would do both that AND train.
A skilled employee has WHAT time to keep their skills up-to-date? The unhealthy obsession with "work ethic" (yes, unhealthy, it causes the majority of heart attacks in the US, more than the food) results in bugger all time to stay current. And because the direction of the industry moves fast and shifts direction, you can't just stay current in one thing, you have to stay current in EVERYTHING.
I can manage it. Just, but then I have no life and can afford to spend the extra time on skill building. I sincerely doubt more than 5% of the IT professionals out there come close to being in a position to stay current, and I'm being generous. To achieve that, we'd have to either adopt the French system (30 hour weeks) or the older University system of paid sabbaticals (one year of no work in every seven, for retraining and networking).
You do understand, of course, that anyone who proposes mandating companies class a 30-hour week as "full time" and anything beyond as overtime, or who obliges corporations to provide a paid year's vacation, would be lynched within 5 minutes of the news reaching the Fox studios. It would slash healthcare costs for the nation, boost (yes, boost) productivity and profits, and raise skill levels, but it violates American "work ethic" and would be shot down, to hell with the consequences for employee and employer.
I agree with you that it's not rocket science. I would say, based on what you've described, that you're well above average - that you even know about Webmin puts you well above average. I absolutely agree that the savings become substantial, especially if you get the parts yourself, but I shudder at the thought of some of the admins I've met being asked to build a box.
Virtually all of the firewalls and security gateways I've seen (Cisco excepted) have been repackaged Linux or OpenBSD. Many of the intrusion detection systems (NCircle and a few others excepted) were likewise.
From a technical standpoint, a roll-your-own should be the smart move - you can remove facilities you don't need/want, you can tune with patches like Web100, you can incorporate routing protocols other than RIP, the Linux and pf firewall mechanisms are much more powerful than the cheapo junky frontends suggest, AQM and QOS become practical, you can use the Layer-7 routing patch, because responsiveness is vital you can apply any number of real-time patches, and so on.
From a safety standpoint, most admins aren't capable of rolling their own napkin, never mind their own firewall. I simply wouldn't trust that they would understand how to identify what mechanisms they need, how to ensure those mechanisms are present and no other, why you should understand Linux Capabilities, or how to maximize uptime and minimize outage time from crashes.
I don't see it as a paradox at all. Wave/particle duality invariably involves waves when you're integrating over time and particles when taking instantaneous views. We know from things like quantum tunneling that the particle can exist anywhere along the wave function but we also know that it can only exist at SOME point along the wave function at any given time - it does not exist everywhere.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is ultimately a property of information theory, not physics, but it helps that particles can only exist with position (not velocity) and waves can only exist with velocity (not position), since this gives you what you want.
(Aside: This, to me, proves the primacy of maths - the physics isn't just modeled by the maths but is the way it is because the maths won't let it be anything else.)
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/aluminum-atomic-clock_092310.cfm
The Aluminium Atomic Clock seems to be roughly as accurate (1 second every 3.7 billion years, so at worst 1/20th as good as the accuracy claimed in the article) and doesn't seem to use unstable isotopes. For now, at least, I'm going to say the Aluminium Atomic Clock is the way to go for any actual experimental use at that level of precision.
I agree on the exploration, but it DOES matter that we don't damage/destroy one thing in order to obtain something else of equal merit. By waiting a little longer, you may be able to have both. Further, damage to the hidden painting due to light and the modern atmosphere should be limited as far as possible.
In fact, I'm not sure we have to "wait" in order to obtain an image of what is behind the second wall. There's presumably an airgap, and autonomous robots are quite capable of operating in those kinds of confined environments. Scan the hidden surface and then print out the scan. One hidden painting.
After an unsuccessful attempt to film the sequel of Avatar at a depth of 36,000 feet in 3D resulted in the actors being squished into the ground under the intense pressures, Cameron vowed to continue filming the movie using a mix of scrapers to move the cast and stop-motion cameras to film the sequences.
Less than at present. Currently, they have to hard-code data and pre-render bumpmaps. That's expensive. The more realistic you want to make something, the more abstract you want the model*, which means less work for the designers and less computer time spent pre-generating things.
*An abstract model can be rendered under a wider range of conditions and thus look real under them. A pre-generated bitmap only looks realistic under very specific conditions. At best. Letting the computer do the work, rather than the designer/coder, means getting more out for less development time in.
CAVE systems (such as the "hamster balls" where you have 360/360 vision) offer the best immersive experience. However, I *still* disagree with this "suspension of disbelief" concept. JRR Tolkien described it as being a failure of the person creating the experience and I'll take the opinion of an expert over and above the opinion of just about anyone else.
The number of pixels and the quality of the textures DO matter at this point - you have to cross the Uncanny Valley completely before the perceived quality goes up. The perceived quality will actually FALL until you reach the other side.
Raytracing will help, provided radiosity is added in (raytracing is lousy at diffuse reflections, which matter if you're wanting true realism). Photon tracing and photon mapping are even better, but the computational cost goes up accordingly. To get audio to match video, you really want to use sound tracing techniques too. You have to have the sound (echos included) match expectation or the brain will detect the mismatch and rebel. There's nothing worse than a brain marching up and down the hall making demands.
To get realism to the point where it will be truly "good enough", I would argue that 20,000x current performance is closer to what is required.
They could have reversed the polarity of the neutron flow, causing the LED to be coupled to the singularity driving the Time Lords' TARDISes.
Agreed, but most of those will already have been hired for the regular books (you can't bill twice for what you've already paid for and already have), it is only reasonable to charge for new costs. I've already looked up the costs of editors ($80,000 seems average) - link elsewhere as a reply to the post that started this thread - and it shouldn't be hard to look up the costs of the other positions.
http://www.publishers.org/bookstats/formats/
This link gives you the net income from e-books. From that, it should be possible to figure the total number of -extra- e-book staff that can be afforded across all publishers whilst maintaining a respectable profit margin AND paying reasonable royalties to authors.
Perhaps, but people generally buy their HQ once. Unless the analyst can find a publisher that relocates every time they publish (other than ones on terror hit lists), the cost of the building is covered. The employees - ok, that's a reasonable claim, but you obviously don't need to hire any more printers, just editors, to cover e-books. How many new editors do they need to hire? Let's say 10 to cover all the additional books they're publishing. How much does an editor earn?
http://www.indeed.com/q-Editor-jobs.html
I'd say $80,000 is a good estimate. That means 10 will cost $800,000 per year. Allowing for taxes, and the limitations of my brain, I'll increase the cost to the company to a round million.
http://www.publishers.org/bookstats/formats/
114 million e-books were sold in 2010. How much does that actually equate to, given the current costs of e-books? From the publishers.org link above, we can see that publishers earned $878 million from e-book sales (net).
This means you'd need to have 878 publishers of e-books at 2010 level of sales before you eliminate all the profits, assuming each publisher has 10 editors.
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how many publishers the market can support without ANY increase in costs AND with reasonable profit margins being maintained for publisher and author.