To simple say that machine intelligence will be eventually asymptotic to human intelligence is meangingless - it need only be close enough that we are unable to tell the difference by any discernable means. Scale matters in all things human - your asymptote argument doesn't hold. We don't live on a graph.
This debate on the pros and cons of manufacturing in the economy is so utterly naive and devoid of hard facts that it really should be shot and left outside. Read any of the adequate books (the most obvious being Fingleton) on this topic that have come out in the last few years and you will see that this debate requires more depth than the simplistic tete-a-tete of/. comments.
Sorry, but discounting manufacturing in the economy has been debunked many times over by economists. A google search on the topic will bring up a number of essays.
The notion that G8 markets should purge manufacturing was once held as an ideal but has, at least for the last five years, been thoroughly debunked. Not all manufacturing is idiot work - consider logistics, cost control, and automation as three aspects of this market which do promote the knowledge economy.
1. You assume that a person is married for dual-income purposes. Let me tell you, this is impossible in "Man Jose" if you've lived there for any length of time.
Maybe if you got some exercise and some new threads you wouldn't have these issues. Every single I guy I have worked with here has gotten married over the years. Maybe your issues are...more systemic, lets say.
But a banker will tell you that your gross annual income must be no less than 1/3 of the value of the home.
What? No one would be able to buy their own house by that math. I don't know who fed you that statistic, but I've never heard it before and it really doesn't make any sense.
3. The reality of the situation is that there is no more room to build, and everyone commutes from the East Bay from as far away as Stockton, enduring horrible commutes. And while you're trying to save a few bucks on your $85k per year salary, you're paying $2000/month in rent. How can you save enough money to make a down payment? You can't. That's why my friend with a wife and two children was living with his parents for the last five years - he can't afford any property.
I can find you $800/month apartments in the South Bay. New units. If you are paying more, it is becuase you want to. If your friend decided to have kids before buying a house, he dinged himself. I know a number of people making in the $80-$90k range who are buying NOW, because they saved and didn't f themselves on rent.
Silicon Valley is crowded, expensive, and generally lacking in culture. I think most people who have lived in any major metro area and then have lived in the Valley can attest to that.
I won't dispute crowded (what city isn't? isn't that the definition of a city??), and yes its expensive (what place worth living isn't??), but I challenge the culture bit. San Fran has more restaurants per capita than any other city in the US. It is often cited as the eating capital of the country. And I'm not talking Hardee's and Carl's Jr. I can catch off-Broadway shoes in San Fran and also in San Jose. San Fran has a world-class symphony and there are a number of respectable galleries. There are stunning parks all around the Bay. There are hippies in Santa Cruz, space cadets in San Fran, and the wine capital of North America all in driving distance. In fact wine is quickly becoming a huge economic driver in the Bay Area.
And I can go from the beach to Olympic skiing in four hours by car. where else can you do this again?
Sure, there is going to be a post-bust feeding frenzy when some of the freed-up talent gets gobbled up by the Silicon Valley survivors, but remember that most of the talented workers never actually owned property there.
Thats bullshit. Who do you think owns the land, farmers? The fact that you can't afford a house in the Bay Area is a myth. In Santa Clara county the average home price is around $500k. I'm not talking mansions here, but its a house that you own with land underneath. If you are a professional techie, you are bringing in around $85k, and if you are married, you are likely looking at household income of around $130k. Now your banker will tell you that you can expect to pay 20x your take-home pay for your house, so in reality this is in line with expectations.
If you are pulling in $50k or less you should either marry someone who makes a lot of money or move - but then again this is the same story in London and Manhatten.
why would any company try and cripple it's self with the plysical location of being in Silicon Valley?
Yes, why would any company want to locate itself in the most concentrated, diverse market for tech talent in the world?
Where else can you hang out your shingle pushing some new-fangled cutting edge tech, and actually have a reasonable expectation of getting a renewable stream of labor that can actually keep up?
Sure you could find a plot of ground in the middle of Kansas for next to nothing, but you are also going to have a hard time getting talent through your door.
As a counter argument, I ask that you name three wildly succesful tech companies that locate themselves in the middle of nowhere.
This is nothing new, in the early nineties you could find seriously technical people tending bar to make ends meet. The same is happening again - the readjustment of wages and companies as the world's healthiest corporate ecology gears up for the next round.
Yes its fun to dig on this place - it has hubris, ego, and arrogance. But it also has the best array of tech talent in the smallest area of any place on earth. It seriously moving towards biotech and other emerging technologies. It will likely continue to be a center for venture capital. It continues to be an academic powerhouse.
So gets your digs in now while its still at a low. Ten years from now real estate there will be even more absurdly expensive, and there will be even more innovation coming out of this continuingly diverse ecology of ideas.
Nobody is forced to subsidize anyone, they are just forced to resell at fair prices. It is amazing how much people bash this mild antimonopoly provision.
SBC is required to offer carrier service to Covad at an externally determined price level. If that isn't a subsidy, what is??
The last mile problem is not being solved because cable and dsl are much less popular than everyone thought they would be.
Chicken and egg. They are unpopular because they are unavailable. Less than 20% of homes in the US can obtain both or either of these services. Cable modem is more popular as the cable operators are not fetterd by the FCC competition subsidies the Bells are saddled with - and this is exactly why the FCC is going to roll these back.
In any case your point makes no sense - its not about demand - its about creating markets by taking risks. The Bells aren't going to put out more capital to support their competitors (even if SBC is a significant shareholder in some of them).
This article completely discounts the obvious innovations coming to market for pushing more bits down the same fibers over time.
I also dispute the notion of an approaching shortage. Of course James Crowe wants you to believe that there is an impending shortage - his company is on the ropes and he desperately needs to foster the notion of the bandwidth boogeyman to keep investors interested in his moribund stock.
Yes if the "last mile" problem is solved, there will be a tremendous spike in demand...but lets be realistic about developments in the last mile - many telcos are scaling back or cancelling outright plans to push high bandwidth deeper into their networks. Case in point, SBC's "Project Pronto", which would have given 80% of SBC customers the equivalent of a 5-7MB/sec connection, has been cancelled for good. If SBC has to provide cut-rate access to their networks to companies like Covad, they simply aren't going to bother with upgrades...and forget about the government forcing companies like SBC to sell off the local loops, this isn't Cuba...hell will freeze over first.
The sad fact is that the regional Bells are only going to make major upgrades when they no longer have to subsidize the competition. It sucks, but its the inevitable fact.
They want to charge people who use Outlook, Eudora, etc to read Yahoo mail.
Charging for email is inevitable. These services require huge hardware infrastructures that have, to this point, been funded by the stock market. Going forward, you can expect the major services to charge...as soon as the little guys are out of the market (which is happening rapidly).
If you think any of these agencies is going to put a private citizen into orbit for less than $5 million in the next ten years, you are deluding yourself. Recreational space travel has absolutely nothing to do with people who aren't extremely wealthy, at least for the next ten years.
The old HP way was to make money with excellent engineering.
Which is exactly in the opposite direction of where HP is heading, for better or for worse...but lets be realistic here - worse is better, as they say. The markets for highly-engineered, high-margin technology products is shrinking as commodity products take over. You aren't going to be able to run an 80k person company on fringe high-margin products. Look at the deterioration of high-end hardware at Sun and IBM.
This merger, once inevitably complete, will create an astoundingly mediocire entity that will likely lose in equity the entire purchase price of the acquisition.
I agree with Carly that HP is in need of major repair - the HP way, though laudable, represents a bygone era that simply can't be applied to modern business. That said, combining HP with another model of mediocrity, Compaq, in a hope to eek out savings-through-scale in the cut-throat, low-margin hardware business is simply not going to increase value.
These companies will spend at least two years properly integrating, during which time Dell and IBM will continue to lead, and in fact increase their leads in hardware and services. After the dust has settled on the two year merger process, the new HP will simply make its quarterly numbers by cutting staff and relying on long-term contracts in its traditional businesses....like 90% of the other mergers of the recent past.
Most startups at some point demand some extraordinary sacrifices of their employees, either in low pay or no pay for some periods.
This is why you don't work for one if you have a mortgage to pay and three kids in college. Look at most start-ups and you see two types - the very young and the very rich.
The West has long had the capacity for using non-nuclear weapons with equally devastating effect. Look back to the firebombing of Dresden to see how much havoc you can wreak without going nuclear.
The only problem I have with this list is that Saudi Arabia is not on it.
Why does style have to be feminie?
on
iMac LCD Impostors
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
The materials and the look of the iMac are far too feminine. The iMac is the VW of comuters and most guys I think would be embarrassed driving a VW (at least any straight guy).
Why not use more "maculine" materials? There is a lot of cool design work you could do with red and blue anodized metals, surgical steel, carbon fiber or other industrial-type materials. Yes, Apple does use something respectable in the Tbook, but the rest of the line is for girls, period.
Do you learn all your history from cartoons? The tribes of America warred on each other with incredible ferocity. The holisitc spiritual utopia of early America is a myth - these people engaged in strip farming, violent incursions, and even ritual torture. This isn't to defame them - many other cultures engaged in these acts as well, including Europeans, but no one is claiming that the Europeans were "children of the Earth" living at peace with the land and each other.
You mean Greene is going to stop me from downloading pap shite like rock-disco-retards No Doubt and neo-plastic-earthy-tripe Dave Matthews?? How oh how will I get by without this putrid excuse for legit music?
To paraphrase Gore Vidal, the Democrats and the Republicans are both branches of the property party. The only difference is each party has different industries providing core corporate sponsorship.
This is all great news anyway - the best way to stay away from corporate ownership of your computer and data is to stop buying their crappy content, which will have the beneficial side-effect of promoting indie artists.
Slashdot Mirror
To simple say that machine intelligence will be eventually asymptotic to human intelligence is meangingless - it need only be close enough that we are unable to tell the difference by any discernable means. Scale matters in all things human - your asymptote argument doesn't hold. We don't live on a graph.
This debate on the pros and cons of manufacturing in the economy is so utterly naive and devoid of hard facts that it really should be shot and left outside. Read any of the adequate books (the most obvious being Fingleton) on this topic that have come out in the last few years and you will see that this debate requires more depth than the simplistic tete-a-tete of /. comments.
The notion that G8 markets should purge manufacturing was once held as an ideal but has, at least for the last five years, been thoroughly debunked. Not all manufacturing is idiot work - consider logistics, cost control, and automation as three aspects of this market which do promote the knowledge economy.
Maybe if you got some exercise and some new threads you wouldn't have these issues. Every single I guy I have worked with here has gotten married over the years. Maybe your issues are...more systemic, lets say.
But a banker will tell you that your gross annual income must be no less than 1/3 of the value of the home.
What? No one would be able to buy their own house by that math. I don't know who fed you that statistic, but I've never heard it before and it really doesn't make any sense.
3. The reality of the situation is that there is no more room to build, and everyone commutes from the East Bay from as far away as Stockton, enduring horrible commutes. And while you're trying to save a few bucks on your $85k per year salary, you're paying $2000/month in rent. How can you save enough money to make a down payment? You can't. That's why my friend with a wife and two children was living with his parents for the last five years - he can't afford any property.
I can find you $800/month apartments in the South Bay. New units. If you are paying more, it is becuase you want to. If your friend decided to have kids before buying a house, he dinged himself. I know a number of people making in the $80-$90k range who are buying NOW, because they saved and didn't f themselves on rent.
I won't dispute crowded (what city isn't? isn't that the definition of a city??), and yes its expensive (what place worth living isn't??), but I challenge the culture bit. San Fran has more restaurants per capita than any other city in the US. It is often cited as the eating capital of the country. And I'm not talking Hardee's and Carl's Jr. I can catch off-Broadway shoes in San Fran and also in San Jose. San Fran has a world-class symphony and there are a number of respectable galleries. There are stunning parks all around the Bay. There are hippies in Santa Cruz, space cadets in San Fran, and the wine capital of North America all in driving distance. In fact wine is quickly becoming a huge economic driver in the Bay Area.
And I can go from the beach to Olympic skiing in four hours by car. where else can you do this again?
Thats bullshit. Who do you think owns the land, farmers? The fact that you can't afford a house in the Bay Area is a myth. In Santa Clara county the average home price is around $500k. I'm not talking mansions here, but its a house that you own with land underneath. If you are a professional techie, you are bringing in around $85k, and if you are married, you are likely looking at household income of around $130k. Now your banker will tell you that you can expect to pay 20x your take-home pay for your house, so in reality this is in line with expectations.
If you are pulling in $50k or less you should either marry someone who makes a lot of money or move - but then again this is the same story in London and Manhatten.
Yes, why would any company want to locate itself in the most concentrated, diverse market for tech talent in the world?
Where else can you hang out your shingle pushing some new-fangled cutting edge tech, and actually have a reasonable expectation of getting a renewable stream of labor that can actually keep up?
Sure you could find a plot of ground in the middle of Kansas for next to nothing, but you are also going to have a hard time getting talent through your door.
As a counter argument, I ask that you name three wildly succesful tech companies that locate themselves in the middle of nowhere.
Yes its fun to dig on this place - it has hubris, ego, and arrogance. But it also has the best array of tech talent in the smallest area of any place on earth. It seriously moving towards biotech and other emerging technologies. It will likely continue to be a center for venture capital. It continues to be an academic powerhouse.
So gets your digs in now while its still at a low. Ten years from now real estate there will be even more absurdly expensive, and there will be even more innovation coming out of this continuingly diverse ecology of ideas.
SBC is required to offer carrier service to Covad at an externally determined price level. If that isn't a subsidy, what is??
The last mile problem is not being solved because cable and dsl are much less popular than everyone thought they would be.
Chicken and egg. They are unpopular because they are unavailable. Less than 20% of homes in the US can obtain both or either of these services. Cable modem is more popular as the cable operators are not fetterd by the FCC competition subsidies the Bells are saddled with - and this is exactly why the FCC is going to roll these back.
In any case your point makes no sense - its not about demand - its about creating markets by taking risks. The Bells aren't going to put out more capital to support their competitors (even if SBC is a significant shareholder in some of them).
This article completely discounts the obvious innovations coming to market for pushing more bits down the same fibers over time.
I also dispute the notion of an approaching shortage. Of course James Crowe wants you to believe that there is an impending shortage - his company is on the ropes and he desperately needs to foster the notion of the bandwidth boogeyman to keep investors interested in his moribund stock.
Yes if the "last mile" problem is solved, there will be a tremendous spike in demand...but lets be realistic about developments in the last mile - many telcos are scaling back or cancelling outright plans to push high bandwidth deeper into their networks. Case in point, SBC's "Project Pronto", which would have given 80% of SBC customers the equivalent of a 5-7MB/sec connection, has been cancelled for good. If SBC has to provide cut-rate access to their networks to companies like Covad, they simply aren't going to bother with upgrades...and forget about the government forcing companies like SBC to sell off the local loops, this isn't Cuba...hell will freeze over first.
The sad fact is that the regional Bells are only going to make major upgrades when they no longer have to subsidize the competition. It sucks, but its the inevitable fact.
Charging for email is inevitable. These services require huge hardware infrastructures that have, to this point, been funded by the stock market. Going forward, you can expect the major services to charge...as soon as the little guys are out of the market (which is happening rapidly).
If you think any of these agencies is going to put a private citizen into orbit for less than $5 million in the next ten years, you are deluding yourself. Recreational space travel has absolutely nothing to do with people who aren't extremely wealthy, at least for the next ten years.
Which is exactly in the opposite direction of where HP is heading, for better or for worse...but lets be realistic here - worse is better, as they say. The markets for highly-engineered, high-margin technology products is shrinking as commodity products take over. You aren't going to be able to run an 80k person company on fringe high-margin products. Look at the deterioration of high-end hardware at Sun and IBM.
I agree with Carly that HP is in need of major repair - the HP way, though laudable, represents a bygone era that simply can't be applied to modern business. That said, combining HP with another model of mediocrity, Compaq, in a hope to eek out savings-through-scale in the cut-throat, low-margin hardware business is simply not going to increase value.
These companies will spend at least two years properly integrating, during which time Dell and IBM will continue to lead, and in fact increase their leads in hardware and services. After the dust has settled on the two year merger process, the new HP will simply make its quarterly numbers by cutting staff and relying on long-term contracts in its traditional businesses....like 90% of the other mergers of the recent past.
This lets you distinguish between the server number in a rotation (the second element) and the specific service it is supporting (the first element).
You are risk-averse. Startups are inherently risk-prone. Act accordingly.
This is why you don't work for one if you have a mortgage to pay and three kids in college. Look at most start-ups and you see two types - the very young and the very rich.
Its not all free massages and BMWs.
The only problem I have with this list is that Saudi Arabia is not on it.
Why not use more "maculine" materials? There is a lot of cool design work you could do with red and blue anodized metals, surgical steel, carbon fiber or other industrial-type materials. Yes, Apple does use something respectable in the Tbook, but the rest of the line is for girls, period.
Do you learn all your history from cartoons? The tribes of America warred on each other with incredible ferocity. The holisitc spiritual utopia of early America is a myth - these people engaged in strip farming, violent incursions, and even ritual torture. This isn't to defame them - many other cultures engaged in these acts as well, including Europeans, but no one is claiming that the Europeans were "children of the Earth" living at peace with the land and each other.
You mean Greene is going to stop me from downloading pap shite like rock-disco-retards No Doubt and neo-plastic-earthy-tripe Dave Matthews?? How oh how will I get by without this putrid excuse for legit music?
This is all great news anyway - the best way to stay away from corporate ownership of your computer and data is to stop buying their crappy content, which will have the beneficial side-effect of promoting indie artists.
We're not talking about "hello world". Try coding up 50k lines of C and see how well your memory management skills stack up.
Not to sound arrogant, but this statement belies a need for substantial reading about C and C++, not casual reading.