They evidently didn't learn a thing from the dot-com bust, which came from investors throwing gobs of money at tech companies with no hope of success. These guys are throwing gobs of money at SCO (probably because they owe the Canopy group a favor), so SCO will stay around a little longer, but still fail miserably. In the end, these people will have absolutely nothing to show for their $50 million. It'll be a good lesson to them. Natural selection in the business world.
Most people only need so much cpu power. Yet Moore's law continues to march onward.
Multicore processers are typically not so much for more overall computational ability, but to increase the bandwidth and decrease latency for communications between the two cores.
However, you're right, as higher density has been possible, the industry has been moving more and more to the fabled "SOC", or "System on a Chip".
We've already got motherboard chipsets that have pretty much every function built into them (IDE, graphics, network, etc.), and processers that have memory controllers built in.
Once it's economically advantageous, then we'll see more and more of that built into the processer itself, and eventually, yes, we'll likely have a system on a chip.
If I recall, Intel's Centrino chips already have wireless networking circuity built into them, don't they?
Anyone get the impression that the manufacturers are hitting the limit on how much they can cram into a single core?
Not at all. : )
You can *always* find something more to stuff in a core. If nothing else, increase cache size, or add more pipelines.
However, as you increase the number of transistors, the size of the die goes up - production drops, yield percentages drop, and it starts getting very costly.
But, every couple of years, a new manufacturing process finds it's way into production usage, which allows manufacturers to make smaller transistors, and then they pack more on a chip.
The adding of a second core is practically insignificant in difficulty compared to designing a completely new architecture. It's a way for AMD to easily, quickly, cheaply take advantage of smaller manufacturing processes to get lots more transistors working. In the mean time, they'll be working on a newer processer, I'm sure.
Plopping down multiple cores is one of the *last* things you do with an architecture; it's what you do when you've run out of other options.
I don't really think so. It's not a matter of simply making a single processer as fast as you can, that's not the commodity market these are intended for. IBM learned years ago that in multiprocessing situations, increased bandwidth is very important, and that getting huge gobs of bandwidth at very low latencies is much, much easier to do if it's all kept on the same chip. It would be easy enough (and CERTAINLY cheaper) to have each core on it's own chip, but getting huge amounts of low-latency bandwidth between them gets prohibitively difficult.
Precisely one of the reasons that the Athlon is such a strong performer is because the memory controller is embedded into the processer, greatly reducing memory access latency. They certainly didn't go to all that work for nothing! And putting more than one core on a chip is all about the same idea. It's a lot easier to hit high transmission rates when your "wires" are one or two millimeters long, not 3-7 inches long.
While some computationally-bound applications do exist, most servers today aren't hurting at all for CPU speed, it's not at all uncommon to see a server hit it's performance limit long before the CPU's hit 100% utilization....with a better performance enhancement than multiple cores will give you for your average program-- which is still typically not going to be multi-threaded.
Well, these chips aren't designed for your average MicroShaft Office applications, are they? They're intended for high-load server applications, where the norm is to encounter not only multiple threads, but multiple processes all trying to get lots of CPU time.
Yet another reason why you shouldn't look to magazine articles as gospel truth.
While the currently-available 2xx-series Opterons only support two-way processing, the 8xx series is due out shortly, and (as the model number suggests), supports up to 8-way processing.
I am glad to see chipmakers getting off their asses and making progress finally.
"Finally"? They've been making steady improvements over the past twenty years. Just over the past ten years:
- CPU frequencies have increased by 30 times. - Memory bandwidths have increased by 24 times. - CPU complexity has increased by a good factor.
The times used to be when x86 processers were the slaggards of the computing world. Now, if you compare the computing power of a modern x86 processer to competing processers costing ten times more, often the x86 processer will win.
Now, the competing processers have features which are still beyond the x86 realm, but the fact still remains that a $400 x86 chip, by itself, can often out-perform a $2,000 or $3,000 competing chip.
As for memory bandwidth, the nature of the Opteron already solves that: Each core has it's own memory controller, so for each core you add, you're adding more memory bandwidth.
As for a thousand pins on the chip, I believe the Opterons are already near that. If you add in the extra pins for the memory controllers, you're probably looking at a minimum of 1500.
As the manufacturing process shrinks, and companies are able to put more transisters on a chip, the question arises: What should we use those extra transistors for?
Now, there are several options. They could come up with a new processer design, but that takes a tremendous amount of R&D. They could just put tons of cache on the chip, but that gives diminishing returns.
Or.... the Opterons already have very simply I/O mechanisms, namely, HyperTransport. Literally all they have to do is plop down two Opteron cores, connect the HyperTransport lines, and bam: Dual-core processer. I'm honestly surprised they're not doing it SOONER.
Of course, the lines for memory controllers and the like have to be drawn out to the pins on the packaging, but that's a piece of cake.
robots capable of doing these moves are many steps closer to being able to move around in real world environments.
I absolutely agree. I've said for ages that a robot just can't usefully navigate a house without being able to do a good roundhouse-kick, preferably to a height of 5.5 feet. Even then, without a good iron-palm strike, it's not going to have problems.
You can use Asterisk as your home PBX, and for $100, you can pick up a card to let you use your analog phone. Or, you can also interface it to your IP telephones. It can do automatic recording for you, including the mandatory beep tone.
Where it gets really frightening is that the telemarketer called my girlfriend back and started an ill-advised bout of verbal beration directed at my girlfriend for hanging up on her.
At work, I'm so incredibly mean and berating to telemarketers that they often call my boss to try and get me in trouble. My boss tells them that they deserved it. It makes them furious ever time.
The good news is, for about an extra $2 a month on the phone bill, I was able to get a call-screening feature
That's not the good part, that's the rip-off part.
Qwest works both sides of the game - they sell your information to telemarketers, then they offer to sell you a service to keep them from calling. In the mean time, they're selling technology to telemarketers to help them get around the blocking service that they're selling you.
When pressed on the matter, Qwest representatives have simply said that they try to find the "balance". And, since Qwest has been fighting to avoid bankruptcy, the balance is whatever makes them the most money by screwing over both sides at once.
The only reason I still have Qwest is because there are no other alternatives to dial-up in my area. However, on the 31st of this month, Comcast will have cable modems here, so no more Qwest for me. If I have my way, they'll never get another cent of mine again.
*WE* are in charge of this country, not the DMA. Of the people, by the people, for the people...
No, we aren't in charge of the country, our elected representatives are. And they're so worried about getting campaign contributions or other types of moneatary perks that they'll cater to whomever gives them the most money.
Now, who gives the politicians the most money - you, or the DMA?
Yes, I know, you can vote them out of office. Unfortunately, in most races, the winner is determined by who has the most campaign money to spend. And again, the DMA gives the politicians a lot more money than you do.
It does work. Rather well, in fact. One of the most simple, common-sense ways to start port-blocking is to block everything below 1024 except for services that you know that you want to provide. It's amazing how many networks get along just fine with nothing but http, ssh, dns, smtp, and pop-3.
By doing that and disallowing email with any executable attachments, one of the networks that I maintain has weathered all of the email/network virii/worms without a single incident - despite the fact that they have M$ machines that haven't been updated at all.
Occasionally, they'll call because someone thinks they have a virus. I'll go and scan all of the machines with the latest patterns, and guess what - no virii.
Of course, this in no way excuses Microsoft for their horrible security. It's simply a way to get at least a good start at protecting yourself.
Look at Dan J. Bernstein of qmail/DJBDNS fame/infamy. He managed to become the department head, if I recall, and he's... well, according to what you say, he's certainly of Newtonian stature.
Yeah, we can really see that now: 5% of the population owns 90% of wealth.
I don't think you'll find a society where that is NOT true. However, even the POOR people in the US live better than the great majority of the rest of the world. No matter how you slice it, that alone says something good about our country.
That's why you have the largest percentage of rape, murder and steal.
We don't. Not at all. There are places all over the world that make the U.S.'s crime rates look like nothing.
I can't see how a US or EU citizen could ever accept working under such conditions...why should a Thailand one accept it ? is he/she a lesser human ?
Why would a Thai person accept it? Because his alternatives are worse. I'm not in any sense saying that I wouldn't like them to make more money, but no matter how much emotion or self-righteousness you put on it, the facts remain: Those sweatshops do provide a better living more those people than they could otherwise obtain, and the influx of money helps the local economy.
Now, if I ran one of those sweatshops, I could not in good conscience pay them that little. But, I still can't argue the fact that the people are better off than they would be without the sweatshops.
Here's a little wakeup call for you: If you think the treatment those people suffer in the sweatshops is bad, you should see how much worse the locally owned shops treat them.
Shhh...don't tell me it is not the exploitation by Europeans and Americans!!! don't tell me it is not that we, white people, have gone over their with guns and taken from them their gold and diamonds, exploited their land and their natural resources, forced them to live in ghettos even in their own countries, sold arms to them, and generally divide and conquer!!!
If you've read the book, you've seen that it's because of a combination of many factors. You've also seen that Whites and Europeans weren't the only ones over there oppressing, killing, and enslaving, the Arabic nations were doing that long before us.
By the way, mr David Landes tells us in that book that poor countries failed to adapt to the industrial revolution due to cultural traits!!! that's simply not true, because the poor countries don't lack culture, they simply have a different form of culture!!! The only reason we are richer is because we have aggresively exploited our environments.
You seem to have either not read that book, or not understood it. Mr. Landes never once said that they did not have culture, or that they had less culture, only that cultural traits that they DID have prevented some countries from adapting. The same thing happens today, even on a personal level.
The only people that get rich under capitalism is those that trade things, i.e. get materials, process it, and then sell the goods to others
How else do you want people to get rich?
The average Joe is poor. Most of us average Joes don't even own a piece of land, for Christ's sake...don't even have our own house!!!
The guy I knew that got rich didn't own a single thing. Owning a house is not a prerequisite to getting rich. And guess what: MOST of the world would be willing to slit your throat to live the way even a poor person in the U.S. lives.
If you don't believe that, then you should spend some time living with truly poor people. I don't know where you're from, but it sounds like you've never spent any time outside of a wealthy, industrialized nation.
money goes where money is; eventually, only a few will have all the money; we are not far off from this situation.
Actually, historically, the reason that capitalism works is because advancement comes from the bottom. All throughout the development of nations, it's been the workers that have developped all of the advancements: Precisely because the workers can (and do) make money by doing so.
Saying that in the long run, communism is no worse than capitalism is completely wrong. Both living conditions AND humanitarian values are much better under a capitalistic republic. If you disagree, I'd like you to tell me of a communistic society where humanitarian values are as good as they are in the U.S..
Those sweatshops in Thailand usually pay the workers better and treat them better than other jobs in their country. They bring an influx of money to local economies that otherwise would remain stagnant. It helps both us and them.
US and EU do not allow the cheap agricultural products of Africa and other areas to enter their markets!!! they actually impose restrictions, in order to promote their own products!!! how is that for a 'free' market ?
By dropping trade barriers, it would help both our countries and theirs. However, then people would complain that we were taking advantage of those poor, exploited nations, making them do our dirty work for pennies on the dollar, despite the fact that it would be HELPING them.
By the way, if you'd like a better idea of WHY most African nations are so dirt poor, read "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations". Some of the largest reasons have probably never even occurred to you.
Point to me one poor person that got rich (or even relatively wealthy) by doing an honest job and being honest for the whole of his/her life.
My friend's relative was living in a homeless shelter, completely homeless, and not very well educated. This was back in the early 80's, if I recall. Do you remember how Izod shirts were so popular? He had an idea to make little embroidered thingies like the lizard logos on Izods, and sell them to people who make their own clothes - helping them dress their kids stylishly at a much lower price.
He hustled his butt off, got some backing, and sold enough of them to make himelf a millionaire. Whether he's remained honest the rest of his life, I don't know, but the fact remains that he made himself a millionaire through honest means.
Precisely because Capitalism works by allowing advancement from the bottom, the lower and middle classes are better off than they are under any other form of government. Under an idealistic socialism, the very lowest classes *could* be better off than under capitalism, but so far, nobody has been able to come up with anything even resembling an ideal socialism on any significant scale, and never will be.
It looks like you've never lived in a truly poor country.
Remember that even at $12,000 per year, you are still within the most wealthy 11% of the world.
To people that have never lived outside of the United States, it's incomprehensible how anyone could survive without a three-room apartment, a car that's still under factory warranty, a leather sofa, and all of the pre-made, frozen food you can eat.
A month's supply of rice costs you what, $30? And unless you live in the middle of manhatten or silicon valley and refuse to commute, you *can* find housing for a few hundred per month. It'll be small, cramped, ugly, run-down, and you might have long commutes to work, but you know what? That $350 per month it costs you for rice and a crappy sty of an apartment can be paid for on minimum wage.
To review, that means that if you're (a) willing to work, and (b) financially frugal, you are guaranteed to at least have a roof over your head and some food.
That doesn't sound like much of a life to most of us, but after seeing how truly poor people live, the fact that you're even guaranteed a roof over your head and some rice is actually not that bad.
In fact, I've known people who made *barely* more than minimum wage, and managed to have a decent apartment, a car, a television, take belly-dancing classes, and overall have a pretty decent life.
I've also seen such poverty that if you even had a 20-year old, run-down, beat-up car, that established you firmly in the middle class. And if you had a telephone to boot, that put you in the upper middle class.
Really. Before anyone complains about the quality of life in the United States, they need to go spend a couple of years living the way most of the world lives. I can remember coming back to the United States and feeling greedy and awful just for the fact that I had carpet, for crying out loud.
Before you jump to conclusions, maybe you should actually read what you're making a judgement on.
Perl has been around for what, two decades? And we're only looking for someone that has one or two years of good, solid programming experience in it.
If you haven't settled down into one particular technical environment, that doesn't make you a bad person, stupid, or anything else. But not having long-term, in-depth experience and expertise in a field greatly limits the jobs you can get.
We epitimize the problem with hiring practices? Of the past 10 people we've hired, perhaps three were actually qualified. The rest we've taken because while they weren't qualified, they were at least the most likely of the bunch. Of those 7 people, two of them have gone on to be great programmers.
To put that in perspective, that means that our company has paid a yearly salary and training costs to *HALF* of the people we've hired, without them really giving us much of a return.
If anything's bad with that hiring practice, it's that we're being TOO nice to people.
My friend's uncle was homeless and had very little education. While he was sleeping in a homeless shelter, he had a good idea. He busted his butt to make it happen, how he's literally a millionaire.
There is no other place on Earth where poor people have as MANY chances as under a capitalistic society.
1. Capitalism sucks as bad as communism. It just takes a little longer to realise...but you realise it well when you are fired and you can't find a job.
Making a comparatively huge wage for years, then spending a while unemployed before making another (comparatively) huge wage is much better than being forced to work in a tedious, menial, or back-breaking job for your whole life with no hope of ever escaping abject poverty. If that isn't clear to you, maybe you could use a stint in a poor country to help you see the real world. If you've never lived outside of the U.S., you've never seen what a hard life really is.
3. Companies sell their products with up to 90% profit, especially those that outsource production. And the profit fills the pockets of their owners
If you think that many companies make 90% profits, you obviously don't understand the costs of doing business. Any market where a company can repeatedly make a profit anywhere near that level is a market that will soon be flooded with competition. For a company to make actual profits even in the very low double-digits is very, very good.
7. If you ever realized how good rich people live, a revolution would be started in a minute.
If you've ever lived in a truly poor nation, you'd realize that you, by virtue of the fact that you're even posting on Slashdot, are likely within the wealthiest 5% of the entire world. The lifestyle accorded to an American working for minimum wage is literally an impossible dream to hundreds of millions of people.
9. If you ever realized that the rich people got rich by stealing,
Yes, we all know that poor people never obtain their means through criminal means.
Over the years, I've found that the more impressive the resume, the more likely the guy is to walk in, sit down in front of a computer, and become absolutely lost. Really!
I've had a person give me resumes that practically made him out to be the greatest computer-related worker in the world. I sat him down and asked him to write an extremely simple (10-line) Perl program. He fiddled around, got the #! line wrong, then finally admitted "I usually just cut and paste this stuff."
That's not an isolated case, either. Every one of the unbelievably good resumes I've been handed have been from unqualified persons. Let's look at the resume in question. With all of these opinions, I could be right or wrong. I've never sat down with the man in question, so these are only opinions.
First, the fact that he claims 13 programming languages would scare me away as an employer. Finding a person who is actually competent, qualified, and a good programmer in that many languages isn't as easy as these "I know 13 programming languages" people think. Now, he may not be a terrible programmer in those 13 languages, but employers aren't looking for people who "aren't terrible" - they're looking for someone really good. For crying out loud, the only programming instruction he lists is a week-long intensive Java course. I'm sorry, but those week-long courses (I've been to some) don't exactly make you a qualified programmer.
Second, it's very easy to put down every vendor in the world under "Hardware Platforms". After all, you're making absolutely no substantiated claim to anything significant. Back in college, I used AIX for a couple of hours working on a physics project. I could list that under "Hardware Platforms" if I wanted.
Third, somewhat related to the second: A lot of these claims smell to me, as an employer, as an attempt to look like more than he is. Let's look at this claim:
I also used SQL*PLUS to for data extracts and and table and data maintenance.
If that's all you can claim, then you probably don't have more than a passing familiarity with Oracle. "Select * from " and "delete from where..." fully substantiate the sentence he's provided, but certainly don't qualify you for a job in my company.
While there are many more things I could pick out, I'll end with experience. In the last ten years, the only programming experience he lists has been a little bit of Java/JSP in his last job and a couple of Perl scripts. The next guy is going to come in and show ten years of solid, heavy programming development. Who do you think is going to get the job?
Overall, the guy's career has been that of a technical writer, with occasional programming jobs mixed in. Unfortunately for him, he seems to be like so many of us that took a while to fall into a career path - first he studied mathematics for 6 years or so, did some programming, did a lot of technical writing, did a litttle programming, did a lot more technical writing, and finally seems to have decided to stick with programming.
Well, he spent a lot of time bouncing around. Those mathematics degrees will be a great help to him in some areas of programming, but it's going to be awfully tough to find a position in web development where it will, and even tougher to find a position in technical writing that will use it. Spending 6 years of your life studying for something you're not going to use doesn't exactly get you to the top. I can say that from experience, I did exactly the same thing. The one thing that saved me was that during the 6 years that I spent studying something I'd never use, I was also out busting my butt in computer jobs to pay the bills, and I went out of my way to take jobs that would give me opportunities to learn, progress, and acquire valuable skills and experience, even if it wasn't the best job to pay the bills.
When employers look at a potential employee, they see a big difference between those that "paid their dues" for 6 to 10 years, busting their butts, and those that took a "week long intensive Java course".
Slashdot Mirror
They evidently didn't learn a thing from the dot-com bust, which came from investors throwing gobs of money at tech companies with no hope of success. These guys are throwing gobs of money at SCO (probably because they owe the Canopy group a favor), so SCO will stay around a little longer, but still fail miserably. In the end, these people will have absolutely nothing to show for their $50 million. It'll be a good lesson to them. Natural selection in the business world.
steve
I think that IBM has been there for a while now, too. : )
steve
Most people only need so much cpu power. Yet Moore's law continues to march onward.
Multicore processers are typically not so much for more overall computational ability, but to increase the bandwidth and decrease latency for communications between the two cores.
However, you're right, as higher density has been possible, the industry has been moving more and more to the fabled "SOC", or "System on a Chip".
We've already got motherboard chipsets that have pretty much every function built into them (IDE, graphics, network, etc.), and processers that have memory controllers built in.
Once it's economically advantageous, then we'll see more and more of that built into the processer itself, and eventually, yes, we'll likely have a system on a chip.
If I recall, Intel's Centrino chips already have wireless networking circuity built into them, don't they?
steve
Anyone get the impression that the manufacturers are hitting the limit on how much they can cram into a single core?
Not at all. : )
You can *always* find something more to stuff in a core. If nothing else, increase cache size, or add more pipelines.
However, as you increase the number of transistors, the size of the die goes up - production drops, yield percentages drop, and it starts getting very costly.
But, every couple of years, a new manufacturing process finds it's way into production usage, which allows manufacturers to make smaller transistors, and then they pack more on a chip.
The adding of a second core is practically insignificant in difficulty compared to designing a completely new architecture. It's a way for AMD to easily, quickly, cheaply take advantage of smaller manufacturing processes to get lots more transistors working. In the mean time, they'll be working on a newer processer, I'm sure.
steve
Plopping down multiple cores is one of the *last* things you do with an architecture; it's what you do when you've run out of other options.
...with a better performance enhancement than multiple cores will give you for your average program-- which is still typically not going to be multi-threaded.
I don't really think so. It's not a matter of simply making a single processer as fast as you can, that's not the commodity market these are intended for. IBM learned years ago that in multiprocessing situations, increased bandwidth is very important, and that getting huge gobs of bandwidth at very low latencies is much, much easier to do if it's all kept on the same chip. It would be easy enough (and CERTAINLY cheaper) to have each core on it's own chip, but getting huge amounts of low-latency bandwidth between them gets prohibitively difficult.
Precisely one of the reasons that the Athlon is such a strong performer is because the memory controller is embedded into the processer, greatly reducing memory access latency. They certainly didn't go to all that work for nothing! And putting more than one core on a chip is all about the same idea. It's a lot easier to hit high transmission rates when your "wires" are one or two millimeters long, not 3-7 inches long.
While some computationally-bound applications do exist, most servers today aren't hurting at all for CPU speed, it's not at all uncommon to see a server hit it's performance limit long before the CPU's hit 100% utilization.
Well, these chips aren't designed for your average MicroShaft Office applications, are they? They're intended for high-load server applications, where the norm is to encounter not only multiple threads, but multiple processes all trying to get lots of CPU time.
steve
Yet another reason why you shouldn't look to magazine articles as gospel truth.
While the currently-available 2xx-series Opterons only support two-way processing, the 8xx series is due out shortly, and (as the model number suggests), supports up to 8-way processing.
steve
I am glad to see chipmakers getting off their asses and making progress finally.
"Finally"? They've been making steady improvements over the past twenty years. Just over the past ten years:
- CPU frequencies have increased by 30 times.
- Memory bandwidths have increased by 24 times.
- CPU complexity has increased by a good factor.
The times used to be when x86 processers were the slaggards of the computing world. Now, if you compare the computing power of a modern x86 processer to competing processers costing ten times more, often the x86 processer will win.
Now, the competing processers have features which are still beyond the x86 realm, but the fact still remains that a $400 x86 chip, by itself, can often out-perform a $2,000 or $3,000 competing chip.
steve
As for memory bandwidth, the nature of the Opteron already solves that: Each core has it's own memory controller, so for each core you add, you're adding more memory bandwidth.
As for a thousand pins on the chip, I believe the Opterons are already near that. If you add in the extra pins for the memory controllers, you're probably looking at a minimum of 1500.
steve
As the manufacturing process shrinks, and companies are able to put more transisters on a chip, the question arises: What should we use those extra transistors for?
Now, there are several options. They could come up with a new processer design, but that takes a tremendous amount of R&D. They could just put tons of cache on the chip, but that gives diminishing returns.
Or.... the Opterons already have very simply I/O mechanisms, namely, HyperTransport. Literally all they have to do is plop down two Opteron cores, connect the HyperTransport lines, and bam: Dual-core processer. I'm honestly surprised they're not doing it SOONER.
Of course, the lines for memory controllers and the like have to be drawn out to the pins on the packaging, but that's a piece of cake.
steve
It makes sense to me. The portion of my "dead drive" stack that is not made by Fujitsu is very small in comparison to the rest of the stack!
robots capable of doing these moves are many steps closer to being able to move around in real world environments.
I absolutely agree. I've said for ages that a robot just can't usefully navigate a house without being able to do a good roundhouse-kick, preferably to a height of 5.5 feet. Even then, without a good iron-palm strike, it's not going to have problems.
steve
You can use Asterisk as your home PBX, and for $100, you can pick up a card to let you use your analog phone. Or, you can also interface it to your IP telephones. It can do automatic recording for you, including the mandatory beep tone.
steve
Where it gets really frightening is that the telemarketer called my girlfriend back and started an ill-advised bout of verbal beration directed at my girlfriend for hanging up on her.
At work, I'm so incredibly mean and berating to telemarketers that they often call my boss to try and get me in trouble. My boss tells them that they deserved it. It makes them furious ever time.
steve
The good news is, for about an extra $2 a month on the phone bill, I was able to get a call-screening feature
That's not the good part, that's the rip-off part.
Qwest works both sides of the game - they sell your information to telemarketers, then they offer to sell you a service to keep them from calling. In the mean time, they're selling technology to telemarketers to help them get around the blocking service that they're selling you.
When pressed on the matter, Qwest representatives have simply said that they try to find the "balance". And, since Qwest has been fighting to avoid bankruptcy, the balance is whatever makes them the most money by screwing over both sides at once.
The only reason I still have Qwest is because there are no other alternatives to dial-up in my area. However, on the 31st of this month, Comcast will have cable modems here, so no more Qwest for me. If I have my way, they'll never get another cent of mine again.
steve
*WE* are in charge of this country, not the DMA. Of the people, by the people, for the people...
No, we aren't in charge of the country, our elected representatives are. And they're so worried about getting campaign contributions or other types of moneatary perks that they'll cater to whomever gives them the most money.
Now, who gives the politicians the most money - you, or the DMA?
Yes, I know, you can vote them out of office. Unfortunately, in most races, the winner is determined by who has the most campaign money to spend. And again, the DMA gives the politicians a lot more money than you do.
steve
It does work. Rather well, in fact. One of the most simple, common-sense ways to start port-blocking is to block everything below 1024 except for services that you know that you want to provide. It's amazing how many networks get along just fine with nothing but http, ssh, dns, smtp, and pop-3.
By doing that and disallowing email with any executable attachments, one of the networks that I maintain has weathered all of the email/network virii/worms without a single incident - despite the fact that they have M$ machines that haven't been updated at all.
Occasionally, they'll call because someone thinks they have a virus. I'll go and scan all of the machines with the latest patterns, and guess what - no virii.
Of course, this in no way excuses Microsoft for their horrible security. It's simply a way to get at least a good start at protecting yourself.
steve
Look at Dan J. Bernstein of qmail/DJBDNS fame/infamy. He managed to become the department head, if I recall, and he's... well, according to what you say, he's certainly of Newtonian stature.
steve
Yeah, we can really see that now: 5% of the population owns 90% of wealth.
I don't think you'll find a society where that is NOT true. However, even the POOR people in the US live better than the great majority of the rest of the world. No matter how you slice it, that alone says something good about our country.
That's why you have the largest percentage of rape, murder and steal.
We don't. Not at all. There are places all over the world that make the U.S.'s crime rates look like nothing.
I can't see how a US or EU citizen could ever accept working under such conditions...why should a Thailand one accept it ? is he/she a lesser human ?
Why would a Thai person accept it? Because his alternatives are worse. I'm not in any sense saying that I wouldn't like them to make more money, but no matter how much emotion or self-righteousness you put on it, the facts remain: Those sweatshops do provide a better living more those people than they could otherwise obtain, and the influx of money helps the local economy.
Now, if I ran one of those sweatshops, I could not in good conscience pay them that little. But, I still can't argue the fact that the people are better off than they would be without the sweatshops.
Here's a little wakeup call for you: If you think the treatment those people suffer in the sweatshops is bad, you should see how much worse the locally owned shops treat them.
Shhh...don't tell me it is not the exploitation by Europeans and Americans!!! don't tell me it is not that we, white people, have gone over their with guns and taken from them their gold and diamonds, exploited their land and their natural resources, forced them to live in ghettos even in their own countries, sold arms to them, and generally divide and conquer!!!
If you've read the book, you've seen that it's because of a combination of many factors. You've also seen that Whites and Europeans weren't the only ones over there oppressing, killing, and enslaving, the Arabic nations were doing that long before us.
By the way, mr David Landes tells us in that book that poor countries failed to adapt to the industrial revolution due to cultural traits!!! that's simply not true, because the poor countries don't lack culture, they simply have a different form of culture!!! The only reason we are richer is because we have aggresively exploited our environments.
You seem to have either not read that book, or not understood it. Mr. Landes never once said that they did not have culture, or that they had less culture, only that cultural traits that they DID have prevented some countries from adapting. The same thing happens today, even on a personal level.
The only people that get rich under capitalism is those that trade things, i.e. get materials, process it, and then sell the goods to others
How else do you want people to get rich?
The average Joe is poor. Most of us average Joes don't even own a piece of land, for Christ's sake...don't even have our own house!!!
The guy I knew that got rich didn't own a single thing. Owning a house is not a prerequisite to getting rich. And guess what: MOST of the world would be willing to slit your throat to live the way even a poor person in the U.S. lives.
If you don't believe that, then you should spend some time living with truly poor people. I don't know where you're from, but it sounds like you've never spent any time outside of a wealthy, industrialized nation.
steve
money goes where money is; eventually, only a few will have all the money; we are not far off from this situation.
Actually, historically, the reason that capitalism works is because advancement comes from the bottom. All throughout the development of nations, it's been the workers that have developped all of the advancements: Precisely because the workers can (and do) make money by doing so.
Saying that in the long run, communism is no worse than capitalism is completely wrong. Both living conditions AND humanitarian values are much better under a capitalistic republic. If you disagree, I'd like you to tell me of a communistic society where humanitarian values are as good as they are in the U.S..
Those sweatshops in Thailand usually pay the workers better and treat them better than other jobs in their country. They bring an influx of money to local economies that otherwise would remain stagnant. It helps both us and them.
US and EU do not allow the cheap agricultural products of Africa and other areas to enter their markets!!! they actually impose restrictions, in order to promote their own products!!! how is that for a 'free' market ?
By dropping trade barriers, it would help both our countries and theirs. However, then people would complain that we were taking advantage of those poor, exploited nations, making them do our dirty work for pennies on the dollar, despite the fact that it would be HELPING them.
By the way, if you'd like a better idea of WHY most African nations are so dirt poor, read "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations". Some of the largest reasons have probably never even occurred to you.
Point to me one poor person that got rich (or even relatively wealthy) by doing an honest job and being honest for the whole of his/her
life.
My friend's relative was living in a homeless shelter, completely homeless, and not very well educated. This was back in the early 80's, if I recall. Do you remember how Izod shirts were so popular? He had an idea to make little embroidered thingies like the lizard logos on Izods, and sell them to people who make their own clothes - helping them dress their kids stylishly at a much lower price.
He hustled his butt off, got some backing, and sold enough of them to make himelf a millionaire. Whether he's remained honest the rest of his life, I don't know, but the fact remains that he made himself a millionaire through honest means.
Precisely because Capitalism works by allowing advancement from the bottom, the lower and middle classes are better off than they are under any other form of government. Under an idealistic socialism, the very lowest classes *could* be better off than under capitalism, but so far, nobody has been able to come up with anything even resembling an ideal socialism on any significant scale, and never will be.
steve
It looks like you've never lived in a truly poor country.
Remember that even at $12,000 per year, you are still within the most wealthy 11% of the world.
To people that have never lived outside of the United States, it's incomprehensible how anyone could survive without a three-room apartment, a car that's still under factory warranty, a leather sofa, and all of the pre-made, frozen food you can eat.
A month's supply of rice costs you what, $30? And unless you live in the middle of manhatten or silicon valley and refuse to commute, you *can* find housing for a few hundred per month. It'll be small, cramped, ugly, run-down, and you might have long commutes to work, but you know what? That $350 per month it costs you for rice and a crappy sty of an apartment can be paid for on minimum wage.
To review, that means that if you're (a) willing to work, and (b) financially frugal, you are guaranteed to at least have a roof over your head and some food.
That doesn't sound like much of a life to most of us, but after seeing how truly poor people live, the fact that you're even guaranteed a roof over your head and some rice is actually not that bad.
In fact, I've known people who made *barely* more than minimum wage, and managed to have a decent apartment, a car, a television, take belly-dancing classes, and overall have a pretty decent life.
I've also seen such poverty that if you even had a 20-year old, run-down, beat-up car, that established you firmly in the middle class. And if you had a telephone to boot, that put you in the upper middle class.
Really. Before anyone complains about the quality of life in the United States, they need to go spend a couple of years living the way most of the world lives. I can remember coming back to the United States and feeling greedy and awful just for the fact that I had carpet, for crying out loud.
steve
Before you jump to conclusions, maybe you should actually read what you're making a judgement on.
Perl has been around for what, two decades? And we're only looking for someone that has one or two years of good, solid programming experience in it.
If you haven't settled down into one particular technical environment, that doesn't make you a bad person, stupid, or anything else. But not having long-term, in-depth experience and expertise in a field greatly limits the jobs you can get.
We epitimize the problem with hiring practices? Of the past 10 people we've hired, perhaps three were actually qualified. The rest we've taken because while they weren't qualified, they were at least the most likely of the bunch. Of those 7 people, two of them have gone on to be great programmers.
To put that in perspective, that means that our company has paid a yearly salary and training costs to *HALF* of the people we've hired, without them really giving us much of a return.
If anything's bad with that hiring practice, it's that we're being TOO nice to people.
My friend's uncle was homeless and had very little education. While he was sleeping in a homeless shelter, he had a good idea. He busted his butt to make it happen, how he's literally a millionaire.
There is no other place on Earth where poor people have as MANY chances as under a capitalistic society.
steve
From the posts you see on Slashdot, it would seem as if half of the people who post here would fit the bill. : )
steve
1. Capitalism sucks as bad as communism. It just takes a little longer to realise...but you realise it well when you are fired and you can't find a job.
Making a comparatively huge wage for years, then spending a while unemployed before making another (comparatively) huge wage is much better than being forced to work in a tedious, menial, or back-breaking job for your whole life with no hope of ever escaping abject poverty. If that isn't clear to you, maybe you could use a stint in a poor country to help you see the real world. If you've never lived outside of the U.S., you've never seen what a hard life really is.
3. Companies sell their products with up to 90% profit, especially those that outsource production. And the profit fills the pockets of their owners
If you think that many companies make 90% profits, you obviously don't understand the costs of doing business. Any market where a company can repeatedly make a profit anywhere near that level is a market that will soon be flooded with competition. For a company to make actual profits even in the very low double-digits is very, very good.
7. If you ever realized how good rich people live, a revolution would be started in a minute.
If you've ever lived in a truly poor nation, you'd realize that you, by virtue of the fact that you're even posting on Slashdot, are likely within the wealthiest 5% of the entire world. The lifestyle accorded to an American working for minimum wage is literally an impossible dream to hundreds of millions of people.
9. If you ever realized that the rich people got rich by stealing,
Yes, we all know that poor people never obtain their means through criminal means.
steve
Over the years, I've found that the more impressive the resume, the more likely the guy is to walk in, sit down in front of a computer, and become absolutely lost. Really!
I've had a person give me resumes that practically made him out to be the greatest computer-related worker in the world. I sat him down and asked him to write an extremely simple (10-line) Perl program. He fiddled around, got the #! line wrong, then finally admitted "I usually just cut and paste this stuff."
That's not an isolated case, either. Every one of the unbelievably good resumes I've been handed have been from unqualified persons. Let's look at the resume in question. With all of these opinions, I could be right or wrong. I've never sat down with the man in question, so these are only opinions.
First, the fact that he claims 13 programming languages would scare me away as an employer. Finding a person who is actually competent, qualified, and a good programmer in that many languages isn't as easy as these "I know 13 programming languages" people think. Now, he may not be a terrible programmer in those 13 languages, but employers aren't looking for people who "aren't terrible" - they're looking for someone really good. For crying out loud, the only programming instruction he lists is a week-long intensive Java course. I'm sorry, but those week-long courses (I've been to some) don't exactly make you a qualified programmer.
Second, it's very easy to put down every vendor in the world under "Hardware Platforms". After all, you're making absolutely no substantiated claim to anything significant. Back in college, I used AIX for a couple of hours working on a physics project. I could list that under "Hardware Platforms" if I wanted.
Third, somewhat related to the second: A lot of these claims smell to me, as an employer, as an attempt to look like more than he is. Let's look at this claim:
I also used SQL*PLUS to for data extracts and and table and data maintenance.
If that's all you can claim, then you probably don't have more than a passing familiarity with Oracle. "Select * from " and "delete from where..." fully substantiate the sentence he's provided, but certainly don't qualify you for a job in my company.
While there are many more things I could pick out, I'll end with experience. In the last ten years, the only programming experience he lists has been a little bit of Java/JSP in his last job and a couple of Perl scripts. The next guy is going to come in and show ten years of solid, heavy programming development. Who do you think is going to get the job?
Overall, the guy's career has been that of a technical writer, with occasional programming jobs mixed in. Unfortunately for him, he seems to be like so many of us that took a while to fall into a career path - first he studied mathematics for 6 years or so, did some programming, did a lot of technical writing, did a litttle programming, did a lot more technical writing, and finally seems to have decided to stick with programming.
Well, he spent a lot of time bouncing around. Those mathematics degrees will be a great help to him in some areas of programming, but it's going to be awfully tough to find a position in web development where it will, and even tougher to find a position in technical writing that will use it. Spending 6 years of your life studying for something you're not going to use doesn't exactly get you to the top. I can say that from experience, I did exactly the same thing. The one thing that saved me was that during the 6 years that I spent studying something I'd never use, I was also out busting my butt in computer jobs to pay the bills, and I went out of my way to take jobs that would give me opportunities to learn, progress, and acquire valuable skills and experience, even if it wasn't the best job to pay the bills.
When employers look at a potential employee, they see a big difference between those that "paid their dues" for 6 to 10 years, busting their butts, and those that took a "week long intensive Java course".
steve