A lot of these hot supermassive gas giants seem to be extremely young. I wonder what that says about planetary development. Do they lose mass after a billion or two years?
It is suspect that stars lose planets during their evolution - either they collide or plunge into their fiery fathers, or get slingshot to hell. Even our own solar system is suspect (or rather is known by inference) to have had more planets and planetoids that what it had in the past.
So what this could mean is that the more readily observable neighborhood with our current technology is composed of younger suns with younger, hotter gas giants. Observable =/= Existing. More precisely Existing > Observable. Heck the entire cosmos is possibly infinitely larger than the also infinite cosmos that is observable now (or that will ever be observable to us from this point if we were to last until the end of the cosmos itself.)
I suspect that as we improve our technology with better optics we will see more of the neighborhood on more mature systems, meaning colder planets, asteroid belts, and perhaps smaller planets. Then the picture will look more like a middle age high school reunion of cold planets and mature stars, as opposed to a frat party full of hot bodies (no pun intended, or maybe:P)
Heck, one day, possibly soon we will have the technology and economics to slingshot a shitload of powerful space telescopes and radio telescopes across the solar system, or better, on a trans-Neptunian orbit and/or above the elliptic. All capable of scanning through the entire spectrum, radio waves, IR all the way to gamma rays. All working semi-autonomously and aggregated in discrete networks with master controlling satellites doing more intelligent data sniffing. The master controllers and individual satellites all sending raw and aggregated/synthesized data back to Sol III.
There, their carbon-based overlords will surely be able to even peek past the atmosphere of exo-planets. Then the paparazzi will be able to take pics of Epsilon Eridani's version of the Kardashian (yeah, tackiness is a universal constant.)
Move over hadoop! Distributed Computing and Big Data on a cosmic scale!!!
Well. Someone has to do it, I'll do it: to point out to you that the 300 light years are not the planetary orbit's radius, but the distance between Earth and that other planetary system. Tsheesh.
Indeed. Plus the article clearly states that as well. Talking about poor reading comprehension, hahaha:)
Once popular in school lunches, younger generations of Japanese rarely, if ever, eat whale."
It was quite never popular to begin with. It tastes awful to begin with, and kids hated it. My wife (a Japanese citizen) finds it like repugnant rubber. It was pushed by the government as school lunches, so it was predominant at once. But predominant does not mean "popular" as this case demonstrates.
To be honest, I cannot remember once single Japanese person I know that has actually said anything positive about whale hunting or whale meat, not even older people (and they do eat some crazy, weird tasting food, like natto). Obviously this is just personal, anecdotal evidence, but still.
Unfortunately political apathy and disenfranchisement being part of the current Japanese ethos prevent actual democratic challenges to the ossified bureocratic structures and interests groups that still fight and rationalize the archaic practice of dishing rubber-shit-tasting whale meat as part of a daily breakfast:/
Sure, but I patented the process of suing patent trolls. Pay up.
Why? That's a little cynic/pedantic if you ask me.
See, this sets a state-level precedent for individual states to go after trolls. It is also easier to initiate as opposed to the Feds initiating it and the trolls cooking some stupid shit like the Feds lacking jurisdiction (arguing that it is a states' right manner, hard to argue, but in our systems of laws you can keep throwing shit against the wall till something hopefully sticks.)
I thought that most of tier 1 calls can be eliminated if people simply read the manual?
This is only true if a) the system is trivial enough or b) if the manual is well-written and the system's usage is self-evident and easily deductible from its interfaces. Most systems do not fit that description.
RTFM can only take us so far, in particular if the users are not technically savyy beyond some business-specific competency (for general systems, neither they have to, nor should we make it a requirement.)
Any complex system, be it software, electric, mechanical, whatever, will be used in manners and conditions not expected, but that yet will fall within its normal operations. It is simply a combinatorial problem that no manual will ever be able to cover.
of course, with the present usage of The Cloud as the location of the manual, the always on and available wiki will be filled with gems like "remember to come back and finish this" (click help in modern software... I fear what would happen if there was no network connection... I found that in wireshark yesterday when looking up SSL stream tracing information... (I guess normal users call for tier 1 support at that point and is instructed to try power cycling the connection on loop)
I used someone's tablet and clicked on the help in chrome, and it went online to pull the manual. What if the tablet couldn't get online? It had no help.
Systems like these (for example, Chrome) are typically self-evident in usage for the general consumer. It is true, however, that utter reliance on the cloud for help is a big design no-no for me as well. I guess now "help" means "google".
It certainly simplifies design, but it doesn't necessarily simplifies users' experience.
So yes, you're right -- if the practice is to continually not ship with documentation, and the links to documentation contain unfinished works, then your tier 1 human who can tell me to try rebooting the SSL connection might never go away. But if they bothered to actually send manuals and people weren't ashamed to read them, I think we wouldn't have to be groaning about helpdesk support being outsourced to another country. There wouldn't be much need for it. I guess that makes me some sort of anti-capitalist, trying to get people to learn...
, work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine
MUAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAHA. Oh, sorry, you were serious. Oh well, MUAAHAHAHAHAHHAAAHAH!!!!
On a serious note, those of us who are in the knows, who have done some type of IT work, we know that that is bullshit. Tier I support has never been done, and can never be done with a IVR system.
For example, let's consider IVR systems, which is where these supposed "software machine" silver bullets can fit in. Call your cell phone or cable provider, and you will see that at most, what you get is an IVR system that leads you to an specialist (or sometimes someone who is reading a script of instructions) after the IVR has tried to collect some basic problem description that, in theory, helps facilitate the specialist.
That is all.
Let's call the IVR system a Tier-0 support system (or more appropriately, a routing system that takes a customer to actual Tier I support.) That is all. It's only when a human being in Tier I support fails at resolving the issue, that Tier II and Tier III get summoned. One would have to create one hell of an expert systems to barely begin to mimick Tier I support for the general-case type of problems.
All you would do is piss the customer. Case in point, look at AT&T and Bank of America, and other cell providers. They are phasing out IVR systems (or severely reducing them) in favor of actual human beings (couple that with a minor shift away from offshore call centers, but that's another story.)
And that is just for mundane tasks.
'what robotics did for the auto assembly line, we are now doing for the IT engineering line.
Yeah, because IT is like pulling levers or flipping burguers (no offense, since I once pulled levers and flipped burguers.)
Serious question: Do they even know what the hell robotics mean?????
I bet they actually do but they are simply latching to the next buzzword (since manufacturing and robotics are the hot pancakes of the day), hoping for the next business-type offsourcing dumbass to actually fall for it.
Up next on Fox News, they invented software-based monkey coders (and thus circumvented Turing's Halting Problem.)
So, the government is going to have to write the government a check?
Yikes.
Why is this surprising? Government is not one, homogeneous thing. Here we have a state government indirectly trying to tax an agency of the federal government.
Again, why is this surprising? Look at any corporation of sufficiently large size. Such a corporation would be divided into either departments or business units (each with their own specific budgets). When one renders a service to another, or when two or more need to engage into some type of cross-organizational project, they need to decide how to fund them from their budgets. And if one causes costs to run higher than a certain cap, that one unit has to compensate the others' budgets from its own.
A more tangible scenario in IT is when IT is its own department with its own budget and its own infrastructure. Other departments deploy their systems with them with some specific SLA agreements. Such SLA agreements typically include IT to pay a penalty (from its annual budget) to the other departments whenever that department(s) experience a downtime during core hours (because those "core hours" down times cause said departments to bleed money in terms of lost transactions, idle employee/users time, etc.)
Large organizations (public or otherwise) do not have a universal budgel like a cookie jar where everyone puts his hands on. Budgets get allocated per department or business unit, with money flowing among them when rendering a service or paying a penalty for loss of service.
'Compare a plumber to going to Harvard College — being a plumber, actually for the average person, probably would be a better deal'
Bloomberg has a point. For the longest time, and while the majority of the world was mired in poverty, the US, with its highest rate of HS graduates, was well equipped to be the predominant manufacturing/economic engine of the world. Now that world poverty has been cut in half, and with increased literacy rates world wide, stuff simply moved overseas.
And the country, all of the sudden, had an emergency need to re-educate its masses. The solution? College!!!!
We treat/treated college as if it were a silver bullet, while all this time we have been treating vocational education like a pariah concept, a joke. Part of a good solution would have included a revamping of vocational education at the HS and community college level. We need that, we desperately need that.
So, Bloomberg is right. For many people, plumbing or any vocational skill set would be a much better deal. We have a shortage of vocational workers, and we have an excess of college graduates (many who graduate in degrees for which there is no economic demand.)
So, it is not a matter of who is intelligent and who is not (having a STEM degree doesn't necessarily indicate practical intelligence, nor lacking one indicates stupidity.) It is a matter of economics, plain good old supply and demand.
It is ridiculous to contemplate a nation with HS graduates and college graduates, and nothing in between. Alas, that's what we have been collectively aiming for the last 20 years, as if that is going to solve the challenges of globalization.
Cost. Risk of change. Ain't-broken-don't-fix-it, etc, etc. Some companies exaggerate these, but in general, these are real, valid concerns.
IE6. Several governments and big companies I know use software dependent on IE6. They won't upgrade, citing the expensive cost.
Companies and orgs exhibiting such ridiculous policies, though large, are not common. Really, they are not. They are not the norm, and are not representative of the general problem companies face when they deliberate on whether to keep or change large, expensive legacy systems.
Companies that keep a policy for using IE6 (or similar follies.) That's an uninteresting, not-so-relevant problem, one that exists in the realm of stupidity and cargo cult practices, not worthy of a/. front page.
OTH, Companies that have aging, yet good-enough-functional (or at least functionally tolerable) multi-million (if not multi-billion) dollar investments, that is a interesting problem to study (and hopefully solve.) This is a genuine business/software engineering problem worthy of a/. front page.
Do you know what's more expensive than upgrading? Downgrading to the old system they had before they upgraded!
But how often does that happen? What is the general prevalence? And how much does such practices intrude in day-to-day business activities?
You see, before computers, companies used to have room full of people manually calculating and processing stuff. It wasn't until the computer came that they could fire all those people and save a ton of money on their collective salaries.
OH, NOW I SEE!!!! Stop the presses, for no one in the history of interweebzkind has ever realized this till now!!!
Are you familiar with the history of the sewing machine, and how such an innovation caused large, though eventually temporary unemployment of seamstresses and taylors? Same here, same with any other technological breakthrough or innovation. Yesterday news, obvious, self-evident news.
Now, my question is: what happened to that money they saved?
Sorry, but the answer is self-evident: It goes into raises, building new infrastructure or new investments, business expansion, etc, etc. Money wisely invested. Money absurdidly wasted. Some of one or the other. Sometimes that works well, sometimes not so much. Business and human nature as usual as they have always been, and always will be.
Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards.
Really, how much is "a small portion"? And how much a "small portion" is enough to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards (whatever that means)? Besides why exactly would you want to upgrade? If you have a COBOL-based banking system that has worked well for 20 years, why would you want to upgrade (and engage the inherent risk of such a change)?
You are talking about money that can do this or that in a business setting, and yet you fail to discuss the ROI of such changes. A discussion on a business change without discussing ROI is not a legitimate business discussion. It is hand waving.
However, big organizations keep citing million-dollar upgrade costs as why they won't do it.
Because it is true. Do the math. Seriously, do the math. Number of engineers involved in a migration process times average yearly salary time 2 (typically the cost of an engineer for a business is 1.5 to 2 times the cost of said engineer's salary.) Then add up the cost of transition, then the cost of retraining users, the cost of violating SLA agreements, the cost of having downtimes due to problems with the transition, then the cost lost money in salaries by having idle users due to retraining or down time, etc, etc.
Kunstler's op-ed piece provides some compelling counter-arguments arguments that are sadly cobblered up together with invectives to the point of being emotional. If we wanted emotional we could simply tune to BravoTV or some crap like that.
The "Atlantic" is simply running a hypothetical "what-if" scenario, and the potential consequences of it. It is a "what-if" (something you always want to see and debate if you are truly open-minded), not a "will-be" article as it is being presented (demonized/ridiculed) by the interweebz borg bovine-mind collective (many whom I'm sure have not had even RTFA in question, with the opening sentence quoted below):
New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare.
Again, it is a "what-if" article pointing to a nightmarish scenario, not a nilly-willy "fuck solar/wind, let's burn moar dino juize" corporate campaign. Sadly, the nuisance is missed to most.
Manager: "We need an application that does X,Y, and Z. When can you have it done?"
Developer: "Well, can you tell me more?"
Manager: "No, time I have a manager's meeting in 5 minutes. Just give a pall park."
Developer:" Ok, umm 3 weeks."
Manager: "THAT LONG?"
Developer: "OK, 2 weeks? Maybe less?"
Manager: "OK"
Later, in the manager's meeting.
Manager:"My developer says he can get it done in less than 5 days."
The fault lays squarely on the developer. You got to stick to your guns with your ballpark or negotiate with the caveat of greater risks of failure as the estimated time is decreased (w/o ever decreasing it substantially.)
Maybe it's because I'm old but I always hated working at home. Even when I was running my own company, I'd find someplace else to go to work. I had one client who didn't mind if I camped out in his firm's empty office for ten hours a day doing my own stuff.
Working at home there are too many distractions: the fridge full of beer, the TV, the pool, the hot divorcée next door . . . you get the point.
I'm on the same boat. I dread working from home, even though I have, at times, done it full time. A friend of mine suggested me next time I do offsite consulting to simply rent a small office (they can run very cheap) and work from there at any time that I need. However, I do find it useful to telecommute to put a lot of extra hours. Checking my e-mails and calendar first thing right after I wake up; logging at night from home to check for any urgent e-mails or if I happen to have an epiphany on how to solve an issue or to fire a time-consuming job to have it ready in the morning. Putting a few hours during the weekend as needed.
Lo and behold one can gradually sustain long hours that way. Long hours are never desirable but often unavoidable. Though I do not like to work from home, I certainly would not want to do 50-60 hour work weeks on premises either.
When a large portion of the country is taking risks big or small, lose on those risks, and proceed to tank the economy. It hurts even those who did not take risks. Not everyone understands the repercussions of their risks. You should care about negligent risk takers.
So, what is the percentage of the economy that was directly/substantially afflicted by this brief fluctuation on the stock market?
The problem isn't more regulations vs. less regulations. The problem is coherent system vs. incoherent system. You can have less regulation, but then you can't have bailouts. You can have bailouts but then you need more regulation. The problem of the recent financial collapse was that the system wasn't coherent. There was less regulation and bailouts, That's a recipe for disaster. The authoritarians blame the lack of regulations and the libertarians blame the bailouts. Neither is right or wrong. They just prefer moving to different coherent systems.
A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
Indeed, it does seem a bit radical. I've worked in start-ups, incidentally ones that survived the dot-com crash and are doing well nowadays. One had a solid business model and the other one was malleable enough to change gears and explore new business venues.
We certainly did work our asses off, but ours were cycles of 50-hour weeks followed by a week or two of 60-hours weeks prior to delivering milestones, followed by a couple of weeks of 9-5's with a couple of days off. Rinse and repeat. It worked, and I know from 2nd and 3rd hand accounts that similar cycles work in other productive environments.
Sometimes people really have to work crazy hours, but then again, who the hell in this time and age works crazy hours on-site????? That is pretty much what this VC is expecting to see, and to me that's a big fuck-up in terms of technology-oriented work environments?
Fine we work long hours, a good portion of it from home. If I see a tech company parking lot full on Friday 9pm, either that company is a government contractor working with classified shit that needs to be done on premises, or they are a bunch of apes who have yet to discover the blessing of telecommuting.
The VC is full of shit, or maybe his business wisdom is sooooo out of our pedestrian ability to grasp that it looks like magic shit conjured by Harry Potter or something.
the fact that so many people has voted my original post as "Troll" shows me how unsecure so many "men" in./ are when facing the prospect of one company, ONE SINGLE COMPANY decides to slightly favor women, all in a male-dominated, employment-plentiful industry. Pathetic.
No. Not good for them. Discrimination is not OK just because it is "inside the law".
Well, as a similar analogy, it is not good, and it is discriminatory, to let women and children take the rafts before men when the ship is sinking. If we taken an absolutist POV, then this practice is discriminatory as well. Poor us men.
Owning people used to be "inside the law" that didn't make it OK.
Of course not, but it is neither ok to take my original argument and try to 'falsify' it by extending it to a complete different context. This is right up the alley of Godwin's Law when it comes to conjuring emotional arguments.
Well, since your question is making the presumption that I'm not, I let it become a de-facto answer to your question since you happen to be subject matter expert in this specific subject/post/whatever.
It is fair for the women who have historically been at a dissadvantage. Similarly, it is not fair, in the absolute sense of the word, to let women and children take the boats first over men when the ship is sinking. Are we gonna cry about it, calling it an unfair practice. "Fair" is not necessarily the same as "acceptable", "appropriate" or "sensible" (or in the case of men being men, the correct thing to do.)
So what you are saying is that men who can't get a job are worthless people?
No. Nice strawman by the way. I'm talking about men worrying about not getting a job at the sight one (A SINGLE FUCKING ONE) single company slightly preferring women in a men-dominated industry, which, even in these economic conditions still provide ample opportunity for employment.
I'm not talking about men in general looking for jobs, in general, and not finding jobs, in general. But don't let that stop you from building a strawman to knock out and pat yourself in the back celebrating your victory, though.
That if a man can't get a job, he's obviously terrible at what he does?
No. See above.
If a man is unable to get a job, then he is pathetic?
No. See above.
It speaks volumes about a man because a company didn't hire him?
No. See above. But don't let reading comprehension stop you from building up your angst.
Then use some actual random function. A coin toss should be fine. That will at least be fair.
It is also fair to introduce some bias to ensure a more equitable distribution of jobs among equally qualifiable candidates of different genders. As a man, I don't get why this is so treatening or unfair to some of you guys. Seriously.
A better solution is to just pick the best candidate no matter what. If that means having to hide the candidates identity that is fine.
A better solution is one that the company sees fit within the boundaries of the law. If said company wishes to do some social experiments and court women (a historical dissadvantaged group) more than men, in a male-predominant industry, in a manner that is legal, then good for them.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of these hot supermassive gas giants seem to be extremely young. I wonder what that says about planetary development. Do they lose mass after a billion or two years?
It is suspect that stars lose planets during their evolution - either they collide or plunge into their fiery fathers, or get slingshot to hell. Even our own solar system is suspect (or rather is known by inference) to have had more planets and planetoids that what it had in the past.
So what this could mean is that the more readily observable neighborhood with our current technology is composed of younger suns with younger, hotter gas giants. Observable =/= Existing. More precisely Existing > Observable. Heck the entire cosmos is possibly infinitely larger than the also infinite cosmos that is observable now (or that will ever be observable to us from this point if we were to last until the end of the cosmos itself.)
I suspect that as we improve our technology with better optics we will see more of the neighborhood on more mature systems, meaning colder planets, asteroid belts, and perhaps smaller planets. Then the picture will look more like a middle age high school reunion of cold planets and mature stars, as opposed to a frat party full of hot bodies (no pun intended, or maybe:P)
Heck, one day, possibly soon we will have the technology and economics to slingshot a shitload of powerful space telescopes and radio telescopes across the solar system, or better, on a trans-Neptunian orbit and/or above the elliptic. All capable of scanning through the entire spectrum, radio waves, IR all the way to gamma rays. All working semi-autonomously and aggregated in discrete networks with master controlling satellites doing more intelligent data sniffing. The master controllers and individual satellites all sending raw and aggregated/synthesized data back to Sol III.
There, their carbon-based overlords will surely be able to even peek past the atmosphere of exo-planets. Then the paparazzi will be able to take pics of Epsilon Eridani's version of the Kardashian (yeah, tackiness is a universal constant.)
Move over hadoop! Distributed Computing and Big Data on a cosmic scale!!!
Well. Someone has to do it, I'll do it: to point out to you that the 300 light years are not the planetary orbit's radius, but the distance between Earth and that other planetary system. Tsheesh.
Indeed. Plus the article clearly states that as well. Talking about poor reading comprehension, hahaha :)
Once popular in school lunches, younger generations of Japanese rarely, if ever, eat whale."
It was quite never popular to begin with. It tastes awful to begin with, and kids hated it. My wife (a Japanese citizen) finds it like repugnant rubber. It was pushed by the government as school lunches, so it was predominant at once. But predominant does not mean "popular" as this case demonstrates.
To be honest, I cannot remember once single Japanese person I know that has actually said anything positive about whale hunting or whale meat, not even older people (and they do eat some crazy, weird tasting food, like natto). Obviously this is just personal, anecdotal evidence, but still.
Unfortunately political apathy and disenfranchisement being part of the current Japanese ethos prevent actual democratic challenges to the ossified bureocratic structures and interests groups that still fight and rationalize the archaic practice of dishing rubber-shit-tasting whale meat as part of a daily breakfast :/
Sure, but I patented the process of suing patent trolls. Pay up.
Why? That's a little cynic/pedantic if you ask me.
See, this sets a state-level precedent for individual states to go after trolls. It is also easier to initiate as opposed to the Feds initiating it and the trolls cooking some stupid shit like the Feds lacking jurisdiction (arguing that it is a states' right manner, hard to argue, but in our systems of laws you can keep throwing shit against the wall till something hopefully sticks.)
I thought that most of tier 1 calls can be eliminated if people simply read the manual?
This is only true if a) the system is trivial enough or b) if the manual is well-written and the system's usage is self-evident and easily deductible from its interfaces. Most systems do not fit that description.
RTFM can only take us so far, in particular if the users are not technically savyy beyond some business-specific competency (for general systems, neither they have to, nor should we make it a requirement.)
Any complex system, be it software, electric, mechanical, whatever, will be used in manners and conditions not expected, but that yet will fall within its normal operations. It is simply a combinatorial problem that no manual will ever be able to cover.
of course, with the present usage of The Cloud as the location of the manual, the always on and available wiki will be filled with gems like "remember to come back and finish this" (click help in modern software... I fear what would happen if there was no network connection... I found that in wireshark yesterday when looking up SSL stream tracing information... (I guess normal users call for tier 1 support at that point and is instructed to try power cycling the connection on loop)
I used someone's tablet and clicked on the help in chrome, and it went online to pull the manual. What if the tablet couldn't get online? It had no help.
Systems like these (for example, Chrome) are typically self-evident in usage for the general consumer. It is true, however, that utter reliance on the cloud for help is a big design no-no for me as well. I guess now "help" means "google".
It certainly simplifies design, but it doesn't necessarily simplifies users' experience.
So yes, you're right -- if the practice is to continually not ship with documentation, and the links to documentation contain unfinished works, then your tier 1 human who can tell me to try rebooting the SSL connection might never go away. But if they bothered to actually send manuals and people weren't ashamed to read them, I think we wouldn't have to be groaning about helpdesk support being outsourced to another country. There wouldn't be much need for it. I guess that makes me some sort of anti-capitalist, trying to get people to learn...
That last part in bold made no sense.
, work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine
MUAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAHA. Oh, sorry, you were serious. Oh well, MUAAHAHAHAHAHHAAAHAH!!!!
On a serious note, those of us who are in the knows, who have done some type of IT work, we know that that is bullshit. Tier I support has never been done, and can never be done with a IVR system.
For example, let's consider IVR systems, which is where these supposed "software machine" silver bullets can fit in. Call your cell phone or cable provider, and you will see that at most, what you get is an IVR system that leads you to an specialist (or sometimes someone who is reading a script of instructions) after the IVR has tried to collect some basic problem description that, in theory, helps facilitate the specialist.
That is all.
Let's call the IVR system a Tier-0 support system (or more appropriately, a routing system that takes a customer to actual Tier I support.) That is all. It's only when a human being in Tier I support fails at resolving the issue, that Tier II and Tier III get summoned. One would have to create one hell of an expert systems to barely begin to mimick Tier I support for the general-case type of problems.
All you would do is piss the customer. Case in point, look at AT&T and Bank of America, and other cell providers. They are phasing out IVR systems (or severely reducing them) in favor of actual human beings (couple that with a minor shift away from offshore call centers, but that's another story.)
And that is just for mundane tasks.
'what robotics did for the auto assembly line, we are now doing for the IT engineering line.
Yeah, because IT is like pulling levers or flipping burguers (no offense, since I once pulled levers and flipped burguers.)
Serious question: Do they even know what the hell robotics mean?????
I bet they actually do but they are simply latching to the next buzzword (since manufacturing and robotics are the hot pancakes of the day), hoping for the next business-type offsourcing dumbass to actually fall for it.
Up next on Fox News, they invented software-based monkey coders (and thus circumvented Turing's Halting Problem.)
So, the government is going to have to write the government a check?
Yikes.
Why is this surprising? Government is not one, homogeneous thing. Here we have a state government indirectly trying to tax an agency of the federal government.
Again, why is this surprising? Look at any corporation of sufficiently large size. Such a corporation would be divided into either departments or business units (each with their own specific budgets). When one renders a service to another, or when two or more need to engage into some type of cross-organizational project, they need to decide how to fund them from their budgets. And if one causes costs to run higher than a certain cap, that one unit has to compensate the others' budgets from its own.
A more tangible scenario in IT is when IT is its own department with its own budget and its own infrastructure. Other departments deploy their systems with them with some specific SLA agreements. Such SLA agreements typically include IT to pay a penalty (from its annual budget) to the other departments whenever that department(s) experience a downtime during core hours (because those "core hours" down times cause said departments to bleed money in terms of lost transactions, idle employee/users time, etc.)
Large organizations (public or otherwise) do not have a universal budgel like a cookie jar where everyone puts his hands on. Budgets get allocated per department or business unit, with money flowing among them when rendering a service or paying a penalty for loss of service.
Bloomberg has a point. For the longest time, and while the majority of the world was mired in poverty, the US, with its highest rate of HS graduates, was well equipped to be the predominant manufacturing/economic engine of the world. Now that world poverty has been cut in half, and with increased literacy rates world wide, stuff simply moved overseas.
And the country, all of the sudden, had an emergency need to re-educate its masses. The solution? College!!!!
We treat/treated college as if it were a silver bullet, while all this time we have been treating vocational education like a pariah concept, a joke. Part of a good solution would have included a revamping of vocational education at the HS and community college level. We need that, we desperately need that.
So, Bloomberg is right. For many people, plumbing or any vocational skill set would be a much better deal. We have a shortage of vocational workers, and we have an excess of college graduates (many who graduate in degrees for which there is no economic demand.)
So, it is not a matter of who is intelligent and who is not (having a STEM degree doesn't necessarily indicate practical intelligence, nor lacking one indicates stupidity.) It is a matter of economics, plain good old supply and demand.
It is ridiculous to contemplate a nation with HS graduates and college graduates, and nothing in between. Alas, that's what we have been collectively aiming for the last 20 years, as if that is going to solve the challenges of globalization.
Why Won't Companies Upgrade Old Software?
Cost. Risk of change. Ain't-broken-don't-fix-it, etc, etc. Some companies exaggerate these, but in general, these are real, valid concerns.
IE6. Several governments and big companies I know use software dependent on IE6. They won't upgrade, citing the expensive cost.
Companies and orgs exhibiting such ridiculous policies, though large, are not common. Really, they are not. They are not the norm, and are not representative of the general problem companies face when they deliberate on whether to keep or change large, expensive legacy systems.
Companies that keep a policy for using IE6 (or similar follies.) That's an uninteresting, not-so-relevant problem, one that exists in the realm of stupidity and cargo cult practices, not worthy of a /. front page.
OTH, Companies that have aging, yet good-enough-functional (or at least functionally tolerable) multi-million (if not multi-billion) dollar investments, that is a interesting problem to study (and hopefully solve.) This is a genuine business/software engineering problem worthy of a /. front page.
Do you know what's more expensive than upgrading? Downgrading to the old system they had before they upgraded!
But how often does that happen? What is the general prevalence? And how much does such practices intrude in day-to-day business activities?
You see, before computers, companies used to have room full of people manually calculating and processing stuff. It wasn't until the computer came that they could fire all those people and save a ton of money on their collective salaries.
OH, NOW I SEE!!!! Stop the presses, for no one in the history of interweebzkind has ever realized this till now!!!
Are you familiar with the history of the sewing machine, and how such an innovation caused large, though eventually temporary unemployment of seamstresses and taylors? Same here, same with any other technological breakthrough or innovation. Yesterday news, obvious, self-evident news.
Now, my question is: what happened to that money they saved?
Sorry, but the answer is self-evident: It goes into raises, building new infrastructure or new investments, business expansion, etc, etc. Money wisely invested. Money absurdidly wasted. Some of one or the other. Sometimes that works well, sometimes not so much. Business and human nature as usual as they have always been, and always will be.
Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards.
Really, how much is "a small portion"? And how much a "small portion" is enough to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards (whatever that means)? Besides why exactly would you want to upgrade? If you have a COBOL-based banking system that has worked well for 20 years, why would you want to upgrade (and engage the inherent risk of such a change)?
You are talking about money that can do this or that in a business setting, and yet you fail to discuss the ROI of such changes. A discussion on a business change without discussing ROI is not a legitimate business discussion. It is hand waving.
However, big organizations keep citing million-dollar upgrade costs as why they won't do it.
Because it is true. Do the math. Seriously, do the math. Number of engineers involved in a migration process times average yearly salary time 2 (typically the cost of an engineer for a business is 1.5 to 2 times the cost of said engineer's salary.) Then add up the cost of transition, then the cost of retraining users, the cost of violating SLA agreements, the cost of having downtimes due to problems with the transition, then the cost lost money in salaries by having idle users due to retraining or down time, etc, etc.
Suggest you read this:
http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/we-wish.html
Kunstler's op-ed piece provides some compelling counter-arguments arguments that are sadly cobblered up together with invectives to the point of being emotional. If we wanted emotional we could simply tune to BravoTV or some crap like that.
The "Atlantic" is simply running a hypothetical "what-if" scenario, and the potential consequences of it. It is a "what-if" (something you always want to see and debate if you are truly open-minded), not a "will-be" article as it is being presented (demonized/ridiculed) by the interweebz borg bovine-mind collective (many whom I'm sure have not had even RTFA in question, with the opening sentence quoted below):
New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare.
Again, it is a "what-if" article pointing to a nightmarish scenario, not a nilly-willy "fuck solar/wind, let's burn moar dino juize" corporate campaign. Sadly, the nuisance is missed to most.
Manager: "We need an application that does X,Y, and Z. When can you have it done?" Developer: "Well, can you tell me more?" Manager: "No, time I have a manager's meeting in 5 minutes. Just give a pall park." Developer:" Ok, umm 3 weeks." Manager: "THAT LONG?" Developer: "OK, 2 weeks? Maybe less?" Manager: "OK"
Later, in the manager's meeting.
Manager:"My developer says he can get it done in less than 5 days."
The fault lays squarely on the developer. You got to stick to your guns with your ballpark or negotiate with the caveat of greater risks of failure as the estimated time is decreased (w/o ever decreasing it substantially.)
Maybe it's because I'm old but I always hated working at home. Even when I was running my own company, I'd find someplace else to go to work. I had one client who didn't mind if I camped out in his firm's empty office for ten hours a day doing my own stuff.
Working at home there are too many distractions: the fridge full of beer, the TV, the pool, the hot divorcée next door . . . you get the point.
I'm on the same boat. I dread working from home, even though I have, at times, done it full time. A friend of mine suggested me next time I do offsite consulting to simply rent a small office (they can run very cheap) and work from there at any time that I need. However, I do find it useful to telecommute to put a lot of extra hours. Checking my e-mails and calendar first thing right after I wake up; logging at night from home to check for any urgent e-mails or if I happen to have an epiphany on how to solve an issue or to fire a time-consuming job to have it ready in the morning. Putting a few hours during the weekend as needed.
Lo and behold one can gradually sustain long hours that way. Long hours are never desirable but often unavoidable. Though I do not like to work from home, I certainly would not want to do 50-60 hour work weeks on premises either.
When a large portion of the country is taking risks big or small, lose on those risks, and proceed to tank the economy. It hurts even those who did not take risks. Not everyone understands the repercussions of their risks. You should care about negligent risk takers.
So, what is the percentage of the economy that was directly/substantially afflicted by this brief fluctuation on the stock market?
The summary said it was the algorithms.
Then whoever is programming these HFT algorithms should be shot. Having them susceptible to tweets is just ridiculous speculation.
You couldn't care less...
Maybe you should know that the big banks who do HFT also co-locate inside the exchanges and front run orders making hundreds of billions per year.
Also, you might want to know that if the market crashes and restarts like today the big banks can get their losing trades reversed and you can't.
All the profit they're making has to come from somewhere. Are you so certain it doesn't come out of your pocket?
Profits are not finite, or more precisely, bound in such a manner that forces someone's win to match someone's losses.
The problem isn't more regulations vs. less regulations. The problem is coherent system vs. incoherent system. You can have less regulation, but then you can't have bailouts. You can have bailouts but then you need more regulation. The problem of the recent financial collapse was that the system wasn't coherent. There was less regulation and bailouts, That's a recipe for disaster. The authoritarians blame the lack of regulations and the libertarians blame the bailouts. Neither is right or wrong. They just prefer moving to different coherent systems.
This ^^^.
F* bingo!
A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
Indeed, it does seem a bit radical. I've worked in start-ups, incidentally ones that survived the dot-com crash and are doing well nowadays. One had a solid business model and the other one was malleable enough to change gears and explore new business venues.
We certainly did work our asses off, but ours were cycles of 50-hour weeks followed by a week or two of 60-hours weeks prior to delivering milestones, followed by a couple of weeks of 9-5's with a couple of days off. Rinse and repeat. It worked, and I know from 2nd and 3rd hand accounts that similar cycles work in other productive environments.
Sometimes people really have to work crazy hours, but then again, who the hell in this time and age works crazy hours on-site????? That is pretty much what this VC is expecting to see, and to me that's a big fuck-up in terms of technology-oriented work environments?
Fine we work long hours, a good portion of it from home. If I see a tech company parking lot full on Friday 9pm, either that company is a government contractor working with classified shit that needs to be done on premises, or they are a bunch of apes who have yet to discover the blessing of telecommuting.
The VC is full of shit, or maybe his business wisdom is sooooo out of our pedestrian ability to grasp that it looks like magic shit conjured by Harry Potter or something.
the fact that so many people has voted my original post as "Troll" shows me how unsecure so many "men" in ./ are when facing the prospect of one company, ONE SINGLE COMPANY decides to slightly favor women, all in a male-dominated, employment-plentiful industry. Pathetic.
No. Not good for them. Discrimination is not OK just because it is "inside the law".
Well, as a similar analogy, it is not good, and it is discriminatory, to let women and children take the rafts before men when the ship is sinking. If we taken an absolutist POV, then this practice is discriminatory as well. Poor us men.
Owning people used to be "inside the law" that didn't make it OK.
Of course not, but it is neither ok to take my original argument and try to 'falsify' it by extending it to a complete different context. This is right up the alley of Godwin's Law when it comes to conjuring emotional arguments.
It is also fair to introduce some bias...
Are you reading what you're typing?
Well, since your question is making the presumption that I'm not, I let it become a de-facto answer to your question since you happen to be subject matter expert in this specific subject/post/whatever.
It is fair for the women who have historically been at a dissadvantage. Similarly, it is not fair, in the absolute sense of the word, to let women and children take the boats first over men when the ship is sinking. Are we gonna cry about it, calling it an unfair practice. "Fair" is not necessarily the same as "acceptable", "appropriate" or "sensible" (or in the case of men being men, the correct thing to do.)
So what you are saying is that men who can't get a job are worthless people?
No. Nice strawman by the way. I'm talking about men worrying about not getting a job at the sight one (A SINGLE FUCKING ONE) single company slightly preferring women in a men-dominated industry, which, even in these economic conditions still provide ample opportunity for employment.
I'm not talking about men in general looking for jobs, in general, and not finding jobs, in general. But don't let that stop you from building a strawman to knock out and pat yourself in the back celebrating your victory, though.
That if a man can't get a job, he's obviously terrible at what he does?
No. See above.
If a man is unable to get a job, then he is pathetic?
No. See above.
It speaks volumes about a man because a company didn't hire him?
No. See above. But don't let reading comprehension stop you from building up your angst.
I mean seriously, there too much unmanly whining in this pathetic thread.
Then use some actual random function. A coin toss should be fine. That will at least be fair.
It is also fair to introduce some bias to ensure a more equitable distribution of jobs among equally qualifiable candidates of different genders. As a man, I don't get why this is so treatening or unfair to some of you guys. Seriously.
A better solution is to just pick the best candidate no matter what. If that means having to hide the candidates identity that is fine.
A better solution is one that the company sees fit within the boundaries of the law. If said company wishes to do some social experiments and court women (a historical dissadvantaged group) more than men, in a male-predominant industry, in a manner that is legal, then good for them.