This is the fasted growing sector of the economy; for the midterm election we are on track to spend as much as the last presidential election. When you add in related jobs at dark money PACs I don't see how you could not have exceptional job security.
One advantage Open Source has is that there are no deadlines and a good project leader can simply reject sub par code. For commercial code no company is going to pay a programmer big bucks and simply throw away his output because it sucks.
I use the paper method for the federal returns. Massachusetts has a WEB based application on the Department of Revenue site that I use for the state returns. It takes about twenty minutes works quite well. The federal government has a similar service, but it is run by an unnamed consortium of companies and paraphrasing their privacy policy; "We're doing nothing illegal with your most sensitive financial information". Until the Feds produce a real data protection policy I'll just keep downloading the PDF form and mailing them back.
With current technology the incremental cost of going to 24/192 is next to nothing, so why not do it?
All of these effort to produce "better sounding" formats have all failed in the past because they double the price of
the recordings despite that fact there are no real increases in manufacturing and distribution cost. People are basically
cheap and that is why this will fail, like all of the enhanced audio formats that have proceeded it.
But, They seem to be saying that because Xerox invented Ethernet (Along with DEC I might point out) that they invented the internet. The Ethernet that xerox invented ran on RU6 coax, about as thick as your thumb, and was good for a distance of 100 Meters. It seems if you want to give Xerox credit for the internet you should at least mention XNS which was an internetworking protocol.
Going back to the bad old days, we really have to give TCP/IP credit for connectiog computers. Prior to TCP/IP the IBM mainframes ran SNA; the Vaxen used DECnet; the PCs were running either Netware (pretty much the same as XNS), NetBios or Vines; Apples were running AppleTalk; and I can't remember what Sperry/UNIVAC called thier protocol. TCP/IP was the first protocol that actually allowed all of these systeem to talk to one another. (I don't mention Suns and BSD because ther were allready running TCP/IP)
As for the growth of the Internet after it was privatized. It was growing expontentially when it was DARPAnet, it continued to expand expontentially as NSFnet, and it continued to grow after privitization.
This distinction between content delivery and content creation is probably the best comment posted to this thread. Smart phones and tablets are for content consumers and will eventually replace desk top computers for most users. Desktops will continue to be used for content creation and be used, if not be more sophisticated users, at least better trained users. So they require a different desktop. The guy who came to replace your roof was most likely driving a pickup truck, not a two seater sports car.
It seems to me that people are not informed because the media tend to cover politics like they are a sporting event. " Gee Bret, Rommeny would have done much better in he Iowa straw poll if he ran further right on the tax issue and then cut back up the centre on abortion rights." -- All we get are poll results, tactics and points spreads. Great if your making book on the election in Vegas, but it doesn't lead to an informed electorate.
The price of basic cable may not fall as much as you would like, but it may not go up as much as it would otherwise.
The "bait and switch" part of the argument seems to be unclear to me. The source article was kind of fuzzy. It seems that what the cable companies are proposing is mini-bundling. A soccer fan that buys ESPN will get all the ESPN channels, even if the Ottawa curling finals are of no interest. Even this kind of unbundling is good however because it places programming decisions back on ESPN. Which now because it is a separate charge on the your cable bill has to explicitly balance between programming cost and viewer ship to keep customers.
Contractors can be useful in some situations. For example if an agency is upgrading a database system, they need people to migrate the data, test the new system and train the db admins and users. For a six month project additional costs of using contract labour is justifier. If we limit contractors to one year with a given agency they will be used on these kinds of projects and not just be overpaid perma-temps.
It doesn't matter which of the above languages that you teach. The fundamental flow control concepts are the same. Things like functions, for-loops and if-then-else are common concepts that are easily transferred to any new language that comes along. Learning a new computer language is much easier than learning your first computer language. You even acknowledged that your "good C class taught you theory that you use today"
I agree that printing money could be equally destructive; may a little less because it doesn't cost anywhere near $20 to print a twenty dollar bill.
I think our difference of opinion is based on confusion between "hard currency" and "money". The world doesn't run on hard currency, it runs on money which is mostly credit. When the fed votes for quantitative easing nobody calls down to the basement and tells them to fire up the presses. New money is created by economic output which increases the supply of credit with no governmental action. These days fed can only effect changes around the edges and is mostly along for the ride.
I don't disagree with bitcoin as a medium of exchange to provide trusted transactions between parties, but presenting, it as a new and improved currency is overreaching.
The biggest flaw in bitcoins is that creating them is destructive. I agree that the deflationary effect is real and serious and this alone would should be enough to prove the system is flawed. But what is worse is that to create bitcoins you expend energy while providing no beneficial goods or services. In credit based monetary system the creation of wealth is constructive. You go to work and create products and services that people want and wealth is created. The currency is a marker for these goods and services, not something that has value in and of itself.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by robocalls, annoying ceaseless rude,
asserting themselves through my telephone at dinner looking to get me to refinance my debt...
When I saw Watson I was really impressed, but, sadly I thought to myself that the first real commercial application was going to be telemarketing. And look it didn't take more than a couple of months.
I don't understand where the controversy on authoritative sources is here. The LA Time is most likely authoritative as to what Palin said. But, Palin is certainly NOT authoritative as to what Paul Revere might have said or done.
I've noticed the strange pricing of used books on Amazon for quite a while now, didn't realize that the sellers were using algorithms to set them. One of the strangest thing I've noticed is books with limited appeal and 50 or 60 copies available going for outrageous prices. I don't think these robots have any idea of what price the books actually sell at, only what others are listing them for. It's kind of like buy-it-now on ebay. When I auction against buy it now items I usually get about 30% of the buy-it-now price.
I worked on digital audio back in the days when a 2.4MHz z80 processor was was considered fast and I can vouch for this sampling rate problem. Our biggest design hurtle wasn't processor speed, but minimizing thermal drift in the anti-aliasing filter. We could do a 35kHz 8-bit logarithmic ADC with no problem. It was the horrible chatter when the box got too hot that made it impossible to get more than 14kHz bandwidth out of it.
The source material is well worth a read. The public image they try to project is kind of a mixture of common sense and pop psychology. But, when you dig a little deeper these people are nuts. Its' kind of like that Jesus cult that keeps resurfacing. The whole forgiveness and absolution of your sins thing is pretty healthy, but that resurrection thing sounds like the plot from a 60s horror film
I hate to disagree with an attorney, but I think the reason nobody sues for software bugs is because they don't cause a lot of damage. If your iPod fails to play a song because of a software bug the most your likely to get out of a suit is a new iPod. When there are damages that make it worth suing, possibly like a wrongful death caused by Toyoto's sudden acceleration problem, you will see law suits aimed at software bugs.
Also, even thought programmers may get a sweet deal on liability issues, there is such a thing as a "Professional Engineer". (The exam is a real bitch.) I use to need to hire them to approve the drawings when I wanted to install a microwave dish on the to of a 12 story building. You rarely run across them in electronics, but, when I work for a small company that designed process control equipment the VP of engineering had his PE
Valuations are hard, but some things you can do before accepting a job with equity are (1) Ask how many share are out standing. Both the common stock that you will be getting and the preferred shares held by the VCs. Also find out how much funding the company got, the VCs get this money back with interest ahead of the shares. (2) Stock is better than options, if the board votes the increase the limit on the number of common or preferred shares you will get a letter. (3) If you get options redeem some of them as soon as possible, then you will get the letters when the board votes to issue more stock.
This situation is exactly why I switched to doing contract work. The more hours my employer wants me to work more hours he pays me for.
I've also worked for equity in start-ups, but I got to believe the product will succeed and get in on the first funding round. When they start going for third and forth rounds you have to objectively consider the companies valuation and how much your equity has been diluted. It may make sense to cut your losses and start looking for a new job.
As for the number hours a coder can work I think it varies greatly depending on the individual. I can do 50 hours a week with out burning out, but, if I go above 55 hours I can only sustain the effort for a two or three weeks. I can do because I don't have any family responsibilities; I can't imagine somebody with a couple of kids working this much.
I wonder if there have be any serious studies on what causes coder burn-out. A lot of the posts talk about the mental effort involved in the job, but after 15 years of programming I find most of the time it's just plain old boredom that gets to me. A brief period of mental activity, where I figure out how to solve the problem, is followed by hours of boiler plate coding. Checking function returns, handling error conditions, logging error messages; that sort of thing. Other things that tend to burn my out are outrageously long compile times and tacking down who submitted the code that broke the poll.
The big problem with your math is that when I buy an eBook I don't have first sale rights. I almost always buy my books used and then pass them on to someone else. So every book I read ends up with at least three owners. I just got back from Goodwill and picked up 4 very-good condition used books for less than $8.00. (One of them was "CODE" by Lawrence Lessig, a good find!)
Once the eBook publishing industry acknowledges the difference between purchasing a physical book and an eBook, they could make eBooks available for a 30 day rental at say $3.99. I'd switch to eBooks and wouldn't care about things like DRM, product obsolescence or vendor lock in.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the fasted growing sector of the economy; for the midterm election we are on track to spend as much as the last presidential election. When you add in related jobs at dark money PACs I don't see how you could not have exceptional job security.
One advantage Open Source has is that there are no deadlines and a good project leader can simply reject sub par code. For commercial code no company is going to pay a programmer big bucks and simply throw away his output because it sucks.
I use the paper method for the federal returns. Massachusetts has a WEB based application on the Department of Revenue site that I use for the state returns. It takes about twenty minutes works quite well. The federal government has a similar service, but it is run by an unnamed consortium of companies and paraphrasing their privacy policy; "We're doing nothing illegal with your most sensitive financial information". Until the Feds produce a real data protection policy I'll just keep downloading the PDF form and mailing them back.
With current technology the incremental cost of going to 24/192 is next to nothing, so why not do it? All of these effort to produce "better sounding" formats have all failed in the past because they double the price of the recordings despite that fact there are no real increases in manufacturing and distribution cost. People are basically cheap and that is why this will fail, like all of the enhanced audio formats that have proceeded it.
But, They seem to be saying that because Xerox invented Ethernet (Along with DEC I might point out) that they invented the internet. The Ethernet that xerox invented ran on RU6 coax, about as thick as your thumb, and was good for a distance of 100 Meters. It seems if you want to give Xerox credit for the internet you should at least mention XNS which was an internetworking protocol.
Going back to the bad old days, we really have to give TCP/IP credit for connectiog computers. Prior to TCP/IP the IBM mainframes ran SNA; the Vaxen used DECnet; the PCs were running either Netware (pretty much the same as XNS), NetBios or Vines; Apples were running AppleTalk; and I can't remember what Sperry/UNIVAC called thier protocol. TCP/IP was the first protocol that actually allowed all of these systeem to talk to one another. (I don't mention Suns and BSD because ther were allready running TCP/IP)
As for the growth of the Internet after it was privatized. It was growing expontentially when it was DARPAnet, it continued to expand expontentially as NSFnet, and it continued to grow after privitization.
This distinction between content delivery and content creation is probably the best comment posted to this thread. Smart phones and tablets are for content consumers and will eventually replace desk top computers for most users. Desktops will continue to be used for content creation and be used, if not be more sophisticated users, at least better trained users. So they require a different desktop. The guy who came to replace your roof was most likely driving a pickup truck, not a two seater sports car.
Actually most people liked Windows 95 a lot better than 3.1, I know I did.
It seems to me that people are not informed because the media tend to cover politics like they are a sporting event. " Gee Bret, Rommeny would have done much better in he Iowa straw poll if he ran further right on the tax issue and then cut back up the centre on abortion rights." -- All we get are poll results, tactics and points spreads. Great if your making book on the election in Vegas, but it doesn't lead to an informed electorate.
It is amazing that people still say that "Patents foster innovation" with a straight face.
The price of basic cable may not fall as much as you would like, but it may not go up as much as it would otherwise. The "bait and switch" part of the argument seems to be unclear to me. The source article was kind of fuzzy. It seems that what the cable companies are proposing is mini-bundling. A soccer fan that buys ESPN will get all the ESPN channels, even if the Ottawa curling finals are of no interest. Even this kind of unbundling is good however because it places programming decisions back on ESPN. Which now because it is a separate charge on the your cable bill has to explicitly balance between programming cost and viewer ship to keep customers.
Contractors can be useful in some situations. For example if an agency is upgrading a database system, they need people to migrate the data, test the new system and train the db admins and users. For a six month project additional costs of using contract labour is justifier. If we limit contractors to one year with a given agency they will be used on these kinds of projects and not just be overpaid perma-temps.
It doesn't matter which of the above languages that you teach. The fundamental flow control concepts are the same. Things like functions, for-loops and if-then-else are common concepts that are easily transferred to any new language that comes along. Learning a new computer language is much easier than learning your first computer language. You even acknowledged that your "good C class taught you theory that you use today"
I agree that printing money could be equally destructive; may a little less because it doesn't cost anywhere near $20 to print a twenty dollar bill. I think our difference of opinion is based on confusion between "hard currency" and "money". The world doesn't run on hard currency, it runs on money which is mostly credit. When the fed votes for quantitative easing nobody calls down to the basement and tells them to fire up the presses. New money is created by economic output which increases the supply of credit with no governmental action. These days fed can only effect changes around the edges and is mostly along for the ride. I don't disagree with bitcoin as a medium of exchange to provide trusted transactions between parties, but presenting, it as a new and improved currency is overreaching.
The biggest flaw in bitcoins is that creating them is destructive. I agree that the deflationary effect is real and serious and this alone would should be enough to prove the system is flawed. But what is worse is that to create bitcoins you expend energy while providing no beneficial goods or services. In credit based monetary system the creation of wealth is constructive. You go to work and create products and services that people want and wealth is created. The currency is a marker for these goods and services, not something that has value in and of itself.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by robocalls, annoying ceaseless rude, asserting themselves through my telephone at dinner looking to get me to refinance my debt ...
When I saw Watson I was really impressed, but, sadly I thought to myself that the first real commercial application was going to be telemarketing. And look it didn't take more than a couple of months.
I don't understand where the controversy on authoritative sources is here. The LA Time is most likely authoritative as to what Palin said. But, Palin is certainly NOT authoritative as to what Paul Revere might have said or done.
I've noticed the strange pricing of used books on Amazon for quite a while now, didn't realize that the sellers were using algorithms to set them. One of the strangest thing I've noticed is books with limited appeal and 50 or 60 copies available going for outrageous prices. I don't think these robots have any idea of what price the books actually sell at, only what others are listing them for. It's kind of like buy-it-now on ebay. When I auction against buy it now items I usually get about 30% of the buy-it-now price.
I worked on digital audio back in the days when a 2.4MHz z80 processor was was considered fast and I can vouch for this sampling rate problem. Our biggest design hurtle wasn't processor speed, but minimizing thermal drift in the anti-aliasing filter. We could do a 35kHz 8-bit logarithmic ADC with no problem. It was the horrible chatter when the box got too hot that made it impossible to get more than 14kHz bandwidth out of it.
The source material is well worth a read. The public image they try to project is kind of a mixture of common sense and pop psychology. But, when you dig a little deeper these people are nuts. Its' kind of like that Jesus cult that keeps resurfacing. The whole forgiveness and absolution of your sins thing is pretty healthy, but that resurrection thing sounds like the plot from a 60s horror film
I hate to disagree with an attorney, but I think the reason nobody sues for software bugs is because they don't cause a lot of damage. If your iPod fails to play a song because of a software bug the most your likely to get out of a suit is a new iPod. When there are damages that make it worth suing, possibly like a wrongful death caused by Toyoto's sudden acceleration problem, you will see law suits aimed at software bugs. Also, even thought programmers may get a sweet deal on liability issues, there is such a thing as a "Professional Engineer". (The exam is a real bitch.) I use to need to hire them to approve the drawings when I wanted to install a microwave dish on the to of a 12 story building. You rarely run across them in electronics, but, when I work for a small company that designed process control equipment the VP of engineering had his PE
Valuations are hard, but some things you can do before accepting a job with equity are (1) Ask how many share are out standing. Both the common stock that you will be getting and the preferred shares held by the VCs. Also find out how much funding the company got, the VCs get this money back with interest ahead of the shares. (2) Stock is better than options, if the board votes the increase the limit on the number of common or preferred shares you will get a letter. (3) If you get options redeem some of them as soon as possible, then you will get the letters when the board votes to issue more stock.
This situation is exactly why I switched to doing contract work. The more hours my employer wants me to work more hours he pays me for. I've also worked for equity in start-ups, but I got to believe the product will succeed and get in on the first funding round. When they start going for third and forth rounds you have to objectively consider the companies valuation and how much your equity has been diluted. It may make sense to cut your losses and start looking for a new job. As for the number hours a coder can work I think it varies greatly depending on the individual. I can do 50 hours a week with out burning out, but, if I go above 55 hours I can only sustain the effort for a two or three weeks. I can do because I don't have any family responsibilities; I can't imagine somebody with a couple of kids working this much. I wonder if there have be any serious studies on what causes coder burn-out. A lot of the posts talk about the mental effort involved in the job, but after 15 years of programming I find most of the time it's just plain old boredom that gets to me. A brief period of mental activity, where I figure out how to solve the problem, is followed by hours of boiler plate coding. Checking function returns, handling error conditions, logging error messages; that sort of thing. Other things that tend to burn my out are outrageously long compile times and tacking down who submitted the code that broke the poll.
The big problem with your math is that when I buy an eBook I don't have first sale rights. I almost always buy my books used and then pass them on to someone else. So every book I read ends up with at least three owners. I just got back from Goodwill and picked up 4 very-good condition used books for less than $8.00. (One of them was "CODE" by Lawrence Lessig, a good find!) Once the eBook publishing industry acknowledges the difference between purchasing a physical book and an eBook, they could make eBooks available for a 30 day rental at say $3.99. I'd switch to eBooks and wouldn't care about things like DRM, product obsolescence or vendor lock in.