Those have been able to build out of much smaller systems over time though.
And lots of them don't work right away... if ever. I wouldn't count delta and their half a million flyers a day (so presumably half a million reservations a day) as a shining example of a successful system. They've had a new system for a year and it still breaks constantly.
Banks yes - but then how much money are we talking about spending on IT. If you spend 500 million dollars to do a project that's going to cost a billion, and then it doesn't work you shouldn't be surprised. That doesn't mean it was easy - to the contrary it was much bigger and more expensive than you anticipated.
JP morgan spends ~ 2 Billion dollars a year on IT (http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3342035/jp-morgan-overhauls-global-it-with-agile-development-and-automation/).
Well kinda, they need to interact with many dozens of insurance companies potentially, but ya, that they undershot capacity is a huge problem (and it's possible the there are capacity issues with the databases they need to talk to but don't control). With an MMO you just sell less copies until you have servers, with a website.. you don't really have that option.
There are so many websites out there that do far more complex operation, and they seem to have very little problem.
Not really at least not that worked at this scale from day one. The closest you're going to get to needing to support millions of unique users on the first day, and hundreds of thousands simultaneously are things like MMO launches and WoW expansion packs or something like google+. And most of those can scale by replication and sectioning people off so it's highly parallel, or are built on already substantial infrastructure. If you crunch the math, there were only 90 days from launch to end date, and you need to enrol about 25 million people or something in that time (the uninsured who don't live in states with their own exchanges), so the daily load is actually quite high, particularly with a large number of people hitting the site to browse and decide. It's also quite likely that they gambled on more states setting up their own exchanges... and lost.
The backend of games and google+ of those is trivial compared to healthcare.gov, which not only needs to talk to databases from federal agencies, but it needs to connect to dozens of insurance companies with multiple sets of rules and regulations. Sure an MMO needs to do math, but one designer with no technical training can decide what equations to use and if they get it wrong no big deal. When you're dealing with money - and we're talking about healthcare that's going to be worth a couple of hundred billion dollars bought through this site, even a 1% error rate is going to cause no end of problems.
is that it's a simple matter of input from the user, and then a matter of storage of that input, and maybe some calculations along the way - all very basic stuff for today's world.
Input from the user that needs to be checked against multiple databases that aren't yours, that have private information in them. Then talking to multiple insurance companies in multiple jurisdictions with slightly different rules etc.
I'm not saying that excuses about 2 months of failure, but one should not assume this is a simple project, that they somehow did not realize that this would require probably 10x the server capacity they had is a complete failure. But other projects that are huge and stable have spent a lot more than 500 million dollars to get to that point, over a lot of years. These guys were trying to solve a problem no one else has ever had to solve on this scale. That they didn't recognize that is pathetic, but we shouldn't suppose this is an easy project.
I can't speak to the job sites in the US, but here we have recruiters coming to classrooms, and indeed.com seems to be working quite well as an aggregator.
I think we've got about 35 new engineering positions a month in the city I'm in, of 400k people. It sounds to me like you're searching wrong. At least assuming you have an actual engineering degree, and not a technician diploma or a degree in physics - those guys are screwed.
>A 70k job without benefits in Boston or Silicon Valley is basically equivalent to a minimum wage job in other parts of the USA. You can live on it, but its got no future.
70k starting salary for an undergrad is pretty good anywhere. Even in the valley.
And as I say, we're not even a great school. Good schools you've actually heard of can command much more.
>Cool, temporary worker, I don't have to provide benefits
I'm in canada, and we can't keep our engineers bottled up. Their 3rd year co-ops started paying more than starting faculty positions, so we had to change the rules and forcibly limit them to about 26 an hour.
Our graduates are going all over in canada and the US, starting salaries 70-80k. And we aren't a particularly spectacular engineering school. Electrical, mechanical, I don't know about civil, computer and software. (I've never had anything to do with the civil people as I'm in CS and our cross courses that I have been involved in are only with the others).
If you can't find work either people don't think your degree is legit, or you're doing a terrible job presenting yourself. Hell, our graduates who can barely communicate in english are getting great jobs.
Bill Gates, I think somewhere in his brain he wants to be altruistic for some philosophical reason, but his charity really just pumps M$ products and tries to make teachers be paid by performance.
And you know, curing polio, fighting AIDS, TB and malaria, etc.
Lets not leave out the the stuff that saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year.
Or that someone was throwing him a freebie job until another one opened up (and they could hopefully find someone better for this one).
Scenario: We have a clusterfuck. And need a new person to head it. But we have no idea who it is.
So we hire some guy who's a business CEO and economics type - clearly completely wrong for the job - but not 2 months later he gets a job suited to the CEO/economics type - as an economics advisor. And we spent the time he was 'in charge' hiring someone who appears to maybe have been exposed to IT projects before.
It solved the theatre problem of needing someone new right away, give him a cushy job for 2 months while the real job you wanted him for became available, and gave you time to find someone who might actually be useful.
Indeed, that is our experience (at a university) as well.
Students taking online courses through the university are expected to be as proficient as the regular students - if they aren't we need to fail them or employers lose faith in our degrees.
If you already have a degree (or most of a degree) and a job then online courses can be a great way to augment your skillset, even if you never do the the homework watching the lectures will tell you a lot of stuff you'll need to look up and learn if a particular type of problem arises.
But actually relying on online open courses as the basis of your credentials is still problematic, and likely will always be. University degrees are in large part a trust relationship between employers and universities - our job isn't to train you for a specific job, but if you get a degree with an 80% average in computer science you should be reasonably proficient in computer science. If we let you buy your degree, or have your friends take your tests for you or the like then we may as well be some corrupt institution no one has ever heard of in Bangladesh or Nigeria.
Honestly, I suspect BT figured they could get everything they actually want from him for free from his security blog or with occasional contracts, particularly if he's willing to take up an academic or otherwise similarly public gig where his main work and discussion all ends up public anyway.
He can probably make a lot more money running around collecting speaking fees than BT would want to pay him.
By suing any company that accepts it in transactions as being in breach of their patent. The same way Newegg just got patent trolled by a company claiming a patent on (part of) public key cryptography. Oh you were using an implementation of our patent? You're going to get sued.
Did no one wonder about that business-model bit in the beginning
No of course not. That's idiotic.
You can't make money or a business model without potential customers and you can't get potential customers for a product they don't know exists and don't even know what would be, and asking for money up front will just drive them away. You build underlying technology and solutions first, then figure out how to make money. If you want to do it the MBA way go invest in a radio station. The rest of us are trying to define new markets.
Approach legal and tell them about our many violations of COPPA?
Ask legal what framework you should be working under, and what laws and compliance are going to be required as part of doing your job. You aren't really sure what your personal obligations are in this regard, because you understand that there are regulations but you aren't sure who is responsible for implementing what exactly, and you've gotten conflicting or confused responses from your superiors.
WW2 started in 1939 in europe, but I think you've got the right idea.
Was there some significant event, not necessarily in 2003 but some number of years earlier that effected everyone but the netherlands, denmark and the UK, could they have the same effect but mask it with different immigration policies? Denmark and the netherlands were both occupied by germany, the UK was bombed, but the netherlands and denmark should not be much worse off than France, belgium, or Norway for example.
In 2002 the euro came into being - well that would explain 12 countries but not all of them if it had a one year lag effect.
But there's a lot of years there that could point to some systematic problem. Maybe windows XP and the proliferation of wide speed internet made people more sedentary and the economic crisis in 2009 had them all out protesting (exercise!) but then the protesting stopped, and this is actually a by product of the internet. It gets worse as more people get better internet and run around less.
Maybe we've got a change in smoking or health rules or counting procedures or immigration laws that completely messes with things.
I'm not by the way discounting a 'something to do with WW2' effect, (or WW1 for that matter), but there needs to be something different about the countries in question. The collection of possibilities is quite large.
Post docs are holding positions until you get a faculty position. If you need/want to build a better research history because your PhD resulted in publication delays or issues (mine is facing issues with being able to publish when I'd like because it's a collaboration, so my publication list with the PhD is shorter than normal and a post doc would be a chance to publish the stuff from my PhD that was delayed and do some more).
But in many cases computer scientists don't need to do post docs, nor do engineers. You can get an entry level faculty position at a smaller school. If you're in physics though, you're not getting a faculty unless you've done a couple of years as a post doc because everyone else has done a post doc.
Where I am graduates about 15-20 PhD's a year, about 1-2 a year will do a post doc, the remainder end up splitting between industry-academia about 75%-25% ish, but that's comp sci. The physics programme (program, take your pick), is about 70/30 academia/industry basically all the academia ones have to do post docs.
I did some cisco and microsoft certifications in highschool.... more than 15 years ago. Not for credit.
They were super useful in terms of getting summer jobs, and some practical IT experience so that even if you don't intend to be an IT guy you aren't completely clueless about how all of this shit works. It's not like universities do a great job of telling students what IT resources are available to them or how to use them. It's all well and good to have free access to piles of software (either to use or through academic licensing) but most of the time students, even CS or software engineering students, have no idea what any of the corporate stuff is or could do for them until after they've done their co-op and are ready to graduate.
Being able to go into a lab as a grad student, and know enough about IT to know what the hell ITS was even offering (if only to know vaguely what all these things do) was hugely helpful. Most people have no idea at all, and knowing a bit about networking and hardware and various software options made a lot of difference throughout my years.
And be thrown in jail for violating sanctions rules. Brilliant.
Moving money between places that allow it is easy, moving money to places that don't allow it isn't challenging for the fun of it, it's hard because there are laws in place about moving money in and out of countries. If you're moving money out of somewhere that doesn't allow it, or money into somewhere under sanctions you're going to find yourself in a world of trouble.
The only saving grace is that a flight from LIsbon to Warsaw (which is about the extreme edge of a flight within the EU) is only 3.5 hours. Most of the time you're not going to be stuck listening to someone loudly talking in a language you don't speak for more than a couple of hours.
Especially when your 3 biggest competitors would suddenly be two companies long established in the console market (Sony and Nintendo), who both have significant revenue they can operate with, and your other competitor is the guy you just bought the division from - Microsoft, and Windows, who ultimately control most of the underlying technology you rely on.
Unless sony or Nintendo wanted to buy it no one with much sense would want to buy the Xbox division. I can't really see Sony or Nintendo wanting it other than to shut it down.
but how many people do you think actually use extensions from outside the store?
of the people that use extensions at all? Probably most of them, as I would think the most popular extensions are things like youtube downloaders and netflix unblockers that let you use VPN services so you can access say UK netflix from the US, and US netflix from Australia.
Slashdot Mirror
Those have been able to build out of much smaller systems over time though.
And lots of them don't work right away... if ever. I wouldn't count delta and their half a million flyers a day (so presumably half a million reservations a day) as a shining example of a successful system. They've had a new system for a year and it still breaks constantly.
Banks yes - but then how much money are we talking about spending on IT. If you spend 500 million dollars to do a project that's going to cost a billion, and then it doesn't work you shouldn't be surprised. That doesn't mean it was easy - to the contrary it was much bigger and more expensive than you anticipated.
JP morgan spends ~ 2 Billion dollars a year on IT (http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3342035/jp-morgan-overhauls-global-it-with-agile-development-and-automation/).
Well kinda, they need to interact with many dozens of insurance companies potentially, but ya, that they undershot capacity is a huge problem (and it's possible the there are capacity issues with the databases they need to talk to but don't control). With an MMO you just sell less copies until you have servers, with a website.. you don't really have that option.
There are so many websites out there that do far more complex operation, and they seem to have very little problem.
Not really at least not that worked at this scale from day one. The closest you're going to get to needing to support millions of unique users on the first day, and hundreds of thousands simultaneously are things like MMO launches and WoW expansion packs or something like google+. And most of those can scale by replication and sectioning people off so it's highly parallel, or are built on already substantial infrastructure. If you crunch the math, there were only 90 days from launch to end date, and you need to enrol about 25 million people or something in that time (the uninsured who don't live in states with their own exchanges), so the daily load is actually quite high, particularly with a large number of people hitting the site to browse and decide. It's also quite likely that they gambled on more states setting up their own exchanges... and lost.
The backend of games and google+ of those is trivial compared to healthcare.gov, which not only needs to talk to databases from federal agencies, but it needs to connect to dozens of insurance companies with multiple sets of rules and regulations. Sure an MMO needs to do math, but one designer with no technical training can decide what equations to use and if they get it wrong no big deal. When you're dealing with money - and we're talking about healthcare that's going to be worth a couple of hundred billion dollars bought through this site, even a 1% error rate is going to cause no end of problems.
is that it's a simple matter of input from the user, and then a matter of storage of that input, and maybe some calculations along the way - all very basic stuff for today's world.
Input from the user that needs to be checked against multiple databases that aren't yours, that have private information in them. Then talking to multiple insurance companies in multiple jurisdictions with slightly different rules etc.
I'm not saying that excuses about 2 months of failure, but one should not assume this is a simple project, that they somehow did not realize that this would require probably 10x the server capacity they had is a complete failure. But other projects that are huge and stable have spent a lot more than 500 million dollars to get to that point, over a lot of years. These guys were trying to solve a problem no one else has ever had to solve on this scale. That they didn't recognize that is pathetic, but we shouldn't suppose this is an easy project.
I can't speak to the job sites in the US, but here we have recruiters coming to classrooms, and indeed.com seems to be working quite well as an aggregator.
I think we've got about 35 new engineering positions a month in the city I'm in, of 400k people. It sounds to me like you're searching wrong. At least assuming you have an actual engineering degree, and not a technician diploma or a degree in physics - those guys are screwed.
>A 70k job without benefits in Boston or Silicon Valley is basically equivalent to a minimum wage job in other parts of the USA. You can live on it, but its got no future.
70k starting salary for an undergrad is pretty good anywhere. Even in the valley.
And as I say, we're not even a great school. Good schools you've actually heard of can command much more.
>Cool, temporary worker, I don't have to provide benefits
Good luck trying that in canada.
70-80k for a fresh graduate is not bad.
I'm in canada, and we can't keep our engineers bottled up. Their 3rd year co-ops started paying more than starting faculty positions, so we had to change the rules and forcibly limit them to about 26 an hour.
Our graduates are going all over in canada and the US, starting salaries 70-80k. And we aren't a particularly spectacular engineering school. Electrical, mechanical, I don't know about civil, computer and software. (I've never had anything to do with the civil people as I'm in CS and our cross courses that I have been involved in are only with the others).
If you can't find work either people don't think your degree is legit, or you're doing a terrible job presenting yourself. Hell, our graduates who can barely communicate in english are getting great jobs.
Bill Gates, I think somewhere in his brain he wants to be altruistic for some philosophical reason, but his charity really just pumps M$ products and tries to make teachers be paid by performance.
And you know, curing polio, fighting AIDS, TB and malaria, etc.
Lets not leave out the the stuff that saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year.
Or that someone was throwing him a freebie job until another one opened up (and they could hopefully find someone better for this one).
Scenario: We have a clusterfuck. And need a new person to head it. But we have no idea who it is.
So we hire some guy who's a business CEO and economics type - clearly completely wrong for the job - but not 2 months later he gets a job suited to the CEO/economics type - as an economics advisor. And we spent the time he was 'in charge' hiring someone who appears to maybe have been exposed to IT projects before.
It solved the theatre problem of needing someone new right away, give him a cushy job for 2 months while the real job you wanted him for became available, and gave you time to find someone who might actually be useful.
Indeed, that is our experience (at a university) as well.
Students taking online courses through the university are expected to be as proficient as the regular students - if they aren't we need to fail them or employers lose faith in our degrees.
If you already have a degree (or most of a degree) and a job then online courses can be a great way to augment your skillset, even if you never do the the homework watching the lectures will tell you a lot of stuff you'll need to look up and learn if a particular type of problem arises.
But actually relying on online open courses as the basis of your credentials is still problematic, and likely will always be. University degrees are in large part a trust relationship between employers and universities - our job isn't to train you for a specific job, but if you get a degree with an 80% average in computer science you should be reasonably proficient in computer science. If we let you buy your degree, or have your friends take your tests for you or the like then we may as well be some corrupt institution no one has ever heard of in Bangladesh or Nigeria.
Honestly, I suspect BT figured they could get everything they actually want from him for free from his security blog or with occasional contracts, particularly if he's willing to take up an academic or otherwise similarly public gig where his main work and discussion all ends up public anyway.
He can probably make a lot more money running around collecting speaking fees than BT would want to pay him.
Yes but he's actually an american.
Beta is beta. they've said before they intend to support AMD, but the first gen of hardware is all nVIDIA.
By suing any company that accepts it in transactions as being in breach of their patent. The same way Newegg just got patent trolled by a company claiming a patent on (part of) public key cryptography. Oh you were using an implementation of our patent? You're going to get sued.
Did no one wonder about that business-model bit in the beginning
No of course not. That's idiotic.
You can't make money or a business model without potential customers and you can't get potential customers for a product they don't know exists and don't even know what would be, and asking for money up front will just drive them away. You build underlying technology and solutions first, then figure out how to make money. If you want to do it the MBA way go invest in a radio station. The rest of us are trying to define new markets.
Lots of what other people have said is good.
Approach legal and tell them about our many violations of COPPA?
Ask legal what framework you should be working under, and what laws and compliance are going to be required as part of doing your job. You aren't really sure what your personal obligations are in this regard, because you understand that there are regulations but you aren't sure who is responsible for implementing what exactly, and you've gotten conflicting or confused responses from your superiors.
There seem to be some problems with the cooling paste installed on a lot of cards as well, causing them to overheat and ramp themselves down.
WW2 started in 1939 in europe, but I think you've got the right idea.
Was there some significant event, not necessarily in 2003 but some number of years earlier that effected everyone but the netherlands, denmark and the UK, could they have the same effect but mask it with different immigration policies? Denmark and the netherlands were both occupied by germany, the UK was bombed, but the netherlands and denmark should not be much worse off than France, belgium, or Norway for example.
In 2002 the euro came into being - well that would explain 12 countries but not all of them if it had a one year lag effect.
But there's a lot of years there that could point to some systematic problem. Maybe windows XP and the proliferation of wide speed internet made people more sedentary and the economic crisis in 2009 had them all out protesting (exercise!) but then the protesting stopped, and this is actually a by product of the internet. It gets worse as more people get better internet and run around less.
Maybe we've got a change in smoking or health rules or counting procedures or immigration laws that completely messes with things.
I'm not by the way discounting a 'something to do with WW2' effect, (or WW1 for that matter), but there needs to be something different about the countries in question. The collection of possibilities is quite large.
Post docs are holding positions until you get a faculty position. If you need/want to build a better research history because your PhD resulted in publication delays or issues (mine is facing issues with being able to publish when I'd like because it's a collaboration, so my publication list with the PhD is shorter than normal and a post doc would be a chance to publish the stuff from my PhD that was delayed and do some more).
But in many cases computer scientists don't need to do post docs, nor do engineers. You can get an entry level faculty position at a smaller school. If you're in physics though, you're not getting a faculty unless you've done a couple of years as a post doc because everyone else has done a post doc.
Where I am graduates about 15-20 PhD's a year, about 1-2 a year will do a post doc, the remainder end up splitting between industry-academia about 75%-25% ish, but that's comp sci. The physics programme (program, take your pick), is about 70/30 academia/industry basically all the academia ones have to do post docs.
I did some cisco and microsoft certifications in highschool.... more than 15 years ago. Not for credit.
They were super useful in terms of getting summer jobs, and some practical IT experience so that even if you don't intend to be an IT guy you aren't completely clueless about how all of this shit works. It's not like universities do a great job of telling students what IT resources are available to them or how to use them. It's all well and good to have free access to piles of software (either to use or through academic licensing) but most of the time students, even CS or software engineering students, have no idea what any of the corporate stuff is or could do for them until after they've done their co-op and are ready to graduate.
Being able to go into a lab as a grad student, and know enough about IT to know what the hell ITS was even offering (if only to know vaguely what all these things do) was hugely helpful. Most people have no idea at all, and knowing a bit about networking and hardware and various software options made a lot of difference throughout my years.
And be thrown in jail for violating sanctions rules. Brilliant.
Moving money between places that allow it is easy, moving money to places that don't allow it isn't challenging for the fun of it, it's hard because there are laws in place about moving money in and out of countries. If you're moving money out of somewhere that doesn't allow it, or money into somewhere under sanctions you're going to find yourself in a world of trouble.
The only saving grace is that a flight from LIsbon to Warsaw (which is about the extreme edge of a flight within the EU) is only 3.5 hours. Most of the time you're not going to be stuck listening to someone loudly talking in a language you don't speak for more than a couple of hours.
Buyers are at significantly less risk, but without sellers the site isn't going to function.
Where there is money to be made, there will be people willing to take the risk.
Especially when your 3 biggest competitors would suddenly be two companies long established in the console market (Sony and Nintendo), who both have significant revenue they can operate with, and your other competitor is the guy you just bought the division from - Microsoft, and Windows, who ultimately control most of the underlying technology you rely on.
Unless sony or Nintendo wanted to buy it no one with much sense would want to buy the Xbox division. I can't really see Sony or Nintendo wanting it other than to shut it down.
They blocked media hint a while ago.
I don't know for sure about the others, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly what is coming.
but how many people do you think actually use extensions from outside the store?
of the people that use extensions at all? Probably most of them, as I would think the most popular extensions are things like youtube downloaders and netflix unblockers that let you use VPN services so you can access say UK netflix from the US, and US netflix from Australia.