Actually McDonalds in particular is moving in this direction. They recently announced a plan to pilot automated order taking (with humans available at the same locations... for now). Hell, I bet any given McDonald's manager would rather run a store full of machines.
I like pay at the pump too, but so far I haven't seen a self-checkout that works very well. I'd rather pay for a drone to bag my groceries for me. But then, I'm slowly turning into an old bastard.:)
I should clarify that damage to the US economy causing trouble for European nations as a result of the economies being bound together is only part of the picture. Even if Europe was almost completely independent of the US economy, Europe is at risk mainly because they're in the same boat comparatively speaking. It's only a matter of time.
For all their varied political and social differences, European big business is just as much good old American-style unfettered capitalism as anybody headquartered on Wall Street.
"The companies" are not single giant entities. A microscopically small part of what makes up "the companies" are what makes the decisions. The choices have been made. Believe me, I know all about this problem, my own company has laid of tens of thousands in the past few years, all the while posting RECORD profit numbers -- not just profits, but bigger profits than we've EVER had before, and they're still cutting heads and selling out the people who are left to jobs in India. It's deeply fucked.
So you're saying that a mouse behaves normally as a result of human contact? Jesus, I must have a whole front yard full of dangerously insane squirrels.
There are at least three critical problems with your perspective:
1. The wealth in the US is primarily held by "the captains of industry" who are the same people sending all this work away. They will continue to make money from these companies. It is the employees in the trenches who will pay the price. Even when things get bad, the majority of the people in the higher echelons are sufficiently wealthy to ride out the repercussions of their actions.
2. By definition, the amount being spent in other countries is relatively small, otherwise this wouldn't be happening. Other countries are not going to get rich off this, not even by their own standards. There will be no cleansing redistribution of hoarded US wealth. The poor will not enjoy the luxuries of American standards of living. A great equalization is not just around the corner.
3. The good old entrepreneurial spirit ensures those running the offshore development companies are looking at wealthy American corporate officers as a role model. They want a cut of that pie, and coming from less well-developed nations, and probably a less comfy background, they are probably even more ruthlessly unconcerned about stepping on their fellow citizens to get it. Consequently, you will end up with the same situation overseas, where the top few are doing well (by their standards) and their workers are doing slightly better than average, at best. This will be worse outside the US as those other countries rarely have the kinds of anti-exploitation protections in place that US workers enjoy, and it is to the advantage of the governments of those countries to avoid that kind of protection to encourage further US investments.
Middle- and even low-end managers are very much involved in budgetary concerns in large companies. The problem is, they have no choice. Where I work, it was recently mandated that MOST work (nearly three quarters) must be done by Indians. Ok, they said "offshore" so we have a few Russians in the mix, but it's mostly Indians. The costs will rise due to natural market forces, not because managers don't care. It has already been documented that offshore development costs a great deal more now, across the board, than it used to.
This problem will not affect the US alone. Read The Register. Jobs are already being lost in the UK. The India and China have more than enough warm bodies available to completely trash the economies of the rest of the civilized world. It has been said that the Japanese never considered WWII to have ended, they merely shifted to an economic form of warfare. They may have been on to something. I do not believe India has any dark intent, they are merely looking out for themselves, and I lay the blame on US companies for selling out their own people -- but I believe the US may have no choice but to take a dim view of this. Unfortunately there seems to be no good solution.
Finally, eventually the same problem will hit India. They will experience their bubble, and it won't last as long as it did here because they have less to offer. I have already seen one news story about fears in India about losing their jobs to literally-dirt-cheap offshore contractors in the Philipenes and the former Soviet republics. It's only a matter of time.
I see no end to this, and I believe it will cause severe and long-lasting damage to the US economy. And don't be so naive as to believe the rest of the world can withstand long-term major economic distress in the US.
This tells me SVG is *slow*.
Check out the CML2SVG demo on a PC in the 1GHz range.
Yikes. I've seen faster simple wireframe spins on a 286.
(Yeah, I understand how much more is going on under the hood, but this is still painfully slow.)
Besides just being suspiciously vague and unlikely, and being completely unsupported by any citation whatsoever, neither of your examples have even a little bit to do with the article. A lab machine was contaminated? Somebody ordered the wrong kind of cells for ten years running, on a project with, apparently, hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding?
were the animals in the article subject to frequent playful human contact
You're joking, right? Please god tell me you're fucking joking. They're MICE. They're going to be shot full of some god-awful chemical to see if they grow giant throbbing tumors. Someone is planning to shoot Clairol into their eyes just to see what happens next. They will have their heads shaved and opened wide so we can poke their naked brains with wires. All the play-time in the fucking world isn't going to make them happy, well-adjusted woodland bunnies.
Interesting. Perhaps my suspicion is misplaced then. I was not aware that they didn't own the spec. In that case, I think SVG's major weakness is a lack of promotion and awareness, and this weakness should not be underestimated -- it has buried countless other very good standards.
Bah. Adobe knows how to make a plugin work, but just barely. Try scripting against the PDF.OCX sometime. It's unsupported, but it's how Adobe does it -- and even though it is unsupported, since it's a COM object it has a publicly declared interface. Play with it for a few minutes and you'll quickly learn it's very inconsistent and unstable. Play with it on several different platforms, and you'll experience a whole new range of inconsistency.
PDF is undoubtedly a convenient format, but Adobe's position on the format is highly restrictive and very unfriendly to developers. PDF has enormous potential which is mostly untapped because of this. Their history with PDF has made me (and many others) regard SVG with a great deal of suspicion. I personally believe they're hoping it'll displace Flash some day, at which time they'll take the same developer-unfriendly approach to SVG that they currently maintain with PDF.
So this small company is getting millions of page views per day (do the math), but they can't afford additional servers? (And nevermind the question of why you're spending that much per server... I work for a very large, very inefficient company, and we don't even blow that much jack for a server.)
Hospital patient databases are mostly for making sure patients get the right treatment, and a legal record of that treatement, and a financial record of the cost of that treatment
I worked on various types of medical database software for eight years. The systems are for making sure insurance claims are filed and paid, they are NOT for making sure patients get the right treatment. That's what doctors and nurses are for. Even the systems which incorporate electronically recorded patient notes and that type of thing do so only because of regulatory requirements.
The "real work" of most hospitals and doctors' offices is still very much a handwritten, manual, hands-on process, and that's how they prefer it, and in my opinion that's a good thing.
At one point we experimented with support for a couple of "expert systems" (back when they were the hot new shit) and the crazy stuff they'd sometimes come up with was enough to scare anybody into hoping the staff stays in the loop.
Do yourself a favor and carefully read the security section of the Freenet FAQ. The two big draws for Freenet are anonymity and plausible deniability, and both have issues people need to be aware of.
One highly relevant quote about anonymity:
Freenet does not offer true anonymity in the way that the Mixmaster and cypherpunk remailers do. Most of the non-trivial attacks (advanced traffic analysis, compromising any given majority of the nodes, etc.) that these were designed to counter would probably be successful in identifying someone making requests on Freenet.
On Freenet, whatever you do, your identity is still revealed to the first Freenet Node you talk to, and even if you limit yourself to talk only to trusted nodes (a feature that will be implemented in the future), they will have to talk to the rest of the network at some time or another. The anonymity that Freenet offers is really just obscurity in the fact that it is hard to prove that your node wasn't proxying the request for or insert of data on behalf of somebody else (who might also just have been proxying it).
And another quote highly relevant to plausible deniability (which is effectively what Freenet relies upon to store potentially controversial content on any connected node, hopefully without exposing that node's owner to prosecution for hosting that content):
Hashing the key and encrypting the data is not meant a method to keep Freenet Node operators from being able to figure out what type of information is in their nodes if they really want to (after all, they can just find the key in the same way as someone who requests the information would) but rather to keep operators from having to know what information is in their nodes if they don't want to. This distinction is more a legal one than a technical one. It is not realistic to expect a node operator to try to continually collect and/ or guess possible keys and then check them against the information in his node (even if such an attack is viable from a security perspective), so a sane society is less likely to hold an operator liable for such information on the network.
They are clearly moving in the right direction, but are they really there yet? Would it be possible, for example, for the RIAA to say, "Hey everybody, this free application will help you decrypt your Freenet node so that you can ensure you're not infringing," and then they're free to nail if you if you're "trafficking" in illegal files? Obviously there are other hurdles (such as identifying you and the content you're hosting), but I suspect the basic idea still describes a potentially unpleasant scenario.
Also, I saw a slashdot reply to another article recently (somebody help me here?) which quoted a legal decision (somehow involving Sony?) which pretty clearly stated that you're still considered guilty if the prosecution can prove that you were intentionally trying to avoid having knowledge of what you suspected was illegal activity for the sole purpose of using that as a defense later on. (At least, that's how I interpreted it... I wish I could find the citation.) Freenet seems to fall flat on it's face in this respect.
Don't get me wrong, I've been fascinated with Freenet and I think they're trying to do a Very Good Thing, but these are two points that I think are important which a lot of people overlook.
Heh, ironically, slashdot is currently showing me this quote: Be careful how you get yourself involved with persons or situations that can't bear inspection.:)
Browsing other user's lists (or: what I miss most)
on
All The Rave
·
· Score: 1
The feature I miss most from Napster is the ability to browse another user's list of files. My Napster usage pattern was typically -- go looking for a couple of tracks that were somehow similar, then browse the lists of anybody that had most or all of them. This was usually a good sign that the person had other stuff I'd like.
AudioGalaxy had a variation of this, but it was extremely awkward to use.
Are there current systems available that let you do this? I imagine it's more difficult (and probably a lot slower) with the current systems' necessarily decentralized models...
You got it pretty close for somebody who (I'm assuming) doesn't use it and hasn't studied it much.
First of all,.NET has nothing to do with ActiveX -- but I think the point you were trying to make was that the marketing name.NET is analogous to the term ActiveX used as a marketing term, so I'll not hassle you on that point.
.NET's virtual machine *is* the Common Language Runtime. You're right that the CLR is a major piece of.NET, but you're fuzzy on how things are split apart. There is the Intermediate Language (IL), the CLR, and the CLI (a specification on which the CLR is based). For the sake of breaking.NET into its various important parts, you can more or less lump all these together (along with many utilities like the assembler and disassembler, and so on). This perspective effectively masks many important features of the CLR such as its excellent reflection support, the local component model, security features, the wide array of runtime compartmentalization options, and so on.
The language C# is part of what is covered by.NET. Contrary to popular belief, C# was largely developed independently of.NET, although there was a lot of collaboration during the final year or so. The best evidence of this is that the CLR can do things that C# can't do. While it's common to state that C# is just Java warmed over, anyone familiar with a wide variety of languages knows most languages have a lot in common. Frankly Java is just C warmed over in terms of syntax. I personally believe C# programming "feels" more like non-.NET VB programming than Java programming (and I mean that "in a good way", to whatever degree that can be said about VB programming).
Finally, there is the rather enormous class hierarchy which is built on top of the rest of.NET. As you allude to, this can very generally be viewed as a replacement for Win32, although it's functionality actually covers much more than Win32 ever did. The nice thing about the class hierarchy is that it was all designed from the ground up -- unlike previous Windows APIs (not just Win32), it isn't the result of years of changes, improvements, fixes, and new ideas all lumped together. It's quite powerful and very feature-rich. While web services has received a lot of hype from the Microsoft marketing machine (disproportionately so), web services is actually just a tiny sliver, just one of several remoting options. It doesn't replace RPC with system services unless, for some reason, the programmer (or in some cases the admin) decides they want to do it that way.
That is probably the most high-level way possible to break down and understand what constitutes the group of things collectively referred to as.NET.
No, people don't open fscking ports anymore because remoting handles the handshaking and retry and error handling and other BS that you'd have to write yourself, by-hand, every time. Depending on the protocol, it may also handle authentication and other security details, or queueing, or a wide variety of other things which a developer can then rely on transparently.
But if you wanted to open a port, that's also pretty easy under.NET.
In terms of it being used everywhere, think of it as if was just replacing Win32. There is a lot more to it than that, but that's why you hear (if you're watching this sort of thing) that they're using it so much in-house. It's really the foundation on which they're building most of the rest of their products.
Applets are typically 10-50KB today for that exact reason -- the types of full-scale applications we were sold on in the early days were too big. Remember, back then there wasn't much server-side to rely upon except early, simple ASP, CGI, ISAPI, and things of that nature.
Keep in mind the discussion here is about what was promised when it rolled out. The way things are today is just as irrelevant here as speculation about what.NET might be in seven or eight years.
.NET as a unified campaign was definitely a response to Java.
The things which are in.NET -- the things which *haven't* failed and are in widespread use today -- were in development for years before.NET or NGWS was announced or even leaked.
Java was not the impetus, the universally hated Win32 API was.
Slashdot Mirror
I like pay at the pump too, but so far I haven't seen a self-checkout that works very well. I'd rather pay for a drone to bag my groceries for me. But then, I'm slowly turning into an old bastard. :)
There's an ironic synergy between what you've posted and your sig.
I should clarify that damage to the US economy causing trouble for European nations as a result of the economies being bound together is only part of the picture. Even if Europe was almost completely independent of the US economy, Europe is at risk mainly because they're in the same boat comparatively speaking. It's only a matter of time.
For all their varied political and social differences, European big business is just as much good old American-style unfettered capitalism as anybody headquartered on Wall Street.
"The companies" are not single giant entities. A microscopically small part of what makes up "the companies" are what makes the decisions. The choices have been made. Believe me, I know all about this problem, my own company has laid of tens of thousands in the past few years, all the while posting RECORD profit numbers -- not just profits, but bigger profits than we've EVER had before, and they're still cutting heads and selling out the people who are left to jobs in India. It's deeply fucked.
So you're saying that a mouse behaves normally as a result of human contact? Jesus, I must have a whole front yard full of dangerously insane squirrels.
1. The wealth in the US is primarily held by "the captains of industry" who are the same people sending all this work away. They will continue to make money from these companies. It is the employees in the trenches who will pay the price. Even when things get bad, the majority of the people in the higher echelons are sufficiently wealthy to ride out the repercussions of their actions.
2. By definition, the amount being spent in other countries is relatively small, otherwise this wouldn't be happening. Other countries are not going to get rich off this, not even by their own standards. There will be no cleansing redistribution of hoarded US wealth. The poor will not enjoy the luxuries of American standards of living. A great equalization is not just around the corner.
3. The good old entrepreneurial spirit ensures those running the offshore development companies are looking at wealthy American corporate officers as a role model. They want a cut of that pie, and coming from less well-developed nations, and probably a less comfy background, they are probably even more ruthlessly unconcerned about stepping on their fellow citizens to get it. Consequently, you will end up with the same situation overseas, where the top few are doing well (by their standards) and their workers are doing slightly better than average, at best. This will be worse outside the US as those other countries rarely have the kinds of anti-exploitation protections in place that US workers enjoy, and it is to the advantage of the governments of those countries to avoid that kind of protection to encourage further US investments.
Middle- and even low-end managers are very much involved in budgetary concerns in large companies. The problem is, they have no choice. Where I work, it was recently mandated that MOST work (nearly three quarters) must be done by Indians. Ok, they said "offshore" so we have a few Russians in the mix, but it's mostly Indians. The costs will rise due to natural market forces, not because managers don't care. It has already been documented that offshore development costs a great deal more now, across the board, than it used to.
This problem will not affect the US alone. Read The Register. Jobs are already being lost in the UK. The India and China have more than enough warm bodies available to completely trash the economies of the rest of the civilized world. It has been said that the Japanese never considered WWII to have ended, they merely shifted to an economic form of warfare. They may have been on to something. I do not believe India has any dark intent, they are merely looking out for themselves, and I lay the blame on US companies for selling out their own people -- but I believe the US may have no choice but to take a dim view of this. Unfortunately there seems to be no good solution.
Finally, eventually the same problem will hit India. They will experience their bubble, and it won't last as long as it did here because they have less to offer. I have already seen one news story about fears in India about losing their jobs to literally-dirt-cheap offshore contractors in the Philipenes and the former Soviet republics. It's only a matter of time.
I see no end to this, and I believe it will cause severe and long-lasting damage to the US economy. And don't be so naive as to believe the rest of the world can withstand long-term major economic distress in the US.
This tells me SVG is *slow*. Check out the CML2SVG demo on a PC in the 1GHz range. Yikes. I've seen faster simple wireframe spins on a 286. (Yeah, I understand how much more is going on under the hood, but this is still painfully slow.)
Um, yeah.
And this is related to psycho mice how, again?
You're joking, right? Please god tell me you're fucking joking. They're MICE. They're going to be shot full of some god-awful chemical to see if they grow giant throbbing tumors. Someone is planning to shoot Clairol into their eyes just to see what happens next. They will have their heads shaved and opened wide so we can poke their naked brains with wires. All the play-time in the fucking world isn't going to make them happy, well-adjusted woodland bunnies.
Interesting. Perhaps my suspicion is misplaced then. I was not aware that they didn't own the spec. In that case, I think SVG's major weakness is a lack of promotion and awareness, and this weakness should not be underestimated -- it has buried countless other very good standards.
PDF is undoubtedly a convenient format, but Adobe's position on the format is highly restrictive and very unfriendly to developers. PDF has enormous potential which is mostly untapped because of this. Their history with PDF has made me (and many others) regard SVG with a great deal of suspicion. I personally believe they're hoping it'll displace Flash some day, at which time they'll take the same developer-unfriendly approach to SVG that they currently maintain with PDF.
Something doesn't add up.
This entire article is destined to be one giant troll session.
I worked on various types of medical database software for eight years. The systems are for making sure insurance claims are filed and paid, they are NOT for making sure patients get the right treatment. That's what doctors and nurses are for. Even the systems which incorporate electronically recorded patient notes and that type of thing do so only because of regulatory requirements.
The "real work" of most hospitals and doctors' offices is still very much a handwritten, manual, hands-on process, and that's how they prefer it, and in my opinion that's a good thing.
At one point we experimented with support for a couple of "expert systems" (back when they were the hot new shit) and the crazy stuff they'd sometimes come up with was enough to scare anybody into hoping the staff stays in the loop.
One highly relevant quote about anonymity:
Freenet does not offer true anonymity in the way that the Mixmaster and cypherpunk remailers do. Most of the non-trivial attacks (advanced traffic analysis, compromising any given majority of the nodes, etc.) that these were designed to counter would probably be successful in identifying someone making requests on Freenet. On Freenet, whatever you do, your identity is still revealed to the first Freenet Node you talk to, and even if you limit yourself to talk only to trusted nodes (a feature that will be implemented in the future), they will have to talk to the rest of the network at some time or another. The anonymity that Freenet offers is really just obscurity in the fact that it is hard to prove that your node wasn't proxying the request for or insert of data on behalf of somebody else (who might also just have been proxying it).
And another quote highly relevant to plausible deniability (which is effectively what Freenet relies upon to store potentially controversial content on any connected node, hopefully without exposing that node's owner to prosecution for hosting that content):
Hashing the key and encrypting the data is not meant a method to keep Freenet Node operators from being able to figure out what type of information is in their nodes if they really want to (after all, they can just find the key in the same way as someone who requests the information would) but rather to keep operators from having to know what information is in their nodes if they don't want to. This distinction is more a legal one than a technical one. It is not realistic to expect a node operator to try to continually collect and/ or guess possible keys and then check them against the information in his node (even if such an attack is viable from a security perspective), so a sane society is less likely to hold an operator liable for such information on the network.
They are clearly moving in the right direction, but are they really there yet? Would it be possible, for example, for the RIAA to say, "Hey everybody, this free application will help you decrypt your Freenet node so that you can ensure you're not infringing," and then they're free to nail if you if you're "trafficking" in illegal files? Obviously there are other hurdles (such as identifying you and the content you're hosting), but I suspect the basic idea still describes a potentially unpleasant scenario.
Also, I saw a slashdot reply to another article recently (somebody help me here?) which quoted a legal decision (somehow involving Sony?) which pretty clearly stated that you're still considered guilty if the prosecution can prove that you were intentionally trying to avoid having knowledge of what you suspected was illegal activity for the sole purpose of using that as a defense later on. (At least, that's how I interpreted it... I wish I could find the citation.) Freenet seems to fall flat on it's face in this respect.
Don't get me wrong, I've been fascinated with Freenet and I think they're trying to do a Very Good Thing, but these are two points that I think are important which a lot of people overlook.
Heh, ironically, slashdot is currently showing me this quote: Be careful how you get yourself involved with persons or situations that can't bear inspection. :)
The feature I miss most from Napster is the ability to browse another user's list of files. My Napster usage pattern was typically -- go looking for a couple of tracks that were somehow similar, then browse the lists of anybody that had most or all of them. This was usually a good sign that the person had other stuff I'd like.
AudioGalaxy had a variation of this, but it was extremely awkward to use.
Are there current systems available that let you do this? I imagine it's more difficult (and probably a lot slower) with the current systems' necessarily decentralized models...
And I remember when it was AT&T. (Damn kids! Get off my lawn!)
And as all good slashdot readers now, step 3 is "PROFIT!"
First of all, .NET has nothing to do with ActiveX -- but I think the point you were trying to make was that the marketing name .NET is analogous to the term ActiveX used as a marketing term, so I'll not hassle you on that point.
The language C# is part of what is covered by .NET. Contrary to popular belief, C# was largely developed independently of .NET, although there was a lot of collaboration during the final year or so. The best evidence of this is that the CLR can do things that C# can't do. While it's common to state that C# is just Java warmed over, anyone familiar with a wide variety of languages knows most languages have a lot in common. Frankly Java is just C warmed over in terms of syntax. I personally believe C# programming "feels" more like non-.NET VB programming than Java programming (and I mean that "in a good way", to whatever degree that can be said about VB programming).
Finally, there is the rather enormous class hierarchy which is built on top of the rest of .NET. As you allude to, this can very generally be viewed as a replacement for Win32, although it's functionality actually covers much more than Win32 ever did. The nice thing about the class hierarchy is that it was all designed from the ground up -- unlike previous Windows APIs (not just Win32), it isn't the result of years of changes, improvements, fixes, and new ideas all lumped together. It's quite powerful and very feature-rich. While web services has received a lot of hype from the Microsoft marketing machine (disproportionately so), web services is actually just a tiny sliver, just one of several remoting options. It doesn't replace RPC with system services unless, for some reason, the programmer (or in some cases the admin) decides they want to do it that way.
That is probably the most high-level way possible to break down and understand what constitutes the group of things collectively referred to as .NET.
But if you wanted to open a port, that's also pretty easy under .NET.
In terms of it being used everywhere, think of it as if was just replacing Win32. There is a lot more to it than that, but that's why you hear (if you're watching this sort of thing) that they're using it so much in-house. It's really the foundation on which they're building most of the rest of their products.
Keep in mind the discussion here is about what was promised when it rolled out. The way things are today is just as irrelevant here as speculation about what .NET might be in seven or eight years.
The things which are in .NET -- the things which *haven't* failed and are in widespread use today -- were in development for years before .NET or NGWS was announced or even leaked.
Java was not the impetus, the universally hated Win32 API was.
The breadth and depth of your argument is utterly convincing.
Fine work. You're probably on the management fast-track, too.
Let's start with the easy one: What features were dropped, O resident .NET expert?