Tell that to Rovio. They've made millions and haven't been bought out. Apple and Google aren't interested in entering the games business. They're already the gatekeepers and getting a cut just by having their walled-garden apps stores.
The other AC commenter is mostly right. EE is dead in the western world, for the most part. You can still make a career there, but it's not easy, because most of the work is being outsourced to Asia now. When companies design products using those microcontrollers and SoCs you talk about, these days they usually send them over to an ODM in Taiwan to be both designed and manufactured there, with the software part being considered the "trade secret" part, and kept in-house here in the US. There's still small companies doing their own hardware design, but it's drying up, plus working at small companies usually means a meager salary.
The exception to this is if you're interested in being an RTL designer, i.e. designing circuits in VHDL and Verilog. Those fancy SoCs you talk about are usually designed here in the US by people with EE degrees. That's where all the EE work has moved: on-chip. But it's mostly digital, done in HDLs, and as such isn't really that different from software. So if you're interested in designing SoCs, then by all means go get a EE degree so you can work at one of the many semiconductor companies in the US, such as Intel, AMD, Freescale, Atmel, Microchip, Marvell, etc. But if you want to design board-level electronics, either look for another profession for your "day job", or be prepared for a much narrower job market, either working at a poorly-managed small company in Bumblefuck for peanuts, or maybe working at one of those large semiconductor companies as an applications engineer.
I don't get the creationism/climate-change-denial perspectives, either.
I find it interesting that so many Slashdotters have a hard time understanding this; it makes me think that there's very few people here who have worked as engineers (not in IT). Highly conservative thinking is very common among engineers. Engineers are NOT scientists, no matter how much some people try to conflate the two.
This isn't that uncommon in the engineering profession actually. Engineers tend to be very conservative and religious; there was even an article a few years ago pointing out that a lot of middle eastern terrorists have (or had, they tend to blow themselves up a lot) engineering backgrounds. Engineers tend to have very black-and-white thinking, and that kind of mentality frequently leads people into fundamentalist religions. The respective mindsets of scientists and engineers are extremely different.
it seems that fiddling is a big part of Linux because its a hobbyist thing, and for windows its just a chore.
You've obviously never used a modern Linux distro like Mint. Except for doing updates and making backups (which you have to (or should) do on any OS), there isn't any "fiddling" necessary.
Um, go read my post again. I only said Google's UIs suck, and then I said that all other large corporations' UIs (including MS) also suck. I never compared the two directly, I put them in the same boat. I don't know who would be a good company to do the UI, because they've all lost their minds these days.
No, they've gotten both better and worse, in other words, things are different.
You're right; ageism is much worse these days in computer-related professions (and others). However, OTOH, technology is cheap and easily-accessible today, unlike 40 years ago. Today, if you're brilliant, you don't need some big institution to give you access to their computers for you to do computer-related work; you can buy a laptop for $100-200 on Ebay and do all the coding you want. You can even easily start a business with it: write a brilliant app for smartphones, start your own 1-person company, and sell it on iTunes/Google Play and make millions potentially. Or you can start a highly-successful open-source project and become the next Linus Torvalds or Guido von Rossum. Unfortunately, Engelbart retired about the time microcomputers were starting to become popular, so he was well ahead of his time.
No, they need to split it up into two sections: the back-end and the front-end (the customer-facing website's UI).
Let Google do the back-end, because they seem to be pretty good at that stuff. Don't let them do the UI, however, because it'll suck. Even Ebay does better UIs than Google. Who should do the UI then, you may ask? Honestly, I don't know, but it shouldn't be any large corporation (including MS), because all their UI designers have drunk some tainted kool-aid.
Exactly. Sure, some might try to tell you DRM is just to prevent unauthorized copying, but that's total bullshit; the copyright cartels really want the ability to do stuff like we see here with Amazon: pull your access to something you paid for, on a whim, when they decide they want to sell you access to it in a different way. DRM is all about maintaining control over copyrighted works, whether it's just to prevent unauthorized copying, or for much more insidious purposes.
We tolerate it with Netflix because it's just a rental model. The cost is super-cheap, and if we get pissed, we can cancel our subscription at any time. We were never under any illusions that we "bought" anything of permanence. However, when we lose access to something that we "bought" on Amazon (and paid a much higher price for), we get pissed, because it's obvious we've been lied to.
#1 and #4 are not sufficient for picking an OS that gets no security updates, especially when there's readily-available alternatives that don't have this problem, and have free licensing to boot.
#2 and #3 (which either must be the same thing, or else you're sadly mistaken if you really think anything network-connected can somehow be secured without security updates) may work for some products/systems, but I've seen way too many industrial systems running on Windows which are in fact network-connected. I'm not just talking about building security systems, I'm talking about all kinds of other stuff out there running on Windows, like $10k-200k oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, multimillion dollar industrial robotics and automation systems, etc. Many of these are in fact intended to be network-connected, and run on ancient Windows versions without security updates. There's simply no excuse for that.
Netflix is different because you know that you're not "buying" anything on there, you're just paying a flat monthly fee for all-you-can-use access to their library. Movies may or may not disappear, the playback may pause randomly on Friday nights, but you know this because you're just paying for a service (and the cost of that service is much less than buying (or "buying") each movie individually).
That's what happens when you have a thoroughly corrupt government. Companies can advertise using whatever language they want, even if it's basically lying, and there's no repercussions.
Yes, exactly. And it's not just that, look at various console games (esp. Xbox): they frequently require an internet connection to work, even though the game comes on a disc. The bottom line is: don't trust that physical media means you don't need a network connection.
An always-connected player would defeat the whole purpose of physical media.
No, it doesn't, because only you think the point of physical media is to not need a network connection. In the minds of the people selling that media, the point of physical media is to keep them from needing massive bandwidth (like Netflix and Amazon video), so customers can just watch the movie from the local media, after exchanging a relatively small amount of data with their servers so they can exercise control over it (even after the customer has "purchased" the disc).
This is built into their display list widget. How shameful past the early 1980s.
What are you talking about? Do you not realize that far superior sorting algorithms were invented as long ago as the 40s? Quicksort was invented in 1960, and mergesort was invented in 1945, for example. Being the early 1980s is no excuse for using crappy sort algorithms.
It's OK to check in as long as you meet your deadline and it seems to work. Performance (esp. years down the road) isn't important. Do you think people buying computers at Best Buy are going to avoid your product because it's going to become ridiculously slow many years later? Of course not. So just throw in a crappy algorithm, it doesn't matter. It's not like this is a free/open-source OS where someone will fix it just out of academic interest. With commercial code, if there isn't a compelling business reason to produce and ship quality code, they won't.
It's not just a (physical, building) security system, it's ANY system. Why on earth would you choose to base your product (something that presumably companies will use for many, many years) on something that will have no security support in just 4 months? It's really quite idiotic; there's lots of freely-available OSes (including an RTOS) out there that you can use instead which don't have this problem.
No, it won't ever work, because the costs of healthcare are spiralling out of control. Making the insurance companies even richer is not going to do anything to reduce the costs; making everyone contribute to these insurance companies will only raise the costs of insurance, and make it so everyone is spending more of their money (and the GDP) on the healthcare and health insurance industries.
If you save your money, you don't need health insurance to cover the high cost of some procedure. Instead, you just fly to a better country and get it done there, for a fraction of the cost of what it is here. Belgium is an excellent place to go, I hear.
There's something seriously wrong when a major procedure in the US costs many times what it costs in Belgium (for an American paying out-of-pocket at a private hospital). Why didn't the Democraps bother doing something about this, instead of just enriching their buddies in the health insurance industry?
The best option is for everyone to refuse to buy into this idiotic ObamaCare plan so that the whole thing collapses and our stupid politicians are forced to make real, productive changes.
Why would he do that? He can just pass on insurance and pay for everything out-of-pocket and save. It looks like he already has a health savings plan of some kind. And if he needs any major surgery, he can just fly over to Belgium and get it done there, out-of-pocket, for a fraction of what it'd cost here in the USA, and he'll be safer since Belgium has a lower rate of surgical infection than the US (Belgium's is among the lowest in the world).
What the dumb Democrat voters should be asking is: why did the Democrap politicians spend all their political capital passing a stupid law that did nothing but benefit health insurance companies (which BTW, don't actually provide any healthcare! Instead, they look for ways to deny you healthcare), rather than passing legislation to reduce the cost of healthcare (to, say, the level that it costs in Belgium, which isn't exactly a cheap third-world country).
You obviously haven't been paying attention either. Your saturday delivery article is from February, 10 months old now, and Congress told them no, so they're still delivering mail on Saturdays. And your other article is 13 months old now; since then they've raised prices. Got anything more recent?
Those are why we pay taxes - to ensure that essential services are available to everyone.
Here in the US, the USPS is fast, reliable, delivers on-time almost all the time (there are rare exceptions, but 99% of the time it's on-time), and has Saturday delivery, and on top of all of that, it isn't funded by taxes at all, it's entirely self-sustaining.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell that to Rovio. They've made millions and haven't been bought out. Apple and Google aren't interested in entering the games business. They're already the gatekeepers and getting a cut just by having their walled-garden apps stores.
The other AC commenter is mostly right. EE is dead in the western world, for the most part. You can still make a career there, but it's not easy, because most of the work is being outsourced to Asia now. When companies design products using those microcontrollers and SoCs you talk about, these days they usually send them over to an ODM in Taiwan to be both designed and manufactured there, with the software part being considered the "trade secret" part, and kept in-house here in the US. There's still small companies doing their own hardware design, but it's drying up, plus working at small companies usually means a meager salary.
The exception to this is if you're interested in being an RTL designer, i.e. designing circuits in VHDL and Verilog. Those fancy SoCs you talk about are usually designed here in the US by people with EE degrees. That's where all the EE work has moved: on-chip. But it's mostly digital, done in HDLs, and as such isn't really that different from software. So if you're interested in designing SoCs, then by all means go get a EE degree so you can work at one of the many semiconductor companies in the US, such as Intel, AMD, Freescale, Atmel, Microchip, Marvell, etc. But if you want to design board-level electronics, either look for another profession for your "day job", or be prepared for a much narrower job market, either working at a poorly-managed small company in Bumblefuck for peanuts, or maybe working at one of those large semiconductor companies as an applications engineer.
I don't get the creationism/climate-change-denial perspectives, either.
I find it interesting that so many Slashdotters have a hard time understanding this; it makes me think that there's very few people here who have worked as engineers (not in IT). Highly conservative thinking is very common among engineers. Engineers are NOT scientists, no matter how much some people try to conflate the two.
This isn't that uncommon in the engineering profession actually. Engineers tend to be very conservative and religious; there was even an article a few years ago pointing out that a lot of middle eastern terrorists have (or had, they tend to blow themselves up a lot) engineering backgrounds. Engineers tend to have very black-and-white thinking, and that kind of mentality frequently leads people into fundamentalist religions. The respective mindsets of scientists and engineers are extremely different.
Spoken by someone who has zero understanding of Ohm's Law or electricity in general.
it seems that fiddling is a big part of Linux because its a hobbyist thing, and for windows its just a chore.
You've obviously never used a modern Linux distro like Mint. Except for doing updates and making backups (which you have to (or should) do on any OS), there isn't any "fiddling" necessary.
Um, go read my post again. I only said Google's UIs suck, and then I said that all other large corporations' UIs (including MS) also suck. I never compared the two directly, I put them in the same boat. I don't know who would be a good company to do the UI, because they've all lost their minds these days.
No, they've gotten both better and worse, in other words, things are different.
You're right; ageism is much worse these days in computer-related professions (and others). However, OTOH, technology is cheap and easily-accessible today, unlike 40 years ago. Today, if you're brilliant, you don't need some big institution to give you access to their computers for you to do computer-related work; you can buy a laptop for $100-200 on Ebay and do all the coding you want. You can even easily start a business with it: write a brilliant app for smartphones, start your own 1-person company, and sell it on iTunes/Google Play and make millions potentially. Or you can start a highly-successful open-source project and become the next Linus Torvalds or Guido von Rossum. Unfortunately, Engelbart retired about the time microcomputers were starting to become popular, so he was well ahead of his time.
That might have something to do with the fact that most Canadian homes don't cost over a million dollars [trulia.com].
You've obviously never looked at the housing market in Vancouver BC.
You obviously haven't used GMail lately.
No, they need to split it up into two sections: the back-end and the front-end (the customer-facing website's UI).
Let Google do the back-end, because they seem to be pretty good at that stuff. Don't let them do the UI, however, because it'll suck. Even Ebay does better UIs than Google. Who should do the UI then, you may ask? Honestly, I don't know, but it shouldn't be any large corporation (including MS), because all their UI designers have drunk some tainted kool-aid.
Exactly. Sure, some might try to tell you DRM is just to prevent unauthorized copying, but that's total bullshit; the copyright cartels really want the ability to do stuff like we see here with Amazon: pull your access to something you paid for, on a whim, when they decide they want to sell you access to it in a different way. DRM is all about maintaining control over copyrighted works, whether it's just to prevent unauthorized copying, or for much more insidious purposes.
We tolerate it with Netflix because it's just a rental model. The cost is super-cheap, and if we get pissed, we can cancel our subscription at any time. We were never under any illusions that we "bought" anything of permanence. However, when we lose access to something that we "bought" on Amazon (and paid a much higher price for), we get pissed, because it's obvious we've been lied to.
#1 and #4 are not sufficient for picking an OS that gets no security updates, especially when there's readily-available alternatives that don't have this problem, and have free licensing to boot.
#2 and #3 (which either must be the same thing, or else you're sadly mistaken if you really think anything network-connected can somehow be secured without security updates) may work for some products/systems, but I've seen way too many industrial systems running on Windows which are in fact network-connected. I'm not just talking about building security systems, I'm talking about all kinds of other stuff out there running on Windows, like $10k-200k oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, multimillion dollar industrial robotics and automation systems, etc. Many of these are in fact intended to be network-connected, and run on ancient Windows versions without security updates. There's simply no excuse for that.
Netflix is different because you know that you're not "buying" anything on there, you're just paying a flat monthly fee for all-you-can-use access to their library. Movies may or may not disappear, the playback may pause randomly on Friday nights, but you know this because you're just paying for a service (and the cost of that service is much less than buying (or "buying") each movie individually).
That's what happens when you have a thoroughly corrupt government. Companies can advertise using whatever language they want, even if it's basically lying, and there's no repercussions.
Yes, exactly. And it's not just that, look at various console games (esp. Xbox): they frequently require an internet connection to work, even though the game comes on a disc. The bottom line is: don't trust that physical media means you don't need a network connection.
An always-connected player would defeat the whole purpose of physical media.
No, it doesn't, because only you think the point of physical media is to not need a network connection. In the minds of the people selling that media, the point of physical media is to keep them from needing massive bandwidth (like Netflix and Amazon video), so customers can just watch the movie from the local media, after exchanging a relatively small amount of data with their servers so they can exercise control over it (even after the customer has "purchased" the disc).
People need to take this as a wake-up call and go back to physical media or non-DRM downloads.
You mean like BitTorrent? You don't have to worry about DRM with that.
This is built into their display list widget. How shameful past the early 1980s.
What are you talking about? Do you not realize that far superior sorting algorithms were invented as long ago as the 40s? Quicksort was invented in 1960, and mergesort was invented in 1945, for example. Being the early 1980s is no excuse for using crappy sort algorithms.
It's OK to check in as long as you meet your deadline and it seems to work. Performance (esp. years down the road) isn't important. Do you think people buying computers at Best Buy are going to avoid your product because it's going to become ridiculously slow many years later? Of course not. So just throw in a crappy algorithm, it doesn't matter. It's not like this is a free/open-source OS where someone will fix it just out of academic interest. With commercial code, if there isn't a compelling business reason to produce and ship quality code, they won't.
It's not just a (physical, building) security system, it's ANY system. Why on earth would you choose to base your product (something that presumably companies will use for many, many years) on something that will have no security support in just 4 months? It's really quite idiotic; there's lots of freely-available OSes (including an RTOS) out there that you can use instead which don't have this problem.
No, it won't ever work, because the costs of healthcare are spiralling out of control. Making the insurance companies even richer is not going to do anything to reduce the costs; making everyone contribute to these insurance companies will only raise the costs of insurance, and make it so everyone is spending more of their money (and the GDP) on the healthcare and health insurance industries.
If you save your money, you don't need health insurance to cover the high cost of some procedure. Instead, you just fly to a better country and get it done there, for a fraction of the cost of what it is here. Belgium is an excellent place to go, I hear.
There's something seriously wrong when a major procedure in the US costs many times what it costs in Belgium (for an American paying out-of-pocket at a private hospital). Why didn't the Democraps bother doing something about this, instead of just enriching their buddies in the health insurance industry?
The best option is for everyone to refuse to buy into this idiotic ObamaCare plan so that the whole thing collapses and our stupid politicians are forced to make real, productive changes.
Why would he do that? He can just pass on insurance and pay for everything out-of-pocket and save. It looks like he already has a health savings plan of some kind. And if he needs any major surgery, he can just fly over to Belgium and get it done there, out-of-pocket, for a fraction of what it'd cost here in the USA, and he'll be safer since Belgium has a lower rate of surgical infection than the US (Belgium's is among the lowest in the world).
What the dumb Democrat voters should be asking is: why did the Democrap politicians spend all their political capital passing a stupid law that did nothing but benefit health insurance companies (which BTW, don't actually provide any healthcare! Instead, they look for ways to deny you healthcare), rather than passing legislation to reduce the cost of healthcare (to, say, the level that it costs in Belgium, which isn't exactly a cheap third-world country).
You obviously haven't been paying attention either. Your saturday delivery article is from February, 10 months old now, and Congress told them no, so they're still delivering mail on Saturdays. And your other article is 13 months old now; since then they've raised prices. Got anything more recent?
Those are why we pay taxes - to ensure that essential services are available to everyone.
Here in the US, the USPS is fast, reliable, delivers on-time almost all the time (there are rare exceptions, but 99% of the time it's on-time), and has Saturday delivery, and on top of all of that, it isn't funded by taxes at all, it's entirely self-sustaining.