When I finally get laid off, this is my business plan. I'm looking for investors.
1. Get lots of cats and dogs. Many different types. 2. Take dead cat/dog. 3. Take $50,000 (or more) 4. Find a similar looking cat/dog. 5. Give them that and say I genetically reengineered it. (If they demand to see how I did it, I'll show them a microwave oven). 6. Profit!
I think this will work. Although I may need to digitally sign the cat/dog to prove the authenticity. Still working on that part.
More competition than people think
on
Router Wars
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· Score: 1
I think the high end router market is more competitive than people think. Cisco is the name that everyone knows about, but there are other big players out there. Most people don't know the names because the number of customers for a $x00,000 router is small. The marketing for that type of product is very different and name recognition isn't the biggest thing.
I've personally seen that in the Sprint network in Las Vegas they have many Juniper GigE routers all over the place. But there are other vendors in the market as well. Most people wouldn't recognize the name of my employer, but we are also a significant player in this market.
People could say the same thing about anti-SPAM software. I could definitely imagine a closed source vendor saying how if the software was open the spammers would have a field day. But in spite of that, spamassassin still works marvelously. A good algorithm should be able to withstand examination.
Well, I've compiled loads of kernels. Explain to me how recompiling the kernel will cause his on-board sound to magically start working. You don't even know what chipset it uses. It might not even be supported.
You make it sound like it is hard to stop unneeded services in all other distros but Slackware. It isn't. Everything you're mentioning is stuff you can do with any other distro. But even doing all of that doesn't result in a 50% speed boost.
My machine is a P4 2.4GHz with 1Gb of RAM. If apache and mysql are running unnecessarily, does that really slow things down? No. They are blocked on a select() call waiting for a request to spring them into action. Unless you are short on RAM, it has no impact at all.
Note that before I bought this computer I was using a P-Pro 200 with 128 Mb of RAM. The only reason I upgraded was because the current desktops (KDE and Gnome) take up so many resources it just makes everything sluggish. I could have used fvwm2 (or other things) to make things very snappy, but it really isn't worth my time. I like to spend my time using my computer, not configuring/tweaking it.
But to compare every non-Slackware distro to Microsoft is just silly.
Why is it that the American government's style of attacking most technical problems seems to involve throwing a lot of money around and doing everything in the most grandiose and impractical way possible?
Huh? There is a big difference between these two projects. The Gravity Probe B is going to provide a much more accurate measure (within 1%) as opposed to the 10% (and that is debatable) that was just done. There simply is no cheap way to get that extra certainty.
Kudos to the researchers who came up with this. This looks like a good case of creative, outside the box thinking that gives some good information quickly and cheaply. But this still needs to be confirmed by an experiment where things are "done right".
Your comparison is like saying DOS 6 is better than Linux 2.6 because it is the less bloated x86 operating system.
But like you observed, we have the resources to do the job right. Why do half-assed science when we can afford to do an accurate job? It's not like we can repeat this over and over by sending up better and better satellites. These things are still expensive enough that we need to get it right the first time.
Incidentally, telecoms is mentioned as a possible application. I don't know enough about cellular telephony to say if it fits, and maybe there are some VoIP applications where it would make sense. But for conventional circuit-switched telecoms (e.g., a telephone switch), it really is not needed.
This isn't really true. SONET based equipment often have real time requirements. For fiber that is protected, it is required that the system detects a failure (e.g. fiber cut) and switches traffic to the protecting fiber within 50 milliseconds. This requires the operating system to be very responsive to interrupts so that the application can respond quickly. This is not an easy requirement to meet even with a real time operating system.
Based on my experience, I have to agree with this. I think the proportion has declined a bit with time, but it is still close to half the time.
Of course, this usually isn't on the schedule. Management's view is that if you spent 6 weeks testing and few bugs were found, then the time was wasted and the product could have shipped out earlier.
But regardless of the schedule, the test time that Brooks states will get spent. Often that time is spent on repeated testing as a result of bug fixes. Last minute bugs end up causing schedule slips and those slips are basically all testing, retesting, and debugging. The sooner tests are done, the sooner and cheaper bugs can be found and fixed.
But as you said we still ignore this (or rather we cross our fingers and hope it won't happen to us this time). Just a couple months ago on my current project, my boss told me that it had been decided that "we didn't have time for integration testing".
I must really be a weirdo.:) I like both testing and programming. To me, breaking things is just plain fun. In fact what really gets me annoyed is when it is just too easy. I.e., when I spend 15 minutes looking at a new feature and I'm finding so many bugs I can't keep up with all of the wrong things that are there. I like to have to work a little to find bugs. Detective work.
But creating new software is fun also. Maybe it is because I use all of the software I write, though. I write tools that help me (and the rest of my team) test better.
But most people here aren't like me. Most of the testers would hate to program. And most developers here hate testing, as evidenced by the crap they tend to deliver to us testers.
Testing is not a job that exercises a lot of creativity, unlike development.
I have to take exception to this statement. I am a full-time tester, but I am also a very good programmer. Testing of large complex systems absolutely requires creativity. It may be that my problem domain is different than most other testers. I work with complex telecomm equipment (e.g. systems with 1200+ separate CPUs with full redundancy carrying terabytes of traffic). Most of our developers don't even understand how the system works; they only know bits and pieces.
But obviously, I don't test GUIs. I'm testing traffic and the automated interfaces that these boxes provide. Maybe testing GUIs is boring, but that doesn't extend to all testing jobs.
But you are right about automation. It is essential. I maintain the test automation tool that we use internally and it is worth its weight in gold. If I were testing GUIs, I'd be looking for a way to test the back-end logic separately from the GUI. That means automation hooks in the guts of the application. That way when testing the GUI, you know that you can focus on the presentation of the data because the accuracy of the data itself was already verified. Of course, there are always factors that make things more complex than this.
This was absolutely the best money I ever spent. I don't know what my vision was before, but it was bad enough that I couldn't drive without glasses. I always found glasses really annoying and didn't want to deal with contacts. After LASIK surgery my vision was 20/15 and has stayed that way and that was several years ago. I know at least 8-9 people at work that had it done and everyone has had a good experience. Some of them had really bad eyesight too, at least compared to me. My eyes were done by Dr Boothe who is one of the best around here. There are definitely cheaper places, but who would shop based on price for something like this? I currently have no vision problems (starbursts, rings, etc) in either night or day.
I read, or try to read anyway, the following magazines.
Smithsonian - My favorite. I especially like the history articles they have.
National Geographic - Great photography of course, but I read the Smithsonian first and don't always get to this one. This was basically free, though (I used expiring frequent flyer miles).
Dr Dobb's Journal - Read this one religiously
Linux Journal - Always read this one too.
IEEE Spectrum - Usually one or two articles of interest.
Communications of the ACM
Computer - The magazine for the IEEE Computer Society
Food and Wine - Don't really like it. I find it pretentious. Another free one.
Flying - I'm not a pilot, but it is still interesting. Another freebie.
Conde Naste Travel - Hate it. When I travel, I backpack and stay in cheap places, not 5 star hotels. But it was free.
IEEE Communications - Not 100% sure on this title. I'm in telecomm, so this is useful when they cover optics stuff.
Queue - From the ACM. Tries to be more oriented toward practicioners, whereas Communications of the ACM is more academic. Usually pretty good. They have been covering Open Source issues on a reqular basis.
Maxim - Won't claim to read the articles because they suck. Cute girls, but the internet is a better source for that sort of stuff. This was also free.
Unfortunately, I don't have time to get through them all, but I at least look flip through them and read what really gets my attention
This is just another example of why Linux is not ready for the desktop. I should be able to buy this CD and put it in my Linux box and NOT be able to rip it just like on Windows. Until Linux can run all of my important software (DRM controls, Kazaa, Gator, Sobig virus, and various spyware), I'll just stick with windows.
Seriously, this is just stupid. I would guess that most pirated MP3s that are being shared out there have been downloaded from someone else, not ripped from the original CD. So it really only takes a few people with either a linux box or enough sense to turn of autorun on their CD drive to be able to spread pirated MP3s all over the world. This can't possibly stop anything and will likely piss off the people that are supposed to be customers.
As a representative of the music industry, I am disappointed that you think this idea is implausible. We think that this idea is one of the best that we have had. Almost as good as Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice and just above DivX DVDs.
Our research indicates there is a lot of demand for this type of product. Customers actually want to pay extra for media players that can be locked down. It is a security feature. The Theft-Proof MP3 players. You do wan't protection against those mad gangs of raving mp3 player theives, don't you? Yeah, that's the ticket! We are pretty sure that consumers will not mind giving fingerprints and DNA samples when they buy a $13.00 CD.
This is not really true. ntfs is provided in source form with the kernel source RPM provided by Fedora. They didn't remove it from the kernel sources. They just don't build it for you. You can certainly build it yourself if you want though.
When I see loads of stuff, it makes me think that they don't know anything well and are simply trying to wow me with their huge skill set. When I interview people with resumes like that, I ask a couple questions about things to see if they really know it. It doesn't matter what you ask. Just look in their eyes and you can see if they are scared they are about to be busted.:) I never beat them up over it, but in my mind the interview is over at that point. I don't want to work with people who will lie to me.
Personally, I don't put anything on a resume that I am not prepared to talk about in depth. I've learned Lisp, Prolog, and Java in college, but I have no real major experience with them so I would never put it on a resume. It just distracts from what I really know. Where I work, we use Tcl extensively, but I rarely ask people about it in interviews. I assume if they can learn C, C++, perl, python, whatever then they can pick up Tcl. But if someone puts Tcl on the resume, they better look out.
P.S. I would never hire a specialist except probably for a decent DBA.
Amen to that. When I see people with 5-10 yrs experience doing one type of work, I run. This typically means that they either can't or won't learn new things. I've been a tester for a diverse set of projects, but there are others in my group who have been working on the same set of technologies for 10 years. Guess who understands the company better? Guess who is more employable (especially outside of telecomm, where I currently work)? Yep, me. I have a lot of knowledge and I've proven that I can and will learn and improve.
So to the question at hand. My advice is do something to show you want to do more than what you are doing now. All you have proven is that you can handle a $13/hr support job. Fine, I have no problem hiring you to do that for me. But you want more. If I were interviewing you, I would want to know what job do you want and what have you done to prepare yourself for it. With the way support is being outsourced, you can't expect to stay in that field and make more money. You need to do _something_ to move yourself where you want to go. Certs? Degree? Depends on what you want to do. But if you aren't willing to go get some of the easy certs how would I, as a hiring manager, know that you will really stretch yourself at my company. I've seen a lot of resumes and everybody with a few years of experience can list lots of technologies, even if they don't really know them. You have to do something to prove you are different.
I personally think a degree is the way to go. It gives you the background you need for other things and shows you are willing to work hard to improve yourself. It is the key to most of the higher paying jobs out there. Without it you will always be chasing after the latest certificate.
Now if that wouldn't be a violation of the Commerce Clause, nothing would be.
It isn't. The commerce clause says that Congress has the right to regulate commerce "among the several states". So making sure that the federal government gets its fair share of the taxes from interstate commerce is definitely within Congress's jurisdiction.
But this article is about state use taxes which really don't have anything to do with the Commerce clause. It seems to me that regulating what the UPS truck brings from the local distribution center to your home is a state matter. And states have all sorts of other rights because Congress has delegated many of its rights under the Commerce clause to the states through various laws.
What stops the government from searching and monitoring all of these packages is Amendment IV of the Constitution which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. So the state would have to get warrants for everyone all the time to be able to do something like this.
Of course, it's also convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal, because you can use that against them on a selective basis.
Maybe I'm just not that paranoid, but I don't see this as being an issue. I use the internet to buy stuff all the time, but how much could I really owe? Certainly not enough to make me scared. If the government ever decided to come after me, I'd simply pay whatever I owe and any leverage they would have is gone. Besides, we are already criminals. Anyone who drives has sped at one time or another. Anyone who has used the internet for some time almost certainly has some instance of copyright violation somewhere. We all engage in small violations now and then, but the penalties fit the crime so the government can't really use this to abuse anyone.
For the typical consumer this is a non-issue. The government is not going to go to extraordinary lengths to figure of if I owe tax on the $50 worth of Amazon stuff I bought. It just isn't economically worth it. Now if they had all financial information in the country in one place, they could theoretically figure this out (although given the government's record of technology use this is extremely unlikely), but that would raise significant privacy concerns.
So who should worry? Well, if you are trying to buy expensive art (or any other pricey item) and trying to avoid the tax, then you are a target. If you figure that the cost of tracking down a non-payment is fixed, then you have to assume they will focus on big ticket items.
What the states are doing in this article is pretty reasonable if you think about it. They throw one line on a form and hope people will send them money. This is money they wouldn't otherwise have gotten and it cost them nothing. They won't get much but, hey, it's free money so why not.
So it's clear that their on-the-ground testing didn't catch the first bug, despite the rigorous testing you described. Which makes one wonder if they really did such rigorous testing. The grandparent is right.
But this was probably intentional. The flight to Mars is a long one, so there is plenty of time to test while the rover is in transit. Before launch, you need to make sure that the hardware works and is reliable. Since they can upload new versions of software, they can do much of the testing after the launch. This is one of the things that allowed them to hit aggressive launch windows.
This looks like it was less a technical failure and more a communications failure. Other rover operations were dependant on the utilities running to clear up flash space. When that did not happen on time, the right people were not told and so they assumed there would be more space available.
If Jr doesn't "trust" e-mail, I call that a highly suspicious pattern. I can't imagine going without instantaneous, securable, asynchronous global communication, and my life is (hopefully) less demanding. But I'm still waiting on that link.
Surely you are not arguing that mail is a trustworthy communications medium. How many fake paypal, bank, credit card scams are running around now? For the types of communications that a government leader typically engages in, email definitely is not something you can trust. Personally, I live on email, but I also recognize that most people do not depend on it like I do. I don't consider them with any suspicion. Most non-geeks don't truly understand email and they don't know what needs to be done to make it secure. I don't blame the users; I blame the geeks. We should be able to make secure email a no-brainer. But until we do, I don't want my government using it for anything important.
I would like the leader of the free world to read a paper now and then, though. Hell, at least read the comic strips.
Open source is going to drive down the value of software.
I don't really buy that argument. It will certainly drive down the value of some businesses, like SCO's. Any business that charges an arm and a leg for what open source gives you for nearly free is going to be hurt. But, to me, that is a company that failed to innovate. Without open source, Microsoft could sit back with their monopoly power, downsize R&D and let the profits roll in. But with Linux around, they can't do that. They must keep changing so that Linux will always be not quite Windows.
When was the last time SCO innovated? That is why Linux is a threat to them.
There is a reason that IBM loves Linux. It allows them to change their business to be more of a service company than a pure software/hardware company. They become integrators. They can take bits and pieces from everywhere and tie it up nicely with Linux at a low cost. That service is way more profitable and less risky than selling hardware and software.
Open source will change where the value is, but it will not ruin the software market.
The RIAA has a decent point... their product IS being illegally bootlegged. No matter how "illegal" you feel this action is, you cannot deny that it is.
Well, I sympathize with the fact that it is sooo easy to copy music now and that certainly creates problems for them. I don't dispute that it is illegal. It is, and I have paid for all of my music. Having said that, I would buy a lot more music if it were cheaper and if it were better. It bothers me when a CD costs more than a DVD. It bothers me when that overpriced CD has one good song and the rest is crap. I'll just go without the music. That is where they are losing their sales. But if they blame their business problems on piracy, they can get Uncle Sam to beat on some 12 year old.
Since when do companies think they have some fundamental, constitutionally protected right to make money. The RIAA, airlines, SCO. If they have trouble competing or can't make a product that they can sell, they turn to the government. As if its the govenments resposibility to overcome bad business practices.
It's a free market. If you get things just right, you are free to make tons of money and get filthy rich. (Microsoft) And if you get it wrong, you are free to go the way of the dodo bird and free up capital for those who have a better idea.
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When I finally get laid off, this is my business plan. I'm looking for investors.
1. Get lots of cats and dogs. Many different types.
2. Take dead cat/dog.
3. Take $50,000 (or more)
4. Find a similar looking cat/dog.
5. Give them that and say I genetically reengineered it. (If they demand to see how I did it, I'll show them a microwave oven).
6. Profit!
I think this will work. Although I may need to digitally sign the cat/dog to prove the authenticity. Still working on that part.
I think the high end router market is more competitive than people think. Cisco is the name that everyone knows about, but there are other big players out there. Most people don't know the names because the number of customers for a $x00,000 router is small. The marketing for that type of product is very different and name recognition isn't the biggest thing.
I've personally seen that in the Sprint network in Las Vegas they have many Juniper GigE routers all over the place. But there are other vendors in the market as well. Most people wouldn't recognize the name of my employer, but we are also a significant player in this market.
People could say the same thing about anti-SPAM software. I could definitely imagine a closed source vendor saying how if the software was open the spammers would have a field day. But in spite of that, spamassassin still works marvelously. A good algorithm should be able to withstand examination.
Well, I've compiled loads of kernels. Explain to me how recompiling the kernel will cause his on-board sound to magically start working. You don't even know what chipset it uses. It might not even be supported.
You make it sound like it is hard to stop unneeded services in all other distros but Slackware. It isn't. Everything you're mentioning is stuff you can do with any other distro. But even doing all of that doesn't result in a 50% speed boost.
My machine is a P4 2.4GHz with 1Gb of RAM. If apache and mysql are running unnecessarily, does that really slow things down? No. They are blocked on a select() call waiting for a request to spring them into action. Unless you are short on RAM, it has no impact at all.
Note that before I bought this computer I was using a P-Pro 200 with 128 Mb of RAM. The only reason I upgraded was because the current desktops (KDE and Gnome) take up so many resources it just makes everything sluggish. I could have used fvwm2 (or other things) to make things very snappy, but it really isn't worth my time. I like to spend my time using my computer, not configuring/tweaking it.
But to compare every non-Slackware distro to Microsoft is just silly.
Why is it that the American government's style of attacking most technical problems seems to involve throwing a lot of money around and doing everything in the most grandiose and impractical way possible?
Huh? There is a big difference between these two projects. The Gravity Probe B is going to provide a much more accurate measure (within 1%) as opposed to the 10% (and that is debatable) that was just done. There simply is no cheap way to get that extra certainty.
Kudos to the researchers who came up with this. This looks like a good case of creative, outside the box thinking that gives some good information quickly and cheaply. But this still needs to be confirmed by an experiment where things are "done right".
Your comparison is like saying DOS 6 is better than Linux 2.6 because it is the less bloated x86 operating system.
But like you observed, we have the resources to do the job right. Why do half-assed science when we can afford to do an accurate job? It's not like we can repeat this over and over by sending up better and better satellites. These things are still expensive enough that we need to get it right the first time.
Incidentally, telecoms is mentioned as a possible application. I don't know enough about cellular telephony to say if it fits, and maybe there are some VoIP applications where it would make sense. But for conventional circuit-switched telecoms (e.g., a telephone switch), it really is not needed.
This isn't really true. SONET based equipment often have real time requirements. For fiber that is protected, it is required that the system detects a failure (e.g. fiber cut) and switches traffic to the protecting fiber within 50 milliseconds. This requires the operating system to be very responsive to interrupts so that the application can respond quickly. This is not an easy requirement to meet even with a real time operating system.
Based on my experience, I have to agree with this. I think the proportion has declined a bit with time, but it is still close to half the time.
Of course, this usually isn't on the schedule. Management's view is that if you spent 6 weeks testing and few bugs were found, then the time was wasted and the product could have shipped out earlier.
But regardless of the schedule, the test time that Brooks states will get spent. Often that time is spent on repeated testing as a result of bug fixes. Last minute bugs end up causing schedule slips and those slips are basically all testing, retesting, and debugging. The sooner tests are done, the sooner and cheaper bugs can be found and fixed.
But as you said we still ignore this (or rather we cross our fingers and hope it won't happen to us this time). Just a couple months ago on my current project, my boss told me that it had been decided that "we didn't have time for integration testing".
I must really be a weirdo. :) I like both testing and programming. To me, breaking things is just plain fun. In fact what really gets me annoyed is when it is just too easy. I.e., when I spend 15 minutes looking at a new feature and I'm finding so many bugs I can't keep up with all of the wrong things that are there. I like to have to work a little to find bugs. Detective work.
But creating new software is fun also. Maybe it is because I use all of the software I write, though. I write tools that help me (and the rest of my team) test better.
But most people here aren't like me. Most of the testers would hate to program. And most developers here hate testing, as evidenced by the crap they tend to deliver to us testers.
Testing is not a job that exercises a lot of creativity, unlike development.
I have to take exception to this statement. I am a full-time tester, but I am also a very good programmer. Testing of large complex systems absolutely requires creativity. It may be that my problem domain is different than most other testers. I work with complex telecomm equipment (e.g. systems with 1200+ separate CPUs with full redundancy carrying terabytes of traffic). Most of our developers don't even understand how the system works; they only know bits and pieces.
But obviously, I don't test GUIs. I'm testing traffic and the automated interfaces that these boxes provide. Maybe testing GUIs is boring, but that doesn't extend to all testing jobs.
But you are right about automation. It is essential. I maintain the test automation tool that we use internally and it is worth its weight in gold. If I were testing GUIs, I'd be looking for a way to test the back-end logic separately from the GUI. That means automation hooks in the guts of the application. That way when testing the GUI, you know that you can focus on the presentation of the data because the accuracy of the data itself was already verified. Of course, there are always factors that make things more complex than this.
This was absolutely the best money I ever spent. I don't know what my vision was before, but it was bad enough that I couldn't drive without glasses. I always found glasses really annoying and didn't want to deal with contacts. After LASIK surgery my vision was 20/15 and has stayed that way and that was several years ago. I know at least 8-9 people at work that had it done and everyone has had a good experience. Some of them had really bad eyesight too, at least compared to me. My eyes were done by Dr Boothe who is one of the best around here. There are definitely cheaper places, but who would shop based on price for something like this? I currently have no vision problems (starbursts, rings, etc) in either night or day.
Unfortunately, I don't have time to get through them all, but I at least look flip through them and read what really gets my attention
This is just another example of why Linux is not ready for the desktop. I should be able to buy this CD and put it in my Linux box and NOT be able to rip it just like on Windows. Until Linux can run all of my important software (DRM controls, Kazaa, Gator, Sobig virus, and various spyware), I'll just stick with windows.
Seriously, this is just stupid. I would guess that most pirated MP3s that are being shared out there have been downloaded from someone else, not ripped from the original CD. So it really only takes a few people with either a linux box or enough sense to turn of autorun on their CD drive to be able to spread pirated MP3s all over the world. This can't possibly stop anything and will likely piss off the people that are supposed to be customers.
As a representative of the music industry, I am disappointed that you think this idea is implausible. We think that this idea is one of the best that we have had. Almost as good as Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice and just above DivX DVDs.
Our research indicates there is a lot of demand for this type of product. Customers actually want to pay extra for media players that can be locked down. It is a security feature. The Theft-Proof MP3 players. You do wan't protection against those mad gangs of raving mp3 player theives, don't you? Yeah, that's the ticket! We are pretty sure that consumers will not mind giving fingerprints and DNA samples when they buy a $13.00 CD.
All your mp3 are belong to us.
This is not really true. ntfs is provided in source form with the kernel source RPM provided by Fedora. They didn't remove it from the kernel sources. They just don't build it for you. You can certainly build it yourself if you want though.
When I see loads of stuff, it makes me think that they don't know anything well and are simply trying to wow me with their huge skill set. When I interview people with resumes like that, I ask a couple questions about things to see if they really know it. It doesn't matter what you ask. Just look in their eyes and you can see if they are scared they are about to be busted. :) I never beat them up over it, but in my mind the interview is over at that point. I don't want to work with people who will lie to me.
Personally, I don't put anything on a resume that I am not prepared to talk about in depth. I've learned Lisp, Prolog, and Java in college, but I have no real major experience with them so I would never put it on a resume. It just distracts from what I really know. Where I work, we use Tcl extensively, but I rarely ask people about it in interviews. I assume if they can learn C, C++, perl, python, whatever then they can pick up Tcl. But if someone puts Tcl on the resume, they better look out.
P.S. I would never hire a specialist except probably for a decent DBA.
Amen to that. When I see people with 5-10 yrs experience doing one type of work, I run. This typically means that they either can't or won't learn new things. I've been a tester for a diverse set of projects, but there are others in my group who have been working on the same set of technologies for 10 years. Guess who understands the company better? Guess who is more employable (especially outside of telecomm, where I currently work)? Yep, me. I have a lot of knowledge and I've proven that I can and will learn and improve.
So to the question at hand. My advice is do something to show you want to do more than what you are doing now. All you have proven is that you can handle a $13/hr support job. Fine, I have no problem hiring you to do that for me. But you want more. If I were interviewing you, I would want to know what job do you want and what have you done to prepare yourself for it. With the way support is being outsourced, you can't expect to stay in that field and make more money. You need to do _something_ to move yourself where you want to go. Certs? Degree? Depends on what you want to do. But if you aren't willing to go get some of the easy certs how would I, as a hiring manager, know that you will really stretch yourself at my company. I've seen a lot of resumes and everybody with a few years of experience can list lots of technologies, even if they don't really know them. You have to do something to prove you are different.
I personally think a degree is the way to go. It gives you the background you need for other things and shows you are willing to work hard to improve yourself. It is the key to most of the higher paying jobs out there. Without it you will always be chasing after the latest certificate.
Now if that wouldn't be a violation of the Commerce Clause, nothing would be.
It isn't. The commerce clause says that Congress has the right to regulate commerce "among the several states". So making sure that the federal government gets its fair share of the taxes from interstate commerce is definitely within Congress's jurisdiction.
But this article is about state use taxes which really don't have anything to do with the Commerce clause. It seems to me that regulating what the UPS truck brings from the local distribution center to your home is a state matter. And states have all sorts of other rights because Congress has delegated many of its rights under the Commerce clause to the states through various laws.
What stops the government from searching and monitoring all of these packages is Amendment IV of the Constitution which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. So the state would have to get warrants for everyone all the time to be able to do something like this.
Maybe I'm just not that paranoid, but I don't see this as being an issue. I use the internet to buy stuff all the time, but how much could I really owe? Certainly not enough to make me scared. If the government ever decided to come after me, I'd simply pay whatever I owe and any leverage they would have is gone. Besides, we are already criminals. Anyone who drives has sped at one time or another. Anyone who has used the internet for some time almost certainly has some instance of copyright violation somewhere. We all engage in small violations now and then, but the penalties fit the crime so the government can't really use this to abuse anyone.
For the typical consumer this is a non-issue. The government is not going to go to extraordinary lengths to figure of if I owe tax on the $50 worth of Amazon stuff I bought. It just isn't economically worth it. Now if they had all financial information in the country in one place, they could theoretically figure this out (although given the government's record of technology use this is extremely unlikely), but that would raise significant privacy concerns.
So who should worry? Well, if you are trying to buy expensive art (or any other pricey item) and trying to avoid the tax, then you are a target. If you figure that the cost of tracking down a non-payment is fixed, then you have to assume they will focus on big ticket items.
What the states are doing in this article is pretty reasonable if you think about it. They throw one line on a form and hope people will send them money. This is money they wouldn't otherwise have gotten and it cost them nothing. They won't get much but, hey, it's free money so why not.
So it's clear that their on-the-ground testing didn't catch the first bug, despite the rigorous testing you described. Which makes one wonder if they really did such rigorous testing. The grandparent is right.
But this was probably intentional. The flight to Mars is a long one, so there is plenty of time to test while the rover is in transit. Before launch, you need to make sure that the hardware works and is reliable. Since they can upload new versions of software, they can do much of the testing after the launch. This is one of the things that allowed them to hit aggressive launch windows.
This looks like it was less a technical failure and more a communications failure. Other rover operations were dependant on the utilities running to clear up flash space. When that did not happen on time, the right people were not told and so they assumed there would be more space available.
Surely you are not arguing that mail is a trustworthy communications medium. How many fake paypal, bank, credit card scams are running around now? For the types of communications that a government leader typically engages in, email definitely is not something you can trust. Personally, I live on email, but I also recognize that most people do not depend on it like I do. I don't consider them with any suspicion. Most non-geeks don't truly understand email and they don't know what needs to be done to make it secure. I don't blame the users; I blame the geeks. We should be able to make secure email a no-brainer. But until we do, I don't want my government using it for anything important.
I would like the leader of the free world to read a paper now and then, though. Hell, at least read the comic strips.
Open source is going to drive down the value of software.
I don't really buy that argument. It will certainly drive down the value of some businesses, like SCO's. Any business that charges an arm and a leg for what open source gives you for nearly free is going to be hurt. But, to me, that is a company that failed to innovate. Without open source, Microsoft could sit back with their monopoly power, downsize R&D and let the profits roll in. But with Linux around, they can't do that. They must keep changing so that Linux will always be not quite Windows.
When was the last time SCO innovated? That is why Linux is a threat to them.
There is a reason that IBM loves Linux. It allows them to change their business to be more of a service company than a pure software/hardware company. They become integrators. They can take bits and pieces from everywhere and tie it up nicely with Linux at a low cost. That service is way more profitable and less risky than selling hardware and software.
Open source will change where the value is, but it will not ruin the software market.
Well, I sympathize with the fact that it is sooo easy to copy music now and that certainly creates problems for them. I don't dispute that it is illegal. It is, and I have paid for all of my music. Having said that, I would buy a lot more music if it were cheaper and if it were better. It bothers me when a CD costs more than a DVD. It bothers me when that overpriced CD has one good song and the rest is crap. I'll just go without the music. That is where they are losing their sales. But if they blame their business problems on piracy, they can get Uncle Sam to beat on some 12 year old.
It's a free market. If you get things just right, you are free to make tons of money and get filthy rich. (Microsoft) And if you get it wrong, you are free to go the way of the dodo bird and free up capital for those who have a better idea.