I am glad for you. I have been told that my skills are out dated, and have seen management targeting older workers in high-tech. One manager I worked for at what was at the time a major Silicon Valley firm seemed to be going after anyone who had used the medical benefit; but that was hard to prove as he never said anything that could have revealed his intention.
A buyers market causes interviewers to set more and more exacting criteria which good generic experience, and especially experience with legacy technology. is easy to dismiss. I would like to know that conditions have changed since 2008, but I think that high tech has not recovered from the bubble that burst in 2993, meaning that there isn't the broad investment in high tech jobs that there was in the '90's. The market has now specialist demand and no need for generalists, as dae as I can tell.
So all the talk about an Ubuntu phone, but I saw a couple of weeks ago, I think it was on Gismodo, a small set-top box, that could easily replace a desk-side box and with a USB hub add in your existing peripherals, for $99. The device used mobile chips, low power and a flash disk.
So five years ago I bought a $300 desk-side box, Athlon-64 dual processor, 320 GB HDD, and 2 Gig ram. I would guess that if someone offered a processor that was x86 compatable, that I could run Linux off a USB stick or off the flash disk, no problem. If this device were also a phone but I brought it home and docked it and attached the USB hub it could operate exactly like my desktop system. If I could install any Linux I wanted, write code, save video and web pages, write webpages, so much the better, and at home could access a NAS or external HDD. Am I just off the boat or does such a thing exist now? Do we even have to seriously worry about Ubuntu Phone getting funded or not?
I have used Ubuntu since 8.10 and have 12.04.2 right now. I tried Unity and recently had to fall back to it because I broke something in Gnome Classic. I try to give competing approaches a chance, even occasionally trying Microsoft releases, but I haven't seen Win 8 as yet. The point is that if you try to use Unity on a desktop you lose the direct access you have to the nested menus you have in Gnome Classic or Gnome 2. It becomes time consuming to open dash every time you want to look for the little used application you've installed and you can't remember what it is called. I've even had to open a terminal and do ls on/usr/bin to jog my memory. I fixed the Gnome Classic problem I had and switched back.
Unity is fine for a touch screen application, I suppose, just not as the default GUI for a desktop with a mouse and keyboard. It was the perception that Shuttleworth was going to cram Unity down our throat that made many of us traditional desktop users unhappy with him. Bringing back Gnome Classic and hopefully keeping support for legacy X11 clients as well is the right thing to do.
I have never been able to drive because of poor vision, one eye, low acuity, no depth perception, So I like the idea of smart cars.
Another thing to consider is high-speed convoying. The networking problem is challenging, but imagine joining an interstate convey that does 200 MPH? That is far too fast for most people to handle, but the right kind of convoying system with reliable hardware could make it viable.
My wish to get around town driven by a digital driver may be more achievable with collision avoidance and failbacks. If may car failed, I would have to leave it and catch the bus!
I don't know where you work, but around here there really is a shortage. IT unemployment is under 3% that means if you have any kind of usable skills and want a job you probably have one. Being on the hiring end of the interviews I can say it's VERY hard to find candidates that are even in the ballpark of our required skill sets. We don't do H1Bs directly but will via consulting firms. We have a team of about 10 of them working on a segregated project. The entire dev team here is probably 50-ish on various projects. Granted, it'd be nice if wages were going up but we're offering six figure incomes in a relatively lower income area. It's tough out there.
Uh ha, its tough out there. Maybe though it boils down to investment and whether investors are accountable in any way other than the bottom line, such as social consciousness or patriotism, or even just fear of social instability and violence. If the problem here is that older workers are being pushed out, and that is not a new trend in IT or Tech, and being replaced by part-time and offshore workers, the problem is worse for our children's generation. Even when they have college degrees many of them are being forced to take part-time or minimum wage jobs and some 17 million of them between ages 32 and 35 have to live at home because they can't find good enough jobs to support them. Again, it is investment that creates jobs, not the need for jobs, and that fact manifests itself in different ways in different parts of the economy.
So, I just heard something on the housing market, on soft demand for new homes and shortage of used housing. Part of the shortage is due to the fact that there is large demand by investors for reposessed homes in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITS) to turn into rental properties. This is bad for building trades because less money is spent on improvements of rentals than new homes. It also suggests that most people in this economy are unable to realize the American Dream of owing their own home, fewer than their parents generation. Who are these investors? Tell me. What sanctions do we have on what they are allowed to do under law and as a sociatial value?
Nor are we out of the woods in investment speculation, the kind of malfeasance that the too-large-to-fail banks caused to begin the wreck the economy in 2008, and with which the Congress has done nothing to remedy in terms of investment oversight and regulation. My point is really, who are these investors, and what input, other than just our own possible weak economic activity, do we have about their decisions? Conservatives tell us that it was federal funding of Student Loans and subsidizies of academic institutions that lead to the high tuition and loan debt our children's generation is carrying. Of course they aren't telling you that those interest rates are really dictated by the general investment climate and the lending rates in the bond markets, and Congress debates the rate to pass back to students based on what the government has to pay to back the loans. No one tells us what decisions sets the bond rates. No one is accountable for the risks of investing in bonds and securities to be used to raise funds that ultimately are used to create jobs.
"Its Tough Out there", you say, and I am not disagreeing with you, but it is a shame that people, even people with useful and not necessarily obsolete skills are marginalized by processes they don't know how to think about and whose political meaning is not discussed much. The fact is that hiring managers can get very choosy, turning away qualified and useful talent because their hand has already been forced by investor choices. This is not communicated back to applicants, that it isn't that applicants are stupid it is that the economic conditions do not meet the reasonable needs of people and cater to the unreasonable desires of a few. That is revolutionary and dangerous. I know of nothing that sows the dragon's teeth of discord more than that. One can analyze the violence in
I am wondering about Tin Cook of Apple. I don't see the stream of new vision that we got from Jobs. Am I wrong about that?
Balmer strikes me as a more typical CEO, businessman, lost in the day to day, lost in the details, not minding the vision and the future of the company, and not repairing the fraud that is Microsoft. The whole idea that Microsoft gets to O.E.M its OS on X86 systems should have been put a stop to by regulators long ago. It is the only reason Microsoft has the market share it retains, that and because it has a captive market, it doesn't believe in educating its users as to the effective and safe use of software. Every time its business partners, Norton and Symantech get to nag you, uninvited, to buy their security products, creates a huge hole for hackers. he very idea that an entity that you don't allow in can get in to try to sell you something that should have been shipped with the base OS invites exploits.
Microsoft has missed the boat and I realize that the mobile technology it has missed is poised to totally replace the desk-side computer, notice I didn't say desktop, and by that I mean that the low power chips needed for mobile with the memory sizes and storage capacity of desk-side boxes of as recently as three years ago can totally make the traditional desk-side box obsolete and permanently so. A set-top box the size of your palm coupled with a USB hub to connect your existing peripherals, already exists, and it doesn't run Windows, at least not well. It runs Android, or IOS, or Linux. In this time of concern about government snooping and closed platforms, FOSS and Linux may become the premium, and Windows left to legacy systems. Microsoft would then decline or go out of business, and maybe that is what it deserves. Oh, I know how conservative American businesses are. I'm not saying that they will ditch their Windows Servers, but Microsoft may be relegated to supporting legacy systems and not leading change and new adoption, which is a huge market, especially if the software for it is open sourced. I can't say that I feel sorry for Balmer and Microsoft; maybe they have screwed their customers long enough, too long anyway.
Consider the history of the realizations of the canons in Bach's Musical Offering. First, a canon is published as a puzzle to be solved. Look in the Dover Edition from the Bach Geselleschaft Edition (BGA). The first canon "Seek and You Shall find" has two entirely different solutions discovered years apart. Counterpuntal puzzles offer a challenge akin to programming and can be considered Open Source. They are in fact derived from something that may be copyrightable, but to the extaxt that strict or free solutions are possible, these offered solutions can be considered open source.
Now Bach did not complete the last fugue in the Art of Fugue, with the poignant epigraph by C. P. Bach on his fathers dying over the unfinished fugue in three countersubjects. For sometime after J.S. Bach's death (1750) it was not always regarded as part of the Art of Fugue. It took Donald Francis Tovy and a century later to prove that a variant of the AOF theme fit perfectly with the three countersuvjects, still no one has to date produced a satisfying realization of how the work should end and we hear performances today where the fugue just fades out after all the countersubjects have been stated and worked through and where we expect the entry of the main theme and conclusion, and yet no one including Tovy has come up with anything that matches the satisfaction we would have gotten if Bach himself had finished it.This is intangible, we know somehow that a realization, one of many actually written, is not Bach, but it is very hard to describe.
Still, aside from the copyright issue, a composer could put a piece out there, even copyright his version, and say to the community "Here, add to this and modify what I have done, but don't claim your work as my own." There has been speculation that J.S. Bach deliberately left that last fugue unfinsihed to prove that no one else could complete it. I don't really believe it. even one of his students whose name is all over his music, Krinberger, didn't try to finish the fugue, or was undistinguished.
So, back to the NSA. They should replace *nix servers with Windows? I'd like that. Any person who wants the NSA to be far less effective would like that!
What would be so hard about analyzing the FFT every 1/10 sec for the power specturn in pitch frequency and attempting to assign a note name to the pitches? Make that the visualization, sheet music of a sort, and I don't mean just a piano roll kind of thing. There have been attempts to do this since at least 1970. One doesn't have to be perfectionistic and determine meter, two triplets is good enough for 6/8 time and so what if measures aren't drawn?
What percentage of these bodies has valuable metals? One thing to consider is that most of the economic deposits of the Pt-Group Metals, such as the Bushvesd, Skargard, and Stillwater Complexes are probably astroblems from the post Great Bonbardment era in which asteroids give the Earth their heavy metals after it had the heat to concentrate these in the core. They remained in the crust. This may also apply to Au and related metals as well.
It would seem to me to be important to find those bodies that are planetessimal cores, metal asteroids with a high concentration of Iron and other Pt-group metals that could be mined in low energy orbits with processable metal or easily fabricated products, including water, produced in orbit and used in space. Really valuable metals could be refined in space and economically returned to earth for use here.
Useful rare metals could be a boon, but it wouldn't take much Au and Ag to really make the currency markets unstable. The total amount of Au in reserves is but a few cubic meters. If by chance one of those bodies has an appreciable percentage of Au of current reserves, it could spell economic chaos. Imagine an Iron asteroid of a few hundred meters in size with a few percent Au.
What could be more important is if these bodies produce more Rare Earths as well as Pt-Group metals.
Tine was, ten years ago, that Sun Microsystems was happy about Linux being available and free because it provided access to the mindset and demand for Solaris servers, especially to take way from Microsoft. In part this was a destraction for Open Source advocates in its engineering groups. Sun wanted Solaris to win on big data models, but also hoped that it would succeed like Apple eventually did with OS-X on the desktop. That would not happen. SPARC was too expensive and Sun muffed it big on X86, losing eventually to Apple to port BSD to inexpensive processors.
UM. maybe the true cause is finance and capital, and the largely hidden processes which determine where investors put their money and what return on investment they expect. If Higher Education, like many other entities have to go to the bond market to raise funds, they may find the costs there has skyrocketed but they and we have little say over prices because they are controlled internationally and by decisions whose basis in murky and not subject to much review. Same as with banking. no one paid much attention until they started failing. The "freedom" in Capitalism comes with a price. Sooner or later you will have to open your books to
outside examination, especially if you have been accused of fraud. I am in favor of financial disclosure, even if it threatens the business model.
There may be a bubble in higher education but maybe it is the will of elitist Conservatives, who by undermining public funding for education get to exclude who they want out of society's favor, Nazi-like. I know what the fundamental characteristic of Conservativism is, it is "I got mine, Screw You." Or I don't care about you, you don't deserve what I do." Hitler was the extreme case of that. And no I'm not going to apologize to Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Parties, for comparing them to Nazis. That is only a warning not to go too far.
And to be able to raise the cost to users once they are captured. If they (ISPs, Google, Micro$soft) can control the platform, they can extort more $ from you. The answer is to not let them, or with help from the government, control the platform. up to and including using UUCP in place of Internet Protocols:-) to prevent closed captive markets.
Jobs was not your run of the mill CEO, especially in that he was not initially a business student or MBA. He was a computer geek with a strong vision of what electronics could do for people. When he returned to Apple, who did he succeed? John Scully, a Marketing exec from Coca Cola, that the board of directors wanted over Jobs, to run Apple, and Scully almost drove Apple into the ground. When Jobs came back the stock price had plummeted and Wall Street was ignoring Apple, relatively speaking. Jobs was able to redirect Apple without Wall Street Analysts pressuring him. Analysts are a bunch of idiots, anyway, or their values are all whacked. I am not saying that Jobs has having different management tactics as his peers, including Ellison, or Scott McNealy, only that he was unusual in his vision, his keen eye for function and design of products. I am not excusing Apple for the elitism it creates around its products or their high price, but they seem to be more reliable than the competition.
Anyone who knows the story of Next is aware that the system was a failure in the market place, first for only supporting a monochrome display, but then that the wisdom of basing a later system on BSD and of using the GUI based on NextStep became a resounding business success. The success of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad are not only because they are innovative designs but their basis in Mac OS-X and open source, even though they are closed hardware platforms. There is genius in supporting open source applications while establishing the branding of a proprietary set of designs.
The comments about Apple declining might have also applied to the company after Jobs was forced out, and for the same reason. The average CEO lacks the special insights that Jobs brought. A big part of the reason is that management is now a professional role supported by business schools with an emphasis on finance and the investment markets. It is rare that people come up through the ranks of the industry even when the business is concentrated on one. I can understand that diversified companies might need a more financial orientation to business. In my opinion the financial, actually financialization, orientation of the leadershop of many large businesses, the boards of directors and management, is bad for business and the economy as a whole. I would like to see the discrediting of most business schools as sources of good advise to management and especially changes to the rules for short term investment and planning.
The idea of program trading, the milisecond trading done by large financial institutions based on computer technology and Big Data should be seen as dangerous to good market practices and severely regulated. If one wants to damn Larry Ellison, and also Scott McNealy, for anything it is their role in enabling this. It is the large memory models needed by Oralce and enabled on the large servers that Sun created and others, IBM, that allowed for this. At the time (2000) when I was at Sun, I didn't understand what the interest of the banks and financial corporations really was in the technology. The Crash of 2008 told us what it was and the sin here is speculation, not normal prudent market activity. The U.S. Congress has not done the right thing to remove the risk of market instabilities caused by the misuse of computers by speculators. The SEC could end this in an instant by making a 30 second latency mandatory on all trades including electronic trades. This is why the Congress has not repaired the financial system and it will fail again and possibly soon. Had I understood all this is 2000, I would have left Sun much sooner, and Ellison and Oracle had the dubious heritage of this now.
I worked for Sun long before Oracle acquired it, and I hate Java, hated it before I left Sun. I hate it for two reasons:first is that Sun messed up the design of the class libraries, and two Java is a bloated C, a strongly typed language. What makes C usable is its small size the small size of the standard library. C++ suffers from the same bloat as Java and for the same reason, but at least you can still use pointers and references without obscure syntactic candy. Modern languages that delay typing to compile time have a generality that is superior to all the administrivia in Java and C++. These days I am liking Python and even Javascript with its namespace lambda construct better than Java.
I'm glad I left Sun long before Oracle took it over. I would have hated to work for Ellison,
Yeah, Ellison is a hell of a one to talk. The only thing he seems creatively capable of is sicking lawyers on his competition and driving creative forces out of his organization, but then again you don't expect more from a narcissist. Besides, the only capital he got from buying Sun Microsystems was the Big Data Financial application and that should be ruled illegal anyway. His handling of Solaris, Java and MySQL has forced people to take their creative energy elsewhere. Fork Larry Ellison!
I now prefer python, and even over perl. My biggest gripe with Java is the class libraries, their size and complexity, and I know that the reason is that in the early days Sun was doing PL/1 in C and trying to do class design by committee and please its corporate customers. Java is a disaster by design. A pox on it!
I didn't reply to the head of this thread, but I think that programmed trading in financial markets has destroyed the safety of the world economic system and so squeezing performance out of Java so traders can play electronic speculators is not only beside the point, it is evil.
If I were the SEC or a world market regulator I would ADD latancy to trades! I would make every electronic trade wait 30 seconds.
Over and over in the press, it is statistical inference that is botched. In the area of medical developments, stories are given coverage that this or that breakthrough has been made when about half way through the story you find that the sample size of a study is very small. Or politicians make some well-known slight of hand with charts that present statistics that support their claims, with a bigger dataset or a different presentation might not support their claims at all.
It doesn't take equations or complex math to get people to recognize flaws in reasoning based on biased or incomplete data. Would people trust the FDA as much as if they were made aware that most of the applications for approvals are made from research studies the developers paid for themselves? The FDA is not funded well enough by Congress to be able to do independent research to support such clams. So it depends on biased research. That is why so many drugs and proceedures have to be pulled from the market after they have been approved by the FDA.
I don't know that I would be as concerned that the press have some math smarts, although that is not a bad thing, but it might be more important that they show some reasoning and inference skills to uncover bias and distortion of the facts. That might require some math skills, but the uncritical passing on of claims is a far more serious problem.
Mark Zuckerberg is a hell of a person to talk about not repeating mistakes and learning from the past. Whether computer science or not, Face Book is designed to make every error in BBS, blog and USENET design that has ever been made in the past, beginning with the context reply debacle of recent months, and I know because the first BBS I used was way back in 1976 that used text-only messages. It was developed by the Institute for the Future from Menlo Park Ca. and we ran it on a Honeywell MULTICS system at USGS, we may have only used T1 lines to talk to other branches, but USGS was on the Arpanet at about that time.
What is happening is that still very few programmers have CS degrees and so don't know the work of Knuth, McCarthy, Minsky, and even of Richie and Kerningham, so they can't know the evolution of computer languages and operating systems and they can't know how log ago some of the issues we have to deal with today were first discussed 50 years ago and before. They might have Linux or *nix and not appreciate the history contained in/usr/bin. My favorite computer language of late is python, and with any language you revisit the past more or less with design patterns and data structures, so learning design patterns repeatedly for emerging languages gets you some legacy, but going back and revisiting the issues of the past and not falling into the trap of thinking because it is new and hyped that it must be better is a big hurdle for modern developers, especially when they buy into the hype of the PR departments they work with.
As for Zuck, he would do good to examine the vitality of his business model and the history of newsgroups then to worry about theoretical matters. Leave that to the people at places like Stanford Computer Science. Zuck has a long way to go before he can hobnob at that level, despite how much is worth. He shoudl mind his own business, literally, and make the experience decent for his users, because it is not!
Would that be just disabling a root login, or the ability to do sudo? In Linux land you get root if your system is in recovery mode, but there is no root with a login shell. Is this the same in Android?
I worked at Sun from 1997 to 2004. and interviewed at Oracle at Redwood Shores in 1993, and I describe my experience as "leaving a bad taste in my mouth", feeling that the work environment was chintzy. Events subsequent have confirmed my feelings that Ellison and Oracle, were bad people to work for.
As for Solaris, its niche is big servers, serving Big Data, and if you are a big business, a big financial institution, you will shut up and pay whatever Ellison extorts from you. These guys were Sun's customers and they were largely responsible for mismanagement of markets and the meltdown of 2008 and the problems they created have not been fixed; the Congress has evaded its duty to repair this broken system, driven by bogus mathematics. Screw them all!
As for the rest of us with more usual requirements, there is not need for Solaris as opposed to Linux, and that became obvious to Sun in about 2003. By then Intel servers were powerful enough to meet mid-sized needs with Linux, no need for Solaris. Since Sun short changed X86 Solaris, even not supporting it for a time, they lost any chance of getting a piece of the consumer market that Steve Jobs was able to exploit. That left Sun dependent on the Big Data, Big Iron people who had to cut their expenditures during the Great Recession, which they helped cause. At the same time Sun put more resources into Java, trying to play catch-up with in the IDE market. Sun lost on both fronts and was bought by Ellison.
Java is legacy, and now there are much better OO alternatives because of the JIT processing and the weaker enforcement of type, but also because Sun did not do a good job designing the class libraries. It has gone the way of PL/1 and now languages like python are much better OO implementations, and Javascript has become a much better client language in the browser, largely because of the frameworks models that rely on lambda functions. Even if the ACM front end for Java had been the standard instead of the Sun Class Libraries, Java would have been a much better language. I think that because of the corporate appeal that Sun wrote the libraries with lots of dross, security via obfescation.
My last experience at Sun was telling. I knew system administration and legacy compilers. I was the mid-teir support for the Fortran Compiler and did other support for gcc. I was asked to change my focus to java and to provide support for Netbeans then under development. I found this to be very challenging for me because of my vision disability. The camel text and the poor formatting of the debugging stream made it very hard for me to do my job, and even though Sun paid some lip service to assessability it was not adequate and finally a lippy manager caused me to leave. Later a visually impaired system admin I met flat out said that Java was not accessable. My subsequent experience was that by the time they were stable products eclipse and netbeans had improved font size and debugging info. I seems that for Java, Eclipse has become more widely used and I wonder if Netbeans is even still around. Maybe Ellison's greed has forced people to use Eclipse instead of Netbeans. It seems like the same is the case for Solaris.
This world needs fewer FAT EGOS to mess things up, and if you mean it is OK because it is Mark Shuttleworth's money, then fine, poetic justice is that he loses his shirt. Possibly the only merit of Ubuntu is that it installs easier than its parent, Debian, but Shuttleworth's grand scheme to make Linux mobile is half baked from the start. Unity was a disaster because most of the platforms were desktops and Unity put in extra steps that are not needed and there is still no mobile platform for it. The plan in the video, which I could only stomach for 80% of it, is admission that there will not be a real platform for Ubuntu mobile that will compete with what is already there, including Windows Fone.
It isn't that it is always a bad idea to run *inux on a mobile device, but why not a well debugged KDE desktop with a USB keyboard and external screen That sounds like a Rasberry Pi with more memory, That exists already.
So we are dealing with an idiot with too much money and too much narcissism for his own good. I hope he goes down in flames. Within a year, someone will put a mobile phone mount on the back of a desktop monitor and let you run Linux on any number of devices.
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You can tunefs, but can you tune a fish?
I am glad for you. I have been told that my skills are out dated, and have seen management targeting older workers in high-tech. One manager I worked for at what was at the time a major Silicon Valley firm seemed to be going after anyone who had used the medical benefit; but that was hard to prove as he never said anything that could have revealed his intention.
A buyers market causes interviewers to set more and more exacting criteria which good generic experience, and especially experience with legacy technology. is easy to dismiss. I would like to know that conditions have changed since 2008, but I think that high tech has not recovered from the bubble that burst in 2993, meaning that there isn't the broad investment in high tech jobs that there was in the '90's. The market has now specialist demand and no need for generalists, as dae as I can tell.
So all the talk about an Ubuntu phone, but I saw a couple of weeks ago, I think it was on Gismodo, a small set-top box, that could easily replace a desk-side box and with a USB hub add in your existing peripherals, for $99. The device used mobile chips, low power and a flash disk.
So five years ago I bought a $300 desk-side box, Athlon-64 dual processor, 320 GB HDD, and 2 Gig ram. I would guess that if someone offered a processor that was x86 compatable, that I could run Linux off a USB stick or off the flash disk, no problem. If this device were also a phone but I brought it home and docked it and attached the USB hub it could operate exactly like my desktop system. If I could install any Linux I wanted, write code, save video and web pages, write webpages, so much the better, and at home could access a NAS or external HDD. Am I just off the boat or does such a thing exist now? Do we even have to seriously worry about Ubuntu Phone getting funded or not?
I have used Ubuntu since 8.10 and have 12.04.2 right now. I tried Unity and recently had to fall back to it because I broke something in Gnome Classic. I try to give competing approaches a chance, even occasionally trying Microsoft releases, but I haven't seen Win 8 as yet. The point is that if you try to use Unity on a desktop you lose the direct access you have to the nested menus you have in Gnome Classic or Gnome 2. It becomes time consuming to open dash every time you want to look for the little used application you've installed and you can't remember what it is called. I've even had to open a terminal and do ls on /usr/bin to jog my memory. I fixed the Gnome Classic problem I had and switched back.
Unity is fine for a touch screen application, I suppose, just not as the default GUI for a desktop with a mouse and keyboard. It was the perception that Shuttleworth was going to cram Unity down our throat that made many of us traditional desktop users unhappy with him. Bringing back Gnome Classic and hopefully keeping support for legacy X11 clients as well is the right thing to do.
I have never been able to drive because of poor vision, one eye, low acuity, no depth perception, So I like the idea of smart cars.
Another thing to consider is high-speed convoying. The networking problem is challenging, but imagine joining an interstate convey that does 200 MPH? That is far too fast for most people to handle, but the right kind of convoying system with reliable hardware could make it viable.
My wish to get around town driven by a digital driver may be more achievable with collision avoidance and failbacks. If may car failed, I would have to leave it and catch the bus!
I don't know where you work, but around here there really is a shortage. IT unemployment is under 3% that means if you have any kind of usable skills and want a job you probably have one. Being on the hiring end of the interviews I can say it's VERY hard to find candidates that are even in the ballpark of our required skill sets. We don't do H1Bs directly but will via consulting firms. We have a team of about 10 of them working on a segregated project. The entire dev team here is probably 50-ish on various projects. Granted, it'd be nice if wages were going up but we're offering six figure incomes in a relatively lower income area. It's tough out there.
Uh ha, its tough out there. Maybe though it boils down to investment and whether investors are accountable in any way other than the bottom line, such as social consciousness or patriotism, or even just fear of social instability and violence. If the problem here is that older workers are being pushed out, and that is not a new trend in IT or Tech, and being replaced by part-time and offshore workers, the problem is worse for our children's generation. Even when they have college degrees many of them are being forced to take part-time or minimum wage jobs and some 17 million of them between ages 32 and 35 have to live at home because they can't find good enough jobs to support them. Again, it is investment that creates jobs, not the need for jobs, and that fact manifests itself in different ways in different parts of the economy.
So, I just heard something on the housing market, on soft demand for new homes and shortage of used housing. Part of the shortage is due to the fact that there is large demand by investors for reposessed homes in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITS) to turn into rental properties. This is bad for building trades because less money is spent on improvements of rentals than new homes. It also suggests that most people in this economy are unable to realize the American Dream of owing their own home, fewer than their parents generation. Who are these investors? Tell me. What sanctions do we have on what they are allowed to do under law and as a sociatial value?
Nor are we out of the woods in investment speculation, the kind of malfeasance that the too-large-to-fail banks caused to begin the wreck the economy in 2008, and with which the Congress has done nothing to remedy in terms of investment oversight and regulation. My point is really, who are these investors, and what input, other than just our own possible weak economic activity, do we have about their decisions? Conservatives tell us that it was federal funding of Student Loans and subsidizies of academic institutions that lead to the high tuition and loan debt our children's generation is carrying. Of course they aren't telling you that those interest rates are really dictated by the general investment climate and the lending rates in the bond markets, and Congress debates the rate to pass back to students based on what the government has to pay to back the loans. No one tells us what decisions sets the bond rates. No one is accountable for the risks of investing in bonds and securities to be used to raise funds that ultimately are used to create jobs.
"Its Tough Out there", you say, and I am not disagreeing with you, but it is a shame that people, even people with useful and not necessarily obsolete skills are marginalized by processes they don't know how to think about and whose political meaning is not discussed much. The fact is that hiring managers can get very choosy, turning away qualified and useful talent because their hand has already been forced by investor choices. This is not communicated back to applicants, that it isn't that applicants are stupid it is that the economic conditions do not meet the reasonable needs of people and cater to the unreasonable desires of a few. That is revolutionary and dangerous. I know of nothing that sows the dragon's teeth of discord more than that. One can analyze the violence in
Wait till you reach 50-55.
I am wondering about Tin Cook of Apple. I don't see the stream of new vision that we got from Jobs. Am I wrong about that?
Balmer strikes me as a more typical CEO, businessman, lost in the day to day, lost in the details, not minding the vision and the future of the company, and not repairing the fraud that is Microsoft. The whole idea that Microsoft gets to O.E.M its OS on X86 systems should have been put a stop to by regulators long ago. It is the only reason Microsoft has the market share it retains, that and because it has a captive market, it doesn't believe in educating its users as to the effective and safe use of software. Every time its business partners, Norton and Symantech get to nag you, uninvited, to buy their security products, creates a huge hole for hackers. he very idea that an entity that you don't allow in can get in to try to sell you something that should have been shipped with the base OS invites exploits.
Microsoft has missed the boat and I realize that the mobile technology it has missed is poised to totally replace the desk-side computer, notice I didn't say desktop, and by that I mean that the low power chips needed for mobile with the memory sizes and storage capacity of desk-side boxes of as recently as three years ago can totally make the traditional desk-side box obsolete and permanently so. A set-top box the size of your palm coupled with a USB hub to connect your existing peripherals, already exists, and it doesn't run Windows, at least not well. It runs Android, or IOS, or Linux. In this time of concern about government snooping and closed platforms, FOSS and Linux may become the premium, and Windows left to legacy systems. Microsoft would then decline or go out of business, and maybe that is what it deserves. Oh, I know how conservative American businesses are. I'm not saying that they will ditch their Windows Servers, but Microsoft may be relegated to supporting legacy systems and not leading change and new adoption, which is a huge market, especially if the software for it is open sourced. I can't say that I feel sorry for Balmer and Microsoft; maybe they have screwed their customers long enough, too long anyway.
Consider the history of the realizations of the canons in Bach's Musical Offering. First, a canon is published as a puzzle to be solved. Look in the Dover Edition from the Bach Geselleschaft Edition (BGA). The first canon "Seek and You Shall find" has two entirely different solutions discovered years apart. Counterpuntal puzzles offer a challenge akin to programming and can be considered Open Source. They are in fact derived from something that may be copyrightable, but to the extaxt that strict or free solutions are possible, these offered solutions can be considered open source.
Now Bach did not complete the last fugue in the Art of Fugue, with the poignant epigraph by C. P. Bach on his fathers dying over the unfinished fugue in three countersubjects. For sometime after J.S. Bach's death (1750) it was not always regarded as part of the Art of Fugue. It took Donald Francis Tovy and a century later to prove that a variant of the AOF theme fit perfectly with the three countersuvjects, still no one has to date produced a satisfying realization of how the work should end and we hear performances today where the fugue just fades out after all the countersubjects have been stated and worked through and where we expect the entry of the main theme and conclusion, and yet no one including Tovy has come up with anything that matches the satisfaction we would have gotten if Bach himself had finished it.This is intangible, we know somehow that a realization, one of many actually written, is not Bach, but it is very hard to describe.
Still, aside from the copyright issue, a composer could put a piece out there, even copyright his version, and say to the community "Here, add to this and modify what I have done, but don't claim your work as my own." There has been speculation that J.S. Bach deliberately left that last fugue unfinsihed to prove that no one else could complete it. I don't really believe it. even one of his students whose name is all over his music, Krinberger, didn't try to finish the fugue, or was undistinguished.
So, back to the NSA. They should replace *nix servers with Windows? I'd like that. Any person who wants the NSA to be far less effective would like that!
What would be so hard about analyzing the FFT every 1/10 sec for the power specturn in pitch frequency and attempting to assign a note name to the pitches? Make that the visualization, sheet music of a sort, and I don't mean just a piano roll kind of thing. There have been attempts to do this since at least 1970. One doesn't have to be perfectionistic and determine meter, two triplets is good enough for 6/8 time and so what if measures aren't drawn?
What percentage of these bodies has valuable metals? One thing to consider is that most of the economic deposits of the Pt-Group Metals, such as the Bushvesd, Skargard, and Stillwater Complexes are probably astroblems from the post Great Bonbardment era in which asteroids give the Earth their heavy metals after it had the heat to concentrate these in the core. They remained in the crust. This may also apply to Au and related metals as well.
It would seem to me to be important to find those bodies that are planetessimal cores, metal asteroids with a high concentration of Iron and other Pt-group metals that could be mined in low energy orbits with processable metal or easily fabricated products, including water, produced in orbit and used in space. Really valuable metals could be refined in space and economically returned to earth for use here.
Useful rare metals could be a boon, but it wouldn't take much Au and Ag to really make the currency markets unstable. The total amount of Au in reserves is but a few cubic meters. If by chance one of those bodies has an appreciable percentage of Au of current reserves, it could spell economic chaos. Imagine an Iron asteroid of a few hundred meters in size with a few percent Au.
What could be more important is if these bodies produce more Rare Earths as well as Pt-Group metals.
Tine was, ten years ago, that Sun Microsystems was happy about Linux being available and free because it provided access to the mindset and demand for Solaris servers, especially to take way from Microsoft. In part this was a destraction for Open Source advocates in its engineering groups. Sun wanted Solaris to win on big data models, but also hoped that it would succeed like Apple eventually did with OS-X on the desktop. That would not happen. SPARC was too expensive and Sun muffed it big on X86, losing eventually to Apple to port BSD to inexpensive processors.
UM. maybe the true cause is finance and capital, and the largely hidden processes which determine where investors put their money and what return on investment they expect. If Higher Education, like many other entities have to go to the bond market to raise funds, they may find the costs there has skyrocketed but they and we have little say over prices because they are controlled internationally and by decisions whose basis in murky and not subject to much review. Same as with banking. no one paid much attention until they started failing. The "freedom" in Capitalism comes with a price. Sooner or later you will have to open your books to outside examination, especially if you have been accused of fraud. I am in favor of financial disclosure, even if it threatens the business model.
There may be a bubble in higher education but maybe it is the will of elitist Conservatives, who by undermining public funding for education get to exclude who they want out of society's favor, Nazi-like. I know what the fundamental characteristic of Conservativism is, it is "I got mine, Screw You." Or I don't care about you, you don't deserve what I do." Hitler was the extreme case of that. And no I'm not going to apologize to Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Parties, for comparing them to Nazis. That is only a warning not to go too far.
And to be able to raise the cost to users once they are captured. If they (ISPs, Google, Micro$soft) can control the platform, they can extort more $ from you. The answer is to not let them, or with help from the government, control the platform. up to and including using UUCP in place of Internet Protocols :-) to prevent closed captive markets.
I am BizNew, Destroyer of Business Plans!
Jobs was not your run of the mill CEO, especially in that he was not initially a business student or MBA. He was a computer geek with a strong vision of what electronics could do for people. When he returned to Apple, who did he succeed? John Scully, a Marketing exec from Coca Cola, that the board of directors wanted over Jobs, to run Apple, and Scully almost drove Apple into the ground. When Jobs came back the stock price had plummeted and Wall Street was ignoring Apple, relatively speaking. Jobs was able to redirect Apple without Wall Street Analysts pressuring him. Analysts are a bunch of idiots, anyway, or their values are all whacked. I am not saying that Jobs has having different management tactics as his peers, including Ellison, or Scott McNealy, only that he was unusual in his vision, his keen eye for function and design of products. I am not excusing Apple for the elitism it creates around its products or their high price, but they seem to be more reliable than the competition.
Anyone who knows the story of Next is aware that the system was a failure in the market place, first for only supporting a monochrome display, but then that the wisdom of basing a later system on BSD and of using the GUI based on NextStep became a resounding business success. The success of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad are not only because they are innovative designs but their basis in Mac OS-X and open source, even though they are closed hardware platforms. There is genius in supporting open source applications while establishing the branding of a proprietary set of designs.
The comments about Apple declining might have also applied to the company after Jobs was forced out, and for the same reason. The average CEO lacks the special insights that Jobs brought. A big part of the reason is that management is now a professional role supported by business schools with an emphasis on finance and the investment markets. It is rare that people come up through the ranks of the industry even when the business is concentrated on one. I can understand that diversified companies might need a more financial orientation to business. In my opinion the financial, actually financialization, orientation of the leadershop of many large businesses, the boards of directors and management, is bad for business and the economy as a whole. I would like to see the discrediting of most business schools as sources of good advise to management and especially changes to the rules for short term investment and planning.
The idea of program trading, the milisecond trading done by large financial institutions based on computer technology and Big Data should be seen as dangerous to good market practices and severely regulated. If one wants to damn Larry Ellison, and also Scott McNealy, for anything it is their role in enabling this. It is the large memory models needed by Oralce and enabled on the large servers that Sun created and others, IBM, that allowed for this. At the time (2000) when I was at Sun, I didn't understand what the interest of the banks and financial corporations really was in the technology. The Crash of 2008 told us what it was and the sin here is speculation, not normal prudent market activity. The U.S. Congress has not done the right thing to remove the risk of market instabilities caused by the misuse of computers by speculators. The SEC could end this in an instant by making a 30 second latency mandatory on all trades including electronic trades. This is why the Congress has not repaired the financial system and it will fail again and possibly soon. Had I understood all this is 2000, I would have left Sun much sooner, and Ellison and Oracle had the dubious heritage of this now.
I worked for Sun long before Oracle acquired it, and I hate Java, hated it before I left Sun. I hate it for two reasons:first is that Sun messed up the design of the class libraries, and two Java is a bloated C, a strongly typed language. What makes C usable is its small size the small size of the standard library. C++ suffers from the same bloat as Java and for the same reason, but at least you can still use pointers and references without obscure syntactic candy. Modern languages that delay typing to compile time have a generality that is superior to all the administrivia in Java and C++. These days I am liking Python and even Javascript with its namespace lambda construct better than Java.
I'm glad I left Sun long before Oracle took it over. I would have hated to work for Ellison,
Yeah, Ellison is a hell of a one to talk. The only thing he seems creatively capable of is sicking lawyers on his competition and driving creative forces out of his organization, but then again you don't expect more from a narcissist. Besides, the only capital he got from buying Sun Microsystems was the Big Data Financial application and that should be ruled illegal anyway. His handling of Solaris, Java and MySQL has forced people to take their creative energy elsewhere. Fork Larry Ellison!
HFT should either be banned or a latency built in. The SEC could institute a thirty second delay on each trade, right now.
It is Suns fault!
I now prefer python, and even over perl. My biggest gripe with Java is the class libraries, their size and complexity, and I know that the reason is that in the early days Sun was doing PL/1 in C and trying to do class design by committee and please its corporate customers. Java is a disaster by design. A pox on it!
I didn't reply to the head of this thread, but I think that programmed trading in financial markets has destroyed the safety of the world economic system and so squeezing performance out of Java so traders can play electronic speculators is not only beside the point, it is evil.
If I were the SEC or a world market regulator I would ADD latancy to trades! I would make every electronic trade wait 30 seconds.
Over and over in the press, it is statistical inference that is botched. In the area of medical developments, stories are given coverage that this or that breakthrough has been made when about half way through the story you find that the sample size of a study is very small. Or politicians make some well-known slight of hand with charts that present statistics that support their claims, with a bigger dataset or a different presentation might not support their claims at all.
It doesn't take equations or complex math to get people to recognize flaws in reasoning based on biased or incomplete data. Would people trust the FDA as much as if they were made aware that most of the applications for approvals are made from research studies the developers paid for themselves? The FDA is not funded well enough by Congress to be able to do independent research to support such clams. So it depends on biased research. That is why so many drugs and proceedures have to be pulled from the market after they have been approved by the FDA.
I don't know that I would be as concerned that the press have some math smarts, although that is not a bad thing, but it might be more important that they show some reasoning and inference skills to uncover bias and distortion of the facts. That might require some math skills, but the uncritical passing on of claims is a far more serious problem.
Mark Zuckerberg is a hell of a person to talk about not repeating mistakes and learning from the past. Whether computer science or not, Face Book is designed to make every error in BBS, blog and USENET design that has ever been made in the past, beginning with the context reply debacle of recent months, and I know because the first BBS I used was way back in 1976 that used text-only messages. It was developed by the Institute for the Future from Menlo Park Ca. and we ran it on a Honeywell MULTICS system at USGS, we may have only used T1 lines to talk to other branches, but USGS was on the Arpanet at about that time.
What is happening is that still very few programmers have CS degrees and so don't know the work of Knuth, McCarthy, Minsky, and even of Richie and Kerningham, so they can't know the evolution of computer languages and operating systems and they can't know how log ago some of the issues we have to deal with today were first discussed 50 years ago and before. They might have Linux or *nix and not appreciate the history contained in /usr/bin. My favorite computer language of late is python, and with any language you revisit the past more or less with design patterns and data structures, so learning design patterns repeatedly for emerging languages gets you some legacy, but going back and revisiting the issues of the past and not falling into the trap of thinking because it is new and hyped that it must be better is a big hurdle for modern developers, especially when they buy into the hype of the PR departments they work with.
As for Zuck, he would do good to examine the vitality of his business model and the history of newsgroups then to worry about theoretical matters. Leave that to the people at places like Stanford Computer Science. Zuck has a long way to go before he can hobnob at that level, despite how much is worth. He shoudl mind his own business, literally, and make the experience decent for his users, because it is not!
Would that be just disabling a root login, or the ability to do sudo? In Linux land you get root if your system is in recovery mode, but there is no root with a login shell. Is this the same in Android?
God, I have never liked Larry Ellison!
I worked at Sun from 1997 to 2004. and interviewed at Oracle at Redwood Shores in 1993, and I describe my experience as "leaving a bad taste in my mouth", feeling that the work environment was chintzy. Events subsequent have confirmed my feelings that Ellison and Oracle, were bad people to work for.
As for Solaris, its niche is big servers, serving Big Data, and if you are a big business, a big financial institution, you will shut up and pay whatever Ellison extorts from you. These guys were Sun's customers and they were largely responsible for mismanagement of markets and the meltdown of 2008 and the problems they created have not been fixed; the Congress has evaded its duty to repair this broken system, driven by bogus mathematics. Screw them all!
As for the rest of us with more usual requirements, there is not need for Solaris as opposed to Linux, and that became obvious to Sun in about 2003. By then Intel servers were powerful enough to meet mid-sized needs with Linux, no need for Solaris. Since Sun short changed X86 Solaris, even not supporting it for a time, they lost any chance of getting a piece of the consumer market that Steve Jobs was able to exploit. That left Sun dependent on the Big Data, Big Iron people who had to cut their expenditures during the Great Recession, which they helped cause. At the same time Sun put more resources into Java, trying to play catch-up with in the IDE market. Sun lost on both fronts and was bought by Ellison.
Java is legacy, and now there are much better OO alternatives because of the JIT processing and the weaker enforcement of type, but also because Sun did not do a good job designing the class libraries. It has gone the way of PL/1 and now languages like python are much better OO implementations, and Javascript has become a much better client language in the browser, largely because of the frameworks models that rely on lambda functions. Even if the ACM front end for Java had been the standard instead of the Sun Class Libraries, Java would have been a much better language. I think that because of the corporate appeal that Sun wrote the libraries with lots of dross, security via obfescation.
My last experience at Sun was telling. I knew system administration and legacy compilers. I was the mid-teir support for the Fortran Compiler and did other support for gcc. I was asked to change my focus to java and to provide support for Netbeans then under development. I found this to be very challenging for me because of my vision disability. The camel text and the poor formatting of the debugging stream made it very hard for me to do my job, and even though Sun paid some lip service to assessability it was not adequate and finally a lippy manager caused me to leave. Later a visually impaired system admin I met flat out said that Java was not accessable. My subsequent experience was that by the time they were stable products eclipse and netbeans had improved font size and debugging info. I seems that for Java, Eclipse has become more widely used and I wonder if Netbeans is even still around. Maybe Ellison's greed has forced people to use Eclipse instead of Netbeans. It seems like the same is the case for Solaris.
You mean weeds.
This world needs fewer FAT EGOS to mess things up, and if you mean it is OK because it is Mark Shuttleworth's money, then fine, poetic justice is that he loses his shirt. Possibly the only merit of Ubuntu is that it installs easier than its parent, Debian, but Shuttleworth's grand scheme to make Linux mobile is half baked from the start. Unity was a disaster because most of the platforms were desktops and Unity put in extra steps that are not needed and there is still no mobile platform for it. The plan in the video, which I could only stomach for 80% of it, is admission that there will not be a real platform for Ubuntu mobile that will compete with what is already there, including Windows Fone.
It isn't that it is always a bad idea to run *inux on a mobile device, but why not a well debugged KDE desktop with a USB keyboard and external screen That sounds like a Rasberry Pi with more memory, That exists already.
So we are dealing with an idiot with too much money and too much narcissism for his own good. I hope he goes down in flames. Within a year, someone will put a mobile phone mount on the back of a desktop monitor and let you run Linux on any number of devices.