This is exactly what will happen, tho'. Go look up seniority [everything2.com]. Remember the recent dispute [nytimes.com] between the dockers union and the ports on the West Coast? The union paralyzed Pacific trade in a bid to prevent the introduction of new technology. A union thinks in terms of quantity, not quality - they want as many jobs as possible and that's their only priority, even though they risk destroying the source of those jobs [nytimes.com].
Ummm actually the Dock Workers had no problem with the technology. They had a problem with the people running the technology not being members of the Union. It was a damned dirty trick by management to reduce union power. They don't think in terms or quality OR quantity. They think in terms of power period. If you can maintain power over the ports with 3000 geeks rather than 20,000 longshoremen it will actually be easier to lobby your union base to strike. You'll have more money per vote to spend.
Listen Unions really are all about power. Do you trust management to have all of the power over workers? Yes unions are corrupt. Yes sometimes they cut off their nose to spite their face. Do you want to be without a union when you're told that your company is outsourcing IT? After you've been with the company for 20 years?
Feh, what does it even matter in this country? It's not like our unions have any teeth anymore, they've been legislatively defanged long ago by business.
I've said that lower trained IT staff, Helpdesk, Support, even SysAdmins need a union for years. Of course if the industry were unionized that would be the end of the 25 year old engineering manager. Then again is that such a bad thing?
I think that thing that everyone is scared of is a Union coming in and telling them that they're relegated to Jr. SysAdmin while the mainframe guys are trained and promoted. People are afraid that they won't be allowed to rise to the level of their competance as quickly as they saw people do during the boom years.
Ultimately any union that is created for IT will be started by IT workers, remember that. It's not like the UAW is going to come in and force their methods of union dirty tricks on the IT industry. Would any of you have a problem with an IT Union that was built by Sage/USENIX, or a like organization? If there actually were an IT union and it had some clout who do you think could be lobbying in Washington against DMCA and the like?
The problem is we all still have some of that cowboy glint in our eyes. "Yeah I can be a CIO by 30, I know more than the doofus sitting in the executive suite does anyway" Grow up a little bit and see that while not perfect, in the face of a declining IT industry a Union is one thing that can give you some power back, on a large economic sized scale.
Yes, but will it make my wife more reasonable? Will there be a PMS disconnect? Or will she be able to go from 0 to bitch on nanoseconds (as if she can't already...)
Have you boys never heard of SOSUS? Yeah, I'm sure that it was probably also used to tap 'secure' Soviet communications lines, but it was also probably a SOSUS repair truck.
Don't you people remember the hype around all the freshwater released into the north atlantic shutting down the gulf stream and plungeing Europe into a mini-ice age? What good will knocking 6000+ nm off of the europe-far east trade route be when the ships are frozen in European ports?
Now, all we need to do is to find an enemy to use it against.
Last I knew North Korea had more than a few tubes pointed at our troops....
If we don't know where the shells are coming from, what's the chances that this system will be able to realistically identify a genuine incoming round, activate (from idle) and reliably shoot it down in time?
Assuming that when the system is on alert the laser is charged and ready to go, and it's hooked up to a nice Phased Array radar? I'd say pretty good. Knowing where the shells are coming from isn't really an issue. On a modern battle field against US technology opposing artilery MIGHT get one-shot off before counter-battery fire turns the opposing tubes into a crater. This just assures that that one shot isn't going to do much of anything.
If we do know where they're coming from (and we damn well should, given what we spend on reccetech), then why aren't we pasting them with our existing overwhelming air superiority and artillery?
How many stories did you hear about US casualties due to Iraqi Artillery? That was more than a decade ago. Now we've got hellfire equipped predators (or global hawks, UAV's at any rate)
Where are these systems going to be deployed? I'm sure if you ask the Army there'd be one with every Infantry division.
It's neato technology, but it seems like a solution to a problem that the US has spent trillions to ensure that it doesn't have any more.
Actually the US has lagged behind the rest of the world in Artillery for a while. The Soviet era stuff is still better than the M-109, and other US systems (if perhaps less well kept and less well trained) Hell, the South Africans have better artillery than the US. With the death of the Crusader system the US is still behind, at best opertaionally better than other countries.
Before long we will have the ability to render even sophisticated armies totally obsolete. I think this is a good thing.
Hmmmmm, now this may be slightly off-topic but....
Here's what makes me doubt your comment. We are getting very close on some of this cool-high tech stuff. But there's one weapon system in particular that gives me pause. HERF. High-Energy Radio Frequency. The military refers to it as High Power Microwaves. Imagine a steerable localized EMP. This is what HPM is. Have some electronics that aren't protected by a Faraday Cage that depend on transistors or microprocessors and these weapons will fry the systems.
That's all nice and good, if it's the good guys that possess the technology, but what if the bad guys get ahold of it. The United States Military has become the HERF Gunner's dream target. Can you imagine a HERF weapon system combined with a phased array radar? Hell the systems could be one-in-the-same with enough design. Now Saddam's AAA just watches for Aircraft coming by and zaps their computers. An F-117 won't fly without it's computer. Even if the planes manage to get their JDAM's off before they turn in jumbo sized lawn darts you just zap the guidance package on the bomb and your $100k precision guided munition just became a dumb bomb again.
I mean really HERF/HPM is something to worry about. What's to stop AlQuida from aquireing the technology and camping out on the approach lanes to JFK or National? I mean if the Airlines complain about walk-mans and laptops interfering with aproach and landing signals how are they going to do when the bad guys start zapping airliners with directional EMP?
Really, thinking about it Lex Luthor is kinda the anti-Bruce Wayne. Now a match up between Bruce/Batman and Luthor... If done properly that could be a story to rival Hannibal.
Speaking of, I wonder how Batman vs Hannibal Lector would go.
You know there was a time, not so long ago, when companies actually shared their profit with their share-holders. They were called dividends, and they let you take the money from you share and re-invest it, or just live off of it.
The problem these days is that most investing is meant to pump the stock and dump it. If people could gt back to the concept on holding a stock for the dividends maybe real-world factors like profit/loss earnings and such would return to being factors in stock valuation.
Like the other responder to this I too immediatly thought of Steve Jobs when I read Crigley's bit. I think you can really boil it down to "A company without a soul is doomed to fail."
I am interested in the Wall Street analysis that Apple perhaps has one of the worst board rooms in the industry, but then leadership by commity almost killed the company before. I see Apple as Steve's ship. He doesn't give you a good idea of where he's sailing, but you know that there will be some pretty cool ports of call along the way.
It's not like other companies that flounder around with too much market research or board room squabbles about where the ship should sail. It's almost like Steve puts down a 'this is really cool, we should do this' gauntlet and the board and the rest of the ship pull the oars to get there. If you don't like where Steve's going, well there's always Microsoft or OpenSource.
It would be refreshing is more companies were like this, rather than drafting in Apple's wake.
Right, they're adding an AltiVec unit, which isn't purely PowerPC. So, yes they're adding extensions for Apple compatibility, not PowerPC Spec compatibility.
Dude, didn't you like watch Mission Impossible 2? The only thing I could think after walking out of that abomination was "Well, the cineamatography was probably as close as we'll see to Live action Anime".
There has recently been a push in serveral governments, though not so much in the US, to adopt a policy of favoring Open Source solutions above commercial solutions. Do you see these initiatives as some grass-roots desire for glasnost, or a reaction to US technological imperialism?
Geeks of old (I guess we were called nerds back then) focused strictly on technology and science and stayed as far away from politics of any kind as you could possible get.
Huh, and here I thought most geeks from 20 years ago were people that worked either directly or indirectly for the defence industry, and had probably seen time in the service. If you're trying to tell me that such a lifestyle equates to political indifference I've got some shares of LinuxCare to sell you...
I've always used Internet Pulse off of the Keynote site. You can drill down to a bit finer detail than InternetTraffic and see what peering points are going haywire. If you've got a subscruption there's always keynote itself too, but I lost mine two jobs ago.
Only when you fail to factor on per processor software costs. Trust me, a small cluster of xeons running Oracle at the same performance level as a 24 processor RS/6000 is going to cost you a pretty penny in licensing from Oracle. (Not to memtion DBA time to cluster Oracle)
(as an aside, have you seen the prices on the newer Single core POWER4's? The prices are coming down my friend)
*sigh* I guess it works. You present a few facts, then use them as the launching point for unreasonable claims.
PPC != Apple. You start by attacking the XServe, which may be deserved, and expand the attack to the rest of the PPC family. It doesn't wash.
G4 does not compete with Xeon. POWER4 (itself a wholely compliant PPC chip) does, and you know what it Smokes Xeon as a server chip. Xeon scales to what 8 way, with a contorted memory bus structure? POWER4 scales to at least 24 way, probably higher if IBM cared to offer something bigger and integrates onto a modern server crossbar switch.
If Xeon is so good, why aren't companies converting their Sun/Oracle installations to it rather than RS/6000 POWER4 machines?
Please spare us the classic bait and switch strategy of arguments.
you really start to get an idea that sun wants to beat MS like a red headed step child..."
Who exactally is the redheaded step child here? I just have this image of Sun as the little step brother madder than hell swinging at Microsoft that is holding the kid at arms length by the top of the head.
Slashdot Mirror
IP Over Firewire is not the new localtalk. IP Over Firewire is not the new localtalk. IP Over Firewire is not... oh the hell with it.
Why do I see the little daisy chain boxes showing up in schools again?
(But you see Mr. School administrator with shrinking funds, you don't need to buy a hub or switch, we've got that covered.)
This is exactly what will happen, tho'. Go look up seniority [everything2.com]. Remember the recent dispute [nytimes.com] between the dockers union and the ports on the West Coast? The union paralyzed Pacific trade in a bid to prevent the introduction of new technology. A union thinks in terms of quantity, not quality - they want as many jobs as possible and that's their only priority, even though they risk destroying the source of those jobs [nytimes.com].
Ummm actually the Dock Workers had no problem with the technology. They had a problem with the people running the technology not being members of the Union. It was a damned dirty trick by management to reduce union power. They don't think in terms or quality OR quantity. They think in terms of power period. If you can maintain power over the ports with 3000 geeks rather than 20,000 longshoremen it will actually be easier to lobby your union base to strike. You'll have more money per vote to spend.
Listen Unions really are all about power. Do you trust management to have all of the power over workers? Yes unions are corrupt. Yes sometimes they cut off their nose to spite their face. Do you want to be without a union when you're told that your company is outsourcing IT? After you've been with the company for 20 years?
Feh, what does it even matter in this country? It's not like our unions have any teeth anymore, they've been legislatively defanged long ago by business.
I've said that lower trained IT staff, Helpdesk, Support, even SysAdmins need a union for years. Of course if the industry were unionized that would be the end of the 25 year old engineering manager. Then again is that such a bad thing?
I think that thing that everyone is scared of is a Union coming in and telling them that they're relegated to Jr. SysAdmin while the mainframe guys are trained and promoted. People are afraid that they won't be allowed to rise to the level of their competance as quickly as they saw people do during the boom years.
Ultimately any union that is created for IT will be started by IT workers, remember that. It's not like the UAW is going to come in and force their methods of union dirty tricks on the IT industry. Would any of you have a problem with an IT Union that was built by Sage/USENIX, or a like organization? If there actually were an IT union and it had some clout who do you think could be lobbying in Washington against DMCA and the like?
The problem is we all still have some of that cowboy glint in our eyes. "Yeah I can be a CIO by 30, I know more than the doofus sitting in the executive suite does anyway" Grow up a little bit and see that while not perfect, in the face of a declining IT industry a Union is one thing that can give you some power back, on a large economic sized scale.
Yes, but will it make my wife more reasonable? Will there be a PMS disconnect? Or will she be able to go from 0 to bitch on nanoseconds (as if she can't already...)
Have you boys never heard of SOSUS? Yeah, I'm sure that it was probably also used to tap 'secure' Soviet communications lines, but it was also probably a SOSUS repair truck.
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/news-release/releases/200 1/01-102.htm
Don't you people remember the hype around all the freshwater released into the north atlantic shutting down the gulf stream and plungeing Europe into a mini-ice age? What good will knocking 6000+ nm off of the europe-far east trade route be when the ships are frozen in European ports?
Now, all we need to do is to find an enemy to use it against.
Last I knew North Korea had more than a few tubes pointed at our troops....
If we don't know where the shells are coming from, what's the chances that this system will be able to realistically identify a genuine incoming round, activate (from idle) and reliably shoot it down in time?
Assuming that when the system is on alert the laser is charged and ready to go, and it's hooked up to a nice Phased Array radar? I'd say pretty good. Knowing where the shells are coming from isn't really an issue. On a modern battle field against US technology opposing artilery MIGHT get one-shot off before counter-battery fire turns the opposing tubes into a crater. This just assures that that one shot isn't going to do much of anything.
If we do know where they're coming from (and we damn well should, given what we spend on reccetech), then why aren't we pasting them with our existing overwhelming air superiority and artillery?
How many stories did you hear about US casualties due to Iraqi Artillery? That was more than a decade ago. Now we've got hellfire equipped predators (or global hawks, UAV's at any rate)
Where are these systems going to be deployed? I'm sure if you ask the Army there'd be one with every Infantry division.
It's neato technology, but it seems like a solution to a problem that the US has spent trillions to ensure that it doesn't have any more.
Actually the US has lagged behind the rest of the world in Artillery for a while. The Soviet era stuff is still better than the M-109, and other US systems (if perhaps less well kept and less well trained) Hell, the South Africans have better artillery than the US. With the death of the Crusader system the US is still behind, at best opertaionally better than other countries.
Before long we will have the ability to render even sophisticated armies totally obsolete. I think this is a good thing.
Hmmmmm, now this may be slightly off-topic but....
Here's what makes me doubt your comment. We are getting very close on some of this cool-high tech stuff. But there's one weapon system in particular that gives me pause. HERF. High-Energy Radio Frequency. The military refers to it as High Power Microwaves. Imagine a steerable localized EMP. This is what HPM is. Have some electronics that aren't protected by a Faraday Cage that depend on transistors or microprocessors and these weapons will fry the systems.
That's all nice and good, if it's the good guys that possess the technology, but what if the bad guys get ahold of it. The United States Military has become the HERF Gunner's dream target. Can you imagine a HERF weapon system combined with a phased array radar? Hell the systems could be one-in-the-same with enough design. Now Saddam's AAA just watches for Aircraft coming by and zaps their computers. An F-117 won't fly without it's computer. Even if the planes manage to get their JDAM's off before they turn in jumbo sized lawn darts you just zap the guidance package on the bomb and your $100k precision guided munition just became a dumb bomb again.
I mean really HERF/HPM is something to worry about. What's to stop AlQuida from aquireing the technology and camping out on the approach lanes to JFK or National? I mean if the Airlines complain about walk-mans and laptops interfering with aproach and landing signals how are they going to do when the bad guys start zapping airliners with directional EMP?
Really, thinking about it Lex Luthor is kinda the anti-Bruce Wayne. Now a match up between Bruce/Batman and Luthor... If done properly that could be a story to rival Hannibal.
Speaking of, I wonder how Batman vs Hannibal Lector would go.
You know there was a time, not so long ago, when companies actually shared their profit with their share-holders. They were called dividends, and they let you take the money from you share and re-invest it, or just live off of it.
The problem these days is that most investing is meant to pump the stock and dump it. If people could gt back to the concept on holding a stock for the dividends maybe real-world factors like profit/loss earnings and such would return to being factors in stock valuation.
Like the other responder to this I too immediatly thought of Steve Jobs when I read Crigley's bit. I think you can really boil it down to "A company without a soul is doomed to fail."
I am interested in the Wall Street analysis that Apple perhaps has one of the worst board rooms in the industry, but then leadership by commity almost killed the company before. I see Apple as Steve's ship. He doesn't give you a good idea of where he's sailing, but you know that there will be some pretty cool ports of call along the way.
It's not like other companies that flounder around with too much market research or board room squabbles about where the ship should sail. It's almost like Steve puts down a 'this is really cool, we should do this' gauntlet and the board and the rest of the ship pull the oars to get there. If you don't like where Steve's going, well there's always Microsoft or OpenSource.
It would be refreshing is more companies were like this, rather than drafting in Apple's wake.
About fscking time. Wait, strike that.
Cool. Thanks for setting me strait. :)
Woah Dude! Mr. Glass posts to slashdot!
Right, they're adding an AltiVec unit, which isn't purely PowerPC. So, yes they're adding extensions for Apple compatibility, not PowerPC Spec compatibility.
Ummm no, actually PowerPC is a subset of POWER, not an extention. PowerPC code would run on a POWER, not nessessarily vice versa.
Dude, didn't you like watch Mission Impossible 2? The only thing I could think after walking out of that abomination was "Well, the cineamatography was probably as close as we'll see to Live action Anime".
There has recently been a push in serveral governments, though not so much in the US, to adopt a policy of favoring Open Source solutions above commercial solutions. Do you see these initiatives as some grass-roots desire for glasnost, or a reaction to US technological imperialism?
Oh bullshit. Go check out Plastic. Or, if you're too afraid of leaving the warm comforting confines of geekdom, there's always kuro5hin.
Geeks of old (I guess we were called nerds back then) focused strictly on technology and science and stayed as far away from politics of any kind as you could possible get.
Huh, and here I thought most geeks from 20 years ago were people that worked either directly or indirectly for the defence industry, and had probably seen time in the service. If you're trying to tell me that such a lifestyle equates to political indifference I've got some shares of LinuxCare to sell you...
I've always used Internet Pulse off of the Keynote site. You can drill down to a bit finer detail than InternetTraffic and see what peering points are going haywire. If you've got a subscruption there's always keynote itself too, but I lost mine two jobs ago.
"The more your tighten your grip, the more systems (or states) will slip through your fingers."
Just too bad that there's no Luke Skywalker to return balance to our force of Government.
Only when you fail to factor on per processor software costs. Trust me, a small cluster of xeons running Oracle at the same performance level as a 24 processor RS/6000 is going to cost you a pretty penny in licensing from Oracle. (Not to memtion DBA time to cluster Oracle)
(as an aside, have you seen the prices on the newer Single core POWER4's? The prices are coming down my friend)
*sigh* I guess it works. You present a few facts, then use them as the launching point for unreasonable claims.
PPC != Apple. You start by attacking the XServe, which may be deserved, and expand the attack to the rest of the PPC family. It doesn't wash.
G4 does not compete with Xeon. POWER4 (itself a wholely compliant PPC chip) does, and you know what it Smokes Xeon as a server chip. Xeon scales to what 8 way, with a contorted memory bus structure? POWER4 scales to at least 24 way, probably higher if IBM cared to offer something bigger and integrates onto a modern server crossbar switch.
If Xeon is so good, why aren't companies converting their Sun/Oracle installations to it rather than RS/6000 POWER4 machines?
Please spare us the classic bait and switch strategy of arguments.
you really start to get an idea that sun wants to beat MS like a red headed step child ..."
Who exactally is the redheaded step child here? I just have this image of Sun as the little step brother madder than hell swinging at Microsoft that is holding the kid at arms length by the top of the head.