Does this mean that if we buy MORE dvd players, the Chinese folks making them will have a better life? Maybe this is a rare instance where the opposite isn't true
Disagree! Disagreement on so many fronts.
Naturally, more units sold is better for business. This will either create more employment, economic spinoffs, better pay, something.
DVD players happen to be quite useful, more so than say, masking tape or nail clippers. People watching DVDs are likely to become inspired. At the very least they become more demanding consumers.
Of course, if you personally buy more DVD players you don't have a greater marginal utility unless you donate/resell them.
That's just where experience comes from. Companies that have the guts to see what can go wrong will know what kind of problems need extra attention. It may be fretful now, but it would be remiss not to at least investigate a less expensive source of humanity.
Those fund and investment pools carry enough votes to run the company, but they don't.
THEY CAN'T. Because investor groups AREN'T allowed to nominate board members. THE CEO nominates the board members. The shareholders can vote them up or down
Ever heard of
Money talks, bullshit walks?
Anyone with the ideas that make the most sense to the shareholders will have the greatest chance of being CEO. Chances are most companies are doing as well as they can, or the investors are really warped.
All of those jobs have gone abroad, and as is fairly obvious, eventually it will happen to software too.
You make software sound like an easy problem to solve. P = NP. There is no undecidability.
Software that have practical applications and that has been implemented for the masses will go to open source. User interface tweaking/enhancement will migrate to self-serve customization. And cheap third world labor will be replaced with robots.
P != NP though, not yet anyways. That leaves people with the difficult problems. Everyone should prepare to work on something hard because resources will be allocated to those problems. People who don't want to touch difficult problems simply won't have a job, just because there's no money to pay for it.
We're all facing the prospect of getting off this planet. It's becoming depleted. The sun will burn out. An asteroid is coming. We can't just worry about how the middle class could disintegrate due to unsustainable consumption. The whole world has the technology to cooperatively find its way so let's do it.
Control is an issue that has never been so prominent. Technology has made it so much easier for competitors to take advantage of someone else's new innovation.
The attitude of the world is that it is ok to use information obtained however cheaply. Look at all the rampant filesharing.
This is fine, but people should give as good as they get. Turn all the freebie information into something that will benefit the world - that's all I ask. Well, vast numbers of people are making real contributions so let's just hope it works out. Besides, people can only compete so much in the same field before they find out they may be in the wrong area, which may be oversaturated or lacking in opportunity or too muddled.
There are plenty of unique things for people to go into, for those who are not afraid to try. It can be painful to see a competitor with more resources or good fortune make great gains on one's good idea, but this should not be a deterrence.
Not too mention that Americans are expected to compete with workers who are restrained by American laws--no environmental standards in factories, no minimum wage laws, nothing
Worry not. If a country with poor environmental laws improves economically, their enriched bosses will start thinking about whether they are living in a craphole. Then they will legislate.
The third world is way overpopulated for their own good. It's really bad for the environment.
Perhaps more technology will help reduce pollution and clean up the food chain. Technology can optimize work flow and offer improved chemical processes. I can't really imagine what is required to install the machinery as well make people use it effectively.
I can state as a fact that not everyone is capable of doing their work "smarter" as you would probably call it.
It's about time more infrastructure for job training is available. We're poised to enter an era where machines take on the most menial tasks.
Let's all brainstorm to devise a system people can use to learn how to perform a unique task of some responsibility. Also people have to adjust their lifestyles to be able to learn more and perform new tasks instead of the same old thing day after day or season after season.
Machines are supposed to help us become more enlightened. Why aren't we all trying to gain that enlightenment instead of worrying about job security?
start studying topics that can differentiate you. SW archicture and requirements gathering
How hard is it to outsource software architecture and requirements gathering??
Isn't that part of the contractor's job anyways - so they're already good at it. At least they will have someone good at it.
Suppose everyone starts with the same physical resources. Then what differentiates everyone from everyone else is creativity, intelligence, physical abilities, etc. This does not stop average people from succeeding. You can find a niche with little competition or you can practice until you are really good at something.
But to beat the competition - being able to deliver a better result is a big factor. This is one of the selling points of offshore outsourcing. "Them people ain't dumb," as heard in a song.
Everyone should really perk up. We need a better continuing education system and a positive attitude for achievement. There are so many problems begging for a solution, more than enough to assign 10 hard unique problems to every man, woman, and child on earth. These are problems whose solutions would benefit us all. But 90% of people in the North America wouldn't even invest their time to understand a unique problem of medium difficulty.
Falling prices indicate a lack of demand too, not just an increase in supply. Many businesses have not been adding to their computer staff. They believe they have enough technology to remain competitive. There are many exotic technologies that businesses could try although the rewards are not well known. Technology developers need to persuade businesses to make some forays into new applications and devices.
Many of the bottlenecks are human rather than computers/machines. Software is waiting for people to finish their tasks and then log a few more keystokes.
Speeding up people will create more demand for machinery, but are people not working smart enough? We're surrounded by information, but whenever a deep question needs to be answered, it is still so hard to get the best answer.
What are some effective ways to sell the idea of improving the knowledge infrastructure? If businesses buy more software for knowledge, this will improve their expertise and create more demand for developers.
There are more consumer gadgets that show the power of computer decisions. One example is the GPS navigator, that tells you how to go from A to B. Such devices could spark an interest in business owners to install custom systems to guide people through their tasks.
In other words, the insertion of more computer smarts in our everyday lives create more demand for applying computers to take on more tasks.
Now this brings us back around the cycle to people not working smart enough. What will people do when computers have taken over their jobs? These people will need more software to keep up with the requirements of their future work.
Right now this cycle is kind of sluggish. A lot of people do not need to learn much before they enter their next job. However, the attitude that very little effort is needed to start a new job must change. Globalization is a wakeup call. Everyone needs to see themselves as a player with international competition as well as computerized ocmpetition.
An answer may be to accelerate the cycle. Everyone has to do two things: boost their own competitive advantage by learning, and increase the appetite for new technology.
So yes, they really do need that kind of stuff, unless you enjoy Wikipedia averaging being down one day out of 3 (which has been happening each time a ram stick burns out or a hdd fails, which is why it went down this time).
How can there be so much failure?
I worked for a year and a half at a place where I was surrounded by computers running all day, some in construction sites, but I didn't see any hardware fail except the monitor that someone dumped a lot of sawdust onto.
R&D is good for humanity. There are so many students doing R&D in universities for a pittance. No one wants to close schools.
A lot of el cheapo research overseas should help move some corporate asses. I suggest some companies should be getting ready because foreign research intellectual capital might not come to North America if North America doesn't have research results to trade.
I've always admired Steve Jobs' passion for creating insanely great products, and innovation is a big part of it. But, I think the products could be even better if Apple had the humility to do a little more copying from less innovative sources that still manage to come up with some good ideas every now and then.
All the different OS's and UI's will eventually converge.
Now I wonder what the result will be. Look at The Matrix when Neo eats the cookie from the Oracle. If the red pill can scramble input/output signals, a cookie might be useful for accessing certain interfaces. We might operate a computer like a buffet.
One advantage of a cube is stackability. The Virginia Tech's X is an example of how to build yourself a very powerful computer, but can you run that in the back of a van? Too much space is wasted. I can link cubes together, put some legs on them and end up with a computer centipede.
If I was paraphrasing a passage I don't understand, I would need a dictionary and grammar rules. If the grammar was normal or normalized, I would still need the dictionary.
So, what would a dictionary for a computer look like? How can basic concepts be defined for computer understanding?
I guess you could try using Esperanto or Lojban as your intermediary language. Lojgan in particular is computer parseable *and* human understandable, so it would probably be the easiest to write translations for.
The name Logban is kind of anti-intuitive isn't it? You can't even keep the spelling consistent.
Clearly there is too little innovation in IT. When just about anyone with a minimal education can crank out code, IT is really no more creative than work in McDonald's.
I don't want to hear people whining about losing IT jobs. There are no bragging rights for people working at McDonald's.
How do we bring innovation back into IT?
Can we convince businesses to take risks and develop software products rather than software that just supports their business?
Millions of people go to repetitive simple-minded jobs every day. What would the world be like if their tasks were forced to be of the risk-taking decision-making type?
People need information to make the right decisions. IT should be enabling more decision making. IT should be creating more responsibility in work.
Responsibility is not what a lot of people are used to. How can IT give people the means to take advantage of empowering? Should computers help train people in more complex scenarios? Computers can enhance communications that enable responsibility fulfillment. Would computers help people understand fields they have no experience with? The world would definitely be more chaotic. Good software is necessary to help people achieve their objectives, once they are in a position to set more objectives per unit time.
The whole point here, is that it makes the simulation of folding a complete gene in about a years time.
Isn't that folding a protein?
But how big a protein?
A chromosone would take a lot longer to simulate - but it's essentially a double helix when you get down to the molecular level. That would be a good test though - if you take DNA and can't simulate it going into a double helix how can you trust the computer?
Blockbuster wants to drive the sale price of DVDs down to $5 and abandon the rental business altogether. The publishers are reluctant.
My first reaction - Blockbuster has the right idea really. Look at it economically. If people believe DVDs are affordable they will buy
But this will drive up the cost of making movies. If the best movie by today's standards is just worth $5 when released on DVD, what is required to produce a movie worth $7.50 or even $7.75 on DVD?
Isn't it just typical of people to herald a technological advance by worrying how much it improves their entertainment.
Four games is not enough to statistically show who is better, especially if they are tied after three games.
I think Kasparov still knows a lot of tricks but will not reveal many of them even if it means losing a match of just 4 games. He would know after just a game or two who is really stronger, and if the machine is limited, he woould't care to play 100% in case the next upgrade learns too much.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean that if we buy MORE dvd players, the Chinese folks making them will have a better life? Maybe this is a rare instance where the opposite isn't true
Disagree! Disagreement on so many fronts.
Naturally, more units sold is better for business. This will either create more employment, economic spinoffs, better pay, something.
DVD players happen to be quite useful, more so than say, masking tape or nail clippers. People watching DVDs are likely to become inspired. At the very least they become more demanding consumers.
Of course, if you personally buy more DVD players you don't have a greater marginal utility unless you donate/resell them.
And then, the next country it "preys" on will benefit.
What happens if there is no country left as prey?
Inflation and automation?
Its almost too funny watching it go so wrong
That's just where experience comes from. Companies that have the guts to see what can go wrong will know what kind of problems need extra attention. It may be fretful now, but it would be remiss not to at least investigate a less expensive source of humanity.
Those fund and investment pools carry enough votes to run the company, but they don't.
THEY CAN'T. Because investor groups AREN'T allowed to nominate board members. THE CEO nominates the board members. The shareholders can vote them up or down
Ever heard of
Money talks, bullshit walks?
Anyone with the ideas that make the most sense to the shareholders will have the greatest chance of being CEO. Chances are most companies are doing as well as they can, or the investors are really warped.
All of those jobs have gone abroad, and as is fairly obvious, eventually it will happen to software too.
You make software sound like an easy problem to solve. P = NP. There is no undecidability.
Software that have practical applications and that has been implemented for the masses will go to open source. User interface tweaking/enhancement will migrate to self-serve customization. And cheap third world labor will be replaced with robots.
P != NP though, not yet anyways. That leaves people with the difficult problems. Everyone should prepare to work on something hard because resources will be allocated to those problems. People who don't want to touch difficult problems simply won't have a job, just because there's no money to pay for it.
We're all facing the prospect of getting off this planet. It's becoming depleted. The sun will burn out. An asteroid is coming. We can't just worry about how the middle class could disintegrate due to unsustainable consumption. The whole world has the technology to cooperatively find its way so let's do it.
But either you lose control
Control is an issue that has never been so prominent. Technology has made it so much easier for competitors to take advantage of someone else's new innovation.
The attitude of the world is that it is ok to use information obtained however cheaply. Look at all the rampant filesharing.
This is fine, but people should give as good as they get. Turn all the freebie information into something that will benefit the world - that's all I ask. Well, vast numbers of people are making real contributions so let's just hope it works out. Besides, people can only compete so much in the same field before they find out they may be in the wrong area, which may be oversaturated or lacking in opportunity or too muddled.
There are plenty of unique things for people to go into, for those who are not afraid to try. It can be painful to see a competitor with more resources or good fortune make great gains on one's good idea, but this should not be a deterrence.
Not too mention that Americans are expected to compete with workers who are restrained by American laws--no environmental standards in factories, no minimum wage laws, nothing
Worry not. If a country with poor environmental laws improves economically, their enriched bosses will start thinking about whether they are living in a craphole. Then they will legislate.
The third world is way overpopulated for their own good. It's really bad for the environment.
Perhaps more technology will help reduce pollution and clean up the food chain. Technology can optimize work flow and offer improved chemical processes. I can't really imagine what is required to install the machinery as well make people use it effectively.
I can state as a fact that not everyone is capable of doing their work "smarter" as you would probably call it.
It's about time more infrastructure for job training is available. We're poised to enter an era where machines take on the most menial tasks.
Let's all brainstorm to devise a system people can use to learn how to perform a unique task of some responsibility. Also people have to adjust their lifestyles to be able to learn more and perform new tasks instead of the same old thing day after day or season after season.
Machines are supposed to help us become more enlightened. Why aren't we all trying to gain that enlightenment instead of worrying about job security?
start studying topics that can differentiate you. SW archicture and requirements gathering
How hard is it to outsource software architecture and requirements gathering??
Isn't that part of the contractor's job anyways - so they're already good at it. At least they will have someone good at it.
Suppose everyone starts with the same physical resources. Then what differentiates everyone from everyone else is creativity, intelligence, physical abilities, etc. This does not stop average people from succeeding. You can find a niche with little competition or you can practice until you are really good at something.
But to beat the competition - being able to deliver a better result is a big factor. This is one of the selling points of offshore outsourcing. "Them people ain't dumb," as heard in a song.
Everyone should really perk up. We need a better continuing education system and a positive attitude for achievement. There are so many problems begging for a solution, more than enough to assign 10 hard unique problems to every man, woman, and child on earth. These are problems whose solutions would benefit us all. But 90% of people in the North America wouldn't even invest their time to understand a unique problem of medium difficulty.
Sounds like a good way to advertise yourself as a programmer. I'll pass the web addresses around and generate some customers!
A company with strong leadership that actually looks toward the future sucess does not chase the easy dollar
implying Nike, IBM, Microsoft and all that ilk do not have strong leadership
The old man's company secrets are most likely being reversed engineered and re-engineered offshore.
It's much harder now to maintain an edge. Companies should increase their IQ by inventing new products, not just new features.
Falling prices indicate a lack of demand too, not just an increase in supply. Many businesses have not been adding to their computer staff. They believe they have enough technology to remain competitive. There are many exotic technologies that businesses could try although the rewards are not well known. Technology developers need to persuade businesses to make some forays into new applications and devices.
Many of the bottlenecks are human rather than computers/machines. Software is waiting for people to finish their tasks and then log a few more keystokes.
Speeding up people will create more demand for machinery, but are people not working smart enough? We're surrounded by information, but whenever a deep question needs to be answered, it is still so hard to get the best answer.
What are some effective ways to sell the idea of improving the knowledge infrastructure? If businesses buy more software for knowledge, this will improve their expertise and create more demand for developers.
There are more consumer gadgets that show the power of computer decisions. One example is the GPS navigator, that tells you how to go from A to B. Such devices could spark an interest in business owners to install custom systems to guide people through their tasks.
In other words, the insertion of more computer smarts in our everyday lives create more demand for applying computers to take on more tasks.
Now this brings us back around the cycle to people not working smart enough. What will people do when computers have taken over their jobs? These people will need more software to keep up with the requirements of their future work.
Right now this cycle is kind of sluggish. A lot of people do not need to learn much before they enter their next job. However, the attitude that very little effort is needed to start a new job must change. Globalization is a wakeup call. Everyone needs to see themselves as a player with international competition as well as computerized ocmpetition.
An answer may be to accelerate the cycle. Everyone has to do two things: boost their own competitive advantage by learning, and increase the appetite for new technology.
So yes, they really do need that kind of stuff, unless you enjoy Wikipedia averaging being down one day out of 3 (which has been happening each time a ram stick burns out or a hdd fails, which is why it went down this time).
How can there be so much failure?
I worked for a year and a half at a place where I was surrounded by computers running all day, some in construction sites, but I didn't see any hardware fail except the monitor that someone dumped a lot of sawdust onto.
It's not really the rate of failures that need to be increased. It is the rate of decisions made that needs to be increased. Subtle difference
But you would think that making more failures was caused by making more decisions in the first place.
Why do so many people want to stop overseas R&D?
R&D is good for humanity. There are so many students doing R&D in universities for a pittance. No one wants to close schools.
A lot of el cheapo research overseas should help move some corporate asses. I suggest some companies should be getting ready because foreign research intellectual capital might not come to North America if North America doesn't have research results to trade.
I've always admired Steve Jobs' passion for creating insanely great products, and innovation is a big part of it. But, I think the products could be even better if Apple had the humility to do a little more copying from less innovative sources that still manage to come up with some good ideas every now and then.
All the different OS's and UI's will eventually converge.
Now I wonder what the result will be. Look at The Matrix when Neo eats the cookie from the Oracle. If the red pill can scramble input/output signals, a cookie might be useful for accessing certain interfaces. We might operate a computer like a buffet.
One advantage of a cube is stackability. The Virginia Tech's X is an example of how to build yourself a very powerful computer, but can you run that in the back of a van? Too much space is wasted. I can link cubes together, put some legs on them and end up with a computer centipede.
When you put them in your shirt pockets you look like you have breast implants.
If I was paraphrasing a passage I don't understand, I would need a dictionary and grammar rules. If the grammar was normal or normalized, I would still need the dictionary.
So, what would a dictionary for a computer look like? How can basic concepts be defined for computer understanding?
Would it look perhaps like a Prolog program?
I guess you could try using Esperanto or Lojban as your intermediary language. Lojgan in particular is computer parseable *and* human understandable, so it would probably be the easiest to write translations for.
The name Logban is kind of anti-intuitive isn't it? You can't even keep the spelling consistent.
Clearly there is too little innovation in IT. When just about anyone with a minimal education can crank out code, IT is really no more creative than work in McDonald's.
I don't want to hear people whining about losing IT jobs. There are no bragging rights for people working at McDonald's.
How do we bring innovation back into IT?
Can we convince businesses to take risks and develop software products rather than software that just supports their business?
Millions of people go to repetitive simple-minded jobs every day. What would the world be like if their tasks were forced to be of the risk-taking decision-making type?
People need information to make the right decisions. IT should be enabling more decision making. IT should be creating more responsibility in work.
Responsibility is not what a lot of people are used to. How can IT give people the means to take advantage of empowering? Should computers help train people in more complex scenarios? Computers can enhance communications that enable responsibility fulfillment. Would computers help people understand fields they have no experience with? The world would definitely be more chaotic. Good software is necessary to help people achieve their objectives, once they are in a position to set more objectives per unit time.
The whole point here, is that it makes the simulation
of folding a complete gene in about a years time.
Isn't that folding a protein?
But how big a protein?
A chromosone would take a lot longer to simulate - but it's essentially a double helix when you get down to the molecular level. That would be a good test though - if you take DNA and can't simulate it going into a double helix how can you trust the computer?
Well, it may be able to play Doom3
This time guess who/what will hold the joystick
Blockbuster wants to drive the sale price of DVDs down to $5 and abandon the rental business altogether. The publishers are reluctant.
My first reaction - Blockbuster has the right idea really. Look at it economically. If people believe DVDs are affordable they will buy
But this will drive up the cost of making movies. If the best movie by today's standards is just worth $5 when released on DVD, what is required to produce a movie worth $7.50 or even $7.75 on DVD?
Isn't it just typical of people to herald a technological advance by worrying how much it improves their entertainment.
Four games is not enough to statistically show who is better, especially if they are tied after three games.
I think Kasparov still knows a lot of tricks but will not reveal many of them even if it means losing a match of just 4 games. He would know after just a game or two who is really stronger, and if the machine is limited, he woould't care to play 100% in case the next upgrade learns too much.