I recall Norm Macdonald's roast of Clinton years ago. It happened around the whole Lewinsky affair and as I recall Norm made quite a few brutal cuts at Clinton. At one point, Macdonald cringed a little and asked the audience, "Is he laughing?"
Guessing about you? I have no idea what that means.
So your point is, its a big bad world, get over it. Fine. My point is that organizations need to start looking beyond profit and start seeing their impact on the world. Turning a blind eye to the environmental and human rights abuses in China to make a quick buck does not a better world make. The need to recognize that they need to invest back in the communities that allowed them to flurish. Could IBM have come up in the horribly corrupt, bribery driven Indian business environment? Could IBM have been so dynamic in the state controlled industrial complex of communist China? In a word, no.
In total does IBM actually owe the US anything? You're right it doesn't. It shouldn't expect anything either. The government uses our tax money to fund research that often ends up growing into the inventions that make corporations rich. From now on, we ought to be sure that the tax payer's investment in fundamental research shows us some dividneds, maybe through taking a direct percentage of the gross on any sales of products using that technology. Clearly, in the new world model those investments aren't going to pay off in the form of jobs. And to be honest, I don't give a fuck about the benefit of a cheap Chinese electronic product as a return for all that outsourcing. Give me a real cash return on my investment via taxes in the technologies that we're just giving away today.
This is the same thing that Frank Zappa was doing over ten years ago with the Synclavier- writing music beyond the capability of human musicians with the intent of having the Synclavier perform it.
In this case the performance is being done on a MIDI enabled pipe organ instead of a synthesizer. Is it any surprise that a computer could fire MIDI signals to the pipes better than 10 fingers and two feet working away at a console? I guess I'm still not impressed.
A friend of mine is a pretty successful pipe organ restorer and he says that for well over a decade modern pipe organs have been set up with MIDI interfaces from the consoles to the actuators that actually control the pipes. Many restoration projects on older pipe organs involve replacing older mechanical or electric consoles with MIDI. So, as far as I can tell, it sounds like there's nothing special going on with this organ. The guy has just replaced the console with a laptop as the MIDI input device.
Everyone's posts seem to be exclusively focused on the merits of Liberty re: the internet. I think a lot of corporate customers are interested in a standard, open single-sign-on solution to link up their internal web applications. A lot of them are using their own internal hacks or using proprietary solutions that work only in the context of a particular app server.
My last customer (for a variety of reasons) was concurrently supporting iPlanet, Tomcat and JRun and wanted to be sure that their users could log into the central intranet site once and then have their credentials forwared securely to the rest of their web based applications. We did something custom but a open standard that was built into a J2EE compliant application container would have been a very nice thing.
Re:Concerns - answered in follow up to article
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I think one of the responders (Stefan Sokolowski) to the article did a good job of shedding a little more light on some of these concerns:
As a real security professional (i.e. one that does not go around screaming that the sky is falling) and as someone who has worked with RFID for the military and for civilian uses (mainly Post Offices) for over six years, I find your article makes a number of glaring omissions that would allow any sensible human being to make a rational judgement about this technology.
Omissions:
1) Range verses size. Very basic issue. The smaller it is, the closer you have to be to it to pick up the signal. For a small passive tag we are talking inches (3-4 feet max). In order to track something from 200 yards (maximum range currently in use), you need an active tag (i.e. with a battery) and it has to be the size of a beer mat. I think you would notice it in your jeans. The signal generator in this case is also a non-trivial device. It is the size on a lamp-post and weights in excuss of 30Kg. Hardly PDA attachment material.
2)Storage area on the device is tiny. For the small passive devices you are referring to the storage area is less than 1Kilobyte.
Not much space for your medical records here.
3)The logic associated with the tyre scenario. The association of the vehicle number and the tyre would not be stored on the tag. There is no space, and Read/Write tags are much more expensive (and larger). Easy to overwrite also. So for your big brother is watching scenario, you would need to replace every lamp-post on every highway with a signal generator, have assess to the database that cross-references your vehicle ID with the tag ids, and be able to monitor all of the signal generators in real-time to see what was happening.
And all this just to find out where you are.
Are you really that important? I think ringing your mobile would be easier.
There is also a problem with reading many tags at once. The current limit is around 200 tags per second for the best sensor. The tag will respond and continue to respond at regular intervals (sub-second usually but dependant on set-up). Because they are all talking at once on the same frequency, the sensor cannot distinguish and ignore tags in real-time. It may recieve many responses from the same tag, and there is no way to tell the tag to shut up. So imagine the situation across a busy highway.
It may be much more than Anime culture. Stick with me here... the Japanese have a 1.3 replacement birth rate right now and a rapidly growing retired population. The government and industry in Japan recognize robotics as a crucial tool to handle a dwindling labor force without resorting to guest workers.
As the geriatric population grows, the burden of caring for them falls to fewer and fewer young people. There are already many instances where Aibos are being put into service as companions for increasingly lonely and isolated older people. As the robots capability increases, they may be able to provide more than just companionship for passing the time. Distributing medicine in nusing homes is one task that comes to mind.
As a culture, the Japanese are growing distant from each other (take the current trend of the parasite children, 20 to 30 somethings who work, live at home with the folks and have no social life). Robot companions, while artificial, provide obligation free friendship when needed.
Ok, so they may be $un's paid representatives (afterall, who pushed through the H1B cap increases in congress afterall?). You can automatically generate a fax or an email
here that will reach all the senators/representatives in your state/district.
This link is union afiliated, which I'm ambivalent about, but it is a way to give ourselves a voice and let the politicians know that we're concerned about America's middle class being gutted.
Note that presidential candidate Gephardt is now talking about going to the WTO to establish worldwide minimum wage requirements. So there are some politicians who seem to be thinking about this.
In addition, colloidal silver also turns your skin a nice healthy bluish-grey color. Look at what its done for
this nice lady and this free thinking politician. We should applaud these folks for not being dupes of the pharmaceutical industry.
An important factor in the emergence of anti-biotic resistant bacterial infections is the rampant overuse of our mainstay anti-biotics by those in the medical community. Several years ago there the media started reporting on this issue when people began to note the prevalance of bacterial infections that didn't respond to conventional treatments. Doctors were found writing anti-biotic prescriptions even when such treatments were contraindicated. One doctor said that patients insisted that they receive anti-biotics and it seems easier to give them rather than put up with the fuss or risk a situation that might lead to a lawsuit.
I don't condone price gouging by the pharmaceutical industry, but if this product is expensive and it prompts doctors to use it as a last resort, then it certainly will forstall the day when natural selection delivers us bacteria that are resistant to it.
I've heard that GM will debut this car at this years Paris Auto Show. According to GM the real driver for development on this car is emerging economies like China. Your typical Chinese farmer lives in a house that's miles and miles off of any electrical grid. With the AUTOnomy platform, he can buy one transport that can serve as Tractor, Truck and power generation for his house when he comes home at night. Pretty cool. Of course, where is a Chinese farmer going to get a reliable source or Hydrogen??
The interview is great for conveying the commitment and enthusiasm Freeman felt for the Orion Project. They really believed that the ship would be build and flown to Mars last century. With NASA's new administrator Sean O'Keefe talking about alternative propulsion systems (including nuclear), who knows maybe Dyson's ideas will actually see the light of day.
Check out www.npr.org for a stream of talk of the nation's interview with Adam Cohen about his book. An interesting point comes when a caller named Rosalinda calls in and relates the dark side of ebay (which includes rigged auctions and shill bidding rings).
I'm not sure that a certification is going to help you. I say that because certifications are not held in high esteem by the people who stand between you and a job. Those people are the recruiters.
Recruiters are one of the grim realities of the evolving job market. Harried IT managers use recruiters because their schedules don't allow for the kind of thorough, enlightened review of resumes that would lead to a bright, yet inexperienced resource being invited for an interview. Recruiters know that they can only submit so many resumes to a manager (usually less than 10) and they want to make sure their chances of getting that 25%-40% of starting salary fee are good. On the flip side, most recruiters know nothing about the "product" they're selling to the hiring managers. So how do they do what they do?
First and foremost, recruiters break out the tried and true acronym filter and run the resume's through it. If the hiring manager says HTML, VB, CICS, JAVA, AIX, MOSIX, and Babbage Engines then the recruiter is going to throw out all resumes but those that satisfy every last one of the requirements.
Second, the recruiter is going to look at experience and sometimes certifications. Project experience, especially full-lifecycle stuff) is critical to getting past the recruiter to the hiring manager. Certifications are nice for people with experience, but if you have none, they're worthless.
I've found that the trick is to be very agressive about tailoring my resume to the job postings I see. I over 10 years industry experience so I generally can dig up enough relevant experience, that when massaged the right way, turn me into an ideal candidate.
Beyond that, you've got to call people. Talking to hiring managers (and I don't know how you get their numbers, you'll have to work on that yourself) is the best way to improve your odds. One in 40 might turn out for you, so prepare yourself for some serious rejection. But stick with it, and as long as the economy doesn't nose dive when Dick Cheney's predicitions of [9/11]^2 come to fruition, you may just find yourself employed.
You're right, I have the AIW 8500 DV and it does come with firewire. You should note that although ATI doesn't state it in any of their advertising, their drivers only support DirectShow and not Video For Windows. This might be an issue for those of you looking to use this card for video conferencing.
I attended a small business focused school near Boston about 10 years ago and took a number of their CIS classes (algorithms, data structures, structured analysis, etc).
I feel that one of the best tactics used by the professor was to create a project assignment that lasted the entire semester. We would start out with by writing a basic application framework (say an online catalog) and extend or modify its modules (replacing the data storage mechanism for instance). Students who didn't abstract their code enough via implementing flexible interfaces would end up spending inordinate amounts of time rewriting their applications to accommodate the requirements of each new project unit.
The project forced us to live with a body of code for an extended period of time and made us realize that shortcuts or sloppy coding practices would eventually hurt us. We were all forced to think about our code as an evolving work that we would be reusing and extending. For those who embraced the idea (and in doing so succeeded) it was great training for becoming professional programmers.
Now, after 10 years in the software industry, I've become a v.p. of software development and spend a lot of time reviewing candidates. I always ask the recent college graduates about the structure of their programming classes. The vast majority has only experienced one off assignments, where they write code, submit it for grading and never deal with it again. In many cases, it shows in the quality of their work. It takes a lot of time to retrain these folks so that they write code that not only solves the problem at hand, but is open and clean enough so that it can adapt (or be adapted) to the ever changing requirements of our customers.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall Norm Macdonald's roast of Clinton years ago. It happened around the whole Lewinsky affair and as I recall Norm made quite a few brutal cuts at Clinton. At one point, Macdonald cringed a little and asked the audience, "Is he laughing?"
Guessing about you? I have no idea what that means.
So your point is, its a big bad world, get over it. Fine. My point is that organizations need to start looking beyond profit and start seeing their impact on the world. Turning a blind eye to the environmental and human rights abuses in China to make a quick buck does not a better world make. The need to recognize that they need to invest back in the communities that allowed them to flurish. Could IBM have come up in the horribly corrupt, bribery driven Indian business environment? Could IBM have been so dynamic in the state controlled industrial complex of communist China? In a word, no.
In total does IBM actually owe the US anything? You're right it doesn't. It shouldn't expect anything either. The government uses our tax money to fund research that often ends up growing into the inventions that make corporations rich. From now on, we ought to be sure that the tax payer's investment in fundamental research shows us some dividneds, maybe through taking a direct percentage of the gross on any sales of products using that technology. Clearly, in the new world model those investments aren't going to pay off in the form of jobs. And to be honest, I don't give a fuck about the benefit of a cheap Chinese electronic product as a return for all that outsourcing. Give me a real cash return on my investment via taxes in the technologies that we're just giving away today.
I think TFA said he was using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0.
So just where are these updates being issued? Is it for current employees only?
This is the same thing that Frank Zappa was doing over ten years ago with the Synclavier- writing music beyond the capability of human musicians with the intent of having the Synclavier perform it.
In this case the performance is being done on a MIDI enabled pipe organ instead of a synthesizer. Is it any surprise that a computer could fire MIDI signals to the pipes better than 10 fingers and two feet working away at a console? I guess I'm still not impressed.
A friend of mine is a pretty successful pipe organ restorer and he says that for well over a decade modern pipe organs have been set up with MIDI interfaces from the consoles to the actuators that actually control the pipes. Many restoration projects on older pipe organs involve replacing older mechanical or electric consoles with MIDI. So, as far as I can tell, it sounds like there's nothing special going on with this organ. The guy has just replaced the console with a laptop as the MIDI input device.
As you know, nature abhors a vacuum...
My last customer (for a variety of reasons) was concurrently supporting iPlanet, Tomcat and JRun and wanted to be sure that their users could log into the central intranet site once and then have their credentials forwared securely to the rest of their web based applications. We did something custom but a open standard that was built into a J2EE compliant application container would have been a very nice thing.
It may be much more than Anime culture. Stick with me here... the Japanese have a 1.3 replacement birth rate right now and a rapidly growing retired population. The government and industry in Japan recognize robotics as a crucial tool to handle a dwindling labor force without resorting to guest workers.
As the geriatric population grows, the burden of caring for them falls to fewer and fewer young people. There are already many instances where Aibos are being put into service as companions for increasingly lonely and isolated older people. As the robots capability increases, they may be able to provide more than just companionship for passing the time. Distributing medicine in nusing homes is one task that comes to mind.
As a culture, the Japanese are growing distant from each other (take the current trend of the parasite children, 20 to 30 somethings who work, live at home with the folks and have no social life). Robot companions, while artificial, provide obligation free friendship when needed.
This link is union afiliated, which I'm ambivalent about, but it is a way to give ourselves a voice and let the politicians know that we're concerned about America's middle class being gutted.
Note that presidential candidate Gephardt is now talking about going to the WTO to establish worldwide minimum wage requirements. So there are some politicians who seem to be thinking about this.
In addition, colloidal silver also turns your skin a nice healthy bluish-grey color. Look at what its done for this nice lady and this free thinking politician. We should applaud these folks for not being dupes of the pharmaceutical industry.
I don't condone price gouging by the pharmaceutical industry, but if this product is expensive and it prompts doctors to use it as a last resort, then it certainly will forstall the day when natural selection delivers us bacteria that are resistant to it.
Interesting, this article says that the second these boxes will run on Linux.
Is it just me or does the GNU/HURD icon bear a startling resemblance to South Park's Mr. Hanky?
I've heard that GM will debut this car at this years Paris Auto Show. According to GM the real driver for development on this car is emerging economies like China. Your typical Chinese farmer lives in a house that's miles and miles off of any electrical grid. With the AUTOnomy platform, he can buy one transport that can serve as Tractor, Truck and power generation for his house when he comes home at night. Pretty cool. Of course, where is a Chinese farmer going to get a reliable source or Hydrogen??
http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/segment_display.cfm?s egID=145345
The interview is great for conveying the commitment and enthusiasm Freeman felt for the Orion Project. They really believed that the ship would be build and flown to Mars last century. With NASA's new administrator Sean O'Keefe talking about alternative propulsion systems (including nuclear), who knows maybe Dyson's ideas will actually see the light of day.
Check out www.npr.org for a stream of talk of the nation's interview with Adam Cohen about his book. An interesting point comes when a caller named Rosalinda calls in and relates the dark side of ebay (which includes rigged auctions and shill bidding rings).
Recruiters are one of the grim realities of the evolving job market. Harried IT managers use recruiters because their schedules don't allow for the kind of thorough, enlightened review of resumes that would lead to a bright, yet inexperienced resource being invited for an interview. Recruiters know that they can only submit so many resumes to a manager (usually less than 10) and they want to make sure their chances of getting that 25%-40% of starting salary fee are good. On the flip side, most recruiters know nothing about the "product" they're selling to the hiring managers. So how do they do what they do?
First and foremost, recruiters break out the tried and true acronym filter and run the resume's through it. If the hiring manager says HTML, VB, CICS, JAVA, AIX, MOSIX, and Babbage Engines then the recruiter is going to throw out all resumes but those that satisfy every last one of the requirements.
Second, the recruiter is going to look at experience and sometimes certifications. Project experience, especially full-lifecycle stuff) is critical to getting past the recruiter to the hiring manager. Certifications are nice for people with experience, but if you have none, they're worthless.
I've found that the trick is to be very agressive about tailoring my resume to the job postings I see. I over 10 years industry experience so I generally can dig up enough relevant experience, that when massaged the right way, turn me into an ideal candidate.
Beyond that, you've got to call people. Talking to hiring managers (and I don't know how you get their numbers, you'll have to work on that yourself) is the best way to improve your odds. One in 40 might turn out for you, so prepare yourself for some serious rejection. But stick with it, and as long as the economy doesn't nose dive when Dick Cheney's predicitions of [9/11]^2 come to fruition, you may just find yourself employed.
You're right, I have the AIW 8500 DV and it does come with firewire. You should note that although ATI doesn't state it in any of their advertising, their drivers only support DirectShow and not Video For Windows. This might be an issue for those of you looking to use this card for video conferencing.
I feel that one of the best tactics used by the professor was to create a project assignment that lasted the entire semester. We would start out with by writing a basic application framework (say an online catalog) and extend or modify its modules (replacing the data storage mechanism for instance). Students who didn't abstract their code enough via implementing flexible interfaces would end up spending inordinate amounts of time rewriting their applications to accommodate the requirements of each new project unit.
The project forced us to live with a body of code for an extended period of time and made us realize that shortcuts or sloppy coding practices would eventually hurt us. We were all forced to think about our code as an evolving work that we would be reusing and extending. For those who embraced the idea (and in doing so succeeded) it was great training for becoming professional programmers.
Now, after 10 years in the software industry, I've become a v.p. of software development and spend a lot of time reviewing candidates. I always ask the recent college graduates about the structure of their programming classes. The vast majority has only experienced one off assignments, where they write code, submit it for grading and never deal with it again. In many cases, it shows in the quality of their work. It takes a lot of time to retrain these folks so that they write code that not only solves the problem at hand, but is open and clean enough so that it can adapt (or be adapted) to the ever changing requirements of our customers.