you don't know the definition of commodity a lot of software is "commodity" anymore, and its not the total production cost but marginal cost that matters in commodity markets, and software does have a very near zero marginal cost of production.
2.5 years on a mac now, at first there was a bit of a learning curve, but since I develop web services and web applications that run on Unix servers (Solaris and Linux), well... it just makes complete sense to have a Unix OS as my dev machine.
I think a lot of devs are moving to this sort of platform (IE web services/web apps over traditional desktop client apps) and that could explain a lot of the shift, OS X is by far the nicest Unix desktop there is.
Of course, the fact that I don't even remember how to repair the TCP/IP stack in windows is nice too:) Or edit the registry... well lets just say, I do basically zero stupid day to day IT admin on my dev machines now, whereas I used to reload windows at least every 3-4 months to get a stable machine again after registry tweaks, multiple installs of various software stepping on each other, etc... My mac, (surprisingly even to me) seems immune to the crazy amount of software I install/uninstall/install again... only 1 reload over 2.5 years for each machine, and that was for the 10.4-10.5 upgrade
yeah, and we'd have 0 open source software, and a lot less software in general, and it would be massively expensive.
If MS was liable for damages when someone hacks their systems... well, lets just say code red would have put even MS out of business, I'm sure that nastly little worm cause at least 20-30 billion in damages. Certainly companies would argue that it did.
not necessarily... My colo recently had a major power outage which because of the nature of the outage (a brownout, then a complete drop) fooled the generator into turning on while the power was still on (during the brownout), then because the power was still on the generator shut itself down, and put itself in a state which required manual intervention to start up.. so when the power actually failed about 2 minutes later, the whole datacenter went down (after the 2-5 minutes of battery ran out)...
Anyway it was a major outage, but they sent a detailed email of what happened about 2 hours after the incident, once they had manually reset things and restored power and AC to the datacenter floor (the power outage lasted 2 days). Then, within another 4-6 hours, sent a detailed email specifying exactly what changes they were making to their power infrastructure to mitigate the problem in the future. These changes took more than a month to implement involving work from the power company, the generator company, and various electrical contractors. I received 1-2 emails per week detailing progress of the work, exactly what state everything was in, and estimated completion dates for everything.
I guess my point is, no, these aren't short term fixes and I get notification prior to the fix being implemented if it is a major issue.
My ISP is equally forthcoming about issues which cause outages on their network. Sure if its a small thing that they've already fixed, I'll get the notification after the fix, but for large issues, or issues which require ongoing work to actually remedy, I am kept in the loop as the situation is ongoing.
Seems to me going without security updates for 2-3 weeks would classify as a major outage. Further, if redhat has identified the attack vector, they should release it, as millions of other redhat servers are probably vulnerable to the same attack, and customers need to know so they can mitigate their exposure.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I switched because of this, although upon re-reading my original post, I agree it reads that way....
I started switching after Fedora 3, which was such a colossal flop, and caused me way too many headaches... I moved most systems to centos at that time, then, since Ubuntu has released their server product, I've been using it and migrating systems from centos...
I unfortunately don't work for a 500 mil/yr company, and so can't afford 1500-2500/yr/server for security updates. I worked for 1 company that had the resources for RHEL licenses, and we never in 2 years called support, nor used anything but RHN for security updates... No way can I justify that expense for security updates to my current employer... Our systems run enough virtualized instances, and have enough processor sockets to require the Advanced Platform licenses which start at 1500/yr/server...
The problem is that they are eating their own dogfood. If they were to disclose the method of attack, they would be protecting all of their customers, as their customers could take steps to prevent the same attack from succeeding against them. As it is, they are just leaving all of their customers open to a known hole.
Further, the fact that they have been so mum about the attack leaves people with 0 ability to mitigate any damage that may have been done. They admit that the attacker was able to sign modified SSH packages and distribute them. Fedora says the attacker was not able to sign any packages because they didn't have the passphrase and couldn't hack it.... So does RedHat not have a passphrase on their signing key? Do they keep it in plaintext on the signing server? Was theirs just really easy to guess? Point being, it looks to me like RedHat seriously dropped the security ball. They ought to admit it, and move on.
I used to be 100% redhat and fedora... Now I've moved almost all my systems to ubuntu, but I still run centos on a few servers.
Every reputable tech company I deal with (ISP, Software, Hosting, Colo) has very clear, very open policies about outages, breaches, and security in general. If they don't I don't do business with them.
I know the ins and outs of my ISP, Hosting, and Colo companies processes because I get emailed whenever I have an outage that says "we experienced an outage from x-y on day z, the outage was caused by our dumb admin who tripped on the power cable, we rewired our entire data center to move all of the power cables to the ceiling to prevent a similar outage in the future".
Obviously that is a made up report, but it is extremely standard practice to let all your customers know a) when the problem happened, b) what caused the problem, c) concrete steps taken or procedures implemented to prevent similar problems in the future
That RedHat has fallen so miserably short of this basic tenet of IT procedures is extremely scary.
So... I suppose I've been mis-using SSL all along, but, I secure the login with ssl, after that, the information inside my sites isn't particularly sensitive in any way, I just protect the username/password on the wire for all those people that have 1 username and 1 password for everything...
I assume to protect against this vuln every page behind the login has to be 100% SSL secured so that you can keep sending the sessionid cookie? If so, that means I get to buy twice as many servers for my 2 little web apps (that already have 5 servers dedicated to them) to support all that SSL traffic? It's not like I'm making much money off these things, maybe 3-400 in ads a month. Am I understanding correctly?
you're funny... you do realize we exhale CO2 as well? Giving Carbon Dioxide, an element our bodies produce in abundance, and which plants depend on for existence, a bad name is not helping anyone either.
A community that produces Zero CO2 by definition cannot contain any people, or other animals that inhale oxygen and exhale CO2.
Happen to check the "results" pages of any major news organization while you were watching that "live" broadcast? I did, and although the word "LIVE" was plastered all over, and the commentators kept stating the broadcast was "LIVE", the results of all of the events were already available.
I don't think any of this is being broadcast live.
Also, it is very strange. I just saw an interview with Phelps who was talking about an upcoming event and stated "I'm just trying to make sure I'm prepared for the relay tomorrow morning, I mean evening". That is just idiotic to make the athletes try to advertise the broadcaster's schedule for them. They have enough on their minds, and enough to do they don't need to constantly be checking in to know "when are you actually broadcasting my event".
You're being a little naive there... I'm sure most if not all of the nuclear power plants in the US are connected to the net, I'm 100% confident that operation of those plants is handled by computers.
Manage to hack into a couple of those, and, I dunno... turn off the cooling pumps. Bye Bye! to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention years of cleanup, high disease rates, etc.
Sure they have fail safes, and maybe it wouldn't work, but even the threat of that, if a power company came out and said "we had to perform an emergency shutdown of the reactor because XYZ terrorist group hacked in and shut down the cooling systems", even if no one was hurt or actually died, the threat alone would be enough to get Joe Public to outlaw the internet, or in some other way seriously degrade the network, and the Gov't would be all too willing to go along.
Only problem with your statement is that making laws is the ONLY TOOL CONGRESS HAS to try to fix anything.
The only action that congress has the power to take is to make new laws. So by definition if they are going to fix anything, it will be through the passage of new laws.
I doubt it would immediately invalidate existing patents, however, it would certainly open the door to A LOT of patent challenges, and certainly greatly reduce the value of people's patent portfolios. If you implement page rank, and Google sues you, you have a clear cut defense now it appears. In your case you can argue that page rank is not patentable material, and it appears you would win based on these recent decisions.
It would certainly take the bite out of the patent trolls, as soon as they sue, their patents would be invalidated by this rule, and they'd lose.
In short, I don't think it would invalidate any patents immediately, but it would greatly reduce the ability of companies to leverage their software patent portfolios against competitors (think Microsoft's patent threats against Linux...)
While I agree parents are extremely important, and my own have had a profound influence on my life, I will have to disagree just a little with being willing to stretch to understand.
My dad, while brilliant, also, is an extremely poor teacher. In high school I was generally very good at math and science compared to my peers, but when I would get stuck on hard problems, I dreaded working with my dad on them. He could look at the hardest problem in my high school calculus book and solve it without writing down a single thing. He had a very hard time stepping back and walking through his thought process, and it made math extremely frustrating for me. Instead of getting me more interested it really turned me off.
Again this isn't to say I don't love my dad, or appreciate time spent with him, but I would much rather go sailing, skiing, talk about investing, or just about anything else besides work on math problems with him. It seems this could be a similar situation, a veteran kernel hacker with poor teaching skills could really turn off someone to programming because their insights, ability to see through problems and solve them without needing to express what their brain is actually doing can be extremely detrimental to the learning process and therefore ongoing interest in a subject.
maybe you're just in the wrong market segment, or you're not really very talented... Talented, qualified, skilled IT workers are in extreme demand.
I've been working in IT my entire career (15 years now), and I feel like the last 3-4 have been better than any previous time (except of course the crazyness of the late 90's but no one thought that could really last). I've only seen increased demand, increased wages, and decreased competition in the last 2-3 years especially. I've been in my current job for 1.5 years, I've gotten 10-20% raises every 6 months because some head hunter calls, I interview for a position, they offer me more money than I'm making now, I take the offer to my current boss, and they match it.
If replacing me was so easy, why don't my current employers do it? If its so easy to hire an Indian to take my place why do I keep getting higher and higher offers, 6 months of experience certainly shouldn't equate to a 20k/yr raise...
I really have felt a huge reversal in outsourcing, at least in my market here in the good ole us of a. Many many companies have brought dev teams back from India because of a) communication barriers, b) low retention rates/high retraining costs, c) poor quality of work, d) logistical nightmares, and e) low morale for the few staffers they kept on to manage the outsourced devs, and f) not realizing the cost savings actually promised.
India is running 10-15% inflation, so is China, so is most of the old eastern block, and most of south east asia.. the exceptions are running much higher inflation than that... If you think that inflation isn't going to reflect in outsourcing costs you're crazy. Even at our "extremely high" rate of 5%, every year that Indian developer gets more and more expensive compared to a US based one. Besides with the weak dollar, Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan might start finding it cheaper to hire american devs than Indian ones... There are benefits to having a weak currency.
I really don't think the article is saying "we should do intranets like web 2.0 websites! and have all user generated content!"
They are simply saying, Instead of say having an internal software dev project, and having a huge design timeframe, huge development time frame, and then 3 months for test/fix/ship, the project should be built incrementally, using the same techniques as a lot of web 2.0 startups use...
release early, release often, work with the users, incorporating their feedback quickly into the project. Instead of doing 1-2 years of design, 1 year of dev, then releasing a beta that no one can use, solves no ones problems, and in general was a complete waste.
Instead, start prototyping early, releasing things to users or a group of users, and building the software iteratively with them instead of saying "this is what we built, learn how to use it" say "help us build this so it solves your problems in the best way possible"
good job quoting the doctored numbers... I love you envirobunnies.
someone outside nasa proved that that graph is invalid because of a computer error, after the error is taken out, the large spike at the end nearly completely disappears.
I don't have a link, but I know I read about it, and NASA was revising those numbers
Its economics, when you are first starting out down the path towards industrialization from third world status, you don't have capital to invest to build the latest greatest greenest factories, you can't afford to spend an extra order of magnitude to build all your power production from solar and wind. You use the cheapest thing you've got (IE coal), and you get up and going.
Same thing for the factories, for transportation, for all your infrastructure. Now, once you get up and running, and you are making money, now you have capital to invest to clean things up. It is simply economically untenable to go from pre-industrialized to industrialized in a green way.
I've done the same analysis of solar... where I live power is still only $.07/kwh. Given a megawatt of power coming off this thing, that would be $70 retail per hour...
Solar at ~200w/$1000 panel and only providing power 8-10 hours/day comes out looking much worse. The wave generator would get you ~24000kwh/day or $1680/day retail. The solar panel gets you generously speaking about 2kwh/day. So you can make a whopping $.14/day on your $1000 investment (not including installation or maint.)
Assuming zero maint. and zero install cost (obviously not the case), that is 7143 days to recoup your investment, a little over 19.5 years.
If you apply the same economics to this wave generator, it could cost 12 million+ and still be just as cost effective as solar.
I strongly question your "average" of 7200kwh/month for the average american. My family of 3 (so.. by your math we should be using 21600kwh/mo?) uses about 900kwh/mo during the peak summer months of july and august. Most of the year we use 3-400kwh/mo. We live in a regular american home, 2500sq ft, central ac, fridge, water heater, the whole shebang. Watch TV whenever we want on 1 or 2 42" plus TVs.
In short, we are not energy conservationists by any stretch. Sure we have CFLs in all our light sockets... and that dropped our usage by about 10%/mo... By far our largest draw is the AC. Oh yeah did I mention we have 8 computers in the house... they aren't always on, but 2 of them usually are at least.
I guess maybe with car+nat gas+energy drawn at work+every other energy use maybe we use 7200kwh/month...
I think there are a lot bigger problems facing the planet than global warming. I would like to see an unbiased study of the various alternatives for dealing with global warming.
There are a few things that don't quite add up with the whole "global warming will ruin everyone's life" theory. 1) we KNOW for a FACT that it was warmer in the 1200-1400 years than it is today. They grew grapes and made wine on the British Isles then. We're still at least 5 degrees C from being able to do that today. 2) During that previous warm period europe did really really really well. The previous warm period increased crop yields enough that people could actually work in the arts and sciences. They didn't have to spend 100% of their time subsistence farming. If it gets warmer again, why is that suddenly going to kill millions when we have verifiable, historical evidence to the contrary? 3) CO2 is not nearly as potent a greenhouse gas as H2O or methane. It accounts for a tiny fraction of the atmosphere. In short, marginally speaking, increased CO2 levels will have a very small effect on temperature compared to a similar increase in H20 or methane. Why aren't we regulating those gasses? 4) There is verifiable proof that CO2 levels have been much higher in the planet's past. These elevated levels of CO2 did not prevent ice ages... so, why are billions of years of geologic history being ignored? 5) Does everyone on this planet like to live in cold weather? Personally I prefer summer, and warm weather.
Anyway, what I would like to see is an unbiased study of the costs of dealing with climate change by adaptation rather than wholesale destruction of the world economy. Lets face it, if we were to say "after next year no more CO2 emissions" millions (if not a couple billion) of people would die within a month or 2 of that decision by starvation. The only thing that I can see that will be "devastating" if the temperature increases 5C would be the sea level rise making a lot of really nice, really expensive real estate go underwater. However, its not like that is going to happen overnight, its not like its going to drown anyone. The sea may rise 2-3 centimeters a year for the next 150-200 years... well... if you can't get away from water advancing that fast I'm sorry but Darwin award for you.
Yes the governments of the world would probably need to set aside a fund to purchase the real estate from people at some sort of market rate, but I would be willing to bet that that is cheaper than re-working the entire economy.
Sure gas is getting expensive, and, in saying all this, I am not trying to say "lets just keep burning oil". I'm all for alternative energy sources, I just think global warming is a hideously weak argument to use when trying to get people to make massive life changes. I'd much prefer "lets use solar, wind, and whatever else we can because then we aren't paying people billions of dollars a day so they can buy our weapons systems and then use them against us". At this point we are funding both sides of 2 wars, and until we establish energy independence, we will always be slaves to Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, et al. This situation is stupid, and we should remedy it. I also think you green people out there would get a lot more traction and a lot more willingness to sacrifice from people in general if you used this argument instead of "sometime 100 years from now maybe things might be worse off based on this computer model we ran". Energy independence is a virtue unto itself, just like any other self-reliance people may establish. Promoting the use of alternative energy as a responsible and self reliant strategy is much more compelling to me.
you are an uninformed idiot. Without Carter's ban on reprocessing there would be NO NUCLEAR WASTE. We had the technology then, we have it now. This is how European countries generate tons and tons of nuclear power without the waste problem.
this argument is specious. France gets more than 50% of their power from nuclear plants, yet they are one of the strongest voices against Iran building plants.
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you don't know the definition of commodity a lot of software is "commodity" anymore, and its not the total production cost but marginal cost that matters in commodity markets, and software does have a very near zero marginal cost of production.
2.5 years on a mac now, at first there was a bit of a learning curve, but since I develop web services and web applications that run on Unix servers (Solaris and Linux), well... it just makes complete sense to have a Unix OS as my dev machine.
I think a lot of devs are moving to this sort of platform (IE web services/web apps over traditional desktop client apps) and that could explain a lot of the shift, OS X is by far the nicest Unix desktop there is.
Of course, the fact that I don't even remember how to repair the TCP/IP stack in windows is nice too :) Or edit the registry... well lets just say, I do basically zero stupid day to day IT admin on my dev machines now, whereas I used to reload windows at least every 3-4 months to get a stable machine again after registry tweaks, multiple installs of various software stepping on each other, etc... My mac, (surprisingly even to me) seems immune to the crazy amount of software I install/uninstall/install again... only 1 reload over 2.5 years for each machine, and that was for the 10.4-10.5 upgrade
yeah, and we'd have 0 open source software, and a lot less software in general, and it would be massively expensive.
If MS was liable for damages when someone hacks their systems... well, lets just say code red would have put even MS out of business, I'm sure that nastly little worm cause at least 20-30 billion in damages. Certainly companies would argue that it did.
I have 3 web and 2 db... I guess I could pull one of those web and dedicate it to ssl...
Anyway, I'll give it a go and see what happens.
not necessarily... My colo recently had a major power outage which because of the nature of the outage (a brownout, then a complete drop) fooled the generator into turning on while the power was still on (during the brownout), then because the power was still on the generator shut itself down, and put itself in a state which required manual intervention to start up.. so when the power actually failed about 2 minutes later, the whole datacenter went down (after the 2-5 minutes of battery ran out)...
Anyway it was a major outage, but they sent a detailed email of what happened about 2 hours after the incident, once they had manually reset things and restored power and AC to the datacenter floor (the power outage lasted 2 days). Then, within another 4-6 hours, sent a detailed email specifying exactly what changes they were making to their power infrastructure to mitigate the problem in the future. These changes took more than a month to implement involving work from the power company, the generator company, and various electrical contractors. I received 1-2 emails per week detailing progress of the work, exactly what state everything was in, and estimated completion dates for everything.
I guess my point is, no, these aren't short term fixes and I get notification prior to the fix being implemented if it is a major issue.
My ISP is equally forthcoming about issues which cause outages on their network. Sure if its a small thing that they've already fixed, I'll get the notification after the fix, but for large issues, or issues which require ongoing work to actually remedy, I am kept in the loop as the situation is ongoing.
Seems to me going without security updates for 2-3 weeks would classify as a major outage. Further, if redhat has identified the attack vector, they should release it, as millions of other redhat servers are probably vulnerable to the same attack, and customers need to know so they can mitigate their exposure.
Sorry,
I didn't mean to imply that I switched because of this, although upon re-reading my original post, I agree it reads that way....
I started switching after Fedora 3, which was such a colossal flop, and caused me way too many headaches... I moved most systems to centos at that time, then, since Ubuntu has released their server product, I've been using it and migrating systems from centos...
I unfortunately don't work for a 500 mil/yr company, and so can't afford 1500-2500/yr/server for security updates. I worked for 1 company that had the resources for RHEL licenses, and we never in 2 years called support, nor used anything but RHN for security updates... No way can I justify that expense for security updates to my current employer... Our systems run enough virtualized instances, and have enough processor sockets to require the Advanced Platform licenses which start at 1500/yr/server...
The problem is that they are eating their own dogfood. If they were to disclose the method of attack, they would be protecting all of their customers, as their customers could take steps to prevent the same attack from succeeding against them. As it is, they are just leaving all of their customers open to a known hole.
Further, the fact that they have been so mum about the attack leaves people with 0 ability to mitigate any damage that may have been done. They admit that the attacker was able to sign modified SSH packages and distribute them. Fedora says the attacker was not able to sign any packages because they didn't have the passphrase and couldn't hack it.... So does RedHat not have a passphrase on their signing key? Do they keep it in plaintext on the signing server? Was theirs just really easy to guess? Point being, it looks to me like RedHat seriously dropped the security ball. They ought to admit it, and move on.
I used to be 100% redhat and fedora... Now I've moved almost all my systems to ubuntu, but I still run centos on a few servers.
Every reputable tech company I deal with (ISP, Software, Hosting, Colo) has very clear, very open policies about outages, breaches, and security in general. If they don't I don't do business with them.
I know the ins and outs of my ISP, Hosting, and Colo companies processes because I get emailed whenever I have an outage that says "we experienced an outage from x-y on day z, the outage was caused by our dumb admin who tripped on the power cable, we rewired our entire data center to move all of the power cables to the ceiling to prevent a similar outage in the future".
Obviously that is a made up report, but it is extremely standard practice to let all your customers know a) when the problem happened, b) what caused the problem, c) concrete steps taken or procedures implemented to prevent similar problems in the future
That RedHat has fallen so miserably short of this basic tenet of IT procedures is extremely scary.
So... I suppose I've been mis-using SSL all along, but, I secure the login with ssl, after that, the information inside my sites isn't particularly sensitive in any way, I just protect the username/password on the wire for all those people that have 1 username and 1 password for everything...
I assume to protect against this vuln every page behind the login has to be 100% SSL secured so that you can keep sending the sessionid cookie? If so, that means I get to buy twice as many servers for my 2 little web apps (that already have 5 servers dedicated to them) to support all that SSL traffic? It's not like I'm making much money off these things, maybe 3-400 in ads a month. Am I understanding correctly?
you're funny... you do realize we exhale CO2 as well? Giving Carbon Dioxide, an element our bodies produce in abundance, and which plants depend on for existence, a bad name is not helping anyone either.
A community that produces Zero CO2 by definition cannot contain any people, or other animals that inhale oxygen and exhale CO2.
Happen to check the "results" pages of any major news organization while you were watching that "live" broadcast? I did, and although the word "LIVE" was plastered all over, and the commentators kept stating the broadcast was "LIVE", the results of all of the events were already available.
I don't think any of this is being broadcast live.
Also, it is very strange. I just saw an interview with Phelps who was talking about an upcoming event and stated "I'm just trying to make sure I'm prepared for the relay tomorrow morning, I mean evening". That is just idiotic to make the athletes try to advertise the broadcaster's schedule for them. They have enough on their minds, and enough to do they don't need to constantly be checking in to know "when are you actually broadcasting my event".
You're being a little naive there... I'm sure most if not all of the nuclear power plants in the US are connected to the net, I'm 100% confident that operation of those plants is handled by computers.
Manage to hack into a couple of those, and, I dunno... turn off the cooling pumps. Bye Bye! to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention years of cleanup, high disease rates, etc.
Sure they have fail safes, and maybe it wouldn't work, but even the threat of that, if a power company came out and said "we had to perform an emergency shutdown of the reactor because XYZ terrorist group hacked in and shut down the cooling systems", even if no one was hurt or actually died, the threat alone would be enough to get Joe Public to outlaw the internet, or in some other way seriously degrade the network, and the Gov't would be all too willing to go along.
Only problem with your statement is that making laws is the ONLY TOOL CONGRESS HAS to try to fix anything.
The only action that congress has the power to take is to make new laws. So by definition if they are going to fix anything, it will be through the passage of new laws.
I doubt it would immediately invalidate existing patents, however, it would certainly open the door to A LOT of patent challenges, and certainly greatly reduce the value of people's patent portfolios. If you implement page rank, and Google sues you, you have a clear cut defense now it appears. In your case you can argue that page rank is not patentable material, and it appears you would win based on these recent decisions.
It would certainly take the bite out of the patent trolls, as soon as they sue, their patents would be invalidated by this rule, and they'd lose.
In short, I don't think it would invalidate any patents immediately, but it would greatly reduce the ability of companies to leverage their software patent portfolios against competitors (think Microsoft's patent threats against Linux...)
While I agree parents are extremely important, and my own have had a profound influence on my life, I will have to disagree just a little with being willing to stretch to understand.
My dad, while brilliant, also, is an extremely poor teacher. In high school I was generally very good at math and science compared to my peers, but when I would get stuck on hard problems, I dreaded working with my dad on them. He could look at the hardest problem in my high school calculus book and solve it without writing down a single thing. He had a very hard time stepping back and walking through his thought process, and it made math extremely frustrating for me. Instead of getting me more interested it really turned me off.
Again this isn't to say I don't love my dad, or appreciate time spent with him, but I would much rather go sailing, skiing, talk about investing, or just about anything else besides work on math problems with him. It seems this could be a similar situation, a veteran kernel hacker with poor teaching skills could really turn off someone to programming because their insights, ability to see through problems and solve them without needing to express what their brain is actually doing can be extremely detrimental to the learning process and therefore ongoing interest in a subject.
maybe you're just in the wrong market segment, or you're not really very talented... Talented, qualified, skilled IT workers are in extreme demand.
I've been working in IT my entire career (15 years now), and I feel like the last 3-4 have been better than any previous time (except of course the crazyness of the late 90's but no one thought that could really last). I've only seen increased demand, increased wages, and decreased competition in the last 2-3 years especially. I've been in my current job for 1.5 years, I've gotten 10-20% raises every 6 months because some head hunter calls, I interview for a position, they offer me more money than I'm making now, I take the offer to my current boss, and they match it.
If replacing me was so easy, why don't my current employers do it? If its so easy to hire an Indian to take my place why do I keep getting higher and higher offers, 6 months of experience certainly shouldn't equate to a 20k/yr raise...
I really have felt a huge reversal in outsourcing, at least in my market here in the good ole us of a. Many many companies have brought dev teams back from India because of a) communication barriers, b) low retention rates/high retraining costs, c) poor quality of work, d) logistical nightmares, and e) low morale for the few staffers they kept on to manage the outsourced devs, and f) not realizing the cost savings actually promised.
India is running 10-15% inflation, so is China, so is most of the old eastern block, and most of south east asia.. the exceptions are running much higher inflation than that... If you think that inflation isn't going to reflect in outsourcing costs you're crazy. Even at our "extremely high" rate of 5%, every year that Indian developer gets more and more expensive compared to a US based one. Besides with the weak dollar, Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan might start finding it cheaper to hire american devs than Indian ones... There are benefits to having a weak currency.
I really don't think the article is saying "we should do intranets like web 2.0 websites! and have all user generated content!"
They are simply saying, Instead of say having an internal software dev project, and having a huge design timeframe, huge development time frame, and then 3 months for test/fix/ship, the project should be built incrementally, using the same techniques as a lot of web 2.0 startups use...
release early, release often, work with the users, incorporating their feedback quickly into the project. Instead of doing 1-2 years of design, 1 year of dev, then releasing a beta that no one can use, solves no ones problems, and in general was a complete waste.
Instead, start prototyping early, releasing things to users or a group of users, and building the software iteratively with them instead of saying "this is what we built, learn how to use it" say "help us build this so it solves your problems in the best way possible"
good job quoting the doctored numbers... I love you envirobunnies.
someone outside nasa proved that that graph is invalid because of a computer error, after the error is taken out, the large spike at the end nearly completely disappears.
I don't have a link, but I know I read about it, and NASA was revising those numbers
That's not exactly how it works...
Its economics, when you are first starting out down the path towards industrialization from third world status, you don't have capital to invest to build the latest greatest greenest factories, you can't afford to spend an extra order of magnitude to build all your power production from solar and wind. You use the cheapest thing you've got (IE coal), and you get up and going.
Same thing for the factories, for transportation, for all your infrastructure. Now, once you get up and running, and you are making money, now you have capital to invest to clean things up. It is simply economically untenable to go from pre-industrialized to industrialized in a green way.
I've done the same analysis of solar... where I live power is still only $.07/kwh. Given a megawatt of power coming off this thing, that would be $70 retail per hour...
Solar at ~200w/$1000 panel and only providing power 8-10 hours/day comes out looking much worse. The wave generator would get you ~24000kwh/day or $1680/day retail. The solar panel gets you generously speaking about 2kwh/day. So you can make a whopping $.14/day on your $1000 investment (not including installation or maint.)
Assuming zero maint. and zero install cost (obviously not the case), that is 7143 days to recoup your investment, a little over 19.5 years.
If you apply the same economics to this wave generator, it could cost 12 million+ and still be just as cost effective as solar.
I strongly question your "average" of 7200kwh/month for the average american. My family of 3 (so.. by your math we should be using 21600kwh/mo?) uses about 900kwh/mo during the peak summer months of july and august. Most of the year we use 3-400kwh/mo. We live in a regular american home, 2500sq ft, central ac, fridge, water heater, the whole shebang. Watch TV whenever we want on 1 or 2 42" plus TVs.
In short, we are not energy conservationists by any stretch. Sure we have CFLs in all our light sockets... and that dropped our usage by about 10%/mo... By far our largest draw is the AC. Oh yeah did I mention we have 8 computers in the house... they aren't always on, but 2 of them usually are at least.
I guess maybe with car+nat gas+energy drawn at work+every other energy use maybe we use 7200kwh/month...
I think there are a lot bigger problems facing the planet than global warming. I would like to see an unbiased study of the various alternatives for dealing with global warming.
There are a few things that don't quite add up with the whole "global warming will ruin everyone's life" theory.
1) we KNOW for a FACT that it was warmer in the 1200-1400 years than it is today. They grew grapes and made wine on the British Isles then. We're still at least 5 degrees C from being able to do that today.
2) During that previous warm period europe did really really really well. The previous warm period increased crop yields enough that people could actually work in the arts and sciences. They didn't have to spend 100% of their time subsistence farming. If it gets warmer again, why is that suddenly going to kill millions when we have verifiable, historical evidence to the contrary?
3) CO2 is not nearly as potent a greenhouse gas as H2O or methane. It accounts for a tiny fraction of the atmosphere. In short, marginally speaking, increased CO2 levels will have a very small effect on temperature compared to a similar increase in H20 or methane. Why aren't we regulating those gasses?
4) There is verifiable proof that CO2 levels have been much higher in the planet's past. These elevated levels of CO2 did not prevent ice ages... so, why are billions of years of geologic history being ignored?
5) Does everyone on this planet like to live in cold weather? Personally I prefer summer, and warm weather.
Anyway, what I would like to see is an unbiased study of the costs of dealing with climate change by adaptation rather than wholesale destruction of the world economy. Lets face it, if we were to say "after next year no more CO2 emissions" millions (if not a couple billion) of people would die within a month or 2 of that decision by starvation. The only thing that I can see that will be "devastating" if the temperature increases 5C would be the sea level rise making a lot of really nice, really expensive real estate go underwater. However, its not like that is going to happen overnight, its not like its going to drown anyone. The sea may rise 2-3 centimeters a year for the next 150-200 years... well... if you can't get away from water advancing that fast I'm sorry but Darwin award for you.
Yes the governments of the world would probably need to set aside a fund to purchase the real estate from people at some sort of market rate, but I would be willing to bet that that is cheaper than re-working the entire economy.
Sure gas is getting expensive, and, in saying all this, I am not trying to say "lets just keep burning oil". I'm all for alternative energy sources, I just think global warming is a hideously weak argument to use when trying to get people to make massive life changes. I'd much prefer "lets use solar, wind, and whatever else we can because then we aren't paying people billions of dollars a day so they can buy our weapons systems and then use them against us". At this point we are funding both sides of 2 wars, and until we establish energy independence, we will always be slaves to Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, et al. This situation is stupid, and we should remedy it. I also think you green people out there would get a lot more traction and a lot more willingness to sacrifice from people in general if you used this argument instead of "sometime 100 years from now maybe things might be worse off based on this computer model we ran". Energy independence is a virtue unto itself, just like any other self-reliance people may establish. Promoting the use of alternative energy as a responsible and self reliant strategy is much more compelling to me.
ok.. I know it isn't 100% efficient, nothing is, there is still some waste, but it doesn't last nearly as long and there isn't nearly as much of it.
you are an uninformed idiot. Without Carter's ban on reprocessing there would be NO NUCLEAR WASTE. We had the technology then, we have it now. This is how European countries generate tons and tons of nuclear power without the waste problem.
this argument is specious. France gets more than 50% of their power from nuclear plants, yet they are one of the strongest voices against Iran building plants.