IDKFA - instantly adds 200 votes to the machine
IDNOCLIP - you can now remotely vote for any precinct
IDCLEV - switch election year
IDDT - show final rigged outcome now
IDDQD - touchscreen switches to evil negative color theme, allows user to specify all results for entire election
Re:Outsourcing made simple
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Two parties will not willingly engage in a trade unless both parties are better off afterwords than they were before.
However, what's good for an individual party is not necessarily good for the nation as a whole. For example, if I dump my used motor oil down the storm sewer, that's good for me because I got rid of my old oil quickly and cheaply. However, it's not good for the well-being of my neighborhood.
A similar situation holds true for the trend of offshoring all of our manufacturing and engineering know-how. For each individual transaction, outsourcer may temporarilly come out ahead and have an advantage over their domestic competitors. However, over the long run, the net effect of this group behavior is to transfer this country's technical know-how to foreign countries while simultaneously letting our technical skills atrophy. After enough time, we lose control over our own future because we become dependent on foreign suppliers for even the most basic products. Moreover, the fact that currently we export far less than we import is creating a massive debt situation that may one day lead to a financial crisis.
Eventually, we dig a hole where we've lost basic capabilities that are vital to our economy, and regaining it would require re-bootstrapping entire industries from near zero. If too much of this happens, it begins to become a national security issue. Much more is at stake than any one company's next quarterly earnings report, but that's the only factor currently driving this trend.
I believe that a better approach to increasing the productivity of the US economy is for companies to invest more in automation. It's more work up front, and a lot of jobs would still be lost, but at least we wouldn't be simultaneously forgetting how to make vital products, becoming more dependent on other countries for our survival, and racking up staggering foreign debts.
Clearly the companies which are outsourcing and selling their business units to other countries do not feel that America and American workers are good value for money.
It would appear that the only workers that are a "good value for the money" are the ones who are willing to work under conditions that would make Charles Dickens cringe.
Wouldn't publishing to a distributed system designed to endlessly replicate your message around the globe on thousands of random servers, making your message freely available to millions of viewers, completely beyond your or anybody else's control, be implicitly giving up most of your rights to control the content?
If not, all Google would have to do is restructure their database to somehow run off of an actual usenet server protocol in the back end, and they could claim that they're just continuing to host your content exactly as you intended when you published it.
If fission power doesn't do anything more than put a tiny dent in our overall energy usage, then it's not really worth the WMD proliferation risks, is it?
We need to be looking for solutions that won't run out in the forseeable future and won't be a smokescreen that two-bit countries can hide behind while they work on nuclear warheads.
Lots of people felt the same way about nuclear energy in the 40s (both for war and peacetime use).
Ummm... once fission was discovered, it was only a couple of years before the first working nuclear reactor was assembled. During that time, there really wasn't much doubt about what was going on or how much energy could potentially be released. Experiments showed clear evidence of fission reactions, and theoretical calculations matched the experimental data.
OTOH it's been well over a decade since this cold fusion story surfaced, and since then nobody has definitively demonstrated that anything at all is going on, nor is there any theory to back it up.
And if you're doing nothing illegal, the police and/or government won't care either, and they'll keep on listening for others.
If you're not doing anything illegal, you wouldn't mind the government searching your home every month either.
Luckily, the founders of this nation were wiser than people like you, and they required that specific warrants be required for each search.
Throughout human history, for every person killed by random murderers or terrorists, dozens more have been killed by their own governments. Odds are you should be worried more about the people running the microphones than the people being monitored by them.
Why not look at is in driving wages up in the countries these people come from.
You could, but a math genius like you would realize that with the relative population numbers, the equalization point will be only slightly above the other countries' wages and only a small fraction of current US wages.
US monopoly on high wages has to end at some point with globalization.
True. That's one reason that I'm a globalization Luddite.
the problem is that computer science is so diluted in our schools because our younger children don't learn math properly.
And why should they if there are no decent-paying jobs available that require those math skills?
Getting Americans hired over foreigners starts in schools, if we want Americans to be hired lets at least make there education and oppurtunities better to give them an advantage instead of this artificial advantage of limiting immigrants which does nothing but make it harder for companies to find acceptable candidates.
That sure is a good way to motivate schools and students to work hard on teaching and learning computer science: drive salaries down into the gutter with an infinite supply of cheap immigrant labor.
Of course, the powers given to congress to grant copyright by the US constitution are predicated on promoting "useful arts and sciences". It's hard to argue that that condition is being satisfied when something is being buried so that absolutely nobody benefits from it.
If still not convinced - check out how many CPU instructions are wasted for such a simple thing as returning a C++ string object from a function.
Of course it's going to take a lot of instructions, because you're dynamically allocating a new variable-length string object. That's far safer than the typical C approach. If you allocate a new safe string object in C using something like glib, you'll get a comparable number of instructions.
Maybe C++ should have used immutable strings to make it somewhat more efficient to create new string copies. OTOH, if you pass mutable strings by reference to a function and have it modify the string as output, you get performance that other languages like Java can't touch because you can avoid doing any heap allocations. C++ strings are just a library anyway; you can probably find an immutable string library somewhere.
Doing it the C way with manually allocated fixed sized buffers is simply not an option. It is unacceptably dangerous and has been the root of many if not most security holes.
Any time you're selling more than you can make, that's a "success".
A couple of times in the past, AMD themselves had come out CPUs that compared very favorably to Intel's then-current chips. However, they ran into fab problems and never got production and market share up before the next cycle where Intel leapfrogged them. That was certainly a failure; they didn't recoup enough of their investments and AMD's very survival has been in question a couple of times. It's taken many years for them to battle back from their past mishaps into their current apparently healthy state.
There is a long way to go before we hit the physical limits of existing technology.
That may be true, but we may currently be very close to the economic limits. You simply can't crank the average power consumption of a PC beyond 200W before people start rejecting them because of power bills and excess heat. In the past, all problems with chip performance were made better by shrinking the die. However, the chip companies have recently gotten to the point where power consumption getting worse with geometry shrinks.
In the 1960s, everybody assumed that supersonic planes would become common. After all, the technical problems had been solved and military planes were routinely hitting mach 3. However, real-world economic factors arose and 40 years later all commercial air traffic is still subsonic.
We may hit a similar situation with CPUs: Shure, you could go faster, but for 99.9% of the applications, it just costs too much.
The current state of the scope is that there is NO money for new telescopes other then the Webb telescope
I don't see why we can't just dust off the original Hubble blueprints and make an exact copy (but this time check the focus). There would be next to zero development costs. It would be just parts and labor.
If artificial barriers like budget classifications for "new telescope" vs "repair mission" is a problem, just say that this is a field service mission that happens to be replacing 100% of the Hubble's parts.
I don't need to find a current example because it's a prediction. Recently, they've cleared their decks of outstanding antitrust lawsuits (which they had been stubbornly fighting), and they've been cranking up the IP litigation FUD machine. It's not unlikely that this is in preparation for a new patent-based offensive against their smaller competitors. Time will tell whether I'm right.
Re:Expensive launch mass?
on
NASA's Deep Impact
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Finding themselves unable to afford chemical or nuclear explosives, NASA employees have spent the last four years collecting stray pennies
Hmmm... their experimental data is going to be skewed when they find out that today's pennies are actually 98% zinc.
My assertions work even better when Microsoft sues others. In that case, Microsoft has nothing to lose other than court costs, and their targets have nothing to win. They'd won't be able to get law firms to work for them on contingency, and they'll have to find the cash up front. Most will just capitulate rather than face bankrupcy.
I referred to the stacker case because it was an example of Microsoft aggressively throwing money into a losing case, something that you claim they would never do.
It doesn't matter who initiated the case. The issues are the same. They've stuck with many cases that they had no "chance in hell of winning" until the bitter end.
It also doesn't matter if Microsoft has no chance of winning. If their opponent runs out of cash before the end of the lawsuit, they're toast, and the question of whether they could ultimately win the case in theory is moot.
Do you seriously think MS became the world's largest software company by throwing money into lawsuits they know they will lose?
Why not? That's been their basic strategy until recently, and it has served them well. See the Stacker case for example. They have ultimately lost many expensive lawsuits. However, for each case they lost, they have undoubtedly intimidated or financially drained into submission many other legal opponents. By showing their willingness to dump a lot of money even into losing cases, they raise a barrier for those who would sue them. It will require a lot of financial resources to finance the effort to its final conclusion. Most will be deterred from even trying.
Lawsuits can be extended for many years by shoveling money at them regardless of the merit; sometimes you can even win a meritless suit with brute force combination of money and lawyers. The vast majority of their opponents will give up or settle before Microsoft feels the slightest pain.
A "lawyer or two" isn't going to cut it. These people took on the entire US federal government and ultimately prevailed. If stupid patents could really be taken out by a couple of small-time lawyers, then things like the one-click patent wouldn't still be in force.
Ohhh yeah, here's a chance to bleed them dry! With $50B in the bank, they probably can't afford any more than 50,000 of these lawsuits before they run out of cash.
I believe the common practice is to use these patents as bargining tools with other companies.
Or use threats of litigation to nip any new potential competitors in the bud while they're still small. This will become increasingly important since Microsoft is now under scrutiny from anti-trust enforcers over illegal business tactics. They'll be looking for a more socially acceptable way to stamp out any up-and-coming threats.
Impossible Mission on the C64 was one of my favorite games of all time. The action was incredibly smooth for an 8-bit machine. They took advantage of the hardware-accelerated graphic sprites for maximum effect.
I remember being sorely disappointed when I bought Impossible Mission 2 for a different platform (might of been Sega Genesis or CGA on IBM PC; I don't remember now). The gameplay was sluggish and the graphics sucked in comparison.
Obviously these sysadmins
were incompetent.
Everybody knows that a BSOD is impossible under Windows XP.
If they had simply upgraded the other 60,000 machines to XP first, and then updated these 7 problem systems,
this whole problem would easily have been avoided.
Well, I've had to teach my gf and a couple others some simple things... and just the idea of a "variable" is hard to grasp for some people.
I've been programming computers for over 25 years, and sometimes a variable can still be hard to grasp: Is it the data value? Is it the storage slot? Is it a reference to the storage slot? Is it the name of the variable? Is it the binding between the name and storage? Does the value have different names in different scopes? Does the storage slot have a type? Does the value have a type? Is the value mutable? Do I have to manage the storage allocation myself? What are the exact lifetimes of all of the above? In what scopes are they visible? Does it exist in a strange place like a closure?
Some languages expose most all of these concepts to the programmer (Perl is one of them, even though it doesn't usually make you explicitely deal with most of these), and things can get tricky.
The reason OS X, linux, and FreeBSD (which OS X is based on) don't get spyware, is because you need root privilages to install them
I'm not sure that's exactly true. A lot of distros put $HOME/bin on the user's path by default, and users' login scripts could be altered to run arbitrary programs from their own file space.
I would attribute the lack of spyware more to the absence of the ubelievably ill-conceived misfeature called ActiveX.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are all of the cheatcodes:
IDKFA - instantly adds 200 votes to the machine
IDNOCLIP - you can now remotely vote for any precinct
IDCLEV - switch election year
IDDT - show final rigged outcome now
IDDQD - touchscreen switches to evil negative color theme, allows user to specify all results for entire election
However, what's good for an individual party is not necessarily good for the nation as a whole. For example, if I dump my used motor oil down the storm sewer, that's good for me because I got rid of my old oil quickly and cheaply. However, it's not good for the well-being of my neighborhood.
A similar situation holds true for the trend of offshoring all of our manufacturing and engineering know-how. For each individual transaction, outsourcer may temporarilly come out ahead and have an advantage over their domestic competitors. However, over the long run, the net effect of this group behavior is to transfer this country's technical know-how to foreign countries while simultaneously letting our technical skills atrophy. After enough time, we lose control over our own future because we become dependent on foreign suppliers for even the most basic products. Moreover, the fact that currently we export far less than we import is creating a massive debt situation that may one day lead to a financial crisis.
Eventually, we dig a hole where we've lost basic capabilities that are vital to our economy, and regaining it would require re-bootstrapping entire industries from near zero. If too much of this happens, it begins to become a national security issue. Much more is at stake than any one company's next quarterly earnings report, but that's the only factor currently driving this trend.
I believe that a better approach to increasing the productivity of the US economy is for companies to invest more in automation. It's more work up front, and a lot of jobs would still be lost, but at least we wouldn't be simultaneously forgetting how to make vital products, becoming more dependent on other countries for our survival, and racking up staggering foreign debts.
It would appear that the only workers that are a "good value for the money" are the ones who are willing to work under conditions that would make Charles Dickens cringe.
If not, all Google would have to do is restructure their database to somehow run off of an actual usenet server protocol in the back end, and they could claim that they're just continuing to host your content exactly as you intended when you published it.
We need to be looking for solutions that won't run out in the forseeable future and won't be a smokescreen that two-bit countries can hide behind while they work on nuclear warheads.
Ummm... once fission was discovered, it was only a couple of years before the first working nuclear reactor was assembled. During that time, there really wasn't much doubt about what was going on or how much energy could potentially be released. Experiments showed clear evidence of fission reactions, and theoretical calculations matched the experimental data.
OTOH it's been well over a decade since this cold fusion story surfaced, and since then nobody has definitively demonstrated that anything at all is going on, nor is there any theory to back it up.
If you're not doing anything illegal, you wouldn't mind the government searching your home every month either.
Luckily, the founders of this nation were wiser than people like you, and they required that specific warrants be required for each search.
Throughout human history, for every person killed by random murderers or terrorists, dozens more have been killed by their own governments. Odds are you should be worried more about the people running the microphones than the people being monitored by them.
You could, but a math genius like you would realize that with the relative population numbers, the equalization point will be only slightly above the other countries' wages and only a small fraction of current US wages.
US monopoly on high wages has to end at some point with globalization.
True. That's one reason that I'm a globalization Luddite.
the problem is that computer science is so diluted in our schools because our younger children don't learn math properly.
And why should they if there are no decent-paying jobs available that require those math skills?
That sure is a good way to motivate schools and students to work hard on teaching and learning computer science: drive salaries down into the gutter with an infinite supply of cheap immigrant labor.
Of course, the powers given to congress to grant copyright by the US constitution are predicated on promoting "useful arts and sciences". It's hard to argue that that condition is being satisfied when something is being buried so that absolutely nobody benefits from it.
Of course it's going to take a lot of instructions, because you're dynamically allocating a new variable-length string object. That's far safer than the typical C approach. If you allocate a new safe string object in C using something like glib, you'll get a comparable number of instructions.
Maybe C++ should have used immutable strings to make it somewhat more efficient to create new string copies. OTOH, if you pass mutable strings by reference to a function and have it modify the string as output, you get performance that other languages like Java can't touch because you can avoid doing any heap allocations. C++ strings are just a library anyway; you can probably find an immutable string library somewhere.
Doing it the C way with manually allocated fixed sized buffers is simply not an option. It is unacceptably dangerous and has been the root of many if not most security holes.
A couple of times in the past, AMD themselves had come out CPUs that compared very favorably to Intel's then-current chips. However, they ran into fab problems and never got production and market share up before the next cycle where Intel leapfrogged them. That was certainly a failure; they didn't recoup enough of their investments and AMD's very survival has been in question a couple of times. It's taken many years for them to battle back from their past mishaps into their current apparently healthy state.
That may be true, but we may currently be very close to the economic limits. You simply can't crank the average power consumption of a PC beyond 200W before people start rejecting them because of power bills and excess heat. In the past, all problems with chip performance were made better by shrinking the die. However, the chip companies have recently gotten to the point where power consumption getting worse with geometry shrinks.
In the 1960s, everybody assumed that supersonic planes would become common. After all, the technical problems had been solved and military planes were routinely hitting mach 3. However, real-world economic factors arose and 40 years later all commercial air traffic is still subsonic.
We may hit a similar situation with CPUs: Shure, you could go faster, but for 99.9% of the applications, it just costs too much.
Then FIND THOSE BLUEPRINTS TOO.
I don't see why we can't just dust off the original Hubble blueprints and make an exact copy (but this time check the focus). There would be next to zero development costs. It would be just parts and labor.
If artificial barriers like budget classifications for "new telescope" vs "repair mission" is a problem, just say that this is a field service mission that happens to be replacing 100% of the Hubble's parts.
I don't need to find a current example because it's a prediction. Recently, they've cleared their decks of outstanding antitrust lawsuits (which they had been stubbornly fighting), and they've been cranking up the IP litigation FUD machine. It's not unlikely that this is in preparation for a new patent-based offensive against their smaller competitors. Time will tell whether I'm right.
Hmmm... their experimental data is going to be skewed when they find out that today's pennies are actually 98% zinc.
I referred to the stacker case because it was an example of Microsoft aggressively throwing money into a losing case, something that you claim they would never do.
It also doesn't matter if Microsoft has no chance of winning. If their opponent runs out of cash before the end of the lawsuit, they're toast, and the question of whether they could ultimately win the case in theory is moot.
Why not? That's been their basic strategy until recently, and it has served them well. See the Stacker case for example. They have ultimately lost many expensive lawsuits. However, for each case they lost, they have undoubtedly intimidated or financially drained into submission many other legal opponents. By showing their willingness to dump a lot of money even into losing cases, they raise a barrier for those who would sue them. It will require a lot of financial resources to finance the effort to its final conclusion. Most will be deterred from even trying.
Lawsuits can be extended for many years by shoveling money at them regardless of the merit; sometimes you can even win a meritless suit with brute force combination of money and lawyers. The vast majority of their opponents will give up or settle before Microsoft feels the slightest pain.
A "lawyer or two" isn't going to cut it. These people took on the entire US federal government and ultimately prevailed. If stupid patents could really be taken out by a couple of small-time lawyers, then things like the one-click patent wouldn't still be in force.
Ohhh yeah, here's a chance to bleed them dry! With $50B in the bank, they probably can't afford any more than 50,000 of these lawsuits before they run out of cash.
I believe the common practice is to use these patents as bargining tools with other companies.
Or use threats of litigation to nip any new potential competitors in the bud while they're still small. This will become increasingly important since Microsoft is now under scrutiny from anti-trust enforcers over illegal business tactics. They'll be looking for a more socially acceptable way to stamp out any up-and-coming threats.
I remember being sorely disappointed when I bought Impossible Mission 2 for a different platform (might of been Sega Genesis or CGA on IBM PC; I don't remember now). The gameplay was sluggish and the graphics sucked in comparison.
Obviously these sysadmins were incompetent. Everybody knows that a BSOD is impossible under Windows XP. If they had simply upgraded the other 60,000 machines to XP first, and then updated these 7 problem systems, this whole problem would easily have been avoided.
I've been programming computers for over 25 years, and sometimes a variable can still be hard to grasp: Is it the data value? Is it the storage slot? Is it a reference to the storage slot? Is it the name of the variable? Is it the binding between the name and storage? Does the value have different names in different scopes? Does the storage slot have a type? Does the value have a type? Is the value mutable? Do I have to manage the storage allocation myself? What are the exact lifetimes of all of the above? In what scopes are they visible? Does it exist in a strange place like a closure?
Some languages expose most all of these concepts to the programmer (Perl is one of them, even though it doesn't usually make you explicitely deal with most of these), and things can get tricky.
I'm not sure that's exactly true. A lot of distros put $HOME/bin on the user's path by default, and users' login scripts could be altered to run arbitrary programs from their own file space.
I would attribute the lack of spyware more to the absence of the ubelievably ill-conceived misfeature called ActiveX.