heh, I'm kind of arguing out of both sides of my mouth here.
My general experience with M$ versus Unix is that it takes four times as long to solve something in Unix, but once it's solved it's done and you never have to touch it again. With M$, you generally pay a lot more up front in licensing (compared to the free Unices), and you also pay a lot more in ongoing maintenance as stuff mysteriously breaks. If you need the services up instantly, use Windows. If you have some time to twiddle and a talented person to do the twiddling, Unix may be a better bet.
For the dotcoms, that were all about flash and sizzle, Windows made a lot of sense. For the companies who are in it for the long haul, I tend to think that Unix is a better solution a lot of the time. Probably the single most important factor is the overall skill level of the IT staff, with the caveat that if you don't push them a little they're not improving as fast as they might be. (note I said a LITTLE.:-) )
As an aside, W2K does seems substantially better than NT, but still not as good as Unix.
well yes, but the admin is $90K PER YEAR -- in theory, at least for now, the $40K is a once-off expense. And from a business perspective, spending $40K to save $40K/year makes excellent sense.
Flip side of the coin is that the $90K guy is probably going to be able to do a hell of a lot more than just basic administration. Whether or not this is worth it to a given company will mostly depend on whether they see IT as a strategic asset or as a cost center.
Yes, but you are exposed to 'new interpretations' of a contract. And while you may not personally have a problem with staying with a version of an OS that had a license you liked (say, Win95 or Win 3.1) indefinitely, that is not an option for many of us. It's especially bad for corporations, which are often forced to install new versions of OSes on computers they buy because the old ones simply are no longer available. For instance, you simply cannot get Win95 anymore through legit sources, nor can you get Office 95. You can get copies but they are almost certainly counterfeit. Microsoft no longer sells them.
And I assure you that the license terms on 2000 versions of these aren't nearly as liberal as the old ones were. If you doubt this, go back and examine both licenses. This is how Microsoft (and presumably Apple) will extract more and more money from the same number of customers.
re: licenses -- that was a form of expression you may be unfamiliar with. It's called humor. It's a strange custom in which the author often exaggerates wildly or makes blatantly false assertions. You might look into it.
And I have personally spent nearly as much on Red Hat software as I have Microsoft, even though I didn't have to. Depressed stock prices for many tech companies are indeed a result of poor business models, but RH is not one of them. They will likely have cashflow trouble for awhile yet, but I have every expectation that they will be a nicely profitable business.
Now, they will probably never get to the extraordinary level of monopoly profits enjoyed by Microsoft, but make no mistake -- Microsoft is rich because you are poorer. RH will settle for making less money, which is the same as handing you cash if you use their software.
Also, we are coming off a stock market mania. Commonsense rules didn't apply on the way up and they're not going to apply on the way back down. It went irrationally high and it's going to go irrationally low. (it's not even close yet.) Don't be one of the sheeple -- the fact that stock prices were high didn't make Internet companies 'good', any more than the fact that their stock prices are lower now makes them 'bad'. There is obviously going to be a long term correlation there, but in the short run it's essentially meaningless.
Anytime you have a closed-source proprietary system with the bullshit 'intellectual property' laws we have, they can change the rules on you any time they want to.
I haven't looked at Darwin's license directly (I avoid anything made by Apple -- they are even worse at pretending to be interested in their customers' welfare than is Microsoft) -- but I'd read the fine print most carefully.
Legally, corporations are a single person. But in practice, you can't assume that a corporation will behave with the consistency that a person does. It is made of many people, some of whom are likely to be assholes. That is why contracts exist: they are protection against the (possibly numerous) assholes at a given company, who will have a harder time screwing you over in the presence of a written agreement. You will also have more recourse if they do.
The license that comes with most software these days ('In exchange for the use of our valuable Intellectual Property, we own your firstborn child and your left testicle/ovary, and if our product doesn't work we still get them') has no anti-asshole protection at all.
That is why GPL and the Artistic licenses are so important. In the case of the GPL, it even attempts to pre-emptively prevent assholishness.
It's hard for me to imagine that, over the long term (10 to 20 years), commercial software companies will be able to continue their predatory licensing methods, when free alternatives continue to develop. People expected Microsoft to instantly disappear. That won't happen. But, gradually, the assholes in the software world will choke themselves into extinction.
In a way, you should be grateful to them. They are one of the driving forces behind all the great free software you can get nowadays.
Right, that is exactly it. The circuits in that original article were taking advantage of electrical effects that we do not understand. It is doing something entirely new, and it is very possible that no human designer of any intelligence can ever even understand how the circuit works, much less design a new one.
And not all FPGAs will run this circuit either. Only certain ones will, and apparently there's no easy way to determine which ones will work.
Again extrapolating, what happens when we start evolving one-off tools whcih we don't understand and can't duplicate? If the tool did something important enough, it would become instantly precious. It would be magic..... the equivalent of a holy relic.
No, you missed the point. We all use tools we don't understand. I haven't a clue how to fix my car. See section re:mechanics and plumbers. I couldn't possibly be expert in every field, but until now every tool I have ever used has had an expert available somewhere.
What I am trying to point out here is that for the first time, we may be using tools that NOBODY understands -- and perhaps tools that nobody even CAN understand. We may soon be using tools that are beyond human intelligence.
Think I'm exaggerating? Go back and read the first article that was on Slashdot about this scientist's work -- there's another link to it somewhere in this discussion. That evolved circuit, which turns a 5v output on and off in response to two specific voice commands, uses about a third of the components that any human designer would have used. In looking at it, the programmer of the evolutionary system says it is unbelievably complex -- he says it looks like God designed the chip. He doesn't understand it. It is entirely possible that nobody ever will. But it works. (within +-5 degrees F anyway -- apparently he hadn't thought to evolve for temperature variation, and not all FPGAs will run this circuit.)
What practical difference is there between the description above and 'it's magic'?
In rereading this, I think it would have been much stronger if I simply omitted the last four paragraphs. They are true to some extent, but they're really stuff I've seen other places -- relatively weak, alarmist thinking.
If I had it to do over, I'd pull those last four paragraphs out... they weren't the main point anyway.
There was another article about this technology I read a year or two ago, and I got to thinking a lot about it. I think this is very important technology, possibly the most important ever.
Now, that's a big claim. Most important EVER?
Consider: no other technological progress to date has ever changed the fundamental nature of Man and his tools. We are the Tool-Using Ape, and all of our technological toys and bombs are just extensions of the first person picking up a stick. He/she could use that stick in many ways, from agriculture to communication to personal hygiene to warfare. Essentially all of the other tools we have ever invented are extensions of that original concept -- specialized forms of stick.
Our sticks have gotten very complex, to the point where most of us navigate in ignorance through a world of astonishing complexity. Very few of us understand something so simple as indoor plumbing, but we are thoroughly dependent on it. This is all old news and we are well used to it -- if the plumbing breaks, call a plumber. If the car breaks, go see a mechanic. If the computer breaks, post on Slashdot from another one and hope to god you pick out the truly informed answer from the barrage of ignorant suggestions. But I digress.:-)
This is where this new technology is important. This isn't just a stick anymore. With all of our existing tools, someone, somewhere invented them, and someone somewhere knows how to fix them when they break. No matter how complex or intimidating the tool, if you are willing to devote enough resources to the problem, you find an expert who understands the technology you are using and can fix it. In the cases of unforeseen interactions between complex systems, like computer software, it may be necessary to consult many experts, but ultimately all of the tools we use are sticks, someone invented them, and someone can fix them.
And that relationship is what is now changing, for the first time since that first person picked up a stick and used it to scratch, we are starting to use tools that we did not invent and that nobody, anywhere understands.
This is an incredibly big deal. We are talking about starting to use tools that are essentially not deterministic in their uses. Different versions of the same tool may work better than others, even though nobody quite understands why.
Consider some of the ramifications: Perhaps your specific tool will have learned how to trace cables or diagnose car engine trouble better than other people's, and you can charge more for your services because of that. Or maybe your gizmo calibrator just doesn't work properly unless you hold it upside down. And what if your computer develops an amazing ability to pick stocks if you consult it after midnight on Tuesday, but sinks into a blue funk and refuses to even talk to you if you fail to address it as "Lord Master Xerxes of Apollo"??
What we are talking about here is sticks with intelligence. Admittedly this is just the very beginning of what, I presume, will be a long slow (dare I say it) evolution of the tools. Taking things out to an extreme, it is not inconceivable that we might end up with tools that have moral or ethical reservations about being used for what we want to use them for. Or we might see guns that *like* to kill and look for excuses to do so. 'It was my sidearm, Your Honor, it just went off unexpectedly.'
Arthur C. Clarke's most famous quote was, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I really am starting to wonder if we're not going to end up in an age of tools that are so smart that using them resembles incantation and gesture -- in essence the casting of spells.
What happens when we become dependent on tools that NOBODY understands or invented?
In a weird sideways tangent, I am reminded of a wise observation that, I believe, Louis L'Amour had about the early war in America between the settlers and the Indians. He pointed out that the Indians lost not because of being outgunned, or because of the sheer numbers of European colonists, but rather because they became dependent on firearms with which to fight, and could not themselves manufacture them. That meant that to fight the colonists, they needed the colonists as arms suppliers. They couldn't drive out the colonists without the colonists' help. Their loss of cultural identity was inescapable as soon as they picked up guns.
If we flesh intelligences end up at odds with silicon ones, and we are dependent on them and cannot duplicate their services with our old sticks and rocks -- we will lose.
Skillz, dude.:-) Check out the Champions/Hero system for a very well-done non-level system. GURPS is probably the best-known example, but I liked Hero better. More fun IMO.
In Champions/Hero you basically invent the rules to support the character, instead of envisioning a character to suit the rules. It takes a lot more work and thought, though -- you can't just blindly throw some dice, do some math, pick a few spells and have an evening's encounter. Not very hack and slashish -- but the combat system is fun and characters don't die too easily (comes from its superhero origins) -- though death is certainly a possibility.
GURPS is more 'realistic' -- combat is VERY dangerous. The characters are very mortal -- getting into a fight is not a good way to improve one's lifespan. In GURPS, if you take a sword through the chest you are almost certainly going to die -- a high-skill character will be much more adept at avoiding the sword but will die just as quickly when stabbed.
Character levels are a workable first attempt at a gaming system, but skills seem to be a closer approximation of how life really works.
If you had a million dollars in the bank, you could remove $10,000 from that account every year forever. (assuming continued bank solvency and an interest income of at least 1%.)
If you pulled out $100,000 each year you could report much better results to stockholders... for 10 years plus some change.
The capitalist approach to resources is consumption -- the second company would do far better and the owners would make a great deal more money. If everyone does this for too long, we all starve.
This truth is simple and inescapable but people deny it and consume, consume, consume anyway.
A good real life example is the Icelandic cod. At one time they were available in such huge numbers that it seemed we would never run out. The cod have been wiped out -- because there was no overall control on consumption, it was in each individual's interest to extract as much fish as possible every year to feed his family and consume, consume, consume. We could have pulled cod out of the ocean forever but instead there may never again be a cod population.
If we are this stupid on an individual basis it is hard to expect corporations to be any smarter.
Dude, it's just paper. There's no reason for anyone to pay even 1 cent for a mass-produced piece of paper that says that the owner is entitled to a portion of a company that is not profitable and never will be.
But people paid nosebleed prices for these pieces of paper because *other* people would pay nosebleed prices for these pieces of paper.
That wouldn't surprise me, but I am repeating history I have learned from books and articles, rather than history I have lived through. If you were there at the time you may have some good points.
I was born in the late 60s -- was too young to be paying attention to engineer layoffs from Boeing.:-)
But if you lend money to me when I am desperate and far over extended -- and you KNOW THAT -- expecting that I will default on the debt and surrender assets that are worth much more than the dollar value of the loan, well.... don't you see a problem here?
OK - but creating suffering in the name of 'preventing fraud'... that is a terrible idea. There isn't much of a problem, and the price will be heavy -- and paid by the people who can least afford it, average people who have had disaster befall them.
I would suggest that the credit card companies making a little less money is preferable to people losing their houses en masse.
Actually credit can make a lot of sense. If you are borrowing money to CREATE something instead of COMSUME something, it is healthy and viable and creates a lot of economic growth.
But if you just waste it by buying dog food or what have you, then it's almost purely bad. In that instance I would agree with your comments.
Actually I think your grandfather is dead on the money. Recessions teach prudence and financial discipline. There are a lot of young people that have never seen a recession during their working lives. Many of them are in debt up to their eyebrows. (and hell, so are a lot of older people that should know better!)
Because it's been so long and people are so in debt, this recession is likely to be a doozy. For that reason I suspect that itulip.com is right about people starting to 'be good' instead of choosing to 'be wealthy'. The early 90s recession wasn't bad enough to really change behaviors. We haven't had a major economic problem since the late 70s.
And of course the prediction could be wrong. We may have fallen so far into greed and apathy that not even a profound recession can change it.
What I am telling you is that the supply is too high because there are a lot of people who are not natively really techies. They came into this field not because they were interested in it, but because it paid a lot of money.
There probably aren't many/. readers that would fit this category. I'm talking about the ones out vegetating in front of a TV or playing lawn darts or something... the idiots who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground and simply should not be working in tech. I'm sure you've known any number of them.
So is that elitist? Yeah, a little. But I'm not excluding you specifically, particularly not because your salary has gone down. Your salary has gone down because there are too many techs. If you are delivering software on time and under budget, that just about automatically includes you in the 'clue' category.
And if your salary has gone down, and you have a good skill set and can sell yourself, get out there and do so. It's not like jobs have all dried up and blown away. You can probably do better if you are willing to relocate. Bad times are starting but they certainly aren't all the way here yet, and really talented people are still rare and precious.
As far as 'entitlement' goes, you are out of your mind. Nobody owes you a damn thing, and just because you made X number of dollars last year doesn't magically 'entitle' you to make X+1 dollars this year. Ultimately you are creating value for an employer. You must create more value than you consume in salary, benefits, and administrative overhead. On average, if you don't do that you won't stay employed. It's really up to you -- you have to figure out a way to create enough value for someone that they will pay you to do it. 'Entitlement'? Hardly.
And salaries won't fall to nil. They will drop some but they won't go to 0. If they did the supply of techs would also drop to 0 and so salaries would have to go back up. Ultimately a balance will be struck. It is likely to be a lot lower than it was during the last two years. But I think it will still be significantly higher than average, again simply because the *good* techs are hard to find.
So the whole point of all that bile was to call me an idiot? Considering you don't have any data, you are showing thinking of the quality I am attributing to the low-clue IT crowd.
I suspect you know this, too. Of the two groups (talented versus untalented) in the original post, it's pretty obvious with which one you are identifying.
As far as unions go, I am resistant to them. Bureaucracies replace intelligence with rules. If systems administration were highly unionized, for example, I would probably have never gotten into it. Now, it is pretty apparent that you wouldn't consider that a loss, but I can assure you that my prior employers would.
Well, according to existing law, yes. However, the credit companies have big, big sticks they can hit you with. Bad debt NEVER goes away. It gets bought by the credit reporting agencies, and they dutifully report the debt as delinquent FOREVER. So you can't ever get credit again unless you declare bankruptcy, and if this bill goes through, not even then.
Of course there will be some abuse. But the cost of preventing that abuse is going to be tragic.
Oh I agree with you re:talent. I think competition is wonderful, and I'll compete toe to toe with anyone.
However, your H1-B person *cannot vote with his feet* if he becomes unhappy with your company. It sounds like you folks are really great, but not everyone is, and once someone is here, if they want to get a green card it is very difficult for them to change jobs.
On the whole, business would do better if it could pay employees $.01/hour, demand that they work 16 hours a day until age 65, and then shoot them. (pay for your own bullet please.) For most business with low-skill employees, this would be wonderful for the bottom line and the stockholders.
The less power that workers have to leave, the more power that businesses have over them.
Give an H1-B person the same right to move around and work for anyone they choose that any citizen has, and I'm all for the program. As far as I am concerned, there should be no immigration restrictions. Humans -- FREE humans -- are our best resource.
But it is hard to compete on a cost basis with people in leg irons.
www.itulip.com/#Commentary has a great editorial up. Among other interesting things, the author points out that the focus is going to shift from 'becoming wealthy' to 'becoming good people' -- which is actually rather pleasant to contemplate.
It would be a lot easier to stop this bankruptcy bill than it will be to undo it though. I recommend contacting your Senator.
In the 1970s, engineers were the same hot property that programmers were last year. During the grinding 1970s recession, times got very tough for them. Many of them lost their homes. Nobody but engineers could afford the payments, and there wasn't much work for engineers. Many of them ended up simply defaulting on their debts, walking away from houses where they owed more (sometimes a lot more) than what they could sell the house for.
It is no coincidence that the big financial companies are pushing through the bankruptcy legislation now. Their stories of abuse are foolish, but people are buying it. ("bankruptcy frauds" now joins "deadbeat dads" and "welfare moms" in the Archive for Scary Stories About Bad People and How We Shouldn't Let Those Bastards Get Away With It.)
They are not pushing through this legislation because of existing abuses. It is because the lenders have been irresponsible and want to make sure that We the People pay for their mistakes. It's a good step along the path back to debtor's prisons. (And if that doesn't scare you, go study your history books. See: "American Revolution, Causes Of.")
If you are a techie, don't set yourself up to rely on the extraordinary incomes of the last few years. Some of us will do fine and will continue to make good money, but many of us will not. Really good performers will always tend to do well -- but there are a lot of marginal people that have been brought into the industry by the 'gold rush' and it's going to take quite awhile to weed them out. Eventually they will go back to jobs which fit their talent levels better, but that's a ways off yet. There will probably be four or five years of tech oversupply.
Could be longer if industry keeps whining about the H1-Bs (aka indentured servants. See: "American Revolution, Causes Of.")
Re:outlook is actually pretty horrible....
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You are right, I may be mistaken there. However, when considering debt load, don't forget stock options. Yahoo has passed those out like water, and this will reduce the investors' share value significantly.
Also, I have read that Yahoo's balance sheet is very weak, and that they held so much stock in so mnay other companies that they were more like a mutual fund than an Internet company. Are you sure that is 2 billion in cash, or is it 2 billion that they spent for other stocks?
Re:outlook is actually pretty horrible....
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That's an interesting assertion. By 'dollars-in', are you counting labor properly? The small one-person farm does have a lot of labor put into it. Big farms have to buy lots of equipment and hire people, so I'm wondering if they might not be coming out lopsidedly more expensive.
In most industries scale = efficiency, so I'd be surprised if large farms were actually less productive *if they use the same methods to farm*. Big if.:-)
Re:outlook is actually pretty horrible....
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Unfortunately, the banks have worked very hard on getting those 1930s-era restrictions removed, and have mostly succeeded. They have become very aggressive in their lending. Past a certain point, when all of your good borrowers are tapped out, the only way to keep growing a lending business is to lend to poorer and poorer credit risks.
After enough years of that, credit is so fast and loose that ANYONE can get a loan. Over the next few years you are going to see defaults skyrocket. (Moody's is predicting about a 9.5% corporate bond default rate for 2001, up from the 6.5% last year, which was also up a lot.) Banks are in very weak positions now. They are allowed to have as 'assets', against which they can lend, derivative positions in other assets. The problem with that is that in a crisis, they may not be able to cash in those pieces of paper for what they are listed as being worth. Japan's banking system played similar games with real estate in the 1980s. They are still very shaky and barely solvent ten years later, and Japan is still mired in recession. This is probably not coincidence.
Basically, our modern banks have found ways to leverage dollars of 'real' money into many, many more 'illusionary' dollars than they are supposed to. The reserve laws are supposed to prevent too much magnification of original money. If there is a 20% reserve rate, for instance, for every 'real' dollar that the Fed lends out (creates) in the economy, about 5 'illusionary' dollars will come into existence. These are all dollars and all spend, but if too many people ask for paper dollars at once there will be problems. (The Fed has come up with systems to inject emergency liquidity which will prevent bank runs like we had in the 1930s. )
The problem here is that one bank may issue some derivative instrument, say something based somehow on the gold price. Another bank can buy that derivative and list it as an asset and create more illusionary dollars to lend. Basically the banks have managed to do an end run around the liquidity rules and are magnifying the dollars far past what the Fed believes they can do.
This may be why Greenspan is arguing that money can't be quantified -- he realizes that banks and other large institutions are using all these other pieces of paper to represent dollars and instead of correcting the problem, he just seems to be shrugging his shoulders and accepting it.
Upshot: the controls put in place in the 1930s have pretty much been dismantled. The risks now of a major meltdown are much higher than I am comfortable with, personally.
As far as tech stocks being 'traditionally' overvalued, that has been because they grow faster. A P/E multiple of about 20 is considered high but acceptable for growth stocks. I believe the last figure I saw on P/E ratios for the Nasdaq was on the order of 160-1. This was 2 or 3 weeks ago.
As I was commenting in another forum, I think Nasdaq 500 is a lot more likely in the near term than Nasdaq 5000. Admittedly, 500 is a very low probability event, but 5000 is just about zero IMHO... at least barring enormous inflation. I suspect a reasonable valuation would be somewhere between 800 and 1000, but that's just hunch, no solid numbers behind it.
I use the terms 'real' and 'illusionary' dollars here, but I by no means consider paper dollars to be real without some kind of backing. Much of the excess of the 1990s would have been impossible with a commodity-backed monetary standard. It doesn't have to be gold, but gold is one of the best substances we've found to use as a guarantor of paper money.
Fiat currency -- that is, currency that is not real and has no backing -- is simply a method for governments to make horrible financial mistakes and print more money to dig themselves out of the mess they made, screwing their populations in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
heh, I'm kind of arguing out of both sides of my mouth here.
:-) )
My general experience with M$ versus Unix is that it takes four times as long to solve something in Unix, but once it's solved it's done and you never have to touch it again. With M$, you generally pay a lot more up front in licensing (compared to the free Unices), and you also pay a lot more in ongoing maintenance as stuff mysteriously breaks. If you need the services up instantly, use Windows. If you have some time to twiddle and a talented person to do the twiddling, Unix may be a better bet.
For the dotcoms, that were all about flash and sizzle, Windows made a lot of sense. For the companies who are in it for the long haul, I tend to think that Unix is a better solution a lot of the time. Probably the single most important factor is the overall skill level of the IT staff, with the caveat that if you don't push them a little they're not improving as fast as they might be. (note I said a LITTLE.
As an aside, W2K does seems substantially better than NT, but still not as good as Unix.
well yes, but the admin is $90K PER YEAR -- in theory, at least for now, the $40K is a once-off expense. And from a business perspective, spending $40K to save $40K/year makes excellent sense.
Flip side of the coin is that the $90K guy is probably going to be able to do a hell of a lot more than just basic administration. Whether or not this is worth it to a given company will mostly depend on whether they see IT as a strategic asset or as a cost center.
Yes, but you are exposed to 'new interpretations' of a contract. And while you may not personally have a problem with staying with a version of an OS that had a license you liked (say, Win95 or Win 3.1) indefinitely, that is not an option for many of us. It's especially bad for corporations, which are often forced to install new versions of OSes on computers they buy because the old ones simply are no longer available. For instance, you simply cannot get Win95 anymore through legit sources, nor can you get Office 95. You can get copies but they are almost certainly counterfeit. Microsoft no longer sells them.
And I assure you that the license terms on 2000 versions of these aren't nearly as liberal as the old ones were. If you doubt this, go back and examine both licenses. This is how Microsoft (and presumably Apple) will extract more and more money from the same number of customers.
re: licenses -- that was a form of expression you may be unfamiliar with. It's called humor. It's a strange custom in which the author often exaggerates wildly or makes blatantly false assertions. You might look into it.
And I have personally spent nearly as much on Red Hat software as I have Microsoft, even though I didn't have to. Depressed stock prices for many tech companies are indeed a result of poor business models, but RH is not one of them. They will likely have cashflow trouble for awhile yet, but I have every expectation that they will be a nicely profitable business.
Now, they will probably never get to the extraordinary level of monopoly profits enjoyed by Microsoft, but make no mistake -- Microsoft is rich because you are poorer. RH will settle for making less money, which is the same as handing you cash if you use their software.
Also, we are coming off a stock market mania. Commonsense rules didn't apply on the way up and they're not going to apply on the way back down. It went irrationally high and it's going to go irrationally low. (it's not even close yet.) Don't be one of the sheeple -- the fact that stock prices were high didn't make Internet companies 'good', any more than the fact that their stock prices are lower now makes them 'bad'. There is obviously going to be a long term correlation there, but in the short run it's essentially meaningless.
Anytime you have a closed-source proprietary system with the bullshit 'intellectual property' laws we have, they can change the rules on you any time they want to.
I haven't looked at Darwin's license directly (I avoid anything made by Apple -- they are even worse at pretending to be interested in their customers' welfare than is Microsoft) -- but I'd read the fine print most carefully.
Legally, corporations are a single person. But in practice, you can't assume that a corporation will behave with the consistency that a person does. It is made of many people, some of whom are likely to be assholes. That is why contracts exist: they are protection against the (possibly numerous) assholes at a given company, who will have a harder time screwing you over in the presence of a written agreement. You will also have more recourse if they do.
The license that comes with most software these days ('In exchange for the use of our valuable Intellectual Property, we own your firstborn child and your left testicle/ovary, and if our product doesn't work we still get them') has no anti-asshole protection at all.
That is why GPL and the Artistic licenses are so important. In the case of the GPL, it even attempts to pre-emptively prevent assholishness.
It's hard for me to imagine that, over the long term (10 to 20 years), commercial software companies will be able to continue their predatory licensing methods, when free alternatives continue to develop. People expected Microsoft to instantly disappear. That won't happen. But, gradually, the assholes in the software world will choke themselves into extinction.
In a way, you should be grateful to them. They are one of the driving forces behind all the great free software you can get nowadays.
Right, that is exactly it. The circuits in that original article were taking advantage of electrical effects that we do not understand. It is doing something entirely new, and it is very possible that no human designer of any intelligence can ever even understand how the circuit works, much less design a new one.
And not all FPGAs will run this circuit either. Only certain ones will, and apparently there's no easy way to determine which ones will work.
Again extrapolating, what happens when we start evolving one-off tools whcih we don't understand and can't duplicate? If the tool did something important enough, it would become instantly precious. It would be magic..... the equivalent of a holy relic.
No, you missed the point. We all use tools we don't understand. I haven't a clue how to fix my car. See section re:mechanics and plumbers. I couldn't possibly be expert in every field, but until now every tool I have ever used has had an expert available somewhere.
What I am trying to point out here is that for the first time, we may be using tools that NOBODY understands -- and perhaps tools that nobody even CAN understand. We may soon be using tools that are beyond human intelligence.
Think I'm exaggerating? Go back and read the first article that was on Slashdot about this scientist's work -- there's another link to it somewhere in this discussion. That evolved circuit, which turns a 5v output on and off in response to two specific voice commands, uses about a third of the components that any human designer would have used. In looking at it, the programmer of the evolutionary system says it is unbelievably complex -- he says it looks like God designed the chip. He doesn't understand it. It is entirely possible that nobody ever will. But it works. (within +-5 degrees F anyway -- apparently he hadn't thought to evolve for temperature variation, and not all FPGAs will run this circuit.)
What practical difference is there between the description above and 'it's magic'?
In rereading this, I think it would have been much stronger if I simply omitted the last four paragraphs. They are true to some extent, but they're really stuff I've seen other places -- relatively weak, alarmist thinking.
If I had it to do over, I'd pull those last four paragraphs out... they weren't the main point anyway.
Now, that's a big claim. Most important EVER?
Consider: no other technological progress to date has ever changed the fundamental nature of Man and his tools. We are the Tool-Using Ape, and all of our technological toys and bombs are just extensions of the first person picking up a stick. He/she could use that stick in many ways, from agriculture to communication to personal hygiene to warfare. Essentially all of the other tools we have ever invented are extensions of that original concept -- specialized forms of stick.
Our sticks have gotten very complex, to the point where most of us navigate in ignorance through a world of astonishing complexity. Very few of us understand something so simple as indoor plumbing, but we are thoroughly dependent on it. This is all old news and we are well used to it -- if the plumbing breaks, call a plumber. If the car breaks, go see a mechanic. If the computer breaks, post on Slashdot from another one and hope to god you pick out the truly informed answer from the barrage of ignorant suggestions. But I digress. :-)
This is where this new technology is important. This isn't just a stick anymore. With all of our existing tools, someone, somewhere invented them, and someone somewhere knows how to fix them when they break. No matter how complex or intimidating the tool, if you are willing to devote enough resources to the problem, you find an expert who understands the technology you are using and can fix it. In the cases of unforeseen interactions between complex systems, like computer software, it may be necessary to consult many experts, but ultimately all of the tools we use are sticks, someone invented them, and someone can fix them.
And that relationship is what is now changing, for the first time since that first person picked up a stick and used it to scratch, we are starting to use tools that we did not invent and that nobody, anywhere understands.
This is an incredibly big deal. We are talking about starting to use tools that are essentially not deterministic in their uses. Different versions of the same tool may work better than others, even though nobody quite understands why.
Consider some of the ramifications: Perhaps your specific tool will have learned how to trace cables or diagnose car engine trouble better than other people's, and you can charge more for your services because of that. Or maybe your gizmo calibrator just doesn't work properly unless you hold it upside down. And what if your computer develops an amazing ability to pick stocks if you consult it after midnight on Tuesday, but sinks into a blue funk and refuses to even talk to you if you fail to address it as "Lord Master Xerxes of Apollo"??
What we are talking about here is sticks with intelligence. Admittedly this is just the very beginning of what, I presume, will be a long slow (dare I say it) evolution of the tools. Taking things out to an extreme, it is not inconceivable that we might end up with tools that have moral or ethical reservations about being used for what we want to use them for. Or we might see guns that *like* to kill and look for excuses to do so. 'It was my sidearm, Your Honor, it just went off unexpectedly.'
Arthur C. Clarke's most famous quote was, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I really am starting to wonder if we're not going to end up in an age of tools that are so smart that using them resembles incantation and gesture -- in essence the casting of spells.
What happens when we become dependent on tools that NOBODY understands or invented?
In a weird sideways tangent, I am reminded of a wise observation that, I believe, Louis L'Amour had about the early war in America between the settlers and the Indians. He pointed out that the Indians lost not because of being outgunned, or because of the sheer numbers of European colonists, but rather because they became dependent on firearms with which to fight, and could not themselves manufacture them. That meant that to fight the colonists, they needed the colonists as arms suppliers. They couldn't drive out the colonists without the colonists' help. Their loss of cultural identity was inescapable as soon as they picked up guns.
If we flesh intelligences end up at odds with silicon ones, and we are dependent on them and cannot duplicate their services with our old sticks and rocks -- we will lose.
Like I said, this is a big deal.
Skillz, dude. :-) Check out the Champions/Hero system for a very well-done non-level system. GURPS is probably the best-known example, but I liked Hero better. More fun IMO.
In Champions/Hero you basically invent the rules to support the character, instead of envisioning a character to suit the rules. It takes a lot more work and thought, though -- you can't just blindly throw some dice, do some math, pick a few spells and have an evening's encounter. Not very hack and slashish -- but the combat system is fun and characters don't die too easily (comes from its superhero origins) -- though death is certainly a possibility.
GURPS is more 'realistic' -- combat is VERY dangerous. The characters are very mortal -- getting into a fight is not a good way to improve one's lifespan. In GURPS, if you take a sword through the chest you are almost certainly going to die -- a high-skill character will be much more adept at avoiding the sword but will die just as quickly when stabbed.
Character levels are a workable first attempt at a gaming system, but skills seem to be a closer approximation of how life really works.
If you pulled out $100,000 each year you could report much better results to stockholders... for 10 years plus some change.
The capitalist approach to resources is consumption -- the second company would do far better and the owners would make a great deal more money. If everyone does this for too long, we all starve.
This truth is simple and inescapable but people deny it and consume, consume, consume anyway.
A good real life example is the Icelandic cod. At one time they were available in such huge numbers that it seemed we would never run out. The cod have been wiped out -- because there was no overall control on consumption, it was in each individual's interest to extract as much fish as possible every year to feed his family and consume, consume, consume. We could have pulled cod out of the ocean forever but instead there may never again be a cod population.
If we are this stupid on an individual basis it is hard to expect corporations to be any smarter.
Dude, it's just paper. There's no reason for anyone to pay even 1 cent for a mass-produced piece of paper that says that the owner is entitled to a portion of a company that is not profitable and never will be.
But people paid nosebleed prices for these pieces of paper because *other* people would pay nosebleed prices for these pieces of paper.
Can you say, 'lemming'?
That wouldn't surprise me, but I am repeating history I have learned from books and articles, rather than history I have lived through. If you were there at the time you may have some good points.
:-)
I was born in the late 60s -- was too young to be paying attention to engineer layoffs from Boeing.
But if you lend money to me when I am desperate and far over extended -- and you KNOW THAT -- expecting that I will default on the debt and surrender assets that are worth much more than the dollar value of the loan, well.... don't you see a problem here?
They hand out credit cards to ANYONE these days.
OK - but creating suffering in the name of 'preventing fraud' ... that is a terrible idea. There isn't much of a problem, and the price will be heavy -- and paid by the people who can least afford it, average people who have had disaster befall them.
I would suggest that the credit card companies making a little less money is preferable to people losing their houses en masse.
Actually credit can make a lot of sense. If you are borrowing money to CREATE something instead of COMSUME something, it is healthy and viable and creates a lot of economic growth.
But if you just waste it by buying dog food or what have you, then it's almost purely bad. In that instance I would agree with your comments.
Actually I think your grandfather is dead on the money. Recessions teach prudence and financial discipline. There are a lot of young people that have never seen a recession during their working lives. Many of them are in debt up to their eyebrows. (and hell, so are a lot of older people that should know better!)
Because it's been so long and people are so in debt, this recession is likely to be a doozy. For that reason I suspect that itulip.com is right about people starting to 'be good' instead of choosing to 'be wealthy'. The early 90s recession wasn't bad enough to really change behaviors. We haven't had a major economic problem since the late 70s.
And of course the prediction could be wrong. We may have fallen so far into greed and apathy that not even a profound recession can change it.
What I am telling you is that the supply is too high because there are a lot of people who are not natively really techies. They came into this field not because they were interested in it, but because it paid a lot of money.
/. readers that would fit this category. I'm talking about the ones out vegetating in front of a TV or playing lawn darts or something... the idiots who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground and simply should not be working in tech. I'm sure you've known any number of them.
There probably aren't many
So is that elitist? Yeah, a little. But I'm not excluding you specifically, particularly not because your salary has gone down. Your salary has gone down because there are too many techs. If you are delivering software on time and under budget, that just about automatically includes you in the 'clue' category.
And if your salary has gone down, and you have a good skill set and can sell yourself, get out there and do so. It's not like jobs have all dried up and blown away. You can probably do better if you are willing to relocate. Bad times are starting but they certainly aren't all the way here yet, and really talented people are still rare and precious.
As far as 'entitlement' goes, you are out of your mind. Nobody owes you a damn thing, and just because you made X number of dollars last year doesn't magically 'entitle' you to make X+1 dollars this year. Ultimately you are creating value for an employer. You must create more value than you consume in salary, benefits, and administrative overhead. On average, if you don't do that you won't stay employed. It's really up to you -- you have to figure out a way to create enough value for someone that they will pay you to do it. 'Entitlement'? Hardly.
And salaries won't fall to nil. They will drop some but they won't go to 0. If they did the supply of techs would also drop to 0 and so salaries would have to go back up. Ultimately a balance will be struck. It is likely to be a lot lower than it was during the last two years. But I think it will still be significantly higher than average, again simply because the *good* techs are hard to find.
So the whole point of all that bile was to call me an idiot? Considering you don't have any data, you are showing thinking of the quality I am attributing to the low-clue IT crowd.
I suspect you know this, too. Of the two groups (talented versus untalented) in the original post, it's pretty obvious with which one you are identifying.
As far as unions go, I am resistant to them. Bureaucracies replace intelligence with rules. If systems administration were highly unionized, for example, I would probably have never gotten into it. Now, it is pretty apparent that you wouldn't consider that a loss, but I can assure you that my prior employers would.
Well, according to existing law, yes. However, the credit companies have big, big sticks they can hit you with. Bad debt NEVER goes away. It gets bought by the credit reporting agencies, and they dutifully report the debt as delinquent FOREVER. So you can't ever get credit again unless you declare bankruptcy, and if this bill goes through, not even then.
Of course there will be some abuse. But the cost of preventing that abuse is going to be tragic.
IMO the abuse cost us far less.
Oh I agree with you re:talent. I think competition is wonderful, and I'll compete toe to toe with anyone.
However, your H1-B person *cannot vote with his feet* if he becomes unhappy with your company. It sounds like you folks are really great, but not everyone is, and once someone is here, if they want to get a green card it is very difficult for them to change jobs.
On the whole, business would do better if it could pay employees $.01/hour, demand that they work 16 hours a day until age 65, and then shoot them. (pay for your own bullet please.) For most business with low-skill employees, this would be wonderful for the bottom line and the stockholders.
The less power that workers have to leave, the more power that businesses have over them.
Give an H1-B person the same right to move around and work for anyone they choose that any citizen has, and I'm all for the program. As far as I am concerned, there should be no immigration restrictions. Humans -- FREE humans -- are our best resource.
But it is hard to compete on a cost basis with people in leg irons.
It would be a lot easier to stop this bankruptcy bill than it will be to undo it though. I recommend contacting your Senator.
Great article -- thanks for the pointer.
In the 1970s, engineers were the same hot property that programmers were last year. During the grinding 1970s recession, times got very tough for them. Many of them lost their homes. Nobody but engineers could afford the payments, and there wasn't much work for engineers. Many of them ended up simply defaulting on their debts, walking away from houses where they owed more (sometimes a lot more) than what they could sell the house for.
It is no coincidence that the big financial companies are pushing through the bankruptcy legislation now. Their stories of abuse are foolish, but people are buying it. ("bankruptcy frauds" now joins "deadbeat dads" and "welfare moms" in the Archive for Scary Stories About Bad People and How We Shouldn't Let Those Bastards Get Away With It.)
They are not pushing through this legislation because of existing abuses. It is because the lenders have been irresponsible and want to make sure that We the People pay for their mistakes. It's a good step along the path back to debtor's prisons. (And if that doesn't scare you, go study your history books. See: "American Revolution, Causes Of.")
If you are a techie, don't set yourself up to rely on the extraordinary incomes of the last few years. Some of us will do fine and will continue to make good money, but many of us will not. Really good performers will always tend to do well -- but there are a lot of marginal people that have been brought into the industry by the 'gold rush' and it's going to take quite awhile to weed them out. Eventually they will go back to jobs which fit their talent levels better, but that's a ways off yet. There will probably be four or five years of tech oversupply.
Could be longer if industry keeps whining about the H1-Bs (aka indentured servants. See: "American Revolution, Causes Of.")
You are right, I may be mistaken there. However, when considering debt load, don't forget stock options. Yahoo has passed those out like water, and this will reduce the investors' share value significantly.
Also, I have read that Yahoo's balance sheet is very weak, and that they held so much stock in so mnay other companies that they were more like a mutual fund than an Internet company. Are you sure that is 2 billion in cash, or is it 2 billion that they spent for other stocks?
That's an interesting assertion. By 'dollars-in', are you counting labor properly? The small one-person farm does have a lot of labor put into it. Big farms have to buy lots of equipment and hire people, so I'm wondering if they might not be coming out lopsidedly more expensive.
:-)
In most industries scale = efficiency, so I'd be surprised if large farms were actually less productive *if they use the same methods to farm*. Big if.
After enough years of that, credit is so fast and loose that ANYONE can get a loan. Over the next few years you are going to see defaults skyrocket. (Moody's is predicting about a 9.5% corporate bond default rate for 2001, up from the 6.5% last year, which was also up a lot.) Banks are in very weak positions now. They are allowed to have as 'assets', against which they can lend, derivative positions in other assets. The problem with that is that in a crisis, they may not be able to cash in those pieces of paper for what they are listed as being worth. Japan's banking system played similar games with real estate in the 1980s. They are still very shaky and barely solvent ten years later, and Japan is still mired in recession. This is probably not coincidence.
Basically, our modern banks have found ways to leverage dollars of 'real' money into many, many more 'illusionary' dollars than they are supposed to. The reserve laws are supposed to prevent too much magnification of original money. If there is a 20% reserve rate, for instance, for every 'real' dollar that the Fed lends out (creates) in the economy, about 5 'illusionary' dollars will come into existence. These are all dollars and all spend, but if too many people ask for paper dollars at once there will be problems. (The Fed has come up with systems to inject emergency liquidity which will prevent bank runs like we had in the 1930s. )
The problem here is that one bank may issue some derivative instrument, say something based somehow on the gold price. Another bank can buy that derivative and list it as an asset and create more illusionary dollars to lend. Basically the banks have managed to do an end run around the liquidity rules and are magnifying the dollars far past what the Fed believes they can do.
This may be why Greenspan is arguing that money can't be quantified -- he realizes that banks and other large institutions are using all these other pieces of paper to represent dollars and instead of correcting the problem, he just seems to be shrugging his shoulders and accepting it.
Upshot: the controls put in place in the 1930s have pretty much been dismantled. The risks now of a major meltdown are much higher than I am comfortable with, personally.
As far as tech stocks being 'traditionally' overvalued, that has been because they grow faster. A P/E multiple of about 20 is considered high but acceptable for growth stocks. I believe the last figure I saw on P/E ratios for the Nasdaq was on the order of 160-1. This was 2 or 3 weeks ago.
As I was commenting in another forum, I think Nasdaq 500 is a lot more likely in the near term than Nasdaq 5000. Admittedly, 500 is a very low probability event, but 5000 is just about zero IMHO... at least barring enormous inflation. I suspect a reasonable valuation would be somewhere between 800 and 1000, but that's just hunch, no solid numbers behind it.
I use the terms 'real' and 'illusionary' dollars here, but I by no means consider paper dollars to be real without some kind of backing. Much of the excess of the 1990s would have been impossible with a commodity-backed monetary standard. It doesn't have to be gold, but gold is one of the best substances we've found to use as a guarantor of paper money.
Fiat currency -- that is, currency that is not real and has no backing -- is simply a method for governments to make horrible financial mistakes and print more money to dig themselves out of the mess they made, screwing their populations in the process.