Assuming your story is true, you are the first rich person to confirm what I have suspected for a long long time (and tried to explain to others).
That (financial) success is a result of 1 of 2 things:
1- Inheritance/connections; either your where born rich and had opportunities handed to you that others do not (which in turn allows you to take risks the rest of us can't), or rich enough that your family/friends people that surrounded you gave you the connections/opportunities the rest of us do not.
2- Luck; just being at the right place at the right time with the right idea; I could do exactly what Steve Jobs or Bill Gates did and not strike it rich, most likely go completely broke. If I tried to create my own OS or computer company in my basement there is no wayyyy I would succeed (using tech already available), and I cannot myself fund any kind of R&D to come up with a breakthrough in the tech field.
Does hard work play a role? Of course in both cases it does. Does being smart help? Of course it does, but I actually believe being too smart can also hinder you (example a smart person knows that taking a $60k/year job for life with retirement and benefits is the smarter route than risking everything to get a startup going. 99.9% of the time it works out better for the majority of people in the long run, so as a smart person how do you justify the risk when the odds are similar to winning the lottery?).
Some of the hardest working folks I know are also some of the poorest. Often times due to a chain of events out of their control (ex mother died racking up massive bills, brother with gambling issue that needed help etc.)
As for in people in prison, it's not as simple as they where bad and deserved it. Anybody who thinks in such black and white terms is an idiot. The world is full of shades....
Even more strange: what if you have a gf, and you buy her a nice pair of Leboutin's shoes or wtv.
You get home and end up having the best sex ever. Is that prostitution?
What if I loan a female friend some $$$ to help her out. When the due date comes, she does not have the money to pay you back. She offers instead to do you a solid and have sex with you to thank you for your patience and help. Is that prostitution? Do we go to jail?
What about the 2 women living with Charlie Sheen. Was that prostitution?
It's not just the men; Women pay for feeling of protection, stability and companionship that men provide.
The trick is finding a happy medium where both parties are satisfied. In the past the balance was shifted towards men, now it has shifted towards women.
I personally think that the world overall would be a better place if men where allowed to meet their needs without having to either settle down with somebody they do not necessarily want to be with, or without lying/tricking women (ie being a player). Many studies have showed that in places where prostitution is legal there is a drop in rape and sexual violence in general. Also these places (like in a lot of European countries) people still seek out meaningful monogamous relationships.
Funny enough, up here in Canada, it is illegal to pay for sex (this is recent; it used to be legal, what was illegal was solicitation) , however if one pays for sex and records it then it is legal (exception made to keep the porn industry alive).
IMHO women have much much much more choice when it comes potential mates, however I would say it's harder for them to find a decent mate (by decent I mean has a job, not a deadbeat, that like doing activities other than netflix and chill, non violent, not lazy, not looking to get laid and run).
The big difference is, if you are an average looking guy, it's not easy to get laid when you want or get a gf when you want.
The reverse (average looking woman) is not true; Even blandest plain looking average woman can get laid whenever she wants, will have a lineup of men waiting to take her out on dates (getting a decent bf is not as easy though).
This is nothing more than a woman being terrified they will lose their sexual power over men.
Imagine how the dating scene would change if men could get off (legally, cleanly and guilt free) whenever the had the urge, instead of having to date countless women and pretend to like them to get laid until the right one came along.....
It's all about power, right now, in the west at least, women have it.
If you pay attention you will often notice that a lot of women seem to oppose any kind of sexual service offered to men. They are afraid that if men can get laid whenever they want, they will not want to settle or put up with the headaches that come with being in a relationship. Of course they they never admit that, instead of opting for causes such as fighting "human trafficking" and "protecting the children".
And with the rise of sex robots on the horizon.......they are starting to get a little worried, because it renders their arguments against male sexual freedom moot.
I will admit, that I myself have fallen "victim" to the power of the pussy, dating horrible women because simply they "put out".
As far as I know, there is no way to build a fuse to will break at exactly the time you want it to, without it looking suspicious. Besides replacing a fuse in most cases is trivial.
And they can easily avoid class action suit by including in the licensing agreement that you do not own the device, you are renting it for a certain amount of time and the the real owner is the producer and they can, if they so chose, to burn the device at any time for any reason and you agree to it (you know like those credit card contracts that basically say they have the right to change wtv they want any time they want but you cant.)
BTW, most cloud providers do not actually manage the windows/linux/etc. server.
They just make sure the vm is running, their network is up, their internet is up and it ends there.
It's extra if you want them to manage servers, manage accounts etc.....
So server admins are not necessarily dying off.....They are being consolidated into the data centers in most cases (the ones who offer the service). Or the job is outsourced to India.
Most new software that is coming is adopting the SaaS model, so you do not need to run your own Windows/linux box to use it. Short term it does decrease costs, long term I believe it will end up costing an order of magnitude more than had you hosted the solution yourself.
How am I wrong? You say it in your own words "At the mutlinational I work for, the local switch.....".
All I said is that infrastructure does not go away, I said nothing about it being managed in-house or outsourced. The point was that even in an all-cloud environment, you still need to keep a good chunk of infrastructure in place, and pay somebody to manage it.
In my experience, when the environment is small (50 computers and less), it is best to outsource as that kind of environment is nothing complicated to setup and manage (I am talking about a standard setup for emails, file server, networked printers and internet).
At 51-200, it can go either way. It really depends how complex your environment is, if you have remote offices (generally that size is a no). I would says it all depends how tolerant your business is to downtime (yes I know nobody is but realistically some companies depend on information systems way more than others) and how overloaded the person will be making interface with the 3rd party company is with his actual work. It can go either way, but generally speaking the rule of thumb is 3rd party is cheaper, in-house you have more quality control.
200+: I would recommend in most cases it is best to have the expertise in house, or at the very least 1 person who's primary task is to manage and oversee their IT infrastructure while outsourcing the actual work to 3rd parties. Remember the goal of any 3rd party solutions provider is to maximize $$$$$ and not you. So they will often times try to sell you solutions your do not need, or solutions offered by their "partners" which is not always the best/cheaper option.
In any case, the Cloud is not the final solution for IT that the marketers are making out to be.
Although lots of IT services lend themselves well to cloud solutions, not all do.
The job will evolve to take advantage of the new developments in tech, like it always has. Like how to this day, most companies that I worked for still have phone systems, because frankly it's cheaper than having a phone line for each and every employee.
Also going cloud still requires you to have a local LAN and somebody to manage it. And firewall. And ISP. This requirement is going nowhere anytime soon.
What will vanish is (and I would argue has already vanished) is small companies (50 or less) having to have a full time IT guy to manage their stuff. But this is not cost free, as I used to see a lot of these companies during my consulting days falling into complete chaos and dissaray because cloud providers don't usually manage your workstations or make sure your employees are following the processes and business practices your company relies on. Some went back to having their own in-house IT because of it.
A huge chunk of sys admins will be absorbed into cloud providers. And some positions will also be eliminated. This is to be expected.
Biggest issue we face in the IT industry (IMHO of course) is more that companies like Google, Apple, M$ and others pressuring universities and colleges to expand their CS/IT programs and issue a related diploma to people who just look at the curriculum. They also keep spreading the propaganda that it is a hot industry (drawing in suckers) and keep pressuring the government to allow in more H1Bs (aka digital slave labor) all to drive down IT salary costs.
Some places have no idea what a sysadmin or software engineer is supposed to do. They assume we are all one and the same. So you will be harassed for any problem that involves using electricity.
Some places refuse to follow or put in place process/policies/limitations and enforce them in order to make the workload manageable.
Some places refuse to see the value in our work; They only see it as a cost center to be minimized at all costs, morale be damned.
It is a thankless job (and who cares about being thanked, show me the money lobowski!), yes most place refuse to pay what the position should be paying. So you either end up with subpar employees or are forced to work with subpar employees that cause a lot of problems you need to cleanup.
I mean can I get a ride from them, without paying, and in return in the future give a ride to somebody else? No.... If I could, I would be first in line defending them.
It's a damn taxi service with an app......that is all it is. And currently, the reason they can offer lower prices than most local taxi services in the West is because they don't pay the limited and expensive taxi plates, their drivers aren't tested and given a taxi license (that is usually more expensive than a regular license), they do not belong to some sort of taxi association (which gives you access to their territory, get hails etc.), their cars do not go though taxi inspections.......Which is not to say that normal taxi service is more secure or anything, these are all just hidden forms of taxation who's costs are passed along to the clients.
They are competing unfairly and all profits go to Uber....we the taxpayers get screwed in the end because Uber is not paying their fair share......
...Not unless there is some revolutionary paradigm shift in Computer Science.
OS since Windows XP (or OSX) have pretty much hit their "peak" in terms of balance, usability and stability.
Since Windows XP (or OSX) the user experience has not changed much (although there have been significant changes under the hood).
I remember the days when a new OS required new hardware to run all the new goodies that where added (Think Win3.1=> Win95, Win95=>Win 98SE, or from Win98=>WinXP upgrade).
Since WinXP, all we have really seen is incremental, evolutionary changes that get implemented not only with major OS releases but with patches and service packs (and whatever the OS maker refuses to implement gets covered rather quickly by 3rd party software makers).
I expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable future.
How is a sleazy scab who operates a porn site to make money any worse then any other sleazy scab who runs any other kind of company to make money?
You want to be a boss/owner? Then you basically are exploiting humans to earn $$$$. That is how it works.
Also you are assuming they are blocking only sites that violate copyright and sites operated by misogynists, neither of which is stated in the article. Make up shit, much?
In this day and age, everybody should have a basic understand of how computers work and how to use them. Know what a file is, network etc. Same with social media.
But I get the feeling what theses clowns are aiming to do is get people to learn basic coding in order to flood the market with code monkeys that know how to write an if-then-else statement in order to deflate CS salaries......Make it so that anybody with a high school diploma can apply for entry-level coding jobs.
You are correct that the average Joe, including myself, does not review 99.99999% of open sourced software. Quite simply I do not have the time to do so. However when it's open sourced, it is much much harder to sneak in malware because most popular releases do get reviewed by whatever community runs/develops it. If the release in question is ignored, it generally means that there is a lack of interest and/or user base at which point the problem becomes moot.
However it is much much harder to review a closed source OS like Windows/ iOS etc....Nobody will waste their time until paid to do so, and nobody is willing to pay to do so, especially not the companies who make the product.
...what happens if that "malware" comes installed by default on closed source OS like Windows, OS X, iOS?
It's been documented that the NSA (could have been another agency) intercepting IT hardware (like Cisco switches) and installing their own custom firmware. Also hard disks have some code running on them curtsey of the NSA.
Even if it did, still would not stop it's development.
How do you make it so that nobody in the world can program an AI capable of pulling a trigger? What about a baseball bat? How do you stop AI written in some 15 year old basement from firing a gun that does not have a traditional trigger?
Short answer: you cannot.....the geneie was let out of the battle many many years ago....We cannot stop it at this point unless we give up electricity....worldwide....And manage to destroy all generators, all solar, wind bla bla bla you get the point. You can't compile AI without electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming your story is true, you are the first rich person to confirm what I have suspected for a long long time (and tried to explain to others).
That (financial) success is a result of 1 of 2 things:
1- Inheritance/connections; either your where born rich and had opportunities handed to you that others do not (which in turn allows you to take risks the rest of us can't), or rich enough that your family/friends people that surrounded you gave you the connections/opportunities the rest of us do not.
2- Luck; just being at the right place at the right time with the right idea; I could do exactly what Steve Jobs or Bill Gates did and not strike it rich, most likely go completely broke. If I tried to create my own OS or computer company in my basement there is no wayyyy I would succeed (using tech already available), and I cannot myself fund any kind of R&D to come up with a breakthrough in the tech field.
Does hard work play a role? Of course in both cases it does. Does being smart help? Of course it does, but I actually believe being too smart can also hinder you (example a smart person knows that taking a $60k/year job for life with retirement and benefits is the smarter route than risking everything to get a startup going. 99.9% of the time it works out better for the majority of people in the long run, so as a smart person how do you justify the risk when the odds are similar to winning the lottery?).
Some of the hardest working folks I know are also some of the poorest. Often times due to a chain of events out of their control (ex mother died racking up massive bills, brother with gambling issue that needed help etc.)
As for in people in prison, it's not as simple as they where bad and deserved it. Anybody who thinks in such black and white terms is an idiot. The world is full of shades....
Even more strange: what if you have a gf, and you buy her a nice pair of Leboutin's shoes or wtv.
You get home and end up having the best sex ever. Is that prostitution?
What if I loan a female friend some $$$ to help her out. When the due date comes, she does not have the money to pay you back. She offers instead to do you a solid and have sex with you to thank you for your patience and help. Is that prostitution? Do we go to jail?
What about the 2 women living with Charlie Sheen. Was that prostitution?
It's not just the men; Women pay for feeling of protection, stability and companionship that men provide.
The trick is finding a happy medium where both parties are satisfied. In the past the balance was shifted towards men, now it has shifted towards women.
I personally think that the world overall would be a better place if men where allowed to meet their needs without having to either settle down with somebody they do not necessarily want to be with, or without lying/tricking women (ie being a player). Many studies have showed that in places where prostitution is legal there is a drop in rape and sexual violence in general. Also these places (like in a lot of European countries) people still seek out meaningful monogamous relationships.
Funny enough, up here in Canada, it is illegal to pay for sex (this is recent; it used to be legal, what was illegal was solicitation) , however if one pays for sex and records it then it is legal (exception made to keep the porn industry alive).
IMHO women have much much much more choice when it comes potential mates, however I would say it's harder for them to find a decent mate (by decent I mean has a job, not a deadbeat, that like doing activities other than netflix and chill, non violent, not lazy, not looking to get laid and run).
Ok, i'll feed the troll.....just cause I am bored.
Care to elaborate on why my comment is bullshit? What bias am I showing?
Also note that I said "can get laid whenever she wants" and not "does get laid laid whenever she wants".
The big difference is, if you are an average looking guy, it's not easy to get laid when you want or get a gf when you want.
The reverse (average looking woman) is not true; Even blandest plain looking average woman can get laid whenever she wants, will have a lineup of men waiting to take her out on dates (getting a decent bf is not as easy though).
This is nothing more than a woman being terrified they will lose their sexual power over men.
Imagine how the dating scene would change if men could get off (legally, cleanly and guilt free) whenever the had the urge, instead of having to date countless women and pretend to like them to get laid until the right one came along.....
So do girlfriends....just not direct cash exchange ;)
This.....this is exactly it.
It's all about power, right now, in the west at least, women have it.
If you pay attention you will often notice that a lot of women seem to oppose any kind of sexual service offered to men. They are afraid that if men can get laid whenever they want, they will not want to settle or put up with the headaches that come with being in a relationship. Of course they they never admit that, instead of opting for causes such as fighting "human trafficking" and "protecting the children".
And with the rise of sex robots on the horizon.......they are starting to get a little worried, because it renders their arguments against male sexual freedom moot.
I will admit, that I myself have fallen "victim" to the power of the pussy, dating horrible women because simply they "put out".
As far as I know, there is no way to build a fuse to will break at exactly the time you want it to, without it looking suspicious. Besides replacing a fuse in most cases is trivial.
And they can easily avoid class action suit by including in the licensing agreement that you do not own the device, you are renting it for a certain amount of time and the the real owner is the producer and they can, if they so chose, to burn the device at any time for any reason and you agree to it (you know like those credit card contracts that basically say they have the right to change wtv they want any time they want but you cant.)
Now companies will be able to impose the upgrade cycle to all of us for every device known to man (including cars, fridges, etc.)
Ownership of anything is now dead......
...if you are the type who gets the new iPhone every year regardless?
This program is not for everybody, although it will likely suck in more people on the yearly phone upg train.
BTW, most cloud providers do not actually manage the windows/linux/etc. server.
They just make sure the vm is running, their network is up, their internet is up and it ends there.
It's extra if you want them to manage servers, manage accounts etc.....
So server admins are not necessarily dying off.....They are being consolidated into the data centers in most cases (the ones who offer the service). Or the job is outsourced to India.
Most new software that is coming is adopting the SaaS model, so you do not need to run your own Windows/linux box to use it. Short term it does decrease costs, long term I believe it will end up costing an order of magnitude more than had you hosted the solution yourself.
How am I wrong? You say it in your own words "At the mutlinational I work for, the local switch .....".
All I said is that infrastructure does not go away, I said nothing about it being managed in-house or outsourced. The point was that even in an all-cloud environment, you still need to keep a good chunk of infrastructure in place, and pay somebody to manage it.
In my experience, when the environment is small (50 computers and less), it is best to outsource as that kind of environment is nothing complicated to setup and manage (I am talking about a standard setup for emails, file server, networked printers and internet).
At 51-200, it can go either way. It really depends how complex your environment is, if you have remote offices (generally that size is a no). I would says it all depends how tolerant your business is to downtime (yes I know nobody is but realistically some companies depend on information systems way more than others) and how overloaded the person will be making interface with the 3rd party company is with his actual work. It can go either way, but generally speaking the rule of thumb is 3rd party is cheaper, in-house you have more quality control.
200+: I would recommend in most cases it is best to have the expertise in house, or at the very least 1 person who's primary task is to manage and oversee their IT infrastructure while outsourcing the actual work to 3rd parties. Remember the goal of any 3rd party solutions provider is to maximize $$$$$ and not you. So they will often times try to sell you solutions your do not need, or solutions offered by their "partners" which is not always the best/cheaper option.
In any case, the Cloud is not the final solution for IT that the marketers are making out to be.
Although lots of IT services lend themselves well to cloud solutions, not all do.
The job will evolve to take advantage of the new developments in tech, like it always has. Like how to this day, most companies that I worked for still have phone systems, because frankly it's cheaper than having a phone line for each and every employee.
Also going cloud still requires you to have a local LAN and somebody to manage it. And firewall. And ISP. This requirement is going nowhere anytime soon.
What will vanish is (and I would argue has already vanished) is small companies (50 or less) having to have a full time IT guy to manage their stuff. But this is not cost free, as I used to see a lot of these companies during my consulting days falling into complete chaos and dissaray because cloud providers don't usually manage your workstations or make sure your employees are following the processes and business practices your company relies on. Some went back to having their own in-house IT because of it.
A huge chunk of sys admins will be absorbed into cloud providers. And some positions will also be eliminated. This is to be expected.
Biggest issue we face in the IT industry (IMHO of course) is more that companies like Google, Apple, M$ and others pressuring universities and colleges to expand their CS/IT programs and issue a related diploma to people who just look at the curriculum. They also keep spreading the propaganda that it is a hot industry (drawing in suckers) and keep pressuring the government to allow in more H1Bs (aka digital slave labor) all to drive down IT salary costs.
Some places have no idea what a sysadmin or software engineer is supposed to do. They assume we are all one and the same. So you will be harassed for any problem that involves using electricity.
Some places refuse to follow or put in place process/policies/limitations and enforce them in order to make the workload manageable.
Some places refuse to see the value in our work; They only see it as a cost center to be minimized at all costs, morale be damned.
It is a thankless job (and who cares about being thanked, show me the money lobowski!), yes most place refuse to pay what the position should be paying. So you either end up with subpar employees or are forced to work with subpar employees that cause a lot of problems you need to cleanup.
And the list goes on and on.
I mean can I get a ride from them, without paying, and in return in the future give a ride to somebody else? No.... If I could, I would be first in line defending them.
It's a damn taxi service with an app......that is all it is. And currently, the reason they can offer lower prices than most local taxi services in the West is because they don't pay the limited and expensive taxi plates, their drivers aren't tested and given a taxi license (that is usually more expensive than a regular license), they do not belong to some sort of taxi association (which gives you access to their territory, get hails etc.), their cars do not go though taxi inspections.......Which is not to say that normal taxi service is more secure or anything, these are all just hidden forms of taxation who's costs are passed along to the clients.
They are competing unfairly and all profits go to Uber....we the taxpayers get screwed in the end because Uber is not paying their fair share......
...Not unless there is some revolutionary paradigm shift in Computer Science.
OS since Windows XP (or OSX) have pretty much hit their "peak" in terms of balance, usability and stability.
Since Windows XP (or OSX) the user experience has not changed much (although there have been significant changes under the hood).
I remember the days when a new OS required new hardware to run all the new goodies that where added (Think Win3.1=> Win95, Win95=>Win 98SE, or from Win98=>WinXP upgrade).
Since WinXP, all we have really seen is incremental, evolutionary changes that get implemented not only with major OS releases but with patches and service packs (and whatever the OS maker refuses to implement gets covered rather quickly by 3rd party software makers).
I expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable future.
Since when is porn intended for young children?
Sounds to me like that is more of a parenting issue, not a problem with porn.
Just because my neighbor sucks at parenting should not grant the government the right to police my porn consumption.
How is a sleazy scab who operates a porn site to make money any worse then any other sleazy scab who runs any other kind of company to make money?
You want to be a boss/owner? Then you basically are exploiting humans to earn $$$$. That is how it works.
Also you are assuming they are blocking only sites that violate copyright and sites operated by misogynists, neither of which is stated in the article. Make up shit, much?
In this day and age, everybody should have a basic understand of how computers work and how to use them. Know what a file is, network etc. Same with social media.
But I get the feeling what theses clowns are aiming to do is get people to learn basic coding in order to flood the market with code monkeys that know how to write an if-then-else statement in order to deflate CS salaries......Make it so that anybody with a high school diploma can apply for entry-level coding jobs.
You are correct that the average Joe, including myself, does not review 99.99999% of open sourced software. Quite simply I do not have the time to do so. However when it's open sourced, it is much much harder to sneak in malware because most popular releases do get reviewed by whatever community runs/develops it. If the release in question is ignored, it generally means that there is a lack of interest and/or user base at which point the problem becomes moot.
However it is much much harder to review a closed source OS like Windows/ iOS etc....Nobody will waste their time until paid to do so, and nobody is willing to pay to do so, especially not the companies who make the product.
...what happens if that "malware" comes installed by default on closed source OS like Windows, OS X, iOS?
It's been documented that the NSA (could have been another agency) intercepting IT hardware (like Cisco switches) and installing their own custom firmware. Also hard disks have some code running on them curtsey of the NSA.
Does nobody else see the inherit danger here?
Even if it did, still would not stop it's development.
How do you make it so that nobody in the world can program an AI capable of pulling a trigger? What about a baseball bat? How do you stop AI written in some 15 year old basement from firing a gun that does not have a traditional trigger?
Short answer: you cannot.....the geneie was let out of the battle many many years ago....We cannot stop it at this point unless we give up electricity....worldwide....And manage to destroy all generators, all solar, wind bla bla bla you get the point. You can't compile AI without electricity.
The problem is not governments. Governments can be toppled, heads of states assassinated (if need be) or jailed.
The problem is when you get non-state entities that acquire an army of killerbots......
What stops a 15 year old script kiddie that hacks a battalion of these things and sends them on a rampage?
You cannot legislate knowledge away. At best, it will simply delay the development of autonomous weapons by a few years.
Worst it is will allow rogue nations and terrorist organizations to leap ahead which in itself can have disastrous consequences....