Pretty sure his point isn't to do with a cutoff date, but the fact that with software there are no spare parts - if you know how to use a CNC you could make replacement parts for a car, or even sell replacement parts to others with that car ensuring there are always replacement parts to keep it running. With a piece of closed source software there is no such alternative, as long as the software is closed and the vendor isn't supporting it you're hosed - only it's even worse because the vendor had terms of use on par with "if you ever want to tow your boat with this car you must weld the boat to the car and drive it's engine with the car's engine in some non-reversible manner" - so now not only are you out the car, but the much more expensive boat (pretty much every factory is a victim of this, think of CNCs and other industrial equipment with costs exceeding the underlying software by 3-4 orders of magnitude, much worse than the car/boat analogy.)
Instead of a bug breaking some ultra expensive piece of factory gear it will be a hardware failure or something else that can no longer be fixed. Simply removing one of the sources of obsolescence doesn't solve the underlying problem that is that many companies have piss poor obsolescence management or business continuity plans in place.
Hardware still running XP is typically the same type of hardware that was around in the 70's or 80's and is still running - things like CNCs, lathes, grinders, etc used in machine shops or industrial ovens and processing equipment. Weighting the expected lifetime of a 50+ year hardware live vs a 2-3 year software life and having it be 2-3 years is absurd, only moreso due to the facts that the software is typically 0.001% or less of the total cost of the machine and the versions running that 70's and 80's hardware are still running strong. The only thing which makes the hardware obsolete in these cases is Microsoft's decision to make it so. Often times the hardware vendors fill a very specific niche and go under within 5-10 years and the machinery is expected to keep going strong - yet the failing component is provided by a company which is still among the wealthiest in the world. It is obscene to believe Microsoft is able to simply stop supporting their products and let them die off before they as a company go bankrupt, that methodology doesn't apply to hardware and it only applies to software because we allow it to.
If they don't want to support their software anymore, then they should open source it. If there are people and companies that are locked into the older OS, then there is a market for people to produce patches, upgrades, etc.
No. You can't support legacy software forever. If your customers choose to stay with it past it's notified EOL then they are SOL. Any company using XP that got hit by this can only blame themselves.
There is plenty of mission-critical software driving places like machine shops which was never ported to newer systems because the companies making it went under - yet the owners of that software still have $100,000+ machines running on XP (or even 95, 98, and 2000.) If a company decides to exploit their position in the market to lock in customers (like Microsoft did throughout that period of time) they are indebted to those customers for life, no if's, and's or but's. They utilized extra-ordinate market influence to force developers and end users into their product, they owe them at a minimum support for the life of the hardware or the cost to replace the hardware.
The point being: it doesn't do anything. It's a neat curiosity, but it is still restricted to the speed of light, don't add to security, uses more energy (you still have to have photons pumping both sides) and uses a more cumbersome form of hardware meaning higher costs to utilize it. It's really more an interesting experiment showing you can in fact read a system without disturbing it than it is any remotely useful form of communication (though even that is suspect, since chances are there is some disturbance which happens to be too low to measure as most of the "quantum" effects are just "stupid things that happen when we hit the limits of our sensors" and not magic.)
The wild west aspect didn't make the net flourish, it was the fact it was for nerds. Once the plebs got into the mix everything got screwed up, one aspect of which is they are dumb and desperate enough to be taken advantage of, leading to a need for regulations like net neutrality to ensure nerds (the people who the internet was built by/for) don't end up in some bureaucratic mess with ISPs demanding an extra cost for every service used (or worse, hosted.)
Which is more telling; lots of people trying to post comments for net neutrality or some organizations trying to block those people from posting those comments?
You left out that there's also some organization demanding proof of people blocking people from commenting - likely tied to the people who did so, betting that the FCC won't release any logs.
How about we don't try to produce energy with the most toxic and deadly materials mankind has ever discovered?
Life is controlled fire and fire is the combination of energy sources. Any energy source is inherently going to be dangerous to life (even the ones we depend on to survive like the sun or a few logs burning in a fireplace.) The more potential use an energy source has the more dangerous it is, get over it.
This is bullshit. Every other country just realizes that the amount of money that drug companies spend with their multi-million dollar ad spots and high paid executives and huge profits is not in line with their needs to take care of their citizens. If America wants to keep paying for it then fine, but don't get tricked into believing that there won't be cures for anything without all that money floating around.
To be fair, healthcare isn't that hard. What's difficult is making the structure of our healthcare work, but basically every other country has the same care for around half the price.
The issue with this is that the US funds most healthcare development worldwide, then either practically gives it away to or has it stolen by lesser nations. For instance, medications that go for tens of thousands of dollars per month in the US are typically around a few cents per pill in places like India - not because the companies want to sell them that cheap but because Indian companies will knock them off once the US companies have done all the R&D then sell them at the cost to themselves, without all the R&D overhead. In turn the US companies need to sell at the same low cost to such nations to make any revenue from them. What we need is a world-wide single-payer healthcare system because R&D costs are real (if you don't fund R&D you don't get new medicines, and that's all there is to it) but so are the dynamics of having to play ball in a world market. It's a particularly hard problem when the lesser nations have no wealth to contribute to the task but if look at them instead as a place with more lenient medical regulations it is a great place to test emerging treatments, so long as those tests are conducted in a manner that can translate to the developed world - in turn allowing them to shoulder some of the R&D costs.
Another alternative might be going to war with nations which steal medicines, but that kind of defeats the purpose of healthcare in general so seeing them as guinea-pigs is a kinder approach.
What you'll find in every case is that the companies working with H1b's aren't lead by technologists, they're lead by marketing/sales people who see the technology like a raw material leading into the business and their marketing/sales expertise as the core of the business. Incidentally, if we just started throwing everyone in advertising in jail for life (or Hell, just executing them) the H1b problem would disappear overnight.
The award counts as part of your income - the whole reward. For anyone under 91k/yr that 27.5k will bump them up a tax bracket and screw over their entire filing for a higher percentage rate (which they might adjust to have deducted, but still only for half the year at June.)
Given the popularity of Fortran these days amongst 'geeks' (whatever they mean by that), this challenge is essentially limited to people already working on it.
Not to mention the measly $55k prize is split between the top 2 submitters, so you're down to $27.5k off the bat. Now subtract out the taxes for independent contracting and you're down to around $17.875k. Now assume you are working a job somewhere under $91k/yr to even bother with such a thing and you're looking at your entire salary going up to the next tax bracket AND be hit with the extra tax on everything you make for the year simply for taking on a side job and you would be extremely lucky to come away from the ordeal with $5k extra - but don't worry, it will look like around $20k, until you go to do your taxes next year and realize you have to set up a payment plan with the IRS and eat ramen noodles for 2018 while working full time. No thanks.
If they have to pay their interns this kind of money to get talent, it speaks volumes to why expanding the H1B program is an absolute necessity going forward to supply this companies with the kind of people they need.
Or they can just share profit appropriately or sink as they should to make way for more agile companies.
More likely they cracked down post-Snowden (assuming he wasn't a controlled leak, or even if so) and the added internal security is driving employees nuts.
The computer proficiency spectrum is pretty clear-cut: Mac --> Windows --> Linux --> BSD --> Unix. SystemD is the final frontier of high-computing/low-security meeting - move to BSD or higher if you want security.
To say NASA is working on them is outright wrong. They still crack water for breathable air instead of recycling it, they still use the same old space suits because they keep going for over-priced contractors with an in who don't actually know what they're doing, the worst part is their "breakthrough propulsion" lab is so pathetically under-funded that they had to use 6 months of their entire budget to afford a vacuum chamber worth a few thousand dollars to test the EM Drive in. Likewise they've done nearly no tests on warp drives. Not sure where you got the 1% of the population bit - the Orion ship was never meant to launch from Earth, but from space after being lifted up with traditional rockets - of course riding nuclear shockwaves from Earth would be absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
Except maybe Microsoft's PR people.
Pretty sure his point isn't to do with a cutoff date, but the fact that with software there are no spare parts - if you know how to use a CNC you could make replacement parts for a car, or even sell replacement parts to others with that car ensuring there are always replacement parts to keep it running. With a piece of closed source software there is no such alternative, as long as the software is closed and the vendor isn't supporting it you're hosed - only it's even worse because the vendor had terms of use on par with "if you ever want to tow your boat with this car you must weld the boat to the car and drive it's engine with the car's engine in some non-reversible manner" - so now not only are you out the car, but the much more expensive boat (pretty much every factory is a victim of this, think of CNCs and other industrial equipment with costs exceeding the underlying software by 3-4 orders of magnitude, much worse than the car/boat analogy.)
Instead of a bug breaking some ultra expensive piece of factory gear it will be a hardware failure or something else that can no longer be fixed. Simply removing one of the sources of obsolescence doesn't solve the underlying problem that is that many companies have piss poor obsolescence management or business continuity plans in place.
Hardware still running XP is typically the same type of hardware that was around in the 70's or 80's and is still running - things like CNCs, lathes, grinders, etc used in machine shops or industrial ovens and processing equipment. Weighting the expected lifetime of a 50+ year hardware live vs a 2-3 year software life and having it be 2-3 years is absurd, only moreso due to the facts that the software is typically 0.001% or less of the total cost of the machine and the versions running that 70's and 80's hardware are still running strong. The only thing which makes the hardware obsolete in these cases is Microsoft's decision to make it so. Often times the hardware vendors fill a very specific niche and go under within 5-10 years and the machinery is expected to keep going strong - yet the failing component is provided by a company which is still among the wealthiest in the world. It is obscene to believe Microsoft is able to simply stop supporting their products and let them die off before they as a company go bankrupt, that methodology doesn't apply to hardware and it only applies to software because we allow it to.
If they don't want to support their software anymore, then they should open source it. If there are people and companies that are locked into the older OS, then there is a market for people to produce patches, upgrades, etc.
That would reveal the explicit backdoors.
No. You can't support legacy software forever. If your customers choose to stay with it past it's notified EOL then they are SOL. Any company using XP that got hit by this can only blame themselves.
There is plenty of mission-critical software driving places like machine shops which was never ported to newer systems because the companies making it went under - yet the owners of that software still have $100,000+ machines running on XP (or even 95, 98, and 2000.) If a company decides to exploit their position in the market to lock in customers (like Microsoft did throughout that period of time) they are indebted to those customers for life, no if's, and's or but's. They utilized extra-ordinate market influence to force developers and end users into their product, they owe them at a minimum support for the life of the hardware or the cost to replace the hardware.
The point being: it doesn't do anything. It's a neat curiosity, but it is still restricted to the speed of light, don't add to security, uses more energy (you still have to have photons pumping both sides) and uses a more cumbersome form of hardware meaning higher costs to utilize it. It's really more an interesting experiment showing you can in fact read a system without disturbing it than it is any remotely useful form of communication (though even that is suspect, since chances are there is some disturbance which happens to be too low to measure as most of the "quantum" effects are just "stupid things that happen when we hit the limits of our sensors" and not magic.)
How is this different than radio?
It isn't. The author is pretending photons aren't particles to get away with saying "no particles" travel between the points of communication.
The wild west aspect didn't make the net flourish, it was the fact it was for nerds. Once the plebs got into the mix everything got screwed up, one aspect of which is they are dumb and desperate enough to be taken advantage of, leading to a need for regulations like net neutrality to ensure nerds (the people who the internet was built by/for) don't end up in some bureaucratic mess with ISPs demanding an extra cost for every service used (or worse, hosted.)
If this was San Francisco
Nobody cares what happens in insane asylums, open-air or otherwise.
Which is more telling; lots of people trying to post comments for net neutrality or some organizations trying to block those people from posting those comments?
You left out that there's also some organization demanding proof of people blocking people from commenting - likely tied to the people who did so, betting that the FCC won't release any logs.
How about we don't try to produce energy with the most toxic and deadly materials mankind has ever discovered?
Life is controlled fire and fire is the combination of energy sources. Any energy source is inherently going to be dangerous to life (even the ones we depend on to survive like the sun or a few logs burning in a fireplace.) The more potential use an energy source has the more dangerous it is, get over it.
This is bullshit. Every other country just realizes that the amount of money that drug companies spend with their multi-million dollar ad spots and high paid executives and huge profits is not in line with their needs to take care of their citizens. If America wants to keep paying for it then fine, but don't get tricked into believing that there won't be cures for anything without all that money floating around.
Actually, they just don't do their own R&D.
To be fair, healthcare isn't that hard. What's difficult is making the structure of our healthcare work, but basically every other country has the same care for around half the price.
The issue with this is that the US funds most healthcare development worldwide, then either practically gives it away to or has it stolen by lesser nations. For instance, medications that go for tens of thousands of dollars per month in the US are typically around a few cents per pill in places like India - not because the companies want to sell them that cheap but because Indian companies will knock them off once the US companies have done all the R&D then sell them at the cost to themselves, without all the R&D overhead. In turn the US companies need to sell at the same low cost to such nations to make any revenue from them. What we need is a world-wide single-payer healthcare system because R&D costs are real (if you don't fund R&D you don't get new medicines, and that's all there is to it) but so are the dynamics of having to play ball in a world market. It's a particularly hard problem when the lesser nations have no wealth to contribute to the task but if look at them instead as a place with more lenient medical regulations it is a great place to test emerging treatments, so long as those tests are conducted in a manner that can translate to the developed world - in turn allowing them to shoulder some of the R&D costs.
Another alternative might be going to war with nations which steal medicines, but that kind of defeats the purpose of healthcare in general so seeing them as guinea-pigs is a kinder approach.
Or, maybe succeeding in capitalism is easy once you've got enough capital.
Because that's what managers are known for having.
What you'll find in every case is that the companies working with H1b's aren't lead by technologists, they're lead by marketing/sales people who see the technology like a raw material leading into the business and their marketing/sales expertise as the core of the business. Incidentally, if we just started throwing everyone in advertising in jail for life (or Hell, just executing them) the H1b problem would disappear overnight.
This is pretty much what I described - mixing a W2 and a 1099 is bad every time.
The award counts as part of your income - the whole reward. For anyone under 91k/yr that 27.5k will bump them up a tax bracket and screw over their entire filing for a higher percentage rate (which they might adjust to have deducted, but still only for half the year at June.)
You don't know how tax brackets work. At least in the USA.
Been bitten by them enough to know you're wrong if you claim that from what I wrote.
Given the popularity of Fortran these days amongst 'geeks' (whatever they mean by that), this challenge is essentially limited to people already working on it.
Not to mention the measly $55k prize is split between the top 2 submitters, so you're down to $27.5k off the bat. Now subtract out the taxes for independent contracting and you're down to around $17.875k. Now assume you are working a job somewhere under $91k/yr to even bother with such a thing and you're looking at your entire salary going up to the next tax bracket AND be hit with the extra tax on everything you make for the year simply for taking on a side job and you would be extremely lucky to come away from the ordeal with $5k extra - but don't worry, it will look like around $20k, until you go to do your taxes next year and realize you have to set up a payment plan with the IRS and eat ramen noodles for 2018 while working full time. No thanks.
If they have to pay their interns this kind of money to get talent, it speaks volumes to why expanding the H1B program is an absolute necessity going forward to supply this companies with the kind of people they need.
Or they can just share profit appropriately or sink as they should to make way for more agile companies.
Retinal display and augment reality contact lenses (with a special security feature that releases cyanide into the eye of anyone the NSA dislikes.)
More likely they cracked down post-Snowden (assuming he wasn't a controlled leak, or even if so) and the added internal security is driving employees nuts.
The computer proficiency spectrum is pretty clear-cut: Mac --> Windows --> Linux --> BSD --> Unix. SystemD is the final frontier of high-computing/low-security meeting - move to BSD or higher if you want security.
To say NASA is working on them is outright wrong. They still crack water for breathable air instead of recycling it, they still use the same old space suits because they keep going for over-priced contractors with an in who don't actually know what they're doing, the worst part is their "breakthrough propulsion" lab is so pathetically under-funded that they had to use 6 months of their entire budget to afford a vacuum chamber worth a few thousand dollars to test the EM Drive in. Likewise they've done nearly no tests on warp drives. Not sure where you got the 1% of the population bit - the Orion ship was never meant to launch from Earth, but from space after being lifted up with traditional rockets - of course riding nuclear shockwaves from Earth would be absurd.
It's called a fluorescent light bulb. But that's certainly not energy production.
Neither is releasing atomic bonds, it's energy transformation in both cases.