if any one has patented the process of taking a crap yet?
... where would you want to take it to? Wouldn't you rather just flush it, like the rest of us?
Or are you one of those "Emma, come 'n look at this - you ain't gonna believe it!" types?
"Method and system for taking a crap."
1. Eat food (see our related patent application for "Method and system for eating food";
2. Wait. (period of time depends on food eaten and any contamination such as salmonella, see our related patents and our "brown paper" on "Montezuma's Revenge")
3. Do what comes naturally.
Good catch, but... when I referred to it as crap, I meant in the 100% literal sense - the stuff that we also refer to as #2, poop, etc. It really is s***. I was serious about it being fit only to be used as bum-wipe further on - certainly it's not worthy of being classed as reading material in "the library". Maybe a 6-year-old would like it... but 6-year-olds also like sticking toads down girls tops, and grossing people out by eating boogers.
Except that the trilogy really is excretable. After wondering what all the hype was, I picked up the series in the bargain bin. After forcing myself to read the first 50 pages, my initial impression from the first few pages, that it is poorly written crap, continued to be confirmed.
I'm not in favor of burning books, but in this case, I'd be willing to make an exception. It would be better employed starting a campfire for a marshmallow roast. Or to hang up in the outhouse for when someone forgot to pack the toilet paper.
You're free to disagree - but in this case the Nobel committee got it right. Then again, CS Lewis wasn't much of a writer either, being a formulaic hack (and after reading his biography, it becomes obvious why he wrote the way he did - trying to justify his own actions in taking part in forcing other students in same-sex rapes at school as "not counting").
You need to find out where you are before you can develop a plan to "get from here to there."
So, Step ZERO should be to look around all the systems until you find the previous sucker^WVictim^IT persons' name and email address. You might find it stuffed in a comment in a file called by a cron job, or in the header of a random web page, or some source code, or even in a README file.
Then for Step ONE, you contact them to get the real story of what happened (or at least a second perspective, from someone who was there and doesn't have a reason to downplay the stupidity that caused the current situation), and can begin making informed decisions - such as whether you want to stick around or not.
If you DO decide to stick around, then Step TWO becomes adding YOUR contact info (at least your email address - it can be a throw-away one) to a few places, for the next person. It's just professional courtesy to do so (and in engineering, it's pretty much a requirement - you touch it, you sign and stamp it - we should demand the same level of accountability and professionalism in IT).
Step THREE... brush up on your BOfH, because you'll need the inspiration and moral support when management doesn't understand why what you think is essential is wasted time to them. And why stuff that makes sense to you simply will NOT GET DONE BY USERS.
Step FOUR... forget wikis and stuff. The won't edit them, they won't use them. Ditto for bug trackers, ticket systems, etc. Their impression is that you work there in house so they shouldn't have to do that sort of stuff. So, simply tell them to email you for every issue, and you'll look at it when you get the email. If they can't be arsed^troubled to put it in writing, you can't expect to take time away from (point to overflowing inbox) all the ones that people have taken the time to write up properly. Make sure that every time you find an issue yourself, you email yourself as a "reminder". You should quickly end up with a couple hundred emails, just from yourself.
Half the time, they won't bother with the email - they'll go back and figure out that, for example, to print something they have to click on the printer icon (sad but true story). Or they'll ask someone else, while you've just CYA by showing that you already have LOTS to do.
Then at the end of every week, do a simple check of how many emails vs. how many resolved issues. If you can email the boss with a "this week, I had 157 emails about 43 different issues, and 36 were resolved" (and make sure that you send out emails asking for confirmation of every resolved issue for more CYA goodness) you've made progress where it counts - the office politics brown-nose department.
This is also hyper convenient if the boss graciously grants you a summer intern.
Or if you are already the intern, without pay, you should consider quitting while you're ahead.
Or if you are already the intern, without pay, you should document it and demand your pay. Most places, it's illegal to work as an unpaid intern if your work actually has any value to the company.
NO, you don't have to opensource any mods that are not statically linked into the kernel - only statically linked code. This is the guidance from the 9th circuit in Goolab vs Nintendo, and Nintendo knew they would lose if they tried to appeal to the supreme court.
You see, the question of derivative works, under copyright law, is only triggered when the "derived work" is saved in fixed form - so anything done in ram, such as dynamically linking, simply doesn't count. In other words, I can dynamically link to ANY code, including gpl code, and NOT supply source. That's the law as it has stood for decades, and affirmed by the courts.
Now consider this - if they make NO changes to the actual source, just removing stuff, even Larry Rosen has argued that doesn't trigger "must distribute the source on request", because NONE of the code that remains has actually been modified. Sure, as a whole, it's different, but the kernel source is actually an aggregate work - that's why it's possible to remove stuff w/o breaking everything. So if all they did was remove code, and dynamically link to what's left, their distribution requirements could be met by distributing the unmodded kernel source (since that also includes 100% of what was left in).
Of course, the REALLY smart move would be to just have used FreeBSD, like Apple did.
The actual cost to manufacture is $52. The Indian government is making them locally under license, and subsidizing the cost to each student to the tune of $20 - $30 (these are color displays, btw). For $10 more, you can get one with 2x the cpu speed, separate hd video accelerator, double the ram, etc.
What's not to like about that? What used to be high-end chips are now just cheap silicon.
The systems that the Indian government commissioned the competition for, and which they are buying millions of these $52 devices, and subsidizing them, as so that all students in India at every level of education will get one. In other words, India is now closed for dealing with the OLPC.
The hardware is designed to be tough enough to last years in a school environment
At $52 for a color touch-screen tablet, they can buy two, so if one breaks...
Also, they're already offering a next-gen device for $10 more. Expect the trend to continue, so that 3-4 years from now, you'll be able to buy the functional equivalent of an iPad2 for $80-$100.
The main operating system has the full source code under an open source license so the students are guaranteed to be able to modify it if they want to learn how it works
The $52 tablet runs linux and android. So what's your point again?
They come with a whole integrated anti-theft system
The Indian government is making sure that everyone can get one - which is why they're subisidizing it to the point where students (university first, then high schools, and then grade schools) will be able to buy them for between $20 and $30. What's the point of stealing one when everyone has one?
makes them much more likely to stay with the school
The whole point of the program is that these are not JUST for use for "school work". They're to end the digital divide for the entire Indian population.
Overall this means that OLPC systems deliver much more for much less total cost. You or I may not know or understand this. We aren't specialists in educational systems. On the other hand education ministries have people who know exactly this stuff.
And they're the ones who decided that this was the right way to go - that the OLPC is not suited for the real-world needs of university students, etc... a low-cost, general-purpose tablet device for every student, loaded with educational software and ebooks, access to the net, etc., and eventually every citizen, to do with as they wish. So, again, what's your point?
So the OLPC just got kicked out of the second-largest market in the entire known universe. And it's not going to make any headway in the largest market. And the countries that WERE considering it are asking to get on board the $52 tablet instead. If they had 100 million devices, they could sell them all this year, the demand is that high. Even Sweden wants them.
OLPC is finished. So is Canonical after the weeks' CES ("oh look at the Ubuntu tablet that our partner is going to be selling") , but that's another story. Think of it - 2-1/2 years ago, Canonical announced that they would have android running on Ubuntu. Then they had to abandon it, because they don't have any real software engineering expertise. Along comes a company with 150 employees, 50 of whom are engineers, and in a matter of months, they develop a cut-down version of linux that can run android on a $52 device they designed in-house. Who has more linux street cred? Canonical, who have to re-badge Amazon EC2 and sell it as "Ubuntu Cloud", get someone else to re-badge and run "Ubuntu 1 Music Store" or whatever they called it, etc., or a company that has actually designed, produced, and shipped linux devices?
I'm tempted to head down there and interview them. They've got a compelling story, they're actually in production, the world is beating a path to their door, and it was something that they decided to cough up the $100,000 bid bond to enter the bidding war almost on a whim at the last moment.
What's really interesting is the Ubislate - $10 more ($60) - a Cortex A8 cpu, a video accelerator, HD video, and Gingerbread. Sure, it's not ICS, but Gingerbread for $60???
And of course, we all know what that means - within a few years, ICS for under $100.
By your logic, even someone with decades experience is "no longer an IT professional" during an economic downturn the moment they lose their jobs.
Also, 50 postings for the same job on dice.com really does not translate into 50x more demand. All it means is that more recruiting agencies are resorting to posting the same job offers on multiple sites, so you end up with 500 posts on 30 job sites for the SAME job. Many of them don't even make an effort to hide it any more.
Did the doctor drop you on your head, or does it come naturally?
Not the same thing at all. First, the one I cited has already been shipped, unlike either the one you linked to, or the OLPC XO-3. So, not vaporware - unlike most OLPC announcements that don't measure up to the initial hype.
Second, if you read the OLPC article, they don't actually plan on building a tablet if competitors can do it for less... so that's pretty much the end of that... the OLPC project is pretty much dead at this point.
Think of it - the iPad didn't even exist 2 years ago. Today, you can buy a linux+android tablet for under $60. Why would any government get involved in a $100+ tablet when they can get them for half, AND manufacture them under license locally, creating jobs in their own countries?
Did you even read the headline of the stupid article?
1. TheOLPC device is a tablet, not another laptop.
2. The OLPC will NOT be building this device - ever - because others are already doing it cheaper. FTFA:
One other really interesting thing that came up in our conversation was that Negroponte left open the question of whether OLPC would ever really have to make the XO 3. âoeWe may not ever build it,â he says. Thatâ(TM)s largely because competition in the tablet and education spaces is so intense that commercial computer makers might fill the void themselves.
âoeThe interesting thing about now versus five years agoâ"five years ago, we had to build a laptop, because there wasnâ(TM)t a laptopâ geared for the developing world, he says. Now, Negroponte says, itâ(TM)s possible that âoewe donâ(TM)t have to build a tablet.
So, now that competitors are building them at half the price the OLPC project was aiming for, and governments have already committed to buying millions of the cheaper non-OLPC devices, what's the point? OLPC is dead.
In the REAL world, India is already selling tablets that run both linux and android for $35 each to all their students. (cost is ~$55, but there's a subsidy if you're a student, the goal being to get one into every students' hands). So, like everything, the market has changed since OLPC started. 2 years ago, a touch-screen tablet was a non-starter. The iPad didn't even exist. Now? Why would they order laptops when they can get touch-screen tablets for a lot less than $100?
In the morning, Suneet and the remaining three bidders return to the same room. At the front, a 12-person committee shows off the submitted tenders, time-stamped and sealed with wax, before reading off each companyâ(TM)s bidâ"including the lowest estimate of what it would cost to make the Indian governmentâ(TM)s dream: the cheapest tablet in the world.
When the presentation is finished, Datawindâ(TM)s price tagâ"$52â"is the lowest. The next cheapest bid is for $64. âoeI went white,â Suneet says now. âoeI thought, âWeâ(TM)ve missed something.â(TM)â
Feeling nauseous, he staggers out into the antechamber, where rival bidders lob wisecracks in his direction. âoeAt that price, weâ(TM)ll buy some,â one businessman says, laughing. Frantic, Suneet calls Montreal, where it is nearly 3 a.m., knowing heâ(TM)ll wake up Raja. But his elder brother, who at times forgets how many patents he has to his name (more than 50) but never forgets product specs, reassures him that the final price accounts for every single component in the device. Thatâ(TM)s when it sinks in: Theyâ(TM)ve nailed this.
So far, Datawind has manufactured about 10,000 of its ultracheap devices, and has subcontracted more factories in India to gradually churn out a volume of tablets that still seems unbelievable to the founders. The Indian state plans to subsidize the tablets down to between $20 and $35 (U.S.), to be sold to college and university students, and wants to roll the devices out to around 12 million users over the next 12 months. After that, the goal is to place one of these tablets in the hands of each of the countryâ(TM)s 80 to 100 million high school students. The process, despite the hype, is still in a nascent stage, unfolding slowly.
But things got stranger. Shortly after the announcement, Suneet was invited to meet with Thailandâ(TM)s Minister for Information Communications Technology (who was so interested in purchasing 10 million tablets that he attended their meeting even as flood waters descended on Bangkok). Calls arrived from Turkey (which wants 15 million tablets), Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, Panama and Egypt. At one point, the Swedish embassy in Canada called: Would Suneet possibly have time to meet the Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt? And would it be possible to send out a press release to announce that the meeting was happening?
And for an extra $10, you get a much better cpu, a better touch screen, more battery life, etc.
So, forget Canonicals' secret plans to unveil a cheap tablet running linux next week - these run both linux and android, and they're already being sold.
The first link - notice what they call an "IT JOB"? See the pretty picture on the left side - they consider selling cell phones as an "IT Job" because it's somehow it-related. They're pulling their numbers for future expectations out of their collective rectums, based on things like the number of job board postings, which is a negative, not positive, correlation, as I will explain below.
The second link quotes the same dice.com survey. And it adds one necessary data point - that the reason for the "shortage" is money. In fact, it's because companies now want to pay even less than they did when job cuts and salary cuts started a few years ago. Sure, there's a "shortage" if you want to pay half price for twice the experience.
The Dice one is the most bogus of the lot - the fact that there are more job postings on a job board in this case correlates negatively with the employment figures - especially when you consider that last month's government stats say that hiring in IT declined. When the population is increasing, even maintaining the same numbers over the years, when you throw in the new entrants, is actually a net loss due to basic economics 101 - more people competing for each job.
So employers downsize, and/or hire new people at lower wages - hence the increase in job board postings. Keep in mind, these are not jobs, just job postings - and a lot more of them are just duplicates than even a few years ago, as more recruiters post the same job offer. Whereas before you might have seen 3 recruiters post the same job, now you'll see 10. That's not an increase in underlying jobs - to the contrary, it reflects the weakness in the entire IT sector, because now recruiters simply cannot make $$ except by using the shotgun approach.
Do you really want to count two part-time Hell-desk workers getting hired and one full-time developer getting laid off as a net gain? Because that's what it's come down to, same as declining salaries and the continuing trend (noted in the original article) away from full-time hires to part-timers. The type of jobs you hire part-timers for is NOT the type of jobs that you need a full-time worker for - so devs are $crewed for the next 20 years.
Who 20 years? Because people continue to enter the industry, even while the higher jobs are disappearing.
Not necessarily. 3/4 of the people whose credit card numbers were stolen refuse to complain, because the thief is charging less on them than their kids were.
They want to contact this guy to see what he can do about their kids cell phone bills.
What you read and fact are often two different things. There's been a drop in IT unemployment in part because so many have dropped out of the game, changed jobs, become part of the unwillingly self-employed, or they no longer count as "unemployed" because they've exhausted their unemployment benefits.
The article noted that the growth was in part-time and contact workers - not full-time jobs. That alone should be a tip-off that the whole thing is cut from whole cloth.
You need to include both federal and state/prov tax, as well as sales tax on the money you spend (after all, you ARE going to spend it at some point - why earn it otherwise?)
The highest taxes in North America - and still an out-of-control deficit (unlike the rest of the country) thanks to language laws that chase away business..
Summary:
$20,000 a year income, $5382.03 ($5,349.70) in taxes at all levels
$40,000 a year income, $14,252.96 (13,783.42) in taxes at all levels
$60,000 a year income, $24,447.55 (23,995.66) in taxes at all levels
Actually, the average is lower than they report, for several reasons:
1. Employment levels are down, so you have to factor in all the IT workers who are either making $0, or delivering pizza. The article states that companies are continuing to replace full-time workers with contract or part-time hires.
2. Self-selection bias - those who make less are much less likely to report how much (or how little) they make;
3. Venue bias - this survey covers only mid-sized and large-sized companies -- whole swaths of people working in both smaller businesses (the majority of jobs in the economy) or the lower end of the industry are not included in these surveys, so they don't "drag the numbers down."
My point about the claim that car manufacturers "almost" went bankrupt was that some actually DID.
BTW, Apple, as well as the car brands you mention - audi, lexus, infiniti - are all commodity mass-produced, mass-marketed products. Lexus is just a Toyota, same with Infiniti being mostly (or in some cases entirely) Nissan, Acura being just another Honda brand, and Jaguar literally being a Ford Taurus, right down to the cheap plastic faux-chrome trim.
Actually, it's your post that's not plausible. To start:
RIM has thrown their lot in with a half hearted effort at doing Android
RIM doesn't do Android - they bought QNX and re-named it to BBX, got sued over the name, and renamed it Blackberry 10.
most of the car makers nearly went bankrupt
What is this "nearly" you speak of? In North America, GM, Chrysler, and Delphi all went belly-up, in contrast to Kia-Hyundai, which grew their market so much they surpassed Honda in world sales.
When it gives a list by browser type used to access their sites what do you think it could possibly mean, except people surfing the web? So really, read either the summary, or the article - it's all there for anyone who knows what the word "browser" means.
And the answer is "Where it says it's about measured browser usage data in the first line of the summary".
Or if you actually read the article (yeah. right - you couldn't even read the first line of the summary), click on any of the links in the table and select by browser.
Try this - the article fails to mention where Stallman said *anything* about restricting personal freedoms outside of the computer world. So the current insanity going on in the USA has nothing to do with the gratuitious reference to Stallman that was thrown in as link bait, esp. since 95% of the world is NOT in the USA, and is NOT affected by SOPA, except to the extent that, if SOPA passes, a lot of web sites will move elsewhere, costing the US jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Or are you one of those "Emma, come 'n look at this - you ain't gonna believe it!" types?
"Method and system for taking a crap."
1. Eat food (see our related patent application for "Method and system for eating food";
2. Wait. (period of time depends on food eaten and any contamination such as salmonella, see our related patents and our "brown paper" on "Montezuma's Revenge")
3. Do what comes naturally.
Good catch, but ... when I referred to it as crap, I meant in the 100% literal sense - the stuff that we also refer to as #2, poop, etc. It really is s***. I was serious about it being fit only to be used as bum-wipe further on - certainly it's not worthy of being classed as reading material in "the library". Maybe a 6-year-old would like it ... but 6-year-olds also like sticking toads down girls tops, and grossing people out by eating boogers.
Except that the trilogy really is excretable. After wondering what all the hype was, I picked up the series in the bargain bin. After forcing myself to read the first 50 pages, my initial impression from the first few pages, that it is poorly written crap, continued to be confirmed.
I'm not in favor of burning books, but in this case, I'd be willing to make an exception. It would be better employed starting a campfire for a marshmallow roast. Or to hang up in the outhouse for when someone forgot to pack the toilet paper.
You're free to disagree - but in this case the Nobel committee got it right. Then again, CS Lewis wasn't much of a writer either, being a formulaic hack (and after reading his biography, it becomes obvious why he wrote the way he did - trying to justify his own actions in taking part in forcing other students in same-sex rapes at school as "not counting").
You need to find out where you are before you can develop a plan to "get from here to there."
So, Step ZERO should be to look around all the systems until you find the previous sucker^WVictim^IT persons' name and email address. You might find it stuffed in a comment in a file called by a cron job, or in the header of a random web page, or some source code, or even in a README file.
Then for Step ONE, you contact them to get the real story of what happened (or at least a second perspective, from someone who was there and doesn't have a reason to downplay the stupidity that caused the current situation), and can begin making informed decisions - such as whether you want to stick around or not.
If you DO decide to stick around, then Step TWO becomes adding YOUR contact info (at least your email address - it can be a throw-away one) to a few places, for the next person. It's just professional courtesy to do so (and in engineering, it's pretty much a requirement - you touch it, you sign and stamp it - we should demand the same level of accountability and professionalism in IT).
Step THREE ... brush up on your BOfH, because you'll need the inspiration and moral support when management doesn't understand why what you think is essential is wasted time to them. And why stuff that makes sense to you simply will NOT GET DONE BY USERS.
Step FOUR ... forget wikis and stuff. The won't edit them, they won't use them. Ditto for bug trackers, ticket systems, etc. Their impression is that you work there in house so they shouldn't have to do that sort of stuff. So, simply tell them to email you for every issue, and you'll look at it when you get the email. If they can't be arsed^troubled to put it in writing, you can't expect to take time away from (point to overflowing inbox) all the ones that people have taken the time to write up properly. Make sure that every time you find an issue yourself, you email yourself as a "reminder". You should quickly end up with a couple hundred emails, just from yourself.
Half the time, they won't bother with the email - they'll go back and figure out that, for example, to print something they have to click on the printer icon (sad but true story). Or they'll ask someone else, while you've just CYA by showing that you already have LOTS to do.
Then at the end of every week, do a simple check of how many emails vs. how many resolved issues. If you can email the boss with a "this week, I had 157 emails about 43 different issues, and 36 were resolved" (and make sure that you send out emails asking for confirmation of every resolved issue for more CYA goodness) you've made progress where it counts - the office politics brown-nose department.
Or if you are already the intern, without pay, you should document it and demand your pay. Most places, it's illegal to work as an unpaid intern if your work actually has any value to the company.
You see, the question of derivative works, under copyright law, is only triggered when the "derived work" is saved in fixed form - so anything done in ram, such as dynamically linking, simply doesn't count. In other words, I can dynamically link to ANY code, including gpl code, and NOT supply source. That's the law as it has stood for decades, and affirmed by the courts.
Now consider this - if they make NO changes to the actual source, just removing stuff, even Larry Rosen has argued that doesn't trigger "must distribute the source on request", because NONE of the code that remains has actually been modified. Sure, as a whole, it's different, but the kernel source is actually an aggregate work - that's why it's possible to remove stuff w/o breaking everything. So if all they did was remove code, and dynamically link to what's left, their distribution requirements could be met by distributing the unmodded kernel source (since that also includes 100% of what was left in).
Of course, the REALLY smart move would be to just have used FreeBSD, like Apple did.
The actual cost to manufacture is $52. The Indian government is making them locally under license, and subsidizing the cost to each student to the tune of $20 - $30 (these are color displays, btw). For $10 more, you can get one with 2x the cpu speed, separate hd video accelerator, double the ram, etc.
What's not to like about that? What used to be high-end chips are now just cheap silicon.
The systems that the Indian government commissioned the competition for, and which they are buying millions of these $52 devices, and subsidizing them, as so that all students in India at every level of education will get one. In other words, India is now closed for dealing with the OLPC.
At $52 for a color touch-screen tablet, they can buy two, so if one breaks ...
Also, they're already offering a next-gen device for $10 more. Expect the trend to continue, so that 3-4 years from now, you'll be able to buy the functional equivalent of an iPad2 for $80-$100.
The $52 tablet runs linux and android. So what's your point again?
The Indian government is making sure that everyone can get one - which is why they're subisidizing it to the point where students (university first, then high schools, and then grade schools) will be able to buy them for between $20 and $30. What's the point of stealing one when everyone has one?
The whole point of the program is that these are not JUST for use for "school work". They're to end the digital divide for the entire Indian population.
And they're the ones who decided that this was the right way to go - that the OLPC is not suited for the real-world needs of university students, etc ... a low-cost, general-purpose tablet device for every student, loaded with educational software and ebooks, access to the net, etc., and eventually every citizen, to do with as they wish. So, again, what's your point?
So the OLPC just got kicked out of the second-largest market in the entire known universe. And it's not going to make any headway in the largest market. And the countries that WERE considering it are asking to get on board the $52 tablet instead. If they had 100 million devices, they could sell them all this year, the demand is that high. Even Sweden wants them.
OLPC is finished. So is Canonical after the weeks' CES ("oh look at the Ubuntu tablet that our partner is going to be selling") , but that's another story. Think of it - 2-1/2 years ago, Canonical announced that they would have android running on Ubuntu. Then they had to abandon it, because they don't have any real software engineering expertise. Along comes a company with 150 employees, 50 of whom are engineers, and in a matter of months, they develop a cut-down version of linux that can run android on a $52 device they designed in-house. Who has more linux street cred? Canonical, who have to re-badge Amazon EC2 and sell it as "Ubuntu Cloud", get someone else to re-badge and run "Ubuntu 1 Music Store" or whatever they called it, etc., or a company that has actually designed, produced, and shipped linux devices?
OLPC and Canonical are so last-decade.
I'm tempted to head down there and interview them. They've got a compelling story, they're actually in production, the world is beating a path to their door, and it was something that they decided to cough up the $100,000 bid bond to enter the bidding war almost on a whim at the last moment.
What's really interesting is the Ubislate - $10 more ($60) - a Cortex A8 cpu, a video accelerator, HD video, and Gingerbread. Sure, it's not ICS, but Gingerbread for $60???
And of course, we all know what that means - within a few years, ICS for under $100.
By your logic, even someone with decades experience is "no longer an IT professional" during an economic downturn the moment they lose their jobs.
Also, 50 postings for the same job on dice.com really does not translate into 50x more demand. All it means is that more recruiting agencies are resorting to posting the same job offers on multiple sites, so you end up with 500 posts on 30 job sites for the SAME job. Many of them don't even make an effort to hide it any more.
Did the doctor drop you on your head, or does it come naturally?
Second, if you read the OLPC article, they don't actually plan on building a tablet if competitors can do it for less ... so that's pretty much the end of that ... the OLPC project is pretty much dead at this point.
Think of it - the iPad didn't even exist 2 years ago. Today, you can buy a linux+android tablet for under $60. Why would any government get involved in a $100+ tablet when they can get them for half, AND manufacture them under license locally, creating jobs in their own countries?
Simple answer - they won't.
1. TheOLPC device is a tablet, not another laptop.
2. The OLPC will NOT be building this device - ever - because others are already doing it cheaper. FTFA:
So, now that competitors are building them at half the price the OLPC project was aiming for, and governments have already committed to buying millions of the cheaper non-OLPC devices, what's the point? OLPC is dead.
In the REAL world, India is already selling tablets that run both linux and android for $35 each to all their students. (cost is ~$55, but there's a subsidy if you're a student, the goal being to get one into every students' hands). So, like everything, the market has changed since OLPC started. 2 years ago, a touch-screen tablet was a non-starter. The iPad didn't even exist. Now? Why would they order laptops when they can get touch-screen tablets for a lot less than $100?
Another story: from pcworld
And for an extra $10, you get a much better cpu, a better touch screen, more battery life, etc.
So, forget Canonicals' secret plans to unveil a cheap tablet running linux next week - these run both linux and android, and they're already being sold.
The first link - notice what they call an "IT JOB"? See the pretty picture on the left side - they consider selling cell phones as an "IT Job" because it's somehow it-related. They're pulling their numbers for future expectations out of their collective rectums, based on things like the number of job board postings, which is a negative, not positive, correlation, as I will explain below.
The second link quotes the same dice.com survey. And it adds one necessary data point - that the reason for the "shortage" is money. In fact, it's because companies now want to pay even less than they did when job cuts and salary cuts started a few years ago. Sure, there's a "shortage" if you want to pay half price for twice the experience.
The Dice one is the most bogus of the lot - the fact that there are more job postings on a job board in this case correlates negatively with the employment figures - especially when you consider that last month's government stats say that hiring in IT declined. When the population is increasing, even maintaining the same numbers over the years, when you throw in the new entrants, is actually a net loss due to basic economics 101 - more people competing for each job.
So employers downsize, and/or hire new people at lower wages - hence the increase in job board postings. Keep in mind, these are not jobs, just job postings - and a lot more of them are just duplicates than even a few years ago, as more recruiters post the same job offer. Whereas before you might have seen 3 recruiters post the same job, now you'll see 10. That's not an increase in underlying jobs - to the contrary, it reflects the weakness in the entire IT sector, because now recruiters simply cannot make $$ except by using the shotgun approach.
Do you really want to count two part-time Hell-desk workers getting hired and one full-time developer getting laid off as a net gain? Because that's what it's come down to, same as declining salaries and the continuing trend (noted in the original article) away from full-time hires to part-timers. The type of jobs you hire part-timers for is NOT the type of jobs that you need a full-time worker for - so devs are $crewed for the next 20 years.
Who 20 years? Because people continue to enter the industry, even while the higher jobs are disappearing.
They want to contact this guy to see what he can do about their kids cell phone bills.
What you read and fact are often two different things. There's been a drop in IT unemployment in part because so many have dropped out of the game, changed jobs, become part of the unwillingly self-employed, or they no longer count as "unemployed" because they've exhausted their unemployment benefits.
The article noted that the growth was in part-time and contact workers - not full-time jobs. That alone should be a tip-off that the whole thing is cut from whole cloth.
Summary:
$20,000 a year income, $5382.03 ($5,349.70) in taxes at all levels
$40,000 a year income, $14,252.96 (13,783.42) in taxes at all levels
$60,000 a year income, $24,447.55 (23,995.66) in taxes at all levels
Crazy, isn't it?
1. Employment levels are down, so you have to factor in all the IT workers who are either making $0, or delivering pizza. The article states that companies are continuing to replace full-time workers with contract or part-time hires.
2. Self-selection bias - those who make less are much less likely to report how much (or how little) they make;
3. Venue bias - this survey covers only mid-sized and large-sized companies -- whole swaths of people working in both smaller businesses (the majority of jobs in the economy) or the lower end of the industry are not included in these surveys, so they don't "drag the numbers down."
My point about the claim that car manufacturers "almost" went bankrupt was that some actually DID.
BTW, Apple, as well as the car brands you mention - audi, lexus, infiniti - are all commodity mass-produced, mass-marketed products. Lexus is just a Toyota, same with Infiniti being mostly (or in some cases entirely) Nissan, Acura being just another Honda brand, and Jaguar literally being a Ford Taurus, right down to the cheap plastic faux-chrome trim.
Actually, it's your post that's not plausible. To start:
RIM doesn't do Android - they bought QNX and re-named it to BBX, got sued over the name, and renamed it Blackberry 10.
What is this "nearly" you speak of? In North America, GM, Chrysler, and Delphi all went belly-up, in contrast to Kia-Hyundai, which grew their market so much they surpassed Honda in world sales.
That pretty much describes most businesses. Including computers, cars, and crops.
When it gives a list by browser type used to access their sites what do you think it could possibly mean, except people surfing the web? So really, read either the summary, or the article - it's all there for anyone who knows what the word "browser" means.
And the answer is "Where it says it's about measured browser usage data in the first line of the summary".
Or if you actually read the article (yeah. right - you couldn't even read the first line of the summary), click on any of the links in the table and select by browser.
Try this - the article fails to mention where Stallman said *anything* about restricting personal freedoms outside of the computer world. So the current insanity going on in the USA has nothing to do with the gratuitious reference to Stallman that was thrown in as link bait, esp. since 95% of the world is NOT in the USA, and is NOT affected by SOPA, except to the extent that, if SOPA passes, a lot of web sites will move elsewhere, costing the US jobs.