Stickers are just status symbols. A long time ago we use to smear dyes and goats blood on our chest to show our tribal identification. Less painful and itchy this way.
Times up on this though because recently I got laptop stickers promoting some IBM product to suck up your departments budget. Clear sign the kids will move on as they did when their grandparents friend-ed them on Facebook.
AI won't be taking jobs soon, but automation will. It does't take AI or machine learning to replace the majority of any office work. In my department there are about 1000 people. Most of them are just reading from one screen some data to pass off to another person will copy and paste to the next. With some intelligent scripts automating things I could reduce the department size down to 50 people. My boss usually tells me not to say these things out loud.
I remember more a few classes in high school and college that would have been better off without the teacher. Just leaving us the text book and materials would be better than subjecting us to the uncommunicative twat writing on the blackboard.
I have no doubt that you could save hundreds of billions, possibly trillions over the years if smart agreeable people get together and figure it out. The problem is at some point you need to include others and then the trouble starts. Any organization over with more than 100 people run into this. The more people and departments the worse it gets. I am older now and I have seen smart ideas pass from their creators to the masses of underlings and watch it get mangled beyond belief. Your trillion dollar savings will be eaten up by those underlings a hundred fold.
As opposed to the opposite crime where you spend years in requirements and nothing gets done. I worked in one company where the technology group was tasked at building an system to replace an analyst spreadsheet. They said it would take 1 year and a million dollars, it actually took over 5 years and 30 million dollars and the test output still doesn't work. But they passed rigorous technology audits every year with flying colours! They have lots of documentation.
The average person can speak MUCH faster than they can type (250 - 300WPM), and as long as that statistic rings true
Are you for real? You actually speak 5 words every second? There is no study that claims any such thing. In fact all the studies I have seen show the fastest is thinking and then typing. Speech is the slowest form of communication. And that's not even considering the ease of editing what I type as opposed to speaking into a world processor.
"The problem is, finding a place that has near-constant wind in a known or semi-known direction, near no one who minds and yet still near something so that power can be put back into the grid. Oh, and you have to avoid major fault-lines and tornadoes. A tough set of rules to follow..."
The perfect spot would be lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Lake Erie was designed by God as one long wind tunnel to blast the city of Buffalo with crappy weather for the horrible sin of being Buffalo. But putting turbines in the middle of lakes is a lot more money and the Ontario government didn't want to do that. Better to have them near roads where citizens could see what their tax dollars were being spent on, next to the sign telling them what their tax dollars were spent on.
No, they are protesting their location as well. It's been a hot topic in Ontario for the last few years are rural areas have fought against them being built in their back yard. Everything from noise issues (whirling of blades keeps people up at night) to destroying bird species (it's a massive bird strike zone) has been raised.
The only other way to transfer money out of a country is by converting it to something physical that you can stuff in a suit case and carry across the border. It is a really big deal to get cut out of the SWIFT. Carrying bricks of gold or other tangibles across borders just doesn't work for serious amounts.
Any new system won't be able to connect to the major currency markets or any of the major financial institutions is doomed to fail.
Well said sir! And if I may add to that the constant fetish with these new movie style games. I am tired of games that are a barrage of cut scenes with a few moments of some joystick routine I need to master before I get the next set of cut scenes. If I wanted a movie I would rent one.
You can not convert it back to cash, only for products in a MS store. You can not convert those points into Euro's, or Austrailian dollars on any currency exchange. Your local grocery store is not legally obliged to accept your MS points to pay for purchases as stipulated by government laws determining what legal tender is. Central banks do not recognize nor accept MS points as capital. The bank teller will laugh in your face if you try and deposit MS points.
Face it, it is not a currency and any one who has taken economics 101 knows this. It should also be pointed out that the MS points in the link you provided and not real points yet. They are vouchers to activate for real points. You can not un-activate those points back into cash or a card that can be sold. Once that card is activated you can not un-activate it and sell it for more cash.
Because there are many laws in many nations one what can be called currency. You can't just start a new currency and expect it to interact with the current financial system. There are a sh*t load of other laws and regulations, especially if you are engaging in deposit taking or credit lending. You need the appropriate approvals and must conduct your self like other financial institutions do.
Microsoft can get away with points because it's only a one way exchange. You buy MS points to get stuff on the X-Box. You can not convert MS points back into cash.
Piracy here is definitely a problem as I have many friends constantly encouraging me to get my media it the down and dirty way. I have stubbornly been trying to do it the legit way for a long time now. The latest is in trying to get Dexter season 4 and up. Season 1 to 3 is on Netflix Canada but I will be damned if I can rent seasons 4 and up any where. I solved this by using a VPN proxy to the U.S. and some gift card trickery on Amazon to watch it online. I lied to pay for it instead of pirating it.
There is a crap load of content we can never get because some rights holder here in Canada won't allow it to be shown at all here. That's why we can't get Pandora or Spotify. I've seen Canadian indy musicians have their stuff available on iTunes U.S. long before it's available in the Canadian store.
How long do I put up with this before I become a total pirate? Right now I pay a proxy service to pretend like I am American so I can buy the content. I want to pay and be legit but at some point it's just easier to pirate the stuff.
" Canada, as a raw material and energy exporter, needs to allow its currency to be set by the market..."
What the hell are you talking about?!? Canada's currency is a freely floating one and has been for a few decades. It's one of the few countries on the planet that has a completely floating exchange rate. As for natural resources we have a time honored tradition of selling it abroad. The oil sands in Alberta being the latest.
Why don't people look in the history books of computing. If they did they would see that in the before the 80's everything was in "the cloud", except back then they called it servers. They rented these servers and the storage space from IBM, Digital, HP and a few other server providers. The personal computer came a long and data started shifting on to local hard drives and WIntel or Novell LAN servers.
Now they have the problem of trying to maintain every spreadsheet and Access DB sitting on a managers laptop. To solve this they are going back to the future and storing stuff back on servers sold to us by young people who never knew what DASD is. Controls and audits will demand restricted access and rules be put in the cloud for protection just like before. After about 10 years we will all be bitching and complaining about the cloud and praising local storage for it's ease of access and not having our data held hostage by providers. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There is nothing new under the sun people, just move along.
"Capitalism 101 says that pricing acts as a regulator between supply and demand."
Your incorrect, price is where the supply curve intersects with the demand curve. It is the result, not the input. That is economics 101. Price is a regulator of nothing unless your a government that sets price controls (which always fail).
Capitalism 101 just says charge people what you can get away with and pay as little as possible. The difference is profit.
If you think the free market is suppose to give consumers everything at low cost you don't understand the concept. Free markets produce the most accurate real cost of a product, not the friendliest.
AT&T is not acting in a free market, it is regulated. The government controls who can compete with AT&T and this is why they act the way they do. This is the real racket you are referring to. If it were an open market anyone could put up a network to compete for your dollars. That's what the Rand fanbois would tell you.
However that argument is as ill conceived as your post. Barriers to entry and interfering transmissions between carriers destroys that notion. You could have light but intelligent regulation but that requires Congress to act like mature adults. Good luck with that.
Of course, the mainframe is a marginalized beast these days.
Hardly marginalized. It's doing what it has always done best, which is push lots of data around with raw processing power. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there humming away crunching data. If you use an ATM, charge something to a credit card, or receive your pay I guarantee you there is a mainframe at the end of that transaction.
The need for mainframe services never went away, the world just built a whole new computer segment separate from them for new things.
I have to disagree with you on XP. I think it was a much cleaner OS that the ones before it. It was the first to ditch the Windows 95/DOS code base and use the Windows NT kernel as a base. For most of the 90's I was a Linux or BSD user. Windows 95 and 98 were pains in the ass in terms of getting drivers to work or playing nice on the network. I tolerated Win 95 for my games but when game time was done it was back to Linux. XP, at least after the first service pack, seemed to just work. You could plug something in and it just worked. No screaming and cursing trying to make some driver function. I stopped using Linux with XP.
Windows 7 on the other hand is starting to get annoying and has me wondering about going back to Linux. There are too many locked down things in there attempt to be more like OS X. MS seems to be catering to regular consumers instead of power users. It's getting very annoying.
"If you use Windows for financial stuff you will get screwed eventually."
You are clearly not familiar with true computer security. I have used windows for more than a decade (one of many OS's I work with) and have done "financial stuff" on them. A Windows system can be just as hardened as any other. I do everything from person banking to stock trading. I have never had any problems because I have never had a virus or spyware running on any system I have ever used. I know how operating systems work and I make sure I know what every service, application, or driver is doing on my system. This is what being secure really is. Every OS is vulnerable including Linux and OS X, it's just that Windows gets more of the press and targeting by hackers. If you blindly trust the makers of your OS to provide security your going to get screwed.
The amount of gold that exists does change and fluctuate based on how much of it we pull out of the earth. This is the problem with gold or other commodity backed currencies and why it's lead to volatile inflation/deflation cycles. You are connecting the supply of money to the rate miners can dig the mineral out of the earth. Printing money under a proper monetary system can be controlled to keep inflation in check, so long as the central bank's mandate is to keep inflation in check. So pick your poison, a central banking system that requires oversight to avoid the temptation of inflating you way out of problems, or highly volatile inflation/deflation cycles based on the rate miners can dig stuff from the ground.
"Online learning is no substitute for a good teacher....Reading is boring. By using volume, inflection, humour, and gestures the teacher keeps the class lively and the students interested. One can only read for so long before the brain shut down and the learning stops."
This is bunk, and I think I know why you can't see the other side of things. You are one of those extrovert types, you always have to be talking to some one to get that in person experience. If you can't get the facial expressions and vocal tones to go with information you are digesting you just can't digest it, like making a person with gluten allergies try and eat a loaf of bread. Your mistake is you think other people function the same way, but they don't.
As an introvert I hate those intonations and inflections you drone on about. Just give me the book and in a week I will be an expert at the subject matter. You say reading is boring? Do you know how stupid that sounds? I have received greater wisdom from so many great writers who's bones are now dust, all from a printed page. I don't need your professor (who usually won't give me the time of day) to give the right volume and funny spin as you put it to get it through my head. This is why I flourish in on-line education and suck in a traditional setting. Give me the course materials and 6 months to prep and I can ace any exam on any subject.
I understand that your personality type needs things to be told to you by another human for you to properly digest. I read about this in books. But that is just an argument to have both systems available for different learning styles.
"Being able to talk to tutors/unit coordinators face to face helps (being able to send them email questions right on the spot without needing to wait until they can see them in the flesh next time also helps)"
It works for you, not for me. If we are just talking undergrad do you really think you can't lookup the information in a book or even Wikipedia? In an undergrad setting you are getting nothing by being there in person, zip, zero, nada. Unless your the one class suck up it's not going to happen. In this situation your text book and course materials, not to mention external sources, are going to be far more helpful. In a traditional setting your just a bum in a seat in a very large class room setting.
"And yes as others have said, being on campus gives you campus culture and stuff"
Campus culture is crap. This is the excuse of last resort in defending traditional university settings. It's really just a day care centre for not yet adults who get to drink alcohol and party. As each year goes by in the real world you will find your "experience" becomes more of a quaint memory that has nothing to do with real life.
I just spent 4 years getting a degree online (Athabasca) after working in the real world for 15 years and I far prefer it to the traditional experience. On-line or distance gives me the flexibility to keep my full time job (helps to pay for the courses) and manage course load. Employers don't give two craps what your university culture or alma mater is, just what you can do. If you can master course material with little assistance independently and on time you are highly sought after. A degree from the right on-line university (some are great, some not so much) can convey that.
I will admit to agreeing with a lot of your post, but that does not mean a Facebook account is evil and Facebook users deserve what ever evil befalls them. When I was in the army and taking Comm's training they told us to always assume the enemy is listening. I treat Facebook the same way regardless of privacy setting. I say nothing on Facebook or any other site that I could not handle being asked about in a job interview.
Unfortunately there are lots of people who have not made that connection. Their drunken escapades are displayed for all to gawk at. It is these people who do not deserve our pity. But don't tarnish all Facebook users for that idiocy of some.
The process is an enabler of bad management. The biggest assumption that all development life cycle methodology is that management is competent and wants the project to succeed. In the real world of cubicle politics this is nuts to assume. The "process" now becomes a weapon in an agenda war between managers and departments. Competent works and managers become targets and victims of the "process".
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Stickers are just status symbols. A long time ago we use to smear dyes and goats blood on our chest to show our tribal identification. Less painful and itchy this way.
Times up on this though because recently I got laptop stickers promoting some IBM product to suck up your departments budget. Clear sign the kids will move on as they did when their grandparents friend-ed them on Facebook.
AI won't be taking jobs soon, but automation will. It does't take AI or machine learning to replace the majority of any office work. In my department there are about 1000 people. Most of them are just reading from one screen some data to pass off to another person will copy and paste to the next. With some intelligent scripts automating things I could reduce the department size down to 50 people. My boss usually tells me not to say these things out loud.
I remember more a few classes in high school and college that would have been better off without the teacher. Just leaving us the text book and materials would be better than subjecting us to the uncommunicative twat writing on the blackboard.
I have no doubt that you could save hundreds of billions, possibly trillions over the years if smart agreeable people get together and figure it out. The problem is at some point you need to include others and then the trouble starts. Any organization over with more than 100 people run into this. The more people and departments the worse it gets. I am older now and I have seen smart ideas pass from their creators to the masses of underlings and watch it get mangled beyond belief. Your trillion dollar savings will be eaten up by those underlings a hundred fold.
As opposed to the opposite crime where you spend years in requirements and nothing gets done. I worked in one company where the technology group was tasked at building an system to replace an analyst spreadsheet. They said it would take 1 year and a million dollars, it actually took over 5 years and 30 million dollars and the test output still doesn't work. But they passed rigorous technology audits every year with flying colours! They have lots of documentation.
The average person can speak MUCH faster than they can type (250 - 300WPM), and as long as that statistic rings true
Are you for real? You actually speak 5 words every second? There is no study that claims any such thing. In fact all the studies I have seen show the fastest is thinking and then typing. Speech is the slowest form of communication. And that's not even considering the ease of editing what I type as opposed to speaking into a world processor.
"The problem is, finding a place that has near-constant wind in a known or semi-known direction, near no one who minds and yet still near something so that power can be put back into the grid. Oh, and you have to avoid major fault-lines and tornadoes. A tough set of rules to follow..."
The perfect spot would be lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Lake Erie was designed by God as one long wind tunnel to blast the city of Buffalo with crappy weather for the horrible sin of being Buffalo. But putting turbines in the middle of lakes is a lot more money and the Ontario government didn't want to do that. Better to have them near roads where citizens could see what their tax dollars were being spent on, next to the sign telling them what their tax dollars were spent on.
No, they are protesting their location as well. It's been a hot topic in Ontario for the last few years are rural areas have fought against them being built in their back yard. Everything from noise issues (whirling of blades keeps people up at night) to destroying bird species (it's a massive bird strike zone) has been raised.
The only other way to transfer money out of a country is by converting it to something physical that you can stuff in a suit case and carry across the border. It is a really big deal to get cut out of the SWIFT. Carrying bricks of gold or other tangibles across borders just doesn't work for serious amounts.
Any new system won't be able to connect to the major currency markets or any of the major financial institutions is doomed to fail.
Well said sir! And if I may add to that the constant fetish with these new movie style games. I am tired of games that are a barrage of cut scenes with a few moments of some joystick routine I need to master before I get the next set of cut scenes. If I wanted a movie I would rent one.
You can not convert it back to cash, only for products in a MS store. You can not convert those points into Euro's, or Austrailian dollars on any currency exchange. Your local grocery store is not legally obliged to accept your MS points to pay for purchases as stipulated by government laws determining what legal tender is. Central banks do not recognize nor accept MS points as capital. The bank teller will laugh in your face if you try and deposit MS points.
Face it, it is not a currency and any one who has taken economics 101 knows this. It should also be pointed out that the MS points in the link you provided and not real points yet. They are vouchers to activate for real points. You can not un-activate those points back into cash or a card that can be sold. Once that card is activated you can not un-activate it and sell it for more cash.
Because there are many laws in many nations one what can be called currency. You can't just start a new currency and expect it to interact with the current financial system. There are a sh*t load of other laws and regulations, especially if you are engaging in deposit taking or credit lending. You need the appropriate approvals and must conduct your self like other financial institutions do.
Microsoft can get away with points because it's only a one way exchange. You buy MS points to get stuff on the X-Box. You can not convert MS points back into cash.
Piracy here is definitely a problem as I have many friends constantly encouraging me to get my media it the down and dirty way. I have stubbornly been trying to do it the legit way for a long time now. The latest is in trying to get Dexter season 4 and up. Season 1 to 3 is on Netflix Canada but I will be damned if I can rent seasons 4 and up any where. I solved this by using a VPN proxy to the U.S. and some gift card trickery on Amazon to watch it online. I lied to pay for it instead of pirating it.
There is a crap load of content we can never get because some rights holder here in Canada won't allow it to be shown at all here. That's why we can't get Pandora or Spotify. I've seen Canadian indy musicians have their stuff available on iTunes U.S. long before it's available in the Canadian store.
How long do I put up with this before I become a total pirate? Right now I pay a proxy service to pretend like I am American so I can buy the content. I want to pay and be legit but at some point it's just easier to pirate the stuff.
" Canada, as a raw material and energy exporter, needs to allow its currency to be set by the market..."
What the hell are you talking about?!? Canada's currency is a freely floating one and has been for a few decades. It's one of the few countries on the planet that has a completely floating exchange rate. As for natural resources we have a time honored tradition of selling it abroad. The oil sands in Alberta being the latest.
Why don't people look in the history books of computing. If they did they would see that in the before the 80's everything was in "the cloud", except back then they called it servers. They rented these servers and the storage space from IBM, Digital, HP and a few other server providers. The personal computer came a long and data started shifting on to local hard drives and WIntel or Novell LAN servers.
Now they have the problem of trying to maintain every spreadsheet and Access DB sitting on a managers laptop. To solve this they are going back to the future and storing stuff back on servers sold to us by young people who never knew what DASD is. Controls and audits will demand restricted access and rules be put in the cloud for protection just like before. After about 10 years we will all be bitching and complaining about the cloud and praising local storage for it's ease of access and not having our data held hostage by providers. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There is nothing new under the sun people, just move along.
"Capitalism 101 says that pricing acts as a regulator between supply and demand."
Your incorrect, price is where the supply curve intersects with the demand curve. It is the result, not the input. That is economics 101. Price is a regulator of nothing unless your a government that sets price controls (which always fail).
Capitalism 101 just says charge people what you can get away with and pay as little as possible. The difference is profit.
If you think the free market is suppose to give consumers everything at low cost you don't understand the concept. Free markets produce the most accurate real cost of a product, not the friendliest.
AT&T is not acting in a free market, it is regulated. The government controls who can compete with AT&T and this is why they act the way they do. This is the real racket you are referring to. If it were an open market anyone could put up a network to compete for your dollars. That's what the Rand fanbois would tell you.
However that argument is as ill conceived as your post. Barriers to entry and interfering transmissions between carriers destroys that notion. You could have light but intelligent regulation but that requires Congress to act like mature adults. Good luck with that.
Of course, the mainframe is a marginalized beast these days.
Hardly marginalized. It's doing what it has always done best, which is push lots of data around with raw processing power. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there humming away crunching data. If you use an ATM, charge something to a credit card, or receive your pay I guarantee you there is a mainframe at the end of that transaction.
The need for mainframe services never went away, the world just built a whole new computer segment separate from them for new things.
I have to disagree with you on XP. I think it was a much cleaner OS that the ones before it. It was the first to ditch the Windows 95/DOS code base and use the Windows NT kernel as a base. For most of the 90's I was a Linux or BSD user. Windows 95 and 98 were pains in the ass in terms of getting drivers to work or playing nice on the network. I tolerated Win 95 for my games but when game time was done it was back to Linux. XP, at least after the first service pack, seemed to just work. You could plug something in and it just worked. No screaming and cursing trying to make some driver function. I stopped using Linux with XP.
Windows 7 on the other hand is starting to get annoying and has me wondering about going back to Linux. There are too many locked down things in there attempt to be more like OS X. MS seems to be catering to regular consumers instead of power users. It's getting very annoying.
"If you use Windows for financial stuff you will get screwed eventually."
You are clearly not familiar with true computer security. I have used windows for more than a decade (one of many OS's I work with) and have done "financial stuff" on them. A Windows system can be just as hardened as any other. I do everything from person banking to stock trading. I have never had any problems because I have never had a virus or spyware running on any system I have ever used. I know how operating systems work and I make sure I know what every service, application, or driver is doing on my system. This is what being secure really is. Every OS is vulnerable including Linux and OS X, it's just that Windows gets more of the press and targeting by hackers. If you blindly trust the makers of your OS to provide security your going to get screwed.
The amount of gold that exists does change and fluctuate based on how much of it we pull out of the earth. This is the problem with gold or other commodity backed currencies and why it's lead to volatile inflation/deflation cycles. You are connecting the supply of money to the rate miners can dig the mineral out of the earth. Printing money under a proper monetary system can be controlled to keep inflation in check, so long as the central bank's mandate is to keep inflation in check. So pick your poison, a central banking system that requires oversight to avoid the temptation of inflating you way out of problems, or highly volatile inflation /deflation cycles based on the rate miners can dig stuff from the ground.
"Online learning is no substitute for a good teacher....Reading is boring. By using volume, inflection, humour, and gestures the teacher keeps the class lively and the students interested. One can only read for so long before the brain shut down and the learning stops."
This is bunk, and I think I know why you can't see the other side of things. You are one of those extrovert types, you always have to be talking to some one to get that in person experience. If you can't get the facial expressions and vocal tones to go with information you are digesting you just can't digest it, like making a person with gluten allergies try and eat a loaf of bread. Your mistake is you think other people function the same way, but they don't.
As an introvert I hate those intonations and inflections you drone on about. Just give me the book and in a week I will be an expert at the subject matter. You say reading is boring? Do you know how stupid that sounds? I have received greater wisdom from so many great writers who's bones are now dust, all from a printed page. I don't need your professor (who usually won't give me the time of day) to give the right volume and funny spin as you put it to get it through my head. This is why I flourish in on-line education and suck in a traditional setting. Give me the course materials and 6 months to prep and I can ace any exam on any subject.
I understand that your personality type needs things to be told to you by another human for you to properly digest. I read about this in books. But that is just an argument to have both systems available for different learning styles.
"Being able to talk to tutors/unit coordinators face to face helps (being able to send them email questions right on the spot without needing to wait until they can see them in the flesh next time also helps)"
It works for you, not for me. If we are just talking undergrad do you really think you can't lookup the information in a book or even Wikipedia? In an undergrad setting you are getting nothing by being there in person, zip, zero, nada. Unless your the one class suck up it's not going to happen. In this situation your text book and course materials, not to mention external sources, are going to be far more helpful. In a traditional setting your just a bum in a seat in a very large class room setting.
"And yes as others have said, being on campus gives you campus culture and stuff"
Campus culture is crap. This is the excuse of last resort in defending traditional university settings. It's really just a day care centre for not yet adults who get to drink alcohol and party. As each year goes by in the real world you will find your "experience" becomes more of a quaint memory that has nothing to do with real life.
I just spent 4 years getting a degree online (Athabasca) after working in the real world for 15 years and I far prefer it to the traditional experience. On-line or distance gives me the flexibility to keep my full time job (helps to pay for the courses) and manage course load. Employers don't give two craps what your university culture or alma mater is, just what you can do. If you can master course material with little assistance independently and on time you are highly sought after. A degree from the right on-line university (some are great, some not so much) can convey that.
I will admit to agreeing with a lot of your post, but that does not mean a Facebook account is evil and Facebook users deserve what ever evil befalls them. When I was in the army and taking Comm's training they told us to always assume the enemy is listening. I treat Facebook the same way regardless of privacy setting. I say nothing on Facebook or any other site that I could not handle being asked about in a job interview.
Unfortunately there are lots of people who have not made that connection. Their drunken escapades are displayed for all to gawk at. It is these people who do not deserve our pity. But don't tarnish all Facebook users for that idiocy of some.
You problem is bad management, not bad process.
The process is an enabler of bad management. The biggest assumption that all development life cycle methodology is that management is competent and wants the project to succeed. In the real world of cubicle politics this is nuts to assume. The "process" now becomes a weapon in an agenda war between managers and departments. Competent works and managers become targets and victims of the "process".