This article makes no mention of the review by Adm. Gehman. So this sounds like just a restatement of NASA's earlier position, by Weiler, who has been repeating the same thing over and over.
O'Keefe appointed Gehman to study it and report to him, so until O'Keefe comes out in a press conference and announces the results of the study, I think the BBC used the word 'final' a bit prematurely.
Oh good grief. What's next airbags and OnStar onboard the Shuttle?
Heh. Funny, but unfortunately, looks to be true. Crew safety should always be a high priority, but you can never eliminate risk.
Your car is a lot safer if you never leave the driveway, but you obviously won't get very far.
So when/if we go to Mars, are they going to be towing a little space dinghy behind them, or are we going to have to build a duplicate ship to fly alongside in case of an emergency?
There will not be an upswing in the industry (in countries like USA). It is my view that upswings don't occur under capitalism (I don't support capitalism though). For instance, has there been an upswing in manufacturing (which has been declining)? How about say semiconductor manufacturing (which largely went to Taiwan, etc)?
Well, I can't say when or if there will an upswing for programming, but I can say that I think you're incorrect.
Manufacturing continues to grow. Yes, many factories have moved production from the US to other countries. But many new factories have taken their place. Take the auto industry, for example. US automakers continue to make cars in the US, and now you have plants from both Japanese and European companies making cars in the US. Twenty years ago no one thought an autoworker would have a job, as it would either be taken over by Japan or by a robot. Now you've got BMW hiring autoworkers in the US.
As for semiconductor manufacturing, yes, much of it is concentrated in Taiwan. But much like the auto industry, it's a global business. There are fabs making the basic components all over the world, with assemblies being built from them in a similar manner. IBM just spent $2.5 billion for their new chip fab in New York, and last I heard, Intel had two new chip fabs scheduled for the US. So this hardly seems like an industry that isn't on an upswing.
For non-outsourcable jobs, look for anything that can't be done remotely: medicine, nursing, auto repair, plumbing, law. And don't turn up your nose at blue-collar jobs either. Plumbers typically make $80k-100k, a lot more than almost any programmer and even most engineers. Auto body repairmen also make $100k.
Medicine: it's being done remotely. Radiologists halfway around the world may be interpreting your next hospital test.
Nursing: can't be done remotely, but the hospital managers want more education and are paying peanuts. There's a reason there's a nursing shortage.
Law: There's really nothing about law that requires proximity. Probably the best thing that law has going for it WRT outsourcing is that court appearances require a physical presence, and it requires a strong command of English. But that's not to say that legal assistants couldn't be outsourced.
As for the blue collar jobs, I wonder where your numbers came from. A quick check at salary.com shows that the median pay for a plumber I in the US is $32,327, and $38,854 is the 75th percentile. A plumber II has a median of $40,420, and a plumber III a median of $44,084. So the figures you quote are hardly typical.
Similarly, I'd like know the $100k figure for auto body repair. I'm finding average annual salaries of $35k for that, and that's coming from the training schools, who frequently like to make you think you're going to earn a lot.
Now, it's certainly possible that you could become a plumber, and run your own business and make that much. And extremely skilled specialist panel beaters could easily make that much, but it's not the norm.
so it would need very little work to code it so that it didn't send the notification when it could deduce that the sender is forged
That's fine for newer versions of the software, but what about the ones running that are several years old, before this was an issue?
This boils down to bad admins, plain and simple. When the first round of these sender forging worms came out, I simply changed my configuration to not notify the sender.
If what you say is true and companies are terribly mismanaged and execs are motivated only by short term considerations
The problem is that this sort of behaviour is exactly what our current system encourages. Improve your quarterly earnings, stock price goes up, and you get handsome reward. When the short-term strategy breaks for you, bail out and enjoy your golden parachute. So regardless of the competency of the management, it's in their best personal interests to focus on short term gains.
Your comments are rediculous and untrue. In most large companies executives own a small fraction of shares.
If you hope to compete in this system you like so much, I suggest you learn to spell.
Now that that's out of the way, how do you define 'small fraction'? Bill Gates owns 10.8% of the outstanding MSFT shares. Michael Dell owns 12.8% of outstanding shares of Dell.
But regardless of stock ownership, the execs will get large increases in their compensation for increasing profitability, regardless of whether or not that profitability is has any long-term benefits for the company or society. You see, corporate boards are an inbred mess of execs from different companies. It's a high-dollar version of a good old boys club, where they help each other out by creating nice compensation packages.
When offshoring is the only way to get a few more cents per share, what do you do to make good numbers the next quarter? I'd wager that a small increase in shareholder value does not have as positive a benefit on the U.S. economy as keeping people working in the U.S.
I get the feeling you haven't been in the working world for very long. I used to be similarly idealistic about the system, but have seen too much to be that way anymore.
To be honest, I don't have a problem with a company taking advantage of offshoring. I do have a problem with companies having a knee-jerk reaction thinking they need to do it because everyone else is. Poorly planned offshoring turns out to be much more expensive than expected, leads to delays, etc. And while the big Indian consulting companies will tout their high quality, a lot of people are reporting evidence to the contrary, so there's another cost to add. I'd add that the only restrictions I'd consider appropriate at this time are limits on offshoring for government contracts and possibly for sensitive personal information.
Well, for shoes, you should look at New Balance. While not all of their shoes are US-made, they've been working on returning more production to the US, and providing those workers with decent wages and tuition assistance. New Balance is privately held, so they can do things for the long term view, and consider costs/benefits to their community, rather than just to the next earnings report. And they don't pay atheletes millions of dollars to endorse their product.
But yes, it's tough to find things that will fit your criteria.
My only issue with the outsourcing is that generally in my experience the quality is not better over there.
Thus far I haven't had to (knowingly) deal with Indian support. However, a friend of mine works for GE, who is running much of their IT there. Granted, in most situations, first level helpdesk have never been the most respected folks in IT. But he said they have all sorts of problems communicating and getting issues resolved.
So not only does management piss off the people who get laid off, they end up pissing off their current employees who feel like they can't get good service out of their own company.
These are reasons why Dell brought one of their call centers back.
Yes, for their business class machines. Consumer grade folks are still talking to India. Of course, the newest (consumer grade) Dell commercials I've seen where they're touting their support shows the happy customer being helped by a friendly American in a nice-looking call center.
Hahahahahaha! My sister has been a R.N. for about twenty years now. She advises people not to pursue nursing. That sounds odd, considering the shortage of nurses we keep hearing about.
But hospital management wants all nurses to have a B.S.N. degree now, rather than just a R.N. So now you've got a huge investment in time and money, but they only want to pay a bit over what you'd make asking people if they'd like to supersize their value meal.
How good is their list when they don't have the right pictures?
The Bronco II was a small vehicle, based on the Ranger pickup, which spawned the Explorer. The vehicle they show in the picture is a full size Bronco, based on the F-Series pickup, best known as O.J.'s escape vehicle.
Also, they list both the Fiat Strada and the Yugo GV. The Strada grew out of the Fiat 128, which is what Yugo was basically building under license. So they sort of doubled up on that one.
NASA technology and expertise will flow to the military. Applicable military technologies will flow to NASA
Yeah, I couldn't figure out the submitter's question about NASA becoming a conduit for research and money to defense contractors? It's not like there's NASA Heavy Industries that's designed and built all the spacecraft to date. It's been companies like McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell, etc. All companies that were heavily involved in the military-industrial complex.
I was lucky enough to talk to someone yesterday who worked at McDonnell on the early space program. The manufacturing techniques and advances in materials they made during that time were amazing. Are we to suppose they never put any of that expertise to use in the next generations of military hardware?
Even excluding military mapping, there is pretty good coverage of earth. And the article says it's 12m resolution, while the submitter is claiming 10m.
While the domestic cat does indeed take out many birds, I've not seen too many that can take down an eagle or hawk, which are what the article mentions. I suspect that the cat would more likely be the dinner for them.
Are they going to stop renting movies with region codes? I doubt it. They're bluffing and it's as transparent as a McDonalds paper bag.
Uh, how's it a bluff if they're not threatening to do anything? He's simply saying that region encoding and different release schedules are contributing to piracy, not giving an ultimatum.
Paper is much easier to handle and distribute to others when I need to
True. I can't argue that there aren't many advantages to the dead tree version. I regularly print out files myself for later study. It just seems like with the volume of paper you're having to shuffle, that you've gone beyond the tipping point.
While the performance freaks have been griping about the specs on the box, the thing that concerned me the most was the firewall settings. They have some canned configs of low/medium/high security, but a VPN connection can only work with the low setting. Be sure to encrypt your traffic, but have the box easily hackable.....
The article says that it would be silly for companies to do this intentionally, due to the cost of the customer calling in to complain. Seems that, say, credit card companies have no problem spending their reps' time and phone charges on trying to sell you credit protection, or whatever other service they can charge you extra for, so it can't be that much to spend a few minutes on the phone.
Slashdot Mirror
This article makes no mention of the review by Adm. Gehman. So this sounds like just a restatement of NASA's earlier position, by Weiler, who has been repeating the same thing over and over.
O'Keefe appointed Gehman to study it and report to him, so until O'Keefe comes out in a press conference and announces the results of the study, I think the BBC used the word 'final' a bit prematurely.
Oh good grief. What's next airbags and OnStar onboard the Shuttle?
Heh. Funny, but unfortunately, looks to be true. Crew safety should always be a high priority, but you can never eliminate risk.
Your car is a lot safer if you never leave the driveway, but you obviously won't get very far.
So when/if we go to Mars, are they going to be towing a little space dinghy behind them, or are we going to have to build a duplicate ship to fly alongside in case of an emergency?
There will not be an upswing in the industry (in countries like USA). It is my view that upswings don't occur under capitalism (I don't support capitalism though). For instance, has there been an upswing in manufacturing (which has been declining)? How about say semiconductor manufacturing (which largely went to Taiwan, etc)?
Well, I can't say when or if there will an upswing for programming, but I can say that I think you're incorrect.
Manufacturing continues to grow. Yes, many factories have moved production from the US to other countries. But many new factories have taken their place. Take the auto industry, for example. US automakers continue to make cars in the US, and now you have plants from both Japanese and European companies making cars in the US. Twenty years ago no one thought an autoworker would have a job, as it would either be taken over by Japan or by a robot. Now you've got BMW hiring autoworkers in the US.
As for semiconductor manufacturing, yes, much of it is concentrated in Taiwan. But much like the auto industry, it's a global business. There are fabs making the basic components all over the world, with assemblies being built from them in a similar manner. IBM just spent $2.5 billion for their new chip fab in New York, and last I heard, Intel had two new chip fabs scheduled for the US. So this hardly seems like an industry that isn't on an upswing.
For non-outsourcable jobs, look for anything that can't be done remotely: medicine, nursing, auto repair, plumbing, law. And don't turn up your nose at blue-collar jobs either. Plumbers typically make $80k-100k, a lot more than almost any programmer and even most engineers. Auto body repairmen also make $100k.
Medicine: it's being done remotely. Radiologists halfway around the world may be interpreting your next hospital test.
Nursing: can't be done remotely, but the hospital managers want more education and are paying peanuts. There's a reason there's a nursing shortage.
Law: There's really nothing about law that requires proximity. Probably the best thing that law has going for it WRT outsourcing is that court appearances require a physical presence, and it requires a strong command of English. But that's not to say that legal assistants couldn't be outsourced.
As for the blue collar jobs, I wonder where your numbers came from. A quick check at salary.com shows that the median pay for a plumber I in the US is $32,327, and $38,854 is the 75th percentile. A plumber II has a median of $40,420, and a plumber III a median of $44,084. So the figures you quote are hardly typical.
Similarly, I'd like know the $100k figure for auto body repair. I'm finding average annual salaries of $35k for that, and that's coming from the training schools, who frequently like to make you think you're going to earn a lot.
Now, it's certainly possible that you could become a plumber, and run your own business and make that much. And extremely skilled specialist panel beaters could easily make that much, but it's not the norm.
so it would need very little work to code it so that it didn't send the notification when it could deduce that the sender is forged
That's fine for newer versions of the software, but what about the ones running that are several years old, before this was an issue?
This boils down to bad admins, plain and simple. When the first round of these sender forging worms came out, I simply changed my configuration to not notify the sender.
If what you say is true and companies are terribly mismanaged and execs are motivated only by short term considerations
The problem is that this sort of behaviour is exactly what our current system encourages. Improve your quarterly earnings, stock price goes up, and you get handsome reward. When the short-term strategy breaks for you, bail out and enjoy your golden parachute. So regardless of the competency of the management, it's in their best personal interests to focus on short term gains.
Your comments are rediculous and untrue. In most large companies executives own a small fraction of shares.
If you hope to compete in this system you like so much, I suggest you learn to spell.
Now that that's out of the way, how do you define 'small fraction'? Bill Gates owns 10.8% of the outstanding MSFT shares. Michael Dell owns 12.8% of outstanding shares of Dell.
But regardless of stock ownership, the execs will get large increases in their compensation for increasing profitability, regardless of whether or not that profitability is has any long-term benefits for the company or society. You see, corporate boards are an inbred mess of execs from different companies. It's a high-dollar version of a good old boys club, where they help each other out by creating nice compensation packages.
When offshoring is the only way to get a few more cents per share, what do you do to make good numbers the next quarter? I'd wager that a small increase in shareholder value does not have as positive a benefit on the U.S. economy as keeping people working in the U.S.
I get the feeling you haven't been in the working world for very long. I used to be similarly idealistic about the system, but have seen too much to be that way anymore.
To be honest, I don't have a problem with a company taking advantage of offshoring. I do have a problem with companies having a knee-jerk reaction thinking they need to do it because everyone else is. Poorly planned offshoring turns out to be much more expensive than expected, leads to delays, etc. And while the big Indian consulting companies will tout their high quality, a lot of people are reporting evidence to the contrary, so there's another cost to add. I'd add that the only restrictions I'd consider appropriate at this time are limits on offshoring for government contracts and possibly for sensitive personal information.
I'd love to buy American. Where can I start?
Well, for shoes, you should look at New Balance. While not all of their shoes are US-made, they've been working on returning more production to the US, and providing those workers with decent wages and tuition assistance. New Balance is privately held, so they can do things for the long term view, and consider costs/benefits to their community, rather than just to the next earnings report. And they don't pay atheletes millions of dollars to endorse their product.
But yes, it's tough to find things that will fit your criteria.
My only issue with the outsourcing is that generally in my experience the quality is not better over there.
Thus far I haven't had to (knowingly) deal with Indian support. However, a friend of mine works for GE, who is running much of their IT there. Granted, in most situations, first level helpdesk have never been the most respected folks in IT. But he said they have all sorts of problems communicating and getting issues resolved.
So not only does management piss off the people who get laid off, they end up pissing off their current employees who feel like they can't get good service out of their own company.
These are reasons why Dell brought one of their call centers back.
Yes, for their business class machines. Consumer grade folks are still talking to India. Of course, the newest (consumer grade) Dell commercials I've seen where they're touting their support shows the happy customer being helped by a friendly American in a nice-looking call center.
It's not the executives who get most of the money, it's the shareholders.
Heh...who do you think holds most of the shares? Usually the executives and their friends on the board. So the rich get richer.
The average worker bee can't afford to own enough stock in that company to see a significant return.
Why do they owe anyone a subsidy when they can find people willing to do the work for less elsewhere?
Why do we owe them a subsidy? Surely they can get by on a few million dollars less per year.
May I suggest nursing.
Hahahahahaha! My sister has been a R.N. for about twenty years now. She advises people not to pursue nursing. That sounds odd, considering the shortage of nurses we keep hearing about.
But hospital management wants all nurses to have a B.S.N. degree now, rather than just a R.N. So now you've got a huge investment in time and money, but they only want to pay a bit over what you'd make asking people if they'd like to supersize their value meal.
How good is their list when they don't have the right pictures?
The Bronco II was a small vehicle, based on the Ranger pickup, which spawned the Explorer. The vehicle they show in the picture is a full size Bronco, based on the F-Series pickup, best known as O.J.'s escape vehicle.
Also, they list both the Fiat Strada and the Yugo GV. The Strada grew out of the Fiat 128, which is what Yugo was basically building under license. So they sort of doubled up on that one.
I think the submitter got confused by the two links at the bottom of the first page...the American article is under the 'More From Forbes' heading..
NASA technology and expertise will flow to the military. Applicable military technologies will flow to NASA
Yeah, I couldn't figure out the submitter's question about NASA becoming a conduit for research and money to defense contractors? It's not like there's NASA Heavy Industries that's designed and built all the spacecraft to date. It's been companies like McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell, etc. All companies that were heavily involved in the military-industrial complex.
I was lucky enough to talk to someone yesterday who worked at McDonnell on the early space program. The manufacturing techniques and advances in materials they made during that time were amazing. Are we to suppose they never put any of that expertise to use in the next generations of military hardware?
Even excluding military mapping, there is pretty good coverage of earth. And the article says it's 12m resolution, while the submitter is claiming 10m.
There's some slick sh*t in modern industrial control systems
;)
Perhaps you guys need to be wearing some of your own products to keep that stuff out of the equipment...
Yes, when you click a link. But Outlook is still using the IE engine to render any HTML-formatted messages.
I hope you're keeping up with the IE security fixes, and not assuming that you're safe just because Moz is your default browser.
While the domestic cat does indeed take out many birds, I've not seen too many that can take down an eagle or hawk, which are what the article mentions. I suspect that the cat would more likely be the dinner for them.
Are they going to stop renting movies with region codes? I doubt it. They're bluffing and it's as transparent as a McDonalds paper bag.
Uh, how's it a bluff if they're not threatening to do anything? He's simply saying that region encoding and different release schedules are contributing to piracy, not giving an ultimatum.
Paper is much easier to handle and distribute to others when I need to
True. I can't argue that there aren't many advantages to the dead tree version. I regularly print out files myself for later study. It just seems like with the volume of paper you're having to shuffle, that you've gone beyond the tipping point.
Comes down to 200-300 pages per day
Have you considered getting a small laptop, or perhaps a Tablet PC for this?
nah....it's another use for duct tape...
While the performance freaks have been griping about the specs on the box, the thing that concerned me the most was the firewall settings. They have some canned configs of low/medium/high security, but a VPN connection can only work with the low setting. Be sure to encrypt your traffic, but have the box easily hackable.....
Damn thing probably weighed 40 pounds.
At least. Don't you remember the big yellow warning label next to the handle saying it weighed 40+ pounds?
The article says that it would be silly for companies to do this intentionally, due to the cost of the customer calling in to complain. Seems that, say, credit card companies have no problem spending their reps' time and phone charges on trying to sell you credit protection, or whatever other service they can charge you extra for, so it can't be that much to spend a few minutes on the phone.