This is something that I've thought about for awhile now.. most of the places I've worked have been chronically understaffed in the technical department (this does not seem to carry over to marketting, however). It's my personal belief that shoddy software coming from a lot of places is a direct result of this - but that's another issue.
How many people have stopped to think about what they make per hour? Especially if you don't get overtime? If you're working 15-20 more hours a week, then there's obviously either a problem with you, or the tasks you're being asked to do.
Some employers get it - IBM is one of them - that long hours != high productivity. I personally think I'd be a more effective programmer if I was only in the office for 4 hours a day - most of my planning for programs I do in my head while I'm doing other things, then, when I go to write code, I sit down and go hardcore. The only exception is debugging a serious problem - that could take a few weeks in a large system.
Take a look at what you're taking home and see if the lack of a life is worth it. I like playing with my own stuff, and what's the good of having money for cool toys if you have no time to play with them!:)
Don't let bosses take away your life just because they think they can take advantage - and if you're working 20 hours overtime a week, you're getting screwed. If you need money, ask for more money & less time. Lots of places are cluing in.
Nanotech will be a useful tool, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. All those materials have to break chemical bonds somewhere, and the nanobots need ENERGY. They need energy to move, energy to replicate, energy to break carbon bonds (VERY expensive), energy to form bonds.
Will they be useful? Sure. But they'll need lots of energy, and a lot fo the potential applications that I see mentioned here on/. are forgetting that one of the basic principles of thermodynamics is you can't win. None of these nanobot articles discuss this, unless Sandia labs is using some uberscret alien propoulsion technology as a energy source, they'll have the same problems.
Viruses spread fast because they are simple, they aren't even technically "alive", per se. That's why they spread so fast - very little mass to adjust, and they can use cell machinery to replicate themselves - because they are so simple - quickly.
Just like your cell phone gets low on batteries, so will these nanobots. Look at some numbers! Even solar power is drastically too inefficient.
There's our source of control over the nanotech armies - power. Wireless xmission of power decreases with the square of the distance - another fundamental law.
Like, this is stupid. Are foriegners the only ones that thing that the United States of America is the land of the free? It seems that at every opportunity, I see LOTS of bills that look like they'd be more suited towards Nazi Germany rather than Washington DC.
I'm probably going to burn some Karma on this one, but why not skip this slow slide into despotism; If history classes actually taught in the US, the electorate should be able to see in a second where all these bills lie. The erosion of personal freedoms is something that has happened in countless empires before the current holder of the title, and it appears that it will continue to!
So, let's all save some time. It would appear from an outside observer's persepective (I'm Canadian) that some of the things your government would like include:
Unlimited Wiretap Capabilty for ALL communications; No warrant required.
Manditory indoctorination of students into Christian Dogma. Starting with the ten commandments and school prayer; We can move right to the Anti-Sex League next.
Continuing with this orwellian nightmare, we can start getting rid of all those nasty books. We need to protect the childern! Are you a child abuser! Wanting to have sex isn't natural!
Ooops. We can all return our guns now, too. Only criminals need those.
Encryption? That's ILLEGAL. It would break our network filtering!
And finally, let's make sure to get this started in the schools. That way, the adults of tomorrrow will be used to random searches on the road...
YEEEESH. Wake up and smell where this heads, and it isn't pretty. More reason to concider a move to europe. Where they worked most of this stuff out in the _last_ revolution.
Great! Now, if you read what I wrote, you'd see that I said there are female engineers. They're just outnumbered 10:1 or so. So, after reading what I wrote again, for exercise #2, name 6 other females with equivilant skills. For each of those females, you should easily be able to identify 10 males. This is the point I was trying to make.
Forgive me for being "young and naive". Who's discriminating there, eh? I did a 6 year EE/ECE degree too - maybe I'll have to go back, because OBVIOUSLY, I must have missed out on the old boys network. Judging people based on their output instead of sex, damn. I must have fucked up at male training school! Sorry for trying!
I don't start conversations with "geek talk: I'll translate". I'd ask what you've done to make me notice you. Naming a cool C++ project would certainly make my (ears?) perk up.
If you work in an environment that isn't like that, leave. But then again, I'm young and naieve (with male genitalia to boot). YEESH. Those guys sound like high school football alpha males, not linux geeks.
No women in tech fields? God, who would have known? Are people just beginning to notice this? I've been involved with computer related activities (one of those social outcasts mentioned in many other posts) for some time now. And ya know what? I don't see (m)any females, period. Sure, there are one or two. But I've worked all across North America, and the number of women in engineering positions is low!
There are some women in technical writing and related fields (support). I have met (2), count 'em, 2, females developing C++. And frankly, I wasn't too impressed with the skills of one of them (not to be sexist or anything). I have met literally hundreds of male engineers / programmers though - the range of companies spanning everything from small shops, to academia, to big corps (hello Intel!). Some of those males had code that sucked too - but the ratios are astonishing.
Any stats on/.? This is a more general forum than I'm talking about - my background is electrical engineering - and it's still, way, way, way, way male oriented.
So, obviously, there is a serious issue here - is it an issue though? Maybe, concidering that hardcore engineering and programming/design jobs are going to make up more and more of the high paying jobs that are available in the future.
Let's get to the root of it: In western culture, computers aren't cool. Engineers, well, they're not real cool either, by association. This is not the case in many eastern societies, where engineers and tech people are pretty hot shit (pardon my french) as far as potential mates/partners/etc go.
I think a lot of this doesn't have much to do with male vs female genetic differences. It might have a little, but I doubt it. I think it has much more to do with how people (females, especially) are socialized - specifically, that social status, attractiveness, social connections, etc are much more important in the formative years than hacking away on a computer. And this is more important than a lot of people think - most of the skills I have now I can trace the roots back to hacking on my old Commodore 64, learning assembler so I could run programs on my 1541 disk drive:).
There are exceptions to the above, sure. We're talking general trends though. And one of the things that I love about this industry is there is no discrimination. If your code rocks, I don't care if you're a she, he, it, pierced, gay, asexual, socially inept - your code rocks. Being able to communicate with others helps too though:). But, that's all part of being a good hacker.. a la social engineering:).
Personally, a shortage of tech workers is a good thing - it makes me more valuable. That's microeconomics, though. hehehe.
I was one of the die hard amiga users who had their hopes dashed earilier in the year by the possibly premature announcements of whomever the flavor of the month is. (was?).
The amigas did amazing things in their day, but what a lot of people forget was how they did those things. There's room for some real amazing things to be done today too, but I think the culture of hackers that made the amiga are a much rarer breed than they used to be.
The amiga concept was that bigger wasn't better. The amiga was designed from the ground-up to be a multimedia and graphics powerhouse; Back in the day this needed those custom IC's that we were so fond of. The machine was designed so that the processor wouldn't be tied up with graphics or sound calculations; That chips could share memory and use it efficiently. Ah, for the days of chip and fast ram.
The amiga technology of yore is indeed dead. It's too slow and old to be of any use, anyone could see that after about 1995 or so. But what isn't dead is the philosophy that drove the brilliant engineering we saw in the amiga. The coupling of the ground-up hardware and tight OS integration are something that I have not seen since the Amiga, and possibily the early mac days - largely because of the legacy software problem. Nobody wants to break from the pack - be it x86, or MacOS. Remember the flak Apple took when they went to the PowerPC line and broke some stuff?
Set up boxes and thin clients suck ass. These things have been around for decades and never caught on, I have lots of ads for 286 "diskless workstations" and anyone remember the Commodore CDTV units? Yuk! This is not the future of the amiga.
What the market wants is a standardized platform for developing home applications on. No worrying about what hardware a customer has - it's all standardized at some base level. The Amiga 500 provided this, and that's why the games rocked hard. The game developers worked on using the hardware they knew everyone had to the absolute maximum - this is what 3dfx saw, and it's what the opengl people are starting to see too. (A standard platform or API is a good thing).
There exists a great opportunity for Amiga to take some existing (bitching fast) chips - like a optimized Athlon, or Alpha, or PowerPC - and then integrate it with ultra-fast graphics hardware from leaders like Nvidia, with sound engineering from someone like Creative or Turtle beach - and then write (or port something like Linux, or QNX Neutrino) an operating system that takes full advantage of the hardware with which it was provided. Something that used multiprocessing to it's intended end, and it worked right out of the box. Something that provided a nice platform for people to develop on. Something that (gasp) came in a sexy box.
Ship that with some applications, bring the gaming manufacturers on board, and I think you'd have a winner. That's what the amiga was about.
There's another player, though. If Sony "got it" and opened up an OS (like linux) for the Playstation II, or a derivative, you'd have the machine that I described above. Bitching fast graphics and IO, Intenet connectivity, a customized (preferably open) OS, and the rest will follow.
This is a great article, I mean, is getting mentioned in Playboy our generation's version of getting mentioned in time? Will this bring about a new crop of playboy models that are right at home with an xterm, vi, and routing tables? (well, I can hope, (that my gf doesn't read this:).
Did anyone actually read the article though? There is nothing new here, and it has some FUD. Not enough software? Are you kidding me? There's so much software for linux that I've actually been out of the warez scene so long I don't have any contacts anymore!:) Staroffice, Abi, not to mention the tomes at Freshmeat and Gnome.org. Maybe they meant lack of commmercial software.
I don't know what to critque, mainly because I don't know how technical playboy is supposed to be.. The models aren't really photographed in detail enough to be an anatomy lesson, either:).
Excellent publicity. Too bad about that last paragraph though. No mention of the gaming support for linux coming about, and there was no mention of the current achilles heel of linux - getting cutting edge hardware suppored. (USB devices, sound cards, 3D cards, etc.)
All in time though. How about some models in copyleft shirts?:)
If you're really worried about a NBC threat, then don't live in a big city. Problem solved. There's almost nothing you could do about a big threat in a city, anyhow - it's not the bacterium I'd be worried about, it's the mass panic and rioting that would happen shortly after. Any threat large enough to impact a small city or rural setting probably already took out civilization as you know it, so there's no point in worrying. That's a country mouse's opinion, anyhow.. I'll just add that to the list of why I like sparsly populated areas (go Canada!:).
The answer to all this isn't going to come from making existing engines better, nor is it going to come from bigger, badder, faster database engines powered by your friendly clustering technologies!
The answer is simple: More specialized search engines. You're looking for technical stuff? Then you should be able to search a technical database. Like, if I'm looking for source code to model fluid flows - that's pretty specific already. There's no reason that I should have to wade through all the references to "bodily fluids" that I'll get on altavista for instance!
Search engine people, take note of this. Classify your URLs into categories - like Yahoo - but come up with some way to do it automatically. Or even better yet, let the users do it, a la NewHoo.
End of internet predicted. Film at 11. We've heard it before, and we'll hear it again. Just need someone with a little VC money to throw it towards an idea that supports more specialization in search engine tech.
The companies that are actively supporting open source all have one thing in common - they are primarily getting there revenue from hardware, or software consulting - not sales of software. We all know that software isn't really a product, but a service - and I think the economy is waking up to that fact.
Open source helps companies like HP because they get wide distribution of their software - not because they get free developers! Wide distribution of software means it's easier to find bugs. Finding bugs makes better software. The developers are a bonus, but people shouldn't feel exploited.
I did some work for Intel, and they have a LOT of software engineers - why? To find ways to make programs that use their processors. The code isn't important, it's that they sell more hardware.
Open source goes one futher, because when the source code is out there, the program will never become obsolete - hint, engineers a dirt cheap compared to the revenues places like HP and IBM bring in. The only obstacle is not having the code. Remember the PC DemoScene? If all those groups released the code for their effects, then we'd still see evolution of their demos - but none/few of them did. (See the hornet archive before it goes away!)
Companies like Sun haven't completely figured this out yet, I don't think. IBM and HP sure have. We'll see more from them in the future - they are very "with it". If all goes will with my courses this term I'll be accepting an offer with IBM for this very reason - the push for linux and open source in general.
That's all fine and dandy, but I think that this is going to be done no matter who thinks it's bad - and for that reason, it's important that the "free" (speech:) world do it before the "insert godless evil empire here" does it - Imagine a world where only Hitler discovered Nuclear Weapons? Or only Russia developed the Hydrogen bomb from it's atomic bomb research?
Nobody said jack about what I concider to be the most henious of all human inventions - Genetic Warfare - e.g., don't like -insert group opposed to your moral views here-? Well, here's a nasty little bug that kills them and not "us". There were several announcements in previous months that many nations possess this capability, namely Israel, and I'm sure that the USofA has some nasties as well. There's a biological warfare research facility around Ottawa, Canada, too. Er, I mean, biological warfare countermeasures, that's it.
My point is that someone, somewhere, somehow is going to do this. I have this gut feeling that it's going to be easier than a lot of people think. The big discussion isn't going to be if. It's going to be who, for what, and why. Is life really all that special? I think that it might just be more aptly described as a propertly of Carbon, a branch of organic chemistry. That's my "moral" view on the topic - we're not so special, and little that humanity has done would change this in my view. We still butcher and kill babies in the name of "insert diety here". Are those the actions of enlightened, noble, beings?
Technology doesn't respect Morals, either. Individuals need to use technology in an ethical manner, and I don't see how a species that has thermonuclear, biological, and chemical weapons locked n' loaded is in any position to argue morals.
Let's use this technology to improve the condition of those living on the planet - and try to direct it's development so we don't all suffer. Sticking our collective heads in the sand wouldn't be such a bright idea.
I don't know why they want to talk to religious groups, first off. That smells like a grab for some airtime and cheap publicity - Once you concider some of the impacts that this technology can have. From a step back, the only thing I've seen come out of religion recently is a lot of people killing each other and crazies annoying me at my front door in the morning.
Flamebait aside - here's why this is really important. My dad is a PhD Genetist, and has talked about one of the problems with biology for the longest time. Basically it comes down to this - biologists aren't too concerned with how things work, why they work, and how to use them.
One of his favorite stories goes like this - an alien biologist and an alien engineer land on Earth. They see a 2 TV sets, and don't know what they are. The biologist promptly gets his tools, microscope, sketchbook, and disscects the TV, counting and drawing each part, right down to the microscopic level. What does the engineer do? Hits the "power" button.:)
Once we can engineer life, we can make use of the only known self-replicating, self-assembling, kick-entropy-in-the-face system in the universe! The applications are endless, here's a few:
Want to colonize mars? Make a bacterium that feeds on mineral deposits and CO2 to generate massive amounts of Oxygen. Worred about infection and lifespan? An adquate understanding of the genes will allow you to program it to replicate 10 times, and then die - just like your cells die.
Need clean power? The article hit the nail on the head. PLANTS split water up into hydrogen and oxygen - albeit in small amounts - and there isn't a soul on the planet that can duplicate that system. My dad would get a kick out of biology texts, because they have the engineering equivilant of a "and then a miracle happens" block on their photosynthesis charts. This alone has the potential to revolutionalize every aspect of our lives!
Obviously there are dangers, but we're a species that lives with between 20k and 50k thermonuclear warheads turned on and able to extinct the planet with the confirmation of a code and the press of a button.
Quantifying life in chemical terms will open up a new science, breathe new life into biotech, maybe put an end to some of this religious crazieness, and most of all - get engineers working with biological systems, the most elegant computer system of all. Whoever made that analogy in an above post was a genius!
Kudos!
People get the government and laws they deserve.
on
WTO + SDMI = NWO
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· Score: 3
Warning: Excessive Ranting.
I have mixed feelings on this subject - on one hand, there's not much that joe blow can do about a government that he/she doesn't like - and every day, more guns get taken out of the hands of the people, which is what all policical power defaults to. Don't think so? Have a look at Seattle. You US guys should know that the bit about guns in the consitution wasn't about hunting. One of my favorite quotes goes something along the lines "a good government should be afraid of it's people".
Don't like the laws? Start protesting them. But, most aren't willing too, because when it comes right down to it, most people want to come home from their crappy job, drink there beer, sit in front of their cable TV, eat their dinner, and pass out. Until something interferes with that nothing will change.
The protests with the WTO are directly related to governments conspiring (at least from Joe Blow's perspective) to interfere with the "crappy job" bit. People, we all can't be programmers, and the average joe understands this completely. The middle-class medium-skilled jobs are the ones that get transferred to the third world, and those are also the ones most people work!
Software laws will largely become a side point if the current trends in open-source development keep doing. Linux has come a long way in 5 years - imagine what will happen in 15.
On other policical fronts, until the masses get connected in such a way that they can freely work together - something you need strong crypto for - not much is going to change. I know that personally, as long as the man doesn't bother me too much, my bank account remains intact, and I can buy a NSX when I want one, I'm not too concerned.
This is great news for all of us, even the perfect sighted. I think that one of the obstacles to development in these arenas is that the people with the expertise in one field - imaging, robotics - are rarely trained in the fields of medicine. Biomedical Engineering has the potential for many great things, and I think we're just beginning to see what can be achieved when we start engineering our bodies.
Unless people start freaking out about "unnatural" modifications, of course. I am a little worried about that laws that will start to happen when this tech gets more advanced - it's very, very, very primitive right now - how about when you could get enhanced vision? Or strain-free screens to read off of? (via a direct digital connection!)
Sound far fetched? Maybe, but then again, we were all using gopher 6 years ago.
Not going to happen, you say? Icky? Maybe. Someone that's got modifications will have a _competitive advantage_ over you, and might learn better, or faster, or be able to do more.
Welcome to the borg - friendlier, happier, but definately where we're headed. I might not live to see it.. but who knows when nanotech gets off the ground to splice into nerves:).
Are you on crack? Java is not the language of the future. It can barely do things now! Unless you have an obscenely fast computer, java is slow. Not just a little slow. It's WAY slow. Have you ever used a UI done in Java? And no, not the little cheezy things, the real deal. I worked on a GIS project that used a Java front end - GUI a la MFC - and no matter what we tried, there was always (unacceptable) lag.
Java is an elegant, beautiful lanuage that doesn't work in practice. If I can speed things up an order of magnitude with C++, can you guess which language I'm going to pick? Hell, C++ can even be nice an platform independant with some careful design and use of nice toolkits like GTK. (For example, Mozilla!)
When's the last time you used a Java app on a daily basis? Do you use a java made web browser? Office tool? I don't think so.
Java is kinda like Rose - they're a good match, because neither of them really cut it in the trenches. UML designs rock until changes start to happen between the theoretical and the ideal - and changes happen fast when $hit isn't working and your manager is breathing down your neck because of deadlines.
So, in effect, "who cares". I use what works, and Visual J++ isn't on that list. Let me know when we have a nice IDE for C++ on Linux.. something the gnome people should be pouring their heart into!:)
Is this really that uncommon? We pay by the meg after a certain amount (5 or 20gb) on DSL. It's like that in a lot of regions of Canada.. it used to be a lot worse here in NB, where they were going to start charging $0.05/meg (cdn) for access over a gig. Mind you - we get very good speeds, 250+kilobytes/sec in some areas, but it can get very expensive.
What BOTHERS me is that I can write a client that might attack people I don't like with pingfloods when they're inactive on the machine, and run their bills up very high. This could easily be done given the average number of protocols you could exploit - ICQ, Quake....
I wonder why people don't get more upset about this - the flat fee model for bandwidth is what has made the net a huge success in North America, allowing telcos to make obscene profits selling hardware and service. Mind you - pay per use / metered bandwith is what those marketing types have wet dreams over.
If this stuff was around when I was in grade/high school, I'd be locked away with no possibility of parole, for life. (Reminded of Megadeth tune, "Captive Honour"). I mean, lookit the freaks, let's expel them, toss them in for some re-education (Hell, let's even call it the "Ministry of Love, *chuckle*).
Nevermind that this is also the profile of some of the brightest students with the most of offer society, that for one reason or another aren't in a good situation.
I didn't fit in with my peers; It didn't take a rocket scientist to see that I was different. Sooner or later I found some more people like me (that would be the "group of outsiders" and I turned out all right.
Why not address the problems that are causing these people not to be accepted? If you replaced "geek profiling" with "miniority profiling", there would be riots in the streets.
Finally, governments that might actually, maybe, get it:). It strikes me that this is something that the United Nations should fund, as the implications and benefits of any work into researching Near Earth Objects. JPL is associated with some work into this: Check out the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program (NEAT).
Some people think of this as a waste of money, but we are the first species to get to the point where we can prevent our own (eventual) cosmic reset button from being set.
One way to look at it is a great big life insurance program for Human Civilization - the payments aren't high, the work can be largely automated, and if the program ever pays off, there is no way to measure the value of the endeavor!:)
Too bad the US wouldn't shovel some more bucks into NEAT, but, we'll see what international competition can do.
Come on guys! Let's be innovative, here. All the tools are right under your noses in your favorite linux distributions!
Linux is fully multiuser - three's your accounts. Linux has great support for dialin access, there's your modems. It also has killer networking support, as well - there's your telnet.
Want all those DOS online games? Set up a shell and run DOSEMU. Use DOSEMU to load the game. We're running Trade Wars 2002 and Operation Overkill II right now via telnet - ANSI even works in console mode. This works extremely well.
Who's online? Check out the finger command. Need chat? Fire up a local IRC server and you're off to the races!
People like quake? Set up your quake server on that good 'ol linux box.
Online message groups and discussion? That's what TRN is for, my friends. It doesn't take much to get local newsgroups set up and running..
File transfers? ftp! Need a web frontend? Apache is free...
I used to sysop a BBS, and I loved it. This is the next best if not better thing!
In order to prevent a real mess on the web, lots of browsers using standard specifications are a good thing (tm). If mozilla, opera, etc gain mindshare, then in turn sites will be designed with this in mind.
A good browser is absolutely essential to the success of linux, be it open or closed source - BillyG isn't dumb, and there's a reason that IE5.0 is one sweet product. Lots of people on/. have pointed out that they boot windows to use it - this isn't a good thing, we want the "list of reasons" for/dev/hda fat32 to go down, not up!:)
Otoh, it _is_ closed source, although the Opera team did a excellent job on their windows browser, which runs quite nicely on an old 486/75 notebook in the living room displaying my channel listings:).
Mozilla will stomp them all given time.. open source will always win over time, because companies can't/won't commit to infiniately developing and improving a product line - look at the slowdown with Netscape on Linux.
I used to think that math wasn't much of a direct use, but this is incorrect and a lot of it has to do with how mathematics is taught in western culture (something we should be ashamed of; Most people don't do any calculus until senior high school if at all!).
What math does is provide a (perhaps the) universal language with which to describe the universe, science, language, everything. Everything can be represented and manipulated in some form with math - this is what computers do! (discreetly >:).
Discovering relationships between unrelated fields of math allows the scientists and engineers of tomorrow to use these descriptive tools to develop new cool gadgets.;)
Check out the slashdot archives. There was an article this summer that reduced the amount of negative matter required to build a so-called "warp bubble" from the size of a neutron star to approximately one gram. Of course, how to produce this and implement the theory is an exercize for the reader...
While not "solved" - the theory looks sound, and (I believe) has been peer reviewed.
For your viewing pleasure:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/05/27/1215204.shtm l
The body of evidence on UFO's is really compelling when you start researching. And I don't mean the psycho abductees - although, who's to say they're lying - but claims from on duty police and military officials, and not just joe blows on the street.
The roswell case is the most facinating - and from what I've read - most notibly Stanton Friedman's book "Crash at Corona", and might I add, this is a nuclear physisist with some very impressive credentials, including research for the US Governement - has some excellent points and analysis based on governement paperwork, and is presented in a manner that leaves it up to you to decide what went down.
Very little isn't possible with sufficiently advanced technology. We're just beginning to understand the universe, and people sometimes forget just how _mind numbingly_ huge the universe is. I'm reminded of the torture in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where you get shown how insignifigant you are..:) The infinity vortex or something.. but I digress.
I wonder at times, why people are so quick to dismiss out of hand without the slightest degree of investigation into the validity of these people's claims.. what if Volta was so quick to listen to the people laughing at his experiments?
True - lots of these UFO/alien things are likely hoaxes, misconceptions or outright lies. But they should be given at least the benefit of the scientific method, and if they can't be explained, they should be marked as such.
Even the US government's "Blue Book" studies found some really interesting cases that they couldn't explain away, but these were outright ignored.
Lots of people believe in life in the universe, but people have a hard time believing that it could come here. Hell, our own physisists have demonstrated it's only an engineering problem to "warp" through space - one hell of an engineering problem, but possible nothingless. What would that be to a civilization just 1000 more years advanced than us?
I recommmend reading anything by Stanton T. Friedman, who presents excellent balenced analsyses of documents and paper trails produced by US government organizations - and comes up with some compelling possibilities.
Is secure voice really so hard? I mean, there are command line wav file recorders, command line encryption tools, and it's easy to open socket connections to other machines.
So, can't someone hack together a little perl script to implement an extremely basic interface. From there, hacking a gui on it wouldn't be very difficult at all.
e.g.
voicein > pgp -k etc > socketconnection
Might be making things seem more simple than they are, but this really doesn't seem _that_ signifigant.
Slashdot Mirror
This is something that I've thought about for awhile now.. most of the places I've worked have been chronically understaffed in the technical department (this does not seem to carry over to marketting, however). It's my personal belief that shoddy software coming from a lot of places is a direct result of this - but that's another issue.
How many people have stopped to think about what they make per hour? Especially if you don't get overtime? If you're working 15-20 more hours a week, then there's obviously either a problem with you, or the tasks you're being asked to do.
Some employers get it - IBM is one of them - that long hours != high productivity. I personally think I'd be a more effective programmer if I was only in the office for 4 hours a day - most of my planning for programs I do in my head while I'm doing other things, then, when I go to write code, I sit down and go hardcore. The only exception is debugging a serious problem - that could take a few weeks in a large system.
Take a look at what you're taking home and see if the lack of a life is worth it. I like playing with my own stuff, and what's the good of having money for cool toys if you have no time to play with them! :)
Don't let bosses take away your life just because they think they can take advantage - and if you're working 20 hours overtime a week, you're getting screwed. If you need money, ask for more money & less time. Lots of places are cluing in.
Kudos!
Giga == 10^9. Eg. 10^9 x 1024 bytes/k = 1 Gigabyte.
Don't confuse Hz (cycles per second) with Bytes. So, indeed, 1000MHz == 1Ghz.
Nanotech will be a useful tool, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. All those materials have to break chemical bonds somewhere, and the nanobots need ENERGY. They need energy to move, energy to replicate, energy to break carbon bonds (VERY expensive), energy to form bonds.
Will they be useful? Sure. But they'll need lots of energy, and a lot fo the potential applications that I see mentioned here on /. are forgetting that one of the basic principles of thermodynamics is you can't win. None of these nanobot articles discuss this, unless Sandia labs is using some uberscret alien propoulsion technology as a energy source, they'll have the same problems.
Viruses spread fast because they are simple, they aren't even technically "alive", per se. That's why they spread so fast - very little mass to adjust, and they can use cell machinery to replicate themselves - because they are so simple - quickly.
Just like your cell phone gets low on batteries, so will these nanobots. Look at some numbers! Even solar power is drastically too inefficient.
There's our source of control over the nanotech armies - power. Wireless xmission of power decreases with the square of the distance - another fundamental law.
Kudos..
Like, this is stupid. Are foriegners the only ones that thing that the United States of America is the land of the free? It seems that at every opportunity, I see LOTS of bills that look like they'd be more suited towards Nazi Germany rather than Washington DC.
I'm probably going to burn some Karma on this one, but why not skip this slow slide into despotism; If history classes actually taught in the US, the electorate should be able to see in a second where all these bills lie. The erosion of personal freedoms is something that has happened in countless empires before the current holder of the title, and it appears that it will continue to!
So, let's all save some time. It would appear from an outside observer's persepective (I'm Canadian) that some of the things your government would like include:
YEEEESH. Wake up and smell where this heads, and it isn't pretty. More reason to concider a move to europe. Where they worked most of this stuff out in the _last_ revolution.
Kudos!
Great! Now, if you read what I wrote, you'd see that I said there are female engineers. They're just outnumbered 10:1 or so. So, after reading what I wrote again, for exercise #2, name 6 other females with equivilant skills. For each of those females, you should easily be able to identify 10 males. This is the point I was trying to make.
Forgive me for being "young and naive". Who's discriminating there, eh? I did a 6 year EE/ECE degree too - maybe I'll have to go back, because OBVIOUSLY, I must have missed out on the old boys network. Judging people based on their output instead of sex, damn. I must have fucked up at male training school! Sorry for trying!
I don't start conversations with "geek talk: I'll translate". I'd ask what you've done to make me notice you. Naming a cool C++ project would certainly make my (ears?) perk up.
If you work in an environment that isn't like that, leave. But then again, I'm young and naieve (with male genitalia to boot). YEESH. Those guys sound like high school football alpha males, not linux geeks.
Kudos!
No women in tech fields? God, who would have known? Are people just beginning to notice this? I've been involved with computer related activities (one of those social outcasts mentioned in many other posts) for some time now. And ya know what? I don't see (m)any females, period. Sure, there are one or two. But I've worked all across North America, and the number of women in engineering positions is low!
There are some women in technical writing and related fields (support). I have met (2), count 'em, 2, females developing C++. And frankly, I wasn't too impressed with the skills of one of them (not to be sexist or anything). I have met literally hundreds of male engineers / programmers though - the range of companies spanning everything from small shops, to academia, to big corps (hello Intel!). Some of those males had code that sucked too - but the ratios are astonishing.
Any stats on /.? This is a more general forum than I'm talking about - my background is electrical engineering - and it's still, way, way, way, way male oriented.
So, obviously, there is a serious issue here - is it an issue though? Maybe, concidering that hardcore engineering and programming/design jobs are going to make up more and more of the high paying jobs that are available in the future.
Let's get to the root of it: In western culture, computers aren't cool. Engineers, well, they're not real cool either, by association. This is not the case in many eastern societies, where engineers and tech people are pretty hot shit (pardon my french) as far as potential mates/partners/etc go.
I think a lot of this doesn't have much to do with male vs female genetic differences. It might have a little, but I doubt it. I think it has much more to do with how people (females, especially) are socialized - specifically, that social status, attractiveness, social connections, etc are much more important in the formative years than hacking away on a computer. And this is more important than a lot of people think - most of the skills I have now I can trace the roots back to hacking on my old Commodore 64, learning assembler so I could run programs on my 1541 disk drive :).
There are exceptions to the above, sure. We're talking general trends though. And one of the things that I love about this industry is there is no discrimination. If your code rocks, I don't care if you're a she, he, it, pierced, gay, asexual, socially inept - your code rocks. Being able to communicate with others helps too though :). But, that's all part of being a good hacker.. a la social engineering :).
Personally, a shortage of tech workers is a good thing - it makes me more valuable. That's microeconomics, though. hehehe.
There's my $0.02 (cdn)
Kudos!
I was one of the die hard amiga users who had their hopes dashed earilier in the year by the possibly premature announcements of whomever the flavor of the month is. (was?).
The amigas did amazing things in their day, but what a lot of people forget was how they did those things. There's room for some real amazing things to be done today too, but I think the culture of hackers that made the amiga are a much rarer breed than they used to be.
The amiga concept was that bigger wasn't better. The amiga was designed from the ground-up to be a multimedia and graphics powerhouse; Back in the day this needed those custom IC's that we were so fond of. The machine was designed so that the processor wouldn't be tied up with graphics or sound calculations; That chips could share memory and use it efficiently. Ah, for the days of chip and fast ram.
The amiga technology of yore is indeed dead. It's too slow and old to be of any use, anyone could see that after about 1995 or so. But what isn't dead is the philosophy that drove the brilliant engineering we saw in the amiga. The coupling of the ground-up hardware and tight OS integration are something that I have not seen since the Amiga, and possibily the early mac days - largely because of the legacy software problem. Nobody wants to break from the pack - be it x86, or MacOS. Remember the flak Apple took when they went to the PowerPC line and broke some stuff?
Set up boxes and thin clients suck ass. These things have been around for decades and never caught on, I have lots of ads for 286 "diskless workstations" and anyone remember the Commodore CDTV units? Yuk! This is not the future of the amiga.
What the market wants is a standardized platform for developing home applications on. No worrying about what hardware a customer has - it's all standardized at some base level. The Amiga 500 provided this, and that's why the games rocked hard. The game developers worked on using the hardware they knew everyone had to the absolute maximum - this is what 3dfx saw, and it's what the opengl people are starting to see too. (A standard platform or API is a good thing).
There exists a great opportunity for Amiga to take some existing (bitching fast) chips - like a optimized Athlon, or Alpha, or PowerPC - and then integrate it with ultra-fast graphics hardware from leaders like Nvidia, with sound engineering from someone like Creative or Turtle beach - and then write (or port something like Linux, or QNX Neutrino) an operating system that takes full advantage of the hardware with which it was provided. Something that used multiprocessing to it's intended end, and it worked right out of the box. Something that provided a nice platform for people to develop on. Something that (gasp) came in a sexy box.
Ship that with some applications, bring the gaming manufacturers on board, and I think you'd have a winner. That's what the amiga was about.
There's another player, though. If Sony "got it" and opened up an OS (like linux) for the Playstation II, or a derivative, you'd have the machine that I described above. Bitching fast graphics and IO, Intenet connectivity, a customized (preferably open) OS, and the rest will follow.
Kudos!
This is a great article, I mean, is getting mentioned in Playboy our generation's version of getting mentioned in time? Will this bring about a new crop of playboy models that are right at home with an xterm, vi, and routing tables? (well, I can hope, (that my gf doesn't read this :).
Did anyone actually read the article though? There is nothing new here, and it has some FUD. Not enough software? Are you kidding me? There's so much software for linux that I've actually been out of the warez scene so long I don't have any contacts anymore! :) Staroffice, Abi, not to mention the tomes at Freshmeat and Gnome.org. Maybe they meant lack of commmercial software.
I don't know what to critque, mainly because I don't know how technical playboy is supposed to be.. The models aren't really photographed in detail enough to be an anatomy lesson, either :).
Excellent publicity. Too bad about that last paragraph though. No mention of the gaming support for linux coming about, and there was no mention of the current achilles heel of linux - getting cutting edge hardware suppored. (USB devices, sound cards, 3D cards, etc.)
All in time though. How about some models in copyleft shirts? :)
kudos!
If you're really worried about a NBC threat, then don't live in a big city. Problem solved. There's almost nothing you could do about a big threat in a city, anyhow - it's not the bacterium I'd be worried about, it's the mass panic and rioting that would happen shortly after. Any threat large enough to impact a small city or rural setting probably already took out civilization as you know it, so there's no point in worrying. That's a country mouse's opinion, anyhow.. I'll just add that to the list of why I like sparsly populated areas (go Canada! :).
The answer to all this isn't going to come from making existing engines better, nor is it going to come from bigger, badder, faster database engines powered by your friendly clustering technologies!
The answer is simple: More specialized search engines. You're looking for technical stuff? Then you should be able to search a technical database. Like, if I'm looking for source code to model fluid flows - that's pretty specific already. There's no reason that I should have to wade through all the references to "bodily fluids" that I'll get on altavista for instance!
Search engine people, take note of this. Classify your URLs into categories - like Yahoo - but come up with some way to do it automatically. Or even better yet, let the users do it, a la NewHoo.
End of internet predicted. Film at 11. We've heard it before, and we'll hear it again. Just need someone with a little VC money to throw it towards an idea that supports more specialization in search engine tech.
Kudos..
The companies that are actively supporting open source all have one thing in common - they are primarily getting there revenue from hardware, or software consulting - not sales of software. We all know that software isn't really a product, but a service - and I think the economy is waking up to that fact.
Open source helps companies like HP because they get wide distribution of their software - not because they get free developers! Wide distribution of software means it's easier to find bugs. Finding bugs makes better software. The developers are a bonus, but people shouldn't feel exploited.
I did some work for Intel, and they have a LOT of software engineers - why? To find ways to make programs that use their processors. The code isn't important, it's that they sell more hardware.
Open source goes one futher, because when the source code is out there, the program will never become obsolete - hint, engineers a dirt cheap compared to the revenues places like HP and IBM bring in. The only obstacle is not having the code. Remember the PC DemoScene? If all those groups released the code for their effects, then we'd still see evolution of their demos - but none/few of them did. (See the hornet archive before it goes away!)
Companies like Sun haven't completely figured this out yet, I don't think. IBM and HP sure have. We'll see more from them in the future - they are very "with it". If all goes will with my courses this term I'll be accepting an offer with IBM for this very reason - the push for linux and open source in general.
Kudos!
That's all fine and dandy, but I think that this is going to be done no matter who thinks it's bad - and for that reason, it's important that the "free" (speech :) world do it before the "insert godless evil empire here" does it - Imagine a world where only Hitler discovered Nuclear Weapons? Or only Russia developed the Hydrogen bomb from it's atomic bomb research?
Nobody said jack about what I concider to be the most henious of all human inventions - Genetic Warfare - e.g., don't like -insert group opposed to your moral views here-? Well, here's a nasty little bug that kills them and not "us". There were several announcements in previous months that many nations possess this capability, namely Israel, and I'm sure that the USofA has some nasties as well. There's a biological warfare research facility around Ottawa, Canada, too. Er, I mean, biological warfare countermeasures, that's it.
My point is that someone, somewhere, somehow is going to do this. I have this gut feeling that it's going to be easier than a lot of people think. The big discussion isn't going to be if. It's going to be who, for what, and why. Is life really all that special? I think that it might just be more aptly described as a propertly of Carbon, a branch of organic chemistry. That's my "moral" view on the topic - we're not so special, and little that humanity has done would change this in my view. We still butcher and kill babies in the name of "insert diety here". Are those the actions of enlightened, noble, beings?
Technology doesn't respect Morals, either. Individuals need to use technology in an ethical manner, and I don't see how a species that has thermonuclear, biological, and chemical weapons locked n' loaded is in any position to argue morals.
Let's use this technology to improve the condition of those living on the planet - and try to direct it's development so we don't all suffer. Sticking our collective heads in the sand wouldn't be such a bright idea.
Kudos..
I don't know why they want to talk to religious groups, first off. That smells like a grab for some airtime and cheap publicity - Once you concider some of the impacts that this technology can have. From a step back, the only thing I've seen come out of religion recently is a lot of people killing each other and crazies annoying me at my front door in the morning.
Flamebait aside - here's why this is really important. My dad is a PhD Genetist, and has talked about one of the problems with biology for the longest time. Basically it comes down to this - biologists aren't too concerned with how things work, why they work, and how to use them.
One of his favorite stories goes like this - an alien biologist and an alien engineer land on Earth. They see a 2 TV sets, and don't know what they are. The biologist promptly gets his tools, microscope, sketchbook, and disscects the TV, counting and drawing each part, right down to the microscopic level. What does the engineer do? Hits the "power" button. :)
Once we can engineer life, we can make use of the only known self-replicating, self-assembling, kick-entropy-in-the-face system in the universe! The applications are endless, here's a few:
Want to colonize mars? Make a bacterium that feeds on mineral deposits and CO2 to generate massive amounts of Oxygen. Worred about infection and lifespan? An adquate understanding of the genes will allow you to program it to replicate 10 times, and then die - just like your cells die.
Need clean power? The article hit the nail on the head. PLANTS split water up into hydrogen and oxygen - albeit in small amounts - and there isn't a soul on the planet that can duplicate that system. My dad would get a kick out of biology texts, because they have the engineering equivilant of a "and then a miracle happens" block on their photosynthesis charts. This alone has the potential to revolutionalize every aspect of our lives!
Obviously there are dangers, but we're a species that lives with between 20k and 50k thermonuclear warheads turned on and able to extinct the planet with the confirmation of a code and the press of a button.
Quantifying life in chemical terms will open up a new science, breathe new life into biotech, maybe put an end to some of this religious crazieness, and most of all - get engineers working with biological systems, the most elegant computer system of all. Whoever made that analogy in an above post was a genius!
Kudos!
Warning: Excessive Ranting.
I have mixed feelings on this subject - on one hand, there's not much that joe blow can do about a government that he/she doesn't like - and every day, more guns get taken out of the hands of the people, which is what all policical power defaults to. Don't think so? Have a look at Seattle. You US guys should know that the bit about guns in the consitution wasn't about hunting. One of my favorite quotes goes something along the lines "a good government should be afraid of it's people".
Don't like the laws? Start protesting them. But, most aren't willing too, because when it comes right down to it, most people want to come home from their crappy job, drink there beer, sit in front of their cable TV, eat their dinner, and pass out. Until something interferes with that nothing will change.
The protests with the WTO are directly related to governments conspiring (at least from Joe Blow's perspective) to interfere with the "crappy job" bit. People, we all can't be programmers, and the average joe understands this completely. The middle-class medium-skilled jobs are the ones that get transferred to the third world, and those are also the ones most people work!
Software laws will largely become a side point if the current trends in open-source development keep doing. Linux has come a long way in 5 years - imagine what will happen in 15.
On other policical fronts, until the masses get connected in such a way that they can freely work together - something you need strong crypto for - not much is going to change. I know that personally, as long as the man doesn't bother me too much, my bank account remains intact, and I can buy a NSX when I want one, I'm not too concerned.
Kudos!
This is great news for all of us, even the perfect sighted. I think that one of the obstacles to development in these arenas is that the people with the expertise in one field - imaging, robotics - are rarely trained in the fields of medicine. Biomedical Engineering has the potential for many great things, and I think we're just beginning to see what can be achieved when we start engineering our bodies.
Unless people start freaking out about "unnatural" modifications, of course. I am a little worried about that laws that will start to happen when this tech gets more advanced - it's very, very, very primitive right now - how about when you could get enhanced vision? Or strain-free screens to read off of? (via a direct digital connection!)
Sound far fetched? Maybe, but then again, we were all using gopher 6 years ago.
Not going to happen, you say? Icky? Maybe. Someone that's got modifications will have a _competitive advantage_ over you, and might learn better, or faster, or be able to do more.
Welcome to the borg - friendlier, happier, but definately where we're headed. I might not live to see it.. but who knows when nanotech gets off the ground to splice into nerves :).
Kudos!
Are you on crack? Java is not the language of the future. It can barely do things now! Unless you have an obscenely fast computer, java is slow. Not just a little slow. It's WAY slow. Have you ever used a UI done in Java? And no, not the little cheezy things, the real deal. I worked on a GIS project that used a Java front end - GUI a la MFC - and no matter what we tried, there was always (unacceptable) lag.
Java is an elegant, beautiful lanuage that doesn't work in practice. If I can speed things up an order of magnitude with C++, can you guess which language I'm going to pick? Hell, C++ can even be nice an platform independant with some careful design and use of nice toolkits like GTK. (For example, Mozilla!)
When's the last time you used a Java app on a daily basis? Do you use a java made web browser? Office tool? I don't think so.
Java is kinda like Rose - they're a good match, because neither of them really cut it in the trenches. UML designs rock until changes start to happen between the theoretical and the ideal - and changes happen fast when $hit isn't working and your manager is breathing down your neck because of deadlines.
So, in effect, "who cares". I use what works, and Visual J++ isn't on that list. Let me know when we have a nice IDE for C++ on Linux.. something the gnome people should be pouring their heart into! :)
Kudos... (rant off)
Is this really that uncommon? We pay by the meg after a certain amount (5 or 20gb) on DSL. It's like that in a lot of regions of Canada.. it used to be a lot worse here in NB, where they were going to start charging $0.05/meg (cdn) for access over a gig. Mind you - we get very good speeds, 250+kilobytes/sec in some areas, but it can get very expensive.
What BOTHERS me is that I can write a client that might attack people I don't like with pingfloods when they're inactive on the machine, and run their bills up very high. This could easily be done given the average number of protocols you could exploit - ICQ, Quake ....
I wonder why people don't get more upset about this - the flat fee model for bandwidth is what has made the net a huge success in North America, allowing telcos to make obscene profits selling hardware and service. Mind you - pay per use / metered bandwith is what those marketing types have wet dreams over.
Ah well. U auzzies be SSLin stuff, eh. :)
Kudos..
If this stuff was around when I was in grade/high school, I'd be locked away with no possibility of parole, for life. (Reminded of Megadeth tune, "Captive Honour"). I mean, lookit the freaks, let's expel them, toss them in for some re-education (Hell, let's even call it the "Ministry of Love, *chuckle*).
Nevermind that this is also the profile of some of the brightest students with the most of offer society, that for one reason or another aren't in a good situation.
I didn't fit in with my peers; It didn't take a rocket scientist to see that I was different. Sooner or later I found some more people like me (that would be the "group of outsiders" and I turned out all right.
Why not address the problems that are causing these people not to be accepted? If you replaced "geek profiling" with "miniority profiling", there would be riots in the streets.
Rant off..
Kudos..
Finally, governments that might actually, maybe, get it :). It strikes me that this is something that the United Nations should fund, as the implications and benefits of any work into researching Near Earth Objects. JPL is associated with some work into this: Check out the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program (NEAT).
Some people think of this as a waste of money, but we are the first species to get to the point where we can prevent our own (eventual) cosmic reset button from being set.
One way to look at it is a great big life insurance program for Human Civilization - the payments aren't high, the work can be largely automated, and if the program ever pays off, there is no way to measure the value of the endeavor! :)
Too bad the US wouldn't shovel some more bucks into NEAT, but, we'll see what international competition can do.
Kudos..
Come on guys! Let's be innovative, here. All the tools are right under your noses in your favorite linux distributions!
Linux is fully multiuser - three's your accounts. Linux has great support for dialin access, there's your modems. It also has killer networking support, as well - there's your telnet.
Want all those DOS online games? Set up a shell and run DOSEMU. Use DOSEMU to load the game. We're running Trade Wars 2002 and Operation Overkill II right now via telnet - ANSI even works in console mode. This works extremely well.
Who's online? Check out the finger command. Need chat? Fire up a local IRC server and you're off to the races!
People like quake? Set up your quake server on that good 'ol linux box.
Online message groups and discussion? That's what TRN is for, my friends. It doesn't take much to get local newsgroups set up and running..
File transfers? ftp! Need a web frontend? Apache is free...
I used to sysop a BBS, and I loved it. This is the next best if not better thing!
Kudos.. and don't fear the console :)
In order to prevent a real mess on the web, lots of browsers using standard specifications are a good thing (tm). If mozilla, opera, etc gain mindshare, then in turn sites will be designed with this in mind.
A good browser is absolutely essential to the success of linux, be it open or closed source - BillyG isn't dumb, and there's a reason that IE5.0 is one sweet product. Lots of people on /. have pointed out that they boot windows to use it - this isn't a good thing, we want the "list of reasons" for /dev/hda fat32 to go down, not up! :)
Otoh, it _is_ closed source, although the Opera team did a excellent job on their windows browser, which runs quite nicely on an old 486/75 notebook in the living room displaying my channel listings :).
Mozilla will stomp them all given time.. open source will always win over time, because companies can't/won't commit to infiniately developing and improving a product line - look at the slowdown with Netscape on Linux.
Kudos..
I used to think that math wasn't much of a direct use, but this is incorrect and a lot of it has to do with how mathematics is taught in western culture (something we should be ashamed of; Most people don't do any calculus until senior high school if at all!).
What math does is provide a (perhaps the) universal language with which to describe the universe, science, language, everything. Everything can be represented and manipulated in some form with math - this is what computers do! (discreetly >:).
Discovering relationships between unrelated fields of math allows the scientists and engineers of tomorrow to use these descriptive tools to develop new cool gadgets. ;)
Kudos,
Check out the slashdot archives. There was an article this summer that reduced the amount of negative matter required to build a so-called "warp bubble" from the size of a neutron star to approximately one gram. Of course, how to produce this and implement the theory is an exercize for the reader...
While not "solved" - the theory looks sound, and (I believe) has been peer reviewed.
For your viewing pleasure:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/05/27/1215204.shtm l
The body of evidence on UFO's is really compelling when you start researching. And I don't mean the psycho abductees - although, who's to say they're lying - but claims from on duty police and military officials, and not just joe blows on the street.
The roswell case is the most facinating - and from what I've read - most notibly Stanton Friedman's book "Crash at Corona", and might I add, this is a nuclear physisist with some very impressive credentials, including research for the US Governement - has some excellent points and analysis based on governement paperwork, and is presented in a manner that leaves it up to you to decide what went down.
Very little isn't possible with sufficiently advanced technology. We're just beginning to understand the universe, and people sometimes forget just how _mind numbingly_ huge the universe is. I'm reminded of the torture in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where you get shown how insignifigant you are.. :) The infinity vortex or something.. but I digress.
Kudos...
I wonder at times, why people are so quick to dismiss out of hand without the slightest degree of investigation into the validity of these people's claims.. what if Volta was so quick to listen to the people laughing at his experiments?
True - lots of these UFO/alien things are likely hoaxes, misconceptions or outright lies. But they should be given at least the benefit of the scientific method, and if they can't be explained, they should be marked as such.
Even the US government's "Blue Book" studies found some really interesting cases that they couldn't explain away, but these were outright ignored.
Lots of people believe in life in the universe, but people have a hard time believing that it could come here. Hell, our own physisists have demonstrated it's only an engineering problem to "warp" through space - one hell of an engineering problem, but possible nothingless. What would that be to a civilization just 1000 more years advanced than us?
I recommmend reading anything by Stanton T. Friedman, who presents excellent balenced analsyses of documents and paper trails produced by US government organizations - and comes up with some compelling possibilities.
Give science a chance, eh.
Kudos..
Is secure voice really so hard? I mean, there are command line wav file recorders, command line encryption tools, and it's easy to open socket connections to other machines.
So, can't someone hack together a little perl script to implement an extremely basic interface. From there, hacking a gui on it wouldn't be very difficult at all.
e.g.
voicein > pgp -k etc > socketconnection
Might be making things seem more simple than they are, but this really doesn't seem _that_ signifigant.
Kudos..