Plus, those stats contridict some recent stats I beleive came from the IRS that fewer people filed as "information technology specialists" or some other generic term for computer worker.
And how many of those workers got into programming in the first place because of the bubble, and the 'we can't possibly hire enough people in the next 10 years to keep up with demand' thing, and because they liked video games?
If you read the outsourcing articles on here regularly, there's always a lot of stories of people who were much happier leaving IT to do something they really wanted to do.
I'm not saying YOU don't really love programming, but there's a lot of people in the field for all of the wrong reasons. Like the ones who didn't know what the hell I was talking about when I mentioned the speed of various processors in my second year Real-Time Systems class (which involved x86 assembly programming). Scary.
The traditional economic model assumes SOMEONE will make the item- until recently that person was nearby, because it was cheaper to use local labor as transportation costs were a factor.
What's interesting to consider is that as more outsourcing is done, the economies in those nations improve, the standard of living there rises, wages there rise, and costs rise. When you think about this, eventually it will become cheaper to produce locally again.
The key to this is the (obviously hugely idealized pipe dream) that one day the whole world will be at the same level of development. And then everything can be produced efficiently as possible, it won't be 'cheaper' to waste fuel shipping items that could be produced anywhere halfway around the world.
Of course this could all take a very, very long time, and things will suck in the mean time. Signs of hope that it might be quicker:
1) The internet has accelerated this process 2) Rising oil prices will increase the cost of shipping, making it a larger factor in the decision of where to manufacture 3) The US government's budget is horribly overextended, and perpetually on the verge of collapse. If/when the whole treasury bond system collapses, there's going to be some very interesting redistribution of wealth.
Basically as much as people talk about the (quite real) growing divide between the rich and poor in the US, the global economy and communication is doing a lot to start to finally end protectionism and balance things out. We'll see what happens.
The point is there is no net gain in employment in the US so his story doesn't work.
The point is he got promoted twice, no one LOST their job, so he had a net gain of income, which means he spends more, which leads to a net gain in the US economy. Not to mention his company profiting from the presumable increase in production.
When I think "distributed applications", I think a word processor through a browser.
Uhh...that's a web service. A distributed application by definition runs on multiple systems at once. A client/server application like that is a very, very limited example of a distributed application, as all the processing is being done on one end.
Also intersting that Harasson Ford played in three movies on the list.
For a while in the late 90s (before ticket prices got absurd) he was the star in more than half of the top 10 grossing movies of all time. The Fugitive, Star Wars trilogy, Indiana Jones trilogy....the man picked his movies. Since then even crap like Bruce Almighty can apparently be considered the 35th highest grossing movie of all time. Sickening.
I guess I'm just picky, but that's what I'm looking for if they want my business. The theater that I go to now may be the only one around here that doesn't play commercials, and if they started then I certainly wouldn't go there anymore. I've given up on two *closer* theaters already.
I had an amusing experience with my roommate when we went to see Kill Bill vol 1, wherein he was shocked to see a commercial beforehand. He's from a very small town, so only went to two movies before coming to University, but this was in our fifth year. I think if you see movies late enough in their run in almost any theatre now there's often no ads, because the advertisers don't want to pay to show to 10 or 15 people. I've also noticed that now that they're showing the still/digital ads before 'showtime', often the trailers start right at showtime, which is a small improvement.
I'm definitely a huge support of repertory cinemas, though, and the lack of ads (and the interesting trailers) is a giant plus.
My suggested kludge would be to insert the new page break with the new style at the very bottom of the front matter, hit enter to make a blank line (or even some text) on the new page you get, then move the cursor to the beginning of the first 'real' page, and start hitting backspace to move the real text back over the placeholder text.
Alternately (if you're feeling especially lucky) just cut the whole body out, muck with the style, and paste it back in. Probably won't work unless you have a lot of memory, but worth a shot.
Never mind my second question regarding left/right pages. I figured that out. But I'd still like to know if there's some way to change the style of an existing page that has already been created. I can do that by selecting a style, but it changes all the previous and subsequent pages of that style, too. I'd like to be able to select a style and have it be applied only to all subsequent pages until or unless, further below, I select yet another style.
I think this is the idea of actually using breaks in your document. Everywhere you want to change from one style to another, insert a break. The theoretical gain here is that if you want to change the format of a sentence/paragraph/page/whatever you don't have to select the whole thing first, you just make the change and everything in the currently selected style changes.
It takes a while to get used to, but once I had it going for my final engineering project it was so much saner than Word ever was. The only Word-ish problem I ever really had was figures that were beside each other occasionly swapping numbers when using the auto-numbering.
That said, mega-kudos to Neal for getting the computer science right; it of course isn't a formal introduction but it is heads and shoulders above most attempts to convey a real science in a novel form. But if the material is old hat, it isn't going to be much fun.
Have you by chance read The Diamond Age? He deals with the introduction to computer science in a much subtler and more interesting way, that I didn't even really fully appreciate in high school. Reading it again somewhere around year 4 of engineering was much more interesting.
hehe. Since when did Matt and Trey become conservative. Matt was in Bowling for Columbine;)
And Michael Moore was in the NRA! What the hell is your point? Moore has often tried to distance himself from the left.
Check out Political Compass. See, for instance, - On the standard left-right scale, how do you distinguish leftists like Stalin and Gandhi? It's not sufficient to say that Stalin was simply more left than Gandhi. There are fundamental political differences between them that the old categories on their own can't explain.
the 3 body problem is undecidable, right? and all undecidable problems are equivilent because solving any one of them would solve all the others.
This is so glaringly unprovable and/or false it's unbelievable. At least limit it to the realm of mathematics or something....just think for five seconds about the uncertainty principle, or figuring out what your cat wants for lunch. There's all sorts of inequivalent undecidable problems.
For stuff from people like Microsoft who have bandwidth and money to burn, it's not a big problem. But for almost anyone else who wants to distribute large files it's a godsend. I can't explain how annoyed I am when I have to get game patches off of fileshack or whatever because the game publisher can't afford to host them. BitTorrent solves that problem neatly, and saves waiting in a queue on fileshack as well.
And I have not heard of this "final bottleneck" you refer to. Do you have a source?
Downloading from that server with sFTP over a public WiFi connection, I'm now pulling 640Kb/s.
I should use BitTorrent WHY?
You probably didn't have any open ports on the router to allow people to download from you, therefore BT throttled your download. Which is admittedly a problem for many people who either don't have access or don't know how to configure routers they sit behind.
a) Are the people with pirate XP copies actually going to pay for XP if they can't upgrade? No. They'll just not upgrade, and possibly become part of a botnet, which ruins things for everybody. If they were going to pay for it, they would have done so already.
b) I've seen your sig for days, and still don't get it. How did id "lose" money when people downloaded a program they weren't yet selling? A lot of those people probably just wanted to be the first to play it, and bought it anyway. Or wanted to see how it would perform on their hardware before they bought it. Or else would have just waited to play it at a friend's house to try it before they bought it. Or if they weren't going to play it online just borrow it from said friend and installed it (the CD Key thing wouldn't stop them if they weren't playing online). And hell, maybe some of the downloaders just needed megs to get on their favourite DirectConnect hubs.
I'm not saying pirating software is okay, and I bought Doom 3 and Mandrake. But saying 100% of illegal downloads translate into direct losses for a corporation just has no basis in reality. At all. Your hyperbole weakens your case.
I think you miss the point that firewalls can be set to disallow outgoing connections as well. And allowing outgoing port 80 from IE is relatively dangerous, as the grandparent implied.
If you're building a 5000$ server, chances are you're running 2-4 cpus. Getting four of those "Athlon-Trouncing" cpus will cost you 2000$ more. I doubt getting this CPU in any system will justify the price. Putting that 500$ in your HD/video card/RAM will probably yield you way more bang for your buck in a gaming rig.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Xeon is a 'server' market CPU and the AMD64 is a home market (i.e. 'gaming') CPU. Hence the difference in price, and to some extent performance. Some other poster mentioned that the reviewers promised a review with Opterons (server class) soon.
The point being that often price isn't a huge object in a high performance server that needs the biggest CPUs it can get and that's it, whereas (as you mentioned) gaming systems have different tradeoffs, and therefore different price points.
However, I'm thinking that the GP's post might not have been 100% flamebait. Could he have had a flaky $20 PCChips mobo with that AMD CPU, and a $100-200 Intel mobo with the Intel CPU?
An apples to oranges comparison like that would still be flamebait.
Lots of people were killed when cars and planes where in an early stage of development.
The point has already been made several times already that rockets are no longer really in an 'early' stage of development. What these people are trying to do is making something as safe as what already exists with orders of magnitude less funding. Which should be possible (especially as simulation is so much cheaper now thanks to Moore's law, etc.), but they've got to have some sense about doing it safely.
There's one difference: when a rocket screws up, it can kill you (or someone else). Rarely does this happen in the software world, especially after testing. Hmm, maybe I should change fields...
One of my former real-time systems profs is fond of saying that he wishes he had got in onthe contract for the 'star wars' missile defense product. Something like a billion lines of code, and if it ever failed, no one would be left around to give you shit for it.
Even worse, it encourages people to write their passwords down and store them in what is probably a very insecure location! So, in the end, you get only a marginal increase in security.
Someone I work with asked about how he should protect a key to a secured area, and the response was "How often do you lose your car or house keys? Keep it with those." I'd say the same applies to your wallet and keeping passwords in it, if worse comes to worse and you can't remember them.
Considering I've never lost my wallet, keep everything shy of my birth certificiate in it, and will know instantly if it's gone and can report it, I'd say that's pretty secure. I carry it so consistently I feel noticeably strange if it's not in my pocket.
Nobody follows the official retention policy. Not with PHBs constantly denying that they authorized a project or made a decision or whatever...
My manager has a great policy for dealing with people who don't ever respond to e-mail requesting decisions - send them an e-mail saying "This is what we're doing, reply if it's not okay". And keeps a copy of it, knowing full well they never reply. Instant paper trail. Great for CYA.
In support of the comments about the handset running off batteries, and therefore having a shorter range, why do you think they're running 900 on the way back, and not 2.4 both ways? Because 900 takes LESS power to get the same range!
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Plus, those stats contridict some recent stats I beleive came from the IRS that fewer people filed as "information technology specialists" or some other generic term for computer worker.
And how many of those workers got into programming in the first place because of the bubble, and the 'we can't possibly hire enough people in the next 10 years to keep up with demand' thing, and because they liked video games?
If you read the outsourcing articles on here regularly, there's always a lot of stories of people who were much happier leaving IT to do something they really wanted to do.
I'm not saying YOU don't really love programming, but there's a lot of people in the field for all of the wrong reasons. Like the ones who didn't know what the hell I was talking about when I mentioned the speed of various processors in my second year Real-Time Systems class (which involved x86 assembly programming). Scary.
The traditional economic model assumes SOMEONE will make the item- until recently that person was nearby, because it was cheaper to use local labor as transportation costs were a factor.
What's interesting to consider is that as more outsourcing is done, the economies in those nations improve, the standard of living there rises, wages there rise, and costs rise. When you think about this, eventually it will become cheaper to produce locally again.
The key to this is the (obviously hugely idealized pipe dream) that one day the whole world will be at the same level of development. And then everything can be produced efficiently as possible, it won't be 'cheaper' to waste fuel shipping items that could be produced anywhere halfway around the world.
Of course this could all take a very, very long time, and things will suck in the mean time. Signs of hope that it might be quicker:
1) The internet has accelerated this process
2) Rising oil prices will increase the cost of shipping, making it a larger factor in the decision of where to manufacture
3) The US government's budget is horribly overextended, and perpetually on the verge of collapse. If/when the whole treasury bond system collapses, there's going to be some very interesting redistribution of wealth.
Basically as much as people talk about the (quite real) growing divide between the rich and poor in the US, the global economy and communication is doing a lot to start to finally end protectionism and balance things out. We'll see what happens.
The point is there is no net gain in employment in the US so his story doesn't work.
The point is he got promoted twice, no one LOST their job, so he had a net gain of income, which means he spends more, which leads to a net gain in the US economy. Not to mention his company profiting from the presumable increase in production.
When I think "distributed applications", I think a word processor through a browser.
Uhh...that's a web service. A distributed application by definition runs on multiple systems at once. A client/server application like that is a very, very limited example of a distributed application, as all the processing is being done on one end.
Also intersting that Harasson Ford played in three movies on the list.
For a while in the late 90s (before ticket prices got absurd) he was the star in more than half of the top 10 grossing movies of all time. The Fugitive, Star Wars trilogy, Indiana Jones trilogy....the man picked his movies. Since then even crap like Bruce Almighty can apparently be considered the 35th highest grossing movie of all time. Sickening.
I guess I'm just picky, but that's what I'm looking for if they want my business. The theater that I go to now may be the only one around here that doesn't play commercials, and if they started then I certainly wouldn't go there anymore. I've given up on two *closer* theaters already.
I had an amusing experience with my roommate when we went to see Kill Bill vol 1, wherein he was shocked to see a commercial beforehand. He's from a very small town, so only went to two movies before coming to University, but this was in our fifth year. I think if you see movies late enough in their run in almost any theatre now there's often no ads, because the advertisers don't want to pay to show to 10 or 15 people. I've also noticed that now that they're showing the still/digital ads before 'showtime', often the trailers start right at showtime, which is a small improvement.
I'm definitely a huge support of repertory cinemas, though, and the lack of ads (and the interesting trailers) is a giant plus.
My suggested kludge would be to insert the new page break with the new style at the very bottom of the front matter, hit enter to make a blank line (or even some text) on the new page you get, then move the cursor to the beginning of the first 'real' page, and start hitting backspace to move the real text back over the placeholder text.
Alternately (if you're feeling especially lucky) just cut the whole body out, muck with the style, and paste it back in. Probably won't work unless you have a lot of memory, but worth a shot.
Never mind my second question regarding left/right pages. I figured that out. But I'd still like to know if there's some way to change the style of an existing page that has already been created. I can do that by selecting a style, but it changes all the previous and subsequent pages of that style, too. I'd like to be able to select a style and have it be applied only to all subsequent pages until or unless, further below, I select yet another style.
I think this is the idea of actually using breaks in your document. Everywhere you want to change from one style to another, insert a break. The theoretical gain here is that if you want to change the format of a sentence/paragraph/page/whatever you don't have to select the whole thing first, you just make the change and everything in the currently selected style changes.
It takes a while to get used to, but once I had it going for my final engineering project it was so much saner than Word ever was. The only Word-ish problem I ever really had was figures that were beside each other occasionly swapping numbers when using the auto-numbering.
That said, mega-kudos to Neal for getting the computer science right; it of course isn't a formal introduction but it is heads and shoulders above most attempts to convey a real science in a novel form. But if the material is old hat, it isn't going to be much fun.
Have you by chance read The Diamond Age? He deals with the introduction to computer science in a much subtler and more interesting way, that I didn't even really fully appreciate in high school. Reading it again somewhere around year 4 of engineering was much more interesting.
hehe. Since when did Matt and Trey become conservative. Matt was in Bowling for Columbine ;)
And Michael Moore was in the NRA! What the hell is your point? Moore has often tried to distance himself from the left.
Check out Political Compass. See, for instance, - On the standard left-right scale, how do you distinguish leftists like Stalin and Gandhi? It's not sufficient to say that Stalin was simply more left than Gandhi. There are fundamental political differences between them that the old categories on their own can't explain.
I find it interesting that not only does your link look like a webpage from 1998, it was actually last updated in 1997. Cutting edge!
the 3 body problem is undecidable, right? and all undecidable problems are equivilent because solving any one of them would solve all the others.
This is so glaringly unprovable and/or false it's unbelievable. At least limit it to the realm of mathematics or something....just think for five seconds about the uncertainty principle, or figuring out what your cat wants for lunch. There's all sorts of inequivalent undecidable problems.
I haven't seen teh 4th one, but HIII is *much* less worse than HII. I mean, at least the got the special effects right!
One of the problems with 4 is that most of the big special effects shots from the commercial weren't even in the movie.
One of my favourite moments of 3 is when they try to cover up the "Bienvenue a Montreal" sign in the airport with an American flag.
For stuff from people like Microsoft who have bandwidth and money to burn, it's not a big problem. But for almost anyone else who wants to distribute large files it's a godsend. I can't explain how annoyed I am when I have to get game patches off of fileshack or whatever because the game publisher can't afford to host them. BitTorrent solves that problem neatly, and saves waiting in a queue on fileshack as well.
And I have not heard of this "final bottleneck" you refer to. Do you have a source?
Downloading from that server with sFTP over a public WiFi connection, I'm now pulling 640Kb/s.
I should use BitTorrent WHY?
You probably didn't have any open ports on the router to allow people to download from you, therefore BT throttled your download. Which is admittedly a problem for many people who either don't have access or don't know how to configure routers they sit behind.
a) Are the people with pirate XP copies actually going to pay for XP if they can't upgrade? No. They'll just not upgrade, and possibly become part of a botnet, which ruins things for everybody. If they were going to pay for it, they would have done so already.
b) I've seen your sig for days, and still don't get it. How did id "lose" money when people downloaded a program they weren't yet selling? A lot of those people probably just wanted to be the first to play it, and bought it anyway. Or wanted to see how it would perform on their hardware before they bought it. Or else would have just waited to play it at a friend's house to try it before they bought it. Or if they weren't going to play it online just borrow it from said friend and installed it (the CD Key thing wouldn't stop them if they weren't playing online). And hell, maybe some of the downloaders just needed megs to get on their favourite DirectConnect hubs.
I'm not saying pirating software is okay, and I bought Doom 3 and Mandrake. But saying 100% of illegal downloads translate into direct losses for a corporation just has no basis in reality. At all. Your hyperbole weakens your case.
You dont understand TCP and firewalls do you?
I think you miss the point that firewalls can be set to disallow outgoing connections as well. And allowing outgoing port 80 from IE is relatively dangerous, as the grandparent implied.
If you're building a 5000$ server, chances are you're running 2-4 cpus. Getting four of those "Athlon-Trouncing" cpus will cost you 2000$ more. I doubt getting this CPU in any system will justify the price. Putting that 500$ in your HD/video card/RAM will probably yield you way more bang for your buck in a gaming rig.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Xeon is a 'server' market CPU and the AMD64 is a home market (i.e. 'gaming') CPU. Hence the difference in price, and to some extent performance. Some other poster mentioned that the reviewers promised a review with Opterons (server class) soon.
The point being that often price isn't a huge object in a high performance server that needs the biggest CPUs it can get and that's it, whereas (as you mentioned) gaming systems have different tradeoffs, and therefore different price points.
However, I'm thinking that the GP's post might not have been 100% flamebait. Could he have had a flaky $20 PCChips mobo with that AMD CPU, and a $100-200 Intel mobo with the Intel CPU?
An apples to oranges comparison like that would still be flamebait.
Lots of people were killed when cars and planes where in an early stage of development.
The point has already been made several times already that rockets are no longer really in an 'early' stage of development. What these people are trying to do is making something as safe as what already exists with orders of magnitude less funding. Which should be possible (especially as simulation is so much cheaper now thanks to Moore's law, etc.), but they've got to have some sense about doing it safely.
There's one difference: when a rocket screws up, it can kill you (or someone else). Rarely does this happen in the software world, especially after testing. Hmm, maybe I should change fields...
One of my former real-time systems profs is fond of saying that he wishes he had got in onthe contract for the 'star wars' missile defense product. Something like a billion lines of code, and if it ever failed, no one would be left around to give you shit for it.
Pretty secure all the way around, and allows me to use very secure passwords everywhere I care to, since I don't feel the need to memorize them.
Except for secure facilities that don't allow any in/out of recordable media, that is.
Even worse, it encourages people to write their passwords down and store them in what is probably a very insecure location! So, in the end, you get only a marginal increase in security.
Someone I work with asked about how he should protect a key to a secured area, and the response was "How often do you lose your car or house keys? Keep it with those." I'd say the same applies to your wallet and keeping passwords in it, if worse comes to worse and you can't remember them.
Considering I've never lost my wallet, keep everything shy of my birth certificiate in it, and will know instantly if it's gone and can report it, I'd say that's pretty secure. I carry it so consistently I feel noticeably strange if it's not in my pocket.
Nobody follows the official retention policy. Not with PHBs constantly denying that they authorized a project or made a decision or whatever...
My manager has a great policy for dealing with people who don't ever respond to e-mail requesting decisions - send them an e-mail saying "This is what we're doing, reply if it's not okay". And keeps a copy of it, knowing full well they never reply. Instant paper trail. Great for CYA.
In support of the comments about the handset running off batteries, and therefore having a shorter range, why do you think they're running 900 on the way back, and not 2.4 both ways? Because 900 takes LESS power to get the same range!
Thank you, come again.