Java would have been a much better language if you wanted the project to be reusable.
Gosh, with the Java/XML combo...I am surprised that there still is such a thang as a database. Dang, if you designed the blasted thang in UML with Java/XML there wouldn't even be a question of reusability...cause you would be in computer nirvana.
PS: I don't code...just read the trade journals and play foosball.
Well, we've seen that a 10% drop in sales leads to a 20% cut in the work force. My guess is that work loads will need to triple for the number of jobs to double.
My guess is that, as tech workers are willing to settle for significantly reduced salary and benefits, the number of tech jobs will start climbing again. So the article is probably right in its assertion that the number of tech jobs will increase.
I shouldn't use evil. Yet, all sides of the RIAA debate are trying to create caricatures of evil that they are fighting against. The RIAA will probably try to include indies in their version of the axis of evil.
The media moguls are desparately trying to stop the progression of technical advances...forgetting that they fund their coke habbit on the technical advances that trumped entertainers of years past. It is easy to create a caricature of the Hollywood as the evil villians of mass culture.
The fact that these debates get hung up on antecdotes and caricatures pretty much means the political process will not produce a rational result.
You are right on the mark with the ascertion that Indies are a big threat to the media moguls. The media giants know it and find every way possible to thwart independent film and music development.
Independent film makers are a threat in two big ways: There is direct competition in that the indies take attention away from Hollywood. They also are a prime example of how new technologies are making way for new voices...going square in the face of the RIAA's claim that piracy is leading to cultural doom.
The RIAA wants to create a Star Wars theme of evil pirates stealing from artists. The surge of independent film making is showing the opposite...that the technology is opening ground for new voices. As we see independent artists making in roads with new technology, we see that the true pirates of the silver screen are the big media moguls and Hollywood super class that has dominated film for the last century
greater profits await those who seek out continuous revenue streams.
The big profit stream eventually backfired as hundreds of companies have rushed into the printer cartridge refill and refurbish market.
Printer cartridges is one of the few markets that do well on the net. The cartidges are small and easy to ship. The field is information rich...that is, you buy according to the label..not the look of the cartridge. Why do you think you get 10 spams a day from people selling ink?
I've noticed the printer manufacturers have finally started to come down in price on the cartridges to match refillers.
Smart printer shoppers look at the cost of printing and not the cost of the printer. Personally, I would avoid Lexmark because of the chip. I also look for those brands that have the most ink per cartridge.
It is not just the manufacturers and wholesalers who are keeping the price up. Retailers might be partially to blame. I suspect that retailers have different margins requirements at different points in the life cycle of a product. They have a high margin when the product is new. They are willing to dump at or near cost when the product is out of vogue, and will jack up margins again when the product is rare.
Considering weight and shipping costs involved with large CRTs, however, I would think the industry would be pushing the transition from CRT to LCD faster. The smaller lighter flat screens save all sorts of costs.
I would especially expect to see the online retailers pushing flatscreen to save shipping cost.
"I think that the problem with these devices isn't the laws of physics per se, I think its just that they were never properly marketed."
If you used "viral marketing" you won't just have perpetual motion...you will create energy from the ether as excitement around the idea grows. Physics meets MLM.
The real selling point for the technology isn't that it lets parents oppress their kids. The technology will give parents the ability to relive their childhood through their children. The parent will watch every moment of their child's life, giving clues and reliving the moments.
Parents will hook up an entire audio-visual and remote control system on their kids so that they can go through school a second time on their terms.
The outlook is unlikely to be a safer world. You will probably find as many dads coaxing their sons to put their hands on Susie's knee as those who are trying to stop little Johnny from acting on hormones.
I think the author mentioned education games because he could remember playing them as a child and isn't playing them now. Uh, maybe he is a bigger boy than he was a few years ago.
"the problem is that a highly US-driven mono-culture is sweeping the world."
Now, if it were French that was the basis of the the mono-culture, then the development of a common language would be considered giving culture to to world...not taking culture from the world.
The really funny thing about what is happening now is that the US is not as actively trying to create a mono-culture as the French, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian and other imperialist nations did in the past.
When the Europeans were the great imperialist powers, you would find great and glorious writings about bringing culture to the backwards people of the world. Even in Bush's war with Iraq, there is a rhetoric of giving back the country to the Iraqis...the war lacks the imperialist overtones of most historic military excursions.
I suspect that the main reason we hear so much yapping about the issue now is that much of the "mono-culture" is being influenced by a country (the USA) that the French and other Europeans consider to be filled with lesser people. If the world were learning French, the development of a monoculture would likely be considered an enlightenment.
I disagree here.
First, the main thesis of the article is a little bit odd: The article complains that recordings that have never been made recently might get lost. Uh, they would have been definitely been lost if no one recorded it.
The massive amount of recording that we have done has increased the likelihood of the stuff being preserved for the future.
We really are doing better at preserving recorded material and artifacts than at any time in history. The future probably has a bigger challenge in dealing with excesses of recorded material than with degradation of recorded material.
Changing formats pose a challenge, yet is seems to me that the programs for upgrading from one format to another seems to be keeping up fairly well with introductions of new technologies.
Since things tend to build on eachother, my guess is that we will have fewer big changes in storage formats than we had in the heady days of the first computers.
I think the authors of the article are inventing a crisis so they can collect some big fat government grants for their work. We are recording more now than at any time in the past and are preserving things better. I don't buy the crisis argument.
Yeah, the interviewer tossed me out of the building when he discovered my CS degree actually referred to 4 solid years playing CounterStrike.
Well, I got the last laugh when I hacked the company's game server, and wiped the floor with that bozo. Yeah, like he's going to dare enter that gameroom now. ha!
This is why I stopped using answering machines and started using the voice messaging at the telco. Millions of little plastic boxes eating up electricity in millions of homes is bound to be less efficient than voice messaging at a central server.
The services at the telco let people leave messages when I am on the phone.
With the ADA, anyone foolish enough to build a tree house hotel or restaurant will get sued out existence. A proper tree house would have a wheel chair ramp and elevator. You would also need to chop down the adjacent forest to make room for the legally specified number of handy capped parking spots.
I worked for awhile in telecom. For the most part, the expenses of the telephone company are fixed. You have switches and T1 connections going in and out. Those are fixed costs.
A telephone company would build a system for anticipated peak service and would add some room for expansion. As a result, the telephone company would build an expensive system with excess capacity.
Although costs were fixed, telecom companies would bill customers for time used. To do this, they would set a rate for normal usage that would be high enough to cover the costs of the peak usage network.
I imagine that the Internet is somewhat the same way. Internet companies build for peak usage and set a rate for normal usage that will cover the cost of the peak usage network.
The thing that happens in a DOS attack is that the DOS attack pushes the services used from the normal level to peak usage levels for a prolonged period.
Since most of the network's costs are fixed, the DOS attack really doesn't cost the network that much more. A DOS attack doesn't spontaneously generate more routers and fiber optic connections.
The end effect of the attack is that it screws up billing. Remember the normal usage rates are set high enough to cover the cost of peak capacity. The DOS attack creates a situation where the end user is suddenly being charged the rate calculated for normal usage at the volume of peak usage.
Now, I realize the Internet has an extremely layers of service provides. Many ISPs are just a middlemen paying metered rates. The ISP is caught in the same trap of screwed up billing. The cost of the ISP providers didn't go up during the attack.
The big bills for both the ISP and end user are the result of flaws in the billing and metering processes and not actual higher network costs. The challenge is to keep the charges from the DOS attack from screwing up the billing systems.
BTW, I do not mean to imply in this thread that DOS attacks are cost free. Just that the bandwidth consumed during the attack is really not costing the network that much more. The machines, cables and wires have more stuff going through them. The DOS attacks cost the the support people in the ISP time, and have a cost in lost opportunity, they also create billing nightmares. The DOS attack does not actually cost the real dollar amounts that suddenly appear on bills.
The big problem I see here is that people need to know their maximum exposure. Essentially, the exposure of an account is unlimited.
As for the cost, the ISP doesn't just pass on the cost, they pass on the cost plus a tidy 70% profit margin.
Remember, these ISPs have dot com brains. When an ISP sees that they can make beaucoup bucks by DOS attacking clients...well, expect some outrageously large bills.
My request for the 2MB MP3 download is only 4K. I send 4K and receive 2MB. What happens if the DOS attach occurs because someone is repeatedly asking for a large file from the the person getting hacked?
The real issue is intent. How much traffic is hitting a user that the user did not intend to send or receive?
The only way to figure out the user's intent is to play it by ear.
The other issue is neglect. Was there neglect on the part of the DOS victim?
Clearly a system wide DOS attack (like the one that will occur when Bush starts his war) were not intended by the people being attacked. If the spike was clearly launched by a malevolent third party, then the ISP is probably in a better position to eat the expense.
The problem with charging a third party attack through to the victim is that it makes the targetted attack a success?
That was then. The government can easily get its fill of IT people now. Unfortunately, they have budget crunches; so it is incredibly hard to hire people.
The long term problem for government IT isn't the wages, it's that the government tends to promote people for political reasons not skill. The government gets good entry level people, and they weed out the best.
I don't know why they are bothering to pay people to blog for the Product. You would think they could simply create a simulated teen with a random text generator. All that really matters is that the blog adds to the Google Rank and bumps up search results.
The whole computer industry's been built on half-assed backward compatibility. Things are just backward compatible enough that people don't lose data and revolt, meanwhile the industry pushes businesses to buy new, expensive machines every every few years and upgrade all that old software. $$$
A 64bit chip and memory prices at new lows, No doubt Microsoft is looking forward to a big lucrative upgrade to Win64, so that they can break that constraining 4GM limit built into Win32.
I was thinking human editor. As for documenting code, Word is the funnest editor because it does things like replaces "i = 1" with "I = 1" -- keeps you on your toes.
Slashdot Mirror
Java would have been a much better language if you wanted the project to be reusable.
Gosh, with the Java/XML combo...I am surprised that there still is such a thang as a database. Dang, if you designed the blasted thang in UML with Java/XML there wouldn't even be a question of reusability...cause you would be in computer nirvana.
PS: I don't code...just read the trade journals and play foosball.
Well, we've seen that a 10% drop in sales leads to a 20% cut in the work force. My guess is that work loads will need to triple for the number of jobs to double.
My guess is that, as tech workers are willing to settle for significantly reduced salary and benefits, the number of tech jobs will start climbing again. So the article is probably right in its assertion that the number of tech jobs will increase.
I shouldn't use evil. Yet, all sides of the RIAA debate are trying to create caricatures of evil that they are fighting against. The RIAA will probably try to include indies in their version of the axis of evil.
The media moguls are desparately trying to stop the progression of technical advances...forgetting that they fund their coke habbit on the technical advances that trumped entertainers of years past. It is easy to create a caricature of the Hollywood as the evil villians of mass culture.
The fact that these debates get hung up on antecdotes and caricatures pretty much means the political process will not produce a rational result.
You are right on the mark with the ascertion that Indies are a big threat to the media moguls. The media giants know it and find every way possible to thwart independent film and music development.
Independent film makers are a threat in two big ways: There is direct competition in that the indies take attention away from Hollywood. They also are a prime example of how new technologies are making way for new voices...going square in the face of the RIAA's claim that piracy is leading to cultural doom.
The RIAA wants to create a Star Wars theme of evil pirates stealing from artists. The surge of independent film making is showing the opposite...that the technology is opening ground for new voices. As we see independent artists making in roads with new technology, we see that the true pirates of the silver screen are the big media moguls and Hollywood super class that has dominated film for the last century
The big profit stream eventually backfired as hundreds of companies have rushed into the printer cartridge refill and refurbish market.
Printer cartridges is one of the few markets that do well on the net. The cartidges are small and easy to ship. The field is information rich...that is, you buy according to the label..not the look of the cartridge. Why do you think you get 10 spams a day from people selling ink?
I've noticed the printer manufacturers have finally started to come down in price on the cartridges to match refillers.
Smart printer shoppers look at the cost of printing and not the cost of the printer. Personally, I would avoid Lexmark because of the chip. I also look for those brands that have the most ink per cartridge.
It is not just the manufacturers and wholesalers who are keeping the price up. Retailers might be partially to blame. I suspect that retailers have different margins requirements at different points in the life cycle of a product. They have a high margin when the product is new. They are willing to dump at or near cost when the product is out of vogue, and will jack up margins again when the product is rare. Considering weight and shipping costs involved with large CRTs, however, I would think the industry would be pushing the transition from CRT to LCD faster. The smaller lighter flat screens save all sorts of costs. I would especially expect to see the online retailers pushing flatscreen to save shipping cost.
If you used "viral marketing" you won't just have perpetual motion...you will create energy from the ether as excitement around the idea grows. Physics meets MLM.
The real selling point for the technology isn't that it lets parents oppress their kids. The technology will give parents the ability to relive their childhood through their children. The parent will watch every moment of their child's life, giving clues and reliving the moments. Parents will hook up an entire audio-visual and remote control system on their kids so that they can go through school a second time on their terms. The outlook is unlikely to be a safer world. You will probably find as many dads coaxing their sons to put their hands on Susie's knee as those who are trying to stop little Johnny from acting on hormones.
I think the author mentioned education games because he could remember playing them as a child and isn't playing them now. Uh, maybe he is a bigger boy than he was a few years ago.
"the problem is that a highly US-driven mono-culture is sweeping the world."
Now, if it were French that was the basis of the the mono-culture, then the development of a common language would be considered giving culture to to world...not taking culture from the world.
The really funny thing about what is happening now is that the US is not as actively trying to create a mono-culture as the French, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian and other imperialist nations did in the past.
When the Europeans were the great imperialist powers, you would find great and glorious writings about bringing culture to the backwards people of the world. Even in Bush's war with Iraq, there is a rhetoric of giving back the country to the Iraqis...the war lacks the imperialist overtones of most historic military excursions.
I suspect that the main reason we hear so much yapping about the issue now is that much of the "mono-culture" is being influenced by a country (the USA) that the French and other Europeans consider to be filled with lesser people. If the world were learning French, the development of a monoculture would likely be considered an enlightenment.
I disagree here. First, the main thesis of the article is a little bit odd: The article complains that recordings that have never been made recently might get lost. Uh, they would have been definitely been lost if no one recorded it. The massive amount of recording that we have done has increased the likelihood of the stuff being preserved for the future. We really are doing better at preserving recorded material and artifacts than at any time in history. The future probably has a bigger challenge in dealing with excesses of recorded material than with degradation of recorded material. Changing formats pose a challenge, yet is seems to me that the programs for upgrading from one format to another seems to be keeping up fairly well with introductions of new technologies. Since things tend to build on eachother, my guess is that we will have fewer big changes in storage formats than we had in the heady days of the first computers. I think the authors of the article are inventing a crisis so they can collect some big fat government grants for their work. We are recording more now than at any time in the past and are preserving things better. I don't buy the crisis argument.
"oh well, at least counterstrike still loves me."
.
Yeah, the interviewer tossed me out of the building when he discovered my CS degree actually referred to 4 solid years playing CounterStrike
Well, I got the last laugh when I hacked the company's game server, and wiped the floor with that bozo. Yeah, like he's going to dare enter that gameroom now. ha!
This is why I stopped using answering machines and started using the voice messaging at the telco. Millions of little plastic boxes eating up electricity in millions of homes is bound to be less efficient than voice messaging at a central server.
The services at the telco let people leave messages when I am on the phone.
Well, have you ever wondered what happens to all the defected people that get produced?
They end up on earth.
With the ADA, anyone foolish enough to build a tree house hotel or restaurant will get sued out existence. A proper tree house would have a wheel chair ramp and elevator. You would also need to chop down the adjacent forest to make room for the legally specified number of handy capped parking spots.
I say sue 'em and sue 'em good.
I worked for awhile in telecom. For the most part, the expenses of the telephone company are fixed. You have switches and T1 connections going in and out. Those are fixed costs.
A telephone company would build a system for anticipated peak service and would add some room for expansion. As a result, the telephone company would build an expensive system with excess capacity.
Although costs were fixed, telecom companies would bill customers for time used. To do this, they would set a rate for normal usage that would be high enough to cover the costs of the peak usage network.
I imagine that the Internet is somewhat the same way. Internet companies build for peak usage and set a rate for normal usage that will cover the cost of the peak usage network.
The thing that happens in a DOS attack is that the DOS attack pushes the services used from the normal level to peak usage levels for a prolonged period.
Since most of the network's costs are fixed, the DOS attack really doesn't cost the network that much more. A DOS attack doesn't spontaneously generate more routers and fiber optic connections.
The end effect of the attack is that it screws up billing. Remember the normal usage rates are set high enough to cover the cost of peak capacity. The DOS attack creates a situation where the end user is suddenly being charged the rate calculated for normal usage at the volume of peak usage.
Now, I realize the Internet has an extremely layers of service provides. Many ISPs are just a middlemen paying metered rates. The ISP is caught in the same trap of screwed up billing. The cost of the ISP providers didn't go up during the attack.
The big bills for both the ISP and end user are the result of flaws in the billing and metering processes and not actual higher network costs. The challenge is to keep the charges from the DOS attack from screwing up the billing systems.
BTW, I do not mean to imply in this thread that DOS attacks are cost free. Just that the bandwidth consumed during the attack is really not costing the network that much more. The machines, cables and wires have more stuff going through them. The DOS attacks cost the the support people in the ISP time, and have a cost in lost opportunity, they also create billing nightmares. The DOS attack does not actually cost the real dollar amounts that suddenly appear on bills.
The big problem I see here is that people need to know their maximum exposure. Essentially, the exposure of an account is unlimited.
As for the cost, the ISP doesn't just pass on the cost, they pass on the cost plus a tidy 70% profit margin.
Remember, these ISPs have dot com brains. When an ISP sees that they can make beaucoup bucks by DOS attacking clients...well, expect some outrageously large bills.
My request for the 2MB MP3 download is only 4K. I send 4K and receive 2MB. What happens if the DOS attach occurs because someone is repeatedly asking for a large file from the the person getting hacked?
The real issue is intent. How much traffic is hitting a user that the user did not intend to send or receive?
The only way to figure out the user's intent is to play it by ear.
The other issue is neglect. Was there neglect on the part of the DOS victim?
Clearly a system wide DOS attack (like the one that will occur when Bush starts his war) were not intended by the people being attacked. If the spike was clearly launched by a malevolent third party, then the ISP is probably in a better position to eat the expense.
The problem with charging a third party attack through to the victim is that it makes the targetted attack a success?
More open source software in government might open opportunities for small businesses to extend and customize programs for government use.
The only big problem with this thought is the expectation that OSS must be free...meaning unpaid small businesses.
That was then. The government can easily get its fill of IT people now. Unfortunately, they have budget crunches; so it is incredibly hard to hire people.
The long term problem for government IT isn't the wages, it's that the government tends to promote people for political reasons not skill. The government gets good entry level people, and they weed out the best.
The BLS puts the average US wage at $14.98 a year...which would is $30,000. We can't all be above average, now, can we?
Economy at a glance
I don't know why they are bothering to pay people to blog for the Product. You would think they could simply create a simulated teen with a random text generator. All that really matters is that the blog adds to the Google Rank and bumps up search results.
The whole computer industry's been built on half-assed backward compatibility. Things are just backward compatible enough that people don't lose data and revolt, meanwhile the industry pushes businesses to buy new, expensive machines every every few years and upgrade all that old software. $$$
A 64bit chip and memory prices at new lows, No doubt Microsoft is looking forward to a big lucrative upgrade to Win64, so that they can break that constraining 4GM limit built into Win32.
I was thinking human editor. As for documenting code, Word is the funnest editor because it does things like replaces "i = 1" with "I = 1" -- keeps you on your toes.