Meh. In Asia, but also in Europe, public spaces tend to look a lot better than in the USA, where they mostly look rather shabby. But moderns buildings in Asia are just as crap as in Europe and the USA, whereas in old buildings on all continents you will find attention to beauty and detail. I did not find buildings in Asia to be all that nicer.
Hell no, make those regulations part of the game... When the kids have finally figured out the peanut butter sandwich program, tell them that no, you can't do that because of HSE Rule 26b/6. Just like the real world where they'll have to deal with SOx, export compliance, legal, etc. Bonus points if you can actually make a few kids cry during the proceedings (hey it works on grownups...).
Freedom is nice. I like having the freedom to configure the phone the way I want, but that freedom usually comes with the necessity to do that configuration. On the other hand, Apple does not allow me to configure many of the iPhone's aspects... but it'll be fine right out of the box, without having to fiddle with it for hours on end. That's not because the iPhone is the greatest thing since sliced bread; it's because it just offers what I want out of a phone. The user experience that Jobs dictates works for me, and it seems to work for many other people. I did not even bother to jailbreak mine.
Sure, freedom would be better, and the iPhone has a few niggles that I'd like to fix but can't. But on the whole I am very pleased with it and I did not have to spend much time to make it so. Even better: Apple dictating the entire experience means that the carriers don't get to push their crapware on the phone either, and they generally are the worst offenders. I have seen some fine examples of what a crapified phone looks like, and it's why I have stayed away from Android so far. With that said, the market for Android phones is getting close to the point of offering a phone that's close to what I want it to be, out of the box. If that happens I may well switch; I'm not that much of an Apple fanboi...
Why is that dumb? Most subscription-based MMOs charge $15 / €12 or so a month. That is less than one visit to the cinema. For that price you get a hell of a lot of entertainment out of an MMO, if you're into that sort of thing. Even if you sometimes buy a few gewgaws for real money from other players or an in-game store, it's still one of the cheaper pastimes in €/hour.
By the way, some MMOs are great vehicles for player-run RP scenarios, and you'll find plenty of roleplaying going on in there. You're still bound to certain conditions set by the game, but on the other hand, an MMO gives you access to a vast pool of potential roleplayers to adventure with. It is different from tabletop RPGs but not necessarily a poorer experience.
Why yes. The current petrol tax in NL is close to €1/l... I say we certainly have road pricing here already. But from the government's perspective, a fuel tax has one glaring flaw: it can only go so high before even people in the south-west of the country will consider driving to Belgium for gas, driving gas stations near the borders completely out of business.
Now with a scheme that actually lets you charge by the km, the sky is the limit. Great for milking people with no viable alternative to commute, for all they're worth. People don't sit around in traffic jams for fun; even in a country like the Netherlands with its dense and well operated public transport network, cars are still the better alternative by far, even with traffic jams. It's nice for government to be able to tax those people selectively; like putting a high tax on basic necessities so people have no choice to pay, but in this case there's the advantage of being able to sell it as "more fair" and "green".
You can also come up with weird pricing schemes; an old favourite of cell phone providers. Charge for this bit of road, lower the price on that one, fiddle with the car and petrol tax a little, and claim that it's all good, claim that perhaps some will pay more but most will pay less, and the tax burden will remain the same (actual statement from the previous minister of transportation). Except that it won't, of course. And it's not like the current tax does not bring in enough. Road tax, petrol tax and the 45% tax on new cars already pay for the roads and public transport subsidies 3 times over.
For those wondering about GPS jammers and the like: that's covered. There are enough roadside cameras to do a little licence plate recognition. If they spot you on a priced road but don't have a matching GPS signal, they'll send you the bill anyway. If this happens too often, it'll be a fine.
It is still a very odd idea, especially to mandate this as a condition of an acquisition. It's like saying: "you can have your capitalist monopoly and gouge the customer, if we can have our socialist Internet for the disadvantaged, paid out of your profits". If there's not enough competition, they should not allow the acquisition. If Internet access fees are too high for low income families, the government could decide to subsidise it out of their own coffers, which means all taxpaying voters pay for it, not just the Comcast subscribers.
Basically, I go by the advice my dad taught me while playing cards - expect that you're going to lose every bet you ever make. If you're not ok with that outcome, then don't make the bet in the first place.
Sound advice. And the same goes for insurance, which is just a different form of gambling despite the name. Don't gamble with cash you cannot afford to lose, i.e. insure risks you cannot carry financially. But self-insure the rest; the same smug guys going on about lotteries being a tax on people bad at math are often happy to have insured *everything* down to their cell phones and computers. Just remember: insurance companies are just like casinos: they're not charities.
An IBM exec who spoke out against the patent system some time ago said that the motivation of large companies to get into the patent game is not (just) to shut out small startups with disruptive produts. They get into the game because they have to; according to that exec, IBM would be better off without the patent system, even though they are a company that actually does some inventing. It's an arms race: your competitors are stacking up patent claims against you, so you better have a pile of good defensive patents to ward off a lawsuit.
That is exactly what companies like Intellectual Ventures (started by some former Microsoft bigwigs) do. They sit around all day in think tanks coming up with "cool ideas", not with the intention of actually putting in the effort to turn these ideas into products, but simply patenting them by the tens of thousands. They wait until someone comes along with the same idea who does develop a product, then they cash in. Intellectual vultures indeed.
By the way, I have no indication whatsoever that legislators in the US or Europe are of the opinion that the current patent system is hurting innovation. Is anything happening on that front?
I agree that the corporate market and the consumer market are different, and that both RIM and Apple/Google currently serve those respective markets quite well.
What is harder to imagine is how tablets benefit consumers. For most, it is a new shiny thing to play with and they will realize before too long that they don't need to be burdened with the size/weight/fragility of the tablet devices when comparing that against the benefits they get from their use. (A consumer's ROI analysis.)
About this I am not so sure. For one, the business market is shifting, and corporations are now pondering the "consumerisation of IT". Many consumers already carry a smartphone or tablet of their own, and the last thing they want is for their boss to give them an additional one to drag around. If given a choice, many people would prefer to get corporate email on their personal device instead of getting a corporate smartphone/tablet. Around my clients' offices, as soon as the email servers were adapted for use with smart phones, managers were replacing their free Blackberries with iPhones en masse. Looking at the state of the UI of both devices at the time, it is not hard to see why (though the UI has been vastly improved on more recent Blackberry models).
Consumers like tablets for the same reasons as business people: in many situations it's a good alternative to a laptop or desktop PC: quick to boot, easy to use and conventient to carry. I know many people who have a laptop at home for browsing or watching movies on the couch / in the kitchen, etc. Now that those people have tablets, those laptops are pretty much left unused. And you can bet that those people will want to use their own tablet for business as well, rather than having to make do with one provided by the company.
Companies are looking for ways to safely allow personal devices to access corporate data; they are not waiting for a business-ready tablet which they can then hand out to their employees. The RIM tablet is not going to change that. With the consumer and business markets converging, RIM is going to have to compete in both if they want to survive; simply being the one with the best security isn't going to cut it anymore.
Reminds me of that South Park episode:
"What's a sellout?"
- "If you work in the entertainment industry and you make any money, you're a sellout".
Seriously, these guys created K-Splice and they should keep their business going as is, instead of selling to Oracle for (probably) an ass-load of money? For you? Or should they be free to do with their business and their product as they please?
You, of course, are free to create your own version of K-Splice. Except of course that Oracle will have tied up the idea with patents and a pack of blood-thirsty lawyers.
Sure, it's a buzzword, but not a bad one if you think about it from an IT manager's perspective, as something similar to the little clouds in network diagrams. Other than some ground rules around security, functionality and availability (laid down in an SLA) you don't know how it works, nor do you care about the details. All you care about is that it somehow works, and keeps working. "On the internet" does not capture the black box aspect of SaaS, and could just mean hosting.
Put them in management. Specifically, the parts of management having to do with planning, control and implementation of policy. I know a lot of MBAs with varying strengths and weaknesses, but planning and control is something most of them are good at, and where the skills they learned come into play. Those jobs come with other requirements including people management, so do select those that actually have those skills, and not just a pretty diploma. And be sure to prepare them for a management position first; business Administration schools will most certainly not have done that! (a few exceptions aside).
Of course, management is not to be confused with leadership. And most corporations I've seen on the inside need more leaders than they have, and far, far, far fewer managers than they think they need.
To those who use the child porn argument in discussions about censorship, I'll go so far as to turn the "we need censorship to fight child porn" argument around, and say that we should legalize the distribution of child porn, if that is what it takes to safeguard the Internet from censorship".
Not saying of course that we actually should; there are far better ways to ensure our freedoms on the 'net. It's a statement to emphasise the fact that if freedom from online censorship and effective persecution of child porn peddlers are mutually exclusive, then I'll choose freedom every time without a shred of hesitation. This is one of those principal rights not worth sacrificing for some practical considerations, however important those may be.
How is it not crazy and silly? More importantly, what problem is this supposed to fix? Are pets sometimes mistreated? Then legislate and prosecute that. Are pets bred for sale under crappy conditions? Then legislate and prosecute that. Or are all pets bred and kept under horrible conditions? In that case, just ban pet ownership. But I will go so far as to call this proposal crazy and silly indeed.
Most of the time, cost and speed are the main drivers in software development. What some of these methods aim to do is improve quality while keeping cost and speed more or less the same. Same as in furniture: mass produced furniture used to be rather crappy but it is getting better all the time, while prices remain the same. Just compare some of the Ikea furniture of 10 years ago with what's on offer today.
The problem with software development in large corporations is not that managers demand Mennonite quality, it's that they do not realise that the software they want is not a mass-production product. Of course the managers who at last come to that conclusion become staunch proponents of "buy not build", but they often forget the significant and decidedly bespoke system integration effort that comes with off-the-shelf products. But your remark about a desire for a replacable work force is spot on: the drive for a specialised, compartimentalised and highly interchangable workforce has made managers' lives easier. Resources are a lot easier to manage than people, after all. And it has driven down costs. But all other aspects of development work have suffered: speed, quality, but also innovation, corporate agility, and joy in one's work.
The resources required for such an undertaking may exist here on Earth in one form or another, but those resources are too direly needed by the planet's current population to allow it all to be seized up in some dream works that are not guaranteed to produce any positive results.
The inventions brought to us by the space programs of the past are just that -- inventions, not discoveries. There is no cosmos full of advances in textiles, communications, and soft drinks waiting for us to grab it all up.
I choose "ever onward" over "let's stay in our caves, where it's warm". For one, there are vast, valuable resources right here in our solar system. Perhaps one day, we'll be able to profitably harvest them. And perhaps we'll invent a few things along the way, such as advances in textiles, I mean propulsion, materials, and control systems. And with those advances in science and engineering, perhaps we'll send something to another star some day, at a reasonable cost as well.
If anything, we might feel sad at the wealth of new things we have in our lives brought to us by the space program, because it means there are fewer things left to be invented in the future, therefore we face a less valuable future in space program commodities enrichment.
Anyone who unwaveringly insists that there are infinite worthwhile inventions for humans (or infinite ways to improve upon what commodities do exist) has as much sense as an inbred dog and need not read further (for objective truth is wasted upon them).
And if anything, pretty much anyone in the past who thought we had reached the pinnacle of knowledge in one field or another, has been proven wrong time and time again. Sure, it doesn't make much sense to send a probe to another star now. But anyone who unwaveringly insists that there will never be a mission to another star (or profits to be derived thereof) has as much sense as an inbred dog and need not comment further.
Decent dictionary attack software already accounts for the more obvious substitutions like i/!, o/0, l/1, e/3, a/4 etc. I tend to use passwords that can be pronounced but aren't actual words.
But even with a completely random password, you're still screwed if Sony makes the unbelievable and unexcusable mistake of storing them in plaintext. Hell, even the PHP for Beginners book on my shelf explains one-way encryption for passwords to online services.
To earn respect from the top brass (and the associated high paycheck) in many companies, you need to be directly involved in a) generating revenue, or b) cutting costs. a) Means you're in Sales; b) means you're probably middle management. Oh, and according to managers, engineering is most definitely not directly involved in generating revenue. They "make the product which Sales sells", or "just work the hours we bill for thanks to Sales". If an engineer helps close a deal or comes up with a way to slash costs, they are "just doing their job".
I remember experiments in college with exploding-wire phenomena, where we pulsed conductors with capacitors and vaporized wires. This both generates a shock pulse and can do a soft X-ray discharge. Yeah, I want that in my car.
Why not? It sounds like something that might give you superhero powers...
And in my experience, many non-IT people don't have a clue about how computers and tech can help their business. They might not perceive a need to hook up their bookkeeping software to their online banking service, or a need to run an Asterisk server and use VOIP handsets (to name a few things); after all, what they have now works perfectly fine. So, they're missing out on tech that saves them time, money and errors.
One of the recurring problems in IT is that business people are often unaware of what IT can do for them, while the IT people are clueless about what the business' needs are, or how the business even works. No wonder business software often sucks. Add to that the growing trend to compartimentalise IT work with ever-narrower job descriptions and stricter procedures and drive IT people to specialise rather than broaden their expertise, and you have the cause of the gap between business and IT. The ability to bridge that gap is a relatively rare talent, but instead of nurturing such talent we seem to eschew it. Rare talent is hard to plan for, or fit into org charts, so the typical middle manager may perhaps rather do without...
Seriously -- When did "smart" become synonymous with "green"?
Why wouldn't it? They are doing a "smart home" experiment here in the Netherlands, with homeowners, appliance manufacturers, energy companies, and the municipality. In this case smart does mean green. For example: instead of just switching on the washing machine, you tell it: "I want this clean by 5". The washing machine tells the home automation system: "I'll need about 2kW for 45 minutes, some time before 5". The home will then negotiate with the grid and tell the washing machine when it can start. It's a bit too early to be sure, but apparently considerable savings can be made this way, especially when the grid has a substantial solar/wind component. It's not about using less energy, but about using the cleanest/cheapest energy when it's available.
Nuclear, as of current state of technology, is a bad idea. There is no fucking way that *anybody* can take over responsibility for 50 000 years worth of deadly toxic waste. Anyone who thought that needs a clobbering.
I am glad some of those older plants get closed, but even more glad that further research isn't going to stop, and that quite a few other countries still see a future for nuclear power. It'd be better if we had something safer and cleaner to meet our energy needs, but that's a long way off, and at the same time we want to wean ourselves away from fossil fuels. In the near future I see a mix of energy sources: fossil, solar, hydro, perhaps biofuels become viable at some point.... and nuclear. I don't think we can do very well without, but I'd rather see modern nukes instead of 40 year old 2nd generation designs being patched up.
Some of this research is showing promise and may enable nuclear power that can be cheaper (cheaper than current plants due to simpler plant designs), safer (passive cooling, non-pressurised reactor vessels, nuclear reactions that slow rather than accellerate at higher temps, this makes serious accidents far less likely to occur if something breaks, and when an accident does occur it will be far less severe), and cleaner (nuclear waste that stays bad for 100-300 years rather than 10.000). It would be foolish to stop this research because of the current "OMG nucular" sentiment.
Ah yes, the bags of randomly assorted stuff! I fondly remember those. Resistors, capacitors, LEDs, a big bag for a few guilders; these were great for a kid on a tight DIY budget. We had a tiny but extremely well stocked electronics DIY shop two blocks down from the local RS; very often that shop was cheaper, but I always popped into RS to check their bargains. They pulled out of the Netherlands ages ago though...
Exactly. This is the worst case scenario, whether you are in favour of nuclear power or against it: stopping all design and development of modern and much safer and cleaner nuclear plants (sure, not 100% safe nor 100% clean), whilst keeping the existing nukes running well past their designed lifetime... because the clean power source that was to replace them hasn't magically appeared, surprise, surprise.
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Meh. In Asia, but also in Europe, public spaces tend to look a lot better than in the USA, where they mostly look rather shabby. But moderns buildings in Asia are just as crap as in Europe and the USA, whereas in old buildings on all continents you will find attention to beauty and detail. I did not find buildings in Asia to be all that nicer.
Hell no, make those regulations part of the game... When the kids have finally figured out the peanut butter sandwich program, tell them that no, you can't do that because of HSE Rule 26b/6. Just like the real world where they'll have to deal with SOx, export compliance, legal, etc. Bonus points if you can actually make a few kids cry during the proceedings (hey it works on grownups...).
Me, I'm not bitter or anything
Freedom is nice. I like having the freedom to configure the phone the way I want, but that freedom usually comes with the necessity to do that configuration. On the other hand, Apple does not allow me to configure many of the iPhone's aspects... but it'll be fine right out of the box, without having to fiddle with it for hours on end. That's not because the iPhone is the greatest thing since sliced bread; it's because it just offers what I want out of a phone. The user experience that Jobs dictates works for me, and it seems to work for many other people. I did not even bother to jailbreak mine.
Sure, freedom would be better, and the iPhone has a few niggles that I'd like to fix but can't. But on the whole I am very pleased with it and I did not have to spend much time to make it so. Even better: Apple dictating the entire experience means that the carriers don't get to push their crapware on the phone either, and they generally are the worst offenders. I have seen some fine examples of what a crapified phone looks like, and it's why I have stayed away from Android so far. With that said, the market for Android phones is getting close to the point of offering a phone that's close to what I want it to be, out of the box. If that happens I may well switch; I'm not that much of an Apple fanboi...
Why is that dumb? Most subscription-based MMOs charge $15 / €12 or so a month. That is less than one visit to the cinema. For that price you get a hell of a lot of entertainment out of an MMO, if you're into that sort of thing. Even if you sometimes buy a few gewgaws for real money from other players or an in-game store, it's still one of the cheaper pastimes in €/hour.
By the way, some MMOs are great vehicles for player-run RP scenarios, and you'll find plenty of roleplaying going on in there. You're still bound to certain conditions set by the game, but on the other hand, an MMO gives you access to a vast pool of potential roleplayers to adventure with. It is different from tabletop RPGs but not necessarily a poorer experience.
Why yes. The current petrol tax in NL is close to €1/l... I say we certainly have road pricing here already. But from the government's perspective, a fuel tax has one glaring flaw: it can only go so high before even people in the south-west of the country will consider driving to Belgium for gas, driving gas stations near the borders completely out of business.
Now with a scheme that actually lets you charge by the km, the sky is the limit. Great for milking people with no viable alternative to commute, for all they're worth. People don't sit around in traffic jams for fun; even in a country like the Netherlands with its dense and well operated public transport network, cars are still the better alternative by far, even with traffic jams. It's nice for government to be able to tax those people selectively; like putting a high tax on basic necessities so people have no choice to pay, but in this case there's the advantage of being able to sell it as "more fair" and "green".
You can also come up with weird pricing schemes; an old favourite of cell phone providers. Charge for this bit of road, lower the price on that one, fiddle with the car and petrol tax a little, and claim that it's all good, claim that perhaps some will pay more but most will pay less, and the tax burden will remain the same (actual statement from the previous minister of transportation). Except that it won't, of course. And it's not like the current tax does not bring in enough. Road tax, petrol tax and the 45% tax on new cars already pay for the roads and public transport subsidies 3 times over.
For those wondering about GPS jammers and the like: that's covered. There are enough roadside cameras to do a little licence plate recognition. If they spot you on a priced road but don't have a matching GPS signal, they'll send you the bill anyway. If this happens too often, it'll be a fine.
It is still a very odd idea, especially to mandate this as a condition of an acquisition. It's like saying: "you can have your capitalist monopoly and gouge the customer, if we can have our socialist Internet for the disadvantaged, paid out of your profits". If there's not enough competition, they should not allow the acquisition. If Internet access fees are too high for low income families, the government could decide to subsidise it out of their own coffers, which means all taxpaying voters pay for it, not just the Comcast subscribers.
Basically, I go by the advice my dad taught me while playing cards - expect that you're going to lose every bet you ever make. If you're not ok with that outcome, then don't make the bet in the first place.
Sound advice. And the same goes for insurance, which is just a different form of gambling despite the name. Don't gamble with cash you cannot afford to lose, i.e. insure risks you cannot carry financially. But self-insure the rest; the same smug guys going on about lotteries being a tax on people bad at math are often happy to have insured *everything* down to their cell phones and computers. Just remember: insurance companies are just like casinos: they're not charities.
An IBM exec who spoke out against the patent system some time ago said that the motivation of large companies to get into the patent game is not (just) to shut out small startups with disruptive produts. They get into the game because they have to; according to that exec, IBM would be better off without the patent system, even though they are a company that actually does some inventing. It's an arms race: your competitors are stacking up patent claims against you, so you better have a pile of good defensive patents to ward off a lawsuit.
That is exactly what companies like Intellectual Ventures (started by some former Microsoft bigwigs) do. They sit around all day in think tanks coming up with "cool ideas", not with the intention of actually putting in the effort to turn these ideas into products, but simply patenting them by the tens of thousands. They wait until someone comes along with the same idea who does develop a product, then they cash in. Intellectual vultures indeed.
By the way, I have no indication whatsoever that legislators in the US or Europe are of the opinion that the current patent system is hurting innovation. Is anything happening on that front?
About this I am not so sure. For one, the business market is shifting, and corporations are now pondering the "consumerisation of IT". Many consumers already carry a smartphone or tablet of their own, and the last thing they want is for their boss to give them an additional one to drag around. If given a choice, many people would prefer to get corporate email on their personal device instead of getting a corporate smartphone/tablet. Around my clients' offices, as soon as the email servers were adapted for use with smart phones, managers were replacing their free Blackberries with iPhones en masse. Looking at the state of the UI of both devices at the time, it is not hard to see why (though the UI has been vastly improved on more recent Blackberry models).
Consumers like tablets for the same reasons as business people: in many situations it's a good alternative to a laptop or desktop PC: quick to boot, easy to use and conventient to carry. I know many people who have a laptop at home for browsing or watching movies on the couch / in the kitchen, etc. Now that those people have tablets, those laptops are pretty much left unused. And you can bet that those people will want to use their own tablet for business as well, rather than having to make do with one provided by the company.
Companies are looking for ways to safely allow personal devices to access corporate data; they are not waiting for a business-ready tablet which they can then hand out to their employees. The RIM tablet is not going to change that. With the consumer and business markets converging, RIM is going to have to compete in both if they want to survive; simply being the one with the best security isn't going to cut it anymore.
Reminds me of that South Park episode:
"What's a sellout?"
- "If you work in the entertainment industry and you make any money, you're a sellout".
Seriously, these guys created K-Splice and they should keep their business going as is, instead of selling to Oracle for (probably) an ass-load of money? For you? Or should they be free to do with their business and their product as they please?
You, of course, are free to create your own version of K-Splice. Except of course that Oracle will have tied up the idea with patents and a pack of blood-thirsty lawyers.
Sure, it's a buzzword, but not a bad one if you think about it from an IT manager's perspective, as something similar to the little clouds in network diagrams. Other than some ground rules around security, functionality and availability (laid down in an SLA) you don't know how it works, nor do you care about the details. All you care about is that it somehow works, and keeps working. "On the internet" does not capture the black box aspect of SaaS, and could just mean hosting.
Put them in management. Specifically, the parts of management having to do with planning, control and implementation of policy. I know a lot of MBAs with varying strengths and weaknesses, but planning and control is something most of them are good at, and where the skills they learned come into play. Those jobs come with other requirements including people management, so do select those that actually have those skills, and not just a pretty diploma. And be sure to prepare them for a management position first; business Administration schools will most certainly not have done that! (a few exceptions aside).
Of course, management is not to be confused with leadership. And most corporations I've seen on the inside need more leaders than they have, and far, far, far fewer managers than they think they need.
To those who use the child porn argument in discussions about censorship, I'll go so far as to turn the "we need censorship to fight child porn" argument around, and say that we should legalize the distribution of child porn, if that is what it takes to safeguard the Internet from censorship".
Not saying of course that we actually should; there are far better ways to ensure our freedoms on the 'net. It's a statement to emphasise the fact that if freedom from online censorship and effective persecution of child porn peddlers are mutually exclusive, then I'll choose freedom every time without a shred of hesitation. This is one of those principal rights not worth sacrificing for some practical considerations, however important those may be.
How is it not crazy and silly? More importantly, what problem is this supposed to fix? Are pets sometimes mistreated? Then legislate and prosecute that. Are pets bred for sale under crappy conditions? Then legislate and prosecute that. Or are all pets bred and kept under horrible conditions? In that case, just ban pet ownership. But I will go so far as to call this proposal crazy and silly indeed.
Most of the time, cost and speed are the main drivers in software development. What some of these methods aim to do is improve quality while keeping cost and speed more or less the same. Same as in furniture: mass produced furniture used to be rather crappy but it is getting better all the time, while prices remain the same. Just compare some of the Ikea furniture of 10 years ago with what's on offer today.
The problem with software development in large corporations is not that managers demand Mennonite quality, it's that they do not realise that the software they want is not a mass-production product. Of course the managers who at last come to that conclusion become staunch proponents of "buy not build", but they often forget the significant and decidedly bespoke system integration effort that comes with off-the-shelf products. But your remark about a desire for a replacable work force is spot on: the drive for a specialised, compartimentalised and highly interchangable workforce has made managers' lives easier. Resources are a lot easier to manage than people, after all. And it has driven down costs. But all other aspects of development work have suffered: speed, quality, but also innovation, corporate agility, and joy in one's work.
The resources required for such an undertaking may exist here on Earth in one form or another, but those resources are too direly needed by the planet's current population to allow it all to be seized up in some dream works that are not guaranteed to produce any positive results.
The inventions brought to us by the space programs of the past are just that -- inventions, not discoveries. There is no cosmos full of advances in textiles, communications, and soft drinks waiting for us to grab it all up.
I choose "ever onward" over "let's stay in our caves, where it's warm". For one, there are vast, valuable resources right here in our solar system. Perhaps one day, we'll be able to profitably harvest them. And perhaps we'll invent a few things along the way, such as advances in textiles, I mean propulsion, materials, and control systems. And with those advances in science and engineering, perhaps we'll send something to another star some day, at a reasonable cost as well.
If anything, we might feel sad at the wealth of new things we have in our lives brought to us by the space program, because it means there are fewer things left to be invented in the future, therefore we face a less valuable future in space program commodities enrichment.
Anyone who unwaveringly insists that there are infinite worthwhile inventions for humans (or infinite ways to improve upon what commodities do exist) has as much sense as an inbred dog and need not read further (for objective truth is wasted upon them).
And if anything, pretty much anyone in the past who thought we had reached the pinnacle of knowledge in one field or another, has been proven wrong time and time again. Sure, it doesn't make much sense to send a probe to another star now. But anyone who unwaveringly insists that there will never be a mission to another star (or profits to be derived thereof) has as much sense as an inbred dog and need not comment further.
Decent dictionary attack software already accounts for the more obvious substitutions like i/!, o/0, l/1, e/3, a/4 etc. I tend to use passwords that can be pronounced but aren't actual words.
But even with a completely random password, you're still screwed if Sony makes the unbelievable and unexcusable mistake of storing them in plaintext. Hell, even the PHP for Beginners book on my shelf explains one-way encryption for passwords to online services.
To earn respect from the top brass (and the associated high paycheck) in many companies, you need to be directly involved in a) generating revenue, or b) cutting costs. a) Means you're in Sales; b) means you're probably middle management. Oh, and according to managers, engineering is most definitely not directly involved in generating revenue. They "make the product which Sales sells", or "just work the hours we bill for thanks to Sales". If an engineer helps close a deal or comes up with a way to slash costs, they are "just doing their job".
Bitter much? A little, yes....
Why not? It sounds like something that might give you superhero powers...
And in my experience, many non-IT people don't have a clue about how computers and tech can help their business. They might not perceive a need to hook up their bookkeeping software to their online banking service, or a need to run an Asterisk server and use VOIP handsets (to name a few things); after all, what they have now works perfectly fine. So, they're missing out on tech that saves them time, money and errors.
One of the recurring problems in IT is that business people are often unaware of what IT can do for them, while the IT people are clueless about what the business' needs are, or how the business even works. No wonder business software often sucks. Add to that the growing trend to compartimentalise IT work with ever-narrower job descriptions and stricter procedures and drive IT people to specialise rather than broaden their expertise, and you have the cause of the gap between business and IT. The ability to bridge that gap is a relatively rare talent, but instead of nurturing such talent we seem to eschew it. Rare talent is hard to plan for, or fit into org charts, so the typical middle manager may perhaps rather do without...
Why wouldn't it? They are doing a "smart home" experiment here in the Netherlands, with homeowners, appliance manufacturers, energy companies, and the municipality. In this case smart does mean green. For example: instead of just switching on the washing machine, you tell it: "I want this clean by 5". The washing machine tells the home automation system: "I'll need about 2kW for 45 minutes, some time before 5". The home will then negotiate with the grid and tell the washing machine when it can start. It's a bit too early to be sure, but apparently considerable savings can be made this way, especially when the grid has a substantial solar/wind component. It's not about using less energy, but about using the cleanest/cheapest energy when it's available.
I am glad some of those older plants get closed, but even more glad that further research isn't going to stop, and that quite a few other countries still see a future for nuclear power. It'd be better if we had something safer and cleaner to meet our energy needs, but that's a long way off, and at the same time we want to wean ourselves away from fossil fuels. In the near future I see a mix of energy sources: fossil, solar, hydro, perhaps biofuels become viable at some point.... and nuclear. I don't think we can do very well without, but I'd rather see modern nukes instead of 40 year old 2nd generation designs being patched up.
Some of this research is showing promise and may enable nuclear power that can be cheaper (cheaper than current plants due to simpler plant designs), safer (passive cooling, non-pressurised reactor vessels, nuclear reactions that slow rather than accellerate at higher temps, this makes serious accidents far less likely to occur if something breaks, and when an accident does occur it will be far less severe), and cleaner (nuclear waste that stays bad for 100-300 years rather than 10.000). It would be foolish to stop this research because of the current "OMG nucular" sentiment.
Ah yes, the bags of randomly assorted stuff! I fondly remember those. Resistors, capacitors, LEDs, a big bag for a few guilders; these were great for a kid on a tight DIY budget. We had a tiny but extremely well stocked electronics DIY shop two blocks down from the local RS; very often that shop was cheaper, but I always popped into RS to check their bargains. They pulled out of the Netherlands ages ago though...
Exactly. This is the worst case scenario, whether you are in favour of nuclear power or against it: stopping all design and development of modern and much safer and cleaner nuclear plants (sure, not 100% safe nor 100% clean), whilst keeping the existing nukes running well past their designed lifetime... because the clean power source that was to replace them hasn't magically appeared, surprise, surprise.