The problem is that unless the projectile has an energy source, the sonic boom is going to slow it down, and rather quickly. Galileo observed this effect 500 years ago. No matter how much powder they put in a cannon, they ball only went so far.
My recollection is that architect came into use when system engineers (the folks that engineer systems - analyze requirements; decide on hardware, software, interfaces; write the specs; oversee integration; etc.) (many of whom have real engineering degrees) found that MS had used their job title to describe sys admins. So now RH is going to use the term architect to describe sys admins. Grrrrr...
You don't even have to publicize the theft. It can be obvious, like Kerry gets 100% of the vote in GA.
GA is, you will recall, 100% Diebold voting machines. Which is why the loss of Max Cleland is suspecious. Leading in the immediate pre-election polls, but lost the electronic vote.
One of the points that Cynicism Personified makes it that Brown claims that the lack of scarcity of FOSS destroys its value. Here we have a classic case of confusing price and value.
Price is determined by the market. Value is not. Perhaps the most valuable thing on the planet is air -- without it you are dead in 5 minutes. But air is free.
This particular lesson was taught to me by an SOB of a VP, but a shrewd businessman.
If only we could. Over the last ten years, India has been running pretty steady current account surpluses. Over that same time frame the US has run deficits. In a fair market the rupee would have appreciated against the dollar. Since 1995, the rupee fell by half against the dollar, and has in the last 6 months rallied to be down by only a third.
The wto (www.wto.org) has, somewhere on its web site (and I can't find it again, or I'd have given a better link) a rather balk statement that the rules are tilted to favor developing nations. The rules are the rules, but developing nations have longer to come into compliance. Also, WTO excludes labor standards and most ecological considerations from their arbitrations. So you are right, we are not on a level playing field.
If you get tenured, you're basically guaranteed your job for life
Hmmm... This is contrary to what I have been hearing, that tenure is a dying concept. Lots of universities in this area hire Adjuncts. They get paid 2-4K/class, one or two classes per semester. So they need to work for several schools to make ends meet. This may not be true in engineering schools right now, but wait a while. I know that CS enrollments are dropping; I suspect that engineering will follow.
Demand shortages are normally an artifact of a lack of disposable wealth. If you're defining these little pieces of paper we use as money as wealth, and you're proposing devaluing them, I'd suggest an alternate approach--
Increase the disposable income, and you'll get an increase in demand.
Well, that's the trouble isn't it? If Asian workers are taking what used to be $75/yr jobs in the US and doing them for $7.5K, the US workers no longer have disposable income. How do you propose to increase income in the US? And before you point to biotech as the Next Big Thing, I saw an article today that it is the next industry on its way offshore. And I'm quite sure that nanotech will be gone before it even arrives.
The trade advocates have not, and can not, tell us how the middle class in the US survives when the "knowledge workers" can only make 15K/yr. How do we prevent the US economy from doing an Argentina?
You know, this attitude is exactly why there is no loyalty to to company/team/project anymore. I'm currently on a death march (long story) and folks are starting to bail. And I neither resent their bailing, nor do I encourage them to stay (even though their leaving further reduces the likelihood that we will deliver an acceptable product.
Why? because it is just a job. Employers (most of them, these days) will shed employees in a heartbeat, if they can. So a job is simple exchange of time for money, no obligations beyond two weeks. If a worker leaving puts the bosses in a bind, tough. Getting laid off puts workers in a bind.
Is there a large enough difference in costs from America to India that it will sustain this big chain of sub-sub contractors? Or are these middle men not making any money?
The woman in Pakistan started making 3 cents per line. Assume a line a minute and she is getting $1.80 / hr. Two lines a minute is $3.60 / hr. I suspect that is enough of a difference.
Just answering these questions gives the company a legal status,...
The problem is not legal status, it is that current law (as interpreted by the Supreme Court in the late 1800s) makes a corporation the legal equivalent of a person. Therefore corporations have the same rights as you or I (except voting and campaign contibutions). They have rights of free speech, lobbying, owning other corporations. Trouble is, they don't have the same responsibilities. Wasn't Ford found guilty of negligent homicide (exploding Pintos) in the 1980s? Did Ford go to jail?
The ethics of the corporation require management to maximize shareholder equity. So Ford management calculates how much per car it takes to fix the Pinto gas tank, estimates how many people will die if there is no fix, and how much they will have to pay in wrongful death settlements. An individual who acts that way goes to jail. Not a corporation.
Then there is the problem of corporate size. When corporations get large enough, they become, essentially, above the law. The forthcoming EU ruling against Microsoft notwithstanding, is there any effective brake on Bill Gates doing whatever the hell he feels like doing?
We could easily get along without the modern corporation. Form companies (LLCs, Coops, etc) around a particular enterprise. If the enterprise does well, investors get rewarded; if not, not. But corporate chieftans would then have to be able to actually run an enterprise and make money at it, instead of making money by buying and selling other companies. It would be harder to become a billionaire, but easier to make a good living.
Part of it, I'm sure, is that Virginia isn't using Diebold machines.
Are you sure? I thought Fairfax _was_ using Diebold. And there were problems with last Fall's election (VA is unusual in that state offices are elected on odd-numbered years). At least 6 electronic voting machines failed, needed to be repalced/ rebooted,...
If there really was a prolonged "nuclear winter" due to the dust kicked up by the impact, wouldn't the entire marine foodchain have been killed off as well?
The papers referenced by the BBC article indicate a 70% extinction of all plankton at the K-T boundary. That's about as low in the food chain as you can go.
That means, if global warming actually were occurring, that it quite possibly would be (a) not our fault, but something that has been happening over the past several hundred, thousand, or ten thousand years, and is accelerating as the state of the system moves away from an unstable equilibrium point; and (b) impossible to stop, no matter what we do.
You left out (c) that human acitvity will be just enough to push the system out of the current equilibrium.
I wonder if, when the climate goes bonkers, God forbid, all those who opposed efforts to check global warming will make amends by living in the worst climates?
Last time I changed jobs, I went to work for a company headquartered in CA. They have a similar "all your ideas belong to us" terms of employment agreement. They also say that the laws of CA govern the agreement, and the CA courts have held that only work related inventions can be claimed by the employer.
IANAL, etc. The point is that you need a lawyer. This stuff varies by state.
There is simply no way, over the long term, that we could outsource all of our jobs, to India or anywhere else anymore than they outsource their jobs to us. (More on that below). It's just not possible.
But the long term can be very long. The US has not had a trade surplus in goods and services since 1975. Only 3 times in since then have we had current account surpluses (the difference being that current accounts include investment activity). If the international markets worked the way you suppose, the dollar would have fallen very low by now, but it hasn't.
Your arguments work in theory, but not in the real world, where governments act in their own interests. China, for example, has pegged their currency to the dollar at lower-than-the-market-would-have-it. So their goods are cheaper, and they get the jobs.
I've seen this several times now in articles about offshoring software. I've been through several SEI level 3 audits, and I'm pretty sure I could get a troup of monkeys to level 3 without much trouble. I've even worked in a level 5 shop.
The thing the SEI doesn't talk about, is that to actaully operate at level 5 (as opposed to get through a level 5 audit), you need to spend about 10% extra -- data collection and analysis mostly, but also experiments to evaluate new technology in a controlled way. Consequently, not many US shops care to get to level 5.
And of course, level 5 doesn't guarantee quality product, just quality process.
Its mission is that it's necessary for a sustained human presence in space - both for research and as an assembly point/stepping stone for further missions. This is only valid if there are going to be further missions. NASA has not sold that idea to the taxpayers; they haven't even made an attempt. And before anyone brings up the current Prez's "lets go to Mars," consider that the real effect of this initiative will be to kill manned flight: 1)kill shuttle by 2010 2)abandon ISS, Hubble, etc. by 2010 3)go to Mars in 2014, but only if you get the funding. I must be cynical, but I don't think 3 will happen.
What do you mean by "real" science? The kind of science you happen to do, right?, I do software, not science. But we have had humans in LEO for 40 years. We have even done some long-duration stays on orbit. There shouldn't be a whole lot left to learn. Staying in LEO for the sake of staying in LEO isn't science, but it is expensive and dangerous (we've lost 40% of the operational shuttles).
I'd sign up for an effort to terraform Mars, but not to go to Mars just to say we've been there. I'd sign up for putting massive observatories on the far side of the moon, but not for a moon base for the sake of a moon base.
Congress could and should have funded both at a reasonable level... Congress answers to many masters. Did you know that because of the way appropriation bills are organized, NASA budgets are grouped with the Veterans Administration and a couple other agencies. Early in every budget cycle, appropriation bills are given a not-to-exceed cost. So adding to NASA means, in effect, taking away from Veterans. The reality is that any increase for manned space flight means a decrease for everything else in NASA.
The bottom line is that if you want to have manned space exploration, you have to sell it to the voters. And they haven't been buying. Not for the last 30 years.
As for the decision to work with the Russians on ISS; if we hadn't done that there wouldn't BE a space station. We'd still be on the ground. Notice how the Russians currently supply: the...
And the US paid them to do all of that. One of the reasons for Russian participation in ISS was to give their rocket scientists something to do besides sell themselves to nations that might be trying to build ICBMs (such as N Korea). It would have been cheaper and faster to build the Russian contributions ourselves.
The trouble with ISS is that it has no real mission. If we really needed an experimental platform in LEO, why did we let Skylab fall? Turns out using unmanned vehicles lets you do safer and cheaper research on anything except the effect of space flight on humans. But NASA keeps marketing manned flight because they know that it sells well enough to keep their budget flowing. They push manned flight even when it kills real science.
I was working on the Earth Observing System (EOS) (also known as Mission to Planet Earth) when the ISS was given the go-ahead. ISS ate the EOS budget. It went from $15 billion, to 11, to 7, to (ISTR) 4 before I left. So we don't have the really good data that EOS would have given us on issues like global warming. Instead we have a missionless kludge that resulted from 4 (I think) down-designs.
NASA used to have visionaries and great engineers. Most of them left (or lost heart) after the end of Apollo and the end of Skylab. Now they are salesmen and bureaucrats
I admit I'm a "nerd before nerd was cool" snob. But there are a large number of people on this thread and elsewhere who seem to believe that they are entitled to a job because they have a CS/MIS/EE degree.... No job is guaranteed, other than Judgeships and Tenured Professorships. The rest of us have to pull our heads away from the computer every now and then and observe the industry trends, and continually re-mold ourselves.
You seem to think that the threat to the US software industry is to individual jobs. It isn't, it is a threat to the entire industry. When all software is done in India (or whereever is next) then there will be no jobs here. So get ready to remold yourself out of software.
The trouble is that there are no good options. Hardware design is going. Architecture (as in buildings) is going. Even financial analysis is starting to go.
When NAFTA was being debated the proponents said that displaced US workers could be retrained as knowledge workers. Guess what? Knowledge work is the easiest to outsource.
The article claims that after IT, we will move on to Creativity. Bull. If we have no local software talent, no local hardware talent, no manufacturing base, what is the basis of our creativity? Shall we all write poetry for a living? Innovation and creativity require intimate knowledge of the underlying technologies. But they are leaving.
No, I'm saying that adjusting to the realities of the economy is more important.
The realities of the economy are entirely the result of politics. Corporations were not created by God. They were created by politicians writing laws allowing business to incorporate. Change the laws, and the realities change. "Globalization" is not a force of nature. It is the result of large corporations pressuring governments (most importantly in the US) to make rules that favor corporations. The laws can be changed. But not if we all think that we are so smart and so special that people will be willing to pay us 10 times the global rate.
I think that US wages and wages in the rest of the world will equalize. The important question is how long will equalization take. If we see rapid destruction of the US upper middle class, then the whole world is in for one hell of a depression. If the US goes the way of Argentina, not even India will be safe. If equalization take a generation or two, some of us will be able to find work 10 years from now.
Newsflash #1: Carly doesn't actually RUN anything. She's the CEO of a 150,000 person company. Asking her to explain in detail any computing architecture is like asking Arnold Schwarzenegger to explain California's budget. Yeah, it's painful. She's also not the person to look to for a good explination.
Guess what, Carly is the one making the decisions. If she can't explain it, it means she bought someone's sales pitch and is operating on faith.
Back when all the cable companies were spun up on "video on demand" (VoD)(remember that?) my office mate and I spent an idle hour doing a back of the envelope analysis of whether or not it would work. It turns out that with the bandwidth of coax, and the needs of a TV signal, you can push about 500 separate TV signal down a cable. So to do VoD, you need a server farm for every 500 subscribers. And of course we don't have VoD today, do we? But the cable companies lost several billion dollars chasing the dream.
HP may be doing well, but that doesn't mean that the decision makers have a clue.
It's notable that the State does not license the professional
Sorry, doesn't wash. If I treat medical ailments for money without a license, the state will put me in jail. And I know for a fact that the Commonwealth of Virginia licenses mental health practitioners.
Do they really believe that licensing software developers will lead to more secure software?
I'm not sure they think at all. I volunteered as a reviewer of the initial SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) a few years ago. Basing licensure on the SWEBOK would have been a disaster. No design patterns. No agile methodologies. Nothing newer than the late 80s.
You can't have licenses without tests. And you can't have tests on things that are still evolving. So licensed software engineers will be expert on technologies that are 15 years old, and dead.
Alistair Cockburn advocates one methodology per project. This make perfect sense to me. I knows a several dozen ways to build software. And I tailor an approach that fits the project ==> how tight is the schedule, what is the legacy like, who do I have to work on it, how good is the customer, what is the nature of the app, etc. Write me a licensing exam on that.
Slashdot Mirror
This looks like somebody looking for funding.
My recollection is that architect came into use when system engineers (the folks that engineer systems - analyze requirements; decide on hardware, software, interfaces; write the specs; oversee integration; etc.) (many of whom have real engineering degrees) found that MS had used their job title to describe sys admins. So now RH is going to use the term architect to describe sys admins. Grrrrr...
GA is, you will recall, 100% Diebold voting machines. Which is why the loss of Max Cleland is suspecious. Leading in the immediate pre-election polls, but lost the electronic vote.
Price is determined by the market. Value is not. Perhaps the most valuable thing on the planet is air -- without it you are dead in 5 minutes. But air is free.
This particular lesson was taught to me by an SOB of a VP, but a shrewd businessman.
If only we could. Over the last ten years, India has been running pretty steady current account surpluses. Over that same time frame the US has run deficits. In a fair market the rupee would have appreciated against the dollar. Since 1995, the rupee fell by half against the dollar, and has in the last 6 months rallied to be down by only a third.
How do I compete fairly in a rigged market?
The wto (www.wto.org) has, somewhere on its web site (and I can't find it again, or I'd have given a better link) a rather balk statement that the rules are tilted to favor developing nations. The rules are the rules, but developing nations have longer to come into compliance. Also, WTO excludes labor standards and most ecological considerations from their arbitrations. So you are right, we are not on a level playing field.
Hmmm... This is contrary to what I have been hearing, that tenure is a dying concept. Lots of universities in this area hire Adjuncts. They get paid 2-4K/class, one or two classes per semester. So they need to work for several schools to make ends meet. This may not be true in engineering schools right now, but wait a while. I know that CS enrollments are dropping; I suspect that engineering will follow.
Well, that's the trouble isn't it? If Asian workers are taking what used to be $75/yr jobs in the US and doing them for $7.5K, the US workers no longer have disposable income. How do you propose to increase income in the US? And before you point to biotech as the Next Big Thing, I saw an article today that it is the next industry on its way offshore. And I'm quite sure that nanotech will be gone before it even arrives.
The trade advocates have not, and can not, tell us how the middle class in the US survives when the "knowledge workers" can only make 15K/yr. How do we prevent the US economy from doing an Argentina?
Why? because it is just a job. Employers (most of them, these days) will shed employees in a heartbeat, if they can. So a job is simple exchange of time for money, no obligations beyond two weeks. If a worker leaving puts the bosses in a bind, tough. Getting laid off puts workers in a bind.
The woman in Pakistan started making 3 cents per line. Assume a line a minute and she is getting $1.80 / hr. Two lines a minute is $3.60 / hr. I suspect that is enough of a difference.
The problem is not legal status, it is that current law (as interpreted by the Supreme Court in the late 1800s) makes a corporation the legal equivalent of a person. Therefore corporations have the same rights as you or I (except voting and campaign contibutions). They have rights of free speech, lobbying, owning other corporations. Trouble is, they don't have the same responsibilities. Wasn't Ford found guilty of negligent homicide (exploding Pintos) in the 1980s? Did Ford go to jail?
The ethics of the corporation require management to maximize shareholder equity. So Ford management calculates how much per car it takes to fix the Pinto gas tank, estimates how many people will die if there is no fix, and how much they will have to pay in wrongful death settlements. An individual who acts that way goes to jail. Not a corporation.
Then there is the problem of corporate size. When corporations get large enough, they become, essentially, above the law. The forthcoming EU ruling against Microsoft notwithstanding, is there any effective brake on Bill Gates doing whatever the hell he feels like doing?
We could easily get along without the modern corporation. Form companies (LLCs, Coops, etc) around a particular enterprise. If the enterprise does well, investors get rewarded; if not, not. But corporate chieftans would then have to be able to actually run an enterprise and make money at it, instead of making money by buying and selling other companies. It would be harder to become a billionaire, but easier to make a good living.
Are you sure? I thought Fairfax _was_ using Diebold. And there were problems with last Fall's election (VA is unusual in that state offices are elected on odd-numbered years). At least 6 electronic voting machines failed, needed to be repalced/ rebooted, ...
The papers referenced by the BBC article indicate a 70% extinction of all plankton at the K-T boundary. That's about as low in the food chain as you can go.
You left out (c) that human acitvity will be just enough to push the system out of the current equilibrium.
I wonder if, when the climate goes bonkers, God forbid, all those who opposed efforts to check global warming will make amends by living in the worst climates?
In DC's Virginia suburbs I see a lot more Hummers than working pickups. And the new Prius starts at 20K$. (with a 5 month waiting list)
IANAL, etc. The point is that you need a lawyer. This stuff varies by state.
I thought that I was living on the cutting edge of society
Wait a while, you'll get cut.
But the long term can be very long. The US has not had a trade surplus in goods and services since 1975. Only 3 times in since then have we had current account surpluses (the difference being that current accounts include investment activity). If the international markets worked the way you suppose, the dollar would have fallen very low by now, but it hasn't.
Your arguments work in theory, but not in the real world, where governments act in their own interests. China, for example, has pegged their currency to the dollar at lower-than-the-market-would-have-it. So their goods are cheaper, and they get the jobs.
The thing the SEI doesn't talk about, is that to actaully operate at level 5 (as opposed to get through a level 5 audit), you need to spend about 10% extra -- data collection and analysis mostly, but also experiments to evaluate new technology in a controlled way. Consequently, not many US shops care to get to level 5.
And of course, level 5 doesn't guarantee quality product, just quality process.
This is only valid if there are going to be further missions. NASA has not sold that idea to the taxpayers; they haven't even made an attempt. And before anyone brings up the current Prez's "lets go to Mars," consider that the real effect of this initiative will be to kill manned flight:
1)kill shuttle by 2010
2)abandon ISS, Hubble, etc. by 2010
3)go to Mars in 2014, but only if you get the funding. I must be cynical, but I don't think 3 will happen.
What do you mean by "real" science? The kind of science you happen to do, right?,
I do software, not science. But we have had humans in LEO for 40 years. We have even done some long-duration stays on orbit. There shouldn't be a whole lot left to learn. Staying in LEO for the sake of staying in LEO isn't science, but it is expensive and dangerous (we've lost 40% of the operational shuttles).
I'd sign up for an effort to terraform Mars, but not to go to Mars just to say we've been there. I'd sign up for putting massive observatories on the far side of the moon, but not for a moon base for the sake of a moon base.
Congress could and should have funded both at a reasonable level...
Congress answers to many masters. Did you know that because of the way appropriation bills are organized, NASA budgets are grouped with the Veterans Administration and a couple other agencies. Early in every budget cycle, appropriation bills are given a not-to-exceed cost. So adding to NASA means, in effect, taking away from Veterans. The reality is that any increase for manned space flight means a decrease for everything else in NASA.
The bottom line is that if you want to have manned space exploration, you have to sell it to the voters. And they haven't been buying. Not for the last 30 years.
And the US paid them to do all of that. One of the reasons for Russian participation in ISS was to give their rocket scientists something to do besides sell themselves to nations that might be trying to build ICBMs (such as N Korea). It would have been cheaper and faster to build the Russian contributions ourselves.
The trouble with ISS is that it has no real mission. If we really needed an experimental platform in LEO, why did we let Skylab fall? Turns out using unmanned vehicles lets you do safer and cheaper research on anything except the effect of space flight on humans. But NASA keeps marketing manned flight because they know that it sells well enough to keep their budget flowing. They push manned flight even when it kills real science.
I was working on the Earth Observing System (EOS) (also known as Mission to Planet Earth) when the ISS was given the go-ahead. ISS ate the EOS budget. It went from $15 billion, to 11, to 7, to (ISTR) 4 before I left. So we don't have the really good data that EOS would have given us on issues like global warming. Instead we have a missionless kludge that resulted from 4 (I think) down-designs.
NASA used to have visionaries and great engineers. Most of them left (or lost heart) after the end of Apollo and the end of Skylab. Now they are salesmen and bureaucrats
I admit I'm a "nerd before nerd was cool" snob. But there are a large number of people on this thread and elsewhere who seem to believe that they are entitled to a job because they have a CS/MIS/EE degree. ... No job is guaranteed, other than Judgeships and Tenured Professorships. The rest of us have to pull our heads away from the computer every now and then and observe the industry trends, and continually re-mold ourselves.
You seem to think that the threat to the US software industry is to individual jobs. It isn't, it is a threat to the entire industry. When all software is done in India (or whereever is next) then there will be no jobs here. So get ready to remold yourself out of software.
The trouble is that there are no good options. Hardware design is going. Architecture (as in buildings) is going. Even financial analysis is starting to go.
When NAFTA was being debated the proponents said that displaced US workers could be retrained as knowledge workers. Guess what? Knowledge work is the easiest to outsource.
The article claims that after IT, we will move on to Creativity. Bull. If we have no local software talent, no local hardware talent, no manufacturing base, what is the basis of our creativity? Shall we all write poetry for a living? Innovation and creativity require intimate knowledge of the underlying technologies. But they are leaving.
No, I'm saying that adjusting to the realities of the economy is more important.
The realities of the economy are entirely the result of politics. Corporations were not created by God. They were created by politicians writing laws allowing business to incorporate. Change the laws, and the realities change. "Globalization" is not a force of nature. It is the result of large corporations pressuring governments (most importantly in the US) to make rules that favor corporations. The laws can be changed. But not if we all think that we are so smart and so special that people will be willing to pay us 10 times the global rate.
I think that US wages and wages in the rest of the world will equalize. The important question is how long will equalization take. If we see rapid destruction of the US upper middle class, then the whole world is in for one hell of a depression. If the US goes the way of Argentina, not even India will be safe. If equalization take a generation or two, some of us will be able to find work 10 years from now.
Guess what, Carly is the one making the decisions. If she can't explain it, it means she bought someone's sales pitch and is operating on faith.
Back when all the cable companies were spun up on "video on demand" (VoD)(remember that?) my office mate and I spent an idle hour doing a back of the envelope analysis of whether or not it would work. It turns out that with the bandwidth of coax, and the needs of a TV signal, you can push about 500 separate TV signal down a cable. So to do VoD, you need a server farm for every 500 subscribers. And of course we don't have VoD today, do we? But the cable companies lost several billion dollars chasing the dream.
HP may be doing well, but that doesn't mean that the decision makers have a clue.
Sorry, doesn't wash. If I treat medical ailments for money without a license, the state will put me in jail. And I know for a fact that the Commonwealth of Virginia licenses mental health practitioners.
I'm not sure they think at all. I volunteered as a reviewer of the initial SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) a few years ago. Basing licensure on the SWEBOK would have been a disaster. No design patterns. No agile methodologies. Nothing newer than the late 80s.
You can't have licenses without tests. And you can't have tests on things that are still evolving. So licensed software engineers will be expert on technologies that are 15 years old, and dead.
Alistair Cockburn advocates one methodology per project. This make perfect sense to me. I knows a several dozen ways to build software. And I tailor an approach that fits the project ==> how tight is the schedule, what is the legacy like, who do I have to work on it, how good is the customer, what is the nature of the app, etc. Write me a licensing exam on that.