I have found most Americans that have SUVs have them for the combination of two needs: They need to tow things sometimes (boat/trailer) so a more powerful engine is needed that is only found in trucks/SUVs and they have more kids than can legally fit into a car. 50 years ago if you had more then two kids you just crammed them in whereever. Now you are required by law to have each child in a government approved car seat that takes up half the car AND have them all in the back seat. Most cars cannot fit more than two child seats (properly secured).
The factor you seem to be missing is the effect this type of system has on human behavior. When you have a choice and choose to have insurance or pay out of pocket, there is responsibility attached. You chose to go to the doctor only when you need to and your costs [should] remain reasonable. Once your healthcare becomes free (to those who leech off the system) or forced on you, then your human nature will no longer care how much that resource is used (or abused). At which time doctors become overwhelmed with people complaining about every little ache or pain just because they can. Some good friends of mine are firemen and see the ugly side of this sort of behavior every day. They get called out to some lady's house and take her by ambulance to the ER. Why? Because she is on state programs anyway, doesn't drive and she needed to get a prescription filled and she knows that somebody else will have to pay for it in the end. Cheaper to call 911 for her then a Taxi. So probably a $10,000 bill between ambulance, ER and related charges for a $50 prescription that all ends up getting paid through government mandated medical cost "taxes". This stuff happens every single day. You no longer have to wonder why healthcare costs are so high. My point is that "obamacare" obviously does not remedy this sort of situation, only make it available for more people and encourage them to abuse the system too.
Not quite. Currently they are only paying for essentially the people that know how to "work the system" and some other people who actually need assistance. With this universal law, now they will be paying for everyone regardless.
This was actually tried in Washington state back in '93. First insurance premiums went up substantially (up to 400% in same cases by '97) causing a significant number of people to end up without insurance anyway. By '99 all the private insurers had thrown up their hands and pulled out of the state leaving only the state run programs to "insure" people. This was a complete disaster and in '00 the legislature repealed most of the law and now there are some private insurers back again. Medicare and Medicaid have already put this country into a financial situation that is probably unrecoverable. This will only accelerate a full on budget disaster. Quick background: comparatively speaking, the US had more debt after WWII then we do now. But we were able to pay much of it off in the years after the war. But at that time, 1/3 of the total federal budget was not paying for Medicare/Medicaid because those programs did not exist yet. Fast forward to today, and you have a situation where between those parasite programs, essential programs and interest, we are in a hole that probably cannot be escaped. War spending is only adding insult to injury. 4 years ago, with some drastic actions it was still possible to escape the debt black hole. Today, it's a 99% certainty that our economy will experience a complete economic collapse (Greek style) at some point in the future (the only question is how long we can maintain the status quo before that happens).
Stargoat's answer is pretty good. I'll add the next step above that for when you just cant have stuff do down: hardware virtualization with clustering. You can do this with VMware, but it's expensive and you need a dedicated High Availability SAN which is $$$$$$. I have implemented a simple version running SAN software with failover on top of normal servers (Starwind does this and has some cool features). But the best solution would be the new fully integrated solutions that are coming out like this: http://scalecomputing.com/hc3/
No matter how you slice it, it's expensive to do it right. That's just the nature of high availability. After many years of trying to do high availability "on the cheap". I can authoritatively say that there is no "silver bullet".
You are not going to get rich working for my company or the company across the street. But of the salaries I am aware of (I am an engineer, not HR), all are competitive for the region and should pay the bills with some left over for living life along with good benefits. I live in a nice house and drive decent cars, living the American dream as it were. I am sure the situation you are describing is happening in places. But where I am at, it really is about the skills. I get cold calls from recruiters almost weekly asking if I am available or know anybody with similar skills. And everybody I know that has technology skills, from friends to former co-workers, is making at least what their skill level is worth if not more. On the other hand, friends in construction and service trades are scrapping for anything they can find. My former next door neighbor used to own a heating and cooling business, now he works for a yard maintenance company just to try to pay his family's bills. I say former because he had to short sell his house and move to a cheaper house.
with all that said, "competent" doesn't necessarily mean skilled. It can also mean "teachable". The products of the public school system here tend to be neither of those things. They learn how to ride skateboards, sext, have sex with each other and do drugs while retaining enough facts to pass some tests and get a school grade. They don't learn how to think for themselves, think analytically, or make appropriate decisions based on available information. And given that my stepmother is a public school teacher, I can say with some personal experience that it's usually not about the teachers, but rather the system they must work in that is failing them and all their students.
The company I work for does this when possible, and so does the company across the street that we work with sometimes. It's almost as difficult to find "competent" workers without skills as it is to find competent workers with skills. Kids these days seem to think they can bullsh1t their way through anything without actually putting in any work, just like they did in high school and sometimes college. The current U.S. educational system is a complete and utter failure when it comes to producing a good worker. There are those that come out good despite the system, or from private/alternate educational backgrounds. But we have not seen a single "competent" applicant come through our doors from the mainstream public educational system in the past 5 years. The competent entry level employees we have hired (e.g. lasted more then a month or two) either went to private schools or received a significant portion of their education in other countries.
Maybe...but I am not so sure it's so irrational. In general, Win CE has sucked donkey ass. This suckage went on for long enough that we, as a customer base, have been trained to think of any mobile OS from Microsoft as something to be ignored. No matter how "good" a new mobile OS from Microsoft is, they will struggle to get people like us to pay attention now. Given that the new phones suffered from some ugly bugs out of the gate, and carriers were having to give them away to get people on the platform, they have even more negative thought capitol to overcome. Beyond that, smart phones with few apps tend to get ignored. That's a chicken and egg problem since you need interest for lots of apps to get built, but you need apps to get interest. A tough situation for Microsoft, but that's the way it is. Maybe if they threw enough of their $billions at it, they can overcome the hurdles, but no matter what that sort of situation does not change overnight.
That version of the z-drive is not yet on the shelves, but the previous version of it sells for about $5,000 for 800GB.
The z-Drives are just an LSI SAS RAID card with 4 SSDs soldered directly onto the board in a RAID 0 configuration. (Later models have the SSDs as removable modules so it's easier to replace one if a chip goes bad). We have two of them that we used in a software RAID 1 configuration for hosting databases under heavy load. They are the original model of z-drive but they can still kick some serious ass on IOPS. Uptime is a big deal for us though and that configuration was not ideal so we replaced them with Adaptec 5 series SAS RAID cards (the most powerful SAS hardware RAID cards at the time we purchased) and discrete hot-swap SSD drives. These likewise kick some serious ass in both raw bandwidth and IOPS. The key is to have a RAID card with a chip that can handle high IOPS. The latest dual core RAID chips can do even more.
Not quite right. The current generation of SSDs (Intel 520 and others) are already pushing the bandwidth limits of SATA 3.0 (600MB/s including overhead) and are already leaving USB3 (400MB/s including overhead) in the dust now. And that is just a single disk. If you want to attach a DAS RAID for high bandwidth media editing or whatever, you better be using SAS for dedicated bandwidth to each disk or you are wasting your time. USB3.0 is worlds better then 2.0 was for storage, but it's already been outpaced by drives and SATA will soon be in the same boat.
I disagree to a degree. While CP is despicable stuff. And those who watch/make/distribute it deserve an especially painful spot in hell. No laws should be enacted in such a way that the only way to catch people who violate the law is to trample everyone's right to privacy on some governmental witch hunt. Doing so just invites other less moral people to abuse the system and innocent people's rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to be taken away. Especially there should be no law against possessing it, since it's way too easy in the electronic age to have it present on your computer without your knowledge. And once it's made, the damage is done. Punishing someone for their deviant interests is getting into the "thought crime" realm. The focus should be on preventing the stuff from being made in the first place...which means PARENTS being INTERESTED in their kids and knowing what's going on with them. If more parents actually had some relationship with their kids they would find out when these things happen and turn in the offender (the way it should work, as opposed to FBI witch hunts).
Also, tell him to consider entry level government jobs. The pay is usually not that great to start, but does get better and the benefits are great. And some times government technology jobs that require a degree don't specify that it has to be a CS degree.
Yes, as a senior software engineer with no degree, I can say that certs definitely help. Yes, they don't mean much really, but they make your resume more attractive than the stack of resumes with no degree and no certs. Some employers won't even give you the time of day if you don't have a degree. The ones that will consider applicants with no degree have to wade through mountains of resumes from all sorts of riff raff that think they can bullsh1t their way into a job. Anything that makes your resume possibly look better then the next guy's and seem more legit increases your chances of getting an interview and ultimately the job.
The whole representation issue aside. Since when has the UN been given authority to tax anything? Member states pay membership fees to finance the UN. I have never seen anything giving the UN body the authority to tax or tariff.
What you meant to say is that "there are workarounds for the difficulties". Any way you slice it, it is still a PITA...either to deal with it directly or implement the workarounds. I wish they could have come up with a more sane implementation.
Your attitude is part of the problem. There are lots of people who think "that's easy...I can pick up a manual and write code". And this is true to a certain point...but experience is required to know how to write GOOD code. If the only requirement is X lines of code, we can easily hire that out to some sweat shop in India. The shop I work in caters to customers who expect quality, not quantity. It takes a minimum of 6 months of close mentoring to get an entry level programmer trained up enough to write any decent code on their own, and a couple years of supervision and mentoring under senior programmers before they are "journeyman" level typically. When you only have a 6 month or less project/contract, you usually can't even consider entry level people because they would be more of a drain on the project then a help. The problem is still a lack of SKILLED people. You may have learned some programming concepts, but that is a far cry from having skills. Just like you wouldn't read some books on karate/kung fu/whatever and expect to win a fight with Chuck Norris.
The best advice I could give to anyone wanting to get into this business is to get experience any way you can. Pick a problem, even if it's been done before, and create your own program/database/ect to solve it. Volunteer on a project for a not-for-profit. Ask a programmer you know if you can look over their shoulder on some code and then try the concepts you see by yourself. You gain skills by doing/practicing.
There is a balance. While some companies do ask for too much in job postings. My company was accused of asking too much in job postings on several occasions when we were just posting for an average dev position. We didn't even require a degree. The people complaining just didn't have the skills. And that is really the problem...a lack of SKILLED IT labor in the U.S.. The people who have IS degrees and anyone else with decent experience is pretty universally employed. (depending on location...sometimes the labor is not in the same place as the jobs.) But in this area there just is not enough people with the needed skills. We get tons of applicants...but I am sorry, playing WOW all day long and downloading lots of porn via bittorrent does not make you skilled programmer. We need people who can at least code their way out of a paper bag.
Actually it's fundamentally less secure (and less reliable for what that is worth) due to the fact that all email must go through RIM's servers instead of going directly to the phone.
Given the similarities between Elon Musk and Tony Stark I figure it's only a matter of time before something is weaponized....despite Elon's denial that he has a iron suit...
I hesitate to speculate on what's happening over at Yahoo. But whatever it is, it can't be good, and hasn't been good for a long time. The "new" yahoo mail is shiite. I used to use yahoo bookmarks to keep track of links wherever I might be...they "upgraded" that and now it's dog slow and won't even allow you to view bookmarks if you have more then a certain amount per folder. Completely useless. The Yahoo "toolbar" has caused problems with more computers then I can count. First thing I do when my friends/family bring me their "slow" computer is uninstall that crap. So far not one had said they actually used it. I could go on, but you get the idea. Lots of code, with no quality in sight.
The cars were being driven in the same commuting conditions in fact. These co-workers live in the same town and (obviously) commute to the same place of work (actually they car-pool most of the time, alternating vehicles). Other then the alternating drivers, you can't really get a more "ceteris paribus" real world comparison then that. And the TDI still did best despite it's primary driver having a bit more of a "lead foot" then the Prius's primary driver.
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I have found most Americans that have SUVs have them for the combination of two needs: They need to tow things sometimes (boat/trailer) so a more powerful engine is needed that is only found in trucks/SUVs and they have more kids than can legally fit into a car. 50 years ago if you had more then two kids you just crammed them in whereever. Now you are required by law to have each child in a government approved car seat that takes up half the car AND have them all in the back seat. Most cars cannot fit more than two child seats (properly secured).
The factor you seem to be missing is the effect this type of system has on human behavior. When you have a choice and choose to have insurance or pay out of pocket, there is responsibility attached. You chose to go to the doctor only when you need to and your costs [should] remain reasonable. Once your healthcare becomes free (to those who leech off the system) or forced on you, then your human nature will no longer care how much that resource is used (or abused). At which time doctors become overwhelmed with people complaining about every little ache or pain just because they can. Some good friends of mine are firemen and see the ugly side of this sort of behavior every day. They get called out to some lady's house and take her by ambulance to the ER. Why? Because she is on state programs anyway, doesn't drive and she needed to get a prescription filled and she knows that somebody else will have to pay for it in the end. Cheaper to call 911 for her then a Taxi. So probably a $10,000 bill between ambulance, ER and related charges for a $50 prescription that all ends up getting paid through government mandated medical cost "taxes". This stuff happens every single day. You no longer have to wonder why healthcare costs are so high. My point is that "obamacare" obviously does not remedy this sort of situation, only make it available for more people and encourage them to abuse the system too.
Much like my women, I like my clients to have a little substance to them.
Not quite. Currently they are only paying for essentially the people that know how to "work the system" and some other people who actually need assistance. With this universal law, now they will be paying for everyone regardless.
This was actually tried in Washington state back in '93. First insurance premiums went up substantially (up to 400% in same cases by '97) causing a significant number of people to end up without insurance anyway. By '99 all the private insurers had thrown up their hands and pulled out of the state leaving only the state run programs to "insure" people. This was a complete disaster and in '00 the legislature repealed most of the law and now there are some private insurers back again. Medicare and Medicaid have already put this country into a financial situation that is probably unrecoverable. This will only accelerate a full on budget disaster. Quick background: comparatively speaking, the US had more debt after WWII then we do now. But we were able to pay much of it off in the years after the war. But at that time, 1/3 of the total federal budget was not paying for Medicare/Medicaid because those programs did not exist yet. Fast forward to today, and you have a situation where between those parasite programs, essential programs and interest, we are in a hole that probably cannot be escaped. War spending is only adding insult to injury. 4 years ago, with some drastic actions it was still possible to escape the debt black hole. Today, it's a 99% certainty that our economy will experience a complete economic collapse (Greek style) at some point in the future (the only question is how long we can maintain the status quo before that happens).
Stargoat's answer is pretty good. I'll add the next step above that for when you just cant have stuff do down: hardware virtualization with clustering. You can do this with VMware, but it's expensive and you need a dedicated High Availability SAN which is $$$$$$. I have implemented a simple version running SAN software with failover on top of normal servers (Starwind does this and has some cool features). But the best solution would be the new fully integrated solutions that are coming out like this: http://scalecomputing.com/hc3/
No matter how you slice it, it's expensive to do it right. That's just the nature of high availability. After many years of trying to do high availability "on the cheap". I can authoritatively say that there is no "silver bullet".
I don't see any distinction between the two in the IT field (which is what we are talking about here).
You are not going to get rich working for my company or the company across the street. But of the salaries I am aware of (I am an engineer, not HR), all are competitive for the region and should pay the bills with some left over for living life along with good benefits. I live in a nice house and drive decent cars, living the American dream as it were. I am sure the situation you are describing is happening in places. But where I am at, it really is about the skills. I get cold calls from recruiters almost weekly asking if I am available or know anybody with similar skills. And everybody I know that has technology skills, from friends to former co-workers, is making at least what their skill level is worth if not more. On the other hand, friends in construction and service trades are scrapping for anything they can find. My former next door neighbor used to own a heating and cooling business, now he works for a yard maintenance company just to try to pay his family's bills. I say former because he had to short sell his house and move to a cheaper house.
with all that said, "competent" doesn't necessarily mean skilled. It can also mean "teachable". The products of the public school system here tend to be neither of those things. They learn how to ride skateboards, sext, have sex with each other and do drugs while retaining enough facts to pass some tests and get a school grade. They don't learn how to think for themselves, think analytically, or make appropriate decisions based on available information. And given that my stepmother is a public school teacher, I can say with some personal experience that it's usually not about the teachers, but rather the system they must work in that is failing them and all their students.
The company I work for does this when possible, and so does the company across the street that we work with sometimes. It's almost as difficult to find "competent" workers without skills as it is to find competent workers with skills. Kids these days seem to think they can bullsh1t their way through anything without actually putting in any work, just like they did in high school and sometimes college. The current U.S. educational system is a complete and utter failure when it comes to producing a good worker. There are those that come out good despite the system, or from private/alternate educational backgrounds. But we have not seen a single "competent" applicant come through our doors from the mainstream public educational system in the past 5 years. The competent entry level employees we have hired (e.g. lasted more then a month or two) either went to private schools or received a significant portion of their education in other countries.
Maybe...but I am not so sure it's so irrational. In general, Win CE has sucked donkey ass. This suckage went on for long enough that we, as a customer base, have been trained to think of any mobile OS from Microsoft as something to be ignored. No matter how "good" a new mobile OS from Microsoft is, they will struggle to get people like us to pay attention now. Given that the new phones suffered from some ugly bugs out of the gate, and carriers were having to give them away to get people on the platform, they have even more negative thought capitol to overcome. Beyond that, smart phones with few apps tend to get ignored. That's a chicken and egg problem since you need interest for lots of apps to get built, but you need apps to get interest. A tough situation for Microsoft, but that's the way it is. Maybe if they threw enough of their $billions at it, they can overcome the hurdles, but no matter what that sort of situation does not change overnight.
That version of the z-drive is not yet on the shelves, but the previous version of it sells for about $5,000 for 800GB.
The z-Drives are just an LSI SAS RAID card with 4 SSDs soldered directly onto the board in a RAID 0 configuration. (Later models have the SSDs as removable modules so it's easier to replace one if a chip goes bad). We have two of them that we used in a software RAID 1 configuration for hosting databases under heavy load. They are the original model of z-drive but they can still kick some serious ass on IOPS. Uptime is a big deal for us though and that configuration was not ideal so we replaced them with Adaptec 5 series SAS RAID cards (the most powerful SAS hardware RAID cards at the time we purchased) and discrete hot-swap SSD drives. These likewise kick some serious ass in both raw bandwidth and IOPS. The key is to have a RAID card with a chip that can handle high IOPS. The latest dual core RAID chips can do even more.
Not quite right. The current generation of SSDs (Intel 520 and others) are already pushing the bandwidth limits of SATA 3.0 (600MB/s including overhead) and are already leaving USB3 (400MB/s including overhead) in the dust now. And that is just a single disk. If you want to attach a DAS RAID for high bandwidth media editing or whatever, you better be using SAS for dedicated bandwidth to each disk or you are wasting your time. USB3.0 is worlds better then 2.0 was for storage, but it's already been outpaced by drives and SATA will soon be in the same boat.
I disagree to a degree. While CP is despicable stuff. And those who watch/make/distribute it deserve an especially painful spot in hell. No laws should be enacted in such a way that the only way to catch people who violate the law is to trample everyone's right to privacy on some governmental witch hunt. Doing so just invites other less moral people to abuse the system and innocent people's rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to be taken away. Especially there should be no law against possessing it, since it's way too easy in the electronic age to have it present on your computer without your knowledge. And once it's made, the damage is done. Punishing someone for their deviant interests is getting into the "thought crime" realm. The focus should be on preventing the stuff from being made in the first place...which means PARENTS being INTERESTED in their kids and knowing what's going on with them. If more parents actually had some relationship with their kids they would find out when these things happen and turn in the offender (the way it should work, as opposed to FBI witch hunts).
Also, tell him to consider entry level government jobs. The pay is usually not that great to start, but does get better and the benefits are great. And some times government technology jobs that require a degree don't specify that it has to be a CS degree.
Yes, as a senior software engineer with no degree, I can say that certs definitely help. Yes, they don't mean much really, but they make your resume more attractive than the stack of resumes with no degree and no certs. Some employers won't even give you the time of day if you don't have a degree. The ones that will consider applicants with no degree have to wade through mountains of resumes from all sorts of riff raff that think they can bullsh1t their way into a job. Anything that makes your resume possibly look better then the next guy's and seem more legit increases your chances of getting an interview and ultimately the job.
The whole representation issue aside. Since when has the UN been given authority to tax anything? Member states pay membership fees to finance the UN. I have never seen anything giving the UN body the authority to tax or tariff.
What you meant to say is that "there are workarounds for the difficulties". Any way you slice it, it is still a PITA...either to deal with it directly or implement the workarounds. I wish they could have come up with a more sane implementation.
Chavez just wants his place in the hall of fame...
It's and illustration. Duh, everyone knows it's un-possible to beat Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris fact of the day: Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table of elements because he only recognizes the element of surprise.
Your attitude is part of the problem. There are lots of people who think "that's easy...I can pick up a manual and write code". And this is true to a certain point...but experience is required to know how to write GOOD code. If the only requirement is X lines of code, we can easily hire that out to some sweat shop in India. The shop I work in caters to customers who expect quality, not quantity. It takes a minimum of 6 months of close mentoring to get an entry level programmer trained up enough to write any decent code on their own, and a couple years of supervision and mentoring under senior programmers before they are "journeyman" level typically. When you only have a 6 month or less project/contract, you usually can't even consider entry level people because they would be more of a drain on the project then a help. The problem is still a lack of SKILLED people. You may have learned some programming concepts, but that is a far cry from having skills. Just like you wouldn't read some books on karate/kung fu/whatever and expect to win a fight with Chuck Norris.
The best advice I could give to anyone wanting to get into this business is to get experience any way you can. Pick a problem, even if it's been done before, and create your own program/database/ect to solve it. Volunteer on a project for a not-for-profit. Ask a programmer you know if you can look over their shoulder on some code and then try the concepts you see by yourself. You gain skills by doing/practicing.
There is a balance. While some companies do ask for too much in job postings. My company was accused of asking too much in job postings on several occasions when we were just posting for an average dev position. We didn't even require a degree. The people complaining just didn't have the skills. And that is really the problem...a lack of SKILLED IT labor in the U.S.. The people who have IS degrees and anyone else with decent experience is pretty universally employed. (depending on location...sometimes the labor is not in the same place as the jobs.) But in this area there just is not enough people with the needed skills. We get tons of applicants...but I am sorry, playing WOW all day long and downloading lots of porn via bittorrent does not make you skilled programmer. We need people who can at least code their way out of a paper bag.
Actually it's fundamentally less secure (and less reliable for what that is worth) due to the fact that all email must go through RIM's servers instead of going directly to the phone.
Given the similarities between Elon Musk and Tony Stark I figure it's only a matter of time before something is weaponized....despite Elon's denial that he has a iron suit...
I hesitate to speculate on what's happening over at Yahoo. But whatever it is, it can't be good, and hasn't been good for a long time. The "new" yahoo mail is shiite. I used to use yahoo bookmarks to keep track of links wherever I might be...they "upgraded" that and now it's dog slow and won't even allow you to view bookmarks if you have more then a certain amount per folder. Completely useless. The Yahoo "toolbar" has caused problems with more computers then I can count. First thing I do when my friends/family bring me their "slow" computer is uninstall that crap. So far not one had said they actually used it. I could go on, but you get the idea. Lots of code, with no quality in sight.
The cars were being driven in the same commuting conditions in fact. These co-workers live in the same town and (obviously) commute to the same place of work (actually they car-pool most of the time, alternating vehicles). Other then the alternating drivers, you can't really get a more "ceteris paribus" real world comparison then that. And the TDI still did best despite it's primary driver having a bit more of a "lead foot" then the Prius's primary driver.
He's working on it... http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/20/1922248/elon-musk-future-round-trip-to-mars-could-cost-under-500000