My apologies if I've mischaracterized you. But, you have to realize that your statment They don't necessarily know whether they have SCO or Linux. reads like it is straight out of the SCO FUD manual. Furthermore, if that is truly the case with your clients, then I'd suggest you have an ethical obligation to get out there and educate them. And yes, I've done consulting, so I've been in your shoes.
There's a strong possibility that neither SCO nor Linux will go away as a result of SCO's lawsuits or any of the current counter-suits. But things will probably change. You are obligated not only to inform but also to convey some understanding of both the short- and long-term risks associated with each product.
OTOH, if you were simply generalizing and really didn't have any one client in mind, you can ignore all this.
Show of hands: who believes that Tony's business probably runs on pirated Microsoft products?
From his web site we learn that he's a SCO reseller. This makes what he said one of the more interesting twists taken on the SCO-apologist soapbox, IMO.
NASA said that it was worried about sending more maned missions up to the hubble since it is in a different orbit than the space station and if the mission is botched the shuttle would not be able to reach the station in an emergency.
Hubble is 375 miles up; ISS is 240-ish. Wouldn't getting from Hubble to ISS just be a controlled reduction in orbital speed to dropped the altitude? Or, reading a bit between the lines, is the real issue that the shuttles don't have any purely manual thrusters that can be operated without the core systems running?
What I'm really curious about is Lindows. They apparently have the right to distribute Linux, but SCO's FUD is likely to be hurting them as well even though SCO seems to have indicated that Lindows is safe. If SCO were to win, I think Lindows would be driven out of existence in short order. I wonder if Lindows will file as well.
If SCO wanted to take on Lindows, they would also, indirectly, be taking on Wal-Mart. Not exactly a prudent move, from a PR or a cash-flow basis, I would think.
The results at Kamiokande that show neutrino mixing (and thus that they have mass) are very interesting
I thought that was the result, but could recall for certain, and I knew I wasn't going to get the spelling anywhere near right to surf for it. Thanks for the confirmation.
Actually, the outstanding question is whether or not neutrinos have mass. If they do, then the need for Dark Matter[tm] goes away. If they don't, we still have brown dwarf stars, undiscovered planets, and the effects of elector-magnetic currents on stars still not quite 100% accounted for within the current cosmological model.
Dark Matter, as an esoteric, non-euclidian form of matter, is still, IMO, nothing more than the late 20th century equivalent of the luminiferous aether of the 19th century, and merely a convenient algorythmic placeholder, until proven otherwise. Furthermore, without answering either the question on neutrino mass or dark matter, saying we know how the universe is going to end is just so much posturing for marketing's sake, and really poor science.
It's a play on words. The plays of Shakespeare are filled with word-play--something which anyone who has actually read Shakespeare would know.
This was something either done by him, or one of the men behind the penname, as two of the presently popular postulated possibilities participated in the process; or, it was done as a sort of tribute to Shakespeare. Thus is it more than mere coincidence.
Shakespeare appears twice in the 46th Psalm, as "shake" and "spear". If you count the number of words from the beginning and ending, noting at which numbers "shake" and "spear" occur and add them together, they equal 46. Shakespeare, according to his traditional birthdate, would have been 46 in 1611 when the KJV was published.
Our government is incapible of becoming like Orwell's 1984. They cant even keep their system straight
It will be much more like Brazil, with papers and people lost within a system more concerned about avoiding responsibility for screw-ups than actually doing anything productive or benefitial.
For most of the USA, it would be very hard to get a job for more than $60K per year, unless it is a genuine engineering job or a high-level department lead position.
I already have a job at more than 60k per year. I'm labeled a senior unix admin, I don't supervise anyone, and try as I may to work with C, the only programming I've really done that is live is shell scripting, html, and some perl. However, I also have a BS CIS and 16 years experience.
I think some of the current economic conditions are reflective of the fact that low- and mid-level salaried jobs in IT disappeared faster and in greater numbers than the higher paying ones did--except of course for the ubiquitous web developers who were pulling down six figures back in 97-98 and today, are not.
My areas of expertise include HP-UX and AIX, not just Linux. So yes, I would expect to be able to find work. I would also expect to have to look for it and shop my resume around and make use of former co-workers and other inside contacts.
Also, at $150/hr at 30 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, that's $225k. Once you deduct income tax, SS tax, health insurance, business insurance, and travel expenses, the net would only be around $110k - $120k. It's not as unrealistic a picture as you painted.
I charged a nice $20 dollars an hour deal, with extra charges for hardware replacement, software installation. My little business was able to "boom" simply because I was cheaper. All the freelance techs out there now think, "Hey, I'm so 'elite' I can charge $75 an hour!" Wrong.
The hourly rate one can charge depends entirely on what skills one has and the type of work being done for whom. If I had to go it alone, being a Unix System Admin, I wouldn't dream of charging less than $100/hr, and mostly likely closer to twice that. I also would try to concentrate on the Fortune 5000 types of corporations, as those are the guys with the money to burn. Of course, I'd only work about 30 hours a week as a result, but much of that would likely be 2nd or 3rd shift. Those are the hours critcal work is best done, and leaves the regular staff (if any) available for the 9 - 5 routine.
Is there a compelling reason to believe that computer/robot technology won't reach the point where most basic service jobs can be (almost) entirely automated? Think food service, janitorial, banking, etc.
Yes. Customer service cannot be automated. A fully automated McD's = high tech vending machine. For people who want a restaraunt experience on a limited budget, you need a person there to help provide that experience, because a significant part of what we conceptualize as "restaraunt" includes human interaction.
There are similar analogies in other industries. Robotics may acheive as high as a 90% saturation rate within the workforces of certain manual labor based industries, but not 100%. And I am not counting the management or robot maintenance folks either.
Is there a compelling reason to believe that this technology will remain too costly or inconvenient for employers to adopt it?
It's not a question of "if", only of "to what degree". 100% automation is not financially practical, but then it very most likely is not going to be necessary. The other aspect you are ignoring it the requirements of the market. Certain segments of the econonmy will mandate a human presence; some from the supply (business) side, some from the demand (consumer) side. The flip-side of your point is that throughout history business has adopted technology that was more expensive than the labor it replaced only because of market demands.
If (1) and (2), is there some compelling reason why employers will choose not to adopt a cheaper, more convenient technology for these purposes, in order to increase their profits?
Most likely not, but then your statement above is hardly all-encompassing. Contractual and regulatory issues are the two immediate flys for that ointment that come to mind.
The 50 year prediction may be off by quite a lot. But over some reasonable time span (less than a couple of centuries, barring global disaster), the technology will be available and-- assuming our economic system remains similar to what we have today-- it will be in use.
That's a lot of assumptions. Spin the way-back machine to the 1880's, roughly the same point in the coal & steam-based industrial revolution that we are in the electronics revolution, an apply that reasoning. You wouldn't arrive at where we are today.
You'll get alot of advice. Some will be good, some will be bad. Some you will follow, some you will not.
Change your life-style. As you get older, your body will thank you. Do the sit-up/push-up routine in the morning and at night at home. Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
Eat better: cut the carbs, cut the sugar and sweets, limit your beer consumption to 3 nights a week or less and limit how much you drink when you do.
Drink more water. Where you'd normally grab a soda or sports drink, have some water instead. Your body needs it, and there's zero calories. And drink more of it. Buy a gallon of spring or distilled water for at home. See how long it takes you to go through it. If it's more than 3-4 days, you aren't drinking enough water (or, you are simply never at home).
Hit yard sales. Buy a bike. Buy a stationary bike and ride it when watching TV. Buy some free weights. Even just 10 pound hand weights can be useful. They won't make you buff, but they will help you burn calories and tone-up some. Skip-over the abercisers, the nordic traks and the bowflexes. You don't need another expensive dust collector.
Walk. Walk to the store, walk around the block, walk to work if you can do it and still be on time.
Some of this may work, some of it won't. In the end you are only competing against yourself.
Google is just another tool. Like any tool, it's not responsibile for the level of skill of the user. A tool may have all the whiz-bang capability in the world, but if the weilder is lacking in skill, then none of that function matters.
The MSN article was ridiculously lame. If you want to find DVD reviews, search on "DVD +review" and you'll get pages of them, starting with the very first page. In other words, in order to effectively use Google, or any search engine, one has to know how to construct the query. Expecting a single word search to discriminate down to the level of detail that any given person wants is hopelessly naive. Besides, Google has never made any prestence about having a commercial slant.
MSN's apparent expectation that google ought to accomodate those with enough skill to get on-line, but not much more than that, is just more of their corporate bias leaking through.
couldn't a good lawyer argue that the crime was done and the time period where SCO was releasing their code under the GPL was to give them time to "tie up loose ends" with that product line while minimizing the negative impact on their bottom line? It seems like a "victim" of such "theft" should be entitled to pick up the pieces within a reasonable time frame.
IANAL, but according to copyright law, this is entirely dependant on whether or not it is judged that SCO failed to protect its copyrights when it release the code in question on the very first occurance. For SCO to say that they were fooled by conditions in the GPL is argueably specious and I would think that they have a better defense than that.
...why does nobody stop these ridiculus claims of SCO ?
It can be done as it has been already proven in Germany.
Nobody can make false accusations without giving proof. Any Linux distributer or the EFF or other interest groups can sue them. And if one does this SCO would to have to show the code or STFU.
It also raises the question why IBM doesn't do this.
Several reasons:
- it costs money to sue. Without a reasonable expectation of a return of that money in the form of an award for damaages, it's a poor risk.
- is the code from Sequent subject to SCO licensing and IP owership with regard to their contract with IBM for license rights to Unix?
- what of the GPL? This is clearly the biggest question for the Linux community, and much less so for IBM
- Who really has a horse in this race? Marketing considerations aside, what risk does Suse, RedHat, Mandrake, et al have in the SCO vs. IBM suit? Until they are sued by SCO--and it will come in some shape or form regardless of the SCO vs. IBM outcome, unless IBM just buys them--what do they have to worry about that they can do something about?
The system would include an on-board database of the GPS coordinates of the no-fly zones. If it sensed an attempt to jam GPS signals it would switch to other navigation aids such as airport beacons. Being independent of ground control means soft walls would be immune to hacking
Wishful thinking or willful ignorance?
The database would have to be updated prior to each flight, because the zones would have to be flexible. Points of entry are the main database at each airport, the central database at some government facility, and of course every single aircraft participating in this. Factor in the execptions you know the congresscritters cannot avoid putting into any sort of regulatory legislation, like exemptions from participation from non-commercial planes of a certain size or smaller, and you have a system so full of holes that it would hardly be worth the cost.
The court stated that scientific evidence is admissible only if the principle upon which it is based is " `sufficiently established to have general acceptance in the field to which it belongs.' "
This is just more of the system protecting the sytem. The late, great Dr. Richard Feynman said it best, and said it almost 30 years ago in a speach he gave at Caltech.
For any project, if you look at communications costs, hardware costs, personnel costs, all that, software licensing ranges -- the highest you'd ever find is, like, 3% of any IT-type project
He's obviously never been involved with a project using Oracle. Or SAP. Or any large, vertical application priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Actually, what's MS SQL server priced at these days? There's no way that 3% figure is close to being an accurate average.
If the average business-class desktop runs about $900.00, and WinXP runs $99 per seat, that's 10% right there. To drive that $99 down to 3% of the install per seat, communications and people costs would have to run $2,400.00 PER INSTALL!
The real management mindset is; "do it right, quickly."
No, not at all. This is a 14 month project. For projects of one month duration or less, they usually just throw an MS application or three at it.
The "right" vs. "right now" comparison wasn't so much over a subjective time scale as it was about waiting for a software release to be fully debugged, or even paying up-front for the debugging. Insteand, we'll struggle through the installation, data load, testing and evaluation and then ask when's the next release going to be out that fixes a list of problems we found.
Slashdot Mirror
My apologies if I've mischaracterized you. But, you have to realize that your statment They don't necessarily know whether they have SCO or Linux. reads like it is straight out of the SCO FUD manual. Furthermore, if that is truly the case with your clients, then I'd suggest you have an ethical obligation to get out there and educate them. And yes, I've done consulting, so I've been in your shoes.
There's a strong possibility that neither SCO nor Linux will go away as a result of SCO's lawsuits or any of the current counter-suits. But things will probably change. You are obligated not only to inform but also to convey some understanding of both the short- and long-term risks associated with each product.
OTOH, if you were simply generalizing and really didn't have any one client in mind, you can ignore all this.
Show of hands: who believes that Tony's business probably runs on pirated Microsoft products?
From his web site we learn that he's a SCO reseller. This makes what he said one of the more interesting twists taken on the SCO-apologist soapbox, IMO.
How broad a reading would it take to apply this patent to any browser that tracks URL history for indivual users on the same computer?
NASA said that it was worried about sending more maned missions up to the hubble since it is in a different orbit than the space station and if the mission is botched the shuttle would not be able to reach the station in an emergency.
Hubble is 375 miles up; ISS is 240-ish. Wouldn't getting from Hubble to ISS just be a controlled reduction in orbital speed to dropped the altitude? Or, reading a bit between the lines, is the real issue that the shuttles don't have any purely manual thrusters that can be operated without the core systems running?
Given that SuSe got SCO to back off, got with that distro instead.
What I'm really curious about is Lindows. They apparently have the right to distribute Linux, but SCO's FUD is likely to be hurting them as well even though SCO seems to have indicated that Lindows is safe. If SCO were to win, I think Lindows would be driven out of existence in short order. I wonder if Lindows will file as well.
If SCO wanted to take on Lindows, they would also, indirectly, be taking on Wal-Mart. Not exactly a prudent move, from a PR or a cash-flow basis, I would think.
The results at Kamiokande that show neutrino mixing (and thus that they have mass) are very interesting
I thought that was the result, but could recall for certain, and I knew I wasn't going to get the spelling anywhere near right to surf for it. Thanks for the confirmation.
Actually, the outstanding question is whether or not neutrinos have mass. If they do, then the need for Dark Matter[tm] goes away. If they don't, we still have brown dwarf stars, undiscovered planets, and the effects of elector-magnetic currents on stars still not quite 100% accounted for within the current cosmological model.
Dark Matter, as an esoteric, non-euclidian form of matter, is still, IMO, nothing more than the late 20th century equivalent of the luminiferous aether of the 19th century, and merely a convenient algorythmic placeholder, until proven otherwise. Furthermore, without answering either the question on neutrino mass or dark matter, saying we know how the universe is going to end is just so much posturing for marketing's sake, and really poor science.
So what makes you so sure you know the ned of the Universe today?
Who knows? Maybe he really has met Mr Gates in person....
It's a play on words. The plays of Shakespeare are filled with word-play--something which anyone who has actually read Shakespeare would know.
This was something either done by him, or one of the men behind the penname, as two of the presently popular postulated possibilities participated in the process; or, it was done as a sort of tribute to Shakespeare. Thus is it more than mere coincidence.
Shakespeare appears twice in the 46th Psalm, as "shake" and "spear". If you count the number of words from the beginning and ending, noting at which numbers "shake" and "spear" occur and add them together, they equal 46. Shakespeare, according to his traditional birthdate, would have been 46 in 1611 when the KJV was published.
Our government is incapible of becoming like Orwell's 1984. They cant even keep their system straight
It will be much more like Brazil, with papers and people lost within a system more concerned about avoiding responsibility for screw-ups than actually doing anything productive or benefitial.
For most of the USA, it would be very hard to get a job for more than $60K per year, unless it is a genuine engineering job or a high-level department lead position.
I already have a job at more than 60k per year. I'm labeled a senior unix admin, I don't supervise anyone, and try as I may to work with C, the only programming I've really done that is live is shell scripting, html, and some perl. However, I also have a BS CIS and 16 years experience.
I think some of the current economic conditions are reflective of the fact that low- and mid-level salaried jobs in IT disappeared faster and in greater numbers than the higher paying ones did--except of course for the ubiquitous web developers who were pulling down six figures back in 97-98 and today, are not.
My areas of expertise include HP-UX and AIX, not just Linux. So yes, I would expect to be able to find work. I would also expect to have to look for it and shop my resume around and make use of former co-workers and other inside contacts.
Also, at $150/hr at 30 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, that's $225k. Once you deduct income tax, SS tax, health insurance, business insurance, and travel expenses, the net would only be around $110k - $120k. It's not as unrealistic a picture as you painted.
I charged a nice $20 dollars an hour deal, with extra charges for hardware replacement, software installation. My little business was able to "boom" simply because I was cheaper. All the freelance techs out there now think, "Hey, I'm so 'elite' I can charge $75 an hour!" Wrong.
The hourly rate one can charge depends entirely on what skills one has and the type of work being done for whom. If I had to go it alone, being a Unix System Admin, I wouldn't dream of charging less than $100/hr, and mostly likely closer to twice that. I also would try to concentrate on the Fortune 5000 types of corporations, as those are the guys with the money to burn. Of course, I'd only work about 30 hours a week as a result, but much of that would likely be 2nd or 3rd shift. Those are the hours critcal work is best done, and leaves the regular staff (if any) available for the 9 - 5 routine.
Is there a compelling reason to believe that computer/robot technology won't reach the point where most basic service jobs can be (almost) entirely automated? Think food service, janitorial, banking, etc.
Yes. Customer service cannot be automated. A fully automated McD's = high tech vending machine. For people who want a restaraunt experience on a limited budget, you need a person there to help provide that experience, because a significant part of what we conceptualize as "restaraunt" includes human interaction. There are similar analogies in other industries. Robotics may acheive as high as a 90% saturation rate within the workforces of certain manual labor based industries, but not 100%. And I am not counting the management or robot maintenance folks either.
Is there a compelling reason to believe that this technology will remain too costly or inconvenient for employers to adopt it?
It's not a question of "if", only of "to what degree". 100% automation is not financially practical, but then it very most likely is not going to be necessary. The other aspect you are ignoring it the requirements of the market. Certain segments of the econonmy will mandate a human presence; some from the supply (business) side, some from the demand (consumer) side. The flip-side of your point is that throughout history business has adopted technology that was more expensive than the labor it replaced only because of market demands.
If (1) and (2), is there some compelling reason why employers will choose not to adopt a cheaper, more convenient technology for these purposes, in order to increase their profits?
Most likely not, but then your statement above is hardly all-encompassing. Contractual and regulatory issues are the two immediate flys for that ointment that come to mind.
The 50 year prediction may be off by quite a lot. But over some reasonable time span (less than a couple of centuries, barring global disaster), the technology will be available and-- assuming our economic system remains similar to what we have today-- it will be in use.
That's a lot of assumptions. Spin the way-back machine to the 1880's, roughly the same point in the coal & steam-based industrial revolution that we are in the electronics revolution, an apply that reasoning. You wouldn't arrive at where we are today.
You'll get alot of advice. Some will be good, some will be bad. Some you will follow, some you will not.
Change your life-style. As you get older, your body will thank you. Do the sit-up/push-up routine in the morning and at night at home. Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
Eat better: cut the carbs, cut the sugar and sweets, limit your beer consumption to 3 nights a week or less and limit how much you drink when you do.
Drink more water. Where you'd normally grab a soda or sports drink, have some water instead. Your body needs it, and there's zero calories. And drink more of it. Buy a gallon of spring or distilled water for at home. See how long it takes you to go through it. If it's more than 3-4 days, you aren't drinking enough water (or, you are simply never at home).
Hit yard sales. Buy a bike. Buy a stationary bike and ride it when watching TV. Buy some free weights. Even just 10 pound hand weights can be useful. They won't make you buff, but they will help you burn calories and tone-up some. Skip-over the abercisers, the nordic traks and the bowflexes. You don't need another expensive dust collector.
Walk. Walk to the store, walk around the block, walk to work if you can do it and still be on time.
Some of this may work, some of it won't. In the end you are only competing against yourself.
But trust me on the water.
Google is just another tool. Like any tool, it's not responsibile for the level of skill of the user. A tool may have all the whiz-bang capability in the world, but if the weilder is lacking in skill, then none of that function matters.
The MSN article was ridiculously lame. If you want to find DVD reviews, search on "DVD +review" and you'll get pages of them, starting with the very first page. In other words, in order to effectively use Google, or any search engine, one has to know how to construct the query. Expecting a single word search to discriminate down to the level of detail that any given person wants is hopelessly naive. Besides, Google has never made any prestence about having a commercial slant.
MSN's apparent expectation that google ought to accomodate those with enough skill to get on-line, but not much more than that, is just more of their corporate bias leaking through.
couldn't a good lawyer argue that the crime was done and the time period where SCO was releasing their code under the GPL was to give them time to "tie up loose ends" with that product line while minimizing the negative impact on their bottom line? It seems like a "victim" of such "theft" should be entitled to pick up the pieces within a reasonable time frame.
IANAL, but according to copyright law, this is entirely dependant on whether or not it is judged that SCO failed to protect its copyrights when it release the code in question on the very first occurance. For SCO to say that they were fooled by conditions in the GPL is argueably specious and I would think that they have a better defense than that.
Jesus H. Crust. Similar to homer, Jesus' middle name is a mistry.
Or perhaps a mystery even?
Look here
...why does nobody stop these ridiculus claims of SCO ? It can be done as it has been already proven in Germany. Nobody can make false accusations without giving proof. Any Linux distributer or the EFF or other interest groups can sue them. And if one does this SCO would to have to show the code or STFU. It also raises the question why IBM doesn't do this.
Several reasons:
- it costs money to sue. Without a reasonable expectation of a return of that money in the form of an award for damaages, it's a poor risk.
- is the code from Sequent subject to SCO licensing and IP owership with regard to their contract with IBM for license rights to Unix?
- what of the GPL? This is clearly the biggest question for the Linux community, and much less so for IBM
- Who really has a horse in this race? Marketing considerations aside, what risk does Suse, RedHat, Mandrake, et al have in the SCO vs. IBM suit? Until they are sued by SCO--and it will come in some shape or form regardless of the SCO vs. IBM outcome, unless IBM just buys them--what do they have to worry about that they can do something about?
The system would include an on-board database of the GPS coordinates of the no-fly zones. If it sensed an attempt to jam GPS signals it would switch to other navigation aids such as airport beacons. Being independent of ground control means soft walls would be immune to hacking
Wishful thinking or willful ignorance?
The database would have to be updated prior to each flight, because the zones would have to be flexible. Points of entry are the main database at each airport, the central database at some government facility, and of course every single aircraft participating in this. Factor in the execptions you know the congresscritters cannot avoid putting into any sort of regulatory legislation, like exemptions from participation from non-commercial planes of a certain size or smaller, and you have a system so full of holes that it would hardly be worth the cost.
The court stated that scientific evidence is admissible only if the principle upon which it is based is " `sufficiently established to have general acceptance in the field to which it belongs.' "
This is just more of the system protecting the sytem. The late, great Dr. Richard Feynman said it best, and said it almost 30 years ago in a speach he gave at Caltech.
For any project, if you look at communications costs, hardware costs, personnel costs, all that, software licensing ranges -- the highest you'd ever find is, like, 3% of any IT-type project
He's obviously never been involved with a project using Oracle. Or SAP. Or any large, vertical application priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Actually, what's MS SQL server priced at these days? There's no way that 3% figure is close to being an accurate average.
If the average business-class desktop runs about $900.00, and WinXP runs $99 per seat, that's 10% right there. To drive that $99 down to 3% of the install per seat, communications and people costs would have to run $2,400.00 PER INSTALL!
So what's that say about the TCO for WinXP?
The real management mindset is; "do it right, quickly."
No, not at all. This is a 14 month project. For projects of one month duration or less, they usually just throw an MS application or three at it.
The "right" vs. "right now" comparison wasn't so much over a subjective time scale as it was about waiting for a software release to be fully debugged, or even paying up-front for the debugging. Insteand, we'll struggle through the installation, data load, testing and evaluation and then ask when's the next release going to be out that fixes a list of problems we found.