While I appreciate the cynicism, countries that have far more regulation than here, S. Korea, Japan, Switzerland, to name a few, have speeds significantly faster than our speeds for, a fraction of what we pay. Cell phones are another area where regulation creates cheaper (and likely more reliable) service. Unregulated capitalism ends up creating needs and wants for things of no inherent value (so they can be infinitely replicated by a producer and continually sold to consumers who gain nothing). Healthy capitalism fosters some healthy competition that increases benefits to citizen -- cheaper prices for real goods, or making previously unaffordable benefits available at lower cost to more people.
But the practice of removing people's current "rights" or "property" in order to sell back smaller and smaller pieces of the previous "product" (which may have no inherent physical value) is "Dark Capitalism". It is the point when capitalism is no longer benefiting the society, but is becoming a cancer on society. It gets used to financially oppress an underclass who must constantly buy and re-buy worthless goods that gain them little (or nothing), while those owning the desired "worthless" objects can continue to sell them for the "real value" the working class has created via their labors. The capitalist corporations at the top become leeches living off the working class while giving little or nothing in return.
I don't see the inflated values and expectations (except maybe Google, but if they deliver...) present in the first internet bubble.
OTOH, _eventually_ rising energy prices will put a damper on the economy -- possibly "permanently". Unless we find, virtually, complete replacements for non-renewable energy sources, things will *stop* when the energy runs out (global warming or not).
As energy prices rise, the cost of virtually everything will rise -- this will drive prices up, but salaries & compensation won't be able to match, since without energy, productivity will first slow and then grind to a halt. That would be a pretty nasty form of "run-away-inflation". Of course those nearest the economic bottom will be hurt the most -- assuming they have enough food/resources to survive.
Seems it parallels the activities of their parents. Parents who attend higher education tend to put off having children longer *and* have fewer children than those less educated. Makes sense -- the smarter and more educated you are the more you might think about "consequences" -- those put off alot of people having children! They are probably more likely to be informed about or understand proper use of birth control methods.
You describe their invention: "a processor that sits in front of the various processing elements and divvies up the chores to ensure that all processor elements are well fed". How is this different from a multiple stage pentium-III or pentium 4, where instructions get sent to different sub-processing units integer math, FP math, MMU/cache management...etc. After the instructions are decoded, they are broken down into smaller steps that can be split between logical units?? Or am I missing something?
Now add the above to P4's hyperthreading or multicore machines and it seems vague similar even if the MIxMD are not synchronous amongst the separate cores.
The above got marked insightful? How is this a different situation than any previous version of Windows? Business users are usually years behind the new OS curve -- at least 3-4.
What would be insightful is to understand how it is different this time versus previous times.
I've got to wonder: what does Vista offer businesses? - The new desktop wouldn't be a draw. - The new indexing features might not be considered a benefit by some businesses. - The loads of incompatible drivers and applications has got to be a downside -- even it is a small number. - Having extra security prompts come up to business users? In large settings, I'd think that IT would have domains and policies to handle most permissions, and for machines isolated on an internal net, it could be a negative. - Supposedly new hardware may be required -- but that may only be for HD video. Still might not "sit" well. Would a business want to upgrade to a new OS but not compatible hardware to take full advantage of the OS? Maybe easier to wait until you need to replace hardware? - There's a training gap -- things are more different on Vista and Office 2007 from XP and Office 2004 than XP was from Windows 2000 and Office XP was from Office 2000. - And maybe finally, there's the fact that the new OS is either no faster or slower on most tasks than XP. It would be like buying a "downgrade". Why would businesses want to spend more money to downgrade?
And those reasons are on top of the standard reluctance of businesses to immediately jump on a new Windows release.
But which title in the referenced postings makes it more clear as to what is going on?
1) "Data on Americans mined for terror risk" - Yahoo (AT&T, SBC...etc)
or 2) "FBI data mining programs target more than just terrorists, DOJ says" - ComputerWorld
Which headline attracts your attention and makes you want to read it?
Would suppliers of government information (AT&T running to give our phone records to government), have any interest in "burying" minor details from the phone information they regularly "give" (Sell -- may not be money, but they get payback, believe it) to the FBI? Would such an information provider have a vested interest in having Americans not probe too deeply at the lies that were told about the information "only being used to fight the War on Terror"? Did anyone really believed it would stop at that? Welcome to the evolving police state. Will we fall as low as the citizens in the USSR before the wall came down. We going to be like East Germany where 1 in 7 were "spies" for their secret police (isn't that sorta how the FBI is operating)? How low will Americans sink before they stand up and retake the government?
Any "ill-gotten" information gotten by the FBI (or any government agency) should invalidate any evidence obtained as a result of that information. Victims and their property should be held harmless from from government retaliation, enforcement or confiscation.
Anything short of these protections will entice the FBI to hold onto the info to use in future investigations when they need some more easy arrests or property to confiscate.
New police overlord-wanna-be's motto: "To Punish and Enslave" (via arbitrary and increasingly severe law prosecution with long sentences where the prisoners must perform work for private companies or the government). Oh, prisoners don't have rights? Isn't that convenient.
Given the low morals people expect of Geek Squad and Best Buy -- what does this portend for the ISP, Speakeasy that (for some odd reason) Best Buy purchased not long ago? Probably no good...:-(
As for the other comments on inequality: my grandparents were farm laborers and cleaners; my parents junior clerical staff; I was the first member of my family to graduate from university. You can't control where you start, but you can control how far you travel. Instead of whining, start your own company. Take risks. You don't get to the 100-yard line without taking a chance of falling back to the 0 line. Of course, people who inherit wealth rather than work for it offend me, but so do people who aren't prepared to risk everything they have in order to improve what they've got.
There's the rub. My parents were the first generation of my family to graduate from college. My father worked for the same corporation as a lawyer for 35+ years before he retired. My patterns are different than yours. To follow in the footsteps of my parents I would have expected to work for 1-3 companies in my life (staying with the final one until retirement) and to have married 10-15 years ago. Neither pattern was close.:-)
However, you elucidate one of the problems quite clearly. If someone starts out with nothing, it's easy for them to risk "nothing" (what you called "everything") they have in order to improve what they've got. However, it'd be proportionately more difficult for someone the better the circumstances they were born into. Simple example. Two people each win a sum of money. Then each can bet again "double" or nothing. One person wins $10 to start. The other hits a jackpot and wins $50,000,000. Certainly you can see their two choices are different.
Most people would think that someone who has $50M would be foolish to throw it all away on a single bet. Most financial advisers would recommend spreading out the risk. At $10, the risk is much lower. "Ten" dollars can be earned working minimum wage for a few hours (say taxes eat up 50). At 10 times that wage, a worker couldn't make $50M in their lifetime.
Now look at in absolute terms instead of relative. Suppose the 2nd bet would also net you $50,000,000 OR $10. Again, even with 50/50 odds, throwing away the $50M would be considered foolhardy by most.
If you are saying you'd throw away the $50M on a 50/50 chance at doubling, I believe most would call that foolhardy.
As for the programmer shortage...the industry hasn't required competency in programming for over 15 years, why should they start now?:-| (:-( ). I don't think competency has been a requirement since the early 90's. Somewhere around there, companies needed anyone who could operate a computer, so people with English, History and Lit were designing computer programs. Somewhere around then "support" became a profit center -- at one point, a working program was "included" in the purchase price of a program. Now, you get the current "Beta" and an update-subscription.;^| Most hiring managers aren't willing to pay for competency. By pay, I'm not meaning "$/hour". I'm meaning how in how many hours the person will guarantee a particular piece of work. For the competent person: they schedule in time to do thorough testing and documentation. For the standard hiring manager: the working proof-of-concept is sufficient to ship as final product. Everything else can be fixed if the customer buys a support contract.
This isn't a problem, so much, of bad engineers, but bad managers who are willing to hire anyone with a warm body who promises anything "working" well enough to be installed successfully on a customer's computer. After that, they expect to be promoted out of there or working for another company. A manager at a previous company was always taking his "next" job into consideration when making decisions about his company's projects. He made decisions that harmed his employer's bottom line (but not so visibly he'd be called on it -- he was a good bluffer) to put himself in a better light should he have to find employment elsewhere (he wasn't sure of hi
You are not reading what he said. He made two statements, both of which can be true. (1) There is no shortage of programmers or software engineers in the U.S. (2) There is a shortage of people who are interested in being paid next to nothing. --- Seems statement "1" is true...hundreds of thousands of P. & S.E. have been idled due to work being shipped overseas.
Statement (2) is also true -- in the U.S. (which is where we are talking about there being a "shortage", and where MS claims to have difficulty hiring).
So it isn't the case that "there is a shortage of programmers" (i.e. statement 1 is true). What is true, is that MS is finding a shortage of entry level people that can be paid some fraction of what "market conditions" demand of salary.
Obviously, P & S.E. are "trained" -- not just anyone one off the street can do the job. If anyone could, there would be plenty of low-paid applicants to do the job.
In the US, 4 years a respectable college can easily top 120, probably 200K. However, MS can hire foreign workers where a 4 year degree is significantly cheaper and in some countries, paid for by the government. By hiring foreign workers, MS can get around all the worker protections and rights that have been enacted for American workers over the past century. American workers "cost" too much because socially, they have too many protections and have obtained too many benefits. So -- move a factory to China where you can hire child or slave labor (oops, that's been closed down until after the 2008 Olympics)...guess you'll have to pay them $20 a week with no benefits. Darn!
It's a slap in the face of "labor" -- labor being anyone who is, and has to work for a living. Those who are rich enough and have investments that will appreciate with inflation or at least have enough that they won't be bothered by the dollar's shrinking value.
The US economic inequality index (Gini Coefficient) has increased almost 10 percentage points in the past decade (was 37% for period 1990-2000, is 46.6% now). Why? Because the middle class is losing their jobs while the upper class is increasingly being served by non-residents (outsourced work). The US has one of the worse figures of any Western nation**. Another graph, The L-Curve (pdf) shows it using stacks of 100-dollar bills spread out over the length of a football field. The length represents the population of the US -- how many people have nothing would be the "0" yard line. The 50-yard line is the middle of the US population. The stack of bills there is 1.6 inches high (~$40,000). At the 100-yard line are the top earners, with the highest having a stack of $100 bills 30 miles high. That represents the ratio of how much the richest people have vs. the entire US population. Note, the 90 and 95 yard line families have stacks 4 inches and 12 inches, respectively. Compare that to the top families' 30 mile high stacks.
One can claim it is MS's duty to their stockholders -- but it is going for short-term profits at the long term health of the economy and *customers* who have been able to pay for their success. If MS wants to sell in India -- one Indian engineer stated that MS would have to reduce their MS Windows price to fit the "Indian" prices. So instead of selling their top OS at 250-300, it was suggested they reduce their price down to around $20 (otherwise they'll get "zero" as their products are pirated). To make the same profits, they'll have to reduce their costs by 10-15X, so...when engineers in India or China start costing more than 1/10th to 1/15th the cost of a US engineer, MS will be selling the high price copies to a market that will shrink, incredibly (who's driven the adoption of the PC if it hasn't been software engineers, progr
Police officers should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us, since it is their duty to represent the law for the general public.
Your premise is incorrect, so everything that follows is unsupported. It isn't the duty of police to "represent" the law -- it is their duty to enforce the law.
In a meta sense, as many cop cars have written on them, their duty is To protect and serve.. Despite this, many cops are under the delusion that their duty is To Dominate and Enslave. Unfortunately since they have the guns, the populace is dominated and, at least partially (Tax Freedom Day was April 30 this year), enslaved . With a ruler like Lord Bush in power, the domination and loss of freedom is more apparent. Hey, maybe someone will invade us and rescue us from our corrupt government and leaders (hopefully they'll do a much better job than Lord Bush did in Iraq).
If we are to agree that 'M' most closely related to an 'R' movie rating, then how can a game whose violence level has been compared Saw and Hostel be given a rating that denotes anything worse?
The level of violence experienced by the watcher/player is generally much greater when playing than passive watching. People can watch TV with half a brain or no brain (asleep) -- makes no difference, the program continues and ends. You put people in a "VR" to teach people skills. VR is strongly successful in teaching the skills employed. First Person [Shooter or other] Games teach reflexes, techniques, emotional detachment, etc. All great things if you want to learn to be a psychotic. Very few people are 100% effective or even close in compartmentalizing. In stress situations people sometimes don't think, they just act as they have been trained. If they have been heavily trained to do harm in a VR environment, their first reaction might be to respond with training.
Some people can compartmentalize -- most of the time -- maybe 99% of the time but the more the "training", the greater chance of going past one's safe limits -- but worse -- what about those "not so good" at compartmentalizing? Can we tell in advance when something will override our "squick" point? If some random "VR" game is focused on violence wouldn't it be better to restrict it to adults or not release it at all? Do we really need more people trained as killers?
I suppose one could try to claim that VR training doesn't work or wasn't "real" or that it doesn't work for everyone. However, relying on someone's inability to learn in a VR environment as being the "Green Light" for being "unaffected" by FPS or Violence-practicing VR doesn't seem like it would be good policy.
When car's indicate "empty" on fuel gauges, they usually don't mean 0.0 gallons -- some have 2-3 Gl. reserves. The problem is people replace the cartridges when they say empty -- instead, you buy the replacement when it says empty, then replace it when the prints stop printing certain colors. But people don't want the hassle of waiting for a print to look "off" to replace them.
In fact the system should be designed specifically that no individual has far greater influence than any other citizen.
Would you care to offer up a solution, or are you just criticizing?
How do you limit the "individuals" known as "Corporations"? As a speaker for the many stock-holders maybe such a spokesperson should find it a bit easier than most to get such meetings. Certainly Google has users in every state if not in every district. Stockholders buy stock in a company because they want it to "perform". That doesn't mean they want to be engaged in the day-to-day operations. Companies are not represented, typically, by individual stock holders who may hold 100's-1000's of stocks directly or via mutual funds. I can't imagine stockholders being expected to speak for company interests. The stockholders are not voices (other than their individual votes) for the company -- they don't know the day-to-day operations nor, likely, all the long term plans. The Corporate Spokesperson would be the only one qualified to speak to representatives about company issues.
Converse problem -- the corporation has "excessive voice", usually, because more than one lobbiest is usually sent by the largest companies. So corporations that have the legal standing of a person, in business also can have 24x7 multiple-voice representation. That's the real "rub" -- how many "individual people" have such representation?
If I had to choose, I'd rather each company be represented by 1 CEO, that would be closer to "fair" when talking about voices in congress, and that's assuming the CEO also has to run their company -- so their own "lobbying" job can't be anything near a full-time or regular job. However, that's not how politics are run right now.
So you are saying if "Disney" had a "Mick-Box" gaming system, you would be "pissed off" that they didn't port an XXX-rated game to their family-aimed gaming system?
Which proprietary gaming system manufacturers do you feel should be forced to carry titles that they don't wish to carry?
They are "Proprietary Platforms" (PPs) -- first you buy their platform, then, you and publishers have to abide by the hardware company's 'rules'. The game publisher, "Take-Two Interactive Software"studio still has the the option to release it for the PC. However, it appears they were only planning to release for the PPs (PS2, PSP, Wii) on their Release Date, july 10, as the PC platform isn't mentioned on their website in their list of available platforms.
So kick the publisher, maybe, for not releasing on the PC? At least then you would be free to buy it. Seems weird to not release to the PC-market where "% owners over 18 (or 21)" would be greater than "% owners over 18 (or 21)" for game consoles. Statistically. Seems like their age-group focus was for "17 and under". It's one thing to restrict adult-violence games to adults, but quite another to target adult-violence games to the "17 and under" market.
This isn't about "adult's rights", it's about restricting adult content to adults while Take-Two and Rockstar were marketing adult content to minors, from whom they expected the highest payback.
So who do we be "pissed-off" at here? The ratings board? It sounds like they may have given an accurate rating. Should it be the "PP's" for being family-image conscious - maybe, but their customers give that power to them. Or do you blame the game's producer and creators who were marketing "adult-only violence" to minors?
Global winter may be too extreme to be used as hyperbole, but Global Cooling is documented much more recently in this Feb-2007 articlefrom Science News. Of note:
Finally, the results of today's climate simulations--which are much more sophisticated than those that were available in the 1980s--suggest that even a nuclear exchange of just a few dozen weapons could cool Earth substantially for a decade or more.
It seems it would be a matter of "degree" -- how many weapons are targeting cities if it ever happens. Hopefully owners of such toys will be responsible and only choose low soot/low dust targeting.
Where would society be, now, if we had not needed to spend so much in the various wars that have happened (ignoring issues of the differences of opinion that started them). [Waxing Phillisillisophically...]
Darn tools all over the place -- need a tool belt! The original article talks about how the same "spy-plane" may be able to be "repurposed" by removing some of the sensor equipment and replacing it with weapons.
How good are radar detectors in telling which cargo the SR-72 is carrying: recon or attack? You believe the Chinese or "whoever" would be able to reliably tell the difference between two SR-72's carrying different cargo?
Tell me the SR-72 doesn't look like a next-generation cruise-missile designed to carry recon or weapons at extremely high altitudes. Maybe it is a non-issue and the SR-71 was also designed to carry a weapons cargo, so it won't be any different with the SR-72, but that isn't clear. It appears the SR-72 may carry weapons which may make it more of a threat than an SR-71, no?
What type of tool are you? You claim complete destruction for China and "only" heavy mauling for the US or Russia. Considering that because of population and building densities a much smaller nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India could trigger globally deadly nuclear winter, what would be the effect of the complete destruction of China -- which has at _least_ as many people as Pakistan-India? Wouldn't resulting soot fallout from China be, minimally, equally deadly in weather effects, if not more so?
You might get survival of some government types in a well stocked bunker somewhere, but life as we know it would be severely damaged or destroyed by the resulting nuclear winter. Most likely, if things shifted by several degrees, even if for a "short" while -- the increase in earth's reflectivity due to increased ice & snow coverage could easily trigger and maintain a long-term ice age for the planet.
Of course, we can always keep this plan as a "backup" failsafe should global warming become too threatening...;^ 'Sides, from what I've read, according to new figures, China passed the US in global warming emissions last year, so mutual destruction or harming of the US & China might not look so bad to the other nuclear powers. Such a conflict would be an ideal time for global-climate/global-future minded nations to take out the victor as it is weakened in such a strike. Ug...that sounds excessively ugly, but given the way ugly is increasing in the world...
What is the deal here? While I don't have a problem with limiting access to children, why the fsck are they messsing around with content a GROWN ADULT might wish to play??
Depends on your definition of "Grown Adult". 18 or 21 doesn't indicate maturity, wisdom or common sense in making choices. The average age of maturity keeps rising as people behave like kids needing chaperoning at older and older ages.;^/
Most importantly -- why would one want to drive around in something that small when it only gets 40 MPG!!!??! Geez, for something that small it should be getting 75-80, but noooo.
It's a big disappointment like when I first saw a "mini" -- such a small car and to what benefit? What is it about the 50MPG barrier that we can't exceed that these days -- even VW Rabbits from the 80's could get 40's, the diesels could get over 50. Now, 20 years later, no progress. I'd be suspicious or paranoid about a conspiracy, but that's just what they want me to be! Ha!;^/ *plegh*
How does it dissolve "time slots"? Can the DVR record multiple video streams at the same time? Do DVR's record multiple HD streams at the same time? Can HDTV broadcast in 1080p and would DVR's be able to keep up with multiple streams at that rate? If DVR's are similar to VCR's in that they can record one stream while you watch another, it doesn't seem they eliminate "time slot monopolies" any more than VCR's.
What is it with DVR's (over VCR's) that is causing a paradigm shift?
I thought [maybe incorrectly] they had extra privacy laws in England to compensate for the fact that everything was recorded. I.e. -- tapes usable in crime detection, but not to be used for paparazzi or commercial purposes. Google might fail permission under commercial restrictions.
But why bother with signatures? Just blur any faces out using face detection technology. I'm sure the smart people at Google can tweak the face detection algorithms to up the face catching ratio to 99% or so (still would likely have to be reviewed manually, but fewer "false negatives"...
There is a big difference. Having bumper stickers telling people you are running on vegetable oil is "political action": it's letting people know that the car isn't dependent on foreign oil. You probably don't have the attitude that your mods should be adopted by other people to help save the environment or reduce dependence on oil.
MS Win XP already has similar tech to turbo memory. It's the boot and file load optimizer that runs in background every few days to move + coalesce disk reads to all come from the "same area", "sequentially", on disk. Already they measure what areas of disk are used the most during boot and program launch. It would be a simple matter to write the most frequently read areas to "Turbo-memory", _backed_up_ by real disk. The Turbo memory does what it is supposed to do -- speeds up "reads" of frequently used data. Writes may, be done in background or synchronously -- but if they believe the turbo memory is reliable enough, they could write to it synchronous, then do the actual disk write in background, asynchronously.
If the memory "fails" with material on it, no prob. It's also been written to disk, so recovery is seemless though perhaps slightly slower.
Anything MS would put in as functionality over that, would be gravy -- but MS has to do very little to support turbo memory -- either what area of disk to "Turbo-boost" (gets shadowed, for Read purposes, by flash) or Tells the disk what areas need to be "boosted" and let the disk take care of the caching.
In this type of incarnation, it might be nearly equivalent to current disks' cache, but the new Flash-cache will likely have Gigabytes of space vs. todays volatile RAM having megabytes.
I think Sony is likely to lose this one, as it is "theoretically" able to be implemented totally on the disk. Why wouldn't the disk, itself, monitor which sectors are used most often and cache them for reads? It's probably configurable whether or not to turn on write-caching, which might allow writing to Flash and not wait for the copy to reach disk, or force a wait for reliability.
As for failing FLASH -- that could be detected on write -- and could be detected by the disk drive.
And how do you care for your kids with your wife being a doctor and yourself being a 70 hour/week engineer? Where did you learn your parenting skills? How do "good" parents differ from "bad" parents? How do bad parents become good parents? Are their courses?
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While I appreciate the cynicism, countries that have far more regulation than here, S. Korea, Japan, Switzerland, to name a few, have speeds significantly faster than our speeds for, a fraction of what we pay. Cell phones are another area where regulation creates cheaper (and likely more reliable) service. Unregulated capitalism ends up creating needs and wants for things of no inherent value (so they can be infinitely replicated by a producer and continually sold to consumers who gain nothing). Healthy capitalism fosters some healthy competition that increases benefits to citizen -- cheaper prices for real goods, or making previously unaffordable benefits available at lower cost to more people.
But the practice of removing people's current "rights" or "property" in order to sell back smaller and smaller pieces of the previous "product" (which may have no inherent physical value) is "Dark Capitalism". It is the point when capitalism is no longer benefiting the society, but is becoming a cancer on society. It gets used to financially oppress an underclass who must constantly buy and re-buy worthless goods that gain them little (or nothing), while those owning the desired "worthless" objects can continue to sell them for the "real value" the working class has created via their labors. The capitalist corporations at the top become leeches living off the working class while giving little or nothing in return.
I don't see the inflated values and expectations (except maybe Google, but if they deliver...) present in the first internet bubble.
OTOH, _eventually_ rising energy prices will put a damper on the economy -- possibly "permanently". Unless we find, virtually, complete replacements for non-renewable energy sources, things will *stop* when the energy runs out (global warming or not).
As energy prices rise, the cost of virtually everything will rise -- this will drive prices up, but salaries & compensation won't be able to match, since without energy, productivity will first slow and then grind to a halt. That would be a pretty nasty form of "run-away-inflation". Of course those nearest the economic bottom will be hurt the most -- assuming they have enough food/resources to survive.
Seems it parallels the activities of their parents. Parents who attend higher education tend to put off having children longer *and* have fewer children than those less educated.
Makes sense -- the smarter and more educated you are the more you might think about "consequences" -- those put off alot of people having children! They are probably more likely to be informed about or understand proper use of birth control methods.
L
You describe their invention: "a processor that sits in front of the various processing elements and divvies up the chores to ensure that all processor elements are well fed". How is this different from a multiple stage pentium-III or pentium 4, where instructions get sent to different sub-processing units integer math, FP math, MMU/cache management...etc. After the instructions are decoded, they are broken down into smaller steps that can be split between logical units?? Or am I missing something?
Now add the above to P4's hyperthreading or multicore machines and it seems vague similar even if the
MIxMD are not synchronous amongst the separate cores.
The above got marked insightful? How is this a different situation than any previous version of Windows? Business users are usually years behind the new OS curve -- at least 3-4.
What would be insightful is to understand how it is different this time versus previous times.
I've got to wonder: what does Vista offer businesses?
- The new desktop wouldn't be a draw.
- The new indexing features might not be considered a benefit by some businesses.
- The loads of incompatible drivers and applications has got to be a downside -- even it is a small number.
- Having extra security prompts come up to business users? In large settings, I'd think that IT would have
domains and policies to handle most permissions, and for machines isolated on an internal net, it could be a negative.
- Supposedly new hardware may be required -- but that may only be for HD video. Still might not "sit" well. Would a business want to upgrade to a new OS but not compatible hardware to take full advantage of the OS? Maybe easier to wait until you need to replace hardware?
- There's a training gap -- things are more different on Vista and Office 2007 from XP and Office 2004 than XP was from Windows 2000 and Office XP was from Office 2000.
- And maybe finally, there's the fact that the new OS is either no faster or slower on most tasks than XP. It would be like buying a "downgrade". Why would businesses want to spend more money to downgrade?
And those reasons are on top of the standard reluctance of businesses to immediately jump on a new Windows release.
This happened last week and was first reported here. Gawd slashdot editors are slow... :-|
But which title in the referenced postings makes it more clear as to what is going on?
1) "Data on Americans mined for terror risk" - Yahoo (AT&T, SBC...etc)
or
2) "FBI data mining programs target more than just terrorists, DOJ says" - ComputerWorld
Which headline attracts your attention and makes you want to read it?
Would suppliers of government information (AT&T running to give our phone records to government), have any interest in "burying" minor details from the phone information they regularly "give" (Sell -- may not be money, but they get payback, believe it) to the FBI? Would such an information provider have a vested interest in having Americans not probe too deeply at the lies that were told about the information "only being used to fight the War on Terror"? Did anyone really believed it would stop at that? Welcome to the evolving police state. Will we fall as low as the citizens in the USSR before the wall came down. We going to be like East Germany where 1 in 7 were "spies" for their secret police (isn't that sorta how the FBI is operating)? How low will Americans sink before they stand up and retake the government?
Any "ill-gotten" information gotten by the FBI (or any government agency) should invalidate any evidence obtained as a result of that information. Victims and their property should be held harmless from from government retaliation, enforcement or confiscation.
Anything short of these protections will entice the FBI to hold onto the info to use in future investigations when they need some more easy arrests or property to confiscate.
New police overlord-wanna-be's motto: "To Punish and Enslave" (via arbitrary and increasingly severe law prosecution with long sentences where the prisoners must perform work for private companies or the government). Oh, prisoners don't have rights? Isn't that convenient.
Given the low morals people expect of Geek Squad and Best Buy -- what does this portend for the ISP, Speakeasy that (for some odd reason) Best Buy purchased not long ago? Probably no good... :-(
There's the rub. My parents were the first generation of my family to graduate from college. My father worked for the same corporation as a lawyer for 35+ years before he retired. My patterns are different than yours. To follow in the footsteps of my parents I would have expected to work for 1-3 companies in my life (staying with the final one until retirement) and to have married 10-15 years ago. Neither pattern was close. :-)
:-| (:-( ). I don't think competency has been a requirement since the early 90's. Somewhere around there, companies needed anyone who could operate a computer, so people with English, History and Lit were designing computer programs. Somewhere around then "support" became a profit center -- at one point, a working program was "included" in the purchase price of a program. Now, you get the current "Beta" and an update-subscription. ;^|
However, you elucidate one of the problems quite clearly. If someone starts out with nothing, it's easy for them to risk "nothing" (what you called "everything") they have in order to improve what they've got. However, it'd be proportionately more difficult for someone the better the circumstances they were born into. Simple example. Two people each win a sum of money. Then each can bet again "double" or nothing. One person wins $10 to start.
The other hits a jackpot and wins $50,000,000. Certainly you can see their two choices are different.
Most people would think that someone who has $50M would be foolish to throw it all away on a single bet. Most financial advisers would recommend spreading out the risk. At $10, the risk is much lower. "Ten" dollars can be earned working minimum wage for a few hours (say taxes eat up 50). At 10 times that wage, a worker couldn't make $50M in their lifetime.
Now look at in absolute terms instead of relative. Suppose the 2nd bet would also net you $50,000,000 OR $10. Again,
even with 50/50 odds, throwing away the $50M would be considered foolhardy by most.
If you are saying you'd throw away the $50M on a 50/50 chance at doubling, I believe most would call that foolhardy.
As for the programmer shortage...the industry hasn't required competency in programming for over 15 years, why should they start now?
Most hiring managers aren't willing to pay for competency. By pay, I'm not meaning "$/hour". I'm meaning how in how many hours the person will guarantee a particular piece of work. For the competent person: they schedule in time to do thorough testing and documentation. For the standard hiring manager: the working proof-of-concept is sufficient to ship as final product. Everything else can be fixed if the customer buys a support contract.
This isn't a problem, so much, of bad engineers, but bad managers who are willing to hire anyone with a warm body who promises anything "working" well enough to be installed successfully on a customer's computer. After that, they expect to be promoted out of there or working for another company. A manager at a previous company was always taking his "next" job into consideration when making decisions about his company's projects. He made decisions that harmed his employer's bottom line (but not so visibly he'd be called on it -- he was a good bluffer) to put himself in a better light should he have to find employment elsewhere (he wasn't sure of hi
You are not reading what he said. He made two statements, both of which can be true.
(1) There is no shortage of programmers or software engineers in the U.S.
(2) There is a shortage of people who are interested in being paid next to nothing.
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Seems statement "1" is true...hundreds of thousands of P. & S.E. have been idled due to work being shipped overseas.
Statement (2) is also true -- in the U.S. (which is where we are talking about there being a "shortage", and where MS claims to have difficulty hiring).
So it isn't the case that "there is a shortage of programmers" (i.e. statement 1 is true). What is true, is that MS is finding a shortage of entry level people that can be paid some fraction of what "market conditions" demand of salary.
Obviously, P & S.E. are "trained" -- not just anyone one off the street can do the job. If anyone could, there would be plenty of low-paid applicants to do the job.
In the US, 4 years a respectable college can easily top 120, probably 200K. However, MS can hire foreign workers where a 4 year degree is significantly cheaper and in some countries, paid for by the government. By hiring foreign workers, MS can get around all the worker protections and rights that have been enacted for American workers over the past century. American workers "cost" too much because socially, they have too many protections and have obtained too many benefits. So -- move a factory to China where you can hire child or slave labor (oops, that's been closed down until after the 2008 Olympics)...guess you'll have to pay them $20 a week with no benefits. Darn!
It's a slap in the face of "labor" -- labor being anyone who is, and has to work for a living. Those who are rich enough and have investments that will appreciate with inflation or at least have enough that they won't be bothered by the dollar's shrinking value.
The US economic inequality index (Gini Coefficient) has increased almost 10 percentage points in the past decade (was 37% for period 1990-2000, is 46.6% now). Why? Because the middle class is losing their jobs while the upper class is increasingly being served by non-residents (outsourced work). The US has one of the worse figures of any Western nation**. Another graph, The L-Curve (pdf) shows it using stacks of 100-dollar bills spread out over the length of a football field. The length represents the population of the US -- how many people have nothing would be the "0" yard line. The 50-yard line is the middle of the US population. The stack of bills there is 1.6 inches high (~$40,000). At the 100-yard line are the top earners, with the highest having a stack of $100 bills 30 miles high. That represents the ratio of how much the richest people have vs. the entire US population. Note, the 90 and 95 yard line families have stacks 4 inches and 12 inches, respectively. Compare that to the top families' 30 mile high stacks.
One can claim it is MS's duty to their stockholders -- but it is going for short-term profits at the long term health of the economy and *customers* who have been able to pay for their success. If MS wants to sell in India -- one Indian engineer stated that MS would have to reduce their MS Windows price to fit the "Indian" prices. So instead of selling their top OS at 250-300, it was suggested they reduce their price down to around $20 (otherwise they'll get "zero" as their products are pirated). To make the same profits, they'll have to reduce their costs by 10-15X, so...when engineers in India or China start costing more than 1/10th to 1/15th the cost of a US engineer, MS will be selling the high price copies to a market that will shrink, incredibly (who's driven the adoption of the PC if it hasn't been software engineers, progr
Your premise is incorrect, so everything that follows is unsupported. It isn't the duty of police to "represent" the law -- it is their duty to enforce the law.
In a meta sense, as many cop cars have written on them, their duty is To protect and serve. . Despite this, many cops are under the delusion that their duty is To Dominate and Enslave. Unfortunately since they have the guns, the populace is dominated and, at least partially (Tax Freedom Day was April 30 this year), enslaved . With a ruler like Lord Bush in power, the domination and loss of freedom is more apparent. Hey, maybe someone will invade us and rescue us from our corrupt government and leaders (hopefully they'll do a much better job than Lord Bush did in Iraq).
"Have a nice day"
Some people can compartmentalize -- most of the time -- maybe 99% of the time but the more the "training", the greater chance of going past one's safe limits -- but worse -- what about those "not so good" at compartmentalizing? Can we tell in advance when something will override our "squick" point? If some random "VR" game is focused on violence wouldn't it be better to restrict it to adults or not release it at all? Do we really need more people trained as killers?
I suppose one could try to claim that VR training doesn't work or wasn't "real" or that it doesn't work for everyone. However, relying on someone's inability to learn in a VR environment as being the "Green Light" for being "unaffected" by FPS or Violence-practicing VR doesn't seem like it would be good policy.
When car's indicate "empty" on fuel gauges, they usually don't mean 0.0 gallons -- some have 2-3 Gl. reserves. The problem is people replace the cartridges when they say empty -- instead, you buy the replacement when it says empty, then replace it when the prints stop printing certain colors. But people don't want the hassle of waiting for a print to look "off" to replace them.
How do you limit the "individuals" known as "Corporations"? As a speaker for the many stock-holders maybe such a spokesperson should find it a bit easier than most to get such meetings. Certainly Google has users in every state if not in every district. Stockholders buy stock in a company because they want it to "perform". That doesn't mean they want to be engaged in the day-to-day operations. Companies are not represented, typically, by individual stock holders who may hold 100's-1000's of stocks directly or via mutual funds. I can't imagine stockholders being expected to speak for company interests. The stockholders are not voices (other than their individual votes) for the company -- they don't know the day-to-day operations nor, likely, all the long term plans. The Corporate Spokesperson would be the only one qualified to speak to representatives about company issues.
Converse problem -- the corporation has "excessive voice", usually, because more than one lobbiest is usually sent by the largest companies. So corporations that have the legal standing of a person, in business also can have 24x7 multiple-voice representation. That's the real "rub" -- how many "individual people" have such representation?
If I had to choose, I'd rather each company be represented by 1 CEO, that would be closer to "fair" when talking about voices in congress, and that's assuming the CEO also has to run their company -- so their own "lobbying" job can't be anything near a full-time or regular job. However, that's not how politics are run right now.
So you are saying if "Disney" had a "Mick-Box" gaming system, you would be "pissed off" that they didn't port an XXX-rated game to their family-aimed gaming system?
Which proprietary gaming system manufacturers do you feel should be forced to carry titles that they don't wish to carry?
They are "Proprietary Platforms" (PPs) -- first you buy their platform, then, you and publishers have to abide by the hardware company's 'rules'. The game publisher, "Take-Two Interactive Software"studio still has the the option to release it for the PC. However, it appears they were only planning to release for the PPs (PS2, PSP, Wii) on their Release Date, july 10, as the PC platform isn't mentioned on their website in their list of available platforms.
So kick the publisher, maybe, for not releasing on the PC? At least then you would be free to buy it. Seems weird to not release to the PC-market where "% owners over 18 (or 21)" would be greater than "% owners over 18 (or 21)" for game consoles. Statistically. Seems like their age-group focus was for "17 and under". It's one thing to restrict adult-violence games to adults, but quite another to target adult-violence games to the "17 and under" market.
This isn't about "adult's rights", it's about restricting adult content to adults while Take-Two and Rockstar were marketing adult content to minors, from whom they expected the highest payback.
So who do we be "pissed-off" at here? The ratings board? It sounds like they may have given an accurate rating. Should it be the "PP's" for being family-image conscious - maybe, but their customers give that power to them. Or do you blame the game's producer and creators who were marketing "adult-only violence" to minors?
Frankly, the world would be a MUCH better place to live if all the money and resources we wasted against fighting each other was turned into positive investment in standard of living -- I think most wars stem from a real or imaginary need for more "resources". Just recently, New Scientist carried an article on "local" rainfall records' (as a measure of drought) as a possible predictor of "local" wars as "local" governments clash for resources.
Where would society be, now, if we had not needed to spend so much in the various wars that have happened (ignoring issues of the differences of opinion that started them). [Waxing Phillisillisophically...]
Darn tools all over the place -- need a tool belt! The original article talks about how the same "spy-plane" may be able to be "repurposed" by removing some of the sensor equipment and replacing it with weapons.
:-)
How good are radar detectors in telling which cargo the SR-72 is carrying: recon or attack? You believe the Chinese or "whoever" would be able to reliably tell the difference between two SR-72's carrying different cargo?
Tell me the SR-72 doesn't look like a next-generation cruise-missile designed to carry recon or weapons at extremely high altitudes. Maybe it is a non-issue and the SR-71 was also designed to carry a weapons cargo, so it won't be any different with the SR-72, but that isn't clear. It appears the SR-72 may carry weapons which may make it more of a threat than an SR-71, no?
Sincerely, Screwdriver
What type of tool are you? You claim complete destruction for China and "only" heavy mauling for the US or Russia. Considering that because of population and building densities a much smaller nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India could trigger globally deadly nuclear winter, what would be the effect of the complete destruction of China -- which has at _least_ as many people as Pakistan-India? Wouldn't resulting soot fallout from China be, minimally, equally deadly in weather effects, if not more so?
;^ 'Sides, from what I've read, according to new figures, China passed the US in global warming emissions last year, so mutual destruction or harming of the US & China might not look so bad to the other nuclear powers. Such a conflict would be an ideal time for global-climate/global-future minded nations to take out the victor as it is weakened in such a strike. Ug...that sounds excessively ugly, but given the way ugly is increasing in the world...
You might get survival of some government types in a well stocked bunker somewhere, but life as we know it would be severely damaged or destroyed by the resulting nuclear winter. Most likely, if things shifted by several degrees, even if for a "short" while -- the increase in earth's reflectivity due to increased ice & snow coverage could easily trigger and maintain a long-term ice age for the planet.
Of course, we can always keep this plan as a "backup" failsafe should global warming become too threatening...
Depends on your definition of "Grown Adult". 18 or 21 doesn't indicate maturity, wisdom or common sense in making choices. The average age of maturity keeps rising as people behave like kids needing chaperoning at older and older ages.
Most importantly -- why would one want to drive around in something that small when it only gets 40 MPG!!!??! Geez, for something that small it should be getting 75-80, but noooo.
;^/ *plegh*
It's a big disappointment like when I first saw a "mini" -- such a small car and to what benefit? What is it about the 50MPG barrier that we can't exceed that these days -- even VW Rabbits from the 80's could get 40's, the diesels could get over 50. Now, 20 years later, no progress. I'd be suspicious or paranoid about a conspiracy, but that's just what they want me to be! Ha!
How does it dissolve "time slots"? Can the DVR record multiple video streams at the same time? Do DVR's record multiple HD streams at the same time? Can HDTV broadcast in 1080p and would DVR's be able to keep up with multiple streams at that rate? If DVR's are similar to VCR's in that they can record one stream while you watch another, it doesn't seem they eliminate "time slot monopolies" any more than VCR's.
What is it with DVR's (over VCR's) that is causing a paradigm shift?
I thought [maybe incorrectly] they had extra privacy laws in England to compensate for the fact that everything was recorded. I.e. -- tapes usable in crime detection, but not to be used for paparazzi or commercial purposes. Google might fail permission under commercial restrictions.
But why bother with signatures? Just blur any faces out using face detection technology. I'm sure the smart people at Google can tweak the face detection algorithms to up the face catching ratio to 99% or so (still would likely have to be reviewed manually, but fewer "false negatives"...
There is a big difference. Having bumper stickers telling people you are running on vegetable oil is "political action": it's letting people know that the car isn't dependent on foreign oil. You probably don't have the attitude that your mods should be adopted by other people to help save the environment or reduce dependence on oil.
MS Win XP already has similar tech to turbo memory. It's the boot and file load optimizer that runs in background every few days to move + coalesce disk reads to all come from the "same area", "sequentially", on disk. Already they measure what areas of disk are used the most during boot and program launch. It would be a simple matter to write the most frequently read areas to "Turbo-memory", _backed_up_ by real disk. The Turbo memory does what it is supposed to do -- speeds up "reads" of frequently used data. Writes may, be done in background or synchronously -- but if they believe the turbo memory is reliable enough, they could write to it synchronous, then do the actual disk write in background, asynchronously.
If the memory "fails" with material on it, no prob. It's also been written to disk, so recovery is seemless though perhaps slightly slower.
Anything MS would put in as functionality over that, would be gravy -- but MS has to do very little to support turbo memory -- either what area of disk to "Turbo-boost" (gets shadowed, for Read purposes, by flash) or
Tells the disk what areas need to be "boosted" and let the disk take care of the caching.
In this type of incarnation, it might be nearly equivalent to current disks' cache, but the new Flash-cache will likely have Gigabytes of space vs. todays volatile RAM having megabytes.
I think Sony is likely to lose this one, as it is "theoretically" able to be implemented totally on the disk. Why wouldn't the disk, itself, monitor which sectors are used most often and cache them for reads? It's probably configurable whether or not to turn on write-caching, which might allow writing to Flash and not wait for the copy to reach disk, or force a wait for reliability.
As for failing FLASH -- that could be detected on write -- and could be detected by the disk drive.
And how do you care for your kids with your wife being a doctor and yourself being a 70 hour/week engineer? Where did you learn your parenting skills? How do "good" parents differ from "bad" parents? How do bad parents become good parents? Are their courses?