You don't get it. If offshoring causes a net export of jobs, you aren't creating competition, you are transferring means of production to other owners and diminishing your ability to compete with them.
We have an "International Space Station" already. Essentially no useful science is being performed there. Like practically all manned space flight today, it is little more than an extremely elitist, colossally expensive amusement park ride.
These people (NASA, its suppliers and contractors, their lobbyists, and the politicians being lobbied) are pulling the wool over our eyes yet again. They are exploiting many people's belief that human space exploration is useful or desirable, and that humans must be physically present at all times. This is a magical-religious belief. It has no basis in fact, and is monstrously expensive and wasteful. Ironically, its vastly greater cost as compared to robotic space missions actually drastically reduces the amount of exploration and science that can be done. Look at the successes of the Mars and Titan missions, to name just two examples of what can be accomplished without some bozo there to turn things on and off.
The great expense of human space exploration is itself the goal, not the exploration and certainly not the science. The object of the game is to continue to channel billions of dollars to the same old defense industries that prospered during the Cold War. They are a big lobby. They became used to a roiling river of government money that lasted two generations. They have not gone away, and they are not planning on giving up and joining the ranks of the Average Joe. They want that money, and they want it now. Apparently, a hundred billion dollars a year from the "War on Terrorism" is not enough.
If exploiting the magical-religious inclinations of the general public is an efficient way to get their hands in the Federal till, then so be it. The astute reader will notice an underlying pattern being applied.
"Extra! Extra! OpenSolaris Code Released!" shouted the paper boy. Suddenly the cacophany in the cantina abruptly ceased. Drinkers stopped with their mugs of beer and shots of whisky in mid air, mouths agape. Card sharps shifted their gaze, pool hustlers turned their heads. All focused an intense gaze on the paper boy just ouside the window.
"Extra! Extra! OpenSolaris Code Released!" shouted the paper boy once more. Just as suddenly as they had stopped, drinkers resumed their drinking, pool games played on, card players continued their dubious gambits. A brawl seemed to be brewing at the end of the bar, and the paper boy was quickly forgotten.
That's the dumbest question yet. Who was the announcement made to? DEVELOPERS. Who needs to be doing stuff and using their development boxes so programs are available to run on the new machines when they're available? Why would Cringely ask such a stupid question ?
You're kidding, right? You sound a bit on the naive side. To say that your entire product line for the next year or year and a half is obsolete is extremely dangerous. Jobs may be a bit wacky, but stupid he isn't. Your shallow answer doesn't hold water, as Cringely writes in his own. NDAs are more than enough. Apple cares about big software products, whose manufacturers routinely sign NDAs, and much less about Joe Mac Hacker or the many small-potatoes products out there.
The point being that Jobs must have something pretty big up his sleeve in order to take such a colossally perilous risk.
How is this overrated? Don't you understand how journalism works? Do you think the commercial aspect is in the periphery instead of the forefront? Surely you don't believe journalists are pursuing the truth, or have some sort of altruistic drive to accurately and objectively inform some abstract public?
If you do, I can recommend some up-and-coming tickers on the stock market...
Maybe he meant Itanium. The new Apple Macintosh Itanium.
Somehow Jobs will spin it right, and Mac-heads around the world will rejoice. Not coincidentally, it will help justify Apple's traditional overpricing.
You dare question a celebrity (albeit a minor one), you worm? You are nothing. You are worse than nothing, you are a regular person, a mere cur's excrement on the promenade of life. A pedestrian. John Dvorak is a pundit, for MarketWatch, no less! He is illuminated, he can discern the subtleties of markets and technologies alike. He absorbs knowledge and information through the pores of his soul, and exudes a divine distillation of them through his wise opinion pieces.
He is famous (sort of). He is connected. He has a soap box on a major commercial website. Therefore, what he says is truth and wisdom. You, by contrast, are some schmuck on slashdot. You think that just because you know something about computers you are better than him? Smarter than him? Your words more meaningful, correct, or relevant? A resounding NO! I say to you!
If Dvorak thinks changing from PowerPC to x86 will make it easier to develop FOSS on the Mac, then by the power of Hades let it be so! If Apple is abandoning PowerPC/Cell, mere months before vastly powerful multicore (nay, polycore!) cell PCs appear, in favor of a platform that has no multicores yet and is a laggard in the 64 bit arena, it is not up to mere mortals such as yourself to inveigh Dvorak the Truth Giver with your driveling claptrap. It is only through his god-like celebrity vision that we mere slashdotters, reprehensible scum that we are, the very feces of society, fit only to be flushed into the sewer with muck and slime, it is only through his arbitrary received wisdom that we have any hope of understanding this Holy Platform Change.
Mac users are ultra-hip slaves of fashion with fat wallets who buy iPods, iMacs, and Volkswagen Beetles. Linux users are cheap-ass geeks who live in dark, dank rooms and prefer to build their own computers out of discarded hardware, used chewing gum, and cigarette butts found on the sidewalk.
"With molecule-sized transistors a single molecule can switch electrical currents off and on. If a reliable way can be found to make computer 'chips' with single-molecule transistors, then computers would offer higher data processing speeds, lower electrical consumption, and many other advantages over conventional chips, including, perhaps, the ability to create multi-core CPUs with quadrillions of cores, memory 'chips' with more data locations than a human brain has synapses, inexpensive robots more powerful than whole human societies, vast computer networks that could be unobtrusively implanted in people's brains, and that Holy Grail of computing: PDAs with an easy handwriting interface."
1) get an MS or PhD studying some exotic physical phenomenon
2) publish the results accompanied by wildly optimistic claims
3) ?
4) Profit!
These people (NASA, its suppliers and contractors, their lobbyists, and the politicians being lobbied) are pulling the wool over your eyes yet again. They are exploiting many people's belief that human space exploration is useful or desirable, that humans must be physically present at all times. This is a magical-religious belief. It has no basis in fact, and is monstrously expensive and wasteful. Ironically, its vastly greater cost as compared to robotic space missions actually drastically reduces the amount of exploration that can be done. Look at the successes of the Mars and Titan missions, to name just two examples of what can be accomplished without some bozo there to turn things on and off.
The great expense of human space exploration is itself the goal, not the exploration. The object of the game is to continue to channel billions of dollars to the same old defense industries that prospered during the Cold War. They are a big lobby. They became used to a roiling river of government money that lasted two generations. They have not gone away, and they are not planning on giving up and joining the ranks of the Average Joe. They want that money, and they want it now.
If exploiting the magical-religious inclinations of the general public is an efficient way to get their hands in the Federal till, then come to Papa. The astute reader will notice an underlying pattern being applied.
a propaganda war that is turning the weak-minded into a zombie army for the fascist right.
A horrifying analogy.
Anyway, where is corporate angle here?
"Machine readable" IDs (read: RFID-enabled), will require a large and expensive infrastructure, probably several hundred million dollars in government pork. If you are among the clever organizations on the receiving end of the money, this is an enabling technology. Once it is in place, you can sell even more such infrastructure under the guise of "surveillance." It will be easy to make a public argument that we must monitor the streets to make sure they are free from terrorists. Think of the juicy contracts installing detectors on streetlights, parking meters, mailboxes, and god knows where else. Thousands of them, perhaps millions. They will need huge networking infrastructure, computer storage, databases, and a vast sea of poorly thought out and poorly implemented middleware. They will want to "integrate" it with video and audio surveillance, hook it up to the vast "intelligence" and police infrastructure. Eventually, robotic "intelligence" and police devices will be hooked up, and you can use your lurid imagination to guess how that will play out.
Companies will milk billions of dollars in idiotic soviet-style contracts for years to come, and our personal info will be easily available to be misused, abused, and confused with criminals and terrorists. All the while, a chosen few will live like kings of old from the profits, and their families will belong to the untouchable elite for generations to come.
Yeah, and vote for Democrats and Republicans, those tireless champions of liberty, freedom, and equality. Or for Libertarians, Peace and Freedom, Greens, and the rest of the lunatic fringe, the corrupt public official wannabes, and incompetents looking for cushy government jobs.
I suggest you print out your little remark, sign it, date it, and file it. Set an alarm in your Palm Pilot or whatever electronic scheduler you may use to look at the document again 2, 5, and 10 years into the future. Starting a few years from now, you may want to have a glass of wine and a nice sauce handy, for you may need to eat your words.
Plucking a single RFID from a crowd is not the issue. Plucking individual RFIDs from a stream of a few individuals per second is much more realistic. When you are stopped by a cop and asked to produce a driver's license, and the cop observes that it is wrapped in foil or "otherwise tampered with," you are fucked.
Think things through a bit more next time. People like you make conservatives look like shallow-thinking nimrods.
Am I not going to need to keep the fridge (or its radiator) coupled to that magnet?
The fridge is unimportant. It's the magnet that's going to affect the electron spin. The parent didn't emphasize enough that you would need a big magnet.
Not big in the sense of "Damn, this sucker is heavy." Big in the sense of "Holy Shit! I need an industrial electrical feed into my house? I need liquid nitrogen and maybe even liquid helium? Why is every piece of steel within 20 m of my magnet flying toward it at frightening speed?" That big. I won't even get started on how you detect and quantify the spins.
ArfArfArf is a nanoscale technology in which information is carried not by the electron's charge, as it is in conventional microchips, but by the BowWowWow and if a reliable way can be found to control and manipulate the BowWow effect, ArfArfArf devices could offer higher data processing speeds, lower electric consumption, and many other advantages over conventional chips--including, perhaps, the ability to carry out radically new quantum computations, cure baldness, relieve users of the heartbreaks of eczema, seborrhea, and psoriasis, feed the hungry, achieve world peace, make everyone wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, and make real their most obsessive erotic fantasies.
1) get an MS or PhD studying some exotic physical phenomenon
2) publish the results accompanied by wildly optimistic claims
3) ?
4) Profit!
you clicked the link too huh? I hate it when they're so deceptive with the link titles.
After reading that, there I went like a sucker clicking on the link assuming it was something different from its concise domain name. It wasn't, however.
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt economists do believe that. I can just imagine thier research articles:
"Let's assume each American worker is a perfect spherical particle under adiabatic conditions..."
So relevant to the lives of actual individuals, families, and communities.
You don't get it. If offshoring causes a net export of jobs, you aren't creating competition, you are transferring means of production to other owners and diminishing your ability to compete with them.
These people (NASA, its suppliers and contractors, their lobbyists, and the politicians being lobbied) are pulling the wool over our eyes yet again. They are exploiting many people's belief that human space exploration is useful or desirable, and that humans must be physically present at all times. This is a magical-religious belief. It has no basis in fact, and is monstrously expensive and wasteful. Ironically, its vastly greater cost as compared to robotic space missions actually drastically reduces the amount of exploration and science that can be done. Look at the successes of the Mars and Titan missions, to name just two examples of what can be accomplished without some bozo there to turn things on and off.
The great expense of human space exploration is itself the goal, not the exploration and certainly not the science. The object of the game is to continue to channel billions of dollars to the same old defense industries that prospered during the Cold War. They are a big lobby. They became used to a roiling river of government money that lasted two generations. They have not gone away, and they are not planning on giving up and joining the ranks of the Average Joe. They want that money, and they want it now. Apparently, a hundred billion dollars a year from the "War on Terrorism" is not enough.
If exploiting the magical-religious inclinations of the general public is an efficient way to get their hands in the Federal till, then so be it. The astute reader will notice an underlying pattern being applied.
"Extra! Extra! OpenSolaris Code Released!" shouted the paper boy once more. Just as suddenly as they had stopped, drinkers resumed their drinking, pool games played on, card players continued their dubious gambits. A brawl seemed to be brewing at the end of the bar, and the paper boy was quickly forgotten.
You're kidding, right? You sound a bit on the naive side. To say that your entire product line for the next year or year and a half is obsolete is extremely dangerous. Jobs may be a bit wacky, but stupid he isn't. Your shallow answer doesn't hold water, as Cringely writes in his own. NDAs are more than enough. Apple cares about big software products, whose manufacturers routinely sign NDAs, and much less about Joe Mac Hacker or the many small-potatoes products out there.
The point being that Jobs must have something pretty big up his sleeve in order to take such a colossally perilous risk.
Yeah, they'd have to delay it all by at least a year.
Oh, wait...
To a dyslexic? Not bad. It reminds me of Natalie Portman for some reason.
How is this overrated? Don't you understand how journalism works? Do you think the commercial aspect is in the periphery instead of the forefront? Surely you don't believe journalists are pursuing the truth, or have some sort of altruistic drive to accurately and objectively inform some abstract public?
If you do, I can recommend some up-and-coming tickers on the stock market...
Somehow Jobs will spin it right, and Mac-heads around the world will rejoice. Not coincidentally, it will help justify Apple's traditional overpricing.
He is famous (sort of). He is connected. He has a soap box on a major commercial website. Therefore, what he says is truth and wisdom. You, by contrast, are some schmuck on slashdot. You think that just because you know something about computers you are better than him? Smarter than him? Your words more meaningful, correct, or relevant? A resounding NO! I say to you!
If Dvorak thinks changing from PowerPC to x86 will make it easier to develop FOSS on the Mac, then by the power of Hades let it be so! If Apple is abandoning PowerPC/Cell, mere months before vastly powerful multicore (nay, polycore!) cell PCs appear, in favor of a platform that has no multicores yet and is a laggard in the 64 bit arena, it is not up to mere mortals such as yourself to inveigh Dvorak the Truth Giver with your driveling claptrap. It is only through his god-like celebrity vision that we mere slashdotters, reprehensible scum that we are, the very feces of society, fit only to be flushed into the sewer with muck and slime, it is only through his arbitrary received wisdom that we have any hope of understanding this Holy Platform Change.
dvorak is a tit.
I don't see much overlap.
"With molecule-sized transistors a single molecule can switch electrical currents off and on. If a reliable way can be found to make computer 'chips' with single-molecule transistors, then computers would offer higher data processing speeds, lower electrical consumption, and many other advantages over conventional chips, including, perhaps, the ability to create multi-core CPUs with quadrillions of cores, memory 'chips' with more data locations than a human brain has synapses, inexpensive robots more powerful than whole human societies, vast computer networks that could be unobtrusively implanted in people's brains, and that Holy Grail of computing: PDAs with an easy handwriting interface."
1) get an MS or PhD studying some exotic physical phenomenon
2) publish the results accompanied by wildly optimistic claims
3) ?
4) Profit!
"We're gonna smoke 'em out. Smoke 'em outta their caves."
The great expense of human space exploration is itself the goal, not the exploration. The object of the game is to continue to channel billions of dollars to the same old defense industries that prospered during the Cold War. They are a big lobby. They became used to a roiling river of government money that lasted two generations. They have not gone away, and they are not planning on giving up and joining the ranks of the Average Joe. They want that money, and they want it now.
If exploiting the magical-religious inclinations of the general public is an efficient way to get their hands in the Federal till, then come to Papa. The astute reader will notice an underlying pattern being applied.
No shit. If there are things that can be done to fuck things up even more, he has listed a bunch of them.
If you like them a bit on the chubby side.
Old Mexican proverb:
El que por su gusto es buey, hasta la coyunda lame.
Translation: He who is an Ox by his own choice will even lick the yoke.
Sense: If you consciously choose to be a dipshit, you will even be grateful for getting fucked over.
A horrifying analogy.
Anyway, where is corporate angle here?
"Machine readable" IDs (read: RFID-enabled), will require a large and expensive infrastructure, probably several hundred million dollars in government pork. If you are among the clever organizations on the receiving end of the money, this is an enabling technology. Once it is in place, you can sell even more such infrastructure under the guise of "surveillance." It will be easy to make a public argument that we must monitor the streets to make sure they are free from terrorists. Think of the juicy contracts installing detectors on streetlights, parking meters, mailboxes, and god knows where else. Thousands of them, perhaps millions. They will need huge networking infrastructure, computer storage, databases, and a vast sea of poorly thought out and poorly implemented middleware. They will want to "integrate" it with video and audio surveillance, hook it up to the vast "intelligence" and police infrastructure. Eventually, robotic "intelligence" and police devices will be hooked up, and you can use your lurid imagination to guess how that will play out.
Companies will milk billions of dollars in idiotic soviet-style contracts for years to come, and our personal info will be easily available to be misused, abused, and confused with criminals and terrorists. All the while, a chosen few will live like kings of old from the profits, and their families will belong to the untouchable elite for generations to come.
Plucking a single RFID from a crowd is not the issue. Plucking individual RFIDs from a stream of a few individuals per second is much more realistic. When you are stopped by a cop and asked to produce a driver's license, and the cop observes that it is wrapped in foil or "otherwise tampered with," you are fucked.
Think things through a bit more next time. People like you make conservatives look like shallow-thinking nimrods.
The fridge is unimportant. It's the magnet that's going to affect the electron spin. The parent didn't emphasize enough that you would need a big magnet.
Not big in the sense of "Damn, this sucker is heavy." Big in the sense of "Holy Shit! I need an industrial electrical feed into my house? I need liquid nitrogen and maybe even liquid helium? Why is every piece of steel within 20 m of my magnet flying toward it at frightening speed?" That big. I won't even get started on how you detect and quantify the spins.
1) get an MS or PhD studying some exotic physical phenomenon
2) publish the results accompanied by wildly optimistic claims
3) ?
4) Profit!
After reading that, there I went like a sucker clicking on the link assuming it was something different from its concise domain name. It wasn't, however.