A couple years ago, Slashdot was awash with an April-Fools joke that said that Linus and various other, major Open Source developers were now charging for the software. The idea being that, now that their software had significant market penetration, they could rake in a major FORTUNE if they now required users to pay licenses fees (even if they were relatively minor fees). Note: this was an April Fools joke; 99.9% of the people who saw it recognized that, immediately. As for the other 0.1%, well, let's just say I was still hearing about it a month later.
Now, let's put another spin on this. Suppose an organization were to give away its software, free of charge, to any and everyone, thereby putting all competing software developers out of the business. Then, they decide their software is no longer free. If they've eliminated all competition, you have no choice but to pay what they require. With no competition, the price typically DOES go up in the long-term; they just go down in the short-term.
Microsoft's tactic of Embace/Extend/Extinguish is a variation on this. The Japanese car companies tactics in the late '70's and early '80's were a variation on this (the fact that the Big 3 were making crap just made it easier for them); if you've got deep enough pockets, you can sell below cost, starve your competition out of the market, then charge whatever you want when there's less competition.
And yes, "dumping" is illegal. It just doesn't always work; MS dumped IE on the market, but Netscape turned the tables on them by taking their browser Open Source. The Japanese car companies made a serious dent in Detroit's market, and those companies were fined heavily for their misdeeds. The Reagan administration never bothered to push the issue on the fines, and the first Bush administration simply dropped all the fines in an effort to open up Japanese markets to US goods.
The Plaintiff is arguing (rather poorly; last I checked, "MA" was the abbreviation for Massachusetts, not Maine, among other thing) that the FSF is essentially "dumping" software on the market at zero price, depriving him of earning a living as a programmer, developing competing products (no mention is made of what products he has developed, or intends to develop). As such, he argues, they should be legally and financially punished, and he should, of course, derive some benefit from that punishment.
IANAL; I'd never be able to shower enough to feel clean, if I did that for a living.
On the subject of a holodeck, or something similar, Scott Adams theorized:
If I had a holodeck, I'd close the door and never come out until I died of exhaustion. It would be hard to convince me I should be anywhere but in the holodeck, getting my oil massage from Cindy Crawford and her simulated twin sister.
Holodecks would be very addicting.... I'm afraid the holodeck will be society's last invention"
Dennis Miller also seems to believe it would extremely addicting: "If some unemployed punk in New Jersey, can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka."
My theory: some government agency is trying to crackdown on addictive things in our society (the DEA would be my guess), and with their recent doctrine of "preventive strikes," they're intentionally holding this technology back.
<looking nervously left and right, waiting for the black helicopters>
I love it when people say you can't get significant power from an electric motors. They need to get acquainted with the GE AC 6000. The reason why this locomotive (and basically ALL the heavy-duty, modern ones) run as series hybrids, is because you don't want to try to build a mechnical transmission which can handle that kind of power. The main reasons for Electric Vehicles being gutless wonders are:
Batteries have relatively low energy density (compared to gasoline). Gasoline stores about 36 kWh energy / gallon, or about 12 kWh/kg mass. Your best lithium ion batteries are currently around 150 Wh/kg.
Batteries tend to have a relatively lower power density. They're happiest if they're discharged over the course of an hour or more. Push the current higher than that, and they tend to heat up, turning some of their stored energy into heat, which means less electrical energy actually comes out of the battery. Lookup Peukert numbers if you want more info on that.
The amount of battery mass you have to add to get a decent range makes for a very heavy vehicle.
EV's make up for it in increased efficiency. About 80% of the current fed to charging the batteries actually makes it back to the wheels, and you can use regen braking to help that. For most gasoline vehicles, it's in the neighborhood of 12-15%, with NO regen braking. Consequently, if you have something like the EV-1, which got as high as 6 miles / kWh, a 20 kWh battery pack would get about 120 miles of range. A gallon of gasoline has more energy than that, but the gasoline and the gasoline engine weigh considerably less (so a given amount of horsepower will have higher performance) and won't go nearly as far.
Not to mention the fact that many people who have EV's also buy solar power equipment, so they can make their own "fuel." Last I checked, making your own gasoline is rather difficult.
The air hybrid system in this car intends to deal with the low power density problem. Batteries have a difficult time supplying large surges of power out (for accelerating and hill climbing) or absorbing large surges of power in (regen braking, either slowing down to a stop or descending a hill). Some designs are using supercapacitors to handle this, but this adds more weight and complexity to the vehicle. Using an air compressor/motor to handle this part of it all allows the vehicle to have decent performance off the line and up hills, but lets the batteries do what they do best: supply steady, long-term cruise power. In the meantime, compressed air is a relatively well-understood technology; there are plenty of off-the-shelf parts which can be applied.
And before you guys start whining about the low speeds at which the air system works, the Toyota Prius does something similar. It runs on electricity alone at low speed (primarily for stop-and-go traffic) and uses the gasoline engine for highway cruise (and when you need more power than the batteries can supply). If your gasoline engine gets to run at fairly steady speeds (instead of needing to pull you off the line), you can raise its efficiency. The higher-efficiency gasoline engine and the regen braking are what give the Prius its impressive efficiency figures. Ford was playing with an air hybrid transmission for a gasoline-powered vehicle a while back; you can find links to it through Google, but the majority of them seem to be devoid of real content.
Oil is mostly hydrocarbon chains of various lengths. Partial oxidation, in the presence of the right catalyst will give you (using Octane as an example):
C8H18 + 4(O2) --> 8(CO) + 9(H2)
add the carbon monoxide to some steam:
8(CO) + 8(H2O) --> 8(CO2) + 8(H2)
so the sum reaction is:
C8H18 + 4(O2) + 8(H2O) --> 8(CO2) + 17(H2)
Notice what the resultant chemicals are: Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen (gas). Sure, you can get hydrogen from petrochemicals, but you also get Carbon Dioxide in the process.
Pretty much any hydrocarbon can be used in this fashion, from Natural Gas (mostly methane; CH4) to Asphalt (mostly C20H42 or something similar). The end result is always the same, just in different combinations.
I thought the whole idea behind hydrogen power was to REDUCE the greenhouse gas output? In this scenario, you're still making greenhouse gasses, you just aren't producing them at the tailpipe. Considering how bad the total well-to-wheel efficiency is, you'd be better off just burning the petrochemicals.
But then, we're already doing that.
Don't even think about electrolysis. One kilogram of hydrogen (about the same energy content as a gallon of gasoline) has about 33 kWh of energy in it, if you've got a 100% efficient hydrolyzer. About the best you can hope for, though, is about 50% efficient, so it'll take about 66 kWh of electricity to make one kilo of hydrogen. Where I live, that's almost $5 for the equivalent of ONE GALLON of gasoline, and most of our electricity comes from coal-burning power plants (greenhouse gasses still being made at the power station, if not from the tailpipe). Since electricity made solar or wind is more expensive than electricity made from coal, hydrogen made from those sources would also be more expensive.
Photovoltaics aren't sufficiently efficient yet to remove significant amounts of demand from the electrical grid, but PV isn't the only type of solar energy. Personally, I'd like to see a scaled-down version of Solar Two. I mean, think about a couple 3-meter heliostats (the same size as the older analog satellite TV dishes) sitting on top of your garage (or on top of a shed in the back yard; as long as it gets plenty of sunlight), focusing on some small collector on the top of the house.
A 3 meter diameter dish has about about 7 square meters of aperature. If your heliostats are about 85% efficient (you can get reflective films which do this), and the main collector/generator is 33% efficient, that's about 2 kW for each heliostat (7 sq meters * 1 kW solar energy / sq meter * 0.85 * 0.33). That's about 28% efficiency, from the surface of the heliostat to the final output. Considering the fact that most PV's (and all consumer-priced PV) are <20% efficient, that's not too bad. If your generator consists of a steam engine (Rankine or Kalina cycle) or Stirling engine, these typically product AC to begin with, so you don't have to worry about an inverter (which you will probably need with your PV, since they only produce DC).
If you use the molten salts Solar Two used, you could still get power after the sun sets (their research showed this was >95% efficient in terms of energy in vs. energy out). Alternately, you could just do net metering and knock your electric bill down.
Also, if you use the waste heat from the system to provide household heat or hot water, you get an even higher total efficiency. That aspect of it could reduce the amount of electricity you need, as well (if you have electric heat or an electric hot water heater).
Go get a copy of VirtuaWin. I've got it giving me a 3x3 grid of virtual displays on my Win2K machine at work. That way, I've got the same capabilities (screen-wise) as my Linux box at home.
Once you get used to it, you don't want do without it, regardless of which platform you're using. My boss saw me using it, and originally thought it was annoying. Then, he decided to grab it and start playing with it. Now, he's hooked, too (and he's got dual monitors to begin with; it's good to be the boss).
First off, most households which have PV also have an inverter. They may run some things off DC, because there is inherent inefficiency in an inverter, but they still produce AC for stuff like the washer and dryer. HomePower magazine had a article several months ago about wiring some 24V or 48V DC into the home, and which items could be run reliably from it (the answering machine used a simple $5 DC step-down voltage converter from Radio Shack, and his motion-sensitive lighting outside still had AC-powered lights, but the motion sensor was running on DC; all of these greatly reduced the author's energy usage).
Yes, if you produce enough power (and consume less than you produce), the meter can spin backwards. The result is that the local electric grid benefits from your PV, and you get a credit toward your utility use. It's called net metering, and most states have laws in place which REQUIRE the local electric utility to implement it. They are, of course, allowed to set requirements for what kind of equipment you connect to the grid, and those requirements are, in some cases, sufficiently expensive that most people won't bother. Increasingly, companies which sell PV in your area also have the necessary forms to handle the net metering, and will set up you with contractors and equipment which meet the requirements.
Many utilities don't actually cut a check for what you supply. If you produce more power than you use during the day, but draw from the grid when the sun goes down (cheaper than buying batteries), the amount you supplied gets subtracted from the amount you used, and the net (hence the term, "net metering") is what you get billed for.
In some places, you can actually get a check if your annual balance ends up in your favor. In some places, it's "use it or lose it." No laws set up on that one.
While everyone on here whines about solar not being able to completely satisfy our energy needs, it doesn't have to. The part of the day when electricity is most in demand is usually the afternoon, during the summer. If a significant number of people add PV, and stay connected to the grid (using net metering), the PV will be supplying its peak output when there is peak demand. This could reduce the need to add another powerplant in the region. Of course, if enough people add PV to their rooftops, they could probably even shut off (or at least reduce the output from) a powerplant or two. Since most of these plants burn coal, any solar you add helps reduce the regional pollution (either because you are reducing your demand or because you are actively supplying).
Many people on here complain about the fact that PV manufacturing requires a great deal of energy, and some of the earlier panels never supplied as much energy as their manufacture consumed. That may have been true a couple decades ago, but modern manufacturing processes have cut the "manufacturing payback" to about 4-5 years. According to the company website, these new panels are more like 3 weeks.
Also, if they can get the price down to $1/watt (as opposed to the $3-4/watt currently common), that cuts the total payback time, significantly. In the midwest, last time I crunched the numbers, payback was on the order of 20 years (electricity is pretty cheap, and we don't get as much sun as the southwest). If their claims are accurate, these would pay off in 5-7 years. I think 4-5 years is the tipping point for most people.
MRE's and other pre-packaged foods were always preferable to the dining halls at Kunsan. It was generally agreed that, if the North ever attacked at night, anyone near the dining hall would toss flares or something up on the roof, so they would bomb the dining hall out of existence.
I ate a lot of Nestle Crunch bars and Chips Ahoy, and drank a lot of Dew while I was there. Really whacked out my metabolism.
At "the Kun," we had native Korean cooks on the base, no TCN's around. Lots of those stateside, but those were usually related to the military members serving on the base (someone served in Japan, got married while they were there, and the wife worked in the dining hall when they were transferred back to the States). Since Kunsan was considered a remote assignment very few dependents were stationed there (some, but very few). Consequently, we didn't have as many TCN's to choose from.
Yeah, I remember jammers. Never had to operate one (I was a crew chief, not a load toad), but I imagine you could tuck something foil-wrapped (like an MRE) under the engine access hatch and get it pretty warm.
We didn't launch checklists, gloves, etc. off the dash 60 exhaust because we would then have to go locate/clean up whatever we launched. That kinda takes the fun out of it.
Air Force Cookware, circa 1994 (I was stationed in the Republic of Korea, at the time):
floodlights in the hardened shelters; use a couple feet of safety wire and you could make something which would hold your MRE main course right in front of the glass
exhaust from a dash 60 (turbine-powered generator and high-volume air compressor, mounted in a semi-mobile cart)
F110-GE-120 exhaust (engine in the F-16's at the base); you had to hold on to that MRE packet REAL tight. The launch routine for an F-16 tyically involved 10-20 minutes of standing around while the pilot ran through their checks, with the engine running. No, the afterburner isn't used in this, but you can still hold an MRE packet up in the jet exhaust and get it warm enough to be edible within about 60 seconds. If you accidentally let go of it, well, you could go find it in the fence after the plane finally left.
It's been suggested in the past that they build a large Fresnel lens somewhere in earth orbit. The idea was that, if normal solar energy would impart a small push to a solar sail, focused solar energy would provide a more substantial push.
Such a lens would be mostly empty space. If you could build one each in Earth AND Mars orbit (a reflector, in this case), you could shuttle stuff back and forth relatively quickly. If you can get a spacecraft to break out of Mars orbit, then decelerate BELOW the speed needed to stay in Mars' orbit around the sun (breaking orbit going in the opposite direction of the planet's motion), the Sun's gravity will give you your return trip back toward Earth. Needless to say, orbital insertion around the Earth on the way back would require VERY precise positioning and speed. This scheme was developed a while back for how solar sail spacecraft could "come back" from trips to outer planets.
I'm currently working with a company which is looking at selling a service, based on OSS software.
If we just hang some OSS product out there, what's to stop the clients from just grabbing the software and implementing it themselves, instead of paying us for the service?
Hassle and customization.
How do most hosting companies, running LAMP configurations, make their money? The hassle of managing the servers, dealing with the bandwidth, backups, software upgrades, etc. How do web design companies make money developing products on OSS products? Custom development and hassle. This is how you make money in OSS. You get paid to deal with the hassle that the client doesn't want to deal with, directly.
Microsoft will try to tell you that you shouldn't need to pay someone to install their products. That's why they put all the fancy wizards on stuff, so that someone with a minimum of technical know-how can install it.
I think we are all quite clear on just how reliable and secure their "installed with a minimum of technical know-how" systems are. What's the expected lifetime for a WinXP machine, placed on a broadband connection, before it is compromised? Last I heard, it was under 20 minutes.
Of course, this is also a company which makes a tidy bundle off its "Certified Professionals" program.
If any internal app has the potential to become a product that will be sold at some point, you have no business in the OSS arena. If, however, you have a core of stuff which you ARE developing for commercial sale, OSS software makes great sense for ancillary stuff. Contributing updates and development on the ancillary stuff BACK to the community can help build some goodwill for you commercial stuff, too.
My employer readily uses a mix of COTS, OSS and custom-developed stuff. The custom-developed stuff usually comes into play when the COTS stuff doesn't quite do EVERYTHING they want. The OSS is usually web-related (and yes, they're primarily a Windows shop; there is Windows-platform OSS stuff out there), and it's usually tweaked to all hell. That's what I get paid to do: tweak the hell out of existing stuff and custom-develop stuff which fills the gaps.
1. Priced those lately? Very few people are buying PV because it usually takes a decade or more for the energy they generate to offset the purchase price (unless you live somewhere with VERY high electrical rates). The price is falling, but it's still nowhere near coal or natural gas. Wind is getting down to the point where it competes with coal on price, but that's only if you're dealing with the monster 1.5 MW turbines. Even so, if a BEV gives you more miles per kW of generating capacity, the BEV is still more economical than the FCV, regardless of the generating tech.
2. True, but the price of the platinum they use will go UP as the demand goes up, so there are definite limits to how far the price will go down. They're currently sitting around $10/watt, or $250,000 for a 25 kW fuel cell. Even if they cut that by an order of magnitude, you're still talking $25,000 just for the fuel cell.
3. True for all the older battery technologies. A modern supercapacitor and lithium-based machine can fully recharge in the time it would take you to sit down and eat lunch in a restaurant. The limiting factor here is how much electrical power the charging station can provide. If you're limited to 50 amps at 110 volts, that's about 5 kilowatts. A 20 kWh pack will take 4 hours to charge, at that rate. Step it up to industrial, 3-phase, 240 volt power, at 800 amps, and you can cut your charge time down to a half-hour or less.
4. Check the energy densities on the new lithium cells. Thunder Sky is currently shipping cells running about 250 Wh/kg, which means a 20 kWh pack is about 80 kg. That's a battery pack which weighs as much as 26 gallons of gasoline. Think you can do a fuel cell AND the hydrogen storage in that weight? The rest of the powertrain is pretty similar, as they're both electric vehicles.
They're building tour busses (right now, not five or ten years down the line) with >100 miles range. All electric, not hybrid. They just aren't planning on exporting them outside China, at this point.
I hate to think what will happen when they start mass-producing Lithium Sulfur batteries. Those bad boys have a potential of 2500 Wh/kg capacity (10x the capacity of Thunder Sky's current lithium tech). At that rate, a 20 kWh pack would weight a whopping total of 8 kg. The 12-volt battery in my current vehicle weighs more than that.
Let's say it's 1 Euro/watt. That's about $1.33 USD/watt, or about $1,330/kW.
The next factor to consider is the solar insolation for your area. This tells you how many hours of direct sunlight you get, for your area, each day. In my case, the annual average is about 4.5 hours / day.
At that rate, 1 kW of photovoltaics will give me about 4.5 kWh of electricity, per day, on average.
Also in my area, electricity is about 7 cent/kWh. Consequently, that 1 kW PV array will save me about 31.5 cents/day, on average. Thats 4,222 days (about 11 years and 7 months) for payoff. If your area gets more direct sunlight, or your electrical rates are higher, your payoff period would be shorter.
That's the bare, basics of the whole thing. Don't forget: PV makes DC current, but most of your household stuff runs on AC, so you'll need an inverter. Count on a low four-figures for something that can handle the load for a small-medium household. Also, to go off-grid, you'd need some kind of batteries for energy storage (otherwise, the power goes out when the sun goes down), as well as a controller to regulate power to/from them, etc. That gets really expensive, really quick. Consequently, while you may not be able to go off-grid, you could probably do net metering and reduce (if not eliminate) your electric bill.
You can already make hydrogen from water and electricity. This is nothing new. Let's crunch a few numbers, shall we?
I takes approximately 1 kg of hydrogen to provide the same energy as a gallon of gasoline. Most of your hydrogen fuel cell vehicles claim to get about 50 miles / kg h2. Considering the fact that a Prius also claims better than 50 miles / gallon on gasoline, this isn't such a great achievement.
Let's assume your hydrolyzer is 50% efficient (that's a stretch; the latest, large-scale industrial ones max out at 60%, while smaller ones that a private citizen could afford are typically less than 40%). Now, let's make a kilo of hydrogen.
1 kilo h2 @ 100% efficiency = approx 33 kWh electricity. At 50% efficiency, half the energy goes into making hydrogen, the other half makes heat. So, in that case, you need about 66 kWh of electricity to make one kg h2.
Where I live, electricity is about 7 cents / kWh. That works out to about $4.62 / kg h2.
Yes, that's right. $4.62 for the hydrogen equivalent of ONE gallon of gasoline, assuming your electricity is that cheap.
I wouldn't call that "virtually no expense."
Any argument which can be made for a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is an even greater argument for a battery-electric vehicle. Most electric vehicles get at least 4 miles / kWh electricity. Consequently, 66 kWh would push a BEV 264 miles, while using the electricty to make hydrogen and using it in a fuel cell vehicle would would get you (at best) 50 miles.
Not to mention the fact that fuel cells cost about $10/watt. Consequently, a 25 kW fuel cell (that's 25,000 watts) costs a quarter of a million dollars. Just for the fuel cell.
Spend your money on lithium batteries instead of the fuel cell. You'll get better range, and you won't need to buy a hydrolyzer.
I believe I've seen all the episodes of that show. That's the two episodes I remember best. Both of the ships pulled maneouvers that most aircraft can't, but are perfectly possible, from the standpoint of Newtonian physics. The first time I saw that, my jaw hit the floor (it was on Fox, at the time).
So much of that show was believable from a miltary standpoint; I'd just finished a four-year stint in Uncle Sam's Air Force, so that got my attention, as well. I mean, you WANT a C.O. who is a kick-butt warrior, who can pull off minor miracles like that. One of my C.O.'s in the Air Force was some scrawny, balding, older guy who didn't look like much till you put him the cockpit. He was a former instructor at the Air Force Fighter Weapons School (Air Force version of Top Gun), could suck up G's like few others (you don't have to be a muscle-bound brute to make an F-16 tap-dance; light weight is actually an advantage), and royally kicked a-- in the air.
I was sad to see that show go. It had plenty of room for stories, plenty of believable tech, decent characters, etc. I guess pleople like me just aren't a big enough target demographic to support it, though.
Let's say you're using your P2P client to operate as a node (sending and receiving). You get a request for a particular file. You don't have the file, so you send along the request to other nodes on your list. Somebody, somewhere has the file. It passes pieces to all it's known nodes, and they all relay parts of it to the original, requesting node, or relay their part to another node which can send it to the original requestor. The relaying nodes are merely proxying the data; they didn't have the file to begin with, but this effectively hides who DID, originally, have the file.
Since every node on the network can function as a proxy, EVERY NODE ON THE NETWORK IS EQUALLY LIABLE. Will the *AA sue multiple people who provide a copyrighted file over a P2P network? Sure. But CAN THEY SUE EVERYONE ON THE NETWORK? Tracking down who originally provided the file, to sue them, is basically impossible; you'd have to have logs from all of the proxy nodes (if they are keeping logs to begin with) or you'd have to have the cooperation of ALL the ISP's involved, analyzing the traffic. This would be difficult, but not impossible.
If the data going in and out of nodes is encrypted, and there's no way to tell whether data going into a node was copyrighted material, illegially shared, or legal material. If the data is decrypted and re-encrypted at the node (with a different key), there is now no way to tell whether data which went in was destined for that node, or proxied out shortly thereafter. It becomes impossible tell where the file originated. As long as the pieces are encrypted, on the final hop, in a fashion the ending node can decrypt, the system works.
The only way to shut this down is to sue ALL NODES ON THE NETWORK. I can see the *AA filing a couple thousand lawsuits against people who provided copyrighted files, but would they be able to get away with suing everyone on a network, because they MIGHT, potentially, be involved in sharing copyrighted data?
Much more difficult, legally, physically and financially.
I got a B.S. CompSci from a fairly large, state school (Southwest Missouri State University). I was working as a network admin while I was in college, so I had some experience on my resume when I got out. That kept me employed, for the most part, while I transitioned from network admin to development.
Since then, I've worked with ASP,.NET, Perl, Java and SQL. The beauty of a CompSci degree is that you get so much theory in there, that you can implement complex data structures and sophisticated logic in just about any language. Today, I use a mix of ASP, JavaScript and SQL on a daily basis, as well some Perl and MySQL for my "after-hours" projects. I didn't learn learn ASP (VBScript),.NET (C#) or JavaScript in college; I picked those up afterwards. I learned Perl as part of my employment during college (comes in real handy when you're parsing multi-megabyte logfiles looking for real, pertinent stuff to troubleshoot a webserver). I had a formal class on databases, where we covered SQL in the course of a week. I taught myself Java so that I could complete one class, my final semester (the main teaching language was C/C++, which I haven't used since, but they were transitioning to Java). I feel sorry for someone who spent two semesters learning Visual Basic (done some of that, too), but doesn't have enough theory to be able to adapt to a different language.
Get some experience while you're still in college (internships are very helpful); this will get you off the ground when you get out. Get the knowledge from the CS degree; the piece of paper is an important credential, and can get you in the door, but the knowledge will keep you adaptable and employable for decades (hopefully, a lifetime). As long as the school does a good job of getting the knowledge into your skull, I wouldn't be too worried about name recognition (I'm assuming you're NOT going to ITT Technical).
I was laid off from a megacorp. I originally started there on contract (one year), then they hired me on permanent. "Permanent," in this case, was just under a year. In the meantime, they had three other layoffs, including one between Thanksgiving and Christmas. When they sent me packing, I had nothing for about three months. I finally found a small consulting group in our area, who put me to work on a couple different projects. They were part-time at first, but they built me up to full-time. I'm still doing small development work for them on the side, even though one of the projects has hired me on full-time (salary, benefits, the works).
I've been laid off three times in less than a decade. It's not like I don't have skills; the IT industry is very unstable as all the college dropouts who quit classes to go make a quick billion or so on the dot.con bubble are slowly, but surely, leaving the field. Plus, multiple articles here on/. have shown that while the job market may be recovering overall, the IT job market is NOT on the rebound. There is still a large amount of outsourcing going on, even though there is increasing dissatisfaction with foreign outsourcing. As a result of my experience, I'm looking to diversify my income. I mean, most experienced investors will tell you not to "put all your eggs in one basket," yet most people do exactly that when they take a job. If their employer faces a downturn and has to shed bodies, they have no backup plan.
Some of my contract projects didn't need someone with my skillset full-time, and they couldn't really afford to keep someone like me on the payroll full-time. They usuall needed full-time work about 1/3 of the time. Consequently, my goal is:
independent contractor
three-five steady clients (that way, if one of them faces a major downturn, I'm not completely screwed)
stick with smaller companies (the larger ones seem more interested in foreign outsourcing, and smaller ones usually have more projects that one person can fulfill)
live in a less-developed area (say, one-two hours outside of a major city); since I'm not commuting every day, I can live somewhere a little more laid back where housing costs are a bit cheaper
have a face-to-face meeting with each client once a month; this way, they still have personal contact, but you aren't driving commuting into the city every day
Not everyone wants that lifestyle. But, considering my experience, that seems to be the most predictable, reliable way to go. YMMV
1. Happens about once a month. We have an "all hands" meeting, and management provides pizza (wide variety, too) for everyone.
2. We have a soda machine at work, but the coin and bill acceptors have been disabled, intentionally, by the management. Anytime you want a cold soda, got hit the button and get one. Someone comes out and restocks the machine on a daily basis. I make a pretty heavy dent in the Dew supply. When I was interviewing a possible new hire last week, and pointed out the free soda machine, they were shocked. I don't think it costs that much, but the productivity in the place is pretty good.
3. Probably not going to happen, at my current employer. Get a job with VML; they have a couple beer taps in the office, as well as cots for people who've put in too many consecutive hours at the office.
4. I have to stick with a late model HP machine with an 18" LCD display. Not exactly a major gaming machine, but decent.
The author posits that blacksmithing has died out, while bookkeeping has continued, because the knowledgebase that the blacksmith needed was ripe for scientific analysis and automation, while the bookkeeper has to deal with constantly changing requirements. Therefore, since bookkeepers have to always change/upgrade/modify/tweak their craft, they aren't as likely to be automated.
He asks how many people are acquainted with a bookkeeper, and how many are acquainted with a blacksmith. No, I'm not acquainted with many blacksmiths. How many mechanical engineers, or mechanics am I acquainted with? More than bookkeepers, I'm afraid.
The trade of blacksmithing, where one person forges, casts and manufactures something, cradle to grave, is largely gone. However, there are an extensive number of people in this world who know how to shape metal into useful things; I believe they're better known, these days, as engineers. They may not do the actual bending, machinging, forging, etc., but they do the design, which is something a blacksmith did. Also, mechanics may not manufacture their parts (something to which the author alludes), but blacksmiths were ALSO responsible for repairing existing items. Sometimes, that meant fabricating a part, sometimes that meant taking a pre-fabricated part and applying it (or modifying a similar part) to get it working. Mechanics do that, these days, and they have a much larger catalog of pre-fabricated parts to work with, so they don't typically NEED to fabricate a part for the job. Although, in my shade-tree mechanic experience, I've been known to take an existing, not-quite-what-I-needed part, and make it work.
So, while the trade of blacksmithing, as a cradle-to-grave manufacturer, mechanic and engineer has diminished, the different roles they played have spawned their own career fields. Engineers use machines to produce much larger quantities of parts than traditional craftsmen could manage, and their quality is more consistent. Is this the demise of a trade, or simply the application of technology to improve its productivity? I would argue that, if you took all the people who are now working in roles which blacksmiths once filled, the various sub-fields of blacksmithing have MORE people working in it than the bookkeeping field.
I develop websites, for internal use, for my employer. The language and technologies I use were pretty well evolved before I finished college and went to work in this career field. I don't have to code machine language or even assembly; some other developer developed the tools I use. Because I don't have to re-invent the wheel every time my boss wants a new web app, my productivity is much higher. The original programmers were the "blacksmiths" of this field; they created some practical, useful things for their clients, and they create tools which improved their own productivity. Their tools led to the development of other tools. Consequently, there are few if any programming "blacksmiths" in the world today; most all programmers are engineers, mechanics, or factory workers feeding the automated systems. The titles just haven't changed; that's all.
As for bookkeeping not being as ripe for automation, how many bookkeepers do you know who would be willing to go back to pen and paper? Give up their calculators? Give up their computers? I'm willing to be the answer is very few. Their field has also benefitted from automation; a bookkeeper today, with his computers and software, is at least a couple orders of magnitude more productive than an old "quill and paper" bookkeeper of a couple centuries ago. However, the title has changed little, although the career has changed significantly.
As a programmer, I see the technologies I'm working with evolving on a regular basis; I have to adapt to those changes, like the bookkeeper in his analogy. Does that mean that my career will become extinct? I sincerely doubt it; I'll probably be more productive ten years from now, but I sincerely doubt that an automated softwar
So, he took a big honkin' boom box, stuck a power supply, mini-itx mobo, a small hard drive, and a Linksys PCI WiFI adaptor in it. No other info available; picked that up from looking at the pictures. Not sure if this qualifies as a case mod (I mean, it's a computer, but it doesn't LOOK like a computer) or something else. Either way, it should have some kickin' sound output.
I've pondered, for some time, what would happen if large numbers of people had IPod-type hardware, with a WiFi or Bluetooth connection, and a public, read-only storage space available, and no encryption. If you could wander in-range of someone else, see what they've got in their publicly available directory, and download stuff that interested you, without even needing to know who exactly you got it from. Think P2P networking, without wires, without any way of figuring out who's distributing what. If the current P2P system didn't drive the RIAA crazy enough, this would REALLY push them over the edge. I suppose something like this is a logical first step in that direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Alan Tudyk ("Wash") comments that "Serenity" will be the first of THREE Firefly movies.
Even if we don't get more episodes, I'd be willing to cough up for the movies.
I don't think I'd cough up for more Trek-related movies (the last one STUNK, bad!), but I would for Firefly-related movies.
Agreed, this is more like dumping.
A couple years ago, Slashdot was awash with an April-Fools joke that said that Linus and various other, major Open Source developers were now charging for the software. The idea being that, now that their software had significant market penetration, they could rake in a major FORTUNE if they now required users to pay licenses fees (even if they were relatively minor fees). Note: this was an April Fools joke; 99.9% of the people who saw it recognized that, immediately. As for the other 0.1%, well, let's just say I was still hearing about it a month later.
Now, let's put another spin on this. Suppose an organization were to give away its software, free of charge, to any and everyone, thereby putting all competing software developers out of the business. Then, they decide their software is no longer free. If they've eliminated all competition, you have no choice but to pay what they require. With no competition, the price typically DOES go up in the long-term; they just go down in the short-term.
Microsoft's tactic of Embace/Extend/Extinguish is a variation on this. The Japanese car companies tactics in the late '70's and early '80's were a variation on this (the fact that the Big 3 were making crap just made it easier for them); if you've got deep enough pockets, you can sell below cost, starve your competition out of the market, then charge whatever you want when there's less competition.
And yes, "dumping" is illegal. It just doesn't always work; MS dumped IE on the market, but Netscape turned the tables on them by taking their browser Open Source. The Japanese car companies made a serious dent in Detroit's market, and those companies were fined heavily for their misdeeds. The Reagan administration never bothered to push the issue on the fines, and the first Bush administration simply dropped all the fines in an effort to open up Japanese markets to US goods.
The Plaintiff is arguing (rather poorly; last I checked, "MA" was the abbreviation for Massachusetts, not Maine, among other thing) that the FSF is essentially "dumping" software on the market at zero price, depriving him of earning a living as a programmer, developing competing products (no mention is made of what products he has developed, or intends to develop). As such, he argues, they should be legally and financially punished, and he should, of course, derive some benefit from that punishment.
IANAL; I'd never be able to shower enough to feel clean, if I did that for a living.
Dennis Miller also seems to believe it would extremely addicting: "If some unemployed punk in New Jersey, can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka."
My theory: some government agency is trying to crackdown on addictive things in our society (the DEA would be my guess), and with their recent doctrine of "preventive strikes," they're intentionally holding this technology back.
<looking nervously left and right, waiting for the black helicopters>
EV's make up for it in increased efficiency. About 80% of the current fed to charging the batteries actually makes it back to the wheels, and you can use regen braking to help that. For most gasoline vehicles, it's in the neighborhood of 12-15%, with NO regen braking. Consequently, if you have something like the EV-1, which got as high as 6 miles / kWh, a 20 kWh battery pack would get about 120 miles of range. A gallon of gasoline has more energy than that, but the gasoline and the gasoline engine weigh considerably less (so a given amount of horsepower will have higher performance) and won't go nearly as far.
Not to mention the fact that many people who have EV's also buy solar power equipment, so they can make their own "fuel." Last I checked, making your own gasoline is rather difficult.
The air hybrid system in this car intends to deal with the low power density problem. Batteries have a difficult time supplying large surges of power out (for accelerating and hill climbing) or absorbing large surges of power in (regen braking, either slowing down to a stop or descending a hill). Some designs are using supercapacitors to handle this, but this adds more weight and complexity to the vehicle. Using an air compressor/motor to handle this part of it all allows the vehicle to have decent performance off the line and up hills, but lets the batteries do what they do best: supply steady, long-term cruise power. In the meantime, compressed air is a relatively well-understood technology; there are plenty of off-the-shelf parts which can be applied.
And before you guys start whining about the low speeds at which the air system works, the Toyota Prius does something similar. It runs on electricity alone at low speed (primarily for stop-and-go traffic) and uses the gasoline engine for highway cruise (and when you need more power than the batteries can supply). If your gasoline engine gets to run at fairly steady speeds (instead of needing to pull you off the line), you can raise its efficiency. The higher-efficiency gasoline engine and the regen braking are what give the Prius its impressive efficiency figures. Ford was playing with an air hybrid transmission for a gasoline-powered vehicle a while back; you can find links to it through Google, but the majority of them seem to be devoid of real content.
Oil is mostly hydrocarbon chains of various lengths. Partial oxidation, in the presence of the right catalyst will give you (using Octane as an example):
C8H18 + 4(O2) --> 8(CO) + 9(H2)
add the carbon monoxide to some steam:
8(CO) + 8(H2O) --> 8(CO2) + 8(H2)
so the sum reaction is:
C8H18 + 4(O2) + 8(H2O) --> 8(CO2) + 17(H2)
Notice what the resultant chemicals are: Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen (gas). Sure, you can get hydrogen from petrochemicals, but you also get Carbon Dioxide in the process.
Pretty much any hydrocarbon can be used in this fashion, from Natural Gas (mostly methane; CH4) to Asphalt (mostly C20H42 or something similar). The end result is always the same, just in different combinations.
I thought the whole idea behind hydrogen power was to REDUCE the greenhouse gas output? In this scenario, you're still making greenhouse gasses, you just aren't producing them at the tailpipe. Considering how bad the total well-to-wheel efficiency is, you'd be better off just burning the petrochemicals.
But then, we're already doing that.
Don't even think about electrolysis. One kilogram of hydrogen (about the same energy content as a gallon of gasoline) has about 33 kWh of energy in it, if you've got a 100% efficient hydrolyzer. About the best you can hope for, though, is about 50% efficient, so it'll take about 66 kWh of electricity to make one kilo of hydrogen. Where I live, that's almost $5 for the equivalent of ONE GALLON of gasoline, and most of our electricity comes from coal-burning power plants (greenhouse gasses still being made at the power station, if not from the tailpipe). Since electricity made solar or wind is more expensive than electricity made from coal, hydrogen made from those sources would also be more expensive.
Cheap fusion already exists, and the fuel supply is expected to last millenia.
It just happens to be 93 million miles away.
Photovoltaics aren't sufficiently efficient yet to remove significant amounts of demand from the electrical grid, but PV isn't the only type of solar energy. Personally, I'd like to see a scaled-down version of Solar Two. I mean, think about a couple 3-meter heliostats (the same size as the older analog satellite TV dishes) sitting on top of your garage (or on top of a shed in the back yard; as long as it gets plenty of sunlight), focusing on some small collector on the top of the house.
A 3 meter diameter dish has about about 7 square meters of aperature. If your heliostats are about 85% efficient (you can get reflective films which do this), and the main collector/generator is 33% efficient, that's about 2 kW for each heliostat (7 sq meters * 1 kW solar energy / sq meter * 0.85 * 0.33). That's about 28% efficiency, from the surface of the heliostat to the final output. Considering the fact that most PV's (and all consumer-priced PV) are <20% efficient, that's not too bad. If your generator consists of a steam engine (Rankine or Kalina cycle) or Stirling engine, these typically product AC to begin with, so you don't have to worry about an inverter (which you will probably need with your PV, since they only produce DC).
If you use the molten salts Solar Two used, you could still get power after the sun sets (their research showed this was >95% efficient in terms of energy in vs. energy out). Alternately, you could just do net metering and knock your electric bill down.
Also, if you use the waste heat from the system to provide household heat or hot water, you get an even higher total efficiency. That aspect of it could reduce the amount of electricity you need, as well (if you have electric heat or an electric hot water heater).
Electric guitar solos in Beethoven's work? O.k.
And yes, it SERIOUSLY ROCKS! Don't know if he would've included it, but I like it.
Go get a copy of VirtuaWin. I've got it giving me a 3x3 grid of virtual displays on my Win2K machine at work. That way, I've got the same capabilities (screen-wise) as my Linux box at home.
Once you get used to it, you don't want do without it, regardless of which platform you're using. My boss saw me using it, and originally thought it was annoying. Then, he decided to grab it and start playing with it. Now, he's hooked, too (and he's got dual monitors to begin with; it's good to be the boss).
First off, most households which have PV also have an inverter. They may run some things off DC, because there is inherent inefficiency in an inverter, but they still produce AC for stuff like the washer and dryer. HomePower magazine had a article several months ago about wiring some 24V or 48V DC into the home, and which items could be run reliably from it (the answering machine used a simple $5 DC step-down voltage converter from Radio Shack, and his motion-sensitive lighting outside still had AC-powered lights, but the motion sensor was running on DC; all of these greatly reduced the author's energy usage).
Yes, if you produce enough power (and consume less than you produce), the meter can spin backwards. The result is that the local electric grid benefits from your PV, and you get a credit toward your utility use. It's called net metering, and most states have laws in place which REQUIRE the local electric utility to implement it. They are, of course, allowed to set requirements for what kind of equipment you connect to the grid, and those requirements are, in some cases, sufficiently expensive that most people won't bother. Increasingly, companies which sell PV in your area also have the necessary forms to handle the net metering, and will set up you with contractors and equipment which meet the requirements.
Many utilities don't actually cut a check for what you supply. If you produce more power than you use during the day, but draw from the grid when the sun goes down (cheaper than buying batteries), the amount you supplied gets subtracted from the amount you used, and the net (hence the term, "net metering") is what you get billed for.
In some places, you can actually get a check if your annual balance ends up in your favor. In some places, it's "use it or lose it." No laws set up on that one.
While everyone on here whines about solar not being able to completely satisfy our energy needs, it doesn't have to. The part of the day when electricity is most in demand is usually the afternoon, during the summer. If a significant number of people add PV, and stay connected to the grid (using net metering), the PV will be supplying its peak output when there is peak demand. This could reduce the need to add another powerplant in the region. Of course, if enough people add PV to their rooftops, they could probably even shut off (or at least reduce the output from) a powerplant or two. Since most of these plants burn coal, any solar you add helps reduce the regional pollution (either because you are reducing your demand or because you are actively supplying).
Many people on here complain about the fact that PV manufacturing requires a great deal of energy, and some of the earlier panels never supplied as much energy as their manufacture consumed. That may have been true a couple decades ago, but modern manufacturing processes have cut the "manufacturing payback" to about 4-5 years. According to the company website, these new panels are more like 3 weeks.
Also, if they can get the price down to $1/watt (as opposed to the $3-4/watt currently common), that cuts the total payback time, significantly. In the midwest, last time I crunched the numbers, payback was on the order of 20 years (electricity is pretty cheap, and we don't get as much sun as the southwest). If their claims are accurate, these would pay off in 5-7 years. I think 4-5 years is the tipping point for most people.
MRE's and other pre-packaged foods were always preferable to the dining halls at Kunsan. It was generally agreed that, if the North ever attacked at night, anyone near the dining hall would toss flares or something up on the roof, so they would bomb the dining hall out of existence.
I ate a lot of Nestle Crunch bars and Chips Ahoy, and drank a lot of Dew while I was there. Really whacked out my metabolism.
At "the Kun," we had native Korean cooks on the base, no TCN's around. Lots of those stateside, but those were usually related to the military members serving on the base (someone served in Japan, got married while they were there, and the wife worked in the dining hall when they were transferred back to the States). Since Kunsan was considered a remote assignment very few dependents were stationed there (some, but very few). Consequently, we didn't have as many TCN's to choose from.
Yeah, I remember jammers. Never had to operate one (I was a crew chief, not a load toad), but I imagine you could tuck something foil-wrapped (like an MRE) under the engine access hatch and get it pretty warm.
We didn't launch checklists, gloves, etc. off the dash 60 exhaust because we would then have to go locate/clean up whatever we launched. That kinda takes the fun out of it.
It's been suggested in the past that they build a large Fresnel lens somewhere in earth orbit. The idea was that, if normal solar energy would impart a small push to a solar sail, focused solar energy would provide a more substantial push.
Such a lens would be mostly empty space. If you could build one each in Earth AND Mars orbit (a reflector, in this case), you could shuttle stuff back and forth relatively quickly. If you can get a spacecraft to break out of Mars orbit, then decelerate BELOW the speed needed to stay in Mars' orbit around the sun (breaking orbit going in the opposite direction of the planet's motion), the Sun's gravity will give you your return trip back toward Earth. Needless to say, orbital insertion around the Earth on the way back would require VERY precise positioning and speed. This scheme was developed a while back for how solar sail spacecraft could "come back" from trips to outer planets.
I'm currently working with a company which is looking at selling a service, based on OSS software.
If we just hang some OSS product out there, what's to stop the clients from just grabbing the software and implementing it themselves, instead of paying us for the service?
Hassle and customization.
How do most hosting companies, running LAMP configurations, make their money? The hassle of managing the servers, dealing with the bandwidth, backups, software upgrades, etc. How do web design companies make money developing products on OSS products? Custom development and hassle. This is how you make money in OSS. You get paid to deal with the hassle that the client doesn't want to deal with, directly.
Microsoft will try to tell you that you shouldn't need to pay someone to install their products. That's why they put all the fancy wizards on stuff, so that someone with a minimum of technical know-how can install it.
I think we are all quite clear on just how reliable and secure their "installed with a minimum of technical know-how" systems are. What's the expected lifetime for a WinXP machine, placed on a broadband connection, before it is compromised? Last I heard, it was under 20 minutes.
Of course, this is also a company which makes a tidy bundle off its "Certified Professionals" program.
If any internal app has the potential to become a product that will be sold at some point, you have no business in the OSS arena. If, however, you have a core of stuff which you ARE developing for commercial sale, OSS software makes great sense for ancillary stuff. Contributing updates and development on the ancillary stuff BACK to the community can help build some goodwill for you commercial stuff, too.
My employer readily uses a mix of COTS, OSS and custom-developed stuff. The custom-developed stuff usually comes into play when the COTS stuff doesn't quite do EVERYTHING they want. The OSS is usually web-related (and yes, they're primarily a Windows shop; there is Windows-platform OSS stuff out there), and it's usually tweaked to all hell. That's what I get paid to do: tweak the hell out of existing stuff and custom-develop stuff which fills the gaps.
Unfortunately, that only works if you've been to Taco Bell in the last hour or two.
1. Priced those lately? Very few people are buying PV because it usually takes a decade or more for the energy they generate to offset the purchase price (unless you live somewhere with VERY high electrical rates). The price is falling, but it's still nowhere near coal or natural gas. Wind is getting down to the point where it competes with coal on price, but that's only if you're dealing with the monster 1.5 MW turbines. Even so, if a BEV gives you more miles per kW of generating capacity, the BEV is still more economical than the FCV, regardless of the generating tech.
2. True, but the price of the platinum they use will go UP as the demand goes up, so there are definite limits to how far the price will go down. They're currently sitting around $10/watt, or $250,000 for a 25 kW fuel cell. Even if they cut that by an order of magnitude, you're still talking $25,000 just for the fuel cell.
3. True for all the older battery technologies. A modern supercapacitor and lithium-based machine can fully recharge in the time it would take you to sit down and eat lunch in a restaurant. The limiting factor here is how much electrical power the charging station can provide. If you're limited to 50 amps at 110 volts, that's about 5 kilowatts. A 20 kWh pack will take 4 hours to charge, at that rate. Step it up to industrial, 3-phase, 240 volt power, at 800 amps, and you can cut your charge time down to a half-hour or less.
4. Check the energy densities on the new lithium cells. Thunder Sky is currently shipping cells running about 250 Wh/kg, which means a 20 kWh pack is about 80 kg. That's a battery pack which weighs as much as 26 gallons of gasoline. Think you can do a fuel cell AND the hydrogen storage in that weight? The rest of the powertrain is pretty similar, as they're both electric vehicles.
They're building tour busses (right now, not five or ten years down the line) with >100 miles range. All electric, not hybrid. They just aren't planning on exporting them outside China, at this point.
I hate to think what will happen when they start mass-producing Lithium Sulfur batteries. Those bad boys have a potential of 2500 Wh/kg capacity (10x the capacity of Thunder Sky's current lithium tech). At that rate, a 20 kWh pack would weight a whopping total of 8 kg. The 12-volt battery in my current vehicle weighs more than that.
Let's say it's 1 Euro/watt. That's about $1.33 USD/watt, or about $1,330/kW.
The next factor to consider is the solar insolation for your area. This tells you how many hours of direct sunlight you get, for your area, each day. In my case, the annual average is about 4.5 hours / day.
At that rate, 1 kW of photovoltaics will give me about 4.5 kWh of electricity, per day, on average.
Also in my area, electricity is about 7 cent/kWh. Consequently, that 1 kW PV array will save me about 31.5 cents/day, on average. Thats 4,222 days (about 11 years and 7 months) for payoff. If your area gets more direct sunlight, or your electrical rates are higher, your payoff period would be shorter.
That's the bare, basics of the whole thing. Don't forget: PV makes DC current, but most of your household stuff runs on AC, so you'll need an inverter. Count on a low four-figures for something that can handle the load for a small-medium household. Also, to go off-grid, you'd need some kind of batteries for energy storage (otherwise, the power goes out when the sun goes down), as well as a controller to regulate power to/from them, etc. That gets really expensive, really quick. Consequently, while you may not be able to go off-grid, you could probably do net metering and reduce (if not eliminate) your electric bill.
You can already make hydrogen from water and electricity. This is nothing new. Let's crunch a few numbers, shall we?
I takes approximately 1 kg of hydrogen to provide the same energy as a gallon of gasoline. Most of your hydrogen fuel cell vehicles claim to get about 50 miles / kg h2. Considering the fact that a Prius also claims better than 50 miles / gallon on gasoline, this isn't such a great achievement.
Let's assume your hydrolyzer is 50% efficient (that's a stretch; the latest, large-scale industrial ones max out at 60%, while smaller ones that a private citizen could afford are typically less than 40%). Now, let's make a kilo of hydrogen.
1 kilo h2 @ 100% efficiency = approx 33 kWh electricity. At 50% efficiency, half the energy goes into making hydrogen, the other half makes heat. So, in that case, you need about 66 kWh of electricity to make one kg h2.
Where I live, electricity is about 7 cents / kWh. That works out to about $4.62 / kg h2.
Yes, that's right. $4.62 for the hydrogen equivalent of ONE gallon of gasoline, assuming your electricity is that cheap.
I wouldn't call that "virtually no expense."
Any argument which can be made for a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is an even greater argument for a battery-electric vehicle. Most electric vehicles get at least 4 miles / kWh electricity. Consequently, 66 kWh would push a BEV 264 miles, while using the electricty to make hydrogen and using it in a fuel cell vehicle would would get you (at best) 50 miles.
Not to mention the fact that fuel cells cost about $10/watt. Consequently, a 25 kW fuel cell (that's 25,000 watts) costs a quarter of a million dollars. Just for the fuel cell.
Spend your money on lithium batteries instead of the fuel cell. You'll get better range, and you won't need to buy a hydrolyzer.
I believe I've seen all the episodes of that show. That's the two episodes I remember best. Both of the ships pulled maneouvers that most aircraft can't, but are perfectly possible, from the standpoint of Newtonian physics. The first time I saw that, my jaw hit the floor (it was on Fox, at the time).
So much of that show was believable from a miltary standpoint; I'd just finished a four-year stint in Uncle Sam's Air Force, so that got my attention, as well. I mean, you WANT a C.O. who is a kick-butt warrior, who can pull off minor miracles like that. One of my C.O.'s in the Air Force was some scrawny, balding, older guy who didn't look like much till you put him the cockpit. He was a former instructor at the Air Force Fighter Weapons School (Air Force version of Top Gun), could suck up G's like few others (you don't have to be a muscle-bound brute to make an F-16 tap-dance; light weight is actually an advantage), and royally kicked a-- in the air.
I was sad to see that show go. It had plenty of room for stories, plenty of believable tech, decent characters, etc. I guess pleople like me just aren't a big enough target demographic to support it, though.
Let's say you're using your P2P client to operate as a node (sending and receiving). You get a request for a particular file. You don't have the file, so you send along the request to other nodes on your list. Somebody, somewhere has the file. It passes pieces to all it's known nodes, and they all relay parts of it to the original, requesting node, or relay their part to another node which can send it to the original requestor. The relaying nodes are merely proxying the data; they didn't have the file to begin with, but this effectively hides who DID, originally, have the file.
Since every node on the network can function as a proxy, EVERY NODE ON THE NETWORK IS EQUALLY LIABLE. Will the *AA sue multiple people who provide a copyrighted file over a P2P network? Sure. But CAN THEY SUE EVERYONE ON THE NETWORK? Tracking down who originally provided the file, to sue them, is basically impossible; you'd have to have logs from all of the proxy nodes (if they are keeping logs to begin with) or you'd have to have the cooperation of ALL the ISP's involved, analyzing the traffic. This would be difficult, but not impossible.
If the data going in and out of nodes is encrypted, and there's no way to tell whether data going into a node was copyrighted material, illegially shared, or legal material. If the data is decrypted and re-encrypted at the node (with a different key), there is now no way to tell whether data which went in was destined for that node, or proxied out shortly thereafter. It becomes impossible tell where the file originated. As long as the pieces are encrypted, on the final hop, in a fashion the ending node can decrypt, the system works.
The only way to shut this down is to sue ALL NODES ON THE NETWORK. I can see the *AA filing a couple thousand lawsuits against people who provided copyrighted files, but would they be able to get away with suing everyone on a network, because they MIGHT, potentially, be involved in sharing copyrighted data?
Much more difficult, legally, physically and financially.
I got a B.S. CompSci from a fairly large, state school (Southwest Missouri State University). I was working as a network admin while I was in college, so I had some experience on my resume when I got out. That kept me employed, for the most part, while I transitioned from network admin to development.
.NET, Perl, Java and SQL. The beauty of a CompSci degree is that you get so much theory in there, that you can implement complex data structures and sophisticated logic in just about any language. Today, I use a mix of ASP, JavaScript and SQL on a daily basis, as well some Perl and MySQL for my "after-hours" projects. I didn't learn learn ASP (VBScript), .NET (C#) or JavaScript in college; I picked those up afterwards. I learned Perl as part of my employment during college (comes in real handy when you're parsing multi-megabyte logfiles looking for real, pertinent stuff to troubleshoot a webserver). I had a formal class on databases, where we covered SQL in the course of a week. I taught myself Java so that I could complete one class, my final semester (the main teaching language was C/C++, which I haven't used since, but they were transitioning to Java). I feel sorry for someone who spent two semesters learning Visual Basic (done some of that, too), but doesn't have enough theory to be able to adapt to a different language.
Since then, I've worked with ASP,
Get some experience while you're still in college (internships are very helpful); this will get you off the ground when you get out. Get the knowledge from the CS degree; the piece of paper is an important credential, and can get you in the door, but the knowledge will keep you adaptable and employable for decades (hopefully, a lifetime). As long as the school does a good job of getting the knowledge into your skull, I wouldn't be too worried about name recognition (I'm assuming you're NOT going to ITT Technical).
I was laid off from a megacorp. I originally started there on contract (one year), then they hired me on permanent. "Permanent," in this case, was just under a year. In the meantime, they had three other layoffs, including one between Thanksgiving and Christmas. When they sent me packing, I had nothing for about three months. I finally found a small consulting group in our area, who put me to work on a couple different projects. They were part-time at first, but they built me up to full-time. I'm still doing small development work for them on the side, even though one of the projects has hired me on full-time (salary, benefits, the works).
I've been laid off three times in less than a decade. It's not like I don't have skills; the IT industry is very unstable as all the college dropouts who quit classes to go make a quick billion or so on the dot.con bubble are slowly, but surely, leaving the field. Plus, multiple articles here on
Some of my contract projects didn't need someone with my skillset full-time, and they couldn't really afford to keep someone like me on the payroll full-time. They usuall needed full-time work about 1/3 of the time. Consequently, my goal is:
- independent contractor
- three-five steady clients (that way, if one of them faces a major downturn, I'm not completely screwed)
- stick with smaller companies (the larger ones seem more interested in foreign outsourcing, and smaller ones usually have more projects that one person can fulfill)
- live in a less-developed area (say, one-two hours outside of a major city); since I'm not commuting every day, I can live somewhere a little more laid back where housing costs are a bit cheaper
- have a face-to-face meeting with each client once a month; this way, they still have personal contact, but you aren't driving commuting into the city every day
Not everyone wants that lifestyle. But, considering my experience, that seems to be the most predictable, reliable way to go. YMMV1. Happens about once a month. We have an "all hands" meeting, and management provides pizza (wide variety, too) for everyone.
2. We have a soda machine at work, but the coin and bill acceptors have been disabled, intentionally, by the management. Anytime you want a cold soda, got hit the button and get one. Someone comes out and restocks the machine on a daily basis. I make a pretty heavy dent in the Dew supply. When I was interviewing a possible new hire last week, and pointed out the free soda machine, they were shocked. I don't think it costs that much, but the productivity in the place is pretty good.
3. Probably not going to happen, at my current employer. Get a job with VML; they have a couple beer taps in the office, as well as cots for people who've put in too many consecutive hours at the office.
4. I have to stick with a late model HP machine with an 18" LCD display. Not exactly a major gaming machine, but decent.
The author posits that blacksmithing has died out, while bookkeeping has continued, because the knowledgebase that the blacksmith needed was ripe for scientific analysis and automation, while the bookkeeper has to deal with constantly changing requirements. Therefore, since bookkeepers have to always change/upgrade/modify/tweak their craft, they aren't as likely to be automated.
He asks how many people are acquainted with a bookkeeper, and how many are acquainted with a blacksmith. No, I'm not acquainted with many blacksmiths. How many mechanical engineers, or mechanics am I acquainted with? More than bookkeepers, I'm afraid.
The trade of blacksmithing, where one person forges, casts and manufactures something, cradle to grave, is largely gone. However, there are an extensive number of people in this world who know how to shape metal into useful things; I believe they're better known, these days, as engineers. They may not do the actual bending, machinging, forging, etc., but they do the design, which is something a blacksmith did. Also, mechanics may not manufacture their parts (something to which the author alludes), but blacksmiths were ALSO responsible for repairing existing items. Sometimes, that meant fabricating a part, sometimes that meant taking a pre-fabricated part and applying it (or modifying a similar part) to get it working. Mechanics do that, these days, and they have a much larger catalog of pre-fabricated parts to work with, so they don't typically NEED to fabricate a part for the job. Although, in my shade-tree mechanic experience, I've been known to take an existing, not-quite-what-I-needed part, and make it work.
So, while the trade of blacksmithing, as a cradle-to-grave manufacturer, mechanic and engineer has diminished, the different roles they played have spawned their own career fields. Engineers use machines to produce much larger quantities of parts than traditional craftsmen could manage, and their quality is more consistent. Is this the demise of a trade, or simply the application of technology to improve its productivity? I would argue that, if you took all the people who are now working in roles which blacksmiths once filled, the various sub-fields of blacksmithing have MORE people working in it than the bookkeeping field.
I develop websites, for internal use, for my employer. The language and technologies I use were pretty well evolved before I finished college and went to work in this career field. I don't have to code machine language or even assembly; some other developer developed the tools I use. Because I don't have to re-invent the wheel every time my boss wants a new web app, my productivity is much higher. The original programmers were the "blacksmiths" of this field; they created some practical, useful things for their clients, and they create tools which improved their own productivity. Their tools led to the development of other tools. Consequently, there are few if any programming "blacksmiths" in the world today; most all programmers are engineers, mechanics, or factory workers feeding the automated systems. The titles just haven't changed; that's all.
As for bookkeeping not being as ripe for automation, how many bookkeepers do you know who would be willing to go back to pen and paper? Give up their calculators? Give up their computers? I'm willing to be the answer is very few. Their field has also benefitted from automation; a bookkeeper today, with his computers and software, is at least a couple orders of magnitude more productive than an old "quill and paper" bookkeeper of a couple centuries ago. However, the title has changed little, although the career has changed significantly.
As a programmer, I see the technologies I'm working with evolving on a regular basis; I have to adapt to those changes, like the bookkeeper in his analogy. Does that mean that my career will become extinct? I sincerely doubt it; I'll probably be more productive ten years from now, but I sincerely doubt that an automated softwar
So, he took a big honkin' boom box, stuck a power supply, mini-itx mobo, a small hard drive, and a Linksys PCI WiFI adaptor in it. No other info available; picked that up from looking at the pictures. Not sure if this qualifies as a case mod (I mean, it's a computer, but it doesn't LOOK like a computer) or something else. Either way, it should have some kickin' sound output.
I've pondered, for some time, what would happen if large numbers of people had IPod-type hardware, with a WiFi or Bluetooth connection, and a public, read-only storage space available, and no encryption. If you could wander in-range of someone else, see what they've got in their publicly available directory, and download stuff that interested you, without even needing to know who exactly you got it from. Think P2P networking, without wires, without any way of figuring out who's distributing what. If the current P2P system didn't drive the RIAA crazy enough, this would REALLY push them over the edge. I suppose something like this is a logical first step in that direction.