People actually trading on death! What a horrible idea!
Not only should terrorism derivatives be outlawed, so should terrorism insurance.
And life insurance! Who in their right mind would buy life insurance! You give your beneficiaries a reason to knock you off so they can profit from your death - and you pay the premium yourself!
(In most cases its illegal for the beneficiary to buy insurance on someone else. Except for businesses. A business has every reason to work a "key employee" to death because they'll just replace him with a warm body and collect a million bucks or few.)
The author of the/. article didn't bother to thimk and check on how original this idea is. A cursory check would have revealed a huge industry in desktop manufacturing, including quite a few that will turn solid cad designs into solid prototypes.
MIT folk hacked a cannon bubblejet (I think) to make parts long ago enough for the third or fourth generation product to be on the market today.
Besides the obvious ability to hold in your hand a model of an object you designed, its possible to turn it into plastic of sufficient strength to meet most applications.
And its quite easy to use the model for investment casting and produce a quality part in almost any metal.
But of course, in America we don't think in terms of real products. In American we just make money blowing hot air. Manufacturing in American is dead and no one who wants to be in an exciting field will certainly stay far away from anything having to do with mechanical devices.
The discussion about intellectual property rights is mostly crap and is the result of expecting to just walk into the holodeck and live your dream. Most at fault are the business leaders who don't want to deal with the problem of manufacturing requiring better trained people than windoze or unix code minkeys.
Computers and software have gone from raw idea to commodity product in a little over my life time. Its been a long run. But I remember lots of other innovations that burst onto the scene and then faded into the background: hifi, stereo, LPs, acid rock, rock and roll, blues, jazz, radio phones, cell phones, mass production, muscle cars, and on and on.
Frank Zappa (gee, another thing that's come and gone) used phrasing like trend mongers, (gee another thing thats come and gone, polyester suits), which reflects the degree that some part of America will embrace just about any new idea.
So, the computer industry becoming too boring for Americans to really be bothered - after all, what is now needed is for Microsoft to get rid of 99% of its employees and hire those slow working, spec writing, code reviewing, boring coders who won't release a line of code until it can be burned into ROM, and there are about 7 of those guys in the US. Get the 100 million lines of Microsoft code right without "improving it" requires people who can achieve nirvana or inner peace by spending hours making that one perfect cut or perfect stroke.
But that isn't to say that there aren't great opportunities for real innovation, for breaking the mold, for proving that the impossible just takes an extra day.
America is a land of extremes.
We are so innovative that we "invented" the oil based economy and we've pushed it to such an extreme that 10% of the worlds population consumes 25% of the world's oil production. And we created the infrastructure to do it. The mind bogggles.
Consider: The US uses 18 million barrels of oil a day. That's well over three quarters of a million gallons of petroleum products every day. That's about 3 gallons for every man, women, child every day. And that's only about half the energy we use per person.
To make the US and the world totally dependent on oil, Americans drilled lots of holes. In a span of about 20 years, Americans were so into finding oil that 10 of thousands of people founded 10s of thousands of companies to drill about a million holes. Some of those holes are still producing about 2 barrels a day, just a bit less than they produced when they were new wells. What all the people did pumping out millions of PC software packages and millions of web sites wasn't anything new.
But where are we today.
Well, we're probably at the world peak in terms of oil production. For the next 100 years, oil product is going to go down hill.
And how are a lot of Americans viewing this? "That's impossible, there has to be more oil, we can't live without oil, if this is true, life is over"
And when anyone suggests something simple like, say, windmills, the response is "it would take 20 years of installing 10,000 windmills to replace the electricity we use every day.
Hmmmm, 20 * 10,000 -> 200,000. That's a small number. What's the problem?
Americans should have no problem installing 1 million or more windmills in 10 years.
In fact, after the first 25,000 were installed, the costs should be brought down by everything learned and by competition so that we'd be installing a million a year.
Twenty years ago a sat dish was huge, required a specially trained team to install. But today, people pick them up and install them on the side of their house. And the sat dish is "free". I don't expect a wind mill to be as small as a sat dish and I don't expect them to be "free", but I expect that they will be so cheap that wind mills will be used instead of running 100 feet of copper wire.
Either that, or wind mills won't be able to match solar panels.
I suspect that there are a few people reading/. that remember when computer people didn't want a pc (lower case). Who would want to leave work on a computer with a 100 meg disk drive and go home to play with a computer where the only storage was a cassette recorder that could hold about 100 KB on an expensive 60 minute tape. On
If the goal was to stop downloading and that was it, then maybe the strategy works. But I thought the goal was to "restore industry income and profits". If someone stops downloading but doesn't buy any CDs, or some other format of RIAA member company products, then what is the benefit?
Look at it from the economists standpoint. The demand for music downloads might be almost perfectly elastic. At zero the demand is 10 billion downloads. But at a price of 1 cent, the demand might be 1 billion downloads. At 10 cents, 10 million downloads. And at $1 it might be 100,000 downloads. If that were the case, the price should be lower than what they are currently charging, but to adopt a more profitable price structure will generate pressure on the existing CD price structure, resulting in lower overall revenue. Unless selling CDs for one half the price would more than triple the sales of CDs.
In one sense, the way the RIAA member companies think of things is the ideal situation for clubs around the country is for there to be 5 cloned bands that play 5 identical play lists. The spend all their money promoting their 5 live bands. When you want to go to a club on Friday night, you pick the country band, the rock band, the heavy metal, or folk band and pay the $10 cover charge. When upstart clubs start up with independent bands, the RIAA goes out and makes sure they don't get permits, licenses, or are allowed to advertise. This is the American way - screw the customer, big salaries to those can most effectively limit choice to drive up prices.
In The Innovator's Dilemma, the case is made by point out case after case for companies destroying themselves by listening to their customers.
All the mainframe companies did - their customers didn't want minicomputers.
All the minicomputer companies did - all their minicomputer customers rejected PCs as a solution.
And Microsoft must be listening to their customers and getting the same wrong information. But when you talk to customers who manage corporate computer infrastructures built on paying Microsoft millions of dollars, how many are going to say "Microsoft, make the next release free with optional support so that I can cut my budget from $20M to $5M."? Zero! Why? Well, a CIO saying that might as well be saying, "hey, give my boss justification for cutting my salary by 50%".
The music companies has as an important a role in the future of music sales as mainframe computer companies have in computer sales.
And guess what, the market has spoken on the matter of mainframe computer companies and they no longer exist.
Its just a matter of time until the music companies of the 50s, 60s, and 70s disappear.
What's missing is a Dell to take music sales to a new level. A company that focuses entirely on distribution and marketing its internet address, and leaving all the product marketing to the artists (like Dell does with Intel and Windows) and focusing on low prices, quick delivery, and high volume.
And does anyone actually believe that the fossil fuels industry will lie down and let this happen without a fight?
Right! Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney are going to mandate every American buy 10 gallons of gas every week to keep the oil industry afloat as the price of oil goes to $30, $40, $50, $60, $70 a barrel and the US has to increase its share of world oil production from 25% to 40% to 50% to 75%.
The reality is that world oil production will peak this decade if it hasn't already.
That doesn't mean that oil will run out, only that there will be no increase in daily supply no matter what the demand. There have been no major oil fields discovered in the past decade, and the important oil fields were discovered more than 40 years ago.
Technology won't magically cause oil to require less energy to extract. The people extracting oil aren't complete morons, they have always extracted the oil that is easiest and cheapest to extract before moving on to the harder and more expensive to extract oil. Millions of people have been extracting oil over the past century and if there was a way to extract hard to extract oil cheaper than today, they would have found it by now because cheaper would mean more profit.
So the only way the oil industry can prevent higher prices motivating consumers to switch to some other, any other, form of energy is to get a mandate passed that requires Americans to buy 10 gallons of gas every week no matter what the price.
Failing that, there is nothing that the oil industry can do to prevent the decline of oil as an energy source.
What we as consumers have to hope for is a million small steps to cheaper hydrogen production. The likelihood of someone coming up with real cold fusion are real slim. Hydrogen as a fuel in 20 years is going to be more expensive than oil as a fuel is today, but the price of oil in 20 years will make hydrogen look cheap.
HP claims to have 159 of the systems in the top500, but doesn't talk about the fact that over 100 of them are for computer architectures that HP has declared dead, those based on DEC's Alpha and HP's PARISC.
HP's future is based on commodity chips where the only advantage that HP has is size and the cash to support the significant amount of upfront large scale system integration. And I'm sure that a lot of the folk who have done this work in the past are headed for the chopping block as HP finishes off the parts of DEC that Compaq didn't.
Re:Social cost=private costs + external cost
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"I should have said "concentrate on the selling, not the buying"."
And I should have said social cost = private cost + external cost.
And the problem is that you don't seem to understand the concept of external cost. External costs are those that aren't factored in the price of a good or service.
Energy, of all goods, has more external costs than any other with the possible exception of military weapons.
There are the external costs of pollution and that is one that many recognize.
But how many people recognize the external cost of oil wealth destroying the traditional economy of the Persian Gulf and a number of other regions where oil has been found (eg. Argentina)? The result has been millions of people cycling between wealth and poverty and back while never producing any actual goods. (Oil is not a product - it is "land", a finite resource, that once consumed is gone.)
More people, but not many, recognize that the US military presences in the Persian Gulf is an external cost of energy.
The focus for energy must be on incorporating the external costs into cost of energy. Costs are costs. Costs are costs. Costs are costs.
An economist says price is the sum of the factors of production plus profit. Factors of production are land (resources), capital, labor, technology, and institutional costs. For oil these costs are extremely low if the short view is taken, and for oil the long view is a million years.
Oil is different from iron or gold, after mining and processing iron and gold, the iron and gold still exist - trash dumps contain as much iron per cubic yard as many iron mines, and that is excluding the steel recycled before the dump. Oil is stored energy, and once the stored energy is released, you're left with carbon and hydrogen in much lower energy states.
Externalities cause the value of the "land" factor of oil production to be set at effectively zero. Some of those externalities is the claims that "oil will never run out", "coal can replace oil", "technology will find more oil", "technology will replace oil". This is the externality of "the commons".
When oil can be produced and delivered to the US from Saudi Arabia for $10 a barrel (the situation in 1999), the effects ripple through the economy. This low price makes coal a high cost method of producing electricity, so coal plants were not built, pollution control equipment was not installed because that would make the cost be greater than the market price, power production was shifted from coal to natural gas.
I would put the external costs of oil at $50 a barrel, and I might be low.
If oil were priced at $60-80 a barrel, coal powered electric power generation could afford to be extremely clean, possibly paying for CO2 sequestration in the ocean. But now wind becomes extremely profitable, equivalent to about $20 a barrel for the equivalent amount of electricity produced from oil, and that would be after running a million miles of power lines to connect the upper midwest and canada to the US east and west coasts.
The only problem is the mechanism of converting external costs to a factor of production.
Something that is very political given the debate over the actual costs - Bush will not accept the idea that 9/11 is an external cost of a carbon fuel based economy.
Bush will not accept that the illusion of great wealth in the Persian Gulf (from oil) as a huge external cost of oil. The assumption is that Iraq can be transformed into a democracy cheaply because of Iraq's oil, but Iraq's oil will prevent Iraq from developing a sustainable economy and it sow the seed of another 9/11. The US would be safer if the US mandated that Iraq could produce no more than 3 million barrels of oil per day, but an unlimited amount of electricity and hyrdrogen from solar and wind. Ditto Iran. Ditto Saudi Arabia. It might not be a good "market" solution, but it would be a lot better than the likely outcome.
Re:Wind Farms don't work
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"Trouble is, wind farms don't generate much electricity."
And I bet you believe that
- oil production under the texas oil commision didn't peak in 1970 and has been declining because Texans are too wealthy.
- that oil fields the size of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are found every year
- that its impossible for cars to get more than 20 MPG
- that American technology will solve the problem
The truth is that windmills are quite profitable when its possible to connect to the grid, that oil in the lower 48 was predicted to decline in the early 70s in 1956 and that happened, Only two gigantic oil fields have been found (in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) ever and they were found more than 50 years ago, non-US auto companies are able to meet significantly higher CAFE standards than the US auto companies and the major growth in energy technology deployment and products is all outside the US. In a few years, many smaller countries will be generating more wind power than the US which pioneered modern wind power generation in the 80s with the significant investments in California.
Social cost=private costs + social cost
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A Mighty Wind
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"If the "drawbacks" aren't paid for it's the seller's fault for setting the price too low, not the buyer's fault, which you try to blame."
New England is suing the Midwest because the costs of power in the Midwest is not included in the cost of power generated in the Midwest. Those costs are such things as dying lakes and ponds, dying trees, etc, caused by sulpher and nitrogen compounds pumped into the air from burning coal and oil in power plants and cars.
Of course, England and France are paying the social costs of the same kinds of pollution in New England....
By the time I got to high school, most of the writing was done on a typewriter (manual, not electric, this was in the mid-60s), except for the occasional exam. Having a preference for "science", I was taking as much math, physics, chemistry, electronics, etc. as I could, so I was spending a lot of time printing already and my writing became a mix. The same was pretty much the case in college as well.
Then I dropped out of college and started programming. Fortran, assembly, etc., especially on coding forms, isn't something you do in cursive. I did type my own code - on 80 column cards - but keypunches were a scarce resource so you had to know what you were doing at one.
By the time I got into a situation where I worked with people on a project, it was a more than a decade later and we all had terminals in our offices.
I'm back in college studying machine tool, welding, mechanical design, and for the first time I had an exam that included some signficant writing, a microeconomics exam. Every other exam has included significant technical jargon, formulas, or terms and procedures, and G-code. I don't have a clue how to write things like GTAW, GMAW, SMAW, E7018, cursively, much less stuff like G03X1.Y2.I-2.J0M06.
Maybe some people mix cursive with printing when writing "while (cyclecountctrreg)..." on white boards or making corrections or notes, but not I - find it easier to just print everything. There are times when I find printing a bit tiring, but then I wish for a keyboard, not writing in cursive. When I did mix them, lines of code would start out cursive and end in printing and then paragraph after would start out in print and switch to cursive until an equation or symbol name when it would switch to printing. Very strange to look at and read.
I've seen a lot of cases where someone reinvented the wheel, but instead of using an axle, they just put the wheel under the object so you have to move the wheel to the front to keep going, and then to top it off, they made the wheel square or triangular.
I did that once. In 1969 I needed a sort, so I looked in the fortran programming book I had and implemented a bubble sort, to sort records on disks. When it became clear that the sort would take a couple of months to complete, I started working on optimizations. As I was working for a college, one of the profs suggested that I take a look at the collected algorithms of the ACM. There I learned about quick sort and heap sort. I was able to incorporate those, but I had to deal with the fact that I had a lot of data on disk that I couldn't bring into memory. Eventually I got a sort working that wasn't too bad for the times and the computer resources.
Then Knuth published Vol 3 which I studied with my experience in mind. I was amazed to see Knuth develop and analyze my progession of improvements and cite the authors and dates, all of which preceded my efforts by at least 5 years. I also noted that Knuth's statement that the common use of the bubble sort in programming texts was a great crime.
Roll forward a five years and I join a group where a new backup utility has been released which sorts the blocks to be backed up, but there was some sort of stack overflow problem. But I was the new guy who wanted nothing to do with tapes and besides, the two engineers working on it were comp sci graduates and I was a college drop out.
Roll forward another five years and a coworker had been stuck with this code which was still running into some sort of strange stack overflow problem. He's the polite, persistent nagger type, so I reluctantly agree to take a look at the code. In 15 minutes I realize that the code is quick sort, which then means that there is a serious bug in the code because its overflowing a 200 element stack (and if you don't know wny I knew there was a serious bug instantaniously, you MUST NEVER CODE ANY SORT). In the next 15 minutes I found 3 coding errors in the code, 1 was from the original fortran code, and 2 were from editing the fortran assembly to inline it into the module.
If I have a problem that calls for a sort, I can reuse Knuth's research into sort algorithms, which reuses the work of others to create significant advance in the subject, I can reuse the algorithm coding by transliterating the MIXAL, I can find code in various languages from all sorts of sources (which I evaluate by reusing Knuth's methodology), I can call a binary library routine that I may or may not be able to see source code for, but whose bahavior I can check with rules of thumb reused from Knuth, and I can research new algorithms and possibly reuse after reusing Knuth's analysis to verify the claimed advantages.
In my view, reuse is the obvious method to apply to any development process.
As a mechanical designer, I would be foolish to fail to use standard nuts and bolts, and where that's not reasonable, foolish for failing to use standard conventions and standards for screw threads. A mechanical engineer works with dozens of references and hundreds of catalogs.
For a programmer to fail to access reference materials and catalogs looking for existing components and art (craft) to reuse is idiotic.
The problem is that there are few good references to draw on.
The only reasonably comprehensive compendium of computer software algorithms I know of is in the 6-10 books that Knuth has published.
I've opened a number of books where the title suggests a comprehensive listing of software algorithms or C++ objects, and been greatly disappointed at the lack of depth. These books are like going into the drug store or Sears to find the right nuts and bolts for a project. I was hoping for something closer to Home Depot which only scratches the surface of reusuable fastener technology.
Softwa
corporations can not patent anything
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"My new innovations are patented by the company"
Wrong! Patent law recognizes that only individuals can invent something.
The more names on the patent, the more likely the idea is either not new or is obvious.
Consider: I walk into a room of 50 people and describe a problem and ask everyone to jot down a solution. I collect the notes and find that 40 people have the same idea. I check the patent databases and can't find a patent on the idea and no one can identify anyone else using the same solution.
How many names are put on the patent?
Zero, because the idea is obvious.
Each person's contribution to a patent must be clear and concrete. So, a corporate can't be granted a patent.
What has confused you is the overly broad and general requirement for you to assign any and all patent rights to your employer, and to ensure that there is a valid contract, most companies pay you a piddling bonus when the application is filed and another when granted. A company may spend $50,000 to draft a patent, so giving you $500 is nothing. Giving you another $500 when granted is also piddling.
One of the things that a lot of employees should do is step back a moment and frame the problem in the terms they understood it a day before they "invented" something and ask their coworkers how they would solve the problem. I'll bet that they'd get a lot of "easy, do this", meaning the solution is obvious.
Just because I spend days understanding a problem, going down dozens of dead ends to come up with an understanding of the problem, and then struggle for a day to figure out the solution to the right statement of the problem, doesn't mean that the solution is "not obvious", merely that my mind was clouded by all the extraneoous details of the problem.
The patent office examiners certainly has few veterans of the computer industry working for them, especially software veterans. 25 to 50 years ago, programming especially was a craft learned in a guild. The approach to problems and the construction of solutions was learned from peers, or solved by working with peers or passing a problem around until a solution was found. When books were written, or algorithms published, the ones written up were either the simple ones that showed how to refine a solution, for example the bubble sort, or the solutions which were most creative or insightful, such as quicksort and heapsort. While a bunch of sort algorithms were published in the 60s, a comprehensive compilation wasn't produced until Knuth's book.
My guess is that if patents were granted for software in the early 70s, a lot of sorts would have been patented even tho Knuth had already cataloged and analyzed them but hadn't published because he was developing TeX.
But more important, software development is as much about the process of analyzing a problem and reframing it into a set of problems that have known solutions. A process just like much of mathematics.
The problem is to find the winners of a dutch auction...think think think...I'll put the bids in order by swapping adjacent bids until all pairs are ordered...ah I'll patent interatively ordering bids pair wise until all are in order.
Whoa, there is nothing to patent because a bubble sort is an obvious method of sorting, a bad one, but obvious.
That's why people who have been programming for a decade or two find almost every software patent to be bogus.
Edison was a good self promoter
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A lot that we "know" as "truth" about Edison isn't. Telsa's contributions were certainly more important.
That Edison is well known and Telsa is generally known as a crackpot who made telsa machines has to do with what are now considered illegal business acts and little to do with the vagaries of patent law.
Telsa did get patents but he didn't consider them to grant him the rights to "print money. He viewed the money from the patents as merely the means to do more research. In other words, he would have do everything he did even if he couldn't get patents, although without the patents, he might have had less money to pursue his work.
The US got about half of the German rocket men, the Russians the other half. We, the US, got Wernher von Braun, a man that had been heading for space all of this life and was willing to do anything to further the technology needed.
For the past three decades, the US has been losing the engineering experience and knowledge to replicate the space program of the 60s. The result is that the US must rely on other countries for our commercial space equipment needs. And now the US is dependent on the bankrupt Russians to access space because NASA has adopted the Microsoft quality mantra: "you can't prove it will crash if we don't fix that problem".
The American attitude the past few decades has been, "I don't need no education", cause we can import some people who know math, chemistry, physics, from India or China. Of course we don't need to import them because they know that the won't face much competition at US universities from Americans.
I was fortunate to grow up in the 50s and 60s when a lot of people worried about real education and kids dreamed of being a scientist or engineer and making the forecasts of popular science come true. Today the only motivated people seem to be those who want to do a startup, go public, and then retire at 40 as a multi-billionaire. Or be a pop star getting rich doing music videos. (Don't get me wrong, I love rock and roll and wasn't just part of the woodstock generation, I was there.)
But its really discouraging to see all the people here who seem to think that America did all sorts of neat stuff on its own. America's strength has been the synergy of millions of people from a hundred countries.
Even more discouraging is to see American's criticising the work done by other countries who followed the advice of some American's who really did understand the process of progress. American's wouldn't pay attention to Demming, but Asia did, and for that reason Asia leads America in most types of manufacturing.
America has some things to be proud of:
- cars with fins
- enron
- dot bomb
It would really be nice if the US were educating one million scientists and engineers to fill 1000 jobs in the space program to match the 10 million scientist and engineers China will be educating in the next decade to fill 10,000 jobs in the space program. Then we'd have a million engineers to invent stuff before the 10 million in china do. America still have the advantage of many cultures all mixed together.
"The biggest problem with high-altitude tethered aerostats is that the tether is invisible to aircraft."
How many densely populated area have unrestricted low altitude free flight?
Half the US eastern seaboard had flight rules about a year ago that almost completely shutdown private fields due to restrictions on flight over cities and government installations.
"I think the real reason they have so much support is because of anti-american sentiments."
A major reason given in countries outside the US is the advancement of a local software industry.
The first country within an economic zone to switch to make Linux the preferred government business platform will probably be the first to develop Linux applications required within the zone. Germans are unlikely to develop applications for a South American country and vice versa.
Most important, the US is least likely to develop Linux applications for use in countries outside the US. That means that a local preference for Linux gives the local software industry a competitive advantage.
Produce for the US, then for the rest of the world is built into nearly all intellectual property marketing strategies. On the one hand, the US expects that the world will all speak American, but on the other, US companies want to control the release of IP outside the US separately from the US release. For DVD this was hardwired, the same is true for software as well.
All programmers should welcome signficant Linux development. Even if you only know Microsoft, the demand for programmers for Linux projects will make the pool of MS Windows programmers smaller increasing your probability of keeping a job.
You're put in charge of a mainframe which runs 24/7 with a few days downtime a year that has 400 20GB disk drives in some sort of storage controller that does raid, etc.
Those 20GB drives are getting old and need to be replaced AND the database needs more storage space. So, the storage on the system is going to be upgraded to 100GB drives and some newer storage controllers are being added.
It will take a month just to jockey the new hardware into place and get it checked out and connected to the system. That will give you some extra storage so you can migrate data from old drives to new ones, so the old drives can be pulled and replaced with the new 100GB drives. Everything needs to be done without interrupting the 24/7 operation of the system.
When something goes wrong, and it will, you have to figure out within minutes whether the problem is with the application, the operator, the old hardware, the new firmware, the old firmware with the new drives, the new drive, the new controllers, the database software, the change to the database application,....
No matter how clear it is to you that the problem is due to foo, the guy responsible for foo will argue that it has to be bar, wombat, or guano that caused the problem.
If you don't know all the details of every bit of hardware, software, and firmware in the entire system and application, you know enough about their architecture to know the way they operate and fail. And you know who the BS artists are and who the gurus are and when you can trust them to give you good information or actually fix the problem.
There are people who think they know Windows or linux.
There are people who _really_ know Windows or linux.
There are people who think they know Windows or linux applications for doing foo
There are people who _really_ know Windows or linux applications for doing foo
Then there are the people who know the really big Windows or linux application systems were implemented 25 years ago because they were involved then and have been involved for the past 25 years making the systems bigger and bigger and moving them from 25 year old technology to 20 to 15 to 10 to 5 year old technology. Often with 25 year old technology still mixed in with the 5 year old technology.
Then there is the new CIO who comes in and defines a strategy to switch from the old system to a grand new application system in 9 months.
That's where real job insecurity comes in - the old timers are never quite sure which contract house the will be required to work for or when the company will be bought out because the business is out of control, but he does know that he'll be working on that old mainframe application for another 3-5 years.
While Windows XP SP1 has "production" support for IPv6, this is a far cry from Windows supporting IPv6. The XP SP1 computers represent maybe 1% of all Windows computers. XP might represent 10% of all Windows computers. XP can't be installed on over 50% of Windows computers, so the only way those can support IPv6 for them to be upgraded to Linux.
And IPv6 isn't "out of the box" even with XP SP1. So that means that ISPs will have to provide their on network installation software to turn it on - most have their own "network installation" software to simplify configuration for their customers.
The lifetime of a recent Windows computer should be a decade. While a replacement computer costs around $200, you need to pay Microsoft $100 to get a valid license, so replacing things like CDROM drives and mice will make sense for most PCs which for the most part are used for web browsing and email.
ISP are part of the telecom world which is officially or in practice in bankruptcy, so none can afford to discard the customers who pay a couple of hundred a year for email and web access.
Businesses on the web can't afford to lose any customers so they can't afford to not have an IPv4 address.
The move to IPv6 is not going to happen soon, for the same reason that the move to broadcast HDTV is going to happen by the current deadline which is years later than the original deadline.
I wouldn't be surprised if IPv6 is replaced by another standard before IPv4 happens. After all, IPv6 is the second attempt to expand the address space, one that STARTED when the prior standard became available on all major operating systems.
The prior standard, the OSI suite was a COTS system, commercial off the shelf, which means it cost money to get an implementation. IPv6 was supposed to be so much simpler that it would be faster and cheaper to deploy, but as far as I can tell, IPv6 costs real money, and more real money, than IPv4, for all but the most technologically astute.
"If it wasn't for SUVs and Trucks, us in the North East on that last snow storm would have gotten no where.... Take your stupid crap car on the road then. You would have gotten no where. It would not have been safer, more like a death box with all the sliding cars."
Hmmm, the news reports commented on all the SUVs off the road in the storm this week. The speculation was that the people driving them believed what you do, and went out when they should have stayed home.
When it comes to stopping and steering, an SUV has no advantage over a small car. Its simply a matter of physics. And if an SUV can get going faster than a small car and has a higher center of balance, its at a disadvantage.
If it's such a bad product, why would it be stolen
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Buy a Segway... Please
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"6. Will it get stolen as soon as you park it next to your local trendy cafe? YES"
I can't figure out your logic.
If it sucks as badly as you claim, why would anyone steal it????
Someone is always paying and always has.
Wait until mommy and daddy kick you out of the house and you have to pay for food and housing. No one paid for food and housing until a few thousand years ago, by your logic (there was no concept of money).
If not paying for anything is so great, then the soviet union, china, cuba should be ruling the world.
Free email works as well as the communist economies. Its not that anything is free, its just that the costs are not allocated in a rational fashion.
If you have ever paid for a bottle of water, then you know that your statement is totally bogus.
Nearly all the water sold in vending machines, grocery and convenience stores might as well be straight out of the tap of almost any large city water supply and much of it is exactly that.
If paying for just some email would separate the mail into "paid" and "unpaid", that would add tremendous value.
In fact, many people have switched to completely cell phones because the cell phone user pays for both incoming and outgoing calls. This both motivated and added teeth to the laws that make it illegal to make unsolicited phone calls to cell phones.
Email is worth every penney the sender paid to send it;-)
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People actually trading on death! What a horrible idea!
Not only should terrorism derivatives be outlawed, so should terrorism insurance.
And life insurance! Who in their right mind would buy life insurance! You give your beneficiaries a reason to knock you off so they can profit from your death - and you pay the premium yourself!
(In most cases its illegal for the beneficiary to buy insurance on someone else. Except for businesses. A business has every reason to work a "key employee" to death because they'll just replace him with a warm body and collect a million bucks or few.)
The author of the /. article didn't bother to thimk and check on how original this idea is. A cursory check would have revealed a huge industry in desktop manufacturing, including quite a few that will turn solid cad designs into solid prototypes.
MIT folk hacked a cannon bubblejet (I think) to make parts long ago enough for the third or fourth generation product to be on the market today.
Besides the obvious ability to hold in your hand a model of an object you designed, its possible to turn it into plastic of sufficient strength to meet most applications.
And its quite easy to use the model for investment casting and produce a quality part in almost any metal.
But of course, in America we don't think in terms of real products. In American we just make money blowing hot air. Manufacturing in American is dead and no one who wants to be in an exciting field will certainly stay far away from anything having to do with mechanical devices.
The discussion about intellectual property rights is mostly crap and is the result of expecting to just walk into the holodeck and live your dream. Most at fault are the business leaders who don't want to deal with the problem of manufacturing requiring better trained people than windoze or unix code minkeys.
Computers and software have gone from raw idea to commodity product in a little over my life time. Its been a long run. But I remember lots of other innovations that burst onto the scene and then faded into the background: hifi, stereo, LPs, acid rock, rock and roll, blues, jazz, radio phones, cell phones, mass production, muscle cars, and on and on.
/. that remember when computer people didn't want a pc (lower case). Who would want to leave work on a computer with a 100 meg disk drive and go home to play with a computer where the only storage was a cassette recorder that could hold about 100 KB on an expensive 60 minute tape. On
Frank Zappa (gee, another thing that's come and gone) used phrasing like trend mongers, (gee another thing thats come and gone, polyester suits), which reflects the degree that some part of America will embrace just about any new idea.
So, the computer industry becoming too boring for Americans to really be bothered - after all, what is now needed is for Microsoft to get rid of 99% of its employees and hire those slow working, spec writing, code reviewing, boring coders who won't release a line of code until it can be burned into ROM, and there are about 7 of those guys in the US. Get the 100 million lines of Microsoft code right without "improving it" requires people who can achieve nirvana or inner peace by spending hours making that one perfect cut or perfect stroke.
But that isn't to say that there aren't great opportunities for real innovation, for breaking the mold, for proving that the impossible just takes an extra day.
America is a land of extremes.
We are so innovative that we "invented" the oil based economy and we've pushed it to such an extreme that 10% of the worlds population consumes 25% of the world's oil production. And we created the infrastructure to do it. The mind bogggles.
Consider: The US uses 18 million barrels of oil a day. That's well over three quarters of a million gallons of petroleum products every day. That's about 3 gallons for every man, women, child every day. And that's only about half the energy we use per person.
To make the US and the world totally dependent on oil, Americans drilled lots of holes. In a span of about 20 years, Americans were so into finding oil that 10 of thousands of people founded 10s of thousands of companies to drill about a million holes. Some of those holes are still producing about 2 barrels a day, just a bit less than they produced when they were new wells. What all the people did pumping out millions of PC software packages and millions of web sites wasn't anything new.
But where are we today.
Well, we're probably at the world peak in terms of oil production. For the next 100 years, oil product is going to go down hill.
And how are a lot of Americans viewing this? "That's impossible, there has to be more oil, we can't live without oil, if this is true, life is over"
And when anyone suggests something simple like, say, windmills, the response is "it would take 20 years of installing 10,000 windmills to replace the electricity we use every day.
Hmmmm, 20 * 10,000 -> 200,000. That's a small number. What's the problem?
Americans should have no problem installing 1 million or more windmills in 10 years.
In fact, after the first 25,000 were installed, the costs should be brought down by everything learned and by competition so that we'd be installing a million a year.
Twenty years ago a sat dish was huge, required a specially trained team to install. But today, people pick them up and install them on the side of their house. And the sat dish is "free". I don't expect a wind mill to be as small as a sat dish and I don't expect them to be "free", but I expect that they will be so cheap that wind mills will be used instead of running 100 feet of copper wire.
Either that, or wind mills won't be able to match solar panels.
I suspect that there are a few people reading
"What do you know, scare tactics work!"
If the goal was to stop downloading and that was it, then maybe the strategy works. But I thought the goal was to "restore industry income and profits". If someone stops downloading but doesn't buy any CDs, or some other format of RIAA member company products, then what is the benefit?
Look at it from the economists standpoint. The demand for music downloads might be almost perfectly elastic. At zero the demand is 10 billion downloads. But at a price of 1 cent, the demand might be 1 billion downloads. At 10 cents, 10 million downloads. And at $1 it might be 100,000 downloads. If that were the case, the price should be lower than what they are currently charging, but to adopt a more profitable price structure will generate pressure on the existing CD price structure, resulting in lower overall revenue. Unless selling CDs for one half the price would more than triple the sales of CDs.
In one sense, the way the RIAA member companies think of things is the ideal situation for clubs around the country is for there to be 5 cloned bands that play 5 identical play lists. The spend all their money promoting their 5 live bands. When you want to go to a club on Friday night, you pick the country band, the rock band, the heavy metal, or folk band and pay the $10 cover charge. When upstart clubs start up with independent bands, the RIAA goes out and makes sure they don't get permits, licenses, or are allowed to advertise. This is the American way - screw the customer, big salaries to those can most effectively limit choice to drive up prices.
In The Innovator's Dilemma, the case is made by point out case after case for companies destroying themselves by listening to their customers.
All the mainframe companies did - their customers didn't want minicomputers.
All the minicomputer companies did - all their minicomputer customers rejected PCs as a solution.
And Microsoft must be listening to their customers and getting the same wrong information. But when you talk to customers who manage corporate computer infrastructures built on paying Microsoft millions of dollars, how many are going to say "Microsoft, make the next release free with optional support so that I can cut my budget from $20M to $5M."? Zero! Why? Well, a CIO saying that might as well be saying, "hey, give my boss justification for cutting my salary by 50%".
The music companies has as an important a role in the future of music sales as mainframe computer companies have in computer sales.
And guess what, the market has spoken on the matter of mainframe computer companies and they no longer exist.
Its just a matter of time until the music companies of the 50s, 60s, and 70s disappear.
What's missing is a Dell to take music sales to a new level. A company that focuses entirely on distribution and marketing its internet address, and leaving all the product marketing to the artists (like Dell does with Intel and Windows) and focusing on low prices, quick delivery, and high volume.
Right! Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney are going to mandate every American buy 10 gallons of gas every week to keep the oil industry afloat as the price of oil goes to $30, $40, $50, $60, $70 a barrel and the US has to increase its share of world oil production from 25% to 40% to 50% to 75%.
The reality is that world oil production will peak this decade if it hasn't already.
That doesn't mean that oil will run out, only that there will be no increase in daily supply no matter what the demand. There have been no major oil fields discovered in the past decade, and the important oil fields were discovered more than 40 years ago.
Technology won't magically cause oil to require less energy to extract. The people extracting oil aren't complete morons, they have always extracted the oil that is easiest and cheapest to extract before moving on to the harder and more expensive to extract oil. Millions of people have been extracting oil over the past century and if there was a way to extract hard to extract oil cheaper than today, they would have found it by now because cheaper would mean more profit.
So the only way the oil industry can prevent higher prices motivating consumers to switch to some other, any other, form of energy is to get a mandate passed that requires Americans to buy 10 gallons of gas every week no matter what the price.
Failing that, there is nothing that the oil industry can do to prevent the decline of oil as an energy source.
What we as consumers have to hope for is a million small steps to cheaper hydrogen production. The likelihood of someone coming up with real cold fusion are real slim. Hydrogen as a fuel in 20 years is going to be more expensive than oil as a fuel is today, but the price of oil in 20 years will make hydrogen look cheap.
HP claims to have 159 of the systems in the top500, but doesn't talk about the fact that over 100 of them are for computer architectures that HP has declared dead, those based on DEC's Alpha and HP's PARISC.
HP's future is based on commodity chips where the only advantage that HP has is size and the cash to support the significant amount of upfront large scale system integration. And I'm sure that a lot of the folk who have done this work in the past are headed for the chopping block as HP finishes off the parts of DEC that Compaq didn't.
"I should have said "concentrate on the selling, not the buying"."
And I should have said social cost = private cost + external cost.
And the problem is that you don't seem to understand the concept of external cost. External costs are those that aren't factored in the price of a good or service.
Energy, of all goods, has more external costs than any other with the possible exception of military weapons.
There are the external costs of pollution and that is one that many recognize.
But how many people recognize the external cost of oil wealth destroying the traditional economy of the Persian Gulf and a number of other regions where oil has been found (eg. Argentina)? The result has been millions of people cycling between wealth and poverty and back while never producing any actual goods. (Oil is not a product - it is "land", a finite resource, that once consumed is gone.)
More people, but not many, recognize that the US military presences in the Persian Gulf is an external cost of energy.
The focus for energy must be on incorporating the external costs into cost of energy. Costs are costs. Costs are costs. Costs are costs.
An economist says price is the sum of the factors of production plus profit. Factors of production are land (resources), capital, labor, technology, and institutional costs. For oil these costs are extremely low if the short view is taken, and for oil the long view is a million years.
Oil is different from iron or gold, after mining and processing iron and gold, the iron and gold still exist - trash dumps contain as much iron per cubic yard as many iron mines, and that is excluding the steel recycled before the dump. Oil is stored energy, and once the stored energy is released, you're left with carbon and hydrogen in much lower energy states.
Externalities cause the value of the "land" factor of oil production to be set at effectively zero. Some of those externalities is the claims that "oil will never run out", "coal can replace oil", "technology will find more oil", "technology will replace oil". This is the externality of "the commons".
When oil can be produced and delivered to the US from Saudi Arabia for $10 a barrel (the situation in 1999), the effects ripple through the economy.
This low price makes coal a high cost method of producing electricity, so coal plants were not built, pollution control equipment was not installed because that would make the cost be greater than the market price, power production was shifted from coal to natural gas.
I would put the external costs of oil at $50 a barrel, and I might be low.
If oil were priced at $60-80 a barrel, coal powered electric power generation could afford to be extremely clean, possibly paying for CO2 sequestration in the ocean. But now wind becomes extremely profitable, equivalent to about $20 a barrel for the equivalent amount of electricity produced from oil, and that would be after running a million miles of power lines to connect the upper midwest and canada to the US east and west coasts.
The only problem is the mechanism of converting external costs to a factor of production.
Something that is very political given the debate over the actual costs - Bush will not accept the idea that 9/11 is an external cost of a carbon fuel based economy.
Bush will not accept that the illusion of great wealth in the Persian Gulf (from oil) as a huge external cost of oil. The assumption is that Iraq can be transformed into a democracy cheaply because of Iraq's oil, but Iraq's oil will prevent Iraq from developing a sustainable economy and it sow the seed of another 9/11. The US would be safer if the US mandated that Iraq could produce no more than 3 million barrels of oil per day, but an unlimited amount of electricity and hyrdrogen from solar and wind. Ditto Iran. Ditto Saudi Arabia. It might not be a good "market" solution, but it would be a lot better than the likely outcome.
"Trouble is, wind farms don't generate much electricity."
And I bet you believe that
- oil production under the texas oil commision didn't peak in 1970 and has been declining because Texans are too wealthy.
- that oil fields the size of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are found every year
- that its impossible for cars to get more than 20 MPG
- that American technology will solve the problem
The truth is that windmills are quite profitable when its possible to connect to the grid, that oil in the lower 48 was predicted to decline in the early 70s in 1956 and that happened, Only two gigantic oil fields have been found (in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) ever and they were found more than 50 years ago, non-US auto companies are able to meet significantly higher CAFE standards than the US auto companies and the major growth in energy technology deployment and products is all outside the US. In a few years, many smaller countries will be generating more wind power than the US which pioneered modern wind power generation in the 80s with the significant investments in California.
"If the "drawbacks" aren't paid for it's the seller's fault for setting the price too low, not the buyer's fault, which you try to blame." New England is suing the Midwest because the costs of power in the Midwest is not included in the cost of power generated in the Midwest. Those costs are such things as dying lakes and ponds, dying trees, etc, caused by sulpher and nitrogen compounds pumped into the air from burning coal and oil in power plants and cars. Of course, England and France are paying the social costs of the same kinds of pollution in New England....
By the time I got to high school, most of the writing was done on a typewriter (manual, not electric, this was in the mid-60s), except for the occasional exam. Having a preference for "science", I was taking as much math, physics, chemistry, electronics, etc. as I could, so I was spending a lot of time printing already and my writing became a mix. The same was pretty much the case in college as well.
Then I dropped out of college and started programming. Fortran, assembly, etc., especially on coding forms, isn't something you do in cursive. I did type my own code - on 80 column cards - but keypunches were a scarce resource so you had to know what you were doing at one.
By the time I got into a situation where I worked with people on a project, it was a more than a decade later and we all had terminals in our offices.
I'm back in college studying machine tool, welding, mechanical design, and for the first time I had an exam that included some signficant writing, a microeconomics exam. Every other exam has included significant technical jargon, formulas, or terms and procedures, and G-code. I don't have a clue how to write things like GTAW, GMAW, SMAW, E7018, cursively, much less stuff like G03X1.Y2.I-2.J0M06.
Maybe some people mix cursive with printing when writing "while (cyclecountctrreg)..." on white boards or making corrections or notes, but not I - find it easier to just print everything. There are times when I find printing a bit tiring, but then I wish for a keyboard, not writing in cursive. When I did mix them, lines of code would start out cursive and end in printing and then paragraph after would start out in print and switch to cursive until an equation or symbol name when it would switch to printing. Very strange to look at and read.
I've seen a lot of cases where someone reinvented the wheel, but instead of using an axle, they just put the wheel under the object so you have to move the wheel to the front to keep going, and then to top it off, they made the wheel square or triangular.
I did that once. In 1969 I needed a sort, so I looked in the fortran programming book I had and implemented a bubble sort, to sort records on disks. When it became clear that the sort would take a couple of months to complete, I started working on optimizations. As I was working for a college, one of the profs suggested that I take a look at the collected algorithms of the ACM. There I learned about quick sort and heap sort. I was able to incorporate those, but I had to deal with the fact that I had a lot of data on disk that I couldn't bring into memory. Eventually I got a sort working that wasn't too bad for the times and the computer resources.
Then Knuth published Vol 3 which I studied with my experience in mind. I was amazed to see Knuth develop and analyze my progession of improvements and cite the authors and dates, all of which preceded my efforts by at least 5 years. I also noted that Knuth's statement that the common use of the bubble sort in programming texts was a great crime.
Roll forward a five years and I join a group where a new backup utility has been released which sorts the blocks to be backed up, but there was some sort of stack overflow problem. But I was the new guy who wanted nothing to do with tapes and besides, the two engineers working on it were comp sci graduates and I was a college drop out.
Roll forward another five years and a coworker had been stuck with this code which was still running into some sort of strange stack overflow problem. He's the polite, persistent nagger type, so I reluctantly agree to take a look at the code. In 15 minutes I realize that the code is quick sort, which then means that there is a serious bug in the code because its overflowing a 200 element stack (and if you don't know wny I knew there was a serious bug instantaniously, you MUST NEVER CODE ANY SORT). In the next 15 minutes I found 3 coding errors in the code, 1 was from the original fortran code, and 2 were from editing the fortran assembly to inline it into the module.
If I have a problem that calls for a sort, I can reuse Knuth's research into sort algorithms, which reuses the work of others to create significant advance in the subject, I can reuse the algorithm coding by transliterating the MIXAL, I can find code in various languages from all sorts of sources (which I evaluate by reusing Knuth's methodology), I can call a binary library routine that I may or may not be able to see source code for, but whose bahavior I can check with rules of thumb reused from Knuth, and I can research new algorithms and possibly reuse after reusing Knuth's analysis to verify the claimed advantages.
In my view, reuse is the obvious method to apply to any development process.
As a mechanical designer, I would be foolish to fail to use standard nuts and bolts, and where that's not reasonable, foolish for failing to use standard conventions and standards for screw threads. A mechanical engineer works with dozens of references and hundreds of catalogs.
For a programmer to fail to access reference materials and catalogs looking for existing components and art (craft) to reuse is idiotic.
The problem is that there are few good references to draw on.
The only reasonably comprehensive compendium of computer software algorithms I know of is in the 6-10 books that Knuth has published.
I've opened a number of books where the title suggests a comprehensive listing of software algorithms or C++ objects, and been greatly disappointed at the lack of depth. These books are like going into the drug store or Sears to find the right nuts and bolts for a project. I was hoping for something closer to Home Depot which only scratches the surface of reusuable fastener technology.
Softwa
"My new innovations are patented by the company"
Wrong! Patent law recognizes that only individuals can invent something.
The more names on the patent, the more likely the idea is either not new or is obvious.
Consider: I walk into a room of 50 people and describe a problem and ask everyone to jot down a solution. I collect the notes and find that 40 people have the same idea. I check the patent databases and can't find a patent on the idea and no one can identify anyone else using the same solution.
How many names are put on the patent?
Zero, because the idea is obvious.
Each person's contribution to a patent must be clear and concrete. So, a corporate can't be granted a patent.
What has confused you is the overly broad and general requirement for you to assign any and all patent rights to your employer, and to ensure that there is a valid contract, most companies pay you a piddling bonus when the application is filed and another when granted. A company may spend $50,000 to draft a patent, so giving you $500 is nothing. Giving you another $500 when granted is also piddling.
One of the things that a lot of employees should do is step back a moment and frame the problem in the terms they understood it a day before they "invented" something and ask their coworkers how they would solve the problem. I'll bet that they'd get a lot of "easy, do this", meaning the solution is obvious.
Just because I spend days understanding a problem, going down dozens of dead ends to come up with an understanding of the problem, and then struggle for a day to figure out the solution to the right statement of the problem, doesn't mean that the solution is "not obvious", merely that my mind was clouded by all the extraneoous details of the problem.
The patent office examiners certainly has few veterans of the computer industry working for them, especially software veterans. 25 to 50 years ago, programming especially was a craft learned in a guild. The approach to problems and the construction of solutions was learned from peers, or solved by working with peers or passing a problem around until a solution was found. When books were written, or algorithms published, the ones written up were either the simple ones that showed how to refine a solution, for example the bubble sort, or the solutions which were most creative or insightful, such as quicksort and heapsort. While a bunch of sort algorithms were published in the 60s, a comprehensive compilation wasn't produced until Knuth's book.
My guess is that if patents were granted for software in the early 70s, a lot of sorts would have been patented even tho Knuth had already cataloged and analyzed them but hadn't published because he was developing TeX.
But more important, software development is as much about the process of analyzing a problem and reframing it into a set of problems that have known solutions. A process just like much of mathematics.
The problem is to find the winners of a dutch auction...think think think...I'll put the bids in order by swapping adjacent bids until all pairs are ordered...ah I'll patent interatively ordering bids pair wise until all are in order.
Whoa, there is nothing to patent because a bubble sort is an obvious method of sorting, a bad one, but obvious.
That's why people who have been programming for a decade or two find almost every software patent to be bogus.
A lot that we "know" as "truth" about Edison isn't.
Telsa's contributions were certainly more important.
That Edison is well known and Telsa is generally known as a crackpot who made telsa machines has to do with what are now considered illegal business acts and little to do with the vagaries of patent law.
Telsa did get patents but he didn't consider them to grant him the rights to "print money. He viewed the money from the patents as merely the means to do more research. In other words, he would have do everything he did even if he couldn't get patents, although without the patents, he might have had less money to pursue his work.
The US got about half of the German rocket men, the Russians the other half. We, the US, got Wernher von Braun, a man that had been heading for space all of this life and was willing to do anything to further the technology needed.
For the past three decades, the US has been losing the engineering experience and knowledge to replicate the space program of the 60s. The result is that the US must rely on other countries for our commercial space equipment needs. And now the US is dependent on the bankrupt Russians to access space because NASA has adopted the Microsoft quality mantra: "you can't prove it will crash if we don't fix that problem".
The American attitude the past few decades has been, "I don't need no education", cause we can import some people who know math, chemistry, physics, from India or China. Of course we don't need to import them because they know that the won't face much competition at US universities from Americans.
I was fortunate to grow up in the 50s and 60s when a lot of people worried about real education and kids dreamed of being a scientist or engineer and making the forecasts of popular science come true. Today the only motivated people seem to be those who want to do a startup, go public, and then retire at 40 as a multi-billionaire. Or be a pop star getting rich doing music videos. (Don't get me wrong, I love rock and roll and wasn't just part of the woodstock generation, I was there.)
But its really discouraging to see all the people here who seem to think that America did all sorts of neat stuff on its own. America's strength has been the synergy of millions of people from a hundred countries.
Even more discouraging is to see American's criticising the work done by other countries who followed the advice of some American's who really did understand the process of progress. American's wouldn't pay attention to Demming, but Asia did, and for that reason Asia leads America in most types of manufacturing.
America has some things to be proud of:
- cars with fins
- enron
- dot bomb
It would really be nice if the US were educating one million scientists and engineers to fill 1000 jobs in the space program to match the 10 million scientist and engineers China will be educating in the next decade to fill 10,000 jobs in the space program. Then we'd have a million engineers to invent stuff before the 10 million in china do. America still have the advantage of many cultures all mixed together.
How many densely populated area have unrestricted low altitude free flight?
Half the US eastern seaboard had flight rules about a year ago that almost completely shutdown private fields due to restrictions on flight over cities and government installations.
A major reason given in countries outside the US is the advancement of a local software industry.
The first country within an economic zone to switch to make Linux the preferred government business platform will probably be the first to develop Linux applications required within the zone. Germans are unlikely to develop applications for a South American country and vice versa.
Most important, the US is least likely to develop Linux applications for use in countries outside the US. That means that a local preference for Linux gives the local software industry a competitive advantage.
Produce for the US, then for the rest of the world is built into nearly all intellectual property marketing strategies. On the one hand, the US expects that the world will all speak American, but on the other, US companies want to control the release of IP outside the US separately from the US release. For DVD this was hardwired, the same is true for software as well.
All programmers should welcome signficant Linux development. Even if you only know Microsoft, the demand for programmers for Linux projects will make the pool of MS Windows programmers smaller increasing your probability of keeping a job.
You're put in charge of a mainframe which runs 24/7 with a few days downtime a year that has 400 20GB disk drives in some sort of storage controller that does raid, etc.
....
Those 20GB drives are getting old and need to be replaced AND the database needs more storage space. So, the storage on the system is going to be upgraded to 100GB drives and some newer storage controllers are being added.
It will take a month just to jockey the new hardware into place and get it checked out and connected to the system. That will give you some extra storage so you can migrate data from old drives to new ones, so the old drives can be pulled and replaced with the new 100GB drives. Everything needs to be done without interrupting the 24/7 operation of the system.
When something goes wrong, and it will, you have to figure out within minutes whether the problem is with the application, the operator, the old hardware, the new firmware, the old firmware with the new drives, the new drive, the new controllers, the database software, the change to the database application,
No matter how clear it is to you that the problem is due to foo, the guy responsible for foo will argue that it has to be bar, wombat, or guano that caused the problem.
If you don't know all the details of every bit of hardware, software, and firmware in the entire system and application, you know enough about their architecture to know the way they operate and fail. And you know who the BS artists are and who the gurus are and when you can trust them to give you good information or actually fix the problem.
There are people who think they know Windows or linux.
There are people who _really_ know Windows or linux.
There are people who think they know Windows or linux applications for doing foo
There are people who _really_ know Windows or linux applications for doing foo
Then there are the people who know the really big Windows or linux application systems were implemented 25 years ago because they were involved then and have been involved for the past 25 years making the systems bigger and bigger and moving them from 25 year old technology to 20 to 15 to 10 to 5 year old technology. Often with 25 year old technology still mixed in with the 5 year old technology.
Then there is the new CIO who comes in and defines a strategy to switch from the old system to a grand new application system in 9 months.
That's where real job insecurity comes in - the old timers are never quite sure which contract house the will be required to work for or when the company will be bought out because the business is out of control, but he does know that he'll be working on that old mainframe application for another 3-5 years.
While Windows XP SP1 has "production" support for IPv6, this is a far cry from Windows supporting IPv6. The XP SP1 computers represent maybe 1% of all Windows computers. XP might represent 10% of all Windows computers. XP can't be installed on over 50% of Windows computers, so the only way those can support IPv6 for them to be upgraded to Linux.
And IPv6 isn't "out of the box" even with XP SP1. So that means that ISPs will have to provide their on network installation software to turn it on - most have their own "network installation" software to simplify configuration for their customers.
The lifetime of a recent Windows computer should be a decade. While a replacement computer costs around $200, you need to pay Microsoft $100 to get a valid license, so replacing things like CDROM drives and mice will make sense for most PCs which for the most part are used for web browsing and email.
ISP are part of the telecom world which is officially or in practice in bankruptcy, so none can afford to discard the customers who pay a couple of hundred a year for email and web access.
Businesses on the web can't afford to lose any customers so they can't afford to not have an IPv4 address.
The move to IPv6 is not going to happen soon, for the same reason that the move to broadcast HDTV is going to happen by the current deadline which is years later than the original deadline.
I wouldn't be surprised if IPv6 is replaced by another standard before IPv4 happens. After all, IPv6 is the second attempt to expand the address space, one that STARTED when the prior standard became available on all major operating systems.
The prior standard, the OSI suite was a COTS system, commercial off the shelf, which means it cost money to get an implementation. IPv6 was supposed to be so much simpler that it would be faster and cheaper to deploy, but as far as I can tell, IPv6 costs real money, and more real money, than IPv4, for all but the most technologically astute.
"If it wasn't for SUVs and Trucks, us in the North East on that last snow storm would have gotten no where.... Take your stupid crap car on the road then. You would have gotten no where. It would not have been safer, more like a death box with all the sliding cars."
Hmmm, the news reports commented on all the SUVs off the road in the storm this week. The speculation was that the people driving them believed what you do, and went out when they should have stayed home.
When it comes to stopping and steering, an SUV has no advantage over a small car. Its simply a matter of physics. And if an SUV can get going faster than a small car and has a higher center of balance, its at a disadvantage.
"6. Will it get stolen as soon as you park it next to your local trendy cafe? YES"
I can't figure out your logic.
If it sucks as badly as you claim, why would anyone steal it????
Someone is always paying and always has. Wait until mommy and daddy kick you out of the house and you have to pay for food and housing. No one paid for food and housing until a few thousand years ago, by your logic (there was no concept of money). If not paying for anything is so great, then the soviet union, china, cuba should be ruling the world. Free email works as well as the communist economies. Its not that anything is free, its just that the costs are not allocated in a rational fashion.
If you have ever paid for a bottle of water, then you know that your statement is totally bogus.
;-)
Nearly all the water sold in vending machines, grocery and convenience stores might as well be straight out of the tap of almost any large city water supply and much of it is exactly that.
If paying for just some email would separate the mail into "paid" and "unpaid", that would add tremendous value.
In fact, many people have switched to completely cell phones because the cell phone user pays for both incoming and outgoing calls. This both motivated and added teeth to the laws that make it illegal to make unsolicited phone calls to cell phones.
Email is worth every penney the sender paid to send it