Somehow, if we get all the way over there and fail to avail ourselves of the opportunity to see this, it kinda seems like traveling all the way to California to see Disneyland, then stopping at the ticket gate.
The rovers have a limited lifetime.
I leave it to the scientists to see this from their chair. They drove more than they expected, past the "warranty" of the rover, to get there. From now on, all is gravy. From their vantage points, they can figure out if there is anything even remotely around which would make it not worth the risk. You gotta die sometime. Might as well be doing something useful.
Interesting approach. I saw that one in use a few years ago at an apartment complex I resided in.
The problem was a flock of ducks residing in the drainage ditch.. er. "lake", adjacent to us. One resident's children would coax the ducks to the apartment complex with bread crumbs, and from then on the sidewalks were one slippery mess. Now, we had a condrundrum...
However, an entrerprising family had a really neat way of taking advantage of this. I noticed they would leave their patio gate open and ducks came in. Then the gate would silently close. Then they would run their barbeque a bit, then an assortment of duck parts would show up in the dumpster. And his kids seemed awful well-fed...
Nobody said a word.
But if there is resistance to human consumption, could this biomass be used as an ingredient in animal feed? I mean like there is nothing biologically wrong with it is there? As far as I see, its still a potent nutrient source of the highest order. The first thing that comes to mind is an ingredient for livestock and pet food if humans have an aversion to it. It sure seems like a shame to let all those assembled protein chains go to waste.
After the nonsense I have been seeing lately being egged on by all people using the legal system for quick fortune instead of working for it, I can't say I really blame Microsoft.
I have studied in Economics classes where the high technology sector is responsible for America's stellar economic growth compared to the rest of the world, yet we are strangling our cash cow with myriads of legal snarling. Our factories are damn near gone. Our students are losing their love of studying science. Our high-tech industries are moving offshore. It seems the highest valued jobs in America does not concern making anything anymore, its who can argue the best. We have become like a family who no longer works, we just sit back and bicker, each of us "lobbying" the powers that be to grant us power over the other.
I took a course in Object Oriented Data Structures in C++ just for the fun of it. There were seven students in the class ( including me ). The college actually ran the course. I also took a course in Intellectual Property Rights the business college ran... it was full to the gunwales - 50 students - and a line out the door down the hall the first day of class of prospective students trying to beg into the class. If it weren't for my having 100+ semester hours at that college, I probably would not have gotten in on my first try. ( I have been taking evening classes there for several decades ). But that really illustrated to me the future of our country. A couple of guys that actually do something, hundreds bickering over who can do what with it.
I don't think things will change until the general public becomes economically painfully aware that Congress has killed our cash cow with all their penmanship. Right now we are hiding the fact by dropping interest rates to damn near zero trying to flood the market for just a little while longer with unearned borrowed dollars.. so merchants and property owners still see cash flow. But this debt will come due. As a country, we are acting out the parent's worst nightmare, as the kid - unaware of the financial mathematics governing a credit card - goes on a wild melee spending spree.
When the bills come in, and something of value has to be scrounged up to settle them, Congress is going to have some interesting situations on their hands. People don't like stepping down. And people don't like paying tax if they already don't have enough surplus in their spendable income to even hold on to their existing stuff.
My venture is that within ten years, we are gonna see some very interesting twists come up. My suggestion is to learn some trade that can be bartered directly with Joe Public. Going to college just to get some scrap of paper to make you appealing to some corporate entity may be a lost cause. America is full of bickering skills already. I believe there will always be a market for the skills of actually doing something useful.
One is supposed to file a PATENT, and publicize the exact details and mechanization one's work, in order to receive the protection promised by the government in exchange for the idea becoming public domain in what.. 17 years or so?
The alternative is a "trade secret"... apparently not protected by patent. But possibly protected by copyright.
Ok, copyright. Some photographer takes a picture of the Grand Canyon. He has his copyright to his proofs. I supposedly can not grab one of his photos and redistribute it. But, apparently, what I CAN do is go to the exact spot he shot his shot from, set up my camera, and take one too.
Ok, So, I can not use the code I stripped from their program. Fair enough. So I go to the exact same spot and type the instructions I need into my machine manually if need be. Now, this one, like the film in my camera, has been personally authored by ME.
I am having a hard time thinking along the lines that someone has patent protection for a trade secret. And if he has copyright, I grant its gonna be hard as hell to tell by looking at a sequence of ones and zeroes if they are the exact same one's and zeroes he or I typed in. Just as it may be hard as hell by looking at the proofs just who took the photo of the Grand Canyon.
I note drug manufacturers have to explain exactly what it is they have and the exact structure of it in order to have that structure protected by patent law. And when the patent runs out, competitors are free to begin production. Its why some pills are hundred dollars per pill, and why I buy bottles of 200 ea. aspirin pills at the "dollar deals" store for a buck.
I am sure looking forward to the day when the word "standard" means a public-domain description of something which the public has agreed to adhere to. If its a "standard", then by definition, it would be public domain and no-one in the government would protect anyone's exclusive claim to license it. Imagine how our industrial revolution would have been hindered if companies could not as much as make their screws compatible with someone else's nuts? Or light bulbs that would run on standard voltages and have standard basing? All this legal snarling that Congress is creating is making it damn near impossible to make interoperative stuff.
( I wonder why photographers call picture a "proof"... maybe they were trying to prove they took a picture? Yes! I did put film in the camera! Here's Proof! )
Unfortunately, we run into economics and monopolies.
Yes, students spend upwards of $500/semester on books. I do. And I have seen countless occasions where book publishers issue revision after revision, often making changes as minor as just re-ordering the problems at the end of the chapter, just to render the previous revison ( no longer available, reproduction of previous revision forbidden by copyright law ) obsolete, forcing teachers to adopt the new version, also rendering student's investment in the earlier version a sunk cost.
Think its gonna be cheaper to "lease"? We already do. Cost of reproduction is not that much. Geez, if printing is so expensive, how can you justify the literal tons of printed junk mail generated daily?
For my stuff, I generally keep my books anyway. Geez, they are the ones I fall back to when I am trying to remember some little quirk in Control Theory or some obscure little DSP goodie I remember my professor talking about. I even still have my books discussing control theory algorithms using Vacuum Tubes!!! Although the mechanizations change, the basic ideas are identical. I see over and over again where often things get way, way, way more complicated than they need to be. I can perform integration with a fullbore DSP. I can also do it with a capacitor. Or, I might use a combo approach to use the digital side to store constants which compensate for analog tolerances. But then, think of all the techniques I was taught that I would lose reference to if my books expired!
My parent is an excellent example of how these damn worms and viruses spread, except instead of going through all the trouble of instructing the computer to do this, they simply tell the human operator to do it.
But the procedures are identical.
And, to make matters even worse, at least some people have a smidgen of common sense. Computers have none at all.
If its got the intelligence to see him coming at it too fast, I also it has the intelligence to watch him and delay cross-traffic if the speeder also decides to become a traffic light violator.
Combined with the traffic light violator cameras, this looks like speeding could become an expensive fruitless pastime.
I have been thinking since America has been "de-industrializing" with the closure of our big factories, and now the offshoring of our technical jobs, they are gonna have one hellava time trying to get accurate personal income tax returns filed.
Back in the old heyday, it was very easy to coax a big business that hired hundreds of thousands of factory workers to withold pay and send it in. Just a few well-placed loops in the tax code is all it took - basically you told the big company that they could write their labor costs off if they would inform the government who they paid the money to so the government could go to the individual taxpayer for the money, and business was all too happy to comply.
But now, everytime we see a closing factory, outsourcing, whatever, that represents people no longer working for business. The government no longer gets the witholding automatically deducted. And, to add insult, a lot of those former workers, no longer making big taxable incomes, now resort to finding how to work directly for others without rendering their SSN.
Its gonna get interesting, with identity theft being what it is, to exact income tax from individuals who are facing a simultaneous competition from abroad to keep costs to a bare minimum.
Yes, we may call it "under the table" but it is now turning into a game of who is responsible for paying the tax on income. In the past, business wrote off the cost of labor as a factor required for production. Ok, the business did not pay tax on that money, the factory worker did. Now, that the factory worker has been nailed with the responsibility for paying the tax on his earnings, what's left is clean money... free and clear. Its his to spend. Now, if he wants to pay someone else to work for him, does he write it off against his tax? If he can, fine, now the person he paid the money to has the onus of paying the tax. Since when have barbershop services, car repair, tree trimming, and other individual services sold to individuals been an expense that one wrote off against their tax? The individual that earned that money has already paid tax on it.... so why should someone else that individual pays with clean taxpaid money be forced to pay tax on it again?
If the man I pay to fix my car has to pay tax on the money I give him, then I, like the business I got the money from, want my deduction! If I can't deduct it, then I pay the tax on the money, and give the mechanic clean taxpaid money.
I know they are gonna go after anybody opening up a business, so the trick seems to be finding something you can do from home - by word of mouth advertising. I know several mechanics working this way now. They will come to your house and fix your car. The cash discount is substantial. You can pay by check if you want to, but be prepared for the cost to more than double, as the check has to go through "the business", and the "business rate" is about four times the "doing it for a friend" rate. They are honest guys... you get the exact same quality of work whether you give them a couple of twenties in appreciation for their work, or a check for three or four hundred dollars. And I will guarantee you they will pay tax on the check. The cash though will probably be spent at the grocery store on the way home though.
I get the idea they stumbled on MacroVision by accident when they tried to put data into the "dead space" in the video signal between frames.
Remember, when we were first playing around with the first character generators and trying to get a standard TV to display our output, how they would rip and tear if we didn't get the video drive just right, compared to the sync drives?
And remember, on the old analog TVs, they would "roll" if the vertical wasn't adjusted properly, and you could see the "black bar" between frames?
A NTSC TV image is nothing more than a series of interlaced frames sent, even/odd, at a rate of 262.5 lines at 60 Hz. ( well, 59.94 if you wanna nitpick. ) The "even" frame started at the top left corner and ended up at bottom center; the "odd" frame picked back up at top center and ended up at bottom right. Remember, the video was designed to be displayed on an old analog tube whose beam was electromagnetically steered by sawtooth-shaped current pulses ( deflection yoke ). It is easy to get sawtooth shaped pulses because a coil, by its very nature, accepts a linear sawtooth-shaped current if driven from a rectangular voltage pulse, and it is easy to set up a tube circuit to turn full on/full off ( vertical sweep multivibrator / horizontal output tube ). These tubes were run on-off, but the resultant current through the deflection yoke was sawtooth because of the nature of inductive reactance on the applied voltage.
Bear with me, what I am getting at is the vertical oscillator could not be made to have instantaneous return, as that would mandate very high drive voltages and currents. So they decided to "throw away" a good portion of the picture while the vertical oscillator retraced to start the next frame. The networks decided to throw all sorts of interesting digital stuff in there themselves, being no one could see it anyhow. This area, known as the Vertical Interval, became home to the Vertical Interval Test Signals, teletext, and other little goodies the stations might wanna piggyback onto the signal. And a lot of the older sets went haywire when they did this, as the reference circuits the sets used looked at the average video signal strength and determined from that what voltages on the video signal represented the pulses to synchronize the vertical and horizontal oscillators to. If stations were not really careful how they inserted the signals, all hell broke loose on the customer sets.
Now, someone notices how you can corrupt the signals by transmitting strings of "1" and it screws up the works. Macrovision Technology is born.
I had an earlier analog TV for a while. I could easily see macrovision signals on it in the vertical retrace area between frames. They would alternate between bright white and full black. About eight lines of it. This really messed up the Automatic Gain Controls ( AGC ) of the TV, and it had a helluva time locking on this signal.
Now, what MacroVision takes advantage of is that the TV sets now have really nice electronic phase locked loop circuits that can speedily adjust to phase variances, because the sweep circuits of a TV can rapidly reacquire sync, but a VCR has this big rotating head, quite massive, synchronized so that each frame of TV ( 262.5 lines ) represents one sweep ( 1/2 rotation ) of the head to tape. The switching from even to odd frames occurs as the VCR has one head leaving tape, and the head on the other side swinging into position to read the next stripe on tape. And here is where Macrovision got clever. That big head has a helluva lot of mechanical inertia, and if you can screw up its sync, everything gets out of place, and the whole house of cards indicating what gets placed onto the tape where, comes falling down.
Now, its just a matter of participating companies to look for the signals in the vertical retrace area to recognize this and honor the macrovision intent.
There are several products on the market whose entire design is to completely cle
Yeh, the reason I specifically named that item is that its the one thing that comes to mind immediately as something I would like to get off the ship as soon as possible. Just about anything else, I would find somewhere to stow it.
Well, if nothing else, I just wish they would stop releasing software that honors embedded executables.
I still remember the day I could open up anything...yes... anything in my text editor without the slightest fear of anything going amiss. The absolute worst that could possibly happen is I get a screenfull of gibberish as the character generator tried to translate the binary file to displayable characters.
Then some yokel got busy with embedded executables ( not Gates... I am talking about the guys behind the ANSI escape codes which enabled certain codes to be defined then execute to do certain things ) and the first "ANSI bombs" were crafted. Its been downhill from there.
If nothing else, return to a clean form of HTML. Standardize it. And give it no power to do ANYTHING but display.
And Gates, stay out of those damn plug-ins. You don't wanna take the heat for the security risks, because anyone can write a plug-in to do all sorts of nefarious things under the rug. Trying to make some sort of automated install easy for some businessman is only gonna be subverted to make worms and viruses autoinstall.
Asking people to install programs they know nothing about to me is akin to asking people to sign legal forms they know nothing about. If businesses are going to be afforded the protection of the law when it comes to people not knowing how it works, they are going to have to assume all liability for what it does when said uninformed people run it.
If we can't enforce this accountability onto software developers, then we are never gonna get rid of those underhanded people who release code that has ulterior motives. Those people who release sneakycode are really making it tough on the rest of us who want honest programs.
Loud metallic banging. But they are not noticing an air leak? With the skin of the ISS being as thin as it is, and velocities being what they are in space, I would think *any* impact with another orbital object would do significant damage, not just make noise.
My guess is that its thermally related, and some piece of metal has a bistable position, and has been driven to the alternate position from forces resulting from thermal expansion.
I would think the only way that something could be traveling in orbit so closely to them as to bump and not go through is if they were dumping debris ( possibly a bag of toilet waste? ) which upon ejection interacted with solar wind or orbital forces to garner enough velocity to come back and ping them. Really sounds unlikely though.
Don't quote me for facts. This is just my best guess after reading what I saw on it.
Interesting. I'll have to check for the Sentinel next time I'm at the bookstore. I guess I first got whiff of the idea of an old book, I think it was "Chariots of the Gods", and of course, the old monoliths of "2001: A Space Odessey ( Kubrick )". The idea seemed plausible enough - not enough to convince me that this was how life happened, but enough to make me leave this option open for further consideration.
Given the age of the earth, and how I see as our own technology is giving way to things that have a shorter and shorter lifetime ( like when I was working at Chevron, I saw oil pumps still in service that were 100 years old! Its unusual today to see anything even ten years old still in service.). I consider as our technology and economics advance, maybe we trend to a position where we don't produce anything that lasts more than a few years, then maybe our economy implodes one day, and wipes out the human race that had grown absolutely dependent on it? Sometimes I wonder if humans had been on earth billions of years ago, and had actually accomplished what we have just done, and now we find evidence of this. On earth, all their achievements may have been weathered back to oblivion, but still exist on the Moon. I get the idea if our economies collapse, and the great plague (whatever it is) wipes out the human race, whenever life evolves again to the point of interplanetary travel, they will discover the stuff we just left on the Moon and Mars, and probably evoke great rounds of discussions.
Now, I do not trust those in charge of the missions though. If they indeed did find such a thing, would they tell us about it? Without meaning to troll, I would have felt much more informed during the Clinton administration should something like this be discovered. I fear the Bush administration is so fundie that they are apt to suppress anything that doesn't play the party religious line in the name of "national security".
I sure hope this is a prank. But being how many laws I see being passed these days and how our rights are being trampled one by one, this kind of stuff isn't that easily passed off as an insane idea anymore. The fact I even consider such lunacy as this to be a possibility scares me.
Personally, I hope the word gets out fast amongst our community, we find this thing, nail the bastid that took it, and make the news on all the other channels that somebody picked on the wrong guy.
You know, like the stories about the guy who tried to play a fast one on what he thought was a sucker, only to find out later he couldn't have picked a worse fella to swindle.
It is quite true I still browse around with the Netscape 3 / Proxomitron / ZoneAlarm combo. I tried some other browsers, Opera was the only other one I liked. I tried to use the later Netscape and ( God Forbid, IE ) and just got plastered with popups. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. There is a lot of stuff I had just as soon not see.
Its been my observation that once the browsers passed a certain point, further "improvements" were done for the benefit of the business advertiser and marketing data-gatherer, with such "improvements" coming at the expense of my bandwidth and privacy. Given the choice of having my old car, which I control, or a fancy new car which gets permission from its maker everytime I want to go somewhere, and its always telling its maker where I go, I will take my old car.
Yeh, at this time, you are modded "funny", however I think you are quite insightful.
I have a very big curiousity about if they find anything kinda, well shall we say, of extraterrestrial origin, on the moon or Mars. My rationale being I have no idea how life really started on Earth. There are a few theories floating around stating the possibility of life being "seeded" on Earth by spaceborne visitors. Unfortunately, any evidence left by these spaceborne visitors will have been destroyed either by the elements or man himself ( you know, the same way we have "lost" the Ark of the Covenant - which isn't really all that old! ).
If we were indeed seeded here, I consider the possibility that the ones who seeded us left some additional info on neighboring planets, knowing full good and well that that info would not be accessible to us until we found a way to get to it and hopefully would be sufficiently advanced to understand it in lieu of holding it as some sort of religious trophy and fighting over it, most likely having it destroyed in the process.
I was thinking if I were to seed a planet with life, with full anticipation it would eventually advance to interplanetary capability, I would leave some documentation on a neighboring planet void of weathering conditions ( I thought the moon was ideal for this ) so that it would stay out of harm's way until the life I had seeded had passed my "intelligence test" of being able to get to it.
On my system, I am seeing the text of the search results overflow to the right onto the sponsored links area. Then upon scrolling the page up and down, the text gets snipped off as the sponsored links area overwrites it.
I know this is probably something to do with my old Netscape 3 browser, but the later browsers seem so bloated I haven't wanted to mess with them. As another thread on Slashdot was discussing, I considered Netscape 3 good enough and never messed with updating it.
They have to be FDA approved, and no one knows exactly whats in soda pop anyway, so safety isn't a question.
So, I go into a store, sort by price, choose cheapest.
Take it home, sample it. If its OK, drink rest of sample, and upon visit to store, buy more.
If it tastes funny, or has other annoying side effects, try the next product up on the price sort.
So far, my algorithm stopped at WalMart's "Sam's Choice" diet cola at 50 cents per 2 liter bottle.
Incidentally, because of my aversion to playing store card games, the price I use for my evaluations is the shelf price. Businesses that use the old "rack the shelf price up really high so to encourage everyone to carry our store card" lose out on this, as their shelf price puts them at the very "least likely to purchase" location on my selection algorithm.
As you have probably guessed by now, WalMart usually is the vendor of choice for just about anything I need that is stocked by WalMart.
I still do not understand why freon-water heat exchangers never caught on with pool owners.
Air conditioning owners are stuck with this big noisy box outside containing a monstrous fan and freon compressor. It appeared to be minimal work to me to concentrically place a copper pipe into a larger piece of PVC pipe, and route the pool water through it. You have to run the pool pump so many hours a day to circulate and filter the water so the water stays clean. So why not heat it up a bit too? I would much rather have the heat in the pool than in the house, and all it would take is a short length ( twenty feet max, ten feet each way ) of say 1/2" copper tubing placed inside the 2" or so PVC pipe carrying the circulating pool water. Run the direction counterflow, so that the exiting condensed liquid freon encounters the coldest newly incoming water and the hottest vapor freon sees the warmer exiting stream of water.
Just run the pool pump concurrently with the air conditioning compressor. Presto, heat transferred from house air, to freon, to pool water.
No big noisy fan. No big box. Everything nice, neat, tucked away. You would never even see what made this thing work unless you really looked for it.
If I had not responded to another post later in this thread, I would have given you a modpoint for that.
I think what you said is exactly what needs to happen... that is more of us go out on our own and cut out the supervisory overhead which makes us so damned expensive.
I haven't "taken my car to the shop" for over ten years, because I know mechanics. I get my car maintained for less than 1/10 of the price I pay in the "car repair palace". The mechanics I know often work right out of their home. They often do the work right in my own driveway. They do not have a business, nor do they advertise. The only way you can get into "the loop" is to know someone who is and they share with you.
There is no need to force a heavy economic burden to support unnecessary supervision on our customers.
In the past, our training has been all designed to train us for corporate wage-slave work. With the current outsourcing trends, I think the writing is on the wall that to train for corporate work is kinda like training to be a ditch digger. Face it, there is no way we can economically compete with foreign labor, given the cost-of-living and taxation overheads one has to pay to do the work here.
We need to see how others survive here.
And its not working for corporations.
One needs to work for people directly. Like the mechanics I know. There are several who shortly retired from working at the car palace because the car palace took too many hours out of their day and too many dollars out of their paychecks.
We not only need to learn to work for ourselves, we need to pay a lot more attention to not involving corporations in our affairs and going directly to the workman for whatever needs to be done.
One thing I found out, you don't need to "earn" nearly as many dollars when you learn to do things for each other directly and bypass the corporate economic overburdens.
Corporate interests can always hire the supervisorial guy for the quarter-million dollar a year executive job, but they may have trouble hiring local guys which they consider on the menial level to design their products or maintain their systems for the same wage as given in India.
So, go into business for yourself...
If a friend of a friend asks you a favor, you can do it pretty cheap as you don't have any overhead to speak of.
If a corporate guy calls, the instant he gives you a form wanting your social-security number, your hourly rate goes to at least $200/hr to cover the accounting overhead and the paperwork this guy is fixing to create for you.
Its not that I am advocating tax cheat, tax has to be paid on money - The question is who is going to pay the tax. If someone else is going to write the money paid to me off as a business expense and leave the burden on me to pay the tax, fine, I just need to include the tax and paperwork handling burdens in my rate. If they pay the tax on the money and pay me in cash, that's fine too then I don't need to mess with accounting for it. Or maybe, we can work out an arrangement to swap services.
As things mutate, we need to adapt too. And that means leaving the corporate umbrella and working for ourselves.
When Congress signs those bills sending our jobs overseas, they also need to see the American jobs lost as that many tax returns no longer arriving and make appropriate cuts to their congressional budgets to reflect the lost income taxes received.
We will survive. Its just we won't be corporately employed. We, like my automotive mechanic friends, will survive by rendering service needed by people, not by rendering services needed by corporations. Corporations can get their services cheaper overseas. We need to address the needs of people here. In our neighborhoods.
Incidentally, I am taking a helluva lot of courses at the local college in auto repair. Its a helluva occupation these days. Do you know how complex the average car
You see, I used to work in Aerospace. A very small company. We were just a bunch of Amateur Radio Operators and electronics tinkerers who found out the Government would hire us to tinker for them. We worked our butts off, but we called it fun.
Then big-money Wall Street Corporation got interested in us. Used lots of money to buy us. Then paid big-money for the management and executive skills to tell us what to do and how to do it. Thats we started needing to develop "strong interpersonal skills" in order to communicate with those who were above having to deal with time-consuming technical minutiae.
We techies no longer called the shots; we are now just followers trying to keep the tie-guys that did our personnel evaluations happy. It seemed every day was like taking an exam in college, if you passed, you got to come again tomorrow and do it again. At one time, the job was fun, but now its a drudge as people who have never had the joys of having to take the time to understand exactly what they are doing now tell me that I am a "perfectionist" and write in their little Franklin Day Planners that I lack the "communication skills" required to keep them happy. From my point of view, I flat refuse to tell them something I do not think has a snowball's chance in hell of working, regardless of how they express their desires to have me approve this thing they propose. So they call me inflexible and lay me off.
I am no longer allowed the luxury of doing things the way I know how to do them. I do get set in my ways, and if there are certain tools ( such as my trusty old Borland C++ compiler ) that I feel I gotta have to run my DSP algorithms past, so be it. I know this old tool. I know it has bugs - but I know where they are. I am very uncomfortable with tools I have not worked with - especially if I don't have a lot of time to go back and fix the things I missed. You would not ask some golf pro to give up his clubs and use some fancy new proprietary tool to use right before a game, but why do they force this on us engineers? In the case of the team I was working on, I figured we gave up about two hundred year's worth of combined knowledge in order to make us subordinate to the executive manager, in addition to the salary he was paid. And somehow, they expected this change to result in a better cash flow?
No biggie. I start doing industrial robot work on my own. By now, I know the Corporate Executive is looking for Car Salesmen types to work for him, not mechanincs. I perceive the MBA Executive Graduate hired by the Corporate Interests is looking more for one who knows psychology well, but knowledge of physics is a don't care. He wants his hand shaken and pretty reports submitted in the latest wordprocessor and presentation formats of the day, but who cares if the product in the development lab is full of bugs?
Yeh, you can tell already I will not be able to work for one of these quarter-million-dollar a year salary guys. You know, I would rather fix cars for a living than have to snub up to them all the time, kissing the tailpipe of their BMW.
Yeh, the salary is nice, but there is such a thing as job satisfaction too. Often times, in the frenzy to push perceived output of subordinate wage-slaves to the limit, the workplace becomes a place of maximal stress... and its just not worth it. I realize the guys up the line drawing these huge salaries justify it on the basis they can extract it out of the underlings. So, as they wedge themselves into the upper echelons of management, the company slowly evolves from a production organization to a management organization, with much emphasis on monitoring skills, and lesser and lesser emphasis on technical acumen.
Here's some observations I have:
I noted in the college I am attending - in a class in Data Structures ( which BTW, I thoroughly enjoyed ), there were seven students. This course is offered once per year. Seven students.
I think you brought up a good point assuming the applications downloaded are all open source.
But then, requiring all stuff open source would remove a lot of incentive for doing a lot of specialized stuff.
I have no problem with something like a core algorithm for a motor control being proprietary, or maybe databases - but I feel strongly that one requirement that should go in exchange for the legal mandate of keeping my nose out of it is that it be very clear that the responsibility for what the code does rests squarely with the one claiming ownership of the proprietary code and takes *all* legal liability for *any* consequences of using that code.
The business caveat for Open Source code is that in exchange for letting you in on its innards, is that you are supposed to read and understand the code, and thereby know its actions when executed.
Code doesn't lie. If it doesn't do what you expected, there is no one out there responsible for it. You may contact the author, or support organizations, and you are free to negotiate suitable arrangements for technical support if you can't read or don't have the time to tune the code so it does exactly whatever it is you wanted.
It sure looks to me that they see this Utah legislation as throwing a monkey wrench into their business plan of first snaring an audience, then once they become dependent on their services, then requiring them to install proprietary software. Pacific Bell did that to me. I went for years on their dialup. Suddenly I start getting emails from them telling me its mandatory that I visit their website and download their proprietary Yahoo code. I read the EULA, and again saw all those disclaimers of any liability, as well as implicit permission to share my stuff with their marketing partners. I just about puked at that point. I hated to kill that account, but I had to.
It seems to me the largest vector for viral infections is the use of any programs ( which, by their very nature, require permissions to run and access the TCPIP stack ) to execute rogue scripts. Microsoft's stuff is full of it. Linux would be too if it were as popular. I do not see the problem as being OS-centric, as rogue programs and exploits can be written to exploit an executable under any OS. Any other programs demanding executable permissions ( plug-ins, etc. ) out there only open up yet more security problems. Anyone who has surfed the net notes that an ever-increasing number of webmasters are now requiring the use of some specialized plug-in to view content instead of just using the standard way of doing the exact same thing. These specialized plug-ins are wide open for spoofing and tampering, as by their nature, once installed, they are given the keys to the kingdom.
It looks to me this legislation would effectively bar the trickery of demanding installation of plug-ins ( which may well have ulterior motives unseen by the downloader ) to view content.
I feel a lot of the internet businessmen have been watching the supermarkets and their "value cards" and have been thinking of implementing it on the web. I get the idea each has been tinkering with getting their proprietary bots in our machines much like the supermarkets coerced their cards into our wallets and purses. This legislation looks like it throws a monkey wrench into that plan.
Go for it. It may ( like the DMCA ) need some adjustment later, but for now, it sure looks like it will help curb the flow of exploitable code people are demanded to install at the whim of webmasters who inflict this on their visitors.
I don't know why 0x0d0a got a flamebait because what he said is absolutely true.
I have had days I could not log onto my PacBell account because of some difficulty they were having. No big deal. I have had a day where I could not log onto the ISP I am now with as a result of some technical problems they were having. They worked it out. No big deal.
I hardly thought this topic was even worth looking at. I guess I could jump all over someone for not doing a perfect job, but then, I don't do a perfect job at every attempt I make, regardless of my intentions. ( Actually, I get very few things perfect. The longer I work on it, the more I approach perfection, but I rarely get there.. often being forced by time and economics to accept "good enough" ).
I will rant till I am blue in the face if I think their failures are due to unsound practices ( aka embedded executables, unverifiable hidden crap, etc. ), but they just had server difficulty, and any of us that have to work on things of this size know how much more complex these things are than something, say, like a radio station or something.
For now, I guess there is no telling what was causing all the grief. As dynamic as a mail system is, I congratulate them for not losing all the mail. I sure have had things take me more than a day to fix. Actually I am impressed they keep it working as well as they do.
Microsoft started out really neat - remember how they helped all of us get out from under the control of "big iron". It wasn't until just a few years ago they got a bee in their bonnet to start making things very difficult to understand in order to hide the inner workings so various tricks and games could be used for intelletual property rights enforcement. Games which sometimes go wrong and leave a trail of innocent victims who paid for a product, but could not receive the benefit.
Dropping a day of Hotmail service... no big thing.
Releasing unverifiable code that I can't troubleshoot and fix if something goes awry - now that's a horse of a completely different color.
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The rovers have a limited lifetime.
I leave it to the scientists to see this from their chair. They drove more than they expected, past the "warranty" of the rover, to get there. From now on, all is gravy. From their vantage points, they can figure out if there is anything even remotely around which would make it not worth the risk. You gotta die sometime. Might as well be doing something useful.
These ships were not made to stay in the harbor.
The problem was a flock of ducks residing in the drainage ditch.. er. "lake", adjacent to us. One resident's children would coax the ducks to the apartment complex with bread crumbs, and from then on the sidewalks were one slippery mess. Now, we had a condrundrum...
However, an entrerprising family had a really neat way of taking advantage of this. I noticed they would leave their patio gate open and ducks came in. Then the gate would silently close. Then they would run their barbeque a bit, then an assortment of duck parts would show up in the dumpster. And his kids seemed awful well-fed... Nobody said a word.
But if there is resistance to human consumption, could this biomass be used as an ingredient in animal feed? I mean like there is nothing biologically wrong with it is there? As far as I see, its still a potent nutrient source of the highest order. The first thing that comes to mind is an ingredient for livestock and pet food if humans have an aversion to it. It sure seems like a shame to let all those assembled protein chains go to waste.
I have studied in Economics classes where the high technology sector is responsible for America's stellar economic growth compared to the rest of the world, yet we are strangling our cash cow with myriads of legal snarling. Our factories are damn near gone. Our students are losing their love of studying science. Our high-tech industries are moving offshore. It seems the highest valued jobs in America does not concern making anything anymore, its who can argue the best. We have become like a family who no longer works, we just sit back and bicker, each of us "lobbying" the powers that be to grant us power over the other.
I took a course in Object Oriented Data Structures in C++ just for the fun of it. There were seven students in the class ( including me ). The college actually ran the course. I also took a course in Intellectual Property Rights the business college ran... it was full to the gunwales - 50 students - and a line out the door down the hall the first day of class of prospective students trying to beg into the class. If it weren't for my having 100+ semester hours at that college, I probably would not have gotten in on my first try. ( I have been taking evening classes there for several decades ). But that really illustrated to me the future of our country. A couple of guys that actually do something, hundreds bickering over who can do what with it.
I don't think things will change until the general public becomes economically painfully aware that Congress has killed our cash cow with all their penmanship. Right now we are hiding the fact by dropping interest rates to damn near zero trying to flood the market for just a little while longer with unearned borrowed dollars.. so merchants and property owners still see cash flow. But this debt will come due. As a country, we are acting out the parent's worst nightmare, as the kid - unaware of the financial mathematics governing a credit card - goes on a wild melee spending spree.
When the bills come in, and something of value has to be scrounged up to settle them, Congress is going to have some interesting situations on their hands. People don't like stepping down. And people don't like paying tax if they already don't have enough surplus in their spendable income to even hold on to their existing stuff.
My venture is that within ten years, we are gonna see some very interesting twists come up. My suggestion is to learn some trade that can be bartered directly with Joe Public. Going to college just to get some scrap of paper to make you appealing to some corporate entity may be a lost cause. America is full of bickering skills already. I believe there will always be a market for the skills of actually doing something useful.
One is supposed to file a PATENT, and publicize the exact details and mechanization one's work, in order to receive the protection promised by the government in exchange for the idea becoming public domain in what.. 17 years or so?
The alternative is a "trade secret"... apparently not protected by patent. But possibly protected by copyright.
Ok, copyright. Some photographer takes a picture of the Grand Canyon. He has his copyright to his proofs. I supposedly can not grab one of his photos and redistribute it. But, apparently, what I CAN do is go to the exact spot he shot his shot from, set up my camera, and take one too.
Ok, So, I can not use the code I stripped from their program. Fair enough. So I go to the exact same spot and type the instructions I need into my machine manually if need be. Now, this one, like the film in my camera, has been personally authored by ME.
I am having a hard time thinking along the lines that someone has patent protection for a trade secret. And if he has copyright, I grant its gonna be hard as hell to tell by looking at a sequence of ones and zeroes if they are the exact same one's and zeroes he or I typed in. Just as it may be hard as hell by looking at the proofs just who took the photo of the Grand Canyon.
I note drug manufacturers have to explain exactly what it is they have and the exact structure of it in order to have that structure protected by patent law. And when the patent runs out, competitors are free to begin production. Its why some pills are hundred dollars per pill, and why I buy bottles of 200 ea. aspirin pills at the "dollar deals" store for a buck.
I am sure looking forward to the day when the word "standard" means a public-domain description of something which the public has agreed to adhere to. If its a "standard", then by definition, it would be public domain and no-one in the government would protect anyone's exclusive claim to license it. Imagine how our industrial revolution would have been hindered if companies could not as much as make their screws compatible with someone else's nuts? Or light bulbs that would run on standard voltages and have standard basing? All this legal snarling that Congress is creating is making it damn near impossible to make interoperative stuff.
( I wonder why photographers call picture a "proof"... maybe they were trying to prove they took a picture? Yes! I did put film in the camera! Here's Proof! )
Yes, students spend upwards of $500/semester on books. I do. And I have seen countless occasions where book publishers issue revision after revision, often making changes as minor as just re-ordering the problems at the end of the chapter, just to render the previous revison ( no longer available, reproduction of previous revision forbidden by copyright law ) obsolete, forcing teachers to adopt the new version, also rendering student's investment in the earlier version a sunk cost.
Think its gonna be cheaper to "lease"? We already do. Cost of reproduction is not that much. Geez, if printing is so expensive, how can you justify the literal tons of printed junk mail generated daily?
For my stuff, I generally keep my books anyway. Geez, they are the ones I fall back to when I am trying to remember some little quirk in Control Theory or some obscure little DSP goodie I remember my professor talking about. I even still have my books discussing control theory algorithms using Vacuum Tubes!!! Although the mechanizations change, the basic ideas are identical. I see over and over again where often things get way, way, way more complicated than they need to be. I can perform integration with a fullbore DSP. I can also do it with a capacitor. Or, I might use a combo approach to use the digital side to store constants which compensate for analog tolerances. But then, think of all the techniques I was taught that I would lose reference to if my books expired!
My parent is *not* off-topic.
My parent is an excellent example of how these damn worms and viruses spread, except instead of going through all the trouble of instructing the computer to do this, they simply tell the human operator to do it.
But the procedures are identical.
And, to make matters even worse, at least some people have a smidgen of common sense. Computers have none at all.
Combined with the traffic light violator cameras, this looks like speeding could become an expensive fruitless pastime.
I have been thinking since America has been "de-industrializing" with the closure of our big factories, and now the offshoring of our technical jobs, they are gonna have one hellava time trying to get accurate personal income tax returns filed.
Back in the old heyday, it was very easy to coax a big business that hired hundreds of thousands of factory workers to withold pay and send it in. Just a few well-placed loops in the tax code is all it took - basically you told the big company that they could write their labor costs off if they would inform the government who they paid the money to so the government could go to the individual taxpayer for the money, and business was all too happy to comply.
But now, everytime we see a closing factory, outsourcing, whatever, that represents people no longer working for business. The government no longer gets the witholding automatically deducted. And, to add insult, a lot of those former workers, no longer making big taxable incomes, now resort to finding how to work directly for others without rendering their SSN.
Its gonna get interesting, with identity theft being what it is, to exact income tax from individuals who are facing a simultaneous competition from abroad to keep costs to a bare minimum.
Yes, we may call it "under the table" but it is now turning into a game of who is responsible for paying the tax on income. In the past, business wrote off the cost of labor as a factor required for production. Ok, the business did not pay tax on that money, the factory worker did. Now, that the factory worker has been nailed with the responsibility for paying the tax on his earnings, what's left is clean money... free and clear. Its his to spend. Now, if he wants to pay someone else to work for him, does he write it off against his tax? If he can, fine, now the person he paid the money to has the onus of paying the tax. Since when have barbershop services, car repair, tree trimming, and other individual services sold to individuals been an expense that one wrote off against their tax? The individual that earned that money has already paid tax on it.... so why should someone else that individual pays with clean taxpaid money be forced to pay tax on it again?
If the man I pay to fix my car has to pay tax on the money I give him, then I, like the business I got the money from, want my deduction! If I can't deduct it, then I pay the tax on the money, and give the mechanic clean taxpaid money.
I know they are gonna go after anybody opening up a business, so the trick seems to be finding something you can do from home - by word of mouth advertising. I know several mechanics working this way now. They will come to your house and fix your car. The cash discount is substantial. You can pay by check if you want to, but be prepared for the cost to more than double, as the check has to go through "the business", and the "business rate" is about four times the "doing it for a friend" rate. They are honest guys... you get the exact same quality of work whether you give them a couple of twenties in appreciation for their work, or a check for three or four hundred dollars. And I will guarantee you they will pay tax on the check. The cash though will probably be spent at the grocery store on the way home though.
This is gonna get interesting fellas!
Remember, when we were first playing around with the first character generators and trying to get a standard TV to display our output, how they would rip and tear if we didn't get the video drive just right, compared to the sync drives?
And remember, on the old analog TVs, they would "roll" if the vertical wasn't adjusted properly, and you could see the "black bar" between frames?
A NTSC TV image is nothing more than a series of interlaced frames sent, even/odd, at a rate of 262.5 lines at 60 Hz. ( well, 59.94 if you wanna nitpick. ) The "even" frame started at the top left corner and ended up at bottom center; the "odd" frame picked back up at top center and ended up at bottom right. Remember, the video was designed to be displayed on an old analog tube whose beam was electromagnetically steered by sawtooth-shaped current pulses ( deflection yoke ). It is easy to get sawtooth shaped pulses because a coil, by its very nature, accepts a linear sawtooth-shaped current if driven from a rectangular voltage pulse, and it is easy to set up a tube circuit to turn full on/full off ( vertical sweep multivibrator / horizontal output tube ). These tubes were run on-off, but the resultant current through the deflection yoke was sawtooth because of the nature of inductive reactance on the applied voltage.
Bear with me, what I am getting at is the vertical oscillator could not be made to have instantaneous return, as that would mandate very high drive voltages and currents. So they decided to "throw away" a good portion of the picture while the vertical oscillator retraced to start the next frame. The networks decided to throw all sorts of interesting digital stuff in there themselves, being no one could see it anyhow. This area, known as the Vertical Interval, became home to the Vertical Interval Test Signals, teletext, and other little goodies the stations might wanna piggyback onto the signal. And a lot of the older sets went haywire when they did this, as the reference circuits the sets used looked at the average video signal strength and determined from that what voltages on the video signal represented the pulses to synchronize the vertical and horizontal oscillators to. If stations were not really careful how they inserted the signals, all hell broke loose on the customer sets.
Now, someone notices how you can corrupt the signals by transmitting strings of "1" and it screws up the works. Macrovision Technology is born.
I had an earlier analog TV for a while. I could easily see macrovision signals on it in the vertical retrace area between frames. They would alternate between bright white and full black. About eight lines of it. This really messed up the Automatic Gain Controls ( AGC ) of the TV, and it had a helluva time locking on this signal.
Now, what MacroVision takes advantage of is that the TV sets now have really nice electronic phase locked loop circuits that can speedily adjust to phase variances, because the sweep circuits of a TV can rapidly reacquire sync, but a VCR has this big rotating head, quite massive, synchronized so that each frame of TV ( 262.5 lines ) represents one sweep ( 1/2 rotation ) of the head to tape. The switching from even to odd frames occurs as the VCR has one head leaving tape, and the head on the other side swinging into position to read the next stripe on tape. And here is where Macrovision got clever. That big head has a helluva lot of mechanical inertia, and if you can screw up its sync, everything gets out of place, and the whole house of cards indicating what gets placed onto the tape where, comes falling down.
Now, its just a matter of participating companies to look for the signals in the vertical retrace area to recognize this and honor the macrovision intent.
There are several products on the market whose entire design is to completely cle
I still remember the day I could open up anything...yes... anything in my text editor without the slightest fear of anything going amiss. The absolute worst that could possibly happen is I get a screenfull of gibberish as the character generator tried to translate the binary file to displayable characters.
Then some yokel got busy with embedded executables ( not Gates... I am talking about the guys behind the ANSI escape codes which enabled certain codes to be defined then execute to do certain things ) and the first "ANSI bombs" were crafted. Its been downhill from there.
If nothing else, return to a clean form of HTML. Standardize it. And give it no power to do ANYTHING but display.
And Gates, stay out of those damn plug-ins. You don't wanna take the heat for the security risks, because anyone can write a plug-in to do all sorts of nefarious things under the rug. Trying to make some sort of automated install easy for some businessman is only gonna be subverted to make worms and viruses autoinstall.
Asking people to install programs they know nothing about to me is akin to asking people to sign legal forms they know nothing about. If businesses are going to be afforded the protection of the law when it comes to people not knowing how it works, they are going to have to assume all liability for what it does when said uninformed people run it.
If we can't enforce this accountability onto software developers, then we are never gonna get rid of those underhanded people who release code that has ulterior motives. Those people who release sneakycode are really making it tough on the rest of us who want honest programs.
My guess is that its thermally related, and some piece of metal has a bistable position, and has been driven to the alternate position from forces resulting from thermal expansion.
I would think the only way that something could be traveling in orbit so closely to them as to bump and not go through is if they were dumping debris ( possibly a bag of toilet waste? ) which upon ejection interacted with solar wind or orbital forces to garner enough velocity to come back and ping them. Really sounds unlikely though.
Don't quote me for facts. This is just my best guess after reading what I saw on it.
Given the age of the earth, and how I see as our own technology is giving way to things that have a shorter and shorter lifetime ( like when I was working at Chevron, I saw oil pumps still in service that were 100 years old! Its unusual today to see anything even ten years old still in service.). I consider as our technology and economics advance, maybe we trend to a position where we don't produce anything that lasts more than a few years, then maybe our economy implodes one day, and wipes out the human race that had grown absolutely dependent on it? Sometimes I wonder if humans had been on earth billions of years ago, and had actually accomplished what we have just done, and now we find evidence of this. On earth, all their achievements may have been weathered back to oblivion, but still exist on the Moon. I get the idea if our economies collapse, and the great plague (whatever it is) wipes out the human race, whenever life evolves again to the point of interplanetary travel, they will discover the stuff we just left on the Moon and Mars, and probably evoke great rounds of discussions.
Now, I do not trust those in charge of the missions though. If they indeed did find such a thing, would they tell us about it? Without meaning to troll, I would have felt much more informed during the Clinton administration should something like this be discovered. I fear the Bush administration is so fundie that they are apt to suppress anything that doesn't play the party religious line in the name of "national security".
I sure hope this is a prank. But being how many laws I see being passed these days and how our rights are being trampled one by one, this kind of stuff isn't that easily passed off as an insane idea anymore. The fact I even consider such lunacy as this to be a possibility scares me.
Yes, it happens everyday.
But when it happens to one of us, its WAR!!!
Personally, I hope the word gets out fast amongst our community, we find this thing, nail the bastid that took it, and make the news on all the other channels that somebody picked on the wrong guy.
You know, like the stories about the guy who tried to play a fast one on what he thought was a sucker, only to find out later he couldn't have picked a worse fella to swindle.
Now, that said, lets find this thing.
It is quite true I still browse around with the Netscape 3 / Proxomitron / ZoneAlarm combo. I tried some other browsers, Opera was the only other one I liked. I tried to use the later Netscape and ( God Forbid, IE ) and just got plastered with popups. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. There is a lot of stuff I had just as soon not see.
Its been my observation that once the browsers passed a certain point, further "improvements" were done for the benefit of the business advertiser and marketing data-gatherer, with such "improvements" coming at the expense of my bandwidth and privacy. Given the choice of having my old car, which I control, or a fancy new car which gets permission from its maker everytime I want to go somewhere, and its always telling its maker where I go, I will take my old car.
I have a very big curiousity about if they find anything kinda, well shall we say, of extraterrestrial origin, on the moon or Mars. My rationale being I have no idea how life really started on Earth. There are a few theories floating around stating the possibility of life being "seeded" on Earth by spaceborne visitors. Unfortunately, any evidence left by these spaceborne visitors will have been destroyed either by the elements or man himself ( you know, the same way we have "lost" the Ark of the Covenant - which isn't really all that old! ).
If we were indeed seeded here, I consider the possibility that the ones who seeded us left some additional info on neighboring planets, knowing full good and well that that info would not be accessible to us until we found a way to get to it and hopefully would be sufficiently advanced to understand it in lieu of holding it as some sort of religious trophy and fighting over it, most likely having it destroyed in the process.
I was thinking if I were to seed a planet with life, with full anticipation it would eventually advance to interplanetary capability, I would leave some documentation on a neighboring planet void of weathering conditions ( I thought the moon was ideal for this ) so that it would stay out of harm's way until the life I had seeded had passed my "intelligence test" of being able to get to it.
I know this is probably something to do with my old Netscape 3 browser, but the later browsers seem so bloated I haven't wanted to mess with them. As another thread on Slashdot was discussing, I considered Netscape 3 good enough and never messed with updating it.
So, I go into a store, sort by price, choose cheapest.
Take it home, sample it. If its OK, drink rest of sample, and upon visit to store, buy more.
If it tastes funny, or has other annoying side effects, try the next product up on the price sort.
So far, my algorithm stopped at WalMart's "Sam's Choice" diet cola at 50 cents per 2 liter bottle.
Incidentally, because of my aversion to playing store card games, the price I use for my evaluations is the shelf price. Businesses that use the old "rack the shelf price up really high so to encourage everyone to carry our store card" lose out on this, as their shelf price puts them at the very "least likely to purchase" location on my selection algorithm.
As you have probably guessed by now, WalMart usually is the vendor of choice for just about anything I need that is stocked by WalMart.
Air conditioning owners are stuck with this big noisy box outside containing a monstrous fan and freon compressor. It appeared to be minimal work to me to concentrically place a copper pipe into a larger piece of PVC pipe, and route the pool water through it. You have to run the pool pump so many hours a day to circulate and filter the water so the water stays clean. So why not heat it up a bit too? I would much rather have the heat in the pool than in the house, and all it would take is a short length ( twenty feet max, ten feet each way ) of say 1/2" copper tubing placed inside the 2" or so PVC pipe carrying the circulating pool water. Run the direction counterflow, so that the exiting condensed liquid freon encounters the coldest newly incoming water and the hottest vapor freon sees the warmer exiting stream of water.
Just run the pool pump concurrently with the air conditioning compressor. Presto, heat transferred from house air, to freon, to pool water.
No big noisy fan. No big box. Everything nice, neat, tucked away. You would never even see what made this thing work unless you really looked for it.
But I don't see this. Why?
I think what you said is exactly what needs to happen... that is more of us go out on our own and cut out the supervisory overhead which makes us so damned expensive.
I haven't "taken my car to the shop" for over ten years, because I know mechanics. I get my car maintained for less than 1/10 of the price I pay in the "car repair palace". The mechanics I know often work right out of their home. They often do the work right in my own driveway. They do not have a business, nor do they advertise. The only way you can get into "the loop" is to know someone who is and they share with you.
There is no need to force a heavy economic burden to support unnecessary supervision on our customers.
In the past, our training has been all designed to train us for corporate wage-slave work. With the current outsourcing trends, I think the writing is on the wall that to train for corporate work is kinda like training to be a ditch digger. Face it, there is no way we can economically compete with foreign labor, given the cost-of-living and taxation overheads one has to pay to do the work here.
We need to see how others survive here.
And its not working for corporations.
One needs to work for people directly. Like the mechanics I know. There are several who shortly retired from working at the car palace because the car palace took too many hours out of their day and too many dollars out of their paychecks.
We not only need to learn to work for ourselves, we need to pay a lot more attention to not involving corporations in our affairs and going directly to the workman for whatever needs to be done.
One thing I found out, you don't need to "earn" nearly as many dollars when you learn to do things for each other directly and bypass the corporate economic overburdens.
Corporate interests can always hire the supervisorial guy for the quarter-million dollar a year executive job, but they may have trouble hiring local guys which they consider on the menial level to design their products or maintain their systems for the same wage as given in India.
So, go into business for yourself...
If a friend of a friend asks you a favor, you can do it pretty cheap as you don't have any overhead to speak of.
If a corporate guy calls, the instant he gives you a form wanting your social-security number, your hourly rate goes to at least $200/hr to cover the accounting overhead and the paperwork this guy is fixing to create for you.
Its not that I am advocating tax cheat, tax has to be paid on money - The question is who is going to pay the tax. If someone else is going to write the money paid to me off as a business expense and leave the burden on me to pay the tax, fine, I just need to include the tax and paperwork handling burdens in my rate. If they pay the tax on the money and pay me in cash, that's fine too then I don't need to mess with accounting for it. Or maybe, we can work out an arrangement to swap services.
As things mutate, we need to adapt too. And that means leaving the corporate umbrella and working for ourselves.
When Congress signs those bills sending our jobs overseas, they also need to see the American jobs lost as that many tax returns no longer arriving and make appropriate cuts to their congressional budgets to reflect the lost income taxes received.
We will survive. Its just we won't be corporately employed. We, like my automotive mechanic friends, will survive by rendering service needed by people, not by rendering services needed by corporations. Corporations can get their services cheaper overseas. We need to address the needs of people here. In our neighborhoods.
Incidentally, I am taking a helluva lot of courses at the local college in auto repair. Its a helluva occupation these days. Do you know how complex the average car
You see, I used to work in Aerospace. A very small company. We were just a bunch of Amateur Radio Operators and electronics tinkerers who found out the Government would hire us to tinker for them. We worked our butts off, but we called it fun.
Then big-money Wall Street Corporation got interested in us. Used lots of money to buy us. Then paid big-money for the management and executive skills to tell us what to do and how to do it. Thats we started needing to develop "strong interpersonal skills" in order to communicate with those who were above having to deal with time-consuming technical minutiae.
We techies no longer called the shots; we are now just followers trying to keep the tie-guys that did our personnel evaluations happy. It seemed every day was like taking an exam in college, if you passed, you got to come again tomorrow and do it again. At one time, the job was fun, but now its a drudge as people who have never had the joys of having to take the time to understand exactly what they are doing now tell me that I am a "perfectionist" and write in their little Franklin Day Planners that I lack the "communication skills" required to keep them happy. From my point of view, I flat refuse to tell them something I do not think has a snowball's chance in hell of working, regardless of how they express their desires to have me approve this thing they propose. So they call me inflexible and lay me off.
I am no longer allowed the luxury of doing things the way I know how to do them. I do get set in my ways, and if there are certain tools ( such as my trusty old Borland C++ compiler ) that I feel I gotta have to run my DSP algorithms past, so be it. I know this old tool. I know it has bugs - but I know where they are. I am very uncomfortable with tools I have not worked with - especially if I don't have a lot of time to go back and fix the things I missed. You would not ask some golf pro to give up his clubs and use some fancy new proprietary tool to use right before a game, but why do they force this on us engineers? In the case of the team I was working on, I figured we gave up about two hundred year's worth of combined knowledge in order to make us subordinate to the executive manager, in addition to the salary he was paid. And somehow, they expected this change to result in a better cash flow?
No biggie. I start doing industrial robot work on my own. By now, I know the Corporate Executive is looking for Car Salesmen types to work for him, not mechanincs. I perceive the MBA Executive Graduate hired by the Corporate Interests is looking more for one who knows psychology well, but knowledge of physics is a don't care. He wants his hand shaken and pretty reports submitted in the latest wordprocessor and presentation formats of the day, but who cares if the product in the development lab is full of bugs?
Yeh, you can tell already I will not be able to work for one of these quarter-million-dollar a year salary guys. You know, I would rather fix cars for a living than have to snub up to them all the time, kissing the tailpipe of their BMW.
Yeh, the salary is nice, but there is such a thing as job satisfaction too. Often times, in the frenzy to push perceived output of subordinate wage-slaves to the limit, the workplace becomes a place of maximal stress... and its just not worth it. I realize the guys up the line drawing these huge salaries justify it on the basis they can extract it out of the underlings. So, as they wedge themselves into the upper echelons of management, the company slowly evolves from a production organization to a management organization, with much emphasis on monitoring skills, and lesser and lesser emphasis on technical acumen.
Here's some observations I have:
I noted in the college I am attending - in a class in Data Structures ( which BTW, I thoroughly enjoyed ), there were seven students. This course is offered once per year. Seven students.
This is the la
But then, requiring all stuff open source would remove a lot of incentive for doing a lot of specialized stuff.
I have no problem with something like a core algorithm for a motor control being proprietary, or maybe databases - but I feel strongly that one requirement that should go in exchange for the legal mandate of keeping my nose out of it is that it be very clear that the responsibility for what the code does rests squarely with the one claiming ownership of the proprietary code and takes *all* legal liability for *any* consequences of using that code.
The business caveat for Open Source code is that in exchange for letting you in on its innards, is that you are supposed to read and understand the code, and thereby know its actions when executed.
Code doesn't lie. If it doesn't do what you expected, there is no one out there responsible for it. You may contact the author, or support organizations, and you are free to negotiate suitable arrangements for technical support if you can't read or don't have the time to tune the code so it does exactly whatever it is you wanted.
It sure looks to me that they see this Utah legislation as throwing a monkey wrench into their business plan of first snaring an audience, then once they become dependent on their services, then requiring them to install proprietary software. Pacific Bell did that to me. I went for years on their dialup. Suddenly I start getting emails from them telling me its mandatory that I visit their website and download their proprietary Yahoo code. I read the EULA, and again saw all those disclaimers of any liability, as well as implicit permission to share my stuff with their marketing partners. I just about puked at that point. I hated to kill that account, but I had to.
It seems to me the largest vector for viral infections is the use of any programs ( which, by their very nature, require permissions to run and access the TCPIP stack ) to execute rogue scripts. Microsoft's stuff is full of it. Linux would be too if it were as popular. I do not see the problem as being OS-centric, as rogue programs and exploits can be written to exploit an executable under any OS. Any other programs demanding executable permissions ( plug-ins, etc. ) out there only open up yet more security problems. Anyone who has surfed the net notes that an ever-increasing number of webmasters are now requiring the use of some specialized plug-in to view content instead of just using the standard way of doing the exact same thing. These specialized plug-ins are wide open for spoofing and tampering, as by their nature, once installed, they are given the keys to the kingdom.
It looks to me this legislation would effectively bar the trickery of demanding installation of plug-ins ( which may well have ulterior motives unseen by the downloader ) to view content.
I feel a lot of the internet businessmen have been watching the supermarkets and their "value cards" and have been thinking of implementing it on the web. I get the idea each has been tinkering with getting their proprietary bots in our machines much like the supermarkets coerced their cards into our wallets and purses. This legislation looks like it throws a monkey wrench into that plan.
Go for it. It may ( like the DMCA ) need some adjustment later, but for now, it sure looks like it will help curb the flow of exploitable code people are demanded to install at the whim of webmasters who inflict this on their visitors.
I have had days I could not log onto my PacBell account because of some difficulty they were having. No big deal. I have had a day where I could not log onto the ISP I am now with as a result of some technical problems they were having. They worked it out. No big deal.
I hardly thought this topic was even worth looking at. I guess I could jump all over someone for not doing a perfect job, but then, I don't do a perfect job at every attempt I make, regardless of my intentions. ( Actually, I get very few things perfect. The longer I work on it, the more I approach perfection, but I rarely get there.. often being forced by time and economics to accept "good enough" ).
I will rant till I am blue in the face if I think their failures are due to unsound practices ( aka embedded executables, unverifiable hidden crap, etc. ), but they just had server difficulty, and any of us that have to work on things of this size know how much more complex these things are than something, say, like a radio station or something.
For now, I guess there is no telling what was causing all the grief. As dynamic as a mail system is, I congratulate them for not losing all the mail. I sure have had things take me more than a day to fix. Actually I am impressed they keep it working as well as they do.
Microsoft started out really neat - remember how they helped all of us get out from under the control of "big iron". It wasn't until just a few years ago they got a bee in their bonnet to start making things very difficult to understand in order to hide the inner workings so various tricks and games could be used for intelletual property rights enforcement. Games which sometimes go wrong and leave a trail of innocent victims who paid for a product, but could not receive the benefit.
Dropping a day of Hotmail service... no big thing.
Releasing unverifiable code that I can't troubleshoot and fix if something goes awry - now that's a horse of a completely different color.