My prediction is that the first high-tech consumer product implants will be cell phones. But this does raise interesting questions about producing reasonably sized implant electronics for blind and deaf people, as well as other human systems failures.
Why bother wasting resources like that? Someone could find a retarded six year old, get them to parrot buzzwords at speech recognition software, and the "management overview" would be perfect.
It is attitudes like this that will sink Linux in an all-out Linux-Microsoft (Open Source -vs. Closed Source) war. With attitudes like this guys, Linux will lose.
Does anyone recall the little fact that none of the September 11 hijackers traveled under a false identity?
The point is not to pick out people who are traveling under false papers, the point is to build a database of foreign nationals. 28 countries are exempt only because the United States could not diplomatically get away with insulting these exempt countries this way. The truth is that if GWB could get away with doing this for US citizens as well, he would. It's all about control.
Yup, yup. Linux people focus on technical babble that upper management neither understands nor cares about. The question to these management types is wholly total cost and ROI. Intelligent and knowledgeable Linux people need to put out more material that addresses these issues in a "management overview" format. I think many people get lost on the point that IT professionals do not normally have final say on these issues in an "enterprise" business environment.
As long as the wages are low and the quality of code is at least acceptable (and, these people DO do good work), India will continue to get the jobs. Remember: The PRIME responsibility of the board of directors for a publicly traded company is to MAKE MONEY for it's stock holders.
Don't know why this is offtopic.... It has been much talked about that an IPO will be the end of Google. Remember that the only thing that matters legally to a publicly traded companies board of directors is returning dividends and raising the stock value. This being so, we can expect Google to become MUCH more commercial.
Take note some of the complaints about Google in a recent Slashdot article on another up-and-coming search engine: It is now becoming very difficult to get relevant non-commercial results from Google. Expect this to continue, and lookout for pop-ups and banner ads... Seriously!
If we want secure software, it has to be Open Source..
I'm not sure how you can say this authoritatively just because Microsoft is a poster child for buggy software. There is nothing in particular that keeps Closed Source from being secure. The idea that "more eyes" looking at the code is the solution just does not fly when you consider the number of "eyes" that Microsoft employs (ever been to Redmond? Zillions of code ants work there...) still does not keep them from producing buggy software. Further more, there are plenty of first-class Closed Source products out there.
Granted, at the start the code quality of Open Source stuff is around equal to Closed Source stuff...
God, I just don't know how to approach this statement since it is just plain not true. Certainly, much of the most used Open Source such as Apache, Linux / *BSD, Perl, PHP, and such, is superior to most Closed Source, but really there are large heaps and piles of Open Source crap out there.
It's bad to generalize the argument into saying most Closed Source is unsecure crap, and all Open Source is Godly, when it just isn't so. When screeching frothing people blather this crud at the people in business and government that have the decision making power, it just invalidates the entire Open Source movement.
The drum we really should be beating is the Total Cost argument: "It's better, and cheaper to use!"
To mod my previous post "flamebait" is a great example of the problem with moderation at Slashdot. It is NOT flamebait; it is an honest opinion about the Mars lander. Is this not a place for honest discussion? My opinion clearly showed that I think the Mars lander is an amazing thing. The appropriate mod would be "offtopic". Obviously this is not the place for intelligent discussion.
Oh, I know this will elicit lots of venom, but I'm wondering why we (the United States) as a nation are funding these types of billion dollar excursions. This is not "basic science", wonderful pictures of the Martian surface are not going to extend or increase anything but our knowledge of what kind of rocks are on the surface of Mars. These things, while interesting, will not solve any great national debates, increase out overall knowledge of the universe, or get us any closer to the useless inevitability of putting a human on Mars. These incredible landers do nothing more than allow a few dozen very smart scientists to write masters and doctors' theses. Is there a better way to spend this kind of public cash on something more valuable to more people? A much better place to spend this kind of cash would be on a successor to the Shuttle.
Anyone who is happy with Windows 98 should not be required to upgrade just because Microsoft can't be bothered to support a product they created and sold to end users.
Not true. When you buy Microsoft, you understand that it is not Open Source, and that your patches are at their convenience, this is known, don't complain when they stop supporting something they did not agree to support forever.
Either that, or Microsoft should give these users the opportunity to support themselves.
Why? Windows 98 has been out for years. Microsoft never said, implied, promised, suggested, or led to believe they would support any specific product forever. They have always been about upgrading to whatever the newest product is. How can this be a surprise?
or, be supported by someone else.
Microsoft products are not Open Source. Did you not realize this when you bought Windows 98 way back in the Stone Age? The Closed Source model carries with it liabilities to the manufacturer, why would you expect them to allow unknown persons to provide support? To do so, they would be required to disclose source code, and this ain't going to happen
In closing, when you buy Closed Source products, you accept that you rely on the manufacturer (or their agents) for support. If that's the paradigm you wish to buy into, don't complain when they tell you to upgrade.
Quite so. When I bought my latest piece-of-shit Compaq (long story, old machine died in the middle of a project, I went out to the only place open Sunday night (Sears) and put it on my credit card) it had Win98. I lived with 98 exactly one day before installing Win95. Both Win95 and Win2000 are soooooo much better than 98, really a step down from Win95. If you MUST have Windows, Win95 or Win2000 (if you can't get NT4).
I know that everyone is going to this is all just a ploy by M$ to force people to upgrade to newer, expensive software (and is almost certainly so), but no software company is required to support obsolete versions of their software forever, this is not a reasonable idea. The/.'ers frothing at the mouth about this are the same ones who are first to also froth about how bad an OS Windows 98 is.
Forget it. Programming is like doing mathmatics. Soon, everyone that can understand it, will use programming like an everyday tool for their own daily activities. In fact, I'm sure that schools around the world will have programming added in as a basic staple of education.
YUP! I think in the future, the only real computer jobs will be networking.
The military has been using TCAS for years, although it does not automatically remove pilot control. TCAS is designed to "see" the traffic situation in the vicinity of the aircraft, but similar technology works with large land masses also.
The core technologies have been around awhile but I think it's important to remember that GPS technology and fast small CPUs are just now becoming "mature", so it's not out of line that these systems are still in the testing phase. Sure, ten years ago maybe you could build such systems with half of the first class section stuffed with hardware...
Oh this is GREAT, like we have not all han enough of the H1-B thing and outsourcing... Now all the farmers will be doing our coding and customer service...
But seriously there are great things that small farmers can do with connectivity, it has a great possibility to increase these peoples quality of life.
Fo those who do not wish to deal with the sign-in process...
Here it is:
Indian Soybean Farmers Join the Global Village
By AMY WALDMAN
Published: January 1, 2004
TIHI, India -- At least once a day in this village of 2,500 people, Ravi Sham Choudhry turns on the computer in his front room and logs in to the Web site of the Chicago Board of Trade.
He has the dirt of a farmer under his fingernails and pecks slowly at the keys. But he knows what he wants: the prices for soybean commodity futures.
A drop in prices on the Chicago Board, shown in red, could augur a drop in prices here, meaning that he and fellow soybean farmers should sell their crop now. An increase there argues that the farmers should wait for prices to rise.
"If it goes up there, it goes up here," Mr. Choudhry said. The correlation is rough but real. Real, too, is the link between farmers in rural central India and around the globe, thanks to a company's innovation.
The concept is the e-choupal, taken from the Hindi word for village square, or gathering place. The twist is the "e": providing a computer and Internet connections for farmers to gather around. Mr. Choudhry supervises the project for Tihi and several nearby villages.
E-choupal allows the farmers to check both futures prices across the globe and local prices before going to market. It gives them access to local weather conditions, soil-testing techniques and other expert knowledge that will increase their productivity.
Nonprofit organizations have tried similar initiatives but none have achieved anywhere near the scale that e-choupals have. There are now 1,700 in this state, Madhya Pradesh, and 3,000 total in India. They are serving 18,000 villages, reaching up to 1.8 million farmers.
As a result, say those who have studied the concept, the company behind e-choupals, ITC Ltd., has done as much as anyone to bridge India's vast digital divide: most of its one billion people have no access to the technology developed by some of their fellow Indians, whether in Bangalore or Silicon Valley.
E-choupals may offer a model for all developing countries.
"It is a new form of liberation," C. K. Prahalad, who led a case study on e-choupals for the University of Michigan Business School, said of the transparency and access to information they give farmers.
More than two-thirds of India's people still depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. With little chance of the huge manufacturing boom that has employed many rural poor in China, the challenge is to increase farmers' productivity.
Even more tantalizing, ITC now has the means to reach into some of India's 600,000 villages, where 72 percent of the people live and where the greatest potential markets lie. Most businesses never venture to an area with fewer than 5,000 people, said ITC's chairman, Y. C. Deveshwar.
Eventually the company expects to sell everything from microcredit to tractors via e-choupals -- and hopes to use them to become the Wal-Mart of India, Mr. Deveshwar told shareholders this year.
"We are laying infrastructure in a sense," Mr. Deveshwar said. Sixty companies have already taken part in a pilot project to sell services and goods, from insurance to seeds to motorbikes to biscuits, through ITC.
By overcoming the infrastructure problems that have hampered progress in India's villages in the past -- ITC decided to use satellites and solar panels, for instance, to sidestep the state's shaky power supply and lack of phone lines -- and by offering full Internet service on the computers, the company has instantly broadened villagers' horizons.
You don't see the need for SSL on a journal / blog site... Then how do YOU propose to manage security and prevent hacks? Will you feel differently when YOUR account is hacked? No, SSL is virtually required (Oh my! I like that!) for this sort of thing, and overhead is highly overstated.
On the other hand, I tend to think people who live through their on-line journal / blog need to find a real life.
It is amazing what we US taxpayers allow our government to spend money on. Apperently, B2 bombers and such are more important than science to the average American. Says a lot, really.
I believe that at this point, there is no way to "save" the Internet from spammers. And I would like to advance, perhaps now it is not the spammers we need to fear, but Corporate Borg Beings that have decided the Internet belongs to them. Perhaps it is time to build a "new" Internet, and define the rules of "ownership".
But apparently, you don't believe your own words enough to use your actual Slashdot account. This is the result of small testicals, but if you see a doctor, you may be able to get help.
Just because many shell scripts are hack jobs does not mean that this is the way they need to be. So, are you telling me that all Perl and Ruby looks like it should be put in the Louvre ? Sounds to me like either you don't know how to shell script, or you don't know how to shell script well.
Slashdot Mirror
My prediction is that the first high-tech consumer product implants will be cell phones. But this does raise interesting questions about producing reasonably sized implant electronics for blind and deaf people, as well as other human systems failures.
It is attitudes like this that will sink Linux in an all-out Linux-Microsoft (Open Source -vs. Closed Source) war. With attitudes like this guys, Linux will lose.
The point is not to pick out people who are traveling under false papers, the point is to build a database of foreign nationals. 28 countries are exempt only because the United States could not diplomatically get away with insulting these exempt countries this way. The truth is that if GWB could get away with doing this for US citizens as well, he would. It's all about control.
Yup, yup. Linux people focus on technical babble that upper management neither understands nor cares about. The question to these management types is wholly total cost and ROI. Intelligent and knowledgeable Linux people need to put out more material that addresses these issues in a "management overview" format. I think many people get lost on the point that IT professionals do not normally have final say on these issues in an "enterprise" business environment.
As long as the wages are low and the quality of code is at least acceptable (and, these people DO do good work), India will continue to get the jobs. Remember: The PRIME responsibility of the board of directors for a publicly traded company is to MAKE MONEY for it's stock holders.
Unless, of course, you get your caffine form Jolt or Dew...
Take note some of the complaints about Google in a recent Slashdot article on another up-and-coming search engine: It is now becoming very difficult to get relevant non-commercial results from Google. Expect this to continue, and lookout for pop-ups and banner ads... Seriously!
I'm not sure how you can say this authoritatively just because Microsoft is a poster child for buggy software. There is nothing in particular that keeps Closed Source from being secure. The idea that "more eyes" looking at the code is the solution just does not fly when you consider the number of "eyes" that Microsoft employs (ever been to Redmond? Zillions of code ants work there...) still does not keep them from producing buggy software. Further more, there are plenty of first-class Closed Source products out there.
Granted, at the start the code quality of Open Source stuff is around equal to Closed Source stuff...
God, I just don't know how to approach this statement since it is just plain not true. Certainly, much of the most used Open Source such as Apache, Linux / *BSD, Perl, PHP, and such, is superior to most Closed Source, but really there are large heaps and piles of Open Source crap out there.
It's bad to generalize the argument into saying most Closed Source is unsecure crap, and all Open Source is Godly, when it just isn't so. When screeching frothing people blather this crud at the people in business and government that have the decision making power, it just invalidates the entire Open Source movement. The drum we really should be beating is the Total Cost argument: "It's better, and cheaper to use!"
To mod my previous post "flamebait" is a great example of the problem with moderation at Slashdot. It is NOT flamebait; it is an honest opinion about the Mars lander. Is this not a place for honest discussion? My opinion clearly showed that I think the Mars lander is an amazing thing. The appropriate mod would be "offtopic". Obviously this is not the place for intelligent discussion.
At least, I take my negative moderations LIKE A MAN, instead of posting as an Anony[b]mouse[/b] Coward...
Oh, I know this will elicit lots of venom, but I'm wondering why we (the United States) as a nation are funding these types of billion dollar excursions. This is not "basic science", wonderful pictures of the Martian surface are not going to extend or increase anything but our knowledge of what kind of rocks are on the surface of Mars. These things, while interesting, will not solve any great national debates, increase out overall knowledge of the universe, or get us any closer to the useless inevitability of putting a human on Mars. These incredible landers do nothing more than allow a few dozen very smart scientists to write masters and doctors' theses. Is there a better way to spend this kind of public cash on something more valuable to more people? A much better place to spend this kind of cash would be on a successor to the Shuttle.
There is actually a second party utility to add USB support to NT4, but yeh, I hear you.
Don't worry, the AC is a troll, mod up to funny.
Not true. When you buy Microsoft, you understand that it is not Open Source, and that your patches are at their convenience, this is known, don't complain when they stop supporting something they did not agree to support forever.
Either that, or Microsoft should give these users the opportunity to support themselves.
Why? Windows 98 has been out for years. Microsoft never said, implied, promised, suggested, or led to believe they would support any specific product forever. They have always been about upgrading to whatever the newest product is. How can this be a surprise?
or, be supported by someone else.
Microsoft products are not Open Source. Did you not realize this when you bought Windows 98 way back in the Stone Age? The Closed Source model carries with it liabilities to the manufacturer, why would you expect them to allow unknown persons to provide support? To do so, they would be required to disclose source code, and this ain't going to happen
In closing, when you buy Closed Source products, you accept that you rely on the manufacturer (or their agents) for support. If that's the paradigm you wish to buy into, don't complain when they tell you to upgrade.
Quite so. When I bought my latest piece-of-shit Compaq (long story, old machine died in the middle of a project, I went out to the only place open Sunday night (Sears) and put it on my credit card) it had Win98. I lived with 98 exactly one day before installing Win95. Both Win95 and Win2000 are soooooo much better than 98, really a step down from Win95. If you MUST have Windows, Win95 or Win2000 (if you can't get NT4).
I know that everyone is going to this is all just a ploy by M$ to force people to upgrade to newer, expensive software (and is almost certainly so), but no software company is required to support obsolete versions of their software forever, this is not a reasonable idea. The /.'ers frothing at the mouth about this are the same ones who are first to also froth about how bad an OS Windows 98 is.
YUP! I think in the future, the only real computer jobs will be networking.
The core technologies have been around awhile but I think it's important to remember that GPS technology and fast small CPUs are just now becoming "mature", so it's not out of line that these systems are still in the testing phase. Sure, ten years ago maybe you could build such systems with half of the first class section stuffed with hardware...
But seriously there are great things that small farmers can do with connectivity, it has a great possibility to increase these peoples quality of life.
Fo those who do not wish to deal with the sign-in process...
Here it is:
Indian Soybean Farmers Join the Global Village By AMY WALDMAN
Published: January 1, 2004
TIHI, India -- At least once a day in this village of 2,500 people, Ravi Sham Choudhry turns on the computer in his front room and logs in to the Web site of the Chicago Board of Trade.
He has the dirt of a farmer under his fingernails and pecks slowly at the keys. But he knows what he wants: the prices for soybean commodity futures.
A drop in prices on the Chicago Board, shown in red, could augur a drop in prices here, meaning that he and fellow soybean farmers should sell their crop now. An increase there argues that the farmers should wait for prices to rise.
"If it goes up there, it goes up here," Mr. Choudhry said. The correlation is rough but real. Real, too, is the link between farmers in rural central India and around the globe, thanks to a company's innovation.
The concept is the e-choupal, taken from the Hindi word for village square, or gathering place. The twist is the "e": providing a computer and Internet connections for farmers to gather around. Mr. Choudhry supervises the project for Tihi and several nearby villages.
E-choupal allows the farmers to check both futures prices across the globe and local prices before going to market. It gives them access to local weather conditions, soil-testing techniques and other expert knowledge that will increase their productivity.
Nonprofit organizations have tried similar initiatives but none have achieved anywhere near the scale that e-choupals have. There are now 1,700 in this state, Madhya Pradesh, and 3,000 total in India. They are serving 18,000 villages, reaching up to 1.8 million farmers.
As a result, say those who have studied the concept, the company behind e-choupals, ITC Ltd., has done as much as anyone to bridge India's vast digital divide: most of its one billion people have no access to the technology developed by some of their fellow Indians, whether in Bangalore or Silicon Valley.
E-choupals may offer a model for all developing countries.
"It is a new form of liberation," C. K. Prahalad, who led a case study on e-choupals for the University of Michigan Business School, said of the transparency and access to information they give farmers.
More than two-thirds of India's people still depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. With little chance of the huge manufacturing boom that has employed many rural poor in China, the challenge is to increase farmers' productivity.
Even more tantalizing, ITC now has the means to reach into some of India's 600,000 villages, where 72 percent of the people live and where the greatest potential markets lie. Most businesses never venture to an area with fewer than 5,000 people, said ITC's chairman, Y. C. Deveshwar.
Eventually the company expects to sell everything from microcredit to tractors via e-choupals -- and hopes to use them to become the Wal-Mart of India, Mr. Deveshwar told shareholders this year.
"We are laying infrastructure in a sense," Mr. Deveshwar said. Sixty companies have already taken part in a pilot project to sell services and goods, from insurance to seeds to motorbikes to biscuits, through ITC.
By overcoming the infrastructure problems that have hampered progress in India's villages in the past -- ITC decided to use satellites and solar panels, for instance, to sidestep the state's shaky power supply and lack of phone lines -- and by offering full Internet service on the computers, the company has instantly broadened villagers' horizons.
"We never dreamed of this, that our vi
On the other hand, I tend to think people who live through their on-line journal / blog need to find a real life.
It is amazing what we US taxpayers allow our government to spend money on. Apperently, B2 bombers and such are more important than science to the average American. Says a lot, really.
I believe that at this point, there is no way to "save" the Internet from spammers. And I would like to advance, perhaps now it is not the spammers we need to fear, but Corporate Borg Beings that have decided the Internet belongs to them. Perhaps it is time to build a "new" Internet, and define the rules of "ownership".
But apparently, you don't believe your own words enough to use your actual Slashdot account. This is the result of small testicals, but if you see a doctor, you may be able to get help.
Yes, yes, I know, but I see a psychologist about it, and I'm getting better...
Just because many shell scripts are hack jobs does not mean that this is the way they need to be. So, are you telling me that all Perl and Ruby looks like it should be put in the Louvre ? Sounds to me like either you don't know how to shell script, or you don't know how to shell script well .