unless you're a digital hoarder who feels the need to keep more music and TV/movies than any reasonable person can watch in a lifetime hard drives are large enough.
Never say that kind of stuff around a video editor like my wife. You take maybe 25 to 100 hours of uncompressed high def documentary video, per project, times a couple simultaneous projects, oh whoops that's why I have a full size tower full of hard drives in the basement along with what sounds like a jet fighter auxiliary turbine power unit to cool it. Just one of her projects is about the size of my complete lifetime mp3 collection, or about the same as a full set of low-def star trek... and she still has more projects. My digital hoard is pretty big by/.er standards, at least a TB, but compared to her half dozen half finished projects I'm just a rounding error.
Someday, someone will make a laptop that can hold everything a semi-pro video editor needs, but that day isn't here yet, isn't even on the horizon. Maybe by 2020 or 2030?
Apple is popular with the artsy craftsy AV crowd. There are people that do that kind of stuff on PCs, but they're kind of far and few between.
And external storage isn't expensive... $70 for a 500GB and $90 for a 1000GB drive.
The only measure of a laptop is its thinness, and you're not going to find a 1/16th inch thick 1 TB drive anywhere soon. So you've gotta make a flash card RAID array out of about forty 32 gig SD cards and a zillion USB hubs and cables and adapters. The price is gonna add up.
Why should the only measure of a laptop be its thinness?
I want a laptop that's light, cool (thermally), powerful, reliable, cheap, good A/V and silent. Thinness is at least 8th on my priority list. Make it 4 inches thick as long as it maxes out the 7 higher priority goals first.
Why is there is fixation on thin laptops? What do you "get" out of a laptop being 1/2 inch thinner than another laptop?
whatever restrictive terms (dropping Android?) come with that discount.
My guess is the carrot will be 95% of the cost will be refunded if their secureboot implementation used to prevent linux or android from being installed is not broken.
The day after a "crack" or whatever hits pirate bay so end users can install linux or android over the microsoft install, the refund disappears.
Taking a very classic example, does 'wwf' take you to wrestling or pandas?
Kids these days. As an original internet gangster OG back when dinosaurs roamed the earth in the 90s, the classic example to prove that a projector equipped internet browser had connectivity, perhaps after the presenter 404d due to a typo, was to encourage the presenter to "surf" (I hate that verb) to www.whitehouse.com to see Prez Clinton's website (the real one being whitehouse.gov). Worked almost every time I tried it, did not matter if they fell for it, everyone started laughing. whitehouse.com was a pr0n site. Maybe still is. Depending on the presenter and audience, I think the presenter knew about it and just wanted to play along, or just wanted to see some pr0n to brighten up his day.
Anyway my point is I've got a great idea for a site at the new TLD and I think we'll call it whitehouse.democrat...
Kids who are just a little younger than me have the consensus view that rebellion means anyone under the age of 20 when the fast and the furious came out should get kanji tattoos. This leads to hilarious blogs like the hanzismatter where gullible buffoons get random asian style tats that mean nothing at all, or have something truly embarrassing like it means small wiener when translated. Of course the concept is pretty moronic in general, makes me want to move to China and start inking gullible buffoons with english words like "goatse.cx" and telling the morons it means "strong" in english.
Anyway the point of this ramble is I can see some of the UTF-8 kanji TLDs being popular for vanity email addresses among the kanji tats crowd. After all, its kanji, it must be cool, right? Also I think it would be hilarious to go thru life in the US when people ask me for my email address I can tell them vlm at-sign "draw them a kanji". This might cut down on spam too. In fact I think it would be doubly awesome if I could intentionally get a kanji TLD that means "goatse", or maybe some random swear word.
(Another fun thing will be watching the love I'm about to receive in about 10 seconds from/.ers with kanji tats)
Get out the hot glue gun... Any device with thunderbolt has the full PCI bus exposed. Plug in the right gadget, which cops and crooks WILL have, and you completely and utterly own the system down to the lowest level, memory and drive contents. Best of all its hot pluggable, no reset required, heck maybe not even detectable if you do it right by splicing into a users "video" cable, etc.
The spec even allows 7 devices in a daisy chain so you can get owned by an industrial competitor, and the local cops, and your own IT monitoring system, and the IRS, and the CIA and the FBI and MI-6 all at the same time. Fantastic!
Aside from reading, it should be trivial to create a writer to insert a root kit or keylogger into the system.
So much for the bad guys using it. The good guys can use it to bypass any DRM scheme. A little magic box plugs in, and watches memory as the decrypted file appears and is rendered. All that HDCP stuff is irrelevant, bypassed. Or, on the fly, keys are sniffed out.
If only they could have just multiplexed a USB over the displayport, or firewire, but no, they had to provide a root access connector that is now standardized across many devices. Oh boy is this going to be fun.
I honestly believe this is why rollout has been so slow, a frantic flurry of trying to figure out some way to patch the massive gaping goatse sized hole. Dev kits still not available, or so I'm told.
Since the journalists Fd up everything else in the story, next we'll probably hear its actually kapton tape not teflon. That would really suck because kapton is made out of C N and O just like life and has no handy marker like being 2/3 F. Now that would be a real whoops.
The thing I don't get about the whole story is anyone doing anything with teflon knows it slowly deteriorates. So the first sample has 1 ppb carbon, the second 1.0001, the third 1.0002, fourth 1.0003 you know something is steadily falling apart. Just test each sample a whole bunch of times and look for a trend.
correlate the amount of fluorine with the expected amount of carbon (since it should be exactly 2 to 1)
The best news is that commercial teflon is pretty pure stuff inherently. There is some odd acid manufacturing byproduct but I remember it was measured in PPB so there's not much. Probably baked aerospace grade stuff is pretty ridiculously pure so that 2 to 1 ratio will hold quite well.
This assumes the fluorine can be accurately analyzed, which may be a major issue since it is extremely reactive.
Extremely reactive means easily ionizable means its really easy to detect in a mass spectrometer. So thats good news, assuming thats what they're doing.
If they can heat the samples they can play games with the pyrolosis temperature, above 500 degrees or so it turns to nasty toxic gas and blows away, so measure the C and F content at 450 degrees, then roast it to 550 for awhile and measure again, delta is roughly the amount of PTFE contamination.
Cant be necessarily GOOD for me, though. Serious, it looks like I cracked a shitton of fresh pepper on my eggs every time I use the thing. Pretty soon, I will be unstickable.
Depends on your definition of good. The lack of friction is unchanged. Its not staying in your body unless you have something really weird going on. I've occasionally wondered if gelatin capsules of powdered teflon would make a good medical stool softener. My guess is yes, but the conventional treatment material is much cheaper. Some idiot would probably find a way to contaminate the powder by embedding anaerobic bacteria in it, or it would psuedo-creep-sinter in the capsules making a little pellet instead of a dispersed powder (so you could encapsulate each grain in something digestible, but this is getting ridiculously expensive).
Seriously at sane temperatures its probably one of the least biologically active materials in your house. Think of non-biodegradable plastic. This stuff is ultra-uber-leet-non-bio-degradable plastic.
Actually its even worse. I'm assuming they're using a mass spectrometer and you get one C ion for every two F ions. So they got the concept of the ratio correct, but backwards. Well, its just journalism and PR, can't expect much from those folks.
I think the guy is trying to use the evidence that he wrote yet-another-stand-alone electronic mail system (nothing new at the time) and named one subroutine email, therefore he invented the term email. Then there's massive water muddying trying to extend being the first to use that word into inventing the current worldwide internet email system and extending into inventing the very concept of email and extending into inventing email programs as a concept. A pretty big stretch.
I'm not sure that naming my stereo amplifier that I built with radio shack parts in 1985 the "iPod", because the stringy wiring reminds me of a bean, necessarily means I invented your ipod touch, or I invented the concept of a mp3 player, I'm not even sure if using the name first is all that relevant other than as a trivia question. Going into full blown PR mode with the PR message being "I invented the ipod in 1985" is more than a bit irresponsible. Just for the record I did build a amp out of radio shack parts more or less of my own design, and it worked at least for awhile, but I never gave it a cool trendy name. Should have named it "facebook".
"Scientist" - may be. "Engineer" - hell no. You wouldn't want a surgeon who knows the theory but never practiced it to operate on you, would you?
It would be like advertising for "heart surgeon" and specifying BS in bio, premed, or biochem are OK. They could crosstrain, but its kinda inappropriate. Its just as dumb to ask for a CS degree to swap backup tapes, pull cat5, and run "ghost". They could probably learn to do it, but...
Its a huge problem with computer jobs. If construction trades were run like computers, we'd confuse architects, structural engineers, building roofers, masons, CSI arson investigators, janitors, and maintenance dudes and no one would consider that unusual because they're all building workers and all building workers are the same, except that we'd include endless name brands and specs in each job description "Job title is plumber, must have minimum 25 years experience using 2010 model year craftsman 12 oz carpentry hammer model number 124351-3, along with 120 git sandpaper operation, 100 grit and 150 grit sandpaper operators need not apply, architect degree preferred, and TIG pipeline welding certificate optional"
If not manufacturing and STEM skills, then what will America have to be viable in the global economy?
If we don't export food, mostly grains, the world starves.
Also we've carefully, methodically annihilated all domestic consumer good manufacture, yet we rule the roost in ultra heavy industry (100K ton mining draglines, 100 ton mining trucks, giant cranes, that kind of thing) and aerospace. There are international competitors, some of them quite good, especially if their govt helps them with dumping funds and tariffs on imported American machinery, but we hold our own quite well in those fields. If it weighs 100 pounds we simply don't make it here, if it weighs 10000 pounds its 50:50 if its domestic or asian/german and if it weighs 10e6 pounds we lead the world or at least we're neck and neck with the world leaders (there's a people of walmart joke buried in there somewhere wrt to 1e6 pounds)
We're competitive / leaders in arms, blood money is nothing to be proud of, but money is money, and someone's gotta make the munitions, may as well be us. This borders on STEM, but frankly we could cease R+D for a couple human generations and we'd still be competitive with the rest of the world. Going to be a very long time before Somalia, for example, does the R+D to invent a better surface to air missile than we can sell off the shelf.
Cultural imperialism works pretty well so far.
As for services we had / have great higher ed, although that bubble is near popping.
Do foreign countries want American business managers?
LOL, ah, no. There's some joke about in heaven the chefs are french, the bankers are swiss, blah blah whereas in hell the chefs are english, the managers are american, etc.
There is no natural compensation like a well balanced role playing game... intentionally methodically destroying our STEM field industries does not result in the games DM/GM magically giving us bonus points in 200 ton mining dump trucks to balance the game. It just means we're destroying our STEM fields and we're not going to be doing that anymore. We won't be the first nation in the history of humanity to intentionally flush ourselves down the toilet, nor the last.
Nice interview. Answers felt straightforward and honest unlike SOME interviews I've read on/. Of course it helps that I liked the answers. And that VLM guy asked some great questions, he must be a genius.
I like this project. I like it a lot. I have the gut feeling they're on to something very big, as long as they avoid Fing it up along the way. Might I request that/. follow this project? We had raspberry pi articles roughly daily, that might be a bit excessive, but I don't want this project forgotten for 5 years until we have the obligatory "whatever happened to Space Command?" article. More Space Command articles please.
The uncanny valley goes the other direction too. Too much work done on a human female by a plastic surgeon, hair stylist, body piercer, tattoo artist, or makeup artist makes her look really weird, you could even say "uncanny".
I would postulate that a overlap situation either already exists or soon will, where a silicone female can be found who is weirder looking in the artificial direction than a silicon female in the human direction. This has interesting implications for hollywood and pr0n actors where at least some fraction of human beings are better replaced with CGI equivalents.
If an outsourced email provider explodes they have $49.95/month or whatever times all of their customers of motivation to fix it.
Only if they have all their customers on one server, or the explosion is hardware related. Config disasters are more likely. Also nightmare "support".
1) Customer tries sending email with.iso image attached, their virtual server is for all intents and purposes dead. Then I unclog the pipes, so to speak, and a few hours later secretary notices the recipients didn't get their isos, so she emails again. 2) Customer and Customer's client are fighting and playing games and customer wants root on all our boxes to "prove" client is not sending them the docs, but our legal and security dept is hearing nothing of it. 3) Variations on "checks in the mail" scam where client claims to not get emailed invoices and in the opposite direction customer of the customer claims to not get finished product as email attachment on time, can we access the logs? Um, no, not at the ratio of our labor rate vs your service charge. 4) The joys of who owns a DNS domain, where the MX record points, what does the former provider think / do, etc. 5) We filter 1e7 spam per day (back when that was a lot) and one customer wants one email from one sender. WTF all around. 6) Customer has 300 machines all infected and sending 10 emails per second, or whatever the exact numbers were. That was funny. 7) Not directly related to outsourced email, but plenty of customers think their ISP somehow controls the blacklists that other people use. You're on a list of open relays, well, too bad. Directly related to outsourced email, we get on a blacklist only used by nutcases, what are we going to do about it when our customer can't email someone using nutcase blacklist? Well, nothing pretty much.
As a parent of grade school students in a district with a STEM school, the kids are made fun of for going into a field where they'll be outsourced. Some parents call it the outsourcing school.
The schools are almost perfectly focused on the fields most likely to decline in the future, which is scary. Its as if special "automotive assembly line bolt turner" high schools were set up in Detroit in the early 70s, just dooming the kids to life long poverty. Pretty sad situation.
Now there's nothing wrong with computers or IT or science as a hobby, just like there's nothing wrong with drama or art or dance or music, but you have to be realistic and look at it like they used to look at liberal arts, that's all very interesting and sounds like fun on the weekends, and maybe dad or grandpa even made a living doing that kind of work decades ago, but you need a way to put food on the table for the rest of your life and STEM is certainly not going to be it.
Balanced by most recent US grads (around 50%) are un- or under- employed yet have gigantic student loans to pay off. Obviously the ratio is lower in a "real" degree like IT or CS, but there's still plenty of very hungry skilled USAians.
Just to be fair CS is big O notation and calculating algorithmic efficiency, Knuth's books, so its possible to be a decent computer scientist without a computer. You need calculus and a blackboard a lot more than you need a computer.
But doing IT code monkey stuff is utterly impossible without hardware and labs.
I'm estimating it costs me about 30 cents per mile to drive here,
And I successfully Fed that up pretty badly about 29% low.
Actual figures over the past 12 years are:
25e3 purchase / 125e3 miles + 10e3 maintenance / 125e3 miles + 3 bucks per gallon average over the life of the car / 28 MPG average + $1000 per year insurance / 125e3 miles / 12 years owned = about 39 cents per mile.
Having (probably) visited your country, I can verify that your gasoline costs more per liter than ours does per gallon (a gallon is "around" four liters)
Also I've seen your (speaking generally) newspapers and you guys have/had crazy import duties and VAT taxes on cars, so ownership and maintenance is very expensive compared to here. Finally your equivalent of the DMV has teeth... you won't allow cars on the road that here would be considered in worn but usable shape.
The feds (well, the GSA) lets us claim 55.5 cents per mile of expense on our cars when used for govt (and presumably business purposes).. This is hyperinflated such that even land barge SUV drivers with horrible insurance rates and expensive maintenance still make a microscopic profit, so needless to say my domestic subcompact with cheap (married dude) insurance makes me a profit of something like a quarter per mile.
I'm estimating it costs me about 30 cents per mile to drive here, and in your country it approaches or exceeds one euro per mile, so it's going to be difficult financially to justify spending 6 euro to deliver a 99 cent hamburger three miles away.
Also our cuisine sucks but its almost designed for a delay in delivery, whereas a lot of the stuff I've eaten in Europe would not benefit by sitting around for 15 minutes and being bounced around in a car before eating.
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unless you're a digital hoarder who feels the need to keep more music and TV/movies than any reasonable person can watch in a lifetime hard drives are large enough.
Never say that kind of stuff around a video editor like my wife. You take maybe 25 to 100 hours of uncompressed high def documentary video, per project, times a couple simultaneous projects, oh whoops that's why I have a full size tower full of hard drives in the basement along with what sounds like a jet fighter auxiliary turbine power unit to cool it. Just one of her projects is about the size of my complete lifetime mp3 collection, or about the same as a full set of low-def star trek ... and she still has more projects. My digital hoard is pretty big by /.er standards, at least a TB, but compared to her half dozen half finished projects I'm just a rounding error.
Someday, someone will make a laptop that can hold everything a semi-pro video editor needs, but that day isn't here yet, isn't even on the horizon. Maybe by 2020 or 2030?
Apple is popular with the artsy craftsy AV crowd. There are people that do that kind of stuff on PCs, but they're kind of far and few between.
And external storage isn't expensive... $70 for a 500GB and $90 for a 1000GB drive.
The only measure of a laptop is its thinness, and you're not going to find a 1/16th inch thick 1 TB drive anywhere soon. So you've gotta make a flash card RAID array out of about forty 32 gig SD cards and a zillion USB hubs and cables and adapters. The price is gonna add up.
Why should the only measure of a laptop be its thinness?
I want a laptop that's light, cool (thermally), powerful, reliable, cheap, good A/V and silent. Thinness is at least 8th on my priority list. Make it 4 inches thick as long as it maxes out the 7 higher priority goals first.
Why is there is fixation on thin laptops? What do you "get" out of a laptop being 1/2 inch thinner than another laptop?
whatever restrictive terms (dropping Android?) come with that discount.
My guess is the carrot will be 95% of the cost will be refunded if their secureboot implementation used to prevent linux or android from being installed is not broken.
The day after a "crack" or whatever hits pirate bay so end users can install linux or android over the microsoft install, the refund disappears.
Its an interesting anti-competitive tactic.
Taking a very classic example, does 'wwf' take you to wrestling or pandas?
Kids these days. As an original internet gangster OG back when dinosaurs roamed the earth in the 90s, the classic example to prove that a projector equipped internet browser had connectivity, perhaps after the presenter 404d due to a typo, was to encourage the presenter to "surf" (I hate that verb) to www.whitehouse.com to see Prez Clinton's website (the real one being whitehouse.gov). Worked almost every time I tried it, did not matter if they fell for it, everyone started laughing. whitehouse.com was a pr0n site. Maybe still is. Depending on the presenter and audience, I think the presenter knew about it and just wanted to play along, or just wanted to see some pr0n to brighten up his day.
Anyway my point is I've got a great idea for a site at the new TLD and I think we'll call it whitehouse.democrat...
Kids who are just a little younger than me have the consensus view that rebellion means anyone under the age of 20 when the fast and the furious came out should get kanji tattoos. This leads to hilarious blogs like the hanzismatter where gullible buffoons get random asian style tats that mean nothing at all, or have something truly embarrassing like it means small wiener when translated. Of course the concept is pretty moronic in general, makes me want to move to China and start inking gullible buffoons with english words like "goatse.cx" and telling the morons it means "strong" in english.
Anyway the point of this ramble is I can see some of the UTF-8 kanji TLDs being popular for vanity email addresses among the kanji tats crowd. After all, its kanji, it must be cool, right? Also I think it would be hilarious to go thru life in the US when people ask me for my email address I can tell them vlm at-sign "draw them a kanji". This might cut down on spam too. In fact I think it would be doubly awesome if I could intentionally get a kanji TLD that means "goatse", or maybe some random swear word.
(Another fun thing will be watching the love I'm about to receive in about 10 seconds from /.ers with kanji tats)
No one, because the new TLD names almost all suck and are for PR firms and megacorps.
I don't want to see .yoga I want a .yogapants TLD. Where's .chan? Where's .pr0n?
I am happy to see .WTF made it so far. I skimmed thru the list and thats the only new TLD that has any appeal for me, as either a buyer or a visitor.
I was kinda surprised to see .dodge as in the car marketing brand, but not the discontinued brand names like .oldsmobile or .saturn.
Also how many client/server scripts will break when the new TLDs arrive?
Probably the unicode TLDs will be a larger challenge than .app
Get out the hot glue gun... Any device with thunderbolt has the full PCI bus exposed. Plug in the right gadget, which cops and crooks WILL have, and you completely and utterly own the system down to the lowest level, memory and drive contents. Best of all its hot pluggable, no reset required, heck maybe not even detectable if you do it right by splicing into a users "video" cable, etc.
The spec even allows 7 devices in a daisy chain so you can get owned by an industrial competitor, and the local cops, and your own IT monitoring system, and the IRS, and the CIA and the FBI and MI-6 all at the same time. Fantastic!
Aside from reading, it should be trivial to create a writer to insert a root kit or keylogger into the system.
So much for the bad guys using it. The good guys can use it to bypass any DRM scheme. A little magic box plugs in, and watches memory as the decrypted file appears and is rendered. All that HDCP stuff is irrelevant, bypassed. Or, on the fly, keys are sniffed out.
If only they could have just multiplexed a USB over the displayport, or firewire, but no, they had to provide a root access connector that is now standardized across many devices. Oh boy is this going to be fun.
I honestly believe this is why rollout has been so slow, a frantic flurry of trying to figure out some way to patch the massive gaping goatse sized hole. Dev kits still not available, or so I'm told.
Since the journalists Fd up everything else in the story, next we'll probably hear its actually kapton tape not teflon. That would really suck because kapton is made out of C N and O just like life and has no handy marker like being 2/3 F. Now that would be a real whoops.
The thing I don't get about the whole story is anyone doing anything with teflon knows it slowly deteriorates. So the first sample has 1 ppb carbon, the second 1.0001, the third 1.0002, fourth 1.0003 you know something is steadily falling apart. Just test each sample a whole bunch of times and look for a trend.
correlate the amount of fluorine with the expected amount of carbon (since it should be exactly 2 to 1)
The best news is that commercial teflon is pretty pure stuff inherently. There is some odd acid manufacturing byproduct but I remember it was measured in PPB so there's not much. Probably baked aerospace grade stuff is pretty ridiculously pure so that 2 to 1 ratio will hold quite well.
This assumes the fluorine can be accurately analyzed, which may be a major issue since it is extremely reactive.
Extremely reactive means easily ionizable means its really easy to detect in a mass spectrometer. So thats good news, assuming thats what they're doing.
If they can heat the samples they can play games with the pyrolosis temperature, above 500 degrees or so it turns to nasty toxic gas and blows away, so measure the C and F content at 450 degrees, then roast it to 550 for awhile and measure again, delta is roughly the amount of PTFE contamination.
Cant be necessarily GOOD for me, though. Serious, it looks like I cracked a shitton of fresh pepper on my eggs every time I use the thing. Pretty soon, I will be unstickable.
Depends on your definition of good. The lack of friction is unchanged. Its not staying in your body unless you have something really weird going on. I've occasionally wondered if gelatin capsules of powdered teflon would make a good medical stool softener. My guess is yes, but the conventional treatment material is much cheaper. Some idiot would probably find a way to contaminate the powder by embedding anaerobic bacteria in it, or it would psuedo-creep-sinter in the capsules making a little pellet instead of a dispersed powder (so you could encapsulate each grain in something digestible, but this is getting ridiculously expensive).
Seriously at sane temperatures its probably one of the least biologically active materials in your house. Think of non-biodegradable plastic. This stuff is ultra-uber-leet-non-bio-degradable plastic.
Actually its even worse. I'm assuming they're using a mass spectrometer and you get one C ion for every two F ions. So they got the concept of the ratio correct, but backwards. Well, its just journalism and PR, can't expect much from those folks.
I think the guy is trying to use the evidence that he wrote yet-another-stand-alone electronic mail system (nothing new at the time) and named one subroutine email, therefore he invented the term email. Then there's massive water muddying trying to extend being the first to use that word into inventing the current worldwide internet email system and extending into inventing the very concept of email and extending into inventing email programs as a concept. A pretty big stretch.
I'm not sure that naming my stereo amplifier that I built with radio shack parts in 1985 the "iPod", because the stringy wiring reminds me of a bean, necessarily means I invented your ipod touch, or I invented the concept of a mp3 player, I'm not even sure if using the name first is all that relevant other than as a trivia question. Going into full blown PR mode with the PR message being "I invented the ipod in 1985" is more than a bit irresponsible. Just for the record I did build a amp out of radio shack parts more or less of my own design, and it worked at least for awhile, but I never gave it a cool trendy name. Should have named it "facebook".
"Scientist" - may be. "Engineer" - hell no. You wouldn't want a surgeon who knows the theory but never practiced it to operate on you, would you?
It would be like advertising for "heart surgeon" and specifying BS in bio, premed, or biochem are OK. They could crosstrain, but its kinda inappropriate. Its just as dumb to ask for a CS degree to swap backup tapes, pull cat5, and run "ghost". They could probably learn to do it, but...
Its a huge problem with computer jobs. If construction trades were run like computers, we'd confuse architects, structural engineers, building roofers, masons, CSI arson investigators, janitors, and maintenance dudes and no one would consider that unusual because they're all building workers and all building workers are the same, except that we'd include endless name brands and specs in each job description "Job title is plumber, must have minimum 25 years experience using 2010 model year craftsman 12 oz carpentry hammer model number 124351-3, along with 120 git sandpaper operation, 100 grit and 150 grit sandpaper operators need not apply, architect degree preferred, and TIG pipeline welding certificate optional"
If not manufacturing and STEM skills, then what will America have to be viable in the global economy?
If we don't export food, mostly grains, the world starves.
Also we've carefully, methodically annihilated all domestic consumer good manufacture, yet we rule the roost in ultra heavy industry (100K ton mining draglines, 100 ton mining trucks, giant cranes, that kind of thing) and aerospace. There are international competitors, some of them quite good, especially if their govt helps them with dumping funds and tariffs on imported American machinery, but we hold our own quite well in those fields. If it weighs 100 pounds we simply don't make it here, if it weighs 10000 pounds its 50:50 if its domestic or asian/german and if it weighs 10e6 pounds we lead the world or at least we're neck and neck with the world leaders (there's a people of walmart joke buried in there somewhere wrt to 1e6 pounds)
We're competitive / leaders in arms, blood money is nothing to be proud of, but money is money, and someone's gotta make the munitions, may as well be us. This borders on STEM, but frankly we could cease R+D for a couple human generations and we'd still be competitive with the rest of the world. Going to be a very long time before Somalia, for example, does the R+D to invent a better surface to air missile than we can sell off the shelf.
Cultural imperialism works pretty well so far.
As for services we had / have great higher ed, although that bubble is near popping.
Do foreign countries want American business managers?
LOL, ah, no. There's some joke about in heaven the chefs are french, the bankers are swiss, blah blah whereas in hell the chefs are english, the managers are american, etc.
There is no natural compensation like a well balanced role playing game... intentionally methodically destroying our STEM field industries does not result in the games DM/GM magically giving us bonus points in 200 ton mining dump trucks to balance the game. It just means we're destroying our STEM fields and we're not going to be doing that anymore. We won't be the first nation in the history of humanity to intentionally flush ourselves down the toilet, nor the last.
Nice interview. Answers felt straightforward and honest unlike SOME interviews I've read on /. Of course it helps that I liked the answers. And that VLM guy asked some great questions, he must be a genius.
I like this project. I like it a lot. I have the gut feeling they're on to something very big, as long as they avoid Fing it up along the way. Might I request that /. follow this project? We had raspberry pi articles roughly daily, that might be a bit excessive, but I don't want this project forgotten for 5 years until we have the obligatory "whatever happened to Space Command?" article. More Space Command articles please.
The uncanny valley goes the other direction too.
Too much work done on a human female by a plastic surgeon, hair stylist, body piercer, tattoo artist, or makeup artist makes her look really weird, you could even say "uncanny".
I would postulate that a overlap situation either already exists or soon will, where a silicone female can be found who is weirder looking in the artificial direction than a silicon female in the human direction. This has interesting implications for hollywood and pr0n actors where at least some fraction of human beings are better replaced with CGI equivalents.
Only if they have all their customers on one server, or the explosion is hardware related.
Config disasters are more likely. Also nightmare "support".
1) Customer tries sending email with .iso image attached, their virtual server is for all intents and purposes dead. Then I unclog the pipes, so to speak, and a few hours later secretary notices the recipients didn't get their isos, so she emails again.
2) Customer and Customer's client are fighting and playing games and customer wants root on all our boxes to "prove" client is not sending them the docs, but our legal and security dept is hearing nothing of it.
3) Variations on "checks in the mail" scam where client claims to not get emailed invoices and in the opposite direction customer of the customer claims to not get finished product as email attachment on time, can we access the logs? Um, no, not at the ratio of our labor rate vs your service charge.
4) The joys of who owns a DNS domain, where the MX record points, what does the former provider think / do, etc.
5) We filter 1e7 spam per day (back when that was a lot) and one customer wants one email from one sender. WTF all around.
6) Customer has 300 machines all infected and sending 10 emails per second, or whatever the exact numbers were. That was funny.
7) Not directly related to outsourced email, but plenty of customers think their ISP somehow controls the blacklists that other people use. You're on a list of open relays, well, too bad. Directly related to outsourced email, we get on a blacklist only used by nutcases, what are we going to do about it when our customer can't email someone using nutcase blacklist? Well, nothing pretty much.
your Open Source code is due tomorrow
As someone who's been "in this", or at least in the periphery, for about 20 years, what does this mean?
As a parent of grade school students in a district with a STEM school, the kids are made fun of for going into a field where they'll be outsourced. Some parents call it the outsourcing school.
The schools are almost perfectly focused on the fields most likely to decline in the future, which is scary. Its as if special "automotive assembly line bolt turner" high schools were set up in Detroit in the early 70s, just dooming the kids to life long poverty. Pretty sad situation.
Now there's nothing wrong with computers or IT or science as a hobby, just like there's nothing wrong with drama or art or dance or music, but you have to be realistic and look at it like they used to look at liberal arts, that's all very interesting and sounds like fun on the weekends, and maybe dad or grandpa even made a living doing that kind of work decades ago, but you need a way to put food on the table for the rest of your life and STEM is certainly not going to be it.
Balanced by most recent US grads (around 50%) are un- or under- employed yet have gigantic student loans to pay off. Obviously the ratio is lower in a "real" degree like IT or CS, but there's still plenty of very hungry skilled USAians.
Just to be fair CS is big O notation and calculating algorithmic efficiency, Knuth's books, so its possible to be a decent computer scientist without a computer. You need calculus and a blackboard a lot more than you need a computer.
But doing IT code monkey stuff is utterly impossible without hardware and labs.
I'm estimating it costs me about 30 cents per mile to drive here,
And I successfully Fed that up pretty badly about 29% low.
Actual figures over the past 12 years are:
25e3 purchase / 125e3 miles + 10e3 maintenance / 125e3 miles + 3 bucks per gallon average over the life of the car / 28 MPG average + $1000 per year insurance / 125e3 miles / 12 years owned = about 39 cents per mile.
Having (probably) visited your country, I can verify that your gasoline costs more per liter than ours does per gallon (a gallon is "around" four liters)
Also I've seen your (speaking generally) newspapers and you guys have/had crazy import duties and VAT taxes on cars, so ownership and maintenance is very expensive compared to here. Finally your equivalent of the DMV has teeth... you won't allow cars on the road that here would be considered in worn but usable shape.
The feds (well, the GSA) lets us claim 55.5 cents per mile of expense on our cars when used for govt (and presumably business purposes).. This is hyperinflated such that even land barge SUV drivers with horrible insurance rates and expensive maintenance still make a microscopic profit, so needless to say my domestic subcompact with cheap (married dude) insurance makes me a profit of something like a quarter per mile.
I'm estimating it costs me about 30 cents per mile to drive here, and in your country it approaches or exceeds one euro per mile, so it's going to be difficult financially to justify spending 6 euro to deliver a 99 cent hamburger three miles away.
Also our cuisine sucks but its almost designed for a delay in delivery, whereas a lot of the stuff I've eaten in Europe would not benefit by sitting around for 15 minutes and being bounced around in a car before eating.