Because Bluetooth is a lot more expensive than printing a friggin barcode? Why use a dynamic, electronic, and (relatively) complicated wireless system for what is, by and large, going to be static data? This is like saying I should include a little Bluetooth "beacon" on every one of my hundreds of business cards, rather than just printing my damn URL and e-mail address on the cards.
It's not clear to me that a dual core processor would take less power than a single core processor. Sure a dual-core processor _will_ take less power than two single-core processors on a board. So I suppose at a system-level a single core processor will take less power than a dual processor system, but the power problems we're seeing now are primarily at the chip-level.
BTW: As someone who 'knows' people that work at Intel, this decision was a pretty huge one on the 'Richter scale'. 1000s of people found out in the last couple of weeks that they were being redeployed to different projects (or making major changs on current projects). This decision is having a huge effect inside of Intel. I suspect that this kind of shake up means that the higher ups at Intel were very afraid that AMD is making major inroads and they finally realized that they couldn't keep going in the direction they were headed in without disasterous effects on marketshare.
I really can't see how this is revolutionary. As has been mentioned this bears some resemblance to the failed CueCat thingy. Also, why would I want to post these 2D barcodes all over the place?
Why not use BlueTooth for this? You get close to a 'beackon' and a little icon appears on your phone, if you choose to click the icon it takes you to the desired URL.
Come on people, either you don't know what a workstation is, or you haven't used OS X. Compared to Solaris, it's a fisher-price toy.
Depends on what you want to do, eh? A dual 2GHz (or the promised-by-end-of-summer 3GHz) G5 with a couple of gig of RAM would certainly make a nice workstation. And the engineer would also have those so-called productivity apps available on the same machine.
Besides, how many, say, EDA tools have OS X ports? Oh, that's right, zero. And if Sun does go under, where will they get ported?
Linux (as they are now)... we already had that battle about 5 years ago and Windows lost handily in the EDA space.
OS X would actually be a very nice EDA platform (given the kind of hardware mentioned above). In some ways it would be a lot easier for EDA companies to support.
Apple is definately making moves into the workstation/server space and OSX _can_ play there. Perhaps Apple could buy what's left of Sun in a year ot two (when there's much less than there is now) for firesale prices. This would mostly be to gain acess to Sun's sales channels and some engineering resources.
Or, more likely: IBM buys Sun and then takes Java in the direction it wants to take it. Of course, they also would probably want to wait for a lower price, so don't look for this to happen right away.
Though of course it wouldnt have remained their algorithm any more. (At least not in a money making sense..which is the sense that stock holders care the most about)
Perhaps, but the effect would have been the same money-wise. In this case it was a fairly small company. While they did get some license fees early on in the life of the patent, my understanding is that nobody even wants to pay the fees anymore because there are free alternatives which are now better. Essentially, the patent drove innovation in a different direction completely. (so maybe there is something to patents and innovation afterall, but it's just not the effect that the IP boosters planned on).
Opponents have found an ally in crop scientists who condemn the conglomerates behind transgenics, especially Monsanto. The company owns scores of patents covering its GM seeds and the entire development process that creates them. This gives Monsanto a virtual monopoly on GM seeds for mainline crops and stifles outside innovation. No one can gene-jockey without a tithe to the life sciences giant.
Of course we/.'ers know that patents tend to stifle innovation. However, maybe this is an area where it's good to have the innovation stifled (or at least slowed down) for a while. Since we're not quite sure what will happen when many of the genes inserted via the Monsanto method will do when they get out into the gene pools of wild-plants, perhaps it's good that Monsanto has stifled innovation in this area. It has caused the search for alternatives such as the super breeding outlined in the article. Of course, the other thing that was happening was that Monsanto was basically making it illegal for farmers in 3rd world countries to reuse their seed because the M company claimed that each succeeding generation contained some of their IP.
Interesting side effects of Patents... I recently took an algorithms class where we were discussing various optimization algorithms. A company patented a particular algorithm a few years ago which essentially stopped all research in that direction. So researchers started looking at different classes of alternative algorithms and now have come up with a much better class of algorithms than the patented one - basically nobody uses the patented one anymore. Now, had the company not been so greedy they could have seen further development of their (very promising at the time) algorithm, but now all development in that direction has basically been halted for several years.
From his blog: I've been a little gun-shy of blogging about Word for fear of being inundated by what are as far as I can tell a gang of "net thugs" who roam the net making outrageous claims about Microsoft and its behavior, motives, etc in every public forum they find (none of which information they are privy to, little of which they have evidence for, and basically all of which I find personally offensive, not to mention incorrect - since they often are implicitly about me and therefore I for one know them to be incorrect).
Hmmm... so he takes all of our Anti-Micr$oft rants personally, does he?
Well, having never heard of this guy until now, I for one must clarify by saying that none of my anti-Micro$oft rants have been directed toward him, but perhaps he has a guilty conscience?
Also, as far as the 'lack of evidence' thing goes, we know for sure that Micro$oft was found guilty of anti-trust violations. To reiterate: Micro$oft broke US law.
ust why is it that all these worms people write nowadays just seem so.. nice? I remember the days when 90% of viruses would at the very least format your hard disc.. now they just sit there.
Well, a virus/worm that kills it's host too easily won't spread too far, will it? It's the same in the biological world. Ebola is very effective at killing it's host quickly, and that's what limits it's spread.
And generally these newer viruses/worms aren't just sitting there, they're figuring out how to spead to all the email addresses in your mailbox.
Rense.com being cited as an authority? Just check out his root page (http://www.rense.com) All kinds of stuff about the world-wide Zionist conspiracy, UFOs, chem-trails, etc.
Much of his material seems to be blatently anti-semetic.
Next time use Art Bell as a source, at least I don't think he's anti-Semetic and he's probably got the same level of credibility.
Count yourself lucky to even have one offer let alone 2. I know several experienced software engineers who are either out of work or working for much less than they made a few years ago.
Given the downward pressure that offshoring is having on wages it's not surprising that your offers seem low.
Is that the US programmer/engineer generally has a lot more real project experience than the offshore engineers. Of course, if the offshoring trend continues it will be just the opposite in a few years.
Most offshoring projects are 'on-the-job-training' for the foreign engineers who work on them. A former co-worker of mine was recently sent over to India to do some training in the Indian office, he said that one of the first things he realized was that he needed to teach a course in basic C programming.
The strange thing is that none of these companies would hire unqualified workers in the US and then train them on the job. They expect us to know the intimate details of obscure technologies before they'll even consider hiring us. Yet they're hiring unskilled foreign workers. Sure it seems like they're saving money in the short term, but it's a risky bet, isn't it?
Isn't it great that all these US corporations are suddenly so altruistic that they're going over to 3rd world countries to train the workers there to do highly skilled work. It's almost like the Peace Corps or something.... Oh, wait, it would be altruistic if they weren't throwing US workers out of their jobs.
The total was less than USD$1500 (or 1,800 - can't remember)
Still pretty pricey if you ask me, even if they were only $200 each it would be pretty expensive for headlights. Just curious, what's the motivation for spending that much for headlights? Is there some kind of coolness factor among car-geeks or something? Are they really _that_ much better? I seem to be doing fine with the stock headlights in my car (halogen, I believe) that cost about $15/each to replace.
I'm guessing that the Xenon HID's are the blueish tinted lights that are so annoying when you're on the recieving end, am I right?
The use of electronics in cars was supposed to make them cheaper not more expensive. The problem isn't generally the 'expensive electronics' the problem usually is that there aren't enough trained technicians to fix electronic problems. Most mechanics are trained in, well mechanics, not electronics.
xenon high-intensity-discharge headlights: $3,000 each
I'm thinking this isn't a general problem. How many people are buying cars that have $6000 worth of headlights alone? Damn, those must be some mighty fine headlights, why not just equip the car with nightvision goggles, it would be cheaper.
Specialist technicians need advanced reading, problem-solving, and basic electronics skills.... The best people to find are those who have worked in the IT [information technology] industry.
I've actually been thinking that automotive electronics diagnostics & repair could be a good field to get into - it can't be outsourced and the demand is there.
Apple, a company which makes Microsoft look like a bastion of openness?
Ummm... Since when did Micro$oft start basing Windoze off of an open source OS (As Apple has by basing OSX on Darwin (which itself is a FreeBSD derivative))? Does Microsoft give away development tools like OS X's Xcode?
Wouldn't a Linux or *BSD solution, ultimately, be what they should have gone with?
You could definately say that OS X is a *BSD solution.
Oddly enough, even though Intel is into promoting WiFi, they don't seem to want to encourage WiFi on their own campuses as much as they might.
I've heard that at Intel your manager has to get you permission to use WiFi and your department must pay some sort of ongoing fees to some other group for the priviledge.
Just because the US Patent office issued a patent for this nonsense doesn't mean that the underlying physics is sound...
After all, the US Patent office will grant a patent for anything as/.'ers are well aware.
Someone sent me this link a few weeks back and I read through the article. I had my doubts, but then I read the line that said something like (sorry, I'm paraphasing, as the site seems to be/.'ed) "And you could connect a generator to one of these motors and get more power out than you put in". At that point it was clear that I didn't need to read further...
Amazing news: Lawyers invented Perl in 1984!
on
Happy Spamiversary!
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Now we know the truth. A pair of Arizona Lawyers invented Perl in 1984, 3 years prior to Larry Wall's claim.
So, did Larry steal Perl or did he come up with the idea independently?
That one's very easy: STOP CONSUMING LIKE A MORON.
I completely agree with the essence your post. When I was out of work for about a year we were able to get our living expenses (household of 2) down to about $1300/mo (including ~$250/mo. health insurance premium for both of us - high deductable, of course). We don't have a mortgage payment, so that helps a whole lot (payed that off at the end of the roaring '90's - was expecting economic trouble) but we still have about $200/mo for property taxes.
If we want to compete with the 3rd world the only way we are going to be able to do it is to drastically cut expenses. However, there are some areas were we won't be able to make cuts, like health insurance, for example, it just keeps going up. Some sort of national health insurance similar to the Canadian plan (heck, even the state in India where Bangalore is has health insurance for all citizens - that probably helps a lot to make up for the lower wages) would probably be a big help at this point. What if we hadn't spent the $100Billion to destroy Iraq and then the $87Billion to rebuild it (and whatever it's going to cost every year for the next several years)? Could have gone a long ways toward some sort of national health plan.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Bluetooth is a lot more expensive than printing a friggin barcode? Why use a dynamic, electronic, and (relatively) complicated wireless system for what is, by and large, going to be static data? This is like saying I should include a little Bluetooth "beacon" on every one of my hundreds of business cards, rather than just printing my damn URL and e-mail address on the cards.
RFID?
It's not clear to me that a dual core processor would take less power than a single core processor. Sure a dual-core processor _will_ take less power than two single-core processors on a board. So I suppose at a system-level a single core processor will take less power than a dual processor system, but the power problems we're seeing now are primarily at the chip-level.
BTW: As someone who 'knows' people that work at Intel, this decision was a pretty huge one on the 'Richter scale'. 1000s of people found out in the last couple of weeks that they were being redeployed to different projects (or making major changs on current projects). This decision is having a huge effect inside of Intel. I suspect that this kind of shake up means that the higher ups at Intel were very afraid that AMD is making major inroads and they finally realized that they couldn't keep going in the direction they were headed in without disasterous effects on marketshare.
I really can't see how this is revolutionary.
As has been mentioned this bears some resemblance to the failed CueCat thingy. Also, why would I want to post these 2D barcodes all over the place?
Why not use BlueTooth for this? You get close to a 'beackon' and a little icon appears on your phone, if you choose to click the icon it takes you to the desired URL.
The review didn't mention this, I'm wondering if there are there similar references available online so I don't have to drop $60?
Come on people, either you don't know what a workstation is, or you haven't used OS X. Compared to Solaris, it's a fisher-price toy.
Depends on what you want to do, eh? A dual 2GHz (or the promised-by-end-of-summer 3GHz) G5 with a couple of gig of RAM would certainly make a nice workstation. And the engineer would also have those so-called productivity apps available on the same machine.
Besides, how many, say, EDA tools have OS X ports? Oh, that's right, zero. And if Sun does go under, where will they get ported?
Linux (as they are now)... we already had that battle about 5 years ago and Windows lost handily in the EDA space.
OS X would actually be a very nice EDA platform (given the kind of hardware mentioned above). In some ways it would be a lot easier for EDA companies to support.
What about these possible scenarios:
Apple is definately making moves into the workstation/server space and OSX _can_ play there. Perhaps Apple could buy what's left of Sun in a year ot two (when there's much less than there is now) for firesale prices. This would mostly be to gain acess to Sun's sales channels and some engineering resources.
Or, more likely: IBM buys Sun and then takes Java in the direction it wants to take it. Of course, they also would probably want to wait for a lower price, so don't look for this to happen right away.
Though of course it wouldnt have remained their algorithm any more. (At least not in a money making sense ..which is the sense that stock holders care the most about)
Perhaps, but the effect would have been the same money-wise. In this case it was a fairly small company. While they did get some license fees early on in the life of the patent, my understanding is that nobody even wants to pay the fees anymore because there are free alternatives which are now better. Essentially, the patent drove innovation in a different direction completely. (so maybe there is something to patents and innovation afterall, but it's just not the effect that the IP boosters planned on).
From the article:
/.'ers know that patents tend to stifle innovation. However, maybe this is an area where it's good to have the innovation stifled (or at least slowed down) for a while. Since we're not quite sure what will happen when many of the genes inserted via the Monsanto method will do when they get out into the gene pools of wild-plants, perhaps it's good that Monsanto has stifled innovation in this area. It has caused the search for alternatives such as the super breeding outlined in the article. Of course, the other thing that was happening was that Monsanto was basically making it illegal for farmers in 3rd world countries to reuse their seed because the M company claimed that each succeeding generation contained some of their IP.
Opponents have found an ally in crop scientists who condemn the conglomerates behind transgenics, especially Monsanto. The company owns scores of patents covering its GM seeds and the entire development process that creates them. This gives Monsanto a virtual monopoly on GM seeds for mainline crops and stifles outside innovation. No one can gene-jockey without a tithe to the life sciences giant.
Of course we
Interesting side effects of Patents... I recently took an algorithms class where we were discussing various optimization algorithms. A company patented a particular algorithm a few years ago which essentially stopped all research in that direction. So researchers started looking at different classes of alternative algorithms and now have come up with a much better class of algorithms than the patented one - basically nobody uses the patented one anymore. Now, had the company not been so greedy they could have seen further development of their (very promising at the time) algorithm, but now all development in that direction has basically been halted for several years.
From his blog:
I've been a little gun-shy of blogging about Word for fear of being inundated by what are as far as I can tell a gang of "net thugs" who roam the net making outrageous claims about Microsoft and its behavior, motives, etc in every public forum they find (none of which information they are privy to, little of which they have evidence for, and basically all of which I find personally offensive, not to mention incorrect - since they often are implicitly about me and therefore I for one know them to be incorrect).
Hmmm... so he takes all of our Anti-Micr$oft rants personally, does he?
Well, having never heard of this guy until now, I for one must clarify by saying that none of my anti-Micro$oft rants have been directed toward him, but perhaps he has a guilty conscience?
Also, as far as the 'lack of evidence' thing goes, we know for sure that Micro$oft was found guilty of anti-trust violations. To reiterate: Micro$oft broke US law.
You mean we've been making fun of cold fusion for nothing all these years? What'll we make fun of now?
ust why is it that all these worms people write nowadays just seem so.. nice? I remember the days when 90% of viruses would at the very least format your hard disc.. now they just sit there.
Well, a virus/worm that kills it's host too easily won't spread too far, will it? It's the same in the biological world. Ebola is very effective at killing it's host quickly, and that's what limits it's spread.
And generally these newer viruses/worms aren't just sitting there, they're figuring out how to spead to all the email addresses in your mailbox.
Rense.com being cited as an authority?
Just check out his root page (http://www.rense.com)
All kinds of stuff about the world-wide Zionist conspiracy, UFOs, chem-trails, etc.
Much of his material seems to be blatently anti-semetic.
Next time use Art Bell as a source, at least I don't think he's anti-Semetic and he's probably got the same level of credibility.
I don't know of any software engineering/ IT jobs that pay overtime now. Usually these jobs are salaried - no OT.
How many people in this field get paid for overtime?
Count yourself lucky to even have one offer let alone 2. I know several experienced software engineers who are either out of work or working for much less than they made a few years ago.
Given the downward pressure that offshoring is having on wages it's not surprising that your offers seem low.
Is that the US programmer/engineer generally has a lot more real project experience than the offshore engineers. Of course, if the offshoring trend continues it will be just the opposite in a few years.
Most offshoring projects are 'on-the-job-training' for the foreign engineers who work on them. A former co-worker of mine was recently sent over to India to do some training in the Indian office, he said that one of the first things he realized was that he needed to teach a course in basic C programming.
The strange thing is that none of these companies would hire unqualified workers in the US and then train them on the job. They expect us to know the intimate details of obscure technologies before they'll even consider hiring us. Yet they're hiring unskilled foreign workers. Sure it seems like they're saving money in the short term, but it's a risky bet, isn't it?
Isn't it great that all these US corporations are suddenly so altruistic that they're going over to 3rd world countries to train the workers there to do highly skilled work. It's almost like the Peace Corps or something.... Oh, wait, it would be altruistic if they weren't throwing US workers out of their jobs.
Apparently, they should be switching to car repair...
Or (for those with actual people skills) switch to nursing.
Great, so the choice comes down to do I want grease under my fingernails or work around blood,guts & bedpans. Neither seems all that appealing.
The total was less than USD$1500 (or 1,800 - can't remember)
Still pretty pricey if you ask me, even if they were only $200 each it would be pretty expensive for headlights. Just curious, what's the motivation for spending that much for headlights?
Is there some kind of coolness factor among car-geeks or something? Are they really _that_ much better? I seem to be doing fine with the stock headlights in my car (halogen, I believe) that cost about $15/each to replace.
I'm guessing that the Xenon HID's are the blueish tinted lights that are so annoying when you're on the recieving end, am I right?
...but I wasn't a factory worker and I had a Libertarian outlook, so I said, "Fine, they were overpaid anyway!"
Then they sent the IT jobs overseas, but I wasn't an IT worker, so I said, "No problem, my job is safe."
Now they're sending my BioTech job over to India and nobody's left to complain.
increased use of expensive electronics
The use of electronics in cars was supposed to make them cheaper not more expensive. The problem isn't generally the 'expensive electronics' the problem usually is that there aren't enough trained technicians to fix electronic problems. Most mechanics are trained in, well mechanics, not electronics.
xenon high-intensity-discharge headlights: $3,000 each
I'm thinking this isn't a general problem. How many people are buying cars that have $6000 worth
of headlights alone? Damn, those must be some mighty fine headlights, why not just equip the car with nightvision goggles, it would be cheaper.
Specialist technicians need advanced reading, problem-solving, and basic electronics skills.... The best people to find are those who have worked in the IT [information technology] industry.
I've actually been thinking that automotive electronics diagnostics & repair could be a good field to get into - it can't be outsourced and the demand is there.
Apple, a company which makes Microsoft look like a bastion of openness?
Ummm... Since when did Micro$oft start basing Windoze off of an open source OS (As Apple has by basing OSX on Darwin (which itself is a FreeBSD derivative))? Does Microsoft give away development tools like OS X's Xcode?
Wouldn't a Linux or *BSD solution, ultimately, be what they should have gone with?
You could definately say that OS X is a *BSD solution.
Oddly enough, even though Intel is into promoting WiFi, they don't seem to want to encourage WiFi on their own campuses as much as they might.
I've heard that at Intel your manager has to get you permission to use WiFi and your department must pay some sort of ongoing fees to some other group for the priviledge.
Just because the US Patent office issued a patent for this nonsense doesn't mean that the underlying physics is sound... After all, the US Patent office will grant a patent for anything as /.'ers are well aware.
...I knew you could.
/.'ed) "And you could connect a generator to one of these motors and get more power out than you put in". At that point it was clear that I didn't need to read further...
Someone sent me this link a few weeks back and I read through the article. I had my doubts, but then I read the line that said something like (sorry, I'm paraphasing, as the site seems to be
Now we know the truth. A pair of Arizona Lawyers invented Perl in 1984, 3 years prior to Larry Wall's claim.
So, did Larry steal Perl or did he come up with the idea independently?
That one's very easy: STOP CONSUMING LIKE A MORON.
I completely agree with the essence your post. When I was out of work for about a year we were able to get our living expenses (household of 2) down to about $1300/mo (including ~$250/mo. health insurance premium for both of us - high deductable, of course). We don't have a mortgage payment, so that helps a whole lot (payed that off at the end of the roaring '90's - was expecting economic trouble) but we still have about $200/mo for property taxes.
If we want to compete with the 3rd world the only way we are going to be able to do it is to drastically cut expenses. However, there are some areas were we won't be able to make cuts, like health insurance, for example, it just keeps going up. Some sort of national health insurance similar to the Canadian plan (heck, even the state in India where Bangalore is has health insurance for all citizens - that probably helps a lot to make up for the lower wages) would probably be a big help at this point. What if we hadn't spent the $100Billion to destroy Iraq and then the $87Billion to rebuild it (and whatever it's going to cost every year for the next several years)? Could have gone a long ways toward some sort of national health plan.