Yes, and so does the human nervous system. So that must mean that we are all Stalinists!
Actually, the human nervous system does not represent a Stalinist model. Nerves make decisions by firing input either for or against to other neurons to pass on their vote or lack thereof (proxy). The culmination of inputs and weight by input cells is then "proxied" forward to the next cell(s) in line.
Those cells not near the brain's voting system send their votes in via the nervous system communications infrastructure. (Of course, this parallels the problems with current electronic remote voting issues... You do not feel pain if something is blocking the signal.)
Sounds more like the American voting system. All of your votes here are actually for the electoral points that your state has to offer. The electoral college then "votes" based on its inputs (and weights). That is how a President can be elected with a minority of the vote.
The nervous system is kind of the ultimate consensus computing device - and is capable of knowing that you can die in a traffic accident and completely ignore the fear.
My only thought is about cutting the advertisements out. Having worked with marketing so much, and having a small amount of experience working with a cable franchise and how marketing revenues lowers people's monthly costs... What will the users of these products do when the content providers start raising the prices of the content to cover the cost no longer covered by marketing companies that see these as lost advertising dollars.
Seriously, the numbers are not high enough now to have that effect, but can you imagine having to pay for every channel the same way you do for HBO and Showtime? Or, maybe the marketing people will become more savvy and include marketing in a way we can not skip over. Like web pages with embedded marketing (product placement)...
This is more interesting to me than the ability to save the movies in the first place. The question in the end for the business, is where does the money come from. These machines change that dynamic. What are/.s willing to put up with in terms of advertising that would not be deletable to continue to have TV that is "end-viewer" discounted. Since the reality is that the ad dollars are paid for when you purchase the products, could the masses have the vision to see moving those dollars from product purchases to content and delivery fees?
It is nothing more than a mind tease meant to make people think. Something so many people I know never (or rarely) do in regard to religion's whys, whats and hows.
In our family, we play a cooking game. Someong (normally a child) tells us what they are looking for in a culinary experience. We then go to the spice cabinets and try to find the spices we think we will need.
If we think we have all the spices, we then see if we have the other ingredients. If we think we have everything, we try to decide how it should be prepared.
We then run the plan. We taste it along the way to ensure what we expect to happen is actually happening. If we need to (and we are able to), we make changes along the way.
When the cooking is done, we put it in front of the other family members for a quality taste test. If it passes (and it normally does), dinner is served. If not, we head out for a shrink wrapped meal.
...is trying to cut from a MS way doing things on MS products to a MS way of doing things on non-MS products.
With a little planning and creativity, we normally find ways of doing things that are different and better than the "traditional" MS model. And, they work on all systems we use. By writing code in Java, Perl, Python, et al, and using Web browsers for most of the interface, we are able to push products out that work with any platform.
For products that need something a little more direct or snappier than what a web browser can provide, there are a few good tools for building cross platform GUIs, or there is X. Hummingbird provides a good commercial X server for MS OSs, and there are other less expensive ones (as well as free). Of course, one of my personal favorites has been the good old fashioned text interface on a ssh connection. It is fast, and when done right as easy to use as a most GUIs. Not to mention, the user can type ahead. We still have not figured out how to make click ahead work;-)
By planning ahead, and taking a 6 to 12 month preparation cycle in which we build apps that are cross platform before we cross the platform, the crossovers go without a hitch. True, in product costs, there are more dollars spent, but in the manpower dollars, where most of the cost is, there are far fewer dollars spent. Overall, the client saves money on product, saves money on installation, saves money on training, saves money on upkeep and saves money on future development. Not a bad tradeoff for 6 to 12 months of up front preperation work.
InnerWeb
Automatically block calls in the car while moving.
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
My biggest concern with cell phone users are those who insist on carrying on conversations on them while driving (I have the same issues with those who eat, smoke, apply makeup, sleep or anything else that interferes with driving - heck in the Cinci commute, I used to see people getting dressed while driving).
Most people I know do pull over to use the cell phone when driving. But, there are those idiots out there who think that multi-tasking while driving is a good thing. They should have to commute through the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky bridges on a daily basis, see all the accidents that happen. Maybe witnessing a few deaths will help instill the true meaning of distracted driver.
Beyond the drivers who use them at the wrong time, the rest are just irritating jerks. I always take my conversation away from those who might be interrupted by it. That is outside, down the hall, private room. It is called being polite. That aside though, I would be pissed if someone were jamming my cell phone. I think the appropriate action is to ask politely (first time) for a rude cell phone owner to take it elsewhere. If that does not work, we have done everything from turning our own volume up to the point where said arse had to leave to hear to pointedly telling the individual we were not going to put up with their rude interruptions anymore (to which we have actually received applause from those around us). Honestly, such drastic measures are rarely needed, as almost everyone once asked has been polite.
Actually, almost every HAM I know has a power backup with enough juice to run for several days to weeks.
HAMs are not the general public and typicaly are prepared for the type of situation you mention. I would be more worried about the tower being knocked over and destoyed. But, the guys I know already have contingencies for that situation as well. After all, they are those damned engineers who actually want to know how everything works.
If you can not picture the real meaning of this research, remember the face of the beautiful bald 8 year old child in the cancer ward who's own immune system is destroying them. The child expresses no fear, but cries most nights. They know they await their death. And they have been told by the society around them that the their death is a justifiable cost to prevent cloning.
I have seen this, and it always brings tears to my eyes. Now, with these solutions so close, yet banned by the selfish ignorance of others, it stirs deep anger within me for those who would do this to children.
Most of us on here agree that OSS is a very important issue. But even it is dwarfed by the importance of this issue. The sanctity of human life, a child's life. The ending of the suffering of millions. Hundreds of millions of suffering people regaining the ability to lead a normal life and be like most moms, dads and children.
Yes, the individuals denying this research do not raise their hands directly to do harm, but they enforce the continuation of harm, suffering and death by not allowing this hope to be researched. It is like a Mafia Don who does not pull the trigger, but gave the order. Do you really think a pacemaker is a good alternative to a healthy heart? A syringe to healthy islet cells? Paralyzation to a working nervous system?
If religious belief is your answer to denying this, I challenge you to post where in what Bible (Hindu, Christian, Muslim, whatever) it is written anywhere that talks about anything like this. I have never seen it written or heard of it written. I have only heard people in power use it to whip up their flock to action on something else they tie to it.
Ignorance is not an excuse for violence, in God's eyes, whether it be passive or active!
I am starting to think this guy has a bot that posts theses and then looks for replys that he can pounce on.
Seriously. If those facts were correct, then the people (all but one) I have worked for in the past must be unable to add. They saved a bunch on Unix, then linux. Less hardware, less people to maintain, less downtime (less pissed off customers). List goes on. MS may have purchased some fancy science-like surveys, but as I said before, 2 out of 3 dentists surveyed say they use.... (in 1 out of 20 surveys)
Cripes, I think Family Feud has a more accurate survey system than most stuff I read backed by MS.
Anybody who thinks that this next little step is harmless, has a poor grasp of history. True, in and of itself, it may be mostly useless, but it is not in and of itself. It is a tool that augments a larger collection of tools to provide a "data" or "statistical" picture of a person, their habits and their wanderings.
What happens in the future when a person is in the same location as a terrorist, has a friend with a suspect background, and espouses unpopular (but legal) ideas. You can now arrest them. Circumstantial evidence links them to the terrorist (you can not avoid whom you do not know), they are saying "anti-government" ideals (not necessarily separatist or violent), and through enough weeding, the rest of the case will be found.
McCarthy destroyed many people who opposed him by using innuendo, circumstantial evidence and (lying) witnesses. Almost no one was able to beat him at his game because he had such an effective information collection and management system. That is where we are slowly headed, good intentions or not.
Right now, those in power would benefit immensely from this system. It makes it that much easier to stay in power if your potential enemies' weaknesses are that much easier to find. Do not think that this information system will not be abused. The RIAA has just provided us with many beautiful example of how this is abused by prosecuting minors. Children are not able to enter into legal agreements because it is agreed that they are incapable of understanding what the legal consequences are, let alone to be able to distinguish right from wrong (true, to some degree, most children know basic rights and wrongs, but more complicated ones are hard if not impossible for most children to grasp.) Other forms of this are profiling, poorly managed data at credit reporting agencies (Experian, Equifax and Trans Union required The Fair Credit
Reporting Act to get them to do some things better) and so on
Oh, and for those of you who point to the police not being able to find criminals because they did not bother to look at the system, human error will always exist. This system allows a much different use of the data than what the typical police system has. Those tend to be much less complete, and the officers themselves often recieve little training and have even less support and experience doing this kind of research. The people to worry about with the systems being made today are in a different world from "on the street" law enforcement. They thrive on this kind of data mining. Most of the informarion McCarthy had on people was never used. He had it there just in case. It was how he controlled votes in the government and kept even his dark secrets out of the light. I am not worried that this will be used to arrest some innocent people nearly as much as I am worried that a smart person with a "bad" bent will learn how to gather and abuse this information to further corrupt the process in their favor. I do not think this is an if thing, but a when thing. Every tool gets abused. The more powerful the tool, the more powerful the abuse and the abuser.
The problems with my arguments are things like this abduction at Fox News. You would have to be a heartless bastard to not want a safer world for our children, our parents and our friends. With crime against innocents and defenseless individuals so rampant, it is very difficult to argue against this type of tool. It is a very similar to what McCarthy had with the Soviets and Cuba when he was in power.
A CS degree is quickly becoming a supporting degree that you use to augment a primary skill in the US. (In other countries, it is quickly becoming the degree to have, but they too will eventually hit the same problem we have as other non-English speaking countries learn the dollar value of speaking English).
BioInformatics is a great career at the moment, but I already know India is starting to pick at that market, and several US companies are not just looking, but planning to move R&D to India and other countries. They have to many incentives, lack of environmental restrictions, dirt cheap brain power and labor, dirt cheap land and building... The list goes on. I would not want to specialize in anything that can be done almost as well 1000 miles away as it can be done where I am.
I am still making more per hour than most that I know in the field, but I am making 1/3rd of what I was in 2000, and I know the dollar amount is going down. I won't say no to a CS degree, but I will say think very carefully about your other options before trying to get into this field. I expect that there will be less than 1 in 20 programming jobs in the US in the next 5 to 6 years. The issues that companies run into with outsourcing to India and others will largely go away, as they are as interested in profit as we are.
Almost every time MS comes out with some research, I get an instant flashback to the old 2 out of 3 dentists surveyed use blah, blah, blah.
Commercial research is not about the truth unless it is internal. It is all about marketing spin. Even if the research is double blind, the basis for the research (the questions, the assumptions) can and do skew the results.
It is very difficult to get unbiased research anywhere. A sponsor to the research just makes it that much more biased (it impacts what questions you ask, how you ask the questions, what assumptions you make...)
If companies were honest, we would not buy half the stuff we buy. The fact that we buy stuff from companies that lie to us is either a testament to our (as a population) extreme lack of education, or the expertise with which we are lied to. A study passes under most people's radar because the truth is used to build the disinformation. That is why so much damage control is done with research.
MS still charges for Win98 support. They still charge for new copies sold and pre installed (yes, you can buy it in shrink wrap), and I have not seen a legal free for download and use site for Win98 yet.
And, yes I would defend MS for doing the same (though I almost never defend MS - ick). That is essentially how support fees are charged. A company makes its best guess at what support will cost over a period of time, then charges you that plus a profit margin. Business is about making money. If it does not do that, it is no longer a business, but a bankruptcy. The past 36 months have many notable examples of this basic fiscal law. (not a rule, but a law like gravity attracts.)
Red Hat has a responsibility with legal and fiscal repercussions to the people in charge of Red Hat to its employees and more importantly (via law) its stockholders to produce a profit. Companies with stockholders that do not produce a profit can be and often are sued if appropriate changes are not made.
I wonder if the public awareness could be raised to the point where the cost to the economy caused by these abuses could make it into some campaign discussions. It would be one heck of a soap box to stand on - how government processes are being abused by greedy corporate (and private) businessmen who hide the truth like an Enron or Worldcom and how this is once again causing the nation's economy undo harm while the government watchdogs are not being diligent. It would give all these politic heads another reformation of government and business topic that they could make huge promises about without ever moving towards a solution. And it is a whole lot safer to double the USPTO's budet to handle this than it is to double the welfare system.;-)
This is scary. I remember the reasons given for using MS servers as the customers front end (Internet). They were easy enough that an idiot could set them up, manage them and put content onto them. Noone cared if they crashed (which they had projected would happen often enough anyway based on a lab setup with many systems running servers), since all you had to do was restart and/or reinstall. It is funny how none of the important (mission critical) applications were ever allowed to be considered for the MS servers.
Is this coming?
MADD -> Mothers Against Drunk Drivers
MAMS -> Mothers Against Microsoft
I see automotive functions in a similar way. If we want some dinky music system that uses something so unreliable, cool. Let the radio crash. Not my brakes, engine, locks,... No. I do not relish the thought of anti-lock breaks not functioning correctly when the OS crashes, or returns erroneous results.
As a cold calculation, if you really hate MS, you should encourage this. I believe that the ensuing deaths from MS's OS will be able to finally pierce the EULA and expose MS to a fatal barrage of lawsuits. Until now, MS has never really been accountable to their shoddy software (monopolies have a great tradition of this - Here, their history of arrogance and complete disregard for their responsibility as a supplier of a product would create a situation in a court room not unlike the smokers lawsuits. Lied about what they knew about the products shortcomings, the damage inflicted upon its users, produced an environment where the user could not get away from the faulty product even though they wanted to. Though, hopefuly not with the same numbers of victims.) This would also be good for the linux community, as MS will have to raise prices to handle tort claims once the lawsuits start happening.
Most of us know what will happen with Windows CE in charge of the car's brain. It is not pretty. Personally, I will now be asking what the OS is the car runs on. Unknown or MS, and I go to the next manufacturer. From the looks of the article, it may be that we used to buy Honda and Toyoto cars. They have been extremely reliable for us.
For those who say that the bugs will be worked out enough in 3 years, MS has never had an OS that became that stable. Any MS OS ever. There are some exceptions to individual installations with the perfect combination of hardware and software, but just as in computers, there are many different pieces of hardware and features to be added to cars.
In the end, I think we have enough safety issues to deal with just with the human factors behind the wheel. Now, we are talking about making the car as reliable as a desktop (have reinstalled Windows XP 6 times in 4 months on multiple systems already as upgrades have caused hardware issues and left XP unable to even crawl along). I hope consumer reports starts to include testing of the carse computer system in their safety and ranking tests!
I think one of the main problems with advertising on the Internet is that we, the webmasters and content providers, do not take enough resposibility for what that they, the advertisers and spammers, thrust upon the consumer.
I am a heavy user of the Internet for personal use as well as business use. I find many advertisements make me cringe (esp the gambling ones). I rarely run into adult content ads now, but there are plenty of ads that I can do without. A system in place that allows the ads to be filtered for the end user - that is the Internet experience.
And, we need to police the content and frequency of those ads better. On TV, you get ads every so often (5 to 15 minutes), yet on the Internet, you tend to get ads on every page. The small ads do not cause enough pain to complain about (unless the subject matter is off for the individual viewer), but the in your face ads are enough for people to stop using a site.
People may think that their lives are complicated enough without having to monitor the content of what other people are providing on a site. Consider the view of the consumer. This is your site, and you(we) are allowing the advertisers to post their ads. In the view of the end user, we are just as guilty as the advertiser is.
On all of our sites, all advertising is served from our servers, and all advertising is reviewed before placement. We do not make quite as much per ad, but we do have great content control (including an internal rating system that allows parents to control what can be advertised to them).
As we go forward, people will be more and more selective about what they are willing to see. Since we (and the advertisers) are really providing a service, we need to learn to adjust to the demands of the consumer. After all, they are the ones who choose whether or not to make our advertising dollars worthwhile to the advertisers.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and so does the human nervous system. So that must mean that we are all Stalinists!
Actually, the human nervous system does not represent a Stalinist model. Nerves make decisions by firing input either for or against to other neurons to pass on their vote or lack thereof (proxy). The culmination of inputs and weight by input cells is then "proxied" forward to the next cell(s) in line.
Those cells not near the brain's voting system send their votes in via the nervous system communications infrastructure. (Of course, this parallels the problems with current electronic remote voting issues... You do not feel pain if something is blocking the signal.)
Sounds more like the American voting system. All of your votes here are actually for the electoral points that your state has to offer. The electoral college then "votes" based on its inputs (and weights). That is how a President can be elected with a minority of the vote.
The nervous system is kind of the ultimate consensus computing device - and is capable of knowing that you can die in a traffic accident and completely ignore the fear.
InnerWeb
Seriously, the numbers are not high enough now to have that effect, but can you imagine having to pay for every channel the same way you do for HBO and Showtime? Or, maybe the marketing people will become more savvy and include marketing in a way we can not skip over. Like web pages with embedded marketing (product placement)...
This is more interesting to me than the ability to save the movies in the first place. The question in the end for the business, is where does the money come from. These machines change that dynamic. What are /.s willing to put up with in terms of advertising that would not be deletable to continue to have TV that is "end-viewer" discounted. Since the reality is that the ad dollars are paid for when you purchase the products, could the masses have the vision to see moving those dollars from product purchases to content and delivery fees?
InnerWeb
It is nothing more than a mind tease meant to make people think. Something so many people I know never (or rarely) do in regard to religion's whys, whats and hows.
InnerWeb
If we think we have all the spices, we then see if we have the other ingredients. If we think we have everything, we try to decide how it should be prepared.
We then run the plan. We taste it along the way to ensure what we expect to happen is actually happening. If we need to (and we are able to), we make changes along the way.
When the cooking is done, we put it in front of the other family members for a quality taste test. If it passes (and it normally does), dinner is served. If not, we head out for a shrink wrapped meal.
Innerweb
With a little planning and creativity, we normally find ways of doing things that are different and better than the "traditional" MS model. And, they work on all systems we use. By writing code in Java, Perl, Python, et al, and using Web browsers for most of the interface, we are able to push products out that work with any platform.
For products that need something a little more direct or snappier than what a web browser can provide, there are a few good tools for building cross platform GUIs, or there is X. Hummingbird provides a good commercial X server for MS OSs, and there are other less expensive ones (as well as free). Of course, one of my personal favorites has been the good old fashioned text interface on a ssh connection. It is fast, and when done right as easy to use as a most GUIs. Not to mention, the user can type ahead. We still have not figured out how to make click ahead work ;-)
By planning ahead, and taking a 6 to 12 month preparation cycle in which we build apps that are cross platform before we cross the platform, the crossovers go without a hitch. True, in product costs, there are more dollars spent, but in the manpower dollars, where most of the cost is, there are far fewer dollars spent. Overall, the client saves money on product, saves money on installation, saves money on training, saves money on upkeep and saves money on future development. Not a bad tradeoff for 6 to 12 months of up front preperation work.
InnerWeb
Most people I know do pull over to use the cell phone when driving. But, there are those idiots out there who think that multi-tasking while driving is a good thing. They should have to commute through the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky bridges on a daily basis, see all the accidents that happen. Maybe witnessing a few deaths will help instill the true meaning of distracted driver.
Beyond the drivers who use them at the wrong time, the rest are just irritating jerks. I always take my conversation away from those who might be interrupted by it. That is outside, down the hall, private room. It is called being polite. That aside though, I would be pissed if someone were jamming my cell phone. I think the appropriate action is to ask politely (first time) for a rude cell phone owner to take it elsewhere. If that does not work, we have done everything from turning our own volume up to the point where said arse had to leave to hear to pointedly telling the individual we were not going to put up with their rude interruptions anymore (to which we have actually received applause from those around us). Honestly, such drastic measures are rarely needed, as almost everyone once asked has been polite.
InnerWeb
HAMs are not the general public and typicaly are prepared for the type of situation you mention. I would be more worried about the tower being knocked over and destoyed. But, the guys I know already have contingencies for that situation as well. After all, they are those damned engineers who actually want to know how everything works.
-InnerWeb
-InnerWeb
I have seen this, and it always brings tears to my eyes. Now, with these solutions so close, yet banned by the selfish ignorance of others, it stirs deep anger within me for those who would do this to children.
Most of us on here agree that OSS is a very important issue. But even it is dwarfed by the importance of this issue. The sanctity of human life, a child's life. The ending of the suffering of millions. Hundreds of millions of suffering people regaining the ability to lead a normal life and be like most moms, dads and children.
Yes, the individuals denying this research do not raise their hands directly to do harm, but they enforce the continuation of harm, suffering and death by not allowing this hope to be researched. It is like a Mafia Don who does not pull the trigger, but gave the order. Do you really think a pacemaker is a good alternative to a healthy heart? A syringe to healthy islet cells? Paralyzation to a working nervous system?
If religious belief is your answer to denying this, I challenge you to post where in what Bible (Hindu, Christian, Muslim, whatever) it is written anywhere that talks about anything like this. I have never seen it written or heard of it written. I have only heard people in power use it to whip up their flock to action on something else they tie to it.
Ignorance is not an excuse for violence, in God's eyes, whether it be passive or active!
links to sites with further information World Health Organization Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-InnerWeb
I am starting to think this guy has a bot that posts theses and then looks for replys that he can pounce on.
Seriously. If those facts were correct, then the people (all but one) I have worked for in the past must be unable to add. They saved a bunch on Unix, then linux. Less hardware, less people to maintain, less downtime (less pissed off customers). List goes on. MS may have purchased some fancy science-like surveys, but as I said before, 2 out of 3 dentists surveyed say they use .... (in 1 out of 20 surveys)
Cripes, I think Family Feud has a more accurate survey system than most stuff I read backed by MS.
Anybody who thinks that this next little step is harmless, has a poor grasp of history. True, in and of itself, it may be mostly useless, but it is not in and of itself. It is a tool that augments a larger collection of tools to provide a "data" or "statistical" picture of a person, their habits and their wanderings.
What happens in the future when a person is in the same location as a terrorist, has a friend with a suspect background, and espouses unpopular (but legal) ideas. You can now arrest them. Circumstantial evidence links them to the terrorist (you can not avoid whom you do not know), they are saying "anti-government" ideals (not necessarily separatist or violent), and through enough weeding, the rest of the case will be found.
McCarthy destroyed many people who opposed him by using innuendo, circumstantial evidence and (lying) witnesses. Almost no one was able to beat him at his game because he had such an effective information collection and management system. That is where we are slowly headed, good intentions or not.
Right now, those in power would benefit immensely from this system. It makes it that much easier to stay in power if your potential enemies' weaknesses are that much easier to find. Do not think that this information system will not be abused. The RIAA has just provided us with many beautiful example of how this is abused by prosecuting minors. Children are not able to enter into legal agreements because it is agreed that they are incapable of understanding what the legal consequences are, let alone to be able to distinguish right from wrong (true, to some degree, most children know basic rights and wrongs, but more complicated ones are hard if not impossible for most children to grasp.) Other forms of this are profiling, poorly managed data at credit reporting agencies (Experian, Equifax and Trans Union required The Fair Credit Reporting Act to get them to do some things better) and so on
Oh, and for those of you who point to the police not being able to find criminals because they did not bother to look at the system, human error will always exist. This system allows a much different use of the data than what the typical police system has. Those tend to be much less complete, and the officers themselves often recieve little training and have even less support and experience doing this kind of research. The people to worry about with the systems being made today are in a different world from "on the street" law enforcement. They thrive on this kind of data mining. Most of the informarion McCarthy had on people was never used. He had it there just in case. It was how he controlled votes in the government and kept even his dark secrets out of the light. I am not worried that this will be used to arrest some innocent people nearly as much as I am worried that a smart person with a "bad" bent will learn how to gather and abuse this information to further corrupt the process in their favor. I do not think this is an if thing, but a when thing. Every tool gets abused. The more powerful the tool, the more powerful the abuse and the abuser.
The problems with my arguments are things like this abduction at Fox News. You would have to be a heartless bastard to not want a safer world for our children, our parents and our friends. With crime against innocents and defenseless individuals so rampant, it is very difficult to argue against this type of tool. It is a very similar to what McCarthy had with the Soviets and Cuba when he was in power.
A CS degree is quickly becoming a supporting degree that you use to augment a primary skill in the US. (In other countries, it is quickly becoming the degree to have, but they too will eventually hit the same problem we have as other non-English speaking countries learn the dollar value of speaking English).
BioInformatics is a great career at the moment, but I already know India is starting to pick at that market, and several US companies are not just looking, but planning to move R&D to India and other countries. They have to many incentives, lack of environmental restrictions, dirt cheap brain power and labor, dirt cheap land and building... The list goes on. I would not want to specialize in anything that can be done almost as well 1000 miles away as it can be done where I am.
I am still making more per hour than most that I know in the field, but I am making 1/3rd of what I was in 2000, and I know the dollar amount is going down. I won't say no to a CS degree, but I will say think very carefully about your other options before trying to get into this field. I expect that there will be less than 1 in 20 programming jobs in the US in the next 5 to 6 years. The issues that companies run into with outsourcing to India and others will largely go away, as they are as interested in profit as we are.
Almost every time MS comes out with some research, I get an instant flashback to the old 2 out of 3 dentists surveyed use blah, blah, blah.
Commercial research is not about the truth unless it is internal. It is all about marketing spin. Even if the research is double blind, the basis for the research (the questions, the assumptions) can and do skew the results.
It is very difficult to get unbiased research anywhere. A sponsor to the research just makes it that much more biased (it impacts what questions you ask, how you ask the questions, what assumptions you make...)
If companies were honest, we would not buy half the stuff we buy. The fact that we buy stuff from companies that lie to us is either a testament to our (as a population) extreme lack of education, or the expertise with which we are lied to. A study passes under most people's radar because the truth is used to build the disinformation. That is why so much damage control is done with research.
MS still charges for Win98 support. They still charge for new copies sold and pre installed (yes, you can buy it in shrink wrap), and I have not seen a legal free for download and use site for Win98 yet.
And, yes I would defend MS for doing the same (though I almost never defend MS - ick). That is essentially how support fees are charged. A company makes its best guess at what support will cost over a period of time, then charges you that plus a profit margin. Business is about making money. If it does not do that, it is no longer a business, but a bankruptcy. The past 36 months have many notable examples of this basic fiscal law. (not a rule, but a law like gravity attracts.)
Red Hat has a responsibility with legal and fiscal repercussions to the people in charge of Red Hat to its employees and more importantly (via law) its stockholders to produce a profit. Companies with stockholders that do not produce a profit can be and often are sued if appropriate changes are not made.
I wonder if the public awareness could be raised to the point where the cost to the economy caused by these abuses could make it into some campaign discussions. It would be one heck of a soap box to stand on - how government processes are being abused by greedy corporate (and private) businessmen who hide the truth like an Enron or Worldcom and how this is once again causing the nation's economy undo harm while the government watchdogs are not being diligent. It would give all these politic heads another reformation of government and business topic that they could make huge promises about without ever moving towards a solution. And it is a whole lot safer to double the USPTO's budet to handle this than it is to double the welfare system. ;-)
This is scary. I remember the reasons given for using MS servers as the customers front end (Internet). They were easy enough that an idiot could set them up, manage them and put content onto them. Noone cared if they crashed (which they had projected would happen often enough anyway based on a lab setup with many systems running servers), since all you had to do was restart and/or reinstall. It is funny how none of the important (mission critical) applications were ever allowed to be considered for the MS servers.
Is this coming?
MADD -> Mothers Against Drunk Drivers
MAMS -> Mothers Against Microsoft
I see automotive functions in a similar way. If we want some dinky music system that uses something so unreliable, cool. Let the radio crash. Not my brakes, engine, locks, ... No. I do not relish the thought of anti-lock breaks not functioning correctly when the OS crashes, or returns erroneous results.
As a cold calculation, if you really hate MS, you should encourage this. I believe that the ensuing deaths from MS's OS will be able to finally pierce the EULA and expose MS to a fatal barrage of lawsuits. Until now, MS has never really been accountable to their shoddy software (monopolies have a great tradition of this - Here, their history of arrogance and complete disregard for their responsibility as a supplier of a product would create a situation in a court room not unlike the smokers lawsuits. Lied about what they knew about the products shortcomings, the damage inflicted upon its users, produced an environment where the user could not get away from the faulty product even though they wanted to. Though, hopefuly not with the same numbers of victims.) This would also be good for the linux community, as MS will have to raise prices to handle tort claims once the lawsuits start happening.
Most of us know what will happen with Windows CE in charge of the car's brain. It is not pretty. Personally, I will now be asking what the OS is the car runs on. Unknown or MS, and I go to the next manufacturer. From the looks of the article, it may be that we used to buy Honda and Toyoto cars. They have been extremely reliable for us.
For those who say that the bugs will be worked out enough in 3 years, MS has never had an OS that became that stable. Any MS OS ever. There are some exceptions to individual installations with the perfect combination of hardware and software, but just as in computers, there are many different pieces of hardware and features to be added to cars.
In the end, I think we have enough safety issues to deal with just with the human factors behind the wheel. Now, we are talking about making the car as reliable as a desktop (have reinstalled Windows XP 6 times in 4 months on multiple systems already as upgrades have caused hardware issues and left XP unable to even crawl along). I hope consumer reports starts to include testing of the carse computer system in their safety and ranking tests!
I think one of the main problems with advertising on the Internet is that we, the webmasters and content providers, do not take enough resposibility for what that they, the advertisers and spammers, thrust upon the consumer.
I am a heavy user of the Internet for personal use as well as business use. I find many advertisements make me cringe (esp the gambling ones). I rarely run into adult content ads now, but there are plenty of ads that I can do without. A system in place that allows the ads to be filtered for the end user - that is the Internet experience.
And, we need to police the content and frequency of those ads better. On TV, you get ads every so often (5 to 15 minutes), yet on the Internet, you tend to get ads on every page. The small ads do not cause enough pain to complain about (unless the subject matter is off for the individual viewer), but the in your face ads are enough for people to stop using a site.
People may think that their lives are complicated enough without having to monitor the content of what other people are providing on a site. Consider the view of the consumer. This is your site, and you(we) are allowing the advertisers to post their ads. In the view of the end user, we are just as guilty as the advertiser is.
On all of our sites, all advertising is served from our servers, and all advertising is reviewed before placement. We do not make quite as much per ad, but we do have great content control (including an internal rating system that allows parents to control what can be advertised to them).
As we go forward, people will be more and more selective about what they are willing to see. Since we (and the advertisers) are really providing a service, we need to learn to adjust to the demands of the consumer. After all, they are the ones who choose whether or not to make our advertising dollars worthwhile to the advertisers.