>This is imbecilic. Do you have a contract with the SSA guaranteeing you money? What if you die before you vest?
That isn't my problem with the trust fund - my problem is with the government spending the surplus it got from the baby boomers when it should have been banking it away for when they retire.
I'm not claiming fraud. I'm not claiming that people won't be getting their money back. I am claiming that it's not a well run institution, and, once again, the taxpayers are going to feel the brunt of it's mismanagement.
> the SS Trust Fund is a "Ponzi scheme" come from people's misconception of it as a savings vehicle.
Probably because it's called a "Trust fund." Pretty much every other use of the term implies a managed pool of wealth that attempts to maintain that wealth.
The way it works now is the trust fund buys securities from the federal government. The federal government then spends the money made on the sale of the security. It owes the social security fund that money back, plus interest. Guess where that money is going to come from? Taxpayers. So they take your retirement money from you, invest it in themselves, then charge you later for getting your own money back through increased taxes to cover the cost of the interest they are charging on themselves.
It's an incredibly stupid way to manage money and, like most of the financial shenanigans the government pulls, if a private trust fund was caught doing it there would be some people going to prison for a long time.
Sorry, I was being vague. I was talking about paper charts which, AFAIK, commercial aircraft are still required to carry as backups if the radio navigation units fail.
> Since it requires updating of all the charts that aircraft are required to carry (not to mention signage on the ground), it's often deferred as long as possible.
The signage on the ground and numbering/labeling on the computer equipment is probably a pain, but if I remember my aviation science class correctly, aeronautical charts are updated yearly and commercial aircraft are required to carry the latest, so that's not really a factor.
They are different markets. Smartphone apps need to be simple and uni-tasking. Try to do too much and it becomes too complicated for the limited I/O of the device. People expect more from desktop applications, and are willing to pay more if a free app doesn't cover their needs.
I'd spend a few bucks for an app that let me do simple photo editing on an iPhone. I wouldn't spend a few bucks for a similar app on a desktop machine, because there are plenty of free apps that do the same thing. I *would* spend a few hundred on something more powerful if needed.
What a terrible article. Does he interview any actual developers? Does he talk to software resellers? Does he talk to iPhone developers considering the move to the app store? Does he have any statistics at all? No, he did his research by looking at Amazon and MacConnection. He came up with a whole bunch of scary sounding analogies, though - I guess that should drive traffic to his site.
I think that, in the short term, the App store is going to compete with the traditional shareware market, which has always been pretty active in the Macintosh community. The solution for those developers is simple: make their products available on the app store. It will probably help them in the long run.
The National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine has received billions of dollars of public NIH funding. They study "alternative" medicine, such as chiropractic and homeopathic remedies. So far, their strongest conclusion has been that ginger has a slight positive effect on upset stomachs.
Billions of dollars. Ginger for upset stomachs. When asked why they haven't produced many solid results, the director of NCCAM usually says that they need more funding. I'd say we need a bit more results-based funding in some areas.
There weren't patent agreements between countries back then. China has agreed to abide by our IP laws to facilitate trade, then ignores them. It's one thing when individual inventors and engineers do it, it's quite another when it's state policy handed down to state run companies for state funded projects.
Monitor arms and wireless keyboards/mice, or a keyboard drawer. This frees up valuable desk space for working on stuff.
Also useful:
USB port replicator - used for laptops, gets legacy and USB ports up on the desk from the tower, so you can get at them. Variable power supply - get good ones with a couple of voltage options. +/- 5V, +/- 12V rails along with a variable output is very handy Plenty of outlets on the desks or, better yet, built into the desks Grounding - if you can't get grounded desks, get antistatic pads or, at least, antistatic wrist straps, and ground everything you can
The three things you shouldn't scrimp on - power supply, soldering station with adjustable temperature, multimeter
Get a cheap desktop for the hardware station - interfacing with hardware doesn't take much horsepower.
Buy a monster for the software station so you can run multiple OSes in virtual machines - get the free VMWare player that lets you create virtual machines and you can run Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, etc...
There's a fundamental difference between phones and console/PC architectures. Consoles are known, fairly stable quantities. If you develop for a console, your development strategy is pretty much guaranteed to be stable for at least three or four years.
Ditto the PC - If you develop a game for DirectX or OpenGL, you can be confident that the platform will be stable for a while, and there are plenty of tools to make sure your graphics and audio work well on multiple environments.
On Android, you develop your app for the best phone, try to scale it down to make sure it's somewhat playable on the lowest end phone, and you're good - for a few months.Until the next greatest phone comes out, the one with twice the resolution and four times the 3d processing power. So then you have to update everything to support that phone, until it turns out it's a dog and nobody is buying it, and another company produces a similar phone but with slightly different specs. So you start developing for that platform....
I used to work for a consumer electronics company. A few years ago they sent a small delegation to China and Korea looking for companies to mass-produce a complicated electronic gadget.
They visited a Chinese government owned and operated facility, showed them a prototype of what they wanted built, then were offered a tour of the plant. While they were walking around, one of the delegates ran back to the conference room to get his cell phone. A couple of factory employees had taken apart the prototype and were taking pictures of the internals. Needless to say, the company went with a Korean manufacturer.
The Chinese don't play fair. This attitude is institutionalized.
> So, by stealing the design, the Chinese company at the most saved themselves the cost of a full reverse-engineering job on the Ford car.
THIS.
Car parts are relatively simple to make. Making a part that lasts under every possible environmental condition without failing or performing out of spec, that's complicated and takes, literally, years of research. Type acceptance for a part usually takes a year. If it's electronic, sometimes two to three. Engines can take half a decade. Most of that time is spent testing, and re-testing, and re-testing again. The total cost of bringing a single engine to market runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars - which is why it's a big deal when a car company introduces a new engine.
If you are a start-up car company and someone brings you a blueprint to an engine that's already tested and ready to be put into production - that's worth a fortune.
> Software itself won't be compliant, it's how you use the software and how you've documented how to control documents using the software that matters.
Passing ISO on paper and passing an ISO inspection audit are two different things. Just because you have a process and everyone follows it doesn't necessarily mean the auditor will pass you. Your process has to be clear, make sense, and have controls and methods to handle failures in the process, and achieve some goal as far as improving or maintaining quality.
A self serving recommendation, to be sure, but a company called CEBOS makes an ISO 9000 compliance suite called MQ1 that has a fully compliant documents module. Windows-only, fat.NET client, SQL server based. It supports controlled/uncontrolled documents, electronic signatures based approval process, conversion to PDF, embedding control/version info in Word and Excel docs, and a ton more. The professional services guys know ISO inside and out and will really help you get compliant.
You don't have to buy the whole suite if you just want docs, you can just buy the docs module (the whole suite includes APQP, training/HR, supplier management, project management, maintenance, gauge calibration, regular and L.P. auditing, basic customer management, purchasing/receiving, metrics, corrective actions, tooling, data collection (SPC/SQC) synchronization with ERP/CRM systems, etc... all pretty well integrated.)
Tell them Jason sent you so I get a cut of the commission:)
Loads of "recording artists" use Autotune. When used properly you can't tell it's being used. Guys like T-Pain just crank the rate of note blending way down so it's more obvious.
Regardless, what you've said still doesn't change the fact that this is generally a useless technology.
That's what people said about 3d desktops, now every major OS has some 3d elements in the UI. I don't see an immersive 3d environment in a browser, but I do see 3d elements being useful for the display of some types of data, and navigating through certain types of datasets.
Most video operations don't benefit at all from 3D graphics; they inherently need 2D acceleration.
If you can put a video on a 3d surface, you can pipe it through the GPU to speed up deinterlacing, interpolation, scaling, etc... All modern video acceleration schemes use the GPU anyways, having a separate processor do all the heavy video processing doesn't make sense these days.
It's a novelty that's bound to resurface every 15 years or so, as people forget the experiments and failures of the previous generation of developers.
I don't think the X3D working group has completely forgotten the past failures of in-browser 3d, which is why X3D is not VRML, though it maintains backwards compatibility.
We realized that 3D graphics in the browser were stupid and useless back in 1995, when the VRML hype was much like the HTML5 hype is today.
There are a few differences.
VRML was never really an industry standard, it evolved from an SGI project and was adopted by a few other companies. There were competing technologies that seemed better, but were mostly closed. In any case, they required browser plugins that were large, clunky, and crashy.
At the height of VRML's popularity, there really weren't any standards for desktop 3D acceleration. Getting decent performance from a VRML browser required a pretty fast machine, and the graphics were very crude even then.
Now we have an industry standard backed by the group in charge of HTML, ridiculously fast 3d hardware on even low end desktops, and, with the modded FireFox and Webkit backends, integration with the codebase.
How about a wireless projecter, the size of a deck of cards, with built-in wireless USB and/or bluetooth? Then you can use it with nearly anything, the way wi-fi projectors work now.
Besides, if you're playing a video with your phone, what if you want to then take a phone call?
> Then next time I hear someone say that union workers in the GM plant are "making $80/hr" I may just put my size 11 union-made shoe up their ass.
OK, then I'll say that it takes three union workers to accompany one industrial engineer to replace one fuse on the floor of a factory. Happens to my friend nearly every day.
> I came back from a trip to Rome and Milan in March, and when you see the level of technology and good design that is available on the road in Europe, you realize just how badly run American car companies are and have been.
Different != better. My Italian engineering prof claimed that every Italian car he owned while growing up there was a piece of garbage.
> Rather, Americans want big, inefficient cars because that's what they are sold.
Riiiight. It has nothing to do with relatively cheap gas, and the difference in cost between "big" and "small" cars relatively small. Poor consumers, unable to think for themselves...
> CAFE standards that are "just killing" the car companies. It's a complete load of bullshit
Yes, CAFE is crap, if that's what you meant, but probably not. Want people to buy less gas? Increase the price of gas, don't create some nonsensical average fuel economy standard that forces companies to build subcompacts that don't sell, so they can build SUVs that do.
Planar speakers have been around for decades. Magnepan is one of the oldest, along with Martin Logan, Quad, SoundLab and the defunct Apogee. Sota and Monsoon also made planars for a while.
The new variations on planar technologies are, mainly, refinements. The researchers at Warwick basically figured out how to embed the motor in the planar substrate itself, saving a few more millimeters in thickness.
English is also the international language of aviation. When a Swiss airplane is landing in Egypt, the pilot speaks English to the tower. Why? Because the US and England had the first major commercial air industries.
At the turn of the last century, if you wanted a science or engineering degree, you had to learn German, as all the best journals were printed in that language.
Slashdot Mirror
>This is imbecilic. Do you have a contract with the SSA guaranteeing you money? What if you die before you vest?
That isn't my problem with the trust fund - my problem is with the government spending the surplus it got from the baby boomers when it should have been banking it away for when they retire.
I'm not claiming fraud. I'm not claiming that people won't be getting their money back. I am claiming that it's not a well run institution, and, once again, the taxpayers are going to feel the brunt of it's mismanagement.
> the SS Trust Fund is a "Ponzi scheme" come from people's misconception of it as a savings vehicle.
Probably because it's called a "Trust fund." Pretty much every other use of the term implies a managed pool of wealth that attempts to maintain that wealth.
The way it works now is the trust fund buys securities from the federal government. The federal government then spends the money made on the sale of the security. It owes the social security fund that money back, plus interest. Guess where that money is going to come from? Taxpayers. So they take your retirement money from you, invest it in themselves, then charge you later for getting your own money back through increased taxes to cover the cost of the interest they are charging on themselves.
It's an incredibly stupid way to manage money and, like most of the financial shenanigans the government pulls, if a private trust fund was caught doing it there would be some people going to prison for a long time.
Sorry, I was being vague. I was talking about paper charts which, AFAIK, commercial aircraft are still required to carry as backups if the radio navigation units fail.
> Since it requires updating of all the charts that aircraft are required to carry (not to mention signage on the ground), it's often deferred as long as possible.
The signage on the ground and numbering/labeling on the computer equipment is probably a pain, but if I remember my aviation science class correctly, aeronautical charts are updated yearly and commercial aircraft are required to carry the latest, so that's not really a factor.
*THIS*
They are different markets. Smartphone apps need to be simple and uni-tasking. Try to do too much and it becomes too complicated for the limited I/O of the device. People expect more from desktop applications, and are willing to pay more if a free app doesn't cover their needs.
I'd spend a few bucks for an app that let me do simple photo editing on an iPhone. I wouldn't spend a few bucks for a similar app on a desktop machine, because there are plenty of free apps that do the same thing. I *would* spend a few hundred on something more powerful if needed.
What a terrible article. Does he interview any actual developers? Does he talk to software resellers? Does he talk to iPhone developers considering the move to the app store? Does he have any statistics at all? No, he did his research by looking at Amazon and MacConnection. He came up with a whole bunch of scary sounding analogies, though - I guess that should drive traffic to his site.
I think that, in the short term, the App store is going to compete with the traditional shareware market, which has always been pretty active in the Macintosh community. The solution for those developers is simple: make their products available on the app store. It will probably help them in the long run.
The National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine has received billions of dollars of public NIH funding. They study "alternative" medicine, such as chiropractic and homeopathic remedies. So far, their strongest conclusion has been that ginger has a slight positive effect on upset stomachs.
Billions of dollars. Ginger for upset stomachs. When asked why they haven't produced many solid results, the director of NCCAM usually says that they need more funding. I'd say we need a bit more results-based funding in some areas.
There weren't patent agreements between countries back then. China has agreed to abide by our IP laws to facilitate trade, then ignores them. It's one thing when individual inventors and engineers do it, it's quite another when it's state policy handed down to state run companies for state funded projects.
They are given priority in the telephone switching network, yes. As traffic increases, switching bandwidth is set aside for emergency services.
You don't think the whole system is still analog, do you?
Monitor arms and wireless keyboards/mice, or a keyboard drawer. This frees up valuable desk space for working on stuff.
Also useful:
USB port replicator - used for laptops, gets legacy and USB ports up on the desk from the tower, so you can get at them.
Variable power supply - get good ones with a couple of voltage options. +/- 5V, +/- 12V rails along with a variable output is very handy
Plenty of outlets on the desks or, better yet, built into the desks
Grounding - if you can't get grounded desks, get antistatic pads or, at least, antistatic wrist straps, and ground everything you can
The three things you shouldn't scrimp on - power supply, soldering station with adjustable temperature, multimeter
Get a cheap desktop for the hardware station - interfacing with hardware doesn't take much horsepower.
Buy a monster for the software station so you can run multiple OSes in virtual machines - get the free VMWare player that lets you create virtual machines and you can run Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, etc...
There's a fundamental difference between phones and console/PC architectures. Consoles are known, fairly stable quantities. If you develop for a console, your development strategy is pretty much guaranteed to be stable for at least three or four years.
Ditto the PC - If you develop a game for DirectX or OpenGL, you can be confident that the platform will be stable for a while, and there are plenty of tools to make sure your graphics and audio work well on multiple environments.
On Android, you develop your app for the best phone, try to scale it down to make sure it's somewhat playable on the lowest end phone, and you're good - for a few months.Until the next greatest phone comes out, the one with twice the resolution and four times the 3d processing power. So then you have to update everything to support that phone, until it turns out it's a dog and nobody is buying it, and another company produces a similar phone but with slightly different specs. So you start developing for that platform....
I used to work for a consumer electronics company. A few years ago they sent a small delegation to China and Korea looking for companies to mass-produce a complicated electronic gadget.
They visited a Chinese government owned and operated facility, showed them a prototype of what they wanted built, then were offered a tour of the plant. While they were walking around, one of the delegates ran back to the conference room to get his cell phone. A couple of factory employees had taken apart the prototype and were taking pictures of the internals. Needless to say, the company went with a Korean manufacturer.
The Chinese don't play fair. This attitude is institutionalized.
> So, by stealing the design, the Chinese company at the most saved themselves the cost of a full reverse-engineering job on the Ford car.
THIS.
Car parts are relatively simple to make. Making a part that lasts under every possible environmental condition without failing or performing out of spec, that's complicated and takes, literally, years of research. Type acceptance for a part usually takes a year. If it's electronic, sometimes two to three. Engines can take half a decade. Most of that time is spent testing, and re-testing, and re-testing again. The total cost of bringing a single engine to market runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars - which is why it's a big deal when a car company introduces a new engine.
If you are a start-up car company and someone brings you a blueprint to an engine that's already tested and ready to be put into production - that's worth a fortune.
> Software itself won't be compliant, it's how you use the software and how you've documented how to control documents using the software that matters.
Passing ISO on paper and passing an ISO inspection audit are two different things. Just because you have a process and everyone follows it doesn't necessarily mean the auditor will pass you. Your process has to be clear, make sense, and have controls and methods to handle failures in the process, and achieve some goal as far as improving or maintaining quality.
A self serving recommendation, to be sure, but a company called CEBOS makes an ISO 9000 compliance suite called MQ1 that has a fully compliant documents module. Windows-only, fat .NET client, SQL server based. It supports controlled/uncontrolled documents, electronic signatures based approval process, conversion to PDF, embedding control/version info in Word and Excel docs, and a ton more. The professional services guys know ISO inside and out and will really help you get compliant.
You don't have to buy the whole suite if you just want docs, you can just buy the docs module (the whole suite includes APQP, training/HR, supplier management, project management, maintenance, gauge calibration, regular and L.P. auditing, basic customer management, purchasing/receiving, metrics, corrective actions, tooling, data collection (SPC/SQC) synchronization with ERP/CRM systems, etc... all pretty well integrated.)
Tell them Jason sent you so I get a cut of the commission :)
http://www.cebos.com/
(Full disclosure, yeah I work there :)
Loads of "recording artists" use Autotune. When used properly you can't tell it's being used. Guys like T-Pain just crank the rate of note blending way down so it's more obvious.
How is HTML5 any more of a "standard" that VRML was?
Who cares? X3D is an ISO standard developed in an open process. http://www.web3d.org/x3d/
Regardless, what you've said still doesn't change the fact that this is generally a useless technology.
That's what people said about 3d desktops, now every major OS has some 3d elements in the UI. I don't see an immersive 3d environment in a browser, but I do see 3d elements being useful for the display of some types of data, and navigating through certain types of datasets.
Most video operations don't benefit at all from 3D graphics; they inherently need 2D acceleration.
If you can put a video on a 3d surface, you can pipe it through the GPU to speed up deinterlacing, interpolation, scaling, etc... All modern video acceleration schemes use the GPU anyways, having a separate processor do all the heavy video processing doesn't make sense these days.
It's a novelty that's bound to resurface every 15 years or so, as people forget the experiments and failures of the previous generation of developers.
I don't think the X3D working group has completely forgotten the past failures of in-browser 3d, which is why X3D is not VRML, though it maintains backwards compatibility.
We realized that 3D graphics in the browser were stupid and useless back in 1995, when the VRML hype was much like the HTML5 hype is today.
There are a few differences.
VRML was never really an industry standard, it evolved from an SGI project and was adopted by a few other companies. There were competing technologies that seemed better, but were mostly closed. In any case, they required browser plugins that were large, clunky, and crashy.
At the height of VRML's popularity, there really weren't any standards for desktop 3D acceleration. Getting decent performance from a VRML browser required a pretty fast machine, and the graphics were very crude even then.
Now we have an industry standard backed by the group in charge of HTML, ridiculously fast 3d hardware on even low end desktops, and, with the modded FireFox and Webkit backends, integration with the codebase.
This might end up working.
How about a wireless projecter, the size of a deck of cards, with built-in wireless USB and/or bluetooth? Then you can use it with nearly anything, the way wi-fi projectors work now.
Besides, if you're playing a video with your phone, what if you want to then take a phone call?
> Then next time I hear someone say that union workers in the GM plant are "making $80/hr" I may just put my size 11 union-made shoe up their ass.
OK, then I'll say that it takes three union workers to accompany one industrial engineer to replace one fuse on the floor of a factory. Happens to my friend nearly every day.
> I came back from a trip to Rome and Milan in March, and when you see the level of technology and good design that is available on the road in Europe, you realize just how badly run American car companies are and have been.
Different != better. My Italian engineering prof claimed that every Italian car he owned while growing up there was a piece of garbage.
> Rather, Americans want big, inefficient cars because that's what they are sold.
Riiiight. It has nothing to do with relatively cheap gas, and the difference in cost between "big" and "small" cars relatively small. Poor consumers, unable to think for themselves...
> CAFE standards that are "just killing" the car companies. It's a complete load of bullshit
Yes, CAFE is crap, if that's what you meant, but probably not. Want people to buy less gas? Increase the price of gas, don't create some nonsensical average fuel economy standard that forces companies to build subcompacts that don't sell, so they can build SUVs that do.
Yeah the ET guys are brilliant, and crazy to the point of culty-ness. The propeller-sub is completely bonkers, I'd love to hear one.
Planar speakers have been around for decades. Magnepan is one of the oldest, along with Martin Logan, Quad, SoundLab and the defunct Apogee. Sota and Monsoon also made planars for a while.
The new variations on planar technologies are, mainly, refinements. The researchers at Warwick basically figured out how to embed the motor in the planar substrate itself, saving a few more millimeters in thickness.
English is also the international language of aviation. When a Swiss airplane is landing in Egypt, the pilot speaks English to the tower. Why? Because the US and England had the first major commercial air industries.
At the turn of the last century, if you wanted a science or engineering degree, you had to learn German, as all the best journals were printed in that language.
>But it's not about dancing. It's about ratings and attracting viewers.
I'll watch it while you're still on.
> You never know what pranks I might find a way to pull on the show.
Oh, please do. Segway tango? :)
"The guy plays Segway polo, he has to be nimble on his feet."
How on earth did you interpret that statement in any way other than light sarcasm?