You dork. I said high end x86 boxen have lights out, and yes, I'm aware the HP makes some of said high end x86.
As for 8 ways and such, give me a break. Go to HP's website (http://www.hp.com/ select an 8 way system, and increase its RAM and drive configurations to the standard in the US-IV system. What's it come to? Here's a hint, it's pretty close to $150,000 depending on exactly what you consider to be precisely equivalent to the Sun boxen.
Also, the US-IV systems are all dual core, so we're talking 16 cores. If you could buy a 16 core athlon machine with the sort of ram and Disks that the suns have, it wouldn't cost 39k, if you can get it at all, that is.
I never said the price for performance was equivalent, but spec out a few machines and see how close it is. It's the same in the 4-8 core realm (with the V40z), and it's about the same in the 16+ core realm due the difficulty in getting good 8+ core x86 systems. 48 cores of US-IV will be expensive, but there aren't a lot of x86 boxes out there that can touch it's whole-system performance. And yes, I too know what I'm talking about.
I've actually had to deal with the JBoss guys on several occasions (I brought them in to compete for a few bids at my company), and I can't stand them. They are the least responsive vendor I have ever seen, and that's saying something. They're more arrogant and confrontational than Reuters or Bloomberg, and that's an almost miraculous achievement.
I am glad that they have succeeded, as if JBoss does for app servers what Linux did for Operating Systems, that will be a good thing. Unfortunately, I see a rocky future for them, probably. It seems that if you want to use the service business model, telling your customers to screw off at every opportunity is not a good plan, and it will hurt you eventually.
I also think their focus is slightly misplaced, but that's a minor technical issue. Presumably it will be fixed as JBoss becomes more mature. With a little time, hopefully by JBoss 5.0, they'll have a much more impressive AS, with fewer weakpoints. Perhaps then they can really strive to fix the few weaknesses they have.
If you're NASA, you probably find the Altix supercomputers pretty compelling. If you're an iBank, you probably find the 8-24 way dual core (48 cores in the big ones) Sun boxes pretty useful for processing all your data and trades.
Sun boxes are about the same cost as x86 boxes in the high end, and they have all the stuff you really need. 64-bit, lights out management (you can discover problems in the hardware even after it has crashed, because it contains a little computer on a chip designed just to report the statte of the hardware, power cycle it, etc....), lots of PCI cards, SSL accelerator cards, lots of ram slots, disk slots, raid cards, etc....
Your average 8 proc US-IV system (16 cores) from Sun costs about the same as an 8 proc (8 cores) Opteron system from HP, for similar configurations. It (supposedly) has much better support for things like SSL cards and massive multiprocessing/multithreading, especially under java.
Someone probably should buy SGI and Cray. There is a market for high end (top 500) supercomputers and other high end data processing systems.
One of my friends worked for Google, and he told me their stories. We both worked for Microsoft. Google is FAR more arrogant. Among other things, they decided to open a branch in India because they've "exhausted the talent supply in the United States." This is all the more remarkable because they only have a few thousand employees, only a few hundred in NYC. Apparently they've got all 300 or so good programmers in NYC. That certainly came as a shock to me, especially considering that most other places in NYC pay MUCH more than Google does. Perhaps they've exhausted the supply of talented people willing to work for half the industry standard wage?
In any case, arrogance breeds downfall, soon enough. Most of the Microserfs I met were not terribly arrogant, not moreso than your average techie at least. Though Google loving seems to be the order of the day, I'm not such a fan. A company valued at 100x earnings that thinks it vomits sunshine, well, granny's pension fund is going to lose some money.
Islam has always been a melded church and state, even more so than the Catholics ever did. For many years (up to the present) there has been essentially no difference between clerics and rulers, usually they were the same people, still are. This causes pervasive problems. Not the least of which is that those who hold the reigns of government are religiously obligated to eradicate the infidels (both the Koran and bible are very clear about converting or killing nonbelievers). Just as bad (and we see some of this in the States) is that the government feels the need to ban or repress science, as both religion and science are claiming to have the truth, and they can't both be right. This makes Theocracies third world countries, and it makes the citizens jealous of those who are not so backwards.
Theocracy and democracy cannot easily coexist, just as Communism and Capitalism have trouble. A Theocracy next to a democracy finds that many of its citizens would flow over the border to join the heathens, and those left behind would hate the outsiders for reasons related to religious dogma and jealousy. You just can't build your dreams on forcing people to strictly adhere to a set of rules if there is a beautiful country nearby without those rules. This will cause persistent conflict that cannot be eliminated without eliminating either Democracy or Theocracy, I know which one I'll pick. One way or another, Theocracy has got to go, there will be no peace until it does.
That being said, the US hasn't been terribly careful in picking its battles (literally and figuratively), but we didn't cause the problem. The problem will continue until there is a concrete change in the world dynamic, leaving them alone won't solve anything. If they were powerful enough to destroy us, they would have done so long ago. We have been powerful enough to destroy them for many years, and yet we have not done so. Fortunately, the balance of power is not likely to ever change.
In the immortal (and misquoted, by me) words of Benjaman Graham....
"Stocks decreasing in price is not a bad thing, it is a good thing. If you saw a sign at your local car dealership that said '10% off', you would be happy, not sad. Furthermore, an investor is almost never forced to sell, if you choose to sell whenever the price dips, then you are turning your primary advantage (having liquid markets) into a disadvantage. You should not be tempted to turn an imaginary loss into a real one through other people's mistakes of judgement."
Markets going down isn't a bad thing, not really. Let the markets do what they will, and worry about the people. If you're concerned with money, then worry about underlying infrastructure, not about the psychology of the masses. If you want to make an investment, then just buy now.
That too will come in time. Soon enough, the various markets will saturate, and prices will start to fall, then companies will move on to the harder tasks where there is still money.
I'm not a big "invisible hand" guy, but modulo a few sticking points (microsoft document formats, monopolies, etc...) things have slowly started to reach that point. A lot of the low level stuff is slowly (or quickly) falling into opensource, and there in no return from that black hole. JBoss, Apache, Linux, Open Office, the list goes on. Two of the three most common web browsers are now opensource, IE being the only real holdout.
For now, this is a short term effect. More money is being squeezed out of a few sectors that are now nearing saturation. Profits will fall rapidly as saturation occurs, and employment (which has already dropped) will perhaps decline further. It is likely that most programming jobs will follow the businesses they serve into the major metropolitan areas, just like the doctors and lawyers. The profitability of the valley won't affect this, it's the way of the future.
If you really know how to program well, NYC is callling your name. Actual competent people are exceedingly rare (due to the endless appetites of the iBanks for programmers). The payscale and environment are both very friendly. Get accustomed to working 45 hour weeks, but not much more than that, and for very good pay.
Your historical points are true, but somewhat less valid now.
Currently, swing is slightly faster than SWT. It uses full (or sometimes partial) hardware acceleration, and therefore doesn't end up rendering much with the CPU. This is expected to improve further in the future.
The real problem with swing (currently) has two parts.
1) No drag and drop. In SWT you can drag and drop a grid of stuff into Excel, for instance. This does not (as near as I can tell) work with Swing, though perhaps there are hacks to make it work.
2) It doesn't look native. I really like the metal java LNF, but the people I work with don't. Due to a poorly designed past project they hate java, so we need to either write native code (in which case our project would take 5x longer and have half the features), or make it look native. This means we need to use SWT.
Notice that nobody else does this sort of BS. For instance, when IE screws up, people don't blame C++, but every time a java program is sucky, people blame java first, and the program never.
Oh well, such is life.
If swing can get a really good windows LNF, and good drag and drop, then perhaps we (and everyone else) will switch back. SWT is a pain, mostly due to the.dlls and such.
Do keep in mind though that not all energy is created equal. If it takes some number of units of heat and electricity, we needn't assume they come from oil. Really, studies like this need to break things out into "portable" and "non-portable" energy forms. If it uses more portable energy than it produces, then it's a loser. If it uses less portable energy, but some additional amount of non-portable energy then it could still work out OK.
At the end of the day, we don't make electricity out of oil, so a process that uses electricity and produces oil/ethanol might be useful if we need oil, and have electricity to burn.
This is one of the primary justifications for things like widespread solar and nuclear power sources. Though they don't help our dependence on oil directly, by giving us a limitless/very large source of electricity, we are more able to undertake processes that consume electricity but produce oil/ethanol, helping to reduce the constraints on oil supplies.
Another good example of this is Hydrogen. Hydrogen production is important, but not because you'll run your car on it. It is used in all sorts of industry (including oil refining), and can easily be used with Thermal Depolymerization (TDP) to produce oil from all sorts of useless trash, literally. We currently make hydrogen from natural gas, so it's not worth it to use that hydrogen to make oil, but if we could make it from something else, then the whole equation changes. Lots of industry that burns natural gas or coal, or uses it chemically, could use the produced hydrogen instead, and the natural gas could be used to power vehicles, or even be directly converted into oil.
It's very much interconnected. Saving electricity doesn't really help here, as we would still be converting coal to oil, which isn't really so helpful from an environmental standpoint. Dramatic new sources of power, however, like widespread solar or nuclear allows us to convert effectively limitless energy to an oil like form, and would change things dramatically.
Once again, life is more complicated than what passes for journalism these days.
OOps, my bad. 1.6 million total, about $100,000 per house. They are paying them exactly what the guys claimed the value of their houses were for tax purposes. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
A few things. First of all, you don't have to go ad-hominim. You have no idea of my income bracket or anything else.
In any case, let us accept that a city needs some money to run. Let us also pretend that a city has 100 units of property in it. This city thus decides that it should apply a property tax to get its money needed to run. Fair enough. Now let us imagine that your house is worth twice the mean house price in the city. It might easily follow that you are using twice the resouces. Twice the electricity to keep it running, twice the police protection too defend it, twice of everything. Shouldn't you then pay twice the mean tax rate? If your house is 2% of the city's property, by value, then why shouldn't you pay 2% of the city's property taxes?
I'm not advocating taking anything away from anyone, merely stating that those who refuse to pay property taxes on the actual value of their property could be forced to sell it, or I guess have leins stack up against it, or whatever. Really, I'm not even advocating (or opposing) a progressive, or any other type of tax code. All I'm saying is that.....
1) People should pay property tax based on actual value, not a made up number that will shield the wicked and screw the honest.
2) This would not only make the tax code more fair, and prevent cheating, but it would also be very helpful to developers, so that they would know exactly how much it would cost to do development.
I never said anything about just seizing property without compensation, which everyone seems to try to imply. The people in this case (you did read the case didn't you?) were offered plenty of money. So much money that virtually all of them sold out immediately. One person was offered around 1.5 million dollars, for property that surely wasn't worth 20% of that figure. If this person can refuse to sell out and hold up the entire project, that should be their right, but to refuse to sell out, and then only pay taxes on some imagined $100,000 value for your now $2,000,000.00 house while condemning all your neighbors to a life in the ghetto, that seems a little bit of a stretch, don't you think?
Since you made some guesses about my economic status, lets see if I can make some about yours that might be a little more accurate.
1) you are a suburbanite. 2) You are middle class, I almost certainly pay more taxes than you do, property taxes or not. 3) Though being a suburbanite almost guarantees that your entire existence is heavily subsidized (universal service funds for electricity and communications, plenty of federal funds for highways, a few troops to protect your SUV's fuel supply, the right to pollute your neighbors for free, excercised freely by said SUV and probably a fairly large, old, and inefficient house that keeps the coal burners cranking out the watts at a steady pace, the list goes on), and you think it's your god given right to fight tooth and claw with anybody who claims that you maybe should pay your fair share. Someone who comes along and says no more free rides, and pay your taxes really gets to you.
Anyway, that's enough for tonight........
And as a side note, I doubt property prices would be so volatile if people paid taxes based on actual value, and the actual value was an actual bid from an arbitrage firm or potential buyer. That would flatten out the fluctuations so fast it would make your head spin. The valuations are just crazy now because nobody really knows what a particular home is worth, because so few of them are on the market, and there is so little arbitrage cleaning up inconsistencies.
Wow, clearly some republicans in the audience, let's see if I can sum up the arguments....
1) How dare you declare that my house is worth whatever someone is willing to pay, I prefer the old system of my house being worth whatever I can bribe the inspector to say it's worth.
2) Bribing an inspector is my idea of a sound investment.
3) How dare you say that I should actually have to pay property taxes, those are for little people. Secondly, how dare you say that I should pay property taxes on the actual value of my home, not my made up (and very low) figure....
I'm not the first one to suggest this, but here's how it should work.
1) When you go to pay your property taxes, you declare the value of your home. You can declare whatever you want, a penny or a fortune, it's your call.
2) When you declare the value, your house goes onto a website, think of it as the ultimate government ebay. Anyone who wants to can bid, including you. At the end of the auction, the highest bidder (which might be you) gets your home for the specified price, and pays property taxes on the price paid. Obviously the thing should have quite a few warnings so people don't accidentally get outbid, and if you win the auction then you just pay the taxes and you're done, but that's the basic idea.
This would solve most of the problem. People would have an incentive to declare the value of thier property truthfully, and the government would get the taxes it actually deserves. If some private entity wants to buy you out, then the price of your home goes up sharply in the next auction, and you have to pay the increased property taxes on that new value to hold them off. Economic development could continue (where it's profitable enough to entice the homeowners), and everyone is happy.
The problem with the current situation is that people can have home values assessed for next to nothing, and yet not be willing to sell for a king's ransom. This happens in NYC all the time, people complain every year if their homes get assessed at even half the market rate, many of them are declared to be worth only a few percent of the market rate, and yet nobody sells. It must be infuriating to a developer, people have super valueable houses, and yet it costs them nothing in taxes (because of low assessments), so there's no way to ever get them to move out when the value skyrockets. They're all holding out for the highest possible bid, and screwing the city out of a lot of property taxes. Clearly something is rotten there, and if the municipal government strikes back, well, neither side is a saint.
That may be true, but it's important to ensure that the venting is fairly slow. It wouldn't hurt to apply some basic tariffs on imports from countries that have slave labor and no environmental regulations (China and India, for instance). The US workers can compete with low cost outsiders, but there's no reason for them to compete agains convict labor or gunpoint sweatshops in China. You can't outright ban those things, but you can at least make them less attractive. In the process, we might help make China a more libertaria and environmentally sound country as well, which would be good for everyone.
A few things would help immensely here....
1) Declare that the feds will not buy things not made in the USA if at all possibly (maybe they'd pay up to twice as much for USA products). That would ensure that the US has at least some of pretty much every industry. It would prevent the cornering of the market that we've seen when foreign countries subsidize their industries, and would be very handy in case of war.
2) Impose corporate taxes as if the company had an effective personal income equivalent to their net income divided by the number of US workers. This would be a significant tax advantage to hiring US workers. After all, if the workers are paying taxes in the US, then perhaps the company may not need to pay quite as much.
3) Impose some fractional tax for any worker paid less than minimum wage. For instance, lets say that for every dollar less than minimum wage paid out, the company's products get tariffed $.25 when entering the US. It wouldn't eliminate the profitability of places like China, but it would reduce it, and it would encourage higher wages overseas, which would be good for everyone.
4) same for environmental regulations. Impose some surcharge on goods entering the country if they violated (what would be) US laws overseas. Emit too much mercury, then it's $.10 per mg above US tolerances spread over the produced products, etc....
Hardly libertarian, and not outright protectionist, but fairly reasonable, in my opinion.
I doubt it man. We hire interns, and I had only a year of (not including internships) experience when I was hired. Many of our programmers have only one or two years experience, and it's not so hard to believe that we'd pick up someone with no experience if we ever found one. It seems common that the first year of experience comes from the most recent internship extending for an extra year, though that wasn't the case for me. It was the case for some other programmers we picked up.
At any level, there are too few programmers who really know their stuff. The problem is actually very simple. Allow me to pontificate....
There are some professions that don't scale well with additional people. For instance, doctors, lawyers, (supposedly) CEOs, and (to a degree) programmers. Hiring 10 sucky doctors is not as good as hiring one good doctor, and 10 sucky lawyers won't win a case for you, whereas one good one will. Consequently, when there's a lot on the line (billion dollar lawsuits, your life, the life of a company, or the life of your infrastructure), it doesn't hurt to pay 5x as much for a 10% increased chance of success. This is not the case for ditchdiggers though, 10 ditch diggers probably are better than 1 really good one, so you can't see huge salary multiples for ditch diggers.
So, just like other skill professions, there is a severe shortage of skilled programmers, and a severe glut of unskilled ones. A programmer who is just 10% worse than average is essentially unemployable, and everyone is desperately trying to find that top 10 or 20%.
The fact is that a lot of programmers out there just have no interest in computers. Many of them couldn't really say how one works, how a compiler works, how a DB works, how an OS works, and these are students coming out of GOOD schools. In my classes at school, less than 10% of the students had any interest in computers at all. The instructor at one point spent 6 weeks describing a linked list, and this was an advanced class! I would also point out the dismal quality of the TAs and research papers (if you've studied a hard science and know some comp sci, read a few published comp sci papers once in awhile, it should be good for a laugh. Publishing unresearched tripe like that in any other science would result in a lynch mob), but this probably isn't the place. Like all fads, CS has a lot of quackery. It will eventually settle down, but until then, expect some turmoil.
exactly. If these people are actually qualified (I have found that about 20% of the "Super senior level god type programer/systemguy/dba and CTO"s out there are qualified to be basic entry level programmers) to be programmers, then I know about 20 companies that would trip over themselves trying to hire them for six figure salaries.
If these people are HTML designers who call themselves CTOs because they can pick colors that look hideous together, then I think that's the root of the problem.
Incompetence no longer guarantees a tech job. Most tech places have about 50% incompetent people, or more. Getting rid of them will be a long, drawn out, process as management learns something about computers and becomes able to recognize competence. While that happens, the dead weight will get cut loose, and we'll hear "OMG, 10% of techies who can't do basic arithmatic have been fired!!!!!" twice a week.
Not quite. If your business is information, you should build your own software. This is where things like banks, insurance companies, perhaps ISPs, etc... fall. Your business is information, if you outsource all the actual "information handling", then what exactly are you adding to the equation? The company that makes the uber bank software package that gives you everything you need to be a bank will, in short order, become a bank itself, or be bought by one.
Same goes for places like boeing and Ford. For Ford to make the software that designs the cars is probably a good idea, but they certainly shouldn't be making their own email program.
So basically, I'm just saying that condition 2 (combined with 3) is sufficient for you to make it yourself, if it is core to your business.
dude, work for a company who's business is information. A bank is a good place to start. Learn some skills, and make something important, and one way or another, it'll all work out.
I agree. You give two weeks notice as a coutresy and (lets be honest) in exchange for a good reccomendation. If you think they won't give you a good rec. (and it doesn't look like they will), or they are squirrly enough that you can't count on a good rec from them, then you don't owe them anything. Tell them to ---- off, and write a letter to your state AG if they even think about trying to withhold a paycheck.
You've clearly never worked on a large project. With any large project, 90% of the work is done in 10% of the time, that other 10% of the work takes 90% of the time.
It's easy to go from nothing to something, and I applaud the Chinese for that. It is much harder to go from something to everything, just look at Japan. China suffers far more from crony capitalism than Japan does, so they have a much greater mess to clean up. Also, as soon as they are no longer the cheapest source of labor in the world, they'll find that businesses aren't flocking in quite as fast, then what do they do? What happens when walmart starts laying them off? And yes, I have actually been to china, large swaths of it at least, so I kindof know what I'm talking about.
It won't be an endless sea of poverty forever, that is good. Go back and watch rising sun, and see what the movie thinks japan will be like compared to what it is, the same thing will happen with China.
Too late, the media companies already beat you to the punch. They won't be giving back the analog spectrum. Friendly coverage of bush before the election, get to keep billions of dollars in spectrum after the election. Everyon (except the taxpayers) is happy.
Wow, interesting? This is a troll. Swing already uses hardware acceleration, and you can't really tell the difference on most apps (in my experience) between swing and SWT.
Yeah, SWT, it's like swing but without all that pesky portability and inherent safety. That's exactly what java needs, I demand more buffer overflows.:-)
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You dork. I said high end x86 boxen have lights out, and yes, I'm aware the HP makes some of said high end x86.
As for 8 ways and such, give me a break. Go to HP's website (http://www.hp.com/ select an 8 way system, and increase its RAM and drive configurations to the standard in the US-IV system. What's it come to? Here's a hint, it's pretty close to $150,000 depending on exactly what you consider to be precisely equivalent to the Sun boxen.
Also, the US-IV systems are all dual core, so we're talking 16 cores. If you could buy a 16 core athlon machine with the sort of ram and Disks that the suns have, it wouldn't cost 39k, if you can get it at all, that is.
I never said the price for performance was equivalent, but spec out a few machines and see how close it is. It's the same in the 4-8 core realm (with the V40z), and it's about the same in the 16+ core realm due the difficulty in getting good 8+ core x86 systems. 48 cores of US-IV will be expensive, but there aren't a lot of x86 boxes out there that can touch it's whole-system performance. And yes, I too know what I'm talking about.
I've actually had to deal with the JBoss guys on several occasions (I brought them in to compete for a few bids at my company), and I can't stand them. They are the least responsive vendor I have ever seen, and that's saying something. They're more arrogant and confrontational than Reuters or Bloomberg, and that's an almost miraculous achievement.
I am glad that they have succeeded, as if JBoss does for app servers what Linux did for Operating Systems, that will be a good thing. Unfortunately, I see a rocky future for them, probably. It seems that if you want to use the service business model, telling your customers to screw off at every opportunity is not a good plan, and it will hurt you eventually.
I also think their focus is slightly misplaced, but that's a minor technical issue. Presumably it will be fixed as JBoss becomes more mature. With a little time, hopefully by JBoss 5.0, they'll have a much more impressive AS, with fewer weakpoints. Perhaps then they can really strive to fix the few weaknesses they have.
If you're NASA, you probably find the Altix supercomputers pretty compelling. If you're an iBank, you probably find the 8-24 way dual core (48 cores in the big ones) Sun boxes pretty useful for processing all your data and trades.
Sun boxes are about the same cost as x86 boxes in the high end, and they have all the stuff you really need. 64-bit, lights out management (you can discover problems in the hardware even after it has crashed, because it contains a little computer on a chip designed just to report the statte of the hardware, power cycle it, etc....), lots of PCI cards, SSL accelerator cards, lots of ram slots, disk slots, raid cards, etc....
Your average 8 proc US-IV system (16 cores) from Sun costs about the same as an 8 proc (8 cores) Opteron system from HP, for similar configurations. It (supposedly) has much better support for things like SSL cards and massive multiprocessing/multithreading, especially under java.
Someone probably should buy SGI and Cray. There is a market for high end (top 500) supercomputers and other high end data processing systems.
One of my friends worked for Google, and he told me their stories. We both worked for Microsoft. Google is FAR more arrogant. Among other things, they decided to open a branch in India because they've "exhausted the talent supply in the United States." This is all the more remarkable because they only have a few thousand employees, only a few hundred in NYC. Apparently they've got all 300 or so good programmers in NYC. That certainly came as a shock to me, especially considering that most other places in NYC pay MUCH more than Google does. Perhaps they've exhausted the supply of talented people willing to work for half the industry standard wage?
In any case, arrogance breeds downfall, soon enough. Most of the Microserfs I met were not terribly arrogant, not moreso than your average techie at least. Though Google loving seems to be the order of the day, I'm not such a fan. A company valued at 100x earnings that thinks it vomits sunshine, well, granny's pension fund is going to lose some money.
There's more to the situation.
Islam has always been a melded church and state, even more so than the Catholics ever did. For many years (up to the present) there has been essentially no difference between clerics and rulers, usually they were the same people, still are. This causes pervasive problems. Not the least of which is that those who hold the reigns of government are religiously obligated to eradicate the infidels (both the Koran and bible are very clear about converting or killing nonbelievers). Just as bad (and we see some of this in the States) is that the government feels the need to ban or repress science, as both religion and science are claiming to have the truth, and they can't both be right. This makes Theocracies third world countries, and it makes the citizens jealous of those who are not so backwards.
Theocracy and democracy cannot easily coexist, just as Communism and Capitalism have trouble. A Theocracy next to a democracy finds that many of its citizens would flow over the border to join the heathens, and those left behind would hate the outsiders for reasons related to religious dogma and jealousy. You just can't build your dreams on forcing people to strictly adhere to a set of rules if there is a beautiful country nearby without those rules. This will cause persistent conflict that cannot be eliminated without eliminating either Democracy or Theocracy, I know which one I'll pick. One way or another, Theocracy has got to go, there will be no peace until it does.
That being said, the US hasn't been terribly careful in picking its battles (literally and figuratively), but we didn't cause the problem. The problem will continue until there is a concrete change in the world dynamic, leaving them alone won't solve anything. If they were powerful enough to destroy us, they would have done so long ago. We have been powerful enough to destroy them for many years, and yet we have not done so. Fortunately, the balance of power is not likely to ever change.
In the immortal (and misquoted, by me) words of Benjaman Graham....
"Stocks decreasing in price is not a bad thing, it is a good thing. If you saw a sign at your local car dealership that said '10% off', you would be happy, not sad. Furthermore, an investor is almost never forced to sell, if you choose to sell whenever the price dips, then you are turning your primary advantage (having liquid markets) into a disadvantage. You should not be tempted to turn an imaginary loss into a real one through other people's mistakes of judgement."
Markets going down isn't a bad thing, not really. Let the markets do what they will, and worry about the people. If you're concerned with money, then worry about underlying infrastructure, not about the psychology of the masses. If you want to make an investment, then just buy now.
That too will come in time. Soon enough, the various markets will saturate, and prices will start to fall, then companies will move on to the harder tasks where there is still money.
I'm not a big "invisible hand" guy, but modulo a few sticking points (microsoft document formats, monopolies, etc...) things have slowly started to reach that point. A lot of the low level stuff is slowly (or quickly) falling into opensource, and there in no return from that black hole. JBoss, Apache, Linux, Open Office, the list goes on. Two of the three most common web browsers are now opensource, IE being the only real holdout.
For now, this is a short term effect. More money is being squeezed out of a few sectors that are now nearing saturation. Profits will fall rapidly as saturation occurs, and employment (which has already dropped) will perhaps decline further. It is likely that most programming jobs will follow the businesses they serve into the major metropolitan areas, just like the doctors and lawyers. The profitability of the valley won't affect this, it's the way of the future.
If you really know how to program well, NYC is callling your name. Actual competent people are exceedingly rare (due to the endless appetites of the iBanks for programmers). The payscale and environment are both very friendly. Get accustomed to working 45 hour weeks, but not much more than that, and for very good pay.
Your historical points are true, but somewhat less valid now.
.dlls and such.
Currently, swing is slightly faster than SWT. It uses full (or sometimes partial) hardware acceleration, and therefore doesn't end up rendering much with the CPU. This is expected to improve further in the future.
The real problem with swing (currently) has two parts.
1) No drag and drop. In SWT you can drag and drop a grid of stuff into Excel, for instance. This does not (as near as I can tell) work with Swing, though perhaps there are hacks to make it work.
2) It doesn't look native. I really like the metal java LNF, but the people I work with don't. Due to a poorly designed past project they hate java, so we need to either write native code (in which case our project would take 5x longer and have half the features), or make it look native. This means we need to use SWT.
Notice that nobody else does this sort of BS. For instance, when IE screws up, people don't blame C++, but every time a java program is sucky, people blame java first, and the program never.
Oh well, such is life.
If swing can get a really good windows LNF, and good drag and drop, then perhaps we (and everyone else) will switch back. SWT is a pain, mostly due to the
Do keep in mind though that not all energy is created equal. If it takes some number of units of heat and electricity, we needn't assume they come from oil. Really, studies like this need to break things out into "portable" and "non-portable" energy forms. If it uses more portable energy than it produces, then it's a loser. If it uses less portable energy, but some additional amount of non-portable energy then it could still work out OK.
At the end of the day, we don't make electricity out of oil, so a process that uses electricity and produces oil/ethanol might be useful if we need oil, and have electricity to burn.
This is one of the primary justifications for things like widespread solar and nuclear power sources. Though they don't help our dependence on oil directly, by giving us a limitless/very large source of electricity, we are more able to undertake processes that consume electricity but produce oil/ethanol, helping to reduce the constraints on oil supplies.
Another good example of this is Hydrogen. Hydrogen production is important, but not because you'll run your car on it. It is used in all sorts of industry (including oil refining), and can easily be used with Thermal Depolymerization (TDP) to produce oil from all sorts of useless trash, literally. We currently make hydrogen from natural gas, so it's not worth it to use that hydrogen to make oil, but if we could make it from something else, then the whole equation changes. Lots of industry that burns natural gas or coal, or uses it chemically, could use the produced hydrogen instead, and the natural gas could be used to power vehicles, or even be directly converted into oil.
It's very much interconnected. Saving electricity doesn't really help here, as we would still be converting coal to oil, which isn't really so helpful from an environmental standpoint. Dramatic new sources of power, however, like widespread solar or nuclear allows us to convert effectively limitless energy to an oil like form, and would change things dramatically.
Once again, life is more complicated than what passes for journalism these days.
OOps, my bad. 1.6 million total, about $100,000 per house. They are paying them exactly what the guys claimed the value of their houses were for tax purposes. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
A few things. First of all, you don't have to go ad-hominim. You have no idea of my income bracket or anything else.
In any case, let us accept that a city needs some money to run. Let us also pretend that a city has 100 units of property in it. This city thus decides that it should apply a property tax to get its money needed to run. Fair enough. Now let us imagine that your house is worth twice the mean house price in the city. It might easily follow that you are using twice the resouces. Twice the electricity to keep it running, twice the police protection too defend it, twice of everything. Shouldn't you then pay twice the mean tax rate? If your house is 2% of the city's property, by value, then why shouldn't you pay 2% of the city's property taxes?
I'm not advocating taking anything away from anyone, merely stating that those who refuse to pay property taxes on the actual value of their property could be forced to sell it, or I guess have leins stack up against it, or whatever. Really, I'm not even advocating (or opposing) a progressive, or any other type of tax code. All I'm saying is that.....
1) People should pay property tax based on actual value, not a made up number that will shield the wicked and screw the honest.
2) This would not only make the tax code more fair, and prevent cheating, but it would also be very helpful to developers, so that they would know exactly how much it would cost to do development.
I never said anything about just seizing property without compensation, which everyone seems to try to imply. The people in this case (you did read the case didn't you?) were offered plenty of money. So much money that virtually all of them sold out immediately. One person was offered around 1.5 million dollars, for property that surely wasn't worth 20% of that figure. If this person can refuse to sell out and hold up the entire project, that should be their right, but to refuse to sell out, and then only pay taxes on some imagined $100,000 value for your now $2,000,000.00 house while condemning all your neighbors to a life in the ghetto, that seems a little bit of a stretch, don't you think?
Since you made some guesses about my economic status, lets see if I can make some about yours that might be a little more accurate.
1) you are a suburbanite.
2) You are middle class, I almost certainly pay more taxes than you do, property taxes or not.
3) Though being a suburbanite almost guarantees that your entire existence is heavily subsidized (universal service funds for electricity and communications, plenty of federal funds for highways, a few troops to protect your SUV's fuel supply, the right to pollute your neighbors for free, excercised freely by said SUV and probably a fairly large, old, and inefficient house that keeps the coal burners cranking out the watts at a steady pace, the list goes on), and you think it's your god given right to fight tooth and claw with anybody who claims that you maybe should pay your fair share. Someone who comes along and says no more free rides, and pay your taxes really gets to you.
Anyway, that's enough for tonight........
And as a side note, I doubt property prices would be so volatile if people paid taxes based on actual value, and the actual value was an actual bid from an arbitrage firm or potential buyer. That would flatten out the fluctuations so fast it would make your head spin. The valuations are just crazy now because nobody really knows what a particular home is worth, because so few of them are on the market, and there is so little arbitrage cleaning up inconsistencies.
Wow, clearly some republicans in the audience, let's see if I can sum up the arguments....
1) How dare you declare that my house is worth whatever someone is willing to pay, I prefer the old system of my house being worth whatever I can bribe the inspector to say it's worth.
2) Bribing an inspector is my idea of a sound investment.
3) How dare you say that I should actually have to pay property taxes, those are for little people. Secondly, how dare you say that I should pay property taxes on the actual value of my home, not my made up (and very low) figure....
4) Stupidest thing I've ever heard.....(not sure why really).
With such luminaries as yourselves correcting me, I feel confident that I will be a genius soon.
I'm not the first one to suggest this, but here's how it should work.
1) When you go to pay your property taxes, you declare the value of your home. You can declare whatever you want, a penny or a fortune, it's your call.
2) When you declare the value, your house goes onto a website, think of it as the ultimate government ebay. Anyone who wants to can bid, including you. At the end of the auction, the highest bidder (which might be you) gets your home for the specified price, and pays property taxes on the price paid. Obviously the thing should have quite a few warnings so people don't accidentally get outbid, and if you win the auction then you just pay the taxes and you're done, but that's the basic idea.
This would solve most of the problem. People would have an incentive to declare the value of thier property truthfully, and the government would get the taxes it actually deserves. If some private entity wants to buy you out, then the price of your home goes up sharply in the next auction, and you have to pay the increased property taxes on that new value to hold them off. Economic development could continue (where it's profitable enough to entice the homeowners), and everyone is happy.
The problem with the current situation is that people can have home values assessed for next to nothing, and yet not be willing to sell for a king's ransom. This happens in NYC all the time, people complain every year if their homes get assessed at even half the market rate, many of them are declared to be worth only a few percent of the market rate, and yet nobody sells. It must be infuriating to a developer, people have super valueable houses, and yet it costs them nothing in taxes (because of low assessments), so there's no way to ever get them to move out when the value skyrockets. They're all holding out for the highest possible bid, and screwing the city out of a lot of property taxes. Clearly something is rotten there, and if the municipal government strikes back, well, neither side is a saint.
if you're in the NYC area, email me your resume.
tjw19@columbia.edu
Um, I hate to break it to you, but that is the situation already. At least in my neck of the woods.
That may be true, but it's important to ensure that the venting is fairly slow. It wouldn't hurt to apply some basic tariffs on imports from countries that have slave labor and no environmental regulations (China and India, for instance). The US workers can compete with low cost outsiders, but there's no reason for them to compete agains convict labor or gunpoint sweatshops in China. You can't outright ban those things, but you can at least make them less attractive. In the process, we might help make China a more libertaria and environmentally sound country as well, which would be good for everyone.
A few things would help immensely here....
1) Declare that the feds will not buy things not made in the USA if at all possibly (maybe they'd pay up to twice as much for USA products). That would ensure that the US has at least some of pretty much every industry. It would prevent the cornering of the market that we've seen when foreign countries subsidize their industries, and would be very handy in case of war.
2) Impose corporate taxes as if the company had an effective personal income equivalent to their net income divided by the number of US workers. This would be a significant tax advantage to hiring US workers. After all, if the workers are paying taxes in the US, then perhaps the company may not need to pay quite as much.
3) Impose some fractional tax for any worker paid less than minimum wage. For instance, lets say that for every dollar less than minimum wage paid out, the company's products get tariffed $.25 when entering the US. It wouldn't eliminate the profitability of places like China, but it would reduce it, and it would encourage higher wages overseas, which would be good for everyone.
4) same for environmental regulations. Impose some surcharge on goods entering the country if they violated (what would be) US laws overseas. Emit too much mercury, then it's $.10 per mg above US tolerances spread over the produced products, etc....
Hardly libertarian, and not outright protectionist, but fairly reasonable, in my opinion.
I doubt it man. We hire interns, and I had only a year of (not including internships) experience when I was hired. Many of our programmers have only one or two years experience, and it's not so hard to believe that we'd pick up someone with no experience if we ever found one. It seems common that the first year of experience comes from the most recent internship extending for an extra year, though that wasn't the case for me. It was the case for some other programmers we picked up.
At any level, there are too few programmers who really know their stuff. The problem is actually very simple. Allow me to pontificate....
There are some professions that don't scale well with additional people. For instance, doctors, lawyers, (supposedly) CEOs, and (to a degree) programmers. Hiring 10 sucky doctors is not as good as hiring one good doctor, and 10 sucky lawyers won't win a case for you, whereas one good one will. Consequently, when there's a lot on the line (billion dollar lawsuits, your life, the life of a company, or the life of your infrastructure), it doesn't hurt to pay 5x as much for a 10% increased chance of success. This is not the case for ditchdiggers though, 10 ditch diggers probably are better than 1 really good one, so you can't see huge salary multiples for ditch diggers.
So, just like other skill professions, there is a severe shortage of skilled programmers, and a severe glut of unskilled ones. A programmer who is just 10% worse than average is essentially unemployable, and everyone is desperately trying to find that top 10 or 20%.
The fact is that a lot of programmers out there just have no interest in computers. Many of them couldn't really say how one works, how a compiler works, how a DB works, how an OS works, and these are students coming out of GOOD schools. In my classes at school, less than 10% of the students had any interest in computers at all. The instructor at one point spent 6 weeks describing a linked list, and this was an advanced class! I would also point out the dismal quality of the TAs and research papers (if you've studied a hard science and know some comp sci, read a few published comp sci papers once in awhile, it should be good for a laugh. Publishing unresearched tripe like that in any other science would result in a lynch mob), but this probably isn't the place. Like all fads, CS has a lot of quackery. It will eventually settle down, but until then, expect some turmoil.
exactly. If these people are actually qualified (I have found that about 20% of the "Super senior level god type programer/systemguy/dba and CTO"s out there are qualified to be basic entry level programmers) to be programmers, then I know about 20 companies that would trip over themselves trying to hire them for six figure salaries.
If these people are HTML designers who call themselves CTOs because they can pick colors that look hideous together, then I think that's the root of the problem.
Incompetence no longer guarantees a tech job. Most tech places have about 50% incompetent people, or more. Getting rid of them will be a long, drawn out, process as management learns something about computers and becomes able to recognize competence. While that happens, the dead weight will get cut loose, and we'll hear "OMG, 10% of techies who can't do basic arithmatic have been fired!!!!!" twice a week.
Not quite. If your business is information, you should build your own software. This is where things like banks, insurance companies, perhaps ISPs, etc... fall. Your business is information, if you outsource all the actual "information handling", then what exactly are you adding to the equation? The company that makes the uber bank software package that gives you everything you need to be a bank will, in short order, become a bank itself, or be bought by one.
Same goes for places like boeing and Ford. For Ford to make the software that designs the cars is probably a good idea, but they certainly shouldn't be making their own email program.
So basically, I'm just saying that condition 2 (combined with 3) is sufficient for you to make it yourself, if it is core to your business.
dude, work for a company who's business is information. A bank is a good place to start. Learn some skills, and make something important, and one way or another, it'll all work out.
I agree. You give two weeks notice as a coutresy and (lets be honest) in exchange for a good reccomendation. If you think they won't give you a good rec. (and it doesn't look like they will), or they are squirrly enough that you can't count on a good rec from them, then you don't owe them anything. Tell them to ---- off, and write a letter to your state AG if they even think about trying to withhold a paycheck.
You've clearly never worked on a large project. With any large project, 90% of the work is done in 10% of the time, that other 10% of the work takes 90% of the time.
It's easy to go from nothing to something, and I applaud the Chinese for that. It is much harder to go from something to everything, just look at Japan. China suffers far more from crony capitalism than Japan does, so they have a much greater mess to clean up. Also, as soon as they are no longer the cheapest source of labor in the world, they'll find that businesses aren't flocking in quite as fast, then what do they do? What happens when walmart starts laying them off? And yes, I have actually been to china, large swaths of it at least, so I kindof know what I'm talking about.
It won't be an endless sea of poverty forever, that is good. Go back and watch rising sun, and see what the movie thinks japan will be like compared to what it is, the same thing will happen with China.
In addition, if they could avoid trying to vote away our rights, that would be great too.
thanks.
Too late, the media companies already beat you to the punch. They won't be giving back the analog spectrum. Friendly coverage of bush before the election, get to keep billions of dollars in spectrum after the election. Everyon (except the taxpayers) is happy.
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/LIS/archive/bar
Wow, interesting? This is a troll. Swing already uses hardware acceleration, and you can't really tell the difference on most apps (in my experience) between swing and SWT.
Yeah, SWT, it's like swing but without all that pesky portability and inherent safety. That's exactly what java needs, I demand more buffer overflows.