"truly globalized and free economy" may be a wish for some but it is the fallacy. Take India, where they can compete and are even given preference on contracts within the US as minority owned businesses. However, to get a contract in India, as a foreign company, makes winning the lottery look easy. A rule as simple as "sustaining displaced workers." The "English" version means you need to hire a worker in India if your business would displace that worker in order to do business there.
Free traders need to recognize that we have neither free nor fair trade and being the first to unilaterally choose the option has proven a complete failure to all except those few board members making millions on the savings.
So... we shouldn't listen to people who made mistakes in the past? I think that if someone was running up the street and said the road ahead was out, you might want to listen --- even if he did drive off it.
"You" only get dragged in front of a judge if you are a fool. Anyone who believes they can go into a court without a lawyer truly has a fool for a client.
Having said that, you may still end up in court, and if you have setup a deletion policy (even if it is a policy that no logs are kept), and you follow the policy in all cases, little can be done. There is sufficient precedent to support the deletion of logs, emails, etc. as perfectly legal and within the realm of business propriety. Where trouble starts is having a policy of one day, but only following it when you feel like it. Or leaving it to the end user - which is the same as not having a policy.
It should be exciting to think about the vast majority of humans who need habitats. They will not have $15,000,000, as their average income rounds out around $60 per week.
If you want to impress me with the home of the future, describe a place that can provide protection from the elements, including hurricanes, monsoons, etc. Provide warmth, cooling (for food), waste elimination and water filtration (see Dollar a day). All on an average yearly income of less than $3200 Per Capita Income
We have a lot of intelligent people in the world looking to make good things great while the vast, vast, majority of people are just looking to make horrible, merely bad.
You are in _their_ movie theater and you bought a ticket - thus agreeing to any conditions they wish to place on it. If they say you cannot come in with clothes on - they can prevent you from doing so. You do not have to buy a ticket, and you have no "right" to movies, coffee, etc. If they block the signal while you are on the street you may have a claim but to claim it "may" prevent you from calling 911 while in their building, under a contract (the ticket) is a lost argument.
What you really mean is you want to do whatever you wish regardless of the impact on others on your conditions. How ego-centric of you. If you want to sit behind me and call your buddy to tell him you will meet him in 90 minutes. "How's the movie - well, we are about to get to the part where we find out Darth Vader is Luke's father" I believe other movie goers should have the _right_ to beat you with your cell phone until you and it are silent.
Jammers are a much better option than movie theaters needing to police the audience or the audience having to go and complain - or confront the donkey who uses the phone in the first place.
I agree, but I also suspect it will be a difficult sell to them too. If Google were to have an "accidental" release of data, you - as the personal responsible for protecting it, are hosed. While it is possible that data can leak from anywhere, the chances that it will come off my network are a lot less than Google. People are not trying to directly hack me every day - just to make a name for themselves (and critical data is not on a internet accessible machine).
Further, when I shred a document - I know it is gone. Google will keep it for eternity - like it or not. Then when the government requests the records and my lawyer would have stopped them, Google will turn it over to them without telling me.
This is home use only and even then, I recommend openoffice over this option. Anyone trusting security to an ISP or web site are going to lose eventually.
While I imagine I am headed for -255 troll...People in power write laws, enact regulations, and monkey with the system to remain in power.
Consider redistricting, which should really be called the lottery for those in power. You get to redistrict to ensure you stay in power. What Tom Delay did with redistricting in Texas was not illegal, because the law was on his side. Was it right? Ask someone from each party and the answer is different. Perhaps the Democrats are just mad they did not think of it first, or glad they would not run that far outside the ethical center.
Or what happened at the State of the Union where Cindy Sheehan was arrested. I am not saying I agree or do not with her politics, but look at it from the outside. The President had a citizen arrested, who disagreed with him. That it was a Capital police officer, is a distinction made in the US.
George Washington warned about foreign entanglements, because the compromise our ability to make a stand. If we want the Chinese to change their behavior, then we need to offer them an incentive. Unfortunately, we have become seriously "entangled." China now holds sufficient US currency to bankrupt America. Not the philosophical bankrupt, but the real - worse than 1929 depression kind. Worse, we gave them full trade status because there was money to be made.
Walmart, the nation's largest employer, now imports over 80% of their goods from China and makes up 1% of the Chinese GDP. What do you think they or other industries will tell a President thinking about an embargo or a serious response to China's stand?
I am not suggesting we agree with the Chinese or even remain silent. But, we need to have something tangible or each time we speak out, we sound weaker. The Chinese know we have little affect on their future and find us more a curiosity than an threat. Until we can position ourselves to have real leverage, they have no reason to listen, or even care.
Other than a full license to Graffiti, there is little for Palm to offer. Don't get me wrong, I own a Palm Pilot and am probably one of the few left who love it.
However, I can easily see Apple producing a product of superior technology with as good an interface, based on the iPod. In fact, my iPod supports full motion video, gigs of data, and a simple interface. Start adding features and you face the Palm conundrum: How do you change the interface to a vastly successful product, and keep your customer base?
Part of Palm's other dilemma was its success. I have had the same Palm Pilot since it came out five years ago. It does everything I need, it syncs to my desktop, keeps outlook happy (oops that may be an Apple issue), and allows me to handle the things I want to. It will be interesting to see if iPod suffers the same issues.
If you want to make me a happy camper - make an iPod version with a nice 4" screen, support for palm like applications (notebook, address book, calendar, etc.) and support Ebook formats. Then provide a truly open development environment. One of the great things about palm was how many 3rd part applications were available because Palm wined and dined independent developers. But that means you (the platform owner) do not control everything on your platform.
Such a tool would allow me to hold my videos, books, and all the last things my palm does today. But none of these require palm to provide.
But wait -- what about the phone? Forget it. While some people do use the phone to replace the palm, most never do much but store phone numbers. Further, people are used to a phone being replaced every two years - for free. That is a market that pays for itself in the marketing of minutes. Not a good place to play.
We can retaliate, but this idea that we can "glass their a$$" if they nuke us is just false. We may, and may is really strong word, be able to drop a tactical nuke. But that is about it.
Why would we not just wipe them out, you ask? Because we do not have "limited theater nuclear weapons." That's the fancy term for "we cannot stop the fallout from moving." So if NK attacks and we just send in one ICBM, we will spread fallout over NK, Japan and China. NK - well they got what they asked for. Japan - they are an ally and we would be really sorry. China -- well they are going to look at this about the way we would if China nuked Mexico (assuming Mexico deserved it), and Texas became a wasteland.
The middle east? Just as bad. Nuke Syria and you are going to glass a bunch of desert and poison a lot of people. These will then become terrorists of tomorrow (or freedom fighters depending on your view). On top of which Israel would be drawn in, they would use a nuke or two and suddenly you can get all the oil for free but you need a lead suit to fill up at the pump.
In reality, if they get one to us, they would hurt us big. Not because they would win the war (the knew that would not happen), but they would ruin the economy. Look at post 9-11 economics, four buildings and 2600 people die (very bad). It took two years to get the economy back and we could go to ground zero that afternoon. Now imagine 9-11b where Los Angeles is uninhabitable for even 5 years and having to move 7 million people to other areas of the country.
As someone said on the Sunday talk show circuit, we have to be right 100% of the time, without creating a prison for our population. They only have to get it right once.
If you were sitting in Napster's corporate offices in December, you were probably wondering what was worse, the quick death you thought you would get or the slow painful fall into nothingness you seemed to find.
Now, if Google is really interested, they cannot come out and say "please save us." They need, like SCO, to keep at least the illusion that they are viable so the price does not plummet before they can sell.
I do wonder though, what does Google get out of this?
Mr. Horowitz is neither enlightened, or the least bit interested in fairness. I live in PA and the bill HR177, has defined that the GOP shall staff the review board (an amendment to make it equal to both parties failed on a party line vote). Further, required information when identifying a professor for "review" is their political affiliation. So now we will have a GOP appointed committee deciding if a non-GOP teacher show bias to a student making a complaint.
Can you imagine the outrage if Democrats had suggested such a bill? If you really believe this to be an enlightened approach to fairness, then I fear for us all.
To add insult to injury - the representatives will be reimbursed for any expenses they incur while investigating a claim, but no such provision is made for the professor, or school.
Even if they mean what they are saying today, the very existence of the data allows someone to start collecting, retaining, analyzing and suing. The Itunes privacy policy ends with: Apple may update its privacy policy from time to time. When we change the policy in a material way a notice will be posted on our website along with the updated privacy policy.
So today they say they will not collect it. Tomorrow, as part of a RIAA lawsuit, they must collect and reveal the information. Further, the RIAA will make the case that if Apple tells anyone, it will show up on slashdot, and all of you criminals will know.
Apple should just remove the code or stop making excuses. They monitor - if you do not like it, do not buy the product. But that would sound unsympathetic to their customers, so they flounder in this legalese.
I wish I had points to up you. Yours is the approached I have used for far more than 8+ years and it works for the benefit of everyone. Not too time consuming but it give the person coming in some idea of what you may have been thinking. This is especially important when that "someone" is you and it has been three years.
Can someone explain why we can standardize street signs and the amount of sugar allowed in school lunches but we cannot get a standardized election system?
After the 2000 election debacle, we had money thrown at the states to "fix the problem." So we ended up with 35 different solutions.
A simple federal mandate - the voter must be verifiable, their vote must be able to be able to be authenticated after they leave the booth, in the event of a recount and the system can be fully audited. Instead, we have systems with no paper trails, questionable vendor operations, and seemingly contradictory election results.
We can make millions of secure stock sales, bank transfers and on-line purchases daily, and we cannot get a vote counted and auditable? The people who produced these machines should be fired for stupidity and forced to return our money.
Where can anyone now draw the line? The judge ruled that there wasn't a compelling enough reason, such as preventing imminent violence The Illinois law, would have barred stores from selling or renting extremely violent or sexual games to minors.
Deeper into the ruling the judge makes an interesting statement: "The First Amendment embodies a principle that is at the core of our political system and our national ethos: "each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence." A law that restricts speech because of its message "contravenes this essential right. For this reason, content-based regulations are presumptively invalid."
Couldn't the same argument be made for anything? Movies? Porn? If you get specific about what constitutes imminent violence even guns qualify. In essence, you cannot stop someone from selling anything to anyone because you cannot prove it creates or produces an immanent threat to anyone.
If I were the porn industry, the focus would change to video games. Why not, since I can now sell to anyone, regardless of age. They cannot do that with magazines and online.
For the posters who said - it is up to parents. I agree to a point. I watch my children, however I still expect the police to arrest drug dealers, child molesters, etc. While I can watch mine, who knows if you are watching yours. Sure, you buy them Super Mario Brothers XXVIII, but they took the birthday money from grandma and bought Leisure Suit Larry does Las Vegas. It is also a contiguous fight with game manufactures to really explain what is going on in the game. While I would have passed on GTA for the violence, I must have missed the "Contains explicit sexual acts" statement on the game - oh wait, it wasn't on the game.
The students today are reading it correctly. While I wish it were otherwise, this is not a long term career anymore. If you hit a hot technology you can ride that for a good while but looking at the market in general few people I know will recommend IT as a career. IT has become the assembly line worker of the 1970s or the steel worker of the 1960s. While today, you can find fabricators in niche markets making a lot of money, the vast majority moved to other industries and professions.
I run an IT Consulting company and cannot recommend this to family or friends. I am not pessimistic about my company's ability to earn money and keep me comfortable, but in general it is an ugly market to enter.
Here is what the typical college graduate in IT will encounter.
. You will start at fair wages and long hours. Under difficult deadlines and penny pinching companies you will be squeezed for everything you can produce.
. You are considered an "expense" that must be controlled. More often than not you will get an "good boy" instead of a bonus.
. You are as respected and appreciated as a union laborer.
. There is a pervasive belief that you are interchangeable with any other developer at half the price.
. Unlike other industries where age implies experience (and we can all argue whether it should), in IT age is taken as an indicator of being "behind".
. If you do not work at a software company, you salary will top out around 35 and you will get slightly lower than COLA in subsequent years.
. There is always someone willing to do your job for less than. They will be in two categories Offshore or Fresh out of University. It does not make sense logically, but bean counters do not use logic of this type.
. Your experience is weighed against your age/salary and with few exceptions age/salary will do you in. I often (too often) hear people say for what they pay a 40 year developer they can get three out of college - and then they do.
. Churn is high, making job security low - It is a myth contractors are fired first.
As I said, I make my living on this and while I hire and pay well, most of my competitors do not. They often win bids because they can low ball me. I often win second rounds because the first round was spent with nothing produced and we put a team on the ground that gets results. However, success does not matter these days, its all about price. I can guarantee a project for $700,000 and someone with next to zero experience bidding $675,000 will get it. Most often they bid $250,000 figuring once they get in it will be hard to get them out. (There is a reason recruiters for programming shops are called pimps)
Well, now that I vented most of that, I feel better. I am guessing this will end up flame-bait or troll (of which it is neither). It is a reflection of my frustration as I watch good developers move into other industries so they can have a family and pay a mortgage.
If you really want to help your students, stop teaching regular IT and focus on niche markets - embedded systems, AI, robotics. Things that are bleeding edge. Make the course horribly difficult so only the best and brightest make it through. It is better to choose another career in college than at 40. Add project management courses and "learning to learn" because anyone entering this as profession will need to stay on the bleeding edge or be unemployed. The difficult part for you will be replacing the instructors you have with those that can teach these topics.
Now I am guessing people will reply to this with - "Hey - I am doing fine" and that's good for them. I see the industry as a whole, not just the individual programmers and it does not look pretty for a career. For the top 20% sure - the rest...
We deployed it ourselves, and it worked OK for a while, but things went very very wrong when we tried updating one of the configuration parameters, causing us to to inexplicably lose quite a bit of data.
They changed the database parms on part of a large clustered HA system and it is the systems fault you lost data? I would be very interested in hearing what parm(s) were changed. If you mean they changed a parm on part of the cluster, then have them "move away from the keyboard, before someone gets hurt." Every major database (Oracle, DB2, SS) warns about doing such things because the side-effect is nearly impossible to predict.
They had a year to study this and came up with some unusual metrics to say the least. For those who did not read the 44 pages of PDF, let me summarize some of my observations:
- They appear to be more comfortable with Windows than Linux. There is nothing wrong with that except they do not account for it in the time to complete tasks.
- They compared a Windows box running MS SS against two versions of Red Hat running MySQL and Oracle. That the did not use the same data bases on both OS slants the numbers from the start. Even if they wanted to avoid MySQL, they could have selected an Oracle installation.
- They counted vulnerabilities at the component level. So a shared library that had a vulnerability, but was used by both the installed OS and the database is counted twice. One used by the OS, the GUI, and the database, three times, etc. They state this is fair, but this would automatically penalize a Linux distribution because MS does not get counted twice in any case.
- The Red Hat installations were done manually and minimal installations. They then had problems, and make commentary on the difficulty of the upgrades. I would be very interested in the detail of what they did for the install. This appears to be a self-inflicted wound claiming to be otherwise.
- They make an big deal about what ports are open in the default installation. They comment that MS continues to allow MSUpdate, a good thing, but that Linux left the port for up2date open, a bad thing. Again, as a minimalist install they should have secured the ports, but that is dumb argument regardless. Admins who leave a machine wide open deserved to be fired. Because MS now ships theirs with everything closed is a side effect of the number of complaints about bad admins leaving the server in its out of the box state.
- Days to resolve a vulnerability are dangerous guides. First, a vulnerability has to be reported, then verified. We are dependent upon the vendor (MS, Oracle, etc) to correctly reflect these. However, almost anyone can and does report one for OSS - and that is a good thing.
In general, they speak of vulnerabilities and the ability to respond to business requests. I would like to see the requests they specifically refer to. While 68% sounds like a lot, is it the difference between 12 and 26 seconds? I just cannot see in my day to day activities it taking me more than half again as long to do anything and it is far less to image entire boxes. I wonder if this is a familiarity thing.
It is really time someone from RedHat or SUSE took a study like this and dissected it for a comparison 1:1 with MS. None of this it counts twice or differing databases garbage, a real compare. The top 20 tasks an admin will perform in a year. If we loose at least we know what to focus our energies upon. (What does not kill us, makes us stronger)
Supporting a mixed (Windows/Linux/Solaris) environment, I just do not see a 68% difference anywhere for an experienced admin.
I do believe in Copyrights (that alone may get this modded down to -255). However, if google lives up to the claim they will only provide snippets, how is that different than what any web site, quoting an author does. Is this web site in violation Dilbert -why you are wrong by quoting from Dilbert? It appears fair use to me.
Where google may have issues, is if anyone figures out a way to reconstruct a book in total. They would give people like this a lot of ammunition against them. Of course, the library does not prevent me from scanning a book if I take it home, but that is something that will be missed in the hype around it. I am not sure how they could prevent this, but these are some pretty smart guys.
In this case, the authors sound more like they want a cut of the click through, regardless of sales. What may be interesting in the end is book sellers would be the most likely to advertise on Google Print. A "click here to buy this book" type of link.
Perhaps I am doing the math wrong here, but this seems to be worse. If you assume after deductions a person has $100,000 of taxable income it comes out to $18330 in taxes. At 23% of purchases, and most Americans saving less than 10%, it is 23% of $90,000 or $20,700. For $2,000 I am willing to do my taxes. The numbers actually get worse as you make less than $100,000 or save less than 10%. I am hard pressed to see how most anyone in our industry would be better off.
As for outsourcing changing direction - If a company wants to buy goods and services they will do it overseas where the tax burden would be far less than 23%.
My suggestion is move it down to 17%, include corporate perks as expenses (you have a driver, that is an expense - to you or the company) and force Congress to balance the budget, unless we declare a war. In which case, the budget can be unbalanced for the time of war + 2 years.
The issue I see today is no one wants to make the hard choices, because its someone else's money they spend. The US 2005 budget was passed by Congress in 2 days. Who could review the entire budget in 2 days? No one. Even the people who wrote it could not tell people what was in it.
Because they said so? While that may mean nothing, at this point it is MS' position that they will not support OpenDocument formats, regardless of requirements by governments.
MS Not supporting OpenDocument
Now MS is claiming the open document standard is inferior, yet they sit on the standards committee. Instead they support the MS XML standard which is a standard for MS documents. Which means it owns (under copyright and soon patent), the format and standard.
Office 12 XML documents will not have an easy introduction into many non-Microsoft products. To do so, you will need to license the format from MS, who has said it sees no reason to support OSS in this regard and the use of MS XML in a GPL'd product would invalidate the GPL, and the MS license. (Microsoft does have some very smart lawyers writing their EULAs and contracts). All the others would need to pay a fee and it is doubtful MS would provide a discount to the disadvantage of their own products.
A better read on OpenDocument vs. MS XML is found on Wheeler's page
The format matters because a company, in part due to its responsibility to stockholders, must have planned obsolescence. MS documents from the 80s are difficult to open and read, even in MS products. An open standard ensures that my documents are available to me, through many companies, for a very long time. Governments need this and are now getting smart enough about technology to understand and demand it. And while no one can imagine MS being gone, the same was said of dozens of top 20 companies over the past 20 years.
As for the comment about the learning curve between open office and MS Office, we can now thank MS. With office 12, they cannot claim an easy transition, the product takes a new direction and whether it is better or not, is irrelevant. The learning curve of going to 12 will be greater than moving to Open Office which retains the current MS office look and feel for the vast majority of users.
Sure, we're not using assembly today, but even some of the more minor systems implemented in C++ are far more complex than anything that was written in pure assembly several decade ago.
The idea that it is dead or less complex is just inaccurate and that is the point being made. Decades ago, assembler was how they created the first multi-threaded (to use current terminology) applications on the mainframe. The idea that systems are less complex, except in the UI level, is an misunderstanding of what was done and continues to be done on some of the largest, fastest processing systems in use today.
Claims processing, airline tracking, financial trades, and systems where tens of thousands of transactions need to occur in seconds were and continue to be supported and developed in assembler. If you live in the US, most states still run a large portion of their internal systems using assembler programs.
For years, I have heard that the differences between MS Office and Open Office were so significant that the cost of retraining was not worth transitioning.
Where are those people today? The same ones that argued that it was not cost effective to retrain, will be arguing this is an incremental change or significant but worth the effort. I can hardly wait for Laura DiDio's "How Office 12 will make your company 12 times more productive" press release disguised as a "research paper."
As several prior posters have said, if you are going to take the upgrade hit, why not take it to open office? It will certainly be less expensive in both licensing and training. And it will support OpenDocument formats, something MS has said they will not do.
The funding of the space program continues to be less and less each year (adjusted for inflation). Even those in NASA recognize it depends on the "will of Congress" to fund such an effort at a time when we are spending $180 Billion a year in Iraq, $200 billion on Katrina, Billions upon billions for Homeland Security and we still have other natural disasters to face (Rita is on her way now).
Further, we do not have the motivation that existed in the 60s, when Russia beat the US into space. It was not just American pride, it was a deterrent, to both sides, to show they had the technology to be a leader in the world. Unless we see China, or India on the moon, it is unlikely to be of such importance that NASA would be funded for it. Even if we do see them, the question may be "So what? We were they ~40 years ago."
Talking about precursors, or the technology we would derive from such an effort, will be lost on the "yes, but we have "X" that needs to be paid for first." I wish it were otherwise, but I just do not get the feeling we have the 60s excitement around space. People look at the technology and fail to see it was possible because it was necessary to fulfill the mission. They are thankful for the derivatives, but many believe another Steve Jobs could create the same in IPOD like fashion.
Fascism: A social and political ideology with the primary guiding principle that the state or nation is the highest priority, rather than personal or individual freedoms.
Slashdot Mirror
"truly globalized and free economy" may be a wish for some but it is the fallacy. Take India, where they can compete and are even given preference on contracts within the US as minority owned businesses. However, to get a contract in India, as a foreign company, makes winning the lottery look easy. A rule as simple as "sustaining displaced workers." The "English" version means you need to hire a worker in India if your business would displace that worker in order to do business there.
Free traders need to recognize that we have neither free nor fair trade and being the first to unilaterally choose the option has proven a complete failure to all except those few board members making millions on the savings.
So... we shouldn't listen to people who made mistakes in the past? I think that if someone was running up the street and said the road ahead was out, you might want to listen --- even if he did drive off it.
"You" only get dragged in front of a judge if you are a fool. Anyone who believes they can go into a court without a lawyer truly has a fool for a client.
Having said that, you may still end up in court, and if you have setup a deletion policy (even if it is a policy that no logs are kept), and you follow the policy in all cases, little can be done. There is sufficient precedent to support the deletion of logs, emails, etc. as perfectly legal and within the realm of business propriety. Where trouble starts is having a policy of one day, but only following it when you feel like it. Or leaving it to the end user - which is the same as not having a policy.
Set a policy - always follow the policy.
It should be exciting to think about the vast majority of humans who need habitats. They will not have $15,000,000, as their average income rounds out around $60 per week. If you want to impress me with the home of the future, describe a place that can provide protection from the elements, including hurricanes, monsoons, etc. Provide warmth, cooling (for food), waste elimination and water filtration (see Dollar a day). All on an average yearly income of less than $3200 Per Capita Income
We have a lot of intelligent people in the world looking to make good things great while the vast, vast, majority of people are just looking to make horrible, merely bad.
While I am sure someone will call this a flame...
You are in _their_ movie theater and you bought a ticket - thus agreeing to any conditions they wish to place on it. If they say you cannot come in with clothes on - they can prevent you from doing so. You do not have to buy a ticket, and you have no "right" to movies, coffee, etc. If they block the signal while you are on the street you may have a claim but to claim it "may" prevent you from calling 911 while in their building, under a contract (the ticket) is a lost argument.
What you really mean is you want to do whatever you wish regardless of the impact on others on your conditions. How ego-centric of you. If you want to sit behind me and call your buddy to tell him you will meet him in 90 minutes. "How's the movie - well, we are about to get to the part where we find out Darth Vader is Luke's father" I believe other movie goers should have the _right_ to beat you with your cell phone until you and it are silent.
Jammers are a much better option than movie theaters needing to police the audience or the audience having to go and complain - or confront the donkey who uses the phone in the first place.
I agree, but I also suspect it will be a difficult sell to them too. If Google were to have an "accidental" release of data, you - as the personal responsible for protecting it, are hosed. While it is possible that data can leak from anywhere, the chances that it will come off my network are a lot less than Google. People are not trying to directly hack me every day - just to make a name for themselves (and critical data is not on a internet accessible machine).
Further, when I shred a document - I know it is gone. Google will keep it for eternity - like it or not. Then when the government requests the records and my lawyer would have stopped them, Google will turn it over to them without telling me.
This is home use only and even then, I recommend openoffice over this option. Anyone trusting security to an ISP or web site are going to lose eventually.
While I imagine I am headed for -255 troll...People in power write laws, enact regulations, and monkey with the system to remain in power.
Consider redistricting, which should really be called the lottery for those in power. You get to redistrict to ensure you stay in power. What Tom Delay did with redistricting in Texas was not illegal, because the law was on his side. Was it right? Ask someone from each party and the answer is different. Perhaps the Democrats are just mad they did not think of it first, or glad they would not run that far outside the ethical center.
Or what happened at the State of the Union where Cindy Sheehan was arrested. I am not saying I agree or do not with her politics, but look at it from the outside. The President had a citizen arrested, who disagreed with him. That it was a Capital police officer, is a distinction made in the US.
George Washington warned about foreign entanglements, because the compromise our ability to make a stand. If we want the Chinese to change their behavior, then we need to offer them an incentive. Unfortunately, we have become seriously "entangled." China now holds sufficient US currency to bankrupt America. Not the philosophical bankrupt, but the real - worse than 1929 depression kind. Worse, we gave them full trade status because there was money to be made.
Walmart, the nation's largest employer, now imports over 80% of their goods from China and makes up 1% of the Chinese GDP. What do you think they or other industries will tell a President thinking about an embargo or a serious response to China's stand?
I am not suggesting we agree with the Chinese or even remain silent. But, we need to have something tangible or each time we speak out, we sound weaker. The Chinese know we have little affect on their future and find us more a curiosity than an threat. Until we can position ourselves to have real leverage, they have no reason to listen, or even care.
Other than a full license to Graffiti, there is little for Palm to offer. Don't get me wrong, I own a Palm Pilot and am probably one of the few left who love it.
However, I can easily see Apple producing a product of superior technology with as good an interface, based on the iPod. In fact, my iPod supports full motion video, gigs of data, and a simple interface. Start adding features and you face the Palm conundrum: How do you change the interface to a vastly successful product, and keep your customer base?
Part of Palm's other dilemma was its success. I have had the same Palm Pilot since it came out five years ago. It does everything I need, it syncs to my desktop, keeps outlook happy (oops that may be an Apple issue), and allows me to handle the things I want to. It will be interesting to see if iPod suffers the same issues.
If you want to make me a happy camper - make an iPod version with a nice 4" screen, support for palm like applications (notebook, address book, calendar, etc.) and support Ebook formats. Then provide a truly open development environment. One of the great things about palm was how many 3rd part applications were available because Palm wined and dined independent developers. But that means you (the platform owner) do not control everything on your platform.
Such a tool would allow me to hold my videos, books, and all the last things my palm does today. But none of these require palm to provide.
But wait -- what about the phone? Forget it. While some people do use the phone to replace the palm, most never do much but store phone numbers. Further, people are used to a phone being replaced every two years - for free. That is a market that pays for itself in the marketing of minutes. Not a good place to play.
We can retaliate, but this idea that we can "glass their a$$" if they nuke us is just false. We may, and may is really strong word, be able to drop a tactical nuke. But that is about it.
Why would we not just wipe them out, you ask? Because we do not have "limited theater nuclear weapons." That's the fancy term for "we cannot stop the fallout from moving." So if NK attacks and we just send in one ICBM, we will spread fallout over NK, Japan and China. NK - well they got what they asked for. Japan - they are an ally and we would be really sorry. China -- well they are going to look at this about the way we would if China nuked Mexico (assuming Mexico deserved it), and Texas became a wasteland.
The middle east? Just as bad. Nuke Syria and you are going to glass a bunch of desert and poison a lot of people. These will then become terrorists of tomorrow (or freedom fighters depending on your view). On top of which Israel would be drawn in, they would use a nuke or two and suddenly you can get all the oil for free but you need a lead suit to fill up at the pump.
In reality, if they get one to us, they would hurt us big. Not because they would win the war (the knew that would not happen), but they would ruin the economy. Look at post 9-11 economics, four buildings and 2600 people die (very bad). It took two years to get the economy back and we could go to ground zero that afternoon. Now imagine 9-11b where Los Angeles is uninhabitable for even 5 years and having to move 7 million people to other areas of the country.
As someone said on the Sunday talk show circuit, we have to be right 100% of the time, without creating a prison for our population. They only have to get it right once.
If you were sitting in Napster's corporate offices in December, you were probably wondering what was worse, the quick death you thought you would get or the slow painful fall into nothingness you seemed to find.
Now, if Google is really interested, they cannot come out and say "please save us." They need, like SCO, to keep at least the illusion that they are viable so the price does not plummet before they can sell.
I do wonder though, what does Google get out of this?
Mr. Horowitz is neither enlightened, or the least bit interested in fairness. I live in PA and the bill HR177, has defined that the GOP shall staff the review board (an amendment to make it equal to both parties failed on a party line vote). Further, required information when identifying a professor for "review" is their political affiliation. So now we will have a GOP appointed committee deciding if a non-GOP teacher show bias to a student making a complaint.
0 /HR0177P2553.pdf
Can you imagine the outrage if Democrats had suggested such a bill? If you really believe this to be an enlightened approach to fairness, then I fear for us all.
PDF Warning: http://www2.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/BI/BT/2005/
To add insult to injury - the representatives will be reimbursed for any expenses they incur while investigating a claim, but no such provision is made for the professor, or school.
Even if they mean what they are saying today, the very existence of the data allows someone to start collecting, retaining, analyzing and suing. The Itunes privacy policy ends with:
Apple may update its privacy policy from time to time. When we change the policy in a material way a notice will be posted on our website along with the updated privacy policy.
So today they say they will not collect it. Tomorrow, as part of a RIAA lawsuit, they must collect and reveal the information. Further, the RIAA will make the case that if Apple tells anyone, it will show up on slashdot, and all of you criminals will know.
Apple should just remove the code or stop making excuses. They monitor - if you do not like it, do not buy the product. But that would sound unsympathetic to their customers, so they flounder in this legalese.
I wish I had points to up you. Yours is the approached I have used for far more than 8+ years and it works for the benefit of everyone. Not too time consuming but it give the person coming in some idea of what you may have been thinking. This is especially important when that "someone" is you and it has been three years.
Can someone explain why we can standardize street signs and the amount of sugar allowed in school lunches but we cannot get a standardized election system?
After the 2000 election debacle, we had money thrown at the states to "fix the problem." So we ended up with 35 different solutions.
A simple federal mandate - the voter must be verifiable, their vote must be able to be able to be authenticated after they leave the booth, in the event of a recount and the system can be fully audited. Instead, we have systems with no paper trails, questionable vendor operations, and seemingly contradictory election results.
We can make millions of secure stock sales, bank transfers and on-line purchases daily, and we cannot get a vote counted and auditable? The people who produced these machines should be fired for stupidity and forced to return our money.
Where can anyone now draw the line? The judge ruled that there wasn't a compelling enough reason, such as preventing imminent violence The Illinois law, would have barred stores from selling or renting extremely violent or sexual games to minors.
Deeper into the ruling the judge makes an interesting statement:
"The First Amendment embodies a principle that is at the core of our political system and our national ethos: "each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence." A law that restricts speech because of its message "contravenes this essential right. For this reason, content-based regulations are presumptively invalid."
Couldn't the same argument be made for anything? Movies? Porn? If you get specific about what constitutes imminent violence even guns qualify. In essence, you cannot stop someone from selling anything to anyone because you cannot prove it creates or produces an immanent threat to anyone.
If I were the porn industry, the focus would change to video games. Why not, since I can now sell to anyone, regardless of age. They cannot do that with magazines and online.
For the posters who said - it is up to parents. I agree to a point. I watch my children, however I still expect the police to arrest drug dealers, child molesters, etc. While I can watch mine, who knows if you are watching yours. Sure, you buy them Super Mario Brothers XXVIII, but they took the birthday money from grandma and bought Leisure Suit Larry does Las Vegas. It is also a contiguous fight with game manufactures to really explain what is going on in the game. While I would have passed on GTA for the violence, I must have missed the "Contains explicit sexual acts" statement on the game - oh wait, it wasn't on the game.
The students today are reading it correctly. While I wish it were otherwise, this is not a long term career anymore. If you hit a hot technology you can ride that for a good while but looking at the market in general few people I know will recommend IT as a career. IT has become the assembly line worker of the 1970s or the steel worker of the 1960s. While today, you can find fabricators in niche markets making a lot of money, the vast majority moved to other industries and professions.
I run an IT Consulting company and cannot recommend this to family or friends. I am not pessimistic about my company's ability to earn money and keep me comfortable, but in general it is an ugly market to enter.
Here is what the typical college graduate in IT will encounter.
. You will start at fair wages and long hours. Under difficult deadlines and penny pinching companies you will be squeezed for everything you can produce.
. You are considered an "expense" that must be controlled. More often than not you will get an "good boy" instead of a bonus.
. You are as respected and appreciated as a union laborer.
. There is a pervasive belief that you are interchangeable with any other developer at half the price.
. Unlike other industries where age implies experience (and we can all argue whether it should), in IT age is taken as an indicator of being "behind".
. If you do not work at a software company, you salary will top out around 35 and you will get slightly lower than COLA in subsequent years.
. There is always someone willing to do your job for less than. They will be in two categories Offshore or Fresh out of University. It does not make sense logically, but bean counters do not use logic of this type.
. Your experience is weighed against your age/salary and with few exceptions age/salary will do you in. I often (too often) hear people say for what they pay a 40 year developer they can get three out of college - and then they do.
. Churn is high, making job security low - It is a myth contractors are fired first.
As I said, I make my living on this and while I hire and pay well, most of my competitors do not. They often win bids because they can low ball me. I often win second rounds because the first round was spent with nothing produced and we put a team on the ground that gets results. However, success does not matter these days, its all about price. I can guarantee a project for $700,000 and someone with next to zero experience bidding $675,000 will get it. Most often they bid $250,000 figuring once they get in it will be hard to get them out. (There is a reason recruiters for programming shops are called pimps)
Well, now that I vented most of that, I feel better. I am guessing this will end up flame-bait or troll (of which it is neither). It is a reflection of my frustration as I watch good developers move into other industries so they can have a family and pay a mortgage.
If you really want to help your students, stop teaching regular IT and focus on niche markets - embedded systems, AI, robotics. Things that are bleeding edge. Make the course horribly difficult so only the best and brightest make it through. It is better to choose another career in college than at 40. Add project management courses and "learning to learn" because anyone entering this as profession will need to stay on the bleeding edge or be unemployed. The difficult part for you will be replacing the instructors you have with those that can teach these topics.
Now I am guessing people will reply to this with - "Hey - I am doing fine" and that's good for them. I see the industry as a whole, not just the individual programmers and it does not look pretty for a career. For the top 20% sure - the rest...
We deployed it ourselves, and it worked OK for a while, but things went very very wrong when we tried updating one of the configuration parameters, causing us to to inexplicably lose quite a bit of data.
They changed the database parms on part of a large clustered HA system and it is the systems fault you lost data? I would be very interested in hearing what parm(s) were changed. If you mean they changed a parm on part of the cluster, then have them "move away from the keyboard, before someone gets hurt." Every major database (Oracle, DB2, SS) warns about doing such things because the side-effect is nearly impossible to predict.
They had a year to study this and came up with some unusual metrics to say the least. For those who did not read the 44 pages of PDF, let me summarize some of my observations:
- They appear to be more comfortable with Windows than Linux. There is nothing wrong with that except they do not account for it in the time to complete tasks.
- They compared a Windows box running MS SS against two versions of Red Hat running MySQL and Oracle. That the did not use the same data bases on both OS slants the numbers from the start. Even if they wanted to avoid MySQL, they could have selected an Oracle installation.
- They counted vulnerabilities at the component level. So a shared library that had a vulnerability, but was used by both the installed OS and the database is counted twice. One used by the OS, the GUI, and the database, three times, etc. They state this is fair, but this would automatically penalize a Linux distribution because MS does not get counted twice in any case.
- The Red Hat installations were done manually and minimal installations. They then had problems, and make commentary on the difficulty of the upgrades. I would be very interested in the detail of what they did for the install. This appears to be a self-inflicted wound claiming to be otherwise.
- They make an big deal about what ports are open in the default installation. They comment that MS continues to allow MSUpdate, a good thing, but that Linux left the port for up2date open, a bad thing. Again, as a minimalist install they should have secured the ports, but that is dumb argument regardless. Admins who leave a machine wide open deserved to be fired. Because MS now ships theirs with everything closed is a side effect of the number of complaints about bad admins leaving the server in its out of the box state.
- Days to resolve a vulnerability are dangerous guides. First, a vulnerability has to be reported, then verified. We are dependent upon the vendor (MS, Oracle, etc) to correctly reflect these. However, almost anyone can and does report one for OSS - and that is a good thing.
In general, they speak of vulnerabilities and the ability to respond to business requests. I would like to see the requests they specifically refer to. While 68% sounds like a lot, is it the difference between 12 and 26 seconds? I just cannot see in my day to day activities it taking me more than half again as long to do anything and it is far less to image entire boxes. I wonder if this is a familiarity thing.
It is really time someone from RedHat or SUSE took a study like this and dissected it for a comparison 1:1 with MS. None of this it counts twice or differing databases garbage, a real compare. The top 20 tasks an admin will perform in a year. If we loose at least we know what to focus our energies upon. (What does not kill us, makes us stronger)
Supporting a mixed (Windows/Linux/Solaris) environment, I just do not see a 68% difference anywhere for an experienced admin.
I do believe in Copyrights (that alone may get this modded down to -255). However, if google lives up to the claim they will only provide snippets, how is that different than what any web site, quoting an author does. Is this web site in violation Dilbert -why you are wrong by quoting from Dilbert? It appears fair use to me.
Where google may have issues, is if anyone figures out a way to reconstruct a book in total. They would give people like this a lot of ammunition against them. Of course, the library does not prevent me from scanning a book if I take it home, but that is something that will be missed in the hype around it. I am not sure how they could prevent this, but these are some pretty smart guys.
In this case, the authors sound more like they want a cut of the click through, regardless of sales. What may be interesting in the end is book sellers would be the most likely to advertise on Google Print. A "click here to buy this book" type of link.
Perhaps I am doing the math wrong here, but this seems to be worse. If you assume after deductions a person has $100,000 of taxable income it comes out to $18330 in taxes. At 23% of purchases, and most Americans saving less than 10%, it is 23% of $90,000 or $20,700. For $2,000 I am willing to do my taxes. The numbers actually get worse as you make less than $100,000 or save less than 10%. I am hard pressed to see how most anyone in our industry would be better off.
As for outsourcing changing direction - If a company wants to buy goods and services they will do it overseas where the tax burden would be far less than 23%.
My suggestion is move it down to 17%, include corporate perks as expenses (you have a driver, that is an expense - to you or the company) and force Congress to balance the budget, unless we declare a war. In which case, the budget can be unbalanced for the time of war + 2 years.
The issue I see today is no one wants to make the hard choices, because its someone else's money they spend. The US 2005 budget was passed by Congress in 2 days. Who could review the entire budget in 2 days? No one. Even the people who wrote it could not tell people what was in it.
And what makes you think MS won't follow suit
Because they said so? While that may mean nothing, at this point it is MS' position that they will not support OpenDocument formats, regardless of requirements by governments. MS Not supporting OpenDocument
Now MS is claiming the open document standard is inferior, yet they sit on the standards committee. Instead they support the MS XML standard which is a standard for MS documents. Which means it owns (under copyright and soon patent), the format and standard.
Office 12 XML documents will not have an easy introduction into many non-Microsoft products. To do so, you will need to license the format from MS, who has said it sees no reason to support OSS in this regard and the use of MS XML in a GPL'd product would invalidate the GPL, and the MS license. (Microsoft does have some very smart lawyers writing their EULAs and contracts). All the others would need to pay a fee and it is doubtful MS would provide a discount to the disadvantage of their own products.
A better read on OpenDocument vs. MS XML is found on Wheeler's page
The format matters because a company, in part due to its responsibility to stockholders, must have planned obsolescence. MS documents from the 80s are difficult to open and read, even in MS products. An open standard ensures that my documents are available to me, through many companies, for a very long time. Governments need this and are now getting smart enough about technology to understand and demand it. And while no one can imagine MS being gone, the same was said of dozens of top 20 companies over the past 20 years.
As for the comment about the learning curve between open office and MS Office, we can now thank MS. With office 12, they cannot claim an easy transition, the product takes a new direction and whether it is better or not, is irrelevant. The learning curve of going to 12 will be greater than moving to Open Office which retains the current MS office look and feel for the vast majority of users.
Sure, we're not using assembly today, but even some of the more minor systems implemented in C++ are far more complex than anything that was written in pure assembly several decade ago.
The idea that it is dead or less complex is just inaccurate and that is the point being made. Decades ago, assembler was how they created the first multi-threaded (to use current terminology) applications on the mainframe. The idea that systems are less complex, except in the UI level, is an misunderstanding of what was done and continues to be done on some of the largest, fastest processing systems in use today.
Claims processing, airline tracking, financial trades, and systems where tens of thousands of transactions need to occur in seconds were and continue to be supported and developed in assembler. If you live in the US, most states still run a large portion of their internal systems using assembler programs.
For years, I have heard that the differences between MS Office and Open Office were so significant that the cost of retraining was not worth transitioning.
Where are those people today? The same ones that argued that it was not cost effective to retrain, will be arguing this is an incremental change or significant but worth the effort. I can hardly wait for Laura DiDio's "How Office 12 will make your company 12 times more productive" press release disguised as a "research paper."
As several prior posters have said, if you are going to take the upgrade hit, why not take it to open office? It will certainly be less expensive in both licensing and training. And it will support OpenDocument formats, something MS has said they will not do.
At least until the MS PR machine starts rolling.
Open Office Home page
The funding of the space program continues to be less and less each year (adjusted for inflation). Even those in NASA recognize it depends on the "will of Congress" to fund such an effort at a time when we are spending $180 Billion a year in Iraq, $200 billion on Katrina, Billions upon billions for Homeland Security and we still have other natural disasters to face (Rita is on her way now).
Further, we do not have the motivation that existed in the 60s, when Russia beat the US into space. It was not just American pride, it was a deterrent, to both sides, to show they had the technology to be a leader in the world. Unless we see China, or India on the moon, it is unlikely to be of such importance that NASA would be funded for it. Even if we do see them, the question may be "So what? We were they ~40 years ago."
Talking about precursors, or the technology we would derive from such an effort, will be lost on the "yes, but we have "X" that needs to be paid for first." I wish it were otherwise, but I just do not get the feeling we have the 60s excitement around space. People look at the technology and fail to see it was possible because it was necessary to fulfill the mission. They are thankful for the derivatives, but many believe another Steve Jobs could create the same in IPOD like fashion.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi -0509100027sep10,1,5918883.story?coll=chi-newsnati onworld-hed
Shows that the US is not that far behind, as an appeals court says it is legal to hold US citizens forever without trial, as part of the Presidential powers.
I think the courts and our political leaders need to pick up a dictionary.
Fascism: A social and political ideology with the primary guiding principle that the state or nation is the highest priority, rather than personal or individual freedoms.
I believe we had a world war over this.