Start by providing real electronic transfers and bill payments. For example, to transfer money electronically between accounts in two different US banks (e.g. BofA, WellsFargo,...) costs something like 20-40 USD and the receiving bank may charge an additional 10 USD. As a comparison, most transfer within the EU is free across banks and countries! It is even cheaper to send money from EU to the US, than within the US.
That is highway robbery. I can make an unlimited number of electronic payments (transfers, BPay, etc) to anyone with my bank and it comes to a capped fee of $5/month. That even includes the credit card linked to my account. Getting cash is the killer here. If you want cash it can cost up to $5 per ATM transaction depending on the two banks involved. The Govt and banks are keen to make everything electronic because it's easier to track you and make sure you pay your taxes if you don't use that pesky cash stuff. Also, they can save money by not printing anymore of that costly cash stuff.
A billion dollars. Talk about misuse of taxpayer funds.
At least it's a start. Somebody realised that the patent could be abused to fuck practically everyone (if you fuck the banks the banks fuck the people; bankers aren't about losing money).
$1B is a lot of money. Perhaps in the future someone will look back and decide that they could have saved that money by reforming the patent system. It's all too easy to nay-say (I am guilty) but some small movement, even backwards sometimes, is good in what is a mostly stagnant area.
Also, don't forget that this small Texas startup sold their patent for $1B then paid half back in tax on their earnings.
Your post just makes you sound ignorant about what is actually offered in a *good* CS department.
You obviously haven't had to deal with a lot of recent CS graduates have you? Some schools might offer good CS courses but the majority of grads I deal with know nothing more than buzzword garbage, and I am not alone in my views; I regularly hear associates complain that they can't get a CS person who knows their ass from an infinite loop.
CS courses are supposed to be about computer science. If I wanted to learn how to make a webpage I'd just get a good reference and hack at it (or take a summer class).
I don't meet many CS graduates with any grasp on computer fundamentals. I was actually arguing with someone last week about why Java is the WRONG language to use for a once-off program to edit a column in a database. His response was "but Java is common and everyone knows it AND it's a database language, who knows Perl?". Shows how much he knows - a simple Perl script (or $DEITY help us a Bash script) that read, modified and updated each row according to the desired (not-quite-trivial) operation would have sufficed. The same CS graduate didn't get the concept of an inode-based file system and I thought that was fairly basic CS knowledge.
I've had engineers come to me and develop entire programs in Java then try and download their class file to a DSP. They sit there dazed wondering why the ICD tools won't accept their class file.
I've had other engineers develop entire swarths of MFC and DirectX code to do DSP (use GUI and Graph Editors to make program that just runs directx plugins to do "dsp" and not write a single line of C++ themselves) then wonder why they can't get the ICD to load their exe file. I even watched this one guy copy the exe to DSP memory and try and set the instruction pointer to the first word of it.
I met one CE grad who was tasked with writing a one-off sort. She took three days, spent most of it in books and on the phone to friends trying to work it out. This was a one-off sort that would have been run overnight on a production machine; they decided to change the data ordering. The simplest bubble sort in a 10 line C file would have solved the problem and met the requirements. She tried to write the most highly optimal sort algorithm (fine, I guess) but she couldn't even make it work. In the end I hacked together about 100 lines of code to read the data on stdin, sort it and write it to stdout. Wasn't hard. Didn't use too much memory and finished in about 30 minutes (well within the overnight parameter).
Of course, these engineers had one thing in common. Like many schools, they took their programming and algorithms classes in the CS faculty because the schools were trying to save money. The CS schools are doing their best to churn out people who know all the buzzword technologies (Java, HTML, AJAX, etc) but have little marketable skill. CS courses seem mostly a left-over from the dot bomb era.
I've yet to meet a CS grad who properly understands the difference between TCP, UDP and IP. I haven't met one who knows anything about algorithm analysis (or big O notation; I think they were all out getting a lot of Big-O's instead of studying).
The best computer programmers I've met are electronic engineers with specialty in microprocessor systems hardware and maths/physics people. They seem to get programming much more than the CS-types.
(And that a 75-CD limited edition import CD set being sold for $31 is an obivous misprint, right?) If it's anything like all the "limited edition box sets" i see advertised on television it'll could be utter crap and the $31 price tag could be accurate... Not that it's the case this time.. but there is grounds to argue!
Nobody is jazzed about it because it seems a waste of time for VERY little gain. The time to set all this up, test it against failure (l-user error) and so on probably far outweighs the benefits. Failing that, he wants to do it with Windows; an operating system that at its very core is single user (they like to claim otherwise) and horrid.
RedHat ship a clustered filesystem with RHEL. I don't know how well it works but it can't be that bad if they actually decided to charge for it.
There are better things to do with the time/space than finding ways to use it. I agree with one of the parent posters - why have disks if they're all running what sounds like a standardised operating environment. That's an awful lot of power being chewed up in his building. Multiply that by the thousands of buildings in a similar boat and you'll soon see significant numbers. The same goes for all those little fans on video cards that generally don't need to be there for joe-user at work (how often do you know people in an office that push their 3d card to its limits?).
Computers have become so fast, large and cheap that there's a lot of wastage in the computer industry. Best to work in elimination wastage by efficient solutions rather than using wastage in inefficient hacky solutions to make you feel better.
Fuck, nobody ever said these people were smart!! Most of them were probably in the right place at the right time and got to go along with the megaband ride that really took off 50 years ago. They're nearly dead. Their business model is nearly dead. They're scared. That is all.
An Eee PC with a USB card reader and a small pile of cards. CF is too big to carry a pile of, and Xd is probably too small to carry round without losing (although those cradles that hold 6 seem to be the go). Get a bunch of cards in 1G+ (whatever you can afford) and burn/post. IF you sticky-tape the XD to the inside of a card and mail it back it is likely to look and feel like one of thise singing birthday cards when it passes through customs (so it won't get lost).
If you're paranoid you can even encrypt them.
The Eee is a good option - and you could even spec the hell out of it like the article that was on here last week. A bit of good GPS software and a receiver would certainly help on a trek such as yours.
Anything that helps not pay the Microsoft Tax and helps to reduce their profits be even a few cents is good piracy! Put the fuckers and their shoddy wares out of business.
I'm with you dude - I haven't purchased ant RIAA garbage for a long time now. Not planning to either. There's enough good original live music where I come from that I don't need to. I just go see gigs and buy their home made CDs.
"Because we do our jobs well, you don't hear about the latest scandal on Slashdot."
And because we do our jobs well we get paid handsomly and nobody ever "sees" our handiwork. The boss doesn't understand what we do. I spend a good 50% of my time analysing and designing the system. At least 20% is testing so that doesn't leave a whole lot for actual coding. Usually the PHB doesn't get software and wants to see the blinkenlights as quickly as possible in the dev cycle (with the associated hacks and crap that comes with that).
Part of being good at what I do is resisting change for the sake of change. Safety critical systems are best example of this, but any reliable piece of software can be shown as an example. Changes introduce modifications to a well designed piece of software. Often the PHB wants wholesale changes for the sake of adding more useless features and tick boxes to the marketing brochure.
The other part of being a good software engineer is budgeting a sensible amount of time instead of the 10 minute hack that the boss wants to hear. You need to be able to allow ample time for analysis, design and testing; not just hacking.
I was interviewing some "software engineers" recently. Many claimed to be senior level with tonnes of experience. Either I am REALLY the best at what I do (not likely) or they were really dumb.
There's a lot of people out there couldn't write a program to add two amounts of currency (dollars and cents) and guarantee an accurate result. These people (at least where I come from) call themselves software engineers when really they're two-bit (IQ?) hackers.
It shits me because they don't want to be subject to public scrutiny - no matter how much they say that they are all of that.
As others have said it can take from months to years before a case is decided. In that time the media will have moved onto other things and the general public will be none-the-wiser about some insignificant person who was arrested and dropped out of society some time ago.
Most of the "terrorism" arrests that you hear about in the news are bogus. It's usually the authorities have decided they want to have a poke about in a person's life for some other reason. Find some flimsy link to terrorism (he knew a guy who once called a guy who once shared a public bus with a suspected terrorist) and arrest him, detain him for long enough to snoop through his house and generally find out all there is to know.
When he gets out a week or so later (if they really do find nothing they care about) they put a media block in place to prevent the public finding out. It doesn't matter that the guy's been gagged and can't even tell his (now) ex employer why he's a week late for work. If they find something they keep up the terrorist guise and charge him with other things as well.
Ok, so that was a hypothetical, but it's scary either way.
No, Wal-Mart is charging for a required service the Mfg./Supplier isn't complying with
So Wal-Mart is buying off a supplier who never RFID tagged anything, and probably never agreed to. Now Wal-Mart is going to charge the people who it's buying off a fee for tagging their stuff. This seems to me nothing more than a devious attempt by Wal-Mart to start shafting both ends of their business chain!
I won't live long enough for that clock to run out
At 64-bits the universe probably won't live long enough to see the clock run out unless they do something stupid and start counting picoseconds. 64-bit time will last us another 290 billion years.
Put simply, a lot of software is poorly written and uses int as synonymous with time_t (or somesuch). The two are often interchanged by programmers; particularly those with a Windows background who can't find CTime (or whatever it's called) on non-Windows platforms.
Moving to 64-bit machines won't fix all the magic 32-bit binaries out there but software that's recompiled for 64-bit machines will automagically use 64-bit ints where the programmer held the time in an int.
Of course, I've seen a lot dumber bugs than ignoring to use the operating system's time structures and methods for dealing with time so I don't doubt that there are some bugs that actually will need some serious considerations made.
I guess it's a fault of the Unix people from way back. They made this epoch thing and used a 32-bit number to store the number of seconds since it. I guess they were assuming that all their software would have been replaced by something better on bigger machines. They shouldn't have written such reliable software and then maybe some of it would have been replaced by now;)
Slashdot Mirror
That is highway robbery. I can make an unlimited number of electronic payments (transfers, BPay, etc) to anyone with my bank and it comes to a capped fee of $5/month. That even includes the credit card linked to my account. Getting cash is the killer here. If you want cash it can cost up to $5 per ATM transaction depending on the two banks involved. The Govt and banks are keen to make everything electronic because it's easier to track you and make sure you pay your taxes if you don't use that pesky cash stuff. Also, they can save money by not printing anymore of that costly cash stuff.
At least it's a start. Somebody realised that the patent could be abused to fuck practically everyone (if you fuck the banks the banks fuck the people; bankers aren't about losing money).
$1B is a lot of money. Perhaps in the future someone will look back and decide that they could have saved that money by reforming the patent system. It's all too easy to nay-say (I am guilty) but some small movement, even backwards sometimes, is good in what is a mostly stagnant area.
Also, don't forget that this small Texas startup sold their patent for $1B then paid half back in tax on their earnings.
Yes, in fact I have but I also said the transformation was not trivial. Right tool for right job.
You obviously haven't had to deal with a lot of recent CS graduates have you? Some schools might offer good CS courses but the majority of grads I deal with know nothing more than buzzword garbage, and I am not alone in my views; I regularly hear associates complain that they can't get a CS person who knows their ass from an infinite loop.
CS courses are supposed to be about computer science. If I wanted to learn how to make a webpage I'd just get a good reference and hack at it (or take a summer class).
I don't meet many CS graduates with any grasp on computer fundamentals. I was actually arguing with someone last week about why Java is the WRONG language to use for a once-off program to edit a column in a database. His response was "but Java is common and everyone knows it AND it's a database language, who knows Perl?". Shows how much he knows - a simple Perl script (or $DEITY help us a Bash script) that read, modified and updated each row according to the desired (not-quite-trivial) operation would have sufficed. The same CS graduate didn't get the concept of an inode-based file system and I thought that was fairly basic CS knowledge.
I've had engineers come to me and develop entire programs in Java then try and download their class file to a DSP. They sit there dazed wondering why the ICD tools won't accept their class file.
I've had other engineers develop entire swarths of MFC and DirectX code to do DSP (use GUI and Graph Editors to make program that just runs directx plugins to do "dsp" and not write a single line of C++ themselves) then wonder why they can't get the ICD to load their exe file. I even watched this one guy copy the exe to DSP memory and try and set the instruction pointer to the first word of it.
I met one CE grad who was tasked with writing a one-off sort. She took three days, spent most of it in books and on the phone to friends trying to work it out. This was a one-off sort that would have been run overnight on a production machine; they decided to change the data ordering. The simplest bubble sort in a 10 line C file would have solved the problem and met the requirements. She tried to write the most highly optimal sort algorithm (fine, I guess) but she couldn't even make it work. In the end I hacked together about 100 lines of code to read the data on stdin, sort it and write it to stdout. Wasn't hard. Didn't use too much memory and finished in about 30 minutes (well within the overnight parameter).
Of course, these engineers had one thing in common. Like many schools, they took their programming and algorithms classes in the CS faculty because the schools were trying to save money. The CS schools are doing their best to churn out people who know all the buzzword technologies (Java, HTML, AJAX, etc) but have little marketable skill. CS courses seem mostly a left-over from the dot bomb era.
I've yet to meet a CS grad who properly understands the difference between TCP, UDP and IP. I haven't met one who knows anything about algorithm analysis (or big O notation; I think they were all out getting a lot of Big-O's instead of studying).
The best computer programmers I've met are electronic engineers with specialty in microprocessor systems hardware and maths/physics people. They seem to get programming much more than the CS-types.
I am never gay when I have to use windows. It's such a shitty experience. All that shit makes me sad, not gay!
Nobody is jazzed about it because it seems a waste of time for VERY little gain. The time to set all this up, test it against failure (l-user error) and so on probably far outweighs the benefits. Failing that, he wants to do it with Windows; an operating system that at its very core is single user (they like to claim otherwise) and horrid.
RedHat ship a clustered filesystem with RHEL. I don't know how well it works but it can't be that bad if they actually decided to charge for it.
There are better things to do with the time/space than finding ways to use it. I agree with one of the parent posters - why have disks if they're all running what sounds like a standardised operating environment. That's an awful lot of power being chewed up in his building. Multiply that by the thousands of buildings in a similar boat and you'll soon see significant numbers. The same goes for all those little fans on video cards that generally don't need to be there for joe-user at work (how often do you know people in an office that push their 3d card to its limits?).
Computers have become so fast, large and cheap that there's a lot of wastage in the computer industry. Best to work in elimination wastage by efficient solutions rather than using wastage in inefficient hacky solutions to make you feel better.
Don't you worry about BLANK, let ME worry about blank!
It's always the year of Linux on the desktop... too fucking bad that the desktop is too small and that bulky windows takes all the room...
One day somebody will build a better desk I guess
Fuck, nobody ever said these people were smart!! Most of them were probably in the right place at the right time and got to go along with the megaband ride that really took off 50 years ago. They're nearly dead. Their business model is nearly dead. They're scared. That is all.
Zip it up, rename it to "paris hilton does britney in the ass with a strapon.mpg" and put it on Kazaa! That should keep it otu there forever.
Except it doesn't have a built in Xd or small form factor reader, meaning if your camera takes those you're S.O.L
An Eee PC with a USB card reader and a small pile of cards. CF is too big to carry a pile of, and Xd is probably too small to carry round without losing (although those cradles that hold 6 seem to be the go). Get a bunch of cards in 1G+ (whatever you can afford) and burn/post. IF you sticky-tape the XD to the inside of a card and mail it back it is likely to look and feel like one of thise singing birthday cards when it passes through customs (so it won't get lost).
If you're paranoid you can even encrypt them.
The Eee is a good option - and you could even spec the hell out of it like the article that was on here last week. A bit of good GPS software and a receiver would certainly help on a trek such as yours.
Anything that helps not pay the Microsoft Tax and helps to reduce their profits be even a few cents is good piracy! Put the fuckers and their shoddy wares out of business.
I'm with you dude - I haven't purchased ant RIAA garbage for a long time now. Not planning to either. There's enough good original live music where I come from that I don't need to. I just go see gigs and buy their home made CDs.
"Because we do our jobs well, you don't hear about the latest scandal on Slashdot."
And because we do our jobs well we get paid handsomly and nobody ever "sees" our handiwork. The boss doesn't understand what we do. I spend a good 50% of my time analysing and designing the system. At least 20% is testing so that doesn't leave a whole lot for actual coding. Usually the PHB doesn't get software and wants to see the blinkenlights as quickly as possible in the dev cycle (with the associated hacks and crap that comes with that).
Part of being good at what I do is resisting change for the sake of change. Safety critical systems are best example of this, but any reliable piece of software can be shown as an example. Changes introduce modifications to a well designed piece of software. Often the PHB wants wholesale changes for the sake of adding more useless features and tick boxes to the marketing brochure.
The other part of being a good software engineer is budgeting a sensible amount of time instead of the 10 minute hack that the boss wants to hear. You need to be able to allow ample time for analysis, design and testing; not just hacking.
I was interviewing some "software engineers" recently. Many claimed to be senior level with tonnes of experience. Either I am REALLY the best at what I do (not likely) or they were really dumb.
There's a lot of people out there couldn't write a program to add two amounts of currency (dollars and cents) and guarantee an accurate result. These people (at least where I come from) call themselves software engineers when really they're two-bit (IQ?) hackers.
It shits me because they don't want to be subject to public scrutiny - no matter how much they say that they are all of that.
As others have said it can take from months to years before a case is decided. In that time the media will have moved onto other things and the general public will be none-the-wiser about some insignificant person who was arrested and dropped out of society some time ago.
Most of the "terrorism" arrests that you hear about in the news are bogus. It's usually the authorities have decided they want to have a poke about in a person's life for some other reason. Find some flimsy link to terrorism (he knew a guy who once called a guy who once shared a public bus with a suspected terrorist) and arrest him, detain him for long enough to snoop through his house and generally find out all there is to know.
When he gets out a week or so later (if they really do find nothing they care about) they put a media block in place to prevent the public finding out. It doesn't matter that the guy's been gagged and can't even tell his (now) ex employer why he's a week late for work. If they find something they keep up the terrorist guise and charge him with other things as well.
Ok, so that was a hypothetical, but it's scary either way.
Fuck this proposal I tell you.
Morbo welcomes our new German overlords. May death come swiftly to their enemies!
...now I can finally finish the calculations for my ultimate doomsday device.
So Wal-Mart is buying off a supplier who never RFID tagged anything, and probably never agreed to. Now Wal-Mart is going to charge the people who it's buying off a fee for tagging their stuff. This seems to me nothing more than a devious attempt by Wal-Mart to start shafting both ends of their business chain!
At 64-bits the universe probably won't live long enough to see the clock run out unless they do something stupid and start counting picoseconds. 64-bit time will last us another 290 billion years.
Put simply, a lot of software is poorly written and uses int as synonymous with time_t (or somesuch). The two are often interchanged by programmers; particularly those with a Windows background who can't find CTime (or whatever it's called) on non-Windows platforms.
;)
Moving to 64-bit machines won't fix all the magic 32-bit binaries out there but software that's recompiled for 64-bit machines will automagically use 64-bit ints where the programmer held the time in an int.
Of course, I've seen a lot dumber bugs than ignoring to use the operating system's time structures and methods for dealing with time so I don't doubt that there are some bugs that actually will need some serious considerations made.
I guess it's a fault of the Unix people from way back. They made this epoch thing and used a 32-bit number to store the number of seconds since it. I guess they were assuming that all their software would have been replaced by something better on bigger machines. They shouldn't have written such reliable software and then maybe some of it would have been replaced by now
...that thought the headline referred to the Mercury Messenger program that is "compatible" with a certain large vendor's offering?
This is the point of the Darwin awards. Those fools do not get to contribute to the gene pool. I like the gravity still works one...