It looks like the new replays go for about $900 while one of these new tivos will be $650 ($400 + $250 lifetime guide fee). But the tivo will barely do 10mb/s while the replay will do 100mb/s (probably not flat out, but when you want to suck a 3GB file over the net every bit helps). It seems like Tivo is just as litigious and patent crazy as SB - just get a load of their new patents on networked multi-tivo boxes - a big old "duh!" but they got the patent.
So, all in all a $250 premium for easy to hack, more consumer-oriented, faster data transfer rates and available at least a couple of months sooner isn't so bad. Better than giving my money to a child of the copyright industry - even if they do run linux.
but creating a fake persona and hiding your real identity is not that difficult to those that really want to and need to.
Which is exactly why real criminals won't be hindered by these new invasions but the rest of us will live with that background fear that "THEY" will screw up our data (with no accountability) and the result will be that we get our lives totally screwed over.
I just read that a special collectors edition DVD of "The Net" is due for release soon. The story is weak, but it makes a great cautionary tale.
The definitive source for computer contracting information is http://www.realrates.com/ There is a message-board off the main page where plenty of experts gather and discuss this stuff ad infinitum.
As at least one other poster has mentioned, there is a fourth option - use an umbrella company. I currently use an umbrella company and am very happy. They do all the back-office work, they sell me benefits like 401k and insurance and best of all, they stay with me as I go from job to job making those benefits fairly consistent. All for a fee of about 4% of billings that drops to 2% after I bill $125K per annum. Of course 401k and insurance are on top of that, the fee is just for the paperwork and dealing with the IRS - that ugly stuff. They also let me write-off all kinds of stuff directly rather than having to itemize when I file my personal taxes.
Here is a link to an FAQ like document on the way umbrellas work. It is maintained by one fairly good umbrella company, but the document is totally unbiased.
Let this be not only a lesson about Linux and the GPL, but about banks in America. This kind of behaviour is completely sanctioned by federal banking laws. Most people don't realize it, but federally insured banks are allowed to whatever they want, whenever, they want, with your money and you can't do a damn thing about it. The best thing a high-priced attorney can do for you in situations like this is tell you to kiss-ass until your face is tan and do whatever the bank wants and then pray they decide to give you your money back. Once you have your money, close your account and never do business with that bank again - it isn't much because any bank is allowed to screw you over, but if you can find a small-town "family" bank where they actually know their customers and where they will feel guilt for doing you like that, you have less chance of getting the shaft.
No, you can ORDER a Power4 box. If you are a super-special customer, you can get a beta machine delivered. If you aren't a special buddy of IBM, then you can wait until December, or more likely January for a regular box.
Mod this Anon up guys, he knows what he is talking about, that first guy is just spurting random IA64 (aka Itanic) talk which has very little to do with PA-RISC - PA does not have predication, nor does it have instruction grouping.
All it takes is a little patience on the con-man's part. Ebay 'expires' auctions way too quickly, you can't go look at an auction that is more than a few months old. Many times I have clicked on the auction id number in a seller's feedback to have ebay tell me that the page no longer exists. IMHO that's bogus, they should keep the expired auction info indefinitely - it is only a few K per auction and disk space is cheap.
Unfortunately no matter what actions we take, or what rhetoric we put forth, we shall always be condemned for helping people.
That's the same kind of thinking that Bush appeals to when he says that the attack on the WTC was an "attack on liberty." In other words, pure hogwash.
On one hand we can never be everything to everyone. But what we can do is to stop saying one thing and doing another. Stop taking the shortest, simplest route to furthering our own ends in the middle-east (and else where). Our foreign policy always seems to favor the short-term solution with little regard to long-term consquences - bin Laden is the perfect example, he is a product of our cold war policies just like all those petty dictators in south America.
Our foreign policy needs to follow the path of "enlightened self-interest." Where we spend as much effort on getting the long-term results that we need rather than acting like the proverbial 800lb gorilla who wants his banana and wants it RIGHT NOW!
This conflict is not about us helping anyone, it is about us hurting the little people to further our own interests - the two do not have to go hand in hand, world diplomacy is not a zero-sum game. Terrorism, or assymetric warfare as our DoD refers to it, is a way for those little people to hurt in the same proportion they have been hurt. Because the scale is all out of whack, military action on the part of first and second world countries will never bring a reliable end to the threat, only good PR through good actions will do that.
I have a friend who lives in Pakistan. She told me that there were plenty of people in Pakistan cheering as well. Therefore I have no reason to doubt that the footage of palestine was accurate.
As others have stated, our foreign policy over the last 30-40 years has done a lot to turn the muslim world against us. We speak the rhetoric of freedom, but when it comes to other nations our actions are all about our self-interest at almost any cost and rarely about freedom. If we were to bring our actions in line with our rhetoric, the base of people from which bin Laden recruits would shrink to almost nil. Until then, we are only going to encourage more people to hate us.
I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with my conclusions, but I believe them to be sound. If you want to be successful on Linux (or any other free OS), you need to be libre/free.
That means making the source code available under a GPL-like license.
However, you can still protect your market at the same time. Just make it a requirement that anything compiled with the libre version of VectorC, or a derivative, also be licensed under the GPL or any of the similar licenses recognized by the OSI.
Then dual-license the compiler so that anyone who pays for the commercial license is free to do whatever they want with the resultant binaries, no licensing restrictions.
That way you can contribute to the community by providing a libre compiler, benefit from the community who will likely contribute bug-fixes and enhancements, and still make money from the people who would be willing to pay in the first place.
Bruce, that line about fabs is what HP has been saying ever since they announced the IA64 partnership with Intel. The problem with that reasoning, as another poster has already pointed out, is that designing a cpu is not contigent on owning a fab. Sparc, MIPS, Transmeta - they are all fabless. Even PA-RISC has been fabless for a long time now, it is common knowledge (well, at least common among comp.arch readers) that the last three generations of PA-RISC have been fabbed at Intel and IBM fabs rather than an HP facility. There is little technical reason to prevent that scenario from continuing indefinitely.
Fiorina, who's heard such complaints before, calls the HP Way ``a wonderfully convenient and evocative and emotive umbrella to throw all kinds of complaints under.'' In actuality, she says, the philosophy was underpinned by the commitment of HP's founders to doing what was best for the company.
``Dave Packard would say, `The most important thing is for a company to be profitable, period,' '' Fiorina says. ``He also was fond of saying, `This is not a democracy.' ''
It looks like Carly is turning out to be just another golden-parachuter. With an approach like that towards managing HP, she wants to turn it into a glorified Dell. Unfortunately for her, the Dell we already have is pretty darn good and commodifying HP's business is not doing what is best for the company. Don't be surprised to see her making that golden sky-dive in a year or two, while HP's share price continues to make that bright-red sky-dive we've seen for the last year or so...
Dunno where you have been for the last decade or so, but - PA-RISC was the first commercially shipping RISC implementation. The Alpha and PA-RISC architectures regularly alternated between being 1st and 2nd for performance, depending on who had the most recent release (although Alpha tended to stay on top for longer periods of time, second is hardly sucking). IA64/EPIC have often been informally refered to as "PA-RISC 3.0"
Now, the PA-8700, just officially released with a top-speed of 750MHz is a bit of a disappointment since over a year ago they were claiming 1GHz+ in the lab and at least 800MHz for delivery to the real world, especially in light of the Power4 (and we all knew the Power4 had been coming for way over a year now). But the PA-8800 has potential (comp.arch rumours that it is dual-core like the Power4 -- the engineers leaving likely won't effect that design as it probably mostly done with by now) but I doubt we will see a PA-8900 with those guys gone.
and at the same time, one can easily argue that this all plays nicely into the hands of 'big business,' and only serves to further the push towards globalization, which is surely the last thing any mid-East terrorist could want!
Unless you are a middle-east terrorist with a net value of 100's of millions of dollars and corporate holdings world-wide. Then this might be exactly what you want.
Attrition, both nature and head-hunters will take care of opening up positions for fresh blood and the real old dogs who refuse to learn new tricks should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
Let the youngsters work 80 hour weeks (and only get paid for 40), but a whole development team without more than a year or two of experience is just a recipe for disaster.
In this industry, something like 2 out of 3 people leave for a career in another industry by their mid-30s. That means that anyone with experience who isn't dead wood is going to be rare enough that they are worth keeping around.
Sounds like you've bought into the major management fallacy of our times - that you can cut one good experienced developer and replace him with 3-4 inexperienced developers for a lower total cost and still get equivalent quality. This is the same fallacy that has led to the wholesale replacement of experienced employees by cheap H1B-visa holders.
The results of the H1B replacement have been extremely poor - almost universally you hear about projects that have gone down the tubes after the transition to H1B. Many times the reason for failure is couched in terms that are not easily linked to the management decision to toss their experienced people, because management is extremely blame adverse. But unless the people are doing the equivalent of "sweat-shop" programming - there is no way that tossing experience in favor of a direct lower cost is going to produce a better product.
At the levels these people people work at, computer science is an art - you make decisions based on prior experience and an instinct based on years of experience discovering what works and what doesn't work. You put a bunch of newbies in there and they will spend the same time taking all the wrong-steps that the experienced people did ten years ago, meanwhile product quality goes out the window and so does time to market. It isn't about teaching old dogs new tricks - the old tricks are fundamental nowadays - just as you don't re-invent the shape of the wheel either.
Plus, if you had read the article, you would see that the people in that lab come from a wide range of backgrounds, they aren't all HPUX crusties - in fact most of them came from Bell Labs just a few years ago. They certainly don't fit the profile of a bunch of old computer geezers who don't know their way around a modern OS or a modern CPU (they were porting to Itanic, some would call that a post-modern CPU - others might call it trash, but that's another story).
Not only that, but when you contribute to the kernel, you get to keep the copyright on your contributions. Of course you have to license it under the GPL, but *you* still own it.
Hardly any Afghanis are terrorists. Even if every single person in bin Laden's organization turned out to be Afghani, that still leaves 99.9999% of Afghanis who aren't brainwashed.
In reality what happens is that bin Laden recruits from the disaffected muslims. They come from all over the middle-east and from all levels of society, although probably more often than not, they have a background of near-poverty. These people are united by what they feel is the west, as led by the USA, oppressing them and muslims in general. If you want to stop new people from being recruited, we need to stop making it so easy for people in the middle-east to hate us. We need to make an equitable peace in Palestine. We need to finish up with Iraq - the current approach with sanctions just lets Sadam get richer while millions suffer and the US gets the blame. The list doesn't stop there, but those are two biggest items that cause distrust and sometimes outright hate of the US in the middle-east. It is that hate that bin Laden builds on to recuirt terrorists. If we remove the source of that hate, then we will severely reduce, if not outright stop, the conversion of new people into bin Laden's organization.
Beware those jobs that offer a fun environment with nerf toys, free soda and all that. More often than not, it is a ploy to make you put in those uncompensated hours of overtime. A lot of companies use these incentives because they are extremely inexpensive compared to paying you for each hour you work.
Maybe it is just the contractor in me speaking, but when it comes down to it - pay me the money and I will take care of having my own fun outside of work. That doesn't I don't love the work I do, it just means that I do a great job at it because I love the work, not the silly cheapo incentives.
I could really make good use of those figures that show that an outsourced 1st level support position can cost $5k-$6k. I would be very grateful if you could post a citation on those numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like the new replays go for about $900 while one of these new tivos will be $650 ($400 + $250 lifetime guide fee). But the tivo will barely do 10mb/s while the replay will do 100mb/s (probably not flat out, but when you want to suck a 3GB file over the net every bit helps). It seems like Tivo is just as litigious and patent crazy as SB - just get a load of their new patents on networked multi-tivo boxes - a big old "duh!" but they got the patent.
So, all in all a $250 premium for easy to hack, more consumer-oriented, faster data transfer rates and available at least a couple of months sooner isn't so bad. Better than giving my money to a child of the copyright industry - even if they do run linux.
Which is exactly why real criminals won't be hindered by these new invasions but the rest of us will live with that background fear that "THEY" will screw up our data (with no accountability) and the result will be that we get our lives totally screwed over. I just read that a special collectors edition DVD of "The Net" is due for release soon. The story is weak, but it makes a great cautionary tale.
You know the old joke don't you?
Q: What does MCSE stand for?
A: Must Call Someone Experienced
The definitive source for computer contracting information is http://www.realrates.com/ There is a message-board off the main page where plenty of experts gather and discuss this stuff ad infinitum.
As at least one other poster has mentioned, there is a fourth option - use an umbrella company. I currently use an umbrella company and am very happy. They do all the back-office work, they sell me benefits like 401k and insurance and best of all, they stay with me as I go from job to job making those benefits fairly consistent. All for a fee of about 4% of billings that drops to 2% after I bill $125K per annum. Of course 401k and insurance are on top of that, the fee is just for the paperwork and dealing with the IRS - that ugly stuff. They also let me write-off all kinds of stuff directly rather than having to itemize when I file my personal taxes.
Here is a link to an FAQ like document on the way umbrellas work. It is maintained by one fairly good umbrella company, but the document is totally unbiased.
http://rmpcp.com/umbrellas.html
Richard Feynman, RIP.
Let this be not only a lesson about Linux and the GPL, but about banks in America. This kind of behaviour is completely sanctioned by federal banking laws. Most people don't realize it, but federally insured banks are allowed to whatever they want, whenever, they want, with your money and you can't do a damn thing about it. The best thing a high-priced attorney can do for you in situations like this is tell you to kiss-ass until your face is tan and do whatever the bank wants and then pray they decide to give you your money back. Once you have your money, close your account and never do business with that bank again - it isn't much because any bank is allowed to screw you over, but if you can find a small-town "family" bank where they actually know their customers and where they will feel guilt for doing you like that, you have less chance of getting the shaft.
No, you can ORDER a Power4 box. If you are a super-special customer, you can get a beta machine delivered. If you aren't a special buddy of IBM, then you can wait until December, or more likely January for a regular box.
Mod this Anon up guys, he knows what he is talking about, that first guy is just spurting random IA64 (aka Itanic) talk which has very little to do with PA-RISC - PA does not have predication, nor does it have instruction grouping.
All it takes is a little patience on the con-man's part. Ebay 'expires' auctions way too quickly, you can't go look at an auction that is more than a few months old. Many times I have clicked on the auction id number in a seller's feedback to have ebay tell me that the page no longer exists. IMHO that's bogus, they should keep the expired auction info indefinitely - it is only a few K per auction and disk space is cheap.
Unfortunately no matter what actions we take, or what rhetoric we put forth, we shall always be condemned for helping people.
That's the same kind of thinking that Bush appeals to when he says that the attack on the WTC was an "attack on liberty." In other words, pure hogwash.
On one hand we can never be everything to everyone. But what we can do is to stop saying one thing and doing another. Stop taking the shortest, simplest route to furthering our own ends in the middle-east (and else where). Our foreign policy always seems to favor the short-term solution with little regard to long-term consquences - bin Laden is the perfect example, he is a product of our cold war policies just like all those petty dictators in south America.
Our foreign policy needs to follow the path of "enlightened self-interest." Where we spend as much effort on getting the long-term results that we need rather than acting like the proverbial 800lb gorilla who wants his banana and wants it RIGHT NOW!
This conflict is not about us helping anyone, it is about us hurting the little people to further our own interests - the two do not have to go hand in hand, world diplomacy is not a zero-sum game. Terrorism, or assymetric warfare as our DoD refers to it, is a way for those little people to hurt in the same proportion they have been hurt. Because the scale is all out of whack, military action on the part of first and second world countries will never bring a reliable end to the threat, only good PR through good actions will do that.
I have a friend who lives in Pakistan. She told me that there were plenty of people in Pakistan cheering as well. Therefore I have no reason to doubt that the footage of palestine was accurate.
As others have stated, our foreign policy over the last 30-40 years has done a lot to turn the muslim world against us. We speak the rhetoric of freedom, but when it comes to other nations our actions are all about our self-interest at almost any cost and rarely about freedom. If we were to bring our actions in line with our rhetoric, the base of people from which bin Laden recruits would shrink to almost nil. Until then, we are only going to encourage more people to hate us.
I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with my conclusions, but I believe them to be sound. If you want to be successful on Linux (or any other free OS), you need to be libre/free.
That means making the source code available under a GPL-like license.
However, you can still protect your market at the same time. Just make it a requirement that anything compiled with the libre version of VectorC, or a derivative, also be licensed under the GPL or any of the similar licenses recognized by the OSI.
Then dual-license the compiler so that anyone who pays for the commercial license is free to do whatever they want with the resultant binaries, no licensing restrictions.
That way you can contribute to the community by providing a libre compiler, benefit from the community who will likely contribute bug-fixes and enhancements, and still make money from the people who would be willing to pay in the first place.
Bruce, that line about fabs is what HP has been saying ever since they announced the IA64 partnership with Intel. The problem with that reasoning, as another poster has already pointed out, is that designing a cpu is not contigent on owning a fab. Sparc, MIPS, Transmeta - they are all fabless. Even PA-RISC has been fabless for a long time now, it is common knowledge (well, at least common among comp.arch readers) that the last three generations of PA-RISC have been fabbed at Intel and IBM fabs rather than an HP facility. There is little technical reason to prevent that scenario from continuing indefinitely.
``Dave Packard would say, `The most important thing is for a company to be profitable, period,' '' Fiorina says. ``He also was fond of saying, `This is not a democracy.' ''
It looks like Carly is turning out to be just another golden-parachuter. With an approach like that towards managing HP, she wants to turn it into a glorified Dell. Unfortunately for her, the Dell we already have is pretty darn good and commodifying HP's business is not doing what is best for the company. Don't be surprised to see her making that golden sky-dive in a year or two, while HP's share price continues to make that bright-red sky-dive we've seen for the last year or so...
Dunno where you have been for the last decade or so, but - PA-RISC was the first commercially shipping RISC implementation. The Alpha and PA-RISC architectures regularly alternated between being 1st and 2nd for performance, depending on who had the most recent release (although Alpha tended to stay on top for longer periods of time, second is hardly sucking). IA64/EPIC have often been informally refered to as "PA-RISC 3.0"
Now, the PA-8700, just officially released with a top-speed of 750MHz is a bit of a disappointment since over a year ago they were claiming 1GHz+ in the lab and at least 800MHz for delivery to the real world, especially in light of the Power4 (and we all knew the Power4 had been coming for way over a year now). But the PA-8800 has potential (comp.arch rumours that it is dual-core like the Power4 -- the engineers leaving likely won't effect that design as it probably mostly done with by now) but I doubt we will see a PA-8900 with those guys gone.
Unless you are a middle-east terrorist with a net value of 100's of millions of dollars and corporate holdings world-wide. Then this might be exactly what you want.
Blank stares are cheaper
Even free blank stares aren't worth anything.
Attrition, both nature and head-hunters will take care of opening up positions for fresh blood and the real old dogs who refuse to learn new tricks should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
Let the youngsters work 80 hour weeks (and only get paid for 40), but a whole development team without more than a year or two of experience is just a recipe for disaster.
In this industry, something like 2 out of 3 people leave for a career in another industry by their mid-30s. That means that anyone with experience who isn't dead wood is going to be rare enough that they are worth keeping around.
But if you are in the South you can call any old soda a Coke!
Sounds like you've bought into the major management fallacy of our times - that you can cut one good experienced developer and replace him with 3-4 inexperienced developers for a lower total cost and still get equivalent quality. This is the same fallacy that has led to the wholesale replacement of experienced employees by cheap H1B-visa holders.
The results of the H1B replacement have been extremely poor - almost universally you hear about projects that have gone down the tubes after the transition to H1B. Many times the reason for failure is couched in terms that are not easily linked to the management decision to toss their experienced people, because management is extremely blame adverse. But unless the people are doing the equivalent of "sweat-shop" programming - there is no way that tossing experience in favor of a direct lower cost is going to produce a better product.
At the levels these people people work at, computer science is an art - you make decisions based on prior experience and an instinct based on years of experience discovering what works and what doesn't work. You put a bunch of newbies in there and they will spend the same time taking all the wrong-steps that the experienced people did ten years ago, meanwhile product quality goes out the window and so does time to market. It isn't about teaching old dogs new tricks - the old tricks are fundamental nowadays - just as you don't re-invent the shape of the wheel either.
Plus, if you had read the article, you would see that the people in that lab come from a wide range of backgrounds, they aren't all HPUX crusties - in fact most of them came from Bell Labs just a few years ago. They certainly don't fit the profile of a bunch of old computer geezers who don't know their way around a modern OS or a modern CPU (they were porting to Itanic, some would call that a post-modern CPU - others might call it trash, but that's another story).
Not only that, but when you contribute to the kernel, you get to keep the copyright on your contributions. Of course you have to license it under the GPL, but *you* still own it.
You forget:
0) The IRS gets their cut and any back taxes, no exceptions. Anything left over then gets split up among the various creditors.
This is true for all 50 states and any territories.
Hardly any Afghanis are terrorists. Even if every single person in bin Laden's organization turned out to be Afghani, that still leaves 99.9999% of Afghanis who aren't brainwashed.
In reality what happens is that bin Laden recruits from the disaffected muslims. They come from all over the middle-east and from all levels of society, although probably more often than not, they have a background of near-poverty. These people are united by what they feel is the west, as led by the USA, oppressing them and muslims in general. If you want to stop new people from being recruited, we need to stop making it so easy for people in the middle-east to hate us. We need to make an equitable peace in Palestine. We need to finish up with Iraq - the current approach with sanctions just lets Sadam get richer while millions suffer and the US gets the blame. The list doesn't stop there, but those are two biggest items that cause distrust and sometimes outright hate of the US in the middle-east. It is that hate that bin Laden builds on to recuirt terrorists. If we remove the source of that hate, then we will severely reduce, if not outright stop, the conversion of new people into bin Laden's organization.
Beware those jobs that offer a fun environment with nerf toys, free soda and all that. More often than not, it is a ploy to make you put in those uncompensated hours of overtime. A lot of companies use these incentives because they are extremely inexpensive compared to paying you for each hour you work.
Maybe it is just the contractor in me speaking, but when it comes down to it - pay me the money and I will take care of having my own fun outside of work. That doesn't I don't love the work I do, it just means that I do a great job at it because I love the work, not the silly cheapo incentives.
If you are good looking, that's something I'd like to see.
I could really make good use of those figures that show that an outsourced 1st level support position can cost $5k-$6k. I would be very grateful if you could post a citation on those numbers.