Does anyone else find the "Sponsored Links" in TFA unbelievably annoying? I stopped reading after the second page because of this. This story is out and out ad-spam.
Too bad they gave up, because Bluetooth would have been cool if it had only worked reliably.
I have a Sony Ericsson cell phone with a Bluetooth headset, and a Sony Viao laptop. The headset works with the cellphone about 80% of the time if I'm lucky. The rest of the time, I have to fool around to get them to connect. The cell phone has successfully worked with the laptop on two occasions out of 50 or so attempts.
As a recent Ph.D. graduate in Chemical Engineering, this is nothing new. When I entered graduate school 10% of my fellow class mates were US citizens. Our finest graduate schools in the technical fields (engineering, physics, medicine) have been training foreign students for a long time now.
As an indication of just how long, when I entered the university in 1973, over 50% of the physics grad students were Chinese, not one of my calculus section leaders could speak English, and at least 30% of the engineering grad students were from overseas. This has clearly been going on for longer than most of us think.
However, I see this as progress - education is a good thing because it raises the economic status of people the world over. And if someone discovers a cure for cancer or a usable fusion energy source, I don't care where they were born or where they were educated.
I did a project about 10 years ago using early MO drives from a $VLJC which was one of the pioneers of the format. The problem we had was not the media, but the drives themselves. After about six month of heavy use, the optical block would fail and require replacement.
The moral of this story is that for any archival medium that requires technology to interpret, one must archive the necessary hardware to read it, along with spare parts, the software to control the hardware (another little problem), not to mention the software to interpret the data and a machine (or machines)to run that. This is not a simple problem.
The actual problem (the serious one) is with Index Server, which ships with NT4/IIS4. It's not just the Win2K machines, it's EVERY NT server running IIS4 with Index Server, which installs by default and must be disabled manually.
BTW, this was reported yeaterday morning on the UK ZDNET and BugTraq, it took the US ZDNET editors a day to catch on....I patched my NT boxen yesterday morning.
Yes, experts frequently accomplish very little code re-use, except perhape their own code. Why?
1. Because you can't verify that code is correct unless you understand it and can at least audit the source. This leaves out closed-source "objects". How do you know if you are testing all possible path through the code if all you can do is black-box testing?
2. Because there are no guarantees on software. Just read the license agreement on the next box of pre-constructed objects you purchase. "No guarantee of merchantability of fitness for purpose" leaves a hole big enough to drive a truck through.
3. Optimization. If you don't thoroughly understand the code, you can't fix bottlenecks that crop up in that code.
4. In the case of closed-source code reuse, you can't even step through it with a debugger unless you want to do it in assembly.
Another point. While it's very nice to learn OO design in a teaching language, it is the very unusual real-world application that you can code up in Scheme. And now that the buzz is wearing off of Java, I actually see a trend back to C++.
We just gave up on installing OpenBSD 2.5 on an older PC that we wanted to make into a firewall router. We never got past the first boot from the hard disk, it fails on the first line displayed (Reading from device xxx).
If anyone can provide a pointer to installation support for OpenBSD, we would certainly appreciate the help. The online instructions and readmes are no help at all. I would love to support the project by sending more money for the new version, but there's no point if you can't get to first base....
So far, the Internet has not developed a charge model that supports a meta-magazine for techies that can afford to pay its authors. This will come, but for now there is a publication where you can read 3 years of 30 magazines, including Dr. Dobbs, C User's Journal, Sys Admin, Unix Review, MSJ, etc. on a CD-ROM. Unfortunately, this doesn't carry any Linux-specific mags yet, but it saves trees and is searchable. It's called Developer Source, and more info is available at the publisher's site .
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with these guys, just a subscriber.
No one, to my knowledge, has ever organized computer folks as a political force, at least not directly. The indirect examples I have seen are companies pooling PAC contributions and.org's like IEEE taking positions on immigration (which didn't exactly delight all the members). I would like to see some web sites that would let you vote with your pocketbook to influence specific issues in the same way that large corporations and overseas governments do: by aggregating large sums of money and brib^H^H^H^H donating money to political campaigns. Speaking for myself, there have been a lot of occasions lately where I would have whipped out a credit card and typed it in to a secure advocacy site....
I also am grey enough to remember the engineering glut, at least from my POV in California at the time. At one time during that period, I was trying to hire engineers to help me develop digital media systems (back before it was so fashionable). I was innundated with applications from folks with advanced degrees and years of experience, unfortunately in all the wrong specialties. And when I say specialized, I mean these guys spent their entire careers narrowly focused on tiny parts of systems with little or no application outside the context of the system. As you might guess, these candidates came overwhelmingly from the aerospace industry, which apparantly pigeonholed engineers with a vengance. I ended up filling the first position with an immigrant from the UK because I could not find a candidate with the right qualifications from the local talent pool.
So, a couple of observations: 1. The engineer glut as I saw it was not caused by evil MBAs plotting in a basement, but by a shifting of national priorities away from defense work and toward social welfare programs. 2. Many of the affected engineers dug their own graves by becoming too specialized and failing to train outside their very narrow areas of expertise. 3. The next glut will happen when the money finds somewhere else to go, probably when the Internet is built to about 80% of wherever it is headed. That will not happen soon unless outside forces such as a financial depression or a war force a major priority shift. Of course, the sudden emergence of a new technology such as genetic engineering could cause a smaller reallocation of funds, but in that case the transition would be more gradual giving the more forward-looking engineers time to retrain. 4. At risk of repeating an overused line, engineering (and other) professionals need to take more responsibility for keeping their skills updated. The only place to get lifetime jobs with pensions will be at Wal-Mart or the Post Office as time goes by.
So I'm not so sure that the IT worker shortage will end "soon", but it will end eventually. Tech-Nerds had best be prepared to take advantage of the next wave when it comes, by keeping their focus a bit broader than the requirements of their current position and investing in their own skillset. Whining about H1Bs and foreign workers will not save you!
A fellow by the name of Jerry Sumpton registered every family name he could back in 1996 and has been squatting on them ever since. He claims to host over 12,000 domains, renting the family names to individuals ($10/mo for email, $20/mo for web hosting). Quite a scam, although it's hard to believe that he gets many suc^H^H^H customers at those prices.
Note that SGI is showing all the signs of entering the death throes stage. Another 30% of the workforce laid off, abandoning major initiatives, CEO bailing (to MS!!), loss of faith by major customers. Reasonable people must expect that SGI goes Chapter 11 RSN (barring a government bailout) and then what happens to people who need supercomputers? Buy them from the Japanese? I don't think so.
to put your money where your mouth is. Even if you don't agree with McCain on all issues, send the man a check for standing up an issue important to you. Hold your nose and remember that single-issue politics is the only way anything happens in the U.S. political system. If the other whor^H^H^H^Hpoliticians see him get a good response on this, you bet that the issue will be picked up on by someone with a chance of winning the presidential race.
If you think QNX (cost-wise) is unreal, notice what happened to OS/9 when they got their first set-top box contract. BOOM, all support for small (20,000units/year) customers went away, and the prices went up for small unit volumes. We ended up writing a an OS from scratch that cost less over a small number of units than an OS/9 solution, back in the days before Linux was ready for prime time. There will be a rather large shake-out in the embedded market for the majority of applications where "hard" real-time is not required once Linux is sufficiently well-documented to be used in commercial development. The tools are almost there, and all it will take is for someone to release an embedded development kit with porting tools that support the CPUs normally used for embedded development. Then you will see a shake-out in the embedded market.
Slashdot Mirror
Real geeks never blogged in the first place.
Real geeks never blogged in the second place.
Blogs are for self-promoting wankers.
How hard is this for people to figure out?
Does anyone else find the "Sponsored Links" in TFA unbelievably annoying? I stopped reading after the second page because of this. This story is out and out ad-spam.
Too bad they gave up, because Bluetooth would have been cool if it had only worked reliably.
:-)
I have a Sony Ericsson cell phone with a Bluetooth headset, and a Sony Viao laptop. The headset works with the cellphone about 80% of the time if I'm lucky. The rest of the time, I have to fool around to get them to connect. The cell phone has successfully worked with the laptop on two occasions out of 50 or so attempts.
I haven't tried the headset with the laptop
As an indication of just how long, when I entered the university in 1973, over 50% of the physics grad students were Chinese, not one of my calculus section leaders could speak English, and at least 30% of the engineering grad students were from overseas. This has clearly been going on for longer than most of us think.
However, I see this as progress - education is a good thing because it raises the economic status of people the world over. And if someone discovers a cure for cancer or a usable fusion energy source, I don't care where they were born or where they were educated.
The moral of this story is that for any archival medium that requires technology to interpret, one must archive the necessary hardware to read it, along with spare parts, the software to control the hardware (another little problem), not to mention the software to interpret the data and a machine (or machines)to run that. This is not a simple problem.
BTW, this was reported yeaterday morning on the UK ZDNET and BugTraq, it took the US ZDNET editors a day to catch on....I patched my NT boxen yesterday morning.
Maybe the Chinese government will accidently shut down some of those china-based mailservers that are relaying Spam all over the world.....:)
1. Because you can't verify that code is correct unless you understand it and can at least audit the source. This leaves out closed-source "objects". How do you know if you are testing all possible path through the code if all you can do is black-box testing?
2. Because there are no guarantees on software. Just read the license agreement on the next box of pre-constructed objects you purchase. "No guarantee of merchantability of fitness for purpose" leaves a hole big enough to drive a truck through.
3. Optimization. If you don't thoroughly understand the code, you can't fix bottlenecks that crop up in that code.
4. In the case of closed-source code reuse, you can't even step through it with a debugger unless you want to do it in assembly.
Another point. While it's very nice to learn OO design in a teaching language, it is the very unusual real-world application that you can code up in Scheme. And now that the buzz is wearing off of Java, I actually see a trend back to C++.
If anyone can provide a pointer to installation support for OpenBSD, we would certainly appreciate the help. The online instructions and readmes are no help at all. I would love to support the project by sending more money for the new version, but there's no point if you can't get to first base....
Forgot to mention: All of the advertising is stripped out in Developer Source. All you get is content, including code and figures:-)
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with these guys, just a subscriber.
No one, to my knowledge, has ever organized computer folks as a political force, at least not directly. The indirect examples I have seen are companies pooling PAC contributions and .org's like IEEE taking positions on immigration (which didn't exactly delight all the members).
I would like to see some web sites that would let you vote with your pocketbook to influence specific issues in the same way that large corporations and overseas governments do: by aggregating large sums of money and brib^H^H^H^H donating money to political campaigns.
Speaking for myself, there have been a lot of occasions lately where I would have whipped out a credit card and typed it in to a secure advocacy site....
So, a couple of observations:
1. The engineer glut as I saw it was not caused by evil MBAs plotting in a basement, but by a shifting of national priorities away from defense work and toward social welfare programs.
2. Many of the affected engineers dug their own graves by becoming too specialized and failing to train outside their very narrow areas of expertise.
3. The next glut will happen when the money finds somewhere else to go, probably when the Internet is built to about 80% of wherever it is headed. That will not happen soon unless outside forces such as a financial depression or a war force a major priority shift. Of course, the sudden emergence of a new technology such as genetic engineering could cause a smaller reallocation of funds, but in that case the transition would be more gradual giving the more forward-looking engineers time to retrain.
4. At risk of repeating an overused line, engineering (and other) professionals need to take more responsibility for keeping their skills updated. The only place to get lifetime jobs with pensions will be at Wal-Mart or the Post Office as time goes by.
So I'm not so sure that the IT worker shortage will end "soon", but it will end eventually. Tech-Nerds had best be prepared to take advantage of the next wave when it comes, by keeping their focus a bit broader than the requirements of their current position and investing in their own skillset. Whining about H1Bs and foreign workers will not save you!
--Bill
It's Jerry Sumpton again. Check WhoIs....
A fellow by the name of Jerry Sumpton registered every family name he could back in 1996 and has been squatting on them ever since. He claims to host over 12,000 domains, renting the family names to individuals ($10/mo for email, $20/mo for web hosting). Quite a scam, although it's hard to believe that he gets many suc^H^H^H customers at those prices.
Note that SGI is showing all the signs of entering the death throes stage. Another 30% of the workforce laid off, abandoning major initiatives, CEO bailing (to MS!!), loss of faith by major customers. Reasonable people must expect that SGI goes Chapter 11 RSN (barring a government bailout) and then what happens to people who need supercomputers? Buy them from the Japanese? I don't think so.
to put your money where your mouth is. Even if you don't agree with McCain on all issues, send the man a check for standing up an issue important to you. Hold your nose and remember that single-issue politics is the only way anything happens in the U.S. political system. If the other whor^H^H^H^Hpoliticians see him get a good response on this, you bet that the issue will be picked up on by someone with a chance of winning the presidential race.
If you think QNX (cost-wise) is unreal, notice what happened to OS/9 when they got their first set-top box contract. BOOM, all support for small (20,000units/year) customers went away, and the prices went up for small unit volumes. We ended up writing a an OS from scratch that cost less over a small number of units than an OS/9 solution, back in the days before Linux was ready for prime time. There will be a rather large shake-out in the embedded market for the majority of applications where "hard" real-time is not required once Linux is sufficiently well-documented to be used in commercial development. The tools are almost there, and all it will take is for someone to release an embedded development kit with porting tools that support the CPUs normally used for embedded development. Then you will see a shake-out in the embedded market.
Supposedly TiVo's product is Linux-based, but I haven't seen any of their extensions released. Maybe I'm not looking in right places?