Same as others have reported: My wife has a small business, with lots of depreciation, self-employment taxes, multiple sorts of retirement accounts. I do some "consulting" on the side for friends. This is all added onto my 401k's, etc.
The totally out of control complexity of the U.S. tax system makes "analog" tax preparation all but impossible to get "right" without some sort of software assistance. I've been a Turbotax user for >9 years and it's saved huge amounts of time. (It still takes >2 weekends...:-( ) It looks like I'll be converting to TaxCut or a tax preparer too.
I'll have to agree WRT human cloning. It is truly irresponsible to inflict artifically-generated risks on a person with the perfectly ordinary goals and aspirations of a human being.
Cats, cattle and sheep are one thing... Human children are another entirely.
Disclaimer: I would be hesitant even to clone animals until I feel that we have some confidence in the process, as I believe that humans have a responsibility to consider the effects of their actions. Particularly when the subject of the experiment doesn't have any say in it.
Having only *one* token/object/system for all of a person's access means that only one thing needs to be hacked to gain access to that person's stuff: Not Good.
Having only *one* token/object/system for all of a person's access means that the person cannot (easily) grant a subset of their secured "capabilities" to another person (think "power of attorney" as a similar concept).
Finally, I would want the issuer of such a token/object/system to be a Disinterested Third Party. No single organization can be disinterested for long, they would become the target of all sorts of human-hacks: Payoffs, "standard hacking", etc. And worst of all, the government is not under any circumstances a disinterested third party! "The government" is not a monolith, "it" consists of lots of departments/divisions/people, many of whom love power.
In entirely too many situations, some entity would claim "legal right" to use their information/influence, sometimes for "good", sometimes for a rather narrower or shortsighted "good", as defined by them, not me. It is those people that I worry about. (Too tinfoil-hat? Maybe. But I know lots of people who cannot see past the ends of their noses, and some of them are in government. It's not so much paranoia as it is a recognition that pelple can be real assholes, and I have already given them too much influence over my life already!)
I am Not an economist... I AM a longtime software developer...
Moore's law has allowed, for what may be one of the first times in history, the de-insdustrialization of a major economic product: Computer software. When I started 30+ years ago, computer access was for the dedicated geek (this I know...:-) ). A DEC PDP-8 cost 10 grand. Its 2.5 Mbyte RK05 was an additional 9 grand.
Today, just about anyone can afford a crappy little out-of-date 400+MHz, 256Mbyte, 20+gig system, which can make a single individual developer economically productive.
Coupled with The Internet, such people can virtually gather together to be economically more productive.
This has caught all sorts of people by surprise, and those who are accustomed to simply "managing" or "owning" the means of production have been caught flat-footed by this sea-change in the possession of economic productivity. (I think this is why the OSS/libre software movement is critically important for the developing world, and why I wish that I had enough savings to stop working for money today in order to make a real contribution...)
One of the points (in my opinion) that we must remember is that there are people and/or organizations what want to return to the days when the few could control the resources required for economic productivity of the many.
FYI, I am using agricultural societies (exemplified by feudalism, as observed in places like Europe) and industrial society as basis for this thinking.
I am not a communist, but I will refuse to ever allow someone else to take away my freedom to code, and additionally, to team up with others of like mind to satisfy our needs for information systems productivity.
I agree, 2GB is "inadequate" for current large system applications, and for "new media", etc.
On the other hand, I question whether having >2GB flat files is a reasonable way to organize big data. (Movies have "scenes", music is often divided into "songs", or "movements" for the classically minded, plays have "acts", and so on. Hierarchy and subdivision come naturally in many domains of activity.
On the gripping hand, as 64-bit CPUs become more common (MMmm... Hammer...), I expect a relatively natural though not necessarily monotonic progression toward 64-bit addressing in flat files.
In all the comments about this stuff, NOBODY "got it"...
Microsoft wants to use their control of IE to gain control of the web services market.
It's not the client in this case: It's their capacity to control the client space ("free" IE vs Netscape's browser) that could allow them to start building "extended" web services that work "more optimally" with IE in order to enhance their server market penetration.
It's Microsoft's desire to enter (and in my opinion, dominate) the server marketplace using their control over the browser client space, having killed Netscape. Had Netscape survived the price-war with Microsoft, it could have served as an impediment to Microsoft's desire for control over the HTTP/web services protocols.
Linux, with "son of Netscape" serves the impediment role formerly held by Netscape only because it (Linux or Gnu/Linux with Mozilla, Konqueror, or Opera) cannot be destroyed by price under-cutting.
Mee too++. 25 years post-grad, 29 years including summers & assistantships. I thought I would be "washed up" by 40 (6 years ago), but I'm still gainfully employed. It's a bit of a surprise to me, though: I see many very good quality former co-workers laid off in this downturn, who are simply unable to get any work at all.
Companies, including the one I work for, unfortunately, are unwilling to hire a good person for a reduced wage (they are willing to work for *anything*, they have families to support) until business picks up.
A hint for those who expect to be well-paid: Be diligent, intelligent, and above all, a team player. Engineering is a team sport! Knowing lots of languages is assumed. The ability to pick up new languages/paradigms is assumed. Being buzzword compliant is assumed. Being "37337" is worthless. The ability to help the team move forward on a tight schedule is (at least in every job I've been in) where the value lies.
Remember this: Microsoft executives have a legally defined fiduciary responsiblity to their stockholders. This responsiblity informs essentially all of their marketing, technology and business decisions. They know the rules (exceptionally well!). Their resonsibility is to use the rules of the and manipulate the process to macimize their profits.
It's up to us, as citizens in a (theoretically) representative democracy to participate in the establishment of rules to prevent such indecent treatment of their customers and competitors. If we don't like their masterful use of monopoly in one business to destroy all hope of honest competition in another business, then it's our job to speak up. Thoughtfully.
And we'd also better be prepared to compete too. (As a very happy Linux user and developer, I believe this is actually being done successfully.)
Agreed to both comments. When I was 16, a human soul wasn't worth the cost of the most "basic" computer; having access to a real computer was the dream of geeks everywhere. About 8 months after I ascended the throne of computer access for the first time, the university bought a 2.5 Mbyte RK05 and it was acres of storage, impossible to use fully... That feeling doesn't occur much anymore, even with my current PC: Shuttle XPC (nice and quiet) Apple Cinema (only the 22-inch version) 2.4-GHz P4 (performance is OK) 1 Gbyte RAM (a reasonable amount) 80 gbyte disk (plenty for now) Nice and cheap...
I still have several plots generated on a PDP-8/L, drawn on a Hewlett-Packard X-Y recorded through the D/A outputs.
<slightly offtopic>I stay away from WinXP for the second reason: I will not allow someone else any sort of control over my machine, especially god-like without explicit direct authorization! In exchange for which, I recognize the rights of authors and work accordingly. </offtopic>
I've seen and worked with companies that built several systems based on it, and it's not a bad way to get Linux-sized flexibility and power in a small, inexpensive package. It was/is straightforward, once one understands system behavior without copy-on-write forking semantics.
A few years ago, a good example of a uClinux implementation was the uCsimm, a 30-pin SIMM sized machine based on the Motorola 68EZ328. 8Mbytes RAM, 2 Mbytes flash, Crystal 8900 (10 Mbit) Ethernet. The 68EZ328 powers all pre-PalmOS-5.0 units. We had a web server with complete CGI capability, as well as several additional communication front-end tools. So I know Linux runs on the 68EZ328, and I've seen references to the Palm H/W in the uClinux kernel code, though I haven't tried it on my Palm...
More recently, uClinux also runs on NetSilicon Net+ARM family processors, http://www.netsilicon.com/
The people who tried to commercialize uClinux (and probably worked on uClibc, though I am less sure of this connection) were Rt-Control, a Canadian company that were subsequently acquired by Lineo: http://www.lineo.com/
I have no relationship with either Lineo or NetSilicon, other than being a (mostly) satisfied customer.
It's easy to pick out egregious failures. Naturally, incompetent people in positions of responsibility and thieves should be "called on the carpet". These organizations and people are statistically infrequent.
There are many organizations doing the best they can to manage their systems competently and get hacked anyway.
In my opinion, it's a good idea to give such organizations the opportunity to improve their techniques and technology before dragging their names through the public mud. The Public can be very judgmental...
This idea bears further investigation by those wiser than myself, or those with time to consider topics other than remaining employed.
Having watched the arc of this story, I agree with Michael that there is *definitely* some overreacting going on, and that such overreactions reflect negatively on the community.
A few weeks ago, my brother asked me about the recovery of the "tech sector" of the stock market. My response to him was that the arrival of DRM and other technologies intended to benefit narrow market segments (major corporate "content providers" and certain market-dominating "software" "providers") would chill real innovation, and consequently chill both real wealth creation and market recovery.
Anyone have any thoughts about market consequences? (Am I being hopeful that chilled innovation would be even recognized?)
I remember a Scientific American article a few years ago, in which genetic algorithms were used to program an FPGA to recognize a 1kHz input signal. Could be the same researcher, I don't remember. But I do remember two important observations:
The final design that worked with one FPGA did not work with a different chip of the same model.
The researcher had no idea how the final design worked.
$5000 is not *horribly* unreasonable as an initial investment in a technology, but I would want a substantially lower annual cost for maintenance of the certification.
Yes, I have done it / am doing it now. It is (already noted to be) not a no-brainer! If your organization is small or has limited heavy-lifting build/makefile skills, it might be worth considering one of the commercial kits.
On the other hand, if your organization is large enough to dedicate some time, or needs to maintain a toolchain to meet long-term (ISO9000...) requirements for building "old" products from source, then it is probably worth the hassle of establishing and maintaining the toolchain. Of course, given that many of us are control freaks, we all just love having access to and control over our sources.
Our organization has "invested":-) the effort in establishing our own toolchain in order to increase the likelihood that we'll be able to reproduce our compiled product long after the current generation of workstations has gone the way of the dodo. We keep backup sources for everything including GCC, binutils, glibc, etc...
Having built the toolchain, we can manage portability of our product code among several processor architectures locally.
People and organizations providing online purchasing and access services could benefit from the services of a high-quality honest broker.
Microsoft could have served in such a role
had they been honest. Their need to
use domination of one marketplace to force
products and services into other markeplaces (e.g. Office<->OS<-> browser) renders them absolutely unacceptable in the role.
I felt rich a few years ago, and got the 1600SW
with #9 Revolution IV. It had a few very bright
hot pixels, so SGI replaced it; the replacement
is absolutely flawless.
I just hope my Revolution IV doesn't croak!
I had hoped to update the existing PCI card with
AGP, but they have become too rare.:-(
If I had any confidence that sellers (on Ebay,
for example) would be truthful about hot pixels,
I would get another 1600SW without hesitation.
I saw an Apple Cinema at our local
computer store a few days ago, and thought it
looked pretty good. Lots of big pixels
(I seem to have difficulty with >90
pixels/inch)...
Does anyone know whether Linux PPC has X
support for the Cinema and its video card?
I have a co-worker whose *attachments* are
invisible to my non-OE mail reader. I receive
a message asking me to review an enclosed
Word(TM) document, only to find the
"winmail.dat" ms-tnef unreadable attachment.
It happens every time. Micro$haft
hides the attachments in their
bogus proprietary format, and That's
the problem!!
I received one of these CueCats for being
a Forbes subscriber, and thought it was a
neat little item...
If I cannot get it to work on my system
(meaning under Linux) then it has absolutely
no utility: for me, for the
Digital Convergence folks (the people who
seem to have come up with the concept) or for
Tandy (who built it).
It's too bad, really... I hope people like
this get a clue someday. Is it their intention
that *only* Windows users use their product? Or (more likely) They want *only their software*
handling the transactions so they can limit
people's use of the device to accessing the paid
"CueCat enabled advertisements?"
My company does much of its work in the Windows Environment, while I remain a *NIX partisan (particularly Linux).
In order to preserve my sanity, I continue to use Linux, but run NT on VMware to support Office, etc. It's all running on a Sony Z505-Rx, with VMware and NT as a "guest". It works very well for me, the NT guest is fast enough in pure computation, slower in system access, but still acceptable. I run RedHat 6.1, XFree86 3.3.5, and VMware displays nicely either in an X window or full-screen.
If you use VMware on a portable system (like a laptop), be *certain* to shut down NT and VMware when changing network configurations since they like to lock the system up if they get confused.
Other than that proviso, I find the implementation very effective. I've configured my NT guest to use DHCP, and it participates fully and correctly in all Windows-based networking in our office as well as in my home network. This includes the Linux host running Samba 2.0.6, where I keep all "workspace" files, with NT accessing the Linux system as if it were a server on the Windows network. This makes the source tree available to both Linux and NT.
Count on NT taking at least 1.5 gig of disk and 64 MB RAM to run reasonably. The Z505-Rx comes with 128 MB RAM, so VMware/NT scarf half my RAM (it's configurable, but have you ever tried running NT with less than 64MB? Dont't try it at home, kids! It's not pretty!). I am seriously considering upgrading to 192 MB for this reason. The Z505Rx runs a Pentium-II at 400 MHz which is feel is a minimum CPU speed for reasonable responsiveness.
Slashdot Mirror
Happy Linux user, forgetful of those cute winky keys... :-)
The totally out of control complexity of the U.S. tax system makes "analog" tax preparation all but impossible to get "right" without some sort of software assistance. I've been a Turbotax user for >9 years and it's saved huge amounts of time. (It still takes >2 weekends... :-( ) It looks like I'll be converting to TaxCut or a tax preparer too.
Cats, cattle and sheep are one thing... Human children are another entirely.
Disclaimer: I would be hesitant even to clone animals until I feel that we have some confidence in the process, as I believe that humans have a responsibility to consider the effects of their actions. Particularly when the subject of the experiment doesn't have any say in it.
Having only *one* token/object/system for all of a person's access means that the person cannot (easily) grant a subset of their secured "capabilities" to another person (think "power of attorney" as a similar concept).
Finally, I would want the issuer of such a token/object/system to be a Disinterested Third Party. No single organization can be disinterested for long, they would become the target of all sorts of human-hacks: Payoffs, "standard hacking", etc. And worst of all, the government is not under any circumstances a disinterested third party! "The government" is not a monolith, "it" consists of lots of departments/divisions/people, many of whom love power.
In entirely too many situations, some entity would claim "legal right" to use their information/influence, sometimes for "good", sometimes for a rather narrower or shortsighted "good", as defined by them, not me. It is those people that I worry about. (Too tinfoil-hat? Maybe. But I know lots of people who cannot see past the ends of their noses, and some of them are in government. It's not so much paranoia as it is a recognition that pelple can be real assholes, and I have already given them too much influence over my life already!)
Moore's law has allowed, for what may be one of the first times in history, the de-insdustrialization of a major economic product: Computer software. When I started 30+ years ago, computer access was for the dedicated geek (this I know... :-) ). A DEC PDP-8 cost 10 grand. Its 2.5 Mbyte RK05 was an additional 9 grand.
Today, just about anyone can afford a crappy little out-of-date 400+MHz, 256Mbyte, 20+gig system, which can make a single individual developer economically productive.
Coupled with The Internet, such people can virtually gather together to be economically more productive.
This has caught all sorts of people by surprise, and those who are accustomed to simply "managing" or "owning" the means of production have been caught flat-footed by this sea-change in the possession of economic productivity. (I think this is why the OSS/libre software movement is critically important for the developing world, and why I wish that I had enough savings to stop working for money today in order to make a real contribution...)
One of the points (in my opinion) that we must remember is that there are people and/or organizations what want to return to the days when the few could control the resources required for economic productivity of the many.
FYI, I am using agricultural societies (exemplified by feudalism, as observed in places like Europe) and industrial society as basis for this thinking.
I am not a communist, but I will refuse to ever allow someone else to take away my freedom to code, and additionally, to team up with others of like mind to satisfy our needs for information systems productivity.
On the other hand, I question whether having >2GB flat files is a reasonable way to organize big data. (Movies have "scenes", music is often divided into "songs", or "movements" for the classically minded, plays have "acts", and so on. Hierarchy and subdivision come naturally in many domains of activity.
On the gripping hand, as 64-bit CPUs become more common (MMmm... Hammer...), I expect a relatively natural though not necessarily monotonic progression toward 64-bit addressing in flat files.
Microsoft wants to use their control of IE to gain control of the web services market.
It's not the client in this case: It's their capacity to control the client space ("free" IE vs Netscape's browser) that could allow them to start building "extended" web services that work "more optimally" with IE in order to enhance their server market penetration.
It's Microsoft's desire to enter (and in my opinion, dominate) the server marketplace using their control over the browser client space, having killed Netscape. Had Netscape survived the price-war with Microsoft, it could have served as an impediment to Microsoft's desire for control over the HTTP/web services protocols.
Linux, with "son of Netscape" serves the impediment role formerly held by Netscape only because it (Linux or Gnu/Linux with Mozilla, Konqueror, or Opera) cannot be destroyed by price under-cutting.
It is guaranteed to be the last assuming the search stops on success... </irrestable extAttr="grin">
Companies, including the one I work for, unfortunately, are unwilling to hire a good person for a reduced wage (they are willing to work for *anything*, they have families to support) until business picks up.
A hint for those who expect to be well-paid: Be diligent, intelligent, and above all, a team player. Engineering is a team sport! Knowing lots of languages is assumed. The ability to pick up new languages/paradigms is assumed. Being buzzword compliant is assumed. Being "37337" is worthless. The ability to help the team move forward on a tight schedule is (at least in every job I've been in) where the value lies.
It's up to us, as citizens in a (theoretically) representative democracy to participate in the establishment of rules to prevent such indecent treatment of their customers and competitors. If we don't like their masterful use of monopoly in one business to destroy all hope of honest competition in another business, then it's our job to speak up. Thoughtfully.
And we'd also better be prepared to compete too. (As a very happy Linux user and developer, I believe this is actually being done successfully.)
Shuttle XPC (nice and quiet)
Apple Cinema (only the 22-inch version)
2.4-GHz P4 (performance is OK)
1 Gbyte RAM (a reasonable amount)
80 gbyte disk (plenty for now)
Nice and cheap...
I still have several plots generated on a PDP-8/L, drawn on a Hewlett-Packard X-Y recorded through the D/A outputs.
<slightly offtopic>I stay away from WinXP for the second reason: I will not allow someone else any sort of control over my machine, especially god-like without explicit direct authorization! In exchange for which, I recognize the rights of authors and work accordingly.
</offtopic>
I've seen and worked with companies that built several systems based on it, and it's not a bad way to get Linux-sized flexibility and power in a small, inexpensive package. It was/is straightforward, once one understands system behavior without copy-on-write forking semantics.
A few years ago, a good example of a uClinux implementation was the uCsimm, a 30-pin SIMM sized machine based on the Motorola 68EZ328. 8Mbytes RAM, 2 Mbytes flash, Crystal 8900 (10 Mbit) Ethernet. The 68EZ328 powers all pre-PalmOS-5.0 units. We had a web server with complete CGI capability, as well as several additional communication front-end tools. So I know Linux runs on the 68EZ328, and I've seen references to the Palm H/W in the uClinux kernel code, though I haven't tried it on my Palm...
More recently, uClinux also runs on NetSilicon Net+ARM family processors, http://www.netsilicon.com/
The people who tried to commercialize uClinux (and probably worked on uClibc, though I am less sure of this connection) were Rt-Control, a Canadian company that were subsequently acquired by Lineo: http://www.lineo.com/
I have no relationship with either Lineo or NetSilicon, other than being a (mostly) satisfied customer.
There are many organizations doing the best they can to manage their systems competently and get hacked anyway.
In my opinion, it's a good idea to give such organizations the opportunity to improve their techniques and technology before dragging their names through the public mud. The Public can be very judgmental...
Having watched the arc of this story, I agree with Michael that there is *definitely* some overreacting going on, and that such overreactions reflect negatively on the community.
Anyone have any thoughts about market consequences? (Am I being hopeful that chilled innovation would be even recognized?)
$5000 is not *horribly* unreasonable as an initial investment in a technology, but I would want a substantially lower annual cost for maintenance of the certification.
On the other hand, if your organization is large enough to dedicate some time, or needs to maintain a toolchain to meet long-term (ISO9000...) requirements for building "old" products from source, then it is probably worth the hassle of establishing and maintaining the toolchain. Of course, given that many of us are control freaks, we all just love having access to and control over our sources.
Our organization has "invested" :-) the effort in establishing our own toolchain in order to increase the likelihood that we'll be able to reproduce our compiled product long after the current generation of workstations has gone the way of the dodo. We keep backup sources for everything including GCC, binutils, glibc, etc...
Having built the toolchain, we can manage portability of our product code among several processor architectures locally.
Microsoft could have served in such a role had they been honest. Their need to use domination of one marketplace to force products and services into other markeplaces (e.g. Office<->OS<-> browser) renders them absolutely unacceptable in the role.
I just hope my Revolution IV doesn't croak! I had hoped to update the existing PCI card with AGP, but they have become too rare. :-(
If I had any confidence that sellers (on Ebay, for example) would be truthful about hot pixels, I would get another 1600SW without hesitation.
Does anyone know whether Linux PPC has X support for the Cinema and its video card?
It happens every time. Micro$haft hides the attachments in their bogus proprietary format, and That's the problem!!
If I cannot get it to work on my system (meaning under Linux) then it has absolutely no utility: for me, for the Digital Convergence folks (the people who seem to have come up with the concept) or for Tandy (who built it).
It's too bad, really... I hope people like this get a clue someday. Is it their intention that *only* Windows users use their product? Or (more likely) They want *only their software* handling the transactions so they can limit people's use of the device to accessing the paid "CueCat enabled advertisements?"
I wish Apple and IBM well!
In order to preserve my sanity, I continue to use Linux, but run NT on VMware to support Office, etc. It's all running on a Sony Z505-Rx, with VMware and NT as a "guest". It works very well for me, the NT guest is fast enough in pure computation, slower in system access, but still acceptable. I run RedHat 6.1, XFree86 3.3.5, and VMware displays nicely either in an X window or full-screen.
If you use VMware on a portable system (like a laptop), be *certain* to shut down NT and VMware when changing network configurations since they like to lock the system up if they get confused.
Other than that proviso, I find the implementation very effective. I've configured my NT guest to use DHCP, and it participates fully and correctly in all Windows-based networking in our office as well as in my home network. This includes the Linux host running Samba 2.0.6, where I keep all "workspace" files, with NT accessing the Linux system as if it were a server on the Windows network. This makes the source tree available to both Linux and NT.
Count on NT taking at least 1.5 gig of disk and 64 MB RAM to run reasonably. The Z505-Rx comes with 128 MB RAM, so VMware/NT scarf half my RAM (it's configurable, but have you ever tried running NT with less than 64MB? Dont't try it at home, kids! It's not pretty!). I am seriously considering upgrading to 192 MB for this reason. The Z505Rx runs a Pentium-II at 400 MHz which is feel is a minimum CPU speed for reasonable responsiveness.