You have a point, and I make a similar salary running a bank of VMWare servers that host the automated testing system whose architecture I designed. The common factor in both of these activities is that both would be prohibitively difficult and expensive to outsource. Too much specialized institutional and domain knowledge is involved. You'd spend more time and money writing specifications and managing an outsourced system then you would on the current in-house system.
Our company actually does minimal outsourcing, but this is due to historical quirks that created a team not easily re-created elsewhere. If they were starting over today, I think the entire company would be in India or China.
By the way, where do you work where you can make $100K or more with powerpoint docs and diagrams?
I think the real problem is, Americans aren't interested in Science and Technology careers that lead them to a lifetime of poverty for themselves and their families.
It's about the money. The rest is BS media hyped fantasy. When I can use my brain to become a doctor, lawyer, or financier or any high paying skill which can't be outsourced, why would I bother pursuing a career where my skills can, and inevitably will, be outsourced?
...what else can you do other than levy a fine? You can throw the top executives who made the decisions in jail with the general prison population. Of course, executive hanging would more effectively reduce recidivism, particularly if done publicly on the nightly news.
The not so subtle point I was making is that if the content is free, even with embedded advertising, someone was still able to make a profit. It's not worth most people's time to dig up a download if free streaming content (with commercials) is available, *exactly* as TV and radio do. FYI, the bundling situation you're describing has been around since Betamax tapes made their debut in the 70s or cassette tapes even earlier than that. TV did not fall over dead nor did the music industry. The whole trivial issue has been blown up out of all recognition by the RIAA.
I didn't really "get" mathematics until after I'd been programming steadily for about 5 years. After that, concepts like n-dimensional matrices, determining the area under curves and relational changes between quantities became much more intuitive.
What always made math difficult was never the basic concepts, which are often trivial. It was the god-awful symbols and counter-intuitive syntax used to express math. Had I learned concept-symbol relations early, like Chinese and Japanese students do when they memorize characters, I expect that I would have had much less trouble.
I too must confess that my enjoyment of Mexican tarragon in chicken soup is rarely discussed. Will Microsoft attempt to blackmail me with this sizzling secret?
Agreed. Our battery technology is pathetic at the moment, but the point is that the only advantage to biofuel is the form it comes in. It's not particularly efficient in terms of energy return and the environmental and social costs are high. We'd do better trying to improve battery technology using readily available inexpensive materials like carbon and common metals rather than displacing edible crops with fuel crops.
Biodiesel is essentially harvested solar energy, packaged in chemical form, with an efficiency that is probably comparable to solar panels. Worse, sunlight and resources devoted to growing grass is sunlight and resources not growing food. We can, and will, grow some of our fuel, but at nowhere near the scale, nor at the same energy return, as oil.
Biofuel is one answer, but it's a small one-word, vaguely apologetic answer lost in the din. You want to generate energy? Think "nuclear."
If true, it's unfortunate that you still misunderstand the difference between masturbation and money and sound like a frustrated adolescent who can't quite figure out why the rest of the world doesn't recognize his genius. I'm sure you're also still fascinated by science fiction and think next year is the year of the Linux desktop too.
Look, life is full of people at all skill levels. I deal with C++ programmers who have never cracked a case, and have only a vague familiarity with the relationship between voltage, current, and power and have never touched assembly. Guess what? They can still program in C++ and C# competently, and we all make money. Do they work hard to engage in "best practices?" No. Our current attempt at this has been "Agile" which too will be undermined by human nature. Has the business been viable since 1989? Yes. Will the software one day become unmanageable? It has been that way for the last decade. We patch it up, overlay it with.net and wpf, and muddle through. Nobody cares. We'll all be gone by the time it all falls over, just like every other software company.
Art is not eternal. Neither is software. Embrace the chaos. It keeps us all in our jobs, eh?
I admin about 100+ VMs on 14 separate servers. I used to admin about 50 real physical machines. I can tell you that the physical machines had many more quirky, one-off problems that, quite frankly, weren't worthy of further investigation in terms of business cost-effectiveness. They were inevitably reformatted. All virtualization did was to speed up the process so that a new machine can be created in an hour instead of in two days.
As much as it might be intellectually satisfying to dig down into a problem, most systems are there to serve a business, and make money, not to solve the intellectual curiosity of a system admin who vaguely believes that the world is a better place if he/she can just take the time to solve every little system quirk.
You keep them working so the company can make money. That's all. That's the main priority. And thus we grow up.
They just want to make money and don't care how it happens. If we found out tomorrow that we could get electricity by plugging 13 ampere taps into the butts of angels, Shell would simply proceed to purchase the catholic church. Biofuels look potentially profitable? Buy the patents for a trivial sum and perhaps on day, skim the profits of those companies and individuals who do the actual work of development.
In terms of energy density, our battery technology is pathetic when compared with liquid hydrocarbons. Electricity isn't anything resembling a drop-in replacement for the approximately 166 exajoules of energy that oil currently provides to civilization each year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil).
Even oil isn't fungible. You can't equate light sweet Saudi crude that's cheap to extract and refine and has a high energy return with heavy, sulphur laden asphalt in the Orinoco basin that's expensive to extract, refine and has a lousy energy return.
Probably not then either. Everything will suddenly get more expensive as the high price of oil works its way down the value chain. We'll use less for sure, but by then demand will be much less elastic. People have to eat, you know, and we are pathetically dependent on liquid hydrocarbons for our fuel supply.
Pretty soon, oil price feedback sets in, as the high price of oil itself increases the cost of locating, extracting, refining and distributing refined liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Prices spike suddenly, and crash, and again, and again.. with greater time between spikes and a diminishing height to the spikes before each crash, until we just can't maintain the supply chain any more and we all start to get used to a lower energy level, and starvation. 7 billion of us, remember?
Slashdot Mirror
You have a point, and I make a similar salary running a bank of VMWare servers that host the automated testing system whose architecture I designed. The common factor in both of these activities is that both would be prohibitively difficult and expensive to outsource. Too much specialized institutional and domain knowledge is involved. You'd spend more time and money writing specifications and managing an outsourced system then you would on the current in-house system.
Our company actually does minimal outsourcing, but this is due to historical quirks that created a team not easily re-created elsewhere. If they were starting over today, I think the entire company would be in India or China.
By the way, where do you work where you can make $100K or more with powerpoint docs and diagrams?
Is it really valid to think of it as another "dimension" as such? It seems more like a geometric property of any space that supports interval.
Speaking of which, I gotta go. Lunchtime.
I think the real problem is, Americans aren't interested in Science and Technology careers that lead them to a lifetime of poverty for themselves and their families.
It's about the money. The rest is BS media hyped fantasy. When I can use my brain to become a doctor, lawyer, or financier or any high paying skill which can't be outsourced, why would I bother pursuing a career where my skills can, and inevitably will, be outsourced?
Anybody?
...what else can you do other than levy a fine?
You can throw the top executives who made the decisions in jail with the general prison population. Of course, executive hanging would more effectively reduce recidivism, particularly if done publicly on the nightly news.
We may not have a lock, but we *did* have Tom DeLay, so we win on stupidity points.
how much we *really* value freedom of expression.
Ah, I see you attended my high school.
The not so subtle point I was making is that if the content is free, even with embedded advertising, someone was still able to make a profit. It's not worth most people's time to dig up a download if free streaming content (with commercials) is available, *exactly* as TV and radio do. FYI, the bundling situation you're describing has been around since Betamax tapes made their debut in the 70s or cassette tapes even earlier than that. TV did not fall over dead nor did the music industry. The whole trivial issue has been blown up out of all recognition by the RIAA.
with free shows paid for by advertising, like TV or radio? Uh, wait a second....
Um, yes actually, the USA developed Darpanet (the first internet) in response to the USSR in order to build a robust communications network.
Oh, and there's this new-fangled thing called "Google" you can use to look up the origins like this: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_some_information_about_the_invention_of_the_internet
and this: http://www.velocityguide.com/internet-history/origin-of-the-internet.html
or perhaps a little slideshow might be simpler for you:
http://www.slideshare.net/macloo/invention-of-the-internet
Oh yes, and TCP/IP? See this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf
and this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Kahn.
FYI, neither is Swiss.
You think yourself "harsh" but what you come across as is adolescent and what rural Americans would term "pig-ignorant."
When your country can invent and deploy an internet, you get to make the rules. Until then, nobody's forcing you to use it.
I didn't really "get" mathematics until after I'd been programming steadily for about 5 years. After that, concepts like n-dimensional matrices, determining the area under curves and relational changes between quantities became much more intuitive.
What always made math difficult was never the basic concepts, which are often trivial. It was the god-awful symbols and counter-intuitive syntax used to express math. Had I learned concept-symbol relations early, like Chinese and Japanese students do when they memorize characters, I expect that I would have had much less trouble.
You know how to easily provision a VM? Blasphemy! (And can you give me any hints?)
I too must confess that my enjoyment of Mexican tarragon in chicken soup is rarely discussed. Will Microsoft attempt to blackmail me with this sizzling secret?
Which will no doubt take some barbed comments and pointed insights to thrust ourselves into a much deeper and greater understanding.
Perhaps twice, after a 30 minute resting period.
Agreed. Our battery technology is pathetic at the moment, but the point is that the only advantage to biofuel is the form it comes in. It's not particularly efficient in terms of energy return and the environmental and social costs are high. We'd do better trying to improve battery technology using readily available inexpensive materials like carbon and common metals rather than displacing edible crops with fuel crops.
Biodiesel is essentially harvested solar energy, packaged in chemical form, with an efficiency that is probably comparable to solar panels. Worse, sunlight and resources devoted to growing grass is sunlight and resources not growing food. We can, and will, grow some of our fuel, but at nowhere near the scale, nor at the same energy return, as oil.
Biofuel is one answer, but it's a small one-word, vaguely apologetic answer lost in the din. You want to generate energy? Think "nuclear."
If true, it's unfortunate that you still misunderstand the difference between masturbation and money and sound like a frustrated adolescent who can't quite figure out why the rest of the world doesn't recognize his genius. I'm sure you're also still fascinated by science fiction and think next year is the year of the Linux desktop too.
Look, life is full of people at all skill levels. I deal with C++ programmers who have never cracked a case, and have only a vague familiarity with the relationship between voltage, current, and power and have never touched assembly. Guess what? They can still program in C++ and C# competently, and we all make money. Do they work hard to engage in "best practices?" No. Our current attempt at this has been "Agile" which too will be undermined by human nature. Has the business been viable since 1989? Yes. Will the software one day become unmanageable? It has been that way for the last decade. We patch it up, overlay it with .net and wpf, and muddle through. Nobody cares. We'll all be gone by the time it all falls over, just like every other software company.
Art is not eternal. Neither is software. Embrace the chaos. It keeps us all in our jobs, eh?
Or did they get the wine snob genes from PETA activists? Hmmm......
Congratulations. You've shown that you are unable to distinguish between mental masturbation and practical work. Just the kind of guys I've fired.
Believe me, things will look different when you're out of high school.
Cheers!
I admin about 100+ VMs on 14 separate servers. I used to admin about 50 real physical machines. I can tell you that the physical machines had many more quirky, one-off problems that, quite frankly, weren't worthy of further investigation in terms of business cost-effectiveness. They were inevitably reformatted. All virtualization did was to speed up the process so that a new machine can be created in an hour instead of in two days.
As much as it might be intellectually satisfying to dig down into a problem, most systems are there to serve a business, and make money, not to solve the intellectual curiosity of a system admin who vaguely believes that the world is a better place if he/she can just take the time to solve every little system quirk.
You keep them working so the company can make money. That's all. That's the main priority. And thus we grow up.
My inner core rotation is much slower than it should be, especially after a biggish lunch.
They just want to make money and don't care how it happens. If we found out tomorrow that we could get electricity by plugging 13 ampere taps into the butts of angels, Shell would simply proceed to purchase the catholic church. Biofuels look potentially profitable? Buy the patents for a trivial sum and perhaps on day, skim the profits of those companies and individuals who do the actual work of development.
Corporate feudalism is alive and well.
In terms of energy density, our battery technology is pathetic when compared with liquid hydrocarbons. Electricity isn't anything resembling a drop-in replacement for the approximately 166 exajoules of energy that oil currently provides to civilization each year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil).
Even oil isn't fungible. You can't equate light sweet Saudi crude that's cheap to extract and refine and has a high energy return with heavy, sulphur laden asphalt in the Orinoco basin that's expensive to extract, refine and has a lousy energy return.
Probably not then either. Everything will suddenly get more expensive as the high price of oil works its way down the value chain. We'll use less for sure, but by then demand will be much less elastic. People have to eat, you know, and we are pathetically dependent on liquid hydrocarbons for our fuel supply.
Pretty soon, oil price feedback sets in, as the high price of oil itself increases the cost of locating, extracting, refining and distributing refined liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Prices spike suddenly, and crash, and again, and again.. with greater time between spikes and a diminishing height to the spikes before each crash, until we just can't maintain the supply chain any more and we all start to get used to a lower energy level, and starvation. 7 billion of us, remember?
Cheers!