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Comment Re:Roald Dahl called this 50 years ago... (Score 2) 622

by jeddak (#35404718) Attached to: Is Software Driving a Falling Demand For Brains?

Easy for you to say. If you've been working an assembly line job for years, you're not going to suddenly find the time and money to learn mechanical engineering. Yes, individuals are to some degree responsible for their own marketability, but in the example (taken from a fictional story), it just isn't realistic to expect one type of worker to quickly transform themselves into another type of worker as soon as their type of work becomes obsolete.

Comment Re:Come to Verizon! (Score 1) 738

by jeddak (#31781548) Attached to: Verizon CEO Says "We Will Hunt Heavy Users Down"

Sure, sounds good, Seidenberg.

FYI it's this attitude that is driving me away from the Big Red Monster towards T-Mo (a contractless carrier, imagine that!)

Keep it up and your customer base will erode, leaving you wondering what happened.

I'm so glad my contract is up in 9 days, you idiotic, grasping dinosaurs...
Media

New Study Finds Low Interest In Blu-ray 895

Posted by timothy from the could've-told-you-that-already dept.
PHPNerd writes "A new consumer survey recently released chronicles the woes of the winner of the hi-definition format war: nobody wants it. While consumers were very happy to embrace the DVD standard when it came about because it brought a huge jump in quality over VHS, the pros of switching to Blu-ray are not as obvious. From the article: 'In contrast, while half of the respondents to our survey rated Blu-ray's quality as 'much better' than standard DVD, another 40% termed it only 'somewhat better,' and most are very satisfied with the performance of their current DVD players." Another reason cited was that a Blu-ray investment also dictates an HDTV purchase, something consumers are reluctant to do.'" Maybe it's also that line-doubling DVD players can be had for less than a hundred dollars.
Programming

Why COBOL Could Come Back 405

Posted by timothy from the cost-of-doing-common-business dept.
snydeq writes "Sure 'legacy systems archaeologist' ranks as one of the 7 dirtiest jobs in IT, but COBOL skills might see a scant revival in the wake of California's high-profile pay-cut debacle. After all, as Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister points out, new code may in fact be more expensive than old code. According to an IDC survey, code complexity is on the rise. And it's not the applications that are growing more complex, but the technologies themselves. 'Multicore processing, SOA, and Web 2.0 all contribute to rising software development costs,' which include $5 million to $22 million spent on fixing defects per company per year. Do the math, and California's proposed $177 million nine-year modernization project cost will double, McAllister writes. Perhaps numbers like those won't deter modernization efforts, but the estimated 90,000 coders still versed in COBOL may find themselves in high demand teaching new dogs old tricks."
The Internet

DNS Flaw Hits More Than Just the Web 215

Posted by timothy from the gee-dan-thanks-thanks-a-bunch dept.
gringer writes "Dan Kaminsky presented at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, and said that the DNS vulnerability he discovered is much more dangerous than most have appreciated. Besides hijacking web browsers, hackers might attack email services and spam filters, FTP, Rsync, BitTorrent, Telnet, SSH, as well as SSL services. Ultimately it's not a question of which systems can be attacked by exploiting the flaw, but rather which ones cannot. Then again, it could just be hype. For more information, see Kaminsky's power point presentation." Update: 08/07 19:48 GMT by T : There's also an animation of the progress of the patch.

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