The New-ish Technologies That Will Alter Your Career 66
Nerval's Lobster writes Over at Dice, there's a discussion of the technologies that could actually alter how you work (and what you work on) over the next few years, including 3D printing, embedded systems, and evolving Web APIs. Granted, predicting the future with any accuracy is a nigh-impossible feat, and a lot of nascent technologies come with an accompanying amount of hype. But given how these listed technologies have actually been around in one form or another for years, and don't seem to be fading away, it seems likely that they'll prove an increasing factor in how we live and work over the next decade and beyond. For those who have no interest in mastering aspects of the so-called "Internet of Things," or other tech on this list, never fear: if the past two decades have taught us anything, it's that lots of old hardware and software never truly goes away, either (hi, mainframes!).
Shilling for dice. (Score:5, Insightful)
And, here we go again, gratuitously shilling for dice.com.
No thanks.
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And, here we go again, gratuitously shilling for dice.com.
Well, who else should/would they gratuitously shill for? Besides, it gives us insight into what the buzzwords that PHBs will be throwing around next week, the topic of the next Gartner "study", and some new words for "bullsh*t bingo".
Re:Shilling for dice. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bah, in all likelihood it's to an article on Dice.com which is just a summary of a well written article elsewhere.
I don't expect anything from Dice.com to give me first-hand insights on anything, just whatever their advertisers and executives want to hawk this week.
Sorry, but Slashdot has gone downhill since Dice.com, and many of us will point that out at every chance we get.
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What on earth could a PHB possibly think to do with a 3d printer inside a white collar organization?
That particular one won't even make it to IT buzzword.
Embedded systems, on the other hand, I can see infesting places they don't belong as a result.
"Why don't we deploy our lightweight Web API to an embedded server to decrease energy costs?" on the other hand is the kinda phrase you can just cringe at.
Thank you for your attention. (Score:3)
[background music] "I'd like to extend a surmise for instantiation of surface-approximate prototypical hands-on pass-arounds in order to provide in-house guidance, as well as a vector for social media sharing utilizing a cloud-resident archival basis. [slide] Moving forward, this will provide seamless integration, representing a pro-active new paradigm that is win-win at the end of the day. [slide] I believe
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"Over and Dice" are the only words I dread more on Slashdot than "Frequent contributor Bennet Haselton writes". Dear lord, I miss the Slashdot of 1999, even with all its problems.
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I'm waiting for the concepts to merge : Over on Dice, contributor Bennet Haselton writes....
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Over on Dice, contributor Bennet Haselton writes....
On news tonight - an informational black hole formed at Dice headquarters in New York today. John Smallberries, NIST Underdirector for Strategic Initiatives said, "It appears that a company, Dice Holdings, tried to post their normal daily Bennet Haselton article. When they did that, they neglected to measure the amount of negative information that this article contained and failed to isolate it properly. The amount of negative information was so great tha
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Identifying in the summary that dice owns slashdot would be apt. They used to do that back in the geeknet days when they'd post something that was even related to sourceforge or anything else they owned.
The tech "articles" posted on dice are generally shit. There is basically no reason for them to appear here except dice owns the place.
Oh goodie! (Score:1)
Can you say "recursion"?
I liked the original title better (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah yeah these things exist... and have existed for decades.
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Pretty much :
Internet of Things: The strange idea that my internet connected refrigerator is going to engage in long philosophical discussions with a laundromat in Tashkent and that I will somehow benefit from the discourse. (And that my fridge will not be defrosted by a sociopathic twelve year old in Capetown). Certainly some factory applications will work out. But life changing? My bet is not. (And if I have my way, my ap[pliances aren't going to have an internet connection anyway.)
Parallel Programm
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A lot of parts from a lot of products are made from ABS plastic. Having a 3D printer at home, in the shop or being able to order parts as a service in a local store decreases the wait time for ordering a new part. Even if you use a printed part as a temporary replacement until the injection-molded part arrives,
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Internet of Things: Yeah, but the industrial applications will be huge. Imagine a factory where each machine, or every subsystem in every machine, has a health status that updates in real time, based on sensor input (I imagine this is already in place in many factories). With a sufficiently advanced setup a lot of workers could probably be laid off.
Parallel Programming: Already in use by most of those who benefit from it.
3D printing: Already in use, but could have a lot of niche applications.
Web APIs: Massi
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Internet of Things: Yeah, but the industrial applications will be huge. Imagine a factory where each machine, or every subsystem in every machine, has a health status that updates in real time, based on sensor input (I imagine this is already in place in many factories). With a sufficiently advanced setup a lot of workers could probably be laid off.
No. That is the intranet of things, not the internet of things. Also, that is just networked industrial sensors, that isn't what the "internet of things" is. The word "things" there means "things that would not otherwise be networked," like the common examples of the refrigerator and coffee maker. For example, the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0) https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc23... [ietf.org] isn't even clearly a joke anymore.
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I totally know parallel computing is the future, because I read Parallel Processing: The Transputer and Its Applications back in the 90s.
Web APIs are new? What?
Embedded systems... what? I'll give everybody a hint... when major appliances were replacing incandescent lamps with LEDs in the 70s and 80s, that is when embedded systems were no longer new and were only new-ish.
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"5 Meaningless buzzwords not worth your time"
No, no, no, you'll never be a true Dice webditor with a headline like that. Try something like, "Which 5 Meaningless Buzzwords Are Least Worth Your Time??" or "5 Words That Give Kim Kardashian a Meaningless Buzz!"
Bonus points for correctly identifying embedded systems as a "weird old tip."
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jail / prison may be the only place to get healthcare. + free room and board on the side.
... you forgot "all the sex you NEVER wanted."
The sad part is that there are already people who are breaking windows and stuff just to get a jail cell to sleep in.
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How about trying to break in into the prison? If they don't catch you, you're in prison. If they do catch you, they throw you in prison.
It's win-win!
Some technologies I worry about... (Score:5, Interesting)
In IT, there isn't really much that is new. Cloud systems evolved from offsite data centers. However, there are a few things which are important:
1: IoT. Securing these is like trying to use bandaids after someone stood in front of a 3000 rpm gunship weapon. However, if it does take off, one will have to factor in every doodad that might require Wi-Fi, or might have a 3G card so it can phone home and the black hats can hack into it.
2: Separation of the Internet into sub-networks. It is only a matter of time before this happens. With the state-sponsored armies of blackhats, you can't win a war of defense. The only real way to keep your stuff secure (as a business) is to separate out functions with physically different networks (SIPRNet, NIPRnet are examples), so the Internet is not the only means of communication. This involves real leased lines, additional fiber laid, and additional network fabric, perhaps virtual circuits, so only machines that are configured to communicate with each other can.
3: Bit rot, CAS systems, and ensuring files archived are still readable in a media-agnostic way. That way, if finance needs a document from 2005, it doesn't matter if it is on tape or disk, they can obtain it with minimal operator intervention.
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Separation of the Internet into sub-networks. It is only a matter of time before this happens.
The Great Firewall of China, Putin ordering a Russian Wikipedia uncontaminated by anti-Putin rhetoric, etc. It's happening as we watch.
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2: Separation of the Internet into sub-networks. It is only a matter of time before this happens. With the state-sponsored armies of blackhats, you can't win a war of defense. The only real way to keep your stuff secure (as a business) is to separate out functions with physically different networks (SIPRNet, NIPRnet are examples), so the Internet is not the only means of communication. This involves real leased lines, additional fiber laid, and additional network fabric, perhaps virtual circuits, so only machines that are configured to communicate with each other can.
I used to work for a provider who sold such a service about 15 years back, they called it RPN for "Real Private Network" with the idea that unlike a VPN your traffic stayed within the carriers network. I never really took off back then, few companies had such need (or concern) for the extra security it claimed to provide over VPN.
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It likely will come back. As of now, a company has to use the Internet for all transactions, which means every ingress and egress avenue is vulnerable. It only is a matter of time before carriers will move to dedicated lines and creating their own WANs which are not connected to the Internet for specific tasks (B2B communication, payment processing, etc.)
As stated above, non-interconnected networks are coming, be it China, Russia, Brazil, or others. North Korea has their own "public" WAN, not connected t
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SDN - (Software Defined Networking) makes my list. Huge potential, but also huge potential to get it wrong or to insist on automated systems to replace humans that are perfectly capable of managing environments. I fear how complex and vendor software dependent the industry may become.
I agree with you about the risk of internet segmentation. Logically it makes a lot of sense, but there in lies the rub. Humans cannot be trusted with power, so even if segmenting the internet makes a degree of sense both techni
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SDN as a concept is sort of evolution. Things like OpenFlow just make sense, and was only a matter of time before we would see L2 and L3 packet manipulation merged into one device just like we saw hubs and switches merge. Cisco's Nexus series is an example of this.
The big hurdle is combining network fabric with storage fabric. FCoE does this, but the big leap will be FC, so a switch can function either as a FC switch, or use FC just for media and be an Ethernet device. This way, one can deploy network d
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"Cloud" deployment isn't new because the technology is new, it is new because the billing systems are relatively new. The fine-grained billing allows the technology to be utilized much more broadly than before, and to much greater effect. Also the almost guaranteed instant availability of additional compute units is a big difference compared to the old offsite data center, where you had to lease greater-than-expected-peak capacity. With "the cloud" if you have variable traffic during different parts of the
So Wait (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a two person operation?
Nerval's Lobster works for slashdot, and from his comment history, his entire job is to submit dice.com stories (this is not an exaggeration, as was pointed out to me, go look, it's literally nothing but dice.com posts).
However, he can't actually directly post the articles? So he is literally paid to _submit_ articles to slashdot, but can't directly post them himself? Isn't that a little silly?
Re:So Wait (Score:4, Insightful)
See, any legitimate news organization would have to give a disclaimer about the relationship.
So, one of two things is happening:
Either Nerval's Lobster is purely created to make it look like someone is posting stuff. We'll call that astroturfing.
Or, option B, whatever this poor sod submits, some asshat changes to point to a dice.com clone of the article. We'll call that shilling.
And, yes, I can't see a single story posted by Nerval's Lobster which doesn't point to dice.
So I'm afraid we have to go with astroturfing and blatant shilling.
Thanks for pointing that out, now I can ignore crap from this poster as well the shit from Bennett fuck-me-in-the-ass Haselton.
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2 Comments (Score:4, Informative)
Over at Dice, there's a discussion
No, there is a cheesy article with 2 comments. 2 comments does not a "discussion" make.
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No, even with 2 people it would take 3 comments to make a discussion.
Quantum Computing (Score:2)
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Knuth and Abstraction (Score:3)
Perhaps he was too busy inflicting TeX [wikipedia.org] on us?
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Awesome idea! We can call it Perl, and then throw it away when somebody thinks of Ruby and Python.
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Then you have a wild imagination. Quantum computers are still finite state machines, a subset of the general computer model A.K.A. Turing machine. General programming languages targets that general model and so quantum computers will still use standard development tools and techniques.
Dice (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, that's s reason for us not to follow the discussion. Seriously.
Dice-related posts are like diversity hires. They may be good, but people are assuming that they weren't picked for their quality.
IoT Devices...could alter your career...by leaking (Score:1)
When I read the headline I thought, "IoT Devices...could alter your career...by leaking all kinds of stuff about you to accidentally connected Facebook, Google+ and other social accounts."
I don't even think people know what they're getting into out there - here's a guy who's at least trying to get his head around what people are thinking about on
IoT consumer privacy [iotsecuritylab.com].
Brilliant strategy.. (Score:3)
It's like predicting how these 'automobiles' will be a big part of our lives (news is 100 years too late, but at least accurate). Predicting the future by simply stating the present, brilliant!
Bambi clams up (Score:1)
Deer have mollusks?
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lol... now that's straight-up punitive moderation. :)
Buzzwords != Career-long Skills (Score:2)
Once in a great while, something comes along that fundamentally alters the way the overall practice of computing operates. Everything else is a rehash of the old stuff, with improvements that have been made since its introduction. Cloud computing is just hosted data centers with more flexibility and APIs to control the difficult tasks of resource and application provisioning. When you've been in IT long enough, you see patterns repeat. It's cool when something that barely worked before comes back around wit
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If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. To catch up on all the latest buzzword speaking patterns, just buy a copy of Learn Parallel Embedded 3D Internet of Things with HTML5 and XML for Head First Dummies Unleashed in 7 Days....by Dice.com ;-)
If that doesn't work, just paste the title on your resume (minus the "Dummy" stuff) after they
Parallel Programming Hype (Score:2)
Maybe I'm becoming a "Get off my linear lawn!" curmudgeon, but I've yet to see sufficiently common "cubicle programmer" scenarios that show the net benefits of parallel programming (PP).
PP is fairly hard to test and get right such that the human labor is often more than the machine labor savings. And common PP needs tend to eventually get folded into declarative or semi-declarative API's or interfaces, such as RDBMS and browsers/renderers based off of SQL and markup. The database and the browser manage the
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What's the difference between "function or method call" and "message passing"?
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Really? (Score:2)
* including 3D printing,
Nope. wont change my life or work. For the things I am involved in it is either too expensive, or already relevant.
* embedded systems
Nope. changed my life already. I saw how the analog chips which we used in the end of the 90s for signal processing became obsolete and unavailable/expensive (-> Burr Brown being bough by TI) Not a new tech at all.
* and evolving Web APIs
Oh yeah, because that going to mache such a big difference
Suggested new internet 'law' (Score:2)
Kittenman's law is fine. Pat pending.
Embedded Systems - new?!?! (Score:2)
It's good to know embedded systems are new-ish technology!
Really makes me feel good about the implantable cardiac defibrillators, hard disk drives, engine control units, CNC machines, remote weather stations, mobile phones (baseband), insulin pumps, etc. that I've worked on for the last 20+ years.
A home might have 3-5 desktop/laptop processors in it, while that car on the driveway probably has at least 20, maybe 50, processors in it.
Embedded systems, and the engineers who design the hardware, software, fi
Many others there (Score:2)