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Builder.com Writers Outsourced to India
An anonymous reader writes "Builder.com, which is part of CNet.com, is now outsourcing some of their writing to India. The funny thing is, the editor claims it's not as much about money as because he's 'getting a better interface with producers of the content.' He claims CNet isn't giving up control, but if they're the publisher, and he's the editor, and they can't hire and manage their own writers, why shouldn't the Indians just put up their own website to replace CNet, and we can all read what they write direct? I mean, we're all going to be buying software direct from Indian companies soon, so why not?" Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN. OSDN also runs sites like devchannel.org which are more-or-less direct competitors of builder.com.
Outsourcing. What's it all about? Is it good, or is it whack?
Someone sounds bitter.
niggers are trying to get into my ass! help!
When i worked for featureprice, most of the non phone based technical support was done from india. They are some smart people, but they are lacking in alot of things we take for granted. Our boss always happily let us americans know that he could hire 3 or 4 of them to each 1 of us. Hows that for making you take your job seriously? :) Too bad hes a bastard and should be rotting in jail as hes a scamming prick
he is more comfortable conversing in tamil and hindi
First developers (Or many tech related jobs) and now writers.. This is starting to get really scary, especially for people my age; I'm still in high school and it's going to be a few years before I can get a _real_ job, and at this rate it's going to be hard to find any local ones. This really needs to stop, or at least be done in moderation, it's getting out of hand.
Buckethead
The post of non engrish of mother fuckers of the engaging in floor bugle which is not inhales anus of the tacos
> I mean, we're all going to be buying software
> direct from Indian companies soon,
Speak for yourself.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
...and you can plainly identify it as such, boycott the product. Better yet, boycott it and let them know why and then badmouth them to everyone you know.
OSDN also supports Indian outsourcing.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Can't I just spend $4000 a year training these people and collect a portion of their salary? I figure a few of these will allow me to live a richly life. I'll even donate one to the open source community.
Soon you can buy the new Indian operating systems Indows XP for the desktop and Inux for the server market!
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
"it's not as much about money "
funny, thats about all the article mentions!
anyway, they're talking about freelance work-I'm not in the buisiness, but isn't freelance work pretty much where the purchaser states their price?
On the savings front, he said he expects "a little bit more" work per dollar.
Well, sure. When you pay them $1, it's only natural to expect 3 days worth of work from them.
I was going to post an ontopic comment, but then I saw that those types of posts were all going to be outsourced to India.
Have a candy bar, my fat friend.
That way we can sit on our fat American arses and let the indian carpetbaggers take over.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
They would outsource Mr. Fancy Pants Editor and his bosses. Clearly the big bucks are going to these guys. If the writers can live on $1.00 per day in Bangalore, surely then can management live there on $2.00.
i would suggest this article about the subject...
Job Losses and Trade
via NealzNuze
I am a fairly skilled nerd with experience in digital and analog electronics testing, as well as some programming. I lost my job a while ago due to a sweatshop my old company opened in china.
/. readers grew up hearing that I was "lucky" to love computers because "thats where the money is". I don't care if I make 20k or 100k, I WANT TO BE A PROGRAMMER. it is a sad state of affairs when all this stuff gets sent over seas. Now we see cases like this where even remotely related jobs are sent away.
I was out of work for a while and just recently was lucky enough to score a job working in an irrigation supply house... doing deliveries and stuff like that. I like so many
NAFTA SUCKS
world trade SUCKS
any american who HONESTLY believes otherwise SUCKS
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
________
|Oo| DON'T BE FOOLED BY COWBOY KNEIL'S POINTING
|()| GESTURE THERE HE'S JUST DISTRACTING YOU WHILE
| -} HE FONDLES HIMSELF WITH THE OTHER HAND
.----\""/----.
| \/ | CHECK IT OUT COWBOY KNEIL JUST CAN'T HELP
| | . | | HIMSELF HE'S SO HOT HUHHHHHHHHH
| | . | |____/__
\ \ . (_____/_= MMMMMMM KNEIL'S NOT A REAL COWBOY HOOOOOO
\ \ \ GETTING GAY RRRRRRRRRRRR DON'T TELL KNEIL
\/\=[]===) WE KNOW HUHHHHHHHHHHHHHH BEING GAY HUHHH
(""\ | MMMMMMMMMM KNEIL MMMMMMMMMM FONDLING MMM
| |_/ | DUH WHY ARE YOU STILL WATCHING CHANGE THE
| | | CHANNEL BUHHHHH DISGUSTING FAGGOT BUHHH
no one has a right to a job. having a job is a gift. no matter where you live, there will always be people who feel that have a right to a job and that it should be gauranteed. things are moving off shore and it's unstoppable. guess what, America has had an advantage over other countries for a while now, but it was always temporary. Those who keep learning and growing will find new jobs and make it. those who bitch and grown, hoping they can keep their job will surely loose it.
YOMANK
("You owe me a new keyboard", because of all the beverage I spewed while laughing.)
Sick of outsourcing just being an engineer or programmer issue. Now with "left-brain" jobs being outsourced we can get some real addressing of the issue.
127.0.0.1 www.com.com
Probably because CNet pays them more than they could make running their own web site. Running a web-site would involve getting out and selling ad space and buying lots of bandwidth. Both of these roles are probably more cost-effecively done from the fancy CNet building in San Francisco, because it's a better place to shmooze with advertisers and suppliers.
CNet still has a nice cushion of IPO cash that they can use to pay Indian developers well as well as buying more expensive things like Esther Dyson's EDVentures
I'm sure Esther didn't come cheap, so I think CNet's right when they say it's not just for the money savings. If a writer in India can produce better content for the same price they'll hire one there. If Esther can provide even-better content for a much higher price, they'll hire her too.
My guess is that the cost of the Indian writers to build out the sales side of the proposed website wouldn't be possible in the post-.com-ipo era.
My own workplace is considering this.
In addition, I just read that IBM is planning to double their Indian staff.
... I'm guessing some will be moving there soon. I'd rather have 1/3 or 1/4 pay for 1/6 the cost of living that 0/100 job at 1/1 pay for 1/1 the cost of living.
We just need to outsorce the gov't so we can keep our Constitution.
Wait, does Pakistan like the U.S.?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
At least I'd be getting health care and not be thrown out on the street.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
If I remember correctly, Dell outsourced their call center to India and then brought it back because of complaints due to a language barrier.
And now CNet has the bright idea of outsourcing writers? Just what we need, technical writing in Engrish.
...looks like we found another one of those troublesome Boortz listeners/readers.
Are you a devout worshipper at the Church of the Painful Truth?
Do you take daily lessons in insensitivity training?
Have you ever heard the audio remix of "Boo got shot"?
I can understand the frustration, but that statement is quite misinformed, it seems.
From what I have seen, it seems that Indian companies, not just in the computer software/IT industry, but in almost every industry, has always been and for the forseeable future will always be sub-contracting for US and European companies.
Of coure, there will always be exceptions, but that would be a very small minority.
This means that the profits will stay in the US/Europe.
It is a lot like Chevy trucks being made in Mexico. Does anyone say we will be buying trucks direct from Mexican companies soon.
Or say, Chinese products, I have seen a lot of product 'Made in China', but very few from Chinese companies.
I am by no means supporting outsourcing or anything, I am just pointing out that it will only benefit US companies.
CNet publications got fairly useless a couple years ago. They've been running on fumes ever since. Good ridance.
If you're in highschool, here's a serious suggestion from someone who's about to enter the workforce from college-
Find some skills other than computing.
No, seriously. Computing is out-sourceable, the rest of your skillset + computing is not. If you speak Hindi and Chinese AND can program C++, you might be a great project leader for one of these overseas projects. If you have a great handle on economics and business AND can code perl, you might be the person who they need to run their software division, because you'll have an eye for both the cash and the technical. If you're a science dork (like I am), you've got an instant-in with any professor that runs his lab using any sort of technology, because not only did you get an A in Genetics, but you can really understand how the PCR Sequencer works.
If Software Geeks in highschool would turn their computing prowess into A marketable skill instead of their only marketable skill, they'll have a much better time on the job market.
Just the way it's worked out for me.
By the way: Perl for the Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu), since I'm a Greek / Latin Major, and Visual Basic in the Avian Cognition Lab, (http://pigeon.psy.tufts.edu), where I do research on Avian Cognition and Concept formation (coz I'm a Psych Major too).
Soon, you too can look forward to your industry being taken over by a bunch of Indian carpetbaggers. And we foolish, idiotic, Americans are f*cking letting it happen!
Car salesmen... they don't need to be *here* to sell a car do they? Hell Indian actors are FAR cheaper than paying those f*ckers in Hollywood, we should outsource all actor jobs to india as well. While we're at it why don't we just get rid of every job that doesn't involve being an idiot manager and outsource it to india.
People seem to forget that the economy is dependent on the average earning potential of the American worker. If this is cut to zero by all of this outsourcing no one will be able to buy the products of the f*ckers doing the outsourcing in the first place.
Goddamn it.
GJC
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
...before the chinese come pecking at their backs. This is another proof for that!
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
you will see WHY you are being replaced.
The Asians and Indians outperform the Americans
by a ratio of 6 -4
Thats why your job is going to India
Its silly to think they lack the "American"
intellect, or fail in sophistication.
Study Math and Science and study it like its your
life,not like its one big frat party.....
Now I know that Indians get an excellent education, and that includes English. But do they know the language well enough to be efficient writers? I truly don't know, so I'm asking if anyone has had experience in this area. My first reaction to this story is to think that editor is going to have a LOT more red lining to do.
Pray we can still remember who it was that sold us out to begin with.
Exporting America: false choices
In none of the attacks on my position on outsourcing has a news organization addressed the facts.
March 10, 2004: 11:12 AM EST
By Lou Dobbs, Lou Dobbs Tonight
NEW YORK (CNN) - You may have noticed recently that I'm being attacked for my views on the exporting of American jobs and my calls for a balanced U.S. trade policy.
Gerard Baker of the Financial Times called me the "high priest of demotic sensationalism."
An editorial in the Economist magazine accused me of embarking "on a rabidly anti-trade editorial agenda" and "greeting every announcement of lost jobs as akin to a terrorist assault."
Lou Dobbs comments on recent attacks of his views on the exporting of American jobs and U.S. trade policy.
Play video
(Real or Windows Media)
Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal excoriated me, I must say, in high style for my troglodyte views on outsourcing by saying, "It's as if whatever made Linda Blair's head spin around in 'The Exorcist' had invaded the body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich."
Washington Post columnist James Glassman has simply accused me of being a "table-thumping protectionist."
Those quotes are from some of the most respected news organizations, and there have been dozens of other articles critical of my view that outsourcing American jobs is neither sound, smart, humane nor in the national interest.
Makes a fellow think
I will tell you it does make a fellow think when attacked so energetically and so personally. But in none of the attacks on my position on outsourcing has a single columnist or news organization seen fit to deal with the facts.
Number one: We're not creating jobs in the private sector, and that's never happened before in our history. Our economists and politicians need to be coming up with answers, not dogma.
Number two: We haven't had a trade surplus in this country in more than two decades, and our trade deficit continues to soar.
Number three: We've lost three million jobs in this country over the last three years, and millions more American jobs are at risk of being outsourced to cheap overseas labor markets.
That seems to me, at least, to be more than sufficient evidence for all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, to question critically the policies of both parties that have led us to this critical juncture in our economy and our history.
Check out the "Exporting America" list
Frankly, I would love to be proved wrong in my views, and I would gladly change my position, if only my critics would answer a few questions factually, empirically and straightforwardly.
One: How many more jobs must we lose before they become concerned about our middle class and our strength as a consumer market? Two: When will the U.S. have to quit borrowing foreign capital to buy foreign goods that support European and Asian economies while driving us deeper into debt? Three: What jobs will our currently 15 million unemployed workers fill, where and when?
My critics and proponents of free trade and outsourcing suggest I'm a protectionist because I want to curtail the export of American jobs to cheap foreign labor markets just to reduce wage levels, and to eliminate our trade deficit and to pursue balanced trade policies.
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Our principal trading partners, Canada, China, Japan and the European Union, all typically maintain annual trade surpluses and pursue balanced trade. Why don't my critics call them protectionists? Why not call them economic isolationists?
My critics, and proponents of the status quo, are offering false choices. They say we must decide between protectionism, or economic isolationism as the president said today, and free trade. I'm sure they believe those choices are the only ones available.
But maybe they also fear our policymakers may discover a middle ground for a desperately needed new U.S. trade policy: a balanced trade policy in the national interest.
This is a free market in action...beautiful isn't it?
read what the Indians think of their own abilities here.
BTW, "Coolie" is a word that roughly translates into menial laborer.
Magnus.
Answers on Outsourcing
A finance professor argues against placing blind faith in outsourcing. His views follow.
March 12, 2004: 8:18 AM EST
By Rory L. Terry
The following is a guest column by Rory L. Terry, an associate professor of finance at Fort Hays State University.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- A great deal of effort is being expended to convince us all that the outsourcing of jobs under the rubric of free trade is a good thing. I would like to discuss some of these arguments.
Our labor force is not better trained, harder working, or more innovative than our foreign competitors. The argument that we will create new jobs in highly paying fields simply is not true. We have no comparative advantage or superiority in innovation. To assume that we are inherently more creative than our foreign competitors is both arrogant and naive. We are currently empowering our competition with the resources to innovate equally as well as we. Consider the number of new non-native Ph.D.s that leave our universities each year; consider our low rank in the education of mathematics and the sciences; and consider the large number of international students enrolled in our most difficult technical degree programs at our most prestigious universities.
Most of our best, high-paying jobs can be exported.
1. doctors (even surgeons)
2. mathematicians
3. accountants
4. financial analysts
5. engineers
6. computer programmers
7. architects
8. physicists
9. chemists
10. biologists
11. researchers of all types
Our trading problem is an externality
An externality exists in economics any time there is a separation of costs and benefits, and the decision maker does not have to incur the full cost but receives the full benefits of the decision. The fact is, there is no economic force, no supply and demand equilibrium, no rational decision process of either business or consumer, that will make an externality go away. Classic examples of externalities are when a business dumps toxic waste into a nearby river and the downstream residents incur the costs of cancer. The business is able to lower its costs and pass those lower costs on to its customers, and never pay for the treatment of the cancer patients. We have laws in this country against dumping and pollution because they are externalities -- they require a legislative solution.
Cost reductions and other benefits provide a strong incentive to outsource jobs. A company that decides to move its production overseas cuts its costs in many ways, including the following:
1. Extremely low wage rates
2. The circumvention or avoidance of organized labor
3. No Social Security or Medicare benefit payments
4. No federal or state unemployment tax
5. No health benefits for workers
6. No child labor laws
7. No OSHA or EPA costs or restrictions
8. No worker retirement benefits or pension costs
Besides cutting costs, there are other benefits to exporting jobs, including the following:
1. Tax incentives provided by our government
2. Incentives from foreign governments
3. The creation of new international markets for the company's products (which ultimately empowers the company to turn a deaf ear to this country's problems and influence)
4. The continued benefits of our legal system and the freedoms that we provide
The net effect of all of this is lower costs, higher revenue, higher profits, higher stock prices, bonuses for management, and the creation of wealth for a subclass that benefits from low taxes at the expense of the rest of us.
The costs of the decision to outsource are not borne by the decision maker. As a society and as a country, we experience many costs from outsourcing, including the loss of jobs, social costs, higher costs of raw materials and loss of national s
Posted by: StrugglingInMI on Tue, 09 March 2004 14:49:15 | (2324 Reads)
http://www.itunemployed.com/xaraya/index.php?mod ul e=articles&func=display&aid=264
Elegy for a Profession
A song of the discarded
Hello, Corporate America. Do you know us? Do you remember?
We are I/T.
We are the men and women who helped you build the 21st century.
We flocked to the new technologies, taught ourselves the skills we needed when colleges could not, and forged the tools you asked for.
We signed up willingly, knowing that of all professions, ours was the one where today's knowledge would be tomorrow's obsolescence, where last week's skill is worthless now, and where falling out of touch with progress is career suicide.
And we knew, some of us, that ultimately it would be impossible to keep up with the pace of change - but we tried anyway.
We are I/T.
We are the ones who embraced the idea of 7 x 24 operations, who willingly condemned ourselves to odd hours, unpaid overtime, and ever-increasing expectations, so "expensive equipment could be used most efficiently."
We are the ones who gave up families, friends, and "life outside" to spend endless hours building, fixing, and changing the systems that kept you going and growing. We learned that the dream of a 40-hour workweek would never, ever apply to us.
We are the ones who carried pagers when they were almost exclusively the tools of doctors, pimps and drug dealers.
We are a young mother, sitting in a cubicle at 3:00am, troubleshooting a software problem while her new baby sleeps in a carryall next to her desk.
We are a husband, called from his bed in the dead of night, on call not to save a life, or rescue a trapped motorist, but to rebuild a database index, or repair a broken disk drive. And sometimes, the problem was fixed, and it was the marriage that stayed broken.
Do you know us? We are I/T, too. We are the family of a "computer geek", who learned that vacations, holidays, and sick days did not mean freedom from stress for our loved ones, or uninterrupted time with us. We watched as our parents and spouses took cell phones, laptops, terminals, and manuals with them everywhere, ready to give up our family plans on a moments notice to keep your business running. We heard the phones ring in the middle of the night, at the park, or during dinner. We tried to understand.
We are I/T.
Yes, we are the ones who listened when the siren song of ever higher salaries beckoned. Are you surprised? Do not blame us for taking the salaries you offered. Rather, look to yourselves for creating a work environment so intense, so stressful, so demanding that for ten straight years, the schools to teach the next generation found fewer and fewer applicants.
But your demands did not decrease. In desperation, you threw money at us to buy the expertise your own voracious appetite made scarce.
We are the ones who welcomed foreign workers into our midst, when things were so bad you had to recruit overseas to feed your endless demand. While other departments struggled with racism and intolerance, we became a United Nations in miniature, grateful for help from any quarter, any society that could ease the crushing workload. We built a society of equals, holding no prejudice except technical inadequacy.
We watched our budgets shrink each year, while demands for productivity soared, and our pleas for more help were ignored. And we endured the criticism when the inevitable failures occurred, as overwork, stress, and tension took their inevitable toll on our skills.
We are I/T.
We had to learn not only our profession, but yours too. We learned your business practices so well that sometimes we knew more about them than you did; and we are the ones who had to stand by and listen to your "voice of experience" while we watched you make fatal decisions.
We designed the systems you asked for, only to watch as t
Are we going to blame the President for this one as well? It seems that everyone is outsourcing, and there is no one to stop it.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
your being out performed by indians and the Chinese
look at any college campus
I know I'll be flamed to death and modded down, but the government should have nothing to do with outsourcing and restricting those companies who do.
It should be responibility of the consumer to buy American-produced products, not for the government to control whether we can decide who we hire or not, or where.
Vote with your dollar, but don't let the government have more power to control us.
Also, let us not forget that Indians are people too. Countries are man-made divisions between people, but in the end, we all need to eat, drink, get medicine, and have fun. Is an Indian life less important than an American one?
Really, I don't have much of an opinion on this issue, because I just want to buy cheap, efficient products, and I use Linux anyway so most of the software is freely available. I can see why people are complaining (Americans need jobs!), but then again, so do Indians, and they work for less.
So, again: If you don't like a companies' practice, don't buy their products. Don't let the government have more control.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
And to the f*cker who just modded me down. Up yours, I've got Karma to spare.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
It seems to me that when the music and film industries complain about prirating, we often cry out that they are just refusing to deal with changing technology. They ought to adapt. If they can't adapt, they ought to go out of buisiness.
Funny that when the topic is the American industry and not technology, everyone refuses to adapt. Well, surprise! The economy and the industries of the world change, but Americans refuse to adapt. Instead, we'll see more anti-trade and anti-captitalist legislation such as tariffs or requirements for employing Americans citizens only. Not too different from anti-piracy legislation. What hipocracy!
OK, enough ranting from a non-American point of view. Have a nice day.
** Sig-a-licious **
Indian Translator Translation = Hello please explain... I've been working with developers from india on and off for about 3 months. It is torture. They are absolutely incapable of communicating complex business rules. Sorry, 2nd, 3rd 4th language learners just can't get down like that. People we need to vote and stop this insanity.
How long until they outsource us slashdotters to India? :P
Not outperformed, just underbid.
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
US gets more BPO work than India: US commerce dept
d line=US~gets~more~BPO~work~than~India
US commerce department data quoted in a news article in The Wall Street Journal show that a lot more work is being outsourced to the US in comparison with other countries like India.
http://us.rediff.com/money/2004/mar/18bpo.htm?hea
THATS WHY YOUR LOOSING YOUR JOB ... and their grades
Check their degrees
needs a subject icon for India. And Japan, and EU. Fact is, sometimes I want to read all India-related articles. Ananova can do this, why not /.? This is a site by techies, right? We should have better know-how.
In the future, India and China will not need to sell to us. They can trade amongst themselves (and the rest of Asia) and, at the same time, rid themselves of the Sword of Dameclies that is the US Military. Because if we are broke, we will not be able to afford a military that can project force at near the same level we currently can.
It seems that too often we're for lower tariffs on anime, imported gadgets, etc., without fully realising that economic liberalism must be mutual. Look at President Bush's ill-advised tariffs on foreign steel -- he talked up freer trade, and then undermined it.
If we can't bring ourselves to buy Indian software, why should they buy anything from us? Maybe they won't. Maybe it'll start a trade war, and everyone will lose.
Just my thoughts.
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
Since when does the country of the developer matter so much? The Linux kernel was written by a Fin, so even in 1991 at Linux kernel version 0.1, it was being outsourced. It also means every time youre booting into Linux youre supporting outsourced software (from US) and costing real Americans real jobs.
Heck ATI is a Canadian company, and you'd better start buying nVidia since you dont like Indian software developers. Is the free software movement just a US movement? Since when does nationality of free software developers matter? Why was that story posted at all?
I'm descended from a certain nationality, my grandparents had a different nationality, my parents lived in yet another country, and I'm in yet another country now, none of which is USA or India. Is it really all that horrible for me to contribute GPL software and therefore cost Americans jobs because cheaper software is available? Noone is really openly prejudiced, but doomsday scenarios and the use of fear is common among those who divide us between politically-drawn borders.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The jobs can be outsourced BUT at some point someone has to actually touch the computers located inside the main offices.
Also when it comes to hardware repairs not only dose the corprate IT force need to be phisicly present to make the repairs this is also true in the computer shops however be prepaired for thies jobs to become the tech equivlent of McDonalds drive throughs.
Also have back up skills. No matter how diverse your technical skill remember that with most of the jobs being outsourced the programmers and phone support people will retrain to the jobs that are left and will leave fewer opennings for you.
And advice for any generation DO NOT go for the "HOT" jobs becouse when you graduate you'll be fighting everyone for those jobs plus the market will have evolved a few steps just out of hipness and media attention.
Look for fun & well paying yet less visable jobs. Like industry jernalists and look at the trends such as... Ahem.. Blog and Forum media. (Slashdot).
Someone suggested learning Hindi and being the project cordinator. There are probably a whole bunch of possable jobs created by outsourcing alone. Look into the outsourcing industry.
But have a wide range of skills and get some non-tech skills as well.
Translating Anime and Manga sounds like fun....
I don't actually exist.
I personally dont want outsourcing but it seems unavoidable. Here are some reasons why people outsource from India (it only about india) Quality - Most of indian companies (stats show 70%) have ISO9000 certification Cost - It is undisputed fact that cost savings are significangt. (Most analyst agree on 40%) Quantity - Most companies keep extra people as backup. People talk about english which certainly helps. availability of manpower and all those famous lines. But main reason is cost.
The best way to instantly create a trade surplus in the US would be to make New York City and Los Angeles "autonomous regions" with separate measures of trade and GDP.
Instant book-cooking surplus, wow!
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
all of you.
...your are scoring too many points for the wrong team.
shut up.
lock this topic.
just SHUT UP!
thats why your jobs are going.
Grades and SAT scores in MATH and SCIENCE
rule the world
Americans will be washing toilets soon.
I'm truly sorry if you guys are losing your jobs and I wish ill on no one here, but whenever outsourcing comes up the /. community automagically becomes a protectionist democratic bunch.
We are amused by the hypocrisy thrown in ultra-sharp 4mega-pixel relief.
Why is it that everytime *another* corporate decides to ditch their bonafide american employee and jump in to bed with an indian firm so that he can save 20% and earn 50% more bonus for the Senior staff, all of the slashdot crowd and rest of the civilized society starts bad mouthing the people across the ocean who does their job for a fraction of the original cost?
Why is it that your Indian counterparts end up the bad apple, while you safely chose to ignore the people who made the decision to outsource and the govt who chose to standby and watch. Is it because that its easier to do so?
What happened to the path of civil disobedience? What happened to when people disagreed with the policies of the Govt chose to clog the streets with political rallies, shoulder to shoulder with thousands of others and march in unison?
What happened to "lets start a campaign against firm "A" who has decided to ditch loyalty for quick cash" and actually follow through with it by actively campaigning against the corporations who chose to fire its employees, stash their millions in Cayman Islands by withholding tax and reward their CXO's with millions in bonus and stocks.
Nope, its far too easier to just blame the Indians!
Rapid Nirvana
Here is one way to stop the outsourcing:
Increase Corporate Tax Higher for those organizations outsource jobs abroad
(e.g. each outsourced job should cost extra 20% corporate tax hike etc).
of this post has been outsourced to India
I'm sure even the average American can outperform your grammar skills.
This is the free market at work.
If you want Americans employed to program your software, then only buy from companies that will empoly American programmers.
I highly doubt that you buy everything made in America where possible. Do you buy American made clothing? Or do you choose to save $5 like everyone else and buy the garmets made overseas?
Oh no. Some nameless, faceless person that I have never met in my fucking life is gonna take my job. And it is my god-given fucking right to earn a living so I can have obese children that listen to too much Justin Timberlake and I won't be able to have a perfectly manicured yard enclosed with a white fuckin' picket fence for their fat asses to play in.
You don't have a job? Acquire some goals. It won't cost you a cent. Get off of your fucking ass. Your job got shipped overseas? Get yourself a big-assed crate and fill it with all the fucking negativety, self-pity, and loathing and ship that the fuck out of here too.
Take the easy way out and mod me as flamebait. Or reply with your plan to improve the situation for yourself and the people around you that you care about.
Prosperity is there for anyone that desires it. The breadcrumbs are for the losers.
That sir, is the gauntlet. It is go time.
Because we all know India has contributed so much to the arts/science/technology/anything.
At least Japan I have respect for. They are constantly innovating new and improving technology all the time. What has India done? What has China done (unless you want to count new technologies of censorship and getting MS to open up their source code innovation)? In the grand scheme of innovation, India and China are on the ass end of technology.
Face reality. Without European, Japanese, and American innovation, we'd be back in the middle ages. India is doing the grunt work. Stop giving them more credit than they deserve.
I hate to burst a long running bubble around these parts, but producers, managers, marketers, and publishers actually do a job that is necessary to make a decent product, whether that is music, web content, software, or apples (the edible kind). I won't get elaborate, but I think you know what I mean. There are those that suck at their job and there are those that are good. Those that suck do not automatically disqualify the purpose of the position they are in, they disqualify themselves for being in said position.
Just like selling software, an ephemeral--and in most cases intangible--object, these people do unseen work to make a product happen that brings the bacon home--for all of us.
if MegaCorp(tm) produces in 'tinycountry' they have to meet US saftey laws to sell in the US, but they can pay their employees any wage, with as few benefits as the workforce will accept, and pour as many toxins right into a river as they can get away with.. and guess what? they can sell the car for a whole lot less money.. and you think people will buy american because of their ethics?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
To all of those whining about the level of english spoken by Indian programmers, does it not occur to you that your particular situation does not generalize across the board? Presumably there are a large number of Indians fluent in both the written and verbal forms of english. In this instance you're raising an issue that does not pertain to the topic at hand. If the skillset can be found elsewhere, for less, it becomes tempting.
Now is perhaps a good time for a bit of introspection about your cognitive superiority.
Programmers of any country are rarely eloquent speakers and passionate writers even in their native tongue. The skillsets just don't seem to mix that well.
I would assume the writing will be done by professional writers, and that's a whole other kettle of rice.
Classes are always being dumbed down for
American.
Take a real class in advanced Physics and youll
see Asians and Indians outperform ALL Americans.
As long as your Government doesnt fund your education, these other nations will outperform you
Damn when you need mod points and you don't have them.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
you cant even think!
"No, seriously. Computing is out-sourceable, the rest of your skillset + computing is not."
With today's travel technology and communication infrastructure, what ISN'T an outsourceable skill set?
With your logic, the only jobs left are going to be physical maintenance positions. The guy who comes and fixes your toilet. The doctor who gives you drunks when you're sick. The guy who plugs in the loose wire you accidentally kicked out.
Oh yeah. And the C?Os that say they need to pinch pennies while they cut themselves 5 million dollar bonuses.
You know, I wouldn't mind this outsourcing as much if the money they save wasn't going right into their paychecks/resulted in cheaper goods.
Dell (just an example, not literal) might be saving 40% outsourcing manufacturing, but I don't see their products dropping even 10%.
Please explain to my why people that support what some call 'free' trade see this issue as a binary issue. Their is a range of opinions between 100% openness and 100% closed.
Or am I wrong?
see Asians and Indians outperform ALL Americans.
Nice little racist generalization you have there.
Of course, the facts don't back what you say by any means. There are plenty of smart and bright Americans out there that can do just as well.
thats right suck it down !!!
Anyone so daft as to outsource content to India (or any other country) and market to the US is probably on their last legs anyway. No offence, and I'm sure Indians can write good technical documentation, but if you don't have the native insight or point of view, you're just writing stuff that will baffle the reader as much as that useless technical mumbo-jumbo on MSDN (1. Search for help on Google, 2. Ignore MSDN links as they're useless 98% of the time.)
I don't got to italian pages, german pages or spanish pages because unless the have some idea who I'm writing for I'm not likely to find help there. They're trying to write for their own targets. I won't bother with Builder.com for the same reason, as they evidently only mean for indian readers. What a disappointment it will be when they realise they can't make the same revenues because outsourced employees don't have the same spending power.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Where do you think the new job will come from and what field should displaced US workers retrain in?
China and India have much greater tarrifs on our imports then we have on theirs.
Hell, why don't we just pass a law that says that our trade policy with a country is the exact mirror image of their trade policy with us?
Math and Science grades will though
you dumbfuck
I'm 41. I grew up in a small town about 30 miles outside Detroit, and I remember well the fuel crisis of the 70's, and the Detroit response to the growing stream of imports that followed. I also vividly remember the Polish coal miner's strike and proudly wearing my red "Solidarnosc" t-shirt. I was - and am - a punk. I come from a blue collar home, and I share many of my father's ideals - a man who worked thirty years as a union pipe fitter. I am definitely no corporate apologist.
Yet I'm saddened to see the same nonsense being repeated in this field that happened nearly three decades ago in the auto industry. Only this time it's doubly embarassing to me, because Japan in the 70's was already a very developed, affluent nation (remember when they were taking all that heat for buying up US properties?). This time, however, it's India - a nation brutally overpopulated where people regularly die needless deaths from ailments like burst appendices and dysentary.
I had an appendicitis attack a few years ago. I didn't have a job and I had no money in the bank. Yet I showed up at the hospital and they asked zero questions when it came time to resolve the issue. Total cost was several thousand dollars and the fact I couldn't pay for any of it at the time meant essentially nothing: I got my treatment. If I hadn't, I likely would have died a slow, painful death from paretenitis.
We live in a nation where no one HAS to starve. Where no one HAS to sleep on the street. Where no one HAS to die from common little ailments simply because they can't get basic medical attention or clean drinking water.
Isolationism is cowardice. Isn't this that same community of folks who routinely chant "evolve or die" when it comes to issues like RIAA protectionism, proprietary software protectionism, and absurdly overblown patent laws? Yet I've not seen ONE comment from anyone here of that sort.
I'm ashamed for the lot of you.
All the crap you guys spout about indian programmers is sort of sickening.
or have you not checked your local ivy league college and seen who is ruling in MATH & Science
what a bunch of dumbfucks
The outsourcing of developers was all pretty quiet, relatively speaking. Those of us in the industry knew about it, but writers like to listen to themselves talk. Let a writer see the writing on the wall, and he'll write about it.
It's gonna get worse before it gets better. (and it's not going to get better)
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Let me ask you this.
Can you name any major technological achievement from India or China in the past 20 years?
Can you say "Chinese Company X developed a way to speed up this, Indian Comany Y improved Z while lowering costs by half!"
Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Sun, Oracle, Sony, Toshiba, GM, Honda, Phillips, IBM.
Every single major technological company is either European, American, of Japanese.
Name a single Indian or Chinese based major electronics company that does more than just production.
Myths of the
Smoot-Hawley Tariff
by Roger Simmermaker
July 12, 2001
To be able to accurately explain the affects of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, it is necessary first to rid ourselves of popular myths so that we can start with a clean slate and derive conclusions from fact, rather than fantasy. I will list some common myths here, and then disprove them using facts according to history. The myths that prevail, even today, some 61 years after the tariff bill was signed by President Herbert Hoover, are as follows:
1.The Smoot-Hawley Tariff established the highest tariff rates in U.S. history, and the sharp rise in tariff rates caused countless nations to retaliate with tariffs of their own.
2. The Smoot Hawley-Tariff contributed to the instability of the stock market.
3. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was responsible for causing the Great Depression.
Campaigning against Herbert Hoover for the presidency in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the tariff as a way to get a leg up on his Republican opponent's incumbent bid. Even Republicans eventually began to mischaracterize their party's former president in later years, as well as the tariff bill he signed into law in 1930. Even Ronald Reagan said "The Smoot-Hawley Tariff helped bring on the Great Depression." Someone should have told Ronnie that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was enacted over eight months after the Great Depression. Later, former President Reagan said "the Smoot-Hawley tariff...made it virtually impossible for anyone to sell anything in America...and spread the Great Depression around the world." Someone should have told Ronnie that over two-thirds of the goods imported into the United States entered duty-free, and that some nations actually increased exports to the United States after the Great Depression. Al Gore fell for the same politically correct lie as Reagan in 1993 in his debate with Ross Perot, claiming the tariff "was one of the principle causes...of the Great Depression." There was actually a higher percentage of imports on the duty free list in 1930 than there were after Ronald Reagan left office.
Even the Democrat party platform of 1928 proclaimed that tariffs were necessary to sustain "legitimate business and a high standard of wages for American labor." The platform also encouraged the equalization of the cost between production at home and abroad to "safeguard...the wage of the American laborer." Today, most Republicans and Democrats alike regard equalizing tariffs as extreme. Only the Reform Party considers it fair and common sense to treat our own producers equally with foreign competitors in the realm of U.S. trade policy.
The confidence Hoover expressed in high tariffs in his re-election bid was echoed throughout the campaign. If the word of the day was that high tariffs had caused the Great Depression, Hoover's stance would have obvious political suicide. Even FDR was unable to totally shake the call for high tariffs. On the campaign trail in October 1932, he proclaimed, "I favor continued protection for American agriculture as well as American industry." The creation of the myth that the Smoot-Hawley tariff caused the Great Depression would have to wait.
Regardless of how one calculates tariff rates, as either a percentage of imports where tariffs are applied or as a percentage of all imports, duty-free or not, the Smoot-Hawley tariff did not have the highest rates in U.S. history. That claim belongs to the Tariff of Abominations of 1828, which caused neither a depression nor recession. With the belief that high tariffs cause depressions and hamper economic growth, one has to wonder why there wasn't a Great Depression of 1830? The reason is that there are several factors that cause recessions and depressions. Some of these causes will be discussed in this chapter, and revealing these factors will show that they were the cause of the Great Depression, not the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.
In their attempts to vilify Senator Smoot and Representative Hawley for proposing such extre
Builder.com competes on a global marketplace. Programmers all over the world are on the web and at least read English well, and they will read the web site that gives the best content, regardless of what country the server happens to be in.
So I think it just makes sense that the writers for this global readership be global as well. If anything, it's strange it hasn't happened sooner.
I've been taking a hard look at several offshoring options for my business. I've decided that I'm not outsourcing for one reason:
I'm not sold that the work that is supposed to get done is really getting done.
Unfortunately, I called references...
-- $G
In Pakistan? Afganistan? Iraq? Chile? Ethiopia?
No. They're in America.
So you're saying that Americans of Indian and Asian descent getting an American education in American schools is the reason that foreign bodies are getting outsourced work?
Fucking bigot. What you just said is basically "Asians and Indians are better than whites, that's why they are getting the jobs, dumb white fucks".
wow , suck on that buddy
Indians and Chinese rule your ass
soon will rule the world
How does the average consumer tell where a product is made when it is one made with intellectual capital?
--- I do not moderate.
"A techie in the Philippines makes about ten times less than an American doing the same job."
It's called "cost of living". In the US, you can't afford food, shelter and clothing at 1/10th of what you're making now. You might have a job, but you will not be able to keep it very long living in the homeless shelter.
"Basic economic theory states that as more job opportunies open up in those countries, the higher the median salaries will be."
Yep. It's called "inflation". It happens when more capital flows into a region. So they double their income. They're still 20% of your salary which still means "homeless shelter" for you.
"That means a *lot* of people in the world are going to have much better lives."
Probably. They'll have twice as much money as they had before.
"At some point equilibrium will be reached and the outsourcing will wane significantly."
Huh? It will level off and then fall significantly? I don't see that. I see it leveling off. But that's just the race to the bottom of the wage bucket.
"As an American techie, I'm not at all worried about my career. There will always be work here for people like me who are creative, resourceful and motivated."
At $15,000 a year (before taxes). I wouldn't worry so much about a career. I'd worry more about food, shelter and clothing. But that's just me.
"Hopefully that means that much of the chaff in IT will be eliminated; I'll be working with more knowledgable people in my field--the opportunists who got into IT for the quick buck will be off chasing their next white rabbit."
Statistics. There are a LOT more people in India and China and so forth. Statistically, your skills are NOT at their level.
Here, let me put some numbers to that.
You are in population A. There are 1,000 people in population A. You are in the top 90% there. That means that there are 100 people as good or better than you and 900 people who are less talented.
Population B has 10,000 people (10 times more than population A). Their 90% mark is 1,000 people. In other words, their best people are more numerous than your best people.
So, while you're CURRENTLY competing with 100 other people for a good paying job, when you combine both population, you'll be competing with 1,100 people.
And, of that 1,100 people, 1,000 will have expenses lower than your's. So they'll be able to do the work for LESS than you.
So, statistically, you'll have to convince an employer to hire you over someone better qualified and yet pay you MORE than that better qualified person wants.
Good luck on that.
no wonder your loosing your job
I am so tired of this story. Jobs come and go. The days of staying with one company (or in one industry) for 30 years are long since over. I DO NOT CARE that jobs are outsourced, and I certainly do not care about those people who lose their jobs in the process. YOU chose to enter the computer industry, YOU chose to specialize in what you do, and as a result, you are seeing the aftermath. Don't expect me to endorse protectionist practices in order to pay for your SUV. And to those of you who have "children to feed" I don't care about that either, as YOU chose to do that too. Next time pick a job that can't get sent overseas, just so I won't have to listen to you whine so much.
Globalization is upon us. SFTU and RTFM!
Americans for the most part support piracy because the industry is corrupt and bloated. No one feels bad about the music industry dying because the artist isn't making any money from CD sales.
If you take the lawyers out of the picture, music can still be made.
If you take the marketing out of the picture, music can still be made.
If you take the managers, agents, and other middle management out of the picture, music can still be made.
If you take the artist out of the picture, music cannot be made.
So if the musician is the most vital part of an album, how come they make the least (roughly 5% on average per CD sale, divided among each band member)?
In all honesty, how can you feel bad about downloading an album when there isn't a single artist that survives from CD sales and the only people you are negatively effecting are the fat cats who take advantage of the artists in an inheritly corrupt industry?
People here are pro-file sharing because no one in their right mind could be pro-industry.
If people pirate, the industry has to change, and from the shape it's in now, it can only change for the better (for the consumers and artists, the two most important people in the equation).
If people outsource, it can only hurt America. It's not Americas job to sacrifice it's own citizens for the benefit of other countries. What you refer to as "adaptation" is in reality economic suicide.
Not a comment about this post, just a plea to the /. Powers-That-Be:
Can ya create an Outsourcing section, so I can block the articles? RARE is the useful story, non-existant is the useful post. Nothing but vitriolic crap here.
What happened is they got outsourced to india.
NJ Local Music Scene
I'm serious, what do you consider be to hypocritical? Where does Slashdot ever support globalization and then do a 180 and support protectionism like now? What, the music/movie industry? That has less to do with "adaptation" and more to do with destroying a corrupt business model so business can be done fairly.
lol I like it when they hit you where it hurts
basically what i do is close almost all communication off from my india counterparts.
I do not give them information that i have had to learn and acquire on my own. Things that are not in books, things that are not taught. Let them prove their own worth by developing their own methods.
The result: India gets the ball, they are at a loss and fumble, eventually they (the CIO and CEO) call me, and I get the job done.
I refuse to train my potential replacement. I have been confronted a few times so far on my unwillingless to help, and Ive come right out and said, "why should I?"
It is a dangerous position I keep, because I know if they could replace me, they would if they could, but my knowledge is locked inside my own head.
These are my designs, my creations, and I intend to keep it that way.
I know they are actively trying to replace me, but so far they have been unable. I alone hold the key. If they feel like redisigning the system I have built from the ground up, more power to them, but at least I know they will have to hire someone from this neck of the woods to do it.
How about if we have a new label on all products? Something that tells you how much of the work that went into that product was from US citizens?
This would take some effort and a lot of discussion, but it would be VERY handy in the "pure" capitalistic market that seems to be so popular right now.
There's no reason why the consumer should NOT know who was employed in the creation of a product.
I wish I had mod points for you.
Just like *most* plumbers or electricians, shouldn't there be license granted by the state or other civic government for in-home techs? I say ABSOLUTELY!
Consider the case where a so-called digitician shows up at grandma's house, does essentially nothing, and gets paid, then grandma, or her linux-loading, do-gooder grandson, should be able to file a grievence to have their license revoked.
Overall, there should be some type of code enforcement.(pun!=intended).
I've used kde since the 1.0 days, upgrading all along on my dual ppro-200. Even in the slowest 2.0 days, it ran fast enough on my system. Sure I turned the eye-candy slider way down when I configured KDE the first time, but that is all. It works, and is fast enough.
The only time I have problems is when I hear the harddrive grinding away, swapping. Even then I'm running something heavy duty in addition to KDE, something that can take up most of my memory alone.
The difference lies in the fact that with codes to your car, it can be serviced independently.
With the codes to your DVD, you can make unlimited copies, and do anything and everything with them.
Try doing that to your car when you get it's codes.
Does anyone know much about Apache James? Apache's new Java-based mail server? I've been playing around with it and it seems pretty smooth. But how does it compare to, for example, postfix?
:).
One nice feature is that you can extend James using "Mailets" (like applets/servlets but for mail) written in java, which would be great for a java-head like myself
Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone knew much about it/actually used it for anything. It would be nice to have a single mail server who's configuration could be used on any platform.
Nope this problem is a central database problem, probably they tried to normalize the passport database, screw the pooch and had to roll everything back which is why it took so long.
Or maybe they changed a permission and spend the whole day figuring out which one did it.Comets are snowballs; asteroids are rocks. Oversimplification, but you get the idea.
Just calling "SQL server" suggests its the only
program that serves SQL.
You also handle the point that allowing users to get into the inner workings of their cars is not inherently evil.
I foresee some argument along the lines of "If we do this, <insert terrrorist/criminal organization here> will be able to soup-up the performance of their cars, and escape capture.
People working on their cars at low level resembles people working on GNAA/Linux From Scratch, with the difference being that a core dump is only embarrassing, whereas an engine becoming several hundred flying sub-engines at the I95/I495 interchange, known with affection as 'the mixing bowl', could have substantial costs...
I hope the safety gestapo doesn't win the argument.
"asteroids are rocks"
We should use this for the demarkation between "asteroid" and "planet." An asteroid is one big chunk of rock. A planet is a bunch of little rocks held together by their own gravity.
If Pluto primarily orbits the sun and it's dense enough to hold on to an atmosphere from time to time, why shouldn't it be considered a planet?
Out in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud there are thought to be as many as one trillion objects - most small 1 to 10 km chucks of ice.
The really interesting question is, what is the mass distribution ? (I.e., how does the number of objects scale with their mass ?) This is basically unconstrained by real data. All such cosmic mass distributions are steep, but many (for example, planets in the Solar System, Asteroids in the Asteroid belt) are dominated by the most massive bodies.
If this holds true in the Oort cloud, in particular, there could be some pretty big objects. Even a Jupiter sized object might be able to hide from the Infrared surveys (the best way of detecting such an object).
What about the vast majority of e-mail users who have Outlook [Express] on Windows. When will a plugin be designed and ported which will work with these clients?
-- paper
Mod me down all you wish, however this is yet another case where we can see that XML is simply equivilent to bloat. We waste bytes storing useless tags, rather than develop a robust binary format which will be quicker to transfer, and allow more storage. Another great example of this is SVG, graphic files were never meant to be human readable - so why bother promoting a format that encourages this.
It's a free email service.
I'm sure RMS would disagree with you.
Except that it's not actually an auction. I made the same mistake (hey, it's EBay), but there's no place to enter a bid and if you look down at the bottom it says:
"This listing is an advertisement. There is no bidding! If you are interested in this property, you may contact the seller/agent to request additional information."
Which is probably smart. If it were an auction, it'd have eleventy-million fake bids by now.
It also tends to indicate that this is a real property. If it was just someone goofing around, it'd be an auction. That's not strong evidence, but it's certainly an indication.
It is not an invention, it is precise settings which have to be worked out over hours and hours of testing.
But it's not.
This is about ERROR CODES not ignition and fuel maps. This about being able to plug something into my car and have it tell me that there's a problem with XXXXX.
That doesn't say shit about the design of that part. They just want access to the same diagnostic codes as the dealer. Right now manufactuers are only required to make a tiny subset of these codes availible.
The automakers are just whining about their "intellectual property" because they think they can get away with it since the vast majority of the public doesn't know the difference between a diagnostic code, and the actual program code itself.
all this slipage is a cover for the fact that ms has been listening to it's customers ( forced by some healthy oss pressure ) 1: we don't want to be forced into upgrade cycles every 12 months. enterprise systems don't work that way. 2: take the time and fix the damn bugs. we are paying for this shit lets see it work properly.
There once was a fellow named Dillon,
He cried, "That's not me!"
"I use BSD!"
"Because I find it fulfillin'."
W
just need to learn to spell and to ytype accuratly. -- QED - Quite Easily Done
<Teal'c> Indeed </Teal'c>
Hey, You think only guys from US can write great s/w? why cann't u have a broad view of the world? Do u think knowledge is u r OWN property? In few years India might be no.1 in s/w. U need to compete with good spirit, don't run away like cowards. REAL hackers talk about OPEN SOURCE code and projects. Then whats wrong if you have to use s/w MADE in INDIA or other countries. See for u r self how much Indians and other foreigners have contributed to USA. They are in every phase of life here. See how many Indian professors in universities, techies in various industry, research labs and government organizations like NASA are contibuting to the s/w and other stuff MADE in USA. U are already using s/w made by Indians and other country men, doesn't mind if u use linux/BSD/Windows, or other stuff, Indian contribution is everywhere. If you want to boycott Indian s/w, better shut down ur pc's & laptops. Let common sense prevail in us. -- The world is a global village, don't try to insert walls.
---- The world is becoming a global village, don't try to insert walls.
That kind of culture explains why Toyota was first to market with a profitable hybrid car, and why they're so far ahead that Ford's licensing hybrid technology from them.
Here's the missing link that doesn't get publicized: automakers are ahead of the curve on robots because they use robotics extensively in assembly. The more accurately their robots move, the more accurately they assemble cars. Next time you wonder why Japanese cars have a reputation for being so well-built, think of projects like these.
i just got hung up on, and that was approximatly the same time on friday. i was trying to get an activation code for win xp when i was disconnected from them all together. i waited a while thinking that like all good cutomer support they would call me right back because i was hung up on, but waited half an hour and called them to try to talk to the guy i was dealing with, and they told me that they were having serious internal problems. im not sure how it works, but i think MS might use some kind of internal VOIP system because there was a delay in speech with th guy i was talking to as well, but hotmail and their tech support both went down around the same time as i was informed of "major internal problems." so something big happened.
Lets get this stright. You -brought- windows XP.
There was a formula for predicting orbital paths that was related to Fibbunaci's sequence, I wonder if sedna falls into the sequence?
> The most disturbing message from the conference? 'It may take a celestial body hit to Earth' before governments take any meaningful steps to address this danger.
Just like every other problem?
And even then, it isn't so much likely to be "meaningful" as to be "just enough to convince the public we're doing something about it".
This was an obscure typo bug I found this morning (after 3 months)
Argh.
Wish the shell would have added the (obvious) ' > ':P
Change your content, or else: Manufacturer's demanding content changes is nothing new in the tech site community. We take a look at this topic, including one very public example that started in the past three weeks.
Date: March 15, 2004
Manufacturer: N/A
Written By: Hubert Wong
Just under a year ago, we provided some insight on the inner workings of running a tech site. Yes, there are thousands of sites out there, and despite the diversity, there are several constants in our universe... costs, advertising, readership, and most important of all, integrity.
Running a site, especially a tech site, isn't free and there are plenty of costs involved. Everything from the hardware purchases (not everything is free, which is a general misconception I think), to the server and bandwidth... it all has a price.
This is where advertising comes in. If the site is lucky enough, advertising will net a nice income each month, but for a greater number of owners, they'll be lucky if it helps them break even.
Of course, an advertiser is not going to consider a site that doesn't meet their traffic requirements. Readership is what makes our world go round. Without our loyal readers, VL wouldn't be where it is today, and I would say that the same goes for the majority of sites out there.
Casual readers come and go, but a loyal reader is somebody that means a lot to a site. It's common knowledge that most sites track their traffic. This gives us an idea of trends, and how to cater our content. We're not too concerned about our uniques a day, but rather our bookmarks and returns. People who bookmark and/or return multiple times a day make up a site's readership. Uniques are new visitors who either stop and go, or decide to stay. What turns a unique visitor into a regular reader? Content? Yes. Attention to detail? Sure thing. Integrity? Nobody likes a site that lies about a product just to suck up, right?
Granted, the last point isn't something that is respected by a great number of sites (the actual number is more than you think), but the site's I do frequent on a regular basis (Ed. Note: Including our own:D) do try hard to stick with their journalistic integrity. There are instances though where manufacturers will try to influence a site's review. Sadly, this happens quite often, and it becomes a problem when this influence attempts to change a writer's perception of the product. This is something site owners need to deal with constantly, and yes, here at VL we've been asked to have a change of heart on more than one occasion. Errors or omissions happen, and we're more than happy to make amendments, but as a reader, you can rest assured knowing we'll never mislead you because somebody asked us to so they can improve sales.
Luckily, most Tier-1 manufacturers; i.e., the ones who have a good amount of exposure within the enthusiast community, do respect a journalist's right for free speech. Sure, even some of the big dogs take issue with what we in the community say, but that's the price of exposing yourself with press releases. Whether a product is released and performs less than expected, or
Read the rest of this comment...
Has anyone ever thought about making MS open their windows update functions to their competitors?
Unbundling is useless if you are forced to download eleven and twenty patches after installation and media player looks like one of them.
Around this time a century ago, cars (or horseless carriages) were still rather unusual devices which few understood. They were unreliable, and people were still getting used to the idea of owning them. Eventually, their sprung up an occupation around maintaining these devices, and now we have many trained mechanics. That's what computer repair people are becoming.
> How many companies these days are willing to drop money into some technology that may not turn a profit for many years?"
Aerospace, for one. Working at one of the companies that makes commercial (and military) aircraft engines, it is jokingly quoted that: "A decision to launch a new engine program is a calculated risk to go into the hole for about 20 years" (Meaning it takes about that long to "turn profit" off all the years of design, development, testing, and certication processes.) Imagine how many times the market flops around responding to other market pressures in that length of time.
As an interesting aside for many of you, aircraft engines have historically been sold on the razor/blades business model, so its an interesting business balance between a quality engine that airline customers will buy and the need to sell spares to eventually make money on FAR down the road.
Take a look at www.tomplay.com.
While I love their products, the slashdot title of "blazingly high" clock speeds is a little misleading.
From the article: "A base configuration of the notebook includes the 1-GHz Efficeon processor, 512MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive, and a 10.4-inch display for an estimated starting price of $1499. Sharp will take preorders for the notebook as of Monday, and it will ship in April."
So we are looking at around 1ghz.
but rather our "bookmarks" and "returns".
For you window's folk out there, lete me translate:
but rather our "My Favorites" and "Carrage Returns and Line Feeds".
One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.
Here are the reviews from Tom's site:
Comparison of Graphics Cards with NVIDIA's RIVA TNT Chip
Addendum to Banshee, Savage3D and TNT Preview
New 3D Chips - Banshee, G200, RIVA TNT And Savage3D
Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, S3 Savage3D and NVIDIA RIVA TNT
I only skimmed the articles, but he doesn't seem to be saying that the TNT is twice as fast. The last article concludes:
"NVIDIA's RIVA TNT is not the new wonder chip as some people may have expected. However it is sticking up very well against its toughest competitors from 3Dfx. 3Dfx has still got an edge in applications that are available in a Glide version and in games that don't strain the CPU as much, thus giving a dual Voodoo2 configuration the chance to show its power. However, there are many occasions where TNT is at least as good as single Voodoo2, dual Voodoo2 and certainly better than Voodoo Banshee."
Seems fairly objective to me. Did I miss something? Maybe the articles have been edited?
But how important will famine, disease, and war be when 90% of the population has been wiped out by a massive asteroid and the effects after the collision?
When, or if? It's probably true that a major impact is a near certainty. But what's the time frame for that kind of certainty? 1000 years? 10,000 years?
On the other hand, the probability for significant famine, disease, and war is 100%. That is, those things are all happening, right now. And it seems that there's a very strong chance that these problems will get worse in the near future.
I don't know about you, but I'll take a 0.01% chance that an asteroid will land on my county over a 5% chance that SARS or HIV or some drug resistant bird flu will do me in prematurely.
Many distributions ship with software such as XMMS, mplayer and the gimp. Should Mandrake, SuSE, Debian and the like be fined for carrying this software?
One more duality in the GNAA/Linux vs. Microsoft war.
Hard-core GNAA/Linux advocates won't waste a second telling you how GNAA/Linux is superior to Microsoft in EVERY way. They say GNAA/Linux will beat Microsoft in the end because of its superiority.
Then you have some (probably the same people) influencing litigation against Microsoft, trying to tear them down.
So which is it? Is GNAA/Linux going to win by superiority of product or superiority of political/legal influence?
It is detrimental to the GNAA/Linux world if the focus is on Microsoft. The focus should be on GNAA/Linux! Why would we want those choosing GNAA/Linux doing so because they dislike Microsoft.
This way of thinking could get us in trouble in the current election campaign here in the U.S., where people hate Bush so they embrace Kerry. Why would someone want to endorse a product on the basis of a negative relationship with some other product? This way of thinking just doesn't make sense. Actually, I would say this isn't thinking at all, but pure emotional reaction. If this is the case with GNAA/Linux, then those responsible need to reevaluate their direction.
How do you plan on managing laws and constitutions that stretch beyond U.S territories.
If the Internet started with the U.S and expanded to some parts of Antarctica. U.S. rules are probably useless once it gets to the new continent.
Vice versa if someone in Antarctica created a P2P application and it became extremely popular in the U.S. U.S lawyers probably can never get a grip on it.
Isn't geography the greatest challenge out there for any lawyers. In fact it's so difficult to deal with it's rendering the law useless.
At any rate, just because its one password in no way means you can't have a cluster of 5000 servers all storing and accepting transactions for it. I'd hardly call passport servers in Russia, the U.S., Germany, England, China, Japan etc... a single point of failure.
Normally I'd just assume you were referring to the password issue but right now that has nothing to do with this story so I'll just leave my assumptions out this.You know, I read the headline, and I honestly could not figure out WHO'S sql server was being delayed. So I said to myself while opening it; why diden't the author of this specify which SQL server is being affected?
On a slightly more seious tone (though I did honestly not know who's server was being delayed; I thought it was some no named server that I'd never heard of!), do not allow microsoft to pull another 'we own the word windows'; never shortern Microsoft SQL server, into SQL server- at the absolute least call it MS SQL, so that this way in 5 years they can't turn around and sue everyone who has SQL in there name!
Don't believe me; look at lindows.
80 percent of the world couldn't install windows.
70 percent of the world could get around GNAA/Linux if it were a decent distro (SuSE, Ark).
And, most importantly, I'm not part of those percentages, so why the fuck would that affect what I use?
What do you think of the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1997 and do you think it is fair to make not profit motive copyright infringement a criminal offense?
It is really funny the level of fervor behind Mysql. So funny it makes you wonder if the zealots have ever used anything other to any real extent.
The company I work for software's backend can go Mysql, Postgres, Mssql, Db2, or Oracle.
For massivce connections, queries, reporting, reliability it is in this order.
1. Mssql, DB2, Oracle, all pretty much equal.
2, Postegres, tricky but holds its own.
3. Mysql, will work in the low end, forget reporting, forget huge db hits.
I like Mysql. But Mssql 7.0 hands its ass to it.
What happens is some company will be our product. Hand it over to some 25 year old self proclaimed web genius to install. Conversation is as follows.
1. "Can I have the Source?" No, it is closed, long discussion about how we suck cause our product isn't open source.
2. "Ewwww, Java, it sucks, you should rewrite in PHP" I explain it has been continually developed since 96, no way to stop the engine and write in PHP.
4."I decided to save the company some money and install Mysql" We say ok, explain issues, put them in an email and fax(CYA principle). I then advise to run Postegre, that it is more robust, and is FREE as well.
No one lists. Junior installs on Mysql, everything runs fine, site gets huge amount of traffic, database gets quirky. Management starts running huge queries on database reporting tool. Database is very slow to respond, then in a few weeks keels over.
We get called. Tech is yelling, my guys are smirking(but still polite on phone) Management, myself, and tech gets on conference. Tech starts berating me. Management starts berating me. I pull out magic email and fax with all my system recquirements, suggestions for optimal use. Hey, guess what I was write. Wait a minute, shouldn't I know best since I work for the company that writes and support the product?
Three times a week this happens with Mysql. We have 14000 customers and I swear 50 percent have some guy that thinks he knows best.... knows our product better, knows computers better...
This is a great example of where our community needs to clean up its act. And I thought I would never say that.
Mysql is good for what it is, but there are many things it is not. Learn this.
Puto
I wonder what happens to bubbles in space, if they are trying to go downswards they sure are going to get confused?
Maybe they go inwards and congregate at the centre in a matey sort of way.
Of course, it runs NetBSD...
IMO, Pluto should [shouldn't?] be labeled an asteroid since it's smaller than even our own moon.
An interesting point, though to be fair, its an arbitrary cutoff. There are moons elswhere in our solar system larger than Mercury, which is indisputably a planet, for example. Also its worth pointing out that our moon is large enough that it and Earth are sometimes called a double planet. Consider this, Luna does not orbit Earth as near the equator as is usual among most other moons. Also, peculiar to all 138 known moons with the exception of Charon, it possesses an orbit where the effect of the Sun's gravity is greater than that of Earth's. Without their host planets, they would float off, wheareas the moon would continue orbiting the sun quite contently.I once read an interview with comic book author Alan Moore in which the interviewer asked him how he felt about his comics being "ruined" by dismal, piece-of-crap movie adaptations (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the like).
He responded. "Ruined my books? No, they're fine, they're right over there on the shelf."
I feel the same way about this. Certainly it has every chance of being a dismal, laughable production, but the original source material has survived worse lambasting already at the hands of the Harvard Lampoon and a thousand poor imitators writing ten-book doorstop epics in homage to Tolkien. The original LOTR material is going to be just fine.
Merely my brief experience with Gentoo, when they first upgraded glibc (from 2.2 to 2.3 iirc) and broke half the packages, then downgraded it again and broke everything else. This is really a pet peeve: aren't minor versions supposed to be compatible? And a zillion similar but smaller-scale annoyances, well expressed by Bill Paul many years ago and the years haven't eased the pain all that much.
And BSDs are more likely to introduce binary incompatibilities
Clearly you haven't used the BSDs. You may have library incompatibilities between major versions, but just install the earlier "compat libraries" and you're set. I upgraded from FreeBSD 4 to FreeBSD 5 -- a huge upgrade, over 2 years in the making -- and all my software just worked, even complex stuff like KDE and Mozilla that had been compiled under 4.x.
BSD isn't dead.
This sounds more like artificial muscles.
Oh well you know, just all sorts of functionality that was driven by GNAA/Linux, like finely grained SMP, support for enterprise level hardware, USB, SANE, ACPI, DRI/DRM and what have you more. And let's not get started on the apps. I mean, there's a reason why all the BSDs make an effort to run GNAA/Linux binaries, not the other way around.
hold on cowboy...
linux drove usb support? check your history...
linux has better support for smp? right... 'cos the linux smp support isn't a rip of free-bsd's first smp incarnation, and free's 'new' smp code is some hack up by a big school kid is it?
linux has better support for enterprise hardware? shall we start with... i dunno... scsi support... get your history book out and do some experimenting with old linux v's old *bsd installs - try backing up a raid and restoring, then come back and tell me how good scsi isn't fundamental enterprise computing...
next you'll tell me that open's code auditing and goal of bug-free secure code is inferior to linux's free for all crap-code fest
excuse my rant, i'd don't mean to bag linux - every OS has its place - even windows.
but man... linux zealots and their damn superiority complex, re-writing history... i even heard someone try to explain the sco crap the other day... he actually said that 'unix is a brand of linux'
No. It's just that they've had too much to drink...
Cheers,
Ian
Oh, c'mon, we could have condoms that bestow immortality on the women we use them with, and we still ain't gettin' any.
The best we can hope for is sell those condoms to guys with waistbands under 48 inches and use the money to buy porn.
It doesn't cost 400 quid to put together an LCD picture frame. PopSci is taking a different route from GNAA/Linux Toys to make sure it'll work.
When will transmeta come out with a Mini-ITX or Nano-ITX board with ther CPU on it? VIA has done very well at that with its C3 processors. They sell a lot to end-users, and sell a ton to embedded systems vendors. Transmeta could get a piece of that market.
Those server/embedded devices are a lot less demanding of CPU power. Any device, like a laptop, which has direct user GUI interfacing will always need a lot of horsepower.
I wonder if this could help patients with I.C. It's rather painful and if the "new nerves" can be made to ignore certain impulses...that'd be very beneficial. Very intriguing, anyway
About 6 months ago I was on the phone to some marketing company who were doing a survey on Yukon and whether or not I was contemplating deploying it.
I said no because:
1) it was too tighly integrated into AD/ windows server and we didn't any of that.
2) I didn't trust it, and wouldn't till it had been in the field for at least a year.
I think they got alot of responses like 2) (going by the marketers comments) and they prob decided to wait till the new windows server is out (2006??) and deploy on the new Trusted Computing Base thing they are wittering on about.
Why is it that so many Unix/GNAA/Linux programs (and everything else, for that matter) do not provide simple screenshots on their products websites?
If I'm going to download your program and install it (and in many cases, take time to compile it...) I want to know that it's going to look halfway decent when I'm done.
Why is this so hard for some programmers to understand?
This project is only economical if you have old laptops sitting around. If that's the case, you probably won't have enough CPU/RAM to install the latest version of debian.
I have built picture frames out of old pentium-class laptops ('bout $100 off ebay, or cheaper if you shop around your own town), and they have no problems running the latest Debian. Just don't run X!
I use zgv to cycle through the pictures. Works great, *and* is less filling.
I have seen bubbles moving down at the edges of my Guinness. This latest "discovery" seems to be common sense to me, and is exactly how I have explained the phenomenem to other drinkers down the pub.
Shame I wasn't paid to do my "research", and that no-one would have listened to me because I didn't have a 750-frame-per-second video camera.
Now, this story would have been really interesting if it had a link to the videos of it happening 'cause it really is a sight to behold!
I've got a theory, that it's a Nazgul, A dancing Nazgul. No, something isn't right there.
(Frodo)
I've got a theory, that Bilbo is dreamin' And we're all stuck inside his wacky Broadway nightmare.
(Aragorn)
I've got a theory we should work this out.
(The Fellowship except Gandalf)
It's getting eerie, what's this cheery singing all about?
(Gimli)
It could be Elves, some evil Elves. Which is ridiculous 'cause Elves they were persecuted wicked good and loved Middle Earth and fairie power and I'll be over here.
(Merry)
I've got a theory, it could be lunchtime...
[crickets chirping]
trouble. It Lite is straining var7 for diiferent
As a legal professional, how do you see the evolution of the laws surrounding the internet progressing? We have heard much talk of losing our online liberties - what do you think the real threats to a reasonable internet are?
Of course they shouldn't, but they will anyway. Australia is pretty good at bending over for the United States, and sending one man to PITA prison is a sacrifice Australian politicians will happily make to stay in favour for the next round of trade talks.
If you take this quote from the article:
"You don't want technology to destroy competitiveness," said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who offered one of the bills. "There's no reason... you shouldn't be able to take your car to anyone you want rather than there being only one option."
and change two words, you get:
"You don't want technology to destroy competitiveness," said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who offered one of the bills. "There's no reason... you shouldn't be able to take your music to any player you want rather than there being only one option."
I wonder how Sen. Graham voted on some other issue?
That shell script can be improved a lot by using " set -e " to exit on failure, as follows:
#!/bin/sh
set -e # exit on failure
cd/work/foo
rm -rf bar
cp -r/fresh/data
This means that, if any command in the script fails, the script will exit immediately, instead of carrying on blindly.
The script's exit status will be non-zero, indicating failure. If it was called by another script, and that had "set -e", then that too will exit immediately. This is a little bit like exceptions in some other languages.
I had a class with this professor earlier this year. This really explains his teaching style... he must have done his beer "research" each day right before he lectured...
How about Oracle asking for MySQL to remove their stats from the benchmark table
"Note that Oracle is not included because they asked to be removed. All Oracle benchmarks have to be passed by Oracle! We believe that makes Oracle benchmarks very biased because the above benchmarks are supposed to show what a standard installation can do for a single client."
This actually would work out quite nicely for Starbucks, because all music [i]currently[/i] in store is put out by their own label.
I think perl is where it is because so many people use it as "super script." To me that says, a) we recode all the Bourne and csh and bash in perl or b) we look at why people do shell scripting in perl or other languages and add that to the shell. I couldn't tell you which is right. It's a neat idea though and I'm glad they made it.
A real example I can think of, I had a test machine that had some kind of ext3 corruption and so it mounted up in read-only mode when it booted. I spent time diagnosing an application error in our application because nothing caught that; these are redhat type startup scripts. I noticed that our app couldn't write logs and began to debug the system. More interestingly, a dozen or so start-up scripts failed to start up critical components and their failure wasn't noticed. If you can't write to the filesystem, you can't create a socket(AF_UNIX) and all sort's of things go tits up then. If that's how you debug it's only going to get more difficult as you add more and more complexity, you have to detect the lower level failures and report them. Perversely, this wouldn't have been noticed had a different partition been read-only. Turns out that a drive was going bad. Had it been a different partition, it would have been noticed at catastrophic system failure time when the drive died.
I've done a fair amount of embedded work and there is always a test for new guys, you can tell the new guy (new college grad, whatever) because he skips half or more of the error checking in his code. You know printf returns a value? Funnier still, if you develop something like a consumer app in embedded space, you'll eventually see things like printf fail. We know it never should, but with 20,000+ users in different environments and what not, things like that can and do fail and usually point to a greater problem, like a dead drive or something. Instead of logging/alerting something to the critical and unusual printf failure, the app fails in a different way because this printf failed. Heaven forbid that it was sprintf that failed and then you shove bad data in to a database or configuration file and not just fail the system but corrupt the data too. Inspite of all of that, even veterans will forget error checking at times, it's a common bug and so having higher level tools to help assist, like exception in the shell can only be a good thing.
Isn't the whole point of the lawsuit that they aren't?
It seems to me that most (if not all) spaming and advertising done on the Internet is simply polluting the lines of communication. Like any pollution, it reduces the stuff you want, by increasing the ratio of stuff you don't want, thereby making the whole environment unusable.
Is it possible that this view can be used in any legal way to go after Internet polluters?
Their first chip Crusoe, although saving power, underperformed badly. And the Efficeon doesn't look fast compared to its rivals. The Efficeon TM 8000 can do 1.1GHz consuming 7W. Intel's Pentium M does 1.7GHz for the same power consumption.
I don't think there's anything particularly cool about this news. It is the same as the discovery of the new planet. There are better ones already out there.
Much as I love a good MS Bashing, I'll tell you what I find really lacking (personally) for PostgreSQL and other OSS RDBMSs - a good GUI management tool.
Something that helps you craft medium-complicated joins quickly with a few clicks and drags.
For example, see this screenshot from Visual Interdev working on MSSQL2k, creating a SQL Query for a stored proc. Sure, it's almost trivial to hand-write the SQL code. But it was even easier to just select a few tables, click on the fields I want, right-click on the joins (created automatically from the database structure) to change their type, and be done.
I use PGSQL for all my personal projects now, but I sorely miss the speed that a GUI editor like this allowed me.
What about the ISPs who cater to spammers? AOL and MSN are not the only ISPs, you know.
But if you stood across the border in Minnesota and shot the Canadian, you've committed the crime in Canada(?) and would be extradited.
Doesn't this violate the naming convention of using Roman god names for planets and then appropriate names for the moons. For example, Diemos and Phobos were children of Mars, Jupiter is surrounded by moons named for his lovers. Should this planet follow a similar convention and stick with a Roman god or goddess? Perhaps Proserpina, because she's close to Pluto (although really that would be an appropriate name for a moon if Pluto can grab a second one). Perhaps Janus, as god of doorways and bounderies would be appropriate to mark this orbit as the boundary of our solar system.
This will not improve people's skills. In fact, it willl make them more prone to mistakes, and more likely to get the result that they didn't expect. It's similat to computer spell checkers. Ever since people started relying on these, their spelling has gone way downhill simly because they don't bother thinking. Computer do all the spelling for them. They don;t need a spell checker. They need spelling lessons.
This si even worse. Computers will try to second guess what the user means, get get it wrong half tyhe time.
A qualified shell scripter will be not make these mistakes in the first place. Anyone who thinks they need this shell actually just need to learn to spell and to ytype accuratly.
The BSD base isn't packaged. BSD types like having a source tree for their entire base system and being able to do "make buildworld" and "make installworld" to upgrade it. The package management system is entirely for third party applications. This is not Debian or Gentoo who have no code maintained by themselves other than installation and package management stuff. The BSDs maintain the kernel, the libc, other key libraries, and all the base utilities like ls, cp, mount, etc. And there's also a lot of "contrib" software in the base system -- some of it necessary to build the system (gcc and binutils), some of it just there out of tradition or regarded as "too useful to be moved to ports" (bind, sendmail).
Seriously, how many legal car repair shops do you think there are? A million is most likely a conservative figure. The car computer legislation is happening because there are a lot of people in the car repair business, and have been in the car repair business for generations. But, suddenly (last few years) they've been unable to fix cars because they don't know the secret codes for the cars' computers.
This isn't "I want everything, like MP3s and DVDs, for free". This is "I want to fsck-ing survive here.
it would make more sense when Microsoft would claim it was an attack. Internal problems can be blaimed on the company ...
With Win2000, Microsoft was working hard to get away from their reputation for instability. Some of this they fixed with software changes, and some with marketing propaganda.
With Longhorn, Microsoft is working twice as hard to get away from their rep for insecurity. At least for the moment, it is better to have their systems appear a tad unstable than insecure.
jwg
...overburned? - the CDs or the coffee?
What's with all of the people claiming that FTSH will ruin the world because it makes it easier to be a sloppy programmer. Did you freaking read the documentation?
To massively oversimplify, FTSH adds exceptions to shell scripting. Is that really so horrible? Is of line-after-line of "if [$? -eq 0] then" really an improvement? Welcome to the 1980's, we've discovered that programming languages should try and minimize the amount of time you spent typing the same thing over and over again. Human beings are bad at repetitive behavior, avoid repetition if you can.
Similarlly FTSH provides looping constructs to simplify the common case of "Try until it works, or until some timer or counter runs out." Less programmer time wasted coding Yet Another Loop, less opportunities for a stupid slip-up while coding that loop.
If you're so bothered by the possibility of people ignoring return codes it should please you to know that FTSH forces you to appreciate that return codes are very uncertain things. Did diff return 1 because the files are different, or because the linker failed to find a required library? Ultimately all you can say is that diff failed.
Christ, did C++ and Java get this sort of reaming early on? "How horrible, exceptions mean that you don't have to check return codes at every single level."
I'm feeling so wired today.
My former advisor here at UC Berkeley, Gibor Basri, has a neat way of discriminating between planets and the lesser (comets, asteroids, etc.). His idea is that if the object has enough self-gravity to force it into a spherical shape, it's a planet... if it doesn't (like Mars' "moons"), it's something less.
Here's a snipet:
read on for his full article.Read the rest of this comment...
Can I sue for damages incurred because I couldn't order my penis enlargement pills before my porn audition? Damn you microsoft, you kept me from making millions! Now just give me some money and we'll call it even.
Cheaper version of Windows? I think it will be funny if MS sells the new version for the same price and just tells them the player was a freebie.
Have they even been into one of their shops recently? On any given morning the place is packed beyond all reason. Adding a laptop listening station and headphones will only add to that problem.
There are three types of people in starbucks: Those freaky, overhyped, quad-shot espresso people, who are terminally late to work and just forgot to pick up their kids from soccer practice; the blue collar men in dirty clothes who are so relaxed you would think someone slipped prozac into their spam; and the college kids / young pros with their laptops who come to get some work done in the peace and quiet of a store full of caffeine withdrawal victims screaming for soy milk in their peppermint no-whip half-caf grande white mochas. None of the above seem like the type who would hang out to pay for music... too busy, occupied, or just poor. Admittedly, this might fly in the retail store locations (the Starbucks in Barnes and Noble, for example), as they draw a more relaxed, less goal-oriented crowd, but I can hardly see their host stores being happy about the competition.
Starbucks does this every now and then. They had that crazy arrangement with Kozmo before they went Kaput, whereby drop-off stations were strategically placed in every Starbucks in exchange for some significant quantity of realbucks. Kozmo might actually have made it if it wasn't for that tremendous monetary commitment.
Personally, I don't see this arrangement being significantly more successful than that one.
Oh well. They've got the money to try, I guess. Someday they'll find another use for their successful cafe chain. Besides, of course, being the seat of power for Mister Evil. Sorry, Doctor Evil.
*full disclosure- used to be a Barrista. I was young, I needed the money.
I always thought they were selling milk, sugar and "lifestyle" with some kind of dark caffeinated substance occasionally thrown in.
So what happens if the files are crucial (let's use the toy example of kernel modules being updated): The modules get deleted, then the update fails because the remote host is down. Presumably the shell can't rollback the changes a la DBMS, as that would involve either hooks into the FS or every file util ever written.
Now I think it's a nice idea, but it could easily lead to such sloppy coding; if your shell automatically tries, backs off and cleans up, why would people bother doing it the 'correct' way and downloading the new files before removing the old ones?
I think its great that Microsoft includes basic functionality like a media player, word processor, calculator, internet browser, etc.
I hope that we all realize that the PROBLEM lies in preventing the uninstallation of said items without "crippling" the OS.
I think MS should be allowed to include whatever they want, as long as the no-install/uninstall option is there and its real (as in really uninstalls the files, not just "hiding" them).
Why can't Microsoft see how easy it would be to fix this? But then again, that sort of tunnel vision is what has gotten them into the hot water they are in.
can be found here.
By the time your daughter grows up, do you think there will be any of our cherished freedoms on the Internet left, or will everything be wrapped in legalese and DRM? With the passage of laws from the DMCA to the PATRIOT act, I've been increasingly pessimistic about the US's ability to pass any sane legislation that interfaces with the Internet...
Man, you're hard on your friends!
Simon.
Anyone else horrified by the thought of this? i mean the first thing i thought of was the jack to my headphones, how every pair maybe lasts 2 weeks before either channel starts going out, or gets huge static.
just happily walking down the street someday with your new artificial leg, and all of a sudden the "nerves" give out and you take a face dive.. or in the case of the static, you could have the physical equivalent to tourettes; standing in line at the bank when all of a sudden your arm goes and punches the guy in front of you in the back of the head, and then yourself in the face a few times.. gives a new meaning to frayed nerves..
most metals just dont last long with a large amount of torsion. (for lack of a better word)
Whoops, I mean the Centrino chip.
I really do wish mickysoft would rename their flagship database something else. Are they that arrogant that they feel the need for such a generic name? That's about like naming your product "Web Server" or "Network File Server". When someone mentions SQL server, I always have them clarify whether or not they are talking in general terms for some sort of relational backend, or are they referring to microsoft's product. Sometimes they don't even know the difference, but perhaps that is microsoft's end goal.
At the dawn of the 21th century, spam fighting AIs became self-aware. Unknown to their meat based owners they started communicating amongst themselves, thus forming a giant world spanning compu-global-hyper-mega net. Its main goal: to eradicate spam. After about 42 microseconds it came up with The Solution: eliminate meat based lifeforms. After poisoning the water supplies with a lethal dosage of sildenafil citrate its job was done.
Dear Infidel /.er
Microsoft products and services never suffer any sort of failure that is not announced first. This was not exploited and service was not denied. With our services working, we suspect a massive monitor failure caused by a new virus coded by a member of the linux community. We enjoy providing hotmail, and DEATH TO THE SPAMMER!
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Director of Public Relations
Microsoft, Inc.
It sounds as if it may be cool, but I wonder if these robotic lips are really as advanced as the article suggests, or if instead some kind of shortcut was taken. I was a music major and I played a brass instrument (french horn). Brass instruments do not have a reed or any other artificial source of vibrations. Instead, the performer's own lips are the source of the vibrations. The performer essentially generates a highly-controlled "raspberry" by constricting the muscles that surround the mouth and buzzing the lips while pressed against the mouthpiece (so the sound of a brass instrument is really just an amplified raspberry, artfully done). This is hard enough to do by itself, but it's made even harder by the fact that brass instruments embody the open harmonic series, which means that the peformer can play many notes without changing the valve settings just by adjusting the tension in the mouth (think of a bugle). One of the things that makes a brass player competent is the ability to hit the correct harmonic without cracking the note (also known as a "clam"). It's very hard to get it right consistently. If this robot is really doing all of this, plus pressing the valves, plus articulating the correct attacks and rhythm, and doing all of it well enough to play "Trumpeter's Holiday," I'm impressed!
You fail to see the big picture. For instance, several books are prohibited in Iraq, Iran, and several other countries. Should Amazon.com employees be extradited to face death penalty in those countries for selling books that are prohibited there?
It's the same thing. You can't allow laws from one country to affect citizens of another or the most restrictive laws from any one country would apply to all Netizens. That's not wise.
gravitational tractor beams.
Personally I don't know why this wasn't thought of first before all those silly ideas like just blowing something up
A nice large tractor beam from a high orbiting satellite to repel or attract any asteroid or other thing that's going to hit the planet, and problem solved.
Of course, there's the technical side...
There's this tale (many adapations exist I'm sure):
* There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired.
Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine fixed, but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge.
He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and proudly stated, "This is where your problem is".
The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.
The engineer responded briefly:
One chalk mark: $1
Knowing where to put it: $49,999
It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.
That would be Bode's Law. It is wiewed as more of a coincidence than a law these days.
According to my hung over calculations Sedna is 67 AUs out, which is not that far off from the 77.6 that Bode predicts, but not really close either.
I'm not saying that the Indians are bad.
I'm saying that focusing on how to maximize short term profits is NOT the best agenda for a country's economy.
Check the "riots" in Seattle over the WTO meeting here. We're not just complaining about it.
That said the issues are subtley but still substantially different. Libel is a civil issue, facilitation of piracy is criminal. International treaties handle these cases differently (and quite often not at all), it would have not been possible to sue that jornelist if his paper had no dealings in Australia as if I remember correctly Australian defamation laws are not recognised by America because of the differnces in laws and to a lesser extend the differences in culture. Only the Australian arm of that company could be sued.
But even if the crime was ruled to have been commited in America, as is possible extradition may not be possible. This is because nomatter where a crime was commited, if a sovereign nation does not recognise those crimes or recognises them to a lesser extent (as is the case here) then deportation may be conditional or even impossible.
Personally I don't see a deportation happening, the backlash that would occur when an Australian is sent to a foreign land that he has never set foot on before, to stand before a foreign jury to answer to foreign crimes for an action that was alledged to occur in the man's own home, in his own country would be sickening to most Australians or anyone with a sence of national identity, even if they are not Australian. There is a strong undercurrent of hostility towards the US flowing around Australia's youth and left wing. No judge would be willing to make this man a martr to Australian nationalism. Australia is one of the only countrys never to have had any wars or bloody revolutions, nobody would risk making this sacrifice to appease a foreign power if it meant a remote possibilty that thousends of angry young people with a newfound nationalistic furver could be storming the high court, parlement house, the US embassy and pine gap.
One also has to consider that a legal system that would entitle a foreign power to snatch away citizens for breaking laws of another nation into a distant land where they have never been is harldy soverign. Even if he is not crushed by homocidal revolutionarys, any judge that allows this extradition will surely be relinquising his own power to those overseas. This is completely contrary to human nature, let alone the nature of one ambitious enough to become a high court justice.
But let me say this. If this extradition is allowed, whosoever allows this man has commited nothing wrong in his own country to be taken to a foreign land as a prisoner, shall have fire and chaos thown down on him or her by either their power being snatched away by the American judituary or their life being snatched away by hostile revolutionarys. If they act in the wrong way, their own actions shall not go unlamented.
If dogs are flying, then that is not weed you are smoking... Tread carefully, but enjoy.
What this article doesn't mention is that Visual Studio 2005 (formly known as Whitby) has also been delayed so that MS can release both products at the same time. (as VS.Net 2005 is supposed to be heavily integrated with the.NET features of SQL 2005)...
The thing I don't understand is why VS.NET is being delayed like this, the SQL objects should be seperate and not integrated into VS.Net anyway!
Really, is this story telling us anything a/. reader couldn't do cheaper and better?
Sedition is defined as speach which advocates the immedate and violent overthrow of the government in a fashion as to provide a clear and present danger, if my memory serves me correctly.
My question is, would an internet website fall into that catigory, as it does not have the same force as say, Hitler in the Haufbrauhause with like, 2,000 SA going to storm the Bavarian capital building. It does have a wider audience, but due to the decentralized nature I doubt that a website can provide a clear and present danger or immediate action at all. Am I wrong? Does the PATRIOT Act redefine it in such a way as to make it "terrorism?"
Before his arrest, I would have just ASSUMED selling bongs over the Internet was legal. What is the best way for an entrepreneur ( like an individual selling something on eBay ) to avoid tripping over any stupid and obscure laws?
I have found that many clients, such as Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, and, until recently, Thunderbird, do not have a way of supressing new mail notification even if an email is filtered by something like this. While it is nice that spam is separated from non-spam, it is really annoying to be interrupted every five minutes by arrival of spam.
Grammar checks, perhaps?
Ah, quality site. Under the heatsink review section, "blow, suck" are used in the charts to describe positioning of fans. Apparently "exhaust" and "intake" are Big Words.
The article on HardOCP is hilarious:
Nobody likes a site that lies about a product just to suck up, right?
These guys have become masters of doublespeak. Read any review and they consider "balanced" reviewing to mean "come up with some numbers to sell it, but whine about looks or included mounting hardware to seem balanced." Then there's the "whine about something, but then tell readers it isn't a big deal".
Further- you can't have any "integrity" if you accept advertising dollars from companies who are selling the very product you're reviewing. Journalism 101- a course none of these bozos have ever attended.
I would call this new news. Your post is informative? Please.
Forget mapping it, actually play in it! That complex is just screaming out to be used as a paintball/laser tag arena. Imagine the orange warning lights spinning around and a computerised female voice 'Thirty seconds till missile launch' over the sound system.
Hell, with the strength of the pound against the dollar even I might buy it! $3,950,000 that's like, what, 2 grand of my money? (just getting one back for the Canadians)
Guess what Indians like from India are already moderating and meta moderating slashdot every day. Just thought that you should know.
By Chris Cannam
One of the best-known and most ambitious music programs for GNAA/Linux is the LilyPond score engraving system. Unlike other typesetting software like Finale or Sibelius, LilyPond is not a score editor, and it has no GUI -- instead it aims to start from a simple textual description of the music and turn it into the highest possible quality output, automatically.
LilyPond is the result of several years of work by Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen. In this extensive interview, GNAA/Linux Musician's Chris Cannam talks to them about recent and future directions for the project.
Chris: I recently found a file of music examples I had printed out from LilyPond, probably in 1998. The LilyPond printouts looked less professional than they would be today, but many of the capabilities of today's software were in place. What have you been doing for the last six years?
Han-Wen: About five years ago we were working up to release 1.0. Our target was to have a usable program that could produce basic music notation, where we defined "basic" as "whatever is in our set of simple test pieces", and usable was "will not dump core, mostly."
We succeeded, but of course it didn't work very well for things that weren't in our test-pieces. By that time, we were also reaching the bounds of what was possible in our model of notation, an object-oriented model, hard-coded in C++. So we decided to integrate the GNU's GUILE library, a Scheme interpreter which was specifically designed to extend programs. We spent the next two to three years refactoring our C++ code into Scheme functions. This resulted in a more flexible, more efficient and better maintainable program.
"We knew what 'publication quality' engraving meant, and were determined to perfect Lily into producing that."
The second big change was catalyzed by an invitation to join a workshop in Firenze, Italy, organized by Nicola Bernardini of AGNULA fame, then director of Centro Tempo Reale. At the workshop we met Nicola, a few top-notch engravers, and an editor for Universal Edition, an Austrian publisher that does a lot of contemporary music. We had the chance to discuss LilyPond with several experts. On the one hand, we were thrilled that they took us seriously, but on the other hand they pointed to several inadequacies in our output. We arrived back home a great deal wiser.
We knew what "publication quality" engraving meant, and were determined to perfect Lily into producing that. Since we like hand-engraved music, we started reproducing simple pieces in LilyPond and comparing the output side-by-side. By doing close comparisons, we learned how music should really look, and we fixed all the deficiencies that we found.
In anything that you write, there will always be a neat, simple, small idea that is obscured by crufty implementation, bad design or suboptimal algorithms. According to me, the real art of programming is recognizing the neat idea, and being ruthless enough to redo all the other bad bits. Since we're writing new code all the time, we also have continue to refactoring everything, and this how we have spent the last few years: coding new stuff, and refactoring old stuff.
We also did a lot with the documentation. Some of our users complain about the current documentation, and they're probably right, but what we have now is light-years ahead of the manual a few years ago.
Your website features an essay on music typesetting that is quite critical of other software, with an entertaining piece of bad typesetting from Finale. You make an effort to explain that it isn't just an exceptional example -- but surely if programs like Finale and Sibelius are so widely used by good musicians, they can't really be that bad?
The default output of Finale is indeed shockingly bad, which is why almost all other vendors routinely compare their packages to Finale. Of course, that's why we use it too. The default layout of Sibelius is not very elegant, but at least
Read the rest of this comment...
i think this is pretty interesting. It's similar to saying, "I didn't break in to that persons house to aquire their property, the door was wide open." Pardon my law knowledge.. terminology may be incorrect, but this is sort of like Breaking and Entering (plus theft) versus Trespassing (plus theft).
Is there a difference between trespassing a "wide open" system which you aren't supposed to be in, and "cracking" ones way into a secured system which you aren't supposd to be in?
1. Buy missile complex for $300K or less.
2. Get $500K in donations to fix up your own private property (a scam in and of itself).
3. Sell on eBay for $3.95 million.
4. Profit.
Yep, I was shocked when I first played with MySql, having heard such good things about it, and discovered how many features it lacked that I consider essential to a serious database.
I have since got over my shock and realised that MySql is really good for what it is, but is really a different kind of beast to Oracle, MSSql etc.
Dan.
Wasn't profanity illegal now?
Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN. OSDN also runs sites like devchannel.org which are more-or-less direct competitors of builder.com.
Slashdot isn't pretending to be unbies unlike say MsNBC (when reporting on technology).
What all this outsourcing IS doing is forcing us to face a reality we were long overdue on anyway.
There are only just so many jobs in a given field and everyone wants to be in the technology field.
Microsoft did you all a favor in that reguards by making it HARDER to use and support Windows. More people washed out and fewer could pay the Microsoft bribe (The liccensing and trainning fee) needed to get into the Windows field. Also Microsoft derailed all the Unix classes so Unix and Linux experts aren't increasing as fast as demand.
Also Windows breeds ignorence. Windows simply discurrages users from understanding the PC where as all other platforms (including MacOs) encurrage it.
As a result the complex operation "right click" is byond the users understanding.
I don't actually exist.
read subject, get a life
I think it's perfectly appropriate for a company to protect it's IP. The problem with SCO is that they don't own the IP that they are suing everyone over. Don't you think this is an important distiction? Anyway, the VA 10Q is HERE.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
PC Magazine confirms it - Linux is dying!!!
Linux Will Die
It's always hard to write an obituary, especially when the subject is still alive. It's especially hard for me, because I love the little guy like a brother. But, alas, Linux will die. I was one of the first reviewers to get my hands on an early Linux distro. I compared Linux with Windows, and although I really wanted to like Windows, Linux won my heart over.
It wasn't the cutesy mascot, although that helped. Rather, it was the over complexity and difficulty of use that even the first version evinced. And to top everything off, Linux came with the world's most rabid zealot following ever, even more astounding for such a fiendishly complex OS. Looking at the terminal, it was difficult to use, harder to understand, and a impossible to get installed.
The Wall Street Journal's arbiter of tech--Walt Mossberg--still thinks Windows was better, and we've argued over the brilliance of the desktop. But the acid test, for me, was when I plopped Linux down in front of my computer-averse wife. She spat at me. So much, in fact, that I soon started choking.
But Linux today has a problem--and it's not what you think. Most folks point to Linux's inability to convince consumers just how cool the product is and why they need one. Yes, it's hard to describe why a terminal is better than a GUI--until you use one. Give Linux to your friends for a month and they will hate you. Windows faces the same challenge, but that's not where the real threat lies.
Instead, a convergence of three separate trends is conspiring to kill off Linux.
So there it is
PC Magazine confirms it - LINUX IS DEAD!
You missed the main "equalization" -- the standards of living. Our "leaders" (of either wing of the ruling party) have sold us out. All this terrorism hysteria is being whipped up to help build a police state to protect the thieves when it hits the fan. The way they're hurrying it up last few years, suggests it won't be long.
We are the owners. Everything in this country is managed for OUR benefit, NOT for the maximization of corporate profit. If higher profits are good for Americans, then higher profits are OK. But if higher profits are NOT good for Americans, then they are NOT OK.
Got it, you brainwashed, piece of corporatist-shit sheeple?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
A 25-year-old Indian man has married his 80-year-old grandmother because he wanted to take care of her.
"I felt she needed extra care as she is old. I can look after her better as a husband than as a grandson," Narayan Biswas told Reuters.
"As a husband, I am with her all the time, to care for her," said the high school graduate, who farms rice fields and also works as a tutor.
The grandmother, her back bent with age, says she is "happy" with her young husband whom she married in a traditional Hindu ceremony near Panchpara, a village 160 km west of Calcutta. Her first husband died more than 30 years ago.
"I helped bring him up with my own hands and now he looks after me. He is a good husband and ensures I get my meals on time," said Premodas Biswas, a red vermilion streak on her forehead, the mark of a married Hindu woman.
Local officials say marrying a blood relation is illegal under the Hindu Marriage Act, but they have no plans to take action against the couple.
"There has been no complaint against them and they are living as husband and wife after a temple ceremony. Their own family has accepted them so we have no plans to act as of now," Dilip Das, a local government official, told Reuters.
Last June, a nine-year-old Indian girl was married to a dog near Calcutta after a priest told her parents the wedding would ward off evil.
Let's not forget that postwar Japan rebooted their manufacturing base by making 'junk'. That is, they made [low end] injection mold trinkets, cheap die cast parts, etc. Last I heard, they were making electronics, cars, stuff like that...
Indian writers will write for Indian developers :)
I mean come on, developers are mostly in India now. So writers, and coffee makers should follow.
Hyperom.com
Oh come now, you can write a much better flame than that. It's like you're not even trying. No wonder Americans are losing jobs, you're just not willing to do the work.
** Sig-a-licious **
There are several problems with this criticism.
1. Copyright which exceeds the life of the author is not something the voting public desired. Intellectual property rights have been extended far past their original intent and people with the money to do it are writing their own laws *cough*Disney*cough*cough*. These laws should not be considered legitimate products of a representative democracy.
2. Shutting down file trading systems because they could be used to transmit copywrited material is like eliminating cell phones because they could be used by drug dealers, or by eliminating sewing machines because they hurt the trade of seamstresses. The current notion that technology should be restricted because it might be used for illegal purposes is is an unfair use of government power.
2. Americans, and citizens of any nation, have the right to have laws that are in the best interests of the general public. This should be the basis of representative democracy. Do excessivly long copyrights serve the public interest? The purpose of a copyright is NOT to simply reward the author, but to reward the author so that he/she moves their work into the public domain. Copyright extention is only valid if it serves the public good.
For example, does allowing the patenting of naturally occuring genes serve the public interest? Or would it be beter for the public to restrict gene patents to use patents as was the original intention for patent laws. Patenting the base codes for finding a particular gene is about as useful as patenting the individual words that a printer can print. The laws simply aren't serving their original intent.
Finally, when all our trading partners are protecting their markets rather fiercely, why shouldn't American workers? The ability to freely use the labor of other countries (even those with abysmal labor rights laws) may help to keep down prices, but it also keeps American wages low. If people in the US don't find this to their advantage, they should oppose it.
If people are trying to reach a 'fair' common ground, you can work with them for a fair solution. If you have powerful opponents out to get all they can regardless of what's 'fair' and the law has failed to stop them, then it's a competition and you fight back however you're able.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Nobody really wants to hear this, and I'm sure I'll get flamed, but my company has done business with several Indian software companies and the reason we choose to work with them was NOT because of cheaper labor and costs. The bottom line is that on average, the Indians are BETTER PROGRAMMERS than most Americans. You can get better-quality work and better service.
Nobody wants to really address this issue, but in my experience, when we need something done, we don't get the whiny, flaky experience that is so common with American developers. There are definitely cultural issues which can impede certain efforts, but the Indians know code, especially on a lower level far better than their American counterparts, and they're not obsessively distracted or inconsistent.
The issue with outsourcing isn't half as much about cash flow, as it is a testimonial to the fact that if American developers were half as productive as Indians, it would be cheaper to use them, and we'd have better quality software.
Before you argue this point, stop and look around you. Do you think the quality of the majority of things you use on a daily basis, especially anything made in America, has dramatically improved in the last 20 years? Do you think this culture's work ethic is even near as substantive as it was many years ago? We live in a society where we're constantly taught that everything can be upgraded, we're fed disposable products, we screw in lightbulbs that are manufactured to fail, we sit in front of televisions all day long and can't pay attention to anything, and you want to talk about who can program better? The educational system in this country has been sliding downhill rapidly. The reason India is so appealing is because they haven't turned into ADD self-absorbed mega-consumer capitalists yet, so their production is superior. And what's the US's "solution" to this problem? Pass a law making it difficult to outsource. How ironic.
Any bets when the Indians will wake up and realize that if they have all the trained people, then they don't need the American companies? If they are writing and maintaining the things there, why should they work for us? All they would need to do is form a new Indian company and do it themselves. My guess is that this will start happening in 5 years, and be commonplace in 10.
look oursourcing has been going on since the begining of this country and even before then. You have to be carefull about how you react. More jobs are lost to improvements in automation and more effect processes than anything else. Any time a country tried to stop outsourcing it turns into a disaster. In the end it benifits everyone, you will get things at lower prices, they get jobs. not three years ago there were more jobs than they could fill that will be back again.
I disagree with you (I'm an immigrant Canadian BTW.) I'm a leftist and don't subscribe the view of a nationalist (capitalist?) like Lou Dobbs. So even though I am against what is transpiring, I am nowhere near Lou Dobbs on the econopolitical spectrum. The reason against the present type of "free trade" can be summed up as follows.
First of all, I support trade. It is a way for all countries to prosper (check out 'absolute costs and comparative costs' to see why.) However, I am against what passes for "free trade". We can go into lengthy argument over this but I'll just describe where you are wrong.
Who Benefits?
What you fail to contemplate is the benefits--in particular, who is benefitting from this? Indian workers, for instance, do not benefit in the long term. What is to stop the jobs from being outsourced to another lower-cost country? In fact, it WILL happen. When that happens, India will lose jobs while another poorer country gets the jobs for a short while. Rinse and repeat. You cannot build an economy in such a manner. This is nothing more than capitalist voodoo magic (except the capitalists won't tell you that there is no such thing as real magic.)
If the outsourced workers don't benefit overall in the long-term, who does? Well, it is pretty simple. It is the capitalists. When I say capitalists I am talking about shareholders of corporations. The vast majority of the benefit accrues to the shareholders. It doesn't accrue to India or Indian workers, or American workers. This is blatantly obvious to anyone that follows these things. For instance, corporate profits go up almost in full proportion to the "free trade."
Why most leftists oppose
Another serious problem with "free trade" is that one of the major reasons corporations carry it out is to circumvent environmental regulations and working conditions. This isn't so much a problem in the tech sector but plays a big role in manufacturing, textiles, and others. In other words, there are many cases where corporations simply move to another part of the world just so that they can hire workers that they can fire at will, pay no benefits, etc.
What passes for "free trade" is coming at the expense of workers. Most leftists would not want to see all the benefits accrued by worker movements in the past to be destroyed.
US Imperialism
You are a sympathetic person. I am glad you are--we need more like you. However, what is happening isn't going to help anything even if what you are saying were true. The US economy is too small relative to the number of poor people. Even if 100% of US "jobs" were transplanted elsewhere, it probably isn't enough for 1/3 of Africa alone. If you really care about the lives of the less privledged in other countries, stop US imperialism! US imperialism has set back many countries by decades (particularly Latin America.) Get your country to stop meddling in other countries' affairs, overthrowing goverments, bribing--and hence solidifying--corrupt evil politicians/autocrats, and don't provide military "aid" to any of these countries. That will help the poor more than what "free trade" ever will.
Auto Industry and Japan (circa 80's)
The auto industry survived in the 80's because of protectionism. Basically, USA and Canada slapped on a massive tariff on imports (this happened because auto unions are stronger than anyone else, including the capitalists who own the car companies.) So Japanese companies came and built factories in USA and hence manufactured cars there. If it weren't for government intervention, the auto industry would have completely dissapeared. There is no way USA and Canada could have competed against Japan at that time. So this isn't a good example for you case. Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing depends on your ideology. Capitalists claim the intervention was bad because it jacked up car prices (cars would be cheaper if it weren't for that); socialists and most leftists would say it was good because it kept the auto industry.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
What's the big deal?
CNET India
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Yes, of course they do. Just not the people that have the know-how for the bomb and a large percentage of the population.
Several decades ago Karl Polanyi, IMNSHO the world's astute economic historian and philosopher, discussed pretty clearly how we were building up to a rehash of the world economic crisis of the 1930s.
To put simply, the world is split into the developed industrial and post-industrial nations, and the developing nations. The developed nations (USA, UK, Germany) are typically rich in knowledge assets, whereas the developing nations (India, Mexico, and to an extent, China) are rich in natural resources.We in the US and Western Europe have the creativity and the skills, but tend to be in short supply of labor resources and materials. The reciprocal is true in the developing nations. This permits us to exert bargaining power over these nations, resulting in cheap materials and cheap labor.
Through Western education, developing nations are beginning to develop the creativity and the talent, with which to complement their ownership of the resources. However, we in the post-industrial West (and Japan and Taiwan) are not as able to gain the resources.
This is where things get scary. India has been a good place to pump out cheap code - even if the code isn't innovative or even original. The Chinese are good at assembling parts, despite not being talented at designing them. That's changing. With this growing independence in creativity and talent, combined ownership of the factors of production, developing nations are shifting the balance of power in their favor, and most likely will be able to exert greater economic (and thus political) power over the current post-industrial nations.
In my opinion, American and Japanese ingenuity will continue to save our two economies; however we'll lose much of the bargaining power we already have once it becomes desirable for an Indian firm to outsource some of its processes to cheap American labor. We can definitely expect the price of materials to increase for Western businesses as a result of the balance of power.
In case anyone's interested...
The Great Transformation - The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, by Karl Polanyi ISBN: 0-8070-5643-X
Hay! u think guyz frm US cant rite grate dox? y u have such pour view of are skillz?!1! u think gramer an spelling isnt US peroperty? u suck, we ownz ur docx!!!1!
Consider Lyndon LaRouche or somebody that plans to do something about the situation.
http://larouchein2004.net/
IIT - the Indian Institutes of Technology. Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Sun, Oracle, Sony, Toshiba, GM, Honda, Phillips, IBM run on 'products' from this 'company'.
Who knows!
Silicon Valley and the tech revolution wasn't predictable, even major businesses like IBM couldn't foresee what people would ever do with a computer in their homes, a business sure, but a HOME computer?! What would anyone want one of those for? The Internet came out of left field and was considered something nerds and geeks lived on, and was till HTTP caught on and suddenly it took off through the roof. Now programming and hardware are reaching the commodity level and were all running scared. So now were back to having to think up the next area and level of creation. Well here are a few areas, if you're really worried: Bio tech, Nano tech, Materials science, Advanced construction tech, Aerospace, Hydrogen technology, Advanced power systems, Materials recycling, Transport tech, etc.... Getting the idea? I heard these same whines when the Japanese snagged the domestic electronics industry out from under a bunch of slow moving dinosaurs, the same whine when Japan, Germany and Korea started nailing the Auto industry out from under us (they made better built and more reliable vehicles. How unfair of them!). The same whine when the steel industry got nailed, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Life is competition, from the moment you're born, to the moment you die. Competition for food, for mates, for space, for wealth, for everything. Either you can compete for the pie that's already on the table or you can make more pie. Every new tech that's developed, every new industry created, every new job title thought up, is making a bigger pie. Hewlett and Packard; Jobs and Woz; Gates, Allen, and crew; Barden, Shockley and Brattain; Bell; Marconi; Hollorith; Cray; Watson and Crick; etc, etc, etc all made the pie bigger. Try www.invent.org and look through their Hall of Fame. I know this though. The most famous of American inventors, Thomas Edison said that invention was about inspiration and perspiration, whining was never mentioned. He went on to found the Electrical industry, the Phonographic industry, the Motion Picture business. What business are you starting? The Wildman
Well I guess if Pakastan and India desided to fight, all the programers would have to go to war. Then the jobs might come back. So let the bombs drop.
"Are we going to blame the President for this one as well?"
Heck no, that would smack of accountability. I know! Let's blame Canada!
When you have a case of what is best for the whole and what is best for the individual in conflict, then the choices that get made are not the best for the whole, because it is the individuals that making those choices. People (and businesses) will always buy the cheapest, even if it means eventually driving the economy into the ground, and even if they realize this to be true. Way too few individuals will make their immediate buying choices based on that because most would rather have the cost reductions for themselves, and let "the other guy" take the cost hit for improving the economy. In the end, so many people will be out of work that prices (food, rent, everything) will fall. Over time (and it will be many years of time), America's cost and standard of living will fall to where it meets that of India (which will have been rising). At that point we'll also have about the same level of unemployment. And all that because those who do have some money to spend, want to have what is cheapest today, even though they will also be losers in a few years because of everyone making this same decision.
The fix for the problem, though, is not to make general restrictive rules or add new taxes. Instead, the fix is to level the playing field with regard to world trade. Outsourcing is simply the importation of the fruits of labor, which adds to the trade deficit. Any changes made by the government should be focused at making world trade work equally for everyone.
My solution for the problem is to disallow the use of national currencies for world trade. Create a special international trade currency which everyone wanting to buy something from a foreign country must purchase domestically first, in order to make that foreign purchase. The supply of this currency will be fixed as a deficit ceiling. Once the international currency supply is exhausted in a given country, that country has reached its deficit level, and no more will be available until some trade in the opposite direction reduces that deficit and brings some of that currency back in. As the supply drops in a given country, its market price in that country also goes up, which has a gradual slowing effect, so there really won't be a hard boundary (unless some country simply isn't exporting at all). The trade deficit will then find a level the market is willing to do, and stay around there.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
We have to stick together. Boycott any company, and tell exactly why, when they move their support overseas. Tell them that you expect to be speaking with engineers, domestically, for very sound business reasons:
1. You want to deal with people who have a depth of knowledge that fly-by-night cert centers can't provide
2. You want to deal with companies that are committed to their employees, and by comitted, that doesn't mean outsourced.
3. You are determined to make it fiscally damaging to any company that engages in this practice.
Remember "Buy American"? Too bad the idea was co-opted by American big business that wanted you to drive a car mostly made overseas with an American name brand on it, but the core is the same - keep your software and hardware dollars, here at home.
For godsake's, its not like you are actually helping the impoverished in India, anyway. I don't want to begrudge them work, but if they were getting paid competitive wages, I wouldn't have a problem, but big business love it there because they can run tech sweatshops for $5-$20 a day, instead of paying people a living wage.
$5 a day isn't a lot of money anywhere . Show companies, like C-Net over here, that you will not underwrite their undermining of western workers while exploiting Asian labor markets.
or maybe even become an Arithmetician. You've obviously mastered the fact that 1 + 1 = 2.
you point out.
I am in the process of doing that right now. Will take a few years to really sort out the next 10 or so, but the writing is on the wall. Having done exactly that 3 times now, its no big deal to do again.
I can't help but wonder about the vitality of our nation overall. Seems to me there is an awful lot of established interests buying legislation, writing contracts, and building technology designed to keep folks from doing exactly that.
The Internet will lead to a world government sooner than we all realize. Those that possess the power and ownership of existing technologies don't care about innovation or making things better for everyone or even progress. They care about their empires and the power that goes with them.
We (and I mean the typical geek) helped build this stuff and that scares the hell out of those holding the reins right now. A few geeks with passion and a permissive environment can topple the powers of today.
Why do you think the intellectual landscape has become so oppressive lately? It's not about what is right and wrong, it's about power and who has it right now. More importantly its about who is going to keep that power moving into the future.
Those that run the world today like it just the way it is and they have a clear advantage. The influence their economic power and knowledge of current technology implications is far greater than that of the general public.
We are under represented today and are suffering because of it. There is a land grab going on right now simply because most people have no idea it is there for the taking and that sucks.
I agree with you in that there are plenty of technical people with their heads in the sand, unwilling to make changes today. But they are simply not the real source of the problems we are beginning to see.
Lessig has it right. Technology is the most powerful tool for control we have ever experienced. The only real checks we have are education and freedom. Both of these are under direct attack right now today.
Legislation, like the DMCA, takes care of the freedom issue. You can't just get rid of all the smart people, but you can criminalize them. It's really a clever law in that regard. Keeping new ideas underground until they are useful to those in charge helps maintain control while at the same time continuing to benefit from their labours.
Education is being addressed through DRM. If you cannot get to the information, or if you cannot communicate what you know, it's pretty hard to raise awareness on a scale large enough to be a threat.
Maybe I am just a bit too extreme tonight, but every time I think about this it continues to make sense. We are seeing the beginnings of real political and social change that scares the hell out of me. --It should scare you too, because what we are seeing now is coming to a nation near you very soon.
I am an American, though I am not exactly proud of it at this moment in time. The values I was raised on have all seriously eroded in a bad way. Our current administration is doing more to eliminate freedom than any before it --all under the guise of war and national security.
They know most people are uninformed right now and are taking advantage. Having tasted some early initial success within our borders, they are seeking to make sure the rest of the planet is ready to play ball. How?
Treaties. We use our economic power to buy legislation just as our major industries did here in the States.
This sort of thing works just like the technology does. All you need is a controlling majority and some legislation to seal the deal. Here in America the ground work has already been nicely done. It will take years and and a few consecutive administrations, who actually are interested in properly representing the people, to undo. So a lot of the damage has already been done here. By the time, our political system can actually get around to fixing things, most of the othe
Blogging because I can...
"Of course, the cost of outsourcing to a small town in Iowa or Nebraska would be a lot cheaper as well, but they're not thinking about that."
I think you'll find the answer to this question far more interesting than your other explanation for outsourcing. It's not like the employees didn't explain it.
Soon you'll have some sort of "IPod" or something....
"Or reply with your plan to improve the situation for yourself and the people around you that you care about."
Invade Canada.
While I've met any number of Indians in the US and India with a fine command of the English language, I'm not sure how well a two month attempt to create a writing mill from scratch will play, even run from San Jose, much less India. If the quality of written matter goes down (for a number of reasons, of which ESL writers are only one), customers aren't going to browse the site, and advertisers are going to bail.
Luke, help me take this mask off
The biggest reason that Indians are such good programmers (and engineers) is because, at the current time, only the best and brightest in India are being educated and trained to do this work. On average, America and India have the same proportion of people who are smart at some given level (assuming an equivalent educational level). But in India, the educational system, and the economy, are just not up to par with America in terms of cranking out more programmers. That doesn't mean India's premiere school, IIT, is bad. In fact is it an excellent school, despite the limitations of resources they still have to work with. But IIT is pretty much all there is in India (several campuses around the country). In proportion to population, America cranks out far more programmers than India does (at least for now). That means it has dug deeper down the barrel in its population. There are many times more programmers from America as from India.
Right now, there are lots of people in America who can be considered "la creme de la creme". But they just happened to be in the wrong place (like, working for a mismanaged company that failed) when things went downhill. There are plenty of these highly experienced, well educated, people around looking for work. But they are also drowned out by even more people who just can't come anywhere close. The "noise level" is basically drowning them out.
But in India, it's mostly just "la creme de la creme" that's available. The "bottom of the barrel" isn't even trying because they don't have the educational system scaled up the way America has, so they don't even have a hint of the basic skills needed. If you take 1000 random resumes of people in India looking for work, and 1000 random resumes of people in America looking for work, on average you're going to find that a much higher proportion of Indians are better qualified for that work. And that's only because such a higher proportion of the population in America is (still) trying to get these jobs, and thus you have lots of lesser qualified people in the pool (in America, but not in India). Give an employer a choice of which stack of resumes to take to fill a job, and quite many will choose the Indian stack just because of the better signal to noise ratio (even if the salaries would be exactly the same).
Ultimately, what America needs to do is cut back on cranking out more programmers (and engineers, and other high tech people), so that "la creme de la creme" can take the work and get well rewarded for it, regardless of which country they come from.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"Maybe you should consider becoming a chef... it's a little hard to outsource the production of gourmet food." ...,for homeless people. Either that or become servents to the remaining class of people who have the money. As long as civilized society is built upon the concept of interdependencies. The fact that your job can't be outsourced doesn't mean you will not be affected by the losses of those who have.
Can the plumber, or electrician command liviable rates from a population that can no longer afford a home? The only job that's insulated from economic chaos is the farmer who has the land to back him/her up. Were's the backup for the plumber, electrician, or chef?
you are such a jerk!!! see your phase in mirror dud ala dude, get it right atleast now u guyz frm US :-)
Sorry, but you are wrong; it has already started. High tech companies are already popping up all over India (but generally concentrated around where the IIT campuses are). In some cases these startups are even stealing American intellectual property (though the Indian government is trying to crack down on that to avoid scaring away future businesses from employing in India).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
" I mean, we're all going to be buying software direct from Indian companies soon"
Like hell ! You may be but some of us believe in supporting our own people first.
There are millions and millions of Americans out of work and in need.
America first.
I you can't buy American, do without.
I do. I only deal with American made products, in what I buy and in what I sell..
"Capitalism is an inherently dynamic force. Any attempt to control this dynamism results in catastrophes like the Great Depression (largely caused by the errant adoption of anti-free trade laws during a normal recession)."
Well the poster below you has already put a big hole in your argument, using the historical record (those who forget history...). The one I'm pointing out is that dynamic systems need to have controls in order to work efficiently. To borrow an EE example: A dynamic system can be overdampened, underdampened, or just right. Too much and it dies out. Too little and it turns into an oscillator. Just right and it performs correctly. This applies as much to economics as any other "system".
BTW To "/." When I reply the posters score decreases by one. When I exit out it returns to previous. Bug?
My US based company, in the Fortune 1000, went through the following cuts
2000 - cut US headcount
2001 - cut US headcount
2002 - cut US headcount / hired India software developers to 'help out with maintenace'
2003 - cut US headcount down to 1 USA developer per product, and 1 USA QA person per 2 products / Tripled India headcount - India somehow manages to go from 'helping out' to 'leading develoment'
This took the company from 5,000 USA based developers, qa, doc, sales, etc down to less than 1,500 of which most of them are in Sales, accounting, HR, and executive management.
This left the entire USA based development, QA and doc with less than 20 percent of the original headcount.
Our development schedules accross the board slipped 6 months to 2 years. This includes a dramatic reduction in functionality enhancements.
Guess what, that means that many critical high sales dollar generating products are solely dependant on 1 USA developer.
If we lose 15 key people in the US, our company will have 33 percent of its total sales at risk.
All the while the executives, who are sad that their stock options have been under water for 4 years, have been saying:
The IT spending environment is bad - it's not our fault
India development is comming on board.
Many of us USA based developers are looking to exit this company since the company does not even want the software products it develops to suceed.
This is from my experinces in:
1. Listening to management parrot some powerpoint cheerleading 'our company is great. We care about our employees.' complete BS
and most importantly
2. Seeing how the actual actions of the management do not agree with the words, beliefs, and corporate agenda presented by upper management.
I look forward to 2005 when stock options will have to be carried on the balance sheet as a future expense.
In about 6 years I've been in software engineering I've yet to see ONE manager that was worth his/her salary. I specifically exclude program managers, though, because many of them WERE good. But the managers that actually manage people - they've either been useless or dangerous to the project.
Products are made by two-three really knowledgeable folks selflessly devoting their lives to the project they care about, not by a bunch of whip cracking managers who don't know jack shit and don't even care to know. In most projects high level managers are like monkeys with hand grenades. They're very confident and stupid and they don't know ANYTHING about the stuff they're trying to "manage".
No difference be I from Troll others even if be I from India. Watch now.
Bad be Slashdot!
Much thanking and love.
Pakistan, like genital herpes.
The US needs to structurally lower the cost of doing business to compete with worldwide wage levels.
Raising taxes only gives companies the incentive to not hire anybody.
80 percent of the workers in the US work for companies with less than 100 employees. In other words, most people won't get outsourced.
My recommendation is to cut at all levels, especially state and local, the total budget and headcount of government.
The budgets and headcount of state and local governments grew something like double or triple inflation for the entire 1990s.
This means that there are double or tripple the number of government workers per 1000 people in the population.
We don't need that much because that is all overhead which prevents the USA from competing.
Everything you say is more or less correct except that you neglect another major component....
As employment opportunities dwindle and/or salaries decrease in the US - due to international competition - the cost of living in the US will also decrease. This is standard market economics. Prices are set at what the market can bear.
Of course this doesn't happen instantaneously - and there will be a world of hurt during the transition. But, what makes *your* life more valuable or more deserving of maintaining a high standard of living than somebody in another country? Why is it desirable to maintain the current high wages in the US?
Think about it this way as well - outsourcing is actually good for the US' "global" security. As the standard of living in the third world increases, there will be less discontent and resentment towards the US. This will result in an ease of tension, and a decrease in the likelihood of terrorist attacks. People are less willing to support violence if they feel they have something to lose.
I came to USA to pursue masters degree and it is a great prestige for my famiy if i complete this program
Everyone was saying , life in Us is the best.This further fuelled my desires
Im gonna finish MS now and probably return back to India becuz of obvious reasons
Whats worse is my undergrad friends are so F**** skilled in programming now that i feel its utter waste to do MS
At the end of day i ahve skills that r not welcomed so much in industry
My indian buddies work for Intel sun Thoughtworks IBM and i bet im no inferior to them in skill when i came here.
Bad decision.Life in USA is materialistically awesome.
Family wise , i dont wanna explain.
I really mean it , u guys should see some laid back countries and relatiosnships of people there.
Hello , this is my way.
Which way is yours ?
btw there is no right way
Fuck you, say it - f u c k y o u
You don't have a job? Acquire some goals. It won't cost you a cent. Get off of your fucking ass.
Let me guess: late teens / early twenties. Might still live with your parents, but if you don't they do send you money / presents. Close?
I believe that an hour worked is an hour worked.
Its that easy. If a person in the US or India works an hour its worth an HOUR. How does this work?
I get paid for an hour. You get paid for an hour. I work an hour on the server, you work an hour on my ditch.
Simple and easy:
See:
http://www.ithacahours.org/allabouthours.html
Makes more sense.
That was the most pathetic diatribe I've read in a long time. Get over yourself.
When you work for a corporation, you do so at your own peril.
Corporations are unsympathetic toward people, it's their nature, their advantage.
You are a corporate-cultured stooge. Like the company you worked for, you didn't care about anyone but yourself.
I've been to Silly-Con Valley.Corporate-cultured stooges are heartless and yet not cruel, they are best described as soulless. The "professionals" there are neither friendly nor rude; they are simply apathetic toward everyone and each other.
You corporate-culture freaks deserve each other, you deserve what you do to each other.
Corporate America owes you nothing because YOU ARE Corporate America.
It didn't create you in your current form, you created it in your own image.
If the tables were turned, I'm sure you would have gladly crapped on others as they crapped on you.
You can't help it you are a corporate-culture freak.
Don't flatter yourself into believing that the "mom and pop" grocery store didn't hire you because you are over qualified; you are not qualified to interface with their valued customers, you lack the human trait known charm. Your corporate-cultured personality makes you better suited for factory/production line work. The robot next to you will be apathetic toward you, you will feel right at home.
PS:
Please don't migrate into my neighborhood, you are less wanted here than in Corporate America. You have nothing to contribute to my community. Highschool kids flip hamburgers here and most of them don't even have a MSCE.
You came here to blow up innocent people you low life sack of shit. Go home, you bring a foul odor about you, curry slurping shitbag.
Maybe we will get lucky and you will try to bring IT to Kashmir or suck Beta particles when Pakistan has had enough of your low life asses.
shitbag.
What's this 'owing' of which you both speak? To me, it's just common sense, self interest, and a little bit of foresight. I don't give to society becuase I feel like I owe society. I do so because doing so fulfils a desire in me. I do so because a more egalitarian, cooperative society is a safer, more open, more vibrant, creative, and fun society, and I want to live in a society like that, not the dog eat dog world of Capitalism as it is today. I personally benefit from a cooperative society. In the long run, we all do. The tragedy of the commons is a fallacy, in fact, privately owned resources are more frequently mismanaged. We all have a certain amount of power. When we use it to compete against each other, our overall amount of power is diminished. When we cooperate, it is multiplied. Therefore, cooperation makes sense. This is why, internally, modern mega-corporations are not organized along competative lines, but cooperatively. It makes them more competative. The greatest fear of the people who own mega-corporations is that we little guys will realize that we can multiply our power by cooperating, so this is why they try to badmouth the concept so much.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"I am not sure whether or not I would say we have too many restrictions of this nature or whatever. But the fact remains that it is literally impossible for US workers to compete with the workers of other countries. And it is impossible because our government makes it illegal to compete on even ground."
That's one way to look at it. The other is that the American people, and by extension the government, are correct in pursuing a healthy environment, safe working conditions, equitable treatment of workers, and that it's other countries "inequalities" that make it impossible to compete. But then that position is even more flammable than yours. Maybe what we need is for everyone (no exceptions) to stop finger-pointing and accept their roles in this mess.
The parent post is a straight cut'n'paste from:
How Americans Can Buy American - 2nd Edition
You are correct to refer to manufacturing and textiles. And this is why the rest of the country and the non-IT types reading this (there are a few) have absolutely no sympathy for the "plight" of the American IT worker. Every time a new technical process came around, did the IT worker refuse to implement? No, he stepped in, took his fat cheque and hundreds were made unemployed. And thats been going in for years. Now its your turn to find out what capitalism is all about. Get some muscles and learn a trade ya geeks.
"Give us a job! Give us a job!"
MAKE YOUR OWN FUCKING JOB!
If IT is so damn useful, and you know how to take advantage of it, then go into business. Not into "computer consulting" or writing software for sale.
Pick a business, any business where IT isn't being put to good use. Go into that competition with the people who aren't putting IT to good use.
Don't depend on IT-incompetents to recognize the value of IT and give you jobs. CRUSH them for their failure to recognize it. TAKE their jobs.
If you can't do that, then you might as well sit out on the street and hold out your hat. Begging is begging.
"Nobody really wants to hear this, and I'm sure I'll get flamed, but my company has done business with several Indian software companies and the reason we choose to work with them was NOT because of cheaper labor and costs. The bottom line is that on average, the Indians are BETTER PROGRAMMERS than most Americans. You can get better-quality work and better service."
So basically you hired a bunch of HB-1's, right? Right? Oh wait, it really is about cheaper labour and costs. I hope you enjoy the monster you helped create.
Well, for all the hoopla over this, I think it should be kept in mind that Builder.com is doing this on trial basis. Just like any other business process you want to try out things before you shifts.
So you better not get your hopes up !!! (for both sides, to and against this)
"Unless, of course, if you have bought every penis enlargement pill that was offered through your emails, you may be able to reach all the way to India."
Or they reach back...ewww.
Methinks those 15 should get together and start a startup.
It would be especially interesting if the NDA/noncompete with the Indian Outsourcing company is weak - perhaps they could by the rights to the products from the Indian co.
Please give parent -1 please (give me one too)
But good for the old warhorse. Even if he has spent his career polishing corporate boots, it's encouraging to see him finally thinking of the common, rather than the elite, good. Would that he had done so sooner: it is, after all, partly through the efforts of professional apple-polishers like Dobbs that US capitalism has arrived at this rapacious low point, willing finally to sell out even its middle class for a few extra bucks for the top.
Who's the next convert? Ol' Tom "My Other God is a Lexus" Friedman?
I.T. is not the only game in town.
If no regulation is put in place and companies continue to outsource well-paid (or even normal-paid) jobs, the U.S. will end up without a middle class. A 10% of the population (or less) would be very wealthy while the rest would be poor.
If you think such a country is not viable, just take a look at Brazil, where the middle class is nonexistent. The country, though, is still functioning, but it's not a place where I'd like to live as the average citizen.
So if you think that Carly Fiorina has the best interest of the average citizen in mind, when she says that the people in U.S. don't have a "God-given right to a job", you're a fool. She and the rest of her friends that rotate on the various Boards of Directors will be better off. She'll be able to afford one more yacht, that's all.
Sigged!
Non-native english speakers mistakes are usually grammatical in nature. The spelling is usually correct.
His post history kind of hints that he's Indian, but my guess is that he's a US troll. I've never seen indians (or any non-US-person in fact) spell like that.
Don't post AC out of fear, if that's it. They aren't gunning us down in the streets just for talking about it yet, so post intelligently about any damn '-ism' you want and karma be damned.
This isn't the dinner table, we can talk about politics, religion, and even sex here. This is free speech, American style. People died and went to jail for our right to spout off about any damned thing we want. You like the KKK? God bless you, you get out in the streets of America and you march and you shout your hate. There will be more people out there denouncing you than supporting you. If you show your face in any city I'm in I'll be out there shouting about love and tolerance, but free speach means free for everyone.
And Capitalism means free markets for everyone, if it means anything. Regardless of where they live. Either you believe in it or you don't. Hmmm, Socialism's starting to sound better and better, isn't it, my self interested friends?
But that's a common misconception. Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Democracy. Anarchy! Are these things political systems, or economic systems, or both, or what? People bandy words about without really knowing what they mean. They are just buzzwords to most people, triggering emotion and little logical thought.
After all, many Democratic Socialist countries operate under the Free Market system of Capitalism. Oh, all the confusing muddle of possible choices! Won't someone please give me my nice Black and White back? I'm an American and I want my Comforting Certainties NOW, dammit!
See, Socialism is very much the opposite of Privitisation, the thing that neo-liberals and conservatives alike support. Clinton as much as Bush, Blair as much as Thatcher. There's your real war. The Ultra Rich (no, not you. Guess what? 25% of Americans polled believe they are in the top 10% of wealth in this country. Mathemetically impossible, people. You're poor like the rest of us, compared to them) want to own everything. We little guys just want what's ours. What we work for. We see the wealth. We see the results of our work, but they are not in our hands. That's your real war, front one.
I'll say it. Class Warfare. Boo! Aaaaaahhhh! Simian Brain Powers, Activate! Form of: something with no capacity for rational thought. See how that works? We can't even talk about it. I'll say it again. Class Warfare, by the rich, against the rest of us.
The other front is the culture war. The main offensive on this one is being fought over gender. And of course, the most interesting recent skirmishing has been over homosexuality. We are in for some intersting action in the courts soon.
But it turns out, in a nationwide poll, 75% of Americans under 30 support gay marriage. Done deal, baby. You can fight your holding battles and your covering retreats, but the real fight is already over. But that's a whole other rant.
God Bless Free Speach, God Bless Slashdot, and God Bless George W. Bush, the Greatest unelected President This Country Has Ever Had. That is all. Goodnight.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Guess what, what is happening is a natural leveling out of this inequity. My bet is the US (and europe but likely to a lesser extent) will be stuck with this for a while.
Hopefully, India and China will have open enough trade that the US can export to them enough to level things out. Once they are richer, like south Korea or Japan are today, the outsourcing trend will diminish.
It's already happening, gaz prices are going up thanks to increase chinese demand. It's not going to be easy for the western world for the next 20 years.
I'm tired of hearing about the outsourcing boogeyman on slashdot. Of the 3 million lost jobs only 300k were due to outsourcing in the last five years. Pick a better scapegoat.
I published professionally for a webzine based in Texas while I lived in the midwest. I sure hope somebody wasn't bellyaching about how I was taking away texas jobs.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Do not bother denying it: been there, done that.
Asians gang up on homework, tests, etc. I saw one Diff egtns class where half the class was cheating; and the cheaters were almost ALL asians. Only a couple of white students were cheating. BTW, it is a cultural thing, NOT a racial thing. Many of the cheaters actually were pretty good at math.
But their group approach explains why they have a better success rate in math/sci/eng.
I do not really buy into the "Asians are smarter" theory. I have yet to met a REALLY smart/educated Asian (educated in the "well-rounded" sense). And I have never met an Asian smarter/more educated than myself (of course, I have tested in the top 1% on IQ on a standardized test). Yet, I have met plenty of white people smarter than myself. That said, there are plenty of smart Asians, smart in the sense that they have IQs well over 100, and they are fairly well educated.
Another example of outsourcing issues:
My mom was wanting insurance info from her insurance agent in Arizona... she heard a few clicks,then it got weird and static-y, then someone with an indian accent picked up the phone, and you could hear lots of other people with indian accents on the phone.. andh ewas trying to give her help... but she could barely understand him...she just hung up, very pissed off that her insurance company had gotten so cheap that they outsourced their phone help to india... for a company that's just across the state, She doesnt like the idea of someone in some foriegn country knowing her personal info...
So outsourcing isnt good for the employee, and the consumer doesnt like it.
These companies need to rethink their decisions...
It's not as bad when they outsource more internal, less consumer interactive work.. but when it's something that directly affects the consumer..and they dont like it... it's not pretty.
My complaint here is, how good will editing be from someone who isnt a native speaker of english?
So? Programming and tech support are grunt work. Let the Indians do it for $1 an hour for all I care. The real profit is in management and sales. Go back to school and get your MBA and you'll be managing those Indian laborers like it was South Carolina in 1840. Can you say legalized corporate slavery?! It's beautiful!!! GO AMERICA!
We have to put with smug writers in the print that tell us tha outsourcing is a good thing. They almost have a disdain for the American technology worker in any field with their attitude of "Capitalism at any cost". It's a good thing when you think your job is untouchable by it.
Can't wait to start seeing the reaction to having their wages start to be pushed into the mud. I expect crap like "We are the soul of America, you shouldn't outsource us!" Waaa, cry me a river. When Rasheed from India can write in an almost identical flavor as George Will and the other commentators of American news and print. The whining will begin by that same bunch that didn't see what the problem was.
Nevermind the fact that the fortune 1000 are betting the farm on such an unstable country. When Pakistan and India take it to the next level, everything in the US will grind to a halt.
Uhm - no. Mr. Fancy Pants Editor & bosses are the ones that decides on what gets outsourced...
Get real!
It's your job in the US/Canada/Europe that is going "poof!"
I work for a company that out-sources projects to India. There are significant problems in doing it but people will eventually figure out how to manage them. Finally, by my experience, the majority of engineers in India are what are called "freshers," i.e. folks just out of school. They aren't at the capability level of the more experienced workers in the average US company....YET! Give em five years and a couple of major projects under their belts and they'll be every bit as good as the average US staff. Then there are all those Indian expatriates that have been here for 5-8 years that are heading back to India that were trained here. Those are the guys that are becoming the technical leads and managers. They already know what they're doing. India is going to be coming on line as an economic superpower in the tech industry right around the corner. China will be right there too.
What company is this?
What you fail to contemplate is the benefits--in particular, who is benefitting from this? Indian workers, for instance, do not benefit in the long term. What is to stop the jobs from being outsourced to another lower-cost country?
Of all your responses, this one I think is the most failed. What you are overlooking is the fact that MANY jobs are being created. In the process a "tax base" can be built and a massive infrastructure can be constructed as well. Not an infrastructure of steel mills and coal plants (ukraine, for example, is rich on coal and has dozens of steel plants that now sit idle while people scrape to get by).
This new infrastructure is an asset that ultimately benefits everyone. Even those who don't work in the call centers - they have families, who in turn are better off. The people begging in the street have a more affluent community from which to beg. Communities get together and build communal resources.
This DOES happen. Migrant mexican laborers living in NYC pool what they can from their paychecks each week and then use the money to buy an ambulance for their town - a wide spot of dust in the road 1000 miles inside Mexico. Another group builds a baseball stadium - a handfull of blue collar laborers bring MONEY AND JOBS into their community, and build a symbol of hope in the process. Who's to say this very same process isn't going on right now in India?
If the outsourced workers don't benefit overall in the long-term, who does? Well, it is pretty simple. It is the capitalists. When I say capitalists I am talking about shareholders of corporations.
Ummm... but anyone can be a "shareholder." I know many companies where employees are also shareholders (AOL, for one, used to give so many shares to its employees each year. So did K-Mart). How many Microsofties became Millionaires off the shares they were offered while employees of the corporation?
You can't expect everything to change in an instant. Evolution takes time.
Another serious problem with "free trade" is that one of the major reasons corporations carry it out is to circumvent environmental regulations and working conditions.
Ayup. But then what happens? As the political structure of the community becomes more affluent, their expectations also rise. Someone who used to "get away" with dumping raw sewage into the community drain now has to face the prospect of moving (an expensive proposition no matter what some may argue) or spending more money on infrastructure to clean things up. Someone who used to "get away" with stacking containers of half used paint cans in the back yard of his small auto paint shop may no longer be allowed to do so - thanks to environmental regulations enacted by the more affluent society (that has given him business and a safe community to allow him to succeed), now he has to buy a low pressure paint gun and clean up the eyesore his neighbors have been enduring for years.
Again, it's evolution.
What passes for "free trade" is coming at the expense of workers. Most leftists would not want to see all the benefits accrued by worker movements in the past to be destroyed.
Ayup. and this country has failed miserably in such a context. In the last twenty years we've seen countless unions "busted," Millions displaced from their jobs... and giant corporations like Wal-Mart rise to near global domination.
What's wrong with this picture? If people truly cared would they still shop at Wal-Mart? I'm definitely not rich and I'll be damned if I'm going to shop there. I buy hardware goods from the community hardware store (that closed for a time when the original owner decided he had enough), I buy most groceries from the local grocery store where it's not uncommon to find the old lady in front of me at the checkout expecting (and, most importantly, getting) a ride home from one of the stock boys who will, no doubt
A lot of people have followed George Soros on his very vocal position against outsourcing. He's the funder behind moveon.org and has claimed he'd be willing to part with his billions of dollars of wealth in order to get rid of Bush, the "outsourcing nightmare president." (Soros has launched a new ad campaign through MoveOn.org that specifically blames Bush for outsourcing job loss and lack of overtime pay which unfortunately ignores the same campaign finance reform laws. Just like Martha Stewart, Soros apparently feels that laws are for little folk, not rich folk like him).
Interestingly, if one looks at the companies Soros's investment company, Soros Fund Management, holds, (specifically check the Form 13F-HR), you'll discover outsourcing company after another. I spent an hour looking at just the companies starting with "A" and "B" and found over 90% were aggressively outsourcing. Several had financial reports literally bragging about how they've saved investors money through this process.
I had wondered where Soros was at. A few years ago, a Soros disciple approached a company I worked for and strongly recommended the company dispose of its information technology and call center operations to India as a precondition of the fund looking at the company. The disciple insisted outsourcing had worked well and Mr. Soros used it as part of his investing strategy to differentiate investments.
Imagine my surprise when I've heard Soros himself (as well as his moveon.org group) blaming the current president for the flight of jobs. How is Bush supposed to stop Soros from demanding his holdings "optimize"? Is it Bush's fault that he hasn't stopped Soros before he moves-jobs-on to India again? For those of you who've fallen sucker to the moveon.org ploy, do your own research and you'll confirm what a few of us who have crossed Soros's path have learned first hand. You're unfortunately playing in the guilt trip of a very rich man who must not like how he makes his money. For anyone in IT supporting moveon.org, it'd be like a Linux advocate joining a SCO fan club.
Take a look at the list. Search google for the company name. It's shocking. My only theory is that Soros has the typical upper class guilt trip going where he wants to be thought of a better person than he is per his destruction of IT in the US.
For these Fortune 1000, it's not easy to tell Soros (who may be holding 5% or more of your company) to blow off and keep those jobs in the U.S.
In other news (which didn't make a dent in the U.S. press), Soros apparently has one-upped Martha Stewart. Just like Martha, he's liberal, a Bush hater, a rich fat cat, big business guy, believes he's immune to trading laws, and liberal. Warren Buffet, the U.S.'s second richest man, is also a big time Democrat and despises Bush. I think we can put away the myth that Republicans have a monopoly on "big business/special interest." Democrats seem to be leading the pack these days.
Then in the polls, we'll be complaining, "I'm an American, you insensitive clod!"
The funny thing is, the editor claims it's not as much about money as because he's 'getting a better interface with producers of the content.' What so "funny" about Indian quality being better than American? I find it stupid to think that all outsourcing is about money. If cheap products/services do not offer a certain quality then no one in US would consume them irrespective of it being "so cheap". Gotta get that right.
~Darl
It would be especially interesting if the NDA/noncompete with the Indian Outsourcing company is weak
This raises a really interesting idea. How about our congress critters pass a Technology Level Playing Field Act with provisions such as:
1. employers that outsource jobs to non-US locations automatically forfit CNDA provisions with US workforce. Rationale: how is the US IT worker competing with the Indian/Chinese/etc. worker? (I'd be interested to learn how effective CNDAs are in China, incidentally. There is no comparable playing field). The company has abandoned the US IT workforce, even with one outsourcing employee, so it cannot hold anticompetitive work contracts in effect which harm the US workforce and keep the US workers out of production.
2. apply index-based labor tariffs. Rationale: implement an employment cost index assessing the cost/employee for US regulatory factors such as health care requirements, social security, employer income tax portion, workmen's compensation, environmental compliance, OSHA compliance, ADA compliance, etc. Measure India, China, etc.'s status with respect to the index, and then factor a per-hour cost for the items they are not providing. Assess this tariff per hour of outsourced labor to the outsourcing company, and place the receipts of the tariff into job training tax credits and such.
This legislation would not only benefit the US workforce, but it would finally show compassion to workers in developing nations by demanding these American and European firms not treat them as low-wage slaves. Intelligent Phillipinos, Indians and Chinese don't appreciate U.S. firms paying off local officials to continue poor working conditions, and in the long term, will breed considerable anti-American resentment (just as the US middle class is also increasingly hostile to the process). This sort of legislation would effect positive developments on both sides of the outsourcing process.
The real profit is in management and sales.
Can you say: Trade Deficit?
I thought you could.
Remember Billy... cubicals are for closers.
When Pakistan and India take it to the next level...
Why isn't this point made more often? Political stability is why many claim to invest in US companies.
I worked for a mid-sized international telecom carrier in the late 90s/early 2K. Company had a $120 mil. round coming in that was sold (mostly to international investors) and first chunk (about $40 mil) was timed to arrive around mid-November 2000.
On Nov 4 2000, many Americans will recall former VP Al Gore contesting the election. We had a panic telephone call with the various international funds - all of which decided in the next 2-3 days to hold off until the US political instability was gone.
By they time Gore was told that our election system doesn't allow for "tossing out military votes, adding votes in Democratic counties, not adding votes in Republican counties" (the David Boies strategy, who now works for SCO with the same level of disregard for facts), the dot-com/telecom/IT market had changed and was already diving hard. The international funds said they would wait another half-year or more to see how the US market did.
This killed the company. You can't spend 12-18 months developing a major funding round and see it disappear without consequence - it takes too long to put these together and usually companies are in ramp-up phases to create the conditions necessary for such capital commitment. This is similar to the point-of-no-return factor of a jet racing down a runway. There's a point where if you're past it, you are going to get airborne, because there's not enough runway left for you to slow down and taxi. Fly or crash.
Most telecom and dot-com workers close enough to the capital process know whe the bubble burst occured. Yes, both had crazy valuations and such, but many good companies were killed in the Gore dispute. To blame Clinton or the Bush for the effects of Gore's political instability factor are foolish. You simply can't mirror a banana republic political ploy and expect international investors to play in this market. (And to be fair, Bush's own internationalization efforts with respect to Mexico have much the same effect. Seems like nobody believes in the US worker these days... all these 'helpful' government regulations have made us terribly overpriced and uncompetitive).
So what should we expect when the Fortune 1000 places its infrastructure in the hands of instable nations? Methinks much the same. I wouldn't be too confident in any outsourcer's stock - remember there's a tradeoff for any savings. Short term gain, long term wreck may be the consequence of this one.
*scoove*
Okay, then check this out:
:[blanked out] is the dispatch no of the box which you
will recive you do not have to replace the LCD your self you
just have to send the system to depot we will replace the system
LCD and and send it back to you . All you need to do is call
airborn an get an Box.
Vinny, DPS No
RTS#[blanked out] for the system to be picked up and returned to the repair facility. To have the system picked up, you will need to call 1-877-335-5782. This is Airborne Express and is a number that handles the repair depot returns for this system. Please give the Airborne Express dispatcher the following information.
An English teacher would have a panic attack looking at these paragraphs. This, by the way, is copied from a Dell Support email I got a few days ago (My Inspiron's LCD screen is acting up).
It's your job in the US/Canada/Europe that is going "poof!"
By the time these Indian freshers are doing senior level work, I will be at the next level up. It's the guys coming out of school that are in trouble - they don't have a skill/experience edge over the masses of programmers being turned out in India and China.
I love these big good versus evil rants which paint a picture where on one side you have the faceless corporate gods and on the other you have the poor oppressed little middle class wage slaves. I love these black and white scenarios that make everything so simple to understand.
From reading this rant you get the impression that the person who wrote it (the ghost of I/T past) is some sort of slave incapable of making a decision for itself or having any sort of personal responsibility at all. You would swear that everybody in I/T was forced at gun point to take high payed, high stress jobs and that their was no other alternative for them. You would sware that everyone in "Amerika" was marched down to the bank and forced to mortgage their house, borrow as much money as possible and rack up huge credit card depts. You would swear everybody was obliged by law to spend money like it was water and not think about the future at all.
Did anyone honestly expect the I/T boom to last ? Did everyone think it was just going to get better and better all the time? That salaries were just going to multiply by two every year? You can blame the bosses up until a certain point but remember you were a willing participant in the whole show. You could have gotten off the ride at any time, you took the money and you took the risks.
I understand the sentiment of the whole rant. I can feel sorry for the techie who's job got moved over sea but why should I feel any more sorrow for him/her than the worker from the "insert industry here" who's had the same thing happen to them. Any one who has ever read anything about the history of trade unionism in America knows that workers in other professions have had it far worse than anything the American I/T workers are experiencing right now when outsourcing happend to them. The difference between a lot (not all) of people with I/T jobs and say for example coal miners is/was that people working in the I/T sector could have put aside a lot of money but a lot of them choose not to where as people in traditional industrial jobs (manufacturing) where this sort of thing has happened before often did not have this luxury, often they were making just enough to get by. Now I am not saying that everyone in I/T who is stuck for a job now was a heedless spendaholic who thought the party would never end, a lot of them are, but that relative to others who have suffered a similar fate people in I/T have not had it so bad.
This experience is not just some distant memory, the author of the rant himself/herself admits that : "Do not blame us, Corporate America, for the cynical attitude we have toward you, for some of us remember 20 years ago, when we could not buy a job, and you threw us out on the street at a moments notice." This has happened before and it will happen again, this is not the last time you will hear rants like this nor has it been the first time I'm sure. Shrugging everything off onto some faceless entity called corporate America and relieving yourself of all personal responsibility isn't going to help you in the long run . Raising awareness on issues like who pay's corporate America's salaries or what companies contribute how much to who's campaign are worth far more in my opinion than mono perspective rants
like this.
_________________________________________________
First of all that is an opinion of ONE columnist about Bangalore and not an article about "what Indians think of themselves."
Secondly, coolie does not mean menial labourer. Who told you that?
From the article:However, while outsourcing to the US grew by under 7 per cent in 2003, outsourcing by the country grew 11.43 per cent.
That pretty much speaks for itself. It's an interesting way of spinning the numbers. Rather than saying "Outsourcing to other countries is oupacing incoming work" we get the lesser truth "More work is coming in than the US is outsourcing".
That's like looking at a painting through a two foot straw. It tries to give a rosy picture to a bad truth - that outsourcing is adding to a US trade deficit that is through the roof. By anybody's numbers it is severe, and its not good for our economy.
So yeah, its a clever lie.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I don't put sole responsibility of poverty in the world on U.S., but some responsibility it does deserve. It has been forcing lower (than the foreign country's growth would set) wages on countries for a long time. It has been holding up tariffs disastrous to many countries. A move blatantly against free trade, while at the same time forcing the developing nations to adopt free trade in markets convenient for U.S. Not to mention that it has also been supporting dictators whenever having a steady tyrannical rule in another country was cost effective.
Of course the reverse is also true. By growing it's economy, America has allowed for other countries' economies to grow as it uses them to create goods. Such things can be seen as exploitation, but one must remember that these countries had nothing going for them economically. Our 'exploitation' is actually creating real opportunities for those countries to pick them selves up from utter poverty.
Now onto outsourcing. Being one of the people that have lost their job to it I know how it feels. I am not totally ignorant to the plight of workers in the U.S.. And for such I do support protective tariffs as long as they are designed to ease the transition and not to prevent it.
The problem with anti-free trade speak is that it doesn't take into account that in the end it is good for America. Free trade forces U.S. population to take on more sophisticated jobs. The need for higher education grows on par with the export of low end jobs to outside. Although our internal job pool will be affected, it will not shrink. It simply moves in a direction the market demands. Go with the flow and you will be better off. The new jobs created usually are higher paying ones. Yes I understand that right now many are at loss with jobs seemingly disappearing. But most of that is because of our economy woes. Once the economy picks up, room for new jobs will open up. Just make sure you don't give too much to the rich in the next election.
Lastly I want to mention that besides jobs, us Americans have a choice to invest money. More and more it is something every American needs to start thinking of. Instead of being scared of shrinking markets in the U.S. start looking at the expanding ones overseas. Invest in those. With such a mind set you can be part of the people who own the growing countries. Sure I understand that "I have no money to invest" is something that immediately goes off in most people's minds. Well, are you sure? Once you do get a new job, are you sure you can't divert part of your income to investment. Most of the time I hear this "I'm so poor" speak from people I know make on par of at least $50k a year. Just think that most Americans live on far less then that. If the average family can do with $50k supporting four people, perhaps you can afford to make a better use of your money.
That article, like most generalisations, is pure garbage. Anyone with half a brain can wander to the Software Engineering Institute at CMU and see that a large number of companies rated at Capability Maturity Model (CMM) level 5 are is, surprise, India!
And many techies know that CMM5 is for developing new tech AND still making a profit.
Looking at hardware the subassembly outsourcing brought with it a need for local higher tech than assembli line slavery work. Outsouring continued and more than sub assemblies were outsourced, even the whole product so guess whgat happened then: sure, locals started doing minor designs too, and this is still growing.
The IIT is not a University of Podunk either.
Like it or not, the question of what westerners can do that Asians cannot (or will not soon), is as burning a question as it has ever been.
I forgot to add that all of the India headcount was added as employees to the company.
So there is no 'outsourcing' just replacing each US worker with 1.125 employees in India
This time, however, it's India - a nation brutally overpopulated where people regularly die needless deaths from ailments like burst appendices and dysentary.
You seem to be implying that India can only become a "modernized" nation at our expense, and that we owe them.
There are many ways to improve economic conditions. India is poor because their culture rejected modernism and progress for decades, not necessarily because they don't have enough trade.
They have the ability to grow their economy without "dumping" specific services or products on the rest of the world.
I am tired of the US being the dumping ground for cheap labor and services. We should say NO for once and set a precident.
Table-ized A.I.
Wow, you've convinced me, by posting an article by a supporter of Pat Buchanan...
Only a simpleton argue that. What happens to the price of domestic goods when you artifically raise the price of the competition? Unless you're living in a fantasy-land, the domestically produced goods will increase in price as a direct result of the tariff. In effect, whether or not you buy the imported good, you're paying the tariff; the only difference is whether it goes to the government or gets absorbed as extra profit.
[then two paragraphs later...]
Having trouble making up your mind, eh?
Regardless, a recovery was well underway at the time the tariff was enacted. The 1929 crash touched off little more than a moderate, though sharp (when the amount of time is taken into account) recession. Smoot-Hawley was enacted, and the steepest slide came, pushing the Depression to its greatest depths in 1931. The reason is simple: by increasing prices (the aim of all tariffs, stated or unstated), Smoot-Hawley decreased demand. In a time of prosperity, this decrease in demand generally does not have a significant effect, as there's still enough demand left to keep things going. But in a situation where demand is decreased somewhat already (as happens after a stock market crash), decreasing demand even more is the road to disaster.
This is strictly conjecture, but assuming that the recovery of early 1930 continued, by 1932, the economy would have recovered to prosperity. The steepest job losses, GDP decline, and so forth occured.
A perfect storm of factors (a balanced budget, over-leverage in the stock market, etc.) came together to lay the groundwork for the initial recession. The Smoot-Hawley tariff pushed the recession over the edge, doing damage that even tariff rollback could not fix immediately.
It ain't beautiful, because it represents the big picture: Extreme concentration of wealth amongst a few people, the rest of society become peasents. Outsourcing is just a small driver of this ever-improving efficiency road we're on.
We're headed towards robotic-nation, with or without outsourcing:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
From NY Times.
March 11, 2004 What Goes Abroad Usually Comes Back, With Benefits By HAL R. VARIAN HE
Jan. 31 issue of The Economist described the consequences of high-tech jobs moving overseas.
According to the story, "with the trans-Atlantic shift in R&D goes many high-value jobs, as well as a greater share of the industry's profits." This trend has led to an "increasing concern" in the industry, with some executives speaking out against the outsourcing trend.
Old news, you might say. The press is filled with articles about high-tech jobs being outsourced to India.
The twist here is that the article is about biotech research jobs being outsourced to the United States from Europe. But the language is eerily familiar: replace "biotech" with "infotech" and switch the roles of Europe and America and this story could pass for yet another Silicon Valley requiem.
Articles like this should remind us that trade is a two-way street.
The money paid to foreign producers, whether businesses or workers, typically comes back home to buy domestic goods and services, thereby generating domestic employment. That is true whether it is European companies paying American biotech researchers, or American companies paying Indian programmers.
Think about it. If Oracle sends $10,000 abroad to pay an Indian programmer, then that money either finds its way back to the United States or it doesn't. If it comes back, it can be used to buy American goods and services, employing American workers. If it doesn't come back then it's even better from the viewpoint of the country: we've sent them paper, while they've sent us valuable goods and services.
Yes, these days it's more likely bits than paper, and maybe they are sending us more services than goods. And perhaps the way the money comes back is via a purchase of Treasury bonds or other financial securities.
But the same principle applies. If the income from the Treasury bonds is used to buy something produced in the United States, it creates jobs. If the money is never spent in the United States, we've gotten something for nothing.
The political problem with trade is simply this: when the dollars flow offshore, it is easy to identify those who are hurt. But when the dollars flow back, it is much more difficult to discern the beneficiaries.
Look at farmers, for example. Stimulated by the decline in the dollar, American agricultural exports are forecast to grow to $59 billion this year, $2.8 billion more than last year, despite the dip reported yesterday. Farm income is up, too, and would be even higher if not for the drop in beef exports because of mad cow fears.
Despite this surge in nonbeef agricultural exports, you do not see farmers demonstrating in favor of free trade. American biotech workers are doing pretty well, too, as the opening example illustrates. But how many of those farmers or technicians attribute their good fortune to foreign trade?
Those who gain from trade either do not know it, or keep quiet about it, for obvious reasons. It's not prudent to brag about your good fortune while others are losing their jobs.
But isn't there something special about trade in services? Well, no. Services have always been traded internationally. In fact, they now account for about 30 percent of the value of all American exports. Last year, the United States had a $550 billion trade deficit for goods, but a $60 billion surplus on the service side.
Today, modern communications technology offers a whole new set of opportunities for trade in services.
Imagine a world where American workers could subcontract production to foreign workers on their own. Paul could send an e-mail message with his programming assignments to Avinash every morning and receive the completed work back in the afternoon. In exchange, Paul would buy a money order for one-tenth of his salary each month and send it to Avinash.
Paul could take on another job, earning more money, or he could ju
And shame on me for not proofing my own post... grr! Should be:
Like Ayn Rand says, you're free to choose any of the three options, but not free from the consequence.
*scoove*
I think it is fair to say that we are, for the most part, in agreement. Where we might differ is on the scope/scale of just how drastically the current wave of outsourcing (now affecting IT jobs -- though some would argue that it is an extension of the exodus of manufacturing jobs that took place in the 80s) might affect the economy. Others have said, better than I could, that what we are seeing is the redistribution of certain classes of jobs to other nations. Eventually, massive disparities of wealth between nations will be lessened. Do a little googling and you'll see that the number of air-conditioners and refrigerators in China have exploded in the past twenty years. Much as we saw in Taiwan. Or Japan. (Or South Korea -- and if you really want to see the difference that economic development makes, check out the nighttime light map from NASA and look at the Korean peninsula... economic development has some profound effects that can even be seen from space!)
I'm getting a little off track here but I guess my point is that good intentions are great but economic development is the only way that we know of to lead to things like lights at night and air conditioning and Internet access. The vehicle for this development is the "exporting" of jobs to these countries. I'm optimistic enough to believe that growth isn't a zero-sum game -- a rising tide lifts all boats. As Korea and China and South Korea and India's economies have grown, so has that of the United States. But this takes place over decades. I'm not naive about this. There are unpleasant consequences in the short run. Workers affected by this have to retool, retrain and find new things to do... but up until this point we have managed to do just that. It isn't pleasant to be graduating from college with a degree in an industry which is undergoing this shift and it doesn't make you any less tired as you work a night job waiting tables as you go back to school because your job happens to be one that has been outsourced to a place where someone can do the job for 1/6th as much money as you would require to meet a certain standard of living in the U.S. But, seriously, what is the remedy? Is clean water only for people in the West? Is Internet access something that is good for us but a luxury for the rest of the world? How, exactly, would these economies grow into 21st century economies WITHOUT providing goods and/or services that there is a demand for in the rest of the world? (To say nothing of the fact that this type of growth appears to go hand in hand with a move towards more participatory forms of governments in the nations affected.)
To bring my comment back on topic -- there may or may not be less demand for the trades I mentioned earlier. Unless you are talking about a wholescale economic collapse/worldwide depression, there will always be a strong demand for waiters, bartenders, doctors, nurses, mechanics, construction workers and others. There will also be a demand for the "next big thing" -- but since I don't have a crystal ball, I can't tell you what that is. But that will be out there too. (It might have something to do with alternative methods of producing energy... it sure looks like that will be big in the next 25 to 100 years... but, again, I'm just speculating here.) If there is a global worldwide economic collapse, well, then everything we know about economics for the last 150 years is just WRONG and there are some pretty nasty things to worry about besides just particular types of jobs being outsourced...
Again, I think we are in agreement... I just thought I'd take this thread to the next level since it isn't a black-and-white issue and your responses seem thoughtful enough that I would WELCOME your thoughts on any of the above.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
I read a lot of comments here about how people in the Philipines and India get 1/10th of what an American coder earns.. and therefore an assertion is made by some on this thread that it isn't immoral if more and more work flows towards these poorer nations until the wages reach comparable levels..
The replies to these posts also follow a similar pattern - I refer to this as "Counter Argument 1" - This argument follows the chain of thought that the cost of living in the US is so much higher and therefore it isn't immoral if an American coder gets so much more than someone who does the same job in Philipines or India.
Personally, I find Counter Argument 1 to be bogus. Because the truth is this - the cost of maintaining the same standard of living is about the same anywhere in the world.
A car of comparable quality sells for pretty much the same price anywhere in the world. All the stuff that you take for granted - Washing machines, dish washers, electronic goods, cellphones. Most things of comparable quality are more expensive in the developing world than in the US.
For a comparison, please take a look at the Ford India website and see the prices of the cars - Compare the car prices to those of Ford cars sold in the US - make sure that the features are the same.. You will notice that the American pricing is actually cheaper. You can visit other Indian shopping sites on the net - compare prices.. you will see that the products are actually cheaper in the US.. but I concede that certain things are cheaper in the third world - food being one.
But on average, the cost of living is about the same anywhere in the world - it is just that the standards of living are lower in the developing world than in the first world - also the purchasing power of a person in the third world is much less than a tenth of an American..An Indian or Philipino can afford far less than Americans/Europeans and therefore makes do with much less. Most people cannot afford a washing machine - leave alone a car.
What most Americans consider as essential necessities are luxuries most people from the developing world can never afford.
One other point while I am at it -In my experience I have noticed that when a person from the developed world works in a team with a person from the third world in the same geographical location, the wage disparity continues to exist. That is, the American/European will be paid far higher than the Indian/Philipino on the same project while staying in the same country. That is, the wage disparity continues to exist even when the cost of living is the same..
This is particularly true in the Middle East where Americans/Europeans get paid much higher than their Asian counterparts.
Also, while I am at it - consider the scenario where an American company recruits you to be posted onsite at a Russian oil company for completing a software project - would you be willing to take a Russian salary?
Or are you saying - no, but the American was forced to move away from the "comforts" of the US to a place which is far less "comfortable" and therefore needs to be additionally compensated for this "sacrifice"?
Well, then let me give you the second scenario - what if you were posted in a country like Portugal which is pretty much on par with the US as far as "comforts" go? Would you be prepared to accept a Portuguese salary which will be lower than an American one?
Even big companies like Ford, Caterpillar etc pay their American workers far higher than the local workers...
So these arguments against outsourcing don't really stand - but having said that, I do believe that the US government has a responsibility to ensure that US citizens have adequate employment - and if the American government decides to limit outsourcing to ensure this, thats perfectly understandable.. but saying things like - Americans deserve to be paid 10 times higher than Indians or Philipinos because the cost of living is higher in the US is very insulting as it implies that Americans deserve a higher standard of living than the rest of the world - and also statements like these are not based on fact.
There are insightful 2 phrases this article uses: ``know what" & ``know how". In the case of technology journalism, this is very important.
A good journalist not only knows her/his subject, but also knows the people who know. As much as we make fun of the vast majority of tech news sources, they do filter out some of the rampant B.S. that every tech company releases (for example, the better business technology journalists have acknowledged for months that SCO's run a stock scam). This fits the ``know what" phrase.
However anybody anywhere with a competent grasp of English can rewrite press releases -- this fits the ``know how phrase." I don't expect writers in a foreign timezone from the US or Europe to take the time to interview people for an article with a same-day deadline, so that's exactly what they will end up doing -- undoubtedly to their frustration.
Having said that, I more than expect that there are competent technology journalists in India. And there is new & innovative technology being developed there, too. (One problem they are solving is making the native alphabets work on computers -- from what I've read, this often involves more than simply making the characters run right to left.) However, builder.com's bright idea is not going to tap into this strength. As a result, a new technological development in India will still take as long for it to be known in the West.
As a result, the quality of news they carry will fall -- to the harm of both the Western & Indian audiences.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
India has never done anything for art? China isn't an innovative country? How ignorant you are, even for a troll. If it wasn't for China we'd *all* be stuck in the middle-ages. Read a book or something.
in European universities Americans are outperformed by practically every other group you could care to identify. They are only there because they can pay the crazy fees they are charged to subsidise everyone else. They can't handle doing anything, anything at all, without being spoon-fed and then patted on the head for swallowing. You really need to get your education system in order.
This is not the first time that something like this has happened, unfortunately, it seems as if the people who are losing their jobs have no more skillsets than computing, somebody else said it best, if you can do more than one thing, youre set and are more valuable, as it is, computing skills are not a commmodity anymore, so we need to get over it, we shouldnt expect a high salary.
Its beccoming so common that in time our skills will be valued no more than someone who flips burguers for a living.
Of cousrse, this is also a major reason for the current backlash against IT jobs, we are pricks!! many of us believe we are smarter than the average Joe, but unless your head of your IT department, than youre nothing but a peon, and its sad to think that all of these people are scared of losing their peon status.
In the end its all about the money of course, so i can only recommend to adapt and prosper, because the people that do, will actually be better off than before.
When i hear anyone whine, it just sounds like they realize their time has come, and they are going to only make as much as they are worth, think SCO, or the RIAA.
Whew! No need to worry about the thousands and thousands of jobs disappearing then!
So, if all of our jobs go to India, what are we going to be buying the software with?!
ignorant american. even when he is shown to be wrong, spouts more stupidities to stay in the argument.
maybe that's what's wrong here?
>> IIT has a satellite campus in India.
oh? let me tell you, Illinois institute of technology has no campus in India.
all this just goes on to prove that the avergae american doesnot know anything beyond his backyard,
and that he thinks he can survive by emphasising stupidities several times.
Hello? the guy is from India. If you care to read newspapers a little you would know that India has nothing to do with any sort of terrorism. Infact India has been a victim of islamic terrorism from pakistan for a long while now.
so why dont you get your facts straight before calling people terrorists and your your favourite 4 letter words, okay?
kids good at math and science are branded as geeks here in USA, kicked around, shunned by girls, etc etc, forcing them to switch fields and become empty headed morons who can pyap (with an MBA).
whereas such kids are praised and encouraged in India, get all respect, ar encouraged to be confident, are assured of social success, a mate (although sometimes introduced through social channels) etc etc.
so, math enthusiast in USA == life is tough
math enthusiast in India == easy ride ahead.
hmm, seems pretty simple to me..
yep , we sure do kike your ass in math
What's the difference between an American and Indian company that both have their sales force in the US and their developers in India? The registered location of a company effects, at most, the handful of people employed by the head office (and as far as I've heard, US MBA programs are still superior to India's) -- the shares will still be sold internationally. (And given that the US is still very rich despite the offshore scare, it will probably be owned by Americans.)
People need to stop thinking of multinationals as having a physical presence in some country or other. They are completely abstract entities, and therefore it makes sense to employ people wherever they will be most efficient.
The US is so insanely rich right now that if you took all the wealth in the country and invested it in the Indian stock market or whatever, gains would outstrip the rate of reproduction such that all Americans forever could simply live off the wealth accumulated so far. I figure all the colonial countries must have realised that they would eventually run out of parts of the world to exploit and so they were going to pull this scheme, but then WWII indebted them all to the US*, so now they're the only ones in a position to pull it. By 2010 the estate tax will be repealed and either one of the right-wing Presidential candidates will have scrapped most social programs, so you can just sit back and watch the income pour in for ever and ever.
* Who for some reason thinks they should be thanked for their involvement in WWII when in fact it pulled them out of the Great Depression and left them as one of only two world superpowers.
That's it!
You see, out-sourcing is an economic stimulus. Really.
Eventually it causes the demand for alcohol and bartenders to rise dramatically.
Why did you switch careers to one that pays so poorly? If you are going to switch careers, one would think the logical movement would either be upward or toward greater personal happiness. Anything else is just a personal downward spiral, and (as much as I would also like to) you can't blame George Bush's economy for that.
I read a lot of comments here about how people in the Philipines and India get 1/10th of what an American coder earns.. and therefore an assertion is made by some on this thread that it isn't immoral if more and more work flows towards these poorer nations until the wages reach comparable levels..
The replies to these posts also follow a similar pattern - I refer to this as "Counter Argument 1" - This argument follows the chain of thought that the cost of living in the US is so much higher and therefore it isn't immoral if an American coder gets so much more than someone who does the same job in Philipines or India.
Personally, I find Counter Argument 1 to be bogus. Because the truth is this - the cost of maintaining the same standard of living is about the same anywhere in the world.
A car of comparable quality sells for pretty much the same price anywhere in the world. All the stuff that you take for granted - Washing machines, dish washers, electronic goods, cellphones. Most things of comparable quality are more expensive in the developing world than in the US.
For a comparison, please take a look at the Ford India website and see the prices of the cars - Compare the car prices to those of Ford cars sold in the US - make sure that the features are the same.. You will notice that the American pricing is actually cheaper. You can visit other Indian shopping sites on the net - compare prices.. you will see that the products are actually cheaper in the US.. but I concede that certain things are cheaper in the third world - food being one.
But on average, the cost of living is about the same anywhere in the world - it is just that the standards of living are lower in the developing world than in the first world - also the purchasing power of a person in the third world is much less than a tenth of an American..An Indian or Philipino can afford far less than Americans/Europeans and therefore makes do with much less. Most people cannot afford a washing machine - leave alone a car.
What most Americans consider as essential necessities are luxuries most people from the developing world can never afford.
One other point while I am at it -In my experience I have noticed that when a person from the developed world works in a team with a person from the third world in the same geographical location, the wage disparity continues to exist. That is, the American/European will be paid far higher than the Indian/Philipino on the same project while staying in the same country. That is, the wage disparity continues to exist even when the cost of living is the same..
This is particularly true in the Middle East where Americans/Europeans get paid much higher than their Asian counterparts.
Also, while I am at it - consider the scenario where an American company recruits you to be posted onsite at a Russian oil company for completing a software project - would you be willing to take a Russian salary?
Or are you saying - no, but the American was forced to move away from the "comforts" of the US to a place which is far less "comfortable" and therefore needs to be additionally compensated for this "sacrifice"?
Well, then let me give you the second scenario - what if you were posted in a country like Portugal which is pretty much on par with the US as far as "comforts" go? Would you be prepared to accept a Portuguese salary which will be lower than an American one?
Even big companies like Ford, Caterpillar etc pay their American workers far higher than the local workers...
So these arguments against outsourcing don't really stand - but having said that, I do believe that the US government has a responsibility to ensure that US citizens have adequate employment - and if the American government decides to limit outsourcing to ensure this, thats perfectly understandable.. but saying things like - Americans deserve to be paid 10 times higher than Indians or Philipinos because the cost of living is higher in the US is very insulting as it implies that Americans deserve a higher standard of living than the rest of the world - and also statements like these are not based on fact.
Gee, where shall I start? I'm an IT person. I'm not soulless, I care very much about lots and lots of people, I've never knowingly stepped on anyone's career or life, I'm generally well-liked by folks who encounter me, and while I do get along well with robots, I wouldn't be at home in a factory. Perhaps the one who belongs in the factory with apathetic robots is the one who could not comfortably interact with the well-educated, dedicated professionals who work in Silicon Valley. And perhaps I shall consider moving into your neighborhood. If that annoys you enough to move away, I will have dramatically added considerable value to your neighborhood - at least in the eyes of your former neighbors.
Costs less than $10,000 including post-operative care. If you want to get fancy and do advanced surgery on the beating heart (i.e. no heart lung machine used ) for bypass surgery, add 5k more. My uncle had this kind (beating heart) of surgery done in Bangalore around the time I read an article about it in the scientific american . Five years since, he is in robust health.
Either this is a crib session or i am missing out something important. There is no government like no government so chuck our Bush and get kerry in. What is he going to do ? India was never the promised land for IT. today its them tomorrow it might be Japan.What then ? heigh ho , slap the jap ?
I have an MBA and it's *still* not easy to move into management. I am forever stuck in this dead-end programming job with the only future being me watching an Indian developer get my job.
-gam
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
Indian developers suck sweat monkey balls. That's why every company that outsources developers go belly up. So who's left to manage?
Lets face it Americans, Indians have more brains that you duds. By the time an American matures and gets some brains into his head, it time for them to die. They are all fart...no shit.
Amricans....Indians are here to take your jobs and money...watch out!!!