Because my employer has me writing in a HLL rather than assembly, I have time to post to slashdot
Developers will always use the languages with the easiest syntax and shortest development time. Which means that no matter how fast the processor, it is never fast enough.
I'm rather well versed in assembly language. I've written bootloader code which would boot up a system from a floppy disk. At one point in time, I was writing an OS which would fit on, and be bootable from, a single floppy. The idea was that I would create something that everyone could use, simply by putting in a floppy and rebooting the machine - no need for messy and complicated OS installs.
Then PC manufacturers stopped putting integrated floppy drives in laptops. It won't be long before the floppy is gone completely.
So it doesn't really matter if someone knows this year's OS, or this year's Hot, New! (tm) programming language. Technology changes far too rapidly for the average user to keep up with. By the time the average user becomes proficient in an OS, (not to mention a programming language), it becomes obsolete. And with DRM, users in the future may not even be legally allowed to own programming tools without being licensed and bonded. Even today, DRM is restricting the ability of Windows-crippled machines.
But if you want to be truly free, you have no choice but to understand the machines you work with.
Actually, this is not true. With the DRM that's already implemented in the Windows operating systems, even if you understand the computer, you can't fix it (at least not without violating the DMCA).
I just purchased a laptop with Windows XP, and I hate it already. It can't read CD-R's or CD-WR's burned on another machine. Even though I can capture screen shots of DVD movies, I can't save them. And for some reason, it won't connect to my other Windows boxes.
So it doesn't really matter how much you understand about the machine, with DRM, you can only use it the way the OS designer and media companies allow. Like RMS has been saying for decades, all the programming knowledge in the world is useless if the programming tools are illegal or non-functional.
We've developed lots of tools to do performance analysis for software development--and to understand the hot spots from a performance point of view in code and make improvements to tune code, to improve performance, or to reduce memory footprint, etc.
But programmers don't use them.
With my command of assembly language, there probably aren't many coders out there that could write faster code than I. I'm not bragging; it's a simple fact that if you can fit the entire executable into the processor's cache, all of the optimizing compilers in the world don't matter. Instructions executed out of cache are completed around 7 to 10 times faster than those fetched from memory.
But nobody cares. Programmers have become so used to the increase in processing power that they are willing to write ever more bloated code, knowing that somewhere, somehow, there's an EE major who will invent a fab process that will make up for the shortcomings of programmers.
For every doubling of clock speed or halving of power consumption, there's some intelligent idiot (tm) designing a better, slower Java. It doesn't matter how fast the processor clock is if you're programmers are ever willing to invent less-efficient languages.
Instead, if you taught programmers to write efficient code, the speed of the processor would be a moot point. Today's processors are overkill for the average consumer - unless, of course, said consumer writes an interpreted language in Java and runs the interpreter in a JVM... Yeah, you laugh, but trust me, someone is already doing it....
You forgot:
C)Acquire access to one of the remote shutdown utilities and remotely disable the vehicle on the expressway when it reaches a given location. The resultant traffic backup makes for a high casualty count when your cohorts detonate their car bomb next to the truck. The combination of a large quantity of flammable material and a car bomb could be quite dangerous - the car bomb injures and backs up traffic while the gasoline spill bursts into flames, denying emergency crews access to the victims.
No, I don't feel any safer with this kind of system. We should be working on destroying the causes of terrorism rather than merely applying patches.
Yeah, too bad, but zip drives are nice read/write high capacity removable media.
The problem I always had with CD-RW was that most systems can't read the disks, and even when they can, access is slow. I've managed to install compilers on my zip disk, and I can take my development environment with me anywhere. Even though CD-RW hold more data, you can't realistically run a compiler off of them - the latency is horrible.
Its invisible beam drilled Yamamoto's inch-thick steel plate in two seconds.
It gets even worse:
could knock down previously untouchable targets such as artillery shells, mortars, surface-to-air missiles and even cruise missiles at ranges of up to dozens of miles in good weather. In clear air above the clouds, a high-powered laser could lance out 500 miles to destroy rising ballistic missiles.
In the first place, even the most rudimentary armor on most modern combat vehicles is greater than an inch thick; the armor on a certain very popular tank is 16 inches thick. Secondly, the burst is way too long to be practically usable. It is almost impossible to point a beam at the same spot on a moving object for anything more than a few milliseconds. A modern artillery battery can send 20 rounds downrange per minute; a mortar battery can send 50. With a two second burn time, even supposing that you had the computer and mechanical systems necessary to track incoming rounds, you still couldn't hit every one of them.
Even if we compressed the burst time down to the microseconds, this weapon would still be nothing special. A modern.50 cal round can go through an inch of armor a mile away, and at a sustained rate of more than 100 per minute. A Copperhead guided artillery round can take out a tank more than 6 miles away. The SABOT rounds fired by M1's can penetrate several feet (not inches) of concrete.
With the range of modern ballistics, anything that can be seen can be destroyed. A laser would buy us nothing here - the flight trajectory of ballistic projectiles is well understood, and a computer can easily provide firing solutions in real time. While ballistic projectiles can't yet take out incoming missiles, this laser would need to be at least 200,000 times more powerful to do the trick. At 2 km per second, to paint a 2 cm "target spot" on an incoming missile would require a burst of less than 10 microseconds in duration.
...so easy to accomplish in Windows, requires far more steps and far greater effort on the part of the Linux user..
Which, IMHO, is why Linux hasn't taken over the desktop market. People like things simple! If Linux was reengineered to accommodate the average desktop user, would it still be secure? I think not.
Yeah, it's a double-edged sword. The same convenience of automatic execution is also a gaping security hole. But I'm willing to bet that the average user would rather slow their machine down with AV software and the occasional crash than to click 5 times to save an attachment and then open up a terminal session to execute it. Viruses happen. Geeks are the only ones who no longer get them. The average user thinks it is normal for viruses to occasionally crash their machines.
I understand that it is possible to create secure, highly usable software. Look at the Mac, for example. No offense to Mac users, but your platform isn't exactly a Microsoft killer. Even if Linux did all the right things, people would still buy Microsoft software, for no reason other than familiarity.
One minor annoyance was that to recover the data you not only need a destination drive (in addition to the drive you are recovering), but that drive needs to be formatted FAT32.
But it gets worse:
The only drives you will be able to recover to will be labeled starting with 'C' and only FAT32 partitions will be available to write to...
So, what exactly would these recovery tools do that a Window98 Startup Disk with UNDELETE would not?
They can't even write FAT16 drivers, and I'm supposed to believe that they are "Data Recovery Professionals"? Please...
In one episode of 'Cheers', Cliff is seated at the bar describing the Buffalo Theory to his buddy, Norm. (I don't think I've ever heard the concept explained any better than this....)
"Well you see, Norm, it's like this... A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells.
Now, as we know, excessive intake of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers."
Have you ever seen a character in a popular movie take responsibility for their actions? I mean, anything that was produced after the John Wayne era?
And no, it isn't like saying that GTA is responsible for those kids. It's more like saying that what someone sees in movies influences their attitudes - while most people would not go out and commit physical theft after seeing a movie like the The Italian Job, they might have a more apologetic view of stealing if no one gets hurt. It's a small logical step from this point to rationalize downloading MP3's by saying, "If this band is good, I'll go buy their CD," but never setting foot in a record store. Sure, no one got physically hurt, so it must be OK, right?
Well, it was that or The Italian Job. Neither of which I've seen. But if I do go to see a movie which espouses morals contrary to my own, I further reinforce the argument of the Hollywood: "We only produce what people want to see..." So I guess it's a catch-22; if I see the movie, I support a cause I'm against, and if I don't, I risk making uninformed arguments...
Right now, Matchstick Men is making its way to the theatres. The basic plot is that a con artist teams up with his daughter to steal real money. I think it's ironic that an organization which cries so loudly about "theft of intellectual property" makes money by selling movies that glorify theft in the physical world.
Hate to say it, MPAA, but you had it coming. You produce movies which influence people to steal, and then complain because a poor college kid downloads your work over the internet. Who taught him to do that? It sure wasn't the Religious Right that Hollywood loves to hate. It sure wasn't his parents, who tried to teach him that stealing was wrong. It was your movies.
Perhaps the reason why no one has actually seen an Infinium game console is because their still searching for the Unobtanium necessary for the 3 THz processor required for its Blazing Fast Graphics Subsystem(tm).
Bottom line: Expect to spend an additional 1 percent to 10 percent on vendor selection and initial travel costs.
Bottom line: Expect to spend an additional 2 percent to 3 percent on transition costs.
Bottom line: Expect to pay an extra 3 percent to 5 percent on layoffs and related costs.
Bottom line: Expect to spend an extra 3 percent to 27 percent on productivity lags.
Bottom line: Expect to spend an extra 1 percent to 10 percent on improving software development processes.
Bottom line: Expect to pay an additional 6 percent to 10 percent on managing your offshore contract.
According to the article, the hidden costs of overseas outsourcing could cost between 16 - 65 percent of the total project cost.
I just don't see any savings here.
Consider:
Overseas consulting firms charge $20/hour.
The average American programmer gets paid $35/hour.
The overseas firm charges 57% of what the American programmer gets paid - But, the minimum hidden costs bring that to (57 + 16) 73%, in the best case scenario. In a worst-case "successful" scenario (one in which the project comes in on time, without bugs..), the American firm will pay (57 + 65 = 122) 22% more than just hiring an American programmer. And to add insult to injury, should the overseas firm fail to fulfill its promises in any way, the American firm would have no legal resource against companies based overseas.
And I haven't even gotten into the cases of project overruns, code delivered late, or in an unworking state, etc...
We've become complacent. I mean, as Linux users, we expect the systems to be secure, where as with Windows systems, we know they're insecure, so we're more vigilant, always patching them.
I think a much more meaningful statistic would be how many fully patched Windows and Linux servers are successfully hacked. With Windows, you are always vulnerable, because the rate at which vulnerabilities are discovered far surpasses the rate at which patches are issued. With OSS, OTOH, a patch is usually issued a few hours or days after the vulnerability is discovered. Hence, the amount of time a successful Linux exploit is usuable is usually much lower than an exploit for Windows.
I would guess that most Linux machines that get hacked are due to unpatched/deliberately insecure configurations - like using a dictionary word for a root password.
But what about the liability issue - you contract with an Indian firm, and when the project goes into production, it doesn't work.
So what do you do? The programmers, consultants, and your money are all overseas, out of reach of US law. You can sue, maybe, but good luck collecting a judgement.
Quite frankly, I've heard horror stories about outsourcing. You know, the projects that didn't integrate correctly, didn't work, and the worst of it was that the company had to bring in local consultants to fix it. Of course the consultants charged much more than the project would have cost in the first place had it been done in house.
The high job to population ratio meant less qualified people to fill up job vacancies. That's how the H1 visa program came into being, and was greatly appreciated during the 1990's boom.
Actually, this was never true - there were always enough qualified people to fill the high-tech job vacancies. The problem was that Corporate America wasn't willing to pay the salaries commeasurate with the skills they were demanding. The idea was that if you introduced more workers into the job pool than there were jobs, you would reduce the cost of labor, and salaries would go down.
Instead, they found another route to depress the wages of their workers - hiring overseas.
Now remember, this is about Corporate America's liberal anti-americanism. The truth is, as you and I both know, that telecommuting has always been a viable option for IS workers. In the 90's, the corporate mantra against telecommuting was that in order for a project to succeed, you had to have a physical presence at your workplace. But as we all knew, this was just a lie to deny us the benefit of working from home - now that outsourcing to India has become popular, it seems that the physical presence issue has become moot. In short, Corporate America bought into the left-wing anti-american sentiment which says that the natives overseas are somehow more dignified than the "greedy, lazy, beer-drinking, unsophisticated American worker". They never wanted to hire Americans, and it has been one excuse after another.
If companies could make claims with impunity to sell you something and not fear the consequences we would see cars sold as "safe at 200 mph even if you have never driven before"
Not even a block from my place is a used car dealership with a sign that says, "No licencia - No problema". Which makes me wonder how they intend to sell a car to someone without a license, and advertise the fact, to boot.
but otherwise if you want to make a claim about your product you should be legally obliged to stand by it.
I agree with you, but the problem is that writing bug-free code is almost impossible, and to do so would make the average application too expensive for the average computer user to afford. Once a company becomes acustomed to releasing buggy code, it is just a small slip down the slope of ethics before they are misrepresenting the capabilities of the software - all of which are conveniently disclaimed in the EULA.
IIRC, ENIAC, one of the first computers, was a base 10 system. Problem was, though, that its design didn't scale well and it was notoriously difficult to program. This is what prompted John Von Neumann to design the modern computer using a binary architecture - the logic was simpler, and easier to implement.
While I could see going to trinary, or possibly quaternary, it still won't solve the problem it is meant to addresses - with more states, the smallest stages of design will get larger. Which means that we will need even more silicon to achieve the same functionality. Here's an example:
Say we want a range of 16 digits. With quaternary, we can represent that with 2 bit "positions"; with binary, 4. Problem is, for every position in a quaternary system, we could have 4 values, as opposed to 2 with binary. To differentiate between a 0 and 1 requires 1 comparator in a binary system, whereas to differentiate between 0, 1, 2, 3 requires 6 comparators in a quaternary system.* So for a four bit binary system, we need 4 comparators for a given circuit, but for a 2 bit quaternary system, we need (2 * 6) = 12 comparators. Both can represent the same range of digits, yet one requires three times the transistors of the other.
People who talk about computing in other bases are forgetting the computer history that led to using binary.
* To understand why, consider that to demultiplex a single binary digit requires a single voltage comparator - if the voltage is above a certain certain value it goes to one line, otherwise, the other. To demultiplex quaternary requires 6 comparators, as each line must be able to determine that the voltage is above a certain threshold, but below another. The 0 and 3 lines only require 1 comparator because they only have to satisfy that the voltage is below or above a certain threshold, but the 1 and 2 lines must differentiate a range of voltages.
Better close down the New York Public Library then.
I've heard about federal agents asking libraries to remove certain "harmful" books from circulation after 9/11. Not sure how successful they were, though.
Why is it that we can post the directions for how to properly murder someone or build a bomb...
Actually, you can't. IIRC, public dissemination of bomb-building techniques was made illegal in 1997. Something as simple as talking about using match heads to build pyrotechnic devices is now a federal felony. RaiseTheFist.com was shut down for doing this very thing. After the 9/11, even a newsgroup discussion about ways to make a bomb is illegal.
Yes, technically, it is the person who decided to use Windows. However, there's a twist:
Although IANAL, I do understand that there's this thing called shared liability. Basically, this states that if a court finds that an entity is even partially at fault for an incident, they may bear the entire cost of the judgment. Consider this case: the court may find that the guy (or gal, let's be PC!) who installed windows was 95% at fault, and Microsoft was 5% at fault because they probably could have foreseen this, at least a little, and wrote a better OS. Now when it comes time to pay the $10 billion judgement, what do you think will happen? Will Microsoft pay only 5% of $10 billion? Not on your life! What will happen is that the gal who installed windows will lose her life savings, but Microsoft will end up paying out $10 billion - (gal's life savings), even though they were only 5% responsible!
No, I don't think it's fair, either, but that's the law. The real problem is that if something like this were to actually result in tragedy, software developerment by anyone other than a licensed and bonded developer might become illegal. As bad software has an increasingly dangerous impact on public safety, I can forsee a time when a hobby of writing code may actually become illegal.
Yes, but speaking of Microsoft prosecution, he says later:
And I'm glad they didn't try to get me back. I thank them for opening my eyes, because I'm definitely money ahead now and I'm definitely just as productive, and I don't have any problems communicating with my customers. So thank you, Microsoft.
So yeah, Microsoft made his business, and they almost broke his business.
And yes, you can bet that Microsoft will use that quote in their promotional materials. And you can bet that Ernie Ball will sue Microsoft when they do.
Slashdot Mirror
Because my employer has me writing in a HLL rather than assembly, I have time to post to slashdot
Developers will always use the languages with the easiest syntax and shortest development time. Which means that no matter how fast the processor, it is never fast enough.
I'm rather well versed in assembly language. I've written bootloader code which would boot up a system from a floppy disk. At one point in time, I was writing an OS which would fit on, and be bootable from, a single floppy. The idea was that I would create something that everyone could use, simply by putting in a floppy and rebooting the machine - no need for messy and complicated OS installs.
Then PC manufacturers stopped putting integrated floppy drives in laptops. It won't be long before the floppy is gone completely.
So it doesn't really matter if someone knows this year's OS, or this year's Hot, New! (tm) programming language. Technology changes far too rapidly for the average user to keep up with. By the time the average user becomes proficient in an OS, (not to mention a programming language), it becomes obsolete. And with DRM, users in the future may not even be legally allowed to own programming tools without being licensed and bonded. Even today, DRM is restricting the ability of Windows-crippled machines.
Actually, this is not true. With the DRM that's already implemented in the Windows operating systems, even if you understand the computer, you can't fix it (at least not without violating the DMCA).
I just purchased a laptop with Windows XP, and I hate it already. It can't read CD-R's or CD-WR's burned on another machine. Even though I can capture screen shots of DVD movies, I can't save them. And for some reason, it won't connect to my other Windows boxes.
So it doesn't really matter how much you understand about the machine, with DRM, you can only use it the way the OS designer and media companies allow. Like RMS has been saying for decades, all the programming knowledge in the world is useless if the programming tools are illegal or non-functional.
But programmers don't use them.
With my command of assembly language, there probably aren't many coders out there that could write faster code than I. I'm not bragging; it's a simple fact that if you can fit the entire executable into the processor's cache, all of the optimizing compilers in the world don't matter. Instructions executed out of cache are completed around 7 to 10 times faster than those fetched from memory.
But nobody cares. Programmers have become so used to the increase in processing power that they are willing to write ever more bloated code, knowing that somewhere, somehow, there's an EE major who will invent a fab process that will make up for the shortcomings of programmers.
For every doubling of clock speed or halving of power consumption, there's some intelligent idiot (tm) designing a better, slower Java. It doesn't matter how fast the processor clock is if you're programmers are ever willing to invent less-efficient languages.
Instead, if you taught programmers to write efficient code, the speed of the processor would be a moot point. Today's processors are overkill for the average consumer - unless, of course, said consumer writes an interpreted language in Java and runs the interpreter in a JVM... Yeah, you laugh, but trust me, someone is already doing it....
C)Acquire access to one of the remote shutdown utilities and remotely disable the vehicle on the expressway when it reaches a given location. The resultant traffic backup makes for a high casualty count when your cohorts detonate their car bomb next to the truck. The combination of a large quantity of flammable material and a car bomb could be quite dangerous - the car bomb injures and backs up traffic while the gasoline spill bursts into flames, denying emergency crews access to the victims.
No, I don't feel any safer with this kind of system. We should be working on destroying the causes of terrorism rather than merely applying patches.
Yeah, too bad, but zip drives are nice read/write high capacity removable media.
The problem I always had with CD-RW was that most systems can't read the disks, and even when they can, access is slow. I've managed to install compilers on my zip disk, and I can take my development environment with me anywhere. Even though CD-RW hold more data, you can't realistically run a compiler off of them - the latency is horrible.
It gets even worse:
could knock down previously untouchable targets such as artillery shells, mortars, surface-to-air missiles and even cruise missiles at ranges of up to dozens of miles in good weather. In clear air above the clouds, a high-powered laser could lance out 500 miles to destroy rising ballistic missiles.In the first place, even the most rudimentary armor on most modern combat vehicles is greater than an inch thick; the armor on a certain very popular tank is 16 inches thick. Secondly, the burst is way too long to be practically usable. It is almost impossible to point a beam at the same spot on a moving object for anything more than a few milliseconds. A modern artillery battery can send 20 rounds downrange per minute; a mortar battery can send 50. With a two second burn time, even supposing that you had the computer and mechanical systems necessary to track incoming rounds, you still couldn't hit every one of them.
Even if we compressed the burst time down to the microseconds, this weapon would still be nothing special. A modern .50 cal round can go through an inch of armor a mile away, and at a sustained rate of more than 100 per minute. A Copperhead guided artillery round can take out a tank more than 6 miles away. The SABOT rounds fired by M1's can penetrate several feet (not inches) of concrete.
With the range of modern ballistics, anything that can be seen can be destroyed. A laser would buy us nothing here - the flight trajectory of ballistic projectiles is well understood, and a computer can easily provide firing solutions in real time. While ballistic projectiles can't yet take out incoming missiles, this laser would need to be at least 200,000 times more powerful to do the trick. At 2 km per second, to paint a 2 cm "target spot" on an incoming missile would require a burst of less than 10 microseconds in duration.
Which, IMHO, is why Linux hasn't taken over the desktop market. People like things simple! If Linux was reengineered to accommodate the average desktop user, would it still be secure? I think not.
Yeah, it's a double-edged sword. The same convenience of automatic execution is also a gaping security hole. But I'm willing to bet that the average user would rather slow their machine down with AV software and the occasional crash than to click 5 times to save an attachment and then open up a terminal session to execute it. Viruses happen. Geeks are the only ones who no longer get them. The average user thinks it is normal for viruses to occasionally crash their machines.
I understand that it is possible to create secure, highly usable software. Look at the Mac, for example. No offense to Mac users, but your platform isn't exactly a Microsoft killer. Even if Linux did all the right things, people would still buy Microsoft software, for no reason other than familiarity.
From the article...
One minor annoyance was that to recover the data you not only need a destination drive (in addition to the drive you are recovering), but that drive needs to be formatted FAT32.
But it gets worse:
The only drives you will be able to recover to will be labeled starting with 'C' and only FAT32 partitions will be available to write to...
So, what exactly would these recovery tools do that a Window98 Startup Disk with UNDELETE would not?
They can't even write FAT16 drivers, and I'm supposed to believe that they are "Data Recovery Professionals"? Please...
In one episode of 'Cheers', Cliff is seated at the bar describing the
Buffalo Theory to his buddy, Norm. (I don't think I've ever heard the
concept explained any better than this....)
"Well you see, Norm, it's like this... A herd of buffalo can only move as
fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest
and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection
is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the
whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.
In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the
slowest brain cells.
Now, as we know, excessive intake of alcohol kills brain cells. But
naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this
way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making
the brain a faster and more efficient machine. And that, Norm, is why you
always feel smarter after a few beers."
Have you ever seen a character in a popular movie take responsibility for their actions? I mean, anything that was produced after the John Wayne era?
And no, it isn't like saying that GTA is responsible for those kids. It's more like saying that what someone sees in movies influences their attitudes - while most people would not go out and commit physical theft after seeing a movie like the The Italian Job, they might have a more apologetic view of stealing if no one gets hurt. It's a small logical step from this point to rationalize downloading MP3's by saying, "If this band is good, I'll go buy their CD," but never setting foot in a record store. Sure, no one got physically hurt, so it must be OK, right?
Well, it was that or The Italian Job. Neither of which I've seen. But if I do go to see a movie which espouses morals contrary to my own, I further reinforce the argument of the Hollywood: "We only produce what people want to see..." So I guess it's a catch-22; if I see the movie, I support a cause I'm against, and if I don't, I risk making uninformed arguments...
Ditto for the MPAA.
Right now, Matchstick Men is making its way to the theatres. The basic plot is that a con artist teams up with his daughter to steal real money. I think it's ironic that an organization which cries so loudly about "theft of intellectual property" makes money by selling movies that glorify theft in the physical world.
Hate to say it, MPAA, but you had it coming. You produce movies which influence people to steal, and then complain because a poor college kid downloads your work over the internet. Who taught him to do that? It sure wasn't the Religious Right that Hollywood loves to hate. It sure wasn't his parents, who tried to teach him that stealing was wrong. It was your movies.
Perhaps the reason why no one has actually seen an Infinium game console is because their still searching for the Unobtanium necessary for the 3 THz processor required for its Blazing Fast Graphics Subsystem(tm).
Is it just me, or was this a lucky find? I mean, even before 9/11, finding nuclear devices was pretty hard.
According to the article, the hidden costs of overseas outsourcing could cost between 16 - 65 percent of the total project cost.
I just don't see any savings here. Consider:
- Overseas consulting firms charge $20/hour.
- The average American programmer gets paid $35/hour.
The overseas firm charges 57% of what the American programmer gets paid - But, the minimum hidden costs bring that to (57 + 16) 73%, in the best case scenario. In a worst-case "successful" scenario (one in which the project comes in on time, without bugs..), the American firm will pay (57 + 65 = 122) 22% more than just hiring an American programmer. And to add insult to injury, should the overseas firm fail to fulfill its promises in any way, the American firm would have no legal resource against companies based overseas.And I haven't even gotten into the cases of project overruns, code delivered late, or in an unworking state, etc...
I think a much more meaningful statistic would be how many fully patched Windows and Linux servers are successfully hacked. With Windows, you are always vulnerable, because the rate at which vulnerabilities are discovered far surpasses the rate at which patches are issued. With OSS, OTOH, a patch is usually issued a few hours or days after the vulnerability is discovered. Hence, the amount of time a successful Linux exploit is usuable is usually much lower than an exploit for Windows.
I would guess that most Linux machines that get hacked are due to unpatched/deliberately insecure configurations - like using a dictionary word for a root password.
But what about the liability issue - you contract with an Indian firm, and when the project goes into production, it doesn't work.
So what do you do? The programmers, consultants, and your money are all overseas, out of reach of US law. You can sue, maybe, but good luck collecting a judgement.
Quite frankly, I've heard horror stories about outsourcing. You know, the projects that didn't integrate correctly, didn't work, and the worst of it was that the company had to bring in local consultants to fix it. Of course the consultants charged much more than the project would have cost in the first place had it been done in house.
The high job to population ratio meant less qualified people to fill up job vacancies. That's how the H1 visa program came into being, and was greatly appreciated during the 1990's boom.
Actually, this was never true - there were always enough qualified people to fill the high-tech job vacancies. The problem was that Corporate America wasn't willing to pay the salaries commeasurate with the skills they were demanding. The idea was that if you introduced more workers into the job pool than there were jobs, you would reduce the cost of labor, and salaries would go down.
Instead, they found another route to depress the wages of their workers - hiring overseas.
Now remember, this is about Corporate America's liberal anti-americanism. The truth is, as you and I both know, that telecommuting has always been a viable option for IS workers. In the 90's, the corporate mantra against telecommuting was that in order for a project to succeed, you had to have a physical presence at your workplace. But as we all knew, this was just a lie to deny us the benefit of working from home - now that outsourcing to India has become popular, it seems that the physical presence issue has become moot. In short, Corporate America bought into the left-wing anti-american sentiment which says that the natives overseas are somehow more dignified than the "greedy, lazy, beer-drinking, unsophisticated American worker". They never wanted to hire Americans, and it has been one excuse after another.
Not even a block from my place is a used car dealership with a sign that says, "No licencia - No problema". Which makes me wonder how they intend to sell a car to someone without a license, and advertise the fact, to boot.
but otherwise if you want to make a claim about your product you should be legally obliged to stand by it.
I agree with you, but the problem is that writing bug-free code is almost impossible, and to do so would make the average application too expensive for the average computer user to afford. Once a company becomes acustomed to releasing buggy code, it is just a small slip down the slope of ethics before they are misrepresenting the capabilities of the software - all of which are conveniently disclaimed in the EULA.
IIRC, ENIAC, one of the first computers, was a base 10 system. Problem was, though, that its design didn't scale well and it was notoriously difficult to program. This is what prompted John Von Neumann to design the modern computer using a binary architecture - the logic was simpler, and easier to implement.
While I could see going to trinary, or possibly quaternary, it still won't solve the problem it is meant to addresses - with more states, the smallest stages of design will get larger. Which means that we will need even more silicon to achieve the same functionality. Here's an example:
Say we want a range of 16 digits. With quaternary, we can represent that with 2 bit "positions"; with binary, 4. Problem is, for every position in a quaternary system, we could have 4 values, as opposed to 2 with binary. To differentiate between a 0 and 1 requires 1 comparator in a binary system, whereas to differentiate between 0, 1, 2, 3 requires 6 comparators in a quaternary system.* So for a four bit binary system, we need 4 comparators for a given circuit, but for a 2 bit quaternary system, we need (2 * 6) = 12 comparators. Both can represent the same range of digits, yet one requires three times the transistors of the other.
People who talk about computing in other bases are forgetting the computer history that led to using binary.
* To understand why, consider that to demultiplex a single binary digit requires a single voltage comparator - if the voltage is above a certain certain value it goes to one line, otherwise, the other. To demultiplex quaternary requires 6 comparators, as each line must be able to determine that the voltage is above a certain threshold, but below another. The 0 and 3 lines only require 1 comparator because they only have to satisfy that the voltage is below or above a certain threshold, but the 1 and 2 lines must differentiate a range of voltages.
I've heard about federal agents asking libraries to remove certain "harmful" books from circulation after 9/11. Not sure how successful they were, though.
Actually, you can't. IIRC, public dissemination of bomb-building techniques was made illegal in 1997. Something as simple as talking about using match heads to build pyrotechnic devices is now a federal felony. RaiseTheFist.com was shut down for doing this very thing. After the 9/11, even a newsgroup discussion about ways to make a bomb is illegal.
Although IANAL, I do understand that there's this thing called shared liability . Basically, this states that if a court finds that an entity is even partially at fault for an incident, they may bear the entire cost of the judgment. Consider this case: the court may find that the guy (or gal, let's be PC!) who installed windows was 95% at fault, and Microsoft was 5% at fault because they probably could have foreseen this, at least a little, and wrote a better OS. Now when it comes time to pay the $10 billion judgement, what do you think will happen? Will Microsoft pay only 5% of $10 billion? Not on your life! What will happen is that the gal who installed windows will lose her life savings, but Microsoft will end up paying out $10 billion - (gal's life savings), even though they were only 5% responsible!
No, I don't think it's fair, either, but that's the law. The real problem is that if something like this were to actually result in tragedy, software developerment by anyone other than a licensed and bonded developer might become illegal. As bad software has an increasingly dangerous impact on public safety, I can forsee a time when a hobby of writing code may actually become illegal.
Yes, but speaking of Microsoft prosecution, he says later:
And I'm glad they didn't try to get me back. I thank them for opening my eyes, because I'm definitely money ahead now and I'm definitely just as productive, and I don't have any problems communicating with my customers. So thank you, Microsoft.
So yeah, Microsoft made his business, and they almost broke his business.
And yes, you can bet that Microsoft will use that quote in their promotional materials. And you can bet that Ernie Ball will sue Microsoft when they do.