If people really wanted to "equalize costs for businesses between the countries", they could just buy stuff made in their own nations, where the cost is inherently equalised. The fact that almost nobody exclusively buys goods manufactured in their own nation means that, although people may say they support the sentiment, ultimately they care more about low cost than equal cost.
It's unfair if we have to compete with regulations that they don't have.
That's an interesting argument. In Europe, some countries have adopted the 35-hour working week, which makes it illegal to employ a worker for longer than that. According to your argument, this is unfair, because those workers have to compete against employees in the United States, where employers can work their employees for as long as they wish. Also, the average salary in some countries, like Switzerland, is higher than the U.S. ($66,000). According to your argument, this is unfair, because Swiss companies have to compete with U.S. companies whilst paying higher salaries. According to your argument, these countries with a higher standard of living than the United States should buy nothing from U.S. companies, not outsource work to the U.S., nor directly employ Americans, since to do so would be unfair. Interesting.
Really? So if, say MySQL AB (formerly one of the most widespread open source companies with employees in over 25 countries) were to employ some programmers in India or Russia (which they do), then, according to your wisdom, their Swedish executives should have their salaries forcibly reduced?
Obviously no executive would then employ foreign workers - you might as well just go the whole hog and make outsourcing illegal, which would effectively end global trade, since the production of practically everything requires some components sourced from China. And if you're going to make the argument that "sourcing" is different to "outsourcing" then it's really not - any legal action that enables trade but not direct employment will just result in independent companies, or self-employed individuals, in India/China producing "components" of specified work and selling them to their Western customer; there's no real difference between trading with an overseas company, and using a subsidiary overseas company, and if you legislate against one then the other will just be used.
Your plan doesn't sound like a very practical solution.
The article headline is unnecessarily sensationalistic. I read it and was like, woah, Google is giving actual dog food as a bonus?! And then I found out actually it's a pretty cool device that costs over £400 after shipping and tax - which is about 72 hours work on the minimum wage. Cry me a river - I don't know of any other company even bothering with Christmas bonuses this year.
Traffic police in England also have handheld PDA-type devices that they can type a numberplate into and retrieve the driving license details of the registered driver (including photo). If they pull you over and you have false plates your details won't match those of the legitimate registered owner and you'll be in trouble.
you people are paying a fortune for almost anything that is sold for much cheaper in any other country. even, the SAME corporations are selling same products for much cheaper in europe
Well, recent currency fluctuations aside, it has certainly been the case that historically UK prices were well above those of the US, hence coining of the phrase Rip-off Britain. Stuff like the Tesco-Levi jeans battle, where an independent retailer was barred from importing and re-selling goods from the US, reinforced the perception that British consumers get a tough deal.
Things seem to be better now - partly due to more competition, particularly from online dealers and Ebay, where the traditional good communication links from Hong Kong to the UK mean you can often get fast shipping at Chinese domestic prices. I mean, £10 for a 2GB iPod nano clone including shipping, delivered in 3 days... amazing really.
The big issue now is that we seem to be paying much more than our European neighbours for energy costs. Apart from petrol at the pump, this has nothing to do with taxes - the UK has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in Europe, and domestic energy VAT of only 5%, so there is really no reason why energy companies can't deliver lower prices. I blame lack of competition in the market - if we paid for energy the same way we paid for (unlocked) mobile phone service, the costs would come crashing down.
we actually know why the test gave bad performance
No we don't. If they had compared many different graphics cards on the same Linux system, and shown that there was some performance degradation on a particular card that occurred every time the test was run, then we might know why the test performed badly. At the moment the idea that it was the graphics drivers is just a hypothesis.
even then the performance difference is too large to be attributed to which bit of the disk you're reading
No it isn't. How do you know that a particular sector of the hard disk isn't failing, causing access to that one sector to be a thousand times slower than other sectors? This is why experiments are supposed to be run many times, across different platforms, and the aggregate results taken. Without multiple experimental replicates you have no way of showing that the results you observe generalise at all; the observed problem could just be one bad run.
Various problems with the Phoronix test methodology have been noted before and before that. Without going over the same stuff, here are some potential questions about this benchmarking:
Where is the statistical analysis of these results - ok, you ran a test once and it was 30% slower. Is this reproducible? What is the variance? Is there any statistical difference between openjdk/sun java?
Why is the Java minor version different? Do you see the same results if the same minor version is used?
As mentioned in the previous discussions, exactly why is Windows slower on the file encryption task - it should be either limited by disk throughput, or by CPU throughput, so observing a 40% drop in performance attributed to the underlying I/O handling of the operating system is somewhat surprising; are you sure the test methodology is sound here, and if so, how do you explain the results?
Are these results applicable to both 32 and 64 bit distributions and JDKs?
How do you know that the 2D benchmark performance on Linux is attributable to poor graphics drivers? Why not run the test on another PC and then swap out graphics cards (hence eliminating all other factors) and report on the results?
There are a lot of questions that this benchmarking should have answered, and a lot of assumptions made that could potentially be invalid.
It depends on your national laws. In the United States criminal law can be applied if you knew you were violating copyright, criminal infringement does not have to be commercial (since 1976). As another poster pointed out, since the 1996 WIPO treaty both the US and EU have brought in the DMCA and EUCD respectively, which enables criminal law remedies for circumvention of copyright protection measures (which would apply in the BBC iPlayer case, even though the measures they use to protect the iPhone streams are very simple and ineffective).
Violating the terms of a contractual obligation is not illegal - you can be sued in a civil court by the other parties to the contract, but you can't be arrested and prosecuted in criminal court unless you are suspected of actually violating criminal law. Unfortunately, the BBC could claim that you are in fact violating copyright law, since unless you accept their user contract you won't have a license to reproduce their content on your PC. Think of it as kind of how the GPL works - if you don't accept the GPL contract and redistribute the work, then you are guilty of criminal copyright infringement. If you do accept the GPL contract, then you can redistribute without violating copyright law.
So if they did photograph the air force base then they basically broke the law and have been charged. What's the problem?
The problem is that the secret is already out. Wikimapia has a detailed photo of Jamnagar Air Force Base, the exact same base that these guys have been charged with taking photos of. Not only that, but metadata has been added that is obviously from people who work on the base - check out the Mig 29s, 28 squadron air force, Mig 21s, choppers, swimming pool, school, gymnasium, canteen; it's all there, even the very personal tag "SSQ (Anshu was born here 11 Dec 02)". The proud father who wrote that is going to be in trouble...
The fact that the police actually found some incriminating photos afterwards doesn't mean that the original arrest was reasonable - using a GPS device isn't a crime, and shouldn't give the police license to search the rest of your equipment looking for further evidence.
As to whether photographing an air force base should be a crime in the first place - let me introduce a detailed aerial photo of Jamnagar Air Force Base! Also try searching for Jamnagar AFB on Google images:-) You can't put the cat back in the bag, and this kind of inadvertent information leakage is exactly what I was talking about when I noted the conflict between the traditional secrecy of the military/government and cheap, accurate personal electronics.
I have had similar discussions - the responses were divided between "Tianawhat?" and "Western propaganda! It did never happen!".
And the best Chinese quote I got about democracy: "Our system is better - we always get the right people! Your system is bad - when people vote they sometimes choose the wrong person!".
when Child Labour was outlawed in Britain, the Unions backed it.
Somewhat ambiguous wording - the Unions were obviously against Child Labour.
Another benefit of Unions - the development of a standard eight hour working day. In Britain, the chronic abuse of child workers resulted in the Unions demanding a maximum of 8 hours per day (or 40 hours per week) for child workers. This standard eventually became the norm for most adult workers as well.
Also, when Child Labour was outlawed in Britain, the Unions backed it. as well as some employers. There were still many employers who argued that it was the child's choice to work in their factory, that making it illegal would deprive their families of an income, and make business uncompetitive - arguments that are much the same as those made today against the minimum wage and other such concepts.
Strict ideologies are unhelpful - in some cases the Unions have supported, or even demanded, reform to bring in fairer and safer working conditions, in other cases Unions have been obstructive, extortative and unrealistic in their dealings. Neither fact means that Unions are always good or always bad.
So far all the chinese cars that have been engineered in china have been terrible.
They said the same thing when the Japanese started making cars... I have no doubt that Chinese companies could engineer cars to meet US/European safety regulations, but at the moment they mainly sell to their domestic less-regulated market, so they save money by having lower engineering standards. If there's money to be made by building to higher standards and exporting to the rest of the world, then they will do it.
Sun paid $1 billion for MySQL AB. It has been estimated that MySQL AB revenue was around $80 million (source) Let's be optimistic and assume $100m. But revenue is irrelevant - what matters is profit. In a normal industry a company should expect to make around 10% profit a year - this is obviously a very, very rough figure, but the company needs to return more to shareholders than they would get from a safer bank savings account, or bonds, which usually hover around 5% or so. Again, these figures are very rough, but if we're in the in the right magnitude we should be okay in generating a rough estimate.
The Price/Earnings Ratio historically hovers around 16 (the last decade was a historical anomaly which looks like it is rapidly being corrected) I think at the moment we are somewhere around 18. That means that the share price, relative to the rest of the market, should be somewhere near 18. If it's higher, Sun overpaid, less, Sun got a bargain. We don't know the profit margin of MySQL AB, but we can probably assume that 10% is an optimistic estimate for an open source services company in the current economic climate. That means annual profits of around $10m based on $100m revenue. Which makes the P/E ratio (1*10**9)/(0.10*100*10**6)=100. This is quite an amazing ratio - more than five times the current market average - so my conclusion is that Sun massively overpaid.
I am not an economics expert, just an enthusiastic amateur, so I am happy if anyone can poke any serious holes in the numbers I came up with. To get the P/E to a reasonable figure MySQL AB would have to be generating profits of $50m at 50% of revenue, which seems totally unrealistic. On the other hand, I can't see why Sun would pay so much when they had access to all the figures, so I feel like I must be missing something here...
The problem is believing that you were the one that did the forcing. When you perform some actions, and then some events occur, it is human tendency to correlate the two and believe that you somehow "caused" the events through your actions. This is a particularly appealing train of thought when the events happen to concur with your world view point.
The Power of Nightmares provides an interesting insight in to the various viewpoints surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. Americans were told by the Neo-Con government that the United States had defeated the Soviet Union through proxy wars (e.g. Vietnam, Afghanistan) and big spending on military projects like the Strategic Defence Initiative, and that belief persists to this day. Meanwhile, the Islamists fought a hot war against the Soviets for a decade in Afghanistan, until eventually the Soviets retreated and the Union collapsed. Thus, Islamists and those with a similar world view believe that they defeated the Soviet Union and brought about its collapse.
Most people in the rest of the world think that it was long term economic instability and a stagnating economy that brought about the end of the Soviet Union. The other events may have been contributing factors, but the essential issue was that the combined economic and political model of the Soviet Union was flawed, and it would've fallen apart sooner or later anyway.
The article says the moon went in to orbit, and continues to drift away, not that it flies away and then drifts back and settles:
"These calculations showed that it is possible to launch a Moon if the georeactor generated about 0.5 x 1030 joules.
That is gigantic," he says. By way of example, a one gigawatt nuclear reactor generates just 1017 joules a year, so you'd need the annual energy production of 1013 of these reactors to get the same amount.
This would put the Moon at a distance of about a 100,000 km, much closer than today's 380,000 km. In the 4.5 billion years since then, the Moon has slowly drifted away from us - a process that is still going on today, at about four centimetres a year.
There are other options. The comparison with car GPS is interesting - ok, they don't mind people navigating and mapping roads, since they are public anyway. But small GPS devices that look like mobile phones - could these be more of a security risk? It is possible to walk to many more locations than can be reached on the public highway. It is possible that they could be used as trigger devices, just like in the Madrid train bombings. Consider that the phones are used as timers, and that one of the standard protocols in use in security sensitive areas now is to jam RF and cell phone frequencies to block this kind of trigger. It's not a huge leap to realise that a GPS device could be similarly linked, and would provide an accurate non-blockable trigger for a vehicle based bomb.
It sounds as though Egypt bans or disables all personal GPS devices. I guess it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that a government is concerned about the military implications - remember that the United States only turned off Selective Availability 8 years ago, and this was only after they developed new technology to actively jam GPS signals in targetted regions. And don't forget the political fallout after the EU decided to implement the Galileo M-code overlay inside the same frequency band as the US military GPS in order to ensure that there was no way to block one without blocking the other. GPS technology has traditionally been militarily and politically sensitive, but at the same time we are now seeing the rise of a new world where most human are going to have cell phones and GPS devices. This is inevitably going to cause some social conflict as societies adjust to the new reality.
Slashdot Mirror
If people really wanted to "equalize costs for businesses between the countries", they could just buy stuff made in their own nations, where the cost is inherently equalised. The fact that almost nobody exclusively buys goods manufactured in their own nation means that, although people may say they support the sentiment, ultimately they care more about low cost than equal cost.
That's an interesting argument. In Europe, some countries have adopted the 35-hour working week, which makes it illegal to employ a worker for longer than that. According to your argument, this is unfair, because those workers have to compete against employees in the United States, where employers can work their employees for as long as they wish. Also, the average salary in some countries, like Switzerland, is higher than the U.S. ($66,000). According to your argument, this is unfair, because Swiss companies have to compete with U.S. companies whilst paying higher salaries. According to your argument, these countries with a higher standard of living than the United States should buy nothing from U.S. companies, not outsource work to the U.S., nor directly employ Americans, since to do so would be unfair. Interesting.
Really? So if, say MySQL AB (formerly one of the most widespread open source companies with employees in over 25 countries) were to employ some programmers in India or Russia (which they do), then, according to your wisdom, their Swedish executives should have their salaries forcibly reduced?
Obviously no executive would then employ foreign workers - you might as well just go the whole hog and make outsourcing illegal, which would effectively end global trade, since the production of practically everything requires some components sourced from China. And if you're going to make the argument that "sourcing" is different to "outsourcing" then it's really not - any legal action that enables trade but not direct employment will just result in independent companies, or self-employed individuals, in India/China producing "components" of specified work and selling them to their Western customer; there's no real difference between trading with an overseas company, and using a subsidiary overseas company, and if you legislate against one then the other will just be used.
Your plan doesn't sound like a very practical solution.
The article headline is unnecessarily sensationalistic. I read it and was like, woah, Google is giving actual dog food as a bonus?! And then I found out actually it's a pretty cool device that costs over £400 after shipping and tax - which is about 72 hours work on the minimum wage. Cry me a river - I don't know of any other company even bothering with Christmas bonuses this year.
Or Energon Cubes?
Traffic police in England also have handheld PDA-type devices that they can type a numberplate into and retrieve the driving license details of the registered driver (including photo). If they pull you over and you have false plates your details won't match those of the legitimate registered owner and you'll be in trouble.
Well, recent currency fluctuations aside, it has certainly been the case that historically UK prices were well above those of the US, hence coining of the phrase Rip-off Britain. Stuff like the Tesco-Levi jeans battle, where an independent retailer was barred from importing and re-selling goods from the US, reinforced the perception that British consumers get a tough deal.
Things seem to be better now - partly due to more competition, particularly from online dealers and Ebay, where the traditional good communication links from Hong Kong to the UK mean you can often get fast shipping at Chinese domestic prices. I mean, £10 for a 2GB iPod nano clone including shipping, delivered in 3 days... amazing really.
The big issue now is that we seem to be paying much more than our European neighbours for energy costs. Apart from petrol at the pump, this has nothing to do with taxes - the UK has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in Europe, and domestic energy VAT of only 5%, so there is really no reason why energy companies can't deliver lower prices. I blame lack of competition in the market - if we paid for energy the same way we paid for (unlocked) mobile phone service, the costs would come crashing down.
There's an interesting ZDNet article on the cable intercept submarines. I think it was actually on Slashdot years ago..ah yes, here we go.
No we don't. If they had compared many different graphics cards on the same Linux system, and shown that there was some performance degradation on a particular card that occurred every time the test was run, then we might know why the test performed badly. At the moment the idea that it was the graphics drivers is just a hypothesis.
No it isn't. How do you know that a particular sector of the hard disk isn't failing, causing access to that one sector to be a thousand times slower than other sectors? This is why experiments are supposed to be run many times, across different platforms, and the aggregate results taken. Without multiple experimental replicates you have no way of showing that the results you observe generalise at all; the observed problem could just be one bad run.
Various problems with the Phoronix test methodology have been noted before and before that. Without going over the same stuff, here are some potential questions about this benchmarking:
There are a lot of questions that this benchmarking should have answered, and a lot of assumptions made that could potentially be invalid.
It depends on your national laws. In the United States criminal law can be applied if you knew you were violating copyright, criminal infringement does not have to be commercial (since 1976). As another poster pointed out, since the 1996 WIPO treaty both the US and EU have brought in the DMCA and EUCD respectively, which enables criminal law remedies for circumvention of copyright protection measures (which would apply in the BBC iPlayer case, even though the measures they use to protect the iPhone streams are very simple and ineffective).
Actually, it might be.
Violating the terms of a contractual obligation is not illegal - you can be sued in a civil court by the other parties to the contract, but you can't be arrested and prosecuted in criminal court unless you are suspected of actually violating criminal law. Unfortunately, the BBC could claim that you are in fact violating copyright law, since unless you accept their user contract you won't have a license to reproduce their content on your PC. Think of it as kind of how the GPL works - if you don't accept the GPL contract and redistribute the work, then you are guilty of criminal copyright infringement. If you do accept the GPL contract, then you can redistribute without violating copyright law.
The problem is that the secret is already out. Wikimapia has a detailed photo of Jamnagar Air Force Base, the exact same base that these guys have been charged with taking photos of. Not only that, but metadata has been added that is obviously from people who work on the base - check out the Mig 29s, 28 squadron air force, Mig 21s, choppers, swimming pool, school, gymnasium, canteen; it's all there, even the very personal tag "SSQ (Anshu was born here 11 Dec 02)". The proud father who wrote that is going to be in trouble...
iPlayer-Downloader has no licensing restrictions and no DRM :-)
The engineers were initially arrested for GPS surveying - despite the fact that Google Maps appears to have quite a detailed map of Jamnagar (including the airforce base).
The fact that the police actually found some incriminating photos afterwards doesn't mean that the original arrest was reasonable - using a GPS device isn't a crime, and shouldn't give the police license to search the rest of your equipment looking for further evidence.
As to whether photographing an air force base should be a crime in the first place - let me introduce a detailed aerial photo of Jamnagar Air Force Base! Also try searching for Jamnagar AFB on Google images :-) You can't put the cat back in the bag, and this kind of inadvertent information leakage is exactly what I was talking about when I noted the conflict between the traditional secrecy of the military/government and cheap, accurate personal electronics.
The British police are also interested in those odd people who walk around with GPS devices and then start drawing maps in a cafe. OpenStreetMappers beware.
I have had similar discussions - the responses were divided between "Tianawhat?" and "Western propaganda! It did never happen!".
And the best Chinese quote I got about democracy: "Our system is better - we always get the right people! Your system is bad - when people vote they sometimes choose the wrong person!".
Somewhat ambiguous wording - the Unions were obviously against Child Labour.
Another benefit of Unions - the development of a standard eight hour working day. In Britain, the chronic abuse of child workers resulted in the Unions demanding a maximum of 8 hours per day (or 40 hours per week) for child workers. This standard eventually became the norm for most adult workers as well.
More unrecognised benefits:
Strict ideologies are unhelpful - in some cases the Unions have supported, or even demanded, reform to bring in fairer and safer working conditions, in other cases Unions have been obstructive, extortative and unrealistic in their dealings. Neither fact means that Unions are always good or always bad.
They said the same thing when the Japanese started making cars... I have no doubt that Chinese companies could engineer cars to meet US/European safety regulations, but at the moment they mainly sell to their domestic less-regulated market, so they save money by having lower engineering standards. If there's money to be made by building to higher standards and exporting to the rest of the world, then they will do it.
Sun paid $1 billion for MySQL AB. It has been estimated that MySQL AB revenue was around $80 million (source) Let's be optimistic and assume $100m. But revenue is irrelevant - what matters is profit. In a normal industry a company should expect to make around 10% profit a year - this is obviously a very, very rough figure, but the company needs to return more to shareholders than they would get from a safer bank savings account, or bonds, which usually hover around 5% or so. Again, these figures are very rough, but if we're in the in the right magnitude we should be okay in generating a rough estimate.
The Price/Earnings Ratio historically hovers around 16 (the last decade was a historical anomaly which looks like it is rapidly being corrected) I think at the moment we are somewhere around 18. That means that the share price, relative to the rest of the market, should be somewhere near 18. If it's higher, Sun overpaid, less, Sun got a bargain. We don't know the profit margin of MySQL AB, but we can probably assume that 10% is an optimistic estimate for an open source services company in the current economic climate. That means annual profits of around $10m based on $100m revenue. Which makes the P/E ratio (1*10**9)/(0.10*100*10**6)=100. This is quite an amazing ratio - more than five times the current market average - so my conclusion is that Sun massively overpaid.
I am not an economics expert, just an enthusiastic amateur, so I am happy if anyone can poke any serious holes in the numbers I came up with. To get the P/E to a reasonable figure MySQL AB would have to be generating profits of $50m at 50% of revenue, which seems totally unrealistic. On the other hand, I can't see why Sun would pay so much when they had access to all the figures, so I feel like I must be missing something here...
The problem is believing that you were the one that did the forcing. When you perform some actions, and then some events occur, it is human tendency to correlate the two and believe that you somehow "caused" the events through your actions. This is a particularly appealing train of thought when the events happen to concur with your world view point.
The Power of Nightmares provides an interesting insight in to the various viewpoints surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. Americans were told by the Neo-Con government that the United States had defeated the Soviet Union through proxy wars (e.g. Vietnam, Afghanistan) and big spending on military projects like the Strategic Defence Initiative, and that belief persists to this day. Meanwhile, the Islamists fought a hot war against the Soviets for a decade in Afghanistan, until eventually the Soviets retreated and the Union collapsed. Thus, Islamists and those with a similar world view believe that they defeated the Soviet Union and brought about its collapse.
Most people in the rest of the world think that it was long term economic instability and a stagnating economy that brought about the end of the Soviet Union. The other events may have been contributing factors, but the essential issue was that the combined economic and political model of the Soviet Union was flawed, and it would've fallen apart sooner or later anyway.
The article says the moon went in to orbit, and continues to drift away, not that it flies away and then drifts back and settles:
There are other options. The comparison with car GPS is interesting - ok, they don't mind people navigating and mapping roads, since they are public anyway. But small GPS devices that look like mobile phones - could these be more of a security risk? It is possible to walk to many more locations than can be reached on the public highway. It is possible that they could be used as trigger devices, just like in the Madrid train bombings. Consider that the phones are used as timers, and that one of the standard protocols in use in security sensitive areas now is to jam RF and cell phone frequencies to block this kind of trigger. It's not a huge leap to realise that a GPS device could be similarly linked, and would provide an accurate non-blockable trigger for a vehicle based bomb.
It sounds as though Egypt bans or disables all personal GPS devices. I guess it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that a government is concerned about the military implications - remember that the United States only turned off Selective Availability 8 years ago, and this was only after they developed new technology to actively jam GPS signals in targetted regions. And don't forget the political fallout after the EU decided to implement the Galileo M-code overlay inside the same frequency band as the US military GPS in order to ensure that there was no way to block one without blocking the other. GPS technology has traditionally been militarily and politically sensitive, but at the same time we are now seeing the rise of a new world where most human are going to have cell phones and GPS devices. This is inevitably going to cause some social conflict as societies adjust to the new reality.