I bought a Cayman to replace the NetGear. Their support is five days a week, so I wound up calling Pacific Bell. (I deliberately bought the Cayman because Pac Bell said they'd support it).
In what seems like a typical case of idiocy, their Tier One support person, despite having not the slightest clue what she was talking about, left me on the phone with her for 50 minutes as she tried to figure out how to work out the problem herself. I finally had to ask her supervisor to send me up.
Once I got up, the problem took six minutes to solve.
The shape of support people appears to be dismal no matter what country you're in:-(. (The Pac Bell people sounded like Americans).
A huge proportion of people breaking into systems today - probably more than 9 out of 10 - use pre-built kits to get in; they have no ability to get in themselves. If there's no kit for my setup, then they can't get in.
Security through obscurity is going to make it a lot harder for even a real expert to get in - since he will have to do some programming, instead of using a pre-built kit.
Apple has been very responsive with security updates - they're running a day or two from the announcement. As long as that continues, and I use their automated updates, my system will be long since updated by the time a pre-built kit can be released - if, indeed, anyone bothers.
I think that's a big advantage.
As for my PowerBook...
Other high-end laptops of comparable quality are comparable in price. If you want to compare them with a low-end Dell, take the iBook for $999. Dell might cost 20% less and most of that is in maintaining the proprietary operating system and other goodies -- all of which I want and am willing to spend more for.
Of course that means that the hypothetical $50k pays for five programmers instead of ten. It's still a huge difference.
The other guy who replied to you, though, has an excellent point - eventually things will equalize. Because of the need for a liason between Indian programmers and US executives, there will always be higher overheads associated with hiring the foreign workers. Once Indian wages approach $25k, outsourcing is likely to start looking pretty uneconomic in view of the extra costs of offshoring and even the public relations losses.
I normally wouldn't answer such a rude comment, and I apologise to my audience for feeding the troll. At the same time, I actually think the reasoning behind my decision is very interesting, and might help others. So I'm pleased to share it.
* The Apple products use a different processor, which means a different machine language than mainstream systems. This means buffer overflow exploits aimed at Intel-based platforms can't be used without rewriting the machine language portions, which is beyond the abilities of the click-n-drool set. So even if a buffer overflow is found in, say, Apache, it will take quite a while before an exploit compatible with MacOS X is found and pushed into the wild.
* The Apple products have a puny market share, which means relatively few people will bother making exploits and going to the effort to do that machine language programming. And they are way too rare to make worms likely to succeed. Can you imagine hitting millions of machines with exploit code just to get the few hundred Apple servers in the universe? People writing these things want more bang for their bandwidth, so they spend their time on high market share systems like Windows and Linux.
* The Apple xserve has an automated update, just like Windows Update and Apt-Get. Because the hardware and software are integrated and well known, there are likely to be fewer issues with upgrading, which in turn means they are easier to trust. If I simply delay a day in running software update, I'm going to know if there are any issues. This strikes me as a HUGE advantage over, say, the Windows service packs which routinely disable servers.
* The Xserve was $3,700, which is not much compared to roughly equivalent products from IBM and Dell.
Hope that helps.
D
PS My TiBook was $3,000. Now it's down to $2,600. Not so bad considering what a great machine it is. Apple products cost money, but so does anything else of high quality.
In the case of a hypothetical Indian venture, I'd manage the services of Indian programmers. I'd probably be an entreuepenur who would make a profit by packaging and marketing those services, so I would make whatever profit the market would bear - and I think it would be substantial.
I probably wouldn't have to learn other langauges in the Indian case, since most of them speak English well enough to be understood when in-person factors like gestures and clearer connections are factored in.
In the Brazilian case, I would have to learn Portuguese, which unfortunately isn't easy.
I don't have kids, and don't plan to, so that's a non-issue.
I don't think our society is healthy enough to produce happy children. Successful children, perhaps, but not happy ones.
This is one of the things that makes me want to seriously consider alternatives to our present society. There are a lot of good things about it, yes, but there are a lot of severely diseased things about it too.
Thanks for doing the numbers - that was very informative!
I suppose I could get away with sneaking my PowerBook over on a "tourism" trip. But when it came to buying a new one I might be in trouble:-(.
Still, it doesn't sound like I'm worse off. It sounds like it's pretty similar to the US lifestyle at less than 1/3 the cost.
Of course the best thing to do would be to keep US contacts and make some reasonable fraction of US money, say half what I make now, or $4,000 a month. That would be roughly R$12,000 and you couldn't tell me I couldn't enjoy the good life at that income level.
My belief is that for maybe a couple of thousand R$ a month I could get a nice oceanfront condominium with a great view, which would cost about three thousand DOLLARS a month in California. So if I want a nice view... it's almost affordable in Rio, and an almost unreachable dream in California.
I don't doubt the ability of the Indian programmers, and nothing in what I wrote was meant to question that.
However, I happened to have a problem with a Netgear router, and I was transferred to a bunch of thick-accented tech support people who were fairly obviously in India. What was clear after talking to them is that it was very hard to be understood, and I think it would be even worse if I had to communicate to them about a difficult software project.
So a firm of Indians with expat Americans capable of bridging the gap between the two cultures seems like a pretty good idea.
You would pay me - or someone like me - in India (or whatever other country this was done in) for doing the communication, which is much easier face to face.
It's not the Indian programmers who would need me (although they'd welcome getting the business). It would be the American side of things that would find my services useful.
Funny coincidence: I just got the boss to buy me a boatload of Apple gear.
Our cute buxom office assistant takes any excuse to visit my office and hug the new PowerMac G4. Says it's the coolest thing she's ever seen.
How did I sell the Apple gear to this tragically Windows-based company?
Security. I figure it will be a lot easier to keep up with the patch joneses with MacOS X server than Linux or Windows. I sold that to the boss and now I have the gadgets.
Not bad. Now I just have to get them to work.
Incidentally, if you're not desperate for SCSI drives, Apple actually beats its competitors on price by a nice margin.
Even if we say that $50k is a reasonably civilized salary, that misses the point entirely.
It's still ten times what a typical Indian programmer makes.
I'd say my initial point stands - it would be a good idea to get out of this country and live in a lower cost part of the world.
This is particularly true if you (like me) would prefer to live in a warm weather part of the world. 99% of the US has horrible cold winters. Of the remaining 1%, pretty much all of it is extraordinarily high cost.
I'm not sure why anyone would want to hire Americans, since our cost of living has shot way beyond anything like a reasonable level. You give someone a $100k salary, and in California he can pretty much just make ends meet and maybe buy a few gadgets.
I'm actually thinking it might be a good idea to move offshore myself. I'd earn less, but I might earn more when adjusted to the cost of living in, say, the Philippines or Brazil.
I'd still earn a lot more than the typical offshore worker due to excellent English skills. All I would need to do is learn how to communicate with them and I'd be in demand in the same way the Los Angeles auto mechanic head is. He typically gives instructions to the hispanics who do the real work. No different from my scenerio.
True, the infrastructure isn't there, but if enough of us go, it's going to improve over time. The first mover keeps the low cost of living, and in fact benefits from inevitable increases in costs. For instance, if I buy a house today, it will go up in value if more come.
SF guru Robert Heinlein always said that we have a choice of staying fat and happy in our own spaces, or going to explore the unknown. He said the fat and happy places would decline, and eventually get swallowed up by more competitive ones. I think we're seeing that happen right now, in our own lifetimes. There's no space travel, true, but international travel is every bit as mysterious to the average guy.
Maybe it's about time to realize that unfortunately, America isn't what it's cracked up to be anymore. We've gotten too flabby and expensive for our own good. That spells problems, yes, but it also spells opportunity for those who dare to take it.
Well, I get about a million spams a year, but that doesn't make the Internet any less useful. I still hear from this cute girl I've been talking to via email, and hearing from her is worth wading through a thousand spams to get to her.
And hearing from my boss when he's upset, however unpleasant it can be at times, is a lot easier over email than him screaming in my face.
As long as those thinsg are true, your essential point is accurate. I liked the metaphor of that nice fellow who responded with the analogy that you wouldn't go to a shopping mall where random people continuously waved Goatse posters at you... but if it's still the best place to buy your favourite computer or digital camera, you'll still go.
I've used MacOS X since the first public beta, and there has always been an emacs waiting for me.
Pity it's not a graphical emacs or - better yet - xemacs. I really want to find an emacs where I can edit in some of the dreamy proportional fonts they have, and so far I haven't found anything like that:-(.
For action movies like The Terminator and The Hulk, foreign rights about double box office gross, and that alone would bring The Hulk (and the Terminator 3, for that matter) back to major profitability.
Actually, cellphone service here is so poor it's a joke in many areas. It doesn't hurt that the richest areas of LA are the most hilly and geographically challenging, but even in the flats reception seems poor.
I wonder if real estate is simply so expensive that it's difficult to get contracts for enough cells.
I'm still muddling through with my EOS D30, but I agree with your basic point of view.
One enormous advantage of the SLR, which is not immediately obvious to someone not familiar with them, is that you have an optical viewfinder and look directly through the lens when composing shots. If you're using manual focus, it's hard to underestimate how big an advantage this is over the low-resolution electronic viewfinder in most digital cameras, including this Sony. The Sony magnifies the center of the image when manual focus is used, but it's still not going to be as slick as a genuine optical viewfinder.
The sensor size factor is 1.6, which means the 28mm-135mm becomes 44.8-216mm. It's a really nice range, although it would be really nice to have wider angle. Unfortunately, wide angle zooms have generally pretty poor zoom ranges.
I'm tempted to upgrade to the 10D but the D30 has served me very well.
When you turn on your 10D, how much time does it take before you can take your first picture? On the D30 it takes about 30 seconds or so and that delay's very annoying - especially when the camera has shut itself down and you don't realize it until the once in a lifetime picture comes by.
Surfing HTML on the HipTop works great, even with images.
Either this reviewer is lying, or the SideKick is significantly better.
My only complaint about the HipTop - and it's a biggie - is that internet service stinks. Half the time I can't get a GSM signal and therefore can't use the device at all.
I managed to break it, and I'm not getting a new one until I find out things are working better. Anyone have insight on this?
Does anyone know of a similar web surfing device compatible with all carriers, so I can switch around if things are still bad with T-Mobile when my contract expires?
Cogentco's $1,000 for 100mbps is one heck of a deal, one I wish I could take advantage of. Even their $3,000 for 100mbps for service providers is pretty darn good.
Pity they're so involved with spam... and that they have heavy restrictions on what you can do with the bandwidth.
The other problem is that you have to be in a CogentCo connected building, and most of them are really ugly places around Downtown LA. (At least here in Los Angeles).
So that's really too bad about spam, since this looks like a great solution for inexpensive high bandwidth.
I'm against piracy, so I don't really like file sharing, but I don't hate file sharing enough to want the RIAA to win. It just seems like too much.
I will pay my phone bill with a little appreciation this month, since I'm glad my phone company had the guts to take a stand. Maybe I'll even pay it early.
D
Re:full article text, no pass required
on
Software Archaeology
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I tried it on both Mozilla on a Linux system and Internet Explorer under Windows, and in neither case did it work.
Perhaps you need to restrict ads to Flash instead of Real?
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a Cayman to replace the NetGear. Their support is five days a week, so I wound up calling Pacific Bell. (I deliberately bought the Cayman because Pac Bell said they'd support it).
:-(. (The Pac Bell people sounded like Americans).
In what seems like a typical case of idiocy, their Tier One support person, despite having not the slightest clue what she was talking about, left me on the phone with her for 50 minutes as she tried to figure out how to work out the problem herself. I finally had to ask her supervisor to send me up.
Once I got up, the problem took six minutes to solve.
The shape of support people appears to be dismal no matter what country you're in
D
A huge proportion of people breaking into systems today - probably more than 9 out of 10 - use pre-built kits to get in; they have no ability to get in themselves. If there's no kit for my setup, then they can't get in.
...
Security through obscurity is going to make it a lot harder for even a real expert to get in - since he will have to do some programming, instead of using a pre-built kit.
Apple has been very responsive with security updates - they're running a day or two from the announcement. As long as that continues, and I use their automated updates, my system will be long since updated by the time a pre-built kit can be released - if, indeed, anyone bothers.
I think that's a big advantage.
As for my PowerBook
Other high-end laptops of comparable quality are comparable in price. If you want to compare them with a low-end Dell, take the iBook for $999. Dell might cost 20% less and most of that is in maintaining the proprietary operating system and other goodies -- all of which I want and am willing to spend more for.
D
Of course that means that the hypothetical $50k pays for five programmers instead of ten. It's still a huge difference.
The other guy who replied to you, though, has an excellent point - eventually things will equalize. Because of the need for a liason between Indian programmers and US executives, there will always be higher overheads associated with hiring the foreign workers. Once Indian wages approach $25k, outsourcing is likely to start looking pretty uneconomic in view of the extra costs of offshoring and even the public relations losses.
D
I normally wouldn't answer such a rude comment, and I apologise to my audience for feeding the troll. At the same time, I actually think the reasoning behind my decision is very interesting, and might help others. So I'm pleased to share it.
* The Apple products use a different processor, which means a different machine language than mainstream systems. This means buffer overflow exploits aimed at Intel-based platforms can't be used without rewriting the machine language portions, which is beyond the abilities of the click-n-drool set. So even if a buffer overflow is found in, say, Apache, it will take quite a while before an exploit compatible with MacOS X is found and pushed into the wild.
* The Apple products have a puny market share, which means relatively few people will bother making exploits and going to the effort to do that machine language programming. And they are way too rare to make worms likely to succeed. Can you imagine hitting millions of machines with exploit code just to get the few hundred Apple servers in the universe? People writing these things want more bang for their bandwidth, so they spend their time on high market share systems like Windows and Linux.
* The Apple xserve has an automated update, just like Windows Update and Apt-Get. Because the hardware and software are integrated and well known, there are likely to be fewer issues with upgrading, which in turn means they are easier to trust. If I simply delay a day in running software update, I'm going to know if there are any issues. This strikes me as a HUGE advantage over, say, the Windows service packs which routinely disable servers.
* The Xserve was $3,700, which is not much compared to roughly equivalent products from IBM and Dell.
Hope that helps.
D
PS My TiBook was $3,000. Now it's down to $2,600. Not so bad considering what a great machine it is. Apple products cost money, but so does anything else of high quality.
In the case of a hypothetical Indian venture, I'd manage the services of Indian programmers. I'd probably be an entreuepenur who would make a profit by packaging and marketing those services, so I would make whatever profit the market would bear - and I think it would be substantial.
I probably wouldn't have to learn other langauges in the Indian case, since most of them speak English well enough to be understood when in-person factors like gestures and clearer connections are factored in.
In the Brazilian case, I would have to learn Portuguese, which unfortunately isn't easy.
D
I don't have kids, and don't plan to, so that's a non-issue.
I don't think our society is healthy enough to produce happy children. Successful children, perhaps, but not happy ones.
This is one of the things that makes me want to seriously consider alternatives to our present society. There are a lot of good things about it, yes, but there are a lot of severely diseased things about it too.
D
Thanks for doing the numbers - that was very informative!
:-(.
... it's almost affordable in Rio, and an almost unreachable dream in California.
I suppose I could get away with sneaking my PowerBook over on a "tourism" trip. But when it came to buying a new one I might be in trouble
Still, it doesn't sound like I'm worse off. It sounds like it's pretty similar to the US lifestyle at less than 1/3 the cost.
Of course the best thing to do would be to keep US contacts and make some reasonable fraction of US money, say half what I make now, or $4,000 a month. That would be roughly R$12,000 and you couldn't tell me I couldn't enjoy the good life at that income level.
My belief is that for maybe a couple of thousand R$ a month I could get a nice oceanfront condominium with a great view, which would cost about three thousand DOLLARS a month in California. So if I want a nice view
Which was exactly my point.
D
I don't doubt the ability of the Indian programmers, and nothing in what I wrote was meant to question that.
However, I happened to have a problem with a Netgear router, and I was transferred to a bunch of thick-accented tech support people who were fairly obviously in India. What was clear after talking to them is that it was very hard to be understood, and I think it would be even worse if I had to communicate to them about a difficult software project.
So a firm of Indians with expat Americans capable of bridging the gap between the two cultures seems like a pretty good idea.
You would pay me - or someone like me - in India (or whatever other country this was done in) for doing the communication, which is much easier face to face.
It's not the Indian programmers who would need me (although they'd welcome getting the business). It would be the American side of things that would find my services useful.
D
Well, yes ... if you want to freeze to death during the rather unpleasant period known as "winter".
My mother came from Florida, and I fear I inherited her cold-intolerent genes. Better foreign than frozen for me.
D
Funny coincidence: I just got the boss to buy me a boatload of Apple gear.
Our cute buxom office assistant takes any excuse to visit my office and hug the new PowerMac G4. Says it's the coolest thing she's ever seen.
How did I sell the Apple gear to this tragically Windows-based company?
Security. I figure it will be a lot easier to keep up with the patch joneses with MacOS X server than Linux or Windows. I sold that to the boss and now I have the gadgets.
Not bad. Now I just have to get them to work.
Incidentally, if you're not desperate for SCSI drives, Apple actually beats its competitors on price by a nice margin.
D
Even if we say that $50k is a reasonably civilized salary, that misses the point entirely.
It's still ten times what a typical Indian programmer makes.
I'd say my initial point stands - it would be a good idea to get out of this country and live in a lower cost part of the world.
This is particularly true if you (like me) would prefer to live in a warm weather part of the world. 99% of the US has horrible cold winters. Of the remaining 1%, pretty much all of it is extraordinarily high cost.
D
I'm not sure why anyone would want to hire Americans, since our cost of living has shot way beyond anything like a reasonable level. You give someone a $100k salary, and in California he can pretty much just make ends meet and maybe buy a few gadgets.
I'm actually thinking it might be a good idea to move offshore myself. I'd earn less, but I might earn more when adjusted to the cost of living in, say, the Philippines or Brazil.
I'd still earn a lot more than the typical offshore worker due to excellent English skills. All I would need to do is learn how to communicate with them and I'd be in demand in the same way the Los Angeles auto mechanic head is. He typically gives instructions to the hispanics who do the real work. No different from my scenerio.
True, the infrastructure isn't there, but if enough of us go, it's going to improve over time. The first mover keeps the low cost of living, and in fact benefits from inevitable increases in costs. For instance, if I buy a house today, it will go up in value if more come.
SF guru Robert Heinlein always said that we have a choice of staying fat and happy in our own spaces, or going to explore the unknown. He said the fat and happy places would decline, and eventually get swallowed up by more competitive ones. I think we're seeing that happen right now, in our own lifetimes. There's no space travel, true, but international travel is every bit as mysterious to the average guy.
Maybe it's about time to realize that unfortunately, America isn't what it's cracked up to be anymore. We've gotten too flabby and expensive for our own good. That spells problems, yes, but it also spells opportunity for those who dare to take it.
D
Well, I get about a million spams a year, but that doesn't make the Internet any less useful. I still hear from this cute girl I've been talking to via email, and hearing from her is worth wading through a thousand spams to get to her.
... but if it's still the best place to buy your favourite computer or digital camera, you'll still go.
And hearing from my boss when he's upset, however unpleasant it can be at times, is a lot easier over email than him screaming in my face.
As long as those thinsg are true, your essential point is accurate. I liked the metaphor of that nice fellow who responded with the analogy that you wouldn't go to a shopping mall where random people continuously waved Goatse posters at you
D
Is there an Aqua Emacs port with variable width font support yet?
...
I've been looking for one for ages
Many thanks.
D
Actually, I think it's always been there.
:-(.
I've used MacOS X since the first public beta, and there has always been an emacs waiting for me.
Pity it's not a graphical emacs or - better yet - xemacs. I really want to find an emacs where I can edit in some of the dreamy proportional fonts they have, and so far I haven't found anything like that
Any ideas?
D
How would you compare the Sidekick to the Pocket PC Phone Edition?
D
Nice try.
The best movie of the season was almost certainly Finding Nemo, which was 100% CGI.
The worst movie of the season was almost certainly Gigli, which I don't think had any CGI at all.
Oops!
D
For action movies like The Terminator and The Hulk, foreign rights about double box office gross, and that alone would bring The Hulk (and the Terminator 3, for that matter) back to major profitability.
D
Actually, cellphone service here is so poor it's a joke in many areas. It doesn't hurt that the richest areas of LA are the most hilly and geographically challenging, but even in the flats reception seems poor.
I wonder if real estate is simply so expensive that it's difficult to get contracts for enough cells.
D
I'm still muddling through with my EOS D30, but I agree with your basic point of view.
One enormous advantage of the SLR, which is not immediately obvious to someone not familiar with them, is that you have an optical viewfinder and look directly through the lens when composing shots. If you're using manual focus, it's hard to underestimate how big an advantage this is over the low-resolution electronic viewfinder in most digital cameras, including this Sony. The Sony magnifies the center of the image when manual focus is used, but it's still not going to be as slick as a genuine optical viewfinder.
The sensor size factor is 1.6, which means the 28mm-135mm becomes 44.8-216mm. It's a really nice range, although it would be really nice to have wider angle. Unfortunately, wide angle zooms have generally pretty poor zoom ranges.
I'm tempted to upgrade to the 10D but the D30 has served me very well.
When you turn on your 10D, how much time does it take before you can take your first picture? On the D30 it takes about 30 seconds or so and that delay's very annoying - especially when the camera has shut itself down and you don't realize it until the once in a lifetime picture comes by.
D
No, it can't be used with any other provider :-(.
It's not impossible that service has improved since I broke mine, since it was a few months ago.
Where is your friend? I'm in the Los Angeles area (San Fernando Valley).
D
Surfing HTML on the HipTop works great, even with images.
Either this reviewer is lying, or the SideKick is significantly better.
My only complaint about the HipTop - and it's a biggie - is that internet service stinks. Half the time I can't get a GSM signal and therefore can't use the device at all.
I managed to break it, and I'm not getting a new one until I find out things are working better. Anyone have insight on this?
Does anyone know of a similar web surfing device compatible with all carriers, so I can switch around if things are still bad with T-Mobile when my contract expires?
D
Cogentco's $1,000 for 100mbps is one heck of a deal, one I wish I could take advantage of. Even their $3,000 for 100mbps for service providers is pretty darn good.
... and that they have heavy restrictions on what you can do with the bandwidth.
Pity they're so involved with spam
The other problem is that you have to be in a CogentCo connected building, and most of them are really ugly places around Downtown LA. (At least here in Los Angeles).
So that's really too bad about spam, since this looks like a great solution for inexpensive high bandwidth.
D
I'm against piracy, so I don't really like file sharing, but I don't hate file sharing enough to want the RIAA to win. It just seems like too much.
I will pay my phone bill with a little appreciation this month, since I'm glad my phone company had the guts to take a stand. Maybe I'll even pay it early.
D
I tried it on both Mozilla on a Linux system and Internet Explorer under Windows, and in neither case did it work.
Perhaps you need to restrict ads to Flash instead of Real?
D