LOL about the shielded cable wireless trick. I'll tell that to a coworker, they won't get it for days!
How about limiting the range? I could measure my house from end to end and restrict the range to that. Then someone might have to come up to my doorstep to tap me.:)
Just wondering. I have a wireless router using WPA-PSK security with TKIP cipher type and a 24 character WPA passphrase and I was wondering if that can be hacked?
Spatial Tree file view and huge directories
on
GNOME 2.12 Previewed
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· Score: 1
How much time and cpu power/RAM will be needed for this feature to process a tree with a hundred directories, one directory having a total of, say, 5000 pictures/thumbnails?
That was the most insightful and wise comment by a business owner I've EVER read except my own boss who has said roughly the same thing. He owns this business, too.
Usually when you allow someone to make a huge mess and leave someone else to clean it up, you have a big problem on your hands.
We're giving billions in consumer dollars, intellectual property and factory construction and product development technology to one of the most undemocratic, misogynistic, anti-reproductive choice, pollution-happy, anti-workers rights nations on Earth.
China is in every way the enemy of America except in war. Their way of life is absolutely opposed to ours.
Would you have given such things to Nazi Germany even if they had not declared war on America? No. Well just about everything the Nazi's did to their people, the Chinese do and worse. All they haven't done is invade other nations. Whoops, I forgot, they invaded Tibet!
By trading with China we are shooting workers' rights, human rights, democracy and even environmental policy reform, in the foot.
Cisco's shareholders aren't going far enough; they should close down their factories in China. I'm tired of hearing all this kowtowing to the free market - China is proving that it can have free market "enterprise zones" without democracy and they have 20 of the world's most polluted cities. That Government is a black hole sucking the world into an endless downward spiral of decay in which absolute greed is trumping human rights.
We're doing way more harm than good to the world by allowing corporations in the US to do business with despotic nations like China who refuse to reform their ways.
As I said, the shareholders aren't going far enough with this.
So, exactly how many rich people wound up on the list of WTC dead? Have you heard of any?
The rich wouldn't be found in the WTC, they'd be found in their mansions out on the plantation watching the immigrants pick grapes for their wine. The middle class and investor-wannabes would be found in the WTC.
[Yes, we shouldn't expect opportunities to be open to unqualified people, or to remain if they are non-value added.]
But I'm not talking about the unqualified issue. I'm talking about what was once a proliferation of opportunities for neophytes in the entry-level area. The "entry level" job has quietly become extinct.
The "higher value" jobs you could even conceive of now, have no remote hope of a "come on in, we'll train you!" factor.
To get a job in consulting, the higher value industry you spoke of, requires months if not years of training and by then that industry will be heavily saturated and that training will be worth very little against those who are by then bringing years of experience AND education to the table. And then there'll be some new way to offshore consulting, too; look at some future rendition of vnc for that.
[Building factories creates jobs, more technical and higher paying, than to just have people soldering the things together. Long term most industries end up needing less people to perform the same task. The only way to increase employment, is to create new industries.]
Building factories creates temporary construction jobs. And as I said, new industries cropping up now, are closed to entry level people; by the time you're retrained for it, you're competing against superior people in a market that, by then, has already begun to shrink.
[I agree, but so long as the free market keeps people fed and happy, then it's doing it's job. All economics does is exist as a system to distribute limited resources.]
A lot of people are no longer fed and happy. How many does it take before we realize how big the cracks in the system are?
As I said, keep your eye on those credit companies. The fate of the economy is in their hands.
[ I would contend we are still far from that point. Developing the international infrastructure (transport, communications, legal, etc), is expensive. New industries start up small. They don't have the ability to offshore immediately. Over time however, like any other industry they will end up offshored, and we move to the next thing. Let's look at the alternative to offshoring. US companies only able to hire US workers, are then hampered when it comes to doing buisness in the world. A foreign company that makes similar products with cheaper foreign labor, has a distinct advanatage over a US company. Americans have already shown they'd buy cheaper imported goods than to "buy American." Even if we do have tariffs for imports, they will have an advantage selling to the 6 billion people who don't live in the US. Lower exports = weaker dollar = overall goods more expensive. An isolationist economic policy means a lower standard of living for everybody. And the middle class would be hardest hit, the rich can afford to invest in foreign currency and deal with 10% higher prices.]
Eh, wait a minute, we already are not exporting much. If we lose all our exports and our imports we'd be seeing a net gain, right?
[What about those elevator operators? Door-to-door salesmen? Some jobs aren't needed anymore, sometimes they leave then come back, people need to be flexible.]
So where do these people go when they're homeless, or need a heart transplant and they're abandoned to die because they don't have $250,000 to pay for it?
The difference between now and the good old days that you're referring to, is back then there were entry level positions in The Next Big Thing.
Show me one next big thing, for one thing, and then while you're at it, show me where entry level opportunities exist there.
Take Biotech. You can't just walk in like you did with IT; you need years of training even to be a lab tech. Now they're offshoring that. The current crop of about 200,000 Biotech students rushing to get into the industry have a rude awakening waiting for them in the form of a heavily saturated market and a heavily offshored workforce. So now you need a PhD to get in that industry. But now th
[Who says domestic tapping isn't going offshore? Anybody can tap anywhere in the world, it's one of the problems with our highly connected information systems.]
If you make your system invulnerable to outside access, you still have the admin to worry about. In the US, there's better pay and the FBI to keep that in check. Offshore, the admin is paid peanuts and there's no FBI... they can be bribed ten years' salary at relatively low cost.
China is so good at IP piracy that they're stealing plans for cars. How hard would it be to get personal information at these foreign plants?
[In 1998 2 stoner friends of mine with hardly any skills earned $60k/year in San Jose doing web maintenance. Not creating web pages mind you, but just making sure the links worked and content displayed correctly. The IT industry overexpanded, they took anybody and everybody. Right now, unfortunately, talented people are feeling the hardship as well as the untalented. In the long run things will equalize, those who truly have a passion will be the ones employed, not just a warm body.]
So, basically, it is okay that future windows of opportunity will be closed to more people than before?
[And unless the goverment does something, businesses will pull out to other countries. Getting ripped off is an additional cost which can quickly outweigh labor cost savings.]
The foreign government may not be able to do something. Al Qaeda will be the next group to want a piece of the offshore ID theft pie. Who else but us can (or, more specifically, has managed to) beat them?
Are you willing to trust your personal information to the idea that "some foreign government will eventually want to protect me or the companies will pull out"?
Why has Chevrolet not pulled out of China? Citibank hasn't left India despite being burnt. It's because they stand to lose billions. If Americans were better educated about the dangers of offshoring, Citibank would flee India for fear of a huge consumer backlash. This backlash is already beginning to dog-leash some of those call centers.
[Textiles was a dead end industry, cars have actually ended up becoming balanced offshore and onshore, and cheap electronics, we use those to create the entire IT industry. There doesn't have to be a direct progression like IT being a layer of business on top of the electronics one. Value added, means there are goods and services that can gain higher margins that labor can move into. Computer manufacturing has become a low margin affair, it's the services that earn more money. Look at how IBM has reinvented itself.]
Inherently, higher profit margin goods and services will be made lower margin much faster now than ever before, because of a much faster response by competition (a larger swelling of unemployed people looking for the next bill-paying thing). The tragedy of the commons, in a commercial sense.
IBM, by the way, has cut a ton of jobs while reinventing itself.
[Cars being made by US workers working for Japanese companies investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the US (including building hybrids). Computers are no longer high value, $299 for a complete system, and cellphones that are literally given away. Services are higher value. The cellphone service providers, IBM has shed much of it's hardware (hard drives, computers) and moved towards a consulting service and custom chip provider.]
Well, actually, Toyota is trying to prop up GM, etc., to keep them from going bankrupt. They are looking forward far enough to know that consumer backlash against a dominant Japanese car juggernaut is still a force to be feared. Another part of their US investment comes from those import quotas Reagan and Dubya II have kept going.
As for IBM's consulting service/custom chip thing, how many customers do they serve directly? Do they sell custom chips and consulting services to millions, or a handful of corporations? It smells like business to high end business to me. This implies a very tiny ma
Yeah, I think I'd like to be a producer. I'm fairly intimate with what would be needed to produce a game - the skillset needed, the toolkits needed, and the artwork stuff.
I have some pretty simple but revolutionary ideas for virtual personality creation and interaction, which by themselves will lend to an extremely open ended game. The simple establishment of deadlines (this bomb will blow up in x minutes) would keep the main story line going. Of course, the details of this is in my head and on paper:)
I wouldn't reinvent the graphics engine from scratch; I'd use the UT2 or UT3 engine and call it a day. I'd implement the interaction system via ut script. Simple, beautiful, powerful.
I know how to make a story line with many endings but also how to get the player addicted to seeing every one of them.
The game industry already is mired in endless copycats. The reason why there are one or two gems and a whole lot of crap out there is because truly creative minds can't get in. Lack of talented story writers isn't stopping the industry, granted, but the industry is going nowhere very very fast. For sure there are games with killer graphics but story lines? Ack!
You brought movies into this, well ever wonder why movies suck so bad? It's because of the barrier to entry, and the way it keeps creative but poorly "equipped" people out.
It may come as a surprise but a solid vision and a sold overall plan is great for properly focusing those with the skills to make it happen. The US military knows this best of all.
As a writer I would be spending a LOT of time in programmer meetings getting familiar with the staff and knowing limitations and getting input. The problem with the PHB's you despise, is that they don't listen and interact with their workers, and they treat them like cattle. Where I see it, my game is nothing without the programmers.
Now I just need the programmers and artists to carry out this idea and if it happens I guarantee people will want to play the game. A lot.
BTW I am a project manager by trade, having come into this from glass box software testing. I have done some programming but not enough to be a hard core programmer. I could never handle writing code from scratch to draw, especially not 3d graphics!
The game industry isn't ever going to really take off until you get past the stage where people who can't program but who have good story telling ability, have no chance to get into the industry.
And if I form a company it sure as heck won't allow sweat shop conditions like EA!
When the IP theft czar gets done, the pirates will only be able to steal IP from the offshored factories.
The thing is, that is where all the pirates are probably getting stolen IP from now.
Ever read up on the Chevrolet Spark and the Cherry QQ? Those two cars look alike. They are both sold in China and the latter was made from plans stolen right out of the plant that makes the former.
If Bush wants to stop intellectual property piracy then he needs to stop allowing that stuff to be offshored.
Otherwise it is all a simple matter of paying off the plant management staff, what with their pennies-on-the-US-dollar salary, to cough up an email of the blueprints.
And if you think anyone will be able to do anything about it, ask Cisco what they were able to do when their routers were pirated by Huawei Corp. Cisco abandoned the lawsuit because a) Huawai is funded by China's government; and b) Cisco's factories are in China, which could be shut down at any time.
You may not think offshoring is a problem but as long as it persists, IP piracy will dip for a while as the US clamps down, and then IP piracy will centralize itself in China, with the help of the Chinese government, and IP piracy will go back to its usual blazing pace.
And the US will not sanction China because corporations depend on them to produce those cheap routers and DVD players.
[Not much different from the US with "click here to install hot coed screen savers". The points of origination and destination are always the weakest, especially the people.]
Except that the destination, in offshoring, is orders of magnitude weaker. And so is everything in between...
[The sure fire ticket of IT was another in the cycle of sure fire jobs, that eventually weren't, just like the aerospace boom of the 80's.]
Actually, it was the last of them. I remember one telemarketer woman that called me and that I talked into getting into tech support in 1996(?). She was a single mother of two and earning 6 bucks an hour plus a paltry commish. She heard my pitch, ditched her job and came over to my employer - Countrywide internal support - which paid us $15/hr to support company workers and their PCs. That was a two and a half fold income increase for her, and she eventually made it into software testing. Not bad for a 33 year old single mom from da h00d.
I wonder if you realize the magnitude of what we've lost now that talented people like her will never be tapped because the barrier to entry to anything but McDonald's is completely closed to inexperienced newcomers.
[The internet has cause much more issues with IP theft. It's something that individual companies have to take into account when they make their decision. Sometimes offshoring helps, as it gives them a presence in the region. A company with a plant in China, can put much more pressure on the goverment. Also, as industry grows in those areas, they will lobby for increased protections. I'm sure Bollywood is asking for more and more protections as they now stand to lose more money with IP theft.]
As I pointed out, Cicso lobbied and sued in China for protection and China told them to screw off. The internet can't lead to stealing whole car designs; look at China's Cherry QQ and compare it to Chevrolet's Spark. Inside and out, it is a knockoff.
IP theft is a lot easier when a Chinese spy can tap the factory itself than tapping a computer on the internet. All the internet security in the three universes and infinity and beyond is, as I said, irrelevant when you can get the information - *ahem* - factory direct.
[It reminds me of the "buy american" campaign during the early 90's recession. Of course it didn't work, because people didn't want to pay more for american made products. In the end even though people weren't buying american, we didn't slip into a depression. We continued to innovate and create higher value items]
Actually, we didn't create higher value textiles, electronics or cars - the three major things that got offshored. All the higher value clothes, consumer electronics and cars, come from Taiwan and other offshored nations.
We gave all of that up, and now the next generation of cars - hybrids - aren't even being made here. GM and Ford are light years behind Toyota in that regard, such that Toyota is being forced to raise prices in order to save Ford and GM! See: http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=3&id =342227
Cars, computers and cell phones are still the highest value products, and all of it is being made overseas. In fact, Japan gets even higher value products than we do. You would cry if you saw the PDAs, cell phones and even computers that they sell over there. So exactly what higher value items did we "innovate"?
Yes, you have proven that people go for what is cheap. There's no argument there. But that does not prove that we're going to create "higher value products".
[The middle class in China has been expanding, as this happens there will be more push towards democracy.]
Democracy won't happen in China, no matter how big the middle class is. Democracy in the US is being wiped out by wealthy people, why would wealth create democracy somewhere else?
[A 1950's manufacturing job could support a lower stan
[It's just as risky to have it pinging randomly around the country.]
Banks can fix their intranets so stuff doesn't ping randomly once a customer's computer accesses the bank. That leaves one outside avenue of access left. Overseas, however, the guy who runs the intranet can still be tapped. Fi' dolla times fitty two for 10,000 customers' data. Deal!
[When I graduated in the boom times, if you were comp sci or EE, you had 5 jobs waiting. But if you were were aerospace eng, IE, chem E, or Mat Sci (like myself) it was hard to find a job. IT has matured to the same point, it's no longer a surefire ticket to a job.]
Then what is a sure fire ticket any more? Are we now to accept that musical chairs is the new norm? Do you ever wonder why people are waiting to have families now and some can't even have kids because they waited for so long? (In my next post I'll explain what this debacle means for our nation's retirees.)
[I just have a problem with just across the board saying offshoring is bad. First, almost all imports are the result of some sort of offshoring. Whether it's a foreign company or US company providing the product made overseas, it's still taking away a potential job from somebody in the US.]
The ultimate problem with offshoring is it leaves us much more vulnerable to IP theft. See: Cisco and the automotive companies. Go check out China's "Cherry Automotive" cars and see how similar they look to GM's cheaper cars. Furthermore, we're losing our ability to manufacture anything ourselves. If China gets pissed at us, guess what they're going to do first? We've sacrificed our self sufficiency for cheapness' sake. We can never go to war with China no matter how nasty they get.
In fact, look at your consumer electronics. Every item you buy from China puts money into the hands of a communist dictatorship responsible for the deaths of 50 million Chinese baby girls under their "one child policy".
Capitalism favors despots because despots are easier to pay off; they're accountable to no one.
While talking about spreading democracy abroad, consider what your offshoring dollars are doing to sustain dictatorships that hate democracy. The money they get from your consumer dollar helps them beef up their military and crush the opposition even more efficiently. The intellectual property they steal from us, directly helps them bolster their Great Firewall of China.
IOW: cutting back hard on offshoring will not save democracy abroad, but it will put the brakes on the funding that we are providing for the ongoing runaway war against democracy by foreign dictatorships. We're killing those people. Really. You're going to say that cutting down considerably on offshoring hurts. Well, evidence is strong that continuing it, hurts the world even more.
[Same thing with mining, or steel, or other raw materials, which used to be produced domestically but which were offshored to save costs. The gain from lower raw material prices has helped the economy more than the loss of those jobs has hurt it. This then transitioned to offshoring of manufacturing in the late 20th century. Electronics and computers became cheaper, so much so they were being used everywhere, and we created the IT industry. The value wasn't making the actual machine anymore. It was programming it to be an ATM, or game server, or electronic store front.]
Hold it just a second. In the 1950s one manufactoring job paycheck could support a whole family. How were things more expensive then? History and theory are in serious conflict here.
[It depends, if you want to compete head on, then no. If you want to exploit them so your population can create more value added goods and services (the way we have done with raw materials, and cheap simple goods), then yes you can compete, and win.]
a) what is to stop them from creating more value added goods and services overseas instead of here? b) why can't we do more manufacturing domestically and provide value-added ser
[Would you trust your data to a European country? The problem with confidential data security isn't outsoucing, it's outsourcing to countries with poor policies.]
I could not trust my data to cross a 6000 mile pipeline that could be tapped wirelessly or via hard line (in the ocean). We're getting clobbered hard enough by domestic thieves as it is.
By the time it gets to Europe who knows how often it has been tapped already?
BTW I'm not even coming close to saying this will stop domestic thieves; I just don't want to throw more gasoline onto a raging fire.
[There's a difference between packing up industries and sending them overseas, and expanding overseas. I agree some sectors like data centers and tech support are moving, but overall the IT industry has remained in the US. The employment numbers for IT are flat. Companies aren't sending jobs overseas, they just aren't expanding domestically. Which makes sense since China and India represent expanding economies.]
Flat is bad enough. Our population is growing, the good jobs are not. Bill Gates is crying about our college students not going into IT (no doubt you saw the Slashdot article a few days ago) because they see those jobs going away overseas. The US is losing its tech edge. Fewer IT savvy foreigners are coming here and more are keeping their talents at home abroad. We're offshoring ourselves into oblivion (or pretty close to it).
And are you saying our economy is not expanding, or cannot expand?
[What is the alternative, a completely closed system? We can keep our same level of pay, but everything is just more expensive, and it still won't fix issues with jobs being replace by machines and productivity increases.]
Machines won't be programming machines or managing projects. If we get to that level of automation you will have a lot worse problems on your hands than unemployment. Productivity increases are hitting a wall with employee stress and health issues; this is also unsustainable, a fact that Europe has already learned. Yeah, manufacturing is vulnerable to automation, but not even web design is vulnerable to that; cookie cutter websites that "automation" tends to produce have already hit a wall where their desirability has flattened or is falling. (I see this from personal experience with clients.)
I don't advocate a closed system; but I do advocate clamping down hard on offshoring. Especially with regards to our personal information.
You cannot play "fair, free market" against nations that run sweat shops and tie their currency to ours. This "Free Trade" mantra is akin to saying steroid users can play in the NBA. It doesn't work; the US can never hope to win against cheaters.
[So you don't care about the rich becoming richer, you just want to make sure you are part of the rich.]
Heck no. Let the rich become as fantabulously rich as they wanna be. As long as everyone else has a chance to at least keep up with their bills if they're being sensible.
[The question is whether it's because of lax laws and lack of oversight, or because the data is handled by foreigners.]
The #1 problem is jurisdictional barriers. The best security on Earth is made irrelevant by that. It is also made irrelevant by the fact that you can pay five dolla.... times 52 (aka a year's salary) to the guy who owns the keys to the kingdom over there and get access.
[While I agree sensitive information may be one specific example where we may not want offshoring (another being military), what about the other industries? They are building more than data centers in India and China.]
As I said, intellectual property theft is one chicken making its way home to roost. Ask Cisco about that.
[That's the beauty of hindsight. You can say "Look those women could move into the IT industry." Of course, when those women were being layed off people thought that we'd only need a few computers to run the entire world. When they were replaced they were not thinking about learning CAD or IT, those things didn't exist. Rarely is there a clear path about what is next, that's why change is scary.]
You're living in the past again. Back then they didn't send every new industry that came up, overseas practically overnight.
Even if you can think of a new emerging major industry right now, they're taking its attendant jobs away from us as soon as it's conceived. That has not happened before.
The United States is sinking into a service economy, this is widely known. That means a proliferation of very low paying jobs with a handful of managers and CEOs getting very rich off the entire world.
Meanwhile the price of oil is skyrocketing, as is the cost of homes.
You're clinging to a free market ideology that is unsustainable.
[I'm sure it's just as difficult to tell somebody they can't have a job no matter their qualifications because they live in another country. American jobs are only for Americans, otherwise, how could we keep our relatively rich lifestyle.]
I care about my people in my country before I care about others. Someone get a rope!
[Your conclusion is flawed. Space flights can take place with greater usefulness from equatorial countries. As soon as this so-called useful industry is quantified, it will move by thousands of tons of equipment and craft within 10 years to an equatorial zone that promotes cheap labor, lack of zoning, lack of environmental controls and worker protections, etc. And America will be smack-dab back into the same Depressionary times, having lost the momentum of an industry ONCE AGAIN to the vicious elite who seek greater profits no matter what.]
Eventually things will be built in space instead of on Earth, and that means habitats in space. At that point you might as well reshuffle all economic rules cards and start all over with the cycle of empirical observation to hypothesis to economic theory.
Maybe people will make their own crude space ships and flee the Governments and the Corporations (neither of which I trust) and live by their own rules. A Libertarian dream, I suppose.
Failing that I prefer a nation where government and corporation are at war with each other under a system of checks and balances, not a system where one comes to perpetually dominate the other. As long as they're fighting, we the people can actually live and innovate and thrive and grow.
Slashdot Mirror
No but they have equally bad or worse things.
l
/ 202829.shtml
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2003/jan/03011005.htm
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/1/9
I won't post the entire long article but I trust you'll read it.
10 years in a US prison vs 1 week in a Chinese prison... which one would YOU take?
LOL about the shielded cable wireless trick. I'll tell that to a coworker, they won't get it for days!
:)
How about limiting the range? I could measure my house from end to end and restrict the range to that. Then someone might have to come up to my doorstep to tap me.
How would you capture a packet? More importantly, how would you make capturing a packet as difficult as possible?
Just wondering. I have a wireless router using WPA-PSK security with TKIP cipher type and a 24 character WPA passphrase and I was wondering if that can be hacked?
How much time and cpu power/RAM will be needed for this feature to process a tree with a hundred directories, one directory having a total of, say, 5000 pictures/thumbnails?
That was the most insightful and wise comment by a business owner I've EVER read except my own boss who has said roughly the same thing. He owns this business, too.
regulating corporations.
Usually when you allow someone to make a huge mess and leave someone else to clean it up, you have a big problem on your hands.
We're giving billions in consumer dollars, intellectual property and factory construction and product development technology to one of the most undemocratic, misogynistic, anti-reproductive choice, pollution-happy, anti-workers rights nations on Earth.
China is in every way the enemy of America except in war. Their way of life is absolutely opposed to ours.
Would you have given such things to Nazi Germany even if they had not declared war on America? No. Well just about everything the Nazi's did to their people, the Chinese do and worse. All they haven't done is invade other nations. Whoops, I forgot, they invaded Tibet!
By trading with China we are shooting workers' rights, human rights, democracy and even environmental policy reform, in the foot.
Cisco's shareholders aren't going far enough; they should close down their factories in China. I'm tired of hearing all this kowtowing to the free market - China is proving that it can have free market "enterprise zones" without democracy and they have 20 of the world's most polluted cities. That Government is a black hole sucking the world into an endless downward spiral of decay in which absolute greed is trumping human rights.
We're doing way more harm than good to the world by allowing corporations in the US to do business with despotic nations like China who refuse to reform their ways.
As I said, the shareholders aren't going far enough with this.
>
So, exactly how many rich people wound up on the list of WTC dead? Have you heard of any?
The rich wouldn't be found in the WTC, they'd be found in their mansions out on the plantation watching the immigrants pick grapes for their wine. The middle class and investor-wannabes would be found in the WTC.
There are tons of identity thieves and pedophiles out there that the FBI hasn't gotten around to nailing, either.
Priorities? We're the FBI, we don't need no steeeeeeeenkin priorities!!!
It's wise to free your web based product from proprietary stuff like MSIE. That way if MicroSoft turns on you, so what? Life carries on.
[Yes, we shouldn't expect opportunities to be open to unqualified people, or to remain if they are non-value added.]
But I'm not talking about the unqualified issue. I'm talking about what was once a proliferation of opportunities for neophytes in the entry-level area. The "entry level" job has quietly become extinct.
The "higher value" jobs you could even conceive of now, have no remote hope of a "come on in, we'll train you!" factor.
To get a job in consulting, the higher value industry you spoke of, requires months if not years of training and by then that industry will be heavily saturated and that training will be worth very little against those who are by then bringing years of experience AND education to the table. And then there'll be some new way to offshore consulting, too; look at some future rendition of vnc for that.
[Building factories creates jobs, more technical and higher paying, than to just have people soldering the things together. Long term most industries end up needing less people to perform the same task. The only way to increase employment, is to create new industries.]
Building factories creates temporary construction jobs. And as I said, new industries cropping up now, are closed to entry level people; by the time you're retrained for it, you're competing against superior people in a market that, by then, has already begun to shrink.
[I agree, but so long as the free market keeps people fed and happy, then it's doing it's job. All economics does is exist as a system to distribute limited resources.]
A lot of people are no longer fed and happy. How many does it take before we realize how big the cracks in the system are?
As I said, keep your eye on those credit companies. The fate of the economy is in their hands.
[
I would contend we are still far from that point. Developing the international infrastructure (transport, communications, legal, etc), is expensive. New industries start up small. They don't have the ability to offshore immediately. Over time however, like any other industry they will end up offshored, and we move to the next thing.
Let's look at the alternative to offshoring. US companies only able to hire US workers, are then hampered when it comes to doing buisness in the world. A foreign company that makes similar products with cheaper foreign labor, has a distinct advanatage over a US company. Americans have already shown they'd buy cheaper imported goods than to "buy American." Even if we do have tariffs for imports, they will have an advantage selling to the 6 billion people who don't live in the US. Lower exports = weaker dollar = overall goods more expensive. An isolationist economic policy means a lower standard of living for everybody. And the middle class would be hardest hit, the rich can afford to invest in foreign currency and deal with 10% higher prices.]
Eh, wait a minute, we already are not exporting much. If we lose all our exports and our imports we'd be seeing a net gain, right?
[What about those elevator operators? Door-to-door salesmen? Some jobs aren't needed anymore, sometimes they leave then come back, people need to be flexible.]
So where do these people go when they're homeless, or need a heart transplant and they're abandoned to die because they don't have $250,000 to pay for it?
The difference between now and the good old days that you're referring to, is back then there were entry level positions in The Next Big Thing.
Show me one next big thing, for one thing, and then while you're at it, show me where entry level opportunities exist there.
Take Biotech. You can't just walk in like you did with IT; you need years of training even to be a lab tech. Now they're offshoring that. The current crop of about 200,000 Biotech students rushing to get into the industry have a rude awakening waiting for them in the form of a heavily saturated market and a heavily offshored workforce. So now you need a PhD to get in that industry. But now th
There are a lot of Chinese-owned companies.
Take Huawei, for instance, which stole Cisco's intellectual property, and got the backing of the Government against Cisco's subsequent lawsuit.
A Game design document? What is that?
And who would I show it to in order to get some help going?
[Who says domestic tapping isn't going offshore? Anybody can tap anywhere in the world, it's one of the problems with our highly connected information systems.]
If you make your system invulnerable to outside access, you still have the admin to worry about. In the US, there's better pay and the FBI to keep that in check. Offshore, the admin is paid peanuts and there's no FBI... they can be bribed ten years' salary at relatively low cost.
China is so good at IP piracy that they're stealing plans for cars. How hard would it be to get personal information at these foreign plants?
[In 1998 2 stoner friends of mine with hardly any skills earned $60k/year in San Jose doing web maintenance. Not creating web pages mind you, but just making sure the links worked and content displayed correctly.
The IT industry overexpanded, they took anybody and everybody. Right now, unfortunately, talented people are feeling the hardship as well as the untalented. In the long run things will equalize, those who truly have a passion will be the ones employed, not just a warm body.]
So, basically, it is okay that future windows of opportunity will be closed to more people than before?
[And unless the goverment does something, businesses will pull out to other countries. Getting ripped off is an additional cost which can quickly outweigh labor cost savings.]
The foreign government may not be able to do something. Al Qaeda will be the next group to want a piece of the offshore ID theft pie. Who else but us can (or, more specifically, has managed to) beat them?
Are you willing to trust your personal information to the idea that "some foreign government will eventually want to protect me or the companies will pull out"?
Why has Chevrolet not pulled out of China? Citibank hasn't left India despite being burnt. It's because they stand to lose billions. If Americans were better educated about the dangers of offshoring, Citibank would flee India for fear of a huge consumer backlash. This backlash is already beginning to dog-leash some of those call centers.
[Textiles was a dead end industry, cars have actually ended up becoming balanced offshore and onshore, and cheap electronics, we use those to create the entire IT industry. There doesn't have to be a direct progression like IT being a layer of business on top of the electronics one. Value added, means there are goods and services that can gain higher margins that labor can move into. Computer manufacturing has become a low margin affair, it's the services that earn more money. Look at how IBM has reinvented itself.]
Inherently, higher profit margin goods and services will be made lower margin much faster now than ever before, because of a much faster response by competition (a larger swelling of unemployed people looking for the next bill-paying thing). The tragedy of the commons, in a commercial sense.
IBM, by the way, has cut a ton of jobs while reinventing itself.
[Cars being made by US workers working for Japanese companies investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the US (including building hybrids). Computers are no longer high value, $299 for a complete system, and cellphones that are literally given away.
Services are higher value. The cellphone service providers, IBM has shed much of it's hardware (hard drives, computers) and moved towards a consulting service and custom chip provider.]
Well, actually, Toyota is trying to prop up GM, etc., to keep them from going bankrupt. They are looking forward far enough to know that consumer backlash against a dominant Japanese car juggernaut is still a force to be feared. Another part of their US investment comes from those import quotas Reagan and Dubya II have kept going.
As for IBM's consulting service/custom chip thing, how many customers do they serve directly? Do they sell custom chips and consulting services to millions, or a handful of corporations? It smells like business to high end business to me. This implies a very tiny ma
Yeah, I think I'd like to be a producer. I'm fairly intimate with what would be needed to produce a game - the skillset needed, the toolkits needed, and the artwork stuff.
:)
I have some pretty simple but revolutionary ideas for virtual personality creation and interaction, which by themselves will lend to an extremely open ended game. The simple establishment of deadlines (this bomb will blow up in x minutes) would keep the main story line going. Of course, the details of this is in my head and on paper
I wouldn't reinvent the graphics engine from scratch; I'd use the UT2 or UT3 engine and call it a day. I'd implement the interaction system via ut script. Simple, beautiful, powerful.
I know how to make a story line with many endings but also how to get the player addicted to seeing every one of them.
The game industry already is mired in endless copycats. The reason why there are one or two gems and a whole lot of crap out there is because truly creative minds can't get in. Lack of talented story writers isn't stopping the industry, granted, but the industry is going nowhere very very fast. For sure there are games with killer graphics but story lines? Ack!
You brought movies into this, well ever wonder why movies suck so bad? It's because of the barrier to entry, and the way it keeps creative but poorly "equipped" people out.
It may come as a surprise but a solid vision and a sold overall plan is great for properly focusing those with the skills to make it happen. The US military knows this best of all.
As a writer I would be spending a LOT of time in programmer meetings getting familiar with the staff and knowing limitations and getting input. The problem with the PHB's you despise, is that they don't listen and interact with their workers, and they treat them like cattle. Where I see it, my game is nothing without the programmers.
Now I just need the programmers and artists to carry out this idea and if it happens I guarantee people will want to play the game. A lot.
BTW I am a project manager by trade, having come into this from glass box software testing. I have done some programming but not enough to be a hard core programmer. I could never handle writing code from scratch to draw, especially not 3d graphics!
But I've never been a good programmer.
The game industry isn't ever going to really take off until you get past the stage where people who can't program but who have good story telling ability, have no chance to get into the industry.
And if I form a company it sure as heck won't allow sweat shop conditions like EA!
The screenshots from this thing absolutely scream "video game material".
When the IP theft czar gets done, the pirates will only be able to steal IP from the offshored factories.
The thing is, that is where all the pirates are probably getting stolen IP from now.
Ever read up on the Chevrolet Spark and the Cherry QQ? Those two cars look alike. They are both sold in China and the latter was made from plans stolen right out of the plant that makes the former.
If Bush wants to stop intellectual property piracy then he needs to stop allowing that stuff to be offshored.
Otherwise it is all a simple matter of paying off the plant management staff, what with their pennies-on-the-US-dollar salary, to cough up an email of the blueprints.
And if you think anyone will be able to do anything about it, ask Cisco what they were able to do when their routers were pirated by Huawei Corp. Cisco abandoned the lawsuit because
a) Huawai is funded by China's government;
and b) Cisco's factories are in China, which could be shut down at any time.
Read more at http://in.tech.yahoo.com/031001/137/2858q.html
You may not think offshoring is a problem but as long as it persists, IP piracy will dip for a while as the US clamps down, and then IP piracy will centralize itself in China, with the help of the Chinese government, and IP piracy will go back to its usual blazing pace.
And the US will not sanction China because corporations depend on them to produce those cheap routers and DVD players.
[Not much different from the US with "click here to install hot coed screen savers". The points of origination and destination are always the weakest, especially the people.]
Except that the destination, in offshoring, is orders of magnitude weaker. And so is everything in between...
[The sure fire ticket of IT was another in the cycle of sure fire jobs, that eventually weren't, just like the aerospace boom of the 80's.]
Actually, it was the last of them. I remember one telemarketer woman that called me and that I talked into getting into tech support in 1996(?). She was a single mother of two and earning 6 bucks an hour plus a paltry commish. She heard my pitch, ditched her job and came over to my employer - Countrywide internal support - which paid us $15/hr to support company workers and their PCs. That was a two and a half fold income increase for her, and she eventually made it into software testing. Not bad for a 33 year old single mom from da h00d.
I wonder if you realize the magnitude of what we've lost now that talented people like her will never be tapped because the barrier to entry to anything but McDonald's is completely closed to inexperienced newcomers.
[The internet has cause much more issues with IP theft. It's something that individual companies have to take into account when they make their decision. Sometimes offshoring helps, as it gives them a presence in the region. A company with a plant in China, can put much more pressure on the goverment. Also, as industry grows in those areas, they will lobby for increased protections. I'm sure Bollywood is asking for more and more protections as they now stand to lose more money with IP theft.]
As I pointed out, Cicso lobbied and sued in China for protection and China told them to screw off. The internet can't lead to stealing whole car designs; look at China's Cherry QQ and compare it to Chevrolet's Spark. Inside and out, it is a knockoff.
IP theft is a lot easier when a Chinese spy can tap the factory itself than tapping a computer on the internet. All the internet security in the three universes and infinity and beyond is, as I said, irrelevant when you can get the information - *ahem* - factory direct.
[It reminds me of the "buy american" campaign during the early 90's recession. Of course it didn't work, because people didn't want to pay more for american made products. In the end even though people weren't buying american, we didn't slip into a depression. We continued to innovate and create higher value items]
Actually, we didn't create higher value textiles, electronics or cars - the three major things that got offshored. All the higher value clothes, consumer electronics and cars, come from Taiwan and other offshored nations.
We gave all of that up, and now the next generation of cars - hybrids - aren't even being made here. GM and Ford are light years behind Toyota in that regard, such that Toyota is being forced to raise prices in order to save Ford and GM! See: http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=3&id =342227
Cars, computers and cell phones are still the highest value products, and all of it is being made overseas. In fact, Japan gets even higher value products than we do. You would cry if you saw the PDAs, cell phones and even computers that they sell over there. So exactly what higher value items did we "innovate"?
Yes, you have proven that people go for what is cheap. There's no argument there. But that does not prove that we're going to create "higher value products".
[The middle class in China has been expanding, as this happens there will be more push towards democracy.]
Democracy won't happen in China, no matter how big the middle class is. Democracy in the US is being wiped out by wealthy people, why would wealth create democracy somewhere else?
[A 1950's manufacturing job could support a lower stan
[It's just as risky to have it pinging randomly around the country.]
Banks can fix their intranets so stuff doesn't ping randomly once a customer's computer accesses the bank. That leaves one outside avenue of access left. Overseas, however, the guy who runs the intranet can still be tapped. Fi' dolla times fitty two for 10,000 customers' data. Deal!
[When I graduated in the boom times, if you were comp sci or EE, you had 5 jobs waiting. But if you were were aerospace eng, IE, chem E, or Mat Sci (like myself) it was hard to find a job. IT has matured to the same point, it's no longer a surefire ticket to a job.]
Then what is a sure fire ticket any more? Are we now to accept that musical chairs is the new norm? Do you ever wonder why people are waiting to have families now and some can't even have kids because they waited for so long? (In my next post I'll explain what this debacle means for our nation's retirees.)
[I just have a problem with just across the board saying offshoring is bad. First, almost all imports are the result of some sort of offshoring. Whether it's a foreign company or US company providing the product made overseas, it's still taking away a potential job from somebody in the US.]
The ultimate problem with offshoring is it leaves us much more vulnerable to IP theft. See: Cisco and the automotive companies. Go check out China's "Cherry Automotive" cars and see how similar they look to GM's cheaper cars. Furthermore, we're losing our ability to manufacture anything ourselves. If China gets pissed at us, guess what they're going to do first? We've sacrificed our self sufficiency for cheapness' sake. We can never go to war with China no matter how nasty they get.
In fact, look at your consumer electronics. Every item you buy from China puts money into the hands of a communist dictatorship responsible for the deaths of 50 million Chinese baby girls under their "one child policy".
Capitalism favors despots because despots are easier to pay off; they're accountable to no one.
While talking about spreading democracy abroad, consider what your offshoring dollars are doing to sustain dictatorships that hate democracy. The money they get from your consumer dollar helps them beef up their military and crush the opposition even more efficiently. The intellectual property they steal from us, directly helps them bolster their Great Firewall of China.
IOW: cutting back hard on offshoring will not save democracy abroad, but it will put the brakes on the funding that we are providing for the ongoing runaway war against democracy by foreign dictatorships. We're killing those people. Really. You're going to say that cutting down considerably on offshoring hurts. Well, evidence is strong that continuing it, hurts the world even more.
[Same thing with mining, or steel, or other raw materials, which used to be produced domestically but which were offshored to save costs. The gain from lower raw material prices has helped the economy more than the loss of those jobs has hurt it.
This then transitioned to offshoring of manufacturing in the late 20th century. Electronics and computers became cheaper, so much so they were being used everywhere, and we created the IT industry. The value wasn't making the actual machine anymore. It was programming it to be an ATM, or game server, or electronic store front.]
Hold it just a second. In the 1950s one manufactoring job paycheck could support a whole family. How were things more expensive then? History and theory are in serious conflict here.
[It depends, if you want to compete head on, then no. If you want to exploit them so your population can create more value added goods and services (the way we have done with raw materials, and cheap simple goods), then yes you can compete, and win.]
a) what is to stop them from creating more value added goods and services overseas instead of here?
b) why can't we do more manufacturing domestically and provide value-added ser
[Would you trust your data to a European country? The problem with confidential data security isn't outsoucing, it's outsourcing to countries with poor policies.]
I could not trust my data to cross a 6000 mile pipeline that could be tapped wirelessly or via hard line (in the ocean). We're getting clobbered hard enough by domestic thieves as it is.
By the time it gets to Europe who knows how often it has been tapped already?
BTW I'm not even coming close to saying this will stop domestic thieves; I just don't want to throw more gasoline onto a raging fire.
[There's a difference between packing up industries and sending them overseas, and expanding overseas. I agree some sectors like data centers and tech support are moving, but overall the IT industry has remained in the US. The employment numbers for IT are flat. Companies aren't sending jobs overseas, they just aren't expanding domestically. Which makes sense since China and India represent expanding economies.]
Flat is bad enough. Our population is growing, the good jobs are not. Bill Gates is crying about our college students not going into IT (no doubt you saw the Slashdot article a few days ago) because they see those jobs going away overseas. The US is losing its tech edge. Fewer IT savvy foreigners are coming here and more are keeping their talents at home abroad. We're offshoring ourselves into oblivion (or pretty close to it).
And are you saying our economy is not expanding, or cannot expand?
[What is the alternative, a completely closed system? We can keep our same level of pay, but everything is just more expensive, and it still won't fix issues with jobs being replace by machines and productivity increases.]
Machines won't be programming machines or managing projects. If we get to that level of automation you will have a lot worse problems on your hands than unemployment. Productivity increases are hitting a wall with employee stress and health issues; this is also unsustainable, a fact that Europe has already learned. Yeah, manufacturing is vulnerable to automation, but not even web design is vulnerable to that; cookie cutter websites that "automation" tends to produce have already hit a wall where their desirability has flattened or is falling. (I see this from personal experience with clients.)
I don't advocate a closed system; but I do advocate clamping down hard on offshoring. Especially with regards to our personal information.
You cannot play "fair, free market" against nations that run sweat shops and tie their currency to ours. This "Free Trade" mantra is akin to saying steroid users can play in the NBA. It doesn't work; the US can never hope to win against cheaters.
[So you don't care about the rich becoming richer, you just want to make sure you are part of the rich.]
Heck no. Let the rich become as fantabulously rich as they wanna be. As long as everyone else has a chance to at least keep up with their bills if they're being sensible.
[I don't trust foreign or domestic data centers.]
.... times 52 (aka a year's salary) to the guy who owns the keys to the kingdom over there and get access.
Point well made.
[The question is whether it's because of lax laws and lack of oversight, or because the data is handled by foreigners.]
The #1 problem is jurisdictional barriers. The best security on Earth is made irrelevant by that. It is also made irrelevant by the fact that you can pay five dolla
[While I agree sensitive information may be one specific example where we may not want offshoring (another being military), what about the other industries? They are building more than data centers in India and China.]
As I said, intellectual property theft is one chicken making its way home to roost. Ask Cisco about that.
[That's the beauty of hindsight. You can say "Look those women could move into the IT industry." Of course, when those women were being layed off people thought that we'd only need a few computers to run the entire world. When they were replaced they were not thinking about learning CAD or IT, those things didn't exist. Rarely is there a clear path about what is next, that's why change is scary.]
You're living in the past again. Back then they didn't send every new industry that came up, overseas practically overnight.
Even if you can think of a new emerging major industry right now, they're taking its attendant jobs away from us as soon as it's conceived. That has not happened before.
The United States is sinking into a service economy, this is widely known. That means a proliferation of very low paying jobs with a handful of managers and CEOs getting very rich off the entire world.
Meanwhile the price of oil is skyrocketing, as is the cost of homes.
You're clinging to a free market ideology that is unsustainable.
[I'm sure it's just as difficult to tell somebody they can't have a job no matter their qualifications because they live in another country. American jobs are only for Americans, otherwise, how could we keep our relatively rich lifestyle.]
I care about my people in my country before I care about others. Someone get a rope!
[Your conclusion is flawed. Space flights can take place with greater usefulness from equatorial countries. As soon as this so-called useful industry is quantified, it will move by thousands of tons of equipment and craft within 10 years to an equatorial zone that promotes cheap labor, lack of zoning, lack of environmental controls and worker protections, etc. And America will be smack-dab back into the same Depressionary times, having lost the momentum of an industry ONCE AGAIN to the vicious elite who seek greater profits no matter what.]
Eventually things will be built in space instead of on Earth, and that means habitats in space. At that point you might as well reshuffle all economic rules cards and start all over with the cycle of empirical observation to hypothesis to economic theory.
Maybe people will make their own crude space ships and flee the Governments and the Corporations (neither of which I trust) and live by their own rules. A Libertarian dream, I suppose.
Failing that I prefer a nation where government and corporation are at war with each other under a system of checks and balances, not a system where one comes to perpetually dominate the other. As long as they're fighting, we the people can actually live and innovate and thrive and grow.