"By American" has been the battle cry of factory workers for years, especially factory workers in the automotive industry. Yet how many foreign cars do you see on the road every day?
How many of those "foreign" cars were built by Americans? Quite a few. Japan learned a few things related to the automobile industry. First, it is cheaper to make cars in the U.S. and sell them here than it is to make them in Japan and ship them. My mother always chides me about being "pigheaded" about my "Buy American" attitude. She is proud that her Toyota was built in our home state of Ohio, by Ohioans. Not only does that help the U.S., but our local job market/economy specifically.
Of course, I have one Ford in the garage and one in the driveway. One built at the Chicago plant, one at the Twin Cities plant. The engines and transmissions are all domestic (Norfolk, Cleveland). Beyond that, let the Japanese and Koreans (Ford's primary outsourcing destinations) build the windshield wipers, hubcaps/rims, etc.
Why is it ok for large companies to benefit from freetrade but wrong for regular people to?
How much time and money do you spend lobbying Congress? I thought so.
As for your doctor comment, some hospitals are sending xrays/mri scans oversees to be read.
Processing of medical records goes overseas too. There was a recent story on Slashdot about a woman in Pakistan basically holding sensitive medical data hostage over a contract dispute. Also, within the last year or two an M.D. in Australia or Hawaii or somewhere operated on a patient in the U.S. with a robotic arm and a fat data pipe. I think that was more proof of concept, but still, they may as well outsource surgery now too. Hire a nurse at a fraction of an M.D.'s salary to oil the robot and turn it off if it goes on a crazy killing spree, and save some money:-)
Mind you, I'm as pro-capitalism as they come, so being driven by the battle cry of "returns!" is a good thing, IMHO.
I think capitalism is the best socioeconomic system mankind has come up with yet. But some people get into it a bit too much -- mainly the CEOs at the top who think making ten million per year isn't enough, so they do various things to hurt the people at the bottom of the ladder (cut wages/benefits, outsource, etc).
I like the "survival of the fittest" aspect of capitalism, but I would rather have the citizens survive than a business. Outsourcing is painful, but I think eventually, as the author of one of the articles says, equilibrium will be reached. Hopefully few of us Americans get hurt in the process.
From the article: Some US customers have complained that the Indian technical-support representatives are difficult to communicate with because of thick accents and scripted responses.
Tech support for corporate customers with Optiplex desktop and Latitude notebook computers will instead be handled from call centers in Texas, Idaho and Tennessee, Dell spokesman Jon Weisblatt said Monday.
Let me get this straight. People cannot understand Indian accents, but they can understand Texan and Tennesseean accents? Obviously they've never been to either state;-)
Last time I looked into this, which was several years ago, there were no known different strings which had the same MD5 hash. I thought this was remarkable. Are there any known ones today?
MD5 is a hash. Hashes have three defining characteristics. First, the same input always produces the same output. Second, a small change in input produces a large change in output. Third, collisions are relatively rare -- it should be uncommon for two input strings to produce the same output string. Of course, with 2^128 output values and an infinite number of input values, there are an infinite number of inputs that produce the same output, theoretically.
Anyway, there are a few strings that produce identical outputs, using two dictionary words. I cannot find them at this moment, although I know where I saw them. Google and on-site searching mechanisms aren't helping. Oh well. I tried.
Yes, but KDE being laggy won't impact Apache or ProFTPd running in the background. Put a CD in the drive, and *everything* on a Windows box slows to a crawl until the OS reads the CD.
Nah, not even close. Usenet is a free-for-all public discussion. Email exchange is an invitation-only private discussion. Big difference.
My web host provider has NNTP newsgroups available to their customers. The groups are password protected and don't link with other servers, but it is still technically usenet.
Anyway, it is an excellent way for their customers to share data in real time (no synching issues with only one server) in a private, spam-free forum. The signal to noise ratio is NAN, since you cannot divide by zero. Usenet without the trolls... now if only the "real" usenet were like that...
The fact of the matter is the majority of the people who are in the military are from your lower income bracket. Talk to them without the threat of an dishonorable discharge and most of them will admit to you that they joined primarily because they needed the money (a la Jessica Lynch for college).
I joined because I was a poor college dropout (could not afford another semester even with financial aid). I was too poor to move out of my mom's house, not educated enough to get a better paying job, and too poor to pay for an education.
Now I have quite a bit of a B.S. under my belt and, while still poor as dirt, I was able to junk my old 1986 Ford POS and get a new(er) one. I admit I was from the lower-middle class, and my primary motivation was college, which, in turn, would bring a good job making more money.
Of course, I joined before 9/11, when our security went down the toilet along with civil liberties. There is a whole new perspective now. At this point I probably won't reenlist for philisophical and moral reasons. My opinion is just too far from the "company line" in the Air Force.
Getting Saddam out of power is a noble cause, but I don't think we did it the right way. We got to the finish line, yes, but in the process we alienated our allies and wasted an assload of money. The war was politically motivated and Bush gave us lies as a pretense to go to war. All he had to do was say that a decade of sanctions aren't working, he is a madman who is murdering his own people, and he needs to go. We already knew that, but it is a valid justification. This WMD bullshit is just that -- bullshit.
Anyway, I am happy he is out of power and in custody. I wish the Iraqis the best, and I hope their country gets back in shape soon. Islamic fundamentalist terrorists aside, I do respect the arabs immensly and know they are very capable of living in a peaceful democracy.
how about a phatbox harddrive-based player for your car? there is probably one that is compatible with your truck's existing headunit (so you don't need to buy a new one), and you can have 20-60 gigs of music, instead of shuffling cd's. and yes it does support ogg.
My head unit (Aiwa MP3/CD player) has an aux in, so as long as this thing has a line output it should be compatible. I'll check it out, thanks.
i have one and i love it. i can't imagine having to deal with switching cd's to find my music ever again.
The only time I deal with CDs is when I put them in my DVD-ROM drive to rip them to make MP3 CDs for my truck.
Although I'm sure most people wouldn't consider anything designed to fly through a war zone to be "safe" by most standards.
I would feel much safer in an F-15 or B-1B than I would in a Harrier or Osprey. But these planes generally fly higher than 50 feet. Perhaps a better way of saying it would be that you don't consider any aircraft designed for close combat support (think helicopter hovering at low altitude) safe.
Just curious, anyone knows how this compares to a regular automobile ?
If your car has a problem with the steering, you put on the brakes, and maybe have enough steering capability to get out of traffic. If something jiggles loose in the engine, even in the worst case if a piston were to stick, a rod thrown or timing belt cracked, timing got out of wack and you busted the valves and cracked the block, etc, you stick it in neutral and coast to the side of the road.
The Harrier has had "steering" and engine problems similar to these over its life. Almost all the time, it crashes and the pilots die. Mechanical failure in a car means you pull over to the side of the road in the majority of cases. Even in an airplane you can usually glide to a relatively safe crash-landing, although commercial jets aren't exactly graceful in air. But the Harrier? No way. If you have problems it will probably tip on the side or upside down, making it problematic even to eject and safely observe the wreckage. Assuming the eject mechanism works, of course.
So far, our attempts at bridging the gaps between helicopters and fixed wing aircraft have met with disaster. Take the Osprey, for example. I don't know who it was but he said that it took the worst features of both types of aircraft and mashed them together with poor engineering. Hopefully this new aircraft does not suffer the fate of the Osprey... and her pilots.
Taking the time to put ogg into a player costs money in terms of labor and development, and for that.0001% (or less) of people actually interested in it makes it something of a questionable business decision to spend the time and money on.
Businesses exist to make money. By using OGG, they do not pay patent royalties or fees. If they charge the same amount per device as they do for MP3, they could make $5 or $10 more. Even selling 100,000 devices, they could make between half and a full million dollars in extra profit. That is enough to grab the attention of most businesses.
You make an excellent comparison, but I partially disagree. Cable and T1 are different paradigms in terms of connections. Yes, you can compare based on megabits, but that is not the whole picture. T1 is a dedicated line. Even if you lease a fractional T1, you still have X amount of dedicated bandwidth, up and down, that is reserved for your use. With cable, the cable company can overload your cable loop. Bandwidth = cable size / customers, roughly. It fluctuates based on how many people are using it at a given time and how much bandwidth they are using.
Then the whole static/dynamic IP issue comes into play. Granted those of us with cable routers that keep renewing DHCP leases basically have a static IP, then again, it is not guaranteed. Mine has changed at least twice in the year I've been at this address. That does me no good if I want to put my semi-static IP in the DNS database.
Connections do get faster, both for residential and commercial use. My web host provider has multiple OC-12s. Between all eight of their backbone providers they have over 200 MBps of bandwidth. That was unheard of even ten years ago. Home broadband, ten years ago, usually meant you ran a cable from your office to your home, assuming you lived close enough, or you used a university computer lab. Now it is in the hands of almost anybody who lives near an urban center. You are correct on that account. I certainly am grateful that corporate America thinks there is enough money to be made by selling me broadband. They at least got that much right about me as a consumer;-)
I just wish they offered higher upstream packages on their non-business lines
Wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first.
If the telcos/media/broadcast corporations in this country wanted us to run servers, have a voice among our peers, and turn broadcasting into a two-way medium (as opposed to TV), they would give us higher upstream bandwidth.
Why do you think I pay money each month for web hosting?
Slashdot Mirror
"By American" has been the battle cry of factory workers for years, especially factory workers in the automotive industry. Yet how many foreign cars do you see on the road every day?
How many of those "foreign" cars were built by Americans? Quite a few. Japan learned a few things related to the automobile industry. First, it is cheaper to make cars in the U.S. and sell them here than it is to make them in Japan and ship them. My mother always chides me about being "pigheaded" about my "Buy American" attitude. She is proud that her Toyota was built in our home state of Ohio, by Ohioans. Not only does that help the U.S., but our local job market/economy specifically.
Of course, I have one Ford in the garage and one in the driveway. One built at the Chicago plant, one at the Twin Cities plant. The engines and transmissions are all domestic (Norfolk, Cleveland). Beyond that, let the Japanese and Koreans (Ford's primary outsourcing destinations) build the windshield wipers, hubcaps/rims, etc.
Why is it ok for large companies to benefit from freetrade but wrong for regular people to?
How much time and money do you spend lobbying Congress? I thought so.
As for your doctor comment, some hospitals are sending xrays/mri scans oversees to be read.
Processing of medical records goes overseas too. There was a recent story on Slashdot about a woman in Pakistan basically holding sensitive medical data hostage over a contract dispute. Also, within the last year or two an M.D. in Australia or Hawaii or somewhere operated on a patient in the U.S. with a robotic arm and a fat data pipe. I think that was more proof of concept, but still, they may as well outsource surgery now too. Hire a nurse at a fraction of an M.D.'s salary to oil the robot and turn it off if it goes on a crazy killing spree, and save some money :-)
Mind you, I'm as pro-capitalism as they come, so being driven by the battle cry of "returns!" is a good thing, IMHO.
I think capitalism is the best socioeconomic system mankind has come up with yet. But some people get into it a bit too much -- mainly the CEOs at the top who think making ten million per year isn't enough, so they do various things to hurt the people at the bottom of the ladder (cut wages/benefits, outsource, etc).
I like the "survival of the fittest" aspect of capitalism, but I would rather have the citizens survive than a business. Outsourcing is painful, but I think eventually, as the author of one of the articles says, equilibrium will be reached. Hopefully few of us Americans get hurt in the process.
From the article: Some US customers have complained that the Indian technical-support representatives are difficult to communicate with because of thick accents and scripted responses.
Tech support for corporate customers with Optiplex desktop and Latitude notebook computers will instead be handled from call centers in Texas, Idaho and Tennessee, Dell spokesman Jon Weisblatt said Monday.
Let me get this straight. People cannot understand Indian accents, but they can understand Texan and Tennesseean accents? Obviously they've never been to either state ;-)
Last time I looked into this, which was several years ago, there were no known different strings which had the same MD5 hash. I thought this was remarkable. Are there any known ones today?
MD5 is a hash. Hashes have three defining characteristics. First, the same input always produces the same output. Second, a small change in input produces a large change in output. Third, collisions are relatively rare -- it should be uncommon for two input strings to produce the same output string. Of course, with 2^128 output values and an infinite number of input values, there are an infinite number of inputs that produce the same output, theoretically.
Anyway, there are a few strings that produce identical outputs, using two dictionary words. I cannot find them at this moment, although I know where I saw them. Google and on-site searching mechanisms aren't helping. Oh well. I tried.
Yes, but KDE being laggy won't impact Apache or ProFTPd running in the background. Put a CD in the drive, and *everything* on a Windows box slows to a crawl until the OS reads the CD.
Nah, not even close. Usenet is a free-for-all public discussion. Email exchange is an invitation-only private discussion. Big difference.
My web host provider has NNTP newsgroups available to their customers. The groups are password protected and don't link with other servers, but it is still technically usenet.
Anyway, it is an excellent way for their customers to share data in real time (no synching issues with only one server) in a private, spam-free forum. The signal to noise ratio is NAN, since you cannot divide by zero. Usenet without the trolls... now if only the "real" usenet were like that...
The fact of the matter is the majority of the people who are in the military are from your lower income bracket. Talk to them without the threat of an dishonorable discharge and most of them will admit to you that they joined primarily because they needed the money (a la Jessica Lynch for college).
I joined because I was a poor college dropout (could not afford another semester even with financial aid). I was too poor to move out of my mom's house, not educated enough to get a better paying job, and too poor to pay for an education.
Now I have quite a bit of a B.S. under my belt and, while still poor as dirt, I was able to junk my old 1986 Ford POS and get a new(er) one. I admit I was from the lower-middle class, and my primary motivation was college, which, in turn, would bring a good job making more money.
Of course, I joined before 9/11, when our security went down the toilet along with civil liberties. There is a whole new perspective now. At this point I probably won't reenlist for philisophical and moral reasons. My opinion is just too far from the "company line" in the Air Force.
Getting Saddam out of power is a noble cause, but I don't think we did it the right way. We got to the finish line, yes, but in the process we alienated our allies and wasted an assload of money. The war was politically motivated and Bush gave us lies as a pretense to go to war. All he had to do was say that a decade of sanctions aren't working, he is a madman who is murdering his own people, and he needs to go. We already knew that, but it is a valid justification. This WMD bullshit is just that -- bullshit.
Anyway, I am happy he is out of power and in custody. I wish the Iraqis the best, and I hope their country gets back in shape soon. Islamic fundamentalist terrorists aside, I do respect the arabs immensly and know they are very capable of living in a peaceful democracy.
That was crude and tasteless, even by my standards -- and that's saying a lot.
You have to drink all the beer in your cup at the end of a round, right? That would be more fun.
This sounds like bullshit with dice instead of cards.
Yet another $20 for the game you already own...
Air Force Monopoly
The only reason I care is because I am in the U.S. Chair Force. Although it would be cool to zip around the board in an F-22 or stealth bomber...
and never have sex with your girlfriend again.
Giving a Slashdot subscription is like getting married?
No, I'm not bitter...
I wonder how long it will take for spammers to find a way into this network...
No Human = No Deathtrap
Until they make a manned version, of course. They will if and when it is successful so they can replace the ill-fated Harrier and Osprey.
And this is +3 100% Insightful?
Nobody said you had to be smart to be a moderator... after all, I moderate :-)
how about a phatbox harddrive-based player for your car? there is probably one that is compatible with your truck's existing headunit (so you don't need to buy a new one), and you can have 20-60 gigs of music, instead of shuffling cd's. and yes it does support ogg.
My head unit (Aiwa MP3/CD player) has an aux in, so as long as this thing has a line output it should be compatible. I'll check it out, thanks.
i have one and i love it. i can't imagine having to deal with switching cd's to find my music ever again.
The only time I deal with CDs is when I put them in my DVD-ROM drive to rip them to make MP3 CDs for my truck.
Although I'm sure most people wouldn't consider anything designed to fly through a war zone to be "safe" by most standards.
I would feel much safer in an F-15 or B-1B than I would in a Harrier or Osprey. But these planes generally fly higher than 50 feet. Perhaps a better way of saying it would be that you don't consider any aircraft designed for close combat support (think helicopter hovering at low altitude) safe.
Just curious, anyone knows how this compares to a regular automobile ?
If your car has a problem with the steering, you put on the brakes, and maybe have enough steering capability to get out of traffic. If something jiggles loose in the engine, even in the worst case if a piston were to stick, a rod thrown or timing belt cracked, timing got out of wack and you busted the valves and cracked the block, etc, you stick it in neutral and coast to the side of the road.
The Harrier has had "steering" and engine problems similar to these over its life. Almost all the time, it crashes and the pilots die. Mechanical failure in a car means you pull over to the side of the road in the majority of cases. Even in an airplane you can usually glide to a relatively safe crash-landing, although commercial jets aren't exactly graceful in air. But the Harrier? No way. If you have problems it will probably tip on the side or upside down, making it problematic even to eject and safely observe the wreckage. Assuming the eject mechanism works, of course.
On the other hand, I can see quite extensive military uses for this aircraft, and I could see it as being a very important part of the military.
Maybe that is why DARPA is helping to develop it ;-)
So far, our attempts at bridging the gaps between helicopters and fixed wing aircraft have met with disaster. Take the Osprey, for example. I don't know who it was but he said that it took the worst features of both types of aircraft and mashed them together with poor engineering. Hopefully this new aircraft does not suffer the fate of the Osprey... and her pilots.
Taking the time to put ogg into a player costs money in terms of labor and development, and for that .0001% (or less) of people actually interested in it makes it something of a questionable business decision to spend the time and money on.
Businesses exist to make money. By using OGG, they do not pay patent royalties or fees. If they charge the same amount per device as they do for MP3, they could make $5 or $10 more. Even selling 100,000 devices, they could make between half and a full million dollars in extra profit. That is enough to grab the attention of most businesses.
How about a head unit for my truck's sound system that plays Ogg? I have yet to find one, anyone have a link?
You make an excellent comparison, but I partially disagree. Cable and T1 are different paradigms in terms of connections. Yes, you can compare based on megabits, but that is not the whole picture. T1 is a dedicated line. Even if you lease a fractional T1, you still have X amount of dedicated bandwidth, up and down, that is reserved for your use. With cable, the cable company can overload your cable loop. Bandwidth = cable size / customers, roughly. It fluctuates based on how many people are using it at a given time and how much bandwidth they are using.
Then the whole static/dynamic IP issue comes into play. Granted those of us with cable routers that keep renewing DHCP leases basically have a static IP, then again, it is not guaranteed. Mine has changed at least twice in the year I've been at this address. That does me no good if I want to put my semi-static IP in the DNS database.
Connections do get faster, both for residential and commercial use. My web host provider has multiple OC-12s. Between all eight of their backbone providers they have over 200 MBps of bandwidth. That was unheard of even ten years ago. Home broadband, ten years ago, usually meant you ran a cable from your office to your home, assuming you lived close enough, or you used a university computer lab. Now it is in the hands of almost anybody who lives near an urban center. You are correct on that account. I certainly am grateful that corporate America thinks there is enough money to be made by selling me broadband. They at least got that much right about me as a consumer ;-)
I just wish they offered higher upstream packages on their non-business lines
Wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first.
If the telcos/media/broadcast corporations in this country wanted us to run servers, have a voice among our peers, and turn broadcasting into a two-way medium (as opposed to TV), they would give us higher upstream bandwidth.
Why do you think I pay money each month for web hosting?
I'm also personally excited about this, because of my tight budget, I just may be able to afford the beautiful broadband connection once again
Broadband is one of those things like rent, water, gas, and electricity. Before I even budget for food, I must have broadband :-)