just put an entry in your hosts file corresponding to the IP, and then type the non-numeric link into a browser window... not quite as slick as simply clicking on a link, but it should allow you to circumvent the policy, so long as you are able to modify your hosts file.
Jobs changing hands is no different from jobs changing countries, when you think about it.
If suddenly nurses are able to perform a procedure that was only performable by doctors, then a job has changed hands. If a novice programmer is able to write code (using Java) that an expert programmer used to be able to write (in c++), then a job has changed hands. Each niche in the labor market is subject to the forces of supply and demand. Just because two niches may be in the same industry or in the same country doesn't mean they should not respond to those forces. Here's why:
Forcing people to pay an expert extra $$ to have software written by an expert in c++ creates a situation where companies like Sun have no incentive to invent Java. The major appeal of new technology is that it increases the productivity that one can buy per dollar. You may feel sorry for a c++ coder who gets displaced by a Java coder in the US or a c++ coder in India, but both are the same. The highly paid expert c++ coder is still out of work. Demand has shifted, due to innovation (Java) the money that was going to overpay a c++ coder to reinvent the wheel using the STL is now going to Sun and to the company that is able to get cheaper bids on its software project because it can be done in half the time using Java as compared to c++, the manager who ran the project gets a bonus, consumers get cheaper software, etc., etc.
If nurses are able to do a task that doctors used to, or if hospitals begin outsourcing certain tasks to doctors in Bangalore, patients are still getting the same procedure (value) for less money. That is what consumers/patients want (last time I checked people like to pay less for things, rather than more).
In the US we have a very heavily regulated labor market. We have the 40 hour work week, unemployment insurance, overtime laws, minimum wage, etc. The consequence of this is that we are much less competetive than other countries are that haven't adopted such standards. The standards benefit some, but harm others, even in the US. Think of all the hardworking people who would happily work >40 hours in order to put some extra stuff under the Christmas tree for the kids, but who don't get the option because overtime would cost their employer time and a half and so it's not offered.
Since the height of the communist movement in the US in the 1940s, there has been a TON of empirical data from nations all over the world that illustrates that free trade benefits everyone. The worker who is displaced by an outsource worker may find another job that only pays 80% as much (in the short term), but everyone benefits from cheaper products and increased competition.
Besides, who are any of us to claim that we deserve to sit on our lazy asses working 40 hours per week when some starving person in India is willing to work a heck of a lot harder just to put food on the table.
Some people sweat and strive for the American dream, but happen to live in India. Many of us here have it staring us in the face but would rather sit around complaining about outsourcing.
By the way, laws that prohibit American companies from outsourcing create additional costs, which get passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. Such policies are equivalent to just raising taxes on everybody and writing a welfare check to the people whose jobs are being "protected".
It's too bad that some people lost their jobs... There is risk with any investment. To expect shareholders to come up with a bunch of capital to fund a major overhaul is potentially somewhat unrealistic. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and maybe doing so was the best idea, but you can't blame people for being unable to foresee the future.
It's about jobs changing and the demand for skills changing. Not long ago in history, someone who was capable of doing mathematics as advanced as what is typically taught in US schools in the 5th grade would have a lifetime career as a mathematics expert, and would perform all sorts of feats that were marvelous to his/her peers: Square roots, proportions, long division, etc.
Now that most people learn these skills, the value of them has decreased, and one can no longer make a career out of simply knowing them.
Nobody owes anyone else employment. It must be mutually voluntary in a free society. That means no slavery and no forced hiring or forced wages.
In case you want to outsorce, try rentacoder.com... you can get others to do your work for next to nothing. Some coders are in the US, and some are in India, etc.
Your comment about corporations was completely false. Most anyone can become a shareholder. Corporations are not evil, they are simply collections of normal folks who happen to own shares of stock because they decided to take a chance and invest.
Forcing the shareholder to pay some coder higher than the market wage is equivalent to forcing the shareholder to pay the coder welfare. If you want to be on welfare, so be it, but most self-respecting people do not.
Maybe it's time to find other skills, or to hone an existing skill that is in higher demand.
yeah, let's all spend a lot of time feeling sorry for blacksmiths as we stop buying cars to avoid putting people out of work. Give me a break. The world changes. If you're a blacksmith and you start reading about the Model T in the newspaper, maybe it's time to think about changing careers. The trends that put people out of work are very gradual, and it's only people's denial of reality that allows them to be victimized. By feeling sorry for them and trying to help them out (taxpayer funded subsidies are equivalent to buying horseshoes and destroying them), all you're doing is making the trend less obvious.
The difference is that Tradesports is a futures exchange, not a bookmaker. There is good liquidity, it just costs a lot...:)
I've been following tradesports for almost a year now, and it's continued to grow and the markets are becoming deeper. Over time, more people will "make markets" (aka sell liquidity) and the more who do that the cheaper liquidity will become.
There are some other electronic markets My favorite are tradesports.com and intrade.com, both of which trade a variety of political and econonomic futures contracts.
I'm currently wagering that the google IPO will not reach $105.
To think that all companies doing IPOs could pull off a dutch auction is simply absurd. Only with heavily hyped companies like google is there guaranteed to be enough capital to eliminate the need for the underwriter to offer a little extra cheese to the people (preferred customers) to get them to invest the capital to buy the initial shares.
The comparison to a car doesn't really hold. BMW, Mercedes, etc., are under a lot of pressure not to change the appearance of models year to year, so that people who buy in year x don't suddenly appear to be driving an antique in year x+1 or x+1.
It's fine to spend $3K+ on a PC, but be prepared for the $500 PC I buy in 18 months to outperform it, no matter how fancy the case is.
Risk management has been a fairly precise science for a long time, it's determining what information is relevant to managing a particular risk that is a matter of uncertainty.
Most of the money that was lost in the "bubble burst" was due to plain stupidity or specific decisions not to hedge risk (not the fundamental inability to do so, as Mandelbrot leads one to believe). By stupidity, I mean that very few investors (even institutional ones) had stop loss orders in place. Decisions not to hedge occur for a variety of reasons, most often because hedging costs money and people often underestimate the liklihood of an adverse outcome.
In many cases, a lot MORE money could have been made. For instance, if the SEC made it easier to profit from a prediction that a stock is overvalued. Notably, Greenspan cited "irrational exuberance"... imagine if he'd said "there is money to be made by those wise investors who identify the stocks to short". This would have put tremendous pressure on companies to PROVE that their results were real and not inflated (as in bubble-oriented).
All in all, Mandelbrot's essay seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of supply and demand and of hedging. The entire point of hedging (risk management) is to cover one's ass in the face of uncertainty. Since people often face exposure on opposite sides of an uncertain outcome, the probability of that outcome (and supply and demand) determines the price to hedge against it.
To pretend that the uncertainty itself could have been eliminated through mathematical analysis is absurd... Anyone (or any entity) who would have developed this technique would have been able to use it to make money, and so the incentive has always been there (in a HUGE way) for it to be done, without some sort of absurd top-down decree to "evil corporations"...
Miguel is working on one of the most important and exciting projects in the software world. Regardless of what Novell does or doesn't do with Mono, it will still be open source, and it will forever alter the competetive landscape (by increasing competition for Microsoft).
Strange that this article should come out now. The other day I tried both products in order to figure out which one would work better to 1) host a windows OS instance to work as a print server for the winprinter that I bought real cheap, and 2) to host mythbackend.
To keep things simple I settled on KnopMyth as a quick way to install MythTV. I had the opposite experience of the reviewer: Microsoft Virtual PC installed KnopMyth seamlessly, while VMWare 4.5 crashed when the image tried to boot (KnopMyth is based on a hybrid Debian distro, and I used the straight Linux optimization on VMWare).
It turns out that neither VMWare or Virtual PC were able to access my Hauppauge card, so I had to figure out another option, but I figured I'd add my $.02 to the issue.
Also, VirtualPC actually seemed a bit more zippy to me during the post phase, although I never got KnopMyth installed on it so I didn't really run any benchmarks.
windowsupdate.com used to redirect to windowsupdate.microsoft.com... i'm not sure if the spammer had it set up that way to train people to type the wrong URL, or if Microsoft previously owned the domain and then let it expire...
That is true... but they were on the edge of a very slippery slope, with a bannana peel under each foot. Creating iTunes sooner would have prevented tons of theft and would have allowed them to retain a lot more profit than they did.
By being dinosaurs about it, the RIAA wound up in a situation where internet anarchy led to massive amounts of theft and to the creation of an enormous theft industry (kazaa, napster, etc.). All this is mostly due to their unwillingness to bend to the consumers' preferred distribution model. It doesn't justify the theft, but it doesn't make the RIAA seem particularly savvy either.
Do you believe that people are allowed to give away hundreds of copies of a CD they purchased one copy of?
I think iTunes could have come along a lot sooner... the problem was that the RIAA failed to recognize how hard it would be to police p2p networks, and how easy it would have been to make the songs available legally. The cost of piracy to the RIAA has been enormous, so let's hope the MPAA figures out a way to keep its rightful profit and avoid the lawlessness that happened with music.
I know that to the Slashdot crowd most decisions made by industry groups bare the stench of conspiracy, but maybe the MPAA figures that movie swapping is likely destined to be what music swapping has been for a few years now, and maybe they're trying to move in the direction of iTunes before movie swapping becomes as commonplace.
Think of how different things would have been if iTunes had been released to the public back in 1999.
I think most people have thusfar been impressed by the gmail GUI (I have, even though I've submitted a number of suggestions to Google for how to make it better)...
If Yahoo begins to offer a richer client experience for email users, then it won't be long before many more people start wanting to use both sites with a variety of browsers, and soon both IE and Mozilla (this is/. so I'll mention Opera as well) will have better standards compliance as a consequence. Note how it's mostly the less-used and more esoteric areas of standard compliance where (today) one finds most of the inconsistencies...
Great employees are obviously an investment, and Microsoft wouldn't be the hugely profitable company that it is unless each of the employees who "cost" $300K earned the company more than $300K (on average) per year.
The cost per employee is simply the fixed + variable cost of doing business for one year divided by the number of employees. It's not a terribly useful statistic.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I didn't realize there was a proxy server... but if there is then my 'solution' might not work... but it still might be worth a try... :)
just put an entry in your hosts file corresponding to the IP, and then type the non-numeric link into a browser window... not quite as slick as simply clicking on a link, but it should allow you to circumvent the policy, so long as you are able to modify your hosts file.
Jobs changing hands is no different from jobs changing countries, when you think about it.
If suddenly nurses are able to perform a procedure that was only performable by doctors, then a job has changed hands. If a novice programmer is able to write code (using Java) that an expert programmer used to be able to write (in c++), then a job has changed hands. Each niche in the labor market is subject to the forces of supply and demand. Just because two niches may be in the same industry or in the same country doesn't mean they should not respond to those forces. Here's why:
Forcing people to pay an expert extra $$ to have software written by an expert in c++ creates a situation where companies like Sun have no incentive to invent Java. The major appeal of new technology is that it increases the productivity that one can buy per dollar. You may feel sorry for a c++ coder who gets displaced by a Java coder in the US or a c++ coder in India, but both are the same. The highly paid expert c++ coder is still out of work. Demand has shifted, due to innovation (Java) the money that was going to overpay a c++ coder to reinvent the wheel using the STL is now going to Sun and to the company that is able to get cheaper bids on its software project because it can be done in half the time using Java as compared to c++, the manager who ran the project gets a bonus, consumers get cheaper software, etc., etc.
If nurses are able to do a task that doctors used to, or if hospitals begin outsourcing certain tasks to doctors in Bangalore, patients are still getting the same procedure (value) for less money. That is what consumers/patients want (last time I checked people like to pay less for things, rather than more).
In the US we have a very heavily regulated labor market. We have the 40 hour work week, unemployment insurance, overtime laws, minimum wage, etc. The consequence of this is that we are much less competetive than other countries are that haven't adopted such standards. The standards benefit some, but harm others, even in the US. Think of all the hardworking people who would happily work >40 hours in order to put some extra stuff under the Christmas tree for the kids, but who don't get the option because overtime would cost their employer time and a half and so it's not offered.
Since the height of the communist movement in the US in the 1940s, there has been a TON of empirical data from nations all over the world that illustrates that free trade benefits everyone. The worker who is displaced by an outsource worker may find another job that only pays 80% as much (in the short term), but everyone benefits from cheaper products and increased competition.
Besides, who are any of us to claim that we deserve to sit on our lazy asses working 40 hours per week when some starving person in India is willing to work a heck of a lot harder just to put food on the table.
Some people sweat and strive for the American dream, but happen to live in India. Many of us here have it staring us in the face but would rather sit around complaining about outsourcing.
By the way, laws that prohibit American companies from outsourcing create additional costs, which get passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. Such policies are equivalent to just raising taxes on everybody and writing a welfare check to the people whose jobs are being "protected".
It's too bad that some people lost their jobs... There is risk with any investment. To expect shareholders to come up with a bunch of capital to fund a major overhaul is potentially somewhat unrealistic. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and maybe doing so was the best idea, but you can't blame people for being unable to foresee the future.
It's about jobs changing and the demand for skills changing. Not long ago in history, someone who was capable of doing mathematics as advanced as what is typically taught in US schools in the 5th grade would have a lifetime career as a mathematics expert, and would perform all sorts of feats that were marvelous to his/her peers: Square roots, proportions, long division, etc.
Now that most people learn these skills, the value of them has decreased, and one can no longer make a career out of simply knowing them.
Nobody owes anyone else employment. It must be mutually voluntary in a free society. That means no slavery and no forced hiring or forced wages.
In case you want to outsorce, try rentacoder.com... you can get others to do your work for next to nothing. Some coders are in the US, and some are in India, etc.
Your comment about corporations was completely false. Most anyone can become a shareholder. Corporations are not evil, they are simply collections of normal folks who happen to own shares of stock because they decided to take a chance and invest.
Forcing the shareholder to pay some coder higher than the market wage is equivalent to forcing the shareholder to pay the coder welfare. If you want to be on welfare, so be it, but most self-respecting people do not.
Maybe it's time to find other skills, or to hone an existing skill that is in higher demand.
yeah, let's all spend a lot of time feeling sorry for blacksmiths as we stop buying cars to avoid putting people out of work. Give me a break. The world changes. If you're a blacksmith and you start reading about the Model T in the newspaper, maybe it's time to think about changing careers. The trends that put people out of work are very gradual, and it's only people's denial of reality that allows them to be victimized. By feeling sorry for them and trying to help them out (taxpayer funded subsidies are equivalent to buying horseshoes and destroying them), all you're doing is making the trend less obvious.
uh, nobody forced you to buy it.
The difference is that Tradesports is a futures exchange, not a bookmaker. There is good liquidity, it just costs a lot... :)
I've been following tradesports for almost a year now, and it's continued to grow and the markets are becoming deeper. Over time, more people will "make markets" (aka sell liquidity) and the more who do that the cheaper liquidity will become.
There are some other electronic markets My favorite are tradesports.com and intrade.com, both of which trade a variety of political and econonomic futures contracts.
I'm currently wagering that the google IPO will not reach $105.
To think that all companies doing IPOs could pull off a dutch auction is simply absurd. Only with heavily hyped companies like google is there guaranteed to be enough capital to eliminate the need for the underwriter to offer a little extra cheese to the people (preferred customers) to get them to invest the capital to buy the initial shares.
Well, then make my PC in 18 months a $700 one (spend an extra $200 on a better graphics card)...
The comparison to a car doesn't really hold. BMW, Mercedes, etc., are under a lot of pressure not to change the appearance of models year to year, so that people who buy in year x don't suddenly appear to be driving an antique in year x+1 or x+1.
It's fine to spend $3K+ on a PC, but be prepared for the $500 PC I buy in 18 months to outperform it, no matter how fancy the case is.
Risk management has been a fairly precise science for a long time, it's determining what information is relevant to managing a particular risk that is a matter of uncertainty.
Most of the money that was lost in the "bubble burst" was due to plain stupidity or specific decisions not to hedge risk (not the fundamental inability to do so, as Mandelbrot leads one to believe). By stupidity, I mean that very few investors (even institutional ones) had stop loss orders in place. Decisions not to hedge occur for a variety of reasons, most often because hedging costs money and people often underestimate the liklihood of an adverse outcome.
In many cases, a lot MORE money could have been made. For instance, if the SEC made it easier to profit from a prediction that a stock is overvalued. Notably, Greenspan cited "irrational exuberance"... imagine if he'd said "there is money to be made by those wise investors who identify the stocks to short". This would have put tremendous pressure on companies to PROVE that their results were real and not inflated (as in bubble-oriented).
All in all, Mandelbrot's essay seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of supply and demand and of hedging. The entire point of hedging (risk management) is to cover one's ass in the face of uncertainty. Since people often face exposure on opposite sides of an uncertain outcome, the probability of that outcome (and supply and demand) determines the price to hedge against it.
To pretend that the uncertainty itself could have been eliminated through mathematical analysis is absurd... Anyone (or any entity) who would have developed this technique would have been able to use it to make money, and so the incentive has always been there (in a HUGE way) for it to be done, without some sort of absurd top-down decree to "evil corporations"...
This is truly a great idea, and a great way to get people involved.
If I hadn't switched to gmail I'd plan on participating.
Fair point, but C# is way easier than Java, so Mono comes closer to accomplishing all of the objectives of Java.
Miguel is working on one of the most important and exciting projects in the software world. Regardless of what Novell does or doesn't do with Mono, it will still be open source, and it will forever alter the competetive landscape (by increasing competition for Microsoft).
Strange that this article should come out now. The other day I tried both products in order to figure out which one would work better to 1) host a windows OS instance to work as a print server for the winprinter that I bought real cheap, and 2) to host mythbackend.
To keep things simple I settled on KnopMyth as a quick way to install MythTV. I had the opposite experience of the reviewer: Microsoft Virtual PC installed KnopMyth seamlessly, while VMWare 4.5 crashed when the image tried to boot (KnopMyth is based on a hybrid Debian distro, and I used the straight Linux optimization on VMWare).
It turns out that neither VMWare or Virtual PC were able to access my Hauppauge card, so I had to figure out another option, but I figured I'd add my $.02 to the issue.
Also, VirtualPC actually seemed a bit more zippy to me during the post phase, although I never got KnopMyth installed on it so I didn't really run any benchmarks.
windowsupdate.com used to redirect to windowsupdate.microsoft.com... i'm not sure if the spammer had it set up that way to train people to type the wrong URL, or if Microsoft previously owned the domain and then let it expire...
That is true... but they were on the edge of a very slippery slope, with a bannana peel under each foot. Creating iTunes sooner would have prevented tons of theft and would have allowed them to retain a lot more profit than they did.
By being dinosaurs about it, the RIAA wound up in a situation where internet anarchy led to massive amounts of theft and to the creation of an enormous theft industry (kazaa, napster, etc.). All this is mostly due to their unwillingness to bend to the consumers' preferred distribution model. It doesn't justify the theft, but it doesn't make the RIAA seem particularly savvy either.
Do you believe that people are allowed to give away hundreds of copies of a CD they purchased one copy of?
I think iTunes could have come along a lot sooner... the problem was that the RIAA failed to recognize how hard it would be to police p2p networks, and how easy it would have been to make the songs available legally. The cost of piracy to the RIAA has been enormous, so let's hope the MPAA figures out a way to keep its rightful profit and avoid the lawlessness that happened with music.
I know that to the Slashdot crowd most decisions made by industry groups bare the stench of conspiracy, but maybe the MPAA figures that movie swapping is likely destined to be what music swapping has been for a few years now, and maybe they're trying to move in the direction of iTunes before movie swapping becomes as commonplace.
Think of how different things would have been if iTunes had been released to the public back in 1999.
You may not like Bill Gates, but I think it's a far cry to imply that you're more intelligent than he is.
I think most people have thusfar been impressed by the gmail GUI (I have, even though I've submitted a number of suggestions to Google for how to make it better)...
/. so I'll mention Opera as well) will have better standards compliance as a consequence. Note how it's mostly the less-used and more esoteric areas of standard compliance where (today) one finds most of the inconsistencies...
If Yahoo begins to offer a richer client experience for email users, then it won't be long before many more people start wanting to use both sites with a variety of browsers, and soon both IE and Mozilla (this is
Great employees are obviously an investment, and Microsoft wouldn't be the hugely profitable company that it is unless each of the employees who "cost" $300K earned the company more than $300K (on average) per year.
The cost per employee is simply the fixed + variable cost of doing business for one year divided by the number of employees. It's not a terribly useful statistic.