Feel free to speak for yourself, then close your mouth.
The overwhelming majority of internationalization is done by smart Westerners, most of it by Americans (though Europeans have made huge contributions).
I've worked in Japan and Korea. They couldn't care less about internationalization when designing their own code. Of course they want Western code to be internationalized so they can use it, too, but that's just more pressure on Westerners to internationalize. If the Japanese decide to modify the code themselves, they'll simply add support for Japanese rather than trying to internationalize it.
And even Europeans don't usually have much interest in real internationalization. They've thought of "international" and "European" as synonyms for so long that as soon as it works in the major markets in their neighborhood, they declare it "internationalized" and quit. (Trying to talk to them about really internationalizing is then likely to result in perplexed looks and comments like, "unlike you Americans, we think internationally, so we've already internationalized yadda, yadda....")
It's the multinational US companies that have driven most real internationalization because as soon as they decide to leave their domestic nest, US companies are just as interested in Asia as in Europe. Developers at IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Apple, for example, have the importance of things like Unicode drummed into them. Not so for developers that I've seen at NEC, Fujitsu, Samsung, Siemens, Bull, or Ericsson.
Interestingly, though, the governments of India and Pakistan have both recently joined the Unicode Consortium as full members.
This "require everyone to believe" and "must cause everyone to convert" blather about missionaries is nonsense.
Though I'm an atheist, I've met plenty of missionaries, and they were all, without exception, trying to share what they considered extremely helpful knowledge for the benefit of others. I acknowledge that there are inevitably exceptions, but that's all they are these days: exceptions.
Many religious fundamentalist societies in the past have been coercive in the extreme, of course. The Muslims are the worst case of this today, with the Catholics (with their brutal concentration camps for "wayward" girls or orphans) a close second, but both groups tend to limit their coercion to those unfortunate enough to be born within their own group. Neither group is known, in current times, for proseletyzing missionaries actively seeking to convert nonmembers.
If someone is trying to persuade me of something that he thinks will be a real blessing to me, I'm not offended, and that's all I've seen from current missionaries. (The coercive missionaries these days call themselves by a different name: "political activists".)
...for experts you can call for opinions. He should be able to tell you who would know what and some tips for finding them.
Then, get on the phone and start making calls.
I'm no medical expert, but I've been in your position many times: a non-expert needing to make an important decision based on expertise. What do you do? You find experts and you ask questions. What questions? The more experts you talk to, the better your questions will become. By the time you're talking to your 30th expert, he'll think *you're* an expert from the quality of your questions.
Once you reach the point where you're not learning anything new, you're in as good a position to make the decision as anyone.
It's not that it's a surprise. It's just a huge annoyance.
Microsoft talks about how much easier it is to create Windows apps with.Net than with the old VC++/MFC approach, and that's so completely true that after you see what you can do with C#/.Net, you can't bear the thought of going back to C++/MFC.
But the fatal flaw for Spolsky and others in his position (including me on occasion) is the delivery of such apps to the enormous installed base if you can't deliver via CD-ROM. Then you're in the same position as people who would rather work in Java or Python or Lisp: your elegant little app has this huge boat anchor of a runtime to drag along with it, and people in the general installed base who get your app via download simply won't put up with it.
VC++/MFC have a huge boat anchor of a runtime, but it's Win32 itself, so it's invisible. The majority of the installed base out there can be counted on to have a huge library built into Win98 (likewise for Linux), and all you need to statically link is whatever wasn't already included in Win98.
For a C(++) developer on Win32 or Linux, this doesn't usually add much baggage, so I almost always statically link and save my users from dependency hell.
But for developers in anything else, the runtime is a major impediment to commercial viability (for certain scenarios).
At first I wondered why MS didn't just AOL the world with.Net installer CDs in everybody's mailboxes. I gradually came to the conclusion that it's because they were essentially gamma testing it first on those more savvy users who could figure out how to obtain it and install it themselves, especially on the server side.
It appears as though they plan to give themselves some time to work out the bugs and flaws in.Net and gradually insert it into the new OSes, allowing the upgrade cycle to control the speed of adoption. The least likely to upgrade will be the least sophisticated users that way, and therefore the people least likely to be able to handle the inevitable bugs in.Net will be the last to get it.
It will take a few years, but.Net is a powerful replacement for the Windows API that will eventually be built in to all Windows machines (and others, if MS gets their way), and then you'll be able to safely deliver a C# app without the runtime.
Of course it's an open question whether developers like me will be willing to wait. The major attraction of Windows for me is the huge market that the installed base represents. The OS itself is of little interest. But it's hard to take advantage of that installed base opportunity using.Net apps at the moment, and I can't see starting anything new with MFC (Yuck! I'd be stuck doing MFC maintenance for years to come). The best way to take advantage of.Net right now is on your own machine -- some sort of server-based app. Well, if it's a server scenario, then what the installed base is running is irrelevant, and I'd prefer to use something like Python or Java or even Lisp on Linux. (We'll see how C# on Linux turns out with Mono later this year with the release of 1.0.)
If there were a way to take a 300KB C# app and turn it into a 1.3MB windows *.exe that would run on a plain vanilla Win98 machine, that would change the economics for me as it would for Spolsky. Otherwise, well...we'll see....
The deadline for the mission was very tight, and there's no slipping a deadline imposed by the motion of planets through space. They either had to declare it ready and "ship", or never ship. They couldn't afford the cost of waiting a couple of years for the next launch window. Now or never.
So they built as fast as they could, used whatever time they had for testing and tweaking, and if they tweaked they had to restart the testing.
Every engineer on the team would have preferred more time for testing and tweaking, I'm sure. They didn't have it.
I both agree and disagree with this. Americans who haven't traveled much have a hard time imagining what it would be like if every US state spoke a different primary language. And, yes, there are clear cultural differences between the French and Germans, the Brits and Italians, the Greeks and the Swedes.
But even so, that "diversity" is trivial in some respects compared to what I see in the US. When I'm in Europe, some friend will always point out in amazement at cafe how diverse our fellow diners are. "Look! Those guys are German, and at our table we have two Brits and a half French/half Yank, and over there, there's a Greek and and...who knows? Maybe Polish or Czech?" And I shake my head in wonder. In the US, those same guys -- just transport them all on a business trip to a cafe in NYC -- would be called "white guys" and people would wonder if there was something sinister about the cafe -- that maybe it didn't willingly serve a "diverse" clientele.
You want diversity? Think sub-saharan Africans. Think Lao hill tribes. Think Pacific Islanders. Think Chinese. Think Guatemalan Indians. Think Haitians. Think Koreans. Now imagine them, not in ones or twos as cute cultural tokens, completely swamped by the state majority culture and having to fit in, but in clusters of anywhere from tens of thousands to millions, with their own political agendas and no intention of just "fitting in".
Imagine 2/3rds of the population of Paris being African-Europeans. Imagine London being 60% ethnic Pakistani, with the Pakistanis accepting as a matter of course that the white Londoners (those Germans, Greeks, Brits, and the half-French/half-Yank I mentioned) all owed them reparations for British colonialism. Imagine all of Germany being Central American Indians pouring across the borders into every other country in Europe in such numbers that they created voting blocs that no politician dared offend.
In which European country are Europeans a minority and considered to be oppressing the majority? In the fifth largest economy in the world, California, the over one million resident Europeans are all considered just a part of the white minority. Yes, whites are a minority in California, as are all other groups, and the public schools now teach that white oppression is the primary reason the average income of non-whites is lower than that of whites. (The fact that the avg income of Chinese is higher than that of whites is not taught because it might "confuse" the message that the political coalitions have decided needs to be taught.)
There are different reasonable ways to measure diversity. You're right that Americans often can't see the diversity that locals can see in Europe. Having lots of groups speaking different, but similar, languages and having different, but similar cultures that are easily distinguished by the locals but seem about the same to someone from the other side of the world, is one type. Yes, Europe taken as a whole, is more fragmented and diverse than the US in that sense, especially linguistically. And several mountainous regions in Southeast Asia, with only a few hundred thousand people each, are more diverse than all of Europe, by that measure.
Then there is diversity of the sort that is easily recognized by someone from the other side of the world who isn't thinking of just language differences: very large groups from extremely different ethnic backgrounds, having very different cultural attitudes and proclivities and very different political agendas which they are large enough to be able to effectively pursue, living under one roof in the same society. Most Europeans can't even understand such diversity and its implications, accustomed as they are to thinking that Swedes and Italians are extreme examples of "completely different" cultures.
Go to the US embassy in Mexico City and ask. There's probably an IRS office right in the embassy that deals with issues like yours. (Yes, the IRS has offices outside the US.) A gringo owning and operating a business in Mexico is rather common, and you can save a bundle in taxes if you find out what the rules are and follow them.
Or, go to one of the Mexican offices of a major US accounting firm and ask them what they can offer. They'll charge for their services, but probably not for an initial consultation, and they can show you how to minimize your taxes without getting in trouble with either the IRS or the Federales.
IANAL, either, but I don't have to be one to deal with this anymore than I have to be an accountant to pay taxes.
Forget the legalistic "employee" part. Zoning laws vary all over the place, but they are usually in a commonsensical form designed for the average person. Typically they'll be something like "you can't have any commercial traffic in and out other than a daily small package delivery service (e.g. UPS)" or "you can't put up any business-related signage" or "you can't have customers/clients visit the house" or "you can't have non-residents other than household service employees working on the premises" or "you can't have more than two non-residents working in the house, whether paid or not, and the type of work must be quiet and unobtrusive", or that sort of thing.
In the US, they are governed by the local community, for the most part, and some communities encourage domestic private enterprise, while others are prickly about it.
When you get your business license, they'll tell you about it. If you don't get a business license, you'd better not pay taxes, or they'll catch you. And, of course, if you don't pay taxes, you'll have bigger, scarier agencies to worry about, so just go get your business license.
In 25 years, the US will still be the predominant economy in the world, with a proportionate technology sector. Better?
Yes, absolutely. (From your mouth to God's ear, as they say.)
Of course, the US is the predominant economy in the world right now, but that's not making life much easier for workers in the manufacturing sector. Most of them really do need to try to find something else to do like the farmers before them and perhaps a large percentage of programmers now.
But my intention isn't to nitpick. I think from what you're saying that we mostly agree. There is a sea change in progress, and it should be considered in making one's career choices, but panic, abuse of others, and an assumption that most high tech will leave the US are all foolish.
I am, however, a member of the group that normally gets blamed for every economic downturn...
Ah, you're a politician!;-)
As Hillary Clinton demonstrated recently, Indians aren't protected by standards of political correctness.
Yes, you're not the first to notice how Hillary is more interested in governing the lives of others than in just about anything else. Milking envy and resentment for political gain is hardly limited to "that vast right-wing conspiracy".
There are non-metric units in common use all over the world. I think you confuse the declarations of various gov't bureaucracies with real life. "Societies" are not the same as their gov't agencies.
I agree that people often overreact to a change, and this is no exception.
But for you to set up the strawman that "*every* high-tech job in the US is about to be packed off to India" and knock it down with the assurance that it won't actually be every single one isn't much of an argument.
Yes, of course, there are still going to be programmers in the US. There are still steel workers and, for that matter, farmers and coal miners, but I wouldn't want to be one of them.
People are right to view this as a genuine structural change that has implications for career-related decisions such as a college major. They can do so without being guilty of "panicking".
I think the question is quite sensible, and "get a grip" and "stop panicking" aren't very useful answers.
And I think your "nasty undertone of racism" remark is bunk. You can always find an example of name-calling when people get frustrated and label an entire argument "racism, racism!", but that's mostly a red herring used to shut people up. If the jobs were going to Moscow instead of Bangalore, people would be just as upset and making the same arguments ("we're better than they are", "their quality isn't good", "they can't communicate", "our bosses are greedy and short-sighted", etc.) The issues would be the same.
And many of the most upset are Asian Americans (both East Asian and South Asian) who are having their previously elite status seriously eroded by large numbers of those they thought they left behind in the Old Country.
I don't see anyone doing anything wrong here. It's just the natural balancing of supply and demand at work, but it's a whopper of a change that people need to factor into their personal plans.
ASCII has a relatively simple, consistent mapping from lower- to uppercase and vice versa. Letters all have a single upper-lower 1:1 pair, while all others are caseless and upper and lower are the same. It's a simple map.
But ASCII is obsolete. Java doesn't use it, even for variable names. When you go beyond ASCII, you have many different case maps to choose from. Different cultures have different case equivalency rules, some of which are rather complicated. And then, as others have mentioned, there are the coding conventions that make use of casing to make distinctions, but these conventions ride on top of the cultural conventions regarding which distinctions matter. (I don't want to get into the details, but what one man considers a single letter another might consider to be two, for example.)
You can avoid all of these thorny cultural disagreements by either limiting all identifiers to ASCII with its single equivalency map, or by just making the rule that identifiers are the same if and only if they are composed of the same sequence of characters and avoiding the issues of equivalency maps altogether. (Until you get to normalization, which is another can of worms....)
Since Java allows a much wider range of characters in its identifiers than the puny ASCII character set, it chose the second option: ignore equivalency maps and declare that "if it's not the same, it's different".
This "heat that has already escaped" argument is absurd. By that argument, you may as well be naked in the cold as bundled up because the only thing clothes or a blanket can catch is heat that has "already escaped".
By removing heat from immediately outside the core body area, these heat pipes have the same effect on the core body that standing on a highly thermally conductive material such as cement has on your feet. In fact, if they work really well, they should actually feel cold.
The internal organs need to maintain a rather narrow temperature range or they suffer catastrophic collapse (electrochemical failure). The extremities can go way outside the lethal boundary temperatures in the core before they even start becoming uncomfortable.
For this reason, the body constricts the blood vessels in your extremities if you start to get cold to conserve core body heat. If you bypass this mechanism and create an express lane for moving heat out of the core into the extremities, you'd better have excess core heat or you'll be in trouble.
Of course, if you're not in wilderness survival conditions, and are so bundled up that you're actually getting a bit too warm, then pumping some of the excess heat directly to your fingers or toes could be more comfy than simply opening your coat.
So for around town, for relatively short periods, it could be okay if you're wearing a warm enough coat. But if you're wearing a warm enough coat, you're core temp might start going up, in which case you're body will dilate the blood vessels and dump heat to your hands and feet, essentially doing the same thing.
Of course I oppose aerogel too, but only because I know that NASA is part of the military industrial complex.
Plus, they say it's "inorganic", and we all know that if it's not Organic, it's Bad. If conservatives weren't such religious fanatics and read a few scientific studies, like they have in Mother Jones, they'd see that.
[sigh...] Oh, well. Now where are my crystals. Gotta get rid of this negative energy so when I'm running the School Board meeting tonight all those neanderthal conservatives who often show up won't uncenter my chi....
They also have several samples on display in the Tech Museum in San Jose, CA. Also under glass, but you can get very close to it and see how different it looks as you move around and view it from different angles.
Which languages, "objectively", are the ones to learn?
Though I think the answer is more subjective than you seem to imply, I'm not asking to be argumentative. I'd be interested in what list you would come up with, based on your stated approach, and why you would learn each. As you point out, we don't have time to learn them all, so good advice regarding which few to pick is (potentially) useful.
I prefer Python to Ruby, but your complaints about Python are right on, IMO.
Your "Python stole the thunder" analysis is not quite right, though, and it relates to why I prefer Python.
Ruby is as old as Python, but Matz wrote Ruby to do his own Japanese *nix work. He focused on his own needs, but made it available to all, so essentially he was focusing on the Japanese *nix community and their needs. The Japanese *nix community, for example, cares far more about handling legacy Japanese data than about handling new, multilingual Unicode data, so Matz's design decisions reflect this local bias, to the detriment of those of us with reverse priorities.
Japanese *nixers are a pretty small, insular community, but that's where Ruby has always been centered. These days, the circle has grown out from that center large enough that there's more for Westerners or non-*nix users to use, but the center is still on Japanese *nix users.
It's that focus that explains a lot of the weaknesses of Ruby as seen from the perspective of a Westerner who cares about cross-platform dev, internationalisation, good and plentiful English docs, a big English-speaking community of experienced users, etc.
I think Matz is a smart, humble guy with real talent when it comes to language design. I like him, and I like Ruby's design more than Python's in many ways, but his focus on Japanese *nix programmers and their local priorities has been a ball and chain around Ruby's ankle that I think explains the more rapid growth of Python worldwide (and Ruby's faster growth in Japan).
The term Corporate America is just another tired Slashdot bogeyman. I've worked in several companies in Europe and Asia (locals, not overseas offices of US companies), and I assure you that people are a lot more willing to complain publicly in US companies.
In both the UK and Japan, if it weren't for the practice of going out as a work team and drinking together several nights a week, you'd have no idea what some people were thinking.
And I've never seen the kind of silent hatred for bosses in the US that I've seen overseas. I'm not saying it doesn't exist in some industries, but in my experience, if you hate your boss that much in the US, you either leave or get thrown out. Overseas, it's a lot riskier to leave and a lot harder for them to throw you out, so you stay and smolder silently while your boss, who can't throw you out, works on ruining your life, which he can do as long as you don't leave.
You've never seen office politics unless you've worked somewhere where the people are virtually trapped together for a lifetime. Corporate America, where the jerks come and go relatively quickly, is a picnic in comparison. (Think of a US university faculty and you'll get more of the feeling.)
It is the same "word" in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ("ri" in Korean, too.) By that I mean the same Chinese etymology, which resulted in the same character and same pronunciation, adjusted for language differences. It's actual length, though, varies a great deal from place to place and time to time historically, even within the same kingdom/country.
Slashdot Mirror
Feel free to speak for yourself, then close your mouth.
The overwhelming majority of internationalization is done by smart Westerners, most of it by Americans (though Europeans have made huge contributions).
I've worked in Japan and Korea. They couldn't care less about internationalization when designing their own code. Of course they want Western code to be internationalized so they can use it, too, but that's just more pressure on Westerners to internationalize. If the Japanese decide to modify the code themselves, they'll simply add support for Japanese rather than trying to internationalize it.
And even Europeans don't usually have much interest in real internationalization. They've thought of "international" and "European" as synonyms for so long that as soon as it works in the major markets in their neighborhood, they declare it "internationalized" and quit. (Trying to talk to them about really internationalizing is then likely to result in perplexed looks and comments like, "unlike you Americans, we think internationally, so we've already internationalized yadda, yadda....")
It's the multinational US companies that have driven most real internationalization because as soon as they decide to leave their domestic nest, US companies are just as interested in Asia as in Europe. Developers at IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Apple, for example, have the importance of things like Unicode drummed into them. Not so for developers that I've seen at NEC, Fujitsu, Samsung, Siemens, Bull, or Ericsson.
Interestingly, though, the governments of India and Pakistan have both recently joined the Unicode Consortium as full members.
This "require everyone to believe" and "must cause everyone to convert" blather about missionaries is nonsense.
Though I'm an atheist, I've met plenty of missionaries, and they were all, without exception, trying to share what they considered extremely helpful knowledge for the benefit of others. I acknowledge that there are inevitably exceptions, but that's all they are these days: exceptions.
Many religious fundamentalist societies in the past have been coercive in the extreme, of course. The Muslims are the worst case of this today, with the Catholics (with their brutal concentration camps for "wayward" girls or orphans) a close second, but both groups tend to limit their coercion to those unfortunate enough to be born within their own group. Neither group is known, in current times, for proseletyzing missionaries actively seeking to convert nonmembers.
If someone is trying to persuade me of something that he thinks will be a real blessing to me, I'm not offended, and that's all I've seen from current missionaries. (The coercive missionaries these days call themselves by a different name: "political activists".)
...for experts you can call for opinions. He should be able to tell you who would know what and some tips for finding them.
Then, get on the phone and start making calls.
I'm no medical expert, but I've been in your position many times: a non-expert needing to make an important decision based on expertise. What do you do? You find experts and you ask questions. What questions? The more experts you talk to, the better your questions will become. By the time you're talking to your 30th expert, he'll think *you're* an expert from the quality of your questions.
Once you reach the point where you're not learning anything new, you're in as good a position to make the decision as anyone.
where is the surprise in this?
.Net than with the old VC++/MFC approach, and that's so completely true that after you see what you can do with C#/.Net, you can't bear the thought of going back to C++/MFC.
.Net installer CDs in everybody's mailboxes. I gradually came to the conclusion that it's because they were essentially gamma testing it first on those more savvy users who could figure out how to obtain it and install it themselves, especially on the server side.
.Net and gradually insert it into the new OSes, allowing the upgrade cycle to control the speed of adoption. The least likely to upgrade will be the least sophisticated users that way, and therefore the people least likely to be able to handle the inevitable bugs in .Net will be the last to get it.
.Net is a powerful replacement for the Windows API that will eventually be built in to all Windows machines (and others, if MS gets their way), and then you'll be able to safely deliver a C# app without the runtime.
.Net apps at the moment, and I can't see starting anything new with MFC (Yuck! I'd be stuck doing MFC maintenance for years to come). The best way to take advantage of .Net right now is on your own machine -- some sort of server-based app. Well, if it's a server scenario, then what the installed base is running is irrelevant, and I'd prefer to use something like Python or Java or even Lisp on Linux. (We'll see how C# on Linux turns out with Mono later this year with the release of 1.0.)
It's not that it's a surprise. It's just a huge annoyance.
Microsoft talks about how much easier it is to create Windows apps with
But the fatal flaw for Spolsky and others in his position (including me on occasion) is the delivery of such apps to the enormous installed base if you can't deliver via CD-ROM. Then you're in the same position as people who would rather work in Java or Python or Lisp: your elegant little app has this huge boat anchor of a runtime to drag along with it, and people in the general installed base who get your app via download simply won't put up with it.
VC++/MFC have a huge boat anchor of a runtime, but it's Win32 itself, so it's invisible. The majority of the installed base out there can be counted on to have a huge library built into Win98 (likewise for Linux), and all you need to statically link is whatever wasn't already included in Win98.
For a C(++) developer on Win32 or Linux, this doesn't usually add much baggage, so I almost always statically link and save my users from dependency hell.
But for developers in anything else, the runtime is a major impediment to commercial viability (for certain scenarios).
At first I wondered why MS didn't just AOL the world with
It appears as though they plan to give themselves some time to work out the bugs and flaws in
It will take a few years, but
Of course it's an open question whether developers like me will be willing to wait. The major attraction of Windows for me is the huge market that the installed base represents. The OS itself is of little interest. But it's hard to take advantage of that installed base opportunity using
If there were a way to take a 300KB C# app and turn it into a 1.3MB windows *.exe that would run on a plain vanilla Win98 machine, that would change the economics for me as it would for Spolsky. Otherwise, well...we'll see....
The deadline for the mission was very tight, and there's no slipping a deadline imposed by the motion of planets through space. They either had to declare it ready and "ship", or never ship. They couldn't afford the cost of waiting a couple of years for the next launch window. Now or never.
So they built as fast as they could, used whatever time they had for testing and tweaking, and if they tweaked they had to restart the testing.
Every engineer on the team would have preferred more time for testing and tweaking, I'm sure. They didn't have it.
I both agree and disagree with this. Americans who haven't traveled much have a hard time imagining what it would be like if every US state spoke a different primary language. And, yes, there are clear cultural differences between the French and Germans, the Brits and Italians, the Greeks and the Swedes.
But even so, that "diversity" is trivial in some respects compared to what I see in the US. When I'm in Europe, some friend will always point out in amazement at cafe how diverse our fellow diners are. "Look! Those guys are German, and at our table we have two Brits and a half French/half Yank, and over there, there's a Greek and and...who knows? Maybe Polish or Czech?" And I shake my head in wonder. In the US, those same guys -- just transport them all on a business trip to a cafe in NYC -- would be called "white guys" and people would wonder if there was something sinister about the cafe -- that maybe it didn't willingly serve a "diverse" clientele.
You want diversity? Think sub-saharan Africans. Think Lao hill tribes. Think Pacific Islanders. Think Chinese. Think Guatemalan Indians. Think Haitians. Think Koreans. Now imagine them, not in ones or twos as cute cultural tokens, completely swamped by the state majority culture and having to fit in, but in clusters of anywhere from tens of thousands to millions, with their own political agendas and no intention of just "fitting in".
Imagine 2/3rds of the population of Paris being African-Europeans. Imagine London being 60% ethnic Pakistani, with the Pakistanis accepting as a matter of course that the white Londoners (those Germans, Greeks, Brits, and the half-French/half-Yank I mentioned) all owed them reparations for British colonialism. Imagine all of Germany being Central American Indians pouring across the borders into every other country in Europe in such numbers that they created voting blocs that no politician dared offend.
In which European country are Europeans a minority and considered to be oppressing the majority? In the fifth largest economy in the world, California, the over one million resident Europeans are all considered just a part of the white minority. Yes, whites are a minority in California, as are all other groups, and the public schools now teach that white oppression is the primary reason the average income of non-whites is lower than that of whites. (The fact that the avg income of Chinese is higher than that of whites is not taught because it might "confuse" the message that the political coalitions have decided needs to be taught.)
There are different reasonable ways to measure diversity. You're right that Americans often can't see the diversity that locals can see in Europe. Having lots of groups speaking different, but similar, languages and having different, but similar cultures that are easily distinguished by the locals but seem about the same to someone from the other side of the world, is one type. Yes, Europe taken as a whole, is more fragmented and diverse than the US in that sense, especially linguistically. And several mountainous regions in Southeast Asia, with only a few hundred thousand people each, are more diverse than all of Europe, by that measure.
Then there is diversity of the sort that is easily recognized by someone from the other side of the world who isn't thinking of just language differences: very large groups from extremely different ethnic backgrounds, having very different cultural attitudes and proclivities and very different political agendas which they are large enough to be able to effectively pursue, living under one roof in the same society. Most Europeans can't even understand such diversity and its implications, accustomed as they are to thinking that Swedes and Italians are extreme examples of "completely different" cultures.
If you're just a little patient, someone will usually just give you one.
Go to the US embassy in Mexico City and ask. There's probably an IRS office right in the embassy that deals with issues like yours. (Yes, the IRS has offices outside the US.) A gringo owning and operating a business in Mexico is rather common, and you can save a bundle in taxes if you find out what the rules are and follow them.
Or, go to one of the Mexican offices of a major US accounting firm and ask them what they can offer. They'll charge for their services, but probably not for an initial consultation, and they can show you how to minimize your taxes without getting in trouble with either the IRS or the Federales.
IANAL, either, but I don't have to be one to deal with this anymore than I have to be an accountant to pay taxes.
Forget the legalistic "employee" part. Zoning laws vary all over the place, but they are usually in a commonsensical form designed for the average person. Typically they'll be something like "you can't have any commercial traffic in and out other than a daily small package delivery service (e.g. UPS)" or "you can't put up any business-related signage" or "you can't have customers/clients visit the house" or "you can't have non-residents other than household service employees working on the premises" or "you can't have more than two non-residents working in the house, whether paid or not, and the type of work must be quiet and unobtrusive", or that sort of thing.
In the US, they are governed by the local community, for the most part, and some communities encourage domestic private enterprise, while others are prickly about it.
When you get your business license, they'll tell you about it. If you don't get a business license, you'd better not pay taxes, or they'll catch you. And, of course, if you don't pay taxes, you'll have bigger, scarier agencies to worry about, so just go get your business license.
He's talking about "opportunity cost", and he's absolutely right. Put down your Game Boy and go look it up.
(I swear the average age of these AC's is probably about 13.)
In 25 years, the US will still be the predominant economy in the world, with a proportionate technology sector. Better?
;-)
Yes, absolutely. (From your mouth to God's ear, as they say.)
Of course, the US is the predominant economy in the world right now, but that's not making life much easier for workers in the manufacturing sector. Most of them really do need to try to find something else to do like the farmers before them and perhaps a large percentage of programmers now.
But my intention isn't to nitpick. I think from what you're saying that we mostly agree. There is a sea change in progress, and it should be considered in making one's career choices, but panic, abuse of others, and an assumption that most high tech will leave the US are all foolish.
I am, however, a member of the group that normally gets blamed for every economic downturn...
Ah, you're a politician!
As Hillary Clinton demonstrated recently, Indians aren't protected by standards of political correctness.
Yes, you're not the first to notice how Hillary is more interested in governing the lives of others than in just about anything else. Milking envy and resentment for political gain is hardly limited to "that vast right-wing conspiracy".
There are non-metric units in common use all over the world. I think you confuse the declarations of various gov't bureaucracies with real life. "Societies" are not the same as their gov't agencies.
for the 4 billionth time: A "Assault Weapon" is NOT a "Machine Gun"
Apropos the article: on your "4 billion and first" try, please change that to:
An "Assault Weapon"
I notice that the reviews tend to say that the sound was interesting in its effects, but not very high quality for things like movies and music.
Anyone else doing something similar, but with high quality sound, or is this too new? (Sorry, I'm not an audiophile, so I have no idea.)
I agree that people often overreact to a change, and this is no exception.
But for you to set up the strawman that "*every* high-tech job in the US is about to be packed off to India" and knock it down with the assurance that it won't actually be every single one isn't much of an argument.
Yes, of course, there are still going to be programmers in the US. There are still steel workers and, for that matter, farmers and coal miners, but I wouldn't want to be one of them.
People are right to view this as a genuine structural change that has implications for career-related decisions such as a college major. They can do so without being guilty of "panicking".
I think the question is quite sensible, and "get a grip" and "stop panicking" aren't very useful answers.
And I think your "nasty undertone of racism" remark is bunk. You can always find an example of name-calling when people get frustrated and label an entire argument "racism, racism!", but that's mostly a red herring used to shut people up. If the jobs were going to Moscow instead of Bangalore, people would be just as upset and making the same arguments ("we're better than they are", "their quality isn't good", "they can't communicate", "our bosses are greedy and short-sighted", etc.) The issues would be the same.
And many of the most upset are Asian Americans (both East Asian and South Asian) who are having their previously elite status seriously eroded by large numbers of those they thought they left behind in the Old Country.
I don't see anyone doing anything wrong here. It's just the natural balancing of supply and demand at work, but it's a whopper of a change that people need to factor into their personal plans.
ASCII has a relatively simple, consistent mapping from lower- to uppercase and vice versa. Letters all have a single upper-lower 1:1 pair, while all others are caseless and upper and lower are the same. It's a simple map.
But ASCII is obsolete. Java doesn't use it, even for variable names. When you go beyond ASCII, you have many different case maps to choose from. Different cultures have different case equivalency rules, some of which are rather complicated. And then, as others have mentioned, there are the coding conventions that make use of casing to make distinctions, but these conventions ride on top of the cultural conventions regarding which distinctions matter. (I don't want to get into the details, but what one man considers a single letter another might consider to be two, for example.)
You can avoid all of these thorny cultural disagreements by either limiting all identifiers to ASCII with its single equivalency map, or by just making the rule that identifiers are the same if and only if they are composed of the same sequence of characters and avoiding the issues of equivalency maps altogether. (Until you get to normalization, which is another can of worms....)
Since Java allows a much wider range of characters in its identifiers than the puny ASCII character set, it chose the second option: ignore equivalency maps and declare that "if it's not the same, it's different".
This "heat that has already escaped" argument is absurd. By that argument, you may as well be naked in the cold as bundled up because the only thing clothes or a blanket can catch is heat that has "already escaped".
By removing heat from immediately outside the core body area, these heat pipes have the same effect on the core body that standing on a highly thermally conductive material such as cement has on your feet. In fact, if they work really well, they should actually feel cold.
The internal organs need to maintain a rather narrow temperature range or they suffer catastrophic collapse (electrochemical failure). The extremities can go way outside the lethal boundary temperatures in the core before they even start becoming uncomfortable.
For this reason, the body constricts the blood vessels in your extremities if you start to get cold to conserve core body heat. If you bypass this mechanism and create an express lane for moving heat out of the core into the extremities, you'd better have excess core heat or you'll be in trouble.
Of course, if you're not in wilderness survival conditions, and are so bundled up that you're actually getting a bit too warm, then pumping some of the excess heat directly to your fingers or toes could be more comfy than simply opening your coat.
So for around town, for relatively short periods, it could be okay if you're wearing a warm enough coat. But if you're wearing a warm enough coat, you're core temp might start going up, in which case you're body will dilate the blood vessels and dump heat to your hands and feet, essentially doing the same thing.
They're completely unscientific.
Of course I oppose aerogel too, but only because I know that NASA is part of the military industrial complex.
Plus, they say it's "inorganic", and we all know that if it's not Organic, it's Bad. If conservatives weren't such religious fanatics and read a few scientific studies, like they have in Mother Jones, they'd see that.
[sigh...] Oh, well. Now where are my crystals. Gotta get rid of this negative energy so when I'm running the School Board meeting tonight all those neanderthal conservatives who often show up won't uncenter my chi....
They also have several samples on display in the Tech Museum in San Jose, CA. Also under glass, but you can get very close to it and see how different it looks as you move around and view it from different angles.
Which languages, "objectively", are the ones to learn?
Though I think the answer is more subjective than you seem to imply, I'm not asking to be argumentative. I'd be interested in what list you would come up with, based on your stated approach, and why you would learn each. As you point out, we don't have time to learn them all, so good advice regarding which few to pick is (potentially) useful.
I prefer Python to Ruby, but your complaints about Python are right on, IMO.
Your "Python stole the thunder" analysis is not quite right, though, and it relates to why I prefer Python.
Ruby is as old as Python, but Matz wrote Ruby to do his own Japanese *nix work. He focused on his own needs, but made it available to all, so essentially he was focusing on the Japanese *nix community and their needs. The Japanese *nix community, for example, cares far more about handling legacy Japanese data than about handling new, multilingual Unicode data, so Matz's design decisions reflect this local bias, to the detriment of those of us with reverse priorities.
Japanese *nixers are a pretty small, insular community, but that's where Ruby has always been centered. These days, the circle has grown out from that center large enough that there's more for Westerners or non-*nix users to use, but the center is still on Japanese *nix users.
It's that focus that explains a lot of the weaknesses of Ruby as seen from the perspective of a Westerner who cares about cross-platform dev, internationalisation, good and plentiful English docs, a big English-speaking community of experienced users, etc.
I think Matz is a smart, humble guy with real talent when it comes to language design. I like him, and I like Ruby's design more than Python's in many ways, but his focus on Japanese *nix programmers and their local priorities has been a ball and chain around Ruby's ankle that I think explains the more rapid growth of Python worldwide (and Ruby's faster growth in Japan).
The term Corporate America is just another tired Slashdot bogeyman. I've worked in several companies in Europe and Asia (locals, not overseas offices of US companies), and I assure you that people are a lot more willing to complain publicly in US companies.
In both the UK and Japan, if it weren't for the practice of going out as a work team and drinking together several nights a week, you'd have no idea what some people were thinking.
And I've never seen the kind of silent hatred for bosses in the US that I've seen overseas. I'm not saying it doesn't exist in some industries, but in my experience, if you hate your boss that much in the US, you either leave or get thrown out. Overseas, it's a lot riskier to leave and a lot harder for them to throw you out, so you stay and smolder silently while your boss, who can't throw you out, works on ruining your life, which he can do as long as you don't leave.
You've never seen office politics unless you've worked somewhere where the people are virtually trapped together for a lifetime. Corporate America, where the jerks come and go relatively quickly, is a picnic in comparison. (Think of a US university faculty and you'll get more of the feeling.)
Thanks.
It is the same "word" in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ("ri" in Korean, too.) By that I mean the same Chinese etymology, which resulted in the same character and same pronunciation, adjusted for language differences. It's actual length, though, varies a great deal from place to place and time to time historically, even within the same kingdom/country.
Apparently Cowboy Neal doesn't waste a lot of time reading Slashdot.