500 in a savings account does nothing for the economy
Sure it does. It gets loaned out to someone who then uses it to buy a house or a car, or even start a company (which might then lead to the creation of more jobs and wealth). Banks don't stick your money in a vault and swim in it, Scrooge McDuck-style. If they did, they'd go out of business. They have to loan your money out to others in order to make interest, and thus earn a profit.
$500 spent is just that, $500 spent. $500 saved, though, is $500 in the bank for one person and $500 spent by someone else (yeah, it's a little more complicated than that, and it's not a 2x multiplicative factor exactly, but that's the basic idea).
How is Id's solution charity? For every person who downloads the Linux binary, they sell a boxed copy of the Windows version. Some of those, they'd sell anyway, since the people would reboot into Windows to play the game, but not everyone. I'm sure the Linux market isn't paying Id's bills, but it's undoubtedly a noticeable boost to their total sales.
You're right. I see your point. People look at outsourcing as the evil because it is an imminent threat on their job, while they see open source as something that's only going to hurt the people working at Microsoft. I stand behind my position, though, that both are an equal threat to the individual, but an equal benefit for the economy as a whole (which will ultimately be a benefit to the individual, even if a few people get temporarily hurt in the process). That said, I'd also be pretty pissed if it were my job that was outsourced---not having to deal with such things is one of the big reasons that I went into business for myself.
Up until this point, the software industry has been making what economists call "abnormal profits". In general, those profits have been pretty good for the economy, and really good for the software developers who have been able to see a large chunk of those abnormal profits, due to their relative scarcity. Unfortunately, abnormal profits are unsustainable. Eventually, someone will notice that you're making a lot of money and decide to get their own piece of the action. Then someone else will notice, and someone else, and so on. As more people enter the market, the profits go down. That's the case with the software industry. The abnormal profits are coming to an end, but the software developers continue to expect to make their chunk of those high profit margins. That, coupled with the fact that way too many people have entered the software development field, looking for unsustainable margins, means that there is going to be high unemployment in the field for a while.
The deflation of the current abnormal profits is exacerbated by high availability of cheap outsourcing labor, and the unwillingness of software developers to compromise on their high salaries. In time, though, things are going to settle down, and we may find that outsourcing was not a bad thing, but instead a spark that will trigger an even greater period of Western technology output, as the Western labor force shifts into new fields. Of course, we may fail to make the shift and slip into irrelevance, but I don't think that's too likely. There are too many great (and incredibly well-educated) minds in the west to sit back and stop innovating. The new innovations will occur, and those innovations will create new opportunities in the west, while India and others use the advantages they are getting from outsourcing to cultivate their own minds, which will eventually lead to a surge in native innovation out of those countries, which will complement the innovation of the West and improve us all. In the meantime, they will begin outsourcing the jobs that their improving economy will be come unable to sustain, to other countries that are now reaching a fledgling state that can support those jobs, while using them to improve...repeat ad nauseum.
Of course, the more trade barriers we remove, the faster this will all occur---much of it we could see in our lifetime. Additionally, widespread democracy will add to much to the opportunity available.
Far from seeing this time as a dark time teetering on the edge of the abyss, I think that we are right now poised on the edge of a new golden age of globalism---if we can get over the rough spots without panicking.
You totally missed my point. Of course giving away free hammers won't devastate the carpentry profession. In fact, if all carpenter's tools were free, carpentry would probably be available to people for a much lower cost, thus allowing more custom-made wood things to be created. On the other hand, giving away free hammers would devastate the hammer-makers. They'd be unable to compete with a hammer that was available for free.
Similarly, the availability of GCC for free doesn't hurt the average programmer, but instead enriches his profession by making a valuable tool widely available. However, GCC is quite harmful to the compiler business. No longer can someone make money by creating a cheap, mediocre compiler. The only way someone can make money writing compilers is if their compiler is in some way better than GCC---and priced competitively too.
Does that mean that we should outlaw GCC, to support the poor compiler-writers? Of course not. I can't imagine anyone suggesting that. However, I fail to see how a freely available GCC is all that different from cheap labor in India. They both hurt certain individuals, while improving the world as a whole.
The way for Western programmers to compete with India is not to put up artificial barriers to make the Indians uncompetitive, but rather for the Western programmers to figure out how they can distinguish themselves and thus become more attractive than a cheaply available Indian.
To get back to the point of my original post, though, it was not that open source was bad, but rather that I fail to see how someone can support open source while railing against outsourcing, since they both result in the same negatives. Of course there will always be a way for people to make money with open source. There will also always be a need for programming jobs in the West, despite outsourcing. They just might not be the same jobs that exist today, and they may not pay quite as extravagantly (unless you can offer something truly valuable over the outsourced job). Similarly, with pervasive open source the available jobs are also going to change, and those changes may also not be entirely towards higher pay.
There seem to be two dominant positions on Slashdot, and although I'm not one of these people who fails to see that Slashdot is made up with a variety of people who have a lot of different views, I think that in this case those two dominant positions are largely held simultaneously by a large percentage. Which positions do I refer to?
Open source is good, and any company that starts using it is a hero
Outsourceing is evil, and any company that does it is greedy
Here's the problem with holding those two views. Both corporate outsourcing and corporate use of open source reduce the value of an IT position. In fact, open source may even be a stronger reducer, because it's pitting the professional programmer against free instead of a low-paid Indian.
Now, personally, I don't think either open source or outsourcing are a terribly big deal. I think that in the long run, both are going to increase the world's standard of living, as they result in cheaper and more abundant software. Sure, there will be some highly (over)paid Western engineers who will suffer at the hands of Schumpeter's creative destruction, but in the end we will adapt and the world will be better off as a whole.
On the other hand, those who think holding opposing views about the value of outsourcing and open source are reconcilable, might want to think long and hard about where they really want to stand on the issue.
It has ALWAYS been illegal to make a copy of a song on a mix tape for someone
I'm pretty sure that's not true. If my memory serves me correctly, copyright law specifically requires infringement to cause significant harm to the copyright holder. One copy for a friend is not significant damage. That's why the RIAA is only going after the big offenders on P2P.
True, but Dvorak made an art-form out of it. Predicting that an ailing company will fail if it doesn't turn itself around is one thing. Spending a decade ranting about how Apple's inevitable utter failure is just around the corner is taking it to a whole new level. Hell, he used to even have a column in one of the Mac magazines (MacUser, I think---might have been MacWorld) where he predicted their demise almost every month (and always due to a new reason).
I'm all for seeing Word die a horrible, painful death, but let look at the source for this article. John Dvorak made a living for a good portion of the late eighties and nineties predicting the demise of Apple. I'm not sure his prediction that Word is on its way out means a thing.
I'm no Dvorak fan, but lets cut the guy a little bit of a break. His "new trend" is probably four months out of date because he wrote it four months ahead of time, which is a typical lead time for magazine articles.
The reason Eclipse's GUI toolkit is fast is because it uses the native (non-java) GUI toolkit of the PLATform it's running on. Java has its place, and Eclipse has done a good job finding it, but they've also realized that there are some things for which it's not (yet) appropriate. Same thing with the OpenGL bindings.
Not to say you're wrong, or that those things aren't in the Patriot Act (which I have some serious concerns about), but I read the sections you linked to, and I don't see what you're saying is in there. Could you point out sections/rules/items, where it says that the government's burden of probable cause for getting a wiretap is lowered (well, ok, it does take away some of the international terror requirements on investigations of non-citizens) or where the requirement to get a judge's signature for a wiretap is removed? I'm not saying it's not there, but I read it and I don't see that. It also seems like the gag rules on telling people about wiretaps are fairly limited in scope, too, and require someone to show a compelling reason to a judge, and provide for annual Congressional oversight of each and every gagged wiretap.
I've been a fairly vocal critic of the Patriot Act, and have a lot of major concerns about it. I'm having a hard time getting all that worked up about what I read in that link you provided, though. If everything in the Patriot Act is really that tame, I'm going to go so far as to say that my worries were mostly unfounded.
Of course, I didn't read through the link with fine scrutiny, so I will allow that I may have missed or misread something, but if I did, I'd be very interested to hear what it was.
I think in the case of GE, it really needs to be related specifically to your work. If you work on turbines and come up with a new idea for a turbine, they probably should own it (assuming the agreement says so). On the other hand, if you develop a new clock radio, they shouldn't automatically own that just because they have a clock radio division located five states away.
Well, since Bruce Perens and PJ of Groklaw are involved in this, I somehow doubt the point of the patent search/announcement was to set up a case that Linux is illegitimate because it's not backed by a company.
Just because we'd all like there to be no patent violations in Linux, the odds are that there are some, just as there are patent violations in almost every major piece of software, simply due to the fact that the patent system is completely screwed up when it comes to software. The reason people don't sell insurance to indemnify people against Windows patent suits is because patent violations found in Windows are going to result in a lawsuit against Microsoft, not a Windows end-user. Since there is no single company backing Linux, though, there is the potential that someone will sue a large end-user instead (also, I wouldn't be surprised if major Linux distributers like RedHat and Novell buy this insurance).
As a final note, I'd be very surprised if Microsoft doesn't have some sort of insurance against patent suits, too.
Works for me. I always appreciate someone who's up for some friendly debate. The world's too full of people who hate anyone with a slightly differing opinion.
If you're anywhere near IN, let me know. I may seriously take you up on it.
Speak for yourself. I happen to believe in a strong, but decentralized, democratically republican form of government with a strong, non-intrusive rule of law to protect the free flow of information that you seem to think would be protected by a complete lack of government and laws.
And before you say it, I'm about as far from a Microsoft toady as they come.
Linux 2.6 !< 1.0 Apache neither 1.3 or 2.0 are < 1.0 Gnome 2.6 !< 1.0 GTK+ 2.4 !< 1.0 KDE 3.2 !< 1.0 GCC 3.4 !< 1.0 Mozilla 1.7 !< 1.0
It seems to me that most mature open source projects do eventually hit 1.0. It's just that in the open source world there's no market pressure to prematurely hit 1.0, so 1.0 has come to mean a certain level of stability and feature completeness. In fact, I think it's that kind of deliberate development that will mean today's open source programs stand a much better chance of still being around 200 years from now.
It's not that innovation would stop. Rather, all innovation would become trade secrets, and everything would get hidden behind closed doors. The way it is now, things may take a long time to come into the public domain, but at least they do eventually. It seems like the better solution would be to reduce the length of (some) patents to bring them more in line with the speed at which technology and industry move these days.
I have no problems whatsoever with them using statistical records to catch abusers of the system, and as far as I'm concerned, returning the product after getting the rebate, for full price, is just fraud.
I really don't even have a problem with them keeping track of aggressive bargain hunters and finding ways to give them fewer deals. That said, though, the fewer deals I get, the less likely I am to shop at a store, and the less likely I am to recommend it to friends...and if the store ever tries to deny my a listed sale price, or just plain refuse to sell to me based on their records, I'll not only never shop at that store again, but I'll go out of my way to help ensure that my friends and family don't either. I also don't think I'm alone in that kind of sentiment. Stores needs to be careful. If they get a reputation for antagonizing their customers, they may find they lose more than they can afford to.
Did the Indian method keep a paper trail? Receipts? Any method to verify the results? I think that's the big issue with a lot of the systems being implemented over here. They don't have those kinds of safeguards.
I'm a software developer and a professional writer. My livelihood pretty much depends on my ability to protect my intellectual property rights. That said, I don't believe that my writes as a copyright holder trump anyone else's right as a citizen. It's a balance, and there are people on both sides trying to destroy that balance. The evilness of the "information wants to be free---destroy all property rights" crowd, though, doesn't make the RIAA or MPAA any less evil when they try to destroy all fair use rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it does. It gets loaned out to someone who then uses it to buy a house or a car, or even start a company (which might then lead to the creation of more jobs and wealth). Banks don't stick your money in a vault and swim in it, Scrooge McDuck-style. If they did, they'd go out of business. They have to loan your money out to others in order to make interest, and thus earn a profit.
$500 spent is just that, $500 spent. $500 saved, though, is $500 in the bank for one person and $500 spent by someone else (yeah, it's a little more complicated than that, and it's not a 2x multiplicative factor exactly, but that's the basic idea).
I'm glad to know Miguel has at least a passing familiarity with GNOME. Otherwise he'd be much harder to take seriously. [/sarcasm]
How is Id's solution charity? For every person who downloads the Linux binary, they sell a boxed copy of the Windows version. Some of those, they'd sell anyway, since the people would reboot into Windows to play the game, but not everyone. I'm sure the Linux market isn't paying Id's bills, but it's undoubtedly a noticeable boost to their total sales.
You're right. I see your point. People look at outsourcing as the evil because it is an imminent threat on their job, while they see open source as something that's only going to hurt the people working at Microsoft. I stand behind my position, though, that both are an equal threat to the individual, but an equal benefit for the economy as a whole (which will ultimately be a benefit to the individual, even if a few people get temporarily hurt in the process). That said, I'd also be pretty pissed if it were my job that was outsourced---not having to deal with such things is one of the big reasons that I went into business for myself.
.Net ;-)
P.S. Sorry to hear you have to learn
Up until this point, the software industry has been making what economists call "abnormal profits". In general, those profits have been pretty good for the economy, and really good for the software developers who have been able to see a large chunk of those abnormal profits, due to their relative scarcity. Unfortunately, abnormal profits are unsustainable. Eventually, someone will notice that you're making a lot of money and decide to get their own piece of the action. Then someone else will notice, and someone else, and so on. As more people enter the market, the profits go down. That's the case with the software industry. The abnormal profits are coming to an end, but the software developers continue to expect to make their chunk of those high profit margins. That, coupled with the fact that way too many people have entered the software development field, looking for unsustainable margins, means that there is going to be high unemployment in the field for a while.
The deflation of the current abnormal profits is exacerbated by high availability of cheap outsourcing labor, and the unwillingness of software developers to compromise on their high salaries. In time, though, things are going to settle down, and we may find that outsourcing was not a bad thing, but instead a spark that will trigger an even greater period of Western technology output, as the Western labor force shifts into new fields. Of course, we may fail to make the shift and slip into irrelevance, but I don't think that's too likely. There are too many great (and incredibly well-educated) minds in the west to sit back and stop innovating. The new innovations will occur, and those innovations will create new opportunities in the west, while India and others use the advantages they are getting from outsourcing to cultivate their own minds, which will eventually lead to a surge in native innovation out of those countries, which will complement the innovation of the West and improve us all. In the meantime, they will begin outsourcing the jobs that their improving economy will be come unable to sustain, to other countries that are now reaching a fledgling state that can support those jobs, while using them to improve...repeat ad nauseum.
Of course, the more trade barriers we remove, the faster this will all occur---much of it we could see in our lifetime. Additionally, widespread democracy will add to much to the opportunity available.
Far from seeing this time as a dark time teetering on the edge of the abyss, I think that we are right now poised on the edge of a new golden age of globalism---if we can get over the rough spots without panicking.
You totally missed my point. Of course giving away free hammers won't devastate the carpentry profession. In fact, if all carpenter's tools were free, carpentry would probably be available to people for a much lower cost, thus allowing more custom-made wood things to be created. On the other hand, giving away free hammers would devastate the hammer-makers. They'd be unable to compete with a hammer that was available for free.
Similarly, the availability of GCC for free doesn't hurt the average programmer, but instead enriches his profession by making a valuable tool widely available. However, GCC is quite harmful to the compiler business. No longer can someone make money by creating a cheap, mediocre compiler. The only way someone can make money writing compilers is if their compiler is in some way better than GCC---and priced competitively too.
Does that mean that we should outlaw GCC, to support the poor compiler-writers? Of course not. I can't imagine anyone suggesting that. However, I fail to see how a freely available GCC is all that different from cheap labor in India. They both hurt certain individuals, while improving the world as a whole.
The way for Western programmers to compete with India is not to put up artificial barriers to make the Indians uncompetitive, but rather for the Western programmers to figure out how they can distinguish themselves and thus become more attractive than a cheaply available Indian.
To get back to the point of my original post, though, it was not that open source was bad, but rather that I fail to see how someone can support open source while railing against outsourcing, since they both result in the same negatives. Of course there will always be a way for people to make money with open source. There will also always be a need for programming jobs in the West, despite outsourcing. They just might not be the same jobs that exist today, and they may not pay quite as extravagantly (unless you can offer something truly valuable over the outsourced job). Similarly, with pervasive open source the available jobs are also going to change, and those changes may also not be entirely towards higher pay.
There seem to be two dominant positions on Slashdot, and although I'm not one of these people who fails to see that Slashdot is made up with a variety of people who have a lot of different views, I think that in this case those two dominant positions are largely held simultaneously by a large percentage. Which positions do I refer to?
Here's the problem with holding those two views. Both corporate outsourcing and corporate use of open source reduce the value of an IT position. In fact, open source may even be a stronger reducer, because it's pitting the professional programmer against free instead of a low-paid Indian.
Now, personally, I don't think either open source or outsourcing are a terribly big deal. I think that in the long run, both are going to increase the world's standard of living, as they result in cheaper and more abundant software. Sure, there will be some highly (over)paid Western engineers who will suffer at the hands of Schumpeter's creative destruction, but in the end we will adapt and the world will be better off as a whole.
On the other hand, those who think holding opposing views about the value of outsourcing and open source are reconcilable, might want to think long and hard about where they really want to stand on the issue.
I'm pretty sure that's not true. If my memory serves me correctly, copyright law specifically requires infringement to cause significant harm to the copyright holder. One copy for a friend is not significant damage. That's why the RIAA is only going after the big offenders on P2P.
True, but Dvorak made an art-form out of it. Predicting that an ailing company will fail if it doesn't turn itself around is one thing. Spending a decade ranting about how Apple's inevitable utter failure is just around the corner is taking it to a whole new level. Hell, he used to even have a column in one of the Mac magazines (MacUser, I think---might have been MacWorld) where he predicted their demise almost every month (and always due to a new reason).
I'm all for seeing Word die a horrible, painful death, but let look at the source for this article. John Dvorak made a living for a good portion of the late eighties and nineties predicting the demise of Apple. I'm not sure his prediction that Word is on its way out means a thing.
I'm no Dvorak fan, but lets cut the guy a little bit of a break. His "new trend" is probably four months out of date because he wrote it four months ahead of time, which is a typical lead time for magazine articles.
The reason Eclipse's GUI toolkit is fast is because it uses the native (non-java) GUI toolkit of the PLATform it's running on. Java has its place, and Eclipse has done a good job finding it, but they've also realized that there are some things for which it's not (yet) appropriate. Same thing with the OpenGL bindings.
Not to say you're wrong, or that those things aren't in the Patriot Act (which I have some serious concerns about), but I read the sections you linked to, and I don't see what you're saying is in there. Could you point out sections/rules/items, where it says that the government's burden of probable cause for getting a wiretap is lowered (well, ok, it does take away some of the international terror requirements on investigations of non-citizens) or where the requirement to get a judge's signature for a wiretap is removed? I'm not saying it's not there, but I read it and I don't see that. It also seems like the gag rules on telling people about wiretaps are fairly limited in scope, too, and require someone to show a compelling reason to a judge, and provide for annual Congressional oversight of each and every gagged wiretap.
I've been a fairly vocal critic of the Patriot Act, and have a lot of major concerns about it. I'm having a hard time getting all that worked up about what I read in that link you provided, though. If everything in the Patriot Act is really that tame, I'm going to go so far as to say that my worries were mostly unfounded.
Of course, I didn't read through the link with fine scrutiny, so I will allow that I may have missed or misread something, but if I did, I'd be very interested to hear what it was.
I think in the case of GE, it really needs to be related specifically to your work. If you work on turbines and come up with a new idea for a turbine, they probably should own it (assuming the agreement says so). On the other hand, if you develop a new clock radio, they shouldn't automatically own that just because they have a clock radio division located five states away.
Well, since Bruce Perens and PJ of Groklaw are involved in this, I somehow doubt the point of the patent search/announcement was to set up a case that Linux is illegitimate because it's not backed by a company.
Just because we'd all like there to be no patent violations in Linux, the odds are that there are some, just as there are patent violations in almost every major piece of software, simply due to the fact that the patent system is completely screwed up when it comes to software. The reason people don't sell insurance to indemnify people against Windows patent suits is because patent violations found in Windows are going to result in a lawsuit against Microsoft, not a Windows end-user. Since there is no single company backing Linux, though, there is the potential that someone will sue a large end-user instead (also, I wouldn't be surprised if major Linux distributers like RedHat and Novell buy this insurance).
As a final note, I'd be very surprised if Microsoft doesn't have some sort of insurance against patent suits, too.
Works for me. I always appreciate someone who's up for some friendly debate. The world's too full of people who hate anyone with a slightly differing opinion.
If you're anywhere near IN, let me know. I may seriously take you up on it.
Game over. Next contest...
Speak for yourself. I happen to believe in a strong, but decentralized, democratically republican form of government with a strong, non-intrusive rule of law to protect the free flow of information that you seem to think would be protected by a complete lack of government and laws.
And before you say it, I'm about as far from a Microsoft toady as they come.
It's not that innovation would stop. Rather, all innovation would become trade secrets, and everything would get hidden behind closed doors. The way it is now, things may take a long time to come into the public domain, but at least they do eventually. It seems like the better solution would be to reduce the length of (some) patents to bring them more in line with the speed at which technology and industry move these days.
Then I don't want them as a store.
I have no problems whatsoever with them using statistical records to catch abusers of the system, and as far as I'm concerned, returning the product after getting the rebate, for full price, is just fraud.
I really don't even have a problem with them keeping track of aggressive bargain hunters and finding ways to give them fewer deals. That said, though, the fewer deals I get, the less likely I am to shop at a store, and the less likely I am to recommend it to friends...and if the store ever tries to deny my a listed sale price, or just plain refuse to sell to me based on their records, I'll not only never shop at that store again, but I'll go out of my way to help ensure that my friends and family don't either. I also don't think I'm alone in that kind of sentiment. Stores needs to be careful. If they get a reputation for antagonizing their customers, they may find they lose more than they can afford to.
Did the Indian method keep a paper trail? Receipts? Any method to verify the results? I think that's the big issue with a lot of the systems being implemented over here. They don't have those kinds of safeguards.
Do you have a link to the contractual thing? I'd heard that before, but I thought I also heard that it had been struck down/not passed.
I'm a software developer and a professional writer. My livelihood pretty much depends on my ability to protect my intellectual property rights. That said, I don't believe that my writes as a copyright holder trump anyone else's right as a citizen. It's a balance, and there are people on both sides trying to destroy that balance. The evilness of the "information wants to be free---destroy all property rights" crowd, though, doesn't make the RIAA or MPAA any less evil when they try to destroy all fair use rights.
Well, in that case, I wish you the best of luck. If I weren't on the other side of the world and poor, I'd help you out.