Oh I get where the paranoia in this post and the ones supporting it are coming from. You've got a disk filled with *stuff* and you are afraid to stick your head up. OK OK I get it now.
Look, dump your *stuff*. Do you really need to have Spiderman 15 - the Final, Final Prequel on your disk at the cost of waling around totally paranoid and afraid to participate in your democracy?
Don't do that.
Look at what you give them by doing that. You empower them to seize your computer , in theory.
You dis-empower yourself because you're paranoid because you've got something to hide.
So they get all the power, don't they? You're too afraid to even stick your head up long enough to write your Congresscritter.
Well, I have to tell you, when you find you're in a hole, stop digging.
You don't HAVE to pirate things you can't afford , especially with entertainment for gawds sake.
When I read things like this story I think the RIAA is a bunch of asswipes and resolve to defund them through my buying behavior.
At the same time I think- I never would have maintained that site, no way.
Spiderman 16: Back From The Dead and Ready For Action is NOT a political cause worth risking jail for.
Want to strike fear into the RIAA lawyer's hearts? Defund the people who pay their bills. That's taking it to the man. Stop buying their shit, stop downloading their shit be a part of a Creative Commons creative venture of your choice and PARTICIPATE IN YOUR DEMOCRACY.
If someone were to tell me that this is FUD speread by RIAA lawyers, i couldn't think of a reason why they'd be wrong.
WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMEN and don't be stupidly paranoid about the most basic functioning of your own democracy.
Sorry this is just too stupid and destructive to let slip by.
Ahh with respect to patent infringement, actually no.
The patent has to be valid in both countries. So for instance, software patents are not valid in the UK so if you write infringing software there and sell it there it's too bad for the whoever has the US patent.
What you can't do is write it there (UK) and sell it here (in the US) .
I am not sure if write it here and sell it here and sell it in the UK if the UK will accommodate the US but at any rate, you'll be sued in the US . You have to confine yourself to the UK and similar (non-sw-patent) markets.
That may be true, but they also have to recognize the fact that there are always going to be people for whom there is no reasonable value/price ratio they are willing to pay--and simply ignore them because they are an entirely lost cause. It may be who they are or it may be a transient circumstance that will change in the future; if it's the latter, these companies should want to ensure that when circumstances change, these people return as customers. The people who never were and never will be customers aren't worth the resources.
Well said! This is exactly my point and nothing ore. I hope that was clear in what I said.
Yeah they may in fact want to enslave everyone or at least get all our money or whatever it is that drives these types to such extreme measures but no one is going to facilitate that.
Don't copy their crap. Do something else. Make your own crap. Download Creative Commons crap. Support artists who aren't down with the RIAA.
They don't have any power if enough people stop don't buying their shit. Stop liking their shit more than you like justice. Get involved with other people online who create stuff outside of this greedy octopus.
THAT is what REALLY keeps them up at night. People just walking away.
I appreciate the importance of copyright as the *right* level of IP protection, in contrast to patents
But the actions of the RIAA and all the rest are so mean spirited and personal even I am going to stop going to movies and buying RIAA music in protest
Sorry, but it seems to me you have a value / price problem, not a piracy problem.
You need to put your price and value proposition at a point where people are less inclined to steal .
People take things that they're barely interested in just to have them, then someone has something they didn't pay for - I get it.
But a business's concern is with making money from their product by meeting the market where it wants to be. If you're doing that, the people who casually rip second quality copies of stuff they're barely interested in are not a real problem.
No market is perfectly efficient. There's a low level drag coming form somewhere at all times- from bad legislation, from their own employees productivity , from dishonest middlemen, from a million different places.
By the same token, businesses get huge boosts from employees who have brilliant flashes of creativity and productivity, long-term-thinking lawmakers, new innovations in the distribution chain and a million other synergies the companies themselves expended nothing to obtain.
So just step back from your time-wasitng, money-wasting abacus on which you're keeping track of all the injustices and slights you think randomo people are dishing out to you and get back to doing the hard work of figuring out what the market is trying to tell you.
Here's a hint- 16.99-18.99 for a fucking CD is too much money. And that's why I buy all mine used online.
Here's another hint. 10-15 bucks to see a movie is too much, and that's why I go see one with my family three or four times a year, if that.
That is, I used to do that. This year, no more movies.
Sorry but you've got to realize that trying to kill the messenger and hanging the pickpockets is not a way to equitable and prosperous society.
The way to a society in which people buy music and see movies is by increasing your value proposition to those people so they want to buy your product.
People LOVE to buy and own things; acquisition possession and pride of ownership are an inherent
part of the human character.
Everyone knows that Americans are lazy workers and that's why we need to outsource work to nations where people have the proper appreciation for a day's work and why we need to import foreign labor for doing everything from high tech jobs to picking tomatoes in a field.
Clearly, this is Communist propaganda.
It's a shame Slashdot is permitting its bandwidth to promote Marxism.
Eh tax ex pats didn't start with Bono, it goes back to The Stones and the Beatles? not sure on that one...
Anyway, we mod Bono and U2 up because of what they then DID with that money. Instead of turning it into blow and snorting it up their noses like your average CEO, they actually used it to do GOOD in this world.
Not in Ireland myself, but if I were I also might know about some good U2 has done for causes in that country also.
Some people think U2 is sanctimonious, I get that, but I just have to give people credit for the good acts they actually engage in and U2 has a long list of those indeed.
If people were as generous, as capable of thinking long term, as concerned with the general welfare of the world as U2 was, we wouldn't need taxes or very many laws for that matter.
Men aren't angels, thus, government.
But I never see the point of going after those men who approximate angels to the best of any of our abilities.
How right you are about smaller government and it's proponent's desire to outsource everything (to their buddies companies..).
But the FBI and CIA and especially the armed forces are serious people who actually work in government because they believe in government of a specific kind- good government.
Among serious adults, not about big government or small government, it's about GOOD government
and towards that end, I'll wager, they're rethinking the in house craftsman / vs cheap ?? outsourcing debate internally.
Reading the article, I don't think it was an issue with Agile. I think what the FBI was saying was they're going to try to go ahead on their own, using Agile.
Not an Agile guy myself, but the top practitioners of this- Martin et al are known to be highly competent.
At least the FBI seems to have wised up to Agile methods, which implies they're actually going to go ahead and hire real programmers as opposed to the cheap labor places like Lockheed Martin and IBM are stuffed to the gills with.
The rubber has to hit the road somewhere. Maybe you can contribute to your Senator's re-election campaign and get legislation that gives you visas for ten million programmers who will all work for 25 bucks an hour 12 hours a day 6 days a week, live 6 to an apartment and when their six year contract is up, all go home exchange rate adjusted millionaires.
But somewhere on some machine, ultimately, code has to run without errors.
Rubber, meet road. Road, meet rubber.
I love it when fast buck, coke snorting, prostitute screwing, sexual harassing, hard drinking, low IQ, high ambition, hand pumping, bribe giving, sales men dirtbags come face to face with something the rest of us know as non-negotiable reality.
It doesn't make up for the career swath of career destruction they've cut through the industry, but still.
"Hey ! Does anyone here know how to program? "
One thing is, companies learn their lessons. My spouse's company outsourced everything and after a years time brought it all back and now everyone's job is VERY secure. They'll never do THAT again.
Same thing here. Bet you anything the FBI is hiring programmers right now after having seen the advantages of developing and maintaining their own supply of stable, competent craftsman -programmers.
IBM Lockheed SAP Deloitte SAIC Technodyne and all the rest are in the business of billing bodies by the hour. Full stop. The more hours they bill, hey man, the better the business is. These are of course the same companies who lobby Congress to import as much programming labor as possible to undercut the domestic market.
I bless anyone anywhere who wants to be a programmer or make money for themselves and their families. That doesn't stop me from observing that Mega Corporations cynically exploit those same people and systematically undermine the quality of the work product of the entire industry by first staffing with masses of unqualified programmers, then paying substandard wages, then systematically overworking them all of which has the effect of causing people who wanted to make a real lifelong career of their craft to be forced out of their careers and also having the effect of making an IT career seem like a route to a short lived, overworked and underpaid job to people who are considering it as a major.
As far as these projects go, in the end, none of it works. Like making the WRONG choice for your prom date, you as a project manager only have to hook up with any of these sleazy companies and wait nine months to turn yourself into the sorriest motherfucker on your block.
Slashdotter could, if they'd organize, get rid of software patents and establish net neutrality in a years time.
Nothing is as effective as writing your congressional critter...
These are quantitative considerations. When you crunch the numbers, do you actually arrive at "shortage?".
I am edified by your comment. But does it mean "legitimate shortage" ? That's the question.
As far as one point you made: towers cost money. Yes, in more ways than one, right? If you build a lot of towers and alleviate the shortage then the concomitant drop in pricing power you experience as a result of increased throughput "costs you money".
AFAIK this is the situation with refineries. NIMBY, yes (ever been to Billings MT? How to kill the livability of a entire city using just one industry.....)
but also, why spend money to reduce your pricing power?
This is where govt regulation has to step in. Companies have no natural incentive to serve their populations well under these circumstances.
This is what we did with rural electrification back in the day. Ditto POTS. Now we have the "you're poor, here's the 10 bucks a month cable internet plan". Al a rezsult of government stepping in and saying to industry , "uh, no. You have to do this".
Are there really not technological advancements out there which will increase cell tower throughput? Alternatives to this technology? Other spectrum we could use in different ways. What about muni WIFI? Verizon et al killed that off right quick. This is the kind of market manipulation that goes on. I't not that I don't believe the corporations because I'm a commie. I am interested to learn more from Slashdotters on this topic.
Look, there is no throughput shortage, at least in fiber. Maybe some wireless spectrum is literally jammed packed and "golly we just don't have anymore or other spectrum we could use or any other alternatives... just running out folks!" .
I'll let people who know comment on that;)
Somehow I doubt it's ultimately much different than the situation we have with fiber now.
In general, throughput is not a natural resource like oil or gas for which the amount can be said to be finite in any meaningful way.
We can create more fiber throughput at will, and whats more, we could being to use the copious, in fact, excess amount of fiber optic that exists now:
Less than 50% of the fiber-optic lines buried in the U.S. are being used, up from about 3% a decade ago, estimates TeleGeography.
A decade or so ago I happened upon a booklet (at B and N no less) that outlined, in extremely frank language, that the way for cable providers to increase their profits without having to create value or increase investment was to create an artificial "shortage" of bandwidth by establishing a tiered system of throughput for which access to the upper tier was subject to bidding .
In this way, profits could be increased not through reaching more customers or even improving service.
Is this different than what Enron was doing when they were blacking out the West Coast by creating a "shortage" of electricity? Is this not the same sociopathic personality types and the same "captains of industry" doing what they do best- lying, manipulating consumers and scheming to increase profits without adding value?
Just so none of us forget how this scam works; from the Enron tapes:
From:
Energy trader: "Just cut 'em off. They're so fucked. They should just bring back fucking horses and carriages, fucking lamps, fucking kerosene lamps."
And when describing his reaction when a business owner complained about high energy prices, another trader is heard on tape saying, "I just looked at him.
I said, 'Move.' (laughter) The guy was like horrified. I go, 'Look, don't take it the wrong way. Move. It isn't getting fixed anytime soon."
California's attempt to deregulate energy markets became a disaster for consumers when companies like Enron manipulated the West Cost power market and even shut down plants so they could drive up prices....
Consumers like Grandma Millie, mentioned in one exchange recorded between two Enron employees.
Employee 1: "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?
Employee 2: "Yeah, Grandma Millie man.
Employee 1: "Yeah, now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour."
Another taped exchange between different employees regarding a possible newspaper interview goes like this:
Employee 3: "This guy from the Wall Street Journal calls me up a little bit ago"
Employee 4: "I wouldn't do it, because first of all you'd have to tell 'em a lot of lies because if you told the truth"
Employee 3: "I'd get in trouble."
Employee 4: "You'd get in trouble."
"I'm just -- fucked -- I'm just trying to be an honest camper so I only go to jail once," says one employee.
They sell them at COSTCO alongside Panasonic and Philips and Sony. The quality is not that good, esp. the build quality- knobs housings etc.
If you need to save 80 bucks that badly, then it lets you get a product that you're otherwise priced out of. But it's not like they fond some way to do the same thing more cheaply through a manufacturing revolution or technological innovation. It costs less b/c it's cheaper.
What poor teaching in Comp Sci is going on where exactly?
The reason people are leaving IT is because the job opportunities aren't there. I'll say it- outsourcing and H1Bs in the US and similar measures in other countries. .
How long does it for word from the older brother / friend to the younger brother / friend that the career choices aren't there and they should major in something else?
How rampant is age discrimination in IT?
When the boom hit in 1990s , people poured into IT because of the job opportunities. If this thesis is to believed , it was because the teaching was somehow better back then and today it's gone downhill, so people are leaving.
Nice try. It's all about the economics of being a software engineer. The two things that have changed those economics are
1) oversupply of labor through the devices of outsourcing and false claims made by corporations of desperate IT labor shortages coupled with lobbying Congress to increase, or make unlimited, the number of visas available for IT workers.
Software patents which stifle innovation and curtail opportunities for programming entrepreneurs.
The fact that both of these policies give unnatural leverage over marketplace dynamics to large corporations who in turn fund the re-election campaigns of the lawmakers who pass these laws means means... everything.
The free market is a great thing until it works to drive up wages for workers. Then it's a tragedy of epic propositions and someone somewhere has to do something!! That someone is generally your senator.
First, spending 1k on a patent is not realistic, not if you want it to stand. I've done this and seen it done. Try 40k with a lawyer to shepherd it through the entire process.
Next, the idea that a big team will just copy your innovation and wipe you out is just not an accurate picture of reality for a lot of reasons.
One is a team has its own confusions and pitfalls and no team escapes them. So rather than quickly copying you, actually, they'll be slow as this and that waits for approval and people fight and miscommunicate and priorities and funding changes and oh...the meetings.
Then there's the fact that a knock off is never as good as the visionary's original. The reasons knock offs prevail in the physical world is because the overhead of manufacturing an original is about the same or even more than a knock off, so the visionary has no price advantage and perhaps a price disadvantage if the visionary expects to be compensated for her vision.
This is just the opposite in software where the marginal cost of producing another widget is effectively nil. Now the one with the overhead is the Microsoft with the fat overpaid hierarchy and the big team and the big building and the Congressional lobbying costs etc. etc.
finally visionaries continue to have vision. They are like artists and their products are cohesive and focused and consistent and intuitive in ways that Big Team in Big Companies have a hard time emulating long term.
Look at IntelliJ vs IBM or vs Borland or vs Oracle's offerings. It's all the same feature set on paper, but people love IntelliJ and willing pay for it in a world of free (their recent foray into open source notwithstanding).
Why? Because it possesses that certain something,that fine craftsmanship and quality that people who make their living writing code recognize and value.
In a certain sense, Apple is the same thing. Sure, they're up to the gills in patents now, but back in the day, before there was widespread patenting, they were the visionary product. People loved them and paid more for Apple computers. They had the manufacturing overhead problem- they weren't purely software- so they were more expensive and MS / IBM clones took market share, but even then they kept alive.
When Jobs came back, he had a vision and implemented it (or assembled a vision from his talented employees' separate visions and then took credit ) but anyway they competed on the basis of a unified vision. This is not what MS is or ever was.
You don't need patents to exist and do well in a competitive software environment. Patents definitely favor the big players since they're the only ones who can survive a patent fight . The only way to patent and make money in software without a few million already in the bank to back you up in an eastern district of Texas courtroom is if you exist as a patent troll- all lawsuit, no product.
Software developers today exist as serfs - at the pleasure of large or not so large companies who at any time can crush you completely. This isn't always at the forefront of their minds, but there's no good reason it shouldn't be.
I know of a more than a few software companies who quietly don't sell into the US markets anymore for just this reason. You can die at any moment for reasons that have nothing to do with legitimate competition. Who wants to spend ten years of their lives writing some genius piece of software only to be destroyed in a day by a knock at the door? That's the definition of anti-motivation- sudden death through lawyer. It plaques everyone I know who is thinking about starting a company.Mark Cuban recently said that every start up he knows is being sued by someone. This is the opposite of incentive to innovate and the opposite of value-based competition.
And the legislators know it. Sens. Kyl (AZ) and Schumer (NY) recently passed the most cynical bill
I just hope someday you'll come to understand why everyone appears to be conspiring against you even though they're really not, and why I'm going to add you to my foes list now.
Yeah, I don't keep a "foes" list.
Sometimes when we get really angry at someone, we're *really* talking to ourselves...
Yeah it was the utter vacuity and gratuitous snide tone of the comment that tipped me off. Same tone same guy.
Apparently, people feel they know some things involving their unique history of their own time on slashdot that you were not informed on!
My God! How could that be?
Your narcissistic egocentricity is showing through your inability to understand that other people can sense and have awareness of things you'd naturally be oblivious to.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I get where the paranoia in this post and the ones supporting it are coming from. You've got a disk filled with *stuff* and you are afraid to stick your head up. OK OK I get it now.
Look, dump your *stuff*. Do you really need to have Spiderman 15 - the Final, Final Prequel on your disk at the cost of waling around totally paranoid and afraid to participate in your democracy?
Don't do that.
Look at what you give them by doing that. You empower them to seize your computer , in theory.
You dis-empower yourself because you're paranoid because you've got something to hide.
So they get all the power, don't they? You're too afraid to even stick your head up long enough to write your Congresscritter.
Well, I have to tell you, when you find you're in a hole, stop digging.
You don't HAVE to pirate things you can't afford , especially with entertainment for gawds sake.
When I read things like this story I think the RIAA is a bunch of asswipes and resolve to defund them through my buying behavior.
At the same time I think- I never would have maintained that site, no way.
Spiderman 16: Back From The Dead and Ready For Action is NOT a political cause worth risking jail for.
Want to strike fear into the RIAA lawyer's hearts? Defund the people who pay their bills. That's taking it to the man. Stop buying their shit, stop downloading their shit be a part of a Creative Commons creative venture of your choice and PARTICIPATE IN YOUR DEMOCRACY.
Mod you up a lot . The whole post was cut through with cowardice and cop out and excuse making for non-participation.
Sorry this is just too stupid and destructive to let slip by.
Ahh with respect to patent infringement, actually no.
The patent has to be valid in both countries. So for instance, software patents are not valid in the UK so if you write infringing software there and sell it there it's too bad for the whoever has the US patent.
What you can't do is write it there (UK) and sell it here (in the US) .
I am not sure if write it here and sell it here and sell it in the UK if the UK will accommodate the US but at any rate, you'll be sued in the US . You have to confine yourself to the UK and similar (non-sw-patent) markets.
That may be true, but they also have to recognize the fact that there are always going to be people for whom there is no reasonable value/price ratio they are willing to pay--and simply ignore them because they are an entirely lost cause. It may be who they are or it may be a transient circumstance that will change in the future; if it's the latter, these companies should want to ensure that when circumstances change, these people return as customers. The people who never were and never will be customers aren't worth the resources.
Well said! This is exactly my point and nothing ore. I hope that was clear in what I said.
Yeah they may in fact want to enslave everyone or at least get all our money or whatever it is that drives these types to such extreme measures but no one is going to facilitate that.
Don't copy their crap. Do something else. Make your own crap. Download Creative Commons crap. Support artists who aren't down with the RIAA.
They don't have any power if enough people stop don't buying their shit. Stop liking their shit more than you like justice. Get involved with other people online who create stuff outside of this greedy octopus.
THAT is what REALLY keeps them up at night. People just walking away.
Yeah no one is going to give them that ever. Sure, they'd argue for it, but it's never going to happen. Onward with the boycott!
I appreciate the importance of copyright as the *right* level of IP protection, in contrast to patents
But the actions of the RIAA and all the rest are so mean spirited and personal even I am going to stop going to movies and buying RIAA music in protest
Sorry, but it seems to me you have a value / price problem, not a piracy problem.
You need to put your price and value proposition at a point where people are less inclined to steal .
People take things that they're barely interested in just to have them, then someone has something they didn't pay for - I get it.
But a business's concern is with making money from their product by meeting the market where it wants to be. If you're doing that, the people who casually rip second quality copies of stuff they're barely interested in are not a real problem.
No market is perfectly efficient. There's a low level drag coming form somewhere at all times- from bad legislation, from their own employees productivity , from dishonest middlemen, from a million different places.
By the same token, businesses get huge boosts from employees who have brilliant flashes of creativity and productivity, long-term-thinking lawmakers, new innovations in the distribution chain and a million other synergies the companies themselves expended nothing to obtain.
So just step back from your time-wasitng, money-wasting abacus on which you're keeping track of all the injustices and slights you think randomo people are dishing out to you and get back to doing the hard work of figuring out what the market is trying to tell you.
Here's a hint- 16.99-18.99 for a fucking CD is too much money. And that's why I buy all mine used online.
Here's another hint. 10-15 bucks to see a movie is too much, and that's why I go see one with my family three or four times a year, if that.
That is, I used to do that. This year, no more movies.
Sorry but you've got to realize that trying to kill the messenger and hanging the pickpockets is not a way to equitable and prosperous society.
The way to a society in which people buy music and see movies is by increasing your value proposition to those people so they want to buy your product.
People LOVE to buy and own things; acquisition possession and pride of ownership are an inherent part of the human character.
HOW could you have fucked that up:????
It's because "even" Bono is selfish that we need laws and taxes.
Um.. I think we agree since this is the point I was making in my post, no?
Specifically, it's what I said when I typed: "Men aren't angels, thus, Government".
I guess that's too pithy for Slashdot readers?
Note to self: use more words...
Everyone knows that Americans are lazy workers and that's why we need to outsource work to nations where people have the proper appreciation for a day's work and why we need to import foreign labor for doing everything from high tech jobs to picking tomatoes in a field.
Clearly, this is Communist propaganda.
It's a shame Slashdot is permitting its bandwidth to promote Marxism.
Except that their music is arguably as good as their good.
Show graphic animations of how it will effect everyone.
Pull out all the stops. Get everyone working on this one project right now.
It's like you have a trillion dollar media buy during an election cycle.
Use it. Use it. Don't go "blank".
Anyway, we mod Bono and U2 up because of what they then DID with that money. Instead of turning it into blow and snorting it up their noses like your average CEO, they actually used it to do GOOD in this world.
Not in Ireland myself, but if I were I also might know about some good U2 has done for causes in that country also.
Some people think U2 is sanctimonious, I get that, but I just have to give people credit for the good acts they actually engage in and U2 has a long list of those indeed.
If people were as generous, as capable of thinking long term, as concerned with the general welfare of the world as U2 was, we wouldn't need taxes or very many laws for that matter.
Men aren't angels, thus, government.
But I never see the point of going after those men who approximate angels to the best of any of our abilities.
My 2 cents.
What's THAT?!
But the FBI and CIA and especially the armed forces are serious people who actually work in government because they believe in government of a specific kind- good government.
Among serious adults, not about big government or small government, it's about GOOD government and towards that end, I'll wager, they're rethinking the in house craftsman / vs cheap ?? outsourcing debate internally.
Just a hunch.
Reading the article, I don't think it was an issue with Agile. I think what the FBI was saying was they're going to try to go ahead on their own, using Agile.
Not an Agile guy myself, but the top practitioners of this- Martin et al are known to be highly competent.
The rubber has to hit the road somewhere. Maybe you can contribute to your Senator's re-election campaign and get legislation that gives you visas for ten million programmers who will all work for 25 bucks an hour 12 hours a day 6 days a week, live 6 to an apartment and when their six year contract is up, all go home exchange rate adjusted millionaires.
But somewhere on some machine, ultimately, code has to run without errors.
Rubber, meet road. Road, meet rubber.
I love it when fast buck, coke snorting, prostitute screwing, sexual harassing, hard drinking, low IQ, high ambition, hand pumping, bribe giving, sales men dirtbags come face to face with something the rest of us know as non-negotiable reality.
It doesn't make up for the career swath of career destruction they've cut through the industry, but still.
"Hey ! Does anyone here know how to program? "
One thing is, companies learn their lessons. My spouse's company outsourced everything and after a years time brought it all back and now everyone's job is VERY secure. They'll never do THAT again.
Same thing here. Bet you anything the FBI is hiring programmers right now after having seen the advantages of developing and maintaining their own supply of stable, competent craftsman -programmers.
IBM Lockheed SAP Deloitte SAIC Technodyne and all the rest are in the business of billing bodies by the hour. Full stop. The more hours they bill, hey man, the better the business is. These are of course the same companies who lobby Congress to import as much programming labor as possible to undercut the domestic market.
I bless anyone anywhere who wants to be a programmer or make money for themselves and their families. That doesn't stop me from observing that Mega Corporations cynically exploit those same people and systematically undermine the quality of the work product of the entire industry by first staffing with masses of unqualified programmers, then paying substandard wages, then systematically overworking them all of which has the effect of causing people who wanted to make a real lifelong career of their craft to be forced out of their careers and also having the effect of making an IT career seem like a route to a short lived, overworked and underpaid job to people who are considering it as a major.
As far as these projects go, in the end, none of it works. Like making the WRONG choice for your prom date, you as a project manager only have to hook up with any of these sleazy companies and wait nine months to turn yourself into the sorriest motherfucker on your block.
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/12/20/indianas-gov-daniels-assailed-by-ibm
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/218515/county_alleges_sap_deloitte_engaged_in_racketeering.html
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/237939/epicor_sued_over_alleged_erp_project_failure.html
http://www.cio.com/article/678553/Auditors_ERP_Software_Woes_Could_Cost_Idaho_Millions
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3302164/lawson-embroiled-in-erp-lawsuit-with-customers/
Slashdotter could, if they'd organize, get rid of software patents and establish net neutrality in a years time. Nothing is as effective as writing your congressional critter...
These are quantitative considerations. When you crunch the numbers, do you actually arrive at "shortage?".
I am edified by your comment. But does it mean "legitimate shortage" ? That's the question.
As far as one point you made: towers cost money. Yes, in more ways than one, right? If you build a lot of towers and alleviate the shortage then the concomitant drop in pricing power you experience as a result of increased throughput "costs you money".
AFAIK this is the situation with refineries. NIMBY, yes (ever been to Billings MT? How to kill the livability of a entire city using just one industry.....) but also, why spend money to reduce your pricing power?
This is where govt regulation has to step in. Companies have no natural incentive to serve their populations well under these circumstances.
This is what we did with rural electrification back in the day. Ditto POTS. Now we have the "you're poor, here's the 10 bucks a month cable internet plan". Al a rezsult of government stepping in and saying to industry , "uh, no. You have to do this".
Are there really not technological advancements out there which will increase cell tower throughput? Alternatives to this technology? Other spectrum we could use in different ways. What about muni WIFI? Verizon et al killed that off right quick. This is the kind of market manipulation that goes on. I't not that I don't believe the corporations because I'm a commie. I am interested to learn more from Slashdotters on this topic.
Look, there is no throughput shortage, at least in fiber. Maybe some wireless spectrum is literally jammed packed and "golly we just don't have anymore or other spectrum we could use or any other alternatives... just running out folks!" .
I'll let people who know comment on that ;)
Somehow I doubt it's ultimately much different than the situation we have with fiber now.
In general, throughput is not a natural resource like oil or gas for which the amount can be said to be finite in any meaningful way.
We can create more fiber throughput at will, and whats more, we could being to use the copious, in fact, excess amount of fiber optic that exists now :
from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704529204576256541491117496.html
A decade or so ago I happened upon a booklet (at B and N no less) that outlined, in extremely frank language, that the way for cable providers to increase their profits without having to create value or increase investment was to create an artificial "shortage" of bandwidth by establishing a tiered system of throughput for which access to the upper tier was subject to bidding .
In this way, profits could be increased not through reaching more customers or even improving service.
Is this different than what Enron was doing when they were blacking out the West Coast by creating a "shortage" of electricity? Is this not the same sociopathic personality types and the same "captains of industry" doing what they do best- lying, manipulating consumers and scheming to increase profits without adding value?
Just so none of us forget how this scam works; from the Enron tapes: From:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/02/eveningnews/main620795.shtml
Energy trader: "Just cut 'em off. They're so fucked. They should just bring back fucking horses and carriages, fucking lamps, fucking kerosene lamps."
And when describing his reaction when a business owner complained about high energy prices, another trader is heard on tape saying, "I just looked at him.
I said, 'Move.' (laughter) The guy was like horrified. I go, 'Look, don't take it the wrong way. Move. It isn't getting fixed anytime soon."
California's attempt to deregulate energy markets became a disaster for consumers when companies like Enron manipulated the West Cost power market and even shut down plants so they could drive up prices. ...
Consumers like Grandma Millie, mentioned in one exchange recorded between two Enron employees.
Employee 1: "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?
Employee 2: "Yeah, Grandma Millie man.
Employee 1: "Yeah, now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour."
Another taped exchange between different employees regarding a possible newspaper interview goes like this:
Employee 3: "This guy from the Wall Street Journal calls me up a little bit ago"
Employee 4: "I wouldn't do it, because first of all you'd have to tell 'em a lot of lies because if you told the truth"
Employee 3: "I'd get in trouble."
Employee 4: "You'd get in trouble."
"I'm just -- fucked -- I'm just trying to be an honest camper so I only go to jail once," says one employee.
They sell them at COSTCO alongside Panasonic and Philips and Sony. The quality is not that good, esp. the build quality- knobs housings etc.
If you need to save 80 bucks that badly, then it lets you get a product that you're otherwise priced out of. But it's not like they fond some way to do the same thing more cheaply through a manufacturing revolution or technological innovation. It costs less b/c it's cheaper.
Sorry, this article presumes a falsehood.
What poor teaching in Comp Sci is going on where exactly?
The reason people are leaving IT is because the job opportunities aren't there. I'll say it- outsourcing and H1Bs in the US and similar measures in other countries. .
How long does it for word from the older brother / friend to the younger brother / friend that the career choices aren't there and they should major in something else?
How rampant is age discrimination in IT?
When the boom hit in 1990s , people poured into IT because of the job opportunities. If this thesis is to believed , it was because the teaching was somehow better back then and today it's gone downhill, so people are leaving.
Nice try. It's all about the economics of being a software engineer. The two things that have changed those economics are
1) oversupply of labor through the devices of outsourcing and false claims made by corporations of desperate IT labor shortages coupled with lobbying Congress to increase, or make unlimited, the number of visas available for IT workers.
Software patents which stifle innovation and curtail opportunities for programming entrepreneurs.
The fact that both of these policies give unnatural leverage over marketplace dynamics to large corporations who in turn fund the re-election campaigns of the lawmakers who pass these laws means means ... everything.
The free market is a great thing until it works to drive up wages for workers. Then it's a tragedy of epic propositions and someone somewhere has to do something!! That someone is generally your senator.
I have to disagree most of this.
First, spending 1k on a patent is not realistic, not if you want it to stand. I've done this and seen it done. Try 40k with a lawyer to shepherd it through the entire process.
Next, the idea that a big team will just copy your innovation and wipe you out is just not an accurate picture of reality for a lot of reasons.
One is a team has its own confusions and pitfalls and no team escapes them. So rather than quickly copying you, actually, they'll be slow as this and that waits for approval and people fight and miscommunicate and priorities and funding changes and oh ...the meetings.
Then there's the fact that a knock off is never as good as the visionary's original. The reasons knock offs prevail in the physical world is because the overhead of manufacturing an original is about the same or even more than a knock off, so the visionary has no price advantage and perhaps a price disadvantage if the visionary expects to be compensated for her vision.
This is just the opposite in software where the marginal cost of producing another widget is effectively nil. Now the one with the overhead is the Microsoft with the fat overpaid hierarchy and the big team and the big building and the Congressional lobbying costs etc. etc.
finally visionaries continue to have vision. They are like artists and their products are cohesive and focused and consistent and intuitive in ways that Big Team in Big Companies have a hard time emulating long term.
Look at IntelliJ vs IBM or vs Borland or vs Oracle's offerings. It's all the same feature set on paper, but people love IntelliJ and willing pay for it in a world of free (their recent foray into open source notwithstanding) .
Why? Because it possesses that certain something ,that fine craftsmanship and quality that people who make their living writing code recognize and value.
In a certain sense, Apple is the same thing. Sure, they're up to the gills in patents now, but back in the day, before there was widespread patenting, they were the visionary product. People loved them and paid more for Apple computers. They had the manufacturing overhead problem- they weren't purely software- so they were more expensive and MS / IBM clones took market share, but even then they kept alive.
When Jobs came back, he had a vision and implemented it (or assembled a vision from his talented employees' separate visions and then took credit ) but anyway they competed on the basis of a unified vision. This is not what MS is or ever was.
You don't need patents to exist and do well in a competitive software environment. Patents definitely favor the big players since they're the only ones who can survive a patent fight . The only way to patent and make money in software without a few million already in the bank to back you up in an eastern district of Texas courtroom is if you exist as a patent troll- all lawsuit, no product.
Software developers today exist as serfs - at the pleasure of large or not so large companies who at any time can crush you completely. This isn't always at the forefront of their minds, but there's no good reason it shouldn't be.
I know of a more than a few software companies who quietly don't sell into the US markets anymore for just this reason. You can die at any moment for reasons that have nothing to do with legitimate competition. Who wants to spend ten years of their lives writing some genius piece of software only to be destroyed in a day by a knock at the door? That's the definition of anti-motivation- sudden death through lawyer. It plaques everyone I know who is thinking about starting a company.Mark Cuban recently said that every start up he knows is being sued by someone. This is the opposite of incentive to innovate and the opposite of value-based competition.
And the legislators know it. Sens. Kyl (AZ) and Schumer (NY) recently passed the most cynical bill
I just hope someday you'll come to understand why everyone appears to be conspiring against you even though they're really not, and why I'm going to add you to my foes list now.
Yeah, I don't keep a "foes" list.
Sometimes when we get really angry at someone, we're *really* talking to ourselves...
Yeah it was the utter vacuity and gratuitous snide tone of the comment that tipped me off. Same tone same guy.
Apparently, people feel they know some things involving their unique history of their own time on slashdot that you were not informed on!
My God! How could that be?
Your narcissistic egocentricity is showing through your inability to understand that other people can sense and have awareness of things you'd naturally be oblivious to.