Your post doesn't really contradict my point. It takes years to build a brand reputation, but very little time to destroy it, and one of the fastest ways to do so is the "race to the bottom" of shaving costs by reducing quality, either in the final product or the support of that product.
I don't disagree with that at all. I always preferred Dell even if they were a bit more expensive because their service was -excellent-. I like Apple for the same reason.
But, if Dell wants to turn themselves into Walmart Computer Company (which is what the outsourcing is really all about), then, yeah, they will make more money in the consumer space... but, just like years of bad Chevy's trashed Cadillac, so too will hoards of cheap Dell PCs trash them in the enterprise.
There will be lots of happy people, I'm sure, buying a cheap Dell from Walmart or Walmart like stores where they couldn't have bought them before. But, there won't be people like me spending $2,500 on a Dell PC or a Dell Server, just because, its like, any more than I would hypothetically buy a Yugo Limosine, and I certainly wouldn't tell anyone that Dell is a premium brand any more, when it is not.
I would say that the C++ standard library containers are useful but not necessarily reasonable. There's problems with just putting any old object into them, in the way you can with a Java or a C# container.
Oh yeah, forgot something. How well is Ford doing these days? Last time I checked, not so well.... When your exchange is lower quality in exchange for a better looking bottom line, Wall Street may love you for a while
You should check again. Ford's actually a good stock to pick, and its funny, because of the opposite of what you say. Ford is investing more resources into its cars to improve their feature set and build quality. Consumers are noticing, but Wall Street is non-plussed at the moment.
Ford's new cars are being well received. Unlike some their 1980s dreck, the Focus, Fusion, Edge and Mustang are all good cars. Lincoln is actually starting to get something of an identity back. And...the F-150 remains a highly regarded pick up, if you want such a thing.
The same thing is taking place at GM. GM might be an even better stock pick because GM isn't carrying nearly the debt that Ford is, and GM's product renaissance, again, investing more into building better cars, is beginning to pay dividends. Car magazines do not laugh at GM or Ford small cars the way they did before. The Chevy Cobalt is a -good- car, and 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Americans could not make small cars anymore (although Chrysler's Dodge/Plymouth Neon was actually a wonderful car to drive).
and you think owning a gun is going to allow you to defend yourself against the US military ?
It sucks for we USA but that seems to be working just fine for the insurgents in Iraq. 20 billion dollars a month in occupation is being spent trying to suppress an insurgency that is armed with little more than homemade explosives and automatic weapons. If that does not give you an idea as to the efficacy of the right to keep and bear arms in keeping out a government that you do not like, then nothing will.
The USA is an extremist nation. It always has been and always will be. Let's face it. Life in the early USA sucked and the only reason anyone in their right mind would want to come to this freezing, savage filled continent would either be due to immense greed or some immense political or religious belief.
There is not a single page of American history where the country cannot be divided up into those sets of people - greedy people, religious fruitcakes, and political maniacs. They built the colonies, rammed through the American revolution, wrote our constitution, and continue to drive our present political discourse.
Folks look for moderates in the USA, and there aren't any. Everyone has one opinion or another that is radical about something, it is just that, because everyone's radicalism averages out at a survey level, it only seems like the USA is a rational country.
Americans love radicals, always have, and always will. Thomas Jefferson was a radical. John Brown was a radical. Both Roosevelts were radicals and Wilson was a radical and Kennedy was a radical. Johnson, Carter, Bush.. those guys weren't radicals, but the country hated them. Clinton wasn't radical, but he definitely fell into the greedy camp - greedy for power, greedy for the ladies.... and nobody ever really -liked- him... just, they thought did a decent enough job. Now they loved Reagan, and they love Obama...
So yeah, I like Charlton Heston. I'm a member of the NRA and damned proud of it, and I love my AK-47 and my AR-15 and my Barrett.50 caliber rifle... and I love my country that I have the right to have all this cool stuff, just as much as I love it that someone else on the left wing can have the right to their own dumb ideas about socialism and one world UN government.
Man, you shove a million people into a little tube, all on the way to get humiliated for 8 hours a day, to get your job outsourced to some bunch of dudes in Manila, and then come home and get bitched at by the old lady when she's not slobbing the neighbor's knob. If you don't come through that being paranoid, then, man, you are retarded. "Ride choo choo train... look at pretty lights..." Keep riding, dude, and enjoy the lights.
If workers are given the funding, time and education to retrain and relocate, that isn't a problem. But the closure off the dominant employers in some areas, meant there is no-one to sell services to.
I agree with that.
The other problem, too, is that the USA seems to be the only nation that really doesn't have nationalistic consumer shoppers. Japan comes to mind as the biggest offender. Everyone has a hard time making it in Japan largely because Japanese consumers are outrageously nationalistic when it comes to shopping. There's not some law that the government could pass that would open things up... it's that the people there will only buy Japanese stuff.
Europeans, too are the same way. For decades, Europeans often have been saying that American stuff is crap, and yet, if you look at any honest study of defects per item made, European stuff is surprisingly laggard when it comes to quality. Jaguar is legend for it, but, BMW owners too often have a ritual of taking the car to the shop for teething problems. I know two guys with M3s, and they both went to the shop for this, that and the other.
SO, with that in mind, despite my idealistic and strident defense of the theory of free trade, and, being enormously mindful of the heavy price paid by American manufacturers for it, I do often ask - is the USA the only country that actually tries to trade fairly, and if so, then, really what's the point of free trade? Maybe it would be better to carve the world up into manufacturing zones - like Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
I'm sorry, but I respectfully disagree with you. Outsourcing is a very bad deal. While it has the allure of temporarily deflating the cost of goods and services, it is, in the end, a direct assault on the lower and middle class. Because companies can now outsource to other nations without such pesky problems as labor laws or a living wage, we are quickly seeing the working class gains of the last few decades evaporate.
But is the working class actually -poorer-. That's the question. If you argue on the basis of wages, yes, but if you look at what can be bought with them, then the answer is no.
50 years ago, the biggest food problem in the USA was malnutrition, and now, it is obesity.
50 years ago, people perhaps had one or two family radios. Now, they have radios than they can count. They have radios in their car keys, remote controls, routers and more.
50 years ago, people did not have TVs. Now, people have more TVS than they need.
40 years ago, people did not have what they have today, and 30 years ago, they did not, and even 20 years ago. People have a lot more -stuff- than they had before. Even houses, cars, etc, are all bigger.
Just look at the increase of energy consumption per capita in the USA. I don't think it has ever gone down.
Sorry, but you cannot argue that an Indian telephone support outsourcing will result in a better customer appreciation.
I could. But, whether or not the call center delivers better service is another matter. It's really up to Dell.
I for one used to actually recommend Dell on the basis of, yes, their computers were a bit more expensive, but they had excellent service and were better. But that was back when people felt like they had to call all the time. Now, when people buy computers, they look at the circulars, see a sale at Best Buy or Walmart or Costco or Sams Club, and go and just grab one.
It must be very fatiguing to willfully and consistently conflate the term "outsourcing" with the concept of offshoring. Dell sending their call center to Amarillo (or even Lansing) is vastly different from sending it to Hyderabad
Hopefully you will do this by offering something more substantial than the ever decreasing US$. - if everything is outsourced, how will you pay for it?
If everything was outsourced, we would each have our own distinct business feeding into the global economy. Corporations would become virtual entities collecting a set of goods and services from each set of individual entrepreneurs to build a product, and therefor, there would be full employment, with everyone in jobs that actually made a difference and thus were more rewarding, the world would be richer and we would have more stuff. Oh wait, its kinda like the world that we can see approaching now, if we set aside our fears, embrace change, and not let the end of a depression in commodities prices cause us to erroneously assume that the entire world economy is melting down, when in fact, its actually getting better.
It is amazing to me how a lot of our current economic theory is built on "wishful thinking
No, its based on really proven fact. Outsourcing is really nothing more than specialization of labor. Originally, the manufacturing unit was the family. Then, some of those functions were outsourced to other families and thus villages and then cities were born. Eventually cities outsourced to other cities and thus states and then nations were born.
Along the way, somebody got screwed because of outsourcing, someone always does. But, last time I checked, we all have computers, in fact, we're building computers for third world countries. We all have cars, bikes, broadband, and the radio that seemed almost magical a scant generation or two ago is now pervasive as another feature of everything we own. Thus, in terms of sheer wealth, in terms of sheer things owned, we have way more than we had even ten years ago.
You can't go back on outsourcing without the wealth it brings, so, the question really has to be asked? What level of outsourcing do you want to dial back to? Do you want to go back to the 1960s, the 1970s? The Amish people in Lancaster PA do their best to maintain manufacturing at the village unit, and they have horse and buggies and still must buy reflectors from outside the village. Do you want horse and buggies?
Really, the thing is, when people condemn outsourcing, they never really are specific as to what they think should or should not be outsourced. I buy American cars and American products, but, what's an American car these days? I would be willing to bet that the memory for the onboard computers are made in taiwan, probably using machines designed and built by Siemens in Germany, possibly using an embedded system designed by the British and integrated in design by American engineers, and yeah, probably containing a fair number of parts manufactured in China.
There's nothing national anymore, and even if there could be that way again, how fair would that be for countries that do not have various resources in either raw materials or population on their country. Last time we tried national manufacturing, the economic system completely and repeatedly collapsed, and instead of peaceful oceans we had oceans stuffed with massive battlefleets as various countries tried to grab the best access to raw materials and talent as it could.
Viewed from a distance, the world wars and then the cold war can really be viewed as the consequence of a national manufacturing. We Americans had the insight to use our successful in those wars to more or less impose a free trade regime on the world, with the idea that if trade were unhindered, there would be no more major wars.
-THIS POLICY HAS WORKED-.
Sure, there are plenty of little wars, and even though what's happening in Iraq is costly and unfortunate, overall, there have not been cities being firebombed and 100,000 people being killed in a single night. You don't see armies of 20,000,000 or men mobilized to duke it out. I mean, even now, the US Army of 2008 is -SMALLER- in manpower than the British Army of 1916.
So yeah, it sucks that we might lose our jobs to some muk muk that can do it cheaper, but it beats the shit out of doing what previous generations did - world wide panics, a world war, millions killed, global economic meltdown, then, ANOTHER world war.
It is so historically evident that war is an inevitable consequence of the restraint of trade, that, I should think it madness to seriously contemplate a significant restraint of trade at all.
Our system isn't a race to the bottom. It is a race to what people want. People want computers at the cheapest possible price and they do not care about tech centers or even support.
Outsourcing is a good thing for the economy, not a bad thing. If Ford did not outsource, for example, it would have to make everything from the drills for the oil, the refineries for the gasoline, the machines to make the steel and the chips and the plastic, really, recreate the entire economy and in doing so lose the efficiencies that come with shared costs. We can lament outsourcing of some function at a company, to make ourselves feel good, but, if there were no outsourcing, there would be no cars, no tvs, computers, or any of the millions of products, in all their choice and complexity, because those products would not exist without outsourcing.
We ourselves, each and everyone one of us, outsource all of the time. Go ahead can say Dell is terrible because they outsourced a call center to India or the Philippines, but we outsource every time we use a stapler or a printer, or for that matter, even a computer. How many developers recommend using MySql or Postgres or even Linux over some solution developed in-house. That is outsourcing too, and without that outsourcing, it is very likely that there would be less jobs and more economic stagnation. Few products have the margin or merit to justify the creation of a custom database server or operating system solely for them.
In that vein, outsourcing a call center might actually result in -better- customer service. If a place in India has 200,000 people answering the phones, they are going to get the economies of scale that even Dell could not possibly get.
Outsourcing actually -creates- opportunity. Any time you see more than one company engaged in a similar practice, that is an opportunity for a product or a service than can be outsourced to someone else, and that person might as well be you. If outsourcing did not exist, then, there would be no opportunity, the companies that could have benefited from outsourcing would stagnate, and products would remain more expensive, rather than less.
Bottom line is, outsourcing is a good deal, rather than a bad once, and the dramatic increase in the standard of living in much of the world - from the skyscrapers in China, the surge of wealth in India, to the internet of south korea and the massive works in Dubai, the world is getting richer and better off for it. Even in the USA, where outsourcing has been the subject of much debate, everyone has benefited from outsourcing.
Microsoft trying to take over Yahoo is old news. Microsoft threatening someone is old news. Techies should be rejoicing over the return of Galactica, and yet, what do we get here? Sadly, silence. Some geeks these days!
To paraphrase Captain Kirk: "I mock your superior intellect."
And Spock. "He is very intelligent, but his thinking is two dimensional."
People are posting articles on Slashdot, as if nothing has happened. News about a potential new Windows version.. yawn. Galactica reappeared finally last night, almost as mystically as the Cylons in Baltar's head, and it was some episode.
But, I guess a science and technology web site doesn't have room for one of the most noted SCI FI shows any more....
Rumors and speculation of a pre-vaporware Windows Release might be something, but really, isn't Galactica cooler?
but again, making a sane and True-with-a-capital-T judgment is often beyond our capacity as humans.
We humans have a capacity to assess the truth of something by its utility. Since utility invariably includes political expedience and personal preference, the notion of an absolute truth is absolutely variable as well. All we can really do is do the best we can.
Some other people have said it, but I'm going to just echo the sentiment of foolishness. These Vista folks are still paying a few hundred bucks, at which point, they'll done the wizard hats and find some way to hack up an upgrade into a full edition, under the light of the full moon, with an animal sacrifice, while standing on one hand upside down with a 45 pound weight tied to your leg, and then, say, "thank you Microsoft, for allowing this workaround that lets me license the product at half price....and all you did was publicly say that if I did I would be violating the EULA anyway..." I don't know really know much good will that really is, when, I can go get ubuntu off of a web site for free, spend $1 on a blank DVD, burn it, boot from it, and then be done.... and, best of all, there's no ubuntu 20 digit license key, no ubuntu activation, and, I can do it sitting in my chair, with my feet on the ground, and no weights. Best of all, the animals love me too.
In a data mining context, an algorithm extracts, modifies or creates data from an existing data set.
Ultimately, everything is data.... a Turing machine doesn't know "algorithms"....it's a state machine and its all data to it. So, yeah, although we like to pretend that code and data are separate things, the very bedrock of theory that computer science sits on says that its all the same, and ultimately, when we choose a data driven architecture or an algorithmically heavy one, we're really just choosing where to make the investment of codifying information.
verb vs noun
both are just parts of a grammar, which, overall is just data. look at a very simple language for a text adventure game below. commas indic
noun -> (torch|gold|sword|goblin|door) verb -> (take|drop|attack) direction -> (north|south|east|west) move -> go direction action -> verb noun S -> (move|action)
It's all data...we merely invent noun and verb to classify things. But we could just as easily have written
having no noun and verb at all in our language... in fact, we could theoretically write a text adventure engine with a grammar and a few primitives to run a state machine in the background that describes how things are related...it would be all data, essentially.
all I'm saying is, that, sometimes, to bring it back to a data mining context, it might make sense to think about the system as (data being mined + algorithm) as part of a larger soup of information and then assign to each depending on one's preferences... giving up that proven interchangability because it is presently good practice seems awful risky...
I mean, if we balloon up to 10,000 feet, the problem really is, where do you put the extra data? Do you encode it in an algorithm, or do you have less code but more dynamic data. Given that POV, then, it stands to reason the best place to put the extra data is outside of the code, so that it is easier and less costly to modify.
I personally think internet services are too important to be left to the market
This is backwards. If the service, regardless of what it is, was so important, don't you think that should be sufficient incentive for people to pay for it? If it wasn't important, then people wouldn't want it. So, maybe the government should only subsidize things that aren't important.
I said that judging normality of a biological process across a large number of subjects is problematic. This goes for internal chemical processes, nourishment, and other biological processes. It's not a justification, it's a statement of fact regarding biology and statistics.
Behaviors aren't purely biological, that's what I'm saying.
It just seems like we could be spending the same amount of money we spend on keeping this guy incarcerated until they kill him on programs to help educate and support severely mentally handicapped people... especially since they are unable to understand the consequences of their actions, which again, invalidates the primary argument for the existence of the death penalty.
He raped two people. He killed. It doesn't matter if he understands the consequences of his actions or not. The primary argument for the existence of the death penalty is to remove people that kill from existence. I mean, you argue as if the death penalty is something that should be argued in the positive to exist. I would counter that by arguing what value is it to keep these killers alive?
Right. It's only a part of the population that is hypersexual. I think that being at risk of getting your face bashed in by the person you're hitting on has got to have a profound psychological effect on these people.
All of that doesn't matter now with the proliferation of gay hookup web sites.
Remember Matthew Shepard? Did you see any of those websites with the counters counting how long he'd been in hell?
Matthew Sheppard didn't hit on someone and get punched in the face. He was brutally murdered because he was gay. If that crime had happened in Texas, both of his killers would be dead by now. Then Governor Bush would have signed the death warrant, no problem, and I think he would have been fully justified in doing so, just as he was fully justified in executing those two guys that dragged a black kid to death behind a truck.
Excess is also subjective in cases of things that are naturally a part of our biological process. So it makes it more confusing
I'm inclined to believe that "that which is natural" is the worst excuse for allowing a behavior, ever. It's a natural part of our biological process to destroy those humans that are not like us and to seek revenge on those who would hurt us. If we are going to live a life to do "what's natural", then we have to include killing people that kill the ones we love, driving out people in communities that we would disagree with, a natural tendency to form male dominated societies. Just look at ancient societies, pre-christianity. The Romans sold loads of people in slavery, the Israelites ethnically cleansed Israel... Alexander the Great burned Perseopolis to the ground, the Spartans savaged the Helots for hundreds of years, and so on. If we go back to doing what is natural, then, we are going to fall, mighty far, indeed. I certainly won't disagree that judeo christianity gave us the concept of a religious war, but, by the same token, it did bring us the notion that you had to fight wars for some sort of a cause other than plunder.
I mean, even if you think that Bush lied to invade Iraq and grab the oil with some byzantine plot involving halliburton and PSAs, you also have to concede that had to have a byzantine plot. Julius Caesar had absolutely no problem marching into Gaul, killing everyone that was there, bringing back a bunch of loot for the empire, and that was that. Caesar even -bragged- that he killed two million people. Were Bush the emperor in Roman times, he would be condemned for being too nice. Caesar would burn down all the mosques, crucify Moqtada Al Sadr, haul everyone in Tikrit off to slavery, make the tribal chieftans fight gladiator games, and quite a few others along the way, and would have the oil on its way to the USA by now....
Rich people don't have to evade taxes, they can afford to buy politicians to manipulate the tax code for their benefit. The reason for the Byzantine complexity of the US tax code is that it is the result of nearly a century of politicians selling favors to contributors.
Well, not necessarily. There are some hair brained ideas for advancing "a better society". As much as Democrats stand in favor of supposedly progressive taxation, payroll taxes for social security where their idea, along with taxes on gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes in most northeastern states.
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Your post doesn't really contradict my point. It takes years to build a brand reputation, but very little time to destroy it, and one of the fastest ways to do so is the "race to the bottom" of shaving costs by reducing quality, either in the final product or the support of that product.
I don't disagree with that at all. I always preferred Dell even if they were a bit more expensive because their service was -excellent-. I like Apple for the same reason.
But, if Dell wants to turn themselves into Walmart Computer Company (which is what the outsourcing is really all about), then, yeah, they will make more money in the consumer space... but, just like years of bad Chevy's trashed Cadillac, so too will hoards of cheap Dell PCs trash them in the enterprise.
There will be lots of happy people, I'm sure, buying a cheap Dell from Walmart or Walmart like stores where they couldn't have bought them before. But, there won't be people like me spending $2,500 on a Dell PC or a Dell Server, just because, its like, any more than I would hypothetically buy a Yugo Limosine, and I certainly wouldn't tell anyone that Dell is a premium brand any more, when it is not.
C++ does too in their standard libraries.
I would say that the C++ standard library containers are useful but not necessarily reasonable. There's problems with just putting any old object into them, in the way you can with a Java or a C# container.
Oh yeah, forgot something. How well is Ford doing these days? Last time I checked, not so well.... When your exchange is lower quality in exchange for a better looking bottom line, Wall Street may love you for a while
You should check again. Ford's actually a good stock to pick, and its funny, because of the opposite of what you say. Ford is investing more resources into its cars to improve their feature set and build quality. Consumers are noticing, but Wall Street is non-plussed at the moment.
Ford's new cars are being well received. Unlike some their 1980s dreck, the Focus, Fusion, Edge and Mustang are all good cars. Lincoln is actually starting to get something of an identity back. And...the F-150 remains a highly regarded pick up, if you want such a thing.
The same thing is taking place at GM. GM might be an even better stock pick because GM isn't carrying nearly the debt that Ford is, and GM's product renaissance, again, investing more into building better cars, is beginning to pay dividends. Car magazines do not laugh at GM or Ford small cars the way they did before. The Chevy Cobalt is a -good- car, and 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Americans could not make small cars anymore (although Chrysler's Dodge/Plymouth Neon was actually a wonderful car to drive).
and you think owning a gun is going to allow you to defend yourself against the US military ?
It sucks for we USA but that seems to be working just fine for the insurgents in Iraq. 20 billion dollars a month in occupation is being spent trying to suppress an insurgency that is armed with little more than homemade explosives and automatic weapons. If that does not give you an idea as to the efficacy of the right to keep and bear arms in keeping out a government that you do not like, then nothing will.
The USA is an extremist nation. It always has been and always will be. Let's face it. Life in the early USA sucked and the only reason anyone in their right mind would want to come to this freezing, savage filled continent would either be due to immense greed or some immense political or religious belief.
.50 caliber rifle... and I love my country that I have the right to have all this cool stuff, just as much as I love it that someone else on the left wing can have the right to their own dumb ideas about socialism and one world UN government.
There is not a single page of American history where the country cannot be divided up into those sets of people - greedy people, religious fruitcakes, and political maniacs. They built the colonies, rammed through the American revolution, wrote our constitution, and continue to drive our present political discourse.
Folks look for moderates in the USA, and there aren't any. Everyone has one opinion or another that is radical about something, it is just that, because everyone's radicalism averages out at a survey level, it only seems like the USA is a rational country.
Americans love radicals, always have, and always will. Thomas Jefferson was a radical. John Brown was a radical. Both Roosevelts were radicals and Wilson was a radical and Kennedy was a radical. Johnson, Carter, Bush.. those guys weren't radicals, but the country hated them. Clinton wasn't radical, but he definitely fell into the greedy camp - greedy for power, greedy for the ladies.... and nobody ever really -liked- him... just, they thought did a decent enough job. Now they loved Reagan, and they love Obama...
So yeah, I like Charlton Heston. I'm a member of the NRA and damned proud of it, and I love my AK-47 and my AR-15 and my Barrett
Man, you shove a million people into a little tube, all on the way to get humiliated for 8 hours a day, to get your job outsourced to some bunch of dudes in Manila, and then come home and get bitched at by the old lady when she's not slobbing the neighbor's knob. If you don't come through that being paranoid, then, man, you are retarded. "Ride choo choo train... look at pretty lights..." Keep riding, dude, and enjoy the lights.
If workers are given the funding, time and education to retrain and relocate, that isn't a problem. But the closure off the dominant employers in some areas, meant there is no-one to sell services to.
I agree with that.
The other problem, too, is that the USA seems to be the only nation that really doesn't have nationalistic consumer shoppers. Japan comes to mind as the biggest offender. Everyone has a hard time making it in Japan largely because Japanese consumers are outrageously nationalistic when it comes to shopping. There's not some law that the government could pass that would open things up... it's that the people there will only buy Japanese stuff.
Europeans, too are the same way. For decades, Europeans often have been saying that American stuff is crap, and yet, if you look at any honest study of defects per item made, European stuff is surprisingly laggard when it comes to quality. Jaguar is legend for it, but, BMW owners too often have a ritual of taking the car to the shop for teething problems. I know two guys with M3s, and they both went to the shop for this, that and the other.
SO, with that in mind, despite my idealistic and strident defense of the theory of free trade, and, being enormously mindful of the heavy price paid by American manufacturers for it, I do often ask - is the USA the only country that actually tries to trade fairly, and if so, then, really what's the point of free trade? Maybe it would be better to carve the world up into manufacturing zones - like Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
I'm sorry, but I respectfully disagree with you. Outsourcing is a very bad deal. While it has the allure of temporarily deflating the cost of goods and services, it is, in the end, a direct assault on the lower and middle class. Because companies can now outsource to other nations without such pesky problems as labor laws or a living wage, we are quickly seeing the working class gains of the last few decades evaporate.
But is the working class actually -poorer-. That's the question. If you argue on the basis of wages, yes, but if you look at what can be bought with them, then the answer is no.
50 years ago, the biggest food problem in the USA was malnutrition, and now, it is obesity.
50 years ago, people perhaps had one or two family radios. Now, they have radios than they can count. They have radios in their car keys, remote controls, routers and more.
50 years ago, people did not have TVs. Now, people have more TVS than they need.
40 years ago, people did not have what they have today, and 30 years ago, they did not, and even 20 years ago. People have a lot more -stuff- than they had before. Even houses, cars, etc, are all bigger.
Just look at the increase of energy consumption per capita in the USA. I don't think it has ever gone down.
Guess she is one of those evil people who benefited from outsourcing at the expense of the hard working auto union employee.
It's not just the unions that lead to the woes of the big three. Management of these companies made some pretty stupid decisions too.
Sorry, but you cannot argue that an Indian telephone support outsourcing will result in a better customer appreciation.
I could. But, whether or not the call center delivers better service is another matter. It's really up to Dell.
I for one used to actually recommend Dell on the basis of, yes, their computers were a bit more expensive, but they had excellent service and were better. But that was back when people felt like they had to call all the time. Now, when people buy computers, they look at the circulars, see a sale at Best Buy or Walmart or Costco or Sams Club, and go and just grab one.
It must be very fatiguing to willfully and consistently conflate the term "outsourcing" with the concept of offshoring. Dell sending their call center to Amarillo (or even Lansing) is vastly different from sending it to Hyderabad
Economically speaking, its not different at all.
Hopefully you will do this by offering something more substantial than the ever decreasing US$. - if everything is outsourced, how will you pay for it?
If everything was outsourced, we would each have our own distinct business feeding into the global economy. Corporations would become virtual entities collecting a set of goods and services from each set of individual entrepreneurs to build a product, and therefor, there would be full employment, with everyone in jobs that actually made a difference and thus were more rewarding, the world would be richer and we would have more stuff. Oh wait, its kinda like the world that we can see approaching now, if we set aside our fears, embrace change, and not let the end of a depression in commodities prices cause us to erroneously assume that the entire world economy is melting down, when in fact, its actually getting better.
It is amazing to me how a lot of our current economic theory is built on "wishful thinking
No, its based on really proven fact. Outsourcing is really nothing more than specialization of labor. Originally, the manufacturing unit was the family. Then, some of those functions were outsourced to other families and thus villages and then cities were born. Eventually cities outsourced to other cities and thus states and then nations were born.
Along the way, somebody got screwed because of outsourcing, someone always does. But, last time I checked, we all have computers, in fact, we're building computers for third world countries. We all have cars, bikes, broadband, and the radio that seemed almost magical a scant generation or two ago is now pervasive as another feature of everything we own. Thus, in terms of sheer wealth, in terms of sheer things owned, we have way more than we had even ten years ago.
You can't go back on outsourcing without the wealth it brings, so, the question really has to be asked? What level of outsourcing do you want to dial back to? Do you want to go back to the 1960s, the 1970s? The Amish people in Lancaster PA do their best to maintain manufacturing at the village unit, and they have horse and buggies and still must buy reflectors from outside the village. Do you want horse and buggies?
Really, the thing is, when people condemn outsourcing, they never really are specific as to what they think should or should not be outsourced. I buy American cars and American products, but, what's an American car these days? I would be willing to bet that the memory for the onboard computers are made in taiwan, probably using machines designed and built by Siemens in Germany, possibly using an embedded system designed by the British and integrated in design by American engineers, and yeah, probably containing a fair number of parts manufactured in China.
There's nothing national anymore, and even if there could be that way again, how fair would that be for countries that do not have various resources in either raw materials or population on their country. Last time we tried national manufacturing, the economic system completely and repeatedly collapsed, and instead of peaceful oceans we had oceans stuffed with massive battlefleets as various countries tried to grab the best access to raw materials and talent as it could.
Viewed from a distance, the world wars and then the cold war can really be viewed as the consequence of a national manufacturing. We Americans had the insight to use our successful in those wars to more or less impose a free trade regime on the world, with the idea that if trade were unhindered, there would be no more major wars.
-THIS POLICY HAS WORKED-.
Sure, there are plenty of little wars, and even though what's happening in Iraq is costly and unfortunate, overall, there have not been cities being firebombed and 100,000 people being killed in a single night. You don't see armies of 20,000,000 or men mobilized to duke it out. I mean, even now, the US Army of 2008 is -SMALLER- in manpower than the British Army of 1916.
So yeah, it sucks that we might lose our jobs to some muk muk that can do it cheaper, but it beats the shit out of doing what previous generations did - world wide panics, a world war, millions killed, global economic meltdown, then, ANOTHER world war.
It is so historically evident that war is an inevitable consequence of the restraint of trade, that, I should think it madness to seriously contemplate a significant restraint of trade at all.
Our system isn't a race to the bottom. It is a race to what people want. People want computers at the cheapest possible price and they do not care about tech centers or even support.
Outsourcing is a good thing for the economy, not a bad thing. If Ford did not outsource, for example, it would have to make everything from the drills for the oil, the refineries for the gasoline, the machines to make the steel and the chips and the plastic, really, recreate the entire economy and in doing so lose the efficiencies that come with shared costs. We can lament outsourcing of some function at a company, to make ourselves feel good, but, if there were no outsourcing, there would be no cars, no tvs, computers, or any of the millions of products, in all their choice and complexity, because those products would not exist without outsourcing.
We ourselves, each and everyone one of us, outsource all of the time. Go ahead can say Dell is terrible because they outsourced a call center to India or the Philippines, but we outsource every time we use a stapler or a printer, or for that matter, even a computer. How many developers recommend using MySql or Postgres or even Linux over some solution developed in-house. That is outsourcing too, and without that outsourcing, it is very likely that there would be less jobs and more economic stagnation. Few products have the margin or merit to justify the creation of a custom database server or operating system solely for them.
In that vein, outsourcing a call center might actually result in -better- customer service. If a place in India has 200,000 people answering the phones, they are going to get the economies of scale that even Dell could not possibly get.
Outsourcing actually -creates- opportunity. Any time you see more than one company engaged in a similar practice, that is an opportunity for a product or a service than can be outsourced to someone else, and that person might as well be you. If outsourcing did not exist, then, there would be no opportunity, the companies that could have benefited from outsourcing would stagnate, and products would remain more expensive, rather than less.
Bottom line is, outsourcing is a good deal, rather than a bad once, and the dramatic increase in the standard of living in much of the world - from the skyscrapers in China, the surge of wealth in India, to the internet of south korea and the massive works in Dubai, the world is getting richer and better off for it. Even in the USA, where outsourcing has been the subject of much debate, everyone has benefited from outsourcing.
Microsoft trying to take over Yahoo is old news. Microsoft threatening someone is old news. Techies should be rejoicing over the return of Galactica, and yet, what do we get here? Sadly, silence. Some geeks these days!
To paraphrase Captain Kirk: "I mock your superior intellect."
And Spock. "He is very intelligent, but his thinking is two dimensional."
Hawking has to roll every time he gets near a flight of stairs in a melee or takes the tumble critical hit..
People are posting articles on Slashdot, as if nothing has happened. News about a potential new Windows version
But, I guess a science and technology web site doesn't have room for one of the most noted SCI FI shows any more....
Rumors and speculation of a pre-vaporware Windows Release might be something, but really, isn't Galactica cooler?
but again, making a sane and True-with-a-capital-T judgment is often beyond our capacity as humans.
We humans have a capacity to assess the truth of something by its utility. Since utility invariably includes political expedience and personal preference, the notion of an absolute truth is absolutely variable as well. All we can really do is do the best we can.
Some other people have said it, but I'm going to just echo the sentiment of foolishness. These Vista folks are still paying a few hundred bucks, at which point, they'll done the wizard hats and find some way to hack up an upgrade into a full edition, under the light of the full moon, with an animal sacrifice, while standing on one hand upside down with a 45 pound weight tied to your leg, and then, say, "thank you Microsoft, for allowing this workaround that lets me license the product at half price....and all you did was publicly say that if I did I would be violating the EULA anyway..." I don't know really know much good will that really is, when, I can go get ubuntu off of a web site for free, spend $1 on a blank DVD, burn it, boot from it, and then be done.... and, best of all, there's no ubuntu 20 digit license key, no ubuntu activation, and, I can do it sitting in my chair, with my feet on the ground, and no weights. Best of all, the animals love me too.
In a data mining context, an algorithm extracts, modifies or creates data from an existing data set.
Ultimately, everything is data.... a Turing machine doesn't know "algorithms"....it's a state machine and its all data to it. So, yeah, although we like to pretend that code and data are separate things, the very bedrock of theory that computer science sits on says that its all the same, and ultimately, when we choose a data driven architecture or an algorithmically heavy one, we're really just choosing where to make the investment of codifying information.
verb vs noun
both are just parts of a grammar, which, overall is just data. look at a very simple language for a text adventure game below. commas indic
noun -> (torch|gold|sword|goblin|door)
verb -> (take|drop|attack)
direction -> (north|south|east|west)
move -> go direction
action -> verb noun
S -> (move|action)
It's all data...we merely invent noun and verb to classify things. But we could just as easily have written
inventoriable -> torch|gold|sword
inventorying -> take|drop
inventory -> inventorying inventoriable
having no noun and verb at all in our language... in fact, we could theoretically write a text adventure engine with a grammar and a few primitives to run a state machine in the background that describes how things are related...it would be all data, essentially.
all I'm saying is, that, sometimes, to bring it back to a data mining context, it might make sense to think about the system as (data being mined + algorithm) as part of a larger soup of information and then assign to each depending on one's preferences... giving up that proven interchangability because it is presently good practice seems awful risky...
I mean, if we balloon up to 10,000 feet, the problem really is, where do you put the extra data? Do you encode it in an algorithm, or do you have less code but more dynamic data. Given that POV, then, it stands to reason the best place to put the extra data is outside of the code, so that it is easier and less costly to modify.
I personally think internet services are too important to be left to the market
This is backwards. If the service, regardless of what it is, was so important, don't you think that should be sufficient incentive for people to pay for it? If it wasn't important, then people wouldn't want it. So, maybe the government should only subsidize things that aren't important.
I said that judging normality of a biological process across a large number of subjects is problematic. This goes for internal chemical processes, nourishment, and other biological processes. It's not a justification, it's a statement of fact regarding biology and statistics.
Behaviors aren't purely biological, that's what I'm saying.
It just seems like we could be spending the same amount of money we spend on keeping this guy incarcerated until they kill him on programs to help educate and support severely mentally handicapped people. .. especially since they are unable to understand the consequences of their actions, which again, invalidates the primary argument for the existence of the death penalty.
He raped two people. He killed. It doesn't matter if he understands the consequences of his actions or not. The primary argument for the existence of the death penalty is to remove people that kill from existence. I mean, you argue as if the death penalty is something that should be argued in the positive to exist. I would counter that by arguing what value is it to keep these killers alive?
Right. It's only a part of the population that is hypersexual. I think that being at risk of getting your face bashed in by the person you're hitting on has got to have a profound psychological effect on these people.
All of that doesn't matter now with the proliferation of gay hookup web sites.
Remember Matthew Shepard? Did you see any of those websites with the counters counting how long he'd been in hell?
Matthew Sheppard didn't hit on someone and get punched in the face. He was brutally murdered because he was gay. If that crime had happened in Texas, both of his killers would be dead by now. Then Governor Bush would have signed the death warrant, no problem, and I think he would have been fully justified in doing so, just as he was fully justified in executing those two guys that dragged a black kid to death behind a truck.
Excess is also subjective in cases of things that are naturally a part of our biological process. So it makes it more confusing
I'm inclined to believe that "that which is natural" is the worst excuse for allowing a behavior, ever. It's a natural part of our biological process to destroy those humans that are not like us and to seek revenge on those who would hurt us. If we are going to live a life to do "what's natural", then we have to include killing people that kill the ones we love, driving out people in communities that we would disagree with, a natural tendency to form male dominated societies. Just look at ancient societies, pre-christianity. The Romans sold loads of people in slavery, the Israelites ethnically cleansed Israel... Alexander the Great burned Perseopolis to the ground, the Spartans savaged the Helots for hundreds of years, and so on. If we go back to doing what is natural, then, we are going to fall, mighty far, indeed. I certainly won't disagree that judeo christianity gave us the concept of a religious war, but, by the same token, it did bring us the notion that you had to fight wars for some sort of a cause other than plunder.
I mean, even if you think that Bush lied to invade Iraq and grab the oil with some byzantine plot involving halliburton and PSAs, you also have to concede that had to have a byzantine plot. Julius Caesar had absolutely no problem marching into Gaul, killing everyone that was there, bringing back a bunch of loot for the empire, and that was that. Caesar even -bragged- that he killed two million people. Were Bush the emperor in Roman times, he would be condemned for being too nice. Caesar would burn down all the mosques, crucify Moqtada Al Sadr, haul everyone in Tikrit off to slavery, make the tribal chieftans fight gladiator games, and quite a few others along the way, and would have the oil on its way to the USA by now....
Rich people don't have to evade taxes, they can afford to buy politicians to manipulate the tax code for their benefit.
The reason for the Byzantine complexity of the US tax code is that it is the result of nearly a century of politicians selling favors to contributors.
Well, not necessarily. There are some hair brained ideas for advancing "a better society". As much as Democrats stand in favor of supposedly progressive taxation, payroll taxes for social security where their idea, along with taxes on gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes in most northeastern states.