You forgot all the political skills part. Things like:
Managing Expectations: basically keeping the project stakeholders (those that have an interest in the project, such as future users) aware of the progress of it (instead of, for example, "disappearing" from the stakeholder's scope for 3 months while the project is being done); being upfront with possible problems and delays; being realistic about the ability to deliver certain features in a given time.
Knowing when to say Yes and knowing when to say No: often just being able to say "we can't do that within the time period requested". Better practitioners will do things like having the project goals split into features, get time estimates for each feature and then, if time is not available to implement all features ("in this version") have the client (can be an internal "client") of the project prioritize the features and be made aware of the impossibility of doing all of them "in this iteration" as they were defined.
People and connections: Knowing who your team/project is dependent upon, creating clear lines of communication between teams, making available clear points of contact in your own team ("this is the guy you speak to about the external interface of our system") increasing the visibility of your dependencies on less cooperative teams (if they're late everybody will know that they are causing the delays in the project)
There are a lot more things than this. Mostly boiling down to managing some or other facet of the project/team (managing team morale, managing knowledge dependencies, managing project progress, proactive crisis prevention, contingency planning, crisis management, controlling requirements changes, etc...)
Although some of the work in (low/mid level) management can be done with the same mental skills as used in software development (basically a lot of it is "process planning": which is not too dissimilar to designing program structures and flows) the main differences have to do with the need for people and social skills and experience to evaluate most of the inputs, components and influences of the process and with being aware an coping with a much higher level of uncertainty (software doesn't stop working because one of the classes was "unhappy with the kind of work I've been assigned" and decided to move to another company, people do).
The reason why most of us have very rarely been managed by good managers is that very few people actually have all of the habits and intellectual/logical skills for process planning; the flexibility to deal with high levels of uncertainty and recover when Unknown Unknowns hit your project; the people an social skills.
Instead manager styles usually fall into:
The Salesman: A People's Person - knows everybody, talks to everybody. Knows all the tricks in the book to cover his own ass. Can bullshit like the best. Couldn't plan his way out of a room but can build pretty MS Project graphics like the best.
The Fire-fighter: No process, no method. Does not have contingency planning and mostly reacts to events. Crisis are common and quick "solutions" are put in place to "fix it", said "solutions" often being the cause of the next crisis. Often changes his mind on something mid project as "new" requirements (which could have been found upfront with a little probing) appear
The Techie: Approaches project planning like software design. Thinks that things will be done just like he expects by just telling people to do it (and when he finds that is not the case, ends up micro-managing/doing-the-work-himself). Does not plan for contingencies or take in account uncertainties. Accepts the requests from the "client" like the gospel at any point in the project and just adds them to the project as he understood them (said understanding often not matching what the "client" actually needs). Takes upon himself most/all of the technical responsibilities in the project resulting in overwork and bad decisions.
I would reckon that something based on the Bittorrent protocol (or a subset of it) might be an exceptionally reliable way of, while running in the background, sending files from one machine to another one.
The protocol comes with built-in file splitting/recombination, block validation and you can get several GUIs (and I believe at least one command line implementation) for it. It might be a bit overkill though - pretty much everything in the protocol related to dealing with managing communications with multiple peers (most of the protocol really) is unlikely to be useful in your situation.
That said, your own private tracker listing one and only one peer all the time (the machine where the files are being read from) might be the only tricky bit you need to do to use any bittorrent implementation out there.
Hating Sony for their DRM and rootkits is dumb: one should use cold hard logic and look at the DRM and rootkit in the context of the wider corporate policy.
Application of cold hard logic to Sony's behavior shows that they turned from a company whose main drive was to create excellent products (once upon a time they were known for the exceptional quality of their products) into one whose main drive is to squeeze as much revenue as possible from their customers, often in deceitful ways such as sneaking into their products built-in limitations in such a way that people don't know about them until after they got those products. The DRM and the rootkit are just some of the most well known (around here) examples of that.
It's like as if you go buy to a hardware store and buy a "high-performance" hammer from a well known company which used to sell great product. The handle is improperly preserved wood and the head is low quality steel so it doesn't last more than a couple of months. You go and buy a specialist screwdriver from the same company and it turns out the tip is soft iron that looses it shape in a couple of months. With most companies, at this point most people would start thinking that their products are now crap, designed to fail in a couple of months so that you buy new ones. With Sony, it seems there are people which are still dazzled by their past performance (or maybe the complexity inherent to software-hardware mixes) and keep on ignoring the signs that what they do now is designed for restricted and time-limited functionality.
That said, I expect that this new Sony Game/Phone hybrid will come with interesting and exciting new ways for consumer lock in and Digital Right retrictions - all of which will be of course relegated to the really small print in their adverts and prospectus.
I work in an IP heavy profession - Software Engineering - and the funny part is that directly (and usually also indirectly) I make no money out of the IP of what I make: companies hire me and pay me to create and maintain software solutions to serve their specific needs.
I'm not even an employee: I'm a freelancer.
Like me, there are millions: the truth is, the vast majority of people employed in IT are not in any way whatsoever making their money directly or indirectly from IP.
I all my 12 years of professional experience, only for 1 years did I worked in a Software Products which would have problems without IP laws - even those had a product which was so complex to setup that they would be able to get away without IP laws.
The way I see it from my point of view IP only serves to create artificial barriers to entry and fatten up fat cats.
It should just work just like any other job: artists should get paid for the work they do (like a performance) once and that's it.
If a plumber comes over to install a new toilet at my place, he gets paid once, not every time anybody flushes it.
Why should I pay Paul McCartney when I get a copy of a Beatles track and then again if I give a copy to my mother and then yet again (to his descendants) when in (say) 20 years time I give a copy of a Beatles track to my grandson?
I don't see why the money I pay in taxes should be propping up a system where some people are by law privileged above all others.
It's highly likely that that non-paying players will have vastly inferior equipment than anybody that paid for "add-ons". To put things in perspective: non-paying players will be there as free cannon fodder for the entertainment of the paying ones.
EA has done this to paying costumers on previous versions of the Battlefield series: even before fixing all the worst bugs in the previous version of the game, they would put out game expansions which not only had new maps (perfectly fair) but also new and superior kit relative to what those without the expansion could use, said kit being available in the original maps (for those with the expansion) - thus meaning that if you wanted to keep on playing in a level playing field you had to buy each expansion.
That said, with a "free" game it's a perfectly valid strategy of them to do it as long as non-paying players are made aware of that. (although with EA, I suspect they will say nothing about it until they have enough buy-in from non-paying players, at which point they will start selling easy-pwnage add-ons).
For £150 you can buy a Nokia E51, SIM free (change network whenever you want) which supports VOIP over Wi-Fi.
That's £10 less AND all your calls will be a lot cheaper (VOIP prices are much less than mobile phone prices) when you're in range of your Wi-Fi router.
You can even configure your VOIP to forward calls to your mobile phone number when you're not in range.
wherein two or more carrier network identifiers associated with a common carrier network system are aggregated to generate a carrier network system identifier that is included in the user selectable list
so if you see multiple Starbucks SSIDS, you just display one on the list to pick from.
it would seem, therefore, that if you do not perform this step of aggregating the two or more network identifiers associated with a common network system, you've avoided this patent.
Group multiple entries as being equivalent and only displaying one. Who could ever have thought of that novel concept!!???
Now I'm really convinced that current IP laws do indeed promote the creation and dissemination of new ideas!
What surprises me here is the lack of mention of ARM.
An ultra-thin netbook type machine requires an ARM processor to have an half-way decent battery life (ultra-thin usually implies smaller batteries). A CPU that consumers 7W (such as the Atom) is using 6 Watts too many IMHO.
A highly motivated worker who will go on and on for 14 hours a day breaking stone with a hammer will still under-produce the not so motivated one which uses a jackhammer for 2h and lazies about for the rest of the day.
In Software Engineering, skill and experience are the jackhammer while the hammer stands for little skill and experience.
The truth is that motivation and hard-work alone do not make up for lack of skill and/or experience in intellectual pursuits.
The problem with the IT work outsourced to India is that nowadays: - The increase in numbers of IT "professionals" has been achieved by bringing into IT people which are not at all gifted for it. - The really good IT techies have been promoted to management because they are so much above the average and demand higher salaries.
I look at the highly-motivate and little experienced me of 12 years ago and I see how much work I did for how little results (even though I was one of the gifted types, so I produced 4x - 10x more results than the average). I can only begin to imagine how exceptionally unproductive somebody which is neither gifted (came into IT 'cause of the big salaries) nor experienced (doesn't stay in the technical side for long if any good) can be.
Actually the retn at the end means that it will return to the address that you just pushed into the stack, which is 1 more than the address it originally had.
If the version of assembly that you are using has variable length OP-codes (it looks suspiciously like x86 32 bit but I'm not sure though), incrementing the return address might result in that the retn will get your execution pointer to go to what was intended to be a parameter to be loaded into a register ( for example, if the op-code for the original return address was for "mov ax, 0056h", then assuming 16bit op-codes, your return will now cause the op-code 0056h to be executed - whatever it is).
Note that the ZX Spectrum ROM actually had places where this was done on purpose (they only had 16kB of ROM).
That said, it's been quite a while since I did ASM but I did know this already when I started working in IT.:)
Interestingly enough I've been getting the same experience dealing with some recent IT graduates doing internships where I work (I'm in the UK): they are surprisingly ignorant of some of the most basic concepts in Software Development.
I was thinking that maybe the problem was that because I was so far ahead in terms of professional experience and had an unusual background (I started coding on my ZX Spectrum, for fun, when I was 14) hence had too high expectations for an "average" recent graduate in IT.
Maybe it is an issue with the quality of some of the Software Engineering degrees out there...
My experience with working with remote resources in India has lead me to believe that over there what's happening is the same as what's happened in developed countries during the Internet boom:
There is a high demand for technology services (a significant slice of the IT work in at least the US and the UK is sent there + all the IT work that needs to be done in India) and a restricted supply of people (India might be a big country, but the number of people trained in IT is a tiny percentage).
Because of this, salaries are (compared to local salaries) very high and there is a lot of competition for people.
This has attracted to IT a large number of people which aren't any got at IT work and would never gone for it otherwise. The end results is that the small core of world class IT professionals is surrounded by vast masses of mediocre IT people.
On top of that the Peter Principle is hard at work: the really competent people are quickly promoted (they either get promoted internally or just leave for somewhere else where they get a promotion) and eventually end up in management where most of them don't really know what they're doing.
This exactly what was happening during the Internet boom - I was working in a consultancy at the time and remember that people were literally being picked up fresh from the University and put in projects for clients as "Senior Developers" and that (due to the way pay grades for techies were always below those for management) some of our best Software Engineers where quickly promoted to management, the vast majority of them turning out to be completely inept at managing people.
Certainly the picture that I see every day from the software developers I work with in Mumbai is that almost all of them are quite bad and the one that was any good got promoted to management where he is not that great.
Although free trade has increased the average wealth in developed societies (wealth measured not just in money but also in what you can get for that money) it has also increased wealth inequality (the second effect being much stronger than the first).
As you pointed out, there is a huge difference in prices between the same goods in the original (developing) country and in any destination developed country. The difference is mostly captured by companies and then passed on to CxOs and large shareholders (small shareholders usually get a pittance on account of their share being a tiny percentage of the total).
Basically this is because of two effects: - Job competition with foreign based/born workers (outsourcing) means that companies can (and do) pressure local workers to keep salaries low. - Intellectual Property laws create artificial barriers which are only enforced in developed markets, thus resulting in high-spreads in the cost of medicines, video and audio media and trademarked goods (all which are very IP-heavy).
A lot of the problem is that large companies have a disproportionate amount of influence with politicians and thus get laws passed for their benefit which usually negatively affect people and small up-and-coming companies (anti-circumvention laws, over-broad IP laws and other barrier to entry laws).
It's thanks to this regulatory capture by the industry that the wealth produced by Free Trade has been channeled mostly to a small number of people.
Although some defend that what's needed is more Free Trade, it's my opinion that what the kind of trade we have now is not Free and that until the political system and the laws are fixed to remove the undue influence of special interest groups, rules have to be put in place to restrict trade: the truth is that, things being as they are now, just like the positive aspects of free trade went into the pockets of a few, the negative impact of restricting trade would hit the pockets of that same few.
Free Trade must be built on a basis of true freedom of trading, not in the tightly controlled channels of wealth as we have now - the trade off should be clear: either the benefits are free to flow to all or voters will turn against the opening of borders which is a requirement of Free Trade.
The problem with any approaches that try to indoctrinate into people that copying is bad is that Intellectual Property is not a natural law. Think for a moment about the fact that if you tell somebody as joke which you heard on TV you are breaking somebody's copyright - how natural is it to not tell or even write down something your read or heard from others?
The truth is that we are by nature highly social animals. The sharing of and building upon the ideas of others is ingrained in our genes: it's what makes a community our of a bunch of individuals. A society's identity pretty much boils down to shared beliefs, behaviors and ideas - all things which we get from some and pass on to others.
Now bring into this picture things Copyright and Patents: these mean that you cannot freely shared ideas and build upon the ideas of others to make new ideas - in the extreme you're supposed to track who owns each and every idea you've ever heard of and read about and pay them every time your tell that idea to others.
Now consider that trying to justify things like Copyright quickly slides into vague and ill defined concepts like "encouraging" others to create.
Reducing the IP argument to the most basic concepts and it boils down to: we must track and pay for ideas in order to encourage people to have and share ideas.
This is as anti-intuitive as it gets.
At the end of the day, it's much more easy to make arguments which are anti-IP than pro-IP, especially since nowadays the most visible face of IP are rich artists (as soon as I read the article I came up with a counter advert in which people would be told that they must not whistle songs without paying the artists since they would be taking food away from the mouths of starving artists all the while showing images of wealthy artists enjoying their expensive cars, huge mansions and glamorous vacations in the Cote D'Azur)
My recollections of Usenet flamewars, MUD griefing and how much everybody bitched and moaned when AOL started letting their subscribers use the Internet does not match your description of an Idyllic past and us receiving the "common man" with open arms.
This raises the price of the good, which in turn, causes some people to stop buying that product. Because there are less purchasers, while the complexity driven capital cost remains the same, the unit cost goes up. So, more people drop off, and the cost goes further up. Eventually, the good cannot be produced at all.
That being the case, then there would still be sellers of the "lower" efficiency version of the product.
No product stops being sold because it's efficiency is increased - instead what happens is that a balance is achieved where a less then perfectly efficient product is sold at a price that people are willing to pay, even though the technology and know-how exists to make an even more efficient product which would however cost more than what people are willing to pay.
This a widely observable effect and related to the "law of diminishing returns".
Also in you efficiency versus complexity curve you need to take in account not just incremental improvements but also breakthroughs - not all increases in efficiency are driven by the slow accumulation of incremental improvements: significant increases in efficiency also happen when new knowledge/processes/technologies allow the removal of up to then insurmountably barriers, while often reducing complexity. For example, in the world of electronics, consider the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors.
... only it would work like this: - If you access BBC via another ISP you get your iPlayer content, no problem - If you access it via BT you are informed that to view iPlayer content you must pay the BT comission which is "demanded by BT, paid directly to BT and exclusive to BT" - you are then taken to a payment interface where you must provide your credit/debit card information. All money paid (minus charges from the credit card processor) goes directly to BT. BBC itself does not charge for the service (since it gets no money) and word will quickly spread that if you use BT then your have to pay BT for using iPlayer.
Give it a couple of years with this in place and BTs market share will be down to single digits.
Don't forget that BT is the incumbent telecoms operator in the UK - they were originally a state owned monopoly and got most of their infrastructure in place using taxpayers' money.
These are the same guys that were holding back broadband in the UK a couple of years (all the while broadband adoption in the rest of Europe was taking of like crazy) ago until laws were passed forcing them to allow other ISPs to use their lines. Even now, they will still make it extra hard to use ISPs other than themselves.
They currently censor their customers connection using the list from the Internet Watch Foundation (a state controlled quango) - the same guys that were blocking Wikipedia some months ago - and will voluntarily give contact data for an IP address to any "content owner" who asks for it.
These guys are not the good guys and they haven't been so for many years now.
For this generation, the Wii had the cool controller and the well priced console but the crappiest games (as somebody else pointed out, the Wii section in any games store looks like the kiddies area).
With the other console manufacturers moving towards a sensible stance in terms of price (clearly the Heads of Sony's and Microsoft's Console divisions where smoking something extra strong when they thought that doubling the price of their consoles for this generation would be a smart move) and now coming up with their own cool controller setups, there's a lot less going for the Wii than before: the other consoles already had on their side the fact that most of the games aimed at people other than 9-year-olds are for their consoles and now they will also have intuitive controllers while price is now less of an issue (since it has been coming down).
After gaming exclusively on my PC for many years I bought myself a Wii as my first console and ended up severely disappointed: - the controller is as or more intuitive than a mouse and the few games that use it well can be fun. - the price was acceptable. - however most of the games seem to be designed either for kids or retards: even the games from the most celebrated Nintendo series (of which I got both Zelda and Metroid Prime) are restrictive, repetitive and plain boring for anybody that has ever played that type of games in the PC. Going through the Wii shelves in any games store is an exercise in frustration (I get better games in the bargain bin in the PC section). The only two games I enjoyed in the Wii were WiiPlay (although it's incredibly short) and Resident Evil 3.
My recommendation is that, if you're buying a console for the kids, get a Wii. If you're buying it for yourself don't get a Wii.
Slashdot Mirror
The "British" brand has not been a mark of quality in Europe for anything but pop-music for at least 30 years.
(personally I blame it on shoddy management)
You forgot all the political skills part. Things like:
There are a lot more things than this. Mostly boiling down to managing some or other facet of the project/team (managing team morale, managing knowledge dependencies, managing project progress, proactive crisis prevention, contingency planning, crisis management, controlling requirements changes, etc ...)
Although some of the work in (low/mid level) management can be done with the same mental skills as used in software development (basically a lot of it is "process planning": which is not too dissimilar to designing program structures and flows) the main differences have to do with the need for people and social skills and experience to evaluate most of the inputs, components and influences of the process and with being aware an coping with a much higher level of uncertainty (software doesn't stop working because one of the classes was "unhappy with the kind of work I've been assigned" and decided to move to another company, people do).
The reason why most of us have very rarely been managed by good managers is that very few people actually have all of the habits and intellectual/logical skills for process planning; the flexibility to deal with high levels of uncertainty and recover when Unknown Unknowns hit your project; the people an social skills.
Instead manager styles usually fall into:
I would reckon that something based on the Bittorrent protocol (or a subset of it) might be an exceptionally reliable way of, while running in the background, sending files from one machine to another one.
The protocol comes with built-in file splitting/recombination, block validation and you can get several GUIs (and I believe at least one command line implementation) for it. It might be a bit overkill though - pretty much everything in the protocol related to dealing with managing communications with multiple peers (most of the protocol really) is unlikely to be useful in your situation.
That said, your own private tracker listing one and only one peer all the time (the machine where the files are being read from) might be the only tricky bit you need to do to use any bittorrent implementation out there.
Hating Sony for their DRM and rootkits is dumb: one should use cold hard logic and look at the DRM and rootkit in the context of the wider corporate policy.
Application of cold hard logic to Sony's behavior shows that they turned from a company whose main drive was to create excellent products (once upon a time they were known for the exceptional quality of their products) into one whose main drive is to squeeze as much revenue as possible from their customers, often in deceitful ways such as sneaking into their products built-in limitations in such a way that people don't know about them until after they got those products. The DRM and the rootkit are just some of the most well known (around here) examples of that.
It's like as if you go buy to a hardware store and buy a "high-performance" hammer from a well known company which used to sell great product. The handle is improperly preserved wood and the head is low quality steel so it doesn't last more than a couple of months. You go and buy a specialist screwdriver from the same company and it turns out the tip is soft iron that looses it shape in a couple of months. With most companies, at this point most people would start thinking that their products are now crap, designed to fail in a couple of months so that you buy new ones.
With Sony, it seems there are people which are still dazzled by their past performance (or maybe the complexity inherent to software-hardware mixes) and keep on ignoring the signs that what they do now is designed for restricted and time-limited functionality.
That said, I expect that this new Sony Game/Phone hybrid will come with interesting and exciting new ways for consumer lock in and Digital Right retrictions - all of which will be of course relegated to the really small print in their adverts and prospectus.
I work in an IP heavy profession - Software Engineering - and the funny part is that directly (and usually also indirectly) I make no money out of the IP of what I make: companies hire me and pay me to create and maintain software solutions to serve their specific needs.
I'm not even an employee: I'm a freelancer.
Like me, there are millions: the truth is, the vast majority of people employed in IT are not in any way whatsoever making their money directly or indirectly from IP.
I all my 12 years of professional experience, only for 1 years did I worked in a Software Products which would have problems without IP laws - even those had a product which was so complex to setup that they would be able to get away without IP laws.
The way I see it from my point of view IP only serves to create artificial barriers to entry and fatten up fat cats.
It should just work just like any other job: artists should get paid for the work they do (like a performance) once and that's it.
If a plumber comes over to install a new toilet at my place, he gets paid once, not every time anybody flushes it.
Why should I pay Paul McCartney when I get a copy of a Beatles track and then again if I give a copy to my mother and then yet again (to his descendants) when in (say) 20 years time I give a copy of a Beatles track to my grandson?
I don't see why the money I pay in taxes should be propping up a system where some people are by law privileged above all others.
The interesting part here is that Microsoft used a sock-puppet company for those statements.
Has MS come out and say it themselves it wouldn't be quite the news it is.
It's highly likely that that non-paying players will have vastly inferior equipment than anybody that paid for "add-ons". To put things in perspective: non-paying players will be there as free cannon fodder for the entertainment of the paying ones.
EA has done this to paying costumers on previous versions of the Battlefield series: even before fixing all the worst bugs in the previous version of the game, they would put out game expansions which not only had new maps (perfectly fair) but also new and superior kit relative to what those without the expansion could use, said kit being available in the original maps (for those with the expansion) - thus meaning that if you wanted to keep on playing in a level playing field you had to buy each expansion.
That said, with a "free" game it's a perfectly valid strategy of them to do it as long as non-paying players are made aware of that. (although with EA, I suspect they will say nothing about it until they have enough buy-in from non-paying players, at which point they will start selling easy-pwnage add-ons).
For £150 you can buy a Nokia E51, SIM free (change network whenever you want) which supports VOIP over Wi-Fi.
That's £10 less AND all your calls will be a lot cheaper (VOIP prices are much less than mobile phone prices) when you're in range of your Wi-Fi router.
You can even configure your VOIP to forward calls to your mobile phone number when you're not in range.
As if grammar nazis weren't bad enough, now we also have spelling nazis.
Group multiple entries as being equivalent and only displaying one. Who could ever have thought of that novel concept!!???
Now I'm really convinced that current IP laws do indeed promote the creation and dissemination of new ideas!
What surprises me here is the lack of mention of ARM.
An ultra-thin netbook type machine requires an ARM processor to have an half-way decent battery life (ultra-thin usually implies smaller batteries). A CPU that consumers 7W (such as the Atom) is using 6 Watts too many IMHO.
A highly motivated worker who will go on and on for 14 hours a day breaking stone with a hammer will still under-produce the not so motivated one which uses a jackhammer for 2h and lazies about for the rest of the day.
In Software Engineering, skill and experience are the jackhammer while the hammer stands for little skill and experience.
The truth is that motivation and hard-work alone do not make up for lack of skill and/or experience in intellectual pursuits.
The problem with the IT work outsourced to India is that nowadays:
- The increase in numbers of IT "professionals" has been achieved by bringing into IT people which are not at all gifted for it.
- The really good IT techies have been promoted to management because they are so much above the average and demand higher salaries.
I look at the highly-motivate and little experienced me of 12 years ago and I see how much work I did for how little results (even though I was one of the gifted types, so I produced 4x - 10x more results than the average). I can only begin to imagine how exceptionally unproductive somebody which is neither gifted (came into IT 'cause of the big salaries) nor experienced (doesn't stay in the technical side for long if any good) can be.
Actually the retn at the end means that it will return to the address that you just pushed into the stack, which is 1 more than the address it originally had.
If the version of assembly that you are using has variable length OP-codes (it looks suspiciously like x86 32 bit but I'm not sure though), incrementing the return address might result in that the retn will get your execution pointer to go to what was intended to be a parameter to be loaded into a register ( for example, if the op-code for the original return address was for "mov ax, 0056h", then assuming 16bit op-codes, your return will now cause the op-code 0056h to be executed - whatever it is).
Note that the ZX Spectrum ROM actually had places where this was done on purpose (they only had 16kB of ROM).
That said, it's been quite a while since I did ASM but I did know this already when I started working in IT. :)
Interestingly enough I've been getting the same experience dealing with some recent IT graduates doing internships where I work (I'm in the UK): they are surprisingly ignorant of some of the most basic concepts in Software Development.
I was thinking that maybe the problem was that because I was so far ahead in terms of professional experience and had an unusual background (I started coding on my ZX Spectrum, for fun, when I was 14) hence had too high expectations for an "average" recent graduate in IT.
Maybe it is an issue with the quality of some of the Software Engineering degrees out there ...
My experience with working with remote resources in India has lead me to believe that over there what's happening is the same as what's happened in developed countries during the Internet boom:
This exactly what was happening during the Internet boom - I was working in a consultancy at the time and remember that people were literally being picked up fresh from the University and put in projects for clients as "Senior Developers" and that (due to the way pay grades for techies were always below those for management) some of our best Software Engineers where quickly promoted to management, the vast majority of them turning out to be completely inept at managing people.
Certainly the picture that I see every day from the software developers I work with in Mumbai is that almost all of them are quite bad and the one that was any good got promoted to management where he is not that great.
Although free trade has increased the average wealth in developed societies (wealth measured not just in money but also in what you can get for that money) it has also increased wealth inequality (the second effect being much stronger than the first).
As you pointed out, there is a huge difference in prices between the same goods in the original (developing) country and in any destination developed country. The difference is mostly captured by companies and then passed on to CxOs and large shareholders (small shareholders usually get a pittance on account of their share being a tiny percentage of the total).
Basically this is because of two effects:
- Job competition with foreign based/born workers (outsourcing) means that companies can (and do) pressure local workers to keep salaries low.
- Intellectual Property laws create artificial barriers which are only enforced in developed markets, thus resulting in high-spreads in the cost of medicines, video and audio media and trademarked goods (all which are very IP-heavy).
A lot of the problem is that large companies have a disproportionate amount of influence with politicians and thus get laws passed for their benefit which usually negatively affect people and small up-and-coming companies (anti-circumvention laws, over-broad IP laws and other barrier to entry laws).
It's thanks to this regulatory capture by the industry that the wealth produced by Free Trade has been channeled mostly to a small number of people.
Although some defend that what's needed is more Free Trade, it's my opinion that what the kind of trade we have now is not Free and that until the political system and the laws are fixed to remove the undue influence of special interest groups, rules have to be put in place to restrict trade: the truth is that, things being as they are now, just like the positive aspects of free trade went into the pockets of a few, the negative impact of restricting trade would hit the pockets of that same few.
Free Trade must be built on a basis of true freedom of trading, not in the tightly controlled channels of wealth as we have now - the trade off should be clear: either the benefits are free to flow to all or voters will turn against the opening of borders which is a requirement of Free Trade.
That would match the description that the Guardian is slightly to the left since the current Labour Party is center right.
The problem with any approaches that try to indoctrinate into people that copying is bad is that Intellectual Property is not a natural law. Think for a moment about the fact that if you tell somebody as joke which you heard on TV you are breaking somebody's copyright - how natural is it to not tell or even write down something your read or heard from others?
The truth is that we are by nature highly social animals. The sharing of and building upon the ideas of others is ingrained in our genes: it's what makes a community our of a bunch of individuals. A society's identity pretty much boils down to shared beliefs, behaviors and ideas - all things which we get from some and pass on to others.
Now bring into this picture things Copyright and Patents: these mean that you cannot freely shared ideas and build upon the ideas of others to make new ideas - in the extreme you're supposed to track who owns each and every idea you've ever heard of and read about and pay them every time your tell that idea to others.
Now consider that trying to justify things like Copyright quickly slides into vague and ill defined concepts like "encouraging" others to create.
Reducing the IP argument to the most basic concepts and it boils down to: we must track and pay for ideas in order to encourage people to have and share ideas.
This is as anti-intuitive as it gets.
At the end of the day, it's much more easy to make arguments which are anti-IP than pro-IP, especially since nowadays the most visible face of IP are rich artists (as soon as I read the article I came up with a counter advert in which people would be told that they must not whistle songs without paying the artists since they would be taking food away from the mouths of starving artists all the while showing images of wealthy artists enjoying their expensive cars, huge mansions and glamorous vacations in the Cote D'Azur)
iPhone-only game producer says iPhone is a great games platform (and asks for VC capital???)
Can we please have a separate category in /. for iPhone articles: I'd really like a way to filter out the dross from the iPhone-cultist crowd.
My recollections of Usenet flamewars, MUD griefing and how much everybody bitched and moaned when AOL started letting their subscribers use the Internet does not match your description of an Idyllic past and us receiving the "common man" with open arms.
That being the case, then there would still be sellers of the "lower" efficiency version of the product.
No product stops being sold because it's efficiency is increased - instead what happens is that a balance is achieved where a less then perfectly efficient product is sold at a price that people are willing to pay, even though the technology and know-how exists to make an even more efficient product which would however cost more than what people are willing to pay.
This a widely observable effect and related to the "law of diminishing returns".
Also in you efficiency versus complexity curve you need to take in account not just incremental improvements but also breakthroughs - not all increases in efficiency are driven by the slow accumulation of incremental improvements: significant increases in efficiency also happen when new knowledge/processes/technologies allow the removal of up to then insurmountably barriers, while often reducing complexity. For example, in the world of electronics, consider the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors.
Actually BBC should go ahead and pay BT ...
- If you access BBC via another ISP you get your iPlayer content, no problem
- If you access it via BT you are informed that to view iPlayer content you must pay the BT comission which is "demanded by BT, paid directly to BT and exclusive to BT" - you are then taken to a payment interface where you must provide your credit/debit card information. All money paid (minus charges from the credit card processor) goes directly to BT. BBC itself does not charge for the service (since it gets no money) and word will quickly spread that if you use BT then your have to pay BT for using iPlayer.
Give it a couple of years with this in place and BTs market share will be down to single digits.
Don't forget that BT is the incumbent telecoms operator in the UK - they were originally a state owned monopoly and got most of their infrastructure in place using taxpayers' money.
These are the same guys that were holding back broadband in the UK a couple of years (all the while broadband adoption in the rest of Europe was taking of like crazy) ago until laws were passed forcing them to allow other ISPs to use their lines. Even now, they will still make it extra hard to use ISPs other than themselves.
They currently censor their customers connection using the list from the Internet Watch Foundation (a state controlled quango) - the same guys that were blocking Wikipedia some months ago - and will voluntarily give contact data for an IP address to any "content owner" who asks for it.
These guys are not the good guys and they haven't been so for many years now.
For this generation, the Wii had the cool controller and the well priced console but the crappiest games (as somebody else pointed out, the Wii section in any games store looks like the kiddies area).
With the other console manufacturers moving towards a sensible stance in terms of price (clearly the Heads of Sony's and Microsoft's Console divisions where smoking something extra strong when they thought that doubling the price of their consoles for this generation would be a smart move) and now coming up with their own cool controller setups, there's a lot less going for the Wii than before: the other consoles already had on their side the fact that most of the games aimed at people other than 9-year-olds are for their consoles and now they will also have intuitive controllers while price is now less of an issue (since it has been coming down).
After gaming exclusively on my PC for many years I bought myself a Wii as my first console and ended up severely disappointed:
- the controller is as or more intuitive than a mouse and the few games that use it well can be fun.
- the price was acceptable.
- however most of the games seem to be designed either for kids or retards: even the games from the most celebrated Nintendo series (of which I got both Zelda and Metroid Prime) are restrictive, repetitive and plain boring for anybody that has ever played that type of games in the PC. Going through the Wii shelves in any games store is an exercise in frustration (I get better games in the bargain bin in the PC section). The only two games I enjoyed in the Wii were WiiPlay (although it's incredibly short) and Resident Evil 3.
My recommendation is that, if you're buying a console for the kids, get a Wii. If you're buying it for yourself don't get a Wii.