Economics is not a zero-sum game. Everybody who talks like it is needs to reinvestigate the matter, because such discussions are basically pointless ramblings with no connection to reality.
Point taken. I'm not well-versed in economics, as you can clearly see. But I think that there is at least some truth in my rambling.
Personally, I'm more concerned with acquiring a new skill-set so I'll be ready when the pink slips start flying around where I work.
Just wait. Our tax system can not survive a large influx of people who pay next to no taxes and most of the new jobs in the US don't pay enought to require those working at them to pay federal income tax. Something will have to change
Exactly, along with the simple notion that IBM's American dollars are fueling the Indian economy instead of our own. You can't pour water out of one glass into another without the water level in the first glass going down quite a bit.
Proponents of offshoring claim that it will help to create jobs, but they fail to mention exactly what kinds of jobs will be created. The US doesn't produce anything anymore. Even retail and service providers are being swallowed up by large franchises. It's not just software people getting offshored. It's anything that doesn't require actual physical presence here in the US. It's getting harder and harder to find a line of work that *won't* be offshored, but it's in my best interest to start looking now.
Back to my original point... offshoring is opening up all the valves, and American resources are now spreading to fill a much larger container. A considerable bulge in the pipes is sitting in India right now, but it's just a matter of time before India gets too demanding and the US looks elsewhere. Globalization will raise quality of life for developing countries, and lower quality of life in first-world countries. As long as the economic standards are different in each country (e.g., middle class == $10k/year), this will continue to be the case. It's as if you have thousands of people winning the same lottery and each person ends up only getting a couple grand. Resources will spread themselves out so thinly that it might require a redefinition of the monetary system itself if we don't want to live in poverty.
I don't really know where I was going in all this:-) All I know is, the world is changing. Maybe I'll just become a hermit, buy me a couple of llamas and go live in the mountains. Technology is overrated anyway...
That's something I suppose I should have been able to figure out. I guess I'm getting rusty in my old age:) Or maybe I just need to read the fscking manual...
I use Gentoo also but I must admit that doing "emerge -u world" scares the crap out of me. I'm always scared to mess up my system. But I've been lucky so far.
I can certainly relate, but so far, I haven't had any emerge world trouble on any of the Gentoo machines I've set up. Occasionally it'll fail and you'll have to wait for another portage tree to fix the problem, or you've got to go in and tweak something, but I've found the online message board to be extremely helpful in troubleshooting things like that.
I'm more worried when I have to go and merge in all of those configuration files. I tend to worry that I'm going to overwrite my nicely-configured config files with the bland default ones. That happened to my fstab once. It was painful. But I'm a better man for it now, and I know to be a bit more careful.
Let's say I update my portage tree, and then I want to upgrade a package, like GAIM, for instance. GAIM's dependencies are GTK and a bunch of other stuff. When I try to upgrade my version of GAIM and there happens to be a better version of GTK available, Portage will upgrade GTK first, regardless of whether you actually need the very latest GTK to run GAIM. I'd rather see Portage know what the minimum version a dependency has to be in order to get a program running. As far as I know, it'll just upgrade everything in the dep tree.
Unless I'm mistaken, at least. I've been using Gentoo for a while now, and for the most part I just do a "emerge -u world", which takes care of me pretty nicely. It just takes a while.
1. How's it feel being detested by most of an entire industry back in the US of A (with the exception of the bean counters) ?
I'm a developer in the US, and I still have my job, but I'm having a hard time finding a software job in the geographic area where I want to move. But I don't detest the Indian people, nor do I feel that they've "stolen a job" from me. They're people like us. They want to make a living, they want to provide for themselves and their families, they want what most of us want. Jobs are available, and they're taking them. It's not like they're gathering together in some secret clubhouse buried under a cavern in the Himalayas and plotting how to make Americans' lives miserable. The reason this is happening is because of globalization, and personally, I still haven't decided if I think it's a good thing or not. I'm not going to have the knee-jerk reaction of "Of course it's bad", because the fact is, monetarily speaking, one of me is worth about four top-notch Indian developers. At the same time, though, enrollment in CS and engineering in US schools is plummeting, with the exception of foreign students. Globalization is great until relations break down between us and the country where our talent pool lives.
So speaking as an American programmer whose current livelihood is threatened by globalization, I can say that I hold no grudge against India, Russia, China, or any other country whose citizens are no less human than I am, and whose governments have the same capacity for corruption as my own. My job is marginally safer, since I work for a defense contractor. But it's just a matter of time before my job goes away too, and I'm willing to change careers if I have to. Sure, I could rail against India and American CEOs and bean counters, but that won't put food on my table.
This point has already been mentioned a bit by previous articles, but I'd like to hear an insider's take on it. The Indian tech economy is booming now, but like in the US, it's an unstable boom. Sooner or later, the US will look to other countries for their tech work, leaving India high and dry. What measures are being taken in India to maintain a strong internal tech economy, in the event that the US is no longer a serious customer?
Attention Martians: If you see a gentleman in a suit with a texas accent, and slightly funny ears, landing, be sure to send him back - he wants your oil!
Either that, or he's Ross Perot, in which case he'll try to become your leader. If that happens, don't bother sending him back. You can keep him.
And doesn't the first description of Ford say ginger hair? Not to be racist, but you don't see many black people with naturally ginger hair. Well done on the casting there, way to do exactly not a good job.
Well, I imagine you have to take certain acceptable liberties when casting and all. I'll gladly accept a black, non-ginger-haired Ford Prefect if they can actually get Trillian right this time. That was one of my biggest gripes about the BBC series. Not only did they get Trillian's look completely wrong, which is somewhat forgivable, they also completely rewrote her character to turn her into a mindless bimbo who repeated the computer.
Besides, who says Mos Def can't simply dye his hair to match the character description? According to the story, he's masquerading as an out-of-work actor, and the resulting look would certainly be appropriate for such a person.
I'm already afraid of what the movie is going to do overall to wreck my image of the book. I suppose we'll have to just sit back and wait.
I'm a programmer, but not a GUI developer, so my knowledge of such things is limited. I've used Qt applications, and I've used GTK applications. Personally, I like GTK2, but that's mainly on an aesthetic level, rather than a functional or development level.
I ask anyone who's developed in either/both of GTK/Qt, and even those with Win32 experience. What advantages does Qt have over the other choices?
Bonus points: Tell me how a NASA rocket had its dimensions determined by the standard width of horse back-ends. Hint: The horses were Roman.
I've heard this one before:) The horse rumps determined the distance between the wheels on Roman chariots so that a chariot could fit two horses side-by-side. When driving on roads built throughout the Roman empire, over time the wheels on these chariots would create ruts that were 144 cm apart, the distance between the wheels on the chariots, determined by the width of a horse's rump.
So when new wagons and carriages were built, they were built so the wheels fit into the pre-existing ruts in the roads, and so the tools were designed to build wagons with wheels 144 cm apart, the distance between the ruts, the distance between the wheels on the chariots, determined by the width of a horse's rump.
So then when tramways and railroads were built, they were built using many of the same tools used to build wagons, so again, the tracks were built at a gauge of 143.5 cm, based on the 144 cm distance between wagon wheels. The same tools were used by the British workers who designed and built the railroads in the United States. As a result, railroad tunnels were built only slightly wider than 143.5 cm.
When NASA designed its booster rockets for the Space Shuttle, they had to be transported by train from the factory to Florida, and would therefore need to fit in the railroad tunnels. So the rockets had to be built no wider than 143.5 cm, which was based on the railroad gauge, determined by the distance between old European wagon wheels, determined by the ruts in the road, determined by Roman chariots, determined by the width of a horse's rump.
I realized later that "bam" was a bit trendy for/., but by then it was too late. I can only hope to not be modded "Troll" for impersonating a well-known chef.
Someone told me once that most technologies that have become successful are those technologies that assist in the dissemination of porn and/or voyeurism. Thinking about it, that's very true. Radio gave way quickly to television, which gave way to cable, and BAM! You get porn. Radio also gave way to the telephone, which gave way to party lines, and BAM! Advances in optics have brought us photography (BAM!), telescopes (BAM!), and eyeglasses (the... the porn is so CLEAR now!), to name a few. Look at the primary achievement of the 90s. The commercialization of the Internet. That's essentially a porn revolution!
So porn is being used to break encryption. Personally, I feel there can be no other way. Porn will lead us to the greatest achievements of our day, and conversely, all roads lead to porn.
It's our past, our present, and our future. Embrace it, or be left behind.
The worst part of this is that they are probably planning to replace it with another pathetic "reality" show.
"Trektation Island"...
We're going to put the producers of ST:Enterprise on a remote island where they'll be faced with the ultimate test. If they want, they can hire a bunch of legitimate science fiction authors to devise interesting and complex story arcs. But how will that affect ratings? It's a gamble. And what the producers don't know is that we've loaded the island with all the old Star Trek scripts from the past thirty years! All they'd have to do is change the characters, and they can make a quick buck. To put an even bigger twist on it, we've also got two dozen swimsuit models who'll all be eye-candy aliens for Season 4!
Will Berman & Braga sell their souls? You'll have to see it to believe it! Watch "Trektation Island", coming this fall on FOX.
True "pop up ads" only occur when you enter a site, or leave a site, and shouldn't just pop up spontaneously whenever the computer is on, regardless of whether or not you are on the inet.
Not necessarily. Sometimes if you mistype a website name, it'll go to one of those "Domain Hosting 4 Cheep" sites that'll spawn a windowless IE session. That IE process then spurts out a new popup ad every couple minutes or so unless you right-click on it and select "Close".
Personally, I'm a Mozilla Firebird fanboy. Small, fast, slick, everything I need. Well, almost.
Doubleclick is attempting to evade the pop-up blockers? See, this is something that's always boggled my mind. People are using popup blockers because they don't want to receive popups. As such, they respond in a hostile manner to popup ads, and may more than likely be dissuaded from using any product advertised in such a fashion. The consumer, by using a blocker, is making a statement that they do not want to be advertised to in this way, that they find it intrusive, and that they will not respond to this form of advertising positively.
What makes these companies think that finding means to actively go against consumers' wishes will be an effective way to earn their business? It's like the do-not-call registry. If I opt to be put on the do-not-call list, that means I have no intention of buying anything from a telemarketer. As such, the companies are not losing any of my business because I was never going to give them my business in the first place. If anything, they're saving money by not having to waste the 15 seconds it takes to call me and find out I'm not interested.
This is old business with a new timecard. Some businesses (people, really) watch the one- and two-minute differences with no forgiveness.
I work for a major defense contractor, and we've had a badge-in/badge-out system for years now. Every morning you gotta put your badge up to a scanner, the computer checks your badge ID, logs the time, and the turnstile lets you in. Of course, I usually pray that something goes wrong and it doesn't let me in so that I can go home and take a nap, but so far that hasn't happened. This is hardly surprising, though, in a company where security and protecting classified information is a priority. Still, it does vaguely feel like prison from time to time, especially with all the barbed wire surrounding the place.
what the "banned episode" is about? too lazy to google;-)
It's called "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein", and it's about Peter getting into financial trouble and making a wish for a Jew to come save him, because he thinks all Jewish people are financial geniuses. I thought it was relatively tame compared to some of the other things they've done, particularly the "Special People's Games" episode. In any case, the episode is available on DVD Volume 2, and it's a joy to watch.
I don't know, I find the latest versions of KDE and Gnome to be quite nice to use, and very pleasing to the eye. Granted, their actual functionality is very close to that of Windows, but as a standard desktop environment is concerned, KDE/Gnome are pretty nice. Of course, if you're talking about revolutionizing the Windows, Icons, Mouse, and Pointer model of desktop use, that's another story. I'm all for using a gesture-based system like in Minority Report, myself...
B.) How is this different from the GameCube, XBOX, PS 1&2, GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, Dreamcast (sorta), Saturn, Nintendo 64, 32X, Genesis, SNES, NES, Jaguar, Atari 2600/5200/7800, or Master System? I got news for ya, they were all proprietary, they all had protection schemes, and none of them allowed for you to make backups.
An impressive list, to be sure. I believe the only missing entry is the TurboGrafx 16, the 8-bit machine with 16-bit graphics, giving us such classics as Bonk, and... um... yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
Economics is not a zero-sum game. Everybody who talks like it is needs to reinvestigate the matter, because such discussions are basically pointless ramblings with no connection to reality.
Point taken. I'm not well-versed in economics, as you can clearly see. But I think that there is at least some truth in my rambling.
Personally, I'm more concerned with acquiring a new skill-set so I'll be ready when the pink slips start flying around where I work.
---
Just wait. Our tax system can not survive a large influx of people who pay next to no taxes and most of the new jobs in the US don't pay enought to require those working at them to pay federal income tax. Something will have to change
:-) All I know is, the world is changing. Maybe I'll just become a hermit, buy me a couple of llamas and go live in the mountains. Technology is overrated anyway...
Exactly, along with the simple notion that IBM's American dollars are fueling the Indian economy instead of our own. You can't pour water out of one glass into another without the water level in the first glass going down quite a bit.
Proponents of offshoring claim that it will help to create jobs, but they fail to mention exactly what kinds of jobs will be created. The US doesn't produce anything anymore. Even retail and service providers are being swallowed up by large franchises. It's not just software people getting offshored. It's anything that doesn't require actual physical presence here in the US. It's getting harder and harder to find a line of work that *won't* be offshored, but it's in my best interest to start looking now.
Back to my original point... offshoring is opening up all the valves, and American resources are now spreading to fill a much larger container. A considerable bulge in the pipes is sitting in India right now, but it's just a matter of time before India gets too demanding and the US looks elsewhere. Globalization will raise quality of life for developing countries, and lower quality of life in first-world countries. As long as the economic standards are different in each country (e.g., middle class == $10k/year), this will continue to be the case. It's as if you have thousands of people winning the same lottery and each person ends up only getting a couple grand. Resources will spread themselves out so thinly that it might require a redefinition of the monetary system itself if we don't want to live in poverty.
I don't really know where I was going in all this
---
Thanks!
:) Or maybe I just need to read the fscking manual...
That's something I suppose I should have been able to figure out. I guess I'm getting rusty in my old age
---
I use Gentoo also but I must admit that doing "emerge -u world" scares the crap out of me. I'm always scared to mess up my system. But I've been lucky so far.
I can certainly relate, but so far, I haven't had any emerge world trouble on any of the Gentoo machines I've set up. Occasionally it'll fail and you'll have to wait for another portage tree to fix the problem, or you've got to go in and tweak something, but I've found the online message board to be extremely helpful in troubleshooting things like that.
I'm more worried when I have to go and merge in all of those configuration files. I tend to worry that I'm going to overwrite my nicely-configured config files with the bland default ones. That happened to my fstab once. It was painful. But I'm a better man for it now, and I know to be a bit more careful.
---
My main recommendation for Gentoo...
Let's say I update my portage tree, and then I want to upgrade a package, like GAIM, for instance. GAIM's dependencies are GTK and a bunch of other stuff. When I try to upgrade my version of GAIM and there happens to be a better version of GTK available, Portage will upgrade GTK first, regardless of whether you actually need the very latest GTK to run GAIM. I'd rather see Portage know what the minimum version a dependency has to be in order to get a program running. As far as I know, it'll just upgrade everything in the dep tree.
Unless I'm mistaken, at least. I've been using Gentoo for a while now, and for the most part I just do a "emerge -u world", which takes care of me pretty nicely. It just takes a while.
---
I'm assuming this is not a serious post...
1. How's it feel being detested by most of an entire industry back in the US of A (with the exception of the bean counters) ?
I'm a developer in the US, and I still have my job, but I'm having a hard time finding a software job in the geographic area where I want to move. But I don't detest the Indian people, nor do I feel that they've "stolen a job" from me. They're people like us. They want to make a living, they want to provide for themselves and their families, they want what most of us want. Jobs are available, and they're taking them. It's not like they're gathering together in some secret clubhouse buried under a cavern in the Himalayas and plotting how to make Americans' lives miserable. The reason this is happening is because of globalization, and personally, I still haven't decided if I think it's a good thing or not. I'm not going to have the knee-jerk reaction of "Of course it's bad", because the fact is, monetarily speaking, one of me is worth about four top-notch Indian developers. At the same time, though, enrollment in CS and engineering in US schools is plummeting, with the exception of foreign students. Globalization is great until relations break down between us and the country where our talent pool lives.
So speaking as an American programmer whose current livelihood is threatened by globalization, I can say that I hold no grudge against India, Russia, China, or any other country whose citizens are no less human than I am, and whose governments have the same capacity for corruption as my own. My job is marginally safer, since I work for a defense contractor. But it's just a matter of time before my job goes away too, and I'm willing to change careers if I have to. Sure, I could rail against India and American CEOs and bean counters, but that won't put food on my table.
---
This point has already been mentioned a bit by previous articles, but I'd like to hear an insider's take on it. The Indian tech economy is booming now, but like in the US, it's an unstable boom. Sooner or later, the US will look to other countries for their tech work, leaving India high and dry. What measures are being taken in India to maintain a strong internal tech economy, in the event that the US is no longer a serious customer?
---
How appropriate. They've ended up putting a rabbit in charge of guarding the carrot patch...
---
Attention Martians: If you see a gentleman in a suit with a texas accent, and slightly funny ears, landing, be sure to send him back - he wants your oil!
Either that, or he's Ross Perot, in which case he'll try to become your leader. If that happens, don't bother sending him back. You can keep him.
---
And doesn't the first description of Ford say ginger hair? Not to be racist, but you don't see many black people with naturally ginger hair. Well done on the casting there, way to do exactly not a good job.
Well, I imagine you have to take certain acceptable liberties when casting and all. I'll gladly accept a black, non-ginger-haired Ford Prefect if they can actually get Trillian right this time. That was one of my biggest gripes about the BBC series. Not only did they get Trillian's look completely wrong, which is somewhat forgivable, they also completely rewrote her character to turn her into a mindless bimbo who repeated the computer.
Besides, who says Mos Def can't simply dye his hair to match the character description? According to the story, he's masquerading as an out-of-work actor, and the resulting look would certainly be appropriate for such a person.
I'm already afraid of what the movie is going to do overall to wreck my image of the book. I suppose we'll have to just sit back and wait.
---
I'm a programmer, but not a GUI developer, so my knowledge of such things is limited. I've used Qt applications, and I've used GTK applications. Personally, I like GTK2, but that's mainly on an aesthetic level, rather than a functional or development level.
I ask anyone who's developed in either/both of GTK/Qt, and even those with Win32 experience. What advantages does Qt have over the other choices?
---
Bonus points: Tell me how a NASA rocket had its dimensions determined by the standard width of horse back-ends. Hint: The horses were Roman.
:) The horse rumps determined the distance between the wheels on Roman chariots so that a chariot could fit two horses side-by-side. When driving on roads built throughout the Roman empire, over time the wheels on these chariots would create ruts that were 144 cm apart, the distance between the wheels on the chariots, determined by the width of a horse's rump.
I've heard this one before
So when new wagons and carriages were built, they were built so the wheels fit into the pre-existing ruts in the roads, and so the tools were designed to build wagons with wheels 144 cm apart, the distance between the ruts, the distance between the wheels on the chariots, determined by the width of a horse's rump.
So then when tramways and railroads were built, they were built using many of the same tools used to build wagons, so again, the tracks were built at a gauge of 143.5 cm, based on the 144 cm distance between wagon wheels. The same tools were used by the British workers who designed and built the railroads in the United States. As a result, railroad tunnels were built only slightly wider than 143.5 cm.
When NASA designed its booster rockets for the Space Shuttle, they had to be transported by train from the factory to Florida, and would therefore need to fit in the railroad tunnels. So the rockets had to be built no wider than 143.5 cm, which was based on the railroad gauge, determined by the distance between old European wagon wheels, determined by the ruts in the road, determined by Roman chariots, determined by the width of a horse's rump.
---
Yeah, yeah...
/., but by then it was too late. I can only hope to not be modded "Troll" for impersonating a well-known chef.
I realized later that "bam" was a bit trendy for
Someone told me once that most technologies that have become successful are those technologies that assist in the dissemination of porn and/or voyeurism. Thinking about it, that's very true. Radio gave way quickly to television, which gave way to cable, and BAM! You get porn. Radio also gave way to the telephone, which gave way to party lines, and BAM! Advances in optics have brought us photography (BAM!), telescopes (BAM!), and eyeglasses (the... the porn is so CLEAR now!), to name a few. Look at the primary achievement of the 90s. The commercialization of the Internet. That's essentially a porn revolution!
So porn is being used to break encryption. Personally, I feel there can be no other way. Porn will lead us to the greatest achievements of our day, and conversely, all roads lead to porn.
It's our past, our present, and our future. Embrace it, or be left behind.
Don't forget the vast deposits of marzipan on Io.
Not to mention evidence of Strong Sad and The Cheat living under the ice on Europa...
The worst part of this is that they are probably planning to replace it with another pathetic "reality" show.
"Trektation Island"...
We're going to put the producers of ST:Enterprise on a remote island where they'll be faced with the ultimate test. If they want, they can hire a bunch of legitimate science fiction authors to devise interesting and complex story arcs. But how will that affect ratings? It's a gamble. And what the producers don't know is that we've loaded the island with all the old Star Trek scripts from the past thirty years! All they'd have to do is change the characters, and they can make a quick buck. To put an even bigger twist on it, we've also got two dozen swimsuit models who'll all be eye-candy aliens for Season 4!
Will Berman & Braga sell their souls? You'll have to see it to believe it! Watch "Trektation Island", coming this fall on FOX.
They're not after the geek who installs his own spam filter, they're after ISP customers and corporate desktop users.
Good point. Still, it's the geek with his own spam filter that still gets screwed over.
True "pop up ads" only occur when you enter a site, or leave a site, and shouldn't just pop up spontaneously whenever the computer is on, regardless of whether or not you are on the inet.
Not necessarily. Sometimes if you mistype a website name, it'll go to one of those "Domain Hosting 4 Cheep" sites that'll spawn a windowless IE session. That IE process then spurts out a new popup ad every couple minutes or so unless you right-click on it and select "Close".
Personally, I'm a Mozilla Firebird fanboy. Small, fast, slick, everything I need. Well, almost.
Doubleclick is attempting to evade the pop-up blockers? See, this is something that's always boggled my mind. People are using popup blockers because they don't want to receive popups. As such, they respond in a hostile manner to popup ads, and may more than likely be dissuaded from using any product advertised in such a fashion. The consumer, by using a blocker, is making a statement that they do not want to be advertised to in this way, that they find it intrusive, and that they will not respond to this form of advertising positively.
What makes these companies think that finding means to actively go against consumers' wishes will be an effective way to earn their business? It's like the do-not-call registry. If I opt to be put on the do-not-call list, that means I have no intention of buying anything from a telemarketer. As such, the companies are not losing any of my business because I was never going to give them my business in the first place. If anything, they're saving money by not having to waste the 15 seconds it takes to call me and find out I'm not interested.
Common sense, people...
This is old business with a new timecard. Some businesses (people, really) watch the one- and two-minute differences with no forgiveness.
I work for a major defense contractor, and we've had a badge-in/badge-out system for years now. Every morning you gotta put your badge up to a scanner, the computer checks your badge ID, logs the time, and the turnstile lets you in. Of course, I usually pray that something goes wrong and it doesn't let me in so that I can go home and take a nap, but so far that hasn't happened. This is hardly surprising, though, in a company where security and protecting classified information is a priority. Still, it does vaguely feel like prison from time to time, especially with all the barbed wire surrounding the place.
I'd say the Family Guy fanbase consists of enough of a geek demographic as to make it worth mentioning.
what the "banned episode" is about? too lazy to google ;-)
It's called "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein", and it's about Peter getting into financial trouble and making a wish for a Jew to come save him, because he thinks all Jewish people are financial geniuses. I thought it was relatively tame compared to some of the other things they've done, particularly the "Special People's Games" episode. In any case, the episode is available on DVD Volume 2, and it's a joy to watch.
---
I can't remember who the preferred choices for Marvin and Trillian were, but I'm sure you can dig for it somewhere.
Well, I don't know what DNA's preferences for these characters were, but here are my own choices...
Marvin: Steve Wright
Trillian: Famke Janssen
I don't know, I find the latest versions of KDE and Gnome to be quite nice to use, and very pleasing to the eye. Granted, their actual functionality is very close to that of Windows, but as a standard desktop environment is concerned, KDE/Gnome are pretty nice. Of course, if you're talking about revolutionizing the Windows, Icons, Mouse, and Pointer model of desktop use, that's another story. I'm all for using a gesture-based system like in Minority Report, myself...