My wife just loves John Mayer's music. We but it, she puts a copy on her iPod ( which she uses while bike riding and at the gym) through iTunes, we burn a copy of the CD and put on in the CD changer in the car and the original gets put into the CD collection. Guess what, the EVIL record companies don;t give a shit about that.
My wife just loves Spielberg's films. We buy it, she puts a copy on her iPad/no-dvd laptop/media server, we burn a copy of the DVD and put on in the DVD changer in the car and the original gets put into the DVD collection. Guess what, the EVIL film companies don't give a shit about that.
Guess what, the above is illegal at least in the US (DMCA) and EU (EUCD). That CDs aren't the same is only because CDs are from before DRM became popular.
The EVIL record companies would take us to court if I set up a server, burned everything to MP3 and then connected it to the net, then advertised it on TPB!
What they care about is the "advertised it on TPB" part, but what they're trying to stop is the whole copying part. If it was up to them, the CD you buy would be a one-off. If you scratch it, you lose it. If you don't like the format, tough luck. All the things you're talking about are from the music industry's point of view old flaws and oversights which means they lost DRM as a tool. If it was up to them, it'd be just as illegal to copy as a DVD.
To use a real world analogy a pirate's bay like Tortuga doesn't mean everyone there is a pirate or that they engage only in piracy. It might be a very popular thing among the ships making it their port of call, but it's not really the harbor master's business. TPBs defense has been simple, all content is there at direction of users. You can call it a thin defense but it's been strong enough that it's still running...
Like so many things it's probably a feedback loop, not a simple causality. You might be a tad on the "chubby, antisocial people with the bad self-care issues" side to begin with, then when you have the job you become even more so - which makes you even more likely to take another job like it. Skill and experience is typically the most common one, as you get better at something you do it more because it's more fun being good than sucking, which gives you more experience which leads to higher skills which leads to more experience. Maybe some small talent or interest or external influence got you started, but it's not really the cause of where you ended up.
Can't they do that anyway? I thought that was the whole point of "open source".
Lotus Symphony is not open source, it's a proprietary fork from an early version of OpenOffice with a license that permitted this. IBM has been offering it as freeware, so by offering this code to the Apache foundation they're looking to mend the old fork between OpenOffice and Symphony. It still would not mend the fork between OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but as far as IBM is concerned their Symphony code can now be used in both versions under the Apache license. This is a direct consequence of Oracle giving OpenOffice to Apache, IBM wasn't willing to give Symphony to Sun or Oracle, but they are willing to share it as an Apache project. So good move by IBM, another open source contribution from them.
all in all it has to be said, in simpler terms (as many people on comments here have already said) - don't download stuff you can't trust! but if you can't be bothered to check, but are using a stupid operating system into which a package verification system is not built-in from the ground up, then don't use that stupid operating system!
They did make a package system where only vetted, approved software can be. And they called it an App Store. Last I checked slashdot didn't like the idea, so damned if you do and damned if you don't. People here still won't be pleased unless you run Linux.
Bitcoins is still far more speculative than the worst of the dotcom stocks, that it has a small market where other speculators will work or provide services for bitcoins - or simply to "prove" they're not worthless - doesn't make it a currency. That imaginary value will disappear in an instant when the bubble bursts. I don't claim to predict when or how it'll happen, but it will. Though I suppose if you can time it correctly, you can turn into a millionaire like many of the dotcom founders...
But then, the risk goes both ways -- if bitcoins catch their "big break" and make it mainstream, the value can go up (again) faster than the difficulty.
Except that it's all a bunch of guys sitting around saying "Pretty please start using our money, we've now printed trillions of monopoly money but are ready to sell you a hundred dollar bill" - you have to be pretty stupid to realize you will get screwed. And the longer it goes on and the less coins - compared to all the "old money" - you get, the harder you'll be screwed. Unless you can find a bigger sucker and get out in time. Pyramid schemes look good too, until the bottom falls out.
In the black and white world of "you're either with us or against us", you are either for this bill and against child pornography or you are against this bill and for child pornography. If you try bringing some sanity into it, they will pound that point and make it seem you're eluding it.
It'd be like starting an attack on this bill with "Are you in favor of Soviet-style mass surveillance of ordinary citizens?" and you can hear the question is loaded as all hell. It just turns into a game of piling up the most bad stuff on the other side.
Support means you like the system the way it is, but want the necessary patches and such to keep it working. Upgrade means the versions of everything changes, the UI changes, the API changes and a host of other things that may break systems or confuse users. That means retesting, recertification, updating training materials, guides, system documentation and so on. Just because the upgrade is free doesn't mean upgrading is free. It's a valid point but hardly a perfect substitute.
You got a point there - but this point highlights the key failure of the MBA crowd - they are trapped within their own echo chamber. A good manager needs to be a translator in the first place, he needs to translate between his engineers, his designers, his sales people, his financial people and the customers, all of which are using different languages.
That's assuming all managers manage workers, which isn't true. In a large organization, there's usually quite a few layers of management between the CxO and the bottom of the hierarchy. And most of the time you want the managers to arrange so that the right designers and engineers talk to each other, not sit in the middle and be a horribly lossy translator. The idea is that you are like a 10:1 filter. You get told one high-level thing, you figure it out what that means for your ten subordinates. Your ten subordinates tell you things, you compile it to what your manager needs to hear. You work sideways to resolve everything you can at your level with your counterparts and escalate maybe 1 in 10 to your managers.
That is really the only way a >1k person company can work. Otherwise you'd have people on top making decisions and nothing happening or going in ten different directions. They'd get no feedback or they drown in it. Or they get drowned in micromanagement because the managers can't solve small things on their own. In particular, the manager must know when to fight for the team or department or division, that's also a kind of feedback. At the same time, everybody resist change and more work so they must swing the management whip sometimes and make deliveries. Being a manager is a fairly unique skill set in its own right, of course if you don't know enough about what your people are doing to do your job you won't be a good manager but the education is supposed to be the general "how to manage" class. Just like you must apply "how to program" to your particular software.
Single point of failure is a bad thing and information hoarding makes you a single point of failure. If the people you work for tolerate that kind of behavior from you, they are extremely foolish.
Many companies don't spend any more time cross-training than they have to, there's always work to do and being productive always preempts being non-productive. Same with documentation, if I have to scramble to the second most pressing issue on your list I'll do that. They are trying to avoid single point of disaster, nothing more so if a mad scramble by everyone else can lead to a small to moderate degree of failure that's acceptable. Many other places are simply on a "when you have time" basis which make it easy to be an information hoarder, because you're simply always take on enough work to be busy. Or if you're simply dishonest, pretend to be busy.
Personally I've had it too much the other way around, nobody really wanted to or had the skills to do what I do so I didn't hoard it, I was trapped by it. In the end I resigned and started at a different company simply because I felt I was stuck being an expert in one area they'd never let me leave. I would actually think that happens far more often, it wasn't until I resigned they really got busy trying to cover my skills with other employees. Of course I had to learn quite a bit about the existing systems at my new employer too, but I could be a lot more focused on what would be rather than every gritty detail of the old systems they already had experts in.
Technically, you are only keeping tabs on your own property. This reminds me of a colleague of mine that worked at a phone company, woman called in and was completely furious because they've given the records for HER phone to her husband. Except it wasn't her phone, it was registered in the name of the company and the company was in his name. He requested a detailed bill and the phone company simply complied. It doesn't matter that she was the one using it, that they called it hers because legally it was not - not that she was very willing to listen to that. Same when your spouse is using the car, it's not hers as the ownership is just as joined as ever. Sure a little creepy but it only applies to things you have joint or sole ownership in, that rather limits the uses.
The label isn't going to let you unilaterally decide when to release the album, not going to happen. And they're not going to let you submit some junk, have it rejected and then be free of your contract once you're famous. You'll have to negotiate the terms of an exit, that is if you even realize you could end up in that limbo. I mean your head will be spinning with making the first album. And there your interests are aligned, no album no income for anybody. I mean, it's easy to say "oh you should have seen that" but this isn't missing a mate in one, it's a trap many moves down the road.
Why are you asking him? Why aren't you asking her? Here's how it works, in my case at least: you want to have sex with my g/f, you ask her. She and I will talk about it
Maybe less than perfect confidence in that last part? Which may lead to rage unleashed on you, despite she doing the cheating. Not that I've ever asked anyone in a relationship that, him or her.
Not to be rude against the shuttle or anything, but if I wanted to talk tech revolution I feel the computer I'm sitting at now and the Internet it's connected to are the absurdly biggest revolutions of the last 25 years or so (yes I know the PC and arpanet itself is older). We're talking going from 64kB to 16GB of RAM, 1 Mhz to 3 GHz processors, tapes with ~200 kB of storage to 2 TB hard disks, it's absurdly many orders of magnitude. Not to mention the Internet going from a university thing to something 99% of all households with children have.
That and wireless, when I grew up mobile phones didn't exist (okay they were invented but nobody had them) and these days there are more subscriptions than there are people, as many have home and work phone. A modern smart phone playing video over wireless broadband from a server halfway around the world is just off the scale compared to what I could have imagined 25 years ago. And the broadband revolution is still very much in progress with fiber rollout, higher speeds and lower prices.
So do I feel I need to go see the shuttle to see progress? I got the feeling that progress is far more tangible and all around me, maybe it's that you get it at a distance but if you take a step back and look at your own life you'll probably see plenty changes right there. The shuttle is fine but I don't feel it has had nearly the revolutionary impact on everything else like the Apollo program did, trickle-down science from the space program not withstanding.
China would have a long, long way to catch up with India, that has more than ten times as many speakers (at least Hinglish speakers) and as you can see from the recent story learning proper English is a very highly sought skill. Also Europe is focusing more and more on English now while French, German and Russian is on the retreat so I would say it's far from being dethroned.
I think Occam's razor has an even simpler explanation, all call centers anywhere are likely to fail at living up to the customer experience the user wants. They're pissed that the service is broken to begin with and troubleshooting is a long and tedious process and there might not be any immediate solutions either. Particularly many residential users are worse than useless at helping you resolve it, as well as extremely impatient because the problem wasn't solved ten minutes ago. I would think that getting shouted at is a common occurrence in US call centers as well.
That you've reached an Indian call center is their excuse to vent, the reason the problem isn't fixed in 30 seconds is now because they've gone with some low cost bidder in India and screw the customer. Maybe you sometimes will get poorer service as well, but I think the primary reason is that they now focus all the negativity around that fact. Like it or not, as soon as people hear "outsourced to India" they think the first, second and third reason is cost. And I can't' really say this article has given me much reason to think otherwise...
The baker still has 13 loaves, and can still sell them. Repeatedly. His anger is now because his marketplace has diminished by one. Loss in potential profits of 0.000000001%
The difference is that if the average person seeds back to >1, that one loaf can feed everyone (beat that, Jesus). Theft is a manageable risk, if it was valuable enough your baker could look like a jeweler's store, there could be guards and vaults and alarms and cameras everywhere. At worst that one stolen loaf is one lost sale, at best one lost marginal cost. But once someone has figured out a way to make infinitely many loaves, there's no boundary on how many customers you lose so it's more like 0.000000001-100% of the market.
There is a different between them forgetting to invite you to a wedding and them forgetting to invite you to a movie. As a non-facebook (or really any social networking) user I accept that I miss the occasional "thing". My friends will post stuff like "anyone want to go see " and I'm cool with missing out on that kinda stuff occasionally. I think it would be unfair to expect them to remember to specifically call _me_ every time they are arranging something because I'm that jerk that won't just create a facebook account. All part of the deal.
That was what I was trying to say, it's not like they don't have phone or email or a kazillion other ways of getting in touch if we want. But when they're using the social network to be social then you're not part of that. And it's not the big events that make friendships, it's all the little events - the day I only get invited to a birthday party once a year we're not all that close anymore. It's chilling with some beers or playing games or going to watch a soccer match or going camping or any other of a million little "unimportant" things that together make up a friendship. Of course good friendships survive without that for some time, but not forever.
Unfortunately when you make it a datetime, the European order is bad and American worse. For sanity and sorting yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss is the best way, of course with a 24 hour clock not am/pm. Unfortunately it works great for an ISO standard, not so much for talking. If I say "We'll meet on the 23rd" then implicitly that means the 23 of this month, we don't start on the macro or the microlevel but somewhere in the middle. After all we don't start all our mail addresses with:
Milky Way The "Sun" system 3rd planet [Country] [State] {City] [Street] [House] [Section] [Apartment]
Usually we start in the middle with road and go down "Whitford Lane 13C apt. 4" then back up again to city, state, country etc. just like we do for dates. It's rather practical since most mail you send is domestic, so if you didn't add it then it was implicit. That definitively works better placed after than before. If you have a full address then of course it doesn't really matter.
It might kill 1 or 2 people in the immediate proximity and injure/maim a handful of others.
Well, according to military handbooks the fatality radius is about 5 meters, casualty radius about 15 meters. For unarmored, fully exposed civilians I think you can say at least that. I guess it depends on how crowded, but 10 meters length of sidewalk could easily be way more than 1-2 deaths. If the cafe had large glass windows then probably several guests there as well, and I wouldn't feel too safe in a passing car either if you were next right to it.
A military-tech grenade also likely wouldn't fit "in a small plastic box in his hand" (max est. height: 2in).
True because of the pin and handle but a 2 inch square box has room for roughly as much explosives as a M67 hand grenade (131 vs 134 mL). So for a bomb with radio detonator and grenade-like effect it's actually sufficient. But yes, it does make it much less likely, for a possibility that was rather unlikely to begin with.
I feel very good, have friends, work, hobbies and interest, and don't waste time on social networks trying to find new friends while leaving behind the old real ones.
Maybe your friends are just as odd as you then, nothing really wrong with that but the reason most of us feel the social pressure is because almost all my "old real" friends now are on Facebook. That's where they chatter and share pictures and make events and whatnot, it's not that they're purposely shutting you out but you're the special case. You're the one "being difficult", why can't you just get a profile just like everybody else? Sometimes they plain old forget that they have to tell me via a different means than everybody else. So I caved, my profile is on Facebook. And if everyone moved to Google+, I'd probably have to follow. If that hasn't happened to you, well then you're in the same group as my parents, they're not on Facebook, have no reason to join Facebook and good for them. It doesn't help everyone else who feel they have to either sign up or they'll drift apart from the friends they already have.
It seems to me terrorists used to have some more ulterior goals (ransom, release of prisoners, independence, publicity) not just invoke fear. That is why up to 9/11 they expected hijackers to land and make their demands, not just ram them into buildings. This whole "it'll cost us a million to do and a billion for you do defend against" seems more like a style of guerrilla or economic warfare, trying to make the US crumble under its own weight like the Soviet Union did.
I mean, it doesn't seem to me that al-Qaeda has much they'd really like to talk about, we're infidels and for the most part they'd just like us to die or throw ourselves to the ground and beg for Allah's mercy or something like that. It's not exactly like videos of them slitting captured people's throats are meant to bring us to the negotiation table. And the more they seem like homicidal maniacs, the less I feel like leaving that cancer to spread.
My client's supplier can put ten people and forty hours on something that would take me thirty minutes - as an inexperienced dotnet dev - and still come out ahead, with an acceptable level of quality, SO LONG AS SOMEONE CLEARLY DEFINES THE PARAMETERS. Outsourcing without proper specs easily results in five times the work, but when you write a proper spec - preferrably written by a Sr. dev or a systems architect, it gets done on time, on budget, and according to spec.
Well it's typically those people they're short on which is the reason they're outsourcing in the first place, code monkeys they can get locally too. Often you only have the time to give them a functional design, the software should do this and that. The system design, is left to those doing the project. Youi sound like you're doing some more regular kind of offshoring, it's different than the one-off outsourced projects. They're typically the ones that fail spectacularly.
The Humble Bundle proves that people that are fans of open source will pay more for open source games than people that don't give a fuck if it's proprietary or not. It's like using the sales of a Metallica album to prove that Metallica fans are more willing to pay for music than other fans. Fans that were told "please show how much you support us" while the rest were told "please check out our games". Big surprise that a lot of Windows users did download it for nothing or next to nothing to check it our, almost like a free demo while many Linux users took it as a donation run. You can look at Steam and see lots of people spending lots of money on games every day, a single sale there often being more than any OS' users gave for the Humble Bundle. That this somehow proves this is all wrong and that it's the Linux users that are willing to pay and the Windows users that are not, well let's just say it takes a certain kind of zealotry to reach that conclusion.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife just loves John Mayer's music. We but it, she puts a copy on her iPod ( which she uses while bike riding and at the gym) through iTunes, we burn a copy of the CD and put on in the CD changer in the car and the original gets put into the CD collection. Guess what, the EVIL record companies don;t give a shit about that.
My wife just loves Spielberg's films. We buy it, she puts a copy on her iPad/no-dvd laptop/media server, we burn a copy of the DVD and put on in the DVD changer in the car and the original gets put into the DVD collection. Guess what, the EVIL film companies don't give a shit about that.
Guess what, the above is illegal at least in the US (DMCA) and EU (EUCD). That CDs aren't the same is only because CDs are from before DRM became popular.
The EVIL record companies would take us to court if I set up a server, burned everything to MP3 and then connected it to the net, then advertised it on TPB!
What they care about is the "advertised it on TPB" part, but what they're trying to stop is the whole copying part. If it was up to them, the CD you buy would be a one-off. If you scratch it, you lose it. If you don't like the format, tough luck. All the things you're talking about are from the music industry's point of view old flaws and oversights which means they lost DRM as a tool. If it was up to them, it'd be just as illegal to copy as a DVD.
To use a real world analogy a pirate's bay like Tortuga doesn't mean everyone there is a pirate or that they engage only in piracy. It might be a very popular thing among the ships making it their port of call, but it's not really the harbor master's business. TPBs defense has been simple, all content is there at direction of users. You can call it a thin defense but it's been strong enough that it's still running...
Like so many things it's probably a feedback loop, not a simple causality. You might be a tad on the "chubby, antisocial people with the bad self-care issues" side to begin with, then when you have the job you become even more so - which makes you even more likely to take another job like it. Skill and experience is typically the most common one, as you get better at something you do it more because it's more fun being good than sucking, which gives you more experience which leads to higher skills which leads to more experience. Maybe some small talent or interest or external influence got you started, but it's not really the cause of where you ended up.
Can't they do that anyway? I thought that was the whole point of "open source".
Lotus Symphony is not open source, it's a proprietary fork from an early version of OpenOffice with a license that permitted this. IBM has been offering it as freeware, so by offering this code to the Apache foundation they're looking to mend the old fork between OpenOffice and Symphony. It still would not mend the fork between OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but as far as IBM is concerned their Symphony code can now be used in both versions under the Apache license. This is a direct consequence of Oracle giving OpenOffice to Apache, IBM wasn't willing to give Symphony to Sun or Oracle, but they are willing to share it as an Apache project. So good move by IBM, another open source contribution from them.
all in all it has to be said, in simpler terms (as many people on comments here have already said) - don't download stuff you can't trust! but if you can't be bothered to check, but are using a stupid operating system into which a package verification system is not built-in from the ground up, then don't use that stupid operating system!
They did make a package system where only vetted, approved software can be. And they called it an App Store. Last I checked slashdot didn't like the idea, so damned if you do and damned if you don't. People here still won't be pleased unless you run Linux.
Bitcoins is still far more speculative than the worst of the dotcom stocks, that it has a small market where other speculators will work or provide services for bitcoins - or simply to "prove" they're not worthless - doesn't make it a currency. That imaginary value will disappear in an instant when the bubble bursts. I don't claim to predict when or how it'll happen, but it will. Though I suppose if you can time it correctly, you can turn into a millionaire like many of the dotcom founders...
But then, the risk goes both ways -- if bitcoins catch their "big break" and make it mainstream, the value can go up (again) faster than the difficulty.
Except that it's all a bunch of guys sitting around saying "Pretty please start using our money, we've now printed trillions of monopoly money but are ready to sell you a hundred dollar bill" - you have to be pretty stupid to realize you will get screwed. And the longer it goes on and the less coins - compared to all the "old money" - you get, the harder you'll be screwed. Unless you can find a bigger sucker and get out in time. Pyramid schemes look good too, until the bottom falls out.
In the black and white world of "you're either with us or against us", you are either for this bill and against child pornography or you are against this bill and for child pornography. If you try bringing some sanity into it, they will pound that point and make it seem you're eluding it.
It'd be like starting an attack on this bill with "Are you in favor of Soviet-style mass surveillance of ordinary citizens?" and you can hear the question is loaded as all hell. It just turns into a game of piling up the most bad stuff on the other side.
Support means you like the system the way it is, but want the necessary patches and such to keep it working. Upgrade means the versions of everything changes, the UI changes, the API changes and a host of other things that may break systems or confuse users. That means retesting, recertification, updating training materials, guides, system documentation and so on. Just because the upgrade is free doesn't mean upgrading is free. It's a valid point but hardly a perfect substitute.
You got a point there - but this point highlights the key failure of the MBA crowd - they are trapped within their own echo chamber. A good manager needs to be a translator in the first place, he needs to translate between his engineers, his designers, his sales people, his financial people and the customers, all of which are using different languages.
That's assuming all managers manage workers, which isn't true. In a large organization, there's usually quite a few layers of management between the CxO and the bottom of the hierarchy. And most of the time you want the managers to arrange so that the right designers and engineers talk to each other, not sit in the middle and be a horribly lossy translator. The idea is that you are like a 10:1 filter. You get told one high-level thing, you figure it out what that means for your ten subordinates. Your ten subordinates tell you things, you compile it to what your manager needs to hear. You work sideways to resolve everything you can at your level with your counterparts and escalate maybe 1 in 10 to your managers.
That is really the only way a >1k person company can work. Otherwise you'd have people on top making decisions and nothing happening or going in ten different directions. They'd get no feedback or they drown in it. Or they get drowned in micromanagement because the managers can't solve small things on their own. In particular, the manager must know when to fight for the team or department or division, that's also a kind of feedback. At the same time, everybody resist change and more work so they must swing the management whip sometimes and make deliveries. Being a manager is a fairly unique skill set in its own right, of course if you don't know enough about what your people are doing to do your job you won't be a good manager but the education is supposed to be the general "how to manage" class. Just like you must apply "how to program" to your particular software.
Single point of failure is a bad thing and information hoarding makes you a single point of failure. If the people you work for tolerate that kind of behavior from you, they are extremely foolish.
Many companies don't spend any more time cross-training than they have to, there's always work to do and being productive always preempts being non-productive. Same with documentation, if I have to scramble to the second most pressing issue on your list I'll do that. They are trying to avoid single point of disaster, nothing more so if a mad scramble by everyone else can lead to a small to moderate degree of failure that's acceptable. Many other places are simply on a "when you have time" basis which make it easy to be an information hoarder, because you're simply always take on enough work to be busy. Or if you're simply dishonest, pretend to be busy.
Personally I've had it too much the other way around, nobody really wanted to or had the skills to do what I do so I didn't hoard it, I was trapped by it. In the end I resigned and started at a different company simply because I felt I was stuck being an expert in one area they'd never let me leave. I would actually think that happens far more often, it wasn't until I resigned they really got busy trying to cover my skills with other employees. Of course I had to learn quite a bit about the existing systems at my new employer too, but I could be a lot more focused on what would be rather than every gritty detail of the old systems they already had experts in.
Technically, you are only keeping tabs on your own property. This reminds me of a colleague of mine that worked at a phone company, woman called in and was completely furious because they've given the records for HER phone to her husband. Except it wasn't her phone, it was registered in the name of the company and the company was in his name. He requested a detailed bill and the phone company simply complied. It doesn't matter that she was the one using it, that they called it hers because legally it was not - not that she was very willing to listen to that. Same when your spouse is using the car, it's not hers as the ownership is just as joined as ever. Sure a little creepy but it only applies to things you have joint or sole ownership in, that rather limits the uses.
The label isn't going to let you unilaterally decide when to release the album, not going to happen. And they're not going to let you submit some junk, have it rejected and then be free of your contract once you're famous. You'll have to negotiate the terms of an exit, that is if you even realize you could end up in that limbo. I mean your head will be spinning with making the first album. And there your interests are aligned, no album no income for anybody. I mean, it's easy to say "oh you should have seen that" but this isn't missing a mate in one, it's a trap many moves down the road.
Why are you asking him? Why aren't you asking her? Here's how it works, in my case at least: you want to have sex with my g/f, you ask her. She and I will talk about it
Maybe less than perfect confidence in that last part? Which may lead to rage unleashed on you, despite she doing the cheating. Not that I've ever asked anyone in a relationship that, him or her.
Not to be rude against the shuttle or anything, but if I wanted to talk tech revolution I feel the computer I'm sitting at now and the Internet it's connected to are the absurdly biggest revolutions of the last 25 years or so (yes I know the PC and arpanet itself is older). We're talking going from 64kB to 16GB of RAM, 1 Mhz to 3 GHz processors, tapes with ~200 kB of storage to 2 TB hard disks, it's absurdly many orders of magnitude. Not to mention the Internet going from a university thing to something 99% of all households with children have.
That and wireless, when I grew up mobile phones didn't exist (okay they were invented but nobody had them) and these days there are more subscriptions than there are people, as many have home and work phone. A modern smart phone playing video over wireless broadband from a server halfway around the world is just off the scale compared to what I could have imagined 25 years ago. And the broadband revolution is still very much in progress with fiber rollout, higher speeds and lower prices.
So do I feel I need to go see the shuttle to see progress? I got the feeling that progress is far more tangible and all around me, maybe it's that you get it at a distance but if you take a step back and look at your own life you'll probably see plenty changes right there. The shuttle is fine but I don't feel it has had nearly the revolutionary impact on everything else like the Apollo program did, trickle-down science from the space program not withstanding.
China would have a long, long way to catch up with India, that has more than ten times as many speakers (at least Hinglish speakers) and as you can see from the recent story learning proper English is a very highly sought skill. Also Europe is focusing more and more on English now while French, German and Russian is on the retreat so I would say it's far from being dethroned.
I think Occam's razor has an even simpler explanation, all call centers anywhere are likely to fail at living up to the customer experience the user wants. They're pissed that the service is broken to begin with and troubleshooting is a long and tedious process and there might not be any immediate solutions either. Particularly many residential users are worse than useless at helping you resolve it, as well as extremely impatient because the problem wasn't solved ten minutes ago. I would think that getting shouted at is a common occurrence in US call centers as well.
That you've reached an Indian call center is their excuse to vent, the reason the problem isn't fixed in 30 seconds is now because they've gone with some low cost bidder in India and screw the customer. Maybe you sometimes will get poorer service as well, but I think the primary reason is that they now focus all the negativity around that fact. Like it or not, as soon as people hear "outsourced to India" they think the first, second and third reason is cost. And I can't' really say this article has given me much reason to think otherwise...
The baker still has 13 loaves, and can still sell them. Repeatedly. His anger is now because his marketplace has diminished by one. Loss in potential profits of 0.000000001%
The difference is that if the average person seeds back to >1, that one loaf can feed everyone (beat that, Jesus). Theft is a manageable risk, if it was valuable enough your baker could look like a jeweler's store, there could be guards and vaults and alarms and cameras everywhere. At worst that one stolen loaf is one lost sale, at best one lost marginal cost. But once someone has figured out a way to make infinitely many loaves, there's no boundary on how many customers you lose so it's more like 0.000000001-100% of the market.
There is a different between them forgetting to invite you to a wedding and them forgetting to invite you to a movie. As a non-facebook (or really any social networking) user I accept that I miss the occasional "thing". My friends will post stuff like "anyone want to go see " and I'm cool with missing out on that kinda stuff occasionally. I think it would be unfair to expect them to remember to specifically call _me_ every time they are arranging something because I'm that jerk that won't just create a facebook account. All part of the deal.
That was what I was trying to say, it's not like they don't have phone or email or a kazillion other ways of getting in touch if we want. But when they're using the social network to be social then you're not part of that. And it's not the big events that make friendships, it's all the little events - the day I only get invited to a birthday party once a year we're not all that close anymore. It's chilling with some beers or playing games or going to watch a soccer match or going camping or any other of a million little "unimportant" things that together make up a friendship. Of course good friendships survive without that for some time, but not forever.
Unfortunately when you make it a datetime, the European order is bad and American worse. For sanity and sorting yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss is the best way, of course with a 24 hour clock not am/pm. Unfortunately it works great for an ISO standard, not so much for talking. If I say "We'll meet on the 23rd" then implicitly that means the 23 of this month, we don't start on the macro or the microlevel but somewhere in the middle. After all we don't start all our mail addresses with:
Milky Way
The "Sun" system
3rd planet
[Country]
[State]
{City]
[Street]
[House]
[Section]
[Apartment]
Usually we start in the middle with road and go down "Whitford Lane 13C apt. 4" then back up again to city, state, country etc. just like we do for dates. It's rather practical since most mail you send is domestic, so if you didn't add it then it was implicit. That definitively works better placed after than before. If you have a full address then of course it doesn't really matter.
It might kill 1 or 2 people in the immediate proximity and injure/maim a handful of others.
Well, according to military handbooks the fatality radius is about 5 meters, casualty radius about 15 meters. For unarmored, fully exposed civilians I think you can say at least that. I guess it depends on how crowded, but 10 meters length of sidewalk could easily be way more than 1-2 deaths. If the cafe had large glass windows then probably several guests there as well, and I wouldn't feel too safe in a passing car either if you were next right to it.
A military-tech grenade also likely wouldn't fit "in a small plastic box in his hand" (max est. height: 2in).
True because of the pin and handle but a 2 inch square box has room for roughly as much explosives as a M67 hand grenade (131 vs 134 mL). So for a bomb with radio detonator and grenade-like effect it's actually sufficient. But yes, it does make it much less likely, for a possibility that was rather unlikely to begin with.
I feel very good, have friends, work, hobbies and interest, and don't waste time on social networks trying to find new friends while leaving behind the old real ones.
Maybe your friends are just as odd as you then, nothing really wrong with that but the reason most of us feel the social pressure is because almost all my "old real" friends now are on Facebook. That's where they chatter and share pictures and make events and whatnot, it's not that they're purposely shutting you out but you're the special case. You're the one "being difficult", why can't you just get a profile just like everybody else? Sometimes they plain old forget that they have to tell me via a different means than everybody else. So I caved, my profile is on Facebook. And if everyone moved to Google+, I'd probably have to follow. If that hasn't happened to you, well then you're in the same group as my parents, they're not on Facebook, have no reason to join Facebook and good for them. It doesn't help everyone else who feel they have to either sign up or they'll drift apart from the friends they already have.
It seems to me terrorists used to have some more ulterior goals (ransom, release of prisoners, independence, publicity) not just invoke fear. That is why up to 9/11 they expected hijackers to land and make their demands, not just ram them into buildings. This whole "it'll cost us a million to do and a billion for you do defend against" seems more like a style of guerrilla or economic warfare, trying to make the US crumble under its own weight like the Soviet Union did.
I mean, it doesn't seem to me that al-Qaeda has much they'd really like to talk about, we're infidels and for the most part they'd just like us to die or throw ourselves to the ground and beg for Allah's mercy or something like that. It's not exactly like videos of them slitting captured people's throats are meant to bring us to the negotiation table. And the more they seem like homicidal maniacs, the less I feel like leaving that cancer to spread.
My client's supplier can put ten people and forty hours on something that would take me thirty minutes - as an inexperienced dotnet dev - and still come out ahead, with an acceptable level of quality, SO LONG AS SOMEONE CLEARLY DEFINES THE PARAMETERS. Outsourcing without proper specs easily results in five times the work, but when you write a proper spec - preferrably written by a Sr. dev or a systems architect, it gets done on time, on budget, and according to spec.
Well it's typically those people they're short on which is the reason they're outsourcing in the first place, code monkeys they can get locally too. Often you only have the time to give them a functional design, the software should do this and that. The system design, is left to those doing the project. Youi sound like you're doing some more regular kind of offshoring, it's different than the one-off outsourced projects. They're typically the ones that fail spectacularly.
The Humble Bundle proves that people that are fans of open source will pay more for open source games than people that don't give a fuck if it's proprietary or not. It's like using the sales of a Metallica album to prove that Metallica fans are more willing to pay for music than other fans. Fans that were told "please show how much you support us" while the rest were told "please check out our games". Big surprise that a lot of Windows users did download it for nothing or next to nothing to check it our, almost like a free demo while many Linux users took it as a donation run. You can look at Steam and see lots of people spending lots of money on games every day, a single sale there often being more than any OS' users gave for the Humble Bundle. That this somehow proves this is all wrong and that it's the Linux users that are willing to pay and the Windows users that are not, well let's just say it takes a certain kind of zealotry to reach that conclusion.