Take electric cars and ultra-ultra long life lightbulbs.
What is the problem with these? You can go out and buy either of these today.
Of course you will find that for long life incandescent bulbs the cost of electricity to generate the same amount of life is much higher - see to make the blb last longer you need to make the filament thicker, and that cuts down on the buld efficiency. The typical incandescent light bulb is actually optimized to give the most light per kwh.
If you are really interested in long life bulbs and low cost light, you need to go to a different technology altogether - like compact fluorescent.
As far as electric cars, there are of course tradeoffs - simple things like running a heater on a cold winter day reduce your miles between charges a lot. But we already have a much better solution, already on the roads in large numbers - hybrid gas-electric.
Same thing probably goes for efficient solar energy.
Yes, it exists. The problem is capital cost to collect it, and what do you do to get power when the Sun is down or it is cloudy. Right now solar power is 2x to 5x more expensive than fossil electricity because of the capital costs. However the installed solar power wattage is growing rapidly, primarily in areas that are a mile way from conventional power grids where the cost to run the lines outweghs the cost of the solar power system.
There is no way this camera sees like the human eye - this sensor arrangement is completely different from the rod/cone structure of the human eye. A conventional digicam is actually closer than this is.
As far as this camera comparing it to film - more baloney. A good 35 mm camera on a tripod is capable of somewhere 11-14 megapixels of in a conventional digital camera. This particular sensor does not deliver resolution in that ballpark.
Show me another system running 50,000 users that performs as well as SF.net.
There are many sites with far more users than SourceForge. Most of them run much better, too. Simple corporate sites like Macromedia.com have 1-2 millions of users. Sites like Ebay and Amazon are pushing 100 million users.
Ahem. SourceForge.net (supporting > 500,000 users) is written in PHP (+ Perl and Python).
I could say something snotty like "so that's why it performs so poorly?". Seriously though, SourceForge is not the most reliable web site that I've ever visited. I don't know enough about their issues to say what the cause of the problems are, but they do have problems.
If they are using a mixed code base of Perl, Python and PHP I feel very sorry for them. I used to have to support an e-commerce site that was mixed Perl/PHP and I found that it was a nightmare - logic duplicated all over the place in two different languages. Very, very bad.
One of my best clients has had only requests for PHP/Linux/MySql based solutions.
LAMP is a worthy technology suite for some applications - however I would much rather work with Poostgresql-Linux-Apache-Tomcat-Eclipse, (PLATE) as a starting point. Then if the customer's business grows you are in a good position to move up to heavier duty solutions.
But when you are buying and selling intangible goods like electricity and bandwidth on the open market,
I haven't looked into the issue of bandwidth cost in detail, but I know for sure that it is possible to get a good hard number on the cost of producing a kilowatt-hour of electricity, and it is done all the time. Companies know what their capital investments, fuel costs and operating expenses are or are likely to be, or can estimate the effects of changes in those costs. Before ANY power plant is built you can bet all of this is calculated to a fare-thee-well by the utility company. And there is no bullshit involved in this calculation. I know, I used to do that sort of calculation as part of my job (in a different, but related industry).
The situation with internet bandwidth may be a bit more complicated by fact of the matter is that it's an industry where things are unsettled and changing rapidly, both from an economic and regulatory point of view so making predictions is likely to be a lot riskier. But accounting practices are not the issue - cost engineering is a well established and definitely non-bullshit field. It's the unsettled nature of the business that makes predictions difficult.
Do you think it's really possible for UUNet, Sprint, and AT&T to precisely calculate the cost of transmitting a MB from point A to point B through their vast communication networks?
I think that they know very well how much per day it costs them to run their network, what their capital investment is and how much traffic in MB it carries each day. From that it is actually very easy to calculate what the cost is to move a MB from a to b. I am also sure they have a very good idea what their marginal costs are.
There's no law of supply and demand being followed by these bandwidth cartels.
I disagree with that strongly. Supply and demand is ALWAYS in force. If you raise the price too high, the demand will go down. Period. Look at the current situation with consumers today - we have many people using dialup because they don't want to pay the higher cost of the increased bandwidth of broadband.
And they certainly don't have to worry about setting the price to high. What are you going to do, start laying wire for your own personal Internet?
If the price goes to high you can BET somebody will start launching satellites or running more cable, or launching stratospheric planes, or installing wide area wireless, or deploying whatever other technology seems best at the time.
They've always seemed to be much more technology agnostic, and certainly got pretty far without any big name app servers behind them over the past 6-7 years.
I am not sure that Yahoo's commitment to FreeBSD is 'technology agnostic'. It seems to me more like they have some powerful internal political forces that are pushing them in this direction.
Many of the early internet companies like Yahoo put together their own custom development systems. Amazon and EBay are two other examples I'm aware of. As the internet matured, the costs to maintain these custom systems have gotten out of hand and these companies have switched to third party app servers. Both Amazon and EBay have moved to or are moving to Java.
Take OPEC for example. It's a group nations working cooperatively to maximize profits for the member nations by either creating artificial scarcity or oversupply.
One thing that prevents OEC from doing anything it wants with oil prices is that there are other sources of energy out there. If the price of oil gets to be over $45/barrel for a significant period of time, those other sources become competitive.
The Saudis understand this issue and have publically stated that they will not let the price of oil rise to the point where alternative energy sources are competitive.
Even cartels are subject to supply/demand laws if they distort a market too much.
Scrapping all of those to move to new hardware and OS just to THEN be able to port everything to Java is extremely costly, both hardware-wise and time-wise.
They are going to have to port everything anyway - their custom development environment is being scrapped. And where do you see evidence they need new hardware? And committing to FreeBSD? It seems to me that there are other platforms that are having a LOT more developer resources thrown at them. Will FreeBSD even be sustainable for a large enterprise 3-5 years from now?
I think that they are making a decision that is going to hurt bad when it bites them in the ass.
PHP is a very flexible and powerful language -- very useful for developing applications that need to be easily modifiable, debuggable and portable.
I agree with that in general (I do find Java debuggers to be significantly better than what is available for PHP, primarily due to the strong IDEs available for Java). However if your throw in maintainable and scalable I start to have real problems with PHP. That's why I said I like it for prototypes etc.
About 6 months ago my boss asked me to research the use of PHP on larger scale web sites, i.e. more than two servers for a single application. I went to sites like PHP.net, zend,com, etc. and found no such examples. And in fact some of the examples on these sites turned out to be places that had switched to Java since the example was posted. Now maybe these sites were out of date, but....
I cannot discuss them due to NDA restrictions
Makes it kind of hard to evaluate what you are saying. In any case I would have to say that I think the current leading edge UI technology is Flash MX using Flash Remoting to either ASP.NET or J2EE. And this is something that isn't supported by PHP at all.
You should quickly share your insights with the folks over at Yahoo!
Yahoo is doing some very strange things. They evaluated a bunch of web development technologies, decided J2EE was the best, and then chose to use PHP because FreeBSD has very bad support for threads.
Now to me that is putting the cart before the horse. First you choose what software you want to run, then you choose the platform you run it on.
certainly there are more applications, etc, available to run on microsoft platforms then on *nix platforms..
I don't know about that. *nix has been around for a long time, and there are a LOT of applications for it.
the unofficial standard for most things is gonna be microsfot's format
That's the fact. To be realistic it does a LOT to cut down on the number of applications users actually have the freedom to use. You can say Windows has xyz applications, but how many do spreadsheets on anything other than Excel?
It's also a serious issue that corporations and governments are starting to think about... Do you really want all of your documents in a format that is owned by one vendor?
what's gonna happen when a client sends your a power point presentation, and you're sitting there with your *nix box...
You would be surprised at how good Open Office is at reading MS formats.
i mean not as many features
And how many of those features actually have any practical value??
I haven't done a real in-depth study of Open Office vs. MS-Office features, however I have noticed that Open Office's menus are essentially a complete clone of MS Office's. That presents the user with a pretty good feature set to work with.
but overall there are unquantifiable things that need to be considered
Right - and I think the biggest one of these is license tracking. I've seen companies brought to their knes for weeks on end because Microsoft and the BSA conduct an audit. And when it's done they have to pay millions in fines.
The fact is that the decision to run Microsoft is software is essentially a decision to turn control of all of your companies computers over to Microsoft. You don't have source code, you are stuck with your data in a format controlled by one company, and you have agreed to a very restrictve license.
This is a very bad situation for a company to be in, and in my opinion completely intolerable for a government.
PHP is the defacto standard used by newbies and children who don't want to learn a real language like perl or Java. PHP is shit.
I think PHP has a valid niche in building throwaway code for demos. Things I've used it for include:
- extremely low cost web sites with limited functionality. A person looking to get a site on the web with a concept can build a php site and put in on a shared server for $10/mo in hosting fees.
- prototyping - some times it's necessary to put together a prototype of an idea to show to a client in a hurry.
The first 'cyberpunk' novel was clearly Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, published in 1975. His use of biological metaphor to describe a variety of invasive computer programs was a first; the term 'worm' was adapted from Shockwave Rider's term 'tapeworm' by researchers at Xerox PARC to describe the first self-replicating self-propagating computer program.
Shockwave Rider is why Robert Morris' hack is called the "Morris worm".
It seems to me that something like the H1-B visa program is putting technological education and eventually competitiveness in the US into a situation where severe long term damage to the economy is very likely.
If US companies are successful in using the H1-B program to alleviate wage pressure and shortages in technical jobs, there will be little or no financial incentive for US students to study engineering - short careers and pay not much different from mechanical trades is not going to attract top candidates to a difficult field of study.
The result will be fewer graduates - and with fewer students, the institutions capabable of graduating people with these skills will decay as well. This will exacerbate the skill shortage, and trigger additional demands for more such H1-B workers. The infrastructure to support the education of these candidates in their countries of origin will correspondingly flourish. These educational institutions will be fertile grounds for great new advances in technology while the decaying US institutions will not be able to respond in kind.
There is a great flaw in letting short term band-aids like the H1-B program drive a nation's policies - short term fixes are merely treating the symptoms.
I hate the whole issue of H1B reform, because rather than being framed in terms of fair treatment for H1B workers, it is framed in terms of "protecting American jobs." And any time that phrase comes up, it is a red flag for me.
It sseems to me that the concept of bringing highly qualified professionals to the US where there are cases that the skills are not available from native workers is a policy that has real merit to it. Surely the situation where you cannot compete because you can't find the workers with the skills you need is a very serious issue.
The problem arises when companies abuse the process in a variety of ways including firing current employees with the required skills in order to replace them with workers with lower pay expectations, or fail to look for native workers with any sort of good faith. There is a social cost associated with a worker displaced from his job. Worse you have a case of corporate malfeasence - the corporation is not acting in good faith according to the intent of the enabling legislation When this occurs the legislation must be adjusted. This is what the AFL/CIO is suggesting.
I have had my personal fortunes affected by this - but in a sense not typical to the IT market. My last employer was a French company, with operations in the US. Because of employment laws in France vs. the US it was much less expensive for them to lay off an American worker than a French worker. Therefore when cuts were needed my job and project went to France - not because of any cost savings, but because the French government was doing a better job of protecting their workers than the US was.
Now what should I feel about this? Other developed countries are protecting workers, while the US seems to be intent on discouraging it's own workers.
poor conditions in "third world" countries (as many of you have described them) are largely the effect of colonialism.
That is a long discredited Marxist theory. The fact is that many of the world's strongest economies (US, Australia, Canada, Taiwan, Malaysia, Chile, etc.) are former colonies.
Cheaper labor is not bad for the American economy, it's obviously good.
That is the antithesis of capitalism. The central tenant in a capitalistic society is the increase in worker productivity that comes form the investment in the production process. If workers are cheap there is no incentive to invest, and the economy stagnates.
It seems to me that countries with large ammounts of cheap labor are the countries with the worst economies. Countries with expensive labor are the countries with the best economies.
What is good for an economy is a worker who is productive, i.e. somebody who produces goods cheaply. The worker can be quite expensive so long as the productivity is high. That is very different from cheap labor.
The great advances in economies come when there are major advances in worker productivity through some technological advance or investment of capital. These times of increasing productivity are often triggered by labor shortages.
The classic example was the change and improvement in the status of peasents immediately following the Black Death in Europe. The plague obviously led to a large shortage of labor; this led to a great increase in the status of the worker because of the shortage of and increased expense of labor.
http://www.planetpapers.com/Assets/1682.php
If the H1B program's primary effect is to keep wages down in the US it should be scrapped immediately because it will have an extremely negative effect in the long term growth of worker productivity.
After all, if you had problems with the conduct of the organization as a whole, you'd have moved/quit.
So if some terrorist decides that my country has offended him in some gross way, and kills me because I happen to be a citizen of that country, it is my fault for not leaving that country?
Are you totally cracked? Insane? Nuts?
Sure, there are plenty of things I don't agree with in the way my country conducts itself. But does that mean I must leave the country? What a crock! Haven't you ever heard of the concept of trying to change things as a constructive member of society?
The fact of the matter is that there will ALWAYS be somebody that has an axe to grind against any large organization. There is no country on Earth that is satisfactory to every human on the face of the planet. So if you feel this action is ok, then we are consigned to random violence and anarchy forever.
The question is how are you going to resolve the problem. Is killing randown citizens (and yes children who have no say in where they live) the answer? If you think yes, then you have eschewed every civilized principle that seperates modern man from primitive.
(1) You're saying that Dow employees are not representatives of Dow because they're "poor working stiffs"?
Yup. They had NOTHING to do with the decisions made by Union Carbide some 25-30 years ago when this Bhopal facility was being planned. Making some low level employee of one company accountable for the actions of another company acquired in a financial transaction is the most perverse, twisted notion I have ever encountered.
(2) What "assault"? Returning Dow property (spilled chemicals) to a Dow office?
Yup. Somebody dropping chemical waste into my immediate environment surely qualifies as an assault on me.
Do you as a person expect to be able to walk down the street, randomly shooting pedestrians
Nope. Now please explain to me how this has anything with a receptionist working for Dow in India.
So why should Dow have the manufactured freedom to kill thousands of people and escape any responsibility for their actions?
Dow didn't kill any of these people. A company that Dow acquired 2 years ago in a financial transaction made some mistakes - and Dow now inherits the liabilities associated with those mistakes.
That does not justify criminal acts against Dow in any way.
Re:USA - the world's biggest polluter. So what's n
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 2
A more "fair" comaprison pollution/GDP Per Capita, as opposed to your comparison of pollution/gross GDP.
That is just not right. Per capita comparisons in greenhouse gas production do not reflect the real, important goal - sustainable economic development. Sure, China has a much lower per capita greenhouse gas consumption - but China as is still a developing country with a rapidly growing economy.
The real goal is minimization of energy consumption per dollar of GDP, not just stopping CO2 emissions. That we could do (at great human cost) by simply turning everything off. If we cut emissions per $ GDP, we can actually improve the human condition.
Re:USA - the world's biggest polluter. So what's n
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 2
According to the UN...
A number of sources claim this data is phoney. In particular China is widely believed to be underreporting coal consumption. In fact, the combined reduction in CO2 emissions and increase in economic activity that China is claiming is without precedent in world history, and as such is extremely unlikely to be anything close to the truth.
Here is what the WWF says about China's greenhouse gas status:
Overview
The 1990s was the hottest decade in the past millennium. CO2 emissions worldwide are now around 12 times higher than they were in 1900 as the world burns increasing quantities of coal, oil and gas for energy. The global temperature build-up is seriously disrupting the natural balance of the world's climate, creating more extreme weather conditions and putting one-third of the world's forests at risk, as well as the species that depend on forests for their survival.
China currently accounts for 13% of the global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, ranking second after the US. Although China signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, commitments have yet to be made in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the past two decades, China has experienced massive economic development and social change. With an average economic growth rate of 9% per year, the energy system plays a central role in shaping development in industry, agriculture, and the service sectors.
China has achieved considerable progress in improving energy efficiency and CO2 emissions reduction. However, 70% of energy production is still dependent on coal, and demand for automobiles is growing fast. China¦s challenge will be to shift its energy mix into a cleaner path, particularly in the development and dissemination of new and renewable energy technologies, and promoting structural change for more efficient energy use.
Basic facts
* China is set to overtake the US (at 21%) as the biggest producer of greenhouse gases by 2025 unless current trends are modified.
* 7 of the world's 10 most polluted cities are in China
* economic losses and health costs due to pollution alone are equal to 8% of China's GDP (source: the World Bank)
* acid rain in China is widespread, causing severe damage to crops and forests
* more than 70% of China's energy production is from burning coal
Key threats
* Use of unsustainable energy sources, such as coal and oil, which leads to air and water pollution and global warming
* Non-sustainable consumption patterns and wasteful use of energy
Another interesting that seems to slip through the cracks is that the "former Soviet Union" countries emit more greehouse gases than the US does.
And here is another good one - while the US emissions grew 5% over the period of 1995-2001, The emissions per GDP went down 11%.
Also you might want to look at the other signatories of the Kyoto convention, and what their performance is. For example Japan has been recently averaging a 1.1% growth in greenhouse gas emissions per year - and that's for a country that is essentially economically stagnant.
Slashdot Mirror
Take electric cars and ultra-ultra long life lightbulbs.
What is the problem with these? You can go out and buy either of these today.
Of course you will find that for long life incandescent bulbs the cost of electricity to generate the same amount of life is much higher - see to make the blb last longer you need to make the filament thicker, and that cuts down on the buld efficiency. The typical incandescent light bulb is actually optimized to give the most light per kwh.
If you are really interested in long life bulbs and low cost light, you need to go to a different technology altogether - like compact fluorescent.
As far as electric cars, there are of course tradeoffs - simple things like running a heater on a cold winter day reduce your miles between charges a lot. But we already have a much better solution, already on the roads in large numbers - hybrid gas-electric.
Same thing probably goes for efficient solar energy.
Yes, it exists. The problem is capital cost to collect it, and what do you do to get power when the Sun is down or it is cloudy. Right now solar power is 2x to 5x more expensive than fossil electricity because of the capital costs. However the installed solar power wattage is growing rapidly, primarily in areas that are a mile way from conventional power grids where the cost to run the lines outweghs the cost of the solar power system.
There is no way this camera sees like the human eye - this sensor arrangement is completely different from the rod/cone structure of the human eye. A conventional digicam is actually closer than this is.
As far as this camera comparing it to film - more baloney. A good 35 mm camera on a tripod is capable of somewhere 11-14 megapixels of in a conventional digital camera. This particular sensor does not deliver resolution in that ballpark.
Show me another system running 50,000 users that performs as well as SF.net.
There are many sites with far more users than SourceForge. Most of them run much better, too. Simple corporate sites like Macromedia.com have 1-2 millions of users. Sites like Ebay and Amazon are pushing 100 million users.
SAS Institute isn't pure software? Since when?
Ahem. SourceForge.net (supporting > 500,000 users) is written in PHP (+ Perl and Python).
I could say something snotty like "so that's why it performs so poorly?". Seriously though, SourceForge is not the most reliable web site that I've ever visited. I don't know enough about their issues to say what the cause of the problems are, but they do have problems.
If they are using a mixed code base of Perl, Python and PHP I feel very sorry for them. I used to have to support an e-commerce site that was mixed Perl/PHP and I found that it was a nightmare - logic duplicated all over the place in two different languages. Very, very bad.
One of my best clients has had only requests for PHP/Linux/MySql based solutions.
LAMP is a worthy technology suite for some applications - however I would much rather work with Poostgresql-Linux-Apache-Tomcat-Eclipse, (PLATE) as a starting point. Then if the customer's business grows you are in a good position to move up to heavier duty solutions.
But when you are buying and selling intangible goods like electricity and bandwidth on the open market,
I haven't looked into the issue of bandwidth cost in detail, but I know for sure that it is possible to get a good hard number on the cost of producing a kilowatt-hour of electricity, and it is done all the time. Companies know what their capital investments, fuel costs and operating expenses are or are likely to be, or can estimate the effects of changes in those costs. Before ANY power plant is built you can bet all of this is calculated to a fare-thee-well by the utility company. And there is no bullshit involved in this calculation. I know, I used to do that sort of calculation as part of my job (in a different, but related industry).
The situation with internet bandwidth may be a bit more complicated by fact of the matter is that it's an industry where things are unsettled and changing rapidly, both from an economic and regulatory point of view so making predictions is likely to be a lot riskier. But accounting practices are not the issue - cost engineering is a well established and definitely non-bullshit field. It's the unsettled nature of the business that makes predictions difficult.
Do you think it's really possible for UUNet, Sprint, and AT&T to precisely calculate the cost of transmitting a MB from point A to point B through their vast communication networks?
I think that they know very well how much per day it costs them to run their network, what their capital investment is and how much traffic in MB it carries each day. From that it is actually very easy to calculate what the cost is to move a MB from a to b. I am also sure they have a very good idea what their marginal costs are.
There's no law of supply and demand being followed by these bandwidth cartels.
I disagree with that strongly. Supply and demand is ALWAYS in force. If you raise the price too high, the demand will go down. Period. Look at the current situation with consumers today - we have many people using dialup because they don't want to pay the higher cost of the increased bandwidth of broadband.
And they certainly don't have to worry about setting the price to high. What are you going to do, start laying wire for your own personal Internet?
If the price goes to high you can BET somebody will start launching satellites or running more cable, or launching stratospheric planes, or installing wide area wireless, or deploying whatever other technology seems best at the time.
They've always seemed to be much more technology agnostic, and certainly got pretty far without any big name app servers behind them over the past 6-7 years.
I am not sure that Yahoo's commitment to FreeBSD is 'technology agnostic'. It seems to me more like they have some powerful internal political forces that are pushing them in this direction.
Many of the early internet companies like Yahoo put together their own custom development systems. Amazon and EBay are two other examples I'm aware of. As the internet matured, the costs to maintain these custom systems have gotten out of hand and these companies have switched to third party app servers. Both Amazon and EBay have moved to or are moving to Java.
Take OPEC for example. It's a group nations working cooperatively to maximize profits for the member nations by either creating artificial scarcity or oversupply.
One thing that prevents OEC from doing anything it wants with oil prices is that there are other sources of energy out there. If the price of oil gets to be over $45/barrel for a significant period of time, those other sources become competitive.
The Saudis understand this issue and have publically stated that they will not let the price of oil rise to the point where alternative energy sources are competitive.
Even cartels are subject to supply/demand laws if they distort a market too much.
Scrapping all of those to move to new hardware and OS just to THEN be able to port everything to Java is extremely costly, both hardware-wise and time-wise.
They are going to have to port everything anyway - their custom development environment is being scrapped. And where do you see evidence they need new hardware? And committing to FreeBSD? It seems to me that there are other platforms that are having a LOT more developer resources thrown at them. Will FreeBSD even be sustainable for a large enterprise 3-5 years from now?
I think that they are making a decision that is going to hurt bad when it bites them in the ass.
PHP is a very flexible and powerful language -- very useful for developing applications that need to be easily modifiable, debuggable and portable.
I agree with that in general (I do find Java debuggers to be significantly better than what is available for PHP, primarily due to the strong IDEs available for Java). However if your throw in maintainable and scalable I start to have real problems with PHP. That's why I said I like it for prototypes etc.
About 6 months ago my boss asked me to research the use of PHP on larger scale web sites, i.e. more than two servers for a single application. I went to sites like PHP.net, zend,com, etc. and found no such examples. And in fact some of the examples on these sites turned out to be places that had switched to Java since the example was posted. Now maybe these sites were out of date, but....
I cannot discuss them due to NDA restrictions
Makes it kind of hard to evaluate what you are saying. In any case I would have to say that I think the current leading edge UI technology is Flash MX using Flash Remoting to either ASP.NET or J2EE. And this is something that isn't supported by PHP at all.
You should quickly share your insights with the folks over at Yahoo!
Yahoo is doing some very strange things. They evaluated a bunch of web development technologies, decided J2EE was the best, and then chose to use PHP because FreeBSD has very bad support for threads.
Now to me that is putting the cart before the horse. First you choose what software you want to run, then you choose the platform you run it on.
certainly there are more applications, etc, available to run on microsoft platforms then on *nix platforms..
I don't know about that. *nix has been around for a long time, and there are a LOT of applications for it.
the unofficial standard for most things is gonna be microsfot's format
That's the fact. To be realistic it does a LOT to cut down on the number of applications users actually have the freedom to use. You can say Windows has xyz applications, but how many do spreadsheets on anything other than Excel?
It's also a serious issue that corporations and governments are starting to think about... Do you really want all of your documents in a format that is owned by one vendor?
what's gonna happen when a client sends your a power point presentation, and you're sitting there with your *nix box...
You would be surprised at how good Open Office is at reading MS formats.
i mean not as many features
And how many of those features actually have any practical value??
I haven't done a real in-depth study of Open Office vs. MS-Office features, however I have noticed that Open Office's menus are essentially a complete clone of MS Office's. That presents the user with a pretty good feature set to work with.
but overall there are unquantifiable things that need to be considered
Right - and I think the biggest one of these is license tracking. I've seen companies brought to their knes for weeks on end because Microsoft and the BSA conduct an audit. And when it's done they have to pay millions in fines.
The fact is that the decision to run Microsoft is software is essentially a decision to turn control of all of your companies computers over to Microsoft. You don't have source code, you are stuck with your data in a format controlled by one company, and you have agreed to a very restrictve license.
This is a very bad situation for a company to be in, and in my opinion completely intolerable for a government.
PHP is the defacto standard used by newbies and children who don't want to learn a real language like perl or Java. PHP is shit.
I think PHP has a valid niche in building throwaway code for demos. Things I've used it for include:
- extremely low cost web sites with limited functionality. A person looking to get a site on the web with a concept can build a php site and put in on a shared server for $10/mo in hosting fees.
- prototyping - some times it's necessary to put together a prototype of an idea to show to a client in a hurry.
For serious work, I agree with you.
Where is it? PHP has become the defacto standard for developing new websites.
If it has, it surely isn't reflected in available PHP jobs. Last time I looked on Dice there were 50 Java and 25 ASP jobs for every 1 PHP job.
The first 'cyberpunk' novel was clearly Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, published in 1975. His use of biological metaphor to describe a variety of invasive computer programs was a first; the term 'worm' was adapted from Shockwave Rider's term 'tapeworm' by researchers at Xerox PARC to describe the first self-replicating self-propagating computer program.
Shockwave Rider is why Robert Morris' hack is called the "Morris worm".
It seems to me that something like the H1-B visa program is putting technological education and eventually competitiveness in the US into a situation where severe long term damage to the economy is very likely.
If US companies are successful in using the H1-B program to alleviate wage pressure and shortages in technical jobs, there will be little or no financial incentive for US students to study engineering - short careers and pay not much different from mechanical trades is not going to attract top candidates to a difficult field of study.
The result will be fewer graduates - and with fewer students, the institutions capabable of graduating people with these skills will decay as well. This will exacerbate the skill shortage, and trigger additional demands for more such H1-B workers. The infrastructure to support the education of these candidates in their countries of origin will correspondingly flourish. These educational institutions will be fertile grounds for great new advances in technology while the decaying US institutions will not be able to respond in kind.
There is a great flaw in letting short term band-aids like the H1-B program drive a nation's policies - short term fixes are merely treating the symptoms.
I hate the whole issue of H1B reform, because rather than being framed in terms of fair treatment for H1B workers, it is framed in terms of "protecting American jobs." And any time that phrase comes up, it is a red flag for me.
It sseems to me that the concept of bringing highly qualified professionals to the US where there are cases that the skills are not available from native workers is a policy that has real merit to it. Surely the situation where you cannot compete because you can't find the workers with the skills you need is a very serious issue.
The problem arises when companies abuse the process in a variety of ways including firing current employees with the required skills in order to replace them with workers with lower pay expectations, or fail to look for native workers with any sort of good faith. There is a social cost associated with a worker displaced from his job. Worse you have a case of corporate malfeasence - the corporation is not acting in good faith according to the intent of the enabling legislation When this occurs the legislation must be adjusted. This is what the AFL/CIO is suggesting.
I have had my personal fortunes affected by this - but in a sense not typical to the IT market. My last employer was a French company, with operations in the US. Because of employment laws in France vs. the US it was much less expensive for them to lay off an American worker than a French worker. Therefore when cuts were needed my job and project went to France - not because of any cost savings, but because the French government was doing a better job of protecting their workers than the US was.
Now what should I feel about this? Other developed countries are protecting workers, while the US seems to be intent on discouraging it's own workers.
Why import them here where the cost of living is ridiculously high when you can have one or two middle managers here.
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White men leading the native troops into battle?
The fact seems to be that there are starting to be talent shortages in India's IT market. This will drive salaries up.....
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,
poor conditions in "third world" countries (as many of you have described them) are largely the effect of colonialism.
That is a long discredited Marxist theory. The fact is that many of the world's strongest economies (US, Australia, Canada, Taiwan, Malaysia, Chile, etc.) are former colonies.
Cheaper labor is not bad for the American economy, it's obviously good.
That is the antithesis of capitalism. The central tenant in a capitalistic society is the increase in worker productivity that comes form the investment in the production process. If workers are cheap there is no incentive to invest, and the economy stagnates.
It seems to me that countries with large ammounts of cheap labor are the countries with the worst economies. Countries with expensive labor are the countries with the best economies.
What is good for an economy is a worker who is productive, i.e. somebody who produces goods cheaply. The worker can be quite expensive so long as the productivity is high. That is very different from cheap labor.
The great advances in economies come when there are major advances in worker productivity through some technological advance or investment of capital. These times of increasing productivity are often triggered by labor shortages.
The classic example was the change and improvement in the status of peasents immediately following the Black Death in Europe. The plague obviously led to a large shortage of labor; this led to a great increase in the status of the worker because of the shortage of and increased expense of labor.
http://www.planetpapers.com/Assets/1682.php
If the H1B program's primary effect is to keep wages down in the US it should be scrapped immediately because it will have an extremely negative effect in the long term growth of worker productivity.
After all, if you had problems with the conduct of the organization as a whole, you'd have moved/quit.
So if some terrorist decides that my country has offended him in some gross way, and kills me because I happen to be a citizen of that country, it is my fault for not leaving that country?
Are you totally cracked? Insane? Nuts?
Sure, there are plenty of things I don't agree with in the way my country conducts itself. But does that mean I must leave the country? What a crock! Haven't you ever heard of the concept of trying to change things as a constructive member of society?
The fact of the matter is that there will ALWAYS be somebody that has an axe to grind against any large organization. There is no country on Earth that is satisfactory to every human on the face of the planet. So if you feel this action is ok, then we are consigned to random violence and anarchy forever.
The question is how are you going to resolve the problem. Is killing randown citizens (and yes children who have no say in where they live) the answer? If you think yes, then you have eschewed every civilized principle that seperates modern man from primitive.
(1) You're saying that Dow employees are not representatives of Dow because they're "poor working stiffs"?
Yup. They had NOTHING to do with the decisions made by Union Carbide some 25-30 years ago when this Bhopal facility was being planned. Making some low level employee of one company accountable for the actions of another company acquired in a financial transaction is the most perverse, twisted notion I have ever encountered.
(2) What "assault"? Returning Dow property (spilled chemicals) to a Dow office?
Yup. Somebody dropping chemical waste into my immediate environment surely qualifies as an assault on me.
Do you as a person expect to be able to walk down the street, randomly shooting pedestrians
Nope. Now please explain to me how this has anything with a receptionist working for Dow in India.
So why should Dow have the manufactured freedom to kill thousands of people and escape any responsibility for their actions?
Dow didn't kill any of these people. A company that Dow acquired 2 years ago in a financial transaction made some mistakes - and Dow now inherits the liabilities associated with those mistakes.
That does not justify criminal acts against Dow in any way.
A more "fair" comaprison pollution/GDP Per Capita, as opposed to your comparison of pollution/gross GDP.
That is just not right. Per capita comparisons in greenhouse gas production do not reflect the real, important goal - sustainable economic development. Sure, China has a much lower per capita greenhouse gas consumption - but China as is still a developing country with a rapidly growing economy.
The real goal is minimization of energy consumption per dollar of GDP, not just stopping CO2 emissions. That we could do (at great human cost) by simply turning everything off. If we cut emissions per $ GDP, we can actually improve the human condition.
According to the UN...
A number of sources claim this data is phoney. In particular China is widely believed to be underreporting coal consumption. In fact, the combined reduction in CO2 emissions and increase in economic activity that China is claiming is without precedent in world history, and as such is extremely unlikely to be anything close to the truth.
Here is what the WWF says about China's greenhouse gas status:
Overview
The 1990s was the hottest decade in the past millennium. CO2 emissions worldwide are now around 12 times higher than they were in 1900 as the world burns increasing quantities of coal, oil and gas for energy. The global temperature build-up is seriously disrupting the natural balance of the world's climate, creating more extreme weather conditions and putting one-third of the world's forests at risk, as well as the species that depend on forests for their survival.
China currently accounts for 13% of the global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, ranking second after the US. Although China signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, commitments have yet to be made in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the past two decades, China has experienced massive economic development and social change. With an average economic growth rate of 9% per year, the energy system plays a central role in shaping development in industry, agriculture, and the service sectors.
China has achieved considerable progress in improving energy efficiency and CO2 emissions reduction. However, 70% of energy production is still dependent on coal, and demand for automobiles is growing fast. China¦s challenge will be to shift its energy mix into a cleaner path, particularly in the development and dissemination of new and renewable energy technologies, and promoting structural change for more efficient energy use.
Basic facts
* China is set to overtake the US (at 21%) as the biggest producer of greenhouse gases by 2025 unless current trends are modified.
* 7 of the world's 10 most polluted cities are in China
* economic losses and health costs due to pollution alone are equal to 8% of China's GDP (source: the World Bank)
* acid rain in China is widespread, causing severe damage to crops and forests
* more than 70% of China's energy production is from burning coal
Key threats
* Use of unsustainable energy sources, such as coal and oil, which leads to air and water pollution and global warming
* Non-sustainable consumption patterns and wasteful use of energy
Another interesting that seems to slip through the cracks is that the "former Soviet Union" countries emit more greehouse gases than the US does.
And here is another good one - while the US emissions grew 5% over the period of 1995-2001, The emissions per GDP went down 11%.
Also you might want to look at the other signatories of the Kyoto convention, and what their performance is. For example Japan has been recently averaging a 1.1% growth in greenhouse gas emissions per year - and that's for a country that is essentially economically stagnant.