Big university systems should have admins a lot more knowledable than me, so I expect them to have more stronger measures in place.
hardly.... at the school i went to, and i suspect many others, the systems administrators (on the systems students had access to) were just work study students, many of whom barely knew what they were doing.
also, not having a compiler installed isn't always an option- a lot of the higher level cs classes that i took required us to turn in irix or solaris binaries along with the source code . obviously not many of the students had access to their own solaris or irix boxes, so they had to make use of their accounts on the university servers to compile and test them. (which always made things interesting when the operating systems classes started learning about fork(2))
this might be insightful except for the fact that he took quotes from two separate reasons and put them next to each other. He does go on to say after the first quote that supporting the customer is essential to success with a subscription based model.
then he goes on to the next reason, which is that you need to retain a lot of good lawyers to run a mmog. it discusses lawsuits in small claims courts from players regarding hacking, cheating, etc. as well as the commonly disputed issue of who owns all of the virtual stuff. in the game.
in short, retaining lawyers is a necessary (and frustrating) expense, not supporting the customer...
the editors can't even figure out if they've already already posted something (an article on the mac mini two days after the fact? how could you possibly have missed it the first time around?)
now they're afraid that we might think they actually research and verify the articles before linking to them?
for most applications you wouldn't get anywhere near the same benefit you would from having an equivalent number of processors in one machine, due to the much lower communication bandwidth between the cpu's. even gigabit ethernet doesn't compare to the bandwidth that processors in an smp system have access to, and i'm pretty sure the mac mini only has 100 mbit networking. given the right setup, you could probably run multithreaded applications spread accross several computers, but the performance will be less than stellar.
typically the applications that benefit most from clustering are ones that involve a lot of highly paralellizable steps- operations each computer can perform independently of the other computers without having to communicate with the other computers until they are done. common examples include cg rendering and certain classes of large mathematical problems such as factoring large numbers. other examples would be brute force searches a la distributed.net and seti@home, or distributed compiling of large projects (e.g. gentoo's distcc). however, the more times your problem requires one node to access data that resides on other nodes, the worse your performance is going to be.
in short, just because you are running multi-threaded applications doesn't mean you can expect a properly configured cluster to compare performance-wise with an 'equivalent' smp machine.
as i understand it, there were very few changes involved, and they aren't going to be that difficult to backport. the problem was that there wasn't enough time between the bug being fixed in the trunk and the release of ff1.0 to verify that the change didn't cause more serious problems than the one it fixed.
i believe the plan is for this fix to be included in all future releases of ff/moz/whatever. (unless somebody finds some big problems with it between now and then) they just didn't want to rush it into 1.0.
huh. i had always wondered what idiot came up with that name. i still think it's a dumb name, and a pretty useless law, but at least it makes sense now....
up until now, i had always interpreted can-spam the same as you.
sorry, but even my grandma knows the difference between right and left. in my experience, novices have a much harder time grasping the difference between single and double click than between left and right click.
i remember an interview once with an actress from a movie where they spent a lot of time driving like maniacs around closed courses and sets while filming the movie (and most of the driving was done by the actors/actresses). she said by the time they were done making the movie there would usually be cops sitting outside the movie studio at the end of the day ready to give speeding tickets to the actors leaving work for the day.
i did something sort of like that for a while. last time i moved, i didn't get internet access at my new apartment for about 3 months. i still powered up the access point, which was hooked up to an old web server i use for testing, so that i still mess around with it using my wife's laptop when i had reason to. i had some security enabled on it, but less than any of the other access points in range from my unit.
i never looked at the logs that close to really see if anyone had tried, but it was amusing to imagine somebody's frustration after successfully hacking in and then finding out that they didn't have access to anything useful.
when i finally got cable, i added mac filters to the configuration, just in case.
ice is less dense than water, hence why it floats.
around 4 degrees celcius, the water molecules start to form a crystalline structure. the orientation the water molecules take when crystallising pushes them further apart than they were when they were a liquid. so between 4 degrees and 0 degrees celcius, water actually expands as it cools.
not to mention that the density of salt water is not the same as pure water either...
i would hardly consider what we have here to be a reasonable choice, and (imo) they all at best barely qualifies as affordable.
in almost all of the US you have exactly one cable provider. cable internet costs a ridiculous amount of money unless you are also a cable tv subscriber. (minimum $55/month for cable internet or ~$80 for internet and tv(*))
if you choose dsl instead, you do have choices, but they still suck. choice 1 is to get the crappy service offered by the local phone monopoly. in many areas you can get something like 384/128 DSL for about $20-$30 a month, but in order to get that price you have to get a full blown phone line package including voicemail, talking caller id, unlimited redial, and all kinds of other crap that almost no one needs. so you can get crappy dsl for under $30 a month, but you're paying maybe as much as $50 a month for your phone bills before any per call or per minute charges. alteratively you can get your dsl through a reseller, which will give you much higher speeds (and usually higher reliability), but will cost at least $60 a month because the phone companies here treat the resellers about the same way as your provider over there was doing. and on top of that, every once in a while the phone companies will perform some kind of maintenance on their circuits, "inadvertantly" knocking the resellers customers offline for as long as it takes them to get around to "fixing" the problem.
in my opinion none of these are very good choices, and i don't really consider any of them affordable. maybe it is better than what you have- i have no idea what broadband costs in australia- but it still seems ridiculous to me. having choices doesn't help if they all stink.
from time to time there are other options that pop up, but none ever seem to last long or cover a very large area.
for example, about 4 years ago there was a slashdot article about "broadband from the world's tallest building" where sprint put an antenna on top of the sears tower and anyone within line of sight (most of metro chicago) could get speeds that were (at the time) better than DSL. they only offered the service to new subscribers for a few months, but they are still supporting the customers who signed up at the time. one of my friends who couldn't get cable or dsl (despite living barely a mile from downtown chicago) got the service and still has it today. people take the antennas with them from apartment to aparment when they moved, and as recently as last year i had a conversation with somebody who was selling his account to a friend because he was moving out of the area.
there are still people struggling to light up the ricochet network that shut down years ago. i believe modern ricochet hardware can get something like 256-384 kbps wirelessly, and the service costs $25 a month, but the network has changed hands several times due to financial struggles, and it is currently only available in 2 cities (denver and san diego). iirc, there are 22 other cities that have dormant ricochet networks that were set up in the late 90's before the company that set them up went bankrupt. some of them have never been activated, while others were only live for a few weeks before being shut down again.
(*) this is a wild ass guess, as i have not had cable for sometime, but vaguely remember what the bill was when my roomate had it
So the only way for the 'government to cover the cost' is to have the taxpayers pay for it.
or ensuring that the recipients of that money are using it properly. the problem in the US is not taxes or funding, the problem is that the government protected monopolies that are responsible for providing the technology (and that do make money) don't have any incentive to provide better service, because the fcc isn't doing its job.
i've wondered about this myself. i've had cingualr for about a year now and as far as i can tell there is no way that i can disable incoming sms messages, which i have to pay for.
fortunately, at the moment there is only one person who ever sends me text messages, although i've never figured out why- he only ever messages me to tell me he tried to call me and i didn't answer. if it ever got to the point where it was costing me more than ~30 cents a month, i'd be pissed about thid idiocy, but for the time being, i've accepted it, although that's one more reason that i likely won't stay with cingular much longer.
hopefully sprint hasn't started doing anything dumb like that since i left them.
these days americans don't have equity. they buy their houses with interest only ARMs, and hope they can make money on appreciation. many people don't even make down payments any more.
But hey- software should only be for the rich, right?
most of the work i've done over the past three years hasn't been software written for (or more appropriately, at the request of) individual people, but software for companies, government organizations, or trade groups (which is then used by their customers or constituents). there are a lot of software development projects these days that don't require large teams and years of work to take on, due to the increasing prevalence of both open source solutions and reusable software components. a lot of not-so-rich companies and organizations can now afford to pay for either custom written software or customizations to off-the-shelf software.
As to whether the service could be provided from halfway around the world- many companies and organizations like to be able to meet with their vendors and to know that when they have a problem that needs attention their vendors keep the same or roughly the same hours as they do. both of these are much more difficult when your vendor is located half way around the world. and apparently this may come as a shock to you, but many people have considerations other than the absolute lowest price when choosing products, else apple and microsoft (for example) would have died years ago.
and there are a lot of potential customers that will never leave the united states. near chicago for example, there are a ton of jobs (if you have the right experience) available with the chicago board of trade and chicago board options exchange (cboe/cbot) and the dozens of companies that do work for them. they're not going anywhere any time soon. i suspect the same is true in new york. one of my clients at a previous job was the cook county treasurer's office. they're certainly not moving to the caymans. neither is the alameda/contra-costa transit district.
I'm talking about the ORIGINAL reason for the 30 year loan- which has been around since the 1890s.
alright, i was wrong on that point, and i will concede that. however, my point remains that finding a job that will outlast your mortgage is almost unheard of in any field these days, and that has been the case for many years now, long before outsourcing was considered a problem. a lot has been written about that trend by many people more knowledgeable about the subject than me, but the short version goes something like this:
long ago, the road to job security was specialization. you spent your career learning how to do one job, and doing it well. as long as that job was needed, you had job security. even if your employer closed down, there would be others who were in need of that skill. with the rise of electronics and a host of other new advancements which came out of world war 2, the cold war, and the space race, it was discovered that many of these jobs that required a high degree of specialization happened to be the same types of jobs that could most efficiently be automated by machines. as more and more jobs became automated, the demand for highly specialized workers dwindled. in many of the jobs that could not be automated, being overspecialized was no longer an advantage, but a weakness. now the desirable employees were the ones who could quickly learn new skills as needed, often supervising the ever more advanced machines that had taken their highly specialized co-workers jobs.
in short, the reason it was once common to expect to hold the same job for most or all of your career was that the accepted road to job security was to learn a skill that few posessed and to live off that one skill for the rest of your carreer. with the currentstate of technology, this is no longer practical. even if you could learn such a skill there is no guarantee that there will still be a demand for that skill in 2, 3, 5, or 10 years. such is life.
as an aside, the idea that you could find one job that would last your entire career 30 years didn't hold for my parents or my mothers parents either. and even if it still held now, i don't think i would want to work in a field where that was expected. i'd rather have a job that i might lose in a year than one i'm expected to keep for the next 10.
because in order for the electron guns to do their job properly, the electrons have to travel through a vaccuum. i doubt you could make a good vaccuum out of an inflated mylar bag. aluminum might work, but you probably want a non-conductive material...
1. It seems nobody cared that the user interface becomes blurry and unreadable if you set screen resolution to anything other than integer fractions of the maximum resolutions supported by the flat screens. Unless you want to pay premium for killer video cards to go along with the flat screens, or watching a giant black border on the screen, your 3d gaming performance will go down because of this flat panel 'feature'. You definitely DON'T want ugly scaling on real time streategy games.
I had a dell inspiron lapop that i used for about 3 years, with a 1600x1200 lcd display. the only resolution that ever looked bad was 1280x1024, as the aspect ratio is not the same. 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, and 1400x1040 (iirc) all looked just fine. on a decent lcd screen, you don't need integer fractions- you just need to make sure you are using resolutions that are the same aspect ratio.
that being said, the article is about TV's, where this is not as much of an issue. there are only like resolutions that tv's run at, and the are all the same aspect ratio.
my personal belief is that software development is moving away from the manufacturing "boxed product" mindset to service provider mindset.
if you believe that software is a boxed product and a prospective customer can pick any one of a number of nearly identical boxes based purely on price, then i can see why you claim there is no reason those box manufacturers could not all move to a region where making boxes is the cheapest.
however, if you believe that software can be provided as a service, and that software providers should be responsive to their customers needs, as i and as the companies i have worked for do, then there are numerous benefits to being located near your customers which outweigh any cost savings that could be gained by moving your company halfway around the globe.
and lastly: The reason there is such a thing as a 30 year loan is that was at one time the expectation
i may be wrong on this, but i believe that 30 year loans are a fairly recent phenomenon. the reason that 30 year loans exist is that the sums involved are to high to pay off in a shorter time period, regardless of your job or occupation. it has nothing to do with how long you are expected to work at your current employer. ask any mortgage broker and they will tell you that something like 98% of home buyers will sell or refinance their house within 7 years (hence the surge in popularity in ARMs and interest only mortgages in the last 5-10 years).
Which only means you aren't competing on a global market, yet. For those of us who have lost jobs to the global market, the $7200/year is what we have to compete with- there's NO reason whatsoever that any given software house has to be in the United States.
if this were really true, they'd already all be gone.
there ain't no such thing as a 30 year software job to go with that 30 year mortgage.
there's no such thing as a 30 year job in any field to go with a 30 year mortgage. if you take out a mortgage, or a car loan, or any long term loan, this is a risk you take regardless of preofession. i will acknowledge that at the moment the risks in my field are higher than the risks in many others, however, in 3, 5, 10, or 15 years, that may not (and likely will not) be the case.
Really? They earned less than $7,200/year (which is the global starting salary for a software developer these days
no, they earned less than the starting salary of myself and just about every other software developer that i know or went to school with, most of whom graduated well after the dot com bust, and some of whom are graduating and finding jobs even now (for much more than $7200 a year i might add)
despite what all the raving lunatics on slashdot have you believing, there will always be a market for good software developers in the U.S. the real problem is the number of people who went into programming 5-10 years ago seeing easy dollar signs floating in front of them who are now pissed off when they have to work for it just like everyone else, and blame foreigners and outsourcing for the fact that they were duped into studying a field in which the both the supply and demand for jobs was unsustainaby high.
Heck, I have great doubts that you will even be employed a year from now when your company goes bankrupt.
well, i was just hired at my current job 5 months ago. they've hired 2 more developers and several designers since then. they'll probably hire more as soon as they can move into a larger space, as they've literally filled up every open desk in the office. now, i don't have a crystal ball, so i can't really argue convincingly with you on this one, but i'd say the signs look good so far. how about i get back to you in a year or two and let you know how it went?
It's also about being able to depend on having the same job for more than a few months at a time, and/or find another one quick when the company goes bankrupt.
true enough. unless you are willing and capable of working for yourself, it certainly helps to have a good and reliable employer, but that would be true in any field. nothing particular to software developers there....
actually, i agree with everything you say in this post. (note when i commented in my previous post that if the government stopped supporting airlines to the extent that they did, they could probably stop subsidizing amtrak and other rail passenger services to the extent that they do as well.)
my only objection was to your original statement that the airlines could simplify things by just charging what it costs to fill the seat. there are a lot of variables in airline flight scheduling, requiring airlines to make estimates about what flights will be profitable or sustainable months or even years in advance. likewise, setting the prices requires making a lot of estimates far in advance, and most of those estimates are unable to be verified until after the plan actually flies (at which point it is too late to change the price)
airlines that estimate well will usually be profitable. airlines that do poorly will not, and should go out of business or be taken over by somebody else. (unfortunately, they do not, as the government has them solidly propped up, as you and i have both pointed out) many airlines are able to be profitable, even offering discount fares. so the problem is not that all airlines are discounting their prices too much, it's just that some airlines are not doing a good job of estimating demand and providing supply accordingly. whether they are unable to do this, or just don't care because they know the friendly government will keep them going is a discusion for another time.
my parents lived the "american dream" of getting married, buying a house, having two kids, and even sending their two kids to good private schools, all on salaries lower than the average starting salary for a decent software devloper. i make more money than my father at a job where i have worked less than six months even though he has been working at the same place for 13 years and is nearly finished with his Ph.D.
likewise, my wife an i are closing on a house this week, and although kids aren't on the horizon now, i have no doubt we will be able to make ends meet when the time comes.
given what i know of the people i went to school with, as well as my wife and the people she and i work or have worked with, computer programmers (even now, after the bust) still make a decent amount more than many other fields with comparable work and comparable or greater school requirements. somehow many of these people, who make far less money than the average computer programmer of equivalent experience, have found a way to afford your american dream.... in short it's all about priorities, budgeting and living within your means.
i'd like to agree with you, but to be honest, lately it seems as though reading and writing and thinking in general are becoming a smaller and smaller part of the average person's life.
it's starting to remind me of a quote i read when i was much younger by (i believe) a sci-fi author whose name i've long forgotten:
the danger is not that machines will one day learn to think like people, but that people will one day begin to think like machines.
this is your mistake right here. while it is no big deal for you and i and even my relatively (to slashdot) non-computer-savvy wife to create an efficient filing structure to store all of our information, the vast majority of home ocmputer users are not like that. there are a great many people who have difficulty with the concept of creating and managing directories. other people are very poor at organization, regardless of how good they are with computers. i know people who just throw anything and everything into "My Documents". i've seen other people who keep everything they are working on on their desktop. when it gets too cluttered, they grab every file and folder on their desktop and drag in into a folder called "Desktop Junk". in either case, after a while it gets difficult to find things. for people like tis, desktop search is wonderful. just keep everything in one place, and google will find it for you when you need it.
i use google desktop at work, but i use it for email, not for files. using google desktop allows me to use outlook the same way that i would use gmail. i only have two folders in outlook- inbox and archive. once i read something it goes into archive. stuff that is temporal and not really work related (e.g. so-and-so in accounting is out sick today) gets deleted immediately. once something is in the archive it will never be deleted. if i ever need an old email from the archive- google desktop can find it for me nearly instantly. this allows me for the first time in my life to keep my inbox almost completely uncluttered without ever having to spend a lot of time sorting through emails and figuring out what needs to be saved, what doesn't, and where to file things.
Slashdot Mirror
Big university systems should have admins a lot more knowledable than me, so I expect them to have more stronger measures in place.
hardly.... at the school i went to, and i suspect many others, the systems administrators (on the systems students had access to) were just work study students, many of whom barely knew what they were doing.
also, not having a compiler installed isn't always an option- a lot of the higher level cs classes that i took required us to turn in irix or solaris binaries along with the source code . obviously not many of the students had access to their own solaris or irix boxes, so they had to make use of their accounts on the university servers to compile and test them. (which always made things interesting when the operating systems classes started learning about fork(2))
this might be insightful except for the fact that he took quotes from two separate reasons and put them next to each other. He does go on to say after the first quote that supporting the customer is essential to success with a subscription based model.
then he goes on to the next reason, which is that you need to retain a lot of good lawyers to run a mmog. it discusses lawsuits in small claims courts from players regarding hacking, cheating, etc. as well as the commonly disputed issue of who owns all of the virtual stuff. in the game.
in short, retaining lawyers is a necessary (and frustrating) expense, not supporting the customer...
it's been in a lot more places than rumor sites and tabloids.
well, hello...
the editors can't even figure out if they've already already posted something (an article on the mac mini two days after the fact? how could you possibly have missed it the first time around?)
now they're afraid that we might think they actually research and verify the articles before linking to them?
for most applications you wouldn't get anywhere near the same benefit you would from having an equivalent number of processors in one machine, due to the much lower communication bandwidth between the cpu's. even gigabit ethernet doesn't compare to the bandwidth that processors in an smp system have access to, and i'm pretty sure the mac mini only has 100 mbit networking. given the right setup, you could probably run multithreaded applications spread accross several computers, but the performance will be less than stellar.
typically the applications that benefit most from clustering are ones that involve a lot of highly paralellizable steps- operations each computer can perform independently of the other computers without having to communicate with the other computers until they are done. common examples include cg rendering and certain classes of large mathematical problems such as factoring large numbers. other examples would be brute force searches a la distributed.net and seti@home, or distributed compiling of large projects (e.g. gentoo's distcc). however, the more times your problem requires one node to access data that resides on other nodes, the worse your performance is going to be.
in short, just because you are running multi-threaded applications doesn't mean you can expect a properly configured cluster to compare performance-wise with an 'equivalent' smp machine.
as i understand it, there were very few changes involved, and they aren't going to be that difficult to backport. the problem was that there wasn't enough time between the bug being fixed in the trunk and the release of ff1.0 to verify that the change didn't cause more serious problems than the one it fixed.
i believe the plan is for this fix to be included in all future releases of ff/moz/whatever. (unless somebody finds some big problems with it between now and then) they just didn't want to rush it into 1.0.
huh. i had always wondered what idiot came up with that name. i still think it's a dumb name, and a pretty useless law, but at least it makes sense now....
up until now, i had always interpreted can-spam the same as you.
sorry, but even my grandma knows the difference between right and left. in my experience, novices have a much harder time grasping the difference between single and double click than between left and right click.
i remember an interview once with an actress from a movie where they spent a lot of time driving like maniacs around closed courses and sets while filming the movie (and most of the driving was done by the actors/actresses). she said by the time they were done making the movie there would usually be cops sitting outside the movie studio at the end of the day ready to give speeding tickets to the actors leaving work for the day.
i did something sort of like that for a while. last time i moved, i didn't get internet access at my new apartment for about 3 months. i still powered up the access point, which was hooked up to an old web server i use for testing, so that i still mess around with it using my wife's laptop when i had reason to. i had some security enabled on it, but less than any of the other access points in range from my unit.
i never looked at the logs that close to really see if anyone had tried, but it was amusing to imagine somebody's frustration after successfully hacking in and then finding out that they didn't have access to anything useful.
when i finally got cable, i added mac filters to the configuration, just in case.
ice is less dense than water, hence why it floats.
around 4 degrees celcius, the water molecules start to form a crystalline structure. the orientation the water molecules take when crystallising pushes them further apart than they were when they were a liquid. so between 4 degrees and 0 degrees celcius, water actually expands as it cools.
not to mention that the density of salt water is not the same as pure water either...
i would hardly consider what we have here to be a reasonable choice, and (imo) they all at best barely qualifies as affordable.
in almost all of the US you have exactly one cable provider. cable internet costs a ridiculous amount of money unless you are also a cable tv subscriber. (minimum $55/month for cable internet or ~$80 for internet and tv(*))
if you choose dsl instead, you do have choices, but they still suck. choice 1 is to get the crappy service offered by the local phone monopoly. in many areas you can get something like 384/128 DSL for about $20-$30 a month, but in order to get that price you have to get a full blown phone line package including voicemail, talking caller id, unlimited redial, and all kinds of other crap that almost no one needs. so you can get crappy dsl for under $30 a month, but you're paying maybe as much as $50 a month for your phone bills before any per call or per minute charges. alteratively you can get your dsl through a reseller, which will give you much higher speeds (and usually higher reliability), but will cost at least $60 a month because the phone companies here treat the resellers about the same way as your provider over there was doing. and on top of that, every once in a while the phone companies will perform some kind of maintenance on their circuits, "inadvertantly" knocking the resellers customers offline for as long as it takes them to get around to "fixing" the problem.
in my opinion none of these are very good choices, and i don't really consider any of them affordable. maybe it is better than what you have- i have no idea what broadband costs in australia- but it still seems ridiculous to me. having choices doesn't help if they all stink.
from time to time there are other options that pop up, but none ever seem to last long or cover a very large area.
for example, about 4 years ago there was a slashdot article about "broadband from the world's tallest building" where sprint put an antenna on top of the sears tower and anyone within line of sight (most of metro chicago) could get speeds that were (at the time) better than DSL. they only offered the service to new subscribers for a few months, but they are still supporting the customers who signed up at the time. one of my friends who couldn't get cable or dsl (despite living barely a mile from downtown chicago) got the service and still has it today. people take the antennas with them from apartment to aparment when they moved, and as recently as last year i had a conversation with somebody who was selling his account to a friend because he was moving out of the area.
there are still people struggling to light up the ricochet network that shut down years ago. i believe modern ricochet hardware can get something like 256-384 kbps wirelessly, and the service costs $25 a month, but the network has changed hands several times due to financial struggles, and it is currently only available in 2 cities (denver and san diego). iirc, there are 22 other cities that have dormant ricochet networks that were set up in the late 90's before the company that set them up went bankrupt. some of them have never been activated, while others were only live for a few weeks before being shut down again.
(*) this is a wild ass guess, as i have not had cable for sometime, but vaguely remember what the bill was when my roomate had it
So the only way for the 'government to cover the cost' is to have the taxpayers pay for it.
or ensuring that the recipients of that money are using it properly. the problem in the US is not taxes or funding, the problem is that the government protected monopolies that are responsible for providing the technology (and that do make money) don't have any incentive to provide better service, because the fcc isn't doing its job.
i've wondered about this myself. i've had cingualr for about a year now and as far as i can tell there is no way that i can disable incoming sms messages, which i have to pay for.
fortunately, at the moment there is only one person who ever sends me text messages, although i've never figured out why- he only ever messages me to tell me he tried to call me and i didn't answer. if it ever got to the point where it was costing me more than ~30 cents a month, i'd be pissed about thid idiocy, but for the time being, i've accepted it, although that's one more reason that i likely won't stay with cingular much longer.
hopefully sprint hasn't started doing anything dumb like that since i left them.
these days americans don't have equity. they buy their houses with interest only ARMs, and hope they can make money on appreciation. many people don't even make down payments any more.
But hey- software should only be for the rich, right?
most of the work i've done over the past three years hasn't been software written for (or more appropriately, at the request of) individual people, but software for companies, government organizations, or trade groups (which is then used by their customers or constituents). there are a lot of software development projects these days that don't require large teams and years of work to take on, due to the increasing prevalence of both open source solutions and reusable software components. a lot of not-so-rich companies and organizations can now afford to pay for either custom written software or customizations to off-the-shelf software.
As to whether the service could be provided from halfway around the world- many companies and organizations like to be able to meet with their vendors and to know that when they have a problem that needs attention their vendors keep the same or roughly the same hours as they do. both of these are much more difficult when your vendor is located half way around the world. and apparently this may come as a shock to you, but many people have considerations other than the absolute lowest price when choosing products, else apple and microsoft (for example) would have died years ago.
and there are a lot of potential customers that will never leave the united states. near chicago for example, there are a ton of jobs (if you have the right experience) available with the chicago board of trade and chicago board options exchange (cboe/cbot) and the dozens of companies that do work for them. they're not going anywhere any time soon. i suspect the same is true in new york. one of my clients at a previous job was the cook county treasurer's office. they're certainly not moving to the caymans. neither is the alameda/contra-costa transit district.
I'm talking about the ORIGINAL reason for the 30 year loan- which has been around since the 1890s.
alright, i was wrong on that point, and i will concede that. however, my point remains that finding a job that will outlast your mortgage is almost unheard of in any field these days, and that has been the case for many years now, long before outsourcing was considered a problem. a lot has been written about that trend by many people more knowledgeable about the subject than me, but the short version goes something like this:
long ago, the road to job security was specialization. you spent your career learning how to do one job, and doing it well. as long as that job was needed, you had job security. even if your employer closed down, there would be others who were in need of that skill. with the rise of electronics and a host of other new advancements which came out of world war 2, the cold war, and the space race, it was discovered that many of these jobs that required a high degree of specialization happened to be the same types of jobs that could most efficiently be automated by machines. as more and more jobs became automated, the demand for highly specialized workers dwindled. in many of the jobs that could not be automated, being overspecialized was no longer an advantage, but a weakness. now the desirable employees were the ones who could quickly learn new skills as needed, often supervising the ever more advanced machines that had taken their highly specialized co-workers jobs.
in short, the reason it was once common to expect to hold the same job for most or all of your career was that the accepted road to job security was to learn a skill that few posessed and to live off that one skill for the rest of your carreer. with the currentstate of technology, this is no longer practical. even if you could learn such a skill there is no guarantee that there will still be a demand for that skill in 2, 3, 5, or 10 years. such is life.
as an aside, the idea that you could find one job that would last your entire career 30 years didn't hold for my parents or my mothers parents either. and even if it still held now, i don't think i would want to work in a field where that was expected. i'd rather have a job that i might lose in a year than one i'm expected to keep for the next 10.
because in order for the electron guns to do their job properly, the electrons have to travel through a vaccuum. i doubt you could make a good vaccuum out of an inflated mylar bag. aluminum might work, but you probably want a non-conductive material...
1. It seems nobody cared that the user interface becomes blurry and unreadable if you set screen resolution to anything other than integer fractions of the maximum resolutions supported by the flat screens. Unless you want to pay premium for killer video cards to go along with the flat screens, or watching a giant black border on the screen, your 3d gaming performance will go down because of this flat panel 'feature'. You definitely DON'T want ugly scaling on real time streategy games.
I had a dell inspiron lapop that i used for about 3 years, with a 1600x1200 lcd display. the only resolution that ever looked bad was 1280x1024, as the aspect ratio is not the same. 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, and 1400x1040 (iirc) all looked just fine. on a decent lcd screen, you don't need integer fractions- you just need to make sure you are using resolutions that are the same aspect ratio.
that being said, the article is about TV's, where this is not as much of an issue. there are only like resolutions that tv's run at, and the are all the same aspect ratio.
my personal belief is that software development is moving away from the manufacturing "boxed product" mindset to service provider mindset.
if you believe that software is a boxed product and a prospective customer can pick any one of a number of nearly identical boxes based purely on price, then i can see why you claim there is no reason those box manufacturers could not all move to a region where making boxes is the cheapest.
however, if you believe that software can be provided as a service, and that software providers should be responsive to their customers needs, as i and as the companies i have worked for do, then there are numerous benefits to being located near your customers which outweigh any cost savings that could be gained by moving your company halfway around the globe.
and lastly:
The reason there is such a thing as a 30 year loan is that was at one time the expectation
i may be wrong on this, but i believe that 30 year loans are a fairly recent phenomenon. the reason that 30 year loans exist is that the sums involved are to high to pay off in a shorter time period, regardless of your job or occupation. it has nothing to do with how long you are expected to work at your current employer. ask any mortgage broker and they will tell you that something like 98% of home buyers will sell or refinance their house within 7 years (hence the surge in popularity in ARMs and interest only mortgages in the last 5-10 years).
Which only means you aren't competing on a global market, yet. For those of us who have lost jobs to the global market, the $7200/year is what we have to compete with- there's NO reason whatsoever that any given software house has to be in the United States.
if this were really true, they'd already all be gone.
there ain't no such thing as a 30 year software job to go with that 30 year mortgage.
there's no such thing as a 30 year job in any field to go with a 30 year mortgage. if you take out a mortgage, or a car loan, or any long term loan, this is a risk you take regardless of preofession. i will acknowledge that at the moment the risks in my field are higher than the risks in many others, however, in 3, 5, 10, or 15 years, that may not (and likely will not) be the case.
Really? They earned less than $7,200/year (which is the global starting salary for a software developer these days
no, they earned less than the starting salary of myself and just about every other software developer that i know or went to school with, most of whom graduated well after the dot com bust, and some of whom are graduating and finding jobs even now (for much more than $7200 a year i might add)
despite what all the raving lunatics on slashdot have you believing, there will always be a market for good software developers in the U.S. the real problem is the number of people who went into programming 5-10 years ago seeing easy dollar signs floating in front of them who are now pissed off when they have to work for it just like everyone else, and blame foreigners and outsourcing for the fact that they were duped into studying a field in which the both the supply and demand for jobs was unsustainaby high.
Heck, I have great doubts that you will even be employed a year from now when your company goes bankrupt.
well, i was just hired at my current job 5 months ago. they've hired 2 more developers and several designers since then. they'll probably hire more as soon as they can move into a larger space, as they've literally filled up every open desk in the office. now, i don't have a crystal ball, so i can't really argue convincingly with you on this one, but i'd say the signs look good so far. how about i get back to you in a year or two and let you know how it went?
It's also about being able to depend on having the same job for more than a few months at a time, and/or find another one quick when the company goes bankrupt.
true enough. unless you are willing and capable of working for yourself, it certainly helps to have a good and reliable employer, but that would be true in any field. nothing particular to software developers there....
actually, i agree with everything you say in this post. (note when i commented in my previous post that if the government stopped supporting airlines to the extent that they did, they could probably stop subsidizing amtrak and other rail passenger services to the extent that they do as well.)
my only objection was to your original statement that the airlines could simplify things by just charging what it costs to fill the seat. there are a lot of variables in airline flight scheduling, requiring airlines to make estimates about what flights will be profitable or sustainable months or even years in advance. likewise, setting the prices requires making a lot of estimates far in advance, and most of those estimates are unable to be verified until after the plan actually flies (at which point it is too late to change the price)
airlines that estimate well will usually be profitable. airlines that do poorly will not, and should go out of business or be taken over by somebody else. (unfortunately, they do not, as the government has them solidly propped up, as you and i have both pointed out) many airlines are able to be profitable, even offering discount fares. so the problem is not that all airlines are discounting their prices too much, it's just that some airlines are not doing a good job of estimating demand and providing supply accordingly. whether they are unable to do this, or just don't care because they know the friendly government will keep them going is a discusion for another time.
absolute bullsh*t.
my parents lived the "american dream" of getting married, buying a house, having two kids, and even sending their two kids to good private schools, all on salaries lower than the average starting salary for a decent software devloper. i make more money than my father at a job where i have worked less than six months even though he has been working at the same place for 13 years and is nearly finished with his Ph.D.
likewise, my wife an i are closing on a house this week, and although kids aren't on the horizon now, i have no doubt we will be able to make ends meet when the time comes.
given what i know of the people i went to school with, as well as my wife and the people she and i work or have worked with, computer programmers (even now, after the bust) still make a decent amount more than many other fields with comparable work and comparable or greater school requirements. somehow many of these people, who make far less money than the average computer programmer of equivalent experience, have found a way to afford your american dream.... in short it's all about priorities, budgeting and living within your means.
i'd like to agree with you, but to be honest, lately it seems as though reading and writing and thinking in general are becoming a smaller and smaller part of the average person's life.
it's starting to remind me of a quote i read when i was much younger by (i believe) a sci-fi author whose name i've long forgotten:
the danger is not that machines will one day learn to think like people, but that people will one day begin to think like machines.
But if most people use computers like I use them
this is your mistake right here. while it is no big deal for you and i and even my relatively (to slashdot) non-computer-savvy wife to create an efficient filing structure to store all of our information, the vast majority of home ocmputer users are not like that. there are a great many people who have difficulty with the concept of creating and managing directories. other people are very poor at organization, regardless of how good they are with computers. i know people who just throw anything and everything into "My Documents". i've seen other people who keep everything they are working on on their desktop. when it gets too cluttered, they grab every file and folder on their desktop and drag in into a folder called "Desktop Junk". in either case, after a while it gets difficult to find things. for people like tis, desktop search is wonderful. just keep everything in one place, and google will find it for you when you need it.
i use google desktop at work, but i use it for email, not for files. using google desktop allows me to use outlook the same way that i would use gmail. i only have two folders in outlook- inbox and archive. once i read something it goes into archive. stuff that is temporal and not really work related (e.g. so-and-so in accounting is out sick today) gets deleted immediately. once something is in the archive it will never be deleted. if i ever need an old email from the archive- google desktop can find it for me nearly instantly. this allows me for the first time in my life to keep my inbox almost completely uncluttered without ever having to spend a lot of time sorting through emails and figuring out what needs to be saved, what doesn't, and where to file things.