Not sure about yahoo, but they will have to block google's cache/imaes, which could otherwise make a copy of the porn available. They just block the whole google cache here in China. See the following for a good discussion on this "loophole" to censoring.
http://www.sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/google. ph p
The mere terminology of listing a system as a "legacy" system indicates that its days are numbered and any new system development will most likely be favored toward a NMCI supported platform.
As a general rule in the IT industry, IBM and all their customers with mainframes that were declared "legacy systems" in the 90's might not agree with this definition.
If you dont like the media levy, find a friend who reads Chinese, and purchase your media over the Internet directly from China. No levy here.
To paraphrase an oft expressed thought here: Now if every slashdot reader were to purchase their media directly from China and send an annonyous note to their legislator, the local store they usually buy from, and the company who makes the media they usually buy, perhaps someone would be incented to rethink the law.
I bet theres lots of companies interested in engineers in the US who know some Chinese. Ever thought of learning some? Working on projects with engineers overseas requires very careful project management from both sides. See www.pmi.org for ideas about how to develop skills there. Engineers in China and India cannot interact easily with US customers to learn what they want, so typically there are US based Product Marketing people to do this, the best of whom, I believe, have technical backgrounds. There is also sales engineering and professional services that require high level engineering skills in the US. Or just become (or stay) the best at whatever you are doing now. There is always a market for the cream of the crop skillwise. In fact, some of the best technical people I have known were in the back end of customer support where not only did they respond to urgent customer calls, but instead of just passing bugs back to engineering, they typically fixed the problem in the code and just passed on their patch for review.
These are starters, get the idea? Not everything is or can go overseas, but it may require some additional education on your part. And I havent even considered more drastic re-education, but still rewarding for those so inclined, like studying law.
By the way, moving there temporarily is not such a bad idea either. China especially is looking for experienced people to work along side their younger less experienced ones. Although this might be less appealing since this could also be viewed as helping them prepare to take more jobs. Im not advocating this, but on the otherhand, its going to happen anyways.
I would have to agree with the original poster for the following reasons.
1) Based on friendships with the foreign engineers I have worked with while in the US, mostly Indians, I believe they received somewhat lower compensation and had a slightly, lower living standard than their US citizen peers while in the US. But when they went back to their home, the relatively (to a US citizen) small savings they had from their time in the US gave them a much higher standard of living there than their peers.
2) Based experience managing a software engineering group in China, here's how wages work in a skilled position. i.e. not manufacturing assembly lines. Average people are paid average local wages. Good and very talented people are paid a moderate premium over local wages. People who are brilliant, lucky, have good English skills in addition to above average technical skills, or especially some interesting combination thereof, are paid a high premium over what they might earn locally. Depending on the reputation of the company, this may take them pretty close to US wages. Sometimes even above if they hit all three.
I dont see any exploitation going on in either case and the end result is that their standard of living is equivalent to getting higher pay than they would have gotten otherwise. Just because someone is getting paid less than you, does not mean they are being exploited. Remember that they dont need to buy what *we* make. They can just as well buy what *they* make at a lower price.
Like it or not, the ability and motivation to take advantage of market forces is one thing that makes America great. Long term, jobs will always move to places offering better economies, or to people with better skills, etc. even without foreign competition. Life is a treadmill that you have to stay on unless you want your career to stagnate, in which case it wont help you regardless of what country you live in. In this case, US engineers need to figure out what kind of added value they can provide over and above what the foreign engineers can. I would say that the guy in the article is doing the right thing, adding to his value with further education. I see no problems here.
At the risk of sounding nationalistic (which I dont think I am, its just that having spent nearly 10 years working overseas I have been in a good position to observe these kinds of things) Ill make a similar claim as before. Having to take personal responsibility to improve your own "value" in the marketplace, is one of the things that will keep America great, and will keep giving Americans the ability to buy what *everyone* makes by helping us stay competitive in everything we do.:-)
Sorry, but an international minimum wage is just ridiculous because living costs are not the same. Acceptable working conditions are also very subjective. To fix one aspect of working conditions, you would probably have do 1) allow 10's maybe 100's of millions of people crowded countries to work in the US. 2) donate a few US states to Japan who has half the population of the US in a country the size of California. (OK, I guess we could also invade and conquer some other country with a lot of land we could distribute, but that involves additional moral dilemas.) 3) shrink your entire personal workspace to 1/2 its current size and eliminate the cubicle walls so you can stare into the eyes of the person across from you while you work. Which one would you recommend first? Just because you would not be happy with working conditions you perceive to less than your own doesnt means others who dont perceive such are not.
Caveats: this is obviously written from the perspective of a US citizen. Sorry if youre not. (Just trying to limit the flames of an international flavor.....:-) I also realise that in some sectors it is possible that there is exploitation of foreign labor occuring. But if your comment was in the context of, e.g. sports shoe manufacturing, youre posting in the wrong place.:-)
I just rename the dll by putting an x in front of the filename, and mozilla goes on its business without displaying flash-verts. When I (rarely) encounter a site I want to see, I remove the x from the filename, open a new window, and view the site. When Im done, rename it, and go back to peaceful viewing.
I really dont run into enough sites employing flash to provide me useful information rather than ads for this to be much of a hassle.
I dont believe that alternate browsers, in the (excessive) plural, will help much. The non-techies just dont use "them" and often dont even know they exist. So having 7 different browsers available, each that blocks a subset of the annoying advert behavior, helps/. readers, but not the rest, who outnumber us by orders of magnitude I hesitate to guess at. Unless these anti-adware innovations are put into a single or a small number of alternate browsers, the people who develop innoative adware in the first place wont care, much less stop.
The only hope I currently see for this technology to be available to the general public is thru mozilla, hopefully passed on thru Netscape. (Even if AOL/TW doesnt pass on all the technology, at least people would only be one step away from the appropriate plugin. And even the least computer saavy of my friends knows about Netscape.) So, please, instead of everyone going out and developing their own browser with their own innovation, I urge you to develop it for mozilla instead.
Stiction..... This brings back old memories of the time my company, a high end Unix vendor, found out that the scsi drives we were using from a well known drive vendor has this problem. At that time a TB of space took up a full rack or two of space, so anyone at the high end had say 50 or 100 drives. Our Fortune-500 customers were not happy when after power cycling an array, a handfull of drives didnt spin back up.
Well, I learned more about how lubricating oil gradually makes its way down the arm, to the head, and lodges at the interface to the platter than I ever wanted to. But on the other hand, I also learned how a failed disk drive can make a good frisbee. It turnd out that pretending to throw a stiction-ed drive like a frisbee caused the head to dislodge and fixed the drive about 20% of the time. ("Of course wait until the customer isnt looking before trying this onsite....":-)
We ended up replacing all the drives with stiction potential (failed or not) at customer sites in the field and sending the original disks back to the disk drive vendor. Word was that the vendor then resold them thru their retail PC channels, i.e. where you and most PC users probably get your drives from. This wasnt as horrible as it sounds, because at that time PCs typically did not run for the 3-5 consecutive days (ask me if you want to know why) that it took for the potential of stiction to manifest itself. (This was in the Windows NT 3.5 and 4 days.)
So remember, you get what you pay for. Someone out there likely has drives that have a higher level of reliability and are "guaranteed" not to have stiction at any significant rate. We were definitely told at the time that the drives were not supposed to fail like this and that there was a particular flaw that caused it in this batch of drives.
But obviously the mass market wont pay for this higher level of reliability. If you go this route, my suggestion would be to contact the disk vendor directly to try to find out if you can get drives of a higher quality than what you typically find on the street or in any mass marketed PC. You would certainly want these if you go this route for archiving. But of course you would have to open your wallet just a little bit wider.
A bad consequence can either be something distasteful ("If software isn't free, then governments have an easy way to keep their actions and data ultimately, and forever, secret from the populations that live under them.") or something plainly false ("If proprietary software is a better model, then people will support proprietary software developers"). The first is bad because it's something that only a dictator should want, the second is bad since it just doesn't happen in reality.
Pardon me, but the second does happen. In fact I would wager that there are at least a couple orders of magnitude more proprietary software developers being "supported by people", i.e. people buying products from companies that pay their salaries, than there are open software developers supported by same. While a laudable theory, the world is not yet at the point where Open Source (much less exclusively GPL Open Source) has proved it can pay more developers' salaries than a proprietary model. We need to wait another 5 or 10 years to see how this revolution plays itself out.
Just as a test, I recently installed Windows XP on a Celeron 333MHz machine with 128MB. A few pauses here and there, but it basically runs Mozilla, IE6, Word simultaneously just fine. The ancient (1997) hard disk seems to be more of a performance limiter than the cpu.
Perhaps the pauses are just Intel sponsored advertising so you dont forget there are faster cpu's coming out every so often.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure about yahoo, but they will have to block google's cache/imaes, which could otherwise make a copy of the porn available. They just block the whole google cache here in China. See the following for a good discussion on this "loophole" to censoring.
. ph p
...slip sliding away....
http://www.sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/google
Go after the people who serve it, go after the people who see it, but going after the ISPs is practically off the slippery slope and over the cliff.
I agree with this, but what happens when the poeple who serve it are outside the US and you cannot go after them?
The mere terminology of listing a system as a "legacy" system indicates that its days are numbered and any new system development will most likely be favored toward a NMCI supported platform.
As a general rule in the IT industry, IBM and all their customers with mainframes that were declared "legacy systems" in the 90's might not agree with this definition.
If you dont like the media levy, find a friend who reads Chinese, and purchase your media over the Internet directly from China. No levy here.
To paraphrase an oft expressed thought here: Now if every slashdot reader were to purchase their media directly from China and send an annonyous note to their legislator, the local store they usually buy from, and the company who makes the media they usually buy, perhaps someone would be incented to rethink the law.
I bet theres lots of companies interested in engineers in the US who know some Chinese. Ever thought of learning some? Working on projects with engineers overseas requires very careful project management from both sides. See www.pmi.org for ideas about how to develop skills there. Engineers in China and India cannot interact easily with US customers to learn what they want, so typically there are US based Product Marketing people to do this, the best of whom, I believe, have technical backgrounds. There is also sales engineering and professional services that require high level engineering skills in the US. Or just become (or stay) the best at whatever you are doing now. There is always a market for the cream of the crop skillwise. In fact, some of the best technical people I have known were in the back end of customer support where not only did they respond to urgent customer calls, but instead of just passing bugs back to engineering, they typically fixed the problem in the code and just passed on their patch for review.
These are starters, get the idea? Not everything is or can go overseas, but it may require some additional education on your part. And I havent even considered more drastic re-education, but still rewarding for those so inclined, like studying law.
By the way, moving there temporarily is not such a bad idea either. China especially is looking for experienced people to work along side their younger less experienced ones. Although this might be less appealing since this could also be viewed as helping them prepare to take more jobs. Im not advocating this, but on the otherhand, its going to happen anyways.
I would have to agree with the original poster for the following reasons.
:-)
:-)
1) Based on friendships with the foreign engineers I have worked with while in the US, mostly Indians, I believe they received somewhat lower compensation and had a slightly, lower living standard than their US citizen peers while in the US. But when they went back to their home, the relatively (to a US citizen) small savings they had from their time in the US gave them a much higher standard of living there than their peers.
2) Based experience managing a software engineering group in China, here's how wages work in a skilled position. i.e. not manufacturing assembly lines. Average people are paid average local wages. Good and very talented people are paid a moderate premium over local wages. People who are brilliant, lucky, have good English skills in addition to above average technical skills, or especially some interesting combination thereof, are paid a high premium over what they might earn locally. Depending on the reputation of the company, this may take them pretty close to US wages. Sometimes even above if they hit all three.
I dont see any exploitation going on in either case and the end result is that their standard of living is equivalent to getting higher pay than they would have gotten otherwise. Just because someone is getting paid less than you, does not mean they are being exploited. Remember that they dont need to buy what *we* make. They can just as well buy what *they* make at a lower price.
Like it or not, the ability and motivation to take advantage of market forces is one thing that makes America great. Long term, jobs will always move to places offering better economies, or to people with better skills, etc. even without foreign competition. Life is a treadmill that you have to stay on unless you want your career to stagnate, in which case it wont help you regardless of what country you live in. In this case, US engineers need to figure out what kind of added value they can provide over and above what the foreign engineers can. I would say that the guy in the article is doing the right thing, adding to his value with further education. I see no problems here.
At the risk of sounding nationalistic (which I dont think I am, its just that having spent nearly 10 years working overseas I have been in a good position to observe these kinds of things) Ill make a similar claim as before. Having to take personal responsibility to improve your own "value" in the marketplace, is one of the things that will keep America great, and will keep giving Americans the ability to buy what *everyone* makes by helping us stay competitive in everything we do.
Sorry, but an international minimum wage is just ridiculous because living costs are not the same. Acceptable working conditions are also very subjective. To fix one aspect of working conditions, you would probably have do 1) allow 10's maybe 100's of millions of people crowded countries to work in the US. 2) donate a few US states to Japan who has half the population of the US in a country the size of California. (OK, I guess we could also invade and conquer some other country with a lot of land we could distribute, but that involves additional moral dilemas.) 3) shrink your entire personal workspace to 1/2 its current size and eliminate the cubicle walls so you can stare into the eyes of the person across from you while you work. Which one would you recommend first? Just because you would not be happy with working conditions you perceive to less than your own doesnt means others who dont perceive such are not.
Caveats: this is obviously written from the perspective of a US citizen. Sorry if youre not. (Just trying to limit the flames of an international flavor.....:-) I also realise that in some sectors it is possible that there is exploitation of foreign labor occuring. But if your comment was in the context of, e.g. sports shoe manufacturing, youre posting in the wrong place.
I just rename the dll by putting an x in front of the filename, and mozilla goes on its business without displaying flash-verts. When I (rarely) encounter a site I want to see, I remove the x from the filename, open a new window, and view the site. When Im done, rename it, and go back to peaceful viewing.
I really dont run into enough sites employing flash to provide me useful information rather than ads for this to be much of a hassle.
I dont believe that alternate browsers, in the (excessive) plural, will help much. The non-techies just dont use "them" and often dont even know they exist. So having 7 different browsers available, each that blocks a subset of the annoying advert behavior, helps /. readers, but not the rest, who outnumber us by orders of magnitude I hesitate to guess at. Unless these anti-adware innovations are put into a single or a small number of alternate browsers, the people who develop innoative adware in the first place wont care, much less stop.
The only hope I currently see for this technology to be available to the general public is thru mozilla, hopefully passed on thru Netscape. (Even if AOL/TW doesnt pass on all the technology, at least people would only be one step away from the appropriate plugin. And even the least computer saavy of my friends knows about Netscape.) So, please, instead of everyone going out and developing their own browser with their own innovation, I urge you to develop it for mozilla instead.
Stiction..... This brings back old memories of the time my company, a high end Unix vendor, found out that the scsi drives we were using from a well known drive vendor has this problem. At that time a TB of space took up a full rack or two of space, so anyone at the high end had say 50 or 100 drives. Our Fortune-500 customers were not happy when after power cycling an array, a handfull of drives didnt spin back up.
:-)
Well, I learned more about how lubricating oil gradually makes its way down the arm, to the head, and lodges at the interface to the platter than I ever wanted to. But on the other hand, I also learned how a failed disk drive can make a good frisbee. It turnd out that pretending to throw a stiction-ed drive like a frisbee caused the head to dislodge and fixed the drive about 20% of the time. ("Of course wait until the customer isnt looking before trying this onsite...."
We ended up replacing all the drives with stiction potential (failed or not) at customer sites in the field and sending the original disks back to the disk drive vendor. Word was that the vendor then resold them thru their retail PC channels, i.e. where you and most PC users probably get your drives from. This wasnt as horrible as it sounds, because at that time PCs typically did not run for the 3-5 consecutive days (ask me if you want to know why) that it took for the potential of stiction to manifest itself. (This was in the Windows NT 3.5 and 4 days.)
So remember, you get what you pay for. Someone out there likely has drives that have a higher level of reliability and are "guaranteed" not to have stiction at any significant rate. We were definitely told at the time that the drives were not supposed to fail like this and that there was a particular flaw that caused it in this batch of drives.
But obviously the mass market wont pay for this higher level of reliability. If you go this route, my suggestion would be to contact the disk vendor directly to try to find out if you can get drives of a higher quality than what you typically find on the street or in any mass marketed PC. You would certainly want these if you go this route for archiving. But of course you would have to open your wallet just a little bit wider.
A bad consequence can either be something distasteful ("If software isn't free, then governments have an easy way to keep their actions and data ultimately, and forever, secret from the populations that live under them.") or something plainly false ("If proprietary software is a better model, then people will support proprietary software developers"). The first is bad because it's something that only a dictator should want, the second is bad since it just doesn't happen in reality. Pardon me, but the second does happen. In fact I would wager that there are at least a couple orders of magnitude more proprietary software developers being "supported by people", i.e. people buying products from companies that pay their salaries, than there are open software developers supported by same. While a laudable theory, the world is not yet at the point where Open Source (much less exclusively GPL Open Source) has proved it can pay more developers' salaries than a proprietary model. We need to wait another 5 or 10 years to see how this revolution plays itself out.
Just as a test, I recently installed Windows XP on a Celeron 333MHz machine with 128MB. A few pauses here and there, but it basically runs Mozilla, IE6, Word simultaneously just fine. The ancient (1997) hard disk seems to be more of a performance limiter than the cpu.
:-)
Perhaps the pauses are just Intel sponsored advertising so you dont forget there are faster cpu's coming out every so often.