It won't penalise anybody if it works on the principle of charging only for unsolicited mailing, that is mail from a source not on an approved contact list.
As for the micropayments, I'm not sure that it is a show stopper. Remember we already have transactions taking place as part of regular mail delivery. This is just one more....
The provider of the mail account becomes your means of credit, and it's for them to resolve remuneration with you their client. When you send an e-mail to somebody, if it's unsolicted a notice would bounce back, much like a regular bounce but saying basically, the receipt of this e-mail is not preapproved, it will cost X to send it. You can preapprove the payment of e-mail you send etc ect... the logistics are detail that can be worked out.
It's a decoupled transaction, it's not a problem. The key is that money exchanges hands between service providers, not between users directly. The financial arrangement between the provider and the client is for them to manage themselve.
I think MS might have been onto something with Penny Black... if sending unsolicited e-mail (sending to an address that didn't have you on their contact sheet) cost a small micro-payment, it would quickly offset any profits to be made from spamming on the scale described in the article, and wouldn't be prohibitive to those who needed to send the occasional unsolicited e-mail.
It's either that or get into the murky waters of concrete identity, and of the two the former is the least opressive regime.
Please note the article is refering to a code of practice not a law. There will without doubt be different ways in which ISPs might and will implement it. If a competitor is spamming "on your behalf" then you're going to get a warning from your ISP saying that they're considering yanking your plug... you'll then get to address that and show circumstance.
Then if the chaps framing you are in the UK there's legal action you might take against them.
This is a good thing. It's not a draconian law, it's a business consortium agreeing that they they to focus on an issue and deciding common policy on how to address it.
Yeah because since the days of my Sinclair Spectrum when we copied software from audio tape to tape the computer games industry has really shrunk.
FFS, How the hell do these people get away with nodding, looking thoughtful and saying these things in an erudite fashion?
Back in the day, in the UK you sold ONE copy of a game per school, that's it (yeah we were all funding terrorism back then too). Since then no industries have shrunken as a result... not the aerospace industry, not the catering industry and sure as hell not the software industry.
We could get all melodramatic and start considering papers by Gerring on propoganda and the manipulation of the masses... lets just consider one thing.
The cornerstone of all propoganda is a kernel of fear. If X is allowed to continue Y will happen.
If software piracy continues then the quality of computer games will suffer.... I'm 35 and I've been told that exact same line since I was 13. The exact same line. In 22 years I've come to the conclusion it's not true. It's propoganda, it's tapping into an unfounded fear in the audience.
I was told the same about tape recorders and the music industry. I was told the same about video tape and the movie/cinema industry... all in over 2 decades, untrue. Propoganda.
If somebody tells you the sky is falling in, don't just take their word for it, look up yourself at the sky and ask yourself if it looks as if the sky is falling in.
The radio was supposed to kill the record industry. The VCR was supposed to kill the cinema.... the DVD sure as hell was supposed to kill the cinema when in the UK the DVD has been largely responsible for a huge boom in cinema going.
The DVD (unexpectedly) aided the cinema industry because it got people consuming movies again. It made movie watching a regular leasure activity. As people grew to appreciate movies more they wanted a better quality experience watching movies they were especially excited about. In the UK there was a big push by the cinemas to make the cinema experience a rich one, big good quality screens, top notch sound etc etc so that the new wealth of "movie buffs" in society could get a better experience than they ever could from a DVD.
Its a value added service and it's booming despite predictions beforehand.
You see ecconomics isn't just about spredsheets, it's about people too. It has a social factor and overlaps with sociology.
Because Spain, Portugal, France, Itally, Greece, Croatia are really chilly.
I take your point, and it certainly applies to Northern Europe, I just couldn't resist the jab =)
News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
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That tag is starting to wear awful thin.
Why is it harmful to stoop to clutching at any desperate cheap swipe at MS ignoring any similar commentary on OSS software?.... because there's a large number of NERDS that miss a lot of useful "stuff that matters" on Slashdot because they're not prepared to deal with the rabid hypocrisy of articles like this one.
Secondly it makes the OSS comunity look like a bunch of immature fanboys rather than the dedicated professionals most of the community is made up for... that directly impacts adoption of OSS by business.
If you've ever wondered why OSS struggles for credibility in many businesses, bullshit like this article and the culture it encourages are a significant factor.
Articles like this one hurt the OSS community way way more than they ever hurt MS and feed back into the fact that the OSS community itself is all the advertising MS needs.
"News for OSS Nerds. Any desperate shot at MS."
Grow the hell up.
Get back to news for ALL nerds, and stuff that genuinley does matter. Because **gasp** there are Nerds that also develop on the MS platform, and not suprisingly they're more likely to hear the OSS side of the argument if they're actually around rather than on the other side of the room rolling their eyes at you... and maybe... just maybe... you have as much to learn from them as they have to learn from you.
.NET actually cuts against the grain of using the registry for config and application config files at various levels from machine down to application are now the prefered method.
Same question arose with XSL... some of the most notable objectors btw to XSLT were the chaps developing Opera who advocated JavaScript+DOM as opposed to XSLT.
A little JavaScript and a little DOM isn't a standard approach.... You're using a little JavaScript+DOM, I'm using a little Python+DOM and he's using a little Perl+DOM
Now choice is great, but not for documents that you're publishing to a worlwide audience and which aspire to be unerversally readable.
As an aside you mean ECMAScript+DOM... the standard isn't JavaScript, it's ECMAScript.
Assuming we overcame diversity of language choice and madated ECMAScript+DOM the diversity of implimentation of any given task is FAR FAR broader in ECMAScript than it is in a declarative standard, say like XSLT.
Lastly, because XFORMS like XSLT *is* XML it benefits from application of schema, intigration with existing XML tools, mechisms for transport... and generally can be worked with like a regular XML document for instance one might generate your XFORMS via XSLT from existing XML manifests. While this can be done with ECMAScript+DOM, the task is more complicated, is open to diversity of implimentation, is less usable by other parties... and overall is less standard.
Are you sure your main gripe isn't just that the novel doesn't have a happy ending?
I'm a little suprised that because an author chooses to take a downbeat view on a topic it produces responses of "disgust".
As for the bit about the liberal arts and what may or may not be inherent in the makeup of mankind... I'd suggest that such rarified notions wouldn't survive contact with that's going on in the Congo at the moment.
The idea that without the record industry the artists will starve is nuts. The record industry comes very recent in human industry.
Bands and musicians might care to start performing live as a job of work rather than as an act of cherry picking and earn a buck.
There's no reason why musicians can't earn a living like brick layers, plumber, programmers etc all do. The need for the record industry is predicated upon a desire to turn a small proportion of people into multimillionaires.
Pandora HAS openned the box and there's no going back. All this concern about trying to wrestling the P2P networks is just tilting at windmills.
Whatever ones favourite language might be, a project to mine CPan and port useful modules to Python, Java or C# would be interesting.... Perl syntax reads as a little terse to many non-Perl devs.
Great hackers use many languages. Wannabe hacker become an advocate of "The" language that they happen to be into.
There's stuff I've written that's trivial in Prolog but would be a nightmare to write quickly in Python, Perl, C/C++, Java or C#. There's obvious cases where one might be using SQL and to suggest that one should be using Python because it is the "best language" is just stupid.
Peppering conversation with technical jargon... oh my!
What about peppering conversation with business or marketing jargon.
It would seem to me that the message of the article is it's ok for business, markerting and financial types to act according to type, but God forbid that a techy should act according to type.
Business discussions use business language. Marketing discussions use marketing language. Financial discussions use financial language.
Technical discussions must now use baby talk, lest we annoy... read, expose areas of ignorance... within the other disciplines.
Who's annoying?... Writers of pap populist biz articles.
MS has a very good track record for implimenting XML related standards. One only has to look a the adoption of XSL into the browser by MS while the concept of XSL was still nacent and remember that at the time, with out a simple tool (IE) that developers could use to try out and get excited about XSL that very crucial technology might have been still born.
IE has been frozen since anti-trust activity got serious as there is a compelling interest or even need for MS to allow browser competition on the Web, and more importantly integration of other browsers into products and operating systems.... when it's safe from MS to point and say "look what they're doing!", development of IE will resume.
When one looks at implimentation of XML standards in the rest of the MS product base one can't turn their nose up at them. Yes occasionaly they do something like InfoPath rather than XForms, but as yet nobody is suggesting that all W3C standards must be adopted by mandate rather than option.... when was the last time you used XPath?
Well, it's just that it occurs to me, that if it were lawyers jobs being outsourced... and a fair percentage of legal jobs *could* be sent overseas... we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Your political leaders were elected to represent *your* interests, not to represent the interests of the Indian worker, they have their own political leaders who you can rest-assured don't loose sleep over there security of your job.
And for those who feel I'm just being mean... I worked for 5 years as a shop steward for a union, my left-wing credentials are quite secure, and as a worker the *last* thing you persue is the reduction of wages to the lowest common denominator..... making sweat-shirts did not make the job of a seamstress either rewarding or profitable when it was shipped to Malaysia. Nor did the chance of the local businessman in Thailand to set up a shoe company improve when Nike set up a factory there.
When you allow large "Western" companies to set up plant overseas employing cheap local labour all you ensure is the *local business* can't compete... yeah, read that again.... globalisation allows the exists corporate giants to reduce costs and inhibit the introduction of new competitors in developing markets.
The one chance a business in a developing market has is the competetive edge given it by cheaper labour. You remove that competitive advantage by allowing the 800lb gorilla to wade into the shallow end and you've screwed the business-man in the developing ecconomy.
We wont see emerging competitors from India, from *Indian companies* while Western stock-holders steal the Indian competitive advantage and make it their own.
If you did think the benefits of globalisation were aimed at you, you've been mugged. When politicians and business leaders talk about globalisation they mean for *them*. They told you it would reduce costs and mean cheper products, but they didn't tell you that the reduced costs where as a result of sending your job overseas.
And if you think it's bad now, you aint seen nothing yet.
You did, and are voting for the chaps that aren't just allowing this to happen but are actively working toward it. You want it to stop? Start questioning your candidates as to their position on out-sourcing. Ask them what their position is on what amounts to selling off the IT industry in persuit of short-term gain. Ask them what they intend to do once the process of shipping your IT industry over-seas is complete and any competative edge you once had is lost.
But, but, but the Indian deserves to work too! Absolutely they do. The European and the North American also deserve to yield return on the industries nurtured in those societies. The IT industry did not pop out of the ether, and it was not forged solely on the back of private enterprise, it was built from a wide variety of national as well as private resource.
You are responsible for allowing this to happen when you allow your political leaders to persue their own business interests unchecked.
I personally think "The Man" is laughing at "Us" all the way to the bank.
Who's "Us"?... We that write the software.
"The Man"?... The big business that uses our software.
While it makes perfect sense to me to release code under license that makes it free/cheap/easy for developers to use. I have never and am not likely to ever understand the benefit in giving the wallet of the business who hopes to make a buck off the back of my software a break.
Yeah I know the immediate come-back about making money from supporting software, but guess what, I'm a developer not a support consultant.... remember. I'm not a demi-tech sat on a phone.
You give an application of type X away for free and you are directly taking money out of the pocket of every developer working on related projects commerically as their product must now compete not feature for feature but against a product that costs nothing.
It is laughable that the one place where you will find most angst about outsourcing is the place with the largest numbers of free software advocates.... have you not made the connection between the drive to reduce costs in the production of commercial software and free software?!... You give your software away for free and you devalue the value of the programmer to the point where companies have to outsource to compete.
I'm not quite sure why so many people are runing around trying to resolve the leaking ship that is the music industries business model. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks that the burden is upon the music industry to produce a new model that is to the liking of it's customers whom they wish to part from their cash.
People got used to saying "vote with your wallet" as some sort of wise-crack. Guess it came as a shock when millions did just that.
*shrug* I think the idea of trying to persuade the music industry to patch its leaks and to offer 101 different ways in which it might patch its leaks is odd... it is however crazy while said industry acts in such a petulant fashion.
Let the music industry worry about it's own leaks. The music industries lost billions is not something that should cause the EFF sleepness nights, and there are frankly better things it could concern itself with than where Popstar X is going to get their next gold plated toilet seat from.
It's not about free for use and license it's about free from pivotal corporate control of the specification process.
IBM could plow more resource into it's own Java implementations but they have to have watched what happened to MS when MS ran in a direction with Java that Sun didn't like.... Here's a hint, the Java "community" didn't sue MS, Sun did.
Now IBM and Sun may notionally be sat in the same camp on many issues... but that's today.... IBM has to be looking down the road for many years to come, and if Java is crucially important to IBM then they have to be nervous about Sun exercising such control over their (IBMs) investment in Java.
The only reason why IBM showed even a slight degree of interest in the.NET platform when it was submitted to the ECMA by MS, Intel and Hewlett-Packard was that IBM got to play in the standardisation process of the CLI along with Fujistu and others.
Now this hasn't got anything to do with suggesting IBM has any substantial interest in.NET besides blinking at it, but you can be damn bloody sure that every second IBM reps were sat around the table "at the ECMA" they were thiking to themselves "if only we were dicussing Java".
You can also be sure IBM noticed Intels work on portions of a BCL implementation under a BSD license.
No, it's not huge stuff... at the moment, Intels work here was as part of the ECMA process to assess the technical merit of the spec... but you can be positive these things are nagging on IBMs mind.
There's no love lost between IBM and MS. I'm sure IBM doesn't trust MS for a second. IBM also has a massive investment in Java... huge... but don't kid yourself that there isn't a cut-off point in terms of how much IBM invests it a platform controled by Sun. IBM might be more than happy to hold hands with Sun, but they sure as hell aint going to put their testicles there, and they're reaching the point where that's what it would mean to them.
The sole question of importance to IBM with regard to Java is... "if we had to strategicaly move away from Java could we?"... if the answer to that is "yes, but not tomorrow" you'll watch IBM suddendly start to go "weird".
IBM aint Oracle, the issue aint personal for them. It's business.
As a.NET developer I'll be up front and say over the long haul I sincerely hope that Sun don't Open Source Java. More specificallymy hope is that Sun keeps Java closed for at least another 3 years.... I fugure it's going to take another 3 years for.NET to mature as a cross-platform prospect.
IF... and it's an if, it might never happen... Mono matures over the next 3 years it is going to be absolutely excrutiating for the Open Source community to justify a closed Java.
As a MS.NET developer you can't begin to imagine the childish glee I get from saying to Java developers... "my platform's more open than yours."... to which I'm quickly told "but there's 5 Java jobs for every.NET one", and I have to shut up.
And yes it's incredibly childish, but at least half the motivation behind any platform comparison is childish spite that exposes the facet of a developer that has more in common with a cheer-leader than anything else.
More seriosuly Java has 3 years to go open or the Open Source and Free Software community will have it's nose rubbed in.NET... I can't believe the OS community will stand and defend Sun when it's setting them up for such humiliation.
We could argue the detail, we could justify, but.NET is more open than Java.... the Mono CLR on Linux is more open than the Sun JVM on Linux. You can't dodge that.
What the Open Software community should be doing is screaming blue murder at Sun, not sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "nah nah nah nah, it's not happening, it's not happening".
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It won't penalise anybody if it works on the principle of charging only for unsolicited mailing, that is mail from a source not on an approved contact list.
As for the micropayments, I'm not sure that it is a show stopper. Remember we already have transactions taking place as part of regular mail delivery. This is just one more....
The provider of the mail account becomes your means of credit, and it's for them to resolve remuneration with you their client. When you send an e-mail to somebody, if it's unsolicted a notice would bounce back, much like a regular bounce but saying basically, the receipt of this e-mail is not preapproved, it will cost X to send it. You can preapprove the payment of e-mail you send etc ect... the logistics are detail that can be worked out.
It's a decoupled transaction, it's not a problem. The key is that money exchanges hands between service providers, not between users directly. The financial arrangement between the provider and the client is for them to manage themselve.
I think MS might have been onto something with Penny Black... if sending unsolicited e-mail (sending to an address that didn't have you on their contact sheet) cost a small micro-payment, it would quickly offset any profits to be made from spamming on the scale described in the article, and wouldn't be prohibitive to those who needed to send the occasional unsolicited e-mail.
It's either that or get into the murky waters of concrete identity, and of the two the former is the least opressive regime.
Please note the article is refering to a code of practice not a law. There will without doubt be different ways in which ISPs might and will implement it. If a competitor is spamming "on your behalf" then you're going to get a warning from your ISP saying that they're considering yanking your plug... you'll then get to address that and show circumstance.
Then if the chaps framing you are in the UK there's legal action you might take against them.
This is a good thing. It's not a draconian law, it's a business consortium agreeing that they they to focus on an issue and deciding common policy on how to address it.
Code of practice, not law.
Yeah because since the days of my Sinclair Spectrum when we copied software from audio tape to tape the computer games industry has really shrunk.
FFS, How the hell do these people get away with nodding, looking thoughtful and saying these things in an erudite fashion?
Back in the day, in the UK you sold ONE copy of a game per school, that's it (yeah we were all funding terrorism back then too). Since then no industries have shrunken as a result... not the aerospace industry, not the catering industry and sure as hell not the software industry.
We could get all melodramatic and start considering papers by Gerring on propoganda and the manipulation of the masses... lets just consider one thing.
The cornerstone of all propoganda is a kernel of fear. If X is allowed to continue Y will happen.
If software piracy continues then the quality of computer games will suffer.... I'm 35 and I've been told that exact same line since I was 13. The exact same line. In 22 years I've come to the conclusion it's not true. It's propoganda, it's tapping into an unfounded fear in the audience.
I was told the same about tape recorders and the music industry. I was told the same about video tape and the movie/cinema industry... all in over 2 decades, untrue. Propoganda.
If somebody tells you the sky is falling in, don't just take their word for it, look up yourself at the sky and ask yourself if it looks as if the sky is falling in.
Value added service.
The radio was supposed to kill the record industry. The VCR was supposed to kill the cinema.... the DVD sure as hell was supposed to kill the cinema when in the UK the DVD has been largely responsible for a huge boom in cinema going.
The DVD (unexpectedly) aided the cinema industry because it got people consuming movies again. It made movie watching a regular leasure activity. As people grew to appreciate movies more they wanted a better quality experience watching movies they were especially excited about. In the UK there was a big push by the cinemas to make the cinema experience a rich one, big good quality screens, top notch sound etc etc so that the new wealth of "movie buffs" in society could get a better experience than they ever could from a DVD.
Its a value added service and it's booming despite predictions beforehand.
You see ecconomics isn't just about spredsheets, it's about people too. It has a social factor and overlaps with sociology.
Because Spain, Portugal, France, Itally, Greece, Croatia are really chilly.
I take your point, and it certainly applies to Northern Europe, I just couldn't resist the jab =)
That tag is starting to wear awful thin.
Why is it harmful to stoop to clutching at any desperate cheap swipe at MS ignoring any similar commentary on OSS software?.... because there's a large number of NERDS that miss a lot of useful "stuff that matters" on Slashdot because they're not prepared to deal with the rabid hypocrisy of articles like this one.
Secondly it makes the OSS comunity look like a bunch of immature fanboys rather than the dedicated professionals most of the community is made up for... that directly impacts adoption of OSS by business.
If you've ever wondered why OSS struggles for credibility in many businesses, bullshit like this article and the culture it encourages are a significant factor.
Articles like this one hurt the OSS community way way more than they ever hurt MS and feed back into the fact that the OSS community itself is all the advertising MS needs.
"News for OSS Nerds. Any desperate shot at MS."
Grow the hell up.
Get back to news for ALL nerds, and stuff that genuinley does matter. Because **gasp** there are Nerds that also develop on the MS platform, and not suprisingly they're more likely to hear the OSS side of the argument if they're actually around rather than on the other side of the room rolling their eyes at you... and maybe... just maybe... you have as much to learn from them as they have to learn from you.
.NET actually cuts against the grain of using the registry for config and application config files at various levels from machine down to application are now the prefered method.
The central repository is the old model.
Whatever they're doing to you have a go back at them... chances are their system isn't as secure as yours.
At the very least it's more fun than writting an e-mail!
And those bastards at Redhat and Mandrake stole Linux too!!
Same question arose with XSL... some of the most notable objectors btw to XSLT were the chaps developing Opera who advocated JavaScript+DOM as opposed to XSLT.
A little JavaScript and a little DOM isn't a standard approach.... You're using a little JavaScript+DOM, I'm using a little Python+DOM and he's using a little Perl+DOM
Now choice is great, but not for documents that you're publishing to a worlwide audience and which aspire to be unerversally readable.
As an aside you mean ECMAScript+DOM... the standard isn't JavaScript, it's ECMAScript.
Assuming we overcame diversity of language choice and madated ECMAScript+DOM the diversity of implimentation of any given task is FAR FAR broader in ECMAScript than it is in a declarative standard, say like XSLT.
Lastly, because XFORMS like XSLT *is* XML it benefits from application of schema, intigration with existing XML tools, mechisms for transport... and generally can be worked with like a regular XML document for instance one might generate your XFORMS via XSLT from existing XML manifests. While this can be done with ECMAScript+DOM, the task is more complicated, is open to diversity of implimentation, is less usable by other parties... and overall is less standard.
I swear I never even read the Counterstrike story never mind replied to it =)
The Semantic Web is in a large part an effort to reinvent the wheel that is Prolog.
90% of what one might be able to do, and moreso *hope* to do with RDF in the future you could have done quite some time ago with Prolog.
Are you sure your main gripe isn't just that the novel doesn't have a happy ending?
I'm a little suprised that because an author chooses to take a downbeat view on a topic it produces responses of "disgust".
As for the bit about the liberal arts and what may or may not be inherent in the makeup of mankind... I'd suggest that such rarified notions wouldn't survive contact with that's going on in the Congo at the moment.
The idea that without the record industry the artists will starve is nuts. The record industry comes very recent in human industry.
Bands and musicians might care to start performing live as a job of work rather than as an act of cherry picking and earn a buck.
There's no reason why musicians can't earn a living like brick layers, plumber, programmers etc all do. The need for the record industry is predicated upon a desire to turn a small proportion of people into multimillionaires.
Pandora HAS openned the box and there's no going back. All this concern about trying to wrestling the P2P networks is just tilting at windmills.
Whatever ones favourite language might be, a project to mine CPan and port useful modules to Python, Java or C# would be interesting.... Perl syntax reads as a little terse to many non-Perl devs.
Great hackers use many languages. Wannabe hacker become an advocate of "The" language that they happen to be into.
There's stuff I've written that's trivial in Prolog but would be a nightmare to write quickly in Python, Perl, C/C++, Java or C#. There's obvious cases where one might be using SQL and to suggest that one should be using Python because it is the "best language" is just stupid.
Peppering conversation with technical jargon... oh my!
What about peppering conversation with business or marketing jargon.
It would seem to me that the message of the article is it's ok for business, markerting and financial types to act according to type, but God forbid that a techy should act according to type.
Business discussions use business language.
Marketing discussions use marketing language.
Financial discussions use financial language.
Technical discussions must now use baby talk, lest we annoy... read, expose areas of ignorance... within the other disciplines.
Who's annoying?... Writers of pap populist biz articles.
MS has a very good track record for implimenting XML related standards. One only has to look a the adoption of XSL into the browser by MS while the concept of XSL was still nacent and remember that at the time, with out a simple tool (IE) that developers could use to try out and get excited about XSL that very crucial technology might have been still born.
IE has been frozen since anti-trust activity got serious as there is a compelling interest or even need for MS to allow browser competition on the Web, and more importantly integration of other browsers into products and operating systems.... when it's safe from MS to point and say "look what they're doing!", development of IE will resume.
When one looks at implimentation of XML standards in the rest of the MS product base one can't turn their nose up at them. Yes occasionaly they do something like InfoPath rather than XForms, but as yet nobody is suggesting that all W3C standards must be adopted by mandate rather than option.... when was the last time you used XPath?
Well, it's just that it occurs to me, that if it were lawyers jobs being outsourced... and a fair percentage of legal jobs *could* be sent overseas... we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Your political leaders were elected to represent *your* interests, not to represent the interests of the Indian worker, they have their own political leaders who you can rest-assured don't loose sleep over there security of your job.
And for those who feel I'm just being mean... I worked for 5 years as a shop steward for a union, my left-wing credentials are quite secure, and as a worker the *last* thing you persue is the reduction of wages to the lowest common denominator..... making sweat-shirts did not make the job of a seamstress either rewarding or profitable when it was shipped to Malaysia. Nor did the chance of the local businessman in Thailand to set up a shoe company improve when Nike set up a factory there.
When you allow large "Western" companies to set up plant overseas employing cheap local labour all you ensure is the *local business* can't compete... yeah, read that again.... globalisation allows the exists corporate giants to reduce costs and inhibit the introduction of new competitors in developing markets.
The one chance a business in a developing market has is the competetive edge given it by cheaper labour. You remove that competitive advantage by allowing the 800lb gorilla to wade into the shallow end and you've screwed the business-man in the developing ecconomy.
We wont see emerging competitors from India, from *Indian companies* while Western stock-holders steal the Indian competitive advantage and make it their own.
If you did think the benefits of globalisation were aimed at you, you've been mugged. When politicians and business leaders talk about globalisation they mean for *them*. They told you it would reduce costs and mean cheper products, but they didn't tell you that the reduced costs where as a result of sending your job overseas.
And if you think it's bad now, you aint seen nothing yet.
You did, and are voting for the chaps that aren't just allowing this to happen but are actively working toward it. You want it to stop? Start questioning your candidates as to their position on out-sourcing. Ask them what their position is on what amounts to selling off the IT industry in persuit of short-term gain. Ask them what they intend to do once the process of shipping your IT industry over-seas is complete and any competative edge you once had is lost.
But, but, but the Indian deserves to work too! Absolutely they do. The European and the North American also deserve to yield return on the industries nurtured in those societies. The IT industry did not pop out of the ether, and it was not forged solely on the back of private enterprise, it was built from a wide variety of national as well as private resource.
You are responsible for allowing this to happen when you allow your political leaders to persue their own business interests unchecked.
I personally think "The Man" is laughing at "Us" all the way to the bank.
Who's "Us"?... We that write the software.
"The Man"?... The big business that uses our software.
While it makes perfect sense to me to release code under license that makes it free/cheap/easy for developers to use. I have never and am not likely to ever understand the benefit in giving the wallet of the business who hopes to make a buck off the back of my software a break.
Yeah I know the immediate come-back about making money from supporting software, but guess what, I'm a developer not a support consultant.... remember. I'm not a demi-tech sat on a phone.
You give an application of type X away for free and you are directly taking money out of the pocket of every developer working on related projects commerically as their product must now compete not feature for feature but against a product that costs nothing.
It is laughable that the one place where you will find most angst about outsourcing is the place with the largest numbers of free software advocates.... have you not made the connection between the drive to reduce costs in the production of commercial software and free software?!... You give your software away for free and you devalue the value of the programmer to the point where companies have to outsource to compete.
Free software costs jobs not money.
I'm not quite sure why so many people are runing around trying to resolve the leaking ship that is the music industries business model. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks that the burden is upon the music industry to produce a new model that is to the liking of it's customers whom they wish to part from their cash.
People got used to saying "vote with your wallet" as some sort of wise-crack. Guess it came as a shock when millions did just that.
*shrug* I think the idea of trying to persuade the music industry to patch its leaks and to offer 101 different ways in which it might patch its leaks is odd... it is however crazy while said industry acts in such a petulant fashion.
Let the music industry worry about it's own leaks. The music industries lost billions is not something that should cause the EFF sleepness nights, and there are frankly better things it could concern itself with than where Popstar X is going to get their next gold plated toilet seat from.
It's not about free for use and license it's about free from pivotal corporate control of the specification process.
.NET platform when it was submitted to the ECMA by MS, Intel and Hewlett-Packard was that IBM got to play in the standardisation process of the CLI along with Fujistu and others.
.NET besides blinking at it, but you can be damn bloody sure that every second IBM reps were sat around the table "at the ECMA" they were thiking to themselves "if only we were dicussing Java".
n g/ 44022.htm
IBM could plow more resource into it's own Java implementations but they have to have watched what happened to MS when MS ran in a direction with Java that Sun didn't like.... Here's a hint, the Java "community" didn't sue MS, Sun did.
Now IBM and Sun may notionally be sat in the same camp on many issues... but that's today.... IBM has to be looking down the road for many years to come, and if Java is crucially important to IBM then they have to be nervous about Sun exercising such control over their (IBMs) investment in Java.
The only reason why IBM showed even a slight degree of interest in the
Now this hasn't got anything to do with suggesting IBM has any substantial interest in
You can also be sure IBM noticed Intels work on portions of a BCL implementation under a BSD license.
http://www.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/e
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocl
No, it's not huge stuff... at the moment, Intels work here was as part of the ECMA process to assess the technical merit of the spec... but you can be positive these things are nagging on IBMs mind.
There's no love lost between IBM and MS. I'm sure IBM doesn't trust MS for a second. IBM also has a massive investment in Java... huge... but don't kid yourself that there isn't a cut-off point in terms of how much IBM invests it a platform controled by Sun. IBM might be more than happy to hold hands with Sun, but they sure as hell aint going to put their testicles there, and they're reaching the point where that's what it would mean to them.
The sole question of importance to IBM with regard to Java is... "if we had to strategicaly move away from Java could we?"... if the answer to that is "yes, but not tomorrow" you'll watch IBM suddendly start to go "weird".
IBM aint Oracle, the issue aint personal for them. It's business.
As a .NET developer I'll be up front and say over the long haul I sincerely hope that Sun don't Open Source Java. More specificallymy hope is that Sun keeps Java closed for at least another 3 years.... I fugure it's going to take another 3 years for .NET to mature as a cross-platform prospect.
.NET developer you can't begin to imagine the childish glee I get from saying to Java developers... "my platform's more open than yours."... to which I'm quickly told "but there's 5 Java jobs for every .NET one", and I have to shut up.
.NET... I can't believe the OS community will stand and defend Sun when it's setting them up for such humiliation.
.NET is more open than Java.... the Mono CLR on Linux is more open than the Sun JVM on Linux. You can't dodge that.
IF... and it's an if, it might never happen... Mono matures over the next 3 years it is going to be absolutely excrutiating for the Open Source community to justify a closed Java.
As a MS
And yes it's incredibly childish, but at least half the motivation behind any platform comparison is childish spite that exposes the facet of a developer that has more in common with a cheer-leader than anything else.
More seriosuly Java has 3 years to go open or the Open Source and Free Software community will have it's nose rubbed in
We could argue the detail, we could justify, but
What the Open Software community should be doing is screaming blue murder at Sun, not sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "nah nah nah nah, it's not happening, it's not happening".