Ok, so what I am getting is that in the BSD development process, a bunch of people live at the top level of the org chart and have access to change the source repository. They agree on what they'll do and then theoretically they all make the changes and updates and eventually someone goes, "Hey, lets bugfix this latest commit and release it as (un)stable."
In the linux dev. process, Linus is at the top of the org chart. He accepts or rejects patches that come to him. He trusts other people to maintain certain subsystems and architectures, but ultimately, he decides what goes in and what doesn't (even if he hasn't really looked at it much).
Difference #2: Linux is GPL'd. You can't profit from changes without sharing them. BSD is BSD'd. You can profit from your changes and keep them hidden.
So the sturcture of the Linux license enforces sharing and the structure of the development process enforces a set of standards (each upstream guy's own standards) on the quality (or lack thereof) of the code. The BSD license and the BSD development structure both require social contracts and continuous communication and agreement among the developers to keep things together and quality consistently high.
So in the BSD world there are forks because developers encounter both technical and personal disagreements. In the Linux world, the devs don't really have to get along as much, because the structure of the project is more forceful than the BSD cooperation regime.
All of the problems that this NetBSD guy have described seem to be mitigated more-or-less automatically in the Linux structure and with the GPL. Linux development is not perfect. Nor is the GPL. However, it sure looks like they're better approaches. Linux certainly isn't less successsful than any of the BSDs.
Comparing the UI for a car to the UI to a word Processor is worse than apples to oranges. It's more like apples to ant colonies.
The two things are used and function in entirely different ways. Cars have one practical purpose: convey the driver and passengers to a destination. A word processor's practical purpose is to record and display information. The car interface doesn't need to change because its function never changes. You need these functions while driving: ignition, gear change, break, acceleration, steering. Optionally you will need radio, AC and comfort accessories. The UI for each of the functions can be spread out over a large section of the interior of the car. The word processor UI is required to be much more powerful, making thousands of functions available and organizing them coherently. Many of the functions are interdependent and change state often. Some (e.g. add-ons) are not even known to the UI designer at the time he designs it. In many ways the word processor designer has much less to work with in terms of real estate and visibility. It also has to change to meet the user's choice of custom configurations and fit into multiple screen sizes.
People like comparing computer UIs to car UIs because a car is simple, unchanging and well known. But it's a meaningless comparison. There is no perfect word processor UI and none that will make every user happy. Microsoft was right to try to better organize the UI. The screenshots the new UI, including the ribbon feature seem to show a smarter, more coherent approach. If the critics want more editing room, they should buy bigger screens. They can probably customize the ribbon to take up less space anyway. Think about what program you would rather support over the telephone: a smartly organized one whos UI is coherent and explainable or a hodgepoge of buttons and menus that have to be memorized and ferreted out.
What has Microsoft given us? It has given us Windows...
Microsoft doesn't really give away anything*. It sells us Windows or we steal Windows, but on the whole, MS takes our money in exchange for copies and liscenses of and for its software.
We all know where to look to find something that's free.
* If you'd like to claim that MS gives away Internet Explorer, WMP, Word Viewer, countless open standards, etc., then you should also take notice that these great majority of the PCs in use today were sold subject to the "Microsoft tax." The manufacturers of these machines paid Microsoft OS liscensing fees even on machines they sold that did not include Windows installed on them.
The GPL helped Linux get started in big ways. It was almost as important as Linus' "leadership." Now that the community is established, we don't need ESR anymore. Er, did we ever?
If DRM can defeat spyware and viruses and help me keep my kids' computer safe for them to use, I'll consider it. Bonus if it helps drive down the price of legal online music and movies.
Was anyone involved in the beta? Excited about it
on
Wish Cancelled
·
· Score: 2
It looks to me, from the remnants of the website, that the developers wanted the game to be fairly immersive and involve a fair bit of actual role playing , as opposed to modified hack-n-slash with a quest system bolted on. Did anyone here play in beta? What were the compelling features? What went wrong?
First of all, who cares about filing online? If you're chronically late or obessive about filing right away, I suppose online filing is something you can't do without. However, I don't mind mailing my forms.
H&R Block TaxCut Standard cost me $15 at the store and has a $5 rebate. I chose it because it isn't TurboTax (I hate Intuit because of previous Quickbooks and TurboTax fiascos). TaxCut Standard doesn't do free e-filing, but it does take a lot of reading and analysis out of taxes. Yes, I have the long form and a schedule C and other stuff. It does them and I was happy with the deductions it figured out for me. That's worth $15 and not something I'd trust to an open source project. I don't care if I never e-file a tax return. If you want to pay more you can e-file with the Deluxe or Premium version. I wouldn't expect Free tax filing software to be compatable with either TaxCut or TurboTax, so I see no use in it, unless you are the kind of masochist who wants to calculate and analyize your taxes without assistance, and then fill in forms manually, subject to all the errors and annoyance that this entails.
Incidentally, the infernal revenue service can suck on my paper forms until one or the other of us croaks, for all I care. I think I remember reading that about half of the revenue that the IRS takes in is used in IRS overhead. The ridiculitude of this is beyond expression. In the immortal words of N.W.A., "Fuck tha IRS."
... a bad idea, IMHO, because it causes more problems then [sic] it solves
No, it's a bad idea because it unnecessarily (and, rather stupidly) restricts freedom, which is far worse than simply causing practical problems for people who want to wear religious clothing. So the French hate Bin Laden and the rest of the extremists. They still suck.
That may be, but the best SSH client for windows is not commercial. It's PuTTY, a Free (capital "F" for Freedom) software project. In fact, often it works better than SSH clients on unix. It certianly has terminal emulation that just works right.
Macs are either faster than PCs or they are cheaper than PCs, but they certianly are not both. The advantage that the Mac has always had is that it just makes sense. Once you understand that Mac interface, you basically understand how to use your computer. With Windows, you have to learn how to do things over and over again.
By the way, 10 years ago was 1994. Those were the bad old days for Apple and the Macintosh as far as I'm concerned. These days Macs are pretty darn fast and they're closer to being price-competitive with windows machines than ever before, but an $800 Mac is going to have less disk space, less RAM and less processing power than an $800 PC. The same goes for the rest of the price points.
In addition, with a Mac, you pay over and over again. Every time OS X updates, you pay. Most people never pay more than once for Windows, if at all. The same goes for Office and most of the other popular software. On a Mac, you're usually buying instead of borrowing the install disk from a friend. Legal or not, that's the way it usually works. There are probably 50 little utilites that I use to do various things on windows. Everything from renaming music files to connecting via SSH to linux/unix. Most of these are freeware, Free software, shareware or stolen. Macs just don't have the same ecosystem of software developed around them that Windows and (to a lesser extent) the free unices do. I realize that with OS X, Mac systems are getting a lot of compatable free software from the unix world and there may be a bunch of things that OS X does that Windows needs utilities for, but it's still not nearly as extensive as the Windows world.
Windows is not good and frequently pretty bad. But it usually gets the job done. It sucks that people can't figure out how to keep spyware, viruses and hackers off of their machines and keep their internet connections and their critical programs running without a lot of handholding and behind-the-scenes work from administrators and consultants. I know this, because people pay me to do it. It would make more sense for them to use a Mac. Their critical software doesn't run on a Mac and they don't want to pay about 2x as much up front to get things working on a Mac, even if the critical stuff did run on it.
Macs are beautiful. In a lot of ways they make everyday computer use much easier and less stressful. There is a certian class of users (especially, I think, casual home users who don't require the use of specialized Windows-only software) who will benefit wonderfully from using a Mac. Many of the rest of us are forced, by habit, by contract, or by some other monopoly-related cause, to keep using windows on our desktop.
Linux doesn't need to have common-user-friendliness. It is what it is. If it's not friendly enough for you then don't use it. Lots of people would like it to be friendlier and they work to do make it friendlier, but no one is telling you that you have to believe that the command line is friendly. Linux is unix and it isn't intended to be easy to manage like a home PC. It's silly to advise the people who work on it to rip out its unix heart and replace it with what is needed to make it as friendly as DOS.
Well, the thing that we all know about miniaturization is that the biggest obstacle is almost always going to be the power supply. But, just for kicks, lets take a look at where we were 10 years ago to try to help predict where we will be in 10 years. 1994 was the year of the Pentium. Intel introduced the 60MHz pentium in 1993 and ramped up to 100MHz by early '94. They were big, hot-running chips by the PC standards of the day.
Today we have hand-held PDAs that run in the 100 to 400MHz range without active cooling. I had a 90MHz pentium with 32MB ram in 1994 and I have a 140MHz PDA with 256MB of memory today. I don't think too many people would argue that PDAs are about equal to or more powerful than the fastest desktop PCs of 10 years ago (despite different architectures, IPCs, etc).
If we use that as a guide, in 10 years we should expect the equivalent of a 2 to 3GHz Athlon and 2 to 500GB of memory/storage onboard our PDAs. From a power standpoint this seems ludicrous. Today we use 300 to 500W of power to run a PC, where we used 150 to 200W in 1994. Can that be scaled down to 3W or less in 10 years?
Assuming that the power requirements are met one way or another, can a portable device running with slightly more computing power than today's desktop do some of the things this Robert Sawyer talks about? Speech recognition seems possible. Translation seems possible. Lots of other interesting things may be possible, but I don't see it fitting into a wristwatch.
We need to start a registry of ISPs. Everyone needs to get their ISP to sign up, absolutely every one of them. Then, once a week, the ISP owners can post to the registry website that they have NOT received an NSL from the FBI. Those ISPs which cannot truthfully say that they are not cooperating with an FBI NSL simple need not update their status. The site will revert the status to "possibly assisting FBI due to NSL". ISPs will never have to volunteer that they are cooperating with an NSL and customers will, at least, know that the FBI is watching someone in the ISP. Anyone who thinks he may be a candidate for FBI watchfulness can then act appropriately.
I'm all for catching terrorists, but I have absolutely no reason to trust the government to treat me fairly. The government is run by mortals who will always be corrupted by power. This is simply too much unchecked power.
Does the cool sounding name enlarge your organ? It sure isn't any more useful for wireless keyboards than the proprietary RF or IR versions that came before the bluetooth circlejerk.
OSX is a cool platform. It's pretty and it seems to be powerful, well-designed and easy to use for both users and developers. It's just not Free. You must pay a lot of money to use it and you don't get to see all of what's inside. In practical terms, maybe it's better that way for some people.
For many of us, Free is better. Do what you want to do, but I'll keep my freedom.
The only thing that Debian has never done well for me is install X. It is a great system for setting up reliable network servers and I've never had a problem using it for that purpose.
I abandoned X a long time ago because even at its best (that is, after weeks of frustrating tweaking and configuration), X is much more klunky and harder to use than Windows. If you install cygwin/xfree86 on windows you get the minor benefits of X and the major benefits of windows. If you network that windows box with a debian server as your firewall, you get the best of both worlds and redundancy to boot.
OT: It amazes me that Apple got OSX to work so well. It's a very complex system built out of a moderately complex unix base and what must be an even more complex presentation layer. The linux community doesn't have the unity of purpose that Apple has and so I have doubts about its ability to generate a stable, useful GUI layer. If someone does manage to create one, my gut tells me that it will not be much based on what we currently have in X.
Without even speaking to the fact that these numbers seem quite dubious, there is almost no logical analysis in this article. The author, has failed to logically connect outsourcing jobs offshore to creating jobs in America. She has failed to characterize the 22M new jobs as a real benefit to the American popluation. Forgive me, but this article seems to like kind of work that one might expect from a contractor who bids a project at 1/5th the price of his competitors. It's reminicent of, say, the work done by some foreign outsourced service companies. The article is bareboned, uninspired and almost totally without merit as news. Only the editors who published and linked to this story could feel more ashamed of it than it's author.
That would appear to be the good news. I think that the bad news is that outsourcing isn't going to last long as a real solution for cutting certian labor costs. Instead, companies are going to realize that it really is dangerous and conterproductive to export too much proprietary data and work to outside firms. Instead of purely outsourcing a job to India or elsewhere, companies are going to put more effort to set up real offices in those countries bringing the foreign workers in-house. It has been going on for a while, but recent progress in telecommunication has led companies to choose quick-and-dirty outsourcing to bridge cultural and political gaps and reap cost savings. As executives become more adept at dealing with the foreign cultures and labor marketplaces (esp. by acquiring foreign executives who understand the foreign places) they will be able to achieve both better cost savings and better overall security by untying their internal organization from traditional geographic divisions. Companies will further embrace doing whatever part of their business "needs" to be done in whatever part of the world they can do it cheapest. It's still globalization, but it's more pervasive than just redistributing production centers and opening new markets to sales. It's re-distributing the locus of control within each company.
Here's some predicitons: The biggest U.S. export for a while is going to be culture. Foreigners who want to work for U.S. globalized companies in their own countries are going to have to work in many ways within western cultural frameworks and they will bring that culture home to their families and neighbors. The U.S. dollar will continue a long, slow decline in (relative) value, as will the Euro, eventually. This is a natural result of the strengthening of competing currencies of the foreign nations which will be supplying the new, eager middle-class labor forces. As more countries follow India's example of embracing western culture and education, they will gain a share in the job market.
Hopefully, as western culture (particularly the English language and the values of capitalism) become more pervasive, people will also break down political barriers. It all does seem a long way off, but almost certainly the 100 years of the 21st century will witness more and faster changes in the human landscape of the world than the 20th, due to the interconnectedness of the world (think about, for instance, that probably for all of the next 100 years, people will be able to make a phone call or send email anywhere in the world instantly. In 1900 this was hardly even a dream.) and the continuously-increasing pace of technological advance. Probably third world nations will not disappear, but wealth and poverty are likely to be distributed more evenly (geographically, anyway) throughout the globe. That is, after all, what we're ultimately worried about in out own small way. We (all) want the opportunity to make ourselves useful and prosperous. It's just going to take some suffering and upheaval before things equalize. Buckle up.
That's a good point, but I doubt that rounding errors are going to creep in except after very many operations on a number. One way to prevent that problem would be to simply round the float before and after any complicated calculations that might cause such problems. When I wrote my own payroll software, this is what I did. I initially used rounding to keep number formatting simple and then later to be 100% sure that I was doing the same calculations that the IRS, etc, might be doing. I have to say that it's very interesting the systems you mentioned have native support for packed decimal numbers.
Unfortunately, with the work-from-home situation you reinforce some of the problems that come from lack of face time with your team mates and managers. To do your job well you do need to get to know many of the other people you're working with. To make your job secure you do need to spend time sharing experience, making friends and even kissing ass. Working from home will make your work more commodetized and your job less secure. Find ways as the ER doctor above said, to make your job at the company more beneficial to your employer than just the work you're hired to do.
I, for one, am very sick of all this changing currency. I run a laundromat and depend on a bill changer. If the currency changes then I must pay almost $1000 for a new bill reader to accept the new 20s. The bill reader does not make me money, it is just the cost of doing business. Every time our stupid government decides to change the currency, that's more out of my pocket and into the pockets of the damnable changer manufacturers.
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In the linux dev. process, Linus is at the top of the org chart. He accepts or rejects patches that come to him. He trusts other people to maintain certain subsystems and architectures, but ultimately, he decides what goes in and what doesn't (even if he hasn't really looked at it much).
Difference #2: Linux is GPL'd. You can't profit from changes without sharing them. BSD is BSD'd. You can profit from your changes and keep them hidden.
So the sturcture of the Linux license enforces sharing and the structure of the development process enforces a set of standards (each upstream guy's own standards) on the quality (or lack thereof) of the code. The BSD license and the BSD development structure both require social contracts and continuous communication and agreement among the developers to keep things together and quality consistently high.
So in the BSD world there are forks because developers encounter both technical and personal disagreements. In the Linux world, the devs don't really have to get along as much, because the structure of the project is more forceful than the BSD cooperation regime.
All of the problems that this NetBSD guy have described seem to be mitigated more-or-less automatically in the Linux structure and with the GPL. Linux development is not perfect. Nor is the GPL. However, it sure looks like they're better approaches. Linux certainly isn't less successsful than any of the BSDs.
The two things are used and function in entirely different ways. Cars have one practical purpose: convey the driver and passengers to a destination. A word processor's practical purpose is to record and display information. The car interface doesn't need to change because its function never changes. You need these functions while driving: ignition, gear change, break, acceleration, steering. Optionally you will need radio, AC and comfort accessories. The UI for each of the functions can be spread out over a large section of the interior of the car. The word processor UI is required to be much more powerful, making thousands of functions available and organizing them coherently. Many of the functions are interdependent and change state often. Some (e.g. add-ons) are not even known to the UI designer at the time he designs it. In many ways the word processor designer has much less to work with in terms of real estate and visibility. It also has to change to meet the user's choice of custom configurations and fit into multiple screen sizes.
People like comparing computer UIs to car UIs because a car is simple, unchanging and well known. But it's a meaningless comparison. There is no perfect word processor UI and none that will make every user happy. Microsoft was right to try to better organize the UI. The screenshots the new UI, including the ribbon feature seem to show a smarter, more coherent approach. If the critics want more editing room, they should buy bigger screens. They can probably customize the ribbon to take up less space anyway. Think about what program you would rather support over the telephone: a smartly organized one whos UI is coherent and explainable or a hodgepoge of buttons and menus that have to be memorized and ferreted out.
I'd steal the ad-free version, just like I do now.
There is nothing ideal about the UN.
Microsoft doesn't really give away anything*. It sells us Windows or we steal Windows, but on the whole, MS takes our money in exchange for copies and liscenses of and for its software.
We all know where to look to find something that's free.
* If you'd like to claim that MS gives away Internet Explorer, WMP, Word Viewer, countless open standards, etc., then you should also take notice that these great majority of the PCs in use today were sold subject to the "Microsoft tax." The manufacturers of these machines paid Microsoft OS liscensing fees even on machines they sold that did not include Windows installed on them.
The GPL helped Linux get started in big ways. It was almost as important as Linus' "leadership." Now that the community is established, we don't need ESR anymore. Er, did we ever?
It's as if God gave you one CD-R for the rest of your life and you choose to burn Windows 3.1 on it.
If DRM can defeat spyware and viruses and help me keep my kids' computer safe for them to use, I'll consider it. Bonus if it helps drive down the price of legal online music and movies.
It looks to me, from the remnants of the website, that the developers wanted the game to be fairly immersive and involve a fair bit of actual role playing , as opposed to modified hack-n-slash with a quest system bolted on. Did anyone here play in beta? What were the compelling features? What went wrong?
H&R Block TaxCut Standard cost me $15 at the store and has a $5 rebate. I chose it because it isn't TurboTax (I hate Intuit because of previous Quickbooks and TurboTax fiascos). TaxCut Standard doesn't do free e-filing, but it does take a lot of reading and analysis out of taxes. Yes, I have the long form and a schedule C and other stuff. It does them and I was happy with the deductions it figured out for me. That's worth $15 and not something I'd trust to an open source project. I don't care if I never e-file a tax return. If you want to pay more you can e-file with the Deluxe or Premium version. I wouldn't expect Free tax filing software to be compatable with either TaxCut or TurboTax, so I see no use in it, unless you are the kind of masochist who wants to calculate and analyize your taxes without assistance, and then fill in forms manually, subject to all the errors and annoyance that this entails.
Incidentally, the infernal revenue service can suck on my paper forms until one or the other of us croaks, for all I care. I think I remember reading that about half of the revenue that the IRS takes in is used in IRS overhead. The ridiculitude of this is beyond expression. In the immortal words of N.W.A., "Fuck tha IRS."
No, it's a bad idea because it unnecessarily (and, rather stupidly) restricts freedom, which is far worse than simply causing practical problems for people who want to wear religious clothing. So the French hate Bin Laden and the rest of the extremists. They still suck.
That may be, but the best SSH client for windows is not commercial. It's PuTTY, a Free (capital "F" for Freedom) software project. In fact, often it works better than SSH clients on unix. It certianly has terminal emulation that just works right.
Macs are either faster than PCs or they are cheaper than PCs, but they certianly are not both. The advantage that the Mac has always had is that it just makes sense. Once you understand that Mac interface, you basically understand how to use your computer. With Windows, you have to learn how to do things over and over again.
By the way, 10 years ago was 1994. Those were the bad old days for Apple and the Macintosh as far as I'm concerned. These days Macs are pretty darn fast and they're closer to being price-competitive with windows machines than ever before, but an $800 Mac is going to have less disk space, less RAM and less processing power than an $800 PC. The same goes for the rest of the price points.
In addition, with a Mac, you pay over and over again. Every time OS X updates, you pay. Most people never pay more than once for Windows, if at all. The same goes for Office and most of the other popular software. On a Mac, you're usually buying instead of borrowing the install disk from a friend. Legal or not, that's the way it usually works. There are probably 50 little utilites that I use to do various things on windows. Everything from renaming music files to connecting via SSH to linux/unix. Most of these are freeware, Free software, shareware or stolen. Macs just don't have the same ecosystem of software developed around them that Windows and (to a lesser extent) the free unices do. I realize that with OS X, Mac systems are getting a lot of compatable free software from the unix world and there may be a bunch of things that OS X does that Windows needs utilities for, but it's still not nearly as extensive as the Windows world.
Windows is not good and frequently pretty bad. But it usually gets the job done. It sucks that people can't figure out how to keep spyware, viruses and hackers off of their machines and keep their internet connections and their critical programs running without a lot of handholding and behind-the-scenes work from administrators and consultants. I know this, because people pay me to do it. It would make more sense for them to use a Mac. Their critical software doesn't run on a Mac and they don't want to pay about 2x as much up front to get things working on a Mac, even if the critical stuff did run on it.
Macs are beautiful. In a lot of ways they make everyday computer use much easier and less stressful. There is a certian class of users (especially, I think, casual home users who don't require the use of specialized Windows-only software) who will benefit wonderfully from using a Mac. Many of the rest of us are forced, by habit, by contract, or by some other monopoly-related cause, to keep using windows on our desktop.
Linux doesn't need to have common-user-friendliness. It is what it is. If it's not friendly enough for you then don't use it. Lots of people would like it to be friendlier and they work to do make it friendlier, but no one is telling you that you have to believe that the command line is friendly. Linux is unix and it isn't intended to be easy to manage like a home PC. It's silly to advise the people who work on it to rip out its unix heart and replace it with what is needed to make it as friendly as DOS.
Today we have hand-held PDAs that run in the 100 to 400MHz range without active cooling. I had a 90MHz pentium with 32MB ram in 1994 and I have a 140MHz PDA with 256MB of memory today. I don't think too many people would argue that PDAs are about equal to or more powerful than the fastest desktop PCs of 10 years ago (despite different architectures, IPCs, etc).
If we use that as a guide, in 10 years we should expect the equivalent of a 2 to 3GHz Athlon and 2 to 500GB of memory/storage onboard our PDAs. From a power standpoint this seems ludicrous. Today we use 300 to 500W of power to run a PC, where we used 150 to 200W in 1994. Can that be scaled down to 3W or less in 10 years?
Assuming that the power requirements are met one way or another, can a portable device running with slightly more computing power than today's desktop do some of the things this Robert Sawyer talks about? Speech recognition seems possible. Translation seems possible. Lots of other interesting things may be possible, but I don't see it fitting into a wristwatch.
In other words, we need more people who don't care about getting shit upon, as long as they have interesting toys.
To be read aloud a la Steve Balmer's famous developers speech:
- It's not Free!
- It's not Free!
- It's not Free!
- It's not Free!
- It's not Free!
- It's not Free!
- It's not Free!
- It's not Free!
- IT'S not FREE!
- IT'S not FREE!
- IT'S not FREE!
- IT'S not FREE!
- IT'S not FREE!
- IT'S not FREE!
- IT'S NOT FREE!
- IT'S NOT FREE!
- IT'S NOT FREE!
- IT'S NOT FREE!
- IT'S NOT FREE!
- IT'S
... NOT ... FREE
Is it clear yet?I'm all for catching terrorists, but I have absolutely no reason to trust the government to treat me fairly. The government is run by mortals who will always be corrupted by power. This is simply too much unchecked power.
Does the cool sounding name enlarge your organ? It sure isn't any more useful for wireless keyboards than the proprietary RF or IR versions that came before the bluetooth circlejerk.
For many of us, Free is better. Do what you want to do, but I'll keep my freedom.
I abandoned X a long time ago because even at its best (that is, after weeks of frustrating tweaking and configuration), X is much more klunky and harder to use than Windows. If you install cygwin/xfree86 on windows you get the minor benefits of X and the major benefits of windows. If you network that windows box with a debian server as your firewall, you get the best of both worlds and redundancy to boot.
OT: It amazes me that Apple got OSX to work so well. It's a very complex system built out of a moderately complex unix base and what must be an even more complex presentation layer. The linux community doesn't have the unity of purpose that Apple has and so I have doubts about its ability to generate a stable, useful GUI layer. If someone does manage to create one, my gut tells me that it will not be much based on what we currently have in X.
That would appear to be the good news. I think that the bad news is that outsourcing isn't going to last long as a real solution for cutting certian labor costs. Instead, companies are going to realize that it really is dangerous and conterproductive to export too much proprietary data and work to outside firms. Instead of purely outsourcing a job to India or elsewhere, companies are going to put more effort to set up real offices in those countries bringing the foreign workers in-house. It has been going on for a while, but recent progress in telecommunication has led companies to choose quick-and-dirty outsourcing to bridge cultural and political gaps and reap cost savings. As executives become more adept at dealing with the foreign cultures and labor marketplaces (esp. by acquiring foreign executives who understand the foreign places) they will be able to achieve both better cost savings and better overall security by untying their internal organization from traditional geographic divisions. Companies will further embrace doing whatever part of their business "needs" to be done in whatever part of the world they can do it cheapest. It's still globalization, but it's more pervasive than just redistributing production centers and opening new markets to sales. It's re-distributing the locus of control within each company.
Here's some predicitons: The biggest U.S. export for a while is going to be culture. Foreigners who want to work for U.S. globalized companies in their own countries are going to have to work in many ways within western cultural frameworks and they will bring that culture home to their families and neighbors. The U.S. dollar will continue a long, slow decline in (relative) value, as will the Euro, eventually. This is a natural result of the strengthening of competing currencies of the foreign nations which will be supplying the new, eager middle-class labor forces. As more countries follow India's example of embracing western culture and education, they will gain a share in the job market.
Hopefully, as western culture (particularly the English language and the values of capitalism) become more pervasive, people will also break down political barriers. It all does seem a long way off, but almost certainly the 100 years of the 21st century will witness more and faster changes in the human landscape of the world than the 20th, due to the interconnectedness of the world (think about, for instance, that probably for all of the next 100 years, people will be able to make a phone call or send email anywhere in the world instantly. In 1900 this was hardly even a dream.) and the continuously-increasing pace of technological advance. Probably third world nations will not disappear, but wealth and poverty are likely to be distributed more evenly (geographically, anyway) throughout the globe. That is, after all, what we're ultimately worried about in out own small way. We (all) want the opportunity to make ourselves useful and prosperous. It's just going to take some suffering and upheaval before things equalize. Buckle up.
That's a good point, but I doubt that rounding errors are going to creep in except after very many operations on a number. One way to prevent that problem would be to simply round the float before and after any complicated calculations that might cause such problems. When I wrote my own payroll software, this is what I did. I initially used rounding to keep number formatting simple and then later to be 100% sure that I was doing the same calculations that the IRS, etc, might be doing. I have to say that it's very interesting the systems you mentioned have native support for packed decimal numbers.
Unfortunately, with the work-from-home situation you reinforce some of the problems that come from lack of face time with your team mates and managers. To do your job well you do need to get to know many of the other people you're working with. To make your job secure you do need to spend time sharing experience, making friends and even kissing ass. Working from home will make your work more commodetized and your job less secure. Find ways as the ER doctor above said, to make your job at the company more beneficial to your employer than just the work you're hired to do.
I, for one, am very sick of all this changing currency. I run a laundromat and depend on a bill changer. If the currency changes then I must pay almost $1000 for a new bill reader to accept the new 20s. The bill reader does not make me money, it is just the cost of doing business. Every time our stupid government decides to change the currency, that's more out of my pocket and into the pockets of the damnable changer manufacturers.