'Under the new guidelines, telcos are required to make most of their pre-installed apps deletable except for four necessary items related to Wi-Fi connectivity, near-field communication (NFC), the customer service center and the app store.' It'd be nice if similar legislation were passed in the U.S. and elsewhere."
They could just make one monolithic wifi+nfc+customer service+app store+bloatshit app that now satisfies the requirement that it is necessary to run the phone, and still doesn't give people what they actually want.
I don't usually support laws to handle this sort of thing. But if you are going to make a law, a better one would be that your phone must come with the option to run a stock android OS.
By "their region" are you referring to silicon valley? If so, this is already the highest paid region for software developers. I almost worked at a company that refused to hire workers from the bay area because they knew they expected much higher salaries than they were willing to give.
This is like if a bunch of Ferrari enthusiasts tried to collude to make Ferraris cheaper. Maybe they could succeed in making them a little cheaper. But their still going to be really expensive.
No, but you can just leak it if you know about it. Embarrassing corporate emails get leaked all the time. In fact I would suspect that if ti were legal it would be more likely to become public information because there would be less of an incentive to keep it secret.
You wouldn't be able to throw steve jobs in jail for colluding, but you would probably have a better chance of knowing if he's doing it.
This isn't really true. Any reasonably coherent group has common interests and engineers or workers in general certainly are such groups.
I didn't say that your interests can't overlap. In fact I think I implied that quite often they do. What I am saying is that overlapping self interest should not be confused with concepts like altruism or kin selection. The second your interests no longer overlap significantly both sides should expect the relationship to terminate.
The degree to which ones relationship with ones employer is voluntary is also fairly doubtful. It is voluntary only in that there is a possibility to choose among employers, but even if they were in perfect competition this does not make making the choice voluntary. That is only voluntary as long as one has the resources to become ones own employer.
I would agree with you that it is essential to maintain the ability to become your own employer, in order for employment to be considered voluntary. But I really don;t see much of a threat to the ability to be your own employer. Sure there is some red tape involved, but there is red tape involved with everything. While I don;t think every person is capable of running their own business, enough people do it successfully that I wouldn't consider this path to be overly difficult.
The engineers at google might have those resources if they banded together and formed themselves into a worker co-operative, or had a union which regularly threatened that they would form themselves into such an entity, and that might give them an equitable share of their production. In more capital intensive industries the workers, even collectively can't do this, and must resort to threatening strikes. These are policies necessary for getting a good share of wages even in competitive markets and when people form cartels against people who don't even have a union there will be a reduction in wages.
I don't think unions are bad. I also don't think they are always necessary. There is such a wide skill level difference in engineers that it's hard to commodify it. There is not a real incentive for exceptional engineers to throw their lot in with the others. In fact I frequently find myself wishing other engineers would be fired because I don;t think they are justifying their salary, and I don't see their work as valuable enough to "split the pot" with them.
I think google's strategy thus far has been pretty good. They decided to provide one of the best working environments that a software engineer can get. They offer very competitive salaries, and their engineers get to work on very interesting projects, as well as getting many perks that other companies do not offer. Because of this they were able to attract a lot of really good engineers.
Even if they were engaging in this sort of backroom dealing to retain employees by discouraging competitive offers from certain competitors, they still pay some of the highest salaries in the industry. The fact is that google *needs* to pay these high salaries in order to attract the engineers with the skills they want.
Sure google employees could form a union. But this would probably be less effective than trying to find higher paying jobs, preferably from one of the companies not involved in this cartel.
There may not be so many jobs willing to pay higher salaries than google. If this is the case, then it is evidence that their were not heavily exploiting their cartel.
If google is heavily underpaying their engineers based on their talent. There is every incentive to try to lure them away from google with higher salary offers. If you are adobe, then maybe you have an incentive not to do this to prevent it from being done to you by other big companies, but other companies don't have this restriction.
People say big corporations hold all the cards. But really this can't be true, or else engineers would be making minimum wage. Clearly eng
Bob commits election fraud. Republicans say election fraud is a big problem so we need voter ID laws to prevent it. Democrats say yes Bob needs to go to jail, but that doesn't mean voter fraud is a big deal, and the extreme solution of Voter ID laws to prevent voter fraud would cause more harm in disenfranchising people, than the benefit of stopping voter fraud.
I am saying that yes people need to go to jail if they broke the law. What I am also saying is that more regulation is not necessarily a good thing.
I agree with this. And as a person with a lot of friends who are on the far left, they would prefer to call it cooperation rather than collusion.
I would say that it is a better idea to remove the special protections that big corporations currently have than it is to give out special protections to everyone else to compensate.
So you are saying that because in this particular example was discovered via lawsuit that that's the noly way these sorts of things can be discovered?
Also, it's not like this was discovered because of a lawsuit. Someone discovered it and then filed a lawsuit, and then made it public. Presumably this could have just as easily been made public without the lawsuit.
I believe that's the chance of any particular pair being in collision. The chance of some pair being in collision would be appreciably larger.
The chance of a particular pair colliding is 1/(2^128). The formula I provided is the probability for any pair colliding.
And you left out the number of bins in the hash. Even if the raw md5sum would be different, when you change it into a bin number it will be quite a bit smaller...though this can be handled by chaining, etc.
And this wouldn't count as a collision in the sense that you wouldn't mistakenly assume to files were equal when they were actually different. This would presumably only happen if the md5 hashes collided
But, yest, it is critically dependent on the number of files to be examined. If he's managing a large library of images, and they are valuable, then he might want to avoid this approach.
How large is a large library of files? I don;t know how far you followed this thread, but I actually made a small python script to calculate how many files you'd need to cause a certain liklihood of a collision, and it's been running for about 18 hours so far and at 640 billion files, the chances of a collision are still 0.000000
And how would you judge whether a company is underpaying you? By comparing what the company offers you to the *market price*.
That bit gets a little tricky. In some sense I do compare my salary to the market price. But lets say the market price for a software job was $20k/year. At that point I would consider being a freelance software engineer or starting my own company and hiring a bunch of talented engineers for $20k/year. If the market price were $20k/year, fewer people would go to school to become engineers, and this would lower the supply and increase demand for engineers.
Everyone making this calculation in their head has an effect on market price.
No single entity controls the market price on anything. Engineers have an effect. CEOs have an effect. Universities have an effect, etc.
What the CEOs stand accused of is colluding to depress the market price for engineering labor.
And I agree that that's what they did, and I agree that they probably succeeded to some extent
What I am saying is that I don't think they had a large effect. I think they had the effect that you might expect a small cartel to have. Maybe someone will publish a study showing all engineers industry wide make 20% less because of this deal, but I doubt it, and I made this doubt public.
You made a bunch of statements, and really did not really support those statements. I wouldn't call this an explanation.
Does a CEO have more power than an engineer? Well I would hope so seeing as how it's his/her job to be the head of the company. Does a CEO have more power than all the engineers in a company? That's for the owner of the company to decide. If google shareholders had a choice to either pay X dollars to keep their CEO or all their engineers, I suspect they would keep the engineers.
The "exposure" is not going to come from a few or even many Engineers complaining in isolation that there might be some collusion going on as the alternative offers are drying up.
The exposure doesn't need to come from engineers. It can come from anyone who knows about it.
What you are suggesting is that companies can forma a cartel for software jobs. I agree this is possible, but I don't think it's easy to make this cartel industry wide. The larger the cartel, the more unsustainable it becomes.
As it is, there are tons of opportunities out there for talented software engineers. There is more software that needs to get written than there is developers to write it. It takes a lot of effort to become a good engineer, and there is going to be a strong incentive to compete for these developers.
Even in the article among these few companies, apple was struggling to keep Adobe from ruining the cartel, and ultimately the emails got leaked.
The only one with your interests is you (and possibly your friends and family). The sooner people realize that the better. You have a professional voluntary relationship with your employer, where they are trying to get the most work out of you for the least money, and you are trying to get the most money out of them for the least work.
It's like buying a house. Is the seller your enemy? No but he's definitely not your friend either. It's a voluntary relationship where each side can expect the other to exploit any weakness for their own interest. That doesn't mean this relationship can't be beneficial to both parties under the right circumstances. A lot of companies take the strategy of getting people to produce by instilling company loyalty by treating their employees really well. Some don't.
Ironically Google is actually one of the companies that treats it's employees the best. Maybe they need to have strategies to keep employees salaries in check. I know I might be tempted to feel entitled to a ridiculous salary if I worked at google.
OK. I am actually a free market libertarian software engineer. This does bother me, but I would suggest that the solution to these sorts of problems is exposure rather than laws. I don't feel that my ability to market my skills is significantly affected. I don't need to work for any company that would underpay me. Even though these are big companies, the percentage of software engineers they hire is a small percentage of the total.
As far as examples of negative aspects of the free market go, this is pretty mild.
I would suggest that a free market approach would be to go one step further and have shareholders conspire to limit CEO salaries. Those cut into corporate profits as well.
We don't complain about how expensive it is for otherwise infertile heterosexual couples to have kids with medical help because it's a choice the couple makes.
You are an accessory to welfare fraud too. You did not fight hard enough to stop these welfare queens and now it is your responsibility to pay. Sucks for you.
I actually wrote a program that looks for duplicate files based on md5hash, and I did check "size collisions" before actually computing md5hashes (which are pretty CPU intensive for large files).
But even if all the files were the same size, you need a lot of files before you should expect to run into collisions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure he doesn't want to be murdered if he is worried about getting a fair trial in the US.
They could just make one monolithic wifi+nfc+customer service+app store+bloatshit app that now satisfies the requirement that it is necessary to run the phone, and still doesn't give people what they actually want.
I don't usually support laws to handle this sort of thing. But if you are going to make a law, a better one would be that your phone must come with the option to run a stock android OS.
So nobody try to DDOS him ok?
By "their region" are you referring to silicon valley? If so, this is already the highest paid region for software developers. I almost worked at a company that refused to hire workers from the bay area because they knew they expected much higher salaries than they were willing to give.
This is like if a bunch of Ferrari enthusiasts tried to collude to make Ferraris cheaper. Maybe they could succeed in making them a little cheaper. But their still going to be really expensive.
Man not sense make because sentence fragments
No, but you can just leak it if you know about it. Embarrassing corporate emails get leaked all the time. In fact I would suspect that if ti were legal it would be more likely to become public information because there would be less of an incentive to keep it secret.
You wouldn't be able to throw steve jobs in jail for colluding, but you would probably have a better chance of knowing if he's doing it.
This isn't really true. Any reasonably coherent group has common interests and engineers or workers in general certainly are such groups.
I didn't say that your interests can't overlap. In fact I think I implied that quite often they do. What I am saying is that overlapping self interest should not be confused with concepts like altruism or kin selection. The second your interests no longer overlap significantly both sides should expect the relationship to terminate.
The degree to which ones relationship with ones employer is voluntary is also fairly doubtful. It is voluntary only in that there is a possibility to choose among employers, but even if they were in perfect competition this does not make making the choice voluntary. That is only voluntary as long as one has the resources to become ones own employer.
I would agree with you that it is essential to maintain the ability to become your own employer, in order for employment to be considered voluntary. But I really don;t see much of a threat to the ability to be your own employer. Sure there is some red tape involved, but there is red tape involved with everything. While I don;t think every person is capable of running their own business, enough people do it successfully that I wouldn't consider this path to be overly difficult.
The engineers at google might have those resources if they banded together and formed themselves into a worker co-operative, or had a union which regularly threatened that they would form themselves into such an entity, and that might give them an equitable share of their production. In more capital intensive industries the workers, even collectively can't do this, and must resort to threatening strikes. These are policies necessary for getting a good share of wages even in competitive markets and when people form cartels against people who don't even have a union there will be a reduction in wages.
I don't think unions are bad. I also don't think they are always necessary. There is such a wide skill level difference in engineers that it's hard to commodify it. There is not a real incentive for exceptional engineers to throw their lot in with the others. In fact I frequently find myself wishing other engineers would be fired because I don;t think they are justifying their salary, and I don't see their work as valuable enough to "split the pot" with them.
I think google's strategy thus far has been pretty good. They decided to provide one of the best working environments that a software engineer can get. They offer very competitive salaries, and their engineers get to work on very interesting projects, as well as getting many perks that other companies do not offer. Because of this they were able to attract a lot of really good engineers.
Even if they were engaging in this sort of backroom dealing to retain employees by discouraging competitive offers from certain competitors, they still pay some of the highest salaries in the industry. The fact is that google *needs* to pay these high salaries in order to attract the engineers with the skills they want.
Sure google employees could form a union. But this would probably be less effective than trying to find higher paying jobs, preferably from one of the companies not involved in this cartel.
There may not be so many jobs willing to pay higher salaries than google. If this is the case, then it is evidence that their were not heavily exploiting their cartel.
If google is heavily underpaying their engineers based on their talent. There is every incentive to try to lure them away from google with higher salary offers. If you are adobe, then maybe you have an incentive not to do this to prevent it from being done to you by other big companies, but other companies don't have this restriction.
People say big corporations hold all the cards. But really this can't be true, or else engineers would be making minimum wage. Clearly eng
No it's more like this.
Bob commits election fraud. Republicans say election fraud is a big problem so we need voter ID laws to prevent it. Democrats say yes Bob needs to go to jail, but that doesn't mean voter fraud is a big deal, and the extreme solution of Voter ID laws to prevent voter fraud would cause more harm in disenfranchising people, than the benefit of stopping voter fraud.
I am saying that yes people need to go to jail if they broke the law. What I am also saying is that more regulation is not necessarily a good thing.
I agree with this. And as a person with a lot of friends who are on the far left, they would prefer to call it cooperation rather than collusion.
I would say that it is a better idea to remove the special protections that big corporations currently have than it is to give out special protections to everyone else to compensate.
the upper bound is 2^128. I think I originally said p goes to 1 as n goes to infinity, but it is actually that p goes to 1 as n goes to 2^128
So you are saying that because in this particular example was discovered via lawsuit that that's the noly way these sorts of things can be discovered?
Also, it's not like this was discovered because of a lawsuit. Someone discovered it and then filed a lawsuit, and then made it public. Presumably this could have just as easily been made public without the lawsuit.
I believe that's the chance of any particular pair being in collision. The chance of some pair being in collision would be appreciably larger.
The chance of a particular pair colliding is 1/(2^128). The formula I provided is the probability for any pair colliding.
And you left out the number of bins in the hash. Even if the raw md5sum would be different, when you change it into a bin number it will be quite a bit smaller...though this can be handled by chaining, etc.
And this wouldn't count as a collision in the sense that you wouldn't mistakenly assume to files were equal when they were actually different. This would presumably only happen if the md5 hashes collided
But, yest, it is critically dependent on the number of files to be examined. If he's managing a large library of images, and they are valuable, then he might want to avoid this approach.
How large is a large library of files? I don;t know how far you followed this thread, but I actually made a small python script to calculate how many files you'd need to cause a certain liklihood of a collision, and it's been running for about 18 hours so far and at 640 billion files, the chances of a collision are still 0.000000
And how would you judge whether a company is underpaying you? By comparing what the company offers you to the *market price*.
That bit gets a little tricky. In some sense I do compare my salary to the market price. But lets say the market price for a software job was $20k/year. At that point I would consider being a freelance software engineer or starting my own company and hiring a bunch of talented engineers for $20k/year. If the market price were $20k/year, fewer people would go to school to become engineers, and this would lower the supply and increase demand for engineers.
Everyone making this calculation in their head has an effect on market price.
No single entity controls the market price on anything. Engineers have an effect. CEOs have an effect. Universities have an effect, etc.
What the CEOs stand accused of is colluding to depress the market price for engineering labor.
And I agree that that's what they did, and I agree that they probably succeeded to some extent
What I am saying is that I don't think they had a large effect. I think they had the effect that you might expect a small cartel to have. Maybe someone will publish a study showing all engineers industry wide make 20% less because of this deal, but I doubt it, and I made this doubt public.
You made a bunch of statements, and really did not really support those statements. I wouldn't call this an explanation.
Does a CEO have more power than an engineer? Well I would hope so seeing as how it's his/her job to be the head of the company. Does a CEO have more power than all the engineers in a company? That's for the owner of the company to decide. If google shareholders had a choice to either pay X dollars to keep their CEO or all their engineers, I suspect they would keep the engineers.
You do know majority means >50% right?
The "exposure" is not going to come from a few or even many Engineers complaining in isolation that there might be some collusion going on as the alternative offers are drying up.
The exposure doesn't need to come from engineers. It can come from anyone who knows about it.
What you are suggesting is that companies can forma a cartel for software jobs. I agree this is possible, but I don't think it's easy to make this cartel industry wide. The larger the cartel, the more unsustainable it becomes.
As it is, there are tons of opportunities out there for talented software engineers. There is more software that needs to get written than there is developers to write it. It takes a lot of effort to become a good engineer, and there is going to be a strong incentive to compete for these developers.
Even in the article among these few companies, apple was struggling to keep Adobe from ruining the cartel, and ultimately the emails got leaked.
The only one with your interests is you (and possibly your friends and family). The sooner people realize that the better. You have a professional voluntary relationship with your employer, where they are trying to get the most work out of you for the least money, and you are trying to get the most money out of them for the least work.
It's like buying a house. Is the seller your enemy? No but he's definitely not your friend either. It's a voluntary relationship where each side can expect the other to exploit any weakness for their own interest. That doesn't mean this relationship can't be beneficial to both parties under the right circumstances. A lot of companies take the strategy of getting people to produce by instilling company loyalty by treating their employees really well. Some don't.
Ironically Google is actually one of the companies that treats it's employees the best. Maybe they need to have strategies to keep employees salaries in check. I know I might be tempted to feel entitled to a ridiculous salary if I worked at google.
OK. I am actually a free market libertarian software engineer. This does bother me, but I would suggest that the solution to these sorts of problems is exposure rather than laws. I don't feel that my ability to market my skills is significantly affected. I don't need to work for any company that would underpay me. Even though these are big companies, the percentage of software engineers they hire is a small percentage of the total.
As far as examples of negative aspects of the free market go, this is pretty mild.
I would suggest that a free market approach would be to go one step further and have shareholders conspire to limit CEO salaries. Those cut into corporate profits as well.
We don't complain about how expensive it is for otherwise infertile heterosexual couples to have kids with medical help because it's a choice the couple makes.
I do
You are an accessory to welfare fraud too. You did not fight hard enough to stop these welfare queens and now it is your responsibility to pay. Sucks for you.
Why should tax payers have to pay for orphanages? We should make the people working at the orphanage work for free.
Why should I care if some anonymous coward has to pay for something? Now if it was me, then I would care.
according to who?
What about giving your child to an orphanage?
I actually wrote a program that looks for duplicate files based on md5hash, and I did check "size collisions" before actually computing md5hashes (which are pretty CPU intensive for large files).
But even if all the files were the same size, you need a lot of files before you should expect to run into collisions.