Except that Apple's Mac Mini can't drive dual monitors. Our near-baseline Dell's do it just fine.:(
Re:With the introduction of AppleTV...
on
The Home Server Cometh
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, USB hard drives. And printers.
But only 1 USB port. So if you really need to purchase an additional USB hub to use with it.
And that gigabit ethernet will be awfully useful since you're going to be using it as a fileserver for assumedly 1-5 people in your house. With all that traffic - videos and music and whatnot (throw 2 kids plus you plus s/o or friend(s) on the lan, irc, watching movies from the share, plus a bittorrent or two, ichat/aim/jabber, Tivo/ReplayTV video download from the devices, web and email traffic on your lan, and some game traffic UT or Quake or something). Oh, wait, it doesn't have gigabit ethernet on it.:(
With this thing they are really trying to push wifi it seems. I hope 802.11N works as well as they hope, because from experience 802.11b/g bandwidth can be used up mighty quick by just a few people.
Seriously, they must've put effort into looking for an ethernet chip-set that doesn't have gigabit in it.
What'd have been nice would have been a firewire 400 port. If Steve really wanted to knock my socks off it'd have f/w 400, 800, and gigabit on call cat5 ports. I'd have already ordered it if that were the case. I guess not;(
Whether OSTG uses a "customized version of MySQL" has absolutely nothing to do with what happened with the threaded comment posting being disabled a few months ago. That was a schema issue, plain and simple.
I've never heard they used *anything* custom in MySQL. InnoDB, MyISAM, replication and multiple masters on some beefy hardware is the general consensus. For caching, it's mainly memcached, just like a lot of the bigger sites.
Do a comment search here on Slashdot. I thought it was proven that the auto-drm is a checkbox setting that's off by default in Microsoft Media software.
Yes, you can do this. But you'll end up paying quite a bit more for the plain phone then you will for the gee-whiz-geeked-out phone.
I know, it cost me $70 a few months ago to get a phone that did nothing but calls for my wife because she didn't want one "with all that other crap". Whereas the tricked out phone was free.
I'm not saying that I don't agree the docs could be better. But that's nothing new for 99% of all projects, especially opensource, imho. Some of what's in/docs is seemingly ~4 years old. As far as slashcode goes, there've been many people who've complained the docs aren't great.
However, that you _can_ follow the INSTALL instructions and have a working slashcode system, you can't knock that. I guess when you ask "that's the best you can say?" I don't see anything wrong with that.
"lack of a full releass" kills the entire point of Slashdot users working on the Slashcode
Yes, it surely does. And the upgrade process from 2.2.6 to current is well, abysmal. It's do able with some effort (following the documentation), more so obviously if you don't know the project well. The lack of a "slashupgrade.pl" that site admins can run is a turnoff for many people still running 2.2.6. The lack of a current release just plain puts people off from even attempting to run the latest. And even if you are the running the latest, or somewhat the latest, you have to apply updates - by hand. There's no stock-included upgrade tool to go from T_2_5_0_128 to T_2_5_0_133.
Slashdot's complaining programmer user community is a huge pool.
Slashdot's surely is huge. Slashcode's, I don't agree with you there. Just look at the activity (or lackthereof) on the listserves. Slashdot and Slashcode are two different things. Which is kind of sad, because you'd think with the pool of talent Slashdot itself attracts there'd be many more people trying to help with Slashcode.
If the Slashdot org encouraged us with better docs, not just silence or the arch, obnoxious attitude you just displayed, more of use would join the team to produce a better Slashcode.
Obnoxious? ha.
The 'silence' is what's frustrating for me. Not knowing where the code is heading is aggravating at times.
And if you think that none of the many programmer users would have noticed the index datatype change in one scope but not the necessary one in another, you don't even understand Slashdot.
Well, no one noticed there could be a problem with that index in the stock code, obviously. The schema for comments wasn't changed for how long? The code's out there, been out in the open source land for years now. There's nothing stopping anyone from grabbing it an analyzing it. I still doubt that any "normal traffic" site would have noticed this limitation. Should someone have caught it? Sure. But most sites don't have the traffic slashdot has, so about the only site that'd ever run into this limitation with the slashcode code is Slashdot itself.
In fact, you've just shown you don't understand how OSS projects work
Oh? Please explain.
though you apparently understand how the OSS code works in this one
I think so, yes, at times, anyway.
Exactly my point. No wonder the Slashcode project is so unpopular, and therefore irrelevant. Which you seem more than happy about - defensive of, even. Congratulations.
Defensive? No. If my comment came off that way, that wasn't my reply's intent.
However, frustrated, yes. Frustrated that people pop into a project, claim "this sucks" but don't give any concrete examples where it sucks. Or, better yet, how about some constructive criticism and pointed suggestions such that if someone were to spend their own time helping trying to help with what's pointed out, the project *could be improved*.
PERL is used for small highly-portable scripts, tools, and add-ons.
Are you basing this limited list on your limited experience?;) Perl's used, and misused, for many many more things and in many more instances than what you declare as fact.
Think about this - if he were making $60k/yr, that 66% raise would boost him to ~$99.6k. Thats a _huge_ jump.
Me, I'd be willing to bite the bullet and work in the.Net experience, for at-least a few years there to pay off bills and stash some money away. Besides,.Net isn't that bad to work in, it's just that Perl's better;)
While I agree with you on the lack-of-a-full-release, the doc's are _not_ that bad. Infact, if you compare them to many other open source systems (for the point of this post we'll call Slashcode a CMS) they docs are pretty good. Example: How many of them give pointers to using CPAN? And if you follow the INSTALL instructions, exactly, you have a working slash installation. That seems simple enough to me.
encouraged some of the many of us who complain about bugs/features to help the project
Clap clap clap. There ya go, your encouragement. Now quit your whining and actually _do_ something positive to help the project.
more likely that someone would have debugged this bug earlier
I do not agree with you here. How many websites would have that many comments posted? The only way you are going to find this problem is a) if you're going over the schema with a fine-tooth-code (and c'mon, very, very few people are going to put the energy into this) or b) your data you are migrating to Slashcode has that many comments. No one's going have createTestComments generate that many. That's just not something anyone would normally do.
If you want the best (no matter how you define 'the best') you have to pay the going rate for 'the best'. It's a simple premise, you get what you pay for.
There are very, very few people, as they get older, that will work for "less" because something else they find worthy to justify the lesser salary. Later on in life, once someone has their 401k expanded and savings and everything paid off, that attitude can flip. But for most geeks that are in the 25-45 range (that worked through the 90's boom) they now have a family, a mortage, college to pay off, college savings to bank for their kids. They cannot afford to work for less then what they are worth. And they've spent plenty of days, weeks, months and years behind that monitor, reading those books, donating some freetime to open source stuff, helping newbies on IRC (etc), working the extra hours when the rest of the office went home @5, they deserve to be paid what they are now worth.
And it *is* difficult to find *good people* when you don't want to pay them what they're worth. Every employer I've ever worked for tries this approach. It just doesn't work. They hire newbies who aren't worth the time involved, or middle-tier-level people whom they want superstar work product from. Until things become so scewed up (missed projects, faulty projects, missed deadlines, other departments projects delayed cancelled because IT cannot come through) that they eventually have to clear the position, bump salary threshold for the now-posted-position to a reasonable++ level, and then they are able to acquire good talent. But things are such a mess that they are indebted to where they must spend a year or two (or more) paying the piper having cleanup done. So they don't initially see the "productivity gains" they thought they'd see when they finally hired someone with talent. Nothing's free in the IT world.
Why they just don't do the hiring right from the first place, I don't know. Well, I do know their reasoning, I've heard it. We can save money.
Yeah, right. Two years later I'd be willing to bet you can demonstrate how this attitude and behavior costs more then it was ever projected to save.
1GB (single SO-DIMM) of PC2-5300 (667MHz) DDR2 memory on 2.16GHz configuration; and 2GB (two SO-DIMMs) on 2.33GHz configuration; two SO-DIMM slots support up to 3GB
Plenty of people don't shop Apple for music, often specifically because they reject the lock-in it represents.
I call BS. Where do you get this stat, and out of what user-group?
See, all the techies I know, well, most of them, balk at the DRM iTunes shoves at you. All of the non-techies I know who own iPods have never ran into any of the DRM restrictions (that I am aware of) and regularly purchase music off iTunes.
Me, personally, I've purchased music off iTunes. It works, it's easy. And every once in a while someone releases an app that will unencrypt everything for me. So I run that on what I've bought, back them up, and move on. No biggie, and I feel that doing this covers me, incase Apple's DRM rules were to change (doubtful) or my computer(s) or something screwed up so bad that I were to have problems reading the DRM'd files.
Actually, no, I didn't. I'm skeptical about the future of IT labor in countries which are established and have a much higher cost of living. When a US company can hire someone (with equivalent skills, knowledge, experience) across the globe at half my rate, and they can only do this because this person's cost of living isn't even half that of mine, that scares me.
you get someone that doesn't know what they are doing and needs to be helped constantly. The same as if you'd hired someone locally for that price.
As far as I could tell, yes. It turns out they were _not_ using CVS, SVN (tho both were recommended), and weren't backing anything up. The drive died on their development server, p00f, all gone. Moral of the story, as usual: backup!
they don't last long. I IT is booming overseas, and there's many more jobs than qualified people to fill them.
Sounds like history repeating itself huh? Just a few years ago it was the same here. Thankfully there's been a lot of burn out of the "underqualified" who tried to jump the IT bandwagon and never had the aptitude to begin with.
There's no attitude in what I wrote - it was a statement of fact. His cost of living is far lower then mine.
Whine and complain on Slashdot
I'd say you're the one whining.
Do something about it: Move, Start your own company
Yes, both of those are doable, for most people. For me, moving isn't an option (kids, schools, sick parent). But I did do your 2nd suggestion there, a few years ago. It's of that where my story originates.
but until localized support is in place, it's up to them to learn from the source, at your rates.
I think that's part of the "debate". It used to be you wanted labor, you looked local to you (geographically). "Local" with globalization is becoming everywhere. Yet, with that there is no direct cost of living relationship.
And what happens once they've learned? There is now more competition for you - with which, at your income, at your tax level you may not be able to compete. If this were to continue on, you'd find quite a few jobless people. And jobless people cannot pay taxes. Yes, I'm generalizing, but hopefully you get the idea.
I was recently hired for a short spell to help someone develop a website. It appears they started the project (they're a US Company, based in NY) by hiring a developer from Africa at $10/hour. Now, I would presume for some parts of Africa $10/hr is good money, while others maybe not so much. However, here in Ohio (US), that's squat.
They got into a bind, their developer didn't know what he should know (or, rather, needed to know for this project, possibly not his fault) and ended up contacting me. First wanting my help/advise for free, because, well, the website is based on an open source project I participate in. At first a few questions here or there is fine, but after a while, finding out it's a for-profit venture, enough is enough. I balked at the continued "free help".
First they complained they're only making $10/hr. Later, they begrudgingly offered me half my going rate. Again, I baulked. Eventually they antied up the full rate, and I worked with them till they had a hardware disaster and gave up.
Moral of the story? Globalization of IT is difficult; The language barriers and the difference in time-zones can be frustrating and complex. The difference in pay can be astounding.
However, Globalization rather scares me more then not. Looking at what happened to me, the company seemingly purposefully went out and hired a developer, in Africa, just to save money so they didn't have to pay an American, who'd require more pay. My only saving grace was that this developer they hired didn't know as much as me (and especially didn't know as much related to the open source project's code they were using).
But one day, he may (or will)! Then what? Any US company can hire him, at a far lower wage then what I require (to feed/cloth my family as they currently are, etc etc). Where does that leave me? Scrambling for a job/career that has steady employment from which I can sustain this lifestyle.
I don't relate this experience to complain about the un-named company that hired me, nor the across the globe developer. I bring this up to tell my story of a project which was global in nature and which, after experiencing it, leaves me skeptical regarding IT's future in higher cost of living countries.
I thought it interesting that they have a slider similar to Slashcode's. Cosmetically, I like metaforum's slider better. However, Slashcode's functionality, once you "get it", is far better. Plus the fact that Slashcode's slider follows you down the screen, so you don't have to page-up to find it and change it's settings, I like Slashdot's better.
One thing I did notice about the metaforum, that I'm not sure I like - listing those who've moderated a comment immediately underneath the comment. I can see the good (easy-info, user-name recognition) along with the bad (abuse to get your name in the lime-light).
Apple needs the sale through iTunes. Walmart needs the *foot traffic*. And Walmart has stores all over the country in all sorts of remote locations (that don't have bandwidth, and won't have significant bandwidth anytime soon).
So Apple and Walmart work together to develop a kiosk system. A customer can come in, plop their iPod down into it, choose whatever Movie they want, put their credit card into it, and the movie's copied to their iPod.
Walmart needs no additional staff to do it. Apple gets the sale, Walmart gets a cut. Then the customer goes on to purchase whatever else they need, since, oh, they're already *in* Walmart.
Infact, they could work out an arrangement where the price of the Movie via the kiosk would be cheaper then the physical DVD and it's cheaper then downloading it from iTunes at home. It's the same idea of Walmart selling the latest DVD at less then their cost - to get you into the store. Why wait "hours and hours" for something to download to your iPod? Come into the store and get it on your iPod in minutes!!
And eventually, as the DVD physical format is faded out, they could have multiple kiosks for people to download their media to their iPods. If MS is smart, they'll do the same. Throw in a coffee and food area around them so people can buy an overpriced coffee while they're waiting for their iPod or Zune to fill up. Quick, cheap (cheaper then buying the physical DVD), Walmart gets the foot traffic, Walmart and Apple and the studios get your information on what you bought.
1. At the gym. The TV's generally are hooked into a particular FM frequency. So if they're showing sportscenter and the screen's too far away from the excer-bike to read text or mouths, you could dial your mp3 player into the appropriate frequency and listen to the show. I've wanted this for the History channel, too, because it's on one of their monitors.
2. NPR. Not all of the NPR material is podcasted:(
This only helps if Microsoft has instructions regarding this checkbox plastered all over the Zune's information (manual, etc) or if the checkbox for "Copy protect music is unchecked as the default behavior.
Otherwise, how many of your neighbors will run out and buy a Zune for the kid(s), then the family spends a weekend feeding their cd's into their computer so the Zune can be loaded with it. How many of them will know to go into the tools and uncheck that box?
Out of the 12 or so houses on our block, there's only one household (besides my own) that would eventually figure this out, one way or the other. The others would be clueless.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it have been nice if the submitter or author would've included a link to silverlight in the damned post in the first place?!?
You may find OSCON interesting.
Except that Apple's Mac Mini can't drive dual monitors. Our near-baseline Dell's do it just fine. :(
Yes, USB hard drives. And printers.
:(
;(
But only 1 USB port. So if you really need to purchase an additional USB hub to use with it.
And that gigabit ethernet will be awfully useful since you're going to be using it as a fileserver for assumedly 1-5 people in your house. With all that traffic - videos and music and whatnot (throw 2 kids plus you plus s/o or friend(s) on the lan, irc, watching movies from the share, plus a bittorrent or two, ichat/aim/jabber, Tivo/ReplayTV video download from the devices, web and email traffic on your lan, and some game traffic UT or Quake or something). Oh, wait, it doesn't have gigabit ethernet on it.
With this thing they are really trying to push wifi it seems. I hope 802.11N works as well as they hope, because from experience 802.11b/g bandwidth can be used up mighty quick by just a few people.
Seriously, they must've put effort into looking for an ethernet chip-set that doesn't have gigabit in it.
What'd have been nice would have been a firewire 400 port. If Steve really wanted to knock my socks off it'd have f/w 400, 800, and gigabit on call cat5 ports. I'd have already ordered it if that were the case. I guess not
Whether OSTG uses a "customized version of MySQL" has absolutely nothing to do with what happened with the threaded comment posting being disabled a few months ago. That was a schema issue, plain and simple.
I've never heard they used *anything* custom in MySQL. InnoDB, MyISAM, replication and multiple masters on some beefy hardware is the general consensus. For caching, it's mainly memcached, just like a lot of the bigger sites.
Do a comment search here on Slashdot. I thought it was proven that the auto-drm is a checkbox setting that's off by default in Microsoft Media software.
Yes, you can do this. But you'll end up paying quite a bit more for the plain phone then you will for the gee-whiz-geeked-out phone.
I know, it cost me $70 a few months ago to get a phone that did nothing but calls for my wife because she didn't want one "with all that other crap". Whereas the tricked out phone was free.
I'm not saying that I don't agree the docs could be better. But that's nothing new for 99% of all projects, especially opensource, imho. Some of what's in /docs is seemingly ~4 years old. As far as slashcode goes, there've been many people who've complained the docs aren't great.
However, that you _can_ follow the INSTALL instructions and have a working slashcode system, you can't knock that. I guess when you ask "that's the best you can say?" I don't see anything wrong with that.
"lack of a full releass" kills the entire point of Slashdot users working on the Slashcode
Yes, it surely does. And the upgrade process from 2.2.6 to current is well, abysmal. It's do able with some effort (following the documentation), more so obviously if you don't know the project well. The lack of a "slashupgrade.pl" that site admins can run is a turnoff for many people still running 2.2.6. The lack of a current release just plain puts people off from even attempting to run the latest. And even if you are the running the latest, or somewhat the latest, you have to apply updates - by hand. There's no stock-included upgrade tool to go from T_2_5_0_128 to T_2_5_0_133.
Slashdot's complaining programmer user community is a huge pool.
Slashdot's surely is huge. Slashcode's, I don't agree with you there. Just look at the activity (or lackthereof) on the listserves. Slashdot and Slashcode are two different things. Which is kind of sad, because you'd think with the pool of talent Slashdot itself attracts there'd be many more people trying to help with Slashcode.
If the Slashdot org encouraged us with better docs, not just silence or the arch, obnoxious attitude you just displayed, more of use would join the team to produce a better Slashcode.
Obnoxious? ha.
The 'silence' is what's frustrating for me. Not knowing where the code is heading is aggravating at times.
And if you think that none of the many programmer users would have noticed the index datatype change in one scope but not the necessary one in another, you don't even understand Slashdot.
Well, no one noticed there could be a problem with that index in the stock code, obviously. The schema for comments wasn't changed for how long? The code's out there, been out in the open source land for years now. There's nothing stopping anyone from grabbing it an analyzing it. I still doubt that any "normal traffic" site would have noticed this limitation. Should someone have caught it? Sure. But most sites don't have the traffic slashdot has, so about the only site that'd ever run into this limitation with the slashcode code is Slashdot itself.
In fact, you've just shown you don't understand how OSS projects work
Oh? Please explain.
though you apparently understand how the OSS code works in this one
I think so, yes, at times, anyway.
Exactly my point. No wonder the Slashcode project is so unpopular, and therefore irrelevant. Which you seem more than happy about - defensive of, even. Congratulations.
Defensive? No. If my comment came off that way, that wasn't my reply's intent.
However, frustrated, yes. Frustrated that people pop into a project, claim "this sucks" but don't give any concrete examples where it sucks. Or, better yet, how about some constructive criticism and pointed suggestions such that if someone were to spend their own time helping trying to help with what's pointed out, the project *could be improved*.
PERL is used for small highly-portable scripts, tools, and add-ons.
;) Perl's used, and misused, for many many more things and in many more instances than what you declare as fact.
Are you basing this limited list on your limited experience?
a few extra dollars.
.Net experience, for at-least a few years there to pay off bills and stash some money away. Besides, .Net isn't that bad to work in, it's just that Perl's better ;)
A 66% raise is a few extra dollars?
Think about this - if he were making $60k/yr, that 66% raise would boost him to ~$99.6k. Thats a _huge_ jump.
Me, I'd be willing to bite the bullet and work in the
While I agree with you on the lack-of-a-full-release, the doc's are _not_ that bad. Infact, if you compare them to many other open source systems (for the point of this post we'll call Slashcode a CMS) they docs are pretty good. Example: How many of them give pointers to using CPAN? And if you follow the INSTALL instructions, exactly, you have a working slash installation. That seems simple enough to me.
encouraged some of the many of us who complain about bugs/features to help the project
Clap clap clap. There ya go, your encouragement. Now quit your whining and actually _do_ something positive to help the project.
more likely that someone would have debugged this bug earlier
I do not agree with you here. How many websites would have that many comments posted? The only way you are going to find this problem is a) if you're going over the schema with a fine-tooth-code (and c'mon, very, very few people are going to put the energy into this) or b) your data you are migrating to Slashcode has that many comments. No one's going have createTestComments generate that many. That's just not something anyone would normally do.
If you want the best (no matter how you define 'the best') you have to pay the going rate for 'the best'. It's a simple premise, you get what you pay for.
There are very, very few people, as they get older, that will work for "less" because something else they find worthy to justify the lesser salary. Later on in life, once someone has their 401k expanded and savings and everything paid off, that attitude can flip. But for most geeks that are in the 25-45 range (that worked through the 90's boom) they now have a family, a mortage, college to pay off, college savings to bank for their kids. They cannot afford to work for less then what they are worth. And they've spent plenty of days, weeks, months and years behind that monitor, reading those books, donating some freetime to open source stuff, helping newbies on IRC (etc), working the extra hours when the rest of the office went home @5, they deserve to be paid what they are now worth.
And it *is* difficult to find *good people* when you don't want to pay them what they're worth. Every employer I've ever worked for tries this approach. It just doesn't work. They hire newbies who aren't worth the time involved, or middle-tier-level people whom they want superstar work product from. Until things become so scewed up (missed projects, faulty projects, missed deadlines, other departments projects delayed cancelled because IT cannot come through) that they eventually have to clear the position, bump salary threshold for the now-posted-position to a reasonable++ level, and then they are able to acquire good talent. But things are such a mess that they are indebted to where they must spend a year or two (or more) paying the piper having cleanup done. So they don't initially see the "productivity gains" they thought they'd see when they finally hired someone with talent. Nothing's free in the IT world.
Why they just don't do the hiring right from the first place, I don't know. Well, I do know their reasoning, I've heard it. We can save money.
Yeah, right. Two years later I'd be willing to bet you can demonstrate how this attitude and behavior costs more then it was ever projected to save.
I'm curious how they would fare if they were fed masticated insects
So you think if they were fed masticated insects their behavior would change?
That's what that button label'd "Preview" is for ;)
from specs
I wish they'd up the max on the 15". 2GB w/ normal apps going and a bit of Parallels running with a VM or two, and that 2GB fills up real quick.
Plenty of people don't shop Apple for music, often specifically because they reject the lock-in it represents.
I call BS. Where do you get this stat, and out of what user-group?
See, all the techies I know, well, most of them, balk at the DRM iTunes shoves at you. All of the non-techies I know who own iPods have never ran into any of the DRM restrictions (that I am aware of) and regularly purchase music off iTunes.
Me, personally, I've purchased music off iTunes. It works, it's easy. And every once in a while someone releases an app that will unencrypt everything for me. So I run that on what I've bought, back them up, and move on. No biggie, and I feel that doing this covers me, incase Apple's DRM rules were to change (doubtful) or my computer(s) or something screwed up so bad that I were to have problems reading the DRM'd files.
Don't you mean 'lower cost of living countries'?
:)
Actually, no, I didn't. I'm skeptical about the future of IT labor in countries which are established and have a much higher cost of living. When a US company can hire someone (with equivalent skills, knowledge, experience) across the globe at half my rate, and they can only do this because this person's cost of living isn't even half that of mine, that scares me.
you get someone that doesn't know what they are doing and needs to be helped constantly. The same as if you'd hired someone locally for that price.
True, geographic location doesn't limit boneheaded hiring decisions
Did they REALLY have a 'hardware crash'
As far as I could tell, yes. It turns out they were _not_ using CVS, SVN (tho both were recommended), and weren't backing anything up. The drive died on their development server, p00f, all gone. Moral of the story, as usual: backup!
they don't last long. I IT is booming overseas, and there's many more jobs than qualified people to fill them.
Sounds like history repeating itself huh? Just a few years ago it was the same here. Thankfully there's been a lot of burn out of the "underqualified" who tried to jump the IT bandwagon and never had the aptitude to begin with.
this kind of attitude
There's no attitude in what I wrote - it was a statement of fact. His cost of living is far lower then mine.
Whine and complain on Slashdot
I'd say you're the one whining.
Do something about it: Move, Start your own company
Yes, both of those are doable, for most people. For me, moving isn't an option (kids, schools, sick parent). But I did do your 2nd suggestion there, a few years ago. It's of that where my story originates.
but until localized support is in place, it's up to them to learn from the source, at your rates.
I think that's part of the "debate". It used to be you wanted labor, you looked local to you (geographically). "Local" with globalization is becoming everywhere. Yet, with that there is no direct cost of living relationship.
And what happens once they've learned? There is now more competition for you - with which, at your income, at your tax level you may not be able to compete. If this were to continue on, you'd find quite a few jobless people. And jobless people cannot pay taxes. Yes, I'm generalizing, but hopefully you get the idea.
I was recently hired for a short spell to help someone develop a website. It appears they started the project (they're a US Company, based in NY) by hiring a developer from Africa at $10/hour. Now, I would presume for some parts of Africa $10/hr is good money, while others maybe not so much. However, here in Ohio (US), that's squat.
They got into a bind, their developer didn't know what he should know (or, rather, needed to know for this project, possibly not his fault) and ended up contacting me. First wanting my help/advise for free, because, well, the website is based on an open source project I participate in. At first a few questions here or there is fine, but after a while, finding out it's a for-profit venture, enough is enough. I balked at the continued "free help".
First they complained they're only making $10/hr. Later, they begrudgingly offered me half my going rate. Again, I baulked. Eventually they antied up the full rate, and I worked with them till they had a hardware disaster and gave up.
Moral of the story? Globalization of IT is difficult; The language barriers and the difference in time-zones can be frustrating and complex. The difference in pay can be astounding.
However, Globalization rather scares me more then not. Looking at what happened to me, the company seemingly purposefully went out and hired a developer, in Africa, just to save money so they didn't have to pay an American, who'd require more pay. My only saving grace was that this developer they hired didn't know as much as me (and especially didn't know as much related to the open source project's code they were using).
But one day, he may (or will)! Then what? Any US company can hire him, at a far lower wage then what I require (to feed/cloth my family as they currently are, etc etc). Where does that leave me? Scrambling for a job/career that has steady employment from which I can sustain this lifestyle.
I don't relate this experience to complain about the un-named company that hired me, nor the across the globe developer. I bring this up to tell my story of a project which was global in nature and which, after experiencing it, leaves me skeptical regarding IT's future in higher cost of living countries.
I thought it interesting that they have a slider similar to Slashcode's. Cosmetically, I like metaforum's slider better. However, Slashcode's functionality, once you "get it", is far better. Plus the fact that Slashcode's slider follows you down the screen, so you don't have to page-up to find it and change it's settings, I like Slashdot's better.
One thing I did notice about the metaforum, that I'm not sure I like - listing those who've moderated a comment immediately underneath the comment. I can see the good (easy-info, user-name recognition) along with the bad (abuse to get your name in the lime-light).
I think this is where it'll end up going.
Apple needs the sale through iTunes. Walmart needs the *foot traffic*. And Walmart has stores all over the country in all sorts of remote locations (that don't have bandwidth, and won't have significant bandwidth anytime soon).
So Apple and Walmart work together to develop a kiosk system. A customer can come in, plop their iPod down into it, choose whatever Movie they want, put their credit card into it, and the movie's copied to their iPod.
Walmart needs no additional staff to do it. Apple gets the sale, Walmart gets a cut. Then the customer goes on to purchase whatever else they need, since, oh, they're already *in* Walmart.
Infact, they could work out an arrangement where the price of the Movie via the kiosk would be cheaper then the physical DVD and it's cheaper then downloading it from iTunes at home. It's the same idea of Walmart selling the latest DVD at less then their cost - to get you into the store. Why wait "hours and hours" for something to download to your iPod? Come into the store and get it on your iPod in minutes!!
And eventually, as the DVD physical format is faded out, they could have multiple kiosks for people to download their media to their iPods. If MS is smart, they'll do the same. Throw in a coffee and food area around them so people can buy an overpriced coffee while they're waiting for their iPod or Zune to fill up. Quick, cheap (cheaper then buying the physical DVD), Walmart gets the foot traffic, Walmart and Apple and the studios get your information on what you bought.
For me, it's two things:
:(
1. At the gym. The TV's generally are hooked into a particular FM frequency. So if they're showing sportscenter and the screen's too far away from the excer-bike to read text or mouths, you could dial your mp3 player into the appropriate frequency and listen to the show. I've wanted this for the History channel, too, because it's on one of their monitors.
2. NPR. Not all of the NPR material is podcasted
It only lets you share one song at a time via wi-fi and then only with another Zune player.
Why do you find this difficult to understand? If enough people want to "do sharing" then they'll have to buy a Zune. That's in MS's best interests.
the recipient can only play the song a maximum of 3 times or for a maximum of 3 days
I doubt they could get agreement from the RIAA on any add'l time on that. In-fact, I'm surprised the RIAA let 'em do it at all.
This only helps if Microsoft has instructions regarding this checkbox plastered all over the Zune's information (manual, etc) or if the checkbox for "Copy protect music is unchecked as the default behavior.
Otherwise, how many of your neighbors will run out and buy a Zune for the kid(s), then the family spends a weekend feeding their cd's into their computer so the Zune can be loaded with it. How many of them will know to go into the tools and uncheck that box?
Out of the 12 or so houses on our block, there's only one household (besides my own) that would eventually figure this out, one way or the other. The others would be clueless.