The new geeks in India aren't *just* buying their electronics from Asia.
Presumably, they dine out more often.
Or, they hire cooks, maids, drivers.
They buy nicer and more clothes, which, even if not manufactured locally, are delivered by local truckers and stevedores and sold by people working in retail outlets.
They build bigger houses and pay more taxes.
Presumably, they give more to charity (based on what I've heard about lower-income and formerly-lower-income people in the U.S. tending to give more to charity than upper-income folks, as a percentage of income).
And, when their countries threaten nuclear war w/each other, the big multinationals call 'em up and say "Friends, we're going to have find another back office if you're going to do that."
So, we're exporting jobs, opportunity, world peace, hope, Mom and apple pie. Who could argue with that? Think of the children!
Ok, so I got progressively more sarcastic in the preceding paragraph, but seriously.... It's like giving blood. You lose some, the other party gets what they need.
That's not to say it isn't painful. And it is sure irritating when you see those gains go into some corrupt person's pocket. But you have to hope humans' universal desire for justice will eventually prevail (and corruption will be eliminated), as more and more countries get with the "civilized society" program. (I equate civilization with compassion, not just politely ripping somebody off.)
Here's another angle on corruption, from the economic point of view: it's friction, isn't it? Businesses would prefer not to pay bribes, I bet. Or rather, they'd prefer to keep their expenses predictable, and not greater than their competitor's expenses (i.e., some semblance of "fair").
So, I think the question is not "how can we stop this?" but rather "how can we help this along, so things become fair more quickly?"
Is it better to say "you can't have our jobs until your environment is clean" or is it better to say "here, have some jobs; now please take your new money and spend some of it on cleaning up your environment and implementing new laws"?
Gee, I hope this wasn't a page of nothing. Sorry if it was.
(Waiting for my current http request to finish while I'm profiling the app for memory issues.)
Well, I should post anonymously, but that's just too cowardly.
I'm ambivalent about this whole offshoring thing. On the one hand, we're exporting jobs/opportunity/hope and world peace. (My understanding is that the recent difficulties between India and Pakistan are being ended at least in part because IBM and American Express and Citibank picked up the phone and said, "Friends, we love having our back office in your country, and we'd hate to have to start a search for a more stable environment, but if you're going to have a war w/your neighbor, we're afraid that's just what we're going to have to do.")
On the other hand, who profits from that? If it's the proletariat, that's well and good, but if it's some small group of corrupt people at the sharp, pointy top of the economic pyramid, that's not so well and good. We, in the U.S., are given to understand that the countries to which we are exporting jobs have substantially fewer regulations w/regard to labor practices and the environment. I believe those regulations raise the price of doing business in this country but they are also worthy endeavors. So, is the export of jobs to countries w/fewer regulations simply an end run on the part of big business around the regs?
And then there's the code quality issue mentioned in another reply to your question. If I were to work for MegaMaxiMultiCorp, whose managers are simply too short-sighted to see that low-quality code costs more in the long run (while threatening my job), how happy would I be? I *want* to work for a well-run company. (I currently work for a start up that actually seems to have a fairly well-balanced view of quality vs. time-to-market, although improvements could always be made.)
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned that yet. Good newsweekly, not as lightweight as Time or Newsweek, or as time-consumptive as the Atlantic or the Economist.
Yeah, I didn't want to cloud the issue by raising the possibility that it's just marketing, at least to some extent. A big part of it is Western buy-in, too. Greener grass and all that.
...first major acts in Japanese culture to acknowledge the enormous suffering of Japanese civilians in 1940's due to American...
*sigh*
I really should just keep my fingers off the keyboard and get back to work, but I'm having a hard time letting this slide.
Let me at least try to turn this into an honest question rather than just a screed (my first instinct).
I don't believe the Japanese government has ever acknowledged ill treatment of the people of other countries during the 20th century (or did I miss an apology for the Korean "comfort women"?) Ok, that's no big surprise, I don't think the U.S. government has officially acknowledged poor treatment of Indians and slaves in this country, either. (Although, the U.S. government did officially apologize to Japanese-American citizens interned during WWII. I also think there were some reparation payments.)
However, American culture is chock full of acknowledgement of past injustices. Anybody living in America who hasn't heard of smallpox-infected blankets donated to Indians just isn't paying attention. American textbooks do make reference to these things (I remember seeing a picture in a textbook of an American soldier standing beside a pile of dead, frozen-solid Indians at Wounded Knee).
I have heard, on occasion, that Japanese schools and textbooks don't mention, for example, what was done at Nanking, or to subjects/victims of medical research conducted in foreign countries (or should I use quotes: "research").
So, here's my question, to which I would truly like an answer: Is there acknowledgement in Japanese culture of the Bad Things that were done by Japan (whether by the gov't, the military or the people I'll leave for later debate) in the 20th century? We hear so much about wonderful Japanese things, Zen philosophy and tea ceremonies and Shintoism and Go and aesthetics, but I have such a hard time reconciling all that beauty and nobility with things like beheading contests.
John.
(P.S. Please don't change the subject by accusing America of Bad Stuff. I acknowledge all that. My question is about Japanese culture.)
I don't find it written (in the bible) that it's allegory. I'm not sure I need to find it written in the bible that something is allegory before I conclude that something is allegory. I do consider myself Christian. I do feel I have license to classify certain things as myth. The Easter Bunny, for instance. The creation myths from various "primitive" religions. ("Primitive" in quotes because it ain't so primitive once you study it a bit, don't get your dander up.)
...lest I be taken for a complete lunatic like some of these other folk: the story of Noah's ark is *allegory*, myth, symbolic. The story has value, but we're not going to find the ark on Mt. Ararat.
ehhhhhhhhhh, I *really* ought to let this one go, but it's hard to, coming from one supposedly as intelligent as Bruce Perens (Bruce? Is that you??).
Ya, there's some savage stuff in the Bible (like stoning), but you should try to interpret it relative to its time.
Stoning for disrespecting your elders wasn't a matter of talking back to Mom and Pop, it was for letting them *starve* when they were elderly.
"Eye for an eye" was a rational justice system, considering that if you pissed off a ruler, he'd just remove your head. It was a way of *limiting* punishments.
(Stoning for adultery I don't quite have a handle on yet, but I'm thinking there may be more than meets the eye there.)
Drowning boatloads of people who believe differently from you ain't in the bible atall.
Is it possible that the hate and ignorance you're thinking of came from somewhere besides the bible?
John.
Closing security loopholes != closing security mkt
on
Gates on Winsecurity
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I can't get too worked up about the threat to Symantec et al. caused by MS closing their security loopholes.
Those loopholes should never have existed in the first place. I think the fundamental unfairness is that we had to be saddled for a couple of decades with a P.O.S. "operating environment" because both MS and its customers were too short-sighted to get it right the first time.
Also, no matter how much good faith effort is exerted to close security holes at the design and implementation levels, there will *always* be a need/market for an external security effort. Something like CERT won't go away. I can still imagine a healthy "security ecology", as organizations attempt to crack MS software and blackmail^W attempt to convince the rest of the world that the fix is needed.
I use 'em both. Start-up costs for writing shell scripts are a lot less. No 'FileHandle->new("blah") or die'. No '$rc = system( $cmd); if ($rc >> 8) {die}'.
quick-n-dirty hack and/or small script that will grow ==> shell. Yes, I know perl can be quick-n-dirty, too, but then what's the point? I'd rather read shell q-n-d than perl q-n-d line noise.
complex stuff (like parsing html/xml), and/or something that might get complex in future ==> perl
Seems to me Linux/Unix has the advantages of good fundamental design (SMB, anyone?) and pretty solid stability/security. Microsoft has flash and convenience. Given the lackings of both parties, who can fill in their gaps more easily?
What I really meant to say, though, is that all of Microsoft's innovations in business practices, bundling, contracts and price structures don't change the fact that they are trying to achieve customer lock-in to a mostly-inferior architecture. If they achieve that, congrats to them, but shame on their customers.
That's predicated on the assumption that Linux can offer an organization a competitive advantage. If not, what good are we?
Find a school for gifted and talented kids (some states have 'em) and get him to apply. Find a summer camp for him to go to (e.g., math camp, science camp, computer camp, chess camp) that will be populated w/kids like him. Get him in some kind of peer group.
The Java language, VM, libraries and protocols (RMI, J2EE) are all fully spec'd out. There are *no* proprietary pieces the implementation of which is forbidden by Sun. 3rd parties can implement to their heart's content.
On the other hand, MS always, always, always seems to take care to leave some proprietary poison pill in their work, so you can implement 99% of their offering, but w/out the last 1%, your offering is worth substantially less (if anything at all).
MS-Kerberos is my favorite example: all these bytes are yours, except these two over here. Touch them not.
I think Mono is another case in point: it's an implementation of C# and the VM (yes?) but the.NET libs are off-limits, are they not?
(Consider me trolled. Oh well, it's been a while since I've bitten any hooks.)
I've heard a lot of discomforting stories about MS making pitches directly to PHBs, the result being a... sub-optimal, shall we say, configuration.
My company has its own sales team, and occasionally (I gather) they come into conflict w/the potential customer's IT crew not because of technical issues but because of territorial issues. (We sell a web app that we administer.)
Ideally, the sales critters, PHBs and IT crew are all in the same room, and they're all listening to each other.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it probably did. I know Moz had it (I just switched to thunderbird 0.9, coincidentally, last night).
tray icon: yes
John.
Or maybe that would be put better as: are manufacturing jobs really necessary to drive an economy?
If n manufacturing jobs result in kn service jobs, what is k?
Can manufacturing jobs in Vietnam result in service jobs in India and the Phillipines? (Too lazy to look up the l's and p's.)
John.
Ok, I've seen two replies that imply that service jobs don't add value.
Is this really true?
Law and medicine are service jobs, aren't they?
As is transportation and education.
And software development, imo. I'm not completely convinced that producing configurations of bits counts as manufacturing (but I suppose I could be).
Hmmm...
John.
The new geeks in India aren't *just* buying their electronics from Asia.
Presumably, they dine out more often.
Or, they hire cooks, maids, drivers.
They buy nicer and more clothes, which, even if not manufactured locally, are delivered by local truckers and stevedores and sold by people working in retail outlets.
They build bigger houses and pay more taxes.
Presumably, they give more to charity (based on what I've heard about lower-income and formerly-lower-income people in the U.S. tending to give more to charity than upper-income folks, as a percentage of income).
And, when their countries threaten nuclear war w/each other, the big multinationals call 'em up and say "Friends, we're going to have find another back office if you're going to do that."
So, we're exporting jobs, opportunity, world peace, hope, Mom and apple pie. Who could argue with that? Think of the children!
Ok, so I got progressively more sarcastic in the preceding paragraph, but seriously.... It's like giving blood. You lose some, the other party gets what they need.
That's not to say it isn't painful. And it is sure irritating when you see those gains go into some corrupt person's pocket. But you have to hope humans' universal desire for justice will eventually prevail (and corruption will be eliminated), as more and more countries get with the "civilized society" program. (I equate civilization with compassion, not just politely ripping somebody off.)
Here's another angle on corruption, from the economic point of view: it's friction, isn't it? Businesses would prefer not to pay bribes, I bet. Or rather, they'd prefer to keep their expenses predictable, and not greater than their competitor's expenses (i.e., some semblance of "fair").
So, I think the question is not "how can we stop this?" but rather "how can we help this along, so things become fair more quickly?"
Is it better to say "you can't have our jobs until your environment is clean" or is it better to say "here, have some jobs; now please take your new money and spend some of it on cleaning up your environment and implementing new laws"?
Gee, I hope this wasn't a page of nothing. Sorry if it was.
John.
(Waiting for my current http request to finish while I'm profiling the app for memory issues.)
Well, I should post anonymously, but that's just too cowardly.
I'm ambivalent about this whole offshoring thing. On the one hand, we're exporting jobs/opportunity/hope and world peace. (My understanding is that the recent difficulties between India and Pakistan are being ended at least in part because IBM and American Express and Citibank picked up the phone and said, "Friends, we love having our back office in your country, and we'd hate to have to start a search for a more stable environment, but if you're going to have a war w/your neighbor, we're afraid that's just what we're going to have to do.")
On the other hand, who profits from that? If it's the proletariat, that's well and good, but if it's some small group of corrupt people at the sharp, pointy top of the economic pyramid, that's not so well and good. We, in the U.S., are given to understand that the countries to which we are exporting jobs have substantially fewer regulations w/regard to labor practices and the environment. I believe those regulations raise the price of doing business in this country but they are also worthy endeavors. So, is the export of jobs to countries w/fewer regulations simply an end run on the part of big business around the regs?
And then there's the code quality issue mentioned in another reply to your question. If I were to work for MegaMaxiMultiCorp, whose managers are simply too short-sighted to see that low-quality code costs more in the long run (while threatening my job), how happy would I be? I *want* to work for a well-run company. (I currently work for a start up that actually seems to have a fairly well-balanced view of quality vs. time-to-market, although improvements could always be made.)
And so on, and so forth. I'm still cogitating.
John.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned that yet. Good newsweekly, not as lightweight as Time or Newsweek, or as time-consumptive as the Atlantic or the Economist.
John.
Doh! (Pot, kettle, black.) (Or did you really mean the Mormon Church? I guess they *can* be a little thought-warping :).
John.
What a silly question.
John.
:)
Yeah, I didn't want to cloud the issue by raising the possibility that it's just marketing, at least to some extent. A big part of it is Western buy-in, too. Greener grass and all that.
John.
*sigh*
I really should just keep my fingers off the keyboard and get back to work, but I'm having a hard time letting this slide.
Let me at least try to turn this into an honest question rather than just a screed (my first instinct).
I don't believe the Japanese government has ever acknowledged ill treatment of the people of other countries during the 20th century (or did I miss an apology for the Korean "comfort women"?) Ok, that's no big surprise, I don't think the U.S. government has officially acknowledged poor treatment of Indians and slaves in this country, either. (Although, the U.S. government did officially apologize to Japanese-American citizens interned during WWII. I also think there were some reparation payments.)
However, American culture is chock full of acknowledgement of past injustices. Anybody living in America who hasn't heard of smallpox-infected blankets donated to Indians just isn't paying attention. American textbooks do make reference to these things (I remember seeing a picture in a textbook of an American soldier standing beside a pile of dead, frozen-solid Indians at Wounded Knee).
I have heard, on occasion, that Japanese schools and textbooks don't mention, for example, what was done at Nanking, or to subjects/victims of medical research conducted in foreign countries (or should I use quotes: "research").
So, here's my question, to which I would truly like an answer: Is there acknowledgement in Japanese culture of the Bad Things that were done by Japan (whether by the gov't, the military or the people I'll leave for later debate) in the 20th century? We hear so much about wonderful Japanese things, Zen philosophy and tea ceremonies and Shintoism and Go and aesthetics, but I have such a hard time reconciling all that beauty and nobility with things like beheading contests.
John.
(P.S. Please don't change the subject by accusing America of Bad Stuff. I acknowledge all that. My question is about Japanese culture.)
I don't find it written (in the bible) that it's allegory. I'm not sure I need to find it written in the bible that something is allegory before I conclude that something is allegory. I do consider myself Christian. I do feel I have license to classify certain things as myth. The Easter Bunny, for instance. The creation myths from various "primitive" religions. ("Primitive" in quotes because it ain't so primitive once you study it a bit, don't get your dander up.)
John.
bible littered w/storied of innocents hurt: sure, it's part story book and some of those stories pull no punches. Stories gotta have villains.
rape victims get stoned while perpetrators get lighter punishment: not sure I buy that.
Deut. 21:25--27
more general "adultery":
Lev. 20:10 (which is close to a more-famous verse which I'd like to ignore for the purposes of this little nano-conversation)
Did I miss something?
John.
...lest I be taken for a complete lunatic like some of these other folk: the story of Noah's ark is *allegory*, myth, symbolic. The story has value, but we're not going to find the ark on Mt. Ararat.
John.
ehhhhhhhhhh, I *really* ought to let this one go, but it's hard to, coming from one supposedly as intelligent as Bruce Perens (Bruce? Is that you??).
Ya, there's some savage stuff in the Bible (like stoning), but you should try to interpret it relative to its time.
Stoning for disrespecting your elders wasn't a matter of talking back to Mom and Pop, it was for letting them *starve* when they were elderly.
"Eye for an eye" was a rational justice system, considering that if you pissed off a ruler, he'd just remove your head. It was a way of *limiting* punishments.
(Stoning for adultery I don't quite have a handle on yet, but I'm thinking there may be more than meets the eye there.)
Drowning boatloads of people who believe differently from you ain't in the bible atall.
Is it possible that the hate and ignorance you're thinking of came from somewhere besides the bible?
John.
I can't get too worked up about the threat to Symantec et al. caused by MS closing their security loopholes.
Those loopholes should never have existed in the first place. I think the fundamental unfairness is that we had to be saddled for a couple of decades with a P.O.S. "operating environment" because both MS and its customers were too short-sighted to get it right the first time.
Also, no matter how much good faith effort is exerted to close security holes at the design and implementation levels, there will *always* be a need/market for an external security effort. Something like CERT won't go away. I can still imagine a healthy "security ecology", as organizations attempt to crack MS software and blackmail^W attempt to convince the rest of the world that the fix is needed.
John.
I use 'em both. Start-up costs for writing shell scripts are a lot less. No 'FileHandle->new("blah") or die'. No '$rc = system( $cmd); if ($rc >> 8) {die}'.
quick-n-dirty hack and/or small script that will grow ==> shell. Yes, I know perl can be quick-n-dirty, too, but then what's the point? I'd rather read shell q-n-d than perl q-n-d line noise.
complex stuff (like parsing html/xml), and/or something that might get complex in future ==> perl
John.
I like this one, too.
-e: bomb out immediately when a command exits w/nonzero status
-u: bomb out when de-referencing uninitialized variables ("var=" counts as initialization).
John.
Seems to me Linux/Unix has the advantages of good fundamental design (SMB, anyone?) and pretty solid stability/security. Microsoft has flash and convenience. Given the lackings of both parties, who can fill in their gaps more easily?
What I really meant to say, though, is that all of Microsoft's innovations in business practices, bundling, contracts and price structures don't change the fact that they are trying to achieve customer lock-in to a mostly-inferior architecture. If they achieve that, congrats to them, but shame on their customers.
That's predicated on the assumption that Linux can offer an organization a competitive advantage. If not, what good are we?
John.
Find a school for gifted and talented kids (some states have 'em) and get him to apply. Find a summer camp for him to go to (e.g., math camp, science camp, computer camp, chess camp) that will be populated w/kids like him. Get him in some kind of peer group.
I hope this isn't too obvious.
John.
I think we need a new moderation category.
I find this *very* difficult to believe. Can you cite the relevant part of whatever governing license agreement covers this?
John.
The Java language, VM, libraries and protocols (RMI, J2EE) are all fully spec'd out. There are *no* proprietary pieces the implementation of which is forbidden by Sun. 3rd parties can implement to their heart's content.
.NET libs are off-limits, are they not?
On the other hand, MS always, always, always seems to take care to leave some proprietary poison pill in their work, so you can implement 99% of their offering, but w/out the last 1%, your offering is worth substantially less (if anything at all).
MS-Kerberos is my favorite example: all these bytes are yours, except these two over here. Touch them not.
I think Mono is another case in point: it's an implementation of C# and the VM (yes?) but the
(Consider me trolled. Oh well, it's been a while since I've bitten any hooks.)
John.
I think I used to contract for your company.
Wait 'til you have a conversation w/Greenock.
Zounds.
Americans and Britons, two peoples separated by a common tongue.
John.
Cool.
I've heard a lot of discomforting stories about MS making pitches directly to PHBs, the result being a... sub-optimal, shall we say, configuration.
My company has its own sales team, and occasionally (I gather) they come into conflict w/the potential customer's IT crew not because of technical issues but because of territorial issues. (We sell a web app that we administer.)
Ideally, the sales critters, PHBs and IT crew are all in the same room, and they're all listening to each other.
John.