You're absolutely right about that. Actually, the cost of living in my home town is less than here in Budapest. And less than in Columbus (where a lot of Hungarians live, BTW).
I don't quite agree with your point about "sending jobs overseas" because I think, well, as long as this particular market is global, why should the workforce not be also?
( Within reason of course, and not in the exploitative sense of "poor people shall harbour our toxic waste" and so on. )
I'd certainly rather see more tech jobs in the Sierra Nevadas of California, where I'm from, than in Budapest, where I live. That's very sentimental and I know it. I'd also rather see more jobs back home than in Ohio.
If Columbus can out-compete Budapest for outsourcing, I think that's grand! Competition, at least fair competition, is good for everyone.
But if Budapest (or Bangalore) out-competes Columbus, the goal should be to improve Columbus's competitive position, and not to play the nationalist card. We're not talking about farms here.
(Sorry if that sounds harsh; I don't want to over-interpret your post. It's just that the US IT business owes much of its development to global markets, so I don't think national self-sufficiency arguments really apply to the industrial side. They may well apply to the research side, and certainly ethical considerations should always have some bearing on where you send your work. )
OK, -1 redundant or zero moderations; I'm just posting this in case it's interesting for southpolesammy to know what I have to say about what he/she has to say about what I had to say about... etc.;-)
or at least be willing to work at 3rd world rates....
I think you're overstating the case here. Outsourcing isn't just about the third world.
I'm an American living in Hungary. According to salary.com (at least) my line of work pays between 70-120K per year in the SF Bay Area. That's pretty consistent with what I've made there as a consultant, and what my friends there are making.
Now consider Budapest. Hardly third-world. About to join the EU. Highly-educated IT workforce, most speaking really good English in case it matters. Excellent infrastructure in most parts of town. A decent number of both natives and foreigners with serious IT experience in Western Europe and the USA.
Half of the above-mentioned salary would get you the equivalent spending power here, and in many ways a higher overall quality of life. Even with the ridiculously high taxes.
And Budapest, by Central-European standards, is a very expensive place to live.
I'm sure some version of the above is true for places like Bangalore too, though I haven't been there.
(And yes, a fair amount of outsourcing comes here, albeit more quietly than to, say, India.)
So when a company is thinking about international outsourcing as a way to cut costs, we shouldn't think it's always like Nike making shoes. For that matter I fully expect to see a lot of growth in regional outsourcing within the USA, once more infrastructure reaches the more rural areas.
Now employers can hire anyone from anywhere...
This has been the case for a long time, and certainly predates the current economic downturn. The flip side of it is that, especially in IT, you still want quality and you still need some chain of personal relationships (and trust) in order to get it.
I think it's a good thing.
(... Wondertwin Powers ACTIVATE! Form of ASBESTOS! )
$100 seems a bit cheap, unless you figure someone just happens to know the info you want and will send you an e-mail for the $100.
If someone's going to actually investigate this for you, even online, you should offer a greater reward, even if it's mostly symbolic.
How about $100 plus half of any damages you collect (minus legal fees)?
Or $0 and a free ticket to $WHEREVER_YOU_LIVE and some nice gesture of personal thanks?
Or $500 donated to a good charity in the name of the successful sleuth?
Don't get me wrong, I think you will probably find someone who can help you and will do it just on principle. But if you're going to offer monetary compensation for technical assistance, you should either up the ante or hire a private detective.
Anyway, good luck with your search.
PS: I assume you've already asked Miroslav Karel in Prague...
The thread is a bit old by now but I just noticed the comments on my comment. So, since you asked...
When I posted, the article had been out there for a good long while, and nothing had been moderated up past 2.
My point (which maybe I didn't make as well as I should have) is that it was a story that seemed both important and interesting to the/. community in general, and doing the title in "xx-hacker" made it, at first glance, seem either a niche topic or something funny.
I had been actively looking for a story on Al-Jazeera here; I'd probably seen the headline previously and ignored it. Once I saw how bad the comment/mod situation was, I thought that may have happened to others.
And, of course, this being slashdot, I got a bit carried away in my little typing frenzy.
Now I see that it was more a time-difference problem than a title problem, though I still wish the title had used standard spelling.
Submission Title Problem
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Writing the headline in "|-|@X0R" speak or whatever is pretty stupid here.
This is a serious issue that should be generating lively debate here on/. - and the hackerspeak is probably the number one reason why no comments are floating up in moderation.
I rather doubt "script-kiddies" are involved in this, and as I write this the sites are even more down than they were yesterday (DNS lookups fail).
Regardless of what you think of this development, it's pretty obviously both "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" - and styling it as "n00z 4 n33rD$" is a disservice to this forum.
The point of triggers is not to handle every possible database interaction, but to maintain your data integrity and business rules, as far as possible, at the database level.
This is important so that people writing client/web applications don't accidentally weaken the data integrity. Database users (including applications) should never be able to accidentally or maliciously break things. Only the DBA gets to do that.;-)
If you find your triggers blowing up, it's usually because the database is poorly designed.
If you started with something good and the boss is always changing the business rules on you and forcing you to use application code where you should use triggers, that's a tough situation. But if it's your policy, you would do well to learn a bit more about databases.
BTW, Postgres can do triggers in Perl, for what it's worth.
If they're filtering out Stormfront on the German-language pages and not the English ones, presumably that means any German with enough English skills for Googling will find it.
Considering Germans, *especially* neo-Nazi types, are well aware of the censorship laws, it seems reasonable that they would be Googling in English in the first place, whether for research or for Skinhead Love.
Censoring by language might (weakly) pass as a good-faith effort, but if they really want to comply with German censorship laws they should not allow the Stormfront pages to show up in searches from computers known to be in Germany.
Until shown otherwise by a court, the GPL is legally binding.
I think it's more like "until shown one way or another by a court, the GPL is probably legally binding, so unless you can afford to lose the fight it would be unwise to violate it."
The GPL is a contract which I implicitly accept, and many legal systems give broad rights to the creators of intellectual property, strengthening the "accept" part of it.
Also of course GPL is only one of many good ways to license your open source software.
I have an Oracle background, and for a new project (my own) I decided to use something I could afford (ie, free). So I checked out SAPDB, becase here in Europe SAP has a certain blue-chippish reputation.
I have to say, I was pretty disappointed, not in the DB itself but in the documentation, installation, supporting programs, and so on.
Simply put, it's a MESS. I wouldn't be surprised if it runs well (I didn't do any performance testing), but I sort of got the feeling the Big Companies using it probably had their SAP consultants do all the work, and never had to touch it themselves.
I ended up with Postgres, which I'm quite happy with. Excellent documentation, good online support forums, decent if not great admin tools for Windows, they don't pretend that the DB works on Windows (though some company makes a supported Windows version). Oh yeah, and slowly, slowly some of the better database design tools support it. And I hear it's got a great admin interface for Linux, which I hope to try out some time.
There's even a phpMyAdmin-style web admin tool too if you're into that.
I understand why SAP doesn't want to pour anymore cash onto the product, but as long as the community is so small, I'm afraid people will continue to ignore SAPDB or, like I did, evaluate it and move on.
You can defend that point with machine gun fire, should there ever be a revolution.
At the end of WWII, as Budapest was being liberated from Nazi occupation, the elite Nazi troops made their last stand in the castle, which is on top of a hill.
The Russians parked on another hill and shelled the castle. Game over.
In the event of a revolution, you'd better hope the Bramblethorners are on the side of the guys with the airplanes and bombs.
I admire the potential giver's probable intent, but I feel I must point out the following:
Forcing the institution to adopt a certain policy or lose the grant is a Bad Thing. It flies in the face of academic freedom. I could hurt the students. It could seriously damage the institution's reputation. If the board has a majority of non-idiots, they will turn it down.
That said, I rather hope the poster is overstating the case.
It is quite common, and in my opinion a Good Thing, to stipulate conditions under which the money from *your grant* can be spent.
If I want to give $2.4+ million to a university, and I don't want a penny of that to go to [company I dislike], then I should structure the terms of my gift such that [company I dislike] is not getting any of it. After all, it's *my* gift. Nobody will hold that against me, and my political purpose (anti-[company I dislike] advocacy) will be well served, and the overall environment of the institution will be only the richer for it.
This happens all the time. Think of things like:
+ a new building for Mechanical Engineering (*not* for literature!) + a "conservative|liberal" "think-tank" (*not* for people of radically opposite views!) + an endowed professorship in [group of your choice] Studies (*not* for members of another group!)
These are all Good Things when private individuals endow them, even if they could be Bad Things if the government or the university's board were to underwrite them.
Institutional coersion is always a Bad Thing, and will be remembered as such. I hope your grandfather will lobby the generous patron to tie strings only to his/her own money, and lobby the board to graciously accept the donation only under that condition.
The example you give is much more ethical than the other (deletion) example given by B1LL_GAT3Z.
Disabling a product has the same immediate effect on the customer (can't use product) but without the risk of (intentionally or not) causing other, greater damage, like loss of customer records etc.
I'm currently developing some software that I may end up selling, and it would have a per-user license, but I might sell it to large organizations. So I'm doing some thinking about how to guarantee payment...
But one interesting question here is, if you have a backdoor to de-activate the software, how do you ensure that it's not abusable? And for that matter not removable except by you?
Recently, as I was removing the awful, useless, and insecure "plesk" stuff from a rented server, I noticed that it was all just a bunch of scripts, and that if I were masochist enough to keep it around, the question of what kind of license I would have would be primarily a question of what I felt like telling them.
So far the best I can think of is to make some binary piece without which all the Perl things won't work, and stick in any verification/registration/etc stuff there. I realize that's pretty hackable, but I don't want to compile all the Perl (doh!) and I want to make it so that stealing from me costs you at least the time of a high-quality programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right about that. Actually, the cost of living in my home town is less than here in Budapest. And less than in Columbus (where a lot of Hungarians live, BTW).
I don't quite agree with your point about "sending jobs overseas" because I think, well, as long as this particular market is global, why should the workforce not be also?
( Within reason of course, and not in the exploitative sense of "poor people shall harbour our toxic waste" and so on. )
I'd certainly rather see more tech jobs in the Sierra Nevadas of California, where I'm from, than in Budapest, where I live. That's very sentimental and I know it. I'd also rather see more jobs back home than in Ohio.
If Columbus can out-compete Budapest for outsourcing, I think that's grand! Competition, at least fair competition, is good for everyone.
But if Budapest (or Bangalore) out-competes Columbus, the goal should be to improve Columbus's competitive position, and not to play the nationalist card. We're not talking about farms here.
(Sorry if that sounds harsh; I don't want to over-interpret your post. It's just that the US IT business owes much of its development to global markets, so I don't think national self-sufficiency arguments really apply to the industrial side. They may well apply to the research side, and certainly ethical considerations should always have some bearing on where you send your work. )
OK, -1 redundant or zero moderations; I'm just posting this in case it's interesting for southpolesammy to know what I have to say about what he/she has to say about what I had to say about... etc.
yep, fischli & weiss rock.
here's the parent comment's link, without the space, and...uh...as a link.
I think you're overstating the case here. Outsourcing isn't just about the third world.
I'm an American living in Hungary. According to salary.com (at least) my line of work pays between 70-120K per year in the SF Bay Area. That's pretty consistent with what I've made there as a consultant, and what my friends there are making.
Now consider Budapest. Hardly third-world. About to join the EU. Highly-educated IT workforce, most speaking really good English in case it matters. Excellent infrastructure in most parts of town. A decent number of both natives and foreigners with serious IT experience in Western Europe and the USA.
Half of the above-mentioned salary would get you the equivalent spending power here, and in many ways a higher overall quality of life. Even with the ridiculously high taxes.
And Budapest, by Central-European standards, is a very expensive place to live.
I'm sure some version of the above is true for places like Bangalore too, though I haven't been there.
(And yes, a fair amount of outsourcing comes here, albeit more quietly than to, say, India.)
So when a company is thinking about international outsourcing as a way to cut costs, we shouldn't think it's always like Nike making shoes. For that matter I fully expect to see a lot of growth in regional outsourcing within the USA, once more infrastructure reaches the more rural areas.
This has been the case for a long time, and certainly predates the current economic downturn. The flip side of it is that, especially in IT, you still want quality and you still need some chain of personal relationships (and trust) in order to get it.
I think it's a good thing.
(
Ditto what AndroidCat said, but also:
$100 seems a bit cheap, unless you figure someone just happens to know the info you want and will send you an e-mail for the $100.
If someone's going to actually investigate this for you, even online, you should offer a greater reward, even if it's mostly symbolic.
How about $100 plus half of any damages you collect (minus legal fees)?
Or $0 and a free ticket to $WHEREVER_YOU_LIVE and some nice gesture of personal thanks?
Or $500 donated to a good charity in the name of the successful sleuth?
Don't get me wrong, I think you will probably find someone who can help you and will do it just on principle. But if you're going to offer monetary compensation for technical assistance, you should either up the ante or hire a private detective.
Anyway, good luck with your search.
PS: I assume you've already asked Miroslav Karel in Prague...
Is it just me, or does the Caldera logo really look like a globe with Mickey Mouse's head projected on it?
OK maybe this is a little offtopic, but I'm really curious whether others see that too.
funny, i'm running 1.3 on win2k and one click selects all if i click on the text of the location; of i click at the end, it just places the cursor.
and i definitely didn't touch the user_prefs. maybe it's different if you install on top of a 1.2 installation?
or different on windows? hm..
convincing then million-dollar graphics
OMG, my first spelling error on slashdot!
oh yeah, 01-APR... hooo, i beter get bakc to work.
...but as we know from Godzilla, a guy in a monster suit can be a whole lot more convincing then million-dollar graphics on a two-bit script.
actually they're the same comments as on the other two posts, but the randomness of the moderation system brings different ones to the top.
I will put it on Kazaa as soon as I donwload it. Hopefully others will follow; I just searched and got no hits.
"Please elaborate..."
/. community in general, and doing the title in "xx-hacker" made it, at first glance, seem either a niche topic or something funny.
The thread is a bit old by now but I just noticed the comments on my comment. So, since you asked...
When I posted, the article had been out there for a good long while, and nothing had been moderated up past 2.
My point (which maybe I didn't make as well as I should have) is that it was a story that seemed both important and interesting to the
I had been actively looking for a story on Al-Jazeera here; I'd probably seen the headline previously and ignored it. Once I saw how bad the comment/mod situation was, I thought that may have happened to others.
And, of course, this being slashdot, I got a bit carried away in my little typing frenzy.
Now I see that it was more a time-difference problem than a title problem, though I still wish the title had used standard spelling.
Writing the headline in "|-|@X0R" speak or whatever is pretty stupid here.
/. - and the hackerspeak is probably the number one reason why no comments are floating up in moderation.
This is a serious issue that should be generating lively debate here on
I rather doubt "script-kiddies" are involved in this, and as I write this the sites are even more down than they were yesterday (DNS lookups fail).
Regardless of what you think of this development, it's pretty obviously both "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" - and styling it as "n00z 4 n33rD$" is a disservice to this forum.
(Yeah I know my hacker-writing is a bit rusty.)
In "1984" ...
So that's why supply-side economics is making a comeback!
there is a lack of coordination and significant resistance...
As for the resistance part, everybody's been assuming the Iraqi forces will just wait out the bombing. Not much else they can do.
The lack-of-coordination part could be a lot of things, but it's also possible they may have already used the "e-bomb" - and that would be News.
Do you have any links to examples of this Singaporean language? (the mixed one, not the "clean" ones)
Sounds interesting.
Most people I know run their 17" CRTs at 1024x768, which is about as hi-res as you can get and still read the non-scaling bits.
Most people I know also run their 15" CRTs at 1024x768, because lower resolutions just don't give you enough screen for today's programs.
With a laptop you're usually closer to the screen anyway.
I get your point, but I really think it's more ergonomical to go 1024x768 on a 17" CRT and keep your head a little further from the glass.
The point of triggers is not to handle every possible database interaction, but to maintain your data integrity and business rules, as far as possible, at the database level.
This is important so that people writing client/web applications don't accidentally weaken the data integrity. Database users (including applications) should never be able to accidentally or maliciously break things. Only the DBA gets to do that. ;-)
If you find your triggers blowing up, it's usually because the database is poorly designed.
If you started with something good and the boss is always changing the business rules on you and forcing you to use application code where you should use triggers, that's a tough situation. But if it's your policy, you would do well to learn a bit more about databases.
BTW, Postgres can do triggers in Perl, for what it's worth.
If they're filtering out Stormfront on the German-language pages and not the English ones, presumably that means any German with enough English skills for Googling will find it.
Considering Germans, *especially* neo-Nazi types, are well aware of the censorship laws, it seems reasonable that they would be Googling in English in the first place, whether for research or for Skinhead Love.
Censoring by language might (weakly) pass as a good-faith effort, but if they really want to comply with German censorship laws they should not allow the Stormfront pages to show up in searches from computers known to be in Germany.
Until shown otherwise by a court, the GPL is legally binding.
I think it's more like "until shown one way or another by a court, the GPL is probably legally binding, so unless you can afford to lose the fight it would be unwise to violate it."
The GPL is a contract which I implicitly accept, and many legal systems give broad rights to the creators of intellectual property, strengthening the "accept" part of it.
Also of course GPL is only one of many good ways to license your open source software.
Otherwise, I agree with you.
I have an Oracle background, and for a new project (my own) I decided to use something I could afford (ie, free). So I checked out SAPDB, becase here in Europe SAP has a certain blue-chippish reputation.
I have to say, I was pretty disappointed, not in the DB itself but in the documentation, installation, supporting programs, and so on.
Simply put, it's a MESS. I wouldn't be surprised if it runs well (I didn't do any performance testing), but I sort of got the feeling the Big Companies using it probably had their SAP consultants do all the work, and never had to touch it themselves.
I ended up with Postgres, which I'm quite happy with. Excellent documentation, good online support forums, decent if not great admin tools for Windows, they don't pretend that the DB works on Windows (though some company makes a supported Windows version). Oh yeah, and slowly, slowly some of the better database design tools support it. And I hear it's got a great admin interface for Linux, which I hope to try out some time.
There's even a phpMyAdmin-style web admin tool too if you're into that.
I understand why SAP doesn't want to pour anymore cash onto the product, but as long as the community is so small, I'm afraid people will continue to ignore SAPDB or, like I did, evaluate it and move on.
Even if it's a really good DBMS as such.
nem vagyok magyar, de itt élek pesten.
i'm not hungarian, but i live in budapest.
You can defend that point with machine gun fire, should there ever be a revolution.
At the end of WWII, as Budapest was being liberated from Nazi occupation, the elite Nazi troops made their last stand in the castle, which is on top of a hill.
The Russians parked on another hill and shelled the castle. Game over.
In the event of a revolution, you'd better hope the Bramblethorners are on the side of the guys with the airplanes and bombs.
I admire the potential giver's probable intent, but I feel I must point out the following:
Forcing the institution to adopt a certain policy or lose the grant is a Bad Thing. It flies in the face of academic freedom. I could hurt the students. It could seriously damage the institution's reputation. If the board has a majority of non-idiots, they will turn it down.
That said, I rather hope the poster is overstating the case.
It is quite common, and in my opinion a Good Thing, to stipulate conditions under which the money from *your grant* can be spent.
If I want to give $2.4+ million to a university, and I don't want a penny of that to go to [company I dislike], then I should structure the terms of my gift such that [company I dislike] is not getting any of it. After all, it's *my* gift. Nobody will hold that against me, and my political purpose (anti-[company I dislike] advocacy) will be well served, and the overall environment of the institution will be only the richer for it.
This happens all the time. Think of things like:
+ a new building for Mechanical Engineering (*not* for literature!)
+ a "conservative|liberal" "think-tank" (*not* for people of radically opposite views!)
+ an endowed professorship in [group of your choice] Studies (*not* for members of another group!)
These are all Good Things when private individuals endow them, even if they could be Bad Things if the government or the university's board were to underwrite them.
Institutional coersion is always a Bad Thing, and will be remembered as such. I hope your grandfather will lobby the generous patron to tie strings only to his/her own money, and lobby the board to graciously accept the donation only under that condition.
The example you give is much more ethical than the other (deletion) example given by B1LL_GAT3Z.
Disabling a product has the same immediate effect on the customer (can't use product) but without the risk of (intentionally or not) causing other, greater damage, like loss of customer records etc.
I'm currently developing some software that I may end up selling, and it would have a per-user license, but I might sell it to large organizations. So I'm doing some thinking about how to guarantee payment...
But one interesting question here is, if you have a backdoor to de-activate the software, how do you ensure that it's not abusable? And for that matter not removable except by you?
Recently, as I was removing the awful, useless, and insecure "plesk" stuff from a rented server, I noticed that it was all just a bunch of scripts, and that if I were masochist enough to keep it around, the question of what kind of license I would have would be primarily a question of what I felt like telling them.
So far the best I can think of is to make some binary piece without which all the Perl things won't work, and stick in any verification/registration/etc stuff there. I realize that's pretty hackable, but I don't want to compile all the Perl (doh!) and I want to make it so that stealing from me costs you at least the time of a high-quality programmer.
Bah, hopefully I'll just have honest customers.