Uh, no. For most businesses IT is a cost center that is on the side of their core competencies and has nothing to do with their competitiveness and long term profitability except for the day to day COST of the IT services they need.
Having a great sys admin or developer is useless to most companies if they can purchase a service of the same quality elsewhere, and for most companies where IT administration isn't where the company makes it money that is quite likely to be the case.
Businesses should outsource whatever costs them more to do inhouse than outsourcing at the same quality level. If a software house find they can outsource all their development and be a pure marketing operation, and make more money, then what they have found out is that their real core business is marketing software, not making it.
Sometimes you will want to keep control for strategic reasons, but even then, the only justifiable reason for maintaining internal staff for a function is that it will on the long term generate higher profits or reduce risk.
And if you choose "home grown" software solutions even when they are more expensive than equivalent software made off shore, you will find yourself out of the job because you'd be considered incompetent, or because you and other staff like you make your company unable to compete with companies with less protectionist staff, and the net result for your country is exactly the same, unless the companies that run you out of business happen to be foreign, in which case the net result would actually be worse.
Oh, and regarding being protective of it's markets, the US is already well renowned internationally as being one of the most protectionist countries in the free world.
If a town is entirely dependent on one industry it WILL get shafted, regardless of what that industry is. Companies go bankrupt. Salary levels around the country change. Currency rates fluctuate dramatically and change profitability. Business climate in countries change and make it more or less desirable to move.
You may be right that thousands of American cities never recovered from export of the jobs of certain sectors, yet the American economy has grown massively - INCLUDING average salary levels - over the last couple of decades. Right in the middle of this exodus of low paid jobs.
Why? Because amid the export of jobs, US companies reduced their costs and got more competitive, creating new areas of growth which needed more people, and more of the jobs are jobs that can't be easily exported and that commands higher salaries.
Exporting jobs in itself isn't good. But exporting jobs isn't bad either when the net result is more money pumped into your economy as a result of higher profit margins and more new investment.
Also keep in mind that every job exported means increased salary pressure outside the US, as well as increased purchasing power. The first reduces the economic viability of outsourcing, and thus the long term impact. The second increases US exports, as the US make up such a huge part of world trade, thus reducing the impact of losing a job, even other effects aside.
It's you who doesn't make any sense. Outsourcing happens because it saves money. If a company outsource and lose money on it, or save less money than their competitors, they will shrink, possibly go out of business, or at least not grow as fast as their competitors. If enough jobs are outsourced in a given area, salaries in the US in that area will drop and the economic incentive to continue outsourcing will drop. Similarly, the more jobs are outsourced, the faster salary demands are going to grow in the areas the jobs are being outsourced to, and the economic incentive to continue outsourcing will drop further.
Due to the overhead of outsourcing in terms of managing the relationship, the two salary levels doesn't even have to meet for it to be less efficient to maintain a local workforce instead of outsourcing.
Now, this imbalance can take a while to correct itself, and yes, it will likely have an economic impact on people working in IT, at least certain types of jobs, but sooner or later one of two things will happen: Other jobs will come along in other sectors, or outsourcing will stop being profitable compared to the market rate for IT people in the US.
You do realize that MS doesn't WANT to distribute a Sun JVM, don't you? So much so that Sun sued them to force them to include Sun's JVM instead of the outdated crap they previously shipped (and wanted to drop). MS fought tooth and nail to NOT have to distribute an up to date JVM with Windows.
Elitist crap like this only lowers the bar for who would be considered "idiots" when it comes to operating a particular system. If Linux is hard to maintain, that justs means that a lot of smart people will get stuck making stupid mistakes in addition to all the stupid peole making stupid mistakes.
Maybe we should all stop using GUI's, and switch back to using hex entry to raise the bar so that those losers that can't read and write machine code in hex won't pollute our userbase by their presence? Or isn't that elitist enough for you?
They most certainly didn't "open up the PC architecture". What did you think PS/2 was? It was an attempt at clawing back control after the clone makers had succeeded in engineering their way around all IP issues and were churning out clones in huge volumes.
IBM in the 80's had just shaken off their antitrust lawsuit, and was like a rabid dog trying to get back their territory before they finally had lost so much control that proprietary systems started becoming a problem for them rather than an asset.
You're right they became a services oriented company, but IBM still has one of the largest corporate research arms on the planet... Claiming they are "fully dependent" on the open source movement is pure bullshit.
IBM doesn't NEED Sun's help with providing the software, but without a commitment from Sun IBM would be in the same situation with them as with Microsoft: They can change the specs whenever they feel like it to keep their competitive advantage over other tools.
Frankly I see IBM's comments as an ingenious PR move. Either Sun opens Java, and it will be a great PR win for IBM and great for business, or Sun doesn't in which case it's a big PR win for IBM towards customers (look guys, we're promoting open standards, but Sun just doesn't want to play ball - do you REALLY want to get tied in to a company like that?)
The key thing, however, is that the government tends to arrogantly assume that people should deliver electronic forms etc. in formats compatible with whatever software the government uses. Increased government use of Linux will mean increased government use of things like Open Office, and inevitably some of them will start passing around Open Office files, and expect external consultancies etc. to be able to read and generate these files. That way government acceptance means that a lot of companies will have to deal with open source whether they like it or not.
You know the official system of measurement in the US is the metric system, right? And has been since 1893. The US was even one of the original 17 signatories to the treaty of the meter. So the US government has long realised the advantage of the metric system, having been involved with it's development since Congress authorized it for use in the US in 1866.
Many federal agencies are required by law to use metric units in procurement and grants, and the meter is by law "the preferred system of weight and measures" for US trade and commerce.
My finacee is by most measures a computer newbie, and the experience she had with computers before meeting me was on Windows. Yet she had no problem using Linux, even my bastardized machine that runs all kinds of bleeding edge unstable versions of various software. To the point where she now prefers using Open Office on her laptop (which runs Windows) for her university coursework because she found it easier to use.
Have you tried helping new computer users on Windows?
One of the things that piss me off about these discussions is that the knee jerk reaction is always that "ooh, he killed someone AND he read about necrophilia, so the internet made him do it" (referring to the case mentioned in the article) instead of taking a serious approach to investigating these claimed connections.
Did he have an interest in necrophilia, and started seeking out material about it but wasn't satisfied so he did out and kill? Or did he indeed happen to come upon sites about necrophilia and get interested and go out and kill? Did the sites actually make him more interested in killing, or did they reduce a desire to kill he already had, whether by partly satisfying him or by turning him off the subject?
This applies to ANY discussions of an action related to material regarding the type of action - without knowing more about the specific material he was reading and his psychological profile, and more research into how material like this affect people, it is completely unjustifiable to simply assume that the internet or any particular material is to blame.
You don't have to go that far back to find the great debates about how comic books supposedly was a major driver for violence, and a bit further to find debates about how TV and before that radio supposedly does the same thing.
No, he's saying the lose some money on the few they sell off after only 2-3 rental periods, but make it up with the volume of rentals they are doing for most movies.
The reason for his price estimates is that he's looking for out of the box file servers that are built for high speed access to the data. That is expensive and complete overkill when all you need is to be able to reliably stream a maximum of around 10 Mb/s at a time to one client...
Out of curiousity, do you have TV out from your storage server, or do you have a separate machine to playback? I'm looking for a completely silent Linux machine with TV out that is powerful enough to handle DVD and Divx playback... It could be disk less, as I'd be streaming everything to it, but I want to be able to have it constantly on in the living room without any noise.
Maybe I don't want my DVD's all over the living room, and don't want to risk damaging the disks each time I handle them, and don't want to have to go looking for the particular one I want?
I "only" have around 200 DVD's, and I'm looking for a similar system. Only I also want to timeshift digital TV with it. The archival part is simple... My problem has been finding a suitable SILENT Linux box to put in the living room to stream to.
How exactly is it a far out scenario? Paying in stock is common to do if a company is in debt and have no cash. That a techie would be owed enough to get 1000 DVD's as payment is hardly unlikely - perhaps he did software development for them.
As for wanting a solution to play back a few hundred of them from disk, how is that far out? I'm looking for a similar system myself, for the 200+ DVD's I have BOUGHT over the last 4 years.
Setting up a terabyte sized disk array is trivial, though - it's just a matter of buying a decent RAID controller or two and a bunch of disks. Finding a SILENT machine that is powerful enough to play back DVD's and Divx over my LAN has proven to be much more challenging, particularly as I want something that runs Linux so I can easily customize it... Still looking.
Which means you're talking out of your ass. Streaming from disk to memory will hardly be noticeable in terms of CPU load on any reasonable modern machine - you most certainly don't need a Quad Xeon to do it. A reasonable RAID controller, a few big disks, and practically the cheapest desktop computers out there would be sufficient.
The problem as I see it is that you wouldn't want a beast like that anywhere near your living room, so ideally you'd stream it over your home network to a silent PC in the living room... Finding a good silent PC that is powerful enough to decode both DVD's and DIVX seems to be a bit more of a challenge, though.
Anyone got any ideas? If you're about to suggest Via EPIA 10000's, don't bother unless you've actually TRIED using them for DVD and Divx playback under Linux, as I've seen a LOT of conflicting reports about image quality and whether or not they are powerful enough... If you've tried, though, I'd love to know how well it works as it seems to be the option that's easiest to get completely quiet.
If he contracted to do work for the chain and they went out of business and didn't have any cash, offering to pay in stock would be a fairly normal thing to do.
This is my preferred solution as well. Lots of people here seem to be happy enduring the sounds of their PC's in the living room. I don't. I have about 200 DVD's so far, and subscribe to digital cable, and have been looking at quiet playback machine for the living room for a while, but the only option seem to be to build your own - many devices have support for playing MPEG2 and Divx movies, but few seem to support DVD navigation or timeshifting of digital TV at the same time, so I want something I can run Linux with MythTV or Freevo on so I can tinker with it... The problem is that the only boxes that seems well suited are either "loud" for a living room setting (Shuttle etc.) or on the edge of being too slow (Via EPIA 10000, where the feedback is very mixed - some claims it works fine, some reports lots of problems).
Essentially I'd like a completely noise-less box with either PC Card or USB slot for wireless connectivity and that can boot from a USB or Compact Flash flash drive, and that is powerful enough to play DVD's and Divx at TV resolutions, and that have decent TV out and sound... Is that too much to ask?:)
I don't care about harddisk, as I'd much rather stick a well cooled tower in a closet somewhere than worry about finding silent drives etc., and stream over the network.
Yes, because I really want people all around me to hear exactly what I'm "writing" at any moment... And I really want to hear the e-mails and documents everyone around me are dictating...
Frankly, speech recognition has some good uses for AUGMENTING input, but it's useless as a keyboard replacement for nearly every usage area.
Of course of those of us that actually look at the screen and not the keyboard while typing, feedback about whether or not we pressed the right key comes from what we see and not the tactile feedback anyway, so how would a virtual keyboard be a problem?
An informal "test" with a sheet of paper felt a bit strange, but my finger movements felt natural. But then I don't have a problem switching between multiple keyboard types with very different levels of feedback either.
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Where have you been hiding? Disney IS using Linux extensively, and have for a long time.
Having a great sys admin or developer is useless to most companies if they can purchase a service of the same quality elsewhere, and for most companies where IT administration isn't where the company makes it money that is quite likely to be the case.
Businesses should outsource whatever costs them more to do inhouse than outsourcing at the same quality level. If a software house find they can outsource all their development and be a pure marketing operation, and make more money, then what they have found out is that their real core business is marketing software, not making it.
Sometimes you will want to keep control for strategic reasons, but even then, the only justifiable reason for maintaining internal staff for a function is that it will on the long term generate higher profits or reduce risk.
Oh, and regarding being protective of it's markets, the US is already well renowned internationally as being one of the most protectionist countries in the free world.
You may be right that thousands of American cities never recovered from export of the jobs of certain sectors, yet the American economy has grown massively - INCLUDING average salary levels - over the last couple of decades. Right in the middle of this exodus of low paid jobs.
Why? Because amid the export of jobs, US companies reduced their costs and got more competitive, creating new areas of growth which needed more people, and more of the jobs are jobs that can't be easily exported and that commands higher salaries.
Exporting jobs in itself isn't good. But exporting jobs isn't bad either when the net result is more money pumped into your economy as a result of higher profit margins and more new investment.
Also keep in mind that every job exported means increased salary pressure outside the US, as well as increased purchasing power. The first reduces the economic viability of outsourcing, and thus the long term impact. The second increases US exports, as the US make up such a huge part of world trade, thus reducing the impact of losing a job, even other effects aside.
Due to the overhead of outsourcing in terms of managing the relationship, the two salary levels doesn't even have to meet for it to be less efficient to maintain a local workforce instead of outsourcing.
Now, this imbalance can take a while to correct itself, and yes, it will likely have an economic impact on people working in IT, at least certain types of jobs, but sooner or later one of two things will happen: Other jobs will come along in other sectors, or outsourcing will stop being profitable compared to the market rate for IT people in the US.
Well yes, but the DVD CCA dropped the case, so there won't be a trial.
You do realize that MS doesn't WANT to distribute a Sun JVM, don't you? So much so that Sun sued them to force them to include Sun's JVM instead of the outdated crap they previously shipped (and wanted to drop). MS fought tooth and nail to NOT have to distribute an up to date JVM with Windows.
Maybe we should all stop using GUI's, and switch back to using hex entry to raise the bar so that those losers that can't read and write machine code in hex won't pollute our userbase by their presence? Or isn't that elitist enough for you?
IBM in the 80's had just shaken off their antitrust lawsuit, and was like a rabid dog trying to get back their territory before they finally had lost so much control that proprietary systems started becoming a problem for them rather than an asset.
You're right they became a services oriented company, but IBM still has one of the largest corporate research arms on the planet... Claiming they are "fully dependent" on the open source movement is pure bullshit.
IBM doesn't NEED Sun's help with providing the software, but without a commitment from Sun IBM would be in the same situation with them as with Microsoft: They can change the specs whenever they feel like it to keep their competitive advantage over other tools.
Frankly I see IBM's comments as an ingenious PR move. Either Sun opens Java, and it will be a great PR win for IBM and great for business, or Sun doesn't in which case it's a big PR win for IBM towards customers (look guys, we're promoting open standards, but Sun just doesn't want to play ball - do you REALLY want to get tied in to a company like that?)
The key thing, however, is that the government tends to arrogantly assume that people should deliver electronic forms etc. in formats compatible with whatever software the government uses. Increased government use of Linux will mean increased government use of things like Open Office, and inevitably some of them will start passing around Open Office files, and expect external consultancies etc. to be able to read and generate these files. That way government acceptance means that a lot of companies will have to deal with open source whether they like it or not.
Many federal agencies are required by law to use metric units in procurement and grants, and the meter is by law "the preferred system of weight and measures" for US trade and commerce.
Have you tried helping new computer users on Windows?
Did he have an interest in necrophilia, and started seeking out material about it but wasn't satisfied so he did out and kill? Or did he indeed happen to come upon sites about necrophilia and get interested and go out and kill? Did the sites actually make him more interested in killing, or did they reduce a desire to kill he already had, whether by partly satisfying him or by turning him off the subject?
This applies to ANY discussions of an action related to material regarding the type of action - without knowing more about the specific material he was reading and his psychological profile, and more research into how material like this affect people, it is completely unjustifiable to simply assume that the internet or any particular material is to blame.
You don't have to go that far back to find the great debates about how comic books supposedly was a major driver for violence, and a bit further to find debates about how TV and before that radio supposedly does the same thing.
Now it's moved on to the internet.
No, he's saying the lose some money on the few they sell off after only 2-3 rental periods, but make it up with the volume of rentals they are doing for most movies.
Of course not all of us live in countries as oppressive as the US.
Out of curiousity, do you have TV out from your storage server, or do you have a separate machine to playback? I'm looking for a completely silent Linux machine with TV out that is powerful enough to handle DVD and Divx playback... It could be disk less, as I'd be streaming everything to it, but I want to be able to have it constantly on in the living room without any noise.
I "only" have around 200 DVD's, and I'm looking for a similar system. Only I also want to timeshift digital TV with it. The archival part is simple... My problem has been finding a suitable SILENT Linux box to put in the living room to stream to.
As for wanting a solution to play back a few hundred of them from disk, how is that far out? I'm looking for a similar system myself, for the 200+ DVD's I have BOUGHT over the last 4 years.
Setting up a terabyte sized disk array is trivial, though - it's just a matter of buying a decent RAID controller or two and a bunch of disks. Finding a SILENT machine that is powerful enough to play back DVD's and Divx over my LAN has proven to be much more challenging, particularly as I want something that runs Linux so I can easily customize it... Still looking.
The problem as I see it is that you wouldn't want a beast like that anywhere near your living room, so ideally you'd stream it over your home network to a silent PC in the living room... Finding a good silent PC that is powerful enough to decode both DVD's and DIVX seems to be a bit more of a challenge, though.
Anyone got any ideas? If you're about to suggest Via EPIA 10000's, don't bother unless you've actually TRIED using them for DVD and Divx playback under Linux, as I've seen a LOT of conflicting reports about image quality and whether or not they are powerful enough... If you've tried, though, I'd love to know how well it works as it seems to be the option that's easiest to get completely quiet.
If he contracted to do work for the chain and they went out of business and didn't have any cash, offering to pay in stock would be a fairly normal thing to do.
Essentially I'd like a completely noise-less box with either PC Card or USB slot for wireless connectivity and that can boot from a USB or Compact Flash flash drive, and that is powerful enough to play DVD's and Divx at TV resolutions, and that have decent TV out and sound... Is that too much to ask? :)
I don't care about harddisk, as I'd much rather stick a well cooled tower in a closet somewhere than worry about finding silent drives etc., and stream over the network.
Any suggestions?
Frankly, speech recognition has some good uses for AUGMENTING input, but it's useless as a keyboard replacement for nearly every usage area.
An informal "test" with a sheet of paper felt a bit strange, but my finger movements felt natural. But then I don't have a problem switching between multiple keyboard types with very different levels of feedback either.