The slashdot effect only works from the front page. Seriously. Links from comments draw just a small, puny, trickle of hits compared to a link from the front page, driven by the fact that most people reading Slashdot rarely even click on the comments section, and even then few people will bother going through all the comments. So don't worry about posting links....
I got my current job by using one of the job sites.
However it isn't a matter of just registering and waiting for the offers given the current market. I used the sites to find agencies, and actively applied to every single position that looked remotely interesting, sent mails to every employment agency that listed positions along the lines I was looking for, and updated my CV or "renewed it" (on Monster you can, or at least could, just click on a link to get to the top of the pile again) on the sites EVERY day to make sure my CV was looked at.
It got me several calls from recruiters, and a new job starting last summer at the same salary I had at my previous job, despite the general tenedency being that people in my type of positions took steep pay cuts to move into more secure positions last year. But the number of responses (including people telling me the position had been filled) I got was perhaps 1 in 50 - the rest just didn't bother answering at all.
Another thing to keep in mind, though, is that you MUST make sure you follow up the recruiters. They will NOT follow up you if you don't show interest. I got calls about a couple of positions that I wasn't too interested in, but that I told the recruiters to put me forward for anyway, to find out more, the ones where I wasn't on the phone to the recruiters daily never got back to me at all.
These people are still drowning in CV's and you can assume that when they call you they have probably already called 10 other people. Of anyone qualified they will hire one of the few that are actively spending time trying to understand what their clients want and helps them provide it.
The last thing to keep in mind is: Your CV MUST be keyword friendly to be successful on these sites. In my case, I'd originally not mentioned much about Microsoft products and kept to my core competencies, even though I have in the past used Office and even (I am ashamed to say) programmed Word macros. Many job specs will mention things like Office etc. even if they are completely peripheral to the job - the recruiters will put it into their searches anyway if they get to many results with more relevant keywords.
The other deficiency my CV originally had was that recruiters tend to search for the degree level the employer asks for, while many (most?) tech employers are relatively flexible (the main exception being banks that tend to be really anal about it) about your formal qualifications if you have relevant experience - in my case I quit uni to start my first company at 19. When I added (truthfully) that I am currently taking a MSc. as a correspondence course in my spare time (mostly to "get the paper" for future job hunts...) the level of interest suddenly increased a lot, including for positions where the employer had stated an MSc. as an "absolute requirement".
Do anything except lie to get the interviews - the recruiters often don't know the position well enough to judge whether you'd be suitable...:)
No. It is done on the premise that lots of people are killed by drunk drivers, and making it harder for people to start a car journey when they are drunk will save lives. Just as you aren't legally allowed to drive without a driving license even though you might be a perfectly good driver. Just as you need to go through a test to verify that you meet certain minimum criteria, they are now suggesting to enforce a check that you meet certain minimium criteria before starting a car.
This IS about prevention, not prosecution. This IS about making it harder for people to commit a crime rather than punishing them after the fact.
Credit isn't a right. If devices like that hadn't been an option, you would have likely been turned away as a too high credit risk anyway. Why do you care? It's not like it reflects on your economy or person. When I moved to the UK nearly 4 years ago, getting credit was hell as well, because companies here generally want 3 years of credit history in the country because they can't get any info from outside the UK. People that have recently moved are often considered high risk, for this and similar reasons.
Since when did a 30 seconds delay to the start of your car journeys constitute a conviction or punishment for anything?
Do you consider regulations requiring use of seat belts a nuisance too? What about places where lights needs to be turned on during daytime and you have to spend two seconds flicking them on? Or all that time and money spent to ensure your car passes safety regulations?
As a drive, you will already be spending a lot of time and money that are related to ensuring the safety of yourself and others already, even though you might always drive responsibly and be perfectly capable of compensating for any technical problems with your car. How is this any different?
People die because of seat belts all the time, so why isn't there an outcry around the world against seat belt regulations? Because they save significantly more people than they harm.
Except that a) we have a reasonable replacement for the X libraries, so the libraries don't really matter, b) it's the advertising clause, not GPL incompatibility in itself that is the most serious problem.
There is an interesting language tutor called Michel Thomas that base his French courses entirely around this: By teaching you rules for how the French words were transformed into English and how to transform them back.
Sometimes you will end up with words that will not be in common use in one of the languages, but overall you will be understood.
For example think about the number of words ending in -able, -ible, and -ent that can be used in French as is - it's usually just the pronounciation and sometimes accents that are different: incredible, portable, probable, different, predicament.
Words ending in -ion can often also safely be used: seduction, remuneration, tradition, destruction.
And so on... By learning the rules you instantly have a way of finding words when you don't know of a better alternative. And trying to structure your sentences in English in a way that includes words that you know can be carried straight over into French may often help you find a way of saying something that will sound more natural to a native French speaker than a word for word translation of how you'd normally speak English.
I once heard a quote (attributed to Alexandre Dumas, don't know if that is accurate) saying that "English is just badly spoken French"...
To add to your list of borrowed words in English, I find one of the more amusing one to be "shampoo" (borrowed from a Hindi word for massage, particularly of the head). Supposedly it was imported into the English language once the first English traders arrived in India and found that the natives were rather hesitant about dealing with them at all due to a slight little issue of body odour...
Someone else have already pointed out that the Eskimo snow story is an urban myth. But I'd like to point out one more thing: In Eskimo languages, as in English, the words referring to snow are usually used as roots.
In Eskimo languages, they are used as roots for building words, whereas in English, "snow" is often used to build compound terms that have the same meaning, but may be more verbose.
So where in English we might say "powdered snow" and nobody would consider it a "word" for snow, in an Eskimo language you would tack a root referring to snow onto some other element describing the type of snow.
You will find that to less extremes in many other languages. In Norwegian, what is a noun phrase consisting of several words in English is often represented by a compound noun, written as one word, but should they be counted as separate words? Does Norwegians have an obsession with ice cream just because in our language you have a "word" (more accurately a compound noun) for ever flavour? (vaniljeis = vanilla ice cream, sjokoladeis = chocolate ice cream etc., note that all of them would simply be the flavour followed by the noun "is" - ice - written as one word).
If you do indiscriminately count compound terms, or words built from a small set of roots, suffixes etc. as separate words, a lot of languages will have unbounded numbers of "words" that could be said to be related to a specific subject.
Before making statements about how many words for something a language has you need to understand and relate what a word is in that context, and whether it makes sense to count words the way you want.
You miss the point. There ISN'T a lot of "specialist vocabulary" to deal with snow in Inuit. The whole thing is a myth based on completely lacking understanding of the Inuit language on behalf of the originator.
"The story about Inuit (or Inuktitut, or Yup'ik, or more generally, Eskimo) words for snow is completely wrong. People say that speakers of these languages have 23, or 42, or 50, or 100 words for snow --- the numbers often seem to have been picked at random. The spread of the myth was tracked in a paper by Laura Martin (American Anthropologist 88 (1986), 418-423), and publicized more widely by a later humorous embroidering of the theme by G. K. Pullum (reprinted as chapter 19 of his 1991 book of essays The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). But the Eskimoan language group uses an extraordinary system of multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation called postbases. The list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn't that long: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.
That does not mean there are huge numbers of unrelated basic terms for huge numbers of finely differentiated snow types. It means that the notion of fixing a number of snow words, or even a definition of what a word for snow would be, is meaningless for these languages. You could write down not just thousands but millions of words built from roots that refer to snow if you had the time. But they would all be derivatives of a fairly small number of roots. And you could write down just as many derivatives of any other root: fish, or coffee, or excrement."
What I find funny in discussions like this is that people equates languages and cultures dying with homogenisation. Yes, many obscure languages die, but new language variations arise on a daily basis.
I'm 28, and I already find that there are groups of youths in London where I live that are difficult to understand when talking amongst themselves because they're creating new words and contractions all the time. In certain areas of Norway, where I'm from, I noticed a couple of years ago that many students had started adopting words from Arabic, Vietnamese and other languages used by the immigrant population, simply because many of them go to schools that are have high number of immigrants.
Languages change. Deal. Sometimes use of a language changes enough that it could be justifiably called a new language. To think that having fewer mutually incomprehensible languages means that there won't still be significant differences shows little attention to what is going on.
The same thing goes for culture. So traditions observed by some small group somewhere dies out. So what? New traditions are being created every day. New groups arise, but are often not immediately visible to us because they don't consist of strange looking natives of some far away place carrying out weird rituals - they consists of strange looking natives of your own back yard carrying out weird rituals. It might not be codified in religious texts or have been subjected to anthropological studies, but that doesn't mean it isn't a culture.
If you go out in any moderately large city and LOOK, you could likely easily spot a wide diversity of cultural phenomena that are completely alien to you, and more so than many traditions of dying cultures. They are just more hidden, because they are integrated into a culture you are used to - they may not wear strange clothes, or other visible signs, or they do, but only at special occasions. They may not speak a strange language, or they do, but it's hidden in a veneer of a language you know, and only used when speaking to eachother.
I'd challenge anyone to describe "Western culture" for instance in a way that even a dozen of slashdotter's could agree on, without reducing it to just a handful of vague statements. Any attempt at a comprehensive description would strand on account of not taking into account all the significant variations, whether in lifestyle choices, local traditions that you simply don't notice until you start living with them, language differences you don't realise until you find yourself in a situation where your way of phrasing something is utterly misunderstood, or sub-cultures you normally only see the surface of because you are not "one of them" and not included.
Professional developers would be STUPID if they spend any amount of time looking at Microsofts code, and especially if they comment on it in public. It would be a huge legal risk in case you ever find yourself employed by a company in direct competition with Microsoft.
It isn't all about ratings. I could put together a channel with top ratings if I had unlimited deep pockets and no need to care about profits - I'd just buy the best of everything, and buy exclusives. Hollywood blockbusters that are still in theaters, all the big sports and music shows etc.
The point is, there is NO reason to focus on the ratings. The ONLY thing that matters is whether they make money. If they don't make money for their shareholders they are not doing the job they were hired to do, regardless of how many people are watching.
That means that popular shows will often be killed because they aren't attracting the right kind of viewers or because they are too expensive to produce, regardless of the total number of viewers they bring.
Right. I have a Word document sitting on my harddisk that will crash Word97, load fine in Word pad, and have messed up bulletting in other versions of Word.
Office is only compatible with itself within the same version.
IBM has close to 300.000 employees. The guy talking about this is the technical manager for the Lotus division in Sweden. In other words, he works for a small IBM division in a small country, and he isn't even the top manager for the division. Secondly he's spouting off to Infoworld, instead of releasing a press release through IBM's ordinary channels.
This is some guy that's trying to make an impression for a pet project of his, not global IBM strategy. I bet he's in for some angry phone calls from various people, including his boss who'll likely be pestered as to why one of his subordinates is talking to the press about things that isn't his business.
The reason Microsoft hasn't heard anything is probably because he's been talking to people at his level in Microsoft, who has no authority to make any real decisions, just as this guy is unlikely to have.
Why are you assuming that it would be any simpler to port the Mac port of Office? It's not a Unix app, it's a MaxOS X app, and there is no reason to assume it uses standard Unix API's for anything.
You're assuming the compact flash or eprom would live longer than your drive if subjected to the same usage pattern, which is certainly not a given - both flash and eprom can usually handle much fewer writes than a hard disk can before you can start expecting failures. Add to it that flash is more expensive and slower, and we're not anywhere near replacing hard disks yet.
The mention of textile and electronics is funny. WHY do you think textiles and electronics are becoming so cheap? For a large part because the relative labor costs have dropped dramatically seen from the POV of a US worker. For that to have happened with the jobs staying in the US, those hundreds of thousands of people would have to take pay cuts or stay in lower paid jobs.
Jobs move based on changes in supply and demand at the right price just as any other commodity. Ultimately, the only way inflation adjusted salaries averaged across a population can keep rising is if the market keeps expanding. Jobs will move to where people can be employed cheapest. Salaries for any jobs which is location idependent will approach eachother worldwide barring artificial barriers, possibly resulting in some types of jobs simply not being available in high cost countries because nobody are willing to take the jobs at the salaries offered.
That is a key component of capitalism: Whoever is most "efficient" will dominate the market.
It is also the single largest problem of capitalism: The pressure on salaries drives demand to a certain extent, when it allows an increase in overall consumption by redistributing money to people less likely to "sit on it", however at some point reduced salaries means reduced demand. Capitalism need to compensate for that by growing the market. This was one of the key foundations of Marxism, for instance.
Unless one believes that the market (consumption) will grow forever, meaning that people will need to keep consuming vastly more resources or the population must keep growing at a dramatic pace, at some point growth can only be accomplished by competing more agressively with your competitors by cutting cost.
Ultimately, people are what drives cost up, directly through salaries, and indirectly through the cost of all products and services where a significant part of the price is directly or indirectly a result of paying people. Thus moving jobs to wherever is cheaper, shopping around for suppliers that offer lower prices because they are paying people less or again using suppliers that do so, will in a perfect market without external growth start pushing salaries down.
Some people see it as a potential death spiral that capitalism can't escape if further external growth becomes impossible: Lower salaries means lower consumption, means higher pressure on cost etc.
There's a fatal flaw to this: The top management of these companies get the majority of their compensation in stock options. They are paid for results. There is no reason to assume that any Indian management teams that reach the same levels won't claim the same compensations. CEO jobs aren't threatened for that very same reason - if more top management of the quality needed are available, companies will flock to them.
But yes, of course Indian tech workers will try to push build their own businesses, in order to make more money. But as they do, they will also start closing the price gap as a result of two things: Each job they "take" from some other country means one more person that might be prepared to cut his or her salary to get another job, temporarily lowering the floor in the countries these jobs are coming from, and each job position they fill in India will mean one less person available and competing for jobs, raising the floor there and at the same time increasing the experience and competitive potential of the person hired.
At some point the two will meet, or get close enough that there is no more net loss of jobs to India, and the cycle might start all over again with other countries with increasing number of potential engineers.
No level of protectionism will stop this. If American companies don't take advantage, others will and will be able to compete more efficiently with American companies, and taking jobs that way.
Now, on the other hand, whoever exploits the opportunities of offshore hiring the most efficiently will be able to compete more efficiently for business and grow their company, most likely growing their domestic staff as well, as they presumably will need teams that are customer facing and close too.
Seeing offshoring as a threat is short sighted. It's an inevitable evolution in any business where the geographic location of a team is of little relevance to the quality of the delivered product and where the knowledge needed can be found off shore. It's the nature of capitalism that production will need to continuosly be made more efficient or your company will lose out to those who do.
Because for many of these images they are the only source, and they have no obligation to let the public view these images at all. They have a considerable cost in restoring these images and in hosting them, and finance that by providing reproductions. If they can't restrict reproductions they would likely feel unable to justify the expense of that service.
Which means you essentially have a choice: You can get to see the pictures online, with restrictions, or, if they can't find a legally enforcable way to do that online, you'd be restricted to going there in person if you wanted to see these pictures.
The point is everyone CAN'T already do what they wish with them, just because the pictures are in the public domain. You still need access to the pictures to do anything with them at all, and restrictions can be imposed in order to give you that access.
Now, in this case the goal seems relatively reasonable, since presumably there isn't a huge profit in it for these people, and they are struggling to find a balance where the pictures are available for anyone that wants them, but need some revenue source to make that possible.
Constrast that with the movie and music industries that want to use a similar approach to extract massive profits forever from works they've already made tons of money from, and the same methods (restrict access and demand you agree to restrictive usage terms to be allowed to gain access) look a whole lot less tolerable.
No, they don't. They specifically state that one of the reasons they feel they NEED the long terms of services is that they need to protect access to the images BECAUSE they realise that simple digital reproduction of a public domain work won't result in new copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
The slashdot effect only works from the front page. Seriously. Links from comments draw just a small, puny, trickle of hits compared to a link from the front page, driven by the fact that most people reading Slashdot rarely even click on the comments section, and even then few people will bother going through all the comments. So don't worry about posting links....
However it isn't a matter of just registering and waiting for the offers given the current market. I used the sites to find agencies, and actively applied to every single position that looked remotely interesting, sent mails to every employment agency that listed positions along the lines I was looking for, and updated my CV or "renewed it" (on Monster you can, or at least could, just click on a link to get to the top of the pile again) on the sites EVERY day to make sure my CV was looked at.
It got me several calls from recruiters, and a new job starting last summer at the same salary I had at my previous job, despite the general tenedency being that people in my type of positions took steep pay cuts to move into more secure positions last year. But the number of responses (including people telling me the position had been filled) I got was perhaps 1 in 50 - the rest just didn't bother answering at all.
Another thing to keep in mind, though, is that you MUST make sure you follow up the recruiters. They will NOT follow up you if you don't show interest. I got calls about a couple of positions that I wasn't too interested in, but that I told the recruiters to put me forward for anyway, to find out more, the ones where I wasn't on the phone to the recruiters daily never got back to me at all.
These people are still drowning in CV's and you can assume that when they call you they have probably already called 10 other people. Of anyone qualified they will hire one of the few that are actively spending time trying to understand what their clients want and helps them provide it.
The last thing to keep in mind is: Your CV MUST be keyword friendly to be successful on these sites. In my case, I'd originally not mentioned much about Microsoft products and kept to my core competencies, even though I have in the past used Office and even (I am ashamed to say) programmed Word macros. Many job specs will mention things like Office etc. even if they are completely peripheral to the job - the recruiters will put it into their searches anyway if they get to many results with more relevant keywords.
The other deficiency my CV originally had was that recruiters tend to search for the degree level the employer asks for, while many (most?) tech employers are relatively flexible (the main exception being banks that tend to be really anal about it) about your formal qualifications if you have relevant experience - in my case I quit uni to start my first company at 19. When I added (truthfully) that I am currently taking a MSc. as a correspondence course in my spare time (mostly to "get the paper" for future job hunts...) the level of interest suddenly increased a lot, including for positions where the employer had stated an MSc. as an "absolute requirement".
Do anything except lie to get the interviews - the recruiters often don't know the position well enough to judge whether you'd be suitable... :)
This IS about prevention, not prosecution. This IS about making it harder for people to commit a crime rather than punishing them after the fact.
Credit isn't a right. If devices like that hadn't been an option, you would have likely been turned away as a too high credit risk anyway. Why do you care? It's not like it reflects on your economy or person. When I moved to the UK nearly 4 years ago, getting credit was hell as well, because companies here generally want 3 years of credit history in the country because they can't get any info from outside the UK. People that have recently moved are often considered high risk, for this and similar reasons.
Do you consider regulations requiring use of seat belts a nuisance too? What about places where lights needs to be turned on during daytime and you have to spend two seconds flicking them on? Or all that time and money spent to ensure your car passes safety regulations?
As a drive, you will already be spending a lot of time and money that are related to ensuring the safety of yourself and others already, even though you might always drive responsibly and be perfectly capable of compensating for any technical problems with your car. How is this any different?
Because, as is the case when you start your car, I would have the ability to be a significant risk to others if I wanted to.
People die because of seat belts all the time, so why isn't there an outcry around the world against seat belt regulations? Because they save significantly more people than they harm.
Except that a) we have a reasonable replacement for the X libraries, so the libraries don't really matter, b) it's the advertising clause, not GPL incompatibility in itself that is the most serious problem.
Sometimes you will end up with words that will not be in common use in one of the languages, but overall you will be understood.
For example think about the number of words ending in -able, -ible, and -ent that can be used in French as is - it's usually just the pronounciation and sometimes accents that are different: incredible, portable, probable, different, predicament.
Words ending in -ion can often also safely be used: seduction, remuneration, tradition, destruction.
And so on... By learning the rules you instantly have a way of finding words when you don't know of a better alternative. And trying to structure your sentences in English in a way that includes words that you know can be carried straight over into French may often help you find a way of saying something that will sound more natural to a native French speaker than a word for word translation of how you'd normally speak English.
I once heard a quote (attributed to Alexandre Dumas, don't know if that is accurate) saying that "English is just badly spoken French"...
To add to your list of borrowed words in English, I find one of the more amusing one to be "shampoo" (borrowed from a Hindi word for massage, particularly of the head). Supposedly it was imported into the English language once the first English traders arrived in India and found that the natives were rather hesitant about dealing with them at all due to a slight little issue of body odour...
In Eskimo languages, they are used as roots for building words, whereas in English, "snow" is often used to build compound terms that have the same meaning, but may be more verbose.
So where in English we might say "powdered snow" and nobody would consider it a "word" for snow, in an Eskimo language you would tack a root referring to snow onto some other element describing the type of snow.
You will find that to less extremes in many other languages. In Norwegian, what is a noun phrase consisting of several words in English is often represented by a compound noun, written as one word, but should they be counted as separate words? Does Norwegians have an obsession with ice cream just because in our language you have a "word" (more accurately a compound noun) for ever flavour? (vaniljeis = vanilla ice cream, sjokoladeis = chocolate ice cream etc., note that all of them would simply be the flavour followed by the noun "is" - ice - written as one word).
If you do indiscriminately count compound terms, or words built from a small set of roots, suffixes etc. as separate words, a lot of languages will have unbounded numbers of "words" that could be said to be related to a specific subject.
Before making statements about how many words for something a language has you need to understand and relate what a word is in that context, and whether it makes sense to count words the way you want.
From Language Log:
"The story about Inuit (or Inuktitut, or Yup'ik, or more generally, Eskimo) words for snow is completely wrong. People say that speakers of these languages have 23, or 42, or 50, or 100 words for snow --- the numbers often seem to have been picked at random. The spread of the myth was tracked in a paper by Laura Martin (American Anthropologist 88 (1986), 418-423), and publicized more widely by a later humorous embroidering of the theme by G. K. Pullum (reprinted as chapter 19 of his 1991 book of essays The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). But the Eskimoan language group uses an extraordinary system of multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation called postbases. The list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn't that long: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.
That does not mean there are huge numbers of unrelated basic terms for huge numbers of finely differentiated snow types. It means that the notion of fixing a number of snow words, or even a definition of what a word for snow would be, is meaningless for these languages. You could write down not just thousands but millions of words built from roots that refer to snow if you had the time. But they would all be derivatives of a fairly small number of roots. And you could write down just as many derivatives of any other root: fish, or coffee, or excrement."
Awk is definitively Turing complete too, though most people just use a tiny subset of the language.
I'm 28, and I already find that there are groups of youths in London where I live that are difficult to understand when talking amongst themselves because they're creating new words and contractions all the time. In certain areas of Norway, where I'm from, I noticed a couple of years ago that many students had started adopting words from Arabic, Vietnamese and other languages used by the immigrant population, simply because many of them go to schools that are have high number of immigrants.
Languages change. Deal. Sometimes use of a language changes enough that it could be justifiably called a new language. To think that having fewer mutually incomprehensible languages means that there won't still be significant differences shows little attention to what is going on.
The same thing goes for culture. So traditions observed by some small group somewhere dies out. So what? New traditions are being created every day. New groups arise, but are often not immediately visible to us because they don't consist of strange looking natives of some far away place carrying out weird rituals - they consists of strange looking natives of your own back yard carrying out weird rituals. It might not be codified in religious texts or have been subjected to anthropological studies, but that doesn't mean it isn't a culture.
If you go out in any moderately large city and LOOK, you could likely easily spot a wide diversity of cultural phenomena that are completely alien to you, and more so than many traditions of dying cultures. They are just more hidden, because they are integrated into a culture you are used to - they may not wear strange clothes, or other visible signs, or they do, but only at special occasions. They may not speak a strange language, or they do, but it's hidden in a veneer of a language you know, and only used when speaking to eachother.
I'd challenge anyone to describe "Western culture" for instance in a way that even a dozen of slashdotter's could agree on, without reducing it to just a handful of vague statements. Any attempt at a comprehensive description would strand on account of not taking into account all the significant variations, whether in lifestyle choices, local traditions that you simply don't notice until you start living with them, language differences you don't realise until you find yourself in a situation where your way of phrasing something is utterly misunderstood, or sub-cultures you normally only see the surface of because you are not "one of them" and not included.
Where is the threat of monoculture?
The point is, there is NO reason to focus on the ratings. The ONLY thing that matters is whether they make money. If they don't make money for their shareholders they are not doing the job they were hired to do, regardless of how many people are watching.
That means that popular shows will often be killed because they aren't attracting the right kind of viewers or because they are too expensive to produce, regardless of the total number of viewers they bring.
Office is only compatible with itself within the same version.
This is some guy that's trying to make an impression for a pet project of his, not global IBM strategy. I bet he's in for some angry phone calls from various people, including his boss who'll likely be pestered as to why one of his subordinates is talking to the press about things that isn't his business.
The reason Microsoft hasn't heard anything is probably because he's been talking to people at his level in Microsoft, who has no authority to make any real decisions, just as this guy is unlikely to have.
Why are you assuming that it would be any simpler to port the Mac port of Office? It's not a Unix app, it's a MaxOS X app, and there is no reason to assume it uses standard Unix API's for anything.
You're assuming the compact flash or eprom would live longer than your drive if subjected to the same usage pattern, which is certainly not a given - both flash and eprom can usually handle much fewer writes than a hard disk can before you can start expecting failures. Add to it that flash is more expensive and slower, and we're not anywhere near replacing hard disks yet.
Maybe because there's plenty of equipment costing far more than $1000
Jobs move based on changes in supply and demand at the right price just as any other commodity. Ultimately, the only way inflation adjusted salaries averaged across a population can keep rising is if the market keeps expanding. Jobs will move to where people can be employed cheapest. Salaries for any jobs which is location idependent will approach eachother worldwide barring artificial barriers, possibly resulting in some types of jobs simply not being available in high cost countries because nobody are willing to take the jobs at the salaries offered.
That is a key component of capitalism: Whoever is most "efficient" will dominate the market.
It is also the single largest problem of capitalism: The pressure on salaries drives demand to a certain extent, when it allows an increase in overall consumption by redistributing money to people less likely to "sit on it", however at some point reduced salaries means reduced demand. Capitalism need to compensate for that by growing the market. This was one of the key foundations of Marxism, for instance.
Unless one believes that the market (consumption) will grow forever, meaning that people will need to keep consuming vastly more resources or the population must keep growing at a dramatic pace, at some point growth can only be accomplished by competing more agressively with your competitors by cutting cost.
Ultimately, people are what drives cost up, directly through salaries, and indirectly through the cost of all products and services where a significant part of the price is directly or indirectly a result of paying people. Thus moving jobs to wherever is cheaper, shopping around for suppliers that offer lower prices because they are paying people less or again using suppliers that do so, will in a perfect market without external growth start pushing salaries down.
Some people see it as a potential death spiral that capitalism can't escape if further external growth becomes impossible: Lower salaries means lower consumption, means higher pressure on cost etc.
But yes, of course Indian tech workers will try to push build their own businesses, in order to make more money. But as they do, they will also start closing the price gap as a result of two things: Each job they "take" from some other country means one more person that might be prepared to cut his or her salary to get another job, temporarily lowering the floor in the countries these jobs are coming from, and each job position they fill in India will mean one less person available and competing for jobs, raising the floor there and at the same time increasing the experience and competitive potential of the person hired.
At some point the two will meet, or get close enough that there is no more net loss of jobs to India, and the cycle might start all over again with other countries with increasing number of potential engineers.
No level of protectionism will stop this. If American companies don't take advantage, others will and will be able to compete more efficiently with American companies, and taking jobs that way.
Now, on the other hand, whoever exploits the opportunities of offshore hiring the most efficiently will be able to compete more efficiently for business and grow their company, most likely growing their domestic staff as well, as they presumably will need teams that are customer facing and close too.
Seeing offshoring as a threat is short sighted. It's an inevitable evolution in any business where the geographic location of a team is of little relevance to the quality of the delivered product and where the knowledge needed can be found off shore. It's the nature of capitalism that production will need to continuosly be made more efficient or your company will lose out to those who do.
It doesn't go against it if you bother to read the whole sentence instead of just the start.
Which means you essentially have a choice: You can get to see the pictures online, with restrictions, or, if they can't find a legally enforcable way to do that online, you'd be restricted to going there in person if you wanted to see these pictures.
The point is everyone CAN'T already do what they wish with them, just because the pictures are in the public domain. You still need access to the pictures to do anything with them at all, and restrictions can be imposed in order to give you that access.
Now, in this case the goal seems relatively reasonable, since presumably there isn't a huge profit in it for these people, and they are struggling to find a balance where the pictures are available for anyone that wants them, but need some revenue source to make that possible.
Constrast that with the movie and music industries that want to use a similar approach to extract massive profits forever from works they've already made tons of money from, and the same methods (restrict access and demand you agree to restrictive usage terms to be allowed to gain access) look a whole lot less tolerable.
No, they don't. They specifically state that one of the reasons they feel they NEED the long terms of services is that they need to protect access to the images BECAUSE they realise that simple digital reproduction of a public domain work won't result in new copyright.