Big whoops - in the quickie excerpts I saw sad ripoffs of Alien(1-4),
Well then the tradition is continuing. Watch Alien, especially the part where Brett has to go and find the cat. There's a slow zoom of a pair of double doors which looked suddenly very familiar to me after I'd been playing Doom for a while. There are quite a few textures in the game which seem very similar if not actual copies from shots in the film.
If content producers want to control how their content is distributed, isn't that the content producer's perogative?
Distributed yes.
It's not so much telling you what you can do with your machine as telling you what you can do with their content.
Two things: it is telling you what you can do with your machine leading to all sorts of annoyances (and disasters) with stupid hardware and programs that prevent entirely legitimate use. Secondly, I don't like a world in which content users have so much power over the potential uses of their content. It stifles innovation and creativity and leaves culture locked up in the hands of those who want us to pay every time.
Bangkok, Oriental setting And the city don't know what the city is getting The stripped down orphan of the OS world in a deal with everything but Steve Ballmer
Time flies - doesn't seem a minute Since Licensing 6 put you right deep in it All change - don't you know that when you Sell at this level there's no ordinary revenue
On the MindCandy DVD, a collection of the best PC demos, the commentary mentions that when demos went hardware accelerated, the trend moved more towards style and combination of effects than clever coding. On a 486-50 a demo's code really had to be top-notch and use all sorts of clever tricks to achieve the seemingly impossible - plus the coders would write everything - including the music playback and graphics routines. On a 2Ghz PIV with a GeForce and with the ability to tap into either the OpenGL or DirectX API for graphics (and a third-party music player), it becomes all about style and combination (and procedural effects if size dictates).
Farbrausch's tool is just another step in this evolution. Kudos to them - it just means more good 64ks:)
You'll appreciate this story then. A mate of mine was a journalist in Lebanon covering some pretty bad stuff in the early 90s. While he was in the basement with some of his colleagues sheltering from the latest rocket attack on their hotel he mentioned that his next assignment was to Johannesburg. As one the others said: "Johannesburg! Are you crazy?"
Joburg (where I live now) is like any big city in the US or Europe (and I've been to a few): good areas, dodgy areas and absolute no-go areas. Even Lagos can be OK if you know what you're doing.
Heh. That reminds me of the debugging axiom which states that every program has at least one bug. Therefore by induction you can reduce any program to a single line of code that doesn't work.
David Yallop's book is only suitable as a toilet paper and he hasn't proved anything.
He didn't have to in the end - the army officer in charge of the revolting program was forced to admit it as fact.
However, each antisemite has his own "protocols of elders of zion" to believe in.
Oh of course! I have dared to criticize Israel so I must be an antisemite. It's a lazy way out and quite wrong in my case since I am neither Jewish nor Palestinian and hate neither race. All I have felt for many years now is a deep sadness for that part of the world.
So enjoy reading that piece of shit.
I did actually. I'd also like to hear some proper refutations of many of the allegations in it.
Now, you're telling Arabs are now so brave as not to fear to kill teenagers at a disco or granmas going back home from shopping at the city market? You are calling that "extreme measures"?
Losing fear != being brave. Bravery is when you feel fear and overcome it to do what you feel has to be done. I said that the Palestinians have lost their fear which is quite different. I think the anger and frustration against the occupation (loaded term but bear with me here) is now more than their fear of dying - that's all. And yeah - strapping explosives to yourself and detonating them is a pretty extreme measure.
That is, you consider them a perfectly justified and moral?
Certainly not. I consider it nothing of the sort. Understandable, yes. Do I condone it? No.
I call this losing human nature.
Agreed 100%.
pro-Arab position of most Western media conglomerates (CNN, Reuters, AFP, UPI, BBC) which openly glorify and justify Arab terrorism and blackpaints Israel counter-terrorist measures (and anything Israel does to protect their citizen)
I don't even know where to start with this claptrap. If CNN, Reuters, AFP, UPI or the BBC have been glorifying and justifying Arab terrorism then I'd like some references.
Have you ever heard of what it really was to live in a real ghetto, say, a Warsaw ghetto? Or to be put into a real concentration camp, like Auschwitz? Without UNRWA or UNIFIL or anyone to protect you? Have you ever heard of Babiy Yar in Kiev, Ukraine (former USSR) where entire Jewish population of 180,000 people was literally murdered (shot and buried in common graves)?
Yes. Yes. Yes. I have. I could tell you of quite a few more but I'm sure you have your own examples. It's no excuse though for Israel to behave as badly. It should have the moral high ground.
What I am surprised is to how they managed to poison brains of millions of people around the world to believe that Israel is devil incarnation, root of world evil and the reason of all world problems and disasters.
Incredible isn't it? Just a few Arabs throwing stones with sod-all media coverage of their own and suddenly most of the world thinks Israel is a bunch of heavy-handed Nazis who could teach the old South Africans a thing or two about apartheid. Damn that evil media - they need to get their acts together.
Just for a change, think about starving Ruanda kids or millions of christians murdered in Congo. These are really starving and really murdered.
As opposed to the make-believe killings in Gaza?
And then think twice before talking about brutality of Israelis who have to check ambulances at block posts so as to prevent "Palestinians" from bringing explosives and guns into Israeli cities.
The real problem is that there has been too much blood spilled on both sides. Have you ever stopped to think WHY? Why would a teenage girl with everything to live for kill herself with the object of taking as many Jewish people with her? Is that normal? Was she a "fanatic" or something? Or was it because she has literally nothing to lose - no life, no future, several friends and family murdered or relocated, no peace in sight and American-made
Nice to see pro-Israel posts are as restrained as ever...
They should stop terror attacks agains Israeli civilians to enjoy freedom of movement between their cities. Each time the Israeli army lifts closure - bang! - next day we get school bus blown up or a crowd of shoppers in a mall. You get the idea.
I don't think Palestinians in the occupied territories have ever had freedom of movement. Curfews, roadblocks and restrictions on movement between ghettos and other areas have been in place for decades. All this was long before the Palestinians lost their fear and resorted to extreme measures.
Tell that to your Arab brothers. They should stop killing Jews. That's a precondition.
It won't happen anytime soon. Perhaps it's the decades of brutal treatment by the Israeli Army, perhaps the continually stalled peace process, their own weak leadership, or the best efforts by many countries who benefit from the Palestinian question being dragged out as long as possible. They have lost their fear of you and it will never come back. You can drive bulldozers through their houses, shoot their kids, dig up their orchards and dehumanise them in every way you can, but their fear has gone for ever.
Those Arab kids who get killed are victims of the tactics chosen by their own Islamic Jihad bandits who operate agains Israeli forces from within populated areas (which is violation of Geneva convention)
Israel can hardly point fingers when it comes to the Geneva Convention. One of the most horrible examples was in the late 80s when the army used to steal the bodies of young Palestinians killed in the first Intifada and use them as illegal organ donors. Denied time and again by the authorities and eventually proved as 100% fact by David Yallop in his book "To the Ends of the Earth."
I think you might be slightly misinformed here. You can't "break the GPL" and then distribute - disobeying the terms of the license only applies to distribution. You are perfectly welcome to take any GPLed software and use it in house for whatever you like.
Whenever I hear this argument I always go back to what Paul wrote. He had a "thorn in the flesh" - a painful physical ailment to keep himself from becoming too puffed up because of what had been revealed to him. He prays for God to take it away - and God says "NO, it will keep you weak and reliant on me." When Paul writes to Timothy, he mentions "drink a little wine for the sake of your frequent stomach illnesses." Nothing about praying for distracting demons to be gone - just simple, practical advice to deal with his illness.
When the printing press was invented, this diluted that monopoly, since then the ordinary people could afford their own copies of the Bible and became independent from the Church for information.
Not only that, but Luther translated the Bible into the common tongue. He used to hang out in pubs and the market and make notes of how people really spoke so that his translation would reflect day-to-day usage. The result - which is solidly argued in The Sovereign Individual and elsewhere - is that the common man realised once he read the Bible for himself that he didn't have to prop up the corrupt and extravagant monstrosity that was Rome then - economically or otherwise.
Catholic Church --> RIAA The modern nation state is not a bad analogy either - extortion of taxes by force and the threat of jail, mean grasping and extravagant - and totally unnecessary for true free enterprise. But that's a whole other discussion...
schizophrenia, bi-polar, etc is not an illness but rather a spiritual condition
It's an illness. In my case too much seratonin, the chemical that helps filter sensory input, is reabsorbed in the brain, preventing effective sensory filtering. Consequently I get bombarded with input from the senses all the time, am easily distracted, always interested in too many things at once and get that "crowded in" feeling the whole time. Medication that stops too much seratonin being reabsorbed works when I take it. Perhaps you'd care to explain how exactly this is spiritual? The only "spiritual condition" I know of is that everyone is a sinner and needs salvation and either a) you've acknowledged it and accepted your free gift or b) you haven't.
than needs to be overcome - not "cured" - by the power of our savior Jesus Christ.
Can you be more specific? Do you mean I have an evil spirit? A touch of demon posession? Those are real conditions but quite different to simple chemical imbalances in the brain...
You're not kidding. I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia years ago and since I was (and still am) convinced that the voices/visions are spiritual in nature, handed my complete recovery over to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. As such, I stopped taking my medication cold turkey and guess what, my mind began to work much, much better.
I'm happy for you brother if indeed God has really healed you but you absolutely cannot claim it as normative for every Christian. I speak from personal experience since I am severely bipolar, have to take medication and will almost certainly only be fully healed in the life to come. Having a debilitating weakness is sometimes a good thing since you can never rely on yourself - as Paul discovered when he pleaded for God to take away his "thorn in the flesh."
Look, you can't trust psychiatry. The only one that can really do something about this is Jesus Christ. This is not "the power of positive thinking," but rather trusting in God's One and Only Son which the Almighty likes very, very much. I have become better after I stopped taking my meds and thrust my deliverence solely in the hand of the Lord, period.
Again, wonderful news but remember that every Christian's salvation depends on Christ's finished work on the cross, rather than whether you take your medication or not. Some of us will not be healed right now and will have to take medicines to lead a somewhat normal (in my case very somewhat) life.
Envision that the world likes Diamonds. Not hard to envision...snip..
*Nod*, excellent analogy.
In order for the demand for programming labor to even exist (locally or globally), a massive infrastructure (and tax base) must exist and be continually paid for - for the tech world, most of it in the USA.
Historically, there's no doubt the world has benefited from the explosion in the tech industry driven by the US. Without cheap hardware and bandwidth and the culture of innovation (real innovation I mean - not integrating buggy browsers with the OS) the IT world would not be where it is today.
If all of the developers in (insert country here) were all working for local companies developing goods for resale within their country or even for resale to the world at large - this wouldn't be happening. But that's not the case, because the infrastructure hasn't been developed (and paid for) in their country.
I think the vast majority of developers (with India as a possible exception) do work locally for local companies and the infrastructure they use is paid for with local money, even it's imported from the US. But that works both ways too: the US imports plenty of goods and services from the rest of the world.
The businesses to create those products, to use those products, and to pay for those products don't exist in those countries - the demand and the infrastructure that creates and supports that demand is by and large in the US and paid for by taxing US citizens (both in the form of taxes and real estate prices.)
I am no economist but as I understand it, industries and services will naturally migrate to places where they can they can be produced at lower cost. This has already happened with DRAM and some assembly services (I think my Dell was assembled in Taipei for example). The real problem is that Wall Street has publically-traded US tech companies and the customers they depend on by the short and curlies - expecting x% year or year solid growth, to be more competitive and so on. That has forced many to cut costs and move local cost centres (especially development and call centres) to where they are cheaper.
I am not saying that SAfrica can't / won't contribute to the F/OSS movement. What I am saying is that in outfitting them to do so we are opening yet another Pandora's box that is going to magnify the destructive outsourcing effects that have been running rampant through the US in the past few years and once open that box can't be closed.
South Africa has more than a few problems right now: 40% unemployment, one in ten people here has HIV, crime is still a real problem and the cost of bandwidth and communications is outrageous. But we have little sympathy for the first world when it:
enforces drug patents on us in the name of profit and
burdens us with the first world-friendly requirements of GATT, WTO and TRIPS while slapping massive tariffs on our exports
Recently Brazil, South Africa and India have decided to co-operate on trade precisely because of these issues. I don't think the USA is struggling because it's going down, it's because everyone else is coming up to join them.
The USA doesn't see the collapse of the USA coming, but I bet this massive outsourcing movement is the foundation upon which that failure will be built. And they are doing it to themselves, with many of their citizens encouraging it all the while.
If enough people decide that they've had enough, it will change. Voting the Republicrats out of office would be a good start. But it will take some more time before the vast majority of middle America feel any pain - there's too much security, money and comfort there at the moment.
Disclaimer : I am going to try and keep this civil and troll / flame free, expressing my honest feelings - but damn!
Then let me try and be so in return...
Does nobody see the long term ramifications of this? Is there nobody that can see the writing on the wall?
Well, Andy Grove did in his book Only The Paranoid Survive. Probably the most famous quote in there was this one: "If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry."
Sounds like a spot-on prediction to me. Bear in mind that this was published in 1996 which shows you just how much insight he had back then.
I honestly don't envision the long term effects of this as 'a good thing'. Jesus H. Christ - how's this for an idea : how about I go to some third world country where the wage scales make Indian off-shore wages look like a king's ransom and teach all the indigenous inhabitants how to be 'computer guys'.
Sounds good. Nothing like a bit of volunteer work to get your worldviews really in perspective:)
These guys would sell their own brother into slavery for a cow and a chicken, just envision what they would do for $2/hr.
Surprisingly, most people in the third world (where I live) want the same as you: to be left alone, to have food on the table, roofs over their heads and satisfying work to do to earn money.
Anybody that thinks their long term employment prospects are bad now, just wait until this little project comes to fruition.
I don't see how - the campaign is promoting the use and development of open source software. Anyone in the world who uses it will benefit. The real problem for US tech workers right now is that globalisation has caught up with you where it hurts and I would be lying if that word shadenfreude hasn't occurred to me more than once recently. For many years, the globalisation mantra has benefited few economies outside the US. It's going to be good for your economy in the long run like making it more competitive for a start:)
Plenty of us outside the US (I am South African for the record) have seen this coming for ages, especially in the FLOSS arena where no-one cares where you're from as long as your code is clean and works. Outsourcing of development and support to skilled markets outside the US was just the next step - and it's happening.
My first impressions were probably right, Mark Shuttleworth needs to take his $575M and spend the rest of his life like Hugh Hefner, set up a mansion and tap a LOT of high quality ass.
He could have but he chose instead to put money back into the open source community.
Slashdot Mirror
Big whoops - in the quickie excerpts I saw sad ripoffs of Alien(1-4),
Well then the tradition is continuing. Watch Alien, especially the part where Brett has to go and find the cat. There's a slow zoom of a pair of double doors which looked suddenly very familiar to me after I'd been playing Doom for a while. There are quite a few textures in the game which seem very similar if not actual copies from shots in the film.
GET CARTRIDGE
:)
Entirely on-topic
If content producers want to control how their content is distributed, isn't that the content producer's perogative?
Distributed yes.
It's not so much telling you what you can do with your machine as telling you what you can do with their content.
Two things: it is telling you what you can do with your machine leading to all sorts of annoyances (and disasters) with stupid hardware and programs that prevent entirely legitimate use.
Secondly, I don't like a world in which content users have so much power over the potential uses of their content. It stifles innovation and creativity and leaves culture locked up in the hands of those who want us to pay every time.
Bangkok, Oriental setting
And the city don't know what the city is getting
The stripped down orphan of the OS world in a
deal with everything but Steve Ballmer
Time flies - doesn't seem a minute
Since Licensing 6 put you right deep in it
All change - don't you know that when you
Sell at this level there's no ordinary revenue
It's Munich...or Florida...or - or this place!
Continuations welcome...
Old DOS demos also work well in Dosbox. Even the Gravis only ones I've tried work fine with the emulated Ultrasound driver.
On the MindCandy DVD, a collection of the best PC demos, the commentary mentions that when demos went hardware accelerated, the trend moved more towards style and combination of effects than clever coding. On a 486-50 a demo's code really had to be top-notch and use all sorts of clever tricks to achieve the seemingly impossible - plus the coders would write everything - including the music playback and graphics routines. On a 2Ghz PIV with a GeForce and with the ability to tap into either the OpenGL or DirectX API for graphics (and a third-party music player), it becomes all about style and combination (and procedural effects if size dictates).
:)
Farbrausch's tool is just another step in this evolution. Kudos to them - it just means more good 64ks
You'll appreciate this story then. A mate of mine was a journalist in Lebanon covering some pretty bad stuff in the early 90s. While he was in the basement with some of his colleagues sheltering from the latest rocket attack on their hotel he mentioned that his next assignment was to Johannesburg. As one the others said: "Johannesburg! Are you crazy?"
Joburg (where I live now) is like any big city in the US or Europe (and I've been to a few): good areas, dodgy areas and absolute no-go areas. Even Lagos can be OK if you know what you're doing.
Heh. That reminds me of the debugging axiom which states that every program has at least one bug. Therefore by induction you can reduce any program to a single line of code that doesn't work.
Possibly the holes in the corner of the screen that you refer to are the reel-change markers
In the industry, we call them cigarette burns.
David Yallop's book is only suitable as a toilet paper and he hasn't proved anything.
He didn't have to in the end - the army officer in charge of the revolting program was forced to admit it as fact.
However, each antisemite has his own "protocols of elders of zion" to believe in.
Oh of course! I have dared to criticize Israel so I must be an antisemite. It's a lazy way out and quite wrong in my case since I am neither Jewish nor Palestinian and hate neither race. All I have felt for many years now is a deep sadness for that part of the world.
So enjoy reading that piece of shit.
I did actually. I'd also like to hear some proper refutations of many of the allegations in it.
Now, you're telling Arabs are now so brave as not to fear to kill teenagers at a disco or granmas going back home from shopping at the city market? You are calling that "extreme measures"?
Losing fear != being brave. Bravery is when you feel fear and overcome it to do what you feel has to be done. I said that the Palestinians have lost their fear which is quite different. I think the anger and frustration against the occupation (loaded term but bear with me here) is now more than their fear of dying - that's all. And yeah - strapping explosives to yourself and detonating them is a pretty extreme measure.
That is, you consider them a perfectly justified and moral?
Certainly not. I consider it nothing of the sort. Understandable, yes. Do I condone it? No.
I call this losing human nature.
Agreed 100%.
pro-Arab position of most Western media conglomerates (CNN, Reuters, AFP, UPI, BBC) which openly glorify and justify Arab terrorism and blackpaints Israel counter-terrorist measures (and anything Israel does to protect their citizen)
I don't even know where to start with this claptrap. If CNN, Reuters, AFP, UPI or the BBC have been glorifying and justifying Arab terrorism then I'd like some references.
Have you ever heard of what it really was to live in a real ghetto, say, a Warsaw ghetto? Or to be put into a real concentration camp, like Auschwitz? Without UNRWA or UNIFIL or anyone to protect you? Have you ever heard of Babiy Yar in Kiev, Ukraine (former USSR) where entire Jewish population of 180,000 people was literally murdered (shot and buried in common graves)?
Yes. Yes. Yes. I have. I could tell you of quite a few more but I'm sure you have your own examples. It's no excuse though for Israel to behave as badly. It should have the moral high ground.
What I am surprised is to how they managed to poison brains of millions of people around the world to believe that Israel is devil incarnation, root of world evil and the reason of all world problems and disasters.
Incredible isn't it? Just a few Arabs throwing stones with sod-all media coverage of their own and suddenly most of the world thinks Israel is a bunch of heavy-handed Nazis who could teach the old South Africans a thing or two about apartheid. Damn that evil media - they need to get their acts together.
Just for a change, think about starving Ruanda kids or millions of christians murdered in Congo. These are really starving and really murdered.
As opposed to the make-believe killings in Gaza?
And then think twice before talking about brutality of Israelis who have to check ambulances at block posts so as to prevent "Palestinians" from bringing explosives and guns into Israeli cities.
The real problem is that there has been too much blood spilled on both sides. Have you ever stopped to think WHY? Why would a teenage girl with everything to live for kill herself with the object of taking as many Jewish people with her? Is that normal? Was she a "fanatic" or something? Or was it because she has literally nothing to lose - no life, no future, several friends and family murdered or relocated, no peace in sight and American-made
Nice to see pro-Israel posts are as restrained as ever...
They should stop terror attacks agains Israeli civilians to enjoy freedom of movement between their cities. Each time the Israeli army lifts closure - bang! - next day we get school bus blown up or a crowd of shoppers in a mall. You get the idea.
I don't think Palestinians in the occupied territories have ever had freedom of movement. Curfews, roadblocks and restrictions on movement between ghettos and other areas have been in place for decades. All this was long before the Palestinians lost their fear and resorted to extreme measures.
Tell that to your Arab brothers. They should stop killing Jews. That's a precondition.
It won't happen anytime soon. Perhaps it's the decades of brutal treatment by the Israeli Army, perhaps the continually stalled peace process, their own weak leadership, or the best efforts by many countries who benefit from the Palestinian question being dragged out as long as possible. They have lost their fear of you and it will never come back. You can drive bulldozers through their houses, shoot their kids, dig up their orchards and dehumanise them in every way you can, but their fear has gone for ever.
Those Arab kids who get killed are victims of the tactics chosen by their own Islamic Jihad bandits who operate agains Israeli forces from within populated areas (which is violation of Geneva convention)
Israel can hardly point fingers when it comes to the Geneva Convention. One of the most horrible examples was in the late 80s when the army used to steal the bodies of young Palestinians killed in the first Intifada and use them as illegal organ donors. Denied time and again by the authorities and eventually proved as 100% fact by David Yallop in his book "To the Ends of the Earth."
I think you might be slightly misinformed here. You can't "break the GPL" and then distribute - disobeying the terms of the license only applies to distribution. You are perfectly welcome to take any GPLed software and use it in house for whatever you like.
Good page! Too much here for me to argue with right off the bat. I guess it's time to stop putting off my study of the Reformation...
Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom:
No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats - approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
Whenever I hear this argument I always go back to what Paul wrote. He had a "thorn in the flesh" - a painful physical ailment to keep himself from becoming too puffed up because of what had been revealed to him. He prays for God to take it away - and God says "NO, it will keep you weak and reliant on me."
When Paul writes to Timothy, he mentions "drink a little wine for the sake of your frequent stomach illnesses." Nothing about praying for distracting demons to be gone - just simple, practical advice to deal with his illness.
I really hope you're right...
When the printing press was invented, this diluted that monopoly, since then the ordinary people could afford their own copies of the Bible and became independent from the Church for information.
Not only that, but Luther translated the Bible into the common tongue. He used to hang out in pubs and the market and make notes of how people really spoke so that his translation would reflect day-to-day usage. The result - which is solidly argued in The Sovereign Individual and elsewhere - is that the common man realised once he read the Bible for himself that he didn't have to prop up the corrupt and extravagant monstrosity that was Rome then - economically or otherwise.
Catholic Church --> RIAA
The modern nation state is not a bad analogy either - extortion of taxes by force and the threat of jail, mean grasping and extravagant - and totally unnecessary for true free enterprise. But that's a whole other discussion...
schizophrenia, bi-polar, etc is not an illness but rather a spiritual condition
It's an illness. In my case too much seratonin, the chemical that helps filter sensory input, is reabsorbed in the brain, preventing effective sensory filtering. Consequently I get bombarded with input from the senses all the time, am easily distracted, always interested in too many things at once and get that "crowded in" feeling the whole time. Medication that stops too much seratonin being reabsorbed works when I take it.
Perhaps you'd care to explain how exactly this is spiritual? The only "spiritual condition" I know of is that everyone is a sinner and needs salvation and either a) you've acknowledged it and accepted your free gift or b) you haven't.
than needs to be overcome - not "cured" - by the power of our savior Jesus Christ.
Can you be more specific? Do you mean I have an evil spirit? A touch of demon posession? Those are real conditions but quite different to simple chemical imbalances in the brain...
You're not kidding. I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia years ago and since I was (and still am) convinced that the voices/visions are spiritual in nature, handed my complete recovery over to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. As such, I stopped taking my medication cold turkey and guess what, my mind began to work much, much better.
I'm happy for you brother if indeed God has really healed you but you absolutely cannot claim it as normative for every Christian. I speak from personal experience since I am severely bipolar, have to take medication and will almost certainly only be fully healed in the life to come. Having a debilitating weakness is sometimes a good thing since you can never rely on yourself - as Paul discovered when he pleaded for God to take away his "thorn in the flesh."
Look, you can't trust psychiatry. The only one that can really do something about this is Jesus Christ. This is not "the power of positive thinking," but rather trusting in God's One and Only Son which the Almighty likes very, very much. I have become better after I stopped taking my meds and thrust my deliverence solely in the hand of the Lord, period.
Again, wonderful news but remember that every Christian's salvation depends on Christ's finished work on the cross, rather than whether you take your medication or not. Some of us will not be healed right now and will have to take medicines to lead a somewhat normal (in my case very somewhat) life.
Girls are like Internet domain names, the ones I like are already taken.
:)
You can still get one from a foreign country
Good choice because as we know, KOMPRESSOR stronger than all!
*Nod*, excellent analogy.
In order for the demand for programming labor to even exist (locally or globally), a massive infrastructure (and tax base) must exist and be continually paid for - for the tech world, most of it in the USA.
Historically, there's no doubt the world has benefited from the explosion in the tech industry driven by the US. Without cheap hardware and bandwidth and the culture of innovation (real innovation I mean - not integrating buggy browsers with the OS) the IT world would not be where it is today.
If all of the developers in (insert country here) were all working for local companies developing goods for resale within their country or even for resale to the world at large - this wouldn't be happening. But that's not the case, because the infrastructure hasn't been developed (and paid for) in their country.
I think the vast majority of developers (with India as a possible exception) do work locally for local companies and the infrastructure they use is paid for with local money, even it's imported from the US. But that works both ways too: the US imports plenty of goods and services from the rest of the world.
The businesses to create those products, to use those products, and to pay for those products don't exist in those countries - the demand and the infrastructure that creates and supports that demand is by and large in the US and paid for by taxing US citizens (both in the form of taxes and real estate prices.)
I am no economist but as I understand it, industries and services will naturally migrate to places where they can they can be produced at lower cost. This has already happened with DRAM and some assembly services (I think my Dell was assembled in Taipei for example).
The real problem is that Wall Street has publically-traded US tech companies and the customers they depend on by the short and curlies - expecting x% year or year solid growth, to be more competitive and so on. That has forced many to cut costs and move local cost centres (especially development and call centres) to where they are cheaper.
I am not saying that SAfrica can't / won't contribute to the F/OSS movement. What I am saying is that in outfitting them to do so we are opening yet another Pandora's box that is going to magnify the destructive outsourcing effects that have been running rampant through the US in the past few years and once open that box can't be closed.
South Africa has more than a few problems right now: 40% unemployment, one in ten people here has HIV, crime is still a real problem and the cost of bandwidth and communications is outrageous.
But we have little sympathy for the first world when it:
Recently Brazil, South Africa and India have decided to co-operate on trade precisely because of these issues. I don't think the USA is struggling because it's going down, it's because everyone else is coming up to join them.
The USA doesn't see the collapse of the USA coming, but I bet this massive outsourcing movement is the foundation upon which that failure will be built. And they are doing it to themselves, with many of their citizens encouraging it all the while.
If enough people decide that they've had enough, it will change. Voting the Republicrats out of office would be a good start. But it will take some more time before the vast majority of middle America feel any pain - there's too much security, money and comfort there at the moment.
Disclaimer : I am going to try and keep this civil and troll / flame free, expressing my honest feelings - but damn!
:)
:)
Then let me try and be so in return...
Does nobody see the long term ramifications of this? Is there nobody that can see the writing on the wall?
Well, Andy Grove did in his book Only The Paranoid Survive. Probably the most famous quote in there was this one:
"If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry."
Sounds like a spot-on prediction to me. Bear in mind that this was published in 1996 which shows you just how much insight he had back then.
I honestly don't envision the long term effects of this as 'a good thing'. Jesus H. Christ - how's this for an idea : how about I go to some third world country where the wage scales make Indian off-shore wages look like a king's ransom and teach all the indigenous inhabitants how to be 'computer guys'.
Sounds good. Nothing like a bit of volunteer work to get your worldviews really in perspective
These guys would sell their own brother into slavery for a cow and a chicken, just envision what they would do for $2/hr.
Surprisingly, most people in the third world (where I live) want the same as you: to be left alone, to have food on the table, roofs over their heads and satisfying work to do to earn money.
Anybody that thinks their long term employment prospects are bad now, just wait until this little project comes to fruition.
I don't see how - the campaign is promoting the use and development of open source software. Anyone in the world who uses it will benefit.
The real problem for US tech workers right now is that globalisation has caught up with you where it hurts and I would be lying if that word shadenfreude hasn't occurred to me more than once recently. For many years, the globalisation mantra has benefited few economies outside the US. It's going to be good for your economy in the long run like making it more competitive for a start
Plenty of us outside the US (I am South African for the record) have seen this coming for ages, especially in the FLOSS arena where no-one cares where you're from as long as your code is clean and works. Outsourcing of development and support to skilled markets outside the US was just the next step - and it's happening.
My first impressions were probably right, Mark Shuttleworth needs to take his $575M and spend the rest of his life like Hugh Hefner, set up a mansion and tap a LOT of high quality ass.
He could have but he chose instead to put money back into the open source community.
Soldier on battlement: Are you suggesting Cocoa nuts migrate?
Those things were heavy
Weight has nothing to do with it!