I was not talking about outsourcing, but about moving jobs overseas within a company, as you will see if you re-read my posting more carefully. Instead of hiring someone to work for IBM New York, he/she will just go to work for IBM France or IBM Japan. The facilities already exist, they are fully integrated into the management and communications infrastructure. It's the same people working for the same companies on the same projects. And many of those foreign countries are perfectly happy to let qualified people from third world countries come as guest workers if they can't satisfy the demand at home.
You are right to the degree that smaller companies that don't have overseas facilities will indeed not be able to outsource successfully either. But that doesn't keep the jobs from going to other countries either. Such companies will simply be outcompeted by small European, Asian, and non-US American companies that can hire the labor they need, again, either within their own countries or by letting skilled workers from third countries work there as guest workers.
The basic flaw with Matloff's argument is that he assumes that if foreigners don't come to the US on H1B visas, the jobs will go to US residents. That's wrong. What happens in real life is that if the foreign programmers and professionals can't come here, the jobs simply go to where the people are. Most large companies already have development labs set up all around the world and can shift resources overseas at a moment's notice and without any increase in cost. In fact, that's already what happens when potential foreign hires can't come to the US: they simply work overseas until their visas come through.
Welcome to the new globalized economy and information infrastructure. Knowledge workers produce a product whose movement can't be controlled and that can be instantly shipped anywhere. And the basic tools, PCs, are available anywhere in the world.
Beyond that, Matloff's claims about shortages, wages, "indentured servitude", and working conditions simply don't agree with what I have seen in real life. But it isn't even worth disproving his factual claims point-by-point when his basic reasoning is so faulty.
Having foreign programmers and professionals come to the US has been a spectacularly good deal for the US, and it has been devastating to the high tech industries in foreign countries. Developing countries have been particularly hard hit by this.
You missed the bit about the hormal cycles versus the sleep/wake pattern (third last paragraph; yes, you do have to read it to the bottom...).
No, I didn't miss it at all.
Czeisler reckons the people in the original study were probably just leaving the lights on later at night to liven up a month of clockless cave-dwelling, and their sleep adjusted to it.
That doesn't alter the simple conclusion that in the absence of external input, the natural sleep-wake cycle is longer than 24h in most people.
If the externally imposed cycle is sufficiently far from the "natural" 24 hours, only the sleep/wake pattern adjusts to the external stimulus, whereas the more fundamental cycle of body temperature and hormone levels ignores the external stimulus and goes to 24 hours "precisely".
There is lots of evidence that there isn't a single "more fundamental" cycle, but instead lots of weakly coupled cycles, all with slightly different periods. Under normal conditions, they entrain to daylight. In caves, they work out to a little more than 24h for sleep/wake. You can get them out of sync in various interesting ways. It's hard to predict what happens when you force just the sleep wake cycle to 28h. But Czeisler's results and explanation sound too simplistic, and if his hypothesis were true, it would contradict dozens of experiments and decades of research, and it would require a lot more convincing evidence than a single experiment.
This work is a mix of various biological and chemical techniques. As far as I can tell, the field of nanotechnology contributed nothing significant to these developments.
The "formatting protocol" is probably a piece of Fortran code that used binary I/O directly to the tape device. And that was a pretty reasonable choice at the time for scientific work.
They could have saved a self-describing character stream, a kind of "printout", on the tapes, but what would the point have been? Magnetic tapes are not an archival medium--they get unreliable after a few years on the shelf.
That story doesn't debunk anything. The guy merely showed that with light, you can synchronize people to a 28h cycle. Of course you can--otherwise, the 25h "natural" cycle wouldn't make sense: it gets synchronized by natural light to 24h under normal circumstances. Furthermore, it is well known that there are numerous interacting biological clocks; some take weeks to adapt even to new time zones.
Ximian just views C# as a nice language to build the next generation of Gnome on. That's a pretty reasonable decision: all current Linux desktop efforts are based on C/C++, which makes them pretty cumbersome to program. What Microsoft does or doesn't do with Passport really doesn't matter. Linux has needed a desktop application effort based on something easier to program than C/C++ for years, and this is it.
The main question about Ximian and Mono is why they didn't start such a project based on the Java language with Gnome APIs a couple of years ago. But that question doesn't matter much at this point: they didn't. And today, it doesn't matter that much anymore: as languages, C# and Java are nearly identical. Whatever effort goes into enhancing compilers, runtimes, or libraries for one will pretty much automatically benefit the other. And any programmer that learns one can quickly get started with the other.
So, it's no big deal. If you like the project, contribute. If not, contribute to something else. Microsoft's shenanigans with Passport have nothing to do with software anymore, and you might as well ignore them; Passport and other issues like that will be resolved by politicians and lawyers.
This is a badly written law, and the problem is not with Adobe (who would be foolish not to milk it for what it's worth) or the DA (who is just doing what he's supposed to do).
The problem is with legislators who either don't have a clue about the implications of what they are legislating or who love campaign contributions from cash-flush media companies. The problem is, in short, with people like Senator Feinstein. Protest in front of your legislator's office: they are the ones who created this mess, and they are the only ones who can fix it. We can't keep looking to the courts to throw out badly written laws.
Re:MSFT took 2nd in 1999 with Haskell entry
on
ICFP 2001 Task
·
· Score: 2
It's nice to see that Microsoft supports some more advanced and academice computer science, after two decades of making fun of companies that did. I think most of the work on Haskell happened before the people involved got hired by Microsoft, so this isn't a sign yet of "Microsoft innovation" yet. But, there is hope.
It's at uspto.gov; yes, they do talk about white noise, among other "embodiments". The claims are pretty broad. Of course, sounds like these have been used before in alarm clocks, signals, and horns; giving a scientific explanation for its utility doesn't warrant a new patent.
The IEEE has been lobbying on the issue of H1B visas. Many foreigners feel that the IEEE position was characterized by narrow self-interest of US engineers, to the detriment of both foreign born professionals and the US economy as a whole. US engineers are, of course, fully justified in engaging in those kinds of lobbying activities. What is not acceptable from my point of view is that the IEEE effectively uses membership numbers, subscription fees, and membership dues from inviduals who are IEEE members purely for scientific/technical reasons to support such activities. IEEE professional communications and IEEE lobbying activities should be two separate organizations with separate funding and separate membership lists.
Now, in addition to the face of Cydonia, we have
a giant claw (just look at the bottom of the picture): four fingers with opposable thumb. It looks like it was trying to reach up to the cliff and slipped. What other body parts are we going to find???
Many people already put up their papers as "prepreints" or "extended versions" on the web and submit them to archives, strictly speaking in violation of the copyright agreements they signed at publication.
Another thing you can do is simply refuse to do free reviewing for journals and conferences that have the most restrictive copyright policies. Don't kid yourself: reviewing work doesn't make any significant difference on your resume, it takes a lot of time to do well, and you are basically doing unpaid work for a publisher that's profiting handsomely (or some big "non-profit" organization that runs through large amounts of money). It is the editors that are in the hot seat if they don't get reviewers, and they are also the ones that can perhaps cause their publishers to alter their policies.
If someone wants to support the AAAS and their activities, that's fine. I don't see why people should have to do so by paying artificially high costs for access to research results.
The IEEE, for example, publishes a number of journals that are essential reading for researchers in their areas. Foreign engineers have to pay for access to those journals just like US engineers. Yet, the IEEE effectively uses revenues from those journal publications, as well as inflated membership numbers, to lobby before Congress against the interests of many of their readers.
You can download the UNIX Palm emulator and cross-compile it for your favorite Linux PDA. Legal and practical issues will keep any of this from becoming a big deal. You can't just download the ROM from Palm anymore. People migrating from Palm to PocketPC (why?) might use this as a transitional solution.
I'd be curious to know whether this company started from scratch or whether their "product" is based on the open source Palm emulator.
They are their servers and they really can enforce policies like this. While this really has nothing to do with spam they do have the right to make such a policy.
In the same sense, they also have a "right" to drop every other packet you send, to give access to your credit card info on their server to some con artist, to replace all web pages traveling over their wires to you with their preferred ones, or to spam you with E-mail when you connect to their server. But many of those actions may constitute breach of contract or be in violation of other laws. And most are a good reason to switch and let everybody else know how lousy that company is. You see, that's our right as consumers.
This "it's their hardware and they can do what they want" argument doesn't imply that everybody should just quietly accept whatever stupidity a service provider commits. Make noise. Complain. Switch. Organize. Boycott. Those are your rights, and companies will listen when they stand to lose millions of dollars.
Of course the servers are theirs. What does that have to do with anything? "The Capitalist Way" doesn't just mean that you take whatever your business partner dishes out quietly. It means that you check your contracts for breach of contract, it means that you let your business partners know when they screwed up, and it means that when you switch to a different provider, you publicize your position and problems with business partner to ensure that others make well-informed decisions.
The counterbalance to a billion dollar company with excellent internal communications is not an individual consumer that makes anonymous choices, it's millions of consumers with a collective interest. And that's why it is important for consumers and customers to get in touch over the Internet and share ideas, like, in a little way, is happening here. You see, that's the Capitalist way.
There are no explicit contamination clauses in the license. I think it is wrong to assume automatically that published, copyrighted source code contaminates you. It would be best to check with a lawyer and settle this once and for all. If contamination exists from looking at WinCE3 sources, more people than Linux kernel hackers need to know about it, and it could be a PR problem for MS. If no contamination exists, then people should feel free to look at the code.
Where did this twisted notion come from that one should not benefit from reading copyrighted or patented work? The whole point of copyright and patent law is to encourage people to share their creations so that other people can learn from them. What's going to be next? You'll forever have to pay licensing fees to a textbook author because they help you avoid making mistakes?
Yes, contamination clauses are real. They are usually based on licensing agreements. They are sometimes enforceable, but when they are, they stand in contradiction to everything intellectual property law was meant to achieve.
There are lots of actually interesting scientific questions. Why waste time on defeating some half-baked audio copy protection scheme that some random engineers at Verance came up with? In particular, since the conclusion is obvious to begin with?
Now, if this were actually a DMCA case, there would be some interest, because I do believe it is important to establish legal precedent that allows researchers to do this sort of thing. But the RIAA has backed down. The Adobe encryption case seems like a much better avenue to pursue.
I have been developing for the Agenda VR3 for a few months, and it's great. The Agenda runs a 2.4 Linux kernel and standard X11. Standard Linux applications usually require little more than recompilation. For development, you can telnet into the device, use rsync, have workstation applications use the device as their display, or have agenda applications use the workstation as their display.
The X server binary on the Agenda is a little over 1M and has an in-memory size of 540k. There is also about 2.5M of GUI libraries and fonts installed, although, obviously, not all of that gets loaded into memory. That's not tiny, but it's quite acceptable even on a 16M/16M machine like the Agenda VR3. On the next generation Linux handhelds, which will probably have at least 64M of flash and 64M of memory, this is pretty much negligible.
I think the biggest win of Linux-based handhelds is their compatibility with Linux/UNIX desktop APIs. And the biggest threat to them is people crafting oddball APIs because they somehow believe that these little handhelds can't run the desktop APIs. There is no need. Even the Agenda VR3 is a faster and more powerful machine than many UNIX workstations a few years ago, workstations that ran UNIX and X11 just fine.
I particularly think that trying to push systems like Qt/Embedded onto Linux handhelds "for efficiency reasons" are self-serving attempts by a vendor to corner the Linux embedded GUI market: once a handheld is based around such a non-X11 window system, commercial developers have little choice but to buy the commercial libraries. And there is no indication that systems like Qt/Embedded are more efficient in any practically interesting way that an X11 server.
So, my recommendation is: if a "Linux handheld" doesn't run a standard Linux kernel and a standard X11 server, forget about it and don't buy it--there are plenty that do.
(As an aside, the Agenda VR3 is a great machine. You have to make sure that you have a recent version of the software installed; some of the machines ship with a really ancient version of the OS. The standard calendaring applications aren't quite up to Palm3/4 quality, but for developing and deploying custom applications, it's a lot better than the Palm. The biggest limitation is the lack of expandability--support for CF cards would be really great.)
I think the cops deserve a little more respect, and the lawmakers should respect them by passing enforceable laws that don't make criminals out of most people.
Yes, I think we should appreciate the risks that policemen are taking.
On top of that, most of these folks aren't philosophers, thinking deeply about the role of government and the enforcement of possibly unjust laws.
Unfortunately, the police does influence policy strongly: they ask for more investigative powers, harsher sentences, criminalization of more conduct, and they often get it because it works for politicians and appeals to a vindictive and irrational public. What gets lost in this is a rational policy towards crime: better education, a better social safety net, better rehabilitation, etc. The net effect is that the US is an incredibly violent place, with high crime rates, a harsh and uncertain legal system, and internationally recognized human rights violations.
The people on the ground, the policemen, prison guards, and low level legal staff, are not to blame. Ultimately, its the public, which likes simple answers, and politicians, which are all too eager to supply them. And the net result is that we in the US are much more at risk than we would need to be, both from crime and from government misconduct .
I'd also like to address the disgusting stereotype of police I have been reading around here. I'm friends with four police officers in Massachusetts, three of which I see on a weekly basis. All of them are nice people, and none of them abuse their power
Well, then, as public officials performing a public function in accordance with prevailing laws and regulations, they should have no problem with being recorded in any form.
The problem we have in society in relation to the police is that because we get a speeding ticket, we suddenly decide to foster a hatred for the person who gave it to us.
No, the problem we have in US society is a escalation of violence and power. The police have too much power to make people's lives miserable, criminal convictions are often life-or-death issues, yet such power appears to be necessary because US society as a whole is so violent and disrespectful of the law.
If you don't think there are enough methods to record police officers' actions, then rally your town to pay for every officer to wear a microphone. Just don't be surprised later if it turns out their job performance suffers.
I'd much rather have them work by the book and be less effective than to have a very efficient police force that operates without checks. Have you been in countries where people have traded freedom for security? I have, and it's not pretty. And the US is moving more and more in that direction.
Giving police and the legal system ever more powers is the direct route to a police state. It's a short-term fix for what is a more fundamental problem in US society. Crime needs to be attacked at the root; that is: the US finally needs to get its act together and address its profound social problems. Then the US wouldn't need all-powerful police and harsh punishments anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
No, C# is Microsoft's new name for Java: both the compiler and the runtime are nearly identical.
You are right to the degree that smaller companies that don't have overseas facilities will indeed not be able to outsource successfully either. But that doesn't keep the jobs from going to other countries either. Such companies will simply be outcompeted by small European, Asian, and non-US American companies that can hire the labor they need, again, either within their own countries or by letting skilled workers from third countries work there as guest workers.
Welcome to the new globalized economy and information infrastructure. Knowledge workers produce a product whose movement can't be controlled and that can be instantly shipped anywhere. And the basic tools, PCs, are available anywhere in the world.
Beyond that, Matloff's claims about shortages, wages, "indentured servitude", and working conditions simply don't agree with what I have seen in real life. But it isn't even worth disproving his factual claims point-by-point when his basic reasoning is so faulty.
Having foreign programmers and professionals come to the US has been a spectacularly good deal for the US, and it has been devastating to the high tech industries in foreign countries. Developing countries have been particularly hard hit by this.
No, I didn't miss it at all.
Czeisler reckons the people in the original study were probably just leaving the lights on later at night to liven up a month of clockless cave-dwelling, and their sleep adjusted to it.
That doesn't alter the simple conclusion that in the absence of external input, the natural sleep-wake cycle is longer than 24h in most people.
If the externally imposed cycle is sufficiently far from the "natural" 24 hours, only the sleep/wake pattern adjusts to the external stimulus, whereas the more fundamental cycle of body temperature and hormone levels ignores the external stimulus and goes to 24 hours "precisely".
There is lots of evidence that there isn't a single "more fundamental" cycle, but instead lots of weakly coupled cycles, all with slightly different periods. Under normal conditions, they entrain to daylight. In caves, they work out to a little more than 24h for sleep/wake. You can get them out of sync in various interesting ways. It's hard to predict what happens when you force just the sleep wake cycle to 28h. But Czeisler's results and explanation sound too simplistic, and if his hypothesis were true, it would contradict dozens of experiments and decades of research, and it would require a lot more convincing evidence than a single experiment.
This work is a mix of various biological and chemical techniques. As far as I can tell, the field of nanotechnology contributed nothing significant to these developments.
They could have saved a self-describing character stream, a kind of "printout", on the tapes, but what would the point have been? Magnetic tapes are not an archival medium--they get unreliable after a few years on the shelf.
That story doesn't debunk anything. The guy merely showed that with light, you can synchronize people to a 28h cycle. Of course you can--otherwise, the 25h "natural" cycle wouldn't make sense: it gets synchronized by natural light to 24h under normal circumstances. Furthermore, it is well known that there are numerous interacting biological clocks; some take weeks to adapt even to new time zones.
The main question about Ximian and Mono is why they didn't start such a project based on the Java language with Gnome APIs a couple of years ago. But that question doesn't matter much at this point: they didn't. And today, it doesn't matter that much anymore: as languages, C# and Java are nearly identical. Whatever effort goes into enhancing compilers, runtimes, or libraries for one will pretty much automatically benefit the other. And any programmer that learns one can quickly get started with the other.
So, it's no big deal. If you like the project, contribute. If not, contribute to something else. Microsoft's shenanigans with Passport have nothing to do with software anymore, and you might as well ignore them; Passport and other issues like that will be resolved by politicians and lawyers.
The problem is with legislators who either don't have a clue about the implications of what they are legislating or who love campaign contributions from cash-flush media companies. The problem is, in short, with people like Senator Feinstein. Protest in front of your legislator's office: they are the ones who created this mess, and they are the only ones who can fix it. We can't keep looking to the courts to throw out badly written laws.
It's nice to see that Microsoft supports some more advanced and academice computer science, after two decades of making fun of companies that did. I think most of the work on Haskell happened before the people involved got hired by Microsoft, so this isn't a sign yet of "Microsoft innovation" yet. But, there is hope.
It's at uspto.gov; yes, they do talk about white noise, among other "embodiments". The claims are pretty broad. Of course, sounds like these have been used before in alarm clocks, signals, and horns; giving a scientific explanation for its utility doesn't warrant a new patent.
The IEEE has been lobbying on the issue of H1B visas. Many foreigners feel that the IEEE position was characterized by narrow self-interest of US engineers, to the detriment of both foreign born professionals and the US economy as a whole. US engineers are, of course, fully justified in engaging in those kinds of lobbying activities. What is not acceptable from my point of view is that the IEEE effectively uses membership numbers, subscription fees, and membership dues from inviduals who are IEEE members purely for scientific/technical reasons to support such activities. IEEE professional communications and IEEE lobbying activities should be two separate organizations with separate funding and separate membership lists.
Now, in addition to the face of Cydonia, we have a giant claw (just look at the bottom of the picture): four fingers with opposable thumb. It looks like it was trying to reach up to the cliff and slipped. What other body parts are we going to find???
Another thing you can do is simply refuse to do free reviewing for journals and conferences that have the most restrictive copyright policies. Don't kid yourself: reviewing work doesn't make any significant difference on your resume, it takes a lot of time to do well, and you are basically doing unpaid work for a publisher that's profiting handsomely (or some big "non-profit" organization that runs through large amounts of money). It is the editors that are in the hot seat if they don't get reviewers, and they are also the ones that can perhaps cause their publishers to alter their policies.
The IEEE, for example, publishes a number of journals that are essential reading for researchers in their areas. Foreign engineers have to pay for access to those journals just like US engineers. Yet, the IEEE effectively uses revenues from those journal publications, as well as inflated membership numbers, to lobby before Congress against the interests of many of their readers.
I'd be curious to know whether this company started from scratch or whether their "product" is based on the open source Palm emulator.
This is the first I hear about Verio doing this. They certainly never informed me about it.
In the same sense, they also have a "right" to drop every other packet you send, to give access to your credit card info on their server to some con artist, to replace all web pages traveling over their wires to you with their preferred ones, or to spam you with E-mail when you connect to their server. But many of those actions may constitute breach of contract or be in violation of other laws. And most are a good reason to switch and let everybody else know how lousy that company is. You see, that's our right as consumers.
This "it's their hardware and they can do what they want" argument doesn't imply that everybody should just quietly accept whatever stupidity a service provider commits. Make noise. Complain. Switch. Organize. Boycott. Those are your rights, and companies will listen when they stand to lose millions of dollars.
The counterbalance to a billion dollar company with excellent internal communications is not an individual consumer that makes anonymous choices, it's millions of consumers with a collective interest. And that's why it is important for consumers and customers to get in touch over the Internet and share ideas, like, in a little way, is happening here. You see, that's the Capitalist way.
There are no explicit contamination clauses in the license. I think it is wrong to assume automatically that published, copyrighted source code contaminates you. It would be best to check with a lawyer and settle this once and for all. If contamination exists from looking at WinCE3 sources, more people than Linux kernel hackers need to know about it, and it could be a PR problem for MS. If no contamination exists, then people should feel free to look at the code.
Yes, contamination clauses are real. They are usually based on licensing agreements. They are sometimes enforceable, but when they are, they stand in contradiction to everything intellectual property law was meant to achieve.
Now, if this were actually a DMCA case, there would be some interest, because I do believe it is important to establish legal precedent that allows researchers to do this sort of thing. But the RIAA has backed down. The Adobe encryption case seems like a much better avenue to pursue.
The X server binary on the Agenda is a little over 1M and has an in-memory size of 540k. There is also about 2.5M of GUI libraries and fonts installed, although, obviously, not all of that gets loaded into memory. That's not tiny, but it's quite acceptable even on a 16M/16M machine like the Agenda VR3. On the next generation Linux handhelds, which will probably have at least 64M of flash and 64M of memory, this is pretty much negligible.
I think the biggest win of Linux-based handhelds is their compatibility with Linux/UNIX desktop APIs. And the biggest threat to them is people crafting oddball APIs because they somehow believe that these little handhelds can't run the desktop APIs. There is no need. Even the Agenda VR3 is a faster and more powerful machine than many UNIX workstations a few years ago, workstations that ran UNIX and X11 just fine.
I particularly think that trying to push systems like Qt/Embedded onto Linux handhelds "for efficiency reasons" are self-serving attempts by a vendor to corner the Linux embedded GUI market: once a handheld is based around such a non-X11 window system, commercial developers have little choice but to buy the commercial libraries. And there is no indication that systems like Qt/Embedded are more efficient in any practically interesting way that an X11 server.
So, my recommendation is: if a "Linux handheld" doesn't run a standard Linux kernel and a standard X11 server, forget about it and don't buy it--there are plenty that do.
(As an aside, the Agenda VR3 is a great machine. You have to make sure that you have a recent version of the software installed; some of the machines ship with a really ancient version of the OS. The standard calendaring applications aren't quite up to Palm3/4 quality, but for developing and deploying custom applications, it's a lot better than the Palm. The biggest limitation is the lack of expandability--support for CF cards would be really great.)
Yes, I think we should appreciate the risks that policemen are taking.
On top of that, most of these folks aren't philosophers, thinking deeply about the role of government and the enforcement of possibly unjust laws.
Unfortunately, the police does influence policy strongly: they ask for more investigative powers, harsher sentences, criminalization of more conduct, and they often get it because it works for politicians and appeals to a vindictive and irrational public. What gets lost in this is a rational policy towards crime: better education, a better social safety net, better rehabilitation, etc. The net effect is that the US is an incredibly violent place, with high crime rates, a harsh and uncertain legal system, and internationally recognized human rights violations.
The people on the ground, the policemen, prison guards, and low level legal staff, are not to blame. Ultimately, its the public, which likes simple answers, and politicians, which are all too eager to supply them. And the net result is that we in the US are much more at risk than we would need to be, both from crime and from government misconduct .
Well, then, as public officials performing a public function in accordance with prevailing laws and regulations, they should have no problem with being recorded in any form.
The problem we have in society in relation to the police is that because we get a speeding ticket, we suddenly decide to foster a hatred for the person who gave it to us.
No, the problem we have in US society is a escalation of violence and power. The police have too much power to make people's lives miserable, criminal convictions are often life-or-death issues, yet such power appears to be necessary because US society as a whole is so violent and disrespectful of the law.
If you don't think there are enough methods to record police officers' actions, then rally your town to pay for every officer to wear a microphone. Just don't be surprised later if it turns out their job performance suffers.
I'd much rather have them work by the book and be less effective than to have a very efficient police force that operates without checks. Have you been in countries where people have traded freedom for security? I have, and it's not pretty. And the US is moving more and more in that direction.
Giving police and the legal system ever more powers is the direct route to a police state. It's a short-term fix for what is a more fundamental problem in US society. Crime needs to be attacked at the root; that is: the US finally needs to get its act together and address its profound social problems. Then the US wouldn't need all-powerful police and harsh punishments anymore.