Yeah, things are looking good for achieving one of my lifetime goals... Virgin is going to commercialize SpaceShipOne, and today announced that they are putting double beds on some of their 747s! You do the math!
Outsourcing - a huge negative
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I disagree... Outsourcing means taking money out of the American economy (wages that would be paid to someone getting taxed and buying stuff over here), and sends it overseas where that money (generated with the assistence of US-taxpayer funded US infrastructure, and taxpayer funder corporate tax breaks) now instead helps a competitor to America. That's not a good thing.
The free trade of high paying AMerican jobs for cheap overseas labor also would not naturally end until some natural balance in global salary levels has been achieved... Now, when you realize that the US *currently* has one of the highest salary levels in the worls, but only represents ~5% of the global population, you'll begin to realize where that eventual equilibrium may be achieved... it wont be the midway point between current US and Indian/Chinese/Russian salaries, but rather it'll be much closer to what those Indian etc salaries are right now, since their population sizes swamp our own.
Now, if you actually give a crap about quality of life over here, and your ability to earn a wage that'll pay an American mortage rather than paying for a Chinese apartment (not much use unless you live in China), then you'd be concerned about this, but don't go looking for enlightened CEO's to stop gunning for expense-cutting bonuses in this way, especially since there duty to shareholders is to maximize profits for them, regardless of anythign else (such as whether by doing so they're screwing the American economy, and screwing the job prospects of their shareholders and everyone else).
The only thing that will stop the quality of life in America being dragged down to what'll be supported on an Indian salary is indeed, as Kerry says, to have the government provide disincentives to do so... What I'd support is tax penalties that are proportional to the difference in cost of living between the US and where a company outsources to, since that levels the playing field. I'll happily compete with anyone in the US for a programming job, since I'm good at what I do, and my competitors have pretty much the same cost of living as myself... but trying to compete with someone on the same skill level who's cost of living is 20% of mine is going to be a losing proposition since they can work for 20% of the salary that I need. That's not competition, it's slaughter, and it may be good for globally reducing labor rates to a minimum (if that for some reason is your goal), but it's sure not good for the Americal lifestyle that we enjoy, even if you want to roll out the old excuse that I'll be able to buy a VCR at Walmart for $28.99 instead of $32, because of the Chinese labor.
I'd be voting for Kerry anyway based on the danger to America that Bush represents, but I certainly also support him on this issue - his policy will be good for working Americans, while Bush's outsourcing-happy policy is only good for the independently wealthy and business owners to which lower US labor costs are a plus rather than a negative.
Consistency is a plus, but it'd be nice to have a statistic that measured the job market the same way as those actually looking for jobs...
In the current way of counting in the US, you're basically employed if you're getting a paycheck. A programmer who lost his job and is now delivering pizza or temping at H&R block (I've seen both recently) are both just as employed per the ststistics as if they were making their former family-supporting professional salary. The formal term for this (someone who's working well below the level of experience & salary that they used to have) is "underemployed".. the US unemployment rate does not measure underemployment.
Also, FWIW, the unemployment rate does not measure unemployment per se - it measures the number of people who are not working at all (i.e. not counting those underemployed) who ARE looking for work. If you've gotten so discouraged that you decide to give up and live on welfare - no longer looking for a job (as you report when surveyed) - then you are no longer considered unemployed!!!
What'll go a long way to getting rid of buffer overflow exploits is execute-protected memory, which AFAIK AMD currently has, and Intel is playing catch-up to get. Stack/Heap memory is then non-execute enabled, and if you want to do something tricky like generate code on the fly, then you need to get the OS to allocate memory with execute permission set.
Yep - the dutch auction format ensures that anyone who wants to can buy at the IPO price, so they'd be nuts to pay more for it after the fact (no doubt some people will do it regardless, but then they're doubly stupid for a) paying more than they need, and b) paying a price determined only by others like themselves!).
I'd expect a close pretty close (+/-) to the open.
Actually, while Ada Lovelace saw the potential of Babbage's Analytical Engine, her inspiration for this was Joseph Jacquard's punch-card-progammable Jacquard loom. Jacquards invention was also later copied as Hollerith's computer punched cards.
The distinctive characteristic of the Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the executive right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs. It is in this that the distinction between the two engines lies. Nothing of the sort exists in the Difference Engine. We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.
I guess it's a bit like credit cards - the credit companies don't deny cards to people with crappy credit, because they can still make money from them - they just give them worse rates etc.
eBay certainly needs to do something about buyer assurance, else they're losing sales and screwing their shareholders.
I'd think a starting point might be to self-insure against claims with premiums paid out of sellers fees, which could vary according to sellers "credit ratings" (feedback, and claims against them). If they wanted to they could externally reinsure against most of the risk. There has to be a sweet spot where you make more money by providing a safe marketplace, thereby attracting more customers, while still letting sellers with less than perfect records participate.
># The best programmer I've met once told me that once you've dropped into the debugger, you've lost, which over time I've found to be quite true. The best debugging practice is to learn how not to use a debugger. (e.g., Are you using threads when they're not absolutely required? Say hello to debugging hell...)
Ain't that the truth!
As a 20+ year veteran programmer (soldered together my own 1Mz Z-80 - NASCOM-1 - when it bacame available - -in 1978, beginning of personal computer ownership possibility UK - ow gawm am I drunk - tha t I camn agfree!!!
I *now* submit horribly arrogant patches to source conteol (mutli thread, sdynamis datsa struct, sync primatives - mutexes etc, and I *KNOW& that shit is gonna work !:-), the young graduate fiucks willl take *weeks* to get the samem shitb as took m e 4hrs to submit (untested) that works.
Yes, I'm drunk. amd I'mm worths 100x those newbe cosksukierss.
The trouble with US workers trying to compete with offshore ones is that it's not a level playing field... the cost of living here vs India (or whereever) is staggeringly different.
If you want to allow jobs to flow freely between countries without regard for cost of living, then the result will be very predictable - salaries will find a global equilibrium. Now, remember that while the US has some of the highest salraies in the world (and highest costs of living), that it only comprises 5% (or less) of the global population... in other words the rquilibrium point will be very close to the overseas rate, since the size of their labor pool swamps our own.
Now if you really think it's patriotic to elimitate high level jobs here (living in the US on an Indian level salary is not an option), then keep on advocating offshoring, but personally I like my job, and would like to be able to compete based on merit not based on geographic location / cost of living, which is what you are proposing.
The block artifacts in DCT/FFT based approaches such as MPEG-2 are due to the fact that video has local detail (well, duh!) but you're using a globally repeating waveform (FFT = sine, or DCT = cosine) to encode it. In order to represent local detail with a DCT-based tranforrm you have to divide the image into blocks to localize the transform, and when you throw away the lower order transform coefficients (which is basically what transform-based encoding is all about) those block boundaries become apparent - block artifacts.
In contract, wavelets are spatially localized / non-repeating, so you can represent local detail without needing to introduce blocks. But, when you throw away your lower order coefficients you will see bits of the image represented by only the higher order wavelets, which (wavelets being smooth) means that there'll be blurriness.
The BBC codec might still choose to use blocks for motion compression (I don't know), but the above basically explains the difference between the two, and definitely applies to the difference between image compression using DCT (JPEG) vs wavelet (JPEG2000) compression.
Well, reality says you only get two, and quality was your last requirement... You're certainly highly unlikely to get a quality product that meets the customers requirements if the software was developed by a bunch of hackers without design & test documents, code reviews, etc.
It's understandable that at some level you don't care how the quality gets there as long as it does, but you're also more likely to get that quality (rather than be promised it by your quick 'n' cheap outfit, but disappointed on delivery) out of a company that has a quality development process (which is why - notwithstanding the abuses of it - ISO 9000 certification of supliers - i.e. caring about development methods - is a common requirement among quality conscious companies).
What'd be interesting would be to see would be if the "fuck" count correlated with the shoddiness (no formal specs, etc) of the S/W development process!:-)
I don't know if Linux does this at all, but it seems that one useful VM strategy would be to copy to disk rather than swap to disk. That way you can continue to run bloaty app without swapping it back in, but interactivity is still good since you can resuse memory immediately without needing to swap stuff out at the point the demand occurs. Of course it'd need to be tunable and/or smart (no point copying highly volatile areas of memory for a start).
So the question becomes, can one build a "living" (i.e. identical to a natural) virus from only the parts that make it up? In other words, would a virus, or any living thing, become alive once someone puts together all the parts in exactly the same way?
In the case of a virus it's already been done (e.g. Polio virus), but even if we define a virus as "alive" (somewhat arbitrary), it's hardly interesting since they're really nothing more than complex molecules.
Builing an synthetic bateria would be infinitely more impressive. Of course it'd be as "alive" as one created by any other method.. how could it possibly not be?! Biochemistry is biochemistry... it's only when life takes the form of higher animals that the level of complexity is such that the whole seems more than the sum of the parts (even though, emergent behavior notwithstanding, it's not).
Actually you can use a parachute from as low as around 300' (I believe this is the military limit), and BASE (Buildings, Antenna, Structures, Earth) jumpers routinely parachute of bridges etc which are pretty low.
Yeah, but he's achieved that 1/20 of Google page coverage using only 8 computers, vs Google's thousands, and expects to exceed Googles page coverage this year by adding computers/disks/memory.
Definitely one to watch.
Google was the first to return mostly relevant results, but it definitely isn't perfect... For a start the page ranking algorithm naturally means that large well-linked commercial sites outrank the smaller more specialized or personal ones. Sometimes that's what you want, but sometimes it's not...
If you're concerned about code speed, the Intel C++ compiler for Linux has been available for free for a while, and AFAIK producess better code than the Microsoft one.
The Windows version of Intel's compiler is still commercial only, but maybe they'll change that now.
1.7b sadly seems to have taken a step back from 1.6 in terms of stability - I've had half a dozen crashes during heavy use (opening 20 or so tabs at a time), whereas I never had similar problems with previous Beta versions.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, things are looking good for achieving one of my lifetime goals... Virgin is going to commercialize SpaceShipOne, and today announced that they are putting double beds on some of their 747s! You do the math!
I disagree... Outsourcing means taking money out of the American economy (wages that would be paid to someone getting taxed and buying stuff over here), and sends it overseas where that money (generated with the assistence of US-taxpayer funded US infrastructure, and taxpayer funder corporate tax breaks) now instead helps a competitor to America. That's not a good thing.
The free trade of high paying AMerican jobs for cheap overseas labor also would not naturally end until some natural balance in global salary levels has been achieved... Now, when you realize that the US *currently* has one of the highest salary levels in the worls, but only represents ~5% of the global population, you'll begin to realize where that eventual equilibrium may be achieved... it wont be the midway point between current US and Indian/Chinese/Russian salaries, but rather it'll be much closer to what those Indian etc salaries are right now, since their population sizes swamp our own.
Now, if you actually give a crap about quality of life over here, and your ability to earn a wage that'll pay an American mortage rather than paying for a Chinese apartment (not much use unless you live in China), then you'd be concerned about this, but don't go looking for enlightened CEO's to stop gunning for expense-cutting bonuses in this way, especially since there duty to shareholders is to maximize profits for them, regardless of anythign else (such as whether by doing so they're screwing the American economy, and screwing the job prospects of their shareholders and everyone else).
The only thing that will stop the quality of life in America being dragged down to what'll be supported on an Indian salary is indeed, as Kerry says, to have the government provide disincentives to do so... What I'd support is tax penalties that are proportional to the difference in cost of living between the US and where a company outsources to, since that levels the playing field. I'll happily compete with anyone in the US for a programming job, since I'm good at what I do, and my competitors have pretty much the same cost of living as myself... but trying to compete with someone on the same skill level who's cost of living is 20% of mine is going to be a losing proposition since they can work for 20% of the salary that I need. That's not competition, it's slaughter, and it may be good for globally reducing labor rates to a minimum (if that for some reason is your goal), but it's sure not good for the Americal lifestyle that we enjoy, even if you want to roll out the old excuse that I'll be able to buy a VCR at Walmart for $28.99 instead of $32, because of the Chinese labor.
I'd be voting for Kerry anyway based on the danger to America that Bush represents, but I certainly also support him on this issue - his policy will be good for working Americans, while Bush's outsourcing-happy policy is only good for the independently wealthy and business owners to which lower US labor costs are a plus rather than a negative.
Consistency is a plus, but it'd be nice to have a statistic that measured the job market the same way as those actually looking for jobs...
In the current way of counting in the US, you're basically employed if you're getting a paycheck. A programmer who lost his job and is now delivering pizza or temping at H&R block (I've seen both recently) are both just as employed per the ststistics as if they were making their former family-supporting professional salary. The formal term for this (someone who's working well below the level of experience & salary that they used to have) is "underemployed".. the US unemployment rate does not measure underemployment.
Also, FWIW, the unemployment rate does not measure unemployment per se - it measures the number of people who are not working at all (i.e. not counting those underemployed) who ARE looking for work. If you've gotten so discouraged that you decide to give up and live on welfare - no longer looking for a job (as you report when surveyed) - then you are no longer considered unemployed!!!
What'll go a long way to getting rid of buffer overflow exploits is execute-protected memory, which AFAIK AMD currently has, and Intel is playing catch-up to get. Stack/Heap memory is then non-execute enabled, and if you want to do something tricky like generate code on the fly, then you need to get the OS to allocate memory with execute permission set.
Yep - the dutch auction format ensures that anyone who wants to can buy at the IPO price, so they'd be nuts to pay more for it after the fact (no doubt some people will do it regardless, but then they're doubly stupid for a) paying more than they need, and b) paying a price determined only by others like themselves!).
I'd expect a close pretty close (+/-) to the open.
Actually, while Ada Lovelace saw the potential of Babbage's Analytical Engine, her inspiration for this was Joseph Jacquard's punch-card-progammable Jacquard loom. Jacquards invention was also later copied as Hollerith's computer punched cards.
The distinctive characteristic of the Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the executive right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs. It is in this that the distinction between the two engines lies. Nothing of the sort exists in the Difference Engine. We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.
Lovelace on Jacquard
Jacquard loom
Jacquard loom output
I guess it's a bit like credit cards - the credit companies don't deny cards to people with crappy credit, because they can still make money from them - they just give them worse rates etc.
eBay certainly needs to do something about buyer assurance, else they're losing sales and screwing their shareholders.
I'd think a starting point might be to self-insure against claims with premiums paid out of sellers fees, which could vary according to sellers "credit ratings" (feedback, and claims against them). If they wanted to they could externally reinsure against most of the risk. There has to be a sweet spot where you make more money by providing a safe marketplace, thereby attracting more customers, while still letting sellers with less than perfect records participate.
yoo dum kunt ds s thinktjhis is infoi>>>>>>>>>>>
am azon dont sell aevery hing u wanr\
bullshit . i collect romaN coinbd nad im drunk. but i get some freakin bargansn ob ebay.!
># The best programmer I've met once told me that once you've dropped into the debugger, you've lost, which over time I've found to be quite true. The best debugging practice is to learn how not to use a debugger. (e.g., Are you using threads when they're not absolutely required? Say hello to debugging hell...)
:-), the young graduate fiucks willl take *weeks* to get the samem shitb as took m e 4hrs to submit (untested) that works.
Ain't that the truth!
As a 20+ year veteran programmer (soldered together my own 1Mz Z-80 - NASCOM-1 - when it bacame available - -in 1978, beginning of personal computer ownership possibility UK - ow gawm am I drunk - tha t I camn agfree!!!
I *now* submit horribly arrogant patches to source conteol (mutli thread, sdynamis datsa struct, sync primatives - mutexes etc, and I *KNOW& that shit is gonna work !
Yes, I'm drunk. amd I'mm worths 100x those newbe cosksukierss.
hahhahhah
The trouble with US workers trying to compete with offshore ones is that it's not a level playing field... the cost of living here vs India (or whereever) is staggeringly different.
If you want to allow jobs to flow freely between countries without regard for cost of living, then the result will be very predictable - salaries will find a global equilibrium. Now, remember that while the US has some of the highest salraies in the world (and highest costs of living), that it only comprises 5% (or less) of the global population... in other words the rquilibrium point will be very close to the overseas rate, since the size of their labor pool swamps our own.
Now if you really think it's patriotic to elimitate high level jobs here (living in the US on an Indian level salary is not an option), then keep on advocating offshoring, but personally I like my job, and would like to be able to compete based on merit not based on geographic location / cost of living, which is what you are proposing.
Basically blurriness.
The block artifacts in DCT/FFT based approaches such as MPEG-2 are due to the fact that video has local detail (well, duh!) but you're using a globally repeating waveform (FFT = sine, or DCT = cosine) to encode it. In order to represent local detail with a DCT-based tranforrm you have to divide the image into blocks to localize the transform, and when you throw away the lower order transform coefficients (which is basically what transform-based encoding is all about) those block boundaries become apparent - block artifacts.
In contract, wavelets are spatially localized / non-repeating, so you can represent local detail without needing to introduce blocks. But, when you throw away your lower order coefficients you will see bits of the image represented by only the higher order wavelets, which (wavelets being smooth) means that there'll be blurriness.
The BBC codec might still choose to use blocks for motion compression (I don't know), but the above basically explains the difference between the two, and definitely applies to the difference between image compression using DCT (JPEG) vs wavelet (JPEG2000) compression.
It's wavelet based, so presumably it doesn't suffer from the block artifacts of MPEG-2 & MPRG-4.
Well, reality says you only get two, and quality was your last requirement... You're certainly highly unlikely to get a quality product that meets the customers requirements if the software was developed by a bunch of hackers without design & test documents, code reviews, etc.
It's understandable that at some level you don't care how the quality gets there as long as it does, but you're also more likely to get that quality (rather than be promised it by your quick 'n' cheap outfit, but disappointed on delivery) out of a company that has a quality development process (which is why - notwithstanding the abuses of it - ISO 9000 certification of supliers - i.e. caring about development methods - is a common requirement among quality conscious companies).
Don't you care whether it's full of bugs or not, or whether it's easy (fast, cheap) to change if the customer wants it?
The rule of 3 is (quick,cheap,quality) - pick any 2.
What'd be interesting would be to see would be if the "fuck" count correlated with the shoddiness (no formal specs, etc) of the S/W development process! :-)
I don't know if Linux does this at all, but it seems that one useful VM strategy would be to copy to disk rather than swap to disk. That way you can continue to run bloaty app without swapping it back in, but interactivity is still good since you can resuse memory immediately without needing to swap stuff out at the point the demand occurs. Of course it'd need to be tunable and/or smart (no point copying highly volatile areas of memory for a start).
Man, that's like some vague bad dream...
WTF is that.. COBOL, FORTRAN??? Surely not PL/1.
God help me.
So the question becomes, can one build a "living" (i.e. identical to a natural) virus from only the parts that make it up? In other words, would a virus, or any living thing, become alive once someone puts together all the parts in exactly the same way?
In the case of a virus it's already been done (e.g. Polio virus), but even if we define a virus as "alive" (somewhat arbitrary), it's hardly interesting since they're really nothing more than complex molecules.
Builing an synthetic bateria would be infinitely more impressive. Of course it'd be as "alive" as one created by any other method.. how could it possibly not be?! Biochemistry is biochemistry... it's only when life takes the form of higher animals that the level of complexity is such that the whole seems more than the sum of the parts (even though, emergent behavior notwithstanding, it's not).
Actually you can use a parachute from as low as around 300' (I believe this is the military limit), and BASE (Buildings, Antenna, Structures, Earth) jumpers routinely parachute of bridges etc which are pretty low.
sco sux
Yeah, but he's achieved that 1/20 of Google page coverage using only 8 computers, vs Google's thousands, and expects to exceed Googles page coverage this year by adding computers/disks/memory.
Definitely one to watch.
Google was the first to return mostly relevant results, but it definitely isn't perfect... For a start the page ranking algorithm naturally means that large well-linked commercial sites outrank the smaller more specialized or personal ones. Sometimes that's what you want, but sometimes it's not...
If you're concerned about code speed, the Intel C++ compiler for Linux has been available for free for a while, and AFAIK producess better code than the Microsoft one.
a l/eval.htm
The Windows version of Intel's compiler is still commercial only, but maybe they'll change that now.
http://developer.intel.com/software/products/glob
1.7b sadly seems to have taken a step back from 1.6 in terms of stability - I've had half a dozen crashes during heavy use (opening 20 or so tabs at a time), whereas I never had similar problems with previous Beta versions.