Wow, how new the information that water is being purified and then reused. Water treatment plants have been doing that for the past century and most of it is redistributed as drinking water.
Probably it was the c0o1 name of the weed to merit a story here.
Good industrial design makes sure, that the average user does per default the save things and doing unsafe things needs extra effort. For this reason, nearly all motorised saws and knives have clever hand- and finger guards to reduce the chance of accidents.
Microsoft and most other software companies take with the opposite approach, they just put the onus of safe operation on the user. Considering that most user don't have don't want the necessary knowledge to do that, this idea will fail.
The solution is not to educate users, but to build systems that can be operated in a safe manner by following simple and logical security rules that even my grandmother can understand.
Rules like: As long as you don't click on it, it can do no harm.
A few years ago, there was a big fuss about color printers and copiers having some kind of identifying information of the printer encoded in the dithering patterns used for halftones.
At that time, how to read this information wasn't generally available to the public.
I have some idea how traffic laws and regulations happen here in Austria. Usually they aren't made according to a well-founded plan to provide an ideal traffic flow, but they are created by a bunch of bungling fools with lots of private agendas and often conflicting interests and goals. Add to that a strong desire to implement the traffic policy-of-the-day and the strong need to be seen by the public as active planner so that successes can be celebrated, and you get a good explanation of the mess we have now.
One-way streets have been reversed because a member of the town adminitration didn't like to go the long way when visiting his concubine, politicians had highways built to their favorite golf course, even if no real need was for the little traffic, etc.
Judging be the mess traffic is everywhere else, I assume the planning there isn't really a lot different.
As a citizen, I naturally lament the loss of the freedom to decide what rules I obey and what rules I prefer to break. It really galls me, that I'm forced to drive on an empty highway with 30 km/h simply because some stupid clerk forgot to remove the entry in a database.
I also doubt, that fully automatic traffic will be the bliss you descibe. I also wish for auto-pilots, but I guess they won't be as perfect as you describe. You can rest assured that they'll be produced by companies like Microsoft or EDS, and they'll at least as buggy as Word for Windows. I just imagine the big traffic jams created by a few drivers needing to reboot their autopilot on the highway.
After all, it's not your fault {wink wink} that the black box received no power for the last 6 months.
That's already solved today with the highway-toll system we have today in Austria. On nearly all highway-segments (stretch of road between two exits) you have passive receivers that collect the identification from the boxes in the trucks. Based on what stations you crossed, an invoice for the toll is generated. If for some reason an identification goes wrong, by law thew driver's required to provide the missing data inside 24 to the toll collection agency. Single failures will often be compensated automatically by interpolation.
To prevent truckers turning their box off, there are active stations on frequently used segments. These detect all trucks, their length and whether they have trailers. If the measured data doesn't match with the information from the box or no box answered, you get fined for toll fraud. No winking will get you off the hook, as you as a driver are responsible for the proper operation of the vehicle, which includes the box.
This system doesn't work perfectly, it won't detect trucks without box using the highway for only short distances. It was also necessary to add a few driving limitations for trucks on the byways around the active station. If one can believe the data from the toll collectors, the fraud rate is minimal after those adjustments have been made.
The whole point is not to prevent rare hackers, but to catch the big masses. If one of the hackers is found, they make nice examples to reinforce the belief in the masses that there's no escape.
Automatic Traffic Law Enforcement
on
Vehicles of Tomorrow?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
At least here in Europe, we see the signs of the future cars today, and I hate it. All trends seem to converge to make traffic laws self-enforcing like laws of nature.
Want to drive too fast - sorry, the car won't allow you. Want to park where you shouldn't - the automatically request a parking ticket for you.
The pieces for this total traffic control are already here today. A few examples:
We already have black boxes for cars. Those will see wide adoptions as soon as the insurance companies give rebates for having them installed. For them it makes sense, as it provides better data about accidents. No more fibbing how fast you were.
We already have active on-board-units toll-collection for highway and automatic verification of the box is present. At the moment, it's only for trucks on highways here in Austria, but the system is still young.
We already have working number plate scanner which tag entry ond exit time of cars on a road section and generates automatically speeding tickets if the average speed is too high.
A lot of cars already have GPS navigation to know where they are. Some of those have online updates for traffic jams and other up-to-date news. I can imagine some of them even can tell you today if you're driving too fast.
The engine-management software of all sports cars in Europe won't allow you to exceed 250 km/h, even if the car could.
Tamper-prevention software is in wide use and mostly works if used together with verification. Think about the XBox.
Now put all those ingredients in a big bowl, add a healthy dose of total-control-freaks in burocracies, bake for 10 years with insurance and motor-tax incentives and you get self-enforcing traffic laws.
The car will know where it is and what the speed limits are. The car will make sure for you, that you stay a good citizen via the motor management. The car will know how big the distance to the front car is and will make sure you keep a healthy distance.
Now why not rip the little dictator out of your car? Your car will have to identify itself to the autorities for toll collection on the most travelled roads. While doing that, it's very easy to verify that an untampered control-unit works in the car. If not, they have your license plate from the traffic camera.
All in all, for most purposes it won't be possible to escape. Due to the numerous checkpoints, the recognition-rate doesn't even have to be perfect. 80 to 90 percent is good enough.
Why develop auto-pilots if it's so easy to make the life of the drivers miserable.
Funny thing is, I know for a fact that Austria has toll stations that charge German trucks going to and from Italy. Probably some of that money goes for road maintenance. And even so, whole-EU taxes will theoretically distributed to build roads where they are need.
This is mostly correct, and Autrians would like to charge a lot more, but lost in the European Court. A further problem is that the money goes to the Austrian gouvernement while those people living next to the roads in Tyrol get nothing. Quite a few people there would be quite happy, if the roads, bridges or tunnel across the Brenner pass had a big accident that made it unpassable for trucks.
If the EU would finance a 10 lane highway across the Brenner, it would only worsen the problem. Those roads bring nearly no benefit to the people living next to it while reducing their quality of life tremendously. This is one of the viles of democracy, when a majority decides to make the life of a minority miserable.
And your contention that the desire to lead a happy life is antithetical to free market capitalism is just plain hogwash.
Hmm, is it really? Free market capitalism is based on the sole drive to maximise Profit for the company and to address all other things only as a mean to reach this goal. Last time I checked, the goal to providing a good life to the unwashed masses was more of a socialist thing, not really on the agenda of free market capitlism.
The people owning the profitable companies will then be able to lead a very happy life.
For a company to achieve the optimum performance, it may also be useful from time to time to allow one's workers to lead a happy life.
But other than that, free market capitalism achieves its highest profits, when they can leech common resources or exploit people that can't defend them.
For this reason, rules have been made in some places, to prevent this, like laws against dumping toxic waste in rivers, bans on children labour, rules about truth in advertisment, customer protection laws etc.
Companies deal with these limitations in different ways. Sometime they invested in treating plants, sometime they just pay off a corrupt water inpsector, sometime they ship the waste to somewhere else and dump there and sometime they move the plant to location with less strict rules.
But in all of this one is certain, living next to a toxic waste dump, children aged 5 sewing sneakers, people getting ripped off by untrue advertisment have a more miserable life.
If the exploitation of people and common resources gets too bad, people won't stand for it and do something about it. this could be getting paid off by the company, have new laws passed against the behaviour or - in the extreme case - civil war.
The assumption, that the welfare of the maximum people and the preservation of common resources is always the best course in a free market capitalism is not based on any hard evidence. Facts supports more the opposite view and that companies strive to achieve short term gains at the cost of smaller but sustained long term profits.
People on can stand that much abuse, and when free market capitalism exceeds that limit, the rules change.
The overall wealth of the entire world rises, probably markedly.
Why should that be? I agree that the free market is one way to reach an equilibrium where any further reduction in cost on one side will lead to an increase somewhere else so that there's no net gain. But this state is always in accordance with the rules of the game. Change the rules and you'll get a differen situation.
For eample take the transfer of goods in the European Community. At the moment, it's very profitable to truck half finished products from one country to the other. German potatos will get shipped to Italy for peeling, slicing and frying and then sent back as chips in bags to Germany.
If the freighters now would have to pay more for the upkeep of the roads, because communities see no business case in maintaining highways - for local traffic a dirt road is good enough and gives the people a good reason to buy a SUV, probably the free market will kill the idea of shipping potatos twice across the Union. Building a smaller frying plant will be cheaper.
In all of this, the free market doesn't create any wealth, it distributes it only in an unequal fashion. It makes no difference, if the transport workes make a good living or the corrupt local gouvernement, except naturally to the transport workers and corrupt politicians.
Just like every superhero has his pet arch-villain, the free market has also an opposing force, just as strong: Peoples desire for a happy life. The forces of free market can make people's life miserable up to a certain point, after which the rules get changed. With new rules, the free market will find another equilibrium.
In the above example, this could be some Austrian communities sitting between Germany and Itlay being fed up with all those potato-trucks and deciding they won't maintain those roads for the benefit of German couch potatos any more.
So what happens when China declares war against us 40 or 50 years from now?
Why should they want to invade, if all knowledge has left the USA because of heavy outsourcing and all that is left are a few hundred million people whose major skill is to ask if one want fries with the order?
Seriously, that is one of the most ridiculous arguments I heard against outsourcing. Brain-drain and loss of skill are serious problems, but before worrying about chinese supertanks and missiles, one should be concerned about being able to keep up with the industry, having jobs for people that aren't rocket scientists etc. first.
This seems to match Raffaello's no competition niche market argument.
Then I have to assume, that nearly all companies serve a tiny niche market made from the customer it wants to have. IBM would by this definition server the tiny niche composed of big, rich corporations.
merely replacing one programmer with another.
And exactly this other programmer is the unknown quality. For the customer, if the old one delivered a satisfactory service, saving little might not be worth getting worse service in the future. In addition, house-breaking and potty-training new programmers usually takes time and effort from the customer.
I can take you GPL'd code and offer to maintain and support it for less. I only need to cover my support costs while you need to cover both support and the initial development.
Speaking from experience, price isn't everything, otherwise companies like IBM, Unisys, EDS, Siemens, GE etc. should be dead for a long time.
To take away satisfied customers from an existing provider takes more than just lowering the price. If it were otherwise, Microsoft should be dead by now and OpenOffice and Linux everywhere.
First you need to be able to offer the same service at a lower price. Specially for niche markets, lot of programs are developed for inhouse use and then sold to other customers too. So if a company has a few big customers that finance development, all the others are basically 100% net gain while operating with a team that has the necessary knowledge. As a newcomer, you need to pay at least a few people who know what the product is used for and understand your customers business.
The same goes for other parameters like location. If I'm sitting here in Tinyville, making house-calls to customers across the street is far cheaper than sending over the cheapest tech-support from Bangalore. On the other hand opening an office in Tinyville covers your costs only when you reach a critical mass of customers. You'd have to gamble your resources whether you'll get enough.
Then you need to be able to access the customer. This is specially hard if you're a small company trying to win contracts with multi-national corporations. You simply don't have the access to the key decision makers, while IBM and Microsoft key account managers are playing golf with the C*O every saturday. Your wonderfull cheap offer won't make it past the garbage bin, even if you offer your service for free.
Should you manage to pitch your product, you'll have to overcome the general inertia. Why should a customer switch from a service of know quality for a reasonable price (we're talking about happy customers) to something cheaper of unknown quality, specially considering the involved costs of migration? In most cases, this is gamble that isn't worth the risk, as most businesses need to spend their time earning money and not upgrading computers and software. This comes up every time some big organisation considers switching away from Microsoft Linux and it's Bill's strongest argument.
So you see, there are a lot of other factors here beside the development costs, and getting the software for free doesn't guarantee your success.
The model works always, as long as you provide a useful service to the customer at a price he's willing to afford.
Most customers aren't interested in the details of software development, they just want a product that meets their need and someone they can complain to, if they're in trouble. More prudent customers want also some kind of safety net, that they aren't left alone if the provider decides to move on to other things (like bankruptcy).
The code itself is of no real use to most customers and handing it to the customer is most ot the time no risk at all.If the customer can do something useful with it, he would have written the thing himself in the first place.
Secret magical algorithms that need to be protected by trade secrets are more of a myth than reality. Most code ist shockingly simple and boring, where the biggest effort goes in to producing the required amount of obvious functions and ironing out the bugs.
The best testament to this are the myriads of programs, doing more or less the same things. Sometime a company comes up with a good set of functions at a reasonable price, which makes developing these functions in-house very unattractive. If combined with good marketing/sales, these products may become nearly a monopole like MS-Office.
People pay for convenience and products are just vehicles to achieve that. And most people people don't care about number of wheels on the vehicle, as long as it transports them well enough.
The article mentioned, he put his house up for collateral for the $ 750k. With the $ 2M damages, his house would have been gone anyway.
So economically, his best action is to jump bail, go back to Morocco and leave the courts and banks to fight over the house. That's always better than going to jail and having nothing when he's released.
Today all passport have pictures in them, and most are machine readable. At most borders, the passports will be read by a scanner anyway. If the scanner scans the picture or reads the encoded picture from another place makes no difference for privacy and there's no need to panic.
The big privacy concern is what data is associated in the databases with your passport number - which is easy to scan even today.
The whole RFID-craze seems just to be scam by the chip vendors to peddle their wares.
M ultistate A nti T error R ???? I nformation e X change
Do those multistates also have problem with their acronym generation capabilities? Are those acronyms generated by pimply-faced 14-year-old who want to look cool? Has ATR become a standard abbreviation for antiterror these days?
Questions over questions, and I doubt the database will be of help here.
Re:Interesting concept
on
3D Mouse
·
· Score: 2, Funny
This mouse uses 3 strings to measure distances. For scanning, this reduces the scranning volume dramatically. For example, it would be impossible to scann a simple cube with that mouse, because one of the strings needs to move through the cube. The mouse works only for moving around empty space.
The best use I can imagine for this thing is to attach a fly to the pointer an track it's movements.
Next on Slashdot: Nano-Piercing for flies made easy.
I'm certain, that as soon as the first secret or confidential documents appear on the network, this will be used as pretext to apply all kind of national security and anti-terrorist laws to the network.
Then we'll see, how anonymous, secure and resilient the P2P-network really is.
As a whole, the concept is interesting, as much as watching mice baiting a cat.
If the poor code monkey lives in a civilised country, nothing really can happen to him, as long as there wasn't malice or gross negligence involved. And the second isn't usually so easy to prove and will probably drag down most of the rest of the project team with him.
If his employer feels vindictive, the poor code monkey will have to look for a new job, where he can leverage his skills in mission critical projects.
Generally speaking, these kind of failures aren't usually caused by the poor code monkey, but the failure of the project managment to insure a proper design and quality control, most of the time due to lack of money, unreasonable schedules and incompetence.
All in all, if you survive this kind of thing, you have at least a story to tell.
If even only foreign governments decided to "buy domestic" for their IT needs, the US IT industry would collapse.
That was always one of the big advantages the USA had, historically speaking. The domestic market is big enough, that the industry doesn't collapse in case it has severe export restrictions imposed on it. It might lose some of the income, but it will survive.
> I am a smart person, as are most of the > programmers. I can easily get another tech > job in NYC paying 20% less than I make now.
Unfortunately, those tech jobs are held most of the time by smart people, who have actual experience in the job, whereas you're just new to it.
I'm also certain, that no prospective employer will hold it against you, that not only you have no experience in the new job, you appear also unable to find a job doing what you do best.
More likely, it'll be a world where they don't need managment consultants, pre-chewn potato-chips in neon colour and 500 music-channels playing the same five songs all over.
You got it nearly right, only the conspiracy theory is a little off. Why invent a conspiracy, when a few simple observations explain it also:
If the customers don't care about quality, saving there is a sensible measure. The goal isn't to produce the best, it's to produce just good enough. Anything above that is wasted. If customers wan't better quality, there's a business oppurtunity by making them pay for it.
The other assumption was, that the service from american is better than what poor starved indians provide. More often than not, the so called better service from americans was limited to read the brain-dead script with an american dialect instead of an indian one.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, how new the information that water is being purified and then reused. Water treatment plants have been doing that for the past century and most of it is redistributed as drinking water.
Probably it was the c0o1 name of the weed to merit a story here.
Technical capability of the users.
Good industrial design makes sure, that the average user does per default the save things and doing unsafe things needs extra effort. For this reason, nearly all motorised saws and knives have clever hand- and finger guards to reduce the chance of accidents.
Microsoft and most other software companies take with the opposite approach, they just put the onus of safe operation on the user. Considering that most user don't have don't want the necessary knowledge to do that, this idea will fail.
The solution is not to educate users, but to build systems that can be operated in a safe manner by following simple and logical security rules that even my grandmother can understand.
Rules like: As long as you don't click on it, it can do no harm.
A few years ago, there was a big fuss about color printers and copiers having some kind of identifying information of the printer encoded in the dithering patterns used for halftones.
At that time, how to read this information wasn't generally available to the public.
Probably this is the same stuff warmed up again.
I have some idea how traffic laws and regulations happen here in Austria. Usually they aren't made according to a well-founded plan to provide an ideal traffic flow, but they are created by a bunch of bungling fools with lots of private agendas and often conflicting interests and goals. Add to that a strong desire to implement the traffic policy-of-the-day and the strong need to be seen by the public as active planner so that successes can be celebrated, and you get a good explanation of the mess we have now.
One-way streets have been reversed because a member of the town adminitration didn't like to go the long way when visiting his concubine, politicians had highways built to their favorite golf course, even if no real need was for the little traffic, etc.
Judging be the mess traffic is everywhere else, I assume the planning there isn't really a lot different.
As a citizen, I naturally lament the loss of the freedom to decide what rules I obey and what rules I prefer to break. It really galls me, that I'm forced to drive on an empty highway with 30 km/h simply because some stupid clerk forgot to remove the entry in a database.
I also doubt, that fully automatic traffic will be the bliss you descibe. I also wish for auto-pilots, but I guess they won't be as perfect as you describe. You can rest assured that they'll be produced by companies like Microsoft or EDS, and they'll at least as buggy as Word for Windows. I just imagine the big traffic jams created by a few drivers needing to reboot their autopilot on the highway.
After all, it's not your fault {wink wink} that the black box received no power for the last 6 months.
That's already solved today with the highway-toll system we have today in Austria. On nearly all highway-segments (stretch of road between two exits) you have passive receivers that collect the identification from the boxes in the trucks. Based on what stations you crossed, an invoice for the toll is generated. If for some reason an identification goes wrong, by law thew driver's required to provide the missing data inside 24 to the toll collection agency. Single failures will often be compensated automatically by interpolation.
To prevent truckers turning their box off, there are active stations on frequently used segments. These detect all trucks, their length and whether they have trailers. If the measured data doesn't match with the information from the box or no box answered, you get fined for toll fraud. No winking will get you off the hook, as you as a driver are responsible for the proper operation of the vehicle, which includes the box.
This system doesn't work perfectly, it won't detect trucks without box using the highway for only short distances. It was also necessary to add a few driving limitations for trucks on the byways around the active station. If one can believe the data from the toll collectors, the fraud rate is minimal after those adjustments have been made.
The whole point is not to prevent rare hackers, but to catch the big masses. If one of the hackers is found, they make nice examples to reinforce the belief in the masses that there's no escape.
At least here in Europe, we see the signs of the future cars today, and I hate it. All trends seem to converge to make traffic laws self-enforcing like laws of nature.
Want to drive too fast - sorry, the car won't allow you.
Want to park where you shouldn't - the automatically request a parking ticket for you.
The pieces for this total traffic control are already here today. A few examples:
We already have black boxes for cars. Those will see wide adoptions as soon as the insurance companies give rebates for having them installed. For them it makes sense, as it provides better data about accidents. No more fibbing how fast you were.
We already have active on-board-units toll-collection for highway and automatic verification of the box is present. At the moment, it's only for trucks on highways here in Austria, but the system is still young.
We already have working number plate scanner which tag entry ond exit time of cars on a road section and generates automatically speeding tickets if the average speed is too high.
A lot of cars already have GPS navigation to know where they are. Some of those have online updates for traffic jams and other up-to-date news. I can imagine some of them even can tell you today if you're driving too fast.
The engine-management software of all sports cars in Europe won't allow you to exceed 250 km/h, even if the car could.
Tamper-prevention software is in wide use and mostly works if used together with verification. Think about the XBox.
Now put all those ingredients in a big bowl, add a healthy dose of total-control-freaks in burocracies, bake for 10 years with insurance and motor-tax incentives and you get self-enforcing traffic laws.
The car will know where it is and what the speed limits are. The car will make sure for you, that you stay a good citizen via the motor management. The car will know how big the distance to the front car is and will make sure you keep a healthy distance.
Now why not rip the little dictator out of your car? Your car will have to identify itself to the autorities for toll collection on the most travelled roads. While doing that, it's very easy to verify that an untampered control-unit works in the car. If not, they have your license plate from the traffic camera.
All in all, for most purposes it won't be possible to escape. Due to the numerous checkpoints, the recognition-rate doesn't even have to be perfect. 80 to 90 percent is good enough.
Why develop auto-pilots if it's so easy to make the life of the drivers miserable.
Funny thing is, I know for a fact that Austria has toll stations that charge German trucks going to and from Italy. Probably some of that money goes for road maintenance. And even so, whole-EU taxes will theoretically distributed to build roads where they are need.
This is mostly correct, and Autrians would like to charge a lot more, but lost in the European Court. A further problem is that the money goes to the Austrian gouvernement while those people living next to the roads in Tyrol get nothing. Quite a few people there would be quite happy, if the roads, bridges or tunnel across the Brenner pass had a big accident that made it unpassable for trucks.
If the EU would finance a 10 lane highway across the Brenner, it would only worsen the problem. Those roads bring nearly no benefit to the people living next to it while reducing their quality of life tremendously. This is one of the viles of democracy, when a majority decides to make the life of a minority miserable.
And your contention that the desire to lead a happy life is antithetical to free market capitalism is just plain hogwash.
Hmm, is it really? Free market capitalism is based on the sole drive to maximise Profit for the company and to address all other things only as a mean to reach this goal. Last time I checked, the goal to providing a good life to the unwashed masses was more of a socialist thing, not really on the agenda of free market capitlism.
The people owning the profitable companies will then be able to lead a very happy life.
For a company to achieve the optimum performance, it may also be useful from time to time to allow one's workers to lead a happy life.
But other than that, free market capitalism achieves its highest profits, when they can leech common resources or exploit people that can't defend them.
For this reason, rules have been made in some places, to prevent this, like laws against dumping toxic waste in rivers, bans on children labour, rules about truth in advertisment, customer protection laws etc.
Companies deal with these limitations in different ways. Sometime they invested in treating plants, sometime they just pay off a corrupt water inpsector, sometime they ship the waste to somewhere else and dump there and sometime they move the plant to location with less strict rules.
But in all of this one is certain, living next to a toxic waste dump, children aged 5 sewing sneakers, people getting ripped off by untrue advertisment have a more miserable life.
If the exploitation of people and common resources gets too bad, people won't stand for it and do something about it. this could be getting paid off by the company, have new laws passed against the behaviour or - in the extreme case - civil war.
The assumption, that the welfare of the maximum people and the preservation of common resources is always the best course in a free market capitalism is not based on any hard evidence. Facts supports more the opposite view and that companies strive to achieve short term gains at the cost of smaller but sustained long term profits.
People on can stand that much abuse, and when free market capitalism exceeds that limit, the rules change.
The overall wealth of the entire world rises, probably markedly.
Why should that be? I agree that the free market is one way to reach an equilibrium where any further reduction in cost on one side will lead to an increase somewhere else so that there's no net gain. But this state is always in accordance with the rules of the game. Change the rules and you'll get a differen situation.
For eample take the transfer of goods in the European Community. At the moment, it's very profitable to truck half finished products from one country to the other. German potatos will get shipped to Italy for peeling, slicing and frying and then sent back as chips in bags to Germany.
If the freighters now would have to pay more for the upkeep of the roads, because communities see no business case in maintaining highways - for local traffic a dirt road is good enough and gives the people a good reason to buy a SUV, probably the free market will kill the idea of shipping potatos twice across the Union. Building a smaller frying plant will be cheaper.
In all of this, the free market doesn't create any wealth, it distributes it only in an unequal fashion. It makes no difference, if the transport workes make a good living or the corrupt local gouvernement, except naturally to the transport workers and corrupt politicians.
Just like every superhero has his pet arch-villain, the free market has also an opposing force, just as strong: Peoples desire for a happy life. The forces of free market can make people's life miserable up to a certain point, after which the rules get changed. With new rules, the free market will find another equilibrium.
In the above example, this could be some Austrian communities sitting between Germany and Itlay being fed up with all those potato-trucks and deciding they won't maintain those roads for the benefit of German couch potatos any more.
So what happens when China declares war against us 40 or 50 years from now?
Why should they want to invade, if all knowledge has left the USA because of heavy outsourcing and all that is left are a few hundred million people whose major skill is to ask if one want fries with the order?
Seriously, that is one of the most ridiculous arguments I heard against outsourcing. Brain-drain and loss of skill are serious problems, but before worrying about chinese supertanks and missiles, one should be concerned about being able to keep up with the industry, having jobs for people that aren't rocket scientists etc. first.
This seems to match Raffaello's no competition niche market argument.
Then I have to assume, that nearly all companies serve a tiny niche market made from the customer it wants to have. IBM would by this definition server the tiny niche composed of big, rich corporations.
merely replacing one programmer with another.
And exactly this other programmer is the unknown quality. For the customer, if the old one delivered a satisfactory service, saving little might not be worth getting worse service in the future. In addition, house-breaking and potty-training new programmers usually takes time and effort from the customer.
I can take you GPL'd code and offer to maintain and support it for less. I only need to cover my support costs while you need to cover both support and the initial development.
Speaking from experience, price isn't everything, otherwise companies like IBM, Unisys, EDS, Siemens, GE etc. should be dead for a long time.
To take away satisfied customers from an existing provider takes more than just lowering the price. If it were otherwise, Microsoft should be dead by now and OpenOffice and Linux everywhere.
First you need to be able to offer the same service at a lower price. Specially for niche markets, lot of programs are developed for inhouse use and then sold to other customers too. So if a company has a few big customers that finance development, all the others are basically 100% net gain while operating with a team that has the necessary knowledge. As a newcomer, you need to pay at least a few people who know what the product is used for and understand your customers business.
The same goes for other parameters like location. If I'm sitting here in Tinyville, making house-calls to customers across the street is far cheaper than sending over the cheapest tech-support from Bangalore. On the other hand opening an office in Tinyville covers your costs only when you reach a critical mass of customers. You'd have to gamble your resources whether you'll get enough.
Then you need to be able to access the customer. This is specially hard if you're a small company trying to win contracts with multi-national corporations. You simply don't have the access to the key decision makers, while IBM and Microsoft key account managers are playing golf with the C*O every saturday. Your wonderfull cheap offer won't make it past the garbage bin, even if you offer your service for free.
Should you manage to pitch your product, you'll have to overcome the general inertia. Why should a customer switch from a service of know quality for a reasonable price (we're talking about happy customers) to something cheaper of unknown quality, specially considering the involved costs of migration? In most cases, this is gamble that isn't worth the risk, as most businesses need to spend their time earning money and not upgrading computers and software. This comes up every time some big organisation considers switching away from Microsoft Linux and it's Bill's strongest argument.
So you see, there are a lot of other factors here beside the development costs, and getting the software for free doesn't guarantee your success.
The model works always, as long as you provide a useful service to the customer at a price he's willing to afford.
Most customers aren't interested in the details of software development, they just want a product that meets their need and someone they can complain to, if they're in trouble. More prudent customers want also some kind of safety net, that they aren't left alone if the provider decides to move on to other things (like bankruptcy).
The code itself is of no real use to most customers and handing it to the customer is most ot the time no risk at all.If the customer can do something useful with it, he would have written the thing himself in the first place.
Secret magical algorithms that need to be protected by trade secrets are more of a myth than reality. Most code ist shockingly simple and boring, where the biggest effort goes in to producing the required amount of obvious functions and ironing out the bugs.
The best testament to this are the myriads of programs, doing more or less the same things. Sometime a company comes up with a good set of functions at a reasonable price, which makes developing these functions in-house very unattractive. If combined with good marketing/sales, these products may become nearly a monopole like MS-Office.
People pay for convenience and products are just vehicles to achieve that. And most people people don't care about number of wheels on the vehicle, as long as it transports them well enough.
The article mentioned, he put his house up for collateral for the $ 750k. With the $ 2M damages, his house would have been gone anyway.
So economically, his best action is to jump bail, go back to Morocco and leave the courts and banks to fight over the house. That's always better than going to jail and having nothing when he's released.
You can see it also the other way round.
Today all passport have pictures in them, and most are machine readable. At most borders, the passports will be read by a scanner anyway. If the scanner scans the picture or reads the encoded picture from another place makes no difference for privacy and there's no need to panic.
The big privacy concern is what data is associated in the databases with your passport number - which is easy to scan even today.
The whole RFID-craze seems just to be scam by the chip vendors to peddle their wares.
M ultistate
A nti
T error
R ????
I nformation
e X change
Do those multistates also have problem with their acronym generation capabilities?
Are those acronyms generated by pimply-faced 14-year-old who want to look cool?
Has ATR become a standard abbreviation for antiterror these days?
Questions over questions, and I doubt the database will be of help here.
This mouse uses 3 strings to measure distances. For scanning, this reduces the scranning volume dramatically. For example, it would be impossible to scann a simple cube with that mouse, because one of the strings needs to move through the cube. The mouse works only for moving around empty space.
The best use I can imagine for this thing is to attach a fly to the pointer an track it's movements.
Next on Slashdot: Nano-Piercing for flies made easy.
I'm certain, that as soon as the first secret or confidential documents appear on the network, this will be used as pretext to apply all kind of national security and anti-terrorist laws to the network.
Then we'll see, how anonymous, secure and resilient the P2P-network really is.
As a whole, the concept is interesting, as much as watching mice baiting a cat.
If the poor code monkey lives in a civilised country, nothing really can happen to him, as long as there wasn't malice or gross negligence involved. And the second isn't usually so easy to prove and will probably drag down most of the rest of the project team with him.
If his employer feels vindictive, the poor code monkey will have to look for a new job, where he can leverage his skills in mission critical projects.
Generally speaking, these kind of failures aren't usually caused by the poor code monkey, but the failure of the project managment to insure a proper design and quality control, most of the time due to lack of money, unreasonable schedules and incompetence.
All in all, if you survive this kind of thing, you have at least a story to tell.
If even only foreign governments decided to "buy domestic" for their IT needs, the US IT industry would collapse.
That was always one of the big advantages the USA had, historically speaking. The domestic market is big enough, that the industry doesn't collapse in case it has severe export restrictions imposed on it. It might lose some of the income, but it will survive.
> I am a smart person, as are most of the
> programmers. I can easily get another tech
> job in NYC paying 20% less than I make now.
Unfortunately, those tech jobs are held most of the time by smart people, who have actual experience in the job, whereas you're just new to it.
I'm also certain, that no prospective employer will hold it against you, that not only you have no experience in the new job, you appear also unable to find a job doing what you do best.
Isn't it wonderful to be smart and know about it?
More likely, it'll be a world where they don't need managment consultants, pre-chewn potato-chips in neon colour and 500 music-channels playing the same five songs all over.
You got it nearly right, only the conspiracy theory is a little off. Why invent a conspiracy, when a few simple observations explain it also:
If the customers don't care about quality, saving there is a sensible measure. The goal isn't to produce the best, it's to produce just good enough. Anything above that is wasted. If customers wan't better quality, there's a business oppurtunity by making them pay for it.
The other assumption was, that the service from american is better than what poor starved indians provide. More often than not, the so called better service from americans was limited to read the brain-dead script with an american dialect instead of an indian one.
... and the patent will benefit the university he was working at.
Yet another patent for an anonymous patent portfolio to be used by lawyers as bargaining chips.
Hurrah!
And it works best, when you point it at a sign with a street name on it.
Isn't it wonderful, to what great lengths men go, just to avoid asking for directions?