Correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess 200-400$ aren't that little for a poor Indian. Apart from that fact that I have to wonder whatfor people living in some fuckin slum need a computer!
Please mod this ignorant comment down. It is not insightful.
I assist a charity that is installing computer training colleges in Ethiopia. The colleges have a huge effect - the students can go on to get jobs, move to a better location - it can literally change their lives, and they help pick up the local economy.
I read comments like this whenever this type of topic comes up on Slashdot ("why give them computers when they have hardly got enough food and drinking water..?") If all you do is provide basic necessities then these people will never be able to break out of the poverty trap.
see, what your thinking of is a type of socialism. so don't be talking about it to loudly.
Fortunately I live in a free country so I don't have to whisper my non-mainstream thoughts. I feel sorry for you poor Americans.
Ok I'm being deliberately provocative, but you raise an interesting point. I have a friend that grew up in the USA until his early twenties, then came to Europe, then decided to spend some more time in the USA in his early thirties. He returned to his old community where he still had many friends he grew up with. He said he was amazed by the fact that he was completely rejected by many former friends just because he had some non-mainstream views. Nothing very controversial either, at least not here in Europe - Bush is corrupt, Americas foreign policy these days is much worse than it used to be, stuff like that. He said that people he grew up with would completely stonewall him and reject him just because of his opinions. Now, I don't know what you might think of this, perhaps in America this type of behaviour might be "normal" or accepted. But pretty much anywhere I've been in Europe people don't reject you just because of your opinions. The fact that you have said I shouldn't "be talking about it too loudly" because I have mentioned something that might be considered socialist makes me understand what a hard time my friend must have had returning to the USA. He only lasted four months before returning to Europe.
"A good American programmer will push back and say, What you're asking for doesn't make sense, you idiot,"
Overheard in offices all over America:
Programmer: This doesn't make sense, you idiot!
Pointy Haired Boss: Doesn't it? You're a professional and I trust your judgement. Do whatever you think is best. Thanks for pointing out my lack of understanding.
For me, jobs going offshore exposes the fault in our economic system, and shows how in many ways it is very primitive.
At the turn of the last century people imagined a time when everyone would live in luxury and not have to work. Machines would be able to do the work, and the majority of people could just relax and have a good time. The idea is even more possible today - we can create machines to do most jobs these days, and we should all be living in a work-free time of abundancy. So why aren't we? The simple answer is that our economic system won't allow it - in our system, in order to be able to have stuff, you need money, and to get money you have to work. They crazyness of this situation is highlighted by the fact that periods of adundance now actually cause recession - things become "too cheap", defalation occurs, people can't make money, everybody looses when things are plentiful.
How does this relate to offshore IT? For me it is exactly the same situation. If someone is willing to do my job in another country, then great, I should be able to put my feet up and relax. But of course it doesn't work like that - I loose my job and have no money.
People say that our current economic system is the best system because "it works" but I don't buy that. In many ways it is fairly crude. I think if an alien came from an advanced planet and looked at us today it would think, "look at those idiots working most of their lives when they've already most of the tools to live a life of luxury!"
Oh, come off it, only an illiterate shit would fall for this.
There are a lot of people in this world who aren't as intelligent and perceptive like you so obviously are!
This is no better than the usual spam.
I disagree strongly. Getting an email that looks as if it is coming from a bank or service you subscribe to is not the same as getting an email about enlarging your penis.
(I'm being generous letting them off w. the "unknown persons" bit b/c, while it's bad grammar (person == singular, people == plural), but "person or persons unknown" has made it into the vernacular)..
In the last couple of months there have been an increasing amount of very sophisticated email scams.
For instance, E-Gold members (and others) have been receiving emails like this
Dear e-gold user.
At 09.05.2003 our company was attacked by unknown persons. Out administrators is working on the database restoring. If you have an active account, please check if it is still active, your current balance is right and all transactions can be processed. If you find that your account is inactive, please letus know immediately at e-mail service@e-gold.com To check your account, please click on the link below: https://e-gold.com/sci_asp/payments.asp
It looks official, doesn't it? And the link looks ok too. But it is an html email, and the actual link went to a page located at e-gold2.com, which looked exactly like the real e-gold site. Thus the fraudsters were able to get peoples log-on details. More here.
In the UK, many people have been receiving emails that look as if they are from Barclays bank (one of the biggest in the UK). It is a similar scam to the e-gold one. More here.
I myself have recieved and email asking me to update my ebay account details. Only on close inspection did I realise that it was a fraud.
I find this extremely worrying. Personally I am probably like many Slashdotters - paranoid about security and difficult to catch out. However most people aren't like that, and this new type of scam email is an extremely worrying development, because it could catch a lot of people out. People really need to be informed about this type of scam, but I've yet to see much in the press about it. Any journalists reading..?
You can get a working visa for India. I have a friend that works there. It's just like anywhere else in the world in that respect.
I expect this guy just got a tourist visa and turned up in India expecting to get employed, and the person told him he couldn't legally employ him, which would be true because he had the wrong type of visa.
Is there anywhere in the world where you can just turn up without a working visa and legally work? Not that I know.
I wish the Slashdot editors would just spend five minutes googling to check the validity of this type of thing before posting.
A simple web search will show that you can get a working visa for India:
Employment Visa are initially issued for one year stay subject to fulfillment of certain conditions. This can be extended by Foreigners Regional Registration Office in India, if the job contract continues. Spouses and children will get coterminus Visa.
A valid criticism of the Open Source Community used to be that it just copied, and never innovated. Well I think the copying stage (or as I like to think of it, the "catching up" stage) is now almost over. Now we are innovating.
I have Windows XP, and quite a few of the things in the latest Gnome are better than Windows XP. For instance, the fantastic way Pango deals with multilingual issues. And scalable desktop icons are a great addition. Some of the desktop accessability stuff is great too.
I bet that Microsoft keeps a close eye on the OSS community, and I'm sure it is starting to be the case that - internally within Microsoft - they're actually starting to have to catch up with stuff that is coming out of the OSS community. The next stage in the process - Microsoft realise that OSS solutions are actually moving faster than they can keep up with.
If we go back in time say 500 years, things didn't really change all that much from one generation to the next and so there was no concept of "the future" as we have it today. Imaginary images often revolved around religous "places" such as heaven or hell.
In the golden age of science fiction writing, which for most people I think is the 50's and 60's, in the future amazing things seemed possible and there was am optimism that things like space travel, flying cars, robots etc. might actually happen for ordinary people, perhaps even within the lifetime of the young people that read the fiction.
I think we're a bit more cynical nowadays, and thus the future doesn't seem so exciting. We've learnt that things don't change as fast as we would like them to, and the actual changes are mostly quite dull.
Imagine if a 50's science fiction writer had thought of the web. A story about buying a book on Amazon from your cubicle at work (most peoples reality today) somehow doesn't seem as exciting as flying to another planet with a cheeky robot.
How can the americans say so lightly that cia organised a coup, and in the same breath ask why people around the world dislike them?
You just don't get it do you? American logic works like this:
Americans = good, intelligent people blessed by God. Foreigners = generally bad, often evil, always ignorant, incompetent, infidels, weasels, jealous of Americans.
So using American logic we can see that:
Cybersyn was foreign and therefore evil and Orwellian.
The CIA sponsored coup was American, and therefore good. Of course the ends justify the means sometimes.
You are criticising Americans therefore I assume that you are an ignorant, evil and probably jealous.
Despite certain false claims put out by the left-wing media, that is not what is happening in Iraq (where oil had nothing to do with it).
That's right. It was actually because Saddam was in league with Bin Laden in the plotting of the Sept11 atrocity...
That's apparently what 70% of Americans believe according to a recent poll. Forgive us in the rest of the world for being a bit cynical and believing the American public has been deceived by its administration and media.
Well, at the moment, there isn't much point, other than entertainment.
But I think it represents increadible long term thinking on the part of Sony. They are getting experience in developing and marketing domestic robots. There must be $$$ of R&D going into this, and I expect that Sony isn't making a profit on it. But all the functionality that's going into Aibo - I bet within ten years Sony will be able to create a human size human robot that can perform simple actions from voice commands - i.e. "pick that newspaper up off the coffee table and bring it to me". There might not be much of a market for Aibo at the moment, but imagine the market for a robot that can do that -- great for older people and the handicapped, as well of a million other uses we'll probably only think of once domestic robots are commonplace.
When this type of domestic robot is possible, Sony is going to be years ahead of any other company in the technical development, manufacture and marketing of them. Respect to Sony.
I hate to be the horse and buggy guy BUT I don't need 2 weeks of television recorded.
Perhaps your thinking about it in the wrong way. Imagine stitting down in the evening and wondering - "I wonder if there was anything good on the movie channel* today that I might like to watch" rather than "I wonder if there is anything on right now that I might like to watch".
It sounds cool to me, even more so if you are fussy about what you watch on TV.
(* or BBC One or whatever is your preferred channel.)
The UK has a long sad history of inventors producing things that are unaffordable, impractical, or both, owing to a cultural blindness that seems to prevent reality checks.
I think your interpretation is incorrect. The Brits have an amazing history of invention -- I think they could quite probably boast at being the greatest nation of inventors in the world. However, they are normally really crap at the business side of things.
I don't get this. Surely nearly all the processing with a game like Doom goes into the rendering. Doesn't that all have to be done locally, the latentcy on networks would be too slow when you're rendering many frames a second, wouldn't it?
Secondly, surely a game should max would the processing abilities of a single machine. If lots of machines are connected together and they are all playing the game, and thus maxed out, then what's the advantage with distributing the effort?
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess 200-400$ aren't that little for a poor Indian. Apart from that fact that I have to wonder whatfor people living in some fuckin slum need a computer!
Please mod this ignorant comment down. It is not insightful.
I assist a charity that is installing computer training colleges in Ethiopia. The colleges have a huge effect - the students can go on to get jobs, move to a better location - it can literally change their lives, and they help pick up the local economy.
I read comments like this whenever this type of topic comes up on Slashdot ("why give them computers when they have hardly got enough food and drinking water..?") If all you do is provide basic necessities then these people will never be able to break out of the poverty trap.
I'm sure that they do--you just haven't got extreme enough opinions.
I guess that's the point. Opinions don't seem to have to be very controversial at all to be considered extreme in the USA.
see, what your thinking of is a type of socialism. so don't be talking about it to loudly.
Fortunately I live in a free country so I don't have to whisper my non-mainstream thoughts. I feel sorry for you poor Americans.
Ok I'm being deliberately provocative, but you raise an interesting point. I have a friend that grew up in the USA until his early twenties, then came to Europe, then decided to spend some more time in the USA in his early thirties. He returned to his old community where he still had many friends he grew up with. He said he was amazed by the fact that he was completely rejected by many former friends just because he had some non-mainstream views. Nothing very controversial either, at least not here in Europe - Bush is corrupt, Americas foreign policy these days is much worse than it used to be, stuff like that. He said that people he grew up with would completely stonewall him and reject him just because of his opinions. Now, I don't know what you might think of this, perhaps in America this type of behaviour might be "normal" or accepted. But pretty much anywhere I've been in Europe people don't reject you just because of your opinions. The fact that you have said I shouldn't "be talking about it too loudly" because I have mentioned something that might be considered socialist makes me understand what a hard time my friend must have had returning to the USA. He only lasted four months before returning to Europe.
"A good American programmer will push back and say, What you're asking for doesn't make sense, you idiot,"
Overheard in offices all over America:
Programmer: This doesn't make sense, you idiot!
Pointy Haired Boss: Doesn't it? You're a professional and I trust your judgement. Do whatever you think is best. Thanks for pointing out my lack of understanding.
For me, jobs going offshore exposes the fault in our economic system, and shows how in many ways it is very primitive.
At the turn of the last century people imagined a time when everyone would live in luxury and not have to work. Machines would be able to do the work, and the majority of people could just relax and have a good time. The idea is even more possible today - we can create machines to do most jobs these days, and we should all be living in a work-free time of abundancy. So why aren't we? The simple answer is that our economic system won't allow it - in our system, in order to be able to have stuff, you need money, and to get money you have to work. They crazyness of this situation is highlighted by the fact that periods of adundance now actually cause recession - things become "too cheap", defalation occurs, people can't make money, everybody looses when things are plentiful.
How does this relate to offshore IT? For me it is exactly the same situation. If someone is willing to do my job in another country, then great, I should be able to put my feet up and relax. But of course it doesn't work like that - I loose my job and have no money.
People say that our current economic system is the best system because "it works" but I don't buy that. In many ways it is fairly crude. I think if an alien came from an advanced planet and looked at us today it would think, "look at those idiots working most of their lives when they've already most of the tools to live a life of luxury!"
Oh, come off it, only an illiterate shit would fall for this.
There are a lot of people in this world who aren't as intelligent and perceptive like you so obviously are!
This is no better than the usual spam.
I disagree strongly. Getting an email that looks as if it is coming from a bank or service you subscribe to is not the same as getting an email about enlarging your penis.
(I'm being generous letting them off w. the "unknown persons" bit b/c, while it's bad grammar (person == singular, people == plural), but "person or persons unknown" has made it into the vernacular)..
You, sir, are a bit of a twat.
In the last couple of months there have been an increasing amount of very sophisticated email scams.
For instance, E-Gold members (and others) have been receiving emails like this
Dear e-gold user.
At 09.05.2003 our company was attacked by unknown
persons. Out administrators is working on the database restoring.
If you have an active account, please check if it is still active, your
current balance is right and all transactions can be processed.
If you find that your account is inactive, please letus know
immediately at e-mail service@e-gold.com
To check your account, please click on the link below:
https://e-gold.com/sci_asp/payments.asp
It looks official, doesn't it? And the link looks ok too. But it is an html email, and the actual link went to a page located at e-gold2.com, which looked exactly like the real e-gold site. Thus the fraudsters were able to get peoples log-on details. More here.
In the UK, many people have been receiving emails that look as if they are from Barclays bank (one of the biggest in the UK). It is a similar scam to the e-gold one. More here.
I myself have recieved and email asking me to update my ebay account details. Only on close inspection did I realise that it was a fraud.
I find this extremely worrying. Personally I am probably like many Slashdotters - paranoid about security and difficult to catch out. However most people aren't like that, and this new type of scam email is an extremely worrying development, because it could catch a lot of people out. People really need to be informed about this type of scam, but I've yet to see much in the press about it. Any journalists reading..?
I just found this very entertaining table on Netcraft:
http://www.atrc.net.pk/news/microsoft_london_li
It shows that Microsoft use Linux to deliver their web site content to Europe.
If there was ever a good way to convince your PHB that Linux is a capable system, this must be it. Email that link to your PHB today!
But if Americans can't work in India, then let's kick the damn H1B's out of this country.
You can get a working visa for India. The guy in the story must have asked the wrong person or something.
H1-B visa? Anyone?
India working visa, anyone? Contact your local Indian embassy for details.
This story is bunk.
You can get a working visa for India. I have a friend that works there. It's just like anywhere else in the world in that respect.
I expect this guy just got a tourist visa and turned up in India expecting to get employed, and the person told him he couldn't legally employ him, which would be true because he had the wrong type of visa.
Is there anywhere in the world where you can just turn up without a working visa and legally work? Not that I know.
I wish the Slashdot editors would just spend five minutes googling to check the validity of this type of thing before posting.
A simple web search will show that you can get a working visa for India:
Employment Visa are initially issued for one year stay subject to fulfillment of certain conditions. This can be extended by Foreigners Regional Registration Office in India, if the job contract continues. Spouses and children will get coterminus Visa.
Looks like just about anywhere else in the world.
A valid criticism of the Open Source Community used to be that it just copied, and never innovated. Well I think the copying stage (or as I like to think of it, the "catching up" stage) is now almost over. Now we are innovating.
I have Windows XP, and quite a few of the things in the latest Gnome are better than Windows XP. For instance, the fantastic way Pango deals with multilingual issues. And scalable desktop icons are a great addition. Some of the desktop accessability stuff is great too.
I bet that Microsoft keeps a close eye on the OSS community, and I'm sure it is starting to be the case that - internally within Microsoft - they're actually starting to have to catch up with stuff that is coming out of the OSS community. The next stage in the process - Microsoft realise that OSS solutions are actually moving faster than they can keep up with.
If we go back in time say 500 years, things didn't really change all that much from one generation to the next and so there was no concept of "the future" as we have it today. Imaginary images often revolved around religous "places" such as heaven or hell.
In the golden age of science fiction writing, which for most people I think is the 50's and 60's, in the future amazing things seemed possible and there was am optimism that things like space travel, flying cars, robots etc. might actually happen for ordinary people, perhaps even within the lifetime of the young people that read the fiction.
I think we're a bit more cynical nowadays, and thus the future doesn't seem so exciting. We've learnt that things don't change as fast as we would like them to, and the actual changes are mostly quite dull.
Imagine if a 50's science fiction writer had thought of the web. A story about buying a book on Amazon from your cubicle at work (most peoples reality today) somehow doesn't seem as exciting as flying to another planet with a cheeky robot.
How can the americans say so lightly that cia organised a coup, and in the same breath ask why people around the world dislike them?
You just don't get it do you? American logic works like this:
Americans = good, intelligent people blessed by God.
Foreigners = generally bad, often evil, always ignorant, incompetent, infidels, weasels, jealous of Americans.
So using American logic we can see that:
Cybersyn was foreign and therefore evil and Orwellian.
The CIA sponsored coup was American, and therefore good. Of course the ends justify the means sometimes.
You are criticising Americans therefore I assume that you are an ignorant, evil and probably jealous.
That are just cynical because they do not know the facts.
You mean the type of facts that don't have any supporting evidence? The current administration in the USA seems to like those type of facts.
Despite certain false claims put out by the left-wing media, that is not what is happening in Iraq (where oil had nothing to do with it).
...
That's right. It was actually because Saddam was in league with Bin Laden in the plotting of the Sept11 atrocity
That's apparently what 70% of Americans believe according to a recent poll. Forgive us in the rest of the world for being a bit cynical and believing the American public has been deceived by its administration and media.
What exactly is the point of an Aibo?
Well, at the moment, there isn't much point, other than entertainment.
But I think it represents increadible long term thinking on the part of Sony. They are getting experience in developing and marketing domestic robots. There must be $$$ of R&D going into this, and I expect that Sony isn't making a profit on it. But all the functionality that's going into Aibo - I bet within ten years Sony will be able to create a human size human robot that can perform simple actions from voice commands - i.e. "pick that newspaper up off the coffee table and bring it to me". There might not be much of a market for Aibo at the moment, but imagine the market for a robot that can do that -- great for older people and the handicapped, as well of a million other uses we'll probably only think of once domestic robots are commonplace.
When this type of domestic robot is possible, Sony is going to be years ahead of any other company in the technical development, manufacture and marketing of them. Respect to Sony.
Notice how the SCO version has been badly retouched with a black stripe across the guys t-shirt?
They're hiding something... My guess is that he is wearing a Tux t-shirt...
I hate to be the horse and buggy guy BUT I don't need 2 weeks of television recorded.
Perhaps your thinking about it in the wrong way. Imagine stitting down in the evening and wondering - "I wonder if there was anything good on the movie channel* today that I might like to watch" rather than "I wonder if there is anything on right now that I might like to watch".
It sounds cool to me, even more so if you are fussy about what you watch on TV.
(* or BBC One or whatever is your preferred channel.)
The UK has a long sad history of inventors producing things that are unaffordable, impractical, or both, owing to a cultural blindness that seems to prevent reality checks.
I think your interpretation is incorrect. The Brits have an amazing history of invention -- I think they could quite probably boast at being the greatest nation of inventors in the world. However, they are normally really crap at the business side of things.
Did you forget so quickly that Adobe does sue people/companies too?
PDF is an open format. Microsoft don't incorporate it in their products because they don't control it, not because of any legal reasons.
MS went absolutely over the top with Office; you get "features" now that well over 99% of their user base will never even SKIM the surface of.
And yet features that lots of people would find useful aren't incorporated because they don't fit in with MS strategy.
When I tell small business clients that OpenOffice will write PDF documents just by going "save as", their eyes light up.
I should RTFA, I should...
:-)
It's about game servers, not clients. Apparently a normal Quake server can only cope with a small number of simultaneous players.
Can those people that modded me up as insightful please mod me down again?
I don't get this. Surely nearly all the processing with a game like Doom goes into the rendering. Doesn't that all have to be done locally, the latentcy on networks would be too slow when you're rendering many frames a second, wouldn't it?
Secondly, surely a game should max would the processing abilities of a single machine. If lots of machines are connected together and they are all playing the game, and thus maxed out, then what's the advantage with distributing the effort?