Re:Further evidence Friedman smokes the good stuff
on
Need a Job? Move to India
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Friedman is full of crap if he thinks a few well-off geeks will change life for the heaving masses that populate the sub-continent.
This is correct. In fact, offshoring often simply exacerbates divisions between rich and poor in the "host countries" and can actually lead to global instability. See Amy Chua's "World On Fire" for an alternate (and, IMHO, much more accurate) viewpoint.
Companies are owned by their shareholders. Directors have a fiduciary duty to their owners: they must manage the business in their interest. They aren't there to manage "expectations", or to drive their stock price. The job of a company is to make money for its owners, plain and simple.
First, companies may be there to produce money for their investors. But those investors are also given liability protection by the state and, as such, have some obligation jointly to said state. Some investors believe that payment of taxes and provision of jobs is enough of an obligation. But today, companies are ducking both through offshoring. Should the state continure to grant boons to the corporations if they provide neither jobs nor revenue to the state?
Second, companies definitely have a fiduciary obligation to their investors. But the temporality of that fiducuiary responsibility is not specified nor agreed upon. In many ways, this trend towards offshoring trades short-term profits for potentially disasterous long-term results. If everyone is offshoring, clearly there is no long-term sustainable advantage from doing it. You are also provding multitudes of new entrepeneurs with the funding and knowledge to compete with your business in a legal environment suspicious of and relatively immune to IP or non-competition protections for you. And, since moving a job to another country gets rid of one potential customer in your largest market, given that other countries' markets are not expanding so quickly, you are giving up certainty in your ability to market.
No, I don't believe that the current offshoring trends have as much to do with fiduciary responsibility as much as they have to do with the fact that it's an easy way for a lazy CEO to get a quick pop in the balance sheet and the inbreeding and herd mentality that pervades upper managements.
Sorry but $1 a month is not exactly a fair trade off.
What!? They actually knock money off your bill for less crap on your TV and you're complaning!?!?
I mean, come on... What could you be paying per month to have the privelege of being an advertisement receiver - $5? I hope you're not stupid enough to be paying more. If the world were fair, they'd be paying you to watch their crap (except for porn, of course).
... the latest variants of the Bagle/Beagle virus use password protected encrtypted zip attachments which has caught quite a few mail gateways and virus companies off guard.
I used to work for a major AV company. In one version of one of our e-mail scanning products we had prototyped a feature where the AV scanner, if it found a password protected archive, would try to open it using a standard list of passwords and every word in the email message. We were told to remove it by our management because they didn't want to have even the slightest user suspicion that the passwords were being retained, retransmitted, etc. Of course, it would have saved a lot of grief (from this virus, at least).
And the group that had this (now seemingly prescient) idea? What happened to them? Their project was moved to another site in the company and most of them were laid off. No wonder the AV companies have such l33t s|<i11z.
Outsourcing the IT work to India ensures that they concentrate the most on what they do the best, which is the hallmark of a good company.
It also insures that every whit of their business processes - from lending guidelines to customer service directives to telemarketing scripts - are given to new foreign competitors. It's hard to maintain competitive advantage when your competitors see and know everything you do to give yourself that advantage. In the end, your competitors can simply copy your process with lower cost, since they did not have to pay to develop them in the first place.
>My feature wishlist looks like: >- faster startup / instant-on >- longer battery life >- USB ports >- even smaller/lighter
Check out the Fujitsu Lifebook P1120. Other than the brighter screen and the 30-40G HD, it has all these features. Plus built-in 802.11b wireless. Mine runs Win2K Pro/RH9.0 dual-boot. Only weights 2.5 pounds (less without the extended battery) and runs for 6+ hours. A great little machine...
They made the same mistake as DEC: a radical switch to the Alpha RISC chip from its heavy VAX CISC processors.
But you can excuse DEC for the mistake - they had migrated their customers to a radically different architecture before. When DEC killed the PDP-10 line, they put in a lot of effort to move their existing customer base for that machine to the VAX. And it worked. People may have bitched, but they moved because there was no real alternative then (the only other 36-bit line at the time was Univac, and they were getting ready to throw in the towel). So the DEC customer choice was either another DEC machine or an IBM mainframe of some sort. And guess which one their customers chose? Sure they bitched about it, but it wasn't as if they had any real choice in staying with some sort of comaptible system. And most of their software that wasn't written in MACRO-10 or Bliss was tied to DEC Fortran or COBOL.
It's clear that when DEC did the switch to the Alpha, they expected something similar to happen. The few things they didn't notice? First, there were other 32- and 64-bit platforms to migrate to. A lot of the customers took the opportunity to look at SPARC or MIPS or (GASP!) Intel 32-bit offerrings as well as the 64-bit goodness soon to come out from the other two. Second, most customer's software was not as tied as heavily to their platform. In the interrim, code had migrated to C, FORTRANs and COBOLs had become much more standardized, and very few folks wrote in MACRO-32. Toss in the fact that it's a lot easier to port a program from one 32-bit platform to another 32-bit platform and it's no wonder that DEC's customer base ran away screaming. And that was the end of DEC.
Now Intel, OTOH, has gone through this with at least two other architectures - the IA-432 and the 9900(??) - you'd have thought they's learned their lesson by now. Oh well, third time's a charm - maybe thry'll introduce the 128-bit extensions next year to retake the lead!
You can't make the system more secure than the people building it.
Oh yeah! And you can't make a chess program that plays better than the people build... Oh you can?
In reality, you can build protocols that work in the presence of malicious participants. They are called Byzantime architectures. Their use is why you can actually trust some systems. For instance, OS/400 is very good at separating concerns and becomes a very secure OS in the process.
Clock-for-clock the Pentium M eats the P4 alive, and it's really a shame that we'll probably never see a desktop version of this chip made available...
Sorry to dispute this, but I'm happy to let you know that your wishes may come true, as per this story in The Inquirer. Obligatory quote:
CHIP FIRM Intel will this week announce details about a new wave in desktop computing using the Centrino bundle. The wonder is it didn't do it earlier, we ran a crusade for this. The chip firm is likely to announce it this week.
And Overclockers.com speculates that the whole thing basically means putting the M into desktops without all of the other Centrino crud.
You assume no salary growth over that period -these days, not a bad assumption:-( - and the idea that a person can remain in his career for 13 years. Plus, you're forgetting to figure in any interest on loans. Yup, looks like a pretty good deal! And, yes, I am being sarcastic.
Depressions have been started because competing companies got into tariff wars.
Well, that's one theory, but there are other takes on the issue - such as capitalist economies are in such bad shape by the time they impose tariffs that there is nothing that could have been done to prevent the Depression and that tariffs, in retrospect, make as good a scapegoat as anything. Economic issues are seldom as black and white as you seem to think. Tariffs may be needed to preserve economic capability over the long run because an economy that looks only at NPV adjusted figures as the value of its manufacturing base may not be taking into account systemic externalities, opportunity costs, and political trade realities.
But eventually someone is going to come looking for their due, an American export.
Or the USD could be immensely devalued to the point where no one wants it. And that means we can't buy oil with it or buy goods to import. That also means that the other countries have, essentially, been working for us for free because the dollars they hold will be worthless. But nothing like that could ever happen, could it? Not with the expanding budget deficit, the expanding trade deficit, a general lowering of wages to where the American market shrinks with deflation because, of course, our businesses wouldn't dream of converting their USDs to EURs before they bailed out of this country, would they? I mean, there couldn't be any capitalistic profit in that, could there?
The bubble has burst and the companies (in a true capitalist way) are looking to strengthen the bottomline.
And this is the real problem - there is no sustainable advantage in outsourcing. Eventually, everyone who can outsource something does outsource it and then you're back in the same boat of no revenue growth, but it's five years later and you actually have less control over the situation. Plus, you've given your new foreign competitors the capital they need to create most of the infrastructure required to invade your market. The idea that capitalism requires the destruction of your economy ten years from now because it makes money a year from now is the main reason why we Capitalists are going to see our system collapse the same way that the Soviet system did. The main issue is that rewards will flow to those who have the discipline to wait for rewards, not those who choose to have them today. It's simply a case of short-term vs. long-term and we're on the wrong side of the equation here. If you think you're getting bit in the ass now, just wait a few years when the chickens finally come home to roost.
If they never infected anyone, then what makes them viruses?
They were variants that were probably caught by existing definitions or heuristic scans. As for why they're viruses? Well, a tobacco mosaic virus infects plants, not humans, yet it's still a virus. There are several viruses used in genetic engineering that never infect organisms (only cells from organisms). The class is defined by the structure and capability, not by the action actually happening.
I can't believe that those working at the anti-virus companies are so stupid so as to have not yet realised that by sending out all of these fallacious "OMG YOU GOT SPAM" hype emails - to the wrong people of all things - just sucks up twice, thrice, a dozen times the bandwidth of the original worm.
Well, yes - having worked at an AV company in the past - they do realize it. The problem is the "feature bingo" that IT managers play with AV product selection. The systems that are being used today were designed back in the day when E-mail spoofing was not common as a virus tactic. In fact, the first set of products only had ways to send notification to a specific user - usually an administrator. But that wasn't good enough. Admins started saying, "Well, it's all well and good that you notify me about this. How about notifying the schlub up the food chain so I don't have to tell him myself?" So the AV manufacturers (being relatively helpful people) added this feature and made it on by default so that lazy receiver admin didn't have to turn it on. This feature became an item on an IT manager's check list and now it would be suicide to NOT have this feature. And why is it still enabled by default? Because the admin that was too lazy to send e-mail back to the "From:" sender is still too lazy to send it to the originating sender, and if someone gets a non-spoofing virus and doesn't report it upstream, other admins get their knickers in a twist.
The AV manufacturers have done some things to remedy this problem - adding options to not send notification e-mail on "known" e-mail spoofing viruses, etc. And admins can always turn off sender notification entirely. The problem is that you don't always know that something is a spoofing virus until after a heuristic algorithm has caught something suspicious and the e-mails have started flying (and those machines that haven't updated teir AV definitions are still spewing their notifications weeks later). I guess the AV systems could ship with sender notification turned off (Guess what! These days, most do!). But you can (as always) count on undertrained and oblivious sysmins to muck up the works. Mail security admins - heal thyselves.
Heck, I find apples at Costco from NZ or Chile, how can that be?
It's not only about transport costs for seasonal and wasting stocks - it's about the overall supply and demand and where the crap is when. So it's not about shipping costs - it's about the differential between the shipping costs and the storage cost for equivalent stock levels.
Or, you can buy a Fujitsu P1120. Prism Wireless, ATI graphics and, instead of some stupid Pentium-M, a Cruso chip all built in. And all wrapped up in a 2 pound package (2.5 pounds w/extended battery for a 6-8 hr. battery life) of portable goodness. Oh yeah - you can get it to dual boot Linux. Redhat 9 detects all devices except the touch screen, but you can download the loadable driver and hack your XConfig if you really want it. A really nice little system.
Not the only one - the keyboard sorta sucks because of it's size. But then, I cart along a USB keyboard if I think I'm going to need to type for long periods, so 's'all good. I've gotten mine set up as a dual boot W2K/Linux system. I have the touch screen and wireless subsystems working in Linux and I'm looking at upgrading to a 2.6 kernel for the ACPI support. We'll see how that goes. All-in-all a great little machine (and it gets people's attention, too)
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This is correct. In fact, offshoring often simply exacerbates divisions between rich and poor in the "host countries" and can actually lead to global instability. See Amy Chua's "World On Fire" for an alternate (and, IMHO, much more accurate) viewpoint.
First, companies may be there to produce money for their investors. But those investors are also given liability protection by the state and, as such, have some obligation jointly to said state. Some investors believe that payment of taxes and provision of jobs is enough of an obligation. But today, companies are ducking both through offshoring. Should the state continure to grant boons to the corporations if they provide neither jobs nor revenue to the state?
Second, companies definitely have a fiduciary obligation to their investors. But the temporality of that fiducuiary responsibility is not specified nor agreed upon. In many ways, this trend towards offshoring trades short-term profits for potentially disasterous long-term results. If everyone is offshoring, clearly there is no long-term sustainable advantage from doing it. You are also provding multitudes of new entrepeneurs with the funding and knowledge to compete with your business in a legal environment suspicious of and relatively immune to IP or non-competition protections for you. And, since moving a job to another country gets rid of one potential customer in your largest market, given that other countries' markets are not expanding so quickly, you are giving up certainty in your ability to market.
No, I don't believe that the current offshoring trends have as much to do with fiduciary responsibility as much as they have to do with the fact that it's an easy way for a lazy CEO to get a quick pop in the balance sheet and the inbreeding and herd mentality that pervades upper managements.
You would if you took pride in your work.
And, yes, it is probably one of the reasons you're not rich yet (another being luck).
What!? They actually knock money off your bill for less crap on your TV and you're complaning!?!?
I mean, come on... What could you be paying per month to have the privelege of being an advertisement receiver - $5? I hope you're not stupid enough to be paying more. If the world were fair, they'd be paying you to watch their crap (except for porn, of course).
Hey! He'll have plenty of time to work at Starbucks after he finishes school and can't find a job!
Clippy needs his residuals from the Office sales!
I used to work for a major AV company. In one version of one of our e-mail scanning products we had prototyped a feature where the AV scanner, if it found a password protected archive, would try to open it using a standard list of passwords and every word in the email message. We were told to remove it by our management because they didn't want to have even the slightest user suspicion that the passwords were being retained, retransmitted, etc. Of course, it would have saved a lot of grief (from this virus, at least).
And the group that had this (now seemingly prescient) idea? What happened to them? Their project was moved to another site in the company and most of them were laid off. No wonder the AV companies have such l33t s|<i11z.
IBM said to be reeling after this 30-year late counterpuch. News at eleven.
It also insures that every whit of their business processes - from lending guidelines to customer service directives to telemarketing scripts - are given to new foreign competitors. It's hard to maintain competitive advantage when your competitors see and know everything you do to give yourself that advantage. In the end, your competitors can simply copy your process with lower cost, since they did not have to pay to develop them in the first place.
>My feature wishlist looks like:
>- faster startup / instant-on
>- longer battery life
>- USB ports
>- even smaller/lighter
Check out the Fujitsu Lifebook P1120. Other than the brighter screen and the 30-40G HD, it has all these features. Plus built-in 802.11b wireless. Mine runs Win2K Pro/RH9.0 dual-boot. Only weights 2.5 pounds (less without the extended battery) and runs for 6+ hours. A great little machine...
Dude! Get with the now! It's the eServer iSeries!
OTOH, it's still the greatest processor ever made. And OS/400 still rocks.
Now can someone help me keep this penguin from biting me in the ass?
But you can excuse DEC for the mistake - they had migrated their customers to a radically different architecture before. When DEC killed the PDP-10 line, they put in a lot of effort to move their existing customer base for that machine to the VAX. And it worked. People may have bitched, but they moved because there was no real alternative then (the only other 36-bit line at the time was Univac, and they were getting ready to throw in the towel). So the DEC customer choice was either another DEC machine or an IBM mainframe of some sort. And guess which one their customers chose? Sure they bitched about it, but it wasn't as if they had any real choice in staying with some sort of comaptible system. And most of their software that wasn't written in MACRO-10 or Bliss was tied to DEC Fortran or COBOL.
It's clear that when DEC did the switch to the Alpha, they expected something similar to happen. The few things they didn't notice? First, there were other 32- and 64-bit platforms to migrate to. A lot of the customers took the opportunity to look at SPARC or MIPS or (GASP!) Intel 32-bit offerrings as well as the 64-bit goodness soon to come out from the other two. Second, most customer's software was not as tied as heavily to their platform. In the interrim, code had migrated to C, FORTRANs and COBOLs had become much more standardized, and very few folks wrote in MACRO-32. Toss in the fact that it's a lot easier to port a program from one 32-bit platform to another 32-bit platform and it's no wonder that DEC's customer base ran away screaming. And that was the end of DEC.
Now Intel, OTOH, has gone through this with at least two other architectures - the IA-432 and the 9900(??) - you'd have thought they's learned their lesson by now. Oh well, third time's a charm - maybe thry'll introduce the 128-bit extensions next year to retake the lead!
Neither would I. But I would call it happening to large numbers of (once) relatively well-paid citizens a dangerous economic and political strategy.
Oh yeah! And you can't make a chess program that plays better than the people build... Oh you can?
In reality, you can build protocols that work in the presence of malicious participants. They are called Byzantime architectures. Their use is why you can actually trust some systems. For instance, OS/400 is very good at separating concerns and becomes a very secure OS in the process.
Sorry to dispute this, but I'm happy to let you know that your wishes may come true, as per this story in The Inquirer. Obligatory quote:
CHIP FIRM Intel will this week announce details about a new wave in desktop computing using the Centrino bundle.
The wonder is it didn't do it earlier, we ran a crusade for this.
The chip firm is likely to announce it this week.
And Overclockers.com speculates that the whole thing basically means putting the M into desktops without all of the other Centrino crud.
You assume no salary growth over that period -these days, not a bad assumption :-( - and the idea that a person can remain in his career for 13 years. Plus, you're forgetting to figure in any interest on loans. Yup, looks like a pretty good deal! And, yes, I am being sarcastic.
Well, that's one theory, but there are other takes on the issue - such as capitalist economies are in such bad shape by the time they impose tariffs that there is nothing that could have been done to prevent the Depression and that tariffs, in retrospect, make as good a scapegoat as anything. Economic issues are seldom as black and white as you seem to think. Tariffs may be needed to preserve economic capability over the long run because an economy that looks only at NPV adjusted figures as the value of its manufacturing base may not be taking into account systemic externalities, opportunity costs, and political trade realities.
Or the USD could be immensely devalued to the point where no one wants it. And that means we can't buy oil with it or buy goods to import. That also means that the other countries have, essentially, been working for us for free because the dollars they hold will be worthless. But nothing like that could ever happen, could it? Not with the expanding budget deficit, the expanding trade deficit, a general lowering of wages to where the American market shrinks with deflation because, of course, our businesses wouldn't dream of converting their USDs to EURs before they bailed out of this country, would they? I mean, there couldn't be any capitalistic profit in that, could there?
And this is the real problem - there is no sustainable advantage in outsourcing. Eventually, everyone who can outsource something does outsource it and then you're back in the same boat of no revenue growth, but it's five years later and you actually have less control over the situation. Plus, you've given your new foreign competitors the capital they need to create most of the infrastructure required to invade your market. The idea that capitalism requires the destruction of your economy ten years from now because it makes money a year from now is the main reason why we Capitalists are going to see our system collapse the same way that the Soviet system did. The main issue is that rewards will flow to those who have the discipline to wait for rewards, not those who choose to have them today. It's simply a case of short-term vs. long-term and we're on the wrong side of the equation here. If you think you're getting bit in the ass now, just wait a few years when the chickens finally come home to roost.
They were variants that were probably caught by existing definitions or heuristic scans. As for why they're viruses? Well, a tobacco mosaic virus infects plants, not humans, yet it's still a virus. There are several viruses used in genetic engineering that never infect organisms (only cells from organisms). The class is defined by the structure and capability, not by the action actually happening.
Well, yes - having worked at an AV company in the past - they do realize it. The problem is the "feature bingo" that IT managers play with AV product selection. The systems that are being used today were designed back in the day when E-mail spoofing was not common as a virus tactic. In fact, the first set of products only had ways to send notification to a specific user - usually an administrator. But that wasn't good enough. Admins started saying, "Well, it's all well and good that you notify me about this. How about notifying the schlub up the food chain so I don't have to tell him myself?" So the AV manufacturers (being relatively helpful people) added this feature and made it on by default so that lazy receiver admin didn't have to turn it on. This feature became an item on an IT manager's check list and now it would be suicide to NOT have this feature. And why is it still enabled by default? Because the admin that was too lazy to send e-mail back to the "From:" sender is still too lazy to send it to the originating sender, and if someone gets a non-spoofing virus and doesn't report it upstream, other admins get their knickers in a twist.
The AV manufacturers have done some things to remedy this problem - adding options to not send notification e-mail on "known" e-mail spoofing viruses, etc. And admins can always turn off sender notification entirely. The problem is that you don't always know that something is a spoofing virus until after a heuristic algorithm has caught something suspicious and the e-mails have started flying (and those machines that haven't updated teir AV definitions are still spewing their notifications weeks later). I guess the AV systems could ship with sender notification turned off (Guess what! These days, most do!). But you can (as always) count on undertrained and oblivious sysmins to muck up the works. Mail security admins - heal thyselves.
It's not only about transport costs for seasonal and wasting stocks - it's about the overall supply and demand and where the crap is when. So it's not about shipping costs - it's about the differential between the shipping costs and the storage cost for equivalent stock levels.
Or, you can buy a Fujitsu P1120. Prism Wireless, ATI graphics and, instead of some stupid Pentium-M, a Cruso chip all built in. And all wrapped up in a 2 pound package (2.5 pounds w/extended battery for a 6-8 hr. battery life) of portable goodness. Oh yeah - you can get it to dual boot Linux. Redhat 9 detects all devices except the touch screen, but you can download the loadable driver and hack your XConfig if you really want it. A really nice little system.
Not the only one - the keyboard sorta sucks because of it's size. But then, I cart along a USB keyboard if I think I'm going to need to type for long periods, so 's'all good. I've gotten mine set up as a dual boot W2K/Linux system. I have the touch screen and wireless subsystems working in Linux and I'm looking at upgrading to a 2.6 kernel for the ACPI support. We'll see how that goes. All-in-all a great little machine (and it gets people's attention, too)
... ARE BELONG TO US!