If it's not made by machines, the odds are it's made by underpaid and overworked humans in some overseas sweatshop conditions.
North Americans and Europeans aren't willing to pay for the true cost of the labour.
I seem to recall an article estimating what it would cost to manufacture an iPad in North America with the unions, health and safety regulations, and so on respected. They came up with a number in the neighbourhood of $1400.
I misread a bit of the article. "This American Life" is not owned by the New York Times as I thought; the Times had to retract a different article by the same fellow.
But that still doesn't change the fundamental problem: Why was a "comedian's" opinion presented as fact?
What I don't understand is why his "act" was presented as "fact" by the Times.
Their excuse is that it was an "op-ed". Opinion pieces are normally clearly identified as such; this piece was not.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are going to assume that all the issues raised were bullshit because of the lies that were told, which means that if there was any truth at all, it's just been conveniently swept under the rug.
Bozo boy has done FAR more harm to the idea of protecting foreign workers than he could ever have imagined through this literal bullshit.
But your ignoring the key point: Who determines the "fair value"?
My reading of the article is that either the government or the tax office would be determining "fair value." So what you convince the investor the company is worth is irrelevant -- it's the government that decides when the investment is "excessive."
If they're redacting the information from the talks, they must think "pirates" are terrorists.
Because the only excuse that's even vaguely valid for redacting government information is "national security", and even that gets applied with too broad a brush in most nations.
Second the 30% tax is not on the investment, but on any money paid for share over the fair market value.
The problem is that angel investors are not investing based on the current fair market value of a company, but based on their belief in the projections of the future value of the company and it's hoped-for revenue. The very definition of an angel investor is someone who invests in a company before it has any significant market share, and sometimes even before it has any customers.
What's the fair market value of a company with no customers?
That used to be the case, but no more. No matter where you apply, there are hundreds if not thousands of resumes going in for every job. SaskTel used to get as many as a hundred resumes a DAY when they weren't even advertising positions! My last job, a "mom & pop" sized outfit, was receiving a half dozen resumes a week without needing or advertising for people.
Times are tough all over. Unless you're willing to take any IT-related job that comes up, you're going to be out of work for a while.
That's the facts of life in modern North America. It's the result of outsourcing the majority of the programming work overseas. And it is NOT going to get better.
The best DBA I know is a fellow who only has a Grade 12 education and who was a sheet metal worker/sign maker until he was 45, when he discovered computers.
12 years later, he's one of the best Oracle DBAs I've ever met, and in high demand.
One of the best designers I knew over the years was a Philosophy major at Northern Telecom.
A university education teaches you how to learn, and how to identify what to learn. Within 4-5 years, anything you learn from university programming courses is outdated and obsolete, except for the basic theories of algorithm complexity and your texts of "standard" algorithms. The odds are even the languages you use to program will change within a decade.
So don't sweat it -- point people to your OSS work on your resume to prove you can do it, and let them judge for themselves.
Just don't be surprised if it takes a while to find a good job. It can literally take a couple of years in the current economy to find a "good" job, so be prepared to do some pretty tedious and hideous grunt work, or to get by at a tech support call center for a few years.
The question is what incentive can you offer people who know it's not a "ghost zapping game", but a ploy to get you to take photos of unusual view angles and out-of-the-way places? I'd have a serious problem with anyone taking pictures through cell or tablet devices without even the user knowing the pictures were being taken -- talk about a situation and software that is ripe for abuse by "we don't need no steekink warrants" law enforcement types. (e.g. Being conned into taking a photo that shows where you are 20 minutes after sending a text arranging to meet your dealer, or taking shots every half an hour using the phone of someone who is known to be in a gang.)
However, I do see the potential for the idea of providing real rewards for taking out-of-the-way photos. Things like points/coins to be used in the owner's favourite pay-as-you-play "social" game, for example, or iCoke points to be saved towards some Coke-sponsored trinket (I stopped collecting iCoke points when I realized you couldn't even get a free Coke by doing so like you could with the old system -- all you can get is downloads of MP3s that I don't want to listen to in the first place. 'twas a sad, sad day when I realized the old "You're a winner!" cap liners were no more. But I digress...)
What about a photo-based "geo-caching" type game, where players are given the GPS coordinates and a description of what they're supposed to shoot when they get there?
Dude, we're not talking "C". We're talking a much, much older language called PL/C. If you put a semicolon at the end of every statement as you suggest, the compiler would barf.
Sorry for all the typos and grammar errors. I've got a migraine from hell and I'm having trouble seeing due to auras, so I'm pretty much touch-typing with my eyes closed.
I'll never forget wishing I could just walk out during the first 2-3 classes before I knew attendance wasn't mandatory. We sat through 30 MINUTES of some stupid humanoid trying badgering the prof as to when and where semi-colons were required. It was a brutal, brutal discussion. This individual was as dumb as the proverbial post, and could not grasp the basic idea that you needed a semi colon at the end of every statement except the last one in a code block. It was scary to think this individual might some day be a programmer.
But we need not have worried. The bozo was failing so bad two months into the course that they quit. The classmates who had to attend lectures to learn the details of programmer were greatly relieved to have monkey-brain gone. None of them could ask real questions because yoyo would not STFU and let anyone else ask a question that went beyond the most basic syntax clarification.
BTW, despite wasting 30 minutes of the prof's time, wank-meister got a whopping 5/50 on their first lab because even with feedback from the compiler, they could not figure out where to put the semicolons. It was pretty pathetic. They'd done so bad the lab instructor held up their work and used it as an example in front of the whole class of how not to write code.
Aside from asking your peers about whether they'd like to do peer reviews, you could also ask them how much experience they have. Just because someone is a student doesn't mean they have no programming experience.
I and two first-year friends of mine, for example, pretty much skipped our entire first year programming course except when exams were scheduled (with the blessings of the prof) because we'd all been programming machine language since we were 14-15 years old. By the time we hit university, we had 3-4 years of programming experience and were way beyond our classmates who were still learning basics like how to work with arrays and how to code loops.
Keep in mind, though, that we had no experience with the professional aspects of code. In other words, we didn't know how to document worth shit.
You may NOT monitor my data, voice, and video traffic without a search warrant.
You may request my contact information from my ISP without a warrant, the same as you can do a reverse phone book lookup. It will cost virtually nothing except staff time to do the reverse-name lookup, because my ISP already has a database with that information. But DAMNED if I'm going to tolerate an abuse of my Charter rights:
8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.
In other words, if you want more than my name and address:
Since they collude to keep the prices high, it still costs about $60/mo just to get decent internet access.
You can get a basic 1.5Mbit DSL or cable link from SaskTel or Access Cable here in Saskatchewan pretty much anywhere in the province for $25/month, roughly the same price as a land line. Sure I pay for a $60/month upgraded link, but that's because I need upload capacity for work, not because I needed faster downloads or couldn't stream video and audio just fine at 1.5Mbit.
Faster services are meant for multi-user households, effectively the same as if you had multiple phone lines for each connected device. Just because you can get the faster service doesn't mean you need it.
I know one fellow who pays for the 10Mbit top-tier download package, and gloats that he can pull down a movie torrent in 20 minutes. In the meantime, I can go to my sister's place and start a video stream instantly on her 1.5Mbit link. It pissed him off to no end when I pointed that out to him, and went off on a rant that sounded like Nigel's "but it goes to ELEVEN!" in Spinal Tap.:)
I didn't say it was hard to do or even a novel idea. Just saying it's what I plan to do with my cards.
I've never gone to a printing company without my own design and layout for business cards. Why would I want to use one of the "stock" layouts and look like everyone else? If your card doesn't stand out for any reason, it just disappears in the pile.
The most unique card I've ever seen was from a fellow who worked in the custom metal and steel forming industry. The used their own stamps and laser etching equipment to print thin steel business cards a little thicker than the typical razor blade. Now those stood out in a stack. Not sure what happened to mine -- I hung on to the one he gave me for years, just because it was so different.
Not everyone's going to say "Oh let me get out my smartphone and start the QR code app and scan the QR code, etc"
Precisely why I want to have the QR code printed on the back of a business card I can hand out. They'll have the text version for the 90% of the population that doesn't know what the interesting pattern of dots on the back is for in the first place.:)
I don't expect this "bump" capability someone mentioned to be any more useful than the Palm Pilot's ability to beam your contact info via IR was. Even though I had my PP for years and there were many people I ran into who had one as well, I can only recall beaming my contact info twice. It was a neat idea, but a pain in the ass in practice -- it was just far quicker and easier to hand someone a card than to pull out a compatible device to beam with.
I want to set up a business card with one of those digicodes on the back that can be scanned by a smartphone, such as appear on YouTube VEVO broadcasts.
Realistically, business cards are for giving people your contact info, and nothing more. I never give business cards to people who already have my contact info, but they're invaluable for shows and conferences where they don't have your contact info.
Plus they're handy for dropping in to those "win a meal" restaurant promotion draws.:)
That goes for the companies that set up "newsletters" as well. I can't tell you how many "newsletters" I've subscribed to over the years to keep tabs on a companies products, only to be inundated by weekly "specials" trying to sell me their old stuff, which I've already bought if I wanted it. Needless to say, I've unsubscribed to every single one of those email lists within a month.
Give me information about new products in your newsletter, not a regurgitated nag to buy last year's model.
One thing advertisers don't seem to understand is that I actually like catching a new ad when I watch TV at a friend's place. Many of them are very artistic, cute, and funny.
But even a good joke told 5-6 times per day wears thin.
It's the broadcast time that is the majority of the expense for most advertisements, not the creation of the content. Stop torturing people with the same joke 50-60 times per week for a month at a time, and maybe they'll stop skipping over the ads. Show a new ad each day, or at least once a week.
But stop trying to hammer your "message" into us by repeating yourself ad-nauseum at full volume dozens of times per week. All you're doing is pissing off people and forcing them to use torrents and PVRs to escape your tripe.
Modern advertising is as annoying and effective as a two or three year old yelling "Mommie, mommie, mommie, can we..." over and over for three hours straight, trying to wear down their parents.
It's my money in the end. I'm not going to spend it on your products or give it to you just because you nag like a child. In fact, I'm likely to use your competitor's product because they're not insulting my intelligence and harassing me.
While heavily compressed MP3s sound worse than FLAC, even FLAC doesn't sound like a recording of natural music. And that's because of the simple fact that a 44.1 KHz sample rate isn't fast enough to catch the details of sounds like:
A high hat cymbal, which should ring like metal when struck, not break up into a crashing noise
Wires on a snare drum, which you should hear rattling against the drum head instead of crackling like tissue paper
Triangles or bells, which should ring delicately over the music for a few seconds, not disappear after making a few seconds of decidedly un-bell-like noise.
Go ahead and mod me down again for being able to identify and tag the difference between live music and 44.1 samples again. After all, just because you can't hear it must mean I'm "delusional."
Slashdot Mirror
If it's not made by machines, the odds are it's made by underpaid and overworked humans in some overseas sweatshop conditions.
North Americans and Europeans aren't willing to pay for the true cost of the labour.
I seem to recall an article estimating what it would cost to manufacture an iPad in North America with the unions, health and safety regulations, and so on respected. They came up with a number in the neighbourhood of $1400.
I misread a bit of the article. "This American Life" is not owned by the New York Times as I thought; the Times had to retract a different article by the same fellow.
But that still doesn't change the fundamental problem: Why was a "comedian's" opinion presented as fact?
This is ONE case where I think Apple SHOULD sue.
What I don't understand is why his "act" was presented as "fact" by the Times.
Their excuse is that it was an "op-ed". Opinion pieces are normally clearly identified as such; this piece was not.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are going to assume that all the issues raised were bullshit because of the lies that were told, which means that if there was any truth at all, it's just been conveniently swept under the rug.
Bozo boy has done FAR more harm to the idea of protecting foreign workers than he could ever have imagined through this literal bullshit.
But your ignoring the key point: Who determines the "fair value"?
My reading of the article is that either the government or the tax office would be determining "fair value." So what you convince the investor the company is worth is irrelevant -- it's the government that decides when the investment is "excessive."
If they're redacting the information from the talks, they must think "pirates" are terrorists.
Because the only excuse that's even vaguely valid for redacting government information is "national security", and even that gets applied with too broad a brush in most nations.
The problem is that angel investors are not investing based on the current fair market value of a company, but based on their belief in the projections of the future value of the company and it's hoped-for revenue. The very definition of an angel investor is someone who invests in a company before it has any significant market share, and sometimes even before it has any customers.
What's the fair market value of a company with no customers?
Think about that.
That used to be the case, but no more. No matter where you apply, there are hundreds if not thousands of resumes going in for every job. SaskTel used to get as many as a hundred resumes a DAY when they weren't even advertising positions! My last job, a "mom & pop" sized outfit, was receiving a half dozen resumes a week without needing or advertising for people.
Times are tough all over. Unless you're willing to take any IT-related job that comes up, you're going to be out of work for a while.
That's the facts of life in modern North America. It's the result of outsourcing the majority of the programming work overseas. And it is NOT going to get better.
Pretty much like a 21st century buggy whip.
The best DBA I know is a fellow who only has a Grade 12 education and who was a sheet metal worker/sign maker until he was 45, when he discovered computers.
12 years later, he's one of the best Oracle DBAs I've ever met, and in high demand.
One of the best designers I knew over the years was a Philosophy major at Northern Telecom.
A university education teaches you how to learn, and how to identify what to learn. Within 4-5 years, anything you learn from university programming courses is outdated and obsolete, except for the basic theories of algorithm complexity and your texts of "standard" algorithms. The odds are even the languages you use to program will change within a decade.
So don't sweat it -- point people to your OSS work on your resume to prove you can do it, and let them judge for themselves.
Just don't be surprised if it takes a while to find a good job. It can literally take a couple of years in the current economy to find a "good" job, so be prepared to do some pretty tedious and hideous grunt work, or to get by at a tech support call center for a few years.
The question is what incentive can you offer people who know it's not a "ghost zapping game", but a ploy to get you to take photos of unusual view angles and out-of-the-way places? I'd have a serious problem with anyone taking pictures through cell or tablet devices without even the user knowing the pictures were being taken -- talk about a situation and software that is ripe for abuse by "we don't need no steekink warrants" law enforcement types. (e.g. Being conned into taking a photo that shows where you are 20 minutes after sending a text arranging to meet your dealer, or taking shots every half an hour using the phone of someone who is known to be in a gang.)
However, I do see the potential for the idea of providing real rewards for taking out-of-the-way photos. Things like points/coins to be used in the owner's favourite pay-as-you-play "social" game, for example, or iCoke points to be saved towards some Coke-sponsored trinket (I stopped collecting iCoke points when I realized you couldn't even get a free Coke by doing so like you could with the old system -- all you can get is downloads of MP3s that I don't want to listen to in the first place. 'twas a sad, sad day when I realized the old "You're a winner!" cap liners were no more. But I digress...)
What about a photo-based "geo-caching" type game, where players are given the GPS coordinates and a description of what they're supposed to shoot when they get there?
Dude, we're not talking "C". We're talking a much, much older language called PL/C. If you put a semicolon at the end of every statement as you suggest, the compiler would barf.
Avoid the theft/snatching charge.
Just punch the papparazi in the face and deal with the misdemeanor assault charge.
That depends what your goal is. If your goal is maintainable code, try deleting all the comments and ask people to tell you what the code does.
If they can't figure it out from the function and variable names, you need to stop using non-descriptive names like "i".
Sorry for all the typos and grammar errors. I've got a migraine from hell and I'm having trouble seeing due to auras, so I'm pretty much touch-typing with my eyes closed.
I'll never forget wishing I could just walk out during the first 2-3 classes before I knew attendance wasn't mandatory. We sat through 30 MINUTES of some stupid humanoid trying badgering the prof as to when and where semi-colons were required. It was a brutal, brutal discussion. This individual was as dumb as the proverbial post, and could not grasp the basic idea that you needed a semi colon at the end of every statement except the last one in a code block. It was scary to think this individual might some day be a programmer.
But we need not have worried. The bozo was failing so bad two months into the course that they quit. The classmates who had to attend lectures to learn the details of programmer were greatly relieved to have monkey-brain gone. None of them could ask real questions because yoyo would not STFU and let anyone else ask a question that went beyond the most basic syntax clarification.
BTW, despite wasting 30 minutes of the prof's time, wank-meister got a whopping 5/50 on their first lab because even with feedback from the compiler, they could not figure out where to put the semicolons. It was pretty pathetic. They'd done so bad the lab instructor held up their work and used it as an example in front of the whole class of how not to write code.
Aside from asking your peers about whether they'd like to do peer reviews, you could also ask them how much experience they have. Just because someone is a student doesn't mean they have no programming experience.
I and two first-year friends of mine, for example, pretty much skipped our entire first year programming course except when exams were scheduled (with the blessings of the prof) because we'd all been programming machine language since we were 14-15 years old. By the time we hit university, we had 3-4 years of programming experience and were way beyond our classmates who were still learning basics like how to work with arrays and how to code loops.
Keep in mind, though, that we had no experience with the professional aspects of code. In other words, we didn't know how to document worth shit.
You may NOT monitor my data, voice, and video traffic without a search warrant.
You may request my contact information from my ISP without a warrant, the same as you can do a reverse phone book lookup. It will cost virtually nothing except staff time to do the reverse-name lookup, because my ISP already has a database with that information. But DAMNED if I'm going to tolerate an abuse of my Charter rights:
In other words, if you want more than my name and address:
GET A FUCKING WARRANT!!!
You can get a basic 1.5Mbit DSL or cable link from SaskTel or Access Cable here in Saskatchewan pretty much anywhere in the province for $25/month, roughly the same price as a land line. Sure I pay for a $60/month upgraded link, but that's because I need upload capacity for work, not because I needed faster downloads or couldn't stream video and audio just fine at 1.5Mbit.
Faster services are meant for multi-user households, effectively the same as if you had multiple phone lines for each connected device. Just because you can get the faster service doesn't mean you need it.
I know one fellow who pays for the 10Mbit top-tier download package, and gloats that he can pull down a movie torrent in 20 minutes. In the meantime, I can go to my sister's place and start a video stream instantly on her 1.5Mbit link. It pissed him off to no end when I pointed that out to him, and went off on a rant that sounded like Nigel's "but it goes to ELEVEN!" in Spinal Tap. :)
Well, yeah, that was kind of the plan.
I didn't say it was hard to do or even a novel idea. Just saying it's what I plan to do with my cards.
I've never gone to a printing company without my own design and layout for business cards. Why would I want to use one of the "stock" layouts and look like everyone else? If your card doesn't stand out for any reason, it just disappears in the pile.
The most unique card I've ever seen was from a fellow who worked in the custom metal and steel forming industry. The used their own stamps and laser etching equipment to print thin steel business cards a little thicker than the typical razor blade. Now those stood out in a stack. Not sure what happened to mine -- I hung on to the one he gave me for years, just because it was so different.
Precisely why I want to have the QR code printed on the back of a business card I can hand out. They'll have the text version for the 90% of the population that doesn't know what the interesting pattern of dots on the back is for in the first place. :)
I don't expect this "bump" capability someone mentioned to be any more useful than the Palm Pilot's ability to beam your contact info via IR was. Even though I had my PP for years and there were many people I ran into who had one as well, I can only recall beaming my contact info twice. It was a neat idea, but a pain in the ass in practice -- it was just far quicker and easier to hand someone a card than to pull out a compatible device to beam with.
Gee, I guess the burgers and stuff I've eaten over the years were a figment of my imagination.
I don't win often, but I do win.
And I've never found myself put on a spam list or otherwise had my contact info abused for doing so.
Unlike web companies, brick and mortar businesses like restaurants still give a damn about their customers.
I want to set up a business card with one of those digicodes on the back that can be scanned by a smartphone, such as appear on YouTube VEVO broadcasts.
Realistically, business cards are for giving people your contact info, and nothing more. I never give business cards to people who already have my contact info, but they're invaluable for shows and conferences where they don't have your contact info.
Plus they're handy for dropping in to those "win a meal" restaurant promotion draws. :)
That goes for the companies that set up "newsletters" as well. I can't tell you how many "newsletters" I've subscribed to over the years to keep tabs on a companies products, only to be inundated by weekly "specials" trying to sell me their old stuff, which I've already bought if I wanted it. Needless to say, I've unsubscribed to every single one of those email lists within a month.
Give me information about new products in your newsletter, not a regurgitated nag to buy last year's model.
One thing advertisers don't seem to understand is that I actually like catching a new ad when I watch TV at a friend's place. Many of them are very artistic, cute, and funny.
But even a good joke told 5-6 times per day wears thin.
It's the broadcast time that is the majority of the expense for most advertisements, not the creation of the content. Stop torturing people with the same joke 50-60 times per week for a month at a time, and maybe they'll stop skipping over the ads. Show a new ad each day, or at least once a week.
But stop trying to hammer your "message" into us by repeating yourself ad-nauseum at full volume dozens of times per week. All you're doing is pissing off people and forcing them to use torrents and PVRs to escape your tripe.
Modern advertising is as annoying and effective as a two or three year old yelling "Mommie, mommie, mommie, can we..." over and over for three hours straight, trying to wear down their parents.
It's my money in the end. I'm not going to spend it on your products or give it to you just because you nag like a child. In fact, I'm likely to use your competitor's product because they're not insulting my intelligence and harassing me.
While heavily compressed MP3s sound worse than FLAC, even FLAC doesn't sound like a recording of natural music. And that's because of the simple fact that a 44.1 KHz sample rate isn't fast enough to catch the details of sounds like:
Go ahead and mod me down again for being able to identify and tag the difference between live music and 44.1 samples again. After all, just because you can't hear it must mean I'm "delusional."