That has absolutely not been my company's experience with doing development in India. Indian staff and offices *are* much cheaper, sometimes orders of magnitude cheaper than US offices, but the productivity out of our Indian offices is nowhere near that of others. Going forward I've been told India will be used mainly for doing QA work. Another common complaint I hear about India is the very high turnover. It's like the old dot-com days in Silicon Valley where everyone only stays at a job for a few months, just long enough to learn what they need to hop to the next better paying job. Ironically, we employ a large number of Indians in our California offices as well, and *their* productivity is typically pretty high. Heck, at this point, the California engineering teams are mostly Indian, with almost 100% of the Engineering management being Indian as well.
Now, Canada, on the other hand, I've been told that our Canadian offices are a much better value. Not as cheap as India, but much cheaper than the US (not only are salaries cheaper, but the company doesn't pay as much if anything for health benefits) and the productivity of the Canadian offices are fairly high.
I'm pretty sure we do some development out of Israel as well, but I honestly haven't heard much from the engineering managers about those offices, so I don't know what the costs and productivity are like there.
"There ARE higher level Tech Support jobs out there that pay more, thats true. However, there are a very limited number, how is everyone who is currently in a minimum wage Tech Support position supposed to get one, skilled or not?"
The same way I, and almost everyone I know in IT, did? By starting out as tier 1 support, learning on the job, demonstrating competence, and getting promoted?
"That's the whole point of free market capitalism; if you charge significantly more than the cost of producing something, other players will enter the market, thus increasing supply, thus causing falling prices as the production rate ramps up to meet demand."
Yes, but Cost To Copy != Cost To Produce. It costs potentially years of someone's life to produce an application, or piece of art or music. It costs virtually nothing to duplicate them now. You don't even have the manufacturing costs of media any more.
Someone who designed the world's greatest widget eventually has to compete with people who will try to build their widgets more efficiently. But they don't have to deal with competitors who can reduce their cost of production to near zero. At least not until we get Star Trek replicators. Now *that* would really fuck up an economy. At that point the only people producing anything of real value are energy producers. And maybe not even them if one of the things you can replicate are small consumer fusion generators.
The amount of time it takes me to process an atm/credit transaction is easily still much faster than the time it takes the average cashier to count out change.
Actually, doesn't OSX now support right-clicking via taps on the right edge of the touchpad?
I know currently that's not supported in Windows through Boot Camp, but I assume that's just a question of the feature being added to the touchpad driver.
"With Boot Camp this is different, apple is emulating BIOS inside their own EFI boot manager"
I don't believe this is true, unless there's a firmware update as part of Boot Camp, Apple did not implement the BIOS compatibility layer in their EFI implementation.
I'm pretty sure they're not emulating BIOS, they're providing Windows with an alternate boot loader, similar to how the earlier Windows On Mac project worked.
"No commercial company can sustain that amount of development and give the product away. Period. Time will prove this correct.
I just love it when the MS astroturfers around here (ACs all) tell me that the world I live, breathe, and work in every day is simply not possible."
Are you in fact a commercial company that has been giving away your products for free for several decades?
The previous post's claim was that devoting R&D money to deveoping products that you give away for free is an unsustainable long-term business model. I'm not sure that I agree, time will tell, but it has nothing to do with whether an individual person like you or me can happily *use* those free products.
Or are you still feeling brilliant telling your IT staff all about how "you can get an IDE 200GB drive for $50 at Staples, so why can't that be plugged into the EMC or NetApp fileserver?"
Criminy, I wish I could punch someone in the testicles every time I heard that one. Seriously, it comes up every fucking time R&D fills up their mission critical Five Nines High Performance file servers. "Wow, that server is expensive, we're just doing to use this old Dell and some spare disks to be our file server."
Have I missed part of TFA where it states how this implant is actually *permanent*? I don't see why it couldn't be removed almost as easily as it's implanted.
The apparent ease with which these tags can be skimmed and cloned would be a greater concern to me, personally, as it means implementing an expensive, mildly painful, invasive (which means a non-zero risk of complications, even if small) prodecure, all for what is actually a non-gain in security. Doesn't sound like even remotely a worthwhile trade-off to me.
The mushroom farmer is free to raise his mushroom prices if he feels he can get better prices for them. He's free to do that regardless of what Mario Batali is doing. One would assume unless he's very stupid that he has been raising and lowering his prices according to supply and demand all along.
On the other hand, Mario Batali is also free to buy mushrooms from someone else who offers a better price.
And in this day and age, the smarter mushroom salesman might even offer Mario a *discount* in exchange for Mario putting a prominent "Mario exclusively uses Frobozz Mushrooms" on the menu.
Only on Slashdot does throwing living human beings in ovens equate to internet censorship.
Yeah, we don't like a lot of things the PRC does. We even consider some of those things "evil".
But then, a lot of other countries say that about us when we execute a mentally-challenged person, or even when we execute anyone at all. Or when we invade a country on our own volition that hasn't directly attacked us. *You* may not think those things are evil, but a lot of other people in the world do.
Have you ever bought a diamond? You're supporting "evil". Several brands of shoes and clothing? Also evil. Are Tobacco companies evil? Then huge swaths of consumer products and services support that, as those companies have their fingers in lots of other pies. Where does one draw the line?
I actually tried one of these back a year or two ago, since I needed a new keyboard. (Honestly, one thing that made me consider it a little more was it would be a lot easier to clean. My KBs attract cat hair and other stuff like mad.)
Sadly, the thing was a piece of crap. Using it for gaming was okay, but not a revolutionary difference. Worse though, was the regular keyboard. All talk of "key feel" and whatever aside, I had consistent problems with keys sticking down. Especially the shift key. I assumed at first this must be some disability feature I had mistakenly enabled but could not find an answer. Now it sits unused on a shelf.
Blizzard has a long history of releasing its games on both PC and Mac, so they undoubtedly already have the processes, programmers, and infrastructure in place for doing this. Something they wouldn't seem to have for linux.
Interesting, I'll pass that on to the people who couldn't get it to work.
The important thing, of course, is that the feature works interopably between MS Office and other products, since these people are commonly sending documents around to editors, journal reviewers, etc.
If you keep an eye on the ratings, very often those crappy random monster movies are the highest-rated shows on sci-fi every week, and at the very least tend to stay neck-and-neck with Stargate and BSG. But I've seen many weeks where things like "Pterodactyl 3: The Birdening" garnered much higher ratings than everything else.
Of all the Mac people I know who still use MS Office, they all use it because they have to for professional writing/editing work. And they all use it because the "Track Changes" Functionality is mandatory. They tell me that because OpenOffice does not support this feature (or perhaps doesn't support it well?) they can never use OpenOffice.
Some of them have been looking into NeoOffice, which apparently does have good support for tracking changes.
I literally get almost zero spam any more. However, this is likely only because my ISP implemented "greylisting". So, while I'm definitely getting virtually no spam anymore, I'm also sometimes not getting email because someone's mail server isn't following proper procedures. (American Express, for one, I could not get email from American Express through said ISP.)
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, how many people need it enough to pay $70-100 for it? Or am I somehow reading the price on Amazon and BN wrong?
That has absolutely not been my company's experience with doing development in India. Indian staff and offices *are* much cheaper, sometimes orders of magnitude cheaper than US offices, but the productivity out of our Indian offices is nowhere near that of others. Going forward I've been told India will be used mainly for doing QA work. Another common complaint I hear about India is the very high turnover. It's like the old dot-com days in Silicon Valley where everyone only stays at a job for a few months, just long enough to learn what they need to hop to the next better paying job. Ironically, we employ a large number of Indians in our California offices as well, and *their* productivity is typically pretty high. Heck, at this point, the California engineering teams are mostly Indian, with almost 100% of the Engineering management being Indian as well.
Now, Canada, on the other hand, I've been told that our Canadian offices are a much better value. Not as cheap as India, but much cheaper than the US (not only are salaries cheaper, but the company doesn't pay as much if anything for health benefits) and the productivity of the Canadian offices are fairly high.
I'm pretty sure we do some development out of Israel as well, but I honestly haven't heard much from the engineering managers about those offices, so I don't know what the costs and productivity are like there.
"There ARE higher level Tech Support jobs out there that pay more, thats true. However, there are a very limited number, how is everyone who is currently in a minimum wage Tech Support position supposed to get one, skilled or not?"
The same way I, and almost everyone I know in IT, did? By starting out as tier 1 support, learning on the job, demonstrating competence, and getting promoted?
"That's the whole point of free market capitalism; if you charge significantly more than the cost of producing something, other players will enter the market, thus increasing supply, thus causing falling prices as the production rate ramps up to meet demand."
Yes, but Cost To Copy != Cost To Produce. It costs potentially years of someone's life to produce an application, or piece of art or music. It costs virtually nothing to duplicate them now. You don't even have the manufacturing costs of media any more.
Someone who designed the world's greatest widget eventually has to compete with people who will try to build their widgets more efficiently. But they don't have to deal with competitors who can reduce their cost of production to near zero. At least not until we get Star Trek replicators. Now *that* would really fuck up an economy. At that point the only people producing anything of real value are energy producers. And maybe not even them if one of the things you can replicate are small consumer fusion generators.
The amount of time it takes me to process an atm/credit transaction is easily still much faster than the time it takes the average cashier to count out change.
Actually, doesn't OSX now support right-clicking via taps on the right edge of the touchpad?
I know currently that's not supported in Windows through Boot Camp, but I assume that's just a question of the feature being added to the touchpad driver.
"With Boot Camp this is different, apple is emulating BIOS inside their own EFI boot manager"
I don't believe this is true, unless there's a firmware update as part of Boot Camp, Apple did not implement the BIOS compatibility layer in their EFI implementation.
I'm pretty sure they're not emulating BIOS, they're providing Windows with an alternate boot loader, similar to how the earlier Windows On Mac project worked.
"No commercial company can sustain that amount of development and give the product away. Period. Time will prove this correct.
I just love it when the MS astroturfers around here (ACs all) tell me that the world I live, breathe, and work in every day is simply not possible."
Are you in fact a commercial company that has been giving away your products for free for several decades?
The previous post's claim was that devoting R&D money to deveoping products that you give away for free is an unsustainable long-term business model. I'm not sure that I agree, time will tell, but it has nothing to do with whether an individual person like you or me can happily *use* those free products.
"It's not just modern, it's ultra-modern! It's like living in the not-too-distant future!"
There is at least one way seeing a movie in a theater is better for me and my wife. We actually *watch* the movie if we see it in the theater.
Sitting on the couch at home we've both got our laptops out, multi-tasking, get distracted when the cat starts chasing its tail, the phone rings, etc.
The theater is about the only place we ever just sit and focus on the movie.
I don't even wear pants most of the time. (Working from home has plusses and minuses.)
Though I have long since cut my hair, more because I got tired of having it long than any business pressure.
"This is also a good reason, though I'd argue that vmware is the better route, if you can afford it."
VMWare is free (as in beer) now for everything except the server versions. And pretty soon the non-enterprise server version becomes free as well.
Criminy, I wish I could punch someone in the testicles every time I heard that one. Seriously, it comes up every fucking time R&D fills up their mission critical Five Nines High Performance file servers. "Wow, that server is expensive, we're just doing to use this old Dell and some spare disks to be our file server."
For gaming, you don't want to boot Windows, you want a good OSX port of Cedega.
Have I missed part of TFA where it states how this implant is actually *permanent*? I don't see why it couldn't be removed almost as easily as it's implanted.
The apparent ease with which these tags can be skimmed and cloned would be a greater concern to me, personally, as it means implementing an expensive, mildly painful, invasive (which means a non-zero risk of complications, even if small) prodecure, all for what is actually a non-gain in security. Doesn't sound like even remotely a worthwhile trade-off to me.
The mushroom farmer is free to raise his mushroom prices if he feels he can get better prices for them. He's free to do that regardless of what Mario Batali is doing. One would assume unless he's very stupid that he has been raising and lowering his prices according to supply and demand all along.
On the other hand, Mario Batali is also free to buy mushrooms from someone else who offers a better price.
And in this day and age, the smarter mushroom salesman might even offer Mario a *discount* in exchange for Mario putting a prominent "Mario exclusively uses Frobozz Mushrooms" on the menu.
This definitely proves it. Whatever creator intelligently designed these creatures is a serious bastard.
And, probably the greatest adventure game ever made (yes, even better than Sam & Max): Grim Fandango.
Only on Slashdot does throwing living human beings in ovens equate to internet censorship.
Yeah, we don't like a lot of things the PRC does. We even consider some of those things "evil".
But then, a lot of other countries say that about us when we execute a mentally-challenged person, or even when we execute anyone at all. Or when we invade a country on our own volition that hasn't directly attacked us. *You* may not think those things are evil, but a lot of other people in the world do.
Have you ever bought a diamond? You're supporting "evil". Several brands of shoes and clothing? Also evil. Are Tobacco companies evil? Then huge swaths of consumer products and services support that, as those companies have their fingers in lots of other pies. Where does one draw the line?
I actually tried one of these back a year or two ago, since I needed a new keyboard. (Honestly, one thing that made me consider it a little more was it would be a lot easier to clean. My KBs attract cat hair and other stuff like mad.)
Sadly, the thing was a piece of crap. Using it for gaming was okay, but not a revolutionary difference. Worse though, was the regular keyboard. All talk of "key feel" and whatever aside, I had consistent problems with keys sticking down. Especially the shift key. I assumed at first this must be some disability feature I had mistakenly enabled but could not find an answer. Now it sits unused on a shelf.
Blizzard has a long history of releasing its games on both PC and Mac, so they undoubtedly already have the processes, programmers, and infrastructure in place for doing this. Something they wouldn't seem to have for linux.
Interesting, I'll pass that on to the people who couldn't get it to work.
The important thing, of course, is that the feature works interopably between MS Office and other products, since these people are commonly sending documents around to editors, journal reviewers, etc.
If you keep an eye on the ratings, very often those crappy random monster movies are the highest-rated shows on sci-fi every week, and at the very least tend to stay neck-and-neck with Stargate and BSG. But I've seen many weeks where things like "Pterodactyl 3: The Birdening" garnered much higher ratings than everything else.
Of all the Mac people I know who still use MS Office, they all use it because they have to for professional writing/editing work. And they all use it because the "Track Changes" Functionality is mandatory. They tell me that because OpenOffice does not support this feature (or perhaps doesn't support it well?) they can never use OpenOffice.
Some of them have been looking into NeoOffice, which apparently does have good support for tracking changes.
I literally get almost zero spam any more. However, this is likely only because my ISP implemented "greylisting". So, while I'm definitely getting virtually no spam anymore, I'm also sometimes not getting email because someone's mail server isn't following proper procedures. (American Express, for one, I could not get email from American Express through said ISP.)