If you paid attention to the financial news, you would also hear much lamenting over the fact that the economy seems to be improving, but there hasn't been a noticeable increase in hiring yet.
The financial news tends to be pessimistic until reality slaps them in the face. Last quarter, if one of them predict Q3 GDP growth at 8.2%, they'd have been a laughing stock. But you can't have growth lik e that, and continue not to hire people.
I recently graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science. Out of about 15 CS students I know personally who graduated in the past year, one had a job within 2-3 months of graduation (not counting myself). Many of them had to wait 6 months or more before receiving any kind of job offer... and most of them haven't recieved any offers at all, and are working part-time jobs that pay a little more than minimum wage. If the economy is indeed looking up, you couldn't prove it to them. They can barely afford rent and food.
It took me two months to find my first job in a GOOD year. With the way the job market has been for the last 18-20 mos. six months for fresh grads shouldn't be unusual. Some labor market indicators have been positive for about 10 straight weeks now. So if your friends haven't felt it yet, they should soon.
Dow hitting 10K is largely a symbolic feat. There aren't many purely tech companies among the 30 companies that make up the Dow.
Instead what is going to drive hiring is 8.2 annualized GDP growth coupled with 9.4% productivity gains. Both of these readings are at 20 year highs. Simply put, the economy is growing like crazy, and employers are squeezing current employees to the limit. No economists think 9.4% productivity is sustainable.
Employers will be forced to hire to keep up with demand, I already see signs, as I stated before, my company has suddenly seen many employees leaving for other jobs. This is something we haven't seen since 2000 or maybe 2001 at the latest.
Another reason to download is that some songs are just not available for sale. How many times have you liked a song on the radio, bought the CD only to find the song on the CD is different than what's being played on the radio? The worst recent example of this is the Santana song "Why don't you and I". It's sung by Alex Band on the radio, but Chuck Kroger on the CD. If you bought the CD looking for the Alex Band version, are you unjustified in downloading it?
I totally agree with your post. The music industry model has been obsoleted by technology. The industry is trying to maintain itself by getting laws passed to restrict consumer freedom, rather than adopt to the new technologic reality.
And you touched upon this, while it's wrong to download what you don't own, the industry has created a huge gray area. I mean, you can leave your radio on, and hear the same song every two hours legally at no cost to you. If you turn the radio off, and download that song, and listen to it only once a week, you're breaking the law. But, If you have a tape recorder and tape it off the radio, you're not breaking the law! Think about it, is this a business model that makes any sense whatsoever?
If the RIAA comes to you and says they've caught you (or your 12 year old daughter) illegally sharing MP3s, and you can either settle with them for a few thousand dollars, or they'll take you to court and sue you for many thousands of dollars. What would YOU do?
Right, after all, the "cost savings" gained by outsourcing is used to expand into new areas. A company needs to keep growing to keep its stock price up. Growth leads to new jobs.
Well there are iPod engineers, QA, marketing people, tech writers, etc. Same with the other technologies. But you're thinking consumer products, where the design needs to be simple so that the home user doesn't need to hire an iPod consultant to run his iPod.
In the business world, things are much different. It often takes teams of highly paid individuals to implement and build on the latest technologies.
They gave up the names because they didn't want a fight.
If given a choice on whether to give out customer names to the RIAA or not, I think ISPs will generally choose not to, they want to keep their customers after all.
When are these analysts ever right projecting 3 years into the future? We're supposed to believe them about 12 years?
Sometimes I think they take a couple years worth of data, plot it on a chart, and simply extend the recent trends well into the future to come up with their numbers. Don't believe me? Think back to 1999, every new technology that came along was going to be a multi-billion dollar market by 2003 or whatever.
One thing economists agree on is that while they don't exactly what new kinds of jobs will be here in the future, they WILL be tech jobs. Tech jobs grow like crazy, because every new tech product creates all kinds of problems to be solved, and new opportunities. A major impediment to creating tech jobs is the cost of workers, so if you can reduce costs by hiring offshore workers, that allows on-shore workers to work on new problems that were too expensive to tackle before.
In short, don't throw away your tech degree just yet and become a burger flipper.
I work for a software company. After many months of people having a hard time getting interviews, and very few leaving for other jobs. In the past three weeks, suddenly we had seven people announce they are leaving for new jobs. I have a friend who was recently laid off from another tech company a couple of weeks ago. He's had quite a few interviews already.
Things seem to be looking better out there. New jobs will replace the old ones lost.
I guess you get what you pay for. The Boston subway doesn't cover half the area the NYC system does and runs for about half as long. Bars closing, clubs letting out...good thing you got that great parking space, cause the buses and trains are all in dream land.
In defense of the T, it's pretty impressive for a city the size of Boston. How many other cities of 500,000 have four distinct subway lines, and 10 commuter rail lines? There's not a subway system in the world that can compare to NYC
I'm sorry, but I think Boston driving is worse than NYC driving, and I've done both. Perhaps this is a matter of opinion, but that is what I think. Also, the last time I drove there, there weren't any lane markers on half the roads...that's just silly! Oh, and to make traffic during rush hour faster they turn all the traffic lights to blinking red/orange lights and I got stuck on the wrong end of that light...
Yes, in addition to lack of lane markings, construction objects that seem to be placed at random in Boston streets. There's no sanity to the layout of Boston streets. At least Manhatten features a neat grid.
I'm normally a mild-mannered person, but whenever I have to drive through downtown Boston, I turn into a frothing, raving lunatic, it scares my wife, because dealing with no markers, no warnings that you are in a "turn only" lane, insane unpredictable drivers does that to a person. I've driven Manhatten too, not pleasant, but at least more sane.
> # Boston drivers may be insane, but they're > reasonably polite. NYC drivers are suicidal- and > downright mean.
Huh?
> # It's safer- crime's a fraction of NYC
Ok, that's probably true.
> # By the time Linuxworld gets here, the Big Dig > will be totally done and traffic smooth- and > you'll be able to get to Boston downtown from > the airport in a matter of maybe 5-10 minutes, > and out of the city in 15. Try that in NYC.
Uh-huh, I'll see it when I believe it.
> # Boston/eastern MA is the birthplace of the > revolution. 30 minutes out from Boston is > Concord, MA- the first major battle in the > revolution.
No need to go to Concord, there's plenty of cool revolutionary-era sites in Boston. Bunker Hill, Old North Church, Tea Party Ship, Massacre site.
> # Boston actually has charm. NYC has nothing but > rudeness, dirt, crime, overpopulation...
I'll grant that as well, though much of the charm is currently obscured by the Big Dig construction mess.
> # Where else can you take a tour that's half > on land, half on water, SAME vehicle? Hmm?
Nowadays... The duck boats are almost everywhere.
> # Our subway costs HALF yours. The system may be > dirty+unpredictable, but did I mention it costs > half?
But it stops running at midnight. It sucks if you want to hit the bars and not worry about driving back to your hotel.
"What's puzzling is that there is no rational reason for that kind of growth. The deficit is getting bigger, the trade deficit is getting bigger, the dollar is getting weaker, and the stock market is limping along. I for one am not convinced that those number are for real nor am I convinced that this kind of growth has any legs at all."
Deficit speanding has stimulative economic effects. The stock market has done well this year. A weak dollar makes American exports cheaper to foreigners, so it too has a stimulative effect. The numbers are real because every new economic report lately corrabortes strong growth
"Approval ratings or not slightly more then half of this country are democrats. He may get re-elected but like the last time it will be by the skin of his teeth."
Actually the percentage of Democrats is down to less than a third of the people now:
It never fails to amaze me, for how smart the geeks here are./ are supposed to be, when it comes to politics, they turn into imbiciles. Logic and reason go right out the window. It's rare to find intelligent political posts, they just seem to regurgitate the nonsense in the latest Michael Moore book, or whatever.
I'm not saying everyone needs to agree with Bush, but at least present substantitive reasons for disagreeing, not the easyily refuted popular crap that keeps getting spread around here.
Actually, Bush inherited a nicely balanced budget (indeed, in the surplus) and an economy so hopeful
Well, when the market and the economy tanks it drags tax revenues down with it. Most economists believe that running a deficiet during a recession is not a bad thing because of the stimulative effects.
that one of Bush's campaign ideas (thankfully swept under the rug) was to make Social Security based on the stock market (incidentally an idea that Clinton, Gore, and anyone with a fiscal brain said was a *BAD* idea).
As if the current system where current workers pay current retirees is a GOOD idea fiscally. Everyone knows it's going to become insolvent when boomers retire en masse
But the fact is that by this time 2001 (2002 at the latest) the economy should have corrected and been back to a more stable state.
The recession ended in 2001, growth since was sub-par for a number of reasons.
Instead, because Junior wants to run apeshit through the world like some coked up playboy, we are grasping for economic straws during a time of incredible unemployment.
Incredible unemployment? Hardly! Things were worse in the previous two recessions. Grasping at economic straws? Bush did all the right things to stimulate the economy:
Low Interest rates (well thanks to Greenspan, who is theoretically outside Bush's influence)
I always saw BG as a cheap Star Wars rip-off. Is it really that popular? It never seemed to have much of a following, like Star Trek and other SF shows.
The point I was trying to make with the "tax software" is that it is a void in OSS, and it's a void that OSS alone cannot fill. The tax code is too complex, changes every year, plus you need to worry multiple countries and individual states/provinces. Plus most geeks are not tax accountants, so would you trust the software to do the right thing?
To elaborate on my point about innovation is that whenever M$ "innovates" something, the OSS geeks first sneer at it, then launch a project to clone it. The Ximian/Gnome people seem to be the worst offenders in this regard. Instead of all the effort to play "catch-up" with M$, shouldn't we try to leapfrog them in innovation? I don't mean to imply that OSS people never innovate, just that I feel too much effort is put into cloning the latest MS or MacOS "innovations".
BTW, I have used Audacity. That used to be another area where Linux was lacking (a decent sound editor). Thanks for a great program.
GAIM does fill a void nicely, but like MP3-related software, there are far too many OSS IM clients when there are deficiencies in other areas. Granted, OSS people are going to work on whatever interests them, but this is an inherent weakness in the "OSS/Free software eliminating the need for proprietary software belief.". Some applications are just not very interesting to geeks, or are not the latest trendy application, but important nonetheless
OSS/Free Software people often argue that there's no need for proprietary software, free software can provide everything.
But when I go somewhere like freshmeat, what do I find? More MP3 enocoders/players/front-ends/rippers/catalogers than you can shake a stick at. What don't I find? drivers for some of my devices like scanners, cameras. Productivity applications, like Tax software for instance, and many other things that I can't think of right now, that keep me chained to Windows. Or if I do find them, they are half finished, and barely usable. Some would say, "So fill the void!". I do write my own stuff, but the re are too many things, and I only have so much time to devote to it.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, and need Windows less than ever. But I have a pragmatic approach about it. OSS can do great things, but not everything, there will always be room for proprietary software, and the two should be able to coexist.
The other problem with OSS is lack of innovation. How many things does the OSS community go about attempting to clone only after someone like MS or another company introduced it? Was there a FreeMware before VMware? Was there Linux PVR applications before Tivo? etc.
There are stupid ideas in outsourcing. I think this is one of them. It never made much sense to me that you could direct your customers phone calls to a foreign country, to people pretending to be Americans. If a company cares so little about good customer service that they are willing to go to such lengths to save a buck or two, they shouldn't be shocked that customers go to a different company that values them a little more, after all what else is there to differentiate one PC seller from another than good customer service?
I think companies will realize what makes sense to outsource, and what doesn't. A year ago, the software company I work for had a QA team in India, and was talking about moving all QA over there. Today we no longer have a team in India, the work has been brought back. It just wasn't working, the money saved on salaries was being lost in productivity. (dealing with time zone, language and cultural differences)
To be fair to Bubba, he was ready to go to war against Iraq in '98 over the WMD issue, alone, without UN approval, before Koffi Anan talked him out of it.
But the Left forgets this. They want us to believe that Bush/Blair manufactured this whole WMD issue.
Slashdot Mirror
The financial news tends to be pessimistic until reality slaps them in the face. Last quarter, if one of them predict Q3 GDP growth at 8.2%, they'd have been a laughing stock. But you can't have growth lik e that, and continue not to hire people.
I recently graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science. Out of about 15 CS students I know personally who graduated in the past year, one had a job within 2-3 months of graduation (not counting myself). Many of them had to wait 6 months or more before receiving any kind of job offer... and most of them haven't recieved any offers at all, and are working part-time jobs that pay a little more than minimum wage. If the economy is indeed looking up, you couldn't prove it to them. They can barely afford rent and food.It took me two months to find my first job in a GOOD year. With the way the job market has been for the last 18-20 mos. six months for fresh grads shouldn't be unusual. Some labor market indicators have been positive for about 10 straight weeks now. So if your friends haven't felt it yet, they should soon.
Dow hitting 10K is largely a symbolic feat. There aren't many purely tech companies among the 30 companies that make up the Dow.
Instead what is going to drive hiring is 8.2 annualized GDP growth coupled with 9.4% productivity gains. Both of these readings are at 20 year highs. Simply put, the economy is growing like crazy, and employers are squeezing current employees to the limit. No economists think 9.4% productivity is sustainable.
Employers will be forced to hire to keep up with demand, I already see signs, as I stated before, my company has suddenly seen many employees leaving for other jobs. This is something we haven't seen since 2000 or maybe 2001 at the latest.
Fritz Hollings has announced he is retiring.
Wahoo!
I do I do!
Just share it on Kazaa, and name it "Hillary Duff - So Yesterday.mp3" so I can find it.
Another reason to download is that some songs are just not available for sale. How many times have you liked a song on the radio, bought the CD only to find the song on the CD is different than what's being played on the radio? The worst recent example of this is the Santana song "Why don't you and I". It's sung by Alex Band on the radio, but Chuck Kroger on the CD. If you bought the CD looking for the Alex Band version, are you unjustified in downloading it? I totally agree with your post. The music industry model has been obsoleted by technology. The industry is trying to maintain itself by getting laws passed to restrict consumer freedom, rather than adopt to the new technologic reality. And you touched upon this, while it's wrong to download what you don't own, the industry has created a huge gray area. I mean, you can leave your radio on, and hear the same song every two hours legally at no cost to you. If you turn the radio off, and download that song, and listen to it only once a week, you're breaking the law. But, If you have a tape recorder and tape it off the radio, you're not breaking the law! Think about it, is this a business model that makes any sense whatsoever?
They're not necessarily dumb.
If the RIAA comes to you and says they've caught you (or your 12 year old daughter) illegally sharing MP3s, and you can either settle with them for a few thousand dollars, or they'll take you to court and sue you for many thousands of dollars. What would YOU do?
Right, after all, the "cost savings" gained by outsourcing is used to expand into new areas. A company needs to keep growing to keep its stock price up. Growth leads to new jobs.
Well there are iPod engineers, QA, marketing people, tech writers, etc. Same with the other technologies. But you're thinking consumer products, where the design needs to be simple so that the home user doesn't need to hire an iPod consultant to run his iPod.
In the business world, things are much different. It often takes teams of highly paid individuals to implement and build on the latest technologies.
They gave up the names because they didn't want a fight.
If given a choice on whether to give out customer names to the RIAA or not, I think ISPs will generally choose not to, they want to keep their customers after all.
Right, but they were initiated based on information from ISPs that the court now says ISPs aren't compelled to release.
What happens to the people who have already been snagged and settled with the RIAA? Are they off the hook?
When are these analysts ever right projecting 3 years into the future? We're supposed to believe them about 12 years?
Sometimes I think they take a couple years worth of data, plot it on a chart, and simply extend the recent trends well into the future to come up with their numbers. Don't believe me? Think back to 1999, every new technology that came along was going to be a multi-billion dollar market by 2003 or whatever.
One thing economists agree on is that while they don't exactly what new kinds of jobs will be here in the future, they WILL be tech jobs. Tech jobs grow like crazy, because every new tech product creates all kinds of problems to be solved, and new opportunities. A major impediment to creating tech jobs is the cost of workers, so if you can reduce costs by hiring offshore workers, that allows on-shore workers to work on new problems that were too expensive to tackle before.
In short, don't throw away your tech degree just yet and become a burger flipper.
I work for a software company. After many months of people having a hard time getting interviews, and very few leaving for other jobs. In the past three weeks, suddenly we had seven people announce they are leaving for new jobs. I have a friend who was recently laid off from another tech company a couple of weeks ago. He's had quite a few interviews already.
Things seem to be looking better out there. New jobs will replace the old ones lost.
In defense of the T, it's pretty impressive for a city the size of Boston. How many other cities of 500,000 have four distinct subway lines, and 10 commuter rail lines? There's not a subway system in the world that can compare to NYC
Yes, in addition to lack of lane markings, construction objects that seem to be placed at random in Boston streets. There's no sanity to the layout of Boston streets. At least Manhatten features a neat grid.
I'm normally a mild-mannered person, but whenever I have to drive through downtown Boston, I turn into a frothing, raving lunatic, it scares my wife, because dealing with no markers, no warnings that you are in a "turn only" lane, insane unpredictable drivers does that to a person. I've driven Manhatten too, not pleasant, but at least more sane.
> * Parking is easier(believe it or not)
Huh?
> # Boston drivers may be insane, but they're
> reasonably polite. NYC drivers are suicidal- and
> downright mean.
Huh?
> # It's safer- crime's a fraction of NYC
Ok, that's probably true.
> # By the time Linuxworld gets here, the Big Dig
> will be totally done and traffic smooth- and
> you'll be able to get to Boston downtown from
> the airport in a matter of maybe 5-10 minutes,
> and out of the city in 15. Try that in NYC.
Uh-huh, I'll see it when I believe it.
> # Boston/eastern MA is the birthplace of the
> revolution. 30 minutes out from Boston is
> Concord, MA- the first major battle in the
> revolution.
No need to go to Concord, there's plenty of cool revolutionary-era sites in Boston. Bunker Hill, Old North Church, Tea Party Ship, Massacre site.
> # Boston actually has charm. NYC has nothing but
> rudeness, dirt, crime, overpopulation...
I'll grant that as well, though much of the charm is currently obscured by the Big Dig construction mess.
> # Where else can you take a tour that's half
> on land, half on water, SAME vehicle? Hmm?
Nowadays... The duck boats are almost everywhere.
> # Our subway costs HALF yours. The system may be
> dirty+unpredictable, but did I mention it costs
> half?
But it stops running at midnight. It sucks if you want to hit the bars and not worry about driving back to your hotel.
> # Our mayor doesn't suck.
"Mumbles" Menino? That's debatable.
"What's puzzling is that there is no rational reason for that kind of growth. The deficit is getting bigger, the trade deficit is getting bigger, the dollar is getting weaker, and the stock market is limping along. I for one am not convinced that those number are for real nor am I convinced that this kind of growth has any legs at all."
2 00 1295371_outlook29.html
Deficit speanding has stimulative economic effects. The stock market has done well this year. A weak dollar makes American exports cheaper to foreigners, so it too has a stimulative effect. The numbers are real because every new economic report lately corrabortes strong growth
"Approval ratings or not slightly more then half of this country are democrats. He may get re-elected but like the last time it will be by the skin of his teeth."
Actually the percentage of Democrats is down to less than a third of the people now:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/
Good post.
./ are supposed to be, when it comes to politics, they turn into imbiciles. Logic and reason go right out the window. It's rare to find intelligent political posts, they just seem to regurgitate the nonsense in the latest Michael Moore book, or whatever.
It never fails to amaze me, for how smart the geeks here are
I'm not saying everyone needs to agree with Bush, but at least present substantitive reasons for disagreeing, not the easyily refuted popular crap that keeps getting spread around here.
Well, when the market and the economy tanks it drags tax revenues down with it. Most economists believe that running a deficiet during a recession is not a bad thing because of the stimulative effects.
that one of Bush's campaign ideas (thankfully swept under the rug) was to make Social Security based on the stock market (incidentally an idea that Clinton, Gore, and anyone with a fiscal brain said was a *BAD* idea).As if the current system where current workers pay current retirees is a GOOD idea fiscally. Everyone knows it's going to become insolvent when boomers retire en masse
But the fact is that by this time 2001 (2002 at the latest) the economy should have corrected and been back to a more stable state.The recession ended in 2001, growth since was sub-par for a number of reasons.
Instead, because Junior wants to run apeshit through the world like some coked up playboy, we are grasping for economic straws during a time of incredible unemployment.Incredible unemployment? Hardly! Things were worse in the previous two recessions. Grasping at economic straws? Bush did all the right things to stimulate the economy:
I always saw BG as a cheap Star Wars rip-off. Is it really that popular? It never seemed to have much of a following, like Star Trek and other SF shows.
The point I was trying to make with the "tax software" is that it is a void in OSS, and it's a void that OSS alone cannot fill. The tax code is too complex, changes every year, plus you need to worry multiple countries and individual states/provinces. Plus most geeks are not tax accountants, so would you trust the software to do the right thing?
To elaborate on my point about innovation is that whenever M$ "innovates" something, the OSS geeks first sneer at it, then launch a project to clone it. The Ximian/Gnome people seem to be the worst offenders in this regard. Instead of all the effort to play "catch-up" with M$, shouldn't we try to leapfrog them in innovation? I don't mean to imply that OSS people never innovate, just that I feel too much effort is put into cloning the latest MS or MacOS "innovations".
BTW, I have used Audacity. That used to be another area where Linux was lacking (a decent sound editor). Thanks for a great program.
GAIM does fill a void nicely, but like MP3-related software, there are far too many OSS IM clients when there are deficiencies in other areas. Granted, OSS people are going to work on whatever interests them, but this is an inherent weakness in the "OSS/Free software eliminating the need for proprietary software belief.". Some applications are just not very interesting to geeks, or are not the latest trendy application, but important nonetheless
I've said many of the same things for years.
OSS/Free Software people often argue that there's no need for proprietary software, free software can provide everything.
But when I go somewhere like freshmeat, what do I find? More MP3 enocoders/players/front-ends/rippers/catalogers than you can shake a stick at. What don't I find? drivers for some of my devices like scanners, cameras. Productivity applications, like Tax software for instance, and many other things that I can't think of right now, that keep me chained to Windows. Or if I do find them, they are half finished, and barely usable. Some would say, "So fill the void!". I do write my own stuff, but the re are too many things, and I only have so much time to devote to it.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, and need Windows less than ever. But I have a pragmatic approach about it. OSS can do great things, but not everything, there will always be room for proprietary software, and the two should be able to coexist.
The other problem with OSS is lack of innovation. How many things does the OSS community go about attempting to clone only after someone like MS or another company introduced it? Was there a FreeMware before VMware? Was there Linux PVR applications before Tivo? etc.
There are stupid ideas in outsourcing. I think this is one of them. It never made much sense to me that you could direct your customers phone calls to a foreign country, to people pretending to be Americans. If a company cares so little about good customer service that they are willing to go to such lengths to save a buck or two, they shouldn't be shocked that customers go to a different company that values them a little more, after all what else is there to differentiate one PC seller from another than good customer service?
I think companies will realize what makes sense to outsource, and what doesn't. A year ago, the software company I work for had a QA team in India, and was talking about moving all QA over there. Today we no longer have a team in India, the work has been brought back. It just wasn't working, the money saved on salaries was being lost in productivity. (dealing with time zone, language and cultural differences)
Can "Synthesized Idol" be far behind? Oh wait, isn't that redundant?
To be fair to Bubba, he was ready to go to war against Iraq in '98 over the WMD issue, alone, without UN approval, before Koffi Anan talked him out of it.
But the Left forgets this. They want us to believe that Bush/Blair manufactured this whole WMD issue.