Since all mail clients have an address book facility there is absolutely no excuse for forgetting to mail a friend about your new mail address. This argument is simply a straw man these days.
e.g.
Email sent to entire address book.
???
Profit!
Do you seriously think Hotmail will still be around by the end of your lifetime?
That's all for the best. You don't want to be accussed of knowing anyone who is on AOL do you? AOL and possibly Yahoo (I forget now) do this to my outgoing emails but I just tell people that unless they get an email account that is not lame they can't email me and expect a reply. Honestly, your ISP's all offer multiple email accounts now. Why are people still using this Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL rubbish, unless they are their ISP...and then I just pity them;->
Whoa, now that's a big surprise! Better change the maxim to the top 1% of people then since I am definitely in the middle class range, and yet score in the top 2.9% of income. I am by no means rolling in cash, and if I saw 100,000 lying in the road I would spend the time it takes to stoop and pick it up, unlike some billionaires we could all name.
I have professional music production gear (Layla 8in/10out). Playing a CD and recording it on my gear would give as good a sound as a digital rip. The only hassle is it takes much longer to rip, compress the files, then title them. I'd still do it to have my music in unemcumbered digital form, but I'd rather avoid such measures and CD's when possible. But as stated, it only takes 1 person like me to tip the apple cart over and all their stupid protections are as vapour in the air.
I believe there is a fair degree of truth to the old maxim "5% of the worlds population owns 95% of the wealth". You and I and the others here are not likely to be in that 5%. Sure, big companies have shareholders, but the vast amount of shares are often privately held by a board of directors who control the company. The other shares are released onto the market to plump up the coffers, but without risking loss of control of the company if this is at all possible. The power belongs to the companies, not the people. Your governments are bankrolled by these companies, and the governments write laws to suit these financial giants. We exist only as a demographic to be sold to.
I would tend to agree with you on the cause of the arrogance/defensiveness. People get scared when their livelihood is threatened and they lash out.
The performance I have been hearing about from India is code metric based i.e. code quality is measured using modestly scientific principles and they compare defect rates and lines/day, etc. The Indian companies are touting higher code quality than the US based ones. Whether this is stricly true or not is a matter for informed debate, not idle conjecture.
The two occupations mostly talked about in outsourcing are low level workers e.g. call centres, and IT workers. These are both ideal for outsourcing, which is why they are the most common model at present. The two are not able to be directly compared, because one is an unskilled worker reading from a script, and the other is a highly skilled worker working from detailed design documents. In the case of call centre staff the reasoning is obvious - it's simply cheaper to provide labour and a work site in India. It is transparent to the end user how far away the call centre person is, so geographical considerations are able to be ignored.
The IT worker is slightly different I feel. We are able to telecommute or work at a distance quite effectively, so this is only a little barrier to outsourcing. The bottom line appears to be that Indians can do this job far chepaer than Americans/Brits. Take someone with the same training, but one in India and one in the US, and the Indian guy will always be cheaper. I suspect that all other factors are roughly equal, so the dollar wins the day. Bad news for us, but maybe not as bad as it's made out to be.
Me too. You clearly wasted it doing menial janitorial codemonkey work.
Again, showing your complete ignorance. What's your position in the workforce? Judging by your posts I'm guessing you're an unemployed kid out of uni who is now considering that job offer from MacDonalds.
Erm... yes. That is correct. I never said they didn't.
No, you implied that they went because the jobs are so low skilled. You must be thinking of call centre jobs, because programming jobs are definitely not low skilled.
Yes it is. If it was difficult to find the staff, they wouldn't outsource, because they couldn't outsource.
It's not difficult to hire Indian programmers because there are companies that specialise in providing programmers and handling most of the work of the outsourcing. You do understand the existance of recruitment agencies right? Well, they have them in India too. Time for you to return from your shift break, those burgers won't flip themselves.
Then it all gets outsourced to China instead or Malasia maybe. It will follow the water theory and head for the path of least resistance, where economic cost is a form of resistance.
I'm always amazed at how arrogant the American programmers are thinking that they are ten times better than an Indian programmer simply because they live in the US. India also has universities, education, hell, they even have paper, telephones and computers.
It doesn't make any sense to outsource one job to ten jobs in a foreign country if it costs the same money. Clearly, they are getting better performance for the same money otherwise they wouldn't all be doing it. That's right, those Indians are (on average) as good as you Americans, but they simply cost less due to lower cost of living in India. You wear cheap Chinese t-shirts, drive Japanese cars and Japanese TV's, get about in your cheap-ass third world labour Nikes, and now...now you are going to watch your (and mine) job also go overseas as we all start to use Indian software. Adapt or starve/freeze to death, these are your options. personally, I am choosing to adapt.
Well, thanks goodness writing code is easy and not at all hard. Makes me wonder why I did that degree after all when I could have just spent those three years smoking weed then turned up to a computer company and asked for a job. I'm sure they would give a drug addict a job since they are almost certainly as smart as a trained monkey.
Since you are clearly not equipped with brains let me spell it out for you: they outsource jobs to other countries because it reduces costs and increases profits. It's nothing to do with how hard the jobs are to perform or the tech requirements of the position, it is all to do with their company end of year returns and the numbers that get reported to the press and shareholders.
I've seen the film, but found Gattaca more chilling in it's vision of the future. With talk of mobile phones and GPS allowing targetted location based advertising, and now LCD screens carrying advertising appearing on London busses, I really don't think I'm going to enjoy the future as much as I used to imagine. Shesh, it's a full-time job just keepings the marketeers (bucccaneers:-)) at bay already, the future is Orange.
I've managed to filter a lot of advertising out of my life by opting out of TV, radio and more recently purchasing magazines. The sheer volume of this stuff is staggering, so I can only imagine how people who haven't opted out are feeling...battered I suspect...or maybe they no longer grok it's presence? Even still, billboards, fly-posting and the web, all combine to bombard me with advertising messages. Hell, even my phone(s) are now filling with advertisements from companies desperate to push their shite. I just picked up my messages tonight to hear two copies of the same recorded advertisment on it...time to switch to an unlisted number.
They'll believe the confession the police beat out of you stating that you let your terrorist buddy drive the car around Oregon to throw people off your trail.
Shh, Echalon is also likely monitoring your SlashDot posts as well. Actually, with all the CCTV, RFID on the Underground and other surveilance in place on your mobile phone, landlines, and internet connections I suspect we here in London are amoung the most spied upon in the world. Using a customer loyalty card (Nectar) is only going to make it worse since multiple companies can now aggregate your purchases across the whole chain . What is the modern world going to be like in a few more years when this stuff is omnipresent?
Additionally, the e-Plate is designed to shatter if anyone tries to remove or otherwise tamper with it, and the tag can be programmed to transmit a warning if any attempt is made to dislodge the plate.
Wonder how susceptible this is going to be to a microwave oven. Sure, it's going to fuck your oven, but it should also provide an easy way to disable the tag. Drilling a hold through the RFID would also be effective I suspect.
I understand the need to monitor criminals and terrorists, but I really don't like the idea of having the government (anyone in fact) able to freely track my every movement. We have the Oyster card (RFID enabled travelcard) for the Underground over here, os it will get to the point one day that you won't be able to buy or sell or travel without being monitored. Kinda biblical almost.
You think typing text characters into an e-mail or on IRC is the same as actually speaking to somebody in person right in front of you, staring them in the face?
No, I think it is different, but it is still socialising and communicating. The medium is not the message. If you believe that you can only have relationships through either hearing the other person or seeing them then you are assuming that all the blind and deaf people in this world are incapable of relationships.
Text communication, particularly on the internet, has come in leaps and bounds and for someone like me is the *best* way to stay in contact with friends and make new ones. Example: back in BBS days I was chatting online occassionally to another BBS user and over the course of a few months we became friends. I didn't meet him for almost two years, but by the time we did we were very good friends. He is still a friend 15 years later, and now because he is in another country we maily keep in contact via email. I can picture his face and hear his voice while I read his emails.
Socializing on a computer isn't the same as socializing in person. Comparing it to an afternoon at the pub with your workmates his hilaroius.
My mates and I often drink, spliff, and play games over the net. We chat, joke and discuss our lives. The only thing missing is the facial cues and the sound of voices. Use of emoticons and other textural clues fill in a lot of what is lost through these two missing elements. Since two of those mates are in Australia, one is in Amsterdam, and three are over here in England this is absolutely the best way for us to remain friends and socialise together as a group.
You may as well say you're actually "speaking" to me right now, and it's the same as if we actually ran into each other in person and started debating.
It is. The only missing things are those visual and audible clues. I see them like hints as to what someone is saying, not what they are actually saying. If you have trouble expressing yourself in text then you would be better off with face-face meetings, but I am not one of those people. It is interesting to note, however,that your scenerio of running into each other in the street and debating is highly unlikely to occur, whereas it's almost guaranteed to happen on SlashDot. That is one area where internet based communication is clearly supperior to the old pub/street model.
Finally, I truly believe that all the time I have spent on IM/IRC/mailing lists/SlashDot/etc has vastly improved my ability to communicate with others. The medium is more condusive to careful thought and consideration. Something that is lost in a society of people all waiting to speak rather than listening.
I am sick of hearing this "lone hacker theory" rubbish. Since anyone who works on the kernel is going to be constantly emailing, newsgrouping, and using IRC/IM there is no reason to label them as unsocialable. Just because you are using a computer to do the socialising doesn't make it count less than an afternoon at the pub with your workmates. If they were sitting in their basements and hacking their own sources and never communicating with other developers then your model might hold up, but it just isn't relevant any more.
Since we have laws against hacking, and zombie PC's have been hacked, then yes, that is wrong in and of itself. But there are also laws against unsolicited email, which spammers are sending out, so that is also wrong. Let's not forget wire fraud laws in the US, since these spams are forging their from addresses and contain fraudulent statements they can be proscecuted for that too. Spamming is just plain wrong, and anyone who says otherwise is likely to actually be either a spammer, or a direct marketer, or someone who uses their services. I don't know of one person who has ever said to me they actually like this intrusive form of advertising.
I just go to a more expensive cinema now. The chairs are nicer, the seats are more comfy, and the "youths" don't like to pay the 2 extra so they go elsewhere...everyone wins:-)
You mustn't have been fighting very good fighters then. I'm 6'3" and have only very rarely lost any fight, despite being gangly as a kid. I made a special effort to learn how to control my limbs better (damn long arms and legs) and took fighting lessons (from my dad) when I was young, then karate when old enough. I assure you, the extra one or two inches of reach would be all the advantage I'd need against a shorter but blockier guy. Good technique will win out in most any situation in any case, regardless of size and weight differences. The guys you fought probably didn't have a bad centre of gravity, but a bad centre of balance i.e. they hadn't leant how to maintain their balance whilst still dishing out powerful attacks...very important, power without control is nothing.
I'm a total pacifist now, and a Buddhist to boot, so fighting is not in my nature anymore. Just be aware, that there is always someone better than you out there:-)
P.S. One of my favorite memories to keep me warm in my soon to come old age is fighting against and training with Gary O'Neil who later became the #2 in the All Japan Karate competition. He was a great guy, a wonderful teacher, very humble, and kick-ass at fighting!
Seriously, London has some problems with twats in cinemas, and some are worse than others. I've had people thrown out the cinema at my request three times now, and I have simply stopped using that particular cinema (Holloway Rd, Odeon) since there are too many council brats using it also. This was all after some "nice" asking too, but brats will be brats. In case you're wondering, the little tards were talking and running around during the film, and using mobile phones.
Slashdot Mirror
e.g.
Email sent to entire address book.
???
Profit!
Do you seriously think Hotmail will still be around by the end of your lifetime?
That's all for the best. You don't want to be accussed of knowing anyone who is on AOL do you? AOL and possibly Yahoo (I forget now) do this to my outgoing emails but I just tell people that unless they get an email account that is not lame they can't email me and expect a reply. Honestly, your ISP's all offer multiple email accounts now. Why are people still using this Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL rubbish, unless they are their ISP...and then I just pity them ;->
Whoa, now that's a big surprise! Better change the maxim to the top 1% of people then since I am definitely in the middle class range, and yet score in the top 2.9% of income. I am by no means rolling in cash, and if I saw 100,000 lying in the road I would spend the time it takes to stoop and pick it up, unlike some billionaires we could all name.
I have professional music production gear (Layla 8in/10out). Playing a CD and recording it on my gear would give as good a sound as a digital rip. The only hassle is it takes much longer to rip, compress the files, then title them. I'd still do it to have my music in unemcumbered digital form, but I'd rather avoid such measures and CD's when possible. But as stated, it only takes 1 person like me to tip the apple cart over and all their stupid protections are as vapour in the air.
I believe there is a fair degree of truth to the old maxim "5% of the worlds population owns 95% of the wealth". You and I and the others here are not likely to be in that 5%. Sure, big companies have shareholders, but the vast amount of shares are often privately held by a board of directors who control the company. The other shares are released onto the market to plump up the coffers, but without risking loss of control of the company if this is at all possible. The power belongs to the companies, not the people. Your governments are bankrolled by these companies, and the governments write laws to suit these financial giants. We exist only as a demographic to be sold to.
Just dump it in the streets of New Jersey, who the hell would ever notice?
is haging out the back on that thing. Hope they come with a decently long extension lead.
The performance I have been hearing about from India is code metric based i.e. code quality is measured using modestly scientific principles and they compare defect rates and lines/day, etc. The Indian companies are touting higher code quality than the US based ones. Whether this is stricly true or not is a matter for informed debate, not idle conjecture.
The two occupations mostly talked about in outsourcing are low level workers e.g. call centres, and IT workers. These are both ideal for outsourcing, which is why they are the most common model at present. The two are not able to be directly compared, because one is an unskilled worker reading from a script, and the other is a highly skilled worker working from detailed design documents. In the case of call centre staff the reasoning is obvious - it's simply cheaper to provide labour and a work site in India. It is transparent to the end user how far away the call centre person is, so geographical considerations are able to be ignored.
The IT worker is slightly different I feel. We are able to telecommute or work at a distance quite effectively, so this is only a little barrier to outsourcing. The bottom line appears to be that Indians can do this job far chepaer than Americans/Brits. Take someone with the same training, but one in India and one in the US, and the Indian guy will always be cheaper. I suspect that all other factors are roughly equal, so the dollar wins the day. Bad news for us, but maybe not as bad as it's made out to be.
Again, showing your complete ignorance. What's your position in the workforce? Judging by your posts I'm guessing you're an unemployed kid out of uni who is now considering that job offer from MacDonalds.
Erm... yes. That is correct. I never said they didn't.
No, you implied that they went because the jobs are so low skilled. You must be thinking of call centre jobs, because programming jobs are definitely not low skilled.
Yes it is. If it was difficult to find the staff, they wouldn't outsource, because they couldn't outsource.
It's not difficult to hire Indian programmers because there are companies that specialise in providing programmers and handling most of the work of the outsourcing. You do understand the existance of recruitment agencies right? Well, they have them in India too. Time for you to return from your shift break, those burgers won't flip themselves.
Then it all gets outsourced to China instead or Malasia maybe. It will follow the water theory and head for the path of least resistance, where economic cost is a form of resistance.
It doesn't make any sense to outsource one job to ten jobs in a foreign country if it costs the same money. Clearly, they are getting better performance for the same money otherwise they wouldn't all be doing it. That's right, those Indians are (on average) as good as you Americans, but they simply cost less due to lower cost of living in India. You wear cheap Chinese t-shirts, drive Japanese cars and Japanese TV's, get about in your cheap-ass third world labour Nikes, and now...now you are going to watch your (and mine) job also go overseas as we all start to use Indian software. Adapt or starve/freeze to death, these are your options. personally, I am choosing to adapt.
Since you are clearly not equipped with brains let me spell it out for you:
they outsource jobs to other countries because it reduces costs and increases profits. It's nothing to do with how hard the jobs are to perform or the tech requirements of the position, it is all to do with their company end of year returns and the numbers that get reported to the press and shareholders.
Lot's of their old ones, all the ones I needed, are free and available in PDF format.
I've managed to filter a lot of advertising out of my life by opting out of TV, radio and more recently purchasing magazines. The sheer volume of this stuff is staggering, so I can only imagine how people who haven't opted out are feeling...battered I suspect...or maybe they no longer grok it's presence? Even still, billboards, fly-posting and the web, all combine to bombard me with advertising messages. Hell, even my phone(s) are now filling with advertisements from companies desperate to push their shite. I just picked up my messages tonight to hear two copies of the same recorded advertisment on it...time to switch to an unlisted number.
They'll believe the confession the police beat out of you stating that you let your terrorist buddy drive the car around Oregon to throw people off your trail.
Shh, Echalon is also likely monitoring your SlashDot posts as well. Actually, with all the CCTV, RFID on the Underground and other surveilance in place on your mobile phone, landlines, and internet connections I suspect we here in London are amoung the most spied upon in the world. Using a customer loyalty card (Nectar) is only going to make it worse since multiple companies can now aggregate your purchases across the whole chain . What is the modern world going to be like in a few more years when this stuff is omnipresent?
Wonder how susceptible this is going to be to a microwave oven. Sure, it's going to fuck your oven, but it should also provide an easy way to disable the tag. Drilling a hold through the RFID would also be effective I suspect.
I understand the need to monitor criminals and terrorists, but I really don't like the idea of having the government (anyone in fact) able to freely track my every movement. We have the Oyster card (RFID enabled travelcard) for the Underground over here, os it will get to the point one day that you won't be able to buy or sell or travel without being monitored. Kinda biblical almost.
No, I think it is different, but it is still socialising and communicating. The medium is not the message. If you believe that you can only have relationships through either hearing the other person or seeing them then you are assuming that all the blind and deaf people in this world are incapable of relationships.
Text communication, particularly on the internet, has come in leaps and bounds and for someone like me is the *best* way to stay in contact with friends and make new ones. Example: back in BBS days I was chatting online occassionally to another BBS user and over the course of a few months we became friends. I didn't meet him for almost two years, but by the time we did we were very good friends. He is still a friend 15 years later, and now because he is in another country we maily keep in contact via email. I can picture his face and hear his voice while I read his emails.
Socializing on a computer isn't the same as socializing in person. Comparing it to an afternoon at the pub with your workmates his hilaroius.
My mates and I often drink, spliff, and play games over the net. We chat, joke and discuss our lives. The only thing missing is the facial cues and the sound of voices. Use of emoticons and other textural clues fill in a lot of what is lost through these two missing elements. Since two of those mates are in Australia, one is in Amsterdam, and three are over here in England this is absolutely the best way for us to remain friends and socialise together as a group.
You may as well say you're actually "speaking" to me right now, and it's the same as if we actually ran into each other in person and started debating.
It is. The only missing things are those visual and audible clues. I see them like hints as to what someone is saying, not what they are actually saying. If you have trouble expressing yourself in text then you would be better off with face-face meetings, but I am not one of those people. It is interesting to note, however,that your scenerio of running into each other in the street and debating is highly unlikely to occur, whereas it's almost guaranteed to happen on SlashDot. That is one area where internet based communication is clearly supperior to the old pub/street model.
Finally, I truly believe that all the time I have spent on IM/IRC/mailing lists/SlashDot/etc has vastly improved my ability to communicate with others. The medium is more condusive to careful thought and consideration. Something that is lost in a society of people all waiting to speak rather than listening.
Thank goodness, I'd hate to think my hobbies had also been outsourced to India along with my job ;->
I am sick of hearing this "lone hacker theory" rubbish. Since anyone who works on the kernel is going to be constantly emailing, newsgrouping, and using IRC/IM there is no reason to label them as unsocialable. Just because you are using a computer to do the socialising doesn't make it count less than an afternoon at the pub with your workmates. If they were sitting in their basements and hacking their own sources and never communicating with other developers then your model might hold up, but it just isn't relevant any more.
I for one welcome our new Atlantean overlords!
Since we have laws against hacking, and zombie PC's have been hacked, then yes, that is wrong in and of itself. But there are also laws against unsolicited email, which spammers are sending out, so that is also wrong. Let's not forget wire fraud laws in the US, since these spams are forging their from addresses and contain fraudulent statements they can be proscecuted for that too. Spamming is just plain wrong, and anyone who says otherwise is likely to actually be either a spammer, or a direct marketer, or someone who uses their services. I don't know of one person who has ever said to me they actually like this intrusive form of advertising.
I just go to a more expensive cinema now. The chairs are nicer, the seats are more comfy, and the "youths" don't like to pay the 2 extra so they go elsewhere...everyone wins :-)
I'm a total pacifist now, and a Buddhist to boot, so fighting is not in my nature anymore. Just be aware, that there is always someone better than you out there :-)
P.S. One of my favorite memories to keep me warm in my soon to come old age is fighting against and training with Gary O'Neil who later became the #2 in the All Japan Karate competition. He was a great guy, a wonderful teacher, very humble, and kick-ass at fighting!
Seriously, London has some problems with twats in cinemas, and some are worse than others. I've had people thrown out the cinema at my request three times now, and I have simply stopped using that particular cinema (Holloway Rd, Odeon) since there are too many council brats using it also. This was all after some "nice" asking too, but brats will be brats. In case you're wondering, the little tards were talking and running around during the film, and using mobile phones.