Considering that the average American watches four hours of television per day, I'm not sure the average person has much time left for socializing. Anything that reduces the amount of TV watched, including using the Internet, is likely to improve how social that person is.
Good point, and I agree with you. Personally, I'm pleased that these tools are now available for free and appreciate the move by Microsoft.
But, somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm wondering what Microsoft's next steps might be. Will I like what Microsoft does next? There's some reason to believe, given Microsoft's past behavior, that I might not.
Another widely reported exploration into post-modernist literature was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokal. Sokal says, in order to "test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes."
It's true that it's possible, but it seems premature. There's so much that can be done with cheap robotic probes, it seems like we should focus there first.
In particular, I'd love to see an attempt with tens of cheap insect-like robots exploring the surface in parallel. Rodney Brooks at MIT has been a leading proponent of this technique.
In the vast majority of cases, it is NOT profitable--therefore they don't care!
I think this is where we disagree. I think a lot of investments in workers is profitable. Some are not, but many are. The key is that a happy, well-trained workforce is more productive, reducing overall labor costs even at higher wages.
Your example of university education isn't a very good one. You might as well ask why corporations don't independently provide for the national infrastructure (roads, etc.) or the national defense. Those are public goods. It's a collective action problem to provide public goods like public education or basic infrastructure. No company will do it on their own because they pay all of the costs and only get part of the benefits. That's why a government is necessary to provide these public goods.
There's nothing about capitalism that prevents a company from investing in its workforce. A company doesn't have to care out of charity; it expects a positive return on the investment. Caring is a long-term investment in increased productivity and reduced turnover. It pays for itself and more.
If you're interested in a good book on the topic, I'd recommend Pfeffer's excellent book The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First. It's an easy read and has plenty of examples of how companies have increased productivity and decreased labor costs by investing in their workforce.
It sure would be great to have data specific to the sector. Do you have that data? Your argument seems to depend on it, so I assume you do?
Since I've done my best to provide you with real data, perhaps you could tell me what your reason is for believing that tech productivity is so much higher? In particular, you seem to think tech productivity is much higher than average productivity in India but that tech wages are not higher than average wages. Why? Do you have any data that backs up that claim?
It's not clear what you are arguing here. What are you claiming I fail to understand?
There certainly are cases where it makes sense to outsource overseas. The issue here isn't that outsourcing overseas never makes sense.
I was merely pointing out that you can't make that decision using wage data alone. You need to consider worker productivity to determine total labor costs. Are you disagreeing with that?
In terms of cost, any productivity advantage the US worker has is vastly overwhelmed by the wage differences across different countries.
Just simply not true. According to productivity data from the World Bank, US output per worker was x10 higher than India. Productivity data from the ILO also shows India and other developing countries at about 1/10 the productivity level of developed countries (see Figure 18d in particular) as recently as 2002.
HP used to be a place that cared about it's people. And they cared about HP. Now that HP has changed, now that people are just commodities to be bought and sold, the best people will be out the door at the earliest opportunity.
A job is a partnership between an employer and a company. If one side tells the other, "I don't care if you stay or go," they can't expect the other side to care either.
HP is going downhill in the long-term. In the short-term, profits will be up and Carla will get her big bonuses. But the lack of investment in people will come back to haunt them. Fortunately for Carla, that will be 5-10 years out, long after she's disappeared with her $$$.
Sounds like an interesting book. If you're interested in security topics, I can't recommend Bruce Schneider's (author of Applied Cryptography, among other things) Crypto-gram newsletter. It's free and gives a great overview of the news on computer security. His focus is often on ineffective security measures that people manage to avoid and how they can be improved. Well worth reading.
Ah, okay, so you're saying that it's more mature than other options out there. Better code base, higher performance, more robust parsing routines, better error handling, designed to run on a large server farm, etc. Thanks, that's what I wanted to know.
In her comment, Carla Fiorina fails to understand basic economics. You can't talk about labor costs and only talk about wages. The cost of labor is the wages divided by the productivity. It is only true that lower wages reduce labor costs if productivity is constant. But productivity is much lower in developing countries because of poor infrastructure, corruption, market inefficiencies, and weaker educational systems. It is meaningless to talk about wages without talking about productivity.
There's a huge number of open source web crawlers available already on SourceForge and elsewhere. Anyone know the advantages and disadvantages of this one over the others?
That's pretty compelling too. The only thing I wonder is if the discounts Apple gave to VTech are generally available to the public. Apple is known for steeply discounting for educational purposes. The article suggests that they made a very aggressive bid.
Got a link to that Virginia Tech article? I'd like to see it (and I could be convinced that total cost of ownership is lower), but it's hard to follow up and verify your claims if you don't provide a link.
Are they? A G5 server starts at $3000. A high powered Linux server is about $1000, and you can get a low end Linux server for a couple hundred dollars.
It's pretty well accepted that Apple charges a premium for their products. They're well designed, so sometimes it's worth it, but it seems hard to justify it for something like a server farm where design doesn't matter much.
It seems to me that search could be improved by paying attention to what you've done in the past. Current search engines assume each search is completely independent, but there's valuable information in what you did earlier, especially if you keep refining the query trying to find something. One attempt at this is demoed at Findory Search. It particularly makes a difference if you're refining your search query to try to find something. But it's still a work in progress.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that the average American watches four hours of television per day, I'm not sure the average person has much time left for socializing. Anything that reduces the amount of TV watched, including using the Internet, is likely to improve how social that person is.
Good point, and I agree with you. Personally, I'm pleased that these tools are now available for free and appreciate the move by Microsoft.
But, somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm wondering what Microsoft's next steps might be. Will I like what Microsoft does next? There's some reason to believe, given Microsoft's past behavior, that I might not.
Can you say, "embrace and extend?"
Another widely reported exploration into post-modernist literature was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokal. Sokal says, in order to "test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes."
It's true that it's possible, but it seems premature. There's so much that can be done with cheap robotic probes, it seems like we should focus there first.
In particular, I'd love to see an attempt with tens of cheap insect-like robots exploring the surface in parallel. Rodney Brooks at MIT has been a leading proponent of this technique.
- In the vast majority of cases, it is NOT profitable--therefore they don't care!
I think this is where we disagree. I think a lot of investments in workers is profitable. Some are not, but many are. The key is that a happy, well-trained workforce is more productive, reducing overall labor costs even at higher wages.Your example of university education isn't a very good one. You might as well ask why corporations don't independently provide for the national infrastructure (roads, etc.) or the national defense. Those are public goods. It's a collective action problem to provide public goods like public education or basic infrastructure. No company will do it on their own because they pay all of the costs and only get part of the benefits. That's why a government is necessary to provide these public goods.
There's nothing about capitalism that prevents a company from investing in its workforce. A company doesn't have to care out of charity; it expects a positive return on the investment. Caring is a long-term investment in increased productivity and reduced turnover. It pays for itself and more.
If you're interested in a good book on the topic, I'd recommend Pfeffer's excellent book The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First. It's an easy read and has plenty of examples of how companies have increased productivity and decreased labor costs by investing in their workforce.
What does working hard have to do with it?
It sure would be great to have data specific to the sector. Do you have that data? Your argument seems to depend on it, so I assume you do?
Since I've done my best to provide you with real data, perhaps you could tell me what your reason is for believing that tech productivity is so much higher? In particular, you seem to think tech productivity is much higher than average productivity in India but that tech wages are not higher than average wages. Why? Do you have any data that backs up that claim?
It's not clear what you are arguing here. What are you claiming I fail to understand?
There certainly are cases where it makes sense to outsource overseas. The issue here isn't that outsourcing overseas never makes sense.
I was merely pointing out that you can't make that decision using wage data alone. You need to consider worker productivity to determine total labor costs. Are you disagreeing with that?
- In terms of cost, any productivity advantage the US worker has is vastly overwhelmed by the wage differences across different countries.
Just simply not true. According to productivity data from the World Bank, US output per worker was x10 higher than India. Productivity data from the ILO also shows India and other developing countries at about 1/10 the productivity level of developed countries (see Figure 18d in particular) as recently as 2002.Oops, good point. Sorry, that quote was from Scott Kirwin.
Regardless, the basic point is still the same. But you're right that I shouldn't have attributed that quote to Carly Fiorina. Thanks.
HP used to be a place that cared about it's people. And they cared about HP. Now that HP has changed, now that people are just commodities to be bought and sold, the best people will be out the door at the earliest opportunity.
A job is a partnership between an employer and a company. If one side tells the other, "I don't care if you stay or go," they can't expect the other side to care either.
HP is going downhill in the long-term. In the short-term, profits will be up and Carla will get her big bonuses. But the lack of investment in people will come back to haunt them. Fortunately for Carla, that will be 5-10 years out, long after she's disappeared with her $$$.
Sounds like an interesting book. If you're interested in security topics, I can't recommend Bruce Schneider's (author of Applied Cryptography, among other things) Crypto-gram newsletter. It's free and gives a great overview of the news on computer security. His focus is often on ineffective security measures that people manage to avoid and how they can be improved. Well worth reading.
Ah, okay, so you're saying that it's more mature than other options out there. Better code base, higher performance, more robust parsing routines, better error handling, designed to run on a large server farm, etc. Thanks, that's what I wanted to know.
In her comment, Carla Fiorina fails to understand basic economics. You can't talk about labor costs and only talk about wages. The cost of labor is the wages divided by the productivity. It is only true that lower wages reduce labor costs if productivity is constant. But productivity is much lower in developing countries because of poor infrastructure, corruption, market inefficiencies, and weaker educational systems. It is meaningless to talk about wages without talking about productivity.
There's a huge number of open source web crawlers available already on SourceForge and elsewhere. Anyone know the advantages and disadvantages of this one over the others?
AnandTech did an excellent article on hyper threading a while back. Well written and worth reading.
Very cool! Thanks for all the info!
That's pretty compelling too. The only thing I wonder is if the discounts Apple gave to VTech are generally available to the public. Apple is known for steeply discounting for educational purposes. The article suggests that they made a very aggressive bid.
Thanks again!
Got a link to that Virginia Tech article? I'd like to see it (and I could be convinced that total cost of ownership is lower), but it's hard to follow up and verify your claims if you don't provide a link.
Are they? A G5 server starts at $3000. A high powered Linux server is about $1000, and you can get a low end Linux server for a couple hundred dollars.
It's pretty well accepted that Apple charges a premium for their products. They're well designed, so sometimes it's worth it, but it seems hard to justify it for something like a server farm where design doesn't matter much.
Google was rumored to be planning an unusual public auction for their IPO. It's not a new idea and may result in fairer pricing for IPO shares.
It seems to me that search could be improved by paying attention to what you've done in the past. Current search engines assume each search is completely independent, but there's valuable information in what you did earlier, especially if you keep refining the query trying to find something. One attempt at this is demoed at Findory Search. It particularly makes a difference if you're refining your search query to try to find something. But it's still a work in progress.
the lawyers.
It's hard to imagine that this is cost-competitive with Linux clustering. Macs aren't cheap.