Talking about "average wages" in the industrializing world is pretty misleading.
China is a third world country that contains a first world country. Vista, computers, and internet access is being sold to the first worlders. I've seen $300 / month quoted as the base starting salary for white collar work. Which puts a Chinese office drone at about 1/4 what a US temp staffer makes. This seems about right, given that the kind of consumer price disparities here are primarily the results of China's heavy hand in their own currency market. The government keeps the local currency artificially weak to make sure that outside investment remains dirt cheap.
Now according to basic economic theory, this shouldn't work. It doesn't cost (significantly) less to market a consumer product to the Chinese middle class than anyone elses, so how can they support comparable standards of living with such weak currency, and how does the currency not strengthen as more imports and local consumer spending occurs? The Vista pricing is a good illustration of why basic economic theory is frequently inadequate to describe the real world. Most consumer goods simply don't behave like widgets or pork bellies, advertising and IP law (among many other forces that prevent commoditization of goods) prevent market effects and allow large players like Microsoft and the Chinese Government to keep prices of goods at wildly different levels in some parts of the world rather than others.
But whichever of the military industrial complex contractors has the bid for this project is going to want to maximize their profit, so they'll make more than the US needs, and sell the overstock to our allies.
Of course if you know anything about our choice of "allies" over the past 30 years or so, this means we're one hot headed revolt away from facing a militia where the locals have drone guns too. I'm sure there was a time when only major powers had shoulder rockets. If it's cheaper to buy and operate than an airplane and it's at all useful for guerrilla warfare, then US soldiers will be fighting against it pretty damn fast.
Additionally: compare soldier casualties between the two world wars. Then compare civilian casualties. Bombers ended trench warfare, but they turned any enemy city into no mans land. Military tech that makes war safer for soldiers almost always makes it much more deadly for civilians. The laws of unintended consequences work overtime for war.
Maybe because if the IDE reformats all your code you wind up with the entire file as a diff when you check it in to your source code control system?
Standard practice is to have formatting changes be a check in by themselves, with a comment, so that you know not to worry about that giant diff, and you don't have to hunt around in it for functional changes.
Ahhh yes the American right, placing industry insiders inside regulatory agencies in the name of the free market. Either run the agency right, or get rid of it. Having a favor brokering regulatory agency has nothing to do with open trade.
While the GPL allows you the choice of casting your lots with all future versions, almost every closed EULA i've ever seen absolutely forces you to agree to all future versions of the agreement, subject to arbitrary and unannounced change.
Many US universities have special scholarship programs for students from abroad.
The fact that non-citizens can gain access to our university system is one of the big things that keeps our immigration rates of highly skilled professionals sky high. For decades the US knowledge work economy has been too large to run on local brains alone.
dress and fashion are inherently silly no matter how you slice it. some people like playing with it, some people just wear whatever everyone else is wearing.
the "dumbasses" are the people who let it bother them to any great degree.
"Consumers don't understand how it works." Isn't really a valid legal defense of anything. Ignorance of the law is never an alibi. Furthermore, while only a minority of drivers understand how their car works, all are expected to be responsible for sufficient knowledge of maintenance and operation to be able to operate the vehicle within the law. If the law were to state that due diligence requires that your wireless be safeguarded by some standardized means, ignorance of your hardware wouldn't protect you from breaking that law.
Of course I'm an anarchist at heart, and I don't really believe that legal arguments such as these translate into moral arguments. You can start with perfectly well-considered laws, and by way of logical extrapolation, arrive at a police state. If a big chunk of your population is violating "property" rights in your society, it's more likely that the definition of property is flawed rather than that you've suddenly spawned millions of otherwise well-meaning criminals.
Cleaning out my garage a week or two ago I was going through an old box and ended up tossing a set of Slackware A floppies... That was such a refreshing change from downloading a boot disk and bootstrapping a system starting with compiling GCC.
well between the four digit user ID, and the old timer war stories, what are you up to these days? just chasing the rest of us off of your lawn, cane in fist?
It's pretty basic guys: biological brains are very complicated analogue computers. The simulation of analogue C.A. systems is NP-hard. This one isn't coming for a long looooooong time.
If the intended audience of the study are search engine power users who need to know about slight differences in algorithmic performance, then yes, your study would be more "useful."
However if the intended audience is the marketing and research divisions of major search engine players, then this study goes a lot farther in saying what gets market results than yours would. It answers the question: "do we spend $1 million improving our tech or do we spend it selling our brand?"
Of course it's hardly a secret that customer satisfaction has very little to do with the freely made up mind of the customer. Its why car companies go to such lengths to provide little perks to purchasers and leasers of new cars. A few tens of thousands of miles of free oil changes tends to make the average customer a lot happier with their car than actually buying a really good car does. What makes the average geek happy with one gadget he buys, uses for a week and then leaves in the drawer, and unhappy with another? Even with smart consumers its very rarely a hard honest brass tacks look at features, performance, and price.
Indeed, the fastest way for a bad law to be repealed is for it to be fairly applied to politically powerful people.
Imagine if crooked pharmacists and the millions of middle class Americans who abuse pharmaceutical drugs were treated like other "enemies" in the war on drugs.
What was that? I couldn't hear you... maybe you should take the cock out of your mouth first next time.
Holy jeebus, I mean I like Macs OK, I'm typing on an old G3 iBook right now, but good lord son, they're a private company making money for themselves. You need to fall out of love or just go ahead and grant them joint status on your bank account, it would be more dignified.
Why should my work support someone else's patents and DRM, both of which I find to be utter abberations on the face of computing. What's the point of having code be made open souce if it's going to be patented so that derivitive works can't be made -- that's the whole durn' point. If private interests want DRM and patents, then they can do their own work and keep it closed, but if they're taking code from the FSF, the GPL and millions of coders like me, then I'd prefer they keep their hands above the table, and keep that kind of anti-consumer BS out of their products.
Dammit people, he's dead. How many times in season six did the "you won't hear the one that gets you, it will all just go black." conversation happen. It was clever and artful. Meadow survives. She was always the one member of the family at least halfway working to get away from the evil at the core of their life, the only character in the whole series really. But Carm held on for $600,000 and AJ never took any opportunity to get away from the heart of darkness, and Tony well... Tony is Tony. They bit it. They didn't hear the one that got them, it just went black.
Right now, a lot of employers won't hire someone if there's easily googleable photos of them in college, say, at a drinking party. I think what's happening in privacy (at least for the connected middle class -- the underclass doesn't have access to this stuff, and the true upper class has been practicing cultural invisibility in America since the 1930s) is that we're all becoming dormmates and acquaintances, and shots of us at 19 drinking, acting silly on vacation, and an angry blog or two by an ex are just going to have less and less effect on our real lives -- as they would among circles of people who actually know us.
The privacy that really gets hurt is the ability to compartmentalize off things that really should be private and will bias people against us - association with certain political organizations or friendships with controversial persons, outside the norm sexual habits, etc. etc. much like living in a very small town: it will get harder and harder to live outside the norms of those around us. "Public" frat antics: OK. Unpopular opinions or "deviant" behavior: grounds for not being hired.
It's not too long until we're all living like prospective politicians. I've heard that at Georgetown, there's a very strict no cameras and no Facebook rule for campus parties. A sign of the times, for sure, but really sensible and inevitable. It's been coming ever since the Republicans opened up Gary Hart's private life to politics in 1987, and in doing so, opened up every politicians'.
100% of the life-bearing planets we know of have a lot of different species with almost unique and highly specialized modes of survival, each one of them being as likely to appear as intelligence.
There's nothing special about intelligence. It isn't the "goal" of evolution. It could very well have fizzled out or never shown up here. Think about evolutionary history in an unsentimental way and big brains aren't obviously worth their cost. Sure we win out in the end, but we pay for it by being a lot more fragile and hard to grow than even our closest animal cousins. A bad famine could have picked us off before we developed language.
I don't see why there's any logical reason to think that intelligence is a terribly common adaptive strategy. While a lot of strategies have been pulled off time and time again here on Earth, intelligence only seemed to have survival value for a single species once.
There's a great Joel on Software about platforms and that in general you want to "commoditize your complements" meaning, if you sell hardware, you want to bend over backwards to make sure that there's cheap available software for you hardware (Mac makes this mistake again and again and again - they should have been working with Borland or someone since forever ago to make developing Mac ports of Windows software easy as pie) and if you sell software, you want cheap available hardware that runs your software. The early adopter crowd clearly was adding software functionality to Sony's hardware, Sony killed the software, and thus removed value from their hardware platform. It's as if Palm were to go in and kill backwards-compatibility for their latest OS, or if Windows 95 had decided not to include DOS compatibility.
$50 for a new video game is a price the market supports. Video games aren't the music industry, you aren't charging near $20 for something that everyone damn well knows is only worth $9 or $10, video games aren't going to see the kind of rampant piracy (that is kids with nothing BUT pirated CDs and MP3s) someone who buys the PSP for MAME is going to wind up buying some of your software too. And if you'd had some sense in pricing those UMD movies (also, TV series and cartoons would have been a better fit to the format - works for urban commuters) they'd have bought those too.
The PSP is just another in a long line of Sony's strategic missteps over the last few years. Treat the customer as your enemy, and let the lawyers do your strategic thinking.
American activists and sympathizers are spies? I know a lot of activists, even extreme, black block, brick through the starbuck window types. And while they (we) may read a lot of blogs and follow the news pretty close, I haven't ever heard of anyone wiretapping anything. Where the heck are you getting that from? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you're making this one up entirely.
Anyway, crime by the police is far more upsetting than crime by criminals or crime by activists. There will always be criminals, and any angry political group will always have those who take things too far. However, the police are our representatives. If we can't create a society in which the enforcers of the law can themselves follow the law, I don't see how we can make any legitimate claim to being free. We may be temporarily contented, but we live that way only at the authorities' convenience.
It would be interesting, but I think you'd find programming for the SNES and modern game programming to be different beasts.
Back then, with much smaller resources, a lot of work was still done in assembler and some pretty low level code that is now taken care of by libraries. There isn't the need to squeeze every last inch of functionality out of hardware any more, and the coding is a lot different.
Your right its not appropriate for every 3rd world country. But there are other developing countries without corrupt governments, local crime bosses and gangs.
For real? Do you know *ANY* country without corrupt governments, local crime bosses, and gangs? OK, maybe Canada sometimes, but I swear those guys are cheating somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
Talking about "average wages" in the industrializing world is pretty misleading.
China is a third world country that contains a first world country. Vista, computers, and internet access is being sold to the first worlders. I've seen $300 / month quoted as the base starting salary for white collar work. Which puts a Chinese office drone at about 1/4 what a US temp staffer makes. This seems about right, given that the kind of consumer price disparities here are primarily the results of China's heavy hand in their own currency market. The government keeps the local currency artificially weak to make sure that outside investment remains dirt cheap.
Now according to basic economic theory, this shouldn't work. It doesn't cost (significantly) less to market a consumer product to the Chinese middle class than anyone elses, so how can they support comparable standards of living with such weak currency, and how does the currency not strengthen as more imports and local consumer spending occurs? The Vista pricing is a good illustration of why basic economic theory is frequently inadequate to describe the real world. Most consumer goods simply don't behave like widgets or pork bellies, advertising and IP law (among many other forces that prevent commoditization of goods) prevent market effects and allow large players like Microsoft and the Chinese Government to keep prices of goods at wildly different levels in some parts of the world rather than others.
Sure right now.
But whichever of the military industrial complex contractors has the bid for this project is going to want to maximize their profit, so they'll make more than the US needs, and sell the overstock to our allies.
Of course if you know anything about our choice of "allies" over the past 30 years or so, this means we're one hot headed revolt away from facing a militia where the locals have drone guns too. I'm sure there was a time when only major powers had shoulder rockets. If it's cheaper to buy and operate than an airplane and it's at all useful for guerrilla warfare, then US soldiers will be fighting against it pretty damn fast.
Additionally: compare soldier casualties between the two world wars. Then compare civilian casualties. Bombers ended trench warfare, but they turned any enemy city into no mans land. Military tech that makes war safer for soldiers almost always makes it much more deadly for civilians. The laws of unintended consequences work overtime for war.
Standard practice is to have formatting changes be a check in by themselves, with a comment, so that you know not to worry about that giant diff, and you don't have to hunt around in it for functional changes.
Ahhh yes the American right, placing industry insiders inside regulatory agencies in the name of the free market. Either run the agency right, or get rid of it. Having a favor brokering regulatory agency has nothing to do with open trade.
While the GPL allows you the choice of casting your lots with all future versions, almost every closed EULA i've ever seen absolutely forces you to agree to all future versions of the agreement, subject to arbitrary and unannounced change.
Many US universities have special scholarship programs for students from abroad.
The fact that non-citizens can gain access to our university system is one of the big things that keeps our immigration rates of highly skilled professionals sky high. For decades the US knowledge work economy has been too large to run on local brains alone.
dress and fashion are inherently silly no matter how you slice it. some people like playing with it, some people just wear whatever everyone else is wearing.
the "dumbasses" are the people who let it bother them to any great degree.
"Consumers don't understand how it works." Isn't really a valid legal defense of anything. Ignorance of the law is never an alibi. Furthermore, while only a minority of drivers understand how their car works, all are expected to be responsible for sufficient knowledge of maintenance and operation to be able to operate the vehicle within the law. If the law were to state that due diligence requires that your wireless be safeguarded by some standardized means, ignorance of your hardware wouldn't protect you from breaking that law.
Of course I'm an anarchist at heart, and I don't really believe that legal arguments such as these translate into moral arguments. You can start with perfectly well-considered laws, and by way of logical extrapolation, arrive at a police state. If a big chunk of your population is violating "property" rights in your society, it's more likely that the definition of property is flawed rather than that you've suddenly spawned millions of otherwise well-meaning criminals.
Cleaning out my garage a week or two ago I was going through an old box and ended up tossing a set of Slackware A floppies... That was such a refreshing change from downloading a boot disk and bootstrapping a system starting with compiling GCC.
well between the four digit user ID, and the old timer war stories, what are you up to these days? just chasing the rest of us off of your lawn, cane in fist?
Wow, a new SOAP joke in 2007. Well done, sir. Well done.
Here here on the Man-Mad Brain.
It's pretty basic guys: biological brains are very complicated analogue computers. The simulation of analogue C.A. systems is NP-hard. This one isn't coming for a long looooooong time.
Useful to whom?
If the intended audience of the study are search engine power users who need to know about slight differences in algorithmic performance, then yes, your study would be more "useful."
However if the intended audience is the marketing and research divisions of major search engine players, then this study goes a lot farther in saying what gets market results than yours would. It answers the question: "do we spend $1 million improving our tech or do we spend it selling our brand?"
Of course it's hardly a secret that customer satisfaction has very little to do with the freely made up mind of the customer. Its why car companies go to such lengths to provide little perks to purchasers and leasers of new cars. A few tens of thousands of miles of free oil changes tends to make the average customer a lot happier with their car than actually buying a really good car does. What makes the average geek happy with one gadget he buys, uses for a week and then leaves in the drawer, and unhappy with another? Even with smart consumers its very rarely a hard honest brass tacks look at features, performance, and price.
Indeed, the fastest way for a bad law to be repealed is for it to be fairly applied to politically powerful people.
Imagine if crooked pharmacists and the millions of middle class Americans who abuse pharmaceutical drugs were treated like other "enemies" in the war on drugs.
What was that? I couldn't hear you... maybe you should take the cock out of your mouth first next time.
Holy jeebus, I mean I like Macs OK, I'm typing on an old G3 iBook right now, but good lord son, they're a private company making money for themselves. You need to fall out of love or just go ahead and grant them joint status on your bank account, it would be more dignified.
Why should my work support someone else's patents and DRM, both of which I find to be utter abberations on the face of computing. What's the point of having code be made open souce if it's going to be patented so that derivitive works can't be made -- that's the whole durn' point. If private interests want DRM and patents, then they can do their own work and keep it closed, but if they're taking code from the FSF, the GPL and millions of coders like me, then I'd prefer they keep their hands above the table, and keep that kind of anti-consumer BS out of their products.
Dammit people, he's dead. How many times in season six did the "you won't hear the one that gets you, it will all just go black." conversation happen. It was clever and artful. Meadow survives. She was always the one member of the family at least halfway working to get away from the evil at the core of their life, the only character in the whole series really. But Carm held on for $600,000 and AJ never took any opportunity to get away from the heart of darkness, and Tony well... Tony is Tony. They bit it. They didn't hear the one that got them, it just went black.
Right now, a lot of employers won't hire someone if there's easily googleable photos of them in college, say, at a drinking party. I think what's happening in privacy (at least for the connected middle class -- the underclass doesn't have access to this stuff, and the true upper class has been practicing cultural invisibility in America since the 1930s) is that we're all becoming dormmates and acquaintances, and shots of us at 19 drinking, acting silly on vacation, and an angry blog or two by an ex are just going to have less and less effect on our real lives -- as they would among circles of people who actually know us.
The privacy that really gets hurt is the ability to compartmentalize off things that really should be private and will bias people against us - association with certain political organizations or friendships with controversial persons, outside the norm sexual habits, etc. etc. much like living in a very small town: it will get harder and harder to live outside the norms of those around us. "Public" frat antics: OK. Unpopular opinions or "deviant" behavior: grounds for not being hired.
It's not too long until we're all living like prospective politicians. I've heard that at Georgetown, there's a very strict no cameras and no Facebook rule for campus parties. A sign of the times, for sure, but really sensible and inevitable. It's been coming ever since the Republicans opened up Gary Hart's private life to politics in 1987, and in doing so, opened up every politicians'.
100% of the life-bearing planets we know of have a lot of different species with almost unique and highly specialized modes of survival, each one of them being as likely to appear as intelligence.
There's nothing special about intelligence. It isn't the "goal" of evolution. It could very well have fizzled out or never shown up here. Think about evolutionary history in an unsentimental way and big brains aren't obviously worth their cost. Sure we win out in the end, but we pay for it by being a lot more fragile and hard to grow than even our closest animal cousins. A bad famine could have picked us off before we developed language.
I don't see why there's any logical reason to think that intelligence is a terribly common adaptive strategy. While a lot of strategies have been pulled off time and time again here on Earth, intelligence only seemed to have survival value for a single species once.
...or read a paragraph to determine which file is the right one in the suppository,
you might have pointed your sources.list in the wrong direction there...
There's a great Joel on Software about platforms and that in general you want to "commoditize your complements" meaning, if you sell hardware, you want to bend over backwards to make sure that there's cheap available software for you hardware (Mac makes this mistake again and again and again - they should have been working with Borland or someone since forever ago to make developing Mac ports of Windows software easy as pie) and if you sell software, you want cheap available hardware that runs your software. The early adopter crowd clearly was adding software functionality to Sony's hardware, Sony killed the software, and thus removed value from their hardware platform. It's as if Palm were to go in and kill backwards-compatibility for their latest OS, or if Windows 95 had decided not to include DOS compatibility.
$50 for a new video game is a price the market supports. Video games aren't the music industry, you aren't charging near $20 for something that everyone damn well knows is only worth $9 or $10, video games aren't going to see the kind of rampant piracy (that is kids with nothing BUT pirated CDs and MP3s) someone who buys the PSP for MAME is going to wind up buying some of your software too. And if you'd had some sense in pricing those UMD movies (also, TV series and cartoons would have been a better fit to the format - works for urban commuters) they'd have bought those too.
The PSP is just another in a long line of Sony's strategic missteps over the last few years. Treat the customer as your enemy, and let the lawyers do your strategic thinking.
Subsidies and food stamps aren't going to help the global market, which is what is being discussed.
Ehhhh.... what?
American activists and sympathizers are spies? I know a lot of activists, even extreme, black block, brick through the starbuck window types. And while they (we) may read a lot of blogs and follow the news pretty close, I haven't ever heard of anyone wiretapping anything. Where the heck are you getting that from? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you're making this one up entirely.
Anyway, crime by the police is far more upsetting than crime by criminals or crime by activists. There will always be criminals, and any angry political group will always have those who take things too far. However, the police are our representatives. If we can't create a society in which the enforcers of the law can themselves follow the law, I don't see how we can make any legitimate claim to being free. We may be temporarily contented, but we live that way only at the authorities' convenience.
It would be interesting, but I think you'd find programming for the SNES and modern game programming to be different beasts.
Back then, with much smaller resources, a lot of work was still done in assembler and some pretty low level code that is now taken care of by libraries. There isn't the need to squeeze every last inch of functionality out of hardware any more, and the coding is a lot different.
I can't tell you why you spent $500 on a machine that didn't have any games you were interested in. Compulsive consumerism?
Your right its not appropriate for every 3rd world country.
But there are other developing countries without corrupt governments, local crime bosses and gangs.
For real? Do you know *ANY* country without corrupt governments, local crime bosses, and gangs? OK, maybe Canada sometimes, but I swear those guys are cheating somehow.