But with 90% of the code these days in business (which is the majority of custom code written in the world), Java's speed is acceptable and its portability and memory garbage collection outweigh any speed advantages of C/C++ in a Gigahertz world.
Sure. Java's fine for doing a front end or simple database accessor. Hell, Hypercard was great for this.
It's just not so great to do mainstream apps in, and people claiming that Java is "just as fast as C", which sometimes gets these people to waste time trying to implement their app in Java, gets my gander.
Look at Corel's suite. They implemented the *entire stupid thing* in Java because it was going to be the "next big thing" and eventually be as "fast as C", according to the frenzied shouts of some of the Java supporters. Then they had to throw the whole thing out because of performance issues. I can't even imagine the cost, both direct and strategic (cost in time sitting on your ass while your competitor does something) to Corel. Same thing happened to Mozilla...the thing was originally going to be in Java. That idea got nixed...
The other thing that vaguely pisses me off is that almost all of the things that Java does that make performance *suck* really aren't necessary. You can design a fast language that has most of its security model. Ocaml is quite safe -- moreso than Java -- but the Ocaml people imposed almost no overhead from C, because they avoided adding features that required runtime overhead, but went all out on things that could be somehow finagled into compile-time work. They *do* do most array bounds checking, but that's about it. Ocaml has GC, portability, and type safety...it just does almost all its work at compile time. I'd be willing to use Ocaml (well, actually I don't like functional languages much, but I'd endorse its performance) for almost any of the situations where I'd use C or C++.
I'm not a huge fan of Ocaml itself, but it's a model for what *should* have been done with Java. If a feature is going to nail you performance-wise -- if users are going to have to do contortions to get decent performance -- you should think long and hard before adding it. Everything that sounded "cool" ended up in Java, which resulted in countless wasted CPU cycles for users around the world.
I don't see why, as processors get faster, people feel the need to keep computers equivalently slow. Why not take advantage of the constant-time improvement? We can do better optimizations, do caching, because now we have the memory and extra constant time to do so. We have better body of knowledge about compilers, so why can't we *improve* performance instead of hurting it? It's *stupid*.
The problem is that it's still kind of nasty, because Java makes it very easy to have an inner loop with heap allocation occurring.
It still isn't free. Not sure how much extra overhead a VM requires to to stack allocation -- in native code, it's just a register change, but I suppose that a JVM might have to do a stack-heap collision check.
The heap...you have to probably select the right size data chunk from a bin, find a free chunk (granted, if this isn't fragmented, it isn't *awful*), make some changes to mark the thing as no longer free, update references used to try to locate the next free chunk quickly, register the thing with the GC. Since this is Java, you're also locating a constructor, checking to see whether memory should be defragged and potentially defragging memory. It's also a lot more likely to span a wide range of memory that wasn't previously touched, which means causing cache misses if the architecture running the JVM has a cache.
That being said, ya, it can run faster if you don't have massive heap fragmentation -- which doesn't necessarily occur, even if you aren't defragmenting things, especially if you have a clever internal allocation strategy.
You just described the ideal scenario, one that unfortunately doesn't happen very often. In particular, the number of RPMs available via apt4rpm on RH8 is incredibly small.
I'm also using the freshrpm and Macromedia apt repositories, but yes, it was a good situation. Still, it really isn't all that rare. I use a pretty oddball collection of programs, but I think that every process running at the moment is from an apt-available package.
The Windows scenario as described is also sort of unusual, although as Windows software installation was grown rather than designed yes, it too is far from perfect.
The Windows approach is still non-optimal. I've had plenty of times that uninstallers fail, or installers fail but don't give a useful message.
What's needed is for developers to be able to produce portable binary packages, and then have a distributed and decentralised DNS style network to replace apt. The interface is still the same: "package install galeon" and wait, but unlike apt it scales.
I'd like to see distro folks get together and come up with one *common* meta-spec-file format that can contain all the metainformation that might need to be in a package. Then you can build any sort of packages from it. RPM's spec is a damn ugly, PITA-to-write, not-particularly-heavily-structured format, so it doesn't cut it.
For instance, the GNU ld.so (dynamic linker) contains design, ah, issues which make producing portable binaries quite hard (to do with link trees).
Yup. Why, if I didn't know better, I'd be almost willing to say that Stallman designed things to be inconvenient for non-source distributed software.;-)
[clip bit about good package management]
It'd be nice to support (if not in the package manager itself, in a front end to it) automatic downloading a la emerge or apt-get that's aware of mirrors. It'd be nice to use gpg for *everything* (including downloading new mirror lists), and do so transparently to the user. It'd be nice to have the package manager have an absolutely minimal set of requirements (python and perl are right out). It'd be nice to have the package manager have the ability to *configure* software...to understand configure options. That would be decidedly cool. It'd be nice for the package manager to run as non-root and to allow finding "differences" between two system states -- RH might define "RH 8 is set of packages foo with these specified SHAsums". It'd be nice to have the system be easy for packagers to use. It'd nice fo rthe package manager to have decent backward compatibility (unlike every *other* GNU tool that starts with "auto":-( ) It'd be nice for the package manager to support "user overrides", where the user *knows* something is fulfilled and doesn't want to hear about it again (for example, if he's using a non-packaged kernel).
BTW, if you wrote the blurb on package management on autopackage.org, that's one of the best discussions of package management and issues with current systems I've ever read.
Don't get me wrong. Java's fine for certain applications. For lightweight networking stuff, I think it's almost unparalleled. It's also pretty good for prototyping C++ stuff. It's good for lightweight tasks that break down logically into threads -- Java has nice threading support.
My beef is that Java is not, despite its supporters' loud claims (which have been going on for years), remotely performance-competitive with C.
The language simply has some foundational performance limitations in it. It was designed that way, and tweaking implementations cannot get around that.
I agree that there are some nice things about Java.
Rapid Development
Damn straight. Java is a great prototyping language.
Hotspot
Not bad, but not that incredible, either. The benchmarks I've seen haven't shown HotSpot to be incredible, and besides, competitors like C (gcc) have branch-profiling code of their own.
Secure Software
True. There are some improvements. But buffer overflows are less and less common in C (due to *excellent* libraries like glib), and have been fixed in other languages without anywhere near the performance hit of Java (like Ocaml).
One of the big factors remaining is just HOW you write code in Java.
It may be a personal thing, but I have a deep dislike of languages where you have to modify your regular coding style to get decent performance at a given point. It used to be BASICs...you'd use some nasty trick and you could actually get decent performance out of the thing. Then MATLAB. *God* I hate vectorizing operations. I expect that a MATLAB guru simply does this in his sleep, but I find it incredibly frusterating to totally rethink code in an any areas where performance matters.
These things slow Java down, btu also make it more uniform which makes it easier (faster) to
A fair number of the uniformity improvements in Java could have come from simply tweaking syntax (int[50] x instead of int x[50], for example).
I'm all for modern language features...I just think that doing anything that implies a necessary performance hit is a bad idea. If someone wants a given feature, they can slap it on top. I can make C++ have a virtual function, but I can't make Java run quickly.
If you made every function in your C++ classes virtual, used RTTI and Strings to do runtime linking, etc. your C++ programs would be slower too!
Ya, but Stroustroup went to a lot of work to ensure that you only "pay for what you use".
So, I'm not out to bash Java as a usable language. It has some major pluses. However, specifically in the performance arena, Java definitely has issues.
Okay, for embedded systems there might be some argument. I actually considered consoles, but decided that no one in their right minds would be coding console games in Java. However, I suppose there are some embedded devices that run Java (don't some cell phones, IIRC), so I guess that isn't totally out of line.
However, I stand by my claim that (at least on non-embedded systems) runtime memory defragmentation is pretty silly for general purpose stuff.
1) Computers don't sit there and block on I/O any more. The world isn't Windows 95 anymore, and when something is paging, another app can be doing some processing. The cost of hitting the disk is far less significant.
2) The bottleneck for current desktop systems is generally not CPU cycles, but memory bandwidth. Memory defragmentation eats bandwidth like there's no tomorrow.
Oh, and a follow-up to my previous post. These clowns spent a long time talking about how people can "ignore JIT overhead" because it's almost completely insignificant "most of the time". Fine. Then they spend 80% of the article talking about *binary load time*, which is essentially only an issue under the *exact* same conditions that the JIT is -- once for a single chunk of code. If they're pimping launch time, they sure as hell shouldn't be ignoring JIT time.
...I've heard a lot of complaints from my peers about Java being slow.
Allow me to join the chorus.
Java isn't slow, but sometimes you do have to program more thoughtfully to make Java fast.
No. Java *can* be made less mind-bogglingly slow by avoiding certain things...preallocating a pool of objects and using primitive types (like int) whenever possible helps. The way the language is designed makes it *easy* to be mind-bogglingly slow. That doesn't mean that going out of your way to avoid these things makes Java fast. It makes it only "slow".
Java is Fast for Dummies
Ah, yes. A link tellings how Java isn't *really* that slow on "javaworld.com". I took a skim.
The first two pages say basically "Java isn't that slow". They then start rambling about various features that make Java a good language.
They claim that Java programs load faster than native programs. (The article was written, BTW, in Feb '98, to give an idea of how full of BS they are). This is stupid. JVM startup and load time *dwarfs* application link time. Write "hello world" in C++ and in Java.
First, they laud the small executable size of Java as being a performance boost based on binary format. Everything I've read points the *other* way...Java *is* fairly compact, but can contain data that isn't nicely aligned along host boundaries.
Second, what they're talking about, if it's even accurate these days, which I doubt, has a lot to do with the lousiness of the Windows runtime linker. This isn't really an issue for Linux.
Third, while insinuating that minimizing code size provides a performance boost, they talk about how great it is that Java lets you use *built in* libraries, whereas C++ progams need to *bundle* libraries. What? That's stupid. They're shifting the libraries around, but it sure as hell isn't decreasing total amount of data that needs to get loaded.
Fourth, this gem: Finally, Java contains special libraries that support images and sound files in compressed formats, such as Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) and Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) for images, and Adaptive m -law encoded (AU) for audio. In contrast, the only natively supported formats in Windows NT are uncompressed: bitmap (BMP) for images and wave (WAV) for audio. Compression can reduce the size of images by an order of magnitude and audio files by a factor of three. Additional class libraries are available if you want to add support for other graphics and sound formats.
They're billing this as *improving* performance? Yeah, I'd love to have my app blow CPU time decompressing a JPEG image instead of reading a slightly larger BMP image if I'm trying to minimize load time. Oh, and have it load all the JPEG loading code, too.
They then proceed to ramble about selective loading, and try to imply that Java's runtime linking is faster than C++'s.
They *then* show off smaller binary sizes by embedding a BMP in the C++ binary and a GIF in the Java binary. Impressive.
They then claim that claims of poor Java performance are based on non-JIT implementations. This neatly lets them avoid actually citing numbers. Sure, I'll agree that Java went from "Performance Hideous" to "Performance Bad". Everyone uses JIT these days, and damned if Java isn't *still* slow.
They then try to talk about how JIT allows code to be optimized just like C++. Wow. Yup, JIT sure is known for impressive optimization, isn't it?
They then use the most artificial, contrived benchmarks I've ever seen (which conveniently avoid almost all of the Java pitfalls...they don't need to do array access, they're trivial to implement without heap allocation...)
They finish up talking about how C++ RTTI performance sucks compared to Java (ignoring the fact that Java hits RTTI code *far* more often than C++ does, like every time it yanks something out of a generic container class).
Finally, they finish up by talking about a bunch of random Java features that they think are great, like garbage collection "First, your programs are virtually immune to memory leaks." Hope you don't use hash tables, buddy.
Next, they talk about how a JVM can defrag memory. I'm going to have to just crack up at that. This isn't a performance boost unless you're using a language that *hideously* fragments memory and eats memory like a *beast* (granted, Java is the best candidate I know of). Runtime memory defragmentation went out of fashion with the classic Mac OS...it's pretty much a bad idea as long as you have a hard drive available. VM systems are pretty damn good these days...if you're trying to maximize performance, there are almost always better things to be doing than blowing cycles and bandwidth defragging memory. There's a reason we don't do it any more.
Basically, my conclusion is that "Java is Fast for Dummies" is primarily aimed at, well, dummies.
It doesn't work. Linux uses gcc extensions. Plus, the number of compiler bugs Linux exposes means that running it under icc would probably involve fixing a bunch of icc bugs.
And you'd probably have to fix about a zillion Linux bugs...
Okay, I'm not going to say things are perfect, but I'm sitting here with a RH 8.0-based box with apt-get. (Granted, I could use a GUI and make it *really* friendly, but whatever.) apt-get is *painless*. Compare this to the Windows world, where you have lots of different installers, each of which is a little program that may or may not run and takes up your entire screen and has to be located somewhere on the manufacturer's website (or, as is most common in the Windows world, purchased from a store).
So, let's compare.
Me: 1) apt-get install galeon. 2) Do something else for a while
Them: 1) Drive to store 2) Purchase box 3) Take box home, stick CD in drive 4) Wade through non-standard *interactive* installation process.
As an example, my brother got his hands on an old Windows 98 box today. He asked me to add Divx and CD burning support to the thing. First thing I do is install EZ CD Creator. Installs fine, takes up whole screen, requires a reboot. Upon reboot, starts spewing warnings about applications not being able to launch because of a lack of mfc42.dll exports, as well as another install screen (completing the installation). Okay, turns out he needs mfc42.dll. I go, download that (impossible to find on MS's site even with Google, so I have to get it in a zip file from a third party. No pretty automated installer...drag and drop a dll).
Then, download Divx installer. System gives error about installer being truncated (it's not). Download zip file containing divx codec for manual installation...we'll see how that goes.
I'm sorry, but ease of software installation on Windows does not *compare* to ease of software installation on Linux. I'm not even going to discuss how hard it is to keep software up to date on Windows.
Controversy sure is the bread and butter of Slashdot. Okay.
Microsoft has $40B in the bank and is still making money like they have a license to print it.
Wow. Jump up and down, clap hands. And they differ from fallen industry "angels" IBM, DEC, Compaq, Cisco in *what* way again? Making money this year doesn't say much about what happens over the next few years...in the computer world, market leaders have been turned to chutney in that amount of time. The point is that, while they have a lead, Linux is finally a viable alternative for many people, and gaining strongly in seats used.
Remember, MS makes more money per installed seat than, say, Red Hat. So if RH makes $10M in revenue in a year, and MS makes $500M, RH may still have more users. Are we at that point yet? Nope. Are we getting there? Yup.
MS is a much older company than RH. They're established, and they have a lot of money.
The same thing was true of IBM and MS a few years back.
In the meantime, Borg-like entities like IBM (for Christ's sake) are adopting Linux (should I say "swallowing up Linux"?) and this is somehow a twisted victory for "the cause".
Who cares if IBM has influence? IBM makes some great products. They happen to charge an arm and a leg, but they get their revenue from hardware and services, not software. They appear quite willing to let the software world do its own thing, and just fund parts of it that are most beneficial to it.
Also, Mozilla speed improvements or Phoenix 1.0 would rock!
Try a new version of Phoenix, and try using tabbed browsing.
I've been pleasantly surprised. Around M18 or so, I was pretty firmly decided that Mozilla was *never* going to have decent performance...there'd be some optimization, but it wasn't going to ever be very usable on an older PII.
There is some argument that it's a bit burdensome to say exactly what you mean anymore when specifying a group of OSes on Slashdot, though.
Let me give an example. I might say "Unix had a good year with mplayer", except someone would be sure to pop up and "Linux isn't Unix...it's a Unix-like OS". Okay, that we can deal with. Then we run the dilemma of whether "Unix-like OSes had a good year with mplayer" means "all operating systems that are like Unix, but are not, in fact, Unix", or whether it means "all operating systems that are or are not Unix, as long as they resemble Unix". You could say "Linux had a good year with GNOME 2", but then you get nailed by a FreeBSD guy that says that GNOME 2 works *fine* on FreeBSD as well, and another Stallmanite or Debianite who says that what you *really* mean to say is "GNU/Linux", not "Linux", which refers only to a kernel. "Red Hat Linux" would refer to a whole operating system, but only one distribution of such. Now, one must be sure not to say only "Unix and GNU/Linux have excellent text processing tools", as someone will be sure to mention that GNU/Hurd can handle those same tools as well, and is being shortchanged in your original comment. One could say that "Sun's make is only supported under Solaris" -- is that in fact true, or is it also supported under SunOS?
At this point, we may think we see a clever loophole. "Free operating systems achieved an enormous boom in the last year." However, that would be sure to get Stallmanites pointing out that you do not mean "Free", since BSD is not Free (or perhaps it is -- even with an almost 24/7 tech habit I can't keep up with what the FSF believes). Instead, perhaps you mean "free". Also, Red Hat may or may not be Free, based on their previous inclusion of Netscape Navigator. But you aren't talking about "free" operating systems -- that would include BeOS and Apple's System 6.0.8. You might change to "open source", whereupon you are informed that several companies consider their operating systems to be "open source" but only to some people or under some restrictions. Instead, you must mean "Open Source" operating systems. Well, even assuming you're familiar with ESR's exact rhetoric and can tell what falls under the "Open Source" moniker, at this point you're probably a bit bewildered.
I've reached the point where I just transpose the proper term, the one someone meant, whenever I see "Linux" or "Unix" or "open source operating systems" on Slashdot. It just isn't worth trying to be perfectly accurate, since a term to properly define the set you're talking about is probably at least two sentences long.:-)
You brought up good points but your presentation highly is one-sided.
Yup.:-)
"You knew India was going to kick the US's ass at coding eventually." is inaccurate.
I meant from an economic standpoint. People have been talking about India probably becoming dominant in the software industry for at *least* five years (at least I've been hearing it for that long).
This is more accurate: Many of us were busy coding away trying to meet deadlines and learning new stuff while CEOs and Politicians were busy taking work from U.S. Citizens and taking it to 3rd world countries.
Only expected behavior -- a lot of this got set in motion after a serious worker shortage at the end of the 90s. Workers demanded obscene rates. They got 'em, sure...but it also meant that it was now less costly to contract out additional work to other countries.
Globalization is not about the working person - American or foreigner.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. It *involves* the working person. As for whether it benefits the working person...sure, I'd argue that it does the majority of society, and even probably people in the affected segment (though they may have a painful dip in the short term).
It is about CEOs maximing their profits.
Yup. That's just part of capitalism, though. If you don't work to improve your company's efficiency, you'll get trampled by your competitors.
As the matter of fact, the point of a goernment embracing capitalism at *all* is usually to drive improvements in efficiency, since those that don't improve go under.
Jack Welch, Craig Barret, Shawn Maloney, Bill Gates, and others aren't going global so they could make things cheaper and better for the consumer and provide jobs in the 3rd world. They're doing this to Maximize their profits and minimize expenditures.
Sure, and in the short term they will -- there will be a short time during which profits will rise. But barring monopolies (which the US government and most other governments seek to avoid, for exactly this reason), competition drives down prices and consumes this profit. Most of the benefit of capitalism over a more socialized system is right there -- it's robust. People can be mean, greedy...and instead of screwing over the system, they just improve the system as a whole.
Their investors (who consist of the CEOs themselves, their friends, the upper management echelon, and Wall-Street) demand this from them at any cost. If you don't believe me then read up on Enron. They don't care what lives they ruin or people they impoverish.
That's true. I can assure you, though, that the opposite can be quite frusterating. If you have a "warm, family-owned business", it can suck to be passed over for promotion because of nepotism. It can suck to have your taxes going into agricultural subsidies to "ensure that no one's life gets wrecked." Generally, the system moves along and the requirement of adaptation to the changing environment falls upon individuals. Molded glass replaces blown glass? Not much market for glassblowers any more...they're going to have to change professions.
Recently, I heard on a radio program how a worker at a Nike Chinese sneaker factory only makes $800 a year and will not devote $100 or 1/8 of their salary to buy these shoes. They can't.
So? Nikes are a luxury good. That doesn't mean that they can't buy shoes, just that they can't buy the particular luxury good that their employer happens to produce. Do you expect the guy that sweeps the floor at Ferrari to be able to afford one of their cars?
Linux is taking off in India, to Microsoft's concern, because they can't afford the Microsoft OS or Windows applications.
Yup. MS has had artificially inflated prices for a while now, because they've been able to squeeze people out of the market and because they can impose some serious barriers to entry (computers have so many incidental "compatibility" problems...).
companies, (Intel, Microsoft, GM, Ford, Chrysler, etc, etc,) take advantage of social inequalities. Their factories and plants are operational in a country so long as poverty is high. The moment poverty decreases and wages improve for the common person, they're looking to move elsewhere.
Sure. Is that unjust? Why does the person who's now comfortable deserve wages more than the person who's starving in another country?
Recently, car-manufacturing plants in Mexico migrated to Vietnam because in the former, wages went to $2.25/hr Wow - a lot of dough there! In the latter they are 25 cents per day!! For the last decade, thousands of people in Mexico had built their lives around these factories They contributed to the wealth and success of these companies just like the Americans here in the U.S. did.
And they were compensated for it. If they didn't feel that their pay was worth it, they wouldn't have worked there. Very few people I've seen (aside from people founding a company) hold a particularly high degree of loyalty to a company. If another company came along and offered them nine times the amount of pay for their work (and offered and equivalently nice work environment and people and all that), very, very few people would stick around out of "loyalty". No. They'd drop their old company like a hot potato and move to the new one. So there's little loyalty of the worker for the company. Yet you expect companies, when faced with that same prospect, getting nine times the amount of work for the same price (going by your numbers), to suddenly be "loyal" to their employees? When their competitors will force them out of business or they will face a shareholder suit if they do not?
What are they supposed to do now, eat their own young? No CEOs, including Ford's, apologized.
Do workers apologize to their CEOs when they leave for a higher paying job?
The government allows people to come up illegally because they say Americans don't want to pick their own fruits and vegetables.
The government "allows" people to come up illegally because those people have little to lose in trying to make the crossing (and hence are very hard to stop), and turning the Mexico-Texas border into a massive Berlin Wall would cost insane amounts of money yearly. The Border Patrol arrests and turns back Mexican citizens all the time.
(Actually agricultural lobbyists pay American politicians to look the other way on this issue and are the ones promoting this propaganda.)
Sure, there's some under-the-table crap going on that I wish was gone. But would you be willing to pay...oh, I don't know, ten or twenty percent more for your fruit to know that the guy picking it is named Joe Smith instead of Pedro Martinez? No? Well, that's why they do it. The judge and jury of companies is the consumer, who has spoken with his wallet. Farm owners that hire illegal immigrants are at a significant advantage.
I just saw a program today about women in labor on a cable channel. They focused on a South-Western state. Interestingly most of the women were in their teens and were from South-Of-The-Border. (Gosh, maybe they and their parents had to come up here after the car companies shut down over there.) Do I honestly believe these teens are paying health insurance that will pay for the cost of their pregnancy? No. Who then is paying this? It's the American Tax Payer.
You mean legal immigrants here, or else they wouldn't be getting financial aid. Look, if the United States refused to do work outside of the country (Mexico or Vietnam or wherever), demand to get in would be even worse.
Let's take this a step further. These newborns will attend school here. Every homeowner knows this raises taxes. Uncle Sam and the state governments are not turning around and saying, "Gee, we know you've been displaced from your good job and now you have a lesser one. Don't worry everything's cheaper now. We'll even lower your property Taxes." No, No, No, this is like automobile insurance - it only goes up especially when migrant workers are adding more kids to the system.
That can just as easily be caused by Joe Smith in Kansas being a good Catholic and having eight kids. Unless you want to take the China route and have the government regulate and enforce the number of kids you can have, there's not a lot you can do to put a cap on the growth rate.
The point is the cost of producing that apple cheaply comes from somewhere else. Nothing's for free. What good is an inexpensive fruit or vegetable or keyboard if I can't afford to live somewhere, buy gasoline, or own an auto?
Can't do much about living in a beach house in Santa Barbara...land's a limited resource. However, autos have gotten *far* less expensive, as has gasoline. If we wanted to just subsidize American workers, we *could* use only Texan and Alaskan oil (and probably avoid a ton of Middle East issues). Of course, we'd be working with a much smaller supply, and prices would be far higher.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm sorry you're not in work at the moment. However, neither are you going to starve, though you might have to do something drastic like take a severe pay cut or work in a different field.
The guy in Vietnam that you're complaining about working for a quarter a day...*he's* looking at starving.
When all is said and done, in a ten years, whatever happens, your buying power isn't likely to be significantly lower than it was, because stuff keeps getting cheaper.
BTW, I was born in a communist country. Many people in this country have an out-of-touch view with the rest of the world. There's a lot of hatred for this country - some of it justified and some of it not.
Yup. I know well two people in the same boat.
Large companies will do whatever they need to do to keep their investors happy. If this means taking sensitive technologies to China, Russia, Poland, India, Pakistan or some other place hostile to this country, they will do it.
Yup. If it becomes a national-security issue (exporting certain types of tech or eliminating domestic infrastructure required to fight a war), the government frequently steps in, though.
It's all for short-term profit.
Well...no, I can't agree. I'd say that moving from country to country pretty much guarantees a short-term loss. Setting up relationships if you're subcontracting (maybe getting burned on the first few deals you do), paying out to set up a foreign plant...it's good in the long run for the company, though.
Sometimes companies *do* focus on the short term -- a failure to follow a purely capitalistic model -- because a manager's interests may not be aligned with those of the company. For example, he may want profits *this year* to get a promotion. But companies try to discourage disaligning individual interests with company interests as much as possible.
What does this really mean in the long run? For example, if there's a political crisis between the U.S. and say China then what? They shut down Intel's chip producing plants and a huge part of the tech sector collapses. Gee, where did all the short term profits go then? Down a Chinese toilet.
Yup. Some industries are subsidized here to maintain national security issues.
However, in general the building of trade just makes war less and less profitable, and tends to discourage countries from doing it. You notice how we rarely threaten people we have serious economic ties with?
"US: Boeing, Hughes Helped China Illegally WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The State Department said on Wednesday it had charged Hughes Electronics Corp. and Boeing Co.'s Satellite Systems unit with illegally sharing sensitive space technology with China in the 1990s that may have helped Beijing fine-tune its missiles"
Yup. Like I said, national security is one of the few exceptions the US maintains to allowing companies to do what they want (environmental issues are one of the other ones). And if the issue is serious, its likely that some people are going to get into hot water over this.
On a final note, I'm not proposing any solutions other than to say, we need a new system.
Mmmm...personally, I don't think so. I think capitalism can go a long ways before it realy requires fundamental changes. Maybe the introduction of nanotech would do it. A lot of governments have modified, less pure capitalist societies (Europe tends toward more socialized economies than the United States). I expect that even if production starts to outpace consumption, little tweaks like introducing public health care would keep things running.
One where people are more important than profits and one that is in tune with the environment.
Maybe. No one's come up with anything like this, though. Marx thought he had something, but it turns out that his system tends to fall apart when corrupt people are introduced into his system, whereas capitalism is pretty robust.
Maybe the current system has to crash before this is obvious.
Prolly.
BTW, life in these countries is cheap.
Re:Why is this being "dignified" by Slashdot?
on
Stealth Force Beta
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Okay, there were only about two things in there that I'd really call dangerous to the point of being stupid. First, dangling someone by their ankles over a 60 foot drop to fix a mistake in a prank was stupid. If you didn't think to bring rope or some sort of climbing safety equipment, let it go. It's not worth risking your life.
The other *really* stupid one was trying to wriggle up a 6 inch gap between an active elevator and the wall when the students ended up in a pit at the bottom of the elevator. That was *dumb*. I say sit tight and cope. Another student with his hand on a (potentially operable) emergency stop button does not make it safe.
That being said, a lot of the other "safety" things they broke aren't that bad, like taking out lights and whatnot. Some of the things they did were pretty constructive (I'm not even sure that swiping the railroad ties that campus maintenance wouldn't haul away would be considered a prank.)
You don't hear much about 802.11a because it is newer and has less market penetration than 802.11b. It hasn't had time to come into its own yet.
I doubt it ever will.
First, it costs significantly more. 802.11b is *cheap*.
Second, there's a big installed 802.11b base. The WAPs aren't that big of a deal -- it costs something to yank it out, but it's not that bad. However, trying to convince every person entering your network or visiting to obtain an 802.11a card is non-trivial.
Another way to distract myself while driving and get myself killed!
Or others.
I really, really loathe this trend toward "driver entertainment devices". Even people listening to background music on the radio drive more poorly. Cell phones are downright dangerous. The move towards HUD web browsers or maps is just asking for problems.
In a few more years, the problem will go away. Carnegie Mellon University has been working on self-driving cars for a few years, and they had a test where one did 98% of the way across the US (humans had to fuel it, though). Until then, though, we have this gap where people think it's a great idea to screw around while controlling their hulking SUV. It's not.
I'd strongly support a complete ban on cell phones in use by drivers. Forget this "hands-free crap" -- the difference between hands-on and hands-free phones is not that big in terms of mortality. They should *both* be banned. Someone does *not* need to chat with their friend so badly that they can put other people at risk.
For example, if a cop pulls you over on the road, you cannot refuse a breathalizer exam without automatically losing your license.
In general, while the USC grants use quite a few freedoms, actions that pose a serious and immediate threat to human life and have few benefits are generally not okay in our legal system. And I have to agree with that.
Your regular search and seizure of a home, say, is off-limits because the dominant party (say, Republicans) could search and go through the belongings of the Democrats. It's designed to prevent tyrannies from forming, not to let you get off after dealing crack. That just happens to be a side effect.
With a breathalizer test, things are a little different. There's not a hell of a lot of useful information a malicious government could get from you through a field breathalyzer test (well, perhaps that will change as technology advances) other than your alcohol level. It's not something that could let them really control other political parties.
About the only reason you would *not* want to be breathalized is because you're driving drunk. Doing so poses a pretty nasty and unjustified risk to the lives of others. It's pretty hard to come up with a defense to let people not be breathalized.
I know of one person (Indian, but probably assumed to be Arabic, since this was shortly after 9/11) who was breathalized three times in a row. I suppose you could make some case for police harassment, but I really can't think of any other downsides.
I mean, I'll support the right to bear arms (maintains Hobbes' principle of approximate equivalency, keeps dictatorships from forming) and avoiding general search and seizure without just cause, but I simply don't see the point in stopping breathalizer tests.
Well...I'll certainly grant that a lot of that gets eaten by cost-of-living. Perhaps West Virginia has skewed my perception, and 48k may not be what an *engineer* hopes to make at the end of his career, but it's hardly chump change.
There are plenty of jobs that pay less -- public school teacher (I remember my calculus teacher moonlighting as a security guard to make ends meet...)
Plus, you've got reasonable job security and gov't -class benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
But with 90% of the code these days in business (which is the majority of custom code written in the world), Java's speed is acceptable and its portability and memory garbage collection outweigh any speed advantages of C/C++ in a Gigahertz world.
Sure. Java's fine for doing a front end or simple database accessor. Hell, Hypercard was great for this.
It's just not so great to do mainstream apps in, and people claiming that Java is "just as fast as C", which sometimes gets these people to waste time trying to implement their app in Java, gets my gander.
Look at Corel's suite. They implemented the *entire stupid thing* in Java because it was going to be the "next big thing" and eventually be as "fast as C", according to the frenzied shouts of some of the Java supporters. Then they had to throw the whole thing out because of performance issues. I can't even imagine the cost, both direct and strategic (cost in time sitting on your ass while your competitor does something) to Corel. Same thing happened to Mozilla...the thing was originally going to be in Java. That idea got nixed...
The other thing that vaguely pisses me off is that almost all of the things that Java does that make performance *suck* really aren't necessary. You can design a fast language that has most of its security model. Ocaml is quite safe -- moreso than Java -- but the Ocaml people imposed almost no overhead from C, because they avoided adding features that required runtime overhead, but went all out on things that could be somehow finagled into compile-time work. They *do* do most array bounds checking, but that's about it. Ocaml has GC, portability, and type safety...it just does almost all its work at compile time. I'd be willing to use Ocaml (well, actually I don't like functional languages much, but I'd endorse its performance) for almost any of the situations where I'd use C or C++.
I'm not a huge fan of Ocaml itself, but it's a model for what *should* have been done with Java. If a feature is going to nail you performance-wise -- if users are going to have to do contortions to get decent performance -- you should think long and hard before adding it. Everything that sounded "cool" ended up in Java, which resulted in countless wasted CPU cycles for users around the world.
I don't see why, as processors get faster, people feel the need to keep computers equivalently slow. Why not take advantage of the constant-time improvement? We can do better optimizations, do caching, because now we have the memory and extra constant time to do so. We have better body of knowledge about compilers, so why can't we *improve* performance instead of hurting it? It's *stupid*.
The problem is that it's still kind of nasty, because Java makes it very easy to have an inner loop with heap allocation occurring.
It still isn't free. Not sure how much extra overhead a VM requires to to stack allocation -- in native code, it's just a register change, but I suppose that a JVM might have to do a stack-heap collision check.
The heap...you have to probably select the right size data chunk from a bin, find a free chunk (granted, if this isn't fragmented, it isn't *awful*), make some changes to mark the thing as no longer free, update references used to try to locate the next free chunk quickly, register the thing with the GC. Since this is Java, you're also locating a constructor, checking to see whether memory should be defragged and potentially defragging memory. It's also a lot more likely to span a wide range of memory that wasn't previously touched, which means causing cache misses if the architecture running the JVM has a cache.
That being said, ya, it can run faster if you don't have massive heap fragmentation -- which doesn't necessarily occur, even if you aren't defragmenting things, especially if you have a clever internal allocation strategy.
You just described the ideal scenario, one that unfortunately doesn't happen very often. In particular, the number of RPMs available via apt4rpm on RH8 is incredibly small.
;-)
:-( ) It'd be nice for the package manager to support "user overrides", where the user *knows* something is fulfilled and doesn't want to hear about it again (for example, if he's using a non-packaged kernel).
I'm also using the freshrpm and Macromedia apt repositories, but yes, it was a good situation. Still, it really isn't all that rare. I use a pretty oddball collection of programs, but I think that every process running at the moment is from an apt-available package.
The Windows scenario as described is also sort of unusual, although as Windows software installation was grown rather than designed yes, it too is far from perfect.
The Windows approach is still non-optimal. I've had plenty of times that uninstallers fail, or installers fail but don't give a useful message.
What's needed is for developers to be able to produce portable binary packages, and then have a distributed and decentralised DNS style network to replace apt. The interface is still the same: "package install galeon" and wait, but unlike apt it scales.
I'd like to see distro folks get together and come up with one *common* meta-spec-file format that can contain all the metainformation that might need to be in a package. Then you can build any sort of packages from it. RPM's spec is a damn ugly, PITA-to-write, not-particularly-heavily-structured format, so it doesn't cut it.
For instance, the GNU ld.so (dynamic linker) contains design, ah, issues which make producing portable binaries quite hard (to do with link trees).
Yup. Why, if I didn't know better, I'd be almost willing to say that Stallman designed things to be inconvenient for non-source distributed software.
[clip bit about good package management]
It'd be nice to support (if not in the package manager itself, in a front end to it) automatic downloading a la emerge or apt-get that's aware of mirrors. It'd be nice to use gpg for *everything* (including downloading new mirror lists), and do so transparently to the user. It'd be nice to have the package manager have an absolutely minimal set of requirements (python and perl are right out). It'd be nice to have the package manager have the ability to *configure* software...to understand configure options. That would be decidedly cool. It'd be nice for the package manager to run as non-root and to allow finding "differences" between two system states -- RH might define "RH 8 is set of packages foo with these specified SHAsums". It'd be nice to have the system be easy for packagers to use. It'd nice fo rthe package manager to have decent backward compatibility (unlike every *other* GNU tool that starts with "auto"
BTW, if you wrote the blurb on package management on autopackage.org, that's one of the best discussions of package management and issues with current systems I've ever read.
Here's some the "better" parts of Java:
Don't get me wrong. Java's fine for certain applications. For lightweight networking stuff, I think it's almost unparalleled. It's also pretty good for prototyping C++ stuff. It's good for lightweight tasks that break down logically into threads -- Java has nice threading support.
My beef is that Java is not, despite its supporters' loud claims (which have been going on for years), remotely performance-competitive with C.
The language simply has some foundational performance limitations in it. It was designed that way, and tweaking implementations cannot get around that.
I agree that there are some nice things about Java.
Rapid Development
Damn straight. Java is a great prototyping language.
Hotspot
Not bad, but not that incredible, either. The benchmarks I've seen haven't shown HotSpot to be incredible, and besides, competitors like C (gcc) have branch-profiling code of their own.
Secure Software
True. There are some improvements. But buffer overflows are less and less common in C (due to *excellent* libraries like glib), and have been fixed in other languages without anywhere near the performance hit of Java (like Ocaml).
One of the big factors remaining is just HOW you write code in Java.
It may be a personal thing, but I have a deep dislike of languages where you have to modify your regular coding style to get decent performance at a given point. It used to be BASICs...you'd use some nasty trick and you could actually get decent performance out of the thing. Then MATLAB. *God* I hate vectorizing operations. I expect that a MATLAB guru simply does this in his sleep, but I find it incredibly frusterating to totally rethink code in an any areas where performance matters.
These things slow Java down, btu also make it more uniform which makes it easier (faster) to
A fair number of the uniformity improvements in Java could have come from simply tweaking syntax (int[50] x instead of int x[50], for example).
I'm all for modern language features...I just think that doing anything that implies a necessary performance hit is a bad idea. If someone wants a given feature, they can slap it on top. I can make C++ have a virtual function, but I can't make Java run quickly.
If you made every function in your C++ classes virtual, used RTTI and Strings to do runtime linking, etc. your C++ programs would be slower too!
Ya, but Stroustroup went to a lot of work to ensure that you only "pay for what you use".
So, I'm not out to bash Java as a usable language. It has some major pluses. However, specifically in the performance arena, Java definitely has issues.
Okay, for embedded systems there might be some argument. I actually considered consoles, but decided that no one in their right minds would be coding console games in Java. However, I suppose there are some embedded devices that run Java (don't some cell phones, IIRC), so I guess that isn't totally out of line.
However, I stand by my claim that (at least on non-embedded systems) runtime memory defragmentation is pretty silly for general purpose stuff.
1) Computers don't sit there and block on I/O any more. The world isn't Windows 95 anymore, and when something is paging, another app can be doing some processing. The cost of hitting the disk is far less significant.
2) The bottleneck for current desktop systems is generally not CPU cycles, but memory bandwidth. Memory defragmentation eats bandwidth like there's no tomorrow.
Oh, and a follow-up to my previous post. These clowns spent a long time talking about how people can "ignore JIT overhead" because it's almost completely insignificant "most of the time". Fine. Then they spend 80% of the article talking about *binary load time*, which is essentially only an issue under the *exact* same conditions that the JIT is -- once for a single chunk of code. If they're pimping launch time, they sure as hell shouldn't be ignoring JIT time.
...I've heard a lot of complaints from my peers about Java being slow.
Allow me to join the chorus.
Java isn't slow, but sometimes you do have to program more thoughtfully to make Java fast.
No. Java *can* be made less mind-bogglingly slow by avoiding certain things...preallocating a pool of objects and using primitive types (like int) whenever possible helps. The way the language is designed makes it *easy* to be mind-bogglingly slow. That doesn't mean that going out of your way to avoid these things makes Java fast. It makes it only "slow".
Java is Fast for Dummies
Ah, yes. A link tellings how Java isn't *really* that slow on "javaworld.com". I took a skim.
The first two pages say basically "Java isn't that slow". They then start rambling about various features that make Java a good language.
They claim that Java programs load faster than native programs. (The article was written, BTW, in Feb '98, to give an idea of how full of BS they are). This is stupid. JVM startup and load time *dwarfs* application link time. Write "hello world" in C++ and in Java.
First, they laud the small executable size of Java as being a performance boost based on binary format. Everything I've read points the *other* way...Java *is* fairly compact, but can contain data that isn't nicely aligned along host boundaries.
Second, what they're talking about, if it's even accurate these days, which I doubt, has a lot to do with the lousiness of the Windows runtime linker. This isn't really an issue for Linux.
Third, while insinuating that minimizing code size provides a performance boost, they talk about how great it is that Java lets you use *built in* libraries, whereas C++ progams need to *bundle* libraries. What? That's stupid. They're shifting the libraries around, but it sure as hell isn't decreasing total amount of data that needs to get loaded.
Fourth, this gem: Finally, Java contains special libraries that support images and sound files in compressed formats, such as Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) and Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) for images, and Adaptive m -law encoded (AU) for audio. In contrast, the only natively supported formats in Windows NT are uncompressed: bitmap (BMP) for images and wave (WAV) for audio. Compression can reduce the size of images by an order of magnitude and audio files by a factor of three. Additional class libraries are available if you want to add support for other graphics and sound formats.
They're billing this as *improving* performance? Yeah, I'd love to have my app blow CPU time decompressing a JPEG image instead of reading a slightly larger BMP image if I'm trying to minimize load time. Oh, and have it load all the JPEG loading code, too.
They then proceed to ramble about selective loading, and try to imply that Java's runtime linking is faster than C++'s.
They *then* show off smaller binary sizes by embedding a BMP in the C++ binary and a GIF in the Java binary. Impressive.
They then claim that claims of poor Java performance are based on non-JIT implementations. This neatly lets them avoid actually citing numbers. Sure, I'll agree that Java went from "Performance Hideous" to "Performance Bad". Everyone uses JIT these days, and damned if Java isn't *still* slow.
They then try to talk about how JIT allows code to be optimized just like C++. Wow. Yup, JIT sure is known for impressive optimization, isn't it?
They then use the most artificial, contrived benchmarks I've ever seen (which conveniently avoid almost all of the Java pitfalls...they don't need to do array access, they're trivial to implement without heap allocation...)
They finish up talking about how C++ RTTI performance sucks compared to Java (ignoring the fact that Java hits RTTI code *far* more often than C++ does, like every time it yanks something out of a generic container class).
Finally, they finish up by talking about a bunch of random Java features that they think are great, like garbage collection "First, your programs are virtually immune to memory leaks." Hope you don't use hash tables, buddy.
Next, they talk about how a JVM can defrag memory. I'm going to have to just crack up at that. This isn't a performance boost unless you're using a language that *hideously* fragments memory and eats memory like a *beast* (granted, Java is the best candidate I know of). Runtime memory defragmentation went out of fashion with the classic Mac OS...it's pretty much a bad idea as long as you have a hard drive available. VM systems are pretty damn good these days...if you're trying to maximize performance, there are almost always better things to be doing than blowing cycles and bandwidth defragging memory. There's a reason we don't do it any more.
Basically, my conclusion is that "Java is Fast for Dummies" is primarily aimed at, well, dummies.
It doesn't work. Linux uses gcc extensions. Plus, the number of compiler bugs Linux exposes means that running it under icc would probably involve fixing a bunch of icc bugs.
And you'd probably have to fix about a zillion Linux bugs...
Okay, I'm not going to say things are perfect, but I'm sitting here with a RH 8.0-based box with apt-get. (Granted, I could use a GUI and make it *really* friendly, but whatever.) apt-get is *painless*. Compare this to the Windows world, where you have lots of different installers, each of which is a little program that may or may not run and takes up your entire screen and has to be located somewhere on the manufacturer's website (or, as is most common in the Windows world, purchased from a store).
So, let's compare.
Me:
1) apt-get install galeon.
2) Do something else for a while
Them:
1) Drive to store
2) Purchase box
3) Take box home, stick CD in drive
4) Wade through non-standard *interactive* installation process.
As an example, my brother got his hands on an old Windows 98 box today. He asked me to add Divx and CD burning support to the thing. First thing I do is install EZ CD Creator. Installs fine, takes up whole screen, requires a reboot. Upon reboot, starts spewing warnings about applications not being able to launch because of a lack of mfc42.dll exports, as well as another install screen (completing the installation). Okay, turns out he needs mfc42.dll. I go, download that (impossible to find on MS's site even with Google, so I have to get it in a zip file from a third party. No pretty automated installer...drag and drop a dll).
Then, download Divx installer. System gives error about installer being truncated (it's not). Download zip file containing divx codec for manual installation...we'll see how that goes.
I'm sorry, but ease of software installation on Windows does not *compare* to ease of software installation on Linux. I'm not even going to discuss how hard it is to keep software up to date on Windows.
Controversy sure is the bread and butter of Slashdot. Okay.
Microsoft has $40B in the bank and is still making money like they have a license to print it.
Wow. Jump up and down, clap hands. And they differ from fallen industry "angels" IBM, DEC, Compaq, Cisco in *what* way again? Making money this year doesn't say much about what happens over the next few years...in the computer world, market leaders have been turned to chutney in that amount of time. The point is that, while they have a lead, Linux is finally a viable alternative for many people, and gaining strongly in seats used.
Remember, MS makes more money per installed seat than, say, Red Hat. So if RH makes $10M in revenue in a year, and MS makes $500M, RH may still have more users. Are we at that point yet? Nope. Are we getting there? Yup.
MS is a much older company than RH. They're established, and they have a lot of money.
The same thing was true of IBM and MS a few years back.
In the meantime, Borg-like entities like IBM (for Christ's sake) are adopting Linux (should I say "swallowing up Linux"?) and this is somehow a twisted victory for "the cause".
Who cares if IBM has influence? IBM makes some great products. They happen to charge an arm and a leg, but they get their revenue from hardware and services, not software. They appear quite willing to let the software world do its own thing, and just fund parts of it that are most beneficial to it.
Also, Mozilla speed improvements or Phoenix 1.0 would rock!
Try a new version of Phoenix, and try using tabbed browsing.
I've been pleasantly surprised. Around M18 or so, I was pretty firmly decided that Mozilla was *never* going to have decent performance...there'd be some optimization, but it wasn't going to ever be very usable on an older PII.
Was I ever wrong.
True.
:-)
There is some argument that it's a bit burdensome to say exactly what you mean anymore when specifying a group of OSes on Slashdot, though.
Let me give an example. I might say "Unix had a good year with mplayer", except someone would be sure to pop up and "Linux isn't Unix...it's a Unix-like OS". Okay, that we can deal with. Then we run the dilemma of whether "Unix-like OSes had a good year with mplayer" means "all operating systems that are like Unix, but are not, in fact, Unix", or whether it means "all operating systems that are or are not Unix, as long as they resemble Unix". You could say "Linux had a good year with GNOME 2", but then you get nailed by a FreeBSD guy that says that GNOME 2 works *fine* on FreeBSD as well, and another Stallmanite or Debianite who says that what you *really* mean to say is "GNU/Linux", not "Linux", which refers only to a kernel. "Red Hat Linux" would refer to a whole operating system, but only one distribution of such. Now, one must be sure not to say only "Unix and GNU/Linux have excellent text processing tools", as someone will be sure to mention that GNU/Hurd can handle those same tools as well, and is being shortchanged in your original comment. One could say that "Sun's make is only supported under Solaris" -- is that in fact true, or is it also supported under SunOS?
At this point, we may think we see a clever loophole. "Free operating systems achieved an enormous boom in the last year." However, that would be sure to get Stallmanites pointing out that you do not mean "Free", since BSD is not Free (or perhaps it is -- even with an almost 24/7 tech habit I can't keep up with what the FSF believes). Instead, perhaps you mean "free". Also, Red Hat may or may not be Free, based on their previous inclusion of Netscape Navigator. But you aren't talking about "free" operating systems -- that would include BeOS and Apple's System 6.0.8. You might change to "open source", whereupon you are informed that several companies consider their operating systems to be "open source" but only to some people or under some restrictions. Instead, you must mean "Open Source" operating systems. Well, even assuming you're familiar with ESR's exact rhetoric and can tell what falls under the "Open Source" moniker, at this point you're probably a bit bewildered.
I've reached the point where I just transpose the proper term, the one someone meant, whenever I see "Linux" or "Unix" or "open source operating systems" on Slashdot. It just isn't worth trying to be perfectly accurate, since a term to properly define the set you're talking about is probably at least two sentences long.
I know a fair number of drivers today that I'd trust to get me home less than the *existing* research systems, much less systems in a few years.
You brought up good points but your presentation highly is one-sided.
:-)
Yup.
"You knew India was going to kick the US's ass at coding eventually." is inaccurate.
I meant from an economic standpoint. People have been talking about India probably becoming dominant in the software industry for at *least* five years (at least I've been hearing it for that long).
This is more accurate: Many of us were busy coding away trying to meet deadlines and learning new stuff while CEOs and Politicians were busy taking work from U.S. Citizens and taking it to 3rd world countries.
Only expected behavior -- a lot of this got set in motion after a serious worker shortage at the end of the 90s. Workers demanded obscene rates. They got 'em, sure...but it also meant that it was now less costly to contract out additional work to other countries.
Globalization is not about the working person - American or foreigner.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. It *involves* the working person. As for whether it benefits the working person...sure, I'd argue that it does the majority of society, and even probably people in the affected segment (though they may have a painful dip in the short term).
It is about CEOs maximing their profits.
Yup. That's just part of capitalism, though. If you don't work to improve your company's efficiency, you'll get trampled by your competitors.
As the matter of fact, the point of a goernment embracing capitalism at *all* is usually to drive improvements in efficiency, since those that don't improve go under.
Jack Welch, Craig Barret, Shawn Maloney, Bill Gates, and others aren't going global so they could make things cheaper and better for the consumer and provide jobs in the 3rd world. They're doing this to Maximize their profits and minimize expenditures.
Sure, and in the short term they will -- there will be a short time during which profits will rise. But barring monopolies (which the US government and most other governments seek to avoid, for exactly this reason), competition drives down prices and consumes this profit. Most of the benefit of capitalism over a more socialized system is right there -- it's robust. People can be mean, greedy...and instead of screwing over the system, they just improve the system as a whole.
Their investors (who consist of the CEOs themselves, their friends, the upper management echelon, and Wall-Street) demand this from them at any cost. If you don't believe me then read up on Enron. They don't care what lives they ruin or people they impoverish.
That's true. I can assure you, though, that the opposite can be quite frusterating. If you have a "warm, family-owned business", it can suck to be passed over for promotion because of nepotism. It can suck to have your taxes going into agricultural subsidies to "ensure that no one's life gets wrecked." Generally, the system moves along and the requirement of adaptation to the changing environment falls upon individuals. Molded glass replaces blown glass? Not much market for glassblowers any more...they're going to have to change professions.
Recently, I heard on a radio program how a worker at a Nike Chinese sneaker factory only makes $800 a year and will not devote $100 or 1/8 of their salary to buy these shoes. They can't.
So? Nikes are a luxury good. That doesn't mean that they can't buy shoes, just that they can't buy the particular luxury good that their employer happens to produce. Do you expect the guy that sweeps the floor at Ferrari to be able to afford one of their cars?
Linux is taking off in India, to Microsoft's concern, because they can't afford the Microsoft OS or Windows applications.
Yup. MS has had artificially inflated prices for a while now, because they've been able to squeeze people out of the market and because they can impose some serious barriers to entry (computers have so many incidental "compatibility" problems...).
companies, (Intel, Microsoft, GM, Ford, Chrysler, etc, etc,) take advantage of social inequalities. Their factories and plants are operational in a country so long as poverty is high. The moment poverty decreases and wages improve for the common person, they're looking to move elsewhere.
Sure. Is that unjust? Why does the person who's now comfortable deserve wages more than the person who's starving in another country?
Recently, car-manufacturing plants in Mexico migrated to Vietnam because in the former, wages went to $2.25/hr Wow - a lot of dough there! In the latter they are 25 cents per day!! For the last decade, thousands of people in Mexico had built their lives around these factories They contributed to the wealth and success of these companies just like the Americans here in the U.S. did.
And they were compensated for it. If they didn't feel that their pay was worth it, they wouldn't have worked there. Very few people I've seen (aside from people founding a company) hold a particularly high degree of loyalty to a company. If another company came along and offered them nine times the amount of pay for their work (and offered and equivalently nice work environment and people and all that), very, very few people would stick around out of "loyalty". No. They'd drop their old company like a hot potato and move to the new one. So there's little loyalty of the worker for the company. Yet you expect companies, when faced with that same prospect, getting nine times the amount of work for the same price (going by your numbers), to suddenly be "loyal" to their employees? When their competitors will force them out of business or they will face a shareholder suit if they do not?
What are they supposed to do now, eat their own young? No CEOs, including Ford's, apologized.
Do workers apologize to their CEOs when they leave for a higher paying job?
The government allows people to come up illegally because they say Americans don't want to pick their own fruits and vegetables.
The government "allows" people to come up illegally because those people have little to lose in trying to make the crossing (and hence are very hard to stop), and turning the Mexico-Texas border into a massive Berlin Wall would cost insane amounts of money yearly. The Border Patrol arrests and turns back Mexican citizens all the time.
(Actually agricultural lobbyists pay American politicians to look the other way on this issue and are the ones promoting this propaganda.)
Sure, there's some under-the-table crap going on that I wish was gone. But would you be willing to pay...oh, I don't know, ten or twenty percent more for your fruit to know that the guy picking it is named Joe Smith instead of Pedro Martinez? No? Well, that's why they do it. The judge and jury of companies is the consumer, who has spoken with his wallet. Farm owners that hire illegal immigrants are at a significant advantage.
I just saw a program today about women in labor on a cable channel. They focused on a South-Western state. Interestingly most of the women were in their teens and were from South-Of-The-Border. (Gosh, maybe they and their parents had to come up here after the car companies shut down over there.) Do I honestly believe these teens are paying health insurance that will pay for the cost of their pregnancy? No. Who then is paying this? It's the American Tax Payer.
You mean legal immigrants here, or else they wouldn't be getting financial aid. Look, if the United States refused to do work outside of the country (Mexico or Vietnam or wherever), demand to get in would be even worse.
Let's take this a step further. These newborns will attend school here. Every homeowner knows this raises taxes. Uncle Sam and the state governments are not turning around and saying, "Gee, we know you've been displaced from your good job and now you have a lesser one. Don't worry everything's cheaper now. We'll even lower your property Taxes." No, No, No, this is like automobile insurance - it only goes up especially when migrant workers are adding more kids to the system.
That can just as easily be caused by Joe Smith in Kansas being a good Catholic and having eight kids. Unless you want to take the China route and have the government regulate and enforce the number of kids you can have, there's not a lot you can do to put a cap on the growth rate.
The point is the cost of producing that apple cheaply comes from somewhere else. Nothing's for free. What good is an inexpensive fruit or vegetable or keyboard if I can't afford to live somewhere, buy gasoline, or own an auto?
Can't do much about living in a beach house in Santa Barbara...land's a limited resource. However, autos have gotten *far* less expensive, as has gasoline. If we wanted to just subsidize American workers, we *could* use only Texan and Alaskan oil (and probably avoid a ton of Middle East issues). Of course, we'd be working with a much smaller supply, and prices would be far higher.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm sorry you're not in work at the moment. However, neither are you going to starve, though you might have to do something drastic like take a severe pay cut or work in a different field.
The guy in Vietnam that you're complaining about working for a quarter a day...*he's* looking at starving.
When all is said and done, in a ten years, whatever happens, your buying power isn't likely to be significantly lower than it was, because stuff keeps getting cheaper.
BTW, I was born in a communist country. Many people in this country have an out-of-touch view with the rest of the world. There's a lot of hatred for this country - some of it justified and some of it not.
Yup. I know well two people in the same boat.
Large companies will do whatever they need to do to keep their investors happy. If this means taking sensitive technologies to China, Russia, Poland, India, Pakistan or some other place hostile to this country, they will do it.
Yup. If it becomes a national-security issue (exporting certain types of tech or eliminating domestic infrastructure required to fight a war), the government frequently steps in, though.
It's all for short-term profit.
Well...no, I can't agree. I'd say that moving from country to country pretty much guarantees a short-term loss. Setting up relationships if you're subcontracting (maybe getting burned on the first few deals you do), paying out to set up a foreign plant...it's good in the long run for the company, though.
Sometimes companies *do* focus on the short term -- a failure to follow a purely capitalistic model -- because a manager's interests may not be aligned with those of the company. For example, he may want profits *this year* to get a promotion. But companies try to discourage disaligning individual interests with company interests as much as possible.
What does this really mean in the long run? For example, if there's a political crisis between the U.S. and say China then what? They shut down Intel's chip producing plants and a huge part of the tech sector collapses. Gee, where did all the short term profits go then? Down a Chinese toilet.
Yup. Some industries are subsidized here to maintain national security issues.
However, in general the building of trade just makes war less and less profitable, and tends to discourage countries from doing it. You notice how we rarely threaten people we have serious economic ties with?
"US: Boeing, Hughes Helped China Illegally WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The State Department said on Wednesday it had charged Hughes Electronics Corp. and Boeing Co.'s Satellite Systems unit with illegally sharing sensitive space technology with China in the 1990s that may have helped Beijing fine-tune its missiles"
Yup. Like I said, national security is one of the few exceptions the US maintains to allowing companies to do what they want (environmental issues are one of the other ones). And if the issue is serious, its likely that some people are going to get into hot water over this.
On a final note, I'm not proposing any solutions other than to say, we need a new system.
Mmmm...personally, I don't think so. I think capitalism can go a long ways before it realy requires fundamental changes. Maybe the introduction of nanotech would do it. A lot of governments have modified, less pure capitalist societies (Europe tends toward more socialized economies than the United States). I expect that even if production starts to outpace consumption, little tweaks like introducing public health care would keep things running.
One where people are more important than profits and one that is in tune with the environment.
Maybe. No one's come up with anything like this, though. Marx thought he had something, but it turns out that his system tends to fall apart when corrupt people are introduced into his system, whereas capitalism is pretty robust.
Maybe the current system has to crash before this is obvious.
Prolly.
BTW, life in these countries is cheap.
Okay, there were only about two things in there that I'd really call dangerous to the point of being stupid. First, dangling someone by their ankles over a 60 foot drop to fix a mistake in a prank was stupid. If you didn't think to bring rope or some sort of climbing safety equipment, let it go. It's not worth risking your life.
The other *really* stupid one was trying to wriggle up a 6 inch gap between an active elevator and the wall when the students ended up in a pit at the bottom of the elevator. That was *dumb*. I say sit tight and cope. Another student with his hand on a (potentially operable) emergency stop button does not make it safe.
That being said, a lot of the other "safety" things they broke aren't that bad, like taking out lights and whatnot. Some of the things they did were pretty constructive (I'm not even sure that swiping the railroad ties that campus maintenance wouldn't haul away would be considered a prank.)
Some were pretty neat.
So no talking at all, to anybody
While driving? I'd say that's pretty reasonable.
Some companies have a ban on usage of cell phones while driving on company time because of the risk factor involved.
the robot accidently refills grandpa's heart medication with viagra?
"Flood my IRC bot, will you? I'll hax0r your grandpa's pharmacist! We'll see who laughs last!"
You don't hear much about 802.11a because it is newer and has less market penetration than 802.11b. It hasn't had time to come into its own yet.
I doubt it ever will.
First, it costs significantly more. 802.11b is *cheap*.
Second, there's a big installed 802.11b base. The WAPs aren't that big of a deal -- it costs something to yank it out, but it's not that bad. However, trying to convince every person entering your network or visiting to obtain an 802.11a card is non-trivial.
Too bad there aren't any 10Mbs+ *low cost* hardware for let's say 5,000M radius
So you want a cheap, 10Mbps+, 5000M range networking system?
Pick any two.
Hareware isn't a profitable business unless you are Cisco
or even if you *are* Cisco.
There is a market hole out there right now that could be plugged.
For the home, this is not gonna get fixed. People are not going to upgrade for security.
For big businesses, this is frequently already considered. Security-conscious big businesses usually don't allow 802.11b or have a VPN setup.
For small businesses...well, they're gonna get cracked a few times, and then there's gonna be lots of money for security consultants!
Not if the VPN is the only thing that's paid attention to.
Another way to distract myself while driving and get myself killed!
Or others.
I really, really loathe this trend toward "driver entertainment devices". Even people listening to background music on the radio drive more poorly. Cell phones are downright dangerous. The move towards HUD web browsers or maps is just asking for problems.
In a few more years, the problem will go away. Carnegie Mellon University has been working on self-driving cars for a few years, and they had a test where one did 98% of the way across the US (humans had to fuel it, though). Until then, though, we have this gap where people think it's a great idea to screw around while controlling their hulking SUV. It's not.
I'd strongly support a complete ban on cell phones in use by drivers. Forget this "hands-free crap" -- the difference between hands-on and hands-free phones is not that big in terms of mortality. They should *both* be banned. Someone does *not* need to chat with their friend so badly that they can put other people at risk.
For example, if a cop pulls you over on the road, you cannot refuse a breathalizer exam without automatically losing your license.
In general, while the USC grants use quite a few freedoms, actions that pose a serious and immediate threat to human life and have few benefits are generally not okay in our legal system. And I have to agree with that.
Your regular search and seizure of a home, say, is off-limits because the dominant party (say, Republicans) could search and go through the belongings of the Democrats. It's designed to prevent tyrannies from forming, not to let you get off after dealing crack. That just happens to be a side effect.
With a breathalizer test, things are a little different. There's not a hell of a lot of useful information a malicious government could get from you through a field breathalyzer test (well, perhaps that will change as technology advances) other than your alcohol level. It's not something that could let them really control other political parties.
About the only reason you would *not* want to be breathalized is because you're driving drunk. Doing so poses a pretty nasty and unjustified risk to the lives of others. It's pretty hard to come up with a defense to let people not be breathalized.
I know of one person (Indian, but probably assumed to be Arabic, since this was shortly after 9/11) who was breathalized three times in a row. I suppose you could make some case for police harassment, but I really can't think of any other downsides.
I mean, I'll support the right to bear arms (maintains Hobbes' principle of approximate equivalency, keeps dictatorships from forming) and avoiding general search and seizure without just cause, but I simply don't see the point in stopping breathalizer tests.
Well...I'll certainly grant that a lot of that gets eaten by cost-of-living. Perhaps West Virginia has skewed my perception, and 48k may not be what an *engineer* hopes to make at the end of his career, but it's hardly chump change.
There are plenty of jobs that pay less -- public school teacher (I remember my calculus teacher moonlighting as a security guard to make ends meet...)
Plus, you've got reasonable job security and gov't -class benefits.