From the time an investigation starts, trail is held, conviction is appealed and re-tried, it takes about a decade to exact "justice" on an international corporation.
In the meantime, the victims such as smaller competing firms and consumers have long since picked up the pieces and moved on. The companies at the amepx of it all aren't even relevant anylonger (Netscape?).
In this case, though, the market is still fairly volatile, primarily because Microsoft has only recently been able to get a foothold. If they're held to the judgment regardless of appeal, and the penalties actually have an effect, it could mean quite a bit (and open them up to further suits in the US). As for the US antitrust case, well, Netscape is the biggest competitor to IE, but the market moved much more quickly than most would have expected, primarily because Netscape's development fell flat through much of the antitrust case.
Until the law can put some spring in their step, a $600 Million fine 10 years after putting awa your competition is paultry.
That's why there are other penalties in play, and, as stated in the article, the fine probably would have been the only penalty if the court had not found that the practice is continuing.
Break up Microsoft - THAT is the solution!
Yes, then we can have 2 giant software monopolies and a third company that will sink under it's own weight before the next antitrust trial is over. This is as brilliant an idea as breaking up the Bells, but at least when they did that they put enough restrictions on the Bells, and massive regulation in place, to prevent them from competing in the same markets as the other phone companies which sprung up afterwards.
Right. Of course they didn't know. They just set up shop in a different country and assumed that US law would prevail. What's wrong with that ? (Hint: lots!)
Actually, what people seem to be missing is that they're basically being asked to make the media player something that's easily removed from the system. Under the US antitrust settlements, this is bundling, and can be deemed a violation of antitrust laws if competitors complain that WMP is hurting their business.
In other words, because Microsoft started "integrating" applications rather than simply bundling them, in order to stay within the law in the US, they've apparently violated EU antitrust law. Seperating the media player to comply with the EU ruling leaves them open to more lawsuits in the US, simply because, although it's not distributed in the US, a version (distributed as the same desktop OS) would exist in which the media player can be seperated.
Sony has also confirmed compatibilty with the PSX and PS2. The Register has the story
If you actually read the story in the Register, you should notice that the actual quotes never once say the PS3 will be compatible with the PS1.
"a matter of security... [PS2] offers a sense of insurance because it is compatible with PSone and DVD-Movies."
The insertion of PS2 is The Register's, so we have no idea what it said there, but this isn't discussing the PS3.
"PSone runs on the PlayStation 2 through emulation rather than actual hardware. PlayStation 3 will offer the same compatibility for PS2 software and the format will continue forever,"
Here the "format" could simply be support for the previous generation. It isn't clear, but the actual statement supports this interpretation, perhaps better than the interpretation that the PS3 will support the PS1, because the latter is never stated.
The clarification that the Register is looking for only comes from the Register's own statements. Given their standards of reporting and their noticable lack of quotes actually stating the PS3 will be compatable with the PS1, the only thing we can really deduce from the article is that the PS3 will be compatable with the PS2.
If the console choices do not support my old games I will look at other systems and compare them, if it does support my old games then the choice becomes more of an "upgrade" with minimal cost rather than a replacement with maximum cost.
Exactly, and with many stores accepting trade-ins, you can trade in the previous version to drop the price a bit. Add onto that the fact that many PS1 games plummeted in price on the PS2's release (in fact most of them were cheaper than they are now), and you've got a lot of people that see a lot of cheap games supported by the PS2, even if those same games would've worked fine on a PS1.
In my personal opinion if the PS2 did not support the PS1 games then the XBox would have gained a greater share of the console market.
I don't think it would've been the XBox that could've gained from that, but rather the DreamCast. A lot of people were still buying PSOnes and PS1 games on the Christmas after the DreamCast was released, even though at that time it was quite an old system. The PS2 was coming out eventually, and the games they bought for the PS1 would still work, so they were happy to play cheap games rather than buy a new system (for only $50-100 more than the PS1) with all new $50 games. The Sony hype machine was doing so well during the DreamCast launch that even after the PS2 was released it was rare to see them side-by-side, because Sega had pretty much given up and most people didn't care. The XBox really came out too late for PS2's compatability with PS1 games to make much of an impact on it's market share.
Do you call Radeon 9800 Pro "software emulated" version of Geforce4 MX?
Not quite the right connection to try to make, since nVidia and Ati tend to implement a lot of hardware functionality that the other can not. In the case of most video cards, it is software emulation, because DirectX and OpenGL deal with a subset of hardware functionality and each card deals with those commands appropriately to their own hardware with a driver that translates the DirectX or OpenGL calls. This is also why both Ati and nVidia have managed to speed up cards after they were released simply by working on their drivers for either API.
Actually, it seems more likely that TF2 will remain a seperate release, as was announced some time ago. After all, CS2 is supposed to be a seperate release and was in the HL2 code release, also.
Um the average person can't create a filing system for their tax stuff, let alone hunderds of CD's. You and I have long term memory, but the average person is just above the level of an idiot.
OK, I know this whole thing wasn't directed at me in any way, and I guess I'm not the "average person", because a filing system for hundreds of CDs seems pretty damned obvious to me. In fact, it's so obvious that it's the same way in which they're filed at the store, and most people have to figure that system out before they can buy them. At the very least you do it alphabetically by artist, then albums are either alphabetically organized or sorted by year. Soundtracks and such can be sorted under "Various Artists" or "Soundtracks" or simply filed as if the titles were artists. Further seperation can be done by genre, but then even people that study music disagree about genres. It's a lot of choices, but most people seem to handle it well enough when they buy the discs (then again, most stores don't even bother with much order beyond genre and/or artist).
As for filing their taxes, well, I can't figure that one out anyway. I let the computer figure it out and hope it was right (unless it tells me I owe money, then I hope it was wrong and do it again).
On the other hand, I do see what you're saying about putting things in non-proprietary format. I just think that they also may be shooting for the windows crowd as well. My suspicion is that they hope the eye-candy is cool enough that people will want to switch from MS.
On the other (third?) hand, you'd think that if they were shooting for the windows crowd, they'd put the video in a format that Windows supports without loading a 3rd party player, like MPEG, or a number of AVI formats. QuickTime clips are only viewable on a standard install of a Mac, and Real video format is apparently viewable on the standard install for Sun's Java Desktop, but nowhere else afaik.
Uh...Germany didn't bother condemning them. They just outright banned them
It should be noted, though, that Germany has rather strict laws regarding what can and can't be shown in games. Additionally, most Nazi imagery is illegal in Germany, regardless of context or medium.
The biggest reason I have found to buy print mags any more is to get console demos. PC games demos are easy, a couple clicks and wait a while. Demos for console games are a little harder to come by, probably because rental is still a big medium for people to try out new games. The magazines are mostly fluff and ads anyway, so half the time I can learn more by looking at what's on the disc and playing a couple of demos than if I spent the time to read the whole thing (then again, I still manage to browse through the mags occasionally).
The only time I pick up a mag without a cover disc is when I'm in an airport with a long flight ahead of me. Generally the mags help break up the time a bit and let me read something besides the book I brought with me.
They'll change their tune after playing against a system where the video card is the bottleneck - and that a 9600.
You mean anyone with a processor over 1GHz and an AGP video card?
Hell, the video card isn't even a bottleneck any more with Quake 3, the graphics engine is too old to use half the features of any current video card. This is why benchmarks are starting to diverge more on Q3 than they did when the game was released a few years ago. I've seen benchmarks that put P4 and Athlon64 PCs as much as twice as fast as a G5 (or 5-50 frames faster than a dual G5), using the same video card, and that just shouldn't happen.
Nobody agrees about any of the benchmarks, so Google 'em yourself.
You're right, though I'd have to say it's because Mac users like to point at Apple's benchmarks, which are extremely short on detail and a bit out of date.
And the guy with the Mac gets to laugh at everyone with driver problems
I'll have to join you on that one, since I have about 5 different cards I can swap into my gaming PC without having to touch the drivers once. Of course, then they'll start laughing at me for still using an nVidia card, and I'll laugh back when their drivers (or some game's patch) break again.
That's such a bunch of crap that any game does/should require a keyboard. It's poor game development to require a device that is not, has not, nor will ever be designed around anything other than typing.
The keyboard is a 100+ button device that works quite well for games, and has for decades. The mouse/trackball is a very variable thing, but is one most people find more precise simply because they have used it more and for tasks that have to be precise.
Playstation is Sony's most successful product today, surpassing the walkman. PC gaming is a sad state, there's been nothing original since Wolfenstein 3D, Sim City, and Little Computer People.
The PS2 floats most of Sony's business, we already knew that (after all, things like the Walkman sell at a smaller margin, and the whole division of their company devoted to electronics other than games makes a very slim profit, and has in the last few years usually been their only other profitable business). It's interesting that you mention Wolf3D and Sim City, though, as those are the types of games that most prove the problems with using console controllers. Go pick up Sim City 2000 for the PS1 sometime and see how that plays. Could it have been done better if specifically designed for the controller? Definitely. Would it have been as good as just playing the game on the PC with the mouse & keyboard it was designed for in the first place? No. Game pads were made specifically for handling the limitations of 2D side-scrolling gameplay and button-mashing. Keyboards and mice are more generic interfaces that tend to map better to certain types of games (mostly fps and strategy games). The input preferences tend to define the types of games that are most popular on each platform, which is why PC games are usually FPS or RTS, and why PC RPGs are quite a bit different from console RPGs.
Valve's portfolio accounts for over 8 million retail units sold worldwide, and over 88 percent of the online action market.
I'm actually amazed it's only 8 million, since HL alone (not including Counterstrike, add-ons, expansions, and other retail items) accounts for over 7 million of that.
Still, it looks like they're assuming that they'll make nearly the same sales they did on the first game, which may or may not be a safe assumption. After all, if they sell 1 million, which would be considered a very successful game, it's unlikely they'll recover the costs of making the game.
Sorry to do this, but further seeking found me this: "The Los Angeles Times reports that while the nation's unemployment rate of 5.9 percent is relatively low, it fails to include the 4.9 million people who want full-time positions but are working part-time jobs. The figure also omits 1.5 million people who have stopped looking for work.
Here's another figure, from the Washington Times, quoting a Labor-union leader: Fifteen million people are now unemployed and underemployed. There are three jobless workers for every job opening and the number of long-term unemployed has stood at more than two million for the past three months, its highest level since the recession began. The 57,000 jobs added to the economy last month fall far short of the 306,000 per month needed to fulfill the job growth promises used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
We can pull numbers from all over the place, and as I stated elsewhere, it gets a bit irritating that the government tracks jobs one way and so many others are tracking them in so many other ways. Pointing out the number of people with part-time jobs looking for full-time work, and then counting them as jobless, is just another wonderful way of doing things.
Taken together, the total number of jobless reaches 15.1 million -- or 9.7 percent, up from 9.4 percent a year ago, the Times reports."
And the EU is at what? 10.7%, 18 million jobless? 8-8.8%? Some countries are at 14+% while others are at 3%, and the numbers are averaged over 3 months based only on countries that reported at least once during that 3 months (of which that 14+% wasn't in the numbers I saw for an 8-8.8% unemployment rate). Again, it all depends on where you look for the numbers, and how each country tabulates unemployment numbers.
Looks like plain bad bookkeeping to me Something the Bush admin is quite good at, if you look at how numerous things are accounted for ('no child left behind' programme, environment, etc etc etc).
There's one problem, the method of book-keeping came from Clinton's reforms of the terms for unemployment and welfare benefits. As always, if you don't (or can't) collect unemployment, you're not counted. No one goes around looking up people that stopped collecting government checks to ask why they stopped, so the only way you could come close to getting a number of previously unemployed that are now employed is if those people started paying into Social Security and unemployment insurance again, and you bother to cross-reference it. As for the other items, I don't know what accounting you're referring to, I simply know that spending has increased almost across the board, and it's not exactly the kind of thing I usually vote for. Whether that spending is going to overhead or going straight to the people it's supposed to benefit, I tend to prefer that spending be reduced and that if programs are kept they should be reformed to reduce the overhead involved in those programs, if possible. Sometimes, though, the overhead is in the Congress itself, which means it'll likely never be taken care of. I can only dream that someday I'll see somewhere near 75% of my paycheck, and that someday people won't have to spend 5 years (isn't that how long it takes to drop off unemployment? It's been so long since that was passed I don't remember) "looking" for a job and cashing government checks.
Here I must beg to differ. You can argue that the Xbox lacks the quantity of content of its competitors but the quality of the games it does have are top notch. The list is long and I've leave it up to others to point them out.
What it lacks is the quantity of 1st rate exclusive content that can be found on either the PS2 or the GameCube. It occasionally meets or exceeds that quality level, but is rarely consistent, and falls far short at least as often. The quality of non-exclusive content is often as good as if not better than the same content on the other consoles, but that's not the sort of thing that puts a console in a 1st-rate position. I certainly buy most of the multi-console titles I want on the XBox because of the quality that most acheive, but when it comes to quality exclusive titles, I can probably count the non-sports titles on one hand, and I couldn't comment on the sports titles because I don't care enough about the genre (though I have no issues with the MS sports titles). Halo, KOTOR, PGR2 (and PGR1), and Crimson Skies are the titles that come immediately to mind (and I admit that saying I can count them on one hand is pushing it when including PGR1 and assuming I've missed something), and I have and enjoy every one of them (except PGR1 which I turned in when I bought PGR2).
Also, lets not forget Xbox Live. Nothing on the other consoles comes even close to it. Not even close.
I agree on the Live portion, and it almost makes the XBox a 1st-rate console. In fact, I wrote an editorial on it a while ago. I think Live really puts the rest to shame as far as online capabilities go, but it only serves to reinforce the XBox' weak points at times.
My understanding is that just last month the numbers were bad, but they would have been more horrible if people wouldn't have just "stopped" looking for work. I think they spoke of 250,000 that stopped looking.
The real unemployment rate in the US is most likely on par with the rate in most of western Europe.
They report so many different numbers that I have a hard time keeping track, and it's usually even harder to figure out exactly what the numbers refer to. Still, 250,000, though a large number of people, is in the realms of 2-3% of the employed population, which if it is the number of people that dropped out of the system, would put us near or slightly above the unemployment rate of western Europe (depending on the country).
As for the cheap jobs I was talking about: That's the person who gives you your latte at Starbucks in the morning or your Happy Meal on the way home at Mickey D's.
I'm quite aware that they're the people giving me my pound of coffee every week at Starbucks and handing me a quarter pounder when I get desperate enough to stop at McD's. People are making the same amount of money answering phones or making phone calls. It's just a slight bump upwards (~$2/hour if you only count teachers for 40 hour weeks) if they're teaching in grade school or high school somewhere.
But I guess everything is a matter of perspective.
Of course it is, because the CEOs of most companies doing manufacturing figured out that $5/hour here equates to $5/day or even $5/week in some other country. Now it's tech support and telemarketing, but instead of $5/hour, those people were making anywhere from $7 to $15/hour, and it's still a $5/day job in some countries, but those countries will even setup (or companies in those countries will setup) training for people to get those jobs, so you have even lower costs as a CEO, because you don't have to train the people doing those jobs any more (not to mention that it would have cost them more to train those people to speak English with enough of an American accent to handle calling people in the US).
Of course, that means there are a lot of low-to-low/mid-paying jobs going overseas. The numbers aren't as high as the hype would make you think, we're not losing millions of jobs at the moment, but it's still a lot of people looking for work, with their most recent job experience in a field that's being outsourced. On the other hand, a company that's saving money by shipping jobs overseas might eventually hire more people here for higher-paying jobs, though those people will need more education and work experience than the people that were manning call centers.
The difference comes in right there. We make jobs easier for people to do, and then those jobs leave the country because they can be done for less money somewhere the money will go further. However, when companies cut costs in one area, it sometimes opens up new oppurtunities which require higher-level workers. Job requirements increase, which means that the average worker needs a better education or a more specialized education, but is also getting paid more. It's unfortunate for those that were living on those low-end jobs before, but works out for the people that fill the new positions in the long run. In the end, though, most of those people working at Starbucks and McD's are still going to be high school- or college-age people working 20-30 hour weeks to make their lives a little better while they're putting most of their effort into not having to work those jobs for the rest of their lives. Those jobs don't tend to go anywhere because people still like to interface with other people to get their cup of coffee or their cheeseburger, even when a machine can make a passable cup of coffee and could probably be made to do a better job than McD's at making a cheeseburger.
Still, as a console, the XBox isn't 2nd rate, but it's content certainly is. I think in the case of a media store and everything associated with that, the store itself and the content will probably be first rate, but the hardware and WMP will continue to be just below 1st rate, kindof like iTunes on Windows, which just feels like it doesn't belong there, behaves like it owns the place, and looks like it belongs somewhere else (namely on OS X with the rest of it's brushed metal siblings).
What about Internet Explorer? The world always used Netscape until IE came along.
I used Internet Explorer to download Netscape until Netscape became such a bloated, crap-filled browser that IE 5 looked good. I used IE until IE6 started growing mold because it sat idle so long and Mozilla finally produced a light-weight browser in Phoenix, err Firebird, err Firefox, yet still managed to include more features. I also use a combination of MyIE2 and IE itself for pages that have trouble rendering properly in FireFox, which is an issue that is really much less of a problem than it was back in the days when I used IE to download Netscape (remember when most pages had an intro page where you selected which browser you were using, or which simply told you to download one or the other?).
Or Windows Media (the format)? Real used to dominate, until that came along.
Again, look at what Real's player is and what it does on a Windows client. In this case, I don't use either format, but it's been years since I would even consider putting RealPlayer on any computer, as it was the worst player when it came to taking over your system and installing excess crap. With the format itself, Real's format was simply poor for almost any user, regardless of connection speed, whether because it didn't stream well or because the quality was poor. WMV is not always an improvement, but then I don't do a lot of media streaming, either, and prefer DivX for downloaded video.
I think that music stores are one of those things that just have to be "good enough". If one comes bundled with Windows, is easy to use, offers the same music and features as its competitors... why would the average user want to bother finding an alternative?
I think that in this case you're probably right, and with the fact that it will be integrated with WMP and will work with more hardware than most of the other music stores, it has a lot of reasons to succeed. No need to go out and buy an iPod or that new player for Napster, just use whatever you've already got or choose from all the devices that support WMA and (soon) WMV. The iPod might dominate the market right now, but I can't really say for sure that the dominance is strong enough to say that more than 50% of music players sold are iPods, or would be if most music players supported an online music store rather than just a handful of them.
Still, I think the idea that people have that MS will somehow undercut everyone in the price of downloads is slightly rediculous, unless Apple and the rest of the stores have been lying about RIAA pricing, or MS can somehow get a good deal with the RIAA. The other alternative is for MS to take extremely high losses just to make something popular that will never be profitable, and though that is something they've done before, it just doesn't make sense to me in this case. After all, the only place they make money on this whole thing is in the licensing for the players that people will be downloading this music to.
The way the unemployment rate is calucated in the US is a lot different than in Europe.
Because benefits run out soon people "fall" out of the statistics.
My question is: are people still looking for work if they've collected benefits long enough for those benefits to run out and for them to "fall out" of the statistics? That's more of a personal debate, really, as I can't understand why people would remain out of work that long, as it's enough time to retrain yourself for a completely different job if that's what it takes. I also believe that unemployment benefits should focus more on job training and job location than on handing out checks, but again that's beyond this issue. Still, in reference to unemployment in the US it's still valid going back quite a few years, as the limit on the benefits started running out on people a while ago.
Also, there are many people who might have a job but that alone won't pay the bills so they have another one and maybe even a third one.
Ah, so those are the people taking all of the jobs away! (yes, I'm kidding, sortof) At the same time, jobs that don't pay the bills are often what get outsourced, either because companies no longer want to pay wages that will pay the bills or have trouble finding or keeping people that want to work in a job that won't pay the bills. Personally, I've wanted to relocate for some time now, and it's certainly not a problem for my girlfriend because she only needs to work a slightly-better-than-minimum-wage job to pay her part of the bills, and she knows she can get work just about anywhere. I, on the other hand, pretty much have to have a job waiting before I can move, as I have a lot more bills to pay (a lot more debt to resolve) and need the paychecks to continue coming in on-time to pay them.
If I lose my job, it will certainly be hard to find another one quickly that pays the same amount, but if it comes down to my severence pay (assuming I don't end up in a position where I don't get that) running out I'll take what I can get, never mind unemployment benefits running out.
Many big open-source projects out there have some degree of American involvement, so if they can't use any of that due to anti-American sentiments, they'll have to code their own stuff. And at that point, why would they want to go open-source instead of closed-source...?
They don't really care about whether or not Americans had anything to do with the development. What they care about is whether or not they have to pay for software and/or pay an American company for that software.
For chuff's sake, people hate you so much, they are prepared to fly aeroplanes into your buildings! That speaks volumes.
Right, because terrorism never occurs in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Middle East. Oh, wait, that's different because those people didn't have to cross an ocean to do it, right?
At the same time there are millions of people around the world who are anti-Bush. They dislike Bush and think his politics, especially international politicies, suck. These people are not anti-American and certainly do not sympathise or support Al-Quaida.
There are certain people in the US for whom it is beneficial to lump those of us who are anti-Bush alongside the anti-Americans. You don't need to help them by doing it yourself, though.
People don't need to sympathize with or support Al-Qaeda, though, to be anti-American, and many people that are now anti-Bush were previously anti-American in other ways. Lumping them together in defense against arguments he never made is just a straw-man to avoid the real issue. Many of the arguments Bush made to go into Afghanistan and Iraq were made before him by Clinton to justify bombing Afghanistan and Iraq. All of the same justifications, all of the same outrage from foreign governments, but very different results because of the effectiveness of the very different approaches.
In any case, anti-American sentiment tends to be very different from anti-Bush sentiment, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the US government, but rather with the perception of American culture and the globalization of American business. Many foreign governments would just as readily support Microsoft if they were a corporation in their own country, and the idea that China, like any other socialist country, would prefer an outside capitalist-run corporation's products in their market over an internal government-developed version of open-sourced products is laughable. It's not even particularly anti-American in that case, it's simply anti-Capitalist.
The point is that if it isn't true, they're not necessarily reasons for Linux to be set to boom. Instead, they're reasons that will help an eventual boom if other things fall into place (and they are at the moment, but he didn't mention them). For instance: 1. Growing cost of software in relation to hardware (related to "it's free" 2. Growing anti-Microsoft-sentiment (in part related to his mention of anti-American sentiment) 3. Growing Internet use (related to his first 3 points) 4. Growing interest in security/coverage of Microsoft security problems (related to #4) 5. Growing interest in replacing expensive hardware and associated software and support contracts with inexpensive hardware that can easily be supported by any number of local individuals (related to #8, and makes the cheaper cost of software even more important in relation to my own #1) 6. The inherent flexibility and portability of open source (leading to #9, embedded (and other) devices making use of open source software)
Would have been even better if the web page containing those 102 words wasnt 108KB. Do web developers test a pages on a T1 connection?
No, they test the pages either streaming from their hard drive or over the 10/100/1000mbs local network. I've had to go a few rounds over this practice with an intranet site that's accessed from sites across the country as well as dial-in users all over the world, and they still don't get it. Thankfully, it's becoming less of a problem unless someone goes in and edits one of my html pages in MS Word.
I couldn't agree with you more (until the last paragraph, but I'll get to that). Ten years ago I was in high school, so I can't exactly say that I'm better off than I was then, because it's almost a given. However, just over 5 years ago I was starting off in the same job I hold now, and today I make almost twice as much as I did when I started (which isn't bad since I was making more than any of my friends or anyone I knew my age when I started), and all of this after having shifted school from a full-time to part-time portion of my life.
Of course, to keep my job without taking another position in the company I had to move across the country, to an area where cost of living is significantly lower (then again, the only way I could've moved to a place that had a higher cost of living would've been a move to Silicon Valley or New York City). It's been a little rough, but overall it's cheaper to live out here and I've seen a significant increase in pay in the last 2 years (part of it an incentive for moving).
Since I moved to the east coast, I've had far more work than I ever had on the west coast. If I had the power to do so, I'd probably hire two more people just to get it finished in a reasonable time frame and to help with maintenance. Unfortunately, they don't want to do that, because they only see the work that's currently slated to be done, not the work that may be coming down the road, or the other work that needs to be done and is being neglected.
As for the US remaining the economic leader or not, I think it depends on where things go from here. Some people think that getting things "back on top" will simply require the "next new thing", but I think the dot.com crap can actually work for the economy if they can use it intelligently. You don't invest millions of dollars into a company with no business plan just because 100 other companies have made money for stock-holders the same way. Inflated stock with no underlying value in the company is exactly what it sounds like, and someone's going to get burned on it somewhere (otherwise, you won't have anyone to sell your stock to and it will be you that gets burned). Now everyone's got a web site and you can do more and more of your business online, or your purchases from home, or anything else you might do that involves business.
As with every new technology, though, we tend to make things easier to the point where low-skilled labor can take over the jobs that used to be high-tech and correspondingly high-paying. Even in the case where truly high-tech jobs are going outside the US, like the story this is all attached to, it's still a very limited export, as there are only so many groups in this world that are well enough known for their capabilities for any publisher to go to them to get work done. id Software has certainly been responsible for development work on more games than these guys in Russia are likely to have put their hands into, but you can't go to id Software and say "build me MS Flight Simulator 2010 and I'll give you $1M". They just won't do it. There are a handful of development companies in the US that work that way, most of them are not well known, and most of them are already owned by one or another of the publishers.
Call-centers in India are outsourcing real jobs from the US, real jobs that pay US employees $5-15/hour, depending on the type of work and the level at which they sit in the call hierarchy. Most of the people I know that have done that kind of work would rather do anything else, and turnover rates are extremely high (meaning most of them do find something else to do). Out-sourced developing is going to remain on a limited basis until development houses are built around the world specifically for this purpose. In order for an American company (or companies) to compete with that, you'd have to have a development house built with a focus on code reuse and willingness to build just about anything for a small price, with reliable schedules (something most developers can't do).
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From the time an investigation starts, trail is held, conviction is appealed and re-tried, it takes about a decade to exact "justice" on an international corporation.
In the meantime, the victims such as smaller competing firms and consumers have long since picked up the pieces and moved on. The companies at the amepx of it all aren't even relevant anylonger (Netscape?).
In this case, though, the market is still fairly volatile, primarily because Microsoft has only recently been able to get a foothold. If they're held to the judgment regardless of appeal, and the penalties actually have an effect, it could mean quite a bit (and open them up to further suits in the US). As for the US antitrust case, well, Netscape is the biggest competitor to IE, but the market moved much more quickly than most would have expected, primarily because Netscape's development fell flat through much of the antitrust case.
Until the law can put some spring in their step, a $600 Million fine 10 years after putting awa your competition is paultry.
That's why there are other penalties in play, and, as stated in the article, the fine probably would have been the only penalty if the court had not found that the practice is continuing.
Break up Microsoft - THAT is the solution!
Yes, then we can have 2 giant software monopolies and a third company that will sink under it's own weight before the next antitrust trial is over. This is as brilliant an idea as breaking up the Bells, but at least when they did that they put enough restrictions on the Bells, and massive regulation in place, to prevent them from competing in the same markets as the other phone companies which sprung up afterwards.
Right. Of course they didn't know. They just set up shop in a different country and assumed that US law would prevail. What's wrong with that ? (Hint: lots!)
Actually, what people seem to be missing is that they're basically being asked to make the media player something that's easily removed from the system. Under the US antitrust settlements, this is bundling, and can be deemed a violation of antitrust laws if competitors complain that WMP is hurting their business.
In other words, because Microsoft started "integrating" applications rather than simply bundling them, in order to stay within the law in the US, they've apparently violated EU antitrust law. Seperating the media player to comply with the EU ruling leaves them open to more lawsuits in the US, simply because, although it's not distributed in the US, a version (distributed as the same desktop OS) would exist in which the media player can be seperated.
Sony has also confirmed compatibilty with the PSX and PS2. The Register has the story
If you actually read the story in the Register, you should notice that the actual quotes never once say the PS3 will be compatible with the PS1.
"a matter of security... [PS2] offers a sense of insurance because it is compatible with PSone and DVD-Movies."
The insertion of PS2 is The Register's, so we have no idea what it said there, but this isn't discussing the PS3.
"PSone runs on the PlayStation 2 through emulation rather than actual hardware. PlayStation 3 will offer the same compatibility for PS2 software and the format will continue forever,"
Here the "format" could simply be support for the previous generation. It isn't clear, but the actual statement supports this interpretation, perhaps better than the interpretation that the PS3 will support the PS1, because the latter is never stated.
The clarification that the Register is looking for only comes from the Register's own statements. Given their standards of reporting and their noticable lack of quotes actually stating the PS3 will be compatable with the PS1, the only thing we can really deduce from the article is that the PS3 will be compatable with the PS2.
If the console choices do not support my old games I will look at other systems and compare them, if it does support my old games then the choice becomes more of an "upgrade" with minimal cost rather than a replacement with maximum cost.
Exactly, and with many stores accepting trade-ins, you can trade in the previous version to drop the price a bit. Add onto that the fact that many PS1 games plummeted in price on the PS2's release (in fact most of them were cheaper than they are now), and you've got a lot of people that see a lot of cheap games supported by the PS2, even if those same games would've worked fine on a PS1.
In my personal opinion if the PS2 did not support the PS1 games then the XBox would have gained a greater share of the console market.
I don't think it would've been the XBox that could've gained from that, but rather the DreamCast. A lot of people were still buying PSOnes and PS1 games on the Christmas after the DreamCast was released, even though at that time it was quite an old system. The PS2 was coming out eventually, and the games they bought for the PS1 would still work, so they were happy to play cheap games rather than buy a new system (for only $50-100 more than the PS1) with all new $50 games. The Sony hype machine was doing so well during the DreamCast launch that even after the PS2 was released it was rare to see them side-by-side, because Sega had pretty much given up and most people didn't care. The XBox really came out too late for PS2's compatability with PS1 games to make much of an impact on it's market share.
Do you call Radeon 9800 Pro "software emulated" version of Geforce4 MX?
Not quite the right connection to try to make, since nVidia and Ati tend to implement a lot of hardware functionality that the other can not. In the case of most video cards, it is software emulation, because DirectX and OpenGL deal with a subset of hardware functionality and each card deals with those commands appropriately to their own hardware with a driver that translates the DirectX or OpenGL calls. This is also why both Ati and nVidia have managed to speed up cards after they were released simply by working on their drivers for either API.
Actually, it seems more likely that TF2 will remain a seperate release, as was announced some time ago. After all, CS2 is supposed to be a seperate release and was in the HL2 code release, also.
Um the average person can't create a filing system for their tax stuff, let alone hunderds of CD's.
You and I have long term memory, but the average person is just above the level of an idiot.
OK, I know this whole thing wasn't directed at me in any way, and I guess I'm not the "average person", because a filing system for hundreds of CDs seems pretty damned obvious to me. In fact, it's so obvious that it's the same way in which they're filed at the store, and most people have to figure that system out before they can buy them. At the very least you do it alphabetically by artist, then albums are either alphabetically organized or sorted by year. Soundtracks and such can be sorted under "Various Artists" or "Soundtracks" or simply filed as if the titles were artists. Further seperation can be done by genre, but then even people that study music disagree about genres. It's a lot of choices, but most people seem to handle it well enough when they buy the discs (then again, most stores don't even bother with much order beyond genre and/or artist).
As for filing their taxes, well, I can't figure that one out anyway. I let the computer figure it out and hope it was right (unless it tells me I owe money, then I hope it was wrong and do it again).
On the other hand, I do see what you're saying about putting things in non-proprietary format. I just think that they also may be shooting for the windows crowd as well. My suspicion is that they hope the eye-candy is cool enough that people will want to switch from MS.
On the other (third?) hand, you'd think that if they were shooting for the windows crowd, they'd put the video in a format that Windows supports without loading a 3rd party player, like MPEG, or a number of AVI formats. QuickTime clips are only viewable on a standard install of a Mac, and Real video format is apparently viewable on the standard install for Sun's Java Desktop, but nowhere else afaik.
did Germany condemn any Wolfenstein game(s)?
Uh...Germany didn't bother condemning them. They just outright banned them
It should be noted, though, that Germany has rather strict laws regarding what can and can't be shown in games. Additionally, most Nazi imagery is illegal in Germany, regardless of context or medium.
The biggest reason I have found to buy print mags any more is to get console demos. PC games demos are easy, a couple clicks and wait a while. Demos for console games are a little harder to come by, probably because rental is still a big medium for people to try out new games. The magazines are mostly fluff and ads anyway, so half the time I can learn more by looking at what's on the disc and playing a couple of demos than if I spent the time to read the whole thing (then again, I still manage to browse through the mags occasionally).
The only time I pick up a mag without a cover disc is when I'm in an airport with a long flight ahead of me. Generally the mags help break up the time a bit and let me read something besides the book I brought with me.
They'll change their tune after playing against a system where the video card is the bottleneck - and that a 9600.
You mean anyone with a processor over 1GHz and an AGP video card?
Hell, the video card isn't even a bottleneck any more with Quake 3, the graphics engine is too old to use half the features of any current video card. This is why benchmarks are starting to diverge more on Q3 than they did when the game was released a few years ago. I've seen benchmarks that put P4 and Athlon64 PCs as much as twice as fast as a G5 (or 5-50 frames faster than a dual G5), using the same video card, and that just shouldn't happen.
Nobody agrees about any of the benchmarks, so Google 'em yourself.
You're right, though I'd have to say it's because Mac users like to point at Apple's benchmarks, which are extremely short on detail and a bit out of date.
And the guy with the Mac gets to laugh at everyone with driver problems
I'll have to join you on that one, since I have about 5 different cards I can swap into my gaming PC without having to touch the drivers once. Of course, then they'll start laughing at me for still using an nVidia card, and I'll laugh back when their drivers (or some game's patch) break again.
That's such a bunch of crap that any game does/should require a keyboard. It's poor game development to require a device that is not, has not, nor will ever be designed around anything other than typing.
The keyboard is a 100+ button device that works quite well for games, and has for decades. The mouse/trackball is a very variable thing, but is one most people find more precise simply because they have used it more and for tasks that have to be precise.
Playstation is Sony's most successful product today, surpassing the walkman. PC gaming is a sad state, there's been nothing original since Wolfenstein 3D, Sim City, and Little Computer People.
The PS2 floats most of Sony's business, we already knew that (after all, things like the Walkman sell at a smaller margin, and the whole division of their company devoted to electronics other than games makes a very slim profit, and has in the last few years usually been their only other profitable business). It's interesting that you mention Wolf3D and Sim City, though, as those are the types of games that most prove the problems with using console controllers. Go pick up Sim City 2000 for the PS1 sometime and see how that plays. Could it have been done better if specifically designed for the controller? Definitely. Would it have been as good as just playing the game on the PC with the mouse & keyboard it was designed for in the first place? No. Game pads were made specifically for handling the limitations of 2D side-scrolling gameplay and button-mashing. Keyboards and mice are more generic interfaces that tend to map better to certain types of games (mostly fps and strategy games). The input preferences tend to define the types of games that are most popular on each platform, which is why PC games are usually FPS or RTS, and why PC RPGs are quite a bit different from console RPGs.
Valve's portfolio accounts for over 8 million retail units sold worldwide, and over 88 percent of the online action market.
I'm actually amazed it's only 8 million, since HL alone (not including Counterstrike, add-ons, expansions, and other retail items) accounts for over 7 million of that.
Still, it looks like they're assuming that they'll make nearly the same sales they did on the first game, which may or may not be a safe assumption. After all, if they sell 1 million, which would be considered a very successful game, it's unlikely they'll recover the costs of making the game.
Sorry to do this, but further seeking found me this: "The Los Angeles Times reports that while the nation's unemployment rate of 5.9 percent is relatively low, it fails to include the 4.9 million people who want full-time positions but are working part-time jobs. The figure also omits 1.5 million people who have stopped looking for work.
5 -1 04713-6997r.htm
Here's another figure, from the Washington Times, quoting a Labor-union leader: Fifteen million people are now unemployed and underemployed. There are three jobless workers for every job opening and the number of long-term unemployed has stood at more than two million for the past three months, its highest level since the recession began. The 57,000 jobs added to the economy last month fall far short of the 306,000 per month needed to fulfill the job growth promises used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/2003120
We can pull numbers from all over the place, and as I stated elsewhere, it gets a bit irritating that the government tracks jobs one way and so many others are tracking them in so many other ways. Pointing out the number of people with part-time jobs looking for full-time work, and then counting them as jobless, is just another wonderful way of doing things.
Taken together, the total number of jobless reaches 15.1 million -- or 9.7 percent, up from 9.4 percent a year ago, the Times reports."
And the EU is at what? 10.7%, 18 million jobless? 8-8.8%? Some countries are at 14+% while others are at 3%, and the numbers are averaged over 3 months based only on countries that reported at least once during that 3 months (of which that 14+% wasn't in the numbers I saw for an 8-8.8% unemployment rate). Again, it all depends on where you look for the numbers, and how each country tabulates unemployment numbers.
Looks like plain bad bookkeeping to me Something the Bush admin is quite good at, if you look at how numerous things are accounted for ('no child left behind' programme, environment, etc etc etc).
There's one problem, the method of book-keeping came from Clinton's reforms of the terms for unemployment and welfare benefits. As always, if you don't (or can't) collect unemployment, you're not counted. No one goes around looking up people that stopped collecting government checks to ask why they stopped, so the only way you could come close to getting a number of previously unemployed that are now employed is if those people started paying into Social Security and unemployment insurance again, and you bother to cross-reference it. As for the other items, I don't know what accounting you're referring to, I simply know that spending has increased almost across the board, and it's not exactly the kind of thing I usually vote for. Whether that spending is going to overhead or going straight to the people it's supposed to benefit, I tend to prefer that spending be reduced and that if programs are kept they should be reformed to reduce the overhead involved in those programs, if possible. Sometimes, though, the overhead is in the Congress itself, which means it'll likely never be taken care of. I can only dream that someday I'll see somewhere near 75% of my paycheck, and that someday people won't have to spend 5 years (isn't that how long it takes to drop off unemployment? It's been so long since that was passed I don't remember) "looking" for a job and cashing government checks.
Here I must beg to differ. You can argue that the Xbox lacks the quantity of content of its competitors but the quality of the games it does have are top notch. The list is long and I've leave it up to others to point them out.
What it lacks is the quantity of 1st rate exclusive content that can be found on either the PS2 or the GameCube. It occasionally meets or exceeds that quality level, but is rarely consistent, and falls far short at least as often. The quality of non-exclusive content is often as good as if not better than the same content on the other consoles, but that's not the sort of thing that puts a console in a 1st-rate position. I certainly buy most of the multi-console titles I want on the XBox because of the quality that most acheive, but when it comes to quality exclusive titles, I can probably count the non-sports titles on one hand, and I couldn't comment on the sports titles because I don't care enough about the genre (though I have no issues with the MS sports titles). Halo, KOTOR, PGR2 (and PGR1), and Crimson Skies are the titles that come immediately to mind (and I admit that saying I can count them on one hand is pushing it when including PGR1 and assuming I've missed something), and I have and enjoy every one of them (except PGR1 which I turned in when I bought PGR2).
Also, lets not forget Xbox Live. Nothing on the other consoles comes even close to it. Not even close.
I agree on the Live portion, and it almost makes the XBox a 1st-rate console. In fact, I wrote an editorial on it a while ago. I think Live really puts the rest to shame as far as online capabilities go, but it only serves to reinforce the XBox' weak points at times.
My understanding is that just last month the numbers were bad, but they would have been more horrible if people wouldn't have just "stopped" looking for work. I think they spoke of 250,000 that stopped looking.
The real unemployment rate in the US is most likely on par with the rate in most of western Europe.
They report so many different numbers that I have a hard time keeping track, and it's usually even harder to figure out exactly what the numbers refer to. Still, 250,000, though a large number of people, is in the realms of 2-3% of the employed population, which if it is the number of people that dropped out of the system, would put us near or slightly above the unemployment rate of western Europe (depending on the country).
As for the cheap jobs I was talking about: That's the person who gives you your latte at Starbucks in the morning or your Happy Meal on the way home at Mickey D's.
I'm quite aware that they're the people giving me my pound of coffee every week at Starbucks and handing me a quarter pounder when I get desperate enough to stop at McD's. People are making the same amount of money answering phones or making phone calls. It's just a slight bump upwards (~$2/hour if you only count teachers for 40 hour weeks) if they're teaching in grade school or high school somewhere.
But I guess everything is a matter of perspective.
Of course it is, because the CEOs of most companies doing manufacturing figured out that $5/hour here equates to $5/day or even $5/week in some other country. Now it's tech support and telemarketing, but instead of $5/hour, those people were making anywhere from $7 to $15/hour, and it's still a $5/day job in some countries, but those countries will even setup (or companies in those countries will setup) training for people to get those jobs, so you have even lower costs as a CEO, because you don't have to train the people doing those jobs any more (not to mention that it would have cost them more to train those people to speak English with enough of an American accent to handle calling people in the US).
Of course, that means there are a lot of low-to-low/mid-paying jobs going overseas. The numbers aren't as high as the hype would make you think, we're not losing millions of jobs at the moment, but it's still a lot of people looking for work, with their most recent job experience in a field that's being outsourced. On the other hand, a company that's saving money by shipping jobs overseas might eventually hire more people here for higher-paying jobs, though those people will need more education and work experience than the people that were manning call centers.
The difference comes in right there. We make jobs easier for people to do, and then those jobs leave the country because they can be done for less money somewhere the money will go further. However, when companies cut costs in one area, it sometimes opens up new oppurtunities which require higher-level workers. Job requirements increase, which means that the average worker needs a better education or a more specialized education, but is also getting paid more. It's unfortunate for those that were living on those low-end jobs before, but works out for the people that fill the new positions in the long run. In the end, though, most of those people working at Starbucks and McD's are still going to be high school- or college-age people working 20-30 hour weeks to make their lives a little better while they're putting most of their effort into not having to work those jobs for the rest of their lives. Those jobs don't tend to go anywhere because people still like to interface with other people to get their cup of coffee or their cheeseburger, even when a machine can make a passable cup of coffee and could probably be made to do a better job than McD's at making a cheeseburger.
Xbox is in 2nd place, in console sales
;)
3rd place, worldwide
Still, as a console, the XBox isn't 2nd rate, but it's content certainly is. I think in the case of a media store and everything associated with that, the store itself and the content will probably be first rate, but the hardware and WMP will continue to be just below 1st rate, kindof like iTunes on Windows, which just feels like it doesn't belong there, behaves like it owns the place, and looks like it belongs somewhere else (namely on OS X with the rest of it's brushed metal siblings).
What about Internet Explorer? The world always used Netscape until IE came along.
I used Internet Explorer to download Netscape until Netscape became such a bloated, crap-filled browser that IE 5 looked good. I used IE until IE6 started growing mold because it sat idle so long and Mozilla finally produced a light-weight browser in Phoenix, err Firebird, err Firefox, yet still managed to include more features. I also use a combination of MyIE2 and IE itself for pages that have trouble rendering properly in FireFox, which is an issue that is really much less of a problem than it was back in the days when I used IE to download Netscape (remember when most pages had an intro page where you selected which browser you were using, or which simply told you to download one or the other?).
Or Windows Media (the format)? Real used to dominate, until that came along.
Again, look at what Real's player is and what it does on a Windows client. In this case, I don't use either format, but it's been years since I would even consider putting RealPlayer on any computer, as it was the worst player when it came to taking over your system and installing excess crap. With the format itself, Real's format was simply poor for almost any user, regardless of connection speed, whether because it didn't stream well or because the quality was poor. WMV is not always an improvement, but then I don't do a lot of media streaming, either, and prefer DivX for downloaded video.
I think that music stores are one of those things that just have to be "good enough". If one comes bundled with Windows, is easy to use, offers the same music and features as its competitors... why would the average user want to bother finding an alternative?
I think that in this case you're probably right, and with the fact that it will be integrated with WMP and will work with more hardware than most of the other music stores, it has a lot of reasons to succeed. No need to go out and buy an iPod or that new player for Napster, just use whatever you've already got or choose from all the devices that support WMA and (soon) WMV. The iPod might dominate the market right now, but I can't really say for sure that the dominance is strong enough to say that more than 50% of music players sold are iPods, or would be if most music players supported an online music store rather than just a handful of them.
Still, I think the idea that people have that MS will somehow undercut everyone in the price of downloads is slightly rediculous, unless Apple and the rest of the stores have been lying about RIAA pricing, or MS can somehow get a good deal with the RIAA. The other alternative is for MS to take extremely high losses just to make something popular that will never be profitable, and though that is something they've done before, it just doesn't make sense to me in this case. After all, the only place they make money on this whole thing is in the licensing for the players that people will be downloading this music to.
The way the unemployment rate is calucated in the US is a lot different than in Europe.
Because benefits run out soon people "fall" out of the statistics.
My question is: are people still looking for work if they've collected benefits long enough for those benefits to run out and for them to "fall out" of the statistics? That's more of a personal debate, really, as I can't understand why people would remain out of work that long, as it's enough time to retrain yourself for a completely different job if that's what it takes. I also believe that unemployment benefits should focus more on job training and job location than on handing out checks, but again that's beyond this issue. Still, in reference to unemployment in the US it's still valid going back quite a few years, as the limit on the benefits started running out on people a while ago.
Also, there are many people who might have a job but that alone won't pay the bills so they have another one and maybe even a third one.
Ah, so those are the people taking all of the jobs away! (yes, I'm kidding, sortof) At the same time, jobs that don't pay the bills are often what get outsourced, either because companies no longer want to pay wages that will pay the bills or have trouble finding or keeping people that want to work in a job that won't pay the bills. Personally, I've wanted to relocate for some time now, and it's certainly not a problem for my girlfriend because she only needs to work a slightly-better-than-minimum-wage job to pay her part of the bills, and she knows she can get work just about anywhere. I, on the other hand, pretty much have to have a job waiting before I can move, as I have a lot more bills to pay (a lot more debt to resolve) and need the paychecks to continue coming in on-time to pay them.
If I lose my job, it will certainly be hard to find another one quickly that pays the same amount, but if it comes down to my severence pay (assuming I don't end up in a position where I don't get that) running out I'll take what I can get, never mind unemployment benefits running out.
Many big open-source projects out there have some degree of American involvement, so if they can't use any of that due to anti-American sentiments, they'll have to code their own stuff. And at that point, why would they want to go open-source instead of closed-source...?
They don't really care about whether or not Americans had anything to do with the development. What they care about is whether or not they have to pay for software and/or pay an American company for that software.
For chuff's sake, people hate you so much, they are prepared to fly aeroplanes into your buildings! That speaks volumes.
Right, because terrorism never occurs in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Middle East. Oh, wait, that's different because those people didn't have to cross an ocean to do it, right?
At the same time there are millions of people around the world who are anti-Bush. They dislike Bush and think his politics, especially international politicies, suck. These people are not anti-American and certainly do not sympathise or support Al-Quaida.
There are certain people in the US for whom it is beneficial to lump those of us who are anti-Bush alongside the anti-Americans. You don't need to help them by doing it yourself, though.
People don't need to sympathize with or support Al-Qaeda, though, to be anti-American, and many people that are now anti-Bush were previously anti-American in other ways. Lumping them together in defense against arguments he never made is just a straw-man to avoid the real issue. Many of the arguments Bush made to go into Afghanistan and Iraq were made before him by Clinton to justify bombing Afghanistan and Iraq. All of the same justifications, all of the same outrage from foreign governments, but very different results because of the effectiveness of the very different approaches.
In any case, anti-American sentiment tends to be very different from anti-Bush sentiment, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the US government, but rather with the perception of American culture and the globalization of American business. Many foreign governments would just as readily support Microsoft if they were a corporation in their own country, and the idea that China, like any other socialist country, would prefer an outside capitalist-run corporation's products in their market over an internal government-developed version of open-sourced products is laughable. It's not even particularly anti-American in that case, it's simply anti-Capitalist.
The point is that if it isn't true, they're not necessarily reasons for Linux to be set to boom. Instead, they're reasons that will help an eventual boom if other things fall into place (and they are at the moment, but he didn't mention them). For instance:
1. Growing cost of software in relation to hardware (related to "it's free"
2. Growing anti-Microsoft-sentiment (in part related to his mention of anti-American sentiment)
3. Growing Internet use (related to his first 3 points)
4. Growing interest in security/coverage of Microsoft security problems (related to #4)
5. Growing interest in replacing expensive hardware and associated software and support contracts with inexpensive hardware that can easily be supported by any number of local individuals (related to #8, and makes the cheaper cost of software even more important in relation to my own #1)
6. The inherent flexibility and portability of open source (leading to #9, embedded (and other) devices making use of open source software)
Would have been even better if the web page containing those 102 words wasnt 108KB. Do web developers test a pages on a T1 connection?
No, they test the pages either streaming from their hard drive or over the 10/100/1000mbs local network. I've had to go a few rounds over this practice with an intranet site that's accessed from sites across the country as well as dial-in users all over the world, and they still don't get it. Thankfully, it's becoming less of a problem unless someone goes in and edits one of my html pages in MS Word.
I couldn't agree with you more (until the last paragraph, but I'll get to that). Ten years ago I was in high school, so I can't exactly say that I'm better off than I was then, because it's almost a given. However, just over 5 years ago I was starting off in the same job I hold now, and today I make almost twice as much as I did when I started (which isn't bad since I was making more than any of my friends or anyone I knew my age when I started), and all of this after having shifted school from a full-time to part-time portion of my life.
Of course, to keep my job without taking another position in the company I had to move across the country, to an area where cost of living is significantly lower (then again, the only way I could've moved to a place that had a higher cost of living would've been a move to Silicon Valley or New York City). It's been a little rough, but overall it's cheaper to live out here and I've seen a significant increase in pay in the last 2 years (part of it an incentive for moving).
Since I moved to the east coast, I've had far more work than I ever had on the west coast. If I had the power to do so, I'd probably hire two more people just to get it finished in a reasonable time frame and to help with maintenance. Unfortunately, they don't want to do that, because they only see the work that's currently slated to be done, not the work that may be coming down the road, or the other work that needs to be done and is being neglected.
As for the US remaining the economic leader or not, I think it depends on where things go from here. Some people think that getting things "back on top" will simply require the "next new thing", but I think the dot.com crap can actually work for the economy if they can use it intelligently. You don't invest millions of dollars into a company with no business plan just because 100 other companies have made money for stock-holders the same way. Inflated stock with no underlying value in the company is exactly what it sounds like, and someone's going to get burned on it somewhere (otherwise, you won't have anyone to sell your stock to and it will be you that gets burned). Now everyone's got a web site and you can do more and more of your business online, or your purchases from home, or anything else you might do that involves business.
As with every new technology, though, we tend to make things easier to the point where low-skilled labor can take over the jobs that used to be high-tech and correspondingly high-paying. Even in the case where truly high-tech jobs are going outside the US, like the story this is all attached to, it's still a very limited export, as there are only so many groups in this world that are well enough known for their capabilities for any publisher to go to them to get work done. id Software has certainly been responsible for development work on more games than these guys in Russia are likely to have put their hands into, but you can't go to id Software and say "build me MS Flight Simulator 2010 and I'll give you $1M". They just won't do it. There are a handful of development companies in the US that work that way, most of them are not well known, and most of them are already owned by one or another of the publishers.
Call-centers in India are outsourcing real jobs from the US, real jobs that pay US employees $5-15/hour, depending on the type of work and the level at which they sit in the call hierarchy. Most of the people I know that have done that kind of work would rather do anything else, and turnover rates are extremely high (meaning most of them do find something else to do). Out-sourced developing is going to remain on a limited basis until development houses are built around the world specifically for this purpose. In order for an American company (or companies) to compete with that, you'd have to have a development house built with a focus on code reuse and willingness to build just about anything for a small price, with reliable schedules (something most developers can't do).
Finally, US unemp