The MPAA has deep pockets. Fight fire with fire, eh?
Re:Biggest Market for $100 PC? Developed World
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
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· Score: 1
Luckily, there is very little reason to believe PC makers have successfully conspired to keep prices high. Computer hardware prices fall faster than pretty much every other sector. The $600 price you call stealing was an amazing bargain not so long ago.
Thanks for the pointer, that's the cheapest Exchange price I've seen. Funnily enough, I use 1&1 for some other hosting myself, but I've never looked at their Exchange hosting. I think I had a mental block because their standard email is so terrible. Poor webmail interface, no IMAP, and it downloads messages over and over again if you leave them on the server. (I've heard the last complaint elsewhere, so I'm pretty sure it's not my client.)
You mentioned how OWA only works in IE. Ironically, I use Firefox on my desktop. Of course, I wouldn't need webmail there, since Outlook would be sitting open. But I've become an accidental Firefox evangelist, because I keep installing Firefox on people's machines when they're infested with spyware. Soon, all the places from which I want to use webmail will have Firefox! Of course, they'll still have IE as well, but it's sort of a silly situation when I have to load a different browser for my webmail.
Anyway, I hope that demonstrates I'm certainly not religious about Microsoft (or anything else, for that matter). Exchange and Outlook just seems like the only way (at the moment) to see the same interface, email, and contacts at home and away. However, I'm keeping my eye on Evolution and some Exchange alternatives...
I guess I need to be more specific. Outlook communicating with Exchange is not vanilla POP/IMAP. I believe it's MAPI calls over RPC, but I might be wrong. Anyway, it does more than vanilla POP/IMAP, specifically synchronizing contacts, which is useful for server-side whitelist-based spam filtering.
OWA is the best webmail interface I have seen, and it has the added advantage of providing a similar experience on the desktop and in a web browser. I admit, I have not tried out hundreds of others.
I am well aware that there are Exchange hosting services out there. I said I was looking for something cheap. Most services are geared towards small businesses. I haven't seen anywhere you could get a single mailbox for $60/yr, like this MS offering.
That said, I don't think this offering will work for me. I doubt it offers fine control over spam filter settings or allows the use of your own email address. If you know of a solution with synchronized contacts, flexible spam filter options, and consistent experience between desktop and webmail, then please, let me know. As far as I can tell, it's Outlook and Exchange, and I don't want to administer Exchange or pay a lot for someone else to.
Yeah, Exchange is the key. Technology lockin is a problem, but as far as I can tell email doesn't get better than Exchange and Outlook. MAPI is better than POP or IMAP. Outlook Web Access is the best webmail interface; it's practically the same as Outlook. With MAPI, adding contacts to Outlook adds them to the Exchange server as well, so you can have server-side whitelist filtering for spam.
I've wanted cheap Exchange service for some time now. My webmail is worthless: not only is the interface poor, it's all spam. You can't do proper spam filtering without a good whitelist, and I'm not going to enter all my contacts into the server and client both.
Setting up an Exchange server is a hassle, you need a primary domain controller, for one person it's just not worth it. Unfortunately, I need a service where I can use my own email address.
I don't think Indians are smarter or better than everyone else. That's exactly why I think companies wouldn't favor them over American programmers, especially considering the paperwork hassles.
India's problem is that its people are such hard workers? Yeah, right.
By the way, I abhor victimhood all around. Blacks, hispanics, women, Indians, Jews, and now the white male, too. Maybe working hard isn't the problem, it's the solution.
Actually, I have hired a few programmers myself, but my picks weren't particularly good. They were the first to go, come layoffs.
I understand the hiring process is frustrating. But I don't think looking at $FOREIGN_COUNTRY gets you out of it. Why would the pool of H1Bs be any different? Wouldn't they also exaggerate on their resumes? I have worked with many, they are not all qualified. As far as price, don't they need to be paid higher than prevailing wage?
The only way it would be categorically safer to go with H1Bs is if Indians (and Russians, etc) were all honest, which I don't believe, or our government's "hiring process" (when they screen H1B applicants) is better than the private sector's hiring process, which I don't believe.
Wait, you're suggesting Indians are getting preferential treatment to American programmers? So the Indians are not the victims of racism, the Americans are?
You stretch the limits of plausibility.
If you really believe you're being discriminated against, there are laws against that. More likely, the Indians happen to be more qualified, in some way.
If you are really concerned about the guest workers, let them make their own choices. What you consider "exploitation" they obviously consider a good idea. You wouldn't be doing them any favors by taking away the choice.
Programming may not be carpentry yet, but it's heading there. More and more creativity has been sapped out of my job in the last few years. It's a long time from when a programmer was the master of a mysterious dark art, and business types knelt before the altar, praying for some kind of good result. These days, things are much more thoroughly spec'd out, by people other than programmers, and you pretty much do what you're told.
The job is being distilled out into its component parts. Graphic design, interface, feature lists, specifications, coding and testing are often different teams now. I've been trying to move more on the functional specification side than the implementation side. That's where the creativity is; coding is just implementing someone else's idea.
Offshore programmers are extreme case. Specs need to be exact. If anything is not precisely specified, something weird will come back. I'm not sure why that is, maybe when programmers are in the same room as you, they catch your drift even if it's not captured on paper, or maybe the shared cultural background plays a part, or whatever. In any case, this is forcing a new discipline in writing the specs. Soon there will no room for interpretation at all for the coders.
Of course, there is still creativity at the code level itself. If you get your thrills writing very efficient code, that's great. I was always more interested in the business needs, listening to users, and thinking of a solution.
In any case, we all had it coming. I've seen college dropouts with no experience but a sense of entitlement. Thinking that they deserved to be making 80 grand, while waiting for the stock options to vest and make them rich. I was one myself. Meanwhile, my English major friends graduating from Columbia with massive college debt are making under 30 grand, but hoping one day they will make editor of a magazine, or write a novel.
Of course it couldn't last. It was just too much money, too easily made. The company stock did a reverse 10 to 1 split, twice, and then we declared bankruptcy and were bought by someone else. My 30% raise one year, was a 4% raise the next, and then no raise at all the next year.
Last month, I took a severance package and left the company to go finish school. If the company can afford to start hiring again, there will be plenty of people to take my spot at more rational salaries.
The FTAA doesn't ensure living wages in the US, either. Minimum standards are each country's resposibility, and the FTAA doesn't interfere with that. Some countries have specifically decided against raising minimum wage to court multinationals, which is their right. In any case, the solution is more globalization, not less. Labor unions are already reaching out to third world countries to improve labor standards, in a mix of altruism and self-interest. They don't want to see workers anywhere abused, and they also don't want to see US factories move overseas to cheaper labor.
The result of trade summits is always the demanding to eliminate subsidies and protectionist policies. As organizations such as the WTO grow in power, the US will be obliged to keep their policies in line. That is why these summits are important, and these protests misguided.
They are sending the computers to Ecuador specifically because they are protesting the Free Trade Area of the Americas there. Free trade involves killing subsidies and tariffs, something I imagine "anarchists that would like to see all borders fall and all imposed limits between various peoples disappear" supporting, not protesting.
Globalization by definition involves the elimination of barriers between peoples and places. If this group, by donating computers, wants to ensure that globalization benefits everyone, not just the rich, I'm all for that. That's hardly "Anti-Globalization." Anti-Globalization is against the spread of capitalism, cultural imperialism, loss of national sovereignty, multinational corporations, etc. I don't see how this wonderful project fits into that idealogy.
While I normally try to convince anti-globlization activists of the merits of globalization whenever I can, this time I will hold my tongue. How can plugging a third world country into the internet be seen as anything else but furthering globalization?
If there are group like this in New York City, I would love to volunteer my spare parts and time, all the while chuckling to myself about how it furthers my agenda and not theirs.
Besides, if developing countries end up with an entrenched linux market share, MS will be pressured to build a compelling Switch campaign, a la Apple. The ensuing competition benefits the whole world.
Slashdot Mirror
The MPAA has deep pockets. Fight fire with fire, eh?
Luckily, there is very little reason to believe PC makers have successfully conspired to keep prices high. Computer hardware prices fall faster than pretty much every other sector. The $600 price you call stealing was an amazing bargain not so long ago.
Man, this post and its parent are just about the funniest crap I have ever read on Slashdot.
Too bad it's at some poor bastard's expense...
Thanks for the pointer, that's the cheapest Exchange price I've seen. Funnily enough, I use 1&1 for some other hosting myself, but I've never looked at their Exchange hosting. I think I had a mental block because their standard email is so terrible. Poor webmail interface, no IMAP, and it downloads messages over and over again if you leave them on the server. (I've heard the last complaint elsewhere, so I'm pretty sure it's not my client.)
You mentioned how OWA only works in IE. Ironically, I use Firefox on my desktop. Of course, I wouldn't need webmail there, since Outlook would be sitting open. But I've become an accidental Firefox evangelist, because I keep installing Firefox on people's machines when they're infested with spyware. Soon, all the places from which I want to use webmail will have Firefox! Of course, they'll still have IE as well, but it's sort of a silly situation when I have to load a different browser for my webmail.
Anyway, I hope that demonstrates I'm certainly not religious about Microsoft (or anything else, for that matter). Exchange and Outlook just seems like the only way (at the moment) to see the same interface, email, and contacts at home and away. However, I'm keeping my eye on Evolution and some Exchange alternatives...
I guess I need to be more specific. Outlook communicating with Exchange is not vanilla POP/IMAP. I believe it's MAPI calls over RPC, but I might be wrong. Anyway, it does more than vanilla POP/IMAP, specifically synchronizing contacts, which is useful for server-side whitelist-based spam filtering.
OWA is the best webmail interface I have seen, and it has the added advantage of providing a similar experience on the desktop and in a web browser. I admit, I have not tried out hundreds of others.
I am well aware that there are Exchange hosting services out there. I said I was looking for something cheap. Most services are geared towards small businesses. I haven't seen anywhere you could get a single mailbox for $60/yr, like this MS offering.
That said, I don't think this offering will work for me. I doubt it offers fine control over spam filter settings or allows the use of your own email address. If you know of a solution with synchronized contacts, flexible spam filter options, and consistent experience between desktop and webmail, then please, let me know. As far as I can tell, it's Outlook and Exchange, and I don't want to administer Exchange or pay a lot for someone else to.
Well, investigators trying to bust kiddie porn rings need to look at kiddie porn.
I've wanted cheap Exchange service for some time now. My webmail is worthless: not only is the interface poor, it's all spam. You can't do proper spam filtering without a good whitelist, and I'm not going to enter all my contacts into the server and client both.
Setting up an Exchange server is a hassle, you need a primary domain controller, for one person it's just not worth it. Unfortunately, I need a service where I can use my own email address.
Yeah, just wait until the next big thing, when ifs and thens are chinese characters...
You misunderstand me.
I don't think Indians are smarter or better than everyone else. That's exactly why I think companies wouldn't favor them over American programmers, especially considering the paperwork hassles.
India's problem is that its people are such hard workers? Yeah, right.
By the way, I abhor victimhood all around. Blacks, hispanics, women, Indians, Jews, and now the white male, too. Maybe working hard isn't the problem, it's the solution.
Actually, I have hired a few programmers myself, but my picks weren't particularly good. They were the first to go, come layoffs.
I understand the hiring process is frustrating. But I don't think looking at $FOREIGN_COUNTRY gets you out of it. Why would the pool of H1Bs be any different? Wouldn't they also exaggerate on their resumes? I have worked with many, they are not all qualified. As far as price, don't they need to be paid higher than prevailing wage?
The only way it would be categorically safer to go with H1Bs is if Indians (and Russians, etc) were all honest, which I don't believe, or our government's "hiring process" (when they screen H1B applicants) is better than the private sector's hiring process, which I don't believe.
Wait, you're suggesting Indians are getting preferential treatment to American programmers? So the Indians are not the victims of racism, the Americans are? You stretch the limits of plausibility. If you really believe you're being discriminated against, there are laws against that. More likely, the Indians happen to be more qualified, in some way.
If you are really concerned about the guest workers, let them make their own choices. What you consider "exploitation" they obviously consider a good idea. You wouldn't be doing them any favors by taking away the choice.
Programming may not be carpentry yet, but it's heading there. More and more creativity has been sapped out of my job in the last few years. It's a long time from when a programmer was the master of a mysterious dark art, and business types knelt before the altar, praying for some kind of good result. These days, things are much more thoroughly spec'd out, by people other than programmers, and you pretty much do what you're told.
The job is being distilled out into its component parts. Graphic design, interface, feature lists, specifications, coding and testing are often different teams now. I've been trying to move more on the functional specification side than the implementation side. That's where the creativity is; coding is just implementing someone else's idea.
Offshore programmers are extreme case. Specs need to be exact. If anything is not precisely specified, something weird will come back. I'm not sure why that is, maybe when programmers are in the same room as you, they catch your drift even if it's not captured on paper, or maybe the shared cultural background plays a part, or whatever. In any case, this is forcing a new discipline in writing the specs. Soon there will no room for interpretation at all for the coders.
Of course, there is still creativity at the code level itself. If you get your thrills writing very efficient code, that's great. I was always more interested in the business needs, listening to users, and thinking of a solution.
In any case, we all had it coming. I've seen college dropouts with no experience but a sense of entitlement. Thinking that they deserved to be making 80 grand, while waiting for the stock options to vest and make them rich. I was one myself. Meanwhile, my English major friends graduating from Columbia with massive college debt are making under 30 grand, but hoping one day they will make editor of a magazine, or write a novel.
Of course it couldn't last. It was just too much money, too easily made. The company stock did a reverse 10 to 1 split, twice, and then we declared bankruptcy and were bought by someone else. My 30% raise one year, was a 4% raise the next, and then no raise at all the next year.
Last month, I took a severance package and left the company to go finish school. If the company can afford to start hiring again, there will be plenty of people to take my spot at more rational salaries.
The FTAA doesn't ensure living wages in the US, either. Minimum standards are each country's resposibility, and the FTAA doesn't interfere with that. Some countries have specifically decided against raising minimum wage to court multinationals, which is their right. In any case, the solution is more globalization, not less. Labor unions are already reaching out to third world countries to improve labor standards, in a mix of altruism and self-interest. They don't want to see workers anywhere abused, and they also don't want to see US factories move overseas to cheaper labor.
The result of trade summits is always the demanding to eliminate subsidies and protectionist policies. As organizations such as the WTO grow in power, the US will be obliged to keep their policies in line. That is why these summits are important, and these protests misguided.
They are sending the computers to Ecuador specifically because they are protesting the Free Trade Area of the Americas there. Free trade involves killing subsidies and tariffs, something I imagine "anarchists that would like to see all borders fall and all imposed limits between various peoples disappear" supporting, not protesting.
Globalization by definition involves the elimination of barriers between peoples and places. If this group, by donating computers, wants to ensure that globalization benefits everyone, not just the rich, I'm all for that. That's hardly "Anti-Globalization." Anti-Globalization is against the spread of capitalism, cultural imperialism, loss of national sovereignty, multinational corporations, etc. I don't see how this wonderful project fits into that idealogy.
While I normally try to convince anti-globlization activists of the merits of globalization whenever I can, this time I will hold my tongue. How can plugging a third world country into the internet be seen as anything else but furthering globalization?
If there are group like this in New York City, I would love to volunteer my spare parts and time, all the while chuckling to myself about how it furthers my agenda and not theirs.
Besides, if developing countries end up with an entrenched linux market share, MS will be pressured to build a compelling Switch campaign, a la Apple. The ensuing competition benefits the whole world.