Although i agree with you in principle, in this case, the pornography that was peddled was that of minors performing sexual acts. In such a case, almost any country in the world would deem it illegal, much less India. Even if you discount the law of the land (IANAL, in any case), most people would consider peddling child porn as immoral in ANY country.
I think that a lot of commentators have misunderstood Linus' answers. When Linus blandly said that he's not even going to bother studying Solaris/x86 in detail, he meant that he's not a Solaris expert. The Linux development model, by its very nature, means that any new technology of sufficient value would be easily incorporated in Linux. Linus simply meant that because he has created a dynamic atmosphere that encourages the adoption of ideas, he really doesn't need to inspect a competitive OS with a fine-toothed comb himself. If Solaris 10 does have features that get widely adopted by it's customers and proves itself over time, it would be a trivial issue to incorporate the feature in Linux (if it makes sense).
He's not dismissive of Solaris; he simply has a lot of confidence in his development model.
You have a point. However, you would have compiled your list of 26 based on some inherent qualities in the products, right? If you cut short the list to an arbitrary top 10, the reader is misled to think that the other 16 are bad.
At the very least, the lists should show the relative "goodness" or "badness" of the top 10 products with the others in the category.
While you're at it, would you also consider banning other products that do not match your exalted standards of "usefulness"?
Alcohol, perhaps, because it only promotes wife-beating and dangerous driving? A case for computer games, because they promote violence and are merely for entertainment??
To repeat ad nauseum, a tool, software or hardware, is only a tool and are not inherently good or evil. The responsibility of "correct" usage lies with the users, and only with the users. If we go by your myopic way of thinking, we would all be suitably safe, suitably reassured, and suitably living in the stone age.
Why do most "best-of" or "worst-of" kind of compilations have to be conveniently bracketed into well-rounded numbers like 10, 20, 100 etc. It clearly implies that the authors are just hunting around for products to slander just so that they can fill in the 2 vacant slots or whatever. I mean, if someone does honestly compile a list of bad products, they would simply make a list of products that are outstandingly horrible in a product segment, and end the list when they run out of horrible products!
These kind of list compilations only exemplify shoddy jounalism.
Sorry to pick nits in your comment, but.NET (or ADO.NET) does NOT natively store db objects in XML. Native database objects, such as DataSets, DataTables, etc. are stored in binary format, just like all.NET objects.
It only seems so because almost all the data objects in ADO.NET allow the user to readily serialize and deserialize the objects into and from XML. So yes, XML is the native serialization format for datasets, but not the format in which datasets are stored themselves (because of performance and size penalties).
While i agree that some of the examples mentioned were a little extreme, i challenge the need to have perfect spelling, syntax, and grammar. The purpose of language, at least in the corporate realm, is to communicate. The purpose is not to create a literary masterpiece that would tickle Shakespear's bones.
Yes, communication should be unambiguous and be readable by an ordinary person. However, other requirements such as proper capitalization, placement of commas, perfect spelling, etc. are only good-to-have features of any communication, and not essential requirements.
I also think that it has become a fashion of sorts to bemoan the falling standards of grammar and correct English usage. Yes, the standard might have fallen a bit over the years. However, they haven't gone through the floor, as one would be led to believe. Furthermore, with the advent of technology and electronic communication devices, the focus is now on being brief, being up to the point, and getting the message across in as little time as possible. One simply does not have the luxury of composing verbiage at leisure and on company time, when the more pressing needs of posting on slashdot beckon.
IMHO, the reason why open-source alternatives are not as popular as the commercial products is that these products are not unanimously "pushed" by the users/open source community themselves. I don't mean this as flame-bait, nor am i a guru of ANY sort. However, i am an avid and enthusiastic user of open source products such as Firefox (moox).
I think that open source successes such as Firefox should be replicated. Where open source lacks in marketing muscle, it can make up in word-of-mouth awareness or its internet equivalent. However, most open source products suffer because they mostly compete with not the paid products, but with other open source alternatives themselves! If only there can be concerted efforts to *push* certain mainstream open source products, i think that it can be a major force. Firefox 1.0 is proof of this.
Again, please don't take this as criticism of any sort, but only as a suggestion.
International markets are more price-sensitive than the US, so they'll go with the cheapest CPU they can find, which ain't Intel.
Wrong. Although your view is shared by most folks, it's a popular misconception that poor countries prefer poor computers. All markets behave the way that if you offer them 3 options, the options being premium, price/performance (aka value), and budget, 10% will go for luxury, 60-80% for price/performance, and 10-30% for budget. While these numbers are in no way accurate, i'm stating them as an indicator to show the relative values of the categories.
It's a fallacy to assume that people in poor countries will only buy stripped down budget systems. The fact is that in most countries (not sure about the US), people perceive computers as a luxury AND a necessity (necessary for their children's education, their business etc.). Hence, they will either buy a computer or not. Remember, a computer also costs more than a TV, fridge, gas stove, and oven COMBINED! Hence, those who cannot buy a computer will not buy it even if it only costs as much as a TV and fridge.
However, if a family does decide to buy a computer because they have dreams for their kids, they will rather save and sacrifice and then buy a GOOD computer rather than a discounted one. They will invariably go for the value segment rather than budget simply because the extra money is only an extra couple of months' sacrifice, and most people would not want to get shortchanged on a "lifetime" investment.
This has also been proven correct in most so-called poor markets such as India, China, and the African countries. Yes, there will always be a market for $300 computers but it will never be at the expense of the meat-and-bones computer market that the computer/electronic companies target.
If they think that the PC market is fast moving, wait until they see the mobile market. We're talking a 6-9 month obsolesence cycle and incredible price pressures. There's also lots of established players, so Intel had better offer something special that the others don't have (and can't easily duplicate).
Yes, they are offering something special in their Pentium M (and Centrino) offerings. AFAIK, the mobile market has actually been Intel's primary strength in the recent years, in terms of growth and revenue. They are also very very solid and stable products and i don't see the competition catching up so soon. Incidentally, who are the other established players that you're referring to? Apple?? They hardly constitute 10-20% of the luxury segment itself. A person in a developing country can buy a car for the price of an Apple, for crying out loud! In other words, Apple notebooks literally cost an arm and an i;-)
Yes, it's possible to work for 80 hrs a week, or even more. However, you need to define "work" here. Would you define reading/replying to emails as work? Would you define attending meetings as work? Believe me, these small numbers add up to take away a sizeable portion of your workday and your energy.
If you're talking about pure coding, IMHO, coding is not a tap that can be turned on and off at will. One needs to "get into the flow" to get some real coding done, and this doesn't happen easily (at least for me). I'll often spend hours tinkering around with stuff, browsing some site, but won't for the death of me, be able to finish writing a simple class or stored procedure. Maybe, i'll keep getting stuck, maybe i'll be too distracted, maybe i'll decide to read some documentation instead. Then, suddenly, everything will start happening smoothly and i'll complete a day's work in a couple of hours.
I don't know if it works the same way for others, but i really feel that one cannot just keep coding continuously all day. At the same time, i will also not consider the interstitial time spent tinkering around and writing comments in/. as time wasted. It's also an integral part of the process of coding. Hence, i do claim that one can "work" for 80 arse a weak.
But then, if a movie ticket costed you, say $1000, you would be justified in saying that your movie ticket costs almost as much as the car that you drove to see it. Sometimes, comparing apples and oranges makes sense if they're priced right;-)
SLI offers some interesting upgrade paths. Say you plop $200 for a 6600GT today. Maybe, you can squeeze enough performance out of this baby to get decent frame rates for the current and next season's FPS games. However, going by past trends, i really doubt that you would be able to get adequate performance 2 years down the line. On top of it, your 6600GT would probably fetch you less than a hundred bucks if you do decide to upgrade it.
However, say you decide to buy a relatively cheap-ass motherboard/processor today that does NOT support SLI but fit it with a 6600GT. Note that for a decent gaming system that offers you a good price/performance, you're spending more on your video card than your processor and motherboard combined. 2 years down the line, simply upgrade your motherboard to an SLI enabled one (which would have become really cheap by then), buy yourself another 6600GT from eBay for a hundred bucks or less, and hopefully, you should be able to play FarCry2 by then!
This make any sense? Basically, my rationale here is on 2 points:- 1. I dont really care about my CPU/motherboard as it's way cheaper than my video card 2. With SLI, i can simply buy today's high-end card at tomorrow's prices instead of throwing a perfectly good but outdated video card. This way, i can hold off a major upgrade for another year or two.
I will resist making o/c comments on this post. I will resist making fanboy comments on this post. I will resist making riaa/mpaa comments on this post. I will resist making political/outsourcing comments on this post. I will resist making "that's nothing, i used to make my cyclotrons with a couple of diodes and a pizza box" comments on this post. Amen.
That being said, it's a welcome change reading some genuinely good posts like this one (and the one on chess pieces yesterday). IMHO, one of the reasons that Americans should be proud of themselves is their ability and willingness to DIY just about anything. I hold people like Tim Koeth in higher regard than than any theoretical scientist anyday.
I agree that i was not entirely accurate in my figures. I do know that a person in India can have a decent meal in an average restaurant for about Rs. 50 (~$1), can buy a coke for Rs. 10 (20 cents), can buy decent shirts and trousers for about Rs. 500 each ($10). Yes, these figures vary according to quality, location, brand, etc. but it's still way cheaper than in the USA. For example, a movie ticket in a good theater costs about Rs. 50 - Rs. 100. That's $1-$2!
Yes, certain things are expensive, like white goods for example. However, even these items are becoming cheaper, and not more expensive. Another thing is that the aspiration level is also much lower in India. A 25" TV is considered as an expensive, with 21" being status quo. Plasma and LCD is only affordable for politicians and government servants who take bribes.
Ok, i was wrong about Taiwan. However, you're extrapolating this one incorrect fact to say that i know very little about this subject? I guess that ad hominem tu quoque type of negations are just too easily made.
I was speaking on generalities here, not picking nits as you're doing. I'm also not claiming to be a macro-economic expert. However, i still stand by the basic point of my argument that rural america should compete on factors other than cost, because cost is simply NOT their primary strength.
Face the facts. If you say that India is a outsourcing success story, look at the reasons why. On average, goods in India, barring housing and cars, cost only 20% (or less) of what it costs here in USA. On top of it, the standards of a good life and luxury are far lower than in the US.
In California, you call yourself middle-class if you have a 0.5 mil house, a boat, 2 cars etc. In India, most middle class folks consider a car with a boot as a luxury car (i'm not joking, Hyundai Accent, Ford Ikon, Fiat Siena etc. are considered high-end luxury cars). Even a person driving a small hatch-back considers himself/herself as having acheived something. This is why the big multinationals can afford to pay 10% of what they pay in the US, and still manage to retain a happy workforce!
Add to that, an abundance of intelligent, hard-working, English speaking people, extremely willing to slog for 12 hours a day so that they can save enough over 3-5 years to afford a Maruti Suzuki 800 (yes, it's a ~780 cc car), who can compete with that? Yes, there's still issues, such as infrastructure, accents, timezone differences, etc. and lots of bad apples in the workforce too, but it still doesnt overpower the cost advantage.
It's a bit like how the x86 architecture took over the computer world. People assumed initially, and rightly too, that x86 was inefficient and too cheap. What they didn't count on was that as x86 sold more and more, it also innovated and improved, and very soon, offered a double-whammy cost AND performance advantage over the other proprietary systems. Again, people pad up the costs by factoring communication cost, travel cost etc. What they don't realize is that these costs are firstly, marginal, and secondly, reducing over time.
The cost of living in the midwest or in rural America might be somewhat less than the metros or the coasts, but it cannot compete with the cost advantage offered by countries like India, Taiwan, China etc.
IMHO, rural america can compete effectively with other IT companies. Only, they need to sing a different song. They have to be flexible and play on their natural strengths and not on their weaknesses. For example, if a lot of techies in the small towns and villages got together, formed a virtual company or organization, and offered standardized software solutions to local businesses and institutions, there is NO way that the big city businesses or another country could compete with them. Don't compete on cost, compete on value.
Ok. Maybe, i was not accurate in the timelines. What i was trying to say is that there has been no *fundamental* change in a car's design and implementation. If i was living in, say, 1950, i might have predicted that by 2004, tires, propulsion systems, analog displays, and fuels would have completely changed. I would have imagined a concept car that can fly or glide, is naviagated by computers, and/or will be nuclear powered. However, the fact is that a 2004 model is really not that different from a 1960 model.
Usage of composite materials, tubeless tires, ABS, xenon headlights, perhaps, but nothing that can be considered as a fundamental change.
I beg to differ from most of these "future" theories. More often than not, if asked to envision the future, we let our imagination go wild and concoct devices that use things like anti-gravity, super-intelligent robots, infinite engergy producing machines, and so on. IMHO, the reality of the future would be different, yes, but not this different!
If you trace innovation and progress down the years, you'll mostly see progress happening on a linear basis. Real innovation actually happens very very rarely (fire, internal combustion engine, wireless communication, silicon based computing etc.). I'm talking about innovation that you can count on your fingers. After this new idea has taken seed, there's a very long period of time when this "new-fangled" device or concept is tested, marketed, and finally accepted by society. This is when the idea is modified, perfected, and customized.
Look at automobiles for instance. Are the cars today fundamentally different from the cars made a hundred years ago?? Cars today still use an internal combustion engine, ride on 4 wheels, and have a chassis to hold all the shit together. Yes, we have better engines, better tires, and a better chassis. But fundamentally different? No. We've even tried the hovercraft, the personal helicopter, Segway, etc. but none of these concepts have really replaced the good old automobile.
I'm not saying that inflection points never occur. Yes, they do. However, i'm not so sure that a lot of what we see around us, in terms of technology and automation, will be so dramatically different from today as we imagine it to be.
My take on this is that Gmail will inject their text based ads before sending the mail to our client mail readers. I'm cool with that, as long as it doesn't screw up the original mail's format.
As far as Google is concerned, they're least bothered whether someone clicks on a paid link from the gmail website or from an email client.
Everybody's happy, and that's the way it should be. People often underestimate the junta's capacity to compromise a little bit, as long as they're getting a good deal. Look at the WalMart model for instance. Their selling point is their low price, not their customer service. Most people recognize this too and are quite willing to put up with understaffed and not-so-polite attendants as long as they're getting their 30% discounts.
A lot of people have griped about gmail's privacy and what-not. This is all over-the-top bullshit. Recognize the value that Gmail and it's POP offering brings to the table and the compromise that it asks the users to make. For most users, it's a very reasonable deal.
A fleeting thought
on
Cube Farm
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You know, i've realized that it's easy to write sad shit, but incredibly difficult to write happy stuff. The funny thing is that most of us, at least the self-fashioned highbrows, deign to write favourable critiques only if it's depressing enough for you to slash your wrists! This penchant for despair is also something that i've been noticing in some of the/. comments and posts.
I've been there and lived through that. I'm also sure that most of us have had our periods of depressions and frustrations too (choose your timeframe: junior school, high school, college, limbo between college and first job, stuck in a dead-end job etc.). I just want to say this, and i'm quoting here: THIS IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS.
Jobs will never come easy, and they'll never be a perfect fit for your skills and your interests. Money'll not come easy either. As for love, heck, we're all geeks here. We'll manage to find someone if we're incredibly lucky, brave and desparate enough to go through the trial and error process, and only if we're reasonably good looking to boot! What's left? NOTHING, except for unconditional love, perhaps, if you buy a dog. Yes, this is tabula rasa and it always will be.
What i do, or at least try to do nowadays, is to stop reading this kind of depressing garbage and just focus on the little things. The joy of coding is not to be found in managing to decipher uncommented legacy code or what have you, but in managing to decipher a gem in the uncommented legacy code. It's not sneering at the 101 coding errors that we can find in someone else's code but in finding the one inexplicable construct in someone else's code and the thrill of discovering a new thought pattern.
Or, as the Hagakure suggests:- "Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. Master Ittei wrote: Matters of small concern should be treated seriously."
I'm sorry if i've completely digressed here, as this is supposed to be a book review. However, i do feel an undercurrent of depression in most posts nowadays and just wanted to share my thoughts with all of you.
Slashdot Mirror
Although i agree with you in principle, in this case, the pornography that was peddled was that of minors performing sexual acts. In such a case, almost any country in the world would deem it illegal, much less India. Even if you discount the law of the land (IANAL, in any case), most people would consider peddling child porn as immoral in ANY country.
and here i was, thinking that the open source community is the one place that's devoid of politics.
sigh
I think that a lot of commentators have misunderstood Linus' answers. When Linus blandly said that he's not even going to bother studying Solaris/x86 in detail, he meant that he's not a Solaris expert. The Linux development model, by its very nature, means that any new technology of sufficient value would be easily incorporated in Linux. Linus simply meant that because he has created a dynamic atmosphere that encourages the adoption of ideas, he really doesn't need to inspect a competitive OS with a fine-toothed comb himself. If Solaris 10 does have features that get widely adopted by it's customers and proves itself over time, it would be a trivial issue to incorporate the feature in Linux (if it makes sense).
He's not dismissive of Solaris; he simply has a lot of confidence in his development model.
IMHO, of course.
You have a point. However, you would have compiled your list of 26 based on some inherent qualities in the products, right? If you cut short the list to an arbitrary top 10, the reader is misled to think that the other 16 are bad.
At the very least, the lists should show the relative "goodness" or "badness" of the top 10 products with the others in the category.
While you're at it, would you also consider banning other products that do not match your exalted standards of "usefulness"?
Alcohol, perhaps, because it only promotes wife-beating and dangerous driving?
A case for computer games, because they promote violence and are merely for entertainment??
To repeat ad nauseum, a tool, software or hardware, is only a tool and are not inherently good or evil. The responsibility of "correct" usage lies with the users, and only with the users. If we go by your myopic way of thinking, we would all be suitably safe, suitably reassured, and suitably living in the stone age.
You need to goto k5 to do that ;-)
Why do most "best-of" or "worst-of" kind of compilations have to be conveniently bracketed into well-rounded numbers like 10, 20, 100 etc. It clearly implies that the authors are just hunting around for products to slander just so that they can fill in the 2 vacant slots or whatever. I mean, if someone does honestly compile a list of bad products, they would simply make a list of products that are outstandingly horrible in a product segment, and end the list when they run out of horrible products!
These kind of list compilations only exemplify shoddy jounalism.
Sorry to pick nits in your comment, but .NET (or ADO.NET) does NOT natively store db objects in XML. Native database objects, such as DataSets, DataTables, etc. are stored in binary format, just like all .NET objects.
It only seems so because almost all the data objects in ADO.NET allow the user to readily serialize and deserialize the objects into and from XML. So yes, XML is the native serialization format for datasets, but not the format in which datasets are stored themselves (because of performance and size penalties).
While i agree that some of the examples mentioned were a little extreme, i challenge the need to have perfect spelling, syntax, and grammar. The purpose of language, at least in the corporate realm, is to communicate. The purpose is not to create a literary masterpiece that would tickle Shakespear's bones.
Yes, communication should be unambiguous and be readable by an ordinary person. However, other requirements such as proper capitalization, placement of commas, perfect spelling, etc. are only good-to-have features of any communication, and not essential requirements.
I also think that it has become a fashion of sorts to bemoan the falling standards of grammar and correct English usage. Yes, the standard might have fallen a bit over the years. However, they haven't gone through the floor, as one would be led to believe. Furthermore, with the advent of technology and electronic communication devices, the focus is now on being brief, being up to the point, and getting the message across in as little time as possible. One simply does not have the luxury of composing verbiage at leisure and on company time, when the more pressing needs of posting on slashdot beckon.
IMHO, the reason why open-source alternatives are not as popular as the commercial products is that these products are not unanimously "pushed" by the users/open source community themselves. I don't mean this as flame-bait, nor am i a guru of ANY sort. However, i am an avid and enthusiastic user of open source products such as Firefox (moox).
I think that open source successes such as Firefox should be replicated. Where open source lacks in marketing muscle, it can make up in word-of-mouth awareness or its internet equivalent. However, most open source products suffer because they mostly compete with not the paid products, but with other open source alternatives themselves! If only there can be concerted efforts to *push* certain mainstream open source products, i think that it can be a major force. Firefox 1.0 is proof of this.
Again, please don't take this as criticism of any sort, but only as a suggestion.
International markets are more price-sensitive than the US, so they'll go with the cheapest CPU they can find, which ain't Intel.
;-)
Wrong. Although your view is shared by most folks, it's a popular misconception that poor countries prefer poor computers. All markets behave the way that if you offer them 3 options, the options being premium, price/performance (aka value), and budget, 10% will go for luxury, 60-80% for price/performance, and 10-30% for budget. While these numbers are in no way accurate, i'm stating them as an indicator to show the relative values of the categories.
It's a fallacy to assume that people in poor countries will only buy stripped down budget systems. The fact is that in most countries (not sure about the US), people perceive computers as a luxury AND a necessity (necessary for their children's education, their business etc.). Hence, they will either buy a computer or not. Remember, a computer also costs more than a TV, fridge, gas stove, and oven COMBINED! Hence, those who cannot buy a computer will not buy it even if it only costs as much as a TV and fridge.
However, if a family does decide to buy a computer because they have dreams for their kids, they will rather save and sacrifice and then buy a GOOD computer rather than a discounted one. They will invariably go for the value segment rather than budget simply because the extra money is only an extra couple of months' sacrifice, and most people would not want to get shortchanged on a "lifetime" investment.
This has also been proven correct in most so-called poor markets such as India, China, and the African countries. Yes, there will always be a market for $300 computers but it will never be at the expense of the meat-and-bones computer market that the computer/electronic companies target.
If they think that the PC market is fast moving, wait until they see the mobile market. We're talking a 6-9 month obsolesence cycle and incredible price pressures. There's also lots of established players, so Intel had better offer something special that the others don't have (and can't easily duplicate).
Yes, they are offering something special in their Pentium M (and Centrino) offerings. AFAIK, the mobile market has actually been Intel's primary strength in the recent years, in terms of growth and revenue. They are also very very solid and stable products and i don't see the competition catching up so soon. Incidentally, who are the other established players that you're referring to? Apple?? They hardly constitute 10-20% of the luxury segment itself. A person in a developing country can buy a car for the price of an Apple, for crying out loud! In other words, Apple notebooks literally cost an arm and an i
Yes, it's possible to work for 80 hrs a week, or even more. However, you need to define "work" here. Would you define reading/replying to emails as work? Would you define attending meetings as work? Believe me, these small numbers add up to take away a sizeable portion of your workday and your energy.
/. as time wasted. It's also an integral part of the process of coding. Hence, i do claim that one can "work" for 80 arse a weak.
If you're talking about pure coding, IMHO, coding is not a tap that can be turned on and off at will. One needs to "get into the flow" to get some real coding done, and this doesn't happen easily (at least for me). I'll often spend hours tinkering around with stuff, browsing some site, but won't for the death of me, be able to finish writing a simple class or stored procedure. Maybe, i'll keep getting stuck, maybe i'll be too distracted, maybe i'll decide to read some documentation instead. Then, suddenly, everything will start happening smoothly and i'll complete a day's work in a couple of hours.
I don't know if it works the same way for others, but i really feel that one cannot just keep coding continuously all day. At the same time, i will also not consider the interstitial time spent tinkering around and writing comments in
Well, mother IS the necessity of invention.
But then, if a movie ticket costed you, say $1000, you would be justified in saying that your movie ticket costs almost as much as the car that you drove to see it. Sometimes, comparing apples and oranges makes sense if they're priced right ;-)
SLI offers some interesting upgrade paths. Say you plop $200 for a 6600GT today. Maybe, you can squeeze enough performance out of this baby to get decent frame rates for the current and next season's FPS games. However, going by past trends, i really doubt that you would be able to get adequate performance 2 years down the line. On top of it, your 6600GT would probably fetch you less than a hundred bucks if you do decide to upgrade it.
However, say you decide to buy a relatively cheap-ass motherboard/processor today that does NOT support SLI but fit it with a 6600GT. Note that for a decent gaming system that offers you a good price/performance, you're spending more on your video card than your processor and motherboard combined. 2 years down the line, simply upgrade your motherboard to an SLI enabled one (which would have become really cheap by then), buy yourself another 6600GT from eBay for a hundred bucks or less, and hopefully, you should be able to play FarCry2 by then!
This make any sense? Basically, my rationale here is on 2 points:-
1. I dont really care about my CPU/motherboard as it's way cheaper than my video card
2. With SLI, i can simply buy today's high-end card at tomorrow's prices instead of throwing a perfectly good but outdated video card. This way, i can hold off a major upgrade for another year or two.
nVidia some how has managed to lock out other manufacturers chipsets from working properly with SLI
A case of nVidia acting on the SLI?
.but I can only imagine what it would be like to having someone playing Madden next to me for hours on end.
Maddening, perhaps?
I will resist making o/c comments on this post.
I will resist making fanboy comments on this post.
I will resist making riaa/mpaa comments on this post.
I will resist making political/outsourcing comments on this post.
I will resist making "that's nothing, i used to make my cyclotrons with a couple of diodes and a pizza box" comments on this post.
Amen.
That being said, it's a welcome change reading some genuinely good posts like this one (and the one on chess pieces yesterday). IMHO, one of the reasons that Americans should be proud of themselves is their ability and willingness to DIY just about anything. I hold people like Tim Koeth in higher regard than than any theoretical scientist anyday.
1/5 = 20%. Are you saying something different?
I agree that i was not entirely accurate in my figures. I do know that a person in India can have a decent meal in an average restaurant for about Rs. 50 (~$1), can buy a coke for Rs. 10 (20 cents), can buy decent shirts and trousers for about Rs. 500 each ($10). Yes, these figures vary according to quality, location, brand, etc. but it's still way cheaper than in the USA. For example, a movie ticket in a good theater costs about Rs. 50 - Rs. 100. That's $1-$2!
Yes, certain things are expensive, like white goods for example. However, even these items are becoming cheaper, and not more expensive. Another thing is that the aspiration level is also much lower in India. A 25" TV is considered as an expensive, with 21" being status quo. Plasma and LCD is only affordable for politicians and government servants who take bribes.
Ok, i was wrong about Taiwan. However, you're extrapolating this one incorrect fact to say that i know very little about this subject? I guess that ad hominem tu quoque type of negations are just too easily made. I was speaking on generalities here, not picking nits as you're doing. I'm also not claiming to be a macro-economic expert. However, i still stand by the basic point of my argument that rural america should compete on factors other than cost, because cost is simply NOT their primary strength.
Face the facts. If you say that India is a outsourcing success story, look at the reasons why. On average, goods in India, barring housing and cars, cost only 20% (or less) of what it costs here in USA. On top of it, the standards of a good life and luxury are far lower than in the US.
In California, you call yourself middle-class if you have a 0.5 mil house, a boat, 2 cars etc. In India, most middle class folks consider a car with a boot as a luxury car (i'm not joking, Hyundai Accent, Ford Ikon, Fiat Siena etc. are considered high-end luxury cars). Even a person driving a small hatch-back considers himself/herself as having acheived something. This is why the big multinationals can afford to pay 10% of what they pay in the US, and still manage to retain a happy workforce!
Add to that, an abundance of intelligent, hard-working, English speaking people, extremely willing to slog for 12 hours a day so that they can save enough over 3-5 years to afford a Maruti Suzuki 800 (yes, it's a ~780 cc car), who can compete with that? Yes, there's still issues, such as infrastructure, accents, timezone differences, etc. and lots of bad apples in the workforce too, but it still doesnt overpower the cost advantage.
It's a bit like how the x86 architecture took over the computer world. People assumed initially, and rightly too, that x86 was inefficient and too cheap. What they didn't count on was that as x86 sold more and more, it also innovated and improved, and very soon, offered a double-whammy cost AND performance advantage over the other proprietary systems. Again, people pad up the costs by factoring communication cost, travel cost etc. What they don't realize is that these costs are firstly, marginal, and secondly, reducing over time.
The cost of living in the midwest or in rural America might be somewhat less than the metros or the coasts, but it cannot compete with the cost advantage offered by countries like India, Taiwan, China etc.
IMHO, rural america can compete effectively with other IT companies. Only, they need to sing a different song. They have to be flexible and play on their natural strengths and not on their weaknesses. For example, if a lot of techies in the small towns and villages got together, formed a virtual company or organization, and offered standardized software solutions to local businesses and institutions, there is NO way that the big city businesses or another country could compete with them. Don't compete on cost, compete on value.
Ok. Maybe, i was not accurate in the timelines. What i was trying to say is that there has been no *fundamental* change in a car's design and implementation. If i was living in, say, 1950, i might have predicted that by 2004, tires, propulsion systems, analog displays, and fuels would have completely changed. I would have imagined a concept car that can fly or glide, is naviagated by computers, and/or will be nuclear powered. However, the fact is that a 2004 model is really not that different from a 1960 model.
Usage of composite materials, tubeless tires, ABS, xenon headlights, perhaps, but nothing that can be considered as a fundamental change.
I beg to differ from most of these "future" theories. More often than not, if asked to envision the future, we let our imagination go wild and concoct devices that use things like anti-gravity, super-intelligent robots, infinite engergy producing machines, and so on. IMHO, the reality of the future would be different, yes, but not this different! If you trace innovation and progress down the years, you'll mostly see progress happening on a linear basis. Real innovation actually happens very very rarely (fire, internal combustion engine, wireless communication, silicon based computing etc.). I'm talking about innovation that you can count on your fingers. After this new idea has taken seed, there's a very long period of time when this "new-fangled" device or concept is tested, marketed, and finally accepted by society. This is when the idea is modified, perfected, and customized. Look at automobiles for instance. Are the cars today fundamentally different from the cars made a hundred years ago?? Cars today still use an internal combustion engine, ride on 4 wheels, and have a chassis to hold all the shit together. Yes, we have better engines, better tires, and a better chassis. But fundamentally different? No. We've even tried the hovercraft, the personal helicopter, Segway, etc. but none of these concepts have really replaced the good old automobile. I'm not saying that inflection points never occur. Yes, they do. However, i'm not so sure that a lot of what we see around us, in terms of technology and automation, will be so dramatically different from today as we imagine it to be.
My take on this is that Gmail will inject their text based ads before sending the mail to our client mail readers. I'm cool with that, as long as it doesn't screw up the original mail's format. As far as Google is concerned, they're least bothered whether someone clicks on a paid link from the gmail website or from an email client. Everybody's happy, and that's the way it should be. People often underestimate the junta's capacity to compromise a little bit, as long as they're getting a good deal. Look at the WalMart model for instance. Their selling point is their low price, not their customer service. Most people recognize this too and are quite willing to put up with understaffed and not-so-polite attendants as long as they're getting their 30% discounts. A lot of people have griped about gmail's privacy and what-not. This is all over-the-top bullshit. Recognize the value that Gmail and it's POP offering brings to the table and the compromise that it asks the users to make. For most users, it's a very reasonable deal.
You know, i've realized that it's easy to write sad shit, but incredibly difficult to write happy stuff. The funny thing is that most of us, at least the self-fashioned highbrows, deign to write favourable critiques only if it's depressing enough for you to slash your wrists! This penchant for despair is also something that i've been noticing in some of the /. comments and posts.
I've been there and lived through that. I'm also sure that most of us have had our periods of depressions and frustrations too (choose your timeframe: junior school, high school, college, limbo between college and first job, stuck in a dead-end job etc.). I just want to say this, and i'm quoting here: THIS IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS.
Jobs will never come easy, and they'll never be a perfect fit for your skills and your interests. Money'll not come easy either. As for love, heck, we're all geeks here. We'll manage to find someone if we're incredibly lucky, brave and desparate enough to go through the trial and error process, and only if we're reasonably good looking to boot! What's left? NOTHING, except for unconditional love, perhaps, if you buy a dog. Yes, this is tabula rasa and it always will be.
What i do, or at least try to do nowadays, is to stop reading this kind of depressing garbage and just focus on the little things. The joy of coding is not to be found in managing to decipher uncommented legacy code or what have you, but in managing to decipher a gem in the uncommented legacy code. It's not sneering at the 101 coding errors that we can find in someone else's code but in finding the one inexplicable construct in someone else's code and the thrill of discovering a new thought pattern.
Or, as the Hagakure suggests:-
"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. Master Ittei wrote: Matters of small concern should be treated seriously."
I'm sorry if i've completely digressed here, as this is supposed to be a book review. However, i do feel an undercurrent of depression in most posts nowadays and just wanted to share my thoughts with all of you.