I agree that machine translation is in the realm of AI. But so-called "New AI" is not purely symbol-based, as old AI methods used to be, it is either numeric or a combination of numeric and symbolic. There is no sharp border between statistical methods and new AI methods.
Of course, you can buy dictionaries or get trained people write them, but the amount of data needed for every lexical item would be so large that a wide coverage would be very hard to achieve. For example, you have to note all collocations. Often, such preferences aren't clear-cut. For instance, 'essential' appears much more frequently in an attributive position (e.g. 'X is essential') than in , while 'basic', which can have a very similar meaning in many contexts (e.g. 'the essential X'), appears much more often in an attributive position. Such information is necessary for good translation, but dictionaries usually don't provide it. Statistical analyses of lexical items reveal many things dictionaries don't tell you. Nowadays, a significant part of the work of trained people writing dictionaries is looking at corpora, and making this process automatic is a logical step.
Strictly separating raw dictionary work and grammar seems rather old-fashioned to me. Of course, it can work to some degree, but there are so many different types of collocational preferences that just providing each lexeme with a 'grammatical category' from a relatively small list and basing the grammar on these grammatical categories is hardly enough.
It is true that automatic systems' lack of world knowledge is a big problem, but the examples you provide aren't really a good demonstration of this fact. As you write, 'have' is translated differently into some languages depending on whether the object is abstract. So, given a translation system that recognizes the verb and its object and a bilingual parallel corpus, a statistical system can find out about that.
I heard of people who write dictionaries that can be used for automatic processing, for every lexeme they need between half an hour or an hour (consulting dictionaries and corpora, checking whether the application of rules gives correct sentences). This can only work if the aim of the MT system is either only a very limited domain (e.g. weather forecasts, for which there are working rule-based translation systems) or very low quality. It could never be affordable to have trained people provide all relevant characteristics for the millions of words that would be needed for a good MT system with wide coverage.
Differentiating between concrete and abstract entities is something that seems quite natural to us, but there are many other relevant characteristics of lexical items that don't come to linguists' minds so easily, statistical analyses can be better at discovering them.
It can be much more than just pressing the delete button. For instance, I find SMS notifications for e-mails very useful, so I know right away when I have received an important e-mail even when I'm not at my computer. So, I have to take my mobile phone out of the pocket, press one button to see the SMS and two to delete it. The spam mail is, of course, still on the mail server and has to be deleted.
Because of filters, I don't receive many SMS notifications for spam mails, but the filters themselves mean quite a lot of work and/or paying for services (I'm a student and work part-time at different companies, so I have to do that with an e-mail address of my own).
It can also happen that I have to read an e-mail when there is no computer around. I can read my e-mails on the mobile phone, but GPRS bandwith is relatively expensive, and with the small display, it takes quite a long time to navigate to the wanted mail if there is a lot of spam.
Then there is additional work because I have to empty backup mailboxes more often etc. Especially with reading mails on the phone, a large amount of spam can mean that takes so long and costs so much that it isn't an option any more, and that's really a loss, although it's hard to express it in numbers.
With good filters, it shouldn't happen, but as the situation is now, I often hear people asking someone to send a mail again because their strict filter rules removed it or because they can't find it any more in the large heap of spam. If spam continues to increase, it could well be that soon people with good mail filters will have such problems, too.
Spam has a very bad effect on the usability of the mail system, and it threatens to render recent technological progress useless (e.g. PDAs with integrated mobile phones are much less suitable for receiving and sending mails when you're on the way when that means that you have to pay for much more GPRS data and wait much longer because of spam).
As it has been pointed out elsewhere (I don't remember exactly where), the situation is probably more complicated.
For people who are really interested in IT and good at trying out things, using Linux for most tasks hasn't been a problem for quite some time, for many more difficult things Linux is better suited than Windows.
On the other hand, it seems that people who only use computers for a few basic tasks (writing e-mails and letters, browsing the web etc.) and use only a small part of the options Windows offers them can switch to Linux now, and they won't even notice a big difference.
Switching to Linux would be most difficult for the people in between who have downloaded Windows shareware, connected gadgets with Windows drivers and memorized a significant number of step-to-step procedures for a bit more complicated things in Windows.
Today, I suppose most Linux users belong to the category of people with a computer knowledge above average. The threshold can be lowered, but a good sign for Linux's success would be more and more users from the other end of the scale starting to use Linux. A significant part of those in the middle category probably won't be willing to switch to Linux, anyway.
I had never worked much with video files, and then I suddenly had some videos in all possible formats I wanted to watch. I tried both with Windows XP and SuSE Linux. It wasn't so important, and I didn't invest too much time, but in the end, I could see more of the videos on Linux than on Windows. For Windows, I didn't find free programs that could be used for such a large variety of formats like xine and MPlayer, so I had to download quite a number of different Windows programs, and with some of them, there were problems (e.g. some Quicktime files worked well, but ohers didn't; while xine displayed them perfectly Quicktime for Windows displayed a strange error message).
Certainly, there can be problems with video formats on Linux, but there are similar problems with Windows, as well, and in my case, it worked better with Linux than with Windows.
Those driver issues will only be solved when Linux has 50%+ of the desktop market. That's plain economics.
50% seems much to high. It depends on the amount needed for developing a Linux version of a particular driver, but even if Linux had just a market share of about 10%, for most hardware manufacturers it probably wouldn't make sense not to support Linux. I think there has already been some progress, for an ISDN adapter I used a few years ago there wasn't a driver for Linux first, I had to wait for years, until they provided one, but now the manufacturer provides Linux drivers for new product without such a big delay.
Not necessarily migrating, but there can be reasons for wanting to have one computer with Windows in a Linux network (e.g. special software available only for Windows, special hardware; even if Linux became much more widespread than Windows, some special cases in which Windows is needed or preferred would probably remain). If something is needed by many, it may be worth developing a Linux version, but not if only few need it.
Actually, I think the fact that Windows computers can be well integrated in Linux networks could be quite an important factor for choosing Linux, both when migrating or creating a new network.
While I do think that it is important that labour unions are organized internationally to match the corporations' international nature, I don't think it's true that unions create uncertainty. On the contrary, there is uncertainty when the strikes are spontaneous and representatives of companies don't know whom to talk to. Labour unions provide certainty and reliability because they enable constructive negotiations between employers and workers.
Screw the Indian programmer! Let him/her start their own company!
In ten year's time, when the whole IT market is dominated by Indian, Chinese and Russian companies and IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Sun and HP have been driven out of business, people will say: "Oh, why didn't the companies our country once had use these opportunities to go to India in time. Then, they would still exist, and some of their jobs would be here."
OK, perhaps that scenario is not very likely, but there will probably be more companies from these countries in the future competing with Western companies.
Big companies are already organized internationally, workers must do the same. Of course, many employers prefer an unorganized, easily exploitable workforce, but it is better for most people if workers and employers are equal partners.
I don't really give a flying f*ck how distanced from the wealthy I am. I'd just like to have at least the standard of living my parents had.
But it does matter for the living standard what the wealthy, particularly upper management do. Until recently, payments for CEOs and upper management were rising steeply, and certainly, there were more cases of people from upper management stealing assets of companies and having the company pay for their private expenses than has been found out so far. Such things can't remain without an effect on the living standards for the rest of people if it happens on a large scale, as it seems (and it particularly happened on a very large scale during the DotCom boom, and the money some people appropriated with dubious methods at that time is still missing elsewhere).
I object a downward pressure due to such irresponsible behavior much more than moving labor overseas, which at least makes sense and helps develop the economy there.
Once enough of these jobs are located in India, the wages companies will have to offer Indian workers will rise.
You know there's almost a billion people in India, right? And even with our current job situation in the US, wages have fallen through the floor. How many of these jobs do expect to be created in India? 100 million? Think.
No, as far as I know, salaries of IT professionals had already been rising significantly in the 90es (probably, India's IT job market is now affected by the international economic situation, too, but the tendency remains).
For the development of the IT job market in India, the number newly created IT jobs shouldn't be compared with India's total population. Obviously, only a very small percentage of India's population has an education in IT - many people have specialized in other fields, but mainly, large parts of India are still completely underdeveloped. So, if Western companies create a number of new jobs that is irrelevant in proportion to India's total population, but significant in proportion to the number of Indians with an education, this does lead to a tendency for higher salaries.
Of course, it also leads in principle to more Indians studying IT and computational sciences, but that's a relatively slow process. It could lead to falling salaries, but unless the creation of new jobs stops, that shouldn't be expected.
Then, as the IT industry develops - partly due to Western companies moving jobs there -, this contributes to a general development of the Indian economy and creates a larger domestic market, also for IT services, which again leads to a tendency of higher salaries.
I think that's partly what is already happening and partly something that is reasonable to expect. Certainly, it's far from being idiotic.
A much more difficult question is, however, what effect that can have on the economics of Western companies moving jobs overseas. Certainly, rising salaries in countries like India rather slow that process down somehow, but probably, it would be very difficult to predict whether that would mean that in ten years, there wouldn't be any economic sense in moving many more jobs from the US to India (taken as an example) because the salaries there have reached a level that, if problems with workers being far away and possible misunderstandings are taken into account, it wouldn't be much cheaper, any more. Whether that happens depends on many factors that are hard to predict.
I don't know the IT job market in Poland very well, but I heard from someone in Poland that a few years ago, in Germany they considered that they have to few skilled IT professionals and wanted to grant the right to work in Germany to a certain number of Polish IT workers (a bit easier than inviting people from India, now they probably don't insist on having too few IT workers any more because the situation on the job market has become quite difficult in Germany, as well). Then, they didn't find many Polish IT professionals ready to work in Germany, and it was said that this had to do with the fact that there are enough good and well-paid jobs for IT professionals in Poland.
That was in the times of the IT boom. Was the situation in Poland perhaps much better a few years ago than it is now? Or perhaps the story I heard (from a Polish professor from a field that doesn't have to do with IT) isn't completely true?
I doubt whether Poland can really be called underdevelopped, although there is a big problem with unemployment. And I think in any case, that many companies from the EU will create more jobs in Poland, the fact that it joins the European Union creates some more trust, and I have heard many assessments that the new EU members are regarded by many Western European companies as promising places to invest.
I agree, searching for only one term often isn't a good solution, and people should use better search terms instead of complaining that the results aren't the ones they wanted. But on the other hand, I also think that search engines with clustering do make sense. Sometimes, when you search for a term you don't know very well, it helps when the search engine does the clustering for you. Vivisimo is a meta search engine that does clustering.
When you search for apple, the first clusters are mostly computer-specific, too, but that simply corresponds to what is on the web (it is different both with Google and Vivisimo when you use apples instead).
But sometimes, the automatic clustering can speed up the search, you don't have to find out yourself which additional (positive or negative) criteria work best (you can, of course still add them if you want).
A few examples of the first few clusters with a few Vivisimo searches:
Certainly, and we can expect of people living in a capitalist society that they develop a sense of what advertisement is and what it isn't (e.g. it isn't objective information). But then, it is important that something is recognised as an ad. Quite obviously, DoubleClick tries to pass of the ads as something else, system messages, in which people reasonably have more confidence. I think the point isn't how many people are actually tricked by that (that may play a role in that concrete court case), but that they try to hide the nature of their ads in order for people not to apply the critical attitude one should normally have towards statements in advertisements.
In a way, I understand the US position that freedom of speech should not be restricted in any way. Many people of the left are sceptical about the fight against extremist right-wing propaganda - right-wing extremism, which few people like, can be used as an excuse to introduced repressive measures that will also be used against the left. As soon as freedom of speech is restricted, it's a dangerous slope.
However, I do think it is right that neo-Nazi propaganda is illegal in European countries - not just in Germany, but they have the strictest laws. Even nationalist and radical right-wing propaganda should be legal. In the case of texts that say that the policies of the Nazis who murdered millions of people and that something similar should be started again, I find it, however, right that an exception is made. Among those most active against neo-Nazi and antisemitic websites are organisations of children of survivers of the holocaust, and I find their concerns must be taken seriously (even if they sometimes go too far).
What I also find important in that context is that, in contrast to many laws that have been introduced recently in many countries for the 'war against terror', the restriction of Nazi propaganda is not a new tendency towards more repression, Nazi propaganda has been illegal since the defeat of the Nazis in WW II, and it was a historical necessity (the Americans as one of the occupying powers who liberated Europe from the Nazis hardly objected this ban then). It is important that the ban on Nazi propaganda isn't used as a starting point for more restrictions on the freedom of expression, but as long as it remains an exception for an exceptional ideology that caused such enormous suffering and deaths, there are good reasons to keep it.
The other examples are completely unrelated, and I don't find them convincing. I don't know any other country except Germany where on most parts of highways, there isn't any speed limit, at all. If some more are introduced, this is necessary to prevent accidents and save lives, and the same goes for alcohol limits for drivers. Germany is in no way leading there, in many countries, there are currently attempts to diminish accidents with such measures.
As far as smoking is concerned, there are, indeed, more restrictions than there used to be, but again this is an international development for which there are health reasons, and smoking is much less restricted in Germany than in places like California, New York or Turkmenistan (and although tobacco taxes are rised, cigarettes are still cheaper in Germany than in Great Britain, Scandinavian countries and the US).
First, in most cases, the alternative in most cases is not one click (with deep linking) or more (when starting from the home page), but people seeing a page (when news search engines link to it) or not. Most people only read few newspapers completely and would not read articles from other newspapers if there wasn't a link to a topic they're interested in.
But I would also dispute that deep linking necessarily makes people see fewer pages - perhaps there are studies investigating visitors' behaviour. Many good news sites have links to related articles on their pages, and often when I arrive at one page from Google news search (or sometimes Paperboy.de), I look at other pages of the same site, as well. I think news sites should be glad that with deep linking from news search engines, they already know something about the fields of interests of a visitor. If someone goes to the home page, they don't know to which articles to link most prominently.
Some people will only read the page to which the search engine links, but they would hardly explore a news site starting from the home page, anyway. Those who want to read more probably often read more pages when they start with one article that interests them and see links to related articles (and, of course, they always can go to the home page with one click, as well).
XP Home doesn't include IIS, and although it isn't a particularly good webserver, there are some applications that need it. Possibly, there are ways to install IIS on XP Home, but that seems to be quite complicated, and maybe Microsoft would consider that illegal. Therefore, I once wanted to update from XP home, which was pre-installed on my notebook (together with RedHat), to XP Pro, but then it turned out that the XP Pro update version is only for users of Windows 98, ME, NT and 2000, but not XP Home. I would have had to buy a full XP Pro. I found that so crazy that I decided never to buy any Microsoft product again.
I think that the boxes on the shelves are very important for Linux. Here in Basle (Switzerland), the CD boxes are very conspicuous in software and book shops, they are rather more visible than the Microsoft CD boxes. In the largest book shops, they have quite large tables decorated with penguins with lots of these boxes of different distributions (the main one here is SuSE, RedHat seems to be second and Mandrake third).
I wouldn't be surprised if they sell more of Linux CD boxes than Windows ones, if they weren't sold very often, the Linux CDs wouldn't be placed so prominently, and most people get their Windows with a new computer and never update it.
I think this visibility of Linux is quite important. It would probably have taken me much longer until I installed Linux for the first time. Some years ago, I spontaneously bought a CD box with SuSE Linux (5.something) after having repeatedly read about GNU/Linux. I didn't choose this distribution after a thorough comparison, I just took what was everywhere on the shelves. If there hadn't been any Linux distribution, I would hardly have installed Linux then.
If RedHat wants to leave that market to SuSE, Mandrakes and others, that's OK, but I think this distribution channel is very important, especially when these Linux distros are exhibited as prominently as I have seen it in German and Swiss shops.
At least, the attempt of the British Labour MEP to hurry through a vote on an unclear and self-contradictory new law already on 30 June has failed. Many software producers, organisations and private persons had warned the members of the European parliament of the effects of software patents. The vote will be on 1 September.
I think it is likely that software patents will be rejected or only allowed in a very limited way. There are few very large European IT corporations that could profit from getting sueing opportunities - most of the very large IT companies operating in Europe are American -, but there are a lot of smaller software producers that would be damaged by the introduction of software patents. It isn't astonishing any more that some people of British Labour support the interests of large American corporations against small and medium businesses - after all, some of the most important allies of US neo-cons outside the US are in British Labour as well -, but on the whole, I would find it hard to imagine that European self-interest wouldn't prevail.
The Greens have a clear position against software patents. Most statements of liberal and social democratic (as long as they keep Blair and Campbell, Labour doesn't belong there any more, of course) parties I have seen are against software patents, as well. Among conservatives, such as the German CDU/CSU, there are many supporters of software patents, but it seems that most statements in favour of software patents are badly written and full of errors, while some people who have a better knowledge of the matter (such as CSU MEP Martin Mayer) are critical towards software patents. Since there is more time to discuss now, there is hope that such more informed opinions will find more followers.
Why wait? Software patents mainly exist in Japan and the US, for the rest of the world implementation can begin right now (some software patents have slipped through in Europe, too, although they shouldn't exist according to current laws, but they wouldn't stand any chance at court).
As far as private computers at home are concerned, I wouldn't expect a significant part of the population to switch from Windows to GNU/Linux. OS X is a much stronger competitor of Windows in that area. It seems that mostly people with a special interest in IT and OSS are using Linux (often, they know several operating systems). Sometimes, they can convince "normal" computer users they know to use Linux, as well, but I don't believe that this way of spread can result in a massive rise of the number of Linux users.
One important reason is that the difference in price doesn't matter so much for private users. Of course, Linux is free, but most users - and "normal computer users even more so" - usually want to have a convenient up-to-date distribution on a DVD or CDs, and if you buy new versions from time to time, Linux won't be much cheaper any more.
That is, of course, very different for companies and institutions, even if they always buy the latest version of their distribution, they can use it for an unlimited number of computers. Therefore, I think it can be expected that more companies and institutions will use Linux (of course, some can't because they use specialised software developped for Windows, but many can), cities like Munich or Schwäbisch Hall are a show what might happen in many other places, as well. Then, many people will get to know Linux at work, and because they get used to it, many of them will also use it at home and recommend it to others, and educational institutions will have to deal with Linux "because that's what you will be likely to see at work".
I think that if Linux is going to take over a significant share of the desktop, it is probably going to happen in such a way. The grassroot movement for Linux is quite strong, but I don't think it can reach more than a few per cent of the population if companies and public organisations choosing Linux to save money don't play their role.
While I think, too, that triggers should not normally call applications not directly related to the database, it can be helpful when you can write a trigger in a language like C and are not bound to SQL (or pl/pgSQL / Transact-SQL, respectively).
A company advertised their chicken as inflamed chicken, and a job description in English (at a building company) contained the phrase assistence to the chief executive during erections (they had the erection of buildings in mind)
In my view, globalisation shows that internationalism is not an outdated slogan, but an urgent need. Does it make sense when labour unions support protectionist policies? I don't think so, globalisation can't be stopped that way. Instead, they should realise that they have common interests with workers in poorer countries. If in these countries, there is a strong workers' movement there, salaries will rise more quickly, and therefore also more jobs can be kept in the rich countries. There is a struggle, indeed, but if workers in different countries don't realise that they're on the same side, they will lose. Labour unions in Western Europe and Northern America should collaborate more closely with labour unions in South Korea and Russia and support labour unions in China, where independent workers' organisations are suppressed by the regime (there is wild 19th century capitalism and a lot of state-capitalism in a communist disguise).
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I agree that machine translation is in the realm of AI. But so-called "New AI" is not purely symbol-based, as old AI methods used to be, it is either numeric or a combination of numeric and symbolic. There is no sharp border between statistical methods and new AI methods.
Of course, you can buy dictionaries or get trained people write them, but the amount of data needed for every lexical item would be so large that a wide coverage would be very hard to achieve. For example, you have to note all collocations. Often, such preferences aren't clear-cut. For instance, 'essential' appears much more frequently in an attributive position (e.g. 'X is essential') than in , while 'basic', which can have a very similar meaning in many contexts (e.g. 'the essential X'), appears much more often in an attributive position. Such information is necessary for good translation, but dictionaries usually don't provide it. Statistical analyses of lexical items reveal many things dictionaries don't tell you. Nowadays, a significant part of the work of trained people writing dictionaries is looking at corpora, and making this process automatic is a logical step.
Strictly separating raw dictionary work and grammar seems rather old-fashioned to me. Of course, it can work to some degree, but there are so many different types of collocational preferences that just providing each lexeme with a 'grammatical category' from a relatively small list and basing the grammar on these grammatical categories is hardly enough.
It is true that automatic systems' lack of world knowledge is a big problem, but the examples you provide aren't really a good demonstration of this fact. As you write, 'have' is translated differently into some languages depending on whether the object is abstract. So, given a translation system that recognizes the verb and its object and a bilingual parallel corpus, a statistical system can find out about that.
I heard of people who write dictionaries that can be used for automatic processing, for every lexeme they need between half an hour or an hour (consulting dictionaries and corpora, checking whether the application of rules gives correct sentences). This can only work if the aim of the MT system is either only a very limited domain (e.g. weather forecasts, for which there are working rule-based translation systems) or very low quality. It could never be affordable to have trained people provide all relevant characteristics for the millions of words that would be needed for a good MT system with wide coverage.
Differentiating between concrete and abstract entities is something that seems quite natural to us, but there are many other relevant characteristics of lexical items that don't come to linguists' minds so easily, statistical analyses can be better at discovering them.
It can be much more than just pressing the delete button. For instance, I find SMS notifications for e-mails very useful, so I know right away when I have received an important e-mail even when I'm not at my computer. So, I have to take my mobile phone out of the pocket, press one button to see the SMS and two to delete it. The spam mail is, of course, still on the mail server and has to be deleted.
Because of filters, I don't receive many SMS notifications for spam mails, but the filters themselves mean quite a lot of work and/or paying for services (I'm a student and work part-time at different companies, so I have to do that with an e-mail address of my own).
It can also happen that I have to read an e-mail when there is no computer around. I can read my e-mails on the mobile phone, but GPRS bandwith is relatively expensive, and with the small display, it takes quite a long time to navigate to the wanted mail if there is a lot of spam.
Then there is additional work because I have to empty backup mailboxes more often etc. Especially with reading mails on the phone, a large amount of spam can mean that takes so long and costs so much that it isn't an option any more, and that's really a loss, although it's hard to express it in numbers.
With good filters, it shouldn't happen, but as the situation is now, I often hear people asking someone to send a mail again because their strict filter rules removed it or because they can't find it any more in the large heap of spam. If spam continues to increase, it could well be that soon people with good mail filters will have such problems, too.
Spam has a very bad effect on the usability of the mail system, and it threatens to render recent technological progress useless (e.g. PDAs with integrated mobile phones are much less suitable for receiving and sending mails when you're on the way when that means that you have to pay for much more GPRS data and wait much longer because of spam).
As it has been pointed out elsewhere (I don't remember exactly where), the situation is probably more complicated.
For people who are really interested in IT and good at trying out things, using Linux for most tasks hasn't been a problem for quite some time, for many more difficult things Linux is better suited than Windows.
On the other hand, it seems that people who only use computers for a few basic tasks (writing e-mails and letters, browsing the web etc.) and use only a small part of the options Windows offers them can switch to Linux now, and they won't even notice a big difference.
Switching to Linux would be most difficult for the people in between who have downloaded Windows shareware, connected gadgets with Windows drivers and memorized a significant number of step-to-step procedures for a bit more complicated things in Windows.
Today, I suppose most Linux users belong to the category of people with a computer knowledge above average. The threshold can be lowered, but a good sign for Linux's success would be more and more users from the other end of the scale starting to use Linux. A significant part of those in the middle category probably won't be willing to switch to Linux, anyway.
I had never worked much with video files, and then I suddenly had some videos in all possible formats I wanted to watch. I tried both with Windows XP and SuSE Linux. It wasn't so important, and I didn't invest too much time, but in the end, I could see more of the videos on Linux than on Windows. For Windows, I didn't find free programs that could be used for such a large variety of formats like xine and MPlayer, so I had to download quite a number of different Windows programs, and with some of them, there were problems (e.g. some Quicktime files worked well, but ohers didn't; while xine displayed them perfectly Quicktime for Windows displayed a strange error message).
Certainly, there can be problems with video formats on Linux, but there are similar problems with Windows, as well, and in my case, it worked better with Linux than with Windows.
Those driver issues will only be solved when Linux has 50%+ of the desktop market. That's plain economics.
50% seems much to high. It depends on the amount needed for developing a Linux version of a particular driver, but even if Linux had just a market share of about 10%, for most hardware manufacturers it probably wouldn't make sense not to support Linux. I think there has already been some progress, for an ISDN adapter I used a few years ago there wasn't a driver for Linux first, I had to wait for years, until they provided one, but now the manufacturer provides Linux drivers for new product without such a big delay.
Not necessarily migrating, but there can be reasons for wanting to have one computer with Windows in a Linux network (e.g. special software available only for Windows, special hardware; even if Linux became much more widespread than Windows, some special cases in which Windows is needed or preferred would probably remain). If something is needed by many, it may be worth developing a Linux version, but not if only few need it. Actually, I think the fact that Windows computers can be well integrated in Linux networks could be quite an important factor for choosing Linux, both when migrating or creating a new network.
While I do think that it is important that labour unions are organized internationally to match the corporations' international nature, I don't think it's true that unions create uncertainty. On the contrary, there is uncertainty when the strikes are spontaneous and representatives of companies don't know whom to talk to. Labour unions provide certainty and reliability because they enable constructive negotiations between employers and workers.
Screw the Indian programmer! Let him/her start their own company!
In ten year's time, when the whole IT market is dominated by Indian, Chinese and Russian companies and IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Sun and HP have been driven out of business, people will say: "Oh, why didn't the companies our country once had use these opportunities to go to India in time. Then, they would still exist, and some of their jobs would be here."
OK, perhaps that scenario is not very likely, but there will probably be more companies from these countries in the future competing with Western companies.
Big companies are already organized internationally, workers must do the same. Of course, many employers prefer an unorganized, easily exploitable workforce, but it is better for most people if workers and employers are equal partners.
I don't really give a flying f*ck how distanced from the wealthy I am. I'd just like to have at least the standard of living my parents had.
But it does matter for the living standard what the wealthy, particularly upper management do. Until recently, payments for CEOs and upper management were rising steeply, and certainly, there were more cases of people from upper management stealing assets of companies and having the company pay for their private expenses than has been found out so far. Such things can't remain without an effect on the living standards for the rest of people if it happens on a large scale, as it seems (and it particularly happened on a very large scale during the DotCom boom, and the money some people appropriated with dubious methods at that time is still missing elsewhere).
I object a downward pressure due to such irresponsible behavior much more than moving labor overseas, which at least makes sense and helps develop the economy there.
Once enough of these jobs are located in India, the wages companies will have to offer Indian workers will rise.
You know there's almost a billion people in India, right? And even with our current job situation in the US, wages have fallen through the floor. How many of these jobs do expect to be created in India? 100 million? Think.
No, as far as I know, salaries of IT professionals had already been rising significantly in the 90es (probably, India's IT job market is now affected by the international economic situation, too, but the tendency remains).
For the development of the IT job market in India, the number newly created IT jobs shouldn't be compared with India's total population. Obviously, only a very small percentage of India's population has an education in IT - many people have specialized in other fields, but mainly, large parts of India are still completely underdeveloped. So, if Western companies create a number of new jobs that is irrelevant in proportion to India's total population, but significant in proportion to the number of Indians with an education, this does lead to a tendency for higher salaries.
Of course, it also leads in principle to more Indians studying IT and computational sciences, but that's a relatively slow process. It could lead to falling salaries, but unless the creation of new jobs stops, that shouldn't be expected.
Then, as the IT industry develops - partly due to Western companies moving jobs there -, this contributes to a general development of the Indian economy and creates a larger domestic market, also for IT services, which again leads to a tendency of higher salaries.
I think that's partly what is already happening and partly something that is reasonable to expect. Certainly, it's far from being idiotic.
A much more difficult question is, however, what effect that can have on the economics of Western companies moving jobs overseas. Certainly, rising salaries in countries like India rather slow that process down somehow, but probably, it would be very difficult to predict whether that would mean that in ten years, there wouldn't be any economic sense in moving many more jobs from the US to India (taken as an example) because the salaries there have reached a level that, if problems with workers being far away and possible misunderstandings are taken into account, it wouldn't be much cheaper, any more. Whether that happens depends on many factors that are hard to predict.
I don't know the IT job market in Poland very well, but I heard from someone in Poland that a few years ago, in Germany they considered that they have to few skilled IT professionals and wanted to grant the right to work in Germany to a certain number of Polish IT workers (a bit easier than inviting people from India, now they probably don't insist on having too few IT workers any more because the situation on the job market has become quite difficult in Germany, as well). Then, they didn't find many Polish IT professionals ready to work in Germany, and it was said that this had to do with the fact that there are enough good and well-paid jobs for IT professionals in Poland.
That was in the times of the IT boom. Was the situation in Poland perhaps much better a few years ago than it is now? Or perhaps the story I heard (from a Polish professor from a field that doesn't have to do with IT) isn't completely true?
I doubt whether Poland can really be called underdevelopped, although there is a big problem with unemployment. And I think in any case, that many companies from the EU will create more jobs in Poland, the fact that it joins the European Union creates some more trust, and I have heard many assessments that the new EU members are regarded by many Western European companies as promising places to invest.
Vivisimo is a meta search engine that does clustering.
When you search for apple, the first clusters are mostly computer-specific, too, but that simply corresponds to what is on the web (it is different both with Google and Vivisimo when you use apples instead).
But sometimes, the automatic clustering can speed up the search, you don't have to find out yourself which additional (positive or negative) criteria work best (you can, of course still add them if you want).
A few examples of the first few clusters with a few Vivisimo searches:
- apache: Project, Helicopter, Mod/Module, Apache Software, Resources, Native American, XML, Apache Tribe, New Mexico, Technology
- python: Monty Python, Language/Programming, Snake, Book, Ball Python, Active State, Resources/Tools, Python Scripts,
...
- palladium: Microsoft, Platinum, Photos, London Palladium, Element, PCPA/FAQ, Hotel Palladium Palace in Rome,
...
- blair: Tony Blair, Blair Which, Jayson Blair, Blair/Nebraska, Coupons, Clothing, Blair County,
...
I think such clusterings can be useful. Also interesting: Clustering of 2087 Microsoft patents (1996-present) (provided as a demonstration).Certainly, and we can expect of people living in a capitalist society that they develop a sense of what advertisement is and what it isn't (e.g. it isn't objective information). But then, it is important that something is recognised as an ad. Quite obviously, DoubleClick tries to pass of the ads as something else, system messages, in which people reasonably have more confidence. I think the point isn't how many people are actually tricked by that (that may play a role in that concrete court case), but that they try to hide the nature of their ads in order for people not to apply the critical attitude one should normally have towards statements in advertisements.
In a way, I understand the US position that freedom of speech should not be restricted in any way. Many people of the left are sceptical about the fight against extremist right-wing propaganda - right-wing extremism, which few people like, can be used as an excuse to introduced repressive measures that will also be used against the left. As soon as freedom of speech is restricted, it's a dangerous slope.
However, I do think it is right that neo-Nazi propaganda is illegal in European countries - not just in Germany, but they have the strictest laws. Even nationalist and radical right-wing propaganda should be legal. In the case of texts that say that the policies of the Nazis who murdered millions of people and that something similar should be started again, I find it, however, right that an exception is made. Among those most active against neo-Nazi and antisemitic websites are organisations of children of survivers of the holocaust, and I find their concerns must be taken seriously (even if they sometimes go too far).
What I also find important in that context is that, in contrast to many laws that have been introduced recently in many countries for the 'war against terror', the restriction of Nazi propaganda is not a new tendency towards more repression, Nazi propaganda has been illegal since the defeat of the Nazis in WW II, and it was a historical necessity (the Americans as one of the occupying powers who liberated Europe from the Nazis hardly objected this ban then). It is important that the ban on Nazi propaganda isn't used as a starting point for more restrictions on the freedom of expression, but as long as it remains an exception for an exceptional ideology that caused such enormous suffering and deaths, there are good reasons to keep it.
The other examples are completely unrelated, and I don't find them convincing. I don't know any other country except Germany where on most parts of highways, there isn't any speed limit, at all. If some more are introduced, this is necessary to prevent accidents and save lives, and the same goes for alcohol limits for drivers. Germany is in no way leading there, in many countries, there are currently attempts to diminish accidents with such measures.
As far as smoking is concerned, there are, indeed, more restrictions than there used to be, but again this is an international development for which there are health reasons, and smoking is much less restricted in Germany than in places like California, New York or Turkmenistan (and although tobacco taxes are rised, cigarettes are still cheaper in Germany than in Great Britain, Scandinavian countries and the US).
First, in most cases, the alternative in most cases is not one click (with deep linking) or more (when starting from the home page), but people seeing a page (when news search engines link to it) or not. Most people only read few newspapers completely and would not read articles from other newspapers if there wasn't a link to a topic they're interested in.
But I would also dispute that deep linking necessarily makes people see fewer pages - perhaps there are studies investigating visitors' behaviour. Many good news sites have links to related articles on their pages, and often when I arrive at one page from Google news search (or sometimes Paperboy.de), I look at other pages of the same site, as well. I think news sites should be glad that with deep linking from news search engines, they already know something about the fields of interests of a visitor. If someone goes to the home page, they don't know to which articles to link most prominently.
Some people will only read the page to which the search engine links, but they would hardly explore a news site starting from the home page, anyway. Those who want to read more probably often read more pages when they start with one article that interests them and see links to related articles (and, of course, they always can go to the home page with one click, as well).
XP Home doesn't include IIS, and although it isn't a particularly good webserver, there are some applications that need it. Possibly, there are ways to install IIS on XP Home, but that seems to be quite complicated, and maybe Microsoft would consider that illegal. Therefore, I once wanted to update from XP home, which was pre-installed on my notebook (together with RedHat), to XP Pro, but then it turned out that the XP Pro update version is only for users of Windows 98, ME, NT and 2000, but not XP Home. I would have had to buy a full XP Pro. I found that so crazy that I decided never to buy any Microsoft product again.
I think that the boxes on the shelves are very important for Linux. Here in Basle (Switzerland), the CD boxes are very conspicuous in software and book shops, they are rather more visible than the Microsoft CD boxes. In the largest book shops, they have quite large tables decorated with penguins with lots of these boxes of different distributions (the main one here is SuSE, RedHat seems to be second and Mandrake third).
I wouldn't be surprised if they sell more of Linux CD boxes than Windows ones, if they weren't sold very often, the Linux CDs wouldn't be placed so prominently, and most people get their Windows with a new computer and never update it.
I think this visibility of Linux is quite important. It would probably have taken me much longer until I installed Linux for the first time. Some years ago, I spontaneously bought a CD box with SuSE Linux (5.something) after having repeatedly read about GNU/Linux. I didn't choose this distribution after a thorough comparison, I just took what was everywhere on the shelves. If there hadn't been any Linux distribution, I would hardly have installed Linux then.
If RedHat wants to leave that market to SuSE, Mandrakes and others, that's OK, but I think this distribution channel is very important, especially when these Linux distros are exhibited as prominently as I have seen it in German and Swiss shops.
At least, the attempt of the British Labour MEP to hurry through a vote on an unclear and self-contradictory new law already on 30 June has failed. Many software producers, organisations and private persons had warned the members of the European parliament of the effects of software patents. The vote will be on 1 September.
I think it is likely that software patents will be rejected or only allowed in a very limited way. There are few very large European IT corporations that could profit from getting sueing opportunities - most of the very large IT companies operating in Europe are American -, but there are a lot of smaller software producers that would be damaged by the introduction of software patents. It isn't astonishing any more that some people of British Labour support the interests of large American corporations against small and medium businesses - after all, some of the most important allies of US neo-cons outside the US are in British Labour as well -, but on the whole, I would find it hard to imagine that European self-interest wouldn't prevail.
The Greens have a clear position against software patents. Most statements of liberal and social democratic (as long as they keep Blair and Campbell, Labour doesn't belong there any more, of course) parties I have seen are against software patents, as well. Among conservatives, such as the German CDU/CSU, there are many supporters of software patents, but it seems that most statements in favour of software patents are badly written and full of errors, while some people who have a better knowledge of the matter (such as CSU MEP Martin Mayer) are critical towards software patents. Since there is more time to discuss now, there is hope that such more informed opinions will find more followers.
Why wait? Software patents mainly exist in Japan and the US, for the rest of the world implementation can begin right now (some software patents have slipped through in Europe, too, although they shouldn't exist according to current laws, but they wouldn't stand any chance at court).
As far as private computers at home are concerned, I wouldn't expect a significant part of the population to switch from Windows to GNU/Linux. OS X is a much stronger competitor of Windows in that area. It seems that mostly people with a special interest in IT and OSS are using Linux (often, they know several operating systems). Sometimes, they can convince "normal" computer users they know to use Linux, as well, but I don't believe that this way of spread can result in a massive rise of the number of Linux users.
One important reason is that the difference in price doesn't matter so much for private users. Of course, Linux is free, but most users - and "normal computer users even more so" - usually want to have a convenient up-to-date distribution on a DVD or CDs, and if you buy new versions from time to time, Linux won't be much cheaper any more.
That is, of course, very different for companies and institutions, even if they always buy the latest version of their distribution, they can use it for an unlimited number of computers. Therefore, I think it can be expected that more companies and institutions will use Linux (of course, some can't because they use specialised software developped for Windows, but many can), cities like Munich or Schwäbisch Hall are a show what might happen in many other places, as well. Then, many people will get to know Linux at work, and because they get used to it, many of them will also use it at home and recommend it to others, and educational institutions will have to deal with Linux "because that's what you will be likely to see at work".
I think that if Linux is going to take over a significant share of the desktop, it is probably going to happen in such a way. The grassroot movement for Linux is quite strong, but I don't think it can reach more than a few per cent of the population if companies and public organisations choosing Linux to save money don't play their role.
What database are you going to recommend that allows you to embed C# (C++, whatever) programs in the database itself?
With PostgreSQL, you can write triggers (and other functions including aggregates) in C, Tcl, Perl, Python and Ruby (see http://www.au.postgresql.org/features.html)
While I think, too, that triggers should not normally call applications not directly related to the database, it can be helpful when you can write a trigger in a language like C and are not bound to SQL (or pl/pgSQL / Transact-SQL, respectively).
I heard some similar stories in Poland.
A company advertised their chicken as inflamed chicken, and a job description in English (at a building company) contained the phrase assistence to the chief executive during erections (they had the erection of buildings in mind)
In my view, globalisation shows that internationalism is not an outdated slogan, but an urgent need. Does it make sense when labour unions support protectionist policies? I don't think so, globalisation can't be stopped that way. Instead, they should realise that they have common interests with workers in poorer countries. If in these countries, there is a strong workers' movement there, salaries will rise more quickly, and therefore also more jobs can be kept in the rich countries. There is a struggle, indeed, but if workers in different countries don't realise that they're on the same side, they will lose. Labour unions in Western Europe and Northern America should collaborate more closely with labour unions in South Korea and Russia and support labour unions in China, where independent workers' organisations are suppressed by the regime (there is wild 19th century capitalism and a lot of state-capitalism in a communist disguise).