250 pounds Roland Piquepaille 1 cup article excerpts 1/8 teaspoon finely chopped original contributions. 1 primidi.com blog 1 popular techie website
PREPARATION:
Wash Roland Piquepaille; pat dry. Season with 1 cup copy pasted excerpts from article. Mix in 1/8th teaspoon finely chopped original comments. Heat 3 tablespoons oil in a large skillet or Dutch oven and cook until evenly brown. Link to blog and submit to popular techie website.
No, it does not. If your work otherwise commands $50,000, then you are getting ripped off by accepting $10,000. I don't care what your cost of living is.
How about if I make the equivalent of $50,000 in the local currency...an amount which is enough to give me the purchasing power that $50k would fetch me in another locale?
Way to go and completely misinterpret my arguments by introducing a tangential rent vs mortgage argument into the discussion. I could spend some more of my time trying to explain where you're wrong, but I'd rather have you do it yourself. Please read up on some basic Economics. The Wikipedia article about PPP I linked to in my original comment would be a good starting point. So is this slightly sketchy Wikipedia article about the Cost of Living index. I also presume that you're also okay with not receiving your annual COLA, since the cost of living doesn't really mean anything to you.
Just because you seem to hold a strong opinion that salaries should not take the cost of living into account doesn't necessarily mean it's correct.
The sad thing is that your lower cost of living has deluded you into thinking that $10,000 is actually good money for what you do. You're doing work that would otherwise earn $50,000. In essence, you are getting ripped off by $40,000 that should be yours, whether your cost of living is lower or not.
By the same argument, I can claim that you're getting ripped off every time you buy something, just because the same item is available for a fraction of the cost in USD (taking into account the exchange rate) in some other country.
Forget any other country, just consider the varying costs of living that exist in the US alone. We could make an argument (by your logic) that you're being ripped off because you're paying $2000.00 in rent living in an expensive (and probably more desirable) area while you could get by with a $400.00 rent living in a cheaper, rural area. It doesn't work that way.
Hope this further clarifies my stance on why comparing raw figures without taking into account any of these other factors like the cost of living does not make sense.
Lets not kid ourselves here, the poor developers in India are exploited. The average salary is around $390/month, the kids down at the local fast food joint here in the US make more money than that. Sure the cost of living is a little lower over there, but things like books, computers etc, still cost the same or more than they do here.
Not sure about the rest of your comment, but it sounds mostly like anecdotal evidence and opinions tend to be subjective. I disagree with this particular excerpt from your comment, though.
Convering salaries directly my multiplying/dividing by the exchange rate without taking into account the Purchasing Power Parity is plain ridiculous. To sum it up for you, PPP is used because:
The PPP measures how much a currency can buy in terms of an international measure (usually dollars), since goods and services have different prices in some countries than in others.
Goods and services cost an order of magnitude less in India than they do in the US. For example, a loaf of bread costs about Rs. 10-20 (about 0.25 - 0.50 USD). Monthly rental for a pretty spacious house would approximate to Rs. 10000 (about $250). Those are rough figures, and will differ by region, but a single software engineer (for comparison purposes, since I'm single too) could live *comfortably* in a metro city like Bangalore for about Rs 15000 (including food/rent/groceries/booze/other_expenses). That works out to about 50% of his average salary of about Rs. 30000. Ofcourse when you convert his salary to USD, it comes to only about $750, (which wouldn't even cover the monthly rent in most areas in the US) and causes you to gasp, go hyper and claim "OMG, they're exploiting software engineers" or "OMG they're stealing our jaabs by working for less".
In the end, the major cost saving for companies is *not* the lower salary (as you claim fast food workers in the US get), but about the *Exchange Rate*. Poorer economies have a lower cost of living than more developed counterparts, and hence have a weaker currency against the US Dollar. This multiplication/division factor allows companies to earn in USDollars and pay in Rupees (or any other weaker currency) thus widening their profit margin. So please ponder over these finer points before spreading FUD/incorrect information and basing other (consequently erroneous) axioms on an incorrect assumption. Thank you.
It even removes your spyware for you, as several/. comments noted in the last Zotob story: http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc /data/w32.zotob.d.html It could be that problems (reboots, etc) that people experienced were caused by inadequate testing than purely malicious intent...but then it's a worm, so it is implicitly malicious.
Steve Johnson - a 20 year veteran of Bell Labs, author of yacc, lint and the pcc, and former president of USENIX now works at Mathworks.
I had the good fortune of meeting the gentleman when I interviewed with Mathworks a couple of years ago. I was taken aback by his humility, and the poor guy was embarrassed when I requested his autograph:) He has a former license plate in his office that reads "YACCMAN".
Wifi access in NYC's Bryant Park is sponsored by Google. From the official park webpage:
Special Thanks To
The Bryant Park Wireless Network is proudly sponsored by Google.
Podcasting is right up there with blog...
on
Podcasting
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...in my list of overhyped/overmarketed buzzwords.
This page carries a pretty accurate and humorous description of my feelings on these overused buzzwords. To quote:
Lately I've been hearing a lot of stupid people parroting stupid buzz words. There are too many to list all of them here, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to try. I propose that we all agree, here and now, to strike these words and phrases from our collective for the betterment of humanity, and the improvement of my blood pressure. Thank you.
Podcast: Someone had the revolutionary idea of taking a compressed audio file and putting it online. Yeah, doesn't sound so sexy when I describe it for what it is, does it you morons? It would have been a great idea if streaming audio wasn't already around for over a decade before the word "podcast" entered the lexicon. Man, I can't stand the word "lexicon." Talking about all these shitty words has made me start using shitty words. I'm so pissed, I just slammed the door shut on some kid's nuts.
Podcasting: It's snob for "streaming audio."
Podcatcher: Any idiot with an iPod, web browser, or ears.
Is that a BlackDog 400Mhz USB-powered Linux server with 64Mb DRAM and 512Mb of flash in your pocket or are you just really really really happy to see me...
(Our main engineer on the project has written a bit more about this to respond to your post.)
The comment that Hadi Partovi points us to as a comment by his main engineer doesn't seem to be the right one. The one he linked to is by http://slashdot.org/~yagu and says the following:
kind of says it all... In their hurry to rip off the competition, they even forgot a semicolon... Tsk-tsk!
That criticizing clearly doesn't seem to be coming from an MSN guy. Who really is the informed MSN engineer posting/clarifying on/. and what really did he say?
AI for Computer Games was both enlightening and frustrating at the same time.
Much like how AI is, atleast in it's current state.
Enlightening because even the most basic attempts at simulating intelligence in machines makes us realize how vastly superior Nature's machines are.
And frustrating because of how difficult it is proving for us to reach an adequately satisfactory understanding of "real" intelligence/consciousness inspite of all the research/effort we've been putting in.
However a potential problem with the Atlas' Redundant Rate Gyro Units (RRGUs)...has caused the engineers to make sure that the two RRGUs in MRO's rocket are working
...that they just want to make sure that the RRGUs were installed the right side up.
No, it's not that I hate blogs per se. If you reread my post, you'll notice that I disliked the hype/buzz surrounding this relatively old technology which has been around atleast since 1992. I don't dislike personal webpages and infact maintain a few of my own. It's the buzzwordiness and hype surrounding it that I dislike.
Your statement: "So... you hated blogs because they were so easily accessible by the common person." is a fallacious argument. I never said I "hated" blogs (to use the strong term you use in your quote) at all, and moreover I *never* said I hated them "because they were so accessible to common people". The statement that:
1. I dislike the hype surrounding blogs and
2. Blogs are accessible to common people
taken together do *not* imply your conclusion that "I hated blogs because they were so easily accessible by the common person".
Second, it's not like I didn't have an opinion of my own - I described my opinion in the paragraph above. But I don't mind changing my opinion if I encounter one that is more adequately justifiable, especially when put forth by a person who I consider more knowledgeable than my own (TBL is certainly one of the persons I hold in high regard, and to me he's more of a scholar than a "techno celebrity" as you put it) and I'm willing to accept an opposing opinion contrary to mine if the my opponent in debate is able to justify it satisfactorily to convince me otherwise.
To sum it up and answer your question - both these positions (TBL's and my original one) sound equally rational to me and are more of a personal opinion - I don't even agree completely with using the term "rational" to describe a human opinion. Hope this clarifies my stand.
This wasn't mentioned in the summary/review, but the book appeared in a news posting on samba.org in June. It contains a chapter on File and Print Server performance written by Samba team member Steve French, and the fine folks at samba.org appear to recommend the book too.
21 June 2005
Performance Tuning for Linux Servers
The new book Performance Tuning for Linux Servers from IBM Press contains a chapter on File and Print Server performance written by Samba Team member Steve French. The chapter discusses Samba and NFS performance concepts. Other chapters, especially those on networking and filesystem performance tuning for Linux, also could be helpful for Samba administrators.
For years I had been trying to address the fact that the web for most people wasn't a creative space; there were other editors, but editing web pages became difficult and complicated for people. What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much more simple. When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.
Interesting perspective there coming from the creator of the WWW itself. Especially so because of the contrary opinion that I and a number of techie people (on and off Slashdot) hold - about "blogs" merely being the ancient idea of personal webpages that have been around for 2 decades, and which is being recycled/marketed as a hep "in" idea in the past few years.
I've always thought of "blogs" being a overhyped concept that the PHBs (recall "corporate blogs") and Joe Sixpack are discovering as a kewl thing you can do with teh Intarweb.
And here comes Sir TBL himself and claims that blogs are closer to what he imagined the original WWW to be. And when he puts it like that, I sorta agree with him - I'd rather have people more personal content on there (not talking about the typical immature blog-kiddie's OMG I'm so cool) rather than have it turn into a marketing/services too used mostly for providing business services (car rentals, flight reservations).
If blogs are what make using the WWW easier, more interesting and useful, then I'm willing to drop the whole (Blog = Overhyped Personal Webpage) argument.
Bah! Those kids and their buzzwords
on
Podcasting from Space
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Podcasting (also known as blogcasting) is a method of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed of new files (usually MP3s)....
The word "podcasting" is a portmanteau that combines the words "broadcasting" and "iPod." The term can be misleading since neither podcasting nor listening to podcasts requires an iPod or any portable music player.
So you're right, the astronaut merely recorded a message, which NASA published as an mp3 file, consequently making all the IPod-toting blog kiddies go hyper.
I could similarly claim Podcasting "officially made it into space" with Neil Armstrong's "One small step for man..." quote, since it's available as an audio file in a variety of places.
A wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content.
So this definitely goes against the spirit of a Wiki. That said, I think a little editorial control is probably justified, especially with mature/stable articles, which have reached a high level of quality and experience only infrequent updates.
Rather than having such articles targeted by vandals, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have an occasional valid update go through an editorial vote. Wikipedia already does this currently with "Controversial" articles which are likely to experience Edit-wars.
Extending the control a little probably would do Wikipedia good. The emphasis there being on "little", since overextending editorial content is likely to cause the same problems that regular encyclopedias do - biased content, inaccuracies due to limited knowledge of editors, outdated content, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Roland Piquepaille with Herbed Tomato Sauce
INGREDIENTS:
250 pounds Roland Piquepaille
1 cup article excerpts
1/8 teaspoon finely chopped original contributions.
1 primidi.com blog
1 popular techie website
PREPARATION:
Wash Roland Piquepaille; pat dry. Season with 1 cup copy pasted excerpts from article. Mix in 1/8th teaspoon finely chopped original comments. Heat 3 tablespoons oil in a large skillet or Dutch oven and cook until evenly brown. Link to blog and submit to popular techie website.
Best served hot. Serves ~90,000.
I thought not.
So, which of you clumsy dolts knocked the glass over?
How about if I make the equivalent of $50,000 in the local currency...an amount which is enough to give me the purchasing power that $50k would fetch me in another locale?
Way to go and completely misinterpret my arguments by introducing a tangential rent vs mortgage argument into the discussion. I could spend some more of my time trying to explain where you're wrong, but I'd rather have you do it yourself. Please read up on some basic Economics. The Wikipedia article about PPP I linked to in my original comment would be a good starting point. So is this slightly sketchy Wikipedia article about the Cost of Living index. I also presume that you're also okay with not receiving your annual COLA, since the cost of living doesn't really mean anything to you.
Just because you seem to hold a strong opinion that salaries should not take the cost of living into account doesn't necessarily mean it's correct.
By the same argument, I can claim that you're getting ripped off every time you buy something, just because the same item is available for a fraction of the cost in USD (taking into account the exchange rate) in some other country.
Forget any other country, just consider the varying costs of living that exist in the US alone. We could make an argument (by your logic) that you're being ripped off because you're paying $2000.00 in rent living in an expensive (and probably more desirable) area while you could get by with a $400.00 rent living in a cheaper, rural area. It doesn't work that way.
Hope this further clarifies my stance on why comparing raw figures without taking into account any of these other factors like the cost of living does not make sense.
Not sure about the rest of your comment, but it sounds mostly like anecdotal evidence and opinions tend to be subjective. I disagree with this particular excerpt from your comment, though.
Convering salaries directly my multiplying/dividing by the exchange rate without taking into account the Purchasing Power Parity is plain ridiculous. To sum it up for you, PPP is used because:
The PPP measures how much a currency can buy in terms of an international measure (usually dollars), since goods and services have different prices in some countries than in others.
Goods and services cost an order of magnitude less in India than they do in the US. For example, a loaf of bread costs about Rs. 10-20 (about 0.25 - 0.50 USD). Monthly rental for a pretty spacious house would approximate to Rs. 10000 (about $250). Those are rough figures, and will differ by region, but a single software engineer (for comparison purposes, since I'm single too) could live *comfortably* in a metro city like Bangalore for about Rs 15000 (including food/rent/groceries/booze/other_expenses). That works out to about 50% of his average salary of about Rs. 30000. Ofcourse when you convert his salary to USD, it comes to only about $750, (which wouldn't even cover the monthly rent in most areas in the US) and causes you to gasp, go hyper and claim "OMG, they're exploiting software engineers" or "OMG they're stealing our jaabs by working for less".
In the end, the major cost saving for companies is *not* the lower salary (as you claim fast food workers in the US get), but about the *Exchange Rate*. Poorer economies have a lower cost of living than more developed counterparts, and hence have a weaker currency against the US Dollar. This multiplication/division factor allows companies to earn in USDollars and pay in Rupees (or any other weaker currency) thus widening their profit margin. So please ponder over these finer points before spreading FUD/incorrect information and basing other (consequently erroneous) axioms on an incorrect assumption. Thank you.
1. gridhost% setenv DISPLAY crappy_host.mydomain
/usr/openwin/bin/xinit /usr/dt/bin/Xsession &
2. gridhost % while 1
?
? ???
? echo PROFIT!!!
? end
They can count me out. I'll stick with 'find' and 'grep' and 'strings'.
Heck, maybe I got it wrong, but it's Friday evening and I'm almost done with my 12pack. *hic*
Sorta like the Blue screen of Death...only creepier, and for real.
Deletes the following registry values:
.
.
.
"MyWebSearch"
"WINDOWS SYSTEM"
"Zotob"
"MyWay"
"WeatherOnTray"
"Apropos"
"IBIS TB"
"TBPS"
"Toolbar"
"Hotbar"
"CMESys"
"NavExcel"
"ViewMgr"
"eZula"
"EbatesMoeMoneyMaker"
"Ebates"
"AutoUpdater"
"Gator"
"Trickler"
"QuickTime"
"GatorDownloader"
"eZmmod"
"Viewpoint"
"TkBellExe"
"180"
"WinTools"
"Real"
"QuickTime Task"
I, for one, welcome our new megafaunic overlords.
Yes I did that and you're right I didn't get the job.
I had the good fortune of meeting the gentleman when I interviewed with Mathworks a couple of years ago. I was taken aback by his humility, and the poor guy was embarrassed when I requested his autograph :) He has a former license plate in his office that reads "YACCMAN".
Special Thanks To
The Bryant Park Wireless Network is proudly sponsored by Google.
This page carries a pretty accurate and humorous description of my feelings on these overused buzzwords. To quote:
Lately I've been hearing a lot of stupid people parroting stupid buzz words. There are too many to list all of them here, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to try. I propose that we all agree, here and now, to strike these words and phrases from our collective for the betterment of humanity, and the improvement of my blood pressure. Thank you.
Podcast: Someone had the revolutionary idea of taking a compressed audio file and putting it online. Yeah, doesn't sound so sexy when I describe it for what it is, does it you morons? It would have been a great idea if streaming audio wasn't already around for over a decade before the word "podcast" entered the lexicon. Man, I can't stand the word "lexicon." Talking about all these shitty words has made me start using shitty words. I'm so pissed, I just slammed the door shut on some kid's nuts.
Podcasting: It's snob for "streaming audio."
Podcatcher: Any idiot with an iPod, web browser, or ears.
Is that a BlackDog 400Mhz USB-powered Linux server with 64Mb DRAM and 512Mb of flash in your pocket or are you just really really really happy to see me...
The comment that Hadi Partovi points us to as a comment by his main engineer doesn't seem to be the right one. The one he linked to is by http://slashdot.org/~yagu and says the following:
for me, the last line on the page:
©2005 Microsoft  
kind of says it all... In their hurry to rip off the competition, they even forgot a semicolon ... Tsk-tsk!
That criticizing clearly doesn't seem to be coming from an MSN guy. Who really is the informed MSN engineer posting/clarifying on /. and what really did he say?
Much like how AI is, atleast in it's current state.
Enlightening because even the most basic attempts at simulating intelligence in machines makes us realize how vastly superior Nature's machines are. And frustrating because of how difficult it is proving for us to reach an adequately satisfactory understanding of "real" intelligence/consciousness inspite of all the research/effort we've been putting in.
Your statement: "So ... you hated blogs because they were so easily accessible by the common person." is a fallacious argument. I never said I "hated" blogs (to use the strong term you use in your quote) at all, and moreover I *never* said I hated them "because they were so accessible to common people". The statement that:
1. I dislike the hype surrounding blogs and
2. Blogs are accessible to common people
taken together do *not* imply your conclusion that "I hated blogs because they were so easily accessible by the common person".
Second, it's not like I didn't have an opinion of my own - I described my opinion in the paragraph above. But I don't mind changing my opinion if I encounter one that is more adequately justifiable, especially when put forth by a person who I consider more knowledgeable than my own (TBL is certainly one of the persons I hold in high regard, and to me he's more of a scholar than a "techno celebrity" as you put it) and I'm willing to accept an opposing opinion contrary to mine if the my opponent in debate is able to justify it satisfactorily to convince me otherwise.
To sum it up and answer your question - both these positions (TBL's and my original one) sound equally rational to me and are more of a personal opinion - I don't even agree completely with using the term "rational" to describe a human opinion. Hope this clarifies my stand.
21 June 2005 Performance Tuning for Linux Servers The new book Performance Tuning for Linux Servers from IBM Press contains a chapter on File and Print Server performance written by Samba Team member Steve French. The chapter discusses Samba and NFS performance concepts. Other chapters, especially those on networking and filesystem performance tuning for Linux, also could be helpful for Samba administrators.
Interesting perspective there coming from the creator of the WWW itself. Especially so because of the contrary opinion that I and a number of techie people (on and off Slashdot) hold - about "blogs" merely being the ancient idea of personal webpages that have been around for 2 decades, and which is being recycled/marketed as a hep "in" idea in the past few years.
I've always thought of "blogs" being a overhyped concept that the PHBs (recall "corporate blogs") and Joe Sixpack are discovering as a kewl thing you can do with teh Intarweb.
And here comes Sir TBL himself and claims that blogs are closer to what he imagined the original WWW to be. And when he puts it like that, I sorta agree with him - I'd rather have people more personal content on there (not talking about the typical immature blog-kiddie's OMG I'm so cool) rather than have it turn into a marketing/services too used mostly for providing business services (car rentals, flight reservations).
If blogs are what make using the WWW easier, more interesting and useful, then I'm willing to drop the whole (Blog = Overhyped Personal Webpage) argument.
Podcasting (also known as blogcasting) is a method of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed of new files (usually MP3s)....
The word "podcasting" is a portmanteau that combines the words "broadcasting" and "iPod." The term can be misleading since neither podcasting nor listening to podcasts requires an iPod or any portable music player.
So you're right, the astronaut merely recorded a message, which NASA published as an mp3 file, consequently making all the IPod-toting blog kiddies go hyper.
I could similarly claim Podcasting "officially made it into space" with Neil Armstrong's "One small step for man..." quote, since it's available as an audio file in a variety of places.
A wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content.
So this definitely goes against the spirit of a Wiki. That said, I think a little editorial control is probably justified, especially with mature/stable articles, which have reached a high level of quality and experience only infrequent updates.
Rather than having such articles targeted by vandals, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have an occasional valid update go through an editorial vote. Wikipedia already does this currently with "Controversial" articles which are likely to experience Edit-wars.
Extending the control a little probably would do Wikipedia good. The emphasis there being on "little", since overextending editorial content is likely to cause the same problems that regular encyclopedias do - biased content, inaccuracies due to limited knowledge of editors, outdated content, etc.