This article presents information in a somewhat deceptive fashion. For one, it leads the reader to assume that a single programmer X replaces a single programmer in the US. This is not the case. There are several layers of 'glue infrastructure' - American reps, Indian reps, managers, etc.
It also leads the reader to believe that the product is 'better' somehow. I can tell you from firsthand observation (as a user of several corporate applications, the development of which has been outsourced) that this view is simplistic at best and flat out wrong at worst. The poor communication across the Big Pond alone insures that there are more than a normal amount of bumps in integration.
The thing that people miss is that there is only one source of new wealth. That is the labor of people who create something others will pay for. Any change in value outside that is inflation, pure and simple.
We're steadily exporting everything Americans do that creates wealth, moving more and more of our population into 'service' jobs that are parasitic on the creation of wealth by 'producers'. We've moved out much of our manufacturing infrastructure, and corporatized our farms, the source of much of the wealth that made the US economy the powerhouse of the mid-20th century.
Now, we've moved into the information age - leading the charge, as it were - and just as quickly as we can, we're exporting these positions that produce value as well. There can be some debate about whether or not IP is 'real wealth' in the sense of food or manufactured goods, but I don't think many will challenge the position that America's economy certainly depends on these producers.
When all that is left is a chain of service (I wash your car, you serve John lunch, John cuts down a tree for Pete, and Pete fixes my deck), we're circling the drain, economically; with no infusion of new wealth, we're living on our savings.
The failure of the "Globalization" process is that it's not India or America that benefits, but the CEOs of corporations; this increases the divide between the 1% that controls most of the wealth and the 99% that control 10%. If Nairobi happens to figure out how to put together a solid programming base next year, Bangalores' economy will be in the shitter overnight.
The mutinational corporations (in the form of the most wealthy stockholders) are taking advantage of standard of living, population pressures, and the artificial barriers of visas, borders, and the like.
None of this should surprise us. As time goes on we learn that our categorical views of the world are mere cognitive conveniences. The unit of life is the cell, not the organism - you have cells that can live outside your body, if provided with the proper oxygen and food. The fact that we see a person rather than a collection of single celled symbiotic organisms reflects the bias of our cognition, not some universally correct perception of the cosmos.
I think that we will find 'living systems' everywhere we look, once we overcome the bias of the pattern matchers in our heads that make us think that our biases are the laws of the Universe.
A little background to explain how I got there. The system was supposed to monitor user keystrokes constantly for comparison, and pop a flag when the 'user' changed; we tested 'random characters' to see if that would trigger the 'new user' alarms. If the typist left their hands in the 'home' position, they normally would not change their idiosyncratic timing patterns much, but when they did 'hunt and peck' or lifted their hands from the keyboard to do random typing, the idiosyncracies changed.
As to the use of keystrokes for entropy - I've never looked into the algorithm behind that choice in modern OS's, but if I were doing it, I would use inter-key timing and some checksum value of the keys struck to generate a seed for a psuedo-random generator... I would guess that would insulate the algorithm from the idiosyncratic consistencies pretty well, I would guess...
As someone pointed out in a post yesterday, privacy of information is becoming endangered, and there is nothing we can do to stop that from happening short of becoming Luddites - all of us - and adopting 'less than appropriate technology'.
As an example - waaaay back in '85, when I was hacking on a 8086 Panicsonic Business Partier, I was playing with biometrics with a keyboard snatching TSR (for the company I was working for at the time) that would identify individuals by their idiosyncratic keystroke patterns. The identification was very successful, but on that limited hardware the database involved was prohibitive. There are probably thousands of idiosyncratic behaviors that could be monitored by interactive websites (or 'routers' that could examine traffic) to identify and track users; it's only a matter of CPU power, which Moore's law will take care of - unless it hits Moore's Wall soon.
Thanks for the look 'behind the scenes' - Since you worked in the 'industry' ( >;) ) do you have any suggestions that might actually make a difference?
I thought Big Daddy Gee Dubya had a plan considerably shorter than that... Of course, the EU won't have a prayer, that man contaminates every thing he's associated with.
Surely that was sarcasm and you were aware that the original post said "Immortality leading to laziness" not 'immorality' leading to 'laziness' (or verse vica), right?
LOL... Yeah, fill out all catalog requests and the like with his addy? Nasty, nasty...
In other news - fighting dead-tree spam: I like to take all of the "SASE" type of mail and swap the contents around, so that Credit1 gets the "free gift request" from OurHome.com, and the like. Sucks up their time and money sorting that stuff out.
Oh, you mean the important things like the (later unfunded) "No Child Left Behind"? Or the Social Security SCAM that was run on the American people? Those examples of the wise expenditures of our money you'd like us to research?
Oh, good god. It amazes me that the media only see the few (most joking) "pro-MyDoom" posts, and ignore the hundreds of posters here at slashdot that have repeatedly reviled malware authors of nearly every ilk.
Just because some of 'us' may think it's humorous that a malware author chose SCO as a target doesn't mean we support the author of the trojan. I've read lots of posts in the past week bemoaning the uselessness, speculating on the less-than-complimentary genetic heritage, remarking on the likely physical failures of, and the personal hygien of the author of MyDoom. How come magazines don't post that?
And, last but not least - do you think it wouldn't be on the front page of any and every Windows rag, ezine, and fanboy website if MyDoom were the result of poor design decisions in a Linux mail client?
LOL... Nice! In any case:
This page discusses private property as that owned by a citizen rather than the government.
Nearly all discussion I can find specifically addresses Eminent Domain, where a government takes private property from citizen or citizens and under what circumstances that might happen.
I think we're getting crossways on the difference between 'private property'/'public property' and "public forum". Your constitutional right to free speech is not protected on private property from the owner of that property. If you are the owner, you say what rights of speech someone has there. Here is an article discussing property rights, that should make clear the distinction between a 'public forum' and 'public property' or 'private property'.
" Sorry chief. The cafe is considered a public area so far as most ordinances are concerned."
You think so? Call the cops about a civil issue (like a non-injury automotive accident) and tell them the guy ran the little stopsign at the end of the parking isle. "Private property" they'll say.
The fact is that the Supreme court would consider the cafe 'private property' (since it is owned by an individual rather than the public - the government) for Constitutional purposes. The debate then would focus on the relationship of your rights to the rights of the cafe owner. Look it up, don't just make unfounded assertions.
A privately owned Cyber-cafe is not 'public' in terms of 'speaking in public'. The supreme court has upheld on more than one occasion the right for mAmericans to meet in a private business and hold meetings from which the government is excluded specifically.
Did you attent high school civics? Have you read anything about the constitution?
The Bill of Rights certainly does guarantee privacy, in the Fourth Amendment. The combined interpretation of the Bill of rights has guaranteed my right to communicate securely with whom I choose to, and to exclude who I want - i.e., I can have a 'meeting' that specifically excludes the government and say what I want to say with a few specific exceptions. (i.e., the old 'fire' in a crowded theatre' decision).
If I speak in a public place (i.e, a publicly owned place like the street) the government can indeed monitor my communication. This is distinguished from a cafe in that, if I should lease the place, or engage the owner/operator, I can have a private meeting excluding government observation. Or rather, I could if the constitution mattered.
Do yourself a favor, my friend, and read the rights your forefathers left you. I think you'll understand better why some of us are so upset.
It's like no one has ever heard of the Second Amendment. The only reason it was second instead of first is that they (the authors) wanted us to talk first, shoot second.
I laugh when people talk about weapons like 'fully automatic weapons' not being protected by the second amendment, that instead it meant 'hunting rifles'.
At the time, no one would even have thought it necessary to protect a 'hunting rifle'. The second amendment exists for one reason and one reason only - to guarantee that the population (the armed one, see) would always be able to protect themselves from their own government, because the authors of the constitution knew that the government would be abused.
I have been looking for an hour or more, but I cannot discover any concrete numbers for the number of people Microsoft employs directly, or the number of indirect employees (people who work for firms that support Microsoft products as their primary income). I found one number that suggested that Microsoft employed 32000 people in the US - it's not definitive, but I'll take it as an example.
How many of those people do you think are responsible for the business decisions of Microsoft? The technical decisions?
I made no assertion that 'most of Microsoft's billions in financial reserves are going toward paying the salaries of hard working coders'; I didn't even suggest that. I was talking about everyone who works to live.
The post that I responded to didn't ask for a "ten billion dollar fine", but an additional three zeroes on a 100 million dollar fine, or 100 billion dollars, which would almost certainly render M$ insolvent if it was demanded immediately, and no matter how it was assessed would negatively affect employment globally. We would see a tech crash that would make the 'dot com crash' look like a mild blip.
The course of action I recommended would engender a gradual shift, allowing the numbers of displaced employees to be low and spread out, offering better chances of re-employment and allowing the economy to absorbe the change.
LOL! Exactly.. for a moment I thought the article was about Linux Zealots and Windows Fanboys, and I was wondering how anyone was going to exploit those aberrations to profit...
I completely agree. Particularly in extremely technical corporations, the average stockholder is adrift in attempting to evaluate a given technically driven decision; thus a valuable technical decision can cause a shitstorm of selloffs, driving stock into the ground and reducing the credit rating of a company, making it impossible for them to get cash-flow loans, ultimately (in the worst case scenario) driving them into bankruptcy because of their inability to pay their accounts payable so that they can collect their accounts recievable.
It can make the decision makers who care about the product gunshy, and drive them to 'middle of the road, risk free' behavior. Innovation and advancement doesn't come from this type of behavior.
It's a sad day when the decision makers have to consider the value of their stock tomorrow more highly than the viability of their company in ten years. Why should the CEO care? He won't be there in ten years - he'll have moved on with his rapidly-excercised stock options and golden umbrella payouts; He's liquid enough already (unless he makes really stupid decisions) that he'll be rich even if he never gets another job.
As many have accurately pointed out, this fine is pocket change for Microsoft. Fines, in business, are rarely successful, because they can only be one of two things - irrelevant or destructive.
Many well-meaning individuals have proposed adding 3 zeros to the fine; this sounds good from an anti-Microsoft standpoint, but it's simply bad for the economy; remember that by fining a corporation ridiculous amounts of cash we don't punish the people that make the poor decisions (CEOs, chairmen, board of directors) but the guys just like us, working to make a living so that we can hack in our spare time and play with our kids.
There is a better way, I think. If we force open formats for data storage and network protocols, market penetration will be less useful as leverage to increase the barrier to entry of competition.
Well, since your IT staff is incompetant working with Windows, Im sure having them be doubly incompetant in Linux will solve the problem.
Au contraire - it's not that they are incompetent at all. They have 60k desktops to support, and the attempt to lock the platform down (Windows was never really designed to be locked down; it's inherently a blown up single-user system. One of those design decisions I was talking about) to reduce the desktop to a one-size-fits-all push introduces complexities that are difficult to manage.
Networking pedigree? Linux doesnt even have a fuckin network operating system. At least with Microsoft we can use Active Directory, something of which Im positive you know absolutely nothing.
You apparently don't have a clue what a 'network operating system' is. Active Directory is a directory service - just like Novell's NDS, and the industry standard LDAP (which AD and NDS both owe a debt of gratitude to), and NIS/NIS+ (both of which, IMO, suck, but do what they are designed to do and did it LONG before Microsloth realized they needed a Directory). And, as the saying goes, only fools are positive. I admit, somewhat sheepishly, that I have an MCSE - first acquired in 1997, and updated once since then. I've supported enterprise level WAN spanning M$ NT/2k networks before I got to play with the big boys.
And in case you didn't realize it, *NIX had TCP/IP long before M$, and the entire stack of protocols for NT (tcp, udp, telnet, ftp, http) could be considered a "*NIX Emulator", quite defensibly, if not exactly accurately.
Wow, so you converted three people. BFD.
, Actually, quite a few more than that, I was simply talking about the level of computer savvy required to run linux, and making the point that I would like to believe that our American business computer users are more savvy about computers in general than my grandmother. But maybe that's a forlorn hope. *sigh*.
And what about this scenario sounds like it will be solved 'too rapidly'? Sounds like you arent a consultant anymore because you dont know jack shit about project management.
The fact is that I could (and have) built distribution systems that would allow me to roll out *NIX (linux, specifically, in this instance) to an arbitrarily large number of people with far fewer "desk runners" and less IT/workstation interaction than any M$ migration I've seen, and much faster install times... Even using Ghost over a 100mbit network, a full boat imaging of a windows Box usually takes on the order of 20 to 50 minutes depending upon how many applications are included; I can do Linux boxen in 9 minutes from reboot to login.
Never got hit by SoBig, MyDoom, or any other virii, worms, malware, etc. So it doesnt seem like there was ANY expense there.
Well, then, I'm proud of you. How did you keep those users from double clicking on 'document.doc' from MyDoom? I'm just curious.
Not only is converting to linux a losing proposition, but it's clearly so. At least to anybody with real-world MIS experience.
"Real World MIS experience"... I'll tell you what. I managed an exclusively Microsloth network (only 2500 seats, but spread out over seven countries and having some 130 servers of various types) for four years, then that same network and all of that company's Unix servers for another two years, then on to solely *NIX support for the past five years. Now, you go out and get a job managing an Enterprise level *Nix network, and do it for as long as you've worked on Microsloth's products, and then come back and tell me about "real-world MIS experience". I've done both at very high (engineering and systems integration) levels. Have you?
Well, there are a few thing that Microsoft does extremely well. Product branding, marketing, eye candy, dancing bologna, and FUD. Most people nowadays don't believe that there are reasonable alternatives, when in fact, for business use, Linux/*BSD/MacOSX will do everything I need to do unless someone chooses a specific M$-only package as a standard (not that uncommon, but certainly unneccessary).
I don't advocate the 'breakup' of Microsoft, or their economic destruction. I just want an industry with some alternatives that are allowed to be real alternatives.
I suppose that there may be differing interpretations of 'useful'. I will leave it at this - there is very little question,even among our own pilots from WWII, that the ME262 would have presented a significant challenge to Allied bombers and general air superiority if it had appeared nine months earlier. I define that analysis as 'useful'. Your mileage may vary.
Slashdot Mirror
It also leads the reader to believe that the product is 'better' somehow. I can tell you from firsthand observation (as a user of several corporate applications, the development of which has been outsourced) that this view is simplistic at best and flat out wrong at worst. The poor communication across the Big Pond alone insures that there are more than a normal amount of bumps in integration.
The thing that people miss is that there is only one source of new wealth. That is the labor of people who create something others will pay for. Any change in value outside that is inflation, pure and simple.
We're steadily exporting everything Americans do that creates wealth, moving more and more of our population into 'service' jobs that are parasitic on the creation of wealth by 'producers'. We've moved out much of our manufacturing infrastructure, and corporatized our farms, the source of much of the wealth that made the US economy the powerhouse of the mid-20th century.
Now, we've moved into the information age - leading the charge, as it were - and just as quickly as we can, we're exporting these positions that produce value as well. There can be some debate about whether or not IP is 'real wealth' in the sense of food or manufactured goods, but I don't think many will challenge the position that America's economy certainly depends on these producers.
When all that is left is a chain of service (I wash your car, you serve John lunch, John cuts down a tree for Pete, and Pete fixes my deck), we're circling the drain, economically; with no infusion of new wealth, we're living on our savings.
The failure of the "Globalization" process is that it's not India or America that benefits, but the CEOs of corporations; this increases the divide between the 1% that controls most of the wealth and the 99% that control 10%. If Nairobi happens to figure out how to put together a solid programming base next year, Bangalores' economy will be in the shitter overnight.
The mutinational corporations (in the form of the most wealthy stockholders) are taking advantage of standard of living, population pressures, and the artificial barriers of visas, borders, and the like.
I'd be very interested in what means or processes you use to derive these absolutes and universal absolutes, and what the difference is between them.
I think that we will find 'living systems' everywhere we look, once we overcome the bias of the pattern matchers in our heads that make us think that our biases are the laws of the Universe.
As to the use of keystrokes for entropy - I've never looked into the algorithm behind that choice in modern OS's, but if I were doing it, I would use inter-key timing and some checksum value of the keys struck to generate a seed for a psuedo-random generator... I would guess that would insulate the algorithm from the idiosyncratic consistencies pretty well, I would guess...
As an example - waaaay back in '85, when I was hacking on a 8086 Panicsonic Business Partier, I was playing with biometrics with a keyboard snatching TSR (for the company I was working for at the time) that would identify individuals by their idiosyncratic keystroke patterns. The identification was very successful, but on that limited hardware the database involved was prohibitive. There are probably thousands of idiosyncratic behaviors that could be monitored by interactive websites (or 'routers' that could examine traffic) to identify and track users; it's only a matter of CPU power, which Moore's law will take care of - unless it hits Moore's Wall soon.
Thanks for the look 'behind the scenes' - Since you worked in the 'industry' ( >;) ) do you have any suggestions that might actually make a difference?
I thought Big Daddy Gee Dubya had a plan considerably shorter than that... Of course, the EU won't have a prayer, that man contaminates every thing he's associated with.
In other news - fighting dead-tree spam: I like to take all of the "SASE" type of mail and swap the contents around, so that Credit1 gets the "free gift request" from OurHome.com, and the like. Sucks up their time and money sorting that stuff out.
But I still agree, and am, in spite of the sense of futility.
LOL! Ok, then, you're probably right, we do agree, sort of, except that I'll gladly pick ticks off when there aren't any vampires within reach.. :)
Oh, you mean the important things like the (later unfunded) "No Child Left Behind"? Or the Social Security SCAM that was run on the American people? Those examples of the wise expenditures of our money you'd like us to research?
Just because some of 'us' may think it's humorous that a malware author chose SCO as a target doesn't mean we support the author of the trojan. I've read lots of posts in the past week bemoaning the uselessness, speculating on the less-than-complimentary genetic heritage, remarking on the likely physical failures of, and the personal hygien of the author of MyDoom. How come magazines don't post that?
And, last but not least - do you think it wouldn't be on the front page of any and every Windows rag, ezine, and fanboy website if MyDoom were the result of poor design decisions in a Linux mail client?
Nearly all discussion I can find specifically addresses Eminent Domain, where a government takes private property from citizen or citizens and under what circumstances that might happen.
I think we're getting crossways on the difference between 'private property'/'public property' and "public forum". Your constitutional right to free speech is not protected on private property from the owner of that property. If you are the owner, you say what rights of speech someone has there. Here is an article discussing property rights, that should make clear the distinction between a 'public forum' and 'public property' or 'private property'.
You think so? Call the cops about a civil issue (like a non-injury automotive accident) and tell them the guy ran the little stopsign at the end of the parking isle. "Private property" they'll say.
The fact is that the Supreme court would consider the cafe 'private property' (since it is owned by an individual rather than the public - the government) for Constitutional purposes. The debate then would focus on the relationship of your rights to the rights of the cafe owner. Look it up, don't just make unfounded assertions.
A privately owned Cyber-cafe is not 'public' in terms of 'speaking in public'. The supreme court has upheld on more than one occasion the right for mAmericans to meet in a private business and hold meetings from which the government is excluded specifically.
Did you attent high school civics? Have you read anything about the constitution?
The Bill of Rights certainly does guarantee privacy, in the Fourth Amendment. The combined interpretation of the Bill of rights has guaranteed my right to communicate securely with whom I choose to, and to exclude who I want - i.e., I can have a 'meeting' that specifically excludes the government and say what I want to say with a few specific exceptions. (i.e., the old 'fire' in a crowded theatre' decision).
If I speak in a public place (i.e, a publicly owned place like the street) the government can indeed monitor my communication. This is distinguished from a cafe in that, if I should lease the place, or engage the owner/operator, I can have a private meeting excluding government observation. Or rather, I could if the constitution mattered.
Do yourself a favor, my friend, and read the rights your forefathers left you. I think you'll understand better why some of us are so upset.
It's like no one has ever heard of the Second Amendment. The only reason it was second instead of first is that they (the authors) wanted us to talk first, shoot second.
I laugh when people talk about weapons like 'fully automatic weapons' not being protected by the second amendment, that instead it meant 'hunting rifles'.
At the time, no one would even have thought it necessary to protect a 'hunting rifle'. The second amendment exists for one reason and one reason only - to guarantee that the population (the armed one, see) would always be able to protect themselves from their own government, because the authors of the constitution knew that the government would be abused.
How many of those people do you think are responsible for the business decisions of Microsoft? The technical decisions?
I made no assertion that 'most of Microsoft's billions in financial reserves are going toward paying the salaries of hard working coders'; I didn't even suggest that. I was talking about everyone who works to live.
The post that I responded to didn't ask for a "ten billion dollar fine", but an additional three zeroes on a 100 million dollar fine, or 100 billion dollars, which would almost certainly render M$ insolvent if it was demanded immediately, and no matter how it was assessed would negatively affect employment globally. We would see a tech crash that would make the 'dot com crash' look like a mild blip.
The course of action I recommended would engender a gradual shift, allowing the numbers of displaced employees to be low and spread out, offering better chances of re-employment and allowing the economy to absorbe the change.
LOL! Exactly.. for a moment I thought the article was about Linux Zealots and Windows Fanboys, and I was wondering how anyone was going to exploit those aberrations to profit...
It can make the decision makers who care about the product gunshy, and drive them to 'middle of the road, risk free' behavior. Innovation and advancement doesn't come from this type of behavior.
It's a sad day when the decision makers have to consider the value of their stock tomorrow more highly than the viability of their company in ten years. Why should the CEO care? He won't be there in ten years - he'll have moved on with his rapidly-excercised stock options and golden umbrella payouts; He's liquid enough already (unless he makes really stupid decisions) that he'll be rich even if he never gets another job.
Many well-meaning individuals have proposed adding 3 zeros to the fine; this sounds good from an anti-Microsoft standpoint, but it's simply bad for the economy; remember that by fining a corporation ridiculous amounts of cash we don't punish the people that make the poor decisions (CEOs, chairmen, board of directors) but the guys just like us, working to make a living so that we can hack in our spare time and play with our kids.
There is a better way, I think. If we force open formats for data storage and network protocols, market penetration will be less useful as leverage to increase the barrier to entry of competition.
Au contraire - it's not that they are incompetent at all. They have 60k desktops to support, and the attempt to lock the platform down (Windows was never really designed to be locked down; it's inherently a blown up single-user system. One of those design decisions I was talking about) to reduce the desktop to a one-size-fits-all push introduces complexities that are difficult to manage.
You apparently don't have a clue what a 'network operating system' is. Active Directory is a directory service - just like Novell's NDS, and the industry standard LDAP (which AD and NDS both owe a debt of gratitude to), and NIS/NIS+ (both of which, IMO, suck, but do what they are designed to do and did it LONG before Microsloth realized they needed a Directory). And, as the saying goes, only fools are positive. I admit, somewhat sheepishly, that I have an MCSE - first acquired in 1997, and updated once since then. I've supported enterprise level WAN spanning M$ NT/2k networks before I got to play with the big boys.
And in case you didn't realize it, *NIX had TCP/IP long before M$, and the entire stack of protocols for NT (tcp, udp, telnet, ftp, http) could be considered a "*NIX Emulator", quite defensibly, if not exactly accurately.
, Actually, quite a few more than that, I was simply talking about the level of computer savvy required to run linux, and making the point that I would like to believe that our American business computer users are more savvy about computers in general than my grandmother. But maybe that's a forlorn hope. *sigh*.
The fact is that I could (and have) built distribution systems that would allow me to roll out *NIX (linux, specifically, in this instance) to an arbitrarily large number of people with far fewer "desk runners" and less IT/workstation interaction than any M$ migration I've seen, and much faster install times... Even using Ghost over a 100mbit network, a full boat imaging of a windows Box usually takes on the order of 20 to 50 minutes depending upon how many applications are included; I can do Linux boxen in 9 minutes from reboot to login.
Well, then, I'm proud of you. How did you keep those users from double clicking on 'document.doc' from MyDoom? I'm just curious.
"Real World MIS experience"... I'll tell you what. I managed an exclusively Microsloth network (only 2500 seats, but spread out over seven countries and having some 130 servers of various types) for four years, then that same network and all of that company's Unix servers for another two years, then on to solely *NIX support for the past five years. Now, you go out and get a job managing an Enterprise level *Nix network, and do it for as long as you've worked on Microsloth's products, and then come back and tell me about "real-world MIS experience". I've done both at very high (engineering and systems integration) levels. Have you?
I don't advocate the 'breakup' of Microsoft, or their economic destruction. I just want an industry with some alternatives that are allowed to be real alternatives.
I suppose that there may be differing interpretations of 'useful'. I will leave it at this - there is very little question,even among our own pilots from WWII, that the ME262 would have presented a significant challenge to Allied bombers and general air superiority if it had appeared nine months earlier. I define that analysis as 'useful'. Your mileage may vary.