Dude, the web is full of badly designed websites written in HTML. Is HTML a bad standard?
Flash is capable of creating compact little applications, parsing XML from a data source, playing video, and doing a million other things that are made possible by the ubiquitous Flash player. We've moved on from the days of 'skip intro.' I wish the/. community would update their knowledge accordingly.
They don't have computer networks either. I saw an episode of Voyager where Janeway gives an order, puts it into a PADD, gives it to a crewmember who then walks down into the bowels of the ship and gives the PADD to another crewmwmber who looks at the order and presses a few buttons. Cups and string would be more efficient.
The Shell logo is a lot more recognisable and is quicker to assimilate than the word "SHELL" spelt out in big letters. That's why they removed the word from their logo years ago.
I think that the IT sector is overflowing with boring logos and stylised names. And if I see another logo with a meaningless eliptical sweep around the company name, I swear I'm gonna scream!
James Burke is great. I loved his TV shows when I was younger. The Day the Universe Changed and The Real Thing were a major influence on me. Lately he did another interesting series called Connections which the OU broadcast on Saturday mornings as part of their excellent Open Saturday.
Say what you like about the BBC, they come out with some damn good stuff at times.
I think that people are shy enough as it is. We do very little REAL social interaction as it is. Do we really want to become even more anti-social creatures by promoting music as some sort of "shield" from the outside world?
People avoiding contact is perfectly normal urban behaviour. Stand on a crowded train and even if the person is an inch away from your face you will still avoid eye-contact. If you bump into him you'll probably both apologise. If she's an attractive young chick reading a book that you've read, you might strike up a conversation. If she's wearing headphones, she's sending out a message that she's not in the mood for being chatted up and saves you the embarrassment of being shot down.
People who commute by car shield themselves from others in a steel cocoon. When they nearly bump into someone, or get stuck behind a slower driver, it results in an outpouring of anger.
So you could say that commuting on foot and by mass transit can be more pleasant than taking a private car, and with the headphones you get a good approximation of the privacy of the car, but without the road rage.
Dude, there are plenty of badly designed websites out there written in HTML. Do we denounce HTML as a bad standard and blame it for the sorry state of the web too?
It also doesn't make sense to take every one of our jobs and move them overseas because they can be done cheaper there, for obvious reasons.
"All" of our jobs? I don't think anybody suggested that. However I must comment that a lot of this debate seems to centre on how "we" defend "our" jobs, "we" being the USA. The people of India are entitled a slice of the world's wealth too, and if the developing world is now getting in on the industrial act then good luck to it.
With an absence of a "world government" that is interested in arbiting such problems, we need to do what we can for ourselves.
World economics are (supposedly) governed by the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank. Whether or not these bodies always act in the best interests of the developing world is up for debate. A certain amount of democratic accountability wouldn't go amiss.
This is how you wind up with major corporations supplying rugs and apparel produced in sweat shops by children
It depends on your definition of 'sweatshop.' The Economist did an extensive survey on globalisation several years ago and found that multinationals setting up shop in the developing world have the effect of driving wages up rather than down. What people like the anti-globalisation protestors don't get is that comparing western wages and working conditions to those in the developing world is a fallacy. It's when you compare the conditions of workers in a new multinational-owned facility to those already there, you get a more favourable comparison. Just because working people in Lima don't commute in brand-new Ford Mondeos does not mean that they are 'poor' or being 'exploited.'
If markets are amoral, and price is the only driver, then why not use slave labor? Definitely a cost reduction
At the risk of going slightly off topic, slave labour was never a very efficient means of production and not necessarily a cost reduction. Motivating the workers could only be done using brute force, which is far less effective than the incentives that motivate a free person with a mortgage to pay or a family to support. I have my doubts that productivity was up to scratch. Owning slaves may seem cheap, but bear in mind that there was a Total Cost of Ownership. Slave-owners still had to house and feed their workers. Was that any cheaper in the long run?
I do agree that standards of working conditions should be part of any trade deal though.
What struck me as very noticable when I moved to the US was the sheer vitriol that the two sides of the political spectrum seemed to be shouting at each other. Coming from a European background, it truly is shocking to see people making comments like "I hate liberals" and "Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot." Ad-hominem attacks seem to have replaced a lot of debate about the actual issues. There's no benefit in that.
I highly recommend "On Globalisation" by George Soros. It's a very well-researched and well-argued piece of work that warns of the dangers of market fundamentalism, i.e. the idea that market forces always magically coincide with the public interest.
That's a question I'd love to ask the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, who joined the Democrats in rebuking the president's chief economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, early in February for daring to suggest that outsourcing actually benefits the US economy by making everything more affordable.
As for your president, following his little performance on the steel tarriffs, can we class him as one of your dreaded liberals? After all, he brought in illegal protectionist measures and only backed down after the EU threatened retaliatory measures that would affect the export of goods from key states in the 2004 election.
The Economist had a well-argued case in favour of globalisation and free trade last week in which it claimed that "Contrary to what John Edwards, John Kerry and George Bush seem to think, outsourcing actually sustains American jobs."
EARLIER this month the president's chief economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, once Harvard's youngest tenured professor, attracted a storm of abuse. He told Congress that if a thing or a service could be produced more cheaply abroad, then Americans were better off importing it than producing it at home. As an example, Mr Mankiw uses the case of radiologists in India analysing the X-rays, sent via the internet, of American patients.
Mr Mankiw's proposition, in essence, is the law of comparative advantage, first postulated by David Ricardo two centuries ago and demonstrated to astonishing effect since. Yet the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, joined Democrats in their rebuke of Mr Mankiw for approving of jobs going overseas; another Republican called for his resignation. The White House gave Mr Mankiw only lukewarm support--unsurprisingly, since George Bush recently signed a bill forbidding the outsourcing of federal contracts overseas. And the Democratic presidential contenders? Mr Mankiw had just written their attack ads.
The article goes on to make three points about what is going on:
The vast majority of job losses since the start of the decade are cyclical in nature, not structural
Higher productivity is the only way to lower prices and increase wealth across the whole economy. Outsourcing helps companies to lower prices and improve the standard of living across the board. In any case, outsourcing's contribution to the overall jobless figures is overstated. Over 2 million jobs a month are in a state of flux in the US economy, with jobs being created as others disappear.
Although IT jobs are currently undergoing what manufacturing went through in the 1990s, many more jobs will be created in the US as a result of the lower costs associated with outsourcing IT work. The jobs created at home will be higher paid too.
I think of this in the same way as the metaphor of the digger. Two men are walking past a building site where a house is being constructed and see a man working with a mechanical digger. One says to the other, "If it weren't for that machine you could have ten men out with shovels doing that work." The other says, "If it weren't for your shovels, you could have a hundred men out there with teaspoons doing it." What would be the point? All that would result would be the house being too expensive for anyone to buy.
Bottom line: If you make stuff cheaper, society as a whole benefits. Yes there are painful individual cases where people lose their jobs, but because the house is so much cheaper, they don't have to work huge hours to buy a house when they do get a new job.
One final point of my own. I'm a bit worried by the rising tide of protectionism in the US. It was protectionism and xenophobia that ultimately set up the economic conditions for two world wars.
You actually have some good points to make, but you let yourself down with confrontational comments like:
Get some facts and quit parroting democrat liberal mantra bs lines.
I really wish that political discourse in the USA would calm down and grow up. It would help people to find the middle ground and actually understand the issues if we had fewer Rush Limbaughs and Al Frankens shouting abuse at each other.
Surely someone who has to teach them and has been frustrated by those who don't 'get it' would appreciate books like this which attempt to rectify the problem.
Where does this perverse notion come from that GUI users are inhernetly incapable of using a command-line?
There's a deeper cultural thing going on here. On this site it's not uncommon to see programming-types bash (pardon the pun) users of more graphically-oriented tools (like Flash) with incredible zeal. It's as if there's some sort of Berlin Wall between creative and techinical people, and any attempt to bridge the two is doomed to failure or must be opposed.
This is nonsense.
This seperation of arts & humanities from the sciences is a relatively recent phenomonon. It's when people work with both sides of their brains that beautiful things really start to happen. Look at Leonardo Da Vinci if you want the best example. Look at the power of tools like Flash when you get people working on it to use its more powerful features like XML parsing with ActionScript, remoting, video etc. Look at musicians who can manipulate their creations electronically. Look at the animators who produce beautiful work on the big screen like Finding Nemo, Babylon 5 etc.
A lot of creative Mac people will benefit from having a deeper understanding of the way their command-line works, and if they're approaching it from a different angle than traditional Unix fans then so what? Isn't a fresh persective a good thing? Likewise I think that a lot of Unix fans could do well to visit more art galleries and explore their creative side a bit more. It may make better programmers out of them.
For the record, I work on both sides of the fence and do an equal amount of creative and technical work.
Does it ever cross your mind that big businessmen don't always have the public interest at heart? Why is there always at least one anti-government anarchist in a discussion like this?
This channel had so much potential, and has, with a very few notable exceptions (Dune) failed miserably at its mission of giving us a quality sci-fi expierience.
Babylon 5?
TNG didn't make Captian Kirk a chick
Voyager?
These people have no respect for the mythology of the stories
The 'mythology' of the original series was good, but the plot was dire. There was no motivation for the Cylons to attack, it was just straightforward good guys vs bad guys. And the endless deja vu space battles all looked very similar from one week to the next. It got a bit tiresome. I can think of things that deserve more respect than BSG TOS.
I won't be watching this piece of shit, and in fact, haven't watched the sci-fi channel in the better part of a year.
Kinda makes you wonder how you know it's a 'piece of shit' then, doesn't it?
I'd imagine it's like learning Latin, and armed with that knowledge you then find it easier to learn modern European languages since that's what most of them evolved from.
I'm a great believer in the idea that no knowledge is wasted and that learning specific skills is no guarentee that you'll be any good at a particular task. I found it easy to pick up programming at school thanks to me programming BASIC on a Sinclair ZX80 at home years before. I found it easy to pick up Spanish and French because compared to learning Irish, Spanish and French are dead ringers for English!
I have zero experience with assembly language, but it's something I'd love to be able to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah yeah yeah "Flash sucks, blah blah blah."
/. community would update their knowledge accordingly.
Dude, the web is full of badly designed websites written in HTML. Is HTML a bad standard?
Flash is capable of creating compact little applications, parsing XML from a data source, playing video, and doing a million other things that are made possible by the ubiquitous Flash player. We've moved on from the days of 'skip intro.' I wish the
Sheesh!
"Pseudo?"
They don't have computer networks either. I saw an episode of Voyager where Janeway gives an order, puts it into a PADD, gives it to a crewmember who then walks down into the bowels of the ship and gives the PADD to another crewmwmber who looks at the order and presses a few buttons. Cups and string would be more efficient.
I think that the IT sector is overflowing with boring logos and stylised names. And if I see another logo with a meaningless eliptical sweep around the company name, I swear I'm gonna scream!
Say what you like about the BBC, they come out with some damn good stuff at times.
People who commute by car shield themselves from others in a steel cocoon. When they nearly bump into someone, or get stuck behind a slower driver, it results in an outpouring of anger.
So you could say that commuting on foot and by mass transit can be more pleasant than taking a private car, and with the headphones you get a good approximation of the privacy of the car, but without the road rage.
Dude, there are plenty of badly designed websites out there written in HTML. Do we denounce HTML as a bad standard and blame it for the sorry state of the web too?
Sheesh!
Dude, there are plenty of badly designed websites out there written in HTML. Do we denounce HTML as a bad standard too?
Sheesh!
Indeed. All this talk about water on Mars. Now if they found a trapdoor, THAT'd be something!
I do agree that standards of working conditions should be part of any trade deal though.
What struck me as very noticable when I moved to the US was the sheer vitriol that the two sides of the political spectrum seemed to be shouting at each other. Coming from a European background, it truly is shocking to see people making comments like "I hate liberals" and "Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot." Ad-hominem attacks seem to have replaced a lot of debate about the actual issues. There's no benefit in that.
I highly recommend "On Globalisation" by George Soros. It's a very well-researched and well-argued piece of work that warns of the dangers of market fundamentalism, i.e. the idea that market forces always magically coincide with the public interest.
As for your president, following his little performance on the steel tarriffs, can we class him as one of your dreaded liberals? After all, he brought in illegal protectionist measures and only backed down after the EU threatened retaliatory measures that would affect the export of goods from key states in the 2004 election.
"What is it gentlemen" indeed!
- The vast majority of job losses since the start of the decade are cyclical in nature, not structural
- Higher productivity is the only way to lower prices and increase wealth across the whole economy. Outsourcing helps companies to lower prices and improve the standard of living across the board. In any case, outsourcing's contribution to the overall jobless figures is overstated. Over 2 million jobs a month are in a state of flux in the US economy, with jobs being created as others disappear.
- Although IT jobs are currently undergoing what manufacturing went through in the 1990s, many more jobs will be created in the US as a result of the lower costs associated with outsourcing IT work. The jobs created at home will be higher paid too.
I think of this in the same way as the metaphor of the digger. Two men are walking past a building site where a house is being constructed and see a man working with a mechanical digger. One says to the other, "If it weren't for that machine you could have ten men out with shovels doing that work." The other says, "If it weren't for your shovels, you could have a hundred men out there with teaspoons doing it." What would be the point? All that would result would be the house being too expensive for anyone to buy.Bottom line: If you make stuff cheaper, society as a whole benefits. Yes there are painful individual cases where people lose their jobs, but because the house is so much cheaper, they don't have to work huge hours to buy a house when they do get a new job.
One final point of my own. I'm a bit worried by the rising tide of protectionism in the US. It was protectionism and xenophobia that ultimately set up the economic conditions for two world wars.
IIRC Divine Right doesn't apply any more. The English Civil War sorted that one out.
Two typos and you get trolled? Nice.
Surely someone who has to teach them and has been frustrated by those who don't 'get it' would appreciate books like this which attempt to rectify the problem.
Where does this perverse notion come from that GUI users are inhernetly incapable of using a command-line?
There's a deeper cultural thing going on here. On this site it's not uncommon to see programming-types bash (pardon the pun) users of more graphically-oriented tools (like Flash) with incredible zeal. It's as if there's some sort of Berlin Wall between creative and techinical people, and any attempt to bridge the two is doomed to failure or must be opposed.
This is nonsense.
This seperation of arts & humanities from the sciences is a relatively recent phenomonon. It's when people work with both sides of their brains that beautiful things really start to happen. Look at Leonardo Da Vinci if you want the best example. Look at the power of tools like Flash when you get people working on it to use its more powerful features like XML parsing with ActionScript, remoting, video etc. Look at musicians who can manipulate their creations electronically. Look at the animators who produce beautiful work on the big screen like Finding Nemo, Babylon 5 etc.
A lot of creative Mac people will benefit from having a deeper understanding of the way their command-line works, and if they're approaching it from a different angle than traditional Unix fans then so what? Isn't a fresh persective a good thing? Likewise I think that a lot of Unix fans could do well to visit more art galleries and explore their creative side a bit more. It may make better programmers out of them.
For the record, I work on both sides of the fence and do an equal amount of creative and technical work.
Does it ever cross your mind that big businessmen don't always have the public interest at heart? Why is there always at least one anti-government anarchist in a discussion like this?
Porsche building an SUV? Hang on...
I'd imagine it's like learning Latin, and armed with that knowledge you then find it easier to learn modern European languages since that's what most of them evolved from.
I'm a great believer in the idea that no knowledge is wasted and that learning specific skills is no guarentee that you'll be any good at a particular task. I found it easy to pick up programming at school thanks to me programming BASIC on a Sinclair ZX80 at home years before. I found it easy to pick up Spanish and French because compared to learning Irish, Spanish and French are dead ringers for English!
I have zero experience with assembly language, but it's something I'd love to be able to do.