" How about being able to use visualisations when playing them in WinAmp"
iTunes has visulizations too.
"burning an Audio CD without crashing (about 1/2 the time I try to burn a CD in iTunes, it screws up so bad I have to reboot)."
Something is obviously wrong with your system or iTunes install. Why not fix the problem. What if winamp were crashing all the time. Would you not fix that install.
For once I don't agree with something like this and it's Playfair. Apple works with open source and even uses it in it operating system. They use the DRM to appease the recording companies. They were able and did negotiate the best possible license to download the music. They charge what they are charged per song ($.99). Granted they are no super nice guy and are still in for the profit, but they try and I have yet to find a time where I would need to strip out the DRM unless to share with the masses.
"is not giving any application run by a user permission to change ANYTHING other than minor configuration options without authenticating each application individually."
Windows 2k and beyond does this. If you want to modify something you have to use the admin password. Problem is there are so many other windows holes that this isn't a real stopper on windows.
A GUI you have to learn to click, double click, right click, directory structure, etc. You still have to learn. You are just learning something different. instead of cd [enter] you are double clicking on something. wether you type it or click it you are still learning something.
OS X and the other BSDs topped the most secure OS list. It was also rated by OS News I believe as one of the best operating systems the rated had ever seen. Great OS that is secure.
This could be a good tool if admins actually used it (or some tool to look for holes) and patched the holes and watched their security. But, I have only worked at one place that has done this and the others were under the impression they didn't have to do it very often.
Those hacking into systems will love this tool though. I'm gonna go home tonight and check my network out. Although, I don't have a thing someone would want to hack.
Ok, I watched firefly. Personally I didn't like it. But, if it were popular Fox would have kept it. So, this leads me to believe that people didn't watch it. So, maybe I'm not alone in my opinion of the show.
Ok, I can understand buffy. Everyone should understand Buffy.... but Firefly and for best dramatic presentation. My ass there aren't 5 better candidates than the firefly ones.
mods: Go ahead and mod me flamebait or even lameass but firefly?!?!?!
"To interview the people who are now doing the jobs. How much are they really paid, what are the conditions of employment, how is their economy? etc etc."
They are having rising quality of lives. Are making more than they were before. It is a benefit to them compared to where they have come from. It may not be what we are used to but the US 250,000 million people live better than most of the 6+ billion in the world.
"and I might add that, in the US at least, the education is going down. Being one if not most powerful nation, we should not allow this to happen. We have too much to lose by doing so."
We may want to blow this off but it is true. And we have to deal with it if we don't want to fall as #1
"How can an American manufacturer compete against one that can pay their workers pennies a day, and dump their waste wherever they please?"
It's simple. Lets copy the chinese. Laws need to be in place. The other way is to make it more beneficial for the company. I figure laws would be easier.
So, who has more of these knowledgable people. India graduates about 250,000 engineers a year. They are highly skilled with a high ability to learn. In tern the US has a decining rate of graduating engineers.
When I was in college many of the students with the best grades where chineese, japanese or indian. The US students were out partying and half assing most of the time. Of the guys I went through college with those foreign students knew more, where to find more, and were more motivated. I didn't say they were smarter. I think it's the US is falling behind and these countries are rising to the challenge.
"How do you cooordinate high-level management objectives with an office across the world?"
Well, if you want to know this ask, IBM, GM, Ford, M$ and hundreds more that are international companies and do this all the time. This isn't an outsourcing issue. Many compnaies have been doing this for years so to add another location isn't tough for them.
"With overseas call centers, do you keep enough future customers due to deficiencies in customer support to make it financially viable to continue offshoring support?"
In the US the average turn over for a call center employee is about 9 months. This is not enough time to get the level of training and on the job expereince to be really effective either. But, there is the language barrier. If a call center is put by say Ohio State (just an example) and used students to do the labor then it could be cost effective to do and get the same quality or maybe better than overseas.
"culture and language differences to the mix while not being able to have direct and on-site meetings to architect a complex program, is that a recipe for disaster?"
Well, just as an example, if you give then a software module to write and tell them the interface to the module then the input and output are defined so it doesn't matter how they code the inner workings. This is how cips in your computer from different manufacturers work. The interfaces are defined and a group at say one location integrates all of them but they need little or no technical communication with the parts. Just defined interfaces.
"Err, I may be wrong, but didn't Honda "Outsource" their labor to the United States (as it was cheaper to hire American workers to build cars for sale in the US than to build 'em overseas then ship the things via ocean freight?)"
For the japanese it is much less expensive to produce a car here. They use very strict processes that have cause for little waste, high quality (so they don't have nearly as many bad parts made and don't have to do the same amount of testing) and they don't use unions.
My question would be... If the US is outsourcing many areas and this in tern is bringing the other countries up in the economic levels, then what can US workers and companies do to stay ahead of the curve and continue to be a worlk leader?
At the rate we are going with outsourcing jobs and having decreasing technical educational levels (studies have shown drops in math in science all the way through college) by the time i am old we will not be tha major world power anymore. Other countries will have taken that from us.
"They give these threats little attention, but I would wager that the associated costs of network downtime and lost productivity have cost the average company far more time and money than any terrorism."
Terrorists go around killing people. Internet worms are an inconvienance and cost money. There is a big difference.
"I think that if the government thinks that they can scan every e-mail which is supposedly for our benefit"
Where are you getting from the government that they want to scan every email??? They can't, don't want to do that. Maybe with a court order like a wire tap but that's about it.
"If Ford produced a car that when it got into an accident, took control away from the driver for the next few months and continuously drove into other cars they would probably be held responsible."
Ford in this case didn't make the car. They are the product integrator. They took different components and integrated them into one vehicle. M$ would be like the steering wheel in a car. If this were to happen would they go after the steering wheel manufacturer or Ford. It's also a different case since it directly reflects lives. A car crash can easily (and many times does)kill while some computer being hacked/getting a virus is just typically a huge inconvienance. Big Difference.
"It's hard enough to make them take responsibility for things like overstating earnings and embezzlement. How exactly are they going to be forced to be accountable for this?"
In the good old US of A you are no longer responsible for your actions. You were forced to do it, tricked into doing it, didn't know better, or to you it was ok. Any which way, we have lawyers that manipulate everyone to freedom.
"Seems to me like they are trying to lay some responsibility on the big corporations (not a horribly bad thing)"
So, are you saying that Homeland Security or the FBI should come in to and handle security on their network? Isn't it up to a private company to handle it's own security? Or should the US put up one big firewall around the nation and block us off from the rest of the world and manage secutiy that way. Kind of like an old castle moat for cyberspace.
"Or perhaps something that says an ISP like AOL or Comcast should not permit port 25 traffic beyond its router unless it comes from thier own SMTP server."
Many of the major ISPs won't recieve email from an IP that is from residential cable/dsl service. Most of this is already being blocked. I know from personal experience that comcast is already blocking port 25 in some areas.
"Or we could just make commercial software vendors responsible for the quality of thier software."
Just comercial. What about open source? Should they not be held to the same standard as comercial?
This is one of the most important things in creating any product. I have seen in software and engineering, programs and products created that were technically really cool but didn't fulfil what the "people" wanted.
Creating applications that are people-centric are key. They can make or break a product. I use an app that has a few bigt bugs but it was designed to be people-centric so I still love it. It was coded horribly, has crashed for some dumb reasons but how it was designed is great. (A note, I am working with the author to iron out those bugs)
"While I wholeheartedly agree with having lots of meetings and discussions during the design phase (requirements, functional spec, detailed design) and during the review phase (post mortem, code reviews) I feel that having two coders on one computer is extremely wasteful and unbelievably stressful."
Did I miss in the article where they said 2 coders on the same computer??? When they talk about colaboration they don't say 2 conders on a computer or people looking over your shoulder.
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" How about being able to use visualisations when playing them in WinAmp"
iTunes has visulizations too.
"burning an Audio CD without crashing (about 1/2 the time I try to burn a CD in iTunes, it screws up so bad I have to reboot)."
Something is obviously wrong with your system or iTunes install. Why not fix the problem. What if winamp were crashing all the time. Would you not fix that install.
"How about playing the files on non apple hardware such as a portable mp3 player?"
e reo."
Sure I can play it on my ipod.
"Or even to burn it to cd and play it in your car?"
I burn cds from them all the time. No problem. iTunes itself lets you make the list and burn the cd.
"What if you were searching for hidden messages and wanted to play it backwards?"
To be honest I don't do this. I listen to my music, not search for some message in it or play it backwards.
"Or play it on your network-enabled-but-not-approved-by-apple-home-st
I wouldn't buy a reciever that didn't handle it.
For once I don't agree with something like this and it's Playfair. Apple works with open source and even uses it in it operating system. They use the DRM to appease the recording companies. They were able and did negotiate the best possible license to download the music. They charge what they are charged per song ($.99). Granted they are no super nice guy and are still in for the profit, but they try and I have yet to find a time where I would need to strip out the DRM unless to share with the masses.
It's like picking a friends pocket.
"is not giving any application run by a user permission to change ANYTHING other than minor configuration options without authenticating each application individually."
Windows 2k and beyond does this. If you want to modify something you have to use the admin password. Problem is there are so many other windows holes that this isn't a real stopper on windows.
A GUI you have to learn to click, double click, right click, directory structure, etc. You still have to learn. You are just learning something different. instead of cd [enter] you are double clicking on something. wether you type it or click it you are still learning something.
OS X and the other BSDs topped the most secure OS list. It was also rated by OS News I believe as one of the best operating systems the rated had ever seen. Great OS that is secure.
Lets look back a couple days at the same story
Check out the parent and mod it up.
This could be a good tool if admins actually used it (or some tool to look for holes) and patched the holes and watched their security. But, I have only worked at one place that has done this and the others were under the impression they didn't have to do it very often.
Those hacking into systems will love this tool though. I'm gonna go home tonight and check my network out. Although, I don't have a thing someone would want to hack.
Ok, I watched firefly. Personally I didn't like it. But, if it were popular Fox would have kept it. So, this leads me to believe that people didn't watch it. So, maybe I'm not alone in my opinion of the show.
Ok, I can understand buffy. Everyone should understand Buffy.... but Firefly and for best dramatic presentation. My ass there aren't 5 better candidates than the firefly ones.
mods: Go ahead and mod me flamebait or even lameass but firefly?!?!?!
"To interview the people who are now doing the jobs. How much are they really paid, what are the conditions of employment, how is their economy? etc etc."
They are having rising quality of lives. Are making more than they were before. It is a benefit to them compared to where they have come from. It may not be what we are used to but the US 250,000 million people live better than most of the 6+ billion in the world.
"and I might add that, in the US at least, the education is going down. Being one if not most powerful nation, we should not allow this to happen. We have too much to lose by doing so."
We may want to blow this off but it is true. And we have to deal with it if we don't want to fall as #1
"How can an American manufacturer compete against one that can pay their workers pennies a day, and dump their waste wherever they please?"
It's simple. Lets copy the chinese. Laws need to be in place. The other way is to make it more beneficial for the company. I figure laws would be easier.
"knowledge jobs"
So, who has more of these knowledgable people. India graduates about 250,000 engineers a year. They are highly skilled with a high ability to learn. In tern the US has a decining rate of graduating engineers.
When I was in college many of the students with the best grades where chineese, japanese or indian. The US students were out partying and half assing most of the time. Of the guys I went through college with those foreign students knew more, where to find more, and were more motivated. I didn't say they were smarter. I think it's the US is falling behind and these countries are rising to the challenge.
"How do you cooordinate high-level management objectives with an office across the world?"
Well, if you want to know this ask, IBM, GM, Ford, M$ and hundreds more that are international companies and do this all the time. This isn't an outsourcing issue. Many compnaies have been doing this for years so to add another location isn't tough for them.
"With overseas call centers, do you keep enough future customers due to deficiencies in customer support to make it financially viable to continue offshoring support?"
In the US the average turn over for a call center employee is about 9 months. This is not enough time to get the level of training and on the job expereince to be really effective either. But, there is the language barrier. If a call center is put by say Ohio State (just an example) and used students to do the labor then it could be cost effective to do and get the same quality or maybe better than overseas.
"culture and language differences to the mix while not being able to have direct and on-site meetings to architect a complex program, is that a recipe for disaster?"
Well, just as an example, if you give then a software module to write and tell them the interface to the module then the input and output are defined so it doesn't matter how they code the inner workings. This is how cips in your computer from different manufacturers work. The interfaces are defined and a group at say one location integrates all of them but they need little or no technical communication with the parts. Just defined interfaces.
"Err, I may be wrong, but didn't Honda "Outsource" their labor to the United States (as it was cheaper to hire American workers to build cars for sale in the US than to build 'em overseas then ship the things via ocean freight?)"
For the japanese it is much less expensive to produce a car here. They use very strict processes that have cause for little waste, high quality (so they don't have nearly as many bad parts made and don't have to do the same amount of testing) and they don't use unions.
My question would be... If the US is outsourcing many areas and this in tern is bringing the other countries up in the economic levels, then what can US workers and companies do to stay ahead of the curve and continue to be a worlk leader?
At the rate we are going with outsourcing jobs and having decreasing technical educational levels (studies have shown drops in math in science all the way through college) by the time i am old we will not be tha major world power anymore. Other countries will have taken that from us.
"They give these threats little attention, but I would wager that the associated costs of network downtime and lost productivity have cost the average company far more time and money than any terrorism."
Terrorists go around killing people. Internet worms are an inconvienance and cost money. There is a big difference.
"I think that if the government thinks that they can scan every e-mail which is supposedly for our benefit"
Where are you getting from the government that they want to scan every email??? They can't, don't want to do that. Maybe with a court order like a wire tap but that's about it.
"If Ford produced a car that when it got into an accident, took control away from the driver for the next few months and continuously drove into other cars they would probably be held responsible."
Ford in this case didn't make the car. They are the product integrator. They took different components and integrated them into one vehicle. M$ would be like the steering wheel in a car. If this were to happen would they go after the steering wheel manufacturer or Ford. It's also a different case since it directly reflects lives. A car crash can easily (and many times does)kill while some computer being hacked/getting a virus is just typically a huge inconvienance. Big Difference.
"It's hard enough to make them take responsibility for things like overstating earnings and embezzlement. How exactly are they going to be forced to be accountable for this?"
In the good old US of A you are no longer responsible for your actions. You were forced to do it, tricked into doing it, didn't know better, or to you it was ok. Any which way, we have lawyers that manipulate everyone to freedom.
"Seems to me like they are trying to lay some responsibility on the big corporations (not a horribly bad thing)"
So, are you saying that Homeland Security or the FBI should come in to and handle security on their network? Isn't it up to a private company to handle it's own security? Or should the US put up one big firewall around the nation and block us off from the rest of the world and manage secutiy that way. Kind of like an old castle moat for cyberspace.
"Or perhaps something that says an ISP like AOL or Comcast should not permit port 25 traffic beyond its router unless it comes from thier own SMTP server."
Many of the major ISPs won't recieve email from an IP that is from residential cable/dsl service. Most of this is already being blocked. I know from personal experience that comcast is already blocking port 25 in some areas.
"Or we could just make commercial software vendors responsible for the quality of thier software."
Just comercial. What about open source? Should they not be held to the same standard as comercial?
This is one of the most important things in creating any product. I have seen in software and engineering, programs and products created that were technically really cool but didn't fulfil what the "people" wanted.
Creating applications that are people-centric are key. They can make or break a product. I use an app that has a few bigt bugs but it was designed to be people-centric so I still love it. It was coded horribly, has crashed for some dumb reasons but how it was designed is great. (A note, I am working with the author to iron out those bugs)
"While I wholeheartedly agree with having lots of meetings and discussions during the design phase (requirements, functional spec, detailed design) and during the review phase (post mortem, code reviews) I feel that having two coders on one computer is extremely wasteful and unbelievably stressful."
Did I miss in the article where they said 2 coders on the same computer??? When they talk about colaboration they don't say 2 conders on a computer or people looking over your shoulder.