My brother-in-law negotiates labor contracts for the management side of the equation. I was onto my usual rant about unions being for the weak and unskilled when he pointed out that unions are actually a good thing for the company in some ways. For instance, he can negotiate with a union and reach a contract agreement that covers 15,000 people. If there were no union, the company would have to negotiate with every single hire.
The nightmare for HR in nonunion shops is that without a uniform union contract specifing universal practices for the entire labor force across many sites, hiring negotiations take place on a case by case basis. That leads to higher administrative costs and when wages are based partly on the negotiation skills of an individual, it introduces alot of potential problems when bubba finds out that cletus is making more money, even though bubba has seniority.
I agree with you that content providers should have full freedom of expression. But the issue is that content consumers should have freedom from expression if they choose.
Most of the comments against this technology suggest that it is an attempt at censorship by religious conservatives and people wanting to prevent education. It isn't.
First, the fact that a parent knows that a subject is beyond appropriate for their child, and so chooses to apply the filter is infact very active participation in the education of the child. It isn't a cop-out to utilize technology. That's like saying that to use a car to get to work is a cop-out because you are too lazy to walk 6 miles.
Second, the mainstream content producers need to take yet another lesson from porn producers. Porn is usually shot from multiple angles so that a hardcore and softcore version can be produced. The porn studios do this so that they can get revenue from content streams that would not be available to them if only the "artisticly intact" full insertion version were available. If the mainstream studios would produce a G version of the PG movie, or a PG version of the R movie, they would get more revenue because they would be able to reach into homes where more conservative values guide viewing decisions.
Your post is on target: it's all about making the most money. In this case, the studio and directors wanting to use nudity and profanity to boost sales are really missing the boat w.r.t. maximizing revenues. It is usually only a few scenes that make a PG into and R rated movie in many cases where this technology would be applied. I doubt anyone in SLC is going to try to clean up A Clockwork Orange for viewing by the congregation after services.
Look where it was developed. Before this technology was available, there was a mormon video rental store that would remove from tape the bits that they found offensive and then rent the scrubbed tapes to mormon families who wanted movies without offensive parts. They got hammered by the studios for tampering with the content.
This is just the same thing, but without "tampering" with the original form.
"Perhaps a new breed of people forcing their moral values on the entire country will emerge but hopefully they won't be the ones in control for long if at all."
You mean like some dried up old hag and talentless pop-start who want to force the sight of a bad looking tit into the faces of children watching a sporting event? I'm with you, I hope their reign is short lived.
How did the parent get modded insightful? This is crap. Someone please mod it down as stupid and I'll happily use my next points for your bidding.
Censorship is someone telling you what you can and cannot see, read, speak, hear, think. When a person chooses to restrict personal content intake, that is personal choice. THAT is the essence of freedom. This device is going to be liberating for a lot of people who have more conservative values.
Why don't you take the stick out of your ass and wake the fuck up. If people have the ability to locally control what comes into their homes, they are less likely to attempt try to legislate what comes into everyones homes. That makes life better and allows wider latitiude of content for the rest of us.
Before I get taken for being a puritan based on the sensibility of my post, let's put it out there: I love porn. But I don't think that it belongs on public airwaves where just anyone can trip into it. Do you really believe that everything that comes out of hollywood is artistic? 80% of the sex and profanity in PG and R movies is not germain to the story.
I used to be a vilgilate about spam. I would traceroute to the linked page and alert the hosting company. I would also report the SPAM to every ISP related to the source of the email. I did get quite a few people's accounts closed and hosted commercial sites shut down. But eventually it was an overwhelming task not suited to automation.
Now I occasionally go to the site via an anonymizing prozy and enter bogus information into the forms for mortgage refinancing/etc so that bad leads are sent to the people paying for the leads. I'm about at the point where I'm going to write a script to do this. If I can dilute the data, hopefully the spammer will lose the business of attracting leads.
Another thing I have thought of recently is to start a website that offers as much as $20,000 in support for the legal defense of any person prosecuted for physical assault of a known/verifyable spammer. I'm not offering a bounty on spammers and none of the money would go to the person who assaults a spammer. But it might be a way to set out the idea that spam is causing a empidemic of anger management issues that could result in severe physical damage to someone doing the spam. And the person who assaults the spammer is just as much a victim of mental harrassment and deserves support in his defense and possible mental treatment.
I realize that spam is a petty thing taken as a single incident. But really, if someone littered on my property, daily over the course of several years, causing me to daily clean up the trash, then I should surely be allowed to pummel the life out of the fuck head if I catch him on my property. I apply the same logic to spam.
It's not that they are just now feasible, it's that few people outside of satcom were hip to them.
Processor performance is not much of a factor because you don't do turbo coding in software. It's accelerated in hardware and is performed in line as the datastream passes through the mod/demod sections. There are chips that are not too expensive that do this or a turbo coding core can be dropped into the ASIC that holds the mod/demod sections. That makes it pretty cheap for a consumer device.
"I am also a Cox subscriber and I believe that their phone "service" should be labeled cruel and unusual punishment."
I've had cox as an ISP for about 18months now and I've had a few service issues, as one would expect from any ISP. I've always found their customer service to be very good. Why? Because I go right past first level service immediately by telling them I run linux and describing the 16 things I already tried. Often I've tried more things than their first tier guys even know to try. They always bump me up a few levels right away and those guys generally have their shit together and actually know linux.
I've had some pretty severe anger management issues related to spam. When I talked to the higher tier service folks at cox, while they did not encourage bad behavior, they recommended some **cough**attacks**cough***, uhm behavior, that would be satisfying without putting me in breech of my service contract.
Microsoft also provides a pretty decent cash flow into the coffers of politicians and lobbyists in the U.S. That is one thing that the beast has learned.
1) Leak unimportant proprietary source and bait competing open source developers to download. 2) Initiate legal action against "tainted" developers contributing to open source projects. 3) Continue to PROFIT!!!
Am I the only person that thinks Paris Hilton's face is hideous? No wonder that video was shot in the dark, who could keep it going while staring at that mug?
You can kill anything that is alive. For instance, you can kill a plant. You can kill a single cell. If you want to kill a party, just bring up this topic.
The issue is more along the lines of "is an embryo a Human?" Certain religious people would say yes.
I think that your timeline is off. The first wave of outsourcing is well past for the leading companies and early adopters. And this common wisdom that offshore developers could not possibly provide a quality product is just absurd.
I have first hand experience with offshore development. That was 5 years ago and the teams I used in India were very capable. They developed components for our main project. Not everything went smoothly, but alot of that was because we had to invent the management style neccessary to make it work. We did protect our IP, we did accomodate for the cultural differences (differences across pacific and atlantic oceans). We didn't save money, but we did break even and that was quite a success for our first attempts at a globally distributed development organization. The most difficult issue was, as you mentioned, xenophobia. The biggest problems were caused by onshore developers who were not superstars within the organization yet felt entitled simply because they had a master's degree.
You may not recall that in the sixties most people in the U.S. laughed at the Japaneese and their crappy little "rice burners". Well within 20 years the Japaneese were delivering products that completely blew away the unmitigated crap manufactured by the union labor shops of Detriot. Anyone who thinks that India isn't on the same arc towards mastery of IT is going to get blindsided. Programming is a commodity job already - it has been for at least 8 years. Design will follow as the sophistication of the offshore developers grows.
Sure there are many obscure failures that may not show up explicitly in the prospectus. But there are 10 times more obscure successes. If offshoring was a total failure, jobs would not be leaving. OK, so call centers may be a poor choice to send offshore. But that is the why I believe that we are well into the second wave of outsourcing. The more conservative companies are trying things and everyone else is learning from their failures and successes. Offshore development may not bbe perfect, but it is mainstream.
I do believe that there will be fallout. I do not believe that the fallout will punish companies to the extent needed to cause a reverse in the trend to ship IT away from the U.S. labor pool.
I agree with you that the loss of salaries and lower GDP will harm the U.S. ecomomy as a whole. But corporations are global and they are developing markets all over the world. While Carly sends HP jobs to India, she is also selling printers and personal computers to the Indian IT workers who are now earning a middle class salary. So the net effect for HP is positive and the net effect for India is positive. The localized effect on U.S. share holders of HP is good. The net effect on U.S. workers with nondistiguished skill sets is bad.
The voice of the U.S. consumer has rapidly declining influence on corporations that are expanding into the global market. Just look at the number of companies that sent textile manufacturing overseas. They have flourished regardless of all the cries of injustice to the U.S. workers and the threats of grassroots protectionism.
I disagree that moving IT jobs offshore must result in lower QOS. I have worked directly with offshore engineering groups (India and U.K.) and I know first hand that they offshore groups are capable of producing excellent work.
Well, alot of companies seem to have gotten no
hangover as a result of discarding their "currently invested capital and starting from scratch" when they moved from U.S. to Indian based IT talent. As long as the labor cost difference is sufficient to counter the "exit cost" of throwing away current capital and yield a net increase ROI, there will be no hangover.
From the tone of your post, I infer that you are looking forward to a day of reckoning for these companies that outsource U.S. jobs. My advice: don't hold your breath.
Me first. Company second. Anyone who believes otherwise is delusional.
Putting yourself first isn't always about salary. Young engineers should be more concerned with the technology that they are learning and less about salary. Ultimately, engineering skills are a commodity. If you take the opportunity to develop unique and desirable skills, you will make more money over the long haul than someone with more common skills that chose projects on the basis of salary. You will also be more employable in difficult times. That's how you get rewarded down the road.
I can honestly say that I've always chosen the job that was more technically exciting or seemed like a big long term payoff because it was a risky challenge instead of short term financial gain. I've gotten screwed a few times when companies failed and the sure thing at a better salary would have netted more. But I look back without any regrets because I was always enjoying what I did.
And while you're at it, please brush up on your social skills, ok?
You are kidding right? You're asking a guy who sits at a terminal issuing "truth" with the identity of a coward to brush up on social skills? I think you need to quit playing with all those strong magnets.
Slashdot Mirror
My brother-in-law negotiates labor contracts for the management side of the equation. I was onto my usual rant about unions being for the weak and unskilled when he pointed out that unions are actually a good thing for the company in some ways. For instance, he can negotiate with a union and reach a contract agreement that covers 15,000 people. If there were no union, the company would have to negotiate with every single hire.
The nightmare for HR in nonunion shops is that without a uniform union contract specifing universal practices for the entire labor force across many sites, hiring negotiations take place on a case by case basis. That leads to higher administrative costs and when wages are based partly on the negotiation skills of an individual, it introduces alot of potential problems when bubba finds out that cletus is making more money, even though bubba has seniority.
I agree with you that content providers should have full freedom of expression. But the issue is that content consumers should have freedom from expression if they choose.
Most of the comments against this technology suggest that it is an attempt at censorship by religious conservatives and people wanting to prevent education. It isn't.
First, the fact that a parent knows that a subject is beyond appropriate for their child, and so chooses to apply the filter is infact very active participation in the education of the child. It isn't a cop-out to utilize technology. That's like saying that to use a car to get to work is a cop-out because you are too lazy to walk 6 miles.
Second, the mainstream content producers need to take yet another lesson from porn producers. Porn is usually shot from multiple angles so that a hardcore and softcore version can be produced. The porn studios do this so that they can get revenue from content streams that would not be available to them if only the "artisticly intact" full insertion version were available. If the mainstream studios would produce a G version of the PG movie, or a PG version of the R movie, they would get more revenue because they would be able to reach into homes where more conservative values guide viewing decisions.
Your post is on target: it's all about making the most money. In this case, the studio and directors wanting to use nudity and profanity to boost sales are really missing the boat w.r.t. maximizing revenues. It is usually only a few scenes that make a PG into and R rated movie in many cases where this technology would be applied. I doubt anyone in SLC is going to try to clean up A Clockwork Orange for viewing by the congregation after services.
Yes, thats right.
Look where it was developed. Before this technology was available, there was a mormon video rental store that would remove from tape the bits that they found offensive and then rent the scrubbed tapes to mormon families who wanted movies without offensive parts. They got hammered by the studios for tampering with the content.
This is just the same thing, but without "tampering" with the original form.
"Perhaps a new breed of people forcing their moral values on the entire country will emerge but hopefully they won't be the ones in control for long if at all."
You mean like some dried up old hag and talentless pop-start who want to force the sight of a bad looking tit into the faces of children watching a sporting event? I'm with you, I hope their reign is short lived.
How did the parent get modded insightful? This is crap. Someone please mod it down as stupid and I'll happily use my next points for your bidding.
Censorship is someone telling you what you can and cannot see, read, speak, hear, think. When a person chooses to restrict personal content intake, that is personal choice. THAT is the essence of freedom. This device is going to be liberating for a lot of people who have more conservative values.
Why don't you take the stick out of your ass and wake the fuck up. If people have the ability to locally control what comes into their homes, they are less likely to attempt try to legislate what comes into everyones homes. That makes life better and allows wider latitiude of content for the rest of us.
Before I get taken for being a puritan based on the sensibility of my post, let's put it out there: I love porn. But I don't think that it belongs on public airwaves where just anyone can trip into it. Do you really believe that everything that comes out of hollywood is artistic? 80% of the sex and profanity in PG and R movies is not germain to the story.
Is this really flamebait?
I thought that it was an attempt at humor, parroting Microsoft's approach to the market.
the fact that she's .... better looking than most women
Seriously? I think she's got a hideous face. Maybe she just seems better looking with all that cash in her wallet.
I think that video was shot in the dark for a reason. The guy probably couldn't keep it up if he's had a lamp lit.
I used to be a vilgilate about spam. I would traceroute to the linked page and alert the hosting company. I would also report the SPAM to every ISP related to the source of the email. I did get quite a few people's accounts closed and hosted commercial sites shut down. But eventually it was an overwhelming task not suited to automation.
Now I occasionally go to the site via an anonymizing prozy and enter bogus information into the forms for mortgage refinancing/etc so that bad leads are sent to the people paying for the leads. I'm about at the point where I'm going to write a script to do this. If I can dilute the data, hopefully the spammer will lose the business of attracting leads.
Another thing I have thought of recently is to start a website that offers as much as $20,000 in support for the legal defense of any person prosecuted for physical assault of a known/verifyable spammer. I'm not offering a bounty on spammers and none of the money would go to the person who assaults a spammer. But it might be a way to set out the idea that spam is causing a empidemic of anger management issues that could result in severe physical damage to someone doing the spam. And the person who assaults the spammer is just as much a victim of mental harrassment and deserves support in his defense and possible mental treatment.
I realize that spam is a petty thing taken as a single incident. But really, if someone littered on my property, daily over the course of several years, causing me to daily clean up the trash, then I should surely be allowed to pummel the life out of the fuck head if I catch him on my property. I apply the same logic to spam.
10-20 minutes delay!
What are they using for the decoding? Monkeys turning hand cranks?
Modern turbo coding cores (and I mean modern as in several years ago) introduce a latency of only a couple frames.
It's not that they are just now feasible, it's that few people outside of satcom were hip to them. Processor performance is not much of a factor because you don't do turbo coding in software. It's accelerated in hardware and is performed in line as the datastream passes through the mod/demod sections. There are chips that are not too expensive that do this or a turbo coding core can be dropped into the ASIC that holds the mod/demod sections. That makes it pretty cheap for a consumer device.
Oh Christ, mod parent as funny please!
"I am also a Cox subscriber and I believe that their phone "service" should be labeled cruel and unusual punishment."
I've had cox as an ISP for about 18months now and I've had a few service issues, as one would expect from any ISP. I've always found their customer service to be very good. Why? Because I go right past first level service immediately by telling them I run linux and describing the 16 things I already tried. Often I've tried more things than their first tier guys even know to try. They always bump me up a few levels right away and those guys generally have their shit together and actually know linux.
I've had some pretty severe anger management issues related to spam. When I talked to the higher tier service folks at cox, while they did not encourage bad behavior, they recommended some **cough**attacks**cough***, uhm behavior, that would be satisfying without putting me in breech of my service contract.
Yes. Yes we are.
Funny you should mention it. This is exactly how I got my job with the FBI!
Microsoft also provides a pretty decent cash flow into the coffers of politicians and lobbyists in the U.S. That is one thing that the beast has learned.
Thats a good point.
1) Leak unimportant proprietary source and bait competing open source developers to download.
2) Initiate legal action against "tainted" developers contributing to open source projects.
3) Continue to PROFIT!!!
Am I the only person that thinks Paris Hilton's face is hideous? No wonder that video was shot in the dark, who could keep it going while staring at that mug?
You can kill anything that is alive. For instance, you can kill a plant. You can kill a single cell. If you want to kill a party, just bring up this topic.
The issue is more along the lines of "is an embryo a Human?" Certain religious people would say yes.
You forget that the U.S. was founded by people who left Europe to find a level of self imposed repression not available to them in the old world.
I think that your timeline is off. The first wave of outsourcing is well past for the leading companies and early adopters. And this common wisdom that offshore developers could not possibly provide a quality product is just absurd.
I have first hand experience with offshore development. That was 5 years ago and the teams I used in India were very capable. They developed components for our main project. Not everything went smoothly, but alot of that was because we had to invent the management style neccessary to make it work. We did protect our IP, we did accomodate for the cultural differences (differences across pacific and atlantic oceans). We didn't save money, but we did break even and that was quite a success for our first attempts at a globally distributed development organization. The most difficult issue was, as you mentioned, xenophobia. The biggest problems were caused by onshore developers who were not superstars within the organization yet felt entitled simply because they had a master's degree.
You may not recall that in the sixties most people in the U.S. laughed at the Japaneese and their crappy little "rice burners". Well within 20 years the Japaneese were delivering products that completely blew away the unmitigated crap manufactured by the union labor shops of Detriot. Anyone who thinks that India isn't on the same arc towards mastery of IT is going to get blindsided. Programming is a commodity job already - it has been for at least 8 years. Design will follow as the sophistication of the offshore developers grows.
Sure there are many obscure failures that may not show up explicitly in the prospectus. But there are 10 times more obscure successes. If offshoring was a total failure, jobs would not be leaving. OK, so call centers may be a poor choice to send offshore. But that is the why I believe that we are well into the second wave of outsourcing. The more conservative companies are trying things and everyone else is learning from their failures and successes. Offshore development may not bbe perfect, but it is mainstream.
I do believe that there will be fallout. I do not believe that the fallout will punish companies to the extent needed to cause a reverse in the trend to ship IT away from the U.S. labor pool.
I agree with you that the loss of salaries and lower GDP will harm the U.S. ecomomy as a whole. But corporations are global and they are developing markets all over the world. While Carly sends HP jobs to India, she is also selling printers and personal computers to the Indian IT workers who are now earning a middle class salary. So the net effect for HP is positive and the net effect for India is positive. The localized effect on U.S. share holders of HP is good. The net effect on U.S. workers with nondistiguished skill sets is bad.
The voice of the U.S. consumer has rapidly declining influence on corporations that are expanding into the global market. Just look at the number of companies that sent textile manufacturing overseas. They have flourished regardless of all the cries of injustice to the U.S. workers and the threats of grassroots protectionism.
I disagree that moving IT jobs offshore must result in lower QOS. I have worked directly with offshore engineering groups (India and U.K.) and I know first hand that they offshore groups are capable of producing excellent work.
Well, alot of companies seem to have gotten no hangover as a result of discarding their "currently invested capital and starting from scratch" when they moved from U.S. to Indian based IT talent. As long as the labor cost difference is sufficient to counter the "exit cost" of throwing away current capital and yield a net increase ROI, there will be no hangover.
From the tone of your post, I infer that you are looking forward to a day of reckoning for these companies that outsource U.S. jobs. My advice: don't hold your breath.
Me first. Company second. Anyone who believes otherwise is delusional.
Putting yourself first isn't always about salary. Young engineers should be more concerned with the technology that they are learning and less about salary. Ultimately, engineering skills are a commodity. If you take the opportunity to develop unique and desirable skills, you will make more money over the long haul than someone with more common skills that chose projects on the basis of salary. You will also be more employable in difficult times. That's how you get rewarded down the road.
I can honestly say that I've always chosen the job that was more technically exciting or seemed like a big long term payoff because it was a risky challenge instead of short term financial gain. I've gotten screwed a few times when companies failed and the sure thing at a better salary would have netted more. But I look back without any regrets because I was always enjoying what I did.
How many legal files within the container Linux ISO?
Kind of evens out again, doesn't it?
And while you're at it, please brush up on your social skills, ok?
You are kidding right? You're asking a guy who sits at a terminal issuing "truth" with the identity of a coward to brush up on social skills? I think you need to quit playing with all those strong magnets.