I Am Not A Statistician, but I Am A Brazilian and I'd say 90% of every software in Brazil is either pre-installed or warez. Or pre-installed warez depending on where you buy your PC.
That's possible. Though the computers you buy in the supermarkets come with a legitimate Windows license.
On the other side Brazil's government is working (slowly but steadily) on a transition to FLOSS.
Well, sort of.
The truth is the federal gov't is doing pretty much nothing about FOSS (unless you count empty rethoric as "doing something").
Basically, all about FOSS inside the federal administration sphere has been pushed through independent initiatives inside the administration, with no special help nor federal-wide strategy.
Our president and his party, while in their pre-power opposition days, champaigned for FOSS and all that stuff. But they basically did nothing about after they came to power.
There was a person years ago (a federal deputy?) who started to question the legality of tieing software purchases to Windows/MS-Office, since those are products developed by a single company (technically that goes against the Federal Law 8.666/93, but it seems that nobody cares).
Well, that guy was persecuted by Microsoft Brasil (if I recall correctly) for some unfounded reason (the case was dimissed I guess) and he fell in disgrace just afterwards.
Funny thing is that just few months later Steve Ballmer came to Brazil and had direct talks with our president.
You could also try the RabbIT compressing web proxy. All this relies on having a server somewhere with a fast net connection that you can run programs on - and this is the service that Opera Software are really providing.
If you want image compression - and are able to run Linux/BSD at the server side - Ziproxy may be a better option.
No, I'm beeing serious here - it's quite typical for PL computer, internet or, in this case, "social technical experiment/fun" areas to not even try coming up with anything new, just copying (usually poorly).
Sort like your nickname "Snoopy"?;)
Now, seriously... I've always felt that way too, yet I wonder why could that be so.
More specifically in the IT field, there are lots and lots of (at least theoretically) qualified people (and many left PL to work abroad since there are no enough jobs). With so many people, why there's no real breakthrough happening there?
I've never had the opportunity of seeing a NeXT running. But I'm not surprised it was slow, it always seemed to me that NeXT prized elegant engineering over performance.
About the A1000, the legend says Commodore wanted it to ship with 128kB and, after lots of protests from the engineers, they agreed to ship with 256kB instead. So it was already a win. Though Commodore management was composed of cheapasses, memory was quite expensive back then.
Amiga was originally meant to have YUV (not RGB) color registers and HAM mode made even more sense such way. Unfortunately (IMO) Commodore decided they had to use RGB because everyone else was using that.
So many words to convince the Mac guy on the Amiga superior capabilities.
You could just say that a lowly A500, 68000 7 MHz, when emulating a Mac with A-Max, scored 1.7 times (I saw that in front of me) the speed of the reference 68000 8 MHz Mac in a Mac benchmark tool.
Xbox is just a Celeron II IBM PC, minus the keyboard. Nothing special. Now if you want to talk "cult" consoles, I nominate the Atari VCS/2600 with its measly 1/8th kilobyte of RAM. It was a time when real programmers were real programmers and laughed in the face of challenges like, "How do I make a game when my bitmap is only 25x20 max resolution?"
Actually for the Atari 2600 2D bitmaps did not exist. The machine had a line buffer, which its contents the game had to update realtime for each line currently displayed on the TV.
It wasn't even a proper bitmapped line buffer, but a composition os sprite-alike attributes with a number of restrictions.
You mean Commodore Amiga as whole.
During the second half of 1990s, after the original chipset started to show its age, a faction appeared insisting that the true value was the OS itself.
The OS was great (the kernel, datatypes, installable filesystems, the modularized structure etc), but I think what made the machine mythical was the whole stuff. It was an overload of perfection.
I think it was the opposite. Amigans loathed x86 and DOS/Windows (it was indeed crap), but what really killed the platform was those Commodore management dumbasses.
It's a long history but basically they wasted lots of money in bad or plain stupid products (PC clones, x86-compatibility boards, A600...) and let the platform development stagnate (the stillborn AAA chipset, the switch from 68k processors to PA-RISC the engineers were considering etc).
Major religious rituals: Multitasking 100 programs at once,(...)
I personally liked to emulate a 68k Mac (actually it was more like a virtualization), then inside that emulate a x86, then inside that a DOS ZX-Spectrum emulator playing a game.
In parallel, a number of programs (like www browser, IRC client etc), as usual.
Sounds like no big deal nowadays, but back then it was different.
Mac OS was a joke (it lacked preemptive multitasking for years, programs used static memory alocation, it crashed if you coughed nearby etc), no comments on Windows 3.x, Windows 95 was not immediately viable. OS/2 worked well, but it was heavy and lacked apps (then it died).
I'm from Uruguay, which isn't much like the rest of South America... but most people wouldn't know, in my experience the rest of the world DOES lump South (or Latin) America together
That's quite typical. Likewise people in South America tend to put former communist european countries all in the same basket.
I've visited about 40 countries (though most of them are the small European countries so they do not count), about all of Europe and quite a bit of the Americas. I've lived for a few months in Vienna, Austria (and I liked it), and been in Canada for a few months (and liked it, a little less than Austria, but it had the huge advantage of no language barrier).
I don't have experience with so many countries as you (I would say about 10 in my case). But my conclusions were different.
Spain, for example: nice country, great people... but few (right now probably none) jobs and insane housing pricing (compared to the typical income).
Netherlands: interesting country overall, friendly people, nice cities... but too crowded, too boring, too many weird foreigners, uninteresting food.
Canada: it depends on the city, but overall there's material comfort and it's easier to maintain oneself (IF you're a canadian, I mean) and that's it. But I've felt people there as disturbingly superficial and materialistic.
Etc etc etc.
So, every country has its quirks, so what you gain in one side, you will lose in another. Or so I believe.
Even disregarding that, given the current world situation, migration is a bad deal for now.
Were you living in Venezuela it could still make sense, but even there is not comparable to places such as Afghanistan or Somalia.
My knowlege on Uruguay is quite limited, but my perception is that's a OK and stable country. It's a place I would give some thought had I an opportunity there (and I'm doing fine where I am).
In my case, if were I serious about money I would rather leave I.T. and open my own company in an unrelated-yet-profitable field, but I have other considerations in my life aswell.
Then pack the fuck up and leave. Nobody is stopping you.
The United Arab Emirates have a 0% tax rate; perhaps you should consider immigrating there.
Do they? Really? Would they accept qualified programmers from South America?
Whoa whoa whoa... Please do not use "South America" as if it were some kind of homogeneous zone, because it is not.
Have you some experience abroad? There's a little thing about cultural differences. Depending of the country you're going to, language barrier may be your least concern.
Whenever we release any source we put the most permissive license on it we can - which translates to "You can do whatever you want with this EXCEPT put a GPL style licence on it" (...)
Does your license define what is a "GPL style license"?
If not, thanks but no, thanks.
It's true that it can be hard to buy things overseas, but bear in mind that it is risky to accept payments from countries where the economies may be less stable and profitable and regulation is unfamiliar or ineffective
I mean no offense, but I don't believe the U.S. are exactly an example to the World on stability and profitability nowadays.
With a US credit card, the seller knows that they will get their money, and they won't have to navigate through the laws, taxes and possibly even corruption in 140 other countries and territories worldwide to get it. They don't have to calculate exchange rates, or worry about how a rate shift will devalue their ask price.
If a company wants to remain inside its comfort zone and deal only with US mechanisms, it should not complain foreign people don't buy from them. - It's not like it has some sort of "divine right" to sell to the rest of the world, anyway.
Its technically feasible. But as an advertiser, are you going to pay for 18 localized versions of ads to locales that have very little money to buy your wares? And all the corporate infrastructure needed for that?
Little money? It depends on which so-called developing countries you're talking about.
Now if you're expecting for a guy in Brazil to click in a banner written in English, advertising some generic random gadget, and after that, he would bother to make an international order (to pay a lot for transportation, local taxes, the long wait and any other hassle possible).... Well, think again.
Why should someone bother? Would you?
E-commerce in Brazil is quite popular, and you see lots of banners advertising products domestically buyable. The local companies are not complaining.
If there's some profitability problems with Youtube with certain countries, ones populated with people with broadband connections at home (not exactly starving, aren't they?), there's something wrong going on.
are there YouTube versions in some of the developing third world or second world countries?
"second world"? What the heck you're talking about?
The Cold War era is gone, do you believe is that some kind of development score so 1st word > 2nd world > 3rd world?
Nowadays people talk about "developed" and "developing" countries (and even that is argueable).
Blink tag was not the only plague during the 90s...
I remember the horrendous animated GIFs, like the classical letter going to a mailbox (e-mail link), or other meaningless animations.
The tasteless backgrounds (because one could not simply leave a plain background color). Often you could barely read the text.
Frames! Lots of them. Most not resizeable. I'm glad that fad is long over.
Tasteless color schemes for texts, bizzarely-sized fonts (often too big).
Oh.. the graphical horizonal bar people used to divide sections in the same page. At some point people started to use animated GIF for that sort of thing aswell.
Ah, yes.. Everyone started with their "John Smith's web site", most of those with no useful content.
Good one... I remember when Geocities started to insert advertisements themselves (previously you were supposed to do that by hand, according to the TOS.. remember? I think the allowed space was like 256kB or so back then.), man I got mad.
The only trick I ever bothered to use was to finish the html with <!-- or an incomplete tag (don't remember). After some months they changed things and it stopped working. At that point I no longer had patience, so I simply left, erasing the pages I had there previously.
My first experience with popup banners was with Geocities aswell. It was incredibly annoying (no blocker whatsoever back then) and many pages were stored there, so you had to deal with that from time to time.
Geocities died for me before Yahoo acquired it, along with other relics with as iname.com (which took my email alias ho$tage after they changed their TOS), Xoom (bought then killed by Microsoft) and so many others.
I love Sun hardware, but we've had an Ultra-1 which slowly fried its processor (which is soldered directly to the PCB btw). During its last months of use we had to adapt a strong fan blowing directly to the heat dissipator, otherwise it would simply go crazy under high load.
Oh, we've had a pile of other broken Ultra-1s aswell.
Sparcstation 20 is another model prone to problems (due to bad internal refrigeration).
The most reliable (old) Suns I've encountered are the Classic, Ultra 30 and Enterprise 450.
But isn't the guy going to run Win/DOS apps? Are you suggesting him to use qemu?
That's correct.
I remember installing Ubuntu 5.10 in an old PA-RISC server (EISA-based).
I remember that after installing that back then, the thing just booted directly to X running gdm, then Gnome entered just fine, as if it were some sort of commodity x86 hardware. Such a strange experience I must say.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting happiness out of the job is a bonus.
If getting happiness out of the job is a bonus, you've got the wrong job. Worse yet, your boss has the wrong employee.
I guess what he meant is that people need to survive, _then_ to worry about their life quality.
Nowadays you can't be too picky.
MOV HEALTH, AX
I don't think the Atari 7800 used a x86 processor...
I Am Not A Statistician, but I Am A Brazilian and I'd say 90% of every software in Brazil is either pre-installed or warez. Or pre-installed warez depending on where you buy your PC.
That's possible. Though the computers you buy in the supermarkets come with a legitimate Windows license.
On the other side Brazil's government is working (slowly but steadily) on a transition to FLOSS.
Well, sort of.
The truth is the federal gov't is doing pretty much nothing about FOSS (unless you count empty rethoric as "doing something").
Basically, all about FOSS inside the federal administration sphere has been pushed through independent initiatives inside the administration, with no special help nor federal-wide strategy.
Our president and his party, while in their pre-power opposition days, champaigned for FOSS and all that stuff. But they basically did nothing about after they came to power.
There was a person years ago (a federal deputy?) who started to question the legality of tieing software purchases to Windows/MS-Office, since those are products developed by a single company (technically that goes against the Federal Law 8.666/93, but it seems that nobody cares).
Well, that guy was persecuted by Microsoft Brasil (if I recall correctly) for some unfounded reason (the case was dimissed I guess) and he fell in disgrace just afterwards.
Funny thing is that just few months later Steve Ballmer came to Brazil and had direct talks with our president.
You could also try the RabbIT compressing web proxy. All this relies on having a server somewhere with a fast net connection that you can run programs on - and this is the service that Opera Software are really providing.
If you want image compression - and are able to run Linux/BSD at the server side - Ziproxy may be a better option.
Take that, Americium!
No, I'm beeing serious here - it's quite typical for PL computer, internet or, in this case, "social technical experiment/fun" areas to not even try coming up with anything new, just copying (usually poorly).
Sort like your nickname "Snoopy"? ;)
Now, seriously... I've always felt that way too, yet I wonder why could that be so.
More specifically in the IT field, there are lots and lots of (at least theoretically) qualified people (and many left PL to work abroad since there are no enough jobs). With so many people, why there's no real breakthrough happening there?
I've never had the opportunity of seeing a NeXT running. But I'm not surprised it was slow, it always seemed to me that NeXT prized elegant engineering over performance.
About the A1000, the legend says Commodore wanted it to ship with 128kB and, after lots of protests from the engineers, they agreed to ship with 256kB instead. So it was already a win. Though Commodore management was composed of cheapasses, memory was quite expensive back then.
Amiga was originally meant to have YUV (not RGB) color registers and HAM mode made even more sense such way. Unfortunately (IMO) Commodore decided they had to use RGB because everyone else was using that.
So many words to convince the Mac guy on the Amiga superior capabilities.
You could just say that a lowly A500, 68000 7 MHz, when emulating a Mac with A-Max, scored 1.7 times (I saw that in front of me) the speed of the reference 68000 8 MHz Mac in a Mac benchmark tool.
Xbox is just a Celeron II IBM PC, minus the keyboard. Nothing special. Now if you want to talk "cult" consoles, I nominate the Atari VCS/2600 with its measly 1/8th kilobyte of RAM. It was a time when real programmers were real programmers and laughed in the face of challenges like, "How do I make a game when my bitmap is only 25x20 max resolution?"
Actually for the Atari 2600 2D bitmaps did not exist. The machine had a line buffer, which its contents the game had to update realtime for each line currently displayed on the TV.
It wasn't even a proper bitmapped line buffer, but a composition os sprite-alike attributes with a number of restrictions.
Name: Commodore Amiga OS
You mean Commodore Amiga as whole.
During the second half of 1990s, after the original chipset started to show its age, a faction appeared insisting that the true value was the OS itself.
The OS was great (the kernel, datatypes, installable filesystems, the modularized structure etc), but I think what made the machine mythical was the whole stuff. It was an overload of perfection.
Major Deity: Jay Butterfield
I guess you mean Jay Miner.
Believed Antichrist: Commodore management True Antichrist: Wintel empire
I think it was the opposite. Amigans loathed x86 and DOS/Windows (it was indeed crap), but what really killed the platform was those Commodore management dumbasses.
It's a long history but basically they wasted lots of money in bad or plain stupid products (PC clones, x86-compatibility boards, A600...) and let the platform development stagnate (the stillborn AAA chipset, the switch from 68k processors to PA-RISC the engineers were considering etc).
Major religious rituals: Multitasking 100 programs at once,(...)
I personally liked to emulate a 68k Mac (actually it was more like a virtualization), then inside that emulate a x86, then inside that a DOS ZX-Spectrum emulator playing a game.
In parallel, a number of programs (like www browser, IRC client etc), as usual.
Sounds like no big deal nowadays, but back then it was different.
Mac OS was a joke (it lacked preemptive multitasking for years, programs used static memory alocation, it crashed if you coughed nearby etc), no comments on Windows 3.x, Windows 95 was not immediately viable. OS/2 worked well, but it was heavy and lacked apps (then it died).
I'm from Uruguay, which isn't much like the rest of South America... but most people wouldn't know, in my experience the rest of the world DOES lump South (or Latin) America together
That's quite typical. Likewise people in South America tend to put former communist european countries all in the same basket.
I've visited about 40 countries (though most of them are the small European countries so they do not count), about all of Europe and quite a bit of the Americas. I've lived for a few months in Vienna, Austria (and I liked it), and been in Canada for a few months (and liked it, a little less than Austria, but it had the huge advantage of no language barrier).
I don't have experience with so many countries as you (I would say about 10 in my case). But my conclusions were different.
Spain, for example: nice country, great people... but few (right now probably none) jobs and insane housing pricing (compared to the typical income).
Netherlands: interesting country overall, friendly people, nice cities... but too crowded, too boring, too many weird foreigners, uninteresting food.
Canada: it depends on the city, but overall there's material comfort and it's easier to maintain oneself (IF you're a canadian, I mean) and that's it. But I've felt people there as disturbingly superficial and materialistic.
Etc etc etc.
So, every country has its quirks, so what you gain in one side, you will lose in another. Or so I believe.
Even disregarding that, given the current world situation, migration is a bad deal for now.
Were you living in Venezuela it could still make sense, but even there is not comparable to places such as Afghanistan or Somalia.
My knowlege on Uruguay is quite limited, but my perception is that's a OK and stable country. It's a place I would give some thought had I an opportunity there (and I'm doing fine where I am).
In my case, if were I serious about money I would rather leave I.T. and open my own company in an unrelated-yet-profitable field, but I have other considerations in my life aswell.
Of course that's only my point of view.
Then pack the fuck up and leave. Nobody is stopping you.
The United Arab Emirates have a 0% tax rate; perhaps you should consider immigrating there.
Do they? Really? Would they accept qualified programmers from South America?
Whoa whoa whoa... Please do not use "South America" as if it were some kind of homogeneous zone, because it is not.
Have you some experience abroad? There's a little thing about cultural differences. Depending of the country you're going to, language barrier may be your least concern.
BTW which country are you from?
Whenever we release any source we put the most permissive license on it we can - which translates to "You can do whatever you want with this EXCEPT put a GPL style licence on it" (...)
Does your license define what is a "GPL style license"?
If not, thanks but no, thanks.
It's true that it can be hard to buy things overseas, but bear in mind that it is risky to accept payments from countries where the economies may be less stable and profitable and regulation is unfamiliar or ineffective
I mean no offense, but I don't believe the U.S. are exactly an example to the World on stability and profitability nowadays.
With a US credit card, the seller knows that they will get their money, and they won't have to navigate through the laws, taxes and possibly even corruption in 140 other countries and territories worldwide to get it. They don't have to calculate exchange rates, or worry about how a rate shift will devalue their ask price.
If a company wants to remain inside its comfort zone and deal only with US mechanisms, it should not complain foreign people don't buy from them. - It's not like it has some sort of "divine right" to sell to the rest of the world, anyway.
Its technically feasible. But as an advertiser, are you going to pay for 18 localized versions of ads to locales that have very little money to buy your wares? And all the corporate infrastructure needed for that?
Little money? It depends on which so-called developing countries you're talking about.
Now if you're expecting for a guy in Brazil to click in a banner written in English, advertising some generic random gadget, and after that, he would bother to make an international order (to pay a lot for transportation, local taxes, the long wait and any other hassle possible).... Well, think again.
Why should someone bother? Would you?
E-commerce in Brazil is quite popular, and you see lots of banners advertising products domestically buyable. The local companies are not complaining.
If there's some profitability problems with Youtube with certain countries, ones populated with people with broadband connections at home (not exactly starving, aren't they?), there's something wrong going on.
are there YouTube versions in some of the developing third world or second world countries?
"second world"? What the heck you're talking about?
The Cold War era is gone, do you believe is that some kind of development score so 1st word > 2nd world > 3rd world?
Nowadays people talk about "developed" and "developing" countries (and even that is argueable).
Blink tag was not the only plague during the 90s...
I remember the horrendous animated GIFs, like the classical letter going to a mailbox (e-mail link), or other meaningless animations.
The tasteless backgrounds (because one could not simply leave a plain background color). Often you could barely read the text.
Frames! Lots of them. Most not resizeable. I'm glad that fad is long over.
Tasteless color schemes for texts, bizzarely-sized fonts (often too big).
Oh.. the graphical horizonal bar people used to divide sections in the same page. At some point people started to use animated GIF for that sort of thing aswell.
Ah, yes.. Everyone started with their "John Smith's web site", most of those with no useful content.
"Under construction" pages were a common view.
Etc etc etc...
Good one... I remember when Geocities started to insert advertisements themselves (previously you were supposed to do that by hand, according to the TOS.. remember? I think the allowed space was like 256kB or so back then.), man I got mad.
The only trick I ever bothered to use was to finish the html with <!-- or an incomplete tag (don't remember). After some months they changed things and it stopped working. At that point I no longer had patience, so I simply left, erasing the pages I had there previously.
My first experience with popup banners was with Geocities aswell. It was incredibly annoying (no blocker whatsoever back then) and many pages were stored there, so you had to deal with that from time to time.
Geocities died for me before Yahoo acquired it, along with other relics with as iname.com (which took my email alias ho$tage after they changed their TOS), Xoom (bought then killed by Microsoft) and so many others.
Interesting... Some of the Weston's pictures I saw look like as if taken yesterday.
NT for Alpha had a x86 emulator so you could run your 99,9% non-Alpha NT applications.
Are you suggesting to emulate a x86 with an ARM? In a cheap netbook? Fast?
Good luck with that.
I love Sun hardware, but we've had an Ultra-1 which slowly fried its processor (which is soldered directly to the PCB btw). During its last months of use we had to adapt a strong fan blowing directly to the heat dissipator, otherwise it would simply go crazy under high load.
Oh, we've had a pile of other broken Ultra-1s aswell.
Sparcstation 20 is another model prone to problems (due to bad internal refrigeration).
The most reliable (old) Suns I've encountered are the Classic, Ultra 30 and Enterprise 450.
But isn't the guy going to run Win/DOS apps? Are you suggesting him to use qemu?
Uh... So now it's GNU/FreeBSD?
(head explodes)
That's correct.
I remember installing Ubuntu 5.10 in an old PA-RISC server (EISA-based).
I remember that after installing that back then, the thing just booted directly to X running gdm, then Gnome entered just fine, as if it were some sort of commodity x86 hardware. Such a strange experience I must say.
Everyone should use English. It's the lingua franca of the world now.
*ducks, runs*
More like "English is the x86 of the natural languages".
(now excuse me while my karma goes down the drain...)
and reestablish independent american manufacturing - which you do by weakening patent recognition
I'm not from the U.S. but, hey, competition is good.
But how exactly do you plan to offer competitively priced products?