It makes perfect sense for a global map system to use a global datum.
Absolutely. But that depends on the map data to be described in the same coordinate system. The data bought by Google is not converted to WGS84, and thus erroneous when used with it. Not a matter of imperfection or conversion error, but wrong.
Why? If the only thing keeping your cryptosystem secure is that people cannot legally reverse-engineer or decrypt it, you have bigger things to worry about.
Enforceability or effectiveness has nothing to do with this at all. It means (if I understand that clause correctly, which I well might not, of course) that the mere prescence of a law restricting unauthorized decryption - even when utterly toothless, never enforced, a sad, pathetic remnant of an earlier age still unaccountably on the books - automatically invalidates the new GPL license if you try to apply it to such software. Something like GPG could, in other words, be BSD or MIT licenced, have GPL version2, or be proprietary, but could not be published under GPL3.
[sorry to reply to myself; I noticed half my post was missing]
Also, Google Maps implicitly assume the same coordinate system for all its maps. But since WGS84 isn't terribly accurate in many places, a lot of areas (most, I think) actually use their own, derived, coordinate systems to get a better local fit. Google Maps ignores this. So, for example, if you try to use GPS coordinates to find a specific spot in Japan using Google maps, you will be off by a few tens of meters (how much depends largely on exactly where you are looking). Not a problem if you're looking for mount Fuji, but if you're looking for a particular building or street, you will find the wrong place. I can only assume the same problem exists for a lot of the other non-US maps Google provides (but I can't know since they don't mention this anywhere).
And of course, a lot of their services are US only, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. There's plenty of room for competition, actually.
Actually, it is plenty US-centric still. If you want Google News in English, for instance, it assumes that all news sections that aren't specifically about a country should be about the US. There is no way to choose, say, business and arts news focused on Japan, but in English. What would have been great is to have a "world"-centric, or unfocused location, where the sections are not focused on any one country.
And meanwhile, those people needing sixty character lines on their screen to see anything are being left out in the cold.
One point of the web is to let the users format to their preferences, not having formatting imposed on them by the originator. That goes for badly formatted text files just as much as it does for flash-sites from hell.
To me, that sounds like a breathtakingly simple way to undermine the whole purpose of the DMCA and DRM, simply by saying: Software under this license can never be a protection device that people are not allowed to circumvent. Almost as simple and elegant as the idea of copyleft itself. I'm very impressed.
I'm not. That would mean that any cryptographic software could never be GPL licensed. You won't have a Free implementation of the protocol used for you to connect securely to your bank, since it is illegal in many places to intercept and decrypt such privileged communications.
The "4-5" number comes in part from Apple running the same benchmark on both CPU:s - a benchmark optimized for multiple cores. No wonder the single core Power CPU didn't do a good job on that. It is faster, but not that much faster. A bit disingenious.
Now I have a 2.6 mile drive from my apartment to a parking lot where I go to grad school. Normally it takes about 30 minutes, but today it took an hour, not including time lost when an asshole at the gas station decided to get 2 gallons of gas so she could park her car at the gas station and walk to the dry cleaners.
2.6 miles is about 4 kilometers. You can do that on an ordinary single-speed foldable commuter bicycle in twenty minutes - without going fast enough to break a sweat. You can walk it in less than an hour. Or did you mean 26 miles?
The difference is that you now drive yourself. Driving is stressful, if nothing else because you need to be constantly on your toes in urban traffic, and morning congestion of course just makes that vigilance worse.
But that's not a problem with commuting, but of using a car.:)
I'm a bit surprised as many as one in five feel commuting is a source of stress, actually.
I find it relaxing. In the morning, it gives me some time where I can't really work, and can't rush around looking for things, or doing last-minute household stuff. Instead I can sit (well, stand) on the train and sort oease into the day by reading a book or a bunch of saved webpages on my computer, or just listen to the radio.
In the evening, likewise, I can sit and wind down, again with a book or radio. I get some time to go over the work in my head, in a sense summarizing it and deciding what to do the nesxt morning. By the time I get home, I've left my work behind and can relax.
I have a lot of knowledge stored in my email folders. It's nice to be able to find and read stuff even when I'm not connected.
That, by the way, is my largest gripe with net-based applications: I can't use them when on the local train, or on the bus, or when there is a network problem.
SAAB did as well about ten years ago (before they sold the car division to GM). It apparently worked well, but it was decided that user resistance would probably prevent it from being accepted, other than for disabled drivers.
One reviewer commented that they don't have the time to review and consider every candidate movie anyway. When he chooses which to look at, the ones that require him to set up a special player separate from his usual equipment, and that does not allow him to screen them on his laptop when traveling, will end up in the bottom of the pile, unscreened.
Much gaming entails mastering a given game over many hours of play. You can't really enjoy online FPS:s until you've put in a lot of hours of practice first, for example. For "mainstream", visible gaming, you need to be able to put in quite a lot of hours, preferably in fairly large chunks of time.
People over college age tend to have jobs and family. They do not have all that many long stretches of free hours, and when they do, they will tend to spend it with their spouse, their kids, their garden, whatever.
Note, however, that there is a whole parallel gaming universe out there with a huge number of people playing, and with an average age much, much higher than for the consoles. Just log in to Yahoo! games section as one example. Card and board games where you and your fellow players are all equal; small "desktop" games (mah-jongg, tetris, whatever) that you can enjoy for a quick break of five to ten minutes.
This more general patent problem is not limited to Microsoft and not limited to Mono. Java is no more protected, and neither is any other reasonably modern implementation of anything non-trivial.
The only way to be _sure_ you aren't violating a patent is to turn off the computer and leave it altogether.
The whole "run Win-apps under Linux" really is a little misleading. That's not really the point of Mono for most users.
The point, rather, is that it is a very, very nice development environment and a very pleasant language, well-suited for application development, as f-spot and others are a testament to. As a bonus, the apps written under mono will be easy to deploy under Windows as well, should it be needed.
And when you use Mono to write desktop apps under Linux you aren't using anything Windows-related that isn't covered by the ECMA standard. You have no larger exposure to patent issues than you have under any other environment (possibly barring plain C and POSIX libs. Possibly).
You do realize that the US as a whole has grown wealthier, not poorer, right? When people in the US have lost, economically, it's because wealth disparity within your country has increased, not because wealth distribution between countries have decreased.
Or to put it another way, the pie to be divided has grown bigger in the US as well as in developing countries. But how each country divides up its pie internally also changes over time. If people have gotten poorer, it's because their share of the US pie has shrunk even faster than the pie itself has grown. And that is a matter for national politics, not trade or foreign policy, no matter how much some people would wish to spin it otherwise.
With close to 3 billion ppl living in poverty by US/EU standards, to "equalize" the pay scale, property values will plumment, and the currency will be devalued to levels that deflation will cripple the US/EU
No. Growth will be (is) slower in the richest countries, and much faster in the developing ones. You may have noticed that the disparity is not closing all that fast - a good thing for all concerned.
The change is not happening suddenly for a very good reason: The wealthy countries are the main market for the developing ones (shifting gradually as a direct result of the lower disparity). If the change starts going too fast, the economy in EU and the US starts to sputter, slowing it right down again.
I cannot say it enough, any job can be done by someone else from another country for less, and they are more than eager to do it.
And eager to do it because you can make a boatload of money - so lots of people jump at the chance. That "jump at the chance" entails investing in yourself/your children/your citizens with education and work training, infrastructure, stable legal system and so on, all of which will expand their economy and raise the wage level. Which makes it more expensive to do the job there, but on the other hand making for a better quality job instead, and more work available within the country since it has grown economically.
So will those jobs move to the next cheapest market? Possibly, in time - cost is not the only determinant. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that the number of countries is finite. The overall wealth disparity really goes down as a result. Eventually you will have a world where the search just for cheap labor diminishes since the huge differences will no longer be there to be exploited. That is a good thing. And it doesn't mean everybody makes the same either; the wage differences within the wealthy first world countries is not neglible today. It's just small enough that other factors have a greater impact.
It's the screen itself. I've seen and played with the previous reader here in Japan, and the screen really is amazing. As in "you have to see it before dissing it" amazing. It really is like reading on paper. The brighter the environment is the better it looks.
On one hand, this reader is supposedly able to show any PDF or html and connect over USB like a mass-storage device, which is good (and the lack of which is what stopped me from buying the previous model). On the other hand, Philips is soon coming out with their version of a reader with a paper-like display, and I'd frankly rather buy from just about any company other than Sony nowadays. So I'll wait until I see what the Philips reader will be like, and unless they screw up with some DRM-only boneheaded move, that's what I'll get instead.
However, the west has been sending money, sending food, sending clothes, doing training, and performing other aid for decades to help propel 3rd world countries to the modern age.
Nope, it's backwards. The point of economic growth is just so wealthy countries no longer need to send emergency aid. And this is now what is happening.
Given my choice, I'd rather see the money stay right where it was created.
It is staying. Note how the need for emergency aid nowadays is much more for "true" emergencies (earthquakes and such)? Fewer countries than ever are so destitute that they need relief. Those countries that are now able to competer for real do not receive aid anymore, by and large.
Let the 3rd world make their own. That's what we did. They obviously don't care about the help we've given them for decades to bring them where they are today.
They are making their own wealth. The IT business in Bangalore is thriving, isn't it? How would you propose, say, the Indian IT industry to develop and flourish and _not_ compete with IT industry in other countries? If nothing else, if you expect the likes of Microsoft, Dell or IBM to be able to compete for business in India, surely Indian businesses can compete for it in the US and Europe?
The good part is, many poor countries have grown a lot wealthier. But of course that means the difference in wealth has been reduced. You can't have one without the other. Note that the US and Europa has not grown any poorer by this development; just that countries like India have grown wealthier even faster.
What you are reacting to really is the growing disparity of wealth within your country, not the lessening disparity between countries.
Me, on the whole, I'm much happier seeing my money go to an up-ang-coming country, where it makes a bigger difference, and at the same time I end up getting quality stuff cheaper. And judging from the success of imported goods into the first world, I'm not the only one.
If I were to run a company on US soil the same way one is run in China or other countries I would be taken to court, fined, or possibly jailed if ppl were pissed enough.
Of course, the same could be said about running companies in Europe the way they are sometimes run in the US as well. Differences can go both ways.
One thing, though: it isn't a zero-sum game. If a job moves from Sweden, say, to Estonia, the total wealth in the world is not constant. Since the baseline of wealth is very different, the job (let's say it costs half what it would in Sweden) creates more wealth in Estonia than is lost in Sweden since the value of that job is a smaller proportion of the Swedish wealth than of the Estonian. And since the work is being done for half the money, half is left to invest elsewhere (doing some job that would otherwise go undone), again creating wealth.
The effect? A somewhat more slowly growing Sweden - but a lot faster Growing Estonia. And the end result? An asymptotical narrowing of wealth disparity between the countries, with most of the narrowing effected by the growth of Estonia. And with Estonia about as wealthy as Sweden, it's a much larger market for everybody than when it was just a fraction of Sweden. Everybody wins, but especially the formely poor Estonia.
I said it elsewhere but it's worth repeating: Getting countries and people out of poverty means shrinking the gap in wealth - and that means having them grow wealthier and being more competitive.
The last ACS survey put this around 80%. Yeah - contacts are everything.
But that's really the same everywhere, in any field where skills aren't fungible. Not particular to IT or to Australia. In any given field, in any given area, people tend to know other people working with similar things. And any employer understandably likes the extra safety net of hiring someone who comes recommended by someone they already know and trust. Even if the recommendation is not wholehearted, the person - with strengths and weaknesses both - becomes a known quantity, and thus lower risk.
That's a major reason companies prefer people with some work experience as well. The fact that they have been hired once already in the field gives an implicit stamp of approval; someone else vetted them and found them acceptable. It's the same phenomenon anyone who's gotten engaged or married can tell you - suddenly you're much more interesting to people of the preferred sex than you were when you were single.
Either the skilled immigrants are taking our jobs (competing under our labor laws), or the skilled foreigners are doing our jobs remotely.
So, developing countries follow the (very apt) advice of developing their human resources: better schools, more resources for further education, partnerships for research and development and so on. This undoubtedly is vaulting a lot of societies upwards from poverty.
But of course, that means these people are doing actual work. Either at home, "taking jobs away" from rich countries (disregarding the question of how much of that work would have been done at all otherwise) and we can't have that, can we? So they go to where there's a market already, and suddenly immigrants are "stealing our jobs", and that's unacceptable too, of course.
From a larger view, after the highly developed West have been arguing for fifty years that countries need to expand out of poverty and become competitive, prosperous societies, suddenly everybody is shocked - shocked! - when countries are actually doing so, and becoming competitors in the process. News flash: lessening wealth inequalities means that the differences in wealth between countries will become smaller.
So what should these countries - and the smart, dedicated people living in them - do? Quietly disappear?
Me, given a choice, I much rather see R&D money (and my own money as a consumer) go to a struggling, up-and-coming newcomer of a country than to places that are already among the very wealthiest in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes perfect sense for a global map system to use a global datum.
Absolutely. But that depends on the map data to be described in the same coordinate system. The data bought by Google is not converted to WGS84, and thus erroneous when used with it. Not a matter of imperfection or conversion error, but wrong.
Why? If the only thing keeping your cryptosystem secure is that people cannot legally reverse-engineer or decrypt it, you have bigger things to worry about.
Enforceability or effectiveness has nothing to do with this at all. It means (if I understand that clause correctly, which I well might not, of course) that the mere prescence of a law restricting unauthorized decryption - even when utterly toothless, never enforced, a sad, pathetic remnant of an earlier age still unaccountably on the books - automatically invalidates the new GPL license if you try to apply it to such software. Something like GPG could, in other words, be BSD or MIT licenced, have GPL version2, or be proprietary, but could not be published under GPL3.
[sorry to reply to myself; I noticed half my post was missing]
Also, Google Maps implicitly assume the same coordinate system for all its maps. But since WGS84 isn't terribly accurate in many places, a lot of areas (most, I think) actually use their own, derived, coordinate systems to get a better local fit. Google Maps ignores this. So, for example, if you try to use GPS coordinates to find a specific spot in Japan using Google maps, you will be off by a few tens of meters (how much depends largely on exactly where you are looking). Not a problem if you're looking for mount Fuji, but if you're looking for a particular building or street, you will find the wrong place. I can only assume the same problem exists for a lot of the other non-US maps Google provides (but I can't know since they don't mention this anywhere).
And of course, a lot of their services are US only, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. There's plenty of room for competition, actually.
In other words, you could write ssh under GPL v3, but it would be legal to crack it. Not necessarily possible, just legal.
Nope. In most countries at least, law trumps contract. What would happen is that the license is invalidated, and the software in no longer free.
Actually, it is plenty US-centric still. If you want Google News in English, for instance, it assumes that all news sections that aren't specifically about a country should be about the US. There is no way to choose, say, business and arts news focused on Japan, but in English. What would have been great is to have a "world"-centric, or unfocused location, where the sections are not focused on any one country.
I don't think anyone would license that sort of software under the GPL anyhow. Take a look at OpenBSD and its largely successful OpenSSH.
GPG would suddenly break its own license.
And enlighten me, why would nobody want to GPL license any software that happens to incoroprate secure communication or storage?
And meanwhile, those people needing sixty character lines on their screen to see anything are being left out in the cold.
One point of the web is to let the users format to their preferences, not having formatting imposed on them by the originator. That goes for badly formatted text files just as much as it does for flash-sites from hell.
To me, that sounds like a breathtakingly simple way to undermine the whole purpose of the DMCA and DRM, simply by saying: Software under this license can never be a protection device that people are not allowed to circumvent. Almost as simple and elegant as the idea of copyleft itself. I'm very impressed.
I'm not. That would mean that any cryptographic software could never be GPL licensed. You won't have a Free implementation of the protocol used for you to connect securely to your bank, since it is illegal in many places to intercept and decrypt such privileged communications.
The "4-5" number comes in part from Apple running the same benchmark on both CPU:s - a benchmark optimized for multiple cores. No wonder the single core Power CPU didn't do a good job on that. It is faster, but not that much faster. A bit disingenious.
Wou mean, as good of a version as the replacement GPS satellites that the US putting up are?
Yes - why on earth is the US doing that? They can just use Galileo after all.
Now I have a 2.6 mile drive from my apartment to a parking lot where I go to grad school. Normally it takes about 30 minutes, but today it took an hour, not including time lost when an asshole at the gas station decided to get 2 gallons of gas so she could park her car at the gas station and walk to the dry cleaners.
:)
2.6 miles is about 4 kilometers. You can do that on an ordinary single-speed foldable commuter bicycle in twenty minutes - without going fast enough to break a sweat. You can walk it in less than an hour. Or did you mean 26 miles?
The difference is that you now drive yourself. Driving is stressful, if nothing else because you need to be constantly on your toes in urban traffic, and morning congestion of course just makes that vigilance worse.
But that's not a problem with commuting, but of using a car.
I'm a bit surprised as many as one in five feel commuting is a source of stress, actually.
I find it relaxing. In the morning, it gives me some time where I can't really work, and can't rush around looking for things, or doing last-minute household stuff. Instead I can sit (well, stand) on the train and sort oease into the day by reading a book or a bunch of saved webpages on my computer, or just listen to the radio.
In the evening, likewise, I can sit and wind down, again with a book or radio. I get some time to go over the work in my head, in a sense summarizing it and deciding what to do the nesxt morning. By the time I get home, I've left my work behind and can relax.
Here's somebody with the right idea: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jannem/22329391/
I have a lot of knowledge stored in my email folders. It's nice to be able to find and read stuff even when I'm not connected.
That, by the way, is my largest gripe with net-based applications: I can't use them when on the local train, or on the bus, or when there is a network problem.
SAAB did as well about ten years ago (before they sold the car division to GM). It apparently worked well, but it was decided that user resistance would probably prevent it from being accepted, other than for disabled drivers.
One reviewer commented that they don't have the time to review and consider every candidate movie anyway. When he chooses which to look at, the ones that require him to set up a special player separate from his usual equipment, and that does not allow him to screen them on his laptop when traveling, will end up in the bottom of the pile, unscreened.
Much gaming entails mastering a given game over many hours of play. You can't really enjoy online FPS:s until you've put in a lot of hours of practice first, for example. For "mainstream", visible gaming, you need to be able to put in quite a lot of hours, preferably in fairly large chunks of time.
People over college age tend to have jobs and family. They do not have all that many long stretches of free hours, and when they do, they will tend to spend it with their spouse, their kids, their garden, whatever.
Note, however, that there is a whole parallel gaming universe out there with a huge number of people playing, and with an average age much, much higher than for the consoles. Just log in to Yahoo! games section as one example. Card and board games where you and your fellow players are all equal; small "desktop" games (mah-jongg, tetris, whatever) that you can enjoy for a quick break of five to ten minutes.
This more general patent problem is not limited to Microsoft and not limited to Mono. Java is no more protected, and neither is any other reasonably modern implementation of anything non-trivial.
The only way to be _sure_ you aren't violating a patent is to turn off the computer and leave it altogether.
The whole "run Win-apps under Linux" really is a little misleading. That's not really the point of Mono for most users.
The point, rather, is that it is a very, very nice development environment and a very pleasant language, well-suited for application development, as f-spot and others are a testament to. As a bonus, the apps written under mono will be easy to deploy under Windows as well, should it be needed.
And when you use Mono to write desktop apps under Linux you aren't using anything Windows-related that isn't covered by the ECMA standard. You have no larger exposure to patent issues than you have under any other environment (possibly barring plain C and POSIX libs. Possibly).
You do realize that the US as a whole has grown wealthier, not poorer, right? When people in the US have lost, economically, it's because wealth disparity within your country has increased, not because wealth distribution between countries have decreased.
Or to put it another way, the pie to be divided has grown bigger in the US as well as in developing countries. But how each country divides up its pie internally also changes over time. If people have gotten poorer, it's because their share of the US pie has shrunk even faster than the pie itself has grown. And that is a matter for national politics, not trade or foreign policy, no matter how much some people would wish to spin it otherwise.
With close to 3 billion ppl living in poverty by US/EU standards, to "equalize"
.
the pay scale, property values will plumment, and the currency will be devalued
to levels that deflation will cripple the US/EU
No. Growth will be (is) slower in the richest countries, and much faster in the developing ones. You may have noticed that the disparity is not closing all that fast - a good thing for all concerned.
The change is not happening suddenly for a very good reason: The wealthy countries are the main market for the developing ones (shifting gradually as a direct result of the lower disparity). If the change starts going too fast, the economy in EU and the US starts to sputter, slowing it right down again.
I cannot say it enough, any job can be done by someone else from another country
for less, and they are more than eager to do it
And eager to do it because you can make a boatload of money - so lots of people jump at the chance. That "jump at the chance" entails investing in yourself/your children/your citizens with education and work training, infrastructure, stable legal system and so on, all of which will expand their economy and raise the wage level. Which makes it more expensive to do the job there, but on the other hand making for a better quality job instead, and more work available within the country since it has grown economically.
So will those jobs move to the next cheapest market? Possibly, in time - cost is not the only determinant. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that the number of countries is finite. The overall wealth disparity really goes down as a result. Eventually you will have a world where the search just for cheap labor diminishes since the huge differences will no longer be there to be exploited. That is a good thing. And it doesn't mean everybody makes the same either; the wage differences within the wealthy first world countries is not neglible today. It's just small enough that other factors have a greater impact.
What besides DRM does this do extra??
It's the screen itself. I've seen and played with the previous reader here in Japan, and the screen really is amazing. As in "you have to see it before dissing it" amazing. It really is like reading on paper. The brighter the environment is the better it looks.
On one hand, this reader is supposedly able to show any PDF or html and connect over USB like a mass-storage device, which is good (and the lack of which is what stopped me from buying the previous model). On the other hand, Philips is soon coming out with their version of a reader with a paper-like display, and I'd frankly rather buy from just about any company other than Sony nowadays. So I'll wait until I see what the Philips reader will be like, and unless they screw up with some DRM-only boneheaded move, that's what I'll get instead.
However, the west has been sending money, sending food, sending clothes, doing training, and performing other aid for decades to help propel 3rd world countries to the modern age.
Nope, it's backwards. The point of economic growth is just so wealthy countries no longer need to send emergency aid. And this is now what is happening.
Given my choice, I'd rather see the money stay right where it was created.
It is staying. Note how the need for emergency aid nowadays is much more for "true" emergencies (earthquakes and such)? Fewer countries than ever are so destitute that they need relief. Those countries that are now able to competer for real do not receive aid anymore, by and large.
Let the 3rd world make their own. That's what we did. They obviously don't care about the help we've given them for decades to bring them where they are today.
They are making their own wealth. The IT business in Bangalore is thriving, isn't it? How would you propose, say, the Indian IT industry to develop and flourish and _not_ compete with IT industry in other countries? If nothing else, if you expect the likes of Microsoft, Dell or IBM to be able to compete for business in India, surely Indian businesses can compete for it in the US and Europe?
The good part is, many poor countries have grown a lot wealthier. But of course that means the difference in wealth has been reduced. You can't have one without the other. Note that the US and Europa has not grown any poorer by this development; just that countries like India have grown wealthier even faster.
What you are reacting to really is the growing disparity of wealth within your country, not the lessening disparity between countries.
Me, on the whole, I'm much happier seeing my money go to an up-ang-coming country, where it makes a bigger difference, and at the same time I end up getting quality stuff cheaper. And judging from the success of imported goods into the first world, I'm not the only one.
If I were to run a company on US soil the same way one is run in China or other .
countries I would be taken to court, fined, or possibly jailed if ppl were pissed enough
Of course, the same could be said about running companies in Europe the way they are sometimes run in the US as well. Differences can go both ways.
One thing, though: it isn't a zero-sum game. If a job moves from Sweden, say, to Estonia, the total wealth in the world is not constant. Since the baseline of wealth is very different, the job (let's say it costs half what it would in Sweden) creates more wealth in Estonia than is lost in Sweden since the value of that job is a smaller proportion of the Swedish wealth than of the Estonian. And since the work is being done for half the money, half is left to invest elsewhere (doing some job that would otherwise go undone), again creating wealth.
The effect? A somewhat more slowly growing Sweden - but a lot faster Growing Estonia. And the end result? An asymptotical narrowing of wealth disparity between the countries, with most of the narrowing effected by the growth of Estonia. And with Estonia about as wealthy as Sweden, it's a much larger market for everybody than when it was just a fraction of Sweden. Everybody wins, but especially the formely poor Estonia.
I said it elsewhere but it's worth repeating: Getting countries and people out of poverty means shrinking the gap in wealth - and that means having them grow wealthier and being more competitive.
The last ACS survey put this around 80%. Yeah - contacts are everything.
But that's really the same everywhere, in any field where skills aren't fungible. Not particular to IT or to Australia. In any given field, in any given area, people tend to know other people working with similar things. And any employer understandably likes the extra safety net of hiring someone who comes recommended by someone they already know and trust. Even if the recommendation is not wholehearted, the person - with strengths and weaknesses both - becomes a known quantity, and thus lower risk.
That's a major reason companies prefer people with some work experience as well. The fact that they have been hired once already in the field gives an implicit stamp of approval; someone else vetted them and found them acceptable. It's the same phenomenon anyone who's gotten engaged or married can tell you - suddenly you're much more interesting to people of the preferred sex than you were when you were single.
Either the skilled immigrants are taking our jobs (competing under our labor laws), or the skilled foreigners are doing our jobs remotely.
So, developing countries follow the (very apt) advice of developing their human resources: better schools, more resources for further education, partnerships for research and development and so on. This undoubtedly is vaulting a lot of societies upwards from poverty.
But of course, that means these people are doing actual work. Either at home, "taking jobs away" from rich countries (disregarding the question of how much of that work would have been done at all otherwise) and we can't have that, can we? So they go to where there's a market already, and suddenly immigrants are "stealing our jobs", and that's unacceptable too, of course.
From a larger view, after the highly developed West have been arguing for fifty years that countries need to expand out of poverty and become competitive, prosperous societies, suddenly everybody is shocked - shocked! - when countries are actually doing so, and becoming competitors in the process. News flash: lessening wealth inequalities means that the differences in wealth between countries will become smaller.
So what should these countries - and the smart, dedicated people living in them - do? Quietly disappear?
Me, given a choice, I much rather see R&D money (and my own money as a consumer) go to a struggling, up-and-coming newcomer of a country than to places that are already among the very wealthiest in the world.