Civ 3, The Sims, Runescape, Heroes of Might & Magic, Karaoke Revolution on the Xbox, Alchemy and other Popcap games, and - at the risk of perpetuating stereotypes, I will admit that I also like playing Hello Kitty Rescue (I do it to de-stress, because I can beat bad guys up with a pink cartoon wand).
Take for example a European who works in a low-cost country for a couple of years. The amount he or she earns in the low-cost country will be more than enough to have a good standard of living while they are there, but on a local salary it will be difficult to amass the portion of retirement savings (or house payments) that he or she would normally have saved working the same couple of years in Europe.
That's the problem. That person will live very well for a few years in Asia but when they get back to their home country in Europe they'll be disadvantaged compared to their peers who stayed there (or as my Belgian friend says, if he earns locally, when he goes back home he won't be able to afford a house).
For intra-company transfers this can be helped somewhat by keeping the employee's pension contributions in their home country. I guess expats on local terms could be offered a similar arrangement where they could maintain the same level of retirement savings but the rest of their salary covering other living expenses are closer to local levels.
(I do agree the traditional expat packages are usually too much.)
While the average factory wage in Southeast Asia may be low (and I'll be the first to say many factories have deplorable working conditions), the presence of multinationals has also resulting in the construction of some world-class manufacturing facilities here.
This has increased the standard of living of a number of manufacturing workers -- not just the ones who work at that multinational, but also of workers at competitors forced to match the multinational's compensation packages.
$300-400 a month (which is closer to the typical wages at these facilities) may not seem like a lot to US-based folks, but it can buy quite a lot here and is a respectable salary for a factory worker.
Not all multinational manufacturing facilities in Southeast Asia are sweatshops. I do agree that those that are, need to be corrected.
There has actually been work going on (and I believe some of these are already in use) to develop systems to help cut down on the need for animal testing. If I remember correctly they've already been able to reduce some live testing, except where actual animal tests are required by US federal regulations.
I can't provide a link or more details, but this was happening at a Fortune 100 multinational where I worked, and I am sure something similar is going in on other companies as well.
There are probably companies out there that don't provide the same level benefits to their non-US employees in low-cost countries (I'm guessing).
There are a lot that do provide the same benefits or better. Due to the differences in cost-of-living, they can pay their non-US employees much less in US dollar terms, and the employees still get a salary that allows them to live a really comfortable lifestyle.
For example, I've worked for a couple of Fortune 500 multinationals in the Philippines. Our new hires get 3 weeks' vacation, health benefits, interest-free loans, stock purchase allowances, transport and meal subsidies... pretty much the same benefits as the companies' US employees receive. And they get very competitive salaries (compared locally), so we get the cream of the crop. (Except for the really brilliant people who leave to work in the US - but that's another story).
They have to provide good benefits because they're competing with other offshorers for local talent.
With all those benefits, our labor costs per person are still a fraction (about one-third) of the cost of a similar level person in high-cost countries.
If you have one admin who can manually install it on all the machines (and if all your machines are in the same office), your corporation probably isn't as large as some of the ones that do have strict software control procedures in place. =)
Maybe it's just ingrained habit on my part, but I used Notes for about six years and am finding it extremely difficult looking for anything inside my Outlook mailbox - whether by sorting or searching.
I am sorely missing the All Documents view I had Notes, but due to company constraints on installing software that has not been approved (or not yet been approved, like SP2 - whew, back on topic!), I can't use third-party tools.
We've got over 70,000 PCs, two standard OS configurations, but we still do extensive testing before deploying stuff released by software companies.
In addition to making sure it works well with our standard OS builds, we also need to check that it doesn't break any applications. Never know if there's a 3rd party developer that did something MS wasn't expecting them to do. Sure, it may not be MS' fault if the developer didn't follow the standards... but in the end, we're still going to be the ones whose business gets disrupted if a badly-behaved app breaks.
On top of that - there are still a few non-conformists out there who manage to install personal or unauthorized software on their PCs, and that sometimes causes centralized updates to fail. Even if only 5% of users do it (low estimate if you ask me), that's still around 3,500 PCs.
So - we test as much as we can, and hold off until we can deploy smoothly. And we already know there will probably be some PCs that need to be cleaned up afterwards.
Well, it depends on whom the Portuguese-speaking posters are expecting to communicate to.
If their objective is to talk to each other (which is true in at least some cases, based on how I understood the article), what's wrong with having some of the posts or responses being in Portuguese?
Say someone started a new thread on Ask Slashdot asking about Linux usage in Brazil, and wrote it in Brazilian Portuguese. Wouldn't that help the article get to more of the author's intended audience? Even if it had the side effect of maybe excluding a lot of non-Portuguese-speaking readers?
Perhaps some of those people who would post Portuguese replies are more fluent in Portuguese than English and would not be able to respond as well if they had to post in English.
I don't speak Portuguese myself, but I don't feel it harms me if other people are having a conversation in Portuguese among themselves.
I live in the Philippines and have worked for two US-based multinationals. I'm a hiring manager (in IT) for one of those multinationals right now.
I agree what you've described sometimes applies at small or old-style firms. Newer generations of management (there's that youth thing again =) ) who are better educated don't care about things like measurements, religion, marital status, weight or height.
A lot of times age still matters. Or its popular proxy, years of work experience.
It's funny though. I never cared about the sex of an applicant until our company (rolling out policies developed in the US) started tracking male/female diversity. Then I had to make sure my organization balanced out.
Yes, there are phonetic systems for transcribing Chinese (bo po mo and pinyin).
Although it would be a challenge applying the NASA technology to Chinese because of all the dialects (same character / meaning - totally different pronunciation, not even the same word). You would basically have to treat Chinese as several languages... one implementation for Mandarin, another for Cantonese, etc.
Just curious, what did you mean by Chinese not having a proper phonetic language?
Although, I do get your point wondering about Spanish and Chinese. I'm bilingual and find I think differently when I'm thinking in English, compared to when I'm thinking in my native language. Both are equally easy, but your thoughts get structured differently by the languages.
On a related point, I wonder if this machine works better with some languages than others.
I live in the Philippines and we do get a number of good services via our mobile phones: for example, you can check movie showtimes and reserve seats in the movie theater by sending SMS messages from your phone.
You can also get street directions to restaurants or popular landmarks, but the interface to do those via SMS is a bit clunky.
Various companies here (like Nestle) have also replaced traditional raffle drawings with SMS raffle draws (buy a product, get a scratch card, send the card number to 2333 via SMS, and they'll tell you if you won). No advantage over pen-and-paper raffles really except that you don't need to keep the ticket, and the phone company makes money off you for entering!
For a third world country, it's surprising. Apparently we've got the second-highest SMS usage (or something like that) in the world.
If PG2 is not affiliated with the original Project Gutenberg -- does anybody know why they are using the Project Gutenberg name instead of coming up with a new one?
What would it take to build a basic Linux set-up that would be as easy for a typical user to use as, say, a Mac?
Assuming these users (think of/.ers' parents, for example) get the OS and some core apps pre-loaded by their favorite retailer, what else needs to be tweaked in how they use the system once they actually bring it home?
GUI? Ease of installing other programs? Ease of hooking up stuff like printers and digital cameras? There's bound to be a number of things we could improve...
Slashdot Mirror
Civ 3, The Sims, Runescape, Heroes of Might & Magic, Karaoke Revolution on the Xbox, Alchemy and other Popcap games, and - at the risk of perpetuating stereotypes, I will admit that I also like playing Hello Kitty Rescue (I do it to de-stress, because I can beat bad guys up with a pink cartoon wand).
When I was doing capoeira I used to play Tekken.
Take for example a European who works in a low-cost country for a couple of years. The amount he or she earns in the low-cost country will be more than enough to have a good standard of living while they are there, but on a local salary it will be difficult to amass the portion of retirement savings (or house payments) that he or she would normally have saved working the same couple of years in Europe.
That's the problem. That person will live very well for a few years in Asia but when they get back to their home country in Europe they'll be disadvantaged compared to their peers who stayed there (or as my Belgian friend says, if he earns locally, when he goes back home he won't be able to afford a house).
For intra-company transfers this can be helped somewhat by keeping the employee's pension contributions in their home country. I guess expats on local terms could be offered a similar arrangement where they could maintain the same level of retirement savings but the rest of their salary covering other living expenses are closer to local levels.
(I do agree the traditional expat packages are usually too much.)
While the average factory wage in Southeast Asia may be low (and I'll be the first to say many factories have deplorable working conditions), the presence of multinationals has also resulting in the construction of some world-class manufacturing facilities here.
This has increased the standard of living of a number of manufacturing workers -- not just the ones who work at that multinational, but also of workers at competitors forced to match the multinational's compensation packages.
$300-400 a month (which is closer to the typical wages at these facilities) may not seem like a lot to US-based folks, but it can buy quite a lot here and is a respectable salary for a factory worker.
Not all multinational manufacturing facilities in Southeast Asia are sweatshops. I do agree that those that are, need to be corrected.
There has actually been work going on (and I believe some of these are already in use) to develop systems to help cut down on the need for animal testing. If I remember correctly they've already been able to reduce some live testing, except where actual animal tests are required by US federal regulations.
I can't provide a link or more details, but this was happening at a Fortune 100 multinational where I worked, and I am sure something similar is going in on other companies as well.
I loved the Emperor's New Groove, though!
There are probably companies out there that don't provide the same level benefits to their non-US employees in low-cost countries (I'm guessing).
There are a lot that do provide the same benefits or better. Due to the differences in cost-of-living, they can pay their non-US employees much less in US dollar terms, and the employees still get a salary that allows them to live a really comfortable lifestyle.
For example, I've worked for a couple of Fortune 500 multinationals in the Philippines. Our new hires get 3 weeks' vacation, health benefits, interest-free loans, stock purchase allowances, transport and meal subsidies... pretty much the same benefits as the companies' US employees receive. And they get very competitive salaries (compared locally), so we get the cream of the crop. (Except for the really brilliant people who leave to work in the US - but that's another story).
They have to provide good benefits because they're competing with other offshorers for local talent.
With all those benefits, our labor costs per person are still a fraction (about one-third) of the cost of a similar level person in high-cost countries.
If you have one admin who can manually install it on all the machines (and if all your machines are in the same office), your corporation probably isn't as large as some of the ones that do have strict software control procedures in place. =)
I am sorely missing the All Documents view I had Notes, but due to company constraints on installing software that has not been approved (or not yet been approved, like SP2 - whew, back on topic!), I can't use third-party tools.
Anyone have suggestions?
We've got over 70,000 PCs, two standard OS configurations, but we still do extensive testing before deploying stuff released by software companies.
In addition to making sure it works well with our standard OS builds, we also need to check that it doesn't break any applications. Never know if there's a 3rd party developer that did something MS wasn't expecting them to do. Sure, it may not be MS' fault if the developer didn't follow the standards... but in the end, we're still going to be the ones whose business gets disrupted if a badly-behaved app breaks.
On top of that - there are still a few non-conformists out there who manage to install personal or unauthorized software on their PCs, and that sometimes causes centralized updates to fail. Even if only 5% of users do it (low estimate if you ask me), that's still around 3,500 PCs.
So - we test as much as we can, and hold off until we can deploy smoothly. And we already know there will probably be some PCs that need to be cleaned up afterwards.
Somebody mod the parent up please, I thought this was pretty insightful.
Well, it depends on whom the Portuguese-speaking posters are expecting to communicate to.
If their objective is to talk to each other (which is true in at least some cases, based on how I understood the article), what's wrong with having some of the posts or responses being in Portuguese?
Say someone started a new thread on Ask Slashdot asking about Linux usage in Brazil, and wrote it in Brazilian Portuguese. Wouldn't that help the article get to more of the author's intended audience? Even if it had the side effect of maybe excluding a lot of non-Portuguese-speaking readers?
Perhaps some of those people who would post Portuguese replies are more fluent in Portuguese than English and would not be able to respond as well if they had to post in English.
I don't speak Portuguese myself, but I don't feel it harms me if other people are having a conversation in Portuguese among themselves.
Just a thought.
I live in the Philippines and have worked for two US-based multinationals. I'm a hiring manager (in IT) for one of those multinationals right now.
I agree what you've described sometimes applies at small or old-style firms. Newer generations of management (there's that youth thing again =) ) who are better educated don't care about things like measurements, religion, marital status, weight or height.
A lot of times age still matters. Or its popular proxy, years of work experience.
It's funny though. I never cared about the sex of an applicant until our company (rolling out policies developed in the US) started tracking male/female diversity. Then I had to make sure my organization balanced out.
Yes, there are phonetic systems for transcribing Chinese (bo po mo and pinyin).
Although it would be a challenge applying the NASA technology to Chinese because of all the dialects (same character / meaning - totally different pronunciation, not even the same word). You would basically have to treat Chinese as several languages... one implementation for Mandarin, another for Cantonese, etc.
Just curious, what did you mean by Chinese not having a proper phonetic language?
Although, I do get your point wondering about Spanish and Chinese. I'm bilingual and find I think differently when I'm thinking in English, compared to when I'm thinking in my native language. Both are equally easy, but your thoughts get structured differently by the languages.
On a related point, I wonder if this machine works better with some languages than others.
I live in the Philippines and we do get a number of good services via our mobile phones: for example, you can check movie showtimes and reserve seats in the movie theater by sending SMS messages from your phone.
You can also get street directions to restaurants or popular landmarks, but the interface to do those via SMS is a bit clunky.
Various companies here (like Nestle) have also replaced traditional raffle drawings with SMS raffle draws (buy a product, get a scratch card, send the card number to 2333 via SMS, and they'll tell you if you won). No advantage over pen-and-paper raffles really except that you don't need to keep the ticket, and the phone company makes money off you for entering!
For a third world country, it's surprising. Apparently we've got the second-highest SMS usage (or something like that) in the world.
If PG2 is not affiliated with the original Project Gutenberg -- does anybody know why they are using the Project Gutenberg name instead of coming up with a new one?
What would it take to build a basic Linux set-up that would be as easy for a typical user to use as, say, a Mac? Assuming these users (think of /.ers' parents, for example) get the OS and some core apps pre-loaded by their favorite retailer, what else needs to be tweaked in how they use the system once they actually bring it home?
GUI? Ease of installing other programs? Ease of hooking up stuff like printers and digital cameras? There's bound to be a number of things we could improve...