There are IT unions in Austria and Germany, if not all of (western and central at least) Europe. The national constitution in Austria stipulates if 5 people sign a petition for a union, they become protected by law from their employer and have the right to form one without harassment. I'm not saying the companies don't treat the IT unions like shit, or that the union bosses aren't corrupted, but they do exist. 4 out of 5 people in Finland are union members. For IT workers it's only 1 out of 3, but that figure is probably still much, much higher than in the US and a lot of the low figure has to do with the fact that in Europe most young companies (less than 10 years old) offer two kinds of employment: full-time, which in a lot of European countries automatically entitles the employee to join a union at contract-signing time, and flex-time, which give the employee almost no rights whatsoever but have more flexible working hours. Even then, there's nothing legal stopping them from forming a union, they're just more easy to intimidate because their supervisor can suddenly say "Sorry, we suddenly have to cut your schedule to ten hours a week due to budget problems."
As for "2 out of 5 bosses lie" being interpreted as "3 out of 5 bosses tell the truth," don't forget that even a sociopath can pass a polygraph with flying colours. If they flinched when they fibbed, they wouldn't have gotten promoted in the first place.
You didn't mention where you get the battery replaced. I used to be a watch repairer, and when you buy a watch certified to be waterproof at 100 meters and go to have the battery replaced, a lot of places will simply refuse to do it and suggest you send it to the manufacturer. That's because after the seal on the gasket has been broken to get the back off the watch (in order to take the old battery out and put a new one in), it has to be put under pressure tests again to ensure that it is still certifiable as waterproof with the new seal in. If you just go into a jewelry shop or a department store and they switch the batteries for you right there, please do not consider it waterproof anymore. It's understandable that they can't test it for you, as a pressure tester can cost upwards of 10,000eu and gets extremely rare usage. But be forewarned that 90% of the time it isn't even safe to go in the shower with an uncertified watch let alone swimming or deep diving. The only thing keeping the water out is screws and/or the threads of the caseback. Now, on the other hand if you do get it replaced properly and don't void your warranty on it, the waterproofing test is probably going to cost you quite a penny for the test, the labour, and the shipping and handling (usually it's somewhere between 60 and 100 eu -- I don't know what that is in US dollars since they keep falling in exchange value every week but $1.30 is about 1eu now). When you factor in the added functionality of a cellphone or a PDA, it doesn't seem like such a bad investment for people who can afford it and will actually use those things. Now, if you take the waterproofing out of the equation and compare a cellphone to, say, a cheap Timex (one with no Indiglo furiously eating up the Lithium cel in a few months) that costs a handful of coins and will last somewhere between 3-20 years depending on how filthy and gummed up it gets, and suddenly it's, as you say, a much more convenient and cheap option.
I actually think it would be good if more people learned how to repair Rolexes. We used to have to send them out and our store policy was "Never open a Rolex!" because they had a tendency to explode and throw microscopic movements and pieces everywhere as soon as the caseback was taken off. The best story related to that job was actually the time someone came and asked me to take a look at their Rolex. I said, "What's wrong with it?" and she replied, "The battery just stopped this morning. I already had it replaced last year." I spent about ten seconds trying to come up with the least offensive way of telling the woman that a real Rolex doesn't use batteries. To make matters worse, she added with a pride-filled voice that it was a Mothersday gift from her son. If we had more Rolex training and no anti-Rolex store policy I could at least have changed the battery and spared her the embarrassment of finding out from a complete stranger that her son was a cheap bastard.
I helped my brother-in-law by a new PC a few months ago. We went to the Cosmos, which is like what people in America call Best Buy or another large, "honey take my wallet and whatever you do don't give it back to me until we leave no matter what I say when we're inside" electronics megastore. They were selling two versions of the same high-end full bells-and-whistles workstation. One version had Windows XP and Nero burning software and one came with Debian with loads of extra applications filling the rest of the second DVD. The Windows version was about 260eu more than the Debian box despite the fact that hardware-wise they were identical and software-wise the Debian discs were about ten times as useful (the Windows box didn't even have any OEM office software like that shitty Works program they sometimes throw at you). The only problems he's had so far was getting his iPod working with Linux, but even Windows can't deal directly with HFS+. Say what you want, but I call that pretty damn competitive. They're even selling cheap Linux-based DVD players here in the LIDL grocery stores now. The days of Windows dominance are definitely numbered.
If the conventional, closed-source, heavily-managed style of software development is really defended only by a sort of Maginot Line of problems conducive to boredom, then it's going to remain viable in each individual application area for only so long as nobody finds those problems really interesting and nobody else finds any way to route around them. Because the moment there is open-source competition for a `boring' piece of software, customers are going to know that it was finally tackled by someone who chose that problem to solve because of a fascination with the problem itself--which, in software as in other kinds of creative work, is a far more effective motivator than money alone.
and/or this:
Indeed, it seems the prescription for highest software productivity is almost a Zen paradox; if you want the most efficient production, you must give up trying to make programmers produce. Handle their subsistence, give them their heads, and forget about deadlines. To a conventional manager this sounds crazily indulgent and doomed--but it is exactly the recipe with which the open-source culture is now clobbering its competition.
The quotes in themselves aren't fully summing up the idea, but I didn't think it would be wise to cut and paste the whole chapter(s) in this post. The first quote is from the chapter "On Management and the Maginot Line" in tC&tB. The second quote comes from the chapter "Gift Outcompetes Exchange" in Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere.
There's AutoCADbury, but it's only good for designing sculptures of large chocolate, creme-filled eggs. And the proprietary format for saving them is very similar to AutoCAD's. Thin, easy-to-tear aluminium foil that is simple to disassemble and process the results.
Re:'Javas slow decline in favor of...' oh please
on
2007 Java Predictions
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I won't pretend I've done the research to disagree or agree with either statement. But just doing a keyword search doesn't prove anything about what the "velocity" of any of those languages are, nor does it say how they compare. Saying there's 8213 Java openings compared to 180 for Ruby or 671 for Python doesn't really tell me what the numbers were a month or a year ago. I can do a search for the number of people with HIV in the world, but that single value won't indicate anything meaningful other than that it's non-zero. If you were trying to say that there are far more Java job offers than the other mentioned languages, congratulations. But what you're actually claiming is, "So, in support of the claim that Java is in 'slow decline', we have... java as the most requested programming language in the job market today." If the number of Java offers in 2005 were 0.3% higher than the number you just gave, that would indicate that indeed there is a slow decline. If it were 50% lower, there would have been a sharp increase. But there's no way of telling what the change is, so the "research" you've done cannot support any claim either way. In other words it indicates that there are a lot of job offers for Java and not so many for Ruby or PHP or Perl etc., but that doesn't tell me what the rate of change is, what the numbers are like on Monster.com or any other site, whether those Java offers are really for "large scale enterprise applications" or just applets and midlets, etc. I'm willing to take a blind guess that's based on nothing but anecdotal experience with doing job searches last year on the Austrian equivalent of HotJobs, but I'm wagering far more of those 5000 C++ offers are for enterprise apps or demanding software development in scientific and academic fields than the number of the same types of offers for Java programmers. Then again it would be easier to guess how accurate I am if the data listed in the post above mine actually meant anything.
Strangely the other post that this one is referring to, in which pinkpanther got fingered, was modded "Flamebait" while the post that refers to it is +4 Informative. Maybe someone should mod the other post up instead of down, as it gives evidence to support the theory that this whole article is a hoax, and could help people in the future avoid wasting as much time reading it as we (or at least I) have.
I decided to reply here rather than anywhere else because I have several things I wanted to say. First, and most directly relevant to this branch of the conversation, is that the memory management of Java is not always as great as everyone who bashes C++ thinks it is. I recently spent six months working out the bugs in a J2ME MIDlet only to discover that it was still vomiting blood after a random number of hours because of a poorly coded garbage collector causing a null pointer exception. No way to fix it, no way to disable it or go around it, maybe $20.000USD (including salaries, test equipment, and repeated calls to Nokia and Sun's support centres for absolutely fruitless attempts by their people to figure out what was wrong) down the toilet on the project as it had to be scrapped because of a buggy implementation of the GC. Nokia's advice? "Tell your customers to buy newer mobiles with an updated version of the Java virtual machine." I love Ruby, and it's possibly my favourite language for proof of concept and quick testing, but I've had similar problems since 1.8x with variables local to a function suddenly disappearing halfway down the function's code because Ruby decided arbitrarily that they weren't necessary any longer...and the only way to avoid them being recycled and losing the data was to explicitly copy them to another variable and use that instead. It's not a language I'd rely on for mission-critical programming--yet. I'm checking the site once every week or so to see the latest status on 2.0.
As for C++ pointers being a "hassle" to call new and remembering to call delete on, all you have to do is use the auto_ptr provided by the Standard Template Library, which is 100% compatible with any C++ compiler that supports the Standard (GNU's ISO99 C++ support is fantastic), or use the safe pointers in the Boost Library. They'll know by themselves when to delete without you ever having to mess with it--and you can rest assured that if the program throws an exception and exits a function abnormally there's no pointer mess leftover because they'll call the deconstructor automatically in the stack unwind. The fact is, there are features in C++ that most people either don't use because they don't bother to learn them, or simply have never heard of. Vectors, strings, hash maps, associative arrays, linked lists, safe pointers, throw-catch exception handling, etc. Yeah the code can get a little harder to read, but that's the programmer's fault rather than the language.
My advice to the OP would be that the best experience comes from the workplace. You'll be given assignments for things that seem impossible to you and that you'd never be able to do. And sometimes you can't do them. But when you're faced with a challenge like that you'll find yourself being forced to become an expert on the subject very rapidly. And experience and confidence like that are hard to come by easily or as quickly in an academic environment.
My IP address is not in the US, so I guess that explains why only of the keywords complained about ("photo sharing") returns Google in the top ad spot. All the rest are companies I've never even heard of.
As for regular searching, when I tried the list of keywords in TFA, only "spreadsheet," "word processor," "video," "photo sharing," "maps," "start page," and "books" came up with Google in the first four results. It comes up for "instant messenger" in 6th place.
In conclusion, I doubted this was really some sort of conspiracy before reading the blog post, and now I doubt it even more unless Google simply doesn't give a shit about its international competition.
Speaking of competition, is it just a coincidence the author of the blog runs a company that makes and sells products which would have to compete with Google's free offerings? How much of this anger is just sour grapes? I would be pretty pissed too if I spent a lot of time making DHTML and Wiki-based company office software and Google offers basically the same stuff online at no cost.
1.4 What does "international standardization" mean?
When the large majority of products or services in a particular business or industry sector conform to International Standards, a state of industry-wide standardization can be said to exist. This is achieved through consensus agreements between national delegations representing all the economic stakeholders concerned - suppliers, users and, often, governments. They agree on specifications and criteria to be applied consistently in the classification of materials, the manufacture of products and the provision of services. In this way, International Standards provide a reference framework, or a common technological language, between suppliers and their customers - which facilitates trade and the transfer of technology.
1.5 What benefits does international standardization bring to businesses?
For businesses, the widespread adoption of International Standards means that suppliers can base the development of their products and services on reference documents which have broad market relevance. This, in turn, means that they are increasingly free to compete on many more markets around the world.
1.6 What benefits does international standardization bring to customers?
For customers, the worldwide compatibility of technology which is achieved when products and services are based on International Standards brings them an increasingly wide choice of offers, and they also benefit from the effects of competition among suppliers.
Guess what the article doesn't say: How they actually make them. You read the entire article, which is basically just a fluff piece history of the company and some numbers that might as well be from the LEGO Employees' Quarterly Newsletter, and get to the bottom where there's a link to a slideshow of how they're produced. Lo and behold the slideshow link gives you a 404 File Not Found. So if you only clicked on this story under the impression that it is of any use for explaining or illustrating the production process, you're in for a huge disappointment. Maybe someone could add "Thanks to Businessweek.com's Broken Website I Still Don't Know" in front of the title "How They Make LEGO Bricks."
The plan to change the 1USD bill with a coin is already underway. It was in the news a few days ago. They will feature a different dead president every 3 months with Nixon being the last already-planned coin in 2016. Personally, I like the way the euro currency is designed. The coins increase in size and change colour based on value (penny being the smallest and 2eu being the biggest), as do the bills. So when it comes time to pay a waiter, you can just reach into your pocket and feel whether or not you have enough 1- and 2-eu coins to cover it without taking them out and showing everybody how pathetically broke you are. Not to mention one time I got paid in cash at work and I have to admit I felt like a pretty big wheel down at the cracker factory when I was folding up that enormous 500eu bill.
Shutting down one website in Russia will not end piracy. Have you ever been to Moscow? You can get practically any piece of software, DVD, or CD ever printed for nothing by just walking to an outside market. I have the first five Led Zeppelin albums in 256kbps MP3 format on CD which I got in Russia for the equivalent of about 1euro. How much are those albums worth retail? About 14eu apiece? I had a friend who moved here from the Ukraine and every time her parents would visit Russia on vacation they'd actually go around asking all of their relatives beforehand if they needed anything from Moscow (and I don't mind souvenirs or clothing or what-have-you, but copies of Windows XP or movies or things of that nature). Piracy is built into their culture. Hell, for 80 years they didn't have any private copyrights at all. Thinking that shutting down this one website will turn the citizens of Russia into sudden international-law-abiding retail purchasers, especially without a sharper increase in their standard of living and disposable income, has got to be the stupidest idea in the world.
There are a few situations I can see where everyday workstation users might have a bit of trouble without any training. One would be, as you touched upon, mounting devices, CDs, floppies, USB sticks, etc., to get files that aren't on the primary hard drive or to save something. OK, maybe a French depute doesn't need to understand all of the mechanics and optional arguments of dd or mkisofs, but eventually someone will want to take work home with them on a disk/CD, load something off a pen drive, or burn a graphical presentation to a DVD. Having to tell them as part of the IT department, "Oh, that's too complicated for you. Yeah, I know even someone as stupid as you could figure it out in Windows, but it's a bit trickier now--there's more to remember. I'll come by and do it for you later" is simply not going to be tolerated very long. The problem only gets harder when one considers that the older you get, the more resistant one becomes to new information and ideas. And parliaments aren't exactly full of people in their prime.
Another problem that could arise is if the XServer crashes and the user, who maybe hasn't used DOS in 10+ years, is suddenly met with this command prompt and a lot of text about XFontErrors and core dumps. Their first thought probably won't be, "Woops, I guess I'd better restart the XServer and e-mail this core dump and a list of things I was doing at the time to the appropriate people. How mildly inconvenient," but rather, "Oh, shit, oh shit oh shit, I just destroyed the computer. I'm going to be fired!" and that's when, thinking back to their days in Windows when they needed to fix a crashed program, hit the power button to reboot the computer...without unmounting any of the filesystems or properly shutting down.
I'm too young to have read tech magazines in the late 80s/early 90s (other than those often funny often unfunny Fifth Wave strips in the Xxxx for Dummies books). Was there all this bullshit back then too about how people shouldn't switch from MS-DOS/Mac/etc. to Windows for Workgroups because of the "high cost of training people?"
He not only "sharply criticized" campaign finance laws, he calls the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law "the most systematic effort to censor and repress political speech by those in power since the Federalist overreach of the 18th century." The whole thing, if you have the masochistic desire to read it, can be found here: http://www.newt.org/backpage.asp?art=3079
I look at TFA with a little cynicism, since it's from a local paper and doesn't give any specifics (and I can't find a transcript online--then again I'm six hours ahead of the East Coast and it was only yesterday). But it's on CNN's Political Ticker site, so I guess somebody somewhere must have verified it.
I believe that the difference between the groups that this study used was not really the fact that in one group there were "experts" and in the other "non-experts", but that in one group there were "grad-students" and in the other "non-grad-students".
And I believe someone should RTFA before weighing in on it. It wasn't divided into "people who are grad students" and "people who aren't grad students," it was divided into "people who are grad students or researchers in a certain field and are given an article from Wikipedia about that field" and "people who are grad students or researchers in a certain field and are given a random article from Wikipedia's 'Random Article' link in the Navigation Menu on the front page." Or maybe we shall let the study itself explain:
A total of 258 academics (research fellows, research assistants and PhD students) were asked to participate in the study. 69 (27 percent) agreed to take part with 55 (21 percent) actually completing the survey. Each respondent was randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions. Under Condition 1 they were asked to read an article in Wikipedia that was related to their area of expertise. For example, a member of the Fungal Biology and Genetics Research Group (in the Institute of Genetics at Nottingham University; see http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/biology/Genetics/index .phtml) was asked to look at the article on metabolites. Areas of expertise were found from the academics' own Web sites with the choice of article being made by the author. If there was any doubt the expert was contacted for advice. Under Condition 2 respondents were asked to read a random article. Wikipedia's own random article selection feature was used to assign a different article to each Condition 2 respondent. (http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_11/chesney/ )
It's very short, so it's not too big of an inconvenience to actually read it.
Nintendo? It's 117 years old, and able to release a much hyped console.
It's changed business models a few times. It started out as a playing card company. If you want to discuss a successful long-lived organization - look at the Catholic church. It's been around for two thousand years. It's got just a few layers of management and at the top 183 cardinals report to the Pope.Plus the announced release date* from the Catholic Church's "Head Spokesman" makes Microsoft look pretty reliable and on-target by comparison.
* "Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom" - Matthew Chapter 16, Verse 28
Imagine the horrors if they had had this technology in the late 80s/early 90s. The world would still be using Windows because Linus' dog ate his homework and the only copy of the draft GPL would be smouldering from the end of a roach clip in Richard Stallman's bedroom (aka The Swinging Bit Pad).
I've never heard of a "young child" who even understood the concept of money and its limited supply and the fact people have to work for it let alone dreamt of one day being a banker. A bus driver, maybe. A pirate, probably. A cosmonaut/astronaut, I'm sure. A scientist, I can personally testify that that is a common child's dream. But a guy who sits at a desk all day filling out paperwork and wearing a tie? What the hell is wrong with a kid who wants to do that when they grow up? All right, maybe Michael J Fox in Family Ties, but other than that it seems unlikely. Incidentally, there were banks (sberkassy) in the Soviet Union as far back as the early 20s, and there were bankers as well. So if some weird, psychologically disturbed child really wanted to be a banker there was nothing stopping him/her.
Oh, of course the Jews are behind it all, what an original theory.
The poster you're replying to does sound a bit...out there...but he/she is right in one thing: there are a lot of non-Jews from former Soviet countries that went to Israel in the 90s. Organised crime, drug and weapons smuggling, and forced sex trafficking in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv are serious problems--and most of it comes from criminals who came to Israel under the mass exodus from the USSR (who the governments were happy to be rid of) and who probably think "kosher" is a mispronunciation of "kasha." I don't really see how it can possibly be linked to neoconservatives or Bush unless you include those insane evangelical organisations in the USA like "Eagles' Wings" and "Christians for Israel"1 that pretend to want to help people in former Soviet blocs escape persecution and send them to Israel, but only because they want to try and fulfill the Armageddon prophecies of the Bible by restoring the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In other words, to a lot of fundamentalist Christians support of Israel is merely a means to an end--quite literally. By the way, as polemic and full of assumptions without anything to back them up as the parent was, throwing in the comments about the World Trade Center bombing et al was a bit unfair. Regardless of the poster's real feelings on the subject, the parent wasn't explicitly making anti-Semitic comments (in fact, anyone who assumes that every Israeli citizen must be Jewish is the one making the generalisations and shows they've obviously never been to Israel) and throwing things in that they never said to ridicule wasn't the best (or even an acceptable) way to go about replying.
Christians for Israel is an international spiritual movement of Christians who recognise the return of the Jewish people to Israel as fulfilment of biblical prophecy and a major sign pointing toward the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I don't really understand. I see the UK on a slow, disturbing slide into complete privacy invasion, but this isn't part of it. According to the article, the people monitoring the cameras cannot "activate" the microphone however they wish. Until the aggression sensor detects something, it is inaudible and nothing is being recorded. If you really find this so shocking and unheard of, think back before the telephone was universal and the police used to walk the beat just to find crimes occurring. How did they do that? They walked around and listened for people shouting, glass breaking, metal clanging, gunfire, etc. This system is no different, save the fact that unlike the policeman on the beat, the people monitoring cannot see two lovely women having a chat and decide they want to listen in to the conversation. If anything it's an improvement over the old way, while still allowing constrained police resources and manpower to be used elsewhere. Let me ask you this: if you were being raped and/or murdered in the middle of the night in a dark alley, would you rather be in earshot of a CCTV that the attacker knows for a fact is going to send a cop down and can use any evidence it collects against him later, or would you prefer to wait until it's over and fumble for your blood-soaked mobile (if it wasn't stolen) so you can be put on hold while the emergency line is full?
But it's an invasion of privacy! Yeah, yeah. Listen, if you shout something out in a public street in a loud manner, you've got to be pretty stupid to think you're entitled to any privacy. Apparently the neighbours opening their windows and listening to you is fine, but a piece of electronics doing the same is one more stone in the path to totalitarianism. Forgive me, but comparisons to 1984 may be a little premature. Did anybody read the book The Lottery? I didn't see too many high-tech futuristic security devices in there. Just as terrifying.
That said, I can think of only one really suitable place for this system: outside of football matches and in the subways. For those of you in the States that have never had to leave a subway station or get off a bus a few blocks from a football match that just let out, it's not exactly the most enjoyable way to spend one's evening taking a stroll. There are drunken neo-Nazis walking around in groups just waiting to let out their aggression from the game on whoever walks by. Sure, directly outside the stadium it's packed with police. But if you walk 2 or 3 blocks out and it's evening, you'd better hope you aren't black or Turkish or wearing clothes some skinhead doesn't care for. Since the end of the Cold War, continental Europe has been flooded with some of the stupidest, garbage-spewing, hate-filled Eastern Europeans (mostly East German and Polish) anyone can imagine. And they all love football and probably hate you, whoever you are, for no reason other than they had a shitty, dirt-poor life and blame you for it because you live in the Western half or have a different amount of melanin or foreskin. Fortunately the cameras would probably detect them before they even did anything, if only because there'll be ten of them walking around with beers singing nationalist songs and waking people up long before they decide somebody that walks past them needs a knife in the chest or the shit kicked out of them.
I've had to take economics classes in three different countries, and I have heard the exact same lecture(s) in all three. Not because it's specifically true, but rather because economics is filled with people who like to pretend they're scientists like physicists or chemists and that what they're studying is filled with just as many natural, incontrovertible laws as those of physics or chemistry. Of course, it just so happens that whatever century one finds themself in, those incontrovertible laws just happen, by some convenient circumstance, to completely justify and support the current status quo. What did J.B. Say think was the best system? Surprise, contemporary France. What did Hegel think was? Surprise again, contemporary Prussia. What do modern economists think (here I mean in the mainstream, not monetarists, Austrian school followers, market socialists, Pareconomists, et al)? Little surprise, but the current system is fabulous according to them. There's always, granted, a few things wrong with it, but nothing so radical that it will threaten the economist's career. I'll make a prediction and say that 300 years from now I can guess what economists will believe the best of all possible worlds is. What, you ask? Whatever the current system they happen to have is plus a few platitudes offering ways it could be improved that would ingratiate them towards their employers and influential heads of state. If that's how science really works, modern scientists ought to be ashamed of themselves for disagreeing with whoever is in power or whoever pays their salary.
And choice is fine when the choices are different. If one has to choose between 40 boxes of cereal that taste identical and fall within the same price range plus or minus a few pennies, the benefit of having a lot of options disappears. "Should I get the Brand A frosted wheat flakes, Brand B frosted wheat flakes,... or Brand N frosted wheat flakes?" To be honest it doesn't matter, because it all tastes the same anyway. Look at the investigations into the Pepsi Challenges years back. When they were repeated by researchers with more reliable controls and truer blind tests, the result was that most people couldn't tell the difference between the two. The problem with the shitty quality of food and consumer goods in the USSR had nothing to do with choice. It was more down to the fact that the government simply didn't give a shit about consumer goods because the real money was in exporting weapons to foreign militaries, and the public had no input whatsoever in what was economically needed or how it was manufactured.
That said, software isn't food and it's not very wise to compare it to food. If someone creates an operating system that's ten times more reliable than another, more widely used operating system--that ends up advancing society a notch or two. Or if someone comes up with a new algorithm that blows the most prevalent ones out of the water, that will have a very broad effect upon the whole world. Why? Because writing software is both a science and an art. Creating a new brand of hot dog with cheese squirted into the center is neither, regardless of the stated atomic weight of Bolonium or the aesthetic beauty of a jar of relish. Fostering new ideas and new ways of implementing those ideas should be encouraged. But having 20 different varieties of soap or cereal or frozen dinners doesn't really mean shit to anyone. Yeah, you'll bitch about how you no longer have that particular scent of Irish Spring you once loved, but nobody's going to freak out in the shower and commit suicide over it. It's pointless to pretend consumer choice for domestic commodities is in any way as important as having choices for productivity, research, writing a letter to your parents without the computer crashing halfway through, etc. Believing otherwise is to swallow all the garbage from economics professors who somehow justify to themselves that having 200 flavours of Doritos is a good thing, but decent public transportation or criticism of the success of Microsoft at the expense of the ability of others to innovate is the work of a Bolshevik Satan.
What exactly would be "open source" about the union? The people in it would be open source programmers? Or the decision-making would be done on an open and democratic level? If it's the latter, such unions have existed since the 19th century. In the United States (and elsewhere, but elsewhere existed other types of organisations based on the same principles) the largest was called the IWW, and was rather powerful until World War I when many of its speakers and salters were executed, imprisoned, or deported to other countries under the Espionage and Sedition Acts and during the J. Edgar Hoover-organised Palmer Raids, and was later finished off almost entirely under the Taft-Hartley Act (nicknamed the "Slave Labour Bill" by Harry Truman and euphemistically titled the "Labor-Management Relations Act") of 1947.
By the way, the Rand Corporation looked into general claims of tech/sci shortages in the late 90's, and found none. It is a scam.
Most likely there is a shortage of scientists and engineers...the fine print to that statement being "willing to work for the salaries offered." Hence the encouragement by the Tech Czar to increase the number of foreign entry visas for skilled workers. They're grateful to have the visa and the shit wage and lack of benefits is still a vast improvement to them compared to what they'd settle for back home. And if they ever start to complain, just cancel the visa and you're rid of them. No health care plan, no retirement package, no company car or stock options or competitive income, and best of all no complaining. And if they don't work out, there's plenty others to choose from. People see the free market and globalisation as such a miracle until it dawns on them, far too late, that labour--including theirs unless they happen to be the one doing the buying--is a tradeable commodity like any other.
Slashdot Mirror
There are IT unions in Austria and Germany, if not all of (western and central at least) Europe. The national constitution in Austria stipulates if 5 people sign a petition for a union, they become protected by law from their employer and have the right to form one without harassment. I'm not saying the companies don't treat the IT unions like shit, or that the union bosses aren't corrupted, but they do exist. 4 out of 5 people in Finland are union members. For IT workers it's only 1 out of 3, but that figure is probably still much, much higher than in the US and a lot of the low figure has to do with the fact that in Europe most young companies (less than 10 years old) offer two kinds of employment: full-time, which in a lot of European countries automatically entitles the employee to join a union at contract-signing time, and flex-time, which give the employee almost no rights whatsoever but have more flexible working hours. Even then, there's nothing legal stopping them from forming a union, they're just more easy to intimidate because their supervisor can suddenly say "Sorry, we suddenly have to cut your schedule to ten hours a week due to budget problems."
As for "2 out of 5 bosses lie" being interpreted as "3 out of 5 bosses tell the truth," don't forget that even a sociopath can pass a polygraph with flying colours. If they flinched when they fibbed, they wouldn't have gotten promoted in the first place.
You didn't mention where you get the battery replaced. I used to be a watch repairer, and when you buy a watch certified to be waterproof at 100 meters and go to have the battery replaced, a lot of places will simply refuse to do it and suggest you send it to the manufacturer. That's because after the seal on the gasket has been broken to get the back off the watch (in order to take the old battery out and put a new one in), it has to be put under pressure tests again to ensure that it is still certifiable as waterproof with the new seal in. If you just go into a jewelry shop or a department store and they switch the batteries for you right there, please do not consider it waterproof anymore. It's understandable that they can't test it for you, as a pressure tester can cost upwards of 10,000eu and gets extremely rare usage. But be forewarned that 90% of the time it isn't even safe to go in the shower with an uncertified watch let alone swimming or deep diving. The only thing keeping the water out is screws and/or the threads of the caseback. Now, on the other hand if you do get it replaced properly and don't void your warranty on it, the waterproofing test is probably going to cost you quite a penny for the test, the labour, and the shipping and handling (usually it's somewhere between 60 and 100 eu -- I don't know what that is in US dollars since they keep falling in exchange value every week but $1.30 is about 1eu now). When you factor in the added functionality of a cellphone or a PDA, it doesn't seem like such a bad investment for people who can afford it and will actually use those things. Now, if you take the waterproofing out of the equation and compare a cellphone to, say, a cheap Timex (one with no Indiglo furiously eating up the Lithium cel in a few months) that costs a handful of coins and will last somewhere between 3-20 years depending on how filthy and gummed up it gets, and suddenly it's, as you say, a much more convenient and cheap option.
I actually think it would be good if more people learned how to repair Rolexes. We used to have to send them out and our store policy was "Never open a Rolex!" because they had a tendency to explode and throw microscopic movements and pieces everywhere as soon as the caseback was taken off. The best story related to that job was actually the time someone came and asked me to take a look at their Rolex. I said, "What's wrong with it?" and she replied, "The battery just stopped this morning. I already had it replaced last year." I spent about ten seconds trying to come up with the least offensive way of telling the woman that a real Rolex doesn't use batteries. To make matters worse, she added with a pride-filled voice that it was a Mothersday gift from her son. If we had more Rolex training and no anti-Rolex store policy I could at least have changed the battery and spared her the embarrassment of finding out from a complete stranger that her son was a cheap bastard.
I helped my brother-in-law by a new PC a few months ago. We went to the Cosmos, which is like what people in America call Best Buy or another large, "honey take my wallet and whatever you do don't give it back to me until we leave no matter what I say when we're inside" electronics megastore. They were selling two versions of the same high-end full bells-and-whistles workstation. One version had Windows XP and Nero burning software and one came with Debian with loads of extra applications filling the rest of the second DVD. The Windows version was about 260eu more than the Debian box despite the fact that hardware-wise they were identical and software-wise the Debian discs were about ten times as useful (the Windows box didn't even have any OEM office software like that shitty Works program they sometimes throw at you). The only problems he's had so far was getting his iPod working with Linux, but even Windows can't deal directly with HFS+. Say what you want, but I call that pretty damn competitive. They're even selling cheap Linux-based DVD players here in the LIDL grocery stores now. The days of Windows dominance are definitely numbered.
I think you're talking about this:
and/or this:
The quotes in themselves aren't fully summing up the idea, but I didn't think it would be wise to cut and paste the whole chapter(s) in this post. The first quote is from the chapter "On Management and the Maginot Line" in tC&tB. The second quote comes from the chapter "Gift Outcompetes Exchange" in Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere.
There's AutoCADbury, but it's only good for designing sculptures of large chocolate, creme-filled eggs. And the proprietary format for saving them is very similar to AutoCAD's. Thin, easy-to-tear aluminium foil that is simple to disassemble and process the results.
I won't pretend I've done the research to disagree or agree with either statement. But just doing a keyword search doesn't prove anything about what the "velocity" of any of those languages are, nor does it say how they compare. Saying there's 8213 Java openings compared to 180 for Ruby or 671 for Python doesn't really tell me what the numbers were a month or a year ago. I can do a search for the number of people with HIV in the world, but that single value won't indicate anything meaningful other than that it's non-zero. If you were trying to say that there are far more Java job offers than the other mentioned languages, congratulations. But what you're actually claiming is, "So, in support of the claim that Java is in 'slow decline', we have... java as the most requested programming language in the job market today." If the number of Java offers in 2005 were 0.3% higher than the number you just gave, that would indicate that indeed there is a slow decline. If it were 50% lower, there would have been a sharp increase. But there's no way of telling what the change is, so the "research" you've done cannot support any claim either way. In other words it indicates that there are a lot of job offers for Java and not so many for Ruby or PHP or Perl etc., but that doesn't tell me what the rate of change is, what the numbers are like on Monster.com or any other site, whether those Java offers are really for "large scale enterprise applications" or just applets and midlets, etc. I'm willing to take a blind guess that's based on nothing but anecdotal experience with doing job searches last year on the Austrian equivalent of HotJobs, but I'm wagering far more of those 5000 C++ offers are for enterprise apps or demanding software development in scientific and academic fields than the number of the same types of offers for Java programmers. Then again it would be easier to guess how accurate I am if the data listed in the post above mine actually meant anything.
HERE LIES SUCH AND SUCH
STRUCK DOWN IN HIS YOUTH
BY A GIANT PLASTIC CLITORIS
WITH A SNAGGLY TOOTH
http://www.digitalflotsam.com/archives/thekiller.
Strangely the other post that this one is referring to, in which pinkpanther got fingered, was modded "Flamebait" while the post that refers to it is +4 Informative. Maybe someone should mod the other post up instead of down, as it gives evidence to support the theory that this whole article is a hoax, and could help people in the future avoid wasting as much time reading it as we (or at least I) have.
I decided to reply here rather than anywhere else because I have several things I wanted to say. First, and most directly relevant to this branch of the conversation, is that the memory management of Java is not always as great as everyone who bashes C++ thinks it is. I recently spent six months working out the bugs in a J2ME MIDlet only to discover that it was still vomiting blood after a random number of hours because of a poorly coded garbage collector causing a null pointer exception. No way to fix it, no way to disable it or go around it, maybe $20.000USD (including salaries, test equipment, and repeated calls to Nokia and Sun's support centres for absolutely fruitless attempts by their people to figure out what was wrong) down the toilet on the project as it had to be scrapped because of a buggy implementation of the GC. Nokia's advice? "Tell your customers to buy newer mobiles with an updated version of the Java virtual machine." I love Ruby, and it's possibly my favourite language for proof of concept and quick testing, but I've had similar problems since 1.8x with variables local to a function suddenly disappearing halfway down the function's code because Ruby decided arbitrarily that they weren't necessary any longer...and the only way to avoid them being recycled and losing the data was to explicitly copy them to another variable and use that instead. It's not a language I'd rely on for mission-critical programming--yet. I'm checking the site once every week or so to see the latest status on 2.0.
As for C++ pointers being a "hassle" to call new and remembering to call delete on, all you have to do is use the auto_ptr provided by the Standard Template Library, which is 100% compatible with any C++ compiler that supports the Standard (GNU's ISO99 C++ support is fantastic), or use the safe pointers in the Boost Library. They'll know by themselves when to delete without you ever having to mess with it--and you can rest assured that if the program throws an exception and exits a function abnormally there's no pointer mess leftover because they'll call the deconstructor automatically in the stack unwind. The fact is, there are features in C++ that most people either don't use because they don't bother to learn them, or simply have never heard of. Vectors, strings, hash maps, associative arrays, linked lists, safe pointers, throw-catch exception handling, etc. Yeah the code can get a little harder to read, but that's the programmer's fault rather than the language.
My advice to the OP would be that the best experience comes from the workplace. You'll be given assignments for things that seem impossible to you and that you'd never be able to do. And sometimes you can't do them. But when you're faced with a challenge like that you'll find yourself being forced to become an expert on the subject very rapidly. And experience and confidence like that are hard to come by easily or as quickly in an academic environment.
My IP address is not in the US, so I guess that explains why only of the keywords complained about ("photo sharing") returns Google in the top ad spot. All the rest are companies I've never even heard of.
As for regular searching, when I tried the list of keywords in TFA, only "spreadsheet," "word processor," "video," "photo sharing," "maps," "start page," and "books" came up with Google in the first four results. It comes up for "instant messenger" in 6th place.
In conclusion, I doubted this was really some sort of conspiracy before reading the blog post, and now I doubt it even more unless Google simply doesn't give a shit about its international competition.
Speaking of competition, is it just a coincidence the author of the blog runs a company that makes and sells products which would have to compete with Google's free offerings? How much of this anger is just sour grapes? I would be pretty pissed too if I spent a lot of time making DHTML and Wiki-based company office software and Google offers basically the same stuff online at no cost.
From the ISO website's FAQ:
1.4 What does "international standardization" mean? When the large majority of products or services in a particular business or industry sector conform to International Standards, a state of industry-wide standardization can be said to exist. This is achieved through consensus agreements between national delegations representing all the economic stakeholders concerned - suppliers, users and, often, governments. They agree on specifications and criteria to be applied consistently in the classification of materials, the manufacture of products and the provision of services. In this way, International Standards provide a reference framework, or a common technological language, between suppliers and their customers - which facilitates trade and the transfer of technology.
1.5 What benefits does international standardization bring to businesses? For businesses, the widespread adoption of International Standards means that suppliers can base the development of their products and services on reference documents which have broad market relevance. This, in turn, means that they are increasingly free to compete on many more markets around the world.
1.6 What benefits does international standardization bring to customers? For customers, the worldwide compatibility of technology which is achieved when products and services are based on International Standards brings them an increasingly wide choice of offers, and they also benefit from the effects of competition among suppliers.
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/faqs/faq-general.html
Guess what the article doesn't say: How they actually make them. You read the entire article, which is basically just a fluff piece history of the company and some numbers that might as well be from the LEGO Employees' Quarterly Newsletter, and get to the bottom where there's a link to a slideshow of how they're produced. Lo and behold the slideshow link gives you a 404 File Not Found. So if you only clicked on this story under the impression that it is of any use for explaining or illustrating the production process, you're in for a huge disappointment. Maybe someone could add "Thanks to Businessweek.com's Broken Website I Still Don't Know" in front of the title "How They Make LEGO Bricks."
The plan to change the 1USD bill with a coin is already underway. It was in the news a few days ago. They will feature a different dead president every 3 months with Nixon being the last already-planned coin in 2016. Personally, I like the way the euro currency is designed. The coins increase in size and change colour based on value (penny being the smallest and 2eu being the biggest), as do the bills. So when it comes time to pay a waiter, you can just reach into your pocket and feel whether or not you have enough 1- and 2-eu coins to cover it without taking them out and showing everybody how pathetically broke you are. Not to mention one time I got paid in cash at work and I have to admit I felt like a pretty big wheel down at the cracker factory when I was folding up that enormous 500eu bill.
p e=domesticNews&storyID=2006-11-20T134325Z_01_N2025 2060_RTRUKOC_0_US-ECONOMY-COIN.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsHo me-C3-domesticNews-2
Here is the article about the 1$ coin:
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?ty
Shutting down one website in Russia will not end piracy. Have you ever been to Moscow? You can get practically any piece of software, DVD, or CD ever printed for nothing by just walking to an outside market. I have the first five Led Zeppelin albums in 256kbps MP3 format on CD which I got in Russia for the equivalent of about 1euro. How much are those albums worth retail? About 14eu apiece? I had a friend who moved here from the Ukraine and every time her parents would visit Russia on vacation they'd actually go around asking all of their relatives beforehand if they needed anything from Moscow (and I don't mind souvenirs or clothing or what-have-you, but copies of Windows XP or movies or things of that nature). Piracy is built into their culture. Hell, for 80 years they didn't have any private copyrights at all. Thinking that shutting down this one website will turn the citizens of Russia into sudden international-law-abiding retail purchasers, especially without a sharper increase in their standard of living and disposable income, has got to be the stupidest idea in the world.
There are a few situations I can see where everyday workstation users might have a bit of trouble without any training. One would be, as you touched upon, mounting devices, CDs, floppies, USB sticks, etc., to get files that aren't on the primary hard drive or to save something. OK, maybe a French depute doesn't need to understand all of the mechanics and optional arguments of dd or mkisofs, but eventually someone will want to take work home with them on a disk/CD, load something off a pen drive, or burn a graphical presentation to a DVD. Having to tell them as part of the IT department, "Oh, that's too complicated for you. Yeah, I know even someone as stupid as you could figure it out in Windows, but it's a bit trickier now--there's more to remember. I'll come by and do it for you later" is simply not going to be tolerated very long. The problem only gets harder when one considers that the older you get, the more resistant one becomes to new information and ideas. And parliaments aren't exactly full of people in their prime.
Another problem that could arise is if the XServer crashes and the user, who maybe hasn't used DOS in 10+ years, is suddenly met with this command prompt and a lot of text about XFontErrors and core dumps. Their first thought probably won't be, "Woops, I guess I'd better restart the XServer and e-mail this core dump and a list of things I was doing at the time to the appropriate people. How mildly inconvenient," but rather, "Oh, shit, oh shit oh shit, I just destroyed the computer. I'm going to be fired!" and that's when, thinking back to their days in Windows when they needed to fix a crashed program, hit the power button to reboot the computer...without unmounting any of the filesystems or properly shutting down.
I'm too young to have read tech magazines in the late 80s/early 90s (other than those often funny often unfunny Fifth Wave strips in the Xxxx for Dummies books). Was there all this bullshit back then too about how people shouldn't switch from MS-DOS/Mac/etc. to Windows for Workgroups because of the "high cost of training people?"
He not only "sharply criticized" campaign finance laws, he calls the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law "the most systematic effort to censor and repress political speech by those in power since the Federalist overreach of the 18th century." The whole thing, if you have the masochistic desire to read it, can be found here: http://www.newt.org/backpage.asp?art=3079
I look at TFA with a little cynicism, since it's from a local paper and doesn't give any specifics (and I can't find a transcript online--then again I'm six hours ahead of the East Coast and it was only yesterday). But it's on CNN's Political Ticker site, so I guess somebody somewhere must have verified it.
And I believe someone should RTFA before weighing in on it. It wasn't divided into "people who are grad students" and "people who aren't grad students," it was divided into "people who are grad students or researchers in a certain field and are given an article from Wikipedia about that field" and "people who are grad students or researchers in a certain field and are given a random article from Wikipedia's 'Random Article' link in the Navigation Menu on the front page." Or maybe we shall let the study itself explain:
It's very short, so it's not too big of an inconvenience to actually read it.
Nintendo? It's 117 years old, and able to release a much hyped console.
It's changed business models a few times. It started out as a playing card company. If you want to discuss a successful long-lived organization - look at the Catholic church. It's been around for two thousand years. It's got just a few layers of management and at the top 183 cardinals report to the Pope.Plus the announced release date* from the Catholic Church's "Head Spokesman" makes Microsoft look pretty reliable and on-target by comparison. * "Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom" - Matthew Chapter 16, Verse 28
Imagine the horrors if they had had this technology in the late 80s/early 90s. The world would still be using Windows because Linus' dog ate his homework and the only copy of the draft GPL would be smouldering from the end of a roach clip in Richard Stallman's bedroom (aka The Swinging Bit Pad).
I've never heard of a "young child" who even understood the concept of money and its limited supply and the fact people have to work for it let alone dreamt of one day being a banker. A bus driver, maybe. A pirate, probably. A cosmonaut/astronaut, I'm sure. A scientist, I can personally testify that that is a common child's dream. But a guy who sits at a desk all day filling out paperwork and wearing a tie? What the hell is wrong with a kid who wants to do that when they grow up? All right, maybe Michael J Fox in Family Ties, but other than that it seems unlikely. Incidentally, there were banks (sberkassy) in the Soviet Union as far back as the early 20s, and there were bankers as well. So if some weird, psychologically disturbed child really wanted to be a banker there was nothing stopping him/her.
The poster you're replying to does sound a bit...out there...but he/she is right in one thing: there are a lot of non-Jews from former Soviet countries that went to Israel in the 90s. Organised crime, drug and weapons smuggling, and forced sex trafficking in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv are serious problems--and most of it comes from criminals who came to Israel under the mass exodus from the USSR (who the governments were happy to be rid of) and who probably think "kosher" is a mispronunciation of "kasha." I don't really see how it can possibly be linked to neoconservatives or Bush unless you include those insane evangelical organisations in the USA like "Eagles' Wings" and "Christians for Israel"1 that pretend to want to help people in former Soviet blocs escape persecution and send them to Israel, but only because they want to try and fulfill the Armageddon prophecies of the Bible by restoring the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In other words, to a lot of fundamentalist Christians support of Israel is merely a means to an end--quite literally. By the way, as polemic and full of assumptions without anything to back them up as the parent was, throwing in the comments about the World Trade Center bombing et al was a bit unfair. Regardless of the poster's real feelings on the subject, the parent wasn't explicitly making anti-Semitic comments (in fact, anyone who assumes that every Israeli citizen must be Jewish is the one making the generalisations and shows they've obviously never been to Israel) and throwing things in that they never said to ridicule wasn't the best (or even an acceptable) way to go about replying.
1. From the About Us section of http://www.c4israel.org/ :
I don't really understand. I see the UK on a slow, disturbing slide into complete privacy invasion, but this isn't part of it. According to the article, the people monitoring the cameras cannot "activate" the microphone however they wish. Until the aggression sensor detects something, it is inaudible and nothing is being recorded. If you really find this so shocking and unheard of, think back before the telephone was universal and the police used to walk the beat just to find crimes occurring. How did they do that? They walked around and listened for people shouting, glass breaking, metal clanging, gunfire, etc. This system is no different, save the fact that unlike the policeman on the beat, the people monitoring cannot see two lovely women having a chat and decide they want to listen in to the conversation. If anything it's an improvement over the old way, while still allowing constrained police resources and manpower to be used elsewhere. Let me ask you this: if you were being raped and/or murdered in the middle of the night in a dark alley, would you rather be in earshot of a CCTV that the attacker knows for a fact is going to send a cop down and can use any evidence it collects against him later, or would you prefer to wait until it's over and fumble for your blood-soaked mobile (if it wasn't stolen) so you can be put on hold while the emergency line is full?
But it's an invasion of privacy! Yeah, yeah. Listen, if you shout something out in a public street in a loud manner, you've got to be pretty stupid to think you're entitled to any privacy. Apparently the neighbours opening their windows and listening to you is fine, but a piece of electronics doing the same is one more stone in the path to totalitarianism. Forgive me, but comparisons to 1984 may be a little premature. Did anybody read the book The Lottery? I didn't see too many high-tech futuristic security devices in there. Just as terrifying.
That said, I can think of only one really suitable place for this system: outside of football matches and in the subways. For those of you in the States that have never had to leave a subway station or get off a bus a few blocks from a football match that just let out, it's not exactly the most enjoyable way to spend one's evening taking a stroll. There are drunken neo-Nazis walking around in groups just waiting to let out their aggression from the game on whoever walks by. Sure, directly outside the stadium it's packed with police. But if you walk 2 or 3 blocks out and it's evening, you'd better hope you aren't black or Turkish or wearing clothes some skinhead doesn't care for. Since the end of the Cold War, continental Europe has been flooded with some of the stupidest, garbage-spewing, hate-filled Eastern Europeans (mostly East German and Polish) anyone can imagine. And they all love football and probably hate you, whoever you are, for no reason other than they had a shitty, dirt-poor life and blame you for it because you live in the Western half or have a different amount of melanin or foreskin. Fortunately the cameras would probably detect them before they even did anything, if only because there'll be ten of them walking around with beers singing nationalist songs and waking people up long before they decide somebody that walks past them needs a knife in the chest or the shit kicked out of them.
I've had to take economics classes in three different countries, and I have heard the exact same lecture(s) in all three. Not because it's specifically true, but rather because economics is filled with people who like to pretend they're scientists like physicists or chemists and that what they're studying is filled with just as many natural, incontrovertible laws as those of physics or chemistry. Of course, it just so happens that whatever century one finds themself in, those incontrovertible laws just happen, by some convenient circumstance, to completely justify and support the current status quo. What did J.B. Say think was the best system? Surprise, contemporary France. What did Hegel think was? Surprise again, contemporary Prussia. What do modern economists think (here I mean in the mainstream, not monetarists, Austrian school followers, market socialists, Pareconomists, et al)? Little surprise, but the current system is fabulous according to them. There's always, granted, a few things wrong with it, but nothing so radical that it will threaten the economist's career. I'll make a prediction and say that 300 years from now I can guess what economists will believe the best of all possible worlds is. What, you ask? Whatever the current system they happen to have is plus a few platitudes offering ways it could be improved that would ingratiate them towards their employers and influential heads of state. If that's how science really works, modern scientists ought to be ashamed of themselves for disagreeing with whoever is in power or whoever pays their salary.
... or Brand N frosted wheat flakes?" To be honest it doesn't matter, because it all tastes the same anyway. Look at the investigations into the Pepsi Challenges years back. When they were repeated by researchers with more reliable controls and truer blind tests, the result was that most people couldn't tell the difference between the two. The problem with the shitty quality of food and consumer goods in the USSR had nothing to do with choice. It was more down to the fact that the government simply didn't give a shit about consumer goods because the real money was in exporting weapons to foreign militaries, and the public had no input whatsoever in what was economically needed or how it was manufactured.
And choice is fine when the choices are different. If one has to choose between 40 boxes of cereal that taste identical and fall within the same price range plus or minus a few pennies, the benefit of having a lot of options disappears. "Should I get the Brand A frosted wheat flakes, Brand B frosted wheat flakes,
That said, software isn't food and it's not very wise to compare it to food. If someone creates an operating system that's ten times more reliable than another, more widely used operating system--that ends up advancing society a notch or two. Or if someone comes up with a new algorithm that blows the most prevalent ones out of the water, that will have a very broad effect upon the whole world. Why? Because writing software is both a science and an art. Creating a new brand of hot dog with cheese squirted into the center is neither, regardless of the stated atomic weight of Bolonium or the aesthetic beauty of a jar of relish. Fostering new ideas and new ways of implementing those ideas should be encouraged. But having 20 different varieties of soap or cereal or frozen dinners doesn't really mean shit to anyone. Yeah, you'll bitch about how you no longer have that particular scent of Irish Spring you once loved, but nobody's going to freak out in the shower and commit suicide over it. It's pointless to pretend consumer choice for domestic commodities is in any way as important as having choices for productivity, research, writing a letter to your parents without the computer crashing halfway through, etc. Believing otherwise is to swallow all the garbage from economics professors who somehow justify to themselves that having 200 flavours of Doritos is a good thing, but decent public transportation or criticism of the success of Microsoft at the expense of the ability of others to innovate is the work of a Bolshevik Satan.
What exactly would be "open source" about the union? The people in it would be open source programmers? Or the decision-making would be done on an open and democratic level? If it's the latter, such unions have existed since the 19th century. In the United States (and elsewhere, but elsewhere existed other types of organisations based on the same principles) the largest was called the IWW, and was rather powerful until World War I when many of its speakers and salters were executed, imprisoned, or deported to other countries under the Espionage and Sedition Acts and during the J. Edgar Hoover-organised Palmer Raids, and was later finished off almost entirely under the Taft-Hartley Act (nicknamed the "Slave Labour Bill" by Harry Truman and euphemistically titled the "Labor-Management Relations Act") of 1947.
By the way, the Rand Corporation looked into general claims of tech/sci shortages in the late 90's, and found none. It is a scam.
Most likely there is a shortage of scientists and engineers...the fine print to that statement being "willing to work for the salaries offered." Hence the encouragement by the Tech Czar to increase the number of foreign entry visas for skilled workers. They're grateful to have the visa and the shit wage and lack of benefits is still a vast improvement to them compared to what they'd settle for back home. And if they ever start to complain, just cancel the visa and you're rid of them. No health care plan, no retirement package, no company car or stock options or competitive income, and best of all no complaining. And if they don't work out, there's plenty others to choose from. People see the free market and globalisation as such a miracle until it dawns on them, far too late, that labour--including theirs unless they happen to be the one doing the buying--is a tradeable commodity like any other.