... and thats how they want it. What they want, they get.
I've noticed that there are a number of ways that innovative IT projects get done:
1 - Somebody gets an idea, doesn't ask permission, just implements it and it grows 2 - Somebody has an idea, pays others to implement it and it grows, or dies 3 - Somebody has an idea, wastes untold funds on implementing it the wrong way, it dies 4 - Somebody has an idea, government wastes untold funds implementing the wrong idea 5 - variations on one of the above
The trouble with saying that we are going to do something different than what the current market leader has done is that it seldom works if it is supposed to supplant that current leader. Some recent examples? VHS vs. Betamax? HD-DVD vs DVD? Zune vs. iPod?
Google has not quite been iconized to the point that Hoover or Kleenex have been, but trying to replace Google at this point is the same as the Intel vs. AMD issues except that Google is way ahead of anyone else (don't bother pointing out the other available search engines at this point since it is not germane).
Germany and the EU may well demand that there is an EU equal to Google, but it does not follow that this government alternative will become self sustaining. If it can't function without life supporting funds from governments, it will be discontinued at some point.
Even if the technology is mature, there doesn't seem to be any business model to make this EU funded search engine self supporting. When the funds begin to dry up, so will innovation at this new search engine company, and that will signal the end of it. If Google stops innovating, it too will find its own end of life coming. Lack of innovation == lack of relevance in the fast pace of high tech. Governments are notorious for 'lack of innovation' problems.
Whether this is a good idea on Germany's part or not, there doesn't seem to be any historical evidence to indicate that this project will be long lived.
As mentioned, ferchrissakes, its just a model having sex on the beach, who would want to see that anyway?
Secondly, if the gov't of Brasil wants it taken down... uh, okay, remove it from all Brasilian based servers. If they still aren't happy, redirect all page view requests to a Brasilian gov't website.
Anyone out there with bandwidth? Host a copy yourself. The Brasilian gov't can't require all countries, all websites etc. to remove the video... The Internet cannot be regulated by any single government.
BTW, I do believe that the US government's attempts are at once stupid and lame, demonstrating for all the rest of the world to see that it is not possible to regulate the entire Internet without totally screwing up the Internet as it currently exists, and that trying to do so only highlights the ignorance of lawmakers to the nature of the beast they fear most... information.
Okay, smegma breath, I guess that means you are a tort lawyer with (obviously... snort) decades of experience in court!
Why is it that McD's now warns you that their coffee is hot? Why are there warnings on lighters? Why are there so many warnings on so many seemingly innocuous products? I'll tell you why, because people in the US are litigious. There are 'actual' lawyers that are referred to as 'ambulance chasers' because they will get some money to help other sue. If anyone needs to buy a clue, I'm thinking you need to, but doubt you have the intellectual bartering resources.
Now, with that said and done, please do explain some things to me, oh wizened legal guru. What safety testing is required to put a vehicle on the roads of the US, or any North American country? How will the insurance companies rate a vehicle with such equipment on board? Will it reduce insurance costs or increase them? How will the 'insurance odds' affect the sales of such vehicles? How will such a vehicle pass safety inspections? Who will pay for that additional testing equipment and test costs?
Now that you are thinking of real world, how exactly will the courts favor a vehicle that puts passengers at risk instead of saving them from it? Who will write the code to help the vehicle determine if the driver, not a passenger, is impaired from alcohol intake and not drugs, sleep deprivation, or other legal states? Maybe Microsoft? No, hmmm that leaves auto manufacturers assuming a larger risk, and insurance companies taking on a larger risk.
Yes, the law requires safety inspections as the responsibility of the owner, yet that does not shield manufacturers from responsibility for defects. There is presumably only one way to know if the detector is working... get drunk and see if it lets you drive. There are so many insurance and safety risks involved with implementing anything that can alter the mode/operation of a motor vehicle without human control that to date, only a speed control/limiter has been successfully implemented. Everything else is either initiated by the driver or by circumstance beyond further control (air bags etc.) or is simply an enhanced control of driver operated controls such as ABS, or fuel mixture etc. Even the systems used to stop the car from being started if you don't make a payment are human initiated, and do not (cannot) stop the car once it is started.
So, you have answers? I'd like to hear them.
So, please do tell us how this will really work...
For one very simple reason. Here in the litigious US of A, the first time that someone cannot be driven to the hospital in an emergency and suffers any kind of lasting trauma will be the last time that such devices are left enabled on vehicles. Yes, my brother was drunk when he fell out of the 2nd story window with the only phone in his hand, and yes, I had a beer, but was not drunk... still, the car killed my brother because we couldn't drive him to the hospital... and that would be the end of big brother and his alcohol detector.
Need another story? Yes, the alcohol detector in my vehicle failed and the car would not start. Consequently, I missed my plane and thus also lost a 1.3 Billion dollar account... so I'm suing the maker for 3.1 Billion dollars for loss of revenue, etc.
Grandma is panicked when the car starts slowing down in the wrong part of town because she just took some cold medicine, and there on the side of the busy avenue, she dies of a heart attack because the car thought she was drunk.
When anyone removes the control of the vehicle from the owner they then become responsible for actions or inactions of the vehicle. Sure, in some cases, this is probably a good thing, but the lawyers will see to it that this does not outweigh the bad things.
Politics, business, anything where money is involved has included bribes for about... well, since the inception of bribery... unless we are collecting a list of things MS is doing to be less than moral, or ethical, how is this news?
Description Leaf is a robot inspired by the computer game Creatures. One of our members began to develop a desktop simulation of one of these AI creatures called Norns. This particular critter was called Leaf. We decided that Leaf needed a physical body (i.e. robot). This forum is for the design/discussion and kibitzing of the build process. All are welcome to participate.
This is an open source project; both for hardware and software designs. Our goal is to provide all the information necessary for others to get started building their own robots. Please read the Open Source notice in the Introduction under "Files" before contributing a hardware design or software code to this project.
You are correct, I fear, and at least you understand the problem of differences of culture. Yes, India is probably better suited to serve the far eastern countries with outsourcing than they are to serve English speaking western countries.
In Canada, (west coast anyway) call centers have a very difficult time dealing with the various cultures that have settled there. Each culture presents different problems for the call centers, and they have adapted to these by treating each of them slightly differently. That may or may not be politically correct however it is the truth (truthiness anyone?).
Many good points were made on this thread, its been interesting. I do wish that others would recognize the problems of difference of culture in the outsourcing equation.
I don't assume people of any country cannot learn, but for 12 rupees/hour what do you expect? The value proposition of outsourcing is initially very low wage costs. This low wage set point is what causes lack of loyalty, and also lack of real caring whether there is good service or not in the eyes of the customer. If an extra 7 rupees/hour will cause them to leave one job and go to another, your project, company, customers are less than important or anything resembling important. (note that the numbers are made up for the sakes of understanding)
WRT learning, it is much easier for those of a common culture and language to learn culturally anchored ideas. What customers expect is surprisingly different from one culture to another. The ideas and concepts of western business ethos is lost on some cultures where nothing like it exists in their own culture.
I'm not assuming anything, never mind that some people cannot learn. That would be simply stupid.
While its true that it helps to 'flatten the world' into a large community, it harms our own communities when we outsource. Sure there is that short term bottom line issue of money, but you don't have to go much beyond 'short term' to see that the cost of wages is hardly the big cost in outsourcing. Before this story came out there were many others telling us how good outsourcing is and those that told how bad it is. The indicators have been there all along as to why it is bad.
Big indicators have been the outsourcing of work from India to China! The fact that customer service companies in India cannot communicate with the average person in western English speaking countries on a level that is equitable. The high turnover rates have always been there as a problem that was politely ignored in favor of lower initial labor costs.
Any project manager can tell you that trying to lead a project of software engineers that is not only geographically separate, but separated by as much as 12 hours from the part of the company that needs the software.
All of that is not news, or shouldn't be. What is news is that more and more companies are finally realizing this. There will be companies that continually hunt to find short term savings, like gold rush miners, but in the end, customer service and ease of development will drive down the desire to outsource work.
Yes, I know that Bill et al have proclaimed that there is a shortage of IT workers in the US, and apparently there is a glut of degreed IT workers in India. The trouble with such claims is that those Indian IT workers (no matter how many degrees they have) do not have any kind of realistic understanding of the western world's business environment, and often I swear that they really have no idea about software either, but I suppose that is borne from not understanding the business culture as well.
This story is really about how outsourcing work to foreign countries is coming back to bite the people that thought outsourcing was a good idea to start with.
Those who won't learn from history.... and all those nice cliche's
Impressive, yes... but does it contain
on
Map of the Internet
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
any truthiness?
Someone send this to Colbertnation.com and ask them for a review?
the previous story mentioned social justice in the headline... social justice here would be to have CD copies of their malicious software being rammed up their backsides "without their consent" so to speak...
Why is the DOJ worried more about aunt Eunice downloading MP3s than they are about people who are maliciously causing harm?
sigh, I'll write but I wonder if my representatives will actually notice...
Yep, and with the support of the OOo folks, I hope that Windows users soon will be in a place where they don't notice the difference either... Seriously, does MS have any feet left to shoot?
But the only real concern in making a killer NIC is keeping all the processing off of the CPU and bus. If the CPU/MB can shuffle packets at and from the NIC at the speed of the data bus, then it can't get much faster unless you want to offload protocols to the NIC etc.
A killer NIC? LOL what a phrase... Aren't there several of these Nicolas guys in jail already? right next to the killer Bobs and killer Joes.... sheesh
First, Cuban says Google is stupid for buying YouTube, now all the megamediagiants want to band together to try to beat Google at its own game? Google has some work cut out for it... maybe?
If you consider that **AA wants to pull the rug out from under Google et al, now MS is trying their hand at the online video thing... then along comes johnny mediagiant to try too.
Perhaps there is more to this free internet videos thing after all?
How can the MPAA continue to want to control content and then want to play in the same space as Google?
The only thing I'm certain of is that this could be very interesting...
Next year we will see it as a tag on part of a bill called something like "Keep soldier safe bill" and in trying to save our soldiers or keep porn from the kiddies, they'll find a way to control the tubes of the intarwebs...
Why would any government agency, or anyone else, pay for this? There seems to be absolutely NO security... why pay, you get as good or better for free with F/OSS... wow
Now we can send everyone's name, social security number, and banking details to the as yet undiscovered ET's in the universe on one DVD:-)
Seriously, what is the target use for this? Getting 3 seasons of 'I love Lucy' on one DVD? Replace tape as a backup medium? Distribute personal copies of the Library of Congress to each taxpayer?
What would use 1TB of data storage in normal everyday kind of use?
While there is that problem, and related problems, most everyone in the western world (covers me and my family) have mobile devices whether that is a phone, pda, or pager. These devices can be registered with the service in question as the place to send the token for 2nd factor authentication. To eliminate man in the middle, there are other methods rather than straight https. Sure, that might require that you install some app(let) on your machine and limit you to using only machines with that app(let) installed, but this still allows quite secure remote access to your data with a much reduced risk. Certainly much safer than current methods of remote access to that data.
Slashdot Mirror
... and thats how they want it. What they want, they get.
I've noticed that there are a number of ways that innovative IT projects get done:
1 - Somebody gets an idea, doesn't ask permission, just implements it and it grows
2 - Somebody has an idea, pays others to implement it and it grows, or dies
3 - Somebody has an idea, wastes untold funds on implementing it the wrong way, it dies
4 - Somebody has an idea, government wastes untold funds implementing the wrong idea
5 - variations on one of the above
The trouble with saying that we are going to do something different than what the current market leader has done is that it seldom works if it is supposed to supplant that current leader. Some recent examples? VHS vs. Betamax? HD-DVD vs DVD? Zune vs. iPod?
Google has not quite been iconized to the point that Hoover or Kleenex have been, but trying to replace Google at this point is the same as the Intel vs. AMD issues except that Google is way ahead of anyone else (don't bother pointing out the other available search engines at this point since it is not germane).
Germany and the EU may well demand that there is an EU equal to Google, but it does not follow that this government alternative will become self sustaining. If it can't function without life supporting funds from governments, it will be discontinued at some point.
Even if the technology is mature, there doesn't seem to be any business model to make this EU funded search engine self supporting. When the funds begin to dry up, so will innovation at this new search engine company, and that will signal the end of it. If Google stops innovating, it too will find its own end of life coming. Lack of innovation == lack of relevance in the fast pace of high tech. Governments are notorious for 'lack of innovation' problems.
Whether this is a good idea on Germany's part or not, there doesn't seem to be any historical evidence to indicate that this project will be long lived.
As mentioned, ferchrissakes, its just a model having sex on the beach, who would want to see that anyway?
Secondly, if the gov't of Brasil wants it taken down... uh, okay, remove it from all Brasilian based servers. If they still aren't happy, redirect all page view requests to a Brasilian gov't website.
Anyone out there with bandwidth? Host a copy yourself. The Brasilian gov't can't require all countries, all websites etc. to remove the video... The Internet cannot be regulated by any single government.
BTW, I do believe that the US government's attempts are at once stupid and lame, demonstrating for all the rest of the world to see that it is not possible to regulate the entire Internet without totally screwing up the Internet as it currently exists, and that trying to do so only highlights the ignorance of lawmakers to the nature of the beast they fear most... information.
Yes, they have a future, just not a very bright one....
Okay, smegma breath,
I guess that means you are a tort lawyer with (obviously... snort) decades of experience in court!
Why is it that McD's now warns you that their coffee is hot? Why are there warnings on lighters? Why are there so many warnings on so many seemingly innocuous products? I'll tell you why, because people in the US are litigious. There are 'actual' lawyers that are referred to as 'ambulance chasers' because they will get some money to help other sue. If anyone needs to buy a clue, I'm thinking you need to, but doubt you have the intellectual bartering resources.
Now, with that said and done, please do explain some things to me, oh wizened legal guru. What safety testing is required to put a vehicle on the roads of the US, or any North American country?
How will the insurance companies rate a vehicle with such equipment on board? Will it reduce insurance costs or increase them? How will the 'insurance odds' affect the sales of such vehicles? How will such a vehicle pass safety inspections? Who will pay for that additional testing equipment and test costs?
Now that you are thinking of real world, how exactly will the courts favor a vehicle that puts passengers at risk instead of saving them from it? Who will write the code to help the vehicle determine if the driver, not a passenger, is impaired from alcohol intake and not drugs, sleep deprivation, or other legal states? Maybe Microsoft? No, hmmm that leaves auto manufacturers assuming a larger risk, and insurance companies taking on a larger risk.
Yes, the law requires safety inspections as the responsibility of the owner, yet that does not shield manufacturers from responsibility for defects. There is presumably only one way to know if the detector is working... get drunk and see if it lets you drive. There are so many insurance and safety risks involved with implementing anything that can alter the mode/operation of a motor vehicle without human control that to date, only a speed control/limiter has been successfully implemented. Everything else is either initiated by the driver or by circumstance beyond further control (air bags etc.) or is simply an enhanced control of driver operated controls such as ABS, or fuel mixture etc. Even the systems used to stop the car from being started if you don't make a payment are human initiated, and do not (cannot) stop the car once it is started.
So, you have answers? I'd like to hear them.
So, please do tell us how this will really work...
For one very simple reason. Here in the litigious US of A, the first time that someone cannot be driven to the hospital in an emergency and suffers any kind of lasting trauma will be the last time that such devices are left enabled on vehicles. Yes, my brother was drunk when he fell out of the 2nd story window with the only phone in his hand, and yes, I had a beer, but was not drunk... still, the car killed my brother because we couldn't drive him to the hospital... and that would be the end of big brother and his alcohol detector.
Need another story? Yes, the alcohol detector in my vehicle failed and the car would not start. Consequently, I missed my plane and thus also lost a 1.3 Billion dollar account... so I'm suing the maker for 3.1 Billion dollars for loss of revenue, etc.
Grandma is panicked when the car starts slowing down in the wrong part of town because she just took some cold medicine, and there on the side of the busy avenue, she dies of a heart attack because the car thought she was drunk.
When anyone removes the control of the vehicle from the owner they then become responsible for actions or inactions of the vehicle. Sure, in some cases, this is probably a good thing, but the lawyers will see to it that this does not outweigh the bad things.
Good intentions... but a stupid idea.
Politics, business, anything where money is involved has included bribes for about... well, since the inception of bribery... unless we are collecting a list of things MS is doing to be less than moral, or ethical, how is this news?
Try some of the resources on the web. The leaf project uses Windows, but is open... as in no cost
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/leaf_an_AI_rob
From the group site:
Description
Leaf is a robot inspired by the computer game Creatures. One of our members began to develop a desktop simulation of one of these AI creatures called Norns. This particular critter was called Leaf. We decided that Leaf needed a physical body (i.e. robot). This forum is for the design/discussion and kibitzing of the build process. All are welcome to participate.
This is an open source project; both for hardware and software designs. Our goal is to provide all the information necessary for others to get started building their own robots. Please read the Open Source notice in the Introduction under "Files" before contributing a hardware design or software code to this project.
For much more information about the Leaf robots, see his website at http://leafproject.org./
likes to hang out in karaoke bars, or watch dancing with the stars.... oh, its not the right kind of pain? damn
that finding printer drivers for Linux was difficult....
Where the hell do you find a printer driver for this? I'm pretty sure it won't be from the Intelligent Design Printer company LOLOL
You are correct, I fear, and at least you understand the problem of differences of culture. Yes, India is probably better suited to serve the far eastern countries with outsourcing than they are to serve English speaking western countries.
In Canada, (west coast anyway) call centers have a very difficult time dealing with the various cultures that have settled there. Each culture presents different problems for the call centers, and they have adapted to these by treating each of them slightly differently. That may or may not be politically correct however it is the truth (truthiness anyone?).
Many good points were made on this thread, its been interesting. I do wish that others would recognize the problems of difference of culture in the outsourcing equation.
Oh well
I don't assume people of any country cannot learn, but for 12 rupees/hour what do you expect? The value proposition of outsourcing is initially very low wage costs. This low wage set point is what causes lack of loyalty, and also lack of real caring whether there is good service or not in the eyes of the customer. If an extra 7 rupees/hour will cause them to leave one job and go to another, your project, company, customers are less than important or anything resembling important. (note that the numbers are made up for the sakes of understanding)
WRT learning, it is much easier for those of a common culture and language to learn culturally anchored ideas. What customers expect is surprisingly different from one culture to another. The ideas and concepts of western business ethos is lost on some cultures where nothing like it exists in their own culture.
I'm not assuming anything, never mind that some people cannot learn. That would be simply stupid.
While its true that it helps to 'flatten the world' into a large community, it harms our own communities when we outsource. Sure there is that short term bottom line issue of money, but you don't have to go much beyond 'short term' to see that the cost of wages is hardly the big cost in outsourcing. Before this story came out there were many others telling us how good outsourcing is and those that told how bad it is. The indicators have been there all along as to why it is bad.
.... and all those nice cliche's
Big indicators have been the outsourcing of work from India to China! The fact that customer service companies in India cannot communicate with the average person in western English speaking countries on a level that is equitable. The high turnover rates have always been there as a problem that was politely ignored in favor of lower initial labor costs.
Any project manager can tell you that trying to lead a project of software engineers that is not only geographically separate, but separated by as much as 12 hours from the part of the company that needs the software.
All of that is not news, or shouldn't be. What is news is that more and more companies are finally realizing this. There will be companies that continually hunt to find short term savings, like gold rush miners, but in the end, customer service and ease of development will drive down the desire to outsource work.
Yes, I know that Bill et al have proclaimed that there is a shortage of IT workers in the US, and apparently there is a glut of degreed IT workers in India. The trouble with such claims is that those Indian IT workers (no matter how many degrees they have) do not have any kind of realistic understanding of the western world's business environment, and often I swear that they really have no idea about software either, but I suppose that is borne from not understanding the business culture as well.
This story is really about how outsourcing work to foreign countries is coming back to bite the people that thought outsourcing was a good idea to start with.
Those who won't learn from history
any truthiness?
Someone send this to Colbertnation.com and ask them for a review?
the previous story mentioned social justice in the headline... social justice here would be to have CD copies of their malicious software being rammed up their backsides "without their consent" so to speak...
Why is the DOJ worried more about aunt Eunice downloading MP3s than they are about people who are maliciously causing harm?
sigh, I'll write but I wonder if my representatives will actually notice...
Yep, and with the support of the OOo folks, I hope that Windows users soon will be in a place where they don't notice the difference either... Seriously, does MS have any feet left to shoot?
But the only real concern in making a killer NIC is keeping all the processing off of the CPU and bus. If the CPU/MB can shuffle packets at and from the NIC at the speed of the data bus, then it can't get much faster unless you want to offload protocols to the NIC etc.
A killer NIC? LOL what a phrase... Aren't there several of these Nicolas guys in jail already? right next to the killer Bobs and killer Joes.... sheesh
First, Cuban says Google is stupid for buying YouTube, now all the megamediagiants want to band together to try to beat Google at its own game? Google has some work cut out for it... maybe?
If you consider that **AA wants to pull the rug out from under Google et al, now MS is trying their hand at the online video thing... then along comes johnny mediagiant to try too.
Perhaps there is more to this free internet videos thing after all?
How can the MPAA continue to want to control content and then want to play in the same space as Google?
The only thing I'm certain of is that this could be very interesting...
Next year we will see it as a tag on part of a bill called something like "Keep soldier safe bill" and in trying to save our soldiers or keep porn from the kiddies, they'll find a way to control the tubes of the intarwebs...
RFID tags that use batteries?? That just sounds like lo-jack?
you would swear it must be open source?
Why would any government agency, or anyone else, pay for this? There seems to be absolutely NO security... why pay, you get as good or better for free with F/OSS... wow
Some are even for cars. There are many that relate to computer hardware, but there are others:
t Vehicles/
http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/SmallEfficien
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osmc
Then WHY was it approved as a "standard"?
You my friend are asking the exact right question, one that I'm sure is to be repeated many times in the near future...their campaign contributions, former colleagues etc.
That would make for an interesting web application and an interesting election year...
Now we can send everyone's name, social security number, and banking details to the as yet undiscovered ET's in the universe on one DVD :-)
Seriously, what is the target use for this? Getting 3 seasons of 'I love Lucy' on one DVD? Replace tape as a backup medium? Distribute personal copies of the Library of Congress to each taxpayer?
What would use 1TB of data storage in normal everyday kind of use?
While there is that problem, and related problems, most everyone in the western world (covers me and my family) have mobile devices whether that is a phone, pda, or pager. These devices can be registered with the service in question as the place to send the token for 2nd factor authentication. To eliminate man in the middle, there are other methods rather than straight https. Sure, that might require that you install some app(let) on your machine and limit you to using only machines with that app(let) installed, but this still allows quite secure remote access to your data with a much reduced risk. Certainly much safer than current methods of remote access to that data.