Well most of the working condition in China/India/... are illegal under US/EU law. Using this working force to build your widget is not illegal, it is not even considered immoral - it is considered a good think, even a very good thing. Doing it is not discouraged, it is encouraged. The closest to dodgy you get it is to use fiscal paradise and fiscal loopholes, but then people will just tell you that if it is legal, it should be done.
Sure technically that is not the same, it is more complicated, there are laws, history, etc. But on principle, it boils down to finding a way not to pay a US widget worker is fine, not to pay you fair share of taxes is accepted, but not paying a US artist is immoral and illegal.
We are told we cannot defend some work in the US because it is more efficient elsewhere and any legislation would only delay the inevitable at great cost to all of us. We are also told that all the efficiency that the free market brings will pay back for all the pain it causes.
Yet we cling to laws that maintains artificial scarcity of digital goods and we go to great diplomatic extend to maintain those law in force in most of the world. Will not the gains in the future offset the pain of the current generation of artist ?
So I don't like Kim Dotcom as a man, he is difficult to like really. But frankly, that is as difficult to feel for the outrage of the *AA.
Not familiar with Central London I see. During business hour, there is mostly taxi, buses and professionals (deliveries, taxis, buses, maintenance, construction) Everybody takes the public transportation - or at least a taxi, including rich people.
In cities, the speed limit are useful for the safety of pedestrians. It does not matter if it takes the computer 1 microsecond to start breaking, momentum is what kills.
Unlike the US, Some European cities have a love/hate relationship with car - some cities are completely hostile. Look at London: expensive daily tax to drive downtown + no parking + even skyscraper have a maximum and ridiculously small number of subterranean parking space allowed: that is not surprising for a modern building with more than 2000 people working in it to only have a few loading bay and 5-10 service parking place. Other cities make the entire center of the city completely pedestrian and desynchronise traffic lights to increase the time lost commuting by car. So in the EU, don't hold your breath.
Thanks for the info, but really 150 years old tech ? 150 years ago aluminium was more expensive than gold, now take a look at your kitchen foil roll and the 6 pack in the fridge.
To put that in perspective, the first notable "flying machine" was invented 50 years after that. Yet we managed to put a man on the moon 69 years after, and 100 years after the sky is filled with airplane carrying passenger with safety record that rival all the other type of transportation.
The question is, except being good at your job, can you do any of the things they do ? The reverse is true. Our IT guys would not know how to use the application our business is actually selling or what is new in the latest version, something that the most junior in my team could do in his sleep. That's ok, we expect them to keep internet going, the server up, the mail on and the desktops running, we take care of delivering the apps the sales team managed to sell.
You assume a lot - you assume his coworker actually are idiots, not simply pissed off at the provider. That happen a lot in my company. We do the problem solving for all sort of failure to deliver from our providers. Weird processes, weird configurations, weird software and lot of time lost that you need to justify when there is a budget review or said vendor offer you an outsourcing solution to replace your team (your team take 1 day for 10 machines, we can do 100 machines in half a day with our cheap monkeys in random countries). Sometimes the correct path of action is actually to mark something as defective, you can still have fun at home if you like to feel clever.
We are slowly going back in an era where program running on your machine are just empty shells for processing that happens "on the cloud". For a while, it is likely that the only piece of open source running on your machine will be the OS and the browser. The totality of your data will be processed by closed source software.
To reuse your analogy. Sure as a hitch-hicker you should not ask for the car history. Now if instead of cars, the majority of people start taking public transportations, then it becomes another issue and there is a case for the public to know about their transport history.
If it says "Made in X" I would expect a large part of the assembly and base components to come from X. Otherwise, what does that even mean ? To take a neutral example, if you invite me to taste your home made food, I do not expect you to kill a cow and harvest your fields. But I certainly would expect something more than a frozen pizza from walmart cooked in your home oven, even if you put it in a real plate.
A CEO is a salesman, not an auditor or an engineer. Sure they will not deny the obvious (or what they are legally bound to disclose), but they will hide non-obvious right until they file for chapter 11 : first, that would be idiotic to expose your weaknesses to your competitor and secondly the CEO, as a leader, need to keep its troupe focused and motivated.
Seriously, what good would that do if he said: we are aware of the problem and made lot of changes, however, there is little chance it will work out at the end because our competitors are just so much better ?
It gets even worse when you think that the generation in power in politic and in the private sector is the hippie generation... they are like the ultimate get off my lawn generation.
Google is using every day meaning of word and try to figure out what the user mean. You can even mispell stuff and Google will figure out the right word you meant. That is indeed how human being have come to communicate.
The command line is anything but that - it requires a very strict syntax based on made-up word whose primary meaning was lost years after the technology that spawn them disappeared. The "prompt" thing is really like an autistic version of human communication.
There was no store when the first iPhone was launched. Apple also did invest quite heavily in a (at the time) emerging and badly supported competitor: HTML5 (even going as far as pretenting that it will be the only way to develop for iPhone). Considering the standard of 2007 in mobile browsing (i.e. tiny screen displaying abridged version), they could have gotten away for a lot more control freakiness.
And let's not forget that Adobe has had a love hate relationship with Apple for quite a bit of time and with Flash, they showed a continuous stream of bad quality release and general lack of interest in the platform. (and continue even today - Flash sucks on Mac)
So indeed, that is control of the platform. However, rather than profit motivated, that is the classical control of the platform: avoid your competitor to control your platform or have your user blame you for somebody else mistakes.
Interestingly we can compare that decision with the biggest competitor of the iPhone: Android. Android did support Flash and java. Yet it took 4 years for a highly motivated Adobe to produce a version of flash that run smoothly, but only on an incredibly powerful 1 GHz double core mobile phone (in 2007, people would have laughed at you for thinking that was even possible) And for java, you have Oracle suing Google for not lining enough money in its pocket. Really, as a CEO trying carve a new niche in a highly competitive market, would you like to depend on those 2 (Oracle, Adobe) "partners" ?
Also that is a guy that by trade exposed conspiracies that would make that one pale in comparison. If you and me would dismiss the thought, I guess someone like Assange has every reason to be suspicious.
they were a force of trained Pilots who volunteered their service to a non-US Military effort out of a personal interest and as such, took their lives into their own hands
I find interesting to note that this kind of acts would label you as terrorist, and for a super power like Japan at the time, they would be justified to put the country that trained those freelance dedicated pilots in his own "axe of evil".
That being said, the world was a very different place in the 1940, by those times moral standard, I'm a depraved failure. Context matters...
I read the summary to mean: "I'm a computer math guy looking for a money math career."
From the summary, he is a software engineer, working in a software company in the Bay area with a master in CS and asking the question on slashdot. That very strongly hint to something like "I'm a software developer looking to develop software in the finance sector." As a software developer that made the switch into finance myself, I asked the same question and gave the answer right there in my post in addition of replying to the GP.
Just to summarize, although software in bank deal with money, they are surprisingly similar to other type of software you would develop in other industries. The amount of math and business knowledge is similar to other field (compared to other fields I know: retail, heavy industry, publishing, law, insurance, telecom): you can focus on the tech knowledge and become an architect or you can learn more of the business and become later a business analyst. Banks are smug bastards, they like to hire people with previous banking experience. From a tech point of view, it varies between very old school stuff to small agile team making a new order processing using Clojure with a front end in node.js.
The OP isn't looking for an IT position. I'm not sure from where that assumption came.
BTW, I meant IT as development, as it is clear reading the very next line "There is literally an army of development jobs". The information I give would be weird to give about IT jobs.
What are you talking about ? The very vast majority of IT in the Finance world is just your vanilla application. CRUD stuff, Integration, and all sorts of data mangling back and forth between systems. As in any industry you will need some business knowledge to complement you tech knowledge. You do not need a PhD in "Math with Applied Bullshit" to enter finance.
There is literally an army of development jobs in the financial sector. Lots of interesting stuff lost in a sea of boring assignments in team stuck in management and technical paralysis. i.e. like working for any large company.
The vast minority of people that work in finance are psychopathic moron that make millions in bonus each year. There are quite a lot of 20 something that are psychopathic moron but make nothing at all, but the majority of people that fill those huge skyscrappers are just normal Joe doing normal office job.
I don't know how that works in the US, but in EU you do not have a constitutional right to consume. The owner of a shop has the right of not serving you, at his discretion. (there is obviously some limit such as discrimination or other stuff) I hope that in the US, you are not required by law to sell the proverbial cord that will be used to hang you : at worst the seller could be into trouble, at best he will think he aided somebody break the law.
That said this story look more like the usual reality-tv drama. The girl could have been real bitchy the first time (she brought a tv crew for god sake, she is fishing for a scandal, not for a resolution), the seller on the other hand could have been an arse caught in a bad day.
Of course, that is funny I get it. But seriously, PC maker have been using Intel and Microsoft as a convenient R&D lab. On the consumer side ( 1 sale = 1 machine ), except pushing ever more dubious crippled-ware from their "trusted" partners, their only innovation was in the cost reduction, race to the bottom sector. Big brand only really invested any R&D in the entreprise world ( 1 sale = 10k machines + 3 years maintenance contract + servers + services )
Apple took a different approach, they could not compete on price per MHz (at the time), so they competed on "anything else" that can sell except the price tag, and in a market not fiercely defended by the big players: Joe User market.
Meh, what do you think running a business is really ? Do you really think that Google did consult all its mobile phone manufacturer partner to ask their opinion about buying Motorola ? No they didn't because that is still a free market and partnerships are only temporary truce not legal commitment to preserve your partner business model and profit margin.
If MS is not nice enough with its partners and they take offense they will retaliate by being less nice in turn. That's what it means to be partner - that is a 2 way relationship.
Mango features they unveiled were promptly implemented by Apple.
Come-on, that is a bit lame. If you have done any type of development in a large company, you would know that it takes month to do about anything, even something trivial takes month to develop, especially if you need to make sure that the new feature work well on one of the market leading device. That is even worse at Apple where there is a culture of being anally retentive on the little details and they completely ignored for years other great Android features. You will notice that all companies always seem to work on roughly the same stuff at the same time, if it get delivered soon after, that means that it was in the pipeline for a while.
What happens is that MS has few opportunities to "wow" the people, so the best strategy is to keep everything under wrap until the actual user is there to buy. If I want to be cynical (see a previous post about how I feel with my now obsolete Lumia 710), I would say that it is also better for MS not to remind too much the customer buying the current Windows phones what they will miss in a few months.
And then fuck, that is MS, promising and not delivering has been their company policy for year. Better for them to take the Apple approach: talk about the stuff when it ships.
The value of nokia is the brand name and its know-how. The engineer wont stay on a sinking ship and the one that do will get fired a few at a times each time nokia sinks a bit deeper.
Once the shares hits rock bottom, what exactly will MS buy ? A bunch of middle-manager remembering the good old times when they had the technical resource to build phone, or a brand that is only remembered in declining markets like feature phones ?
That being said, what is Nokia thinking ? They have basically written off all their current line up of phones, they are basically back to the same position they were 1 year ago, with phone running only dead system. I personally bought a Lumia 710 because as it could work as a GPS (downloadable map for free) and was very cheap. I actually thought that they had something with Windows phone, and was expecting WP8.
I can imagine how many updates the Nokia apps will receive in the following months... that is a big fuck you like not even Apple would dare.
You got a iPhone 3G then 3GS then 4. You switch to HTC, then the S2 and now the S3 ? That is like 6 phones in 4 years - thank you for doing your bit to save the economy !
Slashdot Mirror
Well most of the working condition in China/India/... are illegal under US/EU law. Using this working force to build your widget is not illegal, it is not even considered immoral - it is considered a good think, even a very good thing. Doing it is not discouraged, it is encouraged. The closest to dodgy you get it is to use fiscal paradise and fiscal loopholes, but then people will just tell you that if it is legal, it should be done.
Sure technically that is not the same, it is more complicated, there are laws, history, etc. But on principle, it boils down to finding a way not to pay a US widget worker is fine, not to pay you fair share of taxes is accepted, but not paying a US artist is immoral and illegal.
We are told we cannot defend some work in the US because it is more efficient elsewhere and any legislation would only delay the inevitable at great cost to all of us. We are also told that all the efficiency that the free market brings will pay back for all the pain it causes.
Yet we cling to laws that maintains artificial scarcity of digital goods and we go to great diplomatic extend to maintain those law in force in most of the world. Will not the gains in the future offset the pain of the current generation of artist ?
So I don't like Kim Dotcom as a man, he is difficult to like really. But frankly, that is as difficult to feel for the outrage of the *AA.
Not familiar with Central London I see. During business hour, there is mostly taxi, buses and professionals (deliveries, taxis, buses, maintenance, construction) Everybody takes the public transportation - or at least a taxi, including rich people.
In cities, the speed limit are useful for the safety of pedestrians. It does not matter if it takes the computer 1 microsecond to start breaking, momentum is what kills.
Unlike the US, Some European cities have a love/hate relationship with car - some cities are completely hostile. Look at London: expensive daily tax to drive downtown + no parking + even skyscraper have a maximum and ridiculously small number of subterranean parking space allowed: that is not surprising for a modern building with more than 2000 people working in it to only have a few loading bay and 5-10 service parking place. Other cities make the entire center of the city completely pedestrian and desynchronise traffic lights to increase the time lost commuting by car. So in the EU, don't hold your breath.
To put that in perspective, the first notable "flying machine" was invented 50 years after that. Yet we managed to put a man on the moon 69 years after, and 100 years after the sky is filled with airplane carrying passenger with safety record that rival all the other type of transportation.
Pro bono should mean that they are not taking any cut ( vs "no win no fee" - that either get a fixed cut, or charge their cost against won amounts)
The question is, except being good at your job, can you do any of the things they do ? The reverse is true. Our IT guys would not know how to use the application our business is actually selling or what is new in the latest version, something that the most junior in my team could do in his sleep. That's ok, we expect them to keep internet going, the server up, the mail on and the desktops running, we take care of delivering the apps the sales team managed to sell.
You assume a lot - you assume his coworker actually are idiots, not simply pissed off at the provider. That happen a lot in my company. We do the problem solving for all sort of failure to deliver from our providers. Weird processes, weird configurations, weird software and lot of time lost that you need to justify when there is a budget review or said vendor offer you an outsourcing solution to replace your team (your team take 1 day for 10 machines, we can do 100 machines in half a day with our cheap monkeys in random countries). Sometimes the correct path of action is actually to mark something as defective, you can still have fun at home if you like to feel clever.
We are slowly going back in an era where program running on your machine are just empty shells for processing that happens "on the cloud". For a while, it is likely that the only piece of open source running on your machine will be the OS and the browser. The totality of your data will be processed by closed source software.
To reuse your analogy. Sure as a hitch-hicker you should not ask for the car history. Now if instead of cars, the majority of people start taking public transportations, then it becomes another issue and there is a case for the public to know about their transport history.
If it says "Made in X" I would expect a large part of the assembly and base components to come from X. Otherwise, what does that even mean ? To take a neutral example, if you invite me to taste your home made food, I do not expect you to kill a cow and harvest your fields. But I certainly would expect something more than a frozen pizza from walmart cooked in your home oven, even if you put it in a real plate.
A CEO is a salesman, not an auditor or an engineer. Sure they will not deny the obvious (or what they are legally bound to disclose), but they will hide non-obvious right until they file for chapter 11 : first, that would be idiotic to expose your weaknesses to your competitor and secondly the CEO, as a leader, need to keep its troupe focused and motivated.
Seriously, what good would that do if he said: we are aware of the problem and made lot of changes, however, there is little chance it will work out at the end because our competitors are just so much better ?
It gets even worse when you think that the generation in power in politic and in the private sector is the hippie generation ... they are like the ultimate get off my lawn generation.
So you also miss the good old days playing Syndicate :-)
Google is using every day meaning of word and try to figure out what the user mean. You can even mispell stuff and Google will figure out the right word you meant. That is indeed how human being have come to communicate.
The command line is anything but that - it requires a very strict syntax based on made-up word whose primary meaning was lost years after the technology that spawn them disappeared. The "prompt" thing is really like an autistic version of human communication.
There was no store when the first iPhone was launched. Apple also did invest quite heavily in a (at the time) emerging and badly supported competitor: HTML5 (even going as far as pretenting that it will be the only way to develop for iPhone). Considering the standard of 2007 in mobile browsing (i.e. tiny screen displaying abridged version), they could have gotten away for a lot more control freakiness.
And let's not forget that Adobe has had a love hate relationship with Apple for quite a bit of time and with Flash, they showed a continuous stream of bad quality release and general lack of interest in the platform. (and continue even today - Flash sucks on Mac)
So indeed, that is control of the platform. However, rather than profit motivated, that is the classical control of the platform: avoid your competitor to control your platform or have your user blame you for somebody else mistakes.
Interestingly we can compare that decision with the biggest competitor of the iPhone: Android. Android did support Flash and java. Yet it took 4 years for a highly motivated Adobe to produce a version of flash that run smoothly, but only on an incredibly powerful 1 GHz double core mobile phone (in 2007, people would have laughed at you for thinking that was even possible) And for java, you have Oracle suing Google for not lining enough money in its pocket. Really, as a CEO trying carve a new niche in a highly competitive market, would you like to depend on those 2 (Oracle, Adobe) "partners" ?
Also that is a guy that by trade exposed conspiracies that would make that one pale in comparison. If you and me would dismiss the thought, I guess someone like Assange has every reason to be suspicious.
they were a force of trained Pilots who volunteered their service to a non-US Military effort out of a personal interest and as such, took their lives into their own hands
I find interesting to note that this kind of acts would label you as terrorist, and for a super power like Japan at the time, they would be justified to put the country that trained those freelance dedicated pilots in his own "axe of evil".
That being said, the world was a very different place in the 1940, by those times moral standard, I'm a depraved failure. Context matters ...
Interesting comment. Let's talk about 9/11 then, what was the role of Afghanistan and why did the US bombed them ?
I read the summary to mean: "I'm a computer math guy looking for a money math career."
From the summary, he is a software engineer, working in a software company in the Bay area with a master in CS and asking the question on slashdot. That very strongly hint to something like "I'm a software developer looking to develop software in the finance sector." As a software developer that made the switch into finance myself, I asked the same question and gave the answer right there in my post in addition of replying to the GP.
Just to summarize, although software in bank deal with money, they are surprisingly similar to other type of software you would develop in other industries. The amount of math and business knowledge is similar to other field (compared to other fields I know: retail, heavy industry, publishing, law, insurance, telecom): you can focus on the tech knowledge and become an architect or you can learn more of the business and become later a business analyst. Banks are smug bastards, they like to hire people with previous banking experience. From a tech point of view, it varies between very old school stuff to small agile team making a new order processing using Clojure with a front end in node.js.
The OP isn't looking for an IT position. I'm not sure from where that assumption came.
BTW, I meant IT as development, as it is clear reading the very next line "There is literally an army of development jobs". The information I give would be weird to give about IT jobs.
What are you talking about ? The very vast majority of IT in the Finance world is just your vanilla application. CRUD stuff, Integration, and all sorts of data mangling back and forth between systems. As in any industry you will need some business knowledge to complement you tech knowledge. You do not need a PhD in "Math with Applied Bullshit" to enter finance.
There is literally an army of development jobs in the financial sector. Lots of interesting stuff lost in a sea of boring assignments in team stuck in management and technical paralysis. i.e. like working for any large company.
The vast minority of people that work in finance are psychopathic moron that make millions in bonus each year. There are quite a lot of 20 something that are psychopathic moron but make nothing at all, but the majority of people that fill those huge skyscrappers are just normal Joe doing normal office job.
I don't know how that works in the US, but in EU you do not have a constitutional right to consume. The owner of a shop has the right of not serving you, at his discretion. (there is obviously some limit such as discrimination or other stuff) I hope that in the US, you are not required by law to sell the proverbial cord that will be used to hang you : at worst the seller could be into trouble, at best he will think he aided somebody break the law.
That said this story look more like the usual reality-tv drama. The girl could have been real bitchy the first time (she brought a tv crew for god sake, she is fishing for a scandal, not for a resolution), the seller on the other hand could have been an arse caught in a bad day.
Of course, that is funny I get it. But seriously, PC maker have been using Intel and Microsoft as a convenient R&D lab. On the consumer side ( 1 sale = 1 machine ), except pushing ever more dubious crippled-ware from their "trusted" partners, their only innovation was in the cost reduction, race to the bottom sector. Big brand only really invested any R&D in the entreprise world ( 1 sale = 10k machines + 3 years maintenance contract + servers + services )
Apple took a different approach, they could not compete on price per MHz (at the time), so they competed on "anything else" that can sell except the price tag, and in a market not fiercely defended by the big players: Joe User market.
Meh, what do you think running a business is really ? Do you really think that Google did consult all its mobile phone manufacturer partner to ask their opinion about buying Motorola ? No they didn't because that is still a free market and partnerships are only temporary truce not legal commitment to preserve your partner business model and profit margin.
If MS is not nice enough with its partners and they take offense they will retaliate by being less nice in turn. That's what it means to be partner - that is a 2 way relationship.
Mango features they unveiled were promptly implemented by Apple.
Come-on, that is a bit lame. If you have done any type of development in a large company, you would know that it takes month to do about anything, even something trivial takes month to develop, especially if you need to make sure that the new feature work well on one of the market leading device. That is even worse at Apple where there is a culture of being anally retentive on the little details and they completely ignored for years other great Android features. You will notice that all companies always seem to work on roughly the same stuff at the same time, if it get delivered soon after, that means that it was in the pipeline for a while.
What happens is that MS has few opportunities to "wow" the people, so the best strategy is to keep everything under wrap until the actual user is there to buy. If I want to be cynical (see a previous post about how I feel with my now obsolete Lumia 710), I would say that it is also better for MS not to remind too much the customer buying the current Windows phones what they will miss in a few months.
And then fuck, that is MS, promising and not delivering has been their company policy for year. Better for them to take the Apple approach: talk about the stuff when it ships.
The value of nokia is the brand name and its know-how. The engineer wont stay on a sinking ship and the one that do will get fired a few at a times each time nokia sinks a bit deeper.
Once the shares hits rock bottom, what exactly will MS buy ? A bunch of middle-manager remembering the good old times when they had the technical resource to build phone, or a brand that is only remembered in declining markets like feature phones ?
That being said, what is Nokia thinking ? They have basically written off all their current line up of phones, they are basically back to the same position they were 1 year ago, with phone running only dead system. I personally bought a Lumia 710 because as it could work as a GPS (downloadable map for free) and was very cheap. I actually thought that they had something with Windows phone, and was expecting WP8.
I can imagine how many updates the Nokia apps will receive in the following months ... that is a big fuck you like not even Apple would dare.
You got a iPhone 3G then 3GS then 4. You switch to HTC, then the S2 and now the S3 ? That is like 6 phones in 4 years - thank you for doing your bit to save the economy !