*Sigh* There were line spaces when I composed this...
DISCLAIMER: I hope/. readers will apply the knowledge that technology improves over time to my rationale.
It’s tempting to view these types of job mills as unethical and exploitative, but until collaboration tools improve, this type of “click”-work is the only kind which can be trusted to essentially unskilled and untrustworthy anonymous laborers. The rates are just a product of having access to a global workforce and the trivial nature of the work. Also, the iterative trial and error lessons learned from these firms will certainly train the industry on how to manage a virtual workforce better. For all the sweatshop analogies, workers and job posters still have the choice of which firm they go to – there just aren’t many right now.
Graphic and web design jobs are actually fairly practical - most of the freelance jobs I’ve done have been people whom I’ve never spoken to outside of e-mail. Although the rates are often very low for creative work, customers understand that they get what they pay for and both parties can still chose not to participate. For a logo design job, you may want to pay 20 people a one-time throw-away fee of $75 just for creative diversity, rather than paying one professional $1,500 and rolling the dice on whether you’ll like what they come up with. You can still take the top 3 from those to the professional and say “can you do this right?
Before too long, many of us will be working from within virtual worlds for many virtual sources at a time. Most of those sources will be other independent contractors just like us from within chains of divided labor that span the globe. “Working online” will mean putting on a head mounted display and casually, visually conversing with your design and development team in a quick scrum session in a virtual space to mock up some ideas with a 3D ‘whiteboard,’ divide up the work and knock out a contract. Or you can join a guild of professionals with high standards and a good reputation and score decent contracts, just like design houses today minus expensive office space and the associated geographic limitation. The key is that these organizations will be comprised of independent, willful laborers from all over the world whose efficacy stands on their work quality and ethic alone, self-organized through online venues like forums and virtual words with next-to-zero operating expenses.
Even today, I could organize a group of graphic designers, copy writers, another web developer or two, a couple of account managers, a project coordinator, a headhunter, a contract hunter and an accountant and we could all just meet periodically to review bids and commit to a monthly project or two. It would be supplemental income for all of us. You could add a really decent collaboration system that lets us voice/video chat with a whiteboard and host a web-site complete with a forum and customer login interface with just a little FOSS savvy. You would only need a $7/mo hosting account to run mediawiki, phpbb3, wordpress and a few external services like openerp and gmail. There are paid services you could upgrade to when the revenue kicks in.
END DISCLAIMER. To say that the technology doesn’t exist to implement this stuff is frankly a cop-out. A/. audience should understand.
I can’t wait for the Metaverse to be born (although I think it will be augmented virtual, not immersive virtual); being a gargoyle sounds like my kind of gig.
DISCLAIMER: I hope/. readers will apply the knowledge that technology improves over time to my rationale.
It’s tempting to view these types of job mills as unethical and exploitative, but until collaboration tools improve, this type of “click”-work is the only kind which can be trusted to essentially unskilled and untrustworthy anonymous laborers. The rates are just a product of having access to a global workforce and the trivial nature of the work. Also, the iterative trial and error lessons learned from these firms will certainly train the industry on how to manage a virtual workforce better. For all the sweatshop analogies, workers and job posters still have the choice of which firm they go to – there just aren’t many right now.
Graphic and web design jobs are actually fairly practical - most of the freelance jobs I’ve done have been people whom I’ve never spoken to outside of e-mail. Although the rates are often very low for creative work, customers understand that they get what they pay for and both parties can still chose not to participate. For a logo design job, you may want to pay 20 people a one-time throw-away fee of $75 just for creative diversity, rather than paying one professional $1,500 and rolling the dice on whether you’ll like what they come up with. You can still take the top 3 from those to the professional and say “can you do this right?”
Before too long, many of us will be working from within virtual worlds for many virtual sources at a time. Most of those sources will be other independent contractors just like us from within chains of divided labor that span the globe. “Working online” will mean putting on a head mounted display and casually, visually conversing with your design and development team in a quick scrum session in a virtual space to mock up some ideas with a 3D ‘whiteboard,’ divide up the work and knock out a contract. Or you can join a guild of professionals with high standards and a good reputation and score decent contracts, just like design houses today minus expensive office space and the associated geographic limitation. The key is that these organizations will be comprised of independent, willful laborers from all over the world whose efficacy stands on their work quality and ethic alone, self-organized through online venues like forums and virtual words with next-to-zero operating expenses.
Even today, I could organize a group of graphic designers, copy writers, another web developer or two, a couple of account managers, a project coordinator, a headhunter, a contract hunter and an accountant and we could all just meet periodically to review bids and commit to a monthly project or two. It would be supplemental income for all of us. You could add a really decent collaboration system that lets us voice/video chat with a whiteboard and host a web-site complete with a forum and customer login interface with just a little FOSS savvy. You would only need a $7/mo hosting account to run mediawiki, phpbb3, wordpress and a few external services like openerp and gmail. There are paid services you could upgrade to when the revenue kicks in.
END DISCLAIMER. To say that the technology doesn’t exist to implement this stuff is frankly a cop-out. A/. audience should understand.
I can’t wait for the Metaverse to be born (although I think it will be augmented virtual, not immersive virtual); being a gargoyle sounds like my kind of gig.
Can anyone explain the business sense? What does Apple gain by taking such a hard stance on not condoning modifications? Why wouldn't they have a hands-off approach, and not stand in the way of "developers"? Other technologies seem to be gaining so much more from a formalized, open API such as new users, cost-free (to Apple) additional features, and great press from supporting open source on a mobile device which desperately needs a corporate sugar daddy. At least it's my perception that the reputation and success of a company is benefitted by a wide and open developer community, maybe the board of directors have a different take (slightly fewer new cars per year).
It seems to me that Apple is hoping to sell "toggle" features piecemeal at ridiculous additional cost, and make tons of money through an exclusivity agreement which is frankly going to severely limit the amount of money they can make with open carrier choice. But they know as well as we that there will be a minute fraction of people who will say "I want a different carrier so bad, I'll risk destroying my device" and "I want a custom application on there to the degree that I may not be able to use the phone component". But I think an overwhelming majority (and these people are the cash cows) will simply follow exactly whatever Apple says on the 10-step list inside the box just to get their iPhone activated.
I don't understand why companies act like they're going to lose ridiculous money when someone steps up with an acute understanding of the technology and the willpower and skill to manipulate it. There is still a moderate technical challenge in modifying such a device as an end-user, which is a significant enough barrier to prevent the hordes from flocking to it by the thousands it would take to impact their revenue. Why not support this subculture with tools, and enable them to produce even more compelling features for normal users, and make available a Firefox-like Add-on hub? Isn't the fact that the words "firmware" "patch" "flash" and "usb" are essentially jibberish to the average joe user of this device enough to disuade the perception that the Unwashed Masses are going to hijack their product and form a new pseudo-Apple who will take over their IPs, sink their stock and put M80s in all their toilets?
I hope I'm not the only one who sees that there no information here. The NDA is not quoted, and I have signed plenty of NDAs with very similar content. For instance, we have an agreement right now that says basically that we can't publish any articles without prior consent of AMD. It is immediately preceded by "If you wish to receive marketing development funds..."
I would think that a journalist would be a bit more objective when looking into this, or maybe it's just one media outlet trying to protect another. To me, this simply reads: "Journalist attends AMD press conference and refuses to sign standard NDA agreement, walks out after realizing he's not allowed to publish any of what he's seen, and writes a sensationalistic article to drum up press instead of a legitimate technology piece."
I lost years of e-mails on Hotmail due to a pretty assinine policy of theirs. I have a passport account, which uses my hotmail credentials, to log into our Microsoft Partner account. I spent months in and out of there reading docs and downloading patches, thinking the whole time that I was "logging in" to hotmail.
One day I went to check my mail and all of it was gone, due to inactivity during that period. I called microsoft about it and they said that basically they couldn't do anything for me, there were no archives of e-mail.
Unless they've done away with this policy, nobody should use this service.
Cost-effectiveness is often the biggest issue for a lot of companies who need the power but can't gain that TCO edge from buying in massive bulk. Many can't afford the convenient and complete offerings of an IBM/Intel or HP blade whose components alone can cost upwards of $10,000 with 5-10x that in software. A more practical solution would be an in-house project, but you're still paying off-the-shelf prices for something you may be buying in bulk (unless you've got some distributor channel to work with).
In this case, the white-box manufacturer is what you need. There are cheap blade chassis that can easily be fitted with good hardware. I know of a few that won't get you the density of HP or Intel, but it's better than 1U's for cooling and for space. No matter how many systems you will be building, chances are (if you're not going the ol "massive bulk" route) you won't be buying enough hardware to get a decent price per component. That's where white-box companies come in, working with distributor channels to get profitable pricing competitive with solutions from larger vendors.
At this point you're left with the warm-fuzzy of a smaller hardware OEM with kingly support (smaller companies often listen to customers more) and you're left to loose your own geeks on their new hardware. That is, of course, if you've got your own geeks. I'd recommend an OpenMosix Gentoo cluster for simpler job-processing work unless you've already got the software. Dual Opterons are the way to go as you can start out with 1 CPU, then in 3-4 years the same hardware should be able to run 8 cores -- that's real, present, available scalability with a side of cost-effectiveness.
I work for a white-box custom integrator like this and we make such 1U systems which can also be put into a cheap blade form-factor. This is no advertisement so I won't give a name, but feel free to e-mail me if you think I've made a point or two.
Slashdot Mirror
*Sigh* There were line spaces when I composed this...
DISCLAIMER: I hope /. readers will apply the knowledge that technology improves over time to my rationale.
It’s tempting to view these types of job mills as unethical and exploitative, but until collaboration tools improve, this type of “click”-work is the only kind which can be trusted to essentially unskilled and untrustworthy anonymous laborers. The rates are just a product of having access to a global workforce and the trivial nature of the work. Also, the iterative trial and error lessons learned from these firms will certainly train the industry on how to manage a virtual workforce better. For all the sweatshop analogies, workers and job posters still have the choice of which firm they go to – there just aren’t many right now.
Graphic and web design jobs are actually fairly practical - most of the freelance jobs I’ve done have been people whom I’ve never spoken to outside of e-mail. Although the rates are often very low for creative work, customers understand that they get what they pay for and both parties can still chose not to participate. For a logo design job, you may want to pay 20 people a one-time throw-away fee of $75 just for creative diversity, rather than paying one professional $1,500 and rolling the dice on whether you’ll like what they come up with. You can still take the top 3 from those to the professional and say “can you do this right?
Before too long, many of us will be working from within virtual worlds for many virtual sources at a time. Most of those sources will be other independent contractors just like us from within chains of divided labor that span the globe. “Working online” will mean putting on a head mounted display and casually, visually conversing with your design and development team in a quick scrum session in a virtual space to mock up some ideas with a 3D ‘whiteboard,’ divide up the work and knock out a contract. Or you can join a guild of professionals with high standards and a good reputation and score decent contracts, just like design houses today minus expensive office space and the associated geographic limitation. The key is that these organizations will be comprised of independent, willful laborers from all over the world whose efficacy stands on their work quality and ethic alone, self-organized through online venues like forums and virtual words with next-to-zero operating expenses.
Even today, I could organize a group of graphic designers, copy writers, another web developer or two, a couple of account managers, a project coordinator, a headhunter, a contract hunter and an accountant and we could all just meet periodically to review bids and commit to a monthly project or two. It would be supplemental income for all of us. You could add a really decent collaboration system that lets us voice/video chat with a whiteboard and host a web-site complete with a forum and customer login interface with just a little FOSS savvy. You would only need a $7/mo hosting account to run mediawiki, phpbb3, wordpress and a few external services like openerp and gmail. There are paid services you could upgrade to when the revenue kicks in.
END DISCLAIMER. To say that the technology doesn’t exist to implement this stuff is frankly a cop-out. A /. audience should understand.
I can’t wait for the Metaverse to be born (although I think it will be augmented virtual, not immersive virtual); being a gargoyle sounds like my kind of gig.
DISCLAIMER: I hope /. readers will apply the knowledge that technology improves over time to my rationale.
It’s tempting to view these types of job mills as unethical and exploitative, but until collaboration tools improve, this type of “click”-work is the only kind which can be trusted to essentially unskilled and untrustworthy anonymous laborers. The rates are just a product of having access to a global workforce and the trivial nature of the work. Also, the iterative trial and error lessons learned from these firms will certainly train the industry on how to manage a virtual workforce better. For all the sweatshop analogies, workers and job posters still have the choice of which firm they go to – there just aren’t many right now.
Graphic and web design jobs are actually fairly practical - most of the freelance jobs I’ve done have been people whom I’ve never spoken to outside of e-mail. Although the rates are often very low for creative work, customers understand that they get what they pay for and both parties can still chose not to participate. For a logo design job, you may want to pay 20 people a one-time throw-away fee of $75 just for creative diversity, rather than paying one professional $1,500 and rolling the dice on whether you’ll like what they come up with. You can still take the top 3 from those to the professional and say “can you do this right?”
Before too long, many of us will be working from within virtual worlds for many virtual sources at a time. Most of those sources will be other independent contractors just like us from within chains of divided labor that span the globe. “Working online” will mean putting on a head mounted display and casually, visually conversing with your design and development team in a quick scrum session in a virtual space to mock up some ideas with a 3D ‘whiteboard,’ divide up the work and knock out a contract. Or you can join a guild of professionals with high standards and a good reputation and score decent contracts, just like design houses today minus expensive office space and the associated geographic limitation. The key is that these organizations will be comprised of independent, willful laborers from all over the world whose efficacy stands on their work quality and ethic alone, self-organized through online venues like forums and virtual words with next-to-zero operating expenses.
Even today, I could organize a group of graphic designers, copy writers, another web developer or two, a couple of account managers, a project coordinator, a headhunter, a contract hunter and an accountant and we could all just meet periodically to review bids and commit to a monthly project or two. It would be supplemental income for all of us. You could add a really decent collaboration system that lets us voice/video chat with a whiteboard and host a web-site complete with a forum and customer login interface with just a little FOSS savvy. You would only need a $7/mo hosting account to run mediawiki, phpbb3, wordpress and a few external services like openerp and gmail. There are paid services you could upgrade to when the revenue kicks in.
END DISCLAIMER. To say that the technology doesn’t exist to implement this stuff is frankly a cop-out. A /. audience should understand.
I can’t wait for the Metaverse to be born (although I think it will be augmented virtual, not immersive virtual); being a gargoyle sounds like my kind of gig.
Beautiful = )
Can anyone explain the business sense? What does Apple gain by taking such a hard stance on not condoning modifications? Why wouldn't they have a hands-off approach, and not stand in the way of "developers"? Other technologies seem to be gaining so much more from a formalized, open API such as new users, cost-free (to Apple) additional features, and great press from supporting open source on a mobile device which desperately needs a corporate sugar daddy. At least it's my perception that the reputation and success of a company is benefitted by a wide and open developer community, maybe the board of directors have a different take (slightly fewer new cars per year). It seems to me that Apple is hoping to sell "toggle" features piecemeal at ridiculous additional cost, and make tons of money through an exclusivity agreement which is frankly going to severely limit the amount of money they can make with open carrier choice. But they know as well as we that there will be a minute fraction of people who will say "I want a different carrier so bad, I'll risk destroying my device" and "I want a custom application on there to the degree that I may not be able to use the phone component". But I think an overwhelming majority (and these people are the cash cows) will simply follow exactly whatever Apple says on the 10-step list inside the box just to get their iPhone activated. I don't understand why companies act like they're going to lose ridiculous money when someone steps up with an acute understanding of the technology and the willpower and skill to manipulate it. There is still a moderate technical challenge in modifying such a device as an end-user, which is a significant enough barrier to prevent the hordes from flocking to it by the thousands it would take to impact their revenue. Why not support this subculture with tools, and enable them to produce even more compelling features for normal users, and make available a Firefox-like Add-on hub? Isn't the fact that the words "firmware" "patch" "flash" and "usb" are essentially jibberish to the average joe user of this device enough to disuade the perception that the Unwashed Masses are going to hijack their product and form a new pseudo-Apple who will take over their IPs, sink their stock and put M80s in all their toilets?
I hope I'm not the only one who sees that there no information here. The NDA is not quoted, and I have signed plenty of NDAs with very similar content. For instance, we have an agreement right now that says basically that we can't publish any articles without prior consent of AMD. It is immediately preceded by "If you wish to receive marketing development funds..." I would think that a journalist would be a bit more objective when looking into this, or maybe it's just one media outlet trying to protect another. To me, this simply reads: "Journalist attends AMD press conference and refuses to sign standard NDA agreement, walks out after realizing he's not allowed to publish any of what he's seen, and writes a sensationalistic article to drum up press instead of a legitimate technology piece."
I lost years of e-mails on Hotmail due to a pretty assinine policy of theirs. I have a passport account, which uses my hotmail credentials, to log into our Microsoft Partner account. I spent months in and out of there reading docs and downloading patches, thinking the whole time that I was "logging in" to hotmail. One day I went to check my mail and all of it was gone, due to inactivity during that period. I called microsoft about it and they said that basically they couldn't do anything for me, there were no archives of e-mail. Unless they've done away with this policy, nobody should use this service.
Cost-effectiveness is often the biggest issue for a lot of companies who need the power but can't gain that TCO edge from buying in massive bulk. Many can't afford the convenient and complete offerings of an IBM/Intel or HP blade whose components alone can cost upwards of $10,000 with 5-10x that in software. A more practical solution would be an in-house project, but you're still paying off-the-shelf prices for something you may be buying in bulk (unless you've got some distributor channel to work with). In this case, the white-box manufacturer is what you need. There are cheap blade chassis that can easily be fitted with good hardware. I know of a few that won't get you the density of HP or Intel, but it's better than 1U's for cooling and for space. No matter how many systems you will be building, chances are (if you're not going the ol "massive bulk" route) you won't be buying enough hardware to get a decent price per component. That's where white-box companies come in, working with distributor channels to get profitable pricing competitive with solutions from larger vendors. At this point you're left with the warm-fuzzy of a smaller hardware OEM with kingly support (smaller companies often listen to customers more) and you're left to loose your own geeks on their new hardware. That is, of course, if you've got your own geeks. I'd recommend an OpenMosix Gentoo cluster for simpler job-processing work unless you've already got the software. Dual Opterons are the way to go as you can start out with 1 CPU, then in 3-4 years the same hardware should be able to run 8 cores -- that's real, present, available scalability with a side of cost-effectiveness. I work for a white-box custom integrator like this and we make such 1U systems which can also be put into a cheap blade form-factor. This is no advertisement so I won't give a name, but feel free to e-mail me if you think I've made a point or two.