You know, maybe I wasn't clear, but I really admire the US. I wish the US constitution was promoted as the "World constitution" which every country must follow.
I get saddened by all these silly things I mentioned, because they give me the feeling that, little by little, the US is losing it's "awesomeness" - and the whole world loses with that. Unfortunately, it does no good to have an awesome constitution when it's blatantly ignored sometiems.
Hence my urge for you, American citizens, to save your country. It's good for you and for the rest of the world.
The environment you have in the US is unique because it sparkles heavy competition which drives progress more than anything else.
Without the US leading these efforts, we would either: a) progress much slowly, if the world moves by the European pace; b) progress maybe as fast as we're progressing today, but in a much worse environment overall, if China takes over; c) have the unlikely scenario of Japan assuming the center role in the world with maybe faster progress than we have today and end up in a much more quirkier society in 30 years.
Although c) looks good, it's highly unlikely. Probably b) would happen and, as someone who lives in a developing country, I can assure you that the culture in all of them is heavily biased towards short-term myopia and politics are driven by populism. So, in other words, the world would be out of luck again in 30 years or so.
So, please, go ahead and make sure your deputies, senators, governors and presidents stop screwing around with your own country. For once, think of the children.;)
You're debating over the "privacy issues" or whatever.
Have you never stopped to wonder how stupidly ridiculous it is to ask a child to use heart monitors while performing basic physical activities? Soon they'll be outlawing sports for kids altogether as they raise the chance of physical injuries or whatever.
And the fact that they might be doing this just to avoid lawsuits is every more disturbing. American society is still one of the greatest around - and I'm not an American - but it seems it's clearly entering a downward-spiral these days. Silly lawsuits, silly laws, "intellectual property", GPS-tracked mileage taxes.
Seriously, I don't get why tech savyy people keep buying iPhones. Sure, they're pretty. I considered buying one too. The UI is awesome.
But... come on, censoring dictionary applications? No tethering until 2009, and then, a few months later they disable it for anyone not on the "premium networks"? What the fuck?
I really happy with my cheap Nokia Symbian phone which cost me 1/5 of an unlocked iPhone. Sure, it's not as pretty, but it has a native SIP client, multi-tasking, Java and I can even write applications in Python if I wanted to. When will the iPhone beat that?
You're missing the point: most pirates would never buy your game anyway.
Pirates will only pay for online games and, even then, we've had "alternative" servers back in the Ultima Online days (which is a game I played for about 2 years on alternative servers). Back in those days, I wouldn't buy a single game unless absolutely necessary (I bought Half-Life back in 98, I think). No matter how good or bad the game was, I wouldn't pay for it. All my friends would act in the same way and most of them still do.
Nowadays, I can afford to buy games, so I usually buy them through Steam, because it's convenient. I have a ridiculously huge list of games on Steam - I bought games I never even played yet. In the same way I used to download all new releases from pirate sites, I buy Steam games on sale. However, if it's not on Steam, most likely I just won't bother with even trying it - if it's something that seems *really* good, I might try finding it in a torrent site, but I don't even consider buying a game from somewhere else these days.
Finally, one interesting fact is that it's very likely that I'll buy a game I first played as a pirate copy if it's good. I had an amazing time with my (pirated) copy of Fallout 2. So it seemed fair to buy it from GOG when it launched (probably my only non-Steam purchase in the few years). This may seem pointless, but I really want to reward people making really good games. Examples are the "id Software Collection" from Steam, Gothic 2, Fallout 3 (got a pirate copy on the release day, then I bought it on Steam after a while).
Honestly - I just want to avoid all that intrusive DRM crap. I was antecipating Spore for years and, in the end, I didn't even play it because of DRM. I tried a pirate copy but it didn't work on my PC. I would have bought it if it worked and was any good for the first few days.
Well, I don't believe violent video games will harm a 12-year-old. However, I think you really did something wrong by letting a 6-year-old play a violent game.
At that point, it could *really* harm kids. Let them play it after they're eleven or tweleve. You din't play Doom when you were 6.
The Portuguese Wikipedia is hell. I try to maintain some Perl-related articles in there and it's very common for random people, completely unknown to the subject, to revert my edits.
One thing that drives me insane is the stupid "fight" created by wikipedians from Portugal when someone changes the words to their Brazilian Portuguese version. Usually they go on and revert the entire edit just because of a single word - they even have bots for that.
I hope the other localized versions aren't as silly as the pt one. I guess it somewhat reflects the Brazilian and Portuguese society, where petty power is *even more* valued than elsewhere.
Turns out I'm much more relevant according to the new search than in the older one.
I have a long name (first name + 3 names). Previously, I would need to include at least my first name and two other names so I would be the first result. Now, a search for first name + second name already shows me at the top (even though there was a famous soccer player in Brazil, before I was born, with the same name).
So, it is more relevant *for me*, but it's likely anyone who's isn't related to software development, would be searching for that soccer player and not me.
Either way, the results do seem more relevant overall (or at least more "modern"). And also it *feels* so much faster. I wonder if this is just because not many people are using it yet, when compared to the main site.
Not sure about PHP, but when you make such comparisons between RoR and Perl solutions you should at least be aware of recent developments such as the Catalyst framework.
Not to mention things such as perl5i which tries to aggregate most of what is known as modern Perl.
Perl is an evolving language and Perl code from 8 years is very different from modern Perl code.
There's no tapping going on Skype per se. Their "Skype-Capture-Unit" is just a trojan which also records audio, video and text. Skype traffic is encrypted and they don't break its encryption at all.
The "suggested method" of enacting such traps is to send the trojan by email or directly installing it in the victims computer.
In other words: everyone who manages to keep their systems virus-free, should be safe.
It's so rare to see companies even show interest into porting games to Linux. This one has done it and, hell, they deserve to be paid for it. It's not like porting to a minority platform is free.
Even if they charged extra for the Linux version, they would probably still lose money with the port.
Hmmmmm... you're right. It seems I was deceived by some marketing trick as I assumed being "Full HD" meant it would support a higher resolution.
I know the Samsung T240M supports 1900x1200 for sure. But that's 24 inches.
And yes, I'm not in the US. I just assumed the product was available worldwide as it's unusual for a tech product to be available here in Brazil and not on the rest of the world.
Thanks, this was a great suggestion. It has a decent price and it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for.
However, I looked at the specs and it has a 16ms response time and that worries me as I also use this same computer for gaming. Any chance you actually played any fast-paced game using this monitor? If so, was the response time an issue?
I would even be willing to pay the premium for them.
Unfortunately, I'm in Brazil and I've never been able to find one of these NEC monitors for sale around here (and importing is not an option as import taxes would make its price double).
I actually value *vertical* resolution much more than horizontal revolution. Currently I use a 1280x1024 monitor and wanted to upgrade to something with more vertical pixels. Apparently, I need to get a 24" monitor to get 1900x1200, which is just huge.
I really wanted a monitor with a 1600x1200 resolution. Please let me know if you ever find one.
When you already have 80-90% from hydro, you can get an additional 10% from fossil fuels and still remain green. Brazil also has plans to build nuclear power plants (which I personally consider clean enough energy) and additional dams.
Please, keep in mind that evaluating quarterly reports is very different thing when compared to actually living in the freaking country. Hydro power is still great and back then the power was never really rationed: the government mostly threatened to ration power if usage didn't go down and some people which went over some thresholds would pay additional fees.
But no one had their electricity cut.
The only problem here really is that we have the cheapest generation infrastructure (hydro) but still pay a lot for energy. But you can blame that on other social problems here (corruption, culture, etc).
90% of the electricity generated in Brazil comes from hydroelectric power stations. And environmental laws are much stricter here than in the US. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm seeing a lot of comments regarding the (low) quality of outsourced code.
I think what people in US companies fail to understand is that, instead of aiming to cut down their development costs to US$5/hour, they should try to using outsourcing as a tool to hire *good* developers. You can get a top notch developer which would cost US$100+/hour in the US for about US$25-35/hour in Brazil.
This whole "outsourced code is crap" debate happens not because Indians (or Brazilians) have an intrinsic inability to code. This happens because outsourcing companies such as Accenture go to these countries and then hire the cheapest developers who can write something that passes as "working code". They can hire such developers here with a US$1000 monthly wage and the shitty developers will be happy with it!
But the good developers don't work for these companies.
As an advice, if you're ever considering outsourcing to Brazil, never do that to any company with more than 50-80 developers. Ideal would be around 15-30 developers - this is the sweet spot from my personal experience. As a side bonus, these companies are actually cheaper and pay their employees better. These "famous" service companies charge ridiculous amounts of money from their clients - I guess all the money goes to their senior executives bonuses.
The main reason why there are proportionally more crappy developers in developing countries is because there is much higher demand for crappy developers in those countries. So we have hundreds of cheapo colleges springing up on every corner offering IT-related courses.
This is all supported by these large service companies which regularly come up with nonsense such as stating they're recruiting future IT-workers in English classes because, according to them, it's easier to teach Java in 3 months than to learn English. And since they're so eager to hire, that's their only option.
Of course, this is a lie: there's plenty of *qualified* developers. Despite stating they're actively hiring, they're actually firing people right now. And then replacing some of them with people willing to work for a lower salary. So this is what you get from outsourcing to these large companies.
So keep these things in mind. These companies play the same tricks everywhere. In the US, they might want more foreign visas and colleges with courses matching their needs. Here in Brazil, they also play these same tricks regarding universities and try to push the government to allow for more than 8 hours a day without overtime (or even illegally coerce their employees into working unpaid overtime). I can bet they also do something nasty in India.
As a native Brazilian who has worked in the past for American web companies, I know the two sides of the coin and right now there's really no good solution.
I noticed some other users mentioning that local sites *are* indeed profitable in third world countries and that's true. However, they have much lower operating costs, since its employees are cheaper to maintain. Also, each country has specific characteristics and it would be too expensive for a global service to customize their site to meet every single country needs, while a one-country-only service can do that easily.
The real issue is that ads pay much lower for a Brazilian click than they pay for a click coming from the US, for the same keywords. While a US ad would pay more than a dollar per-click, it's difficult to get more than a quarter per-click in Brazil. While the local companies can survive with the reduced revenue, it's not enough for US companies to survive.
Finally, from my own personal experience as a Brazilian who never lived outside of Brazil, I can say this the worst drawback really is what I call "the third world mindset". People just *won't pay* for internet services here. It's very very very difficult to make people to accept the concept of paying to access some website, specially after they're already spoiled as everything has been free on the internet so far.
Some users said people are willing to pay but they can't do it. This is not true. I use PayPal several times a year. It accepts my credit cards without any issues whatsoever. Most people have an international credit card and a lot of people buy online from the Brazilian online retailers. The difference is that they're buying *tangible* products or services.
Even in the poorer areas, where there's no broadband, people will go to "LAN houses" (how we call "Internet Cafes" here) and spend maybe a dollar a day for internet access (nevermind the fact that with $30/month they could actually get broadband at home). The point is, if they spend $30/month, they could easily afford paying maybe $3/month for, say, social network usage. However, they would never do it.
I've tried to convince a lot of people that pirating games is wrong. Even people who aspire to be game developers. Even smart people have trouble understanding why they should pay for something they can get for free. What are the benefits of buying a legitimate game versus a counterfeit copy. And so on.
It's a culture problem and you can't fix culture in a short time. So I just wish luck to those web entrepreneurs adventures in the muddy waters of the third world web economy.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, maybe I wasn't clear, but I really admire the US. I wish the US constitution was promoted as the "World constitution" which every country must follow.
I get saddened by all these silly things I mentioned, because they give me the feeling that, little by little, the US is losing it's "awesomeness" - and the whole world loses with that. Unfortunately, it does no good to have an awesome constitution when it's blatantly ignored sometiems.
Hence my urge for you, American citizens, to save your country. It's good for you and for the rest of the world.
The environment you have in the US is unique because it sparkles heavy competition which drives progress more than anything else.
Without the US leading these efforts, we would either:
a) progress much slowly, if the world moves by the European pace;
b) progress maybe as fast as we're progressing today, but in a much worse environment overall, if China takes over;
c) have the unlikely scenario of Japan assuming the center role in the world with maybe faster progress than we have today and end up in a much more quirkier society in 30 years.
Although c) looks good, it's highly unlikely. Probably b) would happen and, as someone who lives in a developing country, I can assure you that the culture in all of them is heavily biased towards short-term myopia and politics are driven by populism. So, in other words, the world would be out of luck again in 30 years or so.
So, please, go ahead and make sure your deputies, senators, governors and presidents stop screwing around with your own country. ;)
For once, think of the children.
You're debating over the "privacy issues" or whatever.
Have you never stopped to wonder how stupidly ridiculous it is to ask a child to use heart monitors while performing basic physical activities? Soon they'll be outlawing sports for kids altogether as they raise the chance of physical injuries or whatever.
And the fact that they might be doing this just to avoid lawsuits is every more disturbing. American society is still one of the greatest around - and I'm not an American - but it seems it's clearly entering a downward-spiral these days. Silly lawsuits, silly laws, "intellectual property", GPS-tracked mileage taxes.
Seriously, you need to save your country.
Seriously, I don't get why tech savyy people keep buying iPhones.
Sure, they're pretty. I considered buying one too. The UI is awesome.
But... come on, censoring dictionary applications? No tethering until 2009, and then, a few months later they disable it for anyone not on the "premium networks"? What the fuck?
I really happy with my cheap Nokia Symbian phone which cost me 1/5 of an unlocked iPhone. Sure, it's not as pretty, but it has a native SIP client, multi-tasking, Java and I can even write applications in Python if I wanted to. When will the iPhone beat that?
You're missing the point: most pirates would never buy your game anyway.
Pirates will only pay for online games and, even then, we've had "alternative" servers back in the Ultima Online days (which is a game I played for about 2 years on alternative servers).
Back in those days, I wouldn't buy a single game unless absolutely necessary (I bought Half-Life back in 98, I think). No matter how good or bad the game was, I wouldn't pay for it. All my friends would act in the same way and most of them still do.
Nowadays, I can afford to buy games, so I usually buy them through Steam, because it's convenient. I have a ridiculously huge list of games on Steam - I bought games I never even played yet. In the same way I used to download all new releases from pirate sites, I buy Steam games on sale. However, if it's not on Steam, most likely I just won't bother with even trying it - if it's something that seems *really* good, I might try finding it in a torrent site, but I don't even consider buying a game from somewhere else these days.
Finally, one interesting fact is that it's very likely that I'll buy a game I first played as a pirate copy if it's good. I had an amazing time with my (pirated) copy of Fallout 2. So it seemed fair to buy it from GOG when it launched (probably my only non-Steam purchase in the few years). This may seem pointless, but I really want to reward people making really good games. Examples are the "id Software Collection" from Steam, Gothic 2, Fallout 3 (got a pirate copy on the release day, then I bought it on Steam after a while).
Honestly - I just want to avoid all that intrusive DRM crap. I was antecipating Spore for years and, in the end, I didn't even play it because of DRM. I tried a pirate copy but it didn't work on my PC. I would have bought it if it worked and was any good for the first few days.
You should think of pirates as free marketing.
If you ignore all the "catch terrorists" mambo jumbo, this is probably the most advanced and outright awesome data mining tool I've ever seen.
Take a look at the videos on their blogs - the "Palentir Financial" videos are particularly worth it.
Did anyone else also think of the book?
Seems strikingly similar to me.
http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Wii_Linux
Not sure about the 360, though.
Well, I don't believe violent video games will harm a 12-year-old.
However, I think you really did something wrong by letting a 6-year-old play a violent game.
At that point, it could *really* harm kids. Let them play it after they're eleven or tweleve. You din't play Doom when you were 6.
I was going to post exactly this same thing.
The Portuguese Wikipedia is hell. I try to maintain some Perl-related articles in there and it's very common for random people, completely unknown to the subject, to revert my edits.
One thing that drives me insane is the stupid "fight" created by wikipedians from Portugal when someone changes the words to their Brazilian Portuguese version. Usually they go on and revert the entire edit just because of a single word - they even have bots for that.
I hope the other localized versions aren't as silly as the pt one. I guess it somewhat reflects the Brazilian and Portuguese society, where petty power is *even more* valued than elsewhere.
Turns out I'm much more relevant according to the new search than in the older one.
I have a long name (first name + 3 names). Previously, I would need to include at least my first name and two other names so I would be the first result. Now, a search for first name + second name already shows me at the top (even though there was a famous soccer player in Brazil, before I was born, with the same name).
So, it is more relevant *for me*, but it's likely anyone who's isn't related to software development, would be searching for that soccer player and not me.
Either way, the results do seem more relevant overall (or at least more "modern"). And also it *feels* so much faster. I wonder if this is just because not many people are using it yet, when compared to the main site.
Not sure about PHP, but when you make such comparisons between RoR and Perl solutions you should at least be aware of recent developments such as the Catalyst framework.
Not to mention things such as perl5i which tries to aggregate most of what is known as modern Perl.
Perl is an evolving language and Perl code from 8 years is very different from modern Perl code.
Did you really those you posted?
There's no tapping going on Skype per se. Their "Skype-Capture-Unit" is just a trojan which also records audio, video and text. Skype traffic is encrypted and they don't break its encryption at all.
The "suggested method" of enacting such traps is to send the trojan by email or directly installing it in the victims computer.
In other words: everyone who manages to keep their systems virus-free, should be safe.
No, you don't have to license an SDK or ask any sort of permissions to *write* software.
From where this silly idea came from?
You might need to agree to their terms if you want to use their distribution channels (e.g. sell your iPhone software in the Apple store).
Seriously.
It's so rare to see companies even show interest into porting games to Linux.
This one has done it and, hell, they deserve to be paid for it. It's not like porting to a minority platform is free.
Even if they charged extra for the Linux version, they would probably still lose money with the port.
Well, that was obviously a typo. It supports 1920x1200.
Hmmmmm... you're right. It seems I was deceived by some marketing trick as I assumed being "Full HD" meant it would support a higher resolution.
I know the Samsung T240M supports 1900x1200 for sure. But that's 24 inches.
And yes, I'm not in the US. I just assumed the product was available worldwide as it's unusual for a tech product to be available here in Brazil and not on the rest of the world.
Thanks, this was a great suggestion. It has a decent price and it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for.
However, I looked at the specs and it has a 16ms response time and that worries me as I also use this same computer for gaming. Any chance you actually played any fast-paced game using this monitor? If so, was the response time an issue?
I would even be willing to pay the premium for them.
Unfortunately, I'm in Brazil and I've never been able to find one of these NEC monitors for sale around here (and importing is not an option as import taxes would make its price double).
But thanks for taking your time to reply, anyway.
I feel your pain.
I actually value *vertical* resolution much more than horizontal revolution. Currently I use a 1280x1024 monitor and wanted to upgrade to something with more vertical pixels. Apparently, I need to get a 24" monitor to get 1900x1200, which is just huge.
I really wanted a monitor with a 1600x1200 resolution. Please let me know if you ever find one.
Samsung T220M (or HD) should suit your needs.
When you already have 80-90% from hydro, you can get an additional 10% from fossil fuels and still remain green.
Brazil also has plans to build nuclear power plants (which I personally consider clean enough energy) and additional dams.
Please, keep in mind that evaluating quarterly reports is very different thing when compared to actually living in the freaking country. Hydro power is still great and back then the power was never really rationed: the government mostly threatened to ration power if usage didn't go down and some people which went over some thresholds would pay additional fees.
But no one had their electricity cut.
The only problem here really is that we have the cheapest generation infrastructure (hydro) but still pay a lot for energy. But you can blame that on other social problems here (corruption, culture, etc).
90% of the electricity generated in Brazil comes from hydroelectric power stations.
And environmental laws are much stricter here than in the US. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
I wish I had mod points today.
Very insightful post.
I'm seeing a lot of comments regarding the (low) quality of outsourced code.
I think what people in US companies fail to understand is that, instead of aiming to cut down their development costs to US$5/hour, they should try to using outsourcing as a tool to hire *good* developers. You can get a top notch developer which would cost US$100+/hour in the US for about US$25-35/hour in Brazil.
This whole "outsourced code is crap" debate happens not because Indians (or Brazilians) have an intrinsic inability to code. This happens because outsourcing companies such as Accenture go to these countries and then hire the cheapest developers who can write something that passes as "working code". They can hire such developers here with a US$1000 monthly wage and the shitty developers will be happy with it!
But the good developers don't work for these companies.
As an advice, if you're ever considering outsourcing to Brazil, never do that to any company with more than 50-80 developers. Ideal would be around 15-30 developers - this is the sweet spot from my personal experience. As a side bonus, these companies are actually cheaper and pay their employees better. These "famous" service companies charge ridiculous amounts of money from their clients - I guess all the money goes to their senior executives bonuses.
The main reason why there are proportionally more crappy developers in developing countries is because there is much higher demand for crappy developers in those countries. So we have hundreds of cheapo colleges springing up on every corner offering IT-related courses.
This is all supported by these large service companies which regularly come up with nonsense such as stating they're recruiting future IT-workers in English classes because, according to them, it's easier to teach Java in 3 months than to learn English. And since they're so eager to hire, that's their only option.
Of course, this is a lie: there's plenty of *qualified* developers. Despite stating they're actively hiring, they're actually firing people right now. And then replacing some of them with people willing to work for a lower salary. So this is what you get from outsourcing to these large companies.
So keep these things in mind. These companies play the same tricks everywhere. In the US, they might want more foreign visas and colleges with courses matching their needs. Here in Brazil, they also play these same tricks regarding universities and try to push the government to allow for more than 8 hours a day without overtime (or even illegally coerce their employees into working unpaid overtime). I can bet they also do something nasty in India.
As a native Brazilian who has worked in the past for American web companies, I know the two sides of the coin and right now there's really no good solution.
I noticed some other users mentioning that local sites *are* indeed profitable in third world countries and that's true. However, they have much lower operating costs, since its employees are cheaper to maintain. Also, each country has specific characteristics and it would be too expensive for a global service to customize their site to meet every single country needs, while a one-country-only service can do that easily.
The real issue is that ads pay much lower for a Brazilian click than they pay for a click coming from the US, for the same keywords. While a US ad would pay more than a dollar per-click, it's difficult to get more than a quarter per-click in Brazil. While the local companies can survive with the reduced revenue, it's not enough for US companies to survive.
Finally, from my own personal experience as a Brazilian who never lived outside of Brazil, I can say this the worst drawback really is what I call "the third world mindset". People just *won't pay* for internet services here. It's very very very difficult to make people to accept the concept of paying to access some website, specially after they're already spoiled as everything has been free on the internet so far.
Some users said people are willing to pay but they can't do it. This is not true. I use PayPal several times a year. It accepts my credit cards without any issues whatsoever. Most people have an international credit card and a lot of people buy online from the Brazilian online retailers. The difference is that they're buying *tangible* products or services.
Even in the poorer areas, where there's no broadband, people will go to "LAN houses" (how we call "Internet Cafes" here) and spend maybe a dollar a day for internet access (nevermind the fact that with $30/month they could actually get broadband at home). The point is, if they spend $30/month, they could easily afford paying maybe $3/month for, say, social network usage. However, they would never do it.
I've tried to convince a lot of people that pirating games is wrong. Even people who aspire to be game developers. Even smart people have trouble understanding why they should pay for something they can get for free. What are the benefits of buying a legitimate game versus a counterfeit copy. And so on.
It's a culture problem and you can't fix culture in a short time. So I just wish luck to those web entrepreneurs adventures in the muddy waters of the third world web economy.