...was one I wrote myself. Years ago, back in the DOS days, I wrote this fun little tactical space battle simulator. (I'm ashamed to admit I wrote it all in QuickBasic. Even used this crappy 3D wireframe graphics library that constantly made the computer crash.) Each player was given a certain number of points, and you could spend those points on spaceships, so each battle would start out fairly evenly. It was originally written to be a hotseat game so that I could play against my brother. But as it turned out, I knew enough about the game mechanics and the capabilities of each ship (is anyone surprised by this at all?) that everyone I played against was barely a challenge at all. So I started writing an AI to play against. It didn't take long to think up a bunch of tactics to give the AI that would make for a solid challenge. The hardest to beat though, was when the AI would place it's longest range ships on the front line, match your heading and speed, and proceed to target your engines first. As soon as engines were disabled, it'd target the next ship, never firing more more often than it needed to in order to disable a ship. And it would almost make sure to stay as far out as possible from all ships chasing it. If you failed to select ships with long range, you were almost guaranteed to lose (cloaking ships worked OK, since they'd let you get within range, but the ships in your fleet that couldn't cloak would get decimated), and if you did pick long range ships, you still usually lost simply because the AI could do 3D spatial math a heck of a lot better than you could. After a certain point, I realized that I'd have to change the game mechanics significantly if I wanted any hope of beating the AI, and that felt too much like cheating.
That said, Galactic Civilizations 2's AI is almost as frustrating to play against, but on occasion, I can beat it. I don't think I beat the space sim's AI even once after I finished it.
When it comes to Linux software, no doubt that this is the case. Even on Windows, usually, the open source selection is significant enough that you're completely correct. On OS X, the quality of commercial software is so incredibly high, that ponying up the cash very often results in some pretty significant productivity gains.
I've got to join in with everyone else who's given a glowing review of TextMate. It's the best text editor I've ever used, bar none, and it's the main reason I don't use Ubuntu as my primary OS. Yet. I have no doubt that, given enough time, Scribes will get to the point where I might consider replacing TextMate with it, but right now, TextMate is still the king of simple, powerful text editors that refuse to get in your way.
Or, you could always try using ZFS instead. But then you'd have to either run Solaris or wait for one of the ongoing ports of ZFS to finally be finished. But yeah... the solution, IMHO, isn't more/better hardware, but rather better software.
I've had problems with it. Namely this problem. We ended up having almost every install of Office corrupted, as well as huge numbers of random system files as a result. My previous employer had to run System Restore on virtually every single computer on the network. The only computers that weren't down that day were the servers that were running Solaris and the Macs in the QA department. After that experience, I swore I'd never willingly install any of McAfee's products again.
No doubt that this is the case. My own site stats look like this:
Firefox 65% Internet Explorer 17% Safari 13% Camino 1% Mozilla 1% Opera 1% Netscape 1%
Internet Explorer usage started out at around 4 or 5% and has steadily risen as my writing has become of greater interest to a wider audience. Mentioning Stephen Colbert probably had the largest upward effect on IE numbers.
So, if they change the license to spite Novell, does Apple get caught in the crossfire since they include gcc, etc in their Xcode developer tools stuff?
14" razor-sharp Bowie-style knife works almost as well, though you have to begin with a more of a stab than a slice, since the edges are the most reinforced part of those packages.
Um, not really. No. Try incredibly bad business plans, mind-bogglingly stupid venture capitalists, and millions of clueless people investing in companies that were hemorrhaging cash, yet somehow expecting that their stock would continue to grow at huge rates. Meanwhile, companies were hiring people left and right, with those salaries largely powered by the strength of the stock, and the growth of their neighboring companies. When it became clear that the stocks were grossly overvalued, the price plunged, necessitating major layoffs across the board, and further exportation of labor in order to maintain some semblance of the previous level of operations. Cheap imported labor wasn't the cause, it was a symptom. Alan Greenspan was absolutely right to blame "irrational exuberance." Don't get me wrong, cheap foreign labor causes its share of problems, but it didn't cause that particular problem.
Right, bitter marxist hacker. I'd almost forgotten.
Here's the thing. And any legitimate economist could have told you this. (i.e., if it was a lie, it was a lie you told yourself. If anything, economists said the opposite.) Hard work won't prevent your job from being outsourced. Anyone, anywhere can work hard. Hard work is not a scarce commodity. But not everyone is skillful. Especially not everyone in India. You may not be able to export janitorial jobs to India, but the tech industry's equivalent of menial labor you most certainly can. But you'll find that all of the really good jobs in the tech industry are still right here in the US. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are pretty much the only companies in India that have genuinely skilled employees, and only because they have the "prestige" that is required over there to hire the genuinely skilled people. In other words, don't suck, and you don't have to compete with foreigners for your job. (For the record, you can work hard and still suck.) Maybe it's just that I'm not bitter, but I don't find that situation terribly insulting. That's just sort of how the world works.
Also, I know I've said this before, probably even on Slashdot, but it bears repeating. Revolution is simply not a realistic weapon against a nuclear power. So long as there are nuclear weapons, the military has absolutely no choice but to prevent revolution by any means necessary, with any force necessary. The world cannot afford nuclear weapons in the hands of revolutionaries. You can only change the government of the United States from within, through the electoral process that already exists. Unfortunately for you guys, nobody elects people they don't like. And nobody likes Marxists. Except other Marxists. You've got at least two generations to go before the stigma of cold war communism wears off a bit, and if you guys can't manage to learn how to come off as nice guys instead of assholes by then, well, you have a long future of bitterness ahead of you.
Apologies, rather, I meant the Internet Bubble of 1998-2000, which had a huge role in causing the recession in 2001. Failed to hit "preview" on my comment.:-/ Course, I suppose I also don't need to point out that 9/11 and the additional effect that had on the economy also wasn't economists' fault.
And that's the fault of the economists? Seems to me that I recall the economists mostly all denouncing the Internet Bubble of 2001, with the "head economist" correctly calling it "irrational exuberance". Frankly, bitterness is no fun for anyone -- you or the people you interact with. Hell, I can see you're bitter over the Internet, from a single sentence. Are you certain you weren't hired because people get a hint of that in the interview, and nobody wants to work with someone who's got a chip on their shoulder? The Bubble screwed over a lot of people, but it wasn't any one person or organization's fault. It's seriously not worth getting bitter over. Shit happens, but it really only gets messier if you get upset and jump up and down on that pile of shit.
I'm in the midst of a job search right now, and frankly, I'm having no trouble at all. I get interested replies to almost every email I send, and right now, I'm just trying to figure out which employer has the nicest work environment. That said, I know my stuff, and I've gotten pretty good at standing out in a pile of resumes, but finding a job and keeping it certainly aren't an issue for me at this point and time. And I'm really not going to feel terribly threatened by foreign workers until I start seeing them posting blog entries on the finer points of metaprogramming. And even then, this form of protectionism tends to ultimately be a hidden transfer payment. IE, your employers, and by extension, the consumers of your services don't get anything in return for the higher costs they're eventually forced to pay. The theory, of course, is that better job selection outweighs the costs, but the only people who actually believe that are the people who are worried about their jobs. You'd be hard-pressed to find legitimate economists preaching that line. I still think we're better off focusing on specialization, and letting cheap labor have the Java jobs we don't really want anyways.
Now if you want to frame the argument in terms of the increased cost of taxpayer-funded infrastructure required by an influx of people, then you have a stronger case, because now those H1-B visas are actually affecting the guy who works at McDonald's and the doctors, as well as the programmers.
Not buying it. The average CS student makes around $45k a year out of college, significantly higher than the average for other degree-wielding graduates. And after a few years and a switch of employers, they're making $55-65k a year, again, much higher than the average. You can't convince me that those wages are too low to provide for a family, because my dad was a nurse, and our family managed just fine on quite a bit less than that.
Besides, who says a change in career direction is bad for you?
I think long-term, we're all much better off if everyone enjoys their profession.
I disagree. As a Computer Science guy myself, I say leave salaries exactly where they are. IMHO, the IT boom was what got us into this mess of having talentless programmers in the first place. That and programmers from the defense industry mixing with the rest of the coding population. The last thing in the world you want is to make it difficult to spot the people who do it for fun in the middle of a huge pile of people jumping at the chance to make more money. Besides, the smart hackers who feel the need to pursue cash eventually become entrepreneurs anyways.
First off, midway through RIT, I think I had around $25,000 or so in debt. When I left RIT, I was $15,000 in debt. I graduated with a BS in Computer Science in December of 2004, and I'm currently in debt for $2,587.55. My debt will probably be paid off in full in a few months. Admittedly, my relatives helped pay back that debt by a few thousand, so it wasn't entirely my doing, but I assure you, it can be done on your own. The real trick is pretending that you can still only afford Ramen noodles, and then throw a big enough chunk of your paycheck at the loans so that they start to disappear. You're single and you only have to pay for rent and the internet connection. You have to decide whether or not you would rather be debt-free or have a Wii.:-P
But... that wasn't exactly where I intended to go with this...
The problem isn't cheap technical labor. Well, that is a problem, but it's a different kind of problem. Frankly, you get what you pay for. In fact, in my experience with working with outsourced Indian programming "talent", it's not cheap at all, because you actually end up paying to do the job twice. They write the cheap version with a 5-man team in India, and then the 3-man team in the US takes one look at the code and vomits uncontrollably, but shrugs and deploys anyway. Complaints come in, management gets slightly upset, and the 3-man team is tasked with rewriting the software, and it takes them longer than it would have if they'd written it from scratch in the first place, because now version 2.0 has to both undo damage as well as get the actual work done. Can't even count how many times that happened at one of the places I used to work at.
The real issue, in my opinion, is that when I'm sitting on a train, heading to NYC, random suits lean over, look at my laptop screen, and ask, "How hard is it to learn how to program stuff?" I inevitably suggest that Visual Basic for Office is likely to be the most useful language for them. No point in explaining the joys of Ruby hacking. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that that's a symptom of the real problem -- a significant fraction of the people who got into programming did it for the money. I know for a fact that that's the case in India as well. Almost every bad programmer I've ever met was in it for the money, with a few exceptions here and there. That said, I've also met a lot of really amazing programmers who were also in it for the money, but then again, they were also entrepreneurs, while the bad programmers were typically salaried. The internet boom was not good for the programmer talent pool in the US, just as the outsourcing boom was bad for the programmer talent pool in India.
Even if it were, say, France pushing for it, I'd be worried. As sick as it is to have martinlutherking.org run by white supremacists, that's the degree to which the US is willing to go to ensure true freedom of speech. Most of our allies go for the cop out solution of banning hate speech, and I would be worried about what happens if even our friends took over, much less the more oppressive regimes that make up a sizable fraction of the UN. On this issue, I will be very upset if governance is made a UN capability.
Except that IIRC, Google's stock is split between two different types. Internal stock has something like 10 times the voting power of regular people stock. I don't think the stockholders have a lot of say in whether Google pays out dividends or not. That said, IANAI (I am not an investor). So, grain of salt.
I expect it was the contracts more than anything that justified the price. The original purpose though, was almost certainly to consolidate the two biggest video players into one. That said, the only reason this happened at all was because it was an all-stock deal. Google's stock was at around $430 today, which a lot of people seem to think is still over-valued, especially by people within Google. If the internal Google people think their own stock is over-valued, it makes sense for them to try to get the most out of it while it's still high.
There can be no doubt that this will end poorly for site developers, and I really hope this is ultimately overturned. There are many different accessibility guidelines and standards, and some of them are quite poor. What happens if eventually you become liable if you create sites that don't conform to say, WCAG 2? Beyond that, many of the accessibility standards are very difficult to validate against.
I expect that Apple is well aware of this. Count on them really trying hard to push the "Halo effect" from here on out. For example, the get-a-free-ipod-with-your-computer promotions.
Slashdot Mirror
...was one I wrote myself. Years ago, back in the DOS days, I wrote this fun little tactical space battle simulator. (I'm ashamed to admit I wrote it all in QuickBasic. Even used this crappy 3D wireframe graphics library that constantly made the computer crash.) Each player was given a certain number of points, and you could spend those points on spaceships, so each battle would start out fairly evenly. It was originally written to be a hotseat game so that I could play against my brother. But as it turned out, I knew enough about the game mechanics and the capabilities of each ship (is anyone surprised by this at all?) that everyone I played against was barely a challenge at all. So I started writing an AI to play against. It didn't take long to think up a bunch of tactics to give the AI that would make for a solid challenge. The hardest to beat though, was when the AI would place it's longest range ships on the front line, match your heading and speed, and proceed to target your engines first. As soon as engines were disabled, it'd target the next ship, never firing more more often than it needed to in order to disable a ship. And it would almost make sure to stay as far out as possible from all ships chasing it. If you failed to select ships with long range, you were almost guaranteed to lose (cloaking ships worked OK, since they'd let you get within range, but the ships in your fleet that couldn't cloak would get decimated), and if you did pick long range ships, you still usually lost simply because the AI could do 3D spatial math a heck of a lot better than you could. After a certain point, I realized that I'd have to change the game mechanics significantly if I wanted any hope of beating the AI, and that felt too much like cheating.
That said, Galactic Civilizations 2's AI is almost as frustrating to play against, but on occasion, I can beat it. I don't think I beat the space sim's AI even once after I finished it.
When it comes to Linux software, no doubt that this is the case. Even on Windows, usually, the open source selection is significant enough that you're completely correct. On OS X, the quality of commercial software is so incredibly high, that ponying up the cash very often results in some pretty significant productivity gains.
I've got to join in with everyone else who's given a glowing review of TextMate. It's the best text editor I've ever used, bar none, and it's the main reason I don't use Ubuntu as my primary OS. Yet. I have no doubt that, given enough time, Scribes will get to the point where I might consider replacing TextMate with it, but right now, TextMate is still the king of simple, powerful text editors that refuse to get in your way.
We know papyrus has tried-and-true longevity for sure. Everything else is just a pretty good guess.
Please note that Google has already released http://www.google.com/trends so at least they're being transparent about it.
Or, you could always try using ZFS instead. But then you'd have to either run Solaris or wait for one of the ongoing ports of ZFS to finally be finished. But yeah... the solution, IMHO, isn't more/better hardware, but rather better software.
Where are mod points when you need them?
I've had problems with it. Namely this problem. We ended up having almost every install of Office corrupted, as well as huge numbers of random system files as a result. My previous employer had to run System Restore on virtually every single computer on the network. The only computers that weren't down that day were the servers that were running Solaris and the Macs in the QA department. After that experience, I swore I'd never willingly install any of McAfee's products again.
No doubt that this is the case. My own site stats look like this:
Firefox 65%
Internet Explorer 17%
Safari 13%
Camino 1%
Mozilla 1%
Opera 1%
Netscape 1%
Internet Explorer usage started out at around 4 or 5% and has steadily risen as my writing has become of greater interest to a wider audience. Mentioning Stephen Colbert probably had the largest upward effect on IE numbers.
So, if they change the license to spite Novell, does Apple get caught in the crossfire since they include gcc, etc in their Xcode developer tools stuff?
14" razor-sharp Bowie-style knife works almost as well, though you have to begin with a more of a stab than a slice, since the edges are the most reinforced part of those packages.
-sigh-
Um, not really. No. Try incredibly bad business plans, mind-bogglingly stupid venture capitalists, and millions of clueless people investing in companies that were hemorrhaging cash, yet somehow expecting that their stock would continue to grow at huge rates. Meanwhile, companies were hiring people left and right, with those salaries largely powered by the strength of the stock, and the growth of their neighboring companies. When it became clear that the stocks were grossly overvalued, the price plunged, necessitating major layoffs across the board, and further exportation of labor in order to maintain some semblance of the previous level of operations. Cheap imported labor wasn't the cause, it was a symptom. Alan Greenspan was absolutely right to blame "irrational exuberance." Don't get me wrong, cheap foreign labor causes its share of problems, but it didn't cause that particular problem.
Right, bitter marxist hacker. I'd almost forgotten.
Here's the thing. And any legitimate economist could have told you this. (i.e., if it was a lie, it was a lie you told yourself. If anything, economists said the opposite.) Hard work won't prevent your job from being outsourced. Anyone, anywhere can work hard. Hard work is not a scarce commodity. But not everyone is skillful. Especially not everyone in India. You may not be able to export janitorial jobs to India, but the tech industry's equivalent of menial labor you most certainly can. But you'll find that all of the really good jobs in the tech industry are still right here in the US. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are pretty much the only companies in India that have genuinely skilled employees, and only because they have the "prestige" that is required over there to hire the genuinely skilled people. In other words, don't suck, and you don't have to compete with foreigners for your job. (For the record, you can work hard and still suck.) Maybe it's just that I'm not bitter, but I don't find that situation terribly insulting. That's just sort of how the world works.
Also, I know I've said this before, probably even on Slashdot, but it bears repeating. Revolution is simply not a realistic weapon against a nuclear power. So long as there are nuclear weapons, the military has absolutely no choice but to prevent revolution by any means necessary, with any force necessary. The world cannot afford nuclear weapons in the hands of revolutionaries. You can only change the government of the United States from within, through the electoral process that already exists. Unfortunately for you guys, nobody elects people they don't like. And nobody likes Marxists. Except other Marxists. You've got at least two generations to go before the stigma of cold war communism wears off a bit, and if you guys can't manage to learn how to come off as nice guys instead of assholes by then, well, you have a long future of bitterness ahead of you.
Apologies, rather, I meant the Internet Bubble of 1998-2000, which had a huge role in causing the recession in 2001. Failed to hit "preview" on my comment. :-/ Course, I suppose I also don't need to point out that 9/11 and the additional effect that had on the economy also wasn't economists' fault.
And that's the fault of the economists? Seems to me that I recall the economists mostly all denouncing the Internet Bubble of 2001, with the "head economist" correctly calling it "irrational exuberance". Frankly, bitterness is no fun for anyone -- you or the people you interact with. Hell, I can see you're bitter over the Internet, from a single sentence. Are you certain you weren't hired because people get a hint of that in the interview, and nobody wants to work with someone who's got a chip on their shoulder? The Bubble screwed over a lot of people, but it wasn't any one person or organization's fault. It's seriously not worth getting bitter over. Shit happens, but it really only gets messier if you get upset and jump up and down on that pile of shit.
Says the bitter marxist hacker.
I'm in the midst of a job search right now, and frankly, I'm having no trouble at all. I get interested replies to almost every email I send, and right now, I'm just trying to figure out which employer has the nicest work environment. That said, I know my stuff, and I've gotten pretty good at standing out in a pile of resumes, but finding a job and keeping it certainly aren't an issue for me at this point and time. And I'm really not going to feel terribly threatened by foreign workers until I start seeing them posting blog entries on the finer points of metaprogramming. And even then, this form of protectionism tends to ultimately be a hidden transfer payment. IE, your employers, and by extension, the consumers of your services don't get anything in return for the higher costs they're eventually forced to pay. The theory, of course, is that better job selection outweighs the costs, but the only people who actually believe that are the people who are worried about their jobs. You'd be hard-pressed to find legitimate economists preaching that line. I still think we're better off focusing on specialization, and letting cheap labor have the Java jobs we don't really want anyways.
Now if you want to frame the argument in terms of the increased cost of taxpayer-funded infrastructure required by an influx of people, then you have a stronger case, because now those H1-B visas are actually affecting the guy who works at McDonald's and the doctors, as well as the programmers.
Not buying it. The average CS student makes around $45k a year out of college, significantly higher than the average for other degree-wielding graduates. And after a few years and a switch of employers, they're making $55-65k a year, again, much higher than the average. You can't convince me that those wages are too low to provide for a family, because my dad was a nurse, and our family managed just fine on quite a bit less than that.
Besides, who says a change in career direction is bad for you?
I think long-term, we're all much better off if everyone enjoys their profession.
I disagree. As a Computer Science guy myself, I say leave salaries exactly where they are. IMHO, the IT boom was what got us into this mess of having talentless programmers in the first place. That and programmers from the defense industry mixing with the rest of the coding population. The last thing in the world you want is to make it difficult to spot the people who do it for fun in the middle of a huge pile of people jumping at the chance to make more money. Besides, the smart hackers who feel the need to pursue cash eventually become entrepreneurs anyways.
First off, midway through RIT, I think I had around $25,000 or so in debt. When I left RIT, I was $15,000 in debt. I graduated with a BS in Computer Science in December of 2004, and I'm currently in debt for $2,587.55. My debt will probably be paid off in full in a few months. Admittedly, my relatives helped pay back that debt by a few thousand, so it wasn't entirely my doing, but I assure you, it can be done on your own. The real trick is pretending that you can still only afford Ramen noodles, and then throw a big enough chunk of your paycheck at the loans so that they start to disappear. You're single and you only have to pay for rent and the internet connection. You have to decide whether or not you would rather be debt-free or have a Wii. :-P
But... that wasn't exactly where I intended to go with this...
The problem isn't cheap technical labor. Well, that is a problem, but it's a different kind of problem. Frankly, you get what you pay for. In fact, in my experience with working with outsourced Indian programming "talent", it's not cheap at all, because you actually end up paying to do the job twice. They write the cheap version with a 5-man team in India, and then the 3-man team in the US takes one look at the code and vomits uncontrollably, but shrugs and deploys anyway. Complaints come in, management gets slightly upset, and the 3-man team is tasked with rewriting the software, and it takes them longer than it would have if they'd written it from scratch in the first place, because now version 2.0 has to both undo damage as well as get the actual work done. Can't even count how many times that happened at one of the places I used to work at.
The real issue, in my opinion, is that when I'm sitting on a train, heading to NYC, random suits lean over, look at my laptop screen, and ask, "How hard is it to learn how to program stuff?" I inevitably suggest that Visual Basic for Office is likely to be the most useful language for them. No point in explaining the joys of Ruby hacking. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that that's a symptom of the real problem -- a significant fraction of the people who got into programming did it for the money. I know for a fact that that's the case in India as well. Almost every bad programmer I've ever met was in it for the money, with a few exceptions here and there. That said, I've also met a lot of really amazing programmers who were also in it for the money, but then again, they were also entrepreneurs, while the bad programmers were typically salaried. The internet boom was not good for the programmer talent pool in the US, just as the outsourcing boom was bad for the programmer talent pool in India.
Even if it were, say, France pushing for it, I'd be worried. As sick as it is to have martinlutherking.org run by white supremacists, that's the degree to which the US is willing to go to ensure true freedom of speech. Most of our allies go for the cop out solution of banning hate speech, and I would be worried about what happens if even our friends took over, much less the more oppressive regimes that make up a sizable fraction of the UN. On this issue, I will be very upset if governance is made a UN capability.
Except that IIRC, Google's stock is split between two different types. Internal stock has something like 10 times the voting power of regular people stock. I don't think the stockholders have a lot of say in whether Google pays out dividends or not. That said, IANAI (I am not an investor). So, grain of salt.
I expect it was the contracts more than anything that justified the price. The original purpose though, was almost certainly to consolidate the two biggest video players into one. That said, the only reason this happened at all was because it was an all-stock deal. Google's stock was at around $430 today, which a lot of people seem to think is still over-valued, especially by people within Google. If the internal Google people think their own stock is over-valued, it makes sense for them to try to get the most out of it while it's still high.
There can be no doubt that this will end poorly for site developers, and I really hope this is ultimately overturned. There are many different accessibility guidelines and standards, and some of them are quite poor. What happens if eventually you become liable if you create sites that don't conform to say, WCAG 2? Beyond that, many of the accessibility standards are very difficult to validate against.
I expect that Apple is well aware of this. Count on them really trying hard to push the "Halo effect" from here on out. For example, the get-a-free-ipod-with-your-computer promotions.