Suing your customers is a somewhat questionable business model.
The idea is that they aren't your customers anymore than catching someone sneaking over the fence at the ballpark is prosecuting your "customer". Yeah some people strangely use P2P to grab copies of CDs that they own (a logic that is highly perplexing), but contrary to the "that's the majority" portrayal on Slashdot, overwhelmingly P2P is about people grabbing the latest hit song that they heard on the radio, or a divx of some movie (purportedly because they want a much lower quality version of the DVD they already own...)
I read these sorts of posts as a "leave my playground alone!" sort of petulant rant justifying why P2P is inevitable so therefore they should just suck it (and people have been spewing this trash since the Commodore 64 and disc duping, berating how copy protection is just a waste and technologically the business model is failing.)
Here's a thought for you, though: Next year there are zero movies and zero commercial music releases. Before you hurrah about how great that would be for the world as all of the independent acts with "much more talent" comes to the forefront, take a peek at your current collection of video and music files. I'll bet a pretty good coinage that it's all Dixie Chicks, Britney Spears and n'Sync. Such is the nature of the horribly hypocritical pro-P2P community: Giveme givem giveme, but can your failing business model. Good old tragedy of the commons playing out on the P2P networks.
Here's another thought for you -- When big music and big movies fail at thwarting P2P "at the top", they will, and this is a guarantee, start booting in doors and arresting/suing Joe Average for running Limewire and grabbing what appears to be a copyright movie or song. Before you rant about how technologically they couldn't do that, realize that they could with no trouble at all: Tracking down P2P users would be absolutely trivial. Contrary to the YRO sentiment believed on Slashdot, the majority of the general populace would support such actions if presented with big media's side of things.
I've noticed that this whole discussion is just packed full of ridiculously bad analogies: From cars to houses, and now to toilets. Of course they're all incredibly wide of the mark and offer absolutely no parallel to this situation, but it certainly doesn't stop people from proposing them.
Installing a patch for a very high visibility piece of software is not rocket science here, and it should have been done long, long, long ago. The parent post to my original supposes that if we were all firewalled then there would be no problem: Hardly. As mentioned there are many ways for one system in your network to be exposed and to then saturate your network (or do you firewall every port on your switch and have zero port sharing? If not then what are you? CRAZY!?)...and even if you're a super kung fu master admin that has the world firewalled, it's likely that UDP DNS and port 80 traffic can still stream out at an unconstrained rate.
In any case, you totally missed the point. I never said that firewalls should all be turned off (indeed I MOCKED a situation where they did turn it off), but rather that they should be presumed to be a minor moat in the real world of security (instead of the invincible gate that they are often treated as).
While I agree with you that in the land of inexpensive, and easily maintained and used VPNs it is abnormal to have the database server as publicly accessible, I totally disagree that this is some sort of travesty. Indeed in reality the firewall ends up being a crutch that the sysadmins leans on to protect them from their own ignorance and laziness (in this case the patch has been available for some 8 months. Given that the original advisory gave specific instructions on how to exploit it of course there was going to come a worm): Why bother keeping only necessary services running, with the same being actively monitored and administered, when one can just firewall the problem. What's that? The firewall doesn't protect you from the inside? An exploit came through a firewall sanctioned route (email, HTTP, etc) and it proceeded to wreak havoc on your carefully firewalled little world?
Firewalls are a false sense of security, and anyone should be able to defend their system running without a firewall on the public internet at any time (well this is doubly so because the same moronic admins who look for such a blanket protection are the ones who go "Geee...I can't figure out how to get netmeeting to work through the firewall...I'll just take it down for a couple of hours....".
Why is it irresponsible to release an open source project without documentation?
Apparently you, and the other poster, missed the normal software development disclaimer. I didn't say that it's a travesty that they dare do such a thing, but rather that the open source route often does mean that a lot of the normal trappings of software are skipped. Contrast this with the "open source r00lz!" mentality that pervades on Slashdot and sites like it.
When it comes to software, free as in beer is about 100x more important to the average consumer than free as in source code.
I think you're underestimating the ratio there. It is ironic how over-estimated open source really is, rather than being seen for what it often really is
-A last ditch, before being kicked in the grave attempt by an organization to re-invent themselves around a failing product, hoping to get some massive free labour.
-A shirking of normal software development responsibilities. This weekend I had to go spelunking through masses of code for a famous open source product to find a trivial feature that wasn't documented at all. A lot of people have a "throw the code over the wall" mentality that relieves them of documentation, good user interfaces, or even making a stable product (How many times have we heard on here "You've got the code! Fix it!").
And this is the clincher in any of these spam filters: If the filter automatically deletes messages that it identifies as spam (which could be legitimate business proposal or job offer, for example) then a false positive would be incredibly destructive. If it doesn't automatically delete but instead you periodically go through all of the messages, then it's of little value as you're forced to manually filter the spams anyways. The irony is that the better it is at identifying spams, the more destructive a false positive would be as you casually scan through and delete large clusters of supposed spam.
Personally I think the author of the paper is a bit idealistic in ways when they say "If we can write software that recognizes their messages, there is no way they can get around that". Well then again maybe they aren't: Saying "if we can...recognize their messages" is a pretty wide net presumption, and of course the following conclusion follows, however the real question is "can we realistically make software that can effectively identify with zero incidences of false positives". For people who email between themselves and one or two other people on one subject that isn't a problem, but I suspect that statistical word usage analysis wouldn't be quite as successful for someone with a more disparate mail usage.
Well generally when you're installing new hardware you'll be rebooting your PC anyways (and items like USB or Firewire devices don't require a reboot). However the software comment does concur with my pet peeve: Moronic installation teams that always click the "require a restart" button on the installation package despite there being absolutely no reason. There are times when it's replacing some particular system component and absolutely requires it, but that is absolutely a rarity, and instead it's just a installation team that puts the ease of their jobs ahead of the ease of the public.
The volume copies of XP don't require activations: These were the copies that were sent to every MSDN subscriber, large corporate partners, etc. It isn't cracked to not require activation, but rather that was the design.
Like always the copy protection isn't meant to be the end-all solution, but rather is supposed to make copying such a nuisance that most people would just rather buy it. Prior to activation Fred could just dupe the copy Bob got with his new PC, but no longer can he do that: Now he has to go searching IRC channels looking for a DCC bot to download from...unlikely. Of course the likely scenario is that the next MS OS won't include a non-activation version and these prolific volume versions won't be an option.
Re:SVG && Printing
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You talk as if vector graphics are pervasive, yet overwhelmingly examples on the net can show where people convert vector graphics to a raster format (particularly charts, graphs, and maps).
SVG and web authoring don't mix, and why would anyone want to print Gifs or PNGs? Clarify please.
This makes no sense. In the real world most intranets now have HTML reporting functionality (with CSS printing layout), and users print this. SVG is another step in the evolution of that being a credible data information system for corporations.
Re:Two whiff posts in a row. Wrong again.
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Absolutely! Of course you're limited to using the "rectangle" primitive with a minimum size of 1.0, a granularity of 1.0, a snap of 1.0, and a maximum width of 1.0. Beyond that small limitation you are fully open to exploit its feature-rich vector implementation.
Re:What tool was used to create the evolve.svg fil
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The 16/32 operating systems were ALWAYS a huge trade-off, and it was one that everyone was well aware of. Arguments regarding 3.1, 95, 98 and Me are just silly.
Windows NT 3.5 was an ASTOUNDINGLY stable operating system given that it was an entirely microkernel OS with nothing but a tiny 4KB or so kernel at ring 0. That's a QNX style OS.
Windows NT 4 had some issues with certain hardware/software combinations, but I personally had a heavily loaded system (a system with a wide range of tasks) running for months on end between reboots.
Windows 2000 is a tremendously stable operating system, easily equally most Linux installations. The only downfall is the performance tradeoff for video which basically allows video drivers to take down your machine: Get a reputable video card with WHQL drivers.
Windows XP continues the Windows 2000 tradition but is even more stable and includes better support for dynamic driver swaps (i.e. video driver installation without rebooting). It shares the same video driver tradeoff of Windows 2000, but with good drivers it's a extremely stable OS (I'm a very intensive user...Urban Terror is running multiplayer in the background while I type this, as is a RDBMS database and a slew of services. Total unexpected reboots in the time I've used XP: ZERO).
Why is it that every anti-Microsoftarian believes that their own personal anecdotal evidence, and the evidence of the "converted" with which they almost always consrt, somehow represents the global consensus? While I run FreeBSD on another machine and have with zero issues for years now, everytime I've played with Linux I've been astounded at how amateur, and utterly unstable it has been for me. It could very well be that each of the iterations of machines that I've tried it on are "flakey", yet strangely this sort of conclusion is never reached if XP crashes on someone's obsolete hardware with a motherboard trace crack on it.
Slashdot was the one trumpeting P2P as the reason for boosted sales during the blip year at the beginning of P2P when sales spiked. Can't cry wolf about them using the same tactics in reverse.
How ironic that you attempt to portray me as a racism when my point all along was that software development in India is fundamentally a "first world in the third world" (as small crust of highly educated in a small area with a good infrastructure), and that rather than pulling us down they're pulling themselves up. Here comes you screaming racist while at the same time portraying them as whoring yokels by the masses who'll take the whips to undercut North America. Take some history lessons and learn about the rise of Japan.
Pretty much any server can serve hundreds, or even thousands of pages per second (I benchmark a basic PC IIS 5 server serving 17,000+ pages per second), but the problem comes with people turn what should be a static page into a dynamic page. The thought process usually goes like this "I'd like my news to all be dynamically driven so that I don't have to modify my files, but rather just add a new document as a CGI/ISAPI/Script served dynamic page!". This can bring even the largest server to its knees. Another poster mentioned GZIPping, and again this relates to dynamic content: If you have static content any half-decent compression module will cache the gzipped output until the source file changes. The solution, of course, is to find the perfect balance between them: Dynamic content that is statically cached for interval or on-demand periods, allowing your server to effectively server static content to the majority of hits while expensive page regenerations are minimized. Voila- Easy versatility and programmable functionality, but without the massive server requirements.
I say this as a interested party as I design and implemented, and sell, a interval dynamic caching and automatic compression system.
once again, the IFPI and RIAA don't understand technology
How don't they understand technology? Their goal is to fight what currently exists rather than coming up with some master solution that solves it forever. Of course, you realize that they COULD quash P2P quickly and permanently: Active, heavy-handed enforcement. After a couple of low-level traders have their doors booted in and get thrown into jail the networks will decline to nothing (yes, you are traceable). The irony of all of this "we'll beat them!" posturing is that if you did beat them technologically, it will degrade to that regardless of your God given right to trade n'sync songs.
In any case most schemes hashed out on here is just as vulnerable to poisoning as the open P2P network. Other schemes are so labour intensive (maintaining a web of trust) that it would allow the RIAA and friends to fundamentally win the war: Right now the overwhelming majority of traders are not motivated geeks, but rather casual mom and pops and aunts and sisters looking for some song they heard on the radio: Add in some effort and the overwhelming majority would fall off the networks quickly.
I notice you repeated one of your more glaring racist fallacies again
The ignorant and defeated always resort to attempts at diminishing their opponent on faux moral grounds. Hilarious (Let me guess: I'm "worse than Hitler", right? Goodwins law always comes into play with morons such as yourself.) What an excellent example.
In any case, I find your cries of "racist!" to be a riot (not to mention pointing out how much of an idiotic moron that you are). Since when has "race" been a part of this my ignorant friend? India is a third world nation with limited infrastructure and education: This pretty much defines what a third world nation is (otherwise they wouldn't be a third world nation. This is something that you so stunningly miss in your claims of doom for the engineering community that it boggles the mind. Are there small numbers of educated people who are great software developers in India? Absolutely! Are they better than programmers around the world, which people such as yourself (in a hilariously contradictory racism) propose? Absolutely not. Is there astronomically greater numbers of programmers with many more years experience, with a better infrastructure and better conditions in many countries around the world? Of course there is.
You also, like all morons, presume that it's all a zero sum game: Their gain equals our loss. Ignore the fact that billions come right back to North American engineering as they start buying planes, trains and automobiles as that probably hurts your little brain.
BTW, quite employed. In fact, judging by your level of intelligence, I bet I make a lot more than you do.
Bwahahaha, the old "my paycheque is bigger than your paycheque" routine. You're unemployed and living in your parents basement, and I am virtually certain of that. My point about being unemployed or not relates to the fact that the unemployed are most likely to spread doom and gloom as they paint he world with their own situation.
Wow, what a stunning rebuttal. Well let me simplify my response to yours to ignorant, self-justifying (I'll guess that you're unemployed. The unemployed generally will worst-case scenario the world around them to justify and explain their position), paranoid, and utterly inane. The core of your argument is that computer science, a field which requires a large degree of education, can most easily be transplated to "3rd world nations", a status that generally indicates "no education".
You obviously have no idea how much of the software you use was written in India. Almost every major American software company has outsourced or established offices there.
This is just ridiculous. Very little (I would estimate Claims that some outrageous portion of it was birthed in India is just ridiculous. I will fully agree that Indians living in the West contributed...of course they have...but the idea that the Indian tech community is anything more than a TINY blip in the global village is just ridiculous.
and the 2nd can't account for anywhere near the kind of trouble that a 75% discount can't overcome - or even a 20% discount for that matter.
Absolutely ridiculous. Firstly software development is not, and has never been a cost driven field: How else do you think it gets by as an industry with 80% or higher profit margins? The only reason that any organizations right now are looking to relocate to India is simple: A desperate last move in tough tech times. These were the same firms that were paying $150K during the height (which was an opposite form of desperation). It's management justifying themselves by doing something.
Under-estimating communication issues is unbelievably ridiculous as well. Have you ever worked in software development? I suspect not because in real world development the client seldom comes with a "This is what I want in nicely documented form, and I'll see you in 6 months when you deliver", but rather almost all real-world development processes are Agile development style processes (whether formally defined as such or not) where there is a constant bantering between the various development groups and the "customer". Hell, you're trying to claim that communications AROUND THE GLOBE with a people who often speak different languages under completely different laws is no big deal yet most companies still don't even allow telecommuting. What sort of dream world are you living in?
The reality is that software engineering is by far the most ideal candidate for 3rd world outsourcing to date - because there are no transportation costs, and no real possibility to tax or tariff the "product" as it travels over borders.
Exactly as you've mentioned, software development has always been an excellent candidate for world trade: The programmers of India, like anyone else, have always had the ability to create the next Photoshop or Windows. Of course, as you know, they haven't, and the only reason at all that this whole movement gets any support whatsoever is because it's the latest wave of self-justification by layers of HR and upper management. When the tech upturn begins it'll be forgotten into the ether.
Secondly, computer science is one of the most educated fields out there: Saying that it's the most "ideal candidate for 3rd world outsourcing" is just ridiculous in that context. The outsourcing to India is basically occurring to the "Island of the First World", it isn't occurring to some unwashed masses. Education, as you know, is one of the great divisions between the first and third world. Of course the salary in the Indian tech community has ramped up steadily and will quickly reach Western norms.
if you're a software developer planning on living in the 1st world, your world is ending.
Why limit your paranoid extrapolations to just software development? Why not just say "Any intelligence work is going to the 3rd world". Drug research, architecture, electronics engineering, etc. Let's make this even more dramatic shall we?
I think his real point really applied to any outsourcing. If you have a company in the banking sector and you outsource code, it would be absolutely insane not to have an auditing team that goes over the code line by line to ensure that it doesn't introduce backdoors or security holes. This applies whether you've outsourced to India or Accenture. Indeed I would imagine that the auditing field will be a burgeoning new career.
Another field that is going to explode because of the India phenomena is systems analyst/architect: To have the Indian firms develop for you, generally you have to provide them with a absolutely defined need, and that's where that comes in.
Uh...okay. I apologize and I hereby accept all gloating praise heaped upon India (a region whose SOLE selling point is low cost). India is our daddy. In fact, I'm going to buy some India shrinkwrapped software right now given the lateral thinking and innovation that naturally must emerge from the streets of Bangalore. Could you point me to some?
The textiles industry, which was one of the very first high-tech industries, largely left the developed world a long time ago.
I think the point here, though, is not so much that coding is leaving the "Developed" world to go to some sweatshops in India, but rather that Bangalore has become a sort of First world island: They have the infrastructure and the education, so why couldn't they compete? There is a huge danger in all of these articles, though: The United States (I'm personally a Canadian, and I laugh a bit because in some ways Canada is a mini India: We've always attracted this sort of work because of our low dollar. Indeed when this article claimed that software development in India was 40% less than the US...well that actually puts it right on par with Canada then. I think we need to advertise our sweatshops more!) could truly fall behind not because India has shot ahead (and VB type coding that they're doing now is NOT shooting ahead despite this absurd article), but rather because everyone stops going into computer science because of articles like this. Already I've seen a lot of bright minds leave computer science for "management" pathed careers, all because they've bought into the notion that the field is dead here. Of course it isn't, and this article certainly doesn't forbode any new threat that didn't already exist, and of course the mad rush to India will cease, costs will equalize, and then they'll be consumers of the big worldwide information field.
Ironic, though: It'll be interesting to see what happens when developer pay skyrockets as new shops are set up.
Slashdot Mirror
Suing your customers is a somewhat questionable business model.
The idea is that they aren't your customers anymore than catching someone sneaking over the fence at the ballpark is prosecuting your "customer". Yeah some people strangely use P2P to grab copies of CDs that they own (a logic that is highly perplexing), but contrary to the "that's the majority" portrayal on Slashdot, overwhelmingly P2P is about people grabbing the latest hit song that they heard on the radio, or a divx of some movie (purportedly because they want a much lower quality version of the DVD they already own...)
I read these sorts of posts as a "leave my playground alone!" sort of petulant rant justifying why P2P is inevitable so therefore they should just suck it (and people have been spewing this trash since the Commodore 64 and disc duping, berating how copy protection is just a waste and technologically the business model is failing.)
Here's a thought for you, though: Next year there are zero movies and zero commercial music releases. Before you hurrah about how great that would be for the world as all of the independent acts with "much more talent" comes to the forefront, take a peek at your current collection of video and music files. I'll bet a pretty good coinage that it's all Dixie Chicks, Britney Spears and n'Sync. Such is the nature of the horribly hypocritical pro-P2P community: Giveme givem giveme, but can your failing business model. Good old tragedy of the commons playing out on the P2P networks.
Here's another thought for you -- When big music and big movies fail at thwarting P2P "at the top", they will, and this is a guarantee, start booting in doors and arresting/suing Joe Average for running Limewire and grabbing what appears to be a copyright movie or song. Before you rant about how technologically they couldn't do that, realize that they could with no trouble at all: Tracking down P2P users would be absolutely trivial. Contrary to the YRO sentiment believed on Slashdot, the majority of the general populace would support such actions if presented with big media's side of things.
I've noticed that this whole discussion is just packed full of ridiculously bad analogies: From cars to houses, and now to toilets. Of course they're all incredibly wide of the mark and offer absolutely no parallel to this situation, but it certainly doesn't stop people from proposing them.
Installing a patch for a very high visibility piece of software is not rocket science here, and it should have been done long, long, long ago. The parent post to my original supposes that if we were all firewalled then there would be no problem: Hardly. As mentioned there are many ways for one system in your network to be exposed and to then saturate your network (or do you firewall every port on your switch and have zero port sharing? If not then what are you? CRAZY!?)...and even if you're a super kung fu master admin that has the world firewalled, it's likely that UDP DNS and port 80 traffic can still stream out at an unconstrained rate.
In any case, you totally missed the point. I never said that firewalls should all be turned off (indeed I MOCKED a situation where they did turn it off), but rather that they should be presumed to be a minor moat in the real world of security (instead of the invincible gate that they are often treated as).
While I agree with you that in the land of inexpensive, and easily maintained and used VPNs it is abnormal to have the database server as publicly accessible, I totally disagree that this is some sort of travesty. Indeed in reality the firewall ends up being a crutch that the sysadmins leans on to protect them from their own ignorance and laziness (in this case the patch has been available for some 8 months. Given that the original advisory gave specific instructions on how to exploit it of course there was going to come a worm): Why bother keeping only necessary services running, with the same being actively monitored and administered, when one can just firewall the problem. What's that? The firewall doesn't protect you from the inside? An exploit came through a firewall sanctioned route (email, HTTP, etc) and it proceeded to wreak havoc on your carefully firewalled little world?
Firewalls are a false sense of security, and anyone should be able to defend their system running without a firewall on the public internet at any time (well this is doubly so because the same moronic admins who look for such a blanket protection are the ones who go "Geee...I can't figure out how to get netmeeting to work through the firewall...I'll just take it down for a couple of hours....".
Why is it irresponsible to release an open source project without documentation?
Apparently you, and the other poster, missed the normal software development disclaimer. I didn't say that it's a travesty that they dare do such a thing, but rather that the open source route often does mean that a lot of the normal trappings of software are skipped. Contrast this with the "open source r00lz!" mentality that pervades on Slashdot and sites like it.
When it comes to software, free as in beer is about 100x more important to the average consumer than free as in source code.
I think you're underestimating the ratio there. It is ironic how over-estimated open source really is, rather than being seen for what it often really is
-A last ditch, before being kicked in the grave attempt by an organization to re-invent themselves around a failing product, hoping to get some massive free labour.
-A shirking of normal software development responsibilities. This weekend I had to go spelunking through masses of code for a famous open source product to find a trivial feature that wasn't documented at all. A lot of people have a "throw the code over the wall" mentality that relieves them of documentation, good user interfaces, or even making a stable product (How many times have we heard on here "You've got the code! Fix it!").
And this is the clincher in any of these spam filters: If the filter automatically deletes messages that it identifies as spam (which could be legitimate business proposal or job offer, for example) then a false positive would be incredibly destructive. If it doesn't automatically delete but instead you periodically go through all of the messages, then it's of little value as you're forced to manually filter the spams anyways. The irony is that the better it is at identifying spams, the more destructive a false positive would be as you casually scan through and delete large clusters of supposed spam.
Personally I think the author of the paper is a bit idealistic in ways when they say "If we can write software that recognizes their messages, there is no way they can get around that". Well then again maybe they aren't: Saying "if we can...recognize their messages" is a pretty wide net presumption, and of course the following conclusion follows, however the real question is "can we realistically make software that can effectively identify with zero incidences of false positives". For people who email between themselves and one or two other people on one subject that isn't a problem, but I suspect that statistical word usage analysis wouldn't be quite as successful for someone with a more disparate mail usage.
Well generally when you're installing new hardware you'll be rebooting your PC anyways (and items like USB or Firewire devices don't require a reboot). However the software comment does concur with my pet peeve: Moronic installation teams that always click the "require a restart" button on the installation package despite there being absolutely no reason. There are times when it's replacing some particular system component and absolutely requires it, but that is absolutely a rarity, and instead it's just a installation team that puts the ease of their jobs ahead of the ease of the public.
The volume copies of XP don't require activations: These were the copies that were sent to every MSDN subscriber, large corporate partners, etc. It isn't cracked to not require activation, but rather that was the design.
Like always the copy protection isn't meant to be the end-all solution, but rather is supposed to make copying such a nuisance that most people would just rather buy it. Prior to activation Fred could just dupe the copy Bob got with his new PC, but no longer can he do that: Now he has to go searching IRC channels looking for a DCC bot to download from...unlikely. Of course the likely scenario is that the next MS OS won't include a non-activation version and these prolific volume versions won't be an option.
You talk as if vector graphics are pervasive, yet overwhelmingly examples on the net can show where people convert vector graphics to a raster format (particularly charts, graphs, and maps).
SVG and web authoring don't mix, and why would anyone want to print Gifs or PNGs? Clarify please.
This makes no sense. In the real world most intranets now have HTML reporting functionality (with CSS printing layout), and users print this. SVG is another step in the evolution of that being a credible data information system for corporations.
Absolutely! Of course you're limited to using the "rectangle" primitive with a minimum size of 1.0, a granularity of 1.0, a snap of 1.0, and a maximum width of 1.0. Beyond that small limitation you are fully open to exploit its feature-rich vector implementation.
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/SVG-Implementations .htm8#svgedit
Most vector graphics packages nowadays have the ability to export SVG as well.
The 16/32 operating systems were ALWAYS a huge trade-off, and it was one that everyone was well aware of. Arguments regarding 3.1, 95, 98 and Me are just silly.
Windows NT 3.5 was an ASTOUNDINGLY stable operating system given that it was an entirely microkernel OS with nothing but a tiny 4KB or so kernel at ring 0. That's a QNX style OS.
Windows NT 4 had some issues with certain hardware/software combinations, but I personally had a heavily loaded system (a system with a wide range of tasks) running for months on end between reboots.
Windows 2000 is a tremendously stable operating system, easily equally most Linux installations. The only downfall is the performance tradeoff for video which basically allows video drivers to take down your machine: Get a reputable video card with WHQL drivers.
Windows XP continues the Windows 2000 tradition but is even more stable and includes better support for dynamic driver swaps (i.e. video driver installation without rebooting). It shares the same video driver tradeoff of Windows 2000, but with good drivers it's a extremely stable OS (I'm a very intensive user...Urban Terror is running multiplayer in the background while I type this, as is a RDBMS database and a slew of services. Total unexpected reboots in the time I've used XP: ZERO).
Why is it that every anti-Microsoftarian believes that their own personal anecdotal evidence, and the evidence of the "converted" with which they almost always consrt, somehow represents the global consensus? While I run FreeBSD on another machine and have with zero issues for years now, everytime I've played with Linux I've been astounded at how amateur, and utterly unstable it has been for me. It could very well be that each of the iterations of machines that I've tried it on are "flakey", yet strangely this sort of conclusion is never reached if XP crashes on someone's obsolete hardware with a motherboard trace crack on it.
Slashdot was the one trumpeting P2P as the reason for boosted sales during the blip year at the beginning of P2P when sales spiked. Can't cry wolf about them using the same tactics in reverse.
Hoooah. You, sir, are a friggin' riot! Bwahahahaha.
You are a last worder though so please feel free to follow this up with some other pathetic revision on the history of this conversation.
MAN THE BATTLE STATIONS: THE 3RD WORLD IS COMING!
How ironic that you attempt to portray me as a racism when my point all along was that software development in India is fundamentally a "first world in the third world" (as small crust of highly educated in a small area with a good infrastructure), and that rather than pulling us down they're pulling themselves up. Here comes you screaming racist while at the same time portraying them as whoring yokels by the masses who'll take the whips to undercut North America. Take some history lessons and learn about the rise of Japan.
OH GOD IT'S ALL OVER PEOPLE! IT'S IN REVELATIONS!
Pretty much any server can serve hundreds, or even thousands of pages per second (I benchmark a basic PC IIS 5 server serving 17,000+ pages per second), but the problem comes with people turn what should be a static page into a dynamic page. The thought process usually goes like this "I'd like my news to all be dynamically driven so that I don't have to modify my files, but rather just add a new document as a CGI/ISAPI/Script served dynamic page!". This can bring even the largest server to its knees. Another poster mentioned GZIPping, and again this relates to dynamic content: If you have static content any half-decent compression module will cache the gzipped output until the source file changes. The solution, of course, is to find the perfect balance between them: Dynamic content that is statically cached for interval or on-demand periods, allowing your server to effectively server static content to the majority of hits while expensive page regenerations are minimized. Voila- Easy versatility and programmable functionality, but without the massive server requirements.
I say this as a interested party as I design and implemented, and sell, a interval dynamic caching and automatic compression system.
once again, the IFPI and RIAA don't understand technology
How don't they understand technology? Their goal is to fight what currently exists rather than coming up with some master solution that solves it forever. Of course, you realize that they COULD quash P2P quickly and permanently: Active, heavy-handed enforcement. After a couple of low-level traders have their doors booted in and get thrown into jail the networks will decline to nothing (yes, you are traceable). The irony of all of this "we'll beat them!" posturing is that if you did beat them technologically, it will degrade to that regardless of your God given right to trade n'sync songs.
In any case most schemes hashed out on here is just as vulnerable to poisoning as the open P2P network. Other schemes are so labour intensive (maintaining a web of trust) that it would allow the RIAA and friends to fundamentally win the war: Right now the overwhelming majority of traders are not motivated geeks, but rather casual mom and pops and aunts and sisters looking for some song they heard on the radio: Add in some effort and the overwhelming majority would fall off the networks quickly.
I notice you repeated one of your more glaring racist fallacies again
The ignorant and defeated always resort to attempts at diminishing their opponent on faux moral grounds. Hilarious (Let me guess: I'm "worse than Hitler", right? Goodwins law always comes into play with morons such as yourself.) What an excellent example.
In any case, I find your cries of "racist!" to be a riot (not to mention pointing out how much of an idiotic moron that you are). Since when has "race" been a part of this my ignorant friend? India is a third world nation with limited infrastructure and education: This pretty much defines what a third world nation is (otherwise they wouldn't be a third world nation. This is something that you so stunningly miss in your claims of doom for the engineering community that it boggles the mind. Are there small numbers of educated people who are great software developers in India? Absolutely! Are they better than programmers around the world, which people such as yourself (in a hilariously contradictory racism) propose? Absolutely not. Is there astronomically greater numbers of programmers with many more years experience, with a better infrastructure and better conditions in many countries around the world? Of course there is.
You also, like all morons, presume that it's all a zero sum game: Their gain equals our loss. Ignore the fact that billions come right back to North American engineering as they start buying planes, trains and automobiles as that probably hurts your little brain.
BTW, quite employed. In fact, judging by your level of intelligence, I bet I make a lot more than you do.
Bwahahaha, the old "my paycheque is bigger than your paycheque" routine. You're unemployed and living in your parents basement, and I am virtually certain of that. My point about being unemployed or not relates to the fact that the unemployed are most likely to spread doom and gloom as they paint he world with their own situation.
Wow, what a stunning rebuttal. Well let me simplify my response to yours to ignorant, self-justifying (I'll guess that you're unemployed. The unemployed generally will worst-case scenario the world around them to justify and explain their position), paranoid, and utterly inane. The core of your argument is that computer science, a field which requires a large degree of education, can most easily be transplated to "3rd world nations", a status that generally indicates "no education".
You obviously have no idea how much of the software you use was written in India. Almost every major American software company has outsourced or established offices there.
This is just ridiculous. Very little (I would estimate Claims that some outrageous portion of it was birthed in India is just ridiculous. I will fully agree that Indians living in the West contributed...of course they have...but the idea that the Indian tech community is anything more than a TINY blip in the global village is just ridiculous.
and the 2nd can't account for anywhere near the kind of trouble that a 75% discount can't overcome - or even a 20% discount for that matter.
Absolutely ridiculous. Firstly software development is not, and has never been a cost driven field: How else do you think it gets by as an industry with 80% or higher profit margins? The only reason that any organizations right now are looking to relocate to India is simple: A desperate last move in tough tech times. These were the same firms that were paying $150K during the height (which was an opposite form of desperation). It's management justifying themselves by doing something.
Under-estimating communication issues is unbelievably ridiculous as well. Have you ever worked in software development? I suspect not because in real world development the client seldom comes with a "This is what I want in nicely documented form, and I'll see you in 6 months when you deliver", but rather almost all real-world development processes are Agile development style processes (whether formally defined as such or not) where there is a constant bantering between the various development groups and the "customer". Hell, you're trying to claim that communications AROUND THE GLOBE with a people who often speak different languages under completely different laws is no big deal yet most companies still don't even allow telecommuting. What sort of dream world are you living in?
The reality is that software engineering is by far the most ideal candidate for 3rd world outsourcing to date - because there are no transportation costs, and no real possibility to tax or tariff the "product" as it travels over borders.
Exactly as you've mentioned, software development has always been an excellent candidate for world trade: The programmers of India, like anyone else, have always had the ability to create the next Photoshop or Windows. Of course, as you know, they haven't, and the only reason at all that this whole movement gets any support whatsoever is because it's the latest wave of self-justification by layers of HR and upper management. When the tech upturn begins it'll be forgotten into the ether.
Secondly, computer science is one of the most educated fields out there: Saying that it's the most "ideal candidate for 3rd world outsourcing" is just ridiculous in that context. The outsourcing to India is basically occurring to the "Island of the First World", it isn't occurring to some unwashed masses. Education, as you know, is one of the great divisions between the first and third world. Of course the salary in the Indian tech community has ramped up steadily and will quickly reach Western norms.
if you're a software developer planning on living in the 1st world, your world is ending.
Why limit your paranoid extrapolations to just software development? Why not just say "Any intelligence work is going to the 3rd world". Drug research, architecture, electronics engineering, etc. Let's make this even more dramatic shall we?
Sorry I actually did mean to portray them as two separate positions, and indeed a slash indicating role-duality was a mistake. Doh! :-)
I think his real point really applied to any outsourcing. If you have a company in the banking sector and you outsource code, it would be absolutely insane not to have an auditing team that goes over the code line by line to ensure that it doesn't introduce backdoors or security holes. This applies whether you've outsourced to India or Accenture. Indeed I would imagine that the auditing field will be a burgeoning new career.
Another field that is going to explode because of the India phenomena is systems analyst/architect: To have the Indian firms develop for you, generally you have to provide them with a absolutely defined need, and that's where that comes in.
Uh...okay. I apologize and I hereby accept all gloating praise heaped upon India (a region whose SOLE selling point is low cost). India is our daddy. In fact, I'm going to buy some India shrinkwrapped software right now given the lateral thinking and innovation that naturally must emerge from the streets of Bangalore. Could you point me to some?
The textiles industry, which was one of the very first high-tech industries, largely left the developed world a long time ago.
I think the point here, though, is not so much that coding is leaving the "Developed" world to go to some sweatshops in India, but rather that Bangalore has become a sort of First world island: They have the infrastructure and the education, so why couldn't they compete? There is a huge danger in all of these articles, though: The United States (I'm personally a Canadian, and I laugh a bit because in some ways Canada is a mini India: We've always attracted this sort of work because of our low dollar. Indeed when this article claimed that software development in India was 40% less than the US...well that actually puts it right on par with Canada then. I think we need to advertise our sweatshops more!) could truly fall behind not because India has shot ahead (and VB type coding that they're doing now is NOT shooting ahead despite this absurd article), but rather because everyone stops going into computer science because of articles like this. Already I've seen a lot of bright minds leave computer science for "management" pathed careers, all because they've bought into the notion that the field is dead here. Of course it isn't, and this article certainly doesn't forbode any new threat that didn't already exist, and of course the mad rush to India will cease, costs will equalize, and then they'll be consumers of the big worldwide information field.
Ironic, though: It'll be interesting to see what happens when developer pay skyrockets as new shops are set up.