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http://www.geekwire.com/2016/b...

For one thing, the findings haven't yet been submitted for peer-reviewed publication.

Well, realize that you are lucky because there are many programming jobs out there.

Don't get me wrong- it pays well. You can retire early (I retired at 51) because the pay is high.

It sounds like your work never has tight deadlines. That's very nice. In my experience, that's not typical.

Programmers at the major contracting houses put in long hours. Programmers at consumer businesses put in long (and holiday) hours.
Programming at new development companies is insane. I had a friend who had a bed in his office, which also had showers, and food was provided.
On our big project, food was provided two meal a day and 7am to 9pm hours were typical. Around releases, hours were longer.

I don't know about the defense industry. I always got the impression Nasa was a pretty cushy programming job. I'm sure there are easy programming jobs out there.

Fast food was 2-3 hours of busy and 5 hours of mostly standing around doing light work. It's not really work to push 3 burgers around the grill unless you are counting standing up as hard work.

OTH, at exxon, they have a lot of standing desks. Because people's backs are too messed up to sit any more.

I'm sure some burger jobs are harder than others tho.

Look, I agree your point has some validity. But I think you have a false impression of how hard IT work is for many in the field.

http://www.geekwire.com/2012/f...
"Facebook employees gripe about the long hours"

https://www.glassdoor.com.au/R...
"long hours, high stress"
http://www.businessinsider.com...

"For instance, a decade ago, during the Internet bubble, a book called "Death March" became a best seller. It documented how insane hours for programmers led to health issues. It concluded that poor project management was to blame.

In 2004, coders actually sued Electronic Arts regarding overtime and won a $15 million settlement.

Years later, in 2010, a story went viral from a woman married to a programmer who worked for Rockstar Games. It told how the company expected programmers to work 12-hour days/six days a week for months or years on end, damaging some programmers' health as a result of the strain."

Those are valid numbers that you can find for yourself just by looking at federal agency websites.

Oh, it's not the numbers, it's your methodology and reasoning that is a problem.

The claim is that guns are causing more harm than automobiles yet we have more guns than automobiles and automobiles cause more deaths.

Yep, as I said, your reasoning. Right there. That's your reasoning in the end.

That is pure fact from federal agencies put out by the current anti-gun administration.

Nope, it's your reasoning, from your own head. It doesn't even pass a whiff test though.

And no, you will not produce any such conclusion from the current, or any administration.

I doubt even Trump would be dumb enough to say it, but then again, Mitt Romney was dumb enough to say what he did about the US Navy.

You can try to spin it into something different but the fact remains that an automobile in the US is more likely to kill someone than a gun.

You can try to spin it as some sort of declaration from Federal Government agencies in order to make it seem authoritative, but the fact remains, none of them are coming to your conclusion.

The reality is your average American will see a car in operation far more often than a gun, will be in a car far more often than they see a gun in use, and beyond that, there are plenty of efforts to reduce deaths from automobile usage. Significant ones. Even from the current administration.

Your blathering about the number of guns? Really just nonsense, no insurance actuary would even consider it anything but laughable.

The only thing it says, and your repeated insistence upon it, is what it says about your character.

Thank you for your support of teachers. I've already reported and weighed in a few times about this subject, and I'd like to just expand on a few of your points.

Unfortunately, money speaks, and superintendents listen. When someone walks into a sup's office and says, "I'd like to donate $50,000 to the district to buy more technology," who would say no? And, on a national scale, if Zuck & Gates walk into the president's office to say, "We'd like to donate $1,000,000 to get more school districts to code," do you think Obama would be any different?

I do wish that we would just let labor markets let supply and demand naturally encourage or discourage people from entering and leaving the profession, as it happened a decade ago. While Microsoft claims that we aren't supplying enough computer programmers to meet demand, the BLS begs to differ. Salaries have grown at 1.5% annually between 2004-2012, barely keeping up with inflation. All the while, we continue to bring in more H1B visa applicants. If these companies -really- want more programmers, all they need to do is raise salaries. It sounds like they have plenty to spare. Not to mention repatriating all that money would go a long ways in increasing tax revenues to help states pay for their K-12 institutions.

Oops, good point, that should have been mentioned indeed. In my defense, I'll say that this was a quote I pulled from the Geekwire article (which has since, to their credit, been revised) http://www.geekwire.com/2015/w...
SpaceShipOne re-used everything except the actual rocket engine (that is, the combustion chamber and ablative nozzle) which was replaced for each flight (much like a model rocket, now that I think of it).

The Xbox One may be killing the PS4 in the US

U.S. current-generation hardware sales in August as its PlayStation 4 trumped the Xbox One for the fourth consecutive month. The company has outsold Microsoft for U.S. console sales each month of 2015, with the exception of April.

http://www.geekwire.com/2015/s...

Hey baby, tickets were $2. http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... and there's a big difference between non-profit which other posters here have said an "the party — which probably would have lost money anyway — was cancelled." http://www.geekwire.com/2015/i...

I reckon we're being trolled by OP and thanks to RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAGE postings like yours, it's working.

Such a program already exists. And guess what - shock of all shocks, the IAU is throwing a hissy fit about it. They're basically at war with NH's director Alan Stern and are planning to refuse a large portion of the NH team's feature names for Pluto.

They already have: http://www.geekwire.com/2015/i...

Contract telecom workers who rake in the overtime. Eventually you might see a series of evenly spaced cuts on long runs that are calculated so there is too much light loss, entire cable sections need replacement.

The NSA, who is building out a massive dark fiber intercept network to shunt traffic to Utah and is using the outages as 'cover' as they install separate, secret drop-ins.

Those who hate our freedoms. You know, those folks who keep ranting about those folks who hate our freedoms, and how you have to break eggs to make an omelet, and hey it's been a long time since we invaded another new country.

Book Publishers and People who do know how to use the Internet. I should have listed them first. We must track down these people and watch them closely.

The Amish Mafia and Inner Circle. Slowing the encroachment of microchips at home and abroad. You do not want to mess with these people.

Starbucks. What do repair crews drink the most? Slam dunk! Well... oops, wait. We're talking about the global corporate giant that has built the world's largest IT single point of failure. This is either the cleverest, most insidious plot ever, perfect cover... or the dumbest.

Lawyers and Insurance Companies. In general, and it's our own damned fault.

Until things are so bad that a mob of concerned citizens gathers on the spur of the moment to surround, interrogate and hold telecom crews until they are vetted (or) swift and lethal vigilante justice is delivered... we cannot reasonably expect the world to suck less as time goes by.

Trademarks used herein are sole property of their respective dark fantasies.

... some techniques for dealing with anoying objects buzzing around.

Just think of a drone as a big mosquito.

If things get bad enough there's an actual 'revolt' against the platform, that would be something.

Agreed though there is no evidence I can see that such an event has happened or is likely in the near term.

Am I right in thinking the iPhone market-share is decreasing?

No. Apple's marketshare has been remarkably consistent for about 5 years. Apple also gets >50% of the smartphone industry profits which is arguably more important.

The loss includes the first satellite for Planetary Resources, the Arkyd, an orbiting telescope intended to hunt for asteroids.

I am not so worried about the patents. Vertically landing a rocket has been described in the TinTin comic ''Objectif Lune in 1953, has been demonstrated on the moon in 1969, with the Delta Clipper in 1993 and more recently with the X-prize in 2009. The patent by Blue Origin (sponsored by your purchases on Amazon) is from 2009, and is being challenged. I didn't read the patent and I am not a patent attorny, but the 'on a boat' part seems very much like the 'on a mobile device' part that gets slapped onto old ideas.

It is hard to have laws written by Republicans if you keep electing Democrats. Seattle has had Democrats for mayors for decades. This is a bit of Democratic folly, and you're apparently stuck telling not just lies, but obvious stupid lies.

The current Democratic mayor is thinking about changing it, but he might not. Enjoy your Democratic party in action!

http://www.geekwire.com/2014/s...

Because a Cyanogenmod user was able to monitor this application, it was discovered that Swype was requesting location data several thousand times per day.

The vendor responded with a reasonable explanation.

In any case, if you run an Apple device, you will never know if your vendor begins doing such things, either for innocuous reasons, or otherwise.

p.s. You can now buy phones loaded with Cyanogenmod as the native OS.

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/xbox-360-wii-ps3-won-console-generation/

Dominant? I do not think that word means what you think it means. And 360s are still selling. Who's buying a PS3 now? Granted, that says nothing good about Xbone sales, but this isn't about Microsoft being great, but about Sony being lame. Given that Sony was giving away online gaming while Microsoft was charging, they should have ground Microsoft into a paste.

Note that one key element of cost of any service is population density, not population.

So what's the excuse for high prices and slow speeds in places such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, etc? Those would certainly qualify as population dense.

The fact of the matter is the FCC, just like Congress and local governments, has been bribed to allow near monopolies to exist rather than enforcing existing laws regarding competition. As a result the U.S. continues to fall further and further behind the rest of the industrialized world in broadband penetration, speed and obviously, price.

Currently we are ranked lower than places in the former Soviet Union for both speed and price, and well behind places such as Taiwan and Hong Kong. You can keep using the excuse of population density and large land area, but the reality of the situation is we have only 3 (maybe 4) providers in this country who have tacitly agreed not to compete with each other, the end result being what we have now: low speeds for high prices.

Link one for reference

Link two for reference

Link three for reference

Note that all of the above links are from November-December of 2013, less than six months ago so the information is up to date.

Umm, yes. They have won suits in New York, Washington, Massachussets, and Ohio, to name a few. Not all of those rulings were permanent, but this map is pretty recent.

Notably, as shown in the screen capture or TFA, two different images represent ON vs. OFF.

If you actually watched the video or looked at TFA you would see it's a slider

Notably, as shown in the screen capture or TFA, two different images represent ON vs. OFF.

If you actually watched the video or looked at TFA you would see it's a slider

The author seems to be unaware that in 2011 Netflix tried to spin off its DVD business (proposed spinoff "Qwikster") and focus on streaming-only. The outrage from its existing customer base forced it to reverse this plan and publicly apologize to its customers:

"It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming, and the price changes,” wrote Hastings. “That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology.”

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/reed-hastings-netflix-customers-i-messed-up/

https://www.google.com/#q=onenote

First impressions: How Microsoft's new OneNote stacks up against Evernote

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onenote

That was easy.

Haven't you noticed that the prices on Amazon have mysteriously gone up the same amount as what the shipping charge would have been? Just shop around a bit and you can find the same item for less plus a small shipping price, which magically is the same price as the one offered on Amazon with free shipping!
Anyone smell this turning into a class action suit?
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/l...

But what is this job that used to pay $80k - $100k exactly and has now dropped to $40k? It's certainly not software development because wages there have not declined - on the contrary, they've been increasing. Why are you certain the H1-B hires are the reason the average salary has dropped? Another thing I've pointed out previously is that the number of H1-B hires isn't even large enough to have much of an impact on any particular field - they're still a vast minority relative to the numbers in most fields in general.

The wages of tech workers are less than pre-recession levels and are increasing at a rate lower than inflation. http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

So sure, maybe you do work at one of the companies that does bring in cheap overseas hires, but my point remains that all the big boys are not doing this. The big tech companies are all paying well above the average. I can't find the site I used last time I looked into this as it had more uptodate data, this one only goes to 2010, but if you find such a site with more recent data you'll see it's the exact same pattern.

The big boys are definitely hiring the most H1B visas. Whether or not that is driving down their wages is debatable. The top requester of H1B visas is Microsoft. http://www.geekwire.com/2012/4... . Intel, IBM and Oracle are also high on the list. (Yeah, I know, that list is a bit dated, but you get the point.) Actually, the largest recipients of H1B visas may be firms specializing in off-shoring jobs. They bring people over here to learn the jobs and then they can do the work from India or wherever after the visa expires. Apparently, these kind of companies got 40,000 out of the 85,000 visas that were issued in 2012. http://www.npr.org/blogs/allte...

You won't. But a proper native app (not just a wrapper round a webview) will often be far better than a web app. For one thing it can access resources on the phone that a web-app can't. For another thing, the UI will tend to be far better, and will be far more likely to follow platform expectations.

related:
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/m...

I'm shocked to find out that Liberal and Libertarian Washington State is trying to interfere with Tesla's business model. Washington has the most Tesla sales per capita and yet these legislators obviously paid off by the auto dealers has put forward a bill that would stop Telsa from adding stores.

http://www.geekwire.com/2014/p...

"Jeeves, bring around the Dassault Falcon 900EX. This hurts like HELL."

Got any proof of that? Several people in these comments have claimed that MS never made a counter offer, so please back that up - reading the court documents gives a whole different impression on the negotiations in that regard...

So, you have proof, but no link. I tried to find your court documents and found this, which on page 6 attempts to "Reconstructing Hypothetically the Microsoft and Motorola Negotiation", because it didn't happen. Your ball.

If you bought a company that did something prior to your buying it, are you evil?

The takeover was apparently completed in May 2012; the story above links to another that goes back to *November* 2012, and the filing date on the PDF of the court filing that original story links to is also November 2012. (*)

That said, even if it had been, I don't like the principle of absolution of guilt by takeover. If being taken over absolves the company of moral guilt, that raises the possibility of moral hazard, since a company can do evil stuff and get taken over by another who don't have to worry about its reputation- hence the original owners/managers still get paid a high market value for their actions. If the immorality of the original company is more likely to tarnish the purchaser, that will reduce its market value and hence punish the original owners.

(*) I was almost going to say the PDF was dated July 2012- which seemed quite a long gap- which I might have taken to mean the chain of events was possibly set in motion before the takeover. Then I realised "11/07/2012" was in the ass-backwards US format and it *was* November!

They have a much richer set of offerings and ecosystem for end-users as well.

Despite years of trying, Amazon has done what Microsoft STILL could not: make solid inroads into the music market dominated by iTunes. And every item you purchase on their site (electronic or not) ends up in your cloud player collection, making it a very attractive deal.

And Amazon has the entire e-book market locked-up, an impressive competitively-priced competitor to Netflix (Microsoft has no such offerings), and don't forget the successful Kindle/Kindle Fire tablets to enjoy all that content on!

Even though it's not the standard on Android, I have a feeling more people make use of the Amazon App Store than Microsoft's Windows Phone Store. Microsoft can only wish they had made all these right moves years back, instead of letting everyone gallop ahead of Win Mobile.

I just read about this case yesterday. Funny.

One of the undercurrents in this whole thread is that we have no idea whether OP is telling the truth or not. There's a signficant chance s/he's jerking everyone around so s/he can forward this link to a hiring employer. How can we tell the difference? I think OP, if he's telling the truth, has to figure out what can prove they were the real author, besides the obvious of calling the client they did the work for (Duh!). That's something that can't be thought of from a one (long) paragraph summary.

GeekWire: 'Creepy Cameraman' pushes limits of public surveillance - a glimpse of the future? (includes interesting video)

An 'interesting' video, indeed, that shows how easily irked people become when they realize they are'being videoed. We are *so* going to need laws to protect the first "google glassers".

GeekWire: 'Creepy Cameraman' pushes limits of public surveillance - a glimpse of the future? (includes interesting video)

What happened with OP was, technically, an exception-handling bug. The exception was that some condition of the next event wasn't satisfied, and did so with time-sensitive language on the screen. That's not a poor progress bar, that's just negligent coding.

Kudos for pointing out the difference with the Progress Bar and Time Estimation. A good example for both? wget

A properly crafted Progress Bar is not hard to do: Amalgamate the task at hand into a number of homogeneous units and express those in the graphic bar as [ units.done / units.total ] and you'll be fine. Where most fail at this is in keeping the units consistent and/or appropriate. A classic fallacy is one of file-count vs. byte-count, but the most egregious of those failures is a total-units value that dynamically updates. (vis-a-vis, the "dancing left and right" progress bar)

OTOH, there's Time Estimation, which is a far more fickle beast, especially when applied to ISP throughput. This requires more of an understanding of statistics and averages, where the algorithm is actively measuring units of time as well as units of data. A classic approach is to simply calculate the mean throughput and apply it to the bytes remaining to get the ETA, but this quickly falls short when the connection hangs or if the algorithm is relying on throughput statistics to ratchet the loop. The best—and most frugal—implementations of Time Estimation have used a timed loop with throughput calculated on a rolling average from a fixed number of samples. Again, the most common errors here are; using incorrect units; using an unreliable source for rate and/or throughput; using too small of a sample base before starting prediction trends, and the icing on the cake; mistaking a partially completed task as an accurate measurement of throughput in the sum prediction. (Back in the days of 56k dialup, I would resume d/c downloads all the time, and the download managers were regularly telling me that the 10MB chunk I already have somehow sped up the process to twice—or even ten times—the highest possible speed of my dialup connection. el. oh. el.)

Now, all of this goes "out the Windows(tm)" if you happen to be at Microsoft any time in the past fifteen years. Their idea of a "progress bar" seems to be just a mechanism to make the user sit and do nothing for a number of minutes at a time. The progress bars they typically have made are either (A) simple timer animations that masquerade as a progress bar [see: browsing the network] or (B) the obsequious progress bars from Win98, that fill up to 100% and stay there for another two minutes before actually triggering the next process.

Thankfully, someone in the Win8 file manager team actually got the memo, as you can see here.

So, there's really no mystery. The "how to" of making an accurate progress bar or time estimation algorithm is really quite well established. The real question is, how to convince software developers to implement one?

P.S. Units. Units! UNITS!!!

If Bill disbursed 50 billion (leaving himself with a paltry 16 billion), he could have provided every MS employee in the US with $877K. Given that there are plenty of non-rich MS employees, an additional 877K (87K additional salary for 10 years, 43k additional salary for 20 years) would have been far more economically useful to them than it would be as an additional billion for someone that could never spend it.

That might be a valid point if Microsoft employees weren't historically and presently treated/compensated very well compared to the greater tech market: http://www.geekwire.com/2012/microsofts-starting-median-pay-beats-rivals-91500/

Though funny enough, satisfaction is low despite the relatively high pay & perks.

After a decade in the console market Microsoft's Xbox 360 is the last place console this gen

(Emphasis added)

You might want to pull your head out of your ass before sticking your foot halfway down your throat:

360 Maintains Lead in US Console Market (TechNet blog - Feb 2012)
Xbox maintains Console lead in US for 18th consecutive month(ZD Net - Jul 2012)
Xbox 360 marks 22 months atop U.S. console market(Geekwire - Nov 2012)

Seriously, how the fuck do any of those stats equate to: "it's [a] failure"??

In fact, it's only when you compare world-wide figures for ALL generations of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo consoles that Microsoft comes in 3rd place (~25% marketshare). But that's including Sony's PS/1, PS/2 AND PS/3 sales and all of Nintendo's sales against the original xBox and the 360. (Bearing in mind that Microsoft didn't enter the game until the PS/2 came out!) Nevertheless, in the current gen, Xbox has sold more current-gen consoles month over month than Sony; virtually for the entire life of the PS/3 and the 360 has surpassed both the PS/3 AND Wii sales for the past two years.

What matters though, is that at the current time, Microsoft is the king of the pile for current gen consoles in North America, and is continuing to make money for MS as the major players move towards the next-gen, so, by any measure, it's definitely not a "failure"... (it MADE Microsoft in-excess of US$56bn over the past 7 years, if that's a "failure", you can sign me up to "fail" just like that!)

So, maybe, in the future, when you're thinking about mouthing-off over something you don't know fuck-all about, you should just STFU and appear contemplative instead of retarded?

-AC

Hmm, I don't know about that.

You would have to research more than just reading Linus's email to learn that. If you are a programmer yourself this is what you would naturally do. If you are an HR person you just dump the resume - there are many more, and none of those applicants are screamed at by Linus! They must be real good then! :-)

Instead of screaming and cursing at him, or ordering that he be fired or otherwise punished, the pilot said something like, "I bet you're not going to do that again, are you? Now fix my goddamned plane."

This is the approach that I'm advocating here. Rage is usually pointless unless you are willing to beat the guy into a pulp. Screaming does not matter; actions do. Screaming only works when the physical violence is a real possibility. Today it is not. Unless you are him.

Why did you link geekwire instead of The Patent?

Because the USPTO is not a for-profit business. Duh.

Why did you link geekwire instead of The Patent?

.
Xbox team’s ‘consumer detector’ would dis-Kinect freeloading TV viewers
http://www.geekwire.com/2012/microsoft-diskinect-freeloading-tv-viewers/

Maybe they will watch you to see if you are skipping out on the wonderful commercials and instantly rewind the show for you, just in case you missed something important. Or maybe they will charge you more money for their service if you don't watch at least a minimum of their intellectually challenged TV shows each day? There are lots of ways they could increase the popularity if this system, only I bet they misuse all of its capabilities to the max. After all the stupid decisions Microsoft has made in the recent past, this one is likely going to be a real dud as well.

Special Delivery Instructions

link

It's very interesting to note that my post that turns out to be completely right was one of the few that got a negative mod. I guess that the shills with mod points don't want anybody to notice that about half of the initial sales of surface will be from Microsoft to Microsoft.

The company's head lawyer is quoted praising the two former adversaries, and explaining once again that the company wants to license its patents instead of heading to court.

You'll know they have the patent when they sue you.

To put this into context:

So what somebody says, why don’t you tell me which patents you have, Nathan, so I can avoid them, you’re supposed to be avoiding all of them! You’re saying, Nathan, I’d like to be honest with you but cheat everybody else. What’s up with that?

You read that right. You should be avoiding all the patents without knowing they exist -- and as parent stated, you can find out you violated one when you get sued whether over IV's patents or anybody else's.

They do? I could've sworn I heard about some field tests involving iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7, which later resulted in Android being selected. Granted, they cited a lack of secure encryption as a problem, but the nice thing about Android is that you can just put it in yourself. Plus, RIM's services all go through a central point of failure that has proven less-than-resilient in the last year or two.

the european microsoft conference thing where they had the video that talked about penises... or vaginas

Go here: http://www.geekwire.com/2012/raunchy-windows-azure-dance-routine/

trying to be funny, but i guess not. :)

They're doing G-d's Work.

geekwire.com's algorithm served me an article about Darth Vader as an amazing project manager, that is quite telling!

Vader kicks ass, and didn't need to steal software projects or other works when he could implement things himself. Still evil, though.

They were also playing with delivery lockers at 7-11's. I'm not sure if they're running with it, or if that's relevant to sales tax.

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/confirmed-amazons-delivery-locker-7eleven/