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EU Calls For Use of Open Standards
fondacio writes "In a speech that is being reported as taking a swipe at Microsoft, EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes has called for businesses and governments to use software based on open standards. While not mentioning Microsoft by name, Ms. Kroes referred to the fact that '[t]he [European] Commission has never before had to issue two periodic penalty payments in a competition case' until this befell Microsoft. The things she told a conference in Brussels will not come as a surprise to Slashdot readers, but it's encouraging to hear the following quotes from someone in her position: 'Where interoperability information is protected as a trade secret, there may be a lot of truth in the saying that the information is valuable because it is secret, rather than being secret because it is valuable... we should only standardize when there are demonstrable benefits, and we should not rush to standardize on a particular technology too early... I fail to see the interest of customers in including proprietary technology in standards when there are no clear and demonstrable benefits over non-proprietary alternatives.'"
Here. There are lots of goodies.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
Neelie Kroes rules. She makes me proud to be Dutch. That does not happen too often. Soccer be damned.
Time is clearly the legislatures of the world of old men who think the Internet is a series of tubes and they are being replaced by people who at least slightly more tech savvy.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
It would have been nice to see a renunciation of software patents and the bogus "intellectual property" phrase too, but this is very close to that. After laying out the case for secret file formats, she demolishes it. The text is available in html, pdf and, ironically, DOC but I wonder if anyone will bother to download it in that format.
Ms. Kroes referred to the fact that '[t]he [European] Commission has never before had to issue two periodic penalty payments in a competition case'
That's simply because it had never realized that it could profit $2Billion from such penalties.
Hey twitter, how are you and your sockpuppets today?
Europe does a lot of stupid things, but it also does some amazingly brilliant things. This speech is brilliant, let's hope the follow-up isn't stupid. It's definitely a jab at Microsoft, but it's also a jab at ISO in the comments about not rushing things. I think Europe is most displeased with what is going on, or at least some senior figures within it. This does need to translate to action. Possibly on more than one front. If the European Courts are presented with evidence that Microsoft hijacked the ISO standards procedure in an effort to "comply" with prior rulings in a dishonest way, I imagine the court would not be pleased. Could it be considered contempt of court to attempt to mislead the court over compliance? Does the EU court system even have such a concept? If not, can/will the judges increase the fines to reflect the seriousness of the situation? Or given Microsoft's continual appeals and non-payment, are there any other penalties they can exact, such as suspending the business license for Microsoft's European branch?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
FINALLY, people are starting to see the light...
I'm not sure how Microsoft is destroying peoples' careers. I mean, I'm a .Net developer and get offers for Java, C++, etc positions, so I can't imagine how Microsoft could kill someones' career unless they do not keep up with the latest technologies.
Advertisements aren't squandering money either. It one way you generate public knowledge and interest in your product, which translates into sales. And I'm not sure that I'd put advertising in the same breath as corruption unless your advertisement strategy is unethical.
Hmmm... Lets see.... If you were an A) Amiga person B) BeOS person or any other type of OS that wasn't MS, Apple or UNIX, your years of training suddenly were worthless. Now, you could probably still find employment but all of the training you got became worthless due to MS's monopoly, not because the software was bad but because of a monopoly.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
No one likes corruption and everyone is fed up with Microsoft. Kroes has done a fine job of expressing some of the world's contempt, but anywhere there's technical competence people are angry about the ISO hijack. South African, Brazilian and Indonesian citizens have all piped up. World wide corruption has produced world wide derision which will be followed by rejection.
should Microsoft decide to step straight into the fist as it's flying, that's their right. but then don't come whining about being decked by a girl.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Adapted from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advocacy
Well I'm a LAMP developer and have never touched .NET but get offers for VB and .NET positions all the time too. So what's your point?? Recruiters are morons.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Ask the people who worked on DRDOS, Lotus, Word Perfect, OS/2, Netscape, BeOS and so on about careers and keeping up with the latest technologies.
Advertising annoys the people targeted and has done Microsoft less good than product would. I consider that a waste.
Unix and C has been with us since the beginning. Anybody who didnt realize that fact shouldn't be in computers, period.
C will cannibalize any prior language on any platform (from stamps to supers). After that, Unix will not be long to follow, due to simple methods of controlling hardware/software.
Also, the MacOS is dead. Dead through and through. Unix and Windows are the only 2 choices. Just so happens that a company used the FreeBSD base and added a snazzy GUI.
Even since that, guess what is next to die? Microsoft. Why? OSS people need only make the 90% solution, because that "90% @ free" is better than "100% @ big_money" according to many many people. When people realize that one doent need a 200$ operating system to take care of most tasks, they will switch. Acer, Dell, IBM, Asus, and the rest of the gang will make sure of that.
Parent is Redundant, not Informative. The link he provides is in the summary. It's just Twitter trying to get Karma for one of his sock puppets. Odder even replied to westbake's "Informative" post. (And no, I am not willyhill, but this kind of karma whoring bugs me as much as Twitter's sock puppet game bugs willy).
Simple...
It's no longer possible to write a commercial desktop or server OS and expect to turn a profit from it... BeOS was great, but it wasn't compatible with microsoft and ultimately doomed.
Open source is barely competing, despite the obvious price advantage.
Similarly, you can't write a commercial office suite, just look at wordperfect, once the dominant player, now pretty screwed...
Novell faced a similar fate...
It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft simply isn't viable... The only way to compete is very slowly through open source, leveraging the lack of cost and advantages of distributed development. Even then, the process of winning market share over from microsoft is far too slow to make a business selling competing software.
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You mean Richard Stallman has the opinion that it is a "bogus phrase".
No, but you are too wrapped up in your hatred of them that you need to pretend you're nine different people to try to see if someone agrees with you about their "demise", which if I remember correctly you've been promising since 1996. This thread is already polluted by three of your accounts, complete with the usual inane "M$" poetry you're so popular for.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
After all, the link is identical to the one in the blurb.
The statement about monetary incentives is wrong because what the Commission just expects compliance with its rulings. Usually companies do comply. The competition authority acts similarly to a court. Competitors file a complaint, then the Commission rules, then the convicted monopolist complies. This is the way is works. Microsoft broken the rules and refused to comply, it delayed the process, bullied the Commission, lobbied aggressively, even let foreign nations intervene on their behalf.
The penalties are just for non-compliance, the difficulties of the myriads of Microsoft lobby outfits to "understand" what the Commission wants. When Microsoft sued the Commission it won just another enemy. Microsoft acted like a bully, bought politicians, harassed the Commission. This made so many people fed up. Parliament members file parliament questions on Microsoft. Lobbying for Microsoft got a pretty bad smell if you care about your career in public affairs.
Only an american could list those as bad things.... *sigh*...
Strict gun control is hitting the target when you shoot. As for gun violence, all Europe has to do is look in Europe, specifically Switzerland. All able bodied males are required to have a firearm yet crimes used with firearms are lower than in the US, where most "able bodied" males don't have firearms. It's not availability of firearms, it's more the culture; whereas Switzerland has a culture of peace, and money, the US has one of "the Wild West".
FalconShould there be a Law?
Many of us benefit from his contributions, and I am grateful for that, but RMS is also a crack-pot and his statements must be taken with a grain of salt.
It is interesting how most people today point at political and religious fanactics and all agree that fanaticism is never good, while many here worship at the feet of a fanatic.
I'm all for advocating freedom, open source, and open standards. I also believe that these causes are best fought by level-headed folk. Acting like a crack-pot only makes the whole cause look bad.
Search your feelings Skywalker, you know it to be true.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I know quite a few people working in ministries in Den Haag, and as far as I hear from them the ministries continue to be a 100% MS deployment.
Does *anyone* here has first hand experience with actual changes, or at least scheduled plans to introduce any changes?
"It's no longer possible to write a commercial desktop or server OS and expect to turn a profit from it."
Funny, a few years ago Apple was left for dead, developed a new OS, and is gaining market share as they're selling it.
Similarly, you can't write a commercial office suite, just look at wordperfect, once the dominant player, now pretty screwed.
Corel still sells Wordperfect and makes a profit doing so, but their market share is pathetic. If Sun, IBM, Corel, etc. got together and worked on a kick-ass office suite, and united under either the Wordperfect or Lotus brand name, I think they could sell a serious office suite and compete.
1). Get Dell, HP and the like to preinstall it on any computer that doesn't already come with Microsoft Office, as opposed to Works. A fully-functional, free suite is better than Works and PC OEM's should realize this. Win-win for everyone here.
2). Don't dillute the market with 20 different suites. Again, work together. IBM created a nice interface. Wordperfect is proven. OpenOffice has an interesting base. If you improve your Microsoft filters, combine market share, and work towards one incredible UI, you'd have an Office killer.
3). IBM is smart to target big business and sell it is a cost-effective alternative to Microsoft, but you need to target students. Get schools to install it.
"It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft simply isn't viable."
Tell that to Google and Yahoo who trounce Microsoft's search/advertising efforts. Tell that to Apple who is thriving selling an OS. Tell that to Apple who has completely dominated the MP3 player and online music market. Tell that to Sony and Nintendo, etc. etc. etc.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
"Unix and Windows are the only 2 choices."
TRON (The Real-time Operating system Nucleus) claims to be the world's most widely used operating system because it is embedded in a vast number and variety of electronic products.
Oh, you were talking about desktop/server operating systems.
Parent might be worded as a troll, but it is also insightful -- it is scary as hell that the people (Ted Stevens) most directly responsible for legislating the future of the Internet are so completely clueless as to the nature of the beast.
I don't mean that every congressman needs to become an expert on every niche domain of knowledge humans have ever dreamed of -- but at the very least, if you're going to legislate something, learn something about it, or delegate to someone who has.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Sometimes change doesn't happen without a fanatic getting it all started...
Pin-ups men! We need pin-ups!
Sure, she definitely falls into the "milf"-category, but whenever Neelie opens her mouth anyone who cares about open standards gets a geekgasm.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Guy, tone down the drugs and seek help. Schizophrenia is your enemy. Help is available. See a doctor, or use a better text generator.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
You must understand that for business it isn't strictly the one off cost of a product that is an issue.
A bigger issue that companies pay for is the support and the management of their software. Also the case of buying in large amounts especially for government allows for even cheaper cost per unit.
The trouble with being stuck with a nix style system is the lack of support and the excessive technical knowladge required to support who ever has purchased the system. Where as windows and microsoft products are supported by many and it is considerably cheaper than nix support.
"OSS people need only make the 90% solution, because that "90% @ free" is better than "100% @ big_money" according to many many people.When people realize that one doent need a 200$ operating system to take care of most tasks, they will switch. Acer, Dell, IBM, Asus, and the rest of the gang will make sure of that."
From my experience, it is a sad fact that people won't realise this - however much you try to suggest that there's no point paying £200 for an office suite when they only use the bits that come in the free one.
I use OpenOffice entirely, whereas the majority of everyone I know insist that they "need" MS Office. So I will try to say to them that for schoolwork/writing letters, OO.o has everything they need, but without the price tag. I will then go on to say that it can save the MSOffice formats, so there won't be any compatibility issues, and that there's barely any difference in the interface, so it's not like they've got to learn a new piece of software. yet somehow, they still end up spending £200 on MSOffice.
However, what is more interesting is that people will tend to try firefox over internet explorer, despite IE being free.
So maybe people do value that 10% they pay £200 for, even if they don't use it. Or do people just distrust free software, having had bad experiences of malware. Or is it just a large case of corporate brainwashing?
---You must understand that for business it isn't strictly the one off cost of a product that is an issue.
I've seen your types here before. It's the "Real total ROI" game. There's plenty of places to see why you're wrong. You can do that research.
---A bigger issue that companies pay for is the support and the management of their software. Also the case of buying in large amounts especially for government allows for even cheaper cost per unit.
This is the common excuse MS and likes use to develop a cost for free software. Guess what? You need experienced admins, and they cost a lot. It doesnt matter if it's Linux or Windows. Experience costs.
---The trouble with being stuck with a nix style system is the lack of support and the excessive technical knowladge required to support who ever has purchased the system. Where as windows and microsoft products are supported by many and it is considerably cheaper than nix support.
The support IS the source. If the free devs are going somewhere you dont like, fork it internally and hire a coder if the admin is too busy, or farm it out to a 3rd world.
If OSX is dead then why is it gaining market share?
When people realize that one doent need a 200$ operating system to take care of most tasks, they will switch.
Does that explain why people are switching to Macs? Leopard costs $130, a family pack of for 5 Macs cost $200, while the 10 client license for OSX Server cost $500 and for unlimited clients it's $1000.
Acer, Dell, IBM, Asus, and the rest of the gang will make sure of that.
Yea, Micheal Dell has said he'd love to be able to sale Dells with OSX preinstalled. While I'd love to run OSX on most any PC when Apple licensed Mac clones before, they lost money. This was while John Scully was CEO of Apple. But when Apple brought Steve Jobs back he looked at the books and saw Apple was bleeding because of the licensing so he ended it.
Also, if you think about it, because Apple designs the hardware and software inhouse they are able to make sure it "just works". Once third parties can install OSX on their own PCs you can kiss that reputation goodbye.
FalconShould there be a Law?
" information is valuable because it is secret, rather than being secret because it is valuable.." Like putting gates around a bill rather than throwing a bill inside the gates!
I use OpenOffice entirely, whereas the majority of everyone I know insist that they "need" MS Office. So I will try to say to them that for schoolwork/writing letters, OO.o has everything they need, but without the price tag. I will then go on to say that it can save the MSOffice formats, so there won't be any compatibility issues, and that there's barely any difference in the interface, so it's not like they've got to learn a new piece of software. yet somehow, they still end up spending £200 on MSOffice.
Owning a Mac I use NeoOffice the native Mac port of OpenOffice. I've downloaded and read MS Office docs, including Office 2007 .docx files and tables or charts, without trouble, that is until last week. Last week someone emailed me a document that could not be properly viewed, I'm still waiting to hear back from them after writing them about that. However NeoOffice has 2.2.3 out now yet my version is 2.1. So maybe the new version can open it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If I could buy an OS X PC from anyone then you would have a point. However I can't and therefore OS X is not really a competitor to Windows except in the high end market, which is a fairly small segment.
When I can buy a PC from anywhere at any price point from dirt cheap to uber gaming machine with a choice of 2 or more OSes then Microsoft will have a powerful and significant hold on this market sector (I would use the word monopoly but I'm tired of libertarians pretending they don't know that monopoly means something different in legal circles).
It's a better world than it was 10 years ago to be sure with Asus at the bottom end and Apple at the top end but Microsoft have been where they are for way too long considering how badly they bent and broke the law to get there.
"kick-ass office suite" ???
"incredible UI" ???
That is not the point of office software.
An office suite is by nature and definition a rather boring set of tools.
Its job is to produce documents or display and manipulate data. Any sort
of aggrandizement in the form of a fancy graphical interface adds nothing
to its functionality and may even excessively distract or annoy the user.
(Microsoft's opulent "Fluent" interface has all but ruined Office 2007 by
making it a severe pain to operate.)
When I process words or spread data, I like to be able to do it in the
simplest and most straightforward manner possible. I don't want or need
a snazzy UI. Consequently, any office suite can do the job just as well
as any other.
The question naturally arises: Given this undeniable equivalence, why should I,
or anyone else, choose one brand of office product over another?
There is no rational answer. People use MS Office because it's there and
for most it's always been there. They know of nothing else and the corporate
bureaucracy will admit nothing else.
So don't fool yourself by believing that a "killer UI" is going to open
people's minds to an alternative product. You cannot make a better hammer
or a toothbrush. These items are already as good as they can possibly get.
The same applies to office software.
It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft simply isn't viable...
I don't suppose Google or Sony has got the memo? Or Apple, for that matter?
Google had, and still has, a good search engine whereas MS didn't. I recall from years ago how people complained about how they couldn't tell the difference between search results and ads when using MSN, the few tymes I used it myself I didn't find any relevant results. Now, if you look at MS's Live.com it has a clean interface, like Google. Sony was in game consoles before MS so had an advantage there. And Apple has been around as long as MS, MS even writes software for Macs. I'm typing this on a Mac I got less than 10 months ago, after switching from Windows. It came with a trialware version of Office 2004 for Mac. Switching because I don't like it that MS treats it's users like criminals, which is what Activation is about, I was not about to use it. Instead I use NeoOffice the native Mac port of OpenOffice.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Sex sells. Apple lives and dies by this.
A sexy UI will sell software.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Haha, that reminds me of natural language processing class where we had to make sentence generators after learning word sequences from a training corpus. Seems like someone trained on slashdot, and now we have A.I. that says "sux0rs", sweet.
Who modded this offtopic flamebait insightful?
It's taking time for the world to catch up with him, but people like Kroes are well on the way. It's a good idea to listen to people you don't agree with when they are obviously trying to do good things for you. It's also a good idea to take things with a grain of salt from convicted monopolists that talk about "one night stands" and pawn developers. Richard Stallman has taken a lot of heat for the things he's said but almost all of it has been correct. He'd be a much better person in authority than the real greed driven crackpots John McKain favors - Steve Ballmer and Carley Fiorina.
Intellectual property was the desert property of the twenth century.
We love you too, Twitter!
hi twitter
"ibane" is another one of twitter's sockpuppets. He's now down to ganging up on people who have offended him because they don't think exactly the same way he does. This is the damage done by allowing people like twitter to maintain multiple accounts. He is actively gaming the system and should be stopped.
Well, thats kind-of my point. Theres no reason for you to believe that the technology you're working on will last forever. Thats why you have to keep up with the latest technologies.
.Net like a bad habit, would you blame Linus for destroying my career as a .Net developer? Theres lots of people who would. We just had a story on Slashdot about how FOSS was making it hard to market proprietary development tools. Me? I'd just switch to Java, or PHP, or Python, or any of a myriad of technologies. I'm not betting my career on any one technology. Its my responsibility to keep myself marketable, not Microsoft, Sun, or any other company that puts out a development platform.
If Linux wiped out Microsoft tomorrow and everyone dropped
Now a lot of those companies lost out because of unethical business practices, and that is bad. But its not the same as Microsoft destroying their careers. If they were any good, they're probably still in the software business.
Bad advertising annoys the people targeted. Honestly I can't say I've noticed or cared about Microsoft advertising, so I'd be hard pressed to say its annoying.
I wouldn't call a recruiter that recruits programmers for languages they're not experienced in morons. Maybe they're one of the few recruiters who realizes that a good developer can learn new technologies. And thats my point.
No technology lasts forever in its current state. Even the Linux now is different from the Linux 10 years ago. Good developers and admins keep learning and adapt. Bad ones don't. If you cannot work in the IT industry because the technology you learned is no longer used, then you destroyed your own career, not anyone else. You're responsible for making yourself marketable.
Well, if FOSS wipes out some other technology, should I complain that FOSS is destroying my career? Or should I be responsible for keeping my own skills marketable? Me, I figured "Hey I should learn some of this Linux stuff" so I installed Ubuntu on a spare machine and made a personal server. If Linux wiped out Windows tomorrow, I'm confident I'd be able to find a new job.
I love to see you shills whine like bitches now that MS is finally sinking.
Keep posting, your bitterness is like honey to me.
Mac OS is what died with version 9. Some of its toolkits still live, but what we have today are Windows and UNIX, and Apple is in the business of selling UNIX.
We look at it differently then, I look at the OS that created for Macs by Apple run as MacOS and OSX runs Macs. Yes, it's compleatly different than MacOS 9 and earlier but it's still MacOS. It generally works well however it doesn't for MkLinux, though Apple worked on running Linux on Macs I don't consider MkLinux as MacOS.
FalconShould there be a Law?
No one said OSX is dead. MacOS died at version 9, and OSX replaced it.
Those OSes before OSX are the Classical Mac OS.
Hopefully that is straight forward enough. OSX is a Unix varient, and very much alive.
While OSX is based on BSD it's still the MacOS, OSX is the successor to Classical MacOS.
FalconShould there be a Law?
they're starting to get to you, arent they willy?
closing time soon...
Nokia's new music store is open:
http://music.nokia.com.au/
Only don't bother if you are using firefox on windows, Nokia's site will only work in IE.
WTF is wrong with open standards? Seems like they are only important to Nokia if it means they can get the community to develop software for their phones...
"If you were an A) Amiga person"
The Amiga is a bad example because its demise was entirely due to late-period Commodore's legendary ineptitude. Bone-headed management decisions killed the Amiga, not MS.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
"Unix and C has been with us since the beginning."
No they haven't. FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Lisp, Algol, Simula, and a bunch of other languages predate C, while GM-NAA I/O, OS 360, TOPS-10, etc. were around before UNIX.
"Anybody who didnt realize that fact shouldn't be in computers, period."
See above. An old proverb about people living in glass houses not casting stones comes to mind here.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Google already had a market which Microsoft entered... It is Microsoft trying to compete with the established player, and few other companies would have the resources to burn like they are.
Similarly with Sony, Microsoft entered a market already dominated by Sony, and in which both Sony and Nintendo have a very strong presence...
Perhaps i should rephrase my statement to read:
It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft in markets they dominate simply isn't viable.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
twitter deserves frequent ridicule and criticism because he frequently does
things which are wrong. He is either too stupid to understand the social
harm he does or is too greedy to care and he should be called to task each
time he is caught saying or doing the wrong things. This is an impossible
task for any single person, of course, but it's easy for the community if we
cooperate and share what we know.
http://brlug.net/pipermail/general_brlug.net/2008-April/018422.html
Open standards are not sufficient enought. You can slip to a monopoly with an open standard which is so complex that only one piece of software can deal with it properly (cf. OOXML).
Its job is to produce documents or display and manipulate data. Any sort
of aggrandizement in the form of a fancy graphical interface adds nothing
to its functionality and may even excessively distract or annoy the user. Actually, that's not true. Beautiful things work better, according to one of the bigger experts in the field.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Restrict replying as a different user to your own thread by IP.
Stopping the violence in American society takes more than banning guns, and perhaps banning guns isn't even the most important part. I think it probably a necessary part, though. As it is, a lot of violent people have guns, so ordinary citizens feel they have to follow suit; but when everybody is up in arms like that, it is very difficult to effect the change of culture that is necessary in order to make violence less likely to be the "solution" to a problem. And Hate speech, according to whom? Should we not allow vitriol that some people spout be public, for surely intelligent people would realize it for what it is? An idiot who spouts bile in public is harmless only as long as he is generally recognised as an idiot. Unfortunately they are not all immediately recognisable as idiots - some are able to gain wide, public support. The US, despite the KKK, have never been through a period with a Hitler or Mussolini, both of whom managed to whip a huge following, and maybe that is why Europeans are more wary of hate speech. Yes, intelligent people recognise it for what it is; unfortunately, experience shows us many aren't intelligent enough, and that "intellectuals are suspicious". The intellectuals in Germany in the thirties saw Hitler for what he was, but that wasn't enough to stop him.
It is not at all difficult to define "Hate Speech": Incitement to hatred or violence against a group of people, is the simple answer. The silly KKK demonstrations and people talking about certain races or ethnic groups being inferior - that is not hate speech, it is just wrong. But if you say "The muslems are out to get us, and we have to strike first" - or "The Jewish conspiracy is what causes all our problems, and we have to take action against them"; that is hate speech because it incites to violence against certain groups.
So if I'm a EU citizen when should i be able to buy a laptop without paying the MS tax ? I already did expose this situation to the authority for competition (Autoridade da concurrÃncia) but got no replies.
No... I'd call them a moron. I've been approached by these recruiters when I was a lead for a department. The people they give us are not trained in what they want them to be trained in. We have a set of tools and applications that they need to know to be able to ramp up and start helping out as soon as possible, the less they know, the longer the time it takes them to ramp up.
Saying 'a good developer should be able to pick up a new language' is like saying 'a good sys admin should be able to pick up a new operating system'. Doesnt make any sense. Syntax may change, techniques may change, libraries are different... you are a newborn all over again. The only people I have heard this from are managers and marketing people who have an agenda and NEVER from a knowledgable developer as they all know it takes time to learn new syntax and new libraries and techniques.
You are a naive newbie if you honestly believe that it is that simple and cut and dried.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Everyone is calling Open Standards these days. the EU has its own competence team called OSOR (see: http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/6728).
but were is the action ? does anyone see a "bounty" something like that ? What are the products ?
M$ had to pay several $$ fine. Why is the money not supporting a Xorg (see: the State of X11 http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/11/0229209) a product that truly every user uses and that gets so little attention. Several other projects are waiting for a leadership.
There are projects that could save the EU Millions, Howto ? see the german foreigen office ( http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Auswaertiges-Amt-spart-im-IT-Bereich-kraeftig-dank-Open-Source--/meldung/85977 )
the EU could offer education for people that want to add linux to there business in Europe, help with simple things like translations for OS projects.
did anyone hear/read about it ? I did not.
Of course its not that cut and dried, but saying that developers have no ability to jump technologies and become a "newborn" is absurd.
My first job was doing C#.Net and SQL, with absolutely no experience in either of those. In a week I was fixing small defects. A week after that, larger defects. A week after that, new features. I was brought in to fix a PHP application with no PHP experience and did so within the time allotted. I was brought in to make a Java webservice hosted on Tomcat with only academic Java experience, no Tomcat experience, and no webservice experience, and was able to complete that in the time allotted with plenty to spare.
People often over-estimate the experience that developers need and under-estimate their ability to pick up new technologies.
If you want to call me naive thats fine, but I've done it before and I can do it again.
If Slashdot had a way to stop Bill and Steve's Sworn Enemies of Twitter Super Secret Society, they would have implemented it by now, right? That hasn't happened, though, so Rob Malda must be on Microsoft's payroll, and is aiding and abetting the harassment of Twitter. Q.E.D.
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Well I did say it was my first job, so technically I was a newbie. But you missed the part where within the month I was doing development. You also missed the part where I was hired to write a Java web service (from scratch) using two technologies I wasn't familiar with on a tight deadline, and did so. Unless writing a completely new service doesn't count as development. But if thats the case what does?
And my experience at most of my companies was that most of the work fixing defects or adding features to an already-existing app. Every software developer I've met, save you, would call that development. You're trying to move the goal posts here.
You've honed in to one sentence that confirms your pre-existing beliefs. Congrats. Luckily I tend to work with people who are not quite so close minded. They tend to appreciate that I can bring myself up to speed quickly. Of course when I see a hiring manager look for a candidate that can just "jump right in," they usually spend several months where they could have hired a "newbie" that could learn.
And yeah, a new guy isn't going to be able to be the architect for, say, a new software service that generates billions in revenue. But they can contribute (without x years of experience), and build up their skills to the point where they can design add-ons. But the tone of your post seems to indicate that you view development as "building everything from scratch on own," which isn't a view thats applicable in my professional career.
You are talking about building small scripts and tools. Things they send newbies to do. Things a seasoned developer doesn't have time for and that they give to someone to either A) get them out of the way or B) get them used to the tools so they can move on to the next script monkey task.
Is that development? Sure in the same way that welding a panel to the space shuttle makes you a rocket scientist. But trying to act like you 'KNOW' they languages you just used when you just tinkered in them isn't the same thing. Would you call someone who knows SQL a DBA? Would you call someone who jumps from language to language and just tinkers in them a developer? Hardly. 90% of the time, what you built got rewritten or trashed.
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I guarantee that these are not small, scripts, or tools. You're making assumptions about my work based on no information whatsoever. These are production applications, and in some cases have millions of dollars in revenue flowing through them. Is it that you just can't imagine that anyone can learn tools quickly and use them effectively?
Apple have been around for a long time, and their market share is still very small.
Apple are also not directly competing with microsoft, they sell a bundle of hardware and software together.
Plus, much of their market share increases recently have been due to the ability of their hardware to run windows as well as osx, making apple a risk-free choice for a premium system. They also already have a market leading position in another market (mp3 players).
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This is a path that I completely agree with. It is every citizen's own responsibility to keep his skills marketable, and doing as you did, exploring a new and unfamiliar system, as well as widening your perspective, is simply the right thing to do.
Sure, you can buy Windows separately, for about four or five times the price. And you can buy OS X separately also, it just requires the proper hardware.
The only difference is that you can buy a Dell without Windows on it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
CGI scripts have millions of dollars flowing through them too... are I would call the person cranking those out a script monkey too. By your standand, someone who knows HTML and picks up a little CSS, and a little javascript and a little SQL (but doesnt understand any of them WELL) is your idea of a good developer. In the real world however, that is what is knawn as a newbie.
You understand the tools you use and understand them well. We all have to use multiple tools but that does not mean you know them. Learning SQL over the weekend did not turn you into a DBA. Learning about versioning control does not make you into a build engineer. Yet for some reason you assume that by tinkering in other languages, you have become a master. And that is the original point. That whew they say ' a good developer should be able to pick up new languages' they do not mean ' a good developer should dabble or tinker in new languages'. They expect you to be a master of them all in that phrase... and any good developer will tell you that good developers always specialize in something and tinker in other things. But to assume that they KNOW the language is way off base if it isn't their specialty.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.