Normally the lawyers involved schedule a deposition. You can cancel with sufficient notice, all sorts of games get played. While lawyers work weekends, depositions really need to be during the week. You need: 1) Both attorneys, 2) the one being deposed, 3) anyone from either side that wants to be present, 4) any counsel from related lawsuits if you end up with something hairy, and 5) someone to transcribe the session.
The odds of being able to schedule EVERYONE involved except for Monday-Thursday (even Friday's get hairy, as it's harder to run over time on Fridays, etc., lawyers want Fridays for catch-up, etc.) is nearly impossible.
That said, 24 hours notice with a subpoena? Something isn't right, because generally counsel tries to mutually schedule the depositions, and subpeonas only take place after a motion to compel if one side is no-showing. IANAL, and not a Texan, but this seems extremely shady. In an intimidation case, this makes sense, because the more shady things the more you run up the other side's legal bill, but sanctions and other things prevent total abuse.
There are a few different credits. The appliance one was the first $300, others are 10% credit. However, if I had known that, maybe I would have bought my kitchen appliances over a few years...:) But if you didn't fill our form 5695, you wouldn't have known that. That's my point.
That's the thing, the "in" thing to do is use birth control and not have children. Feminist ideology has be subtly discouraging women from having families. It isn't blatant, but it's the "start your career first," "plan your children," etc., that suggests that children are a burden. It's a subconscious thing, but if children are things to wait to have until you can afford, and should be planned for, clearly they are a "bad thing," and it is reflected in birth rates.
The culturally "in" things are: get a good education, make a lot of money, buy fancy toys, etc. People that DO those things have fewer children than those that DO NOT. People that have the most children either "get knocked up as teenagers," engage in anti-social behavior like cheating and child abandonment, or are religiously motivated.
We are selecting cultural and genetic traits that are NOT culturally in. Unless culturally large families become a status symbol (which is unlikely as the government and courts make having large families miserable, try getting 3 kids into a sedan, easy in the 70s, but now with 1-2 car seats and 1-2 booster seats, it can't be done, you need a mini-van or SUV -- and that's just at 3, not large yet) and the cultural elites have big families, you're going to keep de-selecting those traits.
Hell, look our Ms. Spears is derided for getting married and having two kids, while her "rivals" are lauded for partying all night. She is criticized for acting like the celebrity culture wants her to act because she has kids, talk about a message to young people that having kids sucks...:) It's not intentional, it's a whole lot of subconscious things.
Rebelling is a myth... The teenage rebelling is a social construct because we keep extending childhood (first school to 16, then 18, now college until 22) while the brain is wired that after puberty it should go out and seek a mate. Being kept in an artificial state (with parents, while capable of procreating) has created a perception that "teenagers rebel."
If you look in religious communities, where marrying young is encouraged (not 14 anymore, but 18-15 is young in the modern world, but the norm in religious communities, women between 18 and 20, men between 20 and 25), as is having children, the teenage rebellion is MUCH lower.
Basically, the spoiled boomer kids artificially rebelled, and expected their kids to, but the rebellion is a joke... What percentage of boomers as children were A) in college B) part of a counter-culture rebelling, and C) didn't graduate, get a good job, and move to the suburbs and have a life like their parents? 1%?
The political correlation (between parent's political affiliation and child) is somewhere around 80%. Some of this could be because economic circumstances are USUALLY similar (parent's education is the second most highly correlated factor with income, after one's own, but it's a CLOSE second).
The fact is, if fundamentalist birthrates are 4x the "norm" and it APPEARS to be... the right-wing of religious groups appear to be averaging between 6-8 children/generation, while secular birthrates are around 1.5 and overall around 2.2 in the US, then even if 25% of the religious kids become secular and NONE of the secular kids become religious then the religious population is doubling in size each generation. Combine that with generations starting at age 20 instead of 30, and you get 3 double-sized generations in the time that the secular population had 1.
But when you combine a large fundamentalist population that believes secular people are the devil, and a large anti-religious secular population (which also appears to be growing albeit from drop-outs from religious populations), you are tending towards two subsets that hate each other... Without something triggering the reversion to the mean (which normally happens), we're in for a bumpy ride.
The first year we were married, my wife and I did our taxes by hand. We were in Mass at the time, and Federal took about 2 hours to do, State about 4 (Mass has HORRID forms). The reason we did it by hand was to understand the taxes. We all understand the theory (this is taxed at X%, this at Y%, this is deductible, this isn't), but until you go through the process, you don't really understand the 2% thresholds and how those affect deductions, AMT, etc.
After that one painful year that seared in how things worked, we switched to TurboTax (online once, which was a mistake, on the computer after that). All told it probably takes 1-2 hours to do, plus $35 for the software and e-filing. Would it be more cost effective to pay someone to do it? Sure. Would they catch stuff that we miss for deductions... MAYBE... I use Quicken so my deductions are pretty easy to track.
Why do I do it? Because by doing your own taxes, you notice credits/deductions that you don't qualify for but could easily. For example, this year I got a small credit for putting in my new AC, but there are a WHOLE BUNCH of energy improvement credits that I wouldn't have known about without doing my taxes. Since we are renovating our house all the time, there is no way I'll ever NOT spend enough on the energy efficiencies to get the credit. If November rolls around and I haven't earned the $300 for energy improvement, I'll go buy something small, because with the government kicking in the money, you can be sure that I'll take the free house upgrade... paying $200 for a $500 new window is a no brainer.
The reason to do your own taxes... if you own a business and have an accountant that you work with throughout the year and they advise you on tax matters, then go ahead, let them file the return (just spend an hour reviewing it -- find deductions/credits you get in one year to always get, etc.), but if you were just going to walk into H&R block and get no advice (other than them selling you services), then keep doing it yourself...
The traits that our capitalist society rewards (excellence in a field gives extreme wealth, and competence in certain people oriented skills trumps competence in technical fields, etc.) is the appearance of socially what we want. If the pay is better, the supply should increase. However, if you look at birth patterns, things that correspond with higher birthrates are: religion (more => more children), region of country, etc. Traits that are NEGATIVELY correlated are education (more education, for women especially, lowers birth rates), income, etc.
Even MORE interesting is the rate of genetic diversity. The crew most decried by the family values crew (the single mother with multiple children from different fathers) has interestingly creating more genetic diversity. Gentlemen like "K-fed" are producing multiple offspring with multiple women, ensuring their genetic diversity.
This is interesting because after generations of decreasing religiosity, increasing education, and healthier people living longer, it looks like those same biological forces are shrinking those characteristics. There was an amusing editorial a few years ago suggesting that Roe v. Wade destroyed the Democratic party, NOT because abortions were unpopular, but because they were popular. Because of the high correlation of political views with those of the parents, the the correlation of being a Democrat with abortion (roughly 2-3 times more likely to have an abortion if a Democrat than a Republican), then 18 year after Roe v. Wade we found a shrinking pool of Democrats.
Similarly, the higher birthrates of fundamentalists of all religions is causing a slow reversal of post-enlightenment reforms and changes in religious communities. The "mainstream Protestant Churches" are losing numbers, the Catholics are holding steady overall, but their growth is in South America and Africa, while their presence in Europe shrinks and American Catholics are increasing of Latin origin, Judaism has watched a growth of its Orthodox wing (from about 8% 20 years ago to close to 15% of Jews), which itself has been shifting rightward, and Muslim growth rates are outstripping everyone.
Basically. out secular atheistic culture has reached such a pinnacle of self indulgence and freedom that it might actually shrink itself. The American Left is constantly blaming the Bush administration, but the cultural shifts underneath America demonstrate that demographics and not demagoguery is actually causing the reactionary political pull.
It's very interesting, but I find it the HEIGHT of irony that the bible-thumping anti-evolutionary wings of all religions, that were marginal a generation ago, are suddenly making gains, while the secular, science and reason based culture with decades of dominance after WW2 finds itself on the retreat, and the REASON is that the anti-evolution crew is spreading their genetic material and creating offspring to advance their agenda, and the pro-science pro-evolution crew is cutting off their genetic material with families of 0-2 children.
In fact, most disturbing is that the men that engage in the most socially irresponsible behavior -- serial cheating, divorce, etc., are generally fathering many more children than those that "play by the rules." So with whatever genetic material influences behavior, we're going to find each generation a little more adulterous...
If current trends continue, which of course they will NOT, things will swing the otherway, but amusingly, in 4 or 5 generations, we'll have a general population of non-white, deeply religious Americas who going to Church/Synagogue/Mosques regularly, while engaging in adulterous relationships during the week.:) But seriously, if you think that the religious right is bad now, well in 50-60 years, if they continue to have double the birth rate or more as secular America... well they WILL be the majority in time...
Try Money Dance and let me know. I wasn't happy with the first verison, but the crappiness of Quicken Mac is driving me nuts... Very annoyed that my up to date version lacks the basic stuff that I took for granted with Quicken Windows.
Developers who want to starve, sure. A 3% market share can only support so many developers. Pretty soon Apple developers will be the new musicians: out of work and unemployed in every sense of the word, waiting for their big gig, which they're sure is just right around the corner.
I've never understood this assumption, it's wrong on so many levels. Counting Apple's share of computers sold through certain channels and assuming that that is the market for your software.
For example, some percentage of Windows machines are servers, my random desktop application shouldn't count those as potential purchasers. If I make consumer software, then the 50% of Windows machines in corporate networks with controlled installations shouldn't count either. If I am writing software with limited requirements, then Apple Computer's generally longer deployment lifetime means that I'm looking at a different installed base.
Or to put it in another way: If I write software for Java developers to buy, I DO NOT CARE about Windows, Linux, or Mac computers in the hands of non-Java developers. If Apple grabs 25% of the Java developer market, I'm in business. If I write software for musicians, Apple's approx 40%-50% marketshare in this niche makes them viable.
And your assumption ignores competition. Sure, lots of Windows computers need file compression, but how many of them had bought Winzip? After Microsoft embedded unzipping in the OS, how many of them bought Winzip? Apple has a thriving shareware market, Windows may, Linux does not.
As a developer, I care is there a potential market for my software. I really don't have any skin in the OS X vs. Microsoft Windows battle, do you?
Why marginal costs matter. Apple develops OS X and Microsoft develops Windows REGARDLESS of costs. When Apple sells and iPod for $300, they generally spent $200 on parts and sales costs. So while their top line (revenue) goes up by $300, their gross income (revenue - COGS) only goes up $100. While revenue is interesting, a company has to pay all it's expenses out of gross profits. When Microsoft sells a Copy of Vista for $150, the marginal costs (COGS) is pretty close to $0, but for retail is probably $25 or so (packaging, shipping, tracking, etc.). So while their revenue went up $150, gross profits went up $125. Basically, for $300 in revenue, if Microsoft's gross margins are 5/6th, and Apple's are 1/3rd, then Microsoft is doing MUCH better off the same sales.
Now, investors care about Net Profits, after paying for everything. But the company (internally, non C-level employees) cares about gross profits, because that is the money that is available to pay salaries, etc. However, market analysis of businesses normally looks at revenue, because while it isn't a meaningful number, it's the hardest to fake, and analysts normally assume that companies in the same market have similar margins.
Drinking the Kool-aid refers to a cult whose leader had them drink the poisoned kool-aid and they died. Drinking the Kool-aid means that you believe in the leader on faith, originally from the phrase "don't drink the kool-aid" from the Jonestown masacre.
Sugar-water is Apple specific. When Jobs lured John Sculley from Pepsi, Jobs asked Sculley, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?"
Hence the Sugar Water and "Change the World" quotes are Apple quotes, and have nothing to do with the Kool-aid quote you are referring to.
Semantics... the point is it's derived from a lambda calculus mathematic to the core that can be mathematically proven, establishing correctness. Theoretically, a LISP machine could be built where you could PROVE the correctness of the interpreter, the operating system, etc. Such a system would be crash-proof, barring hardware problems. That's "neat," not really useful in the real world, but it's really neat.
The point is, using LISP, one can build a LISP compiler, that compiles to LISP operands (I forget, it's been close to a decade since I did this), or outputs machine code. The boot-strapping project is pretty straight-foward. You implement an interpreter in Assembly ONCE, inefficient, but that can run the 9 basic operations. You then use this to load the LISP interpreter that outputs assembly (modified for a new architecture of course) that brings more operations down to the native layer --- trivial example, one need-not implement a second operation, as first(rest(x)) can implement second, a recursive (rest) with if can be used to implement last... again, trivial examples to illustrate --- then you can do it all in Scheme.
Like the other post, using Scheme to treat the problem and use a Scheme->C Scheme program to get optimized performance. Essentially, for MOST applications (non-embedded) optimizing the algorithms in question will get you FAR more of a performance boost than going to hand-tuned assembler.
The old idea was to find the loops where most time was spent and optimize those. First optimize the algorithms, THEN think about tuning the assembly. However, there is NO excuse for writing everything in assembly... You spend a LOT of time on areas of code rarely executed, and it's much less likely that you've optimized the algorithms as well. No excuse is over stated, maybe you're just that good, but the higher-level languages let you get something up and running fast, then you can tweak as needed.
I used "theoretical" and "neat" to illustrate why this was a great ACADEMIC language, for the controlled environment of research and teaching. You took my theoretical point and said, "but it doesn't work in practice," to which I say, that's why I was clear to point out that it's a theoretical advantage in an academic setting.
BASIC, SQL, and other "simple" programming languages didn't replace programmers because the hard part of programming is logically thinking in a creative manner. The thing that stops most people from being programmers is that they don't think that way. That said, the addition of VBA and other things to Excel HAS let some people do their programming, I've seen business execs write simple macros to process their spreadsheets faster... I'm seen some impressive Excel spreadsheets. This doesn't replace programming, but that is work that doesn't need to get sent to IT.
Making programming easier for logical people WITHOUT training as programmers makes certain jobs too simple for IT, but it doesn't replace the programmers for real work.
But looping through your spreadsheet and doing some basic processing... that is a solved problem, and letting someone code that up quickly doesn't eliminate the need for real comp sci graduates.
Not that I could do any of it anymore, but the 6.001 SICP class that he was talking about did all that. We didn't use Scheme like most places use LISP (as a glorified LOGO), but as an extremely versatile language.
You learn the basics of programming using scheme, which takes about 2 weeks tops, the beauty of LISP. You do things like create object oriented LISP, create a LISP processor in LISP, then we create a basic machine language and process it in LISP. The POINT of it is that you can quickly build up an environment to process anything.
Later, in the intro AI course, you do everything in Scheme again. If you go on to take the "Programming Languages" course (I did not), you actually use Scheme to model every theoretical form of programming language so you can evaluate it.
Scheme is the PERFECT academic language. It is derived from lambda calculus, which lets you do neat things like prove your software is perfect. The interpreter can be proven perfect (all of Scheme CAN be implemented in 8 or 9 commands, that if implemented correctly can make the whole system perfect). You can build a compiler for Scheme in Scheme pretty easily (I remember doing it), etc.
The draw back? It's damned inefficient at using computer resources, it doesn't have a clean library approach, and while it is AWESOME at code reuse, it doesn't let you "optimize" things by playing with memory space, etc. It never won in the marketplace because Worse is Better.
So you are suggesting that the EASIER solution than changing the clocks is to get 300 million people to all switch to your new "government standard hours," adjust to every business being open different hours, etc., as opposed to everyone doing a "spring forward, fall back?"
Sorry, I'm one of those people that loves DST... I make my own hours, but I'm someone limited in how far I can separate from the norm, clients, etc., need to be able to reach me, I need to be able to reach vendors, and banks need to be open.
DST is a wonderful thing, there is time to grill when one gets home, one can do outdoor things afterwork, etc. The real energy savings is from people who go for a walk in the park, or kids playing outside instead of watching television or playing video games. The light usage is pretty minor compared to the others.
I probably use more gas because I'm more likely to run errands when it is light out, but that's much better than saving them up for the weekend.
For you, it's not a big enough change to be worth bothering (with shifting clocks?!?!?!?), but I get the impression that you are not married and have no family, so all that matters is your schedule. The rest of us have to coordinate with other people, making clock changes MUCH easier.
You're illustrating the broken window fallacy, which assumes that since money for repairs is spent somewhere, it isn't lost and is entirely stimulative.
The problem with that is that the opportunity cost of not having that money elsewhere. Of course money never vanishes, it recirculates. If the $1 spent on Y2K7 compliance isn't spent there, it is spent elsewere to earn a return, or as profits to be retained and reinvested or given to shareholders as dividends. All involved would no doubt prefer to spent the money A) increasing widget production, B) developing a new widget, or C) reinvesting it in a profitable opportunity elsewhere. None would choose to spend it D) on updating DST calculations.
Now, when an economy is in a depression or deep recession, sometimes their is a stimulative effect of bad spending (hence the Keynesian stimulation of deficit spending), because the economic loss of unemployed resources is such that the economy may get a lift from spending to bring it out of the depression... that's how WWII ended the great depression... in a non depressed economy, few would argue that the best use of scare resources is to blow up the cities of other countries and send a chunk of your workforce to go into combat half a world away, but in a depression, reducing unemployment through war spending and by removing conscripts from the potential labor force may be stimulative enough to get the economy growing.
However, right now, this isn't economically beneficial. That said, I can't wait for the extra hour of sunshine Monday night!
Here's the point of the article: People who can teach high school calculus or physics don't have educations that put them at salary parity with administrative assistants or receptionists. Hence the suggestion that they should be paid more than people whose alternative employment is as administrative assistants or receptionists.
Agreed, and unions are the bane of education, because they are their for the teachers (its the teachers union) but are politically granted this position as being "for the kids."
The article is 100% accurate, wages for teachers should be set by the market... recruiting competent people.
My point is that the "myth" of the underpaid teacher is a myth... and it's throughout the article. The article says no discriminating against departments, we need to raise pay for all teachers... but the teachers of the humanities are fairly paid, possibly overpaid. The teachers in the math and sciences are underpaid.
I think that unions of public sector employees should have to be apolitical... The idea of being able to push an agenda in lightly followed races gives them too much clout in choosing their bosses, which is what makes them the best paid of the bunch.
Most receptionist or admin assistant jobs don't require a college degree -- those were the kinds of jobs I did before I got a college degree, and that's true in "major cities" I'm aware of as well; entry level analytical jobs are the typical first post-college job
Typical out of college job for a liberal arts student at a non top-50 University? You're out of your mind! That's a typical job for an engineering/math/science (or business school finance track) student that chooses to enter a financial job. But someone with a degree in English, Literature, History, etc.? They aren't getting analyst jobs.
Regarding the higher education requirements of higher up the teaching poll? My mother-in-law is a teacher, switched from private school to public a few years back. Couldn't get over how well she's be doing if she switched 10-15 years earlier... as it stands she'll have 10 years in at the public school system, only granting her a 40% of pay pension... She also won't get that huge 30+ year raise in pay that causes income to double in the years before retirement so your 80% pension is really 160% of what you normally made.
She could make more money moving up in ranks/steps/whatever, but that requires a masters degree. However, the school system will pay for her Masters degree, so she just has to show up and take tests. You get your Masters later on the system's dime... Sure, it takes time, but that's what your 1/3 of the year off is for.
The requirement is something that you don't need until at least 4-5 years into teaching... so just attending summer school at a local university will get you a Masters in 4 years.
The myth of the underpaid teacher is a myth of the wealthy liberal. Consistently, teaching pay/hour is similar to private sector employment that has similar requirements. In fact, if you WATCH the debate about teacher pay, you will ALWAYS HERE "a first year teacher makes $XX,XXX" where the amount sounds really low to middle and upper middle class parents whose kids are being taught by them.
This ignores the fact that a first year teach is generally 22-23 years old and right out of school. If you compare their salary to a receptionist, admin assistance, or other "just out of school" jobs available to liberal arts school graduates, you'll find that teacher pay is comparable, even without normalizing that they work 2/3s of a year (summer + winter break + spring break + extra holidays comes out to 4 months off out of 12). In that other third, they can teach summer school, tutor, work another seasonal job (depending on part of the country), or just spend time with their family.
In addition, the average kindergarten parent sees that number for a first year kindergarten teacher and thinks, "I couldn't live on that." They don't think, "wow, that's about what I make 5 or 6 years ago when I was right out of school."
Teachers that have established themselves for a number of years will make, after 25 or 30 years, $80,000 - $90,000, which may not seem like good money compared to software engineering, but when you consider that most 55 year old engineers have trouble finding employment, it's NOT a bad career path. They have an AMAZING pension, like all public sector employees. If you look at their lifetime earnings, it's NOT bad pay.
The fact is, if you take two 22 year olds right out of school with degrees in English and mediocre grades, and one becomes a public school teacher and the other takes a clerical job in the private sector, the latter MIGHT make a few more dollars in the first years, but the expected lifetime earnings for the teacher is MUCH higher. In 30 years, those two people are 52 years old. The former is making $90,000, and now has a pension of $60k - $75k built up, while the latter is at the mercy of the market for their 401k, but probably doesn't have the $1.2m saved up to buy the annuity that would match the pension benefit, because even if they are now making $100k-$120k/year as HR manager, they have 13 more years of slaving away, while the teacher can call it a day whenever they want.
In fact, the teacher, who has never worked summers (or has and made more money), has had summers to write, maybe has been working on a novel, etc. Teachers have it good and are well paid... not as well paid as medicine, but certainly as well paid as administrative assistants, receptionists, and other jobs often held by people with similar qualifications in major cities. The only area where teachers are paid poorly is in relatively uneducated areas, where your support staff don't have college degrees and teachers are comparatively only slightly less educated that lawyers.
In the mythical man month, there is a talk of system generations. The first system you build kinda works but is kludgy, you fight to get it to do what you want, but it works. The NES was a CHEAP system to build, nothing fancy, but hacking processors onto cartridges kept it going long after the hardware was obsolete. Sega's SMS was better looking than Nintendo's offering, cartridges more reasonably sized, but didn't have the fun factor as nailed down, but they got cool games out there. Sony's first system, the PS, was similar, switched controllers in the middle, did whatever they could with their hardware, dumped it on the market (trying to recover SOME sunk costs, not even turn a profit originally, and pricing reflected that). MS figured out how to build a system for people that wanted the best graphics at a subsidized price, they never set out to make a profit, and succeeded at turning a nice loss.
The second generation system is better, you have things under control, learned from your first system, make things a bit better, etc. The SNES had a nice lifespan, could do more out of the box (didn't need lots of custom controllers, etc.), was the NES but better. Genesis was an awesome system, it was a lot of fun, had awesome games, awesome controllers, a good stretch, made Sega money. The PS2 and Xbox 360 were good sequel systems. Backwards compatible, did what the old one did plus more, etc. They learned along the way (Sony came out the gates swinging, fought for each franchise, etc., pushed Nintendo out of several large chunks of the market), MS realized that you need parts where you get price breaks or can buy on the open market, otherwise you can't win the marathon.
The third system is over engineered, over thought, rediculously complicated, expensive, beyond schedule, and a disaster.
The N64 had plastic parts everywhere to put upgrades in, stuff hanging out of controllers, etc. It was shipping cartridges that cost serious money to produce (and had limited space), everyone else CDs that cost next to nothing, etc. While they made money, it was a disaster for a market that they were the leader of... didn't help that Sony was competing with a second system, so they weren't idiotic. The Saturn was the best 2D gaming system ever made, just as console games moved to 3D. It was ridiculously expensive from throwing everything in to avoid a Sega-CD and other upgrade fiasco, and set the stage for Sega's exit from consoles. Sony's third system IGNORES everything that got them there (cheap systems, easy to crank up production, granted the PS2 had some custom hardware, but NOTHING like the PS3), playing around with Blu-Ray, etc. In short, Sony is making every third system mistake, and we're watching it in the marketplace.
I predict that Sony will lose a LOT of money this round, but maintain a leadership position. They need to start selling the machines for $299 and not care how much they lose, and they'll do it, but it will be a REALLY REALLY expensive mistake. The PS worked because it was cheap and the R&D was already sunk. The PS2 carried the first gen system forward as just a better Playstation. The PS3 is a third system nightmare.
I had 3 OS X Servers, with upgrade licenses for OS X server, running several desktops. It doesn't just work because debugging is a bitch. If things don't work, Apple's support options are a joke. Microsoft's knowledge base is huge, Apple's non-existant. AFP548.com does not a network make.
One time I had a massive problem with my system, called Apple for support. The Enterprise Support group was closed for a meeting. They left for the entire afternoon, no support for me. I had to send my employees home for the day.
The mail systems are just non-standard location wise to make the online resources for the open source projects not quite useful, and Apple provides almost no utilities for debugging things. The resources aren't quite there.
The hardware is getting there (Mini is an AWESOME general desktop, small in size with nothing to mess with), Xserve is cool, and Xraid means not needing massive RAID arrays in the box. The software is getting there as well, each rev of OS X Server is using more OSS solutions that have been made Enterprise ready by companies like Redhat, and their software is maturing Workgroup Manager gets much better each revision. But the support options just aren't there.
Too many Linux on desktop advocates are waiting for this magical day where 50% of Windows users will wake up, throw out their computers, and buy Linux machines... it won't happen that way.
Microsoft's monopoly was built by being the dirt cheap, good enough solution. Attempting to "microsoft them" with the dirt cheap, good enough solution is hard... For most computer users, Windows is "free" it comes with the computer, and even if you are big enough that you buy via site-license and OS-less machines, the cost/license of site licenses gets pretty cheap as well.
However, the maintenance of Windows compared to Linux makes Linux VERY tempting in several parts of an organization. Just like Apple has maintained a presence in Windows companies for graphic designers, web designers, etc., and Server Linux has made inroads for Web Servers, etc., Desktop Linux will make in-roads in chunks at a time.
Is VB6->VB.Net "trivial," sort of. The time frame is MUCH less than a port from VB6 to ANYTHING else. If you are actively maintaining the code-base, you probably bit the bullet a few years ago, otherwise will do so now. If you have legacy VB6 apps that are maintained, then they likely will move over to VB.Net. Microsoft should love this, however, because this creates an incentive to migrate from VB6 -> VB.Net. Even if you don't plan to use the Mono out, it's a reason to modernize your code-base and get to VB.Net compliance.
A small shop, 2-3 coders, that makes a niche product, or an IT team with legacy code to support, now has a viable path to making Linux/OS X viable options. As Mono is free, it's also not unreasonable to bundle Mono/Application and sell it for OS X and Linux now (if you are a small shop, it's eventually going to become a weekend project), or at least keep that option open.
It's trivial compared to any OTHER migration path, that has been "rewrite the application from scratch."
Even when Nintendo doesn't do well in console numbers (Gamecube) or market share (N64), Nintendo is normally the largest publisher of games period. Even with bad console numbers, Nintendo makes money, because normally their is $32/game that goes to the publisher/developer, and Nintendo normally keeps all of it. Sony often makes $8/game because they often get the royalty for the system, but not the publisher/developer cut. Sony may have an excellent piece of hardware, but the Wii can keep dropping in price to move product, and Nintendo can follow-up with a Wii2 to keep up.
Sony messed up, they hit too high a price point, and suffered supply problems. They'll need top drop price to move units, and that will increase their burn/unit. Even if Sony recovers and dominates the console market again (which I think is very possible, they have some nice hardware, nice systems in development, and the PS2 compatibility would mean companies could release a game for the PS2 AND PS3, even if the PS3 version is just emulated with extras to show up on the PS3 shelf. I am not counting Sony out, and the hardware is impressive, BUT they did NOT put a reasonable amount of hardware together for a 2006 release. If they were aiming for a 2007 launch, with a $400 price tag, great, but for $2006, they hit too high a price.
They are going to lose a LOT of money on this round, because they simply CANNOT die... Sony, unlike Nintendo, doesn't own their franchises, which means that if Sony stops holding 70% of the market, the franchises can go elsewhere. So I think that Sony will recover and dominate the market, but it will do so with HUGE price cuts, massive losses, and basically wiping out all profits from the gaming division for years.
On the plus side, I think that they'll establish BR-DVD as a popular standard.
I have one data-entry application written in VB that runs on about 8 dedicated machines throughout my organization. It's light on resource requirements so runs on older machines, but of course requires some version of Windows. For a while I've been thinking of porting the app to Linux in one way or another, without resorting to making it web-based (or re-learning Java), but have concluded it's just not worth the effort currently.
That's an awesome example, I have a similar one. One of my old Interns wrote a program in Cocoa for Mac, because he was a Mac fan and it was a prototype. One of my guys thought that it would be fun to learn Cocoa, so adapted and rewrote the application over several revisions. It doesn't do THAT much, the heavy logic is server side, but it's a pile of code and the developer that wrote it isn't with us any more.
Well, I had 8 people using that program, so what the hell, rather than re-writing/porting, we bought 8 Mac Minis and used those as desktops. Nothing they ran (besides this in-house orphaned program) required OS X, but Apple and OS X got the sales for that reason. Had it been written by the guy who was playing with Qt at the time, who knows, we might have Linux machines there.
Most Slashdot whiners have NO CLUE how computers get used, because they think that their home use of computers is at ALL indicative, or they work in an IT company or school... they don't understand how a few legacy applications may have multiple people (with their computers) can have the oddest software requirements if their job is built around an old legacy code base.
I just toured a potential partner's warehouse, his whole system is manual. The accounting is Quickbooks, the shipping is Fedex's software, and their "integration" is some only shopping cart solution where he can download the information into Quickbooks and Fedex... There is no glue code for managing the warehouse... But he has several people whose job revolve around these applications, and the computers and OS's are purchased to run these apps.
Most software is NOT written for mass consumption, it's either written in house or for small niche markets.
TONS of this software has been written in VB over the years. Either in house processing forms (for specialized data entry people, some is now web based, some is not). Or screwy niche verticals. My mother has a computer that runs some goofy program for running a small therapists office. It looks like garbage, is CLEARLY a VB app, but it's the only application designed for a single therapist that is inexpensive and runs her office.
She wanted to buy an iMac a few years ago, because she thought that they looked cool, but she wanted to run this application, so she needed Windows.
VB -> VB.Net migrations aren't trivial, but they kind of are... anyone actively maintaining VB code has probably migrated by now, with the painful process and all, or will shortly. Once they are on VB.Net, this makes the transition easy.
We're not talking about general applications, but think about the possibilities.
Small office has a custom VB application for 2 data-entry personnel. All they do is read/send email, put things in this application. Now one of the developers sees this thing on Slashdot, downloads it, and converts their VB application to run under Linux. All of a sudden, the next time these people get their computer trashed by viruses, when the IT guy is bitching about rebuilding their machines again, he mentions that he ported their application to Linux. All of a sudden, these special purpose desktops are Linux.
The Excel Power User WILL NOT switch to Linux... hell, I sometimes fire-up Windows via Parallels to run Excel under Windows because Excel for Mac isn't as strong, but you might get the entry level desktops to Linux... and that's a HUGE start.
If you got most businesses to only buy Windows for the executive suite, you'd cut Microsoft's marketshare from 95% to 50% or 60%, and all of a sudden cross-platform becomes a requirement, not a nice to have feature.
Slashdot Mirror
Normally the lawyers involved schedule a deposition. You can cancel with sufficient notice, all sorts of games get played. While lawyers work weekends, depositions really need to be during the week. You need: 1) Both attorneys, 2) the one being deposed, 3) anyone from either side that wants to be present, 4) any counsel from related lawsuits if you end up with something hairy, and 5) someone to transcribe the session.
The odds of being able to schedule EVERYONE involved except for Monday-Thursday (even Friday's get hairy, as it's harder to run over time on Fridays, etc., lawyers want Fridays for catch-up, etc.) is nearly impossible.
That said, 24 hours notice with a subpoena? Something isn't right, because generally counsel tries to mutually schedule the depositions, and subpeonas only take place after a motion to compel if one side is no-showing. IANAL, and not a Texan, but this seems extremely shady. In an intimidation case, this makes sense, because the more shady things the more you run up the other side's legal bill, but sanctions and other things prevent total abuse.
There are a few different credits. The appliance one was the first $300, others are 10% credit. However, if I had known that, maybe I would have bought my kitchen appliances over a few years... :) But if you didn't fill our form 5695, you wouldn't have known that. That's my point.
That's the thing, the "in" thing to do is use birth control and not have children. Feminist ideology has be subtly discouraging women from having families. It isn't blatant, but it's the "start your career first," "plan your children," etc., that suggests that children are a burden. It's a subconscious thing, but if children are things to wait to have until you can afford, and should be planned for, clearly they are a "bad thing," and it is reflected in birth rates.
:) It's not intentional, it's a whole lot of subconscious things.
The culturally "in" things are: get a good education, make a lot of money, buy fancy toys, etc. People that DO those things have fewer children than those that DO NOT. People that have the most children either "get knocked up as teenagers," engage in anti-social behavior like cheating and child abandonment, or are religiously motivated.
We are selecting cultural and genetic traits that are NOT culturally in. Unless culturally large families become a status symbol (which is unlikely as the government and courts make having large families miserable, try getting 3 kids into a sedan, easy in the 70s, but now with 1-2 car seats and 1-2 booster seats, it can't be done, you need a mini-van or SUV -- and that's just at 3, not large yet) and the cultural elites have big families, you're going to keep de-selecting those traits.
Hell, look our Ms. Spears is derided for getting married and having two kids, while her "rivals" are lauded for partying all night. She is criticized for acting like the celebrity culture wants her to act because she has kids, talk about a message to young people that having kids sucks...
Rebelling is a myth... The teenage rebelling is a social construct because we keep extending childhood (first school to 16, then 18, now college until 22) while the brain is wired that after puberty it should go out and seek a mate. Being kept in an artificial state (with parents, while capable of procreating) has created a perception that "teenagers rebel."
If you look in religious communities, where marrying young is encouraged (not 14 anymore, but 18-15 is young in the modern world, but the norm in religious communities, women between 18 and 20, men between 20 and 25), as is having children, the teenage rebellion is MUCH lower.
Basically, the spoiled boomer kids artificially rebelled, and expected their kids to, but the rebellion is a joke... What percentage of boomers as children were A) in college B) part of a counter-culture rebelling, and C) didn't graduate, get a good job, and move to the suburbs and have a life like their parents? 1%?
The political correlation (between parent's political affiliation and child) is somewhere around 80%. Some of this could be because economic circumstances are USUALLY similar (parent's education is the second most highly correlated factor with income, after one's own, but it's a CLOSE second).
The fact is, if fundamentalist birthrates are 4x the "norm" and it APPEARS to be... the right-wing of religious groups appear to be averaging between 6-8 children/generation, while secular birthrates are around 1.5 and overall around 2.2 in the US, then even if 25% of the religious kids become secular and NONE of the secular kids become religious then the religious population is doubling in size each generation. Combine that with generations starting at age 20 instead of 30, and you get 3 double-sized generations in the time that the secular population had 1.
But when you combine a large fundamentalist population that believes secular people are the devil, and a large anti-religious secular population (which also appears to be growing albeit from drop-outs from religious populations), you are tending towards two subsets that hate each other... Without something triggering the reversion to the mean (which normally happens), we're in for a bumpy ride.
The first year we were married, my wife and I did our taxes by hand. We were in Mass at the time, and Federal took about 2 hours to do, State about 4 (Mass has HORRID forms). The reason we did it by hand was to understand the taxes. We all understand the theory (this is taxed at X%, this at Y%, this is deductible, this isn't), but until you go through the process, you don't really understand the 2% thresholds and how those affect deductions, AMT, etc.
After that one painful year that seared in how things worked, we switched to TurboTax (online once, which was a mistake, on the computer after that). All told it probably takes 1-2 hours to do, plus $35 for the software and e-filing. Would it be more cost effective to pay someone to do it? Sure. Would they catch stuff that we miss for deductions... MAYBE... I use Quicken so my deductions are pretty easy to track.
Why do I do it? Because by doing your own taxes, you notice credits/deductions that you don't qualify for but could easily. For example, this year I got a small credit for putting in my new AC, but there are a WHOLE BUNCH of energy improvement credits that I wouldn't have known about without doing my taxes. Since we are renovating our house all the time, there is no way I'll ever NOT spend enough on the energy efficiencies to get the credit. If November rolls around and I haven't earned the $300 for energy improvement, I'll go buy something small, because with the government kicking in the money, you can be sure that I'll take the free house upgrade... paying $200 for a $500 new window is a no brainer.
The reason to do your own taxes... if you own a business and have an accountant that you work with throughout the year and they advise you on tax matters, then go ahead, let them file the return (just spend an hour reviewing it -- find deductions/credits you get in one year to always get, etc.), but if you were just going to walk into H&R block and get no advice (other than them selling you services), then keep doing it yourself...
Alex
The traits that our capitalist society rewards (excellence in a field gives extreme wealth, and competence in certain people oriented skills trumps competence in technical fields, etc.) is the appearance of socially what we want. If the pay is better, the supply should increase. However, if you look at birth patterns, things that correspond with higher birthrates are: religion (more => more children), region of country, etc. Traits that are NEGATIVELY correlated are education (more education, for women especially, lowers birth rates), income, etc.
:) But seriously, if you think that the religious right is bad now, well in 50-60 years, if they continue to have double the birth rate or more as secular America... well they WILL be the majority in time...
Even MORE interesting is the rate of genetic diversity. The crew most decried by the family values crew (the single mother with multiple children from different fathers) has interestingly creating more genetic diversity. Gentlemen like "K-fed" are producing multiple offspring with multiple women, ensuring their genetic diversity.
This is interesting because after generations of decreasing religiosity, increasing education, and healthier people living longer, it looks like those same biological forces are shrinking those characteristics. There was an amusing editorial a few years ago suggesting that Roe v. Wade destroyed the Democratic party, NOT because abortions were unpopular, but because they were popular. Because of the high correlation of political views with those of the parents, the the correlation of being a Democrat with abortion (roughly 2-3 times more likely to have an abortion if a Democrat than a Republican), then 18 year after Roe v. Wade we found a shrinking pool of Democrats.
Similarly, the higher birthrates of fundamentalists of all religions is causing a slow reversal of post-enlightenment reforms and changes in religious communities. The "mainstream Protestant Churches" are losing numbers, the Catholics are holding steady overall, but their growth is in South America and Africa, while their presence in Europe shrinks and American Catholics are increasing of Latin origin, Judaism has watched a growth of its Orthodox wing (from about 8% 20 years ago to close to 15% of Jews), which itself has been shifting rightward, and Muslim growth rates are outstripping everyone.
Basically. out secular atheistic culture has reached such a pinnacle of self indulgence and freedom that it might actually shrink itself. The American Left is constantly blaming the Bush administration, but the cultural shifts underneath America demonstrate that demographics and not demagoguery is actually causing the reactionary political pull.
It's very interesting, but I find it the HEIGHT of irony that the bible-thumping anti-evolutionary wings of all religions, that were marginal a generation ago, are suddenly making gains, while the secular, science and reason based culture with decades of dominance after WW2 finds itself on the retreat, and the REASON is that the anti-evolution crew is spreading their genetic material and creating offspring to advance their agenda, and the pro-science pro-evolution crew is cutting off their genetic material with families of 0-2 children.
In fact, most disturbing is that the men that engage in the most socially irresponsible behavior -- serial cheating, divorce, etc., are generally fathering many more children than those that "play by the rules." So with whatever genetic material influences behavior, we're going to find each generation a little more adulterous...
If current trends continue, which of course they will NOT, things will swing the otherway, but amusingly, in 4 or 5 generations, we'll have a general population of non-white, deeply religious Americas who going to Church/Synagogue/Mosques regularly, while engaging in adulterous relationships during the week.
Amusing amateur demographic observations...
Alex
Try Money Dance and let me know. I wasn't happy with the first verison, but the crappiness of Quicken Mac is driving me nuts... Very annoyed that my up to date version lacks the basic stuff that I took for granted with Quicken Windows.
I've never understood this assumption, it's wrong on so many levels. Counting Apple's share of computers sold through certain channels and assuming that that is the market for your software.
For example, some percentage of Windows machines are servers, my random desktop application shouldn't count those as potential purchasers. If I make consumer software, then the 50% of Windows machines in corporate networks with controlled installations shouldn't count either. If I am writing software with limited requirements, then Apple Computer's generally longer deployment lifetime means that I'm looking at a different installed base.
Or to put it in another way:
If I write software for Java developers to buy, I DO NOT CARE about Windows, Linux, or Mac computers in the hands of non-Java developers. If Apple grabs 25% of the Java developer market, I'm in business. If I write software for musicians, Apple's approx 40%-50% marketshare in this niche makes them viable.
And your assumption ignores competition. Sure, lots of Windows computers need file compression, but how many of them had bought Winzip? After Microsoft embedded unzipping in the OS, how many of them bought Winzip? Apple has a thriving shareware market, Windows may, Linux does not.
As a developer, I care is there a potential market for my software. I really don't have any skin in the OS X vs. Microsoft Windows battle, do you?
Why marginal costs matter. Apple develops OS X and Microsoft develops Windows REGARDLESS of costs. When Apple sells and iPod for $300, they generally spent $200 on parts and sales costs. So while their top line (revenue) goes up by $300, their gross income (revenue - COGS) only goes up $100. While revenue is interesting, a company has to pay all it's expenses out of gross profits. When Microsoft sells a Copy of Vista for $150, the marginal costs (COGS) is pretty close to $0, but for retail is probably $25 or so (packaging, shipping, tracking, etc.). So while their revenue went up $150, gross profits went up $125. Basically, for $300 in revenue, if Microsoft's gross margins are 5/6th, and Apple's are 1/3rd, then Microsoft is doing MUCH better off the same sales.
Now, investors care about Net Profits, after paying for everything. But the company (internally, non C-level employees) cares about gross profits, because that is the money that is available to pay salaries, etc. However, market analysis of businesses normally looks at revenue, because while it isn't a meaningful number, it's the hardest to fake, and analysts normally assume that companies in the same market have similar margins.
Drinking the Kool-aid refers to a cult whose leader had them drink the poisoned kool-aid and they died. Drinking the Kool-aid means that you believe in the leader on faith, originally from the phrase "don't drink the kool-aid" from the Jonestown masacre.
Sugar-water is Apple specific. When Jobs lured John Sculley from Pepsi, Jobs asked Sculley, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?"
Hence the Sugar Water and "Change the World" quotes are Apple quotes, and have nothing to do with the Kool-aid quote you are referring to.
Semantics... the point is it's derived from a lambda calculus mathematic to the core that can be mathematically proven, establishing correctness. Theoretically, a LISP machine could be built where you could PROVE the correctness of the interpreter, the operating system, etc. Such a system would be crash-proof, barring hardware problems. That's "neat," not really useful in the real world, but it's really neat.
The point is, using LISP, one can build a LISP compiler, that compiles to LISP operands (I forget, it's been close to a decade since I did this), or outputs machine code. The boot-strapping project is pretty straight-foward. You implement an interpreter in Assembly ONCE, inefficient, but that can run the 9 basic operations. You then use this to load the LISP interpreter that outputs assembly (modified for a new architecture of course) that brings more operations down to the native layer --- trivial example, one need-not implement a second operation, as first(rest(x)) can implement second, a recursive (rest) with if can be used to implement last... again, trivial examples to illustrate --- then you can do it all in Scheme.
Like the other post, using Scheme to treat the problem and use a Scheme->C Scheme program to get optimized performance. Essentially, for MOST applications (non-embedded) optimizing the algorithms in question will get you FAR more of a performance boost than going to hand-tuned assembler.
The old idea was to find the loops where most time was spent and optimize those. First optimize the algorithms, THEN think about tuning the assembly. However, there is NO excuse for writing everything in assembly... You spend a LOT of time on areas of code rarely executed, and it's much less likely that you've optimized the algorithms as well. No excuse is over stated, maybe you're just that good, but the higher-level languages let you get something up and running fast, then you can tweak as needed.
I used "theoretical" and "neat" to illustrate why this was a great ACADEMIC language, for the controlled environment of research and teaching. You took my theoretical point and said, "but it doesn't work in practice," to which I say, that's why I was clear to point out that it's a theoretical advantage in an academic setting.
BASIC, SQL, and other "simple" programming languages didn't replace programmers because the hard part of programming is logically thinking in a creative manner. The thing that stops most people from being programmers is that they don't think that way. That said, the addition of VBA and other things to Excel HAS let some people do their programming, I've seen business execs write simple macros to process their spreadsheets faster... I'm seen some impressive Excel spreadsheets. This doesn't replace programming, but that is work that doesn't need to get sent to IT.
Making programming easier for logical people WITHOUT training as programmers makes certain jobs too simple for IT, but it doesn't replace the programmers for real work.
But looping through your spreadsheet and doing some basic processing... that is a solved problem, and letting someone code that up quickly doesn't eliminate the need for real comp sci graduates.
Not that I could do any of it anymore, but the 6.001 SICP class that he was talking about did all that. We didn't use Scheme like most places use LISP (as a glorified LOGO), but as an extremely versatile language.
You learn the basics of programming using scheme, which takes about 2 weeks tops, the beauty of LISP. You do things like create object oriented LISP, create a LISP processor in LISP, then we create a basic machine language and process it in LISP. The POINT of it is that you can quickly build up an environment to process anything.
Later, in the intro AI course, you do everything in Scheme again. If you go on to take the "Programming Languages" course (I did not), you actually use Scheme to model every theoretical form of programming language so you can evaluate it.
Scheme is the PERFECT academic language. It is derived from lambda calculus, which lets you do neat things like prove your software is perfect. The interpreter can be proven perfect (all of Scheme CAN be implemented in 8 or 9 commands, that if implemented correctly can make the whole system perfect). You can build a compiler for Scheme in Scheme pretty easily (I remember doing it), etc.
The draw back? It's damned inefficient at using computer resources, it doesn't have a clean library approach, and while it is AWESOME at code reuse, it doesn't let you "optimize" things by playing with memory space, etc. It never won in the marketplace because Worse is Better.
So you are suggesting that the EASIER solution than changing the clocks is to get 300 million people to all switch to your new "government standard hours," adjust to every business being open different hours, etc., as opposed to everyone doing a "spring forward, fall back?"
Sorry, I'm one of those people that loves DST... I make my own hours, but I'm someone limited in how far I can separate from the norm, clients, etc., need to be able to reach me, I need to be able to reach vendors, and banks need to be open.
DST is a wonderful thing, there is time to grill when one gets home, one can do outdoor things afterwork, etc. The real energy savings is from people who go for a walk in the park, or kids playing outside instead of watching television or playing video games. The light usage is pretty minor compared to the others.
I probably use more gas because I'm more likely to run errands when it is light out, but that's much better than saving them up for the weekend.
For you, it's not a big enough change to be worth bothering (with shifting clocks?!?!?!?), but I get the impression that you are not married and have no family, so all that matters is your schedule. The rest of us have to coordinate with other people, making clock changes MUCH easier.
You're illustrating the broken window fallacy, which assumes that since money for repairs is spent somewhere, it isn't lost and is entirely stimulative.
The problem with that is that the opportunity cost of not having that money elsewhere. Of course money never vanishes, it recirculates. If the $1 spent on Y2K7 compliance isn't spent there, it is spent elsewere to earn a return, or as profits to be retained and reinvested or given to shareholders as dividends. All involved would no doubt prefer to spent the money A) increasing widget production, B) developing a new widget, or C) reinvesting it in a profitable opportunity elsewhere. None would choose to spend it D) on updating DST calculations.
Now, when an economy is in a depression or deep recession, sometimes their is a stimulative effect of bad spending (hence the Keynesian stimulation of deficit spending), because the economic loss of unemployed resources is such that the economy may get a lift from spending to bring it out of the depression... that's how WWII ended the great depression... in a non depressed economy, few would argue that the best use of scare resources is to blow up the cities of other countries and send a chunk of your workforce to go into combat half a world away, but in a depression, reducing unemployment through war spending and by removing conscripts from the potential labor force may be stimulative enough to get the economy growing.
However, right now, this isn't economically beneficial. That said, I can't wait for the extra hour of sunshine Monday night!
Alex
Agreed, and unions are the bane of education, because they are their for the teachers (its the teachers union) but are politically granted this position as being "for the kids."
The article is 100% accurate, wages for teachers should be set by the market... recruiting competent people.
My point is that the "myth" of the underpaid teacher is a myth... and it's throughout the article. The article says no discriminating against departments, we need to raise pay for all teachers... but the teachers of the humanities are fairly paid, possibly overpaid. The teachers in the math and sciences are underpaid.
I think that unions of public sector employees should have to be apolitical... The idea of being able to push an agenda in lightly followed races gives them too much clout in choosing their bosses, which is what makes them the best paid of the bunch.
Typical out of college job for a liberal arts student at a non top-50 University? You're out of your mind! That's a typical job for an engineering/math/science (or business school finance track) student that chooses to enter a financial job. But someone with a degree in English, Literature, History, etc.? They aren't getting analyst jobs.
Regarding the higher education requirements of higher up the teaching poll? My mother-in-law is a teacher, switched from private school to public a few years back. Couldn't get over how well she's be doing if she switched 10-15 years earlier... as it stands she'll have 10 years in at the public school system, only granting her a 40% of pay pension... She also won't get that huge 30+ year raise in pay that causes income to double in the years before retirement so your 80% pension is really 160% of what you normally made.
She could make more money moving up in ranks/steps/whatever, but that requires a masters degree. However, the school system will pay for her Masters degree, so she just has to show up and take tests. You get your Masters later on the system's dime... Sure, it takes time, but that's what your 1/3 of the year off is for.
The requirement is something that you don't need until at least 4-5 years into teaching... so just attending summer school at a local university will get you a Masters in 4 years.
The myth of the underpaid teacher is a myth of the wealthy liberal. Consistently, teaching pay/hour is similar to private sector employment that has similar requirements. In fact, if you WATCH the debate about teacher pay, you will ALWAYS HERE "a first year teacher makes $XX,XXX" where the amount sounds really low to middle and upper middle class parents whose kids are being taught by them.
This ignores the fact that a first year teach is generally 22-23 years old and right out of school. If you compare their salary to a receptionist, admin assistance, or other "just out of school" jobs available to liberal arts school graduates, you'll find that teacher pay is comparable, even without normalizing that they work 2/3s of a year (summer + winter break + spring break + extra holidays comes out to 4 months off out of 12). In that other third, they can teach summer school, tutor, work another seasonal job (depending on part of the country), or just spend time with their family.
In addition, the average kindergarten parent sees that number for a first year kindergarten teacher and thinks, "I couldn't live on that." They don't think, "wow, that's about what I make 5 or 6 years ago when I was right out of school."
Teachers that have established themselves for a number of years will make, after 25 or 30 years, $80,000 - $90,000, which may not seem like good money compared to software engineering, but when you consider that most 55 year old engineers have trouble finding employment, it's NOT a bad career path. They have an AMAZING pension, like all public sector employees. If you look at their lifetime earnings, it's NOT bad pay.
The fact is, if you take two 22 year olds right out of school with degrees in English and mediocre grades, and one becomes a public school teacher and the other takes a clerical job in the private sector, the latter MIGHT make a few more dollars in the first years, but the expected lifetime earnings for the teacher is MUCH higher. In 30 years, those two people are 52 years old. The former is making $90,000, and now has a pension of $60k - $75k built up, while the latter is at the mercy of the market for their 401k, but probably doesn't have the $1.2m saved up to buy the annuity that would match the pension benefit, because even if they are now making $100k-$120k/year as HR manager, they have 13 more years of slaving away, while the teacher can call it a day whenever they want.
In fact, the teacher, who has never worked summers (or has and made more money), has had summers to write, maybe has been working on a novel, etc. Teachers have it good and are well paid... not as well paid as medicine, but certainly as well paid as administrative assistants, receptionists, and other jobs often held by people with similar qualifications in major cities. The only area where teachers are paid poorly is in relatively uneducated areas, where your support staff don't have college degrees and teachers are comparatively only slightly less educated that lawyers.
In the mythical man month, there is a talk of system generations. The first system you build kinda works but is kludgy, you fight to get it to do what you want, but it works. The NES was a CHEAP system to build, nothing fancy, but hacking processors onto cartridges kept it going long after the hardware was obsolete. Sega's SMS was better looking than Nintendo's offering, cartridges more reasonably sized, but didn't have the fun factor as nailed down, but they got cool games out there. Sony's first system, the PS, was similar, switched controllers in the middle, did whatever they could with their hardware, dumped it on the market (trying to recover SOME sunk costs, not even turn a profit originally, and pricing reflected that). MS figured out how to build a system for people that wanted the best graphics at a subsidized price, they never set out to make a profit, and succeeded at turning a nice loss.
The second generation system is better, you have things under control, learned from your first system, make things a bit better, etc. The SNES had a nice lifespan, could do more out of the box (didn't need lots of custom controllers, etc.), was the NES but better. Genesis was an awesome system, it was a lot of fun, had awesome games, awesome controllers, a good stretch, made Sega money. The PS2 and Xbox 360 were good sequel systems. Backwards compatible, did what the old one did plus more, etc. They learned along the way (Sony came out the gates swinging, fought for each franchise, etc., pushed Nintendo out of several large chunks of the market), MS realized that you need parts where you get price breaks or can buy on the open market, otherwise you can't win the marathon.
The third system is over engineered, over thought, rediculously complicated, expensive, beyond schedule, and a disaster.
The N64 had plastic parts everywhere to put upgrades in, stuff hanging out of controllers, etc. It was shipping cartridges that cost serious money to produce (and had limited space), everyone else CDs that cost next to nothing, etc. While they made money, it was a disaster for a market that they were the leader of... didn't help that Sony was competing with a second system, so they weren't idiotic. The Saturn was the best 2D gaming system ever made, just as console games moved to 3D. It was ridiculously expensive from throwing everything in to avoid a Sega-CD and other upgrade fiasco, and set the stage for Sega's exit from consoles. Sony's third system IGNORES everything that got them there (cheap systems, easy to crank up production, granted the PS2 had some custom hardware, but NOTHING like the PS3), playing around with Blu-Ray, etc. In short, Sony is making every third system mistake, and we're watching it in the marketplace.
I predict that Sony will lose a LOT of money this round, but maintain a leadership position. They need to start selling the machines for $299 and not care how much they lose, and they'll do it, but it will be a REALLY REALLY expensive mistake. The PS worked because it was cheap and the R&D was already sunk. The PS2 carried the first gen system forward as just a better Playstation. The PS3 is a third system nightmare.
1) Buy Apple machines when your machines are retired
2) Use MS Site License to put Windows on them all
3) Continue your 3 year replacement cycle.
In 3 years, you can start migrating chunks of the enterprise over to OS X, because your hardware is ready, with no downside.
I had 3 OS X Servers, with upgrade licenses for OS X server, running several desktops. It doesn't just work because debugging is a bitch. If things don't work, Apple's support options are a joke. Microsoft's knowledge base is huge, Apple's non-existant. AFP548.com does not a network make.
One time I had a massive problem with my system, called Apple for support. The Enterprise Support group was closed for a meeting. They left for the entire afternoon, no support for me. I had to send my employees home for the day.
The mail systems are just non-standard location wise to make the online resources for the open source projects not quite useful, and Apple provides almost no utilities for debugging things. The resources aren't quite there.
The hardware is getting there (Mini is an AWESOME general desktop, small in size with nothing to mess with), Xserve is cool, and Xraid means not needing massive RAID arrays in the box. The software is getting there as well, each rev of OS X Server is using more OSS solutions that have been made Enterprise ready by companies like Redhat, and their software is maturing Workgroup Manager gets much better each revision. But the support options just aren't there.
Too many Linux on desktop advocates are waiting for this magical day where 50% of Windows users will wake up, throw out their computers, and buy Linux machines... it won't happen that way.
Microsoft's monopoly was built by being the dirt cheap, good enough solution. Attempting to "microsoft them" with the dirt cheap, good enough solution is hard... For most computer users, Windows is "free" it comes with the computer, and even if you are big enough that you buy via site-license and OS-less machines, the cost/license of site licenses gets pretty cheap as well.
However, the maintenance of Windows compared to Linux makes Linux VERY tempting in several parts of an organization. Just like Apple has maintained a presence in Windows companies for graphic designers, web designers, etc., and Server Linux has made inroads for Web Servers, etc., Desktop Linux will make in-roads in chunks at a time.
Is VB6->VB.Net "trivial," sort of. The time frame is MUCH less than a port from VB6 to ANYTHING else. If you are actively maintaining the code-base, you probably bit the bullet a few years ago, otherwise will do so now. If you have legacy VB6 apps that are maintained, then they likely will move over to VB.Net. Microsoft should love this, however, because this creates an incentive to migrate from VB6 -> VB.Net. Even if you don't plan to use the Mono out, it's a reason to modernize your code-base and get to VB.Net compliance.
A small shop, 2-3 coders, that makes a niche product, or an IT team with legacy code to support, now has a viable path to making Linux/OS X viable options. As Mono is free, it's also not unreasonable to bundle Mono/Application and sell it for OS X and Linux now (if you are a small shop, it's eventually going to become a weekend project), or at least keep that option open.
It's trivial compared to any OTHER migration path, that has been "rewrite the application from scratch."
Even when Nintendo doesn't do well in console numbers (Gamecube) or market share (N64), Nintendo is normally the largest publisher of games period. Even with bad console numbers, Nintendo makes money, because normally their is $32/game that goes to the publisher/developer, and Nintendo normally keeps all of it. Sony often makes $8/game because they often get the royalty for the system, but not the publisher/developer cut. Sony may have an excellent piece of hardware, but the Wii can keep dropping in price to move product, and Nintendo can follow-up with a Wii2 to keep up.
Sony messed up, they hit too high a price point, and suffered supply problems. They'll need top drop price to move units, and that will increase their burn/unit. Even if Sony recovers and dominates the console market again (which I think is very possible, they have some nice hardware, nice systems in development, and the PS2 compatibility would mean companies could release a game for the PS2 AND PS3, even if the PS3 version is just emulated with extras to show up on the PS3 shelf. I am not counting Sony out, and the hardware is impressive, BUT they did NOT put a reasonable amount of hardware together for a 2006 release. If they were aiming for a 2007 launch, with a $400 price tag, great, but for $2006, they hit too high a price.
They are going to lose a LOT of money on this round, because they simply CANNOT die... Sony, unlike Nintendo, doesn't own their franchises, which means that if Sony stops holding 70% of the market, the franchises can go elsewhere. So I think that Sony will recover and dominate the market, but it will do so with HUGE price cuts, massive losses, and basically wiping out all profits from the gaming division for years.
On the plus side, I think that they'll establish BR-DVD as a popular standard.
That's an awesome example, I have a similar one. One of my old Interns wrote a program in Cocoa for Mac, because he was a Mac fan and it was a prototype. One of my guys thought that it would be fun to learn Cocoa, so adapted and rewrote the application over several revisions. It doesn't do THAT much, the heavy logic is server side, but it's a pile of code and the developer that wrote it isn't with us any more.
Well, I had 8 people using that program, so what the hell, rather than re-writing/porting, we bought 8 Mac Minis and used those as desktops. Nothing they ran (besides this in-house orphaned program) required OS X, but Apple and OS X got the sales for that reason. Had it been written by the guy who was playing with Qt at the time, who knows, we might have Linux machines there.
Most Slashdot whiners have NO CLUE how computers get used, because they think that their home use of computers is at ALL indicative, or they work in an IT company or school... they don't understand how a few legacy applications may have multiple people (with their computers) can have the oddest software requirements if their job is built around an old legacy code base.
I just toured a potential partner's warehouse, his whole system is manual. The accounting is Quickbooks, the shipping is Fedex's software, and their "integration" is some only shopping cart solution where he can download the information into Quickbooks and Fedex... There is no glue code for managing the warehouse... But he has several people whose job revolve around these applications, and the computers and OS's are purchased to run these apps.
Most software is NOT written for mass consumption, it's either written in house or for small niche markets.
TONS of this software has been written in VB over the years. Either in house processing forms (for specialized data entry people, some is now web based, some is not). Or screwy niche verticals. My mother has a computer that runs some goofy program for running a small therapists office. It looks like garbage, is CLEARLY a VB app, but it's the only application designed for a single therapist that is inexpensive and runs her office.
She wanted to buy an iMac a few years ago, because she thought that they looked cool, but she wanted to run this application, so she needed Windows.
VB -> VB.Net migrations aren't trivial, but they kind of are... anyone actively maintaining VB code has probably migrated by now, with the painful process and all, or will shortly. Once they are on VB.Net, this makes the transition easy.
We're not talking about general applications, but think about the possibilities.
Small office has a custom VB application for 2 data-entry personnel. All they do is read/send email, put things in this application. Now one of the developers sees this thing on Slashdot, downloads it, and converts their VB application to run under Linux. All of a sudden, the next time these people get their computer trashed by viruses, when the IT guy is bitching about rebuilding their machines again, he mentions that he ported their application to Linux. All of a sudden, these special purpose desktops are Linux.
The Excel Power User WILL NOT switch to Linux... hell, I sometimes fire-up Windows via Parallels to run Excel under Windows because Excel for Mac isn't as strong, but you might get the entry level desktops to Linux... and that's a HUGE start.
If you got most businesses to only buy Windows for the executive suite, you'd cut Microsoft's marketshare from 95% to 50% or 60%, and all of a sudden cross-platform becomes a requirement, not a nice to have feature.