And people wonder why the local stores are going out of business. From people too lazy to get out of their mom's basement. If the reward is only for Amazon cards, or Starbucks cards, it is NOT because the reward has an equivalent cash value but because there's a kickback to drive people to those stores. To bad you can't send that $100 card to Amazon and get a $100 bill back in the mail.
This is why when there's a class action judgement that the penalties are often paid out as coupons beause they're cheaper than cash.
This isn't even payment. If people aren't using Edge there's a reason for it, and being forced to also use Bing just to get points that only give discounts is pitiful. A discount is not money unless you were already going to buy item anyway.
Not everyone is capable of doing without new income, not everyone is capable of working for themselves and having their own "business", and even if you do have business you're still a slave to it instead of a slave to a boss that gives you benefits and vacation days. Working for yourself is often more grueling overall. Unlike a slave you can actually opt out, but doing so means your income will drastically drop and now you're competing with other homeless people for the best sleeping spots under the overpass.
I'd rather be an engineer as a hobby than as a profession, but having it as a profession pays better even though it means that most of my day is filled with grunt work, answering stupid quests, helping others get their work done, office politics, pointless meetings, etc.
No one really needs either new gadget. They're being sold to gadget lovers who always must have the latest consumer item, to hipsters because nothing says unsufferable like a guy showing you how he can see if he left the stove on or not while kayaking, and so forth. Those are consumers though. If you're a city or utility though you don't buy your devices from engadget or kickstarter.
Bash doesn't have very many of its own commands. They're mostly Unix commands. The same commands you'd have to know for powershell on linux. Bash does have syntax to learn though and various configuration settings (for command line usage mostly rather than scripting).
I work on IoT, and I want to slap CEOs of companies like this for giving everything a bad name. We're working our ass off to have good security and yet the market is grabbing up toys that are completely useless except for being new and then fail to include even the most basic security. Most hardware good for this is low on security features, but they're slowly starting to come around due to demand from product makers.
But, this is the same crap you see on web pages, etc. Everyone's getting hacked left and right because no one bothers to take security seriously, and because security is hard and you need experts instead of some buddies who need a job, and at best it's an afterthought slapped on at the end. Startup mentality means get your product or app out as fast as possible so there's no time to waste on quality.
Of course, when people try encouraging girls in middle school then they get slamed on slashdot for too much political correctness, followed by assertions that girls just don't like STEM anyway. Ie, status quo is good enough. Some even going so far as to claim there's no problem and thus no solutions are needed.
Encouraging the recruiters to target more minorities is has the goal of increasing the supply of diverse resumes to the hiring managers. There is supply even in silicon valley. But not much supply if it's not actively being looked for and instead just picking low hanging fruit. The whole job of recruiters is to do some actual work instead of just checking the inbox for resumes.
I've never seen that. I have seen the reverse though, everyone in IT uses Windows (and they only implement Microsoft solutions if there's ever a choice), and the user who has Linux is stuck on their own with no support, and regularly get memos requiring them to only run the corporate approved Windows applications on their Linux machine.
Which is why people write scripts in python, but they don't use python as their command line shell. Powershell may be useful in the way python is useful, but it's not so great for a command line shell. Bash succeeds because it is a command line shell with a decent scripting capability, it's not as great at scripting as python is, but that's ok because you can easily combine bash and python (or perl, awk, sed, etc).
But with bash you can just start typing text. No need to look up obscure command system and object names if they only thing you want to do is get a list of all files matching a pattern. There's no text wrangling, you just start typing commands. And the same syntax you use for giving commands is used if you want a complicated script.
The difference is that Unix is oriented around commands and programs that take input and give output; whereas Windows is oriented around DLLs and frameworks that build on top of DLLs.
So dealing with those DLLs from a scripting language is very powerful, but those are inherently complex operations. The learning curve is like a brick wall. Unix builds on combining very simple operations into more complex results. If you only use powershell twice a year you'll forever be stumped and lost, but if you use bash only twice a year you'll still be able to get stuff done.
Cygwin is great. It can be slow in some ways, but sometimes it's better to be slow if it can get work done instead of dealing with an operating system that is hostile to developers.
Solves some problems maybe. Such as the Microsoft oriented IT people who are finding more and more work is moving to Linux, Macs, and other Unix systems, and their only job qualification is having a powershell certificate that is seen as worthless paper to everyone outside of Windows.
But seriously, there are people who think that way. They find themselves becoming irrelevant but want to carry over their old skill set if they move to anything new.
Valve has good marketing, and a halfway decent implementation. Origin and Uplay have absolutely horrid implementations and treat their customers like crap. So you just need something else with a halfware decent implementation and some marketing. The snag comes when these platforms try to be exclusive platforms, as most users aren't going to deal with multiple accounts much.
GOG is decent as a competitor I think. But most of their marketing comes from email, as you don't need anything from GOG as a launcher. Steam pops up the ads in your face and many if it's games require using its launcher. I suspect if Facebook gets this going it will be even more mandatory to use its launcher than even Steam. But competition is good.
The incentives seem approrpriate too. Lots of media articles about the predominance of white/asian males in silicon valley companies, so companies wish to counter that instead of going the whole anti-PC rhetoric preferred here. Having recruiters try to target more minorities does not actually bypass any hiring decisions, it just tells the recruiters to try and be more diverse (and let's face it, it's not called "Man Jose" because of the balanced demographics). However the ultimate hiring decisions aren't happening there, no one can be an asshat and accuse the incoming hires of being quotas or tokens because of the recruiters.
They don't hire the best candidates most of the time. I see them hiring idiots, hiring friends, etc. A referral from someone the manager knows oftens counts much more than any resume or experience. Just look at the average corporations and you can see that the hiring processes are not geared to finding the best because those work places are filled to the brim with people who were clearly not the best. The workplace is not a meritocracy and never has been. Who you know counts for much more than what you know. So trotting out the tired line that minorities just don't measure up to very high standards is bullshit when the standards are very low in practice.
I look around at companies I worke with and different teams have different demographics, even if they're all engineering teams. Hispanics more represented in one group, a different team seems to have a large group of friends that hop together to different jobs and startups, the team with lots of Vietnamese (and I know one person who was turned down for a transfer because she was told she didn't speak Vietnamese which was a clear violation of policy and law), and so forth.
The way a person feels during an interview often beats out other qualifications. It's extremely subjective. No one doing the interviewing is unbiased, no matter how hard they try. Hiring happens based on gut feelings.
No, you're assuming facts that aren't there. People are not all the same, however you are deep into fantasy when you imply that groups are inherently not the same. Women are not dumber than men, they are not less capable of technology than men, they do not naturally gravitate to other fields. Instead women are encouraged from even a young age the technology is for boys, and when older are being excluded from the club, and when in the field often have to work with an unfriendly culture.
What I see is that women who are very smart get hired, average and dumb women don't get hired. However average and dumb men do get hired. Just look around and see all the idiots you have to work with and ask yourself if those idiots are more qualified than every woman or minority who wanted those jobs.
What's the alternative? It's wrong to give up US dominance, and it's wrong to not give up US dominance, so...? We certainly do not have a good record of fair and impartial governance from the US, but neither do international bodies, so it's a toss up. Keep US dominance if you're a jingoist, or accept that commerce is an international concern and so the internet should be governed by international bodies just the same as other areas of commerce.
Except that consoles have been more unfriendly to developers than PCs, so it works both ways. Consoles may be a one-size-fits-all, but you have to pay to get your game onto the console in the first place, seriously undercutting already low profit margins, and you have to jump when the console maker tells you to jump ("press X now!@!"). It can be very difficult to be an indie console game maker. And if you're not an ass making "exclusive" games, then you still have to build for multiple consoles plus the PC.
My mother in a small town could only get 1Mbps DSL. Which was much preferrable to her dialup or a spotty signal from a neighbor (with permission). No other options available without going to cable which was very overpriced and would require extra installation costs. But 1Mbps is plenty for just browsing the web.
There are many types of managers. At a high level what's really important are people who understand the logistics of getting stuff done. The MBA part really doesn't apply to most managers. Then there are the low level grunt managers - project managers who get dumped on by everyone else, given the worst projects with no authority. Product managers who don't understand products because they're really salespeople. Middle managers who used to be smaller managers but now are in a holding pattern waiting for an opening in upper management, and they stick around because they've been with the company so long that everyone assumes they're important. Line managers who actually have a team of workers and need to get stuff done. And sales managers who mostly party a lot at conventions.
Slashdot Mirror
And people wonder why the local stores are going out of business. From people too lazy to get out of their mom's basement. If the reward is only for Amazon cards, or Starbucks cards, it is NOT because the reward has an equivalent cash value but because there's a kickback to drive people to those stores. To bad you can't send that $100 card to Amazon and get a $100 bill back in the mail.
This is why when there's a class action judgement that the penalties are often paid out as coupons beause they're cheaper than cash.
This isn't even payment. If people aren't using Edge there's a reason for it, and being forced to also use Bing just to get points that only give discounts is pitiful. A discount is not money unless you were already going to buy item anyway.
Not everyone is capable of doing without new income, not everyone is capable of working for themselves and having their own "business", and even if you do have business you're still a slave to it instead of a slave to a boss that gives you benefits and vacation days. Working for yourself is often more grueling overall. Unlike a slave you can actually opt out, but doing so means your income will drastically drop and now you're competing with other homeless people for the best sleeping spots under the overpass.
I'd rather be an engineer as a hobby than as a profession, but having it as a profession pays better even though it means that most of my day is filled with grunt work, answering stupid quests, helping others get their work done, office politics, pointless meetings, etc.
No one really needs either new gadget. They're being sold to gadget lovers who always must have the latest consumer item, to hipsters because nothing says unsufferable like a guy showing you how he can see if he left the stove on or not while kayaking, and so forth. Those are consumers though. If you're a city or utility though you don't buy your devices from engadget or kickstarter.
Bash doesn't have very many of its own commands. They're mostly Unix commands. The same commands you'd have to know for powershell on linux. Bash does have syntax to learn though and various configuration settings (for command line usage mostly rather than scripting).
I work on IoT, and I want to slap CEOs of companies like this for giving everything a bad name. We're working our ass off to have good security and yet the market is grabbing up toys that are completely useless except for being new and then fail to include even the most basic security. Most hardware good for this is low on security features, but they're slowly starting to come around due to demand from product makers.
But, this is the same crap you see on web pages, etc. Everyone's getting hacked left and right because no one bothers to take security seriously, and because security is hard and you need experts instead of some buddies who need a job, and at best it's an afterthought slapped on at the end. Startup mentality means get your product or app out as fast as possible so there's no time to waste on quality.
Of course, when people try encouraging girls in middle school then they get slamed on slashdot for too much political correctness, followed by assertions that girls just don't like STEM anyway. Ie, status quo is good enough. Some even going so far as to claim there's no problem and thus no solutions are needed.
Encouraging the recruiters to target more minorities is has the goal of increasing the supply of diverse resumes to the hiring managers. There is supply even in silicon valley. But not much supply if it's not actively being looked for and instead just picking low hanging fruit. The whole job of recruiters is to do some actual work instead of just checking the inbox for resumes.
I've never seen that. I have seen the reverse though, everyone in IT uses Windows (and they only implement Microsoft solutions if there's ever a choice), and the user who has Linux is stuck on their own with no support, and regularly get memos requiring them to only run the corporate approved Windows applications on their Linux machine.
Which is why people write scripts in python, but they don't use python as their command line shell. Powershell may be useful in the way python is useful, but it's not so great for a command line shell. Bash succeeds because it is a command line shell with a decent scripting capability, it's not as great at scripting as python is, but that's ok because you can easily combine bash and python (or perl, awk, sed, etc).
But with bash you can just start typing text. No need to look up obscure command system and object names if they only thing you want to do is get a list of all files matching a pattern. There's no text wrangling, you just start typing commands. And the same syntax you use for giving commands is used if you want a complicated script.
The difference is that Unix is oriented around commands and programs that take input and give output; whereas Windows is oriented around DLLs and frameworks that build on top of DLLs.
So dealing with those DLLs from a scripting language is very powerful, but those are inherently complex operations. The learning curve is like a brick wall. Unix builds on combining very simple operations into more complex results. If you only use powershell twice a year you'll forever be stumped and lost, but if you use bash only twice a year you'll still be able to get stuff done.
It left me speechless.
Cygwin is great. It can be slow in some ways, but sometimes it's better to be slow if it can get work done instead of dealing with an operating system that is hostile to developers.
Solves some problems maybe. Such as the Microsoft oriented IT people who are finding more and more work is moving to Linux, Macs, and other Unix systems, and their only job qualification is having a powershell certificate that is seen as worthless paper to everyone outside of Windows.
But seriously, there are people who think that way. They find themselves becoming irrelevant but want to carry over their old skill set if they move to anything new.
Well clearly, if you need to talk to Windows DLLs on a Unix system it would come in handy!
Valve has good marketing, and a halfway decent implementation. Origin and Uplay have absolutely horrid implementations and treat their customers like crap. So you just need something else with a halfware decent implementation and some marketing. The snag comes when these platforms try to be exclusive platforms, as most users aren't going to deal with multiple accounts much.
GOG is decent as a competitor I think. But most of their marketing comes from email, as you don't need anything from GOG as a launcher. Steam pops up the ads in your face and many if it's games require using its launcher. I suspect if Facebook gets this going it will be even more mandatory to use its launcher than even Steam. But competition is good.
My favorite game is "Luddite Quest 2: The App of Truth"
The incentives seem approrpriate too. Lots of media articles about the predominance of white/asian males in silicon valley companies, so companies wish to counter that instead of going the whole anti-PC rhetoric preferred here. Having recruiters try to target more minorities does not actually bypass any hiring decisions, it just tells the recruiters to try and be more diverse (and let's face it, it's not called "Man Jose" because of the balanced demographics). However the ultimate hiring decisions aren't happening there, no one can be an asshat and accuse the incoming hires of being quotas or tokens because of the recruiters.
They don't hire the best candidates most of the time. I see them hiring idiots, hiring friends, etc. A referral from someone the manager knows oftens counts much more than any resume or experience. Just look at the average corporations and you can see that the hiring processes are not geared to finding the best because those work places are filled to the brim with people who were clearly not the best. The workplace is not a meritocracy and never has been. Who you know counts for much more than what you know. So trotting out the tired line that minorities just don't measure up to very high standards is bullshit when the standards are very low in practice.
I look around at companies I worke with and different teams have different demographics, even if they're all engineering teams. Hispanics more represented in one group, a different team seems to have a large group of friends that hop together to different jobs and startups, the team with lots of Vietnamese (and I know one person who was turned down for a transfer because she was told she didn't speak Vietnamese which was a clear violation of policy and law), and so forth.
The way a person feels during an interview often beats out other qualifications. It's extremely subjective. No one doing the interviewing is unbiased, no matter how hard they try. Hiring happens based on gut feelings.
No, you're assuming facts that aren't there. People are not all the same, however you are deep into fantasy when you imply that groups are inherently not the same. Women are not dumber than men, they are not less capable of technology than men, they do not naturally gravitate to other fields. Instead women are encouraged from even a young age the technology is for boys, and when older are being excluded from the club, and when in the field often have to work with an unfriendly culture.
What I see is that women who are very smart get hired, average and dumb women don't get hired. However average and dumb men do get hired. Just look around and see all the idiots you have to work with and ask yourself if those idiots are more qualified than every woman or minority who wanted those jobs.
What's the alternative? It's wrong to give up US dominance, and it's wrong to not give up US dominance, so...? We certainly do not have a good record of fair and impartial governance from the US, but neither do international bodies, so it's a toss up. Keep US dominance if you're a jingoist, or accept that commerce is an international concern and so the internet should be governed by international bodies just the same as other areas of commerce.
Except that consoles have been more unfriendly to developers than PCs, so it works both ways. Consoles may be a one-size-fits-all, but you have to pay to get your game onto the console in the first place, seriously undercutting already low profit margins, and you have to jump when the console maker tells you to jump ("press X now!@!"). It can be very difficult to be an indie console game maker. And if you're not an ass making "exclusive" games, then you still have to build for multiple consoles plus the PC.
My mother in a small town could only get 1Mbps DSL. Which was much preferrable to her dialup or a spotty signal from a neighbor (with permission). No other options available without going to cable which was very overpriced and would require extra installation costs. But 1Mbps is plenty for just browsing the web.
AT&T here is cheaper than Comcast for me. And the advantage that it's not Comcast.
There are many types of managers. At a high level what's really important are people who understand the logistics of getting stuff done. The MBA part really doesn't apply to most managers. Then there are the low level grunt managers - project managers who get dumped on by everyone else, given the worst projects with no authority. Product managers who don't understand products because they're really salespeople. Middle managers who used to be smaller managers but now are in a holding pattern waiting for an opening in upper management, and they stick around because they've been with the company so long that everyone assumes they're important. Line managers who actually have a team of workers and need to get stuff done. And sales managers who mostly party a lot at conventions.
One should always go study work, but because workers will always be needed.