So if Quebec left Canada, wouldn't the Canadian government offices in Quebec become Quebec government offices? Thus they get to keep their government jobs. Unless you mean those French speakers outside of Quebec could become Quebec citizens while holding government jobs in Ontario?
Of course they share the currency, that's normal, that's what Scotland is planning. Regions have split off from nations in the past, this sort of thing is not entirely hypothetical. You end up with negotiations between two governments, deciding who gets to keep the nukes, what happens with national services, etc. This is like a divorce in a way, you don't have the spouse who wants to leave get no possessions except a bathrobe since they used to be equal partners. Similarly a province or region used to be partners with the other parts of the country, they paid their taxes, the used their labor, they contributed their resources.
Why doesn't Scotland get to keep them? There would need to be negotiation on who gets to keep what, across the board. Like a divorce. The Scots have indeed been building and paying for these bases, they've been joining the armed services, etc. Who's to say Scotland is not a part owner of the submarines?
On the other hand, they have their own computing departments. Many modern companies don't even bother, they outsource everything, or they believe the marketing spiel from SAP or Microsoft or Oracle and then waste all their time with professional services trying to get stuff working.
Also it's unclear what the average salary means. Do they count all the people who didn't manage to find a job, or who are stuck at McDonald's, in which case just one person getting a high paying job bumps up the average quite a lot. Or are they only considering graduates who actually got a job in the computing field, or a development/engineering job rather than support desk peon?
I wonder if just having taken an elective at all is what it takes to raise the average starting salary. As compared to most students who take the minimum necessary to get out of there.
Except for the entry level job. You usually take what you can get because you have no clout at all, and it's lucky just to get the interview. You need to build up a lot of experience before you can pick and choose the team you can be on.
This is regional though, and varies in industries too. There are people who will downgrade an interviewee for showing up in a suit. I think that's short sighted but it happens. What flies in the financial industry in major financial cities is not the same attire that is used in development, engineering, or technical jobs. And COBOL is most definitely not used only in financial industries. Best bet is to scope out the job before showing up; look at their web page, if all the pictures of the executives are in polo shirts then you won't need the suit; drive by the place and see what people are wearing in the parking lot. Or just call ahead, it is perfectly appropriate to ask what expected attire should be.
No, you wear a completely different outfit from the usual. Different shoes, socks, trousers, shirt, plus an additional jacket and tie. Every one of them is very expensive (except maybe shoes, some people buy very expensive athletic shoes to go with their ripped jeans), and you need multliple sets, so it's a big financial hit right off. Then they're much more uncomfortable, that goes without saying, because if they were as comfortable as other clothes then you'd see people wear them more on weekends.
As far as white collar goes, I'm in California and almost everyone here dresses casually, from CEO down. That doesn't mean so-called "business casual" which is actually dressing up a lot. It's hot so the suit is just a stupid attire choice already compared to icy places like NY. Then again, at NJ Bell Labs I asked if I should wear a suit to the interview and they emphatically shouted NO. I haven't had a white collar at work since the 80s, and even then it was a hold out compared to other jobs in the area. There is no sacrifice in money to do this either, you rarely see any engineers wearing a suit to work at any level, and rarely with the executives either.
Dressing smartly is itself a problem. A low paying entry level job can be stressful enough without the fasion police coming buy and telling you that you need to spend the rest of your measly salary upgrading your wardrobe.
I remember my early job where I went from the labs in nice shirt and slacks down to the next town for a meeting and they all said they knew where I was from right away because I was the one without a tie. It's how you tell the drones from the workers.
It's all expensive though. The suit is ok, you can have one only and wear it every day (all you can afford on entry level salary), and if someone complains they can fork over the money to buy a second one. A pain to keep clean, probably have to use the dry cleaners, and you have wrinkles all the time. Gain just a little weight and you need a new suit, lose a little weight and you don't need the new suit but you look silly. They're very very hot, one reason most office crank up the AC.
But the tie is the killer I think, that's what scares people off. They're uncomfortable, even when not tight. I get a suit tailored to fit, and it's annoying once that top button is closed, and lousy once the tie is on. It's hard to relax with that tie on, and that means you can't think well. You're just waiting for the wedding, funeral, or dinner to be over so you can rip it off.
I had the job where we didn't need a tie just dress shirt and slacks. It was ok, but I'd rather not go back to that. The slacks wear out very quickly compared to jeans, you're the only guy walking on the street that isn't casual (Calif, where wearing polo shirt and khakis is dressing up formally), and everyone knows you're the bottom rung IT flunky just by how you look. The shoes are uncomfortable too. Then you're stuck in a lab or workspace where those nicer clothes are out of place. The very first thing that happens when you get home is a change of clothes.
I agree that dressing up is the most minor of all workplace inconveniences. If you pass up a good and interesting job because of a dress code then that is indeed short sighted. However that doesn't absolve the suit from being inconvenient, archaic, and unnecessary. There's a reason most workplaces are relaxing the attire requirements.
Not everyone is cut out to be self employed either. Reminds me of the media attitude towards silicon valley, thinking that everyone is an entrepreneur or wants to be one, whereas most people think 1 mortgage is plenty. If I were self employed I'd be broke. I can't sell anything, much less myself. The limited amount of sales I can do involves finding someone to hire me. I don't see why having a boss telling you what to do is worse than having customers telling you what to do, though with the customers as the boss you end up working longer hours with more stress and a less stable income.
I think the article is talking about entry level jobs, which are automatically low. Maybe the average goes up for COBOL because even a few extra people getting jobs even at the same rate might raise the average salary.
In the US anyway, COBOL is everywhere, not just financial areas. I don't know why that's not true in UK.
And a boring job with COBOL is bound to be massively more exiting than the boring IT job.
Windows had this too, it was just never a default part of an official release. It was a part of PowerToys or some such as I recall. It didn't work that well at times but it just needed some evolving.
Never liked HBO, haven't seen it in a decade. Not worth the cost for me. Original programming maybe, but not worth the cost for me when I can wait a few years and it'll show up somewhere else.
Amazon is a wannabe players, a late comer to the game who flashes around a name with most of their customers comprised of people who mostly want discounted shipping. Sure they could kill Netflix, but only by deliberately running their streaming service at a loss rather than be competing straight on.
Original programming is nice and all, but the cable providers don't create it and they still charge the huge fees. And if you wait the original programming shows up elsewhere.
I'll let someone else foot the bill thank you very much. Nothing is forcing me to watch this stuff or forcing me to pay for it.
And I hope it doesn't surprise anyone to learn this, but no one actually has to foot the bill at all. The world will not come to an end if these television companies go bankrupt or if advertising companies go bankrupt.
Yes maybe I am subsidizing some shows on Netflix I don't want to see. But at $7 a month I'm much more willing to put up with it than under my old $70/month satellite bill (or $100+ if I were cable instead).
If netflix prices get up into ridiculous range that cable/satellite current has, then hopefully someone else will come along and undercut them and start the cycle over. Eventually the high priced guys might take a hint and cut the costs instead of assuming there's some law that mandates we keep paying whatever they demand.
The referenced article about cord-cutting being a fantasy is just outright wrong. First, it's not talking about cord-cutting but instead about ala-carte payments, very different things. I can guarantee my $7 a month is economically better than $70 a month I used to pay.
Next, the assumptions are that if you stop paying things like the ESPN fees that someone else is going to pay more. Well guess what, those who won't pay the ESPN fee will be saving money! It is not the television viewer's goal to try to optimize the average amount spent across all viewers, but instead to try to get an economical value for themselves alone without regard to other people. It is also not the television viewer's goal to try to create a sustainable market for cable providers, and they have no incentive at all to try to maintain current revenue for ESPN or AMC yet the article seems to imply that this is important. If ESPN went out of business because I failed to subsidize them I still would not shed any tears.
The assumption that current television pricing is a good deal for everyone makes the ridiculous assumption that everyone wants to watch TV or considers it affordable. Yes, a $80,000 Lamborghini is a great deal but that doesn't mean everyone will want to pay that since many will still want the $15,000 Honda instead. The thing is a lot of people are finding cheaper ways to get the amount of TV they like, and some people are even deciding not to watch any TV at all. So it is indeed working to cut the cord.
The author sounds like the audience was supposed to be television execs rather than actual consumers. The whole argument sounds like a whine to keep paying huge amounts of money so that we can subsidize other people like him.
Monopoly does not mean owning 100% of the market and it does not mean there is no competition. It means that they dominate the market enough that their position in one market will leverage them unfairly in other markets. There have been legal judgements declaring Microsoft a monopoly, it's not just my opinion.
The question is do you treat Kickstarter as just a pre-pre-pre-order for a game you want, or do you treat it as investing in a product? For Double Fine I think many of those backers were indeed investing in the game: they wanted this sort of game to make a revival. Any investor in software knows the risks of costs spiraling out of control.
You shoudn't need a prototype, that's not what Kickstarter is about. So what if no one wanted Sienna Storm, that doesn't point to a problem with Kickstarter but just says that not enough people wanted that game. Maybe their marketing was badly flawed, maybe the concept wasn't want people wanted, but ultimately they rolled the dice and lost. It happens.
The game I was a kickstarter on is coming out later this year and it looks to be doing well, matching the promises, and despite being from an actual company it wouldn't have gotten off the ground without kickstarter (and it's not wasteland 2, but I'm looking forward to that too). The point is to bypass the traditional model where some big money game maker that everyone hates gets to decide what games are made by the development houses, or to allow the small development house to make a game in their own name and get top billing, or to try and make a niche game.
Except that in the past, on the rare occasion when you could get a PC without Windows, I recall saving $25 by clicking the box that said to have no OS installed. Granted most companies don't like this because they want all machines to be clones, but for those makers who are already customizing each PC (ie, you can choose to have Office or not, antivirus or not, and so on) then there's no added support costs to just leave off the OS.
The OEM price is very cheap, but not zero. If you *know* you'll never use Windows why should you have to pay $30 or more for it? (and $30 was at least one listed OEM price for Windows 8 after it was discounted because of poor sales)
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It's not like you were actually making a decision. Unless somehow you actually had the ability to make that happen.
So if Quebec left Canada, wouldn't the Canadian government offices in Quebec become Quebec government offices? Thus they get to keep their government jobs. Unless you mean those French speakers outside of Quebec could become Quebec citizens while holding government jobs in Ontario?
Of course they share the currency, that's normal, that's what Scotland is planning. Regions have split off from nations in the past, this sort of thing is not entirely hypothetical. You end up with negotiations between two governments, deciding who gets to keep the nukes, what happens with national services, etc. This is like a divorce in a way, you don't have the spouse who wants to leave get no possessions except a bathrobe since they used to be equal partners. Similarly a province or region used to be partners with the other parts of the country, they paid their taxes, the used their labor, they contributed their resources.
Why doesn't Scotland get to keep them? There would need to be negotiation on who gets to keep what, across the board. Like a divorce. The Scots have indeed been building and paying for these bases, they've been joining the armed services, etc. Who's to say Scotland is not a part owner of the submarines?
Or compare all Computer Science and Engineering students to those who took more classes than were strictly necessary for graduation.
It's an elective course. Taking it automatically puts you ahead of other students who do the minimum effort.
On the other hand, they have their own computing departments. Many modern companies don't even bother, they outsource everything, or they believe the marketing spiel from SAP or Microsoft or Oracle and then waste all their time with professional services trying to get stuff working.
Also it's unclear what the average salary means. Do they count all the people who didn't manage to find a job, or who are stuck at McDonald's, in which case just one person getting a high paying job bumps up the average quite a lot. Or are they only considering graduates who actually got a job in the computing field, or a development/engineering job rather than support desk peon?
I wonder if just having taken an elective at all is what it takes to raise the average starting salary. As compared to most students who take the minimum necessary to get out of there.
Except for the entry level job. You usually take what you can get because you have no clout at all, and it's lucky just to get the interview. You need to build up a lot of experience before you can pick and choose the team you can be on.
This is regional though, and varies in industries too. There are people who will downgrade an interviewee for showing up in a suit. I think that's short sighted but it happens. What flies in the financial industry in major financial cities is not the same attire that is used in development, engineering, or technical jobs. And COBOL is most definitely not used only in financial industries. Best bet is to scope out the job before showing up; look at their web page, if all the pictures of the executives are in polo shirts then you won't need the suit; drive by the place and see what people are wearing in the parking lot. Or just call ahead, it is perfectly appropriate to ask what expected attire should be.
No, you wear a completely different outfit from the usual. Different shoes, socks, trousers, shirt, plus an additional jacket and tie. Every one of them is very expensive (except maybe shoes, some people buy very expensive athletic shoes to go with their ripped jeans), and you need multliple sets, so it's a big financial hit right off. Then they're much more uncomfortable, that goes without saying, because if they were as comfortable as other clothes then you'd see people wear them more on weekends.
As far as white collar goes, I'm in California and almost everyone here dresses casually, from CEO down. That doesn't mean so-called "business casual" which is actually dressing up a lot. It's hot so the suit is just a stupid attire choice already compared to icy places like NY. Then again, at NJ Bell Labs I asked if I should wear a suit to the interview and they emphatically shouted NO. I haven't had a white collar at work since the 80s, and even then it was a hold out compared to other jobs in the area. There is no sacrifice in money to do this either, you rarely see any engineers wearing a suit to work at any level, and rarely with the executives either.
Dressing smartly is itself a problem. A low paying entry level job can be stressful enough without the fasion police coming buy and telling you that you need to spend the rest of your measly salary upgrading your wardrobe.
I remember my early job where I went from the labs in nice shirt and slacks down to the next town for a meeting and they all said they knew where I was from right away because I was the one without a tie. It's how you tell the drones from the workers.
It's all expensive though. The suit is ok, you can have one only and wear it every day (all you can afford on entry level salary), and if someone complains they can fork over the money to buy a second one. A pain to keep clean, probably have to use the dry cleaners, and you have wrinkles all the time. Gain just a little weight and you need a new suit, lose a little weight and you don't need the new suit but you look silly. They're very very hot, one reason most office crank up the AC.
But the tie is the killer I think, that's what scares people off. They're uncomfortable, even when not tight. I get a suit tailored to fit, and it's annoying once that top button is closed, and lousy once the tie is on. It's hard to relax with that tie on, and that means you can't think well. You're just waiting for the wedding, funeral, or dinner to be over so you can rip it off.
I had the job where we didn't need a tie just dress shirt and slacks. It was ok, but I'd rather not go back to that. The slacks wear out very quickly compared to jeans, you're the only guy walking on the street that isn't casual (Calif, where wearing polo shirt and khakis is dressing up formally), and everyone knows you're the bottom rung IT flunky just by how you look. The shoes are uncomfortable too. Then you're stuck in a lab or workspace where those nicer clothes are out of place. The very first thing that happens when you get home is a change of clothes.
I agree that dressing up is the most minor of all workplace inconveniences. If you pass up a good and interesting job because of a dress code then that is indeed short sighted. However that doesn't absolve the suit from being inconvenient, archaic, and unnecessary. There's a reason most workplaces are relaxing the attire requirements.
Not everyone is cut out to be self employed either. Reminds me of the media attitude towards silicon valley, thinking that everyone is an entrepreneur or wants to be one, whereas most people think 1 mortgage is plenty. If I were self employed I'd be broke. I can't sell anything, much less myself. The limited amount of sales I can do involves finding someone to hire me. I don't see why having a boss telling you what to do is worse than having customers telling you what to do, though with the customers as the boss you end up working longer hours with more stress and a less stable income.
I think the article is talking about entry level jobs, which are automatically low. Maybe the average goes up for COBOL because even a few extra people getting jobs even at the same rate might raise the average salary.
In the US anyway, COBOL is everywhere, not just financial areas. I don't know why that's not true in UK.
And a boring job with COBOL is bound to be massively more exiting than the boring IT job.
Windows had this too, it was just never a default part of an official release. It was a part of PowerToys or some such as I recall. It didn't work that well at times but it just needed some evolving.
OSX seems to be going downhill though. More and more iphone like, lack of innovation, bugs not getting fixed. At least it's free.
Never liked HBO, haven't seen it in a decade. Not worth the cost for me. Original programming maybe, but not worth the cost for me when I can wait a few years and it'll show up somewhere else.
Amazon is a wannabe players, a late comer to the game who flashes around a name with most of their customers comprised of people who mostly want discounted shipping. Sure they could kill Netflix, but only by deliberately running their streaming service at a loss rather than be competing straight on.
Original programming is nice and all, but the cable providers don't create it and they still charge the huge fees. And if you wait the original programming shows up elsewhere.
They still show music videos on MTV in Europe.
I'll let someone else foot the bill thank you very much. Nothing is forcing me to watch this stuff or forcing me to pay for it.
And I hope it doesn't surprise anyone to learn this, but no one actually has to foot the bill at all. The world will not come to an end if these television companies go bankrupt or if advertising companies go bankrupt.
Yes maybe I am subsidizing some shows on Netflix I don't want to see. But at $7 a month I'm much more willing to put up with it than under my old $70/month satellite bill (or $100+ if I were cable instead).
If netflix prices get up into ridiculous range that cable/satellite current has, then hopefully someone else will come along and undercut them and start the cycle over. Eventually the high priced guys might take a hint and cut the costs instead of assuming there's some law that mandates we keep paying whatever they demand.
The referenced article about cord-cutting being a fantasy is just outright wrong. First, it's not talking about cord-cutting but instead about ala-carte payments, very different things. I can guarantee my $7 a month is economically better than $70 a month I used to pay.
Next, the assumptions are that if you stop paying things like the ESPN fees that someone else is going to pay more. Well guess what, those who won't pay the ESPN fee will be saving money! It is not the television viewer's goal to try to optimize the average amount spent across all viewers, but instead to try to get an economical value for themselves alone without regard to other people. It is also not the television viewer's goal to try to create a sustainable market for cable providers, and they have no incentive at all to try to maintain current revenue for ESPN or AMC yet the article seems to imply that this is important. If ESPN went out of business because I failed to subsidize them I still would not shed any tears.
The assumption that current television pricing is a good deal for everyone makes the ridiculous assumption that everyone wants to watch TV or considers it affordable. Yes, a $80,000 Lamborghini is a great deal but that doesn't mean everyone will want to pay that since many will still want the $15,000 Honda instead. The thing is a lot of people are finding cheaper ways to get the amount of TV they like, and some people are even deciding not to watch any TV at all. So it is indeed working to cut the cord.
The author sounds like the audience was supposed to be television execs rather than actual consumers. The whole argument sounds like a whine to keep paying huge amounts of money so that we can subsidize other people like him.
Monopoly does not mean owning 100% of the market and it does not mean there is no competition. It means that they dominate the market enough that their position in one market will leverage them unfairly in other markets. There have been legal judgements declaring Microsoft a monopoly, it's not just my opinion.
The question is do you treat Kickstarter as just a pre-pre-pre-order for a game you want, or do you treat it as investing in a product? For Double Fine I think many of those backers were indeed investing in the game: they wanted this sort of game to make a revival. Any investor in software knows the risks of costs spiraling out of control.
You shoudn't need a prototype, that's not what Kickstarter is about. So what if no one wanted Sienna Storm, that doesn't point to a problem with Kickstarter but just says that not enough people wanted that game. Maybe their marketing was badly flawed, maybe the concept wasn't want people wanted, but ultimately they rolled the dice and lost. It happens.
The game I was a kickstarter on is coming out later this year and it looks to be doing well, matching the promises, and despite being from an actual company it wouldn't have gotten off the ground without kickstarter (and it's not wasteland 2, but I'm looking forward to that too). The point is to bypass the traditional model where some big money game maker that everyone hates gets to decide what games are made by the development houses, or to allow the small development house to make a game in their own name and get top billing, or to try and make a niche game.
Except that in the past, on the rare occasion when you could get a PC without Windows, I recall saving $25 by clicking the box that said to have no OS installed. Granted most companies don't like this because they want all machines to be clones, but for those makers who are already customizing each PC (ie, you can choose to have Office or not, antivirus or not, and so on) then there's no added support costs to just leave off the OS.
The OEM price is very cheap, but not zero. If you *know* you'll never use Windows why should you have to pay $30 or more for it?
(and $30 was at least one listed OEM price for Windows 8 after it was discounted because of poor sales)