It's simply a matter of time before Unix-based operating systems become the de-facto standard in portable electronics. Companies may be able to leverage their skills in their native markets (i.e., MS on the PC), but the portability of Linux makes it a no-brainer for royalty-free devices. FOSS's agnostic approach to interfacing with other technologies makes it ideal in attaining the interoperability desired by consumers. Let's share our good ideas so that others may benefit from them.
I used to work as a consultant for a gigantic multi-national IT corporation. It's a big money-sink. The bulk of profits end up going to the consulting company. Ignorant non-IT companies end up paying much more than they should for labor.
Case and point, one of my former co-workers made $45K starting out. His employer stationed him in NYC. He worked for a client there doing mainframe maintenance at about $160/hr (about $320K/yr). The client wasn't able to determine when he was at work and when he wasn't. His company sometimes billed the client while he wasn't even there, so they undoubtedly made more on him than that.
That means the company made about $275K/yr off of this guy (minus the benefits he received). That's $275K the client would've saved, had they hired him directly.
This is what happens when forego traditional interviews and rely on a third party to staff your IT department. I wager that cutting down on consulting will put more money in the pockets of both permanent employees and large corporations.
Opera's no saint. After running Opera and Firefox 2 with no plugins for quite some time, they used the same amount of memory on my computer (Linux). I've been running FF w/ no plugins for a very long time on my machine due to its limited memory (512 MB).
While the rendering engine has an obvious need for memory, it's nice to see that they're cutting down on memory usage; it has been one of the biggest drawbacks of using Firefox. There's really no need for a web browser to use more than 100MB of memory. For people with limited RAM, it'd make more sense at that point to cache the contents to disk re-render them when they're needed.
That said, Firefox does need a rewrite of the plugin system (which would be a BIG overhaul), but it's more important that they iron out the bugs for this release first. It'd be a huge step up for the Mozilla team, as long as they don't change the existing plugin API.
Just think of how good it could be if you could actually PAY people to put in the effort to make things right?
Money is one incentive to drive quality, I suppose, but if you read up on quality work, quality products tend to be motivated by other factors, especially job satisfaction. Many of the devs out there would love to be wealthier, but they do their jobs because they love the work. Look at Linus and Linux. It must be maddening to work on the code, but he loves it (and I'm sure the other devs do, too); look at the quality of the kernel code.
I find that my GPL'd code is better than the quality of the code I write for work.
Slashdot Mirror
It's simply a matter of time before Unix-based operating systems become the de-facto standard in portable electronics. Companies may be able to leverage their skills in their native markets (i.e., MS on the PC), but the portability of Linux makes it a no-brainer for royalty-free devices. FOSS's agnostic approach to interfacing with other technologies makes it ideal in attaining the interoperability desired by consumers. Let's share our good ideas so that others may benefit from them.
I, for one, welcome our new agnostic overlords.
I used to work as a consultant for a gigantic multi-national IT corporation. It's a big money-sink. The bulk of profits end up going to the consulting company. Ignorant non-IT companies end up paying much more than they should for labor.
Case and point, one of my former co-workers made $45K starting out. His employer stationed him in NYC. He worked for a client there doing mainframe maintenance at about $160/hr (about $320K/yr). The client wasn't able to determine when he was at work and when he wasn't. His company sometimes billed the client while he wasn't even there, so they undoubtedly made more on him than that.
That means the company made about $275K/yr off of this guy (minus the benefits he received). That's $275K the client would've saved, had they hired him directly.
This is what happens when forego traditional interviews and rely on a third party to staff your IT department. I wager that cutting down on consulting will put more money in the pockets of both permanent employees and large corporations.
Opera's no saint. After running Opera and Firefox 2 with no plugins for quite some time, they used the same amount of memory on my computer (Linux). I've been running FF w/ no plugins for a very long time on my machine due to its limited memory (512 MB).
While the rendering engine has an obvious need for memory, it's nice to see that they're cutting down on memory usage; it has been one of the biggest drawbacks of using Firefox. There's really no need for a web browser to use more than 100MB of memory. For people with limited RAM, it'd make more sense at that point to cache the contents to disk re-render them when they're needed.
That said, Firefox does need a rewrite of the plugin system (which would be a BIG overhaul), but it's more important that they iron out the bugs for this release first. It'd be a huge step up for the Mozilla team, as long as they don't change the existing plugin API.
Just think of how good it could be if you could actually PAY people to put in the effort to make things right? Money is one incentive to drive quality, I suppose, but if you read up on quality work, quality products tend to be motivated by other factors, especially job satisfaction. Many of the devs out there would love to be wealthier, but they do their jobs because they love the work. Look at Linus and Linux. It must be maddening to work on the code, but he loves it (and I'm sure the other devs do, too); look at the quality of the kernel code. I find that my GPL'd code is better than the quality of the code I write for work.