Why is it legal? Because you didn't buy the music, you licensed it. This is closer to a "rent" model... You rent the music for as long as the licensor decides to allow you to rent it. When they turn off the DRM servers, the rental period is over. Your done!
Re:Just seems like a well thought out list
on
The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 1
A tour goes from place to place to place. They may have/hours/ between when the team shows up and the time that they perform. The day before they may have been in another city putting on a show.
The venue/stagehands/etc. were there days before. The band shows up the day of. If the band shows up and that simple request wasn't there, they knew something was up, and the show could be canceled. It is in the band's best interest to cancel the show in that case -- they had lots of pyrotecnics, gear, etc. that all required a certain setup and certain safety measure. If even one thing wasn't adheared to, they could get hurt and they would NOT be able to perform the rest of the show (many bands of that time toured three months at a time, with at most a day off between shows for travel. One injury could put tens, if not hundreds of shows in jepordy. Look at U2 last summer).
There are many, many ways people learn. Some people can learn by listening, some can learn by interacting. Saying that everything should go online dosen't account for the way that at least some students want to consume knowledge. For me, having face time with a professor gives me value -- often more value than the material that is being presented.
That being said, there are a lot of legal issues that are present when trying to with innovate the "U" online. One of the biggest issues facing universities at the moment is the expansion of FERPA in the US. FERPA pretty much says that schools have to know where student data is PHYSICALLY, and students have to explicitily allow for that data to travel anywhere outside the campus. This restricts the use of cloud services, services from new startups (who usually don't put much effort into the legal aspect of their data retention), and other cool new stuff. Heck, even services like Google Apps is often a sticky widget when it comes to universities -- causing them to either invent it themselves or to make one-off contracts with those service providers to store their data differently.
Then we also have to deal with the old crumudgen professor. Many professors have grown up thinking that their only value in academia is their lecture. They copyright it, and they hate the thought of it 'getting out there' so that kids won't sign up for their classes. These are often the professors who teach the same thing year after year and don't provide any other value other than their spoken word. This is not the case with most newer professors, but the old guard is still out there.
Problems with RIM and the Playbook from an owner
on
The (Big) Problem With RIM
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I ended up with a Playbook from winning a contest just about a year ago. I was super excited to get one -- all the specs were great and it seemed like a winning device. The conference I was at had only one, and they kept it behiend a glass case. They wouldn't let any of the devs touch it, but they handed out Playbook Emulators (software) that you could build apps against. Over the course of the next 4 months, the API changed soo many times, and the Emulator was so buggy that it was almost pointless to develop against it.
From that point, it was 6 months before I got the real device in the mail.
A lot of promises that made the device a best-seller still haven't materilized.
- It was said it was going to ship with the ability to run Android and old BBx Apps.
- It was said that devlopers could develop apps in native QNX. Such an SDK has still not been released, except for a few select partners (I've been a BB developer for YEARS, and thought I could make this list... I guess not).
- There were BB phones that were supposed to be released immediatly after the Playbook that ran QNX. This would allow devs to target one SDK / App development model for both phones and tablets. We have not seen anything about a new QNX phone yet.
- It was said that there would be a version that had GSM/CDMA capabilities coming... It's been bumped off their road map. You can either use WiFi, or tether to an existing BB phone.
- There is no 'smartphone' stuff in there. No Calendar, no Mail, nothing. You can tether to an existing BB phone and emulate some of those things, but if your phone is off, or out of range you loose those apps. Who pays hundreds of dollars and can't check your mail on a device!
- There has been a real lack of business apps. Still no SSH app, still no RDP app. No email, no word processor, etc. These are the things people will notice when they check out the devices in the store. If the developer eco-system wasn't supporting these types of apps, RIM should have whipped them up to fill in the gaps. They didn't, and they still don't exist.
- They've scared off most developers because of the way they run their program. You have to register your device with your program and download a developer 'token' that is only good for 30 days. Every 30 days you need to re-register your device to be able to deploy apps to it. Additionally, you have to bake those tokens into your app, which means that your apps can really only be tested for 30 day windows. To get your tokens approved it can take DAYS. Submitting stuff to the App World is a similar process as Apple, except you get more feedback when your apps get rejected.
Now, all that being said, hardware wise I think the device is REAL nice.. One of the best tablet screens I've ever encountered. I love the gestures (the borders of the device are touch sensitive, and most of the gestures you use with the device orgionate from there). The web browser is really solid, and the multi-tasking works very well. Because of the screen, it's one of the few devices I can read a full newspaper on without having a lot of strain on my eyes. The OS is also beautiful too -- and much better laid out than iOS or Android. The battery lasts about 8 hours of continious use, which is great for a device like that.
That being said -- I don't use it every day. I don't even use it every week because the lack of apps to do my work. At this point, it is a glorified web browser and that's about it. Give me the ability to do my day-to-day job (like I can on the iPad or Samsung tab), and it would be the device to carry around. But not until then.
You could buy from a different vendor. There are lots of other manufactures that make great products -- most make products MUCH better than Cisco. Companies like Juniper, Extreme, Foundry, etc. all make products that end up being cheaper, more reliable and often faster than their Cisco counterpart.
Cisco lost a lof of their edge in the last 10 years when they stopped focusing on their core products. They only enhanced their products to make them work better with the products they were buying. Others have surpassed them in most products.
In our town, they consolidated all the post offices into a single office and a "distribution center". The distribution center is only open 10am to 4:30pm M-F (closed for lunch from noon to 1). They are also the ones that hold your package hostage if it is larger than your mailbox.
If I had to pick up my mail on a regular basis with the current situation, I'd be miserable. At least UPS/FedEx is open until 7pm if they have to hold my packages...
The problem with the US, is in most aspects we do slap the title Engineer on a lot of titles. In reality only those who hold a P.E. (Professional Engineer -- somebody who is licensed by the State to be an engineer) should be called an Engineer. Sure, lots of people do engineering (Software Engineers, etc), but they are not true engineers...
You would have thought that AT&T would have known about this before the press release not not been surprised -- I mean, don't they tap everybody's phone lines "for security"?
For me, it's not about change, it's about not being able to see all the options in one shot, and generally poor organization. For example, if you want to make some text bold in Word, where do you go? First assumption would be the Formatting tab. Page Layout? Oh, that's right -- they stuck it in Home. How about adding text to the footer? Home? Nope. Page Layout? Nope. Formatting? Nope. Insert?! Yeah. Oh, and the best one. Where do you set the tab stops? Home? Page Layout? View? Nowhere. You have to click a little (as in 10x10px) square in the lower right corner of the Paragraph section of Home, look at the dialog box and click on the Tabs button. Something that was on a toolbar since Word for DOS is now three clicks away, hidden and very obsecure.
At least when we had menus things were somewhat organized. Now it's a matter of hunting and pecking as to where "they" decided to put it in the ribbon. It's not like I can really move things around to work around how I work (like with toolbars), but I have to learn how their UI guys think I work (they never meet me).
This is no different than when Rick Snyder ran for office in Michigan. He ran as a successful businessman, when all he did was destroy Gateway and sell it to the Chinese. People bought it, and the "businessman" was elected governer, even though he didn't state any of his plans to lead the state. He has been busy trying to figure out if he can sell the state to the Chinese for a profit...
In the past few years we have seen more and more hits of our communication systems because of flare-ups from the Sun. Heck, just last year we had a pretty major television sattelite "Galaxy-11" knocked out and left for dead because of a solar flare (they have since been able to regain control of it after declaring it as space-trash and getting it ready to burn it up in the atomosphere). So much of our communications systems are tied to sattelites and long-range RF communication systems that are vunerable to these flare up that this will become more and more of a problem as time goes on...
With Microsoft's device, you have to buy certain modules to do X work. You can't just take 3 LEDs, a Servo and make something. Only their modules will fit, and only their modules have software that is compatible with them. This is the same market that Phidget was going after -- you don't need to be an EE or know how to solder to make something.
Didn't realize that the Bay Area was near the Canadian border (or boarder, as you called it). I must be holding the map upside down.
Maker Faire has typically had two official events -- San Mataeo and New York (added a few years ago). They added Detroit last year as an annual event. There are local offshoot events in various other localities. If you want to run one of the offshoot events, O'Reilley would be more than happy to help you set it up.
Last I knew, the FCC didn't run the PSTN -- they just regulated common carriers (the providers of the PSTN to consumers). They don't have the authority to shut it down, nor would they save any money doing so. All they do is regulate the carriers, approve interconnection agreements, and make skewed reports on its use.
What is also neglected here is two major things :
- The cellular network runs over the PSTN. Without the PSTN backbone, cellular calls would not be able to be connected to people outside your provider (and even then when you are roaming, you can't call people within your provider either!). Dirty little secret -- most cell towers are connected via T1's via the PSTN to their local backhaul.
- Most businesses utilize the PSTN very heavily. Because the cellular companies have been so apt to lock down cell phones, there has been very little innovation to make these devices work in a business enviroment. Things like PBXs are still very widely popular in the enterprise and these require connections to the outside world -- something more than a cell phone.
The same way they deal with gay marriage -- they don't reconize it, and if you try to file official paperwork trying to get the financial and legal benifits of marriage in the State of Michigan for one of these unreconized marriages then you will be denied.
There's a lot of bible-thumpers here (in Michigan) outside the major cities that give lots of people hardships for trying to do things above board.
This is still all beta software he is dealing with. The platform is still not complete, and RIM is still tweaking the process for creating applications for their new, still unreleased tablet. This is why it's called bleeding-edge -- it's because it's not polished and you may bleed a bit working with it. That is also why those who take the pains and actually publish to the AppWorld first are the ones who are most rewarded. If your app is the first on the market, you will be most visible on opening day, and since it is still free -- you really are only loosing time.
On another note -- there are plenty of walk-throughs available when working with this beta software, from both RIM and Adobe. RIM has also been offering nearly weekly developer web-casts on how to work with it too. Sure, it's not as polished as the iOS development platform (you know, with it being Apple only, certificate issues, profile issues and publishing issues aside), but it does work.
Basically, you are unwilling to do the hard work required to build an effective team. Instead, you take the easy path and assume that an institutional designation of qualified is the same as the correct qualifications for your company. You are part of the problem.
I am willing to do the hard work, but there are limits to everything. When I narrow the resumes to about the best 25 - 30 in the group I do lots of research. I call references, I double check previous employers, I check into qualifications/certifications (you will be amazed as to how many people lie about these). I also have to run the background checks as required by law for this position. My research, on average costs me about $150 per resume, and about 2 hours of my time. I can't afford to do this for each resume that comes into the door.
The way I see it is like this : You have 30 second to impress me. If you are in need of the job (or really want it), you should put forth the effort into it for me to consider you. If you get hired, I'm going to invest about $10,000 before you even step into the office for the first time (things like a laptop, phone, tools, insurance, and lost productivity from my staff to help you ramp up). Now, in a normal situation, I see a new employee making that up plus some within the first year, so I don't mind. BUT the potential applicant needs to see that as an expense that I'm spending to get them on board.
You better damn well impress me. You also better damn well have spent more than 10 minutes on your resume. If you treat finding a job like a job (put in 40 hours, polish your resume, make custom cover letters), you will find a job, and you will get hired by me. I personally don't care if you don't have a college degree, or 10 years of experience. But given two people with near experience (on paper), and one who has a college degree, I will choose the one with the college degree. It's part of my evaluation when I have to make decisions about 200 people I've never met.
For the record, I don't work in HR. I am a manager in charge of a team of 8 people. I have a full time job, and hiring somebody is something that adds to my 55 hr/week job.
Also for the record, on my team, I have 5 people who have a college degree and 3 who do not. You can't tell who dosen't by their work or ethics (or pay, in my case). But the people on my team that don't have degrees were extremely impressive to be selected from the candidates who did.
But the big problem with HR departments is all the unqualified people who do apply for a job.
I just filled a position for a telecom tech. Our simple requirements were that they had to have at least 5 years experience with voice, 1 year of data, and not a convicted felon.
I got > 300 resumes. I think it was closer to 400 actually. But what it all boils down to is, when you get me your resume, you have 30 seconds to impress me -- for it go to into the "I'll look at this one more closely" pile. Not having a college degree makes you much less impressive when I have a stack of 200 people who do. Unless there is something else extremely impressive about you, you won't get a second look.
For me, a person who has finished college tends to be a much more rounded individual. Sure, the guy who dropped out of high-school may be the brightest guy on the block, but I don't know that, and I don't have the time to find out. Espically in my field, education is very important (not just higher learning, but simply learning new technologies), and if you don't seem willing to even learn anything past the basics, it makes you a much less qualified applicant.
Wrong. H.264 was created to create a STANDARD. They roaylities are pooled to pay for existing patents that HAD to be infringed on in order to create the standard. These same patents are expected to be infringed upon in the 'open-source' WebM. H.264 lives in a LOT of places, much more than just the web. Sattelites, Cable TV, Video Cameras, video encoders, hardware decoders, televisions, etc. all have had support for H.264 for a LONG time. By Google removing support for it, for a codec set that they own (remember, it's not free, they still own it), it will force a lot of content to be re-encoded to meet the WebM standard, just to support that browser. Re-Encoding the video just means that you will loose quality, loose productivity (your CPU cycles will have to do the encoding), and just cause a ruckus in the market.
I wish people would just stop drinking the Google Cool-Aid and think about WHY they are making this move. It's not about the money. it's not about openess. It's about trying to make the standard that they bought the standard for video on the web. Next thing, they will limit the licensing to their competitors so that they can't do everything they are doing with video on the web.
In my mind, SimpleCDN is the one who screwed up. For any company trying to start a busness (espically one like this), who signs up with a provider and allows that provider to change the terms of service without any warning?!? If my business depends on your service, you better bet that my contract with you either clearly outlines the terms of service (and only allows them to be modifiable by an amendment to the contract), or at the worst, provide a 90-day change window.
I know we can't all be lawyers, but don't complain if you ALLOW them to do this to you.
Or better yet -- the few times I've had to go to Best Buy to buy something (trust me, I avoid them like the plauge), and they pull this crap, I go to their website while in the store, and order it there. The website dosen't know about the "Geek Squad Markups", and will charge me the normal amount. I can even check the box to do an in-store pickup.
The manager usually gets real pissed at me when he knows I know there are no untouched boxes, and I'm getting their GeekSquad service for free. I usually explain that I'd rather not have it.
ummm... you CAN write apps for your own phone without paying the $99 for the apple-signed cert. If you use a self-signed cert, you can upload the IPK to your phone with iTunes, and you can explicitly share it with other users, as long as your know their phone-id.
I've done this all without paying the Apple fee. The day I was ready to plunk down the money for the cert is when they went all ballistic with the new rules. I got gun-shy and haven't looked back since.
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Why is it legal? Because you didn't buy the music, you licensed it. This is closer to a "rent" model... You rent the music for as long as the licensor decides to allow you to rent it. When they turn off the DRM servers, the rental period is over. Your done!
A tour goes from place to place to place. They may have /hours/ between when the team shows up and the time that they perform. The day before they may have been in another city putting on a show.
The venue/stagehands/etc. were there days before. The band shows up the day of. If the band shows up and that simple request wasn't there, they knew something was up, and the show could be canceled. It is in the band's best interest to cancel the show in that case -- they had lots of pyrotecnics, gear, etc. that all required a certain setup and certain safety measure. If even one thing wasn't adheared to, they could get hurt and they would NOT be able to perform the rest of the show (many bands of that time toured three months at a time, with at most a day off between shows for travel. One injury could put tens, if not hundreds of shows in jepordy. Look at U2 last summer).
There are many, many ways people learn. Some people can learn by listening, some can learn by interacting. Saying that everything should go online dosen't account for the way that at least some students want to consume knowledge. For me, having face time with a professor gives me value -- often more value than the material that is being presented.
That being said, there are a lot of legal issues that are present when trying to with innovate the "U" online. One of the biggest issues facing universities at the moment is the expansion of FERPA in the US. FERPA pretty much says that schools have to know where student data is PHYSICALLY, and students have to explicitily allow for that data to travel anywhere outside the campus. This restricts the use of cloud services, services from new startups (who usually don't put much effort into the legal aspect of their data retention), and other cool new stuff. Heck, even services like Google Apps is often a sticky widget when it comes to universities -- causing them to either invent it themselves or to make one-off contracts with those service providers to store their data differently.
Then we also have to deal with the old crumudgen professor. Many professors have grown up thinking that their only value in academia is their lecture. They copyright it, and they hate the thought of it 'getting out there' so that kids won't sign up for their classes. These are often the professors who teach the same thing year after year and don't provide any other value other than their spoken word. This is not the case with most newer professors, but the old guard is still out there.
I ended up with a Playbook from winning a contest just about a year ago. I was super excited to get one -- all the specs were great and it seemed like a winning device. The conference I was at had only one, and they kept it behiend a glass case. They wouldn't let any of the devs touch it, but they handed out Playbook Emulators (software) that you could build apps against. Over the course of the next 4 months, the API changed soo many times, and the Emulator was so buggy that it was almost pointless to develop against it.
From that point, it was 6 months before I got the real device in the mail.
A lot of promises that made the device a best-seller still haven't materilized.
- It was said it was going to ship with the ability to run Android and old BBx Apps.
- It was said that devlopers could develop apps in native QNX. Such an SDK has still not been released, except for a few select partners (I've been a BB developer for YEARS, and thought I could make this list... I guess not).
- There were BB phones that were supposed to be released immediatly after the Playbook that ran QNX. This would allow devs to target one SDK / App development model for both phones and tablets. We have not seen anything about a new QNX phone yet.
- It was said that there would be a version that had GSM/CDMA capabilities coming... It's been bumped off their road map. You can either use WiFi, or tether to an existing BB phone.
- There is no 'smartphone' stuff in there. No Calendar, no Mail, nothing. You can tether to an existing BB phone and emulate some of those things, but if your phone is off, or out of range you loose those apps. Who pays hundreds of dollars and can't check your mail on a device!
- There has been a real lack of business apps. Still no SSH app, still no RDP app. No email, no word processor, etc. These are the things people will notice when they check out the devices in the store. If the developer eco-system wasn't supporting these types of apps, RIM should have whipped them up to fill in the gaps. They didn't, and they still don't exist.
- They've scared off most developers because of the way they run their program. You have to register your device with your program and download a developer 'token' that is only good for 30 days. Every 30 days you need to re-register your device to be able to deploy apps to it. Additionally, you have to bake those tokens into your app, which means that your apps can really only be tested for 30 day windows. To get your tokens approved it can take DAYS. Submitting stuff to the App World is a similar process as Apple, except you get more feedback when your apps get rejected.
Now, all that being said, hardware wise I think the device is REAL nice.. One of the best tablet screens I've ever encountered. I love the gestures (the borders of the device are touch sensitive, and most of the gestures you use with the device orgionate from there). The web browser is really solid, and the multi-tasking works very well. Because of the screen, it's one of the few devices I can read a full newspaper on without having a lot of strain on my eyes. The OS is also beautiful too -- and much better laid out than iOS or Android. The battery lasts about 8 hours of continious use, which is great for a device like that.
That being said -- I don't use it every day. I don't even use it every week because the lack of apps to do my work. At this point, it is a glorified web browser and that's about it. Give me the ability to do my day-to-day job (like I can on the iPad or Samsung tab), and it would be the device to carry around. But not until then.
You could buy from a different vendor. There are lots of other manufactures that make great products -- most make products MUCH better than Cisco. Companies like Juniper, Extreme, Foundry, etc. all make products that end up being cheaper, more reliable and often faster than their Cisco counterpart.
Cisco lost a lof of their edge in the last 10 years when they stopped focusing on their core products. They only enhanced their products to make them work better with the products they were buying. Others have surpassed them in most products.
Obligotory "You're holding it wrong" post.
In our town, they consolidated all the post offices into a single office and a "distribution center". The distribution center is only open 10am to 4:30pm M-F (closed for lunch from noon to 1). They are also the ones that hold your package hostage if it is larger than your mailbox.
If I had to pick up my mail on a regular basis with the current situation, I'd be miserable. At least UPS/FedEx is open until 7pm if they have to hold my packages...
The problem with the US, is in most aspects we do slap the title Engineer on a lot of titles. In reality only those who hold a P.E. (Professional Engineer -- somebody who is licensed by the State to be an engineer) should be called an Engineer. Sure, lots of people do engineering (Software Engineers, etc), but they are not true engineers...
You would have thought that AT&T would have known about this before the press release not not been surprised -- I mean, don't they tap everybody's phone lines "for security"?
For me, it's not about change, it's about not being able to see all the options in one shot, and generally poor organization. For example, if you want to make some text bold in Word, where do you go? First assumption would be the Formatting tab. Page Layout? Oh, that's right -- they stuck it in Home. How about adding text to the footer? Home? Nope. Page Layout? Nope. Formatting? Nope. Insert?! Yeah. Oh, and the best one. Where do you set the tab stops? Home? Page Layout? View? Nowhere. You have to click a little (as in 10x10px) square in the lower right corner of the Paragraph section of Home, look at the dialog box and click on the Tabs button. Something that was on a toolbar since Word for DOS is now three clicks away, hidden and very obsecure.
At least when we had menus things were somewhat organized. Now it's a matter of hunting and pecking as to where "they" decided to put it in the ribbon. It's not like I can really move things around to work around how I work (like with toolbars), but I have to learn how their UI guys think I work (they never meet me).
This is no different than when Rick Snyder ran for office in Michigan. He ran as a successful businessman, when all he did was destroy Gateway and sell it to the Chinese. People bought it, and the "businessman" was elected governer, even though he didn't state any of his plans to lead the state. He has been busy trying to figure out if he can sell the state to the Chinese for a profit...
In the past few years we have seen more and more hits of our communication systems because of flare-ups from the Sun. Heck, just last year we had a pretty major television sattelite "Galaxy-11" knocked out and left for dead because of a solar flare (they have since been able to regain control of it after declaring it as space-trash and getting it ready to burn it up in the atomosphere). So much of our communications systems are tied to sattelites and long-range RF communication systems that are vunerable to these flare up that this will become more and more of a problem as time goes on...
No, we never experienced anything like the Rodney King incident at all. Nope, never happened.
With Microsoft's device, you have to buy certain modules to do X work. You can't just take 3 LEDs, a Servo and make something. Only their modules will fit, and only their modules have software that is compatible with them. This is the same market that Phidget was going after -- you don't need to be an EE or know how to solder to make something.
Didn't realize that the Bay Area was near the Canadian border (or boarder, as you called it). I must be holding the map upside down.
Maker Faire has typically had two official events -- San Mataeo and New York (added a few years ago). They added Detroit last year as an annual event. There are local offshoot events in various other localities. If you want to run one of the offshoot events, O'Reilley would be more than happy to help you set it up.
Last I knew, the FCC didn't run the PSTN -- they just regulated common carriers (the providers of the PSTN to consumers). They don't have the authority to shut it down, nor would they save any money doing so. All they do is regulate the carriers, approve interconnection agreements, and make skewed reports on its use.
What is also neglected here is two major things :
- The cellular network runs over the PSTN. Without the PSTN backbone, cellular calls would not be able to be connected to people outside your provider (and even then when you are roaming, you can't call people within your provider either!). Dirty little secret -- most cell towers are connected via T1's via the PSTN to their local backhaul.
- Most businesses utilize the PSTN very heavily. Because the cellular companies have been so apt to lock down cell phones, there has been very little innovation to make these devices work in a business enviroment. Things like PBXs are still very widely popular in the enterprise and these require connections to the outside world -- something more than a cell phone.
The same way they deal with gay marriage -- they don't reconize it, and if you try to file official paperwork trying to get the financial and legal benifits of marriage in the State of Michigan for one of these unreconized marriages then you will be denied.
There's a lot of bible-thumpers here (in Michigan) outside the major cities that give lots of people hardships for trying to do things above board.
Data center not too far from my house has the capabilities to run their entire center off diesel generators. They test it once a month. http://www.liquidweb.com/datacenter/datacenter3.html
This is still all beta software he is dealing with. The platform is still not complete, and RIM is still tweaking the process for creating applications for their new, still unreleased tablet. This is why it's called bleeding-edge -- it's because it's not polished and you may bleed a bit working with it. That is also why those who take the pains and actually publish to the AppWorld first are the ones who are most rewarded. If your app is the first on the market, you will be most visible on opening day, and since it is still free -- you really are only loosing time.
On another note -- there are plenty of walk-throughs available when working with this beta software, from both RIM and Adobe. RIM has also been offering nearly weekly developer web-casts on how to work with it too. Sure, it's not as polished as the iOS development platform (you know, with it being Apple only, certificate issues, profile issues and publishing issues aside), but it does work.
Basically, you are unwilling to do the hard work required to build an effective team. Instead, you take the easy path and assume that an institutional designation of qualified is the same as the correct qualifications for your company. You are part of the problem.
I am willing to do the hard work, but there are limits to everything. When I narrow the resumes to about the best 25 - 30 in the group I do lots of research. I call references, I double check previous employers, I check into qualifications/certifications (you will be amazed as to how many people lie about these). I also have to run the background checks as required by law for this position. My research, on average costs me about $150 per resume, and about 2 hours of my time. I can't afford to do this for each resume that comes into the door.
The way I see it is like this : You have 30 second to impress me. If you are in need of the job (or really want it), you should put forth the effort into it for me to consider you. If you get hired, I'm going to invest about $10,000 before you even step into the office for the first time (things like a laptop, phone, tools, insurance, and lost productivity from my staff to help you ramp up). Now, in a normal situation, I see a new employee making that up plus some within the first year, so I don't mind. BUT the potential applicant needs to see that as an expense that I'm spending to get them on board.
You better damn well impress me. You also better damn well have spent more than 10 minutes on your resume. If you treat finding a job like a job (put in 40 hours, polish your resume, make custom cover letters), you will find a job, and you will get hired by me. I personally don't care if you don't have a college degree, or 10 years of experience. But given two people with near experience (on paper), and one who has a college degree, I will choose the one with the college degree. It's part of my evaluation when I have to make decisions about 200 people I've never met.
For the record, I don't work in HR. I am a manager in charge of a team of 8 people. I have a full time job, and hiring somebody is something that adds to my 55 hr/week job.
Also for the record, on my team, I have 5 people who have a college degree and 3 who do not. You can't tell who dosen't by their work or ethics (or pay, in my case). But the people on my team that don't have degrees were extremely impressive to be selected from the candidates who did.
But the big problem with HR departments is all the unqualified people who do apply for a job.
I just filled a position for a telecom tech. Our simple requirements were that they had to have at least 5 years experience with voice, 1 year of data, and not a convicted felon.
I got > 300 resumes. I think it was closer to 400 actually. But what it all boils down to is, when you get me your resume, you have 30 seconds to impress me -- for it go to into the "I'll look at this one more closely" pile. Not having a college degree makes you much less impressive when I have a stack of 200 people who do. Unless there is something else extremely impressive about you, you won't get a second look.
For me, a person who has finished college tends to be a much more rounded individual. Sure, the guy who dropped out of high-school may be the brightest guy on the block, but I don't know that, and I don't have the time to find out. Espically in my field, education is very important (not just higher learning, but simply learning new technologies), and if you don't seem willing to even learn anything past the basics, it makes you a much less qualified applicant.
Wrong. H.264 was created to create a STANDARD. They roaylities are pooled to pay for existing patents that HAD to be infringed on in order to create the standard. These same patents are expected to be infringed upon in the 'open-source' WebM. H.264 lives in a LOT of places, much more than just the web. Sattelites, Cable TV, Video Cameras, video encoders, hardware decoders, televisions, etc. all have had support for H.264 for a LONG time. By Google removing support for it, for a codec set that they own (remember, it's not free, they still own it), it will force a lot of content to be re-encoded to meet the WebM standard, just to support that browser. Re-Encoding the video just means that you will loose quality, loose productivity (your CPU cycles will have to do the encoding), and just cause a ruckus in the market.
I wish people would just stop drinking the Google Cool-Aid and think about WHY they are making this move. It's not about the money. it's not about openess. It's about trying to make the standard that they bought the standard for video on the web. Next thing, they will limit the licensing to their competitors so that they can't do everything they are doing with video on the web.
In my mind, SimpleCDN is the one who screwed up. For any company trying to start a busness (espically one like this), who signs up with a provider and allows that provider to change the terms of service without any warning?!? If my business depends on your service, you better bet that my contract with you either clearly outlines the terms of service (and only allows them to be modifiable by an amendment to the contract), or at the worst, provide a 90-day change window.
I know we can't all be lawyers, but don't complain if you ALLOW them to do this to you.
Or better yet -- the few times I've had to go to Best Buy to buy something (trust me, I avoid them like the plauge), and they pull this crap, I go to their website while in the store, and order it there. The website dosen't know about the "Geek Squad Markups", and will charge me the normal amount. I can even check the box to do an in-store pickup.
The manager usually gets real pissed at me when he knows I know there are no untouched boxes, and I'm getting their GeekSquad service for free. I usually explain that I'd rather not have it.
ummm... you CAN write apps for your own phone without paying the $99 for the apple-signed cert. If you use a self-signed cert, you can upload the IPK to your phone with iTunes, and you can explicitly share it with other users, as long as your know their phone-id.
I've done this all without paying the Apple fee. The day I was ready to plunk down the money for the cert is when they went all ballistic with the new rules. I got gun-shy and haven't looked back since.