I agree with this. Although for me it tends to be more of an ROI thing. The problem with IT, and in my case software development specifically, is that the people that sign the paychecks don't really understand what it takes to implement their shit and keep it running. Thus this ability is undervalued, underappreciated, and underpaid (sometimes). I always just felt like I could make more money, doing less work, by being in management rather than actually doing the work. Its a little backwards if you ask me, but its DEFINITELY become more apparent to me as I've gotten older and my tastes and lifestyle changes.
My opinion on that is not that it gets "harder" per say, But rather that other factors in my life become more important and/or distracting. The net effect being that I tend forget details that less important to my daily 'struggle' so to speak. In other words, when I was younger I would go home and get on my computer all evening, even after being on the computer all day. I kept myself immersed in that world, as such I remembered details like that because I was constantly involving myself with them. These days, I go home and often don't touch my computer. I find other activities more important to my mental health and well being and just don't think about work, at all.
Occasionally with a client I will have a hard push where I'm working 12-16 hour days and am non-stop thinking about work and that ability will resurface. The only thing I have noticed that I might attribute to my age is probably my patience for stupidity, and my willingness to adopt certain technologies or practices that I don't agree with.
I am a consultant currently working at a large client that has completely replaced MS office with G-Suite, including GMail for email. But that is the absolute extent to which any Google "cloud" applications are used. The rest of the environment (desktop wise) is a mixture of Windows 10, Linux, and Mac, also using both Azure and AWS for development via Visual Studio, VSCode, Eclipse, I mean, whatever they want to use honestly. They also use Power BI, and a handful of other data analytics tools that I've never heard of. Anyway, I could keep going, but my point is that most companies do so much more that just cant be done on a Chromebook. It's incredibly naive, and just plain ignorant to assume that a platform serving K-12 schools is even going to come close to providing the same functionality that companies use. Hell, I rarely ever even open any office suite type applications anymore, with the exception of needing to make the occasional flow chart. Anybody that needs to do REAL work is going to need to break out of the Chromebook walled garden, and get on a real desktop OS.
For the record, I pay for an Office 365 subscription for home use because it is easier than pirating it while trying to avoid detection during patches. And also because its a hell of a lot cheaper than buying the full suite even over the span of several years.
Additionally, I will admit I used to pirate every new version of Photoshop when it came out. But now that Adobe offers a subscription at a reasonable cost I don't have to do that any more either and I get access to the entire Adobe suite of applications without having to worry about cracks.
Both are a win/win for me in my opinion considering how much both of those suites usually cost. And certainly a welcome change from the pirating game.
I have checked the box to receive offers, but only when I have signed up with separate (dedicated) spam account. To the previous poster, yes I am in the IT field and occasionally TigerDirect or NewEgg will spam with decent deals that I will buy.
That said, I agree with your frustrations about (un)checking the "send me special offers" box. Lots of retailers seem to go out of their way to obscure that as much as possible. For example; if you failed some validation check on the form after unchecking the box, it will magically re-check itself with no warning. Or they will have it in some obscure part of the form were most people don't notice it. Or even worse they ask you AFTER you have placed your order when most people usually just close the window and don't notice the opt-out at the bottom of the page. That's the kind of crap that pisses me off.
I can vouch for this as well. I monitor traffic from my linux router/firewall and have noticed significant decreases in over all bandwidth utilization with ad blockers enabled in the range of 25/35% depending on what I'm doing. Although I use Disconnect and/or uBlock,as Ad Block Plus is a bit more of a resource hog. During my normal pointless browsing sessions, when Im not doing anything work related and just following click bait for mindless entertainment. I noticed a roughly 20% directly attributed to video ads. This is much less when I am doing something work or hobby related as I generally avoid the news sites and stick to forums and technical sites for information. That said, even some of my regular favorites *cough* Slashdot *cough* have started getting worse with the ads. Fortunately unlike most sites as a long time registered user,/. allows me to disable the ad's.
For the record; I have NEVER in my life clicked an ad from a website that resulted in a purchase. I have only a handful of times, made purchases from email blasts when good deals were presented. Once from Tigerdirect, some from NewEgg during black friday deals, a couple times from REI, and once for a viagra, JUST KIDDING!:D I simply can not imagine how truly successful that style of advertising is successful when 99 out of 100 people I talk to about it say they hate it and avoid clicking that crap, on principle, because it is so annoying.
WMC was a piece of junk. I for one am glad they are getting rid of it. There are better alternatives.
Part of what MS is doing is relinquishing certain things to the open source and third party community because they know other people can do those things better and they can focus more on the core products. That is a good thing in my opinion.
They may provide optional features for a fee, but they have stated at this point that service packs and patches will always be free. I was at the Build conference SF talking to some folks from he Windows team. They were talking about the "vision" for the product. That is basically to monetize the app store, which would be the profit source for the product. Similar to the Apple store, they take a small cut of ever app sold on the store.
That said, that plan may change, who knows? But it seems logical that if MS wants to stay relevant they can't simply be making the sort of ridiculous and illogical decisions that you're suggesting they will.
Wrong! Stop peddling that nonsense! Microsoft has repeatedly and specifically said you do not and will never have to pay a yearly subscription for Windows once you've purchased it. What it means is that there will be no more windows 'versions', that this will just be in place updates from this point.
...all governments ultimately depend on the consent of the people. When that consent is withdrawn, the government collapses.
I've always believed that if something like this did happen, the majority of the folks in the armed forces would defect and join the people, because they would otherwise be fighting their family and friends. I am hoping we never have to find out. That said, when the armed forces is a fleet of drones only the consent of the few that control them is needed.
Not sure what you're getting at there. But, I will say that I own a hand gun and have a concealed carry permit, so no I don't think it only applies to militias. That said, if it ever came down to it; a million citizens revolting against their government with hand guns and rifles isn't even going to make a dent in armor of a fleet of tanks, jets, drones, long range missiles, lasers, rail guns, and whatever else they have cooking up at DARPA. I have no illusions about it... I'm glad to have the right to do so, but don't pretend that it makes any difference in regards to what was probably the original intent of the second amendment.
The patriot act was passed under Bush's watch, and is partially what has enabled this mess in the first place. I'm not defending Obama, he officially became a scum bag in my book after he campaigned on the premise that he would get rid the Patriot Act, but renewed it shortly after taking office. My point is, they are both equally responsible, and equally douchey.
Maybe its a queue for Linux developers to pull their heads out of their asses and start collaborating a little better for a easier user experience. Don't get me wrong, I use both OSs for different things, each on its own merits. But despite what the FOSS crowd seems to want to believe, most users aren't as smart (and masochistic), they don't want to use the command line, or have to wade through clunky confusing dialogs to do simple things. They don't care about customizing their window manager, or their boot process, they just want to get their work done and gtfo. Despite its aging and buggy code base Windows is just simply easier to use for the non tech savvy crowd, and until Linux devs stop trying to over engineer everything and give it funky names that make no sense, then linux will never be successful on at scale on the desktop.
Its really not that complicated, and nerd raging on slashdot doesn't help the case (not speaking to you, but the guy a few threads up).
I'm with you. I will almost ALWAYS to see a movie in a theater first if it interests me, otherwise I might try do download it. If it sucks (i.e. Grown Ups 2), I would have neither bought it, nor gone to the theater to see it, no money lost no money gained for either party involved. However when I do go to the theater, I specifically go to the dinner theater, usually with my girlfriend, and order $50 dollars+ worth of food and drinks. I go there for the experience, of the theater; the nice big cushy comfortable reclining chairs with foot rests, and to have somebody wait on me quietly while I enjoy the movie. And I do this quite often, sometimes 2-3 times a month because its fun. I realize this is the theater, not the studios doing this, and getting profits from it, but I assure you I would not be going so much if the theater didn't give me a reason to.
I do my part to support the studios bottom line despite the fact that I haven't purchased a movie on disk for several years. On that note however, if a studio offered a free digital download for a movie after watching it in a theater, say for an extra $5 dollars, even if it I cant download it for a couple months, I would most likely be willing to do that. But, I refuse to pay $20+ dollars for a blueray, just to have it sit around and collect dust. I run all my media off an HTPC and I don't want a bunch of movies taking up space on a shelf somewhere.
I agree with you for the most part. If a content provider wants to pay the ISP for some "peering" agreement, they should be allowed to do so. However I take issue with the ability of the ISP to regulate what happens outside of the bounds of that agreement. If it begins to affect the bandwidth that I pay for even if I am not using that service then I would have a problem with it, Im sure most people would share that sentiment.
Having not read the proposed bill itself; it seems to me that all it is trying to do is prevent ISPs from discriminating on the connection to the consumer, and is not necessarily preventing peering.
If they sold em off for like 100 bucks a pop, I would certainly buy one. As much as I hate windows 8 on the desktop I think its great on a tablet. They aren't THAT bad, just a little underwhelming compared to the competition.
We have a huge problem with this in my office. A couple of us are working on a new application that utilizes MVC, and a heavy javascript front end which includes Knockout.js. Since this project started I have re-factored this thing 3 times the first because I was told to keep the JS limited to just pure js and jQuery, so I did. However it got complicated and I got to the point where implementing SPA made sense, my manager seemed supportive so I went about the first re-factor. On one point another developer that has not kept his skills current started pitching a fit, at which point my manager who has also not kept his skills current started taking a deeper look at the project, together they claimed it got too "complicated," and at that point I was asked to revert back to page per view, with simple js, so I spent a couple weeks doing that. This eventually created MORE complications due to the nature of the application, rather than storing data in local variables I had to persist through cookies and all kinds of shenanigans. Short of going back and implementing the entire thing in with razor and persisting in session state, which I could have done but given the work I had done thus far was mostly on the client, this would have basically been a re-write of the entire front end. I talked to my managers boss about my frustrations with the indecision of my manager and she said that she absolutely wanted me to do it in SPA as that best represented the vision that she had for the project. So I went and re-factored it AGAIN using knockout, although to be honest this is the way I wanted to do it in the first place so I am happy with the outcome.
In any case, my point is that just a couple developers that have not kept their skills up to date have caused a lot of frustration for the department. The rest of us are all on board with this new way of doing things, why should we cater to the lowest common denominator? In my opinion if these guys doing want to keep their skills up to date they should be relegated to maintenance and legacy applications. We shouldn't hold the rest of the department back because two guys don't want to learn new things, one of which happens to be my manager unfortunately (but doesn't really have the authority to let me go, more like a team lead I guess). As far as I am concerned, you either get with the program or get out of the way and fortunately for me my bosses boss (the VP of IT) is on board with this so I've at least gotten my way in this case lol.
I completely agree with him in regards to how the patent office has been operating as of late. Although his numerous references to retards and special olympics is probably not going to win him any favor with the readers. In any case, I found the letter to be an amusing Monday morning anecdote.
We all know this is coming from the pestering and/or financial contributions of industry lobbyists. It is so blatantly and sickeningly obvious at this point. I've all but lost any hope that things will change. I will be creating my own island with my own laws, in the middle of the pacific, anybody care to join me?:) lol
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with this. Although for me it tends to be more of an ROI thing. The problem with IT, and in my case software development specifically, is that the people that sign the paychecks don't really understand what it takes to implement their shit and keep it running. Thus this ability is undervalued, underappreciated, and underpaid (sometimes). I always just felt like I could make more money, doing less work, by being in management rather than actually doing the work. Its a little backwards if you ask me, but its DEFINITELY become more apparent to me as I've gotten older and my tastes and lifestyle changes.
My opinion on that is not that it gets "harder" per say, But rather that other factors in my life become more important and/or distracting. The net effect being that I tend forget details that less important to my daily 'struggle' so to speak. In other words, when I was younger I would go home and get on my computer all evening, even after being on the computer all day. I kept myself immersed in that world, as such I remembered details like that because I was constantly involving myself with them. These days, I go home and often don't touch my computer. I find other activities more important to my mental health and well being and just don't think about work, at all.
Occasionally with a client I will have a hard push where I'm working 12-16 hour days and am non-stop thinking about work and that ability will resurface. The only thing I have noticed that I might attribute to my age is probably my patience for stupidity, and my willingness to adopt certain technologies or practices that I don't agree with.
I am a consultant currently working at a large client that has completely replaced MS office with G-Suite, including GMail for email. But that is the absolute extent to which any Google "cloud" applications are used. The rest of the environment (desktop wise) is a mixture of Windows 10, Linux, and Mac, also using both Azure and AWS for development via Visual Studio, VSCode, Eclipse, I mean, whatever they want to use honestly. They also use Power BI, and a handful of other data analytics tools that I've never heard of. Anyway, I could keep going, but my point is that most companies do so much more that just cant be done on a Chromebook. It's incredibly naive, and just plain ignorant to assume that a platform serving K-12 schools is even going to come close to providing the same functionality that companies use. Hell, I rarely ever even open any office suite type applications anymore, with the exception of needing to make the occasional flow chart. Anybody that needs to do REAL work is going to need to break out of the Chromebook walled garden, and get on a real desktop OS.
For the record, I pay for an Office 365 subscription for home use because it is easier than pirating it while trying to avoid detection during patches. And also because its a hell of a lot cheaper than buying the full suite even over the span of several years.
Additionally, I will admit I used to pirate every new version of Photoshop when it came out. But now that Adobe offers a subscription at a reasonable cost I don't have to do that any more either and I get access to the entire Adobe suite of applications without having to worry about cracks.
Both are a win/win for me in my opinion considering how much both of those suites usually cost. And certainly a welcome change from the pirating game.
I have checked the box to receive offers, but only when I have signed up with separate (dedicated) spam account. To the previous poster, yes I am in the IT field and occasionally TigerDirect or NewEgg will spam with decent deals that I will buy. That said, I agree with your frustrations about (un)checking the "send me special offers" box. Lots of retailers seem to go out of their way to obscure that as much as possible. For example; if you failed some validation check on the form after unchecking the box, it will magically re-check itself with no warning. Or they will have it in some obscure part of the form were most people don't notice it. Or even worse they ask you AFTER you have placed your order when most people usually just close the window and don't notice the opt-out at the bottom of the page. That's the kind of crap that pisses me off.
What the hell is this response? Some kind of attempt at advertising? Made with Borland Delphi? Really? People still use that? lol!
I can vouch for this as well. I monitor traffic from my linux router/firewall and have noticed significant decreases in over all bandwidth utilization with ad blockers enabled in the range of 25/35% depending on what I'm doing. Although I use Disconnect and/or uBlock ,as Ad Block Plus is a bit more of a resource hog. During my normal pointless browsing sessions, when Im not doing anything work related and just following click bait for mindless entertainment. I noticed a roughly 20% directly attributed to video ads. This is much less when I am doing something work or hobby related as I generally avoid the news sites and stick to forums and technical sites for information. That said, even some of my regular favorites *cough* Slashdot *cough* have started getting worse with the ads. Fortunately unlike most sites as a long time registered user, /. allows me to disable the ad's.
:D I simply can not imagine how truly successful that style of advertising is successful when 99 out of 100 people I talk to about it say they hate it and avoid clicking that crap, on principle, because it is so annoying.
For the record; I have NEVER in my life clicked an ad from a website that resulted in a purchase. I have only a handful of times, made purchases from email blasts when good deals were presented. Once from Tigerdirect, some from NewEgg during black friday deals, a couple times from REI, and once for a viagra, JUST KIDDING!
WMC was a piece of junk. I for one am glad they are getting rid of it. There are better alternatives.
Part of what MS is doing is relinquishing certain things to the open source and third party community because they know other people can do those things better and they can focus more on the core products. That is a good thing in my opinion.
They may provide optional features for a fee, but they have stated at this point that service packs and patches will always be free. I was at the Build conference SF talking to some folks from he Windows team. They were talking about the "vision" for the product. That is basically to monetize the app store, which would be the profit source for the product. Similar to the Apple store, they take a small cut of ever app sold on the store.
That said, that plan may change, who knows? But it seems logical that if MS wants to stay relevant they can't simply be making the sort of ridiculous and illogical decisions that you're suggesting they will.
Wrong! Stop peddling that nonsense! Microsoft has repeatedly and specifically said you do not and will never have to pay a yearly subscription for Windows once you've purchased it. What it means is that there will be no more windows 'versions', that this will just be in place updates from this point.
Honestly, the only reason I haven't switched to IPv6 on my internal network is because I cant remember the damn IPv6 addresses. O_o
"...after a dozen years of explosive growth in cellphone usage here"
Interesting choice of words.... lol!
...all governments ultimately depend on the consent of the people. When that consent is withdrawn, the government collapses.
I've always believed that if something like this did happen, the majority of the folks in the armed forces would defect and join the people, because they would otherwise be fighting their family and friends. I am hoping we never have to find out. That said, when the armed forces is a fleet of drones only the consent of the few that control them is needed.
Not sure what you're getting at there. But, I will say that I own a hand gun and have a concealed carry permit, so no I don't think it only applies to militias. That said, if it ever came down to it; a million citizens revolting against their government with hand guns and rifles isn't even going to make a dent in armor of a fleet of tanks, jets, drones, long range missiles, lasers, rail guns, and whatever else they have cooking up at DARPA. I have no illusions about it... I'm glad to have the right to do so, but don't pretend that it makes any difference in regards to what was probably the original intent of the second amendment.
The patriot act was passed under Bush's watch, and is partially what has enabled this mess in the first place. I'm not defending Obama, he officially became a scum bag in my book after he campaigned on the premise that he would get rid the Patriot Act, but renewed it shortly after taking office. My point is, they are both equally responsible, and equally douchey.
Maybe its a queue for Linux developers to pull their heads out of their asses and start collaborating a little better for a easier user experience. Don't get me wrong, I use both OSs for different things, each on its own merits. But despite what the FOSS crowd seems to want to believe, most users aren't as smart (and masochistic), they don't want to use the command line, or have to wade through clunky confusing dialogs to do simple things. They don't care about customizing their window manager, or their boot process, they just want to get their work done and gtfo. Despite its aging and buggy code base Windows is just simply easier to use for the non tech savvy crowd, and until Linux devs stop trying to over engineer everything and give it funky names that make no sense, then linux will never be successful on at scale on the desktop. Its really not that complicated, and nerd raging on slashdot doesn't help the case (not speaking to you, but the guy a few threads up).
I'm with you. I will almost ALWAYS to see a movie in a theater first if it interests me, otherwise I might try do download it. If it sucks (i.e. Grown Ups 2), I would have neither bought it, nor gone to the theater to see it, no money lost no money gained for either party involved. However when I do go to the theater, I specifically go to the dinner theater, usually with my girlfriend, and order $50 dollars+ worth of food and drinks. I go there for the experience, of the theater; the nice big cushy comfortable reclining chairs with foot rests, and to have somebody wait on me quietly while I enjoy the movie. And I do this quite often, sometimes 2-3 times a month because its fun. I realize this is the theater, not the studios doing this, and getting profits from it, but I assure you I would not be going so much if the theater didn't give me a reason to.
I do my part to support the studios bottom line despite the fact that I haven't purchased a movie on disk for several years. On that note however, if a studio offered a free digital download for a movie after watching it in a theater, say for an extra $5 dollars, even if it I cant download it for a couple months, I would most likely be willing to do that. But, I refuse to pay $20+ dollars for a blueray, just to have it sit around and collect dust. I run all my media off an HTPC and I don't want a bunch of movies taking up space on a shelf somewhere.
Sounds like a freakin witch hunt to me.... Salem all over again?
I agree with you for the most part. If a content provider wants to pay the ISP for some "peering" agreement, they should be allowed to do so. However I take issue with the ability of the ISP to regulate what happens outside of the bounds of that agreement. If it begins to affect the bandwidth that I pay for even if I am not using that service then I would have a problem with it, Im sure most people would share that sentiment.
Having not read the proposed bill itself; it seems to me that all it is trying to do is prevent ISPs from discriminating on the connection to the consumer, and is not necessarily preventing peering.
If they sold em off for like 100 bucks a pop, I would certainly buy one. As much as I hate windows 8 on the desktop I think its great on a tablet. They aren't THAT bad, just a little underwhelming compared to the competition.
What really irks me is shit like this: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/27/19166043-obama-not-scrambling-jets-to-get-nsa-leaker-snowden Whereby we now have US Trade Representatives considering revoking trade privileges of an entire country (Ecuador) because the administration has a personal vendetta against Snowden. It is really sickening what our government is willing to do to cover its own ass.
Just a thought, but have they stopped to consider that maybe the polar shifts might be causing the melting ice, and not the other way around?
We have a huge problem with this in my office. A couple of us are working on a new application that utilizes MVC, and a heavy javascript front end which includes Knockout.js. Since this project started I have re-factored this thing 3 times the first because I was told to keep the JS limited to just pure js and jQuery, so I did. However it got complicated and I got to the point where implementing SPA made sense, my manager seemed supportive so I went about the first re-factor. On one point another developer that has not kept his skills current started pitching a fit, at which point my manager who has also not kept his skills current started taking a deeper look at the project, together they claimed it got too "complicated," and at that point I was asked to revert back to page per view, with simple js, so I spent a couple weeks doing that. This eventually created MORE complications due to the nature of the application, rather than storing data in local variables I had to persist through cookies and all kinds of shenanigans. Short of going back and implementing the entire thing in with razor and persisting in session state, which I could have done but given the work I had done thus far was mostly on the client, this would have basically been a re-write of the entire front end. I talked to my managers boss about my frustrations with the indecision of my manager and she said that she absolutely wanted me to do it in SPA as that best represented the vision that she had for the project. So I went and re-factored it AGAIN using knockout, although to be honest this is the way I wanted to do it in the first place so I am happy with the outcome.
In any case, my point is that just a couple developers that have not kept their skills up to date have caused a lot of frustration for the department. The rest of us are all on board with this new way of doing things, why should we cater to the lowest common denominator? In my opinion if these guys doing want to keep their skills up to date they should be relegated to maintenance and legacy applications. We shouldn't hold the rest of the department back because two guys don't want to learn new things, one of which happens to be my manager unfortunately (but doesn't really have the authority to let me go, more like a team lead I guess). As far as I am concerned, you either get with the program or get out of the way and fortunately for me my bosses boss (the VP of IT) is on board with this so I've at least gotten my way in this case lol.
I completely agree with him in regards to how the patent office has been operating as of late. Although his numerous references to retards and special olympics is probably not going to win him any favor with the readers. In any case, I found the letter to be an amusing Monday morning anecdote.
We all know this is coming from the pestering and/or financial contributions of industry lobbyists. It is so blatantly and sickeningly obvious at this point. I've all but lost any hope that things will change. I will be creating my own island with my own laws, in the middle of the pacific, anybody care to join me? :) lol