No, I wasn't assuming that at all, I gathered from the thread that people were complaining about not being able to get good data analysis (in a science-ish context) out of it. If there are problems that "mom" or "pop" or "mba brown k. noes" has with it, that's not really a user domain I know much about and thus have nothing much to say on it. But for people that have serious data analysis needs, a spreadsheet isn't really a good tool, there are better ones, thus my reply.
I wasn't talking about the general public, because the general public has as much use for good charting and solid data analysis tools as a nematode does for a subscription to Physical Review Letters.;) If you can handle the complexity of the sciences or engineering fields and need the precision, you can handle the complexity of good tools. Actually, I'd say that they're less complex becuase while the learning curve is steeper, they generally won't bite you in the ass in subtle ways like Excel and co. can.
Shit, from what I've heard from friends in the industry, it's more like 30-35k.
(Most them living here in TX, with a fairly average cost of living on the national scale.
[at least the cities where these folks were -- austin, dallas, and houston -- are within 10% of the national average last I checked... it's surely cheaper to live in places like Crockett or Buda or Nacogdoches or whatever, but you don't find many games studios in places where the time zone is still "1952".])
I produced many, many, many data analyses and so forth along with heavy scientific charting requirements using tools like that finishing up my chemistry degree. (Gnuplot and octave in particular I got a lot of mileage out of.)
Most of those should be able to export the graphs from your analyzed data into something like a png, eps, etc. that you can then embed in your word-processing program's report/paper document.
Frankly, as a scientist, Word kind of sucks, and Excel is a really shitty platform for data analysis for anything more complex than sophmore-level undergrad labs. At the least, using a dedicated analysis and charting tool or set of tools is like a breath of fresh air after dealing with Excel's cramped, business-oriented data toolset.
In theory, there are valid reasons not to spend the $10 (based on things that any manager worth their suit would understand, like NPV and IRR[1] in addition to the standard TCO considerations), but they are not universal. In other words, they might have a good reason for not doing it, depending on their interpretations of the fiscal chicken innards. Of course, more likely they're looking at the end-of-quarter results period looming and trying to figure out how they can fire enough people to cut costs to make the analyst bozos on the street happy so that the stock goes up a nickel and they take home fifty large.;)
[1] (basically, "will this investment in linux pay off for us, given the set of fiscal parameters and constraints x, y, z...")
They weren't Christian so much as they were ex-Roman, with all the polyglot of faiths that implies. The Franks hardly had a lock-hold on the region. There were attacks by Islamic nations into the region, but they were attacks of territorial ambition rather than faith-based aggression, and occured several hundred years before Urban's 1095 crusade kick-off, which evidence suggests was intended more to unite the bickering Europeans than to do much of anything for the faith as a whole. (So as a result everybody ran around and killed everybody else (even Christian crusaders... killing other Christians!) for a few hundred years and sweet fuck all got done. Yay for papal infallibility!)
If the music industry forces Apple to close down iTMS via extortionate pricing, what incentive is left for Apple to maintain DRM controls in their music players or iTunes software? If all apple is doing is selling hardware and software to enable their customers to listen to music, but have no investment in selling music itself, they gain competitive advantage by removing barriers to their customer's enjoyment of music. Hello, alternate formats, open music transfer via hardware devices, the return of streaming from iTunes to all and sundry, and goodbye any DRM. Imagine if iTMS was reborn as a free collaborative service where registered Apple music storage devices users could trade music as a giant "fuck you!" to the music industry. You know Jobs has the personality to be tempted by something like that...
*shrug* I love my PowerBook, but I haven't bought into the whole iTunes/iTMS/iPod shebang precisely because I don't feel like supporting the music industry in any fashion or dealing with the DRM shit that Apple has to maintain to please them. The music industry pissing off Apple sufficiently to break the relationship sounds, well, kind of fine to me. If they (the music suits) want to cut off their nose to spite their face, then I'll buy a ticket to watch.
Say it isn't so. That... That'd be like calling the Houston Chronicle a propaganda organ for the Oil and Gas industry!;) (If you think I'm at all exaggerating, it took them over three weeks to report anything about Enron after all the national news media outlets started covering it, and it wasn't even on the front page.)
And it's not even the up-front hardware costs that can kill you (Solaris 10 on an opteron is actually pretty damned price-competitive), it is the relative rarity of the applicable skillsets (and there can be a world of difference between a high-end Solaris, AIX, etc. machine and your common linux server on Dell hardware or whatever) which leads to increased salaries for the in-house administrative staff and the cost of vendor maintenance contracts which tend to be much higher than you might expect coming from the windows/x86/etc. world. (On the other hand, with proprietary Unix you do sometimes get what you pay for. High-end support from a single vendor who provided both the hardware and software in a system can be pretty reassuring if you have a business-critical system, and proprietary Unix runs on hardware that in some cases can do things that your common x86 stuff just does not scale to, both in terms of reliability and in terms of capability. As with all things, tools have jobs they are better suited to than others.)
given that fifty k in southern california is about like 25k everywhere else, I'd say that I'm not exaggerating by much.;) Money isn't everything, yes, but it does facilitate an awfully large subset of "everything". I mean for Christ's sake I've heard their systems admins make like 35k a year. That's cheap even in middle america, let alone a place where the median house prices are north of half a million.
The ironic thing is that their pay scales pretty much suck. (I've talked to several people who interviewed there and turned down job offers because it's hard to make a living in silicon valley on 30-50k. Not bad money for, say, Austin, but shitty money for Southern California.) People seem to gravitate there for the non-financial rewards... which is definitely a valid decision, but you can't pay rent or buy food with "I like my co-workers, they are so smart!".
If you think being an executive is easy, I seriously recommend you take a few accounting classes just as a starter. There's just as much complexity in C-level jobs as there are below, if not moreso, but it is complexity in different areas that are all too easy for gearheads to airly dismiss as trivial (just like it is all to easy for managers to dismiss our jobs as being Simple Matters of Programming). Complexity that if not handled well can completely sink the company, putting everyone on the street and potentially the executive in jail. Sure, large companies have people dedicated underneath the C-level people to the "dangerously complex" tasks like accounting, but your average startup CEO wears not just more than one hat, but pretty much EVERY hat.
Yes, executives make a lot of money. But they do that because of the risks and responsibilities they have. Imagine, for a second, that you're the CEO of Dell or Microsoft or IBM... Nice life, right? Now imagine looking out of your office and every person you see is able to feed their families because of your continued track record of not screwing up, and that companies you couldn't even name are also depending on you to not screw up. Bit more pressure, eh?
I've got a simple standard regarding listening to somebody's economic opinions: has the person ever held a job with a regular paycheck and had to pay rent/buy food/pay bills every month? If not, their opinions are borderline worthless. The same standard writ large applies to corporate management: if you haven't had to meet payroll every month, your opinions about the tasks and difficulty involved with running a company are basically shit.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of dumb managers and executives out there. I've worked for and hated several of them. But to blanket assert that the tasks of a worker bee equal or exceed the risks and responsibilities of an executive's is just absurd.
So? The SR-71 needs similar refitting and costs
many, many times more to produce and service. That the Soviets were able to acheive that speed and operational envelope at all with the materials used is worthy of acclaim.
Hell, everything about Russian (and Soviet before that) industrial design focused on simplicity and maintainability to the exclusion of features. Given their resource constraints, that absolutely makes sense, and they still managed to pull of some amazing design wins with what they had to hand. Prime example that comes to mind is the Mig-25, an interceptor capable of mach 3+ flight at the edge of space, built using things like riveted steel and vacuum tubes. Other examples of "simple, kind of ugly, but works without fail" abound in their weapon systems designs (SKS, AK-series, T-34 and descendents, etc. etc.)... (They did focus too much on that, but given how many times they've been invaded in their culture's history it is kind of understandable. Ultimately they built better guns, we built better blue jeans, and consumer products/culture did more to bring down the iron curtain than any armed force.)
Our aerospace community could learn a lot from
their design ethos.
Set the event in your yahoo! calendar, and have
it send reminders to (say) your regular inbox
and then whatever your phone's email address is.
Cross platform, works most anywhere, free (excepting
whatever cell access/net access costs, and you
probably already have those). I know that isn't
pop-up reminders, but it's about as hard to
ignore and doesn't depend on you actively looking
at your screen.
I know a guy in Portland who is a really sharp, experienced C++ dev. His specialty is game dev on consoles, just as a point of reference,
but he's sharp enough that I don't think picking
up any domain knowlege for other areas will be a problem. He's very recently unemployed and looking to stay in portland, too (the game studio he worked for went under *shrug* it happens). If you want to get in touch with him, reply with an email address
or something and I'll send you his contact info. As an added bonus he's a decent human being rather than your sadly common Technically Brilliant Arsehole.
Because not everyone wants to read documentation
on a screen. Some people like to have a book
open next to their keyboard, some want something
they can read on the train, in a plane, etc. Dead
trees also have no need for power adaptors or
batteries. Neither dead trees nor e-docs are better than the other, they're just different.
I've been using a Sony Ericsson T610 (US, T-Mobile) with my powerbook since this spring and so far everything has worked very well. (Syncing contacts, dialup over bluetooth/gprs, etc.) Plus the T610 has a nice aluminum minimalist look that goes well with the powerbook if you care about such things. (It has also worked pretty well with my palm T2. I seem to have assembled an array of aluminum bluetooth devices without really noticing it.)
It does have a camera, but on the other hand it ships with a default ring tone of "old phone" or somesuch that sounds just like... a regular old rotary telephone. Soothing in a sorta retro way.
The newer Sony-Ericsson line might work well too, but the 610 is starting to get pretty cheap on the used market and is a solid little phone. The only quibble I have with it is that (probably primarily due to the size of the phone itself) the reception isn't the best. Still servicable, but if you're used to a larger phone with a comparably larger antenna you might be irritated.
Ease is in the eye of the beholder, and exists in more than one axis. What does switching to Ruby or Python buy me that C++/Java/Perl/PHP don't already have? Fah. Fad-ism sucks in pop-culture, and it sucks in IT as well.
Huh? Struts far pre-dates RoR and I'm sure other
examples could be found as well of MVC web frameworks. Ruby is far, far from being the first mover there, whatever other virtues it might have. And, fwiw, there is at least one MVC PHP effort that I'm aware of, Mojavi.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I love that GnuCash game, but that end boss sure is a bitch. ;)
Middle.
Management.
*shrug* If they didn't hire rats, there'd be unemployed MBAs and JDs clogging up the gutters. It's as much a public health issue as anything else.
No, I wasn't assuming that at all, I gathered from the thread that people were complaining about not being able to get good data analysis (in a science-ish context) out of it. If there are problems that "mom" or "pop" or "mba brown k. noes" has with it, that's not really a user domain I know much about and thus have nothing much to say on it. But for people that have serious data analysis needs, a spreadsheet isn't really a good tool, there are better ones, thus my reply.
I wasn't talking about the general public, because the general public has as much use for good charting and solid data analysis tools as a nematode does for a subscription to Physical Review Letters. ;) If you can handle the complexity of the sciences or engineering fields and need the precision, you can handle the complexity of good tools. Actually, I'd say that they're less complex becuase while the learning curve is steeper, they generally won't bite you in the ass in subtle ways like Excel and co. can.
Shit, from what I've heard from friends in the industry, it's more like 30-35k. (Most them living here in TX, with a fairly average cost of living on the national scale. [at least the cities where these folks were -- austin, dallas, and houston -- are within 10% of the national average last I checked... it's surely cheaper to live in places like Crockett or Buda or Nacogdoches or whatever, but you don't find many games studios in places where the time zone is still "1952".])
Gnuplot. Gri. R w/ gnuplot. Octave w/ gnuplot. Asymptote with LaTeX. etc. etc.
I produced many, many, many data analyses and so forth along with heavy scientific charting requirements using tools like that finishing up my chemistry degree. (Gnuplot and octave in particular I got a lot of mileage out of.)
Most of those should be able to export the graphs from your analyzed data into something like a png, eps, etc. that you can then embed in your word-processing program's report/paper document.
Frankly, as a scientist, Word kind of sucks, and Excel is a really shitty platform for data analysis for anything more complex than sophmore-level undergrad labs. At the least, using a dedicated analysis and charting tool or set of tools is like a breath of fresh air after dealing with Excel's cramped, business-oriented data toolset.
In theory, there are valid reasons not to spend the $10 (based on things that any manager worth their suit would understand, like NPV and IRR[1] in addition to the standard TCO considerations), but they are not universal. In other words, they might have a good reason for not doing it, depending on their interpretations of the fiscal chicken innards. Of course, more likely they're looking at the end-of-quarter results period looming and trying to figure out how they can fire enough people to cut costs to make the analyst bozos on the street happy so that the stock goes up a nickel and they take home fifty large. ;)
...")
[1] (basically, "will this investment in linux pay off for us, given the set of fiscal parameters and constraints x, y, z
(Which still sucks given who they're quoting.) But the NYT still should have denoted the error in the standard fashion.
They weren't Christian so much as they were ex-Roman, with all the polyglot of faiths that implies. The Franks hardly had a lock-hold on the region. There were attacks by Islamic nations into the region, but they were attacks of territorial ambition rather than faith-based aggression, and occured several hundred years before Urban's 1095 crusade kick-off, which evidence suggests was intended more to unite the bickering Europeans than to do much of anything for the faith as a whole. (So as a result everybody ran around and killed everybody else (even Christian crusaders ... killing other Christians!) for a few hundred years and sweet fuck all got done. Yay for papal infallibility!)
If the music industry forces Apple to close down iTMS via extortionate pricing, what incentive is left for Apple to maintain DRM controls in their music players or iTunes software? If all apple is doing is selling hardware and software to enable their customers to listen to music, but have no investment in selling music itself, they gain competitive advantage by removing barriers to their customer's enjoyment of music. Hello, alternate formats, open music transfer via hardware devices, the return of streaming from iTunes to all and sundry, and goodbye any DRM. Imagine if iTMS was reborn as a free collaborative service where registered Apple music storage devices users could trade music as a giant "fuck you!" to the music industry. You know Jobs has the personality to be tempted by something like that...
*shrug* I love my PowerBook, but I haven't bought into the whole iTunes/iTMS/iPod shebang precisely because I don't feel like supporting the music industry in any fashion or dealing with the DRM shit that Apple has to maintain to please them. The music industry pissing off Apple sufficiently to break the relationship sounds, well, kind of fine to me. If they (the music suits) want to cut off their nose to spite their face, then I'll buy a ticket to watch.
Say it isn't so. That... That'd be like calling the Houston Chronicle a propaganda organ for the Oil and Gas industry! ;) (If you think I'm at all exaggerating, it took them over three weeks to report anything about Enron after all the national news media outlets started covering it, and it wasn't even on the front page.)
And it's not even the up-front hardware costs that can kill you (Solaris 10 on an opteron is actually pretty damned price-competitive), it is the relative rarity of the applicable skillsets (and there can be a world of difference between a high-end Solaris, AIX, etc. machine and your common linux server on Dell hardware or whatever) which leads to increased salaries for the in-house administrative staff and the cost of vendor maintenance contracts which tend to be much higher than you might expect coming from the windows/x86/etc. world. (On the other hand, with proprietary Unix you do sometimes get what you pay for. High-end support from a single vendor who provided both the hardware and software in a system can be pretty reassuring if you have a business-critical system, and proprietary Unix runs on hardware that in some cases can do things that your common x86 stuff just does not scale to, both in terms of reliability and in terms of capability. As with all things, tools have jobs they are better suited to than others.)
given that fifty k in southern california is about like 25k everywhere else, I'd say that I'm not exaggerating by much. ;) Money isn't everything, yes, but it does facilitate an awfully large subset of "everything". I mean for Christ's sake I've heard their systems admins make like 35k a year. That's cheap even in middle america, let alone a place where the median house prices are north of half a million.
The ironic thing is that their pay scales pretty much suck. (I've talked to several people who interviewed there and turned down job offers because it's hard to make a living in silicon valley on 30-50k. Not bad money for, say, Austin, but shitty money for Southern California.) People seem to gravitate there for the non-financial rewards... which is definitely a valid decision, but you can't pay rent or buy food with "I like my co-workers, they are so smart!".
If you think being an executive is easy, I seriously recommend you take a few accounting classes just as a starter. There's just as much complexity in C-level jobs as there are below, if not moreso, but it is complexity in different areas that are all too easy for gearheads to airly dismiss as trivial (just like it is all to easy for managers to dismiss our jobs as being Simple Matters of Programming). Complexity that if not handled well can completely sink the company, putting everyone on the street and potentially the executive in jail. Sure, large companies have people dedicated underneath the C-level people to the "dangerously complex" tasks like accounting, but your average startup CEO wears not just more than one hat, but pretty much EVERY hat.
Yes, executives make a lot of money. But they do that because of the risks and responsibilities they have. Imagine, for a second, that you're the CEO of Dell or Microsoft or IBM... Nice life, right? Now imagine looking out of your office and every person you see is able to feed their families because of your continued track record of not screwing up, and that companies you couldn't even name are also depending on you to not screw up. Bit more pressure, eh?
I've got a simple standard regarding listening to somebody's economic opinions: has the person ever held a job with a regular paycheck and had to pay rent/buy food/pay bills every month? If not, their opinions are borderline worthless. The same standard writ large applies to corporate management: if you haven't had to meet payroll every month, your opinions about the tasks and difficulty involved with running a company are basically shit.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of dumb managers and executives out there. I've worked for and hated several of them. But to blanket assert that the tasks of a worker bee equal or exceed the risks and responsibilities of an executive's is just absurd.
So? The SR-71 needs similar refitting and costs many, many times more to produce and service. That the Soviets were able to acheive that speed and operational envelope at all with the materials used is worthy of acclaim.
Hell, everything about Russian (and Soviet before that) industrial design focused on simplicity and maintainability to the exclusion of features. Given their resource constraints, that absolutely makes sense, and they still managed to pull of some amazing design wins with what they had to hand. Prime example that comes to mind is the Mig-25, an interceptor capable of mach 3+ flight at the edge of space, built using things like riveted steel and vacuum tubes. Other examples of "simple, kind of ugly, but works without fail" abound in their weapon systems designs (SKS, AK-series, T-34 and descendents, etc. etc.)... (They did focus too much on that, but given how many times they've been invaded in their culture's history it is kind of understandable. Ultimately they built better guns, we built better blue jeans, and consumer products/culture did more to bring down the iron curtain than any armed force.) Our aerospace community could learn a lot from their design ethos.
Set the event in your yahoo! calendar, and have it send reminders to (say) your regular inbox and then whatever your phone's email address is. Cross platform, works most anywhere, free (excepting whatever cell access/net access costs, and you probably already have those). I know that isn't pop-up reminders, but it's about as hard to ignore and doesn't depend on you actively looking at your screen.
I don't know, they all seemed to get real lathered up over the Florida vegetable crop a few months ago.
I know a guy in Portland who is a really sharp, experienced C++ dev. His specialty is game dev on consoles, just as a point of reference, but he's sharp enough that I don't think picking up any domain knowlege for other areas will be a problem. He's very recently unemployed and looking to stay in portland, too (the game studio he worked for went under *shrug* it happens). If you want to get in touch with him, reply with an email address or something and I'll send you his contact info. As an added bonus he's a decent human being rather than your sadly common Technically Brilliant Arsehole.
As well as on some of their workstations and business computer lines. You just have to go digging for it.
Because not everyone wants to read documentation on a screen. Some people like to have a book open next to their keyboard, some want something they can read on the train, in a plane, etc. Dead trees also have no need for power adaptors or batteries. Neither dead trees nor e-docs are better than the other, they're just different.
I've been using a Sony Ericsson T610 (US, T-Mobile) with my powerbook since this spring and so far everything has worked very well. (Syncing contacts, dialup over bluetooth/gprs, etc.) Plus the T610 has a nice aluminum minimalist look that goes well with the powerbook if you care about such things. (It has also worked pretty well with my palm T2. I seem to have assembled an array of aluminum bluetooth devices without really noticing it.)
It does have a camera, but on the other hand it ships with a default ring tone of "old phone" or somesuch that sounds just like ... a regular old rotary telephone. Soothing in a sorta retro way.
The newer Sony-Ericsson line might work well too, but the 610 is starting to get pretty cheap on the used market and is a solid little phone. The only quibble I have with it is that (probably primarily due to the size of the phone itself) the reception isn't the best. Still servicable, but if you're used to a larger phone with a comparably larger antenna you might be irritated.
Ease is in the eye of the beholder, and exists in more than one axis. What does switching to Ruby or Python buy me that C++/Java/Perl/PHP don't already have? Fah. Fad-ism sucks in pop-culture, and it sucks in IT as well.
Huh? Struts far pre-dates RoR and I'm sure other examples could be found as well of MVC web frameworks. Ruby is far, far from being the first mover there, whatever other virtues it might have. And, fwiw, there is at least one MVC PHP effort that I'm aware of, Mojavi.