The PC market started to fall for several reasons: - the market was saturated (everybody who wanted one had one) - PCs began to be useful for longer than 3 years - many people started buying tablets instead of PCs for Web surfing and email
Now, however, all those trends have stabilized. We've reached a new normal, and are now in a normal growth curve, as with other mature markets such as cars.
Chromebooks have very little to do with the recent growth of the PC market.
Understanding the differences in income is useful. But what's really important is spending.
Whether a person makes 15K or 150K a year, if you spend more than you bring in, you're sunk.
People who never have enough money typically have no idea where they spent it. When you sit down with them and analyze where "every dollar went," people tend to be completely shocked at some of the silly things they spent it for.
The #1 difference between a person who is well off and one who is not, is not income. It's spending habits.
There are a zillion fad languages out there. Each (presumably) excels at something, but most languages that are not in widespread general use will usually suck at anything outside the core competency of that language. Second-tier languages also have smaller communities developing tools and components, making them less desirable. Finally, if you ever need to hire programmers, you seriously limit your pool of available candidates if you lock yourself into a language that is not in widespread use.
My advice: stick with mainstream languages like Java, C#, C++, JavaScript. All of these languages are powerful in their own way, and there are lots of people who use them.
It is true that costs are up, but not as much as advertised. This chart shows that in the last 40 years, tuition, fees, room, and board totals have roughly doubled, accounting for inflation. That's not insignificant, but it also doesn't explain the explosion of student loans.
Today, it's more fashionable to get student loans, and less fashionable to work one's way through college. It's also more fashionable to demand an education at "big name" schools, which are very expensive. Smaller, high-quality schools such as University of Houston are much less pricey.
If you want privacy, you'll have to go find a wilderness hideout somewhere, not connected to the grid. It's an arms race. The more we try to protect our privacy, the more ways corporations will find ways to circumvent our protections.
While you're out there, you might run into some people who think Y2K destroyed civilization...
Today's young people, particularly boys, tend to spend their time playing video games with each other online. They're too busy to watch football, and don't really care about it.
They've had this for over two years. For $20 a month, you can get ESPN online via Sling.TV. Sure, it's bundled with a few other channels, but the price is good, and it doesn't require a cable TV subscription, and no contract.
Since the 1800s, robots started taking over human craftsmanship jobs: - making cloth - making glass bottles - making paper - farming - making nails and horse shoes - making cars - making (just about anything) Since the 1900s, robots started taking over human service jobs: - typing documents - filing documents - sending messages (postal service) - handling financial transactions - store clerks (e-commerce web sites) - marketing - distributing news
I'm sure there are many more jobs that have been automated, that I've missed. Yet somehow we have very close to "full" employment. Our collective standard of living is higher today than ever, even for the poorest among us.
The robots are coming, this is true. I say this is a good thing! We humans have brains, we will find something better to do than the drudgery that the robots are taking over for us.
The rule of thumb for programming anything is, first make it work, then make it work better / faster.
If the first pass works well enough and fast enough, it doesn't matter if the code was written an efficient manner. If somebody used bubble sort for an array of 5 items, who cares? If the array becomes larger, now you have a performance bug.
It's literally wasteful to spend time on performance enhancement before you know which performance problems actually occur in real life. Another name for premature performance enhancement is "gold plating."
Password managers, especially cloud-based, provide a huge honey pot for hackers. Regardless of the encryption algorithm used, there is ALWAYS a weak link in the chain somewhere. Remember Heartbleed, or the LastPass hack of 2016?
If you must use a password manager, use a lesser-known one, because these will be a less-attractive target for hackers. Or try storing password hints, so the actual password isn't stored anywhere.
It's execution that's hard. Sure, the person on the shop floor or in the cube farm might have an idea that seems great, but making that idea happen politically within the organization is very, very hard. People don't like change. That "good" idea might be somebody else's worst nightmare, and they're going to fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just reality. That's why people who CAN change things become the leaders.
I agree with everything you said, except the last phrase. I think you wouldn't have to be a millionaire to tinker with self-driving technology, but you certainly would need to spend millions to go into business.
While what this kid did is impressive, he's only done the easy part: getting a car to drive itself under a limited set of circumstances that he knows about.
The hard part is to get a car to drive itself under all sorts of weather and road conditions, and safely handle all kinds of expected and unexpected road hazards, such as potholes, people, bicycles, and crazy drivers.
Github is especially popular with the Linux crowd. It was, after all, invented to improve development coordination of Linux.
This population skews the results in three significant ways: 1. Towards obscure and fad languages. This is linked to the extreme fracturing of Linux programmers, each group of which fiercely promotes its own favorite language and tools. 2. Away from Windows. GitHub is especially popular with the open source crowd. This means that C# and.NET languages (favored by programmers who want to make money with their code) will be underrepresented in the statistics. 3. Away from projects developed by less-than-genius developers. GitHub still has a steep learning curve for a lot of developers to master, especially those who have been raised on TFS and SubVersion. The obsession with cloning and branching is foreign to these programmers, and they often don't see the point. These types of programmers are typically creating relatively straightforward Web applications, and tend to write their code in C#.
I suspect that the real numbers for weekend coding would feature Microsoft.NET languages much more prominently, if all types of repositories could be counted.
This story is about plugins, not extensions. These are two different things. Plugins are managed at chrome://plugins, extensions are managed at chrome://extensions.
That doesn't make it honest. Honesty is still important to some Americans. Sure, the company may be out of bounds when they ask, but at least they aren't being dishonest! If you lie on your resume, but you expect the company to be honest and up-front with you, you're being a hypocrite. If you're willing to lie on your resume, you're probably willing to lie about other things. You'll get away with it sometimes, but eventually it does come back to bite you.
Why say anything at all? Leaving the fields blank is just as effective, as a negotiating tactic. Those "extra" fields are usually stupid anyway, nobody actually cares whether you put a number in the box or not.
You certainly seem to place a low value on honesty. Besides the legal risks, which are real, there is the "small" matter of a person's character. I'm not perfect, but I do at least TRY to be honest.
Your salary history (with the possible exception of your current salary) is none of the employer's business. Don't ask about it, just leave the fields blank, make them come back to you and ask for it if they really want it. This puts YOU in the driver's seat.
In school, there was always that student that would ask the teacher if there was any homework, as the class was ending. Don't be that guy!
If you don't want to talk about your salary, just tell them what you're looking for. Make sure that amount is in keeping with the normal ranges for your years of experience, and the area where you live. The business is doing their homework, they know what you SHOULD be making.
Slashdot Mirror
The PC market started to fall for several reasons:
- the market was saturated (everybody who wanted one had one)
- PCs began to be useful for longer than 3 years
- many people started buying tablets instead of PCs for Web surfing and email
Now, however, all those trends have stabilized. We've reached a new normal, and are now in a normal growth curve, as with other mature markets such as cars.
Chromebooks have very little to do with the recent growth of the PC market.
Understanding the differences in income is useful. But what's really important is spending.
Whether a person makes 15K or 150K a year, if you spend more than you bring in, you're sunk.
People who never have enough money typically have no idea where they spent it. When you sit down with them and analyze where "every dollar went," people tend to be completely shocked at some of the silly things they spent it for.
The #1 difference between a person who is well off and one who is not, is not income. It's spending habits.
You just outlined the true cause of "income inequality."
People who follow your rules do well, those who don't, end up on welfare.
It's that simple.
There are a zillion fad languages out there. Each (presumably) excels at something, but most languages that are not in widespread general use will usually suck at anything outside the core competency of that language. Second-tier languages also have smaller communities developing tools and components, making them less desirable. Finally, if you ever need to hire programmers, you seriously limit your pool of available candidates if you lock yourself into a language that is not in widespread use.
My advice: stick with mainstream languages like Java, C#, C++, JavaScript. All of these languages are powerful in their own way, and there are lots of people who use them.
It is true that costs are up, but not as much as advertised. This chart shows that in the last 40 years, tuition, fees, room, and board totals have roughly doubled, accounting for inflation. That's not insignificant, but it also doesn't explain the explosion of student loans.
Today, it's more fashionable to get student loans, and less fashionable to work one's way through college. It's also more fashionable to demand an education at "big name" schools, which are very expensive. Smaller, high-quality schools such as University of Houston are much less pricey.
If you want privacy, you'll have to go find a wilderness hideout somewhere, not connected to the grid. It's an arms race. The more we try to protect our privacy, the more ways corporations will find ways to circumvent our protections.
While you're out there, you might run into some people who think Y2K destroyed civilization...
Today's young people, particularly boys, tend to spend their time playing video games with each other online. They're too busy to watch football, and don't really care about it.
They've had this for over two years. For $20 a month, you can get ESPN online via Sling.TV. Sure, it's bundled with a few other channels, but the price is good, and it doesn't require a cable TV subscription, and no contract.
Rumors and urban legends circulated long before the Internet. The Internet just sped up the process of spreading them.
Since the 1800s, robots started taking over human craftsmanship jobs:
- making cloth
- making glass bottles
- making paper
- farming
- making nails and horse shoes
- making cars
- making (just about anything)
Since the 1900s, robots started taking over human service jobs:
- typing documents
- filing documents
- sending messages (postal service)
- handling financial transactions
- store clerks (e-commerce web sites)
- marketing
- distributing news
I'm sure there are many more jobs that have been automated, that I've missed. Yet somehow we have very close to "full" employment. Our collective standard of living is higher today than ever, even for the poorest among us.
The robots are coming, this is true. I say this is a good thing! We humans have brains, we will find something better to do than the drudgery that the robots are taking over for us.
The rule of thumb for programming anything is, first make it work, then make it work better / faster.
If the first pass works well enough and fast enough, it doesn't matter if the code was written an efficient manner. If somebody used bubble sort for an array of 5 items, who cares? If the array becomes larger, now you have a performance bug.
It's literally wasteful to spend time on performance enhancement before you know which performance problems actually occur in real life. Another name for premature performance enhancement is "gold plating."
I guess this means all our noses are about to change shape.
Password managers, especially cloud-based, provide a huge honey pot for hackers. Regardless of the encryption algorithm used, there is ALWAYS a weak link in the chain somewhere. Remember Heartbleed, or the LastPass hack of 2016?
If you must use a password manager, use a lesser-known one, because these will be a less-attractive target for hackers. Or try storing password hints, so the actual password isn't stored anywhere.
So...he doesn't like it that there are two ways to declare variables? He doesn't like tabs? He doesn't get out much, does he!
Their QA is probably working just fine. They probably actually SPECIFIED the formula that was uncovered by the DNA tests, in order to cut costs.
It's execution that's hard. Sure, the person on the shop floor or in the cube farm might have an idea that seems great, but making that idea happen politically within the organization is very, very hard. People don't like change. That "good" idea might be somebody else's worst nightmare, and they're going to fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just reality. That's why people who CAN change things become the leaders.
I agree with everything you said, except the last phrase. I think you wouldn't have to be a millionaire to tinker with self-driving technology, but you certainly would need to spend millions to go into business.
While what this kid did is impressive, he's only done the easy part: getting a car to drive itself under a limited set of circumstances that he knows about.
The hard part is to get a car to drive itself under all sorts of weather and road conditions, and safely handle all kinds of expected and unexpected road hazards, such as potholes, people, bicycles, and crazy drivers.
Github is especially popular with the Linux crowd. It was, after all, invented to improve development coordination of Linux.
This population skews the results in three significant ways: .NET languages (favored by programmers who want to make money with their code) will be underrepresented in the statistics.
1. Towards obscure and fad languages. This is linked to the extreme fracturing of Linux programmers, each group of which fiercely promotes its own favorite language and tools.
2. Away from Windows. GitHub is especially popular with the open source crowd. This means that C# and
3. Away from projects developed by less-than-genius developers. GitHub still has a steep learning curve for a lot of developers to master, especially those who have been raised on TFS and SubVersion. The obsession with cloning and branching is foreign to these programmers, and they often don't see the point. These types of programmers are typically creating relatively straightforward Web applications, and tend to write their code in C#.
I suspect that the real numbers for weekend coding would feature Microsoft .NET languages much more prominently, if all types of repositories could be counted.
This story is about plugins, not extensions. These are two different things. Plugins are managed at chrome://plugins, extensions are managed at chrome://extensions.
How sad!
That doesn't make it honest. Honesty is still important to some Americans. Sure, the company may be out of bounds when they ask, but at least they aren't being dishonest! If you lie on your resume, but you expect the company to be honest and up-front with you, you're being a hypocrite. If you're willing to lie on your resume, you're probably willing to lie about other things. You'll get away with it sometimes, but eventually it does come back to bite you.
Why say anything at all? Leaving the fields blank is just as effective, as a negotiating tactic. Those "extra" fields are usually stupid anyway, nobody actually cares whether you put a number in the box or not.
You certainly seem to place a low value on honesty. Besides the legal risks, which are real, there is the "small" matter of a person's character. I'm not perfect, but I do at least TRY to be honest.
Your salary history (with the possible exception of your current salary) is none of the employer's business. Don't ask about it, just leave the fields blank, make them come back to you and ask for it if they really want it. This puts YOU in the driver's seat.
In school, there was always that student that would ask the teacher if there was any homework, as the class was ending. Don't be that guy!
If you don't want to talk about your salary, just tell them what you're looking for. Make sure that amount is in keeping with the normal ranges for your years of experience, and the area where you live. The business is doing their homework, they know what you SHOULD be making.
Lie on a job application to get more money? No thanks, I'm not into fraud. The truth has a way of coming out at the least convenient time.