IBM did believe in the desktop PC market (they built one). What they didn't believe in was the power of a standard operating system to create a commodity hardware market.
Microsoft controls 90% of people's browsing experiences through Internet Explorer today. They believed in it pretty quickly.
As for Google, they use free software, but I wouldn't say it's the basis of their business model. They mostly rely on home grown proprietary software, and use free software operating systems and languages to create their own proprietary code. They re-release some of their changes back to the community but usually keep the core bits to themselves.
So sure, there's free software in there, but they rely heavily on highly-paid, high-optioned engineering talent to make it work. This doesn't necessarily work for all business applications or business models, but it worked for theirs.
Amazon treats its employees to a picnic but tries to frame it as some kind of service to the customers.
It is a service. Some people will enjoy it, and thus they win, and Amazon wins.
Others will be cynical about any form of marketing and pissed off that people actually like this sort of thing. They take comfort that in In The New Geek World Order, das ist verboten! They re-read the GNU manifesto and tear up.
And the greatest number are those that don't care either way. No harm, no foul.
Amazon puts up a free concert, and Slashdot idiots go nuclear. What a surprise.
This isn't deserving of thanks or, 'gee look how kind they are' -- I think of it as an extra service provided by a company. Some will enjoy it, some won't. Why is it deserving of such scorn?
When AOL did this several times over the past years, with the Rolling Stones, for example, did that deserve scorn?
Music is highly subjective, but it's the height of adolescent immaturity to slag off Bob Dylan and Norah Jones as crap if you don't like their style of music.
This is one of the classic arguments against democratic selection of rulers: you're free to pick inept ones.
In an authoritarian order, it's more important to have leaders with superior skills & knowledge (i.e. knowledge is closed to a select elite).
In a modern democratic order, it's assumed that everyone pretty much is equally open to fault, and that no one truly has superior knowledge (i.e. knowledge is open to all and transitory).
The Star Wars model seemed to be a unique take on the checks & balances of most political systems -- i.e. the democratic legislative branch (republican senate) vs. the authoritarian judiciary (Jedi). The story highlights the problems that occur in political crisis... when one branch attempts to gain power over the other -- or more generally, the popular preference for the security of authoritarian leadership as an escape from the responsibilities and dangers of freedom.
The conclusion of this article seems to be that MySQL and Apache don't run well on OS X. While Apache certainly is pervasive, most database servers are Oracle or J2EE based. And I believe both would perform well on XServe or PowerMac G5. Most multithreaded servers use thread pools of a fixed size. During peak loads, they can grow, but generally threads are expensive to create (or assumed to be).
Oracle database typically doesn't use threads in UNIX (they do in Windows). They have two modes: dedicated (1 process per session), or shared (a pool of processes). I can't see how Oracle would be affected by slow thread creation (process creation is generally expensive on most platforms). I know there's been some talk recently on comp.databases.oracle.server that Oracle 10g RAC is very fast on XServe G5 with XServe RAID, with a much better price/performance during informal tests, and that Oracle themselves are starting to adopt Mac hardware for their own data centre (at least the XServe RAID arrays, don't know about G5 yet).
You know, there's one litmus test about the quality of an actor, that the screenwriter William Goldman came up with: look at their staying power. Some actors aren't very good, but are popular. People are fickle; they tend to not to stay enamoured for long.
Goldman thinks (and I tend to agree) there's no modern actor that can top Eastwood. Look at each decade for the past 40 years -- from the 60's through now. He would be on a top-10 list each time in terms of popularity.
Now a lot of this depends on how you define acting. Eastwood isn't a method actor or a character actor. He's a macho actor -- the "reassuring presence", as you say. Whether that's actually "acting" may be debatable, but I'll note that not too many people can pull that off. And they try.
Really? Then why all the eagerness to outsource to Indian system integration (SI) / consulting firms like Wipro, Infosys, and Tata? Or for that matter, IBM global services, or BearingPoint, or CGI, or any number of services firms. It's an epedemic.
It's becoming a lot rarer to work in IT as an employee of a firm, unless you're in management or architecture.
I would rephrase it as:
Nobody who cares about actually delivering quality results likes big body shop consultants.
Boutique firms and independent consultants can be very useful. The odd SI, you might get one out of 10 sr. principal consultants worth his or her salt.
WebSphere, their flagship application server, has major OSS components inside of it. In fact, you could think of it as a federation of OSS components with proprietary code for management and extra reliability features.
And by 'services', I don't mean tech support. I mean business strategy (ex-PriceWaterhouse Coopers) consultants that will teach and help you to change your strategy, financial consultants who will help you fund & build a business case for it, project consultants who will help run the initiative, IT architects that will help it fit into your tech environment, and THEN developers and administrators to do the work , and tech support.
IBM could care less about license revenue. Hence OSS == goodness.
The traditional model vs. the new (better?) model
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
The traditional software company was a "product" company. Productization of software relies on strong intellectual property protections and the inability to share information rapidly - both of which seem to be eroding in the face of the Internet and the improved economics of open source.
This is the "old" approach, and McVoy may have a point -- you can't do things the way you used to if you rely on OSS. Lots of software people got their start in the shrink wrap product world and think that's the only way things work... but it's not.
There are two archetypes of the "new way" -- IBM and Google. The commonality is that they are, at their core, service companies, serving different market segments. Lots has been said about Google (take a look at Tim O'Reilly's presentations on this topic), so I'm going to focus on IBM.
IBM serves businesses. They like OSS, particularly in the Linux and Java/J2EE segments because operating systems cost a lot of "overhead" money, and Java appication servers usually cost around $10,000+ per CPU.
An (over)simplified view of WebSphere is takes a lot of Apache-based open source components, intgegrates them together, adds some proprietary code for manageability and reliability, and ships.
Even though they charge similar prices as BEA or Oracle, they don't really care too much about charging for licenses. They really want to dump the busload of Global Services consultants on your doorstep.
By 'services', I don't mean tech support. I mean business strategy (ex-PriceWaterhouse Coopers) consultants that will teach and help you to change your strategy, financial consultants who will help you fund & build a business case for it, project consultants who will help run the initiative, IT architects that will help it fit into your tech environment, and THEN developers and administrators to do the work , and tech support.
In the end, they make more money doing this, and their marketshare goes up for doing this. To the customer, it's about shifting buckets of money around. Buy $5 million in licenses and use your in-house (or a 3rd party's) employees to use + integrate it, or get licenses "free" and spend $8 million on IBM's services, which supposedly covers all the nasty issues your employees aren't qualified to handle.
As for the 'quality' issue -- "does requiring services imply a poor quality product"?, note that most of the services have nothing to do with the product and a lot to do with human fallibility, politics, and externalizing risk & cost. I don't know how IBM justifies its investment for in-house development of WebSphere -- perhaps it's still license based -- but their external sales behaviour indicates their priority is elsewhere.
Most databases do allow you to turn off logging (durability) and allow you to ratchet back the isolation level. I can't think of any sane technical reason to eliminate atomicity and consistency.
I disagree that a programmer can manually create a better query plan than (for example -- others apply) Oracle 10g. In certain cases -- perhaps. A couple of questions though....
A) will a programmer be expected to do statistical analysis of the data, checking for value skew, and also noting the current load of the system before coming up with the best way to perform a query? This is what happens automatically today, each time you parse a SQL statement.
B) if the skew of data changes, do they have to rewrite their query to switch access algorithms?
C) if I want to some day perform the query in parallel, do I also have to rewrite it?
D) if the business needs change, and I have to change the way I look up the data (its access path), do I once again have to rewrite the query?
E) if I rely on an exact order of rows in the database, doesn't that imply an O(log n) insert / update / delete penalty (assuming a B*Tree structure, which generally is the means of preserving order on disk).
F) if the volume of data in the table grows, wouldn't I have to rewrite the query at some point?
These are the reasons we have SQL today. And we have things like optimizer plan stability and now (with Oracle 10g) the ability to actually re-write the plan for a poorly written SQL statement. I think it's best to stick with declarative, logical querying. I'd love a replacement for SQL, but moving back to 3GL-based physical access is a step backwards.
Toyota is renowned for the reliability of its cars and relative speed / inexpense of its production system. It has a lot more to do with how the design and manufacturing processes flow than skimping on part quality.
Having said that, your point is somewhat odd if you consider failure tolerance as a set of engineering tradeoffs: people will only spend so much money for a car, and they already exploit economies of scale to a large degree. Having said that, automakers have a social responsibility to ensure that they cover all known catastrophic scenarios that cover injury or death.
As an illustration, Ford actually introduced seatbelts into certain models nearly a decade before legally required, but people would not buy them. Instead of mandating seatbelts, they pulled them -- extra cost, didn't sell. A decade passes, and the public outcry forces legislation to standardize them. This is a case where social need should trump the economics of the matter. But it's not an easy tradeoff if you want to keep cars affordable.
One more thing -- this article dealing with software crashes poses a real problem, as traditional failure tolerance tradeoffs don't apply as easily. And you can't just "throw money at it".
So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?
There's a big difference between "can" and "should". It's sort of like saying a person "can" win an Olympic medal.
How many students formed companies in the late 1990's boom? How many succeeded vs. failed?
Certainly chronological age doesn't always correlate with maturity and ability to build a business. But it often takes time to learn. New companies with green founders need a lot of luck and leeway for failure to have success in the end, which is arguably why Dell and Microsoft could succeed -- they came at the front-end of a huge wave. Perhaps Yahoo! and Google are the same. Are "web services" the next wave? Hard to say. But I guess they only way to know is to start that company and have a go at it...
If someone gains a large part of their fulfillment through their work (and there are many that do), they certainly will be working until infirm, and afterwards are very upset that they can't work.
I'm not sure what university you're talking about, but drunken binges were a regular feature of the first two years of school I attended (Waterloo), ESPECIALLY for engineering and CS students dealing with the pressures of class. And I'm fairly certain that UBC, U of Alberta, Western, UofT, York, Guelph, Carlton, etc. are all similar in that regard.
By third year people tended to sober up (somewhat:)
As for inferiority complex with regards to tech schools vs. universities, I tend to agree, though it really depends on the tech school. A Ryerson, Georgian, or even Seneca are considered fine, and a lot of those grads get on to get jobs, or at least a solid shot at university entrance. On the other hand, DeVry and the other "cheesy name brand" schools of technology tend to be reviled as useless (often rightfully, IMHO).
If what you say is true, then why would companies be hiring you? You think American companies outsource and hire H1-Bs out of some idealistic belief in a "global economy"? Of course not. They do it because it is cheaper. That said, there are valid arguements for allowing H1-Bs, but don't claim that the obvious is a "myth".
As a former U.S. work visa holder, it's not because we are "Cheaper" it's because there are lots of unqualified people out there and companies want to cast as wide a net as possible.
Most visa holders (from Canada, at least) make very , very good money as a temporary worker in the U.S.
Re:*Business* Competition == redundancy and waste
on
IBM buys Gluecode
·
· Score: 1
One -- cooperation -- is efficient, and gives good opportunity for experimenting with minimal waste.
When people agree.
The other, competitiveness as we often see between capitalist companies, is wasteful, needlessly secretive, and generally childish.
At times. But it's a useful organizing principle for a pluralist society where people often disagree.
Darwin alone is not "utterly useless". It's just a UNIX, and like most any UNIX, it can be a web server, file server, you can run X11 on it, etc
In the past, you could not SAY you were a UNIX implementation unless you had permission of AT&T *and* were a descendent of The UNIX System (aka SYSV). Hence UN*X became popular in the venacular to describe non-AT&T UNIXes, and why GNU stands for "GNU's not UNIX".
Even now, UNIX is a trademark of the SCO Group, and they will cause much pain and suffering for saying your OS is "UNIX" without a license.
Let's also note, for good measure, that Richard Stallman really doesn't like it when people call Linux "UNIX" or just Linux, because the majority of code is a part of the "GNU operating system" -- except the kernel and device drivers.
ASOTV is showing you lots of ways that one can misunderstand that statement -- "we are a UNIX operating system" (vs. UNIX-based) -- in terms of conventions, kernel, device drivers, launch scripts, etc., that don't apply in Darwin. Then again, this tends to apply to other UNIX variants as well, like Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX -- they also take a side-by-side approach (thinking of init & rc.d here, for example).
If "being UNIX" means "something that has a descendent of the GNU or BSD or SYSV system interface and libraries", then Darwin could be called UNIX, but so could Windows+Cygwin.:-)
If "being UNIX" means "compatible/standard system interface, process model, file system model, and core libraries", then that's also Darwin, but arguably Cygwin also provides that abstraction layer, it's just that it's easier to see.
But they say who they are and what they do, so you have some clue as to how authentic/informed they are.
Why not just look at the merits of his arguments? How does someone's identity have anything to do with how informed they are? One can have a small role and be very informed, or a very large & important role and poorly informed. Happens all the time.
The argument is what matters. Motives are a messy and mixed affair; and they don't have an effect on the quality of the argument.
If an astroturfer was making a crappy argument, it's a crappy argument, period. If it's a good argument, what does it matter that they're paid to do it?
In any case, any serious company has formal policy on speaking on behalf of the company.
Sure, except, he never claimed that he was speaking on behalf of the company.
I can state lots of opinions about what I think "we" are doing or should do, so long as it doesn't divulge actual proprietary plans or information. This could get me into political trouble if I don't use common sense, but not legal trouble.
Anyway, I don't know why I'm going to bat for him, I just find this Slashdot cynicism-fueled witch-hunt rather exasperating.
I don't think it's fine, especially not the way he does it. It basically amounts to plagiarism, which is the worst "intellectual" offence that one can commit.
Ehm. What's stealing and claiming as his own? He's repeatedly referred to other teams within Apple when its out of his area of experties.
What does it matter anyway what his identity is? Don't we encourage handles & aliases on the Internet for a reason?
Well, to me, it's not that simple -- it depends on what it is they're doing. If it's just rehetoric, I can disagree with one's political beliefs and still support them because I get value from other things they do. If it's action, then the stakes are higher.
People do this all the time, in message boards and on blogs, usually with a standard disclaimer that opinions expressed are not of their employer.
There are so many examples of this... Look at how many Microsoft employees have blogs like Scoble or Don Box, or Oracle's Tom Kyte, or IBM's Kyle Brown, or BEA 's David Orchard (I work for BEA as well) , or Google's Bosworth.. Do you really think these people are vetted by PR? How many employees post to newsgroups or public tech support forums... I see people get into public flamewars too.
On the other hand, there is a problem here with what constitutes a company's "voice". Bosworth, for example, gets into controversy for people confusing his opinions with Google's (or BEA's , previously).
Frankly, I tend to side with the cluetrain. As long as you don't claim to hold the "official" position, and don't talk about internal confidential information, it's beneficial to the company, its investors, customers, and prospects for employees to engage in open and honest dialogue with others.
I guess it depends on how paranoid you are about your company firing you for speaking your mind. Generally I don't get too concerned about it, if they did such a thing, I wouldn't want to work for them anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM did believe in the desktop PC market (they built one). What they didn't believe in was the power of a standard operating system to create a commodity hardware market.
Microsoft controls 90% of people's browsing experiences through Internet Explorer today. They believed in it pretty quickly.
As for Google, they use free software, but I wouldn't say it's the basis of their business model. They mostly rely on home grown proprietary software, and use free software operating systems and languages to create their own proprietary code. They re-release some of their changes back to the community but usually keep the core bits to themselves.
So sure, there's free software in there, but they rely heavily on highly-paid, high-optioned engineering talent to make it work.
This doesn't necessarily work for all business applications or business models, but it worked for theirs.
Amazon treats its employees to a picnic but tries to frame it as some kind of service to the customers.
It is a service. Some people will enjoy it, and thus they win, and Amazon wins.
Others will be cynical about any form of marketing and pissed off that people actually like this sort of thing. They take comfort that in In The New Geek World Order, das ist verboten! They re-read the GNU manifesto and tear up.
And the greatest number are those that don't care either way. No harm, no foul.
Amazon puts up a free concert, and Slashdot idiots go nuclear. What a surprise.
This isn't deserving of thanks or, 'gee look how kind they are' -- I think of it as an extra service provided by a company. Some will enjoy it, some won't. Why is it deserving of such scorn?
When AOL did this several times over the past years, with the Rolling Stones, for example, did that deserve scorn?
Music is highly subjective, but it's the height of adolescent immaturity to slag off Bob Dylan and Norah Jones as crap if you don't like their style of music.
Get the fuck over yourselves.
(It was time to burn the karma anyway)
This is one of the classic arguments against democratic selection of rulers: you're free to pick inept ones.
... when one branch attempts to gain power over the other -- or more generally, the popular preference for the security of authoritarian leadership as an escape from the responsibilities and dangers of freedom.
In an authoritarian order, it's more important to have leaders with superior skills & knowledge (i.e. knowledge is closed to a select elite).
In a modern democratic order, it's assumed that everyone pretty much is equally open to fault, and that no one truly has superior knowledge (i.e. knowledge is open to all and transitory).
The Star Wars model seemed to be a unique take on the checks & balances of most political systems -- i.e. the democratic legislative branch (republican senate) vs. the authoritarian judiciary (Jedi). The story highlights the problems that occur in political crisis
I meant to say "most database or application servers" are Oracle or J2EE based.
The conclusion of this article seems to be that MySQL and Apache don't run well on OS X. While Apache certainly is pervasive, most database servers are Oracle or J2EE based. And I believe both would perform well on XServe or PowerMac G5. Most multithreaded servers use thread pools of a fixed size. During peak loads, they can grow, but generally threads are expensive to create (or assumed to be).
Oracle database typically doesn't use threads in UNIX (they do in Windows). They have two modes: dedicated (1 process per session), or shared (a pool of processes). I can't see how Oracle would be affected by slow thread creation (process creation is generally expensive on most platforms). I know there's been some talk recently on comp.databases.oracle.server that Oracle 10g RAC is very fast on XServe G5 with XServe RAID, with a much better price/performance during informal tests, and that Oracle themselves are starting to adopt Mac hardware for their own data centre (at least the XServe RAID arrays, don't know about G5 yet).
You know, there's one litmus test about the quality of an actor, that the screenwriter William Goldman came up with: look at their staying power. Some actors aren't very good, but are popular. People are fickle; they tend to not to stay enamoured for long.
Goldman thinks (and I tend to agree) there's no modern actor that can top Eastwood. Look at each decade for the past 40 years -- from the 60's through now. He would be on a top-10 list each time in terms of popularity.
Now a lot of this depends on how you define acting. Eastwood isn't a method actor or a character actor. He's a macho actor -- the "reassuring presence", as you say. Whether that's actually "acting" may be debatable, but I'll note that not too many people can pull that off. And they try.
Nobody likes consultants.
Really? Then why all the eagerness to outsource to Indian system integration (SI) / consulting firms like Wipro, Infosys, and Tata? Or for that matter, IBM global services, or BearingPoint, or CGI, or any number of services firms. It's an epedemic.
It's becoming a lot rarer to work in IT as an employee of a firm, unless you're in management or architecture.
I would rephrase it as:
Nobody who cares about actually delivering quality results likes big body shop consultants.
Boutique firms and independent consultants can be very useful. The odd SI, you might get one out of 10 sr. principal consultants worth his or her salt.
WebSphere, their flagship application server, has major OSS components inside of it. In fact, you could think of it as a federation of OSS components with proprietary code for management and extra reliability features.
And by 'services', I don't mean tech support. I mean business strategy (ex-PriceWaterhouse Coopers) consultants that will teach and help you to change your strategy, financial consultants who will help you fund & build a business case for it, project consultants who will help run the initiative, IT architects that will help it fit into your tech environment, and THEN developers and administrators to do the work , and tech support.
IBM could care less about license revenue. Hence OSS == goodness.
The traditional software company was a "product" company. Productization of software relies on strong intellectual property protections and the inability to share information rapidly - both of which seem to be eroding in the face of the Internet and the improved economics of open source.
This is the "old" approach, and McVoy may have a point -- you can't do things the way you used to if you rely on OSS. Lots of software people got their start in the shrink wrap product world and think that's the only way things work... but it's not.
There are two archetypes of the "new way" -- IBM and Google. The commonality is that they are, at their core, service companies, serving different market segments. Lots has been said about Google (take a look at Tim O'Reilly's presentations on this topic), so I'm going to focus on IBM.
IBM serves businesses. They like OSS, particularly in the Linux and Java/J2EE segments because operating systems cost a lot of "overhead" money, and Java appication servers usually cost around $10,000+ per CPU.
An (over)simplified view of WebSphere is takes a lot of Apache-based open source components, intgegrates them together, adds some proprietary code for manageability and reliability, and ships.
Even though they charge similar prices as BEA or Oracle, they don't really care too much about charging for licenses. They really want to dump the busload of Global Services consultants on your doorstep.
By 'services', I don't mean tech support. I mean business strategy (ex-PriceWaterhouse Coopers) consultants that will teach and help you to change your strategy, financial consultants who will help you fund & build a business case for it, project consultants who will help run the initiative, IT architects that will help it fit into your tech environment, and THEN developers and administrators to do the work , and tech support.
In the end, they make more money doing this, and their marketshare goes up for doing this. To the customer, it's about shifting buckets of money around. Buy $5 million in licenses and use your in-house (or a 3rd party's) employees to use + integrate it, or get licenses "free" and spend $8 million on IBM's services, which supposedly covers all the nasty issues your employees aren't qualified to handle.
As for the 'quality' issue -- "does requiring services imply a poor quality product"?, note that most of the services have nothing to do with the product and a lot to do with human fallibility, politics, and externalizing risk & cost. I don't know how IBM justifies its investment for in-house development of WebSphere -- perhaps it's still license based -- but their external sales behaviour indicates their priority is elsewhere.
Now, is this a "better" model? Audience?
We'd all be consultants.
Seriously.
That's the IBM model, and why they're so eager to support OSS. Don't pay money for licenses, just our army of Global Services.
Most databases do allow you to turn off logging (durability) and allow you to ratchet back the isolation level. I can't think of any sane technical reason to eliminate atomicity and consistency.
I disagree that a programmer can manually create a better query plan than (for example -- others apply) Oracle 10g. In certain cases -- perhaps. A couple of questions though....
A) will a programmer be expected to do statistical analysis of the data, checking for value skew, and also noting the current load of the system before coming up with the best way to perform a query? This is what happens automatically today, each time you parse a SQL statement.
B) if the skew of data changes, do they have to rewrite their query to switch access algorithms?
C) if I want to some day perform the query in parallel, do I also have to rewrite it?
D) if the business needs change, and I have to change the way I look up the data (its access path), do I once again have to rewrite the query?
E) if I rely on an exact order of rows in the database, doesn't that imply an O(log n) insert / update / delete penalty (assuming a B*Tree structure, which generally is the means of preserving order on disk).
F) if the volume of data in the table grows, wouldn't I have to rewrite the query at some point?
These are the reasons we have SQL today. And we have things like optimizer plan stability and now (with Oracle 10g) the ability to actually re-write the plan for a poorly written SQL statement. I think it's best to stick with declarative, logical querying. I'd love a replacement for SQL, but moving back to 3GL-based physical access is a step backwards.
Toyota is renowned for the reliability of its cars and relative speed / inexpense of its production system. It has a lot more to do with how the design and manufacturing processes flow than skimping on part quality.
Having said that, your point is somewhat odd if you consider failure tolerance as a set of engineering tradeoffs: people will only spend so much money for a car, and they already exploit economies of scale to a large degree. Having said that, automakers have a social responsibility to ensure that they cover all known catastrophic scenarios that cover injury or death.
As an illustration, Ford actually introduced seatbelts into certain models nearly a decade before legally required, but people would not buy them. Instead of mandating seatbelts, they pulled them -- extra cost, didn't sell. A decade passes, and the public outcry forces legislation to standardize them. This is a case where social need should trump the economics of the matter. But it's not an easy tradeoff if you want to keep cars affordable.
One more thing -- this article dealing with software crashes poses a real problem, as traditional failure tolerance tradeoffs don't apply as easily. And you can't just "throw money at it".
So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?
There's a big difference between "can" and "should". It's sort of like saying a person "can" win an Olympic medal.
How many students formed companies in the late 1990's boom? How many succeeded vs. failed?
Certainly chronological age doesn't always correlate with maturity and ability to build a business. But it often takes time to learn. New companies with green founders need a lot of luck and leeway for failure to have success in the end, which is arguably why Dell and Microsoft could succeed -- they came at the front-end of a huge wave. Perhaps Yahoo! and Google are the same. Are "web services" the next wave? Hard to say. But I guess they only way to know is to start that company and have a go at it...
If someone gains a large part of their fulfillment through their work (and there are many that do), they certainly will be working until infirm, and afterwards are very upset that they can't work.
I'm not sure what university you're talking about, but drunken binges were a regular feature of the first two years of school I attended (Waterloo), ESPECIALLY for engineering and CS students dealing with the pressures of class. And I'm fairly certain that UBC, U of Alberta, Western, UofT, York, Guelph, Carlton, etc. are all similar in that regard.
:)
By third year people tended to sober up (somewhat
As for inferiority complex with regards to tech schools vs. universities, I tend to agree, though it really depends on the tech school. A Ryerson, Georgian, or even Seneca are considered fine, and a lot of those grads get on to get jobs, or at least a solid shot at university entrance. On the other hand, DeVry and the other "cheesy name brand" schools of technology tend to be reviled as useless (often rightfully, IMHO).
If what you say is true, then why would companies be hiring you? You think American companies outsource and hire H1-Bs out of some idealistic belief in a "global economy"? Of course not. They do it because it is cheaper. That said, there are valid arguements for allowing H1-Bs, but don't claim that the obvious is a "myth".
As a former U.S. work visa holder, it's not because we are "Cheaper" it's because there are lots of unqualified people out there and companies want to cast as wide a net as possible.
Most visa holders (from Canada, at least) make very , very good money as a temporary worker in the U.S.
One -- cooperation -- is efficient, and gives good opportunity for experimenting with minimal waste.
When people agree.
The other, competitiveness as we often see between capitalist companies, is wasteful, needlessly secretive, and generally childish.
At times. But it's a useful organizing principle for a pluralist society where people often disagree.
Darwin alone is not "utterly useless". It's just a UNIX, and like most any UNIX, it can be a web server, file server, you can run X11 on it, etc
:-)
In the past, you could not SAY you were a UNIX implementation unless you had permission of AT&T *and* were a descendent of The UNIX System (aka SYSV). Hence UN*X became popular in the venacular to describe non-AT&T UNIXes, and why GNU stands for "GNU's not UNIX".
Even now, UNIX is a trademark of the SCO Group, and they will cause much pain and suffering for saying your OS is "UNIX" without a license.
Let's also note, for good measure, that Richard Stallman really doesn't like it when people call Linux "UNIX" or just Linux, because the majority of code is a part of the "GNU operating system" -- except the kernel and device drivers.
ASOTV is showing you lots of ways that one can misunderstand that statement -- "we are a UNIX operating system" (vs. UNIX-based) -- in terms of conventions, kernel, device drivers, launch scripts, etc., that don't apply in Darwin. Then again, this tends to apply to other UNIX variants as well, like Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX -- they also take a side-by-side approach (thinking of init & rc.d here, for example).
If "being UNIX" means "something that has a descendent of the GNU or BSD or SYSV system interface and libraries", then Darwin could be called UNIX, but so could Windows+Cygwin.
If "being UNIX" means "compatible/standard system interface, process model, file system model, and core libraries", then that's also Darwin, but arguably Cygwin also provides that abstraction layer, it's just that it's easier to see.
The Richard Daley thing, and the whole jesussave.us site is over-the-top satire, ala "landoverbaptist.org" ....
But they say who they are and what they do, so you have some clue as to how authentic/informed they are.
Why not just look at the merits of his arguments? How does someone's identity have anything to do with how informed they are? One can have a small role and be very informed, or a very large & important role and poorly informed. Happens all the time.
The argument is what matters. Motives are a messy and mixed affair; and they don't have an effect on the quality of the argument.
If an astroturfer was making a crappy argument, it's a crappy argument, period. If it's a good argument, what does it matter that they're paid to do it?
In any case, any serious company has formal policy on speaking on behalf of the company.
Sure, except, he never claimed that he was speaking on behalf of the company.
I can state lots of opinions about what I think "we" are doing or should do, so long as it doesn't divulge actual proprietary plans or information. This could get me into political trouble if I don't use common sense, but not legal trouble.
Anyway, I don't know why I'm going to bat for him, I just find this Slashdot cynicism-fueled witch-hunt rather exasperating.
I don't think it's fine, especially not the way he does it. It basically amounts to plagiarism, which is the worst "intellectual" offence that one can commit.
Ehm. What's stealing and claiming as his own? He's repeatedly referred to other teams within Apple when its out of his area of experties.
What does it matter anyway what his identity is? Don't we encourage handles & aliases on the Internet for a reason?
Horray for unbridled cynicism.
Well, to me, it's not that simple -- it depends on what it is they're doing. If it's just rehetoric, I can disagree with one's political beliefs and still support them because I get value from other things they do. If it's action, then the stakes are higher .
People do this all the time, in message boards and on blogs, usually with a standard disclaimer that opinions expressed are not of their employer.
There are so many examples of this... Look at how many Microsoft employees have blogs like Scoble or Don Box, or Oracle's Tom Kyte, or IBM's Kyle Brown, or BEA 's David Orchard (I work for BEA as well) , or Google's Bosworth.. Do you really think these people are vetted by PR? How many employees post to newsgroups or public tech support forums... I see people get into public flamewars too.
On the other hand, there is a problem here with what constitutes a company's "voice". Bosworth, for example, gets into controversy for people confusing his opinions with Google's (or BEA's , previously).
Frankly, I tend to side with the cluetrain. As long as you don't claim to hold the "official" position, and don't talk about internal confidential information, it's beneficial to the company, its investors, customers, and prospects for employees to engage in open and honest dialogue with others.
I guess it depends on how paranoid you are about your company firing you for speaking your mind. Generally I don't get too concerned about it, if they did such a thing, I wouldn't want to work for them anyway.