4 inches???? Ummmm... sorry, that ain't code. At least not in California. I own some mountain (ranch land) property in the only county in California that does not have a single stop light:) Any time I've tried to dig a hole that had to be in a particular place, it usually requires blasting granite rock to get more than 12 inches deep. Still, the phone company puts things down 24 inches. Now, sometimes they build a "Woody wall" -- for a simple copper pair it sometimes isn't worth going down 24 inches, so they go down as far as they can and then pile rocks on top until they get 24 inches of cover. They don't have to walk very far to find enough rocks:) And the building inspector signs it off. (It's call a "Woody wall" because a Cat driver named Woody had the idea originally.)
Anyway.... a couple of years ago the local phone company put 10,000 feet of fiber across my property. They did that right and proper. First, a D8 Cat comes along with a vibratory pre-ripper that can chew through most rock and that you can hear two miles away. Then a D6 pulling a ripper/plow lays down conduit. A third D6 covers. They blow fiber from pull boxes. They put down 10,000 feet without blasting, although they were a little choosy about the route. (BTW, a D8 is big enough that moving it around on a low boy is an oversize load and requires permits and such, so they don't use it unless they need it. You also might wonder why they have fiber in an area with more bear than people -- it feeds mountain top communication towers, mainly. But I could have a DS3 at my otherwise off-grid cabin if I wanted to pay the monthly:)
Anyway.... 4 inches? That's bush league. I can't imagine how the building inspector signs that off.
Yup. I recently learned that ordinary 9V batteries are an issue. Normally I will leave consumer electronics assembled. But recently we were pulled aside because the 9V battery in the metronome in my 12yo daughter's violin case looked suspicious. The violin, on the X-Ray machine, looks unmistakeably like a violin. We've never had an issue with it. But somehow the 9 volt battery looks opaque and chunky enough that they dug things apart until they found it. So... I've added 9V batteries to the list of things to remove and expose. The mesh water-bottle pockets in the sides of backpacks are a good place to put things like that -- nothing needs to be unpacked to identify the opaque mystery-block.
Yes, of course. E-mail in plain text is about the least secure form of communication ever invented by man. So I don't kid myself that running my own funky little server at the end of a fetchmail cron job is buying me privacy in any reasonable sense. But... who has access to the bits along the way, is it somebody who's business model is simply shipping bits around, or is it somebody who's business model involves *me* being a product that they sell to advertisers?
A reasonable question. I thought the same way before actually trying it.
If your server starts rejecting mails for too long, senders give up and you end up getting unsubscribed from lists, etc. Or worse.... your wife starts getting unsubscribed from lists. That's just one example problem you get from being a flakey receiver. If you want to run a mail server, you need to be able to keep the received flow going reasonably reliably or headaches ensue. Also, asking a "friend" to be your back-up spool for a secondary MX record doesn't work so well either. Voice of sad experience.
Oh, and yes, we have three vehicles for the household. And bicycles. And multiple phones.
Spot on. I ran my own full mail server for a while. It got old very fast. You really need at least two servers for fail-over and simply the ability to down one while you update the other. (And those two should be geographically separated so power outages don't take out both, etc.) *blech* So in the end what I've done is just have simple pop accounts, and then use fetchmail to pop the mail down to my own IMAP server. If my server goes down, I don't care, the mail just spools up at the ISPs (yes, multiple). If things go totally haywire, I can repoint the clients directly at the pop accounts and keep mail flowing -- of course I give up the convenience of IMAP in that case. Anyway, by outsourcing the core POP account you offload all the DNS issues, can get spam filtering if you want it, and get relief from the 24x7 server(s) health monitoring. I like the increased privacy over having a hosted IMAP service.
Let's see... who do we have that's expendable? The worst (as in most cynical employer) internship job I ever heard of was a friend who was a food technology major. She got a summer job with a major packaged foods maker. Her summer job: taste test pilot plant product that was coming out of shelf stability testing using various new experimental preservatives. As in: rate on a scale from slightly stale to disgustingly rancid. Not quite life threatening, but certainly lunch threatening.
Well, Linus has a reputation for seeking lean, effective functionality in every tool he uses. And because he gets a lot of attention, his words can cause large shifts in usage patterns -- and more users brings more development effort.
For my part, I'm overjoyed. I've been using Xfce for a long time, because Gnome and KDE are both festering piles of bloat. From my perspective, Xfce was a step up from Blackbox... although the last release of Xfce seemed dangerously bloaty to me. Obviously, my taste runs to the ultra-lean. In any case, I'm hoping huge numbers of Linus' fan boys follow him blindly and unthinkingly to Xfce just to be cool, because that can only mean better support for Xfce.
From RTFA, it is hard to tell if News Corp was using a remote controlled vehicle or an Autonomous Arial Vehicle (UAV). The regulations regarding UAV's are *extremely* tight right now. People doing UAV robotics research outside of enclosed spaces are under some very restrictive regulations. Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPV), not so much.
If I was a robotics researcher that had to travel half way across the country to the Nevada desert to do my research, and found out that News Corp had deployed UAV paparazzi, I'd be annoyed.
Oh, Lordy, if you had ever programmed in a language with a 255 character limit for strings you would praise $DIETY every time you use a C string. Dealing with length limited strings is the largest PITA of any senseless and time-wasting programming task.
Suppose C had originally had a length for strings? The only thing that makes sense is for the string length count to be the same size as a pointer, so that it could effectively be all of memory. A long is, by C language definition, large enough to hold a pointer that has been cast into it. So string length computations all become longs. Not such a big deal for most of life... until.... 64 bit addressing. Then all sorts of string breakage occurs.
The bottom line is that in an application programming language strings need to be atomic, as they are in Python. You just should not care how strings are implemented, and you should never worry about a length limit. The trouble is, C is a systems programming language, so it is imperative that the language allow direct access to bit-level implementation. If you chose to use a systems programming language for application programming, well, then it sucks to be you. So why did we do that for so long? Because all the other alternatives were worse.
Hell, I've used languages where the statement separator was a 12-11-0-7-8-9 punch. (Bonus points if you can tell me what that is and how to make one.) So a NUL terminated string looks positively modern compared to that.
So, I guess then being from Microsoft, it will be just like Arduino in that all the software *and* all the hardware designs are open source, so anybody can make and sell the hardware if they feel like it. Right? And people can take the hardware designs and modify them to make special purpose version, and be able to release updates to the software tool chain to support the new hardware?
So explain to me why, when I live in the middle of Silicon Valley, on the tiniest lot I have ever had for any house I ever lived in, why is it that I can't get a good connection for a reasonable price? I have DSL, last mile by PacBell (because it has to be), but ISP is Sonic.net (because Sonic is mega-clueful and PacBell is a pack of greedy dipshits). But my DSL rates are not all that great. By your logic, if *anyplace* should be able to get a good connection with competition among providers it should be an area of tiny lots and high incomes.
I admit that I have more choice than others -- I could use PacBell (barf), Comcast (that doesn't even pass the giggle test, especially since I don't watch TV so the bundled price for cable is pointless), or some other ISPs that use PacBell's last mile of copper. But there would be no difference in speed among any of the DSL-based ISP choices.
I started my first reply with "you may not get the job you want". What is the quality of the experience that you have after years with an MS versus 4 years with a BS? That makes a huge difference. An MS will open doors to better experience. And capability? If the guy with a BS couldn't get in or couldn't survive graduate school, that says a lot right there. If the guy with a BS wasn't motivated to go to graduate school, then you have to explore that, too.
Anyway, all I did is present you with raw data: At some companies where you might want to work and might give you gold-plated experience, an MS is required to keep your resume out of the circular file. You are entitled to your opinion -- but that doesn't change the data. After that, I presented you with my opinions, those of the kind of grey-bearded old fart that makes hiring and firing decisions. Feel free to ignore them.
How people react to raw data says a lot more about the person than the data. That's another thing I look for in hiring interviews, although there often isn't anything in an interview situation to bring that to the surface.
Now, somebody who is feeling burned out on school might be well advised to go work for a couple of years and then go back for graduate school. That was my plan, but those two years stretched out. By the time I went back for an MS, I found my homework being graded by a numb-nuts that I had rejected for a summer job a few months earlier -- that tried my patience somewhat. In any case, going back for the MS was the best thing I ever did in terms of the opportunities it created, and the job burn-out recovery time it allowed.
Excellent questions. A BSEE with 2 years experience is probably more productive this week than an MSEE that just walked in the door. A BSEE with 4 years experience versus an MSEE with 2 years experience.... not so much. 10 years out, the MSEE is usually way ahead. Getting into graduate school and out the other side again usually means you have something on the ball (not always, of course). The graduate level courses typically require deeper thinking so that, oddly, developing a specialty can lead to greater flexibility.
People who are good test takers but can't think their way out of a paper bag come in BS, MS, PhD, MBA, and JD flavors, just to name a few. If you are hiring empty suits, then you need to get better at job interviews, which is hard and typically not taught very well. You really need to dig for details, and ask the candidate to solve problems so that you can understand how they think and how they approach problems. I learned interviewing the hard way -- by making bad hiring decisions that turned into miserable firing experiences -- death threats and slashed tires in one case.
Sorting the test takers from the thinkers is done by giving ambiguous problems. Does the candidate ask for clarifications, or just make assumptions and plow ahead? When they believe they have a solution to a puzzle problem, do they double check their own work, or turn the tablet around and expect you to check it over like a homework set?
Is it that, or the level of specialization needed to work in a technical field these days? A BS in engineering these days hardly has time to cover more than the foundation courses.
Well, while it is true that you don't need more than a B.S. to get a good engineering job, you might not get the one you want. Even 15 years ago when I was hiring at Intel, the first level sort was to discard any resume that wasn't at least an M.S. That still left us with more than we could do a thorough job of processing.
Unfortunately, Intel H.R. made our jobs as hiring managers much more difficult by putting all resumes through the "resume cuisinart". At that point in time, all resumes that did not come in as plain ASCII text were OCR'd and everything was put into a data base. The "Objective" field was specifically eliminated from the database because H.R. told us we should not be using it. No matter how many times or how loudly we told them that the "Objective" section of a resume was the most useful in finding a person that fit our needs, HR refused to budge on this issue. (Again, this is an ancient anecdote, YMMV.)
So, my advice: 1) Get the M.S. in engineering, you will be glad you did. 2) Write a thoughtful, truthful, and polished job objective sentence. Smart hiring managers are paying attention to it. 3) If you want to get into a large company, try every entry point that you can. Hitting the HR department with a "fire and forget" resume is a crap shoot, even at companies with the best of intentions.
Just this morning a typographically-challenged friend of mine sent me a broken URL (obviously he didn't test it). The obvious answer is to let Google sort it out.
Well, it's how you define the task. You could check for a short, delayed, weather summary or get delayed commodity quotes over dial-up. You can't get simultaneous real-time weather radar feeds and a real-time commodity ticker. It's hard to place timely commodity trades over dial-up. My dad survived on daily farm market reports that came over the AM radio every noon. Things are different now.
(Off-topic aside: I knew I had moved to a different world when I was driving through Napa Valley during the crush. That familiar monotone drone of the news reader giving the farm markets came on, but instead of hearing "St. Paul fat cattle seventy-two-fifty per hundred weight" I heard "Pinot Noir one thousand fourteen a ton".)
Hang on city boy, that's not true at all. My brother has been paying high fees for a satellite feed out on the farm so that he can get weather and market reports and trade commodity futures in a timely fashion. An internet connect is as important to progressive farmers as it is to any other business these days. The sad thing is that his satellite feed out in an area with less that one family per square mile is a better connection than my DSL connection here in the middle of Silicon Valley in an area of $1M+ homes.
Success in Silicon Valley has always been about turning your own products into obsolete dinosaurs before your competition does, or die. Companies unwilling to torpedo their most successful products with something better are on the path to doom.
Maybe I'm too old-fashioned about such things, but Facebook is severely ethically challenged as a company. By extension, anybody who can work there without vomiting blood from disgust at their employer's behavior is not somebody I would want to hire.
In other words, Apple is treating professionals who live and die by their product as if they were kids doing throw-away projects on a free web-based ap. Um... not a very smart way to treat professionals -- and, BTW, not the best way to treat the customers that buy your most expensive software and most expensive hardware.
The support lifetime for a software product is directly related to *who* uses it, *how* they use it, and the value of *their* end product. At least, when I was in the business of creating electronic design automation software that sold for $50K to $150K *per* *seat*, that's the way we treated it. Customers doing multi-million dollar projects, and who forked over $250K to us for software, didn't have to take updates if they didn't want to. And if they were smart, they sure as hell didn't take updates in the middle of a critical project -- better the bugs that you know and have worked around than the bugs that your vendor just put in last month and hasn't found yet.
Slashdot Mirror
4 inches???? Ummmm... sorry, that ain't code. At least not in California. I own some mountain (ranch land) property in the only county in California that does not have a single stop light :) Any time I've tried to dig a hole that had to be in a particular place, it usually requires blasting granite rock to get more than 12 inches deep. Still, the phone company puts things down 24 inches. Now, sometimes they build a "Woody wall" -- for a simple copper pair it sometimes isn't worth going down 24 inches, so they go down as far as they can and then pile rocks on top until they get 24 inches of cover. They don't have to walk very far to find enough rocks :) And the building inspector signs it off. (It's call a "Woody wall" because a Cat driver named Woody had the idea originally.)
Anyway.... a couple of years ago the local phone company put 10,000 feet of fiber across my property. They did that right and proper. First, a D8 Cat comes along with a vibratory pre-ripper that can chew through most rock and that you can hear two miles away. Then a D6 pulling a ripper/plow lays down conduit. A third D6 covers. They blow fiber from pull boxes. They put down 10,000 feet without blasting, although they were a little choosy about the route. (BTW, a D8 is big enough that moving it around on a low boy is an oversize load and requires permits and such, so they don't use it unless they need it. You also might wonder why they have fiber in an area with more bear than people -- it feeds mountain top communication towers, mainly. But I could have a DS3 at my otherwise off-grid cabin if I wanted to pay the monthly :)
Anyway.... 4 inches? That's bush league. I can't imagine how the building inspector signs that off.
Yup. I recently learned that ordinary 9V batteries are an issue. Normally I will leave consumer electronics assembled. But recently we were pulled aside because the 9V battery in the metronome in my 12yo daughter's violin case looked suspicious. The violin, on the X-Ray machine, looks unmistakeably like a violin. We've never had an issue with it. But somehow the 9 volt battery looks opaque and chunky enough that they dug things apart until they found it. So... I've added 9V batteries to the list of things to remove and expose. The mesh water-bottle pockets in the sides of backpacks are a good place to put things like that -- nothing needs to be unpacked to identify the opaque mystery-block.
Yes, of course. E-mail in plain text is about the least secure form of communication ever invented by man. So I don't kid myself that running my own funky little server at the end of a fetchmail cron job is buying me privacy in any reasonable sense. But... who has access to the bits along the way, is it somebody who's business model is simply shipping bits around, or is it somebody who's business model involves *me* being a product that they sell to advertisers?
A reasonable question. I thought the same way before actually trying it.
If your server starts rejecting mails for too long, senders give up and you end up getting unsubscribed from lists, etc. Or worse.... your wife starts getting unsubscribed from lists. That's just one example problem you get from being a flakey receiver. If you want to run a mail server, you need to be able to keep the received flow going reasonably reliably or headaches ensue. Also, asking a "friend" to be your back-up spool for a secondary MX record doesn't work so well either. Voice of sad experience.
Oh, and yes, we have three vehicles for the household. And bicycles. And multiple phones.
Spot on. I ran my own full mail server for a while. It got old very fast. You really need at least two servers for fail-over and simply the ability to down one while you update the other. (And those two should be geographically separated so power outages don't take out both, etc.) *blech* So in the end what I've done is just have simple pop accounts, and then use fetchmail to pop the mail down to my own IMAP server. If my server goes down, I don't care, the mail just spools up at the ISPs (yes, multiple). If things go totally haywire, I can repoint the clients directly at the pop accounts and keep mail flowing -- of course I give up the convenience of IMAP in that case. Anyway, by outsourcing the core POP account you offload all the DNS issues, can get spam filtering if you want it, and get relief from the 24x7 server(s) health monitoring. I like the increased privacy over having a hosted IMAP service.
Let's see... who do we have that's expendable? The worst (as in most cynical employer) internship job I ever heard of was a friend who was a food technology major. She got a summer job with a major packaged foods maker. Her summer job: taste test pilot plant product that was coming out of shelf stability testing using various new experimental preservatives. As in: rate on a scale from slightly stale to disgustingly rancid. Not quite life threatening, but certainly lunch threatening.
see http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page
Good point. I'm having a bug-prone day today. It's a good day to avoid 'git commit'.
Well, Linus has a reputation for seeking lean, effective functionality in every tool he uses. And because he gets a lot of attention, his words can cause large shifts in usage patterns -- and more users brings more development effort.
For my part, I'm overjoyed. I've been using Xfce for a long time, because Gnome and KDE are both festering piles of bloat. From my perspective, Xfce was a step up from Blackbox... although the last release of Xfce seemed dangerously bloaty to me. Obviously, my taste runs to the ultra-lean. In any case, I'm hoping huge numbers of Linus' fan boys follow him blindly and unthinkingly to Xfce just to be cool, because that can only mean better support for Xfce.
From RTFA, it is hard to tell if News Corp was using a remote controlled vehicle or an Autonomous Arial Vehicle (UAV). The regulations regarding UAV's are *extremely* tight right now. People doing UAV robotics research outside of enclosed spaces are under some very restrictive regulations. Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPV), not so much.
If I was a robotics researcher that had to travel half way across the country to the Nevada desert to do my research, and found out that News Corp had deployed UAV paparazzi, I'd be annoyed.
Oh, Lordy, if you had ever programmed in a language with a 255 character limit for strings you would praise $DIETY every time you use a C string. Dealing with length limited strings is the largest PITA of any senseless and time-wasting programming task.
Suppose C had originally had a length for strings? The only thing that makes sense is for the string length count to be the same size as a pointer, so that it could effectively be all of memory. A long is, by C language definition, large enough to hold a pointer that has been cast into it. So string length computations all become longs. Not such a big deal for most of life... until.... 64 bit addressing. Then all sorts of string breakage occurs.
The bottom line is that in an application programming language strings need to be atomic, as they are in Python. You just should not care how strings are implemented, and you should never worry about a length limit. The trouble is, C is a systems programming language, so it is imperative that the language allow direct access to bit-level implementation. If you chose to use a systems programming language for application programming, well, then it sucks to be you. So why did we do that for so long? Because all the other alternatives were worse.
Hell, I've used languages where the statement separator was a 12-11-0-7-8-9 punch. (Bonus points if you can tell me what that is and how to make one.) So a NUL terminated string looks positively modern compared to that.
So, I guess then being from Microsoft, it will be just like Arduino in that all the software *and* all the hardware designs are open source, so anybody can make and sell the hardware if they feel like it. Right? And people can take the hardware designs and modify them to make special purpose version, and be able to release updates to the software tool chain to support the new hardware?
Somehow, this just doesn't pass the giggle test.
So explain to me why, when I live in the middle of Silicon Valley, on the tiniest lot I have ever had for any house I ever lived in, why is it that I can't get a good connection for a reasonable price? I have DSL, last mile by PacBell (because it has to be), but ISP is Sonic.net (because Sonic is mega-clueful and PacBell is a pack of greedy dipshits). But my DSL rates are not all that great. By your logic, if *anyplace* should be able to get a good connection with competition among providers it should be an area of tiny lots and high incomes.
I admit that I have more choice than others -- I could use PacBell (barf), Comcast (that doesn't even pass the giggle test, especially since I don't watch TV so the bundled price for cable is pointless), or some other ISPs that use PacBell's last mile of copper. But there would be no difference in speed among any of the DSL-based ISP choices.
I started my first reply with "you may not get the job you want". What is the quality of the experience that you have after years with an MS versus 4 years with a BS? That makes a huge difference. An MS will open doors to better experience. And capability? If the guy with a BS couldn't get in or couldn't survive graduate school, that says a lot right there. If the guy with a BS wasn't motivated to go to graduate school, then you have to explore that, too.
Anyway, all I did is present you with raw data: At some companies where you might want to work and might give you gold-plated experience, an MS is required to keep your resume out of the circular file. You are entitled to your opinion -- but that doesn't change the data. After that, I presented you with my opinions, those of the kind of grey-bearded old fart that makes hiring and firing decisions. Feel free to ignore them.
How people react to raw data says a lot more about the person than the data. That's another thing I look for in hiring interviews, although there often isn't anything in an interview situation to bring that to the surface.
Now, somebody who is feeling burned out on school might be well advised to go work for a couple of years and then go back for graduate school. That was my plan, but those two years stretched out. By the time I went back for an MS, I found my homework being graded by a numb-nuts that I had rejected for a summer job a few months earlier -- that tried my patience somewhat. In any case, going back for the MS was the best thing I ever did in terms of the opportunities it created, and the job burn-out recovery time it allowed.
Excellent questions. A BSEE with 2 years experience is probably more productive this week than an MSEE that just walked in the door. A BSEE with 4 years experience versus an MSEE with 2 years experience.... not so much. 10 years out, the MSEE is usually way ahead. Getting into graduate school and out the other side again usually means you have something on the ball (not always, of course). The graduate level courses typically require deeper thinking so that, oddly, developing a specialty can lead to greater flexibility.
People who are good test takers but can't think their way out of a paper bag come in BS, MS, PhD, MBA, and JD flavors, just to name a few. If you are hiring empty suits, then you need to get better at job interviews, which is hard and typically not taught very well. You really need to dig for details, and ask the candidate to solve problems so that you can understand how they think and how they approach problems. I learned interviewing the hard way -- by making bad hiring decisions that turned into miserable firing experiences -- death threats and slashed tires in one case.
Sorting the test takers from the thinkers is done by giving ambiguous problems. Does the candidate ask for clarifications, or just make assumptions and plow ahead? When they believe they have a solution to a puzzle problem, do they double check their own work, or turn the tablet around and expect you to check it over like a homework set?
When the objective says: "... circuit design ..." or something similar and I'm hiring a logic designer, a phone call is a waste of time for both of us.
Is it that, or the level of specialization needed to work in a technical field these days? A BS in engineering these days hardly has time to cover more than the foundation courses.
Well, while it is true that you don't need more than a B.S. to get a good engineering job, you might not get the one you want. Even 15 years ago when I was hiring at Intel, the first level sort was to discard any resume that wasn't at least an M.S. That still left us with more than we could do a thorough job of processing.
Unfortunately, Intel H.R. made our jobs as hiring managers much more difficult by putting all resumes through the "resume cuisinart". At that point in time, all resumes that did not come in as plain ASCII text were OCR'd and everything was put into a data base. The "Objective" field was specifically eliminated from the database because H.R. told us we should not be using it. No matter how many times or how loudly we told them that the "Objective" section of a resume was the most useful in finding a person that fit our needs, HR refused to budge on this issue. (Again, this is an ancient anecdote, YMMV.)
So, my advice: 1) Get the M.S. in engineering, you will be glad you did. 2) Write a thoughtful, truthful, and polished job objective sentence. Smart hiring managers are paying attention to it. 3) If you want to get into a large company, try every entry point that you can. Hitting the HR department with a "fire and forget" resume is a crap shoot, even at companies with the best of intentions.
Just this morning a typographically-challenged friend of mine sent me a broken URL (obviously he didn't test it). The obvious answer is to let Google sort it out.
Well, it's how you define the task. You could check for a short, delayed, weather summary or get delayed commodity quotes over dial-up. You can't get simultaneous real-time weather radar feeds and a real-time commodity ticker. It's hard to place timely commodity trades over dial-up. My dad survived on daily farm market reports that came over the AM radio every noon. Things are different now.
(Off-topic aside: I knew I had moved to a different world when I was driving through Napa Valley during the crush. That familiar monotone drone of the news reader giving the farm markets came on, but instead of hearing "St. Paul fat cattle seventy-two-fifty per hundred weight" I heard "Pinot Noir one thousand fourteen a ton".)
Hang on city boy, that's not true at all. My brother has been paying high fees for a satellite feed out on the farm so that he can get weather and market reports and trade commodity futures in a timely fashion. An internet connect is as important to progressive farmers as it is to any other business these days. The sad thing is that his satellite feed out in an area with less that one family per square mile is a better connection than my DSL connection here in the middle of Silicon Valley in an area of $1M+ homes.
"Dad, tell us again about how you used to store your data on spinning disks...."
Who here has stored a program on punched paper tape using an ASR 33 teletype? *raises hand*
Ironic?? No. You must work for the phone company.
Success in Silicon Valley has always been about turning your own products into obsolete dinosaurs before your competition does, or die. Companies unwilling to torpedo their most successful products with something better are on the path to doom.
Maybe I'm too old-fashioned about such things, but Facebook is severely ethically challenged as a company. By extension, anybody who can work there without vomiting blood from disgust at their employer's behavior is not somebody I would want to hire.
In other words, Apple is treating professionals who live and die by their product as if they were kids doing throw-away projects on a free web-based ap. Um... not a very smart way to treat professionals -- and, BTW, not the best way to treat the customers that buy your most expensive software and most expensive hardware.
The support lifetime for a software product is directly related to *who* uses it, *how* they use it, and the value of *their* end product. At least, when I was in the business of creating electronic design automation software that sold for $50K to $150K *per* *seat*, that's the way we treated it. Customers doing multi-million dollar projects, and who forked over $250K to us for software, didn't have to take updates if they didn't want to. And if they were smart, they sure as hell didn't take updates in the middle of a critical project -- better the bugs that you know and have worked around than the bugs that your vendor just put in last month and hasn't found yet.