Start a startup. It doesn't matter if it succeeds or fails.
Seriously. While I was in college, I started one of my own -- a development shop. We got one contract, executed it nicely and got some good scratch with which to buy booze and pay a few months of rent. Then we realized that you can't really run a company and do your homework at the same time, and the company fell apart.
I then worked as a sysadmin / tech-support for a little over a year to pay the bills (sounds similar to your situation), before deciding that I couldn't handle doing something I hated any more.
That's when I joined another startup as the lead developer. It seemed like it was going well, then we launched one day after what turned out was a major competitor that kind of blindsided us (Google Groups). After flailing around for a while (and writing a whole lot more software for the company that they didn't feel like releasing), the company was in its death throes and I left.
This was about three months after I'd graduated, and it was remarkably easy to get a job. All the recruiters and interviewers I talked to were very impressed by the company I'd started, less impressed by the startup I'd joined, and not at all impressed by the sysadmin job or the programming job I'd had in high school.
So if you have a few months of living expenses saved up, quit your job and start a startup company. 99% chance it'll fail, but it seems to me that afterwards you'll have a much better chance at getting a job.
What do you have to lose? With two years of tech support experience you'll have no trouble getting another tech support job.
Agreed. I never shut down my Aspire One and it boots up in just a few seconds.
It runs a full Linux OS, and it doesn't take long to fire up a terminal window with vim or a GUI text editor, I guess. (Or you could just leave OpenOffice open all the time, so you wouldn't have to wait for it to start up every time you open the screen.)
I've had to sign things like that... and it always worried me that it dilutes the value of a signature. I mean, it makes no sense that you'd be able to sign away your right to sue them for severely injure you; and, of course, your signature is, in this case, invalid. So why do you have to sign? Is it just to get you more comfortable with signing away your rights?
Which, of course, is another reason it's ominous that content is moving online: soon you'll have to enter contracts like these in order to legally enjoy multimedia content.
It's worse than that. With the clauses they're putting into the contracts, it is "legal" for them to say "That song you bought? Well, we raised the price of it. So if you want to play it, you'll have to pay us the difference." Legal contracts have become worthless, unless you are a corporation. They are now only a way for a human to give up his or her rights, in full, to large corporations. Why sign? Because there's no other option.
The problem is that their ability to change the terms of the contract is part of the contract I signed. Obviously that kind of clause is illogical, and should be illegal. However, I don't have a lawyer, nor can I afford one good enough to battle SBC's massive lawyer machine. Just makes me want to move to a cabin in the far north of Canada and never see another contract like that again. Fuck the internet, fuck cell phones, fuck television. It can't possibly be worth it.
What if one of these companies decided to change the terms to something like "We own your house now. Get out." You never signed that, but you signed what amounts to a blank check. It's very dangerous.
No sane business operator enters a contract in which one party has the right to disregard its terms at will
That's funny, because every single one of them does it. If you've ever signed a contract for any kind of service, such as cable/satellite TV, DSL, cellular phones, etc, the contract includes the clause: "$COMPANY maintains the right to change the terms of this agreement without notice" or something to that effect. So basically, what he really means is that no sane business enters a contract in which the terms are fair, or that they don't have complete control over their ability to screw the customer in the future. Cute claim, though, since most people don't read that far into the contract (and there's nothing you can do about it, since you need to get your internet and telephone service from them, and you can't get it without agreeing to let them change the terms on you).
I ran into this problem myself with SBC DSL recently, wherein they changed the terms of the contract after I signed it, stating that after one year, the price goes up three-fold. They didn't even inform me of the change, and acted as if it had always been that way, even though I read the contract and that was not there, and the person on the phone when I ordered the service assured me that there was no such price hike after one year (I specifically asked).
My guess is that if it were going to be at all difficult to contact all the outside contributors, he wouldn't have the complaint that there weren't very many.
He closed the code because he wasn't getting any bug fixes or new features; he was doing all the work himself, and his competitors were benefitting from it. If that hadn't been the case, it would be harder to close the code, but there also wouldn't be a reason to.
Umm... having an empty inbox and then digging around in your cluttered "All Mail" folder is just as useless as having a cluttered inbox in the first place.
You seem to be completely ignoring the implications of Microsoft's push for Trusted Computing. Once it's all implemented, if the computer even allows you to install an "unsigned" operating system (such as Linux), it will not allow you to play DRMed media content.
Reacting to news about Microsoft's push for these draconian "security" measures does not make one paranoid.
How is that going to work? The Xbox 360 uses a PowerPC chip, not an x86.
The only way it could work is if Microsoft has the game code (XNA/DirectX) compile to the.NET runtime, rather than the underlying hardware. They've made it as easy as possible to have the same code run on the 360 and the PC. Normally, it's just a recompile to port between those platforms. But if the games compile to.NET, it would be feasible to have the same game run on both (without a recompile). Since Microsoft can abstract the CPU, the GPU becomes the one that the code has to be compiled for. And that's the possibility that ATI has to love.
Of course, this is all pie in the sky, and would just be a nice thing. It doesn't work in the console market, as it has existed until this point. But Microsoft is trying to change the history... the Core/Premium division may be just the first step here.
You're right. Open standards are more important than Linux itself. It doesn't matter if Linux succeeds, necessarily (it could very well be supplanted by a better open OS), but no alternative OS can succeed without open standards. And that's why we have to fight for Linux at the moment.
Because the way Microsoft is fighting the battle, they're trying to lock you out of being able to install Linux at all on new hardware. They're trying to prevent you from being able to watch your legally purchased media. If desktop Linux doesn't make a push into the mainstream, the advanced users might not even be able to use it any more. That's why it's vitally important.
We don't need to crush Microsoft, we just need Linux to become enough of a player that companies are forced to support it.
Comfort is not nearly as much of a distraction as a lack of comfort. For example, which is more distracting?:
1) Sitting in a crappy folding chair, staring at a 15" monitor with a 60Hz refresh rate, and using a mouse without a scroll wheel. 2) Sitting in a nice office chair which is adjusted to your height, staring at a 19"+ LCD screen, and using a nice mouse with a scroll wheel and several buttons.
You'll find that you're much more distracted by that crick in your neck and the constant blinking in scenario (1) than you are when wondering why you're not experiencing any distractions in scenario (2).
But your definition of the word comfort might just be a little off. Caffeine and alcohol don't add to comfort, nor does lack of sleep. Obviously, those recommendations hold true.
No, there'll be a $1000 version that allows unlimited SMB/CIFS connections, but in an odd twist, all versions of Vista will allow unlimited AFP connections.
The spawn of athletes and models is not a good metric to look at anyway. Has the child of an athlete and a model ever grown up to be anything other than another athlete or model?
What we should be remarking on is the fact that when two very smart people have a child, he/she is often autistic (far more than average). Why?
So make it a reward system for releasing the exploits only to the software companies? With bonus points for providing help on the patch, if possible.
There could be a record of the number of times each person submitted an exploit, the severity of each, and so on, that is shared among all software companies. The higher your score is, the more willing the software company should be to disclose information to you.
And they would start to disclose information about bugs to the security researchers too, in time, so that they could have hundreds of trustworthy experts trying to fix the bug or provide a workaround, or study the exploit more to onearth possible systemic problems to take into consideration in the next version of the problem. There are a lot of ways software companies could benefit from this kind of a system.
If an exploit is known in secret, then the security researcher knows that it exists, and therefore it is possible that someone else may have found it. Since it hasn't been patched, that someone can be assumed not to work for the company who released the product.
For example, say you found an exploit. If you just sat and kept it a secret, eventually someone else would come along and find it too. The software companies are saying this won't happen. The security researchers guess that someone else in the world will find it within 3 months or so, if they haven't already.
But a hack wouldn't be required if Apple and the camera companies collaborated on an iPod-Camera interface. What I mean is, you have your iPod in your pocket, and a cable between it and your digital camera. Every picture you take is saved to your iPod, and automatically downloaded to your computer when you plug it in.
Would that get you and other photographers into the iPod-drive-as-camera-storage thing?
I originally thought the same thing, but they're not even consistent in that. If you check the weight, the system with 4x Pentium M's weighs more than the one with the super AtomChip Quantum Mega-whatever. So at least sometimes they're trying to claim they have this awesome chip.
There won't be a GPU that can match the ones in the upcoming consoles until some time after the consoles have been released (Microsft demanded this from ATI, and ATI agreed because they'll get a good token to use against Nvidia: "buy a computer with an ATI graphics chip and play Xbox games on your PC!")
But more importantly, it will take a significant amount of time before the installed base of PCs that are of equal or greater power, probably more than two years. Either way, Microsoft wouldn't want it to be possible right away anyway. They want people to buy the consoles and the games, and then later, when the consoles are getting old, to stay hooked on the games and play them on their computers. This, of course, makes it much easier for them to continually upgrade the hardware of the Xbox, blurring the line between the console generations. The Microsoft side will gradually improve, so people will have to keep buying, and it is a rather regular stream of revenue. Sony will update their console more irregularly, in much larger spurts. When they release their newest console, it will be better than the Xbox briefly, but the Xbox will surpass it long before the next Sony update. This is exactly what happened in the Microsoft vs. Intel battle. An additional benefit to Microsoft is that it enables them to pursue their dreams of convergence, until you don't buy a computer any more, you just buy an Xbox (after all, the Xbox does run all the programs you need, ie IE and Office, and it has the games). There's a whole line of Xboxes, ranging from $300 to $2000, and there's no longer any reason to deal with Dell, HP, or anybody else: you can get it all, hardware and software, from Microsoft!
Or anyway, that's what I would be doing if I were maniacally obsessed with world domination, had an invulnerable monopoly in the software market, needed a growth vector, and enjoyed unlimited funds.
This is exactly why I'm surprised the Xbox 360 is based on PowerPC. I thought it would be an x86 chip again, with the longterm view of waiting until PC hardware matched or exceeded the console's (about 2 years), and having the feature built into the next version of the OS that it plays Xbox 360 games exactly as the Xbox would. This would be possible since the XNA framework should abstract the calls enough that it could be run on different hardware as long as it was fast enough. I suppose it's possible that Xbox 360 games could be compiled to the.NET runtime, but I can't imagine the game developers would like that. They don't want to sacrifice the speed, or even feel like they might be (for those of you who want to claim that such bytecode is not slower than regularly compiled code... I don't care or want to get into the debate: can we agree that console game developers wouldn't like it?). Still, that would be really cool.
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Start a startup. It doesn't matter if it succeeds or fails.
Seriously. While I was in college, I started one of my own -- a development shop. We got one contract, executed it nicely and got some good scratch with which to buy booze and pay a few months of rent. Then we realized that you can't really run a company and do your homework at the same time, and the company fell apart.
I then worked as a sysadmin / tech-support for a little over a year to pay the bills (sounds similar to your situation), before deciding that I couldn't handle doing something I hated any more.
That's when I joined another startup as the lead developer. It seemed like it was going well, then we launched one day after what turned out was a major competitor that kind of blindsided us (Google Groups). After flailing around for a while (and writing a whole lot more software for the company that they didn't feel like releasing), the company was in its death throes and I left.
This was about three months after I'd graduated, and it was remarkably easy to get a job. All the recruiters and interviewers I talked to were very impressed by the company I'd started, less impressed by the startup I'd joined, and not at all impressed by the sysadmin job or the programming job I'd had in high school.
So if you have a few months of living expenses saved up, quit your job and start a startup company. 99% chance it'll fail, but it seems to me that afterwards you'll have a much better chance at getting a job.
What do you have to lose? With two years of tech support experience you'll have no trouble getting another tech support job.
Agreed. I never shut down my Aspire One and it boots up in just a few seconds. It runs a full Linux OS, and it doesn't take long to fire up a terminal window with vim or a GUI text editor, I guess. (Or you could just leave OpenOffice open all the time, so you wouldn't have to wait for it to start up every time you open the screen.)
I use Skype video chat on Ubuntu every day, with someone using it on a Mac. It works quite nicely.
I've had to sign things like that ... and it always worried me that it dilutes the value of a signature. I mean, it makes no sense that you'd be able to sign away your right to sue them for severely injure you; and, of course, your signature is, in this case, invalid. So why do you have to sign? Is it just to get you more comfortable with signing away your rights?
Which, of course, is another reason it's ominous that content is moving online: soon you'll have to enter contracts like these in order to legally enjoy multimedia content.
It's worse than that. With the clauses they're putting into the contracts, it is "legal" for them to say "That song you bought? Well, we raised the price of it. So if you want to play it, you'll have to pay us the difference." Legal contracts have become worthless, unless you are a corporation. They are now only a way for a human to give up his or her rights, in full, to large corporations. Why sign? Because there's no other option.
The problem is that their ability to change the terms of the contract is part of the contract I signed. Obviously that kind of clause is illogical, and should be illegal. However, I don't have a lawyer, nor can I afford one good enough to battle SBC's massive lawyer machine. Just makes me want to move to a cabin in the far north of Canada and never see another contract like that again. Fuck the internet, fuck cell phones, fuck television. It can't possibly be worth it.
What if one of these companies decided to change the terms to something like "We own your house now. Get out." You never signed that, but you signed what amounts to a blank check. It's very dangerous.
No sane business operator enters a contract in which one party has the right to disregard its terms at will
That's funny, because every single one of them does it. If you've ever signed a contract for any kind of service, such as cable/satellite TV, DSL, cellular phones, etc, the contract includes the clause: "$COMPANY maintains the right to change the terms of this agreement without notice" or something to that effect. So basically, what he really means is that no sane business enters a contract in which the terms are fair, or that they don't have complete control over their ability to screw the customer in the future. Cute claim, though, since most people don't read that far into the contract (and there's nothing you can do about it, since you need to get your internet and telephone service from them, and you can't get it without agreeing to let them change the terms on you).
I ran into this problem myself with SBC DSL recently, wherein they changed the terms of the contract after I signed it, stating that after one year, the price goes up three-fold. They didn't even inform me of the change, and acted as if it had always been that way, even though I read the contract and that was not there, and the person on the phone when I ordered the service assured me that there was no such price hike after one year (I specifically asked).
My guess is that if it were going to be at all difficult to contact all the outside contributors, he wouldn't have the complaint that there weren't very many.
He closed the code because he wasn't getting any bug fixes or new features; he was doing all the work himself, and his competitors were benefitting from it. If that hadn't been the case, it would be harder to close the code, but there also wouldn't be a reason to.
Umm... having an empty inbox and then digging around in your cluttered "All Mail" folder is just as useless as having a cluttered inbox in the first place.
You seem to be completely ignoring the implications of Microsoft's push for Trusted Computing. Once it's all implemented, if the computer even allows you to install an "unsigned" operating system (such as Linux), it will not allow you to play DRMed media content.
Reacting to news about Microsoft's push for these draconian "security" measures does not make one paranoid.
How is that going to work? The Xbox 360 uses a PowerPC chip, not an x86.
.NET runtime, rather than the underlying hardware. They've made it as easy as possible to have the same code run on the 360 and the PC. Normally, it's just a recompile to port between those platforms. But if the games compile to .NET, it would be feasible to have the same game run on both (without a recompile). Since Microsoft can abstract the CPU, the GPU becomes the one that the code has to be compiled for. And that's the possibility that ATI has to love.
... the Core/Premium division may be just the first step here.
The only way it could work is if Microsoft has the game code (XNA/DirectX) compile to the
Of course, this is all pie in the sky, and would just be a nice thing. It doesn't work in the console market, as it has existed until this point. But Microsoft is trying to change the history
You're right. Open standards are more important than Linux itself. It doesn't matter if Linux succeeds, necessarily (it could very well be supplanted by a better open OS), but no alternative OS can succeed without open standards. And that's why we have to fight for Linux at the moment.
Because the way Microsoft is fighting the battle, they're trying to lock you out of being able to install Linux at all on new hardware. They're trying to prevent you from being able to watch your legally purchased media. If desktop Linux doesn't make a push into the mainstream, the advanced users might not even be able to use it any more. That's why it's vitally important.
We don't need to crush Microsoft, we just need Linux to become enough of a player that companies are forced to support it.
Comfort is not nearly as much of a distraction as a lack of comfort. For example, which is more distracting?:
1) Sitting in a crappy folding chair, staring at a 15" monitor with a 60Hz refresh rate, and using a mouse without a scroll wheel.
2) Sitting in a nice office chair which is adjusted to your height, staring at a 19"+ LCD screen, and using a nice mouse with a scroll wheel and several buttons.
You'll find that you're much more distracted by that crick in your neck and the constant blinking in scenario (1) than you are when wondering why you're not experiencing any distractions in scenario (2).
But your definition of the word comfort might just be a little off. Caffeine and alcohol don't add to comfort, nor does lack of sleep. Obviously, those recommendations hold true.
No, there'll be a $1000 version that allows unlimited SMB/CIFS connections, but in an odd twist, all versions of Vista will allow unlimited AFP connections.
The spawn of athletes and models is not a good metric to look at anyway. Has the child of an athlete and a model ever grown up to be anything other than another athlete or model?
What we should be remarking on is the fact that when two very smart people have a child, he/she is often autistic (far more than average). Why?
That's right. Smokers typically die before lunch, whereas non-smokers last until almost dinner time.
So make it a reward system for releasing the exploits only to the software companies? With bonus points for providing help on the patch, if possible.
There could be a record of the number of times each person submitted an exploit, the severity of each, and so on, that is shared among all software companies. The higher your score is, the more willing the software company should be to disclose information to you.
And they would start to disclose information about bugs to the security researchers too, in time, so that they could have hundreds of trustworthy experts trying to fix the bug or provide a workaround, or study the exploit more to onearth possible systemic problems to take into consideration in the next version of the problem. There are a lot of ways software companies could benefit from this kind of a system.
If an exploit is known in secret, then the security researcher knows that it exists, and therefore it is possible that someone else may have found it. Since it hasn't been patched, that someone can be assumed not to work for the company who released the product.
For example, say you found an exploit. If you just sat and kept it a secret, eventually someone else would come along and find it too. The software companies are saying this won't happen. The security researchers guess that someone else in the world will find it within 3 months or so, if they haven't already.
But a hack wouldn't be required if Apple and the camera companies collaborated on an iPod-Camera interface. What I mean is, you have your iPod in your pocket, and a cable between it and your digital camera. Every picture you take is saved to your iPod, and automatically downloaded to your computer when you plug it in.
Would that get you and other photographers into the iPod-drive-as-camera-storage thing?
I hope you spelled it right when you signed up for that engraving. Heh...
I originally thought the same thing, but they're not even consistent in that. If you check the weight, the system with 4x Pentium M's weighs more than the one with the super AtomChip Quantum Mega-whatever. So at least sometimes they're trying to claim they have this awesome chip.
There won't be a GPU that can match the ones in the upcoming consoles until some time after the consoles have been released (Microsft demanded this from ATI, and ATI agreed because they'll get a good token to use against Nvidia: "buy a computer with an ATI graphics chip and play Xbox games on your PC!")
But more importantly, it will take a significant amount of time before the installed base of PCs that are of equal or greater power, probably more than two years. Either way, Microsoft wouldn't want it to be possible right away anyway. They want people to buy the consoles and the games, and then later, when the consoles are getting old, to stay hooked on the games and play them on their computers. This, of course, makes it much easier for them to continually upgrade the hardware of the Xbox, blurring the line between the console generations. The Microsoft side will gradually improve, so people will have to keep buying, and it is a rather regular stream of revenue. Sony will update their console more irregularly, in much larger spurts. When they release their newest console, it will be better than the Xbox briefly, but the Xbox will surpass it long before the next Sony update. This is exactly what happened in the Microsoft vs. Intel battle. An additional benefit to Microsoft is that it enables them to pursue their dreams of convergence, until you don't buy a computer any more, you just buy an Xbox (after all, the Xbox does run all the programs you need, ie IE and Office, and it has the games). There's a whole line of Xboxes, ranging from $300 to $2000, and there's no longer any reason to deal with Dell, HP, or anybody else: you can get it all, hardware and software, from Microsoft!
Or anyway, that's what I would be doing if I were maniacally obsessed with world domination, had an invulnerable monopoly in the software market, needed a growth vector, and enjoyed unlimited funds.
This is exactly why I'm surprised the Xbox 360 is based on PowerPC. I thought it would be an x86 chip again, with the longterm view of waiting until PC hardware matched or exceeded the console's (about 2 years), and having the feature built into the next version of the OS that it plays Xbox 360 games exactly as the Xbox would. This would be possible since the XNA framework should abstract the calls enough that it could be run on different hardware as long as it was fast enough. I suppose it's possible that Xbox 360 games could be compiled to the .NET runtime, but I can't imagine the game developers would like that. They don't want to sacrifice the speed, or even feel like they might be (for those of you who want to claim that such bytecode is not slower than regularly compiled code ... I don't care or want to get into the debate: can we agree that console game developers wouldn't like it?). Still, that would be really cool.