The PowerBook 5300 and 190 series are quite old. Did Apple *have* to do this? Are there *any* PB 5300s still under warranty or other support contract? Sounds more like marketing and positive PR...
The PowerBook 5300/190 had a few design flows and Apple has extended their warranties to 7 years. Mine saw one of the symptoms (the hinge connecting the screen and the rest of the unit came apart) three years ago when it was already a few years old. Apple took it back, replaced the outer casing, motherboard, LCD screen, and hard disk. Essentially they gave me a new laptop sans the battery and floppy drive.
P.S. No I no longer have the PowerBook. I gave it to my sister two years ago. You'll have to look elsewhere to find one to trade-in;-)
The other thing is that we are shutting out thousands of potential programmers who could enter into a test/training program that selects the "brightest" and prepares them for entry-level jobs... instead, these jobs are farmed out overseas to foreigners who market themselves as "experienced" when the entire basis of their experience is solely education... education alone may be insufficient then add in the communications factor...
Personally I think companies will realize the problem with this approach. Foreign programmers might be cheap, but so is the quality of work. As an experiment, my company farmed out some relatively simple C++ work to a couple of Indian programmers who have regular jobs with the Indian branch of a major U.S. technology company. When the code was delivered, it was full of bugs. It took me almost as long to fix all the problems as the time to do the job right from scratch! (Plus everyone at work had to put up with my bitching while fixing the @#$! bugs) Their delivered source code clearly demonstrated that while they knew the C++ syntax, they did not understand object-oriented design at all!
Needless to say, we are not about to try it again any time soon....:)
As far as I am concerned, there are two kinds of workers in the technology field: the talented kind and the worthless kind. Care to guess which category Mr. Richard Ellis (the author of the article) falls into?;-) People who complain about the short life cycles of their skill set should definitely NOT be in this field. I work in this field because things progress constantly and there is always something new. As matter of fact, I refuse to take a job that doesn't involve something I haven't done before. As to U.S. colleges not teaching the latest and "greatest" programming language, that's just fine. Programming languages and OSes are just tools anyway. The important knowledge is the basic concept and theory of computing and problem solving skills. When I was in school, most upper level CS courses involve very little actual coding. Most problems are discussed in pseudo code or even essays. The professors expected people to have acquired the mechanics of coding in lower level courses and did not want to waste time in the details. This is the right approach. I learned the principle of protocol layering and basic concepts of the TCP/IP stack in school. When I actually worked with a TCP/IP stack for the first time on the job, it took me less than a week to port the stack with a telnet shell and tftp application onto my embedded platform. As others have pointed out, there _IS_ a shortage of talented technology workers whom companies are busting their asses trying to hire. Heck, I am not looking for a job but I get offers once every couple of months. On the other hand, there are also plenty of the worthless kind around just to make identifying the talented ones a little harder....
Slashdot Mirror
The PowerBook 5300 and 190 series are quite old. Did Apple *have* to do this? Are there *any* PB 5300s still under warranty or other support contract? Sounds more like marketing and positive PR...
;-)
The PowerBook 5300/190 had a few design flows and Apple has extended their warranties to 7 years. Mine saw one of the symptoms (the hinge connecting the screen and the rest of the unit came apart) three years ago when it was already a few years old. Apple took it back, replaced the outer casing, motherboard, LCD screen, and hard disk. Essentially they gave me a new laptop sans the battery and floppy drive.
P.S. No I no longer have the PowerBook. I gave it to my sister two years ago. You'll have to look elsewhere to find one to trade-in
The other thing is that we are shutting out thousands of potential programmers who could enter into a test/training program that selects the "brightest" and prepares them for entry-level jobs ... instead, these jobs are farmed out overseas to foreigners who market themselves as "experienced" when the entire basis of their experience is solely education ... education alone may be insufficient then add in the communications factor ...
:)
Personally I think companies will realize the problem with this approach. Foreign programmers might be cheap, but so is the quality of work. As an experiment, my company farmed out some relatively simple C++ work to a couple of Indian programmers who have regular jobs with the Indian branch of a major U.S. technology company. When the code was delivered, it was full of bugs. It took me almost as long to fix all the problems as the time to do the job right from scratch! (Plus everyone at work had to put up with my bitching while fixing the @#$! bugs) Their delivered source code clearly demonstrated that while they knew the C++ syntax, they did not understand object-oriented design at all!
Needless to say, we are not about to try it again any time soon....
As far as I am concerned, there are two kinds of workers in the technology field: the talented kind and the worthless kind. Care to guess which category Mr. Richard Ellis (the author of the article) falls into? ;-) People who complain about the short life cycles of their skill set should definitely NOT be in this field. I work in this field because things progress constantly and there is always something new. As matter of fact, I refuse to take a job that doesn't involve something I haven't done before. As to U.S. colleges not teaching the latest and "greatest" programming language, that's just fine. Programming languages and OSes are just tools anyway. The important knowledge is the basic concept and theory of computing and problem solving skills. When I was in school, most upper level CS courses involve very little actual coding. Most problems are discussed in pseudo code or even essays. The professors expected people to have acquired the mechanics of coding in lower level courses and did not want to waste time in the details. This is the right approach. I learned the principle of protocol layering and basic concepts of the TCP/IP stack in school. When I actually worked with a TCP/IP stack for the first time on the job, it took me less than a week to port the stack with a telnet shell and tftp application onto my embedded platform. As others have pointed out, there _IS_ a shortage of talented technology workers whom companies are busting their asses trying to hire. Heck, I am not looking for a job but I get offers once every couple of months. On the other hand, there are also plenty of the worthless kind around just to make identifying the talented ones a little harder....