Larry is correct to point out that anything PHP can do...you can do with perl (mod_perl)...often better, and still keep the language you use for everything else. In this sense the rise of PHP has mystified me.
Why the need for a novel language to do web scripting? The only argument I can see is ease of installation and learning, but those aren't good reasons for serious developers.
Blah. Yes you really nailed me to the wall, I generalized. Check out a census some time. You are a corner case.
I can tell you with certainty that by waiting until you are 35 to get a mortgage means you are wasting huge sums on rent that gives you back no equity, with less time to recoup the housing cost on future sales and rollovers. Even if you don't want a house, a condo is almost certainly a better option.
If you don't take the risk right out of college, you never will. Later, you will be married, have kids, and a mortgage. You will be more risk averse once you have these added dependencies.
I stand by my statement: straight out of college is the best time to take risks.
Want back stabbing, gossip, alliances and enemies? Join the ranks of academia! If you are a prof you get amaazing leeway to abuse your grad students and use them for free labor. Thats if you can survive the constant oversight of the head of the dept. If you are a grad student, bend over and lube up. You are free labor and you have no rights as a worker. After a while you will notice that it is no coincidence that your advisor won't let you leave. Why would they? You are a well conditioned mule. Letting you graduate would mean your advisor would have to break in another.
There are many downsides to the public sector. Pay is often not very good. Your office is often a petri dish for government social engineering...which also breeds the worst kind of office politics.
Added to which, to be frank, from my experience you will end up working with the most mediocore people the market can bear. Sorry, but many government offices are staffed by the otherwise unemployable. Do you really want to work with these people??
I think is the real question. Going to work in most large institutions, be it government or a large corporation, is an opportunity to securely rot for a long time. Note that I use the word secure, although in reality most large corporations are as likely to constantly trim/grow staff now as small ones.
You should work in at least one small, on the edge company for some period of time when you are young and can take more risks. These are the types of places you really learn and grow without having your fate defined by a strictly defined job definition.
This type of question is likely to be answered by all sorts of people crapping on the private sector because of the job situation out there. Come on folks, markets recover. Taking a risk on a smaller company when you have no dependents and no long term debt (like when you are first out of college) is a must.
People have been pushing modular homes for decades. Not as whiz-bang with the touch pads as these, but these models will end up like all those before it - unsellable junk or mobile-home park fodder.
I agree that Word is the de facto standard, but HP also wants to differentiate itself, and price is one way to do that. By going with cheaper AMD processors and getting rid of MS software, they may be able to do that.
Its a risk, but HP needs to take a risk - even with Compaq, they are no match for the cost cutting and distribution that Dell offers.
There are substantial research projects that consist of basic sciences, social sciences, and the humanities that do play a role in the public good. I don't a problem with the government funding basic research. Product development is another issue.
The problem with an ID like this is that ultimately it will be issued to individuals based on previous ownership of a less-secure ID, such as a driver's license or passport. The new ID would only be as verifiable as the data used to authenticate it, which in the case of driver's licenses, isn't trustworthy at all.
For those born after such an ID was introduced, they could be verified and ID's essentially at birth, providing a factually verifiable ID.
The bottom line is that VA has to take a life preserver from anyone who will throw one. They are a public company, so the bottom line is the only line.
Well, the general point is that people weren't waiting for technology that would fruitfully improve profits (no one is disputing the value in that)...its the issue of people buying whatever was being pitched to them because it was new.
As for your example of CRM systems, there are dozens of companies who have blown huge budgets trying to make flaky enterprise apps work. Its often a suckers game.
I don't think anyone has made assertions as extreme as the straw men you are shooting down. What people are saying is that IT needs to be rationalized like any other factor of production. In the 90s that wasn't happening.
Yes, Gates and Jobs are exceptional, but as a general rule, corporations have edged back of ridiculous expectations for their CEOs. Certainly in Silicon Valley during the goldrush times, almost all CEOs were seen as walking on water by virtue of their title.
I'm not talking about the exceptions (Gates, Jobs, Buffett, Weill), I'm talking about the other ten thousand.
We have succesfully put to rest the cult of the superstar CEO, now it is time to put to bed the myth/cult of IT.
Most firms now realize that they can survive another year without upgrading their router or servers, which were either so expenseive originally that they simply must sit in the rack room longer, or are "good enough" even if they aren't the latest model.
Software is a whole other story. Most companies realize now that upgrades are a scam.
On top of all of this, many buyers realize that the latest tech will simply make them part of a large beta testing mob, where their old tech is now largely debugged and productive. Certainly MS users understand this.
If you are in the professional vicinity of making such claims, you are probably already a staff researcher at a government, academic, or private lab. All of these have PR facilities to release discoveries.
On the other hand, if you are the guy in his own backyard or garage who has just made a startling discovery about nanotechnology or cold fusion....well, thats not going to happen so don't worry too much about it.
No, Apple should continue to heed Intel
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PowerPC Goes 64 bit
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sorry, but market forces are now as powerful as performance metrics. Apple no longer benefits from not being x86...cost being the biggest issue, and most of the time now they can't even claim a performance gain.
Intel won the CPU war on desktop PCs. Look to servers, handhelds, game consoles, etc. for the the next CPU battle worth fighting.
To be fair, there was a year or so there where you could have made absurd amounts of money selling domain names. You probably still cna make a little scratch here and there - I'm sure the owner of "Slashdot.com" didn't give it away to this bunch for free.
Otherwise you can apply all of the standard economic models recently applied to tulips, beanie babies, cabbage patach dolls, etc.
But if there is no longer a need to fund more capital growth, for example in a flat or declining market, then you don't need to fund more growth.
Then the stock is really of no interest to any investors. Every company needs to grow and diversify, or investors flee. This is why large companies make acquisitions even when they have stable markets.
...is for all of this to go away. He hates it, because deep down he really is a back-slapping, insider-trading, nudge-nudge-wink-wink sort of guy. His dad was too. They're so "inside" they don't even know what "outside" looks like. Bush has no constituency "outside" this group of back-slapping robber barons.
Its telling that stocks actually drop in real time when he starts talking about corruption.
No oen file for Chapter 11 unless they really are looking for the defribilators. Previous comments in other/. discussions would seem to naively indicate that its just a casual decision to be made when the wind drifts the wrong way.
No. Once you file, you are basically saying that you are an unreliable debtor. That means your corporate bonds are worthless. That means you cannot fund further growth. That means the capital equipment that allows you to operate at all may have have to be auctioned.
Also remember that WorldCom operates in a market that is in terrible shape with crappy prospects even should they somehow survive. I suspect this bankruptcy will act as a huge wave of consolidation in a dead market.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the need for a novel language to do web scripting? The only argument I can see is ease of installation and learning, but those aren't good reasons for serious developers.
Before. During. After. At a company you have heard of unless you live under a rock.
I can tell you with certainty that by waiting until you are 35 to get a mortgage means you are wasting huge sums on rent that gives you back no equity, with less time to recoup the housing cost on future sales and rollovers. Even if you don't want a house, a condo is almost certainly a better option.
I stand by my statement: straight out of college is the best time to take risks.
Want back stabbing, gossip, alliances and enemies? Join the ranks of academia! If you are a prof you get amaazing leeway to abuse your grad students and use them for free labor. Thats if you can survive the constant oversight of the head of the dept. If you are a grad student, bend over and lube up. You are free labor and you have no rights as a worker. After a while you will notice that it is no coincidence that your advisor won't let you leave. Why would they? You are a well conditioned mule. Letting you graduate would mean your advisor would have to break in another.
Added to which, to be frank, from my experience you will end up working with the most mediocore people the market can bear. Sorry, but many government offices are staffed by the otherwise unemployable. Do you really want to work with these people??
You should work in at least one small, on the edge company for some period of time when you are young and can take more risks. These are the types of places you really learn and grow without having your fate defined by a strictly defined job definition.
This type of question is likely to be answered by all sorts of people crapping on the private sector because of the job situation out there. Come on folks, markets recover. Taking a risk on a smaller company when you have no dependents and no long term debt (like when you are first out of college) is a must.
People have been pushing modular homes for decades. Not as whiz-bang with the touch pads as these, but these models will end up like all those before it - unsellable junk or mobile-home park fodder.
Its a risk, but HP needs to take a risk - even with Compaq, they are no match for the cost cutting and distribution that Dell offers.
There is room for independent sites on the web and they will continue to exist while they can find an audience that will sustain them.
There are substantial research projects that consist of basic sciences, social sciences, and the humanities that do play a role in the public good. I don't a problem with the government funding basic research. Product development is another issue.
For those born after such an ID was introduced, they could be verified and ID's essentially at birth, providing a factually verifiable ID.
The bottom line is that VA has to take a life preserver from anyone who will throw one. They are a public company, so the bottom line is the only line.
As for your example of CRM systems, there are dozens of companies who have blown huge budgets trying to make flaky enterprise apps work. Its often a suckers game.
I don't think anyone has made assertions as extreme as the straw men you are shooting down. What people are saying is that IT needs to be rationalized like any other factor of production. In the 90s that wasn't happening.
I'm not talking about the exceptions (Gates, Jobs, Buffett, Weill), I'm talking about the other ten thousand.
Most firms now realize that they can survive another year without upgrading their router or servers, which were either so expenseive originally that they simply must sit in the rack room longer, or are "good enough" even if they aren't the latest model.
Software is a whole other story. Most companies realize now that upgrades are a scam.
On top of all of this, many buyers realize that the latest tech will simply make them part of a large beta testing mob, where their old tech is now largely debugged and productive. Certainly MS users understand this.
Yes I can safely say that you will not discover cold fusion in your garage.
On the other hand, if you are the guy in his own backyard or garage who has just made a startling discovery about nanotechnology or cold fusion....well, thats not going to happen so don't worry too much about it.
Intel won the CPU war on desktop PCs. Look to servers, handhelds, game consoles, etc. for the the next CPU battle worth fighting.
With enough production code, you can essentially push a language's lifespan out to infinity.
Otherwise you can apply all of the standard economic models recently applied to tulips, beanie babies, cabbage patach dolls, etc.
Then the stock is really of no interest to any investors. Every company needs to grow and diversify, or investors flee. This is why large companies make acquisitions even when they have stable markets.
Its telling that stocks actually drop in real time when he starts talking about corruption.
No. Once you file, you are basically saying that you are an unreliable debtor. That means your corporate bonds are worthless. That means you cannot fund further growth. That means the capital equipment that allows you to operate at all may have have to be auctioned.
Also remember that WorldCom operates in a market that is in terrible shape with crappy prospects even should they somehow survive. I suspect this bankruptcy will act as a huge wave of consolidation in a dead market.