Wireless is affordable now. The students have to pay for internet one way or another, why not leave the schools out of it? Get a sprint phone, and you have an hub that will support 8 devices for an extra $30 a month.
Just because this company is going to "train their own" doesn't mean they're going to leave out the fundamentals and theory. The school of hard knocks can teach those too
True, but when you hire somebody who has been trained, from a reputable source, you know that person has training in fundamentals, and theory. Let's be honest, most self-taught developers are pure hackers - they just never see any need for learning theory.
You say some people who have training don't seem to know much about theory. I am sure that is true. But, is that not just as true for doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, etc? So why not do away with all forms of formal training and all forms of formal credentials (i.e. all degrees, all licenses, and all certifications)?
After all, there is nothing that you can learn in school, that can not be taught by other means. And there is no formal credential that absolutely guarantees competence.
Maybe it's just me, but I have always had bad experiences with self taught developers. In my experience, such developers have no concept of structured development practices. They tend to be spaghetti coders who break every rule of good development practices wholesale. They make extensive use of global variables, they see no reason for any kind of documentation, or internal consistency, or for meaningful variable names, and so on.
From what I have seen: the self taught typically learn the syntax of a language, then they just hack away until something seems to work. This method actually works well enough, as long as you are only working with your own code. But when other people have to work with such code, it tends to be a problem.
It's one of the reasons I got out of development. It really sucks to start a new job, and have somebody dump a load of undocumented, spaghetti coded, barf in your lap. Then you are told it only needs a few small changes, and that shouldn't take too long, right?
Working in IT means you are competing with 3rd world wages. There is no way that most western workers can do that. The few IT jobs that can not be offshored right now, will be staffed by foreign guest workers until the job can be offshored.
Maybe US workers with top-secret clearances can find jobs.
In some ways, IT is even easier to offshore than manufacturing. With IT, you do have physical items to ship. As I write this, I am seeing entire IT departments being offshored.
The dice message boards are chock full of posts like this:
"What can I do now? I graduated from some 'prestigious' four year university . . . with a 3.25+ gpa and have been looking for software work for close to a year now. Really, I am sick of looking for work + rejection now."
Have to agree. Since when is it considered illegal for me to give away my own content, if I chose to do so? How is that forcing anybody else to give away content? How is that stealing anything?
The few jobs in IT that can not be offshored are being taken over by guest workers. Since almost all guest workers are men, almost everybody in IT is male.
I doubt US IT jobs are growing, the BLS is using old statistics, or just plain BS. But even if IT jobs are growing, those jobs are not going to US workers. US tech companies are laying off US workers in droves, and hiring guest workers to take the place of the US workers.
Practically all US tech companies have announced huge layoffs in that last two years. The same companies are offshoring IT jobs, and hiring H1Bs, and lobbying congress to raise H1B caps.
Not if you are James Gosling, Guy Steele, Peter Norvig, Ken Tompson, Bjarne Stoustroup, Joshua Block, Donald Knuth etc.
Do those guys really represent typical "IT workers?" To me, IT workers are software developers, system administrators, network engineers, database administrators, and the like. Entrepreneurs, college professors, and people who have been somewhat famous for decades hardly seem to represent the typical situation.
Looking at the reviews for kindle on Amazon, it becomes apparent that a lot of kindle owners do not consider the dark-gray, against a slightly lighter-gray background, to be eye-strain free.
Where I work, the lighting is somewhat dim which is good for reading computer monitors. I can read technical books without any problems but I cannot read text on the Kindle without straining my eyes. Adding a lamp to my office would cause annoying reflections on the shiny computer monitors.
the Kindle 2 has low contrast. The screen background is very dark. Why the background is gray and not white is puzzling to me. The text is also not black, but light black. To me it looks like gray on gray and is completely not acceptable. I was further shocked to find that there is no way to adjust the contrast. That is really messed up.
Trying to read black lettering on grey background is difficult. I called to see if the contrast or backlight could be adjusted and no such luck.
I think the belief that IT workers are washed-up at 40 is fairly widespread. Some believe that the H1B flooding is actually designed to get rid of older IT workers.
* The fact that they get battery life in weeks instead of hours
I don't need something to last weeks, 8 hours is fine.
* The fact that they use minimal power between page flips (vs. a relatively steady draw)
See above.
* The fact that they are easier on the eyes
For reading indoors, an LCD is just as good, maybe better. At least from my experience, and I have terrible vision. I have read my iPod Touch for hours without my eyes getting tired - wearing my readers, of course.
* The fact that they are more easily read in sunlight...
As far as I can tell, that's only real advantage of dedicated ebook reader. For the $498 price take, I would rather use a regular book.
Benefits of netbook:
* Much cheaper * Far more powerful and flexible. Not just a uni-tastker * Back-lit screen can be read in the dark. * Color screen * Can read any format: chm, doc, pdf, whatever. This is my biggest complaint against dedicated ebook readers, none of them read a pdf very well, and converters do not work very well either.
Sadly, Islam is actually relatively well-behaved by historical standards.
Why do Islamic apologists always compare Muslim nations today, to Christian nations of centuries ago, or millennia ago?
Muslims may not have changed their barbaric ways in the last 1000 years, but Christian nations are entirely different. In fact the Christian nations of centuries back are not really even Christian any more, the nations are primarily secular.
Public beheading, death by being stoning, amputation as punishment for stealing, a raped woman being sentenced to beating and incarceration because she accepted a ride with a man, death sentence for peaceful protests; yeah, that is really "well behaved."
What about all the execs at google, yahoo, microsoft, ask, and so on? What about the creators of south park? There must be thousands, maybe millions, of people just as blasphemous as Zuckenberg.
I don't hate Apple, I own an iPod Touch, and an iPod Shuffle, both great devices.
Still, the iPhone does not seem to have the smart-phone market to itself anymore. I think it's fair to say that HTC Android phones equal, or surpass, the iPhone in many ways - certainly in terms of openness.
And you must admit, there are a lot of negatives associated with the AT&T network.
I am just surprised that the iPhone is still popular.
This guy explains it better than I can. I ripped the post from another board, link is at the bottom.
To go directly to the point, I think that the "linux desktop" needs a small, fast, fully-featured graphical backend. This backend should provide basic drawing primitives, input device event handling, network transparency, but should not involve itself with higher-level graphical interface design (like buttons and menus). So far, I suspect that most of the above posters would agree with this notion. Here is where we diverge: I do not think that X11 is small, fast, or fully-featured. And I think that there are fundamental aspects of the X11 protocol which will prevent any implementation from working well.
The first fundamental problem is that X11 is implemented using an asynchronous model. In other words, to raise a window one cannot simply call XMapWindow to map a window. One must call XMapWindow, which will transmit that command to the server, then one waits for the server to respond with a MapNotify event, and then one can proceed. When running over a network this potentially allows the client to send off multiple commands before waiting for the response to a single command, allowing improved performance. But when run on the local machine, this requires a great deal of round-trip communication that produces latency that causes many users to perceive X11 programs as "slow." This problem has been reduced somewhat through the use of shared memory, but still hinders performance. The asynchronous model was an excellent decision for the 1980s when most programs ran over the network. But in the current day, the backend is optimized for a use-case that is rarely used.
Beyond performance issues, the asynchronous model is also the root cause of much of the flickering that occurs on the desktop. As widgets are moved around, the asynchronous model causes repaints to occur while the windows are still in flux resulting in flickering. The developers at QT have effectively already abandoned X11 (or at least a good part of the design) by moving all of the event handling into the QT library to circumvent this flickering (see http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2007/08/09/qt-invaded-by-aliens-the-end-of-all- flicker).
A second fundamental problem with X11 is the absence of resolution independence. X11 describes all coordinates using integers that represent pixel positions. As screen sizes change and pixels become smaller (or less likely larger), then the display begins to appear pixelated. In a resolution independent scheme, all coordinates are described using floating-point values so that display is rendered correctly regardless of the screen size. Again, going with integers positions was an excellent design decision for the 1980s but is no longer an effective design. In the 1980s many of machines shipped without a math co-processor, so that floating-point operations were much much slower than integer operations and the quality of the graphical output was arguably less important. Today, virtually any modern processor has a math co-processor that can perform multiple floating-point operations per clock cycle. The difference in performance that would result from the use of integers rather than floating-point values is gone, the only thing that remains is the pixelation.
The last main problem with X11 is the profound lack of functionality. Some of the above posters have claimed that now that X11 has compositing it has pretty much everything quartz has. To be blunt, this is very very far from the truth. Competing graphical backends (e.g., Quartz) provide much stronger support for anti-aliased drawing (not just text but lines and polygons), gradients, transforms, shadows, patterns, transparency, font selection, color spaces, and data output (to screen, PDF, or Postscript). Modern linux programs compensate for the inadequacies of the X11 protocol by performing this rendering within the toolkit. GTK use
Does anyone remember X11 running a 486-100mhz with 16Meg of memory?
I have done that sort of thing, lots of times. Every time, it makes me think that Linux zealots must have a screw loose. One thing I can tell you for certain: NT 4.0 graphics were far superior on such a system.
Right now, I am running X11 on 3ghz system with 2gb of ram, and the performance is barely adequate. It pixelates like made. I get flicker, and tracing. Performance is far inferior to XP running on the same system.
I have not done any side by side comparisons with Android, but as I understand it, android was designed for devices. X-Window was designed for a network where a separate computer ran the windows manager. X-Window was also designed for systems that did not have a numeric processor, so X uses integers instead of floating point, which is why we get so much pixelation with X.
Slashdot Mirror
Wireless is affordable now. The students have to pay for internet one way or another, why not leave the schools out of it? Get a sprint phone, and you have an hub that will support 8 devices for an extra $30 a month.
Just because this company is going to "train their own" doesn't mean they're going to leave out the fundamentals and theory. The school of hard knocks can teach those too
True, but when you hire somebody who has been trained, from a reputable source, you know that person has training in fundamentals, and theory. Let's be honest, most self-taught developers are pure hackers - they just never see any need for learning theory.
You say some people who have training don't seem to know much about theory. I am sure that is true. But, is that not just as true for doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, etc? So why not do away with all forms of formal training and all forms of formal credentials (i.e. all degrees, all licenses, and all certifications)?
After all, there is nothing that you can learn in school, that can not be taught by other means. And there is no formal credential that absolutely guarantees competence.
Maybe it's just me, but I have always had bad experiences with self taught developers. In my experience, such developers have no concept of structured development practices. They tend to be spaghetti coders who break every rule of good development practices wholesale. They make extensive use of global variables, they see no reason for any kind of documentation, or internal consistency, or for meaningful variable names, and so on.
From what I have seen: the self taught typically learn the syntax of a language, then they just hack away until something seems to work. This method actually works well enough, as long as you are only working with your own code. But when other people have to work with such code, it tends to be a problem.
It's one of the reasons I got out of development. It really sucks to start a new job, and have somebody dump a load of undocumented, spaghetti coded, barf in your lap. Then you are told it only needs a few small changes, and that shouldn't take too long, right?
Working in IT means you are competing with 3rd world wages. There is no way that most western workers can do that. The few IT jobs that can not be offshored right now, will be staffed by foreign guest workers until the job can be offshored.
Maybe US workers with top-secret clearances can find jobs.
In some ways, IT is even easier to offshore than manufacturing. With IT, you do have physical items to ship. As I write this, I am seeing entire IT departments being offshored.
The dice message boards are chock full of posts like this:
"What can I do now? I graduated from some 'prestigious' four year university . . . with a 3.25+ gpa and have been looking for software work for close to a year now. Really, I am sick of looking for work + rejection now."
Please take a quick look at this blog article:
http://techtoil.org/doku.php?id=articles:news_and_commentary
Have to agree. Since when is it considered illegal for me to give away my own content, if I chose to do so? How is that forcing anybody else to give away content? How is that stealing anything?
I don't know, but I suspect that most money from movies, books, or songs, is made in the first year.
Good point. Why no screaming and crying about the lack of male RNs?
The few jobs in IT that can not be offshored are being taken over by guest workers. Since almost all guest workers are men, almost everybody in IT is male.
I doubt US IT jobs are growing, the BLS is using old statistics, or just plain BS. But even if IT jobs are growing, those jobs are not going to US workers. US tech companies are laying off US workers in droves, and hiring guest workers to take the place of the US workers.
Practically all US tech companies have announced huge layoffs in that last two years. The same companies are offshoring IT jobs, and hiring H1Bs, and lobbying congress to raise H1B caps.
Microsoft also forced TomTom into a cross-patent agreement. Is MS "siding" with HTC the same way that MS was "siding" with TomTom?
Not if you are James Gosling, Guy Steele, Peter Norvig, Ken Tompson, Bjarne Stoustroup, Joshua Block, Donald Knuth etc.
Do those guys really represent typical "IT workers?" To me, IT workers are software developers, system administrators, network engineers, database administrators, and the like. Entrepreneurs, college professors, and people who have been somewhat famous for decades hardly seem to represent the typical situation.
Looking at the reviews for kindle on Amazon, it becomes apparent that a lot of kindle owners do not consider the dark-gray, against a slightly lighter-gray background, to be eye-strain free.
Where I work, the lighting is somewhat dim which is good for reading computer monitors. I can read technical books without any problems but I cannot read text on the Kindle without straining my eyes. Adding a lamp to my office would cause annoying reflections on the shiny computer monitors.
the Kindle 2 has low contrast. The screen background is very dark. Why the background is gray and not white is puzzling to me. The text is also not black, but light black. To me it looks like gray on gray and is completely not acceptable. I was further shocked to find that there is no way to adjust the contrast. That is really messed up.
Trying to read black lettering on grey background is difficult. I called to see if the contrast or backlight could be adjusted and no such luck.
I think the belief that IT workers are washed-up at 40 is fairly widespread. Some believe that the H1B flooding is actually designed to get rid of older IT workers.
* The fact that they get battery life in weeks instead of hours
I don't need something to last weeks, 8 hours is fine.
* The fact that they use minimal power between page flips (vs. a relatively steady draw)
See above.
* The fact that they are easier on the eyes
For reading indoors, an LCD is just as good, maybe better. At least from my experience, and I have terrible vision. I have read my iPod Touch for hours without my eyes getting tired - wearing my readers, of course.
* The fact that they are more easily read in sunlight...
As far as I can tell, that's only real advantage of dedicated ebook reader. For the $498 price take, I would rather use a regular book.
Benefits of netbook:
* Much cheaper
* Far more powerful and flexible. Not just a uni-tastker
* Back-lit screen can be read in the dark.
* Color screen
* Can read any format: chm, doc, pdf, whatever. This is my biggest complaint against dedicated ebook readers, none of them read a pdf very well, and converters do not work very well either.
Sadly, Islam is actually relatively well-behaved by historical standards.
Why do Islamic apologists always compare Muslim nations today, to Christian nations of centuries ago, or millennia ago?
Muslims may not have changed their barbaric ways in the last 1000 years, but Christian nations are entirely different. In fact the Christian nations of centuries back are not really even Christian any more, the nations are primarily secular.
Public beheading, death by being stoning, amputation as punishment for stealing, a raped woman being sentenced to beating and incarceration because she accepted a ride with a man, death sentence for peaceful protests; yeah, that is really "well behaved."
In Iran, people can be sentenced to death by stoning. People can be put to death for peaceful protests. Watch "The Neda Effect."
In Saudi, a woman who was raped was sentenced to be brutally beaten, and incarcerated, because she accepted a ride from a man.
What about all the execs at google, yahoo, microsoft, ask, and so on? What about the creators of south park? There must be thousands, maybe millions, of people just as blasphemous as Zuckenberg.
What does the Arduino diddly do?
My, aren't we touchy?
I don't hate Apple, I own an iPod Touch, and an iPod Shuffle, both great devices.
Still, the iPhone does not seem to have the smart-phone market to itself anymore. I think it's fair to say that HTC Android phones equal, or surpass, the iPhone in many ways - certainly in terms of openness.
And you must admit, there are a lot of negatives associated with the AT&T network.
I am just surprised that the iPhone is still popular.
Evo looks sweet to me, and it's getting some good reviews.
Lots of people seem to be fed up with Jobs "walled garden" - crappy iTunes has to be used for everything, no SD card or USB ports, no flash.
AT&T network is getting slammed all over the place - slow, unreliable, and insecure.
Novell Wipes the Floor with SCO
"it (SCO) should have gotten them (copyrights) under the intent of the original deal."
http://linux.sys-con.com/node/1428534/print
Buck up. Microsoft has lots of new shows planned.
But that's a netbook, not a touchscreen device.
This guy explains it better than I can. I ripped the post from another board, link is at the bottom.
To go directly to the point, I think that the "linux desktop" needs a small, fast, fully-featured graphical backend. This backend should provide basic drawing primitives, input device event handling, network transparency, but should not involve itself with higher-level graphical interface design (like buttons and menus). So far, I suspect that most of the above posters would agree with this notion. Here is where we diverge: I do not think that X11 is small, fast, or fully-featured. And I think that there are fundamental aspects of the X11 protocol which will prevent any implementation from working well.
The first fundamental problem is that X11 is implemented using an asynchronous model. In other words, to raise a window one cannot simply call XMapWindow to map a window. One must call XMapWindow, which will transmit that command to the server, then one waits for the server to respond with a MapNotify event, and then one can proceed. When running over a network this potentially allows the client to send off multiple commands before waiting for the response to a single command, allowing improved performance. But when run on the local machine, this requires a great deal of round-trip communication that produces latency that causes many users to perceive X11 programs as "slow." This problem has been reduced somewhat through the use of shared memory, but still hinders performance. The asynchronous model was an excellent decision for the 1980s when most programs ran over the network. But in the current day, the backend is optimized for a use-case that is rarely used.
Beyond performance issues, the asynchronous model is also the root cause of much of the flickering that occurs on the desktop. As widgets are moved around, the asynchronous model causes repaints to occur while the windows are still in flux resulting in flickering. The developers at QT have effectively already abandoned X11 (or at least a good part of the design) by moving all of the event handling into the QT library to circumvent this flickering (see http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2007/08/09/qt-invaded-by-aliens-the-end-of-all- flicker).
A second fundamental problem with X11 is the absence of resolution independence. X11 describes all coordinates using integers that represent pixel positions. As screen sizes change and pixels become smaller (or less likely larger), then the display begins to appear pixelated. In a resolution independent scheme, all coordinates are described using floating-point values so that display is rendered correctly regardless of the screen size. Again, going with integers positions was an excellent design decision for the 1980s but is no longer an effective design. In the 1980s many of machines shipped without a math co-processor, so that floating-point operations were much much slower than integer operations and the quality of the graphical output was arguably less important. Today, virtually any modern processor has a math co-processor that can perform multiple floating-point operations per clock cycle. The difference in performance that would result from the use of integers rather than floating-point values is gone, the only thing that remains is the pixelation.
The last main problem with X11 is the profound lack of functionality. Some of the above posters have claimed that now that X11 has compositing it has pretty much everything quartz has. To be blunt, this is very very far from the truth. Competing graphical backends (e.g., Quartz) provide much stronger support for anti-aliased drawing (not just text but lines and polygons), gradients, transforms, shadows, patterns, transparency, font selection, color spaces, and data output (to screen, PDF, or Postscript). Modern linux programs compensate for the inadequacies of the X11 protocol by performing this rendering within the toolkit. GTK use
Does anyone remember X11 running a 486-100mhz with 16Meg of memory?
I have done that sort of thing, lots of times. Every time, it makes me think that Linux zealots must have a screw loose. One thing I can tell you for certain: NT 4.0 graphics were far superior on such a system.
Right now, I am running X11 on 3ghz system with 2gb of ram, and the performance is barely adequate. It pixelates like made. I get flicker, and tracing. Performance is far inferior to XP running on the same system.
I have not done any side by side comparisons with Android, but as I understand it, android was designed for devices. X-Window was designed for a network where a separate computer ran the windows manager. X-Window was also designed for systems that did not have a numeric processor, so X uses integers instead of floating point, which is why we get so much pixelation with X.