I tend to disagree as the trend towards masters degrees in most if not all professions is happening regardless of the economic cycle in the past few decades.
My exwife is a teacher and a masters degree is required in most schools for entry level positions. BS about being highly qualified puts financial pressures on schools to hire teachers with masters degrees to be No Child Left Behind compliant. It angered me agreatly as this cost $40,000 more in student loans in addition to the $70,000 to be a teacher before the standard was changed while she went to school.... for of course all for a job that pays $45,000! We divorced eventually over the student loan debt.
Anyway usually some lawyer sues a company for a wrongful termination or a discrimination of some sort and an employer can be under hot water if he hires people who are *perceived* to be underqualified. Which is why computer science degrees are required to answer help desk phones. If you need to can someone they can sue and a lawyer can say you were not prudent enough to your hiring processes. My brother works for a major fortune 100 company where they have this policy.
Or the other reason is some dumb executive or HR weenie notices bad employees who ass kissed their way up shouldn't be there. So they make up rules like all our managers must have MBA's etc.
Either way this and the simply laws of supply and demand dictate education requirements. If you needed someone smart to do something in 1960 the top 10% had a 4 year degree. Today generation Y it is closer to 40% or more for a bachelors (I do not have number), but the top 10% have a masters. VIOLA. If you need the top 10% of the brightest employees the masters really is the bachelors of 50 years ago. Plain and simple.
It doesn't do anything well. Rather it has many plugins that try to do everything else.
Chrome is like Vi which it does text editing very simply, elegantly, and very light and fast. However, this drives people absolutely mad if they need anything more than what is there.
"I thought the Keynesians were predicting that with the stimulus we wouldn't see more than 8.5% unemployment?">
The economy and GDP contracted more in the last 3 months of 2008 and into 2009 than in the half of the 1930's. Household wealth vanished by 15% in just 90 days! We would be at 30% unemployment by now if we did nothing and yes he saved 8 million or more jobs at least.
"Weren't the Keynesians through the 2000s saying that housing was a good deal and everyone should get a house? " No. Cite a source? That was made up by FoxNews but the vast majority of the foreclosed homes were not given to under class minority Americans. The foreclosed homes were because the bank promised some families that the mortgage would never go above x amount, and 2 years later it went up 2x because they were not fixed rate. That was fraud. The lack of background checking was another reason.
"Didn't the Austrians predict throughout the 2000s that the enormous bubble in housing, caused by Government intrusion into the marketplace, would bring down the entire U.S. economy? --"
Wrong. They did predict that the amount of debt was problematic and many keynesians noticed that the savings rate was dangerously low and that was bad. Nowhere is there evidence regulation caused the crash.
Evidence support deregulation as the cause. If we kept glass-steagull the banks would not be flipping these toxic loans to wall street who gambled and played them like a game of hot potato until the one holding them lost all the money when it crashed. We need more regulation and the market can readjust. The sole reason the banks were handing out loans like candy is because it was not there problem if they foreclosed. That is Wall Streets problem. Wall Street also had insurance agains't losses from AIG that made it even more messy and encouraged more reckless behavior.
This is very scary. Basically Oracle can simply sue every Linux distro because it has diff, patch, yum/apt-get, or synaptic and I would not be surprised to see Oracle file injuctions to halt every free distro from existence as they love to pick on the small guys who little pockets who can't defend themselves.
Oracle's true intentions are not in the software product but it's patents. The RHN is effectively Oracle's IP until they can throw it out in court.
The key here is that Harper *appointed the judges* and they were not elected. Usually elected officials support the people but with lobbying they all need money from the corporations and special interest business groups to run the fancy commercials on TV in the states.
Appointed judges are much more impartial even if they are more conservative from Harper. They will not feel the pressure to canter to Cisco or risk losing their career in the next election cycle.
GPL 2 wont stop the patents and there are loopholes. RMS created GPL v. 3 mainly to stop patented software. No where in the GPL does it say you can't patent it and sue others who use it.
Patents are not a user right but a monopoly on a product or idea given complete ownership. You may have all the rights to use it under the GPL V. 2 but you can not own it and yes the patent holder has a right to stop you from reproducing it as that is not a right.
"there are still actual judges on this planet after all..... "
Notice this judge is not an American one. If it were you bet he would probably be in the slammer as many judges are elected by businesses who lobby for pro corporate friendly judges to rule in their favor. Canada has actual sanity and does not allow this appauling abuse.
Yeah and too bad that K-Splice has 3 patents that cover splicing the kernel.
So go fork all you want. Within 24 hours you will have an army of lawyers claiming they own your FOSS project.
Knowing Oracle I figured there had to be a more sinister reason to purchase it. So I did a Google search and sure enough found that link and my suspicions were correct. The moral of the story is if you want to be bought out by Oracle then patent the hell out of your product. Oracle is after the patents and not the software and will be happy to sue anyone who needs this functionality. Unlike Goolge, Redhat does not have the resources to go up and defend itself agaisn't such a powerful litigant.
So we all heard we would be suffering hyperinflation back in Early 2009 when it finally came into law. LOOK OUT!!!
Well, it is now 2011. Where is this hyperinflation you speak? I do not see runs on the bank. I do not see the cost of goods going up by the hour like in Weinmar Germany. I do not see riots.
I am becoming a more liberal keyesian economic supporter if anything. Basically in a *normal* economy if the fed did something stupid like this then yes we would have massive hyperinflation, rising costs by the day, riots, and currency being worth nothing next to nothing as you can't buy squat with it. The fact that is it not happening at all shows us that your classical economists...cough... austrian...Paul Ryan... viewpoints are discredited. What is scary for me is they are becoming more mainstream again with the cult of Fox News and Goldline.
Basically Keyesian economics states that demand side, rather than Reagan supply side creates jobs and more goods and services. This whole recession was started because the private sector distorted the free market by deregulation of financial services and loans mixed with the gamblers on Wall Street. The prospensity to consume is hugely influential in consumers behaviors more than cheap prices. If people are scared to spend they will save. Too many universities only teach the conservative classical view of economics where prices and supply always correct each other that complete ignore demand and other factors.
The US and world had a depression in 1873 as well when gold was the standard. It was not as bad as the Great Depression but it was servre and lasted for 7 years. 1812 may have been another one, but we lack economic data at the time to make it a conclusion. Gold would work if we all used it for currency and nothing else but we still trade it without another for purchases.
Yeah and when data is lost and the middleware app crashes then who is at blame? I doubt the DBA as he/she did not implement it. The manager would have some explaining to do to IT on why he thought he could circumvent the DBA and corporate policies.
However I have worked with database software that needed to 1. Compare several tables in different databases 2. Do relational logic to analyize relationships, hence relational RDBMS.
A typical business task at work would be to figure out if a discount worked and by how much with certain stores in only a certain section of the country. Gee, I would need a SQL join (I hear the booing of the noSQL evanglists on that) to look at the orders database, the pricing database, as well as the inventory and store database which are on 2 different tables. Explain how I could do this without a RDMS? I could be full of it, but all the *lack of scalability* arguments the noSQL crowd uses can not produce the same results without joins. Frankly, I need to compare several terabytes of data and write software that triggers and records a log about it so I can let the executives know what is going on in business. Joins are a necessary evil and Oracle does managing very large data quickly quite well as slashdotters hate them.
All I see noSQL databases are good for is storing and retrieving data. I need to compare it, view it, perform logic, and most importantly compare several tables. I also have to work with MS Access or Crystal reports so my boss can pay me. What is the point of storing data if you are not going to use it? Until someone can tell me that a noSQL database can do these things it is all hogwash.
The issue with SQL is with joins particularly. MySQl is not a noSQL solution to this problem. If you do not use them and just need a single database you will be fine with traditional SQL. NoSQL wont be a benefit. If you host a simple website you wont run into that scalability problem.
Now imagine your a systam analyst who needs joins to do things, such as comparing a pricing database with a sales order database to see if a discount worked and by how much? This is where you need join. Now imagine the size of both databases are 1 terabyte? Also imagine you have to pull this data from a regular ethernet connection shared by 100 other users only offering 10 mpbs speed? Also imagine the database is distributed among a cluster of computers and the RDMS needs to wait on the other servers to pull the whole table? See the performance problem?
Can noSQL offer a solution where I could do this?
My above example is why companies love Oracle and people doing analysis or statistics or even accountants need joins. The problem is with many databases and big iron and probably fiber optic connections and switches is that it gets very very expensive and is too much for a startup. The licensing costs then come up as well. Zdnet (dont have link) did an article showing it would cost $650,000,000 for Google to use Oracle to host Youtube. I can see why they went with their own solution.
This is what you get when government bureaucrats are bribed and bidders take the rest of platforms that are needed. Surprise, since I.T. in these departments have no say in the purchases all hell breaks loose and the government wonders why hundreds of billions of dollars are missing. Meanwhile the corrupt companies use that money earned to buy off more politicians to write laws stating to buy their products at inflated prices where you and I pay for them in our taxes. Lovely... anyone in the private sector knows what I am talking about too with this. Specifically when a CEO has lunch with his buddy at Crapware Inc, which sells a product that you need to support that only works with Windows Vista update 23303 on May 12th 2009... on a tuesday, in addition to another product that Crapware Inc. sells, that only works with IE 6 in Windows XP with Java 1.3.1, not 1.3.2 or 1.3.0, which all of course has to communicate together. More fun and joy and of course it is all your fault and not the CEO if it is expensive and can't work together you are the computer guy right?
The difference is in government all software and hardware is done this way and not just for some dumb executive's decision one time. Maybe if the pentagon had a CIO who made these decisions instead they could standardize on a platform so they can talk to each other.
Would you suggest Google start laying off people and implementing hiring freezes instead to boast its share price to pay off Apple? Believe me Wall Street loves doing this to companies and making them lean. They see numbers on spreadsheets and not the morale and productivity on an individual basis drop, or the top talent leaving.
If Wall Street hires an efficiency expert and they see 20% wasted time you can bet they would flip! The pressure would be on the CEO's to resign or cut costs aggresively in such a situation.
It sucks but if you sell you soul to the devil you eventually need to pay its dues. I plan to start a web business myself and I can tell you now I wont allow 20% personal time for my employees. My investors will have a fit and replace me FAST. Maybe if I become big and do not have Wall Street breathing down my neck it would be different.
WIth billions in royalities to Apple and Google not driving the revenue increases it once did something must give. If you do not like it stay private and never go public.
Well, they are a pubically traded company that needs to grow every quarter in compressed 8 to 12 week time frames to boast its share price. Like most companies the need to cut costs and increase productivity.
The employees need to work 20% harder the same price and you can do this by having them focus on products which generate income. It is a business and not a fun place to experiment with cool toys.
The worst situation would be for the Wall Street investors to march in and hire efficiency experts who will then demand to force layoffs, hiring freezes, and benefit cuts, etc. This will foce the top talent to leave and kill morale and productivity. Look at what happened with HP and IBM? Need I say more? No one who is bright would ever consider working there now. Google is in trouble. Apple is suing them to death and its ad revenue is not generating that constant income increase every 8 to 12 weeks to boast their share price.
They need R&D of course, but they need to keep expanding and the best thing to do is increase productivity to keep its stock price highest.
Make sure it is hot pluggable with USB (if one exists yet) as both IDE and Scsi have changed many times with incompatible adapters and cables with different plugs. Odds are they will change again and be unreadable in a couple of years.
Dvd's have rot in which the metallic thin sheet peels off. They say it is based on UV light damage but I found a Gentoo cd under a dark bed in a blinded room from 2005 that is rotting away as we speak. So BluRay discs are out of the question.
Another slashdotter mentioned an external hard drive but magnetic interference from the Earth would erase it like my old audio tapes within a decade or two.
Whatever you choose make sure it is external as USB and Firewire like to remain backwards compatible and this makes it easy to share between machines. Something solid state is the best way to make sure the data remains secure. Or find an internet provider where you can upload it too if you do not mind paying per month or year.
Your post is the first I have seen to show why you need to use anything but IE 6 to the PHBs. Since major sites like CNN and of course the corporate sites all support it then they keep IE 6. If everyone else keeps IE 6 around then the PHBs expect everyone else to support it creating a viscious cycle. I hate these customers saying their webmasters suck if they can't get a great looking website done in IE 6 that looks as good through all browsers in just a day. If it is broken and productivity is being lost then you can put a $$ sign at least, or even better convince them just to upgrade all at once to Windows 7 Pro and IE 8 or IE 9. I know it is like pulling teeth as their job is not play with toys, but work needs to be done and more and more sites wont work, customers will be emailing.docx files, and html 5 is coming, and AJAX is already here with GoogleDocs. The sales team would love to be able to use Google maps fast with AJAX and yes they are being paid to wait for IE 6 and hacks to pop up.
Just this year I finally starting emailing docx files as I no longer have to fear of someone running Office 2000 unable to open my documents. Same is true for everyone else.
Haha that link was intended for humor. It is intended to be a shocker site for my web developer friends like goatse or 2girls1cup. See the section on getting the W3C to change standards to support ie 6?
Unfortunately I am getting some very corporate custumers soon as I am learning the ins and outs of IE 6 and 7 as they will refuse to do business to anyone who doesnt cater to their taste of IE.
There is a HUGE version difference IE 6 and IE 8. IE 8 is actually ok and is a decent 2009 era browser that is relevent and fine for average browsing still today and secure. Html 4 renders compliantly between to firefox 2 and 3. IE 6 is condidered quirks mode in modern versions of IE where webmasters memorize race conditions strange things like ppx doubles in borders compared to everyone else. IE 6 and 7 are really really bad while most on your site who use IE probably all use 8 which is minima l to support
"The massively conservative won't switch until almost everybody else does, it's pointless to look to them for early adopters.
"
The issue is the massively conservative are becoming the new moderate majority. I am quite shocked to read all the pro Windows XP posts here on slashdot. Slashdot users are the ones who *should* welcome change more and experiment before the average users. If half the users here prefer Firefox 3.6 and Windows XP then these tech giants and I.T. consultants are in trouble.
If I had a time machine back in 2001, and told everyone that the majority of slashdot users and the world perfer 10 year old operating systems in the future people would laugh. It is the equilivent of turning down Windows XP for Windows 3.0 when it was new. That would have been ludcrious. Today, this is common sense and mainstream. Is it the recession?
Get with the program and stop whining if newer versions of your apps or your kinetic thingie or IE 9 wont run on a decade old platform. It is kike whining that MS Office 2000 wont run on Dos or Windows 3.0.
China is a much poorer country and I understand this. However it near impossible for any modern browser to get above a 4 or 6% marketshare as web developers live a a decade in the past and so do its citizens. This is plain silly.
That might be a mistake depending on your site. Here in North America or even Europe I would ignore IE 6 unless it is a very corporate site. Chinese do buy things online and ActiveX is required there and so are crippled computers with pirates operating systems that Windows Update can't upgrade to IE 8 easily. I know webmasters want to burn all copies of IE 6, but China is different and IE 8 can run in compatibilty mode so coding once for ActiveX and IE 6 is viable. Everyone else does it so it is standard as much as we hate it.
Banks and most e-commerce websites require ActiveX controls thanks to export bans on encryption back in the 1990s. SSL is not preferred as it was only 64 bit until a few years ago. This was also way Apple gave up on Korea a few years back, as Macs were useless due to every site that needed SSL simply required ActiveX a decade ago and most still do today.
Requiring genuine copies of XP prevents Windows Update to upgrade these users to IE 8 which is much better than IE 6 and at least considered a modern 2009/2010 era browser. IE 8 is popular in China too but most versions of cracked XP still ship with IE 6 and are impossible to upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to disagree as the trend towards masters degrees in most if not all professions is happening regardless of the economic cycle in the past few decades.
My exwife is a teacher and a masters degree is required in most schools for entry level positions. BS about being highly qualified puts financial pressures on schools to hire teachers with masters degrees to be No Child Left Behind compliant. It angered me agreatly as this cost $40,000 more in student loans in addition to the $70,000 to be a teacher before the standard was changed while she went to school. ... for of course all for a job that pays $45,000! We divorced eventually over the student loan debt.
Anyway usually some lawyer sues a company for a wrongful termination or a discrimination of some sort and an employer can be under hot water if he hires people who are *perceived* to be underqualified. Which is why computer science degrees are required to answer help desk phones. If you need to can someone they can sue and a lawyer can say you were not prudent enough to your hiring processes. My brother works for a major fortune 100 company where they have this policy.
Or the other reason is some dumb executive or HR weenie notices bad employees who ass kissed their way up shouldn't be there. So they make up rules like all our managers must have MBA's etc.
Either way this and the simply laws of supply and demand dictate education requirements. If you needed someone smart to do something in 1960 the top 10% had a 4 year degree. Today generation Y it is closer to 40% or more for a bachelors (I do not have number), but the top 10% have a masters. VIOLA. If you need the top 10% of the brightest employees the masters really is the bachelors of 50 years ago. Plain and simple.
It doesn't do anything well. Rather it has many plugins that try to do everything else.
Chrome is like Vi which it does text editing very simply, elegantly, and very light and fast. However, this drives people absolutely mad if they need anything more than what is there.
I guess this makes IE like Visual Studio.
"I thought the Keynesians were predicting that with the stimulus we wouldn't see more than 8.5% unemployment?">
The economy and GDP contracted more in the last 3 months of 2008 and into 2009 than in the half of the 1930's. Household wealth vanished by 15% in just 90 days! We would be at 30% unemployment by now if we did nothing and yes he saved 8 million or more jobs at least.
"Weren't the Keynesians through the 2000s saying that housing was a good deal and everyone should get a house? " No. Cite a source? That was made up by FoxNews but the vast majority of the foreclosed homes were not given to under class minority Americans. The foreclosed homes were because the bank promised some families that the mortgage would never go above x amount, and 2 years later it went up 2x because they were not fixed rate. That was fraud. The lack of background checking was another reason.
"Didn't the Austrians predict throughout the 2000s that the enormous bubble in housing, caused by Government intrusion into the marketplace, would bring down the entire U.S. economy?
--"
Wrong. They did predict that the amount of debt was problematic and many keynesians noticed that the savings rate was dangerously low and that was bad. Nowhere is there evidence regulation caused the crash.
Evidence support deregulation as the cause. If we kept glass-steagull the banks would not be flipping these toxic loans to wall street who gambled and played them like a game of hot potato until the one holding them lost all the money when it crashed. We need more regulation and the market can readjust. The sole reason the banks were handing out loans like candy is because it was not there problem if they foreclosed. That is Wall Streets problem. Wall Street also had insurance agains't losses from AIG that made it even more messy and encouraged more reckless behavior.
I dont think so
Patent #1 is finding a safe time to update your software. That means Ubuntu and Windows update violate Oracle's patents because they check at a certain time of the day.
Patent #2 Is finding out which bits of code are changed in a patch. Gnu Diff, RHN, and Patch violate Oracle's new property on checking to see how a patch changed a file.
This is very scary. Basically Oracle can simply sue every Linux distro because it has diff, patch, yum/apt-get, or synaptic and I would not be surprised to see Oracle file injuctions to halt every free distro from existence as they love to pick on the small guys who little pockets who can't defend themselves.
Oracle's true intentions are not in the software product but it's patents. The RHN is effectively Oracle's IP until they can throw it out in court.
The key here is that Harper *appointed the judges* and they were not elected. Usually elected officials support the people but with lobbying they all need money from the corporations and special interest business groups to run the fancy commercials on TV in the states.
Appointed judges are much more impartial even if they are more conservative from Harper. They will not feel the pressure to canter to Cisco or risk losing their career in the next election cycle.
GPL 2 wont stop the patents and there are loopholes. RMS created GPL v. 3 mainly to stop patented software. No where in the GPL does it say you can't patent it and sue others who use it.
Patents are not a user right but a monopoly on a product or idea given complete ownership. You may have all the rights to use it under the GPL V. 2 but you can not own it and yes the patent holder has a right to stop you from reproducing it as that is not a right.
"there are still actual judges on this planet after all .....
"
Notice this judge is not an American one. If it were you bet he would probably be in the slammer as many judges are elected by businesses who lobby for pro corporate friendly judges to rule in their favor. Canada has actual sanity and does not allow this appauling abuse.
Yeah and too bad that K-Splice has 3 patents that cover splicing the kernel.
So go fork all you want. Within 24 hours you will have an army of lawyers claiming they own your FOSS project.
Knowing Oracle I figured there had to be a more sinister reason to purchase it. So I did a Google search and sure enough found that link and my suspicions were correct. The moral of the story is if you want to be bought out by Oracle then patent the hell out of your product. Oracle is after the patents and not the software and will be happy to sue anyone who needs this functionality. Unlike Goolge, Redhat does not have the resources to go up and defend itself agaisn't such a powerful litigant.
So we all heard we would be suffering hyperinflation back in Early 2009 when it finally came into law. LOOK OUT!!!
Well, it is now 2011. Where is this hyperinflation you speak? I do not see runs on the bank. I do not see the cost of goods going up by the hour like in Weinmar Germany. I do not see riots.
I am becoming a more liberal keyesian economic supporter if anything. Basically in a *normal* economy if the fed did something stupid like this then yes we would have massive hyperinflation, rising costs by the day, riots, and currency being worth nothing next to nothing as you can't buy squat with it. The fact that is it not happening at all shows us that your classical economists ...cough ... austrian...Paul Ryan ... viewpoints are discredited. What is scary for me is they are becoming more mainstream again with the cult of Fox News and Goldline.
Basically Keyesian economics states that demand side, rather than Reagan supply side creates jobs and more goods and services. This whole recession was started because the private sector distorted the free market by deregulation of financial services and loans mixed with the gamblers on Wall Street. The prospensity to consume is hugely influential in consumers behaviors more than cheap prices. If people are scared to spend they will save. Too many universities only teach the conservative classical view of economics where prices and supply always correct each other that complete ignore demand and other factors.
The US and world had a depression in 1873 as well when gold was the standard. It was not as bad as the Great Depression but it was servre and lasted for 7 years. 1812 may have been another one, but we lack economic data at the time to make it a conclusion. Gold would work if we all used it for currency and nothing else but we still trade it without another for purchases.
Yeah and when data is lost and the middleware app crashes then who is at blame? I doubt the DBA as he/she did not implement it. The manager would have some explaining to do to IT on why he thought he could circumvent the DBA and corporate policies.
I am not a database programmer nor a DBA.
However I have worked with database software that needed to
1. Compare several tables in different databases
2. Do relational logic to analyize relationships, hence relational RDBMS.
A typical business task at work would be to figure out if a discount worked and by how much with certain stores in only a certain section of the country. Gee, I would need a SQL join (I hear the booing of the noSQL evanglists on that) to look at the orders database, the pricing database, as well as the inventory and store database which are on 2 different tables. Explain how I could do this without a RDMS? I could be full of it, but all the *lack of scalability* arguments the noSQL crowd uses can not produce the same results without joins. Frankly, I need to compare several terabytes of data and write software that triggers and records a log about it so I can let the executives know what is going on in business. Joins are a necessary evil and Oracle does managing very large data quickly quite well as slashdotters hate them.
All I see noSQL databases are good for is storing and retrieving data. I need to compare it, view it, perform logic, and most importantly compare several tables. I also have to work with MS Access or Crystal reports so my boss can pay me. What is the point of storing data if you are not going to use it? Until someone can tell me that a noSQL database can do these things it is all hogwash.
With all that money the lawyers and lobbyist need to eat. Please somebody think about the lawyers!
Poor schmuks.
I don't know.
This guy made a compeling case to use MongoDB over MySQL.
The issue with SQL is with joins particularly. MySQl is not a noSQL solution to this problem. If you do not use them and just need a single database you will be fine with traditional SQL. NoSQL wont be a benefit. If you host a simple website you wont run into that scalability problem.
Now imagine your a systam analyst who needs joins to do things, such as comparing a pricing database with a sales order database to see if a discount worked and by how much? This is where you need join. Now imagine the size of both databases are 1 terabyte? Also imagine you have to pull this data from a regular ethernet connection shared by 100 other users only offering 10 mpbs speed? Also imagine the database is distributed among a cluster of computers and the RDMS needs to wait on the other servers to pull the whole table? See the performance problem?
Can noSQL offer a solution where I could do this?
My above example is why companies love Oracle and people doing analysis or statistics or even accountants need joins. The problem is with many databases and big iron and probably fiber optic connections and switches is that it gets very very expensive and is too much for a startup. The licensing costs then come up as well. Zdnet (dont have link) did an article showing it would cost $650,000,000 for Google to use Oracle to host Youtube. I can see why they went with their own solution.
This is what you get when government bureaucrats are bribed and bidders take the rest of platforms that are needed. Surprise, since I.T. in these departments have no say in the purchases all hell breaks loose and the government wonders why hundreds of billions of dollars are missing. Meanwhile the corrupt companies use that money earned to buy off more politicians to write laws stating to buy their products at inflated prices where you and I pay for them in our taxes. Lovely ... anyone in the private sector knows what I am talking about too with this. Specifically when a CEO has lunch with his buddy at Crapware Inc, which sells a product that you need to support that only works with Windows Vista update 23303 on May 12th 2009 ... on a tuesday, in addition to another product that Crapware Inc. sells, that only works with IE 6 in Windows XP with Java 1.3.1, not 1.3.2 or 1.3.0, which all of course has to communicate together. More fun and joy and of course it is all your fault and not the CEO if it is expensive and can't work together you are the computer guy right?
The difference is in government all software and hardware is done this way and not just for some dumb executive's decision one time. Maybe if the pentagon had a CIO who made these decisions instead they could standardize on a platform so they can talk to each other.
Would you suggest Google start laying off people and implementing hiring freezes instead to boast its share price to pay off Apple? Believe me Wall Street loves doing this to companies and making them lean. They see numbers on spreadsheets and not the morale and productivity on an individual basis drop, or the top talent leaving.
If Wall Street hires an efficiency expert and they see 20% wasted time you can bet they would flip! The pressure would be on the CEO's to resign or cut costs aggresively in such a situation.
It sucks but if you sell you soul to the devil you eventually need to pay its dues. I plan to start a web business myself and I can tell you now I wont allow 20% personal time for my employees. My investors will have a fit and replace me FAST. Maybe if I become big and do not have Wall Street breathing down my neck it would be different.
WIth billions in royalities to Apple and Google not driving the revenue increases it once did something must give. If you do not like it stay private and never go public.
Well, they are a pubically traded company that needs to grow every quarter in compressed 8 to 12 week time frames to boast its share price. Like most companies the need to cut costs and increase productivity.
The employees need to work 20% harder the same price and you can do this by having them focus on products which generate income. It is a business and not a fun place to experiment with cool toys.
The worst situation would be for the Wall Street investors to march in and hire efficiency experts who will then demand to force layoffs, hiring freezes, and benefit cuts, etc. This will foce the top talent to leave and kill morale and productivity. Look at what happened with HP and IBM? Need I say more? No one who is bright would ever consider working there now. Google is in trouble. Apple is suing them to death and its ad revenue is not generating that constant income increase every 8 to 12 weeks to boast their share price.
They need R&D of course, but they need to keep expanding and the best thing to do is increase productivity to keep its stock price highest.
Make sure it is hot pluggable with USB (if one exists yet) as both IDE and Scsi have changed many times with incompatible adapters and cables with different plugs. Odds are they will change again and be unreadable in a couple of years.
Dvd's have rot in which the metallic thin sheet peels off. They say it is based on UV light damage but I found a Gentoo cd under a dark bed in a blinded room from 2005 that is rotting away as we speak. So BluRay discs are out of the question.
Another slashdotter mentioned an external hard drive but magnetic interference from the Earth would erase it like my old audio tapes within a decade or two.
Whatever you choose make sure it is external as USB and Firewire like to remain backwards compatible and this makes it easy to share between machines. Something solid state is the best way to make sure the data remains secure. Or find an internet provider where you can upload it too if you do not mind paying per month or year.
Your post is the first I have seen to show why you need to use anything but IE 6 to the PHBs. Since major sites like CNN and of course the corporate sites all support it then they keep IE 6. If everyone else keeps IE 6 around then the PHBs expect everyone else to support it creating a viscious cycle. I hate these customers saying their webmasters suck if they can't get a great looking website done in IE 6 that looks as good through all browsers in just a day. If it is broken and productivity is being lost then you can put a $$ sign at least, or even better convince them just to upgrade all at once to Windows 7 Pro and IE 8 or IE 9. I know it is like pulling teeth as their job is not play with toys, but work needs to be done and more and more sites wont work, customers will be emailing .docx files, and html 5 is coming, and AJAX is already here with GoogleDocs. The sales team would love to be able to use Google maps fast with AJAX and yes they are being paid to wait for IE 6 and hacks to pop up.
Just this year I finally starting emailing docx files as I no longer have to fear of someone running Office 2000 unable to open my documents. Same is true for everyone else.
Haha that link was intended for humor. It is intended to be a shocker site for my web developer friends like goatse or 2girls1cup. See the section on getting the W3C to change standards to support ie 6?
Unfortunately I am getting some very corporate custumers soon as I am learning the ins and outs of IE 6 and 7 as they will refuse to do business to anyone who doesnt cater to their taste of IE.
There is a HUGE version difference IE 6 and IE 8. IE 8 is actually ok and is a decent 2009 era browser that is relevent and fine for average browsing still today and secure. Html 4 renders compliantly between to firefox 2 and 3. IE 6 is condidered quirks mode in modern versions of IE where webmasters memorize race conditions strange things like ppx doubles in borders compared to everyone else. IE 6 and 7 are really really bad while most on your site who use IE probably all use 8 which is minima
l to support
"The massively conservative won't switch until almost everybody else does, it's pointless to look to them for early adopters.
"
The issue is the massively conservative are becoming the new moderate majority. I am quite shocked to read all the pro Windows XP posts here on slashdot. Slashdot users are the ones who *should* welcome change more and experiment before the average users. If half the users here prefer Firefox 3.6 and Windows XP then these tech giants and I.T. consultants are in trouble.
If I had a time machine back in 2001, and told everyone that the majority of slashdot users and the world perfer 10 year old operating systems in the future people would laugh. It is the equilivent of turning down Windows XP for Windows 3.0 when it was new. That would have been ludcrious. Today, this is common sense and mainstream. Is it the recession?
Get with the program and stop whining if newer versions of your apps or your kinetic thingie or IE 9 wont run on a decade old platform. It is kike whining that MS Office 2000 wont run on Dos or Windows 3.0.
China is a much poorer country and I understand this. However it near impossible for any modern browser to get above a 4 or 6% marketshare as web developers live a a decade in the past and so do its citizens. This is plain silly.
That might be a mistake depending on your site. Here in North America or even Europe I would ignore IE 6 unless it is a very corporate site. Chinese do buy things online and ActiveX is required there and so are crippled computers with pirates operating systems that Windows Update can't upgrade to IE 8 easily. I know webmasters want to burn all copies of IE 6, but China is different and IE 8 can run in compatibilty mode so coding once for ActiveX and IE 6 is viable. Everyone else does it so it is standard as much as we hate it.
After all these guys can't be wrong?
Banks and most e-commerce websites require ActiveX controls thanks to export bans on encryption back in the 1990s. SSL is not preferred as it was only 64 bit until a few years ago. This was also way Apple gave up on Korea a few years back, as Macs were useless due to every site that needed SSL simply required ActiveX a decade ago and most still do today.
Requiring genuine copies of XP prevents Windows Update to upgrade these users to IE 8 which is much better than IE 6 and at least considered a modern 2009/2010 era browser. IE 8 is popular in China too but most versions of cracked XP still ship with IE 6 and are impossible to upgrade.