Your argument supposes (wrongly) that other companies would not prefer to pay lower wages as well. Without regulation new companies will simply join the collusion against employees, and the overall average wage will remain depreciated indefinitely, they have no incentive to offer more money if they can simply join the scheme and pay less like everyone else. The net effect is to drive down the pay/productivity of employees, and thereby drive up profits.
This agreement appears to be a followup to the now defunct rules that were 'non compete' clauses (that were, but afaik not legal in California anymore*). Those had the same net effect - you couldn't change employers quickly and if you tried you'd be potentially out several months or years salary in doing so. Since non competes have been around as long as I've been in the IT business (which is getting on to 15 years now) this has, in various forms, been going on for a very long time, and the market doesn't seem to have corrected itself. Actually, it's exactly what I said, in that time new companies emerged, (say, google) and were folded into the grand scheme by the existing players (intel, adobe, Apple and so on). The details of the scheme changed, but it's the same scheme. Sure, they still drive up prices for employees competing for talent to some degree - but not as much as they would have without the protection for employers either from non compete contracts or from collusion.
A free market is free to have a massive coordinated effort by those with money to operate from an unfair position against those who don't have money. Preventing the unfair coordination is the point of (some) regulation.
*I don't live in the US, or California, and never have (or will). My recollection on the details of these rules is hazy as it won't ever directly effect me.
If however it turns out to be the case that these companies are actually guilty, they may have to, as part of a settlement with the government, pay employees and or applicants some fees for lost income.
It may also open up the possibility of a class action lawsuit or (or individual lawsuits) where people can request compensation.
Comodo antivirus is very good, but really invasive. As a corporate user it's worth having a licence around, and if you get a machine that you really aren't sure what's up with it, try comodo. Then uninstall it once it is done working. It's the only English AV I've found that will reliably detect chinese virii, or other languages, but chinese is particularly troublesome.
Failing that, there's always MSE and avast which are generally 'good enough' for day to day use.
The idea that the anti virus should update when you tell it to, and not when it needs to is an odd one. On one hand, being a bit of an HCI guy I understand the problem, but as a practical matter if they're patching in stuff for 0 day exploits, if it needs to reboot, it really needs to reboot right now, and not rebooting is as good as not having an AV at all. Oh but you don't go to sketchy websites at work? Well that's sort of the point of '0 day exploit' isn't it? Someone got hacked, and whether that file lands in your inbox from a coworker, gets injected via MSDN, or wikipedia, or youtube or whatever (all of which could be in use for perfectly legitimate reasons) you are basically undoing the work that is done to try and deal with these problems. Sure, there's some general routine patching going on, and yes AVG could handle its dialog boxes better, but saying 'well tough I'm working right now I don't want this update' is the same as saying 'I'm not really concerned about the security of my machine while I'm using it for work'. It would be nice if there was a better solution there, and certainly there's a productivity boost from having an SSD so you can resume your work very quickly for a reboot, but alas, MS does not offer a 'save state of running programs and reboot' option, which I don't imagine would be trivial anyway.
I suppose it depends what you want to count. Is a nook a slate, or an e-book reader as a separate device? or both? Do you want to count sales, or 'active' devices, (how do you define those?).
The stats I'm seeing http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/25/ipad-tablet-dominates-third-quarter-2011 and at your link are comparing android devices to iPads. I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. It might be. But I tend to think the Kindle Fire isn't really a competing product to the iPad.
Ya, it's a supreme court ruling, so it's going to the power congress does or does not have. Not whether or not it should be doing those things. Public domain isn't somehow embedded in the constitution to make it superior to the will of congress, even if that puts existing copyright law on par with anything else congress does, it can still vote to change it.
For all of the things wrong with copyright in the US, there's a lot to be said for the simplicity of the same copyright rules applying everywhere, or at least in more places, so you don't have different rules in the UK, the resto fo Europe, the US etc.
Other way around. These are linux (andriod) tablet makers being paid by MS to make a Windows version. Just like phones, these will be samsung galaxy tabs, acer iconias etc. with a minor refresh/rebrand to run windows. Not windows tablets being done the other way around.
The gadget market is very different from the desktop market anyway. Right now it's an iPad market, with some other hangers on. Whether MS can change that is an open question, but it's not like you can put linux on your iPad, and it has 90% of the market right now.
I don't think i know of any women who haven't been given equal tasks to their male counterparts in a professional capacity. That's not really the issue. It might be how the private sector deals with women vs how the public sector does. Like I said, I haven't had this problem with professors, but even in fields which are mostly female (medicine), where I'm basically called in to fix a computer, with women: it's someones fault. With men: it's broken. To give but one example.
Generally, my experience with professors, teachers and the other public sector has been pretty even. It's when I go into a business I see the disparity. Don't get me wrong, my assertion about men wanting to go to a strip club over lunch isn't an exaggeration. Women might be complaining about that girl down in the office down the hall, but they're at least in the office working. Men trying to get paid for time worked during a 'meeting' at a strip club, or (I kid you not) bringing a toy helicopter into the office and causing thousands of dollars in damage when it triggers a fire alarm is far less desirable.
Right, I even acknowledged the sexism up front, now the question is: am I right, and women under 35 who don't have kids tend to feel a biological clock ticking on their own, or is society forcing that upon them, or is it merely a practical matter being forced upon them? Fertility rates for women over 35 without (relatively expensive) treatment are pretty bad on average, female fertility peaks between 22 and 26. Which means if you want to have kids you have a relatively narrow window between when you start work (say early 20's) and when you aren't going to be able to have kids anymore. Men don't *perceive* the window the same way, simply because a 35 year old may delude themselves into thinking they'll marry someone younger, and their fertility dropoff isn't as severe and doesn't happen until a bit later anyway. Or maybe they will have kids with someone younger.
I'm not sure it's sexist to suggest that people should make reasonable allowances for the lifestyle they want. If you want to have kids and are female you need to think about this problem earlier than men. That's biology. If you *are* thinking about it that's not a bad thing, that's just prior planning.
The bit about kids I'll grant you was poorly worded. That applies to men and women. Which is my point about how many women were learning to program in 1990? There's a lag effect there. The main time when you really could contribute to open source comes later in life (when your kids can feed themselves sort of thing), and you go back that far and there really weren't very many women trained to program.
Men have a less urgent requirement. Notice I specifically said 35 year old. A 35 year old woman without kids is wondering what the cost of fertility treatments will be if it's not working naturally. A 35 year old guy hasn't (and may not need) to put any thought into the issue. Or his solution is to plan to marry someone younger. I'm not suggesting that's a good or realistic plan, but we all like to delude ourselves.
Also, my bit about kids applies to both men and women. And that's sort of it. There's only certain times in your life were making substantial volunteer contributions to anything is particularly viable. Early in life is one of them, but not for everyone, and later in life, well, how many women were there in computer science 20 years ago, who have the time *now* to contribute?
Actually the first part of that statement "obnoxious, arrogant, self centred fuckheads" pretty well describes most of the women I know professionally. Or at least who managed to achieve anything professionally (caveat, not usually professors though). They're usually unwilling to make compromises, and would rather complain about someone else, or blame someone else than actually solve problems. It's men who make compromises and get over grudges, but it's also men who want women out of the room so they can scratch their balls, make juvenile jokes, and want to go to a strip club over lunch. In the end the time wasted complaining is less than the time wasted ball scratching and going to a strip club, and far less than the time wasted posting on/. at 4 in the afternoon on work day.
In a proprietary workplace there are also a lot of other women who may not be 'developers' but they're on business, production, accounting, etc. With OSS it's basically a bunch of programming nerds talking to other programming nerds. That has its place, but there's no professional filter, a great programmer who sexually harasses female coworkers loses his job, but he can be on an OSS project with relatively little impediment.
I suspect, to be a tad sexist, women look at open source differently than men do. Open source is either something you do as part of your job, (intel, ibm) or it's something you do in your free time. If it's part of your job, why would you put up with discrimination and harassment when you can do something else, and not. And women look at free time differently than men. If they want to have kids, which is most of them, they have a ticking biological clock of 'another year lost is a lot of time', whereas a 35 year old guy can sit in his family room coding away and think 'meh, another year, no big deal'. If women want to have stereotypical lives they have to get on with it sooner rather than later. If you have kids your free time is much more about spending with the kids than it is writing code for some project, unless you're doing it professionally. It's not that you cannot contribute if you have kids, but you have a lot less time for it until your kids are getting grown up. And well, then we're into 'how many women were there in computer science in 1990?' sort of questions.
Considering you only start school at like age 5 or 6, that's the difference between 10 years of education and 8, which to me is quite a lot. I wasn't trying to write a novel on the intricacies of how you count years spent in school and all that.
Look at it this way. Virtually everyone agrees on certain basic things you need to be able to do, the 'are you smarter than a 5th grader' sort of problem. You need to know how to read and write, basic math, basic history of some sort, some sort of minimal exposure to what art is, some physical education, social interaction time (whether specifically allocated time or not). That takes you from age 4 (say junior kindergarten) to maybe grade 6 or 7. After that you're into using that knowlege for something, so the difference between a grade 8 and a grade 10 is more like a factor of 2 than 20%, that is to say they've learned twice as many things on top of the basic skillsets. Again though, that's sort of a casual explanation.
When i went to highschool we did OAC's (grade 13), so people were graduating 18/19. That was, I found, a bit late. They ran out of meaningful things to say without deep specialization by our last year. (Well actually grade 12 was pointless and grade 13 had content but you get the idea). You could reasonably get by with a year less than that, and as someone who now teaches at a university people coming in weren't any better prepared than people who only did grade 12 elsewhere. So now our kids go to grade 12, and are graduating 17/18 and they hit 19 in their second year. Again, I think you could do away with the last year (ditch grade 12) pretty comfortably, it's a lot of time spent specializing in an area (science, social science, arts etc.) so if the area you are interested in isn't offered (think tradeschool stuff) you're not missing much. But much less than that and you start cutting out pretty core concepts in civics, geography and science. You can't really teach much about how government works until kids are old enough to need a job, and starting to think about voting because before that they're in the bubble of education, and some of the topics in geography and science (things like nominal vs PPP GDP and batteries) require more background than you'd have time for 2 years earlier. I tend to think coming out of highschool everyone should know how to do their taxes, understand what they're voting for, not kill themselves mixing household chemicals and have some clue what electricity actually is, and how it works, given that it's rather pervasive. There's more than that in a modern society though. Even a mechanic will need some idea how to enter data into a computer, and should know something about security so they aren't constantly getting hacked. Understanding interest rates so they can get a mortgage fairly, that sort of thing.
Even on top of all of this, the reason we now have tradeschools rather than apprenticeships is if you apprentice at GM, and it goes bankrupt (again) you don't want to find yourself needing 4 years of job training to go somewhere else. If you can, by having gone to tradeschool, even 10 years ago, get that retraining time down to 1 year then you've made a big difference in labour mobility. Specializing 13 or 14 year olds into software engineering is either going to make them basically community college IT level people by the time they graduate, jump them well ahead in a CS/SE programme or waste a lot of their time. And in the end they are going to be very narrow specialists in software, which, as an industry might completely change and then where are they starting if they want to do something else?
I'm in game development, but as a specialization from computer science, and a lot of people want to know if a Masters in game development from a specialized school is a good idea, and it's much the same problem. It's not that they're bad programmes, in many ways they are probably better than mine (which is, admittedly a PhD not an MSc), it's that you've very narrowly indicated 'I only know how to do this' and if you suddenly decide you want a job at a bank, or you need a job because they last company you were at imploded you look a lot better off with an MSc in CS (specialization game development) than an MSc in game development.
Sadly, this should have been said Nov 15 2011. The game released nov 17, no one is going to buy the game anymore anyway, this business is a first, day, first week, first month sort of business, beyond that, no one cares unless a miracle occurs. Sure, it's a largely European game, with european audience, which might give it a slightly longer tail, but it's still 50 bucks, so I can't imagine they're moving a lot of copies. The damage has been done, and we've already bought it if we were going to get it.
It's still on the 'top sellers' page on steam, either because they're paying for a spot there (god forbid Ubisoft would ever do anything so dishonest), or because steam sales this week/day/hour whatever are so anemic it's a statistical anomaly.
Actually i think their FAT32 patents start expiring soon, since they got them in the mid 90's. Which either means NTFS doesn't have much they can licence, or they're just planning ahead, since NTFS is about 10 years old, they need to get something else out there, and keep the cycle going.
It's probably a lot harder to make licencing argument with filesystem patents if you don't actually have it out there, and in the wild. And that takes a few years to get/force adoption.
Right, but at the highschool level you don't want to overspecialize. One of the great strengths of education comes from what you can do if your job disappears. If all you know how to do is be a brake mechanic, and they suddenly reinvent breaks (say a switch from mechanical to electrical brakes) you're stuck back at job training. If you know absolutely nothing about electricity, because you started this career as a brake mechanic at age 13, you've got a lot of catching up to do.
The earlier you start that narrow specialization the more difficult it is to fix if something radically changes in the industry. I'm all for more software development in high school, but there is a point of 'too much'. Especially in something like software, where you might be called upon to do physics, math, business, or god knows what, you need to have some idea what those other areas are, so you at least have some concept of how they're all connected to the problem you're trying to solve. Imagine if you get a job in a game studio out of this programme (and then a university degree in something like SE or CS), and that company wants to make a WW2 fighter pilot game. Well you don't really know anything about the physics of flight, and all these people in the office who keep talking about the Big E and Zeros are just completely baffling. Oh and you have no idea where the Philippines are, and what that has to do with Japan.
There's only so much time you can meaningfully spend teaching someone anything. If you go to a 4 year highschool programme on programming, well, you're going to either be at a 2nd or 3rd year level of university, or you're going to have spent 4 years learning super basic stuff over and over, which doesn't do any favours. Especially if they go on into SE or CS and find they've done 60 or 70% of the course material already. Then you've just wasted a bunch of their time.
Admittedly, everyone's idea of what base exposure to information everyone should have is going to be different, but I tend to think a broad education until you're about 16 is a good idea. Focusing on getting people into the workforce as software developers at 18 or 19 poses serious problems to their ability to meaningfully participate in anything outside of some very narrow problem areas. You don't really want these guys to graduate, work for 10 or 15 years, find out that suddenly the industry has completely changed, and they don't have the skills to do anything else, nor do they even know what else they might want to do, because they've spent the last 15 years writing php and SQL.
No, but if you want to use long filenames on say, your android phone, and being able to connect that to a windows machine MS gets a licence fee. That applies to pretty much all devices. That's a FAT32 patent though, and I'm wondering (somewhat seriously) if they don't have anything worthwhile for enforcing on NTFS so that's part of why they're looking for something new.
Sounds like they're due for a refresh so they can get some new patents on their filesystem to make sure all the device makers need to continue to pay them money.
Well ya, now that the price has come down. I'm not sure what was included in the 30k figure I got at the last place I was, whether that was just a box, or software, support and training etc. The 'kits' themselves are under 2k today, but today you're looking at what the Wii U will do, not the Wii. You also need to get into their development programme.
(Note; You can buy emulator kits which are nearly as good, if not better, from sketchy hong kong sites for a lot less than the official kits).
Never made any money is sort of the wrong way to look at it. Sure, 10 years ago the market.. oh wait who gives a shit about 10 years ago? What matters isn't what happened 5 years ago, it's what is happening this year. That's a much murkier question. There's a shift back into PC games as the technology to make sure you get paid for the game has changed. Even a pirated copy you can still sell DLC packs these days.
Sure, 3 or 4 years ago a few big studios surmised that there wasn't enough money in PC versions, and so didn't make any (think fable 2). But for a lot of reasons that market has shifted - and what matters is what the market will look like in 2012, which is that shift continuing. Steam, which is a giant DRM platform, makes the PC appealing, if you're a small indie outfit there's no 30k developer kit (see the Wii....), and no competition from first party or big studios (seriously, who wants to compete with Uncharted 3, or Skyrim?), and now with the way Steam works your game can get front page attention in between major releases at least. That's actually the new 'big thing' in our business is that piracy matters a lot less than when all these really good games are coming out, and trying to find when to squeeze yourself into their release cycles. We're competing on time, not money. Money is not completely solved, but mostly. We've cut retailers out of the process, and sure, digital takes 30%, but before it was more like 60, so you make more money per copy, your game has a longer tail, you're locking them to steam. Sure, steam *can* be cracked, but most people don't want to risk their steam account for one game they could buy for 5 dollars. They'll take that risk for portal2 for 60 bucks, but not for a game you're selling for 5 or 10.
Because piracy wasn't ever really dealt with, the market changed. We now have 'free' games, where you basically buy anything worth having in the game online. We have online games, or DLC or a little bit of both, which means now the thing that can be pirated is not the real value, the real value is in 12 dollars in DLC you're going to sell someone, or the 15 dollars a month and that's all going into your coffers, not to Gamestop or Walmart. It's meant there's a lot less room for innovation in the market. Basically the innovation happens at the top (kinect), you get crazy lucky with a product like minecraft or magicka, or you live on government handouts and hope that works for you. Most small developers are fleeing consoles and PC, because the risk is too high, for all of the help steam provides. You make 20 facebook/android/ios games in the time it takes to make one decent game, and odds are, collecting a 50% government subsidy that you can crawl along breaking even, and you hope for your farmville.
As a practical matter legislation isn't going to stop piracy. It's too easy. The market had to change. But the market is now split between people who make experiences like Skyrim, Mass effect etc... and basically gambling, and hoping enough suckers will spend 300 bucks on your game to keep you afloat (Star Trek Online). I'm not sure that's made it better for consumers. Steam made things better (as did their competitors, the Xbox market, PSN etc.) but the only way to survive making traditional games is if you can be big enough to absorb the losses due to piracy. That's not really a great model, and my nagging (but uninformed) suspicion is that the Xbox 3 and PS4 will be looking a lot more like a software as a service model, where everything important is done over the internet, and any disks you do get will only serve to limit the amount of downloading you need to do, but for it to work, you'll need to constantly authenticate with them.
Sorry, I wasn't clear on training people. I mean in terms of the same knowlege, eg. how to build a 'server' (whatever that happens to mean in context) or how to be an admin, we teach in 1 3 hour lecture to university students, or spend 12 months teaching to college (what in the US I guess you call tradeschools?) kids. That's the same, e.g. a LAMP setup running an actual webpage, (a bit more complex than that, but you don't really want a 10 page lab outline). We actually use almost all the same paperwork, but for the 3 hour lab we start with everything pre downloaded/burned etc... simply because you don't have 20 minutes to waste waiting for things to download in a 3 hour class.
Also, you already know csvtools for linux. If you didn't, your barrier to entry for that is the same, whether you are on windows or linux.
Like I say, we teach, and value both. But MS decided with one release that history grads who've been made into IT guys should be able to run the server, and now they're changing their minds. Which is my complaint, not that CLI is particularly bad, only that it's bad relative to the product they've been trying to sell. No more than I would want to have to use a CLI on my PS3 to start games.
Goodness no. We train people to *be* unix users properly if they're into that sort of thing. But they are also in it as a business. They're learning to use Linux because they view it as a path to employment, or because it's the most appropriate tool for their problem.
I'm talking about the people who come into a programme as linux users and who think because they're linux users they actually know something about CS. We work the other direction, and teach them CS, and then teach them linux if it's applicable to their desired skillset.
Lol, no, they won't. They'll try linux once, get a set of instructions that tell them to open a terminal $sudo, stop reading, and go back to Windows. On the desktop anyway.
But we're talking about phones, and 'gadgets' slates etc. Have you ever used WP7? It's nifty. It's definitely different than the iOS clone that Android is. I don't have a WP7 device of my own, but I can certainly see the appeal, I've played with a few of them and they feel very different than anything else, and they are pretty neat, live tiles is a good concept, as would be the xbox integration if I ever used my xBox. I'm not sure 'better' or 'worse' applies, but the market is new enough there's room for designed differently, which it is, and people who like this design rather than the iOS style will like it.
Believe it or not, people outside the/. bubble hate linux. Well that's not quite true, they actually hate things that break, and windows and linux both break for mostly the same reasons: bad drivers, bad hardware, and software problems users know nothing about. But they at least know more about Windows, and have better free support for windows from friends than there is for Linux, and instructions for how to solve problems on window are written for idiots.
People like to bitch about windows because it's fashionable, and because it tends to produce obfuscated error messages. But every piece of software does that, including Linux. Windows on ARM is for gadgets, not desktops, so you're buying all new software from somewhere, if you want it for your gadget. Now, are you going to buy software you know, that's a recompile from the x86, or software you don't?
WP7 is a platform specified by MS. It runs an MS OS, but they say what software you can (or cannot) pre-load, they say what hardware specs are allowed, form factors etc. Want to know why there are *STILL* no dual core WP7's? Because aren't allowed to make and sell one. Any idiot who can make a/. post should realize there should be a WP7 dual core phone from any of Nokia, HTC, Samsung or the like by now, considering we're about a year after the equivalent on android, and it is, other than Nokia, the same hardware vendors using in many cases essentially the same hardware. But MS defines what a windows phone will be, and the room for innovation in that space by the handset makers is very very narrow.
Or you're confusing Windows 7 with Windows Phone 7, (or windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 as the case may be). Different markets, different rules.
I'm not suggesting this is good or bad btw (although I tend to come down on the side of bad), but the phone market is very different than the PC market. Different rules apply.
No, the path to making better software is to make people understand the ramifications of their actions, and understand not to take those actions unless they understand the consequences, which Microsoft has, in my opinion, been horrible at.
True. So they should you know.. be better at that.
The problem is that, by creating a nice simple interface where you get the impression that everything is SOOO EASY, Microsoft gives people with no clue the impression that they're Windows admins who know what they're doing.
I'll agree, in the aggregate, that it matters less whether there's a GUI or a CLI, but not having a quick and simple interface does help raise the bar a bit and provide a different view, so it doesn't look like the desktop a given clueless user feels familiar with.
Right, but they already lowered the bar. The question isn't whether they should have ever had a GUI, it's whether they should get rid of it. If I upgrade my computer from Windows 7 to Windows 8 (or upgrade a server from 2008 r2 to windows server 8) and suddenly have no idea how to manage it that's *REALLY* bad. Especially because you're now saying 'you were getting by badly before, but now you *have* to spend a pile of money to be trained' etc. That's not going to make for happy users.
To me it's the wrong business move, and wrong business message. Imagine if google said, "you know what, it would be faster, cheaper, and safer if everyone just used POP, preferably via Thunderbird to access gmail, so we're going to take away the web version", and visiting the website will now remotely invoke PINE. Now, that might be correct (probably not, but pretend that is for sake of argument), but you have a huge userbase, which, in MS's server case is a big chunk of their market we're talking about who suddenly have no clue how to use the 'new' version. They have no motivation to upgrade or get trained since the current version just works, and they don't know differently when it doesn't, and if they are going to migrate the service, you just fucked them over, so why would they migrate to you?
I realize the GUI is expensive, but they would be much better served, given then market they have, in putting some serious thought into having the GUI be useful for most tasks, with constant reference to the documentation for the CLI for anything useful, than to default to CLI and hope you don't fuck it up.
Alas, your assertion that the 1% of linux users are more qualified in anything is, without a single exception in my experience, false. They know nothing about POP3/SMTP, IMAP or how to program particularly, actually the windows guys have a lot of better programmers, because they've worked as programmers in a lot of cases (usually in java these days). But either way, the linux guys come in feeling themselves some how superior because they use linux. Then they get 60's because they don't know the rest of that stuff, but have heard the words before and don't know that they don't really know anything about the technology, and then they get their asses handed to them when we want a serious project done, because they are 'computer guys' and use linux. This is university not IT tradeschool college. Those guys, who actually spend 12 months learning linux sysadmining, do in 12 months what we do in 3 hours. And our guys are better at it after 3 hours than they were after 12 months. I've trained both, I gave up on the college IT kids. In the US this is probably different, because there's a different gap between tradeschools and Universities than there is here.
I have done all of those things on windows btw (hex dumps, sed, which actually has a windows version, and csv modifying). Just because you know the linux versions doesn't mean there aren't other ways to accomplish it. Which goes to my 'thinking you're elite because you use Linux, problem. If you don't know what the tools are, you're doomed, if you don't know how to diagnose the problem, you're equally doomed. That applies regardless of OS.
Don't get me wrong. We're training CS types. That's why we teach them command line tools and all of that. There is a place for that, you know.. professional IT people. But MS expanded the market for servers into home user servers, and small business local servers and all of that. Those aren't specialists, they ideally shouldn't need to be specialists. That may mean they need to dumb down windows servers or split the product family. But they're bouncing back in the other direction. Which means 10 years from now, I'm going to get calls on how to support a windows 7 server, because they aren't going to migrate to something they don't know how to use.
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Your argument supposes (wrongly) that other companies would not prefer to pay lower wages as well. Without regulation new companies will simply join the collusion against employees, and the overall average wage will remain depreciated indefinitely, they have no incentive to offer more money if they can simply join the scheme and pay less like everyone else. The net effect is to drive down the pay/productivity of employees, and thereby drive up profits.
This agreement appears to be a followup to the now defunct rules that were 'non compete' clauses (that were, but afaik not legal in California anymore*). Those had the same net effect - you couldn't change employers quickly and if you tried you'd be potentially out several months or years salary in doing so. Since non competes have been around as long as I've been in the IT business (which is getting on to 15 years now) this has, in various forms, been going on for a very long time, and the market doesn't seem to have corrected itself. Actually, it's exactly what I said, in that time new companies emerged, (say, google) and were folded into the grand scheme by the existing players (intel, adobe, Apple and so on). The details of the scheme changed, but it's the same scheme. Sure, they still drive up prices for employees competing for talent to some degree - but not as much as they would have without the protection for employers either from non compete contracts or from collusion.
A free market is free to have a massive coordinated effort by those with money to operate from an unfair position against those who don't have money. Preventing the unfair coordination is the point of (some) regulation.
*I don't live in the US, or California, and never have (or will). My recollection on the details of these rules is hazy as it won't ever directly effect me.
If however it turns out to be the case that these companies are actually guilty, they may have to, as part of a settlement with the government, pay employees and or applicants some fees for lost income.
It may also open up the possibility of a class action lawsuit or (or individual lawsuits) where people can request compensation.
Comodo antivirus is very good, but really invasive. As a corporate user it's worth having a licence around, and if you get a machine that you really aren't sure what's up with it, try comodo. Then uninstall it once it is done working. It's the only English AV I've found that will reliably detect chinese virii, or other languages, but chinese is particularly troublesome.
Failing that, there's always MSE and avast which are generally 'good enough' for day to day use.
The idea that the anti virus should update when you tell it to, and not when it needs to is an odd one. On one hand, being a bit of an HCI guy I understand the problem, but as a practical matter if they're patching in stuff for 0 day exploits, if it needs to reboot, it really needs to reboot right now, and not rebooting is as good as not having an AV at all. Oh but you don't go to sketchy websites at work? Well that's sort of the point of '0 day exploit' isn't it? Someone got hacked, and whether that file lands in your inbox from a coworker, gets injected via MSDN, or wikipedia, or youtube or whatever (all of which could be in use for perfectly legitimate reasons) you are basically undoing the work that is done to try and deal with these problems. Sure, there's some general routine patching going on, and yes AVG could handle its dialog boxes better, but saying 'well tough I'm working right now I don't want this update' is the same as saying 'I'm not really concerned about the security of my machine while I'm using it for work'. It would be nice if there was a better solution there, and certainly there's a productivity boost from having an SSD so you can resume your work very quickly for a reboot, but alas, MS does not offer a 'save state of running programs and reboot' option, which I don't imagine would be trivial anyway.
I suppose it depends what you want to count. Is a nook a slate, or an e-book reader as a separate device? or both? Do you want to count sales, or 'active' devices, (how do you define those?).
The stats I'm seeing http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/25/ipad-tablet-dominates-third-quarter-2011 and at your link are comparing android devices to iPads. I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. It might be. But I tend to think the Kindle Fire isn't really a competing product to the iPad.
Ya, it's a supreme court ruling, so it's going to the power congress does or does not have. Not whether or not it should be doing those things. Public domain isn't somehow embedded in the constitution to make it superior to the will of congress, even if that puts existing copyright law on par with anything else congress does, it can still vote to change it.
For all of the things wrong with copyright in the US, there's a lot to be said for the simplicity of the same copyright rules applying everywhere, or at least in more places, so you don't have different rules in the UK, the resto fo Europe, the US etc.
Other way around. These are linux (andriod) tablet makers being paid by MS to make a Windows version. Just like phones, these will be samsung galaxy tabs, acer iconias etc. with a minor refresh/rebrand to run windows. Not windows tablets being done the other way around.
The gadget market is very different from the desktop market anyway. Right now it's an iPad market, with some other hangers on. Whether MS can change that is an open question, but it's not like you can put linux on your iPad, and it has 90% of the market right now.
I don't think i know of any women who haven't been given equal tasks to their male counterparts in a professional capacity. That's not really the issue. It might be how the private sector deals with women vs how the public sector does. Like I said, I haven't had this problem with professors, but even in fields which are mostly female (medicine), where I'm basically called in to fix a computer, with women: it's someones fault. With men: it's broken. To give but one example.
Generally, my experience with professors, teachers and the other public sector has been pretty even. It's when I go into a business I see the disparity. Don't get me wrong, my assertion about men wanting to go to a strip club over lunch isn't an exaggeration. Women might be complaining about that girl down in the office down the hall, but they're at least in the office working. Men trying to get paid for time worked during a 'meeting' at a strip club, or (I kid you not) bringing a toy helicopter into the office and causing thousands of dollars in damage when it triggers a fire alarm is far less desirable.
Right, I even acknowledged the sexism up front, now the question is: am I right, and women under 35 who don't have kids tend to feel a biological clock ticking on their own, or is society forcing that upon them, or is it merely a practical matter being forced upon them? Fertility rates for women over 35 without (relatively expensive) treatment are pretty bad on average, female fertility peaks between 22 and 26. Which means if you want to have kids you have a relatively narrow window between when you start work (say early 20's) and when you aren't going to be able to have kids anymore. Men don't *perceive* the window the same way, simply because a 35 year old may delude themselves into thinking they'll marry someone younger, and their fertility dropoff isn't as severe and doesn't happen until a bit later anyway. Or maybe they will have kids with someone younger.
I'm not sure it's sexist to suggest that people should make reasonable allowances for the lifestyle they want. If you want to have kids and are female you need to think about this problem earlier than men. That's biology. If you *are* thinking about it that's not a bad thing, that's just prior planning.
The bit about kids I'll grant you was poorly worded. That applies to men and women. Which is my point about how many women were learning to program in 1990? There's a lag effect there. The main time when you really could contribute to open source comes later in life (when your kids can feed themselves sort of thing), and you go back that far and there really weren't very many women trained to program.
Men have a less urgent requirement. Notice I specifically said 35 year old. A 35 year old woman without kids is wondering what the cost of fertility treatments will be if it's not working naturally. A 35 year old guy hasn't (and may not need) to put any thought into the issue. Or his solution is to plan to marry someone younger. I'm not suggesting that's a good or realistic plan, but we all like to delude ourselves.
Also, my bit about kids applies to both men and women. And that's sort of it. There's only certain times in your life were making substantial volunteer contributions to anything is particularly viable. Early in life is one of them, but not for everyone, and later in life, well, how many women were there in computer science 20 years ago, who have the time *now* to contribute?
There's a lag effect here.
Actually the first part of that statement "obnoxious, arrogant, self centred fuckheads" pretty well describes most of the women I know professionally. Or at least who managed to achieve anything professionally (caveat, not usually professors though). They're usually unwilling to make compromises, and would rather complain about someone else, or blame someone else than actually solve problems. It's men who make compromises and get over grudges, but it's also men who want women out of the room so they can scratch their balls, make juvenile jokes, and want to go to a strip club over lunch. In the end the time wasted complaining is less than the time wasted ball scratching and going to a strip club, and far less than the time wasted posting on /. at 4 in the afternoon on work day.
In a proprietary workplace there are also a lot of other women who may not be 'developers' but they're on business, production, accounting, etc. With OSS it's basically a bunch of programming nerds talking to other programming nerds. That has its place, but there's no professional filter, a great programmer who sexually harasses female coworkers loses his job, but he can be on an OSS project with relatively little impediment.
I suspect, to be a tad sexist, women look at open source differently than men do. Open source is either something you do as part of your job, (intel, ibm) or it's something you do in your free time. If it's part of your job, why would you put up with discrimination and harassment when you can do something else, and not. And women look at free time differently than men. If they want to have kids, which is most of them, they have a ticking biological clock of 'another year lost is a lot of time', whereas a 35 year old guy can sit in his family room coding away and think 'meh, another year, no big deal'. If women want to have stereotypical lives they have to get on with it sooner rather than later. If you have kids your free time is much more about spending with the kids than it is writing code for some project, unless you're doing it professionally. It's not that you cannot contribute if you have kids, but you have a lot less time for it until your kids are getting grown up. And well, then we're into 'how many women were there in computer science in 1990?' sort of questions.
Considering you only start school at like age 5 or 6, that's the difference between 10 years of education and 8, which to me is quite a lot. I wasn't trying to write a novel on the intricacies of how you count years spent in school and all that.
Look at it this way. Virtually everyone agrees on certain basic things you need to be able to do, the 'are you smarter than a 5th grader' sort of problem. You need to know how to read and write, basic math, basic history of some sort, some sort of minimal exposure to what art is, some physical education, social interaction time (whether specifically allocated time or not). That takes you from age 4 (say junior kindergarten) to maybe grade 6 or 7. After that you're into using that knowlege for something, so the difference between a grade 8 and a grade 10 is more like a factor of 2 than 20%, that is to say they've learned twice as many things on top of the basic skillsets. Again though, that's sort of a casual explanation.
When i went to highschool we did OAC's (grade 13), so people were graduating 18/19. That was, I found, a bit late. They ran out of meaningful things to say without deep specialization by our last year. (Well actually grade 12 was pointless and grade 13 had content but you get the idea). You could reasonably get by with a year less than that, and as someone who now teaches at a university people coming in weren't any better prepared than people who only did grade 12 elsewhere. So now our kids go to grade 12, and are graduating 17/18 and they hit 19 in their second year. Again, I think you could do away with the last year (ditch grade 12) pretty comfortably, it's a lot of time spent specializing in an area (science, social science, arts etc.) so if the area you are interested in isn't offered (think tradeschool stuff) you're not missing much. But much less than that and you start cutting out pretty core concepts in civics, geography and science. You can't really teach much about how government works until kids are old enough to need a job, and starting to think about voting because before that they're in the bubble of education, and some of the topics in geography and science (things like nominal vs PPP GDP and batteries) require more background than you'd have time for 2 years earlier. I tend to think coming out of highschool everyone should know how to do their taxes, understand what they're voting for, not kill themselves mixing household chemicals and have some clue what electricity actually is, and how it works, given that it's rather pervasive. There's more than that in a modern society though. Even a mechanic will need some idea how to enter data into a computer, and should know something about security so they aren't constantly getting hacked. Understanding interest rates so they can get a mortgage fairly, that sort of thing.
Even on top of all of this, the reason we now have tradeschools rather than apprenticeships is if you apprentice at GM, and it goes bankrupt (again) you don't want to find yourself needing 4 years of job training to go somewhere else. If you can, by having gone to tradeschool, even 10 years ago, get that retraining time down to 1 year then you've made a big difference in labour mobility. Specializing 13 or 14 year olds into software engineering is either going to make them basically community college IT level people by the time they graduate, jump them well ahead in a CS/SE programme or waste a lot of their time. And in the end they are going to be very narrow specialists in software, which, as an industry might completely change and then where are they starting if they want to do something else?
I'm in game development, but as a specialization from computer science, and a lot of people want to know if a Masters in game development from a specialized school is a good idea, and it's much the same problem. It's not that they're bad programmes, in many ways they are probably better than mine (which is, admittedly a PhD not an MSc), it's that you've very narrowly indicated 'I only know how to do this' and if you suddenly decide you want a job at a bank, or you need a job because they last company you were at imploded you look a lot better off with an MSc in CS (specialization game development) than an MSc in game development.
Sadly, this should have been said Nov 15 2011. The game released nov 17, no one is going to buy the game anymore anyway, this business is a first, day, first week, first month sort of business, beyond that, no one cares unless a miracle occurs. Sure, it's a largely European game, with european audience, which might give it a slightly longer tail, but it's still 50 bucks, so I can't imagine they're moving a lot of copies. The damage has been done, and we've already bought it if we were going to get it.
It's still on the 'top sellers' page on steam, either because they're paying for a spot there (god forbid Ubisoft would ever do anything so dishonest), or because steam sales this week/day/hour whatever are so anemic it's a statistical anomaly.
Actually i think their FAT32 patents start expiring soon, since they got them in the mid 90's. Which either means NTFS doesn't have much they can licence, or they're just planning ahead, since NTFS is about 10 years old, they need to get something else out there, and keep the cycle going.
It's probably a lot harder to make licencing argument with filesystem patents if you don't actually have it out there, and in the wild. And that takes a few years to get/force adoption.
Right, but at the highschool level you don't want to overspecialize. One of the great strengths of education comes from what you can do if your job disappears. If all you know how to do is be a brake mechanic, and they suddenly reinvent breaks (say a switch from mechanical to electrical brakes) you're stuck back at job training. If you know absolutely nothing about electricity, because you started this career as a brake mechanic at age 13, you've got a lot of catching up to do.
The earlier you start that narrow specialization the more difficult it is to fix if something radically changes in the industry. I'm all for more software development in high school, but there is a point of 'too much'. Especially in something like software, where you might be called upon to do physics, math, business, or god knows what, you need to have some idea what those other areas are, so you at least have some concept of how they're all connected to the problem you're trying to solve. Imagine if you get a job in a game studio out of this programme (and then a university degree in something like SE or CS), and that company wants to make a WW2 fighter pilot game. Well you don't really know anything about the physics of flight, and all these people in the office who keep talking about the Big E and Zeros are just completely baffling. Oh and you have no idea where the Philippines are, and what that has to do with Japan.
There's only so much time you can meaningfully spend teaching someone anything. If you go to a 4 year highschool programme on programming, well, you're going to either be at a 2nd or 3rd year level of university, or you're going to have spent 4 years learning super basic stuff over and over, which doesn't do any favours. Especially if they go on into SE or CS and find they've done 60 or 70% of the course material already. Then you've just wasted a bunch of their time.
Admittedly, everyone's idea of what base exposure to information everyone should have is going to be different, but I tend to think a broad education until you're about 16 is a good idea. Focusing on getting people into the workforce as software developers at 18 or 19 poses serious problems to their ability to meaningfully participate in anything outside of some very narrow problem areas. You don't really want these guys to graduate, work for 10 or 15 years, find out that suddenly the industry has completely changed, and they don't have the skills to do anything else, nor do they even know what else they might want to do, because they've spent the last 15 years writing php and SQL.
No, but if you want to use long filenames on say, your android phone, and being able to connect that to a windows machine MS gets a licence fee. That applies to pretty much all devices. That's a FAT32 patent though, and I'm wondering (somewhat seriously) if they don't have anything worthwhile for enforcing on NTFS so that's part of why they're looking for something new.
Sounds like they're due for a refresh so they can get some new patents on their filesystem to make sure all the device makers need to continue to pay them money.
Well ya, now that the price has come down. I'm not sure what was included in the 30k figure I got at the last place I was, whether that was just a box, or software, support and training etc. The 'kits' themselves are under 2k today, but today you're looking at what the Wii U will do, not the Wii. You also need to get into their development programme.
(Note; You can buy emulator kits which are nearly as good, if not better, from sketchy hong kong sites for a lot less than the official kits).
Never made any money is sort of the wrong way to look at it. Sure, 10 years ago the market.. oh wait who gives a shit about 10 years ago? What matters isn't what happened 5 years ago, it's what is happening this year. That's a much murkier question. There's a shift back into PC games as the technology to make sure you get paid for the game has changed. Even a pirated copy you can still sell DLC packs these days.
Sure, 3 or 4 years ago a few big studios surmised that there wasn't enough money in PC versions, and so didn't make any (think fable 2). But for a lot of reasons that market has shifted - and what matters is what the market will look like in 2012, which is that shift continuing. Steam, which is a giant DRM platform, makes the PC appealing, if you're a small indie outfit there's no 30k developer kit (see the Wii....), and no competition from first party or big studios (seriously, who wants to compete with Uncharted 3, or Skyrim?), and now with the way Steam works your game can get front page attention in between major releases at least. That's actually the new 'big thing' in our business is that piracy matters a lot less than when all these really good games are coming out, and trying to find when to squeeze yourself into their release cycles. We're competing on time, not money. Money is not completely solved, but mostly. We've cut retailers out of the process, and sure, digital takes 30%, but before it was more like 60, so you make more money per copy, your game has a longer tail, you're locking them to steam. Sure, steam *can* be cracked, but most people don't want to risk their steam account for one game they could buy for 5 dollars. They'll take that risk for portal2 for 60 bucks, but not for a game you're selling for 5 or 10.
Because piracy wasn't ever really dealt with, the market changed. We now have 'free' games, where you basically buy anything worth having in the game online. We have online games, or DLC or a little bit of both, which means now the thing that can be pirated is not the real value, the real value is in 12 dollars in DLC you're going to sell someone, or the 15 dollars a month and that's all going into your coffers, not to Gamestop or Walmart. It's meant there's a lot less room for innovation in the market. Basically the innovation happens at the top (kinect), you get crazy lucky with a product like minecraft or magicka, or you live on government handouts and hope that works for you. Most small developers are fleeing consoles and PC, because the risk is too high, for all of the help steam provides. You make 20 facebook/android/ios games in the time it takes to make one decent game, and odds are, collecting a 50% government subsidy that you can crawl along breaking even, and you hope for your farmville.
As a practical matter legislation isn't going to stop piracy. It's too easy. The market had to change. But the market is now split between people who make experiences like Skyrim, Mass effect etc... and basically gambling, and hoping enough suckers will spend 300 bucks on your game to keep you afloat (Star Trek Online). I'm not sure that's made it better for consumers. Steam made things better (as did their competitors, the Xbox market, PSN etc.) but the only way to survive making traditional games is if you can be big enough to absorb the losses due to piracy. That's not really a great model, and my nagging (but uninformed) suspicion is that the Xbox 3 and PS4 will be looking a lot more like a software as a service model, where everything important is done over the internet, and any disks you do get will only serve to limit the amount of downloading you need to do, but for it to work, you'll need to constantly authenticate with them.
Sorry, I wasn't clear on training people. I mean in terms of the same knowlege, eg. how to build a 'server' (whatever that happens to mean in context) or how to be an admin, we teach in 1 3 hour lecture to university students, or spend 12 months teaching to college (what in the US I guess you call tradeschools?) kids. That's the same, e.g. a LAMP setup running an actual webpage, (a bit more complex than that, but you don't really want a 10 page lab outline). We actually use almost all the same paperwork, but for the 3 hour lab we start with everything pre downloaded/burned etc... simply because you don't have 20 minutes to waste waiting for things to download in a 3 hour class.
Also, you already know csvtools for linux. If you didn't, your barrier to entry for that is the same, whether you are on windows or linux.
Like I say, we teach, and value both. But MS decided with one release that history grads who've been made into IT guys should be able to run the server, and now they're changing their minds. Which is my complaint, not that CLI is particularly bad, only that it's bad relative to the product they've been trying to sell. No more than I would want to have to use a CLI on my PS3 to start games.
Goodness no. We train people to *be* unix users properly if they're into that sort of thing. But they are also in it as a business. They're learning to use Linux because they view it as a path to employment, or because it's the most appropriate tool for their problem.
I'm talking about the people who come into a programme as linux users and who think because they're linux users they actually know something about CS. We work the other direction, and teach them CS, and then teach them linux if it's applicable to their desired skillset.
Lol, no, they won't. They'll try linux once, get a set of instructions that tell them to open a terminal $sudo, stop reading, and go back to Windows. On the desktop anyway.
But we're talking about phones, and 'gadgets' slates etc. Have you ever used WP7? It's nifty. It's definitely different than the iOS clone that Android is. I don't have a WP7 device of my own, but I can certainly see the appeal, I've played with a few of them and they feel very different than anything else, and they are pretty neat, live tiles is a good concept, as would be the xbox integration if I ever used my xBox. I'm not sure 'better' or 'worse' applies, but the market is new enough there's room for designed differently, which it is, and people who like this design rather than the iOS style will like it.
Believe it or not, people outside the /. bubble hate linux. Well that's not quite true, they actually hate things that break, and windows and linux both break for mostly the same reasons: bad drivers, bad hardware, and software problems users know nothing about. But they at least know more about Windows, and have better free support for windows from friends than there is for Linux, and instructions for how to solve problems on window are written for idiots.
People like to bitch about windows because it's fashionable, and because it tends to produce obfuscated error messages. But every piece of software does that, including Linux. Windows on ARM is for gadgets, not desktops, so you're buying all new software from somewhere, if you want it for your gadget. Now, are you going to buy software you know, that's a recompile from the x86, or software you don't?
Simply not true on mobile.
WP7 is a platform specified by MS. It runs an MS OS, but they say what software you can (or cannot) pre-load, they say what hardware specs are allowed, form factors etc. Want to know why there are *STILL* no dual core WP7's? Because aren't allowed to make and sell one. Any idiot who can make a /. post should realize there should be a WP7 dual core phone from any of Nokia, HTC, Samsung or the like by now, considering we're about a year after the equivalent on android, and it is, other than Nokia, the same hardware vendors using in many cases essentially the same hardware. But MS defines what a windows phone will be, and the room for innovation in that space by the handset makers is very very narrow.
Or you're confusing Windows 7 with Windows Phone 7, (or windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 as the case may be). Different markets, different rules.
I'm not suggesting this is good or bad btw (although I tend to come down on the side of bad), but the phone market is very different than the PC market. Different rules apply.
No, the path to making better software is to make people understand the ramifications of their actions, and understand not to take those actions unless they understand the consequences, which Microsoft has, in my opinion, been horrible at.
True. So they should you know.. be better at that.
The problem is that, by creating a nice simple interface where you get the impression that everything is SOOO EASY, Microsoft gives people with no clue the impression that they're Windows admins who know what they're doing.
I'll agree, in the aggregate, that it matters less whether there's a GUI or a CLI, but not having a quick and simple interface does help raise the bar a bit and provide a different view, so it doesn't look like the desktop a given clueless user feels familiar with.
Right, but they already lowered the bar. The question isn't whether they should have ever had a GUI, it's whether they should get rid of it. If I upgrade my computer from Windows 7 to Windows 8 (or upgrade a server from 2008 r2 to windows server 8) and suddenly have no idea how to manage it that's *REALLY* bad. Especially because you're now saying 'you were getting by badly before, but now you *have* to spend a pile of money to be trained' etc. That's not going to make for happy users.
To me it's the wrong business move, and wrong business message. Imagine if google said, "you know what, it would be faster, cheaper, and safer if everyone just used POP, preferably via Thunderbird to access gmail, so we're going to take away the web version", and visiting the website will now remotely invoke PINE. Now, that might be correct (probably not, but pretend that is for sake of argument), but you have a huge userbase, which, in MS's server case is a big chunk of their market we're talking about who suddenly have no clue how to use the 'new' version. They have no motivation to upgrade or get trained since the current version just works, and they don't know differently when it doesn't, and if they are going to migrate the service, you just fucked them over, so why would they migrate to you?
I realize the GUI is expensive, but they would be much better served, given then market they have, in putting some serious thought into having the GUI be useful for most tasks, with constant reference to the documentation for the CLI for anything useful, than to default to CLI and hope you don't fuck it up.
Alas, your assertion that the 1% of linux users are more qualified in anything is, without a single exception in my experience, false. They know nothing about POP3/SMTP, IMAP or how to program particularly, actually the windows guys have a lot of better programmers, because they've worked as programmers in a lot of cases (usually in java these days). But either way, the linux guys come in feeling themselves some how superior because they use linux. Then they get 60's because they don't know the rest of that stuff, but have heard the words before and don't know that they don't really know anything about the technology, and then they get their asses handed to them when we want a serious project done, because they are 'computer guys' and use linux. This is university not IT tradeschool college. Those guys, who actually spend 12 months learning linux sysadmining, do in 12 months what we do in 3 hours. And our guys are better at it after 3 hours than they were after 12 months. I've trained both, I gave up on the college IT kids. In the US this is probably different, because there's a different gap between tradeschools and Universities than there is here.
I have done all of those things on windows btw (hex dumps, sed, which actually has a windows version, and csv modifying). Just because you know the linux versions doesn't mean there aren't other ways to accomplish it. Which goes to my 'thinking you're elite because you use Linux, problem. If you don't know what the tools are, you're doomed, if you don't know how to diagnose the problem, you're equally doomed. That applies regardless of OS.
Don't get me wrong. We're training CS types. That's why we teach them command line tools and all of that. There is a place for that, you know.. professional IT people. But MS expanded the market for servers into home user servers, and small business local servers and all of that. Those aren't specialists, they ideally shouldn't need to be specialists. That may mean they need to dumb down windows servers or split the product family. But they're bouncing back in the other direction. Which means 10 years from now, I'm going to get calls on how to support a windows 7 server, because they aren't going to migrate to something they don't know how to use.