It seem pretty clear that billionaire tech "leaders" do not give a flying f**k about the plight of the American tech worker, especially the older ones. While they buy Hawaiian estates and sponsor the America's cup, they have absolutely abused H1-B visas to enrich themselves. I have seen it since at least 1996, using the lie that there is a lack of American talent for most tech jobs. They use this to depress our American wages and make us work horribly long hours like we were child labor in the early 1900's. They conspire to prevent a free job market by making secret deals with their competitors to not compete for talent. Maybe worst of all, they blackmail H1-B visa workers to get far less pay and to create a sort of slavery for these immigrants that makes it impossible for them to demand equal wages and decent treatment lest they are fired and they are forced to go back to their country of origin. Meanwhile they tear up and down I-280 in their supercars, fly in their private jets, and sail the oceans in their massive yachts. They claim concern for the environment or whatever social cause is popular on the Davos circuit. They live in bubbles like French kings from the 18th century. There was once exploding opportunities for the independent tech guy, but the tech King vampires have made us into blood donors to support their empires. H1-B visa should be used for only the most exceptional foreign talent to enrich the technical talent in this country. They should not be used for lowering wages for jobs where there is plenty of American technical talent, but the greedy Kings of tech just want more. And they should not use these visas to essentially enslave foreign workers.
It is very good that you are coming from a C and assembly background. Its always important to understand what any compilers or interpreted language do behind the scenes. My experience was Pascal => assembly => Basic => ObjectPascal => C => C++ => Java => Objective C => Python => Ruby => Perl; a lot of them overlapping.
The first thing I would suggest is to get up to speed on object-oriented programming concepts.
I would say that you should be familiar C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++ (can come in very hand when using c++ and Objective-C in the same project).
Swift seems to be the future for iOS and OS X and looks to be a very interesting language with some really great Xcode tools behind it. Think Playgrounds.
Its always good to know JVM based languages Java, Scala, etc... Obviously if you are going to do any Android you will have to know Java.
My prediction: Swift will be the most important language for iOS, OS X five years from now. It is usable today. Keep in mind that Swift is a language that is quickly evolving based on developer input, so there is going to be some overhead in keeping up with the changes.
Xcode is free, but it is worth the 99.00 dev program just to watch the last few years WWDC videos. Its pretty wild what you can do with Xcode these days.
Good luck with your iOS adventure. It can be a lot of fun!
I think maybe you should talk to some doctors. My brother is a interventional cardiologist and says that there are many doctors who are going to retire earlier due to the government control of medicine. ObamaCare is turning out to be quite a disaster in terms implementation and the regulations implementing it are only starting to be written.
Also, as doctors are being driven out of private practice into health care corporations, more defensive medicine is being practiced (read more unnecessary tests) by these hospitals. The profits on these tests end up in the hands of MBAs instead of MDs.
Your example of a cardiologist with a 2x "death rate" is a bad example. Rating systems like the one you tout cannot take into account that cardiologists that worry about these rating systems shy away from taking patients who are really sick and by definition are more likely to die. This happens all the time in interventional cardiology where a patient gets shuffled off to a cardiac surgeon because the cardiologist is risk averse. You can imaging that open heart surgery is orders of magnitude more expensive than having an interventional procedure.
Finally, health care cost are soaring because people are living longer because of all the new expensive technologies.
"The elderly (age 65 and over) made up around 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2002, but they consumed 36 percent of total U.S. personal health care expenses. The average health care expense in 2002 was $11,089 per year for elderly people but only $3,352 per year for working-age people (ages 19-64)"
I guess they are aware individuals; they fear for their safety from international drug terrorists in a country where its President will not take basic steps to secure constitutional freedoms of its own citizens.
People should read the law first. They should not turn someone's hit seeking web article into anything important. Arizona resident's have very legitimate concern about the criminal activities of organized crime in Mexico.
This is not a new story: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6848672&page=1
If you do not like the law, change it... do not disobey it.
I do not think that Indian, Russian, Chinese, etc engineers are really at risk of having their civil rights violated.
Where is the empathy on this list for someone who has health problems, especially when it is a man who has a wife and kids? It really sickens me to see the "humor" on some of these posts. Steve Jobs has done more for the personal computer industry than anyone I know. He has restored Apple, Inc to profitability. No analyst, no investor, no Mac or iPhone owner can dispute this.
The infantile need to judge someone who has achieved more than you will ever will is an ugly thing.
You need to learn what the facts are. All of the open source projects I mentioned, Apple contributes back to.
Apple is contributing to Javascript with their SquirrelFish project making Javascript run much faster.
You obviously despise Apple and no amount of information is going to educate you. You need to open your mind to things that are obvious to most people.
What's raising the bar? Ummm on the open source front: WebKit, Bonjour, Darwin, Objective-C, contributions to GGC, BSD, LLVM, SproutCore, JavaScript, and the list goes the list goes on.
On the proprietary front, Core Video, Core Audio, Core Animation, Cocoa, iPhone SDK, App store (which is the best thing to happen to small developers ever).
On the hardware front, great industrial design, great laptops, the iPod, the iPhone.
All of these thing have made Apple incredibly successful and I am sure we will see much more of this kind of innovation that forces all competitors, whether its Linux or MSFT or Dell, to become better.
If you cannot see this, you are living on another planet.
I've been a Mac user for 2 years now, although I owned a PC for around 14. I've had more headaches using Mac OSX than I've ever had using Windows.
I find that impossible to believe. Just try and change an environment variable on Windows on a mature system. The tiny field for this is a joke. The UI for environmental variables hasn't changed in my experience and it would be so easy to do so.
Try and install your licensed XP copy on a new machine to replace the one that died. Wait forever, reboot, reboot, reboot...
Try and do a full restore when you disk craps out.
When I purchased my new MacBook Pro I saw it came with a cool little utility that will copy everything over from my old computer. So I hooked up both computers to my gigabit ethernet switch ready to copy, and then it told me it doesn't support network transfers (!!!) I have to hook up the computers to each other using a firewire cable. I don't happen to have spare firewire cables lying around, although I do have tons and tons of ethernet cables (plus the laptops have built in wireless, it can communicate with the other laptop straight out of the box with nothing extra required.) Same thing with Aperture, I can't backup to network storage only an external drive hooked up via USB or Firewire. I can't imagine why anyone would want to rely on an external drive for a backup mechanism.
Jeez, go out and spend 3.70USD on a firewire cable.
Backup on a hard drive? Obviously, you do not use TimeMachine and you have never had to complete restore a system disk using Time Machine. It is by far the best backup solution ever. Its fast and it works. Network storage? Get a Time Capsule.
The single mouse button is often brought up and people are told "You don't need a second mouse button" although every mac program I've ever used has some right click menu, the standard methods of accessing the method with a single button are holding Ctrl then clicking or holding down the mouse button. The problem is, sometimes that doesn't work (like when finder is dying and you need to restart it, which you can only do through the right click menu) so I have to go find a USB mouse, plug it in, hope it works, and then use that to right click.
The single mouse button issue on the Mac has been settled on the Mac for years. Mighty Mouse (you may not like it) is a slick two button mouse (without the buttons!). The track pad on my MacBook Pro makes "right clicking" simple (two finger gesture on the pad and click).
The Finder rarely dies. You can restart it easily without rebooting.
I have used many, many USB mouses on the Mac and I have never seen one "not work"
In contrast I've never found a problem like the ones listed above in Windows that I can't solve. Even if it requires diving into the registry at least there exists a method. Doing anything sufficiently advanced on a Mac seems impossible (even with the unix backend, a simple task like editing/etc/hosts requires jumping through tons of hoops on the mac just because it's designed to be "easier".)
You have GOT to be kidding! Configuring most things on the Mac are simple and the advanced ones are pretty much equal to Linux. Use Google search and you can learn too!
The registry on Windows is a nightmare. Trying to get your software properly uninstalled is a nightmare. I love it when the Add/Remove Program utility fails and leave the entry in you program list forever.
How your post was modded to "informative" completely escapes me. You should have gotten a 5 for misinformative!
Do not know the guidelines in CA these days, but the killer and sex fiend in VT is a good reason to be concerned about minimum sentences. He got out early, and now a girl is dead.
I find this so odd. I have been a Mac developer since 1986 and I have had three Macs fail. One died in 1988 because I lived in an old house and had no power surge protector. My dryer killed it. The second was a Powerbook Duo, that was replace within a week. The last was the first dual quad core Mac Pro.
All in all I have had a great experience will Mac support in these cases. The most difficult case was with the Mac Pro and as an early adopter, there were few spare parts out there.
Macs have great quality. Statistically, some people will end up having a bad experience. The fact remains that Apple has very high consumer satisfaction for their Macs, and the consumer ratings for the iPhone are incredible.
1.) Mad geniuses who can violate most accepted programming practices, produce great new products, and walk away with the glory and leave the glorious mess to those who come after him or her.
2.) Software professionals who may be a little more tortoise than hare. They understand the companies they work for, adopt practices that fit into these companies, and spend much of their time mentoring anyone who will listen. They know that the best thing they can do is leave a better place than they found.
Just my experience. Don't even get me into bad programers. There are so many...
Funny, I graduated from high school in 1980 also. I was in high school in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
Back to the point, the sun is going to expend its mass as fuel, expand as gravitational forces lessen, and swallow the Earth some time in the next 6-7 billion years. Give or take a lot of math that makes huge approximations.
I am far more concerned by crap math models of global warming. If we close our minds, (say the Sun is in a quite phase, the temperature drops, and we end up fighting for food and energy) we may be not around to see if the global warming enthusiasts are correct.
The global warming argument distracts us from the real problem. We do not know how the climate is going to be. We do know that petro-energy will become more scarce and expensive and that the population is climbing. God help us if we are really going to cool in the next 20 years.
Slashdot Mirror
It seem pretty clear that billionaire tech "leaders" do not give a flying f**k about the plight of the American tech worker, especially the older ones. While they buy Hawaiian estates and sponsor the America's cup, they have absolutely abused H1-B visas to enrich themselves. I have seen it since at least 1996, using the lie that there is a lack of American talent for most tech jobs. They use this to depress our American wages and make us work horribly long hours like we were child labor in the early 1900's. They conspire to prevent a free job market by making secret deals with their competitors to not compete for talent. Maybe worst of all, they blackmail H1-B visa workers to get far less pay and to create a sort of slavery for these immigrants that makes it impossible for them to demand equal wages and decent treatment lest they are fired and they are forced to go back to their country of origin. Meanwhile they tear up and down I-280 in their supercars, fly in their private jets, and sail the oceans in their massive yachts. They claim concern for the environment or whatever social cause is popular on the Davos circuit. They live in bubbles like French kings from the 18th century. There was once exploding opportunities for the independent tech guy, but the tech King vampires have made us into blood donors to support their empires. H1-B visa should be used for only the most exceptional foreign talent to enrich the technical talent in this country. They should not be used for lowering wages for jobs where there is plenty of American technical talent, but the greedy Kings of tech just want more. And they should not use these visas to essentially enslave foreign workers.
It is very good that you are coming from a C and assembly background. Its always important to understand what any compilers or interpreted language do behind the scenes. My experience was Pascal => assembly => Basic => ObjectPascal => C => C++ => Java => Objective C => Python => Ruby => Perl; a lot of them overlapping.
The first thing I would suggest is to get up to speed on object-oriented programming concepts.
I would say that you should be familiar C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++ (can come in very hand when using c++ and Objective-C in the same project).
Swift seems to be the future for iOS and OS X and looks to be a very interesting language with some really great Xcode tools behind it. Think Playgrounds.
Its always good to know JVM based languages Java, Scala, etc... Obviously if you are going to do any Android you will have to know Java.
My prediction: Swift will be the most important language for iOS, OS X five years from now. It is usable today. Keep in mind that Swift is a language that is quickly evolving based on developer input, so there is going to be some overhead in keeping up with the changes.
Xcode is free, but it is worth the 99.00 dev program just to watch the last few years WWDC videos. Its pretty wild what you can do with Xcode these days.
Good luck with your iOS adventure. It can be a lot of fun!
Have you written ANY code for iOS or OS X? How old are LLVM based compilers? How old are the US Tools available in Xcode 6?
I do not understand how your post was marked as insightful. If you want to write an iOS app you must use swift or Objective-C?
Make him or her a Scrum Master! He will never touch code again!
I think maybe you should talk to some doctors. My brother is a interventional cardiologist and says that there are many doctors who are going to retire earlier due to the government control of medicine. ObamaCare is turning out to be quite a disaster in terms implementation and the regulations implementing it are only starting to be written.
Also, as doctors are being driven out of private practice into health care corporations, more defensive medicine is being practiced (read more unnecessary tests) by these hospitals. The profits on these tests end up in the hands of MBAs instead of MDs.
Your example of a cardiologist with a 2x "death rate" is a bad example. Rating systems like the one you tout cannot take into account that cardiologists that worry about these rating systems shy away from taking patients who are really sick and by definition are more likely to die. This happens all the time in interventional cardiology where a patient gets shuffled off to a cardiac surgeon because the cardiologist is risk averse. You can imaging that open heart surgery is orders of magnitude more expensive than having an interventional procedure.
Finally, health care cost are soaring because people are living longer because of all the new expensive technologies.
"The elderly (age 65 and over) made up around 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2002, but they consumed 36 percent of total U.S. personal health care expenses. The average health care expense in 2002 was $11,089 per year for elderly people but only $3,352 per year for working-age people (ages 19-64)"
From: http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/factsheets/costs/expriach/index.html
Health care costs are a serious issue and you attacking doctors is a simplistic and faulty approach to finding solutions to this problem.
You have a potty mouth. Using the f-word is crude and only lessens your arguments. Some people have children that actually read these forums.
Oh, and you facts are wrong; your history is wrong.
Try to do better next time you open your virtual mouth.
Does anyone think this is worth keeping?
-Tom
I guess they are aware individuals; they fear for their safety from international drug terrorists in a country where its President will not take basic steps to secure constitutional freedoms of its own citizens.
So Hopey and Changey. Like.
People should read the law first. They should not turn someone's hit seeking web article into anything important. Arizona resident's have very legitimate concern about the criminal activities of organized crime in Mexico.
This is not a new story: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6848672&page=1
If you do not like the law, change it... do not disobey it.
I do not think that Indian, Russian, Chinese, etc engineers are really at risk of having their civil rights violated.
Too many will(s) in the last sentence.
Where is the empathy on this list for someone who has health problems, especially when it is a man who has a wife and kids? It really sickens me to see the "humor" on some of these posts. Steve Jobs has done more for the personal computer industry than anyone I know. He has restored Apple, Inc to profitability. No analyst, no investor, no Mac or iPhone owner can dispute this.
The infantile need to judge someone who has achieved more than you will ever will is an ugly thing.
I have worked for several Biomedical companies as a contractor over the years and I have done Cocoa, Java/Swing, and Qt along the way.
Feel free to contact me
tomcondon@mac.com
two words... Mighty mouse.
three words... 3rd party mice.
one word... zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
You need to learn what the facts are. All of the open source projects I mentioned, Apple contributes back to.
Apple is contributing to Javascript with their SquirrelFish project making Javascript run much faster.
You obviously despise Apple and no amount of information is going to educate you. You need to open your mind to things that are obvious to most people.
What's raising the bar? Ummm on the open source front: WebKit, Bonjour, Darwin, Objective-C, contributions to GGC, BSD, LLVM, SproutCore, JavaScript, and the list goes the list goes on.
On the proprietary front, Core Video, Core Audio, Core Animation, Cocoa, iPhone SDK, App store (which is the best thing to happen to small developers ever).
On the hardware front, great industrial design, great laptops, the iPod, the iPhone.
All of these thing have made Apple incredibly successful and I am sure we will see much more of this kind of innovation that forces all competitors, whether its Linux or MSFT or Dell, to become better.
If you cannot see this, you are living on another planet.
Why would you hate Apple?
They have succeeded with products that people want to pay for.
They have contributed much to the open source community.
They have raised the bar for software/hardware technology in general.
They give developers a great platform for either open source development or Mac development without charging for developer tools.
They have created an exceptional market for independent developers to make REAL money writing for the iPhone.
I guess Apple is bad because they make money.
Mod this guy up to a ten.
7.5.1? 1996? Ha! You must be a MSFT fanboy of Blue Screen of Death if you bring up that.
Your comment is irrelevant!
I've been a Mac user for 2 years now, although I owned a PC for around 14. I've had more headaches using Mac OSX than I've ever had using Windows.
I find that impossible to believe. Just try and change an environment variable on Windows on a mature system. The tiny field for this is a joke. The UI for environmental variables hasn't changed in my experience and it would be so easy to do so.
Try and install your licensed XP copy on a new machine to replace the one that died. Wait forever, reboot, reboot, reboot...
Try and do a full restore when you disk craps out.
When I purchased my new MacBook Pro I saw it came with a cool little utility that will copy everything over from my old computer. So I hooked up both computers to my gigabit ethernet switch ready to copy, and then it told me it doesn't support network transfers (!!!) I have to hook up the computers to each other using a firewire cable. I don't happen to have spare firewire cables lying around, although I do have tons and tons of ethernet cables (plus the laptops have built in wireless, it can communicate with the other laptop straight out of the box with nothing extra required.) Same thing with Aperture, I can't backup to network storage only an external drive hooked up via USB or Firewire. I can't imagine why anyone would want to rely on an external drive for a backup mechanism.
Jeez, go out and spend 3.70USD on a firewire cable.
Backup on a hard drive? Obviously, you do not use TimeMachine and you have never had to complete restore a system disk using Time Machine. It is by far the best backup solution ever. Its fast and it works. Network storage? Get a Time Capsule.
The single mouse button is often brought up and people are told "You don't need a second mouse button" although every mac program I've ever used has some right click menu, the standard methods of accessing the method with a single button are holding Ctrl then clicking or holding down the mouse button. The problem is, sometimes that doesn't work (like when finder is dying and you need to restart it, which you can only do through the right click menu) so I have to go find a USB mouse, plug it in, hope it works, and then use that to right click.
The single mouse button issue on the Mac has been settled on the Mac for years. Mighty Mouse (you may not like it) is a slick two button mouse (without the buttons!). The track pad on my MacBook Pro makes "right clicking" simple (two finger gesture on the pad and click).
The Finder rarely dies. You can restart it easily without rebooting.
I have used many, many USB mouses on the Mac and I have never seen one "not work"
In contrast I've never found a problem like the ones listed above in Windows that I can't solve. Even if it requires diving into the registry at least there exists a method. Doing anything sufficiently advanced on a Mac seems impossible (even with the unix backend, a simple task like editing /etc/hosts requires jumping through tons of hoops on the mac just because it's designed to be "easier".)
You have GOT to be kidding! Configuring most things on the Mac are simple and the advanced ones are pretty much equal to Linux. Use Google search and you can learn too!
The registry on Windows is a nightmare. Trying to get your software properly uninstalled is a nightmare. I love it when the Add/Remove Program utility fails and leave the entry in you program list forever.
How your post was modded to "informative" completely escapes me. You should have gotten a 5 for misinformative!
Do not know the guidelines in CA these days, but the killer and sex fiend in VT is a good reason to be concerned about minimum sentences. He got out early, and now a girl is dead.
Murder your wife and get a reduced sentence for showing authorities where the body of the dead mother of your children are?
15 years for murder?
This is insane. He should get life. Period.
I hope his children are kept safely away from him.
I mean buy!
Place it in an autoclave for 3 hours. Then go to the Apple store and but a new laptop.
Funny, I thought the Mac was immune to viruses.
I find this so odd. I have been a Mac developer since 1986 and I have had three Macs fail. One died in 1988 because I lived in an old house and had no power surge protector. My dryer killed it. The second was a Powerbook Duo, that was replace within a week. The last was the first dual quad core Mac Pro.
All in all I have had a great experience will Mac support in these cases. The most difficult case was with the Mac Pro and as an early adopter, there were few spare parts out there.
Macs have great quality. Statistically, some people will end up having a bad experience. The fact remains that Apple has very high consumer satisfaction for their Macs, and the consumer ratings for the iPhone are incredible.
My suggestion is to buy AAPL!
-Tom
I believe there are two types:
1.) Mad geniuses who can violate most accepted programming practices, produce great new products, and walk away with the glory and leave the glorious mess to those who come after him or her.
2.) Software professionals who may be a little more tortoise than hare. They understand the companies they work for, adopt practices that fit into these companies, and spend much of their time mentoring anyone who will listen. They know that the best thing they can do is leave a better place than they found.
Just my experience. Don't even get me into bad programers. There are so many...
-ltr
Funny, I graduated from high school in 1980 also. I was in high school in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
Back to the point, the sun is going to expend its mass as fuel, expand as gravitational forces lessen, and swallow the Earth some time in the next 6-7 billion years. Give or take a lot of math that makes huge approximations.
I am far more concerned by crap math models of global warming. If we close our minds, (say the Sun is in a quite phase, the temperature drops, and we end up fighting for food and energy) we may be not around to see if the global warming enthusiasts are correct.
The global warming argument distracts us from the real problem. We do not know how the climate is going to be. We do know that petro-energy will become more scarce and expensive and that the population is climbing. God help us if we are really going to cool in the next 20 years.
All wars are economic.