I grew up with computers, spectrum zx81, speccy +3, Amiga 500+ and then PC. Knew BASIC (woo!), played games, enjoyed them. So went and did a degree.
Enjoyed that (although half the class were married or practically married and the other half had never said boo to a real live woman), drank lots, did some work, had a great laugh and came out with a BSc(hons) Computer Science.
Then started working.
Worked for a consultancy developing telemetry systems for big water companies. Suddenly I realised that what was my passion - translated into the worlds most mind-numingly boring job.
Sitting all day, every day at a computer looking at over a million lines of code written in C (with macros to make it look like ALGOL-86) not understanding how it all fitted together, not having anyone talk to me, getting boring work packages and generally hating every minute of it. I saw no fruit of my labours, got no recognition and whilst the company made record profit I got penuts pay-rises.
So I left, moved to management consultancy, worked with short projects, people and things that actually came to light. I did project management and operations management and... enjoyed it.
I don't claim that all IT is like that, indeed it's not, but my initial experience of it put me completely off for life, and, if i hadn't left, could have completely put me off computers full stop.
Now I just tinker - but it's a damn sight more fun doing that, than for a job.
First off, let me state that I am a rather devout C++ developer with about 8 years experience developing in the language.
But for server apps, I think it's the wrong choice.
Maybe, but my personal opinion is that in the end it's better to write an application in a language you know really well (but might not be the best thing) than write some hacky fudge job (which will no doubt be really flakey and possibly even more insecure) in a language you don't know just because it's the best one to use.
For about 24 hours, they had her connected to all kinds of sensors which were connected to a Dell PC running a data collection/graphing program on what appeared to be Win 2k. The application was a joke. The nurses fumbled and bumbled with it; crashed at least once. Fortunately, the important things went well (it's a boy), but no thanks to our friends in Redmond.
Unless the application was written by the "boys at Redmond", how could it be their fault?
By the sounds of your comment, it was the application crashing and not the operating system. Therefore your effort would be better spent complaining about the company that wrote the application rather than Microsoft.
After all, you don't bitch about the kernel developers if OpenOffice bombs on you, do you?
So, yes MS eventually had a better browser, but they did it by using anti-competitive practices to dry-up cash flow and use (thereby slowing development) of what was a better browser. Again, all MO.
Really? I was led to believe that Netscape 4 was such a pile of cack that it didn't really need any "drying-up" actions on behalf of Microsoft to gain the lead.
They just needed to write something that was better. And they did. I remember making the transistion from NS to IE, going "wow! this actually works, feels nice and renders pages properly" and never looking back.
The problem now is that IE is an inferior browser but becaused it's on every version of Windows and it works reasonably well, (normal) people find it difficulty to justify downloading a 20 meg (or whatever it is thesedays - I haven't looked recently) package to replace it.
Of course, if you're on a dial up modem, then there is even less of an incentive.
That's not exactly rocket science or a complex programming effort. Rather, it's a five line USB hotplug script on Linux (using rsync) that works with every player: iPod, Zen, whatever.
For 98% of the population a "five line USB hotplug script" is rocket science and a complex programming effort.
"Normal" users should even need to think about this sort of stuff.
Doesn't cost them anything to include it except a little more R&D maybe, and it's going to attract at least a few more people.
You have to balance the amount of money it costs on development against the number of new users it'll attract.
Outside the/. community - that number is extremely low compaired to MP3. Hell, probably even in the/. community the number is rather low (they're just very vocal).
Therefore companies find it very difficult to justify this sort of cost for very little gain - especially to the finance department.
The standards change. Look at what happened when Unisys did pull their stunt with LZW. PNG and JPG suddenly became the 'in' thing, and there was a big public backlash.
There was? Funny, I didn't see it. In fact, I still see GIF's all over the place and very little (relativily speaking) PNG's.
Even this very own Slashdot page has 62 GIF's and no PNG's.
There was a backlash, but I definately wouldn't say it was big.
It's worth pointing out here, before the baying masses start shouting, that code signing on the smartphone device is at the discretion of the network operator and not Microsoft.
In the UK, Orange decided to go with code signing because of the concerns about virus' and the fact they could get some money from each application produced for it.
Microsoft merely provides the ability to enforce it, if the operator so desires.
Plug your email address into Google. Sometimes, however hard you try - it still ends up on the internet.
My biggest beef is with people who put emails you send up on the website with no thought to actually helping you avoid being crawled. For example - the perl maintainers. I posted an email from work to them pointing out a bug, they stuck it up on a website without removing my email address and some crawler got it and started sending me (at work) all sorts of spam.
I requested repeatidly that they either remove my email address or obfusicate the address - but they ignored my request every time.
In fact, it's still sitting there and one other page as I write this. Thankfully, I left the company two years ago so don't get the junk that probably still gets sent to it even now.
Garbage like this just makes b0rken browsers like IE less and less tolerable to Joe User. Making Joe unhappy with IE is good because the sites the rest of us need to use will be less and less able to count on IE as some "universal standard."
The chances are that if Microsoft see that enough people are moving away from IE because it doesn't have these features then they'll do something about it and risk the wrath of online websites.
Well, I say wrath because I don't see how Microsoft needs them anyway and they're going to be far more likely to listen to 14,000 people attempting to replace IE than a company who wants to invade you with pop up adverts.
I consider this to be what IE 7 could look like (but probably won't).
You're kidding right? Because the industries you listed are most likely to ask the standard questions (what is your greatest weakness, etc) than anything off the wall. They don't want creative thinking types.
If you've actually been interviewed by any one of them, you'll find out how wrong you are.
Microsoft was not the first company to ask such questions, but it certainly popularized it.
I'd personally say that Banks, Management Consultancies, Lawyers and other blue chip institutions popularised it significantly more than Microsoft ever did.
They may be a big company, but the combination of people like Arthur Anderson, Accenture, PwC, Credit Suisse First Boston, DKW Bank and others dwarf Microsoft quite substantially.
Here are some used in Management Consultancy interviews:
How many phone books are there in London?
How many steel pylons are there on the Eiffel Tower?
What would be the implications of the invention of a machine that could get you from A to B in a fraction of a second?
and many others. They weren't designed to have a right or wrong answer - just to see if you could take something completely silly and logically break it down into sub-points with a bit od creative thinking thrown in for good measure.
Often people got hung up on the impossibility of it, refused to make some guesses or failed to ask good enough questions to get a better understanding of the question.
and assist you in reclaiming disk space by, say, reformating your drive.
<reality check>
Until someone actually writes a massivily spreading virus/worm that jumps from Windows PC to Windows PC doing precisely that (formatting hard drives) - people are just going to patch it and not even think about changing OS.
Hell, most people probably won't even patch it. What doesn't affect them, they don't care about.
The issue is they're using an unintended loophole to circumvent the law. If you think we don't need labor laws, that's fine, oppose the laws on general principal. If you think we do need labor laws, then you should be opposed to Microsoft's (and others') behavior.
In the UK if you employ a temp for a certain amount of time over a period of months you must offer them a full time job.
It is therefore not uncommon to see companies state that temps can only work for a maximum of a couple of days below that limit and then not be able to be re-employed for another period of time.
It's not exploiting a loopbole, it's just working to the letter of it.
The point is that Microsoft is using the temp status to get around labor laws. The aren't really temps, they're being used as permanent employees, but designating them "temps" allows MS to get around having to give them certain benefits.
So do many other companies - it's hardly MS specific. If people don't like it, then they should find another job.
I'm a little lost - when I've been temping almost exactly the same has happened to me. Lets see:
withholding full-time benefits and pay while working them like full-time employees
Check. I did a 9-5 like everyone else and was paid according to the contract. Which, if it was less than others, I was SOL.
Microsoft does not allow these workers to use employee discounts for products they help to design
Check. So? They're a temp, that perk it would appear if for perminant staff. I don't see a problem here.
They aren't invited to company parties. They don't get promotional swag.
Same again. I was never invited to parties nor did I get swag from anyone. Because I was a temp.
Contractors must wear orange name badges to contrast with the blue of full-time employees.
Check again. Been in places where security needs to identify you as either perminant, contract, intern or whatever.
a nickname borne from the "a-" that precedes any Microsoft temp's e-mail address.
They're lucky they got an email address. Often I wasn't even on the network.
Maybe the working laws are different in the US to the UK - but i've been through all the above and people here go through all the above on a daily basis without complaining.
I can't really see what they're complaining about.
Yay another Redhat update. Reading the article I can't seen any reason to upgrade apart from the normal updated packages. However it is nice to see RedHat at least following a sensible, if slightly unpopular, route with regards to pantents such as MP3
For me, there is every reason to update. I must be the worlds unluckiest person when it comes to installing updates. I don't have broadband so the update network is out. RPM's either tend to not work, require 300 dependencies or the source flatly fails to compile with wierd error messages. I've never managed to update KDE or Gnome once without running into problems. In fact I've not managed to update anything without running into some sort of problem.
Even if I do manage to get it to compile, it often core dumps the first run and I'm left scratching my head and wondering what to do. RTFM doesn't seem to help and the email support often replies with "odd, that doesn't happen to me".
It's times like that when I wish for the ease of an installshield program or something similar. Click, click, click and I'm done.
So when Redhat 9 comes out it makes sense for me to go with that where I know everything will be complete, compiled properly and in working order.
Okay, I'll admit the title is rather trollish, but I have a point.
I went on holiday for 10 days - in the, granted, limited time I saw telly I couldn't get over the fact that (compared to the UK) advertising is literally rammed down your throat.
Almost everything is sponsored by someone, you have advert breaks with unnerving frequency (often just cutting out in the middle of the tension without any thought to picking a bit where it would make sense) and you even have adverts just after the starting credits and just before the ending credits (I mean, whats the point of sticking some adverts up - only to come back to the credits, and then more adverts??).
Finally, I was watching some ice hockey and even the player stats screen was littered with 3 adverts! Amazing.
So, in short, I'm not really surprised that Tivo took off over there and badly here. Yes, we have adverts - but they're appproximately once every 15 minutes, cut out at appropriate sections of the programme or film and aren't put so close to the beginning or end of items that it annoys the viewers.
BUT, and it's a big but - Sony are very pro-DRM. Their Net-MD line would be great if it wasn't so crippled and last month I went to buy a CD/MP3 player only to find that whilst their top of the range product was very very cool, you couldn't fast forward or rewind through MP3's. I fail to believe that this is due to technical problems - more the fact that they want it to be so slightly inconveniant that you give up using MP3's.
I think the cruel joke is the horrible load of advertising I'm put through to watch generally tasteless, unorginal, mediocre programming. If the TV networks can't adapt to the new style of TV, then they deserve to go out of business.
Even if there was high quality television programming and a small amount of advertising - people would still fast forward through the commercials.
Why? Because however small a number they are, they're inconveniant and break up your favourite program.
To put it another way, people who copy software illegially these days claim that they wouldn't do it if the price was cheaper. Yet in the days of the Sinclair Spectrum when games were £1.99/$3 (ie. cheap) there were just as many people copying them.
In other words, however many adverts you put on or however good the quality of the television - viewers are still going to complain about the amount and then skip them. Fact of life.
Pretty soon, Internet Explorer will be the only browser without tabs. I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft realises that - yes - tabs are good.
I'm guessing a hell of a lot here, but if Microsoft decide to release IE 7 and put some reasonable effort into it (that is a big "if"), then you'll get something which works a lot like this.
Personally I love it. I've tried Opera and Mozilla but for some reason always end up coming back to this. Sure it uses the IE rendering engine and has the 1001 security flaws that we all know about - but somehow it just feels comfortable.
I think thats another reason why there isn't this mass exodus away from IE. Non-Slashdot reading people (ie. 99% of the computer owning public) get comfortable with something and are totally reluctant to change.
Slashdot Mirror
Enjoyed that (although half the class were married or practically married and the other half had never said boo to a real live woman), drank lots, did some work, had a great laugh and came out with a BSc(hons) Computer Science.
Then started working.
Worked for a consultancy developing telemetry systems for big water companies. Suddenly I realised that what was my passion - translated into the worlds most mind-numingly boring job.
Sitting all day, every day at a computer looking at over a million lines of code written in C (with macros to make it look like ALGOL-86) not understanding how it all fitted together, not having anyone talk to me, getting boring work packages and generally hating every minute of it. I saw no fruit of my labours, got no recognition and whilst the company made record profit I got penuts pay-rises.
So I left, moved to management consultancy, worked with short projects, people and things that actually came to light. I did project management and operations management and ... enjoyed it.
I don't claim that all IT is like that, indeed it's not, but my initial experience of it put me completely off for life, and, if i hadn't left, could have completely put me off computers full stop.
Now I just tinker - but it's a damn sight more fun doing that, than for a job.
But for server apps, I think it's the wrong choice.
Maybe, but my personal opinion is that in the end it's better to write an application in a language you know really well (but might not be the best thing) than write some hacky fudge job (which will no doubt be really flakey and possibly even more insecure) in a language you don't know just because it's the best one to use.
Unless the application was written by the "boys at Redmond", how could it be their fault?
By the sounds of your comment, it was the application crashing and not the operating system. Therefore your effort would be better spent complaining about the company that wrote the application rather than Microsoft.
After all, you don't bitch about the kernel developers if OpenOffice bombs on you, do you?
(reload a couple of times)
Yes, I did have something to do with it. Sorry.
Really? I was led to believe that Netscape 4 was such a pile of cack that it didn't really need any "drying-up" actions on behalf of Microsoft to gain the lead.
They just needed to write something that was better. And they did. I remember making the transistion from NS to IE, going "wow! this actually works, feels nice and renders pages properly" and never looking back.
The problem now is that IE is an inferior browser but becaused it's on every version of Windows and it works reasonably well, (normal) people find it difficulty to justify downloading a 20 meg (or whatever it is thesedays - I haven't looked recently) package to replace it.
Of course, if you're on a dial up modem, then there is even less of an incentive.
For 98% of the population a "five line USB hotplug script" is rocket science and a complex programming effort.
"Normal" users should even need to think about this sort of stuff.
You have to balance the amount of money it costs on development against the number of new users it'll attract.
Outside the /. community - that number is extremely low compaired to MP3. Hell, probably even in the /. community the number is rather low (they're just very vocal).
Therefore companies find it very difficult to justify this sort of cost for very little gain - especially to the finance department.
There was? Funny, I didn't see it. In fact, I still see GIF's all over the place and very little (relativily speaking) PNG's.
Even this very own Slashdot page has 62 GIF's and no PNG's.
There was a backlash, but I definately wouldn't say it was big.
In the UK, Orange decided to go with code signing because of the concerns about virus' and the fact they could get some money from each application produced for it.
Microsoft merely provides the ability to enforce it, if the operator so desires.
My biggest beef is with people who put emails you send up on the website with no thought to actually helping you avoid being crawled. For example - the perl maintainers. I posted an email from work to them pointing out a bug, they stuck it up on a website without removing my email address and some crawler got it and started sending me (at work) all sorts of spam.
I requested repeatidly that they either remove my email address or obfusicate the address - but they ignored my request every time.
In fact, it's still sitting there and one other page as I write this. Thankfully, I left the company two years ago so don't get the junk that probably still gets sent to it even now.
The chances are that if Microsoft see that enough people are moving away from IE because it doesn't have these features then they'll do something about it and risk the wrath of online websites.
Well, I say wrath because I don't see how Microsoft needs them anyway and they're going to be far more likely to listen to 14,000 people attempting to replace IE than a company who wants to invade you with pop up adverts.
I consider this to be what IE 7 could look like (but probably won't).
Try actually reading the article :o)
He specifically states that text adverts on search engines work because you're activily going out to find something.
If you're going for SC level Management Consultancy (not IT) and never experienced interviews like that then I'm surprised.
If you're not talking about that, then I wouldn't know and certainly wouldn't go so far to claim that you are dead wrong.
If you've actually been interviewed by any one of them, you'll find out how wrong you are.
I'd personally say that Banks, Management Consultancies, Lawyers and other blue chip institutions popularised it significantly more than Microsoft ever did.
They may be a big company, but the combination of people like Arthur Anderson, Accenture, PwC, Credit Suisse First Boston, DKW Bank and others dwarf Microsoft quite substantially.
and many others. They weren't designed to have a right or wrong answer - just to see if you could take something completely silly and logically break it down into sub-points with a bit od creative thinking thrown in for good measure.
Often people got hung up on the impossibility of it, refused to make some guesses or failed to ask good enough questions to get a better understanding of the question.
<reality check>
Until someone actually writes a massivily spreading virus/worm that jumps from Windows PC to Windows PC doing precisely that (formatting hard drives) - people are just going to patch it and not even think about changing OS.
Hell, most people probably won't even patch it. What doesn't affect them, they don't care about.
</reality check>
In the UK if you employ a temp for a certain amount of time over a period of months you must offer them a full time job.
It is therefore not uncommon to see companies state that temps can only work for a maximum of a couple of days below that limit and then not be able to be re-employed for another period of time.
It's not exploiting a loopbole, it's just working to the letter of it.
So do many other companies - it's hardly MS specific. If people don't like it, then they should find another job.
Again, I fail to see the issue here.
withholding full-time benefits and pay while working them like full-time employees
Check. I did a 9-5 like everyone else and was paid according to the contract. Which, if it was less than others, I was SOL.
Microsoft does not allow these workers to use employee discounts for products they help to design
Check. So? They're a temp, that perk it would appear if for perminant staff. I don't see a problem here.
They aren't invited to company parties. They don't get promotional swag.
Same again. I was never invited to parties nor did I get swag from anyone. Because I was a temp.
Contractors must wear orange name badges to contrast with the blue of full-time employees.
Check again. Been in places where security needs to identify you as either perminant, contract, intern or whatever.
a nickname borne from the "a-" that precedes any Microsoft temp's e-mail address.
They're lucky they got an email address. Often I wasn't even on the network.
Maybe the working laws are different in the US to the UK - but i've been through all the above and people here go through all the above on a daily basis without complaining.
I can't really see what they're complaining about.
It took him over a year and several helpful pointers in comments before he actually got around to actually installing a spam filter!
For me, there is every reason to update. I must be the worlds unluckiest person when it comes to installing updates. I don't have broadband so the update network is out. RPM's either tend to not work, require 300 dependencies or the source flatly fails to compile with wierd error messages. I've never managed to update KDE or Gnome once without running into problems. In fact I've not managed to update anything without running into some sort of problem.
Even if I do manage to get it to compile, it often core dumps the first run and I'm left scratching my head and wondering what to do. RTFM doesn't seem to help and the email support often replies with "odd, that doesn't happen to me".
It's times like that when I wish for the ease of an installshield program or something similar. Click, click, click and I'm done.
So when Redhat 9 comes out it makes sense for me to go with that where I know everything will be complete, compiled properly and in working order.
I went on holiday for 10 days - in the, granted, limited time I saw telly I couldn't get over the fact that (compared to the UK) advertising is literally rammed down your throat.
Almost everything is sponsored by someone, you have advert breaks with unnerving frequency (often just cutting out in the middle of the tension without any thought to picking a bit where it would make sense) and you even have adverts just after the starting credits and just before the ending credits (I mean, whats the point of sticking some adverts up - only to come back to the credits, and then more adverts??).
Finally, I was watching some ice hockey and even the player stats screen was littered with 3 adverts! Amazing.
So, in short, I'm not really surprised that Tivo took off over there and badly here. Yes, we have adverts - but they're appproximately once every 15 minutes, cut out at appropriate sections of the programme or film and aren't put so close to the beginning or end of items that it annoys the viewers.
BUT, and it's a big but - Sony are very pro-DRM. Their Net-MD line would be great if it wasn't so crippled and last month I went to buy a CD/MP3 player only to find that whilst their top of the range product was very very cool, you couldn't fast forward or rewind through MP3's. I fail to believe that this is due to technical problems - more the fact that they want it to be so slightly inconveniant that you give up using MP3's.
Even if there was high quality television programming and a small amount of advertising - people would still fast forward through the commercials.
Why? Because however small a number they are, they're inconveniant and break up your favourite program.
To put it another way, people who copy software illegially these days claim that they wouldn't do it if the price was cheaper. Yet in the days of the Sinclair Spectrum when games were £1.99/$3 (ie. cheap) there were just as many people copying them.
In other words, however many adverts you put on or however good the quality of the television - viewers are still going to complain about the amount and then skip them. Fact of life.
I'm guessing a hell of a lot here, but if Microsoft decide to release IE 7 and put some reasonable effort into it (that is a big "if"), then you'll get something which works a lot like this.
Personally I love it. I've tried Opera and Mozilla but for some reason always end up coming back to this. Sure it uses the IE rendering engine and has the 1001 security flaws that we all know about - but somehow it just feels comfortable.
I think thats another reason why there isn't this mass exodus away from IE. Non-Slashdot reading people (ie. 99% of the computer owning public) get comfortable with something and are totally reluctant to change.