First, if you carry around a $5000 laptop, you have bigger issues. Not even Apple sells laptops that expensive.
Second, an $40 bag would do just as well.
Third, even if you have cash to burn on a $220 bag, you don't have to write a 18KB puff piece about this or "care" about it on such a deep level. If you want to wipe your ass with 20 dollar bills, that's fine with me. But bragging about it would certainly land you in a douchebag category. As would bragging about your $5K laptop.
>> there's something extra you need, that 'eye for the >> visually pleasing
Not only you need "an eye" (i.e. the discriminative system in learning theory parlance), you also need the ability to come up with something new (i.e. the generative system).
I have "an eye". I can tell whether something is good or not, and can convincingly explain why. I can suggest improvements to an existing interface and explain how they will improve matters. I just can't roll a good UI from scratch.
There's a difference. As an intern, you responsibilites end at the end of your internship. So no one is cracking the whip over your head or forces you to come to work on Saturday (otherwise you won't want to join after you graduate). Once you become an FTE (full-time employee) all of that will change. For one, there will be "stack ranking" where you're ranked against your peers according to the perception that management has of you. If you don't pay attention to "visibility" -- you won't get promoted, no matter how much of a genius you are. You will learn this in about a year or two. Another killer thing is that nowhere does the TEAM performance come into the equation. You're competing solely with your peers for a fixed size pie. The problem with this is that someone has to get a shitty review score in order for someone else to get a good review score. If all members of your team are good, you may have to whore yourself to the management in order to get promoted. But that won't be easy either, because your team members are not stupid, and they're doing the same thing.
This is how FTEs are forced into overtime, ridiculous schedules, and other unreasonable demands. Needless to say, this shit doesn't work on interns, since they couldn't care less if they get a promo.
After about 2 or 3 years there I figured things out and started acting accordingly. I maintained a reasonable, albeit not outstanding, promotion velocity while flat out refusing to work weekends and overtime (except in the final stretch of the shipping cycle). I did good work, I kept my manager (and skip-level manager) informed, and I set the expectations beforehand with each new team I moved to.
That said, the endless fucking performance review cycle did me in and I decided to go somewhere where I'd be actually focused on my job, not on keeping everyone informed.
I did learn a TON, though, both about software engineering and about corporate life (or, shall we say, warfare). I can't recommend Microsoft highly enough for someone who's just out of college, if only for 2 or 3 years.
Don't make a mistake of staying longer. The compensation system is engineered in such a way that you really start liking the numbers in your paycheck at around 3 or 4 year mark. Stash away some cash and move on.
No one is forcing you to use Windows anymore. As a matter of fact, according to marketshare statistics, one person out of every 10 no longer uses Windows already. Make that number go up. This bullshit will cease only when market share drops.
I see a popular misconception rearing its ugly head again. Folks, R&D is not just Research. It's ALL development, testing and program management combined, including project management, vendors, design, UX, localization, etc, etc.
They don't spend $8B a year on just research. One of their problems is that developers represent only a tiny minority of the overall headcount, so most of that sum isn't even spent on "D". Heck, folks at the top of the corporate level ladder (also known as Partners; some of them are worth their weight in rare earth metals, most are completely worthless) rake in over $1B just for themselves.
And still tiny screen, no full PDF and relies on a wireless provider who might go out of business soon. I guess I'll have to wait for V3 SP2, like with Microsoft to get anything that's worth paying for.
Why the hell are we wasting all this power on nukes? How about some advanced drugs? General AI? Complete simulation of human brain? I mean, Jesus H Christ, our nukes are already GOOD ENOUGH.
It will be wildly successful, too. XP was the first really "consumer" OS from Microsoft after Windows Me debacle. Win 7 is the first consumer OS after Vista debacle. I've been using it on all my machines since it came out, and it's a vast improvement over Vista. It starts faster, feels more lightweight, replaces a lot of the botched UI introduced in Vista with versions that make sense. There's more polish in this beta than Vista ever had.
IMO, this is the closest attempt at Apple levels of polish Microsoft has ever been able to pull off.
>> That is to say, he is trying to set Russia up as a Great >> Power and an ideological competitor to the West.
It is a power to be reckoned with, particularly in its immediate area of influence. If Washington DC doesn't like it, they can go pound sand. Military exercises in Venezuela were just a response for NATO military ships in Georgia. You shit on their doorstep, they shit on yours. Simple. You don't talk down to a sovereign country with enough firepower to turn the entire north American continent into nuclear desert. You don't shit on its doorstep. You don't put your military bases near its densely populated areas. You don't buy out the governments of neighboring countries with which Russia has historical relationship dating back three hundred years. That, in short, is Putin's message. And the way I see it, it's the right message to deliver.
If they really wanted to pit themselves against the US, they'd be arming Iran with their latest gear right now, not with the previous generation stuff.
And I don't see where the "ideological" competition is. They're a capitalist country now. Their only big problem is a bit of a personality cult, but that will pass in time.
And India? Please, over a half of the population there _can't_read_.
>> I'm sure $150/bbl oil had nothing to do with it.
It sure did. But at least those profits were properly taxed and put into Russia's reserve fund. If Yeltsin was running the country, the taxpayer wouldn't see a dime.
1. Putin has been addressing the economy pretty darn well. There was pretty dramatic GDP growth during his tenure.
2. While corruption is still high, it is MUCH lower than it was during Yeltsin years. Oligarchs don't open the doors in Kremlin with their foot anymore. The guy who tried to buy up enough of the parliament to pass his own laws (Khodorkovsky) is in the prison, where he will remain for a long time. Needless to say, the Russian people have much less sympathy to him that those who don't know what he's really in the prison for.
3. It's about time Russia asserted itself internationally. For nearly a decade and a half, Russia did exactly as IMF and Washington DC told it. Needless to say, neither of the two had Russia's interests in mind.
4. Putin was merely putting Dell in his place. Just because you got a ticket to Davos doesn't mean you're entitled to any kind of preferential treatment from the government. Dell is just "screwdriver assembly" company. There are plenty of those in Russia.
The UI on the device was great. I liked it much more than iPod UI. Too bad the hardware sucked ass. They should port the software to run on iPod, as a parting shot, and provide a single click installer that would flash Zune software into reasonably recent iPod models. I, for one, would do it.
I like Linux and all, but I've been running Win 7 for the past week or so, and while still buggy in places, it's a VAST improvement over Vista. I hated Vista, and I love Win7.
You had two years of "Vista failure" to gain traction in the market. You have failed.
And before you jump on my throat and say "what have you done to help", I'll tell you that I haven't done anything, and I'm not demanding anything. I'm just stating the fact. I only use Linux on the server, it requires too much manual labor to run on a laptop. And by "run" I mean suspend and wake up, use wireless, support all hardware, etc.
Heck, you even failed to beat Mac OS X on the desktop, in spite of Apple daring to charge money for it.
Originally, the point was to allow third parties to install other products. Guess what, ANY third party can now install their own browser and make it default. Even Google. Now if they force MS to remove IE altogether, no one will buy the OS, because in year 2009 an OS without Internet access is utterly worthless. You can't even download Opera or Firefox with it.
I just find it hard to believe that the best they could come up with is two folks who will obviously be very supportive of offshore outsourcing.
Given the choice, I'd pick Kundra. Warrior is at least in part responsible for Motorola's collapse. She has no government experience. She probably spells "open source" as "open sores", too. Kundra has a much better track record, IMO.
Well, those who object to it on moral grounds are still free to upload files one by one as RMS wants them to. I left the form in place for people who don't have Silverlight.
I think Silverlight is one of the few things Microsoft got right. I've been using Silverlight quite extensively on my Mac since Netflix switched to it, and it's rock solid. This kind of got me interested into looking into the programming aspects of it, and it's pretty darn easy if you know.NET Framework and WPF already, and if you don't, the learning curve is not that bad. I wanted to write a multi-file uploader for one of my apps, and I was able to do so in just a couple of hours, end to end.
You have to drop them off at daycare in the morning and pick them up in the evening. Therefore, no 9 hour workdays, unless your company provides on-site daycare.
It's just way ahead of its time, and it wasn't very "smart".
Face it, today's software packages are so complicated that a "joe sixpack" user not only doesn't use more than 5% of their features - he doesn't even know those features are there.
As AI advances, it will become possible to figure out exactly what user is doing and provide highly contextual assistance, possibly in response to a spoken question. I.e. in Excel you just say "how do I highlight negative cells in column C in pink?" and it just shows you how to do it or (gasp) just does it for you.
I am often reminded of the misery of "regular" users when I use various CAD packages. Those would benefit from some AI and heavily contextual help.
If they license (and sue people for) a patent that hasn't been granted yet, make them refund all licensing fees and legal expenses when patent is denied. Simple. A lot less crap would be patented in the first place unless it's truly non-obvious and innovative, and those filing patents would be scared shitless of licensing them to anyone before they're granted, let alone starting a patent lawsuit.
Granted, there are problems which don't require much RAM per core. However, I run my stuff on a 500+ core cluster nightly and boxes there have 16GB of RAM. We're thinking of upgrading to 32GB, actually, to be able to work with larger data sets. 50MB per core is utterly inadequate for 95% of problems out there, and 100mbps interconnect is inadequate for the remaining 4.5%. If this dude falls into 0.5% for whom this could actually be useful, he can pat himself on the back I guess.
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I've traveled tens of thousands of miles with a Samsonite laptop backpack I bought from Buy.com for $35 on a special. It works OK. :-)
First, if you carry around a $5000 laptop, you have bigger issues. Not even Apple sells laptops that expensive.
Second, an $40 bag would do just as well.
Third, even if you have cash to burn on a $220 bag, you don't have to write a 18KB puff piece about this or "care" about it on such a deep level. If you want to wipe your ass with 20 dollar bills, that's fine with me. But bragging about it would certainly land you in a douchebag category. As would bragging about your $5K laptop.
Caring about bags is the ultimate indication of douchebaggery. About as sure as wearing a bluetooth handset all the times, popped collar or a mullet.
There's no cure from this, either.
>> there's something extra you need, that 'eye for the
>> visually pleasing
Not only you need "an eye" (i.e. the discriminative system in learning theory parlance), you also need the ability to come up with something new (i.e. the generative system).
I have "an eye". I can tell whether something is good or not, and can convincingly explain why. I can suggest improvements to an existing interface and explain how they will improve matters. I just can't roll a good UI from scratch.
>> Adobe CS2 - not supported, not compatible
I'm happily using Photoshop CS2 on Leopard still. I bet at least a half of other programs on your list work just fine, too.
There's a difference. As an intern, you responsibilites end at the end of your internship. So no one is cracking the whip over your head or forces you to come to work on Saturday (otherwise you won't want to join after you graduate). Once you become an FTE (full-time employee) all of that will change. For one, there will be "stack ranking" where you're ranked against your peers according to the perception that management has of you. If you don't pay attention to "visibility" -- you won't get promoted, no matter how much of a genius you are. You will learn this in about a year or two. Another killer thing is that nowhere does the TEAM performance come into the equation. You're competing solely with your peers for a fixed size pie. The problem with this is that someone has to get a shitty review score in order for someone else to get a good review score. If all members of your team are good, you may have to whore yourself to the management in order to get promoted. But that won't be easy either, because your team members are not stupid, and they're doing the same thing.
This is how FTEs are forced into overtime, ridiculous schedules, and other unreasonable demands. Needless to say, this shit doesn't work on interns, since they couldn't care less if they get a promo.
After about 2 or 3 years there I figured things out and started acting accordingly. I maintained a reasonable, albeit not outstanding, promotion velocity while flat out refusing to work weekends and overtime (except in the final stretch of the shipping cycle). I did good work, I kept my manager (and skip-level manager) informed, and I set the expectations beforehand with each new team I moved to.
That said, the endless fucking performance review cycle did me in and I decided to go somewhere where I'd be actually focused on my job, not on keeping everyone informed.
I did learn a TON, though, both about software engineering and about corporate life (or, shall we say, warfare). I can't recommend Microsoft highly enough for someone who's just out of college, if only for 2 or 3 years.
Don't make a mistake of staying longer. The compensation system is engineered in such a way that you really start liking the numbers in your paycheck at around 3 or 4 year mark. Stash away some cash and move on.
No one is forcing you to use Windows anymore. As a matter of fact, according to marketshare statistics, one person out of every 10 no longer uses Windows already. Make that number go up. This bullshit will cease only when market share drops.
I see a popular misconception rearing its ugly head again. Folks, R&D is not just Research. It's ALL development, testing and program management combined, including project management, vendors, design, UX, localization, etc, etc.
They don't spend $8B a year on just research. One of their problems is that developers represent only a tiny minority of the overall headcount, so most of that sum isn't even spent on "D". Heck, folks at the top of the corporate level ladder (also known as Partners; some of them are worth their weight in rare earth metals, most are completely worthless) rake in over $1B just for themselves.
Why would you NEED to test them? They work already.
And still tiny screen, no full PDF and relies on a wireless provider who might go out of business soon. I guess I'll have to wait for V3 SP2, like with Microsoft to get anything that's worth paying for.
Why the hell are we wasting all this power on nukes? How about some advanced drugs? General AI? Complete simulation of human brain? I mean, Jesus H Christ, our nukes are already GOOD ENOUGH.
It will be wildly successful, too. XP was the first really "consumer" OS from Microsoft after Windows Me debacle. Win 7 is the first consumer OS after Vista debacle. I've been using it on all my machines since it came out, and it's a vast improvement over Vista. It starts faster, feels more lightweight, replaces a lot of the botched UI introduced in Vista with versions that make sense. There's more polish in this beta than Vista ever had.
IMO, this is the closest attempt at Apple levels of polish Microsoft has ever been able to pull off.
>> That is to say, he is trying to set Russia up as a Great
>> Power and an ideological competitor to the West.
It is a power to be reckoned with, particularly in its immediate area of influence. If Washington DC doesn't like it, they can go pound sand. Military exercises in Venezuela were just a response for NATO military ships in Georgia. You shit on their doorstep, they shit on yours. Simple. You don't talk down to a sovereign country with enough firepower to turn the entire north American continent into nuclear desert. You don't shit on its doorstep. You don't put your military bases near its densely populated areas. You don't buy out the governments of neighboring countries with which Russia has historical relationship dating back three hundred years. That, in short, is Putin's message. And the way I see it, it's the right message to deliver.
If they really wanted to pit themselves against the US, they'd be arming Iran with their latest gear right now, not with the previous generation stuff.
And I don't see where the "ideological" competition is. They're a capitalist country now. Their only big problem is a bit of a personality cult, but that will pass in time.
And India? Please, over a half of the population there _can't_read_.
>> I'm sure $150/bbl oil had nothing to do with it.
It sure did. But at least those profits were properly taxed and put into Russia's reserve fund. If Yeltsin was running the country, the taxpayer wouldn't see a dime.
1. Putin has been addressing the economy pretty darn well. There was pretty dramatic GDP growth during his tenure.
2. While corruption is still high, it is MUCH lower than it was during Yeltsin years. Oligarchs don't open the doors in Kremlin with their foot anymore. The guy who tried to buy up enough of the parliament to pass his own laws (Khodorkovsky) is in the prison, where he will remain for a long time. Needless to say, the Russian people have much less sympathy to him that those who don't know what he's really in the prison for.
3. It's about time Russia asserted itself internationally. For nearly a decade and a half, Russia did exactly as IMF and Washington DC told it. Needless to say, neither of the two had Russia's interests in mind.
4. Putin was merely putting Dell in his place. Just because you got a ticket to Davos doesn't mean you're entitled to any kind of preferential treatment from the government. Dell is just "screwdriver assembly" company. There are plenty of those in Russia.
Questions?
The UI on the device was great. I liked it much more than iPod UI. Too bad the hardware sucked ass. They should port the software to run on iPod, as a parting shot, and provide a single click installer that would flash Zune software into reasonably recent iPod models. I, for one, would do it.
I like Linux and all, but I've been running Win 7 for the past week or so, and while still buggy in places, it's a VAST improvement over Vista. I hated Vista, and I love Win7.
You had two years of "Vista failure" to gain traction in the market. You have failed.
And before you jump on my throat and say "what have you done to help", I'll tell you that I haven't done anything, and I'm not demanding anything. I'm just stating the fact. I only use Linux on the server, it requires too much manual labor to run on a laptop. And by "run" I mean suspend and wake up, use wireless, support all hardware, etc.
Heck, you even failed to beat Mac OS X on the desktop, in spite of Apple daring to charge money for it.
Originally, the point was to allow third parties to install other products. Guess what, ANY third party can now install their own browser and make it default. Even Google. Now if they force MS to remove IE altogether, no one will buy the OS, because in year 2009 an OS without Internet access is utterly worthless. You can't even download Opera or Firefox with it.
I just find it hard to believe that the best they could come up with is two folks who will obviously be very supportive of offshore outsourcing.
Given the choice, I'd pick Kundra. Warrior is at least in part responsible for Motorola's collapse. She has no government experience. She probably spells "open source" as "open sores", too. Kundra has a much better track record, IMO.
Well, those who object to it on moral grounds are still free to upload files one by one as RMS wants them to. I left the form in place for people who don't have Silverlight.
I think Silverlight is one of the few things Microsoft got right. I've been using Silverlight quite extensively on my Mac since Netflix switched to it, and it's rock solid. This kind of got me interested into looking into the programming aspects of it, and it's pretty darn easy if you know .NET Framework and WPF already, and if you don't, the learning curve is not that bad. I wanted to write a multi-file uploader for one of my apps, and I was able to do so in just a couple of hours, end to end.
You have to drop them off at daycare in the morning and pick them up in the evening. Therefore, no 9 hour workdays, unless your company provides on-site daycare.
It's just way ahead of its time, and it wasn't very "smart".
Face it, today's software packages are so complicated that a "joe sixpack" user not only doesn't use more than 5% of their features - he doesn't even know those features are there.
As AI advances, it will become possible to figure out exactly what user is doing and provide highly contextual assistance, possibly in response to a spoken question. I.e. in Excel you just say "how do I highlight negative cells in column C in pink?" and it just shows you how to do it or (gasp) just does it for you.
I am often reminded of the misery of "regular" users when I use various CAD packages. Those would benefit from some AI and heavily contextual help.
If they license (and sue people for) a patent that hasn't been granted yet, make them refund all licensing fees and legal expenses when patent is denied. Simple. A lot less crap would be patented in the first place unless it's truly non-obvious and innovative, and those filing patents would be scared shitless of licensing them to anyone before they're granted, let alone starting a patent lawsuit.
Granted, there are problems which don't require much RAM per core. However, I run my stuff on a 500+ core cluster nightly and boxes there have 16GB of RAM. We're thinking of upgrading to 32GB, actually, to be able to work with larger data sets. 50MB per core is utterly inadequate for 95% of problems out there, and 100mbps interconnect is inadequate for the remaining 4.5%. If this dude falls into 0.5% for whom this could actually be useful, he can pat himself on the back I guess.