The problem is that they were being honest. I spent a long time fixing bugs in the X server and I can tell you that there were bugs I was able to fix in a day or two and one that months to fix. So, how are they going to give you an estimate and a deadline? And don't try to say that they "should" be able to give you and estimate. By the time they know enough to estimate a bug fix time they have already fixed the bug.
So, how much was it worth to you? Were you willing to sign a contract and post a bond to ensure that the person doing the work would be paid at a reasonable rate for the hours they put into the project? Were you ready to do that even if they could not guarantee that they would be able to fix the bug?
You attitude shows that you don't know anything about software development.
Some of the happiest coding I ever did was working on the X server at E&S. I was their rep to the X consortium. (Hi Keith!) Left there to go to start up where I supervised the X consortium rep. In total I spent almost 6 years inside the X server and its libraries.
Of course that was a long time ago, 15 or 16 years. After the start up cratered I tried to find other jobs working on X. I tried to get on with the DRI folks. It didn't work out. By the middle 90s there were very few paid X server development jobs left. Between Windows and XFree the demand for X server developers pretty much went the way of the dodos.
I do open source development. I'm a committer on a fairly well known project. I think I get open source. OTOH, as much as much fun as I had working on the server I understand how much work it is. How much concentration, and how much hardware you have to invest to fix bugs in the server. That is not something I, personally, would do for fun. Especially when what I do helps video card and computer companies make money with out putting any money in my pocket.
So hey, if they are really willing to pay, and that means a salary and benefits, not these hokey bounties that pay less than third world wages, then I will sign up in a minute.
Oh well, after 30+ years as a software developer I have become very cynical about this sort of things. I'll believe when I get the offer letter:-) ROFLMAO!!!!
Stonewolf
It locks up my laptop solid.....
on
Ubuntu 8.04 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
I started testing 8.04 at alpha 3 and have tested every version since. I am sad to say that that every version I have tested locks up solid after 5 to 10 minutes. The bug has been filed and is being experience by quite a few people on a lot of different hardware.
I have put 7.10 back on my laptop and I will not be updating to 8.04 until the lock up bug is reported as being fixed.
Of course, it is working just fine on a lot of other hardware... So, do your self a favor and burn a live CD and test it for a few hours before you do the final upgrade and do a very careful and complete back up before you upgrade.
This is the first time I have had *any* problems with stability of an Ubuntu release and I have been using it for several years now and I have tested a lot of alpha and beta releases. I hope this is the last time I have any trouble with an Ubuntu release.
I got it as part of a Novell 2010 Executive Workstations. Do you remember when Novell was a computer company? Back in the late '70s and early '80s? The 2010 ran CP/M, it had a 4MHz z80 with 64K of error correcting memory. (Yeah, hardware error correction built in.) The video display was another processor (IIRC) that was used to emulate a Tektronix 4XXX (don't remember the version) graphics terminal. The thing came with either an 8 inch or a 5.25 inch media unit that contained a floppy and a hard drive. I went for the 5.25 inch unit and so I had a full height floppy and full height ST506 hard drive.
5 Megabytes... WOW! I never was able to fill that sucker up. I used it for several years in the early '80s. It was my second personal computer. The first one with any kind of disk drive. I bought it with Turbo Pascal preinstalled on the hard drive. I wrote a mini-lisp interpreter using that. I still have an 8 inch floppy with Turbo Pascal on it. I also wrote a FORTH compiler on the thing that was sold under the trade name FAST FORTH. I got a lot of use out of the ST506.
The disk controller flaked out and Novell had become a software company so I was without a computer for a while. I bought a used Amiga 1000 as my 3rd personal computer. It was a real disappointment....
On the other hand I was able to sell the still working ST506 for a couple of hundred bucks to a guy whose company built ST506 compatible disk controllers for the IBM PC.
The thing was big, and heavy, and felt as solid as a battleship.
Can I assume from what you just said that you believe in God and Heaven? If so, where do you get off telling God who is a suitable guard and who is not? What can I say, religious discussions always seem to wind up with some jackass trying to tell me what an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being can or can not do, will or will not do... The arrogance of those who believe they know the absolute will of God astonishes me no end.
Good line. So... did you get the reference, are you showing you patriotism, are you being sarcastic, are you coming out of closet on slashdot, or none of the above?
I own pendleton.com so any one who want to know who "stonewolf" is can now look me up:-) Pendleton.com is just to much like Pendleton.usmc.mil the domain for Camp Pendleton, the marine corp base.
When I fist got the domain I had all email to invalid addresses forwarded to my mail box. I quickly found that I was getting the orders of the day for Pendleton Marine Corp base. I replied to the email and was immediately removed from the list. Over the years I got all sorts of official and private email sent to and from the base. But, as far as I can tell *none of it was classified*. Any time I replied and pointed out the problem I got a swift apology and never got an email from that source again. The most fun I had with it was when I accidentally got on a mailing list for retired SIGINT officers. Talk about a great group of highly intelligent and creative people! I am so glad they are our side.
I figured out the the rewriting rules used by a lot of email systems would generate pendleton.com from many misspellings of pendleton.usmc.mil and there was nothing I could do about the problem. So, at first I lived with it.
I finally set up my mail to bounce invalid addresses. I did it because email was becoming more popular I started getting a lot of very private communications meant for Marines and I didn't feel right about invading peoples privacy that way. I have always had a deep respect for the US military and the Marine in particular.
I have to say that the US military can misaddress email as easily as anyone else. So, I believe that part of the story. But, I never saw anything that was even vaguely sensitive (even the SIGINT guys didn't talk about anything sensitive) in the several years I was getting email from the base. I do not believe that part of the story. The Marines were always courteous and on the ball. The kind of people where you can believe that if you looked on heavens scenes, you would find the streets are guarded by United States Marines.
In terms of gross revenue MS is the 50th largest corporation in the US with gross income of $44 billion. MS is growing fairly quickly but it is not keeping up with the rest of the largest US corporations and is slipping down the list every year. OTOH the US GDP for 2007 was a little better than $14 trillion dollars (that from revised numbers released today). That means that MS is a very small percentage of the US GDP. Shutting them down or having them leave the country would be a minor blow to the US economy, not one we would likely notice. In other words they do not have the ability to blackmail the US. No company does, not even Walmart, and Walmart really is a big company.
BTW, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) the GDP of the US and the GDP of the EU are not that much different. The EU GDP is between 5 and 10 percent larger than the US GDP. OTOH, the EU GDP is smaller than the NAFTA GDP.
I can see how my use of terms such as "fascist" could trigger your bullshit detector. I should be more careful about using loaded words. In this case I use it in the technical sense. IMHO the current administration has behaved and has attitudes that are sufficiently like those of the classic fascists from the 1930s and beyond to justify the use of the term.
My comment about 10 years, not 10 months is there simply because legal actions work out over decades. In the anti trust case against IBM the trial lasted for 10 years. In the case of AT&T court supervision lasted for ~60 years. Legal battles, even a legal shit storm, play out over years, not months.
For the rest I believe you are either over reacting or have little understanding of how legal proceedings play out. I made no doomsday claim. The world is not going to end over this, MS is just not that important. Nor did I claim the existence of any sort of a conspiracy. Go read the platform of the Republican party and look at its historic behavior on behalf of big business. Then look at the public record of how much money various MS related individuals and organizations donated to both parties in the 2000 election cycle. Then go look at the documented cases of MS astroturfing to try to affect the actions of the DOJ. Everything I said is based on historic facts that are documented where you can look them up if you chose to. There is no claim of conspiracy when you accuse the Republican party of following its own stated aims. Nor is there any claim of conspiracy when you are referring to documented behavior.
The rest of what you said shows the power of MS branding but isn't supported by the facts. MS is a successful company with a yearly income of $44 billion which places it at 50th place in the US Fortune 500 and 139th globally. On the other hand IBM is 16th on the US Fortune 500 with a yearly income of $91 billion and 42nd globally. IBM is more than twice the size of MS. The two companies do not seem to directly compete in any area that I can identify. In fact IBM was badly burned when they tried to cooperate with MS. Look up the history of OS/2.
As far as MS's portfolio of products goes, well you consider it huge, OK, I have no trouble with that. It doesn't seem huge to me. As far as the inability of other companies to compete, well you are correct there and MS has been convicted repeatedly of using illegal means to prevent other companies from competing. That is the whole point of what is going on. To make the market work there can not be any artificial barriers to competition. MS has been found to have created artificial barriers and used them to prevent other companies from competing. That is why they are being fined. I suppose you do not believe that what they have done is unreasonable. Well, I do and so do the governments of the US and the EU.
BTW, mentioning documented illegal behavior is not *bashing*. Calling a convicted criminal a criminal is a statement of fact, not an opinion.
Except for a few specific powers that have been given up to the Federal Government Utah and Illinois are every bit as much countries as are France and Germany. And, with the way the EU seems to be going the differences in sovereignty between Utah, Illinois, France, and Germany are getting smaller every day. Note that Utah refused to extradite the fellow to Illinois because the law that defines murder in Utah is different from the law that defines murder in Illinois and under Utah law the fellow had not, and could not, have committed murder.
Tell me, do you need an extradition hearing to move an indicted criminal from Nice to Paris? How about from France to Germany?
We got this line from everyone we met at MS. The loudest fellow was an ex-patriot Brit who seemed to have no concept of law at all. In fact, very few of the people we talked to at MS and any real concept of the law. I think it was an expression of their culture more than anything else. The rank and file believed that they were in the right, that they were the good guys, and that anyone who opposed them were the bad guys. Very odd corporate culture.
Yeah, it would be interesting to see a major corporation declare itself to be above the law. They already act that way. And MS clearly believes they are above the law. But, they have never made the mistake of publicly declaring that they are beyond the law.
But...
I had the misfortune to have to do business with MS in the '90s before the first judgment came down against them in the US. They told us privately that if the US government tried to break them up they would just move across the border to Canada or just buy a small country, preferably an island, and move the whole company out of the US. They also threatened, privately, to just stop selling Windows and technical support to the US government.
I was working for a baby bell at the time and so we were able to explain to them what it is like for a company to operate for 60 years under judicial supervision. Not nice. In the US a federal court judge can throw the entire executive staff of a company into prison for as long as he likes if they pull the kind of thing you suggest MS pull. They can appoint people to run the company until such time as it is in full compliance with court orders. And, a federal judge can send US marshals anywhere in the world to capture these people. (Yes, it may be kidnapping in the country where they reside... but the judge can still do it), and a Federal Judge can request that the President use military force to capture some one. So yeah, they can send in the Marines... Ok, that last bit is very unlikely to happen, but it could.
I do not know what the EU can do against a company that flaunts its laws. But, I am sure that at least some of the member states have laws similar to those is the US.
Just an example... I once worked for a fellow who was indicted for murder in the state of Illinois. He lived in the state of Utah and Utah declined to extradite him. He now is unable to leave the state of Utah. If he sets foot out side of Utah he can be arrested and most likely will be extradited to Illinois where he will be tried for murder. The same could happen to all the board of directors and all the executives of MS. They could be extradited to the EU to face criminal charges there, or if the US refuses to extradite them they could find that they can never safely leave the US again for fear of being extradited to the EU and spending a large part of the rest of their lives in jail.
No country can fail to react swiftly and harshly to any attack on the sovereignty and that is exactly what MS would be doing if they did what you described.
MS's stock price is down and going lower. MS's cash equivalents on hand have drop from a high of over $50 billion to near $20 billion. MS is plowing billions of dollars a year into product areas such as the X box and their online business that are losing billions of dollars every year. Having to pay a fine of $1.3 billion costs them about 7% of their cash on hand. That is $1.3 dollars that they can't spend on developing new markets, it is #1.3 billion they can't ever hope to use to create stock holder value. This is a big enough fine to cause MS's board of directors and MS's executives to be sued by the stock holders and removed from their offices.
This kind of a fine, especially if it is followed up by stock holder suits can lead to a drop in the stock price that will cost Gates and crew billions of dollars off of their personal net value, force to company to pay the stock holders an equivalent amount of money, and force major changes in the board of directors.
This fine is a big deal.
Microsoft may well be heading into a perfect storm of legal shit.
And, do not forget that the only reason they got a slap on the wrist in the US is because MS spent lots of money on the Bushies and their corporate dogs. The Bushies and the whole neocon (neofascist) crew are not going to be in office in January 2009. The political storm sweeping the US right now is like nothing I have ever seen before. And I lived through most of the 1950s and 1960s.
MS is in trouble.
Oh... for those with no perspective, this is a story that is going to play out over the next 10 years, not the next 10 months.
I agree completely with your comment about Java. Teaching Java as the only programming language in a CS curriculum should be punishable by public flogging.
OTOH your list of jobs is not very impressive. One good University level program oriented at that skill set could fill all those jobs in a couple of years. Well, a couple of years after the first student entered the program which means six years from now.
As other posters to this discussion have pointed out, there are several (many) good CE and EE colleges in the US that are generating far more trained people than are needed to fill that number of jobs. It seems like you made my point. There is no huge demand for these people.
Calling me a troll makes it easy to ignore me. If that is what you want then that is fine. I'm not going to get into a pissing contest about toys with you. Toys are fine, what is your net debt?
One thing I will compare is the ease of getting jobs. I can't remember ever sending out more than one or two resumes to get a job. Most of the time if I changed jobs it was because of a phone call from an old friend who was looking for a lead technical person. As for my skill set, well I can only go by what I'm told and my previous record. I got one of my current teaching jobs by sending in one resume.
But, that all ended when I turned 49. Not just for me, but for my old friends too. Tell me how I went from being the most experienced and most highly rated R&D person in my company to being unemployable in one day? Then tell me how you plan to make the payments on your toys if it happens to you?
OTOH, honestly, I am happy for you. I'm glad you are doing so well and are happy with your job and your ability to get jobs. Just please don't make the mistake of thinking I am a troll. What happened to me can happen to you tomorrow.
The students I talk to know how risky programming jobs are. They are avoiding careers in risky professions. I think it is a damned shame the schools have watered down their curricula to the point they have. OTOH, they are teaching what the students are willing to pay for.
Last summer I gave a week long seminar on teaching game development. We had to add tables and turn people away because it was so popular. CS faculty are now looking to game development programs as a way to attract the number of students needed to save the professors jobs. And, the field is technical enough to require that the schools teach the skills you want. The point being that even CS professors are worried for their jobs because of the lack of demand for their services.
Students are staying away from computer science. They have good reasons to stay away. If you want to change things you have to change your industry.
You sound just like me before I got laid off. I was the senior guy in R&D looking into how to deliver various kinds of multimedia to 3G phones. I as fat and happy and loved my job. Then the board decided that they could make more money by firing the entire US staff and buying an Indian software company to replace us. No one at my level was consulted. No one in R&D or any other part of the company was retained. Several of the best people had to leave the US to get jobs.
Anyway, the main point I was trying to make is that there are plenty of people, both young and old, who can do those jobs and who want to do those jobs. But, there aren't any jobs to be had. The old ones are retraining and moving on. The young ones are going where they see a future. What they see around them are tech companies that are laying off people every other day. What they see are the fathers, uncles, and neighbors losing their homes, their savings, and even their pensions because of dirty dealing at the top of the corporate ladder. They see all that and they go to other fields.
I talk to them every day. Most of the ones who are interested in studying the kind of skills we are talking about are doing it because they want to start their own businesses. They don't trust existing corporations. I can't speak for all of them and I don't pretend to. I'm just reporting what I hear and see.
I truly hope your luck/skill/karma holds out and you get to keep doing the work you love to do. But, I also think you are living in a deep state of denial.
Yes, as a matter of fact I have noticed all those embedded device. I used to do embedded development and would love to do it again. I love seeing a product go from nothing to shipping and in stores.
The fact remains that there are thousands and thousands of 40 and 50 something programmers in the US who would love to do that work, who are fully qualified to do it, who can not get jobs doing it or any other kind of programming.
Why is that?
If there are only thousands of these jobs in the US then the output of a small program in a couple of colleges can easily provide all the people you need every year. Oh, but you don't want to train them, so they have to come out of college knowing exactly what you need for your current project. And if they studied processors you don't use, or an OS you don't use, or a language you don't use, then you don't want them. They must be fully buzz word compliant to even be considered for the job.
So, what happens to *you* when management decides to use a different processor, OS, or language? The older you are the more likely they are to just lay you off and replace *you* instead of letting you learn the new what ever.
I didn't see through it, I lived through it. I have all that knowledge, and I'm glad I do. I used all that knowledge for over 30 years. There are at least 6 people living within a mile me, all in our late 40s and early 50s, all with that kind of training and experience, most with graduate degrees in EE and CS. We were all laid off from different companies, though IBM accounts for most of them (not me), and not one of us has been able to find a programming job since being laid off. I've been in contact with most of the companies you listed and many more.
The list of companies you posted is interesting. Mind posting their current job openings for people with that skill set? Want to post the number of people they currently employee with that skill set? Show me that there is a demand large enough to employ the students currently training for those jobs. I can tell you the demand is not very large because there are thousands of unemployed programmers who would happily fill any empty jobs.
I've become a teacher, one must eat after all. That puts me in contact with a lot of those wily young people. Classes I teach on Office applications are filled to overflowing. Classes I teach on computer programming, 3D graphics, game development, and so on are often canceled for lack of students. There are a lot of smart young people who have seen through the ruse and they are staying away in droves. They see that the market for the skills you mentioned is very small, the jobs are poorly paid, very risky, and in the long run, they have no future.
So yeah, I've lived through the ruse (I fell for it). I am in contact with smart young people every day who are not falling for it. You don't see it. Oh well. Programming makes a great hobby. I should know.
The guy who wrote the article is either an idiot or is out right lying.
The reason so many people stay away from the kind of degrees he wants them to get is because there are very few jobs in those fields and the jobs that do exist are poorly paid when you look at them on an hourly basis. Not to mention that the smart young people he wants to con into being his cheap labor are smart enough to look around and see the thousands of unemployed and unemployable 40 something engineers. They are smart enough to "just say no" to working 60+ hour weeks for 20 years just to be left with no job and no hope of a job in their 40s.
When the smart young people see that they can make a good living working reasonable hours until they retire doing the kind of work he wants them to do, the smart young people will demand that colleges offer that training and colleges will find a way to offer it. Until then, he should understand that most of the smart young people are too smart to be conned by people like him.
The whole article is nothing but misdirection. He wants to make people think there are good jobs out there so they will get the training they need for the jobs and then... he can hire the cream of the crop for sweat shop salaries and work them for sweat shop hours until they wise up. At which time he will fire them an hire more people who have been conned into the same trap. The article is nothing but a self serving con job aimed at both students and colleges.
As I read your post you are assuming that the poster is a Christian. Why do you make that assumption? He could be an atheist, an agnostic, a jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Sikh,... you name it.
I'm a Buddhist, an American, and a Yellow Dog Democrat. I live in the Bible Belt in Texas (A red state) and I share my neighborhood with Baptists, Hindus, Methodists, Catholics, Mormans, Jews, Atheists, Wiccans, Agnostics, Republicans, and Muslims, to name just a few. (There is a Mosque about 2 miles from my home, the closest Buddhist temple is a few miles farther away the nearest Zendo even further, and the Hindu temple is south of town.) We all get along. I find your assumption that the original poster is a Christian to be naive.
As far as I can tell you use the term respect to mean "do what I tell you to do". That is a serious mistake. Even if you were using the word correctly the claim that people must respect other people's religions is absurd. It is nothing but a guilt trip used to trick the naive.
To Function as a world wide community we must be willing, and able, to *tolerate* other peoples religions. Toleration does not imply respect, and it absolutely does not imply that any one must, or even should, comply with the rules of other peoples religions.
There are few things I consider to be true that you might want to at least think about:
1) Your right to practice your religion *ends* where my rights begin. No one has the right to impose there religion on another sentient being. 2) All religions that claim to be the one true religion are inherently false. 3) Respect must be earned, it is never, and can not be, given. 4) The intolerant can not be tolerated.
Well, I was one of those people doing high level design working in the R&D department of my company. I did a lot of research and design and a fair about of coding for the products we were developing.
One day I came in and found out that all the US employees of the company were being laid off. The owners of the company had found a software company in India that they could just buy for nothing and moved *all* the work, including R&D, to India. I guess that is at least one data point against the idea that only the grunt work has moved to India.
The first year I was unemployed I was able get a few interviews and some contract working running doing testing and one gig helping a company figure out how incompetent the US development staff was. (There are a lot of people all over the world who can write a program but are not qualified to design so much as a turd.)
The second year there were fewer contract jobs and interviews.
The third year I retrained as a teacher. After the third year the *only* company that has shown any interest in hiring me was an Indian company that was desperate enough for experienced people to offer to pay my relocation to India. After my kids are out of college my wife and I are seriously considering moving to India or China. I know a couple of people in my situation who are now living like kings pulling down what would be considered good US salaries, being paid in Euros, living in India and China.
Now I make a good wage (for an Indian) teaching people in the US what "click and drag" means. Believe it or not, but a *huge* portion of the people graduating from high school in the US have never used a PC and are scared shitless of having to use one. An even bigger portion of people over thirty do not know what "click and drag" means.
So, lets cut the crap about the quality of the jobs going to India. The only reason Indians aren't getting those jobs is that so many of them do not have the experience to do them. In India those jobs are being filled by Americans and Europeans with decades of experience. Not to mention the huge number of Indians and Chinese who went to school in the US and have worked here for decades who are now going back to start, run, or do high level work, in India and China.
Developing modern games requires more math and science than most people are willing to believe. But, it also requires a deep understanding of philosophy, history, psychology, literature, art, and even sociology. It is an ideal cross disciplinary area that can be used to tie all these different areas together.
Science Fiction plus great books and shows such as Connections and Mythbusters are also a good way to get people interested in math and science. But, they do not grab the modern imagination like games do.
Take a look at the XB0360 and the PS3. Both of these combine several multipurpose cores with a huge number of special purpose SIMD cores used just for graphics. (A typical modern GPU is a large collection of SIMD cores.) So there you have a huge market for multithreaded consumer-level applications.
In business there are people who would be very happy to see a multithreaded spread sheet program. Anyone who works with database extracts in a spread sheet would love that. So, there is at least one business app.
Between 1983 and 2001 I was part of 5 start up companies. In three of them I was covered by key man insurance. I have been a hiring manager at a couple of those start ups. I also spent time at a fortune 100 company as a corporate researcher. (I needed a break from start ups:-). So, I think I understand exactly what it is like to work for and recruit for a start up company.
My network is kaput. I have worked it to death. Most of the people I know are also out of work. A couple of people in my network have left the US to find jobs. One fellow went to Canada, another went to China. The only serious inquiry I've had in the last 3 years was from a company in India.
Recruiters are as bad for you as they are for me. They either won't talk to me because I am too old, or they send out your resume to every job they find no matter how bad the fit.
I am actually building up a nice business teaching. It is interesting to see that companies will pay to send their employees to learn from me, but they will not consider me for a position that requires the skills I teach. What does that tell you?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that they were being honest. I spent a long time fixing bugs in the X server and I can tell you that there were bugs I was able to fix in a day or two and one that months to fix. So, how are they going to give you an estimate and a deadline? And don't try to say that they "should" be able to give you and estimate. By the time they know enough to estimate a bug fix time they have already fixed the bug.
So, how much was it worth to you? Were you willing to sign a contract and post a bond to ensure that the person doing the work would be paid at a reasonable rate for the hours they put into the project? Were you ready to do that even if they could not guarantee that they would be able to fix the bug?
You attitude shows that you don't know anything about software development.
Stonewolf
Some of the happiest coding I ever did was working on the X server at E&S. I was their rep to the X consortium. (Hi Keith!) Left there to go to start up where I supervised the X consortium rep. In total I spent almost 6 years inside the X server and its libraries.
:-) ROFLMAO!!!!
Of course that was a long time ago, 15 or 16 years. After the start up cratered I tried to find other jobs working on X. I tried to get on with the DRI folks. It didn't work out. By the middle 90s there were very few paid X server development jobs left. Between Windows and XFree the demand for X server developers pretty much went the way of the dodos.
I do open source development. I'm a committer on a fairly well known project. I think I get open source. OTOH, as much as much fun as I had working on the server I understand how much work it is. How much concentration, and how much hardware you have to invest to fix bugs in the server. That is not something I, personally, would do for fun. Especially when what I do helps video card and computer companies make money with out putting any money in my pocket.
So hey, if they are really willing to pay, and that means a salary and benefits, not these hokey bounties that pay less than third world wages, then I will sign up in a minute.
Oh well, after 30+ years as a software developer I have become very cynical about this sort of things. I'll believe when I get the offer letter
Stonewolf
I started testing 8.04 at alpha 3 and have tested every version since. I am sad to say that that every version I have tested locks up solid after 5 to 10 minutes. The bug has been filed and is being experience by quite a few people on a lot of different hardware.
I have put 7.10 back on my laptop and I will not be updating to 8.04 until the lock up bug is reported as being fixed.
Of course, it is working just fine on a lot of other hardware... So, do your self a favor and burn a live CD and test it for a few hours before you do the final upgrade and do a very careful and complete back up before you upgrade.
This is the first time I have had *any* problems with stability of an Ubuntu release and I have been using it for several years now and I have tested a lot of alpha and beta releases. I hope this is the last time I have any trouble with an Ubuntu release.
Stonewolf
I got it as part of a Novell 2010 Executive Workstations. Do you remember when Novell was a computer company? Back in the late '70s and early '80s? The 2010 ran CP/M, it had a 4MHz z80 with 64K of error correcting memory. (Yeah, hardware error correction built in.) The video display was another processor (IIRC) that was used to emulate a Tektronix 4XXX (don't remember the version) graphics terminal. The thing came with either an 8 inch or a 5.25 inch media unit that contained a floppy and a hard drive. I went for the 5.25 inch unit and so I had a full height floppy and full height ST506 hard drive.
:-)
5 Megabytes... WOW! I never was able to fill that sucker up. I used it for several years in the early '80s. It was my second personal computer. The first one with any kind of disk drive. I bought it with Turbo Pascal preinstalled on the hard drive. I wrote a mini-lisp interpreter using that. I still have an 8 inch floppy with Turbo Pascal on it. I also wrote a FORTH compiler on the thing that was sold under the trade name FAST FORTH. I got a lot of use out of the ST506.
The disk controller flaked out and Novell had become a software company so I was without a computer for a while. I bought a used Amiga 1000 as my 3rd personal computer. It was a real disappointment....
On the other hand I was able to sell the still working ST506 for a couple of hundred bucks to a guy whose company built ST506 compatible disk controllers for the IBM PC.
The thing was big, and heavy, and felt as solid as a battleship.
Wow... talk about ancient memories.
Stonewolf
Can I assume from what you just said that you believe in God and Heaven? If so, where do you get off telling God who is a suitable guard and who is not? What can I say, religious discussions always seem to wind up with some jackass trying to tell me what an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being can or can not do, will or will not do... The arrogance of those who believe they know the absolute will of God astonishes me no end.
ROFLMAO
Stonewolf
Good line. So... did you get the reference, are you showing you patriotism, are you being sarcastic, are you coming out of closet on slashdot, or none of the above?
stonewolf
I own pendleton.com so any one who want to know who "stonewolf" is can now look me up :-) Pendleton.com is just to much like Pendleton.usmc.mil the domain for Camp Pendleton, the marine corp base.
When I fist got the domain I had all email to invalid addresses forwarded to my mail box. I quickly found that I was getting the orders of the day for Pendleton Marine Corp base. I replied to the email and was immediately removed from the list. Over the years I got all sorts of official and private email sent to and from the base. But, as far as I can tell *none of it was classified*. Any time I replied and pointed out the problem I got a swift apology and never got an email from that source again. The most fun I had with it was when I accidentally got on a mailing list for retired SIGINT officers. Talk about a great group of highly intelligent and creative people! I am so glad they are our side.
I figured out the the rewriting rules used by a lot of email systems would generate pendleton.com from many misspellings of pendleton.usmc.mil and there was nothing I could do about the problem. So, at first I lived with it.
I finally set up my mail to bounce invalid addresses. I did it because email was becoming more popular I started getting a lot of very private communications meant for Marines and I didn't feel right about invading peoples privacy that way. I have always had a deep respect for the US military and the Marine in particular.
I have to say that the US military can misaddress email as easily as anyone else. So, I believe that part of the story. But, I never saw anything that was even vaguely sensitive (even the SIGINT guys didn't talk about anything sensitive) in the several years I was getting email from the base. I do not believe that part of the story. The Marines were always courteous and on the ball. The kind of people where you can believe that if you looked on heavens scenes, you would find the streets are guarded by United States Marines.
Stonewolf
In terms of gross revenue MS is the 50th largest corporation in the US with gross income of $44 billion. MS is growing fairly quickly but it is not keeping up with the rest of the largest US corporations and is slipping down the list every year. OTOH the US GDP for 2007 was a little better than $14 trillion dollars (that from revised numbers released today). That means that MS is a very small percentage of the US GDP. Shutting them down or having them leave the country would be a minor blow to the US economy, not one we would likely notice. In other words they do not have the ability to blackmail the US. No company does, not even Walmart, and Walmart really is a big company.
BTW, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) the GDP of the US and the GDP of the EU are not that much different. The EU GDP is between 5 and 10 percent larger than the US GDP. OTOH, the EU GDP is smaller than the NAFTA GDP.
Stonewolf
I can see how my use of terms such as "fascist" could trigger your bullshit detector. I should be more careful about using loaded words. In this case I use it in the technical sense. IMHO the current administration has behaved and has attitudes that are sufficiently like those of the classic fascists from the 1930s and beyond to justify the use of the term.
My comment about 10 years, not 10 months is there simply because legal actions work out over decades. In the anti trust case against IBM the trial lasted for 10 years. In the case of AT&T court supervision lasted for ~60 years. Legal battles, even a legal shit storm, play out over years, not months.
For the rest I believe you are either over reacting or have little understanding of how legal proceedings play out. I made no doomsday claim. The world is not going to end over this, MS is just not that important. Nor did I claim the existence of any sort of a conspiracy. Go read the platform of the Republican party and look at its historic behavior on behalf of big business. Then look at the public record of how much money various MS related individuals and organizations donated to both parties in the 2000 election cycle. Then go look at the documented cases of MS astroturfing to try to affect the actions of the DOJ. Everything I said is based on historic facts that are documented where you can look them up if you chose to. There is no claim of conspiracy when you accuse the Republican party of following its own stated aims. Nor is there any claim of conspiracy when you are referring to documented behavior.
The rest of what you said shows the power of MS branding but isn't supported by the facts. MS is a successful company with a yearly income of $44 billion which places it at 50th place in the US Fortune 500 and 139th globally. On the other hand IBM is 16th on the US Fortune 500 with a yearly income of $91 billion and 42nd globally. IBM is more than twice the size of MS. The two companies do not seem to directly compete in any area that I can identify. In fact IBM was badly burned when they tried to cooperate with MS. Look up the history of OS/2.
As far as MS's portfolio of products goes, well you consider it huge, OK, I have no trouble with that. It doesn't seem huge to me. As far as the inability of other companies to compete, well you are correct there and MS has been convicted repeatedly of using illegal means to prevent other companies from competing. That is the whole point of what is going on. To make the market work there can not be any artificial barriers to competition. MS has been found to have created artificial barriers and used them to prevent other companies from competing. That is why they are being fined. I suppose you do not believe that what they have done is unreasonable. Well, I do and so do the governments of the US and the EU.
BTW, mentioning documented illegal behavior is not *bashing*. Calling a convicted criminal a criminal is a statement of fact, not an opinion.
Stonewolf
Thank you, I hate making that kind of mistake. I believe that was result of a typo and a spell checker error.
Thank You Very Much,
Stonewolf
Hmmm.... You don't know much about the US do you.
Except for a few specific powers that have been given up to the Federal Government Utah and Illinois are every bit as much countries as are France and Germany. And, with the way the EU seems to be going the differences in sovereignty between Utah, Illinois, France, and Germany are getting smaller every day. Note that Utah refused to extradite the fellow to Illinois because the law that defines murder in Utah is different from the law that defines murder in Illinois and under Utah law the fellow had not, and could not, have committed murder.
Tell me, do you need an extradition hearing to move an indicted criminal from Nice to Paris? How about from France to Germany?
Stonewolf
We got this line from everyone we met at MS. The loudest fellow was an ex-patriot Brit who seemed to have no concept of law at all. In fact, very few of the people we talked to at MS and any real concept of the law. I think it was an expression of their culture more than anything else. The rank and file believed that they were in the right, that they were the good guys, and that anyone who opposed them were the bad guys. Very odd corporate culture.
Stonewolf
Yeah, it would be interesting to see a major corporation declare itself to be above the law. They already act that way. And MS clearly believes they are above the law. But, they have never made the mistake of publicly declaring that they are beyond the law.
But...
I had the misfortune to have to do business with MS in the '90s before the first judgment came down against them in the US. They told us privately that if the US government tried to break them up they would just move across the border to Canada or just buy a small country, preferably an island, and move the whole company out of the US. They also threatened, privately, to just stop selling Windows and technical support to the US government.
I was working for a baby bell at the time and so we were able to explain to them what it is like for a company to operate for 60 years under judicial supervision. Not nice. In the US a federal court judge can throw the entire executive staff of a company into prison for as long as he likes if they pull the kind of thing you suggest MS pull. They can appoint people to run the company until such time as it is in full compliance with court orders. And, a federal judge can send US marshals anywhere in the world to capture these people. (Yes, it may be kidnapping in the country where they reside... but the judge can still do it), and a Federal Judge can request that the President use military force to capture some one. So yeah, they can send in the Marines... Ok, that last bit is very unlikely to happen, but it could.
I do not know what the EU can do against a company that flaunts its laws. But, I am sure that at least some of the member states have laws similar to those is the US.
Just an example... I once worked for a fellow who was indicted for murder in the state of Illinois. He lived in the state of Utah and Utah declined to extradite him. He now is unable to leave the state of Utah. If he sets foot out side of Utah he can be arrested and most likely will be extradited to Illinois where he will be tried for murder. The same could happen to all the board of directors and all the executives of MS. They could be extradited to the EU to face criminal charges there, or if the US refuses to extradite them they could find that they can never safely leave the US again for fear of being extradited to the EU and spending a large part of the rest of their lives in jail.
No country can fail to react swiftly and harshly to any attack on the sovereignty and that is exactly what MS would be doing if they did what you described.
Stonewolf
Not really... Not to stock holders.
MS's stock price is down and going lower. MS's cash equivalents on hand have drop from a high of over $50 billion to near $20 billion. MS is plowing billions of dollars a year into product areas such as the X box and their online business that are losing billions of dollars every year. Having to pay a fine of $1.3 billion costs them about 7% of their cash on hand. That is $1.3 dollars that they can't spend on developing new markets, it is #1.3 billion they can't ever hope to use to create stock holder value. This is a big enough fine to cause MS's board of directors and MS's executives to be sued by the stock holders and removed from their offices.
This kind of a fine, especially if it is followed up by stock holder suits can lead to a drop in the stock price that will cost Gates and crew billions of dollars off of their personal net value, force to company to pay the stock holders an equivalent amount of money, and force major changes in the board of directors.
This fine is a big deal.
Microsoft may well be heading into a perfect storm of legal shit.
And, do not forget that the only reason they got a slap on the wrist in the US is because MS spent lots of money on the Bushies and their corporate dogs. The Bushies and the whole neocon (neofascist) crew are not going to be in office in January 2009. The political storm sweeping the US right now is like nothing I have ever seen before. And I lived through most of the 1950s and 1960s.
MS is in trouble.
Oh... for those with no perspective, this is a story that is going to play out over the next 10 years, not the next 10 months.
Stonewolf
I agree completely with your comment about Java. Teaching Java as the only programming language in a CS curriculum should be punishable by public flogging.
OTOH your list of jobs is not very impressive. One good University level program oriented at that skill set could fill all those jobs in a couple of years. Well, a couple of years after the first student entered the program which means six years from now.
As other posters to this discussion have pointed out, there are several (many) good CE and EE colleges in the US that are generating far more trained people than are needed to fill that number of jobs. It seems like you made my point. There is no huge demand for these people.
Stonewolf
I live in Austin, Texas. Where are you?
Calling me a troll makes it easy to ignore me. If that is what you want then that is fine. I'm not going to get into a pissing contest about toys with you. Toys are fine, what is your net debt?
One thing I will compare is the ease of getting jobs. I can't remember ever sending out more than one or two resumes to get a job. Most of the time if I changed jobs it was because of a phone call from an old friend who was looking for a lead technical person. As for my skill set, well I can only go by what I'm told and my previous record. I got one of my current teaching jobs by sending in one resume.
But, that all ended when I turned 49. Not just for me, but for my old friends too. Tell me how I went from being the most experienced and most highly rated R&D person in my company to being unemployable in one day? Then tell me how you plan to make the payments on your toys if it happens to you?
OTOH, honestly, I am happy for you. I'm glad you are doing so well and are happy with your job and your ability to get jobs. Just please don't make the mistake of thinking I am a troll. What happened to me can happen to you tomorrow.
The students I talk to know how risky programming jobs are. They are avoiding careers in risky professions. I think it is a damned shame the schools have watered down their curricula to the point they have. OTOH, they are teaching what the students are willing to pay for.
Last summer I gave a week long seminar on teaching game development. We had to add tables and turn people away because it was so popular. CS faculty are now looking to game development programs as a way to attract the number of students needed to save the professors jobs. And, the field is technical enough to require that the schools teach the skills you want. The point being that even CS professors are worried for their jobs because of the lack of demand for their services.
Students are staying away from computer science. They have good reasons to stay away. If you want to change things you have to change your industry.
Stonewolf
You sound just like me before I got laid off. I was the senior guy in R&D looking into how to deliver various kinds of multimedia to 3G phones. I as fat and happy and loved my job. Then the board decided that they could make more money by firing the entire US staff and buying an Indian software company to replace us. No one at my level was consulted. No one in R&D or any other part of the company was retained. Several of the best people had to leave the US to get jobs.
Anyway, the main point I was trying to make is that there are plenty of people, both young and old, who can do those jobs and who want to do those jobs. But, there aren't any jobs to be had. The old ones are retraining and moving on. The young ones are going where they see a future. What they see around them are tech companies that are laying off people every other day. What they see are the fathers, uncles, and neighbors losing their homes, their savings, and even their pensions because of dirty dealing at the top of the corporate ladder. They see all that and they go to other fields.
I talk to them every day. Most of the ones who are interested in studying the kind of skills we are talking about are doing it because they want to start their own businesses. They don't trust existing corporations. I can't speak for all of them and I don't pretend to. I'm just reporting what I hear and see.
I truly hope your luck/skill/karma holds out and you get to keep doing the work you love to do. But, I also think you are living in a deep state of denial.
Stonewolf
Yes, as a matter of fact I have noticed all those embedded device. I used to do embedded development and would love to do it again. I love seeing a product go from nothing to shipping and in stores.
The fact remains that there are thousands and thousands of 40 and 50 something programmers in the US who would love to do that work, who are fully qualified to do it, who can not get jobs doing it or any other kind of programming.
Why is that?
If there are only thousands of these jobs in the US then the output of a small program in a couple of colleges can easily provide all the people you need every year. Oh, but you don't want to train them, so they have to come out of college knowing exactly what you need for your current project. And if they studied processors you don't use, or an OS you don't use, or a language you don't use, then you don't want them. They must be fully buzz word compliant to even be considered for the job.
So, what happens to *you* when management decides to use a different processor, OS, or language? The older you are the more likely they are to just lay you off and replace *you* instead of letting you learn the new what ever.
Stonewolf
I didn't see through it, I lived through it. I have all that knowledge, and I'm glad I do. I used all that knowledge for over 30 years. There are at least 6 people living within a mile me, all in our late 40s and early 50s, all with that kind of training and experience, most with graduate degrees in EE and CS. We were all laid off from different companies, though IBM accounts for most of them (not me), and not one of us has been able to find a programming job since being laid off. I've been in contact with most of the companies you listed and many more.
The list of companies you posted is interesting. Mind posting their current job openings for people with that skill set? Want to post the number of people they currently employee with that skill set? Show me that there is a demand large enough to employ the students currently training for those jobs. I can tell you the demand is not very large because there are thousands of unemployed programmers who would happily fill any empty jobs.
I've become a teacher, one must eat after all. That puts me in contact with a lot of those wily young people. Classes I teach on Office applications are filled to overflowing. Classes I teach on computer programming, 3D graphics, game development, and so on are often canceled for lack of students. There are a lot of smart young people who have seen through the ruse and they are staying away in droves. They see that the market for the skills you mentioned is very small, the jobs are poorly paid, very risky, and in the long run, they have no future.
So yeah, I've lived through the ruse (I fell for it). I am in contact with smart young people every day who are not falling for it. You don't see it. Oh well. Programming makes a great hobby. I should know.
The guy who wrote the article is either an idiot or is out right lying.
The reason so many people stay away from the kind of degrees he wants them to get is because there are very few jobs in those fields and the jobs that do exist are poorly paid when you look at them on an hourly basis. Not to mention that the smart young people he wants to con into being his cheap labor are smart enough to look around and see the thousands of unemployed and unemployable 40 something engineers. They are smart enough to "just say no" to working 60+ hour weeks for 20 years just to be left with no job and no hope of a job in their 40s.
When the smart young people see that they can make a good living working reasonable hours until they retire doing the kind of work he wants them to do, the smart young people will demand that colleges offer that training and colleges will find a way to offer it. Until then, he should understand that most of the smart young people are too smart to be conned by people like him.
The whole article is nothing but misdirection. He wants to make people think there are good jobs out there so they will get the training they need for the jobs and then... he can hire the cream of the crop for sweat shop salaries and work them for sweat shop hours until they wise up. At which time he will fire them an hire more people who have been conned into the same trap. The article is nothing but a self serving con job aimed at both students and colleges.
I call bullshit on the entire article.
Stonewolf
As I read your post you are assuming that the poster is a Christian. Why do you make that assumption? He could be an atheist, an agnostic, a jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Sikh, ... you name it.
I'm a Buddhist, an American, and a Yellow Dog Democrat. I live in the Bible Belt in Texas (A red state) and I share my neighborhood with Baptists, Hindus, Methodists, Catholics, Mormans, Jews, Atheists, Wiccans, Agnostics, Republicans, and Muslims, to name just a few. (There is a Mosque about 2 miles from my home, the closest Buddhist temple is a few miles farther away the nearest Zendo even further, and the Hindu temple is south of town.) We all get along. I find your assumption that the original poster is a Christian to be naive.
As far as I can tell you use the term respect to mean "do what I tell you to do". That is a serious mistake. Even if you were using the word correctly the claim that people must respect other people's religions is absurd. It is nothing but a guilt trip used to trick the naive.
To Function as a world wide community we must be willing, and able, to *tolerate* other peoples religions. Toleration does not imply respect, and it absolutely does not imply that any one must, or even should, comply with the rules of other peoples religions.
There are few things I consider to be true that you might want to at least think about:
1) Your right to practice your religion *ends* where my rights begin. No one has the right to impose there religion on another sentient being.
2) All religions that claim to be the one true religion are inherently false.
3) Respect must be earned, it is never, and can not be, given.
4) The intolerant can not be tolerated.
Stonewolf
Well, I was one of those people doing high level design working in the R&D department of my company. I did a lot of research and design and a fair about of coding for the products we were developing.
One day I came in and found out that all the US employees of the company were being laid off. The owners of the company had found a software company in India that they could just buy for nothing and moved *all* the work, including R&D, to India. I guess that is at least one data point against the idea that only the grunt work has moved to India.
The first year I was unemployed I was able get a few interviews and some contract working running doing testing and one gig helping a company figure out how incompetent the US development staff was. (There are a lot of people all over the world who can write a program but are not qualified to design so much as a turd.)
The second year there were fewer contract jobs and interviews.
The third year I retrained as a teacher. After the third year the *only* company that has shown any interest in hiring me was an Indian company that was desperate enough for experienced people to offer to pay my relocation to India. After my kids are out of college my wife and I are seriously considering moving to India or China. I know a couple of people in my situation who are now living like kings pulling down what would be considered good US salaries, being paid in Euros, living in India and China.
Now I make a good wage (for an Indian) teaching people in the US what "click and drag" means. Believe it or not, but a *huge* portion of the people graduating from high school in the US have never used a PC and are scared shitless of having to use one. An even bigger portion of people over thirty do not know what "click and drag" means.
So, lets cut the crap about the quality of the jobs going to India. The only reason Indians aren't getting those jobs is that so many of them do not have the experience to do them. In India those jobs are being filled by Americans and Europeans with decades of experience. Not to mention the huge number of Indians and Chinese who went to school in the US and have worked here for decades who are now going back to start, run, or do high level work, in India and China.
Stonewolf
Developing modern games requires more math and science than most people are willing to believe. But, it also requires a deep understanding of philosophy, history, psychology, literature, art, and even sociology. It is an ideal cross disciplinary area that can be used to tie all these different areas together.
Science Fiction plus great books and shows such as Connections and Mythbusters are also a good way to get people interested in math and science. But, they do not grab the modern imagination like games do.
Stonewolf
Take a look at the XB0360 and the PS3. Both of these combine several multipurpose cores with a huge number of special purpose SIMD cores used just for graphics. (A typical modern GPU is a large collection of SIMD cores.) So there you have a huge market for multithreaded consumer-level applications.
In business there are people who would be very happy to see a multithreaded spread sheet program. Anyone who works with database extracts in a spread sheet would love that. So, there is at least one business app.
Stonewolf
Please examine you assumptions.
:-). So, I think I understand exactly what it is like to work for and recruit for a start up company.
Between 1983 and 2001 I was part of 5 start up companies. In three of them I was covered by key man insurance. I have been a hiring manager at a couple of those start ups. I also spent time at a fortune 100 company as a corporate researcher. (I needed a break from start ups
My network is kaput. I have worked it to death. Most of the people I know are also out of work. A couple of people in my network have left the US to find jobs. One fellow went to Canada, another went to China. The only serious inquiry I've had in the last 3 years was from a company in India.
Recruiters are as bad for you as they are for me. They either won't talk to me because I am too old, or they send out your resume to every job they find no matter how bad the fit.
I am actually building up a nice business teaching. It is interesting to see that companies will pay to send their employees to learn from me, but they will not consider me for a position that requires the skills I teach. What does that tell you?
Stonewolf