What exactly is a "web programming language"? Something that can spit out HTML, I imagine. Perl does that with the best of them and, since it is a general-purpose language, it does it exceptionally well.
Right now, we're in a bubble of web trends. This will not last, because people are realizing that (a) web programming isn't rocket science and (b) most people need modifications of existing off-the-shelf blogs, CMSs, etc. and not much else.
The rare site that does require hardcore programming is more likely to use a language like Perl because it's more stable than the newer, trendier alternatives, and is more favorable to those with a classic CS education.
The trendy people want us to think that Perl is dying, but the converse is true: the trends are dying, and they're trying to improve their own position by denigrating otherwise great languages.
Don't use a Win 8 device till Microsoft fixes the interface. Essentially like most other MS operating system releases it's the 'Wait for SP1' effect.
This is consistent in my advice about all hardware and software, whether from Microsoft or not. Truly new products take at least 18 months to work the bugs out. (There is some flexibility here: really good management will nail most of them in a shorter period, but that's rare.)
I have found this to be great advice with Apple products. You generally had to wait a couple years for them to revise the ROMs so you didn't get random undocumented bugs. And in the case of several machines, they never fixed them.
I view cars the same way. Brand-new 2013 models? Forget it. I'll buy the model that was new in 2008 and they've steadily been upgrading it since then. (Some of the best cars on the market use 1960s designs -- for example, for engines or body -- that they've been incrementally upgrading for decades, like some of the Volvo, Mercedes and Toyota models or even some of the older American pickup trucks.)
And i've been there to see it all from c64s to apple2es, to pc's running dos, desqview, os/2, win31 all the way up to windows 8.
Me too, except for OS/2, which scared me off. The "good old days" were good not for the products in them, but how good they were for the time, especially in contrast to what came before.
I don't think I'd want to trade today's OSs for some of those older, chaotic days.
People are just too slow to change.
Another way to view this is that they understand what's current now, and change forces them to learn new things, at which they might not be as competent. They're afraid of that, understandably.
I anticipate buying a new ultrabook in the next month, it'll come with windows 7, but it'll be running Linux Mint a few hours after I get my hands on it. I have no plans to run Windows 8 right now, or ever.
A Linux install running VMs for Windows XP, 7 and any other environments you need is one of the best ways to configure a laptop.
Innovation is generally incremental. The iPod was not the first MP3 player; they just perfected it. The same is true of many MSFT products.
Microsoft just made the first FULL desktop OS capable of running on all devices including touch based tablets, and you find that to be a bad move?
Microsoft also unified the computer market with Windows back in the 1990s. Before that, it was sheer chaos and incompatibility. Windows and FAT32 gave the world a standard.
While many people dislike it, Microsoft Office was the first complete and integrated office suite to include all the functions needed in an average office. It took it some years to get good, but now it's the standard.
Windows 95 gave us real multitasking at a time when you could freeze a Macintosh by holding down the mouse button.
Come to think of it, the 'softies have done a lot of good things.
Yes, slavishly copying how other people do stuff isn't innovation. Producing something which is unusable is just incompetence, and it sounds like they'd have been better off just ripping everybody else off.
First, you're taking this guy's word that it's unusable. Second, the first version of just about anything is less usable than subsequent versions. Do you remember the 1984 128k Macintosh? Or the first Mac laptop (sorry... "portable")?
That would only apply to direct adoption, correct? Making your own clone of something and then extinguishing it does nothing. If you take over a product line, and then manage to kill it off, that might work, but you need a secondary competing product line.
I'm pretty sure the "embrace, extend, extinguish" campaign with the Zune didn't do much to the iPod.
What use would it be to invent something that duplicates iOS or Android?
People would just keep using the original and deny the copy.
It's smart to take features from these systems, but useless to repeat them. Technology is forged by people who find new ways to do useful things. That doesn't mean imitation, it means re-invention.
Microsoft also has a long legacy of Windows products and users to uphold, and has to merge these two.
I realize that liking Windows around here is about as favorably looked upon as non-ironically liking Bruce Springsteen at a hipster party, but demonization for not being a clone is undeserved here.
We keep hearing about how banks, firms, etc. that were "too big to fail" have...failed.
Then we hear about how humanity is now global and the future is bright. Are we too big to fail, and thus prone to failure?
The interest in Mars seems less about exploration and more about looking for another planet to inhabit. Taken as a whole, this one may be about done, or rather, the human civilizations on it appear to be teetering over the precipice of internal disaster.
But Kaspersky’s rise is particularly notable—and to some, downright troubling—given his KGB-sponsored training, his tenure as a Soviet intelligence officer, his alliance with Vladimir Putin’s regime, and his deep and ongoing relationship with Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB.
And now companies are starting to realize that it's not saving them money, but costing them money, as they have to fix the mistakes or start getting additional, more qualified work overseas or in the host country.
I've seen a lot of this as well. The jobs that are getting outsourced now are those where the quality of the worker does not matter so much as ability to memorize, repeat and achieve high rates (more than high accuracy). Good observation on your part.
Let go back to the good old days when an employee that lost a hand in a machine could be shown the door and children were allowed to work 60 hours a week.
There are other solutions for those problems, most notably lawsuits.
However, if for the child, a job that pays in exchange for 60 hours a week, represents a financial boost, that could be a good thing. It's better than languishing in poverty.
Even the the good old days of the 1950s where life expectancy was 20 years less so there was no need to take care of those useless old folks.
Life expectancy mainly rose because of medical improvements, and I think it's only about ten years since 1950.
It has never been illegal to neglect people and allow them to die.
Let's go back to the days when business was allowed to dump TCE and dioxins into aquifers and people had no recourse. Let's all wax nostalgic over the days when the Cuyahoga river could support a good fire.
This is probably better handled through expensive high-profile lawsuits. They are damaging and tend to force companies to pre-emptively avoid infraction. I am not opposed to regulation in this area but feel it could be better handled than the red-tape snarl that is today's regulation. I might be in favor of an agency that did for-profit lawsuits...
If high wages are such a problem, how come Costco can do it?
First, Costco needs employees here because its stores and distribution are here, so this question is for the most part irrelevant.
Next, Costco is based on using lower numbers of employees thanks to its warehouse model.
Finally, this is a customer-service based business where all workers are client-facing. They're being paid more than average to keep competition for those jobs high.
Part of what makes this difficult is that Costco is a growing concern, and so right now, it's flush with cash because it's replacing other types of businesses (notably Walton concerns).
If Costco weren't localized and customer-facing, these restraints might not apply.
It happened because banks were encouraged to loan (i.e. create) money by issuing more and more debt (i.e. loans). The economic "growth" since the 1970s has been almost entirely debt-driven.
This is the result of our regulatory policies, which convinced us that we could print money by command, and not the cause of our overvalued labor. However, it didn't help the situation.
In the mean time we bought all of their crap and none of our own supplying them with all of our money.
For over a decade, consumer goods got really cheap compared to how they were in the 1990s. This was the boom in third-world manufacturing in India, China, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc. It mirrors the boom in Japanese goods that enhanced lifestyle in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Like all bubbles, it popped. The post-1990s bubble is popping very slowly, but it's going. And when it does, the USA will have to re-develop its industries.
I'm a CEO. What does get your job done faster though is hiring that really bright coder 12 timezones away with good English skills at local prices that are "sky high".
Exactly. Individuals differ, and price differences allow you to buy higher in the market overseas.
I think the Slashdot hivemind would like to think that all coders are the same, but... in my experience, looking at the individual's abilities and qualities is the most important criterion for hiring.
All other stuff, like degrees and experience, are proxies for that. How good of a coder is this person?
There's also a lot of obscuring this scale through trendy knowledge, like the huge influx of people who are good at PHP or Ruby but not very good at practical problems outside the web.
Cheaper labor doesn't get you the same amount or quality of work. Replacing one coder with three coders 12 timezones away doesn't get the job done 3 times faster either.
Very true, even here within the USA. However, that's not the point. The point is all that degrees of quality of our labor have become more expensive through over-regulation.
Not surprising, when you consider that the USA has systematically raised the costs of doing business here, including labor costs, through well-intentioned social justice and wealth redistribution efforts.
Every law that's made, every committee that meets, every rule that must be followed, every union... they all increase our costs. Other places are more competitive, until they decide to implement the same systems (and it's not certain they will, even if they're not Ron Paul(tm)-styled libertarians).
That's a bullshit propaganda talking point that contradicts pretty much everything known about USSR GDP, defense, or economic significance (or, to be precisely, lack of one) of USSR dissolution.
I'd like to add that even if we egged them on, we did not "force" them to outspend their GDP in making military gear. They chose to do that.
Further, from what I saw, the USSR was massively unstable in every other way possible. Vast corruption, couldn't produce enough food, total lack of consumer goods, technologically backward, politically unstable and unresponsive chain of command.
Meanwhile, our collapse is now mathematically impossible to avoid.
Since all of us live here, it's incumbent upon us to avoid collapse if possible.
What kind of collapse are you thinking of? Gibbon and Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire?
Or more like Jared Diamond's Easter Island case study?
It seems Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies might be a good guide, but I'd prefer to hear the math or theories you're using to predict this.
This message is neither agreement nor disagreement with the propositions you have advanced.
The USSR and US had a cold war for decades without actually ending up in an inevitable war, though they did fight proxy wars in places like Afghanistan.
Mainly because the USSR collapsed from within at the end of that time period. China has privatized, thus is not likely to the type of collapse that afflicted the USSR.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly is a "web programming language"? Something that can spit out HTML, I imagine. Perl does that with the best of them and, since it is a general-purpose language, it does it exceptionally well.
Right now, we're in a bubble of web trends. This will not last, because people are realizing that (a) web programming isn't rocket science and (b) most people need modifications of existing off-the-shelf blogs, CMSs, etc. and not much else.
The rare site that does require hardcore programming is more likely to use a language like Perl because it's more stable than the newer, trendier alternatives, and is more favorable to those with a classic CS education.
The trendy people want us to think that Perl is dying, but the converse is true: the trends are dying, and they're trying to improve their own position by denigrating otherwise great languages.
This is consistent in my advice about all hardware and software, whether from Microsoft or not. Truly new products take at least 18 months to work the bugs out. (There is some flexibility here: really good management will nail most of them in a shorter period, but that's rare.)
I have found this to be great advice with Apple products. You generally had to wait a couple years for them to revise the ROMs so you didn't get random undocumented bugs. And in the case of several machines, they never fixed them.
I view cars the same way. Brand-new 2013 models? Forget it. I'll buy the model that was new in 2008 and they've steadily been upgrading it since then. (Some of the best cars on the market use 1960s designs -- for example, for engines or body -- that they've been incrementally upgrading for decades, like some of the Volvo, Mercedes and Toyota models or even some of the older American pickup trucks.)
Me too, except for OS/2, which scared me off. The "good old days" were good not for the products in them, but how good they were for the time, especially in contrast to what came before.
I don't think I'd want to trade today's OSs for some of those older, chaotic days.
Another way to view this is that they understand what's current now, and change forces them to learn new things, at which they might not be as competent. They're afraid of that, understandably.
A Linux install running VMs for Windows XP, 7 and any other environments you need is one of the best ways to configure a laptop.
I think it is a better product, absent a few interface glitches. You can run desktop software on a tablet in a secure and powerful environment.
The criticism appears to be only about those interface glitches.
Ideally, they'll keep improving it and lower their prices to make it more competitive. Yours is good advice for the 'SFT.
Innovation is generally incremental. The iPod was not the first MP3 player; they just perfected it. The same is true of many MSFT products.
Microsoft also unified the computer market with Windows back in the 1990s. Before that, it was sheer chaos and incompatibility. Windows and FAT32 gave the world a standard.
While many people dislike it, Microsoft Office was the first complete and integrated office suite to include all the functions needed in an average office. It took it some years to get good, but now it's the standard.
Windows 95 gave us real multitasking at a time when you could freeze a Macintosh by holding down the mouse button.
Come to think of it, the 'softies have done a lot of good things.
And then there's Microsoft Research and Microsoft Press.
First, you're taking this guy's word that it's unusable. Second, the first version of just about anything is less usable than subsequent versions. Do you remember the 1984 128k Macintosh? Or the first Mac laptop (sorry... "portable")?
That would only apply to direct adoption, correct? Making your own clone of something and then extinguishing it does nothing. If you take over a product line, and then manage to kill it off, that might work, but you need a secondary competing product line.
I'm pretty sure the "embrace, extend, extinguish" campaign with the Zune didn't do much to the iPod.
What use would it be to invent something that duplicates iOS or Android?
People would just keep using the original and deny the copy.
It's smart to take features from these systems, but useless to repeat them. Technology is forged by people who find new ways to do useful things. That doesn't mean imitation, it means re-invention.
Microsoft also has a long legacy of Windows products and users to uphold, and has to merge these two.
I realize that liking Windows around here is about as favorably looked upon as non-ironically liking Bruce Springsteen at a hipster party, but demonization for not being a clone is undeserved here.
We keep hearing about how banks, firms, etc. that were "too big to fail" have ...failed.
Then we hear about how humanity is now global and the future is bright. Are we too big to fail, and thus prone to failure?
The interest in Mars seems less about exploration and more about looking for another planet to inhabit. Taken as a whole, this one may be about done, or rather, the human civilizations on it appear to be teetering over the precipice of internal disaster.
Any comment on these allegations?
I've seen a lot of this as well. The jobs that are getting outsourced now are those where the quality of the worker does not matter so much as ability to memorize, repeat and achieve high rates (more than high accuracy). Good observation on your part.
All of your questions are addressed here, except:
I think physical and sexual abuse have always been illegal.
Nothing like a false dilemma to start off the day.
There are other solutions for those problems, most notably lawsuits.
However, if for the child, a job that pays in exchange for 60 hours a week, represents a financial boost, that could be a good thing. It's better than languishing in poverty.
Life expectancy mainly rose because of medical improvements, and I think it's only about ten years since 1950.
It has never been illegal to neglect people and allow them to die.
This is probably better handled through expensive high-profile lawsuits. They are damaging and tend to force companies to pre-emptively avoid infraction. I am not opposed to regulation in this area but feel it could be better handled than the red-tape snarl that is today's regulation. I might be in favor of an agency that did for-profit lawsuits...
First, Costco needs employees here because its stores and distribution are here, so this question is for the most part irrelevant.
Next, Costco is based on using lower numbers of employees thanks to its warehouse model.
Finally, this is a customer-service based business where all workers are client-facing. They're being paid more than average to keep competition for those jobs high.
Part of what makes this difficult is that Costco is a growing concern, and so right now, it's flush with cash because it's replacing other types of businesses (notably Walton concerns).
If Costco weren't localized and customer-facing, these restraints might not apply.
This is the result of our regulatory policies, which convinced us that we could print money by command, and not the cause of our overvalued labor. However, it didn't help the situation.
For over a decade, consumer goods got really cheap compared to how they were in the 1990s. This was the boom in third-world manufacturing in India, China, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc. It mirrors the boom in Japanese goods that enhanced lifestyle in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Like all bubbles, it popped. The post-1990s bubble is popping very slowly, but it's going. And when it does, the USA will have to re-develop its industries.
You can't raise wages across the board without also increasing costs.
This is why our "increased buying power" is going to imported goods from China.
Exactly. Individuals differ, and price differences allow you to buy higher in the market overseas.
I think the Slashdot hivemind would like to think that all coders are the same, but... in my experience, looking at the individual's abilities and qualities is the most important criterion for hiring.
All other stuff, like degrees and experience, are proxies for that. How good of a coder is this person?
There's also a lot of obscuring this scale through trendy knowledge, like the huge influx of people who are good at PHP or Ruby but not very good at practical problems outside the web.
Very true, even here within the USA. However, that's not the point. The point is all that degrees of quality of our labor have become more expensive through over-regulation.
Not surprising, when you consider that the USA has systematically raised the costs of doing business here, including labor costs, through well-intentioned social justice and wealth redistribution efforts.
Every law that's made, every committee that meets, every rule that must be followed, every union... they all increase our costs. Other places are more competitive, until they decide to implement the same systems (and it's not certain they will, even if they're not Ron Paul(tm)-styled libertarians).
Good answer:
I'd like to add that even if we egged them on, we did not "force" them to outspend their GDP in making military gear. They chose to do that.
Further, from what I saw, the USSR was massively unstable in every other way possible. Vast corruption, couldn't produce enough food, total lack of consumer goods, technologically backward, politically unstable and unresponsive chain of command.
I think when they shot down a civilian airliner and then claimed it was spying, while importing American wheat to avoid starving themselves, we should have known the USSR was circling the bowl.
Since all of us live here, it's incumbent upon us to avoid collapse if possible.
What kind of collapse are you thinking of? Gibbon and Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire?
Or more like Jared Diamond's Easter Island case study?
It seems Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies might be a good guide, but I'd prefer to hear the math or theories you're using to predict this.
This message is neither agreement nor disagreement with the propositions you have advanced.
Mainly because the USSR collapsed from within at the end of that time period. China has privatized, thus is not likely to the type of collapse that afflicted the USSR.