people don't want what they have come to expect from Microsoft on their phones... rebooting, slowness, crashiness and vulnerability
I was with you til this. Rebooting, slowness, and "crashiness" are just fallacies. Vulnerabilities aside, XP and Win7 do not generally suffer from rebooting, slowness, or "crashiness". Even Vista, once it finally booted and UAC was disabled, was a solid OS. I ran it for 2 years that way, and the only reason I upgraded was because I got a free copy of 7 Pro. (I do not have the time nor motivation to maintain an up to date linux system at home) User Confidence is not a general problem with Windows to their users. On the contrary, people use Windows because it works. It's only a perceived problem to their detractors.
Windows 8 has the huge problem of them attempting to steal mobile markets while using the same OS as on the desktop. That's a huge mistake. The input devices are, and will most likely always be too different to make both appealing simultaneously.
Windows most insurmountable advantage is business. Business uses Windows for the PCs. It's not 100% usage, but close enough for this discussion. Business is all about keeping costs down, and OS migrations are anything but that. OS upgrades cost real money as well as time and lost productivity. "Blue" is going to have a multiplying effect on that. You see it, others see it, how can Microsoft not see it?
Even with completely FREE upgrades, business still loses by applying those. It's like Microsoft is deliberately giving enterprise users a legitimate reason to switch to any version of Linux that meets their needs. They can't underestimate that it won't happen, because those MBAs will start to shit little chickens if they see cost projections having noticeable upswings due to Microsoft's annual update.
Lose the business (and Office dominance due to that), and Microsoft will lose the home as well. It just seems like a strategy doomed to fail, all in an attempt to copy competitors in a different market.
I've learned very quickly, that if you read anything about military systems posted on slashdot that you better not hope for valid answers in the comments. The posters here have a very good grasp on Command and Conquer, but not real military tactics. Plus they just love to point out how that same system won't be effective once the enemy "upgrades" their weapons to the even better version that flies faster or spins or gets evasive, or whatever else they come up with. Cause that happens instantaneously in real life for no cost too!! lol
I think, what the submitter is referring to is not necessarily the difference between ballistic missiles and "unguided rockets". Rather that short range missiles are still ballistic, but do behave differently. For instance they typically remain a single vehicle from launch to impact. Once you go to the medium that's usually not the case as there's a booster involved. Long range on the other hand can have multiple boosters as well as possibly separating payloads as well as going fast as all hell. In other words, there's a whole lot of shit to filter through to determine the real target and a very short window to do that in.
You idiot. God doesn't drive evolution. God simply creates and everything remains static because Evolution is a myth perpetuated by those liberal bastards trying to make our kids think outside my little church house rules.
Yes, I've only read the wiki article you linked. That said...
Aside from the plot (which we disagree on), why would the movie have to be bright and colorful? Being dark adds to the intensity of the location, as well as makes the characters' bright lines stick out more. I thought it fit well for the overall feel of the movie. I'll admit the ISO's were kinda dumb. You didn't like Tron Legacy, I did. Moving on.
Disney would do well to either limit the original characters to cameos, or remove them entirely from camera. Referencing is fine. The new trilogy needs to be fully capable of standing on its own, with new stars driving the story. If it turns into yet another sith or dark jedi popping up to attempt to reform the empire, then they have failed. They need to do something grander. And please, please try not to CGI everything.
If they throw in vampire or zombie anything, it's a failure. EPIC FAILURE, worse than episode 1. Worse than John Carter.
See, that's incredibly pertinent information that should be part of the submission. I didn't know that, I'm not big into mobile. That is a rather large difference.
So long as it works very, very well the size of the install will be a minor detail. That's a big if though.
Healthcare, and other benefits, certainly do enter into whether a new job is worth it. I left my first job with incredible health benefits, not realizing how cheap they were and just how much they covered. My next job, with a larger company, offered me benefits approximately twice as expensive while at the same time covering much less. In the interview and all your research, the cost of your premiums as well as the exact coverages are not provided until you're hired. It's impossible to know if you're upgrading or downgrading there and what the effect is. Ultimately, I figure it's costing me about $6000 more per year in out of pocket costs. Now add in that every year those benefits are downgraded with premiums increased and I can see where a union would be helpful since we have no input into that aspect.
As for my job, it cannot be outsourced. Not a won't, but a can't. The problem is, all the big players in my area have all treated their employees the same way in the past few years. I already mentioned healthcare, but they're all also cut vacation caps and accrual rates and a few other minor perks. A union could help there because there's no real financial or economic reason for the cuts. The companies just blankly throw "bad economy" out there like it's the reason when they're also boasting of record billions in profits each. Seems to me like they're simply cutting employee costs to raise profits as much as possible. Especially when they have internal emails boasting of the #1 goal of the company being Shareholder value. Knowing who our customer is, that's downright insulting and in times past would be considered borderline treasonous.
This entire submission is total bullshit. It's intended to stoke the flames of the Microsoft haters and drive clicks here. So it takes up 13 GB? How does that compare to iPad, and the newest factory Android tablets? Is it really bloated, or is the additional stuff actually useful even if in limited circumstances. But no, instead all we get is a worthless and exaggerated metric when taken by itself. Any number taken out of context can be made to look bad.
Today you're willing to do all that. Tomorrow you might not be. If you get married, and if you have kids, suddenly you'll find that switching jobs actually has a lot of headache. Those health benefits you're not talking about are incredibly important. Pay attention to that because your premiums go up a lot for a family. If your company then drops the coverage from 90% to 80% while at the same time increasing premiums when you have a kid on the way you ARE going to notice a huge difference paying for that baby. My multi-billion dollar profit last year company just did this to all their employees. At least that CEO continues to earn his multi millions each year cutting every offered benefit to labor every time he can.
Should I look for a new job? Perhaps. Thing is, I like what I do and I like (mostly) who I work with. The program and product I work on does not exist anywhere else. Shame there's no group looking out for us, but I understand why there's not.
Unions are very important to this country. People bashing on them have never worked in an industry that needed them. However, and this is important, IT workers are in a position where they should not form a union. Our job is far too easily replaced by foreign firms. Sure the product they produce might not work at all, but by the time management figures that out they'll have already collected their obscene bonuses from all the cost savings they got from laying off all the local talent.
Yes, you do KNOW the dose. Whether it's mixed with saline, or is a straight up bag of goo, there's a specific amount added. Then, as part of the doctor's order, it is prescribed with a rate of infusion. If the machine doesn't work right, that rate of infusion is no longer true and there's absolutely no way possible to determine it after the fact using any known blood tests. All they know is that X amount of drug, regardless of how it's mixed, was infused. That is a known constant barring human error with the dose.
This is not an electrical system. Organic systems are complex, if you apply 100 mg of drug X you will then find blood test gives result Y every time will never happen. It doesn't work that way. AT ALL. In fact, given a single blood sample, if you run the same test on it twice you will get different results. They are most likely very close, but they're not exact. However, sometimes a blood sample will give such bizarre results that a second sample will be required to verify. So any attempt to use a blood test to make a numerical certainty of what a device did before hand is sheer lunacy. God you'd almost think I have firsthand knowledge of how hospital laboratories work.
Do you know anything about healthcare, or just like to argue about what you know nothing about.
The better idea, is obviously for a vital piece of equipment found everywhere in hospitals to actually work correctly every time. Ever been in an ER? Just pretend for an instant that it's important their equipment work without question. There's not always time to check after the fact.
Insurance companies pay to run patient diagnostics, not device diagnostics. Don't be dense.
You want to throw urination in as a measure of an IV drip too? What a great idea. Oh wait, there's that tiny little problem of the patient drinking. And of course you need to take into account the efficiency rate of their kidneys.
And one only knows for sure the actual dosage given to the patient via tests that measure that.
But this line is priceless. One always knows the actual dosage given to the patient by how much drug they put in. The IV Infuser working properly or not is irrelevent to that datapoint. The issue here is that the RATE OF INFUSION cannot be determined by any blood tests after the fact. All it can do is tell you how much is in there at that moment.
I don't see how this is even tied to IP vulnerabilities. It's more like a cross between horrible QA and either bad programming or bad management.
Perhaps the programmers flat out sucked. Perhaps they originally designed it for use with specific hardware interfaces that are replaced in newer models. Perhaps management chose to use an older program against newer hardware. QA should catch all of this regardless. If management allowed for proper QA to occur that is...
You have no clue what you're talking about. Patients get PISSED when they need to be stuck with needles more often than necessary. Especially when you go tell them it's because we don't know if that IV device actually works right.
People just love to be guinea pigs.
On top of who's paying for that? Health insurance companies sure as shit don't pay for device diagnostic tests. Nor does it cover the fact that every patient's different based upon their size, composition, metabolism, etc. All those factors play a big role in drug absorption and metabolism. There's no way to get an established set of values to determine a precise numeric value for infusion.
Not to mention, exactly what blood test are you going to use to test for a straight up saline drip?
Your statement is incredibly misinformed. You'd get better results just by standing next to the pump and listening to it to determine approximately how much it's infusing. Of course that requires one be experienced with the pumps to be able to gauge that by ear.
The author needs to get out of his narrow mindset. What he's describing is applicable to every corporation in the U.S. (probably the rest of the world too, but since I haven't been there I won't drag them in) Technology, specifically PCs and all the potential tech and software tied to them is no longer being run by guys who grew up the companies from their mom's garages. Those people, and those idealogies are gone. They've been replaced by generic CEOs who demand huge salaries without even knowing the specifics of the new industry they moved to. They're controlled by wealthy stockholders who don't care about anything other than their ROI.
Every corporation is evil. The one I work for, which had the largest profit margins ever last year (hint it's in the billions) still cited the poor economy and some other woe is me bullshit to justify cutting every employee offered benefit. That includes vacation time caps, accrual rates, health insurance premiums, health insurance coverages, losing holidays, and a few other things all on top of royally fucking every employee over with raises that were in the 1-2% range for employees who were good. Mediocre to bad employees got nothing. (god forbid we get rid of the bad ones..right)
Anyways, so that's how shitty my large corp is. Safe to say I dislike my employer. I do like what I do though and haven't found a better landing spot yet that isn't a big corp. What shocked me more is that everything I just laid out that my company did to us, the company across the street did to their employees too. Corporations have got employees by the balls and they know it. This is why unions existed. This is why unions will start to come back.
So that $25/hr job that is not $15/hr makes it not worth it. Having that student loan debt requires one to make the kind of wage that makes it worthwhile. If I or anyone else wanted a job that paid $15/hr then they could find one that didn't require any college education.
Want an example...I saw a sign at the local Sheetz convenience store last week that was hiring with a starting wage of $9.00/hr. Nine dollars per hour and the education requirements are GED with no special skills. Or I could get a degree and have loans and then be priced out of positions because some foreigners are willing to come in and work at what was a $25/hr job at a lower rate. For $15 an hour I could take a certification course in rudimentary healthcare stuff and not have the large loans to strangle me down on that same salary.
So while you'll go throwing around "entitlement" to make $25/hr, there's a reason for that. Having 20-50k in student loans in order to be minimally qualified for that job means I have to make more otherwise all I'm doing is slowing down my spiral to bankruptcy rather than clawing my way out of debt. But good for the company who can just to sweep up some foreigner who has a very specific skillset and is very excited to make that $15/hr.
Then the ripple effect starts happening and other companies now HAVE to start paying less in order to remain competetive in the short term. If the foreigner is competent, you have a long term effect of reducing salaries across the board and beginning to lock out native workers who find the education cost combined with lower pay to be untenable. Or you have incompetent foreigners where the long term effects are that the company has been making shit for so long that they're now forced to either cut costs (i.e. fire more employees) further or fail.
So while you think the higher wage is an entitlement, you're stupidly wrong. It's that high because the economic forces have driven it that high. Allowing foreigners to come in and artifically lower it is good only for the foreigner and the company. Not for anyone else. Companies don't lower prices, they just reap the increased profits of cheaper labor. Cheaper labor (foreign or domestic here) that no longer has the same buying power those same positions did in the past, which helps slow or retard economic growth across the board.
The reason the company I work for is competitive and has clients is because we're open source, not despite it. When our proprietary competitors have to charge an arm and a leg for making a lot from scratch, we're able to benefit...
That statement right there implies that the main, if not sole, reason your company is doing better than competitors is because you both use open source as well as require them to open source whatever is created for them AND that the competitors can do neither.
I disagree with that. Your competitors are free to use whatever open source they can to deliver their own solution. Your company does not have any innate advantage over them with regards to that. Most likely your company just has better management and programmers which makes you more competitive. Better talent is always an advantage.
That "non-zero cost" with maintaining proprietary code is where you begin get your Return on Investment. If an interface changes, then they should want to come back to you to update it. Just pulling whatever updated version exists from the open source version may fix that problem, but it likely also has other changes. Some are most likely good, but some may produce unwanted side-effects.
Also, who cares if someone else does eventually implement the same functionality in a different way. Customers don't generally care about the backend so long as it all works the way it's supposed to. Customers will only care if someone offers improved functionality. In which case they're going to need additional development regardless.
Everyone does not win. Lower long term maintenance cost is different for each project. You can't simply generalize that one. The next customer getting smaller up front cost. Well, if it plays out the way you have laid out in the rest of your post, that cost should be close to nil and does not involve you having to do it. As for bored implementing the same thing lots of times, are you just developing webpages and database stuff? Of course that will be repetetive. But not all development paths are like that. Nothing I do is open source, and yet magically I've spent many years and have never had to redo the same thing as what I've done previously.
Look, you believe open source is some cure-all, cumbaya thing that solves every problem. It doesn't. It's a fantastic option when it's viable and permissible, it's just not always the case.
Why is a proprietary competitor bound to NOT use any open source software? They're just as free to utilize it as you are.
Perhaps your company has a reputation for being a good company. I really think you've overvalued the "open source" bullet item as it applies to potential customers soliciting bids for work. Other companies hiring yours generally aren't going to care about that philosophy. They want to know that the program they paid for will work, be maintainable, and most importantly be done cheaper than the competitor.
Good god man, you claim knowledge of Visual C++. That alone should get you something worthwhile. My company has interviewed a few fresh from school candidates and the results have not been promising. One could not name a simple datatype, one couldn't explain how to create a function or even define what a pointer is. How the hell is anyone getting out of college these days with a CS degree and can't give a simple definition of what a pointer is? It's like a math major that can't explain scientific notation.
Anyways, my point is that with a good understanding of C++ you should be able to land a job with minimal problems. If that's your primary concern.
By the way, your headline of "Reenergize an old programmer" and content of "in this tight financial environment I need to find a way to get paid for programming" are totally at odds with one another. You can do both, but I really take your post to be focused on the latter. I believe your best way to get paid is to do something you have experience with, and not necessarily learning something shiny and new to play with.
This is the attitude I took away from the post as well. He immediately sees Windows whatever it is, and installs his preferred flavor of Linux and still doesn't express any idea of what he's supposed to do other than something with the phones and maybe email something or other. If Windows is there, someone's already paid for it. Use it unless they don't want it or it's a woefully old version.
I for one do not believe he should touch the phone system, that one is best left to a specialist company or package. As soon as there are issues with them he's going to have everyone in that office up his ass to get them fixed and to make sure they work right all the time.
And for god's sake, lose the attitude. You're generally going to get responses from people here with the same attitude, but don't take it for granted because no one else outside the IT realm gives a flying fuck about your disdain for windows.
Exactly right. The hundreds of thousands of fully functional, combat ready drones that Iran, China, and N. Korea each have will be the end of our air superiority.
The most advanced military in the world will be the only one flying jets with pilots in future wars. The video game logic of this AC's post is downright sad.
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people don't want what they have come to expect from Microsoft on their phones... rebooting, slowness, crashiness and vulnerability
I was with you til this. Rebooting, slowness, and "crashiness" are just fallacies. Vulnerabilities aside, XP and Win7 do not generally suffer from rebooting, slowness, or "crashiness". Even Vista, once it finally booted and UAC was disabled, was a solid OS. I ran it for 2 years that way, and the only reason I upgraded was because I got a free copy of 7 Pro. (I do not have the time nor motivation to maintain an up to date linux system at home) User Confidence is not a general problem with Windows to their users. On the contrary, people use Windows because it works. It's only a perceived problem to their detractors.
Windows 8 has the huge problem of them attempting to steal mobile markets while using the same OS as on the desktop. That's a huge mistake. The input devices are, and will most likely always be too different to make both appealing simultaneously.
Windows most insurmountable advantage is business. Business uses Windows for the PCs. It's not 100% usage, but close enough for this discussion. Business is all about keeping costs down, and OS migrations are anything but that. OS upgrades cost real money as well as time and lost productivity. "Blue" is going to have a multiplying effect on that. You see it, others see it, how can Microsoft not see it?
Even with completely FREE upgrades, business still loses by applying those. It's like Microsoft is deliberately giving enterprise users a legitimate reason to switch to any version of Linux that meets their needs. They can't underestimate that it won't happen, because those MBAs will start to shit little chickens if they see cost projections having noticeable upswings due to Microsoft's annual update.
Lose the business (and Office dominance due to that), and Microsoft will lose the home as well. It just seems like a strategy doomed to fail, all in an attempt to copy competitors in a different market.
I've learned very quickly, that if you read anything about military systems posted on slashdot that you better not hope for valid answers in the comments. The posters here have a very good grasp on Command and Conquer, but not real military tactics. Plus they just love to point out how that same system won't be effective once the enemy "upgrades" their weapons to the even better version that flies faster or spins or gets evasive, or whatever else they come up with. Cause that happens instantaneously in real life for no cost too!! lol
I think, what the submitter is referring to is not necessarily the difference between ballistic missiles and "unguided rockets". Rather that short range missiles are still ballistic, but do behave differently. For instance they typically remain a single vehicle from launch to impact. Once you go to the medium that's usually not the case as there's a booster involved. Long range on the other hand can have multiple boosters as well as possibly separating payloads as well as going fast as all hell. In other words, there's a whole lot of shit to filter through to determine the real target and a very short window to do that in.
So you developed your ego before being paid and already knew everything. What a fantastic coworker you must have made.
You idiot. God doesn't drive evolution. God simply creates and everything remains static because Evolution is a myth perpetuated by those liberal bastards trying to make our kids think outside my little church house rules.
Only if you get a waiver first!
Yes, I've only read the wiki article you linked. That said...
Aside from the plot (which we disagree on), why would the movie have to be bright and colorful? Being dark adds to the intensity of the location, as well as makes the characters' bright lines stick out more. I thought it fit well for the overall feel of the movie. I'll admit the ISO's were kinda dumb. You didn't like Tron Legacy, I did. Moving on.
Disney would do well to either limit the original characters to cameos, or remove them entirely from camera. Referencing is fine. The new trilogy needs to be fully capable of standing on its own, with new stars driving the story. If it turns into yet another sith or dark jedi popping up to attempt to reform the empire, then they have failed. They need to do something grander. And please, please try not to CGI everything.
If they throw in vampire or zombie anything, it's a failure. EPIC FAILURE, worse than episode 1. Worse than John Carter.
I hope your post is sarcasm. The plot for Tron 2.0 sounds like the type of garbage that made the Matrix sequels horrible.
See, that's incredibly pertinent information that should be part of the submission. I didn't know that, I'm not big into mobile. That is a rather large difference.
So long as it works very, very well the size of the install will be a minor detail. That's a big if though.
Healthcare, and other benefits, certainly do enter into whether a new job is worth it. I left my first job with incredible health benefits, not realizing how cheap they were and just how much they covered. My next job, with a larger company, offered me benefits approximately twice as expensive while at the same time covering much less. In the interview and all your research, the cost of your premiums as well as the exact coverages are not provided until you're hired. It's impossible to know if you're upgrading or downgrading there and what the effect is. Ultimately, I figure it's costing me about $6000 more per year in out of pocket costs. Now add in that every year those benefits are downgraded with premiums increased and I can see where a union would be helpful since we have no input into that aspect.
As for my job, it cannot be outsourced. Not a won't, but a can't. The problem is, all the big players in my area have all treated their employees the same way in the past few years. I already mentioned healthcare, but they're all also cut vacation caps and accrual rates and a few other minor perks. A union could help there because there's no real financial or economic reason for the cuts. The companies just blankly throw "bad economy" out there like it's the reason when they're also boasting of record billions in profits each. Seems to me like they're simply cutting employee costs to raise profits as much as possible. Especially when they have internal emails boasting of the #1 goal of the company being Shareholder value. Knowing who our customer is, that's downright insulting and in times past would be considered borderline treasonous.
This entire submission is total bullshit. It's intended to stoke the flames of the Microsoft haters and drive clicks here. So it takes up 13 GB? How does that compare to iPad, and the newest factory Android tablets? Is it really bloated, or is the additional stuff actually useful even if in limited circumstances. But no, instead all we get is a worthless and exaggerated metric when taken by itself. Any number taken out of context can be made to look bad.
Today you're willing to do all that. Tomorrow you might not be. If you get married, and if you have kids, suddenly you'll find that switching jobs actually has a lot of headache. Those health benefits you're not talking about are incredibly important. Pay attention to that because your premiums go up a lot for a family. If your company then drops the coverage from 90% to 80% while at the same time increasing premiums when you have a kid on the way you ARE going to notice a huge difference paying for that baby. My multi-billion dollar profit last year company just did this to all their employees. At least that CEO continues to earn his multi millions each year cutting every offered benefit to labor every time he can.
Should I look for a new job? Perhaps. Thing is, I like what I do and I like (mostly) who I work with. The program and product I work on does not exist anywhere else. Shame there's no group looking out for us, but I understand why there's not.
Unions are very important to this country. People bashing on them have never worked in an industry that needed them. However, and this is important, IT workers are in a position where they should not form a union. Our job is far too easily replaced by foreign firms. Sure the product they produce might not work at all, but by the time management figures that out they'll have already collected their obscene bonuses from all the cost savings they got from laying off all the local talent.
Yes, you do KNOW the dose. Whether it's mixed with saline, or is a straight up bag of goo, there's a specific amount added. Then, as part of the doctor's order, it is prescribed with a rate of infusion. If the machine doesn't work right, that rate of infusion is no longer true and there's absolutely no way possible to determine it after the fact using any known blood tests. All they know is that X amount of drug, regardless of how it's mixed, was infused. That is a known constant barring human error with the dose.
This is not an electrical system. Organic systems are complex, if you apply 100 mg of drug X you will then find blood test gives result Y every time will never happen. It doesn't work that way. AT ALL. In fact, given a single blood sample, if you run the same test on it twice you will get different results. They are most likely very close, but they're not exact. However, sometimes a blood sample will give such bizarre results that a second sample will be required to verify. So any attempt to use a blood test to make a numerical certainty of what a device did before hand is sheer lunacy. God you'd almost think I have firsthand knowledge of how hospital laboratories work.
Do you know anything about healthcare, or just like to argue about what you know nothing about.
The better idea, is obviously for a vital piece of equipment found everywhere in hospitals to actually work correctly every time. Ever been in an ER? Just pretend for an instant that it's important their equipment work without question. There's not always time to check after the fact.
Insurance companies pay to run patient diagnostics, not device diagnostics. Don't be dense.
You want to throw urination in as a measure of an IV drip too? What a great idea. Oh wait, there's that tiny little problem of the patient drinking. And of course you need to take into account the efficiency rate of their kidneys.
And one only knows for sure the actual dosage given to the patient via tests that measure that.
But this line is priceless. One always knows the actual dosage given to the patient by how much drug they put in. The IV Infuser working properly or not is irrelevent to that datapoint. The issue here is that the RATE OF INFUSION cannot be determined by any blood tests after the fact. All it can do is tell you how much is in there at that moment.
I don't see how this is even tied to IP vulnerabilities. It's more like a cross between horrible QA and either bad programming or bad management.
Perhaps the programmers flat out sucked. Perhaps they originally designed it for use with specific hardware interfaces that are replaced in newer models. Perhaps management chose to use an older program against newer hardware. QA should catch all of this regardless. If management allowed for proper QA to occur that is...
You have no clue what you're talking about. Patients get PISSED when they need to be stuck with needles more often than necessary. Especially when you go tell them it's because we don't know if that IV device actually works right.
People just love to be guinea pigs.
On top of who's paying for that? Health insurance companies sure as shit don't pay for device diagnostic tests. Nor does it cover the fact that every patient's different based upon their size, composition, metabolism, etc. All those factors play a big role in drug absorption and metabolism. There's no way to get an established set of values to determine a precise numeric value for infusion.
Not to mention, exactly what blood test are you going to use to test for a straight up saline drip?
Your statement is incredibly misinformed. You'd get better results just by standing next to the pump and listening to it to determine approximately how much it's infusing. Of course that requires one be experienced with the pumps to be able to gauge that by ear.
The author needs to get out of his narrow mindset. What he's describing is applicable to every corporation in the U.S. (probably the rest of the world too, but since I haven't been there I won't drag them in) Technology, specifically PCs and all the potential tech and software tied to them is no longer being run by guys who grew up the companies from their mom's garages. Those people, and those idealogies are gone. They've been replaced by generic CEOs who demand huge salaries without even knowing the specifics of the new industry they moved to. They're controlled by wealthy stockholders who don't care about anything other than their ROI.
Every corporation is evil. The one I work for, which had the largest profit margins ever last year (hint it's in the billions) still cited the poor economy and some other woe is me bullshit to justify cutting every employee offered benefit. That includes vacation time caps, accrual rates, health insurance premiums, health insurance coverages, losing holidays, and a few other things all on top of royally fucking every employee over with raises that were in the 1-2% range for employees who were good. Mediocre to bad employees got nothing. (god forbid we get rid of the bad ones..right)
Anyways, so that's how shitty my large corp is. Safe to say I dislike my employer. I do like what I do though and haven't found a better landing spot yet that isn't a big corp. What shocked me more is that everything I just laid out that my company did to us, the company across the street did to their employees too. Corporations have got employees by the balls and they know it. This is why unions existed. This is why unions will start to come back.
So that $25/hr job that is not $15/hr makes it not worth it. Having that student loan debt requires one to make the kind of wage that makes it worthwhile. If I or anyone else wanted a job that paid $15/hr then they could find one that didn't require any college education.
Want an example...I saw a sign at the local Sheetz convenience store last week that was hiring with a starting wage of $9.00/hr. Nine dollars per hour and the education requirements are GED with no special skills. Or I could get a degree and have loans and then be priced out of positions because some foreigners are willing to come in and work at what was a $25/hr job at a lower rate. For $15 an hour I could take a certification course in rudimentary healthcare stuff and not have the large loans to strangle me down on that same salary.
So while you'll go throwing around "entitlement" to make $25/hr, there's a reason for that. Having 20-50k in student loans in order to be minimally qualified for that job means I have to make more otherwise all I'm doing is slowing down my spiral to bankruptcy rather than clawing my way out of debt. But good for the company who can just to sweep up some foreigner who has a very specific skillset and is very excited to make that $15/hr.
Then the ripple effect starts happening and other companies now HAVE to start paying less in order to remain competetive in the short term. If the foreigner is competent, you have a long term effect of reducing salaries across the board and beginning to lock out native workers who find the education cost combined with lower pay to be untenable. Or you have incompetent foreigners where the long term effects are that the company has been making shit for so long that they're now forced to either cut costs (i.e. fire more employees) further or fail.
So while you think the higher wage is an entitlement, you're stupidly wrong. It's that high because the economic forces have driven it that high. Allowing foreigners to come in and artifically lower it is good only for the foreigner and the company. Not for anyone else. Companies don't lower prices, they just reap the increased profits of cheaper labor. Cheaper labor (foreign or domestic here) that no longer has the same buying power those same positions did in the past, which helps slow or retard economic growth across the board.
Just a general response to this bullshit post. Ignore it.
The reason the company I work for is competitive and has clients is because we're open source, not despite it. When our proprietary competitors have to charge an arm and a leg for making a lot from scratch, we're able to benefit...
That statement right there implies that the main, if not sole, reason your company is doing better than competitors is because you both use open source as well as require them to open source whatever is created for them AND that the competitors can do neither.
I disagree with that. Your competitors are free to use whatever open source they can to deliver their own solution. Your company does not have any innate advantage over them with regards to that. Most likely your company just has better management and programmers which makes you more competitive. Better talent is always an advantage.
That "non-zero cost" with maintaining proprietary code is where you begin get your Return on Investment. If an interface changes, then they should want to come back to you to update it. Just pulling whatever updated version exists from the open source version may fix that problem, but it likely also has other changes. Some are most likely good, but some may produce unwanted side-effects.
Also, who cares if someone else does eventually implement the same functionality in a different way. Customers don't generally care about the backend so long as it all works the way it's supposed to. Customers will only care if someone offers improved functionality. In which case they're going to need additional development regardless.
Everyone does not win. Lower long term maintenance cost is different for each project. You can't simply generalize that one. The next customer getting smaller up front cost. Well, if it plays out the way you have laid out in the rest of your post, that cost should be close to nil and does not involve you having to do it. As for bored implementing the same thing lots of times, are you just developing webpages and database stuff? Of course that will be repetetive. But not all development paths are like that. Nothing I do is open source, and yet magically I've spent many years and have never had to redo the same thing as what I've done previously.
Look, you believe open source is some cure-all, cumbaya thing that solves every problem. It doesn't. It's a fantastic option when it's viable and permissible, it's just not always the case.
Why is a proprietary competitor bound to NOT use any open source software? They're just as free to utilize it as you are.
Perhaps your company has a reputation for being a good company. I really think you've overvalued the "open source" bullet item as it applies to potential customers soliciting bids for work. Other companies hiring yours generally aren't going to care about that philosophy. They want to know that the program they paid for will work, be maintainable, and most importantly be done cheaper than the competitor.
I wish I could mod this up. Spot on.
Good god man, you claim knowledge of Visual C++. That alone should get you something worthwhile. My company has interviewed a few fresh from school candidates and the results have not been promising. One could not name a simple datatype, one couldn't explain how to create a function or even define what a pointer is. How the hell is anyone getting out of college these days with a CS degree and can't give a simple definition of what a pointer is? It's like a math major that can't explain scientific notation.
Anyways, my point is that with a good understanding of C++ you should be able to land a job with minimal problems. If that's your primary concern.
By the way, your headline of "Reenergize an old programmer" and content of "in this tight financial environment I need to find a way to get paid for programming" are totally at odds with one another. You can do both, but I really take your post to be focused on the latter. I believe your best way to get paid is to do something you have experience with, and not necessarily learning something shiny and new to play with.
This is the attitude I took away from the post as well. He immediately sees Windows whatever it is, and installs his preferred flavor of Linux and still doesn't express any idea of what he's supposed to do other than something with the phones and maybe email something or other. If Windows is there, someone's already paid for it. Use it unless they don't want it or it's a woefully old version.
I for one do not believe he should touch the phone system, that one is best left to a specialist company or package. As soon as there are issues with them he's going to have everyone in that office up his ass to get them fixed and to make sure they work right all the time.
And for god's sake, lose the attitude. You're generally going to get responses from people here with the same attitude, but don't take it for granted because no one else outside the IT realm gives a flying fuck about your disdain for windows.
Exactly right. The hundreds of thousands of fully functional, combat ready drones that Iran, China, and N. Korea each have will be the end of our air superiority.
The most advanced military in the world will be the only one flying jets with pilots in future wars. The video game logic of this AC's post is downright sad.