Oracle has its issues, to be sure, but they have been fairly careful about doing acquisitions (despite doing a lot of them), and have a better track record than Hp of keeping the businesses they bought alive and making profits (not to say that they've never had misses).
I'm sure that they have good security technology and procedures. But you are only as strong as your weakest link. And any large and complex system has bugs and vulnerabilities, whether you are talking about off the shelf software such as Linux & Apache, or custom software. And even if the endpoint software is bulletproof, the network may not be. So they shouldn't brag about being uncrackable. They probably aren't.
Word is so complex, most users don't even touch most of its features. And making the UI customizable, as a way of dealing with complexity, does not improve matters - it just confuses users even more. That said, it could be (and has been) worse: if you used it in the 80s, when it was a poor competitor to WordPerfect, you are glad you don't have *that* to deal with anymore.
In my experience developer and software engineer are synonymous. Some organizations will call a person creating or modifying software a Developer and some will call him/her an Engineer. Architect tends to imply you are spending most of your time designing systems or reviewing others' designs, although higher-level software engineers do quite a bit of that too.
I remember at one job I had to call up HR once and ask them what my title was. But it did gradually dawn on me that you don't want to be a title step lower than people who are equally or less skilled than you are. It does affect how others see you in the company and ultimately may affect your salary and promotion prospects, although I don't believe my own career has been derailed much by not caring.
No, not any more. When I was a young programmer, you could disappear into an office and just code all day. But one thing that has happened in the last couple of decades is that coding has become much more collaborative. Even if you are not doing extreme programming, with another coder practically in your lap, test-driven development, continuous integration and methodologies like Scrum mean that you are spending a lot of your day with QA and other devs. Break something and you have 20 guys on your back to fix it, stat. Put in some nifty but unorthodox code and then get it reviewed out of the product. I'm sure there are lots of people who thrive in that environment, and it does tend to improve the quality level of the software, but it means that you don't get to fly solo anymore, and that is what drove a lot of introvert/geek types into programming in the first place. It's also a bit of a shift if you haven't grown up as a dev in the new world, although I've been able to deal with it.
Apple has been making huge money in the other end of the market, high-end smartphones. That is a much higher margin business and still growing. Nokia has been losing market share, to Samsung among others. Also, as others have noted, they are deep in bed with Microsoft already, so that is another reason for Apple to pass.
My 1973 era high school had a calculator that could be programmed with punched cards. It wasn't much, but I did write some programs for it. Then (still in high school, but taking a college math class) I talked my way into getting some machine time on a university IBM 370, also with punched cards, but immensely more powerful. No instruction, though. Just read the manual, bother some guys hanging around the computer center, get to be friends with the operator so he'll run your job sometime before next Tuesday.
I don't know any school where professors have "absolute" power. While professors with active research programs do bring money into the university, that alone doesn't support the school. They don't control the funding, so they don't run the institution.
Not necessarily. I know people who have been with the same company for a couple decades at least and are doing very, very well, having advanced to senior positions over time. They are still challenged by their jobs.
Other posters have said it well, and I agree - money, and career advancement, are not everything. But just looking at it from that point of view, a big question is: how fast is your present company growing? If you are well-situated there and they are growing you will likely have many further opportunities for advancement. Maybe very significant ones. If they aren't growing, or doing it very slowly, you might do better by jumping ship.
It is ridiculous. Because they have a captive market, textbook publishers just gouge students. Professors don't pay the cost, so they don't have an incentive to choose a cheaper book - but also, the fact is, pretty much all the choices are expensive.
The desktop UI for me is mostly an environment to run a terminal in, to support bash + emacs + gcc. So even Unity is usable for that, although its awfulness is all true.
A lot of workplaces already have the downsides you are mentioning (a cube forest basically is a "factory floor with no privacy"), and pair programming just makes them worse.
SCO Group did not buy The Santa Cruz Operation, but instead had bought certain assets from them, and had some rights to use Unix in specific ways under contract. The court ruled that this contract did not transfer the copyrights (in fact, it ruled Santa Cruz Operation didn't own them either, Novell retained ownership). There was quite a bit of willful obfuscation by SCO where they preferred to let on that they had just inherited Unix ownership from The Santa Cruz Operation, and the name similarity helped this little slight of hand. But it didn't hold up in court.
So, Novell was awarded $3 million in 2008 but they have not to this day seen a dime of it. SCO declared bankruptcy and from that point on, various attorneys and advisers got paid, and the bankruptcy trustee, but not the creditors. This went on until no money was left, and now they're going into Chapter 7.
And the IBM case was stayed by the bankruptcy. IBM had a very good counter-suit against SCO for defamation and interfering with IBM's business by wrongfully claiming IBM had no right to sell their Unix product, AIX. This case can now technically be resumed now that SCO is out of Chapter 11, but IBM will never see any monetary compensation, even if they win, because of course SCO has no money.
The whole thing illustrates very well why companies incorporate in Delaware, because the bankruptcy process there practically guarantees that nobody with a claim against the company will get anything. At least if this case is any indication.
I have both an iPad and Kindle. I take the iPad on trips because it has internet. Personally, I'm fine reading ebooks on it. But my wife strongly prefers the Kindle. It's easier on her eyes.
But a huge amount of computer science is not about modeling the physical world. It is about organizing data or doing accounting or serving up web pages. Advanced calculus does not help at all with that.
.223 ammunition is significantly different from.22. It generates a lot higher pressures and has a larger, heavier bullet despite the small difference in caliber. I think "not much more than a varmint round" is inaccurate.
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Oracle has its issues, to be sure, but they have been fairly careful about doing acquisitions (despite doing a lot of them), and have a better track record than Hp of keeping the businesses they bought alive and making profits (not to say that they've never had misses).
I'm sure that they have good security technology and procedures.
But you are only as strong as your weakest link. And any large and complex system has bugs and vulnerabilities, whether you are talking about off the shelf software such as Linux & Apache, or custom software. And even if the endpoint software is bulletproof, the network may not be. So they shouldn't brag about being uncrackable. They probably aren't.
Word is so complex, most users don't even touch most of its features. And making the UI customizable, as a way of dealing with complexity, does not improve matters - it just confuses users even more. That said, it could be (and has been) worse: if you used it in the 80s, when it was a poor competitor to WordPerfect, you are glad you don't have *that* to deal with anymore.
SSL involves more than just usage of the RSA algorithm (and doesn't necessarily depend on that algorithm).
In my experience developer and software engineer are synonymous. Some organizations will call a person creating or modifying software a Developer and some will call him/her an Engineer. Architect tends to imply you are spending most of your time designing systems or reviewing others' designs, although higher-level software engineers do quite a bit of that too.
I remember at one job I had to call up HR once and ask them what my title was. But it did gradually dawn on me that you don't want to be a title step lower than people who are equally or less skilled than you are. It does affect how others see you in the company and ultimately may affect your salary and promotion prospects, although I don't believe my own career has been derailed much by not caring.
if it were not literally true, in this case.
No, not any more. When I was a young programmer, you could disappear into an office and just code all day. But one thing that has happened in the last couple of decades is that coding has become much more collaborative. Even if you are not doing extreme programming, with another coder practically in your lap, test-driven development, continuous integration and methodologies like Scrum mean that you are spending a lot of your day with QA and other devs. Break something and you have 20 guys on your back to fix it, stat. Put in some nifty but unorthodox code and then get it reviewed out of the product. I'm sure there are lots of people who thrive in that environment, and it does tend to improve the quality level of the software, but it means that you don't get to fly solo anymore, and that is what drove a lot of introvert/geek types into programming in the first place. It's also a bit of a shift if you haven't grown up as a dev in the new world, although I've been able to deal with it.
2010 is ages ago in this business.
Apple has been making huge money in the other end of the market, high-end smartphones. That is a much higher margin business and still growing. Nokia has been losing market share, to Samsung among others. Also, as others have noted, they are deep in bed with Microsoft already, so that is another reason for Apple to pass.
My 1973 era high school had a calculator that could be programmed with punched cards. It wasn't much, but I did write some programs for it. Then (still in high school, but taking a college math class) I talked my way into getting some machine time on a university IBM 370, also with punched cards, but immensely more powerful. No instruction, though. Just read the manual, bother some guys hanging around the computer center, get to be friends with the operator so he'll run your job sometime before next Tuesday.
Yes, it does.
I don't know any school where professors have "absolute" power. While professors with active research programs do bring money into the university, that alone doesn't support the school. They don't control the funding, so they don't run the institution.
Most charitable organizations such as foundations cannot donate to political parties. (That's essential to retain their status as charities).
Not necessarily. I know people who have been with the same company for a couple decades at least and are doing very, very well, having advanced to senior positions over time. They are still challenged by their jobs.
Other posters have said it well, and I agree - money, and career advancement, are not everything. But just looking at it from that point of view, a big question is: how fast is your present company growing? If you are well-situated there and they are growing you will likely have many further opportunities for advancement. Maybe very significant ones. If they aren't growing, or doing it very slowly, you might do better by jumping ship.
It is ridiculous. Because they have a captive market, textbook publishers just gouge students. Professors don't pay the cost, so they don't have an incentive to choose a cheaper book - but also, the fact is, pretty much all the choices are expensive.
The desktop UI for me is mostly an environment to run a terminal in, to support bash + emacs + gcc. So even Unity is usable for that, although its awfulness is all true.
I've moved 100s of thousands of lines of code across OSs and changed practically nothing. For GUIs the portability solution is starting to be HTML5.
A lot of workplaces already have the downsides you are mentioning (a cube forest basically is a "factory floor with no privacy"), and pair programming just makes them worse.
SCO Group did not buy The Santa Cruz Operation, but instead had bought certain assets from them, and had some rights to use Unix in specific ways under contract. The court ruled that this contract did not transfer the copyrights (in fact, it ruled Santa Cruz Operation didn't own them either, Novell retained ownership). There was quite a bit of willful obfuscation by SCO where they preferred to let on that they had just inherited Unix ownership from The Santa Cruz Operation, and the name similarity helped this little slight of hand. But it didn't hold up in court.
So, Novell was awarded $3 million in 2008 but they have not to this day seen a dime of it. SCO declared bankruptcy and from that point on, various attorneys and advisers got paid, and the bankruptcy trustee, but not the creditors. This went on until no money was left, and now they're going into Chapter 7.
And the IBM case was stayed by the bankruptcy. IBM had a very good counter-suit against SCO for defamation and interfering with IBM's business by wrongfully claiming IBM had no right to sell their Unix product, AIX. This case can now technically be resumed now that SCO is out of Chapter 11, but IBM will never see any monetary compensation, even if they win, because of course SCO has no money.
The whole thing illustrates very well why companies incorporate in Delaware, because the bankruptcy process there practically guarantees that nobody with a claim against the company will get anything. At least if this case is any indication.
I have both an iPad and Kindle. I take the iPad on trips because it has internet. Personally, I'm fine reading ebooks on it. But my wife strongly prefers the Kindle. It's easier on her eyes.
Mainstream support for Windows 7 ends in 2015.
But a huge amount of computer science is not about modeling the physical world. It is about organizing data or doing accounting or serving up web pages. Advanced calculus does not help at all with that.
.223 ammunition is significantly different from .22. It generates a lot higher pressures and has a larger, heavier bullet despite the small difference in caliber. I think "not much more than a varmint round" is inaccurate.