If you don't think there is a shortage of software developers in the US, why are developers in the US paid so much more than ones in Europe?
Also, there is no hard threshold to define an "actual" shortage when you're talking about such a large job market.
Curiously, European employers (in Germany in particular) are complaining about a "shortage" too and have lobbied with some success for easier immigration of qualified workers. It looks quite similar to the discussion and critique about H-1B workers in the USA, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Criticisms_of_the_program.
Personally, I think a "shortage" can best be detected from the development of wages, relative to other fields where the necessary education is similarly difficult and time consuming. For instance, does the average engineer earn significantly more than the average M.D., lawyer or business manager?
For Germany, AFAIK the answer is "no" and the complaints about a "shortage" are mostly propaganda. I'm not as familiar with the US labor market but the anecdotical evidence I pick up here and there tends to say "no" as well.
I think operators of all types of power plants should have to pay for the costs they cause to society and which are so far externalized. Even if the payment is only partial, it can make the problematic technology less competitive and help others gain market share.
Mandatory insurance for the risk of nuclear accidents is a step in the right direction, if the insurance sum is realistic. For instance, Germany has mandatory insurance for nuclear power plants but only at a paltry 2.5 billion euros coverage per plant. Needs to be much higher.
At the same time, the USA are starting to do something about mercury emissions while the EU doesn't yet: http://www.epa.gov/mats/powerplants.html Not based on taxing the emissions but on emission limits. Emissions below the limits stay free. Still, it is something.
Gas when extracted by fracking probably needs its own regulation concerning fracking chemicals. And so on...
Which would leave renewables in a better position because they don't have most of the usual risks and harmful emissions. Most complains I hear are about birds crashing into wind turbines and turbines looking ugly (matter of taste, YMMD).
The French nuclear industry does not have the very best reputation for diligence and safety. I would not be too surprised if they have a major accident some day. That is the flip side of having no NIMBYs.
You don't have to guess which community Oracle cares about. But if you're not sure, ask yourself which community can Oracle extort support contracts out of, or can be upsold on other products.
Follow the money. How much is the JCP paying Oracle to give a rat's ass about their concerns? Innovation is a cost center to someone protecting a market share, and competing against others who are protecting a market share.
At the moment, lawyers seem to be a bigger cost center in protecting Java market share. See Oracle vs. Google, still ongoing.
I recently had a similar problem with Microsoft Test Manager. With IE11 the content of the administration web page was not visible. I could not find the reason in the security settings (and accessing the web page from the same system suggests that it should be a "trusted zone"). Firefox 31 did the job though.
So I suspect this was another case of IE11 being broken for a Microsoft service.
Further, solar DOES NOT WORK IN A BLACK OUT because it feeds back into the grid. We were told refrigerator sized batteries were available at substantial cost which could be used in a power outtage. Most people do not realize that solar power does not equate to always available power without significant additional cost and inconvenience.
That is due to the current design of inverters that will switch off/refuse to start without a stable grid. Lets call those type A. They make up the majority of installations today.
I believe this could be fixed with inverters that can be switched to isolated operation mode as needed, but there seems to be no market so far.
Currently solar systems for isolated operation mode exist, but they are typically designed to feed a battery (for instance, 48V) from which an inverter for isolated operation mode generates the 220V (or 120V in the USA). Lets call these Type B. Type B and the related batteries are typically used in houses that are too isolated to be connected to the grid. The whole system is more expensive than type A and therefore not so popular. Usually, it is also NOT designed to feed into a grid..
A type A/B that can do both would be nice. Out of curiosity, I've been searching the internet for a vendor that supplies these systems. No luck so far. But then again, a type A system plus a generator to bridge a few days of blackout may actually be cheaper...
Speculation of course, but I think they were told to push the Metro UI by upper management. The obvious culprit would be Ballmer, but he is already gone.
So you may end up being right about the UI team being fired when someone is needed to take the blame. But I doubt they deserve it.
How is that their big problem? They don't need high adoption. Moreover they control the supply of Windows 7 licenses they can resolve the adoption problem very easily. Today Windows 8.1 sells with downgrade rights to and Windows 7 Professional and Windows Vista Business. Tomorrow they eliminate that. If adoption was their problem the solution is trivial.
That might be too much incentive for people to finally switch to Mac or Linux. Early netbooks have shown that the power of Windows to keep users is finite: Linux gained significant market share in the segment, until Microsoft created the ultra-cheap (or was it even free?) Starter Edition of XP.
But what actually seems to happen is that Windows 9 will bring the start menu back in some form. Problem solved for Microsoft where the desktop is considered.
I wonder if Microsoft is learning the wrong lessons from their "good" versions. They're having a hell of a time getting people to leave them. In the future, if people hate the version they're on, they'll be much more likely to buy a new version in the hopes that it's better. Brilliant!
That will only work if you can get people onto the hated version first. Which works not so well with Windows 8, which seems stuck at 12.5% right now (including both 8.0 and 8.1).
That's the only think I can think of to fully explain Windows 8, and why even now they're refusing to admit that Metro apps are a steaming turd on top of an otherwise competent OS. The only idiots who like using those "apps" are the ones who would probably be better off with a tablet or smartphone instead of an actual desktop computer, for whom the actual power of a desktop is apparently wasted.
I think it was an attempt to use their dominance in the desktop market to force the users onto Metro. In the hope that said users would eventually buy more mobile devices with Windows Phone, because they are already familiar with he GUI. Now Windows Phone is making some gains, going from 0.45% to 2.49% over the last six months. But I doubt it is worth the poor acceptance for Windows 8.
Microsoft seems to bet that their dominance of the desktop market is a guaranteed thing. I'd love to see them proven wrong.
I think there are levels in between, such as having some older games that you want to play at decent quality but not the latest stuff.
This said, the AMD IGPs tend to be limited by RAM bandwidth. Discrete graphics cards with similar numbers of shaders tend to beat the AGPs in graphics. I think AMD needs either quad-channel memory (too expensive?) or stacked VRAM on the APU itself. Without that, it is only a matter of time until Intel's HD graphics catch up...
If you quit because the employer fails to pay you, you can also get out of the non-compete ($90a III HGB, culpable conduct of the other party).
Again, IANAL and the above is my best guess as an interested layman who has access to online law texts. This said, non-competes have become rare anyway in Germany as the employer has to pay some compensation for them, otherwise they are illegal..
It is a chip for cheap machines without high performance requirements. Sort of an entry level CPU and entry level GPU in one, with a bit more emphasis on the GPU than the i3. And where you call the AMD "slightly less underpowered" in GPU, the i3 is arguably overpowered for typical office applications. Read, the A10-7800 can do those adequately.
Overall I think the A10-7800 has its market, for home use where you want to do a bit of everything or maybe as HTPC. It is nothing very impressive, but neither is an i3 without discrete graphics card.
Technically (under German law) the employment contract still exists and you could sue them for the unpaid wages. Which may fail if the company is already bankrupt. In that case, you'd be thowing good money after the bad.
But at the same time, AFAIK (IANAL) not paying wages is a bad enough breach of contract that you can get away with immediately terminating said contract. So if you have another job lined up, go for it.
Depends on the audience of the web sites your ads were displayed on. If you were, for instance, advertising for a US company on a site that had lots of viewers from Europe, the exhaustion early in the day might have been legitimate. Europe is a few time zones ahead.
But if adwords does not give you statistics about this, I agree that dropping them would be the smart thing to do.
And I'm tempted to compare it to the behavior of users who want the latest and shiniest, but complain about the shinies eating performance.
Desktop analogy: I sometimes suggest to users of Vista and above that they switch back to the "traditional" XP look of the desktop. Most of the time that suggestion is met by derision. Only those who disliked the change in the first place tend to like my suggestion (if they have not already changed their desktop settings themselves).
But the new corporate headquarters overseas would presumably not be bound by the subpoena. In that case, it sucks to be the guy in the US subsidiary who just got subpoenaed. Because he is unable to comply.
That said, the real papers you want to be on the lookout for are cathode improvements, there's a lot more potential for volume/mass reduction there than in the anode.
Exactly, all articles I can remember offhand for the cathode talk about a capacity of less than 200 mAh/g for existing cathode chemistries. So the cathode would make up most of the weight of the battery.
If the technology from TFA works out, maybe we can get a 20% - 30% improvement in overall energy density.
Many years ago, I joined a group of audiophile students at my university and we were building a pair of two-way loudspeakers with semi-expensive chassis. Students' budget, but it still had potential. When experimenting with crossover components, we soldered things together at first, then someone had the idea to use alligator clips (two each connected by a cable soldered to the clips) for faster turnaround.
The sound quality, which had been quite good up to that point, suddenly dropped to that of a cheap speaker from some supermarket. The ohmic resistance of the cable between the alligator clips was IMHO too low to have much of an influence.
Conclusion: It must have been the alligator clips, and good contacts matter. Since that experience I like to use gold-plated connectors, but with standard cables to connect them. That combination tends to be cheap enough and works for me:-)
My last purchase from 2011, an ASUS M4A7LT, has an onboard sound chip that cannot drive headphones at more than low volume.
At low volume it sounds good, and I'm sure it would be adequate to drive the input of an amplifier. But when I put in my (low impedance, maybe 30 Ohms) walkman headphones it fails miserably. Severe clipping as soon as I turn up the volume a bit.
Instead of putting an external amplifier on my desk, I put a sound card into the PC. Problem solved.
Considering the low probability of a serious reactor accident, individual utility companies might bet on not having one in their powerplants and have no insurance unless it is mandatory, like compulsory vehicle insurance.
Set the minimum coverage to something that would cover Fukujima (estimated $100B) and there is your market-based solution;-)
Sure there is some monkey work at the lower levels of support, especially in a "free" hotline where you don't get billed for calling. Several years ago I met a guy who did first level "support" for Microsoft, following a script from a database. But even there, I think second level should have some actual skills, as they are the ones who handle the cases that are too complex for the script monkeys.
At my current, relatively small company, the hotline (which is AFAIK costing more than peanuts to call) offers what you might find at second level support in a company that follows the above pattern. People who are familiar with the product and don't need to follow a fixed script. Some of them are actually quite good, based on years of experience.
Cases that are too hard for the hotline go to the "repair team", those are software testers who otherwise do QA on upcoming releases. I guess they are at least the equivalent of 3rd level support at a place like Microsoft. The "repair team" can talk directly to software development and ask for fixes, we trust them to distinguish bogus calls from real bugs.
A stagnant unspending base of users damages the entire tech ecosystem. They hold back technological progress creating a tragedy of the commons when it comes to software and web services features.
Unspending users can only hold back technological progress if software vendors keep maintaining obsolete technology to please them. Which doesn't make much sense, except in the context of trying to keep meaningful competition from arising. But maybe that is exactly what Microsoft is trying to achieve, even at the expense of earning less from the well-paying customers who might embrace faster progress.
There is the following Bill Gates quote:
"And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." (Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9) A clear case of trying to keep competition down even among the ultimate unspending non-customers.
This is beyond obvious by now. I'm somewhat surprised that the two major political parties don't suffer a larger loss of popularity over this (the SPD is gradually losing in the polls, but arguably for other reasons).
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If you don't think there is a shortage of software developers in the US, why are developers in the US paid so much more than ones in Europe?
Also, there is no hard threshold to define an "actual" shortage when you're talking about such a large job market.
Curiously, European employers (in Germany in particular) are complaining about a "shortage" too and have lobbied with some success for easier immigration of qualified workers. It looks quite similar to the discussion and critique about H-1B workers in the USA, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Criticisms_of_the_program.
Personally, I think a "shortage" can best be detected from the development of wages, relative to other fields where the necessary education is similarly difficult and time consuming. For instance, does the average engineer earn significantly more than the average M.D., lawyer or business manager?
For Germany, AFAIK the answer is "no" and the complaints about a "shortage" are mostly propaganda. I'm not as familiar with the US labor market but the anecdotical evidence I pick up here and there tends to say "no" as well.
I think operators of all types of power plants should have to pay for the costs they cause to society and which are so far externalized. Even if the payment is only partial, it can make the problematic technology less competitive and help others gain market share.
Mandatory insurance for the risk of nuclear accidents is a step in the right direction, if the insurance sum is realistic. For instance, Germany has mandatory insurance for nuclear power plants but only at a paltry 2.5 billion euros coverage per plant. Needs to be much higher.
For coal and gas-fired plants, I agree that there should be a mechanism for penalizing CO2 and mercury emissions. The EU has introduced such an instrument for CO2, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Trading_Scheme. There seems to be no such thing in the USA yet.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol where the USA, Canada and Russia are the least cooperative states .
At the same time, the USA are starting to do something about mercury emissions while the EU doesn't yet:
http://www.epa.gov/mats/powerplants.html
Not based on taxing the emissions but on emission limits. Emissions below the limits stay free. Still, it is something.
Gas when extracted by fracking probably needs its own regulation concerning fracking chemicals. And so on...
Which would leave renewables in a better position because they don't have most of the usual risks and harmful emissions. Most complains I hear are about birds crashing into wind turbines and turbines looking ugly (matter of taste, YMMD).
The French nuclear industry does not have the very best reputation for diligence and safety. I would not be too surprised if they have a major accident some day. That is the flip side of having no NIMBYs.
To put the whole risk into financial perspective, I suggest mandatory insurance on a level that is sufficient to cover a Fukujima-class accident. Estimated costs of that one are around $100 billion:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/for-tepco-and-japans-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-plant-toxic-water-stymies-cleanup/2013/10/21/406f4d78-2cba-11e3-b141-298f46539716_story.html
With that insurance requirement in place, by all means let the market decide if nuclear is still worthwhile ;-)
You don't have to guess which community Oracle cares about. But if you're not sure, ask yourself which community can Oracle extort support contracts out of, or can be upsold on other products.
Follow the money. How much is the JCP paying Oracle to give a rat's ass about their concerns? Innovation is a cost center to someone protecting a market share, and competing against others who are protecting a market share.
At the moment, lawyers seem to be a bigger cost center in protecting Java market share. See Oracle vs. Google, still ongoing.
I recently had a similar problem with Microsoft Test Manager. With IE11 the content of the administration web page was not visible. I could not find the reason in the security settings (and accessing the web page from the same system suggests that it should be a "trusted zone"). Firefox 31 did the job though.
So I suspect this was another case of IE11 being broken for a Microsoft service.
Further, solar DOES NOT WORK IN A BLACK OUT because it feeds back into the grid. We were told refrigerator sized batteries were available at substantial cost which could be used in a power outtage. Most people do not realize that solar power does not equate to always available power without significant additional cost and inconvenience.
That is due to the current design of inverters that will switch off/refuse to start without a stable grid. Lets call those type A. They make up the majority of installations today.
I believe this could be fixed with inverters that can be switched to isolated operation mode as needed, but there seems to be no market so far.
Currently solar systems for isolated operation mode exist, but they are typically designed to feed a battery (for instance, 48V) from which an inverter for isolated operation mode generates the 220V (or 120V in the USA). Lets call these Type B. Type B and the related batteries are typically used in houses that are too isolated to be connected to the grid. The whole system is more expensive than type A and therefore not so popular. Usually, it is also NOT designed to feed into a grid..
A type A/B that can do both would be nice. Out of curiosity, I've been searching the internet for a vendor that supplies these systems. No luck so far. But then again, a type A system plus a generator to bridge a few days of blackout may actually be cheaper...
Speculation of course, but I think they were told to push the Metro UI by upper management. The obvious culprit would be Ballmer, but he is already gone.
So you may end up being right about the UI team being fired when someone is needed to take the blame. But I doubt they deserve it.
Poor adoption rate is their big problem
How is that their big problem? They don't need high adoption. Moreover they control the supply of Windows 7 licenses they can resolve the adoption problem very easily. Today Windows 8.1 sells with downgrade rights to and Windows 7 Professional and Windows Vista Business. Tomorrow they eliminate that. If adoption was their problem the solution is trivial.
That might be too much incentive for people to finally switch to Mac or Linux. Early netbooks have shown that the power of Windows to keep users is finite:
Linux gained significant market share in the segment, until Microsoft created the ultra-cheap (or was it even free?) Starter Edition of XP.
But what actually seems to happen is that Windows 9 will bring the start menu back in some form. Problem solved for Microsoft where the desktop is considered.
I wonder if Microsoft is learning the wrong lessons from their "good" versions. They're having a hell of a time getting people to leave them. In the future, if people hate the version they're on, they'll be much more likely to buy a new version in the hopes that it's better. Brilliant!
That will only work if you can get people onto the hated version first. Which works not so well with Windows 8, which seems stuck at 12.5% right now (including both 8.0 and 8.1).
That's the only think I can think of to fully explain Windows 8, and why even now they're refusing to admit that Metro apps are a steaming turd on top of an otherwise competent OS. The only idiots who like using those "apps" are the ones who would probably be better off with a tablet or smartphone instead of an actual desktop computer, for whom the actual power of a desktop is apparently wasted.
I think it was an attempt to use their dominance in the desktop market to force the users onto Metro. In the hope that said users would eventually buy more mobile devices with Windows Phone, because they are already familiar with he GUI. Now Windows Phone is making some gains, going from 0.45% to 2.49% over the last six months. But I doubt it is worth the poor acceptance for Windows 8.
Microsoft seems to bet that their dominance of the desktop market is a guaranteed thing. I'd love to see them proven wrong.
I think there are levels in between, such as having some older games that you want to play at decent quality but not the latest stuff.
This said, the AMD IGPs tend to be limited by RAM bandwidth. Discrete graphics cards with similar numbers of shaders tend to beat the AGPs in graphics. I think AMD needs either quad-channel memory (too expensive?) or stacked VRAM on the APU itself. Without that, it is only a matter of time until Intel's HD graphics catch up...
If you quit because the employer fails to pay you, you can also get out of the non-compete ($90a III HGB, culpable conduct of the other party).
Again, IANAL and the above is my best guess as an interested layman who has access to online law texts. This said, non-competes have become rare anyway in Germany as the employer has to pay some compensation for them, otherwise they are illegal..
It is a chip for cheap machines without high performance requirements. Sort of an entry level CPU and entry level GPU in one, with a bit more emphasis on the GPU than the i3.
And where you call the AMD "slightly less underpowered" in GPU, the i3 is arguably overpowered for typical office applications. Read, the A10-7800 can do those adequately.
Overall I think the A10-7800 has its market, for home use where you want to do a bit of everything or maybe as HTPC. It is nothing very impressive, but neither is an i3 without discrete graphics card.
Technically (under German law) the employment contract still exists and you could sue them for the unpaid wages. Which may fail if the company is already bankrupt. In that case, you'd be thowing good money after the bad.
But at the same time, AFAIK (IANAL) not paying wages is a bad enough breach of contract that you can get away with immediately terminating said contract. So if you have another job lined up, go for it.
Depends on the audience of the web sites your ads were displayed on. If you were, for instance, advertising for a US company on a site that had lots of viewers from Europe, the exhaustion early in the day might have been legitimate. Europe is a few time zones ahead.
But if adwords does not give you statistics about this, I agree that dropping them would be the smart thing to do.
And I'm tempted to compare it to the behavior of users who want the latest and shiniest, but complain about the shinies eating performance.
Desktop analogy:
I sometimes suggest to users of Vista and above that they switch back to the "traditional" XP look of the desktop. Most of the time that suggestion is met by derision. Only those who disliked the change in the first place tend to like my suggestion (if they have not already changed their desktop settings themselves).
IANAL, but from a layman's perspective it looks like a breach of contract. A more sue-happy person might have taken that incident to court.
But the new corporate headquarters overseas would presumably not be bound by the subpoena. In that case, it sucks to be the guy in the US subsidiary who just got subpoenaed. Because he is unable to comply.
That said, the real papers you want to be on the lookout for are cathode improvements, there's a lot more potential for volume/mass reduction there than in the anode.
Exactly, all articles I can remember offhand for the cathode talk about a capacity of less than 200 mAh/g for existing cathode chemistries. So the cathode would make up most of the weight of the battery.
If the technology from TFA works out, maybe we can get a 20% - 30% improvement in overall energy density.
Many years ago, I joined a group of audiophile students at my university and we were building a pair of two-way loudspeakers with semi-expensive chassis. Students' budget, but it still had potential. When experimenting with crossover components, we soldered things together at first, then someone had the idea to use alligator clips (two each connected by a cable soldered to the clips) for faster turnaround.
The sound quality, which had been quite good up to that point, suddenly dropped to that of a cheap speaker from some supermarket. The ohmic resistance of the cable between the alligator clips was IMHO too low to have much of an influence.
Conclusion: :-)
It must have been the alligator clips, and good contacts matter. Since that experience I like to use gold-plated connectors, but with standard cables to connect them. That combination tends to be cheap enough and works for me
Depends on your main board.
My last purchase from 2011, an ASUS M4A7LT, has an onboard sound chip that cannot drive headphones at more than low volume.
At low volume it sounds good, and I'm sure it would be adequate to drive the input of an amplifier. But when I put in my (low impedance, maybe 30 Ohms) walkman headphones it fails miserably. Severe clipping as soon as I turn up the volume a bit.
Instead of putting an external amplifier on my desk, I put a sound card into the PC. Problem solved.
Correcting myself:
Tepco itself has estimated a damage of $137 billion, see http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-07/fukushima-137-billion-cost-has-tepco-seeking-more-aid.html
Considering the low probability of a serious reactor accident, individual utility companies might bet on not having one in their powerplants and have no insurance unless it is mandatory, like compulsory vehicle insurance.
Set the minimum coverage to something that would cover Fukujima (estimated $100B) and there is your market-based solution ;-)
Sure there is some monkey work at the lower levels of support, especially in a "free" hotline where you don't get billed for calling. Several years ago I met a guy who did first level "support" for Microsoft, following a script from a database. But even there, I think second level should have some actual skills, as they are the ones who handle the cases that are too complex for the script monkeys.
At my current, relatively small company, the hotline (which is AFAIK costing more than peanuts to call) offers what you might find at second level support in a company that follows the above pattern. People who are familiar with the product and don't need to follow a fixed script. Some of them are actually quite good, based on years of experience.
Cases that are too hard for the hotline go to the "repair team", those are software testers who otherwise do QA on upcoming releases. I guess they are at least the equivalent of 3rd level support at a place like Microsoft. The "repair team" can talk directly to software development and ask for fixes, we trust them to distinguish bogus calls from real bugs.
A stagnant unspending base of users damages the entire tech ecosystem. They hold back technological progress creating a tragedy of the commons when it comes to software and web services features.
Unspending users can only hold back technological progress if software vendors keep maintaining obsolete technology to please them. Which doesn't make much sense, except in the context of trying to keep meaningful competition from arising. But maybe that is exactly what Microsoft is trying to achieve, even at the expense of earning less from the well-paying customers who might embrace faster progress.
There is the following Bill Gates quote:
"And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." (Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9)
A clear case of trying to keep competition down even among the ultimate unspending non-customers.
This is beyond obvious by now. I'm somewhat surprised that the two major political parties don't suffer a larger loss of popularity over this (the SPD is gradually losing in the polls, but arguably for other reasons).