The vast majority of "robocalls" I receive are political. These calls are specifically exempted from the rules.
FYI, that used to be true for me. But over the past year I get *far* more credit scams than political calls. Sometimes the same scam goes on day after day, and I have even gotten 5 calls in one day from the same number with the same scam!
The #1 winner around here is calls from an alarm company. Not my alarm company, a competing alarm company. They use pictures of cops in their big expensive color ads in the local coupon guides. In fact, the owner of this alarm company is an ex-cop. They call multiple times a day, and force their employees to rattle off long live speeches to my answering machine. Presumably because recorded speeches are illegal.
Oh, and did I mention I'm on both the state AND Federal Do-Not-Call lists?
"Pro bono" is short for the Latin phrase pro bono publico, meaning "for the Public Good". Implying that the work will be performed for free as the profit is a better world for everyone.
As opposed, to "Pro Sunny Bono", which means that you can sue people for copyright infringements on works your great-great grandparent did and to which you contributed nothing.
It's been about 5 years or so since all IT was outsourced. We're right on time for managers to start the in-house cycle again. Good luck in the next 5 years and see you all again on the jobmarket in 2017!
It's not often that I get to play the role of optimist, but this is one of them.
Oh, I've no doubt that in 5 years Corporate America will cook up some new fad to once again make employment a misery.
But face it - outsourcing, offshoring was about the bottom of the bucket. I mean yes, they said it could get worse - when India got too expensive the outsourcing would head to Africa, but most of the parts of Africa that have the resources to outsource are probably more expensive than India, and the ones that don't would cost too much to modernize. Not but what it wouldn't be a good idea for their sakes, but altruism was never the reason for outsourcing.
Outsourcing to India had already bottomed out. The good workers demanded - and got - hefty salaries (relative to India) and the bad ones worked cheap but delivered cheap product. Jobs have been slowly leaking back home for several years now.
The GM thing, however, is a cannon fired in the night. A major corporation has committed whole-heartedly towards owning their own IT over Lower Prices Everday[TM]. They've said, in effect, that "IT does matter".
So what will these "fat stupid Americans" switch to? Linux? Or will Apple start selling machines at a reasonable price and achieve larger market share? Something else I am not aware of? Curious to know.
A lot of them are already switching. That's what this whole "Post-PC" thing is about. Meaning that some of those "something else's" are iOS and Android.
While PCs are probably not going to go the way of the minicomputer anytime soon, there are a lot of cases where being tethered to a big, clunky desktop or laptop isn't what people want and they're picking op alternatives in droves. I'm probably spending 50% less time on a PC myself and I'm not exactly a hipster - just someone who prefers to read email, browse the web and RSS new, and do other things at my convenience instead of the desktop's.
However, if the desktop loses its prominence, people are going to lose their enthusiasm for desktop OS's. Which, in fact, is one reason that Windows 8 is so attentive to tablet usage - Microsoft can read the writing on the wall.
The question, of course, being whether Windows on a tablet can overcome being a late arrival behind several other successful platforms.
The "post-PC" meme is a false one, so you're safe. Yeah, a lot of stuff will change and morph, but consumers will swallow almost any false meme with a little ketchup or hot sauce.
The fact is: all of these items are personal computers. Some of your stuff will be on other people's computers, a/k/a "the cloud". The cloud offers some cool storage (albeit not very reliable and often highly proprietary in accessibility) and some great apps, single-user and group.
Spit the bait out of your mouth and continue to watch neat stuff appear in the market place. PCs come in lots of form factors from Raspberry Pis, smartstuff, clothing, iGoo, and will continue to morph. If you want to buy and use a traditional tower PC with discrete monitor, etc., do it. Or choose from a wide variety of, yes, PCs.
A "PC" is not something that you stuff in your pocket on the way out the door.
A "PC" is not something that you toss on the couch.
Yes, I understand what you mean. Cell phones and tablets are, at heart, the same things as PCs, with adjustments to size, shape, weight, and input/output methods.
But, as I like to point out to people, a lot of the difference between my cell phone and the mainframes I used to work on, isn't just the physical characteristics, my cell phone is more powerful than those old mainframes. Plus, generally has more storage.
From the point of view of most other people in this discussion, tablets and other such devices are not "PCs", not because of physical differences - which, as noted, are actually fairly superficial. They're not "PCs" because they're used at times and places that PCs are traditionally not used. But at the same time, it's usually possible to use a portable device such as a tablet in place of a PC, but not so easy to do the reverse.
since US-centrism is in their official policy, you'd think they would use english correctly.
Haha.The American language forked from 'English' in 1776. Any mutual intelligibility is purely coincidental!:)
From what I've read, it's more accurate to say that "English" forked from English and American is in many ways closer to what we had in the days of King George (no, not "W", George III).
Seriously. I'll bet they call him Google because he thinks he knows everything.
Nah - he sounds like the 20-something MIS interns that we get... the running joke in the technical departments at my company is that if they lost access to Google they wouldn't know how to breathe, closely followed by the belief that if we cut off their Facebook access on the corporate network we'd get an immediate 50% drop in network traffic, followed by a brief spike in productivity until the withdrawal symptoms became too severe.
Actually, if you turned off Google, I wouldn't know how to breathe.
Once upon a time, back when I was 22 I could get by with about 8 linear feet of bookshelf space for almost all my tech needs.
Now that I'm old and increasingly senile, I Google. If I got billed by the search, I'd be beyond bankruptcy.
This past week, I learned Neo4J, Wireshark as it relates to being DDOS'ed (thank you unprotected Windows people! - snark snark snark) and how to plug MRTG into Nagios.
The tablet is my RSS and webpage reader, although not all websites are well-adapted to a 1024x800 screen these days (irony).
I have an Android phone, I look at the RSS feed for Slashdot in Google Reader but wish there was a URL handler to push the web page to my desktop screen when connected via wifi!
I don't get a "push", but Firefox has a built-in ability to watch RSS feeds off of menus/toolbars.
Time to go arrest Sony's Execs for their rootkits.
If Japan is anything like the USA, then corporations are above the law unless they start to become unprofitable for the shareholders.
You make corporations sound democratic. They are not. Relatively few persons and/or investment companies typically hold the majority shares in most US companies. Few enough that any recourse is not going to come from a lot of unhappy people, just a few people in the right place, and it's generally not going to come via criminal proceedings. Any legal actions taken are probably going to be in the form of personal lawsuits.
So any criminal prosecution is unlikely to be initiated on behalf specifically of the shareholders or relate specifically to profitability.
Lack of prosecution, on the other hand, often has to do with how often the big shareholders play golf with Attorneys General.
I don't get why Jobs would have thought it was 10" or bust.
I have a Nook Color 7" with ICS(pre-CM9) on it and the screen elements are too small for adult fingers with 'tablet' layout apps.
I should really take some video of me trying to use the thing and post some of the more dramatic comedy-of-errors to YouTube.
That said, the large Android tablets don't seem all that great and I'm not buying Apple gear, so instead I wait for better tech (with a working keyboard at that).
In landscape mode, the keyboard isn't that bad. But I prefer "real" keys, so I'd just as soon have an external Bluetooth keyboard - say the one I own that folds up into a tidy 4x4-inch package for travel.
I do my real typing on a real PC, though, with a 22-inch 1600x1200 monitor that I hope lasts forever, since these stupid "TV set monitors" are a horrible geometry for me. The tablet is my RSS and webpage reader, although not all websites are well-adapted to a 1024x800 screen these days (irony). Oh yes. And I read books on it, too.
If anyone really gave a shit they would just let the other political party take full credit for the idea and legislative implementation. Get it done. The greatest infrastructure planner/implementer ever used to say, "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you are willing to let someone else take the credit."
I wish. The modern day paradigm is more like "Death to the Infidels!" Nothing less than total destruction of the other sides. "Polar opposites". One side wants to steal your money, the other wants to give your money away. One side eats their babies, the other side wants to eat YOUR babies. But they're polar opposites.
We promote schemes of government and economic plans that - for whatever merits they may or may not possess - aren't going to work because their one fatal flaw is that they only work at all if everyone signs on. And then go to great lengths to ensure that only the True Believers are likely to sign on at all. And complain that we just need a little more time and a little more control.
The town I live in, Karlsruhe, germany, has similar summer climate, nevertheless there are not many air conditioned houses. And I for my part prefer to have none, at my job we keep it switched off most of the time.
It still isn't that popular to have A/C in more temperate parts of the US, either. While I did some serious melting visiting my relatives in Northern Kentucky in the summer, they only had to put up with it about 2-3 weeks out of the year on average.
However, a large chunk of the country here is farther South than that. In Florida, the high temperature breaks 90 as early as April, and will continue on until October. For the months of July and August a daily low temperature below 80 is a wondrously cool morning. There's a reason why the state didn't really gain population until air conditioning became widespread. Air conditioning was invented in Florida. Even on cooler days, I've have to run A/C just to keep mildew off the walls - we're surrounded by warm bodies of water.
I prefer much warmer temperatures than most people do. But it's currently 94 outside and I've got the climate control humming.
it's like the wal mart attitude of just buy the cheapest no matter what the hidden costs are of buying more products to make up for the crappy cheapest product in the first place
same here. dollar wise for the initial costs its cheaper to put up overhead wires. and the repair costs are probably low enough that digging holes is always too expensive.
and the fact that when you get to the republican areas everyone is always against higher taxes so they make due with crappy infrastructure
In the USA, we think a "smart bargain" is paying the lowest price at the cash register.
It took us a long time to realize that acid rain was also part of the "price" - or conversely, cleaner, more expensive manufacturing processes. Or that maintenance and disposal is also part of the "price".
But some people don't care. They get their Chinese pet food for the lowest price they can and wonder why the vet is charging so much for a new liver for kitty.
What can the U.S. government do against the whole of the E.U.?
What CAN'T it do? According to libertarians around here, the US government is an evil regime that takes the worst parts of fascism and socialism, and it is totally out of control. When you're that evil, there's no limit on what you can't do to promote your evil agenda.
Who needs to be a libertarian? The US government is an 800-lb. gorilla. And when I say "800 lbs.", it's because the USA doesn't want to hear about any of your wimpy European metric crap.
IT tends to throw out the old and import the young because the old hands don't keep up with the new technology. But if you have special skills that are vital to your industry they'll keep you around until you choose to retire or die of old age.
You will have to keep up on technologies as they come. Your company will tell you what skills they're looking for... Definitely keep training.
The suggestion to move to management also isn't bad.
Work on increasing your value and look at job openings that are close to your skill set. Ideally you don't want to care if you're fired because you're so valuable that you'll just get another job.
Ah, the optimism of the young.
Did you really think that we all ossify the minute we leave college? My problem has been that in more cases than not, I was working with technologies that wouldn't be generally in demand for another 2 years in this particular backwater town.
Skills count for very little, alas, nor does a pride in workmanship.
What counts more is to work fast and to work cheap, and younger people carry as much a stereotype about that as older people do about not keeping up.
What counts even more, however, is social skills. Which, unfortunately, a lot of us never possessed at any age.
The cold brutal truth is that what determines job security isn't how good a job you can do, it's about how good a job you can do in convincing the people above you not to dump you in order to get an extra-large bonus this quarter. But in any event, the idea that in this day and age you'll be at the same employer long enough to recieve a pension and a gold watch is laughable, because virtually nobody holds a job "forever" in this Brave New World, from the CEO on down.
Which brings us back to social skills again. Maintain a network so that when it comes time to hit the street, there will be people who can help you into the next non-permanent position.
Or, you could go for Standard Quackbot Ideological Solution #1: "Start your own business and no one can fire you". Which isn't true - your customers can and will fire you. And of course, you need even more social skills, because contrary to what some would like to believe, starting and running a business is something that requires a particular talent set, and is no more a "everyone can do it" thing than software design or accounting. Speaking of which, forget about doing the fun stuff if you run your own business. You can only do that after you do the management, sales, accounting, and so forth. To be replaced with riding herd on the people that you (hopefully) hire to do sales, accounging and so forth - assuming that you either had enough starting capital (hint, picking wealthy relatives helps immensely) or become profitable in your own right.
Or, do like everyone else says: go into management. Social skills again. Plus politics. And again, kiss the fun stuff goodby.
Someday some genius is going to have the bright idea of being the sole content provider who does not mine users' personal data for targeted ads. And people will sign up in droves for all the pent-up demand.
Most users are not conscious that their data is being mined. And even of those who are and have a problem with it, a majority of those who voice their displeasure will go ahead and continue using the product nonetheless. The result is that users who really insist on privacy are such a small group that it is hard to build a business from them. "Droves" is not a word.
Yet supposedly the data-mining aspect was the primary reason the CueCat [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat] failed.
Rented videos? Noted. Subscribed to a magazine? Noted. Visited a web site? Noted. Searched for something? Noted.
Not even scratched the surface. How about "last page read", "text highlighted", "bookmarks taken", "time spent reading"? These are all things that B&N and Amazon know about your reading habits that weren't covered in your "don't worry-be happy" list.
It's one thing to notice what book the person across the room is reading, but standing behind them and taking notes is a whole level up from there.
I eagerly await the time when this tech is down to less than a dollar a page including controls and a week of battery. Because when that happens, you'll start seeing them used as magazine advertisments. Which hackers should be able to disassemble with some effort. Thus giving hobbiests access to vast areas of color e-paper subsidised by advertisers and so cheap that people can (and will) use it as wallpaper.
Except that almost every paper magazine I read has ditched the paper and gone electronic. With more on the way and newspapers hot in pusuit.
"How are the exploited if they are signing up willingly?"
You can be both. Ever read a book where a con man invoked the cliché of "sheep shearing themselves"? Or less savoury agricultural inducements?
Literature aside, that was basically what tobacco advertising has always been about. For that matter, anti-persperants, junk food, and any number of other commodities that have their darker aspects.
Yeah, because all those people who are going to the track to run shouldn't have to walk the extra 9 feet reserved for a handicap parking space. I mean, you are there to run, right? Why should you have to spend any more time walking to or from your car than necessary, just in case someone else needs that space. How dare grandma, in her wheel chair, show up to watch her grandkid run. Doesn't she know your legs will be tired and you need to park closer?
prick
Come on. Be reasonable. Everyone parked in a handicapped space is handicapped.
Some are handicapped physically. Some are handicapped mentally (too dim to notice the markings). Some are handicapped morally - they're too selfish to leave the space to someone less mobile.
There's nowhere in the constitution that gives congress the power to regulate how private businesses operate.
Oh, I don't know. It seems they've managed to regulate whether private businesses serve black people.
Some would say (not saying I do) that we should let economics figure this out. if there's money to be made, then companies will make it happen.
Anyways, I think that's what the real question was.
True. That's how acid rain and Love Canal were made to happen.
On the other hand, while I would not approve of NetFlix filtering out CC data from their streams, I think that the onus is on the content producers to create that data in the first place. Why single out one channel when it's the source that's at fault?
Slashdot Mirror
The vast majority of "robocalls" I receive are political. These calls are specifically exempted from the rules.
FYI, that used to be true for me. But over the past year I get *far* more credit scams than political calls. Sometimes the same scam goes on day after day, and I have even gotten 5 calls in one day from the same number with the same scam!
The #1 winner around here is calls from an alarm company. Not my alarm company, a competing alarm company. They use pictures of cops in their big expensive color ads in the local coupon guides. In fact, the owner of this alarm company is an ex-cop. They call multiple times a day, and force their employees to rattle off long live speeches to my answering machine. Presumably because recorded speeches are illegal.
Oh, and did I mention I'm on both the state AND Federal Do-Not-Call lists?
"Pro bono" is short for the Latin phrase pro bono publico, meaning "for the Public Good". Implying that the work will be performed for free as the profit is a better world for everyone.
As opposed, to "Pro Sunny Bono", which means that you can sue people for copyright infringements on works your great-great grandparent did and to which you contributed nothing.
In America, you sue everybody!
It's been about 5 years or so since all IT was outsourced.
We're right on time for managers to start the in-house cycle again.
Good luck in the next 5 years and see you all again on the jobmarket in 2017!
It's not often that I get to play the role of optimist, but this is one of them.
Oh, I've no doubt that in 5 years Corporate America will cook up some new fad to once again make employment a misery.
But face it - outsourcing, offshoring was about the bottom of the bucket. I mean yes, they said it could get worse - when India got too expensive the outsourcing would head to Africa, but most of the parts of Africa that have the resources to outsource are probably more expensive than India, and the ones that don't would cost too much to modernize. Not but what it wouldn't be a good idea for their sakes, but altruism was never the reason for outsourcing.
Outsourcing to India had already bottomed out. The good workers demanded - and got - hefty salaries (relative to India) and the bad ones worked cheap but delivered cheap product. Jobs have been slowly leaking back home for several years now.
The GM thing, however, is a cannon fired in the night. A major corporation has committed whole-heartedly towards owning their own IT over Lower Prices Everday[TM]. They've said, in effect, that "IT does matter".
So what will these "fat stupid Americans" switch to? Linux? Or will Apple start selling machines at a reasonable price and achieve larger market share? Something else I am not aware of? Curious to know.
A lot of them are already switching. That's what this whole "Post-PC" thing is about. Meaning that some of those "something else's" are iOS and Android.
While PCs are probably not going to go the way of the minicomputer anytime soon, there are a lot of cases where being tethered to a big, clunky desktop or laptop isn't what people want and they're picking op alternatives in droves. I'm probably spending 50% less time on a PC myself and I'm not exactly a hipster - just someone who prefers to read email, browse the web and RSS new, and do other things at my convenience instead of the desktop's.
However, if the desktop loses its prominence, people are going to lose their enthusiasm for desktop OS's. Which, in fact, is one reason that Windows 8 is so attentive to tablet usage - Microsoft can read the writing on the wall.
The question, of course, being whether Windows on a tablet can overcome being a late arrival behind several other successful platforms.
The "post-PC" meme is a false one, so you're safe. Yeah, a lot of stuff will change and morph, but consumers will swallow almost any false meme with a little ketchup or hot sauce.
The fact is: all of these items are personal computers. Some of your stuff will be on other people's computers, a/k/a "the cloud". The cloud offers some cool storage (albeit not very reliable and often highly proprietary in accessibility) and some great apps, single-user and group.
Spit the bait out of your mouth and continue to watch neat stuff appear in the market place. PCs come in lots of form factors from Raspberry Pis, smartstuff, clothing, iGoo, and will continue to morph. If you want to buy and use a traditional tower PC with discrete monitor, etc., do it. Or choose from a wide variety of, yes, PCs.
A "PC" is not something that you stuff in your pocket on the way out the door.
A "PC" is not something that you toss on the couch.
Yes, I understand what you mean. Cell phones and tablets are, at heart, the same things as PCs, with adjustments to size, shape, weight, and input/output methods.
But, as I like to point out to people, a lot of the difference between my cell phone and the mainframes I used to work on, isn't just the physical characteristics, my cell phone is more powerful than those old mainframes. Plus, generally has more storage.
From the point of view of most other people in this discussion, tablets and other such devices are not "PCs", not because of physical differences - which, as noted, are actually fairly superficial. They're not "PCs" because they're used at times and places that PCs are traditionally not used. But at the same time, it's usually possible to use a portable device such as a tablet in place of a PC, but not so easy to do the reverse.
Haha.The American language forked from 'English' in 1776. Any mutual intelligibility is purely coincidental! :)
From what I've read, it's more accurate to say that "English" forked from English and American is in many ways closer to what we had in the days of King George (no, not "W", George III).
Except that we cleaned up the spelling a little.
Nah - he sounds like the 20-something MIS interns that we get... the running joke in the technical departments at my company is that if they lost access to Google they wouldn't know how to breathe, closely followed by the belief that if we cut off their Facebook access on the corporate network we'd get an immediate 50% drop in network traffic, followed by a brief spike in productivity until the withdrawal symptoms became too severe.
Actually, if you turned off Google, I wouldn't know how to breathe.
Once upon a time, back when I was 22 I could get by with about 8 linear feet of bookshelf space for almost all my tech needs.
Now that I'm old and increasingly senile, I Google. If I got billed by the search, I'd be beyond bankruptcy.
This past week, I learned Neo4J, Wireshark as it relates to being DDOS'ed (thank you unprotected Windows people! - snark snark snark) and how to plug MRTG into Nagios.
And chased 15 kids off my lawn!
I have an Android phone, I look at the RSS feed for Slashdot in Google Reader but wish there was a URL handler to push the web page to my desktop screen when connected via wifi!
I don't get a "push", but Firefox has a built-in ability to watch RSS feeds off of menus/toolbars.
Time to go arrest Sony's Execs for their rootkits.
If Japan is anything like the USA, then corporations are above the law unless they start to become unprofitable for the shareholders.
You make corporations sound democratic. They are not. Relatively few persons and/or investment companies typically hold the majority shares in most US companies. Few enough that any recourse is not going to come from a lot of unhappy people, just a few people in the right place, and it's generally not going to come via criminal proceedings. Any legal actions taken are probably going to be in the form of personal lawsuits.
So any criminal prosecution is unlikely to be initiated on behalf specifically of the shareholders or relate specifically to profitability.
Lack of prosecution, on the other hand, often has to do with how often the big shareholders play golf with Attorneys General.
I don't get why Jobs would have thought it was 10" or bust.
I have a Nook Color 7" with ICS(pre-CM9) on it and the screen elements are too small for adult fingers with 'tablet' layout apps.
I should really take some video of me trying to use the thing and post some of the more dramatic comedy-of-errors to YouTube.
That said, the large Android tablets don't seem all that great and I'm not buying Apple gear, so instead I wait for better tech (with a working keyboard at that).
In landscape mode, the keyboard isn't that bad. But I prefer "real" keys, so I'd just as soon have an external Bluetooth keyboard - say the one I own that folds up into a tidy 4x4-inch package for travel.
I do my real typing on a real PC, though, with a 22-inch 1600x1200 monitor that I hope lasts forever, since these stupid "TV set monitors" are a horrible geometry for me. The tablet is my RSS and webpage reader, although not all websites are well-adapted to a 1024x800 screen these days (irony). Oh yes. And I read books on it, too.
If anyone really gave a shit they would just let the other political party take full credit for the idea and legislative implementation. Get it done. The greatest infrastructure planner/implementer ever used to say, "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you are willing to let someone else take the credit."
I wish. The modern day paradigm is more like "Death to the Infidels!" Nothing less than total destruction of the other sides. "Polar opposites". One side wants to steal your money, the other wants to give your money away. One side eats their babies, the other side wants to eat YOUR babies. But they're polar opposites.
We promote schemes of government and economic plans that - for whatever merits they may or may not possess - aren't going to work because their one fatal flaw is that they only work at all if everyone signs on. And then go to great lengths to ensure that only the True Believers are likely to sign on at all. And complain that we just need a little more time and a little more control.
Ideology is for idiots.
So why are we letting the idiots run everything?
The town I live in, Karlsruhe, germany, has similar summer climate, nevertheless there are not many air conditioned houses. And I for my part prefer to have none, at my job we keep it switched off most of the time.
It still isn't that popular to have A/C in more temperate parts of the US, either. While I did some serious melting visiting my relatives in Northern Kentucky in the summer, they only had to put up with it about 2-3 weeks out of the year on average.
However, a large chunk of the country here is farther South than that. In Florida, the high temperature breaks 90 as early as April, and will continue on until October. For the months of July and August a daily low temperature below 80 is a wondrously cool morning. There's a reason why the state didn't really gain population until air conditioning became widespread. Air conditioning was invented in Florida. Even on cooler days, I've have to run A/C just to keep mildew off the walls - we're surrounded by warm bodies of water.
I prefer much warmer temperatures than most people do. But it's currently 94 outside and I've got the climate control humming.
it's like the wal mart attitude of just buy the cheapest no matter what the hidden costs are of buying more products to make up for the crappy cheapest product in the first place
same here. dollar wise for the initial costs its cheaper to put up overhead wires. and the repair costs are probably low enough that digging holes is always too expensive.
and the fact that when you get to the republican areas everyone is always against higher taxes so they make due with crappy infrastructure
In the USA, we think a "smart bargain" is paying the lowest price at the cash register.
It took us a long time to realize that acid rain was also part of the "price" - or conversely, cleaner, more expensive manufacturing processes. Or that maintenance and disposal is also part of the "price".
But some people don't care. They get their Chinese pet food for the lowest price they can and wonder why the vet is charging so much for a new liver for kitty.
What can the U.S. government do against the whole of the E.U.?
What CAN'T it do? According to libertarians around here, the US government is an evil regime that takes the worst parts of fascism and socialism, and it is totally out of control. When you're that evil, there's no limit on what you can't do to promote your evil agenda.
Who needs to be a libertarian? The US government is an 800-lb. gorilla. And when I say "800 lbs.", it's because the USA doesn't want to hear about any of your wimpy European metric crap.
IT tends to throw out the old and import the young because the old hands don't keep up with the new technology. But if you have special skills that are vital to your industry they'll keep you around until you choose to retire or die of old age.
You will have to keep up on technologies as they come. Your company will tell you what skills they're looking for... Definitely keep training.
The suggestion to move to management also isn't bad.
Work on increasing your value and look at job openings that are close to your skill set. Ideally you don't want to care if you're fired because you're so valuable that you'll just get another job.
Ah, the optimism of the young.
Did you really think that we all ossify the minute we leave college? My problem has been that in more cases than not, I was working with technologies that wouldn't be generally in demand for another 2 years in this particular backwater town.
Skills count for very little, alas, nor does a pride in workmanship.
What counts more is to work fast and to work cheap, and younger people carry as much a stereotype about that as older people do about not keeping up.
What counts even more, however, is social skills. Which, unfortunately, a lot of us never possessed at any age.
The cold brutal truth is that what determines job security isn't how good a job you can do, it's about how good a job you can do in convincing the people above you not to dump you in order to get an extra-large bonus this quarter. But in any event, the idea that in this day and age you'll be at the same employer long enough to recieve a pension and a gold watch is laughable, because virtually nobody holds a job "forever" in this Brave New World, from the CEO on down.
Which brings us back to social skills again. Maintain a network so that when it comes time to hit the street, there will be people who can help you into the next non-permanent position.
Or, you could go for Standard Quackbot Ideological Solution #1: "Start your own business and no one can fire you". Which isn't true - your customers can and will fire you. And of course, you need even more social skills, because contrary to what some would like to believe, starting and running a business is something that requires a particular talent set, and is no more a "everyone can do it" thing than software design or accounting. Speaking of which, forget about doing the fun stuff if you run your own business. You can only do that after you do the management, sales, accounting, and so forth. To be replaced with riding herd on the people that you (hopefully) hire to do sales, accounging and so forth - assuming that you either had enough starting capital (hint, picking wealthy relatives helps immensely) or become profitable in your own right.
Or, do like everyone else says: go into management. Social skills again. Plus politics. And again, kiss the fun stuff goodby.
Most users are not conscious that their data is being mined. And even of those who are and have a problem with it, a majority of those who voice their displeasure will go ahead and continue using the product nonetheless. The result is that users who really insist on privacy are such a small group that it is hard to build a business from them. "Droves" is not a word.
Yet supposedly the data-mining aspect was the primary reason the CueCat [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat] failed.
Rented videos? Noted. Subscribed to a magazine? Noted. Visited a web site? Noted. Searched for something? Noted.
Not even scratched the surface. How about "last page read", "text highlighted", "bookmarks taken", "time spent reading"? These are all things that B&N and Amazon know about your reading habits that weren't covered in your "don't worry-be happy" list.
It's one thing to notice what book the person across the room is reading, but standing behind them and taking notes is a whole level up from there.
You live in Soviet Russia.
The distinctions have begun to get pretty blurry lately.
I eagerly await the time when this tech is down to less than a dollar a page including controls and a week of battery. Because when that happens, you'll start seeing them used as magazine advertisments. Which hackers should be able to disassemble with some effort. Thus giving hobbiests access to vast areas of color e-paper subsidised by advertisers and so cheap that people can (and will) use it as wallpaper.
Except that almost every paper magazine I read has ditched the paper and gone electronic. With more on the way and newspapers hot in pusuit.
So you better hack fast!
Year of the Linux desktop: This is how you make it happen.
Unfortunately, this year is the year the Linux desktop imploded, thanks to Gnome 3 and Unity.
"How are the exploited if they are signing up willingly?"
You can be both. Ever read a book where a con man invoked the cliché of "sheep shearing themselves"? Or less savoury agricultural inducements?
Literature aside, that was basically what tobacco advertising has always been about. For that matter, anti-persperants, junk food, and any number of other commodities that have their darker aspects.
Yeah, because all those people who are going to the track to run shouldn't have to walk the extra 9 feet reserved for a handicap parking space. I mean, you are there to run, right? Why should you have to spend any more time walking to or from your car than necessary, just in case someone else needs that space. How dare grandma, in her wheel chair, show up to watch her grandkid run. Doesn't she know your legs will be tired and you need to park closer?
prick
Come on. Be reasonable. Everyone parked in a handicapped space is handicapped.
Some are handicapped physically.
Some are handicapped mentally (too dim to notice the markings).
Some are handicapped morally - they're too selfish to leave the space to someone less mobile.
There's nowhere in the constitution that gives congress the power to regulate how private businesses operate.
Oh, I don't know. It seems they've managed to regulate whether private businesses serve black people.
Some would say (not saying I do) that we should let economics figure this out. if there's money to be made, then companies will make it happen.
Anyways, I think that's what the real question was.
True. That's how acid rain and Love Canal were made to happen.
On the other hand, while I would not approve of NetFlix filtering out CC data from their streams, I think that the onus is on the content producers to create that data in the first place. Why single out one channel when it's the source that's at fault?
To be fair... gentoo comes with the construction crew too.
Yeah, but they go on strike!