Large numbers of college graduates make better than average incomes. Some do very well. Large numbers of college dropouts do not do well. Some do very well.
Actually, the drop outs do OK and are often lumped in with graduates on salary surveys. It's all in the segmentation. I've seen studies where they do it right and have segments as follows:
Advanced Degeree 4 year 2 year Some college HS Diploma No diploma
I've also seen this one:
Advanced Degree College Vocational HS No HS
The question is where do you put the guy that quit school after three years?
The fact is that most people will have to go to college to obtain a successful career. I would imagine that the dropouts who become billionaires would average out to be a statistical fluke.
Four of Forbes top five richest in America are dropout statistical flukes.
If you can avoid the sour grapes, it makes you think a little bit.
Why is it that non-technical types argue that they can manage technical jobs as good as, or better, than any person of a technical background?
Would you hire an engineer to be the CFO of an advertising agency? Probably not. So why hire a sales & marketing person to run a technical organization, who has no technical background?
Because a business is not a technical organization. It is a business. CEOs are decision makers and they get paid to make correct decisions more than incorrect ones. Unfortunately, many CEOs make poor, irresponsible, decisions because of lack of information - or bad information.
At some point, even the person who has the "best" technical people under him or her to provide advice has to make a decisions based purely on technical data. "I don't know, what do you think" at that point is not an option.
Actually this is flat out wrong. Differing to an expert is a decision. Problem is that many a CEO doesn't have the foresight to hire people capable of making decisions - and when they do hire right, many still don't have the humility and dignity to differ to someone under them.
Some software projects are new ideas. Otheres are implemenatations designed to solve the same problem as another package, but perhaps do it differently or to reduce a high price created by an artificial monopoly. You are not correct though to paint open source as "not innovative".
Exaples of packages that owe their existance to economics:
Linux - duplicates function of Unix at lower cost. Gimp - provides essential function of Photoshop for web designers and UI designers. MySQL - very good database without the bill.
Examples of packages that innovate and carve out new ideas:
Gnutella and other P2P software Sendmail, fetchmail, NNTPD, Apache, etc... PHP, Python, Ruby (sorry if I left out your favorite) EMACS and other editors Inkscape and other SVG tools Zope, Mambo and other CMS / Web application frameworks
MySQL is "ripping off" established commercial databases now, putting in innovative things like stored procedures, views and UFDs. Does MySQL innovate
Another open source product does have substantial capital in the creation of SQL... Postgress. Which leads to a simple comment: Open Source drives an incredible ammount of invention in the computer science field and in the software development tools arena - and always has.
KDE has always looked like Windows. They copied the taskbar, the start menu, the tray notification area and so on.
Incidentally, KED looks like windows if you want it too. KDE has always been spectacularly flexible in its ability to look like what the user wants. Like all desktops, KDE has borrowed the good and tried ways to do better. Other desktop/window managers have tried to be highly original like enlightment and blackbox.
I went through six Treo 270s in less than one year. Four snapped off flips, two defective soldered in batteries. No willingness to replace with something that wasn't 100% crap. I am now the proud user of a BlackBerry.
The only people they (PalmOne) treats worse than customers are employees.
Also, the US is not the big SMS country. It hardly has GSM!
We don't "hardly have GSM" in the US. You'll find most major markets are well covered by GSM from the likes of T|Mobile, Cingular and others. We have TDMA, CDMA and iDEN phones too. All of them support SMS. SMS has been a non-starter because it's expensive here for some unknown, bizarre reason. Why pay $.25 when you can pay $.10 and call the person?
More people still use outdated devices like pagers.
Actually, the pager crowd moved over to Nextel's iDEN network a long time ago and replaced pages with annoying cell phones with a "two way radio" feature. So instead of friendly, quiet text messages, you get to listen to (often at max volume): "Did you get a chance to pick up a bag of sliders? No not yetI'm starvin man, hurry up alreadyBe there in 10, out"
The best part with Nextel is when sales reps forget to turn the phones off before they go into meetings... then you can have fun with them:
Bill - I'm at the Gold Club - Sandee says hi and I paid for a lap dance for you, so get your ass down here
Customer: We're done.
Fourthly, most people cannot send morsecode while receiving it, thus also making asynchronous conversation slower. (And you cannot receive morse from multiple sources
What we need is a morse code input mode for your phone. The point is typing is slow on cell phones and is faster with morse code. So bring on the morse code enabled cell phone.
Fact: it was impossible for anyone other than the authors of the Patriot Act to read it. There was no time. It was rammed through Congress at a time when questioning the content, even if there was time to read it, would have been considered unamerican.
Fact: We do not elect representatives to be coerced (by threat of being called "unamerican") into voting for legislation they do not understand. Congress let us all down on this one - especially the liberals.
No it didn't, but many congressmen (and women) have said afterward, repeatedly, that they were pressured into voting for it and given almost no time at all to review it.
You didn't vote for your congressman to be easily forced intovoting for things he does not understand. (in fact a congressman saying I was forced to vote is laughable) It's their job to understand - and to a person they do. My god - what would you say to a sysadmin who simply didn't bother to make a backup before an OS upgrade?
Try including all the facts instead of only the ones that paint the viewpoint you're shooting for.
I think the poster you are replying to is 100% right. The liberals in congress let us down.
The writer of the article seems to forget entirely that 90% of a computers cost (if you buy a reasonably powerful one) is the hardware, always has been.
This is totally incorrect unless you are talking about component devices and device drivers, and even then the development of drivers can easily exceed 15-30% of the cost of a device.
If we are talking computers, and all you buy is the computer you can run the bios setup and thats about it. Good luck getting anything done. Here's a more accurate assessment of the impact of software on a hardware purchase:
Kick Ass Desktop PC = $2,000 Windows XP Pro = $150 MS Office = $370 Antivirus = $30 Cost of PC: $2550 Cost of SW: $550 SW as % of purchase: 21%
You could save substantial money with open source even on a powerful PC. On an inexpensive computer, giving MS $25-$50 per machine to license winCE puts you at a non-competitive position vs. linux:
Cost to make device: $100 Cost of OS: $25 Device Cost: $125 Base Cost: $150 SW as % of cost 16%
If someone can make a device of the same functionality for 16% less than you, they basically have an insurmountable economic advantage and will prevail. Ulike computers, how a cell phone works is unimportant compared to the fact that it works.
Once again, we Americans are showing our puritanical roots, with the old credo, "Violence is ok, but anything to do with sex or sexuality is very shameful and bad!"
Why deprive geeks of the fleeting hope that they one day might get a chance to reproduce? Why deprive young women who can't get another job and who can't dance from making a buck?
* Castro is not the evil manipulative dictator that the US tries to paint him as
He's certainly not benevolent, either.
* The embargo prevents many vital goods from getting to Cuba. People have a tendency to assume that the lower quality of life due to lack of vital goods is due to Castro, and therefore hold him entirely responsible.
That little escapade with russian missiles in the 60's didn't help Castro's case much...
I forgot... that was 40 years ago... he's changed... riiiiiggghhhttt.
The reason is simply because when Microsoft entered the market, it was the first time a compatible desktop architecture and design had been ported across to a PDA. To a certain extent, they have also been instrumental in turning a PDA into a fully fledged, compatible and capable platform, adding Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, colour screens etc.
The author was wise to focus on convergence of the cell phone and the PDA rather than religous OS issues or conjecture about what would have happened if someone did not do something. Had microsoft not entered the PDA market, someone else would have.
That said, MS does deserve kudos not for PDA bloatware APIs and attempting to turn the PDA into a desktop computer. The kudos for that go to the hardware people who built the platform that included a faster processor, bright color screen, and a PCMCIA or Compact Flash card. MS does deserve recognition for building an os with appropriate multimedia extensions and support for brilliant color, which is what drove palm and RIM (who was lagely left out of the article despite building convergent, internet connected devices in the mid 90s) to focus on smartphones.
What is interesting is the failure of PDA powered convergent devices to supplant personal media players like the iPod and digital cameras.
The real problem here is the business model that Mpaa members have based their business on. It ties payments to the size of distribution your content gets. Additional copies should mean additional revenues. The intrenet doesn't necessarily work that way
cranking out sequel after sequel of the same cliche'd genres.
This is true of almost all industries - take cars - cars like (I'm using US market examples) the mini, VW bug, PT Cruiser, Hummer and the Chrysler/Dodge Magnum are huge departure from the usual and have had better than market rate sales.
And then they wonder why movies that are a significant departure from the stale movies of the day tend to become huge blockbusters:
* Star Wars (Episode IV) * Spider-Man * The Matrix * Titanic * The Passion of the Christ
Of course, then come the sequels which rarely are up the the standard. Fortunately in the case of Titanic and the Passion, they left little room for sequels. Titanic sunk, Chist rose from the dead... etc... etc...
It's going to be hard going in the game business because improving realism and graphics alone doesn't really alter the experience that much. It's not about the hamburger, it's about the experience you have getting the burger that matters. Games that offer a better and different experience win.
lease define 'basic productivity'. Office apps? OO.o runs on Windows. Image editing? Well, if you're doing REAL image editing work you'll be using Photoshop anyway but for throwing something together for a presentation, Gimp will work.
Word Processing, Spreadsheets, End User DBMS, Presentation, Web content editing and Groupware - the stuff that comes with MS Office Pro. OOo delivers some of this functionality. Good point about OOo on Windows.
Microsoft estimates the retraining and lost productivity costs of upgrading from one version of Windows to a newer one at about $2000 per seat.
Lost productivity is a soft number and is almost impossible to attribute to a single initiative in a large company. Soft numbers are the real problem for theses studies because you nailed it when you said might as well train linux. More often than not the soft costs are a wash - and in this case that is the case.
yes, you'd be out at least $1000 using Windows to get the same functionality you get out-of-box with Linux (e.g. compilers) but most users don't need all that functionality anyway.
There is a ton of extra stuff with Linux, no doubt, but if you just look at the core productivity story, it's pretty attractive...
Thanks for pointing that out. (And thats just a small sample).
Whatever. Solaris on X86 has a market share that is a rounding error even for OS/2. Your point is that some vendors support it. That's wonderful. I only wish Sun had done what they had done today in 1996. The horse is most certainly out of the barn at this point and it may be possible to put it back in.
If Sun were afraid of the GPL then why would Sun have spent so much engineer resources on getting GNOME into shape to replace CDE on Solaris?
Expediency and cost - and the fact that it wasn't theirs to begin with.
I really like Sun, don't get me wrong. I just thing they had leadership with limited vision and may still suffer from that issue.
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Large numbers of college graduates make better than average incomes. Some do very well.
Large numbers of college dropouts do not do well. Some do very well.
Actually, the drop outs do OK and are often lumped in with graduates on salary surveys. It's all in the segmentation. I've seen studies where they do it right and have segments as follows:
Advanced Degeree
4 year
2 year
Some college
HS Diploma
No diploma
I've also seen this one:
Advanced Degree
College
Vocational
HS
No HS
The question is where do you put the guy that quit school after three years?
The fact is that most people will have to go to college to obtain a successful career. I would imagine that the dropouts who become billionaires would average out to be a statistical fluke.
Four of Forbes top five richest in America are dropout statistical flukes.
If you can avoid the sour grapes, it makes you think a little bit.
Why is it that non-technical types argue that they can manage technical jobs as good as, or better, than any person of a technical background?
Would you hire an engineer to be the CFO of an advertising agency? Probably not. So why hire a sales & marketing person to run a technical organization, who has no technical background?
Because a business is not a technical organization. It is a business. CEOs are decision makers and they get paid to make correct decisions more than incorrect ones. Unfortunately, many CEOs make poor, irresponsible, decisions because of lack of information - or bad information.
At some point, even the person who has the "best" technical people under him or her to provide advice has to make a decisions based purely on technical data. "I don't know, what do you think" at that point is not an option.
Actually this is flat out wrong. Differing to an expert is a decision. Problem is that many a CEO doesn't have the foresight to hire people capable of making decisions - and when they do hire right, many still don't have the humility and dignity to differ to someone under them.
Some software projects are new ideas. Otheres are implemenatations designed to solve the same problem as another package, but perhaps do it differently or to reduce a high price created by an artificial monopoly. You are not correct though to paint open source as "not innovative".
Exaples of packages that owe their existance to economics:
Linux - duplicates function of Unix at lower cost.
Gimp - provides essential function of Photoshop for web designers and UI designers.
MySQL - very good database without the bill.
Examples of packages that innovate and carve out new ideas:
Gnutella and other P2P software
Sendmail, fetchmail, NNTPD, Apache, etc...
PHP, Python, Ruby (sorry if I left out your favorite)
EMACS and other editors
Inkscape and other SVG tools
Zope, Mambo and other CMS / Web application frameworks
MySQL is "ripping off" established commercial databases now, putting in innovative things like stored procedures, views and UFDs. Does MySQL innovate
Another open source product does have substantial capital in the creation of SQL... Postgress. Which leads to a simple comment: Open Source drives an incredible ammount of invention in the computer science field and in the software development tools arena - and always has.
KDE has always looked like Windows. They copied the taskbar, the start menu, the tray notification area and so on.
Incidentally, KED looks like windows if you want it too. KDE has always been spectacularly flexible in its ability to look like what the user wants. Like all desktops, KDE has borrowed the good and tried ways to do better. Other desktop/window managers have tried to be highly original like enlightment and blackbox.
Software is as software does.
Please feel free to report any problems to me next week between 8:00 and 8:24
This will be followed by a comment to the effect of have your desk cleaned out before 8:26 AM THIS WEEK.
I went through six Treo 270s in less than one year. Four snapped off flips, two defective soldered in batteries. No willingness to replace with something that wasn't 100% crap. I am now the proud user of a BlackBerry.
The only people they (PalmOne) treats worse than customers are employees.
Also, the US is not the big SMS country. It hardly has GSM!
We don't "hardly have GSM" in the US. You'll find most major markets are well covered by GSM from the likes of T|Mobile, Cingular and others. We have TDMA, CDMA and iDEN phones too. All of them support SMS. SMS has been a non-starter because it's expensive here for some unknown, bizarre reason. Why pay $.25 when you can pay $.10 and call the person?
More people still use outdated devices like pagers.
Actually, the pager crowd moved over to Nextel's iDEN network a long time ago and replaced pages with annoying cell phones with a "two way radio" feature. So instead of friendly, quiet text messages, you get to listen to (often at max volume): "Did you get a chance to pick up a bag of sliders? No not yetI'm starvin man, hurry up alreadyBe there in 10, out"
The best part with Nextel is when sales reps forget to turn the phones off before they go into meetings... then you can have fun with them:
Bill - I'm at the Gold Club - Sandee says hi and I paid for a lap dance for you, so get your ass down here
Customer: We're done.
Fourthly, most people cannot send morsecode while receiving it, thus also making asynchronous conversation slower. (And you cannot receive morse from multiple sources
What we need is a morse code input mode for your phone. The point is typing is slow on cell phones and is faster with morse code. So bring on the morse code enabled cell phone.
I miss the days when Republicans were conservatives.
I'm starting to wonder if conservatism died when Gingrich left the Hill...
whatever happened to opposing stuff like the Patriot Act just because it's new-fangled and the founding fathers would find it lacking...
Fact: it was impossible for anyone other than the authors of the Patriot Act to read it. There was no time. It was rammed through Congress at a time when questioning the content, even if there was time to read it, would have been considered unamerican.
Fact: We do not elect representatives to be coerced (by threat of being called "unamerican") into voting for legislation they do not understand. Congress let us all down on this one - especially the liberals.
No it didn't, but many congressmen (and women) have said afterward, repeatedly, that they were pressured into voting for it and given almost no time at all to review it.
You didn't vote for your congressman to be easily forced intovoting for things he does not understand. (in fact a congressman saying I was forced to vote is laughable) It's their job to understand - and to a person they do. My god - what would you say to a sysadmin who simply didn't bother to make a backup before an OS upgrade?
Try including all the facts instead of only the ones that paint the viewpoint you're shooting for.
I think the poster you are replying to is 100% right. The liberals in congress let us down.
The writer of the article seems to forget entirely that 90% of a computers cost (if you buy a reasonably powerful one) is the hardware, always has been.
This is totally incorrect unless you are talking about component devices and device drivers, and even then the development of drivers can easily exceed 15-30% of the cost of a device.
If we are talking computers, and all you buy is the computer you can run the bios setup and thats about it. Good luck getting anything done. Here's a more accurate assessment of the impact of software on a hardware purchase:
Kick Ass Desktop PC = $2,000
Windows XP Pro = $150
MS Office = $370
Antivirus = $30
Cost of PC: $2550
Cost of SW: $550
SW as % of purchase: 21%
You could save substantial money with open source even on a powerful PC. On an inexpensive computer, giving MS $25-$50 per machine to license winCE puts you at a non-competitive position vs. linux:
Cost to make device: $100
Cost of OS: $25
Device Cost: $125
Base Cost: $150
SW as % of cost 16%
If someone can make a device of the same functionality for 16% less than you, they basically have an insurmountable economic advantage and will prevail. Ulike computers, how a cell phone works is unimportant compared to the fact that it works.
Once again, we Americans are showing our puritanical roots, with the old credo, "Violence is ok, but anything to do with sex or sexuality is very shameful and bad!"
Why deprive geeks of the fleeting hope that they one day might get a chance to reproduce? Why deprive young women who can't get another job and who can't dance from making a buck?
* Castro is not the evil manipulative dictator that the US tries to paint him as
... that was 40 years ago... he's changed... riiiiiggghhhttt.
He's certainly not benevolent, either.
* The embargo prevents many vital goods from getting to Cuba. People have a tendency to assume that the lower quality of life due to lack of vital goods is due to Castro, and therefore hold him entirely responsible.
That little escapade with russian missiles in the 60's didn't help Castro's case much...
I forgot
I find it humorous that Microsoft is concerned about competing with a glorified advertising broker like Google.
Note to propaganda minstry:
You were doing well painting Castro as a great guy until you threw this one in:
"You also complain about poverty but neglect to mention 90% of that poverty is due to the trade embargo by the USA"
It's very simmilar in logic to what I hear on the yokel AM "Christian" channel:
"90% of the problems in society are caused by liberal hollywood democrats and their gay supporters."
The reason is simply because when Microsoft entered the market, it was the first time a compatible desktop architecture and design had been ported across to a PDA. To a certain extent, they have also been instrumental in turning a PDA into a fully fledged, compatible and capable platform, adding Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, colour screens etc.
The author was wise to focus on convergence of the cell phone and the PDA rather than religous OS issues or conjecture about what would have happened if someone did not do something. Had microsoft not entered the PDA market, someone else would have.
That said, MS does deserve kudos not for PDA bloatware APIs and attempting to turn the PDA into a desktop computer. The kudos for that go to the hardware people who built the platform that included a faster processor, bright color screen, and a PCMCIA or Compact Flash card. MS does deserve recognition for building an os with appropriate multimedia extensions and support for brilliant color, which is what drove palm and RIM (who was lagely left out of the article despite building convergent, internet connected devices in the mid 90s) to focus on smartphones.
What is interesting is the failure of PDA powered convergent devices to supplant personal media players like the iPod and digital cameras.
The real problem here is the business model that Mpaa members have based their business on. It ties payments to the size of distribution your content gets. Additional copies should mean additional revenues. The intrenet doesn't necessarily work that way
Hell, I think PalmOne's Treo could kill the blackberry if it offered REAL push email and instant messanger applications.
Actually, once you use a blackberry, you really don't want to switch back. It is the Macintosh of the smartphone world.
And it's users are just as... enthusiastic.
n the RIAA's perfect world, you and I would pay every time we listen to a song, on every device that could possibly play the song.
And ASCAP would charge you and your landlord everytime you decided to sing while taking a crap.
At the same time, a gnu antilope (not GNU/Antilope) needs only about 6 hours of sleep per night.
Thank you for clearing this up.
But the truth is, 99% of gun use is against people.
Lol x4. Only when you include guns purchased by governments.
cranking out sequel after sequel of the same cliche'd genres.
This is true of almost all industries - take cars - cars like (I'm using US market examples) the mini, VW bug, PT Cruiser, Hummer and the Chrysler/Dodge Magnum are huge departure from the usual and have had better than market rate sales.
And then they wonder why movies that are a significant departure from the stale movies of the day tend to become huge blockbusters:
* Star Wars (Episode IV)
* Spider-Man
* The Matrix
* Titanic
* The Passion of the Christ
Of course, then come the sequels which rarely are up the the standard. Fortunately in the case of Titanic and the Passion, they left little room for sequels. Titanic sunk, Chist rose from the dead... etc... etc...
It's going to be hard going in the game business because improving realism and graphics alone doesn't really alter the experience that much. It's not about the hamburger, it's about the experience you have getting the burger that matters. Games that offer a better and different experience win.
lease define 'basic productivity'. Office apps? OO.o runs on Windows. Image editing? Well, if you're doing REAL image editing work you'll be using Photoshop anyway but for throwing something together for a presentation, Gimp will work.
Word Processing, Spreadsheets, End User DBMS, Presentation, Web content editing and Groupware - the stuff that comes with MS Office Pro. OOo delivers some of this functionality. Good point about OOo on Windows.
Microsoft estimates the retraining and lost productivity costs of upgrading from one version of Windows to a newer one at about $2000 per seat.
Lost productivity is a soft number and is almost impossible to attribute to a single initiative in a large company. Soft numbers are the real problem for theses studies because you nailed it when you said might as well train linux. More often than not the soft costs are a wash - and in this case that is the case.
yes, you'd be out at least $1000 using Windows to get the same functionality you get out-of-box with Linux (e.g. compilers) but most users don't need all that functionality anyway.
There is a ton of extra stuff with Linux, no doubt, but if you just look at the core productivity story, it's pretty attractive...
Thanks for pointing that out. (And thats just a small sample).
Whatever. Solaris on X86 has a market share that is a rounding error even for OS/2. Your point is that some vendors support it. That's wonderful. I only wish Sun had done what they had done today in 1996. The horse is most certainly out of the barn at this point and it may be possible to put it back in.
If Sun were afraid of the GPL then why would Sun have spent so much engineer resources on getting GNOME into shape to replace CDE on Solaris?
Expediency and cost - and the fact that it wasn't theirs to begin with.
I really like Sun, don't get me wrong. I just thing they had leadership with limited vision and may still suffer from that issue.