This response and others like it remind of the post in the Online Presence thread, "I don't do twitter and facebook," as if those were the only aspects of online presence.
Networking is not just "schmoozing" and not always about climbing the corporate ladder.
If no one knows you from Adam, then an on-line portfolio of your work might help, such as code if you are a developer, or wrtings, or drawings. Social media are
one way to promote yourself.
And if you're a programmer or developer and not self-employed, it absolutely 100% IS part of your job.
Do you write code? When do you have time to write code or add to your programming skills, if you are always on the make?
In my experience it takes time and great concentration to master development.
I wonder if the OP's long track record of success is as long or as successful as we're being told. The traditional hiring process is all about getting your foot in the door. A good resume with an impressive degree is one way of doing that. Having someone on the inside who knows you and your work is a better way of doing that.
He may have been writting code when you were still in diapers, and he may have been out of touch with his prior associates for years and necesssity forces him
to try to reenter the workforce. Networks, notwithstanding, when you are old enough people die and it doesn't take much to fall out of touch or to have a gap
in your experience. I think that some of the crap told about job seeking is competitive misinformation between job seekers, enhanced by ignorant HR types who don't know how to find talented people in the first place, and tacit discrimination by hiring managers. Discrimination law is toothless. You have to be stupid enough to say something so obvious that the law can't ignore it. Otherwide there are a million ways for someone who doesn't know you to refuse you. Yes, It is my experience that the best work I have gotten was because I knew someone, but that seems to make the legions of recruitment people somewhat useless.
There's something a little funny about the expectation that we all should be developing large social networks of business connections, as though failing to do so makes you severely deficient. Lots of people don't take to it naturally, and it's often not required for your actual job. So for many of us, when you're actually focused on doing your job and building your life, you're not going to be going around schmoozing with good professional contacts on a regular basis.
And that's not so bad. It doesn't mean your bad at your job. It doesn't make you a deficient human being. On the contrary, it might mean that you're more interested in doing your job than on climbing the ladder. Frankly, the world would probably be a better place if more focus were placed on doing your current job properly, and less on attaining the next promotion.
But I guess people don't like to hear that, and businesses don't really value people who do their jobs.
This is the old battle between personality types as described on the Enneagram.
People cannot readily change the type of personality, the basic stance they take towards the world, which is set before they are age 7. They can trim down the rough edges, the reactions that cause trouble but not fundementally undo the position they developed with.
In the technical world many engineers are type-5. These are detail oriented but social phobic to some extant. They are very good at nuts and bolts but less good at pressing the flesh. Their managers are often Type-3, Middle Managers, or type-8 sr. managers. There is massive and continual misunderstanding between these different types of people because most people are unconscious of the stance they have taken, but like other unconscious behavior, they project their stance on others and this contaminates the hiring process as much as racial or gender discrimination does. 3's are friendly and affable, good schmoozers, like type 2. They makes good sales and marketing people, but type 3 is built on a persona that often is prone to lies great and small. Mitt Romney is a classic 3, e.g. When people like this get into line management positions they drive engineers type-5 crazy. The engineers standing stiffly against the wall at company socials talking like robots and flooding each other and others with too detailed monologues is classic 5. Just contarst these two types and try to see how hard it is to reconcile these kinds of people and see how hiring can get off on the wrong foot so easily.
And think of who you want working for you or with you? Do you always want someone with the same failings as yourself, even if they are tending to agree with you, or do you need someone different from yourself who might cause your trouble and challenge you?
Exactly right. And if you had the misfortune of being competent when your co-workers preferred to go golfing, able to be found when needed, you pretty much sealed your fate. The dependable worker bee.
Surely you jest, MBA? or Manager? Engineering-management wanna be? i would not knowingly agree to work with you, let alone for you. If there is no room for differences in the Economy you imagine? then screw that economics. Did you vote for Romney in the last election? Because that is the kind of sales force person you are describing. The real world has need to many more different approaches, even if investor and managers say that image-sells. The next war will set you straight with non-Organization Mem. Enneatype-3?
- You're a natural at (interpersonal) networking.
- or you took on board the importance of (interpersonal) networking when you were young, and made a special effort to do it.
If you put your head down and did a job, instead of schmoozing, you might not be so lucky.
This debate about what kills us, especially about what is toxic and kills us through cancer, is a discussion about the Frakenstein world business and the government has created for us. We are lab rats. It isn't a matter of who has knowledge and who shold regulate, or what we should know about outr health. It is that we are babes in the woods about decisions that are not driven with our best welfare in mind.
The greatest gains in human longevity were made by advances in public health, mostly, not treatment of chronic diseases. It is true that the medical profession and the regulatory agencies can claim some success in the safety of the food and drug supply and treatment of disease, but our form of government in the U.S. is to blame for many of the current risks and failures discussed in this thread.
People of Conservative politics love to pit government against business and blame the ills of the world on too much red tape. In the case of drugs and food additives and the risk of cancer, the problem is too much intimacy between business interests and the regulators and the political fact, in the under funding of the FDA, to investigate and enforce sanctions against mistakes, The Congress has sacrificed the general welfare in order to please business interests who have greater access to them and who fund their reelection and who want to rush poorly tested products into the market and into our bodies. That includes drugs and food additives. America is not run by a democracy or even of representative republic but by what i call an "entrepanocracy" in which the duopoly is in joint support.
The American Beverage Consul, a trade organization, lobbyist, for soda and soft-drinks, has been running a pair of ads on TV here in San Francisco Bay Area. One ad pats themselves on the back for providing calorie per serving data, which they are required to by law anyway, the other ad had this woman, in the produce aisle BTW, claiming the government is trying to take "free" choice away from consumers by passing laws and taxing beverage makers. Sounds good until you realize that marketing excels at giving the illusion of choice under what is in effect a cartel of two or three suppliers, all of which use the same basic formula under sanction of the FDA, and all federal agencies, cabinet level posts, have the built-in conflict of interest that they promote the interests of a constituancy at the same time has having to regulate it. This is why the denizens of K Street in Washington DC are so powerful. The other problen with the above ad campaign is that the FDA rushed approval for the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the 1990's before it was implicated in the spike of obesity we are seeing how, because it was adopted by agribusiness in response to a spike in sucrose prices. HFCS is an ingredient in lots of processed foods and our bodies convert most of it to fat, and obesity is one of the major risk factors for cancer. The other problem with the ad is that if something they are doing contributes to the burden of the government to have to treat chronic diseases of aging, such as type II diabetes, cardio-vascular disease, even just through the 30% or so of the total health care cost in Medicare outlays, the government has a right, and even a duty to mitigate the known risk from HFCS and remove it from the market by product liability suits.
Of course this sorry state of affairs wouldn't be so acute if conflict of interest wasn't built into the US Constitution, itself, through the way the legislative branch is formed, and through the imposition of bad law that allows special interests in business to impose their will on us.
I wrote DEC-Fortran programs on RSX-11 on an 11/34 in about 1976. Later, I had access to an 11/70 which came shipped with IAS, we, at USGS in Menlo Park Ca, installed AT&T Version 7 UNIX on it in 1979. In fact an important person in the history of minicomputer and PC UNIX, Bill Jolitz, was the person who installed UNIX on our box. It might have been BSD 4.2 that he installed. I remember reading the UNIX articles from AT&T and Berkeley in binders.
I answer those who stay with Windows because of applications like Word and Excel, Microsoft Office, that if it weren't for the 85% desktop penetration aided and abetted by the government not enforcing anti-trust law against Microsoft for getting the power to ship its OS as an OEM, that competition would be stronger.
Still the comeititon has come along and even though Microsoft may be able to stay a bit ahead of it, thus placating those who resist looking at an alternative, that for me the lack of security and performance has decided the issue for me long ago. Linux is superior and always has been. Now because of Microsoft's illegal OEM arrangement with PC makers, I have been able to use every major release since Windows 3.1 alongside several UNIX and Linus systems.
I believe that the security flaws in Windows are there because of Microsoft's business model. That model is to do about 75% of what you need to have a useful and safe system and then third parties like Norton get to extort you to pay more for the security that should have been there to start with, and the fact that Norton and others can nag you to buy their third-party products, means that there is a gaping hole for a hacker.
We may be seeing in the decline of the desktop, the end of Microsoft's control of the market, and because all of the alternative platforms are based on UNIX or Linux, ultimately, the reasons to run Windows might be reduced and very soon.
On the other hand I have run current Linux releases with LibreOffice on systems that were no more powerful than to run Windows XP. I even ran several on a system with only 3/4 gig of ram and no hard-disk at all. I am running Ubuntu 2.04, which is not small at all, in 1/2 gig of ram. There are many legacy systems that won't run Vista or Windows 7 that will run current Linux releases. How may users have trashed their system, desktop or laptop because their NTFS filesystem became corrupted and they didn't know how to fix it? Time for Knoppix 7 and Gparted.
Backward compat would be nice, proven claims of performance would be nice, but nicer still would be that whatever it replaces that lots of bugs that have been opened on it and are closed. Only then will I be convinced that it MIGHT be worth it to switch from X11, and there had better have been backward compat all along so that all my legacy apps run in the meantime, Anything less is empire building, and judging on how well Ubuntu is maintained, that is a hard sell to me.
I never knew about the ability to download your FB posts, so I have just done save the entire page with the browser. For the past couple of years If I thought that I wanted to save anything significant I just saved the page with a unique name, like the date + some title or just "Facebook". It never dawned on me that FB might have supported an archiving feature that they have just disabled.
I did notice that I could not really page back far through time and see comments I had made to others, which you might want to save. On the Time Line topics you originate with other's' comments are preserved. I have no doubt that FB has everything ever posted to it, somewhere, on heierarchical storage. I am sure that Law Enforcement could execute a warrent and get to anything. The reason why FB would turn off the feature has been discussed pretty well, in fact what you say there belongs to them, unless governments can intervene and define who authors are and what rights they have over the owners of media it is on. Considering the difficulties of copyright on the Internet, there appears to be a double standard there defined by who wants to pay.
I think that FB's days are numbered; people seem pretty pissed of with the crap they have been pulling, with the lousy UI and the privacy abuses, and the time is ripe for an alternative. I fact I have been writing for some time about an alternative: unbundle the UI from the CMS from the global list of friends. A de-funded FB or its replacement could be the clearinghouse for friend's lists, only. The CMS could be distributed to where it is needed; it doesn't have to be under the control of one company and its business partners. If the economic justification for FB was the centrally controlled CMS and the mining by advertisers, that can be done away with and the costs of the CMSs distributed. We don't need a CMS for 1 billion users when we only have about 100 friends on average. FB is then just a marketing scam in which the blogging feature is a sideline and badily donw. Slashdot is a better design, and there are better designs that have a far greater antiquity than that.
No matter what the outcome of FB is; we could agitate to have them restore the ability to archive, demand that they offer us archives of our comments in context, or if they go out of business that the data they have collected must be made available in a dissolution agreement.
Here is why this might be important. The mid late 80's were a pretty bad time, unemployment above 7%, but most of us were able to get job by hustling the newly lucrative computer skills(only high school diploma at that time) into job. Now the employment rate is a little higher, but we are also in a time when firms do not really understand how to apply today's technology, just like back them, and a lot of it has become simple enough that a 20 year old can do some pretty effective stuff. I wonder if people can't get job because they believe articles like this that they do not have to go and sell their ideas, but rather wait for corporate to come to them, prostrated, and beg for the youth wisdom.
I take the view, which might be unpopular on a techie blog like this, that computers are the major cause of the unemployment we are seeing in today's economy, and the unemployability of many more millions of people around the world. My solution is not Luddism, although the net effect might become just that. I would not argue with the power and ease of use possible with technology, only that more and more people are being put at an economic disadvantage by it. How can the productivity of the U.S. economy be going up at unheard of rates while the segment of the permanently unemployalbe going up? Remember that the unemployment rate only counts people who appear to be looking for a job, not those who have given up. The level of discontent and crime in our society might be due not only to the concentration of wealth, which BTW high-tech employment accounts for a good percentage along with energy-related work, but also to the fact that the technology has not empowered as many people as it was promised to do.
This could have huge consequences for the future. The Great Unwashed coud become the digitally illliterate and the revolution could sweep tech aside.
Man, you sound like a Grunt whose every once of passion has been beaten out of you. I suppose that the world has a place for people like you, and that is not necessarily Hell. In fact if you are financially inclined and a Good Boy, you might actually come out all right, at least in terms of assets.
But, in fact there are bad managements and bad decisions and people get hurt by them, such as the whole U.S. economy is now still hurting, in fact it may be that U.S. economic power is terminal, and because of the very things that supposedly made it such a success. One would thinnk that successful people start out as people with good ideas, get schooled in the best techniques to manage a business, and have a career that accrues wisdom, but judging form the comments in this thread, most people who care think that management denied them opportunity and exploited them in that the time wasted was not compensated by wages and other benefits of the association.
I have made plenty of mistakes in my career; even without being explicitly judged for them, but I know of instances I saw first hand of decisions made inside well-known organizations I was part of that were bad for me and the organization.
The greatest error is to stick with a plan after it has been invalidated. It takes special courage to pull the plug when something has really failed. The greatest maladaptive aspectof social animals is to stick with the meme after it has become invalid. These two tendencies do most of the damage in economic and management terms. In nearly every area of life sticking with the business model after it has been shown to be wrong leads to evil of one sort of other.
The other greatest mistake that I've seen, and it may be a variant of the first, is to use the excuse of customers, or the Board of Directors, or Investors, the Market, as a basis for decisions in place of having a clear vision of what you are doing. This is the feeling that you get jerked around every other week and that management does't understand the effort you put into developing your skills and they don't care. They lie and say that they value you and want you to keep your skills current, but since their foresight is reduced to the quarterly bottom line, they don't really care, and it is a situation that unless you take the time or have a good idea of what you need to stay competitive, you either have to steal time and resources to do that, or defer that until you have the time, like after you have terminated. Hindsight says that the winners in this looked busy, even as they were working on tasks not assigned them, or they managed to get assignments that were easy enough so they could spend most of their time on self-directed goals. This is how I live now, but I am retired and living hand to mouth.
I worked for a company, that is no more, whose CEO spent lots of time bashing Microsoft. Had he spent more time giving this company the focus it needed, it might still be with us. The same could be true of Canonical, whose mishandling of the Unity/Gnome 3, and even the possibility that they might not support xOrg in the future; has hurt Linux. They should pay attention to focus, and the benefit to the Linux community.
Fat egos are the source of this problem, not giving users a choice. We could do more about Microsoft if the government and legal system worked and said that the OEM arrangement that lets Microsoft bundle its OS with most of the desktops sold in the world, is a unfair advantage that should not be allowed.
If you could buy a PC with a choice of OS or no OS, the market share problem would be solved. Linux, and Free BSD are mature enough to take a much larger share than they have now. Or we can hope that Microsoft has already lost the battle as it stumbles getting on the tablet and mobile platforms which are displacing desktops. On servers *NIX has a much more competitive share.
I would change Linux. I would make it filesystem agnostic, including installing in NTFS, without needing to partition the drive. I would allow for distros to be run out of any image or directory structure, including swapon files, and remove the whole partitioning issue. This is already done. Either there is no reason to partition, or to partition so any Liniux can install on single large filesystem of a type supported by all releases. This is also done, as it is the basis for virtualization. Why even virtualize? Why not run another Linux from the same device?
The very first programming experience I had was with FORTRAN II on an IBM 1620 in 1969. The "Compiler" was a box and your ran card deck, you know, punched cards in two passes, to check for syntax errors, and then to generate an object deck, which is what did the real work on the computer. A couple of years later I had access to an IBM 360/67 at Stanford Univ. with a FORTRAN IV compiler on a drum memory, I think. It wasn't until maybe 1974 that I could use a terminal, a teletype, really, to code via 300 baud dedicated line to a remote computer. Around that time I had some access to DEC small computers and begin to use timeshare under DEC OS's RSX-11 and DEC Fortran. By thet time we had dumb terminals. By about 1976 I got access to my first UNIX system and was amazed at the concise commands of the shell. It wasn't until 1986 that I got to learn C. Lately I've been learning lisp and python and relearnig pHp and javascript on my own Linux Box.
I realize that having early access to timesharing systems, after 1974 spoiled the personal computer revolution for me. I had access to relatively powerful systems so that PC's seemed too much like toys to me, I had an Apple II, but after finding its limitations, I used to mostly as a terminal to a much more powerful time shared system. It wasn't until 1995 with Linux that I could come even close to the experience I had with a Sparc 5 running Solaris 2.4 on a PC running Linux.
Possibly the Queen has more clout than just being a figurehead, if she can somehow cause Parliment to reconsider legislation its leadership had said was dead. The truth may be that the Queen has political allies who will try and reintroduce the bill. In any case the UK is a country with a tradition of formal class distinctions that carry some political power, still. The reaction to the riots in London two years ago was a mixture of outrage and amazement that the "disadvantaged" would be resentful for getting the crumbs of living in the UK. Class is still real in the UK and racism is just below the surface, as it is in the U.S.
There are meta-class distinctions in the U.S. but more mobility in the U.S. The problem in the U.S. is that people here are more naive about the abuse of power in business, and defer to business people much more than they should. America is an "entrapanocracy". The representative government has been subverted by the business community, by the rich. That preferred status in built-in in the UK institutions. Here you can buy access. In the UK who you know can buy access; the remains of an ancient oligarchy. Such in-groups need to be periodically purged to perserve democratic institutions. Still it is the tug of war between Parliment and the Monarchy that set the representative government traditions in both nations, and spread around the world.
Slashdot Mirror
This response and others like it remind of the post in the Online Presence thread, "I don't do twitter and facebook," as if those were the only aspects of online presence.
Networking is not just "schmoozing" and not always about climbing the corporate ladder.
If no one knows you from Adam, then an on-line portfolio of your work might help, such as code if you are a developer, or wrtings, or drawings. Social media are one way to promote yourself.
And if you're a programmer or developer and not self-employed, it absolutely 100% IS part of your job.
Do you write code? When do you have time to write code or add to your programming skills, if you are always on the make? In my experience it takes time and great concentration to master development.
I wonder if the OP's long track record of success is as long or as successful as we're being told. The traditional hiring process is all about getting your foot in the door. A good resume with an impressive degree is one way of doing that. Having someone on the inside who knows you and your work is a better way of doing that.
He may have been writting code when you were still in diapers, and he may have been out of touch with his prior associates for years and necesssity forces him to try to reenter the workforce. Networks, notwithstanding, when you are old enough people die and it doesn't take much to fall out of touch or to have a gap in your experience. I think that some of the crap told about job seeking is competitive misinformation between job seekers, enhanced by ignorant HR types who don't know how to find talented people in the first place, and tacit discrimination by hiring managers. Discrimination law is toothless. You have to be stupid enough to say something so obvious that the law can't ignore it. Otherwide there are a million ways for someone who doesn't know you to refuse you. Yes, It is my experience that the best work I have gotten was because I knew someone, but that seems to make the legions of recruitment people somewhat useless.
There's something a little funny about the expectation that we all should be developing large social networks of business connections, as though failing to do so makes you severely deficient. Lots of people don't take to it naturally, and it's often not required for your actual job. So for many of us, when you're actually focused on doing your job and building your life, you're not going to be going around schmoozing with good professional contacts on a regular basis.
And that's not so bad. It doesn't mean your bad at your job. It doesn't make you a deficient human being. On the contrary, it might mean that you're more interested in doing your job than on climbing the ladder. Frankly, the world would probably be a better place if more focus were placed on doing your current job properly, and less on attaining the next promotion.
But I guess people don't like to hear that, and businesses don't really value people who do their jobs.
This is the old battle between personality types as described on the Enneagram.
People cannot readily change the type of personality, the basic stance they take towards the world, which is set before they are age 7. They can trim down the rough edges, the reactions that cause trouble but not fundementally undo the position they developed with.
In the technical world many engineers are type-5. These are detail oriented but social phobic to some extant. They are very good at nuts and bolts but less good at pressing the flesh. Their managers are often Type-3, Middle Managers, or type-8 sr. managers. There is massive and continual misunderstanding between these different types of people because most people are unconscious of the stance they have taken, but like other unconscious behavior, they project their stance on others and this contaminates the hiring process as much as racial or gender discrimination does. 3's are friendly and affable, good schmoozers, like type 2. They makes good sales and marketing people, but type 3 is built on a persona that often is prone to lies great and small. Mitt Romney is a classic 3, e.g. When people like this get into line management positions they drive engineers type-5 crazy. The engineers standing stiffly against the wall at company socials talking like robots and flooding each other and others with too detailed monologues is classic 5. Just contarst these two types and try to see how hard it is to reconcile these kinds of people and see how hiring can get off on the wrong foot so easily.
And think of who you want working for you or with you? Do you always want someone with the same failings as yourself, even if they are tending to agree with you, or do you need someone different from yourself who might cause your trouble and challenge you?
Exactly right. And if you had the misfortune of being competent when your co-workers preferred to go golfing, able to be found when needed, you pretty much sealed your fate. The dependable worker bee.
Surely you jest, MBA? or Manager? Engineering-management wanna be? i would not knowingly agree to work with you, let alone for you. If there is no room for differences in the Economy you imagine? then screw that economics. Did you vote for Romney in the last election? Because that is the kind of sales force person you are describing. The real world has need to many more different approaches, even if investor and managers say that image-sells. The next war will set you straight with non-Organization Mem. Enneatype-3?
That is if either:
- You're a natural at (interpersonal) networking. - or you took on board the importance of (interpersonal) networking when you were young, and made a special effort to do it.
If you put your head down and did a job, instead of schmoozing, you might not be so lucky.
You sound like management to me, Curse You!
This debate about what kills us, especially about what is toxic and kills us through cancer, is a discussion about the Frakenstein world business and the government has created for us. We are lab rats. It isn't a matter of who has knowledge and who shold regulate, or what we should know about outr health. It is that we are babes in the woods about decisions that are not driven with our best welfare in mind.
The greatest gains in human longevity were made by advances in public health, mostly, not treatment of chronic diseases. It is true that the medical profession and the regulatory agencies can claim some success in the safety of the food and drug supply and treatment of disease, but our form of government in the U.S. is to blame for many of the current risks and failures discussed in this thread.
People of Conservative politics love to pit government against business and blame the ills of the world on too much red tape. In the case of drugs and food additives and the risk of cancer, the problem is too much intimacy between business interests and the regulators and the political fact, in the under funding of the FDA, to investigate and enforce sanctions against mistakes, The Congress has sacrificed the general welfare in order to please business interests who have greater access to them and who fund their reelection and who want to rush poorly tested products into the market and into our bodies. That includes drugs and food additives. America is not run by a democracy or even of representative republic but by what i call an "entrepanocracy" in which the duopoly is in joint support.
The American Beverage Consul, a trade organization, lobbyist, for soda and soft-drinks, has been running a pair of ads on TV here in San Francisco Bay Area. One ad pats themselves on the back for providing calorie per serving data, which they are required to by law anyway, the other ad had this woman, in the produce aisle BTW, claiming the government is trying to take "free" choice away from consumers by passing laws and taxing beverage makers. Sounds good until you realize that marketing excels at giving the illusion of choice under what is in effect a cartel of two or three suppliers, all of which use the same basic formula under sanction of the FDA, and all federal agencies, cabinet level posts, have the built-in conflict of interest that they promote the interests of a constituancy at the same time has having to regulate it. This is why the denizens of K Street in Washington DC are so powerful. The other problen with the above ad campaign is that the FDA rushed approval for the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the 1990's before it was implicated in the spike of obesity we are seeing how, because it was adopted by agribusiness in response to a spike in sucrose prices. HFCS is an ingredient in lots of processed foods and our bodies convert most of it to fat, and obesity is one of the major risk factors for cancer. The other problem with the ad is that if something they are doing contributes to the burden of the government to have to treat chronic diseases of aging, such as type II diabetes, cardio-vascular disease, even just through the 30% or so of the total health care cost in Medicare outlays, the government has a right, and even a duty to mitigate the known risk from HFCS and remove it from the market by product liability suits.
Of course this sorry state of affairs wouldn't be so acute if conflict of interest wasn't built into the US Constitution, itself, through the way the legislative branch is formed, and through the imposition of bad law that allows special interests in business to impose their will on us.
Yeah, carcinoma of the sigmoid will result in a semi-colon!
I wrote DEC-Fortran programs on RSX-11 on an 11/34 in about 1976. Later, I had access to an 11/70 which came shipped with IAS, we, at USGS in Menlo Park Ca, installed AT&T Version 7 UNIX on it in 1979. In fact an important person in the history of minicomputer and PC UNIX, Bill Jolitz, was the person who installed UNIX on our box. It might have been BSD 4.2 that he installed. I remember reading the UNIX articles from AT&T and Berkeley in binders.
Need I say more?
I answer those who stay with Windows because of applications like Word and Excel, Microsoft Office, that if it weren't for the 85% desktop penetration aided and abetted by the government not enforcing anti-trust law against Microsoft for getting the power to ship its OS as an OEM, that competition would be stronger.
Still the comeititon has come along and even though Microsoft may be able to stay a bit ahead of it, thus placating those who resist looking at an alternative, that for me the lack of security and performance has decided the issue for me long ago. Linux is superior and always has been. Now because of Microsoft's illegal OEM arrangement with PC makers, I have been able to use every major release since Windows 3.1 alongside several UNIX and Linus systems.
I believe that the security flaws in Windows are there because of Microsoft's business model. That model is to do about 75% of what you need to have a useful and safe system and then third parties like Norton get to extort you to pay more for the security that should have been there to start with, and the fact that Norton and others can nag you to buy their third-party products, means that there is a gaping hole for a hacker.
We may be seeing in the decline of the desktop, the end of Microsoft's control of the market, and because all of the alternative platforms are based on UNIX or Linux, ultimately, the reasons to run Windows might be reduced and very soon.
On the other hand I have run current Linux releases with LibreOffice on systems that were no more powerful than to run Windows XP. I even ran several on a system with only 3/4 gig of ram and no hard-disk at all. I am running Ubuntu 2.04, which is not small at all, in 1/2 gig of ram. There are many legacy systems that won't run Vista or Windows 7 that will run current Linux releases. How may users have trashed their system, desktop or laptop because their NTFS filesystem became corrupted and they didn't know how to fix it? Time for Knoppix 7 and Gparted.
Backward compat would be nice, proven claims of performance would be nice, but nicer still would be that whatever it replaces that lots of bugs that have been opened on it and are closed. Only then will I be convinced that it MIGHT be worth it to switch from X11, and there had better have been backward compat all along so that all my legacy apps run in the meantime, Anything less is empire building, and judging on how well Ubuntu is maintained, that is a hard sell to me.
I never knew about the ability to download your FB posts, so I have just done save the entire page with the browser. For the past couple of years If I thought that I wanted to save anything significant I just saved the page with a unique name, like the date + some title or just "Facebook". It never dawned on me that FB might have supported an archiving feature that they have just disabled.
I did notice that I could not really page back far through time and see comments I had made to others, which you might want to save. On the Time Line topics you originate with other's' comments are preserved. I have no doubt that FB has everything ever posted to it, somewhere, on heierarchical storage. I am sure that Law Enforcement could execute a warrent and get to anything. The reason why FB would turn off the feature has been discussed pretty well, in fact what you say there belongs to them, unless governments can intervene and define who authors are and what rights they have over the owners of media it is on. Considering the difficulties of copyright on the Internet, there appears to be a double standard there defined by who wants to pay.
I think that FB's days are numbered; people seem pretty pissed of with the crap they have been pulling, with the lousy UI and the privacy abuses, and the time is ripe for an alternative. I fact I have been writing for some time about an alternative: unbundle the UI from the CMS from the global list of friends. A de-funded FB or its replacement could be the clearinghouse for friend's lists, only. The CMS could be distributed to where it is needed; it doesn't have to be under the control of one company and its business partners. If the economic justification for FB was the centrally controlled CMS and the mining by advertisers, that can be done away with and the costs of the CMSs distributed. We don't need a CMS for 1 billion users when we only have about 100 friends on average. FB is then just a marketing scam in which the blogging feature is a sideline and badily donw. Slashdot is a better design, and there are better designs that have a far greater antiquity than that.
No matter what the outcome of FB is; we could agitate to have them restore the ability to archive, demand that they offer us archives of our comments in context, or if they go out of business that the data they have collected must be made available in a dissolution agreement.
Here is why this might be important. The mid late 80's were a pretty bad time, unemployment above 7%, but most of us were able to get job by hustling the newly lucrative computer skills(only high school diploma at that time) into job. Now the employment rate is a little higher, but we are also in a time when firms do not really understand how to apply today's technology, just like back them, and a lot of it has become simple enough that a 20 year old can do some pretty effective stuff. I wonder if people can't get job because they believe articles like this that they do not have to go and sell their ideas, but rather wait for corporate to come to them, prostrated, and beg for the youth wisdom.
I take the view, which might be unpopular on a techie blog like this, that computers are the major cause of the unemployment we are seeing in today's economy, and the unemployability of many more millions of people around the world. My solution is not Luddism, although the net effect might become just that. I would not argue with the power and ease of use possible with technology, only that more and more people are being put at an economic disadvantage by it. How can the productivity of the U.S. economy be going up at unheard of rates while the segment of the permanently unemployalbe going up? Remember that the unemployment rate only counts people who appear to be looking for a job, not those who have given up. The level of discontent and crime in our society might be due not only to the concentration of wealth, which BTW high-tech employment accounts for a good percentage along with energy-related work, but also to the fact that the technology has not empowered as many people as it was promised to do.
This could have huge consequences for the future. The Great Unwashed coud become the digitally illliterate and the revolution could sweep tech aside.
Man, you sound like a Grunt whose every once of passion has been beaten out of you. I suppose that the world has a place for people like you, and that is not necessarily Hell. In fact if you are financially inclined and a Good Boy, you might actually come out all right, at least in terms of assets.
But, in fact there are bad managements and bad decisions and people get hurt by them, such as the whole U.S. economy is now still hurting, in fact it may be that U.S. economic power is terminal, and because of the very things that supposedly made it such a success. One would thinnk that successful people start out as people with good ideas, get schooled in the best techniques to manage a business, and have a career that accrues wisdom, but judging form the comments in this thread, most people who care think that management denied them opportunity and exploited them in that the time wasted was not compensated by wages and other benefits of the association.
I have made plenty of mistakes in my career; even without being explicitly judged for them, but I know of instances I saw first hand of decisions made inside well-known organizations I was part of that were bad for me and the organization.
The greatest error is to stick with a plan after it has been invalidated. It takes special courage to pull the plug when something has really failed. The greatest maladaptive aspectof social animals is to stick with the meme after it has become invalid. These two tendencies do most of the damage in economic and management terms. In nearly every area of life sticking with the business model after it has been shown to be wrong leads to evil of one sort of other.
The other greatest mistake that I've seen, and it may be a variant of the first, is to use the excuse of customers, or the Board of Directors, or Investors, the Market, as a basis for decisions in place of having a clear vision of what you are doing. This is the feeling that you get jerked around every other week and that management does't understand the effort you put into developing your skills and they don't care. They lie and say that they value you and want you to keep your skills current, but since their foresight is reduced to the quarterly bottom line, they don't really care, and it is a situation that unless you take the time or have a good idea of what you need to stay competitive, you either have to steal time and resources to do that, or defer that until you have the time, like after you have terminated. Hindsight says that the winners in this looked busy, even as they were working on tasks not assigned them, or they managed to get assignments that were easy enough so they could spend most of their time on self-directed goals. This is how I live now, but I am retired and living hand to mouth.
Give 'em a thrashing!
Such cereal humor, one row after another!
You mean, a lawsuit is not furrow awhey?
Why was the farmer outstanding in his field?
I worked for a company, that is no more, whose CEO spent lots of time bashing Microsoft. Had he spent more time giving this company the focus it needed, it might still be with us. The same could be true of Canonical, whose mishandling of the Unity/Gnome 3, and even the possibility that they might not support xOrg in the future; has hurt Linux. They should pay attention to focus, and the benefit to the Linux community.
Fat egos are the source of this problem, not giving users a choice. We could do more about Microsoft if the government and legal system worked and said that the OEM arrangement that lets Microsoft bundle its OS with most of the desktops sold in the world, is a unfair advantage that should not be allowed.
If you could buy a PC with a choice of OS or no OS, the market share problem would be solved. Linux, and Free BSD are mature enough to take a much larger share than they have now. Or we can hope that Microsoft has already lost the battle as it stumbles getting on the tablet and mobile platforms which are displacing desktops. On servers *NIX has a much more competitive share.
I would change Linux. I would make it filesystem agnostic, including installing in NTFS, without needing to partition the drive. I would allow for distros to be run out of any image or directory structure, including swapon files, and remove the whole partitioning issue. This is already done. Either there is no reason to partition, or to partition so any Liniux can install on single large filesystem of a type supported by all releases. This is also done, as it is the basis for virtualization. Why even virtualize? Why not run another Linux from the same device?
The very first programming experience I had was with FORTRAN II on an IBM 1620 in 1969. The "Compiler" was a box and your ran card deck, you know, punched cards in two passes, to check for syntax errors, and then to generate an object deck, which is what did the real work on the computer. A couple of years later I had access to an IBM 360/67 at Stanford Univ. with a FORTRAN IV compiler on a drum memory, I think. It wasn't until maybe 1974 that I could use a terminal, a teletype, really, to code via 300 baud dedicated line to a remote computer. Around that time I had some access to DEC small computers and begin to use timeshare under DEC OS's RSX-11 and DEC Fortran. By thet time we had dumb terminals. By about 1976 I got access to my first UNIX system and was amazed at the concise commands of the shell. It wasn't until 1986 that I got to learn C. Lately I've been learning lisp and python and relearnig pHp and javascript on my own Linux Box.
I realize that having early access to timesharing systems, after 1974 spoiled the personal computer revolution for me. I had access to relatively powerful systems so that PC's seemed too much like toys to me, I had an Apple II, but after finding its limitations, I used to mostly as a terminal to a much more powerful time shared system. It wasn't until 1995 with Linux that I could come even close to the experience I had with a Sparc 5 running Solaris 2.4 on a PC running Linux.
GNU/20Hurd thing.
No, he meant that "The hurd is in the stall, man!"
And that is longitude?
Sorry, its "Parliament"
Possibly the Queen has more clout than just being a figurehead, if she can somehow cause Parliment to reconsider legislation its leadership had said was dead. The truth may be that the Queen has political allies who will try and reintroduce the bill. In any case the UK is a country with a tradition of formal class distinctions that carry some political power, still. The reaction to the riots in London two years ago was a mixture of outrage and amazement that the "disadvantaged" would be resentful for getting the crumbs of living in the UK. Class is still real in the UK and racism is just below the surface, as it is in the U.S.
There are meta-class distinctions in the U.S. but more mobility in the U.S. The problem in the U.S. is that people here are more naive about the abuse of power in business, and defer to business people much more than they should. America is an "entrapanocracy". The representative government has been subverted by the business community, by the rich. That preferred status in built-in in the UK institutions. Here you can buy access. In the UK who you know can buy access; the remains of an ancient oligarchy. Such in-groups need to be periodically purged to perserve democratic institutions. Still it is the tug of war between Parliment and the Monarchy that set the representative government traditions in both nations, and spread around the world.
And just as chauvanistic!