I just can't believe my eyes when I see how many "if you are not teaching computing you don't need computers" replies are in this thread.
Go on people, welcome to the XXIst century!
Pretty much any subject can be tought more efficently with a computer, computers have the fundamental advantage that can be more engaging and interactive. As anybody with a minimal understanding of how learning works will tell you: feedback is essential in good learning, computers are the feedback tool of best resort.
Are they using open formats instead of bribing people to promote their own?
There are many questions you can ask to know if MS deserves to have a better image. Releasing a product that may or may not be technically better is no reason for a change about how this company is perceived, since lack of quality of their products is one of the least important things in the great scheme of things.
In Mexico, in the 80s, when our government defaulted and we had inflation of 150% my dad just used to shrug his shoulders and say "I'll find a way", which he dully did.
No questions the current situation is atrocious, but you don't help yourself by being too pessimistic (after all 9 out of 10 people in rich countries will keep their jobs, if we accept the most pesimistic forecasts, which is a substantial majority).
Now is when companies are going to realize that the chap in India with just one or two years experience can't replace the grumpy old Engineer that has 15.
Companies are idiotically haemorrhaging their corporate DNA, sooner or later they will realize the monumental mistake they have commited and those people with good skills will benefit when the pendulum swings back.
It is monumentally idiotic to suggest that a company can wait to fill a position for 2 years.
Allow me to put my anecdotal evidence forward: the position I used to hold was vacant for six months. I know this because I applied initially but I wasn't really commited to a move, which showed and I was not selected.
6 months later I was ready to move, and to my surprise, my position was still not filled, so I applied again, this time really showing what I am capable of, and got the job.
Once I was in the company we interviewed people for other positions and the average time to fill it was 3 months. 60% of the time the best applicants were foreigners.
This is the UK of course, but I know about companies in the US and Germany having the same problems.
I conducted interviews several times, and sorry to say but people from the US and UK were substandard, when we were lucky to get any local people actually applying for a job.
In Germany you can't get a programmer with advanced skills at all, thus the German government had to make a drive to import people with skills from India.
This is not a coincidence: people in developed countries are shying away from hard sciences (in the UK we have more photographers per capita than anywhere else, and the fastest rising occupation is hairdresser).
Just stoping foreigners that actually will spend money n the local economy is complete balloney.
The second part is that those mortgages wers sold sliced, securitized and then traded as more exotic financial instruments.
At the end nobody, not the bankers, not the regulators knew what the heck was going on.
If the securitization of mortgages had not been allowed, the problem would have been contained mainly to the US and even there it would have not dragged the whole economy.
Google for "Nuremberg defense" if you need further clarification on this regards.
So as a matter of fact International Law and US military regulations mandate that a soldiers disobey an order which may lead to commit a war crime (which torture is).
Sun's bread and butter has been with the sector of the economy that has being hit the worst by the financial meltdown: banks.
If Sun can hang on long enough for the Financial industry to be sorted out, they will be back because they have technical offerings that cheap hardware manufacturers and Linux providers can only dream about (ZFS, dtrace, SMF, self healing, M series, honestly, this is cool stuff that actually have the potential to save tons of money to big companies. Sun is perhaps the only hardware manufacturer trying to drive the amount of energy servers need to work down. Anybody that has been close to any seriously sized datacentre knows that this is vital for the future of computing. Cheap PCs that have not at their heart energy considerations may fail at the end to replace big iron for this only reason).
Can any MS based servers be configured to divide resources on "virtual" machines before the operating system is booted?
And then each one of those virtual machines can run a couple of dozen instances of a operating system?
And then can you assign on the fly CPUs, memory or I/O cards to any of your initial virtual machines?
Can actually any Linux machines do this?
You guys talk about desktops like if getting the latest version of Gnome working was the coolest thing regarding technology. That is not Sun's beef, Sun's realm is completely different, but clearly its main clients (specially banks) are being hit specially badly, but the stuff Sun does is tremendously cool, if you are technically skilled to understand what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Go on, lets go for protectionism, so all those cheap goods you enjoy nowadays will become more expensive.
Lets protect local companies, so ineficiency can be justly rewarded.
Lets stop progress, because there is no progress if it is not labeled American somewhere, somehow.
People here keep talking about HB1 people earning less, but I have not seen any eveidence to back this up.
WHy do you want to make ma laugh ....
I just can't believe my eyes when I see how many "if you are not teaching computing you don't need computers" replies are in this thread.
Go on people, welcome to the XXIst century!
Pretty much any subject can be tought more efficently with a computer, computers have the fundamental advantage that can be more engaging and interactive. As anybody with a minimal understanding of how learning works will tell you: feedback is essential in good learning, computers are the feedback tool of best resort.
Since when wiping out the OS became a solution to a problem?
Are they breaking the law?
Are they using open formats instead of bribing people to promote their own?
There are many questions you can ask to know if MS deserves to have a better image. Releasing a product that may or may not be technically better is no reason for a change about how this company is perceived, since lack of quality of their products is one of the least important things in the great scheme of things.
In Mexico, in the 80s, when our government defaulted and we had inflation of 150% my dad just used to shrug his shoulders and say "I'll find a way", which he dully did.
No questions the current situation is atrocious, but you don't help yourself by being too pessimistic (after all 9 out of 10 people in rich countries will keep their jobs, if we accept the most pesimistic forecasts, which is a substantial majority).
In my company they fired complete departments at once.
If you are really suggesting that such actions are not random then your are even more naive than your initial comment suggests.
Now is when companies are going to realize that the chap in India with just one or two years experience can't replace the grumpy old Engineer that has 15.
Companies are idiotically haemorrhaging their corporate DNA, sooner or later they will realize the monumental mistake they have commited and those people with good skills will benefit when the pendulum swings back.
Like what exactly?
Ha, ha, ha!
It is monumentally idiotic to suggest that a company can wait to fill a position for 2 years.
Allow me to put my anecdotal evidence forward: the position I used to hold was vacant for six months. I know this because I applied initially but I wasn't really commited to a move, which showed and I was not selected.
6 months later I was ready to move, and to my surprise, my position was still not filled, so I applied again, this time really showing what I am capable of, and got the job.
Once I was in the company we interviewed people for other positions and the average time to fill it was 3 months. 60% of the time the best applicants were foreigners.
This is the UK of course, but I know about companies in the US and Germany having the same problems.
That is my anecdotal evidence.
I conducted interviews several times, and sorry to say but people from the US and UK were substandard, when we were lucky to get any local people actually applying for a job.
In Germany you can't get a programmer with advanced skills at all, thus the German government had to make a drive to import people with skills from India.
This is not a coincidence: people in developed countries are shying away from hard sciences (in the UK we have more photographers per capita than anywhere else, and the fastest rising occupation is hairdresser).
Just stoping foreigners that actually will spend money n the local economy is complete balloney.
And we all know performance monitoring of human beings is a bloody exact science.
Just a guess....
Read about the Mississippi Company and John Law for your amusement.
And what about Enron?
The second part is that those mortgages wers sold sliced, securitized and then traded as more exotic financial instruments.
At the end nobody, not the bankers, not the regulators knew what the heck was going on.
If the securitization of mortgages had not been allowed, the problem would have been contained mainly to the US and even there it would have not dragged the whole economy.
It was Rumsfeld and Bush against the rest of the Civilized world.
What a fucking debate it was....
And where do the Geneva convention and banalities like that enter the picture?
Laws, regulations, manuals.
And you are supposed to uphold them.
It is part of your training as a soldier.
If the orders are to kill innocent people, regrettably I would have to refuse.
If the order is to paint a fence pink I think I can live with that one.
There is no moral dilemma, just people that don't understand the importance to uphold human rights and humane values.
Starting with international treaties like Versailles (unjust as it was) and then, once the war started, many other conventions.
They knew it, they were even proud about it, many lower ranked people agreed with this and happily collaborated.
There was no moral relativism, they knew they were doing wrong things and decided to push on that path.
... has been utterly and completely discredited.
Google for "Nuremberg defense" if you need further clarification on this regards.
So as a matter of fact International Law and US military regulations mandate that a soldiers disobey an order which may lead to commit a war crime (which torture is).
The realms of each company are not comparable.
Sun's bread and butter has been with the sector of the economy that has being hit the worst by the financial meltdown: banks.
If Sun can hang on long enough for the Financial industry to be sorted out, they will be back because they have technical offerings that cheap hardware manufacturers and Linux providers can only dream about (ZFS, dtrace, SMF, self healing, M series, honestly, this is cool stuff that actually have the potential to save tons of money to big companies. Sun is perhaps the only hardware manufacturer trying to drive the amount of energy servers need to work down. Anybody that has been close to any seriously sized datacentre knows that this is vital for the future of computing. Cheap PCs that have not at their heart energy considerations may fail at the end to replace big iron for this only reason).
Can any MS based servers be configured to divide resources on "virtual" machines before the operating system is booted?
And then each one of those virtual machines can run a couple of dozen instances of a operating system?
And then can you assign on the fly CPUs, memory or I/O cards to any of your initial virtual machines?
Can actually any Linux machines do this?
You guys talk about desktops like if getting the latest version of Gnome working was the coolest thing regarding technology. That is not Sun's beef, Sun's realm is completely different, but clearly its main clients (specially banks) are being hit specially badly, but the stuff Sun does is tremendously cool, if you are technically skilled to understand what it is.
That is all what you need to know about the imbecile.