Re:The question isn't just "are Macs expensive"
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Mac Tax, Dell Tax, HP Tax
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· Score: 0, Redundant
"Overpriced Mac" can mean more than "the hardware added up doesn't equal the pricetag"... it can also mean "it's twice as much as you need to spend for what you're going to do with it."
I'm sure milages vary on this subject but IMHO it is sometimes worth paying extra. I am willing to pay extra for the *NIX operating system on the Mac or to pay extra for a computer because it's Linux certified, guaranteeing that there will be high quality Linux drivers available for *ALL* of the onboard hardware. I prefer not working with Windows any more than I necessarily have to, but I also want out-of-the-box functionality and I am willing to pay a premium to get that. Another point is the amount of service you get and the length of time the product is supported. I recently reinstalled Windows XP on an ancient IBM ThinkPad laptop that shipped originally with Windows 98 installed. The Lenovo website still has drivers and software for this museum piece that turned out to work with the latest Windows XP service pack. I also recently re-installed a no-name laptop that, theoretically at least, should have offered much greater value for money than a comparable Lenovo. The drivers for the audio card, the network card, the wifi card, the modem and the touch pad were nowhere to be found on the manufacturer's web site. According to their tech-support they don't even support this model any more. The funny thing is that the no-name machine is less than half as old as the IBM. You do sometimes get more if you pay more. That may not always be the case but then again it is up to you to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes what people are asking you to pay for a given level of product and service quality.
Is this anything like that time they tricked us with "To Serve Man"?
Yes and no, it's not a cookbook it's an illustrated guide on how to manage Kanamit slave-camps. It has a particularly good chapter on the employment of slave labour in spice-mining. What you need to read it is glasses with dilithium crystal spectral lenses and adamantium rims. You can buy those from most any online store on the pan galactic subspace inter-web. Just be careful not to stand to close to any sources of high frequency electromagnetic fields, the magnetic eddies in the dilithium lenses can distort the spectral signature of the text.
You impose sanctions, they call in that debt. And who else do you really think is going to loan you the money to pay that back?
The US/China relationship is not as much of a black-and-white situation as nationalistic extremists both in the USA and China would like it to be. If the Chinese 'call in' all of that debt at once in some way, shape or form, there is no way the USA could pay up. Effectively the US would have to default, i.e. welch on the debt. That would wipe out an awful lot of hard earned Chinese wealth. Some of the noises coming out of Beijing lately only confirm that the Chinese are getting nervous even at the mere suggestion of the possibility of a US default. Another thing to consider is that the Chinese are very dependent on exports to the USA and it's NATO allies who are likely to eventually follow the USA's lead, however grudgingly, in any major conflict of any kind with China. If the Chinese were to 'call in' this debt it would be self defeating exercise, as likely to harm the Chinese them selves as much as it would harm the USA. The economies of these countries are very intertwined.
So in other words, the "Microsoft is opposing such a Wonderful Thing (tm)" is all speculation?
Yes you might justifiably call that FUD but In view of past experience with Microsoft, I'd say this sort of speculation is a lot more likely to turn out to be true than if we were dealing with any other randomly selected evil mega-corp. Micosoft is sitting on a hugely profitable dominant market share in a number of areas. If they lose a significant proportion of that market share they will find it significantly harder to regain that market share than it was to lose it. I'd say it's a safe bet that executives@microsoft.com spend a lot of time these days being paranoid about repeating past mistakes like when they slept through the search engine revolution and suddenly woke up to find that Google had mushroomed into a dangerous rival in a key market segment almost over night. To add insult to injury Google had actually achieved a dominant market share in that very important market segment and has proven frustratingly capable of defending it.
It's because the leadership of the USA realised years ago that if such laws were passed the subsequent class-action lawsuits might bankrupt Microsoft.... they just couldn't go and do that to one of the nation's biggest tech companies, now could they?
Today I would also do the homework and add "direct FOSS replacements" for the software in question as much as possible. MS server -> CentOS + Samba; MS OFfice -> OpenOffice, and so on. I would create a roadmap to get everyone legal and ask for approval.
Above all, be professional, curteous, and politically astute. It won't do to create a "fear reflex" where you get shitcanned and blackballed. You may want to have a closed-door conversation first and ask to see if management would like to see the roadmap you've prepared.
That's pretty good advice. Diplomatically explaining to them the consequences of a BSA visit is a good place to start and then offer a number of alternative roadmaps to a legal setup. Be sure to give them both the MS based roadmap and the FOSS roadmap (or a mixed one) if you decide to go in that direction in an attempt to save costs and be *honest* about the pro's and cons of both. FOSS evangelism won't get you very far with PHB types, they respond to bottom lines. You can save costs on FOSS in one area compared to MS solutions only to find the FOSS solution can be more expensive than comparable MS products in others ways. Of course make sure there is a paper trail, covering your ass is the most important thing in case you do get a BSA visit. If your PHBs do decide to keep using pirated software you will at least be on record as having tried to fix the problem.
Of course, the USA isn't doing too badly (relatively speaking) at controlling pollutants, although we're not doing especially well, either. Far better than China or India, AFAIK, although I'm not happy that my country is "better than the worst"!
The problem with the USA's and the EU's record on pollutants is that they tend to solve the problem by shipping pollutants to other parts of the world or they just dump them in the ocean. There is a famous plastic patch the size of Texas in the Pacific ocean between California and Hawaii. Plastic is way to overused and totally under-recycled. Is it really necessary for every candy bar to be packaged in a plastic wrapper? Does every pair of cookies in an Oreo package have to be packaged in their own little plastic pouch? What's the deal with single use plastic bottles? I don't remember my candy tasting any worse when I was a kid and that stuff was sold wrapped in paper or the Coca Cola tasting any different when it shipped in glass bottles. Another major pollutant problem is agricultural runoff. It isn't very visible to Joe Sixpack from the porch of his suburban home and it isn't highly publicised but that stuff can cause havoc. The problem with Algae bloom is well known in the Baltic Sea. To cite a US example, agricultural runoff from the Mississippi River creates a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico which in 2002 measured some 8000 square miles, that's an area bigger than the state of Massachusetts. Keep in mind that this is just due to fertilisers. We haven't even begun to consider the effect of agricultural pesticides on the marine ecosystems and we all know how much faith the agricultural community, goaded on by the chemical industry, places in the lavish application of pesticides. Of course none these problems are unique to the USA, most countries put way to little effort into recycling plastic or putting some money into research into biodegradable plastic substitutes and very few of them are ready to do anything about agricultural runoff.
9) Not understanding permissions is why you are running into these problems. Probably because you tend to resort to running things with root privileges instead of figuring out why the permissions are incorrect.
Unix permissions are one thing I'd never complain about being terribly complicated, IMHO they are a lot less complex than NTFS permissions. I have come across cases of NTFS permission chains so complex that the 'Effective Permissions' resolver in Windows failed to correctly resolve permissions on a directory (it used to be buried inside a set of menus: Right click Folder->Properties->Advanced button->Security tab->Effective Permissions tab, dunno where it is in Windows 7).The fact that you even need an 'Effective Permissions' resolver seems mildly scary to me.
The expectation is that you already know how to learn languages. The issue with only learning C, C++, and Java is that they all use a related syntax and they are all statically typed. This is not enough variety. I would suggest that before you hit the real world you learn at least one language that isn't the same. Python, Ruby are excellent choices at this time. Lisp, Haskell, Erlang are also possibilities if you'd like to explore functional programming.
But C, C++, Java and C# are the most commonly used and once one has good command over them one is that much more hireable. As you pointed out these languages are all related and IMHO the best way to solve the depth-of-knowledge problem he mentioned is not to specialise. Go out and get a couple of books on general OOP and Software design that doesn't tie you to a specific language but that teaches you OOP and general Software design principles on a higher, language independent level, this is one of my favorites. Once you have that kind of understanding you can switch between the above mentioned languages relatively easily. After that is done the most important thing is to get experience. This is IMHO best done (and I'm sure other people's milage varies) by getting an entry level job and either joining a FOSS project for additional experience or write a few small commercial apps of some sort. If you take the latter route the important thing isn't so much, say, writing a killer app for the iPhone or Android that will make you a millionaire over night as much as it is simply to establish a track record you can point at when applying for a job. If you make a few bucks along the way that doesn't hurt either. The beauty of joining FOSS projects or setting up your own is that even if all you can get in this economy is a job flipping burgers at McDonald's you can still build credible experience in your spare time.
Why would you assume people lie on their resumes? You may, but most people don't. Don't get caught at it though: that's pretty much a definitive career ending move. And the incompetence of a technologically illiterate HR person doesn't constitute a "lie" either. That's something called a mistake. Or a typo.
I second that. I have never lied on a resume or even padded mine slightly. I have, however, been asked to an interview more than once by people who then proceeded to ask me for details about my experience with things that weren't on my resume. I will never understand why employers do that, I don't like it when people waste my time. I can only assume they were to lazy to read my resume. What I have experience with is on my resume, what I don't have experience with isn't and all they have to do is read the f*cking thing. Many HR people and head-hunters are a waste of space. I was recently asked by a head-hunter to put certain claims of experience in my resume. Even after I explicitly told him I had no experience with that technology, he wanted me to put it on my resume anyway so it would be easier for him to "sell my resume" to an employer. This, I resoloutely refused to do. In my time I have witnessed a couple of people get caught who outright lied about their experience and knowledge on a resume or in an interview and let me tell you, that's one thing I don't ever want to experience. I cannot even imagine how that feels. Never mind the fact that ever afterwards you'd have to explain why you were only at a certain company for a couple of months and why you left them. Even if you tell another lie, get away with it and get this new job you still have to worry that some PHB meets somebody from that other company on the golf course, they start chatting, and you are screwed anyway. A lie becomes a web of lies and eventually, when you lose track of what lies you have told to which people... that's when you get caught.
By god, back then the electrons were so thick they had to use thick 8 gauge wiring to make anything work.
Some years ago I waked into a computer store to buy a hard drive. Along one of the walls was a series of glass displays containing a small selection of vintage computer equipment. One of the displays contained a gigantic object that looked like it would take two men to shift. It consisted of a really massive looking cast metal casing out of which protruded some disks, arms, some clumsy looking circuit boards and the thing was powered by a quite sizeable 220 volt electric motor of the type one is used to seeing attached to a really big fat lumber saw. I had to take a few steps back before I realised the thing was a (8 GB as it turned out) hard drive from the early 80s and not a piece of industrial machinery with it's panelling removed. I walked out of that place with a 20 Gb hard drive in my hand. Kind of makes one marvel over how far we have come in terms of miniaturisation.
Besides, I don't see how your comment can apply to an end user. IE7 is the standard that the web is coded to. Sure, I complain about it, but only when I'm doing web development. For surfing the web, IE7 is fine because everything is made to work with it.
Hmmmm... For years now my IE use has been limited to my parent's Windows box where the history list contains little more than the Microsoft Updates site and getfirefox.net. Apart from a handful of minor glitches I don't have any problems with broken web-sites while using non MS browsers that are anything like as bad as the totally useless IE only sites we had a few years ago. I think that IE's competitors have now reached a degree of market share where you can't ignore them anymore. Every web-application I have worked on over the last few years was tested on both IE and Firefox and most of them were also tested for Safari. Almost all of the web-applications and web-sites I use are certified for Firefox as well as IE these days and even those that aren't certified work pretty much flawlessly on Firefox and even Safari 4 Public Beta anyway. The last holdout among my favourite web-sites to assure complete Firefox and 'limited' Safari compliancy was a local news site that caved in to popular demand about two or three years ago, admittedly this was to some degree thanks to the Flip4Mac plug-in which, slow and bloated as it is, is still a lot better than WMP for Mac was.
But not everyone WANTS to learn how to use apt. Most people want to turn it on, click an icon, and have something install. Not have to add a repository, update the package listings, install it, etc.
Writing for a clueless user and telling them how to do that only works for non-lazy clueless users. Which are somewhat rare. Most clueless people are clueless from laziness.
Lazy, clueless? Why does simplicity always have to equated with stupidity or lazyness?
Download software you want to install.
Drag said software to a main "Applications" folder marked with a big fat distinctive icon.
Enjoy.
That's how easy it can be. Why put up with repositories, RPM files, dependency hell, etc... when installation can be that simple? When it comes to complicated, most users are defeated even by Windows install packages. Sacrilegious as it may be of me to say this Windows install packages are often less complicated to use than Linux RPM packages can be. The poor UI design of many Linux package managers doesn't help either. What Linux needs, and this has been pointed out by more people than me, is a simple well thought out installation mechanism that is used by all Linux distributions. It would have to be two fold, firstly you could retain an RPM like package system for the non-consumer oriented 'professional' software. For GUI apps, which is what most of your "clueless and lazy" consumers are installing anyway, it is hard to beat the OS X concept of a drag-and-drop application-bundle for ease of use.
It doesn't take even a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see that, if you buy a three year contract from vender 'A' and sell it with an annual maintenance fee to customer 'B', you have in fact become a creditor for customer 'B'. It should therefore come as no surprise to these MCPs that, yes, Microsoft really does want them to pay for the contracts they purchased from Microsoft. I can't imagine anyone at Microsoft stuck a gun to their heads and said, "Sell Microsoft software contracts or die." If you dance with the devil, and willingly did business with Microsoft, than you'd better be prepared to pay for the software contracts you purchased from the company.
You must have noticed the financial party we have been having for the last few years. Why should MCPs be any more sensible than the rest of us? Being sensible wasn't fashionable. The MPCs, like almost everybody else, have been busy buying into the mass delusion that boom lasts forever and recession is a thing of the past. When people are partying anybody being sensible isn't listened to and that usually doesn't change until the partygoers get a major reality check such as being arrested for drunk driving. In Iceland that reality check came in October 2008 in the rest of the world it will probably sink in more slowly.
Perhaps I'm just not enough of a Microsoft-hater, but I fail to see the 'skull fucking' here. What I do see is an angry rant from, I assume, someone who's likely receiving calls from bill collectors in Redmond. I'm sorry that MCP thing didn't work out for you, and if you want to switch from plugging Microsoft products to promoting Open Source Software, than more power to you. But please don't ask me to overlook the poor business decision you made in becoming a de-facto creditor to your customers. If you don't like the way Microsoft does business in Iceland, you don't have to join their game. Take your marbles and go play in some other park with rules more suitable to your taste.
What usually happens in a situation like this is that the distributor and the supplier reach an agreement where some of the debt is perhaps written off and the rest is paid back according to some sort of payment plan. The idea being that you as a manufacturer of a product are better off taking a hit which isn't good but results in the survivial of the network of distributors that you have built up over decades. If you don't do this the competition will swoop down and soak up your market share faster than you can say "negative EBITA". With a whole slew of IT people being unemployed you can rest assured that if Microsoft starts killing off MCPs, dozens of FOSS start-ups will pop up like mushrooms on a forest floor over the next few years to take their place and compete with Microsoft. These MCPs are companies with massive experience in selling MS products, servicing them and lobbying government into buying MS products instead of deploying FOSS. For Microsoft the party is over for the time being just like it is for their customers. Over the last few years Microsoft's corporate customers have become accustomed to burning through borrowed money as if it was firewood but over the foreseeable future that will change. Businesses will be lucky if they can get any credit at all and that, more than anything else, will make FOSS a more attractive option. I am not saying that FOSS will take over the European software market but Microsoft could lose some ground if they don't play their cards right.
If the gaming industry was like Hollywood, you would have to sleep with some producer, just to get your foot in the door.
Can you really see Hollywood embracing a distribution system that makes it easy for independent studios to reach consumers?
The flaw in that plan is that nobody wants to have sex with computer nerds. Perhaps, in exchange for allowing them to get their foot in the door, the evil game industry executives can demand sex with the nerd's girlfrien...... oh wait... never mind....
There are also reports of schools installing CCTV cameras in UK classrooms to monitor both teachers and pupils. Very depressing stuff, that this is even considered, let alone allowed to go on.
All I can say is, I'm glad I went to school 10+ years ago. I wouldn't want to learn in such an invasive environment. It's disgusting, and those who think it's appropriate should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
It seems to me that the UK is becoming a bigger surveillance society than East Germany was.
Just because it's on paper and signed, doesn't mean it's enforcible in court.
Yes, but just because something isn't enforceable in court that doesn't mean it can't be used to bludgeon somebody into submission. Lawsuits are expensive. Theoretically justice is the same for everybody but in practice only the rich can afford a court case if it drags on for too long so de-facto the justice system mostly favours the rich.
I guess it's not even fashionable on slashdot to read the comment you are replying to;) hehe.
You said it would be 'nice' which implies you could live without it, even on the server side. I was trying to make the point that a powerful shell on a server or scripting ability for an admin is not optional it is required.:-)
What do you think will happen when all external media starts using alternative formatting?
That won't happen because Microsoft controls most of the PC market and they won't support anything that threatens any part of their monopoly. Try mounting a HFS volume on an out-of-the-box Windows system.
I think the original comment was directed at Windows Server users not Windows consumer desktop users (unless the user of that consumer desktop is a developer or an admin). I'll agree that most consumer desktop users don't need a shell. I may be a developer these days but I have been an administrator for Linux, Solaris, AIX, several lesser known incarnations of *NIX, Windows NT, Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2003. I can tell you that there are times when you really miss the command-line power of the Unix shell on Windows servers. There are tasks you simply can't do on a Windows server except through the GUI which is nice if you don't have to do it often but when you have, say... a project where you have to do the same set of tasks a few thousand times in a row and want to complete this project in a sane amount of time scripting is a must. The only alternative for solving some such problems even on Windows 2003 is to write a C# program because you can't solve the problem by scripting. Writing a C# program is something I wouldn't expect an average Windows admin to be able to do anymore than I require a Unix admin to be a seasoned Java developer. IMHO an average Windows Server admin or Unix admin should be seasoned at scripting but I wouldn't expect either to be seasoned at C# or Java programming, VB or Perl would be good though. I am not prepared to take a server OS seriously unless I can do more on it's command-line than I can do with the slick GUI management tools.
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"Overpriced Mac" can mean more than "the hardware added up doesn't equal the pricetag" ... it can also mean "it's twice as much as you need to spend for what you're going to do with it."
I'm sure milages vary on this subject but IMHO it is sometimes worth paying extra. I am willing to pay extra for the *NIX operating system on the Mac or to pay extra for a computer because it's Linux certified, guaranteeing that there will be high quality Linux drivers available for *ALL* of the onboard hardware. I prefer not working with Windows any more than I necessarily have to, but I also want out-of-the-box functionality and I am willing to pay a premium to get that. Another point is the amount of service you get and the length of time the product is supported. I recently reinstalled Windows XP on an ancient IBM ThinkPad laptop that shipped originally with Windows 98 installed. The Lenovo website still has drivers and software for this museum piece that turned out to work with the latest Windows XP service pack. I also recently re-installed a no-name laptop that, theoretically at least, should have offered much greater value for money than a comparable Lenovo. The drivers for the audio card, the network card, the wifi card, the modem and the touch pad were nowhere to be found on the manufacturer's web site. According to their tech-support they don't even support this model any more. The funny thing is that the no-name machine is less than half as old as the IBM. You do sometimes get more if you pay more. That may not always be the case but then again it is up to you to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes what people are asking you to pay for a given level of product and service quality.
Is this anything like that time they tricked us with "To Serve Man"?
Yes and no, it's not a cookbook it's an illustrated guide on how to manage Kanamit slave-camps. It has a particularly good chapter on the employment of slave labour in spice-mining. What you need to read it is glasses with dilithium crystal spectral lenses and adamantium rims. You can buy those from most any online store on the pan galactic subspace inter-web. Just be careful not to stand to close to any sources of high frequency electromagnetic fields, the magnetic eddies in the dilithium lenses can distort the spectral signature of the text.
Perhaps, next time, you might not want to impose sanctions on the government that holds by far the largest share of the US debt:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Foreign_Holders_of_United_States_Treasury_Securities-percent_share.gif
You impose sanctions, they call in that debt. And who else do you really think is going to loan you the money to pay that back?
The US/China relationship is not as much of a black-and-white situation as nationalistic extremists both in the USA and China would like it to be. If the Chinese 'call in' all of that debt at once in some way, shape or form, there is no way the USA could pay up. Effectively the US would have to default, i.e. welch on the debt. That would wipe out an awful lot of hard earned Chinese wealth. Some of the noises coming out of Beijing lately only confirm that the Chinese are getting nervous even at the mere suggestion of the possibility of a US default. Another thing to consider is that the Chinese are very dependent on exports to the USA and it's NATO allies who are likely to eventually follow the USA's lead, however grudgingly, in any major conflict of any kind with China. If the Chinese were to 'call in' this debt it would be self defeating exercise, as likely to harm the Chinese them selves as much as it would harm the USA. The economies of these countries are very intertwined.
So in other words, the "Microsoft is opposing such a Wonderful Thing (tm)" is all speculation?
Yes you might justifiably call that FUD but In view of past experience with Microsoft, I'd say this sort of speculation is a lot more likely to turn out to be true than if we were dealing with any other randomly selected evil mega-corp. Micosoft is sitting on a hugely profitable dominant market share in a number of areas. If they lose a significant proportion of that market share they will find it significantly harder to regain that market share than it was to lose it. I'd say it's a safe bet that executives@microsoft.com spend a lot of time these days being paranoid about repeating past mistakes like when they slept through the search engine revolution and suddenly woke up to find that Google had mushroomed into a dangerous rival in a key market segment almost over night. To add insult to injury Google had actually achieved a dominant market share in that very important market segment and has proven frustratingly capable of defending it.
Why can't you sue a software company if you suffer a loss due to poor security in their product?
*Can't...stop...myself...must...don...tinfoil...hat*
It's because the leadership of the USA realised years ago that if such laws were passed the subsequent class-action lawsuits might bankrupt Microsoft.... they just couldn't go and do that to one of the nation's biggest tech companies, now could they?
Today I would also do the homework and add "direct FOSS replacements" for the software in question as much as possible. MS server -> CentOS + Samba; MS OFfice -> OpenOffice, and so on. I would create a roadmap to get everyone legal and ask for approval.
Above all, be professional, curteous, and politically astute. It won't do to create a "fear reflex" where you get shitcanned and blackballed. You may want to have a closed-door conversation first and ask to see if management would like to see the roadmap you've prepared.
That's pretty good advice. Diplomatically explaining to them the consequences of a BSA visit is a good place to start and then offer a number of alternative roadmaps to a legal setup. Be sure to give them both the MS based roadmap and the FOSS roadmap (or a mixed one) if you decide to go in that direction in an attempt to save costs and be *honest* about the pro's and cons of both. FOSS evangelism won't get you very far with PHB types, they respond to bottom lines. You can save costs on FOSS in one area compared to MS solutions only to find the FOSS solution can be more expensive than comparable MS products in others ways. Of course make sure there is a paper trail, covering your ass is the most important thing in case you do get a BSA visit. If your PHBs do decide to keep using pirated software you will at least be on record as having tried to fix the problem.
Of course, the USA isn't doing too badly (relatively speaking) at controlling pollutants, although we're not doing especially well, either. Far better than China or India, AFAIK, although I'm not happy that my country is "better than the worst"!
The problem with the USA's and the EU's record on pollutants is that they tend to solve the problem by shipping pollutants to other parts of the world or they just dump them in the ocean. There is a famous plastic patch the size of Texas in the Pacific ocean between California and Hawaii. Plastic is way to overused and totally under-recycled. Is it really necessary for every candy bar to be packaged in a plastic wrapper? Does every pair of cookies in an Oreo package have to be packaged in their own little plastic pouch? What's the deal with single use plastic bottles? I don't remember my candy tasting any worse when I was a kid and that stuff was sold wrapped in paper or the Coca Cola tasting any different when it shipped in glass bottles. Another major pollutant problem is agricultural runoff. It isn't very visible to Joe Sixpack from the porch of his suburban home and it isn't highly publicised but that stuff can cause havoc. The problem with Algae bloom is well known in the Baltic Sea. To cite a US example, agricultural runoff from the Mississippi River creates a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico which in 2002 measured some 8000 square miles, that's an area bigger than the state of Massachusetts. Keep in mind that this is just due to fertilisers. We haven't even begun to consider the effect of agricultural pesticides on the marine ecosystems and we all know how much faith the agricultural community, goaded on by the chemical industry, places in the lavish application of pesticides. Of course none these problems are unique to the USA, most countries put way to little effort into recycling plastic or putting some money into research into biodegradable plastic substitutes and very few of them are ready to do anything about agricultural runoff.
9) Not understanding permissions is why you are running into these problems. Probably because you tend to resort to running things with root privileges instead of figuring out why the permissions are incorrect.
Unix permissions are one thing I'd never complain about being terribly complicated, IMHO they are a lot less complex than NTFS permissions. I have come across cases of NTFS permission chains so complex that the 'Effective Permissions' resolver in Windows failed to correctly resolve permissions on a directory (it used to be buried inside a set of menus: Right click Folder->Properties->Advanced button->Security tab->Effective Permissions tab, dunno where it is in Windows 7).The fact that you even need an 'Effective Permissions' resolver seems mildly scary to me.
Dell's Smartphone Rejected -- Too Dull
Why don't they just change the 'o' in their logo to a 'u'?
What a pathetic little shit you must be in real life.
This, from an Anonymous Coward...
The expectation is that you already know how to learn languages. The issue with only learning C, C++, and Java is that they all use a related syntax and they are all statically typed. This is not enough variety. I would suggest that before you hit the real world you learn at least one language that isn't the same. Python, Ruby are excellent choices at this time. Lisp, Haskell, Erlang are also possibilities if you'd like to explore functional programming.
But C, C++, Java and C# are the most commonly used and once one has good command over them one is that much more hireable. As you pointed out these languages are all related and IMHO the best way to solve the depth-of-knowledge problem he mentioned is not to specialise. Go out and get a couple of books on general OOP and Software design that doesn't tie you to a specific language but that teaches you OOP and general Software design principles on a higher, language independent level, this is one of my favorites. Once you have that kind of understanding you can switch between the above mentioned languages relatively easily. After that is done the most important thing is to get experience. This is IMHO best done (and I'm sure other people's milage varies) by getting an entry level job and either joining a FOSS project for additional experience or write a few small commercial apps of some sort. If you take the latter route the important thing isn't so much, say, writing a killer app for the iPhone or Android that will make you a millionaire over night as much as it is simply to establish a track record you can point at when applying for a job. If you make a few bucks along the way that doesn't hurt either. The beauty of joining FOSS projects or setting up your own is that even if all you can get in this economy is a job flipping burgers at McDonald's you can still build credible experience in your spare time.
Why would you assume people lie on their resumes? You may, but most people don't. Don't get caught at it though: that's pretty much a definitive career ending move. And the incompetence of a technologically illiterate HR person doesn't constitute a "lie" either. That's something called a mistake. Or a typo.
I second that. I have never lied on a resume or even padded mine slightly. I have, however, been asked to an interview more than once by people who then proceeded to ask me for details about my experience with things that weren't on my resume. I will never understand why employers do that, I don't like it when people waste my time. I can only assume they were to lazy to read my resume. What I have experience with is on my resume, what I don't have experience with isn't and all they have to do is read the f*cking thing. Many HR people and head-hunters are a waste of space. I was recently asked by a head-hunter to put certain claims of experience in my resume. Even after I explicitly told him I had no experience with that technology, he wanted me to put it on my resume anyway so it would be easier for him to "sell my resume" to an employer. This, I resoloutely refused to do. In my time I have witnessed a couple of people get caught who outright lied about their experience and knowledge on a resume or in an interview and let me tell you, that's one thing I don't ever want to experience. I cannot even imagine how that feels. Never mind the fact that ever afterwards you'd have to explain why you were only at a certain company for a couple of months and why you left them. Even if you tell another lie, get away with it and get this new job you still have to worry that some PHB meets somebody from that other company on the golf course, they start chatting, and you are screwed anyway. A lie becomes a web of lies and eventually, when you lose track of what lies you have told to which people... that's when you get caught.
And that concludes my rant...
google takes the apple route and goes "hey look at teh shiny!!!! wooooo!"
As opposed to what? Emulating Dell: "Hey look at the big clumsy gray slab!!! It's Microsoft Vista® enabled! WOOOOOOO!"
My one and a half year old vaio SZ weighs less than that (about 3 pounds)...
FWIIW so does the MacBook Air this thing is supposed to trump.
By god, back then the electrons were so thick they had to use thick 8 gauge wiring to make anything work.
Some years ago I waked into a computer store to buy a hard drive. Along one of the walls was a series of glass displays containing a small selection of vintage computer equipment. One of the displays contained a gigantic object that looked like it would take two men to shift. It consisted of a really massive looking cast metal casing out of which protruded some disks, arms, some clumsy looking circuit boards and the thing was powered by a quite sizeable 220 volt electric motor of the type one is used to seeing attached to a really big fat lumber saw. I had to take a few steps back before I realised the thing was a (8 GB as it turned out) hard drive from the early 80s and not a piece of industrial machinery with it's panelling removed. I walked out of that place with a 20 Gb hard drive in my hand. Kind of makes one marvel over how far we have come in terms of miniaturisation.
Besides, I don't see how your comment can apply to an end user. IE7 is the standard that the web is coded to. Sure, I complain about it, but only when I'm doing web development. For surfing the web, IE7 is fine because everything is made to work with it.
Hmmmm... For years now my IE use has been limited to my parent's Windows box where the history list contains little more than the Microsoft Updates site and getfirefox.net. Apart from a handful of minor glitches I don't have any problems with broken web-sites while using non MS browsers that are anything like as bad as the totally useless IE only sites we had a few years ago. I think that IE's competitors have now reached a degree of market share where you can't ignore them anymore. Every web-application I have worked on over the last few years was tested on both IE and Firefox and most of them were also tested for Safari. Almost all of the web-applications and web-sites I use are certified for Firefox as well as IE these days and even those that aren't certified work pretty much flawlessly on Firefox and even Safari 4 Public Beta anyway. The last holdout among my favourite web-sites to assure complete Firefox and 'limited' Safari compliancy was a local news site that caved in to popular demand about two or three years ago, admittedly this was to some degree thanks to the Flip4Mac plug-in which, slow and bloated as it is, is still a lot better than WMP for Mac was.
But not everyone WANTS to learn how to use apt. Most people want to turn it on, click an icon, and have something install. Not have to add a repository, update the package listings, install it, etc.
Writing for a clueless user and telling them how to do that only works for non-lazy clueless users. Which are somewhat rare. Most clueless people are clueless from laziness.
Lazy, clueless? Why does simplicity always have to equated with stupidity or lazyness?
That's how easy it can be. Why put up with repositories, RPM files, dependency hell, etc... when installation can be that simple? When it comes to complicated, most users are defeated even by Windows install packages. Sacrilegious as it may be of me to say this Windows install packages are often less complicated to use than Linux RPM packages can be. The poor UI design of many Linux package managers doesn't help either. What Linux needs, and this has been pointed out by more people than me, is a simple well thought out installation mechanism that is used by all Linux distributions. It would have to be two fold, firstly you could retain an RPM like package system for the non-consumer oriented 'professional' software. For GUI apps, which is what most of your "clueless and lazy" consumers are installing anyway, it is hard to beat the OS X concept of a drag-and-drop application-bundle for ease of use.
It doesn't take even a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see that, if you buy a three year contract from vender 'A' and sell it with an annual maintenance fee to customer 'B', you have in fact become a creditor for customer 'B'. It should therefore come as no surprise to these MCPs that, yes, Microsoft really does want them to pay for the contracts they purchased from Microsoft. I can't imagine anyone at Microsoft stuck a gun to their heads and said, "Sell Microsoft software contracts or die." If you dance with the devil, and willingly did business with Microsoft, than you'd better be prepared to pay for the software contracts you purchased from the company.
You must have noticed the financial party we have been having for the last few years. Why should MCPs be any more sensible than the rest of us? Being sensible wasn't fashionable. The MPCs, like almost everybody else, have been busy buying into the mass delusion that boom lasts forever and recession is a thing of the past. When people are partying anybody being sensible isn't listened to and that usually doesn't change until the partygoers get a major reality check such as being arrested for drunk driving. In Iceland that reality check came in October 2008 in the rest of the world it will probably sink in more slowly.
Perhaps I'm just not enough of a Microsoft-hater, but I fail to see the 'skull fucking' here. What I do see is an angry rant from, I assume, someone who's likely receiving calls from bill collectors in Redmond. I'm sorry that MCP thing didn't work out for you, and if you want to switch from plugging Microsoft products to promoting Open Source Software, than more power to you. But please don't ask me to overlook the poor business decision you made in becoming a de-facto creditor to your customers. If you don't like the way Microsoft does business in Iceland, you don't have to join their game. Take your marbles and go play in some other park with rules more suitable to your taste.
What usually happens in a situation like this is that the distributor and the supplier reach an agreement where some of the debt is perhaps written off and the rest is paid back according to some sort of payment plan. The idea being that you as a manufacturer of a product are better off taking a hit which isn't good but results in the survivial of the network of distributors that you have built up over decades. If you don't do this the competition will swoop down and soak up your market share faster than you can say "negative EBITA". With a whole slew of IT people being unemployed you can rest assured that if Microsoft starts killing off MCPs, dozens of FOSS start-ups will pop up like mushrooms on a forest floor over the next few years to take their place and compete with Microsoft. These MCPs are companies with massive experience in selling MS products, servicing them and lobbying government into buying MS products instead of deploying FOSS. For Microsoft the party is over for the time being just like it is for their customers. Over the last few years Microsoft's corporate customers have become accustomed to burning through borrowed money as if it was firewood but over the foreseeable future that will change. Businesses will be lucky if they can get any credit at all and that, more than anything else, will make FOSS a more attractive option. I am not saying that FOSS will take over the European software market but Microsoft could lose some ground if they don't play their cards right.
I presume CEOs aren't really politicians, although they usually own a few ;-P
Actually, in this economy, most of us can only afford to rent a politician once in a while.
If the gaming industry was like Hollywood, you would have to sleep with some producer, just to get your foot in the door.
Can you really see Hollywood embracing a distribution system that makes it easy for independent studios to reach consumers?
The flaw in that plan is that nobody wants to have sex with computer nerds. Perhaps, in exchange for allowing them to get their foot in the door, the evil game industry executives can demand sex with the nerd's girlfrien...... oh wait... never mind....
There are also reports of schools installing CCTV cameras in UK classrooms to monitor both teachers and pupils. Very depressing stuff, that this is even considered, let alone allowed to go on.
All I can say is, I'm glad I went to school 10+ years ago. I wouldn't want to learn in such an invasive environment. It's disgusting, and those who think it's appropriate should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
It seems to me that the UK is becoming a bigger surveillance society than East Germany was.
Just because it's on paper and signed, doesn't mean it's enforcible in court.
Yes, but just because something isn't enforceable in court that doesn't mean it can't be used to bludgeon somebody into submission. Lawsuits are expensive. Theoretically justice is the same for everybody but in practice only the rich can afford a court case if it drags on for too long so de-facto the justice system mostly favours the rich.
I guess it's not even fashionable on slashdot to read the comment you are replying to ;) hehe.
You said it would be 'nice' which implies you could live without it, even on the server side. I was trying to make the point that a powerful shell on a server or scripting ability for an admin is not optional it is required. :-)
What do you think will happen when all external media starts using alternative formatting?
That won't happen because Microsoft controls most of the PC market and they won't support anything that threatens any part of their monopoly. Try mounting a HFS volume on an out-of-the-box Windows system.
Because most Windows users need a shell. Right.
I think the original comment was directed at Windows Server users not Windows consumer desktop users (unless the user of that consumer desktop is a developer or an admin). I'll agree that most consumer desktop users don't need a shell. I may be a developer these days but I have been an administrator for Linux, Solaris, AIX, several lesser known incarnations of *NIX, Windows NT, Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2003. I can tell you that there are times when you really miss the command-line power of the Unix shell on Windows servers. There are tasks you simply can't do on a Windows server except through the GUI which is nice if you don't have to do it often but when you have, say... a project where you have to do the same set of tasks a few thousand times in a row and want to complete this project in a sane amount of time scripting is a must. The only alternative for solving some such problems even on Windows 2003 is to write a C# program because you can't solve the problem by scripting. Writing a C# program is something I wouldn't expect an average Windows admin to be able to do anymore than I require a Unix admin to be a seasoned Java developer. IMHO an average Windows Server admin or Unix admin should be seasoned at scripting but I wouldn't expect either to be seasoned at C# or Java programming, VB or Perl would be good though. I am not prepared to take a server OS seriously unless I can do more on it's command-line than I can do with the slick GUI management tools.