Seems reasonable, and possibly lower than I would have guessed. The average age of the US population is a bit older now with the aging baby boomers. If they have been saving for retirement since they started working, $500k isn't very much money for them to have put away.
So shrink your market to a niche and monopolize that instead? The goal is still to crush all competitors and achieve monopoly position even if it's only a smaller market segment.
The next win phone OS looks pretty good. I think it could provide a decent uptick for MS on mobile devices if they can get it on some okay hardware. Having it available on the nearly free t-mo phones will help get it out the door at least.
If you never found somebody who loved their blackberry, you just weren't looking very hard. For instance, frickin' Barack Obama.
I've found the majority of those people didn't love the BB, they loved email on the go. They loved being fully connected all the time, and for a long time the BB was only device that did corporate email at all.
I agree with you. Comments should be reserved for when something is especially tricky or some non-obvious solution was picked for some other non-obvious reason. Code littered with comments simply explaining what the next line of code does is hard to read and harder to follow. Even worse is when there are required comment templates that make fitting more than 1/10 of a function on the screen impossible to do.
Finally, incorrect comments are worse than pretty much anything else. As soon as trivial comments are added that also adds another point of change for maintenance when code changes.
My experience matches yours. The key is GOOD people. Finding good people is hard.
I know someone who has been trying to hire a few good people for awhile now. In between interview 1 and 2 he sends them home with a coding problem. IMHO, it's too basic, but it's just a simple "implement a few design patterns" so that the company doing the hiring can see the programmers style and if they know what they are doing. The goal is to have something to talk about in the second interview. Many of the responses he gets back do not even compile (think about that for a second...the candidate has the full internet at their disposal). The ones that do compile look horrible (editors have auto-format - use it!) and/or don't meet the very simple requirements.
And offshoring really is broken. It can work for a very particular set of project types (basically ones with strictly defined requirements), but even then it's hit or miss. India is really too expensive now, especially if the cost of communication, time zones, culture, and remote management is factored in. Philippines is big now, but with good people there pulling $30k+ and being poached from company to company it's impossible to build any tenure into your people. It seems everyday I talk to a CTO or director who has a story of throwing away lots of money on offshoring with nothing to show for it.
The problem, and you touched on it, is that every company needs software people that not only know software but also know and learn the company. Only then can the real value add company software be created. This requires good people and is very hard to do with outsourcing.
I don't know who the unemployed software engineers are. Possibly people living in the wrong town. I know no unemployed programmers. My office let go a few people, all of whom had new jobs lined up within 2 weeks. Of course, I mean actual software engineers who are experienced, productive, flexible, customer focused and able to have a conversation out loud with other people.
I've been wondering the same thing. My current company has recently lost people to other companies poaching our engineers. My friend manages a software dev group in Tampa and is having a hard time filling his team. He told me a couple weeks ago that he's thinking about getting out of management and back into coding because the market there is going crazy right now ($120k+ for senior software engineers).
I'm about to start a new job after being heavily recruited by a local company. The interviews (if I could call them that) were them selling me on working for them and not the other way around. They are a small company and just put together a very generous bonus program because they were losing software people to other local companies.
So yeah, where are all these senior engineers who know what they are doing and are also out of work?
Heck my pantry is chock full of store-brand stuff because that's pretty much all I buy. For the most part it all tastes pretty darned close to each other.
I'm with you here. Some store brand stuff isn't very good, but at least try it to find out. It's usually so inexpensive it doesn't matter. And those shopper cards. It's a whole new game for me. Nothing even gets in the cart that isn't on sale. Not on sale means I find an equivalent and is on sale or I skip it that week. I don't have the time or desire to extreme coupon, but it is a fun game to see how much I can save on a single $100 grocery store trip. So far my best has been $42 + the 2% cash back from the AMEX:)
Markets look forward. Netflix was gaining customers and are now losing customers. The new trend is down.
I'd also be curious to see the average monthly revenue per customer pre/post pricing change. It seems that many moved to the cheaper streaming only plan when the change was announced. This means Netflix lost customers and are making less on each customer they have left. Not a good thing.
It's also possible to become a billionaire in your lifetime. Just because some people have the right set of circumstances to achieve that doesn't mean everyone does.
Your comparison does not fit at all. There are decent colleges everywhere (and not the crappy ones you see advertised on TV). If a kid lives at home and works part time he/she should be able to get a degree and not have very much debt. That's what I did and finished my 4 year degree from an accredited school with about 9k in student loan debt. It's possible and not really that hard, but kids need to understand that the 'college experience' of living away from home while taking a few classes and getting drunk every night is very expensive and not the best investment of your time or money.
Very few people pay the individual tax rate either. The system as it is currently setup is simply too complicated. They need to remove all deductions and get some reasonable income band flat tax.
Also, while I'm ranting, why do I need to file taxes each year anyway? The government has all the information. Send me something to check, sign and send back if I agree. If I don't agree then I can go down the path of filing.
Between caps and content, I'm not sure the streaming side is really going anywhere. They are making good money with their DVD service, so wouldn't it make more sense to keep it around in order to fund, grow, and protect some risk on the streaming side? They can wind down the DVD side if it ever stops making money, but spinning it off now seems way to premature.
IMHO, we have seen a lot of miscalculations the last week or so from Netflix that sound like desperation. It makes me think there is another bomb that is going to be dropped.
Assuming you are NOT under arrest, and they don't seem to be digging on you (eg "did you see such and such back over there") not being an ass and actually being helpful is the nice and ethical thing to do.
Completely wrong. The problem is that police officers have shown time and again that they are NOT ethical. Keep in mind that a cop is ALWAYS gathering evidence. Sure you know you didn't do anything, but you were nearby. Now you're a suspect. Wait, you were by yourself, so now no alibi. The cop will then of course make stuff up like you looked nervous or seemed anxious. Suddenly you're a prime suspect. At this point all it takes is an eye witness (people see things incorrectly all the time, police can pressure someone to talk) which carry way more weight in court than they should and you're going to jail.
You may think this sounds crazy, but just look at people finally being proven innocent by DNA years later. Turns out the cops and prosecutors got a bead on them and simply make stuff up to make the case work. Don't think police make stuff up? Read this.
A friend of mine is a lawyer. His advice, never speak to the police without your lawyer present. First, he can obviously advise you and second the cop can't later lie in court about what was said.
You think Ohio is bad? Read about the crooked cops in Denver. Better yet they are still on the force! Even better is that these are only the ones they know about!
The list includes the names of about 81 officers still on the force out of 1,434. At least eight officers on the list have two or more violations. One officer has three violations.
The officers on the list have been found to have committed violations in at least one of the following categories: departing from the truth, violating the law, making false reports, making misleading or inaccurate statements, committing a deceptive act, engaging in conduct prohibited by law, engaging in aggravated conduct prohibited by law, conspiring to commit conduct prohibited by law, soliciting or accepting a bribe, removing reports or records, destroying reports or records or altering information on official documents.
At least seven officers are on the list for driving under the influence. At least 13 of the officers are on the list for violations involving dishonesty, considered a fireable offense at many police departments because such a finding could call into question whether an officer would testify truthfully.
And those are just the ones whose cases have been resolved with a finding that the complaint was "sustained." An untold number of other officers may be under investigation for dishonesty but testifying on any given day with no notice to the defense.
The real problem is that neither side is right. Tax hikes on the 'rich' and cutting some pork out of the budget is akin to using a 5 gallon bucket to bail out water while on the titanic. At this point neither will do much. The only way out of this is really a complicated plan no one wants to hear.
First, tax rates across the board need to rise some. Back to Clinton levels would probably be okay, but the government would need to be careful to not kill growth. Revenue growth is key. People like to rip on Reagan, and rightly so for his spending, but if you look at his second year as president once his tax cuts went into place, the federal revenue went way up over the Carter years. The entire economy grew and lower rates led to more revenue. Of course this only works to a point and we're likely below that point right now.
Second, pork while fun to point out is ignoring the elephants in the room - all of the government entitlement programs and military. These have to be scaled back. We have pushed the can down the line too long at this point. Obviously people want more programs when they are essentially free. Well it's time for the frank conversation that they are in fact not free.
The final piece is healthcare costs. This has to also be addressed in order to do any real problem solving because they tie into item two.
Without the three above pieces in place any talk of fixing the deficit or budge is basically bullshit rhetoric, and both sides are equally guilty of spouting this nonsense.
I had something similar happen. I had mallet finger and it took 2 5 minute visits to the doctor to fix it. First visit was to imobilize the finger, second visit 8 weeks later to to check that it worked. The doctors office was in a hospital and hospital billing decided to charge my insurance company for a surgery. I noticed it and called the billing department in the hospital and all I got was "oh yeah, sorry about trying to charge you thousands of more dollars, it's fixed now."
Other MP3 players: you connect them to your computer. You drag your music onto them. Done.
iPod: You connect it to your computer. Oops, but first you need to install iTunes. So do that. A half-hour later, you find out that first you have to drag your music INTO ITUNES. An hour or so after that, you discover you can't say what music iTunes should copy unless the iPod is already connected. So you connect it, and wait a few HOURS for iTunes to copy whatever it wants to over, and only THEN can you tell iTunes which music you REALLY wanted over. So then you get to wait a couple of hours again.
Not to interrupt your rant, but playlists are a much easier way to manage music rather than copying files all over the place. You can make lots of playlists in iTunes [1], plug in your ipod tell it to sync those lists and you're done. Even a very large ipod doesn't take hours to sync. Best part is that you can manage those playlists (ignoring files...ugh) and the next time you plug in your ipod it will sync again. iOS5 is bringing OTA syncing so you won't even need to plug it into the computer, just a power source.
[1] Other music management software I assume now does it the same way with playlists.
Exactly. The other thing Apple seems to do is fine new tech that is coming, but not quite there yet. Then they go ahead and buy a huge amount of said tech up front and help pay to finish the tech/design/fabs. For the risk that Apple takes they get a good price for a certain number of units and exclusive rights for a period of time simply because the factory is working to fill the pre-order that Apple made.
It's a great business move by Apple and a smart way to leverage their cash reserves. It also requires a very strong long term vision from the top, and I wonder if Apple will be able to keep that up when SJ leaves.
years ago they fought over advertising and even now limit what can be said
Keep in mind that fight was not just about competition. Many good lawyers were mad at being seen in a bad light by the endless commercials for 'the strong arm' or whatever those late night clowns like to call themselves. The end result was that advertising is fine, but don't make a mockery of the profession while doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems reasonable, and possibly lower than I would have guessed. The average age of the US population is a bit older now with the aging baby boomers. If they have been saving for retirement since they started working, $500k isn't very much money for them to have put away.
So shrink your market to a niche and monopolize that instead? The goal is still to crush all competitors and achieve monopoly position even if it's only a smaller market segment.
The next win phone OS looks pretty good. I think it could provide a decent uptick for MS on mobile devices if they can get it on some okay hardware. Having it available on the nearly free t-mo phones will help get it out the door at least.
I've found the majority of those people didn't love the BB, they loved email on the go. They loved being fully connected all the time, and for a long time the BB was only device that did corporate email at all.
I agree with you. Comments should be reserved for when something is especially tricky or some non-obvious solution was picked for some other non-obvious reason. Code littered with comments simply explaining what the next line of code does is hard to read and harder to follow. Even worse is when there are required comment templates that make fitting more than 1/10 of a function on the screen impossible to do.
Finally, incorrect comments are worse than pretty much anything else. As soon as trivial comments are added that also adds another point of change for maintenance when code changes.
My experience matches yours. The key is GOOD people. Finding good people is hard.
I know someone who has been trying to hire a few good people for awhile now. In between interview 1 and 2 he sends them home with a coding problem. IMHO, it's too basic, but it's just a simple "implement a few design patterns" so that the company doing the hiring can see the programmers style and if they know what they are doing. The goal is to have something to talk about in the second interview. Many of the responses he gets back do not even compile (think about that for a second...the candidate has the full internet at their disposal). The ones that do compile look horrible (editors have auto-format - use it!) and/or don't meet the very simple requirements.
And offshoring really is broken. It can work for a very particular set of project types (basically ones with strictly defined requirements), but even then it's hit or miss. India is really too expensive now, especially if the cost of communication, time zones, culture, and remote management is factored in. Philippines is big now, but with good people there pulling $30k+ and being poached from company to company it's impossible to build any tenure into your people. It seems everyday I talk to a CTO or director who has a story of throwing away lots of money on offshoring with nothing to show for it.
The problem, and you touched on it, is that every company needs software people that not only know software but also know and learn the company. Only then can the real value add company software be created. This requires good people and is very hard to do with outsourcing.
I don't know who the unemployed software engineers are. Possibly people living in the wrong town. I know no unemployed programmers. My office let go a few people, all of whom had new jobs lined up within 2 weeks. Of course, I mean actual software engineers who are experienced, productive, flexible, customer focused and able to have a conversation out loud with other people.
I've been wondering the same thing. My current company has recently lost people to other companies poaching our engineers. My friend manages a software dev group in Tampa and is having a hard time filling his team. He told me a couple weeks ago that he's thinking about getting out of management and back into coding because the market there is going crazy right now ($120k+ for senior software engineers).
I'm about to start a new job after being heavily recruited by a local company. The interviews (if I could call them that) were them selling me on working for them and not the other way around. They are a small company and just put together a very generous bonus program because they were losing software people to other local companies.
So yeah, where are all these senior engineers who know what they are doing and are also out of work?
India is too expensive now. Try the Philippines, though they are also getting expensive.
Heck my pantry is chock full of store-brand stuff because that's pretty much all I buy. For the most part it all tastes pretty darned close to each other.
I'm with you here. Some store brand stuff isn't very good, but at least try it to find out. It's usually so inexpensive it doesn't matter. And those shopper cards. It's a whole new game for me. Nothing even gets in the cart that isn't on sale. Not on sale means I find an equivalent and is on sale or I skip it that week. I don't have the time or desire to extreme coupon, but it is a fun game to see how much I can save on a single $100 grocery store trip. So far my best has been $42 + the 2% cash back from the AMEX :)
I do to, but bring crap beer to my house and we're going to have a problem ;)
Mail?
I lived in a different state from my credit union for a few years. I mail deposited any checks I received and it only take a couple of days.
Markets look forward. Netflix was gaining customers and are now losing customers. The new trend is down.
I'd also be curious to see the average monthly revenue per customer pre/post pricing change. It seems that many moved to the cheaper streaming only plan when the change was announced. This means Netflix lost customers and are making less on each customer they have left. Not a good thing.
It's also possible to become a billionaire in your lifetime. Just because some people have the right set of circumstances to achieve that doesn't mean everyone does.
Your comparison does not fit at all. There are decent colleges everywhere (and not the crappy ones you see advertised on TV). If a kid lives at home and works part time he/she should be able to get a degree and not have very much debt. That's what I did and finished my 4 year degree from an accredited school with about 9k in student loan debt. It's possible and not really that hard, but kids need to understand that the 'college experience' of living away from home while taking a few classes and getting drunk every night is very expensive and not the best investment of your time or money.
Very few people pay the individual tax rate either. The system as it is currently setup is simply too complicated. They need to remove all deductions and get some reasonable income band flat tax.
Also, while I'm ranting, why do I need to file taxes each year anyway? The government has all the information. Send me something to check, sign and send back if I agree. If I don't agree then I can go down the path of filing.
Between caps and content, I'm not sure the streaming side is really going anywhere. They are making good money with their DVD service, so wouldn't it make more sense to keep it around in order to fund, grow, and protect some risk on the streaming side? They can wind down the DVD side if it ever stops making money, but spinning it off now seems way to premature.
IMHO, we have seen a lot of miscalculations the last week or so from Netflix that sound like desperation. It makes me think there is another bomb that is going to be dropped.
Completely wrong. The problem is that police officers have shown time and again that they are NOT ethical. Keep in mind that a cop is ALWAYS gathering evidence. Sure you know you didn't do anything, but you were nearby. Now you're a suspect. Wait, you were by yourself, so now no alibi. The cop will then of course make stuff up like you looked nervous or seemed anxious. Suddenly you're a prime suspect. At this point all it takes is an eye witness (people see things incorrectly all the time, police can pressure someone to talk) which carry way more weight in court than they should and you're going to jail.
You may think this sounds crazy, but just look at people finally being proven innocent by DNA years later. Turns out the cops and prosecutors got a bead on them and simply make stuff up to make the case work. Don't think police make stuff up? Read this.
A friend of mine is a lawyer. His advice, never speak to the police without your lawyer present. First, he can obviously advise you and second the cop can't later lie in court about what was said.
You think Ohio is bad? Read about the crooked cops in Denver. Better yet they are still on the force! Even better is that these are only the ones they know about!
The real problem is that neither side is right. Tax hikes on the 'rich' and cutting some pork out of the budget is akin to using a 5 gallon bucket to bail out water while on the titanic. At this point neither will do much. The only way out of this is really a complicated plan no one wants to hear.
First, tax rates across the board need to rise some. Back to Clinton levels would probably be okay, but the government would need to be careful to not kill growth. Revenue growth is key. People like to rip on Reagan, and rightly so for his spending, but if you look at his second year as president once his tax cuts went into place, the federal revenue went way up over the Carter years. The entire economy grew and lower rates led to more revenue. Of course this only works to a point and we're likely below that point right now.
Second, pork while fun to point out is ignoring the elephants in the room - all of the government entitlement programs and military. These have to be scaled back. We have pushed the can down the line too long at this point. Obviously people want more programs when they are essentially free. Well it's time for the frank conversation that they are in fact not free.
The final piece is healthcare costs. This has to also be addressed in order to do any real problem solving because they tie into item two.
Without the three above pieces in place any talk of fixing the deficit or budge is basically bullshit rhetoric, and both sides are equally guilty of spouting this nonsense.
I had something similar happen. I had mallet finger and it took 2 5 minute visits to the doctor to fix it. First visit was to imobilize the finger, second visit 8 weeks later to to check that it worked. The doctors office was in a hospital and hospital billing decided to charge my insurance company for a surgery. I noticed it and called the billing department in the hospital and all I got was "oh yeah, sorry about trying to charge you thousands of more dollars, it's fixed now."
What it should be is a clear fraud case.
The only things required to be public are your first and last name, gender and profile photos.
Just a note. G+ apparently listens to users and is rolling out the option to hide your gender this week.
Then just post to all your circles or go twitter style and post public.
Other MP3 players: you connect them to your computer. You drag your music onto them. Done.
iPod: You connect it to your computer. Oops, but first you need to install iTunes. So do that. A half-hour later, you find out that first you have to drag your music INTO ITUNES. An hour or so after that, you discover you can't say what music iTunes should copy unless the iPod is already connected. So you connect it, and wait a few HOURS for iTunes to copy whatever it wants to over, and only THEN can you tell iTunes which music you REALLY wanted over. So then you get to wait a couple of hours again.
Not to interrupt your rant, but playlists are a much easier way to manage music rather than copying files all over the place. You can make lots of playlists in iTunes [1], plug in your ipod tell it to sync those lists and you're done. Even a very large ipod doesn't take hours to sync. Best part is that you can manage those playlists (ignoring files...ugh) and the next time you plug in your ipod it will sync again. iOS5 is bringing OTA syncing so you won't even need to plug it into the computer, just a power source.
[1] Other music management software I assume now does it the same way with playlists.
Exactly. The other thing Apple seems to do is fine new tech that is coming, but not quite there yet. Then they go ahead and buy a huge amount of said tech up front and help pay to finish the tech/design/fabs. For the risk that Apple takes they get a good price for a certain number of units and exclusive rights for a period of time simply because the factory is working to fill the pre-order that Apple made.
It's a great business move by Apple and a smart way to leverage their cash reserves. It also requires a very strong long term vision from the top, and I wonder if Apple will be able to keep that up when SJ leaves.
years ago they fought over advertising and even now limit what can be said
Keep in mind that fight was not just about competition. Many good lawyers were mad at being seen in a bad light by the endless commercials for 'the strong arm' or whatever those late night clowns like to call themselves. The end result was that advertising is fine, but don't make a mockery of the profession while doing it.
That's why the person you responded to said "standard" car. Of course if you're buying rare collectible items that is a completely different scenario.