Your user page says that you "believe that both rampant civil disobedience and heavy lobbying will be necessary to reform our fascist copyright laws. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"
Just as long as those of use who oppose you are allowed to do the same kind of civil disobediance. Like smashing eggs on your house, putting shrimp in your air conditioning, graffiti on your walls, that kind of thing.
So let's see, you're claiming fair use by posting a load of keys for shareware apps?
Tell ya what, why don't you just go out and run through CompUSA, grabbing stuff off the shelves, and throwing it into the street shouting "It's FREE! It's FREE!"
YOU do not have the right to do what you are attempting to do. Only the person who owns that software has the right to decide what they're going to charge for it. If you disagree, don't buy it. Don't be a stupid asshole instead.
Oh, and by the way, I hope you and your family are condemned to work at an IHOP on the 2am shift for the rest of your lives.
Suffice to say, try printf()ing a few tabs and backslashes in quick succession under 200 or XP ad then tell me it's stable. After you've rebooted and reconnected to the internet that is...
This is fixed in Windows XP SP1 (according to my friends at the Borg). It basically kills the windows subsystem process; as a result, as there's no running subsystem on top of the kernel, the kernel shuts the machine down (it's useless keeping the machine around if the kernel's running happily, but no processes are running on top of it).
How in the name of TCP/IP gods would them have someone's MAC addy, unless they ethernet-wire their machines INSIDE M$s ethernet network?
The mind boggles...
It's called a GUID. It's the same as a UUID, and was designed for use in DCE.
... but basically, MAC Id's are guaranteed unique, so they're used in lots of places to generate chunks of unique numbers. The rest of the numbers are generated using timestamps and other such info.
This actually happened to me (Score:4)
by Anthracks (anthracks@deathsdoor.com) on 01:56 PM February 14th, 2002 (#3010218)
(User #532185 Info | http://slashdot.org/)
I bought Sierra's "Tribes 2" game a number of months after it originally came out, and when I went to register and sign into the online portion of the game for the first time, it came back with a message that I was using a pirated CD key! Considering I had just brought the game home from Electronics Boutique and read the key off the back of the shrinkwrapped case, I figured this was unlikely.
That was a bug in the initial release. Some idiot had coded up the error messages wrongly.
What it should have said is that "The username you have chosen has already been taken" rather than the key.
This is why the game was massively patched when it first came out.
So according to you, there is big conspiracy involving most of technology industry where companies forgo profits in order to achieve the higher goal of "getting micorosoft".
*cough* Conspiracy?
Look at the list of companies that these people are on the board of directors for.
There's no need for a conspiracy when they have it all written down in black & white.
mshtml.dll pretty much is the browser. Everything else is GUI fluff. When will people realize that GUIs are
Depends on the software, and your definition of "real".
For example, for something like Office, the GUI is probably somewhere between 30% and 60% of the work.
For the Linux Kernel? The GUI is *nada*.
So it depends on your scope. Consumer apps, for example, are mostly GUI.
I guess it also depends on your definition of "GUI". If it's just "buttons calling functions" then yep, it's zip. If it's "Logic for manipulating data flow, and maintaining an ongoing dialog with the user" then it's a bit more. A GUI can be as complex or as simple as you want, depending on what it's trying to do.
I'm currently working on a project that's 60% GUI, 30% database, 10% network manipulation. And that GUI is a LOT of GUI, handling many, many different edge cases.
"Despite claims to the contrary, Windows is pretty well documented."
You may find this article [byte.com] interesting. It shows how a change in the undefined behavior of one Win32 function crashed his application between Windows versions.
From the article:
At first I thought: &*%# Microsoft! But when I looked at the API documentation, it clearly said that you have to initialize the dwOSVersionInfoSize field of the OSVERSIONINFO structure, with the size of the structure, which I had never done. But it used to work, so what happened?
Jeeeeeeesus Christ.
Rule ONE of Win32 programming. IF A STRUCT says initialize with the size of the struct, you INITIALIZE with the size of the struct.
NT3.51 was the platform it 'worked' on, and NT4.0 threw a fit. The reason?
NT3.51 was the first version of the OS to HAVE that function. So it didn't need to check the length of the struct (no backwards compatibility mode necessary). NT4.0 changed the details of the struct (presumably), and so the check got enforced.
BIG DEAL.
EVERY single book on Win32 programming, EVERY example I've seen, EVERY piece of documentation from Microsoft makes it VERY EXPLICITLY CLEAR that if the struct has a cbSize (or other similar) member, you HAVE to initialize it with the sizeof() the struct.
The guy is an ass. And he wrote an article about his 'l33t haxor1ng sk1ll2'. To whine about his *very* elementary windows programming mistake.
Just goes to show; writing software requires dilligence. And he just didn't have it.
So essentially every technology company is in bed together to get microsoft. If that is true, that would be more of an indictment of their business practices than any antitrust trial.
It's the way they do business in CA. Read up on the KPCB Keiretsu -- http://www.kpcb.com
I have a reasonably-sized library and I just moved. I wouldn't trade those boxes of books (however heavy) in the spare room for any convenience. There are few things that beat sitting in a room full of good books that you've read.
I agree, but I really wish there was some way of compressing them down to the size of a matchbox, and adding a little antigravity to make it possible to move them easily. I'd better get working on it, I guess. Now *that* would be killer tech.
I have long hated the concept of e-books. They're expensive, they forgo all of the benefits of a book, a pile of e-book ram cards is nothing like a shelf full of paper books.
Try saying that again when you have a massive library, are moving, and need to pack them all.
30 book boxes and counting...
No way am I getting my friends round with a UHaul for this stuff. I'm hiring people to move us.
I'd give ANYTHING for an ebook of all these. Of course, I'd need e-paper, wireless access to my library, etc etc etc.
I'd say it was shoddy PR. Didn't Microsoft say that they could deliver what Quicken wanted because their code was modular? Well couldn't they remove it easier? If it's so modular?
If Microsoft said they won because their design was better.....let them prove it. (I think the people from Quicken shot this down at the time though.)
I'd rather go off what Netscape's engineers have to say in the trial evidence:
There's more up there... just check out the Jan 99 evidence filings.
No; Quicken went with Microsoft after Netscape dallied around and couldn't deliver.
As for it being modular, not it doesn't make it easier to remove.
It's componentized. That is, it exposes itself as a component interface; anyone can connect to that interface, and use the functionality. It's a COM object.
However, most of the Windows shell uses that COM object, and other related COM objects that the API exposes. Most of Windows uses other parts of that API set. A hell of a lot of 3rd parties use that API set. If you take the list of everything that IE provides, you end up with a messy cloud of functionality -- which is needed by lots of different applications.
For example, if you remove everything that supposedly makes up IE, you get rid of windows scripting, which will break the command line, large portions of the policy management system, a lot of the administrative tools, and will also break IIS (which uses it for its ASP pages).
You'd also have to get rid of the Cryptography API. Which is used by any kind of password handling, authentication, or encryption in Windows.
So where do you draw the line? What is IE? What isn't?
WinInet provides FTP, Gopher and HTTP file transfer support. That's part of IE. But it sure as hell is a good piece of OS functionality to have in there -- it makes writing apps that handle HTTP *much* easier.
... and so on, and so on...
So which part is IE?
Is it the HTML renderer? Or the HTML parser? Or just the frame window with the menus and toolbar buttons?
OF COURSE it was done on intentionally! What were they supposed to do, build in netscape?
Quicken tried to do that -- it's in the court record. Netscape completely dropped the ball and couldn't componentize their browser, even though they promised Quicken that they could.
It's quite amusing reading all of the crap flinging going on at Netscape at the time. Basically, it comes down to shoddy engineering and shoddy product design.
But hey, I can't blame them for doing that for version 1.0. But for version 3?
For example, there is a 'standard' API call to refresh a window - but IE doesn't use it - it uses a different publicly undocumented call. (Anyone who's used IE under VNC will know what I mean - VNC hooks into the standard API for screen updates.. when you use IE and scroll the screen, the VNC client doesn't know that the window has changed.)
Why is this? Because doing so gives IE some advantage over other (non-MS) programs.
Uh, no, it doesn't.
IE just paints outside of the WM_PAINT handler sometimes. You can do that you know - the call is GetDC. Or GetDCEx if you need better control.
Not to mention that IE doesn't paint directly to the screen. It paints to a memory DC first for compositing, and then paints the memory DC to the screen.
Just because the VNC client isn't complete, don't start claiming that "IE uses undocumented calls" -- because it doesn't.
But tell ya what, prove that it does, and that it's not a bug in VNC, and I'll eat my hat.
For example, in 1999, Oracle, Sun, Netscape and AOL pitched in for $6.8mm of lobbying. THat's not including soft-money donations, which pushes the total way higher.
Given that all of these companies work together (Steve's a friend of Scott's, who is a friend of Larry... and all of them get money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and all of them get legal help from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati), it is suprising that they would lobby together too?
Silicon Valley doesn't need to donate 6mm all from one company. They can share the load.
As a long time Linux user, I strenuously object to this direction for my preferred OS. My Linux box is not a toy, and it shouldn't be used as such!
Linux has succeeded so well because of (until recently) the complete lack of frivolous chrome that bogged down other once-noble systems like DOS. I grudgingly accepted a simple window manager as an occassionally useful tool, but knew full well that some people would get totally carried away with it and force these resource-hog abominations on us like KDE, Gnome and TWM. Serious computing is done with the command line, OK?
I'm sure that the Enlightenment folks would be very upset by your characterising their efforts as a "complete lack of frivolous chrome".
The key to preserving the paycheck is to sink back into the gray cubicle, smile, agree and never open your mouth. This, of course, is precisely the opposite of what a knowledgeable, competent, experienced software engineer should be doing, and the opposite of what they should have been HIRED to do
I can highly concur with that statement; in the last three rounds of layoffs, they managed to get rid of anybody who cared about what they were doing, the quality of the work, the number of sales, and doing a good service by the consumer.
As long as you've gone back to "collage" (sic) - be sure you sign up for remedial spelling classes. Maybe you can't find a job because your friggin ILLITERATE!
Just FYI, a lot of the best programmers I know are dyslexic, or have problems with spelling and grammar.
English Language ability (even for native speakers) is not a good metric. Hardcore logic ability, and problem solving abilities, however, are.
disagree with the statement that front line workers get the axe first
Better believe it, bud. That's what's happening out there. I speak from personal experience.
Si
Re:Experience and talent still count...
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Come on lets be real here, how many people during the.com boom thought "He got a job as a developer ? Bloody Hell"
The reality is that.COM created a huge amount of jobs in companies that had no business being in business, this skewed the market. Now its a question of being the person with experience, and being a _good_ SOFTWARE ENGINEER, rather than a "hacker" or "techie". Basically folks
Welcome back to 1995. Talent counts, experience counts. There are still loads of jobs out there if you have the right experience, if you spent 2 years developing a "cool" website that went under using non-core languages (i.e. not MS, not C++, not Java) then you'll struggle, because the companies who work like that went bust.
The problem, though, is that most peoples' networks are down and dead in the water.
Networking is the easiest way to get a job. Personally, it's the only way I've gotten my jobs in the past (apart from one blip, but that was mostly accidental).
The problem is that it gets really difficult to network your way into a position when everyone you can network with is also looking for a job. Talk about Catch 22.
Experience doesn't seem to count for much right now. Or rather, it does, but you'd better have EXACTLY the experience they're looking for, in stone, that you got employed to have on a professional contract/job basis (which means no ramp-up time either... you can't know the concepts and wing it until you know the API set you're talking to -- you need to know it all now).
Add to that the fact that the market is saturated with all those resume's from out-of-work web developers, perl scripters, VB devs, etc etc. who aren't as experienced -- but are still applying for every job that comes up, and you've got real problems.
It gets even more problematic when the same job is being touted by 15 different recruitment/staffing firms. I got three phone calls in one day, all from different firms, all talking about the same job. My fiancee' then got 4 calls from different firms about the same job.
It's a mess out there. There's thousands of people out of work, and they're all scrabbling down the same avenues trying to get a job.
Take this advice to heart: If you can network, do it. Unless you have a good in, you're not going to be able to get the time of day from most people.
We all became convinced that things that people at "normal" jobs take for granted - eg working at the same office for more than a year - were irrelevant. Hell, why work hard or show up on time when the recruiters will swarm your phone as soon as you put your resume on Monster?
I dunno... my last job was heaven to me; I worked my ass off, and had a great time doing it. Going anywhere else is going to be a painful experience. But I was fully hoping to spend 5/10 years there.
And then the layoffs started happening. Again and again and again.
I think it's the same thing; you can't expect to keep the same job year in, year out because everything has become a commodity. People don't want to hire, because they need to be able to jettison staff fast if their earnings dip, so it's all turning into short-term contracting work.
Slashdot Mirror
Your user page says that you "believe that both rampant civil disobedience and heavy lobbying will be necessary to reform our fascist copyright laws. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"
Just as long as those of use who oppose you are allowed to do the same kind of civil disobediance. Like smashing eggs on your house, putting shrimp in your air conditioning, graffiti on your walls, that kind of thing.
It's not nice when it turns personal, is it?
So let's see, you're claiming fair use by posting a load of keys for shareware apps?
Tell ya what, why don't you just go out and run through CompUSA, grabbing stuff off the shelves, and throwing it into the street shouting "It's FREE! It's FREE!"
YOU do not have the right to do what you are attempting to do. Only the person who owns that software has the right to decide what they're going to charge for it. If you disagree, don't buy it. Don't be a stupid asshole instead.
Oh, and by the way, I hope you and your family are condemned to work at an IHOP on the 2am shift for the rest of your lives.
Simon
Is 2K going to get this fix as well?
All my borg friends rolled off of Whistler onto other things...
Not a clue. I'd hope so. But hopes have a habit of being dashed.
Si
Suffice to say, try printf()ing a few tabs and backslashes in quick succession under 200 or XP ad then tell me it's stable. After you've rebooted and reconnected to the internet that is...
This is fixed in Windows XP SP1 (according to my friends at the Borg). It basically kills the windows subsystem process; as a result, as there's no running subsystem on top of the kernel, the kernel shuts the machine down (it's useless keeping the machine around if the kernel's running happily, but no processes are running on top of it).
Si
Just how much "justice" M$ has bought...
I'd guess about 80% less than the silicon valley cartels have bought.
Simon
How in the name of TCP/IP gods would them have someone's MAC addy, unless they ethernet-wire their machines INSIDE M$s ethernet network?
The mind boggles...
It's called a GUID. It's the same as a UUID, and was designed for use in DCE.
... but basically, MAC Id's are guaranteed unique, so they're used in lots of places to generate chunks of unique numbers. The rest of the numbers are generated using timestamps and other such info.
Si
This actually happened to me (Score:4)
by Anthracks (anthracks@deathsdoor.com) on 01:56 PM February 14th, 2002 (#3010218)
(User #532185 Info | http://slashdot.org/)
I bought Sierra's "Tribes 2" game a number of months after it originally came out, and when I went to register and sign into the online portion of the game for the first time, it came back with a message that I was using a pirated CD key! Considering I had just brought the game home from Electronics Boutique and read the key off the back of the shrinkwrapped case, I figured this was unlikely.
That was a bug in the initial release. Some idiot had coded up the error messages wrongly.
What it should have said is that "The username you have chosen has already been taken" rather than the key.
This is why the game was massively patched when it first came out.
Simon
So according to you, there is big conspiracy involving most of technology industry where companies forgo profits in order to achieve the higher goal of "getting micorosoft".
*cough* Conspiracy?
Look at the list of companies that these people are on the board of directors for.
There's no need for a conspiracy when they have it all written down in black & white.
mshtml.dll pretty much is the browser. Everything else is GUI fluff. When will people realize that GUIs are
Depends on the software, and your definition of "real".
For example, for something like Office, the GUI is probably somewhere between 30% and 60% of the work.
For the Linux Kernel? The GUI is *nada*.
So it depends on your scope. Consumer apps, for example, are mostly GUI.
I guess it also depends on your definition of "GUI". If it's just "buttons calling functions" then yep, it's zip. If it's "Logic for manipulating data flow, and maintaining an ongoing dialog with the user" then it's a bit more. A GUI can be as complex or as simple as you want, depending on what it's trying to do.
I'm currently working on a project that's 60% GUI, 30% database, 10% network manipulation. And that GUI is a LOT of GUI, handling many, many different edge cases.
"Despite claims to the contrary, Windows is pretty well documented."
You may find this article [byte.com] interesting. It shows how a change in the undefined behavior of one Win32 function crashed his application between Windows versions.
From the article:
At first I thought: &*%# Microsoft! But when I looked at the API documentation, it clearly said that you have to initialize the dwOSVersionInfoSize field of the OSVERSIONINFO structure, with the size of the structure, which I had never done. But it used to work, so what happened?
Jeeeeeeesus Christ.
Rule ONE of Win32 programming. IF A STRUCT says initialize with the size of the struct, you INITIALIZE with the size of the struct.
NT3.51 was the platform it 'worked' on, and NT4.0 threw a fit. The reason?
NT3.51 was the first version of the OS to HAVE that function. So it didn't need to check the length of the struct (no backwards compatibility mode necessary). NT4.0 changed the details of the struct (presumably), and so the check got enforced.
BIG DEAL.
EVERY single book on Win32 programming, EVERY example I've seen, EVERY piece of documentation from Microsoft makes it VERY EXPLICITLY CLEAR that if the struct has a cbSize (or other similar) member, you HAVE to initialize it with the sizeof() the struct.
The guy is an ass. And he wrote an article about his 'l33t haxor1ng sk1ll2'. To whine about his *very* elementary windows programming mistake.
Just goes to show; writing software requires dilligence. And he just didn't have it.
So essentially every technology company is in bed together to get microsoft. If that is true, that would be more of an indictment of their business practices than any antitrust trial.
It's the way they do business in CA. Read up on the KPCB Keiretsu -- http://www.kpcb.com
Si
I have a reasonably-sized library and I just moved. I wouldn't trade those boxes of books (however heavy) in the spare room for any convenience. There are few things that beat sitting in a room full of good books that you've read.
I agree, but I really wish there was some way of compressing them down to the size of a matchbox, and adding a little antigravity to make it possible to move them easily. I'd better get working on it, I guess. Now *that* would be killer tech.
I have long hated the concept of e-books. They're expensive, they forgo all of the benefits of a book, a pile of e-book ram cards is nothing like a shelf full of paper books.
Try saying that again when you have a massive library, are moving, and need to pack them all.
30 book boxes and counting...
No way am I getting my friends round with a UHaul for this stuff. I'm hiring people to move us.
I'd give ANYTHING for an ebook of all these. Of course, I'd need e-paper, wireless access to my library, etc etc etc.
Si
I'd say it was shoddy PR. Didn't Microsoft say that they could deliver what Quicken wanted because their code was modular? Well couldn't they remove it easier? If it's so modular?
If Microsoft said they won because their design was better.....let them prove it. (I think the people from Quicken shot this down at the time though.)
I'd rather go off what Netscape's engineers have to say in the trial evidence:
Netscape notes on Netscape/Intuit agreement
There's more up there... just check out the Jan 99 evidence filings.
No; Quicken went with Microsoft after Netscape dallied around and couldn't deliver.
As for it being modular, not it doesn't make it easier to remove.
It's componentized. That is, it exposes itself as a component interface; anyone can connect to that interface, and use the functionality. It's a COM object.
However, most of the Windows shell uses that COM object, and other related COM objects that the API exposes. Most of Windows uses other parts of that API set. A hell of a lot of 3rd parties use that API set. If you take the list of everything that IE provides, you end up with a messy cloud of functionality -- which is needed by lots of different applications.
For example, if you remove everything that supposedly makes up IE, you get rid of windows scripting, which will break the command line, large portions of the policy management system, a lot of the administrative tools, and will also break IIS (which uses it for its ASP pages).
You'd also have to get rid of the Cryptography API. Which is used by any kind of password handling, authentication, or encryption in Windows.
So where do you draw the line? What is IE? What isn't?
WinInet provides FTP, Gopher and HTTP file transfer support. That's part of IE. But it sure as hell is a good piece of OS functionality to have in there -- it makes writing apps that handle HTTP *much* easier.
... and so on, and so on...
So which part is IE?
Is it the HTML renderer? Or the HTML parser? Or just the frame window with the menus and toolbar buttons?
Si
OF COURSE it was done on intentionally! What were they supposed to do, build in netscape?
Quicken tried to do that -- it's in the court record. Netscape completely dropped the ball and couldn't componentize their browser, even though they promised Quicken that they could.
It's quite amusing reading all of the crap flinging going on at Netscape at the time. Basically, it comes down to shoddy engineering and shoddy product design.
But hey, I can't blame them for doing that for version 1.0. But for version 3?
Si
For example, there is a 'standard' API call to refresh a window - but IE doesn't use it - it uses a different publicly undocumented call. (Anyone who's used IE under VNC will know what I mean - VNC hooks into the standard API for screen updates.. when you use IE and scroll the screen, the VNC client doesn't know that the window has changed.)
Why is this? Because doing so gives IE some advantage over other (non-MS) programs.
Uh, no, it doesn't.
IE just paints outside of the WM_PAINT handler sometimes. You can do that you know - the call is GetDC. Or GetDCEx if you need better control.
Not to mention that IE doesn't paint directly to the screen. It paints to a memory DC first for compositing, and then paints the memory DC to the screen.
Just because the VNC client isn't complete, don't start claiming that "IE uses undocumented calls" -- because it doesn't.
But tell ya what, prove that it does, and that it's not a bug in VNC, and I'll eat my hat.
Simon
Yes, but I can't post them because of the Junk filter (frickkin' lameness)
Open Secrets has all the info you'll ever need.
For example, in 1999, Oracle, Sun, Netscape and AOL pitched in for $6.8mm of lobbying. THat's not including soft-money donations, which pushes the total way higher.
Given that all of these companies work together (Steve's a friend of Scott's, who is a friend of Larry... and all of them get money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and all of them get legal help from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati), it is suprising that they would lobby together too?
Silicon Valley doesn't need to donate 6mm all from one company. They can share the load.
As a long time Linux user, I strenuously object to this direction for my preferred OS. My Linux box is not a toy, and it shouldn't be used as such!
Linux has succeeded so well because of (until recently) the complete lack of frivolous chrome that bogged down other once-noble systems like DOS. I grudgingly accepted a simple window manager as an occassionally useful tool, but knew full well that some people would get totally carried away with it and force these resource-hog abominations on us like KDE, Gnome and TWM. Serious computing is done with the command line, OK?
I'm sure that the Enlightenment folks would be very upset by your characterising their efforts as a "complete lack of frivolous chrome".
The key to preserving the paycheck is to sink back into the gray cubicle, smile, agree and never open your mouth. This, of course, is precisely the opposite of what a knowledgeable, competent, experienced software engineer should be doing, and the opposite of what they should have been HIRED to do
I can highly concur with that statement; in the last three rounds of layoffs, they managed to get rid of anybody who cared about what they were doing, the quality of the work, the number of sales, and doing a good service by the consumer.
*shrugs* but hey, thems the breaks.
As long as you've gone back to "collage" (sic) - be sure you sign up for remedial spelling classes. Maybe you can't find a job because your friggin ILLITERATE!
Just FYI, a lot of the best programmers I know are dyslexic, or have problems with spelling and grammar.
English Language ability (even for native speakers) is not a good metric. Hardcore logic ability, and problem solving abilities, however, are.
Simon
Yup, you got it right....at least there's a chance they'll apply for citizenship here in the U.S. and keep their cash and spending in-house.
Which, for the record, takes about 7 years to do. That's after you get your green card. Which takes about 3-4 years.
You're talking 10 years total to complete the process. Kind of nasty, really.
Si
hacker: knows assembly language.
professional software engineer: knows UML.
Who are you going to hire to impelement your project?
The one who can explain concepts the clearest without resorting to a badly-designed methodology for drawing whiteboard diagrams?
Si
disagree with the statement that front line workers get the axe first
Better believe it, bud. That's what's happening out there. I speak from personal experience.
Si
Come on lets be real here, how many people during the .com boom thought "He got a job as a developer ? Bloody Hell"
.COM created a huge amount of jobs in companies that had no business being in business, this skewed the market. Now its a question of being the person with experience, and being a _good_ SOFTWARE ENGINEER, rather than a "hacker" or "techie". Basically folks
The reality is that
Welcome back to 1995. Talent counts, experience counts. There are still loads of jobs out there if you have the right experience, if you spent 2 years developing a "cool" website that went under using non-core languages (i.e. not MS, not C++, not Java) then you'll struggle, because the companies who work like that went bust.
The problem, though, is that most peoples' networks are down and dead in the water.
Networking is the easiest way to get a job. Personally, it's the only way I've gotten my jobs in the past (apart from one blip, but that was mostly accidental).
The problem is that it gets really difficult to network your way into a position when everyone you can network with is also looking for a job. Talk about Catch 22.
Experience doesn't seem to count for much right now. Or rather, it does, but you'd better have EXACTLY the experience they're looking for, in stone, that you got employed to have on a professional contract/job basis (which means no ramp-up time either... you can't know the concepts and wing it until you know the API set you're talking to -- you need to know it all now).
Add to that the fact that the market is saturated with all those resume's from out-of-work web developers, perl scripters, VB devs, etc etc. who aren't as experienced -- but are still applying for every job that comes up, and you've got real problems.
It gets even more problematic when the same job is being touted by 15 different recruitment/staffing firms. I got three phone calls in one day, all from different firms, all talking about the same job. My fiancee' then got 4 calls from different firms about the same job.
It's a mess out there. There's thousands of people out of work, and they're all scrabbling down the same avenues trying to get a job.
Take this advice to heart: If you can network, do it. Unless you have a good in, you're not going to be able to get the time of day from most people.
We all became convinced that things that people at "normal" jobs take for granted - eg working at the same office for more than a year - were irrelevant. Hell, why work hard or show up on time when the recruiters will swarm your phone as soon as you put your resume on Monster?
I dunno... my last job was heaven to me; I worked my ass off, and had a great time doing it. Going anywhere else is going to be a painful experience. But I was fully hoping to spend 5/10 years there.
And then the layoffs started happening. Again and again and again.
I think it's the same thing; you can't expect to keep the same job year in, year out because everything has become a commodity. People don't want to hire, because they need to be able to jettison staff fast if their earnings dip, so it's all turning into short-term contracting work.
Kind of sucks really.
Si