Paper beats electronic readers for the simple reason that it's cheap. People can stick a paperback in their pocket, read in the tub (or if you're George Costanzo, on the toilet), or on the beach without worrying about frying a $300 appliance.
From a former AT&T user, now a Verizon user:
AT&T/Apple gets it all right, except for the actual phone part.
Phone service in the New York area sucks compared to Verizon. I hate Verizon but I have to admit that there are few places where I completely lose the signal these days. That's a far cry from when I used AT&T and a short drive up the Taconic Parkway would see my phone down to 0 bars about 4 times.
So, my take is this: If you like the widgets - phone photography, internet apps, GPS - get AT&T. If you want to make a phone call, get Verizon.
Check in with your local hospital or community college. Those institutions are notorious for having lots of small fiefdoms of IT rather than the monolithic, highly structured corporate IT world. In some of these fiefdoms you'll find that anyone who can hack an Excel macro will be considered a programming god.
Hospitals are also much more willing to hire people with unproven or short time experience because they can't afford much more. If you are in any way competent, you may make yourself a nice niche.
Interesting take. Some more thoughts to add....
IBM has Derby (Cloudscape) and Informix as well in the database arena. Informix is still kept around as a niche but I suspect that Derby might die in favor of the more popular mySQL.
As for WebSphere/Glassfish, there is already an entry level WebSphereCE as well and Project Zero (http://www.projectzero.org/) in that space. So, that winner might be debatable.
Eclipse lives in part because are bunches of IBM products built around it (the entire Rational line, WebSphere Business Modeler and Monitor come to mind).
Well that's the problem with this whole concept of "friends", isn't it?
I know people who have, literally, hundreds of "friends" on facebook. Yet with every friend that is added, facebook privacy becomes less useful.
Do you trust that your friend won't cut and paste your facebook to youtube or flicker?
So, okay, let's take the grand step and say you trust your friends not to do that.
Do you trust your friend to NOT have a password like, say "password", that his geek son might easily hack?
Do you trust your friend's boss who may have access to his work computer? Do you trust your friend's work's IT department who may be doing screen snooping in the name of asset security? Do you trust your friend's ex-wife who has subpoenaed his hard disk to demonstrate his porn addiction?
Now multiply all those potential second effect lurkers by the number of your "friends".
That's how secure facebook is.
Don't post shit you don't want to ever see used against you.
The "locker room" defense is pretty weak unless you're talking about locker rooms that are wired for sound, continuously broadcast, with the history of all words and events in that locker room stored and indexed with full knowledge and consent of the participants.
Go back and watch "Our Mrs. Reynolds. You may feel differently. Or not.
I would agree that the pilot wasn't as good as the rest of the series. But the series is damned good.
IBM has recently changed their internal patent awards so that patents are worth less now and publishes to ip.com are worth more, at least for individual inventors. I can't speak for the patent attorneys.
So, they are, to a certain extent, putting their money where their mouth is. IBM does leverage its patent portfolio but it doesn't tend to "patent troll". Instead, it tends to use its portfolio defensively against patent trolls like SCO.
In the real world, this is going to happen no matter how many laws are written to prevent it.
People still do not get hired for being old, or a little too dark-skinned, or female no matter how many laws you pass. Only the most draconian, dictatorial of laws would prevent that. It's a reality you learn to live with unless you want bureaucrats telling you who you can hire/work for.
So, be careful out there. Don't post anything that you don't want to be known by 6 billion people.
And please don't tell me that you use "Facebook Privacy" to protect your drunken pictures or comments.
Facebook security ends at Facebook's borders. Once its on one of your 2000 "friends'" computer screens, that hugely funny rant about your boss can be cut and pasted into anything and posted anywhere.
The next time you complain about immigration into the USA, consider how much worse things will be when people no longer even want to come here. Worse, that American citizens start leaving for greener pastures. That day may be coming.
If we have an "immigration problem", it's generally a sign of a healthy economy. It's when we have an "emigration problem", that you know things will be really rough.
LinkedIn -yes, Facebook - no
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I haven't heard of anyone's career destroyed because of stuff that got posted on LinkedIn.
Darl doesn't have any illusions that SCO will win. Darl and the SCOites are trying to prevent the few pieces of SCO's value (it's product lines) from falling into IBM and Novell's hands.
The idea is to leave SCO an empty shell so that its creditors end up with nothing.
The best managers I ever had were people that excelled in one thing: getting obstacles out of the way of getting work done.
They told marketing people, "No you can't borrow so-and-so for 2 days so she can drive Powerpoint for you.".
They told upper management, "No, we're not changing to the latest buzzword technology just because you read it in a magazine."
They said, "Yes, you can stay at a decent hotel that has more than paper-thin walls when working 14 hour days for an onsite installation."
Mostly they said, "Don't worry about the TPF reports, I'll do those, you get the code through test."
The best managers I've ever had also understood that it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. In general, if we did something risky but worthwhile, they ensured that we had a contingency plan and took the heat from above.
Good tech managers are very hard to find, but I know from experience that you'll walk through a hail of virtual bullets for one if you have one.
This looks to me like more of a marketing announcement where they take a bunch of previously available product and put it under one particular brand. Yeah, there's a few more things in there but mostly that's glue.
-- Windows Azure, for service hosting and management and low-level scalable storage, computation, and networking. -- Microsoft SQL Services, for database services and reporting. -- Microsoft.Net Services, which are service-based implementations of.Net Framework concepts such as workflow..Net Services previously was called BizTalk Services. "The services themselves, we found, were actually more identifiable to the.Net community than BizTalk," said Steve Martin, Microsoft senior product management director in the companyâ(TM)s Connected Systems Division. -- Live Services, for sharing, storing, and synchronizing documents, photos, and files across PCs, phones, PC applications, and Web sites. -- Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration, and solution development in the cloud
So, they're taking BizTalk, Sharepoint, Live, a bunch of point features in SQL Server and a few other warmed over things and calling them "Azure". Whoopee. They've invented a brand. Wake me up when they have something new.
Your response quoted (without preceding context) my comment which lamented the lack of a common professional certification standard recognized by both workers and employees.
The ACM's certification standards have not been bought into by either employers or employees. Most people in the IT industry in the US simply do not get certified by or belong to the ACM. Nor do most IT employers insist on ACM membership or certification.
That is very different from the lawyering and accounting professions where, at least in the US, lawyers are certified by their state's bar association, accountants are certified by the AICPA, medical doctors are board certified.
No one in the states would consider hiring a lawyer that has not passed the bar or going to a doctor who wasn't board certified. Accountants who have passed the CPA are in higher demand and command higher pay and higher status than those who have not.
IT should work the same way. Yet every day, companies hire idiots who got their programming or IT architecture training from the "Visual Basic for Dummies" book.
Show me the IT want ad that demands ACM certified IT professionals then, I'll grant that the ACM has the same standing as the bar, the AICPA and other professional organizations. Maybe someday they will. I sure hope so. But for now, they do not.
What company insists that their IT professional belong to or are certified by the ACM.
I would dispute that unionizing would improve the situation. I don't know of any trade where BOTH the perceived status of the trade and its members has improved its craft because of unionizing.
"Why are IT professionals treated differently and in such a paternalistic way? More importantly, why do IT professionals accept being treated less favorably than members of other professions? Should IT professionals start to refuse to be treated as not real professionals?"
Others have already pointed out that lawyers and accountants (CPAs at least) submit to testing and are certified by professional organizations. You can't market yourself as a lawyer, CPA, or even an engineer in some places without having the backing of a professional guild.
What I'd like to know is why, in the face of offshoring and job losses, the IT industry hasn't coelesced around a professional society or guild. A professional guild, with some rigid certification testing, would be more effective than even unionizing since it produces a win-win for both employees and employers. Is it just that the need isn't perceived to be there yet?
With professional certification, employers would know they are getting skills without expensive testing and competent IT professionals can be assured that they won't be working with "IT Professionals" whose sole IT experience is that they took one Visual Basic course.
There are lots of vendor specific certs (MS, Novell, Oracle, IBM) but to me, that's more akin testing accountants for having skill in using QuickBooks.
The Open Group has IT Architect certification (http://www.opengroup.org/itac/) which looks to be a start, but it doesn't appear to have gained much momentum. IBM offers cross-certification of its internally certified architects but even within IBM, not all departments bother to pay the fee for TOG certification.
I also see that there's an Institute for Certification of Computer Professionals (http://www.iccp.org/iccpnew/index.html) that's been around since 1973, and a lot of people on its web page have important looking letters next to their names (CCP, CDMP) but outside of this web page, I've never run across an IT person with this on their business card nor a company that insists on this certification.
So I ask the exact opposite question that the poster asks, "Why don't we insist on recognized industry certification testing for IT professionals?"
...one that leaves their brains with few dopamine receptors, molecules that act as docking ports for one of the neurochemicals that carry our thoughts and emotions. A paucity of dopamine receptors is linked to an inability to avoid self-destructive behavior such as illicit drug use. But the effects spill beyond such extremes. Children with the genetic variant are unable to learn from mistakes. No matter how many tests they blow by partying the night before, the lesson just doesn't sink in.
Sure are a lot of fancy words for "Some kids are born stupid."
Slashdot Mirror
Paper beats electronic readers for the simple reason that it's cheap. People can stick a paperback in their pocket, read in the tub (or if you're George Costanzo, on the toilet), or on the beach without worrying about frying a $300 appliance.
From a former AT&T user, now a Verizon user: AT&T/Apple gets it all right, except for the actual phone part. Phone service in the New York area sucks compared to Verizon. I hate Verizon but I have to admit that there are few places where I completely lose the signal these days. That's a far cry from when I used AT&T and a short drive up the Taconic Parkway would see my phone down to 0 bars about 4 times. So, my take is this: If you like the widgets - phone photography, internet apps, GPS - get AT&T. If you want to make a phone call, get Verizon.
ip.com, wikipedia article, facebook entry, and finally, boil it down to 140 characters and put it on your twitter.
Check in with your local hospital or community college. Those institutions are notorious for having lots of small fiefdoms of IT rather than the monolithic, highly structured corporate IT world. In some of these fiefdoms you'll find that anyone who can hack an Excel macro will be considered a programming god. Hospitals are also much more willing to hire people with unproven or short time experience because they can't afford much more. If you are in any way competent, you may make yourself a nice niche.
Interesting take. Some more thoughts to add.... IBM has Derby (Cloudscape) and Informix as well in the database arena. Informix is still kept around as a niche but I suspect that Derby might die in favor of the more popular mySQL. As for WebSphere/Glassfish, there is already an entry level WebSphereCE as well and Project Zero (http://www.projectzero.org/) in that space. So, that winner might be debatable. Eclipse lives in part because are bunches of IBM products built around it (the entire Rational line, WebSphere Business Modeler and Monitor come to mind).
Well that's the problem with this whole concept of "friends", isn't it? I know people who have, literally, hundreds of "friends" on facebook. Yet with every friend that is added, facebook privacy becomes less useful. Do you trust that your friend won't cut and paste your facebook to youtube or flicker? So, okay, let's take the grand step and say you trust your friends not to do that. Do you trust your friend to NOT have a password like, say "password", that his geek son might easily hack? Do you trust your friend's boss who may have access to his work computer? Do you trust your friend's work's IT department who may be doing screen snooping in the name of asset security? Do you trust your friend's ex-wife who has subpoenaed his hard disk to demonstrate his porn addiction? Now multiply all those potential second effect lurkers by the number of your "friends". That's how secure facebook is. Don't post shit you don't want to ever see used against you.
The "locker room" defense is pretty weak unless you're talking about locker rooms that are wired for sound, continuously broadcast, with the history of all words and events in that locker room stored and indexed with full knowledge and consent of the participants.
Go back and watch "Our Mrs. Reynolds. You may feel differently. Or not. I would agree that the pilot wasn't as good as the rest of the series. But the series is damned good.
Firefly's handling was a travesty. Great show that was scheduled to death.
But Dollhouse sucks on its own. It's Fantasy Island with anorexic girls.
IBM has recently changed their internal patent awards so that patents are worth less now and publishes to ip.com are worth more, at least for individual inventors. I can't speak for the patent attorneys.
So, they are, to a certain extent, putting their money where their mouth is. IBM does leverage its patent portfolio but it doesn't tend to "patent troll". Instead, it tends to use its portfolio defensively against patent trolls like SCO.
....and they are free not to hire you.
In the real world, this is going to happen no matter how many laws are written to prevent it.
People still do not get hired for being old, or a little too dark-skinned, or female no matter how many laws you pass. Only the most draconian, dictatorial of laws would prevent that. It's a reality you learn to live with unless you want bureaucrats telling you who you can hire/work for.
So, be careful out there. Don't post anything that you don't want to be known by 6 billion people.
And please don't tell me that you use "Facebook Privacy" to protect your drunken pictures or comments.
Facebook security ends at Facebook's borders. Once its on one of your 2000 "friends'" computer screens, that hugely funny rant about your boss can be cut and pasted into anything and posted anywhere.
Mostly that's true, but I'll quibble a little.
Just like anything else that has price, your replacement doesn't have to be better. He or she just has to be good enough to get the job done.
There's a difference.
The next time you complain about immigration into the USA, consider how much worse things will be when people no longer even want to come here. Worse, that American citizens start leaving for greener pastures. That day may be coming.
If we have an "immigration problem", it's generally a sign of a healthy economy. It's when we have an "emigration problem", that you know things will be really rough.
I haven't heard of anyone's career destroyed because of stuff that got posted on LinkedIn.
Darl doesn't have any illusions that SCO will win.
Darl and the SCOites are trying to prevent the few pieces of SCO's value (it's product lines) from falling into IBM and Novell's hands.
The idea is to leave SCO an empty shell so that its creditors end up with nothing.
The best managers I ever had were people that excelled in one thing: getting obstacles out of the way of getting work done.
They told marketing people, "No you can't borrow so-and-so for 2 days so she can drive Powerpoint for you.".
They told upper management, "No, we're not changing to the latest buzzword technology just because you read it in a magazine."
They said, "Yes, you can stay at a decent hotel that has more than paper-thin walls when working 14 hour days for an onsite installation."
Mostly they said, "Don't worry about the TPF reports, I'll do those, you get the code through test."
The best managers I've ever had also understood that it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. In general, if we did something risky but worthwhile, they ensured that we had a contingency plan and took the heat from above.
Good tech managers are very hard to find, but I know from experience that you'll walk through a hail of virtual bullets for one if you have one.
Recession? What recession?
....and iPods, which will then be known as "antiPods".
This looks to me like more of a marketing announcement where they take a bunch of previously available product and put it under one particular brand. Yeah, there's a few more things in there but mostly that's glue.
-- Windows Azure, for service hosting and management and low-level scalable storage, computation, and networking. .Net Services, which are service-based implementations of .Net Framework concepts such as workflow. .Net Services previously was called BizTalk Services. "The services themselves, we found, were actually more identifiable to the .Net community than BizTalk," said Steve Martin, Microsoft senior product management director in the companyâ(TM)s Connected Systems Division.
-- Microsoft SQL Services, for database services and reporting.
-- Microsoft
-- Live Services, for sharing, storing, and synchronizing documents, photos, and files across PCs, phones, PC applications, and Web sites.
-- Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration, and solution development in the cloud
So, they're taking BizTalk, Sharepoint, Live, a bunch of point features in SQL Server and a few other warmed over things and calling them "Azure". Whoopee. They've invented a brand. Wake me up when they have something new.
Your response quoted (without preceding context) my comment which lamented the lack of a common professional certification standard recognized by both workers and employees.
The ACM's certification standards have not been bought into by either employers or employees.
Most people in the IT industry in the US simply do not get certified by or belong to the ACM. Nor do most IT employers insist on ACM membership or certification.
That is very different from the lawyering and accounting professions where, at least in the US, lawyers are certified by their state's bar association, accountants are certified by the AICPA, medical doctors are board certified.
No one in the states would consider hiring a lawyer that has not passed the bar or going to a doctor who wasn't board certified. Accountants who have passed the CPA are in higher demand and command higher pay and higher status than those who have not.
IT should work the same way. Yet every day, companies hire idiots who got their programming or IT architecture training from the "Visual Basic for Dummies" book.
Show me the IT want ad that demands ACM certified IT professionals then, I'll grant that the ACM has the same standing as the bar, the AICPA and other professional organizations. Maybe someday they will. I sure hope so. But for now, they do not.
What company insists that their IT professional belong to or are certified by the ACM.
I would dispute that unionizing would improve the situation. I don't know of any trade where BOTH the perceived status of the trade and its members has improved its craft because of unionizing.
"Why are IT professionals treated differently and in such a paternalistic way? More importantly, why do IT professionals accept being treated less favorably than members of other professions? Should IT professionals start to refuse to be treated as not real professionals?"
Others have already pointed out that lawyers and accountants (CPAs at least) submit to testing and are certified by professional organizations. You can't market yourself as a lawyer, CPA, or even an engineer in some places without having the backing of a professional guild.
What I'd like to know is why, in the face of offshoring and job losses, the IT industry hasn't coelesced around a professional society or guild. A professional guild, with some rigid certification testing, would be more effective than even unionizing since it produces a win-win for both employees and employers. Is it just that the need isn't perceived to be there yet?
With professional certification, employers would know they are getting skills without expensive testing and competent IT professionals can be assured that they won't be working with "IT Professionals" whose sole IT experience is that they took one Visual Basic course.
There are lots of vendor specific certs (MS, Novell, Oracle, IBM) but to me, that's more akin testing accountants for having skill in using QuickBooks.
The Open Group has IT Architect certification (http://www.opengroup.org/itac/) which looks to be a start, but it doesn't appear to have gained much momentum. IBM offers cross-certification of its internally certified architects but even within IBM, not all departments bother to pay the fee for TOG certification.
I also see that there's an Institute for Certification of Computer Professionals (http://www.iccp.org/iccpnew/index.html) that's been around since 1973, and a lot of people on its web page have important looking letters next to their names (CCP, CDMP) but outside of this web page, I've never run across an IT person with this on their business card nor a company that insists on this certification.
So I ask the exact opposite question that the poster asks, "Why don't we insist on recognized industry certification testing for IT professionals?"
JoAnn
Wow, are they just TRYING to kill the brand?
...that four out of five companies lied on the survey.
...one that leaves their brains with few dopamine receptors, molecules that act as docking ports for one of the neurochemicals that carry our thoughts and emotions. A paucity of dopamine receptors is linked to an inability to avoid self-destructive behavior such as illicit drug use. But the effects spill beyond such extremes. Children with the genetic variant are unable to learn from mistakes. No matter how many tests they blow by partying the night before, the lesson just doesn't sink in.
Sure are a lot of fancy words for "Some kids are born stupid."