That's not true... Windows has had "Web folders" since Windows 98. It's not the greatest way to mount a network share, but I definitely used WebDAV in XP.
The reason DropBox won over the existing services (there were many) was simplicity. It's a folder that syncs. That's all people want. More features, more complexity: Microsoft has tried it. Dropbox ate their lunch.
For a while, maybe. Microsoft just announced new upgrades to SkyDrive where it essentially works just like Dropbox, with more storage for free accounts.
FWIW, though, many people who preferred Live Mesh to Dropbox did so because Live Mesh allowed you to sync arbitrary folders, rather than just one big folder. That was good for (lame) programs that require files to be in certain locations.
G+ won't grow much, I think (I'm a G+ user, BTW), but it doesn't really have to.
I'm not a huge fan of G+, but I think you might be wrong. It's just that G+'s growth will probably come at Twitter's expense, rather than Facebook's. That's just my gut feeling, though.
Making a product a priority and betting the companies future on a product are not the same thing. I very much doubt they will get significant revenue from G+ anytime soon.
How could you tell how much revenue Google gets from it? Google's entire business is based on capturing eyeballs in order to offer greater value to advertisers. Do you honestly think G+ is not designed to do that? And yet, the revenue Google captures from these moves will be reported in the advertising portion of its business. You're not going to see any "Google+ revenue" figure on its 10-K.
Ever see anyone start being a biochemist at 50? Or start being an auto mechanic? By 50, you almost certainly have had some kind of career for a long time, even if it's just managing a bar. People who start "second careers" that are a radical left turn from their last career usually have enough money socked away that it's basically a hobby for them. It's not that it's hard for mature people to start programming, it's just that few people have the luxury of dropping everything and starting over. Remember, at 50 you're probably closer to your death than to the age you were when you got your undergraduate degree. You have different priorities.
Analysts never understand the field they're analyzing. Too much money to be made to slow down and try to figure it out when you get just as much money by making shit up and hoping to pull out before someone notices.
I don't think that's really true. When I see analysis from (say) Gartner, they've identified the players and the trends properly. They've clearly done their research. You can't dive that deeply into a technical industry without understanding it pretty well. The thing I've noticed, though, is that far too much research from analyst firms is sponsored by the very vendors they're commenting on. Slashdot loves to accuse the tech press of being biased, in the pocket of the vendors, etc, but honestly I've barely seen any of that in all my years in the field. But there doesn't seem to be the kind of "firewall" between vendors and analysts that there tends to be between vendors and journalists. As a journalist myself, I take everything the analysts say with a huge grain of salt. In fact, I barely bother to quote them anymore.
I don't think Silicon Valley will "find you spinning wheels." If you're looking for a stable, long-term job, you might be disappointed when Google doesn't hire you, true. But there's still enough activity in the general area that you will find work, provided you're willing to shop around a while and maybe not stick with the same company for too long. The other factor is that you may find the cost of living in the Valley and the Bay Area too expensive to make it worth your while. It all depends on what kind of life you're really looking for. Silicon Valley definitely favors young, eager, driven guys who are putting career first, at least for now.
So, after 20 years, I'm still working in software.
For the same company?
GP wasn't saying nobody has a software career for 15 years. He asked who has a software job for 15 years, meaning one specific gig at one specific company. I agree -- maybe engineers at companies like IBM, Oracle, or Sun have stuck with the same company that long, but I don't personally know many developers who have. Anecdotal evidence suggests few Google or Microsoft developers stick around so long, which says a lot.
It's not "Bloomberg" that's saying it, but somebody who submitted an editorial to Bloomberg, which published it. Traditionally, not everything that's published on the editorial page of a newspaper should be considered the opinion of the newspaper. Some of it is just the opinion of the individual author, as in this case. This "Bloomberg View" page the online equivalent of the editorial page -- although I think a lot of news Web sites could do a lot better job of identifying independent opinion vs. news, this site included.
To you and everybody else in the thread above and below who echoes your sentiments, let's hear more. Seriously. What is it you do (what industry, what languages, any specific areas) and how have you managed your career (stayed with same company, moved around, contracting, etc.)?
I think another strategy is not merely to "keep your skills up to date" -- a pretty vague concept if you're talking about a universe as broad as, say, Java -- but to increasingly specialize over time.
You can't do everything. But after a while, you will do one or a few things really, really well. That will make you more valuable, at least to the right people.
There's risk in this, though. After a while -- probably around the time you turn 40 -- it may dawn on you that it's now actually too late to ever get as good at something else as you are at the one thing you do now. Maybe you've been programming in one industry for so long that you don't really understand the parameters of any other industries that well. Maybe you've been working with Oracle databases for so long that you're an Oracle expert, but on SQL Server you wouldn't really be much more valuable than someone who just got an MCSE. Maybe you've been working on device drivers for embedded systems, and you wouldn't even know where to start to find a framework for building desktop applications. You do what you do, and that's what you do.
That can be pretty scary. You better hope that the thing you're doing is something that can keep you happy for a long, long time -- or at least that it will be lucrative enough to allow you to pursue your other hobbies. And you better hope that the thing you do doesn't just go away. You'll also need to make sure you're sufficiently plugged into the social network that will allow you to find the companies who are looking for people like you.
But look at Cobol. You probably don't personally know any Cobol programmers, but Cobol has bought quite a few houses for quite a few families, even in the last ten years.
I'm sure MS messed that up somehow, just like I'm sure you won't be able to "just recompile" your x86 applications on ARM without some big changes!
That depends how you wrote them, mainly. If it's straight C code which relies heavily on assumptions about the x86 architecture, then no. If they're.Net applications coded for the new Windows Runtime (which I understand they have to be, because you can only run Metro applications on Windows RT), then I doubt it will be too difficult to get them working on both.
It was like taking a bunch of philosophy and science textbooks, and remove every name in and the goal of the puzzle is to fill in the blanks.
But the thing is, you can fill in the blanks, because the ideas Stephenson is dealing with really aren't that complex or hard to grasp. Only it seems Neal thinks they are... so he's going to explain them to you, in elaborate, overwritten, self-important tedium, using an analogy here, a clever misdirection there, and a few distortions there, for page after page. Then, for the next bundle of pages, he'll sit back, tell little jokes, and congratulate himself for being the most clever and inventive fiction writer since Thomas Pynchon. I'm sorry, his books just aren't that smart or clever, yet every page you're being pounded in the face with how smart and clever Stephenson fancies himself to be. It gets painful.
Quicksilver was the first book I ever actually considered burning after I finished it, as catharsis. I never bothered with the rest. I did read Anathem, though. Now I'm done.
Isn't TFA all about an update that, essentially, "changes the entire UI"?
No. All Aura really does so far is let you run the browser non-maximized if you want to, and adds a new, chrome-free maximized window (that's small-C chrome) that emulates a desktop. If you want to, you can ignore the whole thing, run your browser maximized as usual, and you'll notice only minor changes (such as the clock, WiFi strength, and battery level being in the taskbar now).
The biggest change for me is that before, when I would press Ctrl-Shift-W to close all my tabs, I'd get a new, blank browser window. Now I get taken to the desktop. But it doesn't really matter -- hit Ctrl-N or Ctrl-T from the desktop and I've got a new browser tab/window, same as before. The "switch windows" button works a little differently, too, but I think it behaves more logically now.
That's a far cry from Ubuntu replacing your desktop with Unity. And you certainly won't get weekly update notifications telling you to upgrade your ALSA libraries and your glibc.
You can get a beta of Chrome for Android. That's not the same thing as "Android has real Chrome." Also, Chrome for Android doesn't support Flash, for one thing, so it's not the same. (Chromebooks run on Intel Atom processors, which apparently have less of a hard time with Flash than ARM chips.)
And you missed my point that Chrome OS is still a lot simpler. You don't have to launch anything. The browser is just there, all the time.
I don't know much about Android 4.0, but I have an Android 3.0 tablet and the Web browsing experience sucks on it. I can install Firefox, but it's still more complicated than the Chromebook, where I just open the screen, use it, and close it again.
Most of you people who say "there's no use for this" have probably never used a Chromebook. I have -- and though my initial reaction was not too far off from yours, I have to admit that I ended up using the thing way more than I ever expected I would.
My particular use case can be described as: "Eehhh, I guess I'll just leave it in the bedroom for when I need to look something up real quick."
Now, previously I might have done the same thing with some old laptop. But the genius of the Chromebook is that it's a Chrome browser and nothing but, so it never bothers you with anything that would go along with being able to do more than that. It never tells you there's a security fix for the printer driver, or asks if you want to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu distro (which changes the entire UI). If you have a few PCs lying around the house, you've probably rolled your eyes at least once when Microsoft's Patch Tuesday rolled around. That never happens here. It's just a Web browser that sits on the dresser.
There are security updates and it even gets new features, but it all happens behind the scenes, while you aren't paying attention, just like it does with the Chrome browser. Which is totally what you want when you really don't plan to use it for anything but browsing the Web.
Now, I'll go ahead and point out that this makes the Chromebook sort of a luxury item, because for most people who live in today's real world it's going to be a secondary computing device. You're going to buy another computer first, and then you'll buy one of these. But that's fine -- they aren't that expensive, and wasn't that pretty much the case with the entire netbook category, too?
You might say "but a netbook can do a lot more than a Chromebook, a Chromebook can hardly do anything" -- but I have no plans to do anything with it but surf the Web. Could I get a netbook and install Chrome on it? Yes, but that wouldn't be as convenient. Here, I grab it off the dresser, open the screen, and I've got a browser window. Three seconds.
It really is a pretty neat product. Google just hasn't done the best job of marketing it. Maybe that's because, unlike tablets, it looks like something you already have -- a laptop -- even though it's not one.
It may be that the price just has to come down even further. If Chromebooks sold for $199 and still had reasonable build quality, would that seem like a value to you?
How is ChromeOS really all that different to say Android 4.0 running on Tablets?
Well, it's a full Chrome browser. (The Android browser is not Chrome.)
Chrome OS runs the exact same rendering engine as Chrome on any other platform. It also supports any Chrome extensions that run on those platforms. I've written a couple of custom extensions myself, and they run just fine on my Chromebook -- which isn't surprising, since they're just JavaScript and HTML anyway.
But if you look at it from another angle, Android 4.0 on a tablet can actually do a lot more than a Chrome OS device can. Chrome OS is still really just a browser and nothing more. This Aura stuff doesn't really change that.
Slashdot Mirror
Note: This is Motorola Mobility, which ultimately means Google.
That's not true... Windows has had "Web folders" since Windows 98. It's not the greatest way to mount a network share, but I definitely used WebDAV in XP.
Free accounts can only upgrade to 25GB for a limited time, provided they have a few files on SkyDrive already. New users will only get 7GB for free.
The reason DropBox won over the existing services (there were many) was simplicity. It's a folder that syncs. That's all people want. More features, more complexity: Microsoft has tried it. Dropbox ate their lunch.
For a while, maybe. Microsoft just announced new upgrades to SkyDrive where it essentially works just like Dropbox, with more storage for free accounts.
FWIW, though, many people who preferred Live Mesh to Dropbox did so because Live Mesh allowed you to sync arbitrary folders, rather than just one big folder. That was good for (lame) programs that require files to be in certain locations.
G+ won't grow much, I think (I'm a G+ user, BTW), but it doesn't really have to.
I'm not a huge fan of G+, but I think you might be wrong. It's just that G+'s growth will probably come at Twitter's expense, rather than Facebook's. That's just my gut feeling, though.
Making a product a priority and betting the companies future on a product are not the same thing. I very much doubt they will get significant revenue from G+ anytime soon.
How could you tell how much revenue Google gets from it? Google's entire business is based on capturing eyeballs in order to offer greater value to advertisers. Do you honestly think G+ is not designed to do that? And yet, the revenue Google captures from these moves will be reported in the advertising portion of its business. You're not going to see any "Google+ revenue" figure on its 10-K.
Ever see anyone start programming at 50?
Ever see anyone start being a biochemist at 50? Or start being an auto mechanic? By 50, you almost certainly have had some kind of career for a long time, even if it's just managing a bar. People who start "second careers" that are a radical left turn from their last career usually have enough money socked away that it's basically a hobby for them. It's not that it's hard for mature people to start programming, it's just that few people have the luxury of dropping everything and starting over. Remember, at 50 you're probably closer to your death than to the age you were when you got your undergraduate degree. You have different priorities.
Analysts never understand the field they're analyzing. Too much money to be made to slow down and try to figure it out when you get just as much money by making shit up and hoping to pull out before someone notices.
I don't think that's really true. When I see analysis from (say) Gartner, they've identified the players and the trends properly. They've clearly done their research. You can't dive that deeply into a technical industry without understanding it pretty well. The thing I've noticed, though, is that far too much research from analyst firms is sponsored by the very vendors they're commenting on. Slashdot loves to accuse the tech press of being biased, in the pocket of the vendors, etc, but honestly I've barely seen any of that in all my years in the field. But there doesn't seem to be the kind of "firewall" between vendors and analysts that there tends to be between vendors and journalists. As a journalist myself, I take everything the analysts say with a huge grain of salt. In fact, I barely bother to quote them anymore.
Oh, and BTW, if you wanna share your story, I wouldn't mind if you contacted me by email. You can find it.
I don't think Silicon Valley will "find you spinning wheels." If you're looking for a stable, long-term job, you might be disappointed when Google doesn't hire you, true. But there's still enough activity in the general area that you will find work, provided you're willing to shop around a while and maybe not stick with the same company for too long. The other factor is that you may find the cost of living in the Valley and the Bay Area too expensive to make it worth your while. It all depends on what kind of life you're really looking for. Silicon Valley definitely favors young, eager, driven guys who are putting career first, at least for now.
So, after 20 years, I'm still working in software.
For the same company?
GP wasn't saying nobody has a software career for 15 years. He asked who has a software job for 15 years, meaning one specific gig at one specific company. I agree -- maybe engineers at companies like IBM, Oracle, or Sun have stuck with the same company that long, but I don't personally know many developers who have. Anecdotal evidence suggests few Google or Microsoft developers stick around so long, which says a lot.
It's not "Bloomberg" that's saying it, but somebody who submitted an editorial to Bloomberg, which published it. Traditionally, not everything that's published on the editorial page of a newspaper should be considered the opinion of the newspaper. Some of it is just the opinion of the individual author, as in this case. This "Bloomberg View" page the online equivalent of the editorial page -- although I think a lot of news Web sites could do a lot better job of identifying independent opinion vs. news, this site included.
To you and everybody else in the thread above and below who echoes your sentiments, let's hear more. Seriously. What is it you do (what industry, what languages, any specific areas) and how have you managed your career (stayed with same company, moved around, contracting, etc.)?
I think another strategy is not merely to "keep your skills up to date" -- a pretty vague concept if you're talking about a universe as broad as, say, Java -- but to increasingly specialize over time.
You can't do everything. But after a while, you will do one or a few things really, really well. That will make you more valuable, at least to the right people.
There's risk in this, though. After a while -- probably around the time you turn 40 -- it may dawn on you that it's now actually too late to ever get as good at something else as you are at the one thing you do now. Maybe you've been programming in one industry for so long that you don't really understand the parameters of any other industries that well. Maybe you've been working with Oracle databases for so long that you're an Oracle expert, but on SQL Server you wouldn't really be much more valuable than someone who just got an MCSE. Maybe you've been working on device drivers for embedded systems, and you wouldn't even know where to start to find a framework for building desktop applications. You do what you do, and that's what you do.
That can be pretty scary. You better hope that the thing you're doing is something that can keep you happy for a long, long time -- or at least that it will be lucrative enough to allow you to pursue your other hobbies. And you better hope that the thing you do doesn't just go away. You'll also need to make sure you're sufficiently plugged into the social network that will allow you to find the companies who are looking for people like you.
But look at Cobol. You probably don't personally know any Cobol programmers, but Cobol has bought quite a few houses for quite a few families, even in the last ten years.
I'm sure MS messed that up somehow, just like I'm sure you won't be able to "just recompile" your x86 applications on ARM without some big changes!
That depends how you wrote them, mainly. If it's straight C code which relies heavily on assumptions about the x86 architecture, then no. If they're .Net applications coded for the new Windows Runtime (which I understand they have to be, because you can only run Metro applications on Windows RT), then I doubt it will be too difficult to get them working on both.
It was like taking a bunch of philosophy and science textbooks, and remove every name in and the goal of the puzzle is to fill in the blanks.
But the thing is, you can fill in the blanks, because the ideas Stephenson is dealing with really aren't that complex or hard to grasp. Only it seems Neal thinks they are... so he's going to explain them to you, in elaborate, overwritten, self-important tedium, using an analogy here, a clever misdirection there, and a few distortions there, for page after page. Then, for the next bundle of pages, he'll sit back, tell little jokes, and congratulate himself for being the most clever and inventive fiction writer since Thomas Pynchon. I'm sorry, his books just aren't that smart or clever, yet every page you're being pounded in the face with how smart and clever Stephenson fancies himself to be. It gets painful.
Quicksilver was the first book I ever actually considered burning after I finished it, as catharsis. I never bothered with the rest. I did read Anathem, though. Now I'm done.
Seriously, what other incentive could someone have NOT to sign a piece of paper promising not to stab you in the back?
Because, by signing, you may be giving the other party the opportunity to stab you in the back?
NO, not when you can buy tablets for $100 that would fit your use case perfectly. Unless you got your chromebook for free, you overpaid.
Well yeah, I did. But where are these $100 tablets you're talking about?
It was based on a poll. Therefore it wasn't exactly scientific.
Isn't TFA all about an update that, essentially, "changes the entire UI"?
No. All Aura really does so far is let you run the browser non-maximized if you want to, and adds a new, chrome-free maximized window (that's small-C chrome) that emulates a desktop. If you want to, you can ignore the whole thing, run your browser maximized as usual, and you'll notice only minor changes (such as the clock, WiFi strength, and battery level being in the taskbar now).
The biggest change for me is that before, when I would press Ctrl-Shift-W to close all my tabs, I'd get a new, blank browser window. Now I get taken to the desktop. But it doesn't really matter -- hit Ctrl-N or Ctrl-T from the desktop and I've got a new browser tab/window, same as before. The "switch windows" button works a little differently, too, but I think it behaves more logically now.
That's a far cry from Ubuntu replacing your desktop with Unity. And you certainly won't get weekly update notifications telling you to upgrade your ALSA libraries and your glibc.
You can get a beta of Chrome for Android. That's not the same thing as "Android has real Chrome." Also, Chrome for Android doesn't support Flash, for one thing, so it's not the same. (Chromebooks run on Intel Atom processors, which apparently have less of a hard time with Flash than ARM chips.)
And you missed my point that Chrome OS is still a lot simpler. You don't have to launch anything. The browser is just there, all the time.
I don't know much about Android 4.0, but I have an Android 3.0 tablet and the Web browsing experience sucks on it. I can install Firefox, but it's still more complicated than the Chromebook, where I just open the screen, use it, and close it again.
It sounds like it's going to be little more than a bootable interface to the web, I know.
Uhhh... you know... Chrome OS has existed for three years now. This is just a UI update.
Most of you people who say "there's no use for this" have probably never used a Chromebook. I have -- and though my initial reaction was not too far off from yours, I have to admit that I ended up using the thing way more than I ever expected I would.
My particular use case can be described as: "Eehhh, I guess I'll just leave it in the bedroom for when I need to look something up real quick."
Now, previously I might have done the same thing with some old laptop. But the genius of the Chromebook is that it's a Chrome browser and nothing but, so it never bothers you with anything that would go along with being able to do more than that. It never tells you there's a security fix for the printer driver, or asks if you want to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu distro (which changes the entire UI). If you have a few PCs lying around the house, you've probably rolled your eyes at least once when Microsoft's Patch Tuesday rolled around. That never happens here. It's just a Web browser that sits on the dresser.
There are security updates and it even gets new features, but it all happens behind the scenes, while you aren't paying attention, just like it does with the Chrome browser. Which is totally what you want when you really don't plan to use it for anything but browsing the Web.
Now, I'll go ahead and point out that this makes the Chromebook sort of a luxury item, because for most people who live in today's real world it's going to be a secondary computing device. You're going to buy another computer first, and then you'll buy one of these. But that's fine -- they aren't that expensive, and wasn't that pretty much the case with the entire netbook category, too?
You might say "but a netbook can do a lot more than a Chromebook, a Chromebook can hardly do anything" -- but I have no plans to do anything with it but surf the Web. Could I get a netbook and install Chrome on it? Yes, but that wouldn't be as convenient. Here, I grab it off the dresser, open the screen, and I've got a browser window. Three seconds.
It really is a pretty neat product. Google just hasn't done the best job of marketing it. Maybe that's because, unlike tablets, it looks like something you already have -- a laptop -- even though it's not one.
It may be that the price just has to come down even further. If Chromebooks sold for $199 and still had reasonable build quality, would that seem like a value to you?
How is ChromeOS really all that different to say Android 4.0 running on Tablets?
Well, it's a full Chrome browser. (The Android browser is not Chrome.)
Chrome OS runs the exact same rendering engine as Chrome on any other platform. It also supports any Chrome extensions that run on those platforms. I've written a couple of custom extensions myself, and they run just fine on my Chromebook -- which isn't surprising, since they're just JavaScript and HTML anyway.
But if you look at it from another angle, Android 4.0 on a tablet can actually do a lot more than a Chrome OS device can. Chrome OS is still really just a browser and nothing more. This Aura stuff doesn't really change that.