They clearly ask questions that are intended to come across as incisive but which are often nothing but vapid, thinly veiled strawman arguments designed to make them appear insightful and clever.
This is a very unwelcome recent trend at the Beeb. I place the blame squarely on Jeremy Paxman and/or the editorial team behind Newsnight. At some point, a little while ago now though it's hard to pin down exactly when, he seemed to jump from asking difficult questions of his guests but respectfully to doing pretty much exactly what the above quote says. And since Paxman is one of the BBC's longest-established Serious Interviewers, and Newsnight is the nightly serious news show, if you can get away with that sort of behaviour there you can do it anywhere.
Also, it would help if the BBC stopped trying to promote its senior correspondents into celebrities whose personal opinions are somehow more important than the news they report, particularly when those senior people aren't always particularly credible within their fields anyway. Robert Peston and Nick Robinson between them could probably bring down a national economy or something.
And yet all it takes for me to be content with paying my licence fee is about five minutes watching any other major news channel, from the UK or otherwise. The BBC isn't perfect, but it's so far above the average there's no meaningful comparison, and IMHO it is still somewhat ahead of even the decent alternatives overall.
One of the most interesting things about the BBC is the remarkably neutral way their news programmes report on stories involving themselves or their own people. George Entwistle was being interviewed on their regular breakfast programme -- not a show you would normally associate with hard-nosed journalism and heavy questioning of interviewees -- just a few hours before he threw in the towel, and even there the hosts weren't giving him a bye just because he was (at that moment) their own editor-in-chief. On many of the news networks, I imagine the kind of blunt challenges those presenters made would have been career-threatening moves.
Yeah it's well known that geeks are unable to learn anything new.[/sarcasm]
Please notice that I didn't say a developer couldn't become a manager. I'm merely saying that management is a different profession, and moving into management should not be an expected or required transition equated with seniority. A geek might also become a Michelin-starred chef, a world class concert pianist or a breeder of champion race horses, but we don't expect any of those changes in career just because they started out writing code.
By the time you've reached a position of seniority, you should be prepared to manage.
Why?
Skilled and experienced people can contribute in both technical leadership and training/mentoring roles, to the extent that they aren't really part of the same thing anyway, without getting involved at all in "management" in the common senses of project management, product management, being someone's "manager", and the like.
Moreover, being a good manager in any of those senses has very little to do with technical competence. Being good at the job and being good at managing people who do the job are no more the same thing than being a world class athlete and being a world class athletics coach.
A false equation of seniority and management is one of the biggest dumb ideas holding back our industry, and it needs to die. Unfortunately, as long as we keep promoting geeks with no aptitude for management into management roles, they won't understand what's going wrong well enough to stop it happening...
Part of the problem is younger programmers who assume they're better because they put in a lot of effort to learn the latest GUI or DB libraries, and they know the intricate specifications of six trendy programming languages off the top of their head, and they can configure four different Linux web servers on auto-pilot. See, they're always keeping up to date!
Older and wiser programmers know that usually, to a first approximation, a GUI library is a GUI library and a programming language is a programming language and a web server is a web server. They're just tools, and while some are better than others, it's what you build with those tools that ultimately matters.
Of course, they also know when and how to check out the specifics and decide which tools are right for a given job, but they don't waste time on that until they have a need for it, which makes them less buzzword compliant in the eyes of the newbies (but a lot more productive).
When a tool isn't just a rehash of numerous similar tools before it, it's usually the older and more experienced folks who came up with the industry-moving developments, but the newbie programmers who are buzzword aggregators always trying to improve a resume and the naive managers who hire based on buzzwords don't notice that sort of thing. They don't care that someone older could build an efficient database schema that answers the important questions in an instant, or an easy-to-use GUI that customers love, or a robust concurrent server that doesn't crash and make you look like idiots in front of those same customers. Do you have at least 7 years of experience with C# 5?
Of course some older programmers really do slow down, stop learning, and coast along. It might be getting stuck in a rut and not bothering to do anything about it. It might be a matter of changing priorities, family commitments becoming more demanding and the like.
But the thing that really divides the good older programmers, IME, is whether or not they know how to take advantage of their greater understanding and better transferrable skills. If you're still playing resume buzzword bingo at 40, you're doing it wrong, not least because it implies you still look for jobs by spamming resumes like a college grad. You should be landing a good position through your network contacts before it's even advertised, transferring from wage slave to freelancer/contractor/consultant arrangements, starting your own business so you're on the other side of the desk, or otherwise avoiding being a victim of ignorance.
In short, an older developer who knows what they're doing has a more-or-less indefinite shelf life, as long as they don't play games with young, dumb people who don't understand why. As a bonus, avoiding those games is an excellent filter for avoiding crappy jobs, poor working conditions, incompetent colleagues, and low pay.:-)
Looking at the current UK system, I suspect that as a minimum you'd have to:
1. increase the threshold where people start to pay personal income tax and/or adjust the benefits system equivalently (because a lot of salaries in retail and manufacturing are about to take a hit at the same time that a lot of prices are going to go up)
2. reduce or eliminate VAT on essential items
3. increase VAT on non-essential items
4. push VAT into the stratosphere on luxury items
5. adjust taxes on big ticket items like house and car purchases to a sliding scale rather than a flat rate, probably starting reasonably low for your first starter home or runabout but becoming astronomical by the time you're buying that holiday mansion or Ferrari (and in the particular case of property, impose taxes on rents similarly)
6. adjust duties on imports to prevent the obvious workarounds for the items that now have higher VAT
and then hope that you could somehow balance the huge number of minor variations and edge cases that would inevitably arise so that the curve for consumption taxes paid by individuals of different wealth levels wound up looking roughly the same shape as the curve for income taxes they used to pay, all without spending so much on fighting lawsuits over free trade and paying customs staff to fight the resulting black markets that you wound up with less than you started with.
No more tax evasion if everyone pays a consumption tax.
That does solve the profit off-shoring problem up to a point, but it creates another problem because consumption taxes are heavily regressive. I tend to think you're right that it's worth exploring the idea of dramatically shifting where the tax burden falls, but the entire tax system would need dramatically rebalancing to avoid screwing everyone on relatively low incomes in the process.
Are you suggesting I should be happy about their ability to manipulate the situation so I get to pay for their infrastructure?
Given that they probably pay vast sums of VAT (which in turn was paid by their customers), it's fairly likely that it's actually those Apple customers who were paying for your infrastructure.
Plus there's employer's NI contributions, local business and property taxation rules, tax on the fuel that goes in their vehicles, and so on.
There's obviously something to consider in terms of Corporation Tax for international businesses that can shift where profits are recorded, but arguing as if these huge companies weren't contributing any taxes at all in the countries where they operate is either ignorance or wilful misrepresentation.
If the worst happens and they go into administration, many of the legal protections that would normally exist evaporate.
Yes and no. There are strict rules about who gets what and in what order in the event that a company goes into administration or otherwise gets wound up. You might not get everything you otherwise would have, but that's not the same as having no protections at all.
Having a contractual guarantee of certain rights, particularly things that are important to you but have little monetary value to anyone else such as access to key data, can be useful when dealing with administrators. They have to operate under certain rules, and even if you're too far down the pecking order to matter in terms of getting lots of money, other contractual rights can still be advantageous.
(I'm not a lawyer, etc. Having said that, my general understanding here is based directly on formal legal advice from people who are, discussing almost exactly this scenario. If you've been told different by someone who should also know what they're talking about, I'd be interested to hear about it, because at least one of us got bad advice.)
Sometimes the risk of trying to do everything yourself is the greater one.
Sure, but so far there is precious little evidence that the cloud lives up to any of the hype about Google or Amazon infrastructure and staff doing a better job than anyone you could hire and anything you could install in-house. On the contrary, the objective uptime record for just about every major cloud service provider seems to be quite poor, and that's before you even get into the kinds of hazards we're talking about here.
Moreover, their defence after seemingly every outage that customers didn't understand how to use their systems properly and should have allocated availability zone A in region B to be a stand-by for instance C connecting to database D rings hollow if you're arguing that outsourcing is a painless way to get robust IT facilities so you don't have to hire serious (and expensive) expertise in-house. As we've seen with several recent outages, even the "experts" at large businesses with well-established cloud facilities often screw this stuff up.
Then again, you seem to make a living doing things like moving people onto Google Apps, while I just worked up a point-by-point case backed by solid data showing why switching to Google Apps has cost one of my clients a significant amount of money in real terms as well as exposing them to other avoidable business risks. I suppose it's unlikely we're going to see this issue the same way.
Unfortunately, given the standard of regulation of banks in the relevant jurisdiction, that doesn't mean very much at all. In practice, you would probably still have to take legal action against them in another country if they screwed you in one of their notorious surprise moves, such as freezing your account because you irritated some automated potential fraud algorithm with an imperfect heuristic.
Unless they locked up an account belonging to a business with serious transaction volumes (and by that point they reportedly pay more attention to customer service anyway) it seems unlikely that most people would find it cost effective to go after them in court. So being regulated as a bank in Luxembourg isn't really worth much at all, except for apparently being quite effective in convincing people like the parent poster that PayPal in Europe is a safer bet than their infamous US operation.
(I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant, but I have investigated this issue from a business point of view relatively recently. At that time the legal/regulatory situation appeared to be quite clear and obviously in PayPal's favour.)
What good is a backup if you are unable to restore it?
A variant of this theme has always been my problem with all these on-line backup services: in the small print, most (all?) of them seem to have no obligation if they decide to shut things down to give you even a reasonable opportunity to restore anything you need first. Whether they were closed down by their own choice or because of third party influence as in this case doesn't really matter, as the result for the innocent user is just as bad either way.
The common sense rule is the same as it always was: for anything important, try to depend only on people you can trust without needing to rely on any legal measures, or on systems under your direct control. In a lot of these cases, the best any contract can do is provide financial compensation, and even that won't be worth much if the other party has no assets to compensate you with.
Obviously most cloud services can't fall into either the trustworthy or the direct control category, which is why I think it's crazy that so many people and businesses rely on them for actually important things rather than mere convenience.
Well, how did you expect a 2-hour movie made on a low budget to cover every character in detail and provide them with proper character development?
I didn't. That's why Firefly was interesting and Serenity was disappointing. It tried to be One Big Film, and never had a chance of succeeding.
But if they were going to make an extended single episode of Firefly, there was no need to trample on all of the background from the original series and destroy half the cast one way or another. They could have told a good story concentrating on part of the group without actively nerfing everyone else along the way.
Are you sure you're not confusing Serenity (the movie) with Firefly (the series)?
The series was great. The movie was one of those great disappointments, where you feel like some studio exec said, "OK, we know we aren't getting a sequel, so let's ignore the entire back story and personality of our characters, throw in loads of gratuitous SFX and action scenes, and focus on only one or two characters out of a great ensemble cast while reducing the others to supporting roles or tragic-fate-fodder."
Whedon's done some good work in his time, but IMHO Serenity was a low point.
First claim is the big investment houses expect it to fail. It is not investment grade anymore...
We have to be careful with terms here. Many things can be a bad investment at their current share price, but sound as an ongoing business.
...the data shows an upcoming bankruptcy.
Which data is that? That's really what I'm looking for here.
Second, if people can run Office and all their apps on a tablet with a keyboard cover they will do so. Why carry 2 things?
But this is exactly the argument I don't buy when it comes to tablets.
I work in software development, so admittedly my requirements are greater than average. Still, I have over 10 megapixels of desktop in the monitors on my desk, and I frequently use all of it at once and wish I had more. That desk is also home to a full size 105-key keyboard, complete with all the useful special keys in the correct places, various other input devices, phones/chargers, and so on.
There is no way you're ever going to set up a keyboard and tablet ergonomically enough for me to use for more than a few minutes at a time, and unless you're planning on making it unfold to give an order of magnitude more screen area, there's no way even the largest tablets (or laptops for that matter) are ever going to cut it for my serious work without plugging into much higher-spec external equipment. Oh, and my main workstation has more processing power and RAM than all the mobile devices in my office put together. It also has a workstation-class graphics card, made by AMD coincidentally.
I don't necessarily see desktop/workstation/server computing staying in tower cases or rackmount form factors that we use today, but I don't see the idea of having a dedicated work area with good quality input/output devices going away any time soon, and I don't see small and low power (in every sense) mobile components suddenly becoming equal in capabilities to similar components without those restrictions.
Besides, there will always be plenty of people whose applications do need as much raw processing power as they can get, even if an average device becomes powerful enough for an average user. Moreover, the managers and admin staff in every office I visit plug their laptops into a docking station with a large monitor, real keyboard and real mouse when they're at their desk, and in many cases they are just working with word processor documents, spreadsheets, database GUIs and the like. I think it's clear that even "average" business users have greater needs than any tablet/keyboard combo is going to service for more than a few minutes.
Why carry 2 things? As of now the IPAD lacks a keyboard and productivity software. But for general use they are superior with a better OS, longer battery life, higher DPI, etc.
Why carry anything at all? A lot of business people have laptops because that's what you have if you're a manager/salesperson/customer service rep who goes to meetings and sits at the table with a computer. However, those laptops are only necessary for a lot of these people because we haven't really figured networking out yet: we can transfer data from place to place, but we haven't build the UI concepts and security policies and all the other good stuff to really take advantage of it yet.
In twenty years time, would you be surprised if we just threw data around from one of the screens on my desk to yours across the office, or threw a report of interest straight up on the big screen in the meeting room with a swipe/tap/click/whatever? Would you be surprised if we had mini-data centres in family homes, storing all of their media and doing all of the main processing in a centralised place, but with screens and input devices scattered all around the house in useful places?
In any case, I'm not sure how an OS where I have to pay $3 for a ping app to diagnose a wireless connection problem is superior to every mainstream desktop
You make a lot of bold claims there, but they are obviously controversial and you haven't cited any actual data to back them up.
For example, why do you think AMD has only months left? They made a loss in Q3 and they're cutting their workforce, but they still took over $1B in revenues and have over 10,000 employees. That's almost certainly enough scale to survive a bad year or two while they reposition, which is exactly what their CEO said they would be doing on their Q3 call.
And I don't buy your argument about tablets replacing PCs at all. Tablets serve very well as a convenient portable information consumption device. For households that don't have any greater needs than that, sure, maybe they can do without a PC. But anyone who is doing anything creative is going to need way more capabilities than any tablet offers. That includes almost all business use and anyone who likes to send messages that don't fit in a txt msg or tweet, just to name two obvious and huge groups where tablets have no chance of replacing PCs. In short, saying tablets will make PCs obsolete would be like saying cell phones or games consoles would make PCs obsolete. Those things didn't happen, because we're talking about different tools for different jobs.
For the same reason, trying to push UI paradigms that have been reasonably successful on small, primarily consumption-based mobile devices onto a general purpose PC that is also used for creative work seems like a poorly thought-out idea to me. Between that and the evidence from Vista that people won't upgrade to a new version of Windows just because it's the new version of Windows any more, I'm skeptical about the course Microsoft seems to be charting with Windows 8.
Out of curiosity, may I ask where you're based? It sounds like this is a real problem for you, and if I had to submit things myself in Word format then I might well agree. Here in the UK, information from the government is often provided as, e.g., a PDF file, but things that are interactive like filing tax returns are typically done using (usually fairly well done) government-hosted web sites.
Governments should avoid forcing their citizens to pay money to a private entity in order for their citizens to interact with them.
The trouble with that argument is that taken to its logical conclusion it can't possibly work in general. For many government interactions, I now have a choice of filing on-line (requires an Internet connection), sending everything by post (requires paying postage) or personally visiting a government office (requires paying for transportation to get there and back if I don't live nearby). Life isn't free, which is why we get jobs to earn money that we spend on other things, some of which are essential.
This doesn't detract from democratic principles like making information from the government available to everyone. But I don't accept any argument in favour of using only OSS-friendly formats that is based on that principle, because in practice way more people know how to read a Word.doc file or an Adobe.pdf than a LibreOffice Writer file, and free-as-in-beer readers for both proprietary formats are available from Microsoft and Adobe respectively, and non-electronic copies of important things are available via other channels for those who don't have access to an Internet-connected computer.
OK, I was being a little flippant with the "toy" vs. "professional" thing, but only a little.
If, as you say, the majority of your document creation could be handled by WordPad, then sure, it probably doesn't matter which word processor you use. In fact, by your own argument, you don't actually need a word processor at all.
On the other hand, for people who do actually need the kind of extra functionality that a good word processor or spreadsheet offers, the poor usability of the OpenOffice family in comparison to the products of Microsoft's heavily funded and data-driven usability research is a serious consideration. For example, I know many people who complained mightily about the move to the Ribbon UI, but I have never heard anyone I know personally, neither friends and family nor work colleagues, say they had made the move but then wanted to go back after a few days getting used to it. Obviously no one person's experience is necessarily representative here, but still, that's a mighty clear picture for this one person.
From my own direct experience, even silly little changes in LibreOffice can be incredibly frustrating. For example, Calc used to let you type "18/" in a date cell and have it complete to 18/10/12 today (I'm in the UK, and it's 18 October 2012 as I write this). Now you have to type "18/10". There's no benefit whatsoever to that change, and it breaks something that one person I work with who maintains a spreadsheet full of dates has to type many times every day. That person is, let's say politely, not a fan of LibreOffice right now, and this ill-considered change is about to result in my company spending £200 to purchase Microsoft Office for them so they can use Excel instead.
As a business owner, I really don't mind that. Of course it's not just that one change that has motivated the decision to switch to Excel, but it's the straw that broke the camel's back after many other poor usability problems with LibreOffice Calc. I expect that the reduction in frustration and corresponding loss of efficiency will pay for the entire MS Office purchase within a few days because of that one bug. A pleasant working environment is worth a lot both commercially and simply because it's nicer for me and those I work with. On the other hand, allowing staff to suffer silly irritations that waste time can be incredibly damaging. So I guess we'll be one more case study of someone switching back to MS after using the F/OSS alternative by default because it was free.
If you're willing to take that stance regarding Slashdot, why not just be honest about F/OSS office suites? You don't care about them and have no interest in seeing them succeed. There really is nothing wrong with that position.
I think you're making his(?) point for him. He never said he cared about F/OSS office suites or had an interest in seeing them succeed. He said he'd been asked to evaluate them on several occasions and found that they fell short. There is no obligation on anyone, or even on everyone who posts on Slashdot, to find F/OSS inherently superior in some way.
He's not the only one with reservations. I, too, have evaluated many alternatives to MS Office for my own businesses, clients, and others. So far, I am still strongly of the view that for anyone with non-trivial requirements and whose time matters more than a little money (which is almost everyone in business or government for a start) neither the OpenOffice family nor any of the on-line alternatives like Google Docs that I have seen to date are serious competitors. Home users can use toy software and might not mind. Professionals need tools that work reliably and efficiently, and £200 or so is nothing compared to the losses of using substandard and/or incompatible tools.
That makes no sense, because many people can and routinely do send e-mail from the same domain.
This move is fairly directly contrary to the basic rules of privacy in the EU, and after the negative press that European governments have had over things like airline passenger and banking information recently, I don't see this getting very far. There's no compelling "fear the terrorists" or "catch the tax evaders" kind of argument with popular appeal here. The US authorities have no need to know my credit card number, and certainly no need to keep it for years, assuming it's even still valid by that time.
I'm sorry, is there some sort of fairy godmother that provides free cash while an author is writing their first book?
Yes. They're called publishers, and the free cash is called an advance. It's common practice to provide a significant amount of funding to an author up-front, which is guaranteed but will be reclaimed out of their later earnings if the book makes money. This is done because publishers are picky about which authors they take on but view those they do sign up as investments, so they want the first book from the author (and any book with their publishing house's name on it) to be as good as they can make it.
Contrary to popular (read: corporate) belief, ordinary people don't mind purchasing their media, as long as it's convenient, not ridiculously overpriced, and supports the actual creator of the work...
Unfortunately, the real world evidence is not nearly as clear as you're making out. If it were, this debate would have been over a long time ago.
In reality, when creators offer choose-your-own-pricing, plenty of people do just take the product for free. Even creators who give away their work completely free, from a well designed and robust source available to anyone, still find that a significant number of other people will rip it and redistribute, and a significant number of users are using those "pirate" versions instead of real ones.
Of course there are plenty of people who will be honest and pay a fair price, particularly if it's clearly supporting the people who did the hard work to create the product. But this is nowhere near as universal as you're claiming.
It's not quite as simple as that, because it has been know for the UK Transport Secretary to put their fingers in their ears and shout "La la la la" while you mention that particular round of EU legal requirements.
Right now, the best hope for the UK seems to be that no matter how much the government shouts about security and terrorism the fact is that no-one likes having their privacy invaded, and the airports know that it probably does reduce the number of people willing to fly by some amount, and since the airports are in it for the money they don't seem to be reinstalling a lot of these scanners even if they're not prevented from doing so by UK law. Unless the government decides to mandate putting them back in again, of course...
Slashdot Mirror
I was talking about breakfast TV, not the Today programme. Apologies for the ambiguity.
Sorry, I was talking about the breakfast TV show, not Radio 4.
They clearly ask questions that are intended to come across as incisive but which are often nothing but vapid, thinly veiled strawman arguments designed to make them appear insightful and clever.
This is a very unwelcome recent trend at the Beeb. I place the blame squarely on Jeremy Paxman and/or the editorial team behind Newsnight. At some point, a little while ago now though it's hard to pin down exactly when, he seemed to jump from asking difficult questions of his guests but respectfully to doing pretty much exactly what the above quote says. And since Paxman is one of the BBC's longest-established Serious Interviewers, and Newsnight is the nightly serious news show, if you can get away with that sort of behaviour there you can do it anywhere.
Also, it would help if the BBC stopped trying to promote its senior correspondents into celebrities whose personal opinions are somehow more important than the news they report, particularly when those senior people aren't always particularly credible within their fields anyway. Robert Peston and Nick Robinson between them could probably bring down a national economy or something.
The BBC has fallen very low indeed.
And yet all it takes for me to be content with paying my licence fee is about five minutes watching any other major news channel, from the UK or otherwise. The BBC isn't perfect, but it's so far above the average there's no meaningful comparison, and IMHO it is still somewhat ahead of even the decent alternatives overall.
One of the most interesting things about the BBC is the remarkably neutral way their news programmes report on stories involving themselves or their own people. George Entwistle was being interviewed on their regular breakfast programme -- not a show you would normally associate with hard-nosed journalism and heavy questioning of interviewees -- just a few hours before he threw in the towel, and even there the hosts weren't giving him a bye just because he was (at that moment) their own editor-in-chief. On many of the news networks, I imagine the kind of blunt challenges those presenters made would have been career-threatening moves.
Yeah it's well known that geeks are unable to learn anything new.[/sarcasm]
Please notice that I didn't say a developer couldn't become a manager. I'm merely saying that management is a different profession, and moving into management should not be an expected or required transition equated with seniority. A geek might also become a Michelin-starred chef, a world class concert pianist or a breeder of champion race horses, but we don't expect any of those changes in career just because they started out writing code.
By the time you've reached a position of seniority, you should be prepared to manage.
Why?
Skilled and experienced people can contribute in both technical leadership and training/mentoring roles, to the extent that they aren't really part of the same thing anyway, without getting involved at all in "management" in the common senses of project management, product management, being someone's "manager", and the like.
Moreover, being a good manager in any of those senses has very little to do with technical competence. Being good at the job and being good at managing people who do the job are no more the same thing than being a world class athlete and being a world class athletics coach.
A false equation of seniority and management is one of the biggest dumb ideas holding back our industry, and it needs to die. Unfortunately, as long as we keep promoting geeks with no aptitude for management into management roles, they won't understand what's going wrong well enough to stop it happening...
Part of the problem is younger programmers who assume they're better because they put in a lot of effort to learn the latest GUI or DB libraries, and they know the intricate specifications of six trendy programming languages off the top of their head, and they can configure four different Linux web servers on auto-pilot. See, they're always keeping up to date!
Older and wiser programmers know that usually, to a first approximation, a GUI library is a GUI library and a programming language is a programming language and a web server is a web server. They're just tools, and while some are better than others, it's what you build with those tools that ultimately matters.
Of course, they also know when and how to check out the specifics and decide which tools are right for a given job, but they don't waste time on that until they have a need for it, which makes them less buzzword compliant in the eyes of the newbies (but a lot more productive).
When a tool isn't just a rehash of numerous similar tools before it, it's usually the older and more experienced folks who came up with the industry-moving developments, but the newbie programmers who are buzzword aggregators always trying to improve a resume and the naive managers who hire based on buzzwords don't notice that sort of thing. They don't care that someone older could build an efficient database schema that answers the important questions in an instant, or an easy-to-use GUI that customers love, or a robust concurrent server that doesn't crash and make you look like idiots in front of those same customers. Do you have at least 7 years of experience with C# 5?
Of course some older programmers really do slow down, stop learning, and coast along. It might be getting stuck in a rut and not bothering to do anything about it. It might be a matter of changing priorities, family commitments becoming more demanding and the like.
But the thing that really divides the good older programmers, IME, is whether or not they know how to take advantage of their greater understanding and better transferrable skills. If you're still playing resume buzzword bingo at 40, you're doing it wrong, not least because it implies you still look for jobs by spamming resumes like a college grad. You should be landing a good position through your network contacts before it's even advertised, transferring from wage slave to freelancer/contractor/consultant arrangements, starting your own business so you're on the other side of the desk, or otherwise avoiding being a victim of ignorance.
In short, an older developer who knows what they're doing has a more-or-less indefinite shelf life, as long as they don't play games with young, dumb people who don't understand why. As a bonus, avoiding those games is an excellent filter for avoiding crappy jobs, poor working conditions, incompetent colleagues, and low pay. :-)
Looking at the current UK system, I suspect that as a minimum you'd have to:
1. increase the threshold where people start to pay personal income tax and/or adjust the benefits system equivalently (because a lot of salaries in retail and manufacturing are about to take a hit at the same time that a lot of prices are going to go up)
2. reduce or eliminate VAT on essential items
3. increase VAT on non-essential items
4. push VAT into the stratosphere on luxury items
5. adjust taxes on big ticket items like house and car purchases to a sliding scale rather than a flat rate, probably starting reasonably low for your first starter home or runabout but becoming astronomical by the time you're buying that holiday mansion or Ferrari (and in the particular case of property, impose taxes on rents similarly)
6. adjust duties on imports to prevent the obvious workarounds for the items that now have higher VAT
and then hope that you could somehow balance the huge number of minor variations and edge cases that would inevitably arise so that the curve for consumption taxes paid by individuals of different wealth levels wound up looking roughly the same shape as the curve for income taxes they used to pay, all without spending so much on fighting lawsuits over free trade and paying customs staff to fight the resulting black markets that you wound up with less than you started with.
No more tax evasion if everyone pays a consumption tax.
That does solve the profit off-shoring problem up to a point, but it creates another problem because consumption taxes are heavily regressive. I tend to think you're right that it's worth exploring the idea of dramatically shifting where the tax burden falls, but the entire tax system would need dramatically rebalancing to avoid screwing everyone on relatively low incomes in the process.
Are you suggesting I should be happy about their ability to manipulate the situation so I get to pay for their infrastructure?
Given that they probably pay vast sums of VAT (which in turn was paid by their customers), it's fairly likely that it's actually those Apple customers who were paying for your infrastructure.
Plus there's employer's NI contributions, local business and property taxation rules, tax on the fuel that goes in their vehicles, and so on.
There's obviously something to consider in terms of Corporation Tax for international businesses that can shift where profits are recorded, but arguing as if these huge companies weren't contributing any taxes at all in the countries where they operate is either ignorance or wilful misrepresentation.
If the worst happens and they go into administration, many of the legal protections that would normally exist evaporate.
Yes and no. There are strict rules about who gets what and in what order in the event that a company goes into administration or otherwise gets wound up. You might not get everything you otherwise would have, but that's not the same as having no protections at all.
Having a contractual guarantee of certain rights, particularly things that are important to you but have little monetary value to anyone else such as access to key data, can be useful when dealing with administrators. They have to operate under certain rules, and even if you're too far down the pecking order to matter in terms of getting lots of money, other contractual rights can still be advantageous.
(I'm not a lawyer, etc. Having said that, my general understanding here is based directly on formal legal advice from people who are, discussing almost exactly this scenario. If you've been told different by someone who should also know what they're talking about, I'd be interested to hear about it, because at least one of us got bad advice.)
Sometimes the risk of trying to do everything yourself is the greater one.
Sure, but so far there is precious little evidence that the cloud lives up to any of the hype about Google or Amazon infrastructure and staff doing a better job than anyone you could hire and anything you could install in-house. On the contrary, the objective uptime record for just about every major cloud service provider seems to be quite poor, and that's before you even get into the kinds of hazards we're talking about here.
Moreover, their defence after seemingly every outage that customers didn't understand how to use their systems properly and should have allocated availability zone A in region B to be a stand-by for instance C connecting to database D rings hollow if you're arguing that outsourcing is a painless way to get robust IT facilities so you don't have to hire serious (and expensive) expertise in-house. As we've seen with several recent outages, even the "experts" at large businesses with well-established cloud facilities often screw this stuff up.
Then again, you seem to make a living doing things like moving people onto Google Apps, while I just worked up a point-by-point case backed by solid data showing why switching to Google Apps has cost one of my clients a significant amount of money in real terms as well as exposing them to other avoidable business risks. I suppose it's unlikely we're going to see this issue the same way.
Unfortunately, given the standard of regulation of banks in the relevant jurisdiction, that doesn't mean very much at all. In practice, you would probably still have to take legal action against them in another country if they screwed you in one of their notorious surprise moves, such as freezing your account because you irritated some automated potential fraud algorithm with an imperfect heuristic.
Unless they locked up an account belonging to a business with serious transaction volumes (and by that point they reportedly pay more attention to customer service anyway) it seems unlikely that most people would find it cost effective to go after them in court. So being regulated as a bank in Luxembourg isn't really worth much at all, except for apparently being quite effective in convincing people like the parent poster that PayPal in Europe is a safer bet than their infamous US operation.
(I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant, but I have investigated this issue from a business point of view relatively recently. At that time the legal/regulatory situation appeared to be quite clear and obviously in PayPal's favour.)
What good is a backup if you are unable to restore it?
A variant of this theme has always been my problem with all these on-line backup services: in the small print, most (all?) of them seem to have no obligation if they decide to shut things down to give you even a reasonable opportunity to restore anything you need first. Whether they were closed down by their own choice or because of third party influence as in this case doesn't really matter, as the result for the innocent user is just as bad either way.
The common sense rule is the same as it always was: for anything important, try to depend only on people you can trust without needing to rely on any legal measures, or on systems under your direct control. In a lot of these cases, the best any contract can do is provide financial compensation, and even that won't be worth much if the other party has no assets to compensate you with.
Obviously most cloud services can't fall into either the trustworthy or the direct control category, which is why I think it's crazy that so many people and businesses rely on them for actually important things rather than mere convenience.
Well, how did you expect a 2-hour movie made on a low budget to cover every character in detail and provide them with proper character development?
I didn't. That's why Firefly was interesting and Serenity was disappointing. It tried to be One Big Film, and never had a chance of succeeding.
But if they were going to make an extended single episode of Firefly, there was no need to trample on all of the background from the original series and destroy half the cast one way or another. They could have told a good story concentrating on part of the group without actively nerfing everyone else along the way.
Are you sure you're not confusing Serenity (the movie) with Firefly (the series)?
The series was great. The movie was one of those great disappointments, where you feel like some studio exec said, "OK, we know we aren't getting a sequel, so let's ignore the entire back story and personality of our characters, throw in loads of gratuitous SFX and action scenes, and focus on only one or two characters out of a great ensemble cast while reducing the others to supporting roles or tragic-fate-fodder."
Whedon's done some good work in his time, but IMHO Serenity was a low point.
First claim is the big investment houses expect it to fail. It is not investment grade anymore...
We have to be careful with terms here. Many things can be a bad investment at their current share price, but sound as an ongoing business.
...the data shows an upcoming bankruptcy.
Which data is that? That's really what I'm looking for here.
Second, if people can run Office and all their apps on a tablet with a keyboard cover they will do so. Why carry 2 things?
But this is exactly the argument I don't buy when it comes to tablets.
I work in software development, so admittedly my requirements are greater than average. Still, I have over 10 megapixels of desktop in the monitors on my desk, and I frequently use all of it at once and wish I had more. That desk is also home to a full size 105-key keyboard, complete with all the useful special keys in the correct places, various other input devices, phones/chargers, and so on.
There is no way you're ever going to set up a keyboard and tablet ergonomically enough for me to use for more than a few minutes at a time, and unless you're planning on making it unfold to give an order of magnitude more screen area, there's no way even the largest tablets (or laptops for that matter) are ever going to cut it for my serious work without plugging into much higher-spec external equipment. Oh, and my main workstation has more processing power and RAM than all the mobile devices in my office put together. It also has a workstation-class graphics card, made by AMD coincidentally.
I don't necessarily see desktop/workstation/server computing staying in tower cases or rackmount form factors that we use today, but I don't see the idea of having a dedicated work area with good quality input/output devices going away any time soon, and I don't see small and low power (in every sense) mobile components suddenly becoming equal in capabilities to similar components without those restrictions.
Besides, there will always be plenty of people whose applications do need as much raw processing power as they can get, even if an average device becomes powerful enough for an average user. Moreover, the managers and admin staff in every office I visit plug their laptops into a docking station with a large monitor, real keyboard and real mouse when they're at their desk, and in many cases they are just working with word processor documents, spreadsheets, database GUIs and the like. I think it's clear that even "average" business users have greater needs than any tablet/keyboard combo is going to service for more than a few minutes.
Why carry 2 things? As of now the IPAD lacks a keyboard and productivity software. But for general use they are superior with a better OS, longer battery life, higher DPI, etc.
Why carry anything at all? A lot of business people have laptops because that's what you have if you're a manager/salesperson/customer service rep who goes to meetings and sits at the table with a computer. However, those laptops are only necessary for a lot of these people because we haven't really figured networking out yet: we can transfer data from place to place, but we haven't build the UI concepts and security policies and all the other good stuff to really take advantage of it yet.
In twenty years time, would you be surprised if we just threw data around from one of the screens on my desk to yours across the office, or threw a report of interest straight up on the big screen in the meeting room with a swipe/tap/click/whatever? Would you be surprised if we had mini-data centres in family homes, storing all of their media and doing all of the main processing in a centralised place, but with screens and input devices scattered all around the house in useful places?
In any case, I'm not sure how an OS where I have to pay $3 for a ping app to diagnose a wireless connection problem is superior to every mainstream desktop
You make a lot of bold claims there, but they are obviously controversial and you haven't cited any actual data to back them up.
For example, why do you think AMD has only months left? They made a loss in Q3 and they're cutting their workforce, but they still took over $1B in revenues and have over 10,000 employees. That's almost certainly enough scale to survive a bad year or two while they reposition, which is exactly what their CEO said they would be doing on their Q3 call.
And I don't buy your argument about tablets replacing PCs at all. Tablets serve very well as a convenient portable information consumption device. For households that don't have any greater needs than that, sure, maybe they can do without a PC. But anyone who is doing anything creative is going to need way more capabilities than any tablet offers. That includes almost all business use and anyone who likes to send messages that don't fit in a txt msg or tweet, just to name two obvious and huge groups where tablets have no chance of replacing PCs. In short, saying tablets will make PCs obsolete would be like saying cell phones or games consoles would make PCs obsolete. Those things didn't happen, because we're talking about different tools for different jobs.
For the same reason, trying to push UI paradigms that have been reasonably successful on small, primarily consumption-based mobile devices onto a general purpose PC that is also used for creative work seems like a poorly thought-out idea to me. Between that and the evidence from Vista that people won't upgrade to a new version of Windows just because it's the new version of Windows any more, I'm skeptical about the course Microsoft seems to be charting with Windows 8.
Out of curiosity, may I ask where you're based? It sounds like this is a real problem for you, and if I had to submit things myself in Word format then I might well agree. Here in the UK, information from the government is often provided as, e.g., a PDF file, but things that are interactive like filing tax returns are typically done using (usually fairly well done) government-hosted web sites.
Governments should avoid forcing their citizens to pay money to a private entity in order for their citizens to interact with them.
The trouble with that argument is that taken to its logical conclusion it can't possibly work in general. For many government interactions, I now have a choice of filing on-line (requires an Internet connection), sending everything by post (requires paying postage) or personally visiting a government office (requires paying for transportation to get there and back if I don't live nearby). Life isn't free, which is why we get jobs to earn money that we spend on other things, some of which are essential.
This doesn't detract from democratic principles like making information from the government available to everyone. But I don't accept any argument in favour of using only OSS-friendly formats that is based on that principle, because in practice way more people know how to read a Word .doc file or an Adobe .pdf than a LibreOffice Writer file, and free-as-in-beer readers for both proprietary formats are available from Microsoft and Adobe respectively, and non-electronic copies of important things are available via other channels for those who don't have access to an Internet-connected computer.
OK, I was being a little flippant with the "toy" vs. "professional" thing, but only a little.
If, as you say, the majority of your document creation could be handled by WordPad, then sure, it probably doesn't matter which word processor you use. In fact, by your own argument, you don't actually need a word processor at all.
On the other hand, for people who do actually need the kind of extra functionality that a good word processor or spreadsheet offers, the poor usability of the OpenOffice family in comparison to the products of Microsoft's heavily funded and data-driven usability research is a serious consideration. For example, I know many people who complained mightily about the move to the Ribbon UI, but I have never heard anyone I know personally, neither friends and family nor work colleagues, say they had made the move but then wanted to go back after a few days getting used to it. Obviously no one person's experience is necessarily representative here, but still, that's a mighty clear picture for this one person.
From my own direct experience, even silly little changes in LibreOffice can be incredibly frustrating. For example, Calc used to let you type "18/" in a date cell and have it complete to 18/10/12 today (I'm in the UK, and it's 18 October 2012 as I write this). Now you have to type "18/10". There's no benefit whatsoever to that change, and it breaks something that one person I work with who maintains a spreadsheet full of dates has to type many times every day. That person is, let's say politely, not a fan of LibreOffice right now, and this ill-considered change is about to result in my company spending £200 to purchase Microsoft Office for them so they can use Excel instead.
As a business owner, I really don't mind that. Of course it's not just that one change that has motivated the decision to switch to Excel, but it's the straw that broke the camel's back after many other poor usability problems with LibreOffice Calc. I expect that the reduction in frustration and corresponding loss of efficiency will pay for the entire MS Office purchase within a few days because of that one bug. A pleasant working environment is worth a lot both commercially and simply because it's nicer for me and those I work with. On the other hand, allowing staff to suffer silly irritations that waste time can be incredibly damaging. So I guess we'll be one more case study of someone switching back to MS after using the F/OSS alternative by default because it was free.
If you're willing to take that stance regarding Slashdot, why not just be honest about F/OSS office suites? You don't care about them and have no interest in seeing them succeed. There really is nothing wrong with that position.
I think you're making his(?) point for him. He never said he cared about F/OSS office suites or had an interest in seeing them succeed. He said he'd been asked to evaluate them on several occasions and found that they fell short. There is no obligation on anyone, or even on everyone who posts on Slashdot, to find F/OSS inherently superior in some way.
He's not the only one with reservations. I, too, have evaluated many alternatives to MS Office for my own businesses, clients, and others. So far, I am still strongly of the view that for anyone with non-trivial requirements and whose time matters more than a little money (which is almost everyone in business or government for a start) neither the OpenOffice family nor any of the on-line alternatives like Google Docs that I have seen to date are serious competitors. Home users can use toy software and might not mind. Professionals need tools that work reliably and efficiently, and £200 or so is nothing compared to the losses of using substandard and/or incompatible tools.
That makes no sense, because many people can and routinely do send e-mail from the same domain.
This move is fairly directly contrary to the basic rules of privacy in the EU, and after the negative press that European governments have had over things like airline passenger and banking information recently, I don't see this getting very far. There's no compelling "fear the terrorists" or "catch the tax evaders" kind of argument with popular appeal here. The US authorities have no need to know my credit card number, and certainly no need to keep it for years, assuming it's even still valid by that time.
I'm sorry, is there some sort of fairy godmother that provides free cash while an author is writing their first book?
Yes. They're called publishers, and the free cash is called an advance. It's common practice to provide a significant amount of funding to an author up-front, which is guaranteed but will be reclaimed out of their later earnings if the book makes money. This is done because publishers are picky about which authors they take on but view those they do sign up as investments, so they want the first book from the author (and any book with their publishing house's name on it) to be as good as they can make it.
Contrary to popular (read: corporate) belief, ordinary people don't mind purchasing their media, as long as it's convenient, not ridiculously overpriced, and supports the actual creator of the work...
Unfortunately, the real world evidence is not nearly as clear as you're making out. If it were, this debate would have been over a long time ago.
In reality, when creators offer choose-your-own-pricing, plenty of people do just take the product for free. Even creators who give away their work completely free, from a well designed and robust source available to anyone, still find that a significant number of other people will rip it and redistribute, and a significant number of users are using those "pirate" versions instead of real ones.
Of course there are plenty of people who will be honest and pay a fair price, particularly if it's clearly supporting the people who did the hard work to create the product. But this is nowhere near as universal as you're claiming.
It's not quite as simple as that, because it has been know for the UK Transport Secretary to put their fingers in their ears and shout "La la la la" while you mention that particular round of EU legal requirements.
Right now, the best hope for the UK seems to be that no matter how much the government shouts about security and terrorism the fact is that no-one likes having their privacy invaded, and the airports know that it probably does reduce the number of people willing to fly by some amount, and since the airports are in it for the money they don't seem to be reinstalling a lot of these scanners even if they're not prevented from doing so by UK law. Unless the government decides to mandate putting them back in again, of course...
That's a reasonable argument for a public copyright registration scheme with an escrow facility.
It's not a good argument for making copyright off-by-default.