Give OmniWeb another shot. Beta 7 was put out recently and it is much improved. I suggest you get the.tar.gz, and do not use StuffIt on it, as StuffIt blows on Mac OS X; use either the command line or get OpenUp from Softrak.
A web site is just one service that a company can provide, so what do you get by registering a whatever.web address that you don't already have with your usual www.whatever.com? It seems like it would only cause more confusion in the market place, leading to more lawsuits and heavy-handed domain ownership policies.
No, I don't know the details of your company (as you didn't provide many), but that in no way invalidates my argument; it only implies that it may not apply directly to your company. It is instead based on my observations as a contractor working at a number of companies. I'm sure you'd like to believe that your company is very different, but what information you do provide points to the opposite.
In trying to further refute my argument, you actually support it. If your company is willingly hiring 10 known unqualified people at $125K/year just in hopes that 2 will work out, it is completely messed up. Try to justify it all you like to me or yourself, but that's simply a disgusting waste of a million dollars. It speaks more to a shortage of intelligent management than technical staff.
I'm feeling generous today, though, so I'll make you a deal. Give me $500K and I'll interview those same 10 candidates and tell you which two are the ones that will actually work out. Right there I save you half a million dollars; love me. I will even refund their salary if I am in error. Unfortunately, your management seems to prefer throwing that money at any ol' candidate they can get their hands on instead of investing in a better recruiting process.
I'm in no way saying that your company isn't experiencing a shortage, but you are mistaking a local shortage for a global shortage. Your shortage is yours alone and is wholly because your company is doing something wrong when it comes to attracting talent. No, I don't know what that might be, but I wouldn't tell you even if I could figure it out on the sparse information you've given. Afterall, that kind of information appears to be worth about a million dollars. Time for your company to start spending wisely.
Instead of demanding resumes (and, believe me, I could supply a ton of qualified candidates for almost any job; willing to pay $100+/hour?), how's about demanding the companies produce job descriptions that are actually useful? If I see another position that doesn't say anything more than "SV pre-IPO Java Web", I think I'm going to be sick. Companies simply will not give you the basic facts of what you jobs is going to be anymore (maybe they never really did). If they can't go into a bit of detail, how am I supposed to determine whether or not I really want to work there? Instead, they always try to pump up even the most grunt of labors while at the same time downplaying the value of the position so they don't have to pay as much. Face it, the companies themselves are at fault, not the labor market.
If you can't find people, it is for lack of trying not lack of people. From what you say, your boss just isn't doing his job in finding the right people. If he's not getting qualified applicants, there's something wrong with the company, the project, or the job. Companies need to stop looking to blame external forces for their woes and address policy issues within the company that keep people from wanting to work there.
It really is that simple. We're talking basic management here, not rocket science. If you're willing to hire 10 people for 1 year in hopes of finding 2 good ones, maybe you should simply double (or more!) the salary for the positions to further attract qualified people. Perhaps the company has chosen the wrong technology to do the job (all too common), making it impossible to find people who fit the bad qualifications. It could be anything, but it is definitely a problem with the company, not the marketplace. Any company that truly values good people will have no trouble finding them.
The only answer I can think of would be cost, as a company is likely to charge more to do the development if they have to give up control of their source code. That should simply be factored into the bid process, with the notion that a little extra money spent now will be an investment and not an expense. Government is vast, so I don't see any project being a one-off in isolation. Card readers, for example, and subway card readers in particular, aren't the problem of one city, but multiple cities around the country. They would benefit if they could all base their implementation off some common base. It's such a reasonable idea, you just know it'll never be done . . .
Don't they know the speaker goes in the thumb and the microphone in the pinky? That way, you can make the little "call me" wave and have it actually make some sense!
However, the moment you stop dipping the ladle into what M$ oriented education system pours out of the pipeline (or sewer,) you run into some real shortages.
The point of the article, and the majority of the responses, is that that's not true. There is no shortage of skilled people, but rather a shortage of companies that "get it". I know tons of Smalltalk programmers, so you if you can't find them or hire them or keep them, it's a problem your company has, not a problem with the supply chain. You go on to support that by telling us how awful your pay is. If your company really needed Smalltalk developers, management would take the steps necessary to get their projects on track. Since they'd rather make excuses, the "IT worker shortage" makes a wonderful strawman.
It doesn't just seem like a lot, it is a lot. I'm not suggesting that your average drone can go in asking for sick cash, but a skilled person with their thumb on the market will be able to get what they're worth. They key is having a focus on your skills, not their money. I just left a job in Dallas where, had I stayed, I would have been making $150/hour. My skills were no longer being used properly and I simply didn't enjoy the work any longer, so I left.
What kind of experience and skills would a programmer need to make that much in the Bay Area?
Like so many people, especially those complaining about foreign workers, you're thinking about this all wrong. It's not about how you pump up your resume, but what value you can bring to a company by working both hard and smart. You have to be worth $125+K to make it, but worth it how and to whom? What skills do you have that are exceptional and can be brought to bear on a problem that make you worth what you're asking?
Do you know where I can find info about market rates for programmers for different regions in the US?
Why care about market rates? What you're worth to a particular company in a particular job is far more important than what the average person earns at an average company doing an average job. It's all situational, and you need to be willing to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gains. I was happy to get $9/hour doing development for a nothing shop right out of college (instead of starting at IBM for $45K) because the work was extremely interesting and I knew it would teach me a lot and place me on a good path for the future. Now, less than a decade later, it has worked out tremendously well not just in terms of money, but in my ability to do work I actually enjoy instead of having to swallow endless corporate imposed stupidities.
As Joseph Campbell (nice page here) said, "Follow your bliss". If money is your bliss, I wish you the best of luck in finding it, but I cannot help you in that search.
I don't find cheap labor, foreign or domestic, to be a threat. If a company's main goal is to find the cheapest employees possible, they're cutting their own throats. If a company wants to pay someone half of what I'm making, they'll get an employee with 1/10th the skills, and I'll laugh my ass off as their projects fail after becoming late and overbudget. If a company wants to fail, I let it fail and move on. Why would you let it trouble you?
as an older programmer, I have seen many of my friends and colleagues choose other lines of work
"As an autoworker, I have seen . .."
The point I am trying to make is that you simply need to adapt. Instead of sounding like Abe Simpson ("I'm old. Gimme, gimme, gimme!"), you have to sit down and figure out what your skills are and what the market is for those skills. Yes, you may have to get out of a bad market, which might mean switching jobs or taking to an entirely new industry. Tough hop. Stop crying and deal with it.
if the public ever realizes the fraud being perpetrauted, there will be real outrage
You seem to think they don't realize that their software is buggy or their tech support is bad. Not only do they know things are bad, they don't care! And that's the nature of the market. Unless you can show a company that you have the skills to do a better job, they will hire someone cheaper who will still fit within their rough tolerances for performance (i.e., the customer keep buying the product) and, I can't stress this enough, it doesn't matter if the cheaper worker is foreign or domestic. In our free market, you got outbid.
And then we wonder why our best and brightest opt for medical school or law school... wake the fuck up
Actually, smart people tend to do something because they enjoy doing it, not because it pays well, and it just so happens that someone doing a job well (smart or not) will end up making more money than someone who does a job poorly (surprised?). If someone wants to become a doctor or lawyer, I would hope it's because they like that line of work, not because a spreadsheet calculated that they'd make the most money doing it. And I'd think you'll find that it really is the people who do their job (whatever the field) best that get paid the best. I personally don't care what people make in other fields, either. I'm doing my job. not theirs. They would not be making my money doing my job unless they were equally skilled, and vice versa. I don't have a problem with that.
pay for programmers is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago, measured in real dollars... programmers in the 60s made 100K+ per year
And in the 60s it actually meant something to be a programmer, just like it actually means something to be a doctor even today. But in software development today, any goon who read the latest "Idiot's Guide to Programming For Dummies in 21 Days" can call themselves a programmer. They flood the market and bring the average salary down, sure, along with the average quality. But if you look at absolute numbers, I would wager that there are more skilled programmers making over $200K/year today than there were making $100K/year (adjusted) in 1960. I would agree that a market is in a sad state when it would rather hire 4 clueless wannabe's at $50K than one competent guru at $200K, but it is up to you to find a different market if you can't change or work within your current market. To claim that it is somehow the fault of the government or foreigners or college grads is denial at it's best. Your old colleagues don't have a right to a high salary unless they can produce high quality in a market that values it.
...let's face it, programming in the USA was rapidly approaching the status of "doctor" or "lawyer". In the late 80's, a hot programmer could freelance for a fortune.
This made life very tough on Sun, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. The last thing they needed was having to pay $40-$100 an hour for programmers.
In case you're not aware of the current situation, hot programmers can still freelance for well over $100/hour. The only people who really have to worry about foreign workers brought in on H1B visas (or any other way, including companies opening divisions in other countries) are the ones who aren't particularly skilled and are still extracting a premium salary. I don't care where they come from or what color their skin is, if someone can do a job better than an American for less money, they should get the job, even if it was my job. I've yet to have that happen to me, so I don't worry much about it. If foreign workers are taking your job away, it's time to stop complaining about them and start doing a better job yourself.
Not to be overly critical of your company, but that just doesn't jibe. Firstly, I don't care where in the USA you are, but decent people cannot be had for $75K unless they have absolutely no idea about their market value (e.g., they've worked for you with blinders on since you snapped them up out of college). Given the high cost of living in CA/Silicon Valley, $75K is a joke to anyone with skill; I wouldn't consider a job there for less than $125K without some *major* perks. So it is not at all surprising that your company gets "passed over", since it sounds like an average company with average jobs for average people. If you want to attract "non-standard" (read: talented) people, you have to give them non-standard incentives. That doesn't necessarily mean money, either. Talented people just don't like cookie-cutter positions, plain and simple.
she would have to justify the amount she deserves (right?)
If the RIAA doesn't have to justify getting a blanket $25K/album, why should she have to justify getting her cut of that? In fact, if the labels really don't intend to distribute the awarded amount to the artists in question, I think she should get it all, since she is currently the only artist making any claims to it. Once we have all the other artists suing their labels, then we'll worry about splitting it up.:-)
If currently true, that may not always be the case. Their privacy policy allows them to take your personal viewing information, disassociate it from your name, and use it however they wish. What they have is the basis for a rating system not unlike Neilsen's, and that kind of research is worth far more than the high price they charge us for subscriptions to get TV listings that are available at no cost from any number of sites on the net (and if they'd open up their listings format, I'd happily write a converter).
And yet you're saying people should be happy to pay them? "Sir, if you have a few minutes and $5, we'd love to have you fill out this survey for us." I hope that sounds as foolish to you as it does to me. If not, maybe you need to work for the TiVo business division; which clearly doesn't have it's head as firmly attached as the technology division does. The box rocks, but the service blows.
I recently bought a TiVo and, if you read the fine print, you'll find that the $199 is not for your lifetime, but the lifetime of the machine. A machine they don't think will last much longer than 90 days, based on their warranty. If your machine craps out after that or you you want to buy a second generation system if/when they come out, your initial $199 vanishes. This is a fatal flaw, in my opinion, because I would want to be able to buy and sell my service subscription independent of the box I initially got it with. On the whole, I like my TiVo hardware, but they won't get very far on a business plan that involves charging people to gather their personal viewing habits.
There are more than a thousand commands in any m$-office application, users need at least *some* way of uncluttering the menus.
If that's the problem, then there are better solutions than "smart menus". The one that comes to my mind is the old idea of presenting a GUI based on the user profile. Back when I used Word, I recall they had different layouts for Normal and Expert users. I say those aren't good enough profiles based on the features that MS has jammed into what used to be a simple word processor. I should have to tell it I do layout before it thrusts all sorts of kerning and spacing features in my face. Same goes for equation editing, HTML authoring, and any number of other things (many of which are mutually exclusive) it does beyond simple word processing. If complex software has a straightforward dialog for doing user profile configuration (linked to a help system that educates the user as to what the various options meant), it would become much easier to use. We have a long ways to go before smart software replaces the need for the smart user to tell the stupid computer what to do.
GUI coding (in its current instantiations) make for some of the most difficult to read and compicated code out there.
I don't think the original poster was proposing that the user learn to code their own GUI, but to instead understand what the GUI is doing such that scripts to do the same or similar things can be written. This already exists, to some extent, in tools like AppleScript, which let you turn on a "Record" button and it will translate the actions you perform in the GUI to scripting commands. It's a logical level above macros, but it only touches the tip of the problem.
More importantly, how do we encourage people to WANT to do customizations / scripts?
This is defintely the crux of the problem. As nice as tools like AppleScript might be, I doubt even 5% have taken the time to learn it and how to apply it to their daily tasks. It could also be that the daily tasks of most users don't fall into the domain of scriptable actions. If you're using MS Office most of the day, how does scripting (vs simple templates) help you write your reports? As geeks, we don't use computers the same way the average office worker does, so the approach to automating tasks needs to be approached differently. The developer needs to understand how the user is working with the application before they start altering the way it operates, and if the user isn't given them any feedback (surprisingly common in the commercial world, where companies actually make the user pay to make suggestions for improvement, but still fairly common in the open source community, where the user is expected to be a developer themselves if they want to see the app do something differently). All basic design principles, all too often forgotten.
Oddly, it was a direct cut and paste from my browser and it was correct when I checked it in the preview. Something funky must have happened in the submission process.
I merely said that there is no reason to think that anything exists aside from what we can detect with our senses (and devices that enhance our senses).
I'm going to have to guess that this phrase best represents what others see as a problem with your belief structure. Why would we even think of constructing devices to enhance our senses unless we had every reason to think that things exist beyond our perception? Time and time again, these devices have shown that there is, indeed, more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies.
Do you mean that the code has become more tied to the hardware, or just that Apple's stopped talking about supporting other platforms? There's a difference.
Not in the case of Apple. They've hyped the hell out of projects that see 1 month of R&D and never ship a product. In this case, they had a working technology they dropped. Cross platform is as dead as a freakin' Newton. Make any other plans, and you're just gambling, with crap odds at that.
[WO vs ObjC]
I don't see where you read in a comparison. If anything, I was comparing Java with ObjC, and my Basic take on that would be, "Don't look to Apple if your focus is Java, since other platforms have better support and Apple marketing may just decide to focus on C# instead, or whatever language gets the hype next." Yes, ObjC is still very usable for native apps, but some of the beauty with WO is that you could use the same object frameworks (for which I find ObjC to be a much more capable language than Java) you created for your desktop ordering software as part of the web site ordering system. With WO 5.0 Apple is saying "pure Java only", which is a big "fuck you" to those of us who were actually using the existing technology like it was intended.
I know marketing is a dirty word around here, but a platform without developers is not a happy platform.
Then Apple is building a very unhappy platform. There are few enough developers without Apple pissing us off. If marketing were just marketing, they could easily have said "pure Java", but they added the "only", which cripples the technology, and will ultimately cripple Apple. Who in their right mind is going to buy an Apple machine for Java development when there are so many other, better choices out there? Apple should be pushing ObjC as much as Microsoft is pushing C#, with the line from marketing being, "Yeah, we got great Java support, but [ObjC/C#] is what you really want to use to get an advantage over your competition for your next-generation applications."
I think it's a pitty mac os X will never run on intel.
Mac OS X Server DP1 does run on Intel. Apple killed it. Internally, it's a sure bet they have Mac OS X running on Intel currently, and probably Alpha, too. Will we ever see it? Probably not.
Apple's past maps directly to their fututre, it seems. When they bought NeXT, they got a nice multi-platform system, not just at the OS layer, but at the application layer as well. Since then, the have reworked it into Mac OS X, which has become increasingly Mac hardware specific. Darwin might run on Intel, but that's like having the Linux kernel cross platform but no libraries or applications. Just like its NEXTSTEP predecessor, the first developer preview of Mac OS X had an Intel version, but Apple dropped it after that. Now they say they're no longer supporting application-level cross compilation to Windows (aka, Yellow Box). They're also dropping Objective-C, their most useful foundation technology in my opinion, for future versions of WebObjects.
In the early 90's I ditched Apple for Linux because I needed a base OS that actually worked well. In the late 90's I went back to Apple (but not for my server!:-) by way of NeXT with every hope that Apple would have the resources to take the NeXT technology in the right direction. Here I sit in the early 00's looking again at Linux and being pleased with how far GNUstep has come.
The nature of the application market requires cross platform support these days. Apple continues to snub their developers when they make these kinds of decisions. Unless they start making better decisions, they may well end up as the "Also Ran" that some people have been calling for the last 15 years. Sad but true.
Slashdot Mirror
Give OmniWeb another shot. Beta 7 was put out recently and it is much improved. I suggest you get the .tar.gz, and do not use StuffIt on it, as StuffIt blows on Mac OS X; use either the command line or get OpenUp from Softrak.
A web site is just one service that a company can provide, so what do you get by registering a whatever.web address that you don't already have with your usual www.whatever.com? It seems like it would only cause more confusion in the market place, leading to more lawsuits and heavy-handed domain ownership policies.
No, I don't know the details of your company (as you didn't provide many), but that in no way invalidates my argument; it only implies that it may not apply directly to your company. It is instead based on my observations as a contractor working at a number of companies. I'm sure you'd like to believe that your company is very different, but what information you do provide points to the opposite.
In trying to further refute my argument, you actually support it. If your company is willingly hiring 10 known unqualified people at $125K/year just in hopes that 2 will work out, it is completely messed up. Try to justify it all you like to me or yourself, but that's simply a disgusting waste of a million dollars. It speaks more to a shortage of intelligent management than technical staff.
I'm feeling generous today, though, so I'll make you a deal. Give me $500K and I'll interview those same 10 candidates and tell you which two are the ones that will actually work out. Right there I save you half a million dollars; love me. I will even refund their salary if I am in error. Unfortunately, your management seems to prefer throwing that money at any ol' candidate they can get their hands on instead of investing in a better recruiting process.
I'm in no way saying that your company isn't experiencing a shortage, but you are mistaking a local shortage for a global shortage. Your shortage is yours alone and is wholly because your company is doing something wrong when it comes to attracting talent. No, I don't know what that might be, but I wouldn't tell you even if I could figure it out on the sparse information you've given. Afterall, that kind of information appears to be worth about a million dollars. Time for your company to start spending wisely.
Instead of demanding resumes (and, believe me, I could supply a ton of qualified candidates for almost any job; willing to pay $100+/hour?), how's about demanding the companies produce job descriptions that are actually useful? If I see another position that doesn't say anything more than "SV pre-IPO Java Web", I think I'm going to be sick. Companies simply will not give you the basic facts of what you jobs is going to be anymore (maybe they never really did). If they can't go into a bit of detail, how am I supposed to determine whether or not I really want to work there? Instead, they always try to pump up even the most grunt of labors while at the same time downplaying the value of the position so they don't have to pay as much. Face it, the companies themselves are at fault, not the labor market.
If you can't find people, it is for lack of trying not lack of people. From what you say, your boss just isn't doing his job in finding the right people. If he's not getting qualified applicants, there's something wrong with the company, the project, or the job. Companies need to stop looking to blame external forces for their woes and address policy issues within the company that keep people from wanting to work there.
It really is that simple. We're talking basic management here, not rocket science. If you're willing to hire 10 people for 1 year in hopes of finding 2 good ones, maybe you should simply double (or more!) the salary for the positions to further attract qualified people. Perhaps the company has chosen the wrong technology to do the job (all too common), making it impossible to find people who fit the bad qualifications. It could be anything, but it is definitely a problem with the company, not the marketplace. Any company that truly values good people will have no trouble finding them.
The only answer I can think of would be cost, as a company is likely to charge more to do the development if they have to give up control of their source code. That should simply be factored into the bid process, with the notion that a little extra money spent now will be an investment and not an expense. Government is vast, so I don't see any project being a one-off in isolation. Card readers, for example, and subway card readers in particular, aren't the problem of one city, but multiple cities around the country. They would benefit if they could all base their implementation off some common base. It's such a reasonable idea, you just know it'll never be done . . .
Don't they know the speaker goes in the thumb and the microphone in the pinky? That way, you can make the little "call me" wave and have it actually make some sense!
However, the moment you stop dipping the ladle into what M$ oriented education system pours out of the pipeline (or sewer,) you run into some real shortages.
The point of the article, and the majority of the responses, is that that's not true. There is no shortage of skilled people, but rather a shortage of companies that "get it". I know tons of Smalltalk programmers, so you if you can't find them or hire them or keep them, it's a problem your company has, not a problem with the supply chain. You go on to support that by telling us how awful your pay is. If your company really needed Smalltalk developers, management would take the steps necessary to get their projects on track. Since they'd rather make excuses, the "IT worker shortage" makes a wonderful strawman.
$125k seems like a lot
It doesn't just seem like a lot, it is a lot. I'm not suggesting that your average drone can go in asking for sick cash, but a skilled person with their thumb on the market will be able to get what they're worth. They key is having a focus on your skills, not their money. I just left a job in Dallas where, had I stayed, I would have been making $150/hour. My skills were no longer being used properly and I simply didn't enjoy the work any longer, so I left.
What kind of experience and skills would a programmer need to make that much in the Bay Area?
Like so many people, especially those complaining about foreign workers, you're thinking about this all wrong. It's not about how you pump up your resume, but what value you can bring to a company by working both hard and smart. You have to be worth $125+K to make it, but worth it how and to whom? What skills do you have that are exceptional and can be brought to bear on a problem that make you worth what you're asking?
Do you know where I can find info about market rates for programmers for different regions in the US?
Why care about market rates? What you're worth to a particular company in a particular job is far more important than what the average person earns at an average company doing an average job. It's all situational, and you need to be willing to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gains. I was happy to get $9/hour doing development for a nothing shop right out of college (instead of starting at IBM for $45K) because the work was extremely interesting and I knew it would teach me a lot and place me on a good path for the future. Now, less than a decade later, it has worked out tremendously well not just in terms of money, but in my ability to do work I actually enjoy instead of having to swallow endless corporate imposed stupidities.
As Joseph Campbell (nice page here) said, "Follow your bliss". If money is your bliss, I wish you the best of luck in finding it, but I cannot help you in that search.
the shortage is for cheap captive labor
I don't find cheap labor, foreign or domestic, to be a threat. If a company's main goal is to find the cheapest employees possible, they're cutting their own throats. If a company wants to pay someone half of what I'm making, they'll get an employee with 1/10th the skills, and I'll laugh my ass off as their projects fail after becoming late and overbudget. If a company wants to fail, I let it fail and move on. Why would you let it trouble you?
as an older programmer, I have seen many of my friends and colleagues choose other lines of work
"As an autoworker, I have seen . . ."
The point I am trying to make is that you simply need to adapt. Instead of sounding like Abe Simpson ("I'm old. Gimme, gimme, gimme!"), you have to sit down and figure out what your skills are and what the market is for those skills. Yes, you may have to get out of a bad market, which might mean switching jobs or taking to an entirely new industry. Tough hop. Stop crying and deal with it.
if the public ever realizes the fraud being perpetrauted, there will be real outrage
You seem to think they don't realize that their software is buggy or their tech support is bad. Not only do they know things are bad, they don't care! And that's the nature of the market. Unless you can show a company that you have the skills to do a better job, they will hire someone cheaper who will still fit within their rough tolerances for performance (i.e., the customer keep buying the product) and, I can't stress this enough, it doesn't matter if the cheaper worker is foreign or domestic . In our free market, you got outbid.
And then we wonder why our best and brightest opt for medical school or law school ... wake the fuck up
Actually, smart people tend to do something because they enjoy doing it, not because it pays well, and it just so happens that someone doing a job well (smart or not) will end up making more money than someone who does a job poorly (surprised?). If someone wants to become a doctor or lawyer, I would hope it's because they like that line of work, not because a spreadsheet calculated that they'd make the most money doing it. And I'd think you'll find that it really is the people who do their job (whatever the field) best that get paid the best. I personally don't care what people make in other fields, either. I'm doing my job. not theirs. They would not be making my money doing my job unless they were equally skilled, and vice versa. I don't have a problem with that.
pay for programmers is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago, measured in real dollars ... programmers in the 60s made 100K+ per year
And in the 60s it actually meant something to be a programmer, just like it actually means something to be a doctor even today. But in software development today, any goon who read the latest "Idiot's Guide to Programming For Dummies in 21 Days" can call themselves a programmer. They flood the market and bring the average salary down, sure, along with the average quality. But if you look at absolute numbers, I would wager that there are more skilled programmers making over $200K/year today than there were making $100K/year (adjusted) in 1960. I would agree that a market is in a sad state when it would rather hire 4 clueless wannabe's at $50K than one competent guru at $200K, but it is up to you to find a different market if you can't change or work within your current market. To claim that it is somehow the fault of the government or foreigners or college grads is denial at it's best. Your old colleagues don't have a right to a high salary unless they can produce high quality in a market that values it.
In case you're not aware of the current situation, hot programmers can still freelance for well over $100/hour. The only people who really have to worry about foreign workers brought in on H1B visas (or any other way, including companies opening divisions in other countries) are the ones who aren't particularly skilled and are still extracting a premium salary. I don't care where they come from or what color their skin is, if someone can do a job better than an American for less money, they should get the job, even if it was my job. I've yet to have that happen to me, so I don't worry much about it. If foreign workers are taking your job away, it's time to stop complaining about them and start doing a better job yourself.
Not to be overly critical of your company, but that just doesn't jibe. Firstly, I don't care where in the USA you are, but decent people cannot be had for $75K unless they have absolutely no idea about their market value (e.g., they've worked for you with blinders on since you snapped them up out of college). Given the high cost of living in CA/Silicon Valley, $75K is a joke to anyone with skill; I wouldn't consider a job there for less than $125K without some *major* perks. So it is not at all surprising that your company gets "passed over", since it sounds like an average company with average jobs for average people. If you want to attract "non-standard" (read: talented) people, you have to give them non-standard incentives. That doesn't necessarily mean money, either. Talented people just don't like cookie-cutter positions, plain and simple.
she would have to justify the amount she deserves (right?)
If the RIAA doesn't have to justify getting a blanket $25K/album, why should she have to justify getting her cut of that? In fact, if the labels really don't intend to distribute the awarded amount to the artists in question, I think she should get it all, since she is currently the only artist making any claims to it. Once we have all the other artists suing their labels, then we'll worry about splitting it up. :-)
And yet you're saying people should be happy to pay them? "Sir, if you have a few minutes and $5, we'd love to have you fill out this survey for us." I hope that sounds as foolish to you as it does to me. If not, maybe you need to work for the TiVo business division; which clearly doesn't have it's head as firmly attached as the technology division does. The box rocks, but the service blows.
Besides, they'd (the listing sites) sue the pants off of you.
And that's the stupidity of it. They publish information for open viewing, be it by man or machine. Call them on it, though, and they sue you.
I recently bought a TiVo and, if you read the fine print, you'll find that the $199 is not for your lifetime, but the lifetime of the machine. A machine they don't think will last much longer than 90 days, based on their warranty. If your machine craps out after that or you you want to buy a second generation system if/when they come out, your initial $199 vanishes. This is a fatal flaw, in my opinion, because I would want to be able to buy and sell my service subscription independent of the box I initially got it with. On the whole, I like my TiVo hardware, but they won't get very far on a business plan that involves charging people to gather their personal viewing habits.
There are more than a thousand commands in any m$-office application, users need at least *some* way of uncluttering the menus.
If that's the problem, then there are better solutions than "smart menus". The one that comes to my mind is the old idea of presenting a GUI based on the user profile. Back when I used Word, I recall they had different layouts for Normal and Expert users. I say those aren't good enough profiles based on the features that MS has jammed into what used to be a simple word processor. I should have to tell it I do layout before it thrusts all sorts of kerning and spacing features in my face. Same goes for equation editing, HTML authoring, and any number of other things (many of which are mutually exclusive) it does beyond simple word processing. If complex software has a straightforward dialog for doing user profile configuration (linked to a help system that educates the user as to what the various options meant), it would become much easier to use. We have a long ways to go before smart software replaces the need for the smart user to tell the stupid computer what to do.
GUI coding (in its current instantiations) make for some of the most difficult to read and compicated code out there.
I don't think the original poster was proposing that the user learn to code their own GUI, but to instead understand what the GUI is doing such that scripts to do the same or similar things can be written. This already exists, to some extent, in tools like AppleScript, which let you turn on a "Record" button and it will translate the actions you perform in the GUI to scripting commands. It's a logical level above macros, but it only touches the tip of the problem.
More importantly, how do we encourage people to WANT to do customizations / scripts?
This is defintely the crux of the problem. As nice as tools like AppleScript might be, I doubt even 5% have taken the time to learn it and how to apply it to their daily tasks. It could also be that the daily tasks of most users don't fall into the domain of scriptable actions. If you're using MS Office most of the day, how does scripting (vs simple templates) help you write your reports? As geeks, we don't use computers the same way the average office worker does, so the approach to automating tasks needs to be approached differently. The developer needs to understand how the user is working with the application before they start altering the way it operates, and if the user isn't given them any feedback (surprisingly common in the commercial world, where companies actually make the user pay to make suggestions for improvement, but still fairly common in the open source community, where the user is expected to be a developer themselves if they want to see the app do something differently). All basic design principles, all too often forgotten.
In reality, I'm 98% water!
Now grow up.
Oddly, it was a direct cut and paste from my browser and it was correct when I checked it in the preview. Something funky must have happened in the submission process.
I merely said that there is no reason to think that anything exists aside from what we can detect with our senses (and devices that enhance our senses).
I'm going to have to guess that this phrase best represents what others see as a problem with your belief structure. Why would we even think of constructing devices to enhance our senses unless we had every reason to think that things exist beyond our perception? Time and time again, these devices have shown that there is, indeed, more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies.
Do you mean that the code has become more tied to the hardware, or just that Apple's stopped talking about supporting other platforms? There's a difference.
Not in the case of Apple. They've hyped the hell out of projects that see 1 month of R&D and never ship a product. In this case, they had a working technology they dropped. Cross platform is as dead as a freakin' Newton. Make any other plans, and you're just gambling, with crap odds at that.
[WO vs ObjC]
I don't see where you read in a comparison. If anything, I was comparing Java with ObjC, and my Basic take on that would be, "Don't look to Apple if your focus is Java, since other platforms have better support and Apple marketing may just decide to focus on C# instead, or whatever language gets the hype next." Yes, ObjC is still very usable for native apps, but some of the beauty with WO is that you could use the same object frameworks (for which I find ObjC to be a much more capable language than Java) you created for your desktop ordering software as part of the web site ordering system. With WO 5.0 Apple is saying "pure Java only", which is a big "fuck you" to those of us who were actually using the existing technology like it was intended.
I know marketing is a dirty word around here, but a platform without developers is not a happy platform.
Then Apple is building a very unhappy platform. There are few enough developers without Apple pissing us off. If marketing were just marketing, they could easily have said "pure Java", but they added the "only", which cripples the technology, and will ultimately cripple Apple. Who in their right mind is going to buy an Apple machine for Java development when there are so many other, better choices out there? Apple should be pushing ObjC as much as Microsoft is pushing C#, with the line from marketing being, "Yeah, we got great Java support, but [ObjC/C#] is what you really want to use to get an advantage over your competition for your next-generation applications."
They killed it. Maybe I should put my CDs of DP1 for Intel up on eBay . . . :-)
I think it's a pitty mac os X will never run on intel.
Mac OS X Server DP1 does run on Intel. Apple killed it. Internally, it's a sure bet they have Mac OS X running on Intel currently, and probably Alpha, too. Will we ever see it? Probably not.Apple's past maps directly to their fututre, it seems. When they bought NeXT, they got a nice multi-platform system, not just at the OS layer, but at the application layer as well. Since then, the have reworked it into Mac OS X, which has become increasingly Mac hardware specific. Darwin might run on Intel, but that's like having the Linux kernel cross platform but no libraries or applications. Just like its NEXTSTEP predecessor, the first developer preview of Mac OS X had an Intel version, but Apple dropped it after that. Now they say they're no longer supporting application-level cross compilation to Windows (aka, Yellow Box). They're also dropping Objective-C, their most useful foundation technology in my opinion, for future versions of WebObjects.
In the early 90's I ditched Apple for Linux because I needed a base OS that actually worked well. In the late 90's I went back to Apple (but not for my server! :-) by way of NeXT with every hope that Apple would have the resources to take the NeXT technology in the right direction. Here I sit in the early 00's looking again at Linux and being pleased with how far GNUstep has come.
The nature of the application market requires cross platform support these days. Apple continues to snub their developers when they make these kinds of decisions. Unless they start making better decisions, they may well end up as the "Also Ran" that some people have been calling for the last 15 years. Sad but true.