Office? Excel + VBA make for a powerful data hacking tool that has no equivalent in the FOSS world, but for 99% of the stuff that goes on in a typical office, LibreOffice is perfectly adequate. Even if you regularly exchange documents with Office users.
Sharepoint? Dear god. There is no turnkey replacement for Sharepoint and there is a very good reason for that: Sharepoint tries to be a document management system, discussion forum, corporate Wiki, team site, CMS, and workflow application, and it sucks at all of these compared to dedication solutions, even some 10 year old software outperforms Sharepoint in terms of ease of use, functionality, support cost and effort, security, and management. What those dedicated solutions lack is integration amongst each other and with Office. But in practice, that integration is more trouble than it's worth. Sharepoint is a great little tool for small and medium enterprises, but it scales poorly unless you throw insane amounts of money at it (and then it still scales poorly).
What Sharepoint has on other solutions is how users cope and accept its shortcomings. It's a bit like the old "not getting fired for buying IBM"-adage; if you get something else and users get frustrated, they'll ask "why on earth did you choose this?". If you get SP, they might grumble but in general they will not question your decision for going with an industry standard MS solution.
Bingo. That is what you need to demonstrate. If there's no open source project you have contributed to, and if you're allowed to share the crappy code from your last employer, give them that... along with an explanation of what you think is wrong with it. Stick to what matters and don't run your mouth about how shit the CTO of your last place of work was, just explain the issues with the code, and (if they ask) explain the circumstances of why the code is the way it is, and how you were not in a position to do anything about it. Tell them that's why you left, too.
I might not expect a programmer to come up with a complete software architecture, just like I wouldn't expect a builder to design my house as well. But from both I'd expect them to be experienced enough to point out issues with the design, propose solutions, and to speak up when they find something out of order.
A good review isn't one that says if a movie is good or shit. It's not necessarily one that explains why a particular movie is good or shit. A good review is one that gives me a fair chance to judge beforehand whether or not I am likely to enjoy the movie. I'm finding such reviews amongst the writings of more "serious" reviewers as well as punters on IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes. Overall I'd say the availability of amateur reviews has helped me.
A significant portion of the other half are police shootings, which leaves very few "innocent" gun related deaths.
... If you believe that the police only shoot guilty people. I'm not at all convinced of that, or even that most cases of a police officer drawing and using a firearm are justified given the circumstances. IIRC, police officers don't even make the top 10 of most dangerous professions in the USA, so their trigger happy attitude isn't really justified. Unless of course their job is relatively safe because they tend to shoot first.
“Online behavioural advertising” (as opposed to behaviour in online advertising) doesn’t sound meaningless but downright ominous. What is that, something like the Two Minutes Hate in “1984”?
My prediction: self-driving cars may be too expensive for most individuals, at first. If that's the case, we'll see them in taxis first. But I expect the price to come down fast to affordable levels. Will more people rent cars? Undoubtedly. But there are a lot of advantages to actually owning one:
- Guaranteed availability
- Cost (if you use it a lot, owning might be cheaper than renting)
- The ability to leave all your crap in the car while not having to deal with other people's mess
- Status, or being able to buy one kitted just to your liking.
What self-driving cars (even if it's only rentals) will change is which car people will buy. You will no longer have to select one that does your daily commute, is roomy enough for the family holidays, and can haul your boat to the lake every summer weekend. Instead, a lot of people will opt to buy one that serves their daily needs, and just rent whatever they need for other occasions. A lot of people will opt not to buy a second car either, for the same reasons.
A proposed solution for deep space missions (to Mars for example) is to send 2 ships at once, tether them using a long cable, and have them spin around each other like a pair of bolas. Instant gravity without a lot of extra weight (though building a ship for spin of say half a g does add weight too), and you can make the cable a lot longer than any arm, which helps with the coriolis effect.
At some point I started getting more of my news fix from blogs and such instead of newspapers, radio, and TV. When I go back to old school media, I often find myself missing those links to interesting background and different perspectives linked to in articles and comments on blogs and electronic publications. Sometimes a hastily written article on a crappy blog with a boatload of heated comments (with more links) under it provides more insightful information on a topic than a well-crafted op-ed article in print.
Arafat received that together with Perez and Rabin for creating the Oslo Accords, an attempt to work towards peace in the Middle east, for which each of those three had to weather an enormous amount of resistance and criticism from their respective peoples. If the Prize is as much an encouragement to keep up the good work as it is an award for past achievements (the excuse they gave when awarding it to Obama), then I'd say it was well given. Giving the Prize to Obama was bullcrap, giving it to Gore even more so.
If they really are capitalists, they can make money like the rest of us by earning it. And by that I mean that this should come down to laws of ownership, eminent domain and what have you, applied equally without any special consideration for religion. If my farm must be bulldozed to make way for a new interstellar bypass, so does your church. If you claim the church has some historical significance, that's fair enough, but I get to make the same claims for my farm. In this case, if there is some sort of regular worship on that mountain that has been going on for centuries and can't be held anywhere else, they could make a good case for historical significance. But seriously "it's just sitting there, but it's sacred!" isn't good enough. Or it shoudn't be.
Sure, it sucks if your nice countryside gets developed, but that's what most people have to deal with at some point. And unlike these folks, people rarely get compensated if they view or enjoyment of the countryside is ruined.
Something like that might happen sooner than we think. In a lot of places in the ME you can still poke the sand with a stick and get some oil for your trouble; these places can still produce way cheaper than anywhere else. The problem is that the budgets for these countries have grown to match the staggering revenues from oil... oil priced at $75 a barrel and up, that is. When oil dropped to $40, SA was running a deficit that they wouldn't be able to keep up for very long even with their enormous reserves. The pressure has been eased a bit with higher oil prices and some fiscal restraint, but as soon as these governments find themselves having to make cuts for real, the populace will feel this immediately. The days of generous stipends and most work being done by immigrant labour might be over soon, and I bet the transition isn't going to be gentle nor quiet.
There’s no reason to ban real classic cars, there aren’t nearly enough of them to make a difference. And no point in having a strict cutoff year either. What you need to address is cost: many people hang on to their “classic” old car (and will do so in the future) because that’s cheaper than replacing it. Old cars used to be very popular here because of a considerable road tax exemption on classic cars. So they changed the rules for classics that were just being used as cheap daily drivers: you can claim the exemption but you can only drive the car in summer. That’s just one way of separating the car enthusiast from someone taking advantage. I remember when they put in that rule: my wife’s “classic” Mercedes dropped from €20.000 to €2.000 overnight: it was a very popular car to drive tax free. I’d hate to see a complete ban on IC engines and see our other legitimate classic lose it’s value like that, because now we’re talking serious money. Same goes for a lot of new cars. Yeah, I’d expect a buyback program at market value.
If EVs take off, greenhouse gas emissions from cars is going to be a problem that is going to disappear on its own. Just like what already happened with particulates and NOx from cars. The big problem with EVs is that they are still fairly expensive even when produced in large numbers... and there are no affordable second hand ones on the market yet. So we still need some subsidies or perks for EVs to speed up adoption. But by the time we’ve convinced most normal motorists to go electric, the few remaining petrol heads can have their classics. It won’t make a difference for the environment.
By the way: banning 2 stroke engines makes a lot of sense but not for greenhouse emissions. That’s more about pollutants. And if you really want to make a dent in those, ban coal fired BBQs and wood burning fireplaces. Where I live those are by far the biggest contributors to particulate emissions.
These guys take 20% of your earnings and provide no benefits? Sounds like a real gig economy setup. In contrast, the agency through which I currently do contract work take 3% of my fee rate, and for that they provide people who match assignments to my skills rather than only provide a damn website where I have to look for jobs myself. Plus they pay my invoices on the dot even if the client is a bit late with paying theirs.
And all for what? For ads. Let that sink in for a moment.
All that money and effort. The abuse of our trust and violation of our privacy. The tricks and hacks played on our systems - some borderline illegal - in order to track us. All that just to help others sell us more crap. By “better understanding our customers” and “delivering an experience tailored to appeal to each customer”.
And guess what? Ads still suck. Targeted ads aren’t, not beyond showing us stuff matching our recent search history. Some companies may be using data to test ad effectiveness against different demographics, but they rarely are able to make informed decisions about how and where to spend their advertising budget, something they can often learn from a simple old fashioned marketing study. Sure, I’ll believe some improvements have been made, and ads campaigns can be done a little faster and cheaper, but is it really worth all that?
Chips used in mobile computing are often capable of switching off parts that are not in use in order to save power. Whether the GPS on this chip will really be switched off when ordered to is a question I'll leave to the tinfoil hat wearing crowd.
Why wouldn’t it be? But would we be allowed to destroy it? I mean: suppose someone manages to create a conscious AI (and I mean truly conscious and self aware, not something rigged to fool humans in a Turing test). Fine, but at some point that guy might want his computer back so he can mine more bitcoin or whatever. Wouldn’t stopping the AI amount to murder?
By the time there is a decent choice of EVs in most price brackets, the resale value of your current car is going to be crap anyway, unless it's a classic. Conversion is going to be expensive and is probably only worth it on really expensive cars. There's a company doing conversions on Porsche 911s, but it is very pricey and the range isn't great (though performance is).
I think what they have done with the status bar is a decent design decision. But the design really goes off the rails in Landscape mode. Just look at the browser, where Apple insist on not hiding the notch and corners with black bars on either side of the page (which would make the screen look narrower, which is fine). Instead they put white bars on the sides, making the notch really stand out while not serving any other useful purpose, reducing readability and breaking every web page's visual flow in the process.
Not touching the immigration issues, but in general that statement is true: when it comes to environmental problems, politicians in Europe almost immediately jump on a minor problem: cars (personal transportation, not including trucks, delivery vans, etc), while ignoring other far greater sources of pollution. While it makes sense to reduce the number of diesels and promote cleaner trucks, cars in general aren't that big a contributor to NOx or emissions of fines anymore. Still the family car is always the target, and the public are still made to believe - not with fact and numbers but with a weird mix of emotional environmentalism and good old Protestant guilt - that they should feel bad about driving. Sure, every bit of reduction counts, but for the vast majority in my country there are few good alternatives to cars even though we have an extensive public transport network. Politicians shouldn't forget that... and I am sure they haven't. Because it means they can (and have been able to) tax the crap out of car owners: they are made to feel guilty as hell and have no alternative, so most will pay without much protest. Even the right wing parties, traditionally on the side of low taxes and car owners, are trying to green up their image by imposing taxes on cars (instead of proposing far less popular but far more effective measures)
If you've been around long enough, you need to take a little time to show the newbies how to do a CRUD screen instead of letting them reinvent the wheel and come up with Method #39 on their own. Proper coaching or even code reviews in IT seem to be rare. And perhaps it's related to the fact that experienced technical staff aren't valued.
Slashdot Mirror
Office? Excel + VBA make for a powerful data hacking tool that has no equivalent in the FOSS world, but for 99% of the stuff that goes on in a typical office, LibreOffice is perfectly adequate. Even if you regularly exchange documents with Office users.
Sharepoint? Dear god. There is no turnkey replacement for Sharepoint and there is a very good reason for that: Sharepoint tries to be a document management system, discussion forum, corporate Wiki, team site, CMS, and workflow application, and it sucks at all of these compared to dedication solutions, even some 10 year old software outperforms Sharepoint in terms of ease of use, functionality, support cost and effort, security, and management. What those dedicated solutions lack is integration amongst each other and with Office. But in practice, that integration is more trouble than it's worth. Sharepoint is a great little tool for small and medium enterprises, but it scales poorly unless you throw insane amounts of money at it (and then it still scales poorly).
What Sharepoint has on other solutions is how users cope and accept its shortcomings. It's a bit like the old "not getting fired for buying IBM"-adage; if you get something else and users get frustrated, they'll ask "why on earth did you choose this?". If you get SP, they might grumble but in general they will not question your decision for going with an industry standard MS solution.
I agree when it comes to Exchange / Outlook
able to contribute on a team
Bingo. That is what you need to demonstrate. If there's no open source project you have contributed to, and if you're allowed to share the crappy code from your last employer, give them that... along with an explanation of what you think is wrong with it. Stick to what matters and don't run your mouth about how shit the CTO of your last place of work was, just explain the issues with the code, and (if they ask) explain the circumstances of why the code is the way it is, and how you were not in a position to do anything about it. Tell them that's why you left, too.
I might not expect a programmer to come up with a complete software architecture, just like I wouldn't expect a builder to design my house as well. But from both I'd expect them to be experienced enough to point out issues with the design, propose solutions, and to speak up when they find something out of order.
A good review isn't one that says if a movie is good or shit. It's not necessarily one that explains why a particular movie is good or shit. A good review is one that gives me a fair chance to judge beforehand whether or not I am likely to enjoy the movie. I'm finding such reviews amongst the writings of more "serious" reviewers as well as punters on IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes. Overall I'd say the availability of amateur reviews has helped me.
A significant portion of the other half are police shootings, which leaves very few "innocent" gun related deaths.
... If you believe that the police only shoot guilty people. I'm not at all convinced of that, or even that most cases of a police officer drawing and using a firearm are justified given the circumstances. IIRC, police officers don't even make the top 10 of most dangerous professions in the USA, so their trigger happy attitude isn't really justified. Unless of course their job is relatively safe because they tend to shoot first.
God damn, nobody read the article anymore?
You should know better by now...
“Online behavioural advertising” (as opposed to behaviour in online advertising) doesn’t sound meaningless but downright ominous. What is that, something like the Two Minutes Hate in “1984”?
Can you elaborate why you think they are bad? If not, then why post at all?
My prediction: self-driving cars may be too expensive for most individuals, at first. If that's the case, we'll see them in taxis first. But I expect the price to come down fast to affordable levels. Will more people rent cars? Undoubtedly. But there are a lot of advantages to actually owning one:
- Guaranteed availability
- Cost (if you use it a lot, owning might be cheaper than renting)
- The ability to leave all your crap in the car while not having to deal with other people's mess
- Status, or being able to buy one kitted just to your liking.
What self-driving cars (even if it's only rentals) will change is which car people will buy. You will no longer have to select one that does your daily commute, is roomy enough for the family holidays, and can haul your boat to the lake every summer weekend. Instead, a lot of people will opt to buy one that serves their daily needs, and just rent whatever they need for other occasions. A lot of people will opt not to buy a second car either, for the same reasons.
A proposed solution for deep space missions (to Mars for example) is to send 2 ships at once, tether them using a long cable, and have them spin around each other like a pair of bolas. Instant gravity without a lot of extra weight (though building a ship for spin of say half a g does add weight too), and you can make the cable a lot longer than any arm, which helps with the coriolis effect.
It's certainly an improvement when used right. But for a start, it would be nice if the description under each link reflects the content of the page being linked to. Often they don't, at all.
At some point I started getting more of my news fix from blogs and such instead of newspapers, radio, and TV. When I go back to old school media, I often find myself missing those links to interesting background and different perspectives linked to in articles and comments on blogs and electronic publications. Sometimes a hastily written article on a crappy blog with a boatload of heated comments (with more links) under it provides more insightful information on a topic than a well-crafted op-ed article in print.
They do need the data. To "improve their service and offer their customers a superior experience".
Arafat received that together with Perez and Rabin for creating the Oslo Accords, an attempt to work towards peace in the Middle east, for which each of those three had to weather an enormous amount of resistance and criticism from their respective peoples. If the Prize is as much an encouragement to keep up the good work as it is an award for past achievements (the excuse they gave when awarding it to Obama), then I'd say it was well given. Giving the Prize to Obama was bullcrap, giving it to Gore even more so.
If they really are capitalists, they can make money like the rest of us by earning it. And by that I mean that this should come down to laws of ownership, eminent domain and what have you, applied equally without any special consideration for religion. If my farm must be bulldozed to make way for a new interstellar bypass, so does your church. If you claim the church has some historical significance, that's fair enough, but I get to make the same claims for my farm. In this case, if there is some sort of regular worship on that mountain that has been going on for centuries and can't be held anywhere else, they could make a good case for historical significance. But seriously "it's just sitting there, but it's sacred!" isn't good enough. Or it shoudn't be.
Sure, it sucks if your nice countryside gets developed, but that's what most people have to deal with at some point. And unlike these folks, people rarely get compensated if they view or enjoyment of the countryside is ruined.
Something like that might happen sooner than we think. In a lot of places in the ME you can still poke the sand with a stick and get some oil for your trouble; these places can still produce way cheaper than anywhere else. The problem is that the budgets for these countries have grown to match the staggering revenues from oil... oil priced at $75 a barrel and up, that is. When oil dropped to $40, SA was running a deficit that they wouldn't be able to keep up for very long even with their enormous reserves. The pressure has been eased a bit with higher oil prices and some fiscal restraint, but as soon as these governments find themselves having to make cuts for real, the populace will feel this immediately. The days of generous stipends and most work being done by immigrant labour might be over soon, and I bet the transition isn't going to be gentle nor quiet.
There’s no reason to ban real classic cars, there aren’t nearly enough of them to make a difference. And no point in having a strict cutoff year either. What you need to address is cost: many people hang on to their “classic” old car (and will do so in the future) because that’s cheaper than replacing it. Old cars used to be very popular here because of a considerable road tax exemption on classic cars. So they changed the rules for classics that were just being used as cheap daily drivers: you can claim the exemption but you can only drive the car in summer. That’s just one way of separating the car enthusiast from someone taking advantage. I remember when they put in that rule: my wife’s “classic” Mercedes dropped from €20.000 to €2.000 overnight: it was a very popular car to drive tax free. I’d hate to see a complete ban on IC engines and see our other legitimate classic lose it’s value like that, because now we’re talking serious money. Same goes for a lot of new cars. Yeah, I’d expect a buyback program at market value.
If EVs take off, greenhouse gas emissions from cars is going to be a problem that is going to disappear on its own. Just like what already happened with particulates and NOx from cars. The big problem with EVs is that they are still fairly expensive even when produced in large numbers... and there are no affordable second hand ones on the market yet. So we still need some subsidies or perks for EVs to speed up adoption. But by the time we’ve convinced most normal motorists to go electric, the few remaining petrol heads can have their classics. It won’t make a difference for the environment.
By the way: banning 2 stroke engines makes a lot of sense but not for greenhouse emissions. That’s more about pollutants. And if you really want to make a dent in those, ban coal fired BBQs and wood burning fireplaces. Where I live those are by far the biggest contributors to particulate emissions.
These guys take 20% of your earnings and provide no benefits? Sounds like a real gig economy setup. In contrast, the agency through which I currently do contract work take 3% of my fee rate, and for that they provide people who match assignments to my skills rather than only provide a damn website where I have to look for jobs myself. Plus they pay my invoices on the dot even if the client is a bit late with paying theirs.
And all for what? For ads. Let that sink in for a moment.
All that money and effort. The abuse of our trust and violation of our privacy. The tricks and hacks played on our systems - some borderline illegal - in order to track us. All that just to help others sell us more crap. By “better understanding our customers” and “delivering an experience tailored to appeal to each customer”.
And guess what? Ads still suck. Targeted ads aren’t, not beyond showing us stuff matching our recent search history. Some companies may be using data to test ad effectiveness against different demographics, but they rarely are able to make informed decisions about how and where to spend their advertising budget, something they can often learn from a simple old fashioned marketing study. Sure, I’ll believe some improvements have been made, and ads campaigns can be done a little faster and cheaper, but is it really worth all that?
Data isn’t oil, it’s snake oil.
There are no cat parasites, that's fake news spread by catists
Chips used in mobile computing are often capable of switching off parts that are not in use in order to save power. Whether the GPS on this chip will really be switched off when ordered to is a question I'll leave to the tinfoil hat wearing crowd.
Why wouldn’t it be? But would we be allowed to destroy it? I mean: suppose someone manages to create a conscious AI (and I mean truly conscious and self aware, not something rigged to fool humans in a Turing test). Fine, but at some point that guy might want his computer back so he can mine more bitcoin or whatever. Wouldn’t stopping the AI amount to murder?
By the time there is a decent choice of EVs in most price brackets, the resale value of your current car is going to be crap anyway, unless it's a classic. Conversion is going to be expensive and is probably only worth it on really expensive cars. There's a company doing conversions on Porsche 911s, but it is very pricey and the range isn't great (though performance is).
I think what they have done with the status bar is a decent design decision. But the design really goes off the rails in Landscape mode. Just look at the browser, where Apple insist on not hiding the notch and corners with black bars on either side of the page (which would make the screen look narrower, which is fine). Instead they put white bars on the sides, making the notch really stand out while not serving any other useful purpose, reducing readability and breaking every web page's visual flow in the process.
Not touching the immigration issues, but in general that statement is true: when it comes to environmental problems, politicians in Europe almost immediately jump on a minor problem: cars (personal transportation, not including trucks, delivery vans, etc), while ignoring other far greater sources of pollution. While it makes sense to reduce the number of diesels and promote cleaner trucks, cars in general aren't that big a contributor to NOx or emissions of fines anymore. Still the family car is always the target, and the public are still made to believe - not with fact and numbers but with a weird mix of emotional environmentalism and good old Protestant guilt - that they should feel bad about driving. Sure, every bit of reduction counts, but for the vast majority in my country there are few good alternatives to cars even though we have an extensive public transport network. Politicians shouldn't forget that... and I am sure they haven't. Because it means they can (and have been able to) tax the crap out of car owners: they are made to feel guilty as hell and have no alternative, so most will pay without much protest. Even the right wing parties, traditionally on the side of low taxes and car owners, are trying to green up their image by imposing taxes on cars (instead of proposing far less popular but far more effective measures)
If you've been around long enough, you need to take a little time to show the newbies how to do a CRUD screen instead of letting them reinvent the wheel and come up with Method #39 on their own. Proper coaching or even code reviews in IT seem to be rare. And perhaps it's related to the fact that experienced technical staff aren't valued.
A good techie can save* 100s of man hours on a 10 man 10 week project, in 40 hours. But so can a good project manager.
*) of course time, once estimated, is used and never given back. But at least the techie will have saved you from a 30 week train wreck.