I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're not being a self-righteous prick with that last statement regarding Christianity.
Deceiving people is against the tenets of many, many religions; likewise, there are a frightening volume of scammers, swindlers, abusers, liars, deceivers, moral pretenders, and downright assholes flying under the banner of Christianity. Just because someone is deceiving folks doesn't mean they're not a Christian, and a statement to that effect is along the lines of why the more evangelical Christian community bugs the shit out of everyone else.
Not sure how you made the leap from 'technology designed to make its employees more efficient' to robocallers.
From my understanding of TFA, IQor does customer service type of stuff. So, sophisticated knowledge bases, good front-ends for customer service tools, flexible processes, etc. can all be examples of tech that makes a customer service group more efficient (there's much more). Robocallers wouldn't even apply (the only automated piece of the called is, sometimes, the greeting).
Except for the fact that a lot of the 'marketing dweebs' at tech companies are engineers.
Just sayin'. Your product management/marketing folks at these firms are often very plugged in to the tech side of things (I should know, being one of them).
For the record: I've got a BSEE myself, working on the MBA.
The thing about master's degrees is they're generally most effective when you have a fair idea about what you want out of them. Are you looking to broaden your expertise? Focus on a particular topic? Change careers altogether? That will help you choose the right program (school, full-time vs. part-time), the right course of study, etc. You'll be much more motivated and enthusiastic, and you'll get more bang for your buck (and it ain't cheap).
Go get a job, earn some money, work a bit (and don't stress too much about the 'harsh economic climate'). You'll learn a lot about what you want and don't want in a career, what type of work makes you happy, what management style and company you prefer, etc. You'll also have some fun building your life and putting some money in the bank (it's quite rewarding).
Look up in about 2-3 years and see what you think of graduate school at that point. See where you really want to go/what you want to do. Most of the engineers I've known get master's degrees to manage groups or move into senior or even principal design positions (though the later leans more towards a PhD, in bigger companies). Some have done it to shift industries (e.g., telecom to biomed). Depends on what you're after, and you won't know that right out of the undergraduate gate.
Try and get it done before marriage and kids/partnering up. As a collegue once told me, three drinks down: 'changing the world is doable after a wife and kids; it's just a helluva lot harder.' You'll have more energy and focus, and it's easier to live a poor grad student's life when there's no one else to be responsible for. If the timing doesn't work out that way, don't despair, just talk it out with the wife/partner.
Above all, just enjoy it. Life's too short to stress it overmuch.
On the iPod: depends on what you all a 'good' player. There are other players that more feature-rich, slimmer, have better capacity, and are cheaper. Yet why do they sell like hotcakes, this iPod?
I worked at VZW for 1.5 painful years. You know what I found? 80% of cell phones sold today are shit. Feature bloat, cheap hardware, bad at making calls, cumbersome UIs. LG phones were the only ones that really stood a chance (VZW ended up adopting a universal UI based off LG's work) - even then, too many buttons, not innovative. So I question your statement of 'REALLY good competition' and would instead call it 'mature.'
So how do you shake up a mature market with entrenched players? Develop something disruptive. Apple's good at doing exactly that kind of thing, and that's what they appear to be doing with the iPhone. You can make all sorts of disparaging remarks about the keynote, question the timing, harumph about the cell phone market, but I think it boils down to a few things:
1. Their products are excellent from a sense of key feature inclusion (i.e., little to no bloat) and usability.
2. They are not newbies - they're a multi-billion dollar consumer electronics company. And increasingly, that's the kind of product cell phones are turning into. To say they can't roll with the likes of Moto and Nokia is ignoring who they are and what they do.
3. They hit the right timing in the market for the release of such a phone. The evolution of cell phones into multi-function devices and the increase market for smartphones and other 'intelligent' products have converged into a magical point of market timing (otherwise known as an 'inflection point'). This is a great time to throw this hat into the ring.
The market is ripe and if they put a good product into the market with a good partner (AT&T, don't fuck this up), they have a solid shot, for the same reasons the iPod succeeds in the market that it does. We'll see.
's a shame that Yankee, Forrester, et al. have already determined that 99c is the perfect price for a song: demand plummets above it, and does not increase appreciably below.
Whoa, whoa. Hold up there, Tex. This is not consumer fraud in the slightest. This is product management at its core.
I do this stuff for a living. And I've never sold a product to a customer and given them an end-of-life (EOL) schedule at the same time. It doesn't work that way, mainly because you're never exactly sure when your EOL date needs to be. Sure, you have some guesses, but often they're wrong.
Very good reasons for product EOL are declining demand and support/maintenance costs. Tech. support and software maintenance cost real money, and if a company is seeing usage of a product drop off, why support it? Tell your user base, 'listen, you got 4 years out of a $50 product, that's pretty good. Upgrade for a discount and let's get you on something modern that makes both of our lives easier. If not, hey, good luck.'
Companies are not obligated to support/deliver product in perpetuam, else they'd be flat-ass broke. It's not fraud: trust me, there's enough legalese, and this is a common-enough and accepted practice, that it's perfectly legal. Do open-source developers support 10-year-old code builds, when modern stuff is better and more popular?
And yes, MS will eventually drop support on XP, when the time is appropriate for them. Just like they did Win95 and WFW. 'course, at that point, they may stop checking authentication on older SW, as the market will ensure that you upgrade to support new software/hardware. Who knows.
This is going to be viciously unpopular, but maybe the GPL needs to start looking in the mirror and become more BSD-like in its terms.
MS opens up their Office 2003 schema, and they can't use it because of their own terms? Just the sort of ammunition Mr. Gates needs. 'See? We tried to be flexible, but they won't work with us!'
What this might do, however, is move towards a standard document structure that's supported flexibly amongst multiple platforms. Thus, Pages (Apple) and OpenOffice and MS Word all produce the same document, so why do I need to buy MS?
Yeah, probably. Thing is, this is a common syndrome with any other PC manufacturer. Upgrades on a line-item basis are dirt cheap; on the aggregate, they add up to some real money. So when a customer upgrades a few things and realizes they doubled the price of their $599 (Dell, Gateway, Apple) computer, they get sticker shock and bail.
Like many Slashdotters, I guide technology decisions for a lot of friends/family, and one of the main complaints I've heard consistantly about Apple is the pricing. Hell, I've ranted than the only reason I don't own one is the pricetage. The $499/$599 pricetag gets people in the door, and dropping the upgrade price may lower the sticker-shock on the backend and help them complete more sales.
Amen. Couple this also with the fact that Apple doesn't have a monopoly. They don't control supply, they only have 50% market share, and there is evidence that the barrier to entry is not prohibitively high for other competitors. Just look at the slew of players out there, and keep coming out every day.
It's Apple's marketing and hip/geek cache that's got the buying public, not some vast conspiracy. I argue this with a few people regularly. They are not the best value for a player from a strict space/price perspective. But the design of the iPod interface, sleek look, and integration with iTunes has grabbed a huge portion of the buying public. Can't argue with that.
If you don't like what they're selling at Wal-Mart, DO NOT BUY IT. If you don't like their pricing, DO NOT SHOP THERE. If you don't like their attitude, the color of the store, their stance on not carrying lesbian porn, DO NOT FREQUENT THEIR ESTABLISHMENT.
All I ever hear about Wal-Mart anymore is how damned evil they are and how the store sucks and their music is unfairly censored and blahblahblah. If it's so damned bad, why are they making money hand over fist?
Frankly, I love what they've done for supply chain management, I love how they slap their suppliers into line, their prices are incredible, watching white trash is funny as hell, and I don't buy music there because I want to hear Jay-Z say 'fuck.'
Anybody else actually have a problem with Wal-Mart they can express intelligently?
According to a buddy of mine who attended, a professor at Northwestern actually used game theory to prove the lost 'value' in using condoms during your average heterosexual encounter (in economics, it's all about value).
I've talked to several medical professionals and AIDS activists, and they all say that HIV is a hard virus to catch, especially if you're a male in a heterosexual encounter. And one has said 'I've never met a person who, when tested positive, didn't know exactly what they'd done to catch it.'
I agree: lots of fear mongering. It's a hard virus to catch. Of course, if the facts and the odds saw light of day with the masses, your problem might be much, much worse, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't wrap your gear before entry. But a look at the math can strip some of the fear out of the subjest.
Again, it's very much a cultural thing. The US was formed very spectularly in a civil war against an oppressive govt. (or so the story goes). Authority figures overstepping their bounds is something that Americans are sensitive to. With a government that currently seems determined to remove civil liberties in the name of a serious, yet not-wholly-defined goal, by means not fully revealed to the citizenry? Well, you implied yourself that this is a two-way street, no?
And you meet a few of the wrong kind of police in the US, you won't let them within 100 ft. of your apartment without a warrant or your specific summons (i.e., emergency situation). Trust me on this one.
Because, often times, kicking it over to Linux is neither desirable nor feisible, especially if it's a work machine. If I want to use Ethereal on my laptop, and WinXP is feeling quirky, my solution can't be 'boot Knoppix,' 'cause then I can't do anything else with any ease.
Knee-jerk Linux reactions are no better than knee-jerk MS reactions, 'cept Linux has cooler t-shirts.
Bad, sensationalized article title.
on
Can Software Kill?
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· Score: 3, Funny
Good job with the Terminator images in everyone's heads.
Software does not kill. Bad engineering and poor implementation kills. My copy of Windows XP, while still radiating pure evil, has not managed to pop open the gun cabinet.
You might as well ask the question, 'can the old saddlebag gas tanks on Ford Rangers kill? Gasp!'
Just because a manufacturer's costs go down doesn't mean that the product is any less valuable to the consumer. Whether I can make a product for $5 or $0.50 is irrelevant to the fact that the market will bear a price of $50.
Posting on Slashdot should require at least one business course and an ounce of common sense. Good Christ.
Depends on who you ask, really. 'Baby Bell' is just a slang term for Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC), since they all split off from Ma Bell (AT&T). Your players are:
-SBC. Combination of Ameritech, Southwestern Bell, and PacBell, primarily.
-Verizon. Combination of Bell Atlantic, NYNEX, and GTE (who was not an RBOC).
-BellSouth.
-Qwest. Combination of US WEST and Qwest (who started in LD).
And let's not succumb to hyperbole: the 'four big companies controlling telecommunications nationwide' bit sounds a little tinfoil-hat. They've consolidated a bit, yes, but they still serve the same purpose: offer local (and now LD) phone service across a given region.
Watch that again. Solo is reaching for his gun about ten lines before Greedo even gets threatening (aside from the initial exchange).
Han fires in cold blood and kills Greedo. It sets him up as a selfish outlaw who finds redemption and a purpose in the Rebel cause, and eventually in Leia. IMO, Lucas destroys three metric tons of character development with one laser blast.
If the doctor in question is not an arrogant asshole, he'd (gender nonspecific) probably give a legitimate answer.
I'm very shocked by the lack of honest, solid responses to this AS. Sounds like a bunch of bitter, socially inept sysadmins venting on a newbie.
Try this, Mr. Doctor:
1. Right now, technology is in the doldrums. All industries are cyclical, of course, but IT went from boom to bust really fast, leaving a lot of millionaires and a lot of bitter, bitter people. You mention 5-10 years, so you would probably (hopefully?) be in a much different market. Keep that in mind.
2. IT folks are arrogant. Yes, doctors are arrogant, too, but you'll get resisitance from those who've been in the field a while and don't think they're getting a fair shake (read Slashdot regularly to get the idea). Keep that in mind.
3. You still want to do this, huh? I might recommend a MS program in biomedical engineering. A medical degree, as I'm sure you know, is a powerful thing: leverage it with a love/appreciation of technology to get the most benefit. It would be a shame to abandon that background, and the familiarity of medicine in that environment might encourage you, and thus shorten the learning curve (you can teach the engineers while they teach you?).
4. If you're talking full-hog, no-looking-back career change, figure out what speciality you want (software or hardware design, administration, network engineering, etc.) and hit the appropriate MS program. Realize that things are going to change rapdily over even the course of your education, so get ready. I'm an engineer by education (marketing by profession), so I'd learn towards EE. However, an MS strictly in EE would be overkill at this point, I think. Try MSIS or such programs to get a flavor. You want more technical, check programs like CMU or Johns Hopkins to mix it up. I site those two because I know they have programs ranging from 'half management, half tech' to 'full-on geek.' Forget cerification for now: they are an enhancement to experience, not a replacement. Monkeying with an open source OS/DB in parallel is not a bad idea, as it gets a toe into the water.
Above all: really consider why you are doing this. I'm young: I hit the job market right as the boom ended ('99), and consider myself lucking to only be laid off twice, and picked up work rapidly. I saw a lot of my peers who went into this field because they 'liked computers a lot' or for the money/glamour. If that's your motivation, or this is a halfway thing, reconsider. Technology is a bitch of an industry, requires constant education, and moves at a lightning pace. If you don't love it thoroughly, you won't thrive, and it will make you bitter. I'm aware medicine is similar (I know my share of doctors); I'm just sayin'.
Good luck with everything. Frankly, if you're a skilled, personable doctor, I think it'd be a loss to society for you to bow out, but that's a personal choice. Hope it goes well for you.
So, I gotta ask: how many people outside the open-source/Slashdot community are really aware of Ogg? A dozen? Twenty, maybe?
Look, my parents can barely program the VCR, much less decide between audio codecs, and they're typically technologies buyers. They may not get the hardcore geek sale, but they'll get The Masses, and that's where the money is. DRM will give them a backlash, yes, but the codec wars are not fought in the Best Buy crowd. They're fought here. And frankly, we're about the only ones who give a damn.
Give The Masses something that's portable, sounds like a CD, and is flexible, and they'll buy it. Argue with them over open source vs. licensed and bitrates and OHMYGODMYHEADEXPLODED.
A noble angle, but TiVo is kicking major ass. Their DirecTV deal is very sweet, they have a nice customer base that's quite loyal, and they're pushing new product like mad. Unless/until The Masses get upset over this issue, you won't see them change.
'cause, I mean, how many people use MythTV? Yeah, that's what I thought.
I disagree: MS is trying very hard to provide platforms/apps that allow companies to use DRM to protect their patents. WMP is a perfect example. Apple's 'Rip, Mix, Burn' tagline is a bit of a copout: they know people might steal music, but they want to encourage use of their product (and perhaps spin a fun, slightly counter-culture sheen on it), while throwing out the obligatory legalese ('as long as it's your music!').
Not sure about your argument, there. MS is viciously working to implement DRM at multiple levels of the PC, in order to get trust from content providers. In turn, hoping that they use MS delivery methods to move product. Apple just has a great integration method/ad campaign for selling the iPod.
Some of us technically competent also use whatever is pre-installed - I see no value in using a browser other than IE. It's a commodity.
With HP's brand equity and channels, it might be a great movie. Apple addicts still use iPod because of the Mac integration, while the PC crowd goes with something familiar to them (the HP brand). Apple gets paid on every unit, HP gets quick time-to-market and a great platform.
Man, you don't know where the hell you are, do you?
Streaming audio, streaming video, OS patches, umpteen programming applications, remote backups, distributed computing, perfectly legal P2P applications...this is the short list.
Oh, yeah, and another thing: who the hell are you to define what's legitimate? Whether I'm downloading pornography, telecommuting, or watching reruns of 'What's Happening Now?' from a server in New Guinea, it doesn't matter. If I'm not violating my TOS, and I'm simply using my 'unlimited' connection, then I'm not doing anything wrong.
I'll call a spade a spade: certain broadband providers are screwing a subset of their customers, because they can, and relying on 'common sense' from non-techies to justify their actions. I understand their business justifications (hey, I'm a businessman), but their tactics suck, and it will bite them square in the ass someday.
That's a little different than the shit Comcast et al. are playing. They say 'yup, unlimited use, download 'til you pass out!' And when people do, it screws up their contention ratios and bandwidth estimates, and they send threatening letters about 'reasonable usage.' Your company says 'you can't leave your dial-up tacked up all the time; use it or drop it, please.' A little different.
I'm willing to bet (as I've seem some here speculate) that they do this in areas with robust competition. Should Comcast threaten me with a cap (if I used them, that is), I take my 4500ft. loop straight to the local DSL provider, while shooting Comcast the finger.
They want to have their cake and eat it too, which is becoming much less acceptable with the growing ubiquity of broadband. Deploy a tiered pricing structure (128/128 priced well would be a great dial-up killer), or change your marketing.
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I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're not being a self-righteous prick with that last statement regarding Christianity. Deceiving people is against the tenets of many, many religions; likewise, there are a frightening volume of scammers, swindlers, abusers, liars, deceivers, moral pretenders, and downright assholes flying under the banner of Christianity. Just because someone is deceiving folks doesn't mean they're not a Christian, and a statement to that effect is along the lines of why the more evangelical Christian community bugs the shit out of everyone else.
Not sure how you made the leap from 'technology designed to make its employees more efficient' to robocallers.
From my understanding of TFA, IQor does customer service type of stuff. So, sophisticated knowledge bases, good front-ends for customer service tools, flexible processes, etc. can all be examples of tech that makes a customer service group more efficient (there's much more). Robocallers wouldn't even apply (the only automated piece of the called is, sometimes, the greeting).
Did I miss something?
Except for the fact that a lot of the 'marketing dweebs' at tech companies are engineers.
Just sayin'. Your product management/marketing folks at these firms are often very plugged in to the tech side of things (I should know, being one of them).
For the record: I've got a BSEE myself, working on the MBA.
The thing about master's degrees is they're generally most effective when you have a fair idea about what you want out of them. Are you looking to broaden your expertise? Focus on a particular topic? Change careers altogether? That will help you choose the right program (school, full-time vs. part-time), the right course of study, etc. You'll be much more motivated and enthusiastic, and you'll get more bang for your buck (and it ain't cheap).
Go get a job, earn some money, work a bit (and don't stress too much about the 'harsh economic climate'). You'll learn a lot about what you want and don't want in a career, what type of work makes you happy, what management style and company you prefer, etc. You'll also have some fun building your life and putting some money in the bank (it's quite rewarding).
Look up in about 2-3 years and see what you think of graduate school at that point. See where you really want to go/what you want to do. Most of the engineers I've known get master's degrees to manage groups or move into senior or even principal design positions (though the later leans more towards a PhD, in bigger companies). Some have done it to shift industries (e.g., telecom to biomed). Depends on what you're after, and you won't know that right out of the undergraduate gate.
Try and get it done before marriage and kids/partnering up. As a collegue once told me, three drinks down: 'changing the world is doable after a wife and kids; it's just a helluva lot harder.' You'll have more energy and focus, and it's easier to live a poor grad student's life when there's no one else to be responsible for. If the timing doesn't work out that way, don't despair, just talk it out with the wife/partner.
Above all, just enjoy it. Life's too short to stress it overmuch.
On the iPod: depends on what you all a 'good' player. There are other players that more feature-rich, slimmer, have better capacity, and are cheaper. Yet why do they sell like hotcakes, this iPod?
I worked at VZW for 1.5 painful years. You know what I found? 80% of cell phones sold today are shit. Feature bloat, cheap hardware, bad at making calls, cumbersome UIs. LG phones were the only ones that really stood a chance (VZW ended up adopting a universal UI based off LG's work) - even then, too many buttons, not innovative. So I question your statement of 'REALLY good competition' and would instead call it 'mature.'
So how do you shake up a mature market with entrenched players? Develop something disruptive. Apple's good at doing exactly that kind of thing, and that's what they appear to be doing with the iPhone. You can make all sorts of disparaging remarks about the keynote, question the timing, harumph about the cell phone market, but I think it boils down to a few things:
1. Their products are excellent from a sense of key feature inclusion (i.e., little to no bloat) and usability.
2. They are not newbies - they're a multi-billion dollar consumer electronics company. And increasingly, that's the kind of product cell phones are turning into. To say they can't roll with the likes of Moto and Nokia is ignoring who they are and what they do.
3. They hit the right timing in the market for the release of such a phone. The evolution of cell phones into multi-function devices and the increase market for smartphones and other 'intelligent' products have converged into a magical point of market timing (otherwise known as an 'inflection point'). This is a great time to throw this hat into the ring.
The market is ripe and if they put a good product into the market with a good partner (AT&T, don't fuck this up), they have a solid shot, for the same reasons the iPod succeeds in the market that it does. We'll see.
's a shame that Yankee, Forrester, et al. have already determined that 99c is the perfect price for a song: demand plummets above it, and does not increase appreciably below.
Whoa, whoa. Hold up there, Tex. This is not consumer fraud in the slightest. This is product management at its core.
I do this stuff for a living. And I've never sold a product to a customer and given them an end-of-life (EOL) schedule at the same time. It doesn't work that way, mainly because you're never exactly sure when your EOL date needs to be. Sure, you have some guesses, but often they're wrong.
Very good reasons for product EOL are declining demand and support/maintenance costs. Tech. support and software maintenance cost real money, and if a company is seeing usage of a product drop off, why support it? Tell your user base, 'listen, you got 4 years out of a $50 product, that's pretty good. Upgrade for a discount and let's get you on something modern that makes both of our lives easier. If not, hey, good luck.'
Companies are not obligated to support/deliver product in perpetuam, else they'd be flat-ass broke. It's not fraud: trust me, there's enough legalese, and this is a common-enough and accepted practice, that it's perfectly legal. Do open-source developers support 10-year-old code builds, when modern stuff is better and more popular?
And yes, MS will eventually drop support on XP, when the time is appropriate for them. Just like they did Win95 and WFW. 'course, at that point, they may stop checking authentication on older SW, as the market will ensure that you upgrade to support new software/hardware. Who knows.
This is going to be viciously unpopular, but maybe the GPL needs to start looking in the mirror and become more BSD-like in its terms.
MS opens up their Office 2003 schema, and they can't use it because of their own terms? Just the sort of ammunition Mr. Gates needs. 'See? We tried to be flexible, but they won't work with us!'
What this might do, however, is move towards a standard document structure that's supported flexibly amongst multiple platforms. Thus, Pages (Apple) and OpenOffice and MS Word all produce the same document, so why do I need to buy MS?
Yeah, probably. Thing is, this is a common syndrome with any other PC manufacturer. Upgrades on a line-item basis are dirt cheap; on the aggregate, they add up to some real money. So when a customer upgrades a few things and realizes they doubled the price of their $599 (Dell, Gateway, Apple) computer, they get sticker shock and bail.
Like many Slashdotters, I guide technology decisions for a lot of friends/family, and one of the main complaints I've heard consistantly about Apple is the pricing. Hell, I've ranted than the only reason I don't own one is the pricetage. The $499/$599 pricetag gets people in the door, and dropping the upgrade price may lower the sticker-shock on the backend and help them complete more sales.
Amen. Couple this also with the fact that Apple doesn't have a monopoly. They don't control supply, they only have 50% market share, and there is evidence that the barrier to entry is not prohibitively high for other competitors. Just look at the slew of players out there, and keep coming out every day.
It's Apple's marketing and hip/geek cache that's got the buying public, not some vast conspiracy. I argue this with a few people regularly. They are not the best value for a player from a strict space/price perspective. But the design of the iPod interface, sleek look, and integration with iTunes has grabbed a huge portion of the buying public. Can't argue with that.
Man, this is insane.
If you don't like what they're selling at Wal-Mart, DO NOT BUY IT. If you don't like their pricing, DO NOT SHOP THERE. If you don't like their attitude, the color of the store, their stance on not carrying lesbian porn, DO NOT FREQUENT THEIR ESTABLISHMENT.
All I ever hear about Wal-Mart anymore is how damned evil they are and how the store sucks and their music is unfairly censored and blahblahblah. If it's so damned bad, why are they making money hand over fist?
Frankly, I love what they've done for supply chain management, I love how they slap their suppliers into line, their prices are incredible, watching white trash is funny as hell, and I don't buy music there because I want to hear Jay-Z say 'fuck.'
Anybody else actually have a problem with Wal-Mart they can express intelligently?
According to a buddy of mine who attended, a professor at Northwestern actually used game theory to prove the lost 'value' in using condoms during your average heterosexual encounter (in economics, it's all about value).
I've talked to several medical professionals and AIDS activists, and they all say that HIV is a hard virus to catch, especially if you're a male in a heterosexual encounter. And one has said 'I've never met a person who, when tested positive, didn't know exactly what they'd done to catch it.'
I agree: lots of fear mongering. It's a hard virus to catch. Of course, if the facts and the odds saw light of day with the masses, your problem might be much, much worse, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't wrap your gear before entry. But a look at the math can strip some of the fear out of the subjest.
Again, it's very much a cultural thing. The US was formed very spectularly in a civil war against an oppressive govt. (or so the story goes). Authority figures overstepping their bounds is something that Americans are sensitive to. With a government that currently seems determined to remove civil liberties in the name of a serious, yet not-wholly-defined goal, by means not fully revealed to the citizenry? Well, you implied yourself that this is a two-way street, no?
And you meet a few of the wrong kind of police in the US, you won't let them within 100 ft. of your apartment without a warrant or your specific summons (i.e., emergency situation). Trust me on this one.
Because, often times, kicking it over to Linux is neither desirable nor feisible, especially if it's a work machine. If I want to use Ethereal on my laptop, and WinXP is feeling quirky, my solution can't be 'boot Knoppix,' 'cause then I can't do anything else with any ease.
Knee-jerk Linux reactions are no better than knee-jerk MS reactions, 'cept Linux has cooler t-shirts.
Good job with the Terminator images in everyone's heads.
Software does not kill. Bad engineering and poor implementation kills. My copy of Windows XP, while still radiating pure evil, has not managed to pop open the gun cabinet.
You might as well ask the question, 'can the old saddlebag gas tanks on Ford Rangers kill? Gasp!'
Just because a manufacturer's costs go down doesn't mean that the product is any less valuable to the consumer. Whether I can make a product for $5 or $0.50 is irrelevant to the fact that the market will bear a price of $50.
Posting on Slashdot should require at least one business course and an ounce of common sense. Good Christ.
Depends on who you ask, really. 'Baby Bell' is just a slang term for Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC), since they all split off from Ma Bell (AT&T). Your players are:
-SBC. Combination of Ameritech, Southwestern Bell, and PacBell, primarily.
-Verizon. Combination of Bell Atlantic, NYNEX, and GTE (who was not an RBOC).
-BellSouth.
-Qwest. Combination of US WEST and Qwest (who started in LD).
And let's not succumb to hyperbole: the 'four big companies controlling telecommunications nationwide' bit sounds a little tinfoil-hat. They've consolidated a bit, yes, but they still serve the same purpose: offer local (and now LD) phone service across a given region.
Watch that again. Solo is reaching for his gun about ten lines before Greedo even gets threatening (aside from the initial exchange).
Han fires in cold blood and kills Greedo. It sets him up as a selfish outlaw who finds redemption and a purpose in the Rebel cause, and eventually in Leia. IMO, Lucas destroys three metric tons of character development with one laser blast.
If the doctor in question is not an arrogant asshole, he'd (gender nonspecific) probably give a legitimate answer.
I'm very shocked by the lack of honest, solid responses to this AS. Sounds like a bunch of bitter, socially inept sysadmins venting on a newbie.
Try this, Mr. Doctor:
1. Right now, technology is in the doldrums. All industries are cyclical, of course, but IT went from boom to bust really fast, leaving a lot of millionaires and a lot of bitter, bitter people. You mention 5-10 years, so you would probably (hopefully?) be in a much different market. Keep that in mind.
2. IT folks are arrogant. Yes, doctors are arrogant, too, but you'll get resisitance from those who've been in the field a while and don't think they're getting a fair shake (read Slashdot regularly to get the idea). Keep that in mind.
3. You still want to do this, huh? I might recommend a MS program in biomedical engineering. A medical degree, as I'm sure you know, is a powerful thing: leverage it with a love/appreciation of technology to get the most benefit. It would be a shame to abandon that background, and the familiarity of medicine in that environment might encourage you, and thus shorten the learning curve (you can teach the engineers while they teach you?).
4. If you're talking full-hog, no-looking-back career change, figure out what speciality you want (software or hardware design, administration, network engineering, etc.) and hit the appropriate MS program. Realize that things are going to change rapdily over even the course of your education, so get ready. I'm an engineer by education (marketing by profession), so I'd learn towards EE. However, an MS strictly in EE would be overkill at this point, I think. Try MSIS or such programs to get a flavor. You want more technical, check programs like CMU or Johns Hopkins to mix it up. I site those two because I know they have programs ranging from 'half management, half tech' to 'full-on geek.' Forget cerification for now: they are an enhancement to experience, not a replacement. Monkeying with an open source OS/DB in parallel is not a bad idea, as it gets a toe into the water.
Above all: really consider why you are doing this. I'm young: I hit the job market right as the boom ended ('99), and consider myself lucking to only be laid off twice, and picked up work rapidly. I saw a lot of my peers who went into this field because they 'liked computers a lot' or for the money/glamour. If that's your motivation, or this is a halfway thing, reconsider. Technology is a bitch of an industry, requires constant education, and moves at a lightning pace. If you don't love it thoroughly, you won't thrive, and it will make you bitter. I'm aware medicine is similar (I know my share of doctors); I'm just sayin'.
Good luck with everything. Frankly, if you're a skilled, personable doctor, I think it'd be a loss to society for you to bow out, but that's a personal choice. Hope it goes well for you.
So, I gotta ask: how many people outside the open-source/Slashdot community are really aware of Ogg? A dozen? Twenty, maybe?
Look, my parents can barely program the VCR, much less decide between audio codecs, and they're typically technologies buyers. They may not get the hardcore geek sale, but they'll get The Masses, and that's where the money is. DRM will give them a backlash, yes, but the codec wars are not fought in the Best Buy crowd. They're fought here. And frankly, we're about the only ones who give a damn.
Give The Masses something that's portable, sounds like a CD, and is flexible, and they'll buy it. Argue with them over open source vs. licensed and bitrates and OHMYGODMYHEADEXPLODED.
You get the picture.
A noble angle, but TiVo is kicking major ass. Their DirecTV deal is very sweet, they have a nice customer base that's quite loyal, and they're pushing new product like mad. Unless/until The Masses get upset over this issue, you won't see them change.
'cause, I mean, how many people use MythTV? Yeah, that's what I thought.
I disagree: MS is trying very hard to provide platforms/apps that allow companies to use DRM to protect their patents. WMP is a perfect example. Apple's 'Rip, Mix, Burn' tagline is a bit of a copout: they know people might steal music, but they want to encourage use of their product (and perhaps spin a fun, slightly counter-culture sheen on it), while throwing out the obligatory legalese ('as long as it's your music!').
Not sure about your argument, there. MS is viciously working to implement DRM at multiple levels of the PC, in order to get trust from content providers. In turn, hoping that they use MS delivery methods to move product. Apple just has a great integration method/ad campaign for selling the iPod.
Some of us technically competent also use whatever is pre-installed - I see no value in using a browser other than IE. It's a commodity.
With HP's brand equity and channels, it might be a great movie. Apple addicts still use iPod because of the Mac integration, while the PC crowd goes with something familiar to them (the HP brand). Apple gets paid on every unit, HP gets quick time-to-market and a great platform.
So what's the issue?
Streaming audio, streaming video, OS patches, umpteen programming applications, remote backups, distributed computing, perfectly legal P2P applications...this is the short list.
Oh, yeah, and another thing: who the hell are you to define what's legitimate? Whether I'm downloading pornography, telecommuting, or watching reruns of 'What's Happening Now?' from a server in New Guinea, it doesn't matter. If I'm not violating my TOS, and I'm simply using my 'unlimited' connection, then I'm not doing anything wrong.
I'll call a spade a spade: certain broadband providers are screwing a subset of their customers, because they can, and relying on 'common sense' from non-techies to justify their actions. I understand their business justifications (hey, I'm a businessman), but their tactics suck, and it will bite them square in the ass someday.
That's a little different than the shit Comcast et al. are playing. They say 'yup, unlimited use, download 'til you pass out!' And when people do, it screws up their contention ratios and bandwidth estimates, and they send threatening letters about 'reasonable usage.' Your company says 'you can't leave your dial-up tacked up all the time; use it or drop it, please.' A little different.
I'm willing to bet (as I've seem some here speculate) that they do this in areas with robust competition. Should Comcast threaten me with a cap (if I used them, that is), I take my 4500ft. loop straight to the local DSL provider, while shooting Comcast the finger.
They want to have their cake and eat it too, which is becoming much less acceptable with the growing ubiquity of broadband. Deploy a tiered pricing structure (128/128 priced well would be a great dial-up killer), or change your marketing.