Coding can be fun. I quite enjoy it when I've got an interesting project to work on. However, 50 hours a week is a fair amount of time to spend on any hobby, if you really do enjoy your work, you probably don't need to spend an awful lot more time doing it after hours either.
That's not a good analogy, because the two statements don't actually correlate.
I don't generally do a lot of what I do at work when I'm at home. That's not because I don't love my job, or because I do it only for the money, it's because 40-50 hours(if you're lucky) is enough time to spend on it. When I was younger and unemployed I spent quite a bit of time at home working on stuff. Probably about the same amount of time I now spend on it at work.
There are only 168 hours in a week, and on average most working people spend more than a third of those at work working on their craft, which is not an insignificant portion. When you take away sleep and all the other adult obligations most of us have, time for anything else is almost non-existent.
It's fine to love programming or IT work in general, and I probably wouldn't hire someone who was trying to get their first IT job and didn't spend at least some time outside of work working on IT work(even if it wasn't specifically related to the job), but you can love something and still not want to spend every single second of your life on it. Friends, family, non IT hobbies, all of these things take up time and can create a more well rounded person who depending on your organization might or might not fit into your team better than someone who is only interested in their craft.
No, your average new york times style journalist couldn't write that sort of thing, but those aren't news blogs, they're highly specialized and aimed at a very specific audience. Professionals exist who can write those sorts of things, they just aren't working for general news sources.
Journalism has a very serious problem, and it's a problem which may destroy it as an industry, but that problem probably isn't the one you think it is.
The job of a journalist is to present a news story in a clear and, as much as possible, unbiased way. That means talking to the guy who is rabidly pro-nuke, talking to the guy who is rabidly anti-nuke, talking to a bunch of other people and doing a lot of research and then condensing down all those opinions and knowledge into something which gives regular people a reasonable understanding of the issue. It's an important job, and one which no normal industry expert can do because they're too close to the subject matter. If you wanted to report a story on some big event at Microsoft you'd need to talk to someone from Microsoft, but you'd also need to talk to someone from one of their competitors, from Open Source, and depending on the complexity of the issue a few dozen other people. Otherwise you wouldn't get a real understanding of what's happening. To get all those sides you'd need someone all sides at least sort of trusted. That's what journalists are supposed to do. They're also generally required to be able to string a few coherent sentences together which a lot of folks can't do.
The problem is that, a lot of the time they no longer do the research part. This is partly because in the modern age we want news so much faster than we ever did before and there isn't a lot of time to research things properly. Murdoch himself is also a large part of the problem. The commercialization and dumbing down of the news made him a lot of money, but it has come at the cost of a lot of what allowed him to make that money in the first place.
I have very little sympathy for Rupert Murdoch since he is personally responsible for the root causes of a large number of the problems which currently plague him, but that doesn't change the fact that we as a society need professional journalists and reporters, even if there are very few of them around at the moment.
Yes and No. From your lack of experience with head hunters and they way they operate, I'd guess you're probably fairly new to the job market. This can be rough especially in tight economic times like a lot of countries are experiencing. Unless your headhunter is lying about putting you in for jobs this is probably the case. Generally unless you're in high demand, headhunters are more likely to drop you entirely if you bodge an interview or otherwise piss them off than to risk hurting their reputation by sending inappropriate candidates for shits and giggles.
Yes, head hunters do modify your resume. At the least most of them will reformat it, and some of them will play around with it to make it more appealing. Whether you should shut up and live with it depends entirely on what they're doing. If they're hiding your period of unemployment without actually lying then keep your trap shut. If they're claiming you worked somewhere you didn't work or otherwise falsifying your resume then you need to stop going through them(though this probably isn't the case since that sort of misrepresentation could get them sued.
If you feel that Zeke isn't helping your career and especially if you think he's harming it you should tell him you don't want him to represent you anymore, you don't have to tell him to get lost, that's stupid, and is what the don't make enemies thing is about. It doesn't mean you have to be everyone's friend, it means you don't burn bridges or piss people off if you don't need to. Unless Zeke is paying you directly you should also have as many Zeke's out there as you can find trying to sell you to clients because you don't get exclusivity without money.
Pretty much everyone has had experiences like this in their early years. Interviews and Resumes are hard and, especially in the early days, you really have to work hard to make yours stand out.
Getting a job sucks. It's always sucked, and probably always will suck. Nearly every resume you put in will be in a pile with a few hundred others, and the person reading them isn't going to spend an awful lot of time on yours. Nearly everyone fudges theirs a little and your interviewer will probably take off about 20% of what you say as exaggeration regardless.
Interviews are also hard especially in the early days or if you're excruciatingly honest, or don't have the best social skills.
It's hard to say from your description exactly what happened. Hiding periods of unemployment is quite common and acceptable. Lying about periods of employment isn't. We don't know from your story which of these it is.
we have a report written by people who wrote a piece of software claiming that their software was better and cheaper than the software which a potential client actually picked, we have a politician getting some free shots in about a previous government's financial decisions, and we have the fact that it's open source.
That is to say we have a whole lot of nothing. We don't know what they're software can do or what the one they bought could do. We don't know what the doctors who are using it are using it for, or what the hospitals who implemented it wanted to do with it(which can be very very different). We have no idea why they chose the product they did or why they didn't choose this one.
Let me tell, as a guy who's been a technical adviser on more health system purchasing decisions than I care to count, picking health care products is complicated. The ones which are well written and maintained usually don't work for the clinical staff and the ones which do work for the clinical staff are often horribly written and almost impossible to maintain. Add in trying to get one for a country outside the US(health care systems outside the US work very differently so products are often difficult or impossible to use), and it's a gigantic tangled mess.
I've also seen more than my fair share of university developed e-health systems, and most of them are just as crap as the commercial ones and tend to come with all sorts of restrictions on who can host them and who supports them.
eHealth Records are a gigantic money pit which governments all over the world piss tax dollars down. Some of this is government incompetence, some of it is the way clinical staff view their jobs, some of it is crooked vendors. Nearly every government in the world capable of trying it has a failed attempt or two at one of these. Politicians also love to criticize their predecessors, it's how the system works. University researchers always talk up what they do to try and get more funding, it's what they do.
I see nothing convincing in this story to say that this product was any better than any other one, or that the governments in question chose the wrong product. Just because it's open source and cheap doesn't mean it's not crap.
It's not actually the Australian government this time. It's the attorney general of South Australia.
It wasn't banned as such, it just had no classification. The reason why it can't get a classification is because we don't have an AO rating for games, the highest possible rating is MA15+. If it doesn't meet the requirements for that rating there is no rating and games which have no rating cannot be sold.
From my understanding, fixing this involves agreement from all the state and territory attorney generals. For quite some time, six of those have been in complete agreement to add the AO rating, only one disagrees, the attorney general of South Australia. South Australia is also where our religious senatorial nutter comes from(though not our communications minister nutter).
I'm not certain how the federal government feels about all of this, but as far as I can tell, both the current labor government and the previous liberal government were either in favor of or indifferent to the new AO rating.
Analyzing reports is expensive. There's a lot of data there, you have to have multiple people do it(since otherwise the person analyzing the reports can steal from you) and unless you spend a lot of time and have a lot of people doing it you can only really see quite major exceptions from the general trends and most of the people who steal know how to do it without raising an major exception.
The truth of the matter is that low level fraud costs more to prevent than to accept, especially when you take into account the general moral drops you get from showing that you really don't trust your employees.
Most people are honest, most of the people who aren't honest can be scared off with the fact that audit reports exist, and the rest of them all together steal so very little that it's not really that big a deal.
IPv6 is not required yet, it may not be required for another 5-10 years, and even then it can probably be postponed by forcibly splitting up a few more class A's. Yes, it would be better and cheaper for everyone involved if we did IP6 slowly and in a planned and measured approach, but that's not going to happen. We'll get IPv6 when it's required either for a very good business reason, or because the central servers stop supporting IPv4 and there's no choice.
The plus side is that most hardware can now support it out of the box, and most likely nearly all hardware in production will by the time the switch happens. This means we'll have a couple of weeks of very hectic configuration at worst and not the end of the internet as we know it. It may not even be that bad.
What you're not going to see is mass adoption of IPv6 any time before it's necessary, it's a huge waste of resources to configure and support it at the moment.
Well, they've made macs generic twice before. Every time they've been undercut by other manufacturers and stopped it. That doesn't take an armchair quarterback to work out.
They still don't allow you to install OSX on non Mac hardware, which implies they're more interested in selling the hardware than the software licenses. Their top selling products are all hardware, and to the best of my knowledge they haven't released a single one of their for cost software products on another hardware platform or OS.
If they're anything other than a hardware company, they're doing it wrong. They've shown a number of times that they can't sell their hardware cheaper than third parties can produce it.
It doesn't take a genius to work out that Apple is unlikely to gain majority market share while their hardware is noticeably more expensive than comparable alternatives. It doesn't take an armchair quarterback to see that based on past performance Apple cannot produce their hardware at commodity prices and still make money. It also doesn't take a genius to work out that macs are cool isn't an advertising campaign designed to grab huge amounts of market share.
I know the fan boys always want to believe that Apple is someday going to wipe out Microsoft, it's fairly clear to anyone watching closely that without a major restructure of the company that Apple is most likely incapable of doing this without losing money. It's also clear that since Apple is a very profitable company as is that they're unlikely to be motivated to make that kind of change.
None of this has anything to do with how good or bad Apple software or hardware is, I merely state that it's unlikely that a company who is doing very successfully with their current business model is likely to change that business model substantially, particularly to one which they've tried before unsuccessfully.
So long as you restrict yourself to laptops, I think you're correct. This is partially because Apple has been making non upgradable, underpowered hardware(though this has changed somewhat lately) in a cute plastic case for almost 30 years and that's exactly what a laptop is and partially because for the most part, PC laptops really really suck(lenovos are doing a fairly good job of continuing their thinkpad roots and being ugly as all hell, but reasonably functional).
I would never ever by a Mac desktop, but if I had the spare cash I would seriously consider a mac laptop(a real one, not one of the toys).
Wonder when PC makers will realize they've got to lift their game on laptops and create stuff that's actually useful.
Presumably he's not just talking about dev's. There are very few purely development based companies out there, and however easy it is to support macs, supporting a mixed environment without a really good reason is a general nightmare for support(and running VMWare up the second you turn it on to actually do any work on a windows machine isn't a good reason), so using macs for the developers would mean using macs for most everyone else and a lot of those people aren't tech savy.
That said, a lot of developers don't come up through the support path, and quite a number of them don't know much of anything about anything and I've seen network admins who break the sockets for the old ribbon IDE cables because they didn't know how to work with them safely.
Apple isn't gunning for Microsoft, simply because they can't without losing money.
This isn't because they're software or hardware is inferior, it's not. However, they're primary business is hardware, and they're very dependent on their current profit margins. To take out Microsoft, Apple would have to turn their PC's into a commodity item the same way IBM did, and from the evidence of the few times they've tried this, they just end up being undercut by third parties(just like IBM was). To beat Microsoft they'd have to stop making any money, which isn't really an apple thing to do.
They are certainly going for the "Macs are cool, PC's are dull" angle, and they're going even harder than they used to, but that's always been a part of their overall strategy(coolness sells macs), and won't ever get them above at most a 20% market share.
Apple makes the most money by sitting exactly where they are, certainly if Microsoft created a product which was a threat to their market niche, or to the iPod or iPhone they'd go after them ruthlessly, but the Zune doesn't come close, and Windows Mobile while probably better than the iPhone for general purposes, just like Android has no real brand identity. Neither of these are a threat to apple's profit margins.
That's not to say that apple wouldn't take any market share they can grab, but PC's and laptops which are on average $500-1000 dearer than their PC competitors just aren't ever going to be broad market winners, and most of that $500-1000 is pure apple profit.
Actually it's not. This doesn't mean there won't be a 32 bit version of Windows, nor that it won't get sold on consumer PC's.
"Windows 7 capable" on PC's is really only useful if you're trying to sell PC's with Windows Vista while advertising the potential to upgrade to Windows 7 when it's released. Really not all that big a deal from a 32 bit vs 64 bit issue, it's mostly Microsoft just covering their own asses. They'll only certify PC's which can run any version of Windows 7, so if the manufacturer sells you a PC which isn't capable and isn't certified then it's the manufacturer's problem, not Microsoft's.
What might be interesting(and this detail isn't clear in TFA) is if Microsoft is restricting the use of "windows 7 capable" and the like on hardware and software that doesn't support all versions of Windows including 64 bit. That would be much more interesting since it would mean that in order to claim that their device was Windows 7 compatible, hardware manufacturers would have to provide stable 64 bit drivers, and software vendors would have to make sure their programs ran correctly under 64 bit. Now that would be a nail in the 32 bit coffin, even where this PC certification process isn't.
Using freedom of speech to cover created works is a bit of a stretch. Freedom of speech is intended to protect your right to safely express your opinions and beliefs without being persecuted. It's a vitally important protection for the continuation of anything remotely resembling a free society, but saying because you have the right to say "the president is an abusive dictator and should be impeached" you have the write to transmit the contents of a novel or song is really rather missing the point. You don't need the right to send a million copies of the latest harry potter book to all and sundry to have a free society. You do need the right to be able to read it to your child, and that's what fair use is for, not freedom of speech.
As good as this sounds, when this was actually the case, there was far less creative work available for regular people. With enough money you might hire a permanent performer of some sort, but you wouldn't have the great variety you have now. You could argue that when on artist creates a work everyone could benefit, but someone has to pay the bill eventually, and most systems like this involve everyone trying to pass the buck or employers insisting that creative works are not shared.
Your argument touches on the fact that current legislation is flawed and largely non-functional, but that doesn't make the idea of compensation for the creation of artistic work illogical, anymore than the fact that you can't currently instantly create a car makes charging for that car logical. If creative works are valuable and their creation benefits society, then their creators deserve compensation for their creation. You can't really get any more logical than that.
From a philosophical point of view, nearly everything is reasonable(though your example of pi is not actually philosophical anyway). Most people on this earth would agree that creative works by and large benefit society as a whole. They would also agree that since this is the case, then compensating the creators of these works so that they may continue creating those works is a right and valuable thing to do. This is quite a reasonable philosophy to hold, and in no way illogical or immoral.
All of this of course doesn't mean that the current way in which we compensate the creators of creative works or the ways in which we enforce this compensation is moral, logical, or makes any kind of financial or philosophical sense. I personally believe that it makes very little sense at all.
The reproduction and distribution costs of a CD, movie, or even a book, are nearing zero. Advertising is a lot more readily available to individuals than it ever was before. Yet, publishers still take the lion's share of the proceeds of any creative work. This is immoral, illogical, and makes no financial sense.
Due to extremely long copyright periods, artists who create one successful work can currently often retire on the proceeds of just that one work if it is sufficiently popular, creating no additional creative works at all. While this has a certain moral validity, and makes logical and financial sense from the perspective of the author, it does not make sense from the standpoint of the society enforcing the laws governing this compensation.
Creative works can also languish for extremely long periods of time, unused and yet unavailable to society as a whole. This is immoral, illogical, and makes no financial sense, since we pay for enforcement and yet do not benefit.
As it currently stands, stealing a CD from a shop has a far lower penalty than copying the same CD onto your computer, by several orders of magnitude. This is immoral, illogical, and again only make financial sense from the perspective of the person getting that money, not for society as a whole.
Our current copyright system is fundamentally flawed. It does not serve the interests of society, since we as a whole are required to pay to enforce the rights of creative artists, but those creative artists are not required to compensate
I don't think the *AA have anything to do with it. The internet is growing very quickly and is really not under anyone's control whatsoever. It's still very much the wild west, and like the wild west, any number of parties would like it tamed and made safe(banks, on-line retailers, pretty much anyone who uses the internet to make money). This would probably happen eventually whether the the RIAA and MPAA ever even existed, simply because the internet is starting to fill up with people who are very interested in the internet being safe for them to do business in, which it currently is not.
Solutions to tame and control the internet will eventually happen, even if it doesn't happen within our lifetime. It will become taxed, policed, and legislated eventually because it is in the best interest of most nations for this to happen. It may take a long time, and go through many changes along the way(most likely the creation of national or multinational subnets somewhat connected to the current system with requirements for identity and authentication built in), but it will happen eventually.
That said, it probably won't happen fast enough for the MPAA or RIAA and their members to survive(particularly the RIAA) if they don't wake up and smell the coffee. The era of controlling the distribution of music and movies is over, and they'll have to come up with a business model which doesn't require them to be the sole source of their product. Someday in the future we'll have enough technology that the same will probably happen for physical goods as well, and their creators will have to face that change when it comes.
we can use these to weed out the idiots who write all over their books and then sell them back to the bookstore. Your notes are not helpful to others. Most of the time they're wrong, and half the time you're a complete and utter moron who highlights everything(though I did find it somewhat comforting in University to discover that the highlighter monkey had given up on Nietzche about the same place I did, god that man was an ass), or else you highlight the stuff which worked for you, but not for me. Don't get me started on writing all over the books.
I don't mind what you plan on keeping your copy(especially if you buy new so the rest of the world can have reasonable used books. Your notes are supposed to be a synthesis of what you read in the book, and what you heard in lecture so you can boil down what's important into something you can actually study/refer to later. If you're going to have to read through the whole damned thing again just to get your notes you're doing it wrong.
Personally I would have loved to have not had to carry around all those wretched books all the time, not to mention not having to go to whatever pet cause bookstore the professor decided to give his or her booklist to that particular semester just to get gouged because they're the only people who had the books in time(since they had the list).
Certainly a kindle is a bit more fragile than a book, and you'd have to be careful(I can tell you from my days of trying to restore people's papers from a disk they'd shoved into the bottom of a bag full of gigantic books) that a lot of students aren't), but if you consider the benefits of having a search able book at your fingertips.
That's not to say that the Kindle(personally I think it's a pile of crap which only sells because of the value add services Amazon can add to it) is necessarily the right product, but e-book readers in general could be really fantastic for this sort of thing, presuming you can learn to take proper notes in places where notes belong and not scrawl all over your books.
like every other job out there. Sometimes there's glory, but most of the time there isn't. Even people who save lives every day don't actually get much in the way of glory most of the time, and what we do doesn't come close to being as important as something like that.
The IT industry has changed a lot in the last ten years or so, largely for the better. No people aren't as amazed as they used to be by your technical prowess, but companies are starting to actually understand what it is we do. To a certain extent this means that they're no longer throwing money at us willy nilly, but that's not really a long term success plan anyway, and there's plenty of consulting work left if your dream is spreading FUD until someone pays you to solve a problem which doesn't exist.
Personally, I'm glad of the change in IT. Every person who works in the field and loves what they do has suffered because of the thousands of idiots who thought that IT was the easy road to glory and riches. It's not. It's a job. Even worse, it's a job in the service industry. You're not going to get rich quick, you're not going to get the girl, they're not going to give you a medal and praise you every time you walk down the hall. If that's what you want and you hate working in IT, then GTFO and leave the jobs for people who actually enjoy the work. Generally speaking they're better at it than you.
Well you're sort of right. It's not "any advantage" it generally has to be a fairly substantial advantage simply because there's usually a whole hell of a lot more of any species without a new mutation than with a new mutation. Survival rates have to be a noticeable improvement to overcome that disparity.
So for instance, sharks are very unlikely to ever evolve to be resistant to repellent because while eating humans would be better than not if the shark was hungry, humans are not a major part of the shark diet even as is so there probably will never be a large enough survival increase from having that mutation.
On the other hand, human food is a fairly large part of the diets of household cockroaches. Not having access to this food source would probably drastically decrease the cockroach's lifespan. This would mean that if a mutation occurs it might provide enough pressure to evolve the species itself. Presuming of course that the disadvantages of losing this aversion(which presumably has a very strong survival benefit since it is universal) don't overcome the survival advantages of human food, and of course that the right mutation happens to happen.
Yes, but unlike cancer, vendor lock-in is entirely unavoidable. The fact that the vendor is Ubuntu instead of Microsoft doesn't really matter. You're still locked in to the product of that vendor. It's just the degree and cost of that lock-in that really matters.
For your metaphor, it's more like you not caring about dying, but more about how and when you die. You probably aren't really fond of the idea of dying, but you know that some day you're going to do so, and you probably to some level or another accept that. That doesn't mean you want it to be painful or tomorrow.
This is true, however, the generally accepted definition of "vendor lock-in" is useless.
The Enterprise doesn't care about vendor lock-in, they care about the consequences of vendor lock-in. That is to say, they care about what vendor lock-in might cost them. The cost of vendor lock-in is what it will cost you to change from your current system and what costs you might be forced to bear if you want to avoid that. Often this can be an issue of a company basically gouging their customers because they can't afford to get out, but it can just as easily be the costs of maintaining a project if the original maintainers disappear, or any number of other things.
Lock-in doesn't occur because software is closed or for any reasons of legality. There is no law which you can use to force someone to continue to use your software. Lock-in occurs because every piece of software is a little bit different and relearning a new one, adapting your other software to work with a new one, changing your business processes to match a new one, all of that costs an awful lot of money.
In a certain sense, Windows actually has less lock-in than Linux. You can nearly always install windows software on multiple versions of Windows, and the each version of Windows is supported for quite a long time. You can, for the most part(and I've certainly seen this) write a piece of software and run it, without any updates for 15 years. Whereas you can't even guarantee that any given piece of software for Linux will install and run the same way on the next version of the Linux software you're running, let along another distribution.
In any event, none of the four freedoms frees you from costs incurred if the people providing your software change the terms under which they do so. Just because you can maintain it yourself doesn't mean that it is in any way practical or even desirable to do so.
The "he's been arrested" defense was one thing, but the "he's been convicted based on a massive amount of evidence, but he can't be guilty because he works for open source.
There's a certain amount of that here. If Bill Gates were arrested for murder people here would say he did it even if they'd been with him at the time and knew he didn't do it, and Hans Reiser was innocent up until he showed them the body.
There's a difference between open source, free software, and linux, and there's certainly a lot of variation even within those categories. A lot of open source software developers tend to ignore software patents, either for reasons of belief or because they live in jurisdictions where they don't apply. That doesn't mean necessarily that all open source software has to ignore software patents or that existing open source software including linux, isn't in violation of software patents, nor of course does it mean that they shouldn't or are.
Microsoft quite obviously finds some advantages in open source as a concept, even if they don't necessarily agree with the open source movement as a whole or Linux in particular and almost certainly disagree with FSF and RMS quite vehemently(which is perfectly understandable since the FSF and selling closed source software are rather conflicting ideologies).
Microsoft's actions are only contradictory if you view Open Source/Free Software from an ideological perspective as opposed to a practical one. There are a lot of benefits to the open source model, particularly for certain kinds of projects, and more people coding for Windows open source or otherwise is good for Microsoft.
There's also a fairly large wad of cash available for any company which can get the benefits of open source without the costs of ideology(which is what Sun was trying to do) successfully.
It was pretty mediocre code to begin with. Interesting, but not anywhere near as revolutionary in practice as people seem to think. Add to that the fact that Reiser was it's primary maintainer and core developer and it's probably not worth bothering with. Especially since SSD's are likely to change the design of file systems rather dramatically in the next few years.
Plus, slashdot has a lot of karma to make up for all of their "just because they found his car with the seat ripped out and a huge spot of her blood in it doesn't mean he killed her, he's just misunderstood" crap they spouted when he was being tried, so a little criticism of him and his works even things out a bit.
Google apps has some limited value, but it's more a teaming and sharing solution as opposed to "desktop apps in the space".
Not that you're not right, a lot of cloud articles seem to be focused on things like google apps and Application Service Providers and the like. I think it's because the journalists don't really understand what's going on.
The cloud is really very very powerful, and I really believe that it's going to be an important part of enterprise IT, just not in the ways which most journalists like to pretend.
Every software vendor on the planet would love to sell SaaS, and every analyst seems to want to tell them they can do it. However, aside from a few edge cases, no one has really shown how SaaS will benefit the buyer, and so it just doesn't take off. Gartner have been extolling it for years, but it's just not practical.
Scalable server hardware on demand on the other hand, is something that most people can see a real use for.
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Coding can be fun. I quite enjoy it when I've got an interesting project to work on. However, 50 hours a week is a fair amount of time to spend on any hobby, if you really do enjoy your work, you probably don't need to spend an awful lot more time doing it after hours either.
That's not a good analogy, because the two statements don't actually correlate.
I don't generally do a lot of what I do at work when I'm at home. That's not because I don't love my job, or because I do it only for the money, it's because 40-50 hours(if you're lucky) is enough time to spend on it. When I was younger and unemployed I spent quite a bit of time at home working on stuff. Probably about the same amount of time I now spend on it at work.
There are only 168 hours in a week, and on average most working people spend more than a third of those at work working on their craft, which is not an insignificant portion. When you take away sleep and all the other adult obligations most of us have, time for anything else is almost non-existent.
It's fine to love programming or IT work in general, and I probably wouldn't hire someone who was trying to get their first IT job and didn't spend at least some time outside of work working on IT work(even if it wasn't specifically related to the job), but you can love something and still not want to spend every single second of your life on it. Friends, family, non IT hobbies, all of these things take up time and can create a more well rounded person who depending on your organization might or might not fit into your team better than someone who is only interested in their craft.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
No, your average new york times style journalist couldn't write that sort of thing, but those aren't news blogs, they're highly specialized and aimed at a very specific audience. Professionals exist who can write those sorts of things, they just aren't working for general news sources.
Journalism has a very serious problem, and it's a problem which may destroy it as an industry, but that problem probably isn't the one you think it is.
The job of a journalist is to present a news story in a clear and, as much as possible, unbiased way. That means talking to the guy who is rabidly pro-nuke, talking to the guy who is rabidly anti-nuke, talking to a bunch of other people and doing a lot of research and then condensing down all those opinions and knowledge into something which gives regular people a reasonable understanding of the issue. It's an important job, and one which no normal industry expert can do because they're too close to the subject matter. If you wanted to report a story on some big event at Microsoft you'd need to talk to someone from Microsoft, but you'd also need to talk to someone from one of their competitors, from Open Source, and depending on the complexity of the issue a few dozen other people. Otherwise you wouldn't get a real understanding of what's happening. To get all those sides you'd need someone all sides at least sort of trusted. That's what journalists are supposed to do. They're also generally required to be able to string a few coherent sentences together which a lot of folks can't do.
The problem is that, a lot of the time they no longer do the research part. This is partly because in the modern age we want news so much faster than we ever did before and there isn't a lot of time to research things properly. Murdoch himself is also a large part of the problem. The commercialization and dumbing down of the news made him a lot of money, but it has come at the cost of a lot of what allowed him to make that money in the first place.
I have very little sympathy for Rupert Murdoch since he is personally responsible for the root causes of a large number of the problems which currently plague him, but that doesn't change the fact that we as a society need professional journalists and reporters, even if there are very few of them around at the moment.
Getting a job sucks. It's always sucked, and probably always will suck. Nearly every resume you put in will be in a pile with a few hundred others, and the person reading them isn't going to spend an awful lot of time on yours. Nearly everyone fudges theirs a little and your interviewer will probably take off about 20% of what you say as exaggeration regardless.
Interviews are also hard especially in the early days or if you're excruciatingly honest, or don't have the best social skills.
It's hard to say from your description exactly what happened. Hiding periods of unemployment is quite common and acceptable. Lying about periods of employment isn't. We don't know from your story which of these it is.
That is to say we have a whole lot of nothing. We don't know what they're software can do or what the one they bought could do. We don't know what the doctors who are using it are using it for, or what the hospitals who implemented it wanted to do with it(which can be very very different). We have no idea why they chose the product they did or why they didn't choose this one.
Let me tell, as a guy who's been a technical adviser on more health system purchasing decisions than I care to count, picking health care products is complicated. The ones which are well written and maintained usually don't work for the clinical staff and the ones which do work for the clinical staff are often horribly written and almost impossible to maintain. Add in trying to get one for a country outside the US(health care systems outside the US work very differently so products are often difficult or impossible to use), and it's a gigantic tangled mess.
I've also seen more than my fair share of university developed e-health systems, and most of them are just as crap as the commercial ones and tend to come with all sorts of restrictions on who can host them and who supports them.
eHealth Records are a gigantic money pit which governments all over the world piss tax dollars down. Some of this is government incompetence, some of it is the way clinical staff view their jobs, some of it is crooked vendors. Nearly every government in the world capable of trying it has a failed attempt or two at one of these. Politicians also love to criticize their predecessors, it's how the system works. University researchers always talk up what they do to try and get more funding, it's what they do.
I see nothing convincing in this story to say that this product was any better than any other one, or that the governments in question chose the wrong product. Just because it's open source and cheap doesn't mean it's not crap.
It's not actually the Australian government this time. It's the attorney general of South Australia.
It wasn't banned as such, it just had no classification. The reason why it can't get a classification is because we don't have an AO rating for games, the highest possible rating is MA15+. If it doesn't meet the requirements for that rating there is no rating and games which have no rating cannot be sold.
From my understanding, fixing this involves agreement from all the state and territory attorney generals. For quite some time, six of those have been in complete agreement to add the AO rating, only one disagrees, the attorney general of South Australia. South Australia is also where our religious senatorial nutter comes from(though not our communications minister nutter).
I'm not certain how the federal government feels about all of this, but as far as I can tell, both the current labor government and the previous liberal government were either in favor of or indifferent to the new AO rating.
Analyzing reports is expensive. There's a lot of data there, you have to have multiple people do it(since otherwise the person analyzing the reports can steal from you) and unless you spend a lot of time and have a lot of people doing it you can only really see quite major exceptions from the general trends and most of the people who steal know how to do it without raising an major exception.
The truth of the matter is that low level fraud costs more to prevent than to accept, especially when you take into account the general moral drops you get from showing that you really don't trust your employees.
Most people are honest, most of the people who aren't honest can be scared off with the fact that audit reports exist, and the rest of them all together steal so very little that it's not really that big a deal.
IPv6 is not required yet, it may not be required for another 5-10 years, and even then it can probably be postponed by forcibly splitting up a few more class A's. Yes, it would be better and cheaper for everyone involved if we did IP6 slowly and in a planned and measured approach, but that's not going to happen. We'll get IPv6 when it's required either for a very good business reason, or because the central servers stop supporting IPv4 and there's no choice.
The plus side is that most hardware can now support it out of the box, and most likely nearly all hardware in production will by the time the switch happens. This means we'll have a couple of weeks of very hectic configuration at worst and not the end of the internet as we know it. It may not even be that bad.
What you're not going to see is mass adoption of IPv6 any time before it's necessary, it's a huge waste of resources to configure and support it at the moment.
Well, they've made macs generic twice before. Every time they've been undercut by other manufacturers and stopped it. That doesn't take an armchair quarterback to work out.
They still don't allow you to install OSX on non Mac hardware, which implies they're more interested in selling the hardware than the software licenses. Their top selling products are all hardware, and to the best of my knowledge they haven't released a single one of their for cost software products on another hardware platform or OS.
If they're anything other than a hardware company, they're doing it wrong. They've shown a number of times that they can't sell their hardware cheaper than third parties can produce it.
It doesn't take a genius to work out that Apple is unlikely to gain majority market share while their hardware is noticeably more expensive than comparable alternatives. It doesn't take an armchair quarterback to see that based on past performance Apple cannot produce their hardware at commodity prices and still make money. It also doesn't take a genius to work out that macs are cool isn't an advertising campaign designed to grab huge amounts of market share.
I know the fan boys always want to believe that Apple is someday going to wipe out Microsoft, it's fairly clear to anyone watching closely that without a major restructure of the company that Apple is most likely incapable of doing this without losing money. It's also clear that since Apple is a very profitable company as is that they're unlikely to be motivated to make that kind of change.
None of this has anything to do with how good or bad Apple software or hardware is, I merely state that it's unlikely that a company who is doing very successfully with their current business model is likely to change that business model substantially, particularly to one which they've tried before unsuccessfully.
So long as you restrict yourself to laptops, I think you're correct. This is partially because Apple has been making non upgradable, underpowered hardware(though this has changed somewhat lately) in a cute plastic case for almost 30 years and that's exactly what a laptop is and partially because for the most part, PC laptops really really suck(lenovos are doing a fairly good job of continuing their thinkpad roots and being ugly as all hell, but reasonably functional) .
I would never ever by a Mac desktop, but if I had the spare cash I would seriously consider a mac laptop(a real one, not one of the toys).
Wonder when PC makers will realize they've got to lift their game on laptops and create stuff that's actually useful.
Presumably he's not just talking about dev's. There are very few purely development based companies out there, and however easy it is to support macs, supporting a mixed environment without a really good reason is a general nightmare for support(and running VMWare up the second you turn it on to actually do any work on a windows machine isn't a good reason), so using macs for the developers would mean using macs for most everyone else and a lot of those people aren't tech savy.
That said, a lot of developers don't come up through the support path, and quite a number of them don't know much of anything about anything and I've seen network admins who break the sockets for the old ribbon IDE cables because they didn't know how to work with them safely.
Apple isn't gunning for Microsoft, simply because they can't without losing money.
This isn't because they're software or hardware is inferior, it's not. However, they're primary business is hardware, and they're very dependent on their current profit margins. To take out Microsoft, Apple would have to turn their PC's into a commodity item the same way IBM did, and from the evidence of the few times they've tried this, they just end up being undercut by third parties(just like IBM was). To beat Microsoft they'd have to stop making any money, which isn't really an apple thing to do.
They are certainly going for the "Macs are cool, PC's are dull" angle, and they're going even harder than they used to, but that's always been a part of their overall strategy(coolness sells macs), and won't ever get them above at most a 20% market share.
Apple makes the most money by sitting exactly where they are, certainly if Microsoft created a product which was a threat to their market niche, or to the iPod or iPhone they'd go after them ruthlessly, but the Zune doesn't come close, and Windows Mobile while probably better than the iPhone for general purposes, just like Android has no real brand identity. Neither of these are a threat to apple's profit margins.
That's not to say that apple wouldn't take any market share they can grab, but PC's and laptops which are on average $500-1000 dearer than their PC competitors just aren't ever going to be broad market winners, and most of that $500-1000 is pure apple profit.
Actually it's not. This doesn't mean there won't be a 32 bit version of Windows, nor that it won't get sold on consumer PC's.
"Windows 7 capable" on PC's is really only useful if you're trying to sell PC's with Windows Vista while advertising the potential to upgrade to Windows 7 when it's released. Really not all that big a deal from a 32 bit vs 64 bit issue, it's mostly Microsoft just covering their own asses. They'll only certify PC's which can run any version of Windows 7, so if the manufacturer sells you a PC which isn't capable and isn't certified then it's the manufacturer's problem, not Microsoft's.
What might be interesting(and this detail isn't clear in TFA) is if Microsoft is restricting the use of "windows 7 capable" and the like on hardware and software that doesn't support all versions of Windows including 64 bit. That would be much more interesting since it would mean that in order to claim that their device was Windows 7 compatible, hardware manufacturers would have to provide stable 64 bit drivers, and software vendors would have to make sure their programs ran correctly under 64 bit. Now that would be a nail in the 32 bit coffin, even where this PC certification process isn't.
All of this of course doesn't mean that the current way in which we compensate the creators of creative works or the ways in which we enforce this compensation is moral, logical, or makes any kind of financial or philosophical sense. I personally believe that it makes very little sense at all.
The reproduction and distribution costs of a CD, movie, or even a book, are nearing zero. Advertising is a lot more readily available to individuals than it ever was before. Yet, publishers still take the lion's share of the proceeds of any creative work. This is immoral, illogical, and makes no financial sense.
Due to extremely long copyright periods, artists who create one successful work can currently often retire on the proceeds of just that one work if it is sufficiently popular, creating no additional creative works at all. While this has a certain moral validity, and makes logical and financial sense from the perspective of the author, it does not make sense from the standpoint of the society enforcing the laws governing this compensation.
Creative works can also languish for extremely long periods of time, unused and yet unavailable to society as a whole. This is immoral, illogical, and makes no financial sense, since we pay for enforcement and yet do not benefit.
As it currently stands, stealing a CD from a shop has a far lower penalty than copying the same CD onto your computer, by several orders of magnitude. This is immoral, illogical, and again only make financial sense from the perspective of the person getting that money, not for society as a whole.
Our current copyright system is fundamentally flawed. It does not serve the interests of society, since we as a whole are required to pay to enforce the rights of creative artists, but those creative artists are not required to compensate
I don't think the *AA have anything to do with it. The internet is growing very quickly and is really not under anyone's control whatsoever. It's still very much the wild west, and like the wild west, any number of parties would like it tamed and made safe(banks, on-line retailers, pretty much anyone who uses the internet to make money). This would probably happen eventually whether the the RIAA and MPAA ever even existed, simply because the internet is starting to fill up with people who are very interested in the internet being safe for them to do business in, which it currently is not.
Solutions to tame and control the internet will eventually happen, even if it doesn't happen within our lifetime. It will become taxed, policed, and legislated eventually because it is in the best interest of most nations for this to happen. It may take a long time, and go through many changes along the way(most likely the creation of national or multinational subnets somewhat connected to the current system with requirements for identity and authentication built in), but it will happen eventually.
That said, it probably won't happen fast enough for the MPAA or RIAA and their members to survive(particularly the RIAA) if they don't wake up and smell the coffee. The era of controlling the distribution of music and movies is over, and they'll have to come up with a business model which doesn't require them to be the sole source of their product. Someday in the future we'll have enough technology that the same will probably happen for physical goods as well, and their creators will have to face that change when it comes.
I don't mind what you plan on keeping your copy(especially if you buy new so the rest of the world can have reasonable used books. Your notes are supposed to be a synthesis of what you read in the book, and what you heard in lecture so you can boil down what's important into something you can actually study/refer to later. If you're going to have to read through the whole damned thing again just to get your notes you're doing it wrong.
Personally I would have loved to have not had to carry around all those wretched books all the time, not to mention not having to go to whatever pet cause bookstore the professor decided to give his or her booklist to that particular semester just to get gouged because they're the only people who had the books in time(since they had the list).
Certainly a kindle is a bit more fragile than a book, and you'd have to be careful(I can tell you from my days of trying to restore people's papers from a disk they'd shoved into the bottom of a bag full of gigantic books) that a lot of students aren't), but if you consider the benefits of having a search able book at your fingertips.
That's not to say that the Kindle(personally I think it's a pile of crap which only sells because of the value add services Amazon can add to it) is necessarily the right product, but e-book readers in general could be really fantastic for this sort of thing, presuming you can learn to take proper notes in places where notes belong and not scrawl all over your books.
The IT industry has changed a lot in the last ten years or so, largely for the better. No people aren't as amazed as they used to be by your technical prowess, but companies are starting to actually understand what it is we do. To a certain extent this means that they're no longer throwing money at us willy nilly, but that's not really a long term success plan anyway, and there's plenty of consulting work left if your dream is spreading FUD until someone pays you to solve a problem which doesn't exist.
Personally, I'm glad of the change in IT. Every person who works in the field and loves what they do has suffered because of the thousands of idiots who thought that IT was the easy road to glory and riches. It's not. It's a job. Even worse, it's a job in the service industry. You're not going to get rich quick, you're not going to get the girl, they're not going to give you a medal and praise you every time you walk down the hall. If that's what you want and you hate working in IT, then GTFO and leave the jobs for people who actually enjoy the work. Generally speaking they're better at it than you.
Well you're sort of right. It's not "any advantage" it generally has to be a fairly substantial advantage simply because there's usually a whole hell of a lot more of any species without a new mutation than with a new mutation. Survival rates have to be a noticeable improvement to overcome that disparity.
So for instance, sharks are very unlikely to ever evolve to be resistant to repellent because while eating humans would be better than not if the shark was hungry, humans are not a major part of the shark diet even as is so there probably will never be a large enough survival increase from having that mutation.
On the other hand, human food is a fairly large part of the diets of household cockroaches. Not having access to this food source would probably drastically decrease the cockroach's lifespan. This would mean that if a mutation occurs it might provide enough pressure to evolve the species itself. Presuming of course that the disadvantages of losing this aversion(which presumably has a very strong survival benefit since it is universal) don't overcome the survival advantages of human food, and of course that the right mutation happens to happen.
Yes, but unlike cancer, vendor lock-in is entirely unavoidable. The fact that the vendor is Ubuntu instead of Microsoft doesn't really matter. You're still locked in to the product of that vendor. It's just the degree and cost of that lock-in that really matters.
For your metaphor, it's more like you not caring about dying, but more about how and when you die. You probably aren't really fond of the idea of dying, but you know that some day you're going to do so, and you probably to some level or another accept that. That doesn't mean you want it to be painful or tomorrow.
Slashdot in general was more of the issue really. Not everyone was that way, but a lot were.
This is true, however, the generally accepted definition of "vendor lock-in" is useless.
The Enterprise doesn't care about vendor lock-in, they care about the consequences of vendor lock-in. That is to say, they care about what vendor lock-in might cost them. The cost of vendor lock-in is what it will cost you to change from your current system and what costs you might be forced to bear if you want to avoid that. Often this can be an issue of a company basically gouging their customers because they can't afford to get out, but it can just as easily be the costs of maintaining a project if the original maintainers disappear, or any number of other things.
Lock-in doesn't occur because software is closed or for any reasons of legality. There is no law which you can use to force someone to continue to use your software. Lock-in occurs because every piece of software is a little bit different and relearning a new one, adapting your other software to work with a new one, changing your business processes to match a new one, all of that costs an awful lot of money.
In a certain sense, Windows actually has less lock-in than Linux. You can nearly always install windows software on multiple versions of Windows, and the each version of Windows is supported for quite a long time. You can, for the most part(and I've certainly seen this) write a piece of software and run it, without any updates for 15 years. Whereas you can't even guarantee that any given piece of software for Linux will install and run the same way on the next version of the Linux software you're running, let along another distribution.
In any event, none of the four freedoms frees you from costs incurred if the people providing your software change the terms under which they do so. Just because you can maintain it yourself doesn't mean that it is in any way practical or even desirable to do so.
The "he's been arrested" defense was one thing, but the "he's been convicted based on a massive amount of evidence, but he can't be guilty because he works for open source.
There's a certain amount of that here. If Bill Gates were arrested for murder people here would say he did it even if they'd been with him at the time and knew he didn't do it, and Hans Reiser was innocent up until he showed them the body.
There's a difference between open source, free software, and linux, and there's certainly a lot of variation even within those categories. A lot of open source software developers tend to ignore software patents, either for reasons of belief or because they live in jurisdictions where they don't apply. That doesn't mean necessarily that all open source software has to ignore software patents or that existing open source software including linux, isn't in violation of software patents, nor of course does it mean that they shouldn't or are.
Microsoft quite obviously finds some advantages in open source as a concept, even if they don't necessarily agree with the open source movement as a whole or Linux in particular and almost certainly disagree with FSF and RMS quite vehemently(which is perfectly understandable since the FSF and selling closed source software are rather conflicting ideologies).
Microsoft's actions are only contradictory if you view Open Source/Free Software from an ideological perspective as opposed to a practical one. There are a lot of benefits to the open source model, particularly for certain kinds of projects, and more people coding for Windows open source or otherwise is good for Microsoft.
There's also a fairly large wad of cash available for any company which can get the benefits of open source without the costs of ideology(which is what Sun was trying to do) successfully.
It was pretty mediocre code to begin with. Interesting, but not anywhere near as revolutionary in practice as people seem to think. Add to that the fact that Reiser was it's primary maintainer and core developer and it's probably not worth bothering with. Especially since SSD's are likely to change the design of file systems rather dramatically in the next few years.
Plus, slashdot has a lot of karma to make up for all of their "just because they found his car with the seat ripped out and a huge spot of her blood in it doesn't mean he killed her, he's just misunderstood" crap they spouted when he was being tried, so a little criticism of him and his works even things out a bit.
Google apps has some limited value, but it's more a teaming and sharing solution as opposed to "desktop apps in the space".
Not that you're not right, a lot of cloud articles seem to be focused on things like google apps and Application Service Providers and the like. I think it's because the journalists don't really understand what's going on.
The cloud is really very very powerful, and I really believe that it's going to be an important part of enterprise IT, just not in the ways which most journalists like to pretend.
Every software vendor on the planet would love to sell SaaS, and every analyst seems to want to tell them they can do it. However, aside from a few edge cases, no one has really shown how SaaS will benefit the buyer, and so it just doesn't take off. Gartner have been extolling it for years, but it's just not practical.
Scalable server hardware on demand on the other hand, is something that most people can see a real use for.