FWIW, Microsoft wasn't even founded in Washington state but rather in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1975. They only moved to Bellevue, Washington in 1979 and to Redmond in 1986.
Ah, but the devil is in the details. While the percentage of couples using condoms as a primary means of contraception (doesn't mean they use them every time even) who get pregnant is around 15% over the course of a year, once you factor out incorrect and sporadic use that number goes down into the low single digits. And that's just for pregnancy, which is not necessarily equivalent to HIV transmission. More info here.
Yes, there are STDs that are much easier to catch out there. In fact as STDs go, HIV is perhaps surprisingly one of the least transmissible.
If you get syphilis, gonorrhea or chlamydia, you'll take some fairly ordinary (probably cheap generic) antibiotics, either one shot in the ass or some pills to take over maybe up to 10 days. Syphilis can kill you over the course of several years, but is easily cured with antibiotics. For the latter two, without treatment you won't even die--you'll just be in a world of suffering and possibly end up sterile. With herpes, you probably won't take anything at all since treatment is limited and the disease can't be cured. Fortunately, it's not fatal though.
However, if you get HIV you'll be taking expensive, side effect causing anti-viral drugs for the rest of your life. If you're unlucky, you'll still die from AIDS even if you're on the drug cocktails because they don't always work for everybody all the time.
47% of all people diagnosed or 66% of white people diagnosed still does not make it a gay disease. And that's only the numbers for the United States. Once you include the rest of the world, it's overwhelmingly contracted by straight people living in developing countries.
The reason they're not sold outside of agreements is because the carriers refuse to charge phone and service costs separately. If you buy your own phone, you pay exactly the same monthly fee as somebody who got a "free" phone. So long as that's the case, it makes sense for customers to get the "free" phone and be locked into a 1 or 2 year contract.
Agreed. The one thing this merger has shown is that Microsoft executive leadership is more obsessed with beating Google than delivering value to shareholders or quality products to customers.
Wait, so how does the second graph on this page exactly indicate how "miserable" the server market is? Over the past 10 years, IIS and Apache have both eaten away the market share of competitors. When you look at server operating systems, the trend towards Windows and Linux over the Sun and IBM server OSs of the past is even more clear.
I hate to break it to you, but this is by and large how the software business works. Daring, a small startup brings a risky, new idea to market. If it's successful, it most likely finds a niche market and starts to get the attention of others in the industry. A large company with money then buys it, then grows it (or tries to) into a product that's more widely sold to businesses and individuals around the world.
Large companies are good at taking a small successful product and growing it into something huge. They're not very good at thinking up the next great idea and getting it started by selling it as a small product to a niche audience. Small companies are better at coming up with those ideas, getting that idea into a product and out into the marketplace. However, they're not usually as good at growing that into a huge business. There are of course many exceptions (Google and Microsoft come to mind), but mostly the selling of small companies to large ones enables this two tier system to work.
The bottom line is that the TSA's changes are all about making the public feel like the government is doing something to make air travel safer. It's all about the politics of perceptions and not at all about actually making travel safer. Unfortunately, as the comments on the blog demonstrate, a lot of people have already seen through their bullshit, which means they've done little to even improve the perception of safety.
Steven Sinofsky ran Office for many years, where unlike Windows releases came out on schedule over and over again. Back in the 80s sometime after the creation of the Office suite, the release schedules for its constituent applications were unified. This caused a lot of pain at the time, but lead to Office having better processes and discipline for shipping products on time. Windows never underwent a similar reform and as it grew in size, the old processes that worked for a small team began to buckle under the weight of an increasingly complex operating system. Inside Microsoft, Office is known for being regimented and shipping things on time, while Windows has historically been known for its "cowboy culture" of overpromised features, too many interdependencies and teams doing whatever they want wrt their own features.
Moving Sinofsky from Office over to Windows was meant to change the Windows culture to ship the next version as a high quality product on time. Ballmer has even gone on record stating that Microsoft can never allow a development boondoggle like Vista (5 years between releases due to massive delays) to happen again.
Windows 7 is just a code name. I'm sure marketing will come up with a public name once it's closer to release.
However, even as code names go, "7" is a departure from "Longhorn", "Whistler", "Cairo" and others. Word on the street is that it's an effect of Sinofsky taking over leadership of the Windows org after leaving Office (where numbers have always been used for product code names).
Because simply screaming for people to control themselves has worked so well in the past. Look, it's been shown time and time again that telling people to knock it off wrt sex just doesn't work. You've got to educate people to be safe, give them the motivation to want to be safe (i.e, making them aware of the consequences of becoming HIV+) and give them the tools to protect themselves (i.e., make condoms available and easy to obtain).
However, once somebody slips through the cracks and becomes HIV+, you can't simply stand back, say "told you so" and let them die. Besides the ethical implications, letting people die from AIDS is a recipe for economic disaster. Just take a look at any African country with a high HIV/AIDS rate. The disease hits the sexually active the hardest--those between about 16 and 45. That also happens to be the age group that does pretty much all the labor. Those people dying leaves a bunch of young orphans and elderly behind who simply can't do the work to keep those societies functioning properly.
There are nearly a million HIV positive people in the United States today, most of whom are on a regimen of drugs that costs tens of thousands of dollars per year. Even with lengthened life spans from the drugs, AIDS is still a leading cause of death in young people today (especially African-Americans where it's recently been #1 for young men and women).
If you're spreading stacks of source code printouts on a large conference table, the code base isn't really all that large. Then again different people here seem to have different ideas of what large constitutes.
Yup, do you have any idea how sheerly massive the Windows or Office code bases are? They're not the types of things you just sit down to understand over one day or one week or really even one year.
When dealing with such a large code base, you learn quickly that randomly browsing source code is not going to help you figure things out. Sometimes there's architectural documentation, but usually you're figuring it out as you go. The best way is to get your hands dirty in the code by fixing bugs or looking at what somebody else more experienced changed while fixing something else small. Eventually, your only hope is to understand enough about the right subset of the code base to get your work done.
So are you still using punchcards? a monochrome 80x25 fixed font text only display? Windows 1? twm?
Like everything else in software, progress marches forward as people figure out what works best and as hardware improvements make new software techniques possible.
I have no comment on IE or Windows explorer, but the Office 2007 UI was not changed just for the sake of change. It was changed because feature rich applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint had already passed the practical limits of a menu/toolbar and dialog based UI. Users had to dig through long, often confusing menus to find an entry point to an often complicated dialog. Many users were faced with an overload of options and simply gave up searching. A main goal of the Office UI overhaul was to improve discoverability (resulting in the ribbon) and to make it easier to format documents nicely (resulting in galleries). This presentation by Jensen Harris pretty much sums up the reasoning behind the UI change.
And the reason it seems like Office, Messenger and WMP are made by completely different software vendors is because basically they are. Microsoft does not have some monolithic development staff that rotates around from project to project ensuring consistency. It's a very large company with many different groups of people working on specific products.
Flat tax on savings and investments (box 3)
There is a flat tax on the total value of the savings and investments of 1.2 % per year. It is nominally part of the income tax, as a 30 % tax on a fixed assumed yield of 4 % of the value of the assets. EUR 20,014 (higher for 65+ with a low income) of the value of the assets is exempted.
The amount of money invested in approved "green" investments (up to EUR 53,421) aren't taxed in this manner, in fact, a tax rebate per year of 1.3 % of the value is applied for these investments. The rebate only counts towards box III.
I wouldn't mind seeing something like this in US. Real wealth comes from assets not income.
Sites like monster and dice really aren't the best places to look for entry level positions anyways. At least when it comes to larger tech companies, most of the entry level positions are filled through direct college recruiting or other programs that are not targeted towards specific open positions. Basically, they're just looking for smart people with some solid credentials for a general position like "software development engineer". Once you make the first cut (which may involve just reading your resume or a phone/on campus interview), they then will send you to interview for something more specific. I know this is definitely the way Microsoft and Google both work. It doesn't work that way for smaller employers, but it always seemed to me that large companies tend to have more entry level positions available anyways since they can afford to wait for you to ramp up.
All of this is very cyclical. From the dot com bust around 2000 things went down fast. I graduated from college with a bachelor's in CS in 2002 from Berkeley with good grades and several years of part time development experience, but I could hardly even land an interview. I even had an interview cancelled on me by a company that had insituted a hiring freeze after annoucing campus interview. In the end I had two interviews (both at national laboratories) which lead nowhere. So I just went off to grad school instead.
Somewhere around 2003 things began to turn around. By the time I left grad school in 2005, the job market was much, much better. I applied to two companies, got offers from both and pretty much stopped my job search there when I accepted one.
With talk of a recession coming, it seems likely that things will slow down again, although I hope for the sake of everybody in this industry that it won't be like 2002 all over again.
The ideal number of employees per office at Microsoft seems to be one. People almost always share only because there's a space crunch due to head count growth. Often new buildings get built and teams move, moving the average back towards 1:1 constantly.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, Microsoft wasn't even founded in Washington state but rather in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1975. They only moved to Bellevue, Washington in 1979 and to Redmond in 1986.
Ah, but the devil is in the details. While the percentage of couples using condoms as a primary means of contraception (doesn't mean they use them every time even) who get pregnant is around 15% over the course of a year, once you factor out incorrect and sporadic use that number goes down into the low single digits. And that's just for pregnancy, which is not necessarily equivalent to HIV transmission. More info here.
Yes, there are STDs that are much easier to catch out there. In fact as STDs go, HIV is perhaps surprisingly one of the least transmissible.
If you get syphilis, gonorrhea or chlamydia, you'll take some fairly ordinary (probably cheap generic) antibiotics, either one shot in the ass or some pills to take over maybe up to 10 days. Syphilis can kill you over the course of several years, but is easily cured with antibiotics. For the latter two, without treatment you won't even die--you'll just be in a world of suffering and possibly end up sterile. With herpes, you probably won't take anything at all since treatment is limited and the disease can't be cured. Fortunately, it's not fatal though.
However, if you get HIV you'll be taking expensive, side effect causing anti-viral drugs for the rest of your life. If you're unlucky, you'll still die from AIDS even if you're on the drug cocktails because they don't always work for everybody all the time.
47% of all people diagnosed or 66% of white people diagnosed still does not make it a gay disease. And that's only the numbers for the United States. Once you include the rest of the world, it's overwhelmingly contracted by straight people living in developing countries.
The reason they're not sold outside of agreements is because the carriers refuse to charge phone and service costs separately. If you buy your own phone, you pay exactly the same monthly fee as somebody who got a "free" phone. So long as that's the case, it makes sense for customers to get the "free" phone and be locked into a 1 or 2 year contract.
Agreed. The one thing this merger has shown is that Microsoft executive leadership is more obsessed with beating Google than delivering value to shareholders or quality products to customers.
Wait, so how does the second graph on this page exactly indicate how "miserable" the server market is? Over the past 10 years, IIS and Apache have both eaten away the market share of competitors. When you look at server operating systems, the trend towards Windows and Linux over the Sun and IBM server OSs of the past is even more clear.
I hate to break it to you, but this is by and large how the software business works. Daring, a small startup brings a risky, new idea to market. If it's successful, it most likely finds a niche market and starts to get the attention of others in the industry. A large company with money then buys it, then grows it (or tries to) into a product that's more widely sold to businesses and individuals around the world.
Large companies are good at taking a small successful product and growing it into something huge. They're not very good at thinking up the next great idea and getting it started by selling it as a small product to a niche audience. Small companies are better at coming up with those ideas, getting that idea into a product and out into the marketplace. However, they're not usually as good at growing that into a huge business. There are of course many exceptions (Google and Microsoft come to mind), but mostly the selling of small companies to large ones enables this two tier system to work.
The bottom line is that the TSA's changes are all about making the public feel like the government is doing something to make air travel safer. It's all about the politics of perceptions and not at all about actually making travel safer. Unfortunately, as the comments on the blog demonstrate, a lot of people have already seen through their bullshit, which means they've done little to even improve the perception of safety.
Steven Sinofsky ran Office for many years, where unlike Windows releases came out on schedule over and over again. Back in the 80s sometime after the creation of the Office suite, the release schedules for its constituent applications were unified. This caused a lot of pain at the time, but lead to Office having better processes and discipline for shipping products on time. Windows never underwent a similar reform and as it grew in size, the old processes that worked for a small team began to buckle under the weight of an increasingly complex operating system. Inside Microsoft, Office is known for being regimented and shipping things on time, while Windows has historically been known for its "cowboy culture" of overpromised features, too many interdependencies and teams doing whatever they want wrt their own features. Moving Sinofsky from Office over to Windows was meant to change the Windows culture to ship the next version as a high quality product on time. Ballmer has even gone on record stating that Microsoft can never allow a development boondoggle like Vista (5 years between releases due to massive delays) to happen again.
I believe there are even third party tools out there that will write the necessary RibbonX for you to get the customizations.
Windows 7 is just a code name. I'm sure marketing will come up with a public name once it's closer to release.
However, even as code names go, "7" is a departure from "Longhorn", "Whistler", "Cairo" and others. Word on the street is that it's an effect of Sinofsky taking over leadership of the Windows org after leaving Office (where numbers have always been used for product code names).
Because simply screaming for people to control themselves has worked so well in the past. Look, it's been shown time and time again that telling people to knock it off wrt sex just doesn't work. You've got to educate people to be safe, give them the motivation to want to be safe (i.e, making them aware of the consequences of becoming HIV+) and give them the tools to protect themselves (i.e., make condoms available and easy to obtain).
However, once somebody slips through the cracks and becomes HIV+, you can't simply stand back, say "told you so" and let them die. Besides the ethical implications, letting people die from AIDS is a recipe for economic disaster. Just take a look at any African country with a high HIV/AIDS rate. The disease hits the sexually active the hardest--those between about 16 and 45. That also happens to be the age group that does pretty much all the labor. Those people dying leaves a bunch of young orphans and elderly behind who simply can't do the work to keep those societies functioning properly.
There are nearly a million HIV positive people in the United States today, most of whom are on a regimen of drugs that costs tens of thousands of dollars per year. Even with lengthened life spans from the drugs, AIDS is still a leading cause of death in young people today (especially African-Americans where it's recently been #1 for young men and women).
It's estimated that worldwide there are about 34 million people living with HIV. In the US, it's nearly a million with about a third of those people having AIDS symptoms. Only about 40k new cases are diagnosed each year, but because many fewer people are dying (because they're on these drugs) the number of people living with HIV continues to increase. A few years ago, AIDS was even the leading cause of death for young African American men and high up on the list for most other groups of young people.
The only problem is that the poster is dealing with a *large* code base. I'm not sure your method scales well to millions of lines of code.
If you're spreading stacks of source code printouts on a large conference table, the code base isn't really all that large. Then again different people here seem to have different ideas of what large constitutes.
Yup, do you have any idea how sheerly massive the Windows or Office code bases are? They're not the types of things you just sit down to understand over one day or one week or really even one year.
When dealing with such a large code base, you learn quickly that randomly browsing source code is not going to help you figure things out. Sometimes there's architectural documentation, but usually you're figuring it out as you go. The best way is to get your hands dirty in the code by fixing bugs or looking at what somebody else more experienced changed while fixing something else small. Eventually, your only hope is to understand enough about the right subset of the code base to get your work done.
Already been tried and killed nearly 5 years ago.
So are you still using punchcards? a monochrome 80x25 fixed font text only display? Windows 1? twm? Like everything else in software, progress marches forward as people figure out what works best and as hardware improvements make new software techniques possible.
I have no comment on IE or Windows explorer, but the Office 2007 UI was not changed just for the sake of change. It was changed because feature rich applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint had already passed the practical limits of a menu/toolbar and dialog based UI. Users had to dig through long, often confusing menus to find an entry point to an often complicated dialog. Many users were faced with an overload of options and simply gave up searching. A main goal of the Office UI overhaul was to improve discoverability (resulting in the ribbon) and to make it easier to format documents nicely (resulting in galleries). This presentation by Jensen Harris pretty much sums up the reasoning behind the UI change.
And the reason it seems like Office, Messenger and WMP are made by completely different software vendors is because basically they are. Microsoft does not have some monolithic development staff that rotates around from project to project ensuring consistency. It's a very large company with many different groups of people working on specific products.
I wouldn't mind seeing something like this in US. Real wealth comes from assets not income.
Sites like monster and dice really aren't the best places to look for entry level positions anyways. At least when it comes to larger tech companies, most of the entry level positions are filled through direct college recruiting or other programs that are not targeted towards specific open positions. Basically, they're just looking for smart people with some solid credentials for a general position like "software development engineer". Once you make the first cut (which may involve just reading your resume or a phone/on campus interview), they then will send you to interview for something more specific. I know this is definitely the way Microsoft and Google both work. It doesn't work that way for smaller employers, but it always seemed to me that large companies tend to have more entry level positions available anyways since they can afford to wait for you to ramp up.
All of this is very cyclical. From the dot com bust around 2000 things went down fast. I graduated from college with a bachelor's in CS in 2002 from Berkeley with good grades and several years of part time development experience, but I could hardly even land an interview. I even had an interview cancelled on me by a company that had insituted a hiring freeze after annoucing campus interview. In the end I had two interviews (both at national laboratories) which lead nowhere. So I just went off to grad school instead.
Somewhere around 2003 things began to turn around. By the time I left grad school in 2005, the job market was much, much better. I applied to two companies, got offers from both and pretty much stopped my job search there when I accepted one.
With talk of a recession coming, it seems likely that things will slow down again, although I hope for the sake of everybody in this industry that it won't be like 2002 all over again.
The ideal number of employees per office at Microsoft seems to be one. People almost always share only because there's a space crunch due to head count growth. Often new buildings get built and teams move, moving the average back towards 1:1 constantly.