Whenever you see an argument made by someone, it's often best to look behind the motivation.
Very few people I know who like to find convenient articles regarding global warming are people with small, efficient cars who also use the trains quite a lot. Basically, they lap up the "global warming is a myth" because they don't want to face the question that their unnecessary SUV may be causing serious damage to the planet.
For goodness sakes people, get out of your cars. If we find that we got global warming wrong, what's the result? Oh, you probably got a bit healthier and maybe met some interesting people on the bus.
Whilst people have built tools and libraries to read/write PDF, Acrobat is still the de facto gui editor.
Personally, I always prefer pdf over word. If someone's got Word on their website I spot, I offer to transfer it and point out the benefits (no font issues, cross-platform etc).
A lot of "outsourced" software is really hacked like mad. Often, someone will want a product, and a software company will have something sort of close, but the fundamental problem can often be the data model.
So, instead of rewriting to reflect the bus. requirements, they shoehorn the data into the old system. I've seen this shit frequently.
Another problem I've seen is that components/packages etc are only any good if they are truly that. Once you ask a company to modify the code for you, it's really no longer a package. You lose all the benefits of changes being reflected in all versions.
Re:Another threat to MS
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Linux, Inc.
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· Score: 1
The problem with the Oracle/Java idea is that the idea was there before the comms/flexible backend tools were.
We now have a huge percentage of businesses on DSL connections, hosting is cheap as heck now, and users are more familiar with the internet.
In fact, there are already "thin client" services. There's a CRM system (salesforce.com) where you pay for the service - no software. It means that anywhere your sales force/management are, they can get information on clients. They can even travel without a PC and just find an internet cafe.
Re:Another threat to MS
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Linux, Inc.
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· Score: 1
The biggest threat is probably a combination of thin clients with web applications. That thin client will probably be Linux based with not much inside it, but the fact that it's Linux is largely irrelevant.
What's important is the idea that you have a machine with a browser and you just do everything via managed hosting.
The business model suits millions of people worldwide who have simple needs - word processing, accounts, email, web, photo scanning - who don't want to install anything, they just want to switch on and go. You'll just have a browser with flash that will do the lot.
When I see Steve Ballmer say "It's getting to be much more like the old world instead of the new world for us, and we know how to compete with that kind of phenomenon,", I just hope that he really doesn't get it.
This isn't about "another competitor", it's about a whole new model. It isn't like someone creating a rival to MS Word that Microsoft can beat in a competitive market, because the code is out there. The idea of OSS is out there now and it can't get put away. Even if the big Linux distributors die (unlikely), someone else will come along and try and roll with it again. It's an ongoing fight for Microsoft.
Re:The Threat of Linux
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Linux, Inc.
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· Score: 1
At 20%, almost everyone will want to deal with it, because it's too much of the market to ignore.
It's like if Firefox reaches 20% - sites with "We only support IE" will be excluding too much of their market to ignore. They will have to change.
At 20%, software manufacturers are likely to support it, as well as hardware and peripheral manufacturers.
The figures are hard to determine. Let's say I go and download Debian, take a dozen copies and install them on my servers and spread a few around to people who do likewise.
Now, who knows how many servers it is installed on?
It could that before we know it, it's taken over and happened almost without anyone noticing.
Is Longhorn 5 years away? I'm not sure how much it matters anyway because millions of people are running an OS they are happy with, and by the time XP gets no more support, Linux will be strong enough. Products like MS Office have plateaued for most users - they were pretty happy with Office 97/2000.
Do you want to program, or don't you? Your earlier post said about trying to learn it for 5 years, and here you are saying its boring and what's the point - is this more a problem of motivation or application? Incidentally, if you can program BASIC, you can program. And C appears to me to be less and less important in the commercial sector - more cost effective to have people cranking out stuff like Java or C#.
Actually, it wasn't my friends, and maybe friends is too loose a term, more contacts.
Working for free is a form of advertising. I've done it myself in order to gain reputation/custom. It's a pure financial decision. You want people to pick you instead of someone else in the marketplace? Well, you could spend a gazillion on ads, or much less on something that gets given away and distributed to lots of people, all of which has your company name on.
There was recently a french guy did his CV as a flash animation. Probably took much more time than doing it as a word document, but he got hundreds of thousands of hits and about 50 job offers - because it cut through the chaff.
What language are you starting out in? Because I was coding in Basic at the age of 14, and COBOL when I was 17. Nothing hip and trendy, but get your fundamentals right (I'd say start with something like Java or PHP now).
I know people who are very successful programmers, and not graduates. They are smart, though. They get the job done. They hustled to find bits of work to get a name. Some people did stuff for free - built websites for businesses owned by friends and got a reputation from that.
Once you've done it long enough, no-one gives a shit that you're a graduate or not. Also, if you are having trouble learning, get yourself on a course. It might cost you a few thousand, but it's a lot cheaper than 3 years without an income as a student.
I'd say that school after age 13 (is that like 6th grade?) was a total waste of time for me. My math was one of the only things that really advanced, and I got an interest in history.
I did quite average at school, but excelled at college when I did computer science (interesting and taxing). I've also done very well at work.
What I think that schools don't cover well is problem solving and goal based learning. A lot of people can't just learn stuff, because it lacks a point to them, where other people just soak up knowledge. However, they are independent learners who will take the attitude of "I have this problem to solve, where do I go to find out the solution" . There are benefits of this - those people are often really useful to have around, and have diverse knowledge and can apply what they've learnt before.
I never did a degree, but did a diploma in CS. Left school at 18, not 21. I see people going off to "uni" here in the UK, and mostly, I just ask why? To be honest, a lot of what I learnt on my 2 year diploma doesn't do much for me now. The organisation of platters on a HDD is just irrelevant nowadays.
Run up a ton of debt and end up in the job market 3 years behind everyone else in experience because you were tricked on how important it was to your future.
OK, maybe that's overbaking my case, but a lot of people seem to do it for little good reason. If you are fanatical about learning a particular subject, go study it. If it's pretty important to your career (eg Medicine, Law, Chemistry), go study it. For "getting on better in my career", I've rarely seen a benefit.
I know programmers with and without degrees, and I doubt the average earnings are much different. Certainly not enough of a difference to cover £30,000 of college debt.
If I know a school programmer, my advice would be to learn programming early (like at school), practise like crazy and write a ton of OSS and shareware. Market yourself through your creations and get a junior programmer job that way.
Most people have to work. The point that I would make is this...
You have to work to earn. If you do what you enjoy/feel least pain doing, then you'll do better at it.
The lesson should be taught to people who go chasing the next rainbow (currently plumbing in the UK). If you enjoy it, you'll get good at it, and more likely earn more, or at least feel more satisfied.
The problem most bands have is that they're average. And not only that, there are thousands and thousands of average bands, all fighting to get to the top. When you have that situation, market forces dictate that the terms are often going to be poor.
Personally, I don't like any of the acts that you named but I see that people like Sarah McLachlan and Barenaked Ladies aren't average at what they do.
It depends, actually. If you use force to restrain a criminal (eg citizen's arrest) then that's fine. It's "excessive force" (eg. beating the crap out of them just as a form of vengeance) thats unacceptable. In the Tony Martin case, he shot and killed someone running away.
Actually, I don't agree that they are in it for the money. Some MPs actually end up quite seriously out of pocket being in politics. It's more the power they are interested in IMO (and I honestly think that many of them do it with good intentions).
If the current version of the Republicans (ignorant and proud of it, arrogant, fiscally irresponsible, dishonourable) go for a war in Iran, and still get in to the White House again in 4 years, the USA will be truly in unstoppable terminal decline.
How did your country end up with Dubya? I mean, seriously. How? Even in his own party you've got people like Dick Cheney. I may not agree with his policies, but at least he seems bright and he's run successful companies.
I'm not sure about the "crims have more rights than victims". The papers love to find the odd case where something happened and twist it to say that (eg Tony Martin).
I don't really understand our relationship with either the USA or the EU, though. We seem to get nothing in return for backing the USA - AFAIK the contracts for rebuilding in Iraq were open to everyone. We also are half-heartedly in the EU, and as a result seem to have no influence on things like the CAP. We should either ally fully with the USA and quit the EU, or fully sign up to the EU and cut much of our links with the USA.
Personally, I'm voting for anyone who'll try and reform the voting system so that we can get more diverse politics than two sets of authoritarian dinosaurs staffed by lawyers and bureaucrats.
Fact: I don't buy any hardware for my PC before checking Linux compatibility. OK, if there isn't one that comes up good, I'll settle for any.
As well as that, I'm switching as many applications to OSS to run on it. At some time, I may want to switch to Linux, and I want to be able to do it on a whim.
I don't even want to see EPIII. It's the first time ever that I want someone to give me spoilers, so I'm not tempted to spend money on any more of these films.
And I believe the proper response to pointing out an error in your system is "Thank You."
My one cavaet on this would be "tell me privately first please". I think it's good manners to tell a software company (of any size) about a fault first, and give them a reasonable chance to resolve it. Putting it out in the wild at the same time just poses a risk to users. Sometimes I think that companies' hands have to be forced, though.
You can only introduce a standard at the same time as making a significant contribution to what people get.
MP3 still rules music because it's good enough and small enough. Other formats may be better/smaller, but they aren't better/smaller enough to warrant people wanting to swap.
It's like hi-fi separates vs all-in-ones. all-in-ones mean that generally you can expand better and if one part fails, or you want an upgrade, you can.
The real future isn't convergence, it's interoperability. Being able to have your PVR have a web server which means that you can command it to record a program, either from a web browser at work, or from a device communicating with it via XML.
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Very few people I know who like to find convenient articles regarding global warming are people with small, efficient cars who also use the trains quite a lot. Basically, they lap up the "global warming is a myth" because they don't want to face the question that their unnecessary SUV may be causing serious damage to the planet.
For goodness sakes people, get out of your cars. If we find that we got global warming wrong, what's the result? Oh, you probably got a bit healthier and maybe met some interesting people on the bus.
Whilst people have built tools and libraries to read/write PDF, Acrobat is still the de facto gui editor.
Personally, I always prefer pdf over word. If someone's got Word on their website I spot, I offer to transfer it and point out the benefits (no font issues, cross-platform etc).
So, instead of rewriting to reflect the bus. requirements, they shoehorn the data into the old system. I've seen this shit frequently.
Another problem I've seen is that components/packages etc are only any good if they are truly that. Once you ask a company to modify the code for you, it's really no longer a package. You lose all the benefits of changes being reflected in all versions.
We now have a huge percentage of businesses on DSL connections, hosting is cheap as heck now, and users are more familiar with the internet.
In fact, there are already "thin client" services. There's a CRM system (salesforce.com) where you pay for the service - no software. It means that anywhere your sales force/management are, they can get information on clients. They can even travel without a PC and just find an internet cafe.
What's important is the idea that you have a machine with a browser and you just do everything via managed hosting.
The business model suits millions of people worldwide who have simple needs - word processing, accounts, email, web, photo scanning - who don't want to install anything, they just want to switch on and go. You'll just have a browser with flash that will do the lot.
This isn't about "another competitor", it's about a whole new model. It isn't like someone creating a rival to MS Word that Microsoft can beat in a competitive market, because the code is out there. The idea of OSS is out there now and it can't get put away. Even if the big Linux distributors die (unlikely), someone else will come along and try and roll with it again. It's an ongoing fight for Microsoft.
It's like if Firefox reaches 20% - sites with "We only support IE" will be excluding too much of their market to ignore. They will have to change.
At 20%, software manufacturers are likely to support it, as well as hardware and peripheral manufacturers.
Now, who knows how many servers it is installed on?
It could that before we know it, it's taken over and happened almost without anyone noticing.
Is Longhorn 5 years away? I'm not sure how much it matters anyway because millions of people are running an OS they are happy with, and by the time XP gets no more support, Linux will be strong enough. Products like MS Office have plateaued for most users - they were pretty happy with Office 97/2000.
Actually, it wasn't my friends, and maybe friends is too loose a term, more contacts.
Working for free is a form of advertising. I've done it myself in order to gain reputation/custom. It's a pure financial decision. You want people to pick you instead of someone else in the marketplace? Well, you could spend a gazillion on ads, or much less on something that gets given away and distributed to lots of people, all of which has your company name on.
There was recently a french guy did his CV as a flash animation. Probably took much more time than doing it as a word document, but he got hundreds of thousands of hits and about 50 job offers - because it cut through the chaff.
I know people who are very successful programmers, and not graduates. They are smart, though. They get the job done. They hustled to find bits of work to get a name. Some people did stuff for free - built websites for businesses owned by friends and got a reputation from that.
Once you've done it long enough, no-one gives a shit that you're a graduate or not. Also, if you are having trouble learning, get yourself on a course. It might cost you a few thousand, but it's a lot cheaper than 3 years without an income as a student.
I did quite average at school, but excelled at college when I did computer science (interesting and taxing). I've also done very well at work.
What I think that schools don't cover well is problem solving and goal based learning. A lot of people can't just learn stuff, because it lacks a point to them, where other people just soak up knowledge. However, they are independent learners who will take the attitude of "I have this problem to solve, where do I go to find out the solution" . There are benefits of this - those people are often really useful to have around, and have diverse knowledge and can apply what they've learnt before.
Run up a ton of debt and end up in the job market 3 years behind everyone else in experience because you were tricked on how important it was to your future.
OK, maybe that's overbaking my case, but a lot of people seem to do it for little good reason. If you are fanatical about learning a particular subject, go study it. If it's pretty important to your career (eg Medicine, Law, Chemistry), go study it. For "getting on better in my career", I've rarely seen a benefit.
I know programmers with and without degrees, and I doubt the average earnings are much different. Certainly not enough of a difference to cover £30,000 of college debt.
If I know a school programmer, my advice would be to learn programming early (like at school), practise like crazy and write a ton of OSS and shareware. Market yourself through your creations and get a junior programmer job that way.
You have to work to earn. If you do what you enjoy/feel least pain doing, then you'll do better at it.
The lesson should be taught to people who go chasing the next rainbow (currently plumbing in the UK). If you enjoy it, you'll get good at it, and more likely earn more, or at least feel more satisfied.
Personally, I don't like any of the acts that you named but I see that people like Sarah McLachlan and Barenaked Ladies aren't average at what they do.
Actually, I don't agree that they are in it for the money. Some MPs actually end up quite seriously out of pocket being in politics. It's more the power they are interested in IMO (and I honestly think that many of them do it with good intentions).
How did your country end up with Dubya? I mean, seriously. How? Even in his own party you've got people like Dick Cheney. I may not agree with his policies, but at least he seems bright and he's run successful companies.
I don't really understand our relationship with either the USA or the EU, though. We seem to get nothing in return for backing the USA - AFAIK the contracts for rebuilding in Iraq were open to everyone. We also are half-heartedly in the EU, and as a result seem to have no influence on things like the CAP. We should either ally fully with the USA and quit the EU, or fully sign up to the EU and cut much of our links with the USA.
Personally, I'm voting for anyone who'll try and reform the voting system so that we can get more diverse politics than two sets of authoritarian dinosaurs staffed by lawyers and bureaucrats.
The majors have 1 role left now - marketing. That's it. Anyone can record a single with software that costs very little.
It might just be that iTunes might get it.
As well as that, I'm switching as many applications to OSS to run on it. At some time, I may want to switch to Linux, and I want to be able to do it on a whim.
I don't even want to see EPIII. It's the first time ever that I want someone to give me spoilers, so I'm not tempted to spend money on any more of these films.
The big thing is that companies have different ways to get paid, and take different decisions based on those attitudes.
My one cavaet on this would be "tell me privately first please". I think it's good manners to tell a software company (of any size) about a fault first, and give them a reasonable chance to resolve it. Putting it out in the wild at the same time just poses a risk to users. Sometimes I think that companies' hands have to be forced, though.
MP3 still rules music because it's good enough and small enough. Other formats may be better/smaller, but they aren't better/smaller enough to warrant people wanting to swap.
The real future isn't convergence, it's interoperability. Being able to have your PVR have a web server which means that you can command it to record a program, either from a web browser at work, or from a device communicating with it via XML.