Microsoft actually lost a golden opportunity when hey treatead open source the way they did. There will always be demand for proprietary and open source, IBM got that right.
Microsoft on the other hand, decided to try to destroy open source and bury it like it did with other companies before (failing to see that this was a grassroot, difuse movement), basically alienating one generation of developers. Not simple developers mind you, but the superstars, the trend-setters, the guys who write tech-blogs, found innovative start-up and become managers and CIOs in big companies later on.
All of them are dead set against Microsoft and no amount of certification is going to change that now.
Yes, China is the one of world's biggest importers of iron ore, copper and crude oil, not to mention rubber and other commodities. So, althought the sentence "few natural resources" is too general (china is one of the biggest exporters of rare minerals, for instance), it certainly is applicable to a lot of core commodities for manufacturing
For some reason, corporations seem to feel the need to compete in areas where they're clearly outmatched no matter what
Just because you can't see it, it doesn't mean that there is no strong rationale for that.
The reason why google keeps investing in projects different than search is simply to increase usage and accessibility of the internet. By increasing the value of the internet (gmail, orkut, latitude), the ways you can access it (android) and by improving the overall user experience (gwt, chrome), they are basically increasing their market and the appeal of the advertisement in their core search product.
Microsoft, on its turn, knows the value of a good monopoly and the leverage it gives in all your other products. They played this game very successfully in the desktop market, and they know that if they let google run free in the search market, it may eventually be powerful enough to crush any future source of revenue for microsoft in the web.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that any of these guys are doing anything simply out of stupidity, hubris or whatever other reason. They are doing it because there is money involved.
This is not a problem specific to data centers, but rather to IT in general.
In the company I work for, the development team was first reduced by half (all contractors were let go), and then further sliced by 20%. Nobody from the business/management side was dismissed, and keep in mind that those people's job is just to tell the engineers what to do. Things got to the point that now we have more people giving orders than people to actually follow them through.
Meanwhile, the deadlines got more aggressive, the plans more grandiose, and micromanagement ever larger. Funny thing is, when the projects are late or incomplete, the IT guys are somehow to blame for it.
Generally, the beta version is a prototype of the product that comes even before the release candidates. People don't usually pay for beta releases, and it's very uncommon for a product to remain so long in beta, especially when it is already stable, widely deployed and used daily by millions of users.
This curious fact generate especulations about the reasons for that, since so far, no good one was given. What if they decided for instance, that when Gmail is out of beta, the service will be no longer be free and a subscription model will be put in place? Or that the current storage will be available only for premium users? Or that the service will be simply discontinued? The beta versioning could easily provide an excuse for any of those or other changes that could directly impact you, especially after you come to rely strongly on the service.
Right on spot. And with the advancements in medicine and new drugs like Viagra, people in their sixties can still enjoy one of the greatest pleasures of life: lie about your sexual performance.
According to the article, they don't have access to evaluation performance reports, so they are using basically hard data (as salary, programming languages used, experience in particular projects, etc) to model the very broad concept of "skill".
The problem is that the evaluation reports are precisely the most likely source to tell a good programmer from a just regular one, which is exactly what they don't take into account. A junior programmer may be excepional, but he will have less experience and a much lower salary than a "senior" programmer that could just market itself very well, and therefore be marked as a commodity
Categorizing programmers and treating them like commodities could be very dangerous if your model is flawed or considers the wrong parameters, especially if it provides a excuse for bad managers not to think or evaluate their employees individually (hey, if the model says it can't be wrong, right?)
Actually, I have a chronicle lack of sleep myself, but I don't sleepy during the days and don't think that it can impair your productivity in the ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....
Jumping around between companies is NOT the way to get someone to notice you.
That's not always the case
If you have an impressive CV or have enough accomplishments that suggest you can be a good manager, you can start in a new company as one. This is specially true if you are moving from a big company to a smaller one, because it's generally believed that if you were exposed to management in a big company, you may be able to replicate that kind of organization in a smaller one (also because small companies usually can't afford someone who is already a manager in a big company).
With that said, most of the managers I know were promoted inside the same company. I guess that happens because it's easier for someone to bet in you as a manager when they already know your work style and what you can do. If the people in your company are not considering you for this role, you have to ask yourself whether the problem is a bad HR (or whoever is playing this role) or if you just didn't show enough to be considered.
I doubt that a company founded by someone so young that is still a virgin could last for long. Wait, what am I talking about, this is slashdot, everybody is still virgin around here...
It was aways clear to me that full disclosure is a better option simply because people react to incentives, and bad publicity creates a strong incentive for vendors to fix and patch their systems.
Nothing like fear of losing sales and yearly bonus to motivate higher management.
From TFA: "Participants then worked on a "learning task" in which one complex sequence of keypresses was followed by an angry face on the screen, another sequence was followed by a neutral face, and a third sequence was followed by no face"
So they had two neutral situations and an emotional one. I sure would pay more attention in a sequence with an angry face than a sequence with neutral faces. So maybe high-testosterone people are more sensible not to angry faces, but to emotional faces in general. I wonder what the results would have been if they had included faces expressing other kinds of emotions as well.
Equally astonishing (well, not really) is that the *AAs haven't realized that tablature is useless without a copy of the song it represents Yes, but know we have much more sophisticated tablatures, such the ones from GuitarPro, where you can play along with the song and hear all the instruments. They are excellent for learning purposes and you don't need the original song.
But there are still lost of sources of revenue: the more an amateur player learns, the more he spends in instruments, teaching classes, dvd lessons, studio time and of course, official songbooks. Well guess what they are doing? Closing down every site that provides free GuitarPro tablature. The biggest one has now this message on the front page:
"Providing some tabs - even made by ear - of copyrighted music is illegal. In order to respect the law, downloads have been limited to the [Composition] and [Competition] files"
Mind you, even if you make your *own* interpretation of the music and you don't copy anything from anywhere you cannot distribute it. I suppose they'll go now for the amateur bands that perform small gigs with their favorite songs...
Really, it is amazing how this people are destroying their own market. If they continue in this path, eventually having fun with amateur music is gonna be such a pain that people will move on to other hobbies, or more likely, do everything illegally.
Actually, that's how open source brings in innovation. Since there is so many choices, there is a kind of natural selection between projects and only the best ones end up succeeding. You just have to check source forge to see how many dead projects exist, and how in the end only the projects which were more robust, documented, organized and tackled the problem more effectively are still alive.
This is not about becoming more civilized, it's about how the IT career is shifting from a creative, motivating path to a bureaucratic one. Of course there is room for creativity, new ideas and concepts are popping up in a daily basis and they are making things better and easier for everyone. Podcasts, ajax, bittorrent, none of that existed some years ago and is part of life of millions today.
The problem is that many (most?) companies nowadays see programmers as commodities, creativity as risk, planning and careful deployment of systems as expenses. They have managers that don't know anything about technology, deadlines impossible to meet, no recognition for merit and talent. The consequence is that systems crash all the time, "workarounds" are the rule and the good professionals are overloaded with work to make up for all that people that work with them that don't have a clue.
With such perspective ahead, it will be no wonder if in a near future the best brains will go to finance, law or any other profession that may offer what IT used to do.
I was having a conversation with a friend exactly about that in this past weekend. New distributions are finally managing to be easy to install and use, offering to the user every software they may need to replace windows'. I installed Ubuntu for the first time about a week ago, it took about half an hour and the installation was flawless. No hard questions, every device properly recognized and configured, wireless network perfectly functioning, sweet. Of course there are lots of room for improvement, but it's never been so close
I've never believed that linux would take over the desktop market, but now that exist distributions that may grandmother can install and mantain by herself and with corporations and governments pushing it more and more, every incentives for non-nerd people to adopt linux are in place.
That's exactly what I was thinking, this site is a prank.
If you feel you need more good-looking friends in your profile, you can create fake profiles yourself with pictures of beautiful but regular people that you can easily find on the net. With a little extra-efford, you can link these people to other real profiles in MySpace and make them look credible.
Besides, your friends tend to look homogeneous, because you usually like people who think like you, enjoy the same activities, have the same tastes, etc. Nobody that knows you for real will ever believe that you are really friends with the people on the website (except if you look like them, which in this case you wouldn't be needing to pay to have them in your profile, anyway).
Sitting in a angle smaller than 90 degrees -> bad
Sitting upright -> better
Sitting in 135 degrees -> healthy
Sitting in 180 degrees -> wow, that feels great!
So basically they've found out that the more you incline backward the less you put preassure on your body. Very impressive. Too bad we can't lay down and work at the same time.
Man, if your sperm is able to get out of there, use your cellphone, set up a date, come back and finally get that ovum fertilized, you sure as hell can name your first kid McGyver.
For what I've observed, high management just doesn't see any underlying issue. I once have prooved to my old manager that it would be much cheaper and less riksy for the company to hire permanent employees and pay them fairly than keep spending tons of money on consulting and outsourcing for long periods of times. He replied that new employees would be seen as an increase in headcount (and consequently in expenses) as opposed to hiring a consulting firm, which is considered an investment. In other words, it would look good in the balance sheet for the stackeholders, even though the company would be losing more money.
As long stakeholders are happy and high management is getting their bonuses, there's no issue at all.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft on the other hand, decided to try to destroy open source and bury it like it did with other companies before (failing to see that this was a grassroot, difuse movement), basically alienating one generation of developers. Not simple developers mind you, but the superstars, the trend-setters, the guys who write tech-blogs, found innovative start-up and become managers and CIOs in big companies later on.
All of them are dead set against Microsoft and no amount of certification is going to change that now.
China has few natural resources?
Yes, China is the one of world's biggest importers of iron ore, copper and crude oil, not to mention rubber and other commodities. So, althought the sentence "few natural resources" is too general (china is one of the biggest exporters of rare minerals, for instance), it certainly is applicable to a lot of core commodities for manufacturing
For some reason, corporations seem to feel the need to compete in areas where they're clearly outmatched no matter what
Just because you can't see it, it doesn't mean that there is no strong rationale for that.
The reason why google keeps investing in projects different than search is simply to increase usage and accessibility of the internet. By increasing the value of the internet (gmail, orkut, latitude), the ways you can access it (android) and by improving the overall user experience (gwt, chrome), they are basically increasing their market and the appeal of the advertisement in their core search product.
Microsoft, on its turn, knows the value of a good monopoly and the leverage it gives in all your other products. They played this game very successfully in the desktop market, and they know that if they let google run free in the search market, it may eventually be powerful enough to crush any future source of revenue for microsoft in the web.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that any of these guys are doing anything simply out of stupidity, hubris or whatever other reason. They are doing it because there is money involved.
In the company I work for, the development team was first reduced by half (all contractors were let go), and then further sliced by 20%. Nobody from the business/management side was dismissed, and keep in mind that those people's job is just to tell the engineers what to do. Things got to the point that now we have more people giving orders than people to actually follow them through.
Meanwhile, the deadlines got more aggressive, the plans more grandiose, and micromanagement ever larger. Funny thing is, when the projects are late or incomplete, the IT guys are somehow to blame for it.
You could say that not now.
Generally, the beta version is a prototype of the product that comes even before the release candidates. People don't usually pay for beta releases, and it's very uncommon for a product to remain so long in beta, especially when it is already stable, widely deployed and used daily by millions of users.
This curious fact generate especulations about the reasons for that, since so far, no good one was given. What if they decided for instance, that when Gmail is out of beta, the service will be no longer be free and a subscription model will be put in place? Or that the current storage will be available only for premium users? Or that the service will be simply discontinued? The beta versioning could easily provide an excuse for any of those or other changes that could directly impact you, especially after you come to rely strongly on the service.
Right on spot. And with the advancements in medicine and new drugs like Viagra, people in their sixties can still enjoy one of the greatest pleasures of life: lie about your sexual performance.
The problem is that the evaluation reports are precisely the most likely source to tell a good programmer from a just regular one, which is exactly what they don't take into account. A junior programmer may be excepional, but he will have less experience and a much lower salary than a "senior" programmer that could just market itself very well, and therefore be marked as a commodity
Categorizing programmers and treating them like commodities could be very dangerous if your model is flawed or considers the wrong parameters, especially if it provides a excuse for bad managers not to think or evaluate their employees individually (hey, if the model says it can't be wrong, right?)
Actually, I have a chronicle lack of sleep myself, but I don't sleepy during the days and don't think that it can impair your productivity in the ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....
That's not always the case
If you have an impressive CV or have enough accomplishments that suggest you can be a good manager, you can start in a new company as one. This is specially true if you are moving from a big company to a smaller one, because it's generally believed that if you were exposed to management in a big company, you may be able to replicate that kind of organization in a smaller one (also because small companies usually can't afford someone who is already a manager in a big company).
With that said, most of the managers I know were promoted inside the same company. I guess that happens because it's easier for someone to bet in you as a manager when they already know your work style and what you can do. If the people in your company are not considering you for this role, you have to ask yourself whether the problem is a bad HR (or whoever is playing this role) or if you just didn't show enough to be considered.
Sorry guys!
It was aways clear to me that full disclosure is a better option simply because people react to incentives, and bad publicity creates a strong incentive for vendors to fix and patch their systems.
Nothing like fear of losing sales and yearly bonus to motivate higher management.
So they had two neutral situations and an emotional one. I sure would pay more attention in a sequence with an angry face than a sequence with neutral faces. So maybe high-testosterone people are more sensible not to angry faces, but to emotional faces in general. I wonder what the results would have been if they had included faces expressing other kinds of emotions as well.
But there are still lost of sources of revenue: the more an amateur player learns, the more he spends in instruments, teaching classes, dvd lessons, studio time and of course, official songbooks. Well guess what they are doing? Closing down every site that provides free GuitarPro tablature. The biggest one has now this message on the front page:
"Providing some tabs - even made by ear - of copyrighted music is illegal. In order to respect the law, downloads have been limited to the [Composition] and [Competition] files"
Mind you, even if you make your *own* interpretation of the music and you don't copy anything from anywhere you cannot distribute it. I suppose they'll go now for the amateur bands that perform small gigs with their favorite songs...
Really, it is amazing how this people are destroying their own market. If they continue in this path, eventually having fun with amateur music is gonna be such a pain that people will move on to other hobbies, or more likely, do everything illegally.
Actually, that's how open source brings in innovation. Since there is so many choices, there is a kind of natural selection between projects and only the best ones end up succeeding. You just have to check source forge to see how many dead projects exist, and how in the end only the projects which were more robust, documented, organized and tackled the problem more effectively are still alive.
The problem is that many (most?) companies nowadays see programmers as commodities, creativity as risk, planning and careful deployment of systems as expenses. They have managers that don't know anything about technology, deadlines impossible to meet, no recognition for merit and talent. The consequence is that systems crash all the time, "workarounds" are the rule and the good professionals are overloaded with work to make up for all that people that work with them that don't have a clue.
With such perspective ahead, it will be no wonder if in a near future the best brains will go to finance, law or any other profession that may offer what IT used to do.
I've never believed that linux would take over the desktop market, but now that exist distributions that may grandmother can install and mantain by herself and with corporations and governments pushing it more and more, every incentives for non-nerd people to adopt linux are in place.
A dolphin? If you can choose, why not a mermaid? Oh yeah, I remember news, news for nerds :-)
The motto is not "news for adults", is "news for nerds"
I knew I didn't have a problem... In your face AA!!
That's exactly what I was thinking, this site is a prank.
If you feel you need more good-looking friends in your profile, you can create fake profiles yourself with pictures of beautiful but regular people that you can easily find on the net. With a little extra-efford, you can link these people to other real profiles in MySpace and make them look credible.
Besides, your friends tend to look homogeneous, because you usually like people who think like you, enjoy the same activities, have the same tastes, etc. Nobody that knows you for real will ever believe that you are really friends with the people on the website (except if you look like them, which in this case you wouldn't be needing to pay to have them in your profile, anyway).
Sitting upright -> better
Sitting in 135 degrees -> healthy
Sitting in 180 degrees -> wow, that feels great!
So basically they've found out that the more you incline backward the less you put preassure on your body. Very impressive. Too bad we can't lay down and work at the same time.
Man, if your sperm is able to get out of there, use your cellphone, set up a date, come back and finally get that ovum fertilized, you sure as hell can name your first kid McGyver.
For what I've observed, high management just doesn't see any underlying issue. I once have prooved to my old manager that it would be much cheaper and less riksy for the company to hire permanent employees and pay them fairly than keep spending tons of money on consulting and outsourcing for long periods of times. He replied that new employees would be seen as an increase in headcount (and consequently in expenses) as opposed to hiring a consulting firm, which is considered an investment. In other words, it would look good in the balance sheet for the stackeholders, even though the company would be losing more money.
As long stakeholders are happy and high management is getting their bonuses, there's no issue at all.
first post! (patent pending)
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."