At an LA college, he'll compete for the geek girls with other guys who like geek girls.
At an engineering college, he'll compete for the geek girls with everyone with all the guys who realize that girls exist. Granted, that won't be 100% of the guys there, but it'll be more than the competition at the LA college.:)
I'm at a liberal arts school and I spend far more time in these ridiculous liberal arts class than I do in my CS classes.
The flipside of that is, I went to more of a respected engineering-ish school and I spent more time in physics/chemistry/engineering classes than in my CS classes. For the kind of work I do, honestly, more of the liberal arts would have been more useful. Being able to write and express your ideas clearly is of immense importance to anyone with a CS degree who wants a job that can't/won't be outsourced.
Apple makes computers. Microsoft doesn't. World of difference.
In other words, all Microsoft has to do is open a hardware division of PCs they build that run Windows and they instantly have the moral high ground on more or less everything?
I doubt anyone would agree with that, but if that's not what you're saying, then I can't understand how what you are saying would make any sense.
The only problem is, even a post that unintentionally gets half the facts wrong can be a good/constructive one if it generates good replies/discussion in its wake.
If something is factually incorrect and you know it but otherwise is a good post, i.e. doesn't seem to be a troll or flamebait, I would say the correct moderation action is 'reply' and not 'mod down'.
#3 seems like a case for using another OS, as there's nothing written in the past 9+ years that would have me using Windows as a primary OS. Games, maybe, but those can be run in a VM, and are still not a reason to run anything but the game on Windows.
Ultimately, the nature of my work is such that I'll have at least one Windows machine for the foreseeable future.
Games are mostly it in the 9+ years category, excepting odd business applications that I'm replacing, etc. They could be run in a VM, but generally clicking once that, yes, it's okay to run Diablo I find to be less hassle than firing up a VM.
From my recent job hunting recruiters can hurt more often than help with landing a position. A placement fee of 10-15% yearly salary makes managers reluctant to take any risk. They worry about making a decision that will result in a 3 or 6 month hire regardless of the payoff. Better safe than sorry.
I've been seeing a lot more companies in the last few years start people off with contract-to-hire, or just hire consultants to do a smaller job and then make offers to the few they like. It's possible this is related.
Disclaimer: I have not interviewed at Google, and what I've heard may not be true in a general sense.
(Google recognizes talent, is willing to pay for it, and is enormously successful as a result..)
A few friends of mine who interviewed at Google said that they actually would have to take a small pay cut (~10%) from their current jobs to work for Google. They seemed to have the opinion coming out of the interview/offer process that Google knew they didn't have to pay the best because good people would want to work for them anyway just because of who they were. (And at least one of those friends did.)
Granted, even if that's all (and still) completely true, Google's benefits are a lot better than most of the competition, so even with a lower salary they might well still have a better total compensation package.
It's not the location, the culture, the color of the people being outsourced to, it's the nature of outsourcing.
This is dead on.
I've worked a few places where they managed to make outsourcing work for them, and a damn lot that tried it and got catastrophic failure.
At a bare minimum, to outsource a project to someone on another continent, you absolutely must be able to write a design that is so exact and so good that the offshore team can realistically work 8 hours every day without having to ask you, or anyone in the home office, any questions. If you have a good offshore team, you can assume that they won't need to be asking questions about the base technology, but they will need to ask questions about the nature of the business, its rules, and what the project is trying to accomplish. (This is true of an on-site team as well, but getting these kinds of answers on-site is much, much faster and easier.)
Very, very few people are in a position to create a design like that for non-trivial projects. Typically you need a person who understands the business very well and who also is an excellent architect. Few businesses will have or be able to produce such a person; those that do generally need to give them a boatload of money. What's worse is that most businesses will either not realize this requirement or think they have someone who can do this, and will find out in a disasterous way that they don't.
UAC does none of those things in the real world. It is a horrible security mechanism, it slows down every day usage of most PCs, it causes endless annoyance to users.
This kind of statement has been puzzling to me since I installed Vista on one of my machines, since I don't see UAC pop-ups unless:
1) I'm installing something new. 2) I'm running some executable I just downloaded through my web browser, or 3) I'm running something written in the 90's.
The first two cases being times I'm glad the prompt is there and the third being more or less acceptable to me since we're talking about 9+ year old software. Often I'll go weeks at a time withotu seeing a UAC prompt.
Chances are you don't. But the CLI is superior to any GUI anyway. It's easier to get things done with the CLI on linux than the GUI in windows.
As a blanket statement, this isn't true. It depends a lot on what you're trying to do at the moment.
For example: If you want to pick a specific ten files out of a directory and move them to another directory, a GUI is going to be way-ass faster. I grew up on CLI and I type over 100 wpm, and the GUI is still much faster for that specific task.
I agree that we'll start to see a more heterogeneous environment in the future. Will Microsoft be going away anytime soon? I don't think so. Will they play the same role that they do today? Probably not.
I think this is spot on. Does Microsoft still care about the success of Windows? Well, of course. It's still a license to print money.
But in many ways I think they've moved on as a company to fighting the next war(s).
I mean to say that I could believe that EU government sales would be about half of what all US sales (both government and non-government combined) are.
Not my original grand-grand-grand-grand-father post or my numbers, just trying to explain the way I read it.
Where do you come up with this magic "EU is half of the size of the US business market" number?
No idea where those numbers came from, but I could buy that EU government sales are about half the size of the US market, and that's what the article is talking about.
1/2 the size regarding landmass. i'm pretty sure the true (software) market size of the EU is larger when compared to the US.
Well, this is "just" about EU government sales, and I think the idea is that the EU governments taken together are about half the size of the total US software market.
(Obviously, where government leads, others will probably follow.)
How funny is that joke when you want to set up an low-cost, low-end database on a non-MS box? Oh, you can't. MS SQL isn't multi-platform and you need a lawyer to read its EULA.
That's true, yet, for as much as most of the non-Slashdot world cares, you might as well be pointing out that SQL Server doesn't play Betamax tapes.
Multi-platform just isn't a feature with high demand in the market today.
Not only because of Microsoft's belief in the "eat your own dog food" principle, but also because Microsoft had made public statements saying it was going to migrate hotmail to Microsoft operating system and web server software, it is clear that Microsoft really wanted that migration to work, but it still took over five years and three versions of Microsoft's server software.
You know, for the first time you've made me wonder if Microsoft actually did make the long-term smart move by migrating Hotmail.
I mean, from the perspective of Hotmail, it was a disaster, yet... Windows Server got a lot better during that time frame, and I have to wonder how much of that was driven by trying to do projects like Hotmail on it and paying attention to the ways in which they spectacularly failed. If you take the position that at core they're an OS company and it's worth sacrificing a side business to improve their OS...
It's probably too soon to say, but if you had asked me ten years ago I would have predicted that Linux would have crushed Windows even more out of the server market by now than has been the case. If MS is able to get any of the server market share back over the next few years, maybe it was all worth it.
what else would you call it when after ten years of competition, their brightest idea is to try to buy out the competition, not with money earned by fighting the competition, but by using their main cash cow as their own means to compete?
I'd call that business as usual in this industry.
Example: YouTube wasn't bought with money Google made off of Google Video. Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo all do this all the time.
You're probably right about PHP. I haven't used it enough to fairly judge its shortcomings or strengths.
Java, now that's the real competition - but I don't recall Yahoo being particularly associated with that, and anyway, Microsoft has already dropped J# in VS2008, which was the last Java-related thingy in the Microsoft land; why would they suddenly turn back to Java now?
Yeah, I don't know. I can't see them really going back to Java either. C# is really their answer to Java. Syntactically, the two languages are near-identical, with the major differentiator being the libraries/frameworks that have grown up around them -- and right now, C#'s is way better. Although competition with it has been spurring Java to finally improve a lot in the last couple years and I don't know how long that will last. Today, though, for business applications C# is the Firefox to Java's IE, ironically.
So what that leaves for a Yahoo's-preferred-technologies strategy, I don't know.
Microsoft only wants the userbase and the brand, not the products. If Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo!, all their technology (Apache, Oracle, MySQL, PHP, Java, etc running on top of Linux and BSD) would be replaced by Windows servers running IIS. That would make most of the Yahoo! engineers redundant.
Ok, so devil's advocate / tinfoil hat time.
I'm not exactly going to predict this because, come on, Microsoft, but I could sort of see them leaving Yahoo! alone technologically, at least in the short term.
Let's assume there's some viable evil reason for Microsoft to want expertise with PHP/MySQL/etc. in their stable. Microsoft basically cannot grow something like that organically from within. You can't create Microsoft MySQL without essentially admitting there's something wrong with SQL Server, etc.
But you could plausibly buy Yahoo, point to the past migration nightmares of Hotmail, and say that you were wisely letting Yahoo continue with their current technologies due to those experiences.
Slashdot Mirror
what if he's into geek girls? :)
:)
Still better off at the LA college, honestly.
At an LA college, he'll compete for the geek girls with other guys who like geek girls.
At an engineering college, he'll compete for the geek girls with everyone with all the guys who realize that girls exist. Granted, that won't be 100% of the guys there, but it'll be more than the competition at the LA college.
He's supposed to learn C++. Which is a widely used and marketable programming language, if I recall correctly.
In 2008, not so much. Hell, not even so much in 2000. It might not even make the top 10.
Unless we mean widely used in CS classes.
I'm at a liberal arts school and I spend far more time in these ridiculous liberal arts class than I do in my CS classes.
The flipside of that is, I went to more of a respected engineering-ish school and I spent more time in physics/chemistry/engineering classes than in my CS classes. For the kind of work I do, honestly, more of the liberal arts would have been more useful. Being able to write and express your ideas clearly is of immense importance to anyone with a CS degree who wants a job that can't/won't be outsourced.
Apple makes computers. Microsoft doesn't. World of difference.
In other words, all Microsoft has to do is open a hardware division of PCs they build that run Windows and they instantly have the moral high ground on more or less everything?
I doubt anyone would agree with that, but if that's not what you're saying, then I can't understand how what you are saying would make any sense.
The only problem is, even a post that unintentionally gets half the facts wrong can be a good/constructive one if it generates good replies/discussion in its wake.
If something is factually incorrect and you know it but otherwise is a good post, i.e. doesn't seem to be a troll or flamebait, I would say the correct moderation action is 'reply' and not 'mod down'.
#3 seems like a case for using another OS, as there's nothing written in the past 9+ years that would have me using Windows as a primary OS. Games, maybe, but those can be run in a VM, and are still not a reason to run anything but the game on Windows.
Ultimately, the nature of my work is such that I'll have at least one Windows machine for the foreseeable future.
Games are mostly it in the 9+ years category, excepting odd business applications that I'm replacing, etc. They could be run in a VM, but generally clicking once that, yes, it's okay to run Diablo I find to be less hassle than firing up a VM.
From my recent job hunting recruiters can hurt more often than help with landing a position. A placement fee of 10-15% yearly salary makes managers reluctant to take any risk. They worry about making a decision that will result in a 3 or 6 month hire regardless of the payoff. Better safe than sorry.
I've been seeing a lot more companies in the last few years start people off with contract-to-hire, or just hire consultants to do a smaller job and then make offers to the few they like. It's possible this is related.
Disclaimer: I have not interviewed at Google, and what I've heard may not be true in a general sense.
(Google recognizes talent, is willing to pay for it, and is enormously successful as a result..)
A few friends of mine who interviewed at Google said that they actually would have to take a small pay cut (~10%) from their current jobs to work for Google. They seemed to have the opinion coming out of the interview/offer process that Google knew they didn't have to pay the best because good people would want to work for them anyway just because of who they were. (And at least one of those friends did.)
Granted, even if that's all (and still) completely true, Google's benefits are a lot better than most of the competition, so even with a lower salary they might well still have a better total compensation package.
It's not the location, the culture, the color of the people being outsourced to, it's the nature of outsourcing.
This is dead on.
I've worked a few places where they managed to make outsourcing work for them, and a damn lot that tried it and got catastrophic failure.
At a bare minimum, to outsource a project to someone on another continent, you absolutely must be able to write a design that is so exact and so good that the offshore team can realistically work 8 hours every day without having to ask you, or anyone in the home office, any questions. If you have a good offshore team, you can assume that they won't need to be asking questions about the base technology, but they will need to ask questions about the nature of the business, its rules, and what the project is trying to accomplish. (This is true of an on-site team as well, but getting these kinds of answers on-site is much, much faster and easier.)
Very, very few people are in a position to create a design like that for non-trivial projects. Typically you need a person who understands the business very well and who also is an excellent architect. Few businesses will have or be able to produce such a person; those that do generally need to give them a boatload of money. What's worse is that most businesses will either not realize this requirement or think they have someone who can do this, and will find out in a disasterous way that they don't.
Look in the comments, we have people getting multiple requests for renaming/moving files.
If I move/rename a file under Program Files I get asked once. Otherwise... no.
UAC does none of those things in the real world. It is a horrible security mechanism, it slows down every day usage of most PCs, it causes endless annoyance to users.
This kind of statement has been puzzling to me since I installed Vista on one of my machines, since I don't see UAC pop-ups unless:
1) I'm installing something new.
2) I'm running some executable I just downloaded through my web browser, or
3) I'm running something written in the 90's.
The first two cases being times I'm glad the prompt is there and the third being more or less acceptable to me since we're talking about 9+ year old software. Often I'll go weeks at a time withotu seeing a UAC prompt.
One of these days I'm going to consolidate my comparison into a nice and clean Web page and submit it as an article.
I for one would be interested in reading that.
Chances are you don't. But the CLI is superior to any GUI anyway. It's easier to get things done with the CLI on linux than the GUI in windows.
As a blanket statement, this isn't true. It depends a lot on what you're trying to do at the moment.
For example: If you want to pick a specific ten files out of a directory and move them to another directory, a GUI is going to be way-ass faster. I grew up on CLI and I type over 100 wpm, and the GUI is still much faster for that specific task.
I agree that we'll start to see a more heterogeneous environment in the future. Will Microsoft be going away anytime soon? I don't think so. Will they play the same role that they do today? Probably not.
I think this is spot on. Does Microsoft still care about the success of Windows? Well, of course. It's still a license to print money.
But in many ways I think they've moved on as a company to fighting the next war(s).
I mean to say that I could believe that EU government sales would be about half of what all US sales (both government and non-government combined) are.
Not my original grand-grand-grand-grand-father post or my numbers, just trying to explain the way I read it.
Where do you come up with this magic "EU is half of the size of the US business market" number?
No idea where those numbers came from, but I could buy that EU government sales are about half the size of the US market, and that's what the article is talking about.
1/2 the size regarding landmass. i'm pretty sure the true (software) market size of the EU is larger when compared to the US.
Well, this is "just" about EU government sales, and I think the idea is that the EU governments taken together are about half the size of the total US software market.
(Obviously, where government leads, others will probably follow.)
Eh. Google gained nothing but redundancies by buying YouTube, but I'm not quite ready to call that a bad move.
Microsoft does make some pretty boneheaded business decisions, but this one is too soon to call definitively.
How funny is that joke when you want to set up an low-cost, low-end database on a non-MS box? Oh, you can't. MS SQL isn't multi-platform and you need a lawyer to read its EULA.
That's true, yet, for as much as most of the non-Slashdot world cares, you might as well be pointing out that SQL Server doesn't play Betamax tapes.
Multi-platform just isn't a feature with high demand in the market today.
Not only because of Microsoft's belief in the "eat your own dog food" principle, but also because Microsoft had made public statements saying it was going to migrate hotmail to Microsoft operating system and web server software, it is clear that Microsoft really wanted that migration to work, but it still took over five years and three versions of Microsoft's server software.
You know, for the first time you've made me wonder if Microsoft actually did make the long-term smart move by migrating Hotmail.
I mean, from the perspective of Hotmail, it was a disaster, yet... Windows Server got a lot better during that time frame, and I have to wonder how much of that was driven by trying to do projects like Hotmail on it and paying attention to the ways in which they spectacularly failed. If you take the position that at core they're an OS company and it's worth sacrificing a side business to improve their OS...
It's probably too soon to say, but if you had asked me ten years ago I would have predicted that Linux would have crushed Windows even more out of the server market by now than has been the case. If MS is able to get any of the server market share back over the next few years, maybe it was all worth it.
what else would you call it when after ten years of competition, their brightest idea is to try to buy out the competition, not with money earned by fighting the competition, but by using their main cash cow as their own means to compete?
I'd call that business as usual in this industry.
Example: YouTube wasn't bought with money Google made off of Google Video. Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo all do this all the time.
You're probably right about PHP. I haven't used it enough to fairly judge its shortcomings or strengths.
Java, now that's the real competition - but I don't recall Yahoo being particularly associated with that, and anyway, Microsoft has already dropped J# in VS2008, which was the last Java-related thingy in the Microsoft land; why would they suddenly turn back to Java now?
Yeah, I don't know. I can't see them really going back to Java either. C# is really their answer to Java. Syntactically, the two languages are near-identical, with the major differentiator being the libraries/frameworks that have grown up around them -- and right now, C#'s is way better. Although competition with it has been spurring Java to finally improve a lot in the last couple years and I don't know how long that will last. Today, though, for business applications C# is the Firefox to Java's IE, ironically.
So what that leaves for a Yahoo's-preferred-technologies strategy, I don't know.
I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
Microsoft only wants the userbase and the brand, not the products. If Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo!, all their technology (Apache, Oracle, MySQL, PHP, Java, etc running on top of Linux and BSD) would be replaced by Windows servers running IIS. That would make most of the Yahoo! engineers redundant.
Ok, so devil's advocate / tinfoil hat time.
I'm not exactly going to predict this because, come on, Microsoft, but I could sort of see them leaving Yahoo! alone technologically, at least in the short term.
Let's assume there's some viable evil reason for Microsoft to want expertise with PHP/MySQL/etc. in their stable. Microsoft basically cannot grow something like that organically from within. You can't create Microsoft MySQL without essentially admitting there's something wrong with SQL Server, etc.
But you could plausibly buy Yahoo, point to the past migration nightmares of Hotmail, and say that you were wisely letting Yahoo continue with their current technologies due to those experiences.
I'd say that Yahoo Video is also a stronger offering than anything in the MS stable at this point.
It's no YouTube, but that's really a lot more about mindshare than quality per se. Google sure didn't buy it for the technology.