Don't forget that SharePoint comes in 2 flavors. If the company already has CALs for Windows Server and SQL Server, then you only need a Windows Server box at 1000$ for the licenses and you're good to go company wise.
Its only expensive for companies without WinServer/SQLServer already in place or for Microsoft Office SharePoint services, and as you mentionned, even there, no one ever pays full price for MOSS, since even the most trivial setup will qualify you for crazy volume license discount, often bringing down the price to 10-15$ per user. And remember that for test/dev, you can get development licenses for pennies, so that barely counts. The hardware will be more expensive in many cases:)
I do agree Alfresco is pretty damn nice though, especially if you need to scale horizontally, and I'd definately suggest any company interested in SharePoint look at it first, just in case.
Completly agree. People here are confusing "Robust industry standard used everywhere that matters" with "New buzz word thats all over 20 year old college grad blogs"
You want the language you use to do real work to be in the former category. The later is useful, either for hobby projects or for niche uses, and maybe even for real work sometimes, but its a risk.
There's a reason a ton of apps are still in, as you said, COBOL, or even C++, Java, and now.NET (which, let face it, while being buzz-compliant compared to Java, is still not "hip" when compared to Ruby on Rail or whatever)
I know you're joking, but taking notes in the margins has been there for a bit. Some of sony's e-readers have touchscreen display (which sucked in their first incarnation, but are better now), and let you annotate books at will.
XP is a 10 years old OS that was meant to be decomissioned years ago, but was forced to stay because a bunch of nerds who think they know their stuff, but really don't, convinced people the newer version sucked (when it seriously didn't. XP was one of the worse version of Windows, ever, and the one that pushed me to Linux. Vista was a dream compared to it, and of course 7 is even better...but if you aren't willing to leave your comfy turf, well...).
It doesn't get the same kind of attention the newer versions do, so shit like that, while unacceptable (since it IS officially supported and people pay for that support), it is to be expected.
Unfortunately it would make Google a major bullseye for anti-trust regulators. The world would be a better place without all of Apple's BS (not without their product, because while I loathe them, competition is good)
I would pay MORE for an ebook than for a paper book. Even with the very high chance of the format (for the DRMed ones, which is most) dying and becoming unreadable down the road (though I use a sony reader, which is EPUB enabled, less likely to die off than other formats), being able to carry hundreds of books in my jacket's pocket, and being able to full text search, etc, is worth it. Big time.
IE6 was the worse, but pretty much all browsers screw(ed) up pretty badly at one point or another. And HTML/CSS leaves a lot of the default implementations to the browser developers, so while there are many "implicit" agreements between Firefox, Safari, and even IE, they're not part of the standards. So its still a moving target. I remember back in the days of Firefox 3.0 (which isn't long ago in human years, but feels like forever ago in Web years). I would systematically assume that Firefox was right, and IE was not.
Until I hit display:inline-block, which at the time IE got right on SOME stuff, and firefox never got right at all. Took me a while to figure that one out:) (Its been fixed since then, but...)
Perhaps you missed that IE8 with dep and/or uac installed on a version of windows thats not 10 years old didn't have issues? Sure, Microsoft had to put it as vulnerable in their articles because DEP and UAC should be a last line of defence, which doesn't change the fact that there's a bug in the app itself, but good luck getting an exploit to work in that configuration.
Everytime I see an IE exploit, the first thing I do, just for giggles, is to try to make it work in Vista/Win7 on IE8 with default configuration (on a spare box obviously, just in case). None so far:)
my sony reader uses EPUB natively now (as in, thats what the store sells even), supports pdfs (adobe digital edition or everyday random pdfs), text files, office docs (even excel!), and a bunch of other formats. I can buy books for it from everywhere, and you can even "borrow" digital books from some librairies.
It does if you ever been part of recruiting for one of these firms. I've been an interviewer for a so called "mega-corp": 4 to 8 candidates a day, an hour per candidates, and thats after a pretty in depth screening process (so a second round interview: the first round is NOT done by HR, but by people that actually do the work, like software engineers and such, to weed out the worse).
Honestly? its pathetic. You'll have to go through 20-30 candidates to get anything worthwhile. Its not -TOO- bad for new grads. As long as they have the fundamentals, we can train them, no problem (and the quality of grads has increased greatly. 5 years ago it was a total joke). Getting -experienced- developers who actually know squat though? Its almost impossible, to the point that when we find one, we'll pay pretty much whatever they ask. That INCLUDES during the recession where there were 10 times as many applications. Its just that rare.
Where megacorps screw up though, in my opinion, is at the HR department. Stupid blanket policies like "don't hire anyone with 3.0 GPA, no matter what". So someone from Random Crappy University with a 4.0 will make it to first round (and usually gets dismissed, but they still got to talk to us). Someone with a 2.8 from a reputable institution, however, will not even get a phone call, even if we talked to them and know that there were reasons behind it (one bad year where family problems got in the way, and poof you go), and no matter how much we beg, it won't go through HR. That, is really stupid.
To be fair, some companies actually give real numbers on this. An example is the (admitedly extremely overpriced) Nokia Booklet 3G. They claim 12 hour battery life...and ok, if I'm connected to a high speed wifi watching HD movies on youtube non-stop, or playing "netbook-level" games on Steam, i get 9-10, but aside that (typical netbook usage, like listening to music, word processing, checking emails, browsing, etc), 12 is actually an accurate number.
Pretty sure i know which company you're working for, as there's one such large non-IT corporation with a very large IT department that did exactly that in the roughly same timeframe with the same exception at the same time.... while I'm sure there's more than one, the wording used in the summary makes me think I'm right.
Anyway, most debugging tools and stuff will work without administrator right, the main problem is when comes the time to test out new software, like betas, and things not approved to be used by the developers, or when writing an app that needs full control on the machine for integration (rare that there's a REAL business case, but it happens).
In that case, said company will still make an exception, you just need your manager to say pretty please to the powers that be. I still have the exception, and will keep it, because we convinced the upper people that we couldn't do the job without it, along with ability to bypass the proxy and filters, the exe download blocker, and so on. Plus you can request virtual machines to be built for you.
Thats how anal companies work anyway. All other large companies i worked for still gave a lot of control to the devs on their boxes, give or take a few things, such as deciding whats the primary development environment and main development OS, but thats about it, and many are completly free for all, as long as you stay within the realm of legality.
Sometimes just putting the right ad on the right site is sufficient:) Advertising Xbox games in the Xbox section of Gamefaqs, advertising IT tools and services on Slashdot, etc.
If they're well targeted, they're useful. "Thousand Free Smilies!!!oneone" is not. But I routinely see ads of a PC game I almost overlooked, a new netbook model I hadn't seen while shopping for one, and other similar things. Well targeted ads are nice, if they're clean.
I would agree with you. Except that lately, its hard to get a game that works at ALL on release day. There's very few continually profitable game development companies, there's only a subset of those that actually make games that work at all for NORMAL gamers. Now you expect them to make them work for all gamers? 17% of people are disabled. On that 17%, how many can play games at all? From whats left, how many are just color blind? (I remember at some point people asking Bioware to modify a color-based puzzle in one of their game. That substracts from the regular player base, if you ask me, unless you implement 2 different puzzles or something).
And for the rest: software development projects often have a fixed dollar count associated with them. Its flexible to some extent, but it is absolutely true that if I spend an extra 10 grand somewhere, I have to take away 10 grands elsewhere.
Finally, and i mentionned that already: a mind bloggling amount of games are -already made at a loss-. Only a small fraction of games are Wii Fit, Star Craft, World of Warcraft and Assassin's Creed. Many jewels like the Tales of serie are made at an extreme lost, hoping to pull a Tales of Symphonia and gain back the profit. If you just ask nicely for game developers to make games accessible, or make a web site that ranks them at no responsability of the developer (like, what I beleive, the article talks about), then sure, go for it. I'd definately encourage it. More info for people to make educated choices.
As long as it doesn't become an ERSB, which literally prevent some games from coming out, or force them to be dumbed down, hurting the rest of us in the process.
These features and options have to be implemented. In an industry that is already extremely cutthroat with tight schedules and a revenue model that normally involves taking a loss on 9 product in the hope that the 10 will be a multi billion dollar hit ready for chrismas, that means that every single feature that gets implemented that was not absolutely necessary, is one less bug fixed, one less normal stage added, one less part voice acted.
ever heard of punitive damage? If you only ever have to pay exactly for what you did, and no putitive damage, when you g et caught, there would be no point NOT to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem is that then cheating cases will skyrocket. Try to stay motivated once everyone around you is cheating their asses off.
Don't forget that SharePoint comes in 2 flavors. If the company already has CALs for Windows Server and SQL Server, then you only need a Windows Server box at 1000$ for the licenses and you're good to go company wise.
Its only expensive for companies without WinServer/SQLServer already in place or for Microsoft Office SharePoint services, and as you mentionned, even there, no one ever pays full price for MOSS, since even the most trivial setup will qualify you for crazy volume license discount, often bringing down the price to 10-15$ per user. And remember that for test/dev, you can get development licenses for pennies, so that barely counts. The hardware will be more expensive in many cases :)
I do agree Alfresco is pretty damn nice though, especially if you need to scale horizontally, and I'd definately suggest any company interested in SharePoint look at it first, just in case.
Completly agree. People here are confusing "Robust industry standard used everywhere that matters" with "New buzz word thats all over 20 year old college grad blogs"
You want the language you use to do real work to be in the former category. The later is useful, either for hobby projects or for niche uses, and maybe even for real work sometimes, but its a risk.
There's a reason a ton of apps are still in, as you said, COBOL, or even C++, Java, and now .NET (which, let face it, while being buzz-compliant compared to Java, is still not "hip" when compared to Ruby on Rail or whatever)
.NET, Java, PHP and C++, each with their own specialty fields, so which one you end up using depend greatly on what you end up doing.
I know you're joking, but taking notes in the margins has been there for a bit. Some of sony's e-readers have touchscreen display (which sucked in their first incarnation, but are better now), and let you annotate books at will.
Of course, but do note I was replying to a reference to 720p, not to the article.
Fine fine, still leaves the 10 inch 1280x720. I only know of one model, but its the one i have, so meh :)
Not all netbooks have low res. There's a couple of 12 inch that have higher resolution, and some like the nokia booklet have 1280x720 on 10 inch.
XP is a 10 years old OS that was meant to be decomissioned years ago, but was forced to stay because a bunch of nerds who think they know their stuff, but really don't, convinced people the newer version sucked (when it seriously didn't. XP was one of the worse version of Windows, ever, and the one that pushed me to Linux. Vista was a dream compared to it, and of course 7 is even better...but if you aren't willing to leave your comfy turf, well...).
It doesn't get the same kind of attention the newer versions do, so shit like that, while unacceptable (since it IS officially supported and people pay for that support), it is to be expected.
Unfortunately it would make Google a major bullseye for anti-trust regulators. The world would be a better place without all of Apple's BS (not without their product, because while I loathe them, competition is good)
I would pay MORE for an ebook than for a paper book. Even with the very high chance of the format (for the DRMed ones, which is most) dying and becoming unreadable down the road (though I use a sony reader, which is EPUB enabled, less likely to die off than other formats), being able to carry hundreds of books in my jacket's pocket, and being able to full text search, etc, is worth it. Big time.
IE6 was the worse, but pretty much all browsers screw(ed) up pretty badly at one point or another. And HTML/CSS leaves a lot of the default implementations to the browser developers, so while there are many "implicit" agreements between Firefox, Safari, and even IE, they're not part of the standards. So its still a moving target. I remember back in the days of Firefox 3.0 (which isn't long ago in human years, but feels like forever ago in Web years). I would systematically assume that Firefox was right, and IE was not.
Until I hit display:inline-block, which at the time IE got right on SOME stuff, and firefox never got right at all. Took me a while to figure that one out :) (Its been fixed since then, but...)
Perhaps you missed that IE8 with dep and/or uac installed on a version of windows thats not 10 years old didn't have issues? Sure, Microsoft had to put it as vulnerable in their articles because DEP and UAC should be a last line of defence, which doesn't change the fact that there's a bug in the app itself, but good luck getting an exploit to work in that configuration.
Everytime I see an IE exploit, the first thing I do, just for giggles, is to try to make it work in Vista/Win7 on IE8 with default configuration (on a spare box obviously, just in case). None so far :)
The Xbox 360 sold over 30 million units.
While i never had any problems with mine, would you look at me in the eyes and say that "The Xbox 360 works fine"?
Yup, thought so.
my sony reader uses EPUB natively now (as in, thats what the store sells even), supports pdfs (adobe digital edition or everyday random pdfs), text files, office docs (even excel!), and a bunch of other formats. I can buy books for it from everywhere, and you can even "borrow" digital books from some librairies.
Straight out of university, many companies will not talk to you without seeing your transcript.
It does if you ever been part of recruiting for one of these firms. I've been an interviewer for a so called "mega-corp": 4 to 8 candidates a day, an hour per candidates, and thats after a pretty in depth screening process (so a second round interview: the first round is NOT done by HR, but by people that actually do the work, like software engineers and such, to weed out the worse).
Honestly? its pathetic. You'll have to go through 20-30 candidates to get anything worthwhile. Its not -TOO- bad for new grads. As long as they have the fundamentals, we can train them, no problem (and the quality of grads has increased greatly. 5 years ago it was a total joke). Getting -experienced- developers who actually know squat though? Its almost impossible, to the point that when we find one, we'll pay pretty much whatever they ask. That INCLUDES during the recession where there were 10 times as many applications. Its just that rare.
Where megacorps screw up though, in my opinion, is at the HR department. Stupid blanket policies like "don't hire anyone with 3.0 GPA, no matter what". So someone from Random Crappy University with a 4.0 will make it to first round (and usually gets dismissed, but they still got to talk to us). Someone with a 2.8 from a reputable institution, however, will not even get a phone call, even if we talked to them and know that there were reasons behind it (one bad year where family problems got in the way, and poof you go), and no matter how much we beg, it won't go through HR. That, is really stupid.
Being able to carry all of the books necessary for my degree in my jacket's pocket is a big deal to me.
Bonus point if this was the latest Sony Reader touch instead of a kindle, since that is much easier to annotate books to take notes with a stylus.
To be fair, some companies actually give real numbers on this. An example is the (admitedly extremely overpriced) Nokia Booklet 3G. They claim 12 hour battery life...and ok, if I'm connected to a high speed wifi watching HD movies on youtube non-stop, or playing "netbook-level" games on Steam, i get 9-10, but aside that (typical netbook usage, like listening to music, word processing, checking emails, browsing, etc), 12 is actually an accurate number.
Maybe Asus is honest on this one. Maybe.
Pretty sure i know which company you're working for, as there's one such large non-IT corporation with a very large IT department that did exactly that in the roughly same timeframe with the same exception at the same time.... while I'm sure there's more than one, the wording used in the summary makes me think I'm right.
Anyway, most debugging tools and stuff will work without administrator right, the main problem is when comes the time to test out new software, like betas, and things not approved to be used by the developers, or when writing an app that needs full control on the machine for integration (rare that there's a REAL business case, but it happens).
In that case, said company will still make an exception, you just need your manager to say pretty please to the powers that be. I still have the exception, and will keep it, because we convinced the upper people that we couldn't do the job without it, along with ability to bypass the proxy and filters, the exe download blocker, and so on. Plus you can request virtual machines to be built for you.
Thats how anal companies work anyway. All other large companies i worked for still gave a lot of control to the devs on their boxes, give or take a few things, such as deciding whats the primary development environment and main development OS, but thats about it, and many are completly free for all, as long as you stay within the realm of legality.
Sometimes just putting the right ad on the right site is sufficient :) Advertising Xbox games in the Xbox section of Gamefaqs, advertising IT tools and services on Slashdot, etc.
No need for tracking really.
If they're well targeted, they're useful. "Thousand Free Smilies!!!oneone" is not. But I routinely see ads of a PC game I almost overlooked, a new netbook model I hadn't seen while shopping for one, and other similar things. Well targeted ads are nice, if they're clean.
I would agree with you. Except that lately, its hard to get a game that works at ALL on release day. There's very few continually profitable game development companies, there's only a subset of those that actually make games that work at all for NORMAL gamers. Now you expect them to make them work for all gamers? 17% of people are disabled. On that 17%, how many can play games at all? From whats left, how many are just color blind? (I remember at some point people asking Bioware to modify a color-based puzzle in one of their game. That substracts from the regular player base, if you ask me, unless you implement 2 different puzzles or something).
And for the rest: software development projects often have a fixed dollar count associated with them. Its flexible to some extent, but it is absolutely true that if I spend an extra 10 grand somewhere, I have to take away 10 grands elsewhere.
Finally, and i mentionned that already: a mind bloggling amount of games are -already made at a loss-. Only a small fraction of games are Wii Fit, Star Craft, World of Warcraft and Assassin's Creed. Many jewels like the Tales of serie are made at an extreme lost, hoping to pull a Tales of Symphonia and gain back the profit. If you just ask nicely for game developers to make games accessible, or make a web site that ranks them at no responsability of the developer (like, what I beleive, the article talks about), then sure, go for it. I'd definately encourage it. More info for people to make educated choices.
As long as it doesn't become an ERSB, which literally prevent some games from coming out, or force them to be dumbed down, hurting the rest of us in the process.
These features and options have to be implemented. In an industry that is already extremely cutthroat with tight schedules and a revenue model that normally involves taking a loss on 9 product in the hope that the 10 will be a multi billion dollar hit ready for chrismas, that means that every single feature that gets implemented that was not absolutely necessary, is one less bug fixed, one less normal stage added, one less part voice acted.
ever heard of punitive damage? If you only ever have to pay exactly for what you did, and no putitive damage, when you g et caught, there would be no point NOT to do it.