If your employer were hiring experienced, trained admins, it should expect to pay a premium vs. the cost of training its own experienced admins. Rationale: experienced, trained admins scouting the job market are generally already employed, and testing the waters for an engagement more compelling that in which they are already employed.
As of the late 90's, few if any rental operations have paid more than wholesale prices for their VHS tapes/DVDs. The early-to-mid 90's had shown the rental market to be such a critical marketing venue that nearly every film publisher by this time had decided to offer its selection to this market at near-cost pricing.
Absent this downgrade and the general downturn, its share price would not have moved more than a few percentage points. After all, GOOG is big business, and let's not forget who's running the show.
Let's see here. It could have been created by an employee (or contractor) with access to wmf code and some motivation (not necessarily influenced by a govt agency).
Software development is not just writing code -- a substantial portion of the development process involves numerical analysis, and tools (spreadsheets for example) are essential for many kinds of analytics. Using an analytics tool without a numeric keypad is a bit like writing software on... a blackberry. There are mini (85-90 key) keyboards out there without embedded numpads, but even an embedded numpad can be awkward to use regularly. Something to consider in your search anyway. A handful of my colleagues have solved this problem by training themselves to use the mouse left-handed.
...stating that your interests include latex, flash photography, and small mammals.
Chances are slim these beautiful colleagues working upstairs in fantastic surroundings engage in kinky private escapades involving LaTeX. Keep dreaming.
Very good point, however reading between the lines, I don't think the GP really intended to suggest that language and toolset selection are fundamentally irrelevant to project planning. The point (I believe) he was trying to make is that, when staffing project involving a complex set of requirements within a specific problem domain, a competent project manager should emphasize talent & experience over toolkit.
For example, say you want to build a blockbuster 3d shooter -- don't assume dx9 is the way to go based on a collection of articles you may have read, then pick the cheapest dx9 developer you can find. This practice will inevitably yeild an inferior result. Instead, look for individuals who've delivered quality 3d titles in the past (possibly in opengl), and work with those developers to establish the best toolkit for the job.
Re:proper
on
Why KDE Rules
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Debian (gnome) + arbitrary KDE apps = simplicity of Gnome + flexibility of K/QT = best of both worlds. On top of my standard debian system, I run kdevelop, quanta, cervisia, kompare, amarok, (konsole & konqueror as needed), qcad, celestia & umbrello (to name a few). Having run KDE for a few years, then having run Gnome exclusvely of the k* world, I couldn't be happier now.
In global context, this isn't a struggle of *nix vs the local franchose, or *n* vs. varius *nix gui toolkits vs the world; Rather its a struggle representing where free society should be focused, vs where corporate sellouts would rather your sense of justice be focused.
1. Locate, print, and carefully read the license agreement associated with said software product. 0.5-4 hours. 2. Research and understand the Small Claims system in your jurisdiction. 8 hours (due diligence). 3. File the necessary paperwork. 4 hours. 4. Subpeona fee $10. 5. Building case file (repeated telephone calls with manufacturer, letter writing, documentation of each of these exhibits). 6 hours. 6. Traveling to and from courthouse. 0.5-2 hours. 7. Travel/parking expenses. $0-$100 (garages in large cities can run $35 per day). 8. Time spent at courthouse. 4 hours. 9. Other costs (admin fees, postage, photocopying, etc): $10-150.
Time cost: 23-28 hours ($7.18 - $8.70 per hour for a $200 refund). Financial cost: $20-250 (possibly refunded by defendant) Sticking it to the man: Priceless
Actually both the Win32 and RHEL systems cost the same, except RHEL is 64bit and includes 1 year of RHEL distro updates, while the win32 OS is 32-bit, and offers 0 distro updates.
So given both systems priced identically by featurE, the linux box runs a 64-bit OS and includes 1 year of free software updates.
Great post, but you infer too much from Microsoft's recent contract negotiations:
IANAL, but I think that a monopoly is defined legally in the US as a company that can effectively set the prices of their products without regard to external market forces. For example, one might be said to have a sugar monopoly when one could, say, double the price of sugar without causing an appreciable number of customers to switch to an alternative.
Yes, and with an 84% gross profit margin ($33.6B gross profit/$39.8B revenue http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=MSFT&annual), MSFT is clearly not competing on the same level as its nearest competitor, AAPL, which posted a mere (but very respectable) 29% gross profit in Sept.
The fact that Microsoft comes back with discounts when you threaten to switch to a competitor indicates that they are doing exactly that-- setting the prices of their products without regard to external market forces. But it also means that they are now in a position where *occasionally* this doesn't work so well. So this price-cutting behavior seems to me both evidence of monopolistic behavior on Microsoft's part and evidence of the demise of their power at the same time.
The fact that Microsoft comes back with discounts when you threaten to switch to a competitor indicates that... external market forces are coming to bear on its stratospheric profit margin. Nothing more.
If you plan to focus on c/c++ development, using either the QT/KDE or GTK+/GNOME gui frameworks, I highly recommend KDevelop. If you will be working with XML/XSLT or HTML/CSS, Quanta+ is an excellent companion tool. Together these tools are more powerful than anything freely available under Windows (including the free-as-in-beer visual studio express editions) or MacOS, with the notable exceptions being a fully equipped emacs or eclipse environment.
If you plan to focus on Java, eclipse is really the place to start. To get the most out of eclipse however you'll need to install at least a dozen or so plugins, of which there are literally hundreds of powerful plugins to choose from. On the non-free side, you'll want to evaluate IDEA.
If you plan to focus on scripting with Ruby (consider exploring the Rails framework as well), Python, or Perl/CPAN, KDevelop will do nicely. On the non-free side, there is the excellent Komodo IDE.
If you plan to focus on ECMA-CLI development (using any combination of CLI language implementations including C#, Nemerle, Java, Python, etc.) Mono provides a rich set of framework APIs (with its default UI framework based on GTK+), however this list is not nearly as extensive as those available under Java. Using p/invoke it's quite simple to invoke any of the platform-specific libraries that you would normally use in a c/c++ context as well. The MonoDevelop IDE is really the place to start here, however progress is being made to buid mono-specific plugins for emacs, eclipse and Anjuta (IIRC).
Other standard utilities you'll want to have in your toolchest include gcc, g++, gdb, ddd, GIMP (there will come a time when you need to create or modify a bitmap), kompare, subversion, cvs, ltrace, strace, lsof, iostat, oprofile, vmstat, sar, mcheck and valgrind come to mind first.
If you will be doing OSS development on any of the major projects, a good IRC tool is also highly recommended.
Yes. Where do Sun, MS, etc. explicitly state their framework runs perfectly for all users all of the time? They don't because such a claim would be patently false, and there simply is no sexy way to articulate the truth, which is exactly what the Ruby team arbitrarily decided to do anyway. Regardless whether the ambitions of the Ruby team extend to widespread adoption, such careless honesty from such a visible project may inadvertenly damage overall market perception of the f/oss community, regardless of the actual quality of the offering (over the short-term at least). Welcome to the corporate marketplace -- arguably the most fickle place on Earth.
Why give away an expensive gadget (which would also require tech support) when you can simply project the feature on a big screen in the restaurant itself. The price of admission: each viewer must place an order of some kind.
It's a "thinking-person" thing. You see, these crazy "thinking-people" find the inadvertent support of untenable malfeasance via uninformed spending offensive. This sometimes requires a choice between two evils, developing a better understanding of the situation, etc. Hope that helps.
I do not imply that all products and services compete on a level playing field, certainly not OSes like Win32, whose success can be contributed directly to a legacy of anticompetitive contracts and backroom cronyism. But, simply because certain vendors are able to idly enjoy the fruit of monopoly, decade after decade (for one such unnamed organization, this would have ended roughly 5 years ago, but I digress), doesn't mean capitalism itself is broken.
It was not too long ago that the efficacy of online advertising was seriously called into question. Prices were driven so low as to threaten the viability of all major players in this space, including Google, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Aol, MSN, DoubleClick, etc. Either the reversal we've been witnessing these past 2 years is artificial, and a forgetful market is simply repeating a litany of mistakes it had only just comitted, or the online advertising market has reached the critical mass needed to become an effective channel, and advertisers are renweing their contracts because their revenues are actually improving.
Marketing is a tool designed to increase the overall level of visibility of a given product or service. When executed correctly,this increase sharply rises from baseline (A), then falls off its peak slightly to plataeu at a higher level (B). Ongoing investment in this marketing channel is required to sustain visibility at B. The ROI of this investment is easy to calculate: Does net revenue of said product or service (B - A) exceed the cost of this marketing channel?
Getting to C will require further analysis and either 1) a fundamental change in the product/service itself, or 2) more marcom dollars.
When you say you experienced no "matching increase in traffic" are you saying that google billed you for 10,000 click throughs to a particular interstitial page, where your internal stats for that page suggest a much smaller number, or some other fraudulent activity? Or are you merely saying that nooone who visited your interstitial bothered to explore the rest of your site?
There are a number of factors to consider in a case like this:
1. First and foremost, advertising fees are entirely market-driven. If AdWords simply didn't work, the service would either cost far less, or cease to exist entirely. That Google's AdWords revenue consistently improves quarter over quarter over quarter is testament to the notion that this system is fundamentally perceived to be a valuable service by the marketplace.
2. Your interstitial may not have contained a compelling message for its target audience. This is very likely if your AdWords investment resulted in no meaningful gain. Blaming Google in this case is simply shooting the messenger. Shoot the ad agency instead.
3. Your choice of AdWords may not have effectively captured your target audience.
Somehow we are to expect that an organization facing a potentially disruptive technology wouldn't throw its weight into discrediting said tech? This might have been newsworthy had Intel publicly praised this technology. But seriously. Every major player with a stake in the PC (Intel, Apple, M$, Dell, etc.) should be expected to berate this new idea. Anything less would be sheer negligence in the eyes of the shareholder.
Allowing final manufacturing to vary from preliminary tested manufacturing is fundamentally a risky practice. I deal with this regularly, and as an engineer it kills me when the notion of testing a final manufacturing run is overruled. In this situation, what management is effectively saying is, "let our customers do the testing". When things go awry, if the inevitable blame-game doesn't sideline you, guilt-by-association will. Welcome to the late-20th century.
No thinking person with any respect for the next generation would utter such emptiness.
When I look into my son's eyes I see a being untainted by moral relativism, nihilistic relativism, etc. I see a being who is appreciative of mere existance. Respectful of all things large and small, all people gifted or handicapped. I ses an innocent, intellectual love affair with all existence. An affair with logic, emotion and being. An affair set to last a lifetime; an affair defining in many ways perception of the universe itself. Who are you to declare those in such a position insignificant? What other purpose could there be to life? IMHO, there is no greater possible achievement, human or otherwise. If such a relationship can be acheived on Earth, today, then such stakes are simply too high to ignore.
No, it's like being fined for parking your unlocked car on the street anywhere in the vicinity of your home, with a sign on the dashboard which reads in large bold lettering "take me for a ride anytime, for any purpose".
Slashdot Mirror
If your employer were hiring experienced, trained admins, it should expect to pay a premium vs. the cost of training its own experienced admins. Rationale: experienced, trained admins scouting the job market are generally already employed, and testing the waters for an engagement more compelling that in which they are already employed.
As of the late 90's, few if any rental operations have paid more than wholesale prices for their VHS tapes/DVDs. The early-to-mid 90's had shown the rental market to be such a critical marketing venue that nearly every film publisher by this time had decided to offer its selection to this market at near-cost pricing.
Yes, the selloff actually began on the 18th with this headline:
8 2255.html
http://www.newratings.com/analyst_news/article_11
Absent this downgrade and the general downturn, its share price would not have moved more than a few percentage points. After all, GOOG is big business, and let's not forget who's running the show.
Let's see here. It could have been created by an employee (or contractor) with access to wmf code and some motivation (not necessarily influenced by a govt agency).
Software development is not just writing code -- a substantial portion of the development process involves numerical analysis, and tools (spreadsheets for example) are essential for many kinds of analytics. Using an analytics tool without a numeric keypad is a bit like writing software on... a blackberry. There are mini (85-90 key) keyboards out there without embedded numpads, but even an embedded numpad can be awkward to use regularly. Something to consider in your search anyway. A handful of my colleagues have solved this problem by training themselves to use the mouse left-handed.
But Vista is basically Doom3-meets-OS-meets-corporate-machine. The Doom3 part of Vista craves many many megabytes of disk space.
This is not the first Gartner article to pass idle, uninformed speculation for hard research these past few weeks:
3 23
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=137
Are there morale issues at Gartner? Drug problems?
...stating that your interests include latex, flash photography, and small mammals. Chances are slim these beautiful colleagues working upstairs in fantastic surroundings engage in kinky private escapades involving LaTeX. Keep dreaming.
Very good point, however reading between the lines, I don't think the GP really intended to suggest that language and toolset selection are fundamentally irrelevant to project planning. The point (I believe) he was trying to make is that, when staffing project involving a complex set of requirements within a specific problem domain, a competent project manager should emphasize talent & experience over toolkit.
For example, say you want to build a blockbuster 3d shooter -- don't assume dx9 is the way to go based on a collection of articles you may have read, then pick the cheapest dx9 developer you can find. This practice will inevitably yeild an inferior result. Instead, look for individuals who've delivered quality 3d titles in the past (possibly in opengl), and work with those developers to establish the best toolkit for the job.
Debian (gnome) + arbitrary KDE apps = simplicity of Gnome + flexibility of K/QT = best of both worlds. On top of my standard debian system, I run kdevelop, quanta, cervisia, kompare, amarok, (konsole & konqueror as needed), qcad, celestia & umbrello (to name a few). Having run KDE for a few years, then having run Gnome exclusvely of the k* world, I couldn't be happier now.
In global context, this isn't a struggle of *nix vs the local franchose, or *n* vs. varius *nix gui toolkits vs the world; Rather its a struggle representing where free society should be focused, vs where corporate sellouts would rather your sense of justice be focused.
1. Locate, print, and carefully read the license agreement associated with said software product. 0.5-4 hours.
2. Research and understand the Small Claims system in your jurisdiction. 8 hours (due diligence).
3. File the necessary paperwork. 4 hours.
4. Subpeona fee $10.
5. Building case file (repeated telephone calls with manufacturer, letter writing, documentation of each of these exhibits). 6 hours.
6. Traveling to and from courthouse. 0.5-2 hours.
7. Travel/parking expenses. $0-$100 (garages in large cities can run $35 per day).
8. Time spent at courthouse. 4 hours.
9. Other costs (admin fees, postage, photocopying, etc): $10-150.
Time cost: 23-28 hours ($7.18 - $8.70 per hour for a $200 refund).
Financial cost: $20-250 (possibly refunded by defendant)
Sticking it to the man: Priceless
Actually both the Win32 and RHEL systems cost the same, except RHEL is 64bit and includes 1 year of RHEL distro updates, while the win32 OS is 32-bit, and offers 0 distro updates.
So given both systems priced identically by featurE, the linux box runs a 64-bit OS and includes 1 year of free software updates.
Granted this an extremely recent phenomenon, but options are appearing in the marketplace:
f ications.html
http://www.sun.com/desktop/index.jsp
http://h10018.www1.hp.com/wwsolutions/linux/certi
http://linux.dell.com/desktops.shtml
The fact that Microsoft comes back with discounts when you threaten to switch to a competitor indicates that ... external market forces are coming to bear on its stratospheric profit margin. Nothing more.
If you plan to focus on c/c++ development, using either the QT/KDE or GTK+/GNOME gui frameworks, I highly recommend KDevelop. If you will be working with XML/XSLT or HTML/CSS, Quanta+ is an excellent companion tool. Together these tools are more powerful than anything freely available under Windows (including the free-as-in-beer visual studio express editions) or MacOS, with the notable exceptions being a fully equipped emacs or eclipse environment.
If you plan to focus on Java, eclipse is really the place to start. To get the most out of eclipse however you'll need to install at least a dozen or so plugins, of which there are literally hundreds of powerful plugins to choose from. On the non-free side, you'll want to evaluate IDEA.
If you plan to focus on scripting with Ruby (consider exploring the Rails framework as well), Python, or Perl/CPAN, KDevelop will do nicely. On the non-free side, there is the excellent Komodo IDE.
If you plan to focus on ECMA-CLI development (using any combination of CLI language implementations including C#, Nemerle, Java, Python, etc.) Mono provides a rich set of framework APIs (with its default UI framework based on GTK+), however this list is not nearly as extensive as those available under Java. Using p/invoke it's quite simple to invoke any of the platform-specific libraries that you would normally use in a c/c++ context as well. The MonoDevelop IDE is really the place to start here, however progress is being made to buid mono-specific plugins for emacs, eclipse and Anjuta (IIRC).
Other standard utilities you'll want to have in your toolchest include gcc, g++, gdb, ddd, GIMP (there will come a time when you need to create or modify a bitmap), kompare, subversion, cvs, ltrace, strace, lsof, iostat, oprofile, vmstat, sar, mcheck and valgrind come to mind first.
If you will be doing OSS development on any of the major projects, a good IRC tool is also highly recommended.
HTH
Yes. Where do Sun, MS, etc. explicitly state their framework runs perfectly for all users all of the time? They don't because such a claim would be patently false, and there simply is no sexy way to articulate the truth, which is exactly what the Ruby team arbitrarily decided to do anyway. Regardless whether the ambitions of the Ruby team extend to widespread adoption, such careless honesty from such a visible project may inadvertenly damage overall market perception of the f/oss community, regardless of the actual quality of the offering (over the short-term at least). Welcome to the corporate marketplace -- arguably the most fickle place on Earth.
Why give away an expensive gadget (which would also require tech support) when you can simply project the feature on a big screen in the restaurant itself. The price of admission: each viewer must place an order of some kind.
It's a "thinking-person" thing. You see, these crazy "thinking-people" find the inadvertent support of untenable malfeasance via uninformed spending offensive. This sometimes requires a choice between two evils, developing a better understanding of the situation, etc. Hope that helps.
I do not imply that all products and services compete on a level playing field, certainly not OSes like Win32, whose success can be contributed directly to a legacy of anticompetitive contracts and backroom cronyism. But, simply because certain vendors are able to idly enjoy the fruit of monopoly, decade after decade (for one such unnamed organization, this would have ended roughly 5 years ago, but I digress), doesn't mean capitalism itself is broken.
It was not too long ago that the efficacy of online advertising was seriously called into question. Prices were driven so low as to threaten the viability of all major players in this space, including Google, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Aol, MSN, DoubleClick, etc. Either the reversal we've been witnessing these past 2 years is artificial, and a forgetful market is simply repeating a litany of mistakes it had only just comitted, or the online advertising market has reached the critical mass needed to become an effective channel, and advertisers are renweing their contracts because their revenues are actually improving.
Marketing is a tool designed to increase the overall level of visibility of a given product or service. When executed correctly ,this increase sharply rises from baseline (A), then falls off its peak slightly to plataeu at a higher level (B). Ongoing investment in this marketing channel is required to sustain visibility at B. The ROI of this investment is easy to calculate: Does net revenue of said product or service (B - A) exceed the cost of this marketing channel?
Getting to C will require further analysis and either 1) a fundamental change in the product/service itself, or 2) more marcom dollars.
When you say you experienced no "matching increase in traffic" are you saying that google billed you for 10,000 click throughs to a particular interstitial page, where your internal stats for that page suggest a much smaller number, or some other fraudulent activity? Or are you merely saying that nooone who visited your interstitial bothered to explore the rest of your site?
There are a number of factors to consider in a case like this:
1. First and foremost, advertising fees are entirely market-driven. If AdWords simply didn't work, the service would either cost far less, or cease to exist entirely. That Google's AdWords revenue consistently improves quarter over quarter over quarter is testament to the notion that this system is fundamentally perceived to be a valuable service by the marketplace.
2. Your interstitial may not have contained a compelling message for its target audience. This is very likely if your AdWords investment resulted in no meaningful gain. Blaming Google in this case is simply shooting the messenger. Shoot the ad agency instead.
3. Your choice of AdWords may not have effectively captured your target audience.
Just a few thoughts to chew on anyway.
Somehow we are to expect that an organization facing a potentially disruptive technology wouldn't throw its weight into discrediting said tech? This might have been newsworthy had Intel publicly praised this technology. But seriously. Every major player with a stake in the PC (Intel, Apple, M$, Dell, etc.) should be expected to berate this new idea. Anything less would be sheer negligence in the eyes of the shareholder.
Allowing final manufacturing to vary from preliminary tested manufacturing is fundamentally a risky practice. I deal with this regularly, and as an engineer it kills me when the notion of testing a final manufacturing run is overruled. In this situation, what management is effectively saying is, "let our customers do the testing". When things go awry, if the inevitable blame-game doesn't sideline you, guilt-by-association will. Welcome to the late-20th century.
No thinking person with any respect for the next generation would utter such emptiness.
When I look into my son's eyes I see a being untainted by moral relativism, nihilistic relativism, etc. I see a being who is appreciative of mere existance. Respectful of all things large and small, all people gifted or handicapped. I ses an innocent, intellectual love affair with all existence. An affair with logic, emotion and being. An affair set to last a lifetime; an affair defining in many ways perception of the universe itself. Who are you to declare those in such a position insignificant? What other purpose could there be to life? IMHO, there is no greater possible achievement, human or otherwise. If such a relationship can be acheived on Earth, today, then such stakes are simply too high to ignore.
Otherwise, well, I as a father have no opinion...
No, it's like being fined for parking your unlocked car on the street anywhere in the vicinity of your home, with a sign on the dashboard which reads in large bold lettering "take me for a ride anytime, for any purpose".
It wasn't too long ago that Intel covered 90% of all desktop PCs as well.