Well it does depend on what you're doing "in the cloud". If you're hosting web services in the cloud instead of in your office, it may lower bandwidth usage in your office.
But yes, people forget about bandwidth. I've run into a bunch of IT guys who are starting to make the argument, "Why pay all the costs for maintaining this internal file server when I can just use cloud storage?"
"Uh... yeah, because you have 70 people constantly updating 5 TB of data, operating off of a T1. Trying to do it all live over the Internet is going to be really painful. Trying to get around that by syncing/caching stuff on local desktops is going to be a nightmare. Just stick with your internal servers for now."
Yeah, but people think "the cloud" is supposed to be free, or nearly so. They see something that says $0.12/hour, and they think it means they're going to get charged $0.12.
We're not talking about donkeys and horses, though. We're talking about untrained labor and trained labor. The difference between untrained labor and trained labor is some training and experience.
I'm not sure whether you mean to be arguing with me. I've hired people knowing that I'd have to teach them quite a lot. Sure, I'd rather hire someone who is smart, experienced, skilled, responsible, hard working, and easy to work with. However, if I have to sacrifice something (and one often does when hiring), I'd usually rather sacrifice the "experienced" and "skilled" part of things than any of the rest of it.
So yeah, I'd rather teach someone nice. I think it's unfortunate that businesses have no interest in investing in their employees-- and it's no wonder employees don't feel loyalty toward the businesses they work for.
It seems that others are saying similar things, but my general thought here is, don't expect a real programming job. People complain about CS graduates lacking experience, so a high school kid? Forget about it.
If you need the money, find the best-paying job you can get, even if it's working as a waiter. These jobs offer good experience too. There are many jobs that require some kind of customer-service and communication skills, and something like waiting tables provides experience for that.
If you want to gain experience as a programmer, then just come up with something that will help you learn, even if it's not a paying gig. Get involved in an open-source project. Or invent your own project for yourself. I don't know what your programming level is, but you could do something like writing your own blog software from scratch. There are tutorials to get you started, and then you can pick apart other open source projects to see how they do things. If you're more advanced, maybe think of a feature you'd like to see in Firefox and figure out if you can implement it.
Just experiment, try things, and play around. Even if you don't create anything very good, the attempt is a good experience.
Things like personality, which is necessary to some degree depending on the job, are always considered highly above the genuine ability to do a job.
I feel like "personality" is one of the very vital qualities of "genuine ability to do a job". Our work generally doesn't exist in a vacuum. Maybe if you're dealing with a very difficult, complicated, performance-oriented issue, it's worth dealing with a pain-in-the-ass rockstar programmer. However, for many business needs, you'd get more out of a decent programmer who follows directions and can work in a team.
I know that when I've been involved in hiring people, their ability to communicate and work with the existing team is one of my biggest concerns. Specific skills can be taught, but you're stuck with personality.
I'm sure there's something to what you're saying, but in my experience people won't jump ship for "slightly more money" unless their jobs already suck. If your competitors are offering a lot more money, then maybe you're not paying your employees well enough. If your employees are running to your competitors for "slightly more money", then maybe you should look at how you're treating your employees.
According to many, yes. The only non-communist viewpoint is to want to take all the money from everyone in the country and give it to the richest people. After all, the richest people are also the smartest, wisest, and most moral people in the country. How else do you think they got rich, if not by being the superior human beings?
Exactly. Why do they imagine that, given the high unemployment numbers, people are turning down "good jobs at good wages"? Either we should assume those people are all independently wealthy and they're not interested in working, or we would have to guess that those workers believe that the jobs and wages are not good enough.
To me, these complaints read as, "Poor me, I can't find enough people to work like dogs at wages that will barely pay rent. Adding to my woes, the government won't let me import poor 3rd-world people who will work for table scraps. What a terrible world we live in that I might have to sacrifice my 4th summer house in order to pay enough money to get a qualified employee. Meanwhile, I'm going to complain about the education system, even though I have bribed public officials to cut education spending so I can have tax breaks. Poor, poor me."
Oh, I agree. When I said, "make a better product," I didn't mean "make a better product than you're making." I meant "make a better product than the iPad." Undercutting them on price isn't going to be good enough, especially not if you're doing it by cutting features or the quality of hardware.
Either re-imagine the tablet again, or come up with a couple killer features that will attract a large market. And no, it won't be good enough to make it more hackable/customizable, add different UI skins, or provide different ports. You have to allow common users to do something better and more easily. You have to create a superior user experience.
I agree. I think that's part of where the Android tablet market has failed to steal Apple's thunder. Android makers keep trying to compete on price, saying, "Hey, we make something kind of like an iPad, but it's $100 instead of $500!"
And sure, there's a market for that. There are business applications, and I'm sure there are a bunch of happy Kindle Fire owners. On the other hand, they achieved that low price point by skimping on the hardware and design. The $100 Android tablet isn't as powerful and doesn't have as nice of a screen. The development team spent less time thinking about the ins and outs of the the design. It's simply not as nice of a device, and that's reflected both in media hype and sales.
Except for the people who spend a lot of time with computers, or people who have large collections for which computers are the solution. For them, the idea of collecting finally became practical and the collection gained utility value.
My point is that collectors are often not doing it for utility value alone. Collectors often have emotional and experiential concerns which are not as well satisfied by digital collections.
As for status, who cares.
Lots of people. Maybe you're just above all that, but as a general rule, people care about social status and impressing others. I'm not advocating that attitude, but pointing out that it's one of the forces that drive people to collect things.
The Rolling Stones are a rather bad example (they're deservedly one of the best-known and ubiquitously played rock bands, ever), but I suppose they have their rarities too.
Yeah, I don't really care about whether people like the Rolling Stones, but part of my point in giving them as an example is having every digital recording of theirs ever is probably meaningless. I bet there's a tracker available right now that will just torrent that collection for you, and it's as easy as that. However, a few decades ago when you had to go to your local record store, you were limited by what that record store carried and by what you could afford to buy. Tracking down obscure B-sides and bootlegs might take some leg-work, and even if you could find a rare recording, you might need to pay a lot for it. Amassing a collection meant something then that it does not mean today.
Maybe, but I feel like most people I know feel like they have a better selection for those things through streaming services than they ever did with their personal collection.
Some say appending ".com" denotes that it's a web address.
That's not the intention. The "com" TLD is supposed to be for commercial business, the "net" TLD for networking services (ISPs and such), and the "org" TLD for non-profits and such. Then there's "gov" for government addresses and "edu" for educational addresses. Admittedly, people often don't stick to this scheme.
However, they also don't really use "com" for websites either. Most people and businesses get a single domain and use it for all of their services-- websites, email, or anything. Also, people use "org" and "net" for websites, as well as sometimes appropriating country codes for other uses. So people are using "ws" to mean "website" even though it's meant for Western Somoa. People are using "me" to set up personal pages, even though it was meant for Montenegro. The "ly" in bit.ly is actually for "Libya".
Yes, but on the other hand, by dropping TLDs, you're diminishing the number of possible combinations. You want to get the "example.com" domain, but it's taken. Well, you can try "example.org" or "example.net", or even "example.me" or "example.ws". I'd imagine that removing TLDs would actually exacerbate the domain-squatting problem by diminishing the number of possible domains, thereby driving up the value of any decent domain name. You might think that selling off new TLDs has created a land-grab, but just wait until the amount of land is limited and everything gets scooped up.
I do agree that the hierarchy isn't being followed and therefore the TLDs are a bit arbitrary, which I think leaves us one of three options:
1) Keep doing what we're doing, more or less
2) Try to make people follow the intended hierarchy
3) Embrace the arbitrary nature and open up all domains to everyone.
#1 is pretty easy to do and I don't see serious problems with it. #2 will be almost impossible to enforce. #3 makes some sense, but some of the hierarchy is working out pretty well. Schools are pretty much sticking to EDU domains, and the government is using GOV domains.
I think a lot of people try to explain these things too rationally. I could be wrong, but in my mind it all comes down to the idea of "collecting".
See, when people used to collect records and VHS tapes and even DVDs, they didn't just want to listen to the music and watch the movies; they were amassing a collection. However you want to explain the psychology of it, it was pleasing to see your collection on a shelf. It was comforting to know that you were happy with your collection. You could say, "I have every Rolling Stones album ever," or whatever, and it was pleasing beyond the sum of the enjoyment you get from listening to each song individually. You even bought that one album you didn't like very much because otherwise, there was a hole in your collection. You'd think, "I have every Rolling Stones album... except that one. Well, I may as well get that one."
And that was part of where the music industry made its money. There were big hits that made a lot of money, but there were also a bunch of collectors amassing very expensive collections.
And then the whole thing went digital, and the idea of collecting has lost some of its luster. First of all, it's not something you can display on your shelf, so you don't get the satisfaction of having your collection also be a design choice in your house. At most, you might be satisfied when you go to sit through your computer, or as you scroll through your iPhone.
Secondly and perhaps just as importantly, the collection has lost its uniqueness. Sure, you may have every Rolling Stones album ever, but you can just copy it and give it to your friend, and now he has all of their albums too. So there's no status in it, and no accomplishment.
Aside from that, there's nothing personal in it. When you had physical copies, you might look at an old record and remember, "This is the first record I bought for myself when I was 16. I bought it with money from my first job. I listened to this exact physical record over and over until it started to wear out. Now there's a scratch in this one part of the song, and I know exactly when it is from memory, because I know this physical object so well." Now a song is some bits that get transferred from device to device, and are effectively identical to everyone else's collection of bits for that song.
So when you take away the aesthetic appeal of an actual collection, and you take away the uniqueness and the personal nature of it, there's nothing left but the listening. That's all people want: to listen to the music conveniently and cheaply.
Yeah, I think this really just reflects Apple's view of the products they're selling. They are selling an integrated product that is supposed to be viewed as an indivisible unit. They don't believe that there is actually a huge market for people who want to perform after-market upgrades of their own laptops. The market that exists probably doesn't have many people who would consider buying from Apple anyway.
So instead of making everything modular and upgradable, they've focused on making the product itself as tightly integrated as possible. The hardware is all optimized to fit into a tiny little package while maintaining high performance, and then the OS and drivers and applications are built to run on that specific hardware. They believe they can provide a better overall product by integrating the whole stack and keeping things uniform instead of creating a platform that encourages casual tinkering.
You missed my point: being in the cloud might help to reduce these kinds of errors and make it easier to recover from, assuming the cloud is set up well and maintained properly.
Replacing the wrong disk in the RAID, causing the total data loss or not thinking though a command before hitting enter. I don't see how being on a cloud will fix this kind of thing.
Well the "replacing the wrong disk in the RAID" could actually be helped by an additional abstraction layer that has resources allocated redundantly over many servers. It depends on how the "cloud" relates to the hardware, but in some of these cases it means that you're not on a dedicated server and the actual data is stored in multiple places, so any single server failure shouldn't break things-- or at least shouldn't break them for very long.
That goes for all kinds of IT things, and the motivations aren't all financial. If you're having a problem, your internal IT department is motivated to fix it because you're paying them a salary, and it's (probably) the only job they have. They're also motivated by the fact that they know you and everyone else in the company, and they don't want their coworkers to suffer. When you outsource anything, the relationship becomes more impersonal, and now you're one of many clients/customers.
Slashdot Mirror
RUNNING someone elses company, on the other hand... any retard can do that.
And they have retards doing it. Look at the people working at HP and RIM!
Well it does depend on what you're doing "in the cloud". If you're hosting web services in the cloud instead of in your office, it may lower bandwidth usage in your office.
But yes, people forget about bandwidth. I've run into a bunch of IT guys who are starting to make the argument, "Why pay all the costs for maintaining this internal file server when I can just use cloud storage?"
"Uh... yeah, because you have 70 people constantly updating 5 TB of data, operating off of a T1. Trying to do it all live over the Internet is going to be really painful. Trying to get around that by syncing/caching stuff on local desktops is going to be a nightmare. Just stick with your internal servers for now."
Yeah, but people think "the cloud" is supposed to be free, or nearly so. They see something that says $0.12/hour, and they think it means they're going to get charged $0.12.
That said, get your timeline straight: the one button mouse was discontinued as Apple's official mouse in 2007. Not 20 years ago.
The Wikipedia says it was 2005, and anyway that is with Apple's official mouse. They've supported 2-button mice for much longer.
Yes, I know what potential is. Donkeys do not have the potential to become horses, so again, your analogy isn't helpful.
We're not talking about donkeys and horses, though. We're talking about untrained labor and trained labor. The difference between untrained labor and trained labor is some training and experience.
I'm not sure whether you mean to be arguing with me. I've hired people knowing that I'd have to teach them quite a lot. Sure, I'd rather hire someone who is smart, experienced, skilled, responsible, hard working, and easy to work with. However, if I have to sacrifice something (and one often does when hiring), I'd usually rather sacrifice the "experienced" and "skilled" part of things than any of the rest of it.
So yeah, I'd rather teach someone nice. I think it's unfortunate that businesses have no interest in investing in their employees-- and it's no wonder employees don't feel loyalty toward the businesses they work for.
Again, communism is a form of government, it is not an economic system.
Yes, I hope you realize that I was parodying what I've heard other people say.
It seems that others are saying similar things, but my general thought here is, don't expect a real programming job. People complain about CS graduates lacking experience, so a high school kid? Forget about it.
If you need the money, find the best-paying job you can get, even if it's working as a waiter. These jobs offer good experience too. There are many jobs that require some kind of customer-service and communication skills, and something like waiting tables provides experience for that.
If you want to gain experience as a programmer, then just come up with something that will help you learn, even if it's not a paying gig. Get involved in an open-source project. Or invent your own project for yourself. I don't know what your programming level is, but you could do something like writing your own blog software from scratch. There are tutorials to get you started, and then you can pick apart other open source projects to see how they do things. If you're more advanced, maybe think of a feature you'd like to see in Firefox and figure out if you can implement it.
Just experiment, try things, and play around. Even if you don't create anything very good, the attempt is a good experience.
Things like personality, which is necessary to some degree depending on the job, are always considered highly above the genuine ability to do a job.
I feel like "personality" is one of the very vital qualities of "genuine ability to do a job". Our work generally doesn't exist in a vacuum. Maybe if you're dealing with a very difficult, complicated, performance-oriented issue, it's worth dealing with a pain-in-the-ass rockstar programmer. However, for many business needs, you'd get more out of a decent programmer who follows directions and can work in a team.
I know that when I've been involved in hiring people, their ability to communicate and work with the existing team is one of my biggest concerns. Specific skills can be taught, but you're stuck with personality.
I'm sure there's something to what you're saying, but in my experience people won't jump ship for "slightly more money" unless their jobs already suck. If your competitors are offering a lot more money, then maybe you're not paying your employees well enough. If your employees are running to your competitors for "slightly more money", then maybe you should look at how you're treating your employees.
According to many, yes. The only non-communist viewpoint is to want to take all the money from everyone in the country and give it to the richest people. After all, the richest people are also the smartest, wisest, and most moral people in the country. How else do you think they got rich, if not by being the superior human beings?
Exactly. Why do they imagine that, given the high unemployment numbers, people are turning down "good jobs at good wages"? Either we should assume those people are all independently wealthy and they're not interested in working, or we would have to guess that those workers believe that the jobs and wages are not good enough.
To me, these complaints read as, "Poor me, I can't find enough people to work like dogs at wages that will barely pay rent. Adding to my woes, the government won't let me import poor 3rd-world people who will work for table scraps. What a terrible world we live in that I might have to sacrifice my 4th summer house in order to pay enough money to get a qualified employee. Meanwhile, I'm going to complain about the education system, even though I have bribed public officials to cut education spending so I can have tax breaks. Poor, poor me."
It shouldn't be "let's create a 75% iPad clone"
Oh, I agree. When I said, "make a better product," I didn't mean "make a better product than you're making." I meant "make a better product than the iPad." Undercutting them on price isn't going to be good enough, especially not if you're doing it by cutting features or the quality of hardware.
Either re-imagine the tablet again, or come up with a couple killer features that will attract a large market. And no, it won't be good enough to make it more hackable/customizable, add different UI skins, or provide different ports. You have to allow common users to do something better and more easily. You have to create a superior user experience.
I agree. I think that's part of where the Android tablet market has failed to steal Apple's thunder. Android makers keep trying to compete on price, saying, "Hey, we make something kind of like an iPad, but it's $100 instead of $500!"
And sure, there's a market for that. There are business applications, and I'm sure there are a bunch of happy Kindle Fire owners. On the other hand, they achieved that low price point by skimping on the hardware and design. The $100 Android tablet isn't as powerful and doesn't have as nice of a screen. The development team spent less time thinking about the ins and outs of the the design. It's simply not as nice of a device, and that's reflected both in media hype and sales.
If you want to beat Apple, make a better product.
Except for the people who spend a lot of time with computers, or people who have large collections for which computers are the solution. For them, the idea of collecting finally became practical and the collection gained utility value.
My point is that collectors are often not doing it for utility value alone. Collectors often have emotional and experiential concerns which are not as well satisfied by digital collections.
As for status, who cares.
Lots of people. Maybe you're just above all that, but as a general rule, people care about social status and impressing others. I'm not advocating that attitude, but pointing out that it's one of the forces that drive people to collect things.
The Rolling Stones are a rather bad example (they're deservedly one of the best-known and ubiquitously played rock bands, ever), but I suppose they have their rarities too.
Yeah, I don't really care about whether people like the Rolling Stones, but part of my point in giving them as an example is having every digital recording of theirs ever is probably meaningless. I bet there's a tracker available right now that will just torrent that collection for you, and it's as easy as that. However, a few decades ago when you had to go to your local record store, you were limited by what that record store carried and by what you could afford to buy. Tracking down obscure B-sides and bootlegs might take some leg-work, and even if you could find a rare recording, you might need to pay a lot for it. Amassing a collection meant something then that it does not mean today.
Maybe, but I feel like most people I know feel like they have a better selection for those things through streaming services than they ever did with their personal collection.
Some say appending ".com" denotes that it's a web address.
That's not the intention. The "com" TLD is supposed to be for commercial business, the "net" TLD for networking services (ISPs and such), and the "org" TLD for non-profits and such. Then there's "gov" for government addresses and "edu" for educational addresses. Admittedly, people often don't stick to this scheme.
However, they also don't really use "com" for websites either. Most people and businesses get a single domain and use it for all of their services-- websites, email, or anything. Also, people use "org" and "net" for websites, as well as sometimes appropriating country codes for other uses. So people are using "ws" to mean "website" even though it's meant for Western Somoa. People are using "me" to set up personal pages, even though it was meant for Montenegro. The "ly" in bit.ly is actually for "Libya".
Yes, but on the other hand, by dropping TLDs, you're diminishing the number of possible combinations. You want to get the "example.com" domain, but it's taken. Well, you can try "example.org" or "example.net", or even "example.me" or "example.ws". I'd imagine that removing TLDs would actually exacerbate the domain-squatting problem by diminishing the number of possible domains, thereby driving up the value of any decent domain name. You might think that selling off new TLDs has created a land-grab, but just wait until the amount of land is limited and everything gets scooped up.
I do agree that the hierarchy isn't being followed and therefore the TLDs are a bit arbitrary, which I think leaves us one of three options:
1) Keep doing what we're doing, more or less
2) Try to make people follow the intended hierarchy
3) Embrace the arbitrary nature and open up all domains to everyone.
#1 is pretty easy to do and I don't see serious problems with it. #2 will be almost impossible to enforce. #3 makes some sense, but some of the hierarchy is working out pretty well. Schools are pretty much sticking to EDU domains, and the government is using GOV domains.
I think a lot of people try to explain these things too rationally. I could be wrong, but in my mind it all comes down to the idea of "collecting".
See, when people used to collect records and VHS tapes and even DVDs, they didn't just want to listen to the music and watch the movies; they were amassing a collection. However you want to explain the psychology of it, it was pleasing to see your collection on a shelf. It was comforting to know that you were happy with your collection. You could say, "I have every Rolling Stones album ever," or whatever, and it was pleasing beyond the sum of the enjoyment you get from listening to each song individually. You even bought that one album you didn't like very much because otherwise, there was a hole in your collection. You'd think, "I have every Rolling Stones album... except that one. Well, I may as well get that one."
And that was part of where the music industry made its money. There were big hits that made a lot of money, but there were also a bunch of collectors amassing very expensive collections.
And then the whole thing went digital, and the idea of collecting has lost some of its luster. First of all, it's not something you can display on your shelf, so you don't get the satisfaction of having your collection also be a design choice in your house. At most, you might be satisfied when you go to sit through your computer, or as you scroll through your iPhone.
Secondly and perhaps just as importantly, the collection has lost its uniqueness. Sure, you may have every Rolling Stones album ever, but you can just copy it and give it to your friend, and now he has all of their albums too. So there's no status in it, and no accomplishment.
Aside from that, there's nothing personal in it. When you had physical copies, you might look at an old record and remember, "This is the first record I bought for myself when I was 16. I bought it with money from my first job. I listened to this exact physical record over and over until it started to wear out. Now there's a scratch in this one part of the song, and I know exactly when it is from memory, because I know this physical object so well." Now a song is some bits that get transferred from device to device, and are effectively identical to everyone else's collection of bits for that song.
So when you take away the aesthetic appeal of an actual collection, and you take away the uniqueness and the personal nature of it, there's nothing left but the listening. That's all people want: to listen to the music conveniently and cheaply.
Yeah, I think this really just reflects Apple's view of the products they're selling. They are selling an integrated product that is supposed to be viewed as an indivisible unit. They don't believe that there is actually a huge market for people who want to perform after-market upgrades of their own laptops. The market that exists probably doesn't have many people who would consider buying from Apple anyway.
So instead of making everything modular and upgradable, they've focused on making the product itself as tightly integrated as possible. The hardware is all optimized to fit into a tiny little package while maintaining high performance, and then the OS and drivers and applications are built to run on that specific hardware. They believe they can provide a better overall product by integrating the whole stack and keeping things uniform instead of creating a platform that encourages casual tinkering.
For better and worse.
You missed my point: being in the cloud might help to reduce these kinds of errors and make it easier to recover from, assuming the cloud is set up well and maintained properly.
Replacing the wrong disk in the RAID, causing the total data loss or not thinking though a command before hitting enter. I don't see how being on a cloud will fix this kind of thing.
Well the "replacing the wrong disk in the RAID" could actually be helped by an additional abstraction layer that has resources allocated redundantly over many servers. It depends on how the "cloud" relates to the hardware, but in some of these cases it means that you're not on a dedicated server and the actual data is stored in multiple places, so any single server failure shouldn't break things-- or at least shouldn't break them for very long.
That goes for all kinds of IT things, and the motivations aren't all financial. If you're having a problem, your internal IT department is motivated to fix it because you're paying them a salary, and it's (probably) the only job they have. They're also motivated by the fact that they know you and everyone else in the company, and they don't want their coworkers to suffer. When you outsource anything, the relationship becomes more impersonal, and now you're one of many clients/customers.
Part of being in IT is that every computer problem they have is somehow your fault.