One thing I noticed in the PDF was that a Linux server had Oracle on it. It takes 68% longer to do anything in Oracle because it's confusing and they keep changing things (like how to stop and start the database). Why don't they compare Oracle on both Windows and Linux?
Okay, so when will they get patents on: (1) getting unpaid volunteers to create content for them to help their business (in the form of reviews); (2) getting other people to generate revene for them (what percent of net sites have exec/obidos links?); (3) getting volunteers to provide free advertising their sites with exec/obidos links; etc.
People like this from big companies hate open source because there's no barrier to entry. What they've been doing is spending huge amounts of time and money developing certification exams, restricted proprietary software, etc to put a hedge around their domains so not just anyone can get in, only those who pay the barrier to entry fee by taking exams, buying software, buying SDKs, etc etc etc. Only people who are rich, or can get big companies to pay for the barrier to entry, etc can play ball. Open source destroys this hedgemony by letting anyone who can cobble together a mediocre computer (I just put SuSE 10 on an old box) have access to software and information. Anyone, even a disadvantaged person, can learn Linux, gcc, MySQL (or Postgres), etc. There is no monetary barrier to entry. A scary concept for some! So we get people screaming about socialism, unconstitutionality, etc etc etc.
Ok, so the ultra-liberal NYT runs an article saying capitalism is bad, and scoured the world to find an example. This is why people don't buy their newspaper anymore.
Many Internet ads are morally offensive. If I buy a Kiplinger's magazine (for example), I know there's little chance I will be exposed to paranoia ("everything you've ever done on your computer is still there, and you will never delete it without our software"), personal information trawling ("you've just won every device you can't afford at Best Buy if you give us your contact information"), gambling, etc. It's not the quantity of the ads as much as their content.
After all, the MS strategy all along has been to sell shovels to the 49ers trying to get rich off the Internet. They're selling DRM solutions to people and getting their $ up front, not selling content which is a race to the $0.99 bottom as competitors try to put each other out of business. This is a good strategy, if your mission is to destroy traditional copyright and make money off of content ownership and licensing.
Reality is plausible: because MS could expand their DRM to physical media. The media could self-destruct or lock out after so many days, and people could pay to unlock it. A natural extension of the WMP DRM solution for content (like long movies or uncompressed audio) that's hard to sling around over the net.
A hoax is plausible: because MS knows any physical medium with DRM content blocks is usually worked around before the DRM is in active use. (Sharpies, the shift key, etc.) If they sold a DRM solution to companies that was broken almost instantly, it would be a silly black eye for their strategy.
The moral of this story is not to buy anything with DRM protection, and then no one will be able to sell anything with DRM protection because no one will buy it!
Why would MS want to even get into this market? They're the peddlers selling shovels to the 49ers who think they'll get rich in the online music market - supplying them with DRM. Just about every music seller is just using MS's platform. (I don't even know what differentiates them.) Online music will either work and make MS a ton of licensing revenue, or it'll go belly up and MS will have a mature, proven DRM solution to sell someone else.
I guess the story wrote itself. "Anything is supposed to be more reliable than Windows, but these people tried Linux and the decision blew up in their faces and they had to crawl back to Microsoft to get a reliable operating system!" Then you read it, and it isn't even about Linux, it's about some bug in a proprietary software package. The author of the story gets credit for spinning it! Why do people read the computer industry trade press again? Oh, and "the hard work required to keep Linux up and running" - huh? I often forget how I set stuff up on my Linux servers because they run for months and years without me touching them. I have to make notes so I don't forget what I did. I don't suppose anyone has ever factored in productivity into TCO - your admin guy is solving interesting problems on a stable Linux box, while your MSCE is patching MS' mistakes every month.
To me, the most important thing is good backups. Computers come and go. They melt and fry. Hard drives die. Pilot errors trash files. Solar flares flip bits. If you don't have a great backup system in place, the best setup in the world won't be of much use. (Always have more than one copy of your backup, in case a single medium fails. If you overwrite a backup medium like a xxx-RW, make archival copies occasionally.) It's worth $50 or whatever to buy an extra hard drive just to keep a redundant, live copy of a backup. Being able to pick up and go when something fries is probably the #1 productivity enhancer that I've ever found.
The amount of dollars lost each year by pirated software, MP3 downloads, and now unproductive time seems excessive and unrealistic. I do not know how these numbers are created, and haven't kept a running total. Has anyone made a grand total of money that's lost each year? Is it more than the total amount of money in the world yet? When it is more, will these bogus numbers be questioned?
Do we need another entry level book?
on
Spring Into PHP 5
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I am not knocking this book by any means. It is probably very good. But can't any developer who knows a C-ish syntax language pick up PHP basics quickly? I learned it in a day or two just by analogy with C/Perl/etc. How much need/demand is there for entry level books like this?
Where computer books have value to me is when they teach me something that would take hours/days/weeks to learn by trial-and-error. Something non-trivial that can't be guessed from reading the doc. (Like setting up user authentication or something.) That's when I start thinking about spending cash on books which have value by saving me time and especially frustration. (The PHP Cookbook, for example.)
Ami Pro: Bad business kills great product. Intuitive, easy-to-use word processor. Nothing today holds a candle to it. I probably miss it the most of any old technology. Too bad IBM can't open-source it.
LP?: What's so great about LPs? I've always wondered what audiophiles can hear that normal people can't. What is the world like to someone with that kind of hearing? To me, LPs are music set in a background roar. It was nice when I was in college and couldn't afford CDs to get an LP for $1, but the sound wasn't that good. Besides, to balance this out, since the LP era, digital remasters have made many recordings sound better than the best LP ever sounded. (Who wants the un-re-remastered version of Yes' Relayer? It didn't sound decent until the second remastering!) Plus CDs are so convenient: I can put my entire music library into a little zipper case. And I can edit out the filler ("Mother" on Synchronicity is the canonical example), and put 2 LPs on 1 CD, etc. I'll take CDs any day.
Napster: I like being able to call up out-of-print music on demand which no one will sell me for any price.
Riddle me this: In any other market, companies take unwanted inventory and sell it for scrap value just to get it off the books and salvage some value out of it. So why don't record companies take all their out-of-print music and sell it to some service that will let people download songs for a $1 membership fee or something? What do the record companies get for hoarding music? Isn't there some value in it they could squeeze out?
One major problemo with VS or any proprietary IDE is that it may increase productivity to an extent, but when you load all your code into it, and get to being productive, then you hit some show-stopping bug that has no solution, and your entire project is in some proprietary format and you're stuck. No thanks. Besides, MS keeps changing the VS file format (it used to be their proprietary bizarro make language, then a binary file, then make again, then both, etc). Then they do something like bet the company on.NET and your nice C++ IDE is suddenly this horrible proprietary language code generator. Remember Asymetrix Supercede for Java's first edition? At a time when Java IDEs were unusably slow and immature, it was a slick, fast, workable GUI builder. Then with the next version, Asymetrix turned it into a COM (what they used to call.NET) object building tool, then discontinued it. IDEs may be short-term more productive, but in the long term they've always bitten me hard and I don't like them. I prefer Emacs and make, which at least work properly and aren't going to change significantly because too many real projects use them for them to whimsically change (unlike a proprietary IDE).
And I've often thought: There should be some honor system where people who download out-of-print music could pay some small fee, maybe $0.99 or whatever the latest hit song download is, for a license to own the o-o-p sound recording. Whoever owns the rights to Mike Rutherford's Smallcreep's Day album, for example, very recently re-released it on CD, but did not include the b-side "Compression" on the re-release. This song has never appeared on CD to my knowledge. (I had a cassette dub of the LP for years.) Say I download this from a P2P server. I should be able to legalize my copy by paying a fee to the copyright holder (whoever that is!). I don't know if Jon Anderson's Animation album ever got released on CD, but that's another classic album important to the history of Yes that people want but was out of print for years. (I've never been clear about whether if you own the cassette and digitize it, or download someone else's digitized copy, if it's legal or not. I technically "own" a legal copy of the cassette release, but how does that relate to a CD with a digitized version of the LP!?) You could pay $10 or something to have a legal ownership license for the music. This way people who want to do the right thing could do it. Not an outrageous fee, but something similar to the going rate.
But make no mistake: I tried to contact a record company once and ask about paying for a song I downloaded. The e-mail went into the cosmic bit bucket and that was that. They're not the least bit interested in this! Which tells you what their priorities are.
I used to use Napster and some of the others for two things: (1) downloading music that can't be bought, i.e. out-of-print albums, b-sides, etc. and (2) trying music. Back then, I bought numerous CDs after trying music I really liked. Some of these CDs were retail CDs, where I wanted a higher quality sound than a low-grade MP3. Others were b-sides I bought on CD singles off of eBay because I wanted the better sound quality. But I also bought a lot of retail CDs I never would have bought if I had to buy them without hearing them first. So the bottom line for the RIAA is that the P2P effect is not simple: file sharing has caused me to buy music I downloaded, but not always at retail. More music may be sold as a result, but it's not all profit for the RIAA.
The unfortunate part about the new online services is you can't browse the catalogues without first signing up and selling your soul to their DRM. I would love to see if out-of-print music is available on some legal download services, such as out-of-print albums and b-sides, but I doubt there is anything on these services you can't find in Circuit City or the mall, so I don't ever sign up for the DRM.
The one thing no one ever mentions is the CD replacement effect. People who grew up listening to cassettes and LPs in the 70s and 80s got jobs in the 90s and could afford to dump their cassettes and buy CDs. This sort of generational shift in media will never happen again, and the RIAA's sales figures were bloated by people buying albums they already had. The effect is over. Everone now is buying music on CDs from the beginning, and has nothing to replace.
If you want more CS graduates, then why don't you do what the Army does? In high school, the Army will guarantee a prospective student a job upon graduation. This motivates the student to complete the course of study (ROTC or whatever) and graduate, knowing there is security for the future. The same could be done for CS students - after 1 or 2 years of a 4 year CS program, you pretty much know who "has it" and who doesn't. Guarantee the people who have it a job. They'll stick with it. But wait, MS just wants to skim a few people off the top and flush the rest, don't they?
Seems to be saying that the people on the low rung of the ladder economically are going to DeVry, ITT, etc. to get degrees in whatever. I haven't looked at their course catalog in years, but probably hasn't changed much. (They just change the buzzwords each year: "Learn VB, no VB6, no.ASP, no.NET...".) Now, these vocational schools advertise on TV. That isn't cheap. They tend to overemphasize what their education will do for a person to get the person to write a check. Disadvantaged people see this sort of education as a way up in life.
But when they graduate with their degree in plugging in CAT-5 cables (or whatever, rebooting NT servers, I don't know...), these economically disadvantaged people are precisely the lowest rung on the totem pole, and they're the ones swept aside in layoffs. This happened in 99-00, when everyone and his grandmother hung out a shingle as a professional web site builder after reading half an HTML book and taking a class. I still remember all the articles in the NY-Times and other liberal mouthpieces about how the disadvantages were chewed up and spit out during the bubble. Supply and demand: the entry level people are victims of the economic cycle.
So this article is saying that disadvantaged people are spending a lot of money for entry-level classes for training that has very little chance of getting them anywhere. They have very little idea of what the computer industry is really like.
I suppose this is why people say both that there is great demand for trained professionals who can apply technology creatively, while at the same time there is a great oversupply of entry level talent still being shaken out.
The article seems to be confused about entry-level technical skills and the ability to apply technology creatively to solve problems.
And this happens right when they're trying to liquidate old copies of the Penguin Classics with the old covers to clear out warehouse space?:) Reminds me of grab-bags of anything - there may be one or two good books in it, but you have to buy a whole lot of crud. I'll stick to a-la-carte. BTW, Buy.com sells Penguin Classics dirt cheap.
We must be hopeful of the possibility that those companies which want to mix NT with UNIX will poison themselves, and lose. The drag of NT licensing and unreliability will put them at a competitive disadvantage. The money sink of "certification" will cause companies to send their people to seminars and training to learn how to take certification tests, which is a bottomless pit of money wastage. Meanwhile, companies with UNIX/Linux/etc will have a significant advantage as their developers generate code that helps the business instead of paying license fees to MS and sending their developers off with certification fees in hand to give to parasite certification companies who exist only to collect fees.
They are very smart. They do not want to control content (songs, movies, etc), because that's a race to the bottom on price, they want to control the DRM lock-in technology (which is licensed for a flat fee). They have almost cornered the market for DRM-controlled online 99-cent songs through WMP. They're adding DRM to Office and Windows to control files. So why not put DRM locks on P2P files? This seems like a very natural next step, providing a way for content owners lock all their files with MS's DRM lock-in mechanism.
They took the concept of music files in standard formats like MP3 and OGG, added DRM, and now have most online music sites (other than Apple) using their DRM file formats in WMP. They are also adding DRM technologies to the next generation of Windows and Office, so every file can be DRM-controlled. Why not add P2P with DRM? Makes a lot of sense. People could share files only as the original DRM allows, same as they could use Office files in e-mail and on SMB network shares only as the DRM allows. All MS wants is to control content through their DRM management - they're really, really, REALLY smart people - they do NOT want to get into the content game, where songs will trade for pennies. They want the DRM license fees from songs, movies, and all other proprietary content that is sold with DRM restrictions.
Or entry-level shakeout. Everyone hung out a shingle as a web designer in '00 and '01. Now they're gone. The supply of a lot of these sorts of people far exceeded any real or imagined demand.
Most of these people are no big loss. They read some book "for Dummies", did web pages that looked good on their PCs, and had absolutely no idea what was required in the real world of production systems. We are better off that people who don't know how to do professional work and have no professional training are gone.
I've frozen on Win2k because it's the last version that did not have the activation DRM. I imagine that's a huge concern for any enterprise. Or individual. Why would I want to install a version of Windows that MS could declare obsolete and lock me out of at any time, using their DRM? All they have to do is say something about the "lifecycle" and pull the plug. (Think they won't? I tried to install Windows Media Player 7 from an old CD on a fresh W2K repair install. The WMP7 CD will no longer install. Imagine finding that out with your OS during an emergency!)I might switch to Linux. But I won't upgrade.
I've been trying to remember the details of when MS did this once before. They intentionally messed up backwards compatibility in Office and created a huge mess, and eventually had to fix it. They had "compatibility" for old versions back then, too.
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One thing I noticed in the PDF was that a Linux server had Oracle on it. It takes 68% longer to do anything in Oracle because it's confusing and they keep changing things (like how to stop and start the database). Why don't they compare Oracle on both Windows and Linux?
Okay, so when will they get patents on: (1) getting unpaid volunteers to create content for them to help their business (in the form of reviews); (2) getting other people to generate revene for them (what percent of net sites have exec/obidos links?); (3) getting volunteers to provide free advertising their sites with exec/obidos links; etc.
People like this from big companies hate open source because there's no barrier to entry. What they've been doing is spending huge amounts of time and money developing certification exams, restricted proprietary software, etc to put a hedge around their domains so not just anyone can get in, only those who pay the barrier to entry fee by taking exams, buying software, buying SDKs, etc etc etc. Only people who are rich, or can get big companies to pay for the barrier to entry, etc can play ball. Open source destroys this hedgemony by letting anyone who can cobble together a mediocre computer (I just put SuSE 10 on an old box) have access to software and information. Anyone, even a disadvantaged person, can learn Linux, gcc, MySQL (or Postgres), etc. There is no monetary barrier to entry. A scary concept for some! So we get people screaming about socialism, unconstitutionality, etc etc etc.
Ok, so the ultra-liberal NYT runs an article saying capitalism is bad, and scoured the world to find an example. This is why people don't buy their newspaper anymore.
Many Internet ads are morally offensive. If I buy a Kiplinger's magazine (for example), I know there's little chance I will be exposed to paranoia ("everything you've ever done on your computer is still there, and you will never delete it without our software"), personal information trawling ("you've just won every device you can't afford at Best Buy if you give us your contact information"), gambling, etc. It's not the quantity of the ads as much as their content.
Either a hoax or reality could be plausible.
After all, the MS strategy all along has been to sell shovels to the 49ers trying to get rich off the Internet. They're selling DRM solutions to people and getting their $ up front, not selling content which is a race to the $0.99 bottom as competitors try to put each other out of business. This is a good strategy, if your mission is to destroy traditional copyright and make money off of content ownership and licensing.
Reality is plausible: because MS could expand their DRM to physical media. The media could self-destruct or lock out after so many days, and people could pay to unlock it. A natural extension of the WMP DRM solution for content (like long movies or uncompressed audio) that's hard to sling around over the net.
A hoax is plausible: because MS knows any physical medium with DRM content blocks is usually worked around before the DRM is in active use. (Sharpies, the shift key, etc.) If they sold a DRM solution to companies that was broken almost instantly, it would be a silly black eye for their strategy.
The moral of this story is not to buy anything with DRM protection, and then no one will be able to sell anything with DRM protection because no one will buy it!
Why would MS want to even get into this market? They're the peddlers selling shovels to the 49ers who think they'll get rich in the online music market - supplying them with DRM. Just about every music seller is just using MS's platform. (I don't even know what differentiates them.) Online music will either work and make MS a ton of licensing revenue, or it'll go belly up and MS will have a mature, proven DRM solution to sell someone else.
I guess the story wrote itself. "Anything is supposed to be more reliable than Windows, but these people tried Linux and the decision blew up in their faces and they had to crawl back to Microsoft to get a reliable operating system!" Then you read it, and it isn't even about Linux, it's about some bug in a proprietary software package. The author of the story gets credit for spinning it! Why do people read the computer industry trade press again? Oh, and "the hard work required to keep Linux up and running" - huh? I often forget how I set stuff up on my Linux servers because they run for months and years without me touching them. I have to make notes so I don't forget what I did. I don't suppose anyone has ever factored in productivity into TCO - your admin guy is solving interesting problems on a stable Linux box, while your MSCE is patching MS' mistakes every month.
To me, the most important thing is good backups. Computers come and go. They melt and fry. Hard drives die. Pilot errors trash files. Solar flares flip bits. If you don't have a great backup system in place, the best setup in the world won't be of much use. (Always have more than one copy of your backup, in case a single medium fails. If you overwrite a backup medium like a xxx-RW, make archival copies occasionally.) It's worth $50 or whatever to buy an extra hard drive just to keep a redundant, live copy of a backup. Being able to pick up and go when something fries is probably the #1 productivity enhancer that I've ever found.
The amount of dollars lost each year by pirated software, MP3 downloads, and now unproductive time seems excessive and unrealistic. I do not know how these numbers are created, and haven't kept a running total. Has anyone made a grand total of money that's lost each year? Is it more than the total amount of money in the world yet? When it is more, will these bogus numbers be questioned?
I am not knocking this book by any means. It is probably very good. But can't any developer who knows a C-ish syntax language pick up PHP basics quickly? I learned it in a day or two just by analogy with C/Perl/etc. How much need/demand is there for entry level books like this?
Where computer books have value to me is when they teach me something that would take hours/days/weeks to learn by trial-and-error. Something non-trivial that can't be guessed from reading the doc. (Like setting up user authentication or something.) That's when I start thinking about spending cash on books which have value by saving me time and especially frustration. (The PHP Cookbook, for example.)
Ami Pro: Bad business kills great product. Intuitive, easy-to-use word processor. Nothing today holds a candle to it. I probably miss it the most of any old technology. Too bad IBM can't open-source it.
LP?: What's so great about LPs? I've always wondered what audiophiles can hear that normal people can't. What is the world like to someone with that kind of hearing? To me, LPs are music set in a background roar. It was nice when I was in college and couldn't afford CDs to get an LP for $1, but the sound wasn't that good. Besides, to balance this out, since the LP era, digital remasters have made many recordings sound better than the best LP ever sounded. (Who wants the un-re-remastered version of Yes' Relayer? It didn't sound decent until the second remastering!) Plus CDs are so convenient: I can put my entire music library into a little zipper case. And I can edit out the filler ("Mother" on Synchronicity is the canonical example), and put 2 LPs on 1 CD, etc. I'll take CDs any day.
Napster: I like being able to call up out-of-print music on demand which no one will sell me for any price.
Riddle me this: In any other market, companies take unwanted inventory and sell it for scrap value just to get it off the books and salvage some value out of it. So why don't record companies take all their out-of-print music and sell it to some service that will let people download songs for a $1 membership fee or something? What do the record companies get for hoarding music? Isn't there some value in it they could squeeze out?
One major problemo with VS or any proprietary IDE is that it may increase productivity to an extent, but when you load all your code into it, and get to being productive, then you hit some show-stopping bug that has no solution, and your entire project is in some proprietary format and you're stuck. No thanks. Besides, MS keeps changing the VS file format (it used to be their proprietary bizarro make language, then a binary file, then make again, then both, etc). Then they do something like bet the company on .NET and your nice C++ IDE is suddenly this horrible proprietary language code generator. Remember Asymetrix Supercede for Java's first edition? At a time when Java IDEs were unusably slow and immature, it was a slick, fast, workable GUI builder. Then with the next version, Asymetrix turned it into a COM (what they used to call .NET) object building tool, then discontinued it. IDEs may be short-term more productive, but in the long term they've always bitten me hard and I don't like them. I prefer Emacs and make, which at least work properly and aren't going to change significantly because too many real projects use them for them to whimsically change (unlike a proprietary IDE).
And I've often thought: There should be some honor system where people who download out-of-print music could pay some small fee, maybe $0.99 or whatever the latest hit song download is, for a license to own the o-o-p sound recording. Whoever owns the rights to Mike Rutherford's Smallcreep's Day album, for example, very recently re-released it on CD, but did not include the b-side "Compression" on the re-release. This song has never appeared on CD to my knowledge. (I had a cassette dub of the LP for years.) Say I download this from a P2P server. I should be able to legalize my copy by paying a fee to the copyright holder (whoever that is!). I don't know if Jon Anderson's Animation album ever got released on CD, but that's another classic album important to the history of Yes that people want but was out of print for years. (I've never been clear about whether if you own the cassette and digitize it, or download someone else's digitized copy, if it's legal or not. I technically "own" a legal copy of the cassette release, but how does that relate to a CD with a digitized version of the LP!?) You could pay $10 or something to have a legal ownership license for the music. This way people who want to do the right thing could do it. Not an outrageous fee, but something similar to the going rate.
But make no mistake: I tried to contact a record company once and ask about paying for a song I downloaded. The e-mail went into the cosmic bit bucket and that was that. They're not the least bit interested in this! Which tells you what their priorities are.
I used to use Napster and some of the others for two things: (1) downloading music that can't be bought, i.e. out-of-print albums, b-sides, etc. and (2) trying music. Back then, I bought numerous CDs after trying music I really liked. Some of these CDs were retail CDs, where I wanted a higher quality sound than a low-grade MP3. Others were b-sides I bought on CD singles off of eBay because I wanted the better sound quality. But I also bought a lot of retail CDs I never would have bought if I had to buy them without hearing them first. So the bottom line for the RIAA is that the P2P effect is not simple: file sharing has caused me to buy music I downloaded, but not always at retail. More music may be sold as a result, but it's not all profit for the RIAA.
The unfortunate part about the new online services is you can't browse the catalogues without first signing up and selling your soul to their DRM. I would love to see if out-of-print music is available on some legal download services, such as out-of-print albums and b-sides, but I doubt there is anything on these services you can't find in Circuit City or the mall, so I don't ever sign up for the DRM.
The one thing no one ever mentions is the CD replacement effect. People who grew up listening to cassettes and LPs in the 70s and 80s got jobs in the 90s and could afford to dump their cassettes and buy CDs. This sort of generational shift in media will never happen again, and the RIAA's sales figures were bloated by people buying albums they already had. The effect is over. Everone now is buying music on CDs from the beginning, and has nothing to replace.
If you want more CS graduates, then why don't you do what the Army does? In high school, the Army will guarantee a prospective student a job upon graduation. This motivates the student to complete the course of study (ROTC or whatever) and graduate, knowing there is security for the future. The same could be done for CS students - after 1 or 2 years of a 4 year CS program, you pretty much know who "has it" and who doesn't. Guarantee the people who have it a job. They'll stick with it. But wait, MS just wants to skim a few people off the top and flush the rest, don't they?
Seems to be saying that the people on the low rung of the ladder economically are going to DeVry, ITT, etc. to get degrees in whatever. I haven't looked at their course catalog in years, but probably hasn't changed much. (They just change the buzzwords each year: "Learn VB, no VB6, no .ASP, no .NET ...".) Now, these vocational schools advertise on TV. That isn't cheap. They tend to overemphasize what their education will do for a person to get the person to write a check. Disadvantaged people see this sort of education as a way up in life.
But when they graduate with their degree in plugging in CAT-5 cables (or whatever, rebooting NT servers, I don't know...), these economically disadvantaged people are precisely the lowest rung on the totem pole, and they're the ones swept aside in layoffs. This happened in 99-00, when everyone and his grandmother hung out a shingle as a professional web site builder after reading half an HTML book and taking a class. I still remember all the articles in the NY-Times and other liberal mouthpieces about how the disadvantages were chewed up and spit out during the bubble. Supply and demand: the entry level people are victims of the economic cycle.
So this article is saying that disadvantaged people are spending a lot of money for entry-level classes for training that has very little chance of getting them anywhere. They have very little idea of what the computer industry is really like.
I suppose this is why people say both that there is great demand for trained professionals who can apply technology creatively, while at the same time there is a great oversupply of entry level talent still being shaken out.
The article seems to be confused about entry-level technical skills and the ability to apply technology creatively to solve problems.
And this happens right when they're trying to liquidate old copies of the Penguin Classics with the old covers to clear out warehouse space? :) Reminds me of grab-bags of anything - there may be one or two good books in it, but you have to buy a whole lot of crud. I'll stick to a-la-carte. BTW, Buy.com sells Penguin Classics dirt cheap.
We must be hopeful of the possibility that those companies which want to mix NT with UNIX will poison themselves, and lose. The drag of NT licensing and unreliability will put them at a competitive disadvantage. The money sink of "certification" will cause companies to send their people to seminars and training to learn how to take certification tests, which is a bottomless pit of money wastage. Meanwhile, companies with UNIX/Linux/etc will have a significant advantage as their developers generate code that helps the business instead of paying license fees to MS and sending their developers off with certification fees in hand to give to parasite certification companies who exist only to collect fees.
They are very smart. They do not want to control content (songs, movies, etc), because that's a race to the bottom on price, they want to control the DRM lock-in technology (which is licensed for a flat fee). They have almost cornered the market for DRM-controlled online 99-cent songs through WMP. They're adding DRM to Office and Windows to control files. So why not put DRM locks on P2P files? This seems like a very natural next step, providing a way for content owners lock all their files with MS's DRM lock-in mechanism.
They took the concept of music files in standard formats like MP3 and OGG, added DRM, and now have most online music sites (other than Apple) using their DRM file formats in WMP. They are also adding DRM technologies to the next generation of Windows and Office, so every file can be DRM-controlled. Why not add P2P with DRM? Makes a lot of sense. People could share files only as the original DRM allows, same as they could use Office files in e-mail and on SMB network shares only as the DRM allows. All MS wants is to control content through their DRM management - they're really, really, REALLY smart people - they do NOT want to get into the content game, where songs will trade for pennies. They want the DRM license fees from songs, movies, and all other proprietary content that is sold with DRM restrictions.
Most anti-social jobs are illegal. I think you mean "asocial" :)
Or entry-level shakeout. Everyone hung out a shingle as a web designer in '00 and '01. Now they're gone. The supply of a lot of these sorts of people far exceeded any real or imagined demand.
Most of these people are no big loss. They read some book "for Dummies", did web pages that looked good on their PCs, and had absolutely no idea what was required in the real world of production systems. We are better off that people who don't know how to do professional work and have no professional training are gone.
I've frozen on Win2k because it's the last version that did not have the activation DRM. I imagine that's a huge concern for any enterprise. Or individual. Why would I want to install a version of Windows that MS could declare obsolete and lock me out of at any time, using their DRM? All they have to do is say something about the "lifecycle" and pull the plug. (Think they won't? I tried to install Windows Media Player 7 from an old CD on a fresh W2K repair install. The WMP7 CD will no longer install. Imagine finding that out with your OS during an emergency!)I might switch to Linux. But I won't upgrade.
I've been trying to remember the details of when MS did this once before. They intentionally messed up backwards compatibility in Office and created a huge mess, and eventually had to fix it. They had "compatibility" for old versions back then, too.
I think this is it: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-279619.html