OK, I know that when you sign up the fine print gives them to right to study your emails. And I know that it's not a human being, but an automaton reading the email, and directing spam toward your screen. The Telcos are drifting in that direction. Ha, the NSA has plenty of company. And what happens when their (Google, Verizon, and the NSA) software gets good enough to be called intelligent?
Even if prosecutors aren't interested if you sign your right to privacy away, but this a good place to discuss the bigger picture.
After a few minutes of recursively going back to the source, I found this on the Net Applications web site:
We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month.
So now who can tell us succinctly and accurately what Net Apps's network consists of? Which sites are measured and which are not. What do they count, cookies, urls, gets? (It's probably proprietary information.) Is this any kind of reasonable sample? I would think that their customers constitute a horribly biased sample; just 'cause we don't know how it's biased is no comfort.
Maybe my vote's not being not being heard -- or maybe my vote is outrageously exaggerated. Net Apps brags about six news sites, and I do visit one occasionally. How is that counted?
As for me, I recently bought a Mac mini for my home desktop. It's small, it's quiet and when I update the system, nothing bad happens. It replaced an Ubuntu laptop with hardware problems. Once in a while, it's frustrating when you want to do something that Apple decided you don't really need to do. For serious work, everything I use is Linux -- which over the years kicked the hell out of Solaris in my line of work.
As for others, I'm amazed at the proliferation of Macbooks among my colleagues. Every month someone else turns up with one. Will this kill Linux on the Desktop? It'd be a real threat if Linux wasn't a server OS. But we'll have to see what dumb things Apple does over the next few years. If it dumbs down the system too much, lusting after Windows users, Apple might lose the very thing that makes Macs attractive to Linux users. In my case, Mac's X11 is just good enough for me to make use of.
On the other hand, when I think of Ubuntu, I think of little annoying things like not being able to choose your packages on install -- well, you have choice, take everything, or take only the basics. When I think of Fedora, and how you're out of date, and often out of luck every year, I get really annoyed.
Aside from security and open-sourcedness, most Flash is just plain ugly.
On Linux, I never installed the plugin. On Mac, I have flashblock. And I'm happy.
What am I missing? So much Flash content reminds me of the old popup world
It's the advertisers who are unhappy. Recently CNN has retaliated by refusing to show news video clips because I have flashblock. I never liked suffering through its ads anyway.
An American-born student has an automatic legal right to live here and work, and enjoy the richest economy ever seen in history without expending any effort. Oh, don't bore us with a few numbers about some little place somewhere else. It is indeed the richest country in the world and you know it. A foreign born student needs a pretty good excuse to get a visa and stay here.
And even though it's fun to trash our politics, this place offers the closest thing to freedom, economic, social and political, than anywhere else. We have no political police and no religious police. And our ethnic rivalries are punk compared to anywhere else.
>> Rather is is the completely corrupt and Corporate-owned American democracy I'm afraid of.
I don't want to make my karma worse than it is, but is this the skinhead perspective, or the jihad persepctive? Perhaps it is the democracy part you object to?
But I'm really curious if you believe that Google is *not* an American corporation.
This couldn't be it at a mere 1,100, but it's 2x Apple vs. Microsoft on the same day. Why?
And FWIW, I found the underlying NYT article unreadable. A guy sets out three cards on a crate on the sidewalk and asks you to guess where the thing is. You hestitate. You are a believer? A nonbeliever?
Somehow I don't feel that my privacy is threatened by the collection of terrabytes of search strings. After all the web is free and search engines are not regulated public monopoly, but it makes me sad to think of the rationales behind these business strategies. Like these:
I am what I search for on the web.
I will always be what I am now
So when I read somewhere that Jerry Seinfeld was a Scientologist, I spent 15 minutes trying to see if that's true. Does my curiosity deserve to be rewarded by a plague of Scientology ads?
And when I buy a picture book for a 1-year-old, does Amazon really have to deluge me with lists of thousands of other picture books. I pray for an online bookstore with Google's design sensibilities.
If Microsoft manages to make a buck off of this maneuver, then so will Google and eventually, they will push all the oddball pages out of our sight and give us all the variety of the standard American shopping mall.
Oracle's challenge to Red Hat might produce considerable good. I think that Red Hat is too expensive and too focused on the big enterprise. That seems like good business, since it sure attracted Oracle. But that strategy might have some deeper, long-term implications.
At some time in the recent past, Red Hat, I think, was close to being synonymous with Linux (or at least a linux you could bring home to mom). Universities that had linux networks had Red Hat networks, and all those C.S. grads were familiar with the distro. A lot of experimental software from academia was written and debugged on Red Hat, and not likely to run elsewhere. At the same time, it was possible to run a little business with Red Hat on your machines. But I think the Fedora experiment killed all that. Ask anyone who's got an FC 4 machine like me. Red Hat is just another big company -- only it's not so big and like the article points out, it doesn't own the rights to the product it sells. I think that Red Hat is to a large degree coasting on its image as one of the primo keepers of the linux flame. Its image, and service, and prices are all it has. And maybe Oracle's move will nudge Red Hat to improving its ephemeral product.
Maybe I'm out of my league here, since I'm not a big enterprise, but I'm not a hobbyist either. For several years, I maintained a RH subscription on the server that faces the outside world. It just lapsed and I'm on the fence. I know that neither Red Hat nor Oracle cares about me. I also know that I'll always be dependent on some organization to keep my systems current, and I know that the service is worth real money, but I don't like the huge divide that RH imposed on us.
I hope they're doing better than the Amazon recommendations -- or any other auto-may-I-suggest software. I see nothing there but the endless (and I mean endless) repetition of key words from the titles.
This is going to be hard to say, but I'm afraid I'm leaving you. I've been reading about WGA for a couple days and I've decided we just can't continue our relationship. I'm going to do the hard thing and wipe Windows from that beautiful featherweight Dell laptop I bought last year, you know the one. Exasperated when trying to install the security upgrades a few weeks ago, I gave in and let you put WGA on it. At the next boot, I had to wait a really long time to actually use the machine. I knew I shouldn't have caved in, but it was late and I was feeling kind of lazy. I hope you enjoyed your visit.
So now it will Linux. I'll have to do some research on which flavor installs easiest on an X1. (Maybe someone here has a suggestion.) I didn't want to make the switch because it's only my travel laptop, and it didn't seem worth fussing with the drivers and the power management and the idiotic hotel connections. But I can't take this anymore.
After surveying the couple hundred cable channels I have, and after thinking back several years to the last time I was in a movie threater, I submit that more than 90% of them are:
The things making the most noise in large, cold, damp, cavernous rooms with sticky floors, crowded with obnoxious pre-teenagers.
Animated soap operas in which misunderstood pre-teens suffer but live happily ever after.
Something of utmost importance to national security which must be protected at all cost against Chinese pirates and radical file-sharers.
When the characters are over 18, softcore porn depicting impossible positions with acrobatic body doubles.
Advertising opportunities for Coke, Pepsi and Apple, and several other brand names.
It's embarrassing that the big-time U.S. media can't even copy an article originally written in our native tongue. I guess they're too busy proving that the CIA and the NSA have spies.
Forget the computer that talks like a person, or talks back like a person. Language is hard. Let's try a domain where all the answers are written down and found in expensive textbooks.
So,
How about an artificial doctor? How many phds and tech entrepreneurs would go to one? So much better than sitting around for the real doc in an office full of sick people.
Fill out the questoinnaire with a no. 2 pencil, stick the form in the machine and wait for your prescription.
It's really not interesting to most of us to decide who invented what. That PC Mag article was boring. I would like to know if Microsoft is evil or not. Or more evil, less evil equally evil to Apple, Google or Sun.
There is a better question: what in MS Office is worth $400 to $500 when you have Open Office for free. The true answer is nothing. The practical answer is complete compatibility with MS Office.
But on the other hand, I was amused on my new laptop (Windows) that IE now announces its ability to block Javascript popups with a popup. I know it's a kind of crude way to claim credit for what Mozilla forced Microsoft to do, but somehow that gave me a feeling of hope. Maybe the silent majority isn't totally lazy, disinterested, cowed by technology and wowed by big corporations.
I remember sociology -- easy, full of jargon and pseudo-science and essentially based on common sense with a liberal bias.
Here's a course listing from the M.U. web site:
"Survey of approaches to the study of behaviors commonly regarded as deviant such as crime, sexual abuse, substance abuse, mental illness, etc."
Huh? Crime may be OK in Mr. Brent's department? In his world?
People often ignore how disreputable the news business was for most of its history. In the 18th century, journalism was no more than an adjunct to political parties (such as they were then) and its mission was to spread the party line. In many parts of the world, this is still true.
Journalism was big business 100 years later with the assorted hype and fictions that William Randolph Hearst peddled. Later, the life of the guys depicted in 'Front Page' in the 30s was real enough. Reporters were not generally educated and they were not sought after for dinner parties or boring public television shows. What they did for a living was anything but holy.
Things got serious during WW II, when everything was serious, and this notion of serious reporting began. It got very serious in Watergate when reporters brought down an unpopular president. Since then, every J-school kid dreams of bringing down a president, and they almost had one in Clinton. But what does it all mean? Newspaper reading keeps going down, down, down. The New York Times has fiction writers on the staff. All that serves to remind us that journalism is not some kind of priesthood, just people who have the cash and time to write down their stray thoughts and shoot their mouths off -- or hire others to do it for them. That, indeed, is what is protected by the Bill of Rights.
A.J. Liebling, august critic of journalism, said something like freedom of the press only applies to those who own one. There's the key. Two-hundred years ago, it was tough to typeset and print a few sheets of paper, and then how were you going to distribute them? Think of the expensive hardware a newspaper needs today. Not to mention TV, watching around the clock for every move Michael Jackson makes. But in the last 50 years, TV made mincemeat of newspapers in America.
Now the Web. Now anyone with a $500 PC and a telephone is a publisher, and has a potential worldwide audience for anything he or she cares to say. Every bit the journalist as the TV actor who shuffles the paper in front of the camera or the egomaniac who is on a mission to bring down a president, every bit as protected by the Bill of Rights.
Most newspapers and TV stations rip 'n read -- that is they go to the two or three wire services and rehash the articles. Why is that different from what happens here? Because once in a while reporters make phone calls or retype press releases? Any blogger, or whatever, who gets on a couple of mailing lists and receives announcements from business and government has everything the New York Times needs to produce its stories. What's hard about the Times's operation is those two big printing plants.
So bloggers, all you need is someone who clicks -- so get cracking on figuring out the Google page ranking and get to the top of the list -- a better deal than Ben Franklin ever had.
Statistics is a good one, for a math specialty, but like others have said: It is really up to what you want to do. Biotech, finance... others give you some extra strengths.
But careful about MBA's. In general don't waste your time and money unless you have the wherewithall to go to a top-notch program. Heavy-duty finance and accounting are useful subjects for employers. Don't bother with schools that turn out Wal-Mart trainees and burger-joint managers. Management psychology and communications are bogus subjects.
Instead of starting the next chapter of my dissertation (yes, in CS), I spent some time poking around the BLS website, and found some interesting stuff.
Despite all the handwringing, wages are up, way up for us, from 1999 to 2003:
programmers: $55K to $65K;
software engineers (what's the diff?): $66K to $76K;
researchers (ah!): $67K to $85K
And since if you didn't do this, you'd have to do something else, consider these other occupations:
Employment at the post office -- down, slowly but steadily over 10 years.
Employment at your friendly local government? up, up and up, with never a moment's hestitation over the last 10 years. (I didn't happen to find Federal employment.)
What about the dot/com boom? The "Internet publishing and broadcasting" category peaked at 51,000 jobs in 2000, and is now down to 33,000. Compare that to "Computer systems design and related services" which peaked at 1.3 million, but is now down to 1.1 million.
This stuff comes from the month National Employment, Hours and Earnings report and the annual Occupational Employment Statistics survey.
+ What would you pay for I.E.?
- Nothing, it's free.
+ How long would it be free if not for Mozilla? (And Netscape before that -- remember the big court case?)
- Always?
+ Yeah, right. OK, how much did you pay for MS Office?
- Alot.
+ Yeah, but you ought to try Open Office. It's free and it's supposed to be that way. Anything from Microsoft that's free is only that way because of what competitive pressure they haven't been able to wipe out by cutthroat tactics.
Now about this whole discussion of operating systems. It's a curious thing, but there have been no new big ideas in operating systems since the 1970's. No one who sells (or gives away the code only to sell their help-desk) operating systems had anything to do with the fundamental ideas behind a modern (if 35 years old is modern in computers) operating system. You can read all about multitasking and multiprocessing in any old operating systems textbook. About 10 years ago, what Microsoft had to offer didn't do any of those complicated things. Unix, and lots of other systems did, but not old MS DOS and not Windows 3.1. So who's doing the copying?
But now, everyone has them, and it's all in the execution, in the details. But I don't ever use Windows, hardly ever. I have an old laptop with ME, and it still crashes all the time. My last reboot here on Linux was after the big blackout last summer in the Northeast. Not fair, though; Windows has come a long way, you say, catching up, I say.
I was amused this morning when I saw an ad on the Web from Microsoft, offering to block popup windows for free. What popup windows? I use Mozilla. I never see them.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I know that when you sign up the fine print gives them to right to study your emails. And I know that it's not a human being, but an automaton reading the email, and directing spam toward your screen. The Telcos are drifting in that direction. Ha, the NSA has plenty of company. And what happens when their (Google, Verizon, and the NSA) software gets good enough to be called intelligent?
Even if prosecutors aren't interested if you sign your right to privacy away, but this a good place to discuss the bigger picture.
After a few minutes of recursively going back to the source, I found this on the Net Applications web site:
So now who can tell us succinctly and accurately what Net Apps's network consists of? Which sites are measured and which are not. What do they count, cookies, urls, gets? (It's probably proprietary information.) Is this any kind of reasonable sample? I would think that their customers constitute a horribly biased sample; just 'cause we don't know how it's biased is no comfort.
Maybe my vote's not being not being heard -- or maybe my vote is outrageously exaggerated. Net Apps brags about six news sites, and I do visit one occasionally. How is that counted?
As for me, I recently bought a Mac mini for my home desktop. It's small, it's quiet and when I update the system, nothing bad happens. It replaced an Ubuntu laptop with hardware problems. Once in a while, it's frustrating when you want to do something that Apple decided you don't really need to do. For serious work, everything I use is Linux -- which over the years kicked the hell out of Solaris in my line of work.
As for others, I'm amazed at the proliferation of Macbooks among my colleagues. Every month someone else turns up with one. Will this kill Linux on the Desktop? It'd be a real threat if Linux wasn't a server OS. But we'll have to see what dumb things Apple does over the next few years. If it dumbs down the system too much, lusting after Windows users, Apple might lose the very thing that makes Macs attractive to Linux users. In my case, Mac's X11 is just good enough for me to make use of.
On the other hand, when I think of Ubuntu, I think of little annoying things like not being able to choose your packages on install -- well, you have choice, take everything, or take only the basics. When I think of Fedora, and how you're out of date, and often out of luck every year, I get really annoyed.
Aside from security and open-sourcedness, most Flash is just plain ugly.
On Linux, I never installed the plugin. On Mac, I have flashblock. And I'm happy.
What am I missing? So much Flash content reminds me of the old popup world
It's the advertisers who are unhappy. Recently CNN has retaliated by refusing to show news video clips because I have flashblock. I never liked suffering through its ads anyway.
I remember clearly the day I started to reject Google cookies
That was a day I was sick to my stomach while traveling for work. You know, flu sick, feverish, throwing-up sick in a hotel room. I was not happy.
I was using my gmail account to complain to my girlfriend. She was sympathetic, but Google ... that's another story.
Being sick, I didn't dwell on the fact that Google reads my mail, and then targets me with what their very intelligent software thinks I want.
Google thought I needed to lose weight, and filled up the right hand column with diet ads. You know, stomach -> (no) appetite -> fat -> diet.
So now I live without Gmail, Google maps, and this and that other thing, but I'm happier.
And I don't care what IBM says.
An American-born student has an automatic legal right to live here and work, and enjoy the richest economy ever seen in history without expending any effort. Oh, don't bore us with a few numbers about some little place somewhere else. It is indeed the richest country in the world and you know it. A foreign born student needs a pretty good excuse to get a visa and stay here.
And even though it's fun to trash our politics, this place offers the closest thing to freedom, economic, social and political, than anywhere else. We have no political police and no religious police. And our ethnic rivalries are punk compared to anywhere else.
>> Rather is is the completely corrupt and Corporate-owned American democracy I'm afraid of. I don't want to make my karma worse than it is, but is this the skinhead perspective, or the jihad persepctive? Perhaps it is the democracy part you object to? But I'm really curious if you believe that Google is *not* an American corporation.
Or why blogs are not journalism:
Bloomberg says the Wall Street Journal says.
Don't you guys see that there is a difference between reading a newspaper and writing one?
This couldn't be it at a mere 1,100, but it's 2x Apple vs. Microsoft on the same day. Why?
And FWIW, I found the underlying NYT article unreadable. A guy sets out three cards on a crate on the sidewalk and asks you to guess where the thing is. You hestitate. You are a believer? A nonbeliever?
Here's what Cerf said: and that 150 million of them might be participants in a botnet -- nearly all of them unwilling.
Here's what Slashdot said Cerf said: he estimates that at this point one in four computers is infected with botnet software.
Hyping the hype. To what end, s.d.?
Somehow I don't feel that my privacy is threatened by the collection of terrabytes of search strings. After all the web is free and search engines are not regulated public monopoly, but it makes me sad to think of the rationales behind these business strategies. Like these:
So when I read somewhere that Jerry Seinfeld was a Scientologist, I spent 15 minutes trying to see if that's true. Does my curiosity deserve to be rewarded by a plague of Scientology ads?
And when I buy a picture book for a 1-year-old, does Amazon really have to deluge me with lists of thousands of other picture books. I pray for an online bookstore with Google's design sensibilities.
If Microsoft manages to make a buck off of this maneuver, then so will Google and eventually, they will push all the oddball pages out of our sight and give us all the variety of the standard American shopping mall.
Oracle's challenge to Red Hat might produce considerable good. I think that Red Hat is too expensive and too focused on the big enterprise. That seems like good business, since it sure attracted Oracle. But that strategy might have some deeper, long-term implications.
At some time in the recent past, Red Hat, I think, was close to being synonymous with Linux (or at least a linux you could bring home to mom). Universities that had linux networks had Red Hat networks, and all those C.S. grads were familiar with the distro. A lot of experimental software from academia was written and debugged on Red Hat, and not likely to run elsewhere. At the same time, it was possible to run a little business with Red Hat on your machines. But I think the Fedora experiment killed all that. Ask anyone who's got an FC 4 machine like me. Red Hat is just another big company -- only it's not so big and like the article points out, it doesn't own the rights to the product it sells. I think that Red Hat is to a large degree coasting on its image as one of the primo keepers of the linux flame. Its image, and service, and prices are all it has. And maybe Oracle's move will nudge Red Hat to improving its ephemeral product.
Maybe I'm out of my league here, since I'm not a big enterprise, but I'm not a hobbyist either. For several years, I maintained a RH subscription on the server that faces the outside world. It just lapsed and I'm on the fence. I know that neither Red Hat nor Oracle cares about me. I also know that I'll always be dependent on some organization to keep my systems current, and I know that the service is worth real money, but I don't like the huge divide that RH imposed on us.
I hope they're doing better than the Amazon recommendations -- or any other auto-may-I-suggest software. I see nothing there but the endless (and I mean endless) repetition of key words from the titles.
This is going to be hard to say, but I'm afraid I'm leaving you. I've been reading about WGA for a couple days and I've decided we just can't continue our relationship. I'm going to do the hard thing and wipe Windows from that beautiful featherweight Dell laptop I bought last year, you know the one. Exasperated when trying to install the security upgrades a few weeks ago, I gave in and let you put WGA on it. At the next boot, I had to wait a really long time to actually use the machine. I knew I shouldn't have caved in, but it was late and I was feeling kind of lazy. I hope you enjoyed your visit.
So now it will Linux. I'll have to do some research on which flavor installs easiest on an X1. (Maybe someone here has a suggestion.) I didn't want to make the switch because it's only my travel laptop, and it didn't seem worth fussing with the drivers and the power management and the idiotic hotel connections. But I can't take this anymore.
It's been swell.
After surveying the couple hundred cable channels I have, and after thinking back several years to the last time I was in a movie threater, I submit that more than 90% of them are:
It's embarrassing that the big-time U.S. media can't even copy an article originally written in our native tongue. I guess they're too busy proving that the CIA and the NSA have spies.
Forget the computer that talks like a person, or talks back like a person. Language is hard. Let's try a domain where all the answers are written down and found in expensive textbooks.
So,
How about an artificial doctor? How many phds and tech entrepreneurs would go to one? So much better than sitting around for the real doc in an office full of sick people.
Fill out the questoinnaire with a no. 2 pencil, stick the form in the machine and wait for your prescription.
It's really not interesting to most of us to decide who invented what. That PC Mag article was boring. I would like to know if Microsoft is evil or not. Or more evil, less evil equally evil to Apple, Google or Sun. There is a better question: what in MS Office is worth $400 to $500 when you have Open Office for free. The true answer is nothing. The practical answer is complete compatibility with MS Office. But on the other hand, I was amused on my new laptop (Windows) that IE now announces its ability to block Javascript popups with a popup. I know it's a kind of crude way to claim credit for what Mozilla forced Microsoft to do, but somehow that gave me a feeling of hope. Maybe the silent majority isn't totally lazy, disinterested, cowed by technology and wowed by big corporations.
I remember sociology -- easy, full of jargon and pseudo-science and essentially based on common sense with a liberal bias. Here's a course listing from the M.U. web site: "Survey of approaches to the study of behaviors commonly regarded as deviant such as crime, sexual abuse, substance abuse, mental illness, etc." Huh? Crime may be OK in Mr. Brent's department? In his world?
People often ignore how disreputable the news business was for most of its history. In the 18th century, journalism was no more than an adjunct to political parties (such as they were then) and its mission was to spread the party line. In many parts of the world, this is still true. Journalism was big business 100 years later with the assorted hype and fictions that William Randolph Hearst peddled. Later, the life of the guys depicted in 'Front Page' in the 30s was real enough. Reporters were not generally educated and they were not sought after for dinner parties or boring public television shows. What they did for a living was anything but holy. Things got serious during WW II, when everything was serious, and this notion of serious reporting began. It got very serious in Watergate when reporters brought down an unpopular president. Since then, every J-school kid dreams of bringing down a president, and they almost had one in Clinton. But what does it all mean? Newspaper reading keeps going down, down, down. The New York Times has fiction writers on the staff. All that serves to remind us that journalism is not some kind of priesthood, just people who have the cash and time to write down their stray thoughts and shoot their mouths off -- or hire others to do it for them. That, indeed, is what is protected by the Bill of Rights. A.J. Liebling, august critic of journalism, said something like freedom of the press only applies to those who own one. There's the key. Two-hundred years ago, it was tough to typeset and print a few sheets of paper, and then how were you going to distribute them? Think of the expensive hardware a newspaper needs today. Not to mention TV, watching around the clock for every move Michael Jackson makes. But in the last 50 years, TV made mincemeat of newspapers in America. Now the Web. Now anyone with a $500 PC and a telephone is a publisher, and has a potential worldwide audience for anything he or she cares to say. Every bit the journalist as the TV actor who shuffles the paper in front of the camera or the egomaniac who is on a mission to bring down a president, every bit as protected by the Bill of Rights. Most newspapers and TV stations rip 'n read -- that is they go to the two or three wire services and rehash the articles. Why is that different from what happens here? Because once in a while reporters make phone calls or retype press releases? Any blogger, or whatever, who gets on a couple of mailing lists and receives announcements from business and government has everything the New York Times needs to produce its stories. What's hard about the Times's operation is those two big printing plants. So bloggers, all you need is someone who clicks -- so get cracking on figuring out the Google page ranking and get to the top of the list -- a better deal than Ben Franklin ever had.
Statistics is a good one, for a math specialty, but like others have said: It is really up to what you want to do. Biotech, finance ... others give you some extra strengths.
But careful about MBA's. In general don't waste your time and money unless you have the wherewithall to go to a top-notch program. Heavy-duty finance and accounting are useful subjects for employers. Don't bother with schools that turn out Wal-Mart trainees and burger-joint managers. Management psychology and communications are bogus subjects.
Despite all the handwringing, wages are up, way up for us, from 1999 to 2003:
programmers: $55K to $65K;
software engineers (what's the diff?): $66K to $76K;
researchers (ah!): $67K to $85K
And since if you didn't do this, you'd have to do something else, consider these other occupations:
Employment at the post office -- down, slowly but steadily over 10 years.
Employment at your friendly local government? up, up and up, with never a moment's hestitation over the last 10 years. (I didn't happen to find Federal employment.)
What about the dot/com boom? The "Internet publishing and broadcasting" category peaked at 51,000 jobs in 2000, and is now down to 33,000. Compare that to "Computer systems design and related services" which peaked at 1.3 million, but is now down to 1.1 million.
This stuff comes from the month National Employment, Hours and Earnings report and the annual Occupational Employment Statistics survey.
+ What would you pay for I.E.? - Nothing, it's free. + How long would it be free if not for Mozilla? (And Netscape before that -- remember the big court case?) - Always? + Yeah, right. OK, how much did you pay for MS Office? - Alot. + Yeah, but you ought to try Open Office. It's free and it's supposed to be that way. Anything from Microsoft that's free is only that way because of what competitive pressure they haven't been able to wipe out by cutthroat tactics. Now about this whole discussion of operating systems. It's a curious thing, but there have been no new big ideas in operating systems since the 1970's. No one who sells (or gives away the code only to sell their help-desk) operating systems had anything to do with the fundamental ideas behind a modern (if 35 years old is modern in computers) operating system. You can read all about multitasking and multiprocessing in any old operating systems textbook. About 10 years ago, what Microsoft had to offer didn't do any of those complicated things. Unix, and lots of other systems did, but not old MS DOS and not Windows 3.1. So who's doing the copying? But now, everyone has them, and it's all in the execution, in the details. But I don't ever use Windows, hardly ever. I have an old laptop with ME, and it still crashes all the time. My last reboot here on Linux was after the big blackout last summer in the Northeast. Not fair, though; Windows has come a long way, you say, catching up, I say. I was amused this morning when I saw an ad on the Web from Microsoft, offering to block popup windows for free. What popup windows? I use Mozilla. I never see them.