after reading your post several times over the only thing i can fathom is that you completely misunderstood my post. of course tech workers need to understand computers. we write software, build hardware, and build systems that abstract the details for the common 99.9% of other computer users. yes, of course some people must understand the details, but most people do not want to, and thanks to the efforts of a lot of folks here they do not have to. and yes, i am overjoyed that someone pays me to write software.
what that 99.9% of other computer users want is point and click, drag and drop. that is why windows and osx are popular desktops. that is why people use ms office, open office, and excel. that is why people do not use nroff, tex, bc, and vi for their productivity.
there's nothing to prove, and no opinion involved here. just look around you. look at the non-tech populace and see how they user computers. enough said.
Goofus would rather turn on his computer and be a corporate tool for Microsoft without giving a second thought to how much richer the world would be, intellectually speaking, if everyone spent a little more time actually learning how computers worked instead of learning MS specific pointy clickety stuff.
i hate to tell you this, but 99.9% of computer users want pointy clicky stuff in some form. they do not want to undestand how computers work, and they never will. and why should they learn any of this crap? software and hardware can be made to give us this out of the box, without any extra effort. for 99.9% of the population, computers are or will soon be appliances that you turn on, play games, read your email, browse the web, and then turn them off. 99.9% of the people don't want to learn this stuff either. they have their families and other outside interests and other interesting things that they would rather spend them time on.
the source of the information is not a blog. the blog is just a discussion of it. linked from the blog, the source of the information is
here.
the author is herbert h. thompson, of securit innovation,
About Dr. Herbert Thompson, Chief Security Strategist
Dr. Thompson is a world-renown expert in application security and is an adjunct professor at Florida Institute of Technology. He has co-authored or edited 12 books including, "How to Break Software Security: Effective Techniques for Security Testing" (2004, Addison Wellesley) and most recently, "The Software Vulnerability Guide." (2005, Charles River Media)
At Security Innovation, Dr. Thompson is responsible for the overall security and research efforts, along with training developers and security testers at some of the world's largest software companies including Microsoft, VISA, HP, IBM, Cisco, Symantec, ING and SAP
ya okay so now you are going to call his credentials into question. okay, go ahead. the point is, he does have credentials, and the source of this story is not some nobody with a blog and an opinion.
Re:PS3? No thanks, Sony; you screwed the pooch
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 1
bah.
this is the same excuse used by many companies to excuse treating you like crap. it seems like in the last 5 years, anytime i have an issue with a company be it support, or whatever, the answer i get boils down to "not my fault". oh, the problem was caused by our partners, not us. oh, that is another division. oh, that was bob, i'm bill. oh, i just work here. companies hide behind many, many curtains to avoid directly dealing with a consumers problems. don't let them get away with it.
well hey, can you imagine how great games will be 50 years from now? i guess nothing today would deserve a score over 0.1 compared to those future games.
sorry, that's not the way capitalistic markets work. so you think that even though the demand for hybrid cars is going up and up, car makers aren't going to respond by making more of them? if anything, toyota will flood the market with them, and prices will go down... coupled with all of the other car makers that are going to have hybrids on the market.
i had always concluded that since a hybrid engine is more complex, there are more things to break, so overall maintanence would be more costly. that is just my thought though, and i cannot back that up.
Then there is no... clutch to wear out, and no gear-shifting
well... your assumption here is that the prius's CVT is less costly to maintain / lasts longer than a traditional clutch. that would surprise me, but again, i can't back it up.
i looked seriously at getting into a toyota prius earlier this year... here is my conclusion. the car was way overpriced for the quality. i was browsing the top of the line prius, which went for $27k. no discounts because it's in such high demand. honestly, the quality of the car was of something much less expensive. i think a $15k honda civic (gas) would wear much better. what really got me was the upholstery. it felt very cheap.
so then you calculate the real cost. say the civic gets 30mpg, and the prius 60mpg (this is really giving the prius to much credit, but just for the sake of discussion). say you spend $40/week in gas on the civic, you'd then spend $20/week on the prius. you save $20/week on gas with the prius. but, you paid $12,000 more for the prius. divide 10,000 by 20, and you get 500, which is the number of weeks you'd need to drive the prius to break even. 500 weeks ~ 9.61 years. now factor in the possible battery replacement.
i understand that at least part of this conclusion is based on the fact that the prius is in high demand, and therefore overpriced right now.
does anyone have anything more than speculation on how viable this would be? i would tend to think that a large % of an artist's revenue is still based on CD sales. if that is true, then you will NEVER get them to sign with itunes. sorry, but artists are humans also, and they aren't going to throw away 90% of their incomes for some philosophical battle over the cost of digital downloads.
and btw, jobs will never do this either. he answers to apple's stockholders. stockholders, like the artist, also do not care about philosophical battles. they care about the price of the stock. even in this was a success for apple in the long-long-term, in the short term it would really kill them.
i sort of disagree with you. i believe that the ipod-itunes duo is what drives sales for apple. they feed into each. both ipod and itunes dominate their respective markets. you might buy an ipod because it gives you such a nice experience when you use itunes. or you might use itunes because it works so well with your ipod. either way, apple wins.
unfortunately for firefox, i think the issue of "safe browsing" is getting so well known and serious that MSFT is going to solve it before it becomes necessary for users to switch. i have complete confidence that MSFT will throw whatever's necessary at this problem and that IE 7 will provide a safe enough web browsing experience.
maybe it's not unfortunate really, since if IE 7 is safer, that's a good thing for everyone.
so maybe... firefox's niche is now as a cross-platform browser.
imagine if your house was broken into and a large amount of valuables stolen, but the police wouldn't come out to look at it because you didn't donate enough to the last election or you weren't in a high enough tax bracket
in a lot of places, this is already the case. for example: i had a $1k+ mt. bike stolen, and all i got was the privilige of filling out a form online. absolutely nothing happens. IMO, the police have done nothing to directly help me in my entire life.
the network is unrealiable, and terribly slow. i was lost in a large city once. as it turns out, i was ten blocks from my destination. it took me exactly ten blocks to connect to the network and use the browser to find a simple address. this is typical. it loses connection, or has very slow response time.
this experience was the last straw. i canceled my pay-per-megabyte plan and i have not used the network features since. my next phone will just be a phone.
One format will win in the end (remember beta vs vhs) and a group (either HDDVD or Blu-ray) will be left with a bunch of worthless media down the road (ie. beta).
not necessarily. the other option is that neither win; they both fail. like has been said many times throughout this thread, DVD is good enough for almost everyone. heck, i am good with single-layer DVD quality. heck, i am good with a DVD squashed into a 700MB xvid. the average consumer just upgraded to DVD not so long ago. now you are going to try to get them to switch to something else? as a consumer, why would you purchase a new player, and the (probably) higher cost media? the only thing you'll get out of it is better quality video that won't be noticable on 95% of the TVs.
my prediction is that neither of these technologies will win over DVD. consumers will by and large reject them both. neither technology will catch on, and the real DVD replacement will be some new technology that we aren't talking about yet.
Who cares how much money you make if you're so swamped you can't enjoy it? I am considering a career change for this very reason.
instead of changing careers, why not do your time at your current job, and take thay copius amount of excess cash your earning and use it to obtain some sort of financial independence? work 20 years, and spend 30 more on a perpetual vacation. that doesn't sound too bad.
I'm no apologist for China's continued lack of human and political rights, but at the same time at least the government appears to be leading economic growth, which is much more than I can say for Cuba...
cuba has been under attack, both active and passive, for decades now. sure, it's hard to argue that cuba would be a world economic leader otherwise, but when you take it's largest potential importer, and it's largest possible source of tourism out of the picture, it's sort of tough for them to get a break.
maybe you could be more forthcoming about what free-thinking nation you are a citizen of. then we can compare notes as to which population is more aware of the world around them.
i know you've been trying to make some sort of circuitous argument about the connection between you and this other guy, but get this, assuming there is any substance to your posts, your experience is an anomaly. one anomaly doesn't prove another. let me repeat: one anomaly doesn't prove another. if your experience wasn't an anomaly, and that's how business worked, there would be no interviews at all. the fact that there are interviews proves that your experience is an anomaly. the fact that 99% of businesses conduct interviews is proof that your experience is an anomaly. businesses would not waste hours of their employees' precious time for interviews if they knew they were already hiring the person.
i am sure there are positions where you show up and get hired, but a high-end engineering leadership position at MSFT (or anywhere) is not one of them. say what you want about MSFT, but it's well-known that they are extrememely picky about who they hire. they do not send emails to folks like "hi, you're hired for the lead engineer position. please show up on monday in redmond to claim your $150k + bonus."
maybe, just maybe this whole thing was another anomaly for ESR, but the fact remains that it is egotistical to assume a random spam from a MSFT recruiter is a job offer. they are many, many other posters to this thread that have gotten such emails, and they have not been job offers, but rather requests for an interview. there is no evidence to support this is any different.
the difference is that the laws broken in streets of china's cities, for the most part, stay in china. if you buy a pirated DVD, there is not so great a chance that you will bring it to other countries. if you advertise copyrighted material on the web, anyone from all over the world can download that same DVD.
yes i am sure some of the illegally duplicated western media makes it to other countries, but at not nearly the rate that it can be distributed over the internet.
Do they really think they are saving money by switching to open source linux?
yes, probably. sun positions the JDS package as a cost saving alternative to MSFT. i'd have to assume that they did some homework and validated this, in their case at least, to be true. sun is not known for having great sales persons, so it's unlikely that they won such a deal by bamboozling the client.
They want to implement this over a couple of years, by that time maybe something new comes up.
first, it takes corporations years to do this sort of thing. that's just the way it is. no matter what the solution might be. so they should wait for something new to come up, and then apply the same logic that if they wait even longer, something newER will come up, and then... etc. second, corporations aren't concerned about something new coming up. they want a stable solution, for the long term. they aren't so interested in running the latest version of every piece of software like you are on your desktop maybe.
Why any rationally thinking country would want to be at the mercy of a foreign owned commercial entity is beyond me.
as far a being foreign owned, that's inevitable it today's world.
as far as being a commercial entity, companies want 1) service folks to come in and deploy the solution for them and 2) they want a phone number to call when things are broken. sure, you can pay someone to deploy an open source solution, but i don't think the average company cares as long as they get #1 and 2.
I don't know what to tell you. I have work for every employer's job that i interviewed for.
how many employers have said to you "hey sumdumass, i read your resume and i really like you, let's skip the phone screen, and what the heck let's skip the face-face interview too, you're hired!" if that had happend to you, then you might, just might, be saying something that makes sense here. even in that case, you are one person, a sample size of one. if that had happend to you, it would be contrary to the experience of anyone else i've every heard of, and every company i've ever worked for, and every hiring process i've ever been involved in.
obviously, employers wouldn't even bother with job interviews if they didn't use them to decide if they wanted to hire someone. they would not waste 5 hours of employee time to run a person through interviews for nothing.
Most companies i'm aware of interview thier first pick in hopes of keeping them then going onto the next best canidate of that doesn't work out.
no, most certainly not. every serious company interviews multiple candidates for the position, even if they really like the first one. that is standard, good, practice.
the only thing i can do here is assume you are full of it about being hired anywhere other than burger king based on how you reason through problems.
Slashdot Mirror
please. companies "believe" in whatever makes them money.
what that 99.9% of other computer users want is point and click, drag and drop. that is why windows and osx are popular desktops. that is why people use ms office, open office, and excel. that is why people do not use nroff, tex, bc, and vi for their productivity.
there's nothing to prove, and no opinion involved here. just look around you. look at the non-tech populace and see how they user computers. enough said.
i hate to tell you this, but 99.9% of computer users want pointy clicky stuff in some form. they do not want to undestand how computers work, and they never will. and why should they learn any of this crap? software and hardware can be made to give us this out of the box, without any extra effort. for 99.9% of the population, computers are or will soon be appliances that you turn on, play games, read your email, browse the web, and then turn them off. 99.9% of the people don't want to learn this stuff either. they have their families and other outside interests and other interesting things that they would rather spend them time on.
don't be a tech snob.
the source of the information is not a blog. the blog is just a discussion of it. linked from the blog, the source of the information is here.
the author is herbert h. thompson, of securit innovation,
About Dr. Herbert Thompson, Chief Security Strategist Dr. Thompson is a world-renown expert in application security and is an adjunct professor at Florida Institute of Technology. He has co-authored or edited 12 books including, "How to Break Software Security: Effective Techniques for Security Testing" (2004, Addison Wellesley) and most recently, "The Software Vulnerability Guide." (2005, Charles River Media)
At Security Innovation, Dr. Thompson is responsible for the overall security and research efforts, along with training developers and security testers at some of the world's largest software companies including Microsoft, VISA, HP, IBM, Cisco, Symantec, ING and SAP
ya okay so now you are going to call his credentials into question. okay, go ahead. the point is, he does have credentials, and the source of this story is not some nobody with a blog and an opinion.
bah.
this is the same excuse used by many companies to excuse treating you like crap. it seems like in the last 5 years, anytime i have an issue with a company be it support, or whatever, the answer i get boils down to "not my fault". oh, the problem was caused by our partners, not us. oh, that is another division. oh, that was bob, i'm bill. oh, i just work here. companies hide behind many, many curtains to avoid directly dealing with a consumers problems. don't let them get away with it.
well hey, can you imagine how great games will be 50 years from now? i guess nothing today would deserve a score over 0.1 compared to those future games.
whatever 22.2 is, it sure sounds like a lotta speakers.
this is exactly the type of sharp, quick witted analysis that keeps me reading slashdot.
sorry, that's not the way capitalistic markets work. so you think that even though the demand for hybrid cars is going up and up, car makers aren't going to respond by making more of them? if anything, toyota will flood the market with them, and prices will go down ... coupled with all of the other car makers that are going to have hybrids on the market.
Then there is no ... clutch to wear out, and no gear-shifting
well ... your assumption here is that the prius's CVT is less costly to maintain / lasts longer than a traditional clutch. that would surprise me, but again, i can't back it up.
so then you calculate the real cost. say the civic gets 30mpg, and the prius 60mpg (this is really giving the prius to much credit, but just for the sake of discussion). say you spend $40/week in gas on the civic, you'd then spend $20/week on the prius. you save $20/week on gas with the prius. but, you paid $12,000 more for the prius. divide 10,000 by 20, and you get 500, which is the number of weeks you'd need to drive the prius to break even. 500 weeks ~ 9.61 years. now factor in the possible battery replacement.
i understand that at least part of this conclusion is based on the fact that the prius is in high demand, and therefore overpriced right now.
and btw, jobs will never do this either. he answers to apple's stockholders. stockholders, like the artist, also do not care about philosophical battles. they care about the price of the stock. even in this was a success for apple in the long-long-term, in the short term it would really kill them.
i sort of disagree with you. i believe that the ipod-itunes duo is what drives sales for apple. they feed into each. both ipod and itunes dominate their respective markets. you might buy an ipod because it gives you such a nice experience when you use itunes. or you might use itunes because it works so well with your ipod. either way, apple wins.
maybe it's not unfortunate really, since if IE 7 is safer, that's a good thing for everyone.
so maybe ... firefox's niche is now as a cross-platform browser.
in a lot of places, this is already the case. for example: i had a $1k+ mt. bike stolen, and all i got was the privilige of filling out a form online. absolutely nothing happens. IMO, the police have done nothing to directly help me in my entire life.
this experience was the last straw. i canceled my pay-per-megabyte plan and i have not used the network features since. my next phone will just be a phone.
not necessarily. the other option is that neither win; they both fail. like has been said many times throughout this thread, DVD is good enough for almost everyone. heck, i am good with single-layer DVD quality. heck, i am good with a DVD squashed into a 700MB xvid. the average consumer just upgraded to DVD not so long ago. now you are going to try to get them to switch to something else? as a consumer, why would you purchase a new player, and the (probably) higher cost media? the only thing you'll get out of it is better quality video that won't be noticable on 95% of the TVs.
my prediction is that neither of these technologies will win over DVD. consumers will by and large reject them both. neither technology will catch on, and the real DVD replacement will be some new technology that we aren't talking about yet.
instead of changing careers, why not do your time at your current job, and take thay copius amount of excess cash your earning and use it to obtain some sort of financial independence? work 20 years, and spend 30 more on a perpetual vacation. that doesn't sound too bad.
cuba has been under attack, both active and passive, for decades now. sure, it's hard to argue that cuba would be a world economic leader otherwise, but when you take it's largest potential importer, and it's largest possible source of tourism out of the picture, it's sort of tough for them to get a break.
maybe you could be more forthcoming about what free-thinking nation you are a citizen of. then we can compare notes as to which population is more aware of the world around them.
i am sure there are positions where you show up and get hired, but a high-end engineering leadership position at MSFT (or anywhere) is not one of them. say what you want about MSFT, but it's well-known that they are extrememely picky about who they hire. they do not send emails to folks like "hi, you're hired for the lead engineer position. please show up on monday in redmond to claim your $150k + bonus."
maybe, just maybe this whole thing was another anomaly for ESR, but the fact remains that it is egotistical to assume a random spam from a MSFT recruiter is a job offer. they are many, many other posters to this thread that have gotten such emails, and they have not been job offers, but rather requests for an interview. there is no evidence to support this is any different.
yes i am sure some of the illegally duplicated western media makes it to other countries, but at not nearly the rate that it can be distributed over the internet.
yes, probably. sun positions the JDS package as a cost saving alternative to MSFT. i'd have to assume that they did some homework and validated this, in their case at least, to be true. sun is not known for having great sales persons, so it's unlikely that they won such a deal by bamboozling the client.
They want to implement this over a couple of years, by that time maybe something new comes up.
first, it takes corporations years to do this sort of thing. that's just the way it is. no matter what the solution might be. so they should wait for something new to come up, and then apply the same logic that if they wait even longer, something newER will come up, and then ... etc. second, corporations aren't concerned about something new coming up. they want a stable solution, for the long term. they aren't so interested in running the latest version of every piece of software like you are on your desktop maybe.
no, it just says that the currently shipping version for linux is release 2.
as far a being foreign owned, that's inevitable it today's world.
as far as being a commercial entity, companies want 1) service folks to come in and deploy the solution for them and 2) they want a phone number to call when things are broken. sure, you can pay someone to deploy an open source solution, but i don't think the average company cares as long as they get #1 and 2.
how many employers have said to you "hey sumdumass, i read your resume and i really like you, let's skip the phone screen, and what the heck let's skip the face-face interview too, you're hired!" if that had happend to you, then you might, just might, be saying something that makes sense here. even in that case, you are one person, a sample size of one. if that had happend to you, it would be contrary to the experience of anyone else i've every heard of, and every company i've ever worked for, and every hiring process i've ever been involved in.
obviously, employers wouldn't even bother with job interviews if they didn't use them to decide if they wanted to hire someone. they would not waste 5 hours of employee time to run a person through interviews for nothing.
Most companies i'm aware of interview thier first pick in hopes of keeping them then going onto the next best canidate of that doesn't work out.
no, most certainly not. every serious company interviews multiple candidates for the position, even if they really like the first one. that is standard, good, practice.
the only thing i can do here is assume you are full of it about being hired anywhere other than burger king based on how you reason through problems.