Even at their lowest point, Apple had about four billion dollars in the bank, and almost no outstanding debt. When Jobs came back, their balance started climbing rapidly, and has ever since.
For "desktop linux," I don't see why the system isn't reworked to run off of a frame-buffer and scrap all the X crap -- still keep X for running networked apps. Keith Packard talked about this at his 'State of the X.org' Google Tech Talk; he pointed out that toolkits that abandon X and just bang the framebuffer get *worse* performance than running the same toolkits on top of X. The solution is not to ditch X, but to accept that, despite all efforts to the contrary, X is here to stay, and work from that platform forward.
I hope this finally serves as a "wake up call" for Linux lickers and lovers that using Linux does increase chances of violence and murder. Linux is bad juju
This reminds me of what happened with DVDs when they first came out. Ever seen an early DVD disc? One of the ones with four or five movie previews at the start, which publishers configured to be unskippable? So you have to watch them over, and over, every time you want to watch the movie?
This is also similar to the ads that all HD-DVD discs I've played contain... ads for HD-DVD. 'The look and sound of perfect!' Great, except I already have a damn HD-DVD player! I'm already sold!.
It seems like studios just don't get it sometimes.
electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room. But the fourth wall stayed up! And that's what you're getting, son - the strongest data centre in all of Texas!
The 'grace period' in Canada is three months, during which time they can decide that they don't want you and let you go without notice. After that, you're a full-on employee, so they have to give you notice and have some kind of a reason. Six months might be something that an employer can add in an employment agreement, but I've never seen it.
Since coming to Vancouver in August, I've had several jobs - I've just started my sixth - and a few more interviews. The first was Starbucks - just to pay the bills while I was looking for something more solid. The longer I was here, the more technical the jobs and more reputable the company. My last job was for the Coastal Health Authority, the province's largest employer. My first job (after Starbucks) was a half-assed tech company in Gastown that doesn't recognize the value of their employees or their time.
Be entirely prepared to end up talking to companies that survive despite their management, not because of it. A job can sound fantastic until you start talking about benefits or salary - at which point you may well hear an offer that makes you wish you'd asked over the phone. I had one interview with a company (which took me an hour to get to) that lasted all of ten minutes, after waiting in their lobby for ten minutes. The end of the interview was when I asked about salary range, and was told 'low end, $30k... high end, $32k'. This is potentially a living wage in Vancouver, if you live alone and commute for an hour. Potentially.
I've also had interviews that I thought went really well, for positions for which I was a good match, and was told 'We'll let you know'. Most of the time, they'll give a timeframe (since I usually ask by when they're planning to make their decision), usually 'within a week'. Usually I never hear from these companies again, until I e-mail them to ask how things are going and when I can expect a decision, to which they generally reply 'We've decided to go with someone else'. It seems that courtesy, for many companies, just isn't on the books.
Don't be afraid to say 'no' to an unreasonable salary or an uninteresting position. I had a job offer for Canada's largest independent record label, which manages or records most of my favourite artists. I went in, talked to the IT manager, he was impressed by what I knew. Called me back a week later with an offer that I declined. I told him that I appreciated his offer, but it wasn't worth leaving a company I was comfortable with for such a small raise. He called me back a few days later with a substantially higher offer. Good companies will do business this way.
Most importantly, don't get discouraged. You'll see a lot of Microsoft jobs, with inexperienced monkeys getting snapped up for them. It might take you months before you land a good job, or you might have one before you even get here. In the end, the only reason I've gotten the job I have (which, so far, is fantastic) is because I didn't give up, and I didn't settle. I've felt bad for leaving one company to go work for another, then leaving that one two months later, but you have to do what's right for you, and good employers will understand.
I disagree here. I've never found a job through the Canada Job Bank, and for that matter, have never even seen a decent job posted there (maybe it's changed since then).
There is no 'definitive place' to look for jobs in Canada, as each region has their own quirks, peculiarities, and preferences. The biggest site I know of for actual job postings (many of them highly technical, like Linux kernel development) is T-Net Jobs. That said, I've found all of my jobs through Craigslist, oddly enough (and I make pretty good money), with one exception (where a recruiter called me for job that I didn't apply for through them).
Honestly, a lot of the local companies that are recruiting talent (as opposed to 'hiring employees') can be found on Craigslist. Same goes for apartments and cheap couches.
In Vancouver, you can find a lot of the jobs on T-net. I've had this recommended to me many times after moving to Vancouver, and while I didn't get any of my jobs through it, that's largely because I'm not as qualfiied as the high-end candidates.
I can only assume that by 'selling really well' he means that commercial transactions involving Vista have a high probability of success, and not that the amount of such transactions is by any means impressive.
You should check out Colba-Net. They're a small, private ISP, and they've been moving their customers slowly from Bell's infrastructure over to their own. This means if you're in the area they've upgraded, you not only get ADSL2+ speeds, but also avoid Bell's P2P capping as well.
Check them out. A friend used to work for them and did all their installations, so I know a little about their upgrade, but as with anything, it really depends on where on the island you are.
But the GPL doesn't just limit corporations from making and selling products; keep in mind that it also prevents a lot of code-sharing between open-source projects.
For example, the BSD kernels can't accept any code from Linux that might happen to benefit them (or any other GPL'ed code), but FreeBSD's license hasn't stopped them from adding support for ZFS and Dtrace, for example, as OS X has also done.
In comparison, Linux can add neither ZFS nor Dtrace without completely re-implementing them from scratch (or Sun changing the licensing from their current open-source license to one that's GPL-compatible, which they shouldn't have to do).
Not to mention that while plastic can be, and often is, recycled, wood generally gets thrown out and rots (or vice-versa). It doesn't get recycled, even though potentially it could be, and so the trees used to make them get used once.
In addition, wood and steel are heavier than plastics, which can increase shipping costs dramatically, and pulling metals out of the earth and running huge smelting plants is hardly environmentally friendly either (though moreso these days than before).
Let me see... tomorrow is going to be the food crisis again, then Darfur on Thursday... Friday through the weekend is the crisis in China with the earthquake, and then on Monday we're going to go bowling, and I need to do some laundry.
Of course it's complicated - that's why we need to fund Greenpeace to keep track of it all for us, so that they can tell us what to be afraid of and what company we should boycott pointlessly this week.
Except that the XBox 360 and PS3 can often use even more than the Wii. If you turn off the Wii's 'connect24' option, it's measured at 1.3 watts, as seen in this article.
With the PS3, if you leave it on 'remote play' standby, it uses 24 watts. This guy did some interesting measurements. Among the more interesting ones:
Satellite TV receiver (non DVR), standby or off: 15 watts. ReplayTV DVR: 30 watts standby, 34 watts active. Christmas tree, sparsely lit: 61 watts. HP Compaq 2510p work laptop, idle: 67 watts.
So if you're really concerned about how much power your Wii uses in standby, make sure you're unplugging your receivers, DVRs, christmas trees, and computers when not using them as well.
But that's standby? What about when they're on and running? The first article mentioned shows some interesting figures - namely that the 360 averages 185 watts, the PS3 averages 193 watts, their test PC averaged 198 watts, and the Wii averaged... 17 watts?
So the Wii uses 1.3 watts idle, 9-11 watts on Connect24-idle, and 17 watts while active.
The PS3 uses as low as 1.9 watts idle, 24 watts in 'remote start' standby, and up to 193 watts while playing a game.
Terrorism is also the use of fear and intimidation tactics as a form of unconventional or psychological warfare, which I think includes most of Greenpeace's activities pretty well.
Greenpeace for years has used fearmongering and scare tactics to frighten people into thinking that the world will explode if we don't do whatever they say. They've lied repeatedly to the public to try and make their point, and they've performed (potentially valuable) scientific studies, only to ignore the results when they didn't match up with what they wanted the study to conclude.
There are a lot of things wrong with how we treat the environment. There are a lot of groups out there that are trying to make things better. Greenpeace is not one of them, and its actions only give a bad name to those people who do honestly and truly care about environmental issues and the life of our planet.
but the Intel name seems to have gone a long way in assuaging consumer doubts about buying a Mac. Or, more likely, the ability to say 'I hate OS X, I'm going back to Windows' without having wasted a thousand dollars has provided a comfortable fallback so people aren't out as much if they decide they didn't like the choice they made.
Oh, and being able to run Windows at the same time as OS X is a pretty nice touch too.
I have no idea what the EULA is. If I found something distasteful in it, I have the option of refusing and returning the software (the software itself generally says this).
Fair enough. I should have prefaced my comments by saying that they, by and large, refer to the current 'instant gratification' generation. Previous generations, even just my parents' generation, are more hard working and industrious.
It wasn't that long ago that people could/would keep one job their whole lives (see the story of Gabe's grandfather in a previous Penny Arcade news post). Nowadays, people change their *careers* seven times on average; I've had seven jobs in the past year (well, I start the seventh this week). Crazy.
It's QuakeTV! Live, unedited, uncensored footage from earthquakes all over the world! This is the quake lover's dream channel!
See earthquakes from exotic, foreign lands like Peru and Canada on our premiere programming, QuakeWatch! Or, tune in Thursday nights for a special episode of Classic Quakes, featuring a different home-grown American quake every week!
Tune in for the best documentaries about earthquakes, the latest quake news and reviews, and more! QuakeTV is the only channel a quake-watcher will ever need.
Call your cable company today to order QuakeTV, and see what's shakin' tonight!
One of the recurring issues I've seen in American attitudes towards offshoring and immigrants smacks largely of racism and racial superiority. A lot of people, sadly, seem to have a sense of entitlement, a sense that they deserve the jobs or have somehow earned them through no action whatsoever.
In my experience, I've noticed that the immigrants who 'take our jobs' generally take one of two types of jobs:
1. Undesirable jobs that 'white people' don't want to do - e.g. janitorial work, low-paying service jobs, monotonous jobs like security guard, or hard jobs like construction (hours in the sun, hours in the rain, etc.). 2. Highly skilled, educated jobs involving science or technology.
The reasons I've come up with to explain this, and I could be completely off here, are as such:
1. Coming from poorer, less-educated countries, immigrants appreciate the value of a dollar. They don't take for granted that there will be food on the table, good working conditions, and a roof over their heads. They work for it because they know what it's like to go without it (or they've seen it a lot closer than 'we' have). 2. They know the value of hard work. You don't get something for nothing, but people these days (myself included) try to get their something for as little as they can. Poorer Americans in particular are always looking for the 'quick fix', because they've been deluded into believing in the 'American Dream' - dream long enough and good things will come out of nowhere. They don't try to raise themselves up, because they expect someone else to do it for them. 3. Once they get something, they work to keep it. They know that there's always someone else who'll take their job if they don't want it, there's always someone else who wants their apartment. They know they can't coast, because there's no safety net to protect them. I've seen a lot of people get hired for jobs and then act as though the company can't do without them, sometimes immediately. The result is that the company puts up with them as long as they need to, then lets them go.
Point three was particularly emphasized during the dot-com boom, where anyone who could install Linux demanded a six-figure income, stock options, company car, and six weeks of paid vacation a year. When crunch time came, there were a lot of people who would gladly do this supposed $120k job for a measly $60k, and who wouldn't barter for anything other than their wages. Suddenly the arrogant 'I'm the king of the world' geeks found themselves a lot less welcome than they had been.
I've considered that this most likely extends from the American Supremacy doctrine that most Americans seem to be taught - that America, God bless her, is the best country in the world, and everyone else is just jealous because they're second-best. This seems to engender an attitude of American people being better than non-Americans, because... well, I'm not sure. Everyone seems to have their own reasons that they come up with from their own personal experiences or opinions.
All this wraps up to an immigrant workforce who's willing to get their hands dirty andwork to earn their wage, and who won't take their employer for granted. Sound good to you? Sounds good to me.
Now let's consider outsourcing. The average salary for a Sr. Software Engineer in the US is around $90k according to PayScale.com. Not bad, that's more than I make. In India, however, the wage is about 580,000 rupees, or around $13,500. You could pay someone in India pretty well by Indian standards and still save a ton of money by American standards.
Most opponents of outsourcing point to several things at this point. First, foreign workers aren't well-educated like American workers are. Secondly, the quality of their work is lousy (possibly as a result). The problem with these two statements is the staggering number of completely incompetent, short-sighted, narrow-minded 'programmers' I've seen with degrees from universities in the US. The fact is that while a good education makes a b
Slashdot Mirror
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
Even at their lowest point, Apple had about four billion dollars in the bank, and almost no outstanding debt. When Jobs came back, their balance started climbing rapidly, and has ever since.
SpamEggsSausageAndSpam
This reminds me of what happened with DVDs when they first came out. Ever seen an early DVD disc? One of the ones with four or five movie previews at the start, which publishers configured to be unskippable? So you have to watch them over, and over, every time you want to watch the movie?
This is also similar to the ads that all HD-DVD discs I've played contain... ads for HD-DVD. 'The look and sound of perfect!' Great, except I already have a damn HD-DVD player! I'm already sold!.
It seems like studios just don't get it sometimes.
A few comments on this...
The 'grace period' in Canada is three months, during which time they can decide that they don't want you and let you go without notice. After that, you're a full-on employee, so they have to give you notice and have some kind of a reason. Six months might be something that an employer can add in an employment agreement, but I've never seen it.
Since coming to Vancouver in August, I've had several jobs - I've just started my sixth - and a few more interviews. The first was Starbucks - just to pay the bills while I was looking for something more solid. The longer I was here, the more technical the jobs and more reputable the company. My last job was for the Coastal Health Authority, the province's largest employer. My first job (after Starbucks) was a half-assed tech company in Gastown that doesn't recognize the value of their employees or their time.
Be entirely prepared to end up talking to companies that survive despite their management, not because of it. A job can sound fantastic until you start talking about benefits or salary - at which point you may well hear an offer that makes you wish you'd asked over the phone. I had one interview with a company (which took me an hour to get to) that lasted all of ten minutes, after waiting in their lobby for ten minutes. The end of the interview was when I asked about salary range, and was told 'low end, $30k... high end, $32k'. This is potentially a living wage in Vancouver, if you live alone and commute for an hour. Potentially.
I've also had interviews that I thought went really well, for positions for which I was a good match, and was told 'We'll let you know'. Most of the time, they'll give a timeframe (since I usually ask by when they're planning to make their decision), usually 'within a week'. Usually I never hear from these companies again, until I e-mail them to ask how things are going and when I can expect a decision, to which they generally reply 'We've decided to go with someone else'. It seems that courtesy, for many companies, just isn't on the books.
Don't be afraid to say 'no' to an unreasonable salary or an uninteresting position. I had a job offer for Canada's largest independent record label, which manages or records most of my favourite artists. I went in, talked to the IT manager, he was impressed by what I knew. Called me back a week later with an offer that I declined. I told him that I appreciated his offer, but it wasn't worth leaving a company I was comfortable with for such a small raise. He called me back a few days later with a substantially higher offer. Good companies will do business this way.
Most importantly, don't get discouraged. You'll see a lot of Microsoft jobs, with inexperienced monkeys getting snapped up for them. It might take you months before you land a good job, or you might have one before you even get here. In the end, the only reason I've gotten the job I have (which, so far, is fantastic) is because I didn't give up, and I didn't settle. I've felt bad for leaving one company to go work for another, then leaving that one two months later, but you have to do what's right for you, and good employers will understand.
I disagree here. I've never found a job through the Canada Job Bank, and for that matter, have never even seen a decent job posted there (maybe it's changed since then).
There is no 'definitive place' to look for jobs in Canada, as each region has their own quirks, peculiarities, and preferences. The biggest site I know of for actual job postings (many of them highly technical, like Linux kernel development) is T-Net Jobs. That said, I've found all of my jobs through Craigslist, oddly enough (and I make pretty good money), with one exception (where a recruiter called me for job that I didn't apply for through them).
Honestly, a lot of the local companies that are recruiting talent (as opposed to 'hiring employees') can be found on Craigslist. Same goes for apartments and cheap couches.
In Vancouver, you can find a lot of the jobs on T-net. I've had this recommended to me many times after moving to Vancouver, and while I didn't get any of my jobs through it, that's largely because I'm not as qualfiied as the high-end candidates.
More importantly, smaller allows it to fit into smaller devices, meaning larger-capacity USB drives, cellphones, and iPods.
I can only assume that by 'selling really well' he means that commercial transactions involving Vista have a high probability of success, and not that the amount of such transactions is by any means impressive.
You should check out Colba-Net. They're a small, private ISP, and they've been moving their customers slowly from Bell's infrastructure over to their own. This means if you're in the area they've upgraded, you not only get ADSL2+ speeds, but also avoid Bell's P2P capping as well.
Check them out. A friend used to work for them and did all their installations, so I know a little about their upgrade, but as with anything, it really depends on where on the island you are.
Couldn't hurt to call.
No wonder the Department of the Interior is insecure, they're six years behind on their patches!
They'll get it done, just give them a chance to catch up on their e-mail and slashdot first.
But the GPL doesn't just limit corporations from making and selling products; keep in mind that it also prevents a lot of code-sharing between open-source projects.
For example, the BSD kernels can't accept any code from Linux that might happen to benefit them (or any other GPL'ed code), but FreeBSD's license hasn't stopped them from adding support for ZFS and Dtrace, for example, as OS X has also done.
In comparison, Linux can add neither ZFS nor Dtrace without completely re-implementing them from scratch (or Sun changing the licensing from their current open-source license to one that's GPL-compatible, which they shouldn't have to do).
Not to mention that while plastic can be, and often is, recycled, wood generally gets thrown out and rots (or vice-versa). It doesn't get recycled, even though potentially it could be, and so the trees used to make them get used once.
In addition, wood and steel are heavier than plastics, which can increase shipping costs dramatically, and pulling metals out of the earth and running huge smelting plants is hardly environmentally friendly either (though moreso these days than before).
Let me see... tomorrow is going to be the food crisis again, then Darfur on Thursday... Friday through the weekend is the crisis in China with the earthquake, and then on Monday we're going to go bowling, and I need to do some laundry.
Of course it's complicated - that's why we need to fund Greenpeace to keep track of it all for us, so that they can tell us what to be afraid of and what company we should boycott pointlessly this week.
You can disable Connect24 if you like, which will drop you down to about 1.3 watts from the 9 to 11 watts typical.
Except that the XBox 360 and PS3 can often use even more than the Wii. If you turn off the Wii's 'connect24' option, it's measured at 1.3 watts, as seen in this article.
With the PS3, if you leave it on 'remote play' standby, it uses 24 watts. This guy did some interesting measurements. Among the more interesting ones:
Satellite TV receiver (non DVR), standby or off: 15 watts.
ReplayTV DVR: 30 watts standby, 34 watts active.
Christmas tree, sparsely lit: 61 watts.
HP Compaq 2510p work laptop, idle: 67 watts.
So if you're really concerned about how much power your Wii uses in standby, make sure you're unplugging your receivers, DVRs, christmas trees, and computers when not using them as well.
But that's standby? What about when they're on and running? The first article mentioned shows some interesting figures - namely that the 360 averages 185 watts, the PS3 averages 193 watts, their test PC averaged 198 watts, and the Wii averaged... 17 watts?
So the Wii uses 1.3 watts idle, 9-11 watts on Connect24-idle, and 17 watts while active.
The PS3 uses as low as 1.9 watts idle, 24 watts in 'remote start' standby, and up to 193 watts while playing a game.
Sorry Greenpeace - which system is greener?
Terrorism is also the use of fear and intimidation tactics as a form of unconventional or psychological warfare, which I think includes most of Greenpeace's activities pretty well.
Greenpeace for years has used fearmongering and scare tactics to frighten people into thinking that the world will explode if we don't do whatever they say. They've lied repeatedly to the public to try and make their point, and they've performed (potentially valuable) scientific studies, only to ignore the results when they didn't match up with what they wanted the study to conclude.
There are a lot of things wrong with how we treat the environment. There are a lot of groups out there that are trying to make things better. Greenpeace is not one of them, and its actions only give a bad name to those people who do honestly and truly care about environmental issues and the life of our planet.
That's why they're terrorists.
Oh, and being able to run Windows at the same time as OS X is a pretty nice touch too.
I have no idea what the EULA is. If I found something distasteful in it, I have the option of refusing and returning the software (the software itself generally says this).
How can I agree to something I haven't read yet?
Fair enough. I should have prefaced my comments by saying that they, by and large, refer to the current 'instant gratification' generation. Previous generations, even just my parents' generation, are more hard working and industrious.
It wasn't that long ago that people could/would keep one job their whole lives (see the story of Gabe's grandfather in a previous Penny Arcade news post). Nowadays, people change their *careers* seven times on average; I've had seven jobs in the past year (well, I start the seventh this week). Crazy.
It's QuakeTV! Live, unedited, uncensored footage from earthquakes all over the world! This is the quake lover's dream channel!
See earthquakes from exotic, foreign lands like Peru and Canada on our premiere programming, QuakeWatch! Or, tune in Thursday nights for a special episode of Classic Quakes, featuring a different home-grown American quake every week!
Tune in for the best documentaries about earthquakes, the latest quake news and reviews, and more! QuakeTV is the only channel a quake-watcher will ever need.
Call your cable company today to order QuakeTV, and see what's shakin' tonight!
One of the recurring issues I've seen in American attitudes towards offshoring and immigrants smacks largely of racism and racial superiority. A lot of people, sadly, seem to have a sense of entitlement, a sense that they deserve the jobs or have somehow earned them through no action whatsoever.
In my experience, I've noticed that the immigrants who 'take our jobs' generally take one of two types of jobs:
1. Undesirable jobs that 'white people' don't want to do - e.g. janitorial work, low-paying service jobs, monotonous jobs like security guard, or hard jobs like construction (hours in the sun, hours in the rain, etc.).
2. Highly skilled, educated jobs involving science or technology.
The reasons I've come up with to explain this, and I could be completely off here, are as such:
1. Coming from poorer, less-educated countries, immigrants appreciate the value of a dollar. They don't take for granted that there will be food on the table, good working conditions, and a roof over their heads. They work for it because they know what it's like to go without it (or they've seen it a lot closer than 'we' have).
2. They know the value of hard work. You don't get something for nothing, but people these days (myself included) try to get their something for as little as they can. Poorer Americans in particular are always looking for the 'quick fix', because they've been deluded into believing in the 'American Dream' - dream long enough and good things will come out of nowhere. They don't try to raise themselves up, because they expect someone else to do it for them.
3. Once they get something, they work to keep it. They know that there's always someone else who'll take their job if they don't want it, there's always someone else who wants their apartment. They know they can't coast, because there's no safety net to protect them. I've seen a lot of people get hired for jobs and then act as though the company can't do without them, sometimes immediately. The result is that the company puts up with them as long as they need to, then lets them go.
Point three was particularly emphasized during the dot-com boom, where anyone who could install Linux demanded a six-figure income, stock options, company car, and six weeks of paid vacation a year. When crunch time came, there were a lot of people who would gladly do this supposed $120k job for a measly $60k, and who wouldn't barter for anything other than their wages. Suddenly the arrogant 'I'm the king of the world' geeks found themselves a lot less welcome than they had been.
I've considered that this most likely extends from the American Supremacy doctrine that most Americans seem to be taught - that America, God bless her, is the best country in the world, and everyone else is just jealous because they're second-best. This seems to engender an attitude of American people being better than non-Americans, because... well, I'm not sure. Everyone seems to have their own reasons that they come up with from their own personal experiences or opinions.
All this wraps up to an immigrant workforce who's willing to get their hands dirty andwork to earn their wage, and who won't take their employer for granted. Sound good to you? Sounds good to me.
Now let's consider outsourcing. The average salary for a Sr. Software Engineer in the US is around $90k according to PayScale.com. Not bad, that's more than I make. In India, however, the wage is about 580,000 rupees, or around $13,500. You could pay someone in India pretty well by Indian standards and still save a ton of money by American standards.
Most opponents of outsourcing point to several things at this point. First, foreign workers aren't well-educated like American workers are. Secondly, the quality of their work is lousy (possibly as a result). The problem with these two statements is the staggering number of completely incompetent, short-sighted, narrow-minded 'programmers' I've seen with degrees from universities in the US. The fact is that while a good education makes a b