Obviously, the hardware and its capabilities don't matter. Apple didn't get this market because they were first (they were not) or because they are best (they are not--other players have better UIs, more capabilities, more storage, etc. at less money). Apple got this market because of integration with their on-line store, and a good deal of branding, marketing, and design.
For example, to say something is associate with a 240% increase in risk can be technically accurate, but horribly misleading to most readers.
I think the problem there is with "most readers", not with an accurate statement of the risk increase. Furthermore, the absolute numbers are stated in the article, and knowing the population of Sweden, it's easy to compute the absolute risk.
Has anyone ever been able to give a rat cancer by blasting it with amplified cellphone-type radiation? That would convince me of the possibility of cell phone risk much more than digging backward through statistical inormation does.
In addition to heating, microwaves appear to induce measurable changes in cells in tissue culture.
Doing the direct experiment would be a massive undertaking: if it takes 10 million human brains irradiated over 20 years to induce an extra 50 tumors, you'd need a lot of rats for a measurable effect. And you can't just up the radiation dose because then you cook the brains.
Physicists say it can't be, so it cell phones must be safe, right? After all, cell phone radiation is non-ionizing, therefore it couldn't possibly alter DNA and physicists have determined (based on some unstated first principles that non-physicists just aren't smart enough to understand) that the only way EM radiation can damage cells is through smashing DNA, cell phones must be perfectly safe. Therefore, this study, like the ones preceding it, must be wrong. Right.
Is it worth the price? Possibly not. Are the entire front + back office system's features matched ANYWHERE? No.
The kind of setup makes sense if you're already wedded to the Office file formats. For most real-world uses, however, the best thing to do is likely to ditch the office suite entirely and go with in-browser WYSIWYG editing.
Once you take the office suite out of the equation, any of a number of excellent systems give you all the functionality of your Office+Sharepoint+LCS setup at a fraction of the cost (installation, training, maintenance).
You may still laugh at the notion of thin clients and in-browser applications, but it's happening. Even Microsoft is realizing that. Office is a dinosaur, burdened with features that make no sense in a modern computing environment and that are difficult to support in a modern collaborative, networked environment.
From my point of view, the place of Mandrake as an easy-to-use desktop distribution has been taken by Ubuntu. I know--they are very different distributions internally, but to me, they feel similar.
I think all the on-line music stores using DRM, including iTunes, are a big rip-off; and the few on-line music stores that don't use DRM don't have the music I want.
Physical CDs give me content I want without DRM, they provide proof that I own the music, and they provide a physical backup. If that weren't a music distribution model already, someone would have to invent it.
For free music, I use podcasts; they deliver interesting and new stuff onto my machine every day.
So, by doing this simulation of a tiny span of time, the team was able to get new insight into the process of viral replication that would be extremely difficult to come by with experimental techniques.
The fact that DNA is a structural part of viruses and often required for their assembly and stability has been well know for a long time. So, this result is not novel. It's also not hard to demonstrate this experimentally in many cases.
Spore has a good (though not novel) concept and appears to have a reasonable design, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good game or a popular game. Whether a game succeeds or fails, you only know once it's in the market.
If someone were intending to show a genetic component to personality, he or she would first have to show a physiological component to personality. That has yet to happen.
Personality has an extensive physiological component, as demonstrated by numerous drugs that alter personality, as well as numerous well-documented and consistent changes to personality from brain trauma and injury. Something as simple as testosterone alters personality.
To date, there heve been exactly zero scientific studies that point to a genetic component of personality, including the famous twins studies of the late 1990s.
There are so many demonstrations of genetic components of different aspects of personality that this isn't even worth anything debating anymore.
It's kind of ironic that, just as the right wing has their creationists, the left wing has a group of people like you that, for purely ideological reasons, deny elementary facts about individual differences.
The real argument against eugenics and racism is not to deny, against scientific evidence, that there are genetic differences between individuals and groups of people, it is to respect, accept, and support people regardless of what genes they happened to have inherited.
I actually worked at Microsoft and I do know better from my own experience and from talking with other employees at Microsoft. [...] You could easily find someone intelligent with a decent background and train them in a matter of weeks to do the job. [...] Lol... It's not just me. Money is a predominant consideration for most people.
I think that tells pretty much your whole story: you're an ex-Microsoft employee, primarily interested in maximizing your salary, and you think that being a skilled at something takes a few weeks of training.
Let's see... there is no dearth of American applicants, but MS says there are. There is no dearth of computer science students graduating, but MS says there are.
Because someone has a CS degree from Podunk U. and wrote some Perl code during the dotCom boom, we are supposed to consider them a serious member of the applicant pool? It doesn't work that way. 90% of the people who are in the IT industry would require years of additional training before one should let them near a computer, yet many of them are creating software and are responsible for the safety and security of all of us; it is frightning.
There are several IT shortages. The kind of shortage I'm talking about is a shortage of the kind of people who graduate with honors from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, and a few other schools. You can't create these people with "a few weeks of training". In fact, you can't create them at all--there's a limited supply of them.
The only reason you can get away with this is because there are tons of people looking for jobs. [...] But, since you can have the pick of the litter, you don't want to do this.
Actually, we don't get away with it; we leave positions unfilled and turn down business. It's simply not worth trying to retrain barristas or put up with people like you in our line of work.
When the files were deleted, the laptop was not properly under his control because he was allegedly no longer an employee when he did the deletion. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act comes into play, according to the judge, because the secure deletion program was in some way "transmitted" onto the laptop before it was used to do the "damage".
Yes, that's the legal reasoning of the judge; I just think it's wrong.
First of all, since the employment contract provides for the ability to delete files when employment terminates, it recognizes that there is a period after the termination of employment where the employee still has control over the system and may still do things with the system. (I also wonder whether it was established that the deletion actually took place before the actual termination of employment.)
Second, the CFAA was just not intended to cover such cases as when laptops are physically in the posession of someone. The act was specifically intended to address problems with networked computers. Even if a criminal steals a computer and then reinstalls the OS, he should not fall under this act, he should simply be charged under applicable theft and destruction of private property laws. I can't figure out whether Posner is playing word games deliberately or whether he just doesn't understand what "transmit" means, but his decision is unreasonable.
What people do with their laptops when employment terminates should be a simple contractual matter between the employer and the employee. Extending the CFAA to such cases is not only legally questionable, it's also bad for business because it limits the way businesses can structure their relationships with their employees. Many businesses tolerate and encourage reasonable private use of business laptops, and this decision really should worry anybody using a laptop in that way.
If people can prove you destroyed evidence in a murder case that you were legally obligated to hand over to the police, you'll be convicted of destruction of evidence. Whether you'll also be convicted of the murder depends on whether there is still a good case against you after you destroyed the evidence. That's not "next", the law has worked that way for centuries.
In this case, the original dispute was a contractual dispute, which will have to be resolved without the data on the computer now. The guy is now being charged with computer tampering, which is a priori a reasonable charge in this case (although I think that in this specific case, it's a misapplication of the law).
Deleting files can have legal consequences: if it's prohibited by your contract, if it's data shared with others, or if the evidence has already been subpoenaed.
This decision seems wrong, however: preventing people from deleting files on laptops under their control was not what the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was intended for (note, in particular, that it makes reference to a networked computer). Whether the employee was allowed to files should be a matter purely of their employment contract and the stated corporate policies.
Further, I don't believe for one second that MS can't find skilled and qualified workers with all those tons of resumes they get.
Well, you may not believe it, but it's nevertheless true. My company is inviting less than 1% of the applicants we get for interviews, and even most of those aren't any good.
There are a lot of people who fancy themselves IT workers who'd be better off at Starbucks. In fact, the industry would be better off if those people were at Starbucks because the way it is, we have a lot of incompetent people are making bad collective decisions that set the direction of the industry for years to come.
Salaries don't even enter into the application process anyway--at good places, salary is discussed only after a decision to hire has been made.
It is more likely that they are only saying that they can't find qualified workers in order to justify importing more cheap labor from overseas.
Well, you can believe whatever hare-brained conspiracy theory you like, but the fact is that if they don't import the labor, they're just going to move large parts of their operations overseas altogether. Of course, that's fine as far as I'm concerned: for a company like Microsoft to derive a large chunk of its revenue overseas but create skilled jobs primarily in the US is unfair. It's also going to cause resentment and political problems elsewhere. Fortunately, companies are already moving large parts of their operations overseas, so your wish will be granted: they'll import less and less foreign labor into the US.
Lol... It's not just me. Money is a predominant consideration for most people.
Yes, and most people also don't have what it takes to land a job at Microsoft or any of the other good places that are complaining that they can't find skilled workers.
Regardless of the seemingly predominant hatred of Microsoft on Slashdot, there are plenty of people who hold no ill will towards the company. MS gets a ton of resumes on a regular basis. If MS doubled their salaries, you would see a great deal more people rushing to try to work there.
I agree with that assessment. So, how does that help Microsoft's skilled labor shortage? If they are already getting tons of resumes and they can't hire the people they need, how is getting more of the same kinds of applicants going to help them?
Sorry, I don't see it. "Please, please, give me less money!" No...
I'm sorry for you that money is a predominant consideration in your choice of jobs.
According to employees, who said they would be fired if they spoke on the record, the annual review amounts to little more than a closed-door popularity contest in which managers "fight" for higher scores for their team, or defer to higher-level decision makers who mandate how many workers drop to the bottom of the review scale.
One employee in the company's Mobile and Embedded Devices group said when it comes to her review score, "my performance is about 10 percent of the whole equation."
Another employee denounced a compensation system that is "capricious in its tolerance of managers who corrupt the system for their personal gain," and blamed consecutive low-rankings on a "well-entrenched culture of favoritism."
These geeks have trouble with the real world. In the real world, evaluations, rankings, and decisions are 90% politics, personal connections, popularity, and power. We may all wish that it were more rational and more based in quantifiable criteria, but it isn't. That's why we get the politicians and business leaders we do.
If you come up with a better system and manage to implement it, let us all know. Of course, the implementation itself will require you to become a politician using his personal connections, popularity, and power...
Paying higher salaries doesn't make skilled workers appear magically Microsoft probably pretty much has scooped up all the skiled technical workers they are ever going to get; few other people are going to be willing to work for them even if they paid twice as much as they do now.
I know in my career, I have always chosen job offers with substantially lower salaries than the highest available offer, and I'm quite typical that way.
Furthermore, even if hiring IT workers were like buying widgets, there is a salary beyond which the cost/benefit calculations for hiring another IT worker just don't work out. At that point, the salaries stop rising and you have an IT labor shortage.
Zuck claims a liberal education, so we have to conclude that he is deliberately ignoring one of the fundamental rules of quoting people: when talking about what people might say, you only put into quote things that people actually said, and if the quotation is controversial, you must provide a source. As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that Stallman ever used the religious and inflammatory term "vanities", but even if he did, quoting him would require a source and context. Zuck wrote:
Stallman would argue that you don't. He views these practicalities, hybrids and commercial compromises as "vanities" that divert attention away from the real issue,
An honest author must avoid any appearance of putting words into people's mouth.
As for Stallman, Zuck is right to the degree that Stallman is indeed concerned only with making sure that software is free. But Zuck tries to portray Stallman as someone who will deliberately cause mayhem and destruction in order to further his cause and elevate himself, and that's wrong. Stallman may do things that are controversial and that are painful, but he does them because he believes them to be the right thing to do.
Others have pointed out that Zuck is president of ACT and what this means, so it's not surprising where these statements are coming from.
Ok. I've heard that, but what are your sources citing problems with C/C++?
I'm not sure what you are asking for. There is a literature going back 20 years about trying to make C and C++ type safe. Microsoft themselves has come up with several (research) modifications trying to fix C and C++, until they finally gave up and adopted C#. Look around the Microsoft Research web site for their past efforts.
I've heard about equally that they are unable to do a great deal of what they would like in C#
C# has full pointer manipulation support, so I can't imagine how they felt constrained.
That isn't to say that C# is the best programming language for all applications. In fact, for some specialized applications, one does need languages without garbage collection and without reflection (but 99% of the programmers out there aren't writing such applications).
And as a purely practical matter, one often has to choose C or C++. I've been a C and C++ programmer for about two decades. But that's knowing full well the limitations of those languages. The primary reason for choosing C or C++ is their popularity, not their design.
The European gene pool had little to do with their spread. Read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond or watch it on PBS [CC]. Basically everyone was equal, but some had better resources / environment.
Actually, the "Germs" part of that book is very much related to genes: Europeans carried diseases, plus the genes that conferred resistance to them. Diamond himself argues that that's probably one of the ways in which Europeans had an advantage when it came to conquest. So, Diamond supports my point.
Second, Diamond's thesis isn't as simple as "Europeans succeeded because they had better resources". He pointed out that peoples on other continents had fewer domesticable animals, for example, but he also points out that even those that did didn't use them as effectively.
Third, Diamond's thesis is just a thesis, written in a populist book; that doesn't make it a scientifically supported theory. So, it's silly to go around quoting Diamond as fact.
The problem with you is that you're so politically correct that you simply can't deal with the fact that people differ genetically from one another at the population level, and will perform differently in different environments. Most of those differences are not, in fact, "better" or "worse" in an overall sense, but that doesn't change the fact that they exist and that they also can make differences in human conflict and competition. Problems only arise when people like you start attaching values to that. The fact that I probably wouldn't last two weeks in the Papua New Guinea jungle, but that my ancestors managed to go to the New World and kill off most of the population with smallpox, doesn't make my genes better or worse overall, it just is just a genetic difference that happened to work well once in a particular historical context.
re you of the Nazi philosophy? They also believed in the genteic supiriority of the aryan (european) race, and also thought such was a justification in the might is right sense.
I did not say that European genes were "superior", I said that they may have helped Europeans in their conquests. That's "superior" only if you attach a positive value to killing and maiming. Do you? Because if you do, you're the Nazi.
Most new genetic development is resultant of mating selection pressures and epidemic disease immunity's.
And that's one of the things that helped Europeans in their conquests: carrying a whole range of diseases and being resistant to them.
Dont confuse genetics with politics.... its a really bad idea... which has resulted in some really bad consequences.
So, why do you keep doing that? Why do YOU keep attaching value judgements to biological properties?
Linux has full support for suspending and hibernating; the problem isn't with Linux, the problem is with buggy ACPI implementations on laptops: most implementations simply don't conform to the ACPI specifications. They seem to have been created by hardware vendors fiddling with the implementation until it works, more or less, with the current version of Windows.
I also don't share your rosy views of suspend and hibernate on other platforms. On my Powerbook, there is no hibernate at all (although you can apparently enable it through the command line, and it hangs every now and then on restart. On the Windows laptops I have had, I have had numerous problems with suspend and hibernate as well.
Still, it is a shame that Suspend2 won't be integrated into the main kernel; when all is said and done, Suspend2 actually has worked better for me than any of the other solutions, precisely because it does not rely on ACPI or APM at all.
Ask developers at Microsoft if they developed Vista in 100% C# before taking that perspective young man, you might be surprised at the response that you get.
Thank you for illustrating my point.
Microsoft has, in fact, hired many of the top language designers of the world because they think languages matter.
Microsoft has been pushing hard for a move to managed runtimes.
And Microsoft's severe problems with their previous C/C++ efforts are the reason for that.
So, lots of people at Microsoft have come to the conclusion that languages matter a great deal, and that's why they are investing probably hundreds of millions of dollars in that.
I think that article isn't seeing the forest for the trees.
In fact, natural selection has clearly operated at a huge scale, when Europeans settled every corner of the globe, while indiginous populations have disappeared or mingled. Genes associated with those Europeans have spread, while many others have nearly disappeared.
This is an example of group selection, and it has selected many genes at once; some of them may have helped Europeans in their conquests, others may have just been along for the ride.
On the flipside, medical and environmental advances probably are causing us to lose functions at a massive rate: no need to deal with food-born pathogens if you don't encounter any.
Evolution isn't as neat and simple as "better mammal wins" or "better gene gets selected".
The Chinese are illustrative of another interesting development in evolution: limiting population growth in the absence of high child mortality and in the presence of modern medical technologies and genetic testing. Whatever policies nations adopt in that environment, they'll end up acting as "natural" selection as well.
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Obviously, the hardware and its capabilities don't matter. Apple didn't get this market because they were first (they were not) or because they are best (they are not--other players have better UIs, more capabilities, more storage, etc. at less money). Apple got this market because of integration with their on-line store, and a good deal of branding, marketing, and design.
For example, to say something is associate with a 240% increase in risk can be technically accurate, but horribly misleading to most readers.
I think the problem there is with "most readers", not with an accurate statement of the risk increase. Furthermore, the absolute numbers are stated in the article, and knowing the population of Sweden, it's easy to compute the absolute risk.
Has anyone ever been able to give a rat cancer by blasting it with amplified cellphone-type radiation? That would convince me of the possibility of cell phone risk much more than digging backward through statistical inormation does.
In addition to heating, microwaves appear to induce measurable changes in cells in tissue culture.
Doing the direct experiment would be a massive undertaking: if it takes 10 million human brains irradiated over 20 years to induce an extra 50 tumors, you'd need a lot of rats for a measurable effect. And you can't just up the radiation dose because then you cook the brains.
Physicists say it can't be, so it cell phones must be safe, right? After all, cell phone radiation is non-ionizing, therefore it couldn't possibly alter DNA and physicists have determined (based on some unstated first principles that non-physicists just aren't smart enough to understand) that the only way EM radiation can damage cells is through smashing DNA, cell phones must be perfectly safe. Therefore, this study, like the ones preceding it, must be wrong. Right.
Is it worth the price? Possibly not. Are the entire front + back office system's features matched ANYWHERE? No.
The kind of setup makes sense if you're already wedded to the Office file formats. For most real-world uses, however, the best thing to do is likely to ditch the office suite entirely and go with in-browser WYSIWYG editing.
Once you take the office suite out of the equation, any of a number of excellent systems give you all the functionality of your Office+Sharepoint+LCS setup at a fraction of the cost (installation, training, maintenance).
You may still laugh at the notion of thin clients and in-browser applications, but it's happening. Even Microsoft is realizing that. Office is a dinosaur, burdened with features that make no sense in a modern computing environment and that are difficult to support in a modern collaborative, networked environment.
From my point of view, the place of Mandrake as an easy-to-use desktop distribution has been taken by Ubuntu. I know--they are very different distributions internally, but to me, they feel similar.
I think all the on-line music stores using DRM, including iTunes, are a big rip-off; and the few on-line music stores that don't use DRM don't have the music I want.
Physical CDs give me content I want without DRM, they provide proof that I own the music, and they provide a physical backup. If that weren't a music distribution model already, someone would have to invent it.
For free music, I use podcasts; they deliver interesting and new stuff onto my machine every day.
So, by doing this simulation of a tiny span of time, the team was able to get new insight into the process of viral replication that would be extremely difficult to come by with experimental techniques.
The fact that DNA is a structural part of viruses and often required for their assembly and stability has been well know for a long time. So, this result is not novel. It's also not hard to demonstrate this experimentally in many cases.
Spore has a good (though not novel) concept and appears to have a reasonable design, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good game or a popular game. Whether a game succeeds or fails, you only know once it's in the market.
If someone were intending to show a genetic component to personality, he or she would first have to show a physiological component to personality. That has yet to happen.
Personality has an extensive physiological component, as demonstrated by numerous drugs that alter personality, as well as numerous well-documented and consistent changes to personality from brain trauma and injury. Something as simple as testosterone alters personality.
To date, there heve been exactly zero scientific studies that point to a genetic component of personality, including the famous twins studies of the late 1990s.
There are so many demonstrations of genetic components of different aspects of personality that this isn't even worth anything debating anymore.
It's kind of ironic that, just as the right wing has their creationists, the left wing has a group of people like you that, for purely ideological reasons, deny elementary facts about individual differences.
The real argument against eugenics and racism is not to deny, against scientific evidence, that there are genetic differences between individuals and groups of people, it is to respect, accept, and support people regardless of what genes they happened to have inherited.
Millions of years in the grave and it didn't even notice.
I actually worked at Microsoft and I do know better from my own experience and from talking with other employees at Microsoft. [...] You could easily find someone intelligent with a decent background and train them in a matter of weeks to do the job. [...] Lol... It's not just me. Money is a predominant consideration for most people.
I think that tells pretty much your whole story: you're an ex-Microsoft employee, primarily interested in maximizing your salary, and you think that being a skilled at something takes a few weeks of training.
Let's see... there is no dearth of American applicants, but MS says there are. There is no dearth of computer science students graduating, but MS says there are.
Because someone has a CS degree from Podunk U. and wrote some Perl code during the dotCom boom, we are supposed to consider them a serious member of the applicant pool? It doesn't work that way. 90% of the people who are in the IT industry would require years of additional training before one should let them near a computer, yet many of them are creating software and are responsible for the safety and security of all of us; it is frightning.
There are several IT shortages. The kind of shortage I'm talking about is a shortage of the kind of people who graduate with honors from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, and a few other schools. You can't create these people with "a few weeks of training". In fact, you can't create them at all--there's a limited supply of them.
The only reason you can get away with this is because there are tons of people looking for jobs. [...] But, since you can have the pick of the litter, you don't want to do this.
Actually, we don't get away with it; we leave positions unfilled and turn down business. It's simply not worth trying to retrain barristas or put up with people like you in our line of work.
When the files were deleted, the laptop was not properly under his control because he was allegedly no longer an employee when he did the deletion. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act comes into play, according to the judge, because the secure deletion program was in some way "transmitted" onto the laptop before it was used to do the "damage".
Yes, that's the legal reasoning of the judge; I just think it's wrong.
First of all, since the employment contract provides for the ability to delete files when employment terminates, it recognizes that there is a period after the termination of employment where the employee still has control over the system and may still do things with the system. (I also wonder whether it was established that the deletion actually took place before the actual termination of employment.)
Second, the CFAA was just not intended to cover such cases as when laptops are physically in the posession of someone. The act was specifically intended to address problems with networked computers. Even if a criminal steals a computer and then reinstalls the OS, he should not fall under this act, he should simply be charged under applicable theft and destruction of private property laws. I can't figure out whether Posner is playing word games deliberately or whether he just doesn't understand what "transmit" means, but his decision is unreasonable.
What people do with their laptops when employment terminates should be a simple contractual matter between the employer and the employee. Extending the CFAA to such cases is not only legally questionable, it's also bad for business because it limits the way businesses can structure their relationships with their employees. Many businesses tolerate and encourage reasonable private use of business laptops, and this decision really should worry anybody using a laptop in that way.
If people can prove you destroyed evidence in a murder case that you were legally obligated to hand over to the police, you'll be convicted of destruction of evidence. Whether you'll also be convicted of the murder depends on whether there is still a good case against you after you destroyed the evidence. That's not "next", the law has worked that way for centuries.
In this case, the original dispute was a contractual dispute, which will have to be resolved without the data on the computer now. The guy is now being charged with computer tampering, which is a priori a reasonable charge in this case (although I think that in this specific case, it's a misapplication of the law).
Deleting files can have legal consequences: if it's prohibited by your contract, if it's data shared with others, or if the evidence has already been subpoenaed.
This decision seems wrong, however: preventing people from deleting files on laptops under their control was not what the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was intended for (note, in particular, that it makes reference to a networked computer). Whether the employee was allowed to files should be a matter purely of their employment contract and the stated corporate policies.
Further, I don't believe for one second that MS can't find skilled and qualified workers with all those tons of resumes they get.
Well, you may not believe it, but it's nevertheless true. My company is inviting less than 1% of the applicants we get for interviews, and even most of those aren't any good.
There are a lot of people who fancy themselves IT workers who'd be better off at Starbucks. In fact, the industry would be better off if those people were at Starbucks because the way it is, we have a lot of incompetent people are making bad collective decisions that set the direction of the industry for years to come.
Salaries don't even enter into the application process anyway--at good places, salary is discussed only after a decision to hire has been made.
It is more likely that they are only saying that they can't find qualified workers in order to justify importing more cheap labor from overseas.
Well, you can believe whatever hare-brained conspiracy theory you like, but the fact is that if they don't import the labor, they're just going to move large parts of their operations overseas altogether. Of course, that's fine as far as I'm concerned: for a company like Microsoft to derive a large chunk of its revenue overseas but create skilled jobs primarily in the US is unfair. It's also going to cause resentment and political problems elsewhere. Fortunately, companies are already moving large parts of their operations overseas, so your wish will be granted: they'll import less and less foreign labor into the US.
Lol... It's not just me. Money is a predominant consideration for most people.
Yes, and most people also don't have what it takes to land a job at Microsoft or any of the other good places that are complaining that they can't find skilled workers.
Regardless of the seemingly predominant hatred of Microsoft on Slashdot, there are plenty of people who hold no ill will towards the company. MS gets a ton of resumes on a regular basis. If MS doubled their salaries, you would see a great deal more people rushing to try to work there.
I agree with that assessment. So, how does that help Microsoft's skilled labor shortage? If they are already getting tons of resumes and they can't hire the people they need, how is getting more of the same kinds of applicants going to help them?
Sorry, I don't see it. "Please, please, give me less money!" No...
I'm sorry for you that money is a predominant consideration in your choice of jobs.
These geeks have trouble with the real world. In the real world, evaluations, rankings, and decisions are 90% politics, personal connections, popularity, and power. We may all wish that it were more rational and more based in quantifiable criteria, but it isn't. That's why we get the politicians and business leaders we do.
If you come up with a better system and manage to implement it, let us all know. Of course, the implementation itself will require you to become a politician using his personal connections, popularity, and power...
Paying higher salaries doesn't make skilled workers appear magically Microsoft probably pretty much has scooped up all the skiled technical workers they are ever going to get; few other people are going to be willing to work for them even if they paid twice as much as they do now.
I know in my career, I have always chosen job offers with substantially lower salaries than the highest available offer, and I'm quite typical that way.
Furthermore, even if hiring IT workers were like buying widgets, there is a salary beyond which the cost/benefit calculations for hiring another IT worker just don't work out. At that point, the salaries stop rising and you have an IT labor shortage.
An honest author must avoid any appearance of putting words into people's mouth.
As for Stallman, Zuck is right to the degree that Stallman is indeed concerned only with making sure that software is free. But Zuck tries to portray Stallman as someone who will deliberately cause mayhem and destruction in order to further his cause and elevate himself, and that's wrong. Stallman may do things that are controversial and that are painful, but he does them because he believes them to be the right thing to do.
Others have pointed out that Zuck is president of ACT and what this means, so it's not surprising where these statements are coming from.
Ok. I've heard that, but what are your sources citing problems with C/C++?
I'm not sure what you are asking for. There is a literature going back 20 years about trying to make C and C++ type safe. Microsoft themselves has come up with several (research) modifications trying to fix C and C++, until they finally gave up and adopted C#. Look around the Microsoft Research web site for their past efforts.
I've heard about equally that they are unable to do a great deal of what they would like in C#
C# has full pointer manipulation support, so I can't imagine how they felt constrained.
That isn't to say that C# is the best programming language for all applications. In fact, for some specialized applications, one does need languages without garbage collection and without reflection (but 99% of the programmers out there aren't writing such applications).
And as a purely practical matter, one often has to choose C or C++. I've been a C and C++ programmer for about two decades. But that's knowing full well the limitations of those languages. The primary reason for choosing C or C++ is their popularity, not their design.
The European gene pool had little to do with their spread. Read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond or watch it on PBS [CC]. Basically everyone was equal, but some had better resources / environment.
Actually, the "Germs" part of that book is very much related to genes: Europeans carried diseases, plus the genes that conferred resistance to them. Diamond himself argues that that's probably one of the ways in which Europeans had an advantage when it came to conquest. So, Diamond supports my point.
Second, Diamond's thesis isn't as simple as "Europeans succeeded because they had better resources". He pointed out that peoples on other continents had fewer domesticable animals, for example, but he also points out that even those that did didn't use them as effectively.
Third, Diamond's thesis is just a thesis, written in a populist book; that doesn't make it a scientifically supported theory. So, it's silly to go around quoting Diamond as fact.
The problem with you is that you're so politically correct that you simply can't deal with the fact that people differ genetically from one another at the population level, and will perform differently in different environments. Most of those differences are not, in fact, "better" or "worse" in an overall sense, but that doesn't change the fact that they exist and that they also can make differences in human conflict and competition. Problems only arise when people like you start attaching values to that. The fact that I probably wouldn't last two weeks in the Papua New Guinea jungle, but that my ancestors managed to go to the New World and kill off most of the population with smallpox, doesn't make my genes better or worse overall, it just is just a genetic difference that happened to work well once in a particular historical context.
re you of the Nazi philosophy? They also believed in the genteic supiriority of the aryan (european) race, and also thought such was a justification in the might is right sense.
I did not say that European genes were "superior", I said that they may have helped Europeans in their conquests. That's "superior" only if you attach a positive value to killing and maiming. Do you? Because if you do, you're the Nazi.
Most new genetic development is resultant of mating selection pressures and epidemic disease immunity's.
And that's one of the things that helped Europeans in their conquests: carrying a whole range of diseases and being resistant to them.
Dont confuse genetics with politics.... its a really bad idea... which has resulted in some really bad consequences.
So, why do you keep doing that? Why do YOU keep attaching value judgements to biological properties?
Linux has full support for suspending and hibernating; the problem isn't with Linux, the problem is with buggy ACPI implementations on laptops: most implementations simply don't conform to the ACPI specifications. They seem to have been created by hardware vendors fiddling with the implementation until it works, more or less, with the current version of Windows.
I also don't share your rosy views of suspend and hibernate on other platforms. On my Powerbook, there is no hibernate at all (although you can apparently enable it through the command line, and it hangs every now and then on restart. On the Windows laptops I have had, I have had numerous problems with suspend and hibernate as well.
Still, it is a shame that Suspend2 won't be integrated into the main kernel; when all is said and done, Suspend2 actually has worked better for me than any of the other solutions, precisely because it does not rely on ACPI or APM at all.
Ask developers at Microsoft if they developed Vista in 100% C# before taking that perspective young man, you might be surprised at the response that you get.
Thank you for illustrating my point.
Microsoft has, in fact, hired many of the top language designers of the world because they think languages matter.
Microsoft has been pushing hard for a move to managed runtimes.
And Microsoft's severe problems with their previous C/C++ efforts are the reason for that.
So, lots of people at Microsoft have come to the conclusion that languages matter a great deal, and that's why they are investing probably hundreds of millions of dollars in that.
I think that article isn't seeing the forest for the trees.
In fact, natural selection has clearly operated at a huge scale, when Europeans settled every corner of the globe, while indiginous populations have disappeared or mingled. Genes associated with those Europeans have spread, while many others have nearly disappeared.
This is an example of group selection, and it has selected many genes at once; some of them may have helped Europeans in their conquests, others may have just been along for the ride.
On the flipside, medical and environmental advances probably are causing us to lose functions at a massive rate: no need to deal with food-born pathogens if you don't encounter any.
Evolution isn't as neat and simple as "better mammal wins" or "better gene gets selected".
The Chinese are illustrative of another interesting development in evolution: limiting population growth in the absence of high child mortality and in the presence of modern medical technologies and genetic testing. Whatever policies nations adopt in that environment, they'll end up acting as "natural" selection as well.