I agree too! I actually work in the DC area, and unlike this character - I realized the mortgages and rent in DC is just astronomically high and not worth paying. So I decided to shop further out, buying a 2,200 sq. foot 2 story house with a nice yard and a 2 car garage, about an hour's drive away from the office. Sure, the commute sucks - but I was able to negotiate things so I can work from home 2 or 3 days out of each week, and the town we live in has a train station. So I can take the commuter train in to a station where I switch to metro-rail and go on in the last bit of the way to the office that way. It's not ideal, but I'll take it over handing over most of my paycheck to some landlord for a smaller apartment or condo and only on-street parking for our cars!
I was able to buy this house for around $225,000 total -- and if you were fine with something a bit smaller? You can easily find homes here for more like the $160K-180K range. It's kind of nice escaping from the "big city" madness to this relatively peaceful, more rural environment too. Last week, we pulled out the telescope and my daughter and I looked at some of the stars and the moon. Nice clear sky for it that we just wouldn't get if we lived much closer to DC itself.
Anyway, my point here is -- between my wife and I both working full-time, our combined income is a lot less than this guy out in CA (probably around $110K?). We manage to pay the $1500/mo. mortgage payment (and that has the homeowners' insurance and taxes rolled into it), as well as a total of 3 car payments. Sometimes we're out of money until the next payday and it's tough to juggle things -- but it's certainly "doable" since we've been doing it with a family of 5 for several years now.
All I can say is, if you have a decent income and job? You should be able to FIND a way to make yourself a decent living with what you're getting paid. It may require some lifestyle changes, including living further away and doing the commute -- but don't give me a sob story about being "financially strained". The statistical majority of Americans certainly have it a lot worse off than you do.
I've been doing this for a while now with my daughter's Windows 10 PC. She's running as a "standard" user account that prompts for my admin account's assigned PIN code when it needs elevated rights for an action.
It's FAR more functional than an arrangement like this would have been with an older version of Windows like 7 or XP. But it's not perfect. One of the problem she's had is that she's gotten interested in modding games (Minecraft is a good example, as all the serious players use custom texture packs and other modifications so specific servers they want to connect to will let them properly view/play customized levels other people created with the additional tools and patches.) These mods quickly start requiring admin rights to the machine to get them installed properly.
I've also just found it annoying how often I have to provide the admin PIN code to allow updates to go through for various things. Malware Bytes anti-malware software is one example, as are the regular updates pushed out for the Java JRE and the nVidia video driver updates.
For our corporate Windows users in our office, I don't think we could live with taking away their admin rights either. Technically, we *might* be able to do a lot of tedious configuring of more advanced permissions (using "print administrators" security rights and all of that) to get around a lot of their problems. But it's a lot of hassle to still inevitably hit "roadblocks" where something unexpected needs those admin rights to update, install or run. The login scripts that auto map certain drive letters to shared network resources and auto connect certain networked printers for them, plus update the clock date/time with a central time server won't even work without giving them sufficient rights for all of that.
I've definitely gone entire years spending nothing on apps for my iPhone, but other times I've spent considerably more -- especially when said apps work on both my iPhone and my iPad Pro.
When I got the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil for it, it created a new need for apps that take advantage of the pencil's functionality. That was a good reason to buy 1 or 2 of the apps priced at around $10 each that are optimized for it. (For example, it opens up some new capabilities if you can easily fill out PDF forms with the pencil, including initialing or signing pages.)
I know a lot of of kids and teens use their iPhone as an alternative to the dedicated portable gaming consoles too, so obviously, they're going to sink some money into games for it. $40 a year is probably a lot less than they used to spend for games for a PSP, GameBoy or what-not.
I used the online dating sites pretty heavily when I was younger and still single. (I'm married to a woman who I met via OKCupid, as a matter of fact.)
I think like many things in life, you only get out of it what you put into it. If you approach the sites with the "kid in a candy store" mentality (which MANY men and women do), it turns into a way to flip through hundreds of photos to pick out only the people you find the most physically attractive, and to see how many of them you can get to go out with you. A whole lot of people who really tried to leverage the power of the dating site to find you better matches gets squandered or trampled on by all the people "clicking the pretty pictures". (After all, why waste hours taking numerous personality profile tests, writing a complete "bio", etc. -- if all of it was ignored by the majority of people anyway?)
Realistically? I know I'm not a bad looking guy, but I'm not a "head turner" either. I think I rank somewhere solidly in the "average" category on looks. So if we're only competing on a selection of photos alone, I'm going to be consistently left in the dust by guys 10 years younger than me, guys who go to the gym at least 3-4 times a week, etc. That's fine with me though, because I wasn't looking to date models who walked right off of photo shoots either.
So what happened for me is that I actually had some of my most enjoyable dates with women I met on Craigslist personals -- where half the time, they didn't even share a photo. I just went by what they wrote and how they wrote it, to determine if they seemed intelligent, relatively honest, and if we had some things in common. None of these dates led to anything serious, but they felt "genuine". Both of us were going into it pretty much blindly, with "blank slates" as expectations. And even when there was no chemistry, we were able to walk away as friends who just enjoyed a really good dinner or a few games of billiards or what-not.
When I put in the effort to really read through detailed profiles, compare "compatibility percentages" based on tests we both took, and contact people who shared mutual interests and beliefs over on sites like OKCupid? I generally got no response at all. I really think most women on there were just overwhelmed with a large number of initial contacts from all the guys who just said, "Ooh.... sexy photo. I'm gonna chat her up!", and/or got sucked into behaving the same way on the site.
When I finally met the woman I married, it was only because I'd already given up using the web site and left my profile sitting out there for months. I got an email notification that she had sent me a "Woo!", so I signed back in to see who did it and what their story was. That's when it turned out she lived in a different state, but had gotten so frustrated by the lack of communications with people taking the site seriously that she kept expanding her search outside her city and eventually to other states. She liked what I had to say in my profile, so sent me the "Woo" rather than wasting time writing a big letter for nothing (like had so often happened to her previously).
Tindr wasn't even a "thing" yet back then, but when I read about it as a new dating app, I realized it captured the essence of how most people were really using all of these other sites to begin with. Why bother taking quizzes or writing a lot of content? Just show the sexy photos and let people hit on each other....
Attaching THAT to a personal assistant is going to be relatively pointless, IMO. But a site that makes a serious effort to collect user info and preferences, that actually gets USED by serious individuals who want to fill all of that out? That could work.
I agree with the people on here saying we need more evidence that one person writing a blog about their side of the story to know what REALLY took place. But that's a whole lot of writing just to make up a fictional tale of how sexist things are at Uber. I'm inclined to believe it's probably at least generally true.
But assuming it's factual? Why put up with all of that for a year and then write a blog about how you were wronged? If you really did the right thing, saving all of the chats and email conversations -- the obvious next step is a lawsuit.
I *hate* dealing with attorneys and their shady billing practices... but if there was ever a time to deal with them, I think *this* would be it! You're making accusations that H.R. staff broke the law multiple times in handling your complaints, and you were blocked from a promotion by someone going in and modifying a FINAL performance review (without even telling you it would be changed first). I see a whole lot of "sexual harassment" complaints that are largely baseless "he said, she said" garbage. (I used to work for a firm where one of the I.T. guys bought some flowers for the front office receptionist after she was out sick for a while. The card with them was your basic "Get Well Soon" message. She ran to H.R. and filed a complaint against him. THAT is the kind of stuff that's NOT a valid complaint. That's how you ruin things for nice guys and encourage an office environment where nobody gives a crap about each other.) But this story sounds like, especially in the state of California, you've got the law clearly on your side.
Bill Gates.... how far you're fallen! Or maybe, Bill Gates... your good fortune only struck once! Whatever the deal is, he completely changed ever since he had to fight the Federal govt. over the monopolistic practices lawsuits. Now, he just spouts off disturbing ideas and trite "predictions of the future of tech".
Taxing automation to slow down the speed of its utilization is really pretty much the equivalent of proposing, back when he wanted "a PC on every desktop", that it was all going way too fast, requiring heavy taxes on anyone using a personal computer. I mean otherwise? Look how many people the technology would put out of work, in ALL different fields!
As far as I'm concerned, technologies like A.I. have a *long* way to go to become viable. Everything we've been sold so far as "artificial intelligence" has NO intelligence at all! It's taken decades to get things to a state where you can give a computer a voice command and it understands your speech reliably enough not to be frustrating. And we've gotten pretty good at making computers speak without rambling in monotone. But these pieces just allow fakery... personal assistants like Siri or Cortana. But they wouldn't even understand who is "mom" and who is "dad" in a family, or who your boss is, if you didn't tag it first in your contact list on your device!
All of this fear of robots taking all the jobs is nonsense. If we keep progressing as fast as possible, we've still got a L-O-N-G way to go. People are afraid of things like self-driving vehicles. And sure, that's disruptive. But that just happens to be ONE area where huge amounts of money are going into R&D to make it work. The tech you find in a Tesla or in a self-driving truck doesn't really translate to an ability to do anything else. It just knows how to make a wheeled vehicle follow the rules of a public road or highway and travel between points.
A whole lot of assembly work going on in today's factories is already automated. There's not THAT much more automation to do, and you get diminishing returns as you spend more money for more complex machinery to replace the last 100, last 50 and then last 25 workers in a particular facility. For example? I used to work for a place that heat-treated and finished various metals. They had automation for things like hammering a material into shape, so people didn't sit out in the shop with giant sledgehammers, banging on parts by hand anymore. But you still needed humans to inspect all the parts as they went through the ovens and baths, running "recipes" programmed into the systems. Almost like a gourmet chef, they had to make judgement calls during the middle of processes to see if a batch was turning out as intended or not. And sometimes, if something wasn't coming out right - they had to cancel things so more material wasn't wasted, before trying again. New customers or new orders were always asking for different things, so you needed humans to translate all of those requests into results. Automation would have been more complete in such a place if they only did specific things to specific parts, the same way every time. But that's not what people outsourced work to them for. (If it was that easy, places would just heat treat or finish the metals in-house!)
You know, when you read about Edison growing up as a kid, it's clear he had some issues. Maybe he was Asperger's? That would explain his willingness to stubbornly sit there trying material after material to find a suitable filament to make a working light bulb.
Steve Jobs is also often described as "a jerk and an ass", yet it's clear he had some great ideas and was able to not only build a computer company that went head-to-head against Microsoft, but brought it back from the dead when he took it back over again for the second time.
A lot of people running companies are perceived as jerks. Some of that is probably warranted, but maybe it's ALSO because they focus so much on making the company a success? Most "rank and file" employees only care about the paycheck, or doing the little piece of the whole puzzle they're hired to do. If something bad for the company but good for them happens, they're probably pleased about it. The business owner who created it as his "baby" from the ground up? Not so much.
Torvalds is right, IMO, embracing Edison's quote. The people who pretend it's not so are just the ones at the top who can take all the credit for that 99% perspiration of others they hired to implement an idea.
I've made this comment before, but I think it bears repeating. I'm not really sure we can tell if Apple "just doesn't care about a lot of products in their lineup anymore" or not, until we let them get the new "spaceship" campus up and running?
That's a huge real-estate investment that allows them to hire a whole lot of employees or contractors, especially given that Apple has said they don't plan on getting rid of any of its EXISTING office space.
I think historically, Apple has *always* struggled with trying to do so much with so little manpower. They went head-to-head with companies the size of Microsoft, while selling a whole line of hardware along with the operating system and applications for it - when Apple employed FAR fewer people. This has resulted in the ongoing wisdom of "avoiding revision A of a new Mac" and the famed shortages of new products at launch time, among other things.
It appears the head-count is about to dramatically increase at Apple, and I'd like to think a lot of things have gotten behind because it's slated to get addressed when new teams are hired to tackle some of it. The company certainly has the money to make those changes.
I'm one of the people who shelled out the crazy high price for a new Mac Pro "cylinder" workstation, a month or two after it came out. I even upgraded it to 64GB of RAM via a 3rd. party memory supplier and upgraded the 256GB SSD in it to 512GB when I could source the needed part on the used market. I'm using it to type this message today and its still my "main" computer I use at home. But I only invested in this thing because I put faith in Apple to support it at least as well as they did the previous Mac Pro towers. (I owned a 2006 and a 2008 model before this one, and both were excellent workhorses that more than paid for themselves with work I got done with them.) Essentially, my loyalty was taken advantage of. Apple not only couldn't release a suitable display of their own for the machine, but never even took the obvious step of marketing an external drive storage cabinet for it. I bought a 3rd. party (DATOptic e-Box) external Thunderbolt RAID enclosure that I use with it -- but the point is, it looks like something that belongs on a Windows PC, not a Mac. It's bigger and noisier than the Mac Pro itself, and I can't put the Mac into sleep mode while it's on, or it doersn't handle it gracefully and can cause data corruption. Apple has never sold a single video card upgrade for this machine either, which is kind of ridiculous for a "Pro" desktop workstation. The dual FirePro D500's in this one perform about as well as a pair of ATI Radeon 7950 or 7970 cards, but OS X doesn't even support CrossFire mode with them. There should really be a program to take these in to have a newer, better graphics card upgrade professionally installed, since both nVidia and ATI/AMD are selling cards that are essentially 2 generations ahead of this technology now.
I was born and raised in the midwest too, and could never fathom doing a cross-country move with the wife and 3 kids. (Especially difficult since 2 of the kids are "special needs" and were in a good school system where we were at.)
It turns out we live in the metro DC area now. How? Honestly, just total luck. A job offer kind of fell into my lap because of old friends who already worked for the company in question, and they needed someone with my skillset to work in their DC area office.
I negotiated for them to cover $7,500 or so in moving expenses for us. That didn't quite cover everything, but I sold everything I could part with to scrape up the rest of what we needed to do it (including my dad's coin collection he handed down to me before he passed away).
It was one of the harder things I've ever done, to be honest with you. So much stress and uncertainty, combined with the wife almost threatening a divorce because she didn't want to go through with a move and having to leave a job she liked. But a few years into it, it's been an overall good decision. She found a job nearby that she likes, and mine pays better than I was getting in the midwest. More stability too, because my previous jobs were generally in smaller manufacturing places where their success came and went with the trends in the marketplace. We had to move pretty far out from my job, because anything too close to DC itself is wildly unaffordable for us. But the upside is the small town we wound up in having MUCH less crime and a better environment for the kids to grow up in. People actually know who their neighbors are. If one of our kids invites other kids over, there's a good chance we know their parents and/or grandparents and can tell them directly if their kid is acting up. If we don't? We can ask someone else who does and get the "scoop" on the kid's family situation.
I look at my own situation, growing up in Gen-X, where today's millennials insist I supposedly "had it much better than they do". I just don't see it? I had to live with my parents until I was in my early 20's. Couldn't afford the expensive colleges out of state, so I attended the local community college that was only a few miles from my parents' house.
My job options ranged from telemarketing for a carpet cleaning firm to working as a bench computer tech for small "mom and pop" computer stores. (Most of which paid little more than minimum wage and always found ways to screw me into working extra hours without compensation.)
When I did move out, I shared an apartment with a female friend. (No romantic relationship going on... just a friend who was dating one of my best friends at the time.) That ended badly when I lost my job and couldn't find another one quickly enough to cover my share of the rent on time. I got another job 2 weeks after I was kicked out and had to go back to my parents place again. THAT was a fun conversation....
It really wasn't until I was almost 30 years old that I got a real "career job", and even that was very much a "who you know" thing. (An old friend of mine was in management there and agreed to hire me part-time, temporarily. I was then able to impress enough other employees with my work ethic so they pressured him to give me a full time job. He really didn't want to, out of fear people would accuse him of favoritism -- but eventually gave in.)
If you really feel that having kids is "dumb", then you should do everything possible to avoid getting yourself into that situation.
Honestly though? A whole lot of parents out there, if they were 100% honest, would admit that they had their first kid without putting a whole lot of thought into all the "pros" and "cons". They took the view about the financials of, "We'll find SOME way to make it all work out." and their partner probably helped prod them into taking the plunge (if it wasn't more of an accident or carelessness causing the pregnancy in the first place).
And yet, once you find yourself in the situation -- you just kind of throw yourself into it, partly out of a sense of personal responsibility for your actions/decisions, and increasingly, because the whole thing becomes more comfortable. And at that point, you might decide you both want another kid too. (That starts making more sense after the first one because you can re-use a lot of the stuff you bought that the first one grew out of, AND the two kids will keep each other company so YOUR personal attention isn't demanded of them quite so much of the time.)
There's no doubt kids are expensive and often a stressful, disappointing experience. But it's ALSO just as true that the so-called "good life" isn't all it's cracked up to be either. Sure, you might enjoy it for a while. But eventually, almost anything gets old and dull. Give yourself 20 or so years of being single or dating people with the "child free by choice!" attitude, and you might find you start asking yourself what your life's real purpose is. Are you just another consumer on this planet, doing all the things marketed to you as fun, trendy and entertaining? What will people remember you by after you're gone?
The answer is going to be different for different people. But a majority of people I know eventually feel a need to "leave their mark" on this Earth. Sometimes, that comes in the form of building things. A buddy of mine got into furniture-making for this reason. He liked the idea that even after he's gone, people will still be using his dressers or beds or cedar chests each day. But raising another human being is kind of the ultimate "build" to leave behind. You created LIFE... another person who can talk about you and will actually remember you after you're gone. And even though they'll do their own things (not YOUR things), they do all of it with your influence on them.
I lent nearly $1,000 to deadbeats on Prosper who never paid back a dime. I got payments from 2 separate class action suits against Prosper since then, but both were for under $10.
The part that angers me the most is that Prosper was SUPPOSED to turn those debts over to your choice of 2 collection agencies they supposedly employed. I selected one but never heard a THING again. For all I know, they never even really sent anything to collections at all? How would you know as an individual lender?
There's a class action underway right now over milk price fixing, and it started out talking about you earning as much as $43 or something like that. I went ahead and filled out my claim, since I lived in one of the states covered and bought milk during that time. But a week later, a friend of mine checked the site and the estimated payout was down to under $10 already, due to all the claims filed.
I recently attended a Cisco conference and it was helpful. In my case, it was only 20 minutes away from my office, so it didn't cost anything to go. 90% of it was just like people on Slashdot complain about with these conferences... a lot of bored-looking people manning booths where they just hand you a business card and some pamphlet for hardware you don't need a "contact person" to shop for. (EG. Plantronics was there. Wireless telephone headsets and bluetooth headsets are pretty much commodities these days. If I want a Plantronics product, I'll just order it on Amazon or something. I really didn't need the woman's contact info.)
But it's that 10% of info that turns out to be a real gem. EG. Had a specific question about the future roadmap for a Meraki product and got Cisco to admit that the current offering was "under-powered" and did, indeed suffer from the complaints we had about it. They said it was on the way out, and they recommended buying a different unit they sell until that update/refresh is made available. That might sound like a "small thing" - but it's the kind of information your salespeople won't usually tell you over the phone when you're ordering, and cemented our strategy to stop buying that one unit.
Also picked up a flier from a local firm specializing in recovering your whole network and server infrastructure in case you've been hacked. Do I think I'll ever need their services? I sure hope we don't! But that's something nice to file away, as a "just in case". You don't want to have to spend a lot of time finding suitable people to assist with a disaster like that AFTER the fact.
As far back as the early 2000's or late 90's, I remember running into this same attitude all the time in the IRC channels for Linux.
They used to be one of the best places to get assistance, but also the best place to get verbal abuse from half the users in the channel in the process.
So yeah.... sure is irritating, but nothing new by a long shot.
The people trying to sell us on H1B's are always giving these examples of high-end, specialized career jobs where you really might have a tough time finding enough qualified people in America. But the H1B owners I actually witness doing jobs are taking up an awful lot of "rank and file I.T." positions doing basic coding, web design, computer or network support, or server support roles.
Furthermore, it doesn't really make sense that our colleges and universities are supposedly "good" at training foreigners for these jobs, yet somehow, they don't manage to be nearly as good at training Americans to do the same things? The implication seems to be that Americans aren't as smart or are too lazy to study any of these more advanced subjects, so we have to rely on Asians, Indians and others who decide to go to our schools, and hope to keep them here when they graduate. I don't buy into that claim.
One thing I'm coming to grips with, having worked in I.T. my whole working career (and in my mid 40's now), is that a lot of companies simply don't want to pay for "top I.T. talent" anymore. The whole reason they're entertaining the idea of hiring a permanent I.T. person in the first place is the idea it'll be more convenient and save some money over the outside consultants they have to schedule to come in and pay by the hour (or project).
If you're really good and experienced, and believe your talents should be worth well into the 6 figure range? You might be absolutely right, but you're pricing yourself out of what many, many companies are actually budgeting for and interested in getting.
Competition is really heavy, these days, to just "cloud-ify" many of the things a business used to do internally. That means less need for on-site I.T. talent to care for those servers and applications. The need doesn't disappear to make sure the network is still working well, the company's Internet circuit(s) are up, and new hires receive training and the hardware they need to work. And there will always be the trouble tickets put in to get assistance when something's malfunctioning and they don't know if it's on "our end or the other end". But this is all stuff a person can do competently for them without being a "top tier" I.T. support engineer.
I might be biased due to my location (DC metro area, essentially).... but the #1 thing I've seen that justifies a bigger salary for I.T. around here is possessing an active "top secret clearance". A whole lot of govt. and military contractors need I.T. support for even mundane things, but need the person doing the work to be "top secret" cleared because of the information getting handled. That's a really costly and lengthy process to run someone through, so they'll gladly pay above market rate if you already have one. Also tends to mean ex-military get cherry-picked for great paying, easy to do work around here.
My experience with Glassdoor is it's most valuable if you're already researching a specific company you want to work for. The comments people leave about the pros and cons of the companies are usually pretty accurate. (You'll often see the random one that paints an especially good or bad picture. But just like Yelp and other ratings sites, it's wise to discard that as "fringe" and read everything else to get a good average/overall sense of how things are there.)
I also agree that salaries posted from specific companies and job titles are pretty accurate. (I doubt many users are motivated to post false numbers there?) The problem is -- there aren't a huge number of users willing to leave that information at all. So for small or mid-sized companies, you might only see one or two salaries posted. Not that helpful if those were people doing entry level work and you're looking for a management or senior position there, etc.
Selling 4.3 million subscriptions for Office 365 last year doesn't sound like the kind of failure I would mind having!
If the issue is inability to keep subscription levels up as high as they peaked at, when O365 was introduced? I'd suggest several reasons that should be expected.
1. There was definitely some pent up demand for this product on the Mac side, considering Mac OS X users were stuck on Office 2011 as the latest version, until this finally came out. 2. A pretty sizeable number of the total O365 subscription base comes from people who qualified for educational discounts, offered by the high-school, college or university they attended. As far as I can determine? Once you buy one of these heavily discounted licenses for Office 365 this way, it effectively stays active indefinitely. (What seems to determine if the license lives on or expires is if the institution you purchased it through keeps renewing their annual agreement with Microsoft to keep offering it at a discount to people. Unless you attended a school that failed and went out of business, I'd assume the vast majority keep these arrangements active with Microsoft.) I *bet* every time a retail or corporate customer renews Office 365 (annually), Microsoft counts that as another "sale"? If so, the educational customers only wind up counting for that 1 initial sale, since they're not renewing it each year like everyone else. 3. I don't really think the latest Office release offered via O365 is that impressive compared to the one that came before it, for Windows users? My workplace purchased stand alone Office 2013 Pro licenses for a number of PCs, and it's so much like the latest release, you almost have to click "Help" and "About" to make sure which one it is. Many of the improvements are relatively minor and need to be pointed out to someone for them to even realize it's there. It feels to me like MS tries to get you onto the O365 subscription train by bundling cloud services with it, like use of their cloud based Exchange server for Outlook and cloud storage via "OneDrive". Some of that is actually compelling for *some* customers (mostly corporate), but it's worth little or nothing to a whole lot of others. 4. I'll state the reason last that I'm sure lots of Slashdot users were already saying first: Alternatives to Office are eating into its profits. Google Docs, for example, is increasingly used in school classrooms and runs on cheap Chromebooks. Still others are making do with OpenOffice or a variant of it, often on an open source Linux box.
The *one* remaining hope I have for Apple is that huge new "spaceship" campus they're building. I mean, if you look at all the office space that gives them? That could represent an opportunity for Apple to finally employ enough engineers, developers and designers to really plow forward with some innovation.
I find it interesting that so far, I've heard that Apple intends to keep all of its existing office buildings after the new one goes online, too.
They don't do any manufacturing in any of these buildings... so ALL of this would appear to be for the purposing of coding software, designing things, or providing user support.
I don't know for sure, but I think it's possible Apple has kind of put things on the back burner while it ramps all of this up and reorganizes staff internally?
I mean, jellomizer might be absolutely correct in his estimation that his "over 5 year old" laptop is still good enough for him to keep using it.
But in the overall sense, I don't think you can explain this drop in computer sales (especially the fact that Apple is now seeing 2x the decline of the rest of the industry) on the general fact that an older machine is still usable for a lot of folks.
There has ALWAYS been a subset of computer users who have no reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Their only true motivation for a new computer is when the old one just quits working. That should already be reflected in the sales figures, year over year, and be pretty predictable.
I think it's been a pretty good rule of thumb for as long as I can remember working with computers that 3 years is a good length of time to hang onto a machine before upgrading, if you want to stay current, still get some resale value out of what you have, and still maximize how much use you got out of what you purchased. If you think about it? You can do a whole heck of a lot with a computer in 3 years' time. Certainly, you can do enough with it by then to justify every penny you paid for it. I mean, even if you only used an inexpensive PC to do your Federal taxes for 3 years in a row - that alone could cost-justify it vs. paying a tax prep. service instead.
Whenever I've tried to hold onto an older machine for as long as 5 years, I found it had diminishing returns. I'd reach the point where it was limiting me in some way or another -- even if it was just compromising by using lower graphics settings in the newer games I wanted to play on it, or adding on external hard drive storage to compensate for it not having enough inside it. When you stretch things out that long, technology has typically advanced by several iterations on practically everything in the computer. Processors have evolved, as have video chipsets -- but also, the whole bus architecture has likely changed. Computers that are 5 years old now are going to have much older versions of Bluetooth (if they have it at all), older wi-fi standards, and no USB 3.0 support (only 2.0 or 1.1). Quite likely, they only have 100mbit wired ethernet on-board instead of gigabit. If it uses a spinning disk instead of an SSD for at least the boot drive, you're taking a HUGE performance hit over more modern systems too.
I can definitely tell you the same things could be said about Washington DC. Not only are the housing costs sky high, but even if you want to pretend families living and working in that area are all wealthy enough so that's a non-issue? (And trust me, that would be a poor assumption.) The city itself isn't conducive to having a family at all. You really can't get around easily with an automobile. At best, you're going to have to get REALLY good with tedious parallel parking almost every time you need to go someplace and get used to circling around blocks multiple times, hunting for a space. Most of the time, you're going to have insane traffic gridlock on top of that, ensuring you're late to plenty of doctor's appointments and other things you need to take your kid(s) to. The preferred mode of transit is the Metro system, which is really not workable for a family. It's fine for the couple who has only one kid that's still a baby (though a stroller is going to be a big pain navigating the metro stations and getting it onto and off of crowded metro trains). But if you're like many of us, who have a few kids and/or pre-teens? You're looking at paying full price for each fare for them, and issuing each of them their own metro pass to keep filled with funds. A short trip during "peak" operating hours will set a family of 6 back at least $25 or so, round trip. You could use Uber or a cab, but same problem with it getting expensive quickly.
I think it's a general theme for cities with lots of high income job offerings, really. They cater to the individual employee or contractor working there, and to the idea that they may have a partner (whether business partner or relationship) with them. Once you get married and have kids? You're no longer their core focus, because after all -- you're committed to a lot of other responsibilities besides your work-life at that point.
Ok.... as unpopular as my comment may be? I, first of all, think there was no good justification for giving Manning the pardon and not Snowden. Should have been the other way around.
There's really zero evidence that anything Manning leaked amounted to true whistle-blowing. Yes, some of the material might have put military tactics on display that some people took issue with or were disturbed by -- yet all of them were legal activities to engage in under the law that existed at the time they happened. Meanwhile, it did give our enemies information that wasn't supposed to be revealed to them.
Snowden, by contrast, served to prove that Obama's administration was, in fact, continuing the illegal surveillance of American people that Bush's administration started. That's why Obama won't pardon him.... If he had actually changed Bush's policies upon entering office, he would have given Snowden a pardon with a quickness -- but it doesn't serve his narrative.
Actually, FiOS might be a good example of what I was referring to in my original post.
In the city I live in, FiOS started to be very cautiously deployed in a very limited manner -- but was essentially killed off before it got any momentum, because local city government declared it couldn't sell television services here. (They already signed an exclusive deal for Comcast to get all the TV distribution rights for our city for 10 years when they first came in.)
Verizon sold a few (like literally 3 or 4) FiOS installations in town that only had VoIP telephone and Internet, but no TV portion enabled. But to get it, you had to pay the same price as you'd pay for the "triple play" bundle they normally sold. So not that competitive against Comcast.
I can't say if the same has actually happened in a city where they have municipal Internet broadband, but it shows how local government can and does do things to block progress for competing services.
One of our kids is a BIG Nintendo fan, and just from the lack of excitement about the "Switch" coming from him, I can tell this isn't a product likely to set the world on fire.
I've always been more of a computer than a console gamer, but I've owned the PS2, 3 and 4, as well as a few misc. older 8-bit consoles, back in the day.
One of the big downsides of the Switch is that multiplayer gaming will start requiring a fee, just like the XBox and Playstation do. Especially for kids with limited incomes, this really marks the end of one of the reasons to advocate for Nintendo vs. the competition. I don't know what Nintendo plans to charge, but I'm assuming it's going to be in line with today's "industry standard" of an annual price equivalent to a new release game title.
It also appears to be a situation where you'll essentially get forced to buy one, if you want to play the latest in Nintendo's most popular game sagas like Mario Brothers and Zelda. (Yes, I understand they're promising games like the new Zelda will also be available for Wii -- but good chance that's the end of the line there.) IMO, that would be completely forgivable if the Switch had great new graphics capabilities and a faster CPU, so the new titles could utilize the superior hardware resources. But that's not the direction Nintendo has gone here either.
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I agree too! I actually work in the DC area, and unlike this character - I realized the mortgages and rent in DC is just astronomically high and not worth paying. So I decided to shop further out, buying a 2,200 sq. foot 2 story house with a nice yard and a 2 car garage, about an hour's drive away from the office. Sure, the commute sucks - but I was able to negotiate things so I can work from home 2 or 3 days out of each week, and the town we live in has a train station. So I can take the commuter train in to a station where I switch to metro-rail and go on in the last bit of the way to the office that way. It's not ideal, but I'll take it over handing over most of my paycheck to some landlord for a smaller apartment or condo and only on-street parking for our cars!
I was able to buy this house for around $225,000 total -- and if you were fine with something a bit smaller? You can easily find homes here for more like the $160K-180K range. It's kind of nice escaping from the "big city" madness to this relatively peaceful, more rural environment too. Last week, we pulled out the telescope and my daughter and I looked at some of the stars and the moon. Nice clear sky for it that we just wouldn't get if we lived much closer to DC itself.
Anyway, my point here is -- between my wife and I both working full-time, our combined income is a lot less than this guy out in CA (probably around $110K?). We manage to pay the $1500/mo. mortgage payment (and that has the homeowners' insurance and taxes rolled into it), as well as a total of 3 car payments. Sometimes we're out of money until the next payday and it's tough to juggle things -- but it's certainly "doable" since we've been doing it with a family of 5 for several years now.
All I can say is, if you have a decent income and job? You should be able to FIND a way to make yourself a decent living with what you're getting paid. It may require some lifestyle changes, including living further away and doing the commute -- but don't give me a sob story about being "financially strained". The statistical majority of Americans certainly have it a lot worse off than you do.
I've been doing this for a while now with my daughter's Windows 10 PC. She's running as a "standard" user account that prompts for my admin account's assigned PIN code when it needs elevated rights for an action.
It's FAR more functional than an arrangement like this would have been with an older version of Windows like 7 or XP. But it's not perfect. One of the problem she's had is that she's gotten interested in modding games (Minecraft is a good example, as all the serious players use custom texture packs and other modifications so specific servers they want to connect to will let them properly view/play customized levels other people created with the additional tools and patches.) These mods quickly start requiring admin rights to the machine to get them installed properly.
I've also just found it annoying how often I have to provide the admin PIN code to allow updates to go through for various things. Malware Bytes anti-malware software is one example, as are the regular updates pushed out for the Java JRE and the nVidia video driver updates.
For our corporate Windows users in our office, I don't think we could live with taking away their admin rights either. Technically, we *might* be able to do a lot of tedious configuring of more advanced permissions (using "print administrators" security rights and all of that) to get around a lot of their problems. But it's a lot of hassle to still inevitably hit "roadblocks" where something unexpected needs those admin rights to update, install or run. The login scripts that auto map certain drive letters to shared network resources and auto connect certain networked printers for them, plus update the clock date/time with a central time server won't even work without giving them sufficient rights for all of that.
I've definitely gone entire years spending nothing on apps for my iPhone, but other times I've spent considerably more -- especially when said apps work on both my iPhone and my iPad Pro.
When I got the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil for it, it created a new need for apps that take advantage of the pencil's functionality. That was a good reason to buy 1 or 2 of the apps priced at around $10 each that are optimized for it. (For example, it opens up some new capabilities if you can easily fill out PDF forms with the pencil, including initialing or signing pages.)
I know a lot of of kids and teens use their iPhone as an alternative to the dedicated portable gaming consoles too, so obviously, they're going to sink some money into games for it. $40 a year is probably a lot less than they used to spend for games for a PSP, GameBoy or what-not.
I used the online dating sites pretty heavily when I was younger and still single. (I'm married to a woman who I met via OKCupid, as a matter of fact.)
I think like many things in life, you only get out of it what you put into it. If you approach the sites with the "kid in a candy store" mentality (which MANY men and women do), it turns into a way to flip through hundreds of photos to pick out only the people you find the most physically attractive, and to see how many of them you can get to go out with you. A whole lot of people who really tried to leverage the power of the dating site to find you better matches gets squandered or trampled on by all the people "clicking the pretty pictures". (After all, why waste hours taking numerous personality profile tests, writing a complete "bio", etc. -- if all of it was ignored by the majority of people anyway?)
Realistically? I know I'm not a bad looking guy, but I'm not a "head turner" either. I think I rank somewhere solidly in the "average" category on looks. So if we're only competing on a selection of photos alone, I'm going to be consistently left in the dust by guys 10 years younger than me, guys who go to the gym at least 3-4 times a week, etc. That's fine with me though, because I wasn't looking to date models who walked right off of photo shoots either.
So what happened for me is that I actually had some of my most enjoyable dates with women I met on Craigslist personals -- where half the time, they didn't even share a photo. I just went by what they wrote and how they wrote it, to determine if they seemed intelligent, relatively honest, and if we had some things in common. None of these dates led to anything serious, but they felt "genuine". Both of us were going into it pretty much blindly, with "blank slates" as expectations. And even when there was no chemistry, we were able to walk away as friends who just enjoyed a really good dinner or a few games of billiards or what-not.
When I put in the effort to really read through detailed profiles, compare "compatibility percentages" based on tests we both took, and contact people who shared mutual interests and beliefs over on sites like OKCupid? I generally got no response at all. I really think most women on there were just overwhelmed with a large number of initial contacts from all the guys who just said, "Ooh.... sexy photo. I'm gonna chat her up!", and/or got sucked into behaving the same way on the site.
When I finally met the woman I married, it was only because I'd already given up using the web site and left my profile sitting out there for months. I got an email notification that she had sent me a "Woo!", so I signed back in to see who did it and what their story was. That's when it turned out she lived in a different state, but had gotten so frustrated by the lack of communications with people taking the site seriously that she kept expanding her search outside her city and eventually to other states. She liked what I had to say in my profile, so sent me the "Woo" rather than wasting time writing a big letter for nothing (like had so often happened to her previously).
Tindr wasn't even a "thing" yet back then, but when I read about it as a new dating app, I realized it captured the essence of how most people were really using all of these other sites to begin with. Why bother taking quizzes or writing a lot of content? Just show the sexy photos and let people hit on each other....
Attaching THAT to a personal assistant is going to be relatively pointless, IMO. But a site that makes a serious effort to collect user info and preferences, that actually gets USED by serious individuals who want to fill all of that out? That could work.
I agree with the people on here saying we need more evidence that one person writing a blog about their side of the story to know what REALLY took place. But that's a whole lot of writing just to make up a fictional tale of how sexist things are at Uber. I'm inclined to believe it's probably at least generally true.
But assuming it's factual? Why put up with all of that for a year and then write a blog about how you were wronged? If you really did the right thing, saving all of the chats and email conversations -- the obvious next step is a lawsuit.
I *hate* dealing with attorneys and their shady billing practices ... but if there was ever a time to deal with them, I think *this* would be it! You're making accusations that H.R. staff broke the law multiple times in handling your complaints, and you were blocked from a promotion by someone going in and modifying a FINAL performance review (without even telling you it would be changed first). I see a whole lot of "sexual harassment" complaints that are largely baseless "he said, she said" garbage. (I used to work for a firm where one of the I.T. guys bought some flowers for the front office receptionist after she was out sick for a while. The card with them was your basic "Get Well Soon" message. She ran to H.R. and filed a complaint against him. THAT is the kind of stuff that's NOT a valid complaint. That's how you ruin things for nice guys and encourage an office environment where nobody gives a crap about each other.) But this story sounds like, especially in the state of California, you've got the law clearly on your side.
Bill Gates.... how far you're fallen! Or maybe, Bill Gates ... your good fortune only struck once!
Whatever the deal is, he completely changed ever since he had to fight the Federal govt. over the monopolistic practices lawsuits.
Now, he just spouts off disturbing ideas and trite "predictions of the future of tech".
Taxing automation to slow down the speed of its utilization is really pretty much the equivalent of proposing, back when he wanted "a PC on every desktop", that it was all going way too fast, requiring heavy taxes on anyone using a personal computer. I mean otherwise? Look how many people the technology would put out of work, in ALL different fields!
As far as I'm concerned, technologies like A.I. have a *long* way to go to become viable. Everything we've been sold so far as "artificial intelligence" has NO intelligence at all! It's taken decades to get things to a state where you can give a computer a voice command and it understands your speech reliably enough not to be frustrating. And we've gotten pretty good at making computers speak without rambling in monotone. But these pieces just allow fakery ... personal assistants like Siri or Cortana. But they wouldn't even understand who is "mom" and who is "dad" in a family, or who your boss is, if you didn't tag it first in your contact list on your device!
All of this fear of robots taking all the jobs is nonsense. If we keep progressing as fast as possible, we've still got a L-O-N-G way to go. People are afraid of things like self-driving vehicles. And sure, that's disruptive. But that just happens to be ONE area where huge amounts of money are going into R&D to make it work. The tech you find in a Tesla or in a self-driving truck doesn't really translate to an ability to do anything else. It just knows how to make a wheeled vehicle follow the rules of a public road or highway and travel between points.
A whole lot of assembly work going on in today's factories is already automated. There's not THAT much more automation to do, and you get diminishing returns as you spend more money for more complex machinery to replace the last 100, last 50 and then last 25 workers in a particular facility. For example? I used to work for a place that heat-treated and finished various metals. They had automation for things like hammering a material into shape, so people didn't sit out in the shop with giant sledgehammers, banging on parts by hand anymore. But you still needed humans to inspect all the parts as they went through the ovens and baths, running "recipes" programmed into the systems. Almost like a gourmet chef, they had to make judgement calls during the middle of processes to see if a batch was turning out as intended or not. And sometimes, if something wasn't coming out right - they had to cancel things so more material wasn't wasted, before trying again. New customers or new orders were always asking for different things, so you needed humans to translate all of those requests into results. Automation would have been more complete in such a place if they only did specific things to specific parts, the same way every time. But that's not what people outsourced work to them for. (If it was that easy, places would just heat treat or finish the metals in-house!)
You know, when you read about Edison growing up as a kid, it's clear he had some issues. Maybe he was Asperger's? That would explain his willingness to stubbornly sit there trying material after material to find a suitable filament to make a working light bulb.
Steve Jobs is also often described as "a jerk and an ass", yet it's clear he had some great ideas and was able to not only build a computer company that went head-to-head against Microsoft, but brought it back from the dead when he took it back over again for the second time.
A lot of people running companies are perceived as jerks. Some of that is probably warranted, but maybe it's ALSO because they focus so much on making the company a success? Most "rank and file" employees only care about the paycheck, or doing the little piece of the whole puzzle they're hired to do. If something bad for the company but good for them happens, they're probably pleased about it. The business owner who created it as his "baby" from the ground up? Not so much.
Torvalds is right, IMO, embracing Edison's quote. The people who pretend it's not so are just the ones at the top who can take all the credit for that 99% perspiration of others they hired to implement an idea.
I've made this comment before, but I think it bears repeating. I'm not really sure we can tell if Apple "just doesn't care about a lot of products in their lineup anymore" or not, until we let them get the new "spaceship" campus up and running?
That's a huge real-estate investment that allows them to hire a whole lot of employees or contractors, especially given that Apple has said they don't plan on getting rid of any of its EXISTING office space.
I think historically, Apple has *always* struggled with trying to do so much with so little manpower. They went head-to-head with companies the size of Microsoft, while selling a whole line of hardware along with the operating system and applications for it - when Apple employed FAR fewer people. This has resulted in the ongoing wisdom of "avoiding revision A of a new Mac" and the famed shortages of new products at launch time, among other things.
It appears the head-count is about to dramatically increase at Apple, and I'd like to think a lot of things have gotten behind because it's slated to get addressed when new teams are hired to tackle some of it. The company certainly has the money to make those changes.
I'm one of the people who shelled out the crazy high price for a new Mac Pro "cylinder" workstation, a month or two after it came out. I even upgraded it to 64GB of RAM via a 3rd. party memory supplier and upgraded the 256GB SSD in it to 512GB when I could source the needed part on the used market. I'm using it to type this message today and its still my "main" computer I use at home. But I only invested in this thing because I put faith in Apple to support it at least as well as they did the previous Mac Pro towers. (I owned a 2006 and a 2008 model before this one, and both were excellent workhorses that more than paid for themselves with work I got done with them.) Essentially, my loyalty was taken advantage of. Apple not only couldn't release a suitable display of their own for the machine, but never even took the obvious step of marketing an external drive storage cabinet for it. I bought a 3rd. party (DATOptic e-Box) external Thunderbolt RAID enclosure that I use with it -- but the point is, it looks like something that belongs on a Windows PC, not a Mac. It's bigger and noisier than the Mac Pro itself, and I can't put the Mac into sleep mode while it's on, or it doersn't handle it gracefully and can cause data corruption. Apple has never sold a single video card upgrade for this machine either, which is kind of ridiculous for a "Pro" desktop workstation. The dual FirePro D500's in this one perform about as well as a pair of ATI Radeon 7950 or 7970 cards, but OS X doesn't even support CrossFire mode with them. There should really be a program to take these in to have a newer, better graphics card upgrade professionally installed, since both nVidia and ATI/AMD are selling cards that are essentially 2 generations ahead of this technology now.
I was born and raised in the midwest too, and could never fathom doing a cross-country move with the wife and 3 kids. (Especially difficult since 2 of the kids are "special needs" and were in a good school system where we were at.)
It turns out we live in the metro DC area now. How? Honestly, just total luck. A job offer kind of fell into my lap because of old friends who already worked for the company in question, and they needed someone with my skillset to work in their DC area office.
I negotiated for them to cover $7,500 or so in moving expenses for us. That didn't quite cover everything, but I sold everything I could part with to scrape up the rest of what we needed to do it (including my dad's coin collection he handed down to me before he passed away).
It was one of the harder things I've ever done, to be honest with you. So much stress and uncertainty, combined with the wife almost threatening a divorce because she didn't want to go through with a move and having to leave a job she liked. But a few years into it, it's been an overall good decision. She found a job nearby that she likes, and mine pays better than I was getting in the midwest. More stability too, because my previous jobs were generally in smaller manufacturing places where their success came and went with the trends in the marketplace. We had to move pretty far out from my job, because anything too close to DC itself is wildly unaffordable for us. But the upside is the small town we wound up in having MUCH less crime and a better environment for the kids to grow up in. People actually know who their neighbors are. If one of our kids invites other kids over, there's a good chance we know their parents and/or grandparents and can tell them directly if their kid is acting up. If we don't? We can ask someone else who does and get the "scoop" on the kid's family situation.
I look at my own situation, growing up in Gen-X, where today's millennials insist I supposedly "had it much better than they do". I just don't see it?
I had to live with my parents until I was in my early 20's. Couldn't afford the expensive colleges out of state, so I attended the local community college that was only a few miles from my parents' house.
My job options ranged from telemarketing for a carpet cleaning firm to working as a bench computer tech for small "mom and pop" computer stores. (Most of which paid little more than minimum wage and always found ways to screw me into working extra hours without compensation.)
When I did move out, I shared an apartment with a female friend. (No romantic relationship going on... just a friend who was dating one of my best friends at the time.) That ended badly when I lost my job and couldn't find another one quickly enough to cover my share of the rent on time. I got another job 2 weeks after I was kicked out and had to go back to my parents place again. THAT was a fun conversation....
It really wasn't until I was almost 30 years old that I got a real "career job", and even that was very much a "who you know" thing. (An old friend of mine was in management there and agreed to hire me part-time, temporarily. I was then able to impress enough other employees with my work ethic so they pressured him to give me a full time job. He really didn't want to, out of fear people would accuse him of favoritism -- but eventually gave in.)
If you really feel that having kids is "dumb", then you should do everything possible to avoid getting yourself into that situation.
Honestly though? A whole lot of parents out there, if they were 100% honest, would admit that they had their first kid without putting a whole lot of thought into all the "pros" and "cons". They took the view about the financials of, "We'll find SOME way to make it all work out." and their partner probably helped prod them into taking the plunge (if it wasn't more of an accident or carelessness causing the pregnancy in the first place).
And yet, once you find yourself in the situation -- you just kind of throw yourself into it, partly out of a sense of personal responsibility for your actions/decisions, and increasingly, because the whole thing becomes more comfortable. And at that point, you might decide you both want another kid too. (That starts making more sense after the first one because you can re-use a lot of the stuff you bought that the first one grew out of, AND the two kids will keep each other company so YOUR personal attention isn't demanded of them quite so much of the time.)
There's no doubt kids are expensive and often a stressful, disappointing experience. But it's ALSO just as true that the so-called "good life" isn't all it's cracked up to be either. Sure, you might enjoy it for a while. But eventually, almost anything gets old and dull. Give yourself 20 or so years of being single or dating people with the "child free by choice!" attitude, and you might find you start asking yourself what your life's real purpose is. Are you just another consumer on this planet, doing all the things marketed to you as fun, trendy and entertaining? What will people remember you by after you're gone?
The answer is going to be different for different people. But a majority of people I know eventually feel a need to "leave their mark" on this Earth. Sometimes, that comes in the form of building things. A buddy of mine got into furniture-making for this reason. He liked the idea that even after he's gone, people will still be using his dressers or beds or cedar chests each day. But raising another human being is kind of the ultimate "build" to leave behind. You created LIFE ... another person who can talk about you and will actually remember you after you're gone. And even though they'll do their own things (not YOUR things), they do all of it with your influence on them.
Same here!
I lent nearly $1,000 to deadbeats on Prosper who never paid back a dime.
I got payments from 2 separate class action suits against Prosper since then, but both were for under $10.
The part that angers me the most is that Prosper was SUPPOSED to turn those debts over to your choice of 2 collection agencies they supposedly employed. I selected one but never heard a THING again. For all I know, they never even really sent anything to collections at all? How would you know as an individual lender?
Exactly!
There's a class action underway right now over milk price fixing, and it started out talking about you earning as much as $43 or something like that.
I went ahead and filled out my claim, since I lived in one of the states covered and bought milk during that time. But a week later, a friend of mine checked the site and the estimated payout was down to under $10 already, due to all the claims filed.
I recently attended a Cisco conference and it was helpful. In my case, it was only 20 minutes away from my office, so it didn't cost anything to go. 90% of it was just like people on Slashdot complain about with these conferences ... a lot of bored-looking people manning booths where they just hand you a business card and some pamphlet for hardware you don't need a "contact person" to shop for. (EG. Plantronics was there. Wireless telephone headsets and bluetooth headsets are pretty much commodities these days. If I want a Plantronics product, I'll just order it on Amazon or something. I really didn't need the woman's contact info.)
But it's that 10% of info that turns out to be a real gem. EG. Had a specific question about the future roadmap for a Meraki product and got Cisco to admit that the current offering was "under-powered" and did, indeed suffer from the complaints we had about it. They said it was on the way out, and they recommended buying a different unit they sell until that update/refresh is made available. That might sound like a "small thing" - but it's the kind of information your salespeople won't usually tell you over the phone when you're ordering, and cemented our strategy to stop buying that one unit.
Also picked up a flier from a local firm specializing in recovering your whole network and server infrastructure in case you've been hacked. Do I think I'll ever need their services? I sure hope we don't! But that's something nice to file away, as a "just in case". You don't want to have to spend a lot of time finding suitable people to assist with a disaster like that AFTER the fact.
As far back as the early 2000's or late 90's, I remember running into this same attitude all the time in the IRC channels for Linux.
They used to be one of the best places to get assistance, but also the best place to get verbal abuse from half the users in the channel in the process.
So yeah .... sure is irritating, but nothing new by a long shot.
That's what I think, too.
The people trying to sell us on H1B's are always giving these examples of high-end, specialized career jobs where you really might have a tough time finding enough qualified people in America. But the H1B owners I actually witness doing jobs are taking up an awful lot of "rank and file I.T." positions doing basic coding, web design, computer or network support, or server support roles.
Furthermore, it doesn't really make sense that our colleges and universities are supposedly "good" at training foreigners for these jobs, yet somehow, they don't manage to be nearly as good at training Americans to do the same things? The implication seems to be that Americans aren't as smart or are too lazy to study any of these more advanced subjects, so we have to rely on Asians, Indians and others who decide to go to our schools, and hope to keep them here when they graduate. I don't buy into that claim.
One thing I'm coming to grips with, having worked in I.T. my whole working career (and in my mid 40's now), is that a lot of companies simply don't want to pay for "top I.T. talent" anymore. The whole reason they're entertaining the idea of hiring a permanent I.T. person in the first place is the idea it'll be more convenient and save some money over the outside consultants they have to schedule to come in and pay by the hour (or project).
If you're really good and experienced, and believe your talents should be worth well into the 6 figure range? You might be absolutely right, but you're pricing yourself out of what many, many companies are actually budgeting for and interested in getting.
Competition is really heavy, these days, to just "cloud-ify" many of the things a business used to do internally. That means less need for on-site I.T. talent to care for those servers and applications. The need doesn't disappear to make sure the network is still working well, the company's Internet circuit(s) are up, and new hires receive training and the hardware they need to work. And there will always be the trouble tickets put in to get assistance when something's malfunctioning and they don't know if it's on "our end or the other end". But this is all stuff a person can do competently for them without being a "top tier" I.T. support engineer.
I might be biased due to my location (DC metro area, essentially).... but the #1 thing I've seen that justifies a bigger salary for I.T. around here is possessing an active "top secret clearance". A whole lot of govt. and military contractors need I.T. support for even mundane things, but need the person doing the work to be "top secret" cleared because of the information getting handled. That's a really costly and lengthy process to run someone through, so they'll gladly pay above market rate if you already have one. Also tends to mean ex-military get cherry-picked for great paying, easy to do work around here.
My experience with Glassdoor is it's most valuable if you're already researching a specific company you want to work for. The comments people leave about the pros and cons of the companies are usually pretty accurate. (You'll often see the random one that paints an especially good or bad picture. But just like Yelp and other ratings sites, it's wise to discard that as "fringe" and read everything else to get a good average/overall sense of how things are there.)
I also agree that salaries posted from specific companies and job titles are pretty accurate. (I doubt many users are motivated to post false numbers there?) The problem is -- there aren't a huge number of users willing to leave that information at all. So for small or mid-sized companies, you might only see one or two salaries posted. Not that helpful if those were people doing entry level work and you're looking for a management or senior position there, etc.
Selling 4.3 million subscriptions for Office 365 last year doesn't sound like the kind of failure I would mind having!
If the issue is inability to keep subscription levels up as high as they peaked at, when O365 was introduced? I'd suggest several reasons that should be expected.
1. There was definitely some pent up demand for this product on the Mac side, considering Mac OS X users were stuck on Office 2011 as the latest version, until this finally came out.
2. A pretty sizeable number of the total O365 subscription base comes from people who qualified for educational discounts, offered by the high-school, college or university they attended. As far as I can determine? Once you buy one of these heavily discounted licenses for Office 365 this way, it effectively stays active indefinitely. (What seems to determine if the license lives on or expires is if the institution you purchased it through keeps renewing their annual agreement with Microsoft to keep offering it at a discount to people. Unless you attended a school that failed and went out of business, I'd assume the vast majority keep these arrangements active with Microsoft.) I *bet* every time a retail or corporate customer renews Office 365 (annually), Microsoft counts that as another "sale"? If so, the educational customers only wind up counting for that 1 initial sale, since they're not renewing it each year like everyone else.
3. I don't really think the latest Office release offered via O365 is that impressive compared to the one that came before it, for Windows users? My workplace purchased stand alone Office 2013 Pro licenses for a number of PCs, and it's so much like the latest release, you almost have to click "Help" and "About" to make sure which one it is. Many of the improvements are relatively minor and need to be pointed out to someone for them to even realize it's there. It feels to me like MS tries to get you onto the O365 subscription train by bundling cloud services with it, like use of their cloud based Exchange server for Outlook and cloud storage via "OneDrive". Some of that is actually compelling for *some* customers (mostly corporate), but it's worth little or nothing to a whole lot of others.
4. I'll state the reason last that I'm sure lots of Slashdot users were already saying first: Alternatives to Office are eating into its profits. Google Docs, for example, is increasingly used in school classrooms and runs on cheap Chromebooks. Still others are making do with OpenOffice or a variant of it, often on an open source Linux box.
The *one* remaining hope I have for Apple is that huge new "spaceship" campus they're building. I mean, if you look at all the office space that gives them? That could represent an opportunity for Apple to finally employ enough engineers, developers and designers to really plow forward with some innovation.
I find it interesting that so far, I've heard that Apple intends to keep all of its existing office buildings after the new one goes online, too.
They don't do any manufacturing in any of these buildings ... so ALL of this would appear to be for the purposing of coding software, designing things, or providing user support.
I don't know for sure, but I think it's possible Apple has kind of put things on the back burner while it ramps all of this up and reorganizes staff internally?
I mean, jellomizer might be absolutely correct in his estimation that his "over 5 year old" laptop is still good enough for him to keep using it.
But in the overall sense, I don't think you can explain this drop in computer sales (especially the fact that Apple is now seeing 2x the decline of the rest of the industry) on the general fact that an older machine is still usable for a lot of folks.
There has ALWAYS been a subset of computer users who have no reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Their only true motivation for a new computer is when the old one just quits working. That should already be reflected in the sales figures, year over year, and be pretty predictable.
I think it's been a pretty good rule of thumb for as long as I can remember working with computers that 3 years is a good length of time to hang onto a machine before upgrading, if you want to stay current, still get some resale value out of what you have, and still maximize how much use you got out of what you purchased. If you think about it? You can do a whole heck of a lot with a computer in 3 years' time. Certainly, you can do enough with it by then to justify every penny you paid for it. I mean, even if you only used an inexpensive PC to do your Federal taxes for 3 years in a row - that alone could cost-justify it vs. paying a tax prep. service instead.
Whenever I've tried to hold onto an older machine for as long as 5 years, I found it had diminishing returns. I'd reach the point where it was limiting me in some way or another -- even if it was just compromising by using lower graphics settings in the newer games I wanted to play on it, or adding on external hard drive storage to compensate for it not having enough inside it. When you stretch things out that long, technology has typically advanced by several iterations on practically everything in the computer. Processors have evolved, as have video chipsets -- but also, the whole bus architecture has likely changed. Computers that are 5 years old now are going to have much older versions of Bluetooth (if they have it at all), older wi-fi standards, and no USB 3.0 support (only 2.0 or 1.1). Quite likely, they only have 100mbit wired ethernet on-board instead of gigabit. If it uses a spinning disk instead of an SSD for at least the boot drive, you're taking a HUGE performance hit over more modern systems too.
I can definitely tell you the same things could be said about Washington DC. Not only are the housing costs sky high, but even if you want to pretend families living and working in that area are all wealthy enough so that's a non-issue? (And trust me, that would be a poor assumption.) The city itself isn't conducive to having a family at all. You really can't get around easily with an automobile. At best, you're going to have to get REALLY good with tedious parallel parking almost every time you need to go someplace and get used to circling around blocks multiple times, hunting for a space. Most of the time, you're going to have insane traffic gridlock on top of that, ensuring you're late to plenty of doctor's appointments and other things you need to take your kid(s) to. The preferred mode of transit is the Metro system, which is really not workable for a family. It's fine for the couple who has only one kid that's still a baby (though a stroller is going to be a big pain navigating the metro stations and getting it onto and off of crowded metro trains). But if you're like many of us, who have a few kids and/or pre-teens? You're looking at paying full price for each fare for them, and issuing each of them their own metro pass to keep filled with funds. A short trip during "peak" operating hours will set a family of 6 back at least $25 or so, round trip. You could use Uber or a cab, but same problem with it getting expensive quickly.
I think it's a general theme for cities with lots of high income job offerings, really. They cater to the individual employee or contractor working there, and to the idea that they may have a partner (whether business partner or relationship) with them. Once you get married and have kids? You're no longer their core focus, because after all -- you're committed to a lot of other responsibilities besides your work-life at that point.
Ok.... as unpopular as my comment may be? I, first of all, think there was no good justification for giving Manning the pardon and not Snowden. Should have been the other way around.
There's really zero evidence that anything Manning leaked amounted to true whistle-blowing. Yes, some of the material might have put military tactics on display that some people took issue with or were disturbed by -- yet all of them were legal activities to engage in under the law that existed at the time they happened. Meanwhile, it did give our enemies information that wasn't supposed to be revealed to them.
Snowden, by contrast, served to prove that Obama's administration was, in fact, continuing the illegal surveillance of American people that Bush's administration started. That's why Obama won't pardon him.... If he had actually changed Bush's policies upon entering office, he would have given Snowden a pardon with a quickness -- but it doesn't serve his narrative.
Actually, FiOS might be a good example of what I was referring to in my original post.
In the city I live in, FiOS started to be very cautiously deployed in a very limited manner -- but was essentially killed off before it got any momentum, because local city government declared it couldn't sell television services here. (They already signed an exclusive deal for Comcast to get all the TV distribution rights for our city for 10 years when they first came in.)
Verizon sold a few (like literally 3 or 4) FiOS installations in town that only had VoIP telephone and Internet, but no TV portion enabled. But to get it, you had to pay the same price as you'd pay for the "triple play" bundle they normally sold. So not that competitive against Comcast.
I can't say if the same has actually happened in a city where they have municipal Internet broadband, but it shows how local government can and does do things to block progress for competing services.
One of our kids is a BIG Nintendo fan, and just from the lack of excitement about the "Switch" coming from him, I can tell this isn't a product likely to set the world on fire.
I've always been more of a computer than a console gamer, but I've owned the PS2, 3 and 4, as well as a few misc. older 8-bit consoles, back in the day.
One of the big downsides of the Switch is that multiplayer gaming will start requiring a fee, just like the XBox and Playstation do. Especially for kids with limited incomes, this really marks the end of one of the reasons to advocate for Nintendo vs. the competition. I don't know what Nintendo plans to charge, but I'm assuming it's going to be in line with today's "industry standard" of an annual price equivalent to a new release game title.
It also appears to be a situation where you'll essentially get forced to buy one, if you want to play the latest in Nintendo's most popular game sagas like Mario Brothers and Zelda. (Yes, I understand they're promising games like the new Zelda will also be available for Wii -- but good chance that's the end of the line there.) IMO, that would be completely forgivable if the Switch had great new graphics capabilities and a faster CPU, so the new titles could utilize the superior hardware resources. But that's not the direction Nintendo has gone here either.