No, I'm with you on this one. It's ALSO part of the media "machine" to try to frame everyone as either at one end of the spectrum or the other on a topic.
What happened to sensibly, cautiously looking at the data and finding that quite likely, the truth is someplace in the middle?
There are some cases where scientific research is simply done in error:
In other cases, all of the facts aren't really stated or taken into account. I see no compelling to reason to flat out deny the climate is undergoing some change? Apparently, a lot of scientists think it is and they know more than I do about the topic. But that being the case, there's WAY too much money and political agenda behind convincing people of one result or another to take any of these long-term predictive models without a large heap of salt.
Truth is, the U.S. has a lot of wide open space that's sparsely populated - mostly by farmers or ranchers. These people are usually a lot smarter than most people give them credit for. They have to be, because it's so difficult to make a living that way these days. (You have to do a lot of manual labor, do a lot of number crunching, be versed in sales and marketing, and much more.)
My experience is, many of them are already well aware of the Internet and make use of it (even if it's only via a satellite connection). What they may NOT care about that much are "city slickers" coming in, preaching how their entire way of life will die out if they don't change (EG. conform to their ideas of how to modernize everything in town).
They're already adopting a lot of tech that the outsiders probably know little to nothing about -- but it's specific to their career choice.
The city I live in (Brunswick, MD) has Verizon for land line phone service, and they sell you up to 6mbit DSL as the fastest Internet service they offer. Comcast is also available here for TV, phone and broadband -- and with them, you can purchase up to 200mbits down / 10 up. (For some weird reason, they won't give you more than 10mbits up no matter what package you buy here. They tried to tell me it had to do with a limit because their central office is too far from here, but it sure looks artificially capped to me. When you run speed tests, you see it immediately bang up against the 10mbit upload speed limit and get throttled right back down again as soon as it hits 11-12.)
The interesting thing is, FiOS very quietly crept into a neighborhood in town where new construction is taking place (Brunswick Crossing). Initially though, I was told almost nobody purchased it or kept it for any length of time because they could only offer broadband Internet, not television. Comcast supposedly had exclusive rights for the TV in our area. I believe as of just a month ago or so though, that has been lifted and the full FiOS bundle is available for them.
It's not possible to get FiOS anyplace besides in the Crossing housing development out here though. The rumor is, Verizon claims it's "not feasible to run fiber through the hilly terrain the rest of the city consists of" -- but they found a relatively low-cost/easy way to extend service to the one development that sits on flat land, outside the main part of the city.
Have to agree wholeheartedly with the other people commenting here who dislike the social media integration aspect of these new drivers!
IMO, this sort of functionality NEVER belongs in a device driver package (even IF the package also bundles related applications such as control panels or optimization tools). Social media integration should be handled at the application level, by the games or other software someone chooses to install on a machine.
I'm even willing to go so far as to accept than an operating system itself might embrace social media, in the sense that it provides "hooks" so popular social media services can OPTIONALLY pop notifications on an all-purpose status bar or screen. (Apple and Microsoft both do some of this now. I dislike it in the sense that you're now developed an OS that has ties to 3rd. party services outside of the direct control of the people coding the OS. History shows us that this leads to broken features in the OS down the road. At the very least, this looks "ugly" when someone wishes to keep using an older operating system and now has entire menu configuration options that simply don't work when clicked. But at the end of the day, I suppose an OS should offer whatever functionality its users find useful. And enough people use Twitter or Facebook that they'd like their OS's notification bar to incorporate those updates.)
I just don't see where any value is added by rolling this stuff into the device drivers that make hardware "go", though? If I want to discuss my driver settings with other people, I'll visit an online support forum to do that. I don't need bloated drivers providing built in windows to do that stuff!
IMO though, there are always going to be trade-offs with this pay structure.
If one of your primary business goals happens to be growth and as wide a coverage area as possible, it doesn't seem to me that paying "well above market rates" for jobs in the retail or fast food businesses works very well?
For example, you constantly see those comparisons online about Wal-Mart vs. CostCo, claiming how CostCo compensates workers so much better, etc. The thing is, CostCo doesn't even so much as TRY to run a regular chain of superstores open to the general public. It only does membership-based warehouses. Wal-Mart operates Sam's Club, which has a very similar business model to CostCo AND happens to run the most successful retailer in the whole United States while doing that! (Check who the #1 employer is in America, by FAR.... Yep, WalMart. In fact, WalMart still ranks 3rd. in the entire WORLD.
Try eating at In-N-Out burger anywhere on the East Coast of the U.S. Oh, sorry... they don't have any of them out here. By comparison, try finding a McDonalds at least *somewhere* on the East Coast. Oh hey, probably can do that in a 5 mile radius of just about anywhere!
I'm not saying paying people more is a BAD thing, by any means. But I think it's fair to state that doing so tends to work most effectively if you're happy keeping your business relatively limited in size and scope. It doesn't appear that the In-N-Out business model has the ability to keep millions of people employed in America like the WalMart business model does.
If you want to start tracing back where we really "went off the rails" with salary increases not corresponding directly with increased buying power anymore, you find the divergence began right after America got off of the gold standard.
I've never been a big proponent of the idea that gold is the "best option" as the tangible resource to tie the dollar to, but I think the concept itself made a lot of sense. If you don't have *something* of value backing each dollar printed, you're essentially expecting people to believe in its value on sheer faith. That, in turn, opened the floodgates to devaluing the currency because the Fed could simply order more money be printed to cover the costs of any loans or government expenditures. The end result is the multi TRILLION dollar debt ceiling the government just voted to raise again last Monday, and the shrinking of your actual buying power.
Claims by Millennials that employers now believe "the less you pay someone, the harder they'll work" and the like are nonsense, and completely ignore this root problem with our money.
What *really* happened (speaking as a gen-X guy who lived through it) is we generally took to heart the advice our parents taught us, that we'd be able to get ahead with plenty of hard work and dedication. If we had an employer who promised the company would pay us overtime to work extra hours, a lot of us sacrificed and took them up on the offer. If an employer suggested there was a potential for faster career advancement by proving you went "above and beyond" what was required in a job position (often requiring working more than the standard 8 hour day), a lot of people chose to do that. Unfortunately, the value of the U.S. dollar was declining at the same time -- so that notion that putting "work first" and suffering a bit in the short term would pay off in the long term just wasn't coming true. (It would make sense to amass as much savings as possible while you're still young, so it can go into investments like a 401K plan where the money "goes to work for you" earning money just by sitting there. But people were finding they had to keep working that overtime or going "above and beyond" just to tread water.... so the "extra money" to invest didn't always materialize.)
Today's workers see that our generation failed at getting ahead with all of that extra work, so they think the answer is to rail against it and demand employers just compensate them better for doing less. They're not getting that the whole financial system is rigged against us.
Honestly, it's been a while since I even attempted to get 3D cards and gaming working on a Linux box. I pretty much always use Linux for dedicated server "appliances" in the workplaces these days, and stick with a Mac or Windows box for general purpose use at home like gaming.
But I remember in the past, the closed source nVidia graphics driver bundles were perfectly fine, as long as you ran one of the Linux distros they supported. Otherwise, you were sometimes out of luck. That's probably the single biggest argument I had against the closed source drivers. You were stuck using something like RedHat, because nVidia didn't want to provide tarbars for many of the more obscure Linux variants out there.
Otherwise, sure.... I don't think Linux gamers or even people doing heavy 3D editing/animation feel a big need to have access to the source code for the graphics drivers. Maybe a VERY small percentage would prefer it, because they're knowledgeable enough of a coder to tweak a driver to fix a specific problem they're encountering? But that's got to be far less than 1% of the user-base.
All in all though, I get the impression that video drivers are largely debugged and improved BECAUSE advanced video games drive those changes. Windows always winds up with the fastest, best drivers for a given 3D card because it has the most games that push the limits and expose flaws. You saw the same thing happen on the Mac in OS X when it first started getting some "serious" 3D games developed for it like Word of Warcraft. There were regularly updates in OS X for the video drivers that referenced WoW bugs as reasons for the fixes.
Since Linux has the least number of these game titles coded for it, it gets the least video driver development too.
I don't think most I.T. people fear change so much as they fear the lack of support from higher-ups if things break and require time to sort out again.
I knew I.T. people reluctant to move to Windows 7 and it wasn't because they feared learning the new OS version. Many of them already used 7 on their personal machines! They simply knew their company ran applications that weren't updated to work with 7, or the new "7 compatible" editions were expensive upgrades that the company wasn't going to be happy about purchasing.
I was working for a small steel fabricating company when we started upgrading to 7, and it caused me a LOT of headaches. One example was a little (but expensive) DOS based utility for estimating costs of steel bar and plate. I forget who even made the thing, but it was basically sold by a 1 or 2 person team operating out of someone's house in Tennessee or Kentucky. They sold an upgraded version with a Windows GUI and 7 compatibility, but it was something like $2,500. We had a lot of sales guys who had been using the old command line version of YEARS and it was second-nature for them to fire it up and fly through the numeric menu screens to figure up quick estimates while on the phone with potential customers. They just wanted the old version to keep working like it always did, but it just crashed in 7.
In the end, I think I got it going only by having it launch inside a VirtualPC session on the new computers -- which required a lot of additional configuration to the new PCs just to make it go. And that was only ONE of a number of problems Win 7 gave us.
I'm in my mid 40's myself (and I think one of the oldest ones in I.T. where I work currently), but the others are in the 35+ age range.
All of us are quite good at keeping up with the new stuff. Working for a marketing company, that's pretty much required, as the folks working in the core part of the business tend to be the Millennials who always want to find the latest, hardly yet known, new thing to use, so they can be seen as "trendy" and ahead of the curve.
As you said though, we have the collective wisdom from doing this stuff for 20+ years for a paycheck to realize when "new and shiny" is really just a rehash of something that was done long ago (and often done in a more stable fashion).
One good example that comes to mind are all of the file sharing services out there. We often have the need to share very large files with outside clients/customers and there's always someone trying to find a better way to do that. We adopted Dropbox for Business across the company, which does a good job of 99% of what's needed. But DropBox does throttle transfer speeds. Other sharing services have slick "extras" with their paid accounts, like presenting a branded page with the download link so our company logo is right there behind it, and the recipient doesn't see a generic-looking link like DropBox would generate for them to click.
At the end of the day, simply giving someone access to the web GUI for the FTP server capabilities in one of our NAS boxes is still the most efficient way to get files moved between points A to B. But marketing people don't always find that kind of UI acceptable to present to a client. It's times like that when I realize I.T. jobs have become about much more than "finding the most efficient tool to get the job done". Today, there's the expectation that you know how to provide an elegant solution on demand. Command lines and requirements of using utilities that have learning curves are fine for I.T. staff themselves, but the users we support expect more than that.
Honestly, I find it hard to believe ignorance has much to do with it at all. There are some big name companies on the record as completely supporting FISA, including Xerox. (Funny how Xerox also seems to have most of the contracts with local govt. for maintaining speed cameras.... Just maybe, they stand to profit any time government takes on some additional responsibility concerning technology? Hmm....)
I was self-taught in BASIC, because I was one of those "dorky kids" who wanted one of the early home computers as a Christmas gift, back when the owner's manual for one was hundreds of pages long and mostly covered how to program in BASIC for it. (Then, I'd buy or check those books out at the library with lists of BASIC programs you could manually key in and run. Typically, they'd be slightly broken because a given computer didn't have quite the same implementation of BASIC as the book author assumed was in use. So you had to have some coding skills to fix the errors and make them work.)
By the time I had a class in high-school for programming, they put me in the "advanced class" using their Apple//e systems, because I already knew all the beginning level stuff.
In the the end? Those skills were less useful than learning to repair a car, because BASIC quickly became obsolete. (Obviously, a mechanic has to keep up with changes with vehicles too... but the change is slower and less drastic. To this day, an older mechanic with skills tuning or rebuilding old carburetors could still make good money doing it, at least as a "niche" skill for helping keep vintage cars going. Who will pay you to code in BASIC for them today?)
When you start talking about problems such as the company offering 100 pension plans? Your problem isn't that the employee has too many options/choices. The problem is that the company didn't do enough homework of their own to weed out the inferior options. When my employer tells me they made a certain selection for our healthcare provider, our life insurance provider, or anything else related to the benefits offered -- I assume they made an effort to find the best possible value for the dollar spent. Maybe they could have chosen better than they did, and maybe not. But the point is, they tried to apply a "filter" and make a sensible decision. (Why wouldn't you, since you want your benefits package to look attractive compared with your competition?)
Every time we use the web, we're presented with literally hundreds of millions of "options"... yet we're not overwhelmed to the point where we just give up trying to find content we need. That's because we have really powerful search engines like Google we use as part of the process. They act as our filters.
Yep.... I hate to say it, but I think a LOT of us just got fooled on this one, at least initially. As techie "geeks", we *wanted* to believe this was all about a young, brilliant kid getting held back by "the system".
In reality, it's shaping up to look like this was all a political ploy.... Research the background of the kid's parents and you'll start to see what I mean.
IMO, this was all part of a preconceived plan to scare people at school by bringing in a suspicious-looking device and then cry discrimination when called out on it.
Yeah, I guess you could say that. There was apparently a video recorder made in 1963 in the U.K, sold in kit form, that could record 20 minutes at a time in black and white. (It cost about $1,600 in today's U.S. currency too.)
But the device actually called VCR that used video cassettes was a Phillips invention sold to TV stations in 1970, and made available to consumers in 1972.
I was just discussing something similar with a few of my tech buddies, a few weeks ago. Despite all of us working in I.T. for decades and being up on the latest trends -- we universally agreed that it feels like real innovation is slowing down. There were so many inventions in the last 100 or so years that clearly changed society, but in the last 10 or 20? Not so much. Almost everything heralded as the next big thing is really an incremental revision of existing tech, in recent years.
I mean sure, the Internet itself is a huge game-changer, but even that really goes all the way back to DARPANET, started in the early 1970's. The microcomputer is also really a child of the 70's. In fact, a lot happened in the 70's, invention-wise! The Bic disposable lighter was invented, as well as gene splicing. The VCR was invented, forever changing how people watched television. Post it notes, the laser printer, ethernet networking and cellular phones all came from the 70's too, plus the artificial heart and MRI machines.
The current generation is going to be remembered for creating a whole bunch of social media web sites that came and went and for popularizing the digital streaming of content you "rent" on monthly plans instead of buy on pre-packaged media. Oh, and multiple attempts to incrementally improve existing televisions by adding a curve to the flat panels, by adding 3D technologies to them that never really caught on, and by upping the resolutions every so often. I mean, ok... I'm purposely being a little sarcastic here. But I think you get my point. We might still have a big game-changer on the horizon with self-driving vehicles, mind you. But this doesn't appear to be going down as a particularly trans-formative era in history.....
Really, the one thing that made VMWare suddenly appear expensive was Microsoft's move to support the same basic functionality built into Windows Server via Hyper-V. Until that happened, your only other "enterprise-grade" solution came from Citrix and had a price tag comparable to VMWare.
VMWare is still available in a free version though, if all you need is the need to virtualize a number of systems on a single server. (That's all we never needed at my previous job working for a small manufacturing firm. We built one high-spec rack mount server and virtualized 5 of the older physical machines to consolidate it into one box with more drive space and usable RAM.)
And if you start considering paying VMWare's price for all of the "vmotion" licensing related to moving VMs between virtual servers, etc.? Depending on what you actually need - you might be able to save some money just going with VMWare "essentials" instead and combining it with the 3rd. party Veeam backup software. Veeam partnered up with VMWare so their backup product can utilize some direct hooks in VMWare itself, to do things that are usually off limits to other applications not made by VMWare.
Where I live in Maryland, taking the commuter train in to work in the DC area is actually faster than trying to drive, but only due to the congestion on the highway and roads.
If I'm able to go in to work a few hours later than everyone else, the drive takes about 45-50 minutes, vs. the 2+ hours during rush-hour.
With the train though, you're also freed up to do a little bit more than you can while driving. You can read a book or magazine, or get some work done on a computer.... That has some value too.
Mass transit is never going to really be the king of convenience, but when your alternatives aren't good, it can win out as the best choice.
I believe these "flat hierarchy" business models have been tried before.... It's not a brand new, amazing thing that Zappo's was the first to attempt.
That said, it's pretty uncommon because more conventional arrangements are time-tested and proven to work reasonably well. "Why change what ain't broke?", is often a prudent way to go about running a company.
Personally, I think the biggest problem companies trying it will have is making it scale well. It's relatively easy to get a good group of intelligent, motivated people together in some division of a company who start questioning the value in having a boss or bosses. They know how the get the tasks done better than anyone else, and they thrive on as little micro-management as possible. But expand that to the WHOLE company (and keep hiring enough people), and I think the whole culture risks turning "poisonous" at some point. As it is now, you see too many companies with nepotism running rampant. The bosses take turns hiring their stepbrothers, cousins, sons or daughters, etc. - instead of finding someone else who'd actually be far better for the job. Imagine what happens when everyone essentially has equal rank? A few people pull this off as a favor for family/relatives/friends and suddenly, everyone else feels they get a pass to recommend their own friends and family too. At least with a traditional structure, the project manager or mid-level manager who does this can be put in his/her place by someone above them they have to answer to -- questioning why "so and so wasn't selected despite submitting a great resume".
I couldn't help but think, while reading this story, that it'd be perfect for a "based on real life" movie script. Has all the ingredients to be a "feel good, downtrodden guys make good" film.
I dunno.... If this is how things are being conducted on the developer lists, I think the woman has a valid complaint/point.
It's one thing to talk trash to each other when you're playing competitive sports against each other. (And I'm willing to bet women do the same thing when playing tennis, basketball or other womens' sports?)
But software development should be a little bit more professional in nature. I'm more of a sysadmin than a software coder myself, but I'd probably take it personally, too, if every time I worked hard to contribute something to a development project, people turned around and told me I was a "fuckwad" for having the idea and so on.
I mean, why bother contributing at all if everyone else involved comes across like they're that unappreciative of my efforts? I'm not going to "take it personally" in the sense it makes me question my ability to code and I consider switching careers.... but I'd definitely think about putting my efforts into other projects.
Right now, it's just the in thing to avoid soda. The pre-teens and teens I see who tell you they "don't drink that stuff" are the same ones buying up those nasty tasting "energy drinks" chock full of caffeine and all sorts of other chemicals.
Anything you eat or drink too much of can be bad for you. The people I knew who'd wind up with a huge tower of empty soda cans in their cubicle at work, for example? Probably wasn't doing them much good, health-wise.
But honestly, I'm already well into my 40's and am one of those people who gets a fountain soda pretty often at the gas station, or with lunch or dinner when I go out. I occasionally buy a 2 liter of Pepsi or Dr. Pepper or something to drink at home too. I've been doing this since I was a teenager. Can't really say I've had any negative heath effects from it, so far. And I'm getting to the age where stuff starts going wrong, regardless. So I expect someone will blame my thumb that keeps popping out of its joint on the soda drinking or who knows what.... But hey, I don't smoke and really cut back on drinking alcohol since my late 20's.
Personally, I'd trust any of the sodas with real cane sugar in them more than these artificially sweetened low-cal/no cal drinks and/or the energy drinks on the market.
Reminds me of a big discussion we had in history class back in high school.... Supposedly, Nationalism was the blind, "racism without mention of color" that you speak of, as opposed to the good/healthy concept of Patriotism.
Frankly, I was never that convinced the difference was substantial. In theory anyway, Patriotism is simply taking pride in your country without going to the extreme of using it as a reason to put down any other nation.
As you point out though? In practice, I think the difference amounts to splitting hairs, because the place you're born into is just a structured organization full of rules and regulations. Chances are, some of them are ones you agree with and others you take issue with. There's never a valid reason to declare something "right" or "better/superior" just because it comes from the nation you were born in or live in. Even if all you do is wave the flag and put a big one in your front yard, you're probably accomplishing almost nothing. (What message are you trying to send with those flags? Letting people know you're one of their citizens? So what? Most people probably figure that out with the need to fly a flag to let them know.)
Yeah..... I actually agree. Though I don't like the idea of Bernie getting elected at ALL, it's also pretty clear he's not paid for by the establishment (corporate interests, military contractors, etc.). He's essentially advocating for the United States to end the political design of its founders and convert to Socialism. That, in itself, separates him from everyone else running for office under the Democratic or Republican ticket.
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No, I'm with you on this one. It's ALSO part of the media "machine" to try to frame everyone as either at one end of the spectrum or the other on a topic.
What happened to sensibly, cautiously looking at the data and finding that quite likely, the truth is someplace in the middle?
There are some cases where scientific research is simply done in error:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
In other cases, all of the facts aren't really stated or taken into account. I see no compelling to reason to flat out deny the climate is undergoing some change? Apparently, a lot of scientists think it is and they know more than I do about the topic. But that being the case, there's WAY too much money and political agenda behind convincing people of one result or another to take any of these long-term predictive models without a large heap of salt.
Truth is, the U.S. has a lot of wide open space that's sparsely populated - mostly by farmers or ranchers. These people are usually a lot smarter than most people give them credit for. They have to be, because it's so difficult to make a living that way these days. (You have to do a lot of manual labor, do a lot of number crunching, be versed in sales and marketing, and much more.)
My experience is, many of them are already well aware of the Internet and make use of it (even if it's only via a satellite connection). What they may NOT care about that much are "city slickers" coming in, preaching how their entire way of life will die out if they don't change (EG. conform to their ideas of how to modernize everything in town).
They're already adopting a lot of tech that the outsiders probably know little to nothing about -- but it's specific to their career choice.
The city I live in (Brunswick, MD) has Verizon for land line phone service, and they sell you up to 6mbit DSL as the fastest Internet service they offer. Comcast is also available here for TV, phone and broadband -- and with them, you can purchase up to 200mbits down / 10 up. (For some weird reason, they won't give you more than 10mbits up no matter what package you buy here. They tried to tell me it had to do with a limit because their central office is too far from here, but it sure looks artificially capped to me. When you run speed tests, you see it immediately bang up against the 10mbit upload speed limit and get throttled right back down again as soon as it hits 11-12.)
The interesting thing is, FiOS very quietly crept into a neighborhood in town where new construction is taking place (Brunswick Crossing). Initially though, I was told almost nobody purchased it or kept it for any length of time because they could only offer broadband Internet, not television. Comcast supposedly had exclusive rights for the TV in our area. I believe as of just a month ago or so though, that has been lifted and the full FiOS bundle is available for them.
It's not possible to get FiOS anyplace besides in the Crossing housing development out here though. The rumor is, Verizon claims it's "not feasible to run fiber through the hilly terrain the rest of the city consists of" -- but they found a relatively low-cost/easy way to extend service to the one development that sits on flat land, outside the main part of the city.
Have to agree wholeheartedly with the other people commenting here who dislike the social media integration aspect of these new drivers!
IMO, this sort of functionality NEVER belongs in a device driver package (even IF the package also bundles related applications such as control panels or optimization tools). Social media integration should be handled at the application level, by the games or other software someone chooses to install on a machine.
I'm even willing to go so far as to accept than an operating system itself might embrace social media, in the sense that it provides "hooks" so popular social media services can OPTIONALLY pop notifications on an all-purpose status bar or screen. (Apple and Microsoft both do some of this now. I dislike it in the sense that you're now developed an OS that has ties to 3rd. party services outside of the direct control of the people coding the OS. History shows us that this leads to broken features in the OS down the road. At the very least, this looks "ugly" when someone wishes to keep using an older operating system and now has entire menu configuration options that simply don't work when clicked. But at the end of the day, I suppose an OS should offer whatever functionality its users find useful. And enough people use Twitter or Facebook that they'd like their OS's notification bar to incorporate those updates.)
I just don't see where any value is added by rolling this stuff into the device drivers that make hardware "go", though? If I want to discuss my driver settings with other people, I'll visit an online support forum to do that. I don't need bloated drivers providing built in windows to do that stuff!
IMO though, there are always going to be trade-offs with this pay structure.
If one of your primary business goals happens to be growth and as wide a coverage area as possible, it doesn't seem to me that paying "well above market rates" for jobs in the retail or fast food businesses works very well?
For example, you constantly see those comparisons online about Wal-Mart vs. CostCo, claiming how CostCo compensates workers so much better, etc. The thing is, CostCo doesn't even so much as TRY to run a regular chain of superstores open to the general public. It only does membership-based warehouses. Wal-Mart operates Sam's Club, which has a very similar business model to CostCo AND happens to run the most successful retailer in the whole United States while doing that! (Check who the #1 employer is in America, by FAR.... Yep, WalMart. In fact, WalMart still ranks 3rd. in the entire WORLD.
Try eating at In-N-Out burger anywhere on the East Coast of the U.S. Oh, sorry... they don't have any of them out here. By comparison, try finding a McDonalds at least *somewhere* on the East Coast. Oh hey, probably can do that in a 5 mile radius of just about anywhere!
I'm not saying paying people more is a BAD thing, by any means. But I think it's fair to state that doing so tends to work most effectively if you're happy keeping your business relatively limited in size and scope. It doesn't appear that the In-N-Out business model has the ability to keep millions of people employed in America like the WalMart business model does.
If you want to start tracing back where we really "went off the rails" with salary increases not corresponding directly with increased buying power anymore, you find the divergence began right after America got off of the gold standard.
I've never been a big proponent of the idea that gold is the "best option" as the tangible resource to tie the dollar to, but I think the concept itself made a lot of sense. If you don't have *something* of value backing each dollar printed, you're essentially expecting people to believe in its value on sheer faith. That, in turn, opened the floodgates to devaluing the currency because the Fed could simply order more money be printed to cover the costs of any loans or government expenditures. The end result is the multi TRILLION dollar debt ceiling the government just voted to raise again last Monday, and the shrinking of your actual buying power.
Claims by Millennials that employers now believe "the less you pay someone, the harder they'll work" and the like are nonsense, and completely ignore this root problem with our money.
What *really* happened (speaking as a gen-X guy who lived through it) is we generally took to heart the advice our parents taught us, that we'd be able to get ahead with plenty of hard work and dedication. If we had an employer who promised the company would pay us overtime to work extra hours, a lot of us sacrificed and took them up on the offer. If an employer suggested there was a potential for faster career advancement by proving you went "above and beyond" what was required in a job position (often requiring working more than the standard 8 hour day), a lot of people chose to do that. Unfortunately, the value of the U.S. dollar was declining at the same time -- so that notion that putting "work first" and suffering a bit in the short term would pay off in the long term just wasn't coming true. (It would make sense to amass as much savings as possible while you're still young, so it can go into investments like a 401K plan where the money "goes to work for you" earning money just by sitting there. But people were finding they had to keep working that overtime or going "above and beyond" just to tread water.... so the "extra money" to invest didn't always materialize.)
Today's workers see that our generation failed at getting ahead with all of that extra work, so they think the answer is to rail against it and demand employers just compensate them better for doing less. They're not getting that the whole financial system is rigged against us.
Honestly, it's been a while since I even attempted to get 3D cards and gaming working on a Linux box. I pretty much always use Linux for dedicated server "appliances" in the workplaces these days, and stick with a Mac or Windows box for general purpose use at home like gaming.
But I remember in the past, the closed source nVidia graphics driver bundles were perfectly fine, as long as you ran one of the Linux distros they supported. Otherwise, you were sometimes out of luck. That's probably the single biggest argument I had against the closed source drivers. You were stuck using something like RedHat, because nVidia didn't want to provide tarbars for many of the more obscure Linux variants out there.
Otherwise, sure.... I don't think Linux gamers or even people doing heavy 3D editing/animation feel a big need to have access to the source code for the graphics drivers. Maybe a VERY small percentage would prefer it, because they're knowledgeable enough of a coder to tweak a driver to fix a specific problem they're encountering? But that's got to be far less than 1% of the user-base.
All in all though, I get the impression that video drivers are largely debugged and improved BECAUSE advanced video games drive those changes. Windows always winds up with the fastest, best drivers for a given 3D card because it has the most games that push the limits and expose flaws. You saw the same thing happen on the Mac in OS X when it first started getting some "serious" 3D games developed for it like Word of Warcraft. There were regularly updates in OS X for the video drivers that referenced WoW bugs as reasons for the fixes.
Since Linux has the least number of these game titles coded for it, it gets the least video driver development too.
I don't think most I.T. people fear change so much as they fear the lack of support from higher-ups if things break and require time to sort out again.
I knew I.T. people reluctant to move to Windows 7 and it wasn't because they feared learning the new OS version. Many of them already used 7 on their personal machines! They simply knew their company ran applications that weren't updated to work with 7, or the new "7 compatible" editions were expensive upgrades that the company wasn't going to be happy about purchasing.
I was working for a small steel fabricating company when we started upgrading to 7, and it caused me a LOT of headaches. One example was a little (but expensive) DOS based utility for estimating costs of steel bar and plate. I forget who even made the thing, but it was basically sold by a 1 or 2 person team operating out of someone's house in Tennessee or Kentucky. They sold an upgraded version with a Windows GUI and 7 compatibility, but it was something like $2,500. We had a lot of sales guys who had been using the old command line version of YEARS and it was second-nature for them to fire it up and fly through the numeric menu screens to figure up quick estimates while on the phone with potential customers. They just wanted the old version to keep working like it always did, but it just crashed in 7.
In the end, I think I got it going only by having it launch inside a VirtualPC session on the new computers -- which required a lot of additional configuration to the new PCs just to make it go. And that was only ONE of a number of problems Win 7 gave us.
I'm in my mid 40's myself (and I think one of the oldest ones in I.T. where I work currently), but the others are in the 35+ age range.
All of us are quite good at keeping up with the new stuff. Working for a marketing company, that's pretty much required, as the folks working in the core part of the business tend to be the Millennials who always want to find the latest, hardly yet known, new thing to use, so they can be seen as "trendy" and ahead of the curve.
As you said though, we have the collective wisdom from doing this stuff for 20+ years for a paycheck to realize when "new and shiny" is really just a rehash of something that was done long ago (and often done in a more stable fashion).
One good example that comes to mind are all of the file sharing services out there. We often have the need to share very large files with outside clients/customers and there's always someone trying to find a better way to do that. We adopted Dropbox for Business across the company, which does a good job of 99% of what's needed. But DropBox does throttle transfer speeds. Other sharing services have slick "extras" with their paid accounts, like presenting a branded page with the download link so our company logo is right there behind it, and the recipient doesn't see a generic-looking link like DropBox would generate for them to click.
At the end of the day, simply giving someone access to the web GUI for the FTP server capabilities in one of our NAS boxes is still the most efficient way to get files moved between points A to B. But marketing people don't always find that kind of UI acceptable to present to a client. It's times like that when I realize I.T. jobs have become about much more than "finding the most efficient tool to get the job done". Today, there's the expectation that you know how to provide an elegant solution on demand. Command lines and requirements of using utilities that have learning curves are fine for I.T. staff themselves, but the users we support expect more than that.
Honestly, I find it hard to believe ignorance has much to do with it at all. There are some big name companies on the record as completely supporting FISA, including Xerox. (Funny how Xerox also seems to have most of the contracts with local govt. for maintaining speed cameras.... Just maybe, they stand to profit any time government takes on some additional responsibility concerning technology? Hmm....)
I was self-taught in BASIC, because I was one of those "dorky kids" who wanted one of the early home computers as a Christmas gift, back when the owner's manual for one was hundreds of pages long and mostly covered how to program in BASIC for it. (Then, I'd buy or check those books out at the library with lists of BASIC programs you could manually key in and run. Typically, they'd be slightly broken because a given computer didn't have quite the same implementation of BASIC as the book author assumed was in use. So you had to have some coding skills to fix the errors and make them work.)
By the time I had a class in high-school for programming, they put me in the "advanced class" using their Apple //e systems, because I already knew all the beginning level stuff.
In the the end? Those skills were less useful than learning to repair a car, because BASIC quickly became obsolete. (Obviously, a mechanic has to keep up with changes with vehicles too ... but the change is slower and less drastic. To this day, an older mechanic with skills tuning or rebuilding old carburetors could still make good money doing it, at least as a "niche" skill for helping keep vintage cars going. Who will pay you to code in BASIC for them today?)
When you start talking about problems such as the company offering 100 pension plans? Your problem isn't that the employee has too many options/choices. The problem is that the company didn't do enough homework of their own to weed out the inferior options. When my employer tells me they made a certain selection for our healthcare provider, our life insurance provider, or anything else related to the benefits offered -- I assume they made an effort to find the best possible value for the dollar spent. Maybe they could have chosen better than they did, and maybe not. But the point is, they tried to apply a "filter" and make a sensible decision. (Why wouldn't you, since you want your benefits package to look attractive compared with your competition?)
Every time we use the web, we're presented with literally hundreds of millions of "options" ... yet we're not overwhelmed to the point where we just give up trying to find content we need. That's because we have really powerful search engines like Google we use as part of the process. They act as our filters.
Yep.... I hate to say it, but I think a LOT of us just got fooled on this one, at least initially. As techie "geeks", we *wanted* to believe this was all about a young, brilliant kid getting held back by "the system".
In reality, it's shaping up to look like this was all a political ploy.... Research the background of the kid's parents and you'll start to see what I mean.
IMO, this was all part of a preconceived plan to scare people at school by bringing in a suspicious-looking device and then cry discrimination when called out on it.
Yeah, I guess you could say that. There was apparently a video recorder made in 1963 in the U.K, sold in kit form, that could record 20 minutes at a time in black and white. (It cost about $1,600 in today's U.S. currency too.)
But the device actually called VCR that used video cassettes was a Phillips invention sold to TV stations in 1970, and made available to consumers in 1972.
I was just discussing something similar with a few of my tech buddies, a few weeks ago. Despite all of us working in I.T. for decades and being up on the latest trends -- we universally agreed that it feels like real innovation is slowing down. There were so many inventions in the last 100 or so years that clearly changed society, but in the last 10 or 20? Not so much. Almost everything heralded as the next big thing is really an incremental revision of existing tech, in recent years.
I mean sure, the Internet itself is a huge game-changer, but even that really goes all the way back to DARPANET, started in the early 1970's. The microcomputer is also really a child of the 70's. In fact, a lot happened in the 70's, invention-wise! The Bic disposable lighter was invented, as well as gene splicing. The VCR was invented, forever changing how people watched television. Post it notes, the laser printer, ethernet networking and cellular phones all came from the 70's too, plus the artificial heart and MRI machines.
The current generation is going to be remembered for creating a whole bunch of social media web sites that came and went and for popularizing the digital streaming of content you "rent" on monthly plans instead of buy on pre-packaged media. Oh, and multiple attempts to incrementally improve existing televisions by adding a curve to the flat panels, by adding 3D technologies to them that never really caught on, and by upping the resolutions every so often. I mean, ok ... I'm purposely being a little sarcastic here. But I think you get my point. We might still have a big game-changer on the horizon with self-driving vehicles, mind you. But this doesn't appear to be going down as a particularly trans-formative era in history.....
Really, the one thing that made VMWare suddenly appear expensive was Microsoft's move to support the same basic functionality built into Windows Server via Hyper-V. Until that happened, your only other "enterprise-grade" solution came from Citrix and had a price tag comparable to VMWare.
VMWare is still available in a free version though, if all you need is the need to virtualize a number of systems on a single server. (That's all we never needed at my previous job working for a small manufacturing firm. We built one high-spec rack mount server and virtualized 5 of the older physical machines to consolidate it into one box with more drive space and usable RAM.)
And if you start considering paying VMWare's price for all of the "vmotion" licensing related to moving VMs between virtual servers, etc.? Depending on what you actually need - you might be able to save some money just going with VMWare "essentials" instead and combining it with the 3rd. party Veeam backup software. Veeam partnered up with VMWare so their backup product can utilize some direct hooks in VMWare itself, to do things that are usually off limits to other applications not made by VMWare.
Where I live in Maryland, taking the commuter train in to work in the DC area is actually faster than trying to drive, but only due to the congestion on the highway and roads.
If I'm able to go in to work a few hours later than everyone else, the drive takes about 45-50 minutes, vs. the 2+ hours during rush-hour.
With the train though, you're also freed up to do a little bit more than you can while driving. You can read a book or magazine, or get some work done on a computer.... That has some value too.
Mass transit is never going to really be the king of convenience, but when your alternatives aren't good, it can win out as the best choice.
That's about the stupidest comment I've seen on Slashdot in years ... and I've seen a lot of 'em.
Jews are anti-Christians?! Really? Please enlighten me on that one. (Former Catholic myself, but even Jesus was a Jew.)
I believe these "flat hierarchy" business models have been tried before.... It's not a brand new, amazing thing that Zappo's was the first to attempt.
That said, it's pretty uncommon because more conventional arrangements are time-tested and proven to work reasonably well. "Why change what ain't broke?", is often a prudent way to go about running a company.
Personally, I think the biggest problem companies trying it will have is making it scale well. It's relatively easy to get a good group of intelligent, motivated people together in some division of a company who start questioning the value in having a boss or bosses. They know how the get the tasks done better than anyone else, and they thrive on as little micro-management as possible. But expand that to the WHOLE company (and keep hiring enough people), and I think the whole culture risks turning "poisonous" at some point. As it is now, you see too many companies with nepotism running rampant. The bosses take turns hiring their stepbrothers, cousins, sons or daughters, etc. - instead of finding someone else who'd actually be far better for the job. Imagine what happens when everyone essentially has equal rank? A few people pull this off as a favor for family/relatives/friends and suddenly, everyone else feels they get a pass to recommend their own friends and family too. At least with a traditional structure, the project manager or mid-level manager who does this can be put in his/her place by someone above them they have to answer to -- questioning why "so and so wasn't selected despite submitting a great resume".
I couldn't help but think, while reading this story, that it'd be perfect for a "based on real life" movie script. Has all the ingredients to be a "feel good, downtrodden guys make good" film.
I dunno.... If this is how things are being conducted on the developer lists, I think the woman has a valid complaint/point.
It's one thing to talk trash to each other when you're playing competitive sports against each other. (And I'm willing to bet women do the same thing when playing tennis, basketball or other womens' sports?)
But software development should be a little bit more professional in nature. I'm more of a sysadmin than a software coder myself, but I'd probably take it personally, too, if every time I worked hard to contribute something to a development project, people turned around and told me I was a "fuckwad" for having the idea and so on.
I mean, why bother contributing at all if everyone else involved comes across like they're that unappreciative of my efforts? I'm not going to "take it personally" in the sense it makes me question my ability to code and I consider switching careers .... but I'd definitely think about putting my efforts into other projects.
Right now, it's just the in thing to avoid soda. The pre-teens and teens I see who tell you they "don't drink that stuff" are the same ones buying up those nasty tasting "energy drinks" chock full of caffeine and all sorts of other chemicals.
Anything you eat or drink too much of can be bad for you. The people I knew who'd wind up with a huge tower of empty soda cans in their cubicle at work, for example? Probably wasn't doing them much good, health-wise.
But honestly, I'm already well into my 40's and am one of those people who gets a fountain soda pretty often at the gas station, or with lunch or dinner when I go out. I occasionally buy a 2 liter of Pepsi or Dr. Pepper or something to drink at home too. I've been doing this since I was a teenager. Can't really say I've had any negative heath effects from it, so far. And I'm getting to the age where stuff starts going wrong, regardless. So I expect someone will blame my thumb that keeps popping out of its joint on the soda drinking or who knows what.... But hey, I don't smoke and really cut back on drinking alcohol since my late 20's.
Personally, I'd trust any of the sodas with real cane sugar in them more than these artificially sweetened low-cal/no cal drinks and/or the energy drinks on the market.
Reminds me of a big discussion we had in history class back in high school .... Supposedly, Nationalism was the blind, "racism without mention of color" that you speak of, as opposed to the good/healthy concept of Patriotism.
Frankly, I was never that convinced the difference was substantial. In theory anyway, Patriotism is simply taking pride in your country without going to the extreme of using it as a reason to put down any other nation.
As you point out though? In practice, I think the difference amounts to splitting hairs, because the place you're born into is just a structured organization full of rules and regulations. Chances are, some of them are ones you agree with and others you take issue with. There's never a valid reason to declare something "right" or "better/superior" just because it comes from the nation you were born in or live in. Even if all you do is wave the flag and put a big one in your front yard, you're probably accomplishing almost nothing. (What message are you trying to send with those flags? Letting people know you're one of their citizens? So what? Most people probably figure that out with the need to fly a flag to let them know.)
Yeah..... I actually agree. Though I don't like the idea of Bernie getting elected at ALL, it's also pretty clear he's not paid for by the establishment (corporate interests, military contractors, etc.). He's essentially advocating for the United States to end the political design of its founders and convert to Socialism. That, in itself, separates him from everyone else running for office under the Democratic or Republican ticket.
.... Watson can check out the details of my vacation trips AND curse up a storm about them?
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