For what it's worth, you can. I was just running iOS5 beta 1 for the last couple of weeks. For some reason, I had an issue updating to beta 2 and it let me downgrade right back to 4.3.3.
I suppose that depends on your definition of what's worth using. If you're looking at the web as nothing more than submit form, browse table, load from database...yea, no javascript is fine.
If you want anything with a decent user interface that will work on multiple devices and not require people to visit 20 different pages to do something that could be simple...well, then you need javascript.
Saying everything works fine with javascript off is right up there with saying "we might as well all just use the command line". If you have no interest in an interface, then you're absolutely right.
And for the record, I detest using javascript unless I have to but you're comment is just plain wrong.
If you're a programmer, programming language certifications mean very little. After all, you're a programmer. IF however, you don't always want to be a programmer and want to find a way to parlay yourself into a more management related position then something like a Project Management certification (PMP) could do quiet well. Other certs that show a certain level of expertise or specialty can be effective too, but only if you're trying to branch out. Getting certified in something like Backtrack for security and penetration testing can go a long way towards making you a more well rounded option.
Likewise, if you've worked your way into programming but don't have a degree, the certifications can go a long way towards adding credibility when resumes are being sifted through.
If you get certifications for something you already do or should very naturally pick up in your normal course of employment though, it's not going to stand out that much. If you've been a java programmer for 10 years and have every java certification under the Sun (see what I did there?) it's not going to be much different on paper than just saying you've been a java programmer for 10 years. You have 10 years of java programming experience and Backtrack or PMP certification though...all of a sudden you stand out a little more.
Similarly, if you have spent most of your career as a Python programmer and then got certified for Perl, Ruby, and PHP...not that big of a deal. You get a major Java or.NET certification though...that's fairly different environment and the certification goes a long way towards validating your ability in that area especially if you haven't previously had a job yet to back it up. It's help to transition from one to another because, unless somebody is desperate to hire "a programmer" if you don't have the job experience with the language you telling them how quickly "you can pick it up" isn't going to do you any good.
Nobody wants to pay you while you learn to do what they hired you to do, only to see you start demanding raises as soon as you get good at it (not that that ever happens...just sayin).
Equity comes as a risk/reward position. The other guys who put money in, took the risk, likely went without pay or very minimal pay so that they could do things like say...pay really high contractor rates for their developers.
Had you taken low rates to begin with in order to help out the company's capital position when things were tight starting out, then yes absolutely you should have a solid chunk of equity. You're getting paid well and it sounds like you'll be able to continue being paid well for quite a while now since the company is so stable. Enjoy that. Appreciate that.
Understand that you might be aware of a solid chunk of revenue coming in regularly, but you've got no idea where that money's going. If you've got a steady million a year and 5-6 people on contractor rates it's entirely possible that the business is still just scraping by. There's money going to taxes, office space, savings for future expansion and marketing plans, attorneys, preparation for lawsuits against you, preparation for lawsuits that you have to pursue, patent applications and reapplications, advertising, hopefully more employees so that the company can grow without overloading you...and so on.
It is expensive to run a business and the people that are vested in it stand to lose everything they have if it didn't/doesn't work out in many cases. You got a steady paycheck without having to worry about anything. There is a reason they have equity.
The hard drive is the bottleneck, but it's also the easiest piece to upgrade because it's not tied to a cap on the motherboard. By maxing out your RAM, you keep from using swap space on the hard drive and improve the performance of everything. That's the biggest reason that the hard drive is the bottleneck though, because your ran out of RAM.
Also, I should add that I'm not saying you need to upgrade the RAM from the OEM. It's simple enough to just upgrade it yourself, but regardless of how much you spend upgrading it, it will be more valuable than the processor speed boost in the long run. It's not like RAM has a never-ending upgrade cap like a hard drive. The mother board has a per-slot limit too so it become no easier to upgrade the ram once you hit the max than it does to upgrade the processor.
RAM over processor. We're not talking Pentium 90 vs an i7 here. We're talking i7 vs i5. At that level, the difference in processor isn't that big of a deal compared to not having enough RAM.
If, however, you're coming close enough to your RAM limit that you start using swap space on your hard drive, the computer will grind to a crawl. A 7200 RPM drive will certainly help lessen the impact, but the speed difference between RAM and HD is huge. I upgraded my laptop for the first time in about 5 years from a 2GB machine to an 8GB machine. I'm currently sitting here using 5.9 GB of RAM and it's not because I'm doing high end gaming (I'm not). It's just that I'm using a lot of application at once and have about 50 tabs open in Chrome. Helps my work flow. My 5 year old dual core machine would have probably lasted me another 5 years if I could have just put more RAM than 2GB in it.
The point is that lack of RAM is much more detrimental than lack of processor and by maxing out your RAM, you'll get a lot more life out of your machine. Especially with everything moving to 64 bit.
I was talking today with a guy who's site has been around providing legit original content for over 13 years and is HEAVILY plagiarized by other sites that end up ranking higher than him on Google searches and basically stealing ad revenue that should belong to his company. I'm not talking, scraped some sites and compiled a blog post, I'm talking legit, researched, HONcode certified material.
It would be cool if there were a way to reference your copyright ownership of content in an HTML header/sitemap so that Google could legitimately know the original source of the content.
Yea. It's a sad thing but in many cases dev teams are forced to deal with feature releases and marketing deadlines rather than getting to account for every ideal development scenario they'd prefer to pursue. Security details like this are often overlooked as many people/businesses just assume that the cost of fixing an issue when it comes up is dramatically lower than taking the time to try to find and fix every potential security issue.
system that some people would not stop using when the new system went live. He wanted to make it such a pain to use the old one that they would just start using the new one. The more you used it, the worse it gain.
It will be settled quietly most likely. People are forced to defend their trademarks, else void them due to allowing it to be used when they already had knowledge of it.
It will answer questions, get a lot of press, make lawyers a lot of money and help those firms further advertise themselves for more lawsuits that the people affected will barely profit from, if at all.
Not really. Streaming is huge and DTV has access to provide on demand service, premium new releases AND streaming old movies if they do it properly. DTV is a pretty tech savvy company. I'm a customer and I've always been very impressed by their web experience, quality, and support. If they did it, I'd be shocked if it wasn't done well.
If you've ever heard a person of faith tell you that they do not believe in coincidence, it's because they have experienced and repeatedly seen what they believe to be God at work. I will confess to being a programmer that is one of those people.
I grew up as a disenchanted Baptist, spent about 6 years as a HARD core Atheist / Agnostic, and I've been a very imperfect Christian again ever since. The catalyst was the impossible to duplicate string of coincidences that led me to meet my future wife, understand the psychology that I needed to know to handle some complicated situations, and then finally marry my wife. I started to notice some things as we were dating of the "wow, good thing I experienced that" but the real crazy stuff happened after we talked about the little details of our lives up to that point. Some of the incredible parallels of timing of our own life experiences as a number of things that would have had to happen for her in order for us to have ended up together. Now that I've experienced it and have a small understanding of how God can work, I see it everywhere.
However, if I try to explain it to somebody on Slashdot, you'll assume I'm a religious nut case. In this case though, I experienced, learned, and see God's work on a daily basis. I don't feel like I have faith, I feel like I have understanding and if I didn't have that I would probably still be an atheist.
But I'm also fully aware that there's no way I could ever communicate that experience or communicate that experience to somebody else.
At a local university near here, they're IT department has setup an internal cloud using Eucalyptus specifically for that purpose. The generate Selenium tests and then fire up a ton of VM's to simultaneously run them to generate said race conditions. It's pretty slick.
Facebook had more to do with the "find the alternative" approach than anything else. MySpace DOMINATED the social networking scene initially. Facebook wasn't even close for a loooooooooooong time. Once of the single most annoying things about MySpace was that, well, people made it "their space". From personalizing their pages with these hideous designs and annoying songs that would play because you looked at a page, to the endless amount of spam...it was ridiculous.
People liked the concept but not the implementation. Plaxo wanted to keep people connected too. Same concept, different implementation. So did Classmates.com and the High School Alumni site.
Facebook was absurdly clean and non-customized. While MySpace was overrun with high school kids, Facebook was initially reserved for people with collegiate,.edu email addresses initial keeping spam out and making it extremely popular in the college niche while reserving a little bit exclusivity.
When people don't like one option, they go with whatever the other one is. Facebook was, pure and simple, the anti-MySpace.
In this past election, there was no chance that a Republican was going to win simply because so many people wanted "whatever the other one is."
The Governor in SC is nothing more than a figurehead position. It's setup in this state that the state senate has complete control of the state and the lieutenant governor can actually stop the governor from doing...a lot. Doesn't really matter who wins, it's a figurehead seat.
If you want to get something changed in SC, you have to go through the people with weight in the state senate. The status quo remains. Our last governor publicly said that it was setup that way out of fears of a possible black governor after the civil war.
"You'll never make what you're worth working for somebody else."
That's from the wealthiest person I know who is a huge donor to a local university. And he's right.
It really doesn't matter how much stuff you know. The person that runs business X needs somebody who can do task Y and task Y has a specific value to business X. Period. If you can do more, good for you. It doesn't mean that they're going to pay you anymore.
Say you're the single greatest web programmer ever and you work for a company that makes websites for it's customers. In that company, you should be getting a portion of the money you're helping to rake in. You take your identical skill set to a telecom company and you will be paid somewhere in the budget range they've got allocated to the position, based on your experience.
Simple as that. Identical skill sets have different value to different people. Many business people just view you as "the web guy" if you're doing anything related to the web and as far as they're concerned you are being paid the acceptable rate for your time already. It's not a business where you can set different prices for different tasks.
You're being paid for your time per week. If they ask you to do something different with that time, there is not going to be a bit of difference in their mind. If you're doing web content, web design, or web programming you are going to be "the web guy" and assumed to do all of them. If somebody asks the janitor to build a website, the janitor will say "I don't know how."
If you'd like to be paid proportionally, per task type then start a business. The flip side to being able to set your own price as you perceive it's value is that you have to accumulate enough of a client base and reputation that people are willing to pay those rates consistently enough to pay your bills.
I've got my own business now and I used to feel undervalued, significantly, where I worked. Now, I would damn near kill for a steady paycheck. The ups and downs will kill you. What it has done though, is give me a dramatically greater appreciation for people who are able to provide jobs in the first place.
Are you working 100% of the time when you're on the job? Are you spending any time on slashdot/facebook/some other site?
Well, your employer was paying for every ounce of that time that you weren't really doing what you're paid to do. If you factor in your downtime + what you feel like you should be paid during your up time, it might just be a wash.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, you can. I was just running iOS5 beta 1 for the last couple of weeks. For some reason, I had an issue updating to beta 2 and it let me downgrade right back to 4.3.3.
I suppose that depends on your definition of what's worth using. If you're looking at the web as nothing more than submit form, browse table, load from database...yea, no javascript is fine.
If you want anything with a decent user interface that will work on multiple devices and not require people to visit 20 different pages to do something that could be simple...well, then you need javascript.
Saying everything works fine with javascript off is right up there with saying "we might as well all just use the command line". If you have no interest in an interface, then you're absolutely right.
And for the record, I detest using javascript unless I have to but you're comment is just plain wrong.
It's the best learning experience you'll ever have, even if it doesn't work out. Good luck!
If you're a programmer, programming language certifications mean very little. After all, you're a programmer. IF however, you don't always want to be a programmer and want to find a way to parlay yourself into a more management related position then something like a Project Management certification (PMP) could do quiet well. Other certs that show a certain level of expertise or specialty can be effective too, but only if you're trying to branch out. Getting certified in something like Backtrack for security and penetration testing can go a long way towards making you a more well rounded option.
Likewise, if you've worked your way into programming but don't have a degree, the certifications can go a long way towards adding credibility when resumes are being sifted through.
If you get certifications for something you already do or should very naturally pick up in your normal course of employment though, it's not going to stand out that much. If you've been a java programmer for 10 years and have every java certification under the Sun (see what I did there?) it's not going to be much different on paper than just saying you've been a java programmer for 10 years. You have 10 years of java programming experience and Backtrack or PMP certification though...all of a sudden you stand out a little more.
Similarly, if you have spent most of your career as a Python programmer and then got certified for Perl, Ruby, and PHP...not that big of a deal. You get a major Java or .NET certification though...that's fairly different environment and the certification goes a long way towards validating your ability in that area especially if you haven't previously had a job yet to back it up. It's help to transition from one to another because, unless somebody is desperate to hire "a programmer" if you don't have the job experience with the language you telling them how quickly "you can pick it up" isn't going to do you any good.
Nobody wants to pay you while you learn to do what they hired you to do, only to see you start demanding raises as soon as you get good at it (not that that ever happens...just sayin).
Equity comes as a risk/reward position. The other guys who put money in, took the risk, likely went without pay or very minimal pay so that they could do things like say...pay really high contractor rates for their developers.
Had you taken low rates to begin with in order to help out the company's capital position when things were tight starting out, then yes absolutely you should have a solid chunk of equity. You're getting paid well and it sounds like you'll be able to continue being paid well for quite a while now since the company is so stable. Enjoy that. Appreciate that.
Understand that you might be aware of a solid chunk of revenue coming in regularly, but you've got no idea where that money's going. If you've got a steady million a year and 5-6 people on contractor rates it's entirely possible that the business is still just scraping by. There's money going to taxes, office space, savings for future expansion and marketing plans, attorneys, preparation for lawsuits against you, preparation for lawsuits that you have to pursue, patent applications and reapplications, advertising, hopefully more employees so that the company can grow without overloading you...and so on.
It is expensive to run a business and the people that are vested in it stand to lose everything they have if it didn't/doesn't work out in many cases. You got a steady paycheck without having to worry about anything. There is a reason they have equity.
The hard drive is the bottleneck, but it's also the easiest piece to upgrade because it's not tied to a cap on the motherboard. By maxing out your RAM, you keep from using swap space on the hard drive and improve the performance of everything. That's the biggest reason that the hard drive is the bottleneck though, because your ran out of RAM.
Also, I should add that I'm not saying you need to upgrade the RAM from the OEM. It's simple enough to just upgrade it yourself, but regardless of how much you spend upgrading it, it will be more valuable than the processor speed boost in the long run. It's not like RAM has a never-ending upgrade cap like a hard drive. The mother board has a per-slot limit too so it become no easier to upgrade the ram once you hit the max than it does to upgrade the processor.
RAM over processor. We're not talking Pentium 90 vs an i7 here. We're talking i7 vs i5. At that level, the difference in processor isn't that big of a deal compared to not having enough RAM.
If, however, you're coming close enough to your RAM limit that you start using swap space on your hard drive, the computer will grind to a crawl. A 7200 RPM drive will certainly help lessen the impact, but the speed difference between RAM and HD is huge. I upgraded my laptop for the first time in about 5 years from a 2GB machine to an 8GB machine. I'm currently sitting here using 5.9 GB of RAM and it's not because I'm doing high end gaming (I'm not). It's just that I'm using a lot of application at once and have about 50 tabs open in Chrome. Helps my work flow. My 5 year old dual core machine would have probably lasted me another 5 years if I could have just put more RAM than 2GB in it.
The point is that lack of RAM is much more detrimental than lack of processor and by maxing out your RAM, you'll get a lot more life out of your machine. Especially with everything moving to 64 bit.
I was talking today with a guy who's site has been around providing legit original content for over 13 years and is HEAVILY plagiarized by other sites that end up ranking higher than him on Google searches and basically stealing ad revenue that should belong to his company. I'm not talking, scraped some sites and compiled a blog post, I'm talking legit, researched, HONcode certified material.
It would be cool if there were a way to reference your copyright ownership of content in an HTML header/sitemap so that Google could legitimately know the original source of the content.
I wish they'd let people vote on how the money should be allocated / which projects deserve funding. It'd be interesting to see what came out on top.
I'll have to ask them about this.
Something to the effect of "we declare a system unhackable and the hackers find all the holes for us."
It'd be terrifying to go that deep but it's amazing that it might be possible.
Yea. It's a sad thing but in many cases dev teams are forced to deal with feature releases and marketing deadlines rather than getting to account for every ideal development scenario they'd prefer to pursue. Security details like this are often overlooked as many people/businesses just assume that the cost of fixing an issue when it comes up is dramatically lower than taking the time to try to find and fix every potential security issue.
system that some people would not stop using when the new system went live. He wanted to make it such a pain to use the old one that they would just start using the new one. The more you used it, the worse it gain.
It will be settled quietly most likely. People are forced to defend their trademarks, else void them due to allowing it to be used when they already had knowledge of it.
"His head's on backwards!"
It will answer questions, get a lot of press, make lawyers a lot of money and help those firms further advertise themselves for more lawsuits that the people affected will barely profit from, if at all.
Not really. Streaming is huge and DTV has access to provide on demand service, premium new releases AND streaming old movies if they do it properly. DTV is a pretty tech savvy company. I'm a customer and I've always been very impressed by their web experience, quality, and support. If they did it, I'd be shocked if it wasn't done well.
Makes me happy to hear that somebody knows how to do it properly. I'd love to see high speed trains come to the US if it could be done well.
If you've ever heard a person of faith tell you that they do not believe in coincidence, it's because they have experienced and repeatedly seen what they believe to be God at work. I will confess to being a programmer that is one of those people.
I grew up as a disenchanted Baptist, spent about 6 years as a HARD core Atheist / Agnostic, and I've been a very imperfect Christian again ever since. The catalyst was the impossible to duplicate string of coincidences that led me to meet my future wife, understand the psychology that I needed to know to handle some complicated situations, and then finally marry my wife. I started to notice some things as we were dating of the "wow, good thing I experienced that" but the real crazy stuff happened after we talked about the little details of our lives up to that point. Some of the incredible parallels of timing of our own life experiences as a number of things that would have had to happen for her in order for us to have ended up together. Now that I've experienced it and have a small understanding of how God can work, I see it everywhere.
However, if I try to explain it to somebody on Slashdot, you'll assume I'm a religious nut case. In this case though, I experienced, learned, and see God's work on a daily basis. I don't feel like I have faith, I feel like I have understanding and if I didn't have that I would probably still be an atheist.
But I'm also fully aware that there's no way I could ever communicate that experience or communicate that experience to somebody else.
At a local university near here, they're IT department has setup an internal cloud using Eucalyptus specifically for that purpose. The generate Selenium tests and then fire up a ton of VM's to simultaneously run them to generate said race conditions. It's pretty slick.
Facebook had more to do with the "find the alternative" approach than anything else. MySpace DOMINATED the social networking scene initially. Facebook wasn't even close for a loooooooooooong time. Once of the single most annoying things about MySpace was that, well, people made it "their space". From personalizing their pages with these hideous designs and annoying songs that would play because you looked at a page, to the endless amount of spam...it was ridiculous.
People liked the concept but not the implementation. Plaxo wanted to keep people connected too. Same concept, different implementation. So did Classmates.com and the High School Alumni site.
Facebook was absurdly clean and non-customized. While MySpace was overrun with high school kids, Facebook was initially reserved for people with collegiate, .edu email addresses initial keeping spam out and making it extremely popular in the college niche while reserving a little bit exclusivity.
When people don't like one option, they go with whatever the other one is. Facebook was, pure and simple, the anti-MySpace.
In this past election, there was no chance that a Republican was going to win simply because so many people wanted "whatever the other one is."
anything.
The Governor in SC is nothing more than a figurehead position. It's setup in this state that the state senate has complete control of the state and the lieutenant governor can actually stop the governor from doing...a lot. Doesn't really matter who wins, it's a figurehead seat.
If you want to get something changed in SC, you have to go through the people with weight in the state senate. The status quo remains. Our last governor publicly said that it was setup that way out of fears of a possible black governor after the civil war.
"You'll never make what you're worth working for somebody else."
That's from the wealthiest person I know who is a huge donor to a local university. And he's right.
It really doesn't matter how much stuff you know. The person that runs business X needs somebody who can do task Y and task Y has a specific value to business X. Period. If you can do more, good for you. It doesn't mean that they're going to pay you anymore.
Say you're the single greatest web programmer ever and you work for a company that makes websites for it's customers. In that company, you should be getting a portion of the money you're helping to rake in. You take your identical skill set to a telecom company and you will be paid somewhere in the budget range they've got allocated to the position, based on your experience.
Simple as that. Identical skill sets have different value to different people. Many business people just view you as "the web guy" if you're doing anything related to the web and as far as they're concerned you are being paid the acceptable rate for your time already. It's not a business where you can set different prices for different tasks.
You're being paid for your time per week. If they ask you to do something different with that time, there is not going to be a bit of difference in their mind. If you're doing web content, web design, or web programming you are going to be "the web guy" and assumed to do all of them. If somebody asks the janitor to build a website, the janitor will say "I don't know how."
If you'd like to be paid proportionally, per task type then start a business. The flip side to being able to set your own price as you perceive it's value is that you have to accumulate enough of a client base and reputation that people are willing to pay those rates consistently enough to pay your bills.
I've got my own business now and I used to feel undervalued, significantly, where I worked. Now, I would damn near kill for a steady paycheck. The ups and downs will kill you. What it has done though, is give me a dramatically greater appreciation for people who are able to provide jobs in the first place.
Are you working 100% of the time when you're on the job? Are you spending any time on slashdot/facebook/some other site?
Well, your employer was paying for every ounce of that time that you weren't really doing what you're paid to do. If you factor in your downtime + what you feel like you should be paid during your up time, it might just be a wash.