I work for a software consultancy as a software developer -- well, at least I do for the next couple of days. Various events have taken place over the last few months that have reduced my happiness in my role in this company.
Coincidentally, this company has clients in the public sector whose budgets have been frozen due to the economic downturn. This brought some of this company's projects to a stand-still and, unfortunately, this company's reaction was to fire the entire development team for one of the projects (this happened two months ago).
My project was suspended indefinitely by our private sector client whose budget was curtailed, and my development team was merged into another ongoing project. Naturally, I perceived my job security as limited. To make matters worse, rumours were circulating that our very old directors were considering trying to dissolve the company and ship their assets overseas. The idea was that some money already paid by clients might be attempted to be recovered and the directors wanted to retire. Combine all this with my growing discontent in my role in this organisation and I had great motivation to find another job before I was made redundant, but how was I supposed to accomplish this in this doom-n-gloom economy?
My wife and I decided that we liked our chances more with the sagging economy than with my dodgy company. So, I looked for a job, and I was confident as I was fortunate enough to have recently acquired some very valuable skills in our current technological landscape and I knew how they were in high demand and how to sell them. It worked out favorably for me, as I was able to secure a seemingly better job in a more experienced role with a higher pay at a different, much more reputable organisation.
I'd say that I am very lucky but I also believe all of my extra hard work paid off. I feel that, at least for the foreseeable future, a lot of people in IT who keep their skills current and relevant will always be able to find a decent job, the key being very much keeping your technical chops polished.
While we're on the subject, I'll toss out some informal guiding questions and share a thought or two:
If you knew telepathy existed, how exactly would that change your life? What would you be willing to give [up] for that ability? If you were told that the only way you could have an ability such as telapthy would be to eliminate your attachments and improve your moral quality (given a moral standard of course), would you set out in achieving it?
The way I see it, the interesting part of giving up attachments is that, in the process, you wouldn't care anymore if you had an ability such as telepathy. Now consider that you would have transcended a certain part of humanness and would have gained telepathy and much greater abilities and be well on your way to a better you.
Eh, just some thoughts. At any rate, I invite you to point out anything you see wrong with my thoughts and share your own as well, as this sort of stuff interests me.
Yeah, that literally made me fall out of my chair laughing.
Anything but a quick rejection from Borchers on that one would have probably resulted in a decrease in Apple's stock value if the word got out. In fact, that was a major test for Apple, to see if any demise they might meet would come as a result of them committing suicide - something that I could see happening with M$ if they continue to ride on that ill-fated ship that Ballmer is steering over there.
I think Ars made wonderful points and a well informed prediction. However, though this article is a few months old, I think that the principles behind it will still be in effect for Intel's upcoming lines, namely that a motherboard setup with a multi-core chip is in general cheaper than a roughly equivalently configured multi-chip one, and still for most applications the multi-core configuration will result in greater performance.
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
George Santayana
If I were to just leave thas quote as it were this post would likely be negatively moderated as being "Flamebait" or "Offtopic" and those moderations would probably be well justified. However, those are not my intentions.
I'm not saying this as a proliferation of my opinion; I just wanted to pose a different perspective on the issue.
Close, but not quite. Most politicians have learned to ignore voices pretty damn well. What makes an issue seem important is how much money, power, and/or fame they can use the issue to obtain, or how much money, power, and/or fame they stand to lose if they ignore the issue. For most politicians, unless you can promise them that listening to you will bring them one of those three things, they couldn't care less what you have to say.
I definitely agree with you, 110%. I think an addendum to that would be that there are in fact times when politicians don't have an opportunity to pursue their self-serving interests, when the opposing pressure is too great and the spotlight is too bright; basically, a politician is only as honest as the people keep him.
Oh, you know how it is with all these political types. It's not about what's "important"; Importance is only relative anyways.
You know what makes an issue seem important? Voices. Voices create the feeling of presence. And surely, if there is presence on behalf of a particular issue, then that issue seems important. Unfortunately for the masses, a small number of rich people can buy voices and create presence, thus promoting their own ideologies as important.
I kind of feel that this post should be moderated as "Well duh," but perhaps a reminder never hurts.
I certainly agree with you, in that, while working (programming like crazy) and not having to deal with clientele or the outside world, you should be in whatever attire you are most comfortable in. However, when dealing with the outside world, I believe it to be most respective and professional to wear professional attire that is appropriate to that correspondence.
Sure, it's all relative, but just because you're a programmer or even a manager of programmers doesn't mean you have a free pass to represent your company in any way other than the most professional of manners that the present day society has defined.
Google engineers crack the door open wider when addressing computer science audiences, such as rooms full of graduate students whom it is interested in recruiting
An alum of my university who works at Google recently visited and gave an informative lecture with a long Q&A session. I can vouch for the fact that we were told more than I've ever been able to read online about the way Google manages various issues, like their IT infrastucture. However there were still limitations to what he would/could tell us (sorry I won't go into specifics). It seemed (as you would expect) the better our questions, the better his answers, and if we asked questions that were too good, then it was likely that he did not feel liberated to answer.
Also, Google was cool enough to sponsor a Programming Contest and a Graduate Research Conference we held. Our alum attended our little conference and had great feedback and questions for our presenting students. With respect to knowledge, intelligence, and humor this guy was all I would imagine and/or hope for one of our alums working at Google.
On the otherhand, I was very unimpressed with certain issues concerning lack of professionalism in the lecture. As one example, though this is only an impression, it seemed that he felt he could just get away with wearing jeans and a Google t-shirt for the few days that he was with us because he worked at the ever prestigious Google. It seemed a bit arrogant. Also keep in mind that his position at google is higher than a solutions engineer.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) An enormous amount of spam will initially go undetected before your idea is effective
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Your idea proposes a solution that only large corporations could deploy
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) The large amount of resources needed for implementation of your idea that small companies don't have
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(x) Your solution is nothing more than a conceptual remanifestation of a solution that already exists
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) I think it is a creative concept, but there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
In no article I've seen has any writer actually suggested or "alleged" that SUSE Enterprise 10 is going to be a "Vista killer," as the story submitter (and transitively,/. editor) purported. Gotta love the FUD.
You certainly wouldn't hear Novell utter those words. I believe that a company that's been around as long as they have has more sense than that and knows that the best they could ever hope for is "Vista competitor." It would be interesting to know just how much of a margin Novell would have to take of Microsoft's sales in order for them to consider the maneuver to be a success.
Man, that flash video tickles me pink. It reminds me of the time when my family's computer (a Packard Bell 386) had a "talking calculator" application. I found the.WAV files for the numbers it spoke and then I used Sound Recorder to cut off the consonant and vowel sounds and saved them to their own separate.WAV files. I then used those to make my own words. Being the juvenile I was, probably around age 10 or 12 at the time, you bet that the first words I made were, of course, curse words.
You can imagine how overjoyed my father was to turn on the computer and also hear that, rather than the computer greeting him with the usual Windows chime, it was cursing at him.
That was hillarious, thanks. A good way to start off my morning.
Apparently they've been planning on this for some time now. Check out the prequel to this story from last January. It's about as equally informative as the "update."
This was the first I had heard about this exstension. I've been using it for the last half hour or so and I'm very pleased. It really does make browsing/. here a more enjoyable experience.
I find some of the additions of the extension to be things that really should have be built into/. anyways, such as things that you find at Digg like AJAX comment retrieval - things that are not at all hard to implement that can dramatically increase the user experience. Nevertheless, I'm not really too surprised by/.'s apparent slowness in embracing new web technologies considering how long it took them to simply make this site fully standardized in CSS
One negative aspect of the extension, however, is that it seems to me that, depending on the feature set you have enabled,/. pages in general now take a bit longer to load, but not so long that it makes the plug-in not worthwhile, especially since it facilitates the speed of navigation in other ways.
Good lord! I imagine the Japanese language with its 1945+ character alphabet is hard enough to learn; learning Japanese sign language must really suck.
You know what would really spoil those deaf kids is, instead of a robot doing sign language, a robot that shows images or words based on what a speaker says. I know, I know; creating a robot to do this is a feat within itself and impressive in its own right, but perhaps there are better ways of communicating with a robot if it can already perform more than adequate speech recognition.
For those interested in seeing a demo of this impressive family of products click here. The link on the article seemed to be/.ed.
In any case, I don't think this is a "flash killer."
There will always be designers who prefer what they grew up on or somehow prefer what Macromedia has to offer. That doesn't mean, however, that this future product of M$ isn't pretty useful and a bit impressive.
Nevertheless, they had to go and do something similar to what they've done with Vista and hopefully won't do with Office: There are three different components to the entire software package: Expression - Graphics Designer, Interactive Designer, and Web Designer. They could have crammed it all into one package but Microsoft is quite wise (and quite annoying) with marketing strategies.
Slashdot Mirror
What is it with geeks and time?
It always surprises me when this sort of "news" makes the front page.
I mean, I'm a geek, but even I think this is lame.
I work for a software consultancy as a software developer -- well, at least I do for the next couple of days. Various events have taken place over the last few months that have reduced my happiness in my role in this company.
Coincidentally, this company has clients in the public sector whose budgets have been frozen due to the economic downturn. This brought some of this company's projects to a stand-still and, unfortunately, this company's reaction was to fire the entire development team for one of the projects (this happened two months ago).
My project was suspended indefinitely by our private sector client whose budget was curtailed, and my development team was merged into another ongoing project. Naturally, I perceived my job security as limited. To make matters worse, rumours were circulating that our very old directors were considering trying to dissolve the company and ship their assets overseas. The idea was that some money already paid by clients might be attempted to be recovered and the directors wanted to retire. Combine all this with my growing discontent in my role in this organisation and I had great motivation to find another job before I was made redundant, but how was I supposed to accomplish this in this doom-n-gloom economy?
My wife and I decided that we liked our chances more with the sagging economy than with my dodgy company. So, I looked for a job, and I was confident as I was fortunate enough to have recently acquired some very valuable skills in our current technological landscape and I knew how they were in high demand and how to sell them. It worked out favorably for me, as I was able to secure a seemingly better job in a more experienced role with a higher pay at a different, much more reputable organisation.
I'd say that I am very lucky but I also believe all of my extra hard work paid off. I feel that, at least for the foreseeable future, a lot of people in IT who keep their skills current and relevant will always be able to find a decent job, the key being very much keeping your technical chops polished.
Ummm... you mean this century right?
I'm still surprised this made the front page. I mean, I'm a geek, but even I think this is lame.
A thought provoking blog I read at times recently linked to a research thesis on programming with thought.
While we're on the subject, I'll toss out some informal guiding questions and share a thought or two:
If you knew telepathy existed, how exactly would that change your life? What would you be willing to give [up] for that ability? If you were told that the only way you could have an ability such as telapthy would be to eliminate your attachments and improve your moral quality (given a moral standard of course), would you set out in achieving it?
The way I see it, the interesting part of giving up attachments is that, in the process, you wouldn't care anymore if you had an ability such as telepathy. Now consider that you would have transcended a certain part of humanness and would have gained telepathy and much greater abilities and be well on your way to a better you.
Eh, just some thoughts. At any rate, I invite you to point out anything you see wrong with my thoughts and share your own as well, as this sort of stuff interests me.
Defend yourself in the Imminent Robot Rebellion
That's right. Imminent.
Yeah, that literally made me fall out of my chair laughing.
Anything but a quick rejection from Borchers on that one would have probably resulted in a decrease in Apple's stock value if the word got out. In fact, that was a major test for Apple, to see if any demise they might meet would come as a result of them committing suicide - something that I could see happening with M$ if they continue to ride on that ill-fated ship that Ballmer is steering over there.
I think Ars made wonderful points and a well informed prediction. However, though this article is a few months old, I think that the principles behind it will still be in effect for Intel's upcoming lines, namely that a motherboard setup with a multi-core chip is in general cheaper than a roughly equivalently configured multi-chip one, and still for most applications the multi-core configuration will result in greater performance.
George Santayana
If I were to just leave thas quote as it were this post would likely be negatively moderated as being "Flamebait" or "Offtopic" and those moderations would probably be well justified. However, those are not my intentions.
I'm not saying this as a proliferation of my opinion; I just wanted to pose a different perspective on the issue.
I definitely agree with you, 110%. I think an addendum to that would be that there are in fact times when politicians don't have an opportunity to pursue their self-serving interests, when the opposing pressure is too great and the spotlight is too bright; basically, a politician is only as honest as the people keep him.
Oh, you know how it is with all these political types. It's not about what's "important"; Importance is only relative anyways.
You know what makes an issue seem important? Voices. Voices create the feeling of presence. And surely, if there is presence on behalf of a particular issue, then that issue seems important. Unfortunately for the masses, a small number of rich people can buy voices and create presence, thus promoting their own ideologies as important.
I kind of feel that this post should be moderated as "Well duh," but perhaps a reminder never hurts.
I can see the RIAA drooling over this event.
With the UKRI pushing their agenda in allofmp3.com's backyard, at a conference of international powers, this becomes an international issue.
Whatever happens there is likely to serve as some sort of moral precedence and influence legislators in the US as well.
I certainly agree with you, in that, while working (programming like crazy) and not having to deal with clientele or the outside world, you should be in whatever attire you are most comfortable in. However, when dealing with the outside world, I believe it to be most respective and professional to wear professional attire that is appropriate to that correspondence.
Sure, it's all relative, but just because you're a programmer or even a manager of programmers doesn't mean you have a free pass to represent your company in any way other than the most professional of manners that the present day society has defined.
Just an opinion.
An alum of my university who works at Google recently visited and gave an informative lecture with a long Q&A session. I can vouch for the fact that we were told more than I've ever been able to read online about the way Google manages various issues, like their IT infrastucture. However there were still limitations to what he would/could tell us (sorry I won't go into specifics). It seemed (as you would expect) the better our questions, the better his answers, and if we asked questions that were too good, then it was likely that he did not feel liberated to answer.
Also, Google was cool enough to sponsor a Programming Contest and a Graduate Research Conference we held. Our alum attended our little conference and had great feedback and questions for our presenting students. With respect to knowledge, intelligence, and humor this guy was all I would imagine and/or hope for one of our alums working at Google.
On the otherhand, I was very unimpressed with certain issues concerning lack of professionalism in the lecture. As one example, though this is only an impression, it seemed that he felt he could just get away with wearing jeans and a Google t-shirt for the few days that he was with us because he worked at the ever prestigious Google. It seemed a bit arrogant. Also keep in mind that his position at google is higher than a solutions engineer.
Just thought I'd share.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) An enormous amount of spam will initially go undetected before your idea is effective
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Your idea proposes a solution that only large corporations could deploy
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) The large amount of resources needed for implementation of your idea that small companies don't have
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(x) Your solution is nothing more than a conceptual remanifestation of a solution that already exists
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) I think it is a creative concept, but there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
No, because that would still be killing, but I like where you're going with this.
I know more than a few people who have use NdisWrapper to overcome your problem, though I don't know your specific situation.
In no article I've seen has any writer actually suggested or "alleged" that SUSE Enterprise 10 is going to be a "Vista killer," as the story submitter (and transitively, /. editor) purported. Gotta love the FUD.
/. killers, and YouTube killers and now apprently Vista killers...
You certainly wouldn't hear Novell utter those words. I believe that a company that's been around as long as they have has more sense than that and knows that the best they could ever hope for is "Vista competitor." It would be interesting to know just how much of a margin Novell would have to take of Microsoft's sales in order for them to consider the maneuver to be a success.
On a side note, this "killer" stuff is getting way out of hand, with iPod killers and Flash killers, and
Please folks; enough with the killing.
Can't we all just get along?
Man, that flash video tickles me pink. It reminds me of the time when my family's computer (a Packard Bell 386) had a "talking calculator" application. I found the .WAV files for the numbers it spoke and then I used Sound Recorder to cut off the consonant and vowel sounds and saved them to their own separate .WAV files. I then used those to make my own words. Being the juvenile I was, probably around age 10 or 12 at the time, you bet that the first words I made were, of course, curse words.
You can imagine how overjoyed my father was to turn on the computer and also hear that, rather than the computer greeting him with the usual Windows chime, it was cursing at him.
That was hillarious, thanks. A good way to start off my morning.
Apparently they've been planning on this for some time now. Check out the prequel to this story from last January. It's about as equally informative as the "update."
This was the first I had heard about this exstension. I've been using it for the last half hour or so and I'm very pleased. It really does make browsing /. here a more enjoyable experience.
/. anyways, such as things that you find at Digg like AJAX comment retrieval - things that are not at all hard to implement that can dramatically increase the user experience. Nevertheless, I'm not really too surprised by /.'s apparent slowness in embracing new web technologies considering how long it took them to simply make this site fully standardized in CSS
/. pages in general now take a bit longer to load, but not so long that it makes the plug-in not worthwhile, especially since it facilitates the speed of navigation in other ways.
I find some of the additions of the extension to be things that really should have be built into
One negative aspect of the extension, however, is that it seems to me that, depending on the feature set you have enabled,
All of you should check this out for sure!
Good lord! I imagine the Japanese language with its 1945+ character alphabet is hard enough to learn; learning Japanese sign language must really suck.
You know what would really spoil those deaf kids is, instead of a robot doing sign language, a robot that shows images or words based on what a speaker says. I know, I know; creating a robot to do this is a feat within itself and impressive in its own right, but perhaps there are better ways of communicating with a robot if it can already perform more than adequate speech recognition.
For those interested in seeing a demo of this impressive family of products click here. The link on the article seemed to be /.ed.
In any case, I don't think this is a "flash killer."
There will always be designers who prefer what they grew up on or somehow prefer what Macromedia has to offer. That doesn't mean, however, that this future product of M$ isn't pretty useful and a bit impressive.
Nevertheless, they had to go and do something similar to what they've done with Vista and hopefully won't do with Office: There are three different components to the entire software package: Expression - Graphics Designer, Interactive Designer, and Web Designer. They could have crammed it all into one package but Microsoft is quite wise (and quite annoying) with marketing strategies.
Yes I am ;)
FTA:
The 16Gbit device holds 16.4 billion functional transistors
Woah, that's a relief. I was afraid that I might be buying a device with billions of non-functional or even disfunctional transistors.
Now that Samsung has distinguished this for me, from now on, I'm going to make sure all the devices I purchase have fully functional transistors.
Shoo' I'm being raped, tortured, and murdered there!