Thanks for the advice - I do indeed have specifics in mind when I look for a new employer: CMM Level 2 or 3. If they don't have it, I'll evangelize until they do. Despite the drawbacks of having lots of process overhead, it makes a huge difference in the quality of both software and life. On the other hand, I've never seen an Extreme Programming process at work, but it sounds like just the ticket for a smaller team that still needs some structure to their development. No more all-nighters for me if I can possibly help it - estimation, planning, and change control rule the day.
Agreed. This kind of delay is a typical production glitch, with perhaps a bit more impact than most. Still, nothing to see here. Move along. Not to worry. Apple will still sell a kajillion of them.
Congrats to you for gaining two converts! That's not an easy thing to do. Why do I feel like a Jehovah's witness? "Well done, brother, another member of the sect has been added." Creepy, but exciting nonetheless.
Apple will be around for some time to come. I don't think anyone really understands the market niche they're occupying, but clearly they are somewhere, because they've been around this long and have $4 billion in the bank.
While the armchair CEOs are screaming that Apple should port OS X to Intel/attack the enterprise server market/target business desktops, the company is actually doing that in a much slower, roundabout fashion. Instead of trying to bust into a market they have no foothold in, they are slowly but steadily courting the research market with apps like BLAST and ads trumpeting how fast OS X runs Mathematica.
This is smart business.
Even if Apple doesn't have grand designs to take over the enterprise server market, they're definitely going to gain mindshare in the grad student/corporate researcher community with tactics like this. And corporate research can mean big money, especially if a genetics lab decides to purchase a few hundred dual-GHz boxen and set them up as a Beow.... er, cluster.
If this happened, suddenly other institutions would sit up and perhaps take notice of a) the versatility of OS X, b) the ease of use of OS X, and c) the TCO advantage Macs have. I think this is very canny marketing by Apple, working on markets where they already had their foot in the door and trying to open that door a bit more. There's no way OS X Server (given appropriate hardware to run on) would displace Linux/Sun/MS in any Enterprise overnight - but with a few years of incubation and hardening in a research environment, it could have the technological and mindshare boost it needs to attempt a takeover.
I may be - I've been asking myself that. But I don't think so. I need a break to get my head together and figure out what I want to do next - and my wife and I need time to pack up, find another house, and move to the city where her medical residency will be. Not to mention this Masters Thesis I have to write and present before we move. Bottom line is that other life circumstances have conspired to make this a more sensible thing to do.
Your advice is good, and normally I'd heed it, but I'm not quitting because I'm frustrated with my job. The last time I switched jobs I did so with no break and little time to pick and choose where I would land next - this time I'm trying to improve upon that and give myself some breathing room. If you save your pennies properly, it's not a bad thing at all. If most jobs suck, as many here have pointed out, isn't work just a way to make enough money so that you don't have to work anymore?
The simple truth is that there aren't enough bright, mature, talented people out there to fill the excessive amount of management positions that have been created by the incompetent for the incompetent. To be a good manager requires a great deal of depth, intelligence, and sensitivity to other people - and how many of your friends could actually be said to have all three qualities?
I'm actually giving my boss notice today, because we're moving out of the area, but I won't be sorry to get out of here. Everything described in this post is true for me as well - no vision, no creativity, no organizational skills, and no attention paid to the quality employees who make this place work. As my father-in-law is fond of saying, "Mediocrity is incapable of recognizing excellence," and it's very, very true.
Anyone in the Boston/Providence area want to hire a Systems Engineer with CMM and embedded software design experience? Worth a try.:)
As it happens, I'm giving my boss one month's notice today. I'm a Systems Engineer at a large office document corporation (some people call us The Document Company) and while I like the work, I hate the culture. It's like time warping back to 1960. Anyone know of any good software firms in the Boston/Providence area that could use a Systems Engineer? My one weakness is that while I can program, I have little direct experience doing so and I'm not sure I want to develop for a living. But Systems Engineering is rare in most small companies. Am I screwed?
Anything that challenges Intel's processor hegemony in emergent platform markets is fine with me. Not because I hate Intel, but because tying the future of any industry's hardware to a single vendor is just asking for trouble. Monopoly or not, excessive dependence on a single architecture smacks of too many eggs in one basket, which ends up giving the suppliers greater control than the customers over the capabilities and cost of the units. Any biologist can tell you that host diversity goes a long way toward stopping epidemics that threaten to wipe out the whole species.
Perhaps the fabrication of these PDA chips will be a good toehold for the next Intel of the chip industry, since it's too hard to break into the current desktop market with the complexity of those chips.
In his novel A Deepness in the Sky Vinge talks about sensors so small they are like dust motes floating through the air, but so pervasive (and networked) that the person tapping into them can get detailed surveillance and biometric data anywhere the sensors are floating. Sounds very much like where we're headed.
...an extension of the lameness filter that applies to all news stories written everywhere. Just plug it into your browser, eyeglasses, or cable box and boom - there goes Bill O'Reilly, Wheel of Fortune, and "Making the Band."
Perhaps we could get a waiver for Farscape, though. Production values aren't everything...
Archivists can't be happy about this
on
Self-Shredding E-Mail
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
From a security standpoint, this is great, but from a historical perspective, this is an archivist's nightmare. How do you write a biography of a famous figure of the information age without their email to go through? (I know, insert MS trial email joke here.) How many current biographies of presidents, CEOs, entertainers, etc. are based on their mounds of personal correspondence squirreled away in six million shoeboxes in the family archives? With self-destructing email, the possibility of finding such a treasure trove in email form just got even smaller than it already was.
I think the disadvantages of remote voting far outweigh the advantages. Sure, you include those who are homebound or somehow can't make it to the polling place, but you lose a whole lot more. When people are actually present at the polling place, you can guarantee that they:
Are voting in a standardized fashion
Are voting alone
Only vote once
Understand the voting instructions
Ironic that on the heels of the whole MS security discussion, and the rehash of the "computers will never be truly secure" conversation, that we somehow think that one of the fundamental tenets of our democracy can work not only on computers, but over the Internet. Doesn't anyone else see the lunacy of this proposition?
Now, computer terminals safely ensconced at the polling places themselves might offer a few advantages...
Oh sure, mention Bayes' Theorem and say "base rate fallacy" a few times and suddenly you're making the point better...
Don't I get points for not sounding aggressively pedantic?:)
Imagine if you lived in a house that, three owners ago, had a "known terrorist" (read: someone named Muhammed) living in it - you'd be searched constantly. Or if you had a name very similar to aforementioned terrorist (Mohammed Uta?) - you'd be harassed every time you bought a ticket and set foot in the airport. Or if you had to pay cash just once for a ticket - you'd be flagged and frisked at every security checkpoint known to man.
These are the petty annoyances with systems like this - the false hits far outweigh the real ones, and innocent people get harassed and treated rudely by ignorant, underpaid security guards for things they never know about. It's like someone stealing your identity, ruining your credit rating, and leaving you to pick up the pieces - you don't see the authorities in the credit industry rushing to clean up the records of identity theft victims, do you? No - the victims must spend months if not years reclaiming their credit rating - just as he-who-lives-two-doors-down-from-Muhammed would have to somehow convince Big Brother that the same street name doesn't add up to jack.
Really all you'd need would be the Doozers from Fraggle Rock and you'd be set. They'd build the loader in the morning, it would work all day, then you could snack on it at night...
Damn. Here I am at 28 still listening to Radio 1. I'll be switching to Radio 2 immediately in order to conform to cultural norms. Right after Puretone's "Addicted to Bass" is over.
As a side note, I've been listening to Radio 1 at work for a few weeks now, and I'm completely hooked. It's so much better than Top 40 radio in the States, it's barely a valid comparison. The music is just more interesting and varied - the Top 40 station in my area at some point turned into the Ja Rule/Jay-Z station, which is just about completely devoid of music and creativity. With rare exceptions.
Give Radio 1 a try if you've been annoyed at your US Top 40 station lately.
However, the Brit DJs are just as dumb as the American ones. Guess that breed is the same the world over.
Good point. Perhaps there could be some kind of entrance requirement to get onto the guideway system, like scanning the chip that indicates the maintenance status of your vehicle or accessing the central computer directly and checking for problems. Those who have been ignoring the "check engine" light for 6 months would not be allowed on, and their beaters could break down by the side of the road just like they do today.
I don't think people are ready for publicly owned vehicles yet. The own-your-own-car concept is still way to embedded in our culture to expect people to cast it off. But I can easily see that as the next step. Of course, the simpler the design of the cars, the fewer breakdown scenarios there would be...
So much of this upheaval is due to the rapidly changing face of technology in general, which we've been living with for (arguably) about 60 years now. The last two and a half decades have seen the biggest acceleration in the rate of change - but will this rate continue? Or are we just assuming it will because a good chunk of the workforce today hasn't known anything else?
What if we have reached (or will be reaching) the plateau in terms of technological advancements in computing - would that cause society to settle back into some new version of the "job-for-life" paradigm, or would the contracting and freelancing continue out of habit and preference? I think that people want stability more than anything else, and that the myth of the globally-connected, civic-minded worker who is beholden to no corporation is the dream of the wealthy few with brains and education to do it themselves.
Much like the failed Chiat-Day "no office" office environment, the unfettered contract worker concept is not to most peoples' liking. The current working climate is a somewhat unfortunate result of the relentless need for updated skills, and if that ever ends things will settle down. Either that or companies will adopt the Japanese model and retrain, retrain, retrain, instead of casting off valuable organizational veterans in favor of the flavor of the month.
I think a major problem with the adoption of systems like this is the lack of any transitional strategy for people with their individual cars. Why not use a Dual Mode concept where people have personal vehicles that can operate either on or off the tracks, and transition smoothly between the two? It's the best of both worlds, at least until people get used to the concept of riding single cars on a track instead of driving themselves.
It also solves the problem of the stations not being nearby - just drive your car to the on ramp, sit back and enjoy the ride. Until the exit comes and you have to wake up, of course.
Bill Gates' personality is clearly reflected in the behavior of MS as a corporation. Does not play well with others, extremely self-centered and competitive, paranoid, and more interested in dominating the marketplace than producing a quality product at the outset. Gates has always been late to "wake up" to what everyone was talking about (or criticizing MS for) because he is intellectually arrogant enough to believe that he's right all the time.
What would MS have been like if a Gatesian personality had not been at the helm? Possibly not the MS we've come to love. Added attention to security now is obviously not any kind of move in the "right" direction, but instead just a CYA maneuver now that Bill's finally awakened to the fact that their security concerns could be enough to bring the whole house down unless they pay some attention to them. But he cannily waited until the problem was bad enough to be worrisome - had he been more community-minded he would have attacked this more seriously a long, long time ago.
Kind of makes you wonder what will happen to MS once Gates has removed himself entirely. Will they begin to play more nicely with others? (Insert Ballmer monkey comment here.)
Rumor has it that they're trying to get him back for the season-ender. I trust that he'll be really, really pale since he's been hiding out underground to stay away from alien nazis (or something to that effect)...
He should hold out for at least a million. And a surfing trip with Chris Carter.
I know way too much. It comes of having a wife who is a fanfic reader. Really.
Given what Katz says, and what I've read of the comments so far, perhaps Jobs' balancing act needs to be to strive for more marketshare while still maintaining the "elitist" Apple brand. Katz is basically saying that these are mutually exclusive, but consider those reactions to the new iMac that were more muted. "Not as sexy," they said, "Where is the breakthrough?" Perhaps this is indicative of Apple's effort not to make something completely out of this world so it appeals to that famed middle-class user.
Even though you wouldn't know it to hear Jobs and Ive talk about it, that new design is really stunningly obvious and recognizable. (The original iMac was never compared to existing products like desk lamps or vanity mirrors.) Thus this could be Apple's version of the "beige box" intended for widespread appeal.
Slashdot Mirror
At least that's the general idea...
I'm planning a kickass port of this program I like to call "Currency Converter".
Agreed. This kind of delay is a typical production glitch, with perhaps a bit more impact than most. Still, nothing to see here. Move along. Not to worry. Apple will still sell a kajillion of them.
Apple will be around for some time to come. I don't think anyone really understands the market niche they're occupying, but clearly they are somewhere, because they've been around this long and have $4 billion in the bank.
This is smart business.
Even if Apple doesn't have grand designs to take over the enterprise server market, they're definitely going to gain mindshare in the grad student/corporate researcher community with tactics like this. And corporate research can mean big money, especially if a genetics lab decides to purchase a few hundred dual-GHz boxen and set them up as a Beow.... er, cluster.
If this happened, suddenly other institutions would sit up and perhaps take notice of a) the versatility of OS X, b) the ease of use of OS X, and c) the TCO advantage Macs have. I think this is very canny marketing by Apple, working on markets where they already had their foot in the door and trying to open that door a bit more. There's no way OS X Server (given appropriate hardware to run on) would displace Linux/Sun/MS in any Enterprise overnight - but with a few years of incubation and hardening in a research environment, it could have the technological and mindshare boost it needs to attempt a takeover.
I may be - I've been asking myself that. But I don't think so. I need a break to get my head together and figure out what I want to do next - and my wife and I need time to pack up, find another house, and move to the city where her medical residency will be. Not to mention this Masters Thesis I have to write and present before we move. Bottom line is that other life circumstances have conspired to make this a more sensible thing to do.
Your advice is good, and normally I'd heed it, but I'm not quitting because I'm frustrated with my job. The last time I switched jobs I did so with no break and little time to pick and choose where I would land next - this time I'm trying to improve upon that and give myself some breathing room. If you save your pennies properly, it's not a bad thing at all. If most jobs suck, as many here have pointed out, isn't work just a way to make enough money so that you don't have to work anymore?
I'm actually giving my boss notice today, because we're moving out of the area, but I won't be sorry to get out of here. Everything described in this post is true for me as well - no vision, no creativity, no organizational skills, and no attention paid to the quality employees who make this place work. As my father-in-law is fond of saying, "Mediocrity is incapable of recognizing excellence," and it's very, very true.
Anyone in the Boston/Providence area want to hire a Systems Engineer with CMM and embedded software design experience? Worth a try. :)
As it happens, I'm giving my boss one month's notice today. I'm a Systems Engineer at a large office document corporation (some people call us The Document Company) and while I like the work, I hate the culture. It's like time warping back to 1960. Anyone know of any good software firms in the Boston/Providence area that could use a Systems Engineer? My one weakness is that while I can program, I have little direct experience doing so and I'm not sure I want to develop for a living. But Systems Engineering is rare in most small companies. Am I screwed?
Perhaps the fabrication of these PDA chips will be a good toehold for the next Intel of the chip industry, since it's too hard to break into the current desktop market with the complexity of those chips.
In his novel A Deepness in the Sky Vinge talks about sensors so small they are like dust motes floating through the air, but so pervasive (and networked) that the person tapping into them can get detailed surveillance and biometric data anywhere the sensors are floating. Sounds very much like where we're headed.
Perhaps we could get a waiver for Farscape, though. Production values aren't everything...
From a security standpoint, this is great, but from a historical perspective, this is an archivist's nightmare. How do you write a biography of a famous figure of the information age without their email to go through? (I know, insert MS trial email joke here.) How many current biographies of presidents, CEOs, entertainers, etc. are based on their mounds of personal correspondence squirreled away in six million shoeboxes in the family archives? With self-destructing email, the possibility of finding such a treasure trove in email form just got even smaller than it already was.
- Are voting in a standardized fashion
- Are voting alone
- Only vote once
- Understand the voting instructions
Ironic that on the heels of the whole MS security discussion, and the rehash of the "computers will never be truly secure" conversation, that we somehow think that one of the fundamental tenets of our democracy can work not only on computers, but over the Internet. Doesn't anyone else see the lunacy of this proposition?Now, computer terminals safely ensconced at the polling places themselves might offer a few advantages...
Slashdot is the GI tract of the Net. "Where News for Nerds is Digested and Excreted on a Regular Basis."
Oh sure, mention Bayes' Theorem and say "base rate fallacy" a few times and suddenly you're making the point better... Don't I get points for not sounding aggressively pedantic? :)
These are the petty annoyances with systems like this - the false hits far outweigh the real ones, and innocent people get harassed and treated rudely by ignorant, underpaid security guards for things they never know about. It's like someone stealing your identity, ruining your credit rating, and leaving you to pick up the pieces - you don't see the authorities in the credit industry rushing to clean up the records of identity theft victims, do you? No - the victims must spend months if not years reclaiming their credit rating - just as he-who-lives-two-doors-down-from-Muhammed would have to somehow convince Big Brother that the same street name doesn't add up to jack.
Really all you'd need would be the Doozers from Fraggle Rock and you'd be set. They'd build the loader in the morning, it would work all day, then you could snack on it at night...
God I love that tune.
Give Radio 1 a try if you've been annoyed at your US Top 40 station lately. However, the Brit DJs are just as dumb as the American ones. Guess that breed is the same the world over.
I don't think people are ready for publicly owned vehicles yet. The own-your-own-car concept is still way to embedded in our culture to expect people to cast it off. But I can easily see that as the next step. Of course, the simpler the design of the cars, the fewer breakdown scenarios there would be...
What if we have reached (or will be reaching) the plateau in terms of technological advancements in computing - would that cause society to settle back into some new version of the "job-for-life" paradigm, or would the contracting and freelancing continue out of habit and preference? I think that people want stability more than anything else, and that the myth of the globally-connected, civic-minded worker who is beholden to no corporation is the dream of the wealthy few with brains and education to do it themselves.
Much like the failed Chiat-Day "no office" office environment, the unfettered contract worker concept is not to most peoples' liking. The current working climate is a somewhat unfortunate result of the relentless need for updated skills, and if that ever ends things will settle down. Either that or companies will adopt the Japanese model and retrain, retrain, retrain, instead of casting off valuable organizational veterans in favor of the flavor of the month.
It also solves the problem of the stations not being nearby - just drive your car to the on ramp, sit back and enjoy the ride. Until the exit comes and you have to wake up, of course.
What would MS have been like if a Gatesian personality had not been at the helm? Possibly not the MS we've come to love. Added attention to security now is obviously not any kind of move in the "right" direction, but instead just a CYA maneuver now that Bill's finally awakened to the fact that their security concerns could be enough to bring the whole house down unless they pay some attention to them. But he cannily waited until the problem was bad enough to be worrisome - had he been more community-minded he would have attacked this more seriously a long, long time ago.
Kind of makes you wonder what will happen to MS once Gates has removed himself entirely. Will they begin to play more nicely with others? (Insert Ballmer monkey comment here.)
He should hold out for at least a million. And a surfing trip with Chris Carter.
I know way too much. It comes of having a wife who is a fanfic reader. Really.
Even though you wouldn't know it to hear Jobs and Ive talk about it, that new design is really stunningly obvious and recognizable. (The original iMac was never compared to existing products like desk lamps or vanity mirrors.) Thus this could be Apple's version of the "beige box" intended for widespread appeal.