But really don't worry that you are not a verse in SE. I would say the majority who program have just a small working knowledge. The smartest thing to do is when you get to your job is ask what their processes are and what they expect. Use the terminology, like agile, cmmi, unit test, process development, etc. If they have a process or model they are following, they will be thrilled your asking. If they don't then hope they are all master programmers and everyone works well together.
The Logic of Science is a great read. You would need to have a basic knowledge of PDEs but it is more about statistics. It has a wonderful advanced applications section that gives a great review of applied science in many fields.
If you are looking for some general graduate level books, I would suggest either Boaz, Arfkin, or Butkov. All 3 have a "Mathematical Physics" textbook.
Gravitation by Misner has good applied Differential Geometry problems.
Maybe not doing derivatives. In most of Europe basic calculus is as common as PE. But, knowledge of high dimensional vector spaces or convex optimization can make earn you a fairly comfortable salary.
As of last month, if you knew stochastic differential equation every investment house wanted to talk to you. I am sure there will be a glut of those soon.
My salary might not be on the Professional Football player level but I am paid well above the average and never had a pause in working.
Because many of my friends in college protected their gpa and did not want to take difficult classes, I am now in fairly high demand.
I have a minor in math from a state school. Some graduate work and a B- average. But, primarily because of my knowledge of math, I have had one formal interview in my 15 yr professional career and get unsolicited offers a few times a year. Coworkers have been let go in downturns but I have survived.
If a student is choosing between professional athlete or a programmer, the choice is obvious. But, when someone chooses Mass Communications over a technical field because it doesn't sound cool, fuck 'em and call them an idiot when they complain about their Vietnamese boss at your 10 year high school reunion.
You should figure out if he thinks you are going to help him in his success so he will bring you along with him up the latter. If he is just using developers like Kleenex then you might complain. On the other hand if he includes you on bigger and better projects as well as giving you more opportunities then don't worry about it too much.
Either way, I would keep complaining about it to a minimum and only at appropriate moments. Managers have avoided whiners even if they have talen of von Neumann. Change projects or jobs if it gets to be a problem. Complaining wont fix it.
My wife was hired as at NASA GS-10 w/o any graduate work. She did have one year contractor work before that and it was durring the Dot Com boom when they were having a hard time matching salaries and options. They gave the incentive that they would help her get a masters in ME.
The hiring rules have gone from "desperately needing people" in the late 90's to "cant get rid of people fast enought" around '03 to now "we need more people".
The ones I know who got hired right out of college had some type of internship at NASA first. The rumor is that it qualifies as professional work experience but I cannot confirm that. The at least got a good letter from whoever they worked for at NASA so that could be considered a connection. But, these were the type of undergrads that had MANY opportunities for jobs or grad school strait out of college. Most stayed at NASA through grad school and are still here.
Some of the guys around me spent a year of two as a contractor first but they were well paying research jobs. They just always had their job tied to a grant or project so long term stability was the issue. Some took a pay cut to become civil servant.
I could go way off topic again about the NASA budget and contractor vs civil servant issues but if you noticed the lower end of the pay was not that great. Most Nasa projects have to pay their workers out of the project budget. An experienced engineer could get much more elsewhere. The incentive is working on cool project like the vision system for autonomous robots or shuttle tile scanner. I am sure there are alot of boring jobs as well. But, most here are really excited about working at NASA. I could not quite say that at my last job (semi fab) that payed a little more and is probably more stable in the long run. I am much happier.
I hear the same thing about JPL. Is he happy their?
L7_ is correct. We had a choice between Physics, Experimental physics, or Computational physics. I forget what exactly it says on my diploma that distinguishes it but it is all the same dept. It really was just the choice of electives and a research topic. The research was optional but it was the single most valuable piece of work I did in college.
Without the story poster giving us information about who he is and what he is interested in, we can't really tell him what he's good for. And as far as your career goes, you wouldn't have gotten in if it wasn't an area that you were at least interested in, let alone prepared for.
I am working on the assumption that he/she (he from here out) is in decent standing and not doing the minimum to get the degree. If he is avoiding hard classes and cant put on his CV or resume that he has had some challenges in his field then he is definitely in the wrong field. In addition to that most mathematicians are interested in the math first and the application second (if I can speak for mathematicians). The group I am in look at papers from psycology to fluid dynamics for methods that can be applied to our problem. It is an understanding of how the math is applied that is valuable to me.
The part about his being fucked and that his degree is "as good as an Art History major" was a joke. I forgot to follow it with a smiley for the humor impaired. Forgive me.
I was not so worried about the art history comment but thanks for reassuring it was a joke.
My "concern" of your post is the emphasis on the title of the degree. The statistics point to one degree being ahead of another in pay or more likely to be hired, but in reality it is more based on skill and ability.
But I think you took exception to my comparing a Math major to the so called Liberal Arts. Do you consciously or unconsciously look down on the various humanities and social science majors? Maybe I'm wrong about this. Correct me if I am.
When I was is college I was very proud of being in a difficult technical degree. It was nice to hear "you must be smart." Nowaday I dont think that. I tend to believe that I did well because I was interested in what I was doing. I believe that 95% of the population could get a physics degree. I hope that I would be able to do what it takes to get an Art History degree.
What does make me cringe is the belief that a more obsure degree is less valuable.
I was in college the same time as my brother who was getting a liberal arts degree in Japanese Literature. My familly and I would joke about his degree with an undertone of seriousness because we were afraid the only job he was going to get was teaching english in Japan. We were way wrong. He got many more offers than I did and most had nothing to do with speaking Japanese. The reason is hiring managers deal with many majors. They recongnized that if he had the discipline to stick to a degree that required learning a forign language and writing papers weekly then he will probably have no problem doing whatever work they had for him.
I have been told that the same is true for philosophy majors. HR would rather hire them as apposed to a Mass Communications major simply because they believe the effort required to get a degree in philosophy is much greator.
(I personally have no idea what is required for either majors so I hope I have not offended those with either of these degrees)
By the way, I checked that link. I don't know if this was intentional or merely carelessness on your part, but you left off some of the requirements for those jobs:
I cut it off because of length. You are right that it is not aimed at "fresh outs." My point was to show that there are NASA jobs where the degree is not the emphasis. A candidate with an engineering degree has to meet the same qualifications. And, I have know people to get these types of jobs right out of college but they more than met the "SUPERIOR ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT STANDARDS."
I think that gives a bit of a clue as to what they're looking for. Sure, you can apply if you're fresh out of college. But lets face it. Aerospace is not really a growing field and it's
Math majors get hired all the time. The major appears more esoteric than electrical engineer but there are lots of jobs out there where a variety of degrees can meet the requirements. In addition to that alot of fields prefer job candidates with more applied math skills like machine learning, computer vision and medical imaging. And, like mentioned above, financial companies have math heavy positions to look for credit card fraud and market modeling (but to work on wall street you will probably need an advanced degree).
When I was getting my degree (computational physics) I too was worried about my qualifications and felt I had to "specialize" or else I wouldnt be marketable. I am glad I did it but in the end what mattered more is I could show that I could do decent work by having a senior paper. My first job was doing semiconductor device fabrication in a research lab and I had almost no experience in the field. Now I am doing machine learning and work with mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers. We all have our strengths but we all do very similar work.
And, for what it is worth, if you go to http://jobsearch.usajobs.opm.gov/ and search for jobs with the keyword AST (aerospace technology), the qualifications say
"Basic Education Requirement: A bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university with major study in an appropriate field of engineering, physical science, life science, computer science, or mathematics (not engineering technology). "
Those are the NASA jobs avaliable to math and engineering majors
That is not the point. If the government wants to stop drugs they CANNOT search every citizen of the US. They have a process they must follow and get search warrents. They have to do the same in this case. It even says so.
(b) Required Certification.-- (1)...billing records sought are relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such an investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely on the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States;
If a crime has been committed then investigate it. They can even do it secretly so only the justice dept can see it. But by following the process they ensure oversight by judges.
They then cant say "Abortioninst/Drug Users/Gun Owners/PGP Users/ETC are terrorist so we can spy on them all we want."
I dont want to discount his points completely because I am sure anyone who has to deal with a purchasing dept and IT dept and coworkers on different platforms can relate to his scenarios. But, I dont agree with any "exodus".
90% of users only use a few programs. Those programs are avaliable on both systems. For those people it will be a wash at least. If 10% do change platform for these 3 or 4 programs then who it to think they would only go from Mac to windows. Definitly not Wall Street. If 10% of both mac and windows users change then mac wins. 10% of windows market share is a massive number compared to 10% of mac market share.
The Wall Street analysists have figured this out.
Also, if price is an issue then why are there high end products still being sold that only support XP? (lenovo)
His arguments are a first order glance at the issues. There are many factors he left out.
I love this competition though. I cant wait for the next Dell and Toshiba models to come out to compete. It would be great if they got really inovative in new designs to stand out.
Attitude aside, This is the point I think the blog is not addressing. iTunes gave people a choice. A restrictive, proprietary choice but it is a start. eMusic, Napster(as known today) rhapsody and all the others followed and gave us more choices. Torrent is also a choice with the cost being the threat of the RIAA suing your grandmother for giving birth to your mom who has a son that fits the profile of a mp3 sharer. If there is another way to distribute music the world would love to see it.
He might not like iTunes but it did have an impact on music everywhere. CD prices are cheaper, people have exposure artist that they would not have otherwise, mp3 players are better (all players). You do not have to be a direct participant to benefit.
The blogger has traded convience and price for longer lasting and higher bitrate with no DRM. Good for him. That does not make the rest of the world suckers. I spent my free time to save money and by building my own high quality speakers once and saved a few hundred dollars. My father never spent a dime on car repair while the rest of America keeps giving $30 to the man at jiffy lube every 3000 miles. If the author buys stereo equipment and does not change his own oil does he consider himself a sucker. Probably not but I am sure he likes the option to do each of those.
Ironically, his rant reminded me of rant mac users are always spouting when they talk of microsoft. That "I'm enlightened and know more than you on this subject and if you do not follow in my footsteps you will burn in the eternal fires of hell" diatribe that you get from the guy wearing a turtleneck at work. He does not come off balanced.
10 years ago if I had a small issue that needed addressed I would talk to one of my coworkers or my boss in the hall or the lab. Now I tend to send and email. That email will often get sent to other people who will reply and ask for followups. That often includes diagrams and pictures and graphs. Before you know it I have to put a powerpoint together and it has to be clear and attractive because if it gets to upper management that is how they want it.
Now I am not saying this is bad. I do believe that problems get resolved faster, dead end ideas are cut off quicker, and as a team we get more work done in a given amount of time. It is just that I rate my productivity on the progress I do in the lab. When I have 3 or 4 projects and spend 6 to 10 hours a week just emailing or making slides for them my lab productivity is obviously effected. That is where I want to spend my time.
Luckily my managers are well aware of this and include the administrative/communicaton work when evaluating my performance but I do feel less productive.
I used to work at SNF. Industry and small businesses were also allowed to use the lab. I has some very modern equipment but it is mainly for prototype. Once you have a working sample it then can be sent to a fab house for a production run if you get funding. It is not exactly cheap but a small project could be done w/o alot of investment. It all depends on how complicated your process is.
The info in the article sounds like it was picked and choosen. Even though macs have not even come close to denting windows total market share their sales have shot up. Their stock has done very well. They have a loyal following that keeps buying their products. Comparing them to IBM and their choice to move to linux is apples to oranges (not ment to be corny joke?). IBM's product line was being eroded by the many competitors out there doing exactly the same thing.
The good point made is apple says it is a hardware company, but has most of its success with clever software. The ipod success is mostly due to its ease of use and compatibility with itunes. OS-X is sold on its simplistic features. I am not overly excited about apples hardware choices and I think the audience they cater to does not really care. I think it would be much more likely that they make OS-X run on any intel platform than switch from a unix-like subsystem to windows. If they were to dircetly switch then they loose the hardware control anyway and they would then have to worry about microsoft copying their interface.
I have the "pleasure" of having three OS's on my desk right now and each has it pluses and minuses. From my perspective the only gain is to be able to use the development tools for microsoft like C#. There will also be a bigger software base but I am less convinced that that is really an issue amongst mac users. Now how I use my computers is rather specific so I would love to hear what others advandages there are to switching, from a technical standpoint not as a financial decision.
First a drop of 0.44% is not something to stop the presses about. It might be the beginging of a trend but I would be suprised if it is outside of any statistical error.
Second, they do not give any information of mp3 purchases and usage. I just bought a nano because of its size. I am not getting rid of my 40GB ipod because of its storage capacity and I still have the first ipod player I bought years ago (TDK mojo) that I keep around just in case (for what I dont know). Most of my friends have upgraded players as well and intend to keep their original. They are not going to repurchase music.
Third, in all the music sales itunes only makes up 4% of music sales. They do not mention if CD proces are driving people to pirate music. Personally, I would rather own a CD but I cannot justify $15. Especially if I am only buying it for a few songs. I stopped file shareing music a while ago but I do understand why some people continue.
Why didnt the author point out that CD prices rarely come down. Sometime a title will show up in a bargin bin but a customer cannot consistently wait for the price to come down. More that often the case is the price is reduced when it comes out and then you can only pay regular after a few months (which can be $18 or more).
Also, why didnt the author point out the pricing of music is almost a mystery for all media. Try to find out how music execs plan to price a cd for its lifetime, how much are production costs and who gets the proceeds at various stages over time (please, try--I would love to know). It is not public knowledge for a reason.
My impression it this guy is either grossly uninformed or a shill.
I really dont question our survival. In many ways I am impressed that we have survived as well.
Unfortunatly I think that the quick fix idea will never change. I am well educated, well read and just as gullible as the next guy when I hear something that is too good to be true. And, I self centeredly(if isreal(word)) feel I have made great sacrifice and question my survival when I feel the right thing to do drive my honda to work instead of my jeep cj. It is the only thing that makes me cool.
It is probably a human condition instead of a mater of reasoning it out.
The only one who claims to know exactly what is going to happen are the pundits. The entire argument has left the scientific community and now it is distorted by the media and political parties (both).
People have done a great job confusing the issue. It is a complicated, dynamic system. It takes a first grader to find something that is inconsistent.
If you are someone who disagrees with the outcome it is very easy to cloud the issue and mire the reputations by shouting from the mountain top that there is no exact answer.
Democrats do this by saying "it's bush's fault."
Republicans do this by saying "They dont know what they are doing."
In reality if it is anyones fault it is all of ours (global population, even the director of the Sierra Club owned and drove large, gas guzzling SUVs). And, there have been many real science programs, including Bush's request to the NAS to research global warming, that have come up with global warming predictions.
Just because you dont understand it does not mean it is not REAL science.
As someone who has done some work in this field I have to say I hate these articles. Chances are it is media hype. But it works because both sides dig in and either call them alarmists or prophets.
It would be nice if those who jump to say 'I told you so' would recongnize that this is the one of the first articles that claim to have evidence decided we are past a tipping point. The people involved are reutable but we need more research.
It would also be nice for those denying that there is a problem to get some of their facts straight. While the media only reports on catastrophic events like massive flooding and hurricanes those are the worst case predictions. Many of the scientist more realistic predictions made in the past are on tract. West Nile virus, Avian flu, malaria are showing up where it never has before. 20 years ago climate scientist had claimed that this would be an indirect result. There is also other indirect evidence like bird/fish/herd migration changes, species sensitivity and so on. As well as direct evidence as found in telecontection analysis, outgoing longwave radiation, etc (just google climate studies).
The biggest problem is everyone wants or expects a definetive answer right now. It is probably the most complex system that is currently intesivly studied. That is why they need massive supercomputers and incredible amounts of data. You are not going to get an easy answer for about 100 years.
In my opinion it should be more like a health problem. I personally would like to live a long health life. There are now the obvious things to avoid like smoking and drugs, but I also might at least listen when someone talks about chloesterol, heart disease, and bbq pork ribs (mmm, ribs).
are you implying that my inability to spell (and type) is the reason idiots install every piece of shareware/spyware/game they can, or disable security software because it "slows down" their word processors, or open attachments in outlook is because I cant spell?
For the record I was not a sysadmin. If I were I would not even qualify as an average one. I was just the guy who knew more hten the rest of the staff and the boss would send when someone else would have a problem. It was more of a work enviroment problem because I was still responsible for the job I was hired for. Since neither management was going to hire a full time sysadmin nor my coworkers care to listen to my advice I started helping them so it would not be a problem for me.
As someone who became the default sysAdmin for our group I would constantly fix many reccuring problems caused by the users. It got so bad that for a few members of the group I took their win notebooks and gave them macs under the guise that the fix "was going to take a while". They would whine a bit that they couldnt run their softwhere (mostly games) but it would give me a chance to do some real work.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in a similar situation a few years ago. This was the most useful article I found,
http://drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/217701907
But really don't worry that you are not a verse in SE. I would say the majority who program have just a small working knowledge. The smartest thing to do is when you get to your job is ask what their processes are and what they expect. Use the terminology, like agile, cmmi, unit test, process development, etc. If they have a process or model they are following, they will be thrilled your asking. If they don't then hope they are all master programmers and everyone works well together.
The Logic of Science is a great read. You would need to have a basic knowledge of PDEs but it is more about statistics. It has a wonderful advanced applications section that gives a great review of applied science in many fields.
If you are looking for some general graduate level books, I would suggest either Boaz, Arfkin, or Butkov. All 3 have a "Mathematical Physics" textbook.
Gravitation by Misner has good applied Differential Geometry problems.
Maybe not doing derivatives. In most of Europe basic calculus is as common as PE. But, knowledge of high dimensional vector spaces or convex optimization can make earn you a fairly comfortable salary.
As of last month, if you knew stochastic differential equation every investment house wanted to talk to you. I am sure there will be a glut of those soon.
My salary might not be on the Professional Football player level but I am paid well above the average and never had a pause in working.
Because many of my friends in college protected their gpa and did not want to take difficult classes, I am now in fairly high demand.
I have a minor in math from a state school. Some graduate work and a B- average. But, primarily because of my knowledge of math, I have had one formal interview in my 15 yr professional career and get unsolicited offers a few times a year. Coworkers have been let go in downturns but I have survived.
If a student is choosing between professional athlete or a programmer, the choice is obvious. But, when someone chooses Mass Communications over a technical field because it doesn't sound cool, fuck 'em and call them an idiot when they complain about their Vietnamese boss at your 10 year high school reunion.
free gps
I meant ladder and talent.
Should have read closer
You should figure out if he thinks you are going to help him in his success so he will bring you along with him up the latter. If he is just using developers like Kleenex then you might complain. On the other hand if he includes you on bigger and better projects as well as giving you more opportunities then don't worry about it too much.
Either way, I would keep complaining about it to a minimum and only at appropriate moments. Managers have avoided whiners even if they have talen of von Neumann. Change projects or jobs if it gets to be a problem. Complaining wont fix it.
My wife was hired as at NASA GS-10 w/o any graduate work. She did have one year contractor work before that and it was durring the Dot Com boom when they were having a hard time matching salaries and options. They gave the incentive that they would help her get a masters in ME.
The hiring rules have gone from "desperately needing people" in the late 90's to "cant get rid of people fast enought" around '03 to now "we need more people".
The ones I know who got hired right out of college had some type of internship at NASA first. The rumor is that it qualifies as professional work experience but I cannot confirm that. The at least got a good letter from whoever they worked for at NASA so that could be considered a connection. But, these were the type of undergrads that had MANY opportunities for jobs or grad school strait out of college. Most stayed at NASA through grad school and are still here.
Some of the guys around me spent a year of two as a contractor first but they were well paying research jobs. They just always had their job tied to a grant or project so long term stability was the issue. Some took a pay cut to become civil servant.
I could go way off topic again about the NASA budget and contractor vs civil servant issues but if you noticed the lower end of the pay was not that great. Most Nasa projects have to pay their workers out of the project budget. An experienced engineer could get much more elsewhere. The incentive is working on cool project like the vision system for autonomous robots or shuttle tile scanner. I am sure there are alot of boring jobs as well. But, most here are really excited about working at NASA. I could not quite say that at my last job (semi fab) that payed a little more and is probably more stable in the long run. I am much happier.
I hear the same thing about JPL. Is he happy their?
L7_ is correct. We had a choice between Physics, Experimental physics, or Computational physics. I forget what exactly it says on my diploma that distinguishes it but it is all the same dept. It really was just the choice of electives and a research topic. The research was optional but it was the single most valuable piece of work I did in college.
t ml
t ml
If I were to go back i would have done something more like this. http://www.stanford.edu/group/mathcompsci/intro.h
Also, if you are looking for a good terminal masters there is this program.http://www.physics.sjsu.edu/degreeprogs.h
I am working on the assumption that he/she (he from here out) is in decent standing and not doing the minimum to get the degree. If he is avoiding hard classes and cant put on his CV or resume that he has had some challenges in his field then he is definitely in the wrong field. In addition to that most mathematicians are interested in the math first and the application second (if I can speak for mathematicians). The group I am in look at papers from psycology to fluid dynamics for methods that can be applied to our problem. It is an understanding of how the math is applied that is valuable to me.
I was not so worried about the art history comment but thanks for reassuring it was a joke.
My "concern" of your post is the emphasis on the title of the degree. The statistics point to one degree being ahead of another in pay or more likely to be hired, but in reality it is more based on skill and ability.
When I was is college I was very proud of being in a difficult technical degree. It was nice to hear "you must be smart." Nowaday I dont think that. I tend to believe that I did well because I was interested in what I was doing. I believe that 95% of the population could get a physics degree. I hope that I would be able to do what it takes to get an Art History degree.
What does make me cringe is the belief that a more obsure degree is less valuable.
I was in college the same time as my brother who was getting a liberal arts degree in Japanese Literature. My familly and I would joke about his degree with an undertone of seriousness because we were afraid the only job he was going to get was teaching english in Japan. We were way wrong. He got many more offers than I did and most had nothing to do with speaking Japanese. The reason is hiring managers deal with many majors. They recongnized that if he had the discipline to stick to a degree that required learning a forign language and writing papers weekly then he will probably have no problem doing whatever work they had for him.
I have been told that the same is true for philosophy majors. HR would rather hire them as apposed to a Mass Communications major simply because they believe the effort required to get a degree in philosophy is much greator.
(I personally have no idea what is required for either majors so I hope I have not offended those with either of these degrees)
I cut it off because of length. You are right that it is not aimed at "fresh outs." My point was to show that there are NASA jobs where the degree is not the emphasis. A candidate with an engineering degree has to meet the same qualifications. And, I have know people to get these types of jobs right out of college but they more than met the "SUPERIOR ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT STANDARDS."
Bullshit.
the degree is worth more than you think.
Math majors get hired all the time. The major appears more esoteric than electrical engineer but there are lots of jobs out there where a variety of degrees can meet the requirements. In addition to that alot of fields prefer job candidates with more applied math skills like machine learning, computer vision and medical imaging. And, like mentioned above, financial companies have math heavy positions to look for credit card fraud and market modeling (but to work on wall street you will probably need an advanced degree).
When I was getting my degree (computational physics) I too was worried about my qualifications and felt I had to "specialize" or else I wouldnt be marketable. I am glad I did it but in the end what mattered more is I could show that I could do decent work by having a senior paper. My first job was doing semiconductor device fabrication in a research lab and I had almost no experience in the field. Now I am doing machine learning and work with mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers. We all have our strengths but we all do very similar work.
And, for what it is worth, if you go to http://jobsearch.usajobs.opm.gov/ and search for jobs with the keyword AST (aerospace technology), the qualifications say
"Basic Education Requirement: A bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university with major study in an appropriate field of engineering, physical science, life science, computer science, or mathematics (not engineering technology). "
Those are the NASA jobs avaliable to math and engineering majors
That is not the point. If the government wants to stop drugs they CANNOT search every citizen of the US. They have a process they must follow and get search warrents. They have to do the same in this case. It even says so.
...billing records sought are relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such an investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely on the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States;
(b) Required Certification.-- (1)
If a crime has been committed then investigate it. They can even do it secretly so only the justice dept can see it. But by following the process they ensure oversight by judges.
They then cant say "Abortioninst/Drug Users/Gun Owners/PGP Users/ETC are terrorist so we can spy on them all we want."
I dont want to discount his points completely because I am sure anyone who has to deal with a purchasing dept and IT dept and coworkers on different platforms can relate to his scenarios. But, I dont agree with any "exodus".
90% of users only use a few programs. Those programs are avaliable on both systems. For those people it will be a wash at least. If 10% do change platform for these 3 or 4 programs then who it to think they would only go from Mac to windows. Definitly not Wall Street. If 10% of both mac and windows users change then mac wins. 10% of windows market share is a massive number compared to 10% of mac market share.
The Wall Street analysists have figured this out.
Also, if price is an issue then why are there high end products still being sold that only support XP? (lenovo)
His arguments are a first order glance at the issues. There are many factors he left out.
I love this competition though. I cant wait for the next Dell and Toshiba models to come out to compete. It would be great if they got really inovative in new designs to stand out.
Attitude aside, This is the point I think the blog is not addressing. iTunes gave people a choice. A restrictive, proprietary choice but it is a start. eMusic, Napster(as known today) rhapsody and all the others followed and gave us more choices. Torrent is also a choice with the cost being the threat of the RIAA suing your grandmother for giving birth to your mom who has a son that fits the profile of a mp3 sharer. If there is another way to distribute music the world would love to see it.
He might not like iTunes but it did have an impact on music everywhere. CD prices are cheaper, people have exposure artist that they would not have otherwise, mp3 players are better (all players). You do not have to be a direct participant to benefit.
The blogger has traded convience and price for longer lasting and higher bitrate with no DRM. Good for him. That does not make the rest of the world suckers. I spent my free time to save money and by building my own high quality speakers once and saved a few hundred dollars. My father never spent a dime on car repair while the rest of America keeps giving $30 to the man at jiffy lube every 3000 miles. If the author buys stereo equipment and does not change his own oil does he consider himself a sucker. Probably not but I am sure he likes the option to do each of those.
Ironically, his rant reminded me of rant mac users are always spouting when they talk of microsoft. That "I'm enlightened and know more than you on this subject and if you do not follow in my footsteps you will burn in the eternal fires of hell" diatribe that you get from the guy wearing a turtleneck at work. He does not come off balanced.
10 years ago if I had a small issue that needed addressed I would talk to one of my coworkers or my boss in the hall or the lab. Now I tend to send and email. That email will often get sent to other people who will reply and ask for followups. That often includes diagrams and pictures and graphs. Before you know it I have to put a powerpoint together and it has to be clear and attractive because if it gets to upper management that is how they want it.
Now I am not saying this is bad. I do believe that problems get resolved faster, dead end ideas are cut off quicker, and as a team we get more work done in a given amount of time. It is just that I rate my productivity on the progress I do in the lab. When I have 3 or 4 projects and spend 6 to 10 hours a week just emailing or making slides for them my lab productivity is obviously effected. That is where I want to spend my time.
Luckily my managers are well aware of this and include the administrative/communicaton work when evaluating my performance but I do feel less productive.
I used to work at SNF. Industry and small businesses were also allowed to use the lab. I has some very modern equipment but it is mainly for prototype. Once you have a working sample it then can be sent to a fab house for a production run if you get funding. It is not exactly cheap but a small project could be done w/o alot of investment. It all depends on how complicated your process is.
The info in the article sounds like it was picked and choosen. Even though macs have not even come close to denting windows total market share their sales have shot up. Their stock has done very well. They have a loyal following that keeps buying their products. Comparing them to IBM and their choice to move to linux is apples to oranges (not ment to be corny joke?). IBM's product line was being eroded by the many competitors out there doing exactly the same thing.
The good point made is apple says it is a hardware company, but has most of its success with clever software. The ipod success is mostly due to its ease of use and compatibility with itunes. OS-X is sold on its simplistic features. I am not overly excited about apples hardware choices and I think the audience they cater to does not really care. I think it would be much more likely that they make OS-X run on any intel platform than switch from a unix-like subsystem to windows. If they were to dircetly switch then they loose the hardware control anyway and they would then have to worry about microsoft copying their interface.
I have the "pleasure" of having three OS's on my desk right now and each has it pluses and minuses. From my perspective the only gain is to be able to use the development tools for microsoft like C#. There will also be a bigger software base but I am less convinced that that is really an issue amongst mac users. Now how I use my computers is rather specific so I would love to hear what others advandages there are to switching, from a technical standpoint not as a financial decision.
First a drop of 0.44% is not something to stop the presses about. It might be the beginging of a trend but I would be suprised if it is outside of any statistical error.
Second, they do not give any information of mp3 purchases and usage. I just bought a nano because of its size. I am not getting rid of my 40GB ipod because of its storage capacity and I still have the first ipod player I bought years ago (TDK mojo) that I keep around just in case (for what I dont know). Most of my friends have upgraded players as well and intend to keep their original. They are not going to repurchase music.
Third, in all the music sales itunes only makes up 4% of music sales. They do not mention if CD proces are driving people to pirate music. Personally, I would rather own a CD but I cannot justify $15. Especially if I am only buying it for a few songs. I stopped file shareing music a while ago but I do understand why some people continue.
Why didnt the author point out that CD prices rarely come down. Sometime a title will show up in a bargin bin but a customer cannot consistently wait for the price to come down. More that often the case is the price is reduced when it comes out and then you can only pay regular after a few months (which can be $18 or more).
Also, why didnt the author point out the pricing of music is almost a mystery for all media. Try to find out how music execs plan to price a cd for its lifetime, how much are production costs and who gets the proceeds at various stages over time (please, try--I would love to know). It is not public knowledge for a reason.
My impression it this guy is either grossly uninformed or a shill.
I really dont question our survival. In many ways I am impressed that we have survived as well.
Unfortunatly I think that the quick fix idea will never change. I am well educated, well read and just as gullible as the next guy when I hear something that is too good to be true. And, I self centeredly(if isreal(word)) feel I have made great sacrifice and question my survival when I feel the right thing to do drive my honda to work instead of my jeep cj. It is the only thing that makes me cool.
It is probably a human condition instead of a mater of reasoning it out.
The only one who claims to know exactly what is going to happen are the pundits. The entire argument has left the scientific community and now it is distorted by the media and political parties (both).
People have done a great job confusing the issue. It is a complicated, dynamic system. It takes a first grader to find something that is inconsistent.
If you are someone who disagrees with the outcome it is very easy to cloud the issue and mire the reputations by shouting from the mountain top that there is no exact answer.
Democrats do this by saying "it's bush's fault."
Republicans do this by saying "They dont know what they are doing."
In reality if it is anyones fault it is all of ours (global population, even the director of the Sierra Club owned and drove large, gas guzzling SUVs). And, there have been many real science programs, including Bush's request to the NAS to research global warming, that have come up with global warming predictions.
Just because you dont understand it does not mean it is not REAL science.
As someone who has done some work in this field I have to say I hate these articles. Chances are it is media hype. But it works because both sides dig in and either call them alarmists or prophets.
It would be nice if those who jump to say 'I told you so' would recongnize that this is the one of the first articles that claim to have evidence decided we are past a tipping point. The people involved are reutable but we need more research.
It would also be nice for those denying that there is a problem to get some of their facts straight. While the media only reports on catastrophic events like massive flooding and hurricanes those are the worst case predictions. Many of the scientist more realistic predictions made in the past are on tract. West Nile virus, Avian flu, malaria are showing up where it never has before. 20 years ago climate scientist had claimed that this would be an indirect result. There is also other indirect evidence like bird/fish/herd migration changes, species sensitivity and so on. As well as direct evidence as found in telecontection analysis, outgoing longwave radiation, etc (just google climate studies).
The biggest problem is everyone wants or expects a definetive answer right now. It is probably the most complex system that is currently intesivly studied. That is why they need massive supercomputers and incredible amounts of data. You are not going to get an easy answer for about 100 years.
In my opinion it should be more like a health problem. I personally would like to live a long health life. There are now the obvious things to avoid like smoking and drugs, but I also might at least listen when someone talks about chloesterol, heart disease, and bbq pork ribs (mmm, ribs).
Apparently my grammer is as bad as my spelling.
are you implying that my inability to spell (and type) is the reason idiots install every piece of shareware/spyware/game they can, or disable security software because it "slows down" their word processors, or open attachments in outlook is because I cant spell?
For the record I was not a sysadmin. If I were I would not even qualify as an average one. I was just the guy who knew more hten the rest of the staff and the boss would send when someone else would have a problem. It was more of a work enviroment problem because I was still responsible for the job I was hired for. Since neither management was going to hire a full time sysadmin nor my coworkers care to listen to my advice I started helping them so it would not be a problem for me.
As someone who became the default sysAdmin for our group I would constantly fix many reccuring problems caused by the users. It got so bad that for a few members of the group I took their win notebooks and gave them macs under the guise that the fix "was going to take a while". They would whine a bit that they couldnt run their softwhere (mostly games) but it would give me a chance to do some real work.