> The problem with resumes these days, IMO, is that you have to both make a resume that'll get through the > automated filters many companies use and still be grabbing to the human that eventually will read it.
This is an important point and if I'd had some points I'd have modded you up.
I'd also mention that your CV will be read by lots of people e.g. recruitment agents whose knowledge of what the tech buzzwords mean is very similar to the automated filters. These people are gatekeepers between you and the potential employers HR department, which might well have been outsourced itself and have a similar level of knowledge. Getting a job isn't as simple as it used to be, it seems to be much harder to get your CV onto the right person's desk.
I've had mostly poor experiences with the big recruitment sites. Networking and contacts combined with targetted direct applications seem to be the way to go. Well, it worked for me anyway.
I just wanted to point out that getting replies to a CV on Monster isn't the same as getting a job or being able to get one from the resulting contacts. In my (UK) experience many of the people who contact you will be timewasters who seem to collect CVs like some people collect stamps. Others will be pushing jobs at the other end of the country that are wildly inapplicable to your CV. A third group will simply try to act as frustrating middlemen to jobs you could have applied for directly. Others will be from agencies who want you to fill in long and very personal questionnaires on the promise of exciting interviews and will never contact you again once you do.
The widespread use of Internet job sites seems to have made things harder as the cost of wasting other people's time has gone down to next to nothing. Trying to sort out the real possibilities from the CV farmers and hopeless timewasters is a difficult and time-consuming task. Very few of these recruitment people understand anything about the industry, the differences in people's skills or what would make a job interesting and worth applying for. Each of these conversations can feel like a Dilbert episode.
BTW You are also in a good position with 2 years of experience it is much harder if you have more than about six years or so when you will probably start seeing the first signs of ageism.
I hope that wasn't a rant but I currently don't have any good answers about how to stay in the industry long-term and it's giving me a lot of concern.
Interesting. I'm a fairly heavy WoW player and I'm just reaching the end of a 2 week trial of Eve, prompted by the recent publicity around the PvP tournament.
I'm a fan of space games and in need of a fix (after being disappointed by X3:The Single Figure Frame Rate) but I don't think I'll be subscribing to Eve. I agree with your points on the graphics etc. but for some reason the fun seems to be lacking. I'm not saying its a bad game and maybe two weeks isn't long enough to really get into it but I just found it draw me into the story and universe. I know the developers seem to enjoy their niche/cult status but I don't see how making it more accessible to new players would necessarily be a bad thing.
Well they can say what they want but, in my experience, the corporate sector thrives on mediocrity. Most companies want to hire average people and pay them an average amount of money, or a bit less if they can get away with it. I don't claim that this is necessarily wrong, just hypocritical.
They can go on about "passion" and wanting "the best people" but they know that passionate people can be difficult to deal with and the best people not only want the best money and benefits but they want some say in how things get done.
And would they hire someone "passionate" in their late forties or is this merely another codeword for "naive new graduate"?
I guess we've seen enough by now to realise that 'Big Music' are never going to change their tune (yes it's a bad pun, sorry!)
They can only relate to people, collectively, in terms of captive markets with no choice but to buy what they're given. Offering things "for free" was clearly their idea of a clever scheme to get people to buy into DRM and crade-to-grave renting of top 40 hits.
It's quite a while since I was on a University campus but there was always quite a lot of live music available, just a short walk away. It might not always be very good but you see these things differently when you're younger.
And when I was there your friends were the pre-electronic forerunner of the "If you like X you'll probably like Y services." it's a time when you find out that you like a lot of different music to what your expected and the awful shock that your best friends hate some of your favourite bands.
We were told it was the evil cassette that was going to bring down civilisation and force hard drinking record executives to work. Or was that the other way around? The sky still hasn't fallen, they make even more money now. But more money will never be enough for them.
So bank robbery is good for their security and should be encouraged? Everyone who moves to a new city should be immediately mugged so they can learn valuable lessons about personal security? Perhaps there should be an official quota of licensed murders so people don't get too lax about their own safety?
What is the special magic about technology that makes people give opposite answers to "Is X sensible?" and "Is X sensible using a computer?" for just about all values of X?
Sorry, but this appears to be FUD. If you want a native look and feel you need to put in one line of code to tell the UIManager to use it. A few more lines can give the user control of the L&F.
Once a Swing application is up and running it's not noticeably slower or less responsive than any other GUI application, assuming its been correctly written, and it will work cross-platform with no changes. I've taken desktop applications from Windows -> Linux -> Solaris -> HPUX with no porting effort.
As for Java 5.0 features being forced by.NOT I don't really believe this and I don't see how it would matter very much if its true. Modern OO languages all offer a similar set of basic features and it's no more suprising to find generics in Java or.NET than in C++.
I've just played with it and it looks quite interesting but I'll be surprised if it ever gets anywhere. It suffers from the same issues that systems based on Lisp and smalltalk always have, a seeming gratutitous delight in doing things in different ways to what people expect or are already used to.
Never mind the programming language itself, it extends to the most basic things. In less than a minute I was near to screaming in frustration at how difficult it was to move an avatar around. You can't use W,A,S,D or expect the arrow keys to work. You have to handle complicated mouse gestures and interpret miniscule icons, where the tooltips pop up behind the frame so you can't read them.
I like the concept alot, we need open source virtual spaces. Most of the current ones like MMORPGS have corporate owners. You exist in WoW or Second Life only as long as you pay and on the sufferance of the lords of the realm.
So I suggest that the people working on Croquet drop the elitist mindset, get a bunch of people who play Quake or SL and sit them in front of this. Then take notice of their feedback and make it so anyone can pick it up at least using and navigating it in a few minutes.
This was fairly predictable. "Let's bring out a new format that's less flexible and charge more money for it." UK street prices for these were about £19 while, if you wait for the sales, you can pick up 4 DVDs for only £1 more.
I hope that all those retailers who replaced their last shelf of PC games with a UMD display got severely burned.
I never take this sort of article too seriously as the people writing them tend to focus on one particular current short-term issue, which still seems to be outsourcing though I'm sure we're due another bogeyman soon. The last thing I want to do is make career decisions based on following a herd of insecure people who've been panicked into a bad move.
I also don't understand people who talk about IT. If I hear someone say they "work in IT" then I assume they're either not very competent or are in a job only vaguely connected with computing. In other professions people are proud of their specialization and it brings them both status and rewards. For example a neurosurgeon wouldn't go around talking about "working in medicine".
For me its better to have my own set of long term goals and find the jobs that fit in with them. These may well change over time. I used to think I never wanted to do anything except programming. Over time I found that I quite enjoy a mixture of coding and consulting so I moved to a job that gave me this mix.
I guess what I'm saying is to take control of your own career. Lots of people are always claiming that the sky is falling and they're almost always wrong.
Exhibit no 2213 is housed in the west wing of the museum. This is a late (very late) 2007 Ipod Killer made by a now defunct company from Redmond that some people on the tour may remember. Like many of our other 3000 exhibits it suffered from being late to market, overhyped and having a battery life of approximately 27 seconds. The user interface also attracted severe criticism, based as it was on their then popular desktop operating system, that I believe was called "Panes XP" or something.
Move along please, there's always plenty to see in the Ipod Killer Museum. New Exhibits are arriving all the time!
I think you're right. They seem to be hyping it as an "integrated media" platform and go on about its TV capabilities. Microsoft now have Media Center, The Xbox 360 and this Origami thing all competing to be "integrated media centers". I can't see this new thing lasting very long if it looks like it might cut into Xbox sales.
Predictably, the technologically clueless like the BBC who seem to think Gates is some combination of Einstein and the Pope are assuming that because Microsoft are doing it then a.) it will succeed and b.) any competition is doomed. Amusingly, the BBC headline is "Forget About Laptops". If it costs £700 when it comes out here then I don't think many laptops will be forgotten. My laptop runs a MythTV frontend very nicely thank you.
I'm not sure I agree with this. Being on call is real work because it limits your freedom to do the things you'd normally do outside work to relax.
Many of the people using this technology are doing so because they've been given no choice or have been led to believe that they're somehow not important unless they're constantly available at someone else's whim.
The ones who are likely to welcome this are people who already work freelance in jobs such as writing and journalism, like the author of the article maybe? They already have to do time management and have a large amount of control over their working hours. Nobody is likely to ring them at 3AM to complain about a typo in their last article for example.
When 'on call' means supporting complicated systems that run 24/7 it's different. You have no control over the timing and you can't switch your phone off if you need to deal with something important outside work. People in other timezones will call you at convenient times for them, regardless of your situation.
I'm not saying being on call is all bad and some companies manage it very well but its somewhat naive to assume that giving people more connectivity will give them more control over their work rather than less.
Someone obviously just sent this FUD forward from about 1998. I suggest we send them a copy of Firefox back in return, so they can see how the future went.
Ame
They probably see WiFi as a hassle and somehow subversive or threatening. If they want to ban it then spurious health grounds are as good an excuse as any.
I can just see their board of trustees or whatever sitting in a room filled with clouds of cigar smoke, large glasses of whisky in hand, the remains of a seven course meal scattered around the table. "We must ban this WiFi thing, whatever that is. It's a danger to people's health. And could someone please carry me to the car?"
Well when I was in a similar situation I just didn't put anything forward to be patented. Next year the metrics were changed and nobody asked us to do it again. Our immediate management didn't actually want patents. They just wanted to be seen to be doing what they'd been told that year.
Those who went along with it got the nominal £1 for their trouble and their name associated with a patent that was so vague by the time it had been translated into legalese flavoured pseudocode that it was hard to tell what they were actually claiming to have 'invented'. None of them went on to be millionaires and none of them did noticeably well in the pay round that year, largely because nobody did.
It shouldn't be a make or break issue and there's every chance that you won't even have to explain your opposition to patents. They'll have their hands full with the few people who rush forward to suck up to the boss and patent "a means of processing information by means of using an information processing device in a slightly different way to the last 10,000 junk patents we filed."
Nothing much new here it's typical telco thinking. The're used to running large and hugely complex networks (e.g. GSM) with tightly controlled and metered access.
If operators had designed the Internet then searching would be a network function controlled by the them and the concept of multiple search engines would seem strange. But then so woulld using the Internet as the terrifying usage charges would have stalled it way back. Adding a service to the network would take a committee of committees several years (e.g. MMS messaging).
If they don't understand that bandwidth is now a commodity then they could be in for a few serious shocks, unless they can buy the necessary laws to keep out small local competition (they already have in some countries).
There's still money to be made by Telcos as running reliable networks isn't a doddle. I don't think it lies in blackmailing those who build the services that make Internet access desirable in the first place.
Newspaper publishers seem to be making the same kind of errors as the record industry. They seem to be overvaluing their product and treating obvious benefits of digital distribution as something people have to pay extra for, if possible multiple times.
Take the UK national papers, they want the same money for a years subscription than buying a physical product. E.g: http://www.guardian.co.uk/digitaledition/subscribe will cost you £130 for a year. There's only a 2 week searchable archive available for the hefty cost.
Once again I bet they're all scratching their heads wondering why people aren't rushing to sign up.
The original article talked about local papers, which at least in the UK are of poor to laughable quality. A paper containing 90% advertising with a couple of articles making a mountain of some local molehill (with a heavy political bias) is no more appealing online than it is in print.
What's next? Passing a note to a bank teller "By reading this note you have agreed to let me rob your bank and not press the alarm button"?
EULAs are becoming increasingly cluttered with unenforceable and in cases downright silly things. With any luck a few frivolous lawsuits might see some of them struck down.
Once again UK lawmakers display their lack of technical knowlege and common sense.
Firstly, what they're saying is that they want to be able to arrest people on mere suspicion and then go fishing through their lives in the hoping of turning something up. This "he must have done something" attitude used to be alien to our legal system but seems to be increasingly common among the general public. I've been on a jury where several people wanted to convict without a discussion because "the police wouldn't have arrested him if he hadn't done something."
We've already seen how these sort of powers get misused and they also help to foster the climate of suspicion and hysteria that leads to more powers being requested.
Secondly. The UK doesn't allow torture yet, though it's probably coming soon. So all the authorities can do is lock them up if they won't talk. They can pass as many laws as they like that say people "have" to give them your keys. If you're a terrorist willing to die you're not going to be scared by the thought of going to jail for an extra few years on top of the mandatory life sentence you're going to get anyway.
There's no incentive for fantatics to cooperate with the authorities. Whether or not the information is in their head or on a computer they're not going to hand it over willingly so they can be charged with extra offences.
There seems to be no way to get these US based spam calls stopped. I pay a monthly fee for the Anonymous Call Rejection service, it doesn't work on international calls so its worthless for these. The spammers don't take any notice of the TPS register either.
I've complained to BT about it who say there's nothing they can do to stop them. I've also written to OFCOM, who haven't acknowledged my complaint after 6 weeks.
These silent calls really upset the elderly, including my parents. I'd really like something to be done about it but nobody seems interested in stopping them.
One thing that doesn't seem to need making any easier is to write ill-informed IT commentary columns.
This sort of complaint would sound silly in another context. Imagine writing to a medical magazine about how "neurosurgery is too complicated" and they should make it easier to understand. Or rocket science? "They should make the 10 most common kinds of rockets easier to design".
I'm all for cleaning up and improving some of the actively user-hostile interfaces you come across but this kind of complaint really does sound like "complicated things should be easy and require no thought or effort".
Ironically, some of the programs that are aimed at newbies are very difficult to use because they're inflexible and patronisingly assume the user is a dolt. Better software will help people up the learning curve so they can do more complex things with their photos than they originally knew were possible.
Hmmm. I sense your mind may change rapidly when you leave college.
In a college assignment you have a fixed specification that won't be changed, you have a fixed delivery date that won't be changed. You also have the advantages of knowing that the problem is soluble with basic CS techniques in a particular amount of time, in that it's probably the same one as handed out last year.
In badly-run real world projects and companies (which is quite a few of them) one or more of these factors won't be present.
In bad cases deadlines will be moved arbitrarily by people you don't even know. Specifications will never be complete because the people writing them won't know exactly what they want. Your team will constantly fluctuate in size as people are pulled to firefight other projects. You'll be asked to work insane hours "to show how committed you are".
If you make the code bulletproof you'll be blamed for over-engineering it. If you're late shipping you'll be blamed for slacking. If it breaks in service then yes, there's blame heading your way for that as well.
To avoid rapid discouragement it's vital to avoid places like I just described. But it won't be easy because when you go to an interview they'll tell you they are "a quality organization" or "customer driven" which really means they don't have a product strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
> The problem with resumes these days, IMO, is that you have to both make a resume that'll get through the
> automated filters many companies use and still be grabbing to the human that eventually will read it.
This is an important point and if I'd had some points I'd have modded you up.
I'd also mention that your CV will be read by lots of people e.g. recruitment agents whose knowledge of what the tech buzzwords mean is very similar to the automated filters. These people are gatekeepers between you and the potential employers HR department, which might well have been outsourced itself and have a similar level of knowledge. Getting a job isn't as simple as it used to be, it seems to be much harder to get your CV onto the right person's desk.
I've had mostly poor experiences with the big recruitment sites. Networking and contacts combined with targetted direct applications seem to be the way to go. Well, it worked for me anyway.
No, without Godel it's incomplete but if you included him it would be inconsistent.
Ame
I just wanted to point out that getting replies to a CV on Monster isn't the same as getting a job or being able to get one from the resulting contacts. In my (UK) experience many of the people who contact you will be timewasters who seem to collect CVs like some people collect stamps. Others will be pushing jobs at the other end of the country that are wildly inapplicable to your CV. A third group will simply try to act as frustrating middlemen to jobs you could have applied for directly. Others will be from agencies who want you to fill in long and very personal questionnaires on the promise of exciting interviews and will never contact you again once you do.
The widespread use of Internet job sites seems to have made things harder as the cost of wasting other people's time has gone down to next to nothing. Trying to sort out the real possibilities from the CV farmers and hopeless timewasters is a difficult and time-consuming task. Very few of these recruitment people understand anything about the industry, the differences in people's skills or what would make a job interesting and worth applying for. Each of these conversations can feel like a Dilbert episode.
BTW You are also in a good position with 2 years of experience it is much harder if you have more than about six years or so when you will probably start seeing the first signs of ageism.
I hope that wasn't a rant but I currently don't have any good answers about how to stay in the industry long-term and it's giving me a lot of concern.
Interesting. I'm a fairly heavy WoW player and I'm just reaching the end of a 2 week trial of Eve, prompted by the recent publicity around the PvP tournament.
I'm a fan of space games and in need of a fix (after being disappointed by X3:The Single Figure Frame Rate) but I don't think I'll be subscribing to Eve. I agree with your points on the graphics etc. but for some reason the fun seems to be lacking. I'm not saying its a bad game and maybe two weeks isn't long enough to really get into it but I just found it draw me into the story and universe. I know the developers seem to enjoy their niche/cult status but I don't see how making it more accessible to new players would necessarily be a bad thing.
Each to their own in the end I guess.
Ame
Well they can say what they want but, in my experience, the corporate sector thrives on mediocrity. Most companies want to hire average people and pay them an average amount of money, or a bit less if they can get away with it. I don't claim that this is necessarily wrong, just hypocritical.
They can go on about "passion" and wanting "the best people" but they know that passionate people can be difficult to deal with and the best people not only want the best money and benefits but they want some say in how things get done.
And would they hire someone "passionate" in their late forties or is this merely another codeword for "naive new graduate"?
Ame
Microsoft confirmed that they would begin supporting Windows XP sometime during Q3 this year.
Ame
I guess we've seen enough by now to realise that 'Big Music' are never going to change their tune (yes it's a bad pun, sorry!)
They can only relate to people, collectively, in terms of captive markets with no choice but to buy what they're given. Offering things "for free" was clearly their idea of a clever scheme to get people to buy into DRM and crade-to-grave renting of top 40 hits.
It's quite a while since I was on a University campus but there was always quite a lot of live music available, just a short walk away. It might not always be very good but you see these things differently when you're younger.
And when I was there your friends were the pre-electronic forerunner of the "If you like X you'll probably like Y services." it's a time when you find out that you like a lot of different music to what your expected and the awful shock that your best friends hate some of your favourite bands.
We were told it was the evil cassette that was going to bring down civilisation and force hard drinking record executives to work. Or was that the other way around? The sky still hasn't fallen, they make even more money now. But more money will never be enough for them.
Ame
So bank robbery is good for their security and should be encouraged? Everyone who moves to a new city should be immediately mugged so they can learn valuable lessons about personal security? Perhaps there should be an official quota of licensed murders so people don't get too lax about their own safety?
What is the special magic about technology that makes people give opposite answers to "Is X sensible?" and "Is X sensible using a computer?" for just about all values of X?
Ame
Sorry, but this appears to be FUD. If you want a native look and feel you need to put in one line of code to tell the UIManager to use it. A few more lines can give the user control of the L&F.
.NOT I don't really believe this and I don't see how it would matter very much if its true. Modern OO languages all offer a similar set of basic features and it's no more suprising to find generics in Java or .NET than in C++.
Once a Swing application is up and running it's not noticeably slower or less responsive than any other GUI application, assuming its been correctly written, and it will work cross-platform with no changes. I've taken desktop applications from Windows -> Linux -> Solaris -> HPUX with no porting effort.
As for Java 5.0 features being forced by
Ame
I've just played with it and it looks quite interesting but I'll be surprised if it ever gets anywhere. It suffers from the same issues that systems based on Lisp and smalltalk always have, a seeming gratutitous delight in doing things in different ways to what people expect or are already used to.
Never mind the programming language itself, it extends to the most basic things. In less than a minute I was near to screaming in frustration at how difficult it was to move an avatar around. You can't use W,A,S,D or expect the arrow keys to work. You have to handle complicated mouse gestures and interpret miniscule icons, where the tooltips pop up behind the frame so you can't read them.
I like the concept alot, we need open source virtual spaces. Most of the current ones like MMORPGS have corporate owners. You exist in WoW or Second Life only as long as you pay and on the sufferance of the lords of the realm.
So I suggest that the people working on Croquet drop the elitist mindset, get a bunch of people who play Quake or SL and sit them in front of this. Then take notice of their feedback and make it so anyone can pick it up at least using and navigating it in a few minutes.
Ame
This was fairly predictable. "Let's bring out a new format that's less flexible and charge more money for it." UK street prices for these were about £19 while, if you wait for the sales, you can pick up 4 DVDs for only £1 more.
I hope that all those retailers who replaced their last shelf of PC games with a UMD display got severely burned.
Ame
I never take this sort of article too seriously as the people writing them tend to focus on one particular current short-term issue, which still seems to be outsourcing though I'm sure we're due another bogeyman soon. The last thing I want to do is make career decisions based on following a herd of insecure people who've been panicked into a bad move.
I also don't understand people who talk about IT. If I hear someone say they "work in IT" then I assume they're either not very competent or are in a job only vaguely connected with computing. In other professions people are proud of their specialization and it brings them both status and rewards. For example a neurosurgeon wouldn't go around talking about "working in medicine".
For me its better to have my own set of long term goals and find the jobs that fit in with them. These may well change over time. I used to think I never wanted to do anything except programming. Over time I found that I quite enjoy a mixture of coding and consulting so I moved to a job that gave me this mix.
I guess what I'm saying is to take control of your own career. Lots of people are always claiming that the sky is falling and they're almost always wrong.
Ame
Exhibit no 2213 is housed in the west wing of the museum. This is a late (very late) 2007 Ipod Killer made by a now defunct company from Redmond that some people on the tour may remember. Like many of our other 3000 exhibits it suffered from being late to market, overhyped and having a battery life of approximately 27 seconds. The user interface also attracted severe criticism, based as it was on their then popular desktop operating system, that I believe was called "Panes XP" or something.
Move along please, there's always plenty to see in the Ipod Killer Museum. New Exhibits are arriving all the time!
I think you're right. They seem to be hyping it as an "integrated media" platform and go on about its TV capabilities. Microsoft now have Media Center, The Xbox 360 and this Origami thing all competing to be "integrated media centers". I can't see this new thing lasting very long if it looks like it might cut into Xbox sales.
Predictably, the technologically clueless like the BBC who seem to think Gates is some combination of Einstein and the Pope are assuming that because Microsoft are doing it then a.) it will succeed and b.) any competition is doomed. Amusingly, the BBC headline is "Forget About Laptops". If it costs £700 when it comes out here then I don't think many laptops will be forgotten. My laptop runs a MythTV frontend very nicely thank you.
Ame
I'm not sure I agree with this. Being on call is real work because it limits your freedom to do the things you'd normally do outside work to relax.
Many of the people using this technology are doing so because they've been given no choice or have been led to believe that they're somehow not important unless they're constantly available at someone else's whim.
The ones who are likely to welcome this are people who already work freelance in jobs such as writing and journalism, like the author of the article maybe? They already have to do time management and have a large amount of control over their working hours. Nobody is likely to ring them at 3AM to complain about a typo in their last article for example.
When 'on call' means supporting complicated systems that run 24/7 it's different. You have no control over the timing and you can't switch your phone off if you need to deal with something important outside work. People in other timezones will call you at convenient times for them, regardless of your situation.
I'm not saying being on call is all bad and some companies manage it very well but its somewhat naive to assume that giving people more connectivity will give them more control over their work rather than less.
Ame
Someone obviously just sent this FUD forward from about 1998. I suggest we send them a copy of Firefox back in return, so they can see how the future went. Ame
They probably see WiFi as a hassle and somehow subversive or threatening. If they want to ban it then spurious health grounds are as good an excuse as any.
I can just see their board of trustees or whatever sitting in a room filled with clouds of cigar smoke, large glasses of whisky in hand, the remains of a seven course meal scattered around the table. "We must ban this WiFi thing, whatever that is. It's a danger to people's health. And could someone please carry me to the car?"
Ame
Well when I was in a similar situation I just didn't put anything forward to be patented. Next year the metrics were changed and nobody asked us to do it again. Our immediate management didn't actually want patents. They just wanted to be seen to be doing what they'd been told that year.
Those who went along with it got the nominal £1 for their trouble and their name associated with a patent that was so vague by the time it had been translated into legalese flavoured pseudocode that it was hard to tell what they were actually claiming to have 'invented'. None of them went on to be millionaires and none of them did noticeably well in the pay round that year, largely because nobody did.
It shouldn't be a make or break issue and there's every chance that you won't even have to explain your opposition to patents. They'll have their hands full with the few people who rush forward to suck up to the boss and patent "a means of processing information by means of using an information processing device in a slightly different way to the last 10,000 junk patents we filed."
Ame
Nothing much new here it's typical telco thinking. The're used to running large and hugely complex networks (e.g. GSM) with tightly controlled and metered access.
If operators had designed the Internet then searching would be a network function controlled by the them and the concept of multiple search engines would seem strange. But then so woulld using the Internet as the terrifying usage charges would have stalled it way back. Adding a service to the network would take a committee of committees several years (e.g. MMS messaging).
If they don't understand that bandwidth is now a commodity then they could be in for a few serious shocks, unless they can buy the necessary laws to keep out small local competition (they already have in some countries).
There's still money to be made by Telcos as running reliable networks isn't a doddle. I don't think it lies in blackmailing those who build the services that make Internet access desirable in the first place.
Ame
Newspaper publishers seem to be making the same kind of errors as the record industry. They seem to be overvaluing their product and treating obvious benefits of digital distribution as something people have to pay extra for, if possible multiple times.
e will cost you £130 for a year. There's only a 2 week searchable archive available for the hefty cost.
Take the UK national papers, they want the same money for a years subscription than buying a physical product. E.g: http://www.guardian.co.uk/digitaledition/subscrib
Once again I bet they're all scratching their heads wondering why people aren't rushing to sign up.
The original article talked about local papers, which at least in the UK are of poor to laughable quality. A paper containing 90% advertising with a couple of articles making a mountain of some local molehill (with a heavy political bias) is no more appealing online than it is in print.
Ame
What's next? Passing a note to a bank teller "By reading this note you have agreed to let me rob your bank and not press the alarm button"?
EULAs are becoming increasingly cluttered with unenforceable and in cases downright silly things. With any luck a few frivolous lawsuits might see some of them struck down.
Ame
Once again UK lawmakers display their lack of technical knowlege and common sense.
Firstly, what they're saying is that they want to be able to arrest people on mere suspicion and then go fishing through their lives in the hoping of turning something up. This "he must have done something" attitude used to be alien to our legal system but seems to be increasingly common among the general public. I've been on a jury where several people wanted to convict without a discussion because "the police wouldn't have arrested him if he hadn't done something."
We've already seen how these sort of powers get misused and they also help to foster the climate of suspicion and hysteria that leads to more powers being requested.
Secondly. The UK doesn't allow torture yet, though it's probably coming soon. So all the authorities can do is lock them up if they won't talk. They can pass as many laws as they like that say people "have" to give them your keys. If you're a terrorist willing to die you're not going to be scared by the thought of going to jail for an extra few years on top of the mandatory life sentence you're going to get anyway.
There's no incentive for fantatics to cooperate with the authorities. Whether or not the information is in their head or on a computer they're not going to hand it over willingly so they can be charged with extra offences.
Ame
There seems to be no way to get these US based spam calls stopped. I pay a monthly fee for the Anonymous Call Rejection service, it doesn't work on international calls so its worthless for these. The spammers don't take any notice of the TPS register either.
I've complained to BT about it who say there's nothing they can do to stop them. I've also written to OFCOM, who haven't acknowledged my complaint after 6 weeks.
These silent calls really upset the elderly, including my parents. I'd really like something to be done about it but nobody seems interested in stopping them.
Ame
One thing that doesn't seem to need making any easier is to write ill-informed IT commentary columns.
This sort of complaint would sound silly in another context. Imagine writing to a medical magazine about how "neurosurgery is too complicated" and they should make it easier to understand. Or rocket science? "They should make the 10 most common kinds of rockets easier to design".
I'm all for cleaning up and improving some of the actively user-hostile interfaces you come across but this kind of complaint really does sound like "complicated things should be easy and require no thought or effort".
Ironically, some of the programs that are aimed at newbies are very difficult to use because they're inflexible and patronisingly assume the user is a dolt. Better software will help people up the learning curve so they can do more complex things with their photos than they originally knew were possible.
Ame
Hmmm. I sense your mind may change rapidly when you leave college.
In a college assignment you have a fixed specification that won't be changed, you have a fixed delivery date that won't be changed. You also have the advantages of knowing that the problem is soluble with basic CS techniques in a particular amount of time, in that it's probably the same one as handed out last year.
In badly-run real world projects and companies (which is quite a few of them) one or more of these factors won't be present.
In bad cases deadlines will be moved arbitrarily by people you don't even know. Specifications will never be complete because the people writing them won't know exactly what they want. Your team will constantly fluctuate in size as people are pulled to firefight other projects. You'll be asked to work insane hours "to show how committed you are".
If you make the code bulletproof you'll be blamed for over-engineering it. If you're late shipping you'll be blamed for slacking. If it breaks in service then yes, there's blame heading your way for that as well.
To avoid rapid discouragement it's vital to avoid places like I just described. But it won't be easy because when you go to an interview they'll tell you they are "a quality organization" or "customer driven" which really means they don't have a product strategy.
Ame