Of course the Asymco study looks at the profitability of devices and carrier fees taken together. It fails to consider that unlike Apple, Google is not primarily a hardware, software and media delivery company. Google's profitability is driven by advertising revenues. I wonder how Android's profitability numbers would look if the study took into account direct and indirect advertising revenues driven by the Android platform?
The authors of SOPA are not hypocrites. Hypocrisy connotes understanding of the issue and the representatives who allowed this piece of legislation to be crafted for them lack even the terminology to enter into meaningful conversation about issues such as DNS Security, Website Poisoning, and other salient factors affected by the law. To use Wolfgang Pauli's aphorism as a metaphor, this piece of legislation is so bad it's not only not right, it's "not even wrong".
You can get a decent generic barebone from Tigerdirect for less than $300 (have to watch for a deal) with a quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM and a TB hard drive. I have one with Xenserver free version because I like the tools and driver support. I have used VMWare 2 GSX and ESX, then ESX3, VMWare Server free version and ESXi, but have been using Xenserver free version in both test and production for the last three years, though I understand that VMWare's solutions are also very workable. A UPS is helpful as well.
My current test Xenserver has at time of this writing 4 VMs on it - two Linux boxes, a Windows server 2003 and an XP instance, all used for testing and development. I have a Windows 7 instance as well, but it happens to be turned off at the moment. I use an external USB storing snapshots of test VMs - get a clean config, store a snapshot of it, then you can test, muck it up, blow it away then start up a copy of the snapshot without having to re-install. Mine has been running continuously since early summer.
This setup can get you started with minimum cost and effort if you are doing development and functional testing that does not include anything too exotic like clustering or a database with a large transaction volume. You're not going to break any speed records but you can build VMs in all the OS types you want to test and limit the number currently running to 4 or 5, and you'll do just fine.
I'm not a big fan of Oracle's 20th century business model, which like a lot of other big name proprietary software companies and other types of companies as well is predicated on doing everything possible to obtain vendor lock-in, then charge through the nose for licensing and support, forcing upgrades, and basically squeezing customers at every opportunity. That's the downside of the model - in one way it sees customers as prey to be devoured.
The flipside of this is that proprietary companies like Oracle do make considerable investment to create solid, reliable product offerings, and they try to provide high quality support.
There are other proprietary companies out there who have Procrustean approaches; they don't spend time developing or innovating but rather continue to ride the gravy train of code that was written years and years ago. Customers have to alter their problems to fit the proprietary solutions. This is true in part of some of the niche applications aimed at specific vertical markets Oracle has acquired, but Oracle's acquisition has actually brought new life to languishing applications and brought Oracle's support processes to those same small app vendors.
Oracle targets customers who are willing to pay high prices for high quality software and willing to pay high prices for support. Is the cost justifiable? It depends - for some companies the risk exposure of getting 90% of the functionality of Oracle-type products for free or for very low cost is worthwhile, and the risk exposure of being without an enterprise-class support organization (or paying for support on a per-instance basis, sometimes through a consultant if no such support plan is offered for a given application) is justifiable. It's a decision each technology using company has to make for themselves.
Oracle's acquisition of the K Splice project is consistent with their business model.
Their business model is not amenable to me personally, but in some cases it might be a good fit for some of my customers. In those cases I can recommend Oracle's solutions, even though I am not fond of Oracle's business practices, which to some may seem avaricious, but to others may simply be a sign of an aggressively run profitable company that offers high end products and services and demands concomitant prices.
As to whether Oracle will contribute to the K Splice community or hold its own code contributions proprietary is their call. Past history indicates that they may not be enthusiastic contributors to the community but any prediction of how they will act in this case is pure conjecture. We'll have to wait and see.
I'm really glad to see that you are suggesting a Content Management System. While it's inarguable that knowledge of (X)HTML and CSS make better webmasters, much of the world has moved on and let CMS packages like Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, to name a few of the most popular systems, take care of dynamic HTML presentation. Just keep in mind that in any CMS (the ones mentioned all use Apache, MySQL and PHP as the platform stack) you must use security best practices as defined by the community then add your own extra security in things like extended.htaccess entries to prevent most SQL injection keystroke combos. As always, caveat lector!
Underscore the "at worst" because no one's fate is completely sealed by nature or by nurture. Mere genius does not necessarily lead to success, whether the metric thereof is financial, academic, or fame-based. Witness Christopher Langan, arguably the world's smartest man, who nevertheless has not achieved great success. Gladwell and others suggest he was handicapped by being raised in poverty (and one doesn't know where his brain wiring came from). There are plenty of examples of people with modest brainpower who have done well simply through discipline, hard work, and positive attitude, and just as many examples of underachieving geniuses.
There's another trait that's missing here: Professionalism.
Real Veteran Unix Admins are true professionals who know how to function in a business environment without being arrogant or prickly. They are comfortable enough in their own skins and emotionally secure enough that they never need to engage in put-downs of others who don't rise to their level of technical acumen. They never play at being the high priests of the sanctum sanctorum of Unix administration which should not be desecrated by mere mortals. They are capable of doing their jobs without needing constant stroking by management or self-stroking by engaging in endless pissing contests and self-aggrandizement.
Unfortunately there is a small subset of Unix admins who are technically brilliant but emotionally insecure. They can do amazing things with systems but they are often difficult to integrate into a team or an organizational culture. They are high-maintenance employees, both blessing and curse to the companies they work for. With proper structure and coaching (and sometimes therapy) some of these can be developed to become true professionals. Some may be impervious to all efforts to help them mature and become more stable - they will have to be compartmentalized for the good of the organization or let go.
I will leave it to my gentle readers to decide which group the author of the article belongs in.
I think that "maybe" is the only possible answer to the question, and a lot depends on the relative qualifications and temperament of both of the programmers. A young programmer with hot new coding skills may be just what is needed. If the older programmer isn't able to code in the language needed for the technology needed, then it is incumbent upon him or her to gain the requisite skill.
I'm writing as an IT professional in my fifties, so I think I have some perspective here, but I'm not necessarily biased in favor of the older programmer. I have met plenty of older employees who developed a "corporate employee mentality," that is, they thought that the company paid them just enough to keep them from quitting, and they did just enough work to keep from getting fired.
In the case of this senior programmer, if he or she had been around long enough to garner significant experience, why was the salary range so low? It doesn't necessarily mean the programmer wasn't a good employee, but someone who gets the company culture and goals and wants to advance them becomes a valuable asset - compensation usually follows. The fact that a senior programmer was making anything near the range a new associate programmer would be targeted, then I question how valuable the senior coder was to the company. Note that I'm not concluding anything - there isn't enough information here to go into casuistics.
Another thing I see is that long-time corporate employees often expect to be trained at company expense. True, ongoing education and training are a perk companies use to attract and retain good talent, but it is possible for someone who's been around for a long time to get almost an entitlement mentality.
On the other hand, the old hand has a decided advantage if he really knows not just a programming language, but understands the business processes involved in the business segment the project supports, the procedures that implement the processes and the policies that govern them as well as, in the case of a new generation system for an existing line of business, the current systems that implement the processes. This kind of business knowledge is invaluable and it's going to take the new coder some time to get up to speed. If the new coder has some business acumen and training that works in his favor to an extent. Someone who is a whiz with the new coding language but who has lived in the geek bubble of the computer science department at college might not be the best candidate.
In any case it's not a slam dunk either way based on the information given in the article. Initiative, business knowledge, technical knowledge, temperament and experience all play roles. If I infer correctly that the senior programmer was earning in the low end of his range, then I'm inclined to think that management had good reasons for bringing in the new guy at a higher rate. I think that management should be proactive in building employees as company assets, however, and this smacks a bit of a passive-aggressive way to edge out the senior coder. If this is what management wants, they should say so directly and why. It's the decent thing to do.
Or I could be completely wrong - the manager involved might be some shallow, superficial, and insecure incompetent who is dazzled by youthful attractiveness and a facility with the latest buzzwords. Corporate middle management is replete with such people - they can't make the cut for senior management and they can't survive in small business where you pretty much have to produce the goods or you're out of business. Middle management in large companies is where most of these types end up. It's why Dilbert resonates so strongly with so many people.
Okay. I've had my say. Hope I wasn't unfair to either side of the argument.
So, let's see, they achieved their "Substantial Momentum in Q2" working on security problems in what section of the technosphere? Oh, they're a Microsoft partner. So whatever their report says they made most of their money as a security firm working on Microsoft systems? Follow the money.
Remember that the mere fact of being a Microsoft Partner does not make someone a Microsoft lackey. I own an IT company and we're a Microsoft Partner - this is an acknowledgment of the fact that almost all of our clients have significant deployments of Microsoft OS and application software, and that some of the line of business applications they use depend on Microsoft infrastructure.
Nevertheless, my company is an Open Source advocate, and we do all we can to encourage adoption of Linux and Open Source solutions where it's appropriate for our clients. We deploy websites using Joomla, and deploy a lot of apps that use the LAMP stack, and put an Untangle Internet gateway in our client sites.
To be sure, there are partners out there who practice pushing Microsoft to the exclusion of all others, but not everyone does that.
It's equally as true that there are Open Source zealots for whom there is no middle ground - Linux and Free Software is more of a religious commitment for them.
Most of us however live in the real world of reasonableness and prudence, trying to find the best fit for a client without regard to ideology. We see ourselves as Open Source advocates, even evangelists, but we also are cognizant that doing business in today's world means supporting clients who are still depended on Microsoft.
I don't have indepth math, but first glance is as follows:
7 grams of CO2 per search
* 200,000,000 searches per day
= 1400 metric tons of C02 generated by Google alone, each day.
Viscerally that seems a bit on the heavy side, but I don't have any actual figures on Google. Current world CO2 daily output is 82,200,000 metric tons, based on 30 billion tons per year ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/emissions.html )
This would mean Google alone is responsible for 0.17% (a bit less than two tenths of one percent) of total world CO2 output. That seems excessive. There are other issues:
Do we posit the amount of CO2 per search vs. if Google didn't exist at all or vs. Google unutilized but with all its infrastructure running idle?
I'm intrigued, but not convinced. The article is long on abstracts and generalizations and short on concrete and specific facts. Jury has to remain out on this one, IMHO.
May I suggest Think Python, which originated as a book written for middle schoolers.
Originally it was called How to Think Like A Computer Scientist: Learning in Python, written by one high school teacher for Java, and translated to Python by another teacher. A collaborative project resulted in the present volume, which is being published in hard copy by Cambridge University Press, but the linked page has a free downloadable PDF.
Written for kids and partly by kids, I think this volume might fit the bill. It's also free, just like Python itself.
One of my client sites was clickjacked, and another had an attempted clickjacking. The connection is that the one that succeeded redirected users to a Russian site with scareware/malvertisement (AntiVirus Defense 2009). Same modus operandi - their scareware scanned my C: drive and found infected exe and dll files galore, a fact most curious on an Ubuntu Linux desktop.
The other attempted clickjacking was to a Chinese site, but I can't help but wonder if there's something more serious going on here.
Some of these scareware sellers are paying to have script kiddies put iframe clickjacks on every index.* file in a web host they can compromise, which is more than just a civil matter.
Do they stop with just charging $39.95 from the victim's credit card, or keep on charging until they hit the limit or get an alert? And does the victim's machine get free from the scareware, or is it recruited into a botnet to send out more malvertisements?
Ironically, the degree requirement is often disconnected from any technical ability. I know plenty of people who have undergraduate degrees in liberal arts, English, biology or other disciplines who work in IT.
What you can do is summarize projects you've worked on - if you have no experience, try to get internships if you can, though those positions might be slim pickings in the downturn.
Another place to get real experience, albeit without concomitant compensation, is doing work for nonprofits. You can do some free community service, and you get a resume bullet and a glowing recommendation from the nonprofit. Plus you can get a tax receipt for your work. This helps you build technical credibility to offset the lack of a degree.
There are often good reasons to work for free - it's worthwhile to work for free in order to learn a valuable skill or to get experience in a technology or business practice. You may get hungry while you're doing it, but if that's what it takes to open the door, take it.
One of the many other routes in the door to a good sysadmin job is the dreaded helpdesk. It's grunt work, but if you get in the door and are sharp, it's pretty easy to rise above the pack and lobby for a sysadmin opening when it comes along. An alternative path out is to get into a business analyst slot rather than a sysadmin - if you are really good at VBA and Crystal Reports, you can parlay that into a career, in fact it may be more lucrative than doing sysadmin work.
I don't know that you want to press this argument. Does this mean that hacking the email account of someone you don't like is justified if you find something incriminating? This misses the two larger issues.
I think the majority of folks on/. are fairly strongly in favor of a free Internet and the right to privacy.
Hacking into a private email account is not only criminal, it's evil, no matter whose email account it is. And when it's a highly prominent person who may end up in a position to influence technology policy, it's not only criminal to hack into their email, it's really unhelpful (I was going to say stupid, but I want to be kind).
Imagine if the hacked email account had belonged to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton. Would the response have been different? Time for a gut check. Liberty and justice for all, or for all except when we can get a little dirt on the folks we don't agree with?
I completely understand not wanting to be in public - I have the same concern. In my case running at night works out - the kids are in bed, and I can get out and pound down four miles in less than 40 minutes.
The sidewalks are almost completely deserted after nine o'clock, and I've never felt like I was being observed. It took a bit of gumption to go the first couple of times, but now it's part of my routine.
I strap on my MP3 with some good spoken word audio - books or tech talks usually - and my run is a very nice, quiet, private time for me. I have gotten to where I really like it.
But what you're doing is far better than nothing. Keep up the calisthenics and weight training but add some aerobics like running, biking or swimming to your regimen. Your cardiovascular system will love it. It's not easy, but it's worth it.
...and sue anyone who doesn't come to their arcades.
In fact, they should lobby Congress, the Japanese Parliament, the UN, and the United Federation of Planets to make using the Wii illegal. Isn't the lawsuit/regulatory route the default choice for industry segments whose business models have failed to change with the times?
I'm surprised that no one here is referring back to Peter Gutmann's paper on Vista. Yes, it contained some things that were subject to misunderstanding (that could have been construed as factual errors to sticklers) but the point of the paper was this:
Microsoft engineered Vista primarily to benefit content producers, not the people who buy the OS.
And if you will recall, their requirements for Vista certification mostly concerned arm-twisting on the part of Microsoft: Show that you support DRM in all of your hardware or you don't get Vista certification; Oh, and by the way, make sure that your hardware will disable itself in any OS that doesn't toe the DRM line.
Sure, in the case of Vista, the more egregious steps are aimed at HD content, but the lion's share of Vista technology was aimed at digital restrictions management, not end-user functionality. Which is one of the reasons why Vista has been less than a stellar success: Microsoft didn't engineer it for the people who buy it; they put most of the engineering into satisfying the corporate obsession with control. This ticked off all of the end users who had a clue. Sure, the OS has a large lemming constituency.
But Gutmann's paper made clear that Microsoft was unsatisfied with leveraging lock-in of simple computer operating systems. He may have gotten a few things wrong, but he clearly understood the main fact that their (Microsoft's) main motivation is the extension of their hegemony into the realm of content. They ignored older content, concentrating on HD stuff.
It's still an open question of whether this is merely the flailing of a dying dinosaur or not. It will take a few years to see. Dinosaurs survived for a long time after their extinction became inevitable. The real irony of Microsoft is that they, as a computer company of all things, haven't realized that we live in a postmodern, information-age culture. Microsoft is simply one more institution governed by modern, industrial-age assumptions.
In this period of cultural liminality and transition, there are plenty of institutions like Microsoft (and the RIAA and MPAA) who are bewildered by the facts of the new economy. The old economic formulas are based on scarcity of goods, and even according to them, price always approaches incremental cost. Digital content, however, is produced at an effective incremental cost of zero, and the flailing of the RIAA, MPAA, and companies like Microsoft reflects resistance not only to the new paradigm, but also to the prevailing economic rule that price ALWAYS approaches incremental cost. In an economy of abundance, different models must emerge, but media companies and would-be channel monopolies like Microsoft have not even shown the ability to apprehend, much less operate according to, the newly emerging formulas that govern an economy of abundance, and it is unlikely that they will read people like Eben Moglen, Larry Lessig, or Yochai Benkler in an effort to understand the emerging reality, since they aren't interested in understanding; they only view these thinkers as enemies.
But please don't miss the fact that the issue is larger than just the RIAA and the MPAA. The incremental cost of digital media is merely one of the first fields to be impacted by the emerging economic paradigm. It's already affecting publishing and the general field of knowledge and education. Look for industrial-age institutions across the entire economic and political spectrum to be just as resistant to change as the RIAA and MPAA are.
These institutions will fight to preserve their business model, just as the RIAA and MPAA are fighting to preserve theirs. The business models are dinosaurs, and are extinct already de facto, but it will take a while before the walnut-sized brain gets the word that the heart stopped beating some time ago.
Change will be disruptive, but what will drive it is not rage against the existing institutions. Though that will obviously play a role, the real driver will be the emergence of new institu
There are reasonable people on both sides of the question of god's existence.
In this case, the issue is one of causality. Specifically, the "it's watchmakers all the way up" fails because it posits an infinite series of causes.
We exist right now at a point in the series of causation. But an infinite series cannot be traversed, so the infinite series of watchmakers cannot lead us to any present we are part of.
This doesn't connote necessarily the existence of god. It does mandate at some point a cause which is uncaused, non-contingent and necessarily existing as the foundation of existence, but there is no purely logical reason that says a higher order universe cannot have these attributes.
The idea that what we experience as the universe is a VR simulation really doesn't advance the question about ultimate being at all, it just moves it down (or up) one layer.
Ultimately, though, since all we know and experience is both caused and contingent (including the universe itself) there must be something uncaused and non-contingent behind it. Non-being cannot give rise to being, so self-creation is out as well.
Again, this doesn't on purely logical grounds have to be god, and even if one suggests that god is the ground of being this sort of argumentation doesn't come anywhere near proving the existence of any particular god.
In my own case I am a theist, but I have reasonable friends who disbelieve on reasonable grounds (I also have both theistic and atheistic friends who are unreasonable - I hope I'm not falling into that camp by this post).
Hope this helps a bit at least to clarify the implications of the concept of causality.
Part of a general trend: consumer as commodity
on
Sears Installs Spyware
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This is a fairly obvious example of what has happened to the concept of "the customer" in the retail space. The old principle of serving the customer still applies, but the identification of the customer has changed. The customers of K-Mart Sears are no longer the people buying products in stores and use the Sears website; the new customer is the stockholder. The people who buy products and use the website are just commodities to be traded like anything else.
Installing spyware on website users? Why not, if the website users are just inventory to be controlled and traded.
This is true not only in retail, but in IT. Do you think the people who actually buy, say, operating systems, are the customers of the software companies that make them? Think again. Their customers are their stockholders too. The purchaser is just a commodity. Maybe companies which commoditize consumers need a wake-up call to remind them that consumers are still the real customers. A PR mess like this sends a bit of a reminder, but the only message that really hits home is one that impacts the EPS.
Legislation ought to be aimed toward introducing the concept of reasonability, and other areas of the legal corpus give us some sense.
Pharmaceutical patents extend only to 20 years, after which time bio-equivalent generics can be produced. In practice, this is usually 7-12 years, as pharma companies tend to apply for patents well before drugs are approved for public use.
For income taxes, the statute of limitations is seven years in most cases.
For other areas of law, the statute of limitations is even lower.
I'm not a lawyer, but I think that only murder has statutes that apply longer than copyright law.
Common sense dictates that there ought to be a much more reasonable limitation on intellectual property (especially considering that it's an arbitrary concept which is artificially created).
I tend to agree that five years is plenty - look at the sort of content that is being contested by the MPAA and the RIAA: music and films. Both media are exceedingly ephemeral; they're old news in a year, and out of style fairly quickly. Let the studios make their money for five years, then open things up. Seven years tops. You are correct: 120 year copyrights can be described by a host of adjectives, but sane is not among them.
This development appears to be consistent and predictable.
Look at Vista and its license agreement, and you see M$ trying to control not only the software layer but levying requirements on hardware makers, i.e. toe the line and show commitment to DRM in every layer of hardware or M$ won't certify your drivers, and this means NOT providing any open source drivers to the Linux community. Although Peter Gutmann's essay contained some inaccuracies, it detailed these steps.
Why did M$ abandon technical functionality for the end user in favor of an OS that provides a bit of eye candy to users but a whole lot of technology that is aimed at protecting content provider monopoly?
Why did they release the ultra-DRM portable platform, the Zune, about the same time?
Why is M$ now meddling in the media content market, apparently trying to orchestrate some sort of movement in HD media?
It has looked for some time like M$ sees the revenue stream Apple has through ITunes and thought it worthwhile to put a stake in the ground for developing a media market.
Which, in typical M$ fashion, they want to control absolutely. Look for M$ to either acquire or announce a media provider that offers only protected WMA and ultra-DRMed MP3 formats to compete against ITunes.
M$ sees that the OS and application space has limited legs. They appear to be making a move toward becoming a content provider. Pretty savvy on their part, but I think their jack-booted super-mega-ultra-DRM approach will not be well received.
They're either way out in front on the cutting edge, or a dinosaur trying to put a cap on emerging mammals in the media marketplace. Time will tell.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the Asymco study looks at the profitability of devices and carrier fees taken together. It fails to consider that unlike Apple, Google is not primarily a hardware, software and media delivery company. Google's profitability is driven by advertising revenues. I wonder how Android's profitability numbers would look if the study took into account direct and indirect advertising revenues driven by the Android platform?
The authors of SOPA are not hypocrites. Hypocrisy connotes understanding of the issue and the representatives who allowed this piece of legislation to be crafted for them lack even the terminology to enter into meaningful conversation about issues such as DNS Security, Website Poisoning, and other salient factors affected by the law. To use Wolfgang Pauli's aphorism as a metaphor, this piece of legislation is so bad it's not only not right, it's "not even wrong".
You can get a decent generic barebone from Tigerdirect for less than $300 (have to watch for a deal) with a quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM and a TB hard drive. I have one with Xenserver free version because I like the tools and driver support. I have used VMWare 2 GSX and ESX, then ESX3, VMWare Server free version and ESXi, but have been using Xenserver free version in both test and production for the last three years, though I understand that VMWare's solutions are also very workable. A UPS is helpful as well.
My current test Xenserver has at time of this writing 4 VMs on it - two Linux boxes, a Windows server 2003 and an XP instance, all used for testing and development. I have a Windows 7 instance as well, but it happens to be turned off at the moment. I use an external USB storing snapshots of test VMs - get a clean config, store a snapshot of it, then you can test, muck it up, blow it away then start up a copy of the snapshot without having to re-install. Mine has been running continuously since early summer.
This setup can get you started with minimum cost and effort if you are doing development and functional testing that does not include anything too exotic like clustering or a database with a large transaction volume. You're not going to break any speed records but you can build VMs in all the OS types you want to test and limit the number currently running to 4 or 5, and you'll do just fine.
I'm not a big fan of Oracle's 20th century business model, which like a lot of other big name proprietary software companies and other types of companies as well is predicated on doing everything possible to obtain vendor lock-in, then charge through the nose for licensing and support, forcing upgrades, and basically squeezing customers at every opportunity. That's the downside of the model - in one way it sees customers as prey to be devoured.
The flipside of this is that proprietary companies like Oracle do make considerable investment to create solid, reliable product offerings, and they try to provide high quality support.
There are other proprietary companies out there who have Procrustean approaches; they don't spend time developing or innovating but rather continue to ride the gravy train of code that was written years and years ago. Customers have to alter their problems to fit the proprietary solutions. This is true in part of some of the niche applications aimed at specific vertical markets Oracle has acquired, but Oracle's acquisition has actually brought new life to languishing applications and brought Oracle's support processes to those same small app vendors.
Oracle targets customers who are willing to pay high prices for high quality software and willing to pay high prices for support. Is the cost justifiable? It depends - for some companies the risk exposure of getting 90% of the functionality of Oracle-type products for free or for very low cost is worthwhile, and the risk exposure of being without an enterprise-class support organization (or paying for support on a per-instance basis, sometimes through a consultant if no such support plan is offered for a given application) is justifiable. It's a decision each technology using company has to make for themselves.
Oracle's acquisition of the K Splice project is consistent with their business model.
Their business model is not amenable to me personally, but in some cases it might be a good fit for some of my customers. In those cases I can recommend Oracle's solutions, even though I am not fond of Oracle's business practices, which to some may seem avaricious, but to others may simply be a sign of an aggressively run profitable company that offers high end products and services and demands concomitant prices.
As to whether Oracle will contribute to the K Splice community or hold its own code contributions proprietary is their call. Past history indicates that they may not be enthusiastic contributors to the community but any prediction of how they will act in this case is pure conjecture. We'll have to wait and see.
I'm really glad to see that you are suggesting a Content Management System. While it's inarguable that knowledge of (X)HTML and CSS make better webmasters, much of the world has moved on and let CMS packages like Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, to name a few of the most popular systems, take care of dynamic HTML presentation. Just keep in mind that in any CMS (the ones mentioned all use Apache, MySQL and PHP as the platform stack) you must use security best practices as defined by the community then add your own extra security in things like extended .htaccess entries to prevent most SQL injection keystroke combos. As always, caveat lector!
Underscore the "at worst" because no one's fate is completely sealed by nature or by nurture. Mere genius does not necessarily lead to success, whether the metric thereof is financial, academic, or fame-based. Witness Christopher Langan, arguably the world's smartest man, who nevertheless has not achieved great success. Gladwell and others suggest he was handicapped by being raised in poverty (and one doesn't know where his brain wiring came from). There are plenty of examples of people with modest brainpower who have done well simply through discipline, hard work, and positive attitude, and just as many examples of underachieving geniuses.
There's another trait that's missing here: Professionalism.
Real Veteran Unix Admins are true professionals who know how to function in a business environment without being arrogant or prickly. They are comfortable enough in their own skins and emotionally secure enough that they never need to engage in put-downs of others who don't rise to their level of technical acumen. They never play at being the high priests of the sanctum sanctorum of Unix administration which should not be desecrated by mere mortals. They are capable of doing their jobs without needing constant stroking by management or self-stroking by engaging in endless pissing contests and self-aggrandizement.
Unfortunately there is a small subset of Unix admins who are technically brilliant but emotionally insecure. They can do amazing things with systems but they are often difficult to integrate into a team or an organizational culture. They are high-maintenance employees, both blessing and curse to the companies they work for. With proper structure and coaching (and sometimes therapy) some of these can be developed to become true professionals. Some may be impervious to all efforts to help them mature and become more stable - they will have to be compartmentalized for the good of the organization or let go.
I will leave it to my gentle readers to decide which group the author of the article belongs in.
Interesting that /. would choose to put an HP logo in an article about crapware.
I think that "maybe" is the only possible answer to the question, and a lot depends on the relative qualifications and temperament of both of the programmers. A young programmer with hot new coding skills may be just what is needed. If the older programmer isn't able to code in the language needed for the technology needed, then it is incumbent upon him or her to gain the requisite skill.
I'm writing as an IT professional in my fifties, so I think I have some perspective here, but I'm not necessarily biased in favor of the older programmer. I have met plenty of older employees who developed a "corporate employee mentality," that is, they thought that the company paid them just enough to keep them from quitting, and they did just enough work to keep from getting fired.
In the case of this senior programmer, if he or she had been around long enough to garner significant experience, why was the salary range so low? It doesn't necessarily mean the programmer wasn't a good employee, but someone who gets the company culture and goals and wants to advance them becomes a valuable asset - compensation usually follows. The fact that a senior programmer was making anything near the range a new associate programmer would be targeted, then I question how valuable the senior coder was to the company. Note that I'm not concluding anything - there isn't enough information here to go into casuistics.
Another thing I see is that long-time corporate employees often expect to be trained at company expense. True, ongoing education and training are a perk companies use to attract and retain good talent, but it is possible for someone who's been around for a long time to get almost an entitlement mentality.
On the other hand, the old hand has a decided advantage if he really knows not just a programming language, but understands the business processes involved in the business segment the project supports, the procedures that implement the processes and the policies that govern them as well as, in the case of a new generation system for an existing line of business, the current systems that implement the processes. This kind of business knowledge is invaluable and it's going to take the new coder some time to get up to speed. If the new coder has some business acumen and training that works in his favor to an extent. Someone who is a whiz with the new coding language but who has lived in the geek bubble of the computer science department at college might not be the best candidate.
In any case it's not a slam dunk either way based on the information given in the article. Initiative, business knowledge, technical knowledge, temperament and experience all play roles. If I infer correctly that the senior programmer was earning in the low end of his range, then I'm inclined to think that management had good reasons for bringing in the new guy at a higher rate. I think that management should be proactive in building employees as company assets, however, and this smacks a bit of a passive-aggressive way to edge out the senior coder. If this is what management wants, they should say so directly and why. It's the decent thing to do.
Or I could be completely wrong - the manager involved might be some shallow, superficial, and insecure incompetent who is dazzled by youthful attractiveness and a facility with the latest buzzwords. Corporate middle management is replete with such people - they can't make the cut for senior management and they can't survive in small business where you pretty much have to produce the goods or you're out of business. Middle management in large companies is where most of these types end up. It's why Dilbert resonates so strongly with so many people.
Okay. I've had my say. Hope I wasn't unfair to either side of the argument.
So, let's see, they achieved their "Substantial Momentum in Q2" working on security problems in what section of the technosphere? Oh, they're a Microsoft partner. So whatever their report says they made most of their money as a security firm working on Microsoft systems? Follow the money.
...under the nom de plume "Pyrrhus".
Remember that the mere fact of being a Microsoft Partner does not make someone a Microsoft lackey. I own an IT company and we're a Microsoft Partner - this is an acknowledgment of the fact that almost all of our clients have significant deployments of Microsoft OS and application software, and that some of the line of business applications they use depend on Microsoft infrastructure.
Nevertheless, my company is an Open Source advocate, and we do all we can to encourage adoption of Linux and Open Source solutions where it's appropriate for our clients. We deploy websites using Joomla, and deploy a lot of apps that use the LAMP stack, and put an Untangle Internet gateway in our client sites.
To be sure, there are partners out there who practice pushing Microsoft to the exclusion of all others, but not everyone does that.
It's equally as true that there are Open Source zealots for whom there is no middle ground - Linux and Free Software is more of a religious commitment for them.
Most of us however live in the real world of reasonableness and prudence, trying to find the best fit for a client without regard to ideology. We see ourselves as Open Source advocates, even evangelists, but we also are cognizant that doing business in today's world means supporting clients who are still depended on Microsoft.
I don't have indepth math, but first glance is as follows:
7 grams of CO2 per search
* 200,000,000 searches per day
= 1400 metric tons of C02 generated by Google alone, each day.
Viscerally that seems a bit on the heavy side, but I don't have any actual figures on Google. Current world CO2 daily output is 82,200,000 metric tons, based on 30 billion tons per year ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/emissions.html )
This would mean Google alone is responsible for 0.17% (a bit less than two tenths of one percent) of total world CO2 output. That seems excessive. There are other issues:
Do we posit the amount of CO2 per search vs. if Google didn't exist at all or vs. Google unutilized but with all its infrastructure running idle?
I'm intrigued, but not convinced. The article is long on abstracts and generalizations and short on concrete and specific facts. Jury has to remain out on this one, IMHO.
May I suggest Think Python, which originated as a book written for middle schoolers.
Originally it was called How to Think Like A Computer Scientist: Learning in Python, written by one high school teacher for Java, and translated to Python by another teacher. A collaborative project resulted in the present volume, which is being published in hard copy by Cambridge University Press, but the linked page has a free downloadable PDF.
Written for kids and partly by kids, I think this volume might fit the bill. It's also free, just like Python itself.
Did I mention the book is free? Free?!
One of my client sites was clickjacked, and another had an attempted clickjacking. The connection is that the one that succeeded redirected users to a Russian site with scareware/malvertisement (AntiVirus Defense 2009). Same modus operandi - their scareware scanned my C: drive and found infected exe and dll files galore, a fact most curious on an Ubuntu Linux desktop.
The other attempted clickjacking was to a Chinese site, but I can't help but wonder if there's something more serious going on here. Some of these scareware sellers are paying to have script kiddies put iframe clickjacks on every index.* file in a web host they can compromise, which is more than just a civil matter.
Do they stop with just charging $39.95 from the victim's credit card, or keep on charging until they hit the limit or get an alert? And does the victim's machine get free from the scareware, or is it recruited into a botnet to send out more malvertisements?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Ironically, the degree requirement is often disconnected from any technical ability. I know plenty of people who have undergraduate degrees in liberal arts, English, biology or other disciplines who work in IT.
What you can do is summarize projects you've worked on - if you have no experience, try to get internships if you can, though those positions might be slim pickings in the downturn.
Another place to get real experience, albeit without concomitant compensation, is doing work for nonprofits. You can do some free community service, and you get a resume bullet and a glowing recommendation from the nonprofit. Plus you can get a tax receipt for your work. This helps you build technical credibility to offset the lack of a degree.
There are often good reasons to work for free - it's worthwhile to work for free in order to learn a valuable skill or to get experience in a technology or business practice. You may get hungry while you're doing it, but if that's what it takes to open the door, take it.
One of the many other routes in the door to a good sysadmin job is the dreaded helpdesk. It's grunt work, but if you get in the door and are sharp, it's pretty easy to rise above the pack and lobby for a sysadmin opening when it comes along. An alternative path out is to get into a business analyst slot rather than a sysadmin - if you are really good at VBA and Crystal Reports, you can parlay that into a career, in fact it may be more lucrative than doing sysadmin work.
Now, there is proof...
I don't know that you want to press this argument. Does this mean that hacking the email account of someone you don't like is justified if you find something incriminating? This misses the two larger issues.
I think the majority of folks on /. are fairly strongly in favor of a free Internet and the right to privacy.
Hacking into a private email account is not only criminal, it's evil, no matter whose email account it is. And when it's a highly prominent person who may end up in a position to influence technology policy, it's not only criminal to hack into their email, it's really unhelpful (I was going to say stupid, but I want to be kind).
Imagine if the hacked email account had belonged to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton. Would the response have been different? Time for a gut check. Liberty and justice for all, or for all except when we can get a little dirt on the folks we don't agree with?
I completely understand not wanting to be in public - I have the same concern. In my case running at night works out - the kids are in bed, and I can get out and pound down four miles in less than 40 minutes.
The sidewalks are almost completely deserted after nine o'clock, and I've never felt like I was being observed. It took a bit of gumption to go the first couple of times, but now it's part of my routine.
I strap on my MP3 with some good spoken word audio - books or tech talks usually - and my run is a very nice, quiet, private time for me. I have gotten to where I really like it. But what you're doing is far better than nothing. Keep up the calisthenics and weight training but add some aerobics like running, biking or swimming to your regimen. Your cardiovascular system will love it. It's not easy, but it's worth it.
Okay, some of them are obvious, but "feynman"?
...and sue anyone who doesn't come to their arcades. In fact, they should lobby Congress, the Japanese Parliament, the UN, and the United Federation of Planets to make using the Wii illegal. Isn't the lawsuit/regulatory route the default choice for industry segments whose business models have failed to change with the times?
I'm surprised that no one here is referring back to Peter Gutmann's paper on Vista. Yes, it contained some things that were subject to misunderstanding (that could have been construed as factual errors to sticklers) but the point of the paper was this: Microsoft engineered Vista primarily to benefit content producers, not the people who buy the OS. And if you will recall, their requirements for Vista certification mostly concerned arm-twisting on the part of Microsoft: Show that you support DRM in all of your hardware or you don't get Vista certification; Oh, and by the way, make sure that your hardware will disable itself in any OS that doesn't toe the DRM line.
Sure, in the case of Vista, the more egregious steps are aimed at HD content, but the lion's share of Vista technology was aimed at digital restrictions management, not end-user functionality. Which is one of the reasons why Vista has been less than a stellar success: Microsoft didn't engineer it for the people who buy it; they put most of the engineering into satisfying the corporate obsession with control. This ticked off all of the end users who had a clue. Sure, the OS has a large lemming constituency.
But Gutmann's paper made clear that Microsoft was unsatisfied with leveraging lock-in of simple computer operating systems. He may have gotten a few things wrong, but he clearly understood the main fact that their (Microsoft's) main motivation is the extension of their hegemony into the realm of content. They ignored older content, concentrating on HD stuff.
It's still an open question of whether this is merely the flailing of a dying dinosaur or not. It will take a few years to see. Dinosaurs survived for a long time after their extinction became inevitable. The real irony of Microsoft is that they, as a computer company of all things, haven't realized that we live in a postmodern, information-age culture. Microsoft is simply one more institution governed by modern, industrial-age assumptions.
In this period of cultural liminality and transition, there are plenty of institutions like Microsoft (and the RIAA and MPAA) who are bewildered by the facts of the new economy. The old economic formulas are based on scarcity of goods, and even according to them, price always approaches incremental cost. Digital content, however, is produced at an effective incremental cost of zero, and the flailing of the RIAA, MPAA, and companies like Microsoft reflects resistance not only to the new paradigm, but also to the prevailing economic rule that price ALWAYS approaches incremental cost. In an economy of abundance, different models must emerge, but media companies and would-be channel monopolies like Microsoft have not even shown the ability to apprehend, much less operate according to, the newly emerging formulas that govern an economy of abundance, and it is unlikely that they will read people like Eben Moglen, Larry Lessig, or Yochai Benkler in an effort to understand the emerging reality, since they aren't interested in understanding; they only view these thinkers as enemies.
But please don't miss the fact that the issue is larger than just the RIAA and the MPAA. The incremental cost of digital media is merely one of the first fields to be impacted by the emerging economic paradigm. It's already affecting publishing and the general field of knowledge and education. Look for industrial-age institutions across the entire economic and political spectrum to be just as resistant to change as the RIAA and MPAA are.
These institutions will fight to preserve their business model, just as the RIAA and MPAA are fighting to preserve theirs. The business models are dinosaurs, and are extinct already de facto, but it will take a while before the walnut-sized brain gets the word that the heart stopped beating some time ago.
Change will be disruptive, but what will drive it is not rage against the existing institutions. Though that will obviously play a role, the real driver will be the emergence of new institu
There are reasonable people on both sides of the question of god's existence. In this case, the issue is one of causality. Specifically, the "it's watchmakers all the way up" fails because it posits an infinite series of causes.
We exist right now at a point in the series of causation. But an infinite series cannot be traversed, so the infinite series of watchmakers cannot lead us to any present we are part of.
This doesn't connote necessarily the existence of god. It does mandate at some point a cause which is uncaused, non-contingent and necessarily existing as the foundation of existence, but there is no purely logical reason that says a higher order universe cannot have these attributes.
The idea that what we experience as the universe is a VR simulation really doesn't advance the question about ultimate being at all, it just moves it down (or up) one layer.
Ultimately, though, since all we know and experience is both caused and contingent (including the universe itself) there must be something uncaused and non-contingent behind it. Non-being cannot give rise to being, so self-creation is out as well. Again, this doesn't on purely logical grounds have to be god, and even if one suggests that god is the ground of being this sort of argumentation doesn't come anywhere near proving the existence of any particular god.
In my own case I am a theist, but I have reasonable friends who disbelieve on reasonable grounds (I also have both theistic and atheistic friends who are unreasonable - I hope I'm not falling into that camp by this post). Hope this helps a bit at least to clarify the implications of the concept of causality.This is a fairly obvious example of what has happened to the concept of "the customer" in the retail space. The old principle of serving the customer still applies, but the identification of the customer has changed. The customers of K-Mart Sears are no longer the people buying products in stores and use the Sears website; the new customer is the stockholder. The people who buy products and use the website are just commodities to be traded like anything else.
Installing spyware on website users? Why not, if the website users are just inventory to be controlled and traded.
This is true not only in retail, but in IT. Do you think the people who actually buy, say, operating systems, are the customers of the software companies that make them? Think again. Their customers are their stockholders too. The purchaser is just a commodity. Maybe companies which commoditize consumers need a wake-up call to remind them that consumers are still the real customers. A PR mess like this sends a bit of a reminder, but the only message that really hits home is one that impacts the EPS.
Legislation ought to be aimed toward introducing the concept of reasonability, and other areas of the legal corpus give us some sense.
Pharmaceutical patents extend only to 20 years, after which time bio-equivalent generics can be produced. In practice, this is usually 7-12 years, as pharma companies tend to apply for patents well before drugs are approved for public use.
For income taxes, the statute of limitations is seven years in most cases. For other areas of law, the statute of limitations is even lower. I'm not a lawyer, but I think that only murder has statutes that apply longer than copyright law.
Common sense dictates that there ought to be a much more reasonable limitation on intellectual property (especially considering that it's an arbitrary concept which is artificially created). I tend to agree that five years is plenty - look at the sort of content that is being contested by the MPAA and the RIAA: music and films. Both media are exceedingly ephemeral; they're old news in a year, and out of style fairly quickly. Let the studios make their money for five years, then open things up. Seven years tops. You are correct: 120 year copyrights can be described by a host of adjectives, but sane is not among them.
This development appears to be consistent and predictable. Look at Vista and its license agreement, and you see M$ trying to control not only the software layer but levying requirements on hardware makers, i.e. toe the line and show commitment to DRM in every layer of hardware or M$ won't certify your drivers, and this means NOT providing any open source drivers to the Linux community. Although Peter Gutmann's essay contained some inaccuracies, it detailed these steps. Why did M$ abandon technical functionality for the end user in favor of an OS that provides a bit of eye candy to users but a whole lot of technology that is aimed at protecting content provider monopoly? Why did they release the ultra-DRM portable platform, the Zune, about the same time? Why is M$ now meddling in the media content market, apparently trying to orchestrate some sort of movement in HD media? It has looked for some time like M$ sees the revenue stream Apple has through ITunes and thought it worthwhile to put a stake in the ground for developing a media market. Which, in typical M$ fashion, they want to control absolutely. Look for M$ to either acquire or announce a media provider that offers only protected WMA and ultra-DRMed MP3 formats to compete against ITunes. M$ sees that the OS and application space has limited legs. They appear to be making a move toward becoming a content provider. Pretty savvy on their part, but I think their jack-booted super-mega-ultra-DRM approach will not be well received. They're either way out in front on the cutting edge, or a dinosaur trying to put a cap on emerging mammals in the media marketplace. Time will tell.