It won't do anything because Android isn't a tablet OS; it was always meant for the phone. Chrome OS is what Google will be pushing for netbooks and tablets, though we haven't heard much about what's going on there...
Well, not sure if Wal-Mart is any different from K-Mart in compensating their employees, but when I worked there five years ago, I made maybe a dollar or two above minimum wage (a LOT of work for those 7 bucks an hour!). Perhaps things have changed over the years? Is Wal-Mart unionized?
Well, the thing to remember is that physical access = game over. Without exploits or clearly open holes (i.e. jailbreakers opening SSH and forgetting to change the root password), it's pretty hard to gain access to an iPhone or Android device by default. Unless the phone is encrypted (very unlikely), most of the juicy bits are very easy to get and extract after physical possession (e.g. one can still browse the flash RAM on an iPhone even if it has a PIN lock, which is one of the reasons why it's not very helpful).
I'm not a security expert, but I think it's much easier to gain access to sensitive information by way of social engineering or dictionary attacks (everyone hates passwords or being too paranoid about stuff).
Email servers should be blocking emails with.EXE files before they even get anywhere close to the user's inbox. I guess this will expose systems that need a bit of work...
One of the featured examples of the article focuses around a "software engineer" that was laid off after her work was outsourced. I'm not a developer, but aren't software engineers the folks that architect the projects that developers from outside the company will put together? Is the economy recovering so slowly that companies are outsourcing their design arms in hopes of saving some cash? That doesn't sound right.
Nonetheless, given the situation at my employer and experiences I've heard from friends, I agree with the article. I am one of a handful of straight-from-college folks in our department because it seems that we hasn't done any significant college recruiting for the last two years. Additionally, we've been getting lots of consultants lately; not many full-timers.
Despite that, the situation in the tech world is leaps and bounds better than what's going on in, say, the marketing, finance or boutique industries. While almost all of my peers in Electrical/Computer Engineering had no issues finding jobs after graduation (many of us were hired before we even walked down the aisle), all of those markets are overcapacity at the moment; too bad lots of graduating seniors made that their choice of study. Mechanical and Civil Engineering graduates have it hard too, which is a shame given how tough both of those courses are...
Yeah, remember when people used to print maps from MapQuest to each other because in-car GPS modules were expensive and a bit "beta?"
Now, Garmin's newest GPS doubles as an Android phone, the iPad (still waiting for an Android tablet) is the biggest GPS module available and one can find their way from practically anywhere with internet access just by knowing the destination.
Paper maps aren't dead, but they are needed much less nowadays.
Well, the example given is a bad one for starters. It's pretty much universally accepted that devices such as HRM's (heart rate monitors) and speedometers help improve and centralize training achievements. Nike+ made it really easy for runners to do that without extra equipment, provided that they had an iPod with a capable receiver. I wouldn't think that runners would be looking forward to fake Lance congratulating them as much as shaving off 2 minutes from a 10K and knowing how they achieved that quantitatively.
Let's not forget the fact that sensationalism always sells. Facts are always convenient to put aside; facts like:
Televisions and computers having always been highly desirable, but prohibitively expensive for most middle-class families up until the downsizing of electronics in the late 60s-70s (families crowded around the radio and visited movie theaters for the same content, you know)
The effects of the Internet on information sharing and demand, which, amongst other factors, created the hustling and bustling modern-day workforce and made homemade cooking much harder to do
The proliferation of women in the workforce, which left homes without housewives and made outside food super attractive
Now, I'm not saying that these changes EXCUSE the detrimental effects they had on other areas of society (obesity and mass weight gain being one of them). I'm just saying that the real problem is much, much bigger and more complex than people watching more TV and eating McD's. It's not so much about energy in > energy out, though that's the basis for why obesity happens; it's about why that statement is true in the first place.
Quite a few people I'm close to that use Facebook use TERRIBLE passwords that can be guessed easily through brute-force methods. (Some use 'password' as password...) Without some way of FORCING users to use stronger passwords (like !passw0rd!; much better, though still not ideal), this will keep happening.
It's a pretty big showstopper for me, since it makes using it at work extremely difficult to do. I do wish it had its own proxy engine like Firefox does.
I forgot to note that final exams are, essentially, somewhat unrealistic given the fact that the "tests" outside of schooling are almost never examinations and usually tend to have much more dire outcomes.
It's common in upper-level classes for professors to give informal exams based on projects, presentations, papers, etc. The structured, proctored and timed three-hour exam referred to here is mostly for the beginning classes, largely because (a) administrative pressures demand it, probably considering the amount of attention they get and, thus, the amount of weight they place in accreditation and outside perception, (b) freshman-level classes usually have an extremely high number of students and (c) they teach the core fundamentals, which can be tested down to a science (no pun intended).
Examples:
A professor of a Black Urban Studies course I took at NYU (great class!) based the entire grade on one 15-page paper.
Over 30% of my last undergraduate semester grade was based on a senior design project. Not exactly a typical final exam, though it is one of sorts...
One of the most interesting courses I took, a Intro to Theater course (at an engineering school!) made the final exam a play (fun!)
Have you seen how buggy vendor-firmware is these days?
I, fortunately, have the Nexus One and get firmware supplied from Google. Their versions are pretty tight; the only bug I noticed was with large SD transfers rebooting the phone, but that went away after I got a new device, so it may have possibly been a hardware issue as well.
While I appreciate all of the work Steve and his partners (Team Douche:p) have put into making a very viable alternative to vendor-supplied firmware (especially on more restricted devices), it hasn't been reliable enough to make me comfortable with it. They always seem to have battery issues, and little bugs come up here and there that make me trust it less. On top of that, unless someone can point out the contrary, I have to unlock my bootloader to flash it, which voids my warranty. (There is no known way to relock it, and HTC made their bootloader show very obviously whether it's locked or not.)
Then again, the N1 is the least-restricted Android phone that's sort-of available at the moment and gets the latest updates from Google herself, so we have it easier.:)
I don't hike, but common sense tells me that if you're hiking or camping deep into isolated territory and are depending on GPS that depends on cell towers (i.e. most cellular GPS technology), you probably haven't done your homework and are highly likely to get into trouble.
The freedom is unparalled (most of the time), the environmental perks are astounding and the work can get really interesting, really quickly. Only two little issues with them: they don't pay that well in the short-term (most of the time), and they are usually really, really risky. Some places are like a rollercoaster; riding high one minute, then close to bankruptcy in the next. The stability isn't incredibly better at corporations or mature companies, but the pay is far more stable (and higher) and the workload is more predictable.
It doesn't help that working at Google and the like is like working at a startup, except with more money, influence and free stuff. At least that's what I heard, anyway.
An innovative product is something that is new and different. It is something that people didn't think about before but now go "Oooo, I see a use for that." For example the microwave was an innovative product. It cooked food in a completely different way, using a different technology.
Innovation is NOT invention! Innovations don't have to be new, though they do have to be different than the status quo.
I hope you realize that the examples you used for defining innovations were the same reactions tons of people had when the iPhone was released, right? Smartphones were out there, but none of them were "smart" about making the entire experience flow. All of the smartphones I used prior to the iPhone (and I used a lot) had key usability and technical issues in one way or another.
Let me put it this way. My father was always excited about using smartphones (or at least cool phones), but has always been let down by them. Windows Mobile was a complete fail for him (T-Mobile Dash) and the Blackberry he had was a bit better, but not up to his liking. When I bought him the iPhone two years ago, he never asked me for another phone again (except for new iPhones!). When I got one for my mom, who just wanted a phone that works, she learned it in a snap. Not so for the other "smart" phones she used.
If those examples aren't clear enough, then why are so many companies trying to flat out emulate (or migrate) the iPhone experience onto their devices? Yeah, totally not innovative at all.
MIT OpenCourseWare has, almost undoubtedly, the best and strongest educational platform available. The course material, syllabi and problem sets are not only usually provided by leaders in their respective fields (e.g. the Linear Algebra course is 'taught' by the person that wrote the Linear Algebra text I was using at the time...and I was taking it for credit at Courant), but are often much more challenging than comparable material from universities (unless, of course, you go to MIT). Gates uses this as a driver for his argument, so we already knew that.
Let's see a job-seeking 'senior' of OCW get through the HR filters when it comes time to make that cash.
Most [HR departments of] companies and corporations still place strict emphasis on diploma and GPA average. Whether or not that's a quantifiable resource to evaluate candidates with is another argument entirely, but a diploma is much more tangible than candidates who "learned" from OCW and the like. Additionally, college isn't just about the paper and the commencement rites; there's a lot to learn from being a proper college student, like networking, time management (REALLY important) and social skills. You don't necessarily even have to live on campus to enjoy those benefits, though it usually helps to do so (if off-campus housing is actually priced at human rates, of course; room and board rates are insane these days).I can't emphasize the time management component enough; unless one has the will of an ox, it's just way too easy to shrug off a class that won't affect your GPA. Not so for the capstone project that's due two months before graduation that determines whether one will even graduate or not.
What I do hope to see is a proliferation of digital text books that cost less and can be updated more often. We already have iPads and will soon have Android tablets that can hold a bookbag's worth of textbooks at a fraction of the weight and cost. Most popular textbooks can already be retrieved through simple means (Google especially) for nothing. I hope the combination of those two leads to a mass shift similar to that which occurred in the music industry where textbooks don't need to be factored in the cost of one's education.
The TouchDown collaboration suite for Android makes it much more capable as a business device. It allows you to have most of the usual features on Blackberry OS with less security (probably doesn't comply with government standards, etc).
Well, considering that many will receive this phone from their company, they probably won't use those features since they'll be blocked by policy (damn near impossible to circumvent...and not worth losing a job over anyway). I think they still make business users a priority (whatever they do, they don't mess with email and such), while trying to appease the general crowd at the same time (think of it like Windows use in the home; hard to reason why so many people use it, until one realizes that many people have to use it all day at work).
I had the Bold 9700 for a few weeks and was just as unimpressed as I was when RIM released the 8800. The keyboard felt compressed and the trackball was a bit annoying. I really like the clickwheel and feel that even to this day, the OS was designed around it. Blackberry devices are great for business functions, but doing anything else is better on an Android device or on the iPhone.
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It won't do anything because Android isn't a tablet OS; it was always meant for the phone. Chrome OS is what Google will be pushing for netbooks and tablets, though we haven't heard much about what's going on there...
Well, not sure if Wal-Mart is any different from K-Mart in compensating their employees, but when I worked there five years ago, I made maybe a dollar or two above minimum wage (a LOT of work for those 7 bucks an hour!). Perhaps things have changed over the years? Is Wal-Mart unionized?
Well, the thing to remember is that physical access = game over. Without exploits or clearly open holes (i.e. jailbreakers opening SSH and forgetting to change the root password), it's pretty hard to gain access to an iPhone or Android device by default. Unless the phone is encrypted (very unlikely), most of the juicy bits are very easy to get and extract after physical possession (e.g. one can still browse the flash RAM on an iPhone even if it has a PIN lock, which is one of the reasons why it's not very helpful).
I'm not a security expert, but I think it's much easier to gain access to sensitive information by way of social engineering or dictionary attacks (everyone hates passwords or being too paranoid about stuff).
The reason why it's so slow for some people is because it might still be CPU-bound. It's not using OpenGL on OS X yet, for instance.
More information here.
Yeah, you're right. I got a notification about this at work today as well, though we weren't affected by it. Sorry about the misinformation!
Only Exchange 2007 and above have that nifty AJAX-based webmail client. OWA on Exchange 2003 is way different and pretty terrible in comparison.
Email servers should be blocking emails with .EXE files before they even get anywhere close to the user's inbox. I guess this will expose systems that need a bit of work...
I've seen 'em too. They all suck.
Don't believe me? Read this, this and this. Enjoy.
Which is why networking is still the best way to get jobs. Skips most of that HR mess.
One of the featured examples of the article focuses around a "software engineer" that was laid off after her work was outsourced. I'm not a developer, but aren't software engineers the folks that architect the projects that developers from outside the company will put together? Is the economy recovering so slowly that companies are outsourcing their design arms in hopes of saving some cash? That doesn't sound right.
Nonetheless, given the situation at my employer and experiences I've heard from friends, I agree with the article. I am one of a handful of straight-from-college folks in our department because it seems that we hasn't done any significant college recruiting for the last two years. Additionally, we've been getting lots of consultants lately; not many full-timers.
Despite that, the situation in the tech world is leaps and bounds better than what's going on in, say, the marketing, finance or boutique industries. While almost all of my peers in Electrical/Computer Engineering had no issues finding jobs after graduation (many of us were hired before we even walked down the aisle), all of those markets are overcapacity at the moment; too bad lots of graduating seniors made that their choice of study. Mechanical and Civil Engineering graduates have it hard too, which is a shame given how tough both of those courses are...
Yeah, remember when people used to print maps from MapQuest to each other because in-car GPS modules were expensive and a bit "beta?"
Now, Garmin's newest GPS doubles as an Android phone, the iPad (still waiting for an Android tablet) is the biggest GPS module available and one can find their way from practically anywhere with internet access just by knowing the destination.
Paper maps aren't dead, but they are needed much less nowadays.
Well, the example given is a bad one for starters. It's pretty much universally accepted that devices such as HRM's (heart rate monitors) and speedometers help improve and centralize training achievements. Nike+ made it really easy for runners to do that without extra equipment, provided that they had an iPod with a capable receiver. I wouldn't think that runners would be looking forward to fake Lance congratulating them as much as shaving off 2 minutes from a 10K and knowing how they achieved that quantitatively.
Now, I'm not saying that these changes EXCUSE the detrimental effects they had on other areas of society (obesity and mass weight gain being one of them). I'm just saying that the real problem is much, much bigger and more complex than people watching more TV and eating McD's. It's not so much about energy in > energy out, though that's the basis for why obesity happens; it's about why that statement is true in the first place.
Basically, the "good" old days are gone.
Quite a few people I'm close to that use Facebook use TERRIBLE passwords that can be guessed easily through brute-force methods. (Some use 'password' as password...) Without some way of FORCING users to use stronger passwords (like !passw0rd!; much better, though still not ideal), this will keep happening.
It's a pretty big showstopper for me, since it makes using it at work extremely difficult to do. I do wish it had its own proxy engine like Firefox does.
I forgot to note that final exams are, essentially, somewhat unrealistic given the fact that the "tests" outside of schooling are almost never examinations and usually tend to have much more dire outcomes.
Examples:
Have you seen how buggy vendor-firmware is these days?
I, fortunately, have the Nexus One and get firmware supplied from Google. Their versions are pretty tight; the only bug I noticed was with large SD transfers rebooting the phone, but that went away after I got a new device, so it may have possibly been a hardware issue as well.
:p) have put into making a very viable alternative to vendor-supplied firmware (especially on more restricted devices), it hasn't been reliable enough to make me comfortable with it. They always seem to have battery issues, and little bugs come up here and there that make me trust it less. On top of that, unless someone can point out the contrary, I have to unlock my bootloader to flash it, which voids my warranty. (There is no known way to relock it, and HTC made their bootloader show very obviously whether it's locked or not.)
:)
While I appreciate all of the work Steve and his partners (Team Douche
Then again, the N1 is the least-restricted Android phone that's sort-of available at the moment and gets the latest updates from Google herself, so we have it easier.
I don't hike, but common sense tells me that if you're hiking or camping deep into isolated territory and are depending on GPS that depends on cell towers (i.e. most cellular GPS technology), you probably haven't done your homework and are highly likely to get into trouble.
Stupid people do stupid things.
The freedom is unparalled (most of the time), the environmental perks are astounding and the work can get really interesting, really quickly. Only two little issues with them: they don't pay that well in the short-term (most of the time), and they are usually really, really risky. Some places are like a rollercoaster; riding high one minute, then close to bankruptcy in the next. The stability isn't incredibly better at corporations or mature companies, but the pay is far more stable (and higher) and the workload is more predictable.
It doesn't help that working at Google and the like is like working at a startup, except with more money, influence and free stuff. At least that's what I heard, anyway.
An innovative product is something that is new and different. It is something that people didn't think about before but now go "Oooo, I see a use for that." For example the microwave was an innovative product. It cooked food in a completely different way, using a different technology.
Innovation is NOT invention! Innovations don't have to be new, though they do have to be different than the status quo.
I hope you realize that the examples you used for defining innovations were the same reactions tons of people had when the iPhone was released, right? Smartphones were out there, but none of them were "smart" about making the entire experience flow. All of the smartphones I used prior to the iPhone (and I used a lot) had key usability and technical issues in one way or another.
Let me put it this way. My father was always excited about using smartphones (or at least cool phones), but has always been let down by them. Windows Mobile was a complete fail for him (T-Mobile Dash) and the Blackberry he had was a bit better, but not up to his liking. When I bought him the iPhone two years ago, he never asked me for another phone again (except for new iPhones!). When I got one for my mom, who just wanted a phone that works, she learned it in a snap. Not so for the other "smart" phones she used.
If those examples aren't clear enough, then why are so many companies trying to flat out emulate (or migrate) the iPhone experience onto their devices? Yeah, totally not innovative at all.
And not get a $10/hour job doing IT either. (HINT: Most respectable places pay WAY more than that.)
MIT OpenCourseWare has, almost undoubtedly, the best and strongest educational platform available. The course material, syllabi and problem sets are not only usually provided by leaders in their respective fields (e.g. the Linear Algebra course is 'taught' by the person that wrote the Linear Algebra text I was using at the time...and I was taking it for credit at Courant), but are often much more challenging than comparable material from universities (unless, of course, you go to MIT). Gates uses this as a driver for his argument, so we already knew that.
Let's see a job-seeking 'senior' of OCW get through the HR filters when it comes time to make that cash.
Most [HR departments of] companies and corporations still place strict emphasis on diploma and GPA average. Whether or not that's a quantifiable resource to evaluate candidates with is another argument entirely, but a diploma is much more tangible than candidates who "learned" from OCW and the like. Additionally, college isn't just about the paper and the commencement rites; there's a lot to learn from being a proper college student, like networking, time management (REALLY important) and social skills. You don't necessarily even have to live on campus to enjoy those benefits, though it usually helps to do so (if off-campus housing is actually priced at human rates, of course; room and board rates are insane these days).I can't emphasize the time management component enough; unless one has the will of an ox, it's just way too easy to shrug off a class that won't affect your GPA. Not so for the capstone project that's due two months before graduation that determines whether one will even graduate or not.
What I do hope to see is a proliferation of digital text books that cost less and can be updated more often. We already have iPads and will soon have Android tablets that can hold a bookbag's worth of textbooks at a fraction of the weight and cost. Most popular textbooks can already be retrieved through simple means (Google especially) for nothing. I hope the combination of those two leads to a mass shift similar to that which occurred in the music industry where textbooks don't need to be factored in the cost of one's education.
The TouchDown collaboration suite for Android makes it much more capable as a business device. It allows you to have most of the usual features on Blackberry OS with less security (probably doesn't comply with government standards, etc).
Well, considering that many will receive this phone from their company, they probably won't use those features since they'll be blocked by policy (damn near impossible to circumvent...and not worth losing a job over anyway). I think they still make business users a priority (whatever they do, they don't mess with email and such), while trying to appease the general crowd at the same time (think of it like Windows use in the home; hard to reason why so many people use it, until one realizes that many people have to use it all day at work).
I had the Bold 9700 for a few weeks and was just as unimpressed as I was when RIM released the 8800. The keyboard felt compressed and the trackball was a bit annoying. I really like the clickwheel and feel that even to this day, the OS was designed around it. Blackberry devices are great for business functions, but doing anything else is better on an Android device or on the iPhone.