I must h/t Matt Simons for bringing my attention to this act, which would significantly curtail the salaries of many IT professionals. His blog post asking for additional input can be found here:
> Why do you assume Americans are more deserving of Apple's manufacturing jobs than the Chinese?
Because the consumers of every nation on earth, deep-down, are superficially patriotic. We don't want to recognize that the global economy is post-nation state. We want to pretend that when we buy an American company's products it is, American. Just as if we decide to buy an Italian sports car we want it to be Italian. Companies prey on these emotional ties to our identities in all manner of ways. In the parent thread's example, Apple does that by labeling their products' packaging, "Designed by Apple in California."
I don't agree with the 'superficially patriotic' remark, at least in regards to Americans. I believe that after seeing the effect of all these manufacturing jobs being closed down, many would opt to pay a higher price knowing that it would save jobs.
I don't necessarily blame companies for these emotional ties. There was a time when those ties really meant something.
In this case "many" means a minority. The majority have voted with their dollars over the past several decades and overwhelmingly chosen products that are manufactured wherever is cheapest.
It really is only four decades and I meant for today's American consumer in retrospect. Today's consumer doesn't have a choice. It is rare to find a product that hasn't been outsourced for labor.
I have seen the light and been converted to the Church of SSD. The expense /is/ worth it. I routinely run Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 (running Windows Deployment Server to reimage computers at different physical locations) on my Macbook Pro via VMWare Fusion at all times (in addition to all the other random apps I have open on the Mac). I haven't noticed /any/ performance penalties day-in-day out. Compare this to my previous Macbook Pro from three years ago, which begged for mercy booting Windows XP. Sure, I have more RAM and an i7 now, but it was always disk thrashing that killed me.... that's not a problem any more.
Could enterprise software development become "fun" if WebOS fulfills it's potential? Funny to think of BeOS and BeIA becoming HP's NextStep. There's a lot riding on this at HP. I'm not familiar with their executive leadership, other than that Leo Apotheker comes from an enterprise computing background, but a good evaluation of where that leadership comes from will be important at divining what's ahead. Microsoft should be terrified. If anyone can rip enterprise customer's out of Microsoft's grip it's going to be HP.
HP certainly seems to be trying really hard to support developers. For example, get a $200 developer discount on an unlocked Pre 2. I'm sure they'll have something similar for the Palm Pre 3.
Now's a good time to speculate long-term on HP stock. If they do well with WebOS and spin it off to their other computing platforms they could become the "Apple" of enterprise computing. If they /really/ do well maybe people will want to take their work equipment home with them instead of wanting to take their Macs/iphones into work...
Thanks for the leads. I'm in the Washington, DC area so I'll be looking into ShmooCon. I had never heard of it. The other's are on my "too investigate" list, too.
The back-and-forth potshots that faculty members take at each other in the Chronicles comments are even more insightful than the original article. The Chronicle moderators had to go so far as to delete follow-up comments. That's... eye opening.
Yes, and did you notice that a few of them -- one a professor, another who claimed to have been a freelance copy editor for 21 years -- could not spell "plagiarism"?
Every time I read what comes out of Steve Ballmer's mouth I wonder if that guy has ever touched a computer. Microsoft's employees need to acquire some parrots and eye patches. It's mutiny time.
It's not that non-university students are immoral or stupid. The article says nothing of the sort. Plagiarism is a basic lesson of university students on day one. You're being too sensitive.
The unsaid connection the author is making is that universities have honor codes that get drilled into you from freshman year. Those honor codes have very specific definitions of plagiarism, usually with examples. Only an idiot, lazy, or jackoff university student would plagiarize word-for-word thinking that a font change is good enough. That makes the university student 100x "stupid-er" than a non-university student that figured out what plagiarism is through intuition. :)
Chrome, so far, is the only browser I can keep open with a bazillion tabs for days, weeks, MONTHS without seeing my system take a slow, deadly, performance hit. I'm sorry I didn't start using it sooner.
Very true. Indeed, I switched from Firefox to Chrome after Firefox hanged yet again with N tabs open, and I just couldn't figure which one it was and simply close that one. On chrome this never happened, and I never had to restart the browser.
http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2011/11/usa-computer...