The unusually huge volatility (large price movements) in many financial markets essentially means that nobody is certain of the future (providing you believe in 'the wisdom of markets', which despite Gladwellian overtones, is not necessarily a bad idea).
To my knowledge, nobody out there has anything approaching a realistic model of the current economy, either. It has countless variables that interact in countless ways, and producing results that have never been seen before.
Talking heads/pundits are for entertainment value only (depending on your definition of entertainment).
The only way to have confidence in a prediction for the future, at the moment, is by failing to understand the uncertainty of the situation.
Ignore all the people giving advice along the lines of 'suck it up, work is not supposed to be fun'. That is the talk of people who hate the idea of anyone having a better life than them.
You need to map your way out of this situation - demotivation (regardless of the cause) is bad for you and your employer. Persisting with it is unprofessional. If you try and 'suck it up' you will travel the path to burnout and damage to your health and career.
Try and identify the cause before you take the appropriate action - it could be boring/unsuitable work, a medical problem like depression or even something like anemia, burnout, poor diet/exercise, or a lack of fulfilment from other areas of your life.
I'd rather code web-apps than Win-API apps. I'd rather code OSX apps than web apps. But mostly, I'd rather live in a tent than become a multi platform installer/GUI porting expert. There are enough more interesting (or less painful) jobs around for the people who are good enough to do a good job of that. But you might be able to pick up a former banking coder now, and those guys are mostly pre-demoralized :)
That article is a little garbled. What it seems to be saying is that Apple is going to CNC machine MacBook cases from a solid block instead of stamping (or maybe even hydroforming) them. This seems like an incomplete part of the story, since it would be near-impossible to CNC machine aluminum to the very thin dimensions they currently have with their stamped cases. It would also be very difficult to machine a block with the dimensions of a MacBook so that the innards are hollow, reducing the number of seams and fasteners. A great deal of scrap would be produced in the form of aluminum chips, which do not recycle well because the high surface area means there is a lot of aluminum oxide to deal with.
Water jets and laser cutters are in common usage and one or other has probably been used to cut the blanks or trim the finished case parts since the titanium powerbook. They are also excellent for parts like the bezel on the front of the MBP screen. They are not generally used to carve 3D shapes - that is done by a CNC mill, which resembles a big drill bit that can move in three dimensions if you haven't seen one. To stamp a MBP case would take seconds - CNC machining one from solid might keep a 7-figure machine occupied for several minutes. Water jets and lasers generally blow a hole right through whatever they are pointed at, limiting their usage to cutting flat sheets or trimming the edges from stamped parts.
If this article is true, I think we are more likely to see more elaborate internal bracing or complex case designs from Apple. The innards of a MBP are fairly prosaic and complex machining could be used to improve airflow and allow components to be packed closer together. Aluminum could also be strategically placed in more complex shapes to help conduct heat out of the case. But when you manufacture parts by the million, casting the parts then finish-machining them may be more efficient, since the need to tie up expensive machines is reduced. Perhaps this is a strategy to get out of the 'just like every other laptop but with OSX' trap and maintain their competitive advantage in 'design' now that their competitors are starting to lift their game.
Also, aircraft-grade aluminum doesn't really mean anything. There are many different grades with different purposes, many of which are in common use in all kinds of relatively mundane applications. No doubt the current MacBook Pros are made from 'aircraft grade aluminum', but coke cans probably are too.
It sounds like some juicy info has unfortunately been filtered through one or two levels of people who aren't familiar with machine tool jargon. It would be very interesting to hear more details.
If you want to play with these machines yourself, check out emachineshop.com - a cool startup if ever there was one.
That's interesting about the relative recycling value of chips vs. blocks. Is it possible to keep the chips covered in coolant to prevent oxidation if it is known that the aluminum is going to be remelted?
I had a look and found this: http://www.ars-inc.com/ROI.htm
Still, buying expensive aluminum billets and then turning ~99% of the material into chips as would happen with a case design similar to the current MBP wouldn't be very efficient.
Perhaps they are moving to case designs that are a combination of CNC machined parts and stamped pieces? I'm sure Apple's design team is a lot more imaginative than me. There are some CNC-looking parts in the current MBP like the bracket that fixes the HD in place.
But let's face facts. Steve will not rest until he is selling Cube shaped computers again. :)
I don't understand why Apple gets a free ride for manufacturing weapons components (via their acquisition of PA Semi) and having a CEO that owns a large chunk of Disney, which is barely more than a swear word among the same people who appreciate their products on a technical level.
The iPhone SDK issues are merely disappointing in comparison. You don't see two year old blog posts from the same group of people flaming Apple for not providing a wireless device of any kind for them to develop on, which is surely a bigger injustice by their logic. Where were these people when I wanted some apps for my RAZR?
I think the Venn diagram of people who are affected by Apple's iPhone development policies, and the group of people who complain about them on the internet has a very small intersection, and if you add the group of people who can actually code, you could probably buy the lot of them a round of drinks for twenty bucks.
Personally, as a veteran of the war of mendacity against common sense that is SOAP, I support anything that gets Dave Winer upset.
How is Disney a swear word? It churns out a lot of popular crap and it has Pixar making probably the best movies out there now. Steve Jobs made it company policy not to release "direct-to-DVD sequels". Remember that? Without that, Disney quality jumped a LOT (which, I know, just says how awful they HAD been). Meanwhile, they've reinstated their 2D animation department, which is BIG fun news and which might bring back the good old Disney.
Why should we criticize them for making weapons components or for owning Disney? That has nothing to do with their products.
Disney is typically cited as a major force behind the never-ending extension of copyright (the famous 'keep mickey out of the public domain' strategy). Disney has also put considerable resources into lobbying for ever-more-oppressive legal measures such as mandatory DRM hardware in computers. They are no friend of the typical hacker. Steve Jobs, as a major shareholder and board member, could influence this if he so chose. Apple also chose to continue its weapons-grade product lines when it purchased PA Semi. Maybe they have a contract they can't get out of, but they may well have had the choice to shut down or spin off those products.
You can agree or not with those arguments, I'm not advocating for or against them. They don't affect my purchasing decisions (the best tool for the job in my current circumstances is a MacBook Pro so that's what I have). I make my living working for banks that no doubt finance far worse things. If Disney returns to form animation-wise I'll reward them with movie ticket purchases. It just seems to me that all the people posting "Apple is finally evil" linkbait nonsense could choose meatier targets than mistakes in developer relations, and the fact they choose not to means they're not even any good at being wrong.
It's crappy linkbait blog post pollution that irritates me, not anything that Apple's doing.
"Maybe they have a contract they can't get out of"
It really does pay to inform yourself before ranting. Worst case, you spent some time but your argument becomes more clear. Best case, you prevent yourself saying something uninformed and untrue.
In this case, yes, Apple tried to close the military product line, and the US military strongly insisted that PA Semi continue producing their existing military products.
Oh sure, I understand that. It is a complex issue that is a great example of the tension between philosophical or moral ideals and the more atavistic parts of human nature. I feel it would be hypocritical for me to say I am against it, since I benefit from the security and prosperity (and technological development) that military developments provide (and I'm writing this on a Mac). It's hard to fly on an airliner that wasn't built by an arms manufacturer too, and there are plenty of other examples.
What I mean is - you would think that the kind of people who write shrill blog posts about the iPhone SDK would be at least as incensed by these two points, and it's interesting that they have not emerged as anti-Apple memes in general, regardless of their validity.
I'd have expected to see more 'OMG steve jobs makes the brains for cruise missiles and steals our culture with copyright extensions' stuff around. Surely those caused Apple to become 'finally evil' to these people?
Linux: Seg-fault in the gcc toolchain. After casting about for several days, we couldn't even find someone willing to take our money to fix it. Digging into the code (ld), it's so cryptic it may as well be written in undocumented assembler. Responses from mailing lists and forums: "Go back to Windows" "Restructure your project to avoid that problem" "Why are you complaining, fix it yourself, it's open source" etc. We couldn't submit a test case, because it would have required making public a lot of code containing trade secrets.
Solaris: Seg-fault in the Solaris compiler toolchain. We called Sun, and were talking directly to dev tools engineers within minutes. They put the case on 24 hour support and had a patch for us to test a day later. We could submit a reproducible case because Sun accepted the code under NDA.
Not the kind of thing that shows up in feature bullet point comparisons, but when you have 30 developers held up on one side and the clients need the code to calculate their bid for an eleven-figure project (as in this case), it makes a difference.
In other words, Sun is at a disadvantage, since one of their main selling points requires an understanding of IT risks that most people, unfortunately, do not have. IT guys may think linux is 'cheaper' but they don't have their end-users' acute desire to minimise the already-remote chances of some random problem costing them millions in commission. Edit - it is also an unfortunate reality that being able to pin the problem on Sun (or Microsoft, etc) can save your career in a situation like this. There's no-one to blame if you are using open source and it goes wrong. The buck stops with you not just for your code, but for the code of any free tools you are using. I wish that wasn't how it worked, but there it is.
Plus, if you stay 'on piste' doing stuff that has been proven to work (you could hardly argue against Linux + apache for example), you have a relatively small chance of stepping on these engineering landmines.
If you pay for support, you get support. I doubt that there would have been much difference in your experience if you were paying for a support contract with one of the larger Linux distributors, like Redhat or Novell. Linux doesn't mean you're stuck without vendor support, although that's a common misconception.
I don't know how Sun's support compares to the various commercial distros, but comparing an unsupported Linux install to a supported Solaris install isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.
What would be interesting however, would be a nice comparison of a supported Linux with a supported Solaris.
Then again, when you've paid for Linux support, do what is price difference between it and Solaris then? Whit is the price difference between a supported Solaris install and a supported Red-Hat install? Is Red-Hat significantly cheaper? Does it's less restrictive licensing bring about an advantage? Does it have features that compare with Solaris?
In addition to Red-Hat, Novell and supported Ubuntu are also worth talking about. Ubuntu may be free, but support licenses sure aren't.
You could also then compare supported Linux distros to unsupported Linux distros, but that's a whole other box of worms.
Indeed, you can buy Linux support from Red Hat and other companies. But this rings hollow - they do not provide the level of support that Sun or Microsoft does - try getting them or anyone else to fix an obscure bug in the GNU linker, especially if you're not using their distro (even if you want to pay). If you think you're going to convince the likes of prickly GNU toolchain developers to prioritise the development or release of a patch your company depends on, guess again.
And those support contracts cost money, just like Sun/MS support contracts. And as soon as you start relying on software that isn't in their distro, you rapidly run into uncharted territory. The Linux meme of 'you can get support', is, I think, promoted mostly by people who haven't worked on critical IT systems, or have done so without understanding their responsibility.
That's not to say Sun's engineering is better than OSS (after all, we got their compiler to segfault as well as gcc, and my BSD/Apache shared hosting has had better uptime than my landline and TV for the last few years, and I'm sure many people want to set fire to the source code for NFS). Linux and other OSS provide the bulk of features that most people use. And you're probably better off with an unsupported apache server than some of the hideous commercial webservers that used to be around.
The bottom line is Sun charges a lot of money to mitigate somewhat nebulous risks that are hard to understand and communicate, and their OS has no killer features. They have also mastered the art of alienating potential enthusiasts. All of which put them on shaky ground. It is a shame, because platform diversity is one of the best defences of the internet as a whole.
(If you have access to dtrace, learn it. Understanding what it does and being able to use it will make you a better and probably richer developer).
As I said, I have no clue on how Redhat's paid support compares to Sun's, although I know they hire lots of developers working on things throughout the entire stack, so I'm assuming that if you paid enough they'd set one of their developers on your problem. I'm not qualified to judge how helpful they are though.
Interestingly, I seem to have the entire opposite experience with unpaid support. If I asked nicely, I quickly got help about where to dig into the software and what to look for when fixing stuff. The programmers on the projects were quick to respond with requests for more information and suggested fixes, and often the problem was solved within a day or so. All I did was poke them on IRC.
There is no such thing as a conservative banking job at these companies. All of these firms have strongly cyclical business, resulting in aggressive hiring and regular layoffs, and think nothing of canning an entire department if they don't need it any more. Also, at higher levels, the odds of being sacked out of the blue for political reasons increase greatly (e.g. new VP arrives, fires the next tier of management and brings his friends from his last company).
Also, if you work in IT you risk being made the scapegoat for some failure outside your control (note the rating agencies trying to blame the subprime crisis on bugs in their ratings code). And if you do get canned, it's merciless - I've seen it happen to people on holiday, people who have just signed mortgages, and so on. These people are escorted from the building by security and then forgotten.
You also have to contend with the risk of burnout, one of the reasons why there are relatively few employees above the age of 30.
You have to do exceptionally well to receive the grand salaries and bonuses, as these are heavily skewed towards the minority of top-ranked employees. Plus, for every 'master of the universe' there are 10 people in compliance, legal, audit, helpdesk, facilities, hr, IT, back office, etc slaving away.
Going into wall st is an aggressive career choice.
I have to say, I was partly inspired to attend art school (and study painting) by 'Hackers and Painters'. After all, it's an O'Reilly book.
I am an archetypal hacker personality even if my achievements are modest. Computer architecture is as natural to me as breathing, whereas I could barely draw a crude stick figure. I realise MBTI has limitations but I am solidly in the realm of INTP/INTJ.
Anecdotes are not data, but let me tell you - by any measure of personality types I have ever seen, hackers and painters are as close to different species as you can get that can still produce offspring. 'Painters' thought processes and modes of creativity are so alien to those of a 'hacker' that I have no idea how the world does not descend into chaos with so many of those types populating it. I say this after spending many endless days in the company of 'painters' (especially if you include the tutors, many of whom had painting careers).
In fact the experience was shaking enough to make me reconsider my once strongly-held belief in universal suffrage. I gave it a year of full time effort and then threw in the towel. Of course, I am assuming that 'painting students' don't change dramatically by the time they become 'painters'.
Also, regarding the marvellous statement about spending all day with women who aren't wearing any pants - I'll leave what that en'tails' every 28 days up to you to figure out - if that doesn't get through to you then let's just say the novelty wears off.
Paul, if you are reading this, your thesis is bollocks. Thanks for nothing.
Don't judge painters by art students. They're quite different groups. The link between art students and painters is nothing like the one between, say, medical students and doctors. Most art students (painting majors especially) don't end up as artists, and quite a lot of artists spent little or no time in art school. IIRC, Picasso went for one semester and Van Gogh didn't go to art school at all. Calder studied engineering.
How different my experience has been. I'm an avid drawer and programmer.
I don't know how similar the mental processes of drawing and programming are. But what I do know is that the state I'm in when I'm drawing feels the same as the state I'm in when I'm programming. When I'm deep into either, I often remark to myself how relaxing it feels.
If painting didn't feel like programming to you, maybe it was because you weren't good at it. When comparing hackers to painters, it only makes sense to compare people who are good at hacking to people who are good at painting. Doing something you're not good at involves so many hurdles and complications that are unique to the novice that all you're getting is noise. If you'd been drawing for as long as you've been able to hold a pencil, PG's thesis might not seem so bollocks.
Sorry, I'm going to have to disagree. It probably depends on the painter, but I know a few who's senses of humor and curiosity perfectly match that of stereotypical hackers.
Where painters are those who do painting, and hackers are those who hack, I have to say I've noticed much similarity. But if you compare self-appointed 'artistes' to self appointed 'hackers', you'll be disappointed by the similarities, because a cultural touchstones are comparatively random.
Don't get too carried away with the hype about Provigil. It allows you to sleep less and may cause a mild increase in focus, with possibly fewer long term effects than amphetamine-type drugs (speed, ritalin, etc). IE Provigil users don't seem to turn into tweakers.
It is safer but less effective than good old fashioned amphetamine for actually getting stuff done.
If you're just a regular person trying to live a semblance of a balanced lifestyle (for this purpose I will include working a regular 8-to-6 job) the biggest effect of provigil is likely to be to make you say 'so what?'
If you are used to the caffeine-shakes and twitches that come at the rough end of an all-nighter, Provigil can take that away to some extent. The psychological price you pay for doing this too often is unknown, though.
Having said that, it is useful to get you out of a jam if you stay up partying all night and need to drag yourself to work the next morning.
And best of all, if you are in the UK, the NHS pays for it all. In other countries you often have to pay up to several USD per pill and it can take up to 4 pills to be effective.
Edit: Based on my experience, I would consider use of Provigil during a true work crunch or crisis that can only be solved by a burst of long work hours. However, if your masters get used to your performance at that level under those conditions, you might learn more about the expression 'burning the candle at both ends' than you want to know.
To my knowledge, nobody out there has anything approaching a realistic model of the current economy, either. It has countless variables that interact in countless ways, and producing results that have never been seen before.
Talking heads/pundits are for entertainment value only (depending on your definition of entertainment).
The only way to have confidence in a prediction for the future, at the moment, is by failing to understand the uncertainty of the situation.