interesting.

sure, and you're the exception, not the norm. i've seen at least one senior dev in each shop too w/o a degree. there are 20 senior developers and 40 junior developers in said shop.

that's a completely made up statement. i have worked in lots of IT shops and the only place to find folks w/o a college degree is in the help desk/desktop support. i've came across but a handful of developers who didn't have a degree.

i've been involved in the hiring process for my companies, and the candidate's college status is a major part of the package. we expect someone to come in with "bright" eyes and to know deeply what they're talking about, not someone who can bs here and there. college only gives part of that. in addition, they need to be a go getter. the should know about code management processes, and about enterprise architectures, n-tier, etc. development patterns, etc.

If I were Boeing I would not be surprised if passengers start asking for planes to be sold to another airline.

Perhaps, but this is typical for hardware contracts in an environment that Microsoft seeks to control. If the banks have hardware maintenance contracts for their ATM machines, they are likely bumping up against the same problem.

I have worked in an IT department where we were getting slammed every few years with huge upgrade crunches. These were on desktop PCs not ATMs so I don't know how closely our problems mirrored those of banks but for us it was all of in-house software that had to be tested and upgraded to work with Microsoft changes.

We had a hardware maintenance contracted so every few years,like it or not, we would get new PCs that had Microsoft's newest OS. It's not as easy as just dropping new PCs on everyone's desks. Every piece of software that our employees used needed to be tested with the new version of Windows. A lot of them broke. Microsoft products like MS Office mostly worked in vanilla form but we had to test all of our macros and any third party add-ons like Dragon Dictate which often broke.

Basically any third party or in house applications were a crap shoot. The PCs would come in and we had little time to adapted. It was a total pain. If we were running Linux we could have tested at our own pace and then deployed instead of rushing to meet someone else's schedule.

At the rate we are driving species extinct a much simpler system of naming the few surviving will be sufficient.

"Note that superdeterminism doesn't necessarily rule out 'free will'."

I guess I don't understand how the example that you gave following that statement supports the idea of "free will." For me the more interesting question is: "What does awareness mean in a deterministic world?"

Are we just observers riding the deterministic "roller coaster?"

"a scenario that, however far-fetched, implies that a physicist running the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each detectorâ(TM)s setting."

Of course the physicist doesn't have free will. No one has free will. If the universe is controlled by natural laws everything that has happened or ever will happen must be preordained. Every synapse that has ever fired in our brains is just an electrochemical event caused by a long chain of other events that can be traced back to the big bang.

I'm old enough to have lived through the entire Microsoft history of dirty tricks, disingenuous press releases and out right illegal anti-trust violations. It seems that some things never do really change.

Part of the compatibility issues are due to the time lag caused by the need to reverse engineer Microsoft's âoeStandard.â If the past is any indication of how this company works they haven't been forthcoming on providing complete documentation to their document format. There may be a bit of the âoeWindows isn't done until Lotus won't run...â attitude left in a company that has a history of wanting not just to compete but do completely crush anything that remotely smells like competition. And if that takes lies, dirty tricks or anti-trust violations requiring decades to litigate then so be it.

For the younger folks here: Watch this company with a skeptical eye because they don't have YOUR best interest at heart and they will do practically anything to win.

Very true but Microsoft is known for using their operating system to extend power in other areas.

They did this in the non-OS software areas by using undisclosed API calls giving them an advantage and now they want the tablet market.

They probably figure that most people would end up using Windows 8 because most new PCs are sold with a Microsoft OS. Once people get use to Windows 8 they probably figured that they would gain an advantage in the tablet market due to OS familiarity.

They never learn.

This is very encouraging!

We are like *this* close to...FREE BEER!

So, two things.

If you're in the northern midwest of the US, you're not at the same latitude as Moscow. Moscow is 55 deg north, the continental 48 stop at the 49th parallel. So, unless you're talking about Ketchikan, which is decidedly not "midwest", then you need to adjust your memories a bit.

Second, as you should well be aware, latitude alone does not define how cold a place gets. In fact, southern Alaska and the Cascades region in general is generally more temperate than New England. Jet stream, currents, regional topography, all that stuff makes a difference. Going to guess based on your commentary that you're in the Montana/ND area, so comparing Helena with Moscow puts them on about par, with a full nine degrees difference in latitude.

No, "barbaric" is the way we treat people with mental illness and ailments that point to it. Rather than fix the problem, it's easier to take a puritanical view and pretend it's that individual's personal failings that caused the problem instead of society's failing to treat it. When this inevitably results in recidivism, it's just easier for society to hit the guy with a brick and make the problem go away.

We make the monsters and then claim that the monsters have to be killed because they can't be unmade.

yep. we have an internal applet application that uses a self signed certificate. it's deployed to the local file system and launched from a remote page, thus we're stuck using java less than 1.6.24 due to a security change^^^bug oracle made.

http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=7020285