This. The major companies have an interest in keeping tech wages down and they act in that interest every day.

All these educational initiatives like code.org? Those are to increase the supply of tech workers, thus lowering the value of each worker. In the meantime, they pretend they can't find applicants and bring over immigrants from the second and third world who'll work cheaply and lower wage expectations for everyone else.

Devalue a skillset while exploiting those who have it - that's the corporate way.

This is the battle of the management (generalist) class against the specialist class (us). It's a subduction game. They're pretty transparent in their methods, and they are consistently winning.

Maybe we need to go medieval, form a technologist guild, and take control of our own job market. Oh wait, that sounds like a union. Naah, tech workers hate unions - we're all precocious superintelligent individualist experts who don't need the support of our peers, right? And dues, man, we don't want to pay dues, that's for dumb factory workers, right? Riiight.

Carry on, then, let's all keep bending over together.

Where's the ZPM option, you insensitive clods?

Pulse, formerly Syncthing is 100% open and does what BTSync does. Also has a fairly decent Android client.

I get what you're saying. I just think if we ever end up with a wrist-worn device that needs a display bigger than itself, we're going to have some sort of projection trick going on along with gesture recognition rather than a physical expandable screen.

You know, tilt your watch toward you and "see" a larger "screen" hovering over it. Interact with controls by "tapping" them, tracked by depth cameras in the watch. focused puffs of air for tactile feedback maybe.

Seems out there, but given the hurdles materials science needs to get over to give us durable foldable flexible displays that will survive the beating they will take on our wrists, I bet we're looking at about the same timeline. Say, 30 years or so, assuming no nuclear war or worldwide economic collapse.

Nah, that would be silly. Creases in my display? No thanks. Flexible devices sound cool until you actually consider how they would work and how they might break.

Needless engineering complexity for no real purpose, sort of like Samsung's stupid flexible TV.

Um. It's funny. I watched the trailer and all I could think was "wow, Blizzard scores are always so one-dimensional. Disappointing."

They are really good at assigning themes to races or characters. But musically, they just seem hamfisted. There's no real complexity or subtlety. Just HERE IS THE THEME. NOW HERE IS ANOTHER THEME.

Technically well executed; emotionally flat as standalone pieces. Blizzard knows that players will simply attach emotions that they are already feeling in game to the themes they hear as they play though, so it works for them.

No need to be evocative or really creative. Music in WoW is just another hook.

Doing hard or unfamiliar tasks is one way we improve and grow. Mistakes improve our understanding of a domain.

Flagging code for extra review based on "struggle detection" *might* be useful. Sadly, we all know that we'd end up with clueless management punishing or even firing good people because they were stretching to meet a goal.

You can never ignore office politics. You don't have to play the game actively, but you do need to be aware of what's going on around you, who is in what camp, what the major conflicts are. You have to cross battle lines regularly to do your job; you can't afford to be seen as a member of the 'enemy camp' by *anyone*.

As an IT guy you need people to trust you, which means you need to be ethical. If you see something you shouldn't know, don't go chattering about it.That kind of thing does get around, and you'll lose trust instantly.

Nothing's stopping you from making personal career decisions based on the information that you come across in your daily work. For instance, if you see that the company is about to be liquidated and you don't want to be around for the mess, by all means polish your resume and start interviewing. Just don't assume that just because you saw something you have the whole picture. You could end up feeling stupid when the private email you saw turns out to be a deliberate test of your trustworthiness. It does happen.

Keep your mouth shut about the things you see. Look after your career and reputation. Be aware of politics, but abstain from participating wherever possible. After a few years when you have trust and credibility, you can consider climbing the ladder a bit and playing the game - you'll have capital to spend.

As someone who actually likes GNOME Shell, I have to agree. The new-style GNOME apps are horrible. Over simplified, too much white space.

In particular the whole "move dialogue buttons to the window title bar" thing is jarring.

I just use Shell and ignore as much of the rest of GNOME as I can.

You have no idea how many students and families are thrilled to receive a 3-year-old desktop or laptop. I've seen it. I sometimes refurbish old systems for the local horribly-underfunded school district and they are thrilled to recieve them. They are still using machines I built them 5 years ago (from even older hardware) in places. I know, personal anecdote, but this can't be rare. Need is everywhere.

Also, groups like Free Geek exist.