That means they cannot get the people they want, which is good news. After all those jobs are about making the world a worse place.

However their problem might solve itself.
We are on the brink of another "Tech"-Bubble. Nobody knows if Facebook or Uber will still exist in 5 years and no matter when the bubble will burst it will leave a lot of people with various degrees of skills on the market.
The other problem is that the remaining companies will probably enter their "fattening"-stage. They will, for example, get the "dead sea" effect, where the skilled people just leave for more interesting jobs while the less skilled ones stay where they are. In software engineering, less skilled people mean worse and bigger code which lowers the amount of productivity, meaning you need more people. Again the good ones will "evaporate" and gradually the skill level sinks more and more and you get more and more unskilled people until eventually you are left with a company of a million idiots. Obviously to counteract this you need strict procedures which will drive out the remaining skilled people.

When the currently attractive "tech"-companies have reached that point, it'll be comparatively easy for the military to pick people.

I mean seriously, that's just a bad movie. Apparently even so bad it mostly discredits its makers.

If you want do spend thousands of Euros to drop DVDs, drop something more intelligent. Something that actually makes people think, not something the government can easily discredit as the product of some deranged individuals.

Back then "Online Advertisements" were all the rage. Those were animated GIF images designed to influence the behaviour of the users. There were some companies having "pay for surf" business models where you installed a piece of malware onto your computer which would display you banners. You would then get paid money for that. Of course all of those companies went bankrupt as most people simply cheated the software. The disappearance of "Online Advertisements" essentially meant that nobody tried again. Today people probably don't even know that a "banner ad" was.

It's probably the same way with personal data. There is a hype about selling it even though nobody quite knows how to generate money from it. So essentialy a whole generation of companies now collects huge masses of data for the secret services of the world to collect.

Simply put, .net is _far_ to complex for the job. The .net framework binary is already much bigger than a typical Windows 2000 installation. You users are expected to install and maintain a huge framework. On the other side you don't really have much benefits. You have a mostly single vendor solution. Your software won't run on even on all 32 bit Windows machines.

If you want to do client applications look around you, there's plenty of alternatives. One example is Lazarus/Freepascal which compiles you statically linked binaries for most common operating systems. I have been starting and maintaining a software project for Linux, Win32 and MacOSX, and the difference in code is just a few lines. It simply works and on all platforms you get a binary you can just drag and drop. No installation required. Should there be a bug in a new version, the user can simply switch back to the old one.

If .net was any good, why doesn't Microsoft, the company most interested in it, offer Office for .net? They already do have Office for MacOSX.

Just because apparently several companies are stupid and use unsuitable security practices doesn't mean it's not really bad security. I mean we all refuse to do support for people who put their malware ridden gaming rig into their main LAN, why do companies get away with that?

I mean OK, you cannot run a Windows system without SMB in a useful way. However how could this spread. SMB is not a protocol that was designed to work outside of broadcast domains. It does, but you loose some of the features people take for granted.

I seriously wonder how this could spread, after all you don't just have a large Ethernet domain in your international company. You have smaller domains routed together, and in between you can trivially filter. SMB is one of the first things to go. Since it's hard and inefficient to run large filers on Windows, the few remaining machines with SMB enabled probably would be running on Linux, which means that they will not have the same security problems the Windows machines have.

So ideally this should have been easily contained within a fraction of the company network.

In IT there rarely are any hard problems. Few people operate Google scale data centres, few people do automatic voice recognition or video codecs.

This somehow seems to cause a desire for solving simple problems in difficult ways. You suddenly have complex frameworks to do more or less trivial things because you are trying to abuse something that's never meant to be used in a certain way. More and more non essential features get crammed into projects.

If you want to stay ahead in IT, avoid complexity. Simple ideas seem to persist in the long run. A typical example is the Unix philosophy. It's an attempt to make everything as simple as possible, so simple that a single person can write a cut down implementation in just a few months. Another example is the Internet. IP is a wonderful simple protocol. You just throw in a packet and it may or may not arrive on the other end. Compare that to ATM or ISDN and you will see how much simpler it is.

As a rule of thumb, if someone tells you about a new technology or trend, ask them to explain it to you in 1-2 sentences, no more than 20 words. Either they will fail, in this case you'll know that it's either just a buzzword or far to complex, or they will actually say what it is.

It's about the whole experience. While with CDs you play a file you previously ripped off it, for records you actually pull out a large disk carefully onto the turntable.
It's almost like you offer it to the turntable gods, it's a ritual and there is reason why records are so popular. It adds a whole new level of experience to music.

I mean seriously, every "smart"phone is now much faster than anything scientists had till the 1980s... yet since you are unable to write programs for it without the need of other computers, you cannot do anything they did.

On the other hand, if you had a "digital television set" in the 1980s, yes those existed, you had a device with much more processing power than the computer you could have on your desk. The problem was that your TV-set had it in hard wired circuits while your PC didn't even have the IO capacity to get the video signal in. (Digital TVs in the 1980s used digital chips to process the analogue signal, so they would digitize your PAL signal, typically with 7 Bits, and then decode PAL in the digital domain, which can bring you much better pictures at improved reliability and eventually decreased cost)

The power of a computer lies in it's capability to be programmed. If you cannot reprogram a computer, it's no more useful than any single function device.

What happens if the Sahara changes to communism? Nothing for the first years, then they start running out of sand.

So far, what I've seen most recruiters do is to read off random lists of jobs broadly in the area you are interested in. Even the ones who claim they have experience in a certain area are completely clueless.

I have seen one instance of a recruiter not being completely useless. She did an automated "objective suitability test" which was similar to an intelligence test, testing certain aspects of decision making. That was interesting at least.

So far my experience shows that companies who outsource their recruiting don't actually care about what people they get. Eventually this will lead to the "Dead Sea"-effect in those companies making them unable to hold more qualified people.

Here's a German example for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Crash 2030 - Protokoll einer Katastrophe

Or if you like more alarmist ones which turned out to have been hugely wrong on some facts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Studio Telerop 2009

Comparing the Apple Newton and the iPhone... I'd say that the iCar would be a car that's well connected and essentially controlled by Apple. It would not work on roads not approved by Apple. It would probably be controlled by a touch screen or voice. However it would not drive by itself, as that feature has been proven to be complicated. Of course it won't have a driving wheel, instead it'll have a software driving wheel on a large touch screen in front of you.

Functionality wise, the iPhone was a _huge_ step back from what the Newton could do.

There even used to be a 1980s calculator watch which used the watchface so you could draw on your digits. The technology is rather simple so it is a logical thing to do.

The problem is, while it works for calculators, writing complex command lines is much harder.

... and the reason why on other operating systems you have to escape spaces every time. This way you cannot have the ambiguity if you mean a path with a space, or a program and then a parameter.