It's not fair, but it's probably better to just list your master's for now.

Right now they figure you won't be happy with a junior position, but you don't have the experience from them to trust you with something more senior. Once you've got a bit of experience put the PhD back on. It will help you land more senior jobs later.

Off topic, but in case you're following this thread... there was an interesting study on racism in Europe some years ago. They found that racism is about the same everywhere, but the effects of racism are quite different.

In a country like Finland, everything is "by the book". There are rules, and they are followed strictly. That means that if I, as a foreigner, am applying for a loan, the loan officer might be a horrible racist, but if I qualify I'll get the loan anyway. In a country like Italy the loan officer has more discretion and is more likely to find some reason to deny the loan if they happen to dislike me personally.

I didn't actually say that every Indian is corrupt, but most are complicit. They might not like the bribes, but they pay them (because they also need to get things done) or they say nothing when others take them (because they don't want to lose their jobs). And there's the problem - the only thing that can change the system is a massive change in attitudes. And it can't be just a few people - it pretty much has to be everybody at once.

I'm guilty too - I've paid my share of bribes. I don't feel good about it, but I can't afford to be the hero - I need to get stuff done.

I do know lot of honest, hard-working people in India - I wouldn't bother to try to do business there otherwise. But my dealings with government always leave a bad taste in my mouth.

It's not racist. The Indian government is pathetically corrupt. It's truly awful, and goes from the very bottom (police, petty local officials) right to the top. Finland, on the other hand, is one of the least corrupt countries in the world.

I know nothing about this case, but I'm going to trust the Finns on this one until proven otherwise.

(Disclosure: I'm a half-Indian who's lived in Finland and done a lot of work with Nokia. I also have business interests in India.)

Then it's not really similar hardware is it :-).

My requirements were: light, long battary life, at least 8Gb RAM, at least Full HD screen. The Vaio was the only ultrabook I could find that fit my criteria and was available in Canada when I needed it.

I just bought similar hardware from Sony in order to run Linux. I would have considered this one if it had been available three weeks ago.

Some of us really don't want a Mac. Obviously we're a niche market, but presumably Dell thinks there might be enough of us to justify one or two models.

I also love the new trains. They feel a lot roomier. Part of that is because they really are roomier, but part of it is the more open design that feels less claustrophobic.

I always thought it would be interesting to try to create "perfect" compression of English (or any language, really). You create an encoding such that every possible message is a semantically and grammatically correct message. Then each and every decrypted message is equally valid.

Of course, this goal is impossible, but I bet we could get reasonably close. Close enough that a human would be required to check each decrypted message, making brute force attacks unrealistic.

A one time pad is simpler, of course, but where's the fun in that?

Yeah, I'm with on this, sadly.

The gadget geek in me really wants this tablet. But the truth is that my year-old tablet, though not nearly as performant as this new toy, is perfectly fine for the only thing I actually use it for: reading e-books. The processor and memory don't make any difference. The screen is kind of tempting, but would mean more to me if I did real work on my tablet (I care a lot about my laptop screen resolution).

Tablet makers are going to have to come up with something pretty innovative to get me to bother upgrading.

I started my professional career developing for Sun workstations, then various Unixes, and for the past 14 years, Linux. Initially, it was just easier to use Linux as my desktop development environment, as my toolchain is here and I'm more familiar with the Unixy way of doing things. Besides, Windows was unstable and not very pleasant to use.

Nowadays Windows seems a lot more stable, and there are better tools for working cross-platform and/or over a network from a Windows desktop. But Linux GUIs have improved too, and I pretty much hate it when I occasionally need to use OSX or Windows machines. They're ugly, difficult to use, and generally less functioanal than my Linux environemnt. I could probably tweak them to make them friendlier, but why bother?

A lot of developers seem to use Macs, but the single-menu interface drives me crazy. It really doesn't work if you have multiple monitors.

I think Shuttleworth has just decided (probably correctly) that he can't make any money on the desktop, but mobile is still a possibility. The Unity interface and now this are an attempt to compete with Android.

I abandoned Ubuntu for my desktop when Unity came, but I think I might actually like it on a tablet or phone. Anyway, I'll try to keep an open mind when the devices actually come out. I hope one of non-Android Linux phone efforts finds a niche, whether it's Ubuntu, Jolla, Tizen, or Firefox OS. If Shuttleworth can pull it off, then more power to him.

There's still a need for the "gamer" PC, and that niche will continue to exist.

But for most of us, there are better alternatives. I just bought one of the Intel Next Unit of Computing systems a couple of days ago. I'm thrilled with it so far. It's totally quiet, mounts discretely on the side of my desk, supports two monitors, and is plenty fast enough for my software development needs.

I don't develop games, but I imagine that most users will be playing games on tablet-like devices in the near future, so a system like mine probably has more gaming horsepower than the average tablet as well.

Thanks, that was a very informative answer.

It also suggests that GMail is pretty close to being a complete replacement - the only thing missing is the DRM-style features. And obviously if you're an AD-centric shop then AD integration has some value.

Cheers,
Ami.

I'm actually really interested in this. I've worked at a lot of places that insist on using Exchange, but I've never figured out the attraction. It's not even a lock-in issue, really, since replacing your email server is dead-simple.

What is this secret sauce that keeps people using Exchange?

(And yes, I see it as an email and calendaring solution in the same league as GMail - if it does more than that, can you point me to summary or something?)

I find younger programmers don't know how computers actually work. They've never used assembler or C for anything. They can't use SQL properly. They don't have the range of experience that lets you attack a problem from all angles and find the best solution.

That's not to say that I use assembler or C for anything nowadays, but the understanding I gained way-back-when gives me a feel for what's actually happening behind the scenes when write in Javascript, Python, etc. And the addiction to application frameworks among young programmers seems to have inhibited their ability to come up with creative solutions to unique problems. They just apply their favourite framework to everything, regardless of how well it actually fits the problem.

Sorry for the rant, but the lack of technical breadth in younger developers is a real pet peeve of mine. I guess part of the reason I get annoyed by it is that experience isn't given that much weight in hiring decisions, so you have inexperienced people in roles of responsibility that they're not ready for. Us old farts who do know better end up having to deal with with the mess afterwards.