It helps if you have 3 months salary in reserve for emergencies like you should so you don't end up entering a bad situation out of desperation.
Currently, I would recommend people have 6-12 months saved up. Jobs report in August said the AVERAGE length of unemployment is 40.4 weeks. Granted, that's including all industries; but the reality is that it's worse out there than people think.
Again proving there are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary, and those that don't.
And they want their rash idealism back.
Remember how EVERYTHING was going to be free? Free information, free software, free everything. Didn't quite work out for good reasons, and now we've moved on. He clearly hasn't. While I agree with him that cel phones are a good way to be tracked, I also know that if I ever *need* to hide from the government, I can put that fully charged cel phone on the back of a UPS semi and get a pay-as-you go.
As others have said, his brand of 'freedom' sounds more like a blend of wishful thinking and paranoia.
I have a 3GS, and with the last 4 or so updates from Apple, it's been consistently getting slower and slower across the board. Slower response times when starting/closing apps/keyboard trays, slower browsing, and most notably - slower than HECK at starting the camera app. Anyone else notice how horribly long it takes to start the app and take the first photo sometimes? That never happened before.
I'm almost certain at this point that they're trying to 'force' upgrades to the new iPhone 4 by making their old devices slower. Sure it sounds conspiracy theory; but I've already seen a lot of it happening. It's already been proven by the jail-braker guys that the 3GS can do HDR photography just like the 4G with just the flip of a single registry bit. The iOS SDK also supposedly required the new version of Snow Leopard OS, unless you also flipped a hidden registry bit and it worked fine on the old OS.
And with my tinfoil hat on, I also notice there is no way to roll back your iPhone to an earlier version of iOS so I could do some timed comparisons. In fact, given my choice, I'd roll back to right before they introduced multithreading - which really seemed to do nothing other than slow my phone down and show that I'm only getting half the bars I used too (if you remember that fiasco).
DRM will always be cracked. You are not stopping pirates.
I agree, but it's getting MUCH more difficult to crack things. The days of some skript kiddie with SoftICE or the like reverse-engineering something are almost, if not already, gone. The latest consoles were hacked by teams of security experts over the courses of months and that time-frame isn't getting much shorter. Some security like Microsoft's elliptical encryption on their media files has never been cracked - only circumvented when you already have the key. I fear that soon there will only be MS/PhD level folks able to break these schemes, and with such a small pool of that kind of talent, they could quickly shut down or make such activities so painful legally they stop. Then things WON'T be cracked anymore. After all, if you're a genius-level computer scientists, do you really want to risk it all to get free movies? There will always be ideological folks, but that' usually not the majority who have mortgages, wives, and kids.
And here is the big one. Device drivers! Linux's hardware support is actually very good but it needs a stable binary device driver interface! Oh and "checking before you buy" is not so easy.
Good observation - but I'd argue that if your customer/user even NEEDS to know to check about a 'device driver' then you've completely failed to grasp why Apple wins the customer again and again.
People want/need/deserve computers and operating systems that work FOR them - not the other way around. There's a real, and big shift going on that I hope we as developers are realizing.
We're moving to mobile devices increasingly - the desktop is dying in every metric of sales. Heck, even laptops are beginning to be affected by smart phones, ipads, and netbooks. Desktops will always be needed for content creation, laptops also - but the shares of sales are radically changing. In those new mobile environments, the ones that are really winning are the ones that are providing very simple black boxes that get me on the web, email, and watching videos. The user is even willing to pay *more* for crummy DRM'ed content provided that they get Lady Gaga in a really simple interface and can easily play it. To make these things easier in general for the first-time device user, this means you *constrain* the path of purchase/use so that it is easy to work out. Sure it's not configurable and you're locked into one platform - but nobody cares so long as it looks cool, can easily be done, and works on other things in that line. The fact it won't work on another users platform doesn't become a factor until well AFTER the person has plunked down all the money. Yes, this is crummy - but it's the truth.
Internally, this means we're starting to move back to vertical stacks a la the old 70's Sun/IBM/DEC days. The users of small/mobile devices increasingly want SOLUTIONS not tons of confusing CHOICES that they need to read about/learn about. While choices and options are empirically better - the hidden quality is that people actually value their time/image and the desire NOT to have to learn all kinds of technical details or walk around with stupid looking devices that look like a teenagers tricked out rice rocket. They're willing to pay more NOT to have to know about any of the details.
What we as nerds forget is there is other currency besides features and ideology. There is time and social stigma - and these are much more important to the end user. If you're in a social situation and you want to buy/play a song or show someone a video; if you have to go "here we go! Oh, wait a second. Ummm, lemmie configure this codec, etc..." vs. "Here's this youtube video....lol" What a difference! That second example shows how you just built social currency and valued the users TIME - the first shot down the whole moment, wasted their time, added frustration, and made the person appear foolish to their friends/business associates. I think we often forget this 'soft' factor is FAR more important to the user than most other factors.
And after all - we invented computers to do work FOR us, not that we bend ourselves to their needs. That might have been true back in the day, but there's no excuse for having to think the way the computer wants things anymore. It's a big mental shift - but one we as developers better get used too.
Of what you see in books, believe 75%. Of newspapers, believe 50%. And of TV news, believe 25% -- make that 5% if the anchorman wears a blazer.