It's cool until you see the price tag for Visual Studio Profi/Prem/Ultimate (I assume you can't use Python tools with Express versions).
In that case I will stick to my old copy of Visual J++...
You can't use it with VS Express, but you can use it with VS Shell (also free) - and we have a single-file installer that will install both Shell and PTVS for you.
Best Buy is just a test center for Amazon - a lot of people come in just to see and touch stuff before buying it from Amazon. I saw a guy checking a headphones in BB and immediately buying it from Amazon on the spot from his phone.
I hear this all the time from Best Buy sympathizers. The question I don't hear getting asked is "Why are they then buying from Amazon, and not bestbuy.com?" The reason is that Best Buy doesn't want its online business cannibalizing their in store business, so they keep their online prices in line with b&m. As a result, they lose the sale in both places.
While I'm sure that the prices are a big factor, the only one I care about is: their site is fucking terrible. It's insanely difficult to navigate, the search is atrocious, and finding out what's available online versus in stores is just painful.
There are several Best Buys near me, and I'd love to buy stuff online and go run and pick it up when I find that it's available in one of the stores. Every single time I've tried, I ended up going to Amazon and just getting it the next day that way.
I don't care about the price, I just want it to work.
I understand that Best Buy has to pay to keep their stores stocked, having physical space to showcase products and let people play with them requires a huge investment that Amazon doesn't have, yet at the same time they charge 2x sometimes even 3x more without giving me anything but the convenience of testing it out without having to receive the product and sending it back to Amazon...
If Best Buy dropped its prices to something reasonable I would be more inclined to purchase my electronics in their store right there and then because there is something to be said for the convenience of instantly having the product in my hands rather than having to wait for something to ship from a warehouse, it just isn't worth 2 or 3 times the price.
Another hypothesis is that Best Buy can't afford to match Amazon's prices on bestbuy.com because they are subsidizing the online retailers with their in-person show rooms.
(I'm not a Best Buy sympathizer, just a hypothesis)
Uh, no. When your car insurance pays out for accidents that they shouldn't pay for, everyone else's rates go up. Making insurance claims more accurate is a good thing.
If you are sure that you will be able to market yourself after years of working on some no name corporate stuff, by all means. I've been there and seen guys working 10 - 12 years at the same company, enjoying their 8 hours shift just finding out one day that they are not needed anymore - and with obsolete skills set (you get into comfort zone pretty easily in corp world), some of them having really difficult time to find another job.
But layoffs don't just happen in corporate, they happen often at startups too, and without warning (oops, just ran out of funding). Remember the last dotcom bubble? There were a lot of folks laid off with new technology skills that nobody was hiring for anymore.
My point is that classifying corporate:bad, startup:good is just unsafe thinking. If you look at the company on its own without stereotyping its demographics, you'll come out better in the end.
I have a hard time imagining that this guy reading HN is going to let his/her skills become obsolete. Besides that, was there really no writing on the wall? They really had 40 hours of work to do every week, and then suddenly none, with no warning?
1. Comfort zone - if you ever worked in corp world you know what I'm talking about (he mentioned that he enjoys family time after 8 hour work shift so I would like to know how he keeps up to date with skill set).
2. I've seen it myself at least two times - no warning, nothing. Thank you for your service, here is you severance package - 2 weeks of pay and application for COBRA coverage.
I'll second this. I had this happened three months ago, the owner walked into the office, sat down and apologized profusely, and handed me a months severage. No advanced warning, no slowdown of work, jsut boom, you're done. Doesn't pay to be comfortable.
I don't understand your stance on family time vs skill set? My day to day is usually like this: Get up, shower, pick up my house, go to work for 8 hours, come home where I make dinner and invariably end up cleaning my kitchen. Then i sit down with my boyfriend and just do whatever so that we're spending time together.
This past weekend I managed to pick up a book on Go and hoping to deploy something through appengine by the end of week. If you want something, you find the time.
Like most people here, I'm often learning something new, or new aspects of the familiar. Despite the inertia, large comps need people to lead the way, whether it's training how to properly use source control, teaching new languages or platforms, setting up application standards to make troubleshooting possible and aid comprehension for maintenance.
The problem is actually having a large amount of existing code, and having to live with it for a few years, rather than a blank slate to be written with whatever Apache (or others) just released last week. Don't think that code won't feel old in 2 years.
DHH did a wonderful talk about "legacy code" a couple years back, I think it's on the IT Conversations site somewhere.
As a life expectancy is much longer than it was 100 years ago (~30 years difference - http://demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html) we will see more and more "older" people doing stuff which was not imaginable just a half century back.
Not really. Life expectancy numbers were always skewed by the large number of childhood deaths. If you lived past 5, you've always had a pretty good chance of living a long life.
I don't suppose you might have a link to a study to support this statement? The way variations of this comment always appear without any sort of evidence or substantiation has made me think that it might me a popular misconception...
Here's the first one I found by searching for 'life expectancy by age'. You can see that child mortality was indeed very large, but adult mortality has also declined sharply e.g. a 20-year-old white male today can expect to live 15 years longer than his counterpart in 1900:
