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Linux Guru Alan Cox Takes A Year Off
An anonymous reader writes "Linux guru Alan Cox is taking a year off from RedHat and kernel development to get his MBA. For years, Alan Cox has maintained the extremely stable 2.2 Linux kernel, and more or less been Linux creator Linus Torvalds' right hand man. Now it sounds like the 2.2 kernel is up for grabs to someone who is 'good at refusing patches and being ignored'..."
That's today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Apart from being 'funny', honestly why would Alan Cox need any degree or certification? He can go to any Linux development company and put his resume on the table:
Alan Cox.
Unless the HR manager is a college assistant who has Bonzi Buddy installed on her Windows laptop, Alan will get hired. I suppose some larger companies have policies to honor degrees at all levels of the management and Senior Cox is getting ambitious. In that case it kinda gets sad to see him planning to manage rather than code.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Is it totally crazy to think that he just might *want* one?
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
Because learning is fun and you can't learn everything you want to know by coding alone.
And he might want to teach.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
And if he wants to start a business, or be upper management, a (good, not diploma mill) MBA will be a big win.
Apart from being 'funny', honestly why would Alan Cox need any degree or certification? He can go to any Linux development company and put his resume on the table:
Unlike the world of MCSEs and A+ certifications, you don't go and "get" a degree. You earn a degree by learning important skills. He is not going to school just to get a piece of paper. In the case of an MBA, he will learn important management skills that take many years of real-world experience to learn. In business school, that take 1 to 2 years to master many of the skills.
Perhaps he wants to start a business? He is a great coder, good at managing source code trees, but an MBA will teach him about managing a business. Alan obviously isn't just trying to improve his resume, he's trying to improve himself.
Because "the security of getting hired at any time" doesn't always mean your goals, wishes and desire for learning new things are already fulfilled.
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
I have ~ 15 years of technical experience and I would love an MBA. Why? So I could have a better idea what goes on in the mind of the CEO. I just don't get the thinking a lot of times.
The education provided in the MBA path is (to me) no more than a window into the vagaries of the management mind. A scary thought, indeed...but who doesn't wonder the "whys" of management?
Excuse me? Learning how to effectively manage a corporation, and more importantly, learning how a corporate brain thinks is useless? I'm failing to see how the MBA will be useless to anyone with visions of starting a company, which is what went through my head when I first saw the /. article.
When I was trying to decide whether to return to school for my graduate degrees, a professor told me a saying I found most profound, "knowledge is a form of wealth that can not be stolen from you." Perhaps Alan wishes to enrich himself, no?
Again I must tell you that you are AMERICA CENTRIC
It amuses me that the very first hit on google from the query "What is an MBA" just happens to be a web site in New Zealand
Here it is: The New Zealand MBA Association
Clearly, MBA is not an America-centric term. I suspect your definition of America Centric is "anything I haven't heard of" though.
But Word actually is the most useful document exchange format today...
No, Word is the worst possible exchange format. It is proprietary to one corporation, it is a vector for script-based viruses, the tools that read it (other than Microsoft's products) cannot do so reliabily and predictably, and much of the world's population cannot and should not be expected to afford the MS Office software.
Given, also, the recent revival of awareness about hidden information exchanged in Word documents, Word is not only a terrible format in principle, but it is a threat to privacy and security in a most fundamental way.
So, Anonymous Astroturfer, you should go back to your cube and rethink your strategy for spreading lies into the public consciousness.
For basic exhange of information, the best formats are plain text (for text, obviously) or PDF (for type-set documents). Other formats are just asking for trouble.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Now this sounds pretty well-rehearsed.
That's because it is true.
When will people start realizing that there are free tools to handle Word format...
Where are they? Are they 100% compatible with Microsoft's undocumented, proprietary, and volatile document format? It is impossible for these tools to live up to their promises when there is a 100% likelihood their reverse-engineering efforts came up short.
Word is the format of choice even in the free-software-world
Only when Microsoft releases a 100% complete and comprehensible document explaining every aspect of the Word formats (yes there are more than one). Given that it is not in their financial interest to do so, I can guarantee that Word will basically never become the format of choice outside of the Microsoft micro-universe.
The most likely outcome is that one of the emerging XML formats, such as that for OpenOffice.org, will become the de-facto standard for editable document exchange. By then, I hope that Microsoft will be little more than a niche figment of their former selves (not unlike SCO, soon).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Unless you can think of another file format that copes with tables, images, headers, footers, embedded documents, version control and all the other things that most of us use on a regular basis.
Perhaps the Docbook editor being added to OpenOffice.org will provide some relief. HTML isn't totally out of question, either (except that Word screws up HTML, too). And, once OpenOffice.org picks up more steam, its own plain-text XML file format should be widely understood, too.
Non-trivial documents should be done in LaTeX or Docbook, anyway, because they are much more robust and capable than Word. Word is really only appropriate for memos or reports, at most. Textbooks and standards documents done in Word are pretty sad.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin