"I slapped a 750 gig drive in my Lenovo over a year ago for about 80 bucks (Newegg)."
I bought a 3.5" 320 GB hard drive three weeks ago from there. The drive was roughly $42 shipped to my home. I'm using it now. Due to the recent flooding in Southeast Asia recently the same drive is priced at $85 or thereabouts now. My advice would be that unless you have an absolute immediate need for more space to wait a few months before even considering buying a new hard disk.
"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."
This, Citizen, is how World Federal Government is Protecting You! Would you like to know More?
"You won't be laughing when a terrorist hijacks a train and crashes it into the White House.
Or smashes a Ferry into Mt. Rushmore."
How do you smash a boat into Mount Rushmore? As to the first point: I would not be surprised since the agency seems reactive in the extreme. They have become very good at reacting to the last attack rather than working on ways to protect us from the next wave of reasonably creative terrorists.
"You should have known when the Democrats at their convention in Boston herded demonstrators off the street, and restricted them to a "free speech zone" surrounded by barbed wire, that the free speech wouldn't be the Obama Administration's greatest accomplishment."
No to mention the recent events outside the exchange on Wall St. Sure we have free speech and the right to assemble. Just not both at the same time. You can say whatever you want in private but don't be public about it or in groups as that is too much of a threat to the current power structure. If you find a place to speak publicly we'll move the police line so we get a better chance to arrest you or to give you the pepper spray treatment.
This has happened before. Then it was 1968 at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. It was shown on national television and those watching at the time were fairly evenly split between blaming the Mayor of Chicago and the hippies being beaten by the Chicago PD. Personally I blame Mayor Bloomberg for what happened on Wall Street. If he had not wanted the violence to occur and made it clear to the leadership of the NYPD that they would be investigated independently and there would be firings as a result then none of what happened would have happened. It is fairly clear from here that he either ordered the violence or encouraged it through the upper management ranks of the NYPD.
Isn't that one of the reasons for the digital TV conversion? I recall that as one of the reasons to change the spectrum layout last time. How much more do they need anyway? The reason for a lack of communication before was a lack of planning as much as anything else.
They're Blue Dogs. They aren't Democrats but then they aren't Republicans either. These are congress critters that we're talking about. They are very easily confused by someone waving cash at them. It's not like they care what their votes are later when they can repeatedly lie on Fox News (just like the Republicans) and get away with it. The fact is that nobody is actually holding any of the lawmakers in either party to account for their lack of foresight now or any time in the future. The government has been on autopilot for so long that the debt ceiling fight is just yet another iceberg that this ship of state has whacked in to. Most of the country would rather let it sink than worry about it's future.
Exactly!. If the parties become exclusive enough none of us will fit in. Who do you expect us to vote for then? Likely none of the above. We're already at the point where we vote for the least distasteful choices. How far away from fascism or communism do you think that really is for a given side? Read the history of the Third Reich and you will see that the pendulum just swung too far and stayed there for long enough for the system to disintegrate. It's so simple that it should scare the crap out of you.
The moneyed interests have control and the question then becomes what do they want to do with that control? Hopefully it's simple profit but in practice profit can cost lots of lives. This isn't conspiracy. It's just the way the world works. It works for the rich at the cost of everyone else as it always has. The difference is the comfort level that the middle and lower classes are allowed to achieve. In class warfare the rich, everywhere, always win.
It's hard to overstate this. Most people seem to think that if a new party runs for the Presidency it puts them into the game. In order to consistently have a new party in a position to win anything of import that party has to be able to get the signatures to have a candidate enter a race but more important have candidates with local records, decent verified backgrounds, consistent funding and a history of winning at least some races. Without local support there will be no national support without massive astro-turfing which seems an awful lot like what this effort is. It sounds possible in the abstract but, from a practical standpoint, that is not how politics actually works. If you can't run and win dog-catcher then don't expect to have any reach at the national level because it won't happen. For a President, even if this group had one elected to office, to effectively govern would have to have at least a reasonable block of it's own party in Congress and the Senate. Considering how the current parties treat each other do you really think they'd give an independent a break?
In Europe there are groups of parties that vote together after lots of haggling over individual laws that then vote as a block. I find this to be fine in practice and their multiparty setup seems to work great. Over here there seems to be too many egos in the way of making progress and too many special interests that are able to take advantage of the current broken system. The loons run the asylum. It's unfortunate that these folks seems to want to take advantage of that fact to trick us into voting for those who are likely no different than the ones currently in office. This is especially true considering that they are being held up by yet another moneyed special interest in the financial industry.
What my Dad once called "the best system" has turned into a has-been free-for-all of idiotic showmanship trumping the combined social and societal interest by the clods in Congress. I am a Democrat but I owe nothing to extremists on either side. The worst that will happen during the next election cycle may be that I won't vote since I really don't have anyone to vote for this time around. Both parties have become way too extreme.
While NASA is supposed to be a civilian outfit it should be noted that the first astronauts end even the first missiles started out as military rockets. Back in those days the crossover between the military and NACA (which later became NASA) was sort of into just about everything. The same contractors, test pilots and even some funding was shared by both. It was the cold war and there were other issues going on. The Russians had decent rockets and we needed to catch up. When the agency separated from the military and went on it's own budget without military help or working on military issues along with them the agency was slowly starved to death ever since. I suspect that if the military didn't believe in a need for NASA it would soon cease to exist.
Your argument does not really hold though since military R&D is extremely inefficient. NASA does an awful lot of research with that tiny budget compared to the current version of the "military industrial complex". There is a hell of a lot more pork in military R&D (thanks to the current political process) compared to the work NASA does and the way they do it.
I may have missed it but is there anywhere on the DHS web site that allows for any sort of comment? Has there ever been? I suspect there are none and never will be. The government wants to control the process as always. Those of us that have to live with this crap here in the US are expected to shut up and just put up with it. In a sane world there would be no US Department of Homeland Security. If the FBI, NSA and the USCS had been talking to each other instead of acting out a mutual circle-jerk the government would never have created it. As it is now we are stuck with it until the end of the republic. God help us! More clods running loose with guns and nothing to do but come up with crap like this.
Carter's problem was his outlook and loyalty to people who repeatedly burned him while in office. He was smart enough to be there it's just that the clods from Georgia were not. He had plenty of chances to hire better staff during his first term but his loyalty, like that of the current president and Nixon, was his undoing.
Capitalism is not a problem. Capitalism has a place at the table and profits have always been and always will be the goal. The short-sightedness of making profit immediately, though, has to die. Each day in a business' life there is a chance to make things better for the company, the employees, the customer and the reputation of the company in society at large. Certain companies have both large profits and long horizons. It is impossible to do both at once and watch the bottom line from quarter to quarter.
That is where the MBA problem lies: There is no horizon further than next quarter. There is no chance to do any good for the world past cheap monetary contributions to local charities. Poor customer service for the customer and unhappy employees other than the executive class is normal. Rather than float over dips in the economy the company starts to sink in red ink since product production is inefficient and the product line is not on the leading edge any more. Think HP under The Carly, GM, Burger King or Chrysler under Daimler. These companies were stripped bare by the MBA crowd and left to die. HP only exists to sell cheap PCs and crappy printers from China that if you are lucky last maybe a year and Dell stands behind their products better than HP does. When was the last time they were actually known for innovation? GM is on life support. Chrysler, like GM, was bailed out to keep the few jobs left and seems to be thriving under new management but, really, who knows? All of these companies forgot the reason they exist: Products and services, sales and growth. Change will come. Be ready to weather it. Have a bank-roll handy as opportunity is costly and error-prone. Grow the catalog. Make better products and keep the better minds handy as they are the cash cow of the future if you know what to do with them. Fire the most productive engineers? Fire the ones that don't have skin in the game or are less than the ones you need.
MBAs are not trained to see that sort of risk. They only see cost. There are two sides to revenue and if you can't see the value side of product placement or how to create it from a companies product portfolio then you do not belong running a company because sooner or later the company will dig a hole it can't pull it's way out of no matter how any people are laid off or how efficient operations become. The unfortunate fact is that the only way an MBA will learn this is to fly a company into the ground.
You must be from outside the US. The government of the US is vehemently opposed to mass transit of any kind. The results of the last thirty years speak for themselves.
The Federal City does things a bit differently than most of the US. I live in Columbia, MD but have driven in D.C. a lot over the years. There are traffic circles in that town that have the worst of both: A traffic Circle big enough for a number of stop lights. These are so much fun during rush hour that it is hard to believe... Especially in the summer with lost and confused tourists driving next to you.
Here in Howard County the county government has decided to replace stop signs on the outlying areas with roundabouts. Since most of them are single lane they seem to work great. You slow down a couple of gears but usually don't stop and then you can pick up the pace again. Works really well for ~ 35 - 40 MPH roads with little traffic. Stop signs are a drag out in the country anyhow.
Why does it have to be Communism? History tells us that communism as a term devolved in the practical world as yet another name for totalitarianism. That war ended in 1945. I'm not sure we won. Capitalism was never supposed to be totally unregulated. That's why it keeps getting a bad name. There are supposed to be social and societal limits along with regulations and laws limiting corporate behavior. Companies are like people (since they are made up of them in any case): Laws and regulations are for the idiots among us that can't think for themselves. Companies without limits become monstrous in the extreme. Capitalism without restraint is utter insanity. Communism as a concept never happened and was a sort of outsized socialism that never really worked in practice. Socialism seems to work fine in large parts of Europe with a large side dish of capitalism and a dash of common sense. Capitalism seems to coexist pretty well with a lot of other social concepts if given a chance.
Our insistence that anything other than pure capitalism as being the ultimate answer to everything makes us look stupid to the rest of the world and we really need to get over that.
While I doubt that there is a real possibility of an armed revolt taking place it also has to be pointed out that there are more guns here per person than likely anywhere else that isn't part of the third world. And while there may be lots of folks on the right side of the aisle that may "take it up the ass" for big business, most of us will do whatever we have to do to feed our families... armed or not. Big business would then suddenly find the cost of doing business in the US very, very high considering the cost of security even now. There are limits that any society will take and thus far we are not there yet but with the current business climate, the economy in the toilet and the tea party idiots making utter fools of themselves and STILL being elected to congress we are very close, indeed.
This may be the case for English 101/102 or equivalent but that was not the case as I remember it in my Junior level technical writing course. In technical writing the issue of concise and clear writing was the whole point. If you can't do that in the long run you really need to learn by the end of your undergraduate degree regardless because most employers are merciless about this and rightfully so. Concise and clear also requires a basis of knowledge between speaker and recipient without which communication doesn't work. If you took and engineering degree and didn't take a technical writing course near the end I'd be very surprised since your complaint was the whole point. I don't remember spending lots of paper space in technical writing expounding on stuff that wasn't supported by either technical theory, included details or specifics without evidence related to what the paper was about.
Reading, writing are for communication. After a couple of decades in electronics and engineering development I can tell you the engineering documents written by illiterates are a major source of rework, specification missed targets and general mayhem over the years. Engineers have to be able to read and write, communicate with both words and math and make things work on paper even if they brass-board before producing initial prototypes. Some of this is because producing a single wafer worth of parts just for testing can run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. I spent a lot of time as an engineering technician editing and cleaning up engineering information documents used by other engineers who's work was supposed to interface with what the first engineer was building. Documentation had to be concise, clear and accurate. I also ended up reading the IC data sheets to them when their brass-boards didn't work quite right and it was usually missed because they were just too busy.
I did but then I was a bit older and finished the last half part time after 60 credits in mostly electronics for my job.
It may make sense for at least some folks to finish their general education requirements after a bit of "seasoning" out in the world. There are advantages to having your employer not only pay for your education as a "benefit" of working for them but also in cheering you on as a more valuable employee down the road. It seemed to me that spending a few hours one evening a week with other working adults going over a single subject even if it was mythology (Hello Joseph Campbell!) or some other esoteric stuff was more of a hobby or a luxury than anything else.
I also doubt that that Masters program I was looking into might be anything but a big waste. I might pick up some graduate certificates at the local university and I might not. I'd rather take courses I'm interested in now and that seems the way to do it.
"And, keep in mind, like in a lot of places, the most technically minded people aren't always the one making the final decisions. Heck, sometimes it's not even IT making all of the IT decisions."
Private or public this is true across the spectrum of institutional networked computer installations. There are lots of reasons for and against Linux support in an enterprise and it always seems to only be adopted in cases where the cost of licensing the OS itself is the prohibitive factor. Universities are not startups and have a wide user base to support. In the case of Linux being the nasty newcomer anywhere other than the CS wing there is very little knowledge or, in most cases, demand for support. The easiest thing in the world for the university is to either say "you're on your own" or "no you can't". The first option seems to be the default position. They have a fixed budget and preset limits to what they can do so if you can help them to support those running Linux please offer to help at the start of school because they are likely to appreciate it.
You are correct, though, in that most IT decisions are made by folks with access to budgets but less knowledge than really needed to decide things. This works very similarly to the private sector where the CTO may have been a geek years ago but now acts like any other manager and has very little deep understanding of the systems deployed in the enterprise but gets to decide those things anyway since that's why he makes the big bucks.
The problem with this argument either for or against college is that, in today's sound-bite society, it will never get the consideration it requires. There are a lot of great reasons to go to college and better pay is pretty good motivation but I went to college for better work and a more interesting career than the guys I worked with as an engineering technician. I know guys with less schooling and experience in the same field that make more money than I do. I also know folks that wish they were where I was but never took the college money that was part of our benefit package. They left the money on the table. I know a supervisor who is struggling to keep staff because the techs stay long enough to get 30 or so credits to finish the undergrad and split the department for a better job. It's all a matter of interest, what the student is there for and personal interest.
If you are in for the money alone you will have a hard time in the long run. Anyone remember the dot-com bust? Not that long ago was it? I finished anyway. I did it because I wanted to and there would be jobs out there eventually. I landed in the same field I started in; the aerospace industry. The work is well regarded, the pay is good and I get to work with some incredibly smart people every day. I won't get rich on what I make but I make quite a bit more than almost all of the hourly and non-exempt staff. My background is electronics, my degree is in Information Systems and my job is as an industrial sensors (multi-discipline) engineer. My degree was helpful in learning some of the things I have to do but it was hardly what I would think of as a vocational school. That is the other option: Go part time on a company benefit plan while working full time. Get an Associates Degree to get a job and then finish from there. It takes longer and its hard but you end up with the degree minus the debt and that can't be over stated for most of us. You don't have to slog out a degree straight through the traditional way. For those of us from middle income families that is impractical at best and stupid at worst.
I also have to admit that the general education classes I initially dreaded sort of grew on me over the course of my studies. Mythology and the Joseph Campbell books were sort of cool. Philosophy, American History, Psychology, a course in parenting with a Sociologist as the lecturer. While the core courses were the meat and potatoes of the education the general education requirements were a chance to look into things I would otherwise never have considered. By the time I was taking that stuff I had taken all of the math, physics and chemistry along with the software and hardware courses I needed for the BS degree. I still needed the general education courses and I was enjoying it by then. While I did take a few on-line courses over the years in the summers, the networking and people I met, going over the material with other adults (without multi-tasking) for a whole thee hours of so a week came to be something I looked forward to. The job I have now I owe to a course I took at UMUC in the 90's. It's only a waste if you really don't care about it and you don't expect much. If you care about the nature of both work and learning then you put more into it and get more out of it.
I'm one of the folks that didn't get a CS degree but had lots of programming experience and ended up in the field regardless. My degree is IS and programming was a definite requirement. But I also had to learn Java and ADO.NET, C#, LabVIEW and how data acquisition systems over real-time systems work. I was an engineering technician that finished a degree part-time over the course of a career. My employers paid for my degree and I could not see leaving that tuition money on the table along with a pretty decent promotion at the end of the process. My parents tapped themselves out to send me to a local community college for an A.A. in electronics that I never finished. I finished the BS at the behest of my employer. I've worked in the defense industry since 1981. The difference amounted to a pretty decent pay raise along with more interesting work.
Do I think I had it easy? Up to a point. I was curious, had the hardware around to play with (using automated test equipment for 1984 onward may have helped) and wanted to spend more time programming than fixing hardware after a time. I still use the hardware skills making sure that our lab industrial sensors work and that everything is hooked up OK which is hard when the local union won't let me use a screwdriver. I'm not in the union since I'm engineering staff.
C programming took a while to make sense of. If not for the incredible amount of time and effort to actually understand how this stuff worked on my own I would not have figured any if it out. C++ was the '90s version of OOP and for the most part didn't use for the first two semesters of practice - data structures and algorithms. I ended up taking a specific course in OOP later on and the time was right but it required practice. Lots and lots of practice. Programming is not a natural way of thinking in some ways. It takes a long time to understand the the use of the tools and it takes longer to be good with them. Unless the student is a genius, as I am certainly not, the student really has to want to know how this stuff works. Without being driven to learn this a student of CS, Informations Systems or anything else requiring programing is very likely to fail. Should it be easy for everyone? Or should only it be easy for those with the advantages or need that I had?
Our company bought a batch of desktops from Dell. One had a bad main-board. I called and had a tech on-site with the replacement hardware the next day. They have made some cheap hardware over the years but, as far as I can tell, they support their products pretty well. I've actually had better luck with their hardware than with similar HP products in recent memory.
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"I slapped a 750 gig drive in my Lenovo over a year ago for about 80 bucks (Newegg)."
I bought a 3.5" 320 GB hard drive three weeks ago from there. The drive was roughly $42 shipped to my home. I'm using it now. Due to the recent flooding in Southeast Asia recently the same drive is priced at $85 or thereabouts now. My advice would be that unless you have an absolute immediate need for more space to wait a few months before even considering buying a new hard disk.
"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."
This, Citizen, is how World Federal Government is Protecting You!
Would you like to know More?
"You won't be laughing when a terrorist hijacks a train and crashes it into the White House.
Or smashes a Ferry into Mt. Rushmore."
How do you smash a boat into Mount Rushmore?
As to the first point: I would not be surprised since the agency seems reactive in the extreme. They have become very good at reacting to the last attack rather than working on ways to protect us from the next wave of reasonably creative terrorists.
"You should have known when the Democrats at their convention in Boston herded demonstrators off the street, and restricted them to a "free speech zone" surrounded by barbed wire, that the free speech wouldn't be the Obama Administration's greatest accomplishment."
No to mention the recent events outside the exchange on Wall St. Sure we have free speech and the right to assemble. Just not both at the same time. You can say whatever you want in private but don't be public about it or in groups as that is too much of a threat to the current power structure. If you find a place to speak publicly we'll move the police line so we get a better chance to arrest you or to give you the pepper spray treatment.
This has happened before. Then it was 1968 at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. It was shown on national television and those watching at the time were fairly evenly split between blaming the Mayor of Chicago and the hippies being beaten by the Chicago PD. Personally I blame Mayor Bloomberg for what happened on Wall Street. If he had not wanted the violence to occur and made it clear to the leadership of the NYPD that they would be investigated independently and there would be firings as a result then none of what happened would have happened. It is fairly clear from here that he either ordered the violence or encouraged it through the upper management ranks of the NYPD.
Must be. The tinyurl link is broken but this is likely another extreme wing-nut.
Isn't that one of the reasons for the digital TV conversion? I recall that as one of the reasons to change the spectrum layout last time. How much more do they need anyway? The reason for a lack of communication before was a lack of planning as much as anything else.
They're Blue Dogs. They aren't Democrats but then they aren't Republicans either. These are congress critters that we're talking about. They are very easily confused by someone waving cash at them. It's not like they care what their votes are later when they can repeatedly lie on Fox News (just like the Republicans) and get away with it. The fact is that nobody is actually holding any of the lawmakers in either party to account for their lack of foresight now or any time in the future. The government has been on autopilot for so long that the debt ceiling fight is just yet another iceberg that this ship of state has whacked in to. Most of the country would rather let it sink than worry about it's future.
Exactly!. If the parties become exclusive enough none of us will fit in. Who do you expect us to vote for then? Likely none of the above. We're already at the point where we vote for the least distasteful choices. How far away from fascism or communism do you think that really is for a given side? Read the history of the Third Reich and you will see that the pendulum just swung too far and stayed there for long enough for the system to disintegrate. It's so simple that it should scare the crap out of you.
The moneyed interests have control and the question then becomes what do they want to do with that control? Hopefully it's simple profit but in practice profit can cost lots of lives. This isn't conspiracy. It's just the way the world works. It works for the rich at the cost of everyone else as it always has. The difference is the comfort level that the middle and lower classes are allowed to achieve. In class warfare the rich, everywhere, always win.
It's hard to overstate this. Most people seem to think that if a new party runs for the Presidency it puts them into the game. In order to consistently have a new party in a position to win anything of import that party has to be able to get the signatures to have a candidate enter a race but more important have candidates with local records, decent verified backgrounds, consistent funding and a history of winning at least some races. Without local support there will be no national support without massive astro-turfing which seems an awful lot like what this effort is. It sounds possible in the abstract but, from a practical standpoint, that is not how politics actually works. If you can't run and win dog-catcher then don't expect to have any reach at the national level because it won't happen. For a President, even if this group had one elected to office, to effectively govern would have to have at least a reasonable block of it's own party in Congress and the Senate. Considering how the current parties treat each other do you really think they'd give an independent a break?
In Europe there are groups of parties that vote together after lots of haggling over individual laws that then vote as a block. I find this to be fine in practice and their multiparty setup seems to work great. Over here there seems to be too many egos in the way of making progress and too many special interests that are able to take advantage of the current broken system. The loons run the asylum. It's unfortunate that these folks seems to want to take advantage of that fact to trick us into voting for those who are likely no different than the ones currently in office. This is especially true considering that they are being held up by yet another moneyed special interest in the financial industry.
What my Dad once called "the best system" has turned into a has-been free-for-all of idiotic showmanship trumping the combined social and societal interest by the clods in Congress. I am a Democrat but I owe nothing to extremists on either side. The worst that will happen during the next election cycle may be that I won't vote since I really don't have anyone to vote for this time around. Both parties have become way too extreme.
While NASA is supposed to be a civilian outfit it should be noted that the first astronauts end even the first missiles started out as military rockets. Back in those days the crossover between the military and NACA (which later became NASA) was sort of into just about everything. The same contractors, test pilots and even some funding was shared by both. It was the cold war and there were other issues going on. The Russians had decent rockets and we needed to catch up. When the agency separated from the military and went on it's own budget without military help or working on military issues along with them the agency was slowly starved to death ever since. I suspect that if the military didn't believe in a need for NASA it would soon cease to exist.
Your argument does not really hold though since military R&D is extremely inefficient. NASA does an awful lot of research with that tiny budget compared to the current version of the "military industrial complex". There is a hell of a lot more pork in military R&D (thanks to the current political process) compared to the work NASA does and the way they do it.
I may have missed it but is there anywhere on the DHS web site that allows for any sort of comment? Has there ever been? I suspect there are none and never will be. The government wants to control the process as always. Those of us that have to live with this crap here in the US are expected to shut up and just put up with it. In a sane world there would be no US Department of Homeland Security. If the FBI, NSA and the USCS had been talking to each other instead of acting out a mutual circle-jerk the government would never have created it. As it is now we are stuck with it until the end of the republic. God help us! More clods running loose with guns and nothing to do but come up with crap like this.
Back at ya!
Carter's problem was his outlook and loyalty to people who repeatedly burned him while in office. He was smart enough to be there it's just that the clods from Georgia were not. He had plenty of chances to hire better staff during his first term but his loyalty, like that of the current president and Nixon, was his undoing.
Capitalism is not a problem. Capitalism has a place at the table and profits have always been and always will be the goal. The short-sightedness of making profit immediately, though, has to die. Each day in a business' life there is a chance to make things better for the company, the employees, the customer and the reputation of the company in society at large. Certain companies have both large profits and long horizons. It is impossible to do both at once and watch the bottom line from quarter to quarter.
That is where the MBA problem lies: There is no horizon further than next quarter. There is no chance to do any good for the world past cheap monetary contributions to local charities. Poor customer service for the customer and unhappy employees other than the executive class is normal. Rather than float over dips in the economy the company starts to sink in red ink since product production is inefficient and the product line is not on the leading edge any more. Think HP under The Carly, GM, Burger King or Chrysler under Daimler. These companies were stripped bare by the MBA crowd and left to die. HP only exists to sell cheap PCs and crappy printers from China that if you are lucky last maybe a year and Dell stands behind their products better than HP does. When was the last time they were actually known for innovation? GM is on life support. Chrysler, like GM, was bailed out to keep the few jobs left and seems to be thriving under new management but, really, who knows? All of these companies forgot the reason they exist: Products and services, sales and growth. Change will come. Be ready to weather it. Have a bank-roll handy as opportunity is costly and error-prone. Grow the catalog. Make better products and keep the better minds handy as they are the cash cow of the future if you know what to do with them. Fire the most productive engineers? Fire the ones that don't have skin in the game or are less than the ones you need.
MBAs are not trained to see that sort of risk. They only see cost. There are two sides to revenue and if you can't see the value side of product placement or how to create it from a companies product portfolio then you do not belong running a company because sooner or later the company will dig a hole it can't pull it's way out of no matter how any people are laid off or how efficient operations become. The unfortunate fact is that the only way an MBA will learn this is to fly a company into the ground.
You must be from outside the US. The government of the US is vehemently opposed to mass transit of any kind. The results of the last thirty years speak for themselves.
The Federal City does things a bit differently than most of the US. I live in Columbia, MD but have driven in D.C. a lot over the years. There are traffic circles in that town that have the worst of both: A traffic Circle big enough for a number of stop lights. These are so much fun during rush hour that it is hard to believe... Especially in the summer with lost and confused tourists driving next to you.
Here in Howard County the county government has decided to replace stop signs on the outlying areas with roundabouts. Since most of them are single lane they seem to work great. You slow down a couple of gears but usually don't stop and then you can pick up the pace again. Works really well for ~ 35 - 40 MPH roads with little traffic. Stop signs are a drag out in the country anyhow.
Why does it have to be Communism? History tells us that communism as a term devolved in the practical world as yet another name for totalitarianism. That war ended in 1945. I'm not sure we won. Capitalism was never supposed to be totally unregulated. That's why it keeps getting a bad name. There are supposed to be social and societal limits along with regulations and laws limiting corporate behavior. Companies are like people (since they are made up of them in any case): Laws and regulations are for the idiots among us that can't think for themselves. Companies without limits become monstrous in the extreme. Capitalism without restraint is utter insanity. Communism as a concept never happened and was a sort of outsized socialism that never really worked in practice. Socialism seems to work fine in large parts of Europe with a large side dish of capitalism and a dash of common sense. Capitalism seems to coexist pretty well with a lot of other social concepts if given a chance.
Our insistence that anything other than pure capitalism as being the ultimate answer to everything makes us look stupid to the rest of the world and we really need to get over that.
While I doubt that there is a real possibility of an armed revolt taking place it also has to be pointed out that there are more guns here per person than likely anywhere else that isn't part of the third world. And while there may be lots of folks on the right side of the aisle that may "take it up the ass" for big business, most of us will do whatever we have to do to feed our families... armed or not. Big business would then suddenly find the cost of doing business in the US very, very high considering the cost of security even now. There are limits that any society will take and thus far we are not there yet but with the current business climate, the economy in the toilet and the tea party idiots making utter fools of themselves and STILL being elected to congress we are very close, indeed.
This may be the case for English 101/102 or equivalent but that was not the case as I remember it in my Junior level technical writing course. In technical writing the issue of concise and clear writing was the whole point. If you can't do that in the long run you really need to learn by the end of your undergraduate degree regardless because most employers are merciless about this and rightfully so. Concise and clear also requires a basis of knowledge between speaker and recipient without which communication doesn't work. If you took and engineering degree and didn't take a technical writing course near the end I'd be very surprised since your complaint was the whole point. I don't remember spending lots of paper space in technical writing expounding on stuff that wasn't supported by either technical theory, included details or specifics without evidence related to what the paper was about.
Reading, writing are for communication. After a couple of decades in electronics and engineering development I can tell you the engineering documents written by illiterates are a major source of rework, specification missed targets and general mayhem over the years. Engineers have to be able to read and write, communicate with both words and math and make things work on paper even if they brass-board before producing initial prototypes. Some of this is because producing a single wafer worth of parts just for testing can run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. I spent a lot of time as an engineering technician editing and cleaning up engineering information documents used by other engineers who's work was supposed to interface with what the first engineer was building. Documentation had to be concise, clear and accurate. I also ended up reading the IC data sheets to them when their brass-boards didn't work quite right and it was usually missed because they were just too busy.
I did but then I was a bit older and finished the last half part time after 60 credits in mostly electronics for my job.
It may make sense for at least some folks to finish their general education requirements after a bit of "seasoning" out in the world. There are advantages to having your employer not only pay for your education as a "benefit" of working for them but also in cheering you on as a more valuable employee down the road. It seemed to me that spending a few hours one evening a week with other working adults going over a single subject even if it was mythology (Hello Joseph Campbell!) or some other esoteric stuff was more of a hobby or a luxury than anything else.
I also doubt that that Masters program I was looking into might be anything but a big waste. I might pick up some graduate certificates at the local university and I might not. I'd rather take courses I'm interested in now and that seems the way to do it.
"And, keep in mind, like in a lot of places, the most technically minded people aren't always the one making the final decisions. Heck, sometimes it's not even IT making all of the IT decisions."
Private or public this is true across the spectrum of institutional networked computer installations. There are lots of reasons for and against Linux support in an enterprise and it always seems to only be adopted in cases where the cost of licensing the OS itself is the prohibitive factor. Universities are not startups and have a wide user base to support. In the case of Linux being the nasty newcomer anywhere other than the CS wing there is very little knowledge or, in most cases, demand for support. The easiest thing in the world for the university is to either say "you're on your own" or "no you can't". The first option seems to be the default position. They have a fixed budget and preset limits to what they can do so if you can help them to support those running Linux please offer to help at the start of school because they are likely to appreciate it.
You are correct, though, in that most IT decisions are made by folks with access to budgets but less knowledge than really needed to decide things. This works very similarly to the private sector where the CTO may have been a geek years ago but now acts like any other manager and has very little deep understanding of the systems deployed in the enterprise but gets to decide those things anyway since that's why he makes the big bucks.
The problem with this argument either for or against college is that, in today's sound-bite society, it will never get the consideration it requires. There are a lot of great reasons to go to college and better pay is pretty good motivation but I went to college for better work and a more interesting career than the guys I worked with as an engineering technician. I know guys with less schooling and experience in the same field that make more money than I do. I also know folks that wish they were where I was but never took the college money that was part of our benefit package. They left the money on the table. I know a supervisor who is struggling to keep staff because the techs stay long enough to get 30 or so credits to finish the undergrad and split the department for a better job. It's all a matter of interest, what the student is there for and personal interest.
If you are in for the money alone you will have a hard time in the long run. Anyone remember the dot-com bust? Not that long ago was it? I finished anyway. I did it because I wanted to and there would be jobs out there eventually. I landed in the same field I started in; the aerospace industry. The work is well regarded, the pay is good and I get to work with some incredibly smart people every day. I won't get rich on what I make but I make quite a bit more than almost all of the hourly and non-exempt staff. My background is electronics, my degree is in Information Systems and my job is as an industrial sensors (multi-discipline) engineer. My degree was helpful in learning some of the things I have to do but it was hardly what I would think of as a vocational school. That is the other option: Go part time on a company benefit plan while working full time. Get an Associates Degree to get a job and then finish from there. It takes longer and its hard but you end up with the degree minus the debt and that can't be over stated for most of us. You don't have to slog out a degree straight through the traditional way. For those of us from middle income families that is impractical at best and stupid at worst.
I also have to admit that the general education classes I initially dreaded sort of grew on me over the course of my studies. Mythology and the Joseph Campbell books were sort of cool. Philosophy, American History, Psychology, a course in parenting with a Sociologist as the lecturer. While the core courses were the meat and potatoes of the education the general education requirements were a chance to look into things I would otherwise never have considered. By the time I was taking that stuff I had taken all of the math, physics and chemistry along with the software and hardware courses I needed for the BS degree. I still needed the general education courses and I was enjoying it by then. While I did take a few on-line courses over the years in the summers, the networking and people I met, going over the material with other adults (without multi-tasking) for a whole thee hours of so a week came to be something I looked forward to. The job I have now I owe to a course I took at UMUC in the 90's. It's only a waste if you really don't care about it and you don't expect much. If you care about the nature of both work and learning then you put more into it and get more out of it.
I'm one of the folks that didn't get a CS degree but had lots of programming experience and ended up in the field regardless. My degree is IS and programming was a definite requirement. But I also had to learn Java and ADO.NET, C#, LabVIEW and how data acquisition systems over real-time systems work. I was an engineering technician that finished a degree part-time over the course of a career. My employers paid for my degree and I could not see leaving that tuition money on the table along with a pretty decent promotion at the end of the process. My parents tapped themselves out to send me to a local community college for an A.A. in electronics that I never finished. I finished the BS at the behest of my employer. I've worked in the defense industry since 1981. The difference amounted to a pretty decent pay raise along with more interesting work.
Do I think I had it easy? Up to a point. I was curious, had the hardware around to play with (using automated test equipment for 1984 onward may have helped) and wanted to spend more time programming than fixing hardware after a time. I still use the hardware skills making sure that our lab industrial sensors work and that everything is hooked up OK which is hard when the local union won't let me use a screwdriver. I'm not in the union since I'm engineering staff.
C programming took a while to make sense of. If not for the incredible amount of time and effort to actually understand how this stuff worked on my own I would not have figured any if it out. C++ was the '90s version of OOP and for the most part didn't use for the first two semesters of practice - data structures and algorithms. I ended up taking a specific course in OOP later on and the time was right but it required practice. Lots and lots of practice. Programming is not a natural way of thinking in some ways. It takes a long time to understand the the use of the tools and it takes longer to be good with them. Unless the student is a genius, as I am certainly not, the student really has to want to know how this stuff works. Without being driven to learn this a student of CS, Informations Systems or anything else requiring programing is very likely to fail. Should it be easy for everyone? Or should only it be easy for those with the advantages or need that I had?
Our company bought a batch of desktops from Dell. One had a bad main-board. I called and had a tech on-site with the replacement hardware the next day. They have made some cheap hardware over the years but, as far as I can tell, they support their products pretty well. I've actually had better luck with their hardware than with similar HP products in recent memory.