Most programmers are little more than carpenters who don't have to provide their own tools...
I'm sure, had Slashdot been around back in days of Steampunk, there would have been many articles cursing the disappearance of steam-engine related jobs, complaining that these days, steam trains were only used overseas, etc, etc. Meanwhile, the invention of the aeroplane would receive only a passing mention, everyone would think it was cool, then they would go back to complain about the decline in the use of steam technology.
Moving jobs overseas isn't a bad thing. One thing the third world is good at is being cheap labour*. One thing the third world is very bad at is innovation**. Westerners who are good at what the West does - innovate - will be as in demand as ever. Those who can't or won't work to remain on the cutting edge, well, there's no helping them.
* I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing, just that it's a historical fact. ** Also a historical fact. Look at where the new knowledge was and is created over the last 500 years, in technology, pharma, media, you name it - in the West. Even big countries like China and Brazil use Linux, for example - they didn't (or couldn't) start from scratch.
they would have already found this noisy planet and if not made contact at least monitored us from a safe distance
But space is big and time is, well, long. We have been pouring significant amounts of artificial EM into the universe for under a century. We have been actually listening in any sort of organized way for under half a century. The universe could be teeming with life - just not life that happens to be a) within 50 light-years of Earth b) in the EM-broadcasting phase of its development 50 years ago. If there was a culture at a Victorian-equivalent technological stage under a hundred light-years away, it would be completely invisible to us, and vice versa!
Remember that lots of our broadcasting was entirely accidental; a culture that is running short of bandwidth and concerned about energy consumption won't want to tie up huge chunks of it with powerful broadcasts, but will want to use it much more efficiently with short-range signals, line-of-sight, fixed lines, etc etc. It's safe to make that assumption because it's grounded in the laws of physics.
This coming year, I'll be getting a minimum of a dual-opteron, more likely a quad - and getting it for a fraction of what similar performance would cost from Sun.
Sun being overpriced is a piece of FUD these days, they are competitive on price and performance.
It's because this is Slashdot and PowerPoint is a Microsoft product.
Very true. If you are useless at presenting (and this counts for about 90% of engineers, probably 99.5% of Slashdot readers) then PowerPoint can make you more useless faster. But, it's just a tool, and in the hands of a skilled presenter, can be very useful.
Anyone who doesn't take direct action to make things better is just an obstacle to changing the status quo
That's a logical fallacy, and you embarass yourself by using it. You see, you are presenting only two choices where in fact more exist. It is perfectly possible to be neither. If you believe that someone who allows a bad thing to happen is as bad as the person who does it, then I wonder how it is you even own a computer? Shouldn't you have sold it and donated the money to the poor? Because, by your own reasoning, you are guilty of having the means to help, but you have not done so.
What can an American businessman do about the China-Taiwan conflict, which has its roots in Mao's Communist revolution half a century ago? Well, let's see, he could work on integrating China, Taiwan and the US economically, which increases the consequence of war for all three parties. Oh, looks like businessmen are part of the solution after all.
They say they don't want a war because it'd be unprofitable. Isn't avoiding unnecessary bloodshed a good enough reason anymore?
History has shown that while not a perfect solution, intertwining economies is the single best method of preventing wars. A lot of Liberal hand-waving and bleating won't change that. See, you don't understand what profit is. Profit is what happens when person A produces something person B wants, and person B trades something person A wants for it. Profit is the surest guarantor of peace, because if A and B are in different countries, both will pressure their governments not to disrupt their happy relationship.
Now, the Chinese government is a little psycho when it comes to Taiwan. Taiwan is what was left when Mao seized power in mainland China. Taiwan is a free democracy - China is a communist dictatorship. China won't listen to reason. But if it is dependant on other countries for basic economic necessities, then its options are far more limited - especially if measures are in place to prevent it from just taking what it wants by force.
It's nice to think that what with war looming, the prospect of thousands of people being killed, all business men can think about is money. It sickens me.
Oh please. Are you saying that whenever there's a mere potential of anything bad happening anywhere in the world we should all just stop and contemplate our navels until the problem goes away?
No, life goes on. People go about their business, as normally as possible, whatever the situation because that's what we do. A lot of Liberal whining about how evil businessmen are doesn't change the fact that the businessmen are utterly blameless in this affair... but far be it from a Liberal to criticize their fellow Communists, the near-psychotic Chinese government, that has resorted in the past to starving 50M of its own citizens to death just to maintain its own grip on power.
On the other hand, if you have a good general education in programming with a lot of hacking experience in a few languages, then you sure won't find it very difficult to pick up C#, even if you only have passing familiarity with its syntax.
That may have been true once. Back in the day, programming was 90% about the language and 10% about APIs. Now, it's 95% APIs and only 5% about the language. A programmer expert in C and OpenGL would be utterly out of his depth writing C and OCI (and vice versa). These days, languages are just the glue between API calls.
(Note: this is true for corporate application development, probably not so true for device driver writers... YMMV).
You do know that in Ancient Greece, where democracy was invented, this was the norm? And that those who could vote would be publicly whipped if they didn't, in Athens? The idea that the only people who should have a say in the running of a society are those who have a made a contribution to the continuence of that society itself isn't a new one at all.
I have none, nada, zip experience in big databases.
S'okay, I have plenty:-)
But it surprised me that the peak workloads were measured in 100s of concurrent queries. If I had to make a wild guess, I would have guessed 10s of thousands. My blessed ignorance destroyed.
You would typically see tens of thousands (or more) of concurrent connections to a middleware layer - like Tuxedo - which would then multiplex them down to hundreds of connections to the database. This is because there is a lot of latency in establishing a connection, in fact logging in often takes an order of magnitude longer than running an actual query, yet few users submit transactions nonstop. So there is no sense in maintaining tens of thousands of expensive user contexts on the DB server, and there is no sense in requiring intermittent (relatively speaking) users to log out after a short idle period. Middleware does nothing but manage concurrent user contexts, and it can do so very efficiently. A database can't, because it tries to preallocate as much context as it can, and that doesn't match real-world usage patterns, and anyway, database vendors concentrate on their SQL engines and leave middleware vendors to manage the rest.
Of course, if you are a big database vendor, you probably also sell middleware, but there's no-one who tries to bundle the two into one, any more than you'd want a web server to have its own filesystem.
Yes, in this case - look at the "Vendor" column. Note that in the past both MS and Sybase called their database "SQL Server", nowadays Sybase calls it "Adaptive Server". Sybase IQ is highly optimized for DSS work, where as AS is optimized for OLTP.
Everyone at the conference should be tested before entering- they should all be able to figure out how to turn on a computer.
Better yet, only representatives of countries with well-developed technology sectors should be permitted a say. The Western nations, with some others like Japan, invented computers and networks - hell, electronics and even industrial-scale electricity - what have the Third World done that even compares? Frankly, they ought to be grateful we let them play on our network at all!
Centon make great beginner cameras, they are part of the jessops brand who are the largest photographic company in Europe.
Jessop's are very expensive compared with online retailers, tho'. A little while ago I bought a Canon Powershot G5* on Amazon for GBP 478. The other day, I went into the local Jessop's to buy a tripod** and noticed that they had the same camera for GBP 628. By all means browse in a Jessop's store, but make a note of what you want to buy and get it elsewhere!
* I wholeheartedly reccommend this camera for the serious amateur. ** For assorted reasons, I needed one there and then...
Seriously though, that movie shows exactly why 3D interfaces are lame.
You're right, it's like in that movie, Disclosure I think it was. Michael Douglas has to get the corporate files, and this involves going to the special VR room at corporate HQ, putting on goggles, gloves etc then walking through a 3D representation of a room full of filing cabinets. Which was actually far clunkier than actually storing all the files on real paper in real folders in real cabinets and expecting people to really go and get what they wanted on foot! The designers of that system had obviously sat down and thought long and hard about all the things that make digital storage better than physical, then gone out of their way to use technology to completely counter every single one.
Consumers are not conserned with the OS or the Hardware.. They just want to do stuff with their PC.
Indeed. Sun should be flogging these wholesale to corporations who want their employees to have a feature-complete office suite, a web browser for the intranet and no more - and zero problems with spyware, adware, trojans, etc. In that case, lack of compatibility is actually value-adding. It's not a consumer device, and that's fine, 'cos Sun has bugger-all experience in that market anyway... oh wait, I guess that explains it.
Your knowledge represents a subset of the average developer's knowledge
+1 Funny or -1 Flamebait, I can't tell.
No, but seriously, the opposite is true. I've yet to meet a sysadmin who couldn't do some programming, whether it's 150 lines of Korn Shell script or 5000 lines of Python/TK. Inclination is all that really prevents the administrator from being a programmer. A good sysadmin will also understand the system as a whole and how the work it does interacts. In contrast, few developers understand any more than their own little bit of an application, which is but one of many applications the business runs. The developers that do quickly become system architects and stop coding day-to-day, because they're too valuable as "big picture" people to get bogged down in details.
Developers tend to assume, for example, that they have exclusive use of a machine, whereas an administrator knows that the database is busiest at a certain time of day, that the network is saturated on that segment at another time of day, etc etc. A developer thinks he can rely on a version of a library being there, an administrator knows that that library version has a bug in a function that the developer doesn't use, but another application on the machine does. A developer thinks his app is behind the firewall so he doesn't have to worry about buffer overruns, an administrator has been bitten by that mistake in the past. And so on and so on.
Frankly, if you have competent system architects, engineers and administrators, coding is no more difficult than data entry. It's this truth, combined with the prima donna attitude of developers, that's driving jobs offshore.
but what's definitely true is that the non-studying part of the population can be made feeling guilty about giving something to the students for free.
Well, it's not for free, not really. Graduates tend to get higher paying jobs, which means they pay higher rate income tax (40% as opposed to 22%). Not only that, but every graduate engineer (for example) working as a product designer creates several "blue collar" jobs in manufacturing, etc etc. It is clearly in society's best interest to have a highly educated intellectual elite, and in the past, no-one had a problem paying for the university system because of this. It' an investment every bit as much as building a road is an investment.
But nowadays, there are too many graduates who simply aren't useful, yet cost as much to educate. That is the reason there is a funding crisis. A university education is not a right per se; it has to be earned through superior intellectual capability, and then repaid through higher economic productivity. But the socialist government wants equality at any cost, and it's prepared to drag everyone down to a level of mediocrity to enforce that.
My favorite quote from a network administrator when I asked him to set up an ftp server temporarily so I can transfer some files was "I'm not a ftp guy, we'll have to find someone who knows what that is."
Guess you didn't even stop to consider that maybe he was a Cisco admin, and he meant he needed to find someone who knew what Unix machine the ftp server was on?
Nope, because clearly, you've no idea what you're talking about.
hope that defeatist attitudes aren't widespread in govenrment and NASA about getting to Mars
OK, but look at source of these articles NASA. An organization that, these days, is about protecting bureaucratic empires, not about exploration. What NASA would love is for actual space operations to be suspended for a few decades, yet have unlimited funding for conducting "studies" and "risk assessments".
These days, the NASA behemoth is the world's biggest obstacle to space exploration. The sooner it's dismantled, or at the very least its entire management gutted and replaced, the sooner we'll see some progress.
Yes, communities are lacking money but the reason they are taking it from the students now, is not because the universities are the reason for the lack of money, but because students are an easy target. It's easy to make people feel guilty about getting something for free.
The converse is also true: people don't value things they don't pay for.
There are a few posters saying things like universities are important because without physics graduates there's no chance of getting into space, etc. Well I'm sorry, but that argument reveals a dangerous lack of grip on reality. The percentage of students graduating in science, engineering, etc is declining, and the percentage graduating in "soft" subjects like "media studies" is increasing.
In the past, it was much easier to fund universities because graduates did useful stuff. Scientists and engineers drove the economy. But media studies graduates are qualified for, well, nothing. It still costs money to educate them, tho', money that society will never recover during the working life of the graduate. That is why there's a funding crisis. University admission needs to be made as rigourous as it was 50 years ago, when universities were for the academic elite to hone their skills, not for "slackers" to attend a hour of lectures a week and spend the rest of the day in bed or in the bar like modern students do.
His organization has started transitioning from a closed model to a standards based model
Anyone who starts from the premise that closed-source precludes the use of open standards won't have much of value to say on the matter. I cite Sun as a key example - an almost entirely closed-source company that has one more than almost anyone else to drive open standards.
Slashdot needs to start evaluating articles on quality and not just on how well they conform to the approved "open source is good" party line.
Slashdot Mirror
Most programmers are little more than carpenters who don't have to provide their own tools...
I'm sure, had Slashdot been around back in days of Steampunk, there would have been many articles cursing the disappearance of steam-engine related jobs, complaining that these days, steam trains were only used overseas, etc, etc. Meanwhile, the invention of the aeroplane would receive only a passing mention, everyone would think it was cool, then they would go back to complain about the decline in the use of steam technology.
Moving jobs overseas isn't a bad thing. One thing the third world is good at is being cheap labour*. One thing the third world is very bad at is innovation**. Westerners who are good at what the West does - innovate - will be as in demand as ever. Those who can't or won't work to remain on the cutting edge, well, there's no helping them.
* I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing, just that it's a historical fact.
** Also a historical fact. Look at where the new knowledge was and is created over the last 500 years, in technology, pharma, media, you name it - in the West. Even big countries like China and Brazil use Linux, for example - they didn't (or couldn't) start from scratch.
they would have already found this noisy planet and if not made contact at least monitored us from a safe distance
But space is big and time is, well, long. We have been pouring significant amounts of artificial EM into the universe for under a century. We have been actually listening in any sort of organized way for under half a century. The universe could be teeming with life - just not life that happens to be a) within 50 light-years of Earth b) in the EM-broadcasting phase of its development 50 years ago. If there was a culture at a Victorian-equivalent technological stage under a hundred light-years away, it would be completely invisible to us, and vice versa!
Remember that lots of our broadcasting was entirely accidental; a culture that is running short of bandwidth and concerned about energy consumption won't want to tie up huge chunks of it with powerful broadcasts, but will want to use it much more efficiently with short-range signals, line-of-sight, fixed lines, etc etc. It's safe to make that assumption because it's grounded in the laws of physics.
It's wise to keep an ear out, just in case.
This coming year, I'll be getting a minimum of a dual-opteron, more likely a quad - and getting it for a fraction of what similar performance would cost from Sun.
Sun being overpriced is a piece of FUD these days, they are competitive on price and performance.
By their fruits shall ye know them. They write crappy software for a crappy OS--why shouldn't they be flamed?
Oh dear. What code has ESR written? His only major project is the notoriously insecure, buggy and unreliable fetchmail. Pot, meet kettle...
Your friend is right. When you work in a closed source world, your only option is blind obedience to the people who have the source.
Umm, you do know that the source to MFC is readily available, right?
Spolsky also criticizes ESR for flaming Windows programmers while clearly never having never written a line of code on Windows.
It's because this is Slashdot and PowerPoint is a Microsoft product.
Very true. If you are useless at presenting (and this counts for about 90% of engineers, probably 99.5% of Slashdot readers) then PowerPoint can make you more useless faster. But, it's just a tool, and in the hands of a skilled presenter, can be very useful.
Anyone who doesn't take direct action to make things better is just an obstacle to changing the status quo
That's a logical fallacy, and you embarass yourself by using it. You see, you are presenting only two choices where in fact more exist. It is perfectly possible to be neither. If you believe that someone who allows a bad thing to happen is as bad as the person who does it, then I wonder how it is you even own a computer? Shouldn't you have sold it and donated the money to the poor? Because, by your own reasoning, you are guilty of having the means to help, but you have not done so.
What can an American businessman do about the China-Taiwan conflict, which has its roots in Mao's Communist revolution half a century ago? Well, let's see, he could work on integrating China, Taiwan and the US economically, which increases the consequence of war for all three parties. Oh, looks like businessmen are part of the solution after all.
They say they don't want a war because it'd be unprofitable. Isn't avoiding unnecessary bloodshed a good enough reason anymore?
History has shown that while not a perfect solution, intertwining economies is the single best method of preventing wars. A lot of Liberal hand-waving and bleating won't change that. See, you don't understand what profit is. Profit is what happens when person A produces something person B wants, and person B trades something person A wants for it. Profit is the surest guarantor of peace, because if A and B are in different countries, both will pressure their governments not to disrupt their happy relationship.
Now, the Chinese government is a little psycho when it comes to Taiwan. Taiwan is what was left when Mao seized power in mainland China. Taiwan is a free democracy - China is a communist dictatorship. China won't listen to reason. But if it is dependant on other countries for basic economic necessities, then its options are far more limited - especially if measures are in place to prevent it from just taking what it wants by force.
It's nice to think that what with war looming, the prospect of thousands of people being killed, all business men can think about is money. It sickens me.
Oh please. Are you saying that whenever there's a mere potential of anything bad happening anywhere in the world we should all just stop and contemplate our navels until the problem goes away?
No, life goes on. People go about their business, as normally as possible, whatever the situation because that's what we do. A lot of Liberal whining about how evil businessmen are doesn't change the fact that the businessmen are utterly blameless in this affair... but far be it from a Liberal to criticize their fellow Communists, the near-psychotic Chinese government, that has resorted in the past to starving 50M of its own citizens to death just to maintain its own grip on power.
5 Years experience administrating Windows 2000 server.
Early builds of Win2K were certainly available in 1998... so yes, someone really could have 5 years experience.
On the other hand, if you have a good general education in programming with a lot of hacking experience in a few languages, then you sure won't find it very difficult to pick up C#, even if you only have passing familiarity with its syntax.
That may have been true once. Back in the day, programming was 90% about the language and 10% about APIs. Now, it's 95% APIs and only 5% about the language. A programmer expert in C and OpenGL would be utterly out of his depth writing C and OCI (and vice versa). These days, languages are just the glue between API calls.
(Note: this is true for corporate application development, probably not so true for device driver writers... YMMV).
Yes, I said "*military* veterans".
You do know that in Ancient Greece, where democracy was invented, this was the norm? And that those who could vote would be publicly whipped if they didn't, in Athens? The idea that the only people who should have a say in the running of a society are those who have a made a contribution to the continuence of that society itself isn't a new one at all.
I have none, nada, zip experience in big databases.
:-)
S'okay, I have plenty
But it surprised me that the peak workloads were measured in 100s of concurrent queries. If I had to make a wild guess, I would have guessed 10s of thousands. My blessed ignorance destroyed.
You would typically see tens of thousands (or more) of concurrent connections to a middleware layer - like Tuxedo - which would then multiplex them down to hundreds of connections to the database. This is because there is a lot of latency in establishing a connection, in fact logging in often takes an order of magnitude longer than running an actual query, yet few users submit transactions nonstop. So there is no sense in maintaining tens of thousands of expensive user contexts on the DB server, and there is no sense in requiring intermittent (relatively speaking) users to log out after a short idle period. Middleware does nothing but manage concurrent user contexts, and it can do so very efficiently. A database can't, because it tries to preallocate as much context as it can, and that doesn't match real-world usage patterns, and anyway, database vendors concentrate on their SQL engines and leave middleware vendors to manage the rest.
Of course, if you are a big database vendor, you probably also sell middleware, but there's no-one who tries to bundle the two into one, any more than you'd want a web server to have its own filesystem.
Does the SQL Server mean MS-SQL?
Yes, in this case - look at the "Vendor" column. Note that in the past both MS and Sybase called their database "SQL Server", nowadays Sybase calls it "Adaptive Server". Sybase IQ is highly optimized for DSS work, where as AS is optimized for OLTP.
Everyone at the conference should be tested before entering- they should all be able to figure out how to turn on a computer.
Better yet, only representatives of countries with well-developed technology sectors should be permitted a say. The Western nations, with some others like Japan, invented computers and networks - hell, electronics and even industrial-scale electricity - what have the Third World done that even compares? Frankly, they ought to be grateful we let them play on our network at all!
Centon make great beginner cameras, they are part of the jessops brand who are the largest photographic company in Europe.
Jessop's are very expensive compared with online retailers, tho'. A little while ago I bought a Canon Powershot G5* on Amazon for GBP 478. The other day, I went into the local Jessop's to buy a tripod** and noticed that they had the same camera for GBP 628. By all means browse in a Jessop's store, but make a note of what you want to buy and get it elsewhere!
* I wholeheartedly reccommend this camera for the serious amateur.
** For assorted reasons, I needed one there and then...
Seriously though, that movie shows exactly why 3D interfaces are lame.
You're right, it's like in that movie, Disclosure I think it was. Michael Douglas has to get the corporate files, and this involves going to the special VR room at corporate HQ, putting on goggles, gloves etc then walking through a 3D representation of a room full of filing cabinets. Which was actually far clunkier than actually storing all the files on real paper in real folders in real cabinets and expecting people to really go and get what they wanted on foot! The designers of that system had obviously sat down and thought long and hard about all the things that make digital storage better than physical, then gone out of their way to use technology to completely counter every single one.
Consumers are not conserned with the OS or the Hardware.. They just want to do stuff with their PC.
Indeed. Sun should be flogging these wholesale to corporations who want their employees to have a feature-complete office suite, a web browser for the intranet and no more - and zero problems with spyware, adware, trojans, etc. In that case, lack of compatibility is actually value-adding. It's not a consumer device, and that's fine, 'cos Sun has bugger-all experience in that market anyway... oh wait, I guess that explains it.
Your knowledge represents a subset of the average developer's knowledge
+1 Funny or -1 Flamebait, I can't tell.
No, but seriously, the opposite is true. I've yet to meet a sysadmin who couldn't do some programming, whether it's 150 lines of Korn Shell script or 5000 lines of Python/TK. Inclination is all that really prevents the administrator from being a programmer. A good sysadmin will also understand the system as a whole and how the work it does interacts. In contrast, few developers understand any more than their own little bit of an application, which is but one of many applications the business runs. The developers that do quickly become system architects and stop coding day-to-day, because they're too valuable as "big picture" people to get bogged down in details.
Developers tend to assume, for example, that they have exclusive use of a machine, whereas an administrator knows that the database is busiest at a certain time of day, that the network is saturated on that segment at another time of day, etc etc. A developer thinks he can rely on a version of a library being there, an administrator knows that that library version has a bug in a function that the developer doesn't use, but another application on the machine does. A developer thinks his app is behind the firewall so he doesn't have to worry about buffer overruns, an administrator has been bitten by that mistake in the past. And so on and so on.
Frankly, if you have competent system architects, engineers and administrators, coding is no more difficult than data entry. It's this truth, combined with the prima donna attitude of developers, that's driving jobs offshore.
but what's definitely true is that the non-studying part of the population can be made feeling guilty about giving something to the students for free.
Well, it's not for free, not really. Graduates tend to get higher paying jobs, which means they pay higher rate income tax (40% as opposed to 22%). Not only that, but every graduate engineer (for example) working as a product designer creates several "blue collar" jobs in manufacturing, etc etc. It is clearly in society's best interest to have a highly educated intellectual elite, and in the past, no-one had a problem paying for the university system because of this. It' an investment every bit as much as building a road is an investment.
But nowadays, there are too many graduates who simply aren't useful, yet cost as much to educate. That is the reason there is a funding crisis. A university education is not a right per se; it has to be earned through superior intellectual capability, and then repaid through higher economic productivity. But the socialist government wants equality at any cost, and it's prepared to drag everyone down to a level of mediocrity to enforce that.
they made her marry Bill Gates.
She's only using him for sex.
My favorite quote from a network administrator when I asked him to set up an ftp server temporarily so I can transfer some files was "I'm not a ftp guy, we'll have to find someone who knows what that is."
Guess you didn't even stop to consider that maybe he was a Cisco admin, and he meant he needed to find someone who knew what Unix machine the ftp server was on?
Nope, because clearly, you've no idea what you're talking about.
hope that defeatist attitudes aren't widespread in govenrment and NASA about getting to Mars
OK, but look at source of these articles NASA. An organization that, these days, is about protecting bureaucratic empires, not about exploration. What NASA would love is for actual space operations to be suspended for a few decades, yet have unlimited funding for conducting "studies" and "risk assessments".
These days, the NASA behemoth is the world's biggest obstacle to space exploration. The sooner it's dismantled, or at the very least its entire management gutted and replaced, the sooner we'll see some progress.
Yes, communities are lacking money but the reason they are taking it from the students now, is not because the universities are the reason for the lack of money, but because students are an easy target. It's easy to make people feel guilty about getting something for free.
The converse is also true: people don't value things they don't pay for.
There are a few posters saying things like universities are important because without physics graduates there's no chance of getting into space, etc. Well I'm sorry, but that argument reveals a dangerous lack of grip on reality. The percentage of students graduating in science, engineering, etc is declining, and the percentage graduating in "soft" subjects like "media studies" is increasing.
In the past, it was much easier to fund universities because graduates did useful stuff. Scientists and engineers drove the economy. But media studies graduates are qualified for, well, nothing. It still costs money to educate them, tho', money that society will never recover during the working life of the graduate. That is why there's a funding crisis. University admission needs to be made as rigourous as it was 50 years ago, when universities were for the academic elite to hone their skills, not for "slackers" to attend a hour of lectures a week and spend the rest of the day in bed or in the bar like modern students do.
Anyone who starts from the premise that closed-source precludes the use of open standards won't have much of value to say on the matter. I cite Sun as a key example - an almost entirely closed-source company that has one more than almost anyone else to drive open standards.
Slashdot needs to start evaluating articles on quality and not just on how well they conform to the approved "open source is good" party line.