Remember, the new corporate scrutiny will only increase revenue for consulting firms, since the consulting firms are hired to "straighten out the books".
Not quite. PricewaterhouseCoopers are really two organizations. The consulting side does systems integration, large software implementations, and advises on supply chain management and so forth. It's separate from the accounting/auditing side, which will either become more profitable because more corporations need better accounting, or less profitable because the "Big 5" are no longer trusted by shareholders and corporations look further afield, to smaller (but still sizeable by anyone's standards) accounting firms.
IBM are buying the consulting side. Now's probably a good time to do that, since it will be cheap as not many corporates are spending a lot of money on consulting right now, but IBM can leverage it to support outsourcing, which they're big on (and corporations are spending money on, because it saves money).
I beg your pardon? I was under the impression that the point of public education was that democracy is not viable without it. Now we are talking about Malaysia here, but your comment seems to be more general than that...
Are you saying there is no public education under non-democratic regimes? The Soviet Empire, Cuba, China, even Saudi Arabia have public education. In those cases, the point of education is not the personal development of the "citizens", it is the reinforcement of the politically-enforced economic system.
Your people are all dying of Aids, the US / EU drug company that holds the patent charges you US$3000 per person per year for the drugs to give them a sustainably high quality of life.
I've never understood why people default to "evil corporations putting profits before lives" rather than "evil, corrupt governments misappropriating their taxpayer's money instead of spending it on healthcare".
Basically, the lack of medicine boils down to governments wanting to spend on prestige projects. They stole from their own populations, and now they want to steal from foreign corporations. And our governments are letting it happen. In the long term, everyone loses apart from those so-called officials. Particularly the ill, when the pharmaceutical industry realizes that it can make guaranteed profits by research drugs that won't get appropriated, like Viagra or Prozac instead of medicines.
All Boeing have to do is strap a superconducting ceramic disc rotating over powerful electromagnets upside down into one of their planes!
Powered, no doubt, by a slice of buttered toast strapped to the back of a cat!
But wait, how will cat-based purr-petual motion machine work if there's no gravity to pull the cat towards the floor? It's going to take all of Boeing's engineering talent to work that one out:-)
If there is really no other software available to do what needs to be done, and your schools honestly do not have the money to pay for it... morally, I think it's okay for the schools to just copy it, legal or not. Knowledge trumps money.
Your argument simply doesn't hold water. Ultimately, a government regulates and subsidises education with taxpayer's money in order to increase the productivity of the economy. Yes, learning for the purpose of self-improvement is a worthy goal, but don't imagine for a second that is why the state school system exists as it does. It is an investment in the future cashflow of the nation.
My golden rule on software is, if you make money with it, you pay for it. I can overlook someone who has a copy of Photoshop that they use once or twice a year when they scan their vacation photos. But schools, along with investment banks and multinational corporations are literally the engines of the economy. They should pay for software like anyone else who is using it for economic gain.
A lot of software, though... you don't really need that commercial version, you can get something free, especially in educational institutions. If all you need is office software for writing papers, then get Linux and OpenOffice, don't pirate copies of Microsoft software.
There are free alternatives available. You mention writing papers; well they could use LaTeX. That they don't indicates that using commercial software is of tangible benefit to them - and that translates into economic advantage.
Also, this ruling would pretty much destroy the industry that develops software specifically for educational use.
If we put half as much $ and effort into figuring out how to cure diseases and end poverty, as we do into these fucking Dr. Strangelove, penis-waving weapons systems...
Oh, we already know how to prevent plagues and famines. Why do you think they've been unknown in the West (including Japan and Australia) for centuries? Because liberal, democratic capitalism pretty much works. The countries that do suffer from plagues and famines on a regular basis are anarchies or feudal states (varies parts of Africa) or Communist (North Korea) or under some other form of totalitarian government (Iraq, Afghanistan, until recently).
The situation will continue until one of two things happen. One possibility is that these countries establish governments and economies like ours. The other is that one or more Western powers simply conquers them and establishes an Empire. The British tried this, and it worked remarkably well, it was only when they got bored and went home that the former provinces of the Empire reverted to poverty and neglect. The US is doing this in Afghanistan as we speak, and will probably do it in Iraq at some point too (to get back on topic, maybe using laser weapons).
I have a question: how practical is this, really? The article tells us that you get two four-second shots, spaced four seconds apart, and the laser then needs 30 seconds to cool down. This is hardly what I'd call a practical battlefield weapon, especially given the modern war methodology of one well-coordinated, completely overwhelming attack. Why use a laser with such poor fire times?
The first rifles were single-shot muzzle-loaders, mostly made of wood, that required the user to mess around with gunpowder, flint and small lead balls. They were effective only over very short ranges, and it took a well trained user to get out more than one shot per minute. In the grand scheme of things, it didn't take them long to evolve from there into the 20mm Vulcan cannon firing 100 explosive rounds every second.
Only if that was the intended effect of the weapon. If it's a laser weapon that is designed for use against planes, anti-aircraft installations, and ground vehicles that could accidentally blind someone standing nearby, it's considered legit.
It's entertaining, but a little worrying to see how military lawyers interpret things like the Geneva Convention and other documents supposedly governing the acceptable conduct of war. One example is the use of White Phosphorous, a powerful incendiary distributed over a target area using explosives. It comes in everything from grenades to mortars to bombs. Due to the horrific burns it causes, it is prohibited for use against personnel, but can be used against materiel, i.e. equipment. This is a matter of interpretation, after all, rifles and backpacks are equipment, they just happen to often be found in close proximity to enemy soldiers!
It's important to understand that the West is supreme in battle not because of divine right or objective moral superiority, but rather because our culture has elevated warfare to its most efficient. It is debatable whether wholesale blinding of enemy soldiers (and indeed, any civilians who happen to be in the vicinity) is more or less humane than the traditional form of battle, in which some individuals are wounded and killed, but the majority, even in the defeated army, escape more-or-less unscathed.
Software employers, large or small, across the nation, concede that they receive huge numbers of re'sume's but reject most of them without even an interview. One does not have to be a ``techie'' to see the contradiction here. A 2% hiring rate might be unremarkable in other fields, but not in one in which there is supposed to be a ``desperate'' labor shortage. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants.
There's a dirty little secret at the heart of the IT industry, and that is that many - perhaps the majority - of people calling themselves "programmers" aren't actually competent to do that sort of work.
If you want to be an engineer (a real engineer, not a "software engineer") you need a 4-year degree from an accredited school, then to pass the EIT exam, then 4 years experience. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant, you have to have the education, qualification and experience or you cannot work - period.
What we have are a bunch of people with - at most - an associates degree and a copy of "Teach yourself XXX in 21 days" going out into the job market without a clue. It's these people who are responsible for HR discarding the majority of resumes without even looking at them. They see the salaries paid to real programmers and think they can get that without putting in the hard graft to get there.
Put it this way: Hollywood studios have many more people showing up for auditions than they have parts - does that mean there is an actor shortage? No, it just means that very few actors are capable of doing the job.
The solution to the IT recruitment problem is to give the jobs to the most qualified wherever they are from, and make the wannabes adjust their expectations to reality rather than destroying the industry out of sheer spite.
So what happens to the poor people who sold their citizenship. Must they leave the country or do they just slowly accumulate as a mass of poor residents who are no longer protected as citizens by US law.
They can go to Canada - the government looks after everyone there.
Without trying to sound arrogant, could it be that I was just more qualified than other candidates!? Does it occur to the people voting for this bill that there might be good education in other countries, too?
That's an excellent point. Certainly, the laws surrounding the export of crypto imply that US lawmakers believe that there are few if any qualified mathematicians outside of the US.
If you set up a credible company, that company can then provide you with a H1B - however the INS looks very closely to make sure that the company is real, so you can't just set up a shell to get yourself a visa.
Indeed. In fact, set up a company employing 10 or more Americans, and it pretty much guarantees at least a green card. Lots of individual INS employees are incompetent bureaucrats, but the organization as a whole knows where its bread's buttered.
Perhaps they could have an "editor" on duty whose job it is to "edit"?
No, because that would conflict with the duties of the/. marketing manager, whose job it is to maximize the page views and hence banner ad displays that slashdot generates on behalf of its sponsors. One way to do that is through posting controversial, sensationalist headlines.
Re:Why do interviewers use "riddles"?
on
Tech-Interview Riddles
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In other words, either "I'm too stupid to remember stuff I've looked up fifty times" or "I'm so inexperienced that I haven't looked those up very much." If you don't KNOW that SMTP is 25 and HTTP is 80, I don't want you working on my mail or web servers.
Without looking it up, tell me the ports for all the kerberos daemons. Or x400.
You forget - or perhaps are too inexperienced yourself to realize - that there is a lot more to the IT industry than the web or even the internet. Someone could be a highly skilled Unix administrator, and have never run a web server in a production setting. For example, how many public web servers are there running on Dynix? Not many I'd wager, but that particular Unix is common in transaction processing. Have you even heard of Dynix? Memorizing lists of ports is the hallmark of a wannabe.
If you tell me about ARP, DNS, and HTTP and you can name the port numbers and transport layers, that's fine. DHCP, load-balancing, firewalls, SSL, proxy servers, server-side processors, databases, that's all extra credit. If you can't talk about these things, you're not yet ready for a professional career in this industry.
These aren't useful questions, because port numbers and protocols are just something you can look up. I've used Unix for years, but I still grep/etc/services from time to time to look up a port number, and I look up stuff in the RFCs from time to time too. Your questions don't tell you anything about how the candidate would deal with a situation in which knowing the raw facts doesn't help, which is most troubleshooting situations.
The B52 combat aircraft that are working in afganistan today were delivered in 1962 [af.mil]. I agree that they might have recieved some maintence in the interim, but the airframes are older than tha pilots in almost all cases. Now thats reliability.
You could send WW2 bombers into action in Afghanistan, it's not as if the locals have modern air defenses.
Everyone knows that frequent reboots prevents crashes.
The value of a reboot is that it restores the system to a known state. If you're depending on that system, you really don't want it to get into a state the designers never anticipated, because its behavior might be unpredictable. So in a sense, you are correct.
The i860 and i960 were supposed to take over the planet at one point, but it never seemed to happen.
The earliest version of Windows NT was written on the i860. The i860 machine was called the N-10, that's where the NT in NT comes from (other theories are "New Technology" and "Northern Telecom", but the NT product manager says it's from N-10 and I believe him). I expect the decision to mainly target x86 was just due to the sheer installed base, there was never a compelling enough reason for Intel, IBM, MS et al to move away from it. These days the i960 is used for Raster Image Processing (RIPing) in laser printers.
If it requires an inflight reboot, there's no doubt what OS it's running.
RH support: Thanks for calling Red Hat! How may we help you? Pilot: "Uhh.. I'm spiraling towards the earth, both my engines are out, and my display says 'kernel panic' in white text on a black background." RH Support: "And what is the system model?" Pilot: "The the F-22 jet.." RH support: If you read linux-kernel-bugtraq, you will see that you should have patched your kernel to 2.4.19-pre-alpha-revision-d before takeoff. But no problem, this is Linux after all. Do you have another F22 on your LAN? Just telnet in from there, su to root and restart sendmail. Pilot: @#$*! Redhat! I'm switching to Debian if I survive! RH support: Can I interest you in any RHAT?
Their morph-code technology wasn't as desired; look at how many people don't even flash their BIOS.
The real problem with code morphing is that why would anyone pay for morphing code to x86 when x86 processors are so widely available? Now if they'd had the ability to code morph x86 to native *and* the ability to code morph the instruction set of (say) the Java Virtual Machine to native, then maybe we'd be talking. All the advantages of Java, but executing at native speed, plus compatibility with all x86 applications, and maybe SPARC too. Then they could have simply sold the company to Sun for it's next attempt at thin-client desktops. But what was the point of code morphing to only one target? This is something the VCs should have asked before investing a single dollar.
I would like to point out that if the workers owned the means of production, this wouldn't have happened.
But in a company like Transmeta - or indeed any high tech company whose value is its intellectual property - the workers do own the means of production. The company's product is the solidified thoughts of its professional staff. The staff own their own brains and their own educations and their own imaginations. If you've got those, what do you really need to be productive? A PC and a desk, and I bet most of them own those too. It's not like in old-style industries where the value of a business was in its physical assets.
Sadly, dot.communism doesn't protect you from the fundamental law of economics, which is that every participant in an viable economic system must produce at least as much as they consume. At the end of the day, TransMeta simply didn't sell anything that anyone else wanted to buy.
Depending on where you live in the USA, you may not have appropriate clothing for the UK; certainly, my Aussie wife is not yet fully prepared for my Colorado winters...
If you're in New York or New England, you'll have appropriate clothing for most of north-western Europe.
medical care. Australia's socialized medical system is efficient and user-friendly; and my wife is an asthmatic. We'll either have to get medical insurance here, or be prepared to drive to Canada whenever she needs more medications
You will be fine in the UK for emergency care, but you will definitely have to pay for dental and anything else.
The UK has similar anti-rabies regulations on pets.
We've no choice - blame the rabies-infested French!
Are you going to close your American credit card and bank accounts? If not, will they pay overseas postage to send you bills and statements? Do you have investments here that might be expensive to simply liquidate? Are you prepared to learn about your options and obligations under U.K. investment law, or can you afford professional help for all this?
I'm English and I've worked in the US and Europe. The financial side really depends on your bank, if it's some local operation (and by "local" I mean anything up to something the size of Barclays) then you're going to have to take care of setting up a new account, moving money and payments, etc, yourself. But if they're a global player like Citibank or HSBC (not the bit of HSBC that used to be Midland's high street operation) then it's much easier. Citibank, for example, will let you maintain parallel current accounts in difference currencies, move money between them without a commission, etc, and they have branches everywhere. Citibank branches look the same wherever you are, and they all speak English.
The only thing you might need to watch out for is repatriating money - not sure how that works from a tax perspective. In all the countries I've worked in, I've always been paid directly to my accounts in London (in whatever currency) rather than opening a local account.
and that's -if- you can get a work-permit. It's very, very difficult for foreign nationals to get work-permits in the U.K
It's easy, so long as you can get into France first. The next step is to throw away any identity documents you have (you may be able to sell them). Now make your way to Sangatte, where there is free accomodation and food while you make repeated attempts to smuggle yourself into the UK by stowing away on the Eurostar. Don't worry about the police, the French police don't care and will let you break into freight yards without lifting a finger, and the British police are so hamstrung by red tape that they won't be able to stop you without filling in a dozen forms first. When you arrive in the UK, pretend that you don't speak English. Pretty soon, you will get an apartment, free money from the taxpayer, everything you could want. Once you're sure about your SO, just get married, come out as an American, and you're all set.
First, a little background. C# was, is, and always will be, a Micro$oft invention. Like it did with SMB and OLE, not to mention DirectX and ZIP, M$ will have no reservations about mucking with C# just to break Mono compatibility.
More FUD. In fact, C# and the CLI are ECMA standards. Unlike, say, Java, which is controlled by a single vendor.
We all know how MS feels about non-MS operating systems. We all know they're using.NET as a way to lock people into Windows servers and desktops. There's NO WAY they're gonna hang out and let poor Linux play in their reindeer games.
FUD, fud fud. Get your complete C#/.NET development environment, including source code, for FreeBSD here.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, the new corporate scrutiny will only increase revenue for consulting firms, since the consulting firms are hired to "straighten out the books".
Not quite. PricewaterhouseCoopers are really two organizations. The consulting side does systems integration, large software implementations, and advises on supply chain management and so forth. It's separate from the accounting/auditing side, which will either become more profitable because more corporations need better accounting, or less profitable because the "Big 5" are no longer trusted by shareholders and corporations look further afield, to smaller (but still sizeable by anyone's standards) accounting firms.
IBM are buying the consulting side. Now's probably a good time to do that, since it will be cheap as not many corporates are spending a lot of money on consulting right now, but IBM can leverage it to support outsourcing, which they're big on (and corporations are spending money on, because it saves money).
I beg your pardon? I was under the impression that the point of public education was that democracy is not viable without it. Now we are talking about Malaysia here, but your comment seems to be more general than that...
Are you saying there is no public education under non-democratic regimes? The Soviet Empire, Cuba, China, even Saudi Arabia have public education. In those cases, the point of education is not the personal development of the "citizens", it is the reinforcement of the politically-enforced economic system.
Your people are all dying of Aids, the US / EU drug company that holds the patent charges you US$3000 per person per year for the drugs to give them a sustainably high quality of life.
I've never understood why people default to "evil corporations putting profits before lives" rather than "evil, corrupt governments misappropriating their taxpayer's money instead of spending it on healthcare".
Basically, the lack of medicine boils down to governments wanting to spend on prestige projects. They stole from their own populations, and now they want to steal from foreign corporations. And our governments are letting it happen. In the long term, everyone loses apart from those so-called officials. Particularly the ill, when the pharmaceutical industry realizes that it can make guaranteed profits by research drugs that won't get appropriated, like Viagra or Prozac instead of medicines.
All Boeing have to do is strap a superconducting ceramic disc rotating over powerful electromagnets upside down into one of their planes!
:-)
Powered, no doubt, by a slice of buttered toast strapped to the back of a cat!
But wait, how will cat-based purr-petual motion machine work if there's no gravity to pull the cat towards the floor? It's going to take all of Boeing's engineering talent to work that one out
If there is really no other software available to do what needs to be done, and your schools honestly do not have the money to pay for it... morally, I think it's okay for the schools to just copy it, legal or not. Knowledge trumps money.
Your argument simply doesn't hold water. Ultimately, a government regulates and subsidises education with taxpayer's money in order to increase the productivity of the economy. Yes, learning for the purpose of self-improvement is a worthy goal, but don't imagine for a second that is why the state school system exists as it does. It is an investment in the future cashflow of the nation.
My golden rule on software is, if you make money with it, you pay for it. I can overlook someone who has a copy of Photoshop that they use once or twice a year when they scan their vacation photos. But schools, along with investment banks and multinational corporations are literally the engines of the economy. They should pay for software like anyone else who is using it for economic gain.
A lot of software, though... you don't really need that commercial version, you can get something free, especially in educational institutions. If all you need is office software for writing papers, then get Linux and OpenOffice, don't pirate copies of Microsoft software.
There are free alternatives available. You mention writing papers; well they could use LaTeX. That they don't indicates that using commercial software is of tangible benefit to them - and that translates into economic advantage.
Also, this ruling would pretty much destroy the industry that develops software specifically for educational use.
If we put half as much $ and effort into figuring out how to cure diseases and end poverty, as we do into these fucking Dr. Strangelove, penis-waving weapons systems...
Oh, we already know how to prevent plagues and famines. Why do you think they've been unknown in the West (including Japan and Australia) for centuries? Because liberal, democratic capitalism pretty much works. The countries that do suffer from plagues and famines on a regular basis are anarchies or feudal states (varies parts of Africa) or Communist (North Korea) or under some other form of totalitarian government (Iraq, Afghanistan, until recently).
The situation will continue until one of two things happen. One possibility is that these countries establish governments and economies like ours. The other is that one or more Western powers simply conquers them and establishes an Empire. The British tried this, and it worked remarkably well, it was only when they got bored and went home that the former provinces of the Empire reverted to poverty and neglect. The US is doing this in Afghanistan as we speak, and will probably do it in Iraq at some point too (to get back on topic, maybe using laser weapons).
I have a question: how practical is this, really? The article tells us that you get two four-second shots, spaced four seconds apart, and the laser then needs 30 seconds to cool down. This is hardly what I'd call a practical battlefield weapon, especially given the modern war methodology of one well-coordinated, completely overwhelming attack. Why use a laser with such poor fire times?
The first rifles were single-shot muzzle-loaders, mostly made of wood, that required the user to mess around with gunpowder, flint and small lead balls. They were effective only over very short ranges, and it took a well trained user to get out more than one shot per minute. In the grand scheme of things, it didn't take them long to evolve from there into the 20mm Vulcan cannon firing 100 explosive rounds every second.
Only if that was the intended effect of the weapon. If it's a laser weapon that is designed for use against planes, anti-aircraft installations, and ground vehicles that could accidentally blind someone standing nearby, it's considered legit.
It's entertaining, but a little worrying to see how military lawyers interpret things like the Geneva Convention and other documents supposedly governing the acceptable conduct of war. One example is the use of White Phosphorous, a powerful incendiary distributed over a target area using explosives. It comes in everything from grenades to mortars to bombs. Due to the horrific burns it causes, it is prohibited for use against personnel, but can be used against materiel, i.e. equipment. This is a matter of interpretation, after all, rifles and backpacks are equipment, they just happen to often be found in close proximity to enemy soldiers!
It's important to understand that the West is supreme in battle not because of divine right or objective moral superiority, but rather because our culture has elevated warfare to its most efficient. It is debatable whether wholesale blinding of enemy soldiers (and indeed, any civilians who happen to be in the vicinity) is more or less humane than the traditional form of battle, in which some individuals are wounded and killed, but the majority, even in the defeated army, escape more-or-less unscathed.
Software employers, large or small, across the nation, concede that they receive huge numbers of re'sume's but reject most of them without even an interview. One does not have to be a ``techie'' to see the contradiction here. A 2% hiring rate might be unremarkable in other fields, but not in one in which there is supposed to be a ``desperate'' labor shortage. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants.
There's a dirty little secret at the heart of the IT industry, and that is that many - perhaps the majority - of people calling themselves "programmers" aren't actually competent to do that sort of work.
If you want to be an engineer (a real engineer, not a "software engineer") you need a 4-year degree from an accredited school, then to pass the EIT exam, then 4 years experience. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant, you have to have the education, qualification and experience or you cannot work - period.
What we have are a bunch of people with - at most - an associates degree and a copy of "Teach yourself XXX in 21 days" going out into the job market without a clue. It's these people who are responsible for HR discarding the majority of resumes without even looking at them. They see the salaries paid to real programmers and think they can get that without putting in the hard graft to get there.
Put it this way: Hollywood studios have many more people showing up for auditions than they have parts - does that mean there is an actor shortage? No, it just means that very few actors are capable of doing the job.
The solution to the IT recruitment problem is to give the jobs to the most qualified wherever they are from, and make the wannabes adjust their expectations to reality rather than destroying the industry out of sheer spite.
So what happens to the poor people who sold their citizenship. Must they leave the country or do they just slowly accumulate as a mass of poor residents who are no longer protected as citizens by US law.
They can go to Canada - the government looks after everyone there.
Without trying to sound arrogant, could it be that I was just more qualified than other candidates!? Does it occur to the people voting for this bill that there might be good education in other countries, too?
That's an excellent point. Certainly, the laws surrounding the export of crypto imply that US lawmakers believe that there are few if any qualified mathematicians outside of the US.
If you set up a credible company, that company can then provide you with a H1B - however the INS looks very closely to make sure that the company is real, so you can't just set up a shell to get yourself a visa.
Indeed. In fact, set up a company employing 10 or more Americans, and it pretty much guarantees at least a green card. Lots of individual INS employees are incompetent bureaucrats, but the organization as a whole knows where its bread's buttered.
Perhaps they could have an "editor" on duty whose job it is to "edit"?
/. marketing manager, whose job it is to maximize the page views and hence banner ad displays that slashdot generates on behalf of its sponsors. One way to do that is through posting controversial, sensationalist headlines.
No, because that would conflict with the duties of the
In other words, either "I'm too stupid to remember stuff I've looked up fifty times" or "I'm so inexperienced that I haven't looked those up very much." If you don't KNOW that SMTP is 25 and HTTP is 80, I don't want you working on my mail or web servers.
Without looking it up, tell me the ports for all the kerberos daemons. Or x400.
You forget - or perhaps are too inexperienced yourself to realize - that there is a lot more to the IT industry than the web or even the internet. Someone could be a highly skilled Unix administrator, and have never run a web server in a production setting. For example, how many public web servers are there running on Dynix? Not many I'd wager, but that particular Unix is common in transaction processing. Have you even heard of Dynix? Memorizing lists of ports is the hallmark of a wannabe.
If you tell me about ARP, DNS, and HTTP and you can name the port numbers and transport layers, that's fine. DHCP, load-balancing, firewalls, SSL, proxy servers, server-side processors, databases, that's all extra credit. If you can't talk about these things, you're not yet ready for a professional career in this industry.
/etc/services from time to time to look up a port number, and I look up stuff in the RFCs from time to time too. Your questions don't tell you anything about how the candidate would deal with a situation in which knowing the raw facts doesn't help, which is most troubleshooting situations.
These aren't useful questions, because port numbers and protocols are just something you can look up. I've used Unix for years, but I still grep
The B52 combat aircraft that are working in afganistan today were delivered in 1962 [af.mil]. I agree that they might have recieved some maintence in the interim, but the airframes are older than tha pilots in almost all cases. Now thats reliability.
You could send WW2 bombers into action in Afghanistan, it's not as if the locals have modern air defenses.
Everyone knows that frequent reboots prevents crashes.
The value of a reboot is that it restores the system to a known state. If you're depending on that system, you really don't want it to get into a state the designers never anticipated, because its behavior might be unpredictable. So in a sense, you are correct.
The i860 and i960 were supposed to take over the planet at one point, but it never seemed to happen.
The earliest version of Windows NT was written on the i860. The i860 machine was called the N-10, that's where the NT in NT comes from (other theories are "New Technology" and "Northern Telecom", but the NT product manager says it's from N-10 and I believe him). I expect the decision to mainly target x86 was just due to the sheer installed base, there was never a compelling enough reason for Intel, IBM, MS et al to move away from it. These days the i960 is used for Raster Image Processing (RIPing) in laser printers.
If it requires an inflight reboot, there's no doubt what OS it's running.
RH support: Thanks for calling Red Hat! How may we help you?
Pilot: "Uhh.. I'm spiraling towards the earth, both my engines are out, and my display says 'kernel panic' in white text on a black background."
RH Support: "And what is the system model?"
Pilot: "The the F-22 jet.."
RH support: If you read linux-kernel-bugtraq, you will see that you should have patched your kernel to 2.4.19-pre-alpha-revision-d before takeoff. But no problem, this is Linux after all. Do you have another F22 on your LAN? Just telnet in from there, su to root and restart sendmail.
Pilot: @#$*! Redhat! I'm switching to Debian if I survive!
RH support: Can I interest you in any RHAT?
Their morph-code technology wasn't as desired; look at how many people don't even flash their BIOS.
The real problem with code morphing is that why would anyone pay for morphing code to x86 when x86 processors are so widely available? Now if they'd had the ability to code morph x86 to native *and* the ability to code morph the instruction set of (say) the Java Virtual Machine to native, then maybe we'd be talking. All the advantages of Java, but executing at native speed, plus compatibility with all x86 applications, and maybe SPARC too. Then they could have simply sold the company to Sun for it's next attempt at thin-client desktops. But what was the point of code morphing to only one target? This is something the VCs should have asked before investing a single dollar.
I would like to point out that if the workers owned the means of production, this wouldn't have happened.
But in a company like Transmeta - or indeed any high tech company whose value is its intellectual property - the workers do own the means of production. The company's product is the solidified thoughts of its professional staff. The staff own their own brains and their own educations and their own imaginations. If you've got those, what do you really need to be productive? A PC and a desk, and I bet most of them own those too. It's not like in old-style industries where the value of a business was in its physical assets.
Sadly, dot.communism doesn't protect you from the fundamental law of economics, which is that every participant in an viable economic system must produce at least as much as they consume. At the end of the day, TransMeta simply didn't sell anything that anyone else wanted to buy.
Depending on where you live in the USA, you may not have appropriate clothing for the UK; certainly, my Aussie wife is not yet fully prepared for my Colorado winters...
If you're in New York or New England, you'll have appropriate clothing for most of north-western Europe.
medical care. Australia's socialized medical system is efficient and user-friendly; and my wife is an asthmatic. We'll either have to get medical insurance here, or be prepared to drive to Canada whenever she needs more medications
You will be fine in the UK for emergency care, but you will definitely have to pay for dental and anything else.
The UK has similar anti-rabies regulations on pets.
We've no choice - blame the rabies-infested French!
Are you going to close your American credit card and bank accounts? If not, will they pay overseas postage to send you bills and statements? Do you have investments here that might be expensive to simply liquidate? Are you prepared to learn about your options and obligations under U.K. investment law, or can you afford professional help for all this?
I'm English and I've worked in the US and Europe. The financial side really depends on your bank, if it's some local operation (and by "local" I mean anything up to something the size of Barclays) then you're going to have to take care of setting up a new account, moving money and payments, etc, yourself. But if they're a global player like Citibank or HSBC (not the bit of HSBC that used to be Midland's high street operation) then it's much easier. Citibank, for example, will let you maintain parallel current accounts in difference currencies, move money between them without a commission, etc, and they have branches everywhere. Citibank branches look the same wherever you are, and they all speak English.
The only thing you might need to watch out for is repatriating money - not sure how that works from a tax perspective. In all the countries I've worked in, I've always been paid directly to my accounts in London (in whatever currency) rather than opening a local account.
and that's -if- you can get a work-permit. It's very, very difficult for foreign nationals to get work-permits in the U.K
It's easy, so long as you can get into France first. The next step is to throw away any identity documents you have (you may be able to sell them). Now make your way to Sangatte, where there is free accomodation and food while you make repeated attempts to smuggle yourself into the UK by stowing away on the Eurostar. Don't worry about the police, the French police don't care and will let you break into freight yards without lifting a finger, and the British police are so hamstrung by red tape that they won't be able to stop you without filling in a dozen forms first. When you arrive in the UK, pretend that you don't speak English. Pretty soon, you will get an apartment, free money from the taxpayer, everything you could want. Once you're sure about your SO, just get married, come out as an American, and you're all set.
First, a little background. C# was, is, and always will be, a Micro$oft invention. Like it did with SMB and OLE, not to mention DirectX and ZIP, M$ will have no reservations about mucking with C# just to break Mono compatibility.
More FUD. In fact, C# and the CLI are ECMA standards. Unlike, say, Java, which is controlled by a single vendor.
We all know how MS feels about non-MS operating systems. We all know they're using .NET as a way to lock people into Windows servers and desktops. There's NO WAY they're gonna hang out and let poor Linux play in their reindeer games.
FUD, fud fud. Get your complete C#/.NET development environment, including source code, for FreeBSD here.