which means that C# is just another tool in your toolkit, another skill on your resume. I still prefer C++ to C# because I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface of the full power of C++, but I use C# to pay the bills.
And even further; for many programmers, C# is going to be actually much more enjoyable (it is actually a major improvements over C++ in many ways -- not perfect nor absolutely better, but more well-rounded). And I agree, it's generally very good to learn new things (languages, tools, techniques), especially when you have a chance to really use them right away (not just learning for learning's sake, at least not mostly).
It's risky to paint yourself in the corner, to become a niche expert. I know a few people who "just want to be an XML architect" ("I'd rather not learn programming, I just do XSLT"... quite funny), or "only focus on data modelling"; and their getting a new job is an order of magnitude harder than mine (as I try to have each new job be slightly different from the previous one).
If my employers start change everything to make it a job I don't want to do, I just look for a new one. Very different situations.
True, but I think that was exactly the point of the post: different people, different strategies -- there's no one canned answer. I, too, prefer having an exit plan (and have had that so far), but I would not rule out doing something more drastic if it really felt like the right thing to do. So rather than take the extreme example as the single guideline, it could be treated as the other end of the spectrum (the other one being "you end up being unemployed for 5 years and end up living under a bridge for bad timing and too early quitting"), to give one wider perspective on all things possible.
I know people don't hire older programmers, and being 27 this is something that's hainting me.
27 is nothing... seriously, when you are 50+ it may (unfortunately) become a problem, but you are not even close. And even at 50+ category, my ex-co-worker was actually hired from another country to work as a specialist by a US company: he's a hard-core programmer, and has been happy ever since (> 5 years). Getting the job wasn't quite as easy as it was for me (with half his age back then), but he got it (which, btw, was and is his dream job).
Being couple of years older than you are, and about starting my first 6-figure programming job (with ~10 years of experience), I'm not very concerned about my age. Right now it's good balance: enough experience and "wisdom", but still plenty of energy and ambitions left; and I hope that's the impression I make.
I'd say the great failing of UML or other design
languages or symbology is only that it is not tied to code in such a way that code changes back-propagate to the design document. Its just plain hard work to keep design and code on the same page
And I maintain that UML is to programmers what bicycles are to fish...
Sun is going to pull Open Solaris now that their financial situation has improved
Huh? While cheap-ass blade server revenues (and especially shipments) are up, expensive big-ass server revenues are down... and since former has razor thin margins, whereas latter does not, it's not given that their financial situation is positively changed by this. You may want to go read Sun's financial reports to see how well they are doing. It's bit like the optimism regarding Apple-clones back in 90s; growing the market share doesn't help if your company doesn't make money.
You may also want to read public filings by Sun, to check out their profitability and financial status; they give a pretty clear picture of how things are, at high level.
But even if the situation did improve, backtracking from the announcements would be a very foolish move (PR-wise), and considering necessary legal work Sun has already done to get S10 out there as Open Source, I find it very unlikely to happen in near future. In fact, if they did that, I'd consider it as the signal of the show coming to its end.... (i.e. it'd be a desperate move by a dying company)
And some of it isn't even crap, it's just the wrong tool for the job.
That's very true. Most 3rd party tools I have seen seem to have a specific use case for which they'd be pretty good match... but which is seldom the one PHBs expect it to be. Real crap usually exists in places where such a wrong tool for the job has been patched (by custom code) to do the job.
It is kind of good, though, that there's then always need for the tiger teams that solve the problems, usually using much less sophisticated solutions that Just Work.
If you have a grasp of the basics (...), and you know how to manage people, then you will do well
While there are many management/leadership skills that are useful in most situations, it's worth noting that there is a HUGE difference between various employees, depending on the domain.
If you think workers at your local McD are pretty much identical to the ones a surgical team, or software development group
(identical as in how managers interact with them), then you are in for a big surprise. Leading experts is different from managing your 9-to-5 dime-a-dozen workers. Both are challenges, but of different kind. I think words "managing" and "leading" imply the difference between managing one group compared to the other. You need not manage true experts; and there's bit less leadership one needs when dealing with uneducated (and often unmotivated) warm bodies.
I do agree with one of the most important things to do being running interference, however; although this mostly matters within high-tech big expert organizations (I doubt same is applicable to Mickey D, for example).
I don't know whether to be happy, or frightened, by the fact this is so common (i.e. I'm not the only who has witnessed this). Except for the firing part, this has happened at least 3 times so far for the (part of the) company I worked for. It always goes like that: managers are amazed shitless by the smooth demo salesdroids give.
Tech folks are more or less suspicious, voice their concers; but then their concerns are dismissed since "those damn engineers just want to built their own stuff". And guess what? These multi-million (!) dollar platforms prove to be far less than advertised and implied... needing plenty of patching, to do maybe 80% of what was decided is absolutely necessary. And the best part is that after wasting another hundred grand or two for consulting, missing deadlines and causing disruption (since old systems are EOL'ed too early), in the end company has to build the system in-house, with very limited time and budget. And the result is still better than the nicely demoed sucky 'solution' originally purchased.
Where this thing becomes vicious, however, is when the new set of managers and/or architects takes over, they promptly proceed to kill the fully functioning custom-built system... claiming cost savings and dozen other benefits. How? By purhcasing yet another crappy multi-million dollar system (usually CMS, sometimes xml/RDBMS-integration system, other times rules or business workflow engine -- whatever buzzword d'jour happens to be), leading to another fiasco.
I finally left the company, after getting "deja vu all over again": having to re-invent the third party dream for the third time (alas, I'm not exaggerating). But I'm sure the company will keep on doing its death spiral for a while -- it's still very stable company, finance-wise.
I don't mind "Why can't we..." at all. What you have to do is listen to what they are saying and try to understand why they are saying it.
I agree with you, but I think what the parent had problems with was third or fourth time he had to answer essentially the same question; not with the actual question itself.
That is, one of the most frustrating things in corporate world are people asking questions but either not listening to the answer, or not trying to really understand it... and who nonetheless keep on asking variations of the same question, in the same context, and possibly not even realizing they are doing it.
I, too, have no problem explaining myself, explaining my reasoning, and learning from these questions myself (that not everyone knows everything I do, nor do I always succesfully explain things in the first place, or take my time to explain my position). But, alas, like they say: there may not be stupid questions, but there are lots of inquisitive idiots... people who fail to learn from others, but keep on asking for questions/help. My experience is that most experts are like this: they are helpful when people ask questions, as long as people learn and grow that way. But when some people don't do that, they grow very irritated.
Btw, I may very well be wrong as I have a limited viewpoint: A commercial developer, supporting a family, who has stayed away from GPL and even LGPL projects as code I write generally has to be re-usable in my commercial projects.
Just a brief comment: many (most?) companies that use (L)GPL for their products use dual-licensing: as long as they have copyright for all of the code, they can both provide (L)GPL'ed Free version (to prevent derivative products from being closed, i.e. protection against commercial+proprietary competition), AND a for-fee version that has more traditional license, and that usually comes with less restrictions on licensee.
So in your case, assuming you wrote all the code, you can easily use (L)GPL for Free distributions, while still selling a non-open version for companies that do not want to touch a GPL product.
In a way, compenies' fear of GPL (which does exist, I know that part well... I'm an Open Source author as well) can be used for some monetary gain.:-)
Finally, regarding reusability of the code in your commercial projects: as long as you are the (sole) author of the code, absolutely nothing prevents you from using your code in non-open-source commericial projects, using any old license you choose; not just ones you have used earlier. Licenses are contracts between 2 parties: nothing mandates you to use just one contract ad infinitum.
Even if you have released the same code under license like GPL, you do not have any obligation to always license the code using GPL. You can well deploy it again using some other license, for your customer/client: your sources are not damaged in any way by your licensing of a copy of it under GPL. Obviously your customers would alternatively be free to pick up GPL'ed version you had, should they choose to, but likewise they don't have to, if you have licensed them a copy under more appropriate ("proprietary") license.
Restricting public radio is different than restricting the internet. If you want to hear a show with the word 'fuck' there are privatly owned radio solutions.
I don't see much any difference between the internet, and broadcasting. Can you explain why do you think they are?
The idea that the fact that since electromagnetic waves travel freely somehow makes broadcasting trespassing (which was used to justify violating the first amendment WRT radio/TV program censorship) is absurdly idiotic. In both cases people are free to ignore content, and they should be regulated similarly (that is, minimally). And what would those "privately owned radio solutions" be? Keep in mind that it's not just NPR that has to bleep out "indecent" words, but all broadcasters.
What value does the word 'fuck' add to anything anyway?
This is a rather silly argument. If I claimed your comments didn't add any value to the discussion, should I be able to censor it? (or vice versa) Point is, the power to censor individual ideas, concepts and words, is dangerous; and as such censoring "useless" words like fuck (shit, cock, tits, whatever the famous "can't say that on TV" words were) shouldn't be any easier than that of more "useful" words.
Besides, personally I do think that when properly used, words like "fuck" and "shit" have perfectly good use cases: to emphasize portions of message; to display respect or disrespect; and sometimes to add bit of shock value. Overuse will obviously reduce such effects, and diminish value of these great little words. Such words add to the dynamic range of the human language.
True. And I could add police and army as well... they just happen to be areas that are usually thought to be governments'/society's responsibilities, there are fewer plans to privatize those things.
Anyways, one of the reasons that "socialized medicine" is so much cheeper is because even with the large number of people not covered by employer health plans and government plans, patient outcomes are much better in the US than in other countries.
Measured how and by whom? I seriously doubt this is the case, although I do think that the well-to-do part of the population (of which I actually belong to) does get fairly good health-care. But over the whole population I'm very sceptic of claims of superior outcomes. Common indicators such as infant mortality and life expectancy do not support such claim (not that they are the only or the most reliable indicators, but they do seem to correlate with other estimates).
While I also agree that richer countries tend to naturally use more money on health-care, the ratio of GNP to health-care spending is also skewed, such that US standards of livings are not THAT much higher to fully explain the discrepancy.
My understanding is that the wide coverage is big part of affordability: for one, poor people can actually get medical care even before having fatal problems -- in US they tend to end up in ER, due to the lack of accessible preventive health-care.
And that's expensive thing to do, compared to the early treatment alternatives.
And obviously a nation-wide system has much better bargaining position, regarding pharmaceutical industry (Bush and his ilk may whine as long as they want about "unfair" tactics other countries use -- other countries do realize that they are in fact in position to use sensible regulation to their advantage; just like USA uses its economic and military power when bargaining with other governments). And finally, while most people are quick to point out governmental bureaucracy and overhead, few realize that big corporations are as bad if not worse -- they not only have similar overhead (from CEOs cocaine habit to mid-level management on salary continuation plan!), but also the need to channel profits to their owners,
to add to the basic costs.
So while I also happen to agree with US not having a pure laissez-faire health-care system, I do not think that's the problem at all. Even if it was done in libertarian manner, it would still end up being overly expensive, inefficient, and ultimately unfair system.
We've built our own 2 way servers and they compile nearly as fast.
There's obviously some added premium for the Sun logo, but do keep in mind that much of the price comes from premium components used (to improve reliability, and allow hot-swapping). And although kernel compilation gives some indication of performance, scalability of actual services being run on the system (db/app/web servers, most likely) is generally better than that of kernel compilation (which doesn't get fully parallel with make, due to linearity of things like linking).
So 4-way system may scale nicely, and be able to roughly do the work of 2-way system (for db/app/web servers), but be bit less maintenance work.
The other thing, too, is that convenience of just buying something off the shelf is also worth something. I've built my own PC systems for years, but right now I'd rather just let someone else do the monkey work (assembly, smoke testing) and concentrate on my actual job.
Well, I think they actually officially support multiple OSes, so Linux flavours (SuSE, Red Hat) are not the only things that it can run.
Solaris x86 is obviously supported too, and maybe others (Win2k probably). And chances are FreeBSD would run on it too, although probably not officially supported.
But getting the complete list would require reading TFA.:-)
I am of the opinion that free enterprise can always provide a service cheper than a government bureaucracy.
I disagree with your opinion.:-)
But at least opinions can be changed with facts... it'd be worse if you blindly "believed" it, like many here do.
Thing is, there are areas where non-profit organizations (governments included) can and do provide cheaper (better, more efficient, more complete) service. These are mostly in areas of health care, education and infrastructure. For example, most other western countries are what many rightist politicans would consider "socialistic" health care: such systems provide for better coverage (everyone gets treated, no medical bankruptcy if you get cancer etc. etc.), at about half the price (per-capita health care spending ratio between US and other industrialized countries). Same applies to education (interestingly enough, even the cost ratio is about the same: 2-to-1 in favour of society-sponsored system). And in the infrastructure area (where municipal networks woudl be), even US has government run entities like US Post Office... so there has to be something good in there.
In fact, it can help to apply for a patent even if you have no hope of ever getting one since the publication of it can be used as prior art against anyone else trying to patent the same thing.
While true, it would be less expensive to use an alternative methods, such as writing and publishing a "defensive publication". There are (non-peer-reviewed, pay-by-author) magazines that are specifically designed for this, AND read by patent officers (as in indexed for DBs they use for prior art searches). This is a relatively inexpensive way of establishing more prior art. Obviously there are cheaper methods too; it just depends on how certain one wants to be that USPTO is aware of such prior art.
I have seen my employer do this for things they don't think are worth patenting (outside core interests of the company), but are interesting and novel enough that lesser investment is warranted as a protective measure. Or at least that's my interpretation -- lawyers seldom comment on how and why they choose one method over another (that they do defensive publication I know for a fact, just not reasoning).
but for everyday food it's Ok to keep even your cans in refrigerator and consume them within several months. If they were prepared properly, sealed while hot, there is really no need for preservatives.
I fully disagree. This is one of those cases where I just would not trust minimum wage employees in food processing plants to be 100% reliable. All it takes is one of sausages (or other meat product) I ever eat to be in the 0.001% (or whatever error rate it'd be) category. And that one instance could from a deli sandwich, restaurant dinner, or from a home-cooked meal. Thousands of chances of something go wrong enough to cause a fatal accident.
It is true that the proper process can (and should) be used to remove clostr. botulium (that produces the neurotoxin botulin), I just don't have enough faith in the whole food processing chain to ALWAYS do that, each and every time.
And that goes back to the lethality of botulin -- if it was just, say, nasty diarrhea I'd suffer, yeah, who cares, but it's not.
And on top of that, there's no substantial proof of nitrites (for example) having ANY side effects (some studies in 70s implied there might be, but those have largely been refuted).
Botulism lethality depends on the exact toxin, but seems to be around 3ng/kg for Type A. That's friggin' scary, to be honest. It doesn't take much to make that, and it looks like it can kill very quickly.
Indeed! And that's why I personally despise ignorant "preservatives are just EVIL" folks...
I much rather have my meat products without botulin, than without nitrites, thank you very much. While latter just might have negative long-term side effects in humans (or as likely does not...), former has sudden fatal main effect of causing death.
It's pretty obvious that Gates' attitude to patents etc will hchange depending on whether he's on the giving or the receiving end.
Keep in mind, though, that even back in -91 mr. Gates was a multi-millionaire leading a rather big software company. So he was hardly a broke hobbyist. Microsoft wasn't quite a monopoly back then (it took them few more years), but on their track to becoming one.
A billion people watching Princess Di's funeral, or 9/11 -- ok, so a billion tv sets around the world turn on,
...
the OJ Simpson trial, ditto
Interesting point, but one minor nit-picking: as far as I recall, OJ trial really was not much of an event in itself outside US of A (he wasn't very well-known back then, the crime in itself was a dime-a-dozen national one without international significance etc.): the most interest from outside was regarding the weird fascination americans had with the trial.:-)
As to showing the slides: I think the simplest explanation is that since the slides were shown in somewhat regular interval, it's rather normal for one to anticipate next nasty picture... i.e. one really need not be a fortune-teller to know what happens next ("gee, I've been shown 28 pictures, perhaps I'll be shown couple of more too?").
If you cared to read about the actual complaints, they specifically talk about first 4 years of Bush administration, AND contrast it to the time with the previous administration. There's apparently a striking difference (specifically on direct pressure to guide the results), based on the interviews they did (which may or may not be skewed -- I'd assume they are not, knowing how much scientist would HATE non-scientific or clearly biased polls that were used to "represent them").
So your 15 year time frame is a straw-man argument if there ever was one.
Similar concerns have been voiced by many other science-interest groups; read pretty much any Scientific American editorial (or, even National Geographic) to learn more.
By that reasoning, the composition majors should have to be able to perform their compositions flawlessly on whatever instruments are necessary.
No, I think that composition majors should have to be able to play at least ONE instrument, with moderate skills. Without such skill, they wouldn't have a clue as to limitations of any instruments.
And this, I believe, is what those "but programming is monkey job" architect-wannabes are missing. As much as I agree that the most important things is understanding things that are important regarding computer languages (from discrete maths to CPU design and compiler theory), I also think that it is essential to be fluent in at least one real life programming language.
I try not to do too many "ME TOO" replies, but here I have to say I agree 110%. And I'm glad someone points out the problems with fake praise -- to me the only thing worse than not giving/getting positive feedback when some is deserved, is getting such feedback when none is deserved ("I REALLY appreciate you coming to work on time, and spending full 8 hours at your desk... keep up the good work!" ).
The original poster was actually referring to a specialization of Pauling's rule of optimal Vitamin C doses ("double the dose until you get diarrhea; then lower it back down until you get rid of it, then you are set"). May work for those doses, but definitely not with people: people break (get de-motivated) fairly easily, so it's important to avoid the breaking point.
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And even further; for many programmers, C# is going to be actually much more enjoyable (it is actually a major improvements over C++ in many ways -- not perfect nor absolutely better, but more well-rounded). And I agree, it's generally very good to learn new things (languages, tools, techniques), especially when you have a chance to really use them right away (not just learning for learning's sake, at least not mostly). It's risky to paint yourself in the corner, to become a niche expert. I know a few people who "just want to be an XML architect" ("I'd rather not learn programming, I just do XSLT"... quite funny), or "only focus on data modelling"; and their getting a new job is an order of magnitude harder than mine (as I try to have each new job be slightly different from the previous one).
True, but I think that was exactly the point of the post: different people, different strategies -- there's no one canned answer. I, too, prefer having an exit plan (and have had that so far), but I would not rule out doing something more drastic if it really felt like the right thing to do. So rather than take the extreme example as the single guideline, it could be treated as the other end of the spectrum (the other one being "you end up being unemployed for 5 years and end up living under a bridge for bad timing and too early quitting"), to give one wider perspective on all things possible.
27 is nothing... seriously, when you are 50+ it may (unfortunately) become a problem, but you are not even close. And even at 50+ category, my ex-co-worker was actually hired from another country to work as a specialist by a US company: he's a hard-core programmer, and has been happy ever since (> 5 years). Getting the job wasn't quite as easy as it was for me (with half his age back then), but he got it (which, btw, was and is his dream job).
Being couple of years older than you are, and about starting my first 6-figure programming job (with ~10 years of experience), I'm not very concerned about my age. Right now it's good balance: enough experience and "wisdom", but still plenty of energy and ambitions left; and I hope that's the impression I make.
And I maintain that UML is to programmers what bicycles are to fish...
Huh? While cheap-ass blade server revenues (and especially shipments) are up, expensive big-ass server revenues are down... and since former has razor thin margins, whereas latter does not, it's not given that their financial situation is positively changed by this. You may want to go read Sun's financial reports to see how well they are doing. It's bit like the optimism regarding Apple-clones back in 90s; growing the market share doesn't help if your company doesn't make money. You may also want to read public filings by Sun, to check out their profitability and financial status; they give a pretty clear picture of how things are, at high level.
But even if the situation did improve, backtracking from the announcements would be a very foolish move (PR-wise), and considering necessary legal work Sun has already done to get S10 out there as Open Source, I find it very unlikely to happen in near future. In fact, if they did that, I'd consider it as the signal of the show coming to its end.... (i.e. it'd be a desperate move by a dying company)
That's very true. Most 3rd party tools I have seen seem to have a specific use case for which they'd be pretty good match... but which is seldom the one PHBs expect it to be. Real crap usually exists in places where such a wrong tool for the job has been patched (by custom code) to do the job.
It is kind of good, though, that there's then always need for the tiger teams that solve the problems, usually using much less sophisticated solutions that Just Work.
While there are many management/leadership skills that are useful in most situations, it's worth noting that there is a HUGE difference between various employees, depending on the domain. If you think workers at your local McD are pretty much identical to the ones a surgical team, or software development group (identical as in how managers interact with them), then you are in for a big surprise. Leading experts is different from managing your 9-to-5 dime-a-dozen workers. Both are challenges, but of different kind. I think words "managing" and "leading" imply the difference between managing one group compared to the other. You need not manage true experts; and there's bit less leadership one needs when dealing with uneducated (and often unmotivated) warm bodies.
I do agree with one of the most important things to do being running interference, however; although this mostly matters within high-tech big expert organizations (I doubt same is applicable to Mickey D, for example).
Where this thing becomes vicious, however, is when the new set of managers and/or architects takes over, they promptly proceed to kill the fully functioning custom-built system... claiming cost savings and dozen other benefits. How? By purhcasing yet another crappy multi-million dollar system (usually CMS, sometimes xml/RDBMS-integration system, other times rules or business workflow engine -- whatever buzzword d'jour happens to be), leading to another fiasco.
I finally left the company, after getting "deja vu all over again": having to re-invent the third party dream for the third time (alas, I'm not exaggerating). But I'm sure the company will keep on doing its death spiral for a while -- it's still very stable company, finance-wise.
I agree with you, but I think what the parent had problems with was third or fourth time he had to answer essentially the same question; not with the actual question itself. That is, one of the most frustrating things in corporate world are people asking questions but either not listening to the answer, or not trying to really understand it... and who nonetheless keep on asking variations of the same question, in the same context, and possibly not even realizing they are doing it.
I, too, have no problem explaining myself, explaining my reasoning, and learning from these questions myself (that not everyone knows everything I do, nor do I always succesfully explain things in the first place, or take my time to explain my position). But, alas, like they say: there may not be stupid questions, but there are lots of inquisitive idiots... people who fail to learn from others, but keep on asking for questions/help. My experience is that most experts are like this: they are helpful when people ask questions, as long as people learn and grow that way. But when some people don't do that, they grow very irritated.
Just a brief comment: many (most?) companies that use (L)GPL for their products use dual-licensing: as long as they have copyright for all of the code, they can both provide (L)GPL'ed Free version (to prevent derivative products from being closed, i.e. protection against commercial+proprietary competition), AND a for-fee version that has more traditional license, and that usually comes with less restrictions on licensee.
So in your case, assuming you wrote all the code, you can easily use (L)GPL for Free distributions, while still selling a non-open version for companies that do not want to touch a GPL product. In a way, compenies' fear of GPL (which does exist, I know that part well... I'm an Open Source author as well) can be used for some monetary gain. :-)
Finally, regarding reusability of the code in your commercial projects: as long as you are the (sole) author of the code, absolutely nothing prevents you from using your code in non-open-source commericial projects, using any old license you choose; not just ones you have used earlier. Licenses are contracts between 2 parties: nothing mandates you to use just one contract ad infinitum. Even if you have released the same code under license like GPL, you do not have any obligation to always license the code using GPL. You can well deploy it again using some other license, for your customer/client: your sources are not damaged in any way by your licensing of a copy of it under GPL. Obviously your customers would alternatively be free to pick up GPL'ed version you had, should they choose to, but likewise they don't have to, if you have licensed them a copy under more appropriate ("proprietary") license.
I don't see much any difference between the internet, and broadcasting. Can you explain why do you think they are? The idea that the fact that since electromagnetic waves travel freely somehow makes broadcasting trespassing (which was used to justify violating the first amendment WRT radio/TV program censorship) is absurdly idiotic. In both cases people are free to ignore content, and they should be regulated similarly (that is, minimally). And what would those "privately owned radio solutions" be? Keep in mind that it's not just NPR that has to bleep out "indecent" words, but all broadcasters.
What value does the word 'fuck' add to anything anyway?
This is a rather silly argument. If I claimed your comments didn't add any value to the discussion, should I be able to censor it? (or vice versa) Point is, the power to censor individual ideas, concepts and words, is dangerous; and as such censoring "useless" words like fuck (shit, cock, tits, whatever the famous "can't say that on TV" words were) shouldn't be any easier than that of more "useful" words.
Besides, personally I do think that when properly used, words like "fuck" and "shit" have perfectly good use cases: to emphasize portions of message; to display respect or disrespect; and sometimes to add bit of shock value. Overuse will obviously reduce such effects, and diminish value of these great little words. Such words add to the dynamic range of the human language.
True. And I could add police and army as well... they just happen to be areas that are usually thought to be governments'/society's responsibilities, there are fewer plans to privatize those things.
Measured how and by whom? I seriously doubt this is the case, although I do think that the well-to-do part of the population (of which I actually belong to) does get fairly good health-care. But over the whole population I'm very sceptic of claims of superior outcomes. Common indicators such as infant mortality and life expectancy do not support such claim (not that they are the only or the most reliable indicators, but they do seem to correlate with other estimates).
While I also agree that richer countries tend to naturally use more money on health-care, the ratio of GNP to health-care spending is also skewed, such that US standards of livings are not THAT much higher to fully explain the discrepancy.
My understanding is that the wide coverage is big part of affordability: for one, poor people can actually get medical care even before having fatal problems -- in US they tend to end up in ER, due to the lack of accessible preventive health-care. And that's expensive thing to do, compared to the early treatment alternatives. And obviously a nation-wide system has much better bargaining position, regarding pharmaceutical industry (Bush and his ilk may whine as long as they want about "unfair" tactics other countries use -- other countries do realize that they are in fact in position to use sensible regulation to their advantage; just like USA uses its economic and military power when bargaining with other governments). And finally, while most people are quick to point out governmental bureaucracy and overhead, few realize that big corporations are as bad if not worse -- they not only have similar overhead (from CEOs cocaine habit to mid-level management on salary continuation plan!), but also the need to channel profits to their owners, to add to the basic costs.
So while I also happen to agree with US not having a pure laissez-faire health-care system, I do not think that's the problem at all. Even if it was done in libertarian manner, it would still end up being overly expensive, inefficient, and ultimately unfair system.
There's obviously some added premium for the Sun logo, but do keep in mind that much of the price comes from premium components used (to improve reliability, and allow hot-swapping). And although kernel compilation gives some indication of performance, scalability of actual services being run on the system (db/app/web servers, most likely) is generally better than that of kernel compilation (which doesn't get fully parallel with make, due to linearity of things like linking). So 4-way system may scale nicely, and be able to roughly do the work of 2-way system (for db/app/web servers), but be bit less maintenance work.
The other thing, too, is that convenience of just buying something off the shelf is also worth something. I've built my own PC systems for years, but right now I'd rather just let someone else do the monkey work (assembly, smoke testing) and concentrate on my actual job.
Well, I think they actually officially support multiple OSes, so Linux flavours (SuSE, Red Hat) are not the only things that it can run. Solaris x86 is obviously supported too, and maybe others (Win2k probably). And chances are FreeBSD would run on it too, although probably not officially supported. But getting the complete list would require reading TFA. :-)
I disagree with your opinion. :-)
But at least opinions can be changed with facts... it'd be worse if you blindly "believed" it, like many here do.
Thing is, there are areas where non-profit organizations (governments included) can and do provide cheaper (better, more efficient, more complete) service. These are mostly in areas of health care, education and infrastructure. For example, most other western countries are what many rightist politicans would consider "socialistic" health care: such systems provide for better coverage (everyone gets treated, no medical bankruptcy if you get cancer etc. etc.), at about half the price (per-capita health care spending ratio between US and other industrialized countries). Same applies to education (interestingly enough, even the cost ratio is about the same: 2-to-1 in favour of society-sponsored system). And in the infrastructure area (where municipal networks woudl be), even US has government run entities like US Post Office... so there has to be something good in there.
While true, it would be less expensive to use an alternative methods, such as writing and publishing a "defensive publication". There are (non-peer-reviewed, pay-by-author) magazines that are specifically designed for this, AND read by patent officers (as in indexed for DBs they use for prior art searches). This is a relatively inexpensive way of establishing more prior art. Obviously there are cheaper methods too; it just depends on how certain one wants to be that USPTO is aware of such prior art.
I have seen my employer do this for things they don't think are worth patenting (outside core interests of the company), but are interesting and novel enough that lesser investment is warranted as a protective measure. Or at least that's my interpretation -- lawyers seldom comment on how and why they choose one method over another (that they do defensive publication I know for a fact, just not reasoning).
I fully disagree. This is one of those cases where I just would not trust minimum wage employees in food processing plants to be 100% reliable. All it takes is one of sausages (or other meat product) I ever eat to be in the 0.001% (or whatever error rate it'd be) category. And that one instance could from a deli sandwich, restaurant dinner, or from a home-cooked meal. Thousands of chances of something go wrong enough to cause a fatal accident.
It is true that the proper process can (and should) be used to remove clostr. botulium (that produces the neurotoxin botulin), I just don't have enough faith in the whole food processing chain to ALWAYS do that, each and every time. And that goes back to the lethality of botulin -- if it was just, say, nasty diarrhea I'd suffer, yeah, who cares, but it's not. And on top of that, there's no substantial proof of nitrites (for example) having ANY side effects (some studies in 70s implied there might be, but those have largely been refuted).
Indeed! And that's why I personally despise ignorant "preservatives are just EVIL" folks... I much rather have my meat products without botulin, than without nitrites, thank you very much. While latter just might have negative long-term side effects in humans (or as likely does not...), former has sudden fatal main effect of causing death.
Keep in mind, though, that even back in -91 mr. Gates was a multi-millionaire leading a rather big software company. So he was hardly a broke hobbyist. Microsoft wasn't quite a monopoly back then (it took them few more years), but on their track to becoming one.
the OJ Simpson trial, ditto
Interesting point, but one minor nit-picking: as far as I recall, OJ trial really was not much of an event in itself outside US of A (he wasn't very well-known back then, the crime in itself was a dime-a-dozen national one without international significance etc.): the most interest from outside was regarding the weird fascination americans had with the trial. :-)
As to showing the slides: I think the simplest explanation is that since the slides were shown in somewhat regular interval, it's rather normal for one to anticipate next nasty picture... i.e. one really need not be a fortune-teller to know what happens next ("gee, I've been shown 28 pictures, perhaps I'll be shown couple of more too?").
So your 15 year time frame is a straw-man argument if there ever was one. Similar concerns have been voiced by many other science-interest groups; read pretty much any Scientific American editorial (or, even National Geographic) to learn more.
No, I think that composition majors should have to be able to play at least ONE instrument, with moderate skills. Without such skill, they wouldn't have a clue as to limitations of any instruments.
And this, I believe, is what those "but programming is monkey job" architect-wannabes are missing. As much as I agree that the most important things is understanding things that are important regarding computer languages (from discrete maths to CPU design and compiler theory), I also think that it is essential to be fluent in at least one real life programming language.
The original poster was actually referring to a specialization of Pauling's rule of optimal Vitamin C doses ("double the dose until you get diarrhea; then lower it back down until you get rid of it, then you are set"). May work for those doses, but definitely not with people: people break (get de-motivated) fairly easily, so it's important to avoid the breaking point.