It's really hard to say from your post (Where are you? Are you willing to move? What was your three years of experience in?) but my immediate reaction to your post is "you're talking to the wrong recruiters". When recruiters call me about jobs they want to get more specifics about which distros I've worked with, what daemons I've got specific experience with, or my level of experience with integration of *nix systems into Windows environments. There's lots of of *nix jobs out there, a technical recruiter that hasn't heard of Linux is either very highly specialized, an idiot, or a generalist recruiter trying to fill some odd tech job that landed on his desk.
What you need to do is find recruiters that know WTF they're doing in the tech industry. These guys aren't usually technologists themselves, but they know the lingo, the buzzwords, and most importantly for you, they know how it relates to what you've got on your resume. Normally they work for national firms that specialize in finding technology professionals for companies that need more than "MCP with three years of experience" or "Four years Java programming experience". I'm not saying this is going to solve your problem (these guys are subject to the same problems of wanting documented experience in every minuscule technology on a requirement document that any other recruiter can be), but at least you won't have to worry about whether the guy is going to laugh at you because he doesn't anything about the field.
On the experience front... have you considered volunteer work? Either maybe volunteering your services to a local charity to help them with their infrastructure (for IT/admin type experience), getting into an OSS project (for development type experience), or even offering your services (with specific terms and conditions) to a friend or family member's business to help them out and get you resume fodder? I don't know how much it'll help to be honest, but it sure can't hurt and at least you're not sitting around surrounded by tech books and bitterness.
Just never give your name to "Cybercoders". I am primarily a senior level systems and network guy, but I once programmed some simple stuff in Java so it's on my resume. I get fricken "Senior Java Programmer" pushes from them on a weekly (occasionally daily) basis. Even assuming I wanted these jobs I'm not even remotely qualified. I could learn what they need, I have no doubt, but since most of the jobs are 3-6 month contract gigs by the time I did learn it I'd be looking for a new job anyway.
YMMV, but in my experience there are three types of "low level" jobs in IT (not programming per se, though there are definite corollaries here, but "support IT"):
1) Low level tech support grunt for a large company. You're going to be dealing with nothing but users. They are the entire focus of your life, if you get to deal with an "obscure network and infrastructure problem" it's purely by accident because your user happened to discover it. Even then, since you probably have minimal access to servers and network equipment, the best you'll probably be able to do is escalate it.
2) Systems/network admin for a small company or facility. You'll still have to deal with users. You're probably the entire IT department, or at best the junior member of a very small team (all of whom want to push user issues off to you for the same reason you don't want to do them). On the bright side you're far more likely to be directly involved in building, deploying, and supporting the infrastructure. On the down side, unless it's either a really odd company or in the infrastructure business, the stuff will be incredibly vanilla. Windows AD and file servers attached to a few workstations on one or two logical networks and getting to the Internet via some form of SDSL. Probably a firewall appliance sitting between you and the DSL modem, and, if the company actually hosts its own Internet facing presence (most small companies don't), a small DMZ with the web and mail server. Not much for obscure here.
3) Data center lackey for a large company. On the bright side, no users. On the downside you probably mostly haul boxes, rack system, replace parts, and make accounts. If you're both smart and lucky though you might be able to get yourself in good with the higher level guys and they'll trust simpler (for relative values of "simple") problems to you.
Three offer the best possibility for what you want, though you usually have to be patient. Two is how I came up, and frankly I thought it was the best overall situation. You'll have to deal with users, a lot, but I don't really mind users to be honest (I'm a fairly social person, IT geek or not). The thing is, you pretty much to get see every aspect of IT. It's all on a smaller scale of course, but you actually get to do the planning, executing, and maintenance of your very own setup. You don't get a lot of obscure problems, but frankly those sound a lot sexier when you're sitting in college looking for a challenge than when you have a guy breathing down your neck wanting to know when things will be back up while you're still trying to figure out what the Hell happened in the first place.
Where do you get a love it or leave it attitude in my post? I think there's lots of things wrong with this country. I think the way we do airport security is wrong (as I've said about 15 times in this thread). I'm just saying that this particular argument for this particular issue is fallacious. The 4th amendment prevents the government from *forcing you* to submit a search. There is no force here. You either voluntarily submit to the search, or you don't fly commercial air. If there were no travel alternatives to commercial air, their might be a stronger case for this being "force", but there are. Lots of them. Some are even faster, though generally more expensive.
I only recently heard about this... If it's true it's complete bullshit and I won't disagree that it's a violation of the 4th amendment. They can stop you from boarding the plane without a search, if you turn around and leave to take a train instead, hey, that's your business.
Any argument can be reduced to absurdity. The absurd reduction of your is that if the government has no right to search anyone without a warrant ever, then it essentially has no right to any secure facilities at all. Courthouses, military bases, police stations, they should all take down their security check points and let anyone wander in or out with anything they want. Hey prisons to! We don't need to check people walking into prisons for weapons they may turn over to inmates.
There are lots of places you can't go without some form of security check, because of the danger to 1) yourself 2) others 3) information the government has deemed sensitive. Airplanes are one of them. Right to movement is certainly a right. You can move freely throughout the country without documentation, just not necessarily on a commercial aircraft.
And explosives taking a wing off while over a heavily populated area wouldn't accomplish the same basic thing as getting into the cabin? A little less precise maybe, but still a massive potential for death and destruction.
The ninth amendment says nothing about airplanes. It say you may have some other rights. One might just as well interrupt that as having a right not to have airplanes run into your buildings. The fourth amendment says the government can't force you to submit to a search. They're not forcing you. You don't HAVE to get on that plane. They're not going to send you jail if you don't submit to the search, they're not letting you get on the plane.
The fact that you can't conveniently get across the country without getting on the plane isn't the government's problem. They aren't preventing you from traveling, they're preventing you from traveling via commercial aircraft. You could take a private plane. You could drive. You could take a bus or a train. You could walk. Your 9 AM meeting is not the government's problem. Airplanes running into buildings are the government's problem.
Again, I'm not defending the TSA or the way we do airport security, but saying that he 4th amendment protects you from airport security is just stupid. The government cannot force you to submit to a search of your person without a warrant, it can and will force you to submit to a search of your person before allowing you into certain areas of its sphere of control. As long as the only penalty is not allowing you into that area, there's no legal issue.
What if it had been an hour later and the buildings had been full? What if it had been an older building that wasn't designed to collapse inward? Just because mass destruction wasn't caused, doesn't mean that there isn't the potential for it. A poison gas bomb detonated in the middle of a desert may only kill a few people, or no one at all. It's still a potential mass weapon. Again I'm not saying TSA isn't broken, in fact I say quite the opposite, just that there is a case for securing aircraft.
Re:What's the deal with the rush of TSA stories re
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TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old
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· Score: 2, Insightful
While there are lots of objection to TSA's tactics, this isn't one. Flying isn't a right. They aren't saying "submit to a search" which would be a clear violation of your rights. They're saying "submit to a search or you can't get on the plane". You have no intrinsic right to get on the plane, they can be put preconditions on your doing so. There is a compelling argument for aircraft security (air*port* security is really a bit of a misnomer, we put the security in the airport for convenience, but it's intended to secure the aircraft). Even ignoring the safety of your fellow passenger and the crew, it's a huge multi-ton craft moving at incredibly high speed and maneuverable on a three dimensional axis; in short a potential weapon of mass destruction.
That said, we do aircraft security poorly. Current methods are crude, invasive, and let through as much as they stop. What's the right answer? I don't know. We clearly need some form of aircraft security, but the way we do it now is reactive, incomplete, and embarrassing for everyone involved. Not to mention a huge waste of time, and causing little girls to cry.
Yeah the real trick here is the infrastructure left over from the old industrial economy. Detroit and other rust belt areas might be able to pull something like this off, but $randomruralcounty isn't going to have everything a datacenter needs hooked up and ready to go.
It's not that simple though. There's lots of things to consider in these kinds of deals. Typically the corporation itself is given excellent tax breaks (though they usually pay some pittance) , but they provide jobs (in this case pretty good ones most likely) which leads to income tax and lower unemployment. They attract new people to the area which increases sales and property taxes. There's good political capital in being able to point at the big new employer you brought in. They buy energy, water, and bandwidth which is either sold directly by the local government (for a small profit) or taxed by the local government. They provide commerce to local business, which do pay taxes (not to mention that *they* hire more people, which means more income tax, and more "lower unemployment" political capital). All that for giving away a bit of money that you never had in the first place. I'm probably not even scratching the surface either.
My first guess is "no" to the first, but "yes" to the second. I could be completely off base of course, but my read would be that software development will be done in headquarters locations, but given that these are *data* centers, most of what they'll need will probably be systems and network guys. There may be some software development jobs associated with writing internal apps and scripts needed directly by the data center, but probably not a huge number. Again, I don't work for any of these companies, and I have no idea how their internal processes work, that's just how I'd do it.
It's all about perspective. The music of the 60's, 70's and 80's is over and we can look back on it and pick up the best of it and point to how wonderful it is. 90's music is starting to move the same way. Current music is, well, current. There's a lot of it, it's coming out all the time, and we don't have any perspective on it. We like a song here or there, but they slide by in the noise of all the mediocre to awful crap. 20-25 years from now when it's digested and only the really lasting or worthwhile stuff is left, we (or more likely people younger than us) can say how wonderful the music of the 00's was. Remember that for every enduring classic of the 80's there were 50 "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"s. For every haunting melody of the 70's there were 50 "Disco Fever"s.
This is going to sound totally heartless and awful, and I totally don't mean it like that, but Robert Jordan dying was probably the best thing to happen to the Wheel of Time. It wasn't a great thing to have happen, I'm sure his wife and family miss him, and frankly he died a rather lingering and unpleasant death that I wouldn't wish on an enemy let alone a guy who filled so many pleasurable hours of my time with the first 5 or 6 books of the series; but it was good for the Wheel of Time. Jordan had a lot of strengths as a writer, but finishing a damned story wasn't one of them. Sanderson has done a really good job of taking the notes and material and turning them into something with a finite end date. I'm firmly convinced that had Jordan remained healthy there would have been at least 6 more WoT books each fully of lovingly detailed descriptions of Rand's latest coat. Sanderson was able to make use of Jordan's immense skill in plotting and characterization while bringing his own rather brisker and more active writing style into play.
And the gold core, platinum coated speaker wire, right? I mean, right? I spent $5000 on these things, surely you're not telling me they weren't worth it because that would totally... oh... I think I need to lie down a sec...
Not to fanboi out, because I'm well aware of OSX's problems as well as it's advantages, but I think Apple has it right in this case. Their UI always seems snappier than either Linux or Windows. I'm fairly certain their scheduler is written to highly prioritize foreground tasks. There's advantages and disadvantages to any model of course, but since I personally am an inpatient bastard, I like an OS that prioritizes what I'm doing right now over whatever I'm running in the background or whatever it feels like it needs to be doing at the moment.
I think this is some sort of heresy against the great gods of geekdom. Users should want what we want them to want, clearly they can't be trusted to figure out their own wants.
Seriously though? It's a good idea, but only a few companies in the Linux business have the resources to do it on any kind of scale. Most of those are the companies that would benefit least from the tests in the short term, because they release on such a conservative schedule that it might be years before they run a kernel with the improvements suggested. There's advantages and disadvantages to any model and one of the disadvantages of the very distributed way "Linux" is developed is that it's hard to get changes and improvements to whole OS. Note that I put Linux in quotes up there. What I mean is not per se the kernel, or more pointedly not only the kernel, but the whole OS.
Let's say Red Hat does some usability tests of the type that Apple and Microsoft do a lot of. Let's say that they find several areas that users think need improvement in their workstation OS. If they were Microsoft, they'd divide the improvements up into sub systems (kernel, UI, user tools, IE, whatever) and send them to the appropriate team for feasibility studies and such. Microsoft can force the teams to at least give a good reason why they can't use a suggestion, even if they can't always force the suggestion to be implemented.
We aren't talking about Microsoft though. We're talking about Red Hat. So they divide up the improvements into subsystems and figures out that they personally control like three items on the list (mostly administrative tools). The rest they send out to other projects (Linus' Kernel team, the X.org guys, Mozilla, Oracle (for OO.Org), the FSF, etc). Any one of those teams, might use the suggestions, politely thank Red Hat and ignore the suggestions, make rude gestures and wander vaguely away... whatever.
Even assuming that the relevant group takes the suggestion seriously, Red Hat typically releases on a very slow schedule; and they try very hard not to increment subsystems any more than they have to for security reasons within a given release. So if they give Linus' team a kernel suggestion, it might take the kernel team a year to implement the suggestion. Then it might take Red hat another two years to actually start using a version of the kernel which has the improvement. Between their own conservative release schedule and the fact that they have little control over what gets done with their own results, you have to wonder if there's any financial incentive to doing usability studies.
Of course the arguable advantage of the model is that if you really want an improvement you can design and implement it yourself. Or take something like this patch and apply it to your current kernel. Which is great for those of us who can do that. A little less great for Joe Average user.
I suspect it's thoroughly mediocre. Which is to say that it'll get you a "C" in the worst case, probably a "B" or even an "A" under the right circumstances. Any reasonably competent writer can churn out most undergraduate coursework for a humanities or soft science course without being all that expert. I graduated with a degree in History, but I took classes in Lit, Comparative Religions, Philosophy, and Sociology. I got "A" graded papers most of the time in most of those classes, I can't see any reason why I couldn't do so for someone else.
The conundrum for humanities and social sciences is this:
Professors want to encourage research rather than rote memorization, thus they prioritize papers over in-class tests. The problem is that papers, by the very nature of being outside research, are easy use this kind of cheating on. You're not *supposed* to be regurgitating facts from class, you're supposed to be finding sources and making connections. The nature of that sort of work is that any reasonably competent researcher and writer can do it for you, precisely because it's not directly related to what you've done in class. Assuming the students actually do the work, this is the best way for them to learn, but it's really easy for them to get someone else to do it.
The solution, it seems to me, is a combination approach (this is how most of my upper level history classes did it, it would have been much harder to cheat in any of them this way). Make research papers an important part of the grade (say 50%) but not in themselves sufficient to pass. Also give tests, and make them an important part of the grade (again 50% is good) but not in themselves sufficient to pass. Make the tests conceptual rather than fact based. Require students to write short answers rather than using multiple choice. Short answer questions (for 1-2 page definitions of "short") are great in three ways:
1) They show that students understand the concepts behind the material rather than simple memorization of facts.
2) They permit a level of error on unimportant details with penalties that scale with the level of error. An overall excellent short answer with a single minor error of fact might still get full points, whereas a minor error of fact in a multiple choice test is simply wrong. Multiple errors, or more serious errors can affect over all points in a relative manner.
3) It give the professor a writing base line that s/he knows was produced by the student. Is studants ezzay queshions wriiten like thes, but their research papers are all in clear, concise and well written English, you know to be suspicious of the papers.
That isn't his specialty. I guarantee you could find a "him" for physical sciences. The trick would be finding a physical science course load that wasn't heavily lab focused (Note: I don't doubt you could find this, just saying it would be your first challenge).
Slashdot Mirror
An off-the-cuff comment, or something more?
Too much vodka?
My thought was "Guy who wants you to buy his company's product instead"?
It's really hard to say from your post (Where are you? Are you willing to move? What was your three years of experience in?) but my immediate reaction to your post is "you're talking to the wrong recruiters". When recruiters call me about jobs they want to get more specifics about which distros I've worked with, what daemons I've got specific experience with, or my level of experience with integration of *nix systems into Windows environments. There's lots of of *nix jobs out there, a technical recruiter that hasn't heard of Linux is either very highly specialized, an idiot, or a generalist recruiter trying to fill some odd tech job that landed on his desk.
What you need to do is find recruiters that know WTF they're doing in the tech industry. These guys aren't usually technologists themselves, but they know the lingo, the buzzwords, and most importantly for you, they know how it relates to what you've got on your resume. Normally they work for national firms that specialize in finding technology professionals for companies that need more than "MCP with three years of experience" or "Four years Java programming experience". I'm not saying this is going to solve your problem (these guys are subject to the same problems of wanting documented experience in every minuscule technology on a requirement document that any other recruiter can be), but at least you won't have to worry about whether the guy is going to laugh at you because he doesn't anything about the field.
On the experience front... have you considered volunteer work? Either maybe volunteering your services to a local charity to help them with their infrastructure (for IT/admin type experience), getting into an OSS project (for development type experience), or even offering your services (with specific terms and conditions) to a friend or family member's business to help them out and get you resume fodder? I don't know how much it'll help to be honest, but it sure can't hurt and at least you're not sitting around surrounded by tech books and bitterness.
Or maybe people were put off by the fact that you talk like that; and decided the Geek Squad was a safer (if no more competent) bet?
Just never give your name to "Cybercoders". I am primarily a senior level systems and network guy, but I once programmed some simple stuff in Java so it's on my resume. I get fricken "Senior Java Programmer" pushes from them on a weekly (occasionally daily) basis. Even assuming I wanted these jobs I'm not even remotely qualified. I could learn what they need, I have no doubt, but since most of the jobs are 3-6 month contract gigs by the time I did learn it I'd be looking for a new job anyway.
YMMV, but in my experience there are three types of "low level" jobs in IT (not programming per se, though there are definite corollaries here, but "support IT"):
1) Low level tech support grunt for a large company. You're going to be dealing with nothing but users. They are the entire focus of your life, if you get to deal with an "obscure network and infrastructure problem" it's purely by accident because your user happened to discover it. Even then, since you probably have minimal access to servers and network equipment, the best you'll probably be able to do is escalate it.
2) Systems/network admin for a small company or facility. You'll still have to deal with users. You're probably the entire IT department, or at best the junior member of a very small team (all of whom want to push user issues off to you for the same reason you don't want to do them). On the bright side you're far more likely to be directly involved in building, deploying, and supporting the infrastructure. On the down side, unless it's either a really odd company or in the infrastructure business, the stuff will be incredibly vanilla. Windows AD and file servers attached to a few workstations on one or two logical networks and getting to the Internet via some form of SDSL. Probably a firewall appliance sitting between you and the DSL modem, and, if the company actually hosts its own Internet facing presence (most small companies don't), a small DMZ with the web and mail server. Not much for obscure here.
3) Data center lackey for a large company. On the bright side, no users. On the downside you probably mostly haul boxes, rack system, replace parts, and make accounts. If you're both smart and lucky though you might be able to get yourself in good with the higher level guys and they'll trust simpler (for relative values of "simple") problems to you.
Three offer the best possibility for what you want, though you usually have to be patient. Two is how I came up, and frankly I thought it was the best overall situation. You'll have to deal with users, a lot, but I don't really mind users to be honest (I'm a fairly social person, IT geek or not). The thing is, you pretty much to get see every aspect of IT. It's all on a smaller scale of course, but you actually get to do the planning, executing, and maintenance of your very own setup. You don't get a lot of obscure problems, but frankly those sound a lot sexier when you're sitting in college looking for a challenge than when you have a guy breathing down your neck wanting to know when things will be back up while you're still trying to figure out what the Hell happened in the first place.
And, as I've said in THREE other places now, that's wrong. I hope the TSA gets it's ass handed to it over that.
This article is the first I've heard of that, and I completely agree that it's screwed up.
Where do you get a love it or leave it attitude in my post? I think there's lots of things wrong with this country. I think the way we do airport security is wrong (as I've said about 15 times in this thread). I'm just saying that this particular argument for this particular issue is fallacious. The 4th amendment prevents the government from *forcing you* to submit a search. There is no force here. You either voluntarily submit to the search, or you don't fly commercial air. If there were no travel alternatives to commercial air, their might be a stronger case for this being "force", but there are. Lots of them. Some are even faster, though generally more expensive.
I only recently heard about this... If it's true it's complete bullshit and I won't disagree that it's a violation of the 4th amendment. They can stop you from boarding the plane without a search, if you turn around and leave to take a train instead, hey, that's your business.
Any argument can be reduced to absurdity. The absurd reduction of your is that if the government has no right to search anyone without a warrant ever, then it essentially has no right to any secure facilities at all. Courthouses, military bases, police stations, they should all take down their security check points and let anyone wander in or out with anything they want. Hey prisons to! We don't need to check people walking into prisons for weapons they may turn over to inmates.
There are lots of places you can't go without some form of security check, because of the danger to 1) yourself 2) others 3) information the government has deemed sensitive. Airplanes are one of them. Right to movement is certainly a right. You can move freely throughout the country without documentation, just not necessarily on a commercial aircraft.
And explosives taking a wing off while over a heavily populated area wouldn't accomplish the same basic thing as getting into the cabin? A little less precise maybe, but still a massive potential for death and destruction.
The ninth amendment says nothing about airplanes. It say you may have some other rights. One might just as well interrupt that as having a right not to have airplanes run into your buildings. The fourth amendment says the government can't force you to submit to a search. They're not forcing you. You don't HAVE to get on that plane. They're not going to send you jail if you don't submit to the search, they're not letting you get on the plane.
The fact that you can't conveniently get across the country without getting on the plane isn't the government's problem. They aren't preventing you from traveling, they're preventing you from traveling via commercial aircraft. You could take a private plane. You could drive. You could take a bus or a train. You could walk. Your 9 AM meeting is not the government's problem. Airplanes running into buildings are the government's problem.
Again, I'm not defending the TSA or the way we do airport security, but saying that he 4th amendment protects you from airport security is just stupid. The government cannot force you to submit to a search of your person without a warrant, it can and will force you to submit to a search of your person before allowing you into certain areas of its sphere of control. As long as the only penalty is not allowing you into that area, there's no legal issue.
What if it had been an hour later and the buildings had been full? What if it had been an older building that wasn't designed to collapse inward? Just because mass destruction wasn't caused, doesn't mean that there isn't the potential for it. A poison gas bomb detonated in the middle of a desert may only kill a few people, or no one at all. It's still a potential mass weapon. Again I'm not saying TSA isn't broken, in fact I say quite the opposite, just that there is a case for securing aircraft.
While there are lots of objection to TSA's tactics, this isn't one. Flying isn't a right. They aren't saying "submit to a search" which would be a clear violation of your rights. They're saying "submit to a search or you can't get on the plane". You have no intrinsic right to get on the plane, they can be put preconditions on your doing so. There is a compelling argument for aircraft security (air*port* security is really a bit of a misnomer, we put the security in the airport for convenience, but it's intended to secure the aircraft). Even ignoring the safety of your fellow passenger and the crew, it's a huge multi-ton craft moving at incredibly high speed and maneuverable on a three dimensional axis; in short a potential weapon of mass destruction.
That said, we do aircraft security poorly. Current methods are crude, invasive, and let through as much as they stop. What's the right answer? I don't know. We clearly need some form of aircraft security, but the way we do it now is reactive, incomplete, and embarrassing for everyone involved. Not to mention a huge waste of time, and causing little girls to cry.
Yeah the real trick here is the infrastructure left over from the old industrial economy. Detroit and other rust belt areas might be able to pull something like this off, but $randomruralcounty isn't going to have everything a datacenter needs hooked up and ready to go.
It's not that simple though. There's lots of things to consider in these kinds of deals. Typically the corporation itself is given excellent tax breaks (though they usually pay some pittance) , but they provide jobs (in this case pretty good ones most likely) which leads to income tax and lower unemployment. They attract new people to the area which increases sales and property taxes. There's good political capital in being able to point at the big new employer you brought in. They buy energy, water, and bandwidth which is either sold directly by the local government (for a small profit) or taxed by the local government. They provide commerce to local business, which do pay taxes (not to mention that *they* hire more people, which means more income tax, and more "lower unemployment" political capital). All that for giving away a bit of money that you never had in the first place. I'm probably not even scratching the surface either.
My first guess is "no" to the first, but "yes" to the second. I could be completely off base of course, but my read would be that software development will be done in headquarters locations, but given that these are *data* centers, most of what they'll need will probably be systems and network guys. There may be some software development jobs associated with writing internal apps and scripts needed directly by the data center, but probably not a huge number. Again, I don't work for any of these companies, and I have no idea how their internal processes work, that's just how I'd do it.
It's all about perspective. The music of the 60's, 70's and 80's is over and we can look back on it and pick up the best of it and point to how wonderful it is. 90's music is starting to move the same way. Current music is, well, current. There's a lot of it, it's coming out all the time, and we don't have any perspective on it. We like a song here or there, but they slide by in the noise of all the mediocre to awful crap. 20-25 years from now when it's digested and only the really lasting or worthwhile stuff is left, we (or more likely people younger than us) can say how wonderful the music of the 00's was. Remember that for every enduring classic of the 80's there were 50 "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"s. For every haunting melody of the 70's there were 50 "Disco Fever"s.
Well clearly he should. And he thinks they should all be really cheap. Because he's not self absorbed at all :-)
This is going to sound totally heartless and awful, and I totally don't mean it like that, but Robert Jordan dying was probably the best thing to happen to the Wheel of Time. It wasn't a great thing to have happen, I'm sure his wife and family miss him, and frankly he died a rather lingering and unpleasant death that I wouldn't wish on an enemy let alone a guy who filled so many pleasurable hours of my time with the first 5 or 6 books of the series; but it was good for the Wheel of Time. Jordan had a lot of strengths as a writer, but finishing a damned story wasn't one of them. Sanderson has done a really good job of taking the notes and material and turning them into something with a finite end date. I'm firmly convinced that had Jordan remained healthy there would have been at least 6 more WoT books each fully of lovingly detailed descriptions of Rand's latest coat. Sanderson was able to make use of Jordan's immense skill in plotting and characterization while bringing his own rather brisker and more active writing style into play.
And the gold core, platinum coated speaker wire, right? I mean, right? I spent $5000 on these things, surely you're not telling me they weren't worth it because that would totally... oh... I think I need to lie down a sec...
Not to fanboi out, because I'm well aware of OSX's problems as well as it's advantages, but I think Apple has it right in this case. Their UI always seems snappier than either Linux or Windows. I'm fairly certain their scheduler is written to highly prioritize foreground tasks. There's advantages and disadvantages to any model of course, but since I personally am an inpatient bastard, I like an OS that prioritizes what I'm doing right now over whatever I'm running in the background or whatever it feels like it needs to be doing at the moment.
I think this is some sort of heresy against the great gods of geekdom. Users should want what we want them to want, clearly they can't be trusted to figure out their own wants.
Seriously though? It's a good idea, but only a few companies in the Linux business have the resources to do it on any kind of scale. Most of those are the companies that would benefit least from the tests in the short term, because they release on such a conservative schedule that it might be years before they run a kernel with the improvements suggested. There's advantages and disadvantages to any model and one of the disadvantages of the very distributed way "Linux" is developed is that it's hard to get changes and improvements to whole OS. Note that I put Linux in quotes up there. What I mean is not per se the kernel, or more pointedly not only the kernel, but the whole OS.
Let's say Red Hat does some usability tests of the type that Apple and Microsoft do a lot of. Let's say that they find several areas that users think need improvement in their workstation OS. If they were Microsoft, they'd divide the improvements up into sub systems (kernel, UI, user tools, IE, whatever) and send them to the appropriate team for feasibility studies and such. Microsoft can force the teams to at least give a good reason why they can't use a suggestion, even if they can't always force the suggestion to be implemented.
We aren't talking about Microsoft though. We're talking about Red Hat. So they divide up the improvements into subsystems and figures out that they personally control like three items on the list (mostly administrative tools). The rest they send out to other projects (Linus' Kernel team, the X.org guys, Mozilla, Oracle (for OO.Org), the FSF, etc). Any one of those teams, might use the suggestions, politely thank Red Hat and ignore the suggestions, make rude gestures and wander vaguely away... whatever.
Even assuming that the relevant group takes the suggestion seriously, Red Hat typically releases on a very slow schedule; and they try very hard not to increment subsystems any more than they have to for security reasons within a given release. So if they give Linus' team a kernel suggestion, it might take the kernel team a year to implement the suggestion. Then it might take Red hat another two years to actually start using a version of the kernel which has the improvement. Between their own conservative release schedule and the fact that they have little control over what gets done with their own results, you have to wonder if there's any financial incentive to doing usability studies.
Of course the arguable advantage of the model is that if you really want an improvement you can design and implement it yourself. Or take something like this patch and apply it to your current kernel. Which is great for those of us who can do that. A little less great for Joe Average user.
I suspect it's thoroughly mediocre. Which is to say that it'll get you a "C" in the worst case, probably a "B" or even an "A" under the right circumstances. Any reasonably competent writer can churn out most undergraduate coursework for a humanities or soft science course without being all that expert. I graduated with a degree in History, but I took classes in Lit, Comparative Religions, Philosophy, and Sociology. I got "A" graded papers most of the time in most of those classes, I can't see any reason why I couldn't do so for someone else.
The conundrum for humanities and social sciences is this:
Professors want to encourage research rather than rote memorization, thus they prioritize papers over in-class tests. The problem is that papers, by the very nature of being outside research, are easy use this kind of cheating on. You're not *supposed* to be regurgitating facts from class, you're supposed to be finding sources and making connections. The nature of that sort of work is that any reasonably competent researcher and writer can do it for you, precisely because it's not directly related to what you've done in class. Assuming the students actually do the work, this is the best way for them to learn, but it's really easy for them to get someone else to do it.
The solution, it seems to me, is a combination approach (this is how most of my upper level history classes did it, it would have been much harder to cheat in any of them this way). Make research papers an important part of the grade (say 50%) but not in themselves sufficient to pass. Also give tests, and make them an important part of the grade (again 50% is good) but not in themselves sufficient to pass. Make the tests conceptual rather than fact based. Require students to write short answers rather than using multiple choice. Short answer questions (for 1-2 page definitions of "short") are great in three ways:
1) They show that students understand the concepts behind the material rather than simple memorization of facts.
2) They permit a level of error on unimportant details with penalties that scale with the level of error. An overall excellent short answer with a single minor error of fact might still get full points, whereas a minor error of fact in a multiple choice test is simply wrong. Multiple errors, or more serious errors can affect over all points in a relative manner.
3) It give the professor a writing base line that s/he knows was produced by the student. Is studants ezzay queshions wriiten like thes, but their research papers are all in clear, concise and well written English, you know to be suspicious of the papers.
That isn't his specialty. I guarantee you could find a "him" for physical sciences. The trick would be finding a physical science course load that wasn't heavily lab focused (Note: I don't doubt you could find this, just saying it would be your first challenge).