Personally I feel that this story is trying to sensationalize a particular event in a person's life to paint a broad generalization about dotcommers to invoke the "Ha! Serves them right!" response that all the MBA's that didn't make the jump are saying to themselves. We don't know too much about the backgrounds of these people. Perhaps there's other circumstances behind their being sans abode. On the other hand, we do know from the article that the Schlenz and Sacrosante were "Freelance" or independant contractors. We all know that the downturn has hit these areas particularly hard. That is always the case that the contractors are the first to get the boot. Additionally free-lancers value their freedom so highly that some of them would rather try to hold out for a contract than to work for someone, especially after they've had thier own work for years.
There's no denying, however, that there's a downturn, and that the hiring freeze is going on and at the same time hundreds of thousands of techs have been fired from companies (Can you think of any gigantic tech co ranging from Sun to Cisco that hasn't cut at least 5k of workers?)
So this is a horrendous circumstance, a glut of workers in the market, hiring freezes, and additionally an increase in the H1B Visas that are being issued. All this is combining for a lose - lose situation for every aspect of tech workers. Foreigners now have about a month to find another job or are told to go back home, massive competition for the few open jobs. It means that new graduates now have to compete against Cisco veterans to get the few open jobs. However, I feel hiring will even out once the economy turns back up, what we do is very elastic. As companies are formed and expand they need to have tech workers. Our best shot at that happening this year is in the months following the $300 tax rebate. Things won't be the same, because the web is never going to expand at the rate it did.
It seems to me that linux is now public enemy #1 on MS's hit list. It seems more and more now that there's an official statement from microsoft saying that linux isn't this, or open source isn't that. Or as this article claims, they stop distributions from distributing. This only means one thing, they're scared. And I think they have real reason to be. With Linux powering tons of webservers, and databases and with the dotcom failures, these dotcom tech professionals will now be entering old-line companies in droves, bringing Linux with them. Additionally the Itanium processors are here now, and that means that the Linux for Itanium will be the #1 *nix for high-end servers. I realize responding like this on slashdot is preaching to the converted, but my point is that the writing's on the wall. If microsoft hopes to expand its market share its going to have to take it from the server market. The way things stack up there now, the great obsticle for them is Sun and Linux, and with Itanium, it'll be more Linux than anything else. Of course the irony is the Linux community wants Linux to be a desktop system. I guess because it is so good at being a server, and because of its arch nemesis, Microsoft is "so good" at being a desktop system. I think Linux should stand its ground and consolidate its place in the server market. The time is extremely ripe for that. If Linux is to be a desktop system, it needs to have its own OS X type system. But then it would loose credibility as a server, and that would be a great tragedy, for then all would be lost.
I watched voyager off and on during the span of the series. I happened to have thought that DS9 had superior writing and actors. The problem with voyager, besides the writing, was the saturation of Star Trek during its run. Additionally if it weren't for Star Trek, I'm sure that Palms would look a lot less like communicators. The problem with Star Trek is this, and perhaps this is a product of the times (local, not stardate) that each series has occured in, but the show used to be more about a utopian government, enabled through technology, and now it has just degraded into nothing deeper than explosion scenes, and shots of 7 of 9. There was always something underneath the surface in the first two shows, and although critics would say that its just flashy graphics and a waste of time, I could say no, and that there was always a moral to take away from the shows. And I wonder if the changes don't have something to do with our recent technological growth. After all what we have now in some cases surpasses even the technology of the enterprise. Sure there's no phasers and no photon torpedoes, but where's their AIM? Definitely our communications channels are much, much better. Video conferencing and all. Okay, so our android technology only reaches that of Battlestar Galactica (i.e. that robotic dog from sony) but in a few years... I always respected the old series for its sense of awareness of social problems in the country at that time. I hope the new series has more of that. What I'm trying to say is that I feel that the idea that this could possibly be our future (which is a premise of this type of science fiction) well it just seems more and more far fetched with each series, and therefore its more and more difficult to suspend disbelief and get into the show. If you add that to the fact that there were no "heroic" characters in Voyager that you could really respect its no wonder why the show is probably the least favorite of all the Star Trek shows.
Obviously one of the necessary ingredients for an expanding economy is to have access to the necessary energy resources. Liken it to fighting a war by cutting off the enemies supply of natural resources. I believe it's a poor idea to experiment with new energy resources by blasting holes in our atmosphere with microwaves. I have spent many months of my life playing various SimCity editions, and if it's taught me one thing that thing is the answer to our problem is fusion. Why aren't we devoting our government research dollars to the one energy source that is the panacea to all our problems? This one sounds to me like a lot of dead birds, and huge potential risks.
Personally I'm not opposed to nuclear power plants. I think in conjunction with a national power grid we would have something akin to a client/server energy system. Either that or a peer to peer system with manditory solar cells on everyone's homes. You can complain of the danger of nuclear power, but they're environmentally safe, and I think with the necessary precautions they won't explode. The bigger danger is the unemployment and the de-evolution of society that we risk without energy. Not to mention the burnt out condemned buildings that will pop up with those lightning bolts over them.
That brings up an interesting point, when you were unchilled would the government (you know if that show 2525 isn't correct) be obligated to refund estate taxes? And would they have to pay interest?
I was always under the impression that cryogenics wouldn't work because they had not found a way to freeze you quick enough? That the water inside your body would cause cellular damage. Does anyone know if they've actually found a solution for this, or do they figure that this is just one more little hurdle that science will overcome given a few more years (so you'll be thawed out in 2435 instead of 2400)?
I guess the argument of people who try is is that you can't take it with you, and if it doesn't work it won't matter. If it does work, I guess the time you spent dead would only seem like a moment. Unless you believe in reincarnation in which case you've got some problems. One second you're an eagle flying over the grand canyon, the next you're Bernie the accountant from Hackensack.
The other question is, what if the future really sucks?
What if television continues its quality decline? And you wake up with the Execution Channel consistantly winning the children's programming ratings? Or what if you get defrosted, and the president (then called Emperor) of the United States is named Tom Green the Fourth? Who would want to live in such a place? But if I could choose when I want to be defrosted, that'd really be cool, because I would pick 9998. Then I could make a killing on all the Y10k projects going on.
While I believe that Napster is in kind of a catch-22, that is that if they block music, no one uses their service or if god forbid their user base goes up after that happens, the Record companies will say that its because they aren't complying with the court order.
I personally think they get paid too much, and manipulate the public in a way that makes professional wrestling look honest. However, if we are going to have to pay, it should be a reasonable fee. I also believe that the money should go to the artist, with a nominal amount figured in for the actual recording. It seems to me that if they had their way we would pay the full price of a CD for a couple of tracks. And I think that what made MP3's popular is the fact that you can pick the few tracks you like and listen to them.
However, in regard to the article and government price controls, monetarists would say that the market should fix the price. But for that to work, there needs to be healthy competition. There's an oligopoly in the music industry, and if we were to look at it from a file sharing area, napster is about the only mature system out there. So I think rather than being soaked, government price fixing is probably the lesser of the evils.
In my mind there's a lot of problems with the usual CS curriculum at schools. For one thing people don't really make a distinction between it and CIS when they enter school. What the defined distinction is I really could not tell you except that its more "business technical" than CS, but that's really quite fantastic when the CS degree is so much more rewarded in the business world.
Now with from what I understand most people seem to learn C++ or JAVA in their first CS classes. Isn't that an insane language to start with? In a country that has low mathematic scores in high school, it seems like a contradiction to make the lowest level programming course one of the most difficult to learn. And really lets ask ourselves how many people working in the technical field really program in C++? And while Java is more marketable certainly, you're not really going to learn how to apply this to internet apps You're just going to learn recursion, logic etc. And they typically follow these courses with Computer Architecture something equally as esoteric. What does that have to do with programming? Why would we want to learn Assembly? 80% of people entering those courses are doing it to get a big paycheck someday, yet the majority of the skills they're forced to learn are not prized in the market place.
But in changing the curriculum you have to keep in mind that many schools out there conform to the curriculum requirements of the CSAB, and while I doubt the B stands for beurocracy, it sounds like it could be an uphill battle.
While its really great that people come up with "solutions" like this, it only serves as fodder for people who consider what napster was doing to be illegal activity. By running to another country and hiding, it makes the cause seem no better than imbezzlement. If we honestly believe that sharing music is a right that we deserve to have, then it should be fought for in the courts, or through the legislature. Otherwise we all look like criminals running to another country to continue our illegal activities.
So people who look on this as a good thing really need to take a step back and realize the whole context of what has happened. We've been denied something that a great majority of us believe we deserve to have. The ability to share music. That right has been denied to us and we've decided to give up going through the proper channels to get our right. That is why we all lost when napster lost. We all counted on them to do the fighting and we sat back prepping gnutella for the time when it would be necessary and hoping we'd somehow win in the end without having to try. When you're fighting tons of money you need an equal amount of effort in order to win. We deserve what we got.
I've just gone through a similar situation at work. The thought was whether we could use MySQL or Postgres for our application, or go to a commercial grade product such as Oracle. DB2, Sybase weren't given more than a glancing consideration. We went with Oracle.
I have worked on both fronts. I was a PHP/MySQL developer, and now I'm a (very green) oracle DBA. During this time I also moved from working at a.com to a more substantial health care company.
The difference between the databases really is night and day. And people need to put their preferences aside, MySQL is really just a better way to read and write data without actually writing it to a flat file. I mean its a really good way, and all you will need for a website. I remember thinking that I was all that and a bag of chips because I could store a picture inside of MySQL and pull it back out with PHP. So I did it several hundred times with thumbnails. All was well until a little bit of corruption got into the system, and they all got screwed up. No one ever mentions how easily (at least in my experience) mySQL can get corrupted. Even so that's all dandy for website pics, but what about data that really means something to your company?
For websites, and with the possible exception of ecommerce sites, you may want to use mysql. For any mission critical system you _need_ to have an industrial grade database. Data is the life blood of your company. This is true in EVERY (Billing, Human Resources, Supply Chain, etc) conceivable way.
Only a fool, or someone who wants to prove an open-source point (or perhaps one in the same) would think otherwise.
PGSQL is a wonderful database, as is MySQL. They are wonderful solutions for some applications, but not mission critical ones. And that doesn't mean that you need to spend 2.3 million on enterprise edition of oracle on an E10000. However, DB2, Sybase, Informix and even the Standard edition of Oracle are fine examples of high grade databases. I personally would not run MSSQL because I believe you're defeating the purpose of providing a high grade database in a 24/7 environment (for god's sake run some sort of unix variant). And of course the feature set of the non-open source databases are more robust than anything open source. Triggers, functions, generally a 4th generation language for programming functions in the database (and stored procedures). The big guys are also embracing java in very big ways. Transactions are very important these days, and honestly these databases provide much better security features than any open source database that I'm aware of.
I'm not saying that open source databases are bad, I know they have their purpose, but on some levels they cannot compete with companies that throw millions and millions of dollars into database research, and I don't think they should. They should just do what they do, just really well.
I remember where I was...
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 1
I was in fifth grade in rural New York state, and they stopped class and rolled in one of the few television sets that they had. Our teacher told us that a national tragedy had just taken place. We were ignorant to such things but I think that the fact that one of the passengers was a teacher made it ring truer to the administration than it did to us. Our teacher told us to remember where we were, just as he had remembered where he was when Kennedy was shot.
Looking back can we say that it had left the stigma that the Kennedy assassination had done? Not quite, but it has left an undeniable scar on the U.S. space program. 1986 was a height of science fiction in this country with both Star Trek and Star Wars being insanely popular. And this trip was to provide us with our first civilian space traveller and that would make a dream of many become an attainable reality. After the tragedy, NASA became too costly, it would be too dangerous to send a human to this place or that place. In short we lost our nerve.
This is in sharp contrast to the legacy of the Kennedy assassination where we took his statement of going to the moon by the end of the decade as something that had to do in order to honor his memory. What honors the memory of those aboard challenger? A couple of low-budget craters on mars and rover that wouldn't last half a round on BattleBots. America needs to do more!
I don't think anyone that has ever searched for a job on Monster board can possibly suggest that there isn't a shortage of IT labor, but I would think that we can assume the causes of this perceived problem are these: Age descrimination in the workplace, xenophobia and a market that changes so fast that its hard for workers to keep up with it.
Companies believe that they have to move to the latest technologies to keep up with the productivity levels of their competition. They believe that the "kids" of today are more in tune with today's technologies than their older counterparts. This may in some instances be true, and in others not, but it is the perception of the marketplace.
In turn, there is this backlash by programmers, with perhaps older skillsets who have begun to be passed up on newer technology positions in favor of younger people (leaving them stuck in their older skill sets). And when some of them read about H1 Visas being granted for MORE young "kids" to come here and further erode their possibilities of getting a newer technology job (which as we know you must keep up w/technology, or die), they find themselves justifying their dislike of the immigration system.
To answer to the person's question whether or not their CS degree is worth much in this day and age, in my experience its worth about a year's of work experience, not much more. I've never met a CS student that didn't think that one of their professors didn't know how to teach or was also out of tune with the latest technologies (generally caused by them reminiscing about punch card programming, and FORTRAN), and frankly my own aborted experience as a CS student has shown me the narrowness of the scope of the program wasn't a worthwile undertaking, and when I got into the job market I wasn't surprised to find out that the company was just happy that I went to collge, and didn't care that I had a B.A. in Politics, so long as I knew my stuff.
Of course everyone remembers him for his great portrayal of the great Jedi, but had so many more movies than just those three. And he was fantastic in each and everyone one of them. My favorites were a string of british comedies with classics such as the Lavender Hill Mob, and The Man In the White Suit, amongst other great ones. They combined great acting with very dry wit, and very good writing. They are a joy to watch over and over again. Guinness was also considered one of the greatest actors in the world with his role in Bridge on the River Kwai.
I love Star Wars, he was great as Obi-Wan, but he wasn't just great as Obi-Wan, he was great in just about everything I've ever seen him in.
That being said it is a very sad day that the world should lose such a great actor since there aren't any left. If you want to see what acting is all about, you won't find out from watching a George Clooney or Nicholas Cage film, you will however get an idea of the art of acting by watching some of Alec Guinness's older work.
I think that this article was quite on target. Something we cannot seem to recognize through our antisocial ways is that in fact we occupy a very strong position in society. We are one of the most affluent groups in the country, certainly one of the smartest. While they will lump us into categories as Techies, etc, we have nothing but ourselves to blame for having them gloss over our opinions on events that most dramatically effect us. It seems to me that techies have not learned how to play "the game".
While we exist in a subculture of American society, we cannot forget about the superset. When we do, we (as the article says) end up having our Napster taken away from us, and our privacy invaded by ignorant people who are less capable to judge the technology than ourselves, and basically loose our rights because we have refused to speak out about it, and settled for using our brains to invent another technology that replaces the old one. How long you can go on doing that could be debated, perhaps forever, but the question must be begged, why would we have to?
If you want to affect change, you lobby the people who make the change, you don't just go and complain about it on websites. Yet there doesn't seem to be any concerted lobby effort out there for techs. Perhaps I'm wrong, if not I think we will continue to be abused by the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I feel that this story is trying to sensationalize a particular event in a person's life to paint a broad generalization about dotcommers to invoke the "Ha! Serves them right!" response that all the MBA's that didn't make the jump are saying to themselves. We don't know too much about the backgrounds of these people. Perhaps there's other circumstances behind their being sans abode. On the other hand, we do know from the article that the Schlenz and Sacrosante were "Freelance" or independant contractors. We all know that the downturn has hit these areas particularly hard. That is always the case that the contractors are the first to get the boot. Additionally free-lancers value their freedom so highly that some of them would rather try to hold out for a contract than to work for someone, especially after they've had thier own work for years.
There's no denying, however, that there's a downturn, and that the hiring freeze is going on and at the same time hundreds of thousands of techs have been fired from companies (Can you think of any gigantic tech co ranging from Sun to Cisco that hasn't cut at least 5k of workers?)
So this is a horrendous circumstance, a glut of workers in the market, hiring freezes, and additionally an increase in the H1B Visas that are being issued. All this is combining for a lose - lose situation for every aspect of tech workers. Foreigners now have about a month to find another job or are told to go back home, massive competition for the few open jobs. It means that new graduates now have to compete against Cisco veterans to get the few open jobs. However, I feel hiring will even out once the economy turns back up, what we do is very elastic. As companies are formed and expand they need to have tech workers. Our best shot at that happening this year is in the months following the $300 tax rebate. Things won't be the same, because the web is never going to expand at the rate it did.
It seems to me that linux is now public enemy #1 on MS's hit list. It seems more and more now that there's an official statement from microsoft saying that linux isn't this, or open source isn't that. Or as this article claims, they stop distributions from distributing. This only means one thing, they're scared. And I think they have real reason to be. With Linux powering tons of webservers, and databases and with the dotcom failures, these dotcom tech professionals will now be entering old-line companies in droves, bringing Linux with them. Additionally the Itanium processors are here now, and that means that the Linux for Itanium will be the #1 *nix for high-end servers. I realize responding like this on slashdot is preaching to the converted, but my point is that the writing's on the wall. If microsoft hopes to expand its market share its going to have to take it from the server market. The way things stack up there now, the great obsticle for them is Sun and Linux, and with Itanium, it'll be more Linux than anything else. Of course the irony is the Linux community wants Linux to be a desktop system. I guess because it is so good at being a server, and because of its arch nemesis, Microsoft is "so good" at being a desktop system. I think Linux should stand its ground and consolidate its place in the server market. The time is extremely ripe for that. If Linux is to be a desktop system, it needs to have its own OS X type system. But then it would loose credibility as a server, and that would be a great tragedy, for then all would be lost.
I watched voyager off and on during the span of the series. I happened to have thought that DS9 had superior writing and actors. The problem with voyager, besides the writing, was the saturation of Star Trek during its run. Additionally if it weren't for Star Trek, I'm sure that Palms would look a lot less like communicators. The problem with Star Trek is this, and perhaps this is a product of the times (local, not stardate) that each series has occured in, but the show used to be more about a utopian government, enabled through technology, and now it has just degraded into nothing deeper than explosion scenes, and shots of 7 of 9. There was always something underneath the surface in the first two shows, and although critics would say that its just flashy graphics and a waste of time, I could say no, and that there was always a moral to take away from the shows. And I wonder if the changes don't have something to do with our recent technological growth. After all what we have now in some cases surpasses even the technology of the enterprise. Sure there's no phasers and no photon torpedoes, but where's their AIM? Definitely our communications channels are much, much better. Video conferencing and all. Okay, so our android technology only reaches that of Battlestar Galactica (i.e. that robotic dog from sony) but in a few years... I always respected the old series for its sense of awareness of social problems in the country at that time. I hope the new series has more of that. What I'm trying to say is that I feel that the idea that this could possibly be our future (which is a premise of this type of science fiction) well it just seems more and more far fetched with each series, and therefore its more and more difficult to suspend disbelief and get into the show. If you add that to the fact that there were no "heroic" characters in Voyager that you could really respect its no wonder why the show is probably the least favorite of all the Star Trek shows.
Obviously one of the necessary ingredients for an expanding economy is to have access to the necessary energy resources. Liken it to fighting a war by cutting off the enemies supply of natural resources. I believe it's a poor idea to experiment with new energy resources by blasting holes in our atmosphere with microwaves. I have spent many months of my life playing various SimCity editions, and if it's taught me one thing that thing is the answer to our problem is fusion. Why aren't we devoting our government research dollars to the one energy source that is the panacea to all our problems? This one sounds to me like a lot of dead birds, and huge potential risks. Personally I'm not opposed to nuclear power plants. I think in conjunction with a national power grid we would have something akin to a client/server energy system. Either that or a peer to peer system with manditory solar cells on everyone's homes. You can complain of the danger of nuclear power, but they're environmentally safe, and I think with the necessary precautions they won't explode. The bigger danger is the unemployment and the de-evolution of society that we risk without energy. Not to mention the burnt out condemned buildings that will pop up with those lightning bolts over them.
That brings up an interesting point, when you were unchilled would the government (you know if that show 2525 isn't correct) be obligated to refund estate taxes? And would they have to pay interest?
I was always under the impression that cryogenics wouldn't work because they had not found a way to freeze you quick enough? That the water inside your body would cause cellular damage. Does anyone know if they've actually found a solution for this, or do they figure that this is just one more little hurdle that science will overcome given a few more years (so you'll be thawed out in 2435 instead of 2400)?
I guess the argument of people who try is is that you can't take it with you, and if it doesn't work it won't matter. If it does work, I guess the time you spent dead would only seem like a moment. Unless you believe in reincarnation in which case you've got some problems. One second you're an eagle flying over the grand canyon, the next you're Bernie the accountant from Hackensack. The other question is, what if the future really sucks?
What if television continues its quality decline? And you wake up with the Execution Channel consistantly winning the children's programming ratings? Or what if you get defrosted, and the president (then called Emperor) of the United States is named Tom Green the Fourth? Who would want to live in such a place?
But if I could choose when I want to be defrosted, that'd really be cool, because I would pick 9998. Then I could make a killing on all the Y10k projects going on.
While I believe that Napster is in kind of a catch-22, that is that if they block music, no one uses their service or if god forbid their user base goes up after that happens, the Record companies will say that its because they aren't complying with the court order. I personally think they get paid too much, and manipulate the public in a way that makes professional wrestling look honest. However, if we are going to have to pay, it should be a reasonable fee. I also believe that the money should go to the artist, with a nominal amount figured in for the actual recording. It seems to me that if they had their way we would pay the full price of a CD for a couple of tracks. And I think that what made MP3's popular is the fact that you can pick the few tracks you like and listen to them.
However, in regard to the article and government price controls, monetarists would say that the market should fix the price. But for that to work, there needs to be healthy competition. There's an oligopoly in the music industry, and if we were to look at it from a file sharing area, napster is about the only mature system out there. So I think rather than being soaked, government price fixing is probably the lesser of the evils.
In my mind there's a lot of problems with the usual CS curriculum at schools. For one thing people don't really make a distinction between it and CIS when they enter school. What the defined distinction is I really could not tell you except that its more "business technical" than CS, but that's really quite fantastic when the CS degree is so much more rewarded in the business world. Now with from what I understand most people seem to learn C++ or JAVA in their first CS classes. Isn't that an insane language to start with? In a country that has low mathematic scores in high school, it seems like a contradiction to make the lowest level programming course one of the most difficult to learn. And really lets ask ourselves how many people working in the technical field really program in C++? And while Java is more marketable certainly, you're not really going to learn how to apply this to internet apps You're just going to learn recursion, logic etc. And they typically follow these courses with Computer Architecture something equally as esoteric. What does that have to do with programming? Why would we want to learn Assembly? 80% of people entering those courses are doing it to get a big paycheck someday, yet the majority of the skills they're forced to learn are not prized in the market place. But in changing the curriculum you have to keep in mind that many schools out there conform to the curriculum requirements of the CSAB, and while I doubt the B stands for beurocracy, it sounds like it could be an uphill battle.
While its really great that people come up with "solutions" like this, it only serves as fodder for people who consider what napster was doing to be illegal activity. By running to another country and hiding, it makes the cause seem no better than imbezzlement. If we honestly believe that sharing music is a right that we deserve to have, then it should be fought for in the courts, or through the legislature. Otherwise we all look like criminals running to another country to continue our illegal activities.
So people who look on this as a good thing really need to take a step back and realize the whole context of what has happened. We've been denied something that a great majority of us believe we deserve to have. The ability to share music. That right has been denied to us and we've decided to give up going through the proper channels to get our right. That is why we all lost when napster lost. We all counted on them to do the fighting and we sat back prepping gnutella for the time when it would be necessary and hoping we'd somehow win in the end without having to try. When you're fighting tons of money you need an equal amount of effort in order to win. We deserve what we got.
I've just gone through a similar situation at work. The thought was whether we could use MySQL or Postgres for our application, or go to a commercial grade product such as Oracle. DB2, Sybase weren't given more than a glancing consideration. We went with Oracle.
.com to a more substantial health care company.
I have worked on both fronts. I was a PHP/MySQL developer, and now I'm a (very green) oracle DBA. During this time I also moved from working at a
The difference between the databases really is night and day. And people need to put their preferences aside, MySQL is really just a better way to read and write data without actually writing it to a flat file. I mean its a really good way, and all you will need for a website. I remember thinking that I was all that and a bag of chips because I could store a picture inside of MySQL and pull it back out with PHP. So I did it several hundred times with thumbnails. All was well until a little bit of corruption got into the system, and they all got screwed up. No one ever mentions how easily (at least in my experience) mySQL can get corrupted. Even so that's all dandy for website pics, but what about data that really means something to your company? For websites, and with the possible exception of ecommerce sites, you may want to use mysql. For any mission critical system you _need_ to have an industrial grade database. Data is the life blood of your company. This is true in EVERY (Billing, Human Resources, Supply Chain, etc) conceivable way.
Only a fool, or someone who wants to prove an open-source point (or perhaps one in the same) would think otherwise.
PGSQL is a wonderful database, as is MySQL. They are wonderful solutions for some applications, but not mission critical ones. And that doesn't mean that you need to spend 2.3 million on enterprise edition of oracle on an E10000. However, DB2, Sybase, Informix and even the Standard edition of Oracle are fine examples of high grade databases. I personally would not run MSSQL because I believe you're defeating the purpose of providing a high grade database in a 24/7 environment (for god's sake run some sort of unix variant). And of course the feature set of the non-open source databases are more robust than anything open source. Triggers, functions, generally a 4th generation language for programming functions in the database (and stored procedures). The big guys are also embracing java in very big ways. Transactions are very important these days, and honestly these databases provide much better security features than any open source database that I'm aware of.
I'm not saying that open source databases are bad, I know they have their purpose, but on some levels they cannot compete with companies that throw millions and millions of dollars into database research, and I don't think they should. They should just do what they do, just really well.
I was in fifth grade in rural New York state, and they stopped class and rolled in one of the few television sets that they had.
Our teacher told us that a national tragedy had just taken place. We were ignorant to such things but I think that the fact that one of the passengers was a teacher made it ring truer to the administration than it did to us. Our teacher told us to remember where we were, just as he had remembered where he was when Kennedy was shot.
Looking back can we say that it had left the stigma that the Kennedy assassination had done? Not quite, but it has left an undeniable scar on the U.S. space program. 1986 was a height of science fiction in this country with both Star Trek and Star Wars being insanely popular. And this trip was to provide us with our first civilian space traveller and that would make a dream of many become an attainable reality. After the tragedy, NASA became too costly, it would be too dangerous to send a human to this place or that place. In short we lost our nerve. This is in sharp contrast to the legacy of the Kennedy assassination where we took his statement of going to the moon by the end of the decade as something that had to do in order to honor his memory. What honors the memory of those aboard challenger? A couple of low-budget craters on mars and rover that wouldn't last half a round on BattleBots. America needs to do more!
I don't think anyone that has ever searched for a job on Monster board can possibly suggest that there isn't a shortage of IT labor, but I would think that we can assume the causes of this perceived problem are these: Age descrimination in the workplace, xenophobia and a market that changes so fast that its hard for workers to keep up with it. Companies believe that they have to move to the latest technologies to keep up with the productivity levels of their competition. They believe that the "kids" of today are more in tune with today's technologies than their older counterparts. This may in some instances be true, and in others not, but it is the perception of the marketplace.
In turn, there is this backlash by programmers, with perhaps older skillsets who have begun to be passed up on newer technology positions in favor of younger people (leaving them stuck in their older skill sets). And when some of them read about H1 Visas being granted for MORE young "kids" to come here and further erode their possibilities of getting a newer technology job (which as we know you must keep up w/technology, or die), they find themselves justifying their dislike of the immigration system.
To answer to the person's question whether or not their CS degree is worth much in this day and age, in my experience its worth about a year's of work experience, not much more. I've never met a CS student that didn't think that one of their professors didn't know how to teach or was also out of tune with the latest technologies (generally caused by them reminiscing about punch card programming, and FORTRAN), and frankly my own aborted experience as a CS student has shown me the narrowness of the scope of the program wasn't a worthwile undertaking, and when I got into the job market I wasn't surprised to find out that the company was just happy that I went to collge, and didn't care that I had a B.A. in Politics, so long as I knew my stuff.
Of course everyone remembers him for his great portrayal of the great Jedi, but had so many more movies than just those three. And he was fantastic in each and everyone one of them. My favorites were a string of british comedies with classics such as the Lavender Hill Mob, and The Man In the White Suit, amongst other great ones. They combined great acting with very dry wit, and very good writing. They are a joy to watch over and over again. Guinness was also considered one of the greatest actors in the world with his role in Bridge on the River Kwai.
I love Star Wars, he was great as Obi-Wan, but he wasn't just great as Obi-Wan, he was great in just about everything I've ever seen him in.
That being said it is a very sad day that the world should lose such a great actor since there aren't any left. If you want to see what acting is all about, you won't find out from watching a George Clooney or Nicholas Cage film, you will however get an idea of the art of acting by watching some of Alec Guinness's older work.
I think that this article was quite on target. Something we cannot seem to recognize through our antisocial ways is that in fact we occupy a very strong position in society. We are one of the most affluent groups in the country, certainly one of the smartest. While they will lump us into categories as Techies, etc, we have nothing but ourselves to blame for having them gloss over our opinions on events that most dramatically effect us. It seems to me that techies have not learned how to play "the game".
While we exist in a subculture of American society, we cannot forget about the superset. When we do, we (as the article says) end up having our Napster taken away from us, and our privacy invaded by ignorant people who are less capable to judge the technology than ourselves, and basically loose our rights because we have refused to speak out about it, and settled for using our brains to invent another technology that replaces the old one. How long you can go on doing that could be debated, perhaps forever, but the question must be begged, why would we have to?
If you want to affect change, you lobby the people who make the change, you don't just go and complain about it on websites. Yet there doesn't seem to be any concerted lobby effort out there for techs. Perhaps I'm wrong, if not I think we will continue to be abused by the system.