Professors who get research grants bring money into the university (the university always retains some of it, for "administration"). On the other hand, the university does not get an extra dime for having professors who teach well. So guess what their priority is?
I clicked on the link to "XUL Periodic Table" in Firefox 10.0.2 and immediately got the message "This page uses an unsupported technology that is no longer available by default in Firefox.". Doesn't sound very promising.
It is not without risk, but you can always hire out yourself and your tech skills as an independent consultant.
The advantage is, you don't have to, and are not expected to, drink the Kool-Aid at your job. You don't have to believe the B.S. management is telling you because you will be probably be gone when your contract is up. You don't have to solve all their problems, or live with the ones they are not solving, for the same reason.
The disadvantage is, there may be times you are between jobs and those times can be fairly unpredictable in timing and duration. Also, in an economic downturn, consultants are the first to go.
My guess is not. Dust hard to eliminate if using a sheetfed or flat scanner and will be more objectionable for photos than for documents. Also most scanners do not have a resolution close to that of photo film, so you are losing detail. You can ship your photos to a place that will use a professional scanner on them. DigMyPics is one. FotoBridge is another.
I sometimes shop at a place in Sunnyvale called Weird Stuff Warehouse. They have great bins full of surplus and second-hand cards, connectors, keyboards, mice, power adapters, and components. Standard operating procedure is to buy at least two, preferably three, of everything and hope one of them works. But it's cheap enough you can afford to do that.
You need to be able to raise staggering sums of money. That doesn't mean you are well qualified to be President but it is a prerequisite to attaining that office.
I still use Yahoo Finance quite a lot - it's fast, well organized and useful. But if it went away tomorrow, there are alternatives. Yahoo is still making money but their long-term future is starting to look bleak. IMO they should be looking to sell off the valuable pieces while they still have value.
The problem with switching companies is that you will have to prove your skills and worth all over again. And most of them will slot you into at best a middling job grade at first (not architect level) unless you already have an industry-wide reputation.
Yeah, but those who make it mega-big (Facebook, Google, Oracle, IBM..) all have their "crown jewels" close sourced. There is no equivalent monster company that is exclusively open source.
There are a few. Red Hat is a good sized company. Springsource had a reasonable-sized business (tens of millions in revenue) before being acquired by VMwware. mySQL was similar in revenue, and got acquired for crazy money by Sun. There's SugarCRM. But in general.. most of the really valuable companies have really valuable software they keep under lock and key.
There were quite a few people in the 1999-2000 tech boom who exercised their stock options and kept (rather than immediately sold) their shares, expecting they would go even higher. The problem is, the exercise is treated as a taxable gain. So if the stock later tanks, you have a big tax bill and no money to pay it.
Java in fact shares quite a few concepts with Ada. Packages, array validation, etc. Java has at least as good runtime checks as Ada. And there are Java static analysis tools.
For mySQL, it depends on the storage engine you are using. Postgres has row-level locks I believe but there are still some subtle differences in how Oracle does it.
Oracle uses row-level locks only, and unlike for example MS-SQL or Sybase, will never escalate lock scope to the block or table level. It does not have any limit on the number of rows that can be locked during a transaction.
If you have a mostly-read application this may not matter, but it matters a lot if you have a high update frequency from multiple clients.
You can try to relax the transaction isolation level in MS-SQL to get greater update performance but that does not then provide the same degree of isolation as Oracle.
Oracle is not "plug and play" for developers, far from it. But it is true that recent versions do a lot of auto-tuning, and you can get reasonable performance with not a lot of work (but that assumes you don't have a truly dumb design, and really high performance requires a DBA, for sure). Oracle's superior locking model also in my experience produces less developer pain that many of the alternatives.
I have a couple thousand bucks invested in commercial software on Windows. I use this stuff daily. Even if it was available on Mac, do I want to buy that stuff all over again? Most of it is not on Linux. It might run under an emulator, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I do also run Linux and it performs well but I only use it for programming, not games, productivity apps, or anything else.
Larry Ellison has never destroyed a major competetor - Sybase and Informix still stand.
Sybase and Informix are not even nearly major competitors. In the DB market (now a much smaller part of Oracle than previously), that would be DB2 and SQL Server (also mySQL etc. but you could argue that's a different market because most of their users wouldn't ever pay commercial DB license fees, or even support fees).
Larry did, though, buy an awful lot of competitors: PeopleSoft, Hyperion, BEA, Sun, etc.
Markets do a great job at rationing scarce resources. If there are only so many college admissions available, then price is an efficient way of allocating those. But maybe society has an interest in ensuring that more people get into, and complete, college, than a market-based system would accomplish? I think so. You can argue whether government loan programs achieve that or not, but RP seems to believe that government shouldn't even try to achieve that outcome.
IMO there are advantages to being a long-timer at one job. If the company is growing and you have stock options, you will do well, over time. Also if the company is placing you into more senior roles over time you will gain from that too (and not just monetarily, but in terms of valuable experience and job satisfaction). If you are not getting these upsides from staying then that is a reason to be bail.
Software and outsourced services are a big industry in India, but they employ a tiny fraction of the population and they are a relatively small part of GDP (about 5%).
If they (or more likely, their customers) decide they really need RedHat, they can write a big check and buy the company. They could afford it. But they probably won't. As Larry said a few years ago, RedHat doesn't really own any IP. Their stuff is open source. So why pay for something you can just take?
> New brackets every so often that account for inflation, or else a periodic adjustment of all brackets for inflation
FYI the tax bracket thresholds currently are not fixed but change yearly based on inflation. I assume this would be the case with any new bracket placed on very high incomes.
The top tax rate on personal income has never been lower, anytime in the past 50 years. Furthermore it was deliberately set lower than necessary to fund current spending levels, back in 2001. So raising it is only a sensible move. You would think from the outcry against it that it was some radical move to kill off rich people, but it is neither radical nor would it cause a catastrophe. It will not by itself greatly alter the distribution of wealth. But it will start getting us closer to having tax revenue actually fund what the government spends. (I do not think just cutting government spending is a reasonable alternative - although that can be done too - it was a combination of spending and poor tax policy that got us into this, and fixing both those things is a reasonable way to get us out of deficit).
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Professors who get research grants bring money into the university (the university always retains some of it, for "administration"). On the other hand, the university does not get an extra dime for having professors who teach well. So guess what their priority is?
I clicked on the link to "XUL Periodic Table" in Firefox 10.0.2 and immediately got the message "This page uses an unsupported technology that is no longer available by default in Firefox.". Doesn't sound very promising.
Uh, downloading source code is not quite the same as taking a picture. That's called theft.
It is not without risk, but you can always hire out yourself and your tech skills as an independent consultant.
The advantage is, you don't have to, and are not expected to, drink the Kool-Aid at your job. You don't have to believe the B.S. management is telling you because you will be probably be gone when your contract is up. You don't have to solve all their problems, or live with the ones they are not solving, for the same reason.
The disadvantage is, there may be times you are between jobs and those times can be fairly unpredictable in timing and duration. Also, in an economic downturn, consultants are the first to go.
My guess is not. Dust hard to eliminate if using a sheetfed or flat scanner and will be more objectionable for photos than for documents. Also most scanners do not have a resolution close to that of photo film, so you are losing detail. You can ship your photos to a place that will use a professional scanner on them. DigMyPics is one. FotoBridge is another.
I sometimes shop at a place in Sunnyvale called Weird Stuff Warehouse. They have great bins full of surplus and second-hand cards, connectors, keyboards, mice, power adapters, and components. Standard operating procedure is to buy at least two, preferably three, of everything and hope one of them works. But it's cheap enough you can afford to do that.
You need to be able to raise staggering sums of money. That doesn't mean you are well qualified to be President but it is a prerequisite to attaining that office.
I still use Yahoo Finance quite a lot - it's fast, well organized and useful. But if it went away tomorrow, there are alternatives. Yahoo is still making money but their long-term future is starting to look bleak. IMO they should be looking to sell off the valuable pieces while they still have value.
The problem with switching companies is that you will have to prove your skills and worth all over again. And most of them will slot you into at best a middling job grade at first (not architect level) unless you already have an industry-wide reputation.
Yeah, but those who make it mega-big (Facebook, Google, Oracle, IBM ..) all have their "crown jewels" close sourced. There is no equivalent monster company that is exclusively open source.
There are a few. Red Hat is a good sized company. Springsource had a reasonable-sized business (tens of millions in revenue) before being acquired by VMwware. mySQL was similar in revenue, and got acquired for crazy money by Sun. There's SugarCRM. But in general .. most of the really valuable companies have really valuable software they keep under lock and key.
There were quite a few people in the 1999-2000 tech boom who exercised their stock options and kept (rather than immediately sold) their shares, expecting they would go even higher. The problem is, the exercise is treated as a taxable gain. So if the stock later tanks, you have a big tax bill and no money to pay it.
Java in fact shares quite a few concepts with Ada. Packages, array validation, etc. Java has at least as good runtime checks as Ada. And there are Java static analysis tools.
For mySQL, it depends on the storage engine you are using. Postgres has row-level locks I believe but there are still some subtle differences in how Oracle does it.
What is Oracle's superior locking model?
Oracle uses row-level locks only, and unlike for example MS-SQL or Sybase, will never escalate lock scope to the block or table level. It does not have any limit on the number of rows that can be locked during a transaction.
If you have a mostly-read application this may not matter, but it matters a lot if you have a high update frequency from multiple clients.
You can try to relax the transaction isolation level in MS-SQL to get greater update performance but that does not then provide the same degree of isolation as Oracle.
Oracle is not "plug and play" for developers, far from it. But it is true that recent versions do a lot of auto-tuning, and you can get reasonable performance with not a lot of work (but that assumes you don't have a truly dumb design, and really high performance requires a DBA, for sure). Oracle's superior locking model also in my experience produces less developer pain that many of the alternatives.
That is not my experience. I know several Indian CEOs and they had no more than the usual amount of trouble raising venture capital.
I have a couple thousand bucks invested in commercial software on Windows. I use this stuff daily. Even if it was available on Mac, do I want to buy that stuff all over again? Most of it is not on Linux. It might run under an emulator, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I do also run Linux and it performs well but I only use it for programming, not games, productivity apps, or anything else.
Larry Ellison has never destroyed a major competetor - Sybase and Informix still stand.
Sybase and Informix are not even nearly major competitors. In the DB market (now a much smaller part of Oracle than previously), that would be DB2 and SQL Server (also mySQL etc. but you could argue that's a different market because most of their users wouldn't ever pay commercial DB license fees, or even support fees).
Larry did, though, buy an awful lot of competitors: PeopleSoft, Hyperion, BEA, Sun, etc.
Markets do a great job at rationing scarce resources. If there are only so many college admissions available, then price is an efficient way of allocating those. But maybe society has an interest in ensuring that more people get into, and complete, college, than a market-based system would accomplish? I think so. You can argue whether government loan programs achieve that or not, but RP seems to believe that government shouldn't even try to achieve that outcome.
IMO there are advantages to being a long-timer at one job. If the company is growing and you have stock options, you will do well, over time. Also if the company is placing you into more senior roles over time you will gain from that too (and not just monetarily, but in terms of valuable experience and job satisfaction). If you are not getting these upsides from staying then that is a reason to be bail.
Software and outsourced services are a big industry in India, but they employ a tiny fraction of the population and they are a relatively small part of GDP (about 5%).
If they (or more likely, their customers) decide they really need RedHat, they can write a big check and buy the company. They could afford it. But they probably won't. As Larry said a few years ago, RedHat doesn't really own any IP. Their stuff is open source. So why pay for something you can just take?
> New brackets every so often that account for inflation, or else a periodic adjustment of all brackets for inflation
FYI the tax bracket thresholds currently are not fixed but change yearly based on inflation. I assume this would be the case with any new bracket placed on very high incomes.
The top tax rate on personal income has never been lower, anytime in the past 50 years. Furthermore it was deliberately set lower than necessary to fund current spending levels, back in 2001. So raising it is only a sensible move. You would think from the outcry against it that it was some radical move to kill off rich people, but it is neither radical nor would it cause a catastrophe. It will not by itself greatly alter the distribution of wealth. But it will start getting us closer to having tax revenue actually fund what the government spends. (I do not think just cutting government spending is a reasonable alternative - although that can be done too - it was a combination of spending and poor tax policy that got us into this, and fixing both those things is a reasonable way to get us out of deficit).