Actually it's your argument that's BS. The "indirect benefits" argument is usually the last resort when all others have been trounced.
The fact is, if you were to eliminate the UF athletic department entirely, it would not change the situation with academics one bit. Well, that's not true. There would be 6+ million fewer dollars flowing into the university's general fund. But that aside, people are making it a guns/butter situation. But it's not. There is no hard financial opportunity cost to some academic program associated with the operation of the university athletics program. And there certainly is no opportunity cost where these intangibles are concerned, either.
You've just justified tearing the entire university system asunder.
If student tuition could keep academic departments afloat, we would never hear about budget cuts. But it's fantasy. The University of Florida, for example, after budget cuts, will be getting over $800 million dollars in the next academic year. Divide that by roughly 50,000 undergrad + grad, and that's about $18K/student. Tuition is $4K in-state, $24K out-of-state, and the student body definitely skews more toward in-state students. So money received from tuition pales in comparison to what the state sends.
In higher education academics, departments are funded, and justify their existences, through grants. Unfortunate as it may be, that's the way of life. And UF's CS department was not taking in enough grant money to justify remaining a standalone department.
IMO, people are looking at this a bit backwards. This should be highlighting what poor stewards of tax money public colleges and university have been and continue to be. A lot of attention is put on the athletic department, which subsists without state or university funding, turns a profit, and is a major donor to its host school. Yet a blind eye is turned to the fact that this school is raking in billions, yet cannot find a way to keep legitimate academic programs intact.
Why not do some research instead of postulating on a message board. Because if you did, you'd know that the athletic department donates over $6 million to the university per year.
The athletic department does not receive funding from the university. In fact, the UAA is one of the University of Florida's largest benefactors, donating in the neighborhood of $6 million annually.
I've never understood why Comcast and other cable companies have never embraced being a "pipe provider," per your model. It is by far the most profitable of their business units.
People will accept Win 8 as long as it works. Me and Vista were total flops because they were highly unstable, among lots of other warts. Most consumers will probably revert to "classic mode" once they get it, but they won't flat-out reject it the way they did Vista. Remember, Microsoft's OS sales rely on sales of new computers. If 8 works, then I wouldn't expect the downgrade debacle that happened with Vista. Then it's just a matter of how many people are buying new Windows computers.
"I find it strange for MS to do an about-face and claim cloud as an actual replacement for a proper in-house IT."
I don't know if this is 180 degrees from earlier marketing messages. In Microsoft's case, at least.
That's kind of what we see when the reality of the situation intersects with the dream being sold before the technology matured. In an "all other things remaining constant" scenario, that would spell doom for IT admins. But as the cloud market matures, physical hardware costs diminish, power requirements get lower (meaning less money spent on electricity), and hosting/bandwidth centers decrease their prices. For certain operations, it doesn't even make sense for a full cloud deployment. Which is why the tactic Microsoft is taking is to sell hybrid models, and it's also probably what led Amazon to unveil its VPC.
Who knows what the future holds? In 1993, still less than two decades ago, we could not have predicted what this Internet thing would turn into. Maybe we'll be out of jobs in a few years, or maybe this opens up new and different challenges for the future. Regardless, I have to get back to work.
Since it is weakly typed, Javascript can be very difficult to debug, in areas deep in your code. You can ease your transition by writing unit tests for all your Javascript code. Get comfortable with a Javascript unit testing framework, and write tests first. Then, when you are debugging problems in your tests, you will be training yourself to recognize the common problems that occur in Javascript code.
what seems like age bias is that many people stop learning when they hit about 30, and then wonder why nobody wants them when they're 50.
+1
Length in career varies greatly by individual. Tech is no different than any other career -- if you want to continue with it, that means you do what it takes to keep your value high, through continual learning, and self-reflection and improvement. People will either wash out (by choosing not to keep up), or they will choose to drop out, by either migration to management or moving to a different career path. As someone else stated, we're looking at a relatively new industry, so it's hard to judge how many "old" people there are in it. The dot com crash of 2000 sent a LOT of people scrambling away from tech, never to return. That was a draining of the pool from which we'd be seeing a lot of 40-somethings today.
I'm in my mid-30s, and I feel pretty fortunate to remain in demand. However, I also realize it's because I have always striven to stay current with my skills. I spend my free time looking ahead to what is coming, and not just rest on what I have done in the past, and it has continually paid off.
Lots of people can write code. Few are the complete package in this business. Nobody wants to learn the little things, such as builds, deployment, etc. Get interested in the "boring" stuff, like testing and test automation. Learn everything there is to know about build and configuration management with your tools of choice. Then practice all those things copiously. This is an area of deficiency in nearly every organization, so identifying that need and making yourself into the person who can fill it will go a long way toward making more hirable, regardless of how you learned your trade.
who the hell builds their extremely expensive hdd component manufacturing facility on a fucking flood plain? is space really at that much of a premium? if you really must, then put it on some stilts or something.
You've invented a new pastime: armchair industrialism.
Corn does not make cattle ill, and it is not cheap because of subsidies, but because it is ridiculously easy to grow. The subsidies of which you speak have been for ethanol, and they have put upward price pressure on corn. Furthermore, cattle are not fed antibiotics because they are sick, but because the antibiotics are growth promoters. Finally, the blame on livestock antibiotics is most likely misplaced. The antibiotics used for growth promotion are exclusive to that purpose. We do not see high instances of resistant bacterial infections among farmers. Meanwhile, the epicenter of MRSA outbreaks is nearly always hospitals, and they are resistant to one or more specific medically-used antibiotics.
There's just no compelling reason to use G+. Everyone I know is on Facebook, and it's not like G+'s UX sets itself so far above anything else on the web that friends will drop Facebook in droves.
G+ is a Facebook knockoff, and Google is going to have to do something pretty drastic to shake that perception if they are to see an uptick in real users.
How is a research project like this useful, exactly? Big budget science projects like this seem to me to epitomize wasteful and improper spending by government. Billions of dollars will be pumped into this project, which may or may not produce interesting results, and will be of abstract value at best to society.
Looking at the article from the original story, it doesn't seem like the IT contracting firms are billing outrageous rates to the government. $260K/year works out to being a blended rate of $125/hour. While on the high side of the market, it's still in range of prices you typically see firms billing for onshore, onsite IT workers. The post and accompanying chart are a bit misleading, because it is comparing the cost of purchasing services from a firm to the average salaries (minus benefits, PTO, etc.) of individuals in those positions.
From TFA:
"This list begs the question: What service is the Federal Contractor providing to justify charging double what it would cost the Federal Government to employ these same personnel directly?"
If you have a problem with your plumbing at home, a plumbing company is billing you at least $100/hour for the time of its employees. You could hire a full time plumber 1/4 of that rate, but then you're on the hook for that plumber's salary, even though you only had one plumbing problem. I realize that it's not entirely apt metaphor -- after all, you could just fire the plumber as soon as he was finished (but then you'd better hope you never have a problem again). But with the federal government, it's even worse. Most federal employees are virtually untouchable once they are hired. There are exceptions -- in agencies of high political visibility and sensitivity you have a lower screw-up threshold than in most jobs -- but for the most part, if you're in with the feds, you're in for life. So the choice is really, pay a contracting firm their markup for an IT worker for 1-2 years, then wipe that expense off the books once the project is over, or hire someone in-house and keep him/her on payroll for 30-40 years (plus you're on the hook for benefits, regular above-market raises, and rather generous pensions). That alone is a pretty valuable service provided by a staffing firm. Also, the firm is doing the acquisition and vetting of talent, which is not without cost.
It seems like the author of this post is making a half-hearted attempt to demonize the contracting firms themselves, but it's hard to come to that conclusion -- it's not like they're blatantly gouging the government, but rather charging the government their market rates for professional services. Granted, it is eye-opening to see the scale on which the government is consuming professional services. If a private company had IT operations on that scale, they'd be hiring in-house. From a straight-up cost perspective, it is certainly more effective to hire your own. But the flipside is that there would have to be a huge cultural shift in how the government views its workforce to be able to pull that off. You can't be "in for life" on a short-term project, and you can't be tied to one agency or office. But there are so many politics interwoven in government projects, that I don't think that can happen.
This was my thought exactly. Siri is still listed as a product in beta, and all the logic is cloud-based. Sales of the 4S exceeded expectations, and I don't think it's a coincidence that last week several users across the country were reporting frequent problems with Siri connecting to the network. There's really not a lot of work done on the client, so there's no reason that Siri would not be available on any device capable of running iOS5 when it goes GA. If it shows promise, expect it to be open to all devices. If not, expect it to fade into obscurity.
There were calls for more regulation, not better regulation. As I can attest from numerous hangovers in my life, more is not always better. When it comes to federal legislation, that is almost always the rule, not the exception.
You're parsing/enhancing rhetoric for what you want to hear about a political party you want to oppose. So much so that you'll throw your vote to the party that Wall Street really *does* support.
They've won, and OWS only cements that victory rather than providing hope for improvement.
Police have generally been favorable to or at least tolerant of Tea Party protests. They have been hostile and violent towards Occupy Wall St.
is because this:
It's emphasizing peaceful protest as a way of getting what you want.
is not true about occupy Wall Street. Police are favorable to people who do not destroy private property and who organize lawfully. If OWS followed the same pattern of behavior as the Tea Party, there would not be a single arrest.
As of yet, there have been no indications that Occupy Wall St will turn into "elect Democrats" in a way that the Tea Party turned into "elect Republicans". There are also indications that attempts to turn it into an effort to elect Democrats would likely end in failure.
This movement was co-opted by Democrat-funded groups in its very early stages. Protesters have shown little interest in resisting these influences, which is in stark contrast to the Tea Party. Don't forget, much of the Tea Party movement targeted primary, not general, elections. While the GOP has undoubtedly benefited from the Tea Party movement, and tried to steal some of their spotlight, the movement has also taken down some very long-tenured establishment Republicans. Meanwhile, Obama 2012 has had a growing presence in these OWS rallies. It's hard to buy the legitimacy of a movement that is supposedly expressing anger at Wall Street, while an incumbent who counts some of the biggest Wall Street CEOs among his inner circle has a campaign presence among them without resistance.
Is this really any different than Apple's strategy all along? Come out with a phone, and make incremental improvements each year. Every other year (except for 1-3g jump) has been the major refresh mark. If you come out with a majorly new product each year, you stand to alienate your customer base -- the majority of customers will balk at feeling pressure to refresh their devices every year. This puts people on a 2-year track, which also coincides with the term of carrier contracts.
And face it, Apple has never attempted to cater to the device geek market, except maybe with the very first iPhone (and that's a stretch). Instead, they have focused on enhancing features that are important to everyday use, often centering around a single aspect. In this case it's battery life and form factor. It may be lacking 4G, but you will make it through the day on a single charge, without having to do much, if anything, to optimize battery usage. And it will fit pretty comfortably in your pocket.
That's been Apple's MO with all their products -- make consumer-grade devices that do the important things well, and leave other competition for the early adopters. I like a lot of the Android phones, but I wish one of them would take a similar strategy and make them accessories as opposed to focal points -- take a break from cramming new features in and turn attention to gaining energy efficiency and making the things smaller.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it's your argument that's BS. The "indirect benefits" argument is usually the last resort when all others have been trounced.
The fact is, if you were to eliminate the UF athletic department entirely, it would not change the situation with academics one bit. Well, that's not true. There would be 6+ million fewer dollars flowing into the university's general fund. But that aside, people are making it a guns/butter situation. But it's not. There is no hard financial opportunity cost to some academic program associated with the operation of the university athletics program. And there certainly is no opportunity cost where these intangibles are concerned, either.
You've just justified tearing the entire university system asunder.
If student tuition could keep academic departments afloat, we would never hear about budget cuts. But it's fantasy. The University of Florida, for example, after budget cuts, will be getting over $800 million dollars in the next academic year. Divide that by roughly 50,000 undergrad + grad, and that's about $18K/student. Tuition is $4K in-state, $24K out-of-state, and the student body definitely skews more toward in-state students. So money received from tuition pales in comparison to what the state sends.
In higher education academics, departments are funded, and justify their existences, through grants. Unfortunate as it may be, that's the way of life. And UF's CS department was not taking in enough grant money to justify remaining a standalone department.
IMO, people are looking at this a bit backwards. This should be highlighting what poor stewards of tax money public colleges and university have been and continue to be. A lot of attention is put on the athletic department, which subsists without state or university funding, turns a profit, and is a major donor to its host school. Yet a blind eye is turned to the fact that this school is raking in billions, yet cannot find a way to keep legitimate academic programs intact.
Why not do some research instead of postulating on a message board. Because if you did, you'd know that the athletic department donates over $6 million to the university per year.
The athletic department does not receive funding from the university. In fact, the UAA is one of the University of Florida's largest benefactors, donating in the neighborhood of $6 million annually.
I've never understood why Comcast and other cable companies have never embraced being a "pipe provider," per your model. It is by far the most profitable of their business units.
People will accept Win 8 as long as it works. Me and Vista were total flops because they were highly unstable, among lots of other warts. Most consumers will probably revert to "classic mode" once they get it, but they won't flat-out reject it the way they did Vista. Remember, Microsoft's OS sales rely on sales of new computers. If 8 works, then I wouldn't expect the downgrade debacle that happened with Vista. Then it's just a matter of how many people are buying new Windows computers.
It's really about the only option we have remaining to escape the ever-growing police state.
If it makes you feel any better, the bureaucrat is most likely overpaid, not underpaid.
"I find it strange for MS to do an about-face and claim cloud as an actual replacement for a proper in-house IT."
I don't know if this is 180 degrees from earlier marketing messages. In Microsoft's case, at least.
That's kind of what we see when the reality of the situation intersects with the dream being sold before the technology matured. In an "all other things remaining constant" scenario, that would spell doom for IT admins. But as the cloud market matures, physical hardware costs diminish, power requirements get lower (meaning less money spent on electricity), and hosting/bandwidth centers decrease their prices. For certain operations, it doesn't even make sense for a full cloud deployment. Which is why the tactic Microsoft is taking is to sell hybrid models, and it's also probably what led Amazon to unveil its VPC.
Who knows what the future holds? In 1993, still less than two decades ago, we could not have predicted what this Internet thing would turn into. Maybe we'll be out of jobs in a few years, or maybe this opens up new and different challenges for the future. Regardless, I have to get back to work.
Since it is weakly typed, Javascript can be very difficult to debug, in areas deep in your code. You can ease your transition by writing unit tests for all your Javascript code. Get comfortable with a Javascript unit testing framework, and write tests first. Then, when you are debugging problems in your tests, you will be training yourself to recognize the common problems that occur in Javascript code.
what seems like age bias is that many people stop learning when they hit about 30, and then wonder why nobody wants them when they're 50.
+1
Length in career varies greatly by individual. Tech is no different than any other career -- if you want to continue with it, that means you do what it takes to keep your value high, through continual learning, and self-reflection and improvement. People will either wash out (by choosing not to keep up), or they will choose to drop out, by either migration to management or moving to a different career path. As someone else stated, we're looking at a relatively new industry, so it's hard to judge how many "old" people there are in it. The dot com crash of 2000 sent a LOT of people scrambling away from tech, never to return. That was a draining of the pool from which we'd be seeing a lot of 40-somethings today.
I'm in my mid-30s, and I feel pretty fortunate to remain in demand. However, I also realize it's because I have always striven to stay current with my skills. I spend my free time looking ahead to what is coming, and not just rest on what I have done in the past, and it has continually paid off.
Ding ding ding!
I think we have a winner, folks. Sometimes good things just don't make the cut when you're in survival mode.
Advantage: SirWhoopass
If telecommuting is common in the company, then visibility is hardly a concern. People in the hierarchy get trained to look for results, not presence.
If you are the only person who is remote, then it can present more of an issue.
Lots of people can write code. Few are the complete package in this business. Nobody wants to learn the little things, such as builds, deployment, etc. Get interested in the "boring" stuff, like testing and test automation. Learn everything there is to know about build and configuration management with your tools of choice. Then practice all those things copiously. This is an area of deficiency in nearly every organization, so identifying that need and making yourself into the person who can fill it will go a long way toward making more hirable, regardless of how you learned your trade.
who the hell builds their extremely expensive hdd component manufacturing facility on a fucking flood plain? is space really at that much of a premium? if you really must, then put it on some stilts or something.
You've invented a new pastime: armchair industrialism.
Corn does not make cattle ill, and it is not cheap because of subsidies, but because it is ridiculously easy to grow. The subsidies of which you speak have been for ethanol, and they have put upward price pressure on corn. Furthermore, cattle are not fed antibiotics because they are sick, but because the antibiotics are growth promoters. Finally, the blame on livestock antibiotics is most likely misplaced. The antibiotics used for growth promotion are exclusive to that purpose. We do not see high instances of resistant bacterial infections among farmers. Meanwhile, the epicenter of MRSA outbreaks is nearly always hospitals, and they are resistant to one or more specific medically-used antibiotics.
There's just no compelling reason to use G+. Everyone I know is on Facebook, and it's not like G+'s UX sets itself so far above anything else on the web that friends will drop Facebook in droves.
G+ is a Facebook knockoff, and Google is going to have to do something pretty drastic to shake that perception if they are to see an uptick in real users.
How is a research project like this useful, exactly? Big budget science projects like this seem to me to epitomize wasteful and improper spending by government. Billions of dollars will be pumped into this project, which may or may not produce interesting results, and will be of abstract value at best to society.
Looking at the article from the original story, it doesn't seem like the IT contracting firms are billing outrageous rates to the government. $260K/year works out to being a blended rate of $125/hour. While on the high side of the market, it's still in range of prices you typically see firms billing for onshore, onsite IT workers. The post and accompanying chart are a bit misleading, because it is comparing the cost of purchasing services from a firm to the average salaries (minus benefits, PTO, etc.) of individuals in those positions.
From TFA:
"This list begs the question: What service is the Federal Contractor providing to justify charging double what it would cost the Federal Government to employ these same personnel directly?"
If you have a problem with your plumbing at home, a plumbing company is billing you at least $100/hour for the time of its employees. You could hire a full time plumber 1/4 of that rate, but then you're on the hook for that plumber's salary, even though you only had one plumbing problem. I realize that it's not entirely apt metaphor -- after all, you could just fire the plumber as soon as he was finished (but then you'd better hope you never have a problem again). But with the federal government, it's even worse. Most federal employees are virtually untouchable once they are hired. There are exceptions -- in agencies of high political visibility and sensitivity you have a lower screw-up threshold than in most jobs -- but for the most part, if you're in with the feds, you're in for life. So the choice is really, pay a contracting firm their markup for an IT worker for 1-2 years, then wipe that expense off the books once the project is over, or hire someone in-house and keep him/her on payroll for 30-40 years (plus you're on the hook for benefits, regular above-market raises, and rather generous pensions). That alone is a pretty valuable service provided by a staffing firm. Also, the firm is doing the acquisition and vetting of talent, which is not without cost.
It seems like the author of this post is making a half-hearted attempt to demonize the contracting firms themselves, but it's hard to come to that conclusion -- it's not like they're blatantly gouging the government, but rather charging the government their market rates for professional services. Granted, it is eye-opening to see the scale on which the government is consuming professional services. If a private company had IT operations on that scale, they'd be hiring in-house. From a straight-up cost perspective, it is certainly more effective to hire your own. But the flipside is that there would have to be a huge cultural shift in how the government views its workforce to be able to pull that off. You can't be "in for life" on a short-term project, and you can't be tied to one agency or office. But there are so many politics interwoven in government projects, that I don't think that can happen.
This was my thought exactly. Siri is still listed as a product in beta, and all the logic is cloud-based. Sales of the 4S exceeded expectations, and I don't think it's a coincidence that last week several users across the country were reporting frequent problems with Siri connecting to the network. There's really not a lot of work done on the client, so there's no reason that Siri would not be available on any device capable of running iOS5 when it goes GA. If it shows promise, expect it to be open to all devices. If not, expect it to fade into obscurity.
When was it illegal to charge more than 10% interest?
There were calls for more regulation, not better regulation. As I can attest from numerous hangovers in my life, more is not always better. When it comes to federal legislation, that is almost always the rule, not the exception.
You're parsing/enhancing rhetoric for what you want to hear about a political party you want to oppose. So much so that you'll throw your vote to the party that Wall Street really *does* support.
They've won, and OWS only cements that victory rather than providing hope for improvement.
This:
Police have generally been favorable to or at least tolerant of Tea Party protests. They have been hostile and violent towards Occupy Wall St.
is because this:
It's emphasizing peaceful protest as a way of getting what you want.
is not true about occupy Wall Street. Police are favorable to people who do not destroy private property and who organize lawfully. If OWS followed the same pattern of behavior as the Tea Party, there would not be a single arrest.
As of yet, there have been no indications that Occupy Wall St will turn into "elect Democrats" in a way that the Tea Party turned into "elect Republicans". There are also indications that attempts to turn it into an effort to elect Democrats would likely end in failure.
This movement was co-opted by Democrat-funded groups in its very early stages. Protesters have shown little interest in resisting these influences, which is in stark contrast to the Tea Party. Don't forget, much of the Tea Party movement targeted primary, not general, elections. While the GOP has undoubtedly benefited from the Tea Party movement, and tried to steal some of their spotlight, the movement has also taken down some very long-tenured establishment Republicans. Meanwhile, Obama 2012 has had a growing presence in these OWS rallies. It's hard to buy the legitimacy of a movement that is supposedly expressing anger at Wall Street, while an incumbent who counts some of the biggest Wall Street CEOs among his inner circle has a campaign presence among them without resistance.
Is this really any different than Apple's strategy all along? Come out with a phone, and make incremental improvements each year. Every other year (except for 1-3g jump) has been the major refresh mark. If you come out with a majorly new product each year, you stand to alienate your customer base -- the majority of customers will balk at feeling pressure to refresh their devices every year. This puts people on a 2-year track, which also coincides with the term of carrier contracts.
And face it, Apple has never attempted to cater to the device geek market, except maybe with the very first iPhone (and that's a stretch). Instead, they have focused on enhancing features that are important to everyday use, often centering around a single aspect. In this case it's battery life and form factor. It may be lacking 4G, but you will make it through the day on a single charge, without having to do much, if anything, to optimize battery usage. And it will fit pretty comfortably in your pocket.
That's been Apple's MO with all their products -- make consumer-grade devices that do the important things well, and leave other competition for the early adopters. I like a lot of the Android phones, but I wish one of them would take a similar strategy and make them accessories as opposed to focal points -- take a break from cramming new features in and turn attention to gaining energy efficiency and making the things smaller.