That's true, but there's also the question of why those "juicy contracts" exist. A juicy contract is one with high profits - one in which the government pays you much more than it costs you to acquire the item you're selling to re government.
Government routinely pays a lot more than what they could purchase the same item for at Walmart. I've seen it with my own eyes. A government agency can only buy from a vendor approved for the project, after 400 pages of paperwork to get approved. The vendor charges $150 for a widget. Walmart charges $30 for the same widget. The vendor buys the item for $30 and sells it to the government for $150. To avoid HAVING a juicy contract at all, government agencies should be able to just use Walmart.com.
The pproblem, of course, is that if they can skip the BS and just get the item from Walmart, they can also skip the BS and just buy from clintobama.com
That's true. My wife is a homemaker. Before that, she worked in childcare for 13 years. She's good at what she does.
If you don't have kids, cleaning up your own house is part of not being a burden on others - that, by itself does not mean you're contributing your share to society. Whatever feelings you may have about that, it's simply mathematically true. You can't be a net contributor by just cooking yourself and cleaning up after yourself - the same result would be achieved if weren't here.
If you believe that producing and spending is good for economy, it's better to have two people produce and spend than one.
What needs to be subtracted is what could be called infrastructure costs - they use the roads, police protection, etc. What isn't good for an economy is to have people there, and making use of infrastructure, but not producing. What is good for the economy is to have people who produce (and therefore spend) more than they cost to police, emergency medical care, etc.
We might be granting too many H1Bs, I don't know. I haven't seen reliable, relevant numbers. That's a separate discussion.
However, IF you're going to allow a couple to come into the country and IF you're going to allow one of them to work, it makes sense to allow the other to work legally. If you don't , they'll probably work illegally, but having them here and not working isn't helpful. As long as they are here, the best thing for America is that they are being productive. It's best that they be doing something useful and then paying taxes like other workers. The other options are that they aren't doing anything productive, in which case they are just an extra incremental load on the infrastructure, or they are working unlawfully and probably not paying their fair share of taxes.
> And just how do you determine the person at fault in a fraction-of-a-second algorithm?
That one happens to be easy, 90% of the time. If you follow the rules of the road, you won't hit other people who are also following the rules of the road. That's how the rules are made - so that when everyone follows them, there are no collisions. Therefore, if you follow the rules of the road, any collision must have been caused by other driver (most of the time).
Example - you must decide between a head on collision with either of two cars. If you stay in your proper lane, the car you hit must be going the wrong direction. If you instead swerve into oncoming traffic, you'll hit people who are going the correct direction - people who are not at fault.
It's really hard to suggest specific projects because "intermediate" is such an imprecise term. Stay away from anything security sensitive, especially WEB FACING security sensitive applications. Web scripts get attacked several times per day.
Other than that, something that can really teach you a lot in a short time is to become familiar with a low-level language like C (not C++). Even if you don't USE C much, being familiar with it will let you understand your Python code so much better - you'll know WHY sort() is so slow in any language, and how to get the top 10 items much faster, without sorting the entire list. Most languages are themselves written in C, so understanding C will let you understand a bit about how every other language works behind the scenes.
Learn a high-level language like Perl, PHP 5.3, or in your case Python. The Perl programmer can finish writing the software while the C programmer is still declaring her variables.
Learn an object-oriented GUI language and subclas one gui element. Microsoft does a great job in this class of languages. (Not printing html, but actually manipulating GUI objects). When you become familiar with VB.NET or C#, and subclass just one gui element you'll "get it" as far as object-oriented programming goes. Python can do objects, Perl can use objects, etc. but they aren't the best way to LEARN objects. The GUI languages let you see objects and by subclassing one you'll understand the power of object-oriented programming.
You may wish to subscribe to a sysadmin news list of some type. Any of them will be better than none, you'll at least hear about some of the worst issues.
That's interesting. It sounds like on OSX you feel about the same way I feel on FreeBSD.
> OSX is very nonstandard.
It should be noted that OSX follows the UNIX specification, Linux does not. OSX _is_ a UNIX, and certified as one. Linux is not. That said, most *nix software these days is probably developed on Linux systems, so Linux serves as a sort of de facto standard.
Ps whenever I post positive comments about OSX, some idiot flames me, saying "you don't use open source, you obviously hate open source", etc. My name is at the top of my post. Look at it, then look at the changelog for the Linux kernel.
> But then, I still have a lot of friends who will tell me at length about how much better MacOS is, and I find it profoundly irritating to use.
I'm guessing that by "MacOS" you mean OSX, not the classic Mac OS that's been deprecated for a decade? I used Linux rexclusively for over over ten years. Based on my experience with iOS, I expected OSX to be really annoying. When I sat down to use it anyway, I was surprised to find it's a very nice Unix, with a pretty GUI that I don't care about. (For me, the GUI is nothing more than a convenient way to have both a web browser and all my terminals on the various monitors).
I'm curious what any fan of Linux would find so irritating about OSX, especially if you're comfortable with the CLI. It's the same CLI as Linux for daily work. System admin has differences, but for daily work it's the same. All the FOSS software runs on OSX just as it does on Linux, plus it has ready-to-run packages from proprietary vendors like Adobe. All on a very reliable, stable platform. What's not to like, other than the price?*
* Even the price can be $29 or so if you don't choose Mac hardware.
How many phone calls, how many hours (or months), and how much money might be required to fix an outage caused by an Exchange bug? Solving a sendmail problem requires zero phone calls, zero dollars, and no more than a couple of hours - turn on verbose debugging and the logs show me exactly what's happening. If it's caused by a bug in the software, those verbose logs show me exactly where in the source to look for the bug. I check the bugzilla, find the solution there, and deploy it. it's a brand new bug noone has seen before, I fix it and we're up.
Maybe your organization doesn't have anyone who knows how to use Google to find the solution which is posted in the bug tracker. In that case, you can call or email any of the THOUSANDS of companies who do have people who grok the sendmail source. With MS, there is only one company who has seen the source, and you're not going to get Microsoft's programmers on the phone.
[–]LoveExists 392 points 3 hours ago NSA Agent: "Sir, we have reports that u/Seventy_Seven may be working with a terrorist cell, what should we do?" NSA Officer: "Send a drone over there, let me know what happens." walks away... NSA Agent: mutters to himself "its not like anyone ever sends them back.." permalinkparent
> While you're at it, get a technology incident rapid response team together. Staff and fund them well. And, again, don't listen to some lobbyist shysters telling you that they should be used to protect some corporate assets. They can do that themselves. Their job is to keep YOUR COUNTRIES safe. Yes, that includes keeping them safe from said corporations! Their job is to make sure that your infrastructure, from power to gas to water, everything
You've largely described the role of the National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center in the US. Their focus in recent years has been IT security for infrastructure. When the experts there aren't actively responding to an emergency, they are providing training, often to state and city officials. For example, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and his staff could have been much better prepared if they had taken a few days of TEEX training.
NEERTC also provides some pretty good online cybersecurity classes for free. The material is great, the presentation could be improved. The idea is that a few experts can't protect everything, but they can certainly help educate the people who are responsible for critical systems in how to keep the systems safe.
It wwould be sad (and stupid) if the funding for NERRTC (a few million dollars) were redirected to some senator's pork project, so I hope the public continues to support their mission.
Full disclosure - I am tangentially associated with NERRTC. I don't work for NERRTC, but I work with them.
How so? I'm comparing compensation at two different jobs.
Are you complaining that I compared 48 weeks of work in the private sector vs 46 weeks working as a teacher? True, the teacher gets a little more vacation time, but at least some people claim teachers work longer hours, so that should roughly balance out.
Are you complaining that I'm comparing zero tolimited retirement matching in most private sector jobs to the more generous retirement benefits teachers get? That's an important part of the compensation package. It's one reason I work for the school system, and I know several coworkers consider it important as well. My last job had no retirement benefit. The fact that the taxpayers are funding half of my retirement is equalivent to an extra $4,000 per year for me.
What I didn't include was percentage of health insurance costs that they have in common, but that's equal for both, so add that number to both if you like. Of course those numbers are rapidly changing under Obamacare, so you can't really get current numbers right now. You can, however, recognize that the labor cost is fairly inflexible inmany industries, so increased cost of employee health insurance will be partially offset by reduced raises or reduction of other benefits. For that reason, total compensation numbers from a few years ago will still be close to the current numbers.
Thanks for that. When I have a strong signal on my phone, I'll download it and see if any require a masters in education, as the gentleman/lady claimed.
You've been asked twice already to say where this policy supposedly exists. What states are you talking about? I don't want to call BS on your post if some stupid state where liberals don't think about the consequences of their policies actually did something so dumb.
> Still there is not a lot of money. Especially for someone with a CS degree can walk from the teacher job and land a 55k a year job the following week.
They could, but that would be a pay cut, probably. $41k base for 9 months $10k for summer school
$4k retirement matching
$4k additional insurance benefit
$59k comparative
The insurance part represents the fact that private employers pay for about 50% of insurance premiums, while school districts typically pay 80%-100%. The value of that depends - a teacher with a large family benefits more than one who is single.
Yes, their pay schedule has three columns: BA/BS Masters (related to field) Masters (unrelated)
$41,000 is in the middle of their scale for a BA/BS.
I too am curious where you live because a masters in education is generally preferred for a school principal. In most states in the US, teachers need either an education related bachelor's, an unrelated bachelor's plus a six-month teaching certification program, or (rarely) another certification with no degree.
If teacher salaries were much different, that would be one thing, but that's not the case. How many employers pay ANYTHING for time employees spend taking classes? Chicago treats pays PD time at about the same rate those employees are paid for doing their job. Broward pays just as much for the teachers' normal job. They just figure PD, someone taking a class they choose to take which may benefit the employer, is paid as if it were half work-time and half personal. I figure that's about right. I'd be taking the same classes whether I had the job I have or a different job.
Ps, teachers in their first three years also get an additional $300 bonus if they complete professional development (including code.org) equivalent to six credit hours.
Slashdot Mirror
True, with a limit of 65,000 H1B, that represents 0.002% of the population, so that certainly is a tiny, tiny fraction of the workforce.
That's true, but there's also the question of why those "juicy contracts" exist. A juicy contract is one with high profits - one in which the government pays you much more than it costs you to acquire the item you're selling to re government.
Government routinely pays a lot more than what they could purchase the same item for at Walmart. I've seen it with my own eyes. A government agency can only buy from a vendor approved for the project, after 400 pages of paperwork to get approved. The vendor charges $150 for a widget. Walmart charges $30 for the same widget. The vendor buys the item for $30 and sells it to the government for $150. To avoid HAVING a juicy contract at all, government agencies should be able to just use Walmart.com.
The pproblem, of course, is that if they can skip the BS and just get the item from Walmart, they can also skip the BS and just buy from clintobama.com
That's true. My wife is a homemaker. Before that, she worked in childcare for 13 years. She's good at what she does.
If you don't have kids, cleaning up your own house is part of not being a burden on others - that, by itself does not mean you're contributing your share to society. Whatever feelings you may have about that, it's simply mathematically true. You can't be a net contributor by just cooking yourself and cleaning up after yourself - the same result would be achieved if weren't here.
I'm curious if this is the same troupe of monkeys that were recently laid off from Microsoft, after they completed Windows 8.
If you believe that producing and spending is good for economy, it's better to have two people produce and spend than one.
What needs to be subtracted is what could be called infrastructure costs - they use the roads, police protection, etc. What isn't good for an economy is to have people there, and making use of infrastructure, but not producing. What is good for the economy is to have people who produce (and therefore spend) more than they cost to police, emergency medical care, etc.
We might be granting too many H1Bs, I don't know. I haven't seen reliable, relevant numbers. That's a separate discussion.
However, IF you're going to allow a couple to come into the country and IF you're going to allow one of them to work, it makes sense to allow the other to work legally. If you don't , they'll probably work illegally, but having them here and not working isn't helpful. As long as they are here, the best thing for America is that they are being productive. It's best that they be doing something useful and then paying taxes like other workers. The other options are that they aren't doing anything productive, in which case they are just an extra incremental load on the infrastructure, or they are working unlawfully and probably not paying their fair share of taxes.
The article says they are working on innovative new things, like making your desktop rely on the cloud. That's amazing.
> And just how do you determine the person at fault in a fraction-of-a-second algorithm?
That one happens to be easy, 90% of the time. If you follow the rules of the road, you won't hit other people who are also following the rules of the road. That's how the rules are made - so that when everyone follows them, there are no collisions. Therefore, if you follow the rules of the road, any collision must have been caused by other driver (most of the time).
Example - you must decide between a head on collision with either of two cars. If you stay in your proper lane, the car you hit must be going the wrong direction. If you instead swerve into oncoming traffic, you'll hit people who are going the correct direction - people who are not at fault.
It's really hard to suggest specific projects because "intermediate" is such an imprecise term. Stay away from anything security sensitive, especially WEB FACING security sensitive applications. Web scripts get attacked several times per day.
Other than that, something that can really teach you a lot in a short time is to become familiar with a low-level language like C (not C++). Even if you don't USE C much, being familiar with it will let you understand your Python code so much better - you'll know WHY sort() is so slow in any language, and how to get the top 10 items much faster, without sorting the entire list. Most languages are themselves written in C, so understanding C will let you understand a bit about how every other language works behind the scenes.
Learn a high-level language like Perl, PHP 5.3, or in your case Python. The Perl programmer can finish writing the software while the C programmer is still declaring her variables.
Learn an object-oriented GUI language and subclas one gui element. Microsoft does a great job in this class of languages. (Not printing html, but actually manipulating GUI objects). When you become familiar with VB.NET or C#, and subclass just one gui element you'll "get it" as far as object-oriented programming goes. Python can do objects, Perl can use objects, etc. but they aren't the best way to LEARN objects. The GUI languages let you see objects and by subclassing one you'll understand the power of object-oriented programming.
> there are no bugs that cause complete outages.
You may wish to subscribe to a sysadmin news list of some type. Any of them will be better than none, you'll at least hear about some of the worst issues.
That's interesting. It sounds like on OSX you feel about the same way I feel on FreeBSD.
> OSX is very nonstandard.
It should be noted that OSX follows the UNIX specification, Linux does not. OSX _is_ a UNIX, and certified as one. Linux is not.
That said, most *nix software these days is probably developed on Linux systems, so Linux serves as a sort of de facto standard.
Ps whenever I post positive comments about OSX, some idiot flames me, saying "you don't use open source, you obviously hate open source", etc. My name is at the top of my post. Look at it, then look at the changelog for the Linux kernel.
> But then, I still have a lot of friends who will tell me at length about how much better MacOS is, and I find it profoundly irritating to use.
I'm guessing that by "MacOS" you mean OSX, not the classic Mac OS that's been deprecated for a decade? I used Linux rexclusively for over over ten years. Based on my experience with iOS, I expected OSX to be really annoying. When I sat down to use it anyway, I was surprised to find it's a very nice Unix, with a pretty GUI that I don't care about. (For me, the GUI is nothing more than a convenient way to have both a web browser and all my terminals on the various monitors).
I'm curious what any fan of Linux would find so irritating about OSX, especially if you're comfortable with the CLI. It's the same CLI as Linux for daily work. System admin has differences, but for daily work it's the same. All the FOSS software runs on OSX just as it does on Linux, plus it has ready-to-run packages from proprietary vendors like Adobe. All on a very reliable, stable platform. What's not to like, other than the price?*
* Even the price can be $29 or so if you don't choose Mac hardware.
How many phone calls, how many hours (or months), and how much money might be required to fix an outage caused by an Exchange bug?
Solving a sendmail problem requires zero phone calls, zero dollars, and no more than a couple of hours - turn on verbose debugging and the logs show me exactly what's happening. If it's caused by a bug in the software, those verbose logs show me exactly where in the source to look for the bug. I check the bugzilla, find the solution there, and deploy it. it's a brand new bug noone has seen before, I fix it and we're up.
Maybe your organization doesn't have anyone who knows how to use Google to find the solution which is posted in the bug tracker. In that case, you can call or email any of the THOUSANDS of companies who do have people who grok the sendmail source. With MS, there is only one company who has seen the source, and you're not going to get Microsoft's programmers on the phone.
The best post on the reddit thread:
[–]LoveExists 392 points 3 hours ago
NSA Agent: "Sir, we have reports that u/Seventy_Seven may be working with a terrorist cell, what should we do?"
NSA Officer: "Send a drone over there, let me know what happens." walks away...
NSA Agent: mutters to himself "its not like anyone ever sends them back.."
permalinkparent
Last I checked, the democrats have been "running" things for the last six years.
* Where "running" means "destroying".
> While you're at it, get a technology incident rapid response team together. Staff and fund them well. And, again, don't listen to some lobbyist shysters telling you that they should be used to protect some corporate assets. They can do that themselves. Their job is to keep YOUR COUNTRIES safe. Yes, that includes keeping them safe from said corporations! Their job is to make sure that your infrastructure, from power to gas to water, everything
You've largely described the role of the National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center in the US. Their focus in recent years has been IT security for infrastructure. When the experts there aren't actively responding to an emergency, they are providing training, often to state and city officials. For example, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and his staff could have been much better prepared if they had taken a few days of TEEX training.
NEERTC also provides some pretty good online cybersecurity classes for free. The material is great, the presentation could be improved. The idea is that a few experts can't protect everything, but they can certainly help educate the people who are responsible for critical systems in how to keep the systems safe.
It wwould be sad (and stupid) if the funding for NERRTC (a few million dollars) were redirected to some senator's pork project, so I hope the public continues to support their mission.
Full disclosure - I am tangentially associated with NERRTC. I don't work for NERRTC, but I work with them.
> > teachers who have a bachelor's degree AVERAGE ...
Thanks for adding the additional detail.
How so? I'm comparing compensation at two different jobs.
Are you complaining that I compared 48 weeks of work in the private sector vs 46 weeks working as a teacher? True, the teacher gets a little more vacation time, but at least some people claim teachers work longer hours, so that should roughly balance out.
Are you complaining that I'm comparing zero tolimited retirement matching in most private sector jobs to the more generous retirement benefits teachers get? That's an important part of the compensation package. It's one reason I work for the school system, and I know several coworkers consider it important as well. My last job had no retirement benefit. The fact that the taxpayers are funding half of my retirement is equalivent to an extra $4,000 per year for me.
What I didn't include was percentage of health insurance costs that they have in common, but that's equal for both, so add that number to both if you like. Of course those numbers are rapidly changing under Obamacare, so you can't really get current numbers right now. You can, however, recognize that the labor cost is fairly inflexible inmany industries, so increased cost of employee health insurance will be partially offset by reduced raises or reduction of other benefits. For that reason, total compensation numbers from a few years ago will still be close to the current numbers.
Thanks for that. When I have a strong signal on my phone, I'll download it and see if any require a masters in education, as the gentleman/lady claimed.
You've been asked twice already to say where this policy supposedly exists. What states are you talking about? I don't want to call BS on your post if some stupid state where liberals don't think about the consequences of their policies actually did something so dumb.
> Still there is not a lot of money. Especially for someone with a CS degree can walk from the teacher job and land a 55k a year job the following week.
They could, but that would be a pay cut, probably.
$41k base for 9 months
$10k for summer school
$4k retirement matching
$4k additional insurance benefit
$59k comparative
The insurance part represents the fact that private employers pay for about 50% of insurance premiums, while school districts typically pay 80%-100%. The value of that depends - a teacher with a large family benefits more than one who is single.
Yes, their pay schedule has three columns:
BA/BS
Masters (related to field)
Masters (unrelated)
$41,000 is in the middle of their scale for a BA/BS.
I too am curious where you live because a masters in education is generally preferred for a school principal. In most states in the US, teachers need either an education related bachelor's, an unrelated bachelor's plus a six-month teaching certification program, or (rarely) another certification with no degree.
If teacher salaries were much different, that would be one thing, but that's not the case. How many employers pay ANYTHING for time employees spend taking classes? Chicago treats pays PD time at about the same rate those employees are paid for doing their job. Broward pays just as much for the teachers' normal job. They just figure PD, someone taking a class they choose to take which may benefit the employer, is paid as if it were half work-time and half personal. I figure that's about right. I'd be taking the same classes whether I had the job I have or a different job.
Ps, teachers in their first three years also get an additional $300 bonus if they complete professional development (including code.org) equivalent to six credit hours.