Well that sounds pat, and probably wrong in the new world we live in. You and I have a bully pulpit called the Internet in which we can keep alive the message about abuse at the DOJ until the bad guys can't get anything other than a law clerk job. Reputations now have an infinite shelf life and a web search can dredge all the dirt.
These distros are funny. They keep changing how they work and do things. "We're going to do something fresh and different" - abandoning what works. Then they fail. Redhat, Mandrake, Ubuntu... they've all done it.
Guess what? Debian is still pretty much the same as it was in 1998 (but yes, with newer packages, you jokers).
Please, no name calling.
Debian install is tricky. I've has troubles getting it to work, especially the X11 stuff. I can run from a console and use shell commands, but I want a window manager for some things.
I've used KDE, But I like the older versions of it better. I have vision problems, and I find the light blue and transparent boxes to be difficult to use. I like Slax KDE, and actually liked running KDE under Mandrake from a laptop about four years ago. I like Knoppix and KDE there too.
I still like Gnome, and even after the Unity mess, but I have settled on Gnome Classic.
Canonical did not abandon users who want a traditional desktop. You might have heard of Xubuntu and Kubuntu.
True, but there is a problem in the the KDE design too, and some of the tiny window managers trade readability for speed. I am visually impaired and I liked what Gnome 2 did for me. I find the light blue KDE design with the transparent application box to be quite distracting, visually. I do like Mint's interface and Slax too, but I settled on reverting to Gnome Classic and sticking
with Ubuntu for these and another reason as well.
I have made a suggestion to Canonical that they allow for users to use three partitions in an install. These would be one for the swap area, and you my not need to have a swap partition or swap files to run it with 3 GB of ram on your system. There would be one for / and another for/home. The reasons should be obvious. Having to backup/home to reinstall Ubuntu is a pain. even
though I do backups of my files, most of my home dir is filled with cache crap put there by poorly documented configurations set up by Canonical. Ubuntu is full of poorly documented pieces, man pages aren't there that should be and depndencies exist for things that are not documented at all. I mentioned gnome tracker. There is no description of what the metadata is, or means to manage it. You can turn off tracking and have unknown effect on file manager operations. In frustration I once did kill -9 on
the teacker daemon and couldn't use some file managers until I rebooted and let tracker run. On my system my disks are busy for a day and a half after any upgrade because of tracker.
Good, points. I like the "upstate" remark but I have a suspicion that it should be applied to Shuttlworth who is too rich to give a damn. I haven't seen Unity run on a tablet. It just seems that was the intent of the design because I just can't see how the one level of indirection to Dash to get at an app that is not on the Unity bar makes any sense, otherwise.
Windows 8's only failure was it's inability to be so awesome that the benefits outweighed people's natural fear of change.
I've used it. It didn't really impress me, but it wasn't bad enough that I would want to downgrade back to 7 if I had to use a machine that came with it. It's just Windows 7 with a tablet/media server interface duct-taped to it from what I could tell playing with it at Best Buy.
UM, why don.t you try Linux or BSD, then? Too wedded to M$ Office? Please wine!
doesn't have much to do with feudalism though. quite the opposite. you want feudalism, you keep everyone on manual labor, you keep everyone on leash - you don't just set them free to do whatever they please with all the information in the world. you pay few to tax them to feed the masses.. that's more akin to socialism and the star trek goal there is to eventually have just very, very few of us toiling on food production and have everyone else do research and production of whatever gimmick devices they want.
Too much time watching Sci-Fi and not enough time studying history. Feudalism existed because the infrastricture for Europe didn't empower development and sound investment. The Roman Empire had the beginnings of the modern world in roads and means to manage wealth. So without good roads and a financial system people were isolated and under the thumb of the local king-pin, and they lacked the power and incentive to innovate. It had nothing to do with how smart they were and everything to do with the ability to suppress creative destruction and to isolate them.
Our current age has a different problem that leads down the same road. There isn't enough investment to support everybody
becoming creative, and there are large numbers of people who being average or below-average in training and ability, could become
marginalized, that is, not able to support themselves in the economy. So, elites will benefit, but what about everybody else?
My theory is, that like the Crusades, greedy politicians, even evil clerics, or businessmen, will turn them into canon fodder of one type
or another. Society will no longer be inclusive. Human rights will erode, people will be enslaved, because this is what always has
happened in the past when economic systems do not include everybody. Political systems follow in the path of economic exploitation and become repressive. This has to do with whether society can make a useful role for everybody in society. Can you trust greedy
entrapeneurs, and engineers to find a place for people, especially those that don't match the elite? I don't think so.
If you want a cruddy analogy, the brain of a Nobel prize winner might be "better" in whatever measure than the average coffee barista. That doesn't mean that coffee made by a Nobel Prize winner is any more "powerful" than coffee made by the average tattooed pierced B.S. degree holding barista.
But then the question becomes what you do with the tattooed pierced B.S. degree holding barista when he has been replaced by an AI driven expresso machine? This is the issue we are going to face.
Ever think about how excess, marginalized, people were managed in the past? They were turned into canon fodder. War is driven by idle hands, and is surely the devil"s workshop. Take charge guys start trouble and get people to kill one another. These guys might be running marketing campaigns, today, and running some military campaigns, tomorrow.
if you are unable to think at the age of 20, it's too late for you either way.
And if you think that you should not apply the concept of ROI to higher education at all, you are kidding yourself. If the costs are out of whack when compared to the returns, the wealth is squandered, end of story. More often than not you are better off reading few books or stuff on the internet.
Actualy, the ability to reason has to emerge far sooner than age 20.
I agree that the costs associated with getting a formal education and degrees are too high. As to the reasons, I do not choose to elaborate at length here. More to the point is your contention that reading and the Internet can substitute for classroom and homework. I tend to think that it cannot because one really has to produce results to show what you've learned. It might be possible to take a programming course on-line, provided you have to submit to code reviews, also on-line. But I'd be concerned if you told me that your qualifications to be a brain surgeon came from taking on-line courses.
The point of college/university is to teach you how to think not fucking tradeschool. The classes you refer as filler and fluff are the damn point!
I do wonder, though, if they might have taught you to write, and without using expletives; and a little punctuation would help too!
That said, I actually agree with you. A well-rounded education, along with the ability it gives to reason, is far more important than a job-oriented trade-school education whose skills become obsolete within the lifetime of a career.
To this I would add that emphasizing an engineering curriculum does not meet the above criteria, which your poor writing ability might reveal.
This type of elitist response leads directly to Right-Wing extremism and to the "Final Solution", referring to the Nazi extermination of people it deemed as marginalized. This manifests today as some forms of Libertarianism and comes from the same roots. Please remember that many of the people who post here are already in one of the elites. It is pretty obvious that many are engineers or wanna-be techies. Such people tend to be too smart for everybody's good, and some of the extreme ideas that come out of their mouths is the revelation that intelligence does not make wisdom, especially when it is driven by self-centeredness, and the assumption that everybody of value is just like oneself.
In fact you are your brother's keeper and just because you fancy yourself as smarter than 90% of the population doesn't mean that you can dismiss them, like the Nazis did. Because most people are smart enough to put a bullet in YOUR head. Nazi Germany was driven by engineers and elites that ordinary guys that they dismissed put a stop to. It could happen again, so be careful what you do.
I agree with you, and I tried unity on a couple versions of Ubuntu, and then switched to Gnome Classic. I get what unity is for. It is for hand-held devices and tablets. In his flawed vision, Mark Shuttleworth somhnow thinks that the desktop is dead and that he can single handedly force Ubuntu users to behave differently. That is simple arrogance and the result of a business model where decisions are made by a small cabal that doesn't have paying customers. What is worse is that Canonnical muffed it and pissed off users. The changes were too sudden and the product didn't really work and the design was an obstruction to a reasonable workflow. They should have made Unity available on non-desktop test beds, and then when there was a real tablet for it, made it more available.
Besides that Ubuntu is bloatware. There is too much in it and some of the core stuff is poorly documented and of questionable value. My pet peeve is Gnome Tracker. If you have a slow USB drive with an NTFS filesystem and do a kernel upgrade, tracker can keep your system busy for a day or more, and there is no documentation on what metadata it is gathering. Do you trust that a company based in the security-paranoid UK might be using the tracker data in spyware?[ I am looking into an alternative distro because I'd like to be far more selective in what I run, anyway. Slax is looking god. Even Puppy looks good.
I like the idea of running linux in pieces from any available disk and filesystem type. Why not boot linux from a core image on an NTFS filesystem and load archives of added applications and user files backups into memory and and save the changes back to the same disk? I don.t just mean a USB stick, but any old filesystem on a disk, and I don't mean virtualized but from the bootloader which looks for a directory in some filesystem and boots what is there. No partition bull, not booting Windows first, no clobbered grub configs. That is all bull.
About 30 years ago I worked on an academic record database for a major university. I too came to the conclusion that the system entailed bad design and "sloppy code" and said something about it. I was fired, asked to leave. Later, I found that the University has lost about $ 1 Million in the effort to implement this system and had to start over from scratch. It taught me about politics and cover up and that they trump sound technology or even competence, and that academic administrations are very political organizations.
You have to pay JSTOR to read the complete article, though, don't you? and you certenly have to pay many other major peer-reviewed journals to read their articles. I have no problem with publishers asking a fee for prints or reprints or bound journals. The value add is the thing you hold in your hands, but to show the abstract and then charge for the PDF is kind of pointless and even more so if public money, our tax dollars paid for the research. I worked for USGS and did research under an NFS grant. The software I wrote was open sourced because it was paid for by the taxpayers. My guess is that most refereed articles are funded by public funds. Why shouldn't they at least be available for free on the Internet? The point about the Internet was and is that it should be easier to get to the store of knowledge, even given the copyright and patent laws. Why should a profit motive trump this? I already know that even if the incentives are to make the value add on internet commerce the convenience of getting what you want fast that I can find free versions of things I want with a little patience. It doesn't matter that it is public domain, some business person will ask a price for a copyright edition or for the ease to get it, and I have no problem with that. Only be fair with copyright and patent and weigh the value of that paying audience against the larger value of making something widely available.
What the public knows about hacking is what the powerful that run the media want to tell them, which is largely a bunch of nonsense. I was around when computers were novelties, not yet having the transformative and pervasive effect they have now, and of course, money and power is relying them to do more and more, which attracts people who want to steal from them whether to rob them of money and power or to get at what they know and want to hide. Doing the latter is a political act. Politics is the differential advantage given to one group of people or priorities over other competing groups or priorties. The law follows, even in a country with a tradition of precedents,
But ultimately computing is about a binary stream and it matters only in the context of software, so some future researcher will need to have to have a sense of what that software did to make sense of the stream.
We are seeing the maturation of the technology into which the Main Market, which is about margin and control, at worst monopoly, is setting the agenda, and the creative mavricks are endangered because the Big Money wants to protect its investment and its property that it willingly put out as streams of bits. We have the re-emergence of closed platforms and closed software systems on the mobile media now because of this. You may not be able to buy a general purpose machine like a desktop PC in a few years because of the market cycle unless something frees it up again.
Consider China, a relatively closed, centrally run nation, which America could become from the opposite political tradition, a centrally controlled corporate Capitalist in which everything is controlled from a market defined monopolistic network and platform. There would be no toleration for the creative mavrick or hacker; not toleration for jailbreaking the monolith and finding out how it works. Both national extremes, a society that does not tolerate individuality and one that has become over controlled will fail. They cannot produce the talent, the spark of creativity, needed to keep the systems going. If China isolates and we have to go to war with it, we will win if we keep a free flow of information while that nation isolates. On the other hand we will lose every bit as much if we become more like our enemies in the world; become like terrorists in order to fight them.
Ultimately, nothing in bits that can be decoded by discovering the software that created it can be kept secret. It can be cracked eventually and maybe sooner than later. So keeping secrets may be more about the informaton getting obsolete first.
Yes, I get the sense of what you are saying. There are people who have always gotten praise for what they do in life, so much positive attention, that they are not used to failure or negative attention, or that people attack them for reasons they don't understand. It can happen that one gets attacked for appearing to be smart and not being aware that you are being seen that way and disliked for it. There are personality types that may be quite accomplished, I am thinking of artists, who achieved significant things while living with a deep seated insecurity about themselves based on an abandoned childhood. These people may be predisposed to depression where organic disease can cause them to suicide, even if their eternal circumstances are not that bad, and there are some who some major setback can trigger the same, maybe because, as you say, they are not used to setbacks, who because they are also vulnerable to depression, suicide. To have a life struggle, say with a disability, is a blessing in disguise, because having to deal with that adversity does make one strong, it builds courage. Not everybody can have that.
I am not at all sure that petitioning the President is ever all that effective, although I think that even career lawyers in the Justice Department do have to answer in some part to a court of public opinion, even given the possibility that the separation of powers is broken by partisan gridlock, given the right amount of negative information even a powerful JD prosecutor could be made to pay dearly for something the public sees as unjust. Of course if the Congress were to get involved and the guy was hulled before the Justice Committee to answers questions in public, what he says and is disclosed could ruin the rest of his life, even if he isn't disbarred. So, there are sanctions, even if they are informal, and they may be based on the cleansing effect of public disclosure. If there is enough dirty linen, it will get aired. And we better hope that being concerned for freedom of expression continues to make it so.
Human beings everywhere have the same capacity to abuse power, to get greedy, to think they are better than the next guy and deserve to get more than him, to kill or injure to get what they want. We see this everywhere and it doesn't really matter what the history or political system that the misbehavior comes from. An insider in the Communist Party is just as bad as a Capitalist businessman. The one thing that seems to make a difference is that there are checks and balances that are based on knowledge and disclosure. The freedom to inform others of the abuses is the beginning of this, and that freedom is the first one to be attacked by those who want more power, control, and wealth. It begins with intimidation of the people who reveal the problem whether it is an inconsistancy about how a university handles journal articles or if it is someone who has a clearance that thinks that abuse is taking place under the cloak of secrecy, or someone who wants to blow the whistle on business or government corruption. It is all the same. We need to accept the risk that intellectual property will be in peril lest the rest of our freedoms and the means to protect them through getting a free flow of information is taken away too. Tyranny can come from a business suit and a lawyer's brief case as much as from a military led by a jack booted dictator. And otherwise kind-hearted people can be advised or fooled into accepting these tactics.
I have seen lots of online journals that let you see an abstract but charge you to get a copy of the entire article. Just like the online music and ebook, the justification for charging for a copy was always the printing and distribution costs of reproduction. Now, with that cost gone to zero, the publishers can use the law to protect their business interest up to a point. They can erect paywalls and hope that someone doesn't hack them. In fact once they have lost custody of a copy it is much harder to retain it and control redistribution. All that aside. Any Journal publisher such a JSTOR or even the Geological Society of America who publishes research funded by taxpayer funds ought to either make the publication available for free or charge a much lower fee than for privately funded research. And finally, if there is no cost to publish and no incentive to control copying, i.e. peer-reviewed papers do not cost much, then do we need the traditional control over publication at all? We need peer-review, but how much does it really cost?
I think that this gets at the rot in this country, and why what seems to have happened in this case is so wrong. I know how to fix MIT and any journal publisher who erects a paywall to charge for electronic reprints. Make them give the articles away if the government, i.e.you and I, payed for the research in taxes.
I have harsh words for the Obama Justice Department over this and the internet freedom issue in general. I have serious doubts about Obama even though I voted for him, he is only marginally better than the opposition, and the problem with both parties and the government is that the people in Congress and the other branches come from the same cesspool as most people in business and the law, all are too worried about protecting wealth and personal power, first, and human rights and civil rights only secondarily.
The first thing I would do if I were God is the close the business schools as sources of poor ethics, and shortly thereafter most of the law schools. But I think the real poison comes from business and business greed, in a word money.
This was one of the reasons I think that the government running out of money if the Republican Caucus fails to raise the debt ceiling or pass a budget, has a silver lining. It hits at the largest single source of abuse which I think are professionals, elitist professionals, politicians, lawyers, doctors. The only profession I have any respect for is teacher, and that doesn't include their managers or business or government management. It is possible that many of these people are sociopaths. I would suffer the adverse effect to me if the government can't raise money if it hurts the margins of professionals and puts a bunch of them out of business.
Yeah, but I.ll bet what you are hiring for is very specific, and you have zero incentive to hire people with generic skills because of the way the investment climate works, the supply is far less than the demand and so you can wait for an exact match. I guess that you spec the skills you want and you tell some mindless HR type exactly that to find excuses to turn out this huge flood of applicants. I wouldn't want that job; sifting through this huge stack of resumes that you know don't match beforehand.
I think that his problem is true in Silicon Valley. I do live here, and even though you need people, you strike out most of the time too, and yes I know that the filtering has been automated, but still the volume causes delays. Don't kid yourself, there are many people right here who are not working, forced to retire and not even counted on the unemployment rolls because they have stopped looking, and the unemployment rate is still high for those that are counted. I am seriously considering moving away even though i am on Social Security and may need to find a job with generic programming and Unix skils that I can ply almost anywhere else.
You might be right, learning is in general respected more in other places than in the U.S. But my problem with this is do these countries really respect what an advanced degree gets you in most places in the world? That is an ability to think outside the box. The societies of which you speak are not tolerant of independent and iconoclastic thinking. If there was a war that separated China from access to European and American thinking, would it eventually fall behind and become defeated, just like Japan was in WW II? This is not a joke.
That is unfair. I knew a guy with a PhD in EE who had to hide his degree just to get an ordinary software job in an ordinary company. His problem was that he was enough of a perfectionist that the half-assed stuff that goes on these places drove him nuts.
Yeah, I have been down this road, even read the book you cited, it has been through tens of revisions, but after a while trying to anticipate or second-guess the mind set of interviewers is a losing proposition, so is the whole job preparedness game. For one even in Silicon Valley where I happen to live, most job search and recruitment operations, even the human resources people of the companies hiring, don't understand the job descriptions they are trying to fill. So this futile game revolves around people who don't know what they are doing, interviewing people they don't understand in a hostile job market driven by an economy where investment is not robust enough to create enough jobs to be filled by the available talent. In this situation recruiters, whether they understand the job description or not, resort to nonsense, some of it illegal to the intent of the law, to weed applicants out.
It might be a better strategy to let it all hang out and not worry about pleasing interviewers at all. Your advice might be more sound for less technical or more managerial jobs, but not for those that demand a more technical skill. There the problem is that the target cross section for a match has dropped because the demand far exceeds the supply. The generic job recruiter role with all its cover letter drafts and taylor-made resumes is so much spinning of wheels, and it may be better to not worry about interview mistakes, for that just gets mismatches out of the way sooner, You have to interview more, but if you have obvious flaws such as being grey or have an obvious physical handicap or have generic skills, which are by definition out of date, you may as well get it over fast because the guy you are talking to, even if he is another engineer, is going to want the person with the experience he needs right now, because he doesn't have to wait. Years ago if you were alive and warm you could get a job here, no more. Of course the problem with this is that useful talent is wasted just because investors aren't spending, not because such talent is worthless. People, perhaps even yourself believe that effort deserves a reward, but that can't be true if some person believes they are helping you when they don't really know that it is effective, especially when their ideas apply to a situation that might have been true five or ten years ago but has changed.
Slashdot Mirror
Well that sounds pat, and probably wrong in the new world we live in. You and I have a bully pulpit called the Internet in which we can keep alive the message about abuse at the DOJ until the bad guys can't get anything other than a law clerk job. Reputations now have an infinite shelf life and a web search can dredge all the dirt.
These distros are funny. They keep changing how they work and do things. "We're going to do something fresh and different" - abandoning what works. Then they fail. Redhat, Mandrake, Ubuntu... they've all done it.
Guess what? Debian is still pretty much the same as it was in 1998 (but yes, with newer packages, you jokers).
Please, no name calling.
Debian install is tricky. I've has troubles getting it to work, especially the X11 stuff. I can run from a console and use shell commands, but I want a window manager for some things.
I've used KDE, But I like the older versions of it better. I have vision problems, and I find the light blue and transparent boxes to be difficult to use. I like Slax KDE, and actually liked running KDE under Mandrake from a laptop about four years ago. I like Knoppix and KDE there too.
I still like Gnome, and even after the Unity mess, but I have settled on Gnome Classic.
Canonical did not abandon users who want a traditional desktop. You might have heard of Xubuntu and Kubuntu.
True, but there is a problem in the the KDE design too, and some of the tiny window managers trade readability for speed. I am visually impaired and I liked what Gnome 2 did for me. I find the light blue KDE design with the transparent application box to be quite distracting, visually. I do like Mint's interface and Slax too, but I settled on reverting to Gnome Classic and sticking with Ubuntu for these and another reason as well.
I have made a suggestion to Canonical that they allow for users to use three partitions in an install. These would be one for the swap area, and you my not need to have a swap partition or swap files to run it with 3 GB of ram on your system. There would be one for / and another for /home. The reasons should be obvious. Having to backup /home to reinstall Ubuntu is a pain. even
though I do backups of my files, most of my home dir is filled with cache crap put there by poorly documented configurations set up by Canonical. Ubuntu is full of poorly documented pieces, man pages aren't there that should be and depndencies exist for things that are not documented at all. I mentioned gnome tracker. There is no description of what the metadata is, or means to manage it. You can turn off tracking and have unknown effect on file manager operations. In frustration I once did kill -9 on
the teacker daemon and couldn't use some file managers until I rebooted and let tracker run. On my system my disks are busy for a day and a half after any upgrade because of tracker.
Good, points. I like the "upstate" remark but I have a suspicion that it should be applied to Shuttlworth who is too rich to give a damn. I haven't seen Unity run on a tablet. It just seems that was the intent of the design because I just can't see how the one level of indirection to Dash to get at an app that is not on the Unity bar makes any sense, otherwise.
shut up liberal scum
Shut up republican or liberaarian scum!
Someone please mod this +5 hilariously true.
Windows 8's only failure was it's inability to be so awesome that the benefits outweighed people's natural fear of change. I've used it. It didn't really impress me, but it wasn't bad enough that I would want to downgrade back to 7 if I had to use a machine that came with it. It's just Windows 7 with a tablet/media server interface duct-taped to it from what I could tell playing with it at Best Buy.
UM, why don.t you try Linux or BSD, then? Too wedded to M$ Office? Please wine!
doesn't have much to do with feudalism though. quite the opposite. you want feudalism, you keep everyone on manual labor, you keep everyone on leash - you don't just set them free to do whatever they please with all the information in the world. you pay few to tax them to feed the masses.. that's more akin to socialism and the star trek goal there is to eventually have just very, very few of us toiling on food production and have everyone else do research and production of whatever gimmick devices they want.
Too much time watching Sci-Fi and not enough time studying history. Feudalism existed because the infrastricture for Europe didn't empower development and sound investment. The Roman Empire had the beginnings of the modern world in roads and means to manage wealth. So without good roads and a financial system people were isolated and under the thumb of the local king-pin, and they lacked the power and incentive to innovate. It had nothing to do with how smart they were and everything to do with the ability to suppress creative destruction and to isolate them.
Our current age has a different problem that leads down the same road. There isn't enough investment to support everybody becoming creative, and there are large numbers of people who being average or below-average in training and ability, could become marginalized, that is, not able to support themselves in the economy. So, elites will benefit, but what about everybody else?
My theory is, that like the Crusades, greedy politicians, even evil clerics, or businessmen, will turn them into canon fodder of one type or another. Society will no longer be inclusive. Human rights will erode, people will be enslaved, because this is what always has happened in the past when economic systems do not include everybody. Political systems follow in the path of economic exploitation and become repressive. This has to do with whether society can make a useful role for everybody in society. Can you trust greedy entrapeneurs, and engineers to find a place for people, especially those that don't match the elite? I don't think so.
If you want a cruddy analogy, the brain of a Nobel prize winner might be "better" in whatever measure than the average coffee barista. That doesn't mean that coffee made by a Nobel Prize winner is any more "powerful" than coffee made by the average tattooed pierced B.S. degree holding barista.
But then the question becomes what you do with the tattooed pierced B.S. degree holding barista when he has been replaced by an AI driven expresso machine? This is the issue we are going to face.
Ever think about how excess, marginalized, people were managed in the past? They were turned into canon fodder. War is driven by idle hands, and is surely the devil"s workshop. Take charge guys start trouble and get people to kill one another. These guys might be running marketing campaigns, today, and running some military campaigns, tomorrow.
if you are unable to think at the age of 20, it's too late for you either way. And if you think that you should not apply the concept of ROI to higher education at all, you are kidding yourself. If the costs are out of whack when compared to the returns, the wealth is squandered, end of story. More often than not you are better off reading few books or stuff on the internet.
Actualy, the ability to reason has to emerge far sooner than age 20.
I agree that the costs associated with getting a formal education and degrees are too high. As to the reasons, I do not choose to elaborate at length here. More to the point is your contention that reading and the Internet can substitute for classroom and homework. I tend to think that it cannot because one really has to produce results to show what you've learned. It might be possible to take a programming course on-line, provided you have to submit to code reviews, also on-line. But I'd be concerned if you told me that your qualifications to be a brain surgeon came from taking on-line courses.
The point of college/university is to teach you how to think not fucking tradeschool. The classes you refer as filler and fluff are the damn point!
I do wonder, though, if they might have taught you to write, and without using expletives; and a little punctuation would help too!
That said, I actually agree with you. A well-rounded education, along with the ability it gives to reason, is far more important than a job-oriented trade-school education whose skills become obsolete within the lifetime of a career.
To this I would add that emphasizing an engineering curriculum does not meet the above criteria, which your poor writing ability might reveal.
This type of elitist response leads directly to Right-Wing extremism and to the "Final Solution", referring to the Nazi extermination of people it deemed as marginalized. This manifests today as some forms of Libertarianism and comes from the same roots. Please remember that many of the people who post here are already in one of the elites. It is pretty obvious that many are engineers or wanna-be techies. Such people tend to be too smart for everybody's good, and some of the extreme ideas that come out of their mouths is the revelation that intelligence does not make wisdom, especially when it is driven by self-centeredness, and the assumption that everybody of value is just like oneself.
In fact you are your brother's keeper and just because you fancy yourself as smarter than 90% of the population doesn't mean that you can dismiss them, like the Nazis did. Because most people are smart enough to put a bullet in YOUR head. Nazi Germany was driven by engineers and elites that ordinary guys that they dismissed put a stop to. It could happen again, so be careful what you do.
I agree with you, and I tried unity on a couple versions of Ubuntu, and then switched to Gnome Classic. I get what unity is for. It is for hand-held devices and tablets. In his flawed vision, Mark Shuttleworth somhnow thinks that the desktop is dead and that he can single handedly force Ubuntu users to behave differently. That is simple arrogance and the result of a business model where decisions are made by a small cabal that doesn't have paying customers. What is worse is that Canonnical muffed it and pissed off users. The changes were too sudden and the product didn't really work and the design was an obstruction to a reasonable workflow. They should have made Unity available on non-desktop test beds, and then when there was a real tablet for it, made it more available.
Besides that Ubuntu is bloatware. There is too much in it and some of the core stuff is poorly documented and of questionable value. My pet peeve is Gnome Tracker. If you have a slow USB drive with an NTFS filesystem and do a kernel upgrade, tracker can keep your system busy for a day or more, and there is no documentation on what metadata it is gathering. Do you trust that a company based in the security-paranoid UK might be using the tracker data in spyware?[ I am looking into an alternative distro because I'd like to be far more selective in what I run, anyway. Slax is looking god. Even Puppy looks good.
I like the idea of running linux in pieces from any available disk and filesystem type. Why not boot linux from a core image on an NTFS filesystem and load archives of added applications and user files backups into memory and and save the changes back to the same disk? I don.t just mean a USB stick, but any old filesystem on a disk, and I don't mean virtualized but from the bootloader which looks for a directory in some filesystem and boots what is there. No partition bull, not booting Windows first, no clobbered grub configs. That is all bull.
About 30 years ago I worked on an academic record database for a major university. I too came to the conclusion that the system entailed bad design and "sloppy code" and said something about it. I was fired, asked to leave. Later, I found that the University has lost about $ 1 Million in the effort to implement this system and had to start over from scratch. It taught me about politics and cover up and that they trump sound technology or even competence, and that academic administrations are very political organizations.
You have to pay JSTOR to read the complete article, though, don't you? and you certenly have to pay many other major peer-reviewed journals to read their articles. I have no problem with publishers asking a fee for prints or reprints or bound journals. The value add is the thing you hold in your hands, but to show the abstract and then charge for the PDF is kind of pointless and even more so if public money, our tax dollars paid for the research. I worked for USGS and did research under an NFS grant. The software I wrote was open sourced because it was paid for by the taxpayers. My guess is that most refereed articles are funded by public funds. Why shouldn't they at least be available for free on the Internet? The point about the Internet was and is that it should be easier to get to the store of knowledge, even given the copyright and patent laws. Why should a profit motive trump this? I already know that even if the incentives are to make the value add on internet commerce the convenience of getting what you want fast that I can find free versions of things I want with a little patience. It doesn't matter that it is public domain, some business person will ask a price for a copyright edition or for the ease to get it, and I have no problem with that. Only be fair with copyright and patent and weigh the value of that paying audience against the larger value of making something widely available.
What the public knows about hacking is what the powerful that run the media want to tell them, which is largely a bunch of nonsense. I was around when computers were novelties, not yet having the transformative and pervasive effect they have now, and of course, money and power is relying them to do more and more, which attracts people who want to steal from them whether to rob them of money and power or to get at what they know and want to hide. Doing the latter is a political act. Politics is the differential advantage given to one group of people or priorities over other competing groups or priorties. The law follows, even in a country with a tradition of precedents,
But ultimately computing is about a binary stream and it matters only in the context of software, so some future researcher will need to have to have a sense of what that software did to make sense of the stream.
We are seeing the maturation of the technology into which the Main Market, which is about margin and control, at worst monopoly, is setting the agenda, and the creative mavricks are endangered because the Big Money wants to protect its investment and its property that it willingly put out as streams of bits. We have the re-emergence of closed platforms and closed software systems on the mobile media now because of this. You may not be able to buy a general purpose machine like a desktop PC in a few years because of the market cycle unless something frees it up again.
Consider China, a relatively closed, centrally run nation, which America could become from the opposite political tradition, a centrally controlled corporate Capitalist in which everything is controlled from a market defined monopolistic network and platform. There would be no toleration for the creative mavrick or hacker; not toleration for jailbreaking the monolith and finding out how it works. Both national extremes, a society that does not tolerate individuality and one that has become over controlled will fail. They cannot produce the talent, the spark of creativity, needed to keep the systems going. If China isolates and we have to go to war with it, we will win if we keep a free flow of information while that nation isolates. On the other hand we will lose every bit as much if we become more like our enemies in the world; become like terrorists in order to fight them.
Ultimately, nothing in bits that can be decoded by discovering the software that created it can be kept secret. It can be cracked eventually and maybe sooner than later. So keeping secrets may be more about the informaton getting obsolete first.
Yes, I get the sense of what you are saying. There are people who have always gotten praise for what they do in life, so much positive attention, that they are not used to failure or negative attention, or that people attack them for reasons they don't understand. It can happen that one gets attacked for appearing to be smart and not being aware that you are being seen that way and disliked for it. There are personality types that may be quite accomplished, I am thinking of artists, who achieved significant things while living with a deep seated insecurity about themselves based on an abandoned childhood. These people may be predisposed to depression where organic disease can cause them to suicide, even if their eternal circumstances are not that bad, and there are some who some major setback can trigger the same, maybe because, as you say, they are not used to setbacks, who because they are also vulnerable to depression, suicide. To have a life struggle, say with a disability, is a blessing in disguise, because having to deal with that adversity does make one strong, it builds courage. Not everybody can have that.
I am not at all sure that petitioning the President is ever all that effective, although I think that even career lawyers in the Justice Department do have to answer in some part to a court of public opinion, even given the possibility that the separation of powers is broken by partisan gridlock, given the right amount of negative information even a powerful JD prosecutor could be made to pay dearly for something the public sees as unjust. Of course if the Congress were to get involved and the guy was hulled before the Justice Committee to answers questions in public, what he says and is disclosed could ruin the rest of his life, even if he isn't disbarred. So, there are sanctions, even if they are informal, and they may be based on the cleansing effect of public disclosure. If there is enough dirty linen, it will get aired. And we better hope that being concerned for freedom of expression continues to make it so.
Human beings everywhere have the same capacity to abuse power, to get greedy, to think they are better than the next guy and deserve to get more than him, to kill or injure to get what they want. We see this everywhere and it doesn't really matter what the history or political system that the misbehavior comes from. An insider in the Communist Party is just as bad as a Capitalist businessman. The one thing that seems to make a difference is that there are checks and balances that are based on knowledge and disclosure. The freedom to inform others of the abuses is the beginning of this, and that freedom is the first one to be attacked by those who want more power, control, and wealth. It begins with intimidation of the people who reveal the problem whether it is an inconsistancy about how a university handles journal articles or if it is someone who has a clearance that thinks that abuse is taking place under the cloak of secrecy, or someone who wants to blow the whistle on business or government corruption. It is all the same. We need to accept the risk that intellectual property will be in peril lest the rest of our freedoms and the means to protect them through getting a free flow of information is taken away too. Tyranny can come from a business suit and a lawyer's brief case as much as from a military led by a jack booted dictator. And otherwise kind-hearted people can be advised or fooled into accepting these tactics.
I have seen lots of online journals that let you see an abstract but charge you to get a copy of the entire article. Just like the online music and ebook, the justification for charging for a copy was always the printing and distribution costs of reproduction. Now, with that cost gone to zero, the publishers can use the law to protect their business interest up to a point. They can erect paywalls and hope that someone doesn't hack them. In fact once they have lost custody of a copy it is much harder to retain it and control redistribution. All that aside. Any Journal publisher such a JSTOR or even the Geological Society of America who publishes research funded by taxpayer funds ought to either make the publication available for free or charge a much lower fee than for privately funded research. And finally, if there is no cost to publish and no incentive to control copying, i.e. peer-reviewed papers do not cost much, then do we need the traditional control over publication at all? We need peer-review, but how much does it really cost?
I think that this gets at the rot in this country, and why what seems to have happened in this case is so wrong. I know how to fix MIT and any journal publisher who erects a paywall to charge for electronic reprints. Make them give the articles away if the government, i.e.you and I, payed for the research in taxes.
I have harsh words for the Obama Justice Department over this and the internet freedom issue in general. I have serious doubts about Obama even though I voted for him, he is only marginally better than the opposition, and the problem with both parties and the government is that the people in Congress and the other branches come from the same cesspool as most people in business and the law, all are too worried about protecting wealth and personal power, first, and human rights and civil rights only secondarily.
The first thing I would do if I were God is the close the business schools as sources of poor ethics, and shortly thereafter most of the law schools. But I think the real poison comes from business and business greed, in a word money.
This was one of the reasons I think that the government running out of money if the Republican Caucus fails to raise the debt ceiling or pass a budget, has a silver lining. It hits at the largest single source of abuse which I think are professionals, elitist professionals, politicians, lawyers, doctors. The only profession I have any respect for is teacher, and that doesn't include their managers or business or government management. It is possible that many of these people are sociopaths. I would suffer the adverse effect to me if the government can't raise money if it hurts the margins of professionals and puts a bunch of them out of business.
Yeah, but I.ll bet what you are hiring for is very specific, and you have zero incentive to hire people with generic skills because of the way the investment climate works, the supply is far less than the demand and so you can wait for an exact match. I guess that you spec the skills you want and you tell some mindless HR type exactly that to find excuses to turn out this huge flood of applicants. I wouldn't want that job; sifting through this huge stack of resumes that you know don't match beforehand.
I think that his problem is true in Silicon Valley. I do live here, and even though you need people, you strike out most of the time too, and yes I know that the filtering has been automated, but still the volume causes delays. Don't kid yourself, there are many people right here who are not working, forced to retire and not even counted on the unemployment rolls because they have stopped looking, and the unemployment rate is still high for those that are counted. I am seriously considering moving away even though i am on Social Security and may need to find a job with generic programming and Unix skils that I can ply almost anywhere else.
Isn't "Quant" really somewhat disreputable?
You might be right, learning is in general respected more in other places than in the U.S. But my problem with this is do these countries really respect what an advanced degree gets you in most places in the world? That is an ability to think outside the box. The societies of which you speak are not tolerant of independent and iconoclastic thinking. If there was a war that separated China from access to European and American thinking, would it eventually fall behind and become defeated, just like Japan was in WW II? This is not a joke.
That is unfair. I knew a guy with a PhD in EE who had to hide his degree just to get an ordinary software job in an ordinary company. His problem was that he was enough of a perfectionist that the half-assed stuff that goes on these places drove him nuts.
Yeah, I have been down this road, even read the book you cited, it has been through tens of revisions, but after a while trying to anticipate or second-guess the mind set of interviewers is a losing proposition, so is the whole job preparedness game. For one even in Silicon Valley where I happen to live, most job search and recruitment operations, even the human resources people of the companies hiring, don't understand the job descriptions they are trying to fill. So this futile game revolves around people who don't know what they are doing, interviewing people they don't understand in a hostile job market driven by an economy where investment is not robust enough to create enough jobs to be filled by the available talent. In this situation recruiters, whether they understand the job description or not, resort to nonsense, some of it illegal to the intent of the law, to weed applicants out.
It might be a better strategy to let it all hang out and not worry about pleasing interviewers at all. Your advice might be more sound for less technical or more managerial jobs, but not for those that demand a more technical skill. There the problem is that the target cross section for a match has dropped because the demand far exceeds the supply. The generic job recruiter role with all its cover letter drafts and taylor-made resumes is so much spinning of wheels, and it may be better to not worry about interview mistakes, for that just gets mismatches out of the way sooner, You have to interview more, but if you have obvious flaws such as being grey or have an obvious physical handicap or have generic skills, which are by definition out of date, you may as well get it over fast because the guy you are talking to, even if he is another engineer, is going to want the person with the experience he needs right now, because he doesn't have to wait. Years ago if you were alive and warm you could get a job here, no more. Of course the problem with this is that useful talent is wasted just because investors aren't spending, not because such talent is worthless. People, perhaps even yourself believe that effort deserves a reward, but that can't be true if some person believes they are helping you when they don't really know that it is effective, especially when their ideas apply to a situation that might have been true five or ten years ago but has changed.