The article does not mention what this undergrad expected for a job. Presumably, she though that a degree would help her get jobs should would not otherwise be eligible for. There are positions at Micky D's and Payless that do not require such degrees and it sounds like those are the only positions she is getting interviews for.
I have to agree with the woman in the article: paying $70K for a degree that appears to open no career doors for you is extremely frustrating. Who can't sympathize with that?
It seems true that every employee is getting treated even more shabbily than normal in this recession. To me, this is another example of how the middle class is getting shoved into poverty.
As for entitlement in the US, I agree with your disgust. When will the villains on Wall Street be held accountable for irresponsible gambling that jeopardized the national and world economy? Instead, we give them bailouts and bonuses.
I couldn't agree more. I understand that Unite is a P2P/Groove retread. Still, creating a massive new vector for a botnet doesn't strike me as a responsible thing to do for a software maker.
You cannot argue that either closed or open source is secure. Each project has different security profiles. You can have a highly secure open source product that's harded against attack. You can have proprietary products that are also secure. However, security is continual process. So which avenue do you want to bet on to deliver timely patches for newly discovered flaws?
The long predicted death of PCs and the rise of compelling PDA/phones (like the iPhone) is finally here. While I won't speak to the phone bit, I will say that I've been working with thin clients from Wyse, HP, Igel and Sun for years now. They are like vt220s, but better! Better than maintaining PCs anyway.
It makes sense that OS producers are targeting these stripped-down environments. I suppose that's the essence of cloud computing -- the apps are on the net and you just need enough smarts in your device to get to them.
What started off as a fine little space opera became a morass of tangle and contradictory plot lines in Season 4. Ron Moore is a total hack who should have plotted the show arc out. Now, BSG is essentially Dallas in space.
What a wasted opportunity to say something interesting about the human condition.
What makes them elitists is that they were not going to soil their exclusive clientel by allowing those dirty first world kids to buy one, even if that means the 3rd world kids cannot get the benefit of economies of scale
That's not elitist. That's just being stubbornly doctrinal and a bit naive. Frankly, Apple is a bit more elitist, since you've got to have a fair bit of cash to get the hardware. Linux, while not quite elitist, is certainly selective in that you must be more industrious and inquisitive than the average computer user to use it.
Yes, the OLPC project should have simply sold XO units to whom ever had the cash. That's what a for-profit company would have done. Attempting to leverage the wealth of the industrialized nations to support the 3rd world ones isn't such a bad idea. I bought an XO in the first round of G1G1. It was $400, which wasn't an onerous hardship for me at the time.
Why wasn't the G1G1 programming running ALL THE TIME? I still don't understand that at all. It's like these guys wanted to do a soft launch with their hardware.
Negroponte is considered something of a demigod at MIT, having founded the Media Lab. But I do think he executed poorly on this project because of his lack of business experience. I wonder if his brother would have done better.
Frankly, I never did cotton to the Sugar UI (let's stop this talk of it being an OS please). I'm now running Ubuntu on the XO and I'm happier for it. Running XP on the XO hardware will be a joke.
Unfortunately, the article mentions that in the 80s, female enrollment in CS was closer to parity with males. Something has changed since then and I doubt it's biological.
No doubt that the CS field is "socially challenged" at times. However, there are plenty of women in the military. These women face an almost institutionalized form of sexual harassment. This has not dimensioned the enrollment of females into the armed services.
I second your call for male nerds to dial down the stalker instinct. You aren't the first to complain of it.
While we're Blue Skying, I'd also like to call for wider adoption of deodorant in the CS field.
You can infer from the low UID of my account that I've seen one or two of these "perl sucks" kinds of articles. There's a flamewar. There's mention of python or ruby or C or java. There's the old saw "perl is too complex", "perl doesn't have an IDE", "perl is line noise". But it takes awhile before someone just calls it right: there's a lot of bad perl code because there's a lot of bad perl programmers.
That's not a knock on Perl.
Perl is powerful enough that even crappy programmers can do useful work. That's saying something positive about the design of Perl. That Perl allows bad code also says something positive about the design: it's not a fascist regime.
Now, if you need your language design to prevent the creation of unmanageable code, you'll be looking for the language for a very long time.
So next time we start this thread about Perl being bad, let's just skip to lambasting the crappy coders and leave Perl out of it please.
It's a ray gun that's putting voicing in your head. A ray run from a shadowy military operation. Because the government wants you to have voices in your head.
The keyboard is all but unusable for an adult with sausage-like fingers, such as myself. However, the XO recognizes my Apple USB keyboard with MS Mouse very well.
There is a bug that causes the mouse pointer to jump to the edge to screen. That's pretty darn annoying.
Also, I recommend the hack of putting an SD drive more or less permanently in the XO for additional swap space. Use a USB flash drive for more disk space.
Heck, I manage to get a VPN client to install on the thing, so it's almost suitable for work.
There's no doubt that Sugar UI needs refinement, but that will come.
From your old pal UID=2991. It's been a trip. Especially that whole Columbine article. That's when I knew/. had more social capital than was probably advisable.
The real reason I urge my fellow programmers to keep within 80 columns is that should I wish to print out the source code, I need only be sure that the font is 8 point courier. If so, the source will fit well on a page.
True, you can format source code with fancier processes, even get it into PDF. But the primitive cave-programmer in me still likes the 80 column rule.
Most modern languages ignore non-quoted string whitespace anyway, so formating statements should really be about making it easier for humans to read.
I hope Mr. Gates understands that life is difficult for recent graduates. His first job post-degree will likely be an entry-level position without glamour or sufficient compensation. The dog-eat-dog world of corporate America isn't for everyone. Perhaps he won't get too put off by the whole thing.
"We figured out how to tap it in a very unique and proprietary way," Sher said. "We figured out how to mimic nature, using natural salt to extract water and act as a natural decontamination.
"Think of the Dead Sea, where nothing grows around it because the salt dehydrates everything. It's kind of like that."
All the Alton Brown geeks in the house should have perked up their ears when they read that. Salt is hydroscopic; it attracts water. Sugar is also hydroscopic,
but salt is much cheaper (especially if you don't need food-grade salt).
There are two ways salt is harvested by humans: evaporation and mining.
I can see using salt to grab the moisture in the air present in the pre-dawn skies, but I don't rightly know how to make the salt give it back up. I assume they just cook the rocks and capture the steam. Salt, being a rock, can be heated lots of times before degrading.
I imagine a process like this would produce fairly clean water.
Bottom Line. Google are in bed with those dictators. ...
You want to keep making excuses for them, fine
I was rather expecting this comment. I very much doubt that I can offer an argument that will sway anyone who holds this rather black and white view of the world. I would only point out that one can infinitely extend the blanket of cuplability to include everyone on the planet for the abuses of the Chinese government. I buy chinese goods and goods made with Chinese labor all the time and so do you if you work in IT. Heck, even eating Chinese produce in restaurants helps the overall Chinese economy. As consumers, we support this horrible, horrible regime. Should we lose sleep over this? For my part, I don't. Constructive engagement is, perhaps, more effective at regime change than finger pointing.
It's really easy to be a third party with no vested interested in either side looking on and adding color commentary to Google's business decisions. It's quite another to actually have to make the same decisions with your bread and butter on the line. If what Google has done "supports the regime" to you, that's your call. If Google was an arms dealer sealing tanks to China to roll over dissidents, I'd be more inclined to your indignation. I have a very hard time feeling sympathy for blocked web pages. It's just Not That Important.
I expect the counter argument to this is the "slippery slope" saw, but again, I'm not buying it.
"Point a finger and find three pointing back at you."
I don't understand why there's anger at Google for obeying Chinese laws. Do I agree with those laws? Hell no. But business is business. Google doesn't make money from fostering democracy in foreign lands. They make money from selling ads. China is potentially a very large market, and so Google is doing what it has to as a profit-oriented venture.
If you feel the need to blame anyone, blame the dictators. Google is just doing business.
And before this discussion degenerates into WWII analogies, remember that Google is just a damn search engine and what's being repressed are just frigging web pages. No human is being abused or tortured by Google's actions.
The reaction I've seen on this site on others to Google's decision is way out of line to what was done.
I have no doubt that China will need to liberalize their government. If they want to be an effective technological power, they will need smart people and that means increasingly free access to information.
Most blogging systems have some kind of web service now that allows integration with many editors. On my own site I manage updates and deletes through emacs (on Windows, no less). I'm curious to see if Word will support Blogger, which is owned by Google.
Just filling out the web form for this comment fills like writing in cuneiform...
For instance, compare VMWare's P2V application to convert Physical to Virtual servers against Microsoft's offering which requires having a spare server lying around which must run Windows Server 2003 Enterprise with Automated Deployment Services.
I hope you will endulge this spam-vertainment.
For the record, there are third party vendors of P2V software including Platespin and Leostream, whom I work for.
The VMWare P2V Assistant is arguably easier to use that Microsoft's VSMT solution, which appears to be more of an API than a standalone application. Of course, these vendors only support virtualization to their own platform.
Platespin's solution is pretty robust and feature rich, if a bit on the costly side. Coming in as the cheapest and caveman-simplist product is Leostream's P2V Wizard, which supports MSVS, ESX, GSX, VMware Workstation. Leostream also offers free trials so that you can see if the Wizard will work with your hardware.
P2V is a weird process. In the real world, if you shoved a hard drive with an OS from one machine into another machine with complete hardware, you would expect to spend a lot of time replacing drivers. The P2V products all attempt to do this driver replace automatically (since the target virtual machines have a limited set of hardware, this task is managable). Similarly, V2V is pretty simple (even more so than P2V). V2P is very tough because you have to support a large universe of hardware, which Microsoft and Linux OS engineers will tell you is no fun at all.
Virtualization isn't an appropriate solution for all classes of applications (I'm looking at you, heavily-used Oracle DB), but for many tasks VMs make system administration a magnitude order easier. VMs are outstanding for creating standard dev and QA environments.
As for picking a virtualization platform, you need to define what you want. The best performing virtualization layer I know of today for the x86 architecture is VMWare's ESX. It's been in production for years now and it shows. The console OS of ESX is a modified RH7.x system, so linux hackers will feel at home (Windows guys -- not so much).
GSX and MSVS are just about even, offering decent, if not stellar performance.
I have a hard time recommending GSX, since it's the middle product between the high-performance ESX and the low-end Workstation.
Xen is a newcomer. I haven't use the newest Xen which, with the right dual-core CPU, will support W32 guest OSes. It's a work in progress, so it's probably not what you want to slam into a production environment. However, it seems to have a good architecture (using a hypervisor model), so I'd keep an eye on it.
Then there's Parallels, which looks a lot like VMware workstation. It too is a work in progress. I think Parallels could challenge Workstation on W32 and linux, if development continues on that product. It will be a low-cost alternative to Workstation. Eventually, they will need an enterprise server product to go against ESX.
These are the hardcore virtualization options. There are *partitioning* schemes, as used by UML and Virtuoso, which sort of work like VMs. These don't create VMs, but separate instances of the underlying OS. I haven't worked with either of these very much.
Whatever you do, consider spending an afternoon getting to know *some* VM technology. You'll be glad you did.
The problem would go away if mod_php could just run PHP scripts as their owners, instead of as the user running httpd!
This is a simple permissions problem that's common to many unix apps. chmod 0777 is rarely the right answer to the problem (it's like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer).
It's often easier to simply chown the directory containing the scripts to the web server's user. That way, local users cannot use that web directory illicitly.
The suid stuff for php and mod_perl is kind of crap. More trouble than it's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Huge and bloated, eh? Perhaps that darn microkernel approach is looking a lot better to you now. :-D
The article does not mention what this undergrad expected for a job. Presumably, she though that a degree would help her get jobs should would not otherwise be eligible for. There are positions at Micky D's and Payless that do not require such degrees and it sounds like those are the only positions she is getting interviews for.
I have to agree with the woman in the article: paying $70K for a degree that appears to open no career doors for you is extremely frustrating. Who can't sympathize with that?
It seems true that every employee is getting treated even more shabbily than normal in this recession. To me, this is another example of how the middle class is getting shoved into poverty.
As for entitlement in the US, I agree with your disgust. When will the villains on Wall Street be held accountable for irresponsible gambling that jeopardized the national and world economy? Instead, we give them bailouts and bonuses.
Completely vomit inducing, I agree.
I couldn't agree more. I understand that Unite is a P2P/Groove retread. Still, creating a massive new vector for a botnet doesn't strike me as a responsible thing to do for a software maker.
You cannot argue that either closed or open source is secure. Each project has different security profiles. You can have a highly secure open source product that's harded against attack. You can have proprietary products that are also secure. However, security is continual process. So which avenue do you want to bet on to deliver timely patches for newly discovered flaws?
The long predicted death of PCs and the rise of compelling PDA/phones (like the iPhone) is finally here. While I won't speak to the phone bit, I will say that I've been working with thin clients from Wyse, HP, Igel and Sun for years now. They are like vt220s, but better! Better than maintaining PCs anyway.
It makes sense that OS producers are targeting these stripped-down environments. I suppose that's the essence of cloud computing -- the apps are on the net and you just need enough smarts in your device to get to them.
Again, sounds like vt220s all over again.
What started off as a fine little space opera became a morass of tangle and contradictory plot lines in Season 4. Ron Moore is a total hack who should have plotted the show arc out. Now, BSG is essentially Dallas in space.
What a wasted opportunity to say something interesting about the human condition.
Did anyone else think of the latest movie version of /I AM LEGEND/ when reading about this miracle cure for cancer?
I'll begin hording food and guns now.
What makes them elitists is that they were not going to soil their exclusive clientel by allowing those dirty first world kids to buy one, even if that means the 3rd world kids cannot get the benefit of economies of scale
That's not elitist. That's just being stubbornly doctrinal and a bit naive. Frankly, Apple is a bit more elitist, since you've got to have a fair bit of cash to get the hardware. Linux, while not quite elitist, is certainly selective in that you must be more industrious and inquisitive than the average computer user to use it.
Yes, the OLPC project should have simply sold XO units to whom ever had the cash. That's what a for-profit company would have done. Attempting to leverage the wealth of the industrialized nations to support the 3rd world ones isn't such a bad idea. I bought an XO in the first round of G1G1. It was $400, which wasn't an onerous hardship for me at the time.
Why wasn't the G1G1 programming running ALL THE TIME? I still don't understand that at all. It's like these guys wanted to do a soft launch with their hardware.
Negroponte is considered something of a demigod at MIT, having founded the Media Lab. But I do think he executed poorly on this project because of his lack of business experience. I wonder if his brother would have done better.
Frankly, I never did cotton to the Sugar UI (let's stop this talk of it being an OS please). I'm now running Ubuntu on the XO and I'm happier for it. Running XP on the XO hardware will be a joke.
s/dimensioned/diminished/
sigh.
Unfortunately, the article mentions that in the 80s, female enrollment in CS was closer to parity with males. Something has changed since then and I doubt it's biological.
No doubt that the CS field is "socially challenged" at times. However, there are plenty of women in the military. These women face an almost institutionalized form of sexual harassment. This has not dimensioned the enrollment of females into the armed services.
I second your call for male nerds to dial down the stalker instinct. You aren't the first to complain of it.
While we're Blue Skying, I'd also like to call for wider adoption of deodorant in the CS field.
You can infer from the low UID of my account that I've seen one or two of these "perl sucks" kinds of articles. There's a flamewar. There's mention of python or ruby or C or java. There's the old saw "perl is too complex", "perl doesn't have an IDE", "perl is line noise". But it takes awhile before someone just calls it right: there's a lot of bad perl code because there's a lot of bad perl programmers.
That's not a knock on Perl.
Perl is powerful enough that even crappy programmers can do useful work. That's saying something positive about the design of Perl. That Perl allows bad code also says something positive about the design: it's not a fascist regime.
Now, if you need your language design to prevent the creation of unmanageable code, you'll be looking for the language for a very long time.
So next time we start this thread about Perl being bad, let's just skip to lambasting the crappy coders and leave Perl out of it please.
It's a ray gun that's putting voicing in your head. A ray run from a shadowy military operation. Because the government wants you to have voices in your head.
Riiight.
The keyboard is all but unusable for an adult with sausage-like fingers, such as myself. However, the XO recognizes my Apple USB keyboard with MS Mouse very well.
There is a bug that causes the mouse pointer to jump to the edge to screen. That's pretty darn annoying.
Also, I recommend the hack of putting an SD drive more or less permanently in the XO for additional swap space. Use a USB flash drive for more disk space.
Heck, I manage to get a VPN client to install on the thing, so it's almost suitable for work.
There's no doubt that Sugar UI needs refinement, but that will come.
I REQUIRE MORE MINERALS.
However, my VESPIAN GAS stores are UNSTOPPABLE.
From your old pal UID=2991. It's been a trip. Especially that whole Columbine article. That's when I knew /. had more social capital than was probably advisable.
The real reason I urge my fellow programmers to keep within 80 columns is that should I wish to print out the source code, I need only be sure that the font is 8 point courier. If so, the source will fit well on a page.
True, you can format source code with fancier processes, even get it into PDF. But the primitive cave-programmer in me still likes the 80 column rule.
Most modern languages ignore non-quoted string whitespace anyway, so formating statements should really be about making it easier for humans to read.
I hope Mr. Gates understands that life is difficult for recent graduates. His first job post-degree will likely be an entry-level position without glamour or sufficient compensation. The dog-eat-dog world of corporate America isn't for everyone. Perhaps he won't get too put off by the whole thing.
All the Alton Brown geeks in the house should have perked up their ears when they read that. Salt is hydroscopic; it attracts water. Sugar is also hydroscopic, but salt is much cheaper (especially if you don't need food-grade salt).
There are two ways salt is harvested by humans: evaporation and mining.
I can see using salt to grab the moisture in the air present in the pre-dawn skies, but I don't rightly know how to make the salt give it back up. I assume they just cook the rocks and capture the steam. Salt, being a rock, can be heated lots of times before degrading.
I imagine a process like this would produce fairly clean water.
Give up for Food Science! Hell ya!
Bottom Line. Google are in bed with those dictators.
...
You want to keep making excuses for them, fine
I was rather expecting this comment. I very much doubt that I can offer an argument that will sway anyone who holds this rather black and white view of the world. I would only point out that one can infinitely extend the blanket of cuplability to include everyone on the planet for the abuses of the Chinese government. I buy chinese goods and goods made with Chinese labor all the time and so do you if you work in IT. Heck, even eating Chinese produce in restaurants helps the overall Chinese economy. As consumers, we support this horrible, horrible regime. Should we lose sleep over this? For my part, I don't. Constructive engagement is, perhaps, more effective at regime change than finger pointing.
It's really easy to be a third party with no vested interested in either side looking on and adding color commentary to Google's business decisions. It's quite another to actually have to make the same decisions with your bread and butter on the line. If what Google has done "supports the regime" to you, that's your call. If Google was an arms dealer sealing tanks to China to roll over dissidents, I'd be more inclined to your indignation. I have a very hard time feeling sympathy for blocked web pages. It's just Not That Important.
I expect the counter argument to this is the "slippery slope" saw, but again, I'm not buying it.
"Point a finger and find three pointing back at you."
I don't understand why there's anger at Google for obeying Chinese laws. Do I agree with those laws? Hell no. But business is business. Google doesn't make money from fostering democracy in foreign lands. They make money from selling ads. China is potentially a very large market, and so Google is doing what it has to as a profit-oriented venture.
If you feel the need to blame anyone, blame the dictators. Google is just doing business.
And before this discussion degenerates into WWII analogies, remember that Google is just a damn search engine and what's being repressed are just frigging web pages. No human is being abused or tortured by Google's actions.
The reaction I've seen on this site on others to Google's decision is way out of line to what was done.
I have no doubt that China will need to liberalize their government. If they want to be an effective technological power, they will need smart people and that means increasingly free access to information.
Most blogging systems have some kind of web service now that allows integration with many editors. On my own site I manage updates and deletes through emacs (on Windows, no less). I'm curious to see if Word will support Blogger, which is owned by Google.
Just filling out the web form for this comment fills like writing in cuneiform...
I hope you will endulge this spam-vertainment.
For the record, there are third party vendors of P2V software including Platespin and Leostream, whom I work for.
The VMWare P2V Assistant is arguably easier to use that Microsoft's VSMT solution, which appears to be more of an API than a standalone application. Of course, these vendors only support virtualization to their own platform.
Platespin's solution is pretty robust and feature rich, if a bit on the costly side. Coming in as the cheapest and caveman-simplist product is Leostream's P2V Wizard, which supports MSVS, ESX, GSX, VMware Workstation. Leostream also offers free trials so that you can see if the Wizard will work with your hardware.
P2V is a weird process. In the real world, if you shoved a hard drive with an OS from one machine into another machine with complete hardware, you would expect to spend a lot of time replacing drivers. The P2V products all attempt to do this driver replace automatically (since the target virtual machines have a limited set of hardware, this task is managable). Similarly, V2V is pretty simple (even more so than P2V). V2P is very tough because you have to support a large universe of hardware, which Microsoft and Linux OS engineers will tell you is no fun at all.
Virtualization isn't an appropriate solution for all classes of applications (I'm looking at you, heavily-used Oracle DB), but for many tasks VMs make system administration a magnitude order easier. VMs are outstanding for creating standard dev and QA environments.
As for picking a virtualization platform, you need to define what you want. The best performing virtualization layer I know of today for the x86 architecture is VMWare's ESX. It's been in production for years now and it shows. The console OS of ESX is a modified RH7.x system, so linux hackers will feel at home (Windows guys -- not so much).
GSX and MSVS are just about even, offering decent, if not stellar performance. I have a hard time recommending GSX, since it's the middle product between the high-performance ESX and the low-end Workstation.
Xen is a newcomer. I haven't use the newest Xen which, with the right dual-core CPU, will support W32 guest OSes. It's a work in progress, so it's probably not what you want to slam into a production environment. However, it seems to have a good architecture (using a hypervisor model), so I'd keep an eye on it.
Then there's Parallels, which looks a lot like VMware workstation. It too is a work in progress. I think Parallels could challenge Workstation on W32 and linux, if development continues on that product. It will be a low-cost alternative to Workstation. Eventually, they will need an enterprise server product to go against ESX.
These are the hardcore virtualization options. There are *partitioning* schemes, as used by UML and Virtuoso, which sort of work like VMs. These don't create VMs, but separate instances of the underlying OS. I haven't worked with either of these very much.
Whatever you do, consider spending an afternoon getting to know *some* VM technology. You'll be glad you did.
The problem would go away if mod_php could just run PHP scripts as their owners, instead of as the user running httpd!
This is a simple permissions problem that's common to many unix apps. chmod 0777 is rarely the right answer to the problem (it's like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer).
It's often easier to simply chown the directory containing the scripts to the web server's user. That way, local users cannot use that web directory illicitly.
The suid stuff for php and mod_perl is kind of crap. More trouble than it's worth.
Che Guevara is still dead.
Exactly who thought cassettes had a bright future? Are they speculating in Texas oil companies and Californian gold mines too? Jeez...