Nearby, except for the small overlooked piece of it being Plainfield, IL, not NJ. Odd.... Sun Times -> Chicago, Joliet is in IL, Plainfield is right next to Joliet.
Maybe someone from/. should RTFA and fact check before posting!
oddly enough -- someone today told me something like "computer science is the art of solving problems by adding layers of indirection" or something like that
Ummm... what happens to an average when all the datapoints move up? I suppose everybody could be average, then nobody would be above average, but in general at least 50% are at or below average.
Sounds like a perfect case for small claims court - search for one of the "how to get a refund for windows" types of articles and that'll walk through the basic steps.
So... some shops take Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) very seriously. Their corporate auditors have informed them that they need seperation of duties. In their mind this means that the guy who controls the access control mechanisms cannot do anything else - his job is to grant rights to others so they can do their job. The system administrators do just that, sometimes they're even more restricted i.e. only financial systems or only HR systems. Then you have DBAs, also highly restricted as to what they have access to. On top of that are the application developers - they can write code, but can't do anything about pushing it to dev/test/prod systems without a release engineer. Then you get networks -- they maintain the switches and routers, but security is responsible for the firewalls and ACLs.
On top of all these people, you layer a change management process that requires a manager approval for all changes - possibly with execution required during a downtime window.
Ok... with all those pieces, here comes a competant user (lets call him santa clause) requesting access to an application on a system that is considered secure. First that ticket goes through an approval process to determine whether the user should get access to the app (in really streamlined companies, these are granted by role and not by individual ID - you're hired as an accountant, you get systems x y and z, purchasing managers get x, p and q etc). So now you have approval, the access guy grants you access, but on top of that the security guy needs to modify an acl on a router and get that approved by the change process for the network guy to push the change to the router that controls the access.
That doesn't even begin to get into what happens if procurement is needed.
Point - but for most organizations, they still demand that they make it to tapes for shipping offsite. Your snapshot, when you do NDMP to tape is still the size of the full filesystem so you've gotten no win in regard to shaving space off your tape requirements. You also haven't gained easy point in time recovery of individual mailboxes. These are features that many enterprise customers demand - which is unfortunate, because it leads them to accepting mediocrity across the board.
Not true. Most major backup packages have agents that tie in nicely to Exchange and make it incredibly easy to back up. If you have an architecture that is impossibly large and hit heavily by users 24 hours/day, then there's solutions for that that get more complex but are technically very cool. (Split mirror + off host data mover).
The exchange backup agents that I work with allow for point in time recovery of individual mail boxes etc.
Maildir style delivery is a pain for backups. Thousands of small files are the bane of most backup administrators existence. mbox doesn't help either as you can't do an incremental backup "hey look... the file changed, back the whole thing up again".
Again - as the one who got stuck with backups for a company that was doing all forms of mail delivery, the most sane for backup and restore were the systems that did funny things to e-mail. Microsoft and Lotus work with companies like Veritas and put lots of thought into backup and recovery becaue the PHBs they sell to demand it. Same reason that I'd take Oracle over MySQL when given the choice as a backup admin.
Now... my preference for use is maildir and most of my personal databases are mysql, but... for ease of backup and recovery, the comercial vendors win hands down. (On the other hand, windows has difficulty pushing data fast -- Unix systems routinely top out much higher, but when you throw thousands of files in a directory - both suck, but when you have 1G files with 1M of changes a day, it's much nicer to be able to back up that 1M on your incrementals than have to pick up the full G.)
Your pick -- Personally, i've seen the agents take 600G nightly down to 20G nightly and I wouldn't have been able to do this with some sort of spool delivery. </rant>
Well -- So long as any one person fails the generalization, it can't apply. I don't hate Bush, at least not the man. I hate the way he's executed his office as president. I hate that I constantly feel that he's lying, but there are plenty of excuses for this that might make it a fault of Bush the President rather than Bush the man, so I give him the benefit of the doubt on that. It's not really spin so much as it's a check against the definition of "hate" in that I can't have such strong emotional feelings toward a man I've never met beyond the extent to which he's affected me.
(oh... and I hate that a man who can't pronounce "nuclear" is the one at the top of the chain that could order the button to be pushed!)
I hate to reply to something that feels like flamebait, but *slips into asbestos suit* I suppose I feel the need to respond.
The claim that liberals aren't FOR anything is about dead false. Every liberal I know is FOR many core American values like liberty, peace, and democracy. We're also for security, but we don't believe that can be achieved by giving up liberty and feel that there's other ways to go about that.
We happen to be ok with religion - there are some very religious people on the left. What we don't like is having religious views forced on us as law. We take stands that are very neutral in some cases because the opposite of the facist viewpoint is one of choice and we don't feel that the choice we might make should be forced on others.
We don't hate the rich or corporations. We just don't feel that it is right for money to have influence on politics. Lobbying is bad for America.
Going back to freedom of choice... We believe our politicians should do what's right for their constituents. In most cases, this doesn't mean towing the party line. This should mean thinking, talking to people, and making a judgement that meets those needs. If someone in a hotly contested area gets the win 51% - 49%, that isn't reason to only act in favor of the 51%.
And finally, we don't hate Bush. Most of us have never met the man. He seems like a nice enough guy. He just doesn't make a very good President. We don't think he fills the office very well. Then again, he also seems to have a problem telling the truth, admiting his mistakes, and learning from them. This might be a deep fear of admitting mistakes publically or it might the rather disturbing character flaw of compulsively lying.
"When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." -Sinclair Lewis, 1935
(because I saw it on slashdot earlier today and it seems fitting)
I've talked to hiring managers who posted their job on Monster and very quickly got something on the order of 600 resumes, most not even remotely fit for the job. They also give the job description to head hunters - who post it on Monster. The advantage to them of the head hunter is that they pre-screen candidates before passing the resumes along (while harvesting the resumes to put toward other openings). If the job board could serve as a screening function and only pass along qualified candidates to the employers, it would cut out the need for the recruiters in the middle. (btw - that job was filled by a word of mouth referal)
Interesting comment about owners looking for roommates - I would expect that, at least for roommate arrangements, you could judge someone to be a roommate that you could live with or not live with on whatever criteria you wanted. I had a 3 bedroom condo for a while and was tempted at times to put up an ad along the lines of "I've got a spare room and, while I don't need a roommate, I invite people to convince me that I want them as a roommate." and I might have been thinking to include a line "great for med students or residents, also great for nursing students or nurses" (mostly due to location - but it also indicats a class of people that I might have liked living with.)
Are the laws different if you're offering a free room? (I was tempted to do that at times too)
It's a free market right? If providers start limiting things, consumers will be heard as they scramble for a provider that has the features that they want. If anything, the lobbying should be from the consumers in the form of a desire to have full disclosure of what services are being limited by the provider. It's hard to do a feature comparison between vendors if they're not up front about their practices and are allowed to change them on the fly.
If I sign up for a service because it advertises that it allows anything I want to do, and the next day I find them blocking or choking services that I use, I'm going to be pissed -- and not want to be tied to a service contract.
You know that policy doesn't make sense. Many places have contracts that specify that employees MUST give 2 weeks notice or risk losing any benefits due them by the employer (banked vacation time etc). I just resigned a job and gave... 2 months notice. The new job is halfway across the country and because it was a big move, I had lots of notice.
Any malicious person who knows the policy and intends to leave would do their mischief before giving notice. This makes the policy pointless.
Oh... and to answer the question asked -- the best advice is to keep it short and to the point, no comments about why you're leaving or where you're going. "Dear Manager -- As of (date) I resign my position as (position) --Sincerly (yourname)"
April 7 is likely to fall on opening day for baseball. Guess congress only really cares about television events that generate massive advertising revenue and not the ones identified as "American as apple pie." Even the president is more likely to show up to throw out the first pitch of the baseball season than to participate in the final 4.
The libraries have licence from the actual copyright owners to have the book on their shelves, but other rights are reserved.
NO!!! If you start viewing posession of the physical book as a "license" then the world is going to hell. The libraries have a physical copy of the book and all rights of ownership associated with an object. They can do whatever they want with it, including sell it or give it away. They just have no right to copy it.
I'm not sure that what google is doing is wrong or right - it's probably a very grey area, and they probably have very good lawyers who advised them on what they can do.
It's already been established that time shifting and media shifting are legal uses for technology related to copying works - if I have a CD and find it far more efficient to rip the music and stuff it on my iPod, that's legal.
My biggest problem with the current system is that there are so many technical attempts to solve legal problems that everything is a mess. I should be able to digitize all of my music, then make it available for friends to download (one at a time), listen to, and agree to delete at the end of their use - like loaning them a CD, but digital. If I loan them a physical CD, they're on their honor to not rip that and keep a copy past when they return the disc, why should the digital world be any different?
Having been to both University and College (Canadian terms. US equiv is, I believe, College and Community College?), I can say that I can't see not having both.
As I've seen this distinction brought up several times in this thread, in the US we have:
University
Generally research focused and has advanced degrees - Masters, PhD, etc. as well as undergraduate programs. Often these are broken up into colleges (where I went there was Humanities & Social Sciences, School of Computer Science, College of Fine Arts, and a few others) but that distinction is often lost.
College
Generally only grant 4 year degrees - bachelors - no masters or PhD programs. The faculty aren't usually as involved in research as they are in teaching.
Community College
Generally only grant 2 year "associates" degrees. Some have partnerships with universities that offer certain courses to the bachelors level, but that is less common and even then, those courses are being tought by the university professors, not the community college ones. No research focus, often used as a place for people to get general courses out of the way ($90/credit hour is alot cheaper than $1000/credit hour and there's only so many different things that your basic rhetoric class will cover).
Most people going off to school are probably ending up at a university, but there's quite a few small colleges out there that grant the bachelors degree. Also, given that the degree is generally granted by a college as part of the university, it's not incorrect to say "going to college".
I've stressed the "lot of time" point because I think this is a key problem with CS students. You get the typical line out of them at an interview "I didn't learn C# in Comp Science but I could learn it in an afternoon.." I'm a young guy (22) and I've been programing professionally for nearly four years and I can tell you that this is simply false.
I must take issue with this. I did my time in one of the top CS programs in the US. I'm pretty sure that I could learn C# in an afternoon. I wouldn't say that I'd be the most proficient in it in that time frame, but I could learn the language. My experience from being thrown at new technologies in typical development shops is that I'm more proficient than 95+% of the staff within a week (assuming I'm only dealing with that technology) and within a month I'm to the point where I'm the expert on several topics related to that technology.
Learning a language is pretty easy - if you've got solid background in algorithms and know a couple of languages (preferably at least one imperative and one functional) already. Start with finding the base datatypes, then the control structures (loops, functions, etc.) then the object model. At that point you've got enough to implement any algorithm you need. Odds are that's enough to start reading code related to the project you've been put on, and possibly some debugging. Once you start reading the code, look up the object definitions for the object types that are used. Odds are you'll find many places in the code where properties of the object aren't being used because the "developers" have been copy/pasting bad code all over the place rather than learning the objects that they're using, not to mention much business programming is considered finished when it works, not when it works right, works efficiently, or is sane to read - most business programming projects are far more spaghetti like than things allowed in a typical CS program.
I don't know that this method for aproaching a language was taught in my CS program, or if the program just gave me the mental tools to develop it for myself, but it does work. It has worked for me in several cases in the past, and I expect it to work many more times in the future.
What you're missing is that "beg" has a less common definition. "to evade; dodge" or "to take for granted without proof." Under either of these definitions, the definition of "begs the question" makes sense. The problem with such phrases is that people apply the one definition they know for a world like "beg" and completely change the meaning of a phrase.
I won't deny that "begs the question" was introduced into the english language by a poor translation of latin, but it doesn't mean the new meaning is less annoying to those who know the old meaning, and on a site like slashdot, the editors should realize that their audience includes those trained in logic.
Among the most misused phrases EVER. Read this or do a search on your favorite search enging for "begs the question" and you'll see why some find this one of the most obnoxious phrases ever.
For more fun, see the reaction of people when they are making an argument that begs the question, and you tell them "you're really begging the question." Most of the time they'll respond with something similar to "what question?"
For those who don't wish to read the link - "begs the question" means to assume your conclusion as part of your argument, not forces one to ask a particular question.
right -- which is exactly what you end up with when you start mixing up "programming" with "computer science". I've interviewed people from schools who have mixed this up... they're resume says they have a CS degree, but when I've asked "so, what did you like about CS" I've gotten answers about "well... I really enjoyed my java programming class, but VB was ok and that database administration class was interesting". I really wouldn't expect a CS education to teach any specifics - mainframe or otherwise. It's about concepts. Specifics like how to develop in java or how to administer a mainframe are things that should come out of trade schools, not university CS programs. Someone with a CS style background should be able to pick things up very quickly (and in my experience, they can) because they have solid fundamental understanding of concepts. The other kind of education ends up with people who can do things, but don't know why or how they came to be that way. Some don't consider the why or how to be important, and want to hire someone who can do and don't care if they can grow beyond that point or not. Others understand that a solid CS background means you could hire someone who's never touched a mainframe, stick them with the mainframe admins, and they'll be up to speed in under a month, possibly passing the skills of the existing staff shortly after (though maybe not with the complete set of experience to go with it).
Since when is computer science platform specific. Too few people seem to make the distinction between computer science and programming. CS is 90+% not programming. It's algorithms, complexity analysis, logic, math, formal languages, etc... Programming, on the other hand, rarely requires those skills - at least on modern languages. Look at the STL and tell me how many programmers use that rather than learning the intricacies of various sort algorithms or linked lists and binary trees?
Anyway... CS is really platform agnostic - programming might not be. If you want to learn about the mainframe, go find your nearest mainframe systems programmer and ask questions. All of them that I've ever met are more than happy to talk about the details of zOS.
From what I know, courts have fairly consistently ruled that a company cannot prevent an employee for practicing their trade after they leave the company. For a company like Microsoft who can relatively easily claim that any software company competes with them, it would be really hard to ever leave with that kind of clause in the contract - or for that matter, what if you're fired/laid off?
I don't know the details of what this guy did at MS or what Google intended him to do, but it strikes me that there's alot of work to be done in establishing a foreign office that doesn't necessarily compete with what he did at MS. Even enough to keep him busy for a year until that non-compete is up.
Still seems like a bad model for managing support. Far cheaper to just ship the part - 4 hours of a tech on the phone has to be about the same price as a hard drive - especially for a company like Dell who buys in mass quantities. You'd think they would have better things to do with their time than walk through testing when someone calls up and says "my hard drive died".
I find that my DSL company has excellent customer service. They aren't like the phone company who tries to convince you that you caused the problem and starts out by warning you that it will cost you if the problem is found on your site. I think the trick is that the person on the phone is able to fix 90% of the calls. I've called at 3AM, explained the problem, and had it fixed in 5 minutes.
I don't know what customers expect, but if the service was modeled after Speakeasy, I can't see many people complaining. I think part of the trick is that it's a very flat support organization - you don't need to escalate to a level 2 or level 3 person on the phone. The person you get on the call can do everything short of showing up at your door.
Dell, on the other hand, makes people jump through hoops when they call in with a problem (like a dead hard drive). This even happens on corporate accounts - the field techs at work have been known to spend 4 hours on the phone going through dell's script.
Slashdot Mirror
Nearby, except for the small overlooked piece of it being Plainfield, IL, not NJ. Odd.... Sun Times -> Chicago, Joliet is in IL, Plainfield is right next to Joliet.
/. should RTFA and fact check before posting!
Maybe someone from
oddly enough -- someone today told me something like "computer science is the art of solving problems by adding layers of indirection" or something like that
Ummm... what happens to an average when all the datapoints move up? I suppose everybody could be average, then nobody would be above average, but in general at least 50% are at or below average.
Sounds like a perfect case for small claims court - search for one of the "how to get a refund for windows" types of articles and that'll walk through the basic steps.
So... some shops take Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) very seriously. Their corporate auditors have informed them that they need seperation of duties. In their mind this means that the guy who controls the access control mechanisms cannot do anything else - his job is to grant rights to others so they can do their job. The system administrators do just that, sometimes they're even more restricted i.e. only financial systems or only HR systems. Then you have DBAs, also highly restricted as to what they have access to. On top of that are the application developers - they can write code, but can't do anything about pushing it to dev/test/prod systems without a release engineer. Then you get networks -- they maintain the switches and routers, but security is responsible for the firewalls and ACLs.
On top of all these people, you layer a change management process that requires a manager approval for all changes - possibly with execution required during a downtime window.
Ok... with all those pieces, here comes a competant user (lets call him santa clause) requesting access to an application on a system that is considered secure. First that ticket goes through an approval process to determine whether the user should get access to the app (in really streamlined companies, these are granted by role and not by individual ID - you're hired as an accountant, you get systems x y and z, purchasing managers get x, p and q etc). So now you have approval, the access guy grants you access, but on top of that the security guy needs to modify an acl on a router and get that approved by the change process for the network guy to push the change to the router that controls the access.
That doesn't even begin to get into what happens if procurement is needed.
Point - but for most organizations, they still demand that they make it to tapes for shipping offsite. Your snapshot, when you do NDMP to tape is still the size of the full filesystem so you've gotten no win in regard to shaving space off your tape requirements. You also haven't gained easy point in time recovery of individual mailboxes. These are features that many enterprise customers demand - which is unfortunate, because it leads them to accepting mediocrity across the board.
Not true. Most major backup packages have agents that tie in nicely to Exchange and make it incredibly easy to back up. If you have an architecture that is impossibly large and hit heavily by users 24 hours/day, then there's solutions for that that get more complex but are technically very cool. (Split mirror + off host data mover).
... for ease of backup and recovery, the comercial vendors win hands down. (On the other hand, windows has difficulty pushing data fast -- Unix systems routinely top out much higher, but when you throw thousands of files in a directory - both suck, but when you have 1G files with 1M of changes a day, it's much nicer to be able to back up that 1M on your incrementals than have to pick up the full G.)
The exchange backup agents that I work with allow for point in time recovery of individual mail boxes etc.
Maildir style delivery is a pain for backups. Thousands of small files are the bane of most backup administrators existence. mbox doesn't help either as you can't do an incremental backup "hey look... the file changed, back the whole thing up again".
Again - as the one who got stuck with backups for a company that was doing all forms of mail delivery, the most sane for backup and restore were the systems that did funny things to e-mail. Microsoft and Lotus work with companies like Veritas and put lots of thought into backup and recovery becaue the PHBs they sell to demand it. Same reason that I'd take Oracle over MySQL when given the choice as a backup admin.
Now... my preference for use is maildir and most of my personal databases are mysql, but
Your pick -- Personally, i've seen the agents take 600G nightly down to 20G nightly and I wouldn't have been able to do this with some sort of spool delivery.
</rant>
Well -- So long as any one person fails the generalization, it can't apply. I don't hate Bush, at least not the man. I hate the way he's executed his office as president. I hate that I constantly feel that he's lying, but there are plenty of excuses for this that might make it a fault of Bush the President rather than Bush the man, so I give him the benefit of the doubt on that. It's not really spin so much as it's a check against the definition of "hate" in that I can't have such strong emotional feelings toward a man I've never met beyond the extent to which he's affected me.
(oh... and I hate that a man who can't pronounce "nuclear" is the one at the top of the chain that could order the button to be pushed!)
I hate to reply to something that feels like flamebait, but *slips into asbestos suit* I suppose I feel the need to respond.
The claim that liberals aren't FOR anything is about dead false. Every liberal I know is FOR many core American values like liberty, peace, and democracy. We're also for security, but we don't believe that can be achieved by giving up liberty and feel that there's other ways to go about that.
We happen to be ok with religion - there are some very religious people on the left. What we don't like is having religious views forced on us as law. We take stands that are very neutral in some cases because the opposite of the facist viewpoint is one of choice and we don't feel that the choice we might make should be forced on others.
We don't hate the rich or corporations. We just don't feel that it is right for money to have influence on politics. Lobbying is bad for America.
Going back to freedom of choice... We believe our politicians should do what's right for their constituents. In most cases, this doesn't mean towing the party line. This should mean thinking, talking to people, and making a judgement that meets those needs. If someone in a hotly contested area gets the win 51% - 49%, that isn't reason to only act in favor of the 51%.
And finally, we don't hate Bush. Most of us have never met the man. He seems like a nice enough guy. He just doesn't make a very good President. We don't think he fills the office very well. Then again, he also seems to have a problem telling the truth, admiting his mistakes, and learning from them. This might be a deep fear of admitting mistakes publically or it might the rather disturbing character flaw of compulsively lying.
(because I saw it on slashdot earlier today and it seems fitting)I've talked to hiring managers who posted their job on Monster and very quickly got something on the order of 600 resumes, most not even remotely fit for the job. They also give the job description to head hunters - who post it on Monster. The advantage to them of the head hunter is that they pre-screen candidates before passing the resumes along (while harvesting the resumes to put toward other openings). If the job board could serve as a screening function and only pass along qualified candidates to the employers, it would cut out the need for the recruiters in the middle. (btw - that job was filled by a word of mouth referal)
Interesting comment about owners looking for roommates - I would expect that, at least for roommate arrangements, you could judge someone to be a roommate that you could live with or not live with on whatever criteria you wanted. I had a 3 bedroom condo for a while and was tempted at times to put up an ad along the lines of "I've got a spare room and, while I don't need a roommate, I invite people to convince me that I want them as a roommate." and I might have been thinking to include a line "great for med students or residents, also great for nursing students or nurses" (mostly due to location - but it also indicats a class of people that I might have liked living with.)
Are the laws different if you're offering a free room? (I was tempted to do that at times too)
It's a free market right? If providers start limiting things, consumers will be heard as they scramble for a provider that has the features that they want. If anything, the lobbying should be from the consumers in the form of a desire to have full disclosure of what services are being limited by the provider. It's hard to do a feature comparison between vendors if they're not up front about their practices and are allowed to change them on the fly.
If I sign up for a service because it advertises that it allows anything I want to do, and the next day I find them blocking or choking services that I use, I'm going to be pissed -- and not want to be tied to a service contract.
That's really the only danger I see.
You know that policy doesn't make sense. Many places have contracts that specify that employees MUST give 2 weeks notice or risk losing any benefits due them by the employer (banked vacation time etc). I just resigned a job and gave ... 2 months notice. The new job is halfway across the country and because it was a big move, I had lots of notice.
Any malicious person who knows the policy and intends to leave would do their mischief before giving notice. This makes the policy pointless.
Oh... and to answer the question asked -- the best advice is to keep it short and to the point, no comments about why you're leaving or where you're going. "Dear Manager -- As of (date) I resign my position as (position) --Sincerly (yourname)"
April 7 is likely to fall on opening day for baseball. Guess congress only really cares about television events that generate massive advertising revenue and not the ones identified as "American as apple pie." Even the president is more likely to show up to throw out the first pitch of the baseball season than to participate in the final 4.
The libraries have licence from the actual copyright owners to have the book on their shelves, but other rights are reserved.
NO!!! If you start viewing posession of the physical book as a "license" then the world is going to hell. The libraries have a physical copy of the book and all rights of ownership associated with an object. They can do whatever they want with it, including sell it or give it away. They just have no right to copy it.
I'm not sure that what google is doing is wrong or right - it's probably a very grey area, and they probably have very good lawyers who advised them on what they can do.
It's already been established that time shifting and media shifting are legal uses for technology related to copying works - if I have a CD and find it far more efficient to rip the music and stuff it on my iPod, that's legal.
My biggest problem with the current system is that there are so many technical attempts to solve legal problems that everything is a mess. I should be able to digitize all of my music, then make it available for friends to download (one at a time), listen to, and agree to delete at the end of their use - like loaning them a CD, but digital. If I loan them a physical CD, they're on their honor to not rip that and keep a copy past when they return the disc, why should the digital world be any different?
Learning a language is pretty easy - if you've got solid background in algorithms and know a couple of languages (preferably at least one imperative and one functional) already. Start with finding the base datatypes, then the control structures (loops, functions, etc.) then the object model. At that point you've got enough to implement any algorithm you need. Odds are that's enough to start reading code related to the project you've been put on, and possibly some debugging. Once you start reading the code, look up the object definitions for the object types that are used. Odds are you'll find many places in the code where properties of the object aren't being used because the "developers" have been copy/pasting bad code all over the place rather than learning the objects that they're using, not to mention much business programming is considered finished when it works, not when it works right, works efficiently, or is sane to read - most business programming projects are far more spaghetti like than things allowed in a typical CS program.
I don't know that this method for aproaching a language was taught in my CS program, or if the program just gave me the mental tools to develop it for myself, but it does work. It has worked for me in several cases in the past, and I expect it to work many more times in the future.
What you're missing is that "beg" has a less common definition. "to evade; dodge" or "to take for granted without proof." Under either of these definitions, the definition of "begs the question" makes sense. The problem with such phrases is that people apply the one definition they know for a world like "beg" and completely change the meaning of a phrase.
I won't deny that "begs the question" was introduced into the english language by a poor translation of latin, but it doesn't mean the new meaning is less annoying to those who know the old meaning, and on a site like slashdot, the editors should realize that their audience includes those trained in logic.
Among the most misused phrases EVER. Read this or do a search on your favorite search enging for "begs the question" and you'll see why some find this one of the most obnoxious phrases ever.
For more fun, see the reaction of people when they are making an argument that begs the question, and you tell them "you're really begging the question." Most of the time they'll respond with something similar to "what question?"
For those who don't wish to read the link - "begs the question" means to assume your conclusion as part of your argument, not forces one to ask a particular question.
right -- which is exactly what you end up with when you start mixing up "programming" with "computer science". I've interviewed people from schools who have mixed this up ... they're resume says they have a CS degree, but when I've asked "so, what did you like about CS" I've gotten answers about "well... I really enjoyed my java programming class, but VB was ok and that database administration class was interesting".
I really wouldn't expect a CS education to teach any specifics - mainframe or otherwise. It's about concepts. Specifics like how to develop in java or how to administer a mainframe are things that should come out of trade schools, not university CS programs.
Someone with a CS style background should be able to pick things up very quickly (and in my experience, they can) because they have solid fundamental understanding of concepts. The other kind of education ends up with people who can do things, but don't know why or how they came to be that way. Some don't consider the why or how to be important, and want to hire someone who can do and don't care if they can grow beyond that point or not. Others understand that a solid CS background means you could hire someone who's never touched a mainframe, stick them with the mainframe admins, and they'll be up to speed in under a month, possibly passing the skills of the existing staff shortly after (though maybe not with the complete set of experience to go with it).
Since when is computer science platform specific. Too few people seem to make the distinction between computer science and programming. CS is 90+% not programming. It's algorithms, complexity analysis, logic, math, formal languages, etc... Programming, on the other hand, rarely requires those skills - at least on modern languages. Look at the STL and tell me how many programmers use that rather than learning the intricacies of various sort algorithms or linked lists and binary trees?
Anyway... CS is really platform agnostic - programming might not be. If you want to learn about the mainframe, go find your nearest mainframe systems programmer and ask questions. All of them that I've ever met are more than happy to talk about the details of zOS.
From what I know, courts have fairly consistently ruled that a company cannot prevent an employee for practicing their trade after they leave the company. For a company like Microsoft who can relatively easily claim that any software company competes with them, it would be really hard to ever leave with that kind of clause in the contract - or for that matter, what if you're fired/laid off?
I don't know the details of what this guy did at MS or what Google intended him to do, but it strikes me that there's alot of work to be done in establishing a foreign office that doesn't necessarily compete with what he did at MS. Even enough to keep him busy for a year until that non-compete is up.
Still seems like a bad model for managing support. Far cheaper to just ship the part - 4 hours of a tech on the phone has to be about the same price as a hard drive - especially for a company like Dell who buys in mass quantities. You'd think they would have better things to do with their time than walk through testing when someone calls up and says "my hard drive died".
I find that my DSL company has excellent customer service. They aren't like the phone company who tries to convince you that you caused the problem and starts out by warning you that it will cost you if the problem is found on your site. I think the trick is that the person on the phone is able to fix 90% of the calls. I've called at 3AM, explained the problem, and had it fixed in 5 minutes.
I don't know what customers expect, but if the service was modeled after Speakeasy, I can't see many people complaining. I think part of the trick is that it's a very flat support organization - you don't need to escalate to a level 2 or level 3 person on the phone. The person you get on the call can do everything short of showing up at your door.
Dell, on the other hand, makes people jump through hoops when they call in with a problem (like a dead hard drive). This even happens on corporate accounts - the field techs at work have been known to spend 4 hours on the phone going through dell's script.