Thanks for re-formatting. It made it a lot more readable.
I'm in Seattle so I can't speak to the job market in Austin. However I can offer you some free generic advice which is probably worth what you're paying for it.
It sounds like you have a good set of skills. Your references, and the military experience will count for a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of people will claim to have the same skills. They may not actually able to perform at your level, but you are competing with them to get the interviews. You'll need something to distinguish your resume from the posers. I would spend the money and get your certifications current. However, I would not spend any money on training courses. Spend the money on some certification books, and three or four computers to set up your own admin lab. The computers don't have to be current, even two or three years old should be good enough. The certifications won't impress the technical people interviewing you. Their function is to refresh your knowledge, and most importantly, get you past the "buzz-word bingo" in the HR department. The tech folks will be more impressed when you tell them you keep an elaborate home lab to experiment with.
Do you have a current security clearance? Obviously that would give you a huge advantage with defense contractors.
The tech job market currently seems to be improving, but the long term problem you are facing is that sys and network admins are in the same position now that machinists were a decade or so ago. Companies hire when then economy is growing, and lay off when the economy is stagnant or shrinking. It just isn't as stable as it was in the 70s, and 80s, even though there are more positions.
You don't mention wanting to be a programmer, so I wouldn't suggest gettting a B.S. in C.S. Instead, I'd try getting cross-trained in some non-computer field: accounting, medical practice managment, real estate development. You'll be a lot more useful to a small-business if you aren't just the computer/network guy, but really understand their operation. Some of those fields you could pick up in the evenings from a community college. If you are really ambitous you could think about getting and MIS or business degree and going into managment.
How do you program without using discrete math(Or an algorithm for that matter)? It's very hard to program without conditional statements.
Most programming jobs consist of querying a database, displaying the results of query on a screen, providing some sort of UI to collect the user's changes to that data, and sending the updates back to the database. Jobs like that certainly will use arithmetic, maybe even algebra, but probably not discrete math, as in graph theory or combinitorics. They will certainly use and write algorithms, but probably won't use the theory of algorithms, as in run-time analysis (big O notation), dynamic programming, and classic algorithms for tree traversal, searching, and sorting.
Now the folks who wrote the database may very well have used all those tools. But for every programmer who has a job writing a relational database, there are several thousand with jobs as I described above. I think the programmer writing the db has the more intesting job, but that's a matter of taste.
Not to pick on you, but this attitude is just sticking your head in the sand. Some of the best programmers I've known, with experience back to the early 80s and with every technology you can name, were hit hard by the burst in 2000-01. These were bright guys with good people skills and they couldn't find anything for a couple years.
I strongly concur. From the 1950s to the 1990s I think programming was about as close as you could get to a "sure thing" job. Once you'd landed your first programming job you were generally able to find work whenever you wanted it. I don't think this is the case any longer. The swings of the business cycle, your network of contacts, and plain dumb luck, play a much larger role in finding a programming job then they used to. I'd still happily recommend programming to young people of suitable temperment and talents. I'd warn them that it is not a "sure thing", but I'd point out that these days, no job is a sure thing. Even the investment bankers and market analysts went through hard times after the insider trading scandals of the 80s and the tech meltdown of a few years ago.
These are largely designed to be weeder classes to get rid of those that can't cut it as an engineer and for the most part have nothing to do with what you will do after graduation as a programmer.
You are obviously correct that most programming jobs will make no use of calculus, discrete math or even the theory of algorithms. However, I don't think those courses are only filters. There are some software fields (and careers) where that material is needed: computational biology, machine learning, derivatives trading, engineering simulation etc. If you don't get the mathematical basics in the first couple of years of undergraduate study, you are going to have a tough time catching up if you want to go into those fields later on. I think the universities are exposing you to the math early on so you can have the option of pursing the more theoretical and mathematical subfields in your junior and senior years.
but wtf does his being, or not being a freemason have to do with anything?
That struck me as pretty odd too. That's why I always take Wikipedia with a grain of salt. I have checked a few other sources and the rest of the article seems fairly accurate. The freemason comment is defintely from left field though. I didn't check its edit history.
Human experimentation is morally fraught, and I'm reluctant to judge whether this is really a miracle breakthrough from a newspaper article. The apparent success of this experiment makes the rule look foolish, but if half the patients die in two years from brain infections, the regulations and bureaucracy will look wise and insightful. At this very moment there is a heated debate on human experimentation going on in Britain because a drug trial sent six healthy volunteers to intensive care in mortal peril. If you want some really gruesome examples of unregulated human experimentation check out Dr. Ewan Cameron and Tuskegee syphilis experiments
Many countries have extensive laws regulating experimenting on human subjects, and make no mistake, this surgery is completely experimental. One of the big questions is how can a person give informed consent when the risks are considerable and the benefits not known. The laws are a two-edged sword. In this case the surgery had dramatic results and hasn't killed the patient, so the laws and regulations look stupid. On the other hand, if the story had been "6 patients killed in ill-considered experiment in Portugal" the regulations would look wise. Google "Tuskegee Syphilis" and "Dr. Ewen Cameron" if you want to read about some really awful cases of human experimentation.
I would imagine one of the question now is whether the patients are put at long term risk for a massive brain infection. Having a wire running directly into the brain from the outside world doesn't seem like a great idea to me.
Uh-huh. And what matter all of the patented genomic sequences if Google publishes them?
You are conflating multiple issues. As far as I understand matters, simple sequence data is not patentable, any more then value for the pH of water, or the molecular weight of hydrogen is patenable. You must come up with a function for the sequence to make it patenable. Patents have been granted for fairly idiotic functions, like using the sequence as a probe to detect the itself in assays, but this it still a separate issue from publishing sequence data.
if all this data is already considered public domain, why the fuss about Google publishing it?
Considered nothing. Go to NCBI or UCSC Genome Browser. There it all is, help yourself. Why there is a fuss about it is beyond me.
Can you suggest a better motive than profit for such an activity, or is there a simpler explanation than greed?
Ignorance, or a desire to attract public attention by using high-profile buzz words.
The agencies involved in the research, however, seem to have a vested interest in keeping the data private
This is simply not true. Particpants in the Human Genome project were required to publish their sequence data in the public NCBI databases within a couple days of obtaining it. The folks at Celera (the private genome effort) initially kept a large portion of their data private, but later made all it public.
I took a class on ethics and morality once. Very interesting problem arised in one of the lecture's:
It is an interesting problem, but why make it so hypothetical? I have a nice house, a car, hundreds of books, a cell phone, several computers, and an I-pod. I could sell some or even of all this stuff and send the money to help refugees in Darfur or Kenya. It's not like I'd even be suffering: I could move into a studio apartment, my employer provides a computer for me at work, and I could borrow the books and music from the local public library. I have no doubt that I could raise enough money to save several lives. Yet I don't. Am I any less culpable or heartless then the doctor in your example? How much of your labor do you give away at below market rates to worthy causes?
Every time I see one of these studies, I remind myself that they're being performed by the same idiot pre-meds who were struggling through basic physics and chemistry courses.
What makes you think this study isn't being done by some biophysicists or biochemists? The parent article was singularly lacking in detail, but if were working in the field I'd be doing microarray experiments to see if any genes were significantly up or down regulated by microwave exposure. Given what we do know about background levels of EM I would bet there is no effect, but it would be a different tact then epidimiology studies.
Who needs an actual mechanism, as long as I repeat the experiment enough times to get the right confidence level from the stat table!
I see. So you are a fan of the argument from personal incredulity: "I can't think of a mechanism, therefore it is impossible." Surely you are aware that radioactivity was a well known phenomena for 25-30 years before anyone had a clue about the mechanism? Just as most biologists know very little about RF radiation, most physicists know very little about biochemical signal transduction.
Only someone from the inside, with a broad picture of how all the pieces fit together, could possibly judge whether the classification of any particular piece of information is justified or not. Anyone else is doing so based on ignorant hubris.
That sounds pragamatic enough, but then how are citizens to cope with the inevitiable use of classification to bury information for political reasons rather then security reasons? The most egregious example that I know of was the "secret" bombing of Cambodia in the early 70s. North Vietnam, the USSR, China, and Cambodia, all knew the bombing was happening and who was doing it. It was classified to avoid domestic political fallout from an expansion of the war, and to avoid international embarassment from having to admit that the US was violating the neutrality of Cambodia (even though it was well known that North Vietnam was already violating it).
A lot of people thought we were part of some vast conspiracy, when many of us were the ones who got screwed in the process of Enron's downfall just like the other stock shareholders.
I'm sure you, and most of the employees at Enron, were upstanding and decent folk, but didn't you have any inkling that things might be amiss? I mean the guys on the energy trading desk are a long way from the boardroom, but from their taped converstations they knew they were engaging in un-ethical, and perhaps illegal, behavior.
Many years ago I was working for a large, publicly traded, company. At a company meeting someone asked if they should put all their 401k into the company stock. The spokesperson replied that while they believed the company stock would do very well, diversification was an important consideration, and if disaster struck you wouldn't want to loose your job and have your 401k go in the toilet simultaneously. As I understand it, Enron not only suggested, but required, that Enron stock go into your 401k. This didn't raise any flags for you?
Enron the company was doing lots of evil things in the marketplace
I'm a classic bleeding heart liberal, and old enough that I should have known better, but I always thought that folks like Ken Lay were sincere in their beliefs about the virtues of free markets. Then I read The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Den of Theives and finally twigged to the fact that folks like Lay, Skilling, Milken, and Boesky, speak publicly about the miracle of free markets, then go back to their boardrooms and do their damndest to put the markets in their pocket and make sure they are not free. Now I'm re-reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and finding gems like:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
The rate of profit... is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.
They advocate standardizing all code formatting into one standard (tabs v. spaces, how far to indent, where to put the curlys, etc.).
I take your overall point, but have you ever worked on a multi-developer project where one person insisted on using tabs when everyone else use spaces (or visa versa)? It's a pain in the neck.
Likewise, your company can standardize methodologies and practices all it wants. But should they ever standardize the tools they use to solve problems... well, let's just say it won't be long before a problem or need comes along that the standard doesn't fit.
On the other hand, I've worked with folks that chose tools for their novelty factor, not for the fit to the job. This created systems that were hellish mixtures of VB, Access, Java, and TCL/Tk. They were hard even for the original authors to maintain, and even harder to maintain after they left, since most folks didn't care to step into a rats nest like that.
I agree that rigidity is foolish, but guidance to the effect that 'Java is our preferred language, but if you think it's going to be a problem, let's talk about it' doesn't seem like a strait-jacket.
I am a computer programmer. I make computing devices do what I want. I will use any tool at my disposal, to hell with my employer's proposed "beneficial" restrictions.
Wow, that sounds fierce and arrogant! To be sure, users sometimes don't know what the hell they want, but at least occasionally they have sound or at least pragmatic reasons for their restrictions. I mean if I'm running a company that has an infrastructure written largely in VB, and I have dozens of programmers whose expertise is primarily in VB, your demanding to write an application in APL is not going to impress me, even if the application is mostly matrix manipulation. After all, if you want to be an employed programmer you need to make the computer do what your employer wants it to do.
I guess my problem is with the career schools that are churning out.Net developers who couldn't code to save their life. They teach them how to drag and drop controls, write loops, conditionals, functions, and maybe the basics of creating a class, and that's it. Then these people think they are programmers.
I still don't understand why this bothers you. It only bothers me to the extent that they are misleading their students about their job prospects. It seems to me that most programming jobs consist of scraping data out of a database, displaying it in a window, allowing the user to edit it, and pouring the edited data back into the database. This is usually not rocket science, and if somebody want's to push a tool that makes it feasible to do this with very little training, then god bless 'em. I certainly don't want to be writing those applications.
I wrote one GUI app in C on the Macintosh years ago. After that I was happy to use VB and made liberal use of its drag and drop interface design. I'm sure it's a matter of personal taste, but sheparding mouse clicks up the control hierarchy is my idea of hell.
AB Brown, the folks who have a former CEO now at #3 in the CIA. Also the outfit that sold the PUT options on UAL and AMR the morning of 9/11. No. I'm sure it's all just a funny concidence.
Hey, I've been trying to find out about this since 2002. Do you have any references that document the holders of the PUT options? There was some discussion about this immediately after 9-11, but then - nothing. The last I saw touching on this subject was an article on Slate a couple of years ago. They were reviewing "facts" we all knew about 9-11 that were, in fact, myths. For example, they claimed that there was no real evidence that the hijackers used box cutters as weapons. They said that it was true that short selling on airline stocks immediately prior to 9-11 was statisically anomlous and the SEC was investigating, but since then, nothing.
but it is unequivocally a federal felony to intentionally disclose classified information
So how do we deal with malfesance by the government that is concealed by improper use of security classification? In the late 60's and late 70's the bombing campaign in Cambodia was classified, not to avoid detection by our enemies (after all, Cambodia, North Vietnam, China, and the USSR knew perfectly well that the bombing was happening, and knew who was doing it), but at least in part to avoid the domestic political fall out from an unpopular policy that contradicted the publicly stated policies of the government. (The other motive was to avoid the international political fallout from publicly admiting that the US was violating the neutrality of Cambodia, ficticious though that neutrality was)
In this case I have to wonder why the program was secret. The whole world knows that the NSA has the ability to tap domestic phone calls. The new information revealed here was that the tapping was being done without warrants. This information seems to be of no use to Al Queda, but of considerable interest to the citizens of this country.
This is absolutely silly. In a condition known as War, it is okay to attempt to intercept the enemies messages. I'm trying to picture Patton rolling toward Berlin, trying to get the ACLU to support a court order to tap the German phone lines. It's a little more confusing now, particularly for the I-want-to-pretend-to-be-stupid types, because there are cell phones instead of phone lines, and the enemy doesn't wear a uniform anymore, and the battlefield is the Whole Wide World, but the idea isn't that hard to grasp. Jeesh.
This is very confusing to those of us who lived through the cold war. Back then we were told we had to live with the risk of being incinerated in a nuclear attack in order to preserve our constitutional rights. Now we are being told that we have to live with the curtailment of our constitutional rights in order to save ourselves from being incinerated in a terrorist attack.
What seems to not make it across is that anything that cannot be expressed in code cannot be expressed in documentation either.
So how do you name your functions and variables to convey the information to convey the information that:
"We have used an O(n^2) algorithm here because the input data is highly structured and the O(n^2) algorithm will actually be faster then the usual O(n log n) algorithm."
I have worked in IT for 25 years. When an employer posts an ad asking for experience in C#, nothing else matters. This "know yourself" and "know the fundamentals" won't even get past the receptionist who does the initial screening.
I've worked in IT for 20 years, and while I agree with you point about the difficulty of getting past the doorkeepers and their buzzword requirements, I still think the grandparent poster has the right strategy. If you have a solid education in the basics, and make some effort to keep up with technology trends, you can become buzzword compliant in very short order. Lay out a few hundred dollars for certification in the buzzword de jour. Skip the boot camps, just set up the technology on your home computers, read, practice, and take the tests. Keep a couple of hobby projects around and port them to whatever language the employer is looking for. This way you can honestly put the buzzwords on your resume, get past the gatekeepers, and talk to the folks who can really evaluate your qualifications.
I think the interesting question is not how much raw bandwidth is available to users, but whether the move to tiered service for content providers will will catch on. If it does, I think the internet as we know it is doomed.
Step 1. Major backbones provide tiered service offering lower latency and higher speeds to content providers who pay a surcharge. Everyone else is assured that their service will not be adversely affected because they have plenty of execess capacity.
Step 2. Major networks, studios, advertisers, software companies, and national magazines all sign up for prefered status with the backbone providers. Consumers sign up for broadband in droves so they can watch truly high quality streaming media from the major content providers.
Step 3. Excess capacity gets used up. Banwdith partition devoted to those paying for prefered status expands, bandwidth available for everyone else contracts.
Step 4. A consortium of SBC, MTV, Time-Warner, and Ticketmaster buys all the Internet backbones. Web 2.0 becomes Cable TV 2.0. Microsoft re-launches Blackbird. The rest of us go back to using dialup BBS systems over 56modems that are then transmitted over VOIP.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for re-formatting. It made it a lot more readable.
I'm in Seattle so I can't speak to the job market in Austin. However I can offer you some free generic advice which is probably worth what you're paying for it.
It sounds like you have a good set of skills. Your references, and the military experience will count for a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of people will claim to have the same skills. They may not actually able to perform at your level, but you are competing with them to get the interviews. You'll need something to distinguish your resume from the posers. I would spend the money and get your certifications current. However, I would not spend any money on training courses. Spend the money on some certification books, and three or four computers to set up your own admin lab. The computers don't have to be current, even two or three years old should be good enough. The certifications won't impress the technical people interviewing you. Their function is to refresh your knowledge, and most importantly, get you past the "buzz-word bingo" in the HR department. The tech folks will be more impressed when you tell them you keep an elaborate home lab to experiment with.
Do you have a current security clearance? Obviously that would give you a huge advantage with defense contractors.
The tech job market currently seems to be improving, but the long term problem you are facing is that sys and network admins are in the same position now that machinists were a decade or so ago. Companies hire when then economy is growing, and lay off when the economy is stagnant or shrinking. It just isn't as stable as it was in the 70s, and 80s, even though there are more positions.
You don't mention wanting to be a programmer, so I wouldn't suggest gettting a B.S. in C.S. Instead, I'd try getting cross-trained in some non-computer field: accounting, medical practice managment, real estate development. You'll be a lot more useful to a small-business if you aren't just the computer/network guy, but really understand their operation. Some of those fields you could pick up in the evenings from a community college. If you are really ambitous you could think about getting and MIS or business degree and going into managment.
Most programming jobs consist of querying a database, displaying the results of query on a screen, providing some sort of UI to collect the user's changes to that data, and sending the updates back to the database. Jobs like that certainly will use arithmetic, maybe even algebra, but probably not discrete math, as in graph theory or combinitorics. They will certainly use and write algorithms, but probably won't use the theory of algorithms, as in run-time analysis (big O notation), dynamic programming, and classic algorithms for tree traversal, searching, and sorting.
Now the folks who wrote the database may very well have used all those tools. But for every programmer who has a job writing a relational database, there are several thousand with jobs as I described above. I think the programmer writing the db has the more intesting job, but that's a matter of taste.
I strongly concur. From the 1950s to the 1990s I think programming was about as close as you could get to a "sure thing" job. Once you'd landed your first programming job you were generally able to find work whenever you wanted it. I don't think this is the case any longer. The swings of the business cycle, your network of contacts, and plain dumb luck, play a much larger role in finding a programming job then they used to. I'd still happily recommend programming to young people of suitable temperment and talents. I'd warn them that it is not a "sure thing", but I'd point out that these days, no job is a sure thing. Even the investment bankers and market analysts went through hard times after the insider trading scandals of the 80s and the tech meltdown of a few years ago.
You are obviously correct that most programming jobs will make no use of calculus, discrete math or even the theory of algorithms. However, I don't think those courses are only filters. There are some software fields (and careers) where that material is needed: computational biology, machine learning, derivatives trading, engineering simulation etc. If you don't get the mathematical basics in the first couple of years of undergraduate study, you are going to have a tough time catching up if you want to go into those fields later on. I think the universities are exposing you to the math early on so you can have the option of pursing the more theoretical and mathematical subfields in your junior and senior years.
That struck me as pretty odd too. That's why I always take Wikipedia with a grain of salt. I have checked a few other sources and the rest of the article seems fairly accurate. The freemason comment is defintely from left field though. I didn't check its edit history.
Human experimentation is morally fraught, and I'm reluctant to judge whether this is really a miracle breakthrough from a newspaper article. The apparent success of this experiment makes the rule look foolish, but if half the patients die in two years from brain infections, the regulations and bureaucracy will look wise and insightful. At this very moment there is a heated debate on human experimentation going on in Britain because a drug trial sent six healthy volunteers to intensive care in mortal peril. If you want some really gruesome examples of unregulated human experimentation check out Dr. Ewan Cameron and Tuskegee syphilis experiments
Many countries have extensive laws regulating experimenting on human subjects, and make no mistake, this surgery is completely experimental. One of the big questions is how can a person give informed consent when the risks are considerable and the benefits not known. The laws are a two-edged sword. In this case the surgery had dramatic results and hasn't killed the patient, so the laws and regulations look stupid. On the other hand, if the story had been "6 patients killed in ill-considered experiment in Portugal" the regulations would look wise. Google "Tuskegee Syphilis" and "Dr. Ewen Cameron" if you want to read about some really awful cases of human experimentation.
I would imagine one of the question now is whether the patients are put at long term risk for a massive brain infection. Having a wire running directly into the brain from the outside world doesn't seem like a great idea to me.
Is that the same Gary North who went around the country proclaiming that the Y2K problem was going to destroy civilization and that everyone should prepare to flee the cities ? The article about the Ph.D. glut seemed accurate and quite reasonable, but if Dr. North told me that the sky was blue I'd be inclined to get a second opinion.
You are conflating multiple issues. As far as I understand matters, simple sequence data is not patentable, any more then value for the pH of water, or the molecular weight of hydrogen is patenable. You must come up with a function for the sequence to make it patenable. Patents have been granted for fairly idiotic functions, like using the sequence as a probe to detect the itself in assays, but this it still a separate issue from publishing sequence data.
Considered nothing. Go to NCBI or UCSC Genome Browser. There it all is, help yourself. Why there is a fuss about it is beyond me.
Ignorance, or a desire to attract public attention by using high-profile buzz words.
This is simply not true. Particpants in the Human Genome project were required to publish their sequence data in the public NCBI databases within a couple days of obtaining it. The folks at Celera (the private genome effort) initially kept a large portion of their data private, but later made all it public.
It is an interesting problem, but why make it so hypothetical? I have a nice house, a car, hundreds of books, a cell phone, several computers, and an I-pod. I could sell some or even of all this stuff and send the money to help refugees in Darfur or Kenya. It's not like I'd even be suffering: I could move into a studio apartment, my employer provides a computer for me at work, and I could borrow the books and music from the local public library. I have no doubt that I could raise enough money to save several lives. Yet I don't. Am I any less culpable or heartless then the doctor in your example? How much of your labor do you give away at below market rates to worthy causes?
What makes you think this study isn't being done by some biophysicists or biochemists? The parent article was singularly lacking in detail, but if were working in the field I'd be doing microarray experiments to see if any genes were significantly up or down regulated by microwave exposure. Given what we do know about background levels of EM I would bet there is no effect, but it would be a different tact then epidimiology studies.
I see. So you are a fan of the argument from personal incredulity: "I can't think of a mechanism, therefore it is impossible." Surely you are aware that radioactivity was a well known phenomena for 25-30 years before anyone had a clue about the mechanism? Just as most biologists know very little about RF radiation, most physicists know very little about biochemical signal transduction.
That sounds pragamatic enough, but then how are citizens to cope with the inevitiable use of classification to bury information for political reasons rather then security reasons? The most egregious example that I know of was the "secret" bombing of Cambodia in the early 70s. North Vietnam, the USSR, China, and Cambodia, all knew the bombing was happening and who was doing it. It was classified to avoid domestic political fallout from an expansion of the war, and to avoid international embarassment from having to admit that the US was violating the neutrality of Cambodia (even though it was well known that North Vietnam was already violating it).
I'm sure you, and most of the employees at Enron, were upstanding and decent folk, but didn't you have any inkling that things might be amiss? I mean the guys on the energy trading desk are a long way from the boardroom, but from their taped converstations they knew they were engaging in un-ethical, and perhaps illegal, behavior.
Many years ago I was working for a large, publicly traded, company. At a company meeting someone asked if they should put all their 401k into the company stock. The spokesperson replied that while they believed the company stock would do very well, diversification was an important consideration, and if disaster struck you wouldn't want to loose your job and have your 401k go in the toilet simultaneously. As I understand it, Enron not only suggested, but required, that Enron stock go into your 401k. This didn't raise any flags for you?
I'm a classic bleeding heart liberal, and old enough that I should have known better, but I always thought that folks like Ken Lay were sincere in their beliefs about the virtues of free markets. Then I read The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Den of Theives and finally twigged to the fact that folks like Lay, Skilling, Milken, and Boesky, speak publicly about the miracle of free markets, then go back to their boardrooms and do their damndest to put the markets in their pocket and make sure they are not free. Now I'm re-reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and finding gems like:
An entirely reasonable position. I was responding to:
which strikes me as unreasonable.
I take your overall point, but have you ever worked on a multi-developer project where one person insisted on using tabs when everyone else use spaces (or visa versa)? It's a pain in the neck.
On the other hand, I've worked with folks that chose tools for their novelty factor, not for the fit to the job. This created systems that were hellish mixtures of VB, Access, Java, and TCL/Tk. They were hard even for the original authors to maintain, and even harder to maintain after they left, since most folks didn't care to step into a rats nest like that.
I agree that rigidity is foolish, but guidance to the effect that 'Java is our preferred language, but if you think it's going to be a problem, let's talk about it' doesn't seem like a strait-jacket.
Wow, that sounds fierce and arrogant! To be sure, users sometimes don't know what the hell they want, but at least occasionally they have sound or at least pragmatic reasons for their restrictions. I mean if I'm running a company that has an infrastructure written largely in VB, and I have dozens of programmers whose expertise is primarily in VB, your demanding to write an application in APL is not going to impress me, even if the application is mostly matrix manipulation. After all, if you want to be an employed programmer you need to make the computer do what your employer wants it to do.
I still don't understand why this bothers you. It only bothers me to the extent that they are misleading their students about their job prospects. It seems to me that most programming jobs consist of scraping data out of a database, displaying it in a window, allowing the user to edit it, and pouring the edited data back into the database. This is usually not rocket science, and if somebody want's to push a tool that makes it feasible to do this with very little training, then god bless 'em. I certainly don't want to be writing those applications.
I wrote one GUI app in C on the Macintosh years ago. After that I was happy to use VB and made liberal use of its drag and drop interface design. I'm sure it's a matter of personal taste, but sheparding mouse clicks up the control hierarchy is my idea of hell.
Hey, I've been trying to find out about this since 2002. Do you have any references that document the holders of the PUT options? There was some discussion about this immediately after 9-11, but then - nothing. The last I saw touching on this subject was an article on Slate a couple of years ago. They were reviewing "facts" we all knew about 9-11 that were, in fact, myths. For example, they claimed that there was no real evidence that the hijackers used box cutters as weapons. They said that it was true that short selling on airline stocks immediately prior to 9-11 was statisically anomlous and the SEC was investigating, but since then, nothing.
So how do we deal with malfesance by the government that is concealed by improper use of security classification? In the late 60's and late 70's the bombing campaign in Cambodia was classified, not to avoid detection by our enemies (after all, Cambodia, North Vietnam, China, and the USSR knew perfectly well that the bombing was happening, and knew who was doing it), but at least in part to avoid the domestic political fall out from an unpopular policy that contradicted the publicly stated policies of the government. (The other motive was to avoid the international political fallout from publicly admiting that the US was violating the neutrality of Cambodia, ficticious though that neutrality was)
In this case I have to wonder why the program was secret. The whole world knows that the NSA has the ability to tap domestic phone calls. The new information revealed here was that the tapping was being done without warrants. This information seems to be of no use to Al Queda, but of considerable interest to the citizens of this country.
This is very confusing to those of us who lived through the cold war. Back then we were told we had to live with the risk of being incinerated in a nuclear attack in order to preserve our constitutional rights. Now we are being told that we have to live with the curtailment of our constitutional rights in order to save ourselves from being incinerated in a terrorist attack.
So how do you name your functions and variables to convey the information to convey the information that:
"We have used an O(n^2) algorithm here because the input data is highly structured and the O(n^2) algorithm will actually be faster then the usual O(n log n) algorithm."
?
I've worked in IT for 20 years, and while I agree with you point about the difficulty of getting past the doorkeepers and their buzzword requirements, I still think the grandparent poster has the right strategy. If you have a solid education in the basics, and make some effort to keep up with technology trends, you can become buzzword compliant in very short order. Lay out a few hundred dollars for certification in the buzzword de jour. Skip the boot camps, just set up the technology on your home computers, read, practice, and take the tests. Keep a couple of hobby projects around and port them to whatever language the employer is looking for. This way you can honestly put the buzzwords on your resume, get past the gatekeepers, and talk to the folks who can really evaluate your qualifications.
I think the interesting question is not how much raw bandwidth is available to users, but whether the move to tiered service for content providers will will catch on. If it does, I think the internet as we know it is doomed.
Step 1. Major backbones provide tiered service offering lower latency and higher speeds to content providers who pay a surcharge. Everyone else is assured that their service will not be adversely affected because they have plenty of execess capacity.
Step 2. Major networks, studios, advertisers, software companies, and national magazines all sign up for prefered status with the backbone providers. Consumers sign up for broadband in droves so they can watch truly high quality streaming media from the major content providers.
Step 3. Excess capacity gets used up. Banwdith partition devoted to those paying for prefered status expands, bandwidth available for everyone else contracts.
Step 4. A consortium of SBC, MTV, Time-Warner, and Ticketmaster buys all the Internet backbones. Web 2.0 becomes Cable TV 2.0. Microsoft re-launches Blackbird. The rest of us go back to using dialup BBS systems over 56modems that are then transmitted over VOIP.