Your mistake is not finding a 14-year-old geek to explain it to you and instead expecting something out of retail staff besides answers to "how much is it" and "do you have it in stock".
Yeah, and the last few times I've been to Best Buy have taught me not to even bother asking that. If you have an item that you find mis-shelved and don't know the price of, and you ask anyone, they just stare at you blankly and grunt in the general direction of the Customer Service counter. There, you can wait in a long line while two employees work the registers and five or six stand around in back and talk to each other.
Asking "do you have another one of these" was similarly successful.
Perhaps the situation is different over in the home theater section, where there always seem to be more staff (going after the bigger sales?) but my experiences have turned me off from big boxes for the forseeable future. I can have a similar experience by slamming my head repeatedly into a wall while ordering online.
Best Buy I think is inidicative of what consumers want; generally crappy Chinese stuff sold in large quantities at low margins and with crappy service. As technology has become commoditized, I suppose it's to be expected that someone has to become the Wal-Mart of silicon and plastic, they've gone after it with gusto.
It's sad, but I can't find a single thing to disagree with in that statement.
If you can frame the debate as "protecting" the "homeland" from "terrorist" or "child molesters," you can pretty much make whatever laws you goddamn well want to.
Because obviously anyone who opposes it is a terrorist or child molester.
Sorry, I must have missed the official declaration of WAR - you know, the one that can only be done with the unanimous approval of the US congress?
That's because you didn't pay close enough attention in Civics class. The unanimous support of Congress was never required to go to war, although it was often given in WWII. Several quite legitimate U.S. wars did not.
Short list of wars that didn't have unanimous support: (it comes close to half of the declarations of wars by the United States Congress)
War of 1812 Mexican-American War Spanish-American War World War I (versus both Germany and Austria-Hungary, the latter only by 1 vote) World War II (verus Japan only, and only opposed by 1)
The current conflict in Iraq was correctly authorized under the War Powers Act of '73, which has for the most part replaced what used to be done by declarations of war. You can argue that the WPA is probably unconsitutional, and I might agree with you, but as it hasn't been declared as such by the USSC, it's the law of the land. In any event, your claim that a unanimous vote is required is just plain wrong.
To close, here's the relevant part of the Constitution:
ARTICLE 1, SECTION 8
The Congress shall have Power:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
a majority of americans support impeachment for illegal domestic wiretapping.
Yeah, but I bet I could ask an equally biased question (like "Should the NSA have the power to monitor whatever communications it needs to in order to prevent a repeat of 9/11?") and probably get an equally overwhelming response.
Heck, if you phrase the questions right you can get people to give completely contradictory statements in the same breath. I've heard polls that basically elicit responses that make people seem like they're both supporting and opposing abortion at the same time. It's not hard to do.
People are stupid. If you know the right question to ask, you can get them to nod and smile and support anything in a poll.
Those stats basically ignore the CS grads who graduate and then don't have a job. While in a lot of cases I don't have much sympathy (maybe they're not too bright/motivated/personable/etc.) it is a valid concern if you were looking to go into the field.
Someone further up in the thread quoted a really dismal job-placement statistic of between 1 and 3 percent of BA graduates. That's pretty crummy, if true. (I'm not saying it is, since I didn't research it myself.) But starting salaries can be really misleading.
The starting salaries for professional baseball players are pretty good, too, but I wouldn't tell someone who was looking for a career path to bet his future on that, because the number of people actually finding positions in that field is greatly outweighed by the vast number of people who try and have to find something else to do.
Yeah he's wrong on both accounts. You can study for the AMA Boards outside the U.S., and in fact there are quite a few medical schools (ignoring their reputations) located outside the U.S. which are basically "doctor mills" that train people to pass the Boards and then do their residencies in the U.S. I think Grenada has several (wasn't that why we had that mini-war there?). The last time I went into a walk-in clinic the doctors there were all apparently foreigners (I say 'apparently' because I didn't ask for their passports, they could have been from an ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn) -- mostly Asian and African as far as I could tell. I thought it was odd because it was in a very Hispanic neighborhood, and there definitely wasn't a Hispanic or Latino doctor that I saw. But go into any major hospital anywhere in the country and I bet you'll find someone who did at least part of their medical training in another country.
I see no reason why you couldn't do the same thing with Law, although I'm not sure what the accredidation rules are like for foreign law schools, or if you'd need to become a lawyer in your home country and then seek some sort of reciprocity and take the Bar exam in whatever U.S. state you wanted to practice in.
In either case, they're not really professions that you can trivially move from country to country with, like perhaps you could in a completely unregulated field (like a non-engineering IT profession) but they're doable, at least if you want to emigrate to the States semi-permanently to practice.
Anybody know how they handle professional certifications in the EU? I've heard that one of the big motives for the EU in the first place was to make it easier for people with in-demand professions to move around, but naturally I'm suspicious as to whether it actually happened. If you're a doctor/plumber/lawyer in Germany, can you go pick up and practice in France? Seems like (at least for the lawyer) it might be troublesome, but doctors ought to be a pretty portable profession, and I can't imagine the plumbing is that different.
That graph makes it look like there were two bubbles (in CS enrollments), one in the late 80s and one about 10 years later, that we haven't come down from yet. In fact from the slope of the curve in recent years, it looks like the current enrollment bubble is going to be bigger than the late-80s one.
Granted, it only goes to 2001, so perhaps in the last 5 years the curve has turned downward again, making 45,000 graduates a year the high-water mark; that would make it about equal to the highest year in the late 80s. But if it didn't turn down as sharply, then the highest output year for CS grads would definitiely be in the 2000s and not the 80s, at least based on that graph.
With computer stuff you have to constantly reinvent yourself or risk becoming obsolete every couple of years.
Solution: work for the government. Seriously, they still have COBOL programmers around. One man's "obsolescence" is another one's "job security." When your skill becomes uncool and they stop teaching it at ITT Tech, you don't have to worry about being replaced by somebody 10 years younger and making half your pay. (Or at least you can worry less.)
The other good thing about government contract jobs is that they're very difficult to oursource. I'm sure eventually Congress will catch on to the fact that way too many U.S. Citizens are benefiting from their tax dollars this way and figure out a way to fix it so that the contract jobs all go to China, too, but in the meantime you can live pretty high on the hog that way. Not as good as the private sector during the Bubble or anything, but it's a living.
I don't actually work there, but I know a lot of people who do, and they do all right for themselves. Personally the culture would get to me eventually I think.
I think this pretty much describes my perception of the issue as well. I freely admit my perspective may be distorted, since I work doing a lot of "business transformation" ('outsourcing' is such a dirty word these days), but I wouldn't advise a young person to go into CS. If they're really interested in computers, maybe CompE -- since at least then they'll legitimately be able to call themselves an engineer -- but even then I'm not sure that it's worth the investment of time and effort for the pay and security. Unless the person was really motivated and hell-bent on doing it, in which case I wouldn't stand in anybody's way. The market will always have a place for terrifically motivated people in any field, but the great majority of students (at least when I was in and I don't suppose it's changed much) pick a major because it's reasonably interesting, they think they'll be good at it, and it looks like it'll offer them a job. For a bright person with a reasonably diverse skillset, there are a lot of other jobs which are harder to offshore than CS positions (at least the real coding ones).
On the other hand, I think there's a perception out there that I'm hearing from companies that the quality of a lot of big state-school CS programs is pretty dismal. Apparently -- and again, this is perception, which may or not be fact, but it's still important -- a lot of "Computer Science" grads couldn't tell a compiler from a debugger and wouldn't know C from SQL; their experience is maybe some web development or HTML stuff and a smattering of userland application experience. In short, the U.S. CS grads they're interviewing aren't getting experience in the stuff they need: DBA stuff, systems administration, and commercial development methodologies. Now I don't know what the curriculum is in modern CS programs, I haven't had any reason to look recently, but I'd be interested in knowing what it is, and whether the stuff I'm hearing is based on fact or just frustrated HR types who are getting the bottom of the barrel because they're under-offering.
I know your joking, but in all seriousness, your security should never depend on not disclosing your strategy. If it does, something's wrong.
Pretty much anybody in IT can tell you what the "best practices" are, there's nothing secret about them, and a good implementation doesn't depend on the attacker not knowing what they are.
So if the guy's ONLY strategy is to give a public interview, and then not do anything, of course he's got problems. But just giving the interview about what he's doing isn't problematic, because we'd like to hope that he's not doing anything that depends on being secret in order to be secure. An administrator who was really confident in his security practices wouldn't have any problem with frequent audits and public scrutiny of their practices, and I think this can only be a good thing since it would neither give the users an unwarranted lack of confidence or false sense of security in their IT resources.
I really want to know what goes on in the astrology cluster. Can you really parallelize reading the tarot? I wonder what kind of hardware they use; a giant Magic 8-Ball array? And what kind of qualifications does a sysadmin have to have there?
Correction -- it seems that there is an HTML fallback mode, so it is accessible without IE. Apparently the "IE only" thing was put in there by the/. poster and doesn't reflect reality.
Email is SMTP... anything else is GUI fluff, and should be interchangable.
You forget, this is Microsoft that we're talking about; they're not going to let you get near anything that's open, easily understood, and platform-independent, like SMTP. All you have access to in Windows Live is a browser-based webmail service, one that's written so that you can only access it with IE.
I expect that all the backend stuff, the actual mailservers, are all owned by Microsoft (this would be the advantage to the schools -- "no need to run your own infrastructure anymore!") so there's no way to get to them any other way.
Basically, they've made the "GUI fluff" an inherent part of the experience, and impossible to do without. Too bad, because from a computer-science perspective it doesn't do much to demystify email, which ought to be a fairly elementary concept (and one you can easily demonstrate by telling someone to Telnet to port 110 or 25).
I can't believe that people don't go apeshit just for not being able to use a real email client program, and having to use this web-based filth in the first place. I've used GMail and Yahoo, which I suspect are probably better-designed than MS's take on webmail, and neither of them come close to holding a candle to even an old version of Eurora in terms of sorting and organizing messages (although GMail does search better than all but the most recent versions of Apple Mail does). The whole thing is a terrible idea.
At least in my experience, college is when a fair number of people experiment with OSes other than Windows; I've met a few people recently who seem to have had their first exposure to Linux in college or university, because they tend to be institutions large enough to support a more varied computer culture than high schools. (And also at some larger Unis there is still vestiges of a 'UNIX culture' tradition that predates Microsoft.)
It seems more like MS wants to solidify its hold on people that it probably already has its hooks into, to some extent, and keep them from jumping ship while they're in a position to.
If you think about it, once you leave college and are out working, your free time to do something like switch OSes goes way down. Also, with your first paychecks (assuming you graduate with some sort of productive employment) the free-as-in-beer draw of Linux might not be the deal-maker that it was to a college student. College is a good time for someone to switch OSes, if they're not happy with Windows, particularly to Linux (because the other candidate, Apple, is a bit expenisve or perceived as being).
I think this is not really so much an attempt to get its hold on users, as its an attempt to get them further in.
I've worked for a few big companies, and I can tell you with certainty that at any given time, AT LEAST 10% of the people working there were dead weight and could be eliminated.
But that's like saying, 3% of people in society are criminals. Okay, fine; but knowing that doesn't make picking the right ones any easier. You can't just decide to go out on Tuesday and round them all up.
You can spend the rest of your life (and a whole lot of people have) trying to find ways of figuring out which 10% or whatever are the unproductive ones. Occasionally, it's obvious. But more often, it's quite subtle; someone who looks unproductive on the surface might be just the person you need occasionally -- like some of the old-guard guys in my office: they don't do much but sit around and eat donuts 90% of the time, but when you need a piece of information, you know where to go to. And in that other 10% of the time, they make well up for their donut-munching. Likewise, there are interns and brand new hires who slave away constantly from 7:30AM to 6:30PM in some cases, but what they're working on is often not the most useful stuff around. (Of course, they're cheap, so they stay hired regardless.)
Firing people is like playing a game of russian roulette, but instead of just playing for your own brains, you're playing for a whole lot of people's jobs, futures, careers, and fortunes. I'd much rather keep around a few extra people than pull the trigger on someone that turns out, in some subtle and unforseen way, to be crucial to daily operations. Human social networks are a complex thing, and that's what you're really dealing with in "management." (Of course, only a few percentage of managers--usually the best ones in my experience--realize this.)
Actually that's a really good way to answer the question. He never actually denied anything, but he definitely made it seem like it was a denial, right up until the truth broke, when in reconsideration it was everything but.
I wonder if a lawyer advised him to say that or if he decided on it himself. I guess it's not stunningly creative or anything, but it's not bad. You got to give him a little bit of credit.
He had me fooled for a few days. (Not that I really follow Sun that closely, so I'm not tough to fool. I just sort of shrugged and said "sure...rumor...whatever.")
"At any rate, Mother Teresa's actions should prompt the 30-something crowd here and elsewhere to reflect on just what the hell they've been doing with their lifes while this woman became the Leader of Missionaries of Charity..."
Oh! Oh! I know.... (pause)... something about... beer. Yeah. I think there was beer involved. I vaguely remember waking up one morning under a park bench wearing these weird black clothes and a funny hat and with this piece of paper with funny letters on it. And a huge hangover.
Waaay better than hanging out with lepers. Although I did know this dude who got VD.
Agreed. Although I haven't used it for any length of time (I set it up once as a sort of proof of concept to myself, for a few days) I can do the same thing with my iBook and my Motorola Razr. If I ever get put on a travel position, I'll call TMobile and get the unlimited data plan added to my line, and all I have to do is make sure the phone is turned on and within BT range of my laptop.
A builtin card is a step down, IMO, unless it could be cloned to use the same account as the phone, or unless for some reason I didn't want to have a regular voice handset. (But really, how many no-cellphone luddites are really interested in GPRS data service?)
Perhaps the BT-handset combo is more complicated to set up on Windows than it is on the Mac? The big selling point of these built-in cards seems to be ease of use. Seems like for $29.95 a month I could deal with quite a bit of one-time setup hassles, but that's just me.
I used to send all my email out of my own mailserver, out of my home firewall/router/"box-in-a-closet" machine.
Recently -- like within the last six months or so, I've noticed an alarming number of domains that aren't receiving my emails. And no, I haven't been blackholed or otherwise put on anyone's shit list, nor am I running an open relay. The mailserver is perfectly well-behaved, standards compliant, and only relays from within my home LAN.
I also don't mass-mail or do any other sort of sketchy activity, I just always liked having my own mailserver and never having to worry about when my ISPs (or Google's, or my web hosting providers') was going to flake out on me. But it's becoming nearly impractical to do. I'm never sure if an email that I sent out has actually gotten through, or if it's just been silently eaten by some spam filter somewhere.
The worst offender that I've found so far is Comcast; I haven't been able to get any messages through at all to Comcast subscribers, and they don't provide back any sort of acknowledgment that a message has been blocked. Every time I send anything to them, it's firing a shot into the darkness.
I hate spam as much as anybody else (probably more than some); I'm in favor of using some of those Federal "computer crimes" laws -- the ones that have harsher penalties for electronically violating a system than if you walked in and stole it in person -- against spammers. See what 20 years of pound-me-in-the-ass prison followed by another 10 or 15 of no-computer probation (and consequent unemployment) does for their attitude. Or there are the always popular vigilante death squads, I could find a warm place in my heart for them, too. Either of those would be preferable to the current patchwork system of blacklists, whitelists, greylists, RBLs, and unilateral policies on the part of ISPs that break up the nature of the network.
Sending an email shouldn't be like tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean, but that's how it's getting to be with some ISPs.
Of course, I've used RHEL, Fedora Core, and CentOS happily with networking, in virtualization, on my MacBook Pro, so there's no need to worry about "Linux drivers".
Sounds neat; just out of curiosity, what are you using for the virtualization?
And perhaps I'm revealing my ignorance here, but how does the guest OS on a virtualized system handle networking? There must be some sort of psuedo-device driver that you install so that it can talk to the virtualized 'hardware,' or else the virtualization software must emulate some kind of commonly-supported networking hardware. I guess I'm just curious what you have to do to the guest OS, if anything, to get it to work inside the sandbox.
Right now all my equipment (Mac stuff, anyway) is PPC based; however I find the whole virtualization concept really intriguing and I'm hoping that by my next round of upgrades, it'll be sufficiently mature to make dual-booting (or having a separate PC for Linux connected with a KVM switch, my current solution) unnecessary.
Is there such a thing (on the black/grey market or whatever) as a reprogrammable SIM card?
Back in the day (early to mid 90s) it used to be fairly easy to find someone -- in my area it was always Israelis, don't ask me why -- who would clone certain brands and models of cellphones for you. Basically they could take a second phone, and make it appear to the network like a second instance of an already-existing phone. This was how a lot of crooks stole your phone service, but it was also handy because you could buy a second handset, and attach it to one number. Basically, just like having two phones in your house; two extensions on the same number.
I never actually did it, but I knew some commercial users that had it done, or said they did, and seemed to like it. I haven't heard of it being done in years though so I assume with the digital changeover the phone companies figured out some way to prohibit it.
I gotta imagine though that somewhere, in between designing new xBox mod chips, somebody has been working on making a reprogrammable SIM card that you could reflash and give a new address to, so that you could effectively duplicate an existing SIM. Assuming it wasn't so common that the network checks to see whether there are multiple instances of a particular SIM active at the same time, it seems like it would be able to give you the "multiple extension" effect. You could have one 'extension' as your computer, and another as your voice handset. Just set the computer to ignore incoming voice calls, and you'd be all set. You'd only have one service plan and you'd work off of the same pot of minutes using both phones.
I can imagine the cellular carriers would frown on this though, since they don't get to squeeze you for the extra dough on the second service plan.
Anyone ever heard if this is possible? It seems like something that somebody must have put some thought into, either on how to do it, or how to prohibit it.
I think the assumption is, if you can afford a £2000 laptop basically for the sole reason that it has 3G connectivity, you can damn well afford another SIM card and mobile plan for it.
Just be glad you can even change it. I think there are some laptops here in the States, either currently in production or in the pipeline, which are designed for data use on Verizon's EV-DO network; Verizon, of course, doesn't use 3G and doesn't use SIM cards. They use CDMA and each device has a hardcoded identifier, like a MAC address. If you get into a billing dispute with Verizon... well, tough luck. (And that's not to mention that they have TOS restrictions that are outright ridiculous.)
In the case of EV-DO laptops, you have no choice but to get a separate service plan for them, unless you can find some way to clone them using the hardware address of another phone, which is technically legal but probably in violation of every agreement you've ever signed with your provider.
No, I'm serious; the review has a lot of big pictures and easy-to-read language, but it doesn't even once mention an OS. With this amount of built-in wireless stuff (3G, 802.11, Bluetooth), you've basically got yourself a very expensive brick if you can't get drivers for it. There's no information on what chipsets it uses for any of this.
I noticed that there's a Windows key on the keyboard, and in the absence of any other information I guess we're just left to assume that your only choice is the Beast From Redmond.
Pity, because I can't imagine they're going to sell enough of these at £1999 to people interested in Linux in order for a set of useful reverse-engineered drivers to be created, and thus you have a chicken-and-egg problem. Potential Linux users won't ever buy it because there aren't drivers, and there will thus never be the userbase to create the drivers.
What's more ironic is that Fujitsu is a member of the OSDG and sells a lot of high-end Linux stuff, but I guess (like IBM until they sold it off to Lenovo) despite their alleged commitment to it, you're SOL if you want to get a PC with anything except Windows.
Obviously they missed step 1 in the Windows-to-Linux migration strategy. Go through the resumés of everyone in IT, and fire anyone who's top qualification involved the letters "M," "C," "S," and "E."
And hire the next applicant in the door who only wants to know if free Mountain Dew is a company benefit and has a beard.
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Your mistake is not finding a 14-year-old geek to explain it to you and instead expecting something out of retail staff besides answers to "how much is it" and "do you have it in stock".
Yeah, and the last few times I've been to Best Buy have taught me not to even bother asking that. If you have an item that you find mis-shelved and don't know the price of, and you ask anyone, they just stare at you blankly and grunt in the general direction of the Customer Service counter. There, you can wait in a long line while two employees work the registers and five or six stand around in back and talk to each other.
Asking "do you have another one of these" was similarly successful.
Perhaps the situation is different over in the home theater section, where there always seem to be more staff (going after the bigger sales?) but my experiences have turned me off from big boxes for the forseeable future. I can have a similar experience by slamming my head repeatedly into a wall while ordering online.
Best Buy I think is inidicative of what consumers want; generally crappy Chinese stuff sold in large quantities at low margins and with crappy service. As technology has become commoditized, I suppose it's to be expected that someone has to become the Wal-Mart of silicon and plastic, they've gone after it with gusto.
It's sad, but I can't find a single thing to disagree with in that statement.
If you can frame the debate as "protecting" the "homeland" from "terrorist" or "child molesters," you can pretty much make whatever laws you goddamn well want to.
Because obviously anyone who opposes it is a terrorist or child molester.
That's because you didn't pay close enough attention in Civics class. The unanimous support of Congress was never required to go to war, although it was often given in WWII. Several quite legitimate U.S. wars did not.
Short list of wars that didn't have unanimous support: (it comes close to half of the declarations of wars by the United States Congress)
War of 1812
Mexican-American War
Spanish-American War
World War I (versus both Germany and Austria-Hungary, the latter only by 1 vote)
World War II (verus Japan only, and only opposed by 1)
From the list here.
The current conflict in Iraq was correctly authorized under the War Powers Act of '73, which has for the most part replaced what used to be done by declarations of war. You can argue that the WPA is probably unconsitutional, and I might agree with you, but as it hasn't been declared as such by the USSC, it's the law of the land. In any event, your claim that a unanimous vote is required is just plain wrong.
To close, here's the relevant part of the Constitution:
Yeah, but I bet I could ask an equally biased question (like "Should the NSA have the power to monitor whatever communications it needs to in order to prevent a repeat of 9/11?") and probably get an equally overwhelming response.
Heck, if you phrase the questions right you can get people to give completely contradictory statements in the same breath. I've heard polls that basically elicit responses that make people seem like they're both supporting and opposing abortion at the same time. It's not hard to do.
People are stupid. If you know the right question to ask, you can get them to nod and smile and support anything in a poll.
Those stats basically ignore the CS grads who graduate and then don't have a job. While in a lot of cases I don't have much sympathy (maybe they're not too bright/motivated/personable/etc.) it is a valid concern if you were looking to go into the field.
Someone further up in the thread quoted a really dismal job-placement statistic of between 1 and 3 percent of BA graduates. That's pretty crummy, if true. (I'm not saying it is, since I didn't research it myself.) But starting salaries can be really misleading.
The starting salaries for professional baseball players are pretty good, too, but I wouldn't tell someone who was looking for a career path to bet his future on that, because the number of people actually finding positions in that field is greatly outweighed by the vast number of people who try and have to find something else to do.
Yeah he's wrong on both accounts. You can study for the AMA Boards outside the U.S., and in fact there are quite a few medical schools (ignoring their reputations) located outside the U.S. which are basically "doctor mills" that train people to pass the Boards and then do their residencies in the U.S. I think Grenada has several (wasn't that why we had that mini-war there?). The last time I went into a walk-in clinic the doctors there were all apparently foreigners (I say 'apparently' because I didn't ask for their passports, they could have been from an ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn) -- mostly Asian and African as far as I could tell. I thought it was odd because it was in a very Hispanic neighborhood, and there definitely wasn't a Hispanic or Latino doctor that I saw. But go into any major hospital anywhere in the country and I bet you'll find someone who did at least part of their medical training in another country.
I see no reason why you couldn't do the same thing with Law, although I'm not sure what the accredidation rules are like for foreign law schools, or if you'd need to become a lawyer in your home country and then seek some sort of reciprocity and take the Bar exam in whatever U.S. state you wanted to practice in.
In either case, they're not really professions that you can trivially move from country to country with, like perhaps you could in a completely unregulated field (like a non-engineering IT profession) but they're doable, at least if you want to emigrate to the States semi-permanently to practice.
Anybody know how they handle professional certifications in the EU? I've heard that one of the big motives for the EU in the first place was to make it easier for people with in-demand professions to move around, but naturally I'm suspicious as to whether it actually happened. If you're a doctor/plumber/lawyer in Germany, can you go pick up and practice in France? Seems like (at least for the lawyer) it might be troublesome, but doctors ought to be a pretty portable profession, and I can't imagine the plumbing is that different.
That graph makes it look like there were two bubbles (in CS enrollments), one in the late 80s and one about 10 years later, that we haven't come down from yet. In fact from the slope of the curve in recent years, it looks like the current enrollment bubble is going to be bigger than the late-80s one.
Granted, it only goes to 2001, so perhaps in the last 5 years the curve has turned downward again, making 45,000 graduates a year the high-water mark; that would make it about equal to the highest year in the late 80s. But if it didn't turn down as sharply, then the highest output year for CS grads would definitiely be in the 2000s and not the 80s, at least based on that graph.
Maybe I'm not getting your point correctly?
With computer stuff you have to constantly reinvent yourself or risk becoming obsolete every couple of years.
Solution: work for the government. Seriously, they still have COBOL programmers around. One man's "obsolescence" is another one's "job security." When your skill becomes uncool and they stop teaching it at ITT Tech, you don't have to worry about being replaced by somebody 10 years younger and making half your pay. (Or at least you can worry less.)
The other good thing about government contract jobs is that they're very difficult to oursource. I'm sure eventually Congress will catch on to the fact that way too many U.S. Citizens are benefiting from their tax dollars this way and figure out a way to fix it so that the contract jobs all go to China, too, but in the meantime you can live pretty high on the hog that way. Not as good as the private sector during the Bubble or anything, but it's a living.
I don't actually work there, but I know a lot of people who do, and they do all right for themselves. Personally the culture would get to me eventually I think.
I think this pretty much describes my perception of the issue as well. I freely admit my perspective may be distorted, since I work doing a lot of "business transformation" ('outsourcing' is such a dirty word these days), but I wouldn't advise a young person to go into CS. If they're really interested in computers, maybe CompE -- since at least then they'll legitimately be able to call themselves an engineer -- but even then I'm not sure that it's worth the investment of time and effort for the pay and security. Unless the person was really motivated and hell-bent on doing it, in which case I wouldn't stand in anybody's way. The market will always have a place for terrifically motivated people in any field, but the great majority of students (at least when I was in and I don't suppose it's changed much) pick a major because it's reasonably interesting, they think they'll be good at it, and it looks like it'll offer them a job. For a bright person with a reasonably diverse skillset, there are a lot of other jobs which are harder to offshore than CS positions (at least the real coding ones).
On the other hand, I think there's a perception out there that I'm hearing from companies that the quality of a lot of big state-school CS programs is pretty dismal. Apparently -- and again, this is perception, which may or not be fact, but it's still important -- a lot of "Computer Science" grads couldn't tell a compiler from a debugger and wouldn't know C from SQL; their experience is maybe some web development or HTML stuff and a smattering of userland application experience. In short, the U.S. CS grads they're interviewing aren't getting experience in the stuff they need: DBA stuff, systems administration, and commercial development methodologies. Now I don't know what the curriculum is in modern CS programs, I haven't had any reason to look recently, but I'd be interested in knowing what it is, and whether the stuff I'm hearing is based on fact or just frustrated HR types who are getting the bottom of the barrel because they're under-offering.
I know your joking, but in all seriousness, your security should never depend on not disclosing your strategy. If it does, something's wrong.
Pretty much anybody in IT can tell you what the "best practices" are, there's nothing secret about them, and a good implementation doesn't depend on the attacker not knowing what they are.
So if the guy's ONLY strategy is to give a public interview, and then not do anything, of course he's got problems. But just giving the interview about what he's doing isn't problematic, because we'd like to hope that he's not doing anything that depends on being secret in order to be secure. An administrator who was really confident in his security practices wouldn't have any problem with frequent audits and public scrutiny of their practices, and I think this can only be a good thing since it would neither give the users an unwarranted lack of confidence or false sense of security in their IT resources.
traditional math, physics, astrology
I really want to know what goes on in the astrology cluster. Can you really parallelize reading the tarot? I wonder what kind of hardware they use; a giant Magic 8-Ball array? And what kind of qualifications does a sysadmin have to have there?
Oh we'll make it so that you can't use old passwords again, either.
...
Instead, you'll have to do: password, hello, password1, hello1, password2, hello2
You laugh, but I've been there.
Correction -- it seems that there is an HTML fallback mode, so it is accessible without IE. Apparently the "IE only" thing was put in there by the /. poster and doesn't reflect reality.
Email is SMTP... anything else is GUI fluff, and should be interchangable.
You forget, this is Microsoft that we're talking about; they're not going to let you get near anything that's open, easily understood, and platform-independent, like SMTP. All you have access to in Windows Live is a browser-based webmail service, one that's written so that you can only access it with IE.
I expect that all the backend stuff, the actual mailservers, are all owned by Microsoft (this would be the advantage to the schools -- "no need to run your own infrastructure anymore!") so there's no way to get to them any other way.
Basically, they've made the "GUI fluff" an inherent part of the experience, and impossible to do without. Too bad, because from a computer-science perspective it doesn't do much to demystify email, which ought to be a fairly elementary concept (and one you can easily demonstrate by telling someone to Telnet to port 110 or 25).
I can't believe that people don't go apeshit just for not being able to use a real email client program, and having to use this web-based filth in the first place. I've used GMail and Yahoo, which I suspect are probably better-designed than MS's take on webmail, and neither of them come close to holding a candle to even an old version of Eurora in terms of sorting and organizing messages (although GMail does search better than all but the most recent versions of Apple Mail does). The whole thing is a terrible idea.
At least in my experience, college is when a fair number of people experiment with OSes other than Windows; I've met a few people recently who seem to have had their first exposure to Linux in college or university, because they tend to be institutions large enough to support a more varied computer culture than high schools. (And also at some larger Unis there is still vestiges of a 'UNIX culture' tradition that predates Microsoft.)
It seems more like MS wants to solidify its hold on people that it probably already has its hooks into, to some extent, and keep them from jumping ship while they're in a position to.
If you think about it, once you leave college and are out working, your free time to do something like switch OSes goes way down. Also, with your first paychecks (assuming you graduate with some sort of productive employment) the free-as-in-beer draw of Linux might not be the deal-maker that it was to a college student. College is a good time for someone to switch OSes, if they're not happy with Windows, particularly to Linux (because the other candidate, Apple, is a bit expenisve or perceived as being).
I think this is not really so much an attempt to get its hold on users, as its an attempt to get them further in.
Unless, of course, they fire the wrong people.
I've worked for a few big companies, and I can tell you with certainty that at any given time, AT LEAST 10% of the people working there were dead weight and could be eliminated.
But that's like saying, 3% of people in society are criminals. Okay, fine; but knowing that doesn't make picking the right ones any easier. You can't just decide to go out on Tuesday and round them all up.
You can spend the rest of your life (and a whole lot of people have) trying to find ways of figuring out which 10% or whatever are the unproductive ones. Occasionally, it's obvious. But more often, it's quite subtle; someone who looks unproductive on the surface might be just the person you need occasionally -- like some of the old-guard guys in my office: they don't do much but sit around and eat donuts 90% of the time, but when you need a piece of information, you know where to go to. And in that other 10% of the time, they make well up for their donut-munching. Likewise, there are interns and brand new hires who slave away constantly from 7:30AM to 6:30PM in some cases, but what they're working on is often not the most useful stuff around. (Of course, they're cheap, so they stay hired regardless.)
Firing people is like playing a game of russian roulette, but instead of just playing for your own brains, you're playing for a whole lot of people's jobs, futures, careers, and fortunes. I'd much rather keep around a few extra people than pull the trigger on someone that turns out, in some subtle and unforseen way, to be crucial to daily operations. Human social networks are a complex thing, and that's what you're really dealing with in "management." (Of course, only a few percentage of managers--usually the best ones in my experience--realize this.)
Actually that's a really good way to answer the question. He never actually denied anything, but he definitely made it seem like it was a denial, right up until the truth broke, when in reconsideration it was everything but.
I wonder if a lawyer advised him to say that or if he decided on it himself. I guess it's not stunningly creative or anything, but it's not bad. You got to give him a little bit of credit.
He had me fooled for a few days. (Not that I really follow Sun that closely, so I'm not tough to fool. I just sort of shrugged and said "sure...rumor...whatever.")
"At any rate, Mother Teresa's actions should prompt the 30-something crowd here and elsewhere to reflect on just what the hell they've been doing with their lifes while this woman became the Leader of Missionaries of Charity..."
.... (pause) ... something about ... beer. Yeah. I think there was beer involved. I vaguely remember waking up one morning under a park bench wearing these weird black clothes and a funny hat and with this piece of paper with funny letters on it. And a huge hangover.
Oh! Oh! I know
Waaay better than hanging out with lepers. Although I did know this dude who got VD.
Anyway, it was a good time. I think.
Agreed. Although I haven't used it for any length of time (I set it up once as a sort of proof of concept to myself, for a few days) I can do the same thing with my iBook and my Motorola Razr. If I ever get put on a travel position, I'll call TMobile and get the unlimited data plan added to my line, and all I have to do is make sure the phone is turned on and within BT range of my laptop.
A builtin card is a step down, IMO, unless it could be cloned to use the same account as the phone, or unless for some reason I didn't want to have a regular voice handset. (But really, how many no-cellphone luddites are really interested in GPRS data service?)
Perhaps the BT-handset combo is more complicated to set up on Windows than it is on the Mac? The big selling point of these built-in cards seems to be ease of use. Seems like for $29.95 a month I could deal with quite a bit of one-time setup hassles, but that's just me.
Seems like it.
I used to send all my email out of my own mailserver, out of my home firewall/router/"box-in-a-closet" machine.
Recently -- like within the last six months or so, I've noticed an alarming number of domains that aren't receiving my emails. And no, I haven't been blackholed or otherwise put on anyone's shit list, nor am I running an open relay. The mailserver is perfectly well-behaved, standards compliant, and only relays from within my home LAN.
I also don't mass-mail or do any other sort of sketchy activity, I just always liked having my own mailserver and never having to worry about when my ISPs (or Google's, or my web hosting providers') was going to flake out on me. But it's becoming nearly impractical to do. I'm never sure if an email that I sent out has actually gotten through, or if it's just been silently eaten by some spam filter somewhere.
The worst offender that I've found so far is Comcast; I haven't been able to get any messages through at all to Comcast subscribers, and they don't provide back any sort of acknowledgment that a message has been blocked. Every time I send anything to them, it's firing a shot into the darkness.
I hate spam as much as anybody else (probably more than some); I'm in favor of using some of those Federal "computer crimes" laws -- the ones that have harsher penalties for electronically violating a system than if you walked in and stole it in person -- against spammers. See what 20 years of pound-me-in-the-ass prison followed by another 10 or 15 of no-computer probation (and consequent unemployment) does for their attitude. Or there are the always popular vigilante death squads, I could find a warm place in my heart for them, too. Either of those would be preferable to the current patchwork system of blacklists, whitelists, greylists, RBLs, and unilateral policies on the part of ISPs that break up the nature of the network.
Sending an email shouldn't be like tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean, but that's how it's getting to be with some ISPs.
Of course, I've used RHEL, Fedora Core, and CentOS happily with networking, in virtualization, on my MacBook Pro, so there's no need to worry about "Linux drivers".
Sounds neat; just out of curiosity, what are you using for the virtualization?
And perhaps I'm revealing my ignorance here, but how does the guest OS on a virtualized system handle networking? There must be some sort of psuedo-device driver that you install so that it can talk to the virtualized 'hardware,' or else the virtualization software must emulate some kind of commonly-supported networking hardware. I guess I'm just curious what you have to do to the guest OS, if anything, to get it to work inside the sandbox.
Right now all my equipment (Mac stuff, anyway) is PPC based; however I find the whole virtualization concept really intriguing and I'm hoping that by my next round of upgrades, it'll be sufficiently mature to make dual-booting (or having a separate PC for Linux connected with a KVM switch, my current solution) unnecessary.
Is there such a thing (on the black/grey market or whatever) as a reprogrammable SIM card?
Back in the day (early to mid 90s) it used to be fairly easy to find someone -- in my area it was always Israelis, don't ask me why -- who would clone certain brands and models of cellphones for you. Basically they could take a second phone, and make it appear to the network like a second instance of an already-existing phone. This was how a lot of crooks stole your phone service, but it was also handy because you could buy a second handset, and attach it to one number. Basically, just like having two phones in your house; two extensions on the same number.
I never actually did it, but I knew some commercial users that had it done, or said they did, and seemed to like it. I haven't heard of it being done in years though so I assume with the digital changeover the phone companies figured out some way to prohibit it.
I gotta imagine though that somewhere, in between designing new xBox mod chips, somebody has been working on making a reprogrammable SIM card that you could reflash and give a new address to, so that you could effectively duplicate an existing SIM. Assuming it wasn't so common that the network checks to see whether there are multiple instances of a particular SIM active at the same time, it seems like it would be able to give you the "multiple extension" effect. You could have one 'extension' as your computer, and another as your voice handset. Just set the computer to ignore incoming voice calls, and you'd be all set. You'd only have one service plan and you'd work off of the same pot of minutes using both phones.
I can imagine the cellular carriers would frown on this though, since they don't get to squeeze you for the extra dough on the second service plan.
Anyone ever heard if this is possible? It seems like something that somebody must have put some thought into, either on how to do it, or how to prohibit it.
I think the assumption is, if you can afford a £2000 laptop basically for the sole reason that it has 3G connectivity, you can damn well afford another SIM card and mobile plan for it.
... well, tough luck. (And that's not to mention that they have TOS restrictions that are outright ridiculous.)
Just be glad you can even change it. I think there are some laptops here in the States, either currently in production or in the pipeline, which are designed for data use on Verizon's EV-DO network; Verizon, of course, doesn't use 3G and doesn't use SIM cards. They use CDMA and each device has a hardcoded identifier, like a MAC address. If you get into a billing dispute with Verizon
In the case of EV-DO laptops, you have no choice but to get a separate service plan for them, unless you can find some way to clone them using the hardware address of another phone, which is technically legal but probably in violation of every agreement you've ever signed with your provider.
No, I'm serious; the review has a lot of big pictures and easy-to-read language, but it doesn't even once mention an OS. With this amount of built-in wireless stuff (3G, 802.11, Bluetooth), you've basically got yourself a very expensive brick if you can't get drivers for it. There's no information on what chipsets it uses for any of this.
I noticed that there's a Windows key on the keyboard, and in the absence of any other information I guess we're just left to assume that your only choice is the Beast From Redmond.
Pity, because I can't imagine they're going to sell enough of these at £1999 to people interested in Linux in order for a set of useful reverse-engineered drivers to be created, and thus you have a chicken-and-egg problem. Potential Linux users won't ever buy it because there aren't drivers, and there will thus never be the userbase to create the drivers.
What's more ironic is that Fujitsu is a member of the OSDG and sells a lot of high-end Linux stuff, but I guess (like IBM until they sold it off to Lenovo) despite their alleged commitment to it, you're SOL if you want to get a PC with anything except Windows.
Obviously they missed step 1 in the Windows-to-Linux migration strategy. Go through the resumés of everyone in IT, and fire anyone who's top qualification involved the letters "M," "C," "S," and "E."
And hire the next applicant in the door who only wants to know if free Mountain Dew is a company benefit and has a beard.
No wonder they failed; they forgot the basics.