I've been in both situations. You have to decide what your ultimate goals are. Do you want to move up in the organization you're going to join, or do you just want to collect a pay check and focus on other parts of your life?
The corporate gig will allow for advancement. The academic position will not.
You'll have a LOT more flexibility at the academic position, but I'm not sure how much if you're doing sys admin stuff.
One thing to keep in mind in the academic position is that if you don't have a PHD, your opinion will count for crap. It won't even matter what kind of PHD, or how long you've been doing your job. If that other person has a PHD (even from just last week), you'll be looked down upon.
Someone else mentioned the politics (not Repub/Dem...I mean intraoffice).... Try and stay out of that as much as you can. It's bad in industry, but it's 10 times worse in academics. Whatever you do, don't get caught in the cross-hairs of a tenured faculty member. They can not be fired, and they know it. If you get on the wrong side of one of these people, your life will become hell, and there's nothing you can do. I've seen this happen to several people. While many of these people (even co-workers) might espouse liberal beliefs, these are the same people that would rip your heart out of your chest and eat it if they thought it would further their aims. Intraoffice and even multi-university politics is a "blood sport" you don't want to be involved in. You won't think with the progressive beliefs they talk about at lunch that people would be that way, but many of them are. I haven't figured that out.
Having said that, it's not the much better in corporate America, but it's not nearly as hostile as academics. In my experience, people don't care about your political beliefs (Rep/Dem) that much. They DO in academia. If someone labels you as someone that isn't on their "side", watch out. (See the previous paragraph again). My advice on that is just keep whatever political affliation you have to yourself.
Some of them will treat you like complete crap, even below the students that work on their projects. Most don't care one way or the other, and they'll ignore you.
Ok... enough of that.
If you're full time staff, chances are that you'll have a LOT of vacation time. Some positions offer five weeks a year, and that doesn't count holidays (which are about 10 days a year), or the two/three sick weeks you'll get. If you ever have kids, this is important.
You'll have much more flexible "flex-time" at a university.
The corporate position will pay more.
There will be less overtime in the university (although, since you're a sysadmin type, that may or may not be the case).
You'll probably have more say in what side projects you can explore at the university.
You can likely (as long as it has nothing to do with your work) start your own company "on the side" with a university position. In my experience, I saw many people do that. That's generally not the case in the corporate world, and certainly not with a startup.
University towns generally have some pretty great "mom/pop" type of places to grab something, and it's pretty inexpensive.
One last thing: People said it's hard to get fired from a university. That's BS. If you're in a "funded" position (funded with grant money), the position is only as good as the funds last. Generally they need to give you a lot (like three to six months) of notice before your contract goes terminal, but this varies from university to university, and you'll need to find that out....Er...one more last thing.:-) if you're being lured to either position with promises of something (money, type of work, etc), get it in writing.
Good luck. Be sure to go into this with your eyes wide open. There's a lot of good advice in this thread. It might sound contradictory at times, but these are things the people have had to live with when they made the choice.
Newegg.com is good most of the time. The last order I put in for a three day delivery took a week. No big deal on that for me, but it sure wasn't the three days they said it would be.
Snood's the same way. It's a clone of an 80s game. Gotta hand it to the developer tho, started off as a one-man operation, and it's made him millions.
The real problem is that some of these outfits have gotten so big, that if a small-time developer comes out with a new game gets any kind of good response, the big guys swoop in, draw some pretty graphics, and whammo, the little guy has just had his market taken away.
Even with that, I hope that this doesn't turn into a legal battle. The only people that win those things are the lawyers, and lawyers have ruined (or nearly ruined) enough industries already.
There's a corporate fraud task force the government that was started in 2002 for this very purpose; considering what the government was letting people get away with during the nineties, it was long overdue:
You're right. And as we've seen in press reports since then, if the Governer hadn't been worrying about her "image" so much, and taken responsibility to get things going instead of pushing off help so she could "think about it", the help would have been brought in much more quickly.
Don't even get me started about the levy system down there. Having seperate governing bodies for EACH levy is pretty freakin' stupid.
Finally, take a look at Florida. They've had EIGHT hurricanes hit in the last two years, including Katarina. Back when the big one hit down there (Andrew), they had it together enough to have FEMA in there within 5 days under Clinton. Bush had 'em in there for Katarina in three days. Florida did great in both cases, because they stepped up. That was through both Democrat and Republican state administrations.
The state of Lousiana failed, and it was left to the feds to pick up the pieces.
You cite a bad example, and comparing apples to oranges. The increases you saw in that tuition are due to the school raising their rates; they didn't go strictly by inflation. If you were spending that 13 years ago, you got a bargain. Twenty years ago (where I went to school) it was much more than that.
The original poster was correct. An increase in spending is an increase in spending. Not spending as much as someone wants to be spent is NOT a decrease in spending.... the amount of money being spent is still an increase.
It just sounds so much better to the people who don't pay attention, or worse, want to try and set the stage of an argument based on a lie.
UIUC/NCSA owns it. Spyglass itself changed into the OpenTV company, which, if you have a sat. dish in the US may be running some of their apps (DISH network does, not sure about DirectTV).
"The citizens of the USA, who paid for much of its development?"
No, for a couple of reasons.
First, funding for research centers in the US does come from tax money (as does all grant money from the government), but once it's the governments', it's theirs and you don't have a claim on any money other than what you're entitled to (Social Security, welfare, tax refunds, etc). While you're technically correct, that the USA did pay for some (State of Illinois and UIUC also paid) of the development, the taxpayers don't own it. Most research at universities is funded this way.
Second, both Spyglass and Microsoft did further development on the code, so the original code may have been licensed, but it's been modified since then. No one paid for that except those companies.
In any event, it's more likely there is NO code from the original Mosaic in either the Mac or Windows versions. The license agreement probably stated "you have to give credit", but if they were smart, they re-wrote the whole thing once they had a chance.
Good thing to know that if downtown New York got bombed, and thousands of people died, nobody would want to know if someone was plotting another attack like that.
Here's some data about what people pay now (don't get me wrong, I think the Internet tax shouldn't happen). I'm posting the following to show how much those "rich" people really DO pay.
This was taken from another site, but it's good data:
It shows that the top one percent of taxpayers paid 34.3 percent of all federal income taxes in 2003, although they earned just 16.8 percent of the adjusted gross income. The top five percent of taxpayers paid more than half of all federal income taxes, the top 10 percent paid two-thirds, and the top half of taxpayers paid 96.5 percent, meaning that the bottom half paid just 3.5 percent.
The top one percent and found that the top ten percent of the top one percent (the top 0.1 percent) increased their share of all federal income taxes from seven percent in 1980 to 15.3 percent in 2003. These 129,000 tax filers earned 7.6 percent of the income and paid an average tax rate of 23.6 percent. This came to $114.6 billion--four times more than all the taxes paid by the 64 million taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent--who paid an average tax rate of 2.9 percent.
The "rich" pay a helluva lot of money. The data is there from the IRS itself for you to check the facts.
The thing the ticks me off about this is that the mail order lobby was the group that started all this crap back in the 90s, because they saw their revenue going down. Back then, it was "oh, tax the internet, but leave us alone".
Personally though, I don't think either of them should be taxed, but if they do pass this, the better make all the regular mail order companies comply with it too.
Discounting what some of the other alarmist posters are posting, I hope you find a good job that you'll enjoy. There's a good reason that people come to the states, and in spite of some people freaking out about what they think is going on over here, they're not so freaked out they're actually leaving in the numbers they say they represent. In other words, people are staying, other people are coming here, and they're staying too.
People come here to work every day. A lot of them start their own companies. It's not hard to start one... Keeping it going is another story. If you have that type of background over there, you can do it over here. Just be sure you have a good lawyer and a good accountant to keep you within the corporate laws of not only the country, but the state you're moving to.
If you do end up working for someone else's company, be aware that vacation time is drastically different over here than it is in Europe. You'll get two weeks per year to start....*if* you're lucky. Some jobs make you wait one year. The vacation time can sometimes be negotiated, so try to do that if at all possible.
With that out of the way, another piece of advice I can give is to travel around the country after you get settled and have some vacation time to spend. Living in one area in any country might give you a good idea of what goes on in that one area, but it won't give you a good idea of what the rest of the country is like. Go to Boston, South Florida, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Nashville, Atlanta, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Indianapolis (especially for the 500 race), etc. You'll meet a lot of great people, hear a lot of viewpoints on everything, and you'll have a lot of fun.
Well, I haven't either (and it's been longer than 10 years for me), but that doesn't mean it isn' out there. I know of two places that use LISP. One was Yahoo in the early stages. Another is a startup I know about.
Just because *you* haven't seen it doesn't mean a thing. You probably haven't run across Fortran or RPG at a job. There's a lot of tech out there you haven't been exposed to... does't mean it isn't out there.
Ask "What do you like about working here", and follow up with "What don't you like working about here". You'll get pat answers to the first, and a lot of times you'll get really honest answers to the second. Sometimes those answers will help you steer away from a train-wreck of a job change.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe he was refering to the bat population, which other turbine farms have been, er....reducing....
w s/nation/stories/12/bizwindmill1214a_5STR.html
http://www.oxfordpress.com/news/content/shared/ne
Regular people regularly get compensated for the time in court. Happens all the time.
I've been in both situations. You have to decide what your ultimate goals are. Do you want to move up in the organization you're going to join, or do you just want to collect a pay check and focus on other parts of your life?
.... Try and stay out of that as much as you can. It's bad in industry, but it's 10 times worse in academics. Whatever you do, don't get caught in the cross-hairs of a tenured faculty member. They can not be fired, and they know it. If you get on the wrong side of one of these people, your life will become hell, and there's nothing you can do. I've seen this happen to several people. While many of these people (even co-workers) might espouse liberal beliefs, these are the same people that would rip your heart out of your chest and eat it if they thought it would further their aims. Intraoffice and even multi-university politics is a "blood sport" you don't want to be involved in. You won't think with the progressive beliefs they talk about at lunch that people would be that way, but many of them are. I haven't figured that out.
...Er...one more last thing. :-) if you're being lured to either position with promises of something (money, type of work, etc), get it in writing.
The corporate gig will allow for advancement. The academic position will not.
You'll have a LOT more flexibility at the academic position, but I'm not sure how much if you're doing sys admin stuff.
One thing to keep in mind in the academic position is that if you don't have a PHD, your opinion will count for crap. It won't even matter what kind of PHD, or how long you've been doing your job. If that other person has a PHD (even from just last week), you'll be looked down upon.
Someone else mentioned the politics (not Repub/Dem...I mean intraoffice)
Having said that, it's not the much better in corporate America, but it's not nearly as hostile as academics. In my experience, people don't care about your political beliefs (Rep/Dem) that much. They DO in academia. If someone labels you as someone that isn't on their "side", watch out. (See the previous paragraph again). My advice on that is just keep whatever political affliation you have to yourself.
Some of them will treat you like complete crap, even below the students that work on their projects. Most don't care one way or the other, and they'll ignore you.
Ok... enough of that.
If you're full time staff, chances are that you'll have a LOT of vacation time. Some positions offer five weeks a year, and that doesn't count holidays (which are about 10 days a year), or the two/three sick weeks you'll get. If you ever have kids, this is important.
You'll have much more flexible "flex-time" at a university.
The corporate position will pay more.
There will be less overtime in the university (although, since you're a sysadmin type, that may or may not be the case).
You'll probably have more say in what side projects you can explore at the university.
You can likely (as long as it has nothing to do with your work) start your own company "on the side" with a university position. In my experience, I saw many people do that. That's generally not the case in the corporate world, and certainly not with a startup.
University towns generally have some pretty great "mom/pop" type of places to grab something, and it's pretty inexpensive.
One last thing: People said it's hard to get fired from a university. That's BS. If you're in a "funded" position (funded with grant money), the position is only as good as the funds last. Generally they need to give you a lot (like three to six months) of notice before your contract goes terminal, but this varies from university to university, and you'll need to find that out.
Good luck. Be sure to go into this with your eyes wide open. There's a lot of good advice in this thread. It might sound contradictory at times, but these are things the people have had to live with when they made the choice.
I hope it works out for you.
Yup, that's been my previous experience too, and why I'd order from them again. I think it was just an after Christmas glitch.
Newegg.com is good most of the time. The last order I put in for a three day delivery took a week. No big deal on that for me, but it sure wasn't the three days they said it would be.
That said, I'd order from 'em again.
Yeah, the same thing occurred to me. It's a great idea, and I'm surprised we haven't seen this before.
The thing I wonder about is whether or not he'll actually be able to get a patent on it, as he said during the demo here.
Puzzle Bobble
Show me the data that shows inflation changed your costs from then until now for that college tuition you posted.
You can't. It's not purely inflation that did it. The school raised it's costs.
Snood's the same way. It's a clone of an 80s game. Gotta hand it to the developer tho, started off as a one-man operation, and it's made him millions.
The real problem is that some of these outfits have gotten so big, that if a small-time developer comes out with a new game gets any kind of good response, the big guys swoop in, draw some pretty graphics, and whammo, the little guy has just had his market taken away.
Even with that, I hope that this doesn't turn into a legal battle. The only people that win those things are the lawyers, and lawyers have ruined (or nearly ruined) enough industries already.
Go read what I wrote. You didn't say a thing about grants, etc. You talked about the cost of college, then and now.
Don't ignore this point: Your school increased the cost of what it costs to go there. Period.
You can't say inflation caused that kind of price increase.
The increase is HIGHER than the rate of inflation; Again, this is not a cut. It's an increase.
You'd figure most people could figure that out.
There's a corporate fraud task force the government that was started in 2002 for this very purpose; considering what the government was letting people get away with during the nineties, it was long overdue:
4 .htm
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2005/August/05_opa_43
I'd be satisfied if they required proof (via State issued FREE ids, if necessary) of who you are when you showed up to vote.
You're right. And as we've seen in press reports since then, if the Governer hadn't been worrying about her "image" so much, and taken responsibility to get things going instead of pushing off help so she could "think about it", the help would have been brought in much more quickly.
Don't even get me started about the levy system down there. Having seperate governing bodies for EACH levy is pretty freakin' stupid.
Finally, take a look at Florida. They've had EIGHT hurricanes hit in the last two years, including Katarina. Back when the big one hit down there (Andrew), they had it together enough to have FEMA in there within 5 days under Clinton. Bush had 'em in there for Katarina in three days. Florida did great in both cases, because they stepped up. That was through both Democrat and Republican state administrations.
The state of Lousiana failed, and it was left to the feds to pick up the pieces.
You cite a bad example, and comparing apples to oranges. The increases you saw in that tuition are due to the school raising their rates; they didn't go strictly by inflation. If you were spending that 13 years ago, you got a bargain. Twenty years ago (where I went to school) it was much more than that.
The original poster was correct. An increase in spending is an increase in spending. Not spending as much as someone wants to be spent is NOT a decrease in spending.... the amount of money being spent is still an increase.
It just sounds so much better to the people who don't pay attention, or worse, want to try and set the stage of an argument based on a lie.
UIUC/NCSA owns it. Spyglass itself changed into the OpenTV company, which, if you have a sat. dish in the US may be running some of their apps (DISH network does, not sure about DirectTV).
"The citizens of the USA, who paid for much of its development?"
No, for a couple of reasons.
First, funding for research centers in the US does come from tax money (as does all grant money from the government), but once it's the governments', it's theirs and you don't have a claim on any money other than what you're entitled to (Social Security, welfare, tax refunds, etc). While you're technically correct, that the USA did pay for some (State of Illinois and UIUC also paid) of the development, the taxpayers don't own it. Most research at universities is funded this way.
Second, both Spyglass and Microsoft did further development on the code, so the original code may have been licensed, but it's been modified since then. No one paid for that except those companies.
In any event, it's more likely there is NO code from the original Mosaic in either the Mac or Windows versions. The license agreement probably stated "you have to give credit", but if they were smart, they re-wrote the whole thing once they had a chance.
Clinton's aides were on TV saying they backed Bush on this, and it was legal.
Love to have an investigation that lead to the leaks on this. After all, Plame was important, right?
Good thing to know that if downtown New York got bombed, and thousands of people died, nobody would want to know if someone was plotting another attack like that.
Phew....good thing that never happened.
Some "people" don't "use" "quotation" marks "correctly".
That always "drives" me nuts.
Here's some data about what people pay now (don't get me wrong, I think the Internet tax shouldn't happen). I'm posting the following to show how much those "rich" people really DO pay.
This was taken from another site, but it's good data:
Check this out.
It shows that the top one percent of taxpayers paid 34.3 percent of all federal income taxes in 2003, although they earned just 16.8 percent of the adjusted gross income. The top five percent of taxpayers paid more than half of all federal income taxes, the top 10 percent paid two-thirds, and the top half of taxpayers paid 96.5 percent, meaning that the bottom half paid just 3.5 percent.
And this.
The top one percent and found that the top ten percent of the top one percent (the top 0.1 percent) increased their share of all federal income taxes from seven percent in 1980 to 15.3 percent in 2003. These 129,000 tax filers earned 7.6 percent of the income and paid an average tax rate of 23.6 percent. This came to $114.6 billion--four times more than all the taxes paid by the 64 million taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent--who paid an average tax rate of 2.9 percent.
The "rich" pay a helluva lot of money. The data is there from the IRS itself for you to check the facts.
In the fair tax plan, low income folks are protected.
The thing the ticks me off about this is that the mail order lobby was the group that started all this crap back in the 90s, because they saw their revenue going down. Back then, it was "oh, tax the internet, but leave us alone".
Personally though, I don't think either of them should be taxed, but if they do pass this, the better make all the regular mail order companies comply with it too.
Discounting what some of the other alarmist posters are posting, I hope you find a good job that you'll enjoy. There's a good reason that people come to the states, and in spite of some people freaking out about what they think is going on over here, they're not so freaked out they're actually leaving in the numbers they say they represent. In other words, people are staying, other people are coming here, and they're staying too.
People come here to work every day. A lot of them start their own companies. It's not hard to start one... Keeping it going is another story. If you have that type of background over there, you can do it over here. Just be sure you have a good lawyer and a good accountant to keep you within the corporate laws of not only the country, but the state you're moving to.
If you do end up working for someone else's company, be aware that vacation time is drastically different over here than it is in Europe. You'll get two weeks per year to start....*if* you're lucky. Some jobs make you wait one year. The vacation time can sometimes be negotiated, so try to do that if at all possible.
With that out of the way, another piece of advice I can give is to travel around the country after you get settled and have some vacation time to spend. Living in one area in any country might give you a good idea of what goes on in that one area, but it won't give you a good idea of what the rest of the country is like. Go to Boston, South Florida, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Nashville, Atlanta, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Indianapolis (especially for the 500 race), etc. You'll meet a lot of great people, hear a lot of viewpoints on everything, and you'll have a lot of fun.
Good luck.
Well, I haven't either (and it's been longer than 10 years for me), but that doesn't mean it isn' out there. I know of two places that use LISP. One was Yahoo in the early stages. Another is a startup I know about.
Just because *you* haven't seen it doesn't mean a thing. You probably haven't run across Fortran or RPG at a job. There's a lot of tech out there you haven't been exposed to... does't mean it isn't out there.
Ask "What do you like about working here", and follow up with "What don't you like working about here". You'll get pat answers to the first, and a lot of times you'll get really honest answers to the second. Sometimes those answers will help you steer away from a train-wreck of a job change.