Throwing my two cents on an already-heavy post here... but having worked with many people in the IT field who have neither a CS, MIS, or other technical degree, I submit that it really doesn't matter in the current hiring realm. Those who are doing the hiring will either care greatly (i.e. actually distinguishing between CS and MIS, which I find to be rare), or not care at all.
In fact, from what I hear from former coworkers, the more education and advanced degrees that one has, the more they are likely to be labeled 'overtrained' for a given job posting.
I have a BSCS from Ohio State, 1986. That and $2.50 will get you a 'cafe american' at S'bucks. It's the experience that gets me a job interview.
I won't go down the doom route, but I'll simply say that it's _far_ from a foregone conclusion that humans will be around even a million years.
OK, I'll go down the doom route for you;). Even if we assume that local effects (stability of the sun, earth, orbits of other planets) are predictable and non-threatening (big assumption in itself), the chances are very high that another large-body collision will occur before then (like the one that is theorized to have caused the dinosaurs' extinction event 65 million ago). Also, in round numbers, we've got about 25-30 more revolutions around the center of the galaxy... plenty of chance for interaction with other stars or extra-solar bodies. Then there's intergalactic interaction... I forget what the latest estimate is, but Andromeda (M31) is supposed to pay us a visit sometime before 5 billion years is out.
Or, some asshole will push the button, and we'll leave the roaches and telemarketers to ponder the whole thing.
Not sure why that post was modded down, maybe it's the taste of bad medicine for open software; truth is though, this AC's right. Infrastructure implementation is scrutinized much more intensely during a tight economy, and while some may bristle at the notion that Linux is 'experimental', convincing the management otherwise is even more of a chore now that new capital expenditure money may make the difference between staying open and shutting our doors (I'm currently dealing with this at the place where I work... I'd discuss the issue with the coworker that introduced me to Slashdot, but he just got laid off).
Also, Linux and the dot-coms were two big items in IT media coverage in 2000... because the coverage has passed, some will associate Linux with
the dot-com boom and bust (grit your teeth and prepare to hear "Linux? Wasn't that just a fad?" from the PHBs).
Yeah, well I used to work for that very agency (Ohio EPA) for 10 years... it was rather frustrating working there and watching as we'd make the headlines for something that wasn't being cleaned up, or something that was being glossed over... but you know where all the decisions are made? At the top. The director of the agency is beholden to the Governor; this shows very plainly with the last director that was appointed there. (He came from the Attorney General's office, a conservative pro-business lawyer, plain and simple.)
Now, what does this have to do with Monsanto? Only one point: the big decisions are made at the top; the direction of the company comes from the top. The company won't change until the CEO/board/etc changes.
As for Ion Storm and their games, while Xmas shopping I saw a small pallet-full of Daikatana sitting unbought at the local computer store... guess it was still overpriced, at $9.99 a copy.
Re:College Football, what else is there?
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New Years Marathons
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· Score: 1
Yeah, but unless you're a fan of one of the playing teams, none of the Monday bowls are enough to leave work early for (yes, I'm in overtime mode; tomorrow's college football 'marathon' should be a dandy though... go Bucks!!!)
I'd watch part of the Iron Chef marathon for some food-geekism, but I think I've seen 'em all by now.
It'd be great if Comedy Central could put together a decent Monty Python marathon, including some of the lesser known shows. Doesn't seem like they're motivated to do so, though.
OK, so net backbone and provider companies are growing fewer over time... that's true of corporations in general: more mergers than splits and startups means fewer companies. Not exactly fresh news.
It may become a moot point whether the current Internet is run by corporations, as the.edu and maybe the.mil sites will eventually separate to become part of their second-generation nets that have limited accessibility/intersection with the current Internet; a reversal of how the Internet was created in the first place.
Space exploration was and continues to be such a huge tennant (tenet?) of sci-fi
That's because space holds the most possibilities and unknowns... and because exploration of that other great unknown, the Earth's oceans, tends to be a lot more expensive to shoot than 'space' stuff. And yet we're still finding things in the oceans that we've never seen and can't quite explain yet.
American TV had some equivalent to this (if it's not the exact same series) in the mid/late 70's... I believe it was on NBC, and it was called 'Operation Blue Book'(after a military investigation of the same name). It did have a bit of an X-files feel to it, but was much tamer than X-files, and I don't recall it having any grossout monsters like X does.
It's a great idea, unless you work in an environment where the end of the month/quarter/year is vital to company ops... I'm at a company that cranks out game CDs and DVDs throughout the holiday season (you're welcome;)... and they had shifts going through the holidays, incl. Xmas to try and make the year's numbers look better (and keep the company afloat, frankly).
So for us, and probably a lot of other similar businesses, the downtime windows don't change for the holidays. If anything, there's even less downtime, because nobody can get ahold of mgmt. to sign off on a scheduled outage!
Yeah, Hugo Weaving (Elrond/Matrix's Agent Smith) wasn't really made up enough to get away from his character in 'The Matrix'... same impassionate voice too.
As for seeing the movie, I went with friends to the 12:01 showing in a big new theatre in downtown Columbus... Arena Grand, fabulous place. And seeing it there sold me on the notion that you would have to see this flick in the best possible theatre. It was showing in two of their 'big' rooms there, with a curved high-aspect-ratio screen (at least 2-to-1, possibly 2.2-to-1). I think this one would lose quite a bit on a smaller screen and definitely on conventional TV.
Yeah, he came along a bit later, but as more of a spammer and deliberate irritant than the Dr.... but I love Abian's stuff for the earnest defense of an incomprehensible theory (quote from the end of one of his posts):
TIME-SPACE HAS INERTIA. EQUIVALENCE OF TIME-SPACE AND MASS 1/T + 1/log M =1(ABIAN)
ALTER EARTH'S ORBIT AND TILT - STOP EPIDEMICS OF CANCER, CHOLERA, AIDS, ETC.
VENUS MUST BE GIVEN A NEAR EARTH-LIKE ORBIT TO BECOME A BORN AGAIN EARTH
Who knows? Maybe "the answer" isn't 42, it's something else, buried in 20 years of Usenet posts... but I doubt it.;)
For the morbidly curious, search on "1 ABIAN" for more examples of the above 'wisdom'.
As I recall, he was just a guy who wanted to be able search newsfeeds for his own posts... and inserted 'Kibo' into each of them.
Stuff like that wasn't all that unusual before AOL and spam hit Usenet... for a lot of people, it was their 15 minutes/textlines of fame. In some ways, Usenet before the mid-90's was like 1950's TV.
I used to have a whole list of these people written down somewhere... Serdar Argic (robot replied to any message mentioning Turkey and/or Armenia), Dr. Alexander Abian (crackpot who posted some bizarre self-centered theories in the sci.* newsgroups), and many others. Searching through this junkyard of Usenet might be fun after all...
Now I know that this 'magnate' guy has his own Oz-centric (eccentric?) plans for the wildlife, but hey, these animals can go most anywhere where there's grass and water to consume. Even Ohio. Check it out.
It would be a miracle if T3 approached anything close to good sci-fi (heh, a full CGI version of 'Ringworld', anyone? THAT would be cool.)... personally, I'd settle for some so-so sci-fi, like an Aliens vs. Predator vs. Terminator deathmatch movie (i.e. the humans create the Terminators to get rid of Aliens and Predators, them the Terminators go bad, during the 'rise of the machines', etc etc...)
Or at least something that makes paying $4 for popcorn worthwhile...
Not holding my breath though... T3 is in a production snail-race with Neverwinter Nights for the entertainment product that will take the longest to come to fruition.
Heaven help us if management everywhere finds out how much of the entire Net relies on half-assed perl scripts...
Corporate purchases are like the old 'pig-in-a-poke' metaphor... management almost never knows EXACTLY what they're getting, they look at balance sheets and concepts... then when a few years have past and the merged/purchased parts don't work, it's too late. I work for a small company that did that, and now it faces bankruptcy or worse because the purchased units never measured up to expectations.
Flog your users for being so fucking stupid! Can't... the CEO has employed too many of his relatives for IT to get away with that one.
Flog Microsoft for creating such insecure software. More like flog the old IT director for buying it.
Flog the nosepickers for being such pricks. Given that they'll be in the Israeli military in their young adult years, being shot at by Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East, they'll get theirs anyway.
OT: I've never heard our NT admin curse as much as he did this past week, when Goner came through......... He would have flogged the users.
The Dave Rhodes 'Make Money Fast' thing was more of a chain letter on steroids, no central point of initiation, while the Cantor/Siegel 'Green Card' spam was a industrialized mass-mailing with the cooperation of the host ISP.
Problem with looking all this up is that most news items from back then (1994-1995) are gone; I also looked up Samford Wallace, another major spammer from a couple years after the Cantor/Siegel era, and found disappointingly little on him out there.
Re:South Park, and issues with IT
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This is IT?
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· Score: 1
Ya know what, the South Park version with its big-diameter wheel would probably handle real-life roads better than what was rolled out on GMA this morning. Give this thing some Ohio potholes to handle, and I can see the grin on the AAA guy's face as he pulls up to someone with a busted scooter.
The pathetic range of this vehicle will kill it; acc. to the maker, it gets 15 miles on a six-hour charge. Who the hell is going to pay 3 grand for that, when a small cheap car (think used Geo) can do better on range AND protect you from the elements, AND drive through slush and snow when it hits in the winter???
And then there's the modest weight; anybody who has had a bicycle in an urban area knows how easy it is to get your wheels ripped off; this thing is light enough to grab, toss in a truck and drive off while the owner is half-way through his/her double latte in the local Starbucks. (Doubt you'd ever see one pulling up to a McD window.)
Bottom line: it's a cute lab toy, not a real-world transportation option.
yeah, I remembered that after I posted (doh!) but still, Spock starts the movie missing, and even at the end he's not himself yet (I mean, Spock in a hotel bathrobe with a dopey 'huh?' look on his face? Yuck!)... I think that's why people may not like ST3. It ties the series together, but isn't a wham bang movie by itself.
The same movie vs. movie comparisons come up in discussion of Bond films; and they're about as relevant... don't watch the ones ya don't like (like ST5 or Moonraker... either way, ouch!)
Also, I hope that they make Marina Sirtis cover up. At her present age, they must be bouncing off her knees now.
But that's Sci-fi! Suspension of disbelief... and knockers that defy gravity (hey, if Sigourney Weaver can pull it off in Galaxy Quest, certainly Marina Sirtis can have one last go-round on the big screen). Surely the future has miracle bras, etc. for the women that want them... externally adjustable implants? Hmm, maybe this new Vulcan on Enterprise will explore *that* strange new world for us...
The even-odd thing didn't start until about ST 5... people started to ask "how can we avoid the bad ones?"
But really, the 1st ST movie wasn't that bad (talk about new frontiers! The 1st one could have been made a dozen different ways after all), and 3 was mostly a shock to the purists (A main cast member dies? And not be resurrected by a time warp thingie! Blasphemy!!!) I enjoyed both. Ricardo Montalban was just a very hard villain to measure up to in the later movies, and that's why some of them were panned (until the Borg showed up and became the new really nasty villain).
In other words, when people quote the even/odd thing, ignore 'em, watch the flicks and judge for yourself. Here's hoping the new one is great.
It's no surprise that the courts would favor the corps. in these web cases, because they've been favoring the corps. in other name-ownership cases for years.
Ever hear of 'Taylor California Cellars' wine, or other Taylor wines? Originally, the name came from a family winery in NY state, but years ago the head of the family sold the name 'Taylor' off to some big conglomerate. Years later, when a grandson of this guy put labels on his own wineries' wine, with 'Walter S. Taylor proprietor' or some such innocuous tag in the small print, the conglomerate sued him! And the courts agreed with the big company, several times.
Since then, Walter just blacks out his name on the labels... "Walter S. ------" (or did... seems Walter S. passed away this year).
Other such cases exist, I'm sure, as does the Nissan, Shell and other examples above.Moral: it might pay to get a serious trademark registered if you really want a domain name, but in the end, if a big company wants it, you're screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a BSCS from Ohio State, 1986. That and $2.50 will get you a 'cafe american' at S'bucks. It's the experience that gets me a job interview.
OK, I'll go down the doom route for you ;). Even if we assume that local effects (stability of the sun, earth, orbits of other planets) are predictable and non-threatening (big assumption in itself), the chances are very high that another large-body collision will occur before then (like the one that is theorized to have caused the dinosaurs' extinction event 65 million ago). Also, in round numbers, we've got about 25-30 more revolutions around the center of the galaxy... plenty of chance for interaction with other stars or extra-solar bodies. Then there's intergalactic interaction... I forget what the latest estimate is, but Andromeda (M31) is supposed to pay us a visit sometime before 5 billion years is out.
Or, some asshole will push the button, and we'll leave the roaches and telemarketers to ponder the whole thing.
Also, Linux and the dot-coms were two big items in IT media coverage in 2000... because the coverage has passed, some will associate Linux with the dot-com boom and bust (grit your teeth and prepare to hear "Linux? Wasn't that just a fad?" from the PHBs).
Now, what does this have to do with Monsanto? Only one point: the big decisions are made at the top; the direction of the company comes from the top. The company won't change until the CEO/board/etc changes.
No... in fact, we'd probably think it was pretty damned amusing.
As for Ion Storm and their games, while Xmas shopping I saw a small pallet-full of Daikatana sitting unbought at the local computer store... guess it was still overpriced, at $9.99 a copy.
I'd watch part of the Iron Chef marathon for some food-geekism, but I think I've seen 'em all by now.
It'd be great if Comedy Central could put together a decent Monty Python marathon, including some of the lesser known shows. Doesn't seem like they're motivated to do so, though.
It may become a moot point whether the current Internet is run by corporations, as the .edu and maybe the .mil sites will eventually separate to become part of their second-generation nets that have limited accessibility/intersection with the current Internet; a reversal of how the Internet was created in the first place.
That's because space holds the most possibilities and unknowns... and because exploration of that other great unknown, the Earth's oceans, tends to be a lot more expensive to shoot than 'space' stuff. And yet we're still finding things in the oceans that we've never seen and can't quite explain yet.
American TV had some equivalent to this (if it's not the exact same series) in the mid/late 70's... I believe it was on NBC, and it was called 'Operation Blue Book'(after a military investigation of the same name). It did have a bit of an X-files feel to it, but was much tamer than X-files, and I don't recall it having any grossout monsters like X does.
So for us, and probably a lot of other similar businesses, the downtime windows don't change for the holidays. If anything, there's even less downtime, because nobody can get ahold of mgmt. to sign off on a scheduled outage!
As for seeing the movie, I went with friends to the 12:01 showing in a big new theatre in downtown Columbus... Arena Grand, fabulous place. And seeing it there sold me on the notion that you would have to see this flick in the best possible theatre. It was showing in two of their 'big' rooms there, with a curved high-aspect-ratio screen (at least 2-to-1, possibly 2.2-to-1). I think this one would lose quite a bit on a smaller screen and definitely on conventional TV.
TIME-SPACE HAS INERTIA. EQUIVALENCE OF TIME-SPACE AND MASS 1/T + 1/log M =1(ABIAN)
ALTER EARTH'S ORBIT AND TILT - STOP EPIDEMICS OF CANCER, CHOLERA, AIDS, ETC.
VENUS MUST BE GIVEN A NEAR EARTH-LIKE ORBIT TO BECOME A BORN AGAIN EARTH
Who knows? Maybe "the answer" isn't 42, it's something else, buried in 20 years of Usenet posts... but I doubt it. ;)
For the morbidly curious, search on "1 ABIAN" for more examples of the above 'wisdom'.
Stuff like that wasn't all that unusual before AOL and spam hit Usenet... for a lot of people, it was their 15 minutes/textlines of fame. In some ways, Usenet before the mid-90's was like 1950's TV.
I used to have a whole list of these people written down somewhere... Serdar Argic (robot replied to any message mentioning Turkey and/or Armenia), Dr. Alexander Abian (crackpot who posted some bizarre self-centered theories in the sci.* newsgroups), and many others. Searching through this junkyard of Usenet might be fun after all...
Such sources will undoubtedly come in handy when tracking T3, given how long it's been in the rumor mill.
Now I know that this 'magnate' guy has his own Oz-centric (eccentric?) plans for the wildlife, but hey, these animals can go most anywhere where there's grass and water to consume. Even Ohio. Check it out.
Or at least something that makes paying $4 for popcorn worthwhile...
Not holding my breath though... T3 is in a production snail-race with Neverwinter Nights for the entertainment product that will take the longest to come to fruition.
Corporate purchases are like the old 'pig-in-a-poke' metaphor... management almost never knows EXACTLY what they're getting, they look at balance sheets and concepts... then when a few years have past and the merged/purchased parts don't work, it's too late. I work for a small company that did that, and now it faces bankruptcy or worse because the purchased units never measured up to expectations.
Can't... the CEO has employed too many of his relatives for IT to get away with that one.
Flog Microsoft for creating such insecure software.
More like flog the old IT director for buying it.
Flog the nosepickers for being such pricks.
Given that they'll be in the Israeli military in their young adult years, being shot at by Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East, they'll get theirs anyway.
OT: I've never heard our NT admin curse as much as he did this past week, when Goner came through......... He would have flogged the users.
Problem with looking all this up is that most news items from back then (1994-1995) are gone; I also looked up Samford Wallace, another major spammer from a couple years after the Cantor/Siegel era, and found disappointingly little on him out there.
The pathetic range of this vehicle will kill it; acc. to the maker, it gets 15 miles on a six-hour charge. Who the hell is going to pay 3 grand for that, when a small cheap car (think used Geo) can do better on range AND protect you from the elements, AND drive through slush and snow when it hits in the winter???
And then there's the modest weight; anybody who has had a bicycle in an urban area knows how easy it is to get your wheels ripped off; this thing is light enough to grab, toss in a truck and drive off while the owner is half-way through his/her double latte in the local Starbucks. (Doubt you'd ever see one pulling up to a McD window.)
Bottom line: it's a cute lab toy, not a real-world transportation option.
Two words: Borg Tribbles.
The same movie vs. movie comparisons come up in discussion of Bond films; and they're about as relevant... don't watch the ones ya don't like (like ST5 or Moonraker... either way, ouch!)
But that's Sci-fi! Suspension of disbelief... and knockers that defy gravity (hey, if Sigourney Weaver can pull it off in Galaxy Quest, certainly Marina Sirtis can have one last go-round on the big screen). Surely the future has miracle bras, etc. for the women that want them... externally adjustable implants? Hmm, maybe this new Vulcan on Enterprise will explore *that* strange new world for us...
But really, the 1st ST movie wasn't that bad (talk about new frontiers! The 1st one could have been made a dozen different ways after all), and 3 was mostly a shock to the purists (A main cast member dies? And not be resurrected by a time warp thingie! Blasphemy!!!) I enjoyed both. Ricardo Montalban was just a very hard villain to measure up to in the later movies, and that's why some of them were panned (until the Borg showed up and became the new really nasty villain).
In other words, when people quote the even/odd thing, ignore 'em, watch the flicks and judge for yourself. Here's hoping the new one is great.
Ever hear of 'Taylor California Cellars' wine, or other Taylor wines? Originally, the name came from a family winery in NY state, but years ago the head of the family sold the name 'Taylor' off to some big conglomerate. Years later, when a grandson of this guy put labels on his own wineries' wine, with 'Walter S. Taylor proprietor' or some such innocuous tag in the small print, the conglomerate sued him! And the courts agreed with the big company, several times.
Since then, Walter just blacks out his name on the labels... "Walter S. ------" (or did... seems Walter S. passed away this year).
Other such cases exist, I'm sure, as does the Nissan, Shell and other examples above.Moral: it might pay to get a serious trademark registered if you really want a domain name, but in the end, if a big company wants it, you're screwed.