We used RT at my last company. Keeps track of tickets, with different ticket queues, and different user groups. People can do it by web or e-mail or both. You can search the system for old tickets as well, although it's not a good idea to search the body of the message if you have a lot of tickets going back many years.
Putting aside the discussion of real or imagined danger from the LHC, you ask why our smartest scientists are pressured (through grants etc.) to work on projects like these. Or if particle accelerators are necessary, perhaps all of this can be done in a distributed, low-tech manner.
In the 19th century, studies of the economy was called study of political economy (not study of economics). The decision to do these massive scientific projects like the LHC, or that are done within in NASA, or in a military sense. things like missile shields or the like - all of these things are done not for scientific reasons, but due to the economy part of political economy (and to a lesser extent, the political side of political economy). Or to say that again, they are not done primarily for scientific but for economic reasons. Our current economic system favors that the government spend money on centralized, high tech projects like this. It is why the US is building dozens of nuclear submaries it does not need, but does not have enough troops on the ground in Iraq or provide them with as much "armor" as they could use. It is why bridges to nowhere are built, and other expensive and unnecessary projects are done. Richard Nixon once shocked conservatives by stating his agreement with the phrase "We are all Keynesians now".
I'm not a physics expert, but I certainly have seen these white elephants pop up, everyone has. I'm sure every physicist knows the same thing you do, and has said so. Has your collective criticism done anything? No. Why? Because it is a problem within political economy, not with science or the scientific community. If you're interested in solving the problem, realize that charts and presentations and so forth showing how money is being wasted on big white elephant projects will help some, but will only go so far. You have to understand the relation of grants to the existing system of political economy, and then understand political economy, the problems in political economy, and how to properly deal with them, which goes beyond just charts and presentations. It takes effort to fix things on a one-off basis, and completely fixing all of the problems in the system would be a major, major effort, and would probably include a lot of political turmoil.
I think one thing instructive about American scientific progress in some instances was really helped by the Russians. Let me ask a question - when was NASA formed? The answer is July 1958. Now let me ask another question - when was Sputnik launched? The answer is October 1957. The newspapers up until the 1950s were full of stories of the superiority of the US economic system over the USSR's economic system. Even things like the A-bomb can be said to have been gotten through spying. However, when the USSR launched the first artificial satellite, it was a technical innovation, the first of the kind, so it couldn't be blamed on espionage and was inarguably proof of Russian superiority in this area. Within several months NASA formed and the US devoted a massive amount of money to technology. The educational system was re-done to create students with a better mathematical and scientific outlook. If one has met Russian IT people, as I have, you are probably quite often impressed with how sharp and well-educated many of them are. Anyhow, all of this is an example of how political economy pushed forward scientific development. Would we ever have spent the money to go to the moon if Sputnik was never launched? Probably not.
First - Sun had a UNIX for x86 in 1992-1993 which was superior to Linux at the time. This is not hindsight being 20-20, my manager complained to me in 1997 (we had Solaris x86 dekstops) how Sun was screwing up Solaris x86. Red Hat only got things like a decent kernel crash dump put in recently - Sun really messed this up.
Secondly - too slow to embrace "open source". Red Hat did and now their market cap is about to surpass the company that did not (soon enough anyhow).
Thirdly - how necessary was dumping the Berkeley-like SunOS for the System V-like Solaris? I personally think they put too much of an effort into this, although opinions may vary.
I watched SGI get killed in the mid-1990s. People began doing low-end graphics stuff on Macs or even Windows, and suddenly SGI only became a company for the high-end. It was easy to see that this was the future for Sun. Now Wall Street has collapsed, and the big market Sun had has dried up. And Wall Street has gone from an environment where in 2001 Linux was just a test project, to where some companies are now almost all Linux on the UNIX front, and are looking to dump their "legacy" Sun stuff. It didn't have to be this way.
I first encountered Sun in the late 1980s and until recently I still had a lot of love for them. Red Hat's lack of things like a decent kernel crash dump bugged me. But now Red Hat really does have almost all of the stuff that a critical production server needs. Windows-heavy shops like Suse a lot. I know a lot of UNIX admins and shops that develop for UNIX, including in the traditional financial companies - everywhere the new machines coming in are Linux, and a lot of places are trying to phase their Suns out. I think metaphors of a Sun set are becoming appropriate. Sun screwed up x86 and they screwed up "open source" and now Solaris is going to be relegated to the dustbin that Ultrix and HP-UX are in. If you search for admin jobs on Craigslist, Solaris doesn't even have much of a lead on AIX. With Red Hat now having journaling filing systems, virtualization, decent kernel crash dumps, production Oracle instances that run as well (or better) than on Solaris, high availability and so on and so forth, I can think of very little that Sparc's running Solaris have that a cheaper x86-64 running Red Hat doesn't have.
I watch Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott on the television all of time. He was born in rural Kansas and acts like a rube, the CNBC interviewer asked him some question and Scott's answer began "Gee whiz, I hope so." Scott is not a rube, you do not climb to the top of the Wal-Mart management chain by being a nice guy.
I have been in IT for over eleven years, and I have seen over and over that "networking" is a more important attribute than "knowing your shit". I went on a job interview recently where I was given an interview on the phone which was half technical and half non-technical, and then I was brought in and talked to about six people, only one of whom asked one directly technical question. So it was about ten minutes of showing I had a basic grasp of the technical stuff, and several hours of talking about how I handle problems and people. I've had interviews where I've been asked no direct technical questions. My resume is long enough that it's obvious I had to know something to be employed by some of these well-known companies for so many years, and for most positions there's really no reason why they would have to spend more than 10-15 minutes on my technical knowledge. We had a position which we interviewed dozens of people over a period of many months, and it was educational to me about interviewing - I discovered that within about three technical questions I could gauge 100% - not 99% - 100% of the time what their level of technical expertise was. I would go on to ask more than three questions, but anyone who hit a home run on the first three would do well on the rest, anyone who struggled with the first three would struggle with the rest.
There is no such thing as a non-management position. Unless you have a better than normal manager, most managers want you to not only do your technical job, but want you to do their job as well. At that recent interview I mentioned, the person who would be my manager complained so many IT people just sit at their desk and do their job instead of interacting with the business units, managing their own projects etc. He said he was overburdened, and without saying so he was obviously implying he was looking for the people under him to take a lot of that burden from him. Years ago when there were layoffs at a large company I was at, one of the managers also said people who just sat at their desks and did their job as opposed to schmoozing and all of that were at risk.
That you need some base level of technical knowledge goes without saying. But the people who brown-nose managers, who inquire what the business units want and who are held in high regard by the managers and leads of the other prominent business units etc. are who stays when there are layoffs. Within every company there is a coterie of managers, leads and top IT people who may as well be a lead or manager, and you are either in it or you are not. If you are not, you are susceptible to the ax.
I have seen a lot of self-delusion on Slashdot and among IT people as to there being a gap between hard-working people who know their shit (which the person considering this always thinking they're part of this group) and slackers who are incompetent. Which is standard. But you are going beyond even this and saying technical knowledge is everything, and brown-nosing managers and schmoozing other managers and leads means little or nothing. You may find this is not the case the hard way. I have seen two tough times in this field - from about 2002-2003, and another one which started last year and will end in who knows. Finding out that you are wrong may be a very painful lesson.
In some other post someone was mentioning how things work under capitalism etc. And so they were right. Someone who thinks their technical skill is all-important, and who doesn't see how those who brown-nose managers and schmooze with other managers and leads get ahead, is certainly going to be blind to the workings of the overall economic system. Because such things are intertwined with the economic system to some extent. But if someone can't see the obvious about who people who brown-nose managers get ahead of more technically competent personnel, than going into any of the broader stuff is pointless.
In "Nickel and Dimed", Barbara Ehrenreich, who is an author and professor with a Phd, spent several months living as a blue collar worker for her book. She talks about applying for Wal-Mart, and while how she answered mostly correct, she made the mistake of on a scale from 1 to 5, giving a 4 saying she would "Almost Always" "Follow rules to the letter" as opposed to 5 "Always". Despite that, she got the job. At another place, the question was if "management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different goals".
I applied for a job in a large chain store a few years ago and got a question almost exactly like the last one, it was something a long the lines of "Do workers and management have the same interests at heart?" Woe to the blue collar wage worker who has read the first page of the Communist Manifesto, which says "Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat."
I do. I'm typing this in a Seamonkey window on a Gnewsense system right now.
People are probably less cognizant of what is free and not free until they don't have it. Gnewsense 1.0 was launched on November 2nd, 2006 and Sun announced that they would open Java 11 days later. Not that there's a direct correlation, but Gnewsense launched 1.0 without a decent JDK. I wasn't even aware of the "Java trap" before this. Or that mplayer was not free. Or difficulties in playing Youtube videos (although gnash helps a bit - funded by John Gilmore!) That GLX was unfree was known by some for a while, but it didn't really penetrate the open source community for a while - it was ripped out of Gnewsense in January 2008. SGI made an announcement in September that opened their end up, but there are still some legal minefields so it's not in Gnewsense yet.
Anyhow, I can't think of much I can't do on this that I want to. No good JDK was really the biggest thing, and now that's taken care of. I don't have time to play World of Warcraft or the like nowadays.
The positions which are out there are generally these in a large organization - The lowest end position would probably be help desk. This is a "level 1 position". If you have a BS in Computer Science you should avoid this position if possible. The position that is a step up from this is a Windows Systems Administrator. This is a "level 2" position. There are also UNIX Systems Administrators. This is a level 2 position as well, although it is generally considered a little bit above a Windows Systems Administrator. There are also more esoteric systems administrators like Mainframe administrators, but I'll stick with the more common positions. Years ago, there really were not a lot of storage administrators as it was considered just a function of a sysadmin, but storage administrator nowadays is 80% of the way to being a real, common position like the others (only 80% because 95% of ads for storage admins ask for some Windows and/or UNIX sysadmin experience).
There are other administrators as well. Network administrators deal with switches and routers. DBAs deal with administering databases.
Then there are programmers. While there's a lot of talk about how a good programmer can program in any language, they are pretty much divided by language. I would say Java is #1 right now. The #2 language would be C# (and from the little I know, most ASP.NET is done in C#, but my familiarity with this is limited). Then there's other languages as well - C, C++, PERL, Python etc.
Then there's security people. They usually sit by themselves and no one knows what they're doing.
At level 3 are engineers. They usually do engineering and architecture, have a decent amount of experience and know a lot. They can be found on the administrator and programmer side of things.
As I said, this is at larger companies. At a small company with few IT people, you can wear many hats. I am mainly a UNIX sysadmin, but I have been a Windows sysadmin (from NT 3.51 to now), a network admin running Cisco switches and routers, I have done security, putting access lists for network access. I have also installed and managed databases, and even done some programming, although the programming I've done has been automation scripts you'd expect a UNIX sysadmin to write.
There are pros and cons to each position. Sysadmins generally work from 9 to 5, but are more or less oncall 24/7. Programmers usually don't get called in the middle of the night, but unless you're lucky you often have to put in long hours at the office, especially if they're near a deadline of going live on a big project milestone. Choose your poison.
I want to go out on my own,...starting my own company... doing Java development, but I'm not sure of the best way to get started, and my family needs the stability of my current job. I'd really like to start out part-time at 5-15 hours a week to use it as supplemental income (which my family could really use at the moment), but I really don't know where to start.
You say this yet most of the people focus on the part-time moonlighting consulting part. I agree with them that moonlighting can affect your present position negatively, kill your free time and make your family time and social life lessened and more stressful, and will likely not really give you much of an income supplement. On the other hand, it is a way to make contacts and improve your technical skills, so it's all what you want.
When the dot-com boom was happening, I had a server stored at a colo facility for free. In 1998-1999 I saw so many idiots getting $10-20 million VC I started a dot com site which nowadays would be called a "Web 2.0" site. I started to get a lot of traffic, and in early 2000 I was even scoping out disk arrays for the site (it used a lot of disk space). But then in spring of 2000 the dot com market crashed, and I gave up the idea - a few months later I stopped taking new users, and I closed the site up in late 2001. I am not a programmer yet I did all the programming on the site, so that's the main thing I gained from the experience.
Nowadays I have a side business as well. Unlike the earlier one, you see a lot more cash upfront. I sell things online. Not the sexiest thing in the world, but it makes money. I haven't tallied up revenues for last year but I know I ordered over $10k of stuff from one of my suppliers. One reason I don't have more revenue is I do not want more revenue at this point. An important point which I will go into. But anyhow, on the technical end I have an osCommerce (PHP) web site which I modify when I need or want to. Right now I sell everything off of it. I was selling off of FeeBay as well, but they raised their rates too high for me. My web site is registered on Google Base/Shopping and right now I am getting 99% of my hits from that, which is free. Via it, (looking now at my osCommerce screen I see) I have had 25 separate orders from December 10th to today, with an average price of about $50 (price and shipping). I used Google Ads previously, and still like them, but I am not trying to grow revenue currently. I also wrote a suite of screen scraper stuff in PERL so as to get me advantageous information. They are helpful, but they can be a pain to maintain by myself.
Anyhow - at the beginning of this year, I called my main supplier and asked for a good price on the item we sell the most of. He gave me a price and I ordered 70 of it, and 6 each of five similar items (100 in all). I called back a month later and said I was selling more of the five similar items and could I have a break on those prices as well. I got a break on all six. I promised I would order at least 100 every quarter (he had wanted me to commit to 100 every month but I said I couldn't do that). He also said if the manufacturer started charging more they'd raise the price. I was selling about $1500 a month on eBay, plus more from Google Ads and Shopping/Base on the web site. I was often shipping out 2 to 3 items a day. Between work, night school, and everything else, this shipping got to be a pain. Also I was only making one or two dollars on each shipment, and margins got tighter as time went on. In the summer, the supplier raised their prices on everything including this stuff. I used that as a point to stop ordering at the 100-a-quarter pace, as I didn't want to keep going at that rate, and it was a good excuse to end the deal we had. I learned that shipping is time-consuming and something I didn't want to spend time on. I was considering hiring a part-time person to do shipping for maybe an hour or two 5 times a
I'll start with the one I'm most qualified to know about, with many years of UNIX systems administration under my belt - the UNIX System Administration Handbook. It reads like a book written by a bunch of sysadmins who know what they're talking about, and then telling you what you need to know.
Operating Systems Design and Implementation by Andrew Tanenbaum and Albert S Woodhull. Walks you step-by-step through Minix, a "POSIX conformant" Unix system designed primarily to teach students how operating systems work. You should probably have a *little* UNIX experience before going through it, but it will spell out in detail how things like pipes work beyond that they're STDOUT to STDIN, or how semaphores work and why it was necessary for semaphores to be invented in the first place. And so on.
K&R - not only a classic, but a useful one to boot.
Code Complete. Lots of the common wisdom, and theory to praxis to practice tried and true advice on how to right good programs - a preference for short functions that do one thing and do them well, with a limited number of variables, and with even more efforts to be conservative with regards to global variables.
Richards TCP/IP book. I use it as a reference when I need to know how to do something.
Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is a reference book FOR reference books. You often see comments in kernel and critical software which says "Knuth's TAOCP says this is the best way to do this". He states how math underlies Computer Science which is probably why I'm still stuck on the first few pages of Volume 1. Maybe I'll go back to after I take a course in discrete math and calculus.
These are the six I can think of. I can think of other books I have found useful as well - some books on assembly programming and how the processor and system works, lots of O'Reilly books like the PERL ones.
And if you're looking for some light reading, Accidental Empires is good, as well as Hackers. You might also enjoy Just For Fun (by Linus Torvalds) and Free as in Freedom (about Richard Stallman) as well.
This uses servers as an example, but what about desktops? We use Windows desktops where I am, and having AIM and Outlook open all the time is more or less mandatory for me. Plus there are these virus-scanning programs always running which eat up a chunk of resources. I open up a web browser and one or two more things and stuff starts paging out to disk. I'm a techie and sometimes need a lot of stuff open.
We have a call center on our floor, where the people make less than one third what I do, and who don't need as many windows open, yet they get the exact same desktop I do. My time is three times more valuable than theirs, yet the company gives me the same old, low-end desktop they get, resulting in more of my productive time being lost - those seconds I wait when I switch from an ssh client to Outlook and wait for Outlook to be usable add up to minutes and hours eventually. Giving everyone the same desktop makes no sense (I should note I eventually snagged more RAM, but the point is about general company policy more than my initial problems).
There's only one quality I generally rate managers by, and you could call it confidence, ability, cool-headedness or whatever. It all tends to boil down to the same thing. A manager who is incompetent, an example of the Peter Principle, afraid he is going to lose his job if it's discovered he is unqualified is someone who says yes to his boss and other business units all of the time, and makes ridiculous demands on those under him. If things go wrong he panics and flips out. A confident, able boss knows his stuff, can deal firmly with his manager or other business units when need be, doesn't flip out when something goes wrong and so on.
* The ability to print a document without the date, the web page URL etc. on the header/footer
* The ability to block images per web server (or at all) like Firefox can
I am typing this from a Gnewsense system. I really appreciate the position Stallman holds - that the sole reason he would ever use unfree software would be to write free software to replace it. Thus, until he wrote the GNU system, he used proprietary systems and components until he could write his own free one. I am not able to go that far, but for non-work related things, I usually avoid non-free software, and even at work, I am working with Red Hat and other free software a lot of the time.
I guess I wasn't following things closely as one thing I was surprised at when I started using Debian (and later Ubuntu) was that there was no free Java out there. Gcj/gij and Kaffe are out there, but neither is at a level that can run most modern Java programs. Sun said in 2006 they were releasing Java as GPLv2, but that is still going on as far as I know. No full-featured Java means problems for packages I use like Eclipse or Vuze or Freenet.
Video players also have a lot of problems. Mplayer and Debian had a long history (of no Mplayer), but over the past two years it has been brought into Debian (but not Gnewsense). Flash videos from places like Youtube is a problem as well, I use Gnash, which can see some videos on Youtube and can't with others. It's also a whole rigmarole for me to watch Youtube videos on Gnewsense, I actually paste URLs into a shell script instead of watching them through my browser.
I figure if I'm going to put binary blobs, Java, and so forth on, I might as well being using Microsoft Vista. I agree with Stallman that a system is not 100% free if it allows an automatic method of installing non-free things. I personally think Debian, while not 100% free, is still close enough to suit myself in terms of allowing the option of installing non-free stuff. I don't use Debian any more but I can appreciate their position. With regards to Fedora and Ubuntu, I do not think the "you can remove non-free stuff if you want" argument holds water. That is a slippery slope as far as I'm concerned.
I appreciate Stallman's position very much. The problem with technical people is they tend to think very logically and practically and technically and don't really appreciate what Stallman's stance does. For every Stallman out there, there are thousands of guys in suits out there who want to see Vista, or at the very least some Suse hybrid on everyone's desk. I think we are very lucky to have Stallman around. I have to admit he has been helped by the Linus's and Debian's out there which are a little more practical, and a little less ideological (although to the average suit, they seem as ideological as Stallman). But stepping too far away to me is on a slippery slope to Vista land. It's an old story - if you can't beat it, then sue it for patent crap, start making Suse Linux/Microsoft hybrids and all of that.
On the contrary, during and prior to World War II, many enlisted men wouldn't even shoot their guns at other troops. Actually, towards the end of World War I, most European armies turned their guns on their officers en masse (the French Nivelle mutinies, the German naval munities, the Russian mutinies and soldier and worker councils).
After World War II, army psychologists discovered how many men were not firing their guns at enemy soldiers and worked via various means to increase that percentage, which they did in Korea, and even more so in Vietnam.
I don't see Russian soldiers, as that old song goes, "shooting the generals on their own side" if they feel a war is wrong. As I said before, the resistance to kill resides in the enlisted men, the low-level brass on up is much less concerned about this. The US has purposefully and consciously targeted non-combat civilians in every major war it has ever fought, but stating such is a danger to the machine of empire so it becomes something that one can't state. When it is so publicly and undeniably done, such as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then it becomes rationalized, but it has happened before and since then.
I agree. I can't print documents without a header and footer (I can with Firefox, or even IE). I can't block images like with Firefox. There are things I like about Chrome, like that one tab acting funny or crashing does not affect the other tabs, or the downloading interface it has, or that it remembers my most frequently trafficked pages and makes that as my start page, or that I can move tabs around, or that new tabs expand locally etc. But I hate having to use multiple browsers just to block images, or print a page, or whatever.
Another ironic thing is, they create a browser so that Microsoft can't monopolize the viewing experience of the Google web page, but then they only release it on Microsoft's OS. I am typing at the moment in a Seamonkey browser on my Gnewsense (RMS-approved Ubuntu fork) box, if Chrome was released on Linux, maybe I'd be using it instead.
Last year we went through hundreds of resumes, and interviewed dozens of people for a position. Only three of them would I say "really knew their stuff". One of them was an old-timer who worked at some prominent places. He had a thorough understanding of the technologies, much more so than almost everyone we talked to. I recommended he be hired (he wasn't). The two deficits he had - one was the boss didn't think he'd like being oncall 24/7/365, having to do off-hours work onsite in the middle of the night and so forth. The second, which I agreed with, is he didn't know all of the latest whiz-bang stuff in the latest version of whatever. I knew though that he could easily learn all of that quickly, while some kid right out of college would probably not have that deep understanding of things that he did.
I carry a pager, and with escalation am potentially oncall 24/7/365. Our servers were down recently and we called someone who was on his honeymoon to be on the conference call. This weekend I spent hours by myself sitting in front of a screen designing a portion of a CPU's ALU for the Computer Science class I take at night. Where I work, even the project managers are all male in my group, a job traditionally which more woman are in. People are on power trips much more than they really need to be in terms of how things are designed, or who is the person putting in the effort and who knows their stuff and all of that. This is all in a second level position - first line tech support has to deal with more crap. It's ultimately an alienating experience, and a 24/7 one. I think there are aspects of computer science women are interested in, but relations of production such as they are now have them wanting out. The work creates a state of mind on off-hours that is socially unacceptable for women, a standard that men aren't held up to as much.
Of course, if you get a Phd in CS from a good college, your work experience is even better, and even more so if you're able to work for yourself in a decent capacity. But people with an advanced degree, or enough skills and capital to work for themselves can do well in many fields.
Please quantify "people", how many?
Please explain if "don't follow a set pattern" = "don't follow truth".
People: David Irving, Ernst Zündel, Horst Mahler, Pedro Varela, Jürgen Graf, Germar Rudolf. And I can think of more that were jailed as well. People like Robert Faurisson were not jailed, they were put on probation. I should add, once EU countries start jailing people for this, the number of people openly engaged in it tends to fall off.
You say the set pattern is jailing people who "don't follow truth". If every book, article and so forth published that "didn't follow truth" were jailed, then there would be a lot of people in jail. So obviously that is not the set pattern. I'm not sure what ministry of the government would be the one to determine what historical truth was, and to jail people who go against the truth, perhaps we should go back to the days where the church controlled the truth, and the local authorities took care of the Giordano Bruno's and Galileo Galilei's who went against the official truth that the sun revolves around the earth.
That Heilmann worked for the German Democratic Republic's Ministry for State Security has been well known for a while, he is objecting to claims on Wikipedia that he was a pornographer and the like, which there is very little evidence of. Of course, the person summarizing this making bullshit up has a much better chance of getting people up in arms over it, lying always helps in mud-slinging since the point of mud-slinging is to throw as much mud as possible and see how many uninformed people will believe any stuck, debunking lies is mostly a waste of effort.
In terms of free speech in Europe this is very minor, people are jailed for analyses of Nazi treatment of Jews during World War II that don't follow a set pattern. If people are being sent to jail for writing in Europe, I don't see why closing down a press or web site is that big of a deal. From my understanding of things, many Nazis tended to be barbaric, so I would be skeptical of apologetic books on how nice concentration camps were, but I don't think people should be jailed for it, or the books and presses even shut down.
A look at the Forbes 400 richest shows this to be the case. While ordinarily, looking at individuals is not helpful, concentration of capital is so skewed that in this case it is. Because Forbes 400 richest Americans collectively have more wealth than the world's poorest 2.5 billion people. So let's take a look.
Bill Gates III. The III should give it away. His father was a millionaire, one of Seattle's most prominent lawyer's and was instrumental in Microsoft's early success. Gates's mother was on charity boards with bigshots from IBM, which also helped Gates out. Forbes marks Gates as "self-made", in terms of its rankings, the half of their list who did not inherit hundreds of millions is self-made, the half that inherited hundreds of millions to billions is not self-made.
Warren Buffett - also marked as self made. His father was a Congressman and his family owned a number of stores in Omaha. He was born into Omaha's elite - of course, being part of Omaha's elite is not like being part of New York City's elite, but still.
Larry Ellison - from what I know, he is the first truly self-made person on the list. Like many on the list, he got rich by out-maneuvering IBM. He read a paper by an IBM scientists about how IBM was going to be making relational databases, and he quickly put Oracle together, beating out IBM's long drawn out development process. He also out-maneuvered competitors like Informix and Sybase.
The next four people on the list - Waltons - inherited all of their money.
One illusion of the list I think is usually self-made individuals are at the top. The four Waltons together are far richer than Bill Gates. David Rockefeller Senior, at the age of 93, is 144th on the list, but who has more influence, Rockefeller and the Rockefellers, or Gates? From listening to Gates's interviews recently, he almost sounds like he has no control over things like Microsoft's development of Vista any more, so if he can't even control that, what does he control?
I think this may be a case where correlation does not imply causation. I think it's rather obvious that a person who is spending his evenings hanging out with girls who look like Leighton Meester or Kristin Kreuk is going to be happier than those who go home and just watch people like that on their television. I think it's also obvious that reading good books is usually more enriching than watching some reality show of people competitively chasing the American dream, and who swallow a bottle of sleeping pills when they don't win. Recently I've been interviewing, so I have been reading books like Andrew Tanenbaum's Operating Systems and the like, which I already know will help me as it has answers to questions I've missed on some interviews (such as an indepth look into how pipes work in UNIX in terms of how file descriptors are handled etc.) Or I read some books on (pre)revolutionary China which expand my knowledge of the world, and which I sometimes refer to in conversations with people. Or I've read books by Sigmund Freud or Marvin Minsky on the brain, which not only are things which are interesting to discuss, but you could say have had a more significant impact on my life than some TV show would. I hear from too many people how some lame-o, poorly written book like the Fountainhead "changed their life"; but things like Freud's idea that unexpressed aggression can only be turned inward causing anxiety and depression, or Minsky's ideas on how rationality is not counterposed to being emotional in the brain, but that (to simplify it, perhaps too much) that rationality is just one of our emotions, or is parsed out in pieces among our emotions (considering all possibilities to a problem is euphoric, being very critical of each solution in turn is depressing), has probably changed my behavior somewhat.
Thinking of my own life, I usually sat down and vegetated in front of the tube when I was "beat" after coming home from work. If work was stressful, with too many hours, too little time spent on planning and too little money spent on resources, so that keeping all plates spinning fell more and more on the people working there, I come home tired and don't feel the energy to do anything else, work has sucked all my energy via too many hours and too much asked for in those hours - with the too much not being critical thinking but rushing from crisis to crisis. On the other hand, I've worked at places where hours are more reasonable and work is more enjoyable, so I have more time and energy at night to socialize or do other constructive things. Watching too much television might be a sign of unhappiness, but what are the causes of that unhappiness?
While I think the main cause of unhappiness leads to the correlation of watching too much television, I also think television has an anesthesizing and depressing effect of its own. Aside from watching the US electoral debates recently, I have very rarely watched any television. Almost all of it garbage. The only channels that are any good are the Independent Film Channel, which has good stuff sometimes, or sometimes C-SPAN or PBS has someone interesting on. The only things I used to watch regularly were the Daily Show and Colbert Report, but now I'm usually doing something else at that time.
Is he talks about capitalism in ideological terms.
In the old days, with men like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and Malthus and Say, the field they said they studied was political economy. Political economy. In the mid-late 19th century Marx said capitalism was a social relation between capitalist and proletariat. In reaction to that , "political economy" changed into something which sounds more like mathemat-ics, or phys-ics - econom-ics. Beneath all of the mathematical formulas are the same old political questions though. Keynes addressed some of this, and despite conservatives denouncing Keynesianism all the time, they certainly are not shy about using it when they want to (bailout etc.)
Going back to the two poles, Marx and a Paul-style laissez-faire capitalist, Marx says capitalism is a social and political relationship while Paul looks at it as an economic system. In this case I think Marx (and Keynes, who leans towards this idea) is right - the capitalists are concerned with protecting their political power. Paul complaining that the capitalists are not for capitalism (with this bailout) is kind of silly. This *is* capitalism. Capitalism is not some theory on a drawing board, it is a social relation involving labor, capital, wages and profit.
Why do Eric Schmidt and Warren Buffett endorse Obama? Because he is for growth-oriented, social democratic capitalism. Growth through innovation, educating your populace, with a safety net, and did I say education?
McCain's capitalism revolves around military contractors and, what I am not unafraid to call plain old imperialism. It is also based on monopoly capitalism - like the monopoly Verizon has over the local loop. Exploiting low-educated workers to the last penny.
The choice of Obama is obvious, unless you're of the worse-is-better school.
Slashdot Mirror
We used RT at my last company. Keeps track of tickets, with different ticket queues, and different user groups. People can do it by web or e-mail or both. You can search the system for old tickets as well, although it's not a good idea to search the body of the message if you have a lot of tickets going back many years.
Putting aside the discussion of real or imagined danger from the LHC, you ask why our smartest scientists are pressured (through grants etc.) to work on projects like these. Or if particle accelerators are necessary, perhaps all of this can be done in a distributed, low-tech manner.
In the 19th century, studies of the economy was called study of political economy (not study of economics). The decision to do these massive scientific projects like the LHC, or that are done within in NASA, or in a military sense. things like missile shields or the like - all of these things are done not for scientific reasons, but due to the economy part of political economy (and to a lesser extent, the political side of political economy). Or to say that again, they are not done primarily for scientific but for economic reasons. Our current economic system favors that the government spend money on centralized, high tech projects like this. It is why the US is building dozens of nuclear submaries it does not need, but does not have enough troops on the ground in Iraq or provide them with as much "armor" as they could use. It is why bridges to nowhere are built, and other expensive and unnecessary projects are done. Richard Nixon once shocked conservatives by stating his agreement with the phrase "We are all Keynesians now".
I'm not a physics expert, but I certainly have seen these white elephants pop up, everyone has. I'm sure every physicist knows the same thing you do, and has said so. Has your collective criticism done anything? No. Why? Because it is a problem within political economy, not with science or the scientific community. If you're interested in solving the problem, realize that charts and presentations and so forth showing how money is being wasted on big white elephant projects will help some, but will only go so far. You have to understand the relation of grants to the existing system of political economy, and then understand political economy, the problems in political economy, and how to properly deal with them, which goes beyond just charts and presentations. It takes effort to fix things on a one-off basis, and completely fixing all of the problems in the system would be a major, major effort, and would probably include a lot of political turmoil.
I think one thing instructive about American scientific progress in some instances was really helped by the Russians. Let me ask a question - when was NASA formed? The answer is July 1958. Now let me ask another question - when was Sputnik launched? The answer is October 1957. The newspapers up until the 1950s were full of stories of the superiority of the US economic system over the USSR's economic system. Even things like the A-bomb can be said to have been gotten through spying. However, when the USSR launched the first artificial satellite, it was a technical innovation, the first of the kind, so it couldn't be blamed on espionage and was inarguably proof of Russian superiority in this area. Within several months NASA formed and the US devoted a massive amount of money to technology. The educational system was re-done to create students with a better mathematical and scientific outlook. If one has met Russian IT people, as I have, you are probably quite often impressed with how sharp and well-educated many of them are. Anyhow, all of this is an example of how political economy pushed forward scientific development. Would we ever have spent the money to go to the moon if Sputnik was never launched? Probably not.
First - Sun had a UNIX for x86 in 1992-1993 which was superior to Linux at the time. This is not hindsight being 20-20, my manager complained to me in 1997 (we had Solaris x86 dekstops) how Sun was screwing up Solaris x86. Red Hat only got things like a decent kernel crash dump put in recently - Sun really messed this up.
Secondly - too slow to embrace "open source". Red Hat did and now their market cap is about to surpass the company that did not (soon enough anyhow).
Thirdly - how necessary was dumping the Berkeley-like SunOS for the System V-like Solaris? I personally think they put too much of an effort into this, although opinions may vary.
I watched SGI get killed in the mid-1990s. People began doing low-end graphics stuff on Macs or even Windows, and suddenly SGI only became a company for the high-end. It was easy to see that this was the future for Sun. Now Wall Street has collapsed, and the big market Sun had has dried up. And Wall Street has gone from an environment where in 2001 Linux was just a test project, to where some companies are now almost all Linux on the UNIX front, and are looking to dump their "legacy" Sun stuff. It didn't have to be this way.
I first encountered Sun in the late 1980s and until recently I still had a lot of love for them. Red Hat's lack of things like a decent kernel crash dump bugged me. But now Red Hat really does have almost all of the stuff that a critical production server needs. Windows-heavy shops like Suse a lot. I know a lot of UNIX admins and shops that develop for UNIX, including in the traditional financial companies - everywhere the new machines coming in are Linux, and a lot of places are trying to phase their Suns out. I think metaphors of a Sun set are becoming appropriate. Sun screwed up x86 and they screwed up "open source" and now Solaris is going to be relegated to the dustbin that Ultrix and HP-UX are in. If you search for admin jobs on Craigslist, Solaris doesn't even have much of a lead on AIX. With Red Hat now having journaling filing systems, virtualization, decent kernel crash dumps, production Oracle instances that run as well (or better) than on Solaris, high availability and so on and so forth, I can think of very little that Sparc's running Solaris have that a cheaper x86-64 running Red Hat doesn't have.
I watch Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott on the television all of time. He was born in rural Kansas and acts like a rube, the CNBC interviewer asked him some question and Scott's answer began "Gee whiz, I hope so." Scott is not a rube, you do not climb to the top of the Wal-Mart management chain by being a nice guy.
There is no such thing as a non-management position. Unless you have a better than normal manager, most managers want you to not only do your technical job, but want you to do their job as well. At that recent interview I mentioned, the person who would be my manager complained so many IT people just sit at their desk and do their job instead of interacting with the business units, managing their own projects etc. He said he was overburdened, and without saying so he was obviously implying he was looking for the people under him to take a lot of that burden from him. Years ago when there were layoffs at a large company I was at, one of the managers also said people who just sat at their desks and did their job as opposed to schmoozing and all of that were at risk.
That you need some base level of technical knowledge goes without saying. But the people who brown-nose managers, who inquire what the business units want and who are held in high regard by the managers and leads of the other prominent business units etc. are who stays when there are layoffs. Within every company there is a coterie of managers, leads and top IT people who may as well be a lead or manager, and you are either in it or you are not. If you are not, you are susceptible to the ax.
I have seen a lot of self-delusion on Slashdot and among IT people as to there being a gap between hard-working people who know their shit (which the person considering this always thinking they're part of this group) and slackers who are incompetent. Which is standard. But you are going beyond even this and saying technical knowledge is everything, and brown-nosing managers and schmoozing other managers and leads means little or nothing. You may find this is not the case the hard way. I have seen two tough times in this field - from about 2002-2003, and another one which started last year and will end in who knows. Finding out that you are wrong may be a very painful lesson.
In some other post someone was mentioning how things work under capitalism etc. And so they were right. Someone who thinks their technical skill is all-important, and who doesn't see how those who brown-nose managers and schmooze with other managers and leads get ahead, is certainly going to be blind to the workings of the overall economic system. Because such things are intertwined with the economic system to some extent. But if someone can't see the obvious about who people who brown-nose managers get ahead of more technically competent personnel, than going into any of the broader stuff is pointless.
I applied for a job in a large chain store a few years ago and got a question almost exactly like the last one, it was something a long the lines of "Do workers and management have the same interests at heart?" Woe to the blue collar wage worker who has read the first page of the Communist Manifesto, which says "Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat."
People are probably less cognizant of what is free and not free until they don't have it. Gnewsense 1.0 was launched on November 2nd, 2006 and Sun announced that they would open Java 11 days later. Not that there's a direct correlation, but Gnewsense launched 1.0 without a decent JDK. I wasn't even aware of the "Java trap" before this. Or that mplayer was not free. Or difficulties in playing Youtube videos (although gnash helps a bit - funded by John Gilmore!) That GLX was unfree was known by some for a while, but it didn't really penetrate the open source community for a while - it was ripped out of Gnewsense in January 2008. SGI made an announcement in September that opened their end up, but there are still some legal minefields so it's not in Gnewsense yet.
Anyhow, I can't think of much I can't do on this that I want to. No good JDK was really the biggest thing, and now that's taken care of. I don't have time to play World of Warcraft or the like nowadays.
The positions which are out there are generally these in a large organization -
The lowest end position would probably be help desk. This is a "level 1 position". If you have a BS in Computer Science you should avoid this position if possible. The position that is a step up from this is a Windows Systems Administrator. This is a "level 2" position. There are also UNIX Systems Administrators. This is a level 2 position as well, although it is generally considered a little bit above a Windows Systems Administrator. There are also more esoteric systems administrators like Mainframe administrators, but I'll stick with the more common positions. Years ago, there really were not a lot of storage administrators as it was considered just a function of a sysadmin, but storage administrator nowadays is 80% of the way to being a real, common position like the others (only 80% because 95% of ads for storage admins ask for some Windows and/or UNIX sysadmin experience).
There are other administrators as well. Network administrators deal with switches and routers. DBAs deal with administering databases.
Then there are programmers. While there's a lot of talk about how a good programmer can program in any language, they are pretty much divided by language. I would say Java is #1 right now. The #2 language would be C# (and from the little I know, most ASP.NET is done in C#, but my familiarity with this is limited). Then there's other languages as well - C, C++, PERL, Python etc.
Then there's security people. They usually sit by themselves and no one knows what they're doing.
At level 3 are engineers. They usually do engineering and architecture, have a decent amount of experience and know a lot. They can be found on the administrator and programmer side of things.
As I said, this is at larger companies. At a small company with few IT people, you can wear many hats. I am mainly a UNIX sysadmin, but I have been a Windows sysadmin (from NT 3.51 to now), a network admin running Cisco switches and routers, I have done security, putting access lists for network access. I have also installed and managed databases, and even done some programming, although the programming I've done has been automation scripts you'd expect a UNIX sysadmin to write.
There are pros and cons to each position. Sysadmins generally work from 9 to 5, but are more or less oncall 24/7. Programmers usually don't get called in the middle of the night, but unless you're lucky you often have to put in long hours at the office, especially if they're near a deadline of going live on a big project milestone. Choose your poison.
I want to go out on my own, ...starting my own company ... doing Java development, but I'm not sure of the best way to get started, and my family needs the stability of my current job. I'd really like to start out part-time at 5-15 hours a week to use it as supplemental income (which my family could really use at the moment), but I really don't know where to start.
You say this yet most of the people focus on the part-time moonlighting consulting part. I agree with them that moonlighting can affect your present position negatively, kill your free time and make your family time and social life lessened and more stressful, and will likely not really give you much of an income supplement. On the other hand, it is a way to make contacts and improve your technical skills, so it's all what you want.
When the dot-com boom was happening, I had a server stored at a colo facility for free. In 1998-1999 I saw so many idiots getting $10-20 million VC I started a dot com site which nowadays would be called a "Web 2.0" site. I started to get a lot of traffic, and in early 2000 I was even scoping out disk arrays for the site (it used a lot of disk space). But then in spring of 2000 the dot com market crashed, and I gave up the idea - a few months later I stopped taking new users, and I closed the site up in late 2001. I am not a programmer yet I did all the programming on the site, so that's the main thing I gained from the experience.
Nowadays I have a side business as well. Unlike the earlier one, you see a lot more cash upfront. I sell things online. Not the sexiest thing in the world, but it makes money. I haven't tallied up revenues for last year but I know I ordered over $10k of stuff from one of my suppliers. One reason I don't have more revenue is I do not want more revenue at this point. An important point which I will go into. But anyhow, on the technical end I have an osCommerce (PHP) web site which I modify when I need or want to. Right now I sell everything off of it. I was selling off of FeeBay as well, but they raised their rates too high for me. My web site is registered on Google Base/Shopping and right now I am getting 99% of my hits from that, which is free. Via it, (looking now at my osCommerce screen I see) I have had 25 separate orders from December 10th to today, with an average price of about $50 (price and shipping). I used Google Ads previously, and still like them, but I am not trying to grow revenue currently. I also wrote a suite of screen scraper stuff in PERL so as to get me advantageous information. They are helpful, but they can be a pain to maintain by myself.
Anyhow - at the beginning of this year, I called my main supplier and asked for a good price on the item we sell the most of. He gave me a price and I ordered 70 of it, and 6 each of five similar items (100 in all). I called back a month later and said I was selling more of the five similar items and could I have a break on those prices as well. I got a break on all six. I promised I would order at least 100 every quarter (he had wanted me to commit to 100 every month but I said I couldn't do that). He also said if the manufacturer started charging more they'd raise the price. I was selling about $1500 a month on eBay, plus more from Google Ads and Shopping/Base on the web site. I was often shipping out 2 to 3 items a day. Between work, night school, and everything else, this shipping got to be a pain. Also I was only making one or two dollars on each shipment, and margins got tighter as time went on. In the summer, the supplier raised their prices on everything including this stuff. I used that as a point to stop ordering at the 100-a-quarter pace, as I didn't want to keep going at that rate, and it was a good excuse to end the deal we had. I learned that shipping is time-consuming and something I didn't want to spend time on. I was considering hiring a part-time person to do shipping for maybe an hour or two 5 times a
I'll start with the one I'm most qualified to know about, with many years of UNIX systems administration under my belt - the UNIX System Administration Handbook. It reads like a book written by a bunch of sysadmins who know what they're talking about, and then telling you what you need to know.
Operating Systems Design and Implementation by Andrew Tanenbaum and Albert S Woodhull. Walks you step-by-step through Minix, a "POSIX conformant" Unix system designed primarily to teach students how operating systems work. You should probably have a *little* UNIX experience before going through it, but it will spell out in detail how things like pipes work beyond that they're STDOUT to STDIN, or how semaphores work and why it was necessary for semaphores to be invented in the first place. And so on.
K&R - not only a classic, but a useful one to boot.
Code Complete. Lots of the common wisdom, and theory to praxis to practice tried and true advice on how to right good programs - a preference for short functions that do one thing and do them well, with a limited number of variables, and with even more efforts to be conservative with regards to global variables.
Richards TCP/IP book. I use it as a reference when I need to know how to do something.
Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is a reference book FOR reference books. You often see comments in kernel and critical software which says "Knuth's TAOCP says this is the best way to do this". He states how math underlies Computer Science which is probably why I'm still stuck on the first few pages of Volume 1. Maybe I'll go back to after I take a course in discrete math and calculus.
These are the six I can think of. I can think of other books I have found useful as well - some books on assembly programming and how the processor and system works, lots of O'Reilly books like the PERL ones.
And if you're looking for some light reading, Accidental Empires is good, as well as Hackers. You might also enjoy Just For Fun (by Linus Torvalds) and Free as in Freedom (about Richard Stallman) as well.
This uses servers as an example, but what about desktops? We use Windows desktops where I am, and having AIM and Outlook open all the time is more or less mandatory for me. Plus there are these virus-scanning programs always running which eat up a chunk of resources. I open up a web browser and one or two more things and stuff starts paging out to disk. I'm a techie and sometimes need a lot of stuff open.
We have a call center on our floor, where the people make less than one third what I do, and who don't need as many windows open, yet they get the exact same desktop I do. My time is three times more valuable than theirs, yet the company gives me the same old, low-end desktop they get, resulting in more of my productive time being lost - those seconds I wait when I switch from an ssh client to Outlook and wait for Outlook to be usable add up to minutes and hours eventually. Giving everyone the same desktop makes no sense (I should note I eventually snagged more RAM, but the point is about general company policy more than my initial problems).
There's only one quality I generally rate managers by, and you could call it confidence, ability, cool-headedness or whatever. It all tends to boil down to the same thing. A manager who is incompetent, an example of the Peter Principle, afraid he is going to lose his job if it's discovered he is unqualified is someone who says yes to his boss and other business units all of the time, and makes ridiculous demands on those under him. If things go wrong he panics and flips out. A confident, able boss knows his stuff, can deal firmly with his manager or other business units when need be, doesn't flip out when something goes wrong and so on.
* The ability to print a document without the date, the web page URL etc. on the header/footer
* The ability to block images per web server (or at all) like Firefox can
I am typing this from a Gnewsense system. I really appreciate the position Stallman holds - that the sole reason he would ever use unfree software would be to write free software to replace it. Thus, until he wrote the GNU system, he used proprietary systems and components until he could write his own free one. I am not able to go that far, but for non-work related things, I usually avoid non-free software, and even at work, I am working with Red Hat and other free software a lot of the time.
I guess I wasn't following things closely as one thing I was surprised at when I started using Debian (and later Ubuntu) was that there was no free Java out there. Gcj/gij and Kaffe are out there, but neither is at a level that can run most modern Java programs. Sun said in 2006 they were releasing Java as GPLv2, but that is still going on as far as I know. No full-featured Java means problems for packages I use like Eclipse or Vuze or Freenet.
Video players also have a lot of problems. Mplayer and Debian had a long history (of no Mplayer), but over the past two years it has been brought into Debian (but not Gnewsense). Flash videos from places like Youtube is a problem as well, I use Gnash, which can see some videos on Youtube and can't with others. It's also a whole rigmarole for me to watch Youtube videos on Gnewsense, I actually paste URLs into a shell script instead of watching them through my browser.
I figure if I'm going to put binary blobs, Java, and so forth on, I might as well being using Microsoft Vista. I agree with Stallman that a system is not 100% free if it allows an automatic method of installing non-free things. I personally think Debian, while not 100% free, is still close enough to suit myself in terms of allowing the option of installing non-free stuff. I don't use Debian any more but I can appreciate their position. With regards to Fedora and Ubuntu, I do not think the "you can remove non-free stuff if you want" argument holds water. That is a slippery slope as far as I'm concerned.
I appreciate Stallman's position very much. The problem with technical people is they tend to think very logically and practically and technically and don't really appreciate what Stallman's stance does. For every Stallman out there, there are thousands of guys in suits out there who want to see Vista, or at the very least some Suse hybrid on everyone's desk. I think we are very lucky to have Stallman around. I have to admit he has been helped by the Linus's and Debian's out there which are a little more practical, and a little less ideological (although to the average suit, they seem as ideological as Stallman). But stepping too far away to me is on a slippery slope to Vista land. It's an old story - if you can't beat it, then sue it for patent crap, start making Suse Linux/Microsoft hybrids and all of that.
On the contrary, during and prior to World War II, many enlisted men wouldn't even shoot their guns at other troops. Actually, towards the end of World War I, most European armies turned their guns on their officers en masse (the French Nivelle mutinies, the German naval munities, the Russian mutinies and soldier and worker councils).
After World War II, army psychologists discovered how many men were not firing their guns at enemy soldiers and worked via various means to increase that percentage, which they did in Korea, and even more so in Vietnam.
I don't see Russian soldiers, as that old song goes, "shooting the generals on their own side" if they feel a war is wrong. As I said before, the resistance to kill resides in the enlisted men, the low-level brass on up is much less concerned about this. The US has purposefully and consciously targeted non-combat civilians in every major war it has ever fought, but stating such is a danger to the machine of empire so it becomes something that one can't state. When it is so publicly and undeniably done, such as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then it becomes rationalized, but it has happened before and since then.
I agree. I can't print documents without a header and footer (I can with Firefox, or even IE). I can't block images like with Firefox. There are things I like about Chrome, like that one tab acting funny or crashing does not affect the other tabs, or the downloading interface it has, or that it remembers my most frequently trafficked pages and makes that as my start page, or that I can move tabs around, or that new tabs expand locally etc. But I hate having to use multiple browsers just to block images, or print a page, or whatever.
Another ironic thing is, they create a browser so that Microsoft can't monopolize the viewing experience of the Google web page, but then they only release it on Microsoft's OS. I am typing at the moment in a Seamonkey browser on my Gnewsense (RMS-approved Ubuntu fork) box, if Chrome was released on Linux, maybe I'd be using it instead.
Last year we went through hundreds of resumes, and interviewed dozens of people for a position. Only three of them would I say "really knew their stuff". One of them was an old-timer who worked at some prominent places. He had a thorough understanding of the technologies, much more so than almost everyone we talked to. I recommended he be hired (he wasn't). The two deficits he had - one was the boss didn't think he'd like being oncall 24/7/365, having to do off-hours work onsite in the middle of the night and so forth. The second, which I agreed with, is he didn't know all of the latest whiz-bang stuff in the latest version of whatever. I knew though that he could easily learn all of that quickly, while some kid right out of college would probably not have that deep understanding of things that he did.
Of course, if you get a Phd in CS from a good college, your work experience is even better, and even more so if you're able to work for yourself in a decent capacity. But people with an advanced degree, or enough skills and capital to work for themselves can do well in many fields.
Please quantify "people", how many?
Please explain if "don't follow a set pattern" = "don't follow truth".
People: David Irving, Ernst Zündel, Horst Mahler, Pedro Varela, Jürgen Graf, Germar Rudolf. And I can think of more that were jailed as well. People like Robert Faurisson were not jailed, they were put on probation. I should add, once EU countries start jailing people for this, the number of people openly engaged in it tends to fall off.
You say the set pattern is jailing people who "don't follow truth". If every book, article and so forth published that "didn't follow truth" were jailed, then there would be a lot of people in jail. So obviously that is not the set pattern. I'm not sure what ministry of the government would be the one to determine what historical truth was, and to jail people who go against the truth, perhaps we should go back to the days where the church controlled the truth, and the local authorities took care of the Giordano Bruno's and Galileo Galilei's who went against the official truth that the sun revolves around the earth.
In terms of free speech in Europe this is very minor, people are jailed for analyses of Nazi treatment of Jews during World War II that don't follow a set pattern. If people are being sent to jail for writing in Europe, I don't see why closing down a press or web site is that big of a deal. From my understanding of things, many Nazis tended to be barbaric, so I would be skeptical of apologetic books on how nice concentration camps were, but I don't think people should be jailed for it, or the books and presses even shut down.
Bill Gates III. The III should give it away. His father was a millionaire, one of Seattle's most prominent lawyer's and was instrumental in Microsoft's early success. Gates's mother was on charity boards with bigshots from IBM, which also helped Gates out. Forbes marks Gates as "self-made", in terms of its rankings, the half of their list who did not inherit hundreds of millions is self-made, the half that inherited hundreds of millions to billions is not self-made.
Warren Buffett - also marked as self made. His father was a Congressman and his family owned a number of stores in Omaha. He was born into Omaha's elite - of course, being part of Omaha's elite is not like being part of New York City's elite, but still.
Larry Ellison - from what I know, he is the first truly self-made person on the list. Like many on the list, he got rich by out-maneuvering IBM. He read a paper by an IBM scientists about how IBM was going to be making relational databases, and he quickly put Oracle together, beating out IBM's long drawn out development process. He also out-maneuvered competitors like Informix and Sybase.
The next four people on the list - Waltons - inherited all of their money.
One illusion of the list I think is usually self-made individuals are at the top. The four Waltons together are far richer than Bill Gates. David Rockefeller Senior, at the age of 93, is 144th on the list, but who has more influence, Rockefeller and the Rockefellers, or Gates? From listening to Gates's interviews recently, he almost sounds like he has no control over things like Microsoft's development of Vista any more, so if he can't even control that, what does he control?
Thinking of my own life, I usually sat down and vegetated in front of the tube when I was "beat" after coming home from work. If work was stressful, with too many hours, too little time spent on planning and too little money spent on resources, so that keeping all plates spinning fell more and more on the people working there, I come home tired and don't feel the energy to do anything else, work has sucked all my energy via too many hours and too much asked for in those hours - with the too much not being critical thinking but rushing from crisis to crisis. On the other hand, I've worked at places where hours are more reasonable and work is more enjoyable, so I have more time and energy at night to socialize or do other constructive things. Watching too much television might be a sign of unhappiness, but what are the causes of that unhappiness?
While I think the main cause of unhappiness leads to the correlation of watching too much television, I also think television has an anesthesizing and depressing effect of its own. Aside from watching the US electoral debates recently, I have very rarely watched any television. Almost all of it garbage. The only channels that are any good are the Independent Film Channel, which has good stuff sometimes, or sometimes C-SPAN or PBS has someone interesting on. The only things I used to watch regularly were the Daily Show and Colbert Report, but now I'm usually doing something else at that time.
This is the first thing I thought of, I didn't learn of xargs until after using UNIX for a year or so, it can come in quite handy.
Going back to the two poles, Marx and a Paul-style laissez-faire capitalist, Marx says capitalism is a social and political relationship while Paul looks at it as an economic system. In this case I think Marx (and Keynes, who leans towards this idea) is right - the capitalists are concerned with protecting their political power. Paul complaining that the capitalists are not for capitalism (with this bailout) is kind of silly. This *is* capitalism. Capitalism is not some theory on a drawing board, it is a social relation involving labor, capital, wages and profit.
Why do Eric Schmidt and Warren Buffett endorse Obama? Because he is for growth-oriented, social democratic capitalism. Growth through innovation, educating your populace, with a safety net, and did I say education?
McCain's capitalism revolves around military contractors and, what I am not unafraid to call plain old imperialism. It is also based on monopoly capitalism - like the monopoly Verizon has over the local loop. Exploiting low-educated workers to the last penny.
The choice of Obama is obvious, unless you're of the worse-is-better school.