I'm now waiting to see the perspectives of Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman on resumes. I predict that most posts about those articles would concern shorts and a dunk tank, the fact that the Hurd still isn't finished, and whether or not it should be "GNU/resume."
After seeing that "India" comment in the article, I rapidly lost interest. It didn't help that he follows it up with a bullet point that begins "In the olden days..." I began to picture Joel as a grumpy old redneck (like my dad) who's about to launch into a diatribe about "them fuzzy furreiners" or "damn kids these days," and decided that I had other things to do (like hitting the back button and spending a few minutes writing this).
If I get a resume that indicates the writer's first language is not English, I'm not going to automatically discard it, or even view it in a negative way. So what if they've made some punctuation, grammar, or spelling errors? I'm hiring them to write software, not to proofread or produce works of literature.
For Joel's sake, I hope he never needs a job with any company based in India.:)
P.S. I know I didn't use the characters with the aigu accent for the word "resume." I figured I'd add that just in case Joel is reading, and thinks I'm applying for a job at his firm.
Intel doesn't want to release the specs because the Centrino's flexibility allows you to do certain things that breach government broadcast regulations.
Some analogs in other industries:
Ford doesn't want to release the specs because the Explorer's flexibility allows you to drive at certain speeds that breach government speed limits.
Smith & Wesson doesn't want to release the specs because the 500 S&W Magnum's flexibility allows you to shoot people in a manner that breaches government criminal statues.
Craftsman doesn't want to release the specs because the flexibility of the pipe wrench allows you to smash people in the head in a manner that breaches government criminal statues.
The XYZ pipe company doesn't want to release the specs because the design of the pipe allows you to use it to build a potato/sewage/pumpkin cannon in violation of government statues.
Why would Intel be worried about being liable for people using their product in an illegal manner? Is Intel really worried about someone hauling them into court because J. Random Hacker managed to get 1W out of his wireless device that's only allowed by law to produce 500mW?
My personal take is that the management of Intel, just like that of many other big companies, is primarily worried that someone will steal their "brilliant innovations," not that someone might misuse their product. Even if someone did take them to court, they would lose (as have people that have taken gun manufacturers to court for misuse of their product), and that would be that.
I'm not an astrophysicist, but based on things I've read, I wouldn't expect 100GeV stuff coming from the sun. But there are other things in the universe (black holes, magnetars) that can make photons and other stuff with that kind of energy, and much higher (I've seen some articles about cosmic rays with energies of ~10^21 eV, although nobody knows for sure where they come from).
As far as distance from the source goes, photons only get scattered if they interact with something . As long as there's not much between 'there' and 'here,' they can get through, even if it does take a while.
If feedback to the brain can really be made to work, that would open up huge possibilities for misuse -- you could make a person believe anything you wanted to, just by writing a virus/malicious code to send the right signals to the brain.
I have a suspicion that writing virii or other malicious for the brain is going to turn out to be a hell of a lot harder than writing it for any existing computer hardware/software combination. There's a huge gap between sending some small amount of input into the brain and making people "believe anything you wanted to."
It's not like someone comes and installs a pristine version of Microsoft HumanBrain 2004 (Service Pack 1) onto standardized neural hardware when a child is born. Everybody's brain is constructed and programmed from scratch, and I think it's probably too early for us to make the assumption that there's going to be a one-size-fits-all solution for feeding data into the brain. The best analogy I can think of to argue against worrying about virii at this point is this: writing a virus to infect and control many human brains would be like trying to write a virus to infect a networked population of computers that are custom-built from homemade parts, each running its own custom-written OS.
Maybe once we understand in some detail how brains work from the neuron level all the way up to conscious thought, we might spot some common patterns in human minds that might allow us to control people, but I think that's a long way off. Until then, I guess we'll just have to stick with old-fashioned things like advertising, bribes, and blackmail.:)
...or at least make it mandatory to for-profit organizations to give a certain minimum amount and take it out of their taxes?
Ack! The last thing I need is yet another roadblock to using open source....
PHB: So are there any downsides to using this open source thingy?
Me: Um, well, there is that new law the President just signed that requires the company to donate time and/or money to any OS project we use.
PHB: Oh, forget it then. See if Microsoft offers a mauve database that we can use via email instead.
And, unlike other reasons people have for not using open source, this one would be a black-and-white, non-optional, IRS-breathing-down-your-neck, gotta-fill-out-forms-in-triplicate requirement. No thanks.
As others have said already, if you like a project, then you can stroke them a check or write some code. Buy books pertaining to the project (help write one if none exist), or buy a packaged copy of the software. Even if you can only send the developer $10, many of them are very appreciative of it (in my experience at least). Who cares if it's tax-deductible or not? You're almost certainly going to be giving less than you'd pay for an equivalent commercial product.
If somebody is violating the license of an open-sourced project, that's an entirely different matter that should be taken to court if necessary. That's the only sort of government involvement I think we need here.
So with a nuclear (or even nuclear fission) blast you would have extremely low wavelengths in the gamma range. That means that your cage can have only very small holes. But for the gamma range this means that even the distance between atoms is too big - you can't just block them. That's why all these military stations are so deep in the earth: they don't aim to block gamma rays, they just want to get away from them to decrease the incoming energy (=less harmful). This works because you have cubic decay of the radiation intensity. Note that there is still no full protection: after WW III all these military bunkers would be full of cancer ridden mutants away.
This is informative? I am not a physicist, but here are a few responses that come to mind:
You're trying to apply the concept of a Faraday cage to stuff on an atomic scale; that just doesn't work.
You can "just block" gamma radiation; even water makes a decent shield in sufficient quantities (each 24 inches of water reduces the indicent radiation by a factor of 10, IIRC). I googled for a bit but couldn't find the half or tenth-thickness for granite; even if it's 10 feet, these vaults should be very safe.
Gamma radiation is emitted by the fission reaction and resulting product nuclei, not by the EMP mechanism. IIRC, EMP is actually caused by asymmetric gamma flux in a nuclear device accelerating electrons in an asymmetric pattern.
Falloff of radiation with distance is (I believe) inverse square, not cubic.
Even if the very low-frequency components of an EMP can get into the storage vault, keeping a magnetic tape or hard drive in a conductive magnetically shielded box would most likely be enough to keep them safe.
Maybe it was just because I'd planned on studying for finals during the commercial breaks, but it seemed to me that there were fewer commercial interruptions than normal on SciFi, and that there weren't significantly more commercials per break.
Anyway, it really was nice to see ships in space that 'fly' more like...well, ships in space (as opposed to airplanes in air), and kinetic weapons with or without explosives instead of some unspecified kind of directed energy weapons. There were no magical shields or tachyon beams, and nobody came up with a new principle of physics and implemented it by modifying the deflector shield in 5 minutes. And - finally - ships that lose propulsion don't come to a "complete stop" (whatever that is) in space. Hooray, momentum is finally conserved in a scifi series!:)
As an ex-Navy guy, some of the announcements, etc. on Galactica sounded familiar, as did some of the equipment. This and the more realistic physics/weapons makes me think the producers did their homework and/or got some good consultants on board to make sure things looked mostly legit.
The things that bothered me were minor and easily overlooked: (1) I thought it wasn't quite clear where all the twelve colonies were located; are they within one solar system or several? How did they luck up and have 12 habitable Earth-sized planets in a single solar system or in a few neighboring systems? (2) I got the basic idea that the anchorage was on the other side of the solar system the Galactica was currently in, but I don't recall it being explicitly spelled out. (3) How is that cloud of "stuff" kept around the anchorage station? (4) The nuke the Cylons used on Galactica apparently went off at or near the hull, and it didn't even burn/ablate off the painted "GALACTICA" on the port pod, and nobody in the vicinity experienced lethal levels of radiation.
Overall, I thought it was well done. I would love to see them take this and extend it into a series.
A degree does not a good programming employee make.
No, but a degree, Masters or Bachelors, qualifies a person to hold a programming job by definition.
Granted, someone who has completed a degree in computer science can probably jump into a programming job and get by. But if I'm given the choice of a high school grad that has been writing software (real, honest-to-goodness, used-in-the-real-world software) for five years, and somebody with a masters in CS but no day-to-day programming experience, I'm going to consider them to be pretty much equal. Both of them will bring valuable things to the job, and (even if it sounded like it in my initial post) I don't discount someone just because they have a degree.
A Masters Degree ON ITS FACE qualifies its holder to teach that field of study at a University.
Ah, yes, and I've been taught by some of those people. Most of them are clueful, but I've seen enough to know that the possession of a teaching position and/or degree status does not mean that I should automatically want to hire someone to write software for me.
This entire notion of "just because you have a degree doesn't mean you're qualified" is a pantload. It is arbitrary, subjective and unfair.
And stating that a person who holds a masters in CS is automatically more qualified than a self-taught programmer to be plugged in to a software development process would be equally subjective. Sure, the process of obtaining a degree provides a mostly objective measurement of a person's ability to "learn enough get the job done," but I'm not necessarily looking for that. I'm looking for someone who can learn enough to get the job done well. And - in my limited personal experience - college CS programs do not generally measure such a thing.
Certainly, my outlook on this is colored by my personal experiences. Maybe my opinions will change on this subject if I'm not hired in the future because somebody with less education than me has more "experience." Maybe I'll look at it as unfair then.
2) Anyone who can't get a job as a programmer now is a skill-less, freeloading slacker who got their technical skills from "Learn $TECHNOLOGY in 21 days" books.
False. There are Masters Degree holders in both engineering and scientific fields of IT study who cant rent interviews, much less jobs.
While I am not one that believes all unemployed programmers are "skill-less, freeloading slackers," I cannot agree with your reason for saying 2) is false. I have worked for (and with) people who hold masters degrees in CS and other related fields, and they couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone in a production environment. They didn't have the slightest clue about how to use CS 300-level concepts like the STL, so they implemented everything with arrays (I'm talking about people who learned C++ in college, and worked in C++ only for years on end, not people who learned some other language and have no C++ experience).
A degree does not a good programming employee make. Someone can have the ability to complete a degree, and still lack some fundamental capability that's necessary to be a good programmer. I think if I ever find myself interviewing prospective programmers I will have at least some ability to sniff out the people who won't be a good programmer, even if they do hold advanced degrees. JMNSHO:)
Good points. Here's an additional one: the Samba team doesn't have PHBs to get in the way. In my limited experience, if you're given an existing codebase and told to improve on it, that's exactly what you're expected to do - and it's all you're expected to do. You can't discover that "wow, this legacy code is crap," throw the offending chunks away and write something that works correctly and is more stable and/or secure.
The Samba team has complete freedom with their code, while the Microsoft developers do not.
I don't know what you get at your local theater for $17.50, but I would hesitate to use the terms "bucket" and "keg" to describe any drink or foor item available for purchase at most movie theaters.
The HURD is not an OS, it's another kernel for the GNU OS. But that's probably just semantics, depending on who you ask. As others have pointed out, the HURD is not ready for production use. For some time (years, maybe?), neither was the Linux kernel, but people still worked on it for fun, research, thesis papers, whatever.
The lack of need for something doesn't mean that nobody would want to work on it, or that nobody should work on it. We don't always set out to create things just because somebody needs them. Nobody needed airplanes before 1903, but there were several prople working on them. Nobody needed electrical power delivered to their homes 150 years ago, yet a lot of people were interested in various aspects of electricity and tinkered around with it. Now a significant portion of the world depends on those things.
We owe a lot to all those people that tinkered with and dreamed about things that people didn't need. We'd probably still be living in caves or thatched huts if all the dreamers and tinkerers over the centuries had listened to the friends and relatives that said "Bah! Nobody needs that! Why are you wasting your time on it?"
I can't tell if you're trying to be funny, so I'll respond as if you're not.
I wouldn't code anything new in.NET, because am hesitant to lock myself into using a closed-source foundation for a project of any significant size. At a company I used to work for, we had used a closed-source component in a very central way (in a lot of places) in a very large project. On at least one occasion we ran into a bug in the component that was difficult to work around. Since we didn't have the source, we couldn't fix it ourselves.
"Ah," someone will say, "that's why you should use proprietary components and platforms, so you don't have to worry about fixing any problems in them. You can let the experts fix it the 'right way.'" That sounds great, until you're the only customer affected by said problems, and "the experts" decide not to fix them. Then you're just stuck.
Maybe there are situations where one doesn't have a choice about what platform or tools one uses, but it's my preference to use open source stuff when possible. I don't like taking on the risk of somebody else's PHB deciding that any problems I encounter are insignificant.
Re:No Overtime No Vacation
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I was in a situation very similar to yours; a year after our (secret-up-until-the-month-before) buyout, I couldn't take it any more. Endless meetings, training requirements, and silly certification programs took up more and more work time. I got tired of working for people that got paid more than twice my salary, and yet had no discernible talent/skills (either in management or their chosen technical field) that would justify such a rate of compensation.
So I took a chance, and quit. I've been doing part-time contract work for the past few months. Some associates and I are now working on starting a company of our own. Assuming we are successful, my hope is that we can treat any future employees with the respect we expected from our former employers.
These large companies will continue to take advantage of people until they start quitting on them en masse (unless their bad business practices catch up with them first). As risky and scary as it may seem to some, the only way to rid yourself of treatment like this is to remove yourself from the employ of corporate idiots. Don't expect the government to do it for you - they can pass laws ad infinitum, but there will always be loopholes and under-the-table deals. As far as I can tell, both Democrats and Republicans owe too many favors to too many corporate interests, so I don't expect any help from them.
Once upon a time I did not really understand why unions originally came about, but now I think I have a little more appreciation for them. While I don't think I could function in a union environment, I can understand why people working for an idiotic company might prefer a union.
A few years ago I read an article suggesting that a dark age of sorts could come about because we are storing so much information in electronic form only. IIRC, their premise was that information might not get rolled forward onto new media when its original storage medium becomes obsolete.
Originally, I thought this was just a little farfetched, but I worry a little about trends I see. Some companies now seem to desire the ability to turn a profit on any innovation for all eternity by maintaining everlasting copyrights, patents and IP rights. Maybe this will be one of the driving forces that causes the loss of knowledge about old technology and "unimportant" information.
I think the US will pay a big price in the long term by passing these "mediocrity protection" laws. I would not be surprised at all to see more and more smart people begin going to countries where they won't be blocked at every turn when they try to build on other people's work.
Believe it or not I paid for my copy here at home. I guess that makes me a chump in a lot of people's minds; I just thought it was fair since I used it a lot.
Odd that my former employer - one of the biggest companies in the world - didn't have money to spare for a single license for our office. Never mind that it was installed on probably 50 computers, each of which had a properly licensed copy of WinNT or Win2000. It seemed to me that they only worried about proper licensing when it involved companies that stood a chance of giving them grief, and to hell with everyone else.
I disagree: there are unsolvable problems, of many kinds. For example, if a problem involves getting from here to the center of the Andromeda galaxy in 5 minutes using only a pair of rubber bands and a liquid lunch, then that has a vanishingly small chance of being solvable. Or find me some integer values of x, y and z that satisfy x^27 + y^27 = z^27, or find the integral of e^(-x^2) in terms of fundamental mathematical expressions.
As the 'NOT, NOT, NOT a "force field"' original post said, this is essentially a valve, not a force field. I was merely trying to point out that there is very likely little chance that such a device can be scaled up to provide anything resembling force field. It is not necessarily true that there is any way to generate StarTrek-style force fields (or shields or warp drives or tractor beams, for that matter). No, that shouldn't (and won't) stop us from trying to come up with ways to make such things, but just because we'd like it to be possible doesn't make it so.
Slashdot Mirror
There must be a witty comment that could be made about the irony of the contents of that linked page, but I'll be damned if I can think of one. :)
I'm now waiting to see the perspectives of Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman on resumes. I predict that most posts about those articles would concern shorts and a dunk tank, the fact that the Hurd still isn't finished, and whether or not it should be "GNU/resume."
After seeing that "India" comment in the article, I rapidly lost interest. It didn't help that he follows it up with a bullet point that begins "In the olden days..." I began to picture Joel as a grumpy old redneck (like my dad) who's about to launch into a diatribe about "them fuzzy furreiners" or "damn kids these days," and decided that I had other things to do (like hitting the back button and spending a few minutes writing this).
:)
If I get a resume that indicates the writer's first language is not English, I'm not going to automatically discard it, or even view it in a negative way. So what if they've made some punctuation, grammar, or spelling errors? I'm hiring them to write software, not to proofread or produce works of literature.
For Joel's sake, I hope he never needs a job with any company based in India.
P.S. I know I didn't use the characters with the aigu accent for the word "resume." I figured I'd add that just in case Joel is reading, and thinks I'm applying for a job at his firm.
Why would Intel be worried about being liable for people using their product in an illegal manner? Is Intel really worried about someone hauling them into court because J. Random Hacker managed to get 1W out of his wireless device that's only allowed by law to produce 500mW?
My personal take is that the management of Intel, just like that of many other big companies, is primarily worried that someone will steal their "brilliant innovations," not that someone might misuse their product. Even if someone did take them to court, they would lose (as have people that have taken gun manufacturers to court for misuse of their product), and that would be that.
I'm not an astrophysicist, but based on things I've read, I wouldn't expect 100GeV stuff coming from the sun. But there are other things in the universe (black holes, magnetars) that can make photons and other stuff with that kind of energy, and much higher (I've seen some articles about cosmic rays with energies of ~10^21 eV, although nobody knows for sure where they come from).
As far as distance from the source goes, photons only get scattered if they interact with something . As long as there's not much between 'there' and 'here,' they can get through, even if it does take a while.
Golly, I'm glad Microsoft is all over this one, because God knows nobody else would ever have thought to do it.
It's not like someone comes and installs a pristine version of Microsoft HumanBrain 2004 (Service Pack 1) onto standardized neural hardware when a child is born. Everybody's brain is constructed and programmed from scratch, and I think it's probably too early for us to make the assumption that there's going to be a one-size-fits-all solution for feeding data into the brain. The best analogy I can think of to argue against worrying about virii at this point is this: writing a virus to infect and control many human brains would be like trying to write a virus to infect a networked population of computers that are custom-built from homemade parts, each running its own custom-written OS.
Maybe once we understand in some detail how brains work from the neuron level all the way up to conscious thought, we might spot some common patterns in human minds that might allow us to control people, but I think that's a long way off. Until then, I guess we'll just have to stick with old-fashioned things like advertising, bribes, and blackmail.
I know we're not all idiots individually. en masse we are the equivalent of one very large, distributed idiot.
Because none of us is as dumb as all of us.
Ack! The last thing I need is yet another roadblock to using open source....
And, unlike other reasons people have for not using open source, this one would be a black-and-white, non-optional, IRS-breathing-down-your-neck, gotta-fill-out-forms-in-triplicate requirement. No thanks.
As others have said already, if you like a project, then you can stroke them a check or write some code. Buy books pertaining to the project (help write one if none exist), or buy a packaged copy of the software. Even if you can only send the developer $10, many of them are very appreciative of it (in my experience at least). Who cares if it's tax-deductible or not? You're almost certainly going to be giving less than you'd pay for an equivalent commercial product.
If somebody is violating the license of an open-sourced project, that's an entirely different matter that should be taken to court if necessary. That's the only sort of government involvement I think we need here.
This is informative? I am not a physicist, but here are a few responses that come to mind:
- You're trying to apply the concept of a Faraday cage to stuff on an atomic scale; that just doesn't work.
- You can "just block" gamma radiation; even water makes a decent shield in sufficient quantities (each 24 inches of water reduces the indicent radiation by a factor of 10, IIRC). I googled for a bit but couldn't find the half or tenth-thickness for granite; even if it's 10 feet, these vaults should be very safe.
- Gamma radiation is emitted by the fission reaction and resulting product nuclei, not by the EMP mechanism. IIRC, EMP is actually caused by asymmetric gamma flux in a nuclear device accelerating electrons in an asymmetric pattern.
- Falloff of radiation with distance is (I believe) inverse square, not cubic.
Even if the very low-frequency components of an EMP can get into the storage vault, keeping a magnetic tape or hard drive in a conductive magnetically shielded box would most likely be enough to keep them safe.So there's my 2 cents. Merry Christmas.
Be honest, you're just worried about them finding the backups of all your pr0n files.
...or finding all the backups of the 'personal photos' that Susan from Accounts and the original poster took in the storage closet....
Maybe it was just because I'd planned on studying for finals during the commercial breaks, but it seemed to me that there were fewer commercial interruptions than normal on SciFi, and that there weren't significantly more commercials per break.
:)
Anyway, it really was nice to see ships in space that 'fly' more like...well, ships in space (as opposed to airplanes in air), and kinetic weapons with or without explosives instead of some unspecified kind of directed energy weapons. There were no magical shields or tachyon beams, and nobody came up with a new principle of physics and implemented it by modifying the deflector shield in 5 minutes. And - finally - ships that lose propulsion don't come to a "complete stop" (whatever that is) in space. Hooray, momentum is finally conserved in a scifi series!
As an ex-Navy guy, some of the announcements, etc. on Galactica sounded familiar, as did some of the equipment. This and the more realistic physics/weapons makes me think the producers did their homework and/or got some good consultants on board to make sure things looked mostly legit.
The things that bothered me were minor and easily overlooked: (1) I thought it wasn't quite clear where all the twelve colonies were located; are they within one solar system or several? How did they luck up and have 12 habitable Earth-sized planets in a single solar system or in a few neighboring systems? (2) I got the basic idea that the anchorage was on the other side of the solar system the Galactica was currently in, but I don't recall it being explicitly spelled out. (3) How is that cloud of "stuff" kept around the anchorage station? (4) The nuke the Cylons used on Galactica apparently went off at or near the hull, and it didn't even burn/ablate off the painted "GALACTICA" on the port pod, and nobody in the vicinity experienced lethal levels of radiation.
Overall, I thought it was well done. I would love to see them take this and extend it into a series.
Ah, yes, and I've been taught by some of those people. Most of them are clueful, but I've seen enough to know that the possession of a teaching position and/or degree status does not mean that I should automatically want to hire someone to write software for me. And stating that a person who holds a masters in CS is automatically more qualified than a self-taught programmer to be plugged in to a software development process would be equally subjective. Sure, the process of obtaining a degree provides a mostly objective measurement of a person's ability to "learn enough get the job done," but I'm not necessarily looking for that. I'm looking for someone who can learn enough to get the job done well. And - in my limited personal experience - college CS programs do not generally measure such a thing.
Certainly, my outlook on this is colored by my personal experiences. Maybe my opinions will change on this subject if I'm not hired in the future because somebody with less education than me has more "experience." Maybe I'll look at it as unfair then.
A degree does not a good programming employee make. Someone can have the ability to complete a degree, and still lack some fundamental capability that's necessary to be a good programmer. I think if I ever find myself interviewing prospective programmers I will have at least some ability to sniff out the people who won't be a good programmer, even if they do hold advanced degrees. JMNSHO
Ah, that one's just asking for some touch-up....
Good points. Here's an additional one: the Samba team doesn't have PHBs to get in the way. In my limited experience, if you're given an existing codebase and told to improve on it, that's exactly what you're expected to do - and it's all you're expected to do. You can't discover that "wow, this legacy code is crap," throw the offending chunks away and write something that works correctly and is more stable and/or secure.
The Samba team has complete freedom with their code, while the Microsoft developers do not.
I don't know what you get at your local theater for $17.50, but I would hesitate to use the terms "bucket" and "keg" to describe any drink or foor item available for purchase at most movie theaters.
The HURD is not an OS, it's another kernel for the GNU OS. But that's probably just semantics, depending on who you ask. As others have pointed out, the HURD is not ready for production use. For some time (years, maybe?), neither was the Linux kernel, but people still worked on it for fun, research, thesis papers, whatever.
The lack of need for something doesn't mean that nobody would want to work on it, or that nobody should work on it. We don't always set out to create things just because somebody needs them. Nobody needed airplanes before 1903, but there were several prople working on them. Nobody needed electrical power delivered to their homes 150 years ago, yet a lot of people were interested in various aspects of electricity and tinkered around with it. Now a significant portion of the world depends on those things.
We owe a lot to all those people that tinkered with and dreamed about things that people didn't need. We'd probably still be living in caves or thatched huts if all the dreamers and tinkerers over the centuries had listened to the friends and relatives that said "Bah! Nobody needs that! Why are you wasting your time on it?"
I can't tell if you're trying to be funny, so I'll respond as if you're not.
.NET, because am hesitant to lock myself into using a closed-source foundation for a project of any significant size. At a company I used to work for, we had used a closed-source component in a very central way (in a lot of places) in a very large project. On at least one occasion we ran into a bug in the component that was difficult to work around. Since we didn't have the source, we couldn't fix it ourselves.
I wouldn't code anything new in
"Ah," someone will say, "that's why you should use proprietary components and platforms, so you don't have to worry about fixing any problems in them. You can let the experts fix it the 'right way.'" That sounds great, until you're the only customer affected by said problems, and "the experts" decide not to fix them. Then you're just stuck.
Maybe there are situations where one doesn't have a choice about what platform or tools one uses, but it's my preference to use open source stuff when possible. I don't like taking on the risk of somebody else's PHB deciding that any problems I encounter are insignificant.
I was in a situation very similar to yours; a year after our (secret-up-until-the-month-before) buyout, I couldn't take it any more. Endless meetings, training requirements, and silly certification programs took up more and more work time. I got tired of working for people that got paid more than twice my salary, and yet had no discernible talent/skills (either in management or their chosen technical field) that would justify such a rate of compensation.
So I took a chance, and quit. I've been doing part-time contract work for the past few months. Some associates and I are now working on starting a company of our own. Assuming we are successful, my hope is that we can treat any future employees with the respect we expected from our former employers.
These large companies will continue to take advantage of people until they start quitting on them en masse (unless their bad business practices catch up with them first). As risky and scary as it may seem to some, the only way to rid yourself of treatment like this is to remove yourself from the employ of corporate idiots. Don't expect the government to do it for you - they can pass laws ad infinitum, but there will always be loopholes and under-the-table deals. As far as I can tell, both Democrats and Republicans owe too many favors to too many corporate interests, so I don't expect any help from them.
Once upon a time I did not really understand why unions originally came about, but now I think I have a little more appreciation for them. While I don't think I could function in a union environment, I can understand why people working for an idiotic company might prefer a union.
A few years ago I read an article suggesting that a dark age of sorts could come about because we are storing so much information in electronic form only. IIRC, their premise was that information might not get rolled forward onto new media when its original storage medium becomes obsolete.
Originally, I thought this was just a little farfetched, but I worry a little about trends I see. Some companies now seem to desire the ability to turn a profit on any innovation for all eternity by maintaining everlasting copyrights, patents and IP rights. Maybe this will be one of the driving forces that causes the loss of knowledge about old technology and "unimportant" information.
I think the US will pay a big price in the long term by passing these "mediocrity protection" laws. I would not be surprised at all to see more and more smart people begin going to countries where they won't be blocked at every turn when they try to build on other people's work.
Believe it or not I paid for my copy here at home. I guess that makes me a chump in a lot of people's minds; I just thought it was fair since I used it a lot.
Odd that my former employer - one of the biggest companies in the world - didn't have money to spare for a single license for our office. Never mind that it was installed on probably 50 computers, each of which had a properly licensed copy of WinNT or Win2000. It seemed to me that they only worried about proper licensing when it involved companies that stood a chance of giving them grief, and to hell with everyone else.
I disagree: there are unsolvable problems, of many kinds. For example, if a problem involves getting from here to the center of the Andromeda galaxy in 5 minutes using only a pair of rubber bands and a liquid lunch, then that has a vanishingly small chance of being solvable. Or find me some integer values of x, y and z that satisfy x^27 + y^27 = z^27, or find the integral of e^(-x^2) in terms of fundamental mathematical expressions.
As the 'NOT, NOT, NOT a "force field"' original post said, this is essentially a valve, not a force field. I was merely trying to point out that there is very likely little chance that such a device can be scaled up to provide anything resembling force field. It is not necessarily true that there is any way to generate StarTrek-style force fields (or shields or warp drives or tractor beams, for that matter). No, that shouldn't (and won't) stop us from trying to come up with ways to make such things, but just because we'd like it to be possible doesn't make it so.