First, I didn't say "Socialist", I said: "near-Socialist"
Ahhh. Thanks for clearing that up. For a second there it sounded like Bill Gates was a socialist. Second, I applied the term to his rhetoric -- during this particular presentation
I see. So given enough time, Bill Gates may eventually be a socialist. He's headed down that road then? Forcing the tax-payers, as some of the politicians impressed by Bill Gates' trick might attempt to do, will qualify.
I see. So then the vast majority of congress are then a "socialists" because they have supported soup kitchens, or welfare in some for or another. George W. Bush for instance.. HUGE socialist because he supported "forcing" taxpayers to give money to African countries to stop AIDS.
(you might want to look up what socialism is. Hint, it's not a dirty word for things you don't like).
he better dispense with the near-Socialist proclamations...
Bill Gates, richest man in the world, and widely derided for his destructive business practices declared a Socialist by internet "blogger".
Sorry, I just can't stop laughing. It's like an onion headline. So in your estimation is anyone who gives a bum on the street a dime a "socialist". I'm just really curious how broad the definition has become these days.
it is conceivable that the administration can do more than one thing at a time.
They can. But any administration has a limited amount of things they can do. With ALL the issues I just listed, can you really say they can address all of them before we look at the TV thing? There's a limited amount of political capital to spend for any politician. Spending it on something so trivial is stupid and wasteful. One could also point out that a lot of people get their news from TV so to them it is important.
That's why I mentioned priorities. Anyone that hasn't gotten the damn thing by NOW doesn't see it as a priority. Waiting a few months isn't going to solve that problem. The only way you'll solve it is if the TV doesn't work one day, and maybe then they'll have to go buy a box.
Believe it or not.. there was life before television. There may even be people that survive just fine without a television. I also like the dig you threw in about Democrats. As if only democrats are behind this issue.
It's not, but it's largely driven by Democrats. The senate voted for it 100%, but the votes against it in the house came from the Republicans, and was lead by a Republican (Joe Barton from TX). This is probably the first thing I can remember that the Republican party has taken leadership in that I've agreed with.
It just kills me that the Obama administration has chosen this issue to be one to focus on. Television? I watch it, I don't have a problem with it. I'm not one of those people who triumphantly claim they don't watch television as if it makes them smarter.
But let's get real here. Television just isn't all that important, especially compared to say... health care, the economy, energy, torture, "the terrorists", North Korea, Putin, Russia, global warming, the housing crisis, Israel/Palestinian, New Orleans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Melamine, Salmonella, Gitmo, domestic spying, illegal immigration, crumbling infra-structure, and a host of other issues I'd rather just forget about. Each of those expands into a whole different set of problems, and they all interact with one another.
But.. the television switchover that's been going on in some fashion for the last 10 years is one of the FIRST issues the administration has chosen to take on. Why? I have my suspicions, mostly about Democrats being in bed with Big Content (hey, whenever you refer to Big it's bad.. right?).
The justification is just bizarre. The poor and technically inept might be without TV for a little while. I know around here we like to brow-beat anyone that's "stupid", or a technophile as if they deserve what they get. I'm not a big believer in that, but I am a believer in priorities. The people who television is THAT important to have gotten a converter. The people remaining might just have to go without for a while until they decide it's a priority. But yet this whole thing gets sold to us like it's an essential element to survival. Just yesterday I saw an ad from a local broadcaster urging people to "help their neighbors" in making sure they can get the digital broadcast, as if a hurricane has torn down houses, or a snowstorm has buried everyone in snow. This isn't a disaster... It's just television.
Quick, someone tell the physicits! I'm sure they forgot all about this.
More like someone tell the journalists (the people who actually WROTE this article). It happens all the time that a scientist says something offhand like "and you could use this for processing power", and a journalist misinterprets this to mean that it's both feasible, and commercially viable.
what does this matter? I mean, isn't the BIOS tied to the architecture of the chipset anyway?
I'm not a BIOS writer, but I am a software developer.
My best guess is there are parts of a BIOS that are tied to the hardware architecture, and there are parts that aren't.
For instance, what if you want to write a BIOS that can read an EXT3 partition? Or has a TCP/IP stack in it? These might be bad examples, but I can certainly see that there's generic things to be done that aren't necessarily tied to a particular processor.
Or do these NEOs have some kind of exotic resource that I am unaware of?
The "exotic" resource would most likely be "every day minerals not stuck in earths gravity well".
It's expensive in terms of energy to lift things into orbit. This stuff is already free of earth's gravity. It _might_ be advantageous someday to mine this stuff if we wanted to make things in orbit.
Besides, a lot of the difficulty in making even an inefficient nuclear bomb at all obtaining the weapons grade fissile material.
I'd say that the vast majority of the difficulty is obtaining the fissile material. Weapons grade uranium/plutonium doesn't exactly grow on trees. Creating it yourself (and preventing anyone from stopping you) takes the power of a government.
This has essentially been the policy to control proliferation for 60 years now. Stopping the knowledge of the design details is merely security theater.
During manufacturing Boron is diffused into selected regions of purified silicon (doping) to create the transistors....Most CMOS process technologies have anticipated lifespans of 5-10yrs.
Uhh.. I've had plenty of machines that are more than 10 years old that work just fine. I've got one machine that's been running continuously for 6 1/2 years (a few reboots, but no crashes). The motherboard is approaching 10 years old.
Several years ago I had an AMD 386-40, circa 1992. I ran it as my mail server until maybe 2005 when I decided to upgrade to a faster machine and run spamassassin. It ran continuously for several years, and with the exception of HD and power supply failures ran without a hitch.
The ONLY component failures beyond the normal PS/HD failures I've seen are blown capacitors. This happened after only a few years, and was part of the larger problem people have been experiencing with bad caps.
So.. I'd say your theory about boron diffusion destroying computers in 5-10 years doesn't stand up to the evidence. There's a LOT of people with rather old everyday machines that run just fine after 10 years.
Quite the spin you've put on a quote that doesn't even indicate OUT of context what you're claiming.
Obama is simply being careful and pragmatic. Not making snap judgments is good enough advice for anyone. Saying he approves of torture because he doesn't make a snap judgment before knowing all the facts is inaccurate, and dangerous.
Wasn't one of the major complaints about the Bush administration that they made snap decisions based on ideologies without considering facts, or even after MORE information is available? i.e. Steven Colbert's: "The president believes the SAME thing on Wednesday that he believed on MONDAY.. NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENED ON TUESDAY!"
In a server environment, I can see a use for faster disks when memory is maxed out.
I can see it, but the use is fairly limited. The usage would have to be an environment where you need both extreme performance, and don't care about losing the data on the device. (The battery is only good for 4 hours, not a terribly long amount of time).
Those situations exist, but are relatively specialized.
By the way: "Breakeven" in this context is "costs no more than installing and buying grid power"
Depends on where you are. Many areas of the country have much higher electric costs, and a lot of sun. With tax credits available, it often times is a good investment.
If they need the voucher as a downpayment to get a loan, they probably can't afford to pay off the loan to begin with.
Not necessarily. There's plenty of people that could afford the car, but because of the recession they've belt-tightened because they're afraid of losing their job. A voucher might be just enough to encourage them to sell their car (especially if it's a broken down POS that they can't sell anyway).
Anyway, if lenders are concerned about defaults (a very valid concern), perhaps they should.. you know, check income levels, debt/income ratios, and all that jazz to make sure a borrower can pay back the loan?
Well, I don't know much about how well samba performs when 50 people all try to write to the same file, but my experience with samba over a windows server is that samba is much faster.
In any case judging samba performance on the basis of a very odd use-case like 50 users hitting a single file is kind of strange. Generally you don't have that many people trying to access a single file. If NT4 is better in this one respect, that's great for you and the other 10 people that are using jet in this crazy manner, but for everyone else it's irrelevant.
Our stores were dark, dated, they felt old, the store was like the weird used car salesman of electronics.
That's exactly how I've felt about CC. It always felt like I was walking into someones lair rather than a store. Of course, BB is the exact opposite extreme where it's actually TOO brightly lit, and the sales people act like they're on methamphetamine.
Despite that, the service was maybe a little better at CC. The sales people were a bit more mature and not a 18-20 year old kid who thinks he's some kind of wunderkin because he knows how to hook up the color coded DVD player to the color coded TV.
I'd also tend to agree about the prices. A couple years ago I was going to buy a SDTV TV. I first went to BB, mainly because the weird dark interior of the CC always creeped me out a little more than the way-to-brightly-lit BB. Some wunderkind latched onto me and tried to stear me towards the more expensive Sony SDTV. He was kind of smarmy while I was trying to look at all the factors, adjust the controls, or even make sure they were all receiving a digital signal (which they weren't). I eventually got annoyed with him, and drove a few blocks to the CC, mainly to compare prices. The CC sales drones were a bit more savy, and recognized I just wanted to make my own decision. I actually _did_ wind up buying the more expensive Sony SDTV the BB guy zeroed in on, but at CC. The price was exactly the same, so why go back to BB?
So.. the lost of CC is a mixed bag. I can see why they failed, but BB isn't all that attractive of any option either. Perhaps the failure of CC will open up room for another competitor, but likely not for 10 years or so.
If you have $15000 to spend on a toy, you are a rich man.
You really think so?
Plenty of people spend A LOT more on second vacation homes, a boat, or even a sports car. Most of them aren't what anyone would consider "rich". It all depends on what you value. Some people just value being able to fly more than going up to a lake cabin.
Without being privy to the financials, how do you judge whether an exec is overpaid or not?
Because nobody is worth 10/20/30 million dollars a year. That kind of money does nothing but promote corruption. Are you going to tell me that Steve Jobs' value to Apple isn't 100-200 greater than that of a code jockey in some windowless building in Cupertino?
Yes, I'm telling you that. He isn't made of magic, he's just one guy. (I guess I'm "assuming" something about the made-of-magic comment)
The thing is really caused by the media and politicians beating it up far out of proportion
Oh I think there's enough blame to go around. I blame the public for eating up what politicians and media put out. I blame the school system for not teaching critical thinking, (and the public for not insisting this is taught).
The problem is systemic, not just one particular group. It can only be solved be people waking up and stop fearing _everything_.
If you really think that engineers (or any knowledge worker for that matter) are simply "commodities", then you truly don't understand. Quality varies considerably.
Anyway, I'm not terribly concerned about the execs that earn 10 times an average workers salary. I'm terribly concerned about the ones that earn 100-200x an average workers salary. Those people are seriously overpaid, and more often than not based on graft and not performance.
I think the point was supposed to be that the challenges in software development have merely changed over time. Software does a lot more than it did 30 years ago, mostly because the tools, languages, and computing resources have gotten a lot bigger/better.
It shouldn't really be all that surprising. Programmers likely aren't a lot better or worse now than they were 30 years ago, they just face a different environment. Good software developers will always expand what they're capable of to the point where they reach the limits of the human brain. That's what we call "complexity".
its faster to teach someone to use a specific program then to teach someone a generic way of thinking that can be applied again and again...
This is true, but software is different from other areas in that the method of doing something is constantly in flux. There's also an enormous amount of software that anyone will encounter over their lifetime. So much that you can't possibly teach each program individually. People wind up learning the conventions used through osmosis anyway.
It may be easier to teach people how to use a specific version of a specific program, but over the long run you're much better off teaching people useful skills on how to learn and navigate software.
It always kind of amazes me that people like yourself think everyone is like people like yourself.
Can you really back-up statements like: Unless you have had an employer who works in those fields, your experience will be considered "hobby" and won't count for much
and: And yes, these days, interviewers/will/ call your references and check.
I've seen one dumbass that had NO idea how to run an actual server, but yet he "ran servers at home". He wouldn't survive a real interview though. You ask him any real question that didn't involve a clicky-pointy interface, and he was completely lost. (I call him an interface jockey). Many other people I've known that ran servers at home generally knew what they were doing, often times more than someone with some paper experience.
As far as references, who says that "these days" people check references? Why is it any different "these days"? I'd say it's just like it's always been. Some places will check references, some won't. Some people don't count "hobby" experience, others will see it as a sign that you're serious about your profession and don't consider it just a money-maker.
What if the cleaning program fouls a hospital's computers? Or fouls up some other important infrastructure. Do you want to be the guy standing next to the enter key in that event?
It seems to me that a computer participating in a botnet is already a threat to the public. If "cleaning gone wrong" fouls a computer that's already infected, that's really just 'collateral damage'. If it happens to be a hospitals computers, well, I'd say the real problem was the hospital trusting critical infra-structure to software that's insecure. If a hospital is really dumb enough to put infra-structure that could harm someones life on a network connected to the internet, I'd say that's criminal negligence.
I really do think we've hit the point where the people with the vulnerable computers need to start taking SOME of the blame here and stop acting as if they're all just innocent bystanders. There's certainly plenty of blame to go around. (Oh, and the software producers can sure take some of the blame as well).
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First, I didn't say "Socialist", I said: "near-Socialist"
Ahhh. Thanks for clearing that up. For a second there it sounded like Bill Gates was a socialist.
Second, I applied the term to his rhetoric -- during this particular presentation
I see. So given enough time, Bill Gates may eventually be a socialist. He's headed down that road then?
Forcing the tax-payers, as some of the politicians impressed by Bill Gates' trick might attempt to do, will qualify.
I see. So then the vast majority of congress are then a "socialists" because they have supported soup kitchens, or welfare in some for or another. George W. Bush for instance.. HUGE socialist because he supported "forcing" taxpayers to give money to African countries to stop AIDS.
(you might want to look up what socialism is. Hint, it's not a dirty word for things you don't like).
he better dispense with the near-Socialist proclamations...
Bill Gates, richest man in the world, and widely derided for his destructive business practices declared a Socialist by internet "blogger".
Sorry, I just can't stop laughing. It's like an onion headline. So in your estimation is anyone who gives a bum on the street a dime a "socialist". I'm just really curious how broad the definition has become these days.
The SF Chronicle columnist Herb Caen ran a story the next day saying that Teller was dressed as the angel of peace.
An interesting story about a man who was awarded the first Ig-nobel prize for peace:
it is conceivable that the administration can do more than one thing at a time.
They can. But any administration has a limited amount of things they can do. With ALL the issues I just listed, can you really say they can address all of them before we look at the TV thing? There's a limited amount of political capital to spend for any politician. Spending it on something so trivial is stupid and wasteful.
One could also point out that a lot of people get their news from TV so to them it is important.
That's why I mentioned priorities. Anyone that hasn't gotten the damn thing by NOW doesn't see it as a priority. Waiting a few months isn't going to solve that problem. The only way you'll solve it is if the TV doesn't work one day, and maybe then they'll have to go buy a box.
Believe it or not.. there was life before television. There may even be people that survive just fine without a television.
I also like the dig you threw in about Democrats. As if only democrats are behind this issue.
It's not, but it's largely driven by Democrats. The senate voted for it 100%, but the votes against it in the house came from the Republicans, and was lead by a Republican (Joe Barton from TX). This is probably the first thing I can remember that the Republican party has taken leadership in that I've agreed with.
It just kills me that the Obama administration has chosen this issue to be one to focus on. Television? I watch it, I don't have a problem with it. I'm not one of those people who triumphantly claim they don't watch television as if it makes them smarter.
But let's get real here. Television just isn't all that important, especially compared to say... health care, the economy, energy, torture, "the terrorists", North Korea, Putin, Russia, global warming, the housing crisis, Israel/Palestinian, New Orleans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Melamine, Salmonella, Gitmo, domestic spying, illegal immigration, crumbling infra-structure, and a host of other issues I'd rather just forget about. Each of those expands into a whole different set of problems, and they all interact with one another.
But.. the television switchover that's been going on in some fashion for the last 10 years is one of the FIRST issues the administration has chosen to take on. Why? I have my suspicions, mostly about Democrats being in bed with Big Content (hey, whenever you refer to Big it's bad.. right?).
The justification is just bizarre. The poor and technically inept might be without TV for a little while. I know around here we like to brow-beat anyone that's "stupid", or a technophile as if they deserve what they get. I'm not a big believer in that, but I am a believer in priorities. The people who television is THAT important to have gotten a converter. The people remaining might just have to go without for a while until they decide it's a priority. But yet this whole thing gets sold to us like it's an essential element to survival. Just yesterday I saw an ad from a local broadcaster urging people to "help their neighbors" in making sure they can get the digital broadcast, as if a hurricane has torn down houses, or a snowstorm has buried everyone in snow. This isn't a disaster... It's just television.
Quick, someone tell the physicits! I'm sure they forgot all about this.
More like someone tell the journalists (the people who actually WROTE this article). It happens all the time that a scientist says something offhand like "and you could use this for processing power", and a journalist misinterprets this to mean that it's both feasible, and commercially viable.
what does this matter? I mean, isn't the BIOS tied to the architecture of the chipset anyway?
I'm not a BIOS writer, but I am a software developer.
My best guess is there are parts of a BIOS that are tied to the hardware architecture, and there are parts that aren't.
For instance, what if you want to write a BIOS that can read an EXT3 partition? Or has a TCP/IP stack in it? These might be bad examples, but I can certainly see that there's generic things to be done that aren't necessarily tied to a particular processor.
Or do these NEOs have some kind of exotic resource that I am unaware of?
The "exotic" resource would most likely be "every day minerals not stuck in earths gravity well".
It's expensive in terms of energy to lift things into orbit. This stuff is already free of earth's gravity. It _might_ be advantageous someday to mine this stuff if we wanted to make things in orbit.
Besides, a lot of the difficulty in making even an inefficient nuclear bomb at all obtaining the weapons grade fissile material.
I'd say that the vast majority of the difficulty is obtaining the fissile material. Weapons grade uranium/plutonium doesn't exactly grow on trees. Creating it yourself (and preventing anyone from stopping you) takes the power of a government.
This has essentially been the policy to control proliferation for 60 years now. Stopping the knowledge of the design details is merely security theater.
During manufacturing Boron is diffused into selected regions of purified silicon (doping) to create the transistors....Most CMOS process technologies have anticipated lifespans of 5-10yrs.
Uhh.. I've had plenty of machines that are more than 10 years old that work just fine. I've got one machine that's been running continuously for 6 1/2 years (a few reboots, but no crashes). The motherboard is approaching 10 years old.
Several years ago I had an AMD 386-40, circa 1992. I ran it as my mail server until maybe 2005 when I decided to upgrade to a faster machine and run spamassassin. It ran continuously for several years, and with the exception of HD and power supply failures ran without a hitch.
The ONLY component failures beyond the normal PS/HD failures I've seen are blown capacitors. This happened after only a few years, and was part of the larger problem people have been experiencing with bad caps.
So.. I'd say your theory about boron diffusion destroying computers in 5-10 years doesn't stand up to the evidence. There's a LOT of people with rather old everyday machines that run just fine after 10 years.
Quite the spin you've put on a quote that doesn't even indicate OUT of context what you're claiming.
Obama is simply being careful and pragmatic. Not making snap judgments is good enough advice for anyone. Saying he approves of torture because he doesn't make a snap judgment before knowing all the facts is inaccurate, and dangerous.
Wasn't one of the major complaints about the Bush administration that they made snap decisions based on ideologies without considering facts, or even after MORE information is available? i.e. Steven Colbert's:
"The president believes the SAME thing on Wednesday that he believed on MONDAY.. NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENED ON TUESDAY!"
In a server environment, I can see a use for faster disks when memory is maxed out.
I can see it, but the use is fairly limited. The usage would have to be an environment where you need both extreme performance, and don't care about losing the data on the device. (The battery is only good for 4 hours, not a terribly long amount of time).
Those situations exist, but are relatively specialized.
By the way: "Breakeven" in this context is "costs no more than installing and buying grid power"
Depends on where you are. Many areas of the country have much higher electric costs, and a lot of sun. With tax credits available, it often times is a good investment.
If they need the voucher as a downpayment to get a loan, they probably can't afford to pay off the loan to begin with.
Not necessarily. There's plenty of people that could afford the car, but because of the recession they've belt-tightened because they're afraid of losing their job. A voucher might be just enough to encourage them to sell their car (especially if it's a broken down POS that they can't sell anyway).
Anyway, if lenders are concerned about defaults (a very valid concern), perhaps they should.. you know, check income levels, debt/income ratios, and all that jazz to make sure a borrower can pay back the loan?
Well, I don't know much about how well samba performs when 50 people all try to write to the same file, but my experience with samba over a windows server is that samba is much faster.
In any case judging samba performance on the basis of a very odd use-case like 50 users hitting a single file is kind of strange. Generally you don't have that many people trying to access a single file. If NT4 is better in this one respect, that's great for you and the other 10 people that are using jet in this crazy manner, but for everyone else it's irrelevant.
Our stores were dark, dated, they felt old, the store was like the weird used car salesman of electronics.
That's exactly how I've felt about CC. It always felt like I was walking into someones lair rather than a store. Of course, BB is the exact opposite extreme where it's actually TOO brightly lit, and the sales people act like they're on methamphetamine.
Despite that, the service was maybe a little better at CC. The sales people were a bit more mature and not a 18-20 year old kid who thinks he's some kind of wunderkin because he knows how to hook up the color coded DVD player to the color coded TV.
I'd also tend to agree about the prices. A couple years ago I was going to buy a SDTV TV. I first went to BB, mainly because the weird dark interior of the CC always creeped me out a little more than the way-to-brightly-lit BB. Some wunderkind latched onto me and tried to stear me towards the more expensive Sony SDTV. He was kind of smarmy while I was trying to look at all the factors, adjust the controls, or even make sure they were all receiving a digital signal (which they weren't). I eventually got annoyed with him, and drove a few blocks to the CC, mainly to compare prices. The CC sales drones were a bit more savy, and recognized I just wanted to make my own decision. I actually _did_ wind up buying the more expensive Sony SDTV the BB guy zeroed in on, but at CC. The price was exactly the same, so why go back to BB?
So.. the lost of CC is a mixed bag. I can see why they failed, but BB isn't all that attractive of any option either. Perhaps the failure of CC will open up room for another competitor, but likely not for 10 years or so.
If you have $15000 to spend on a toy, you are a rich man.
You really think so?
Plenty of people spend A LOT more on second vacation homes, a boat, or even a sports car. Most of them aren't what anyone would consider "rich". It all depends on what you value. Some people just value being able to fly more than going up to a lake cabin.
Nice. Don't give up your day job; that second career as a logician is looking mighty iffy at this point.
Your job as a manager or business owner might look a little iffy at this point if this is how you conduct a conversation.
Without being privy to the financials, how do you judge whether an exec is overpaid or not?
Because nobody is worth 10/20/30 million dollars a year. That kind of money does nothing but promote corruption.
Are you going to tell me that Steve Jobs' value to Apple isn't 100-200 greater than that of a code jockey in some windowless building in Cupertino?
Yes, I'm telling you that. He isn't made of magic, he's just one guy. (I guess I'm "assuming" something about the made-of-magic comment)
The thing is really caused by the media and politicians beating it up far out of proportion
Oh I think there's enough blame to go around. I blame the public for eating up what politicians and media put out. I blame the school system for not teaching critical thinking, (and the public for not insisting this is taught).
The problem is systemic, not just one particular group. It can only be solved be people waking up and stop fearing _everything_.
If you really think that engineers (or any knowledge worker for that matter) are simply "commodities", then you truly don't understand. Quality varies considerably.
Anyway, I'm not terribly concerned about the execs that earn 10 times an average workers salary. I'm terribly concerned about the ones that earn 100-200x an average workers salary. Those people are seriously overpaid, and more often than not based on graft and not performance.
I think the point was supposed to be that the challenges in software development have merely changed over time. Software does a lot more than it did 30 years ago, mostly because the tools, languages, and computing resources have gotten a lot bigger/better.
It shouldn't really be all that surprising. Programmers likely aren't a lot better or worse now than they were 30 years ago, they just face a different environment. Good software developers will always expand what they're capable of to the point where they reach the limits of the human brain. That's what we call "complexity".
its faster to teach someone to use a specific program then to teach someone a generic way of thinking that can be applied again and again...
This is true, but software is different from other areas in that the method of doing something is constantly in flux. There's also an enormous amount of software that anyone will encounter over their lifetime. So much that you can't possibly teach each program individually. People wind up learning the conventions used through osmosis anyway.
It may be easier to teach people how to use a specific version of a specific program, but over the long run you're much better off teaching people useful skills on how to learn and navigate software.
It always kind of amazes me that people like yourself think everyone is like people like yourself.
Can you really back-up statements like:
Unless you have had an employer who works in those fields, your experience will be considered "hobby" and won't count for much
and:
/will/ call your references and check.
And yes, these days, interviewers
I've seen one dumbass that had NO idea how to run an actual server, but yet he "ran servers at home". He wouldn't survive a real interview though. You ask him any real question that didn't involve a clicky-pointy interface, and he was completely lost. (I call him an interface jockey). Many other people I've known that ran servers at home generally knew what they were doing, often times more than someone with some paper experience.
As far as references, who says that "these days" people check references? Why is it any different "these days"? I'd say it's just like it's always been. Some places will check references, some won't. Some people don't count "hobby" experience, others will see it as a sign that you're serious about your profession and don't consider it just a money-maker.
What if the cleaning program fouls a hospital's computers? Or fouls up some other important infrastructure. Do you want to be the guy standing next to the enter key in that event?
It seems to me that a computer participating in a botnet is already a threat to the public. If "cleaning gone wrong" fouls a computer that's already infected, that's really just 'collateral damage'. If it happens to be a hospitals computers, well, I'd say the real problem was the hospital trusting critical infra-structure to software that's insecure. If a hospital is really dumb enough to put infra-structure that could harm someones life on a network connected to the internet, I'd say that's criminal negligence.
I really do think we've hit the point where the people with the vulnerable computers need to start taking SOME of the blame here and stop acting as if they're all just innocent bystanders. There's certainly plenty of blame to go around. (Oh, and the software producers can sure take some of the blame as well).