What would happen if those ISPs notice increased profit and customer satisfaction (overall) when they are paying less for resources used up by bots?
(Assuming they don't have problems with false-positives or find far too many customers being cut off, etc.)
I'm an engineer and I don't know even vaguely how much bandwidth is used at my house. I don't count up the uses I know about, but there are plenty of uses I don't know about, like automatic update checks, game usage or at worst, viruses using my bandwidth for their purposes.
People flocked to flat-rate pricing long ago because they wanted access, but didn't want the surprise bill at the end of the month.
Another question: do laws have to be enacted to verify that the bandwidth meter is accurate, the way gas stations pumps must?
Tech vs. Business is too vague a statement really. Many bits of business can't move forward without tech these days, making tech the biggest enabler of business.
I have worked in software development for both internal-only and commercial projects, and saw differences in approach and treatment of the teams. Some of the differences revolve around how money flows.
If your group or project is seen as a "cost center", then someone has a goal of reducing you as goals for costs are always to make them smaller. (By "cost center" I mean that money is spent with no possibility of revenue. Money is spent to keep things working which were already paid for.) For these projects, being able to say something like "we saved the company X tons of money this year" was good.
If your group/project is seen as a "revenue center" then there is as least a possibility that some product of yours will be used to make money somehow. These projects have pressures of their own, but I was always surprised how much easier it is to justify resources for them. Here the sales staff is almost always on your side.
So go old school. Print out your opinion, SIGN IT, fold it up and use snail-mail to send it. They'll be more impressed with a real signature attached to your opinion than any number of emails from people they don't know.
Yes, that does take time, money and effort; but not a lot. Your willingness to expend the time/money/effort tells them that this is important to you.
Perhaps one day they'll spend their effort and money to create a payment system that is cheap enough to allow low-cost songs (or online transactions in general.) Today's credit card companies charge what? $0.35 per transaction and 2% to 5% of the gross price?
Once you've broken in and gotten the customer database from 2006, why bother breaking in a year later, taking the risk all over again of getting caught and going to jail, just to get the updated 2007 database?
Is there a lot of risk? Especially if you're a cracker in China or Nigeria? What's the FBI or the FTC going to be able to do?
Also, you're not thinking like a crook. They probably worry more about DETECTION, because then the victim can close up the vulnerabilities and prevent further theft. They will be back as often as they can to get more as long as they think they can pull it off.
Scams are most effective against people who have not been scammed before. Most of the few victims I've spoken to were new to being online, or new to being online in a particular area when they were tricked. Knowing this, scammers really long to find the newbies.
I'm sure that they do everything possible to get them including: - manipulating ISP employees to get new accounts and/or addresses as soon as created - scanning net traffic at all possible points to see email going by (like that "welcome to Ameritrade" message)
- think infected zombie computers in homes and in ISP offices or your offices - scanning address books of infected computers (yours and your friends')
I once made up a new address to see how long it would take to get spam on its own. After a few months of no spam, I gave the address to a friend so he could send a file to me. Our computers on both ends were Mac OS X machines. Within 1 day of receiving his message, I got a pile of spam of all sorts. Presuming that neither of us had some unknown virus and that he had not put my address into a PC somehow, that only leaves ISP problems or traffic-sniffing to lose the address.
It would be more interesting if Newt were proposing to sacrifice something he likes. Its never interesting to listen to anyone say "there should be a law against it" just because they don't like it.
It would be better if our officials focussed on taking positions that could withstand questioning rather than taking the position that no one is allowed to question them.
Sony also directly denied the existance of the rootkit DRM at first. Then they managed to make other stupid PR moves before coming clean. At best, they appeared uncoordinated internally. So, they are a little overdrawn in the credibility bank acount.
Such a rumor is easy to believe since we all know that many a company would love to stop resales. The notion of making more money without doing any more work is a favorite in big corporations. After all, who wouldn't like that?
Automatically added edit markers at least? Makes editing quicker. I like someone's comment about being able to control ad volume (I hated it when they would wake up the baby.)
Which will only put more pressure between the very popular programs and everything else. A very popular show would be the only one to get away with this. Less popular shows would alienate viewers quickly using this.
TV Guide would love this. Another reason to actually plan your viewing.
Of course, if a surfer can't change channels away from your show, they can't change to it either. Broadcasters already try to put commercials inline with each other so you don't find anything but more commercials when you surf away.
prior art: bad DVD titles have been forcing commercials on us for years.
Or more to the point, next time I'll preview my rantings before submitting. I'm sorry. It was late. I was tired. It should have been a plain-text post rather than html.
Talk about bad first impressions.
If anyone still cares, it should have looked like this:
I've always marveled that there are scholars who can work well with complex subjects, but can't communicate them well to others. Sort of like a great chef who can't write a recipe down well enough to cooking students to follow.
Slides: sloppy stuff. The bullet points seem choppy an not well explained. The points are unclear. Slide 2 drops what seem like weak arguments to me and I haven't touched physics in a direct way since 1988.
In bullet 4 he says a pulse "implies", in the next, "therefore". "Implies" leads to "therefore"? since when?
As I recall, you can't conclude what will be observed in one frame of reference from the what is observed in the other. Paradoxes can happen.
What kind of bugs me is the insistent thinking in straight lines. Because an observer at rest would observe a doppler shift along the straight-line diagonal between clocks, he assumes the observer in the rocket must. However, Einstein showed that the rocket observer would see a light beam bending "down" (toward the bottom of the rocket) as the beam itself was accelerated. Thus, any light beam/photon that went from one clock to the other would be observed taking a curved trajectory to do so, not traveling in a straight line.
The trajectory would become more pronounced as greater acceleration was applied. That means that the path followed by the light that does go between clocks gets longer as acceleration increases. If acceleration stays the same, the light's path stays the same. (Hmmm, would that mean that relativistic distance perpendicular to motion increases as acceleration increases? I don't remember that in physics.)
If I recall correctly, there can only be doppler shift between items along the axis of relative motion (where V is not 0) No velocity, no shift. So for this fellow's argument that there is a red shift to hold, they must be moving away from each other at some velocity. ie. the distance between them must be increasing.
Back to bending light, if the acceleration stays the same, the light's path will not change to the observer on the rocket, so the distance remains constant for constant acceleration. No doppler shift. OK, I'm tired now. And only to page 5 of the intro. If there are holes in the argument already, how can the rest be good?
I've always marveled that there are scholars who can work well with complex subjects, but can't communicate them well to others. Sort of like a great chef who can't write a recipe down well enough to cooking students to follow.
Slides: sloppy stuff. The bullet points seem choppy an not well explained. The points are unclear.
Slide 2 drops what seem like weak arguements to me and I haven't touched physics in a direct way since 1988. In bullet 4 he says a pulse "implies", in the next, "therefore". "Implies" leads to "therefore"? since when? As I recall, you can't conclude what will be observed in one frame of reference from the what is observed in the other. Paradoxes can happen.
What kind of bugs me is the insistant thinking in straight lines. Because an observer at rest would observe a doppler shift along the straight-line diagonal between clocks, he assumes the observer in the rocket must. However, Einstein showed that the rocket observer would see a light beam bending "down" (toward the bottom of the rocket) as the beam itself was accelerated. Thus, any light beam/photon that went from one clock to the other would be observed taking a balistic trajectory to do so, not traveling in a straight line. The trajectory would become more pronounced as greater acceleration was applied. That means that the path followed by the light that does go between clocks gets longer as acceleration increases. If acceleration stays the same, the light's path stays the same. (Hmmm, would that mean that relativistic distance perpindicular to motion increases as acceleration increases? I don't remember that in physics.)
If I recall correctly, there can only be doppler shift between items along the axis of relative motion (where V is not 0) No velocity, no shift. So if there was a red shift, they must be moving away from each other at some velocity. If the acceleration stays the same, the light's path will not change to the observer on the rocket, so the distance remains constant for constant acceleration. No dopper shift.
OK, I'm tired now. And only to page 5 of the intro. If there are wholes already, how can the rest be good?
I've rather thought of time as an expression of change. The weird part is that with curvature of space-time, you have places of more space and less time (down a gravity well for instance.) So for the reverse, you can have places with less space and more time.
So if there are areas of space with more or less time, how can there be one age of the universe? It may look one age to us and look much older in an area which has more time.
> Ergo, if a tachyon exists, it would experience a spacial axis as "time" and the time axis as space,
Meaning that for us space is navigable (can change position in it) and time is not. For a tachyon, time is navigable, and space is not.
So time is more a measure of the amount of change available in a given space (no vector).
the real point - Do you have the power you need to make changes to Microsoft products which increase Security?
Can you overrule a sales executive's claim that Windows should ship with insecure default settings because 7,575,000 customers want it so?
Can you assert to other departments that a change that costs million of dollars, but increases security is worth the money?
My niece's boyfriend seemed to think he could get security like this by being the only network guy to know the passwords to the company's routers.
I had to point out that if he had a boss who would not know why such a situation shouldn't exist would probably also not know why the network guy shouldn't be laid off.
We're going to leave it up to the users to buy & install some of the parts of the bridge (motherboard, RAM, power supply, OS, and our app). And we're going to allow the users to replace parts of the foundation on their own so they can drive faster. And, without our OK, the users are going to install new features to the bridge (plugins, drivers, applications, viruses, spyware.)
OK, now who wants to be responsible for the bridge?
I agree with an underlying theme of Zorikin's post that the quality of your work experience is going to depend on the management chain above you. I'll rephrase some of it in my own words.
Your satisfaction many hinge on one aspect: are your expectations being realized? (Well, mostly realized?) -Yes? probably satisfied -No? probably not I find this is a big factor in any relationship, be it work, social, or romantic
Your manager: Technical? or NON-technical? What do you expect? If your manager is non-technical, how can he or she make any judgement about the technical quality of your work? How can they tell good design from bad? (Before products are shipped or deployed.) How can they tell good code from bad? A non-technical manager may be better at judging your teamwork, ethics, rudeness, promptness or other human qualities than a technical manager (who may have lost too many social skills.)
A technical manager will probably know good technical practices from bad. Good code from bad. Good design from bad. May reward low-bug-counts over being in the office for 12 hours starting at 8:00am or for dressing well. They may also be unwilling to take up necessary confrontation. They may put up with a lot of prima-donna nonsense from one highly-skilled worker at the expense of team moral.
What criteria do you expect to be more important in your career advancement? Go where those are important to the company.
---EXPECTATION SET #2 --- What kind of job you are doing? I had a supervisor once who boiled it down nicely. The job is either "revenue centric" or "cost centric".
In a revenue centric job, the software/product/thing you are producing will be sold to someone else to make money. You can probably expect that budgets are more easily gained for these kinds of prodjects. You can expect that the "glamour" is greater for these kinds of projects. Companies are all about making money, even if only by selling logo t-shirts at the company store. Hours here can be long, especially when deadlines are nearing. A company's stock price can rise and fall on meeting the delivery schedule. Pressure can be intense. I've been told (and somewhat experienced) that these jobs can be more volatile. A new product may not do well on the market. A market may move out from under a previously successful product. The team may grow or shrink with real or perceived success.
In a cost-centric job, the software/product/thing will be used to contain costs and manage things. The product costs the company money and will never be sold or generate revenue from outside. Budgets are slimmer and harder to justify. "Glamour" is low or non-existant. Metrics will hugely important to you so you can justify your raises (you must imperically show that the improvement in the previous version of the software saved the company a lot of money.) There will be more meetings as "internal customers" (ie, other employees) have better access to you than "external customers" (ie, people who don't work here.) Development life cycles are often shorter, as the customer-base is more well-known and much trainable to work around bugs. Customer contact can be much stronger, so their satisfaction with, or dissapointment in your new software can be seen immediately. And they can take you to lunch or send a memo (good or bad) directly to your boss. Hours may tend to be much more 9-to-5. The revenue of the company may not be affected if the new warehouse database is 3 weeks later than planned. These jobs (I'm told) tend to be more stable. Managers know more about their long-term needs for workers, so if one kind of work is no longer needed, workers may be re-trained to do another kind of work.
I'm sure many things can be added to these lists. The big question is, which set of expectations looks better to you?
Cubicles can be just fine, but here's a clue to know when they are NOT: when the noise coming in past them makes it harder to work.
I've had cubes that were just fine for working in, and I've had some that were awful. The better ones were dividers in smaller areas, so that just my own team was there. There was a wall between us and the main runway to the bathroom/breakroom. If there were meetings, it was my own team and I was probably attending it. One phone call generally didn't have the power to disturb many others.
The worst cube areas tended to be in a huge open space, so that many teams were there. With so many people in one space, noise is always coming from phone calls, hallway meetings, group meetings in some cube and so on. To make matters worse, these arrangement tended to have the teams' members scattered throughout, making hallway meetings more likely.
I recommend "PeopleWare: Productive Projects and Teams" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister for anyone working in computing. They help put good explanations and even dollar values on things that always seemed wrong in some corporate environments, but were hard to explain to some managers. Their chapters on cost of space versus worker productivity are very good, and they cite real research from many sources.
A quote from Chapter 9: Saving Money on Space: "Workers who reported before the exercise that their workplace was acceptably quiet were one-third more likely to deliver zero-defect work."
Slashdot Mirror
What would happen if those ISPs notice increased profit and customer satisfaction (overall) when they are paying less for resources used up by bots? (Assuming they don't have problems with false-positives or find far too many customers being cut off, etc.)
I'm an engineer and I don't know even vaguely how much bandwidth is used at my house. I don't count up the uses I know about, but there are plenty of uses I don't know about, like automatic update checks, game usage or at worst, viruses using my bandwidth for their purposes.
People flocked to flat-rate pricing long ago because they wanted access, but didn't want the surprise bill at the end of the month.
Another question: do laws have to be enacted to verify that the bandwidth meter is accurate, the way gas stations pumps must?
Tech vs. Business is too vague a statement really. Many bits of business can't move forward without tech these days, making tech the biggest enabler of business.
I have worked in software development for both internal-only and commercial projects, and saw differences in approach and treatment of the teams. Some of the differences revolve around how money flows.
If your group or project is seen as a "cost center", then someone has a goal of reducing you as goals for costs are always to make them smaller. (By "cost center" I mean that money is spent with no possibility of revenue. Money is spent to keep things working which were already paid for.) For these projects, being able to say something like "we saved the company X tons of money this year" was good.
If your group/project is seen as a "revenue center" then there is as least a possibility that some product of yours will be used to make money somehow. These projects have pressures of their own, but I was always surprised how much easier it is to justify resources for them. Here the sales staff is almost always on your side.
The lumberjacks are pretty sure they'll come out ahead when everyone starts hitting the "print" button.
So go old school. Print out your opinion, SIGN IT, fold it up and use snail-mail to send it. They'll be more impressed with a real signature attached to your opinion than any number of emails from people they don't know.
Yes, that does take time, money and effort; but not a lot. Your willingness to expend the time/money/effort tells them that this is important to you.
Perhaps one day they'll spend their effort and money to create a payment system that is cheap enough to allow low-cost songs (or online transactions in general.) Today's credit card companies charge what? $0.35 per transaction and 2% to 5% of the gross price?
Scams are most effective against people who have not been scammed before. Most of the few victims I've spoken to were new to being online, or new to being online in a particular area when they were tricked. Knowing this, scammers really long to find the newbies.
I'm sure that they do everything possible to get them including:
- manipulating ISP employees to get new accounts and/or addresses as soon as created
- scanning net traffic at all possible points to see email going by (like that "welcome to Ameritrade" message)
- think infected zombie computers in homes and in ISP offices or your offices
- scanning address books of infected computers (yours and your friends')
I once made up a new address to see how long it would take to get spam on its own. After a few months of no spam, I gave the address to a friend so he could send a file to me. Our computers on both ends were Mac OS X machines. Within 1 day of receiving his message, I got a pile of spam of all sorts. Presuming that neither of us had some unknown virus and that he had not put my address into a PC somehow, that only leaves ISP problems or traffic-sniffing to lose the address.
Big eyes in the glasses, caressing the Golden Master CD, saying "My Precious...My Precious"
It would be more interesting if Newt were proposing to sacrifice something he likes. Its never interesting to listen to anyone say "there should be a law against it" just because they don't like it. It would be better if our officials focussed on taking positions that could withstand questioning rather than taking the position that no one is allowed to question them.
We have freedom of speech so that we can find out what the government is up to and change it BEFORE it becomes necessary to resort to force.
It is illegal, but beyond that its a bad idea, as doing so tends to attract many more lawyers.
Sony also directly denied the existance of the rootkit DRM at first. Then they managed to make other stupid PR moves before coming clean. At best, they appeared uncoordinated internally. So, they are a little overdrawn in the credibility bank acount.
Such a rumor is easy to believe since we all know that many a company would love to stop resales. The notion of making more money without doing any more work is a favorite in big corporations. After all, who wouldn't like that?
The problem with tools that help everyone is that they help everyone. They help the good guys and the bad guys.
Good or evil is in the heart of the wielder.
Automatically added edit markers at least? Makes editing quicker. I like someone's comment about being able to control ad volume (I hated it when they would wake up the baby.) Which will only put more pressure between the very popular programs and everything else. A very popular show would be the only one to get away with this. Less popular shows would alienate viewers quickly using this. TV Guide would love this. Another reason to actually plan your viewing. Of course, if a surfer can't change channels away from your show, they can't change to it either. Broadcasters already try to put commercials inline with each other so you don't find anything but more commercials when you surf away. prior art: bad DVD titles have been forcing commercials on us for years.
Or more to the point, next time I'll preview my rantings before submitting. I'm sorry. It was late. I was tired. It should have been a plain-text post rather than html.
Talk about bad first impressions.
If anyone still cares, it should have looked like this:
I've always marveled that there are scholars who can work well with complex subjects, but can't communicate them well to others. Sort of like a great chef who can't write a recipe down well enough to cooking students to follow.
Slides: sloppy stuff. The bullet points seem choppy an not well explained. The points are unclear. Slide 2 drops what seem like weak arguments to me and I haven't touched physics in a direct way since 1988.
In bullet 4 he says a pulse "implies", in the next, "therefore". "Implies" leads to "therefore"? since when?
As I recall, you can't conclude what will be observed in one frame of reference from the what is observed in the other. Paradoxes can happen.
What kind of bugs me is the insistent thinking in straight lines. Because an observer at rest would observe a doppler shift along the straight-line diagonal between clocks, he assumes the observer in the rocket must. However, Einstein showed that the rocket observer would see a light beam bending "down" (toward the bottom of the rocket) as the beam itself was accelerated. Thus, any light beam/photon that went from one clock to the other would be observed taking a curved trajectory to do so, not traveling in a straight line.
The trajectory would become more pronounced as greater acceleration was applied. That means that the path followed by the light that does go between clocks gets longer as acceleration increases. If acceleration stays the same, the light's path stays the same. (Hmmm, would that mean that relativistic distance perpendicular to motion increases as acceleration increases? I don't remember that in physics.)
If I recall correctly, there can only be doppler shift between items along the axis of relative motion (where V is not 0) No velocity, no shift. So for this fellow's argument that there is a red shift to hold, they must be moving away from each other at some velocity. ie. the distance between them must be increasing.
Back to bending light, if the acceleration stays the same, the light's path will not change to the observer on the rocket, so the distance remains constant for constant acceleration. No doppler shift. OK, I'm tired now. And only to page 5 of the intro. If there are holes in the argument already, how can the rest be good?
I've always marveled that there are scholars who can work well with complex subjects, but can't communicate them well to others. Sort of like a great chef who can't write a recipe down well enough to cooking students to follow. Slides: sloppy stuff. The bullet points seem choppy an not well explained. The points are unclear. Slide 2 drops what seem like weak arguements to me and I haven't touched physics in a direct way since 1988. In bullet 4 he says a pulse "implies", in the next, "therefore". "Implies" leads to "therefore"? since when? As I recall, you can't conclude what will be observed in one frame of reference from the what is observed in the other. Paradoxes can happen. What kind of bugs me is the insistant thinking in straight lines. Because an observer at rest would observe a doppler shift along the straight-line diagonal between clocks, he assumes the observer in the rocket must. However, Einstein showed that the rocket observer would see a light beam bending "down" (toward the bottom of the rocket) as the beam itself was accelerated. Thus, any light beam/photon that went from one clock to the other would be observed taking a balistic trajectory to do so, not traveling in a straight line. The trajectory would become more pronounced as greater acceleration was applied. That means that the path followed by the light that does go between clocks gets longer as acceleration increases. If acceleration stays the same, the light's path stays the same. (Hmmm, would that mean that relativistic distance perpindicular to motion increases as acceleration increases? I don't remember that in physics.) If I recall correctly, there can only be doppler shift between items along the axis of relative motion (where V is not 0) No velocity, no shift. So if there was a red shift, they must be moving away from each other at some velocity. If the acceleration stays the same, the light's path will not change to the observer on the rocket, so the distance remains constant for constant acceleration. No dopper shift. OK, I'm tired now. And only to page 5 of the intro. If there are wholes already, how can the rest be good?
I've rather thought of time as an expression of change. The weird part is that with curvature of space-time, you have places of more space and less time (down a gravity well for instance.) So for the reverse, you can have places with less space and more time. So if there are areas of space with more or less time, how can there be one age of the universe? It may look one age to us and look much older in an area which has more time.
> Ergo, if a tachyon exists, it would experience a spacial axis as "time" and the time axis as space, Meaning that for us space is navigable (can change position in it) and time is not. For a tachyon, time is navigable, and space is not. So time is more a measure of the amount of change available in a given space (no vector).
Neither is fixed. If you have more of one, you have less of the other. They balance each other to keep the speed of light constant.
the real point - Do you have the power you need to make changes to Microsoft products which increase Security? Can you overrule a sales executive's claim that Windows should ship with insecure default settings because 7,575,000 customers want it so? Can you assert to other departments that a change that costs million of dollars, but increases security is worth the money?
My niece's boyfriend seemed to think he could get security like this by being the only network guy to know the passwords to the company's routers.
I had to point out that if he had a boss who would not know why such a situation shouldn't exist would probably also not know why the network guy shouldn't be laid off.
You've forgotten:
We're going to leave it up to the users to buy & install some of the parts of the bridge (motherboard, RAM, power supply, OS, and our app).
And we're going to allow the users to replace parts of the foundation on their own so they can drive faster.
And, without our OK, the users are going to install new features to the bridge (plugins, drivers, applications, viruses, spyware.)
OK, now who wants to be responsible for the bridge?
I agree with an underlying theme of Zorikin's post that the quality of your work experience is going to depend on the management chain above you. I'll rephrase some of it in my own words.
Your satisfaction many hinge on one aspect: are your expectations being realized? (Well, mostly realized?)
-Yes? probably satisfied
-No? probably not
I find this is a big factor in any relationship, be it work, social, or romantic
Your manager: Technical? or NON-technical? What do you expect?
If your manager is non-technical, how can he or she make any judgement about the technical quality of your work? How can they tell good design from bad? (Before products are shipped or deployed.) How can they tell good code from bad? A non-technical manager may be better at judging your teamwork, ethics, rudeness, promptness or other human qualities than a technical manager (who may have lost too many social skills.)
A technical manager will probably know good technical practices from bad. Good code from bad. Good design from bad. May reward low-bug-counts over being in the office for 12 hours starting at 8:00am or for dressing well. They may also be unwilling to take up necessary confrontation. They may put up with a lot of prima-donna nonsense from one highly-skilled worker at the expense of team moral.
What criteria do you expect to be more important in your career advancement? Go where those are important to the company.
---EXPECTATION SET #2 ---
What kind of job you are doing? I had a supervisor once who boiled it down nicely. The job is either "revenue centric" or "cost centric".
In a revenue centric job, the software/product/thing you are producing will be sold to someone else to make money. You can probably expect that budgets are more easily gained for these kinds of prodjects. You can expect that the "glamour" is greater for these kinds of projects. Companies are all about making money, even if only by selling logo t-shirts at the company store. Hours here can be long, especially when deadlines are nearing. A company's stock price can rise and fall on meeting the delivery schedule. Pressure can be intense. I've been told (and somewhat experienced) that these jobs can be more volatile. A new product may not do well on the market. A market may move out from under a previously successful product. The team may grow or shrink with real or perceived success.
In a cost-centric job, the software/product/thing will be used to contain costs and manage things. The product costs the company money and will never be sold or generate revenue from outside. Budgets are slimmer and harder to justify. "Glamour" is low or non-existant. Metrics will hugely important to you so you can justify your raises (you must imperically show that the improvement in the previous version of the software saved the company a lot of money.) There will be more meetings as "internal customers" (ie, other employees) have better access to you than "external customers" (ie, people who don't work here.) Development life cycles are often shorter, as the customer-base is more well-known and much trainable to work around bugs. Customer contact can be much stronger, so their satisfaction with, or dissapointment in your new software can be seen immediately. And they can take you to lunch or send a memo (good or bad) directly to your boss. Hours may tend to be much more 9-to-5. The revenue of the company may not be affected if the new warehouse database is 3 weeks later than planned. These jobs (I'm told) tend to be more stable. Managers know more about their long-term needs for workers, so if one kind of work is no longer needed, workers may be re-trained to do another kind of work.
I'm sure many things can be added to these lists. The big question is, which set of expectations looks better to you?
Cubicles can be just fine, but here's a clue to know when they are NOT: when the noise coming in past them makes it harder to work. I've had cubes that were just fine for working in, and I've had some that were awful. The better ones were dividers in smaller areas, so that just my own team was there. There was a wall between us and the main runway to the bathroom/breakroom. If there were meetings, it was my own team and I was probably attending it. One phone call generally didn't have the power to disturb many others. The worst cube areas tended to be in a huge open space, so that many teams were there. With so many people in one space, noise is always coming from phone calls, hallway meetings, group meetings in some cube and so on. To make matters worse, these arrangement tended to have the teams' members scattered throughout, making hallway meetings more likely. I recommend "PeopleWare: Productive Projects and Teams" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister for anyone working in computing. They help put good explanations and even dollar values on things that always seemed wrong in some corporate environments, but were hard to explain to some managers. Their chapters on cost of space versus worker productivity are very good, and they cite real research from many sources. A quote from Chapter 9: Saving Money on Space: "Workers who reported before the exercise that their workplace was acceptably quiet were one-third more likely to deliver zero-defect work."