I went to a school ranked in the top 10 for their CS program(Ivy League) for a CS degree.
Since it costs big bucks, the question is: is it worth it? While it might be in my interests to say "yes", I'm not sure.
While top-20 school graduates earn more than others, there does not mean that the degree got them the money. There also exists the possibility that the qualities that got them into the top-20 school (but not the education or the degree itself) got them the money. In fact, I have heard of a study that analyzed students who got into the Ivy League but didn't go. Their earnings were the same as Ivy League graduates on average.
So I'm not sure the name buys you much, empirically speaking, based on that study. (Sorry I don't have a better pointer; I haven't scanned Google.) Maybe a CS degree is different from the general "Ivy League-or-not" question but I doubt it. If anything, CS is more meritocratic.
From personal-- albeit anecdotal-- experience, I would say that my salary isn't appreciably different due to the degree. It makes it easier to bargain with employers but at the end of the day, my salary isn't super-high or anything.
Also from personal experience, I'd say that the top-10-CS degree has had the following benefits: 1) I met a couple world-class professors and had a couple world-class classmates. Using one of the former as a reference acted like an 'oh-hes-good-no-need-to-check' flag. 2) Almost everybody in my classes was smart and most worked hard. (Hrm, is this an advantage or disadvantage in school?) While I have yet to take advantage of my relationships with them (hiring, getting hired, etc), perhaps that could pay off at some point. 3) When interviewing for a job, the employers (save a standard Microsoft interview) generally don't even bother to try to figure out if I'm smart enough; they assume it and focus on other issues in the interview (experience, skills, personality, etc.)
The quality of the teaching can probably be matched at a very strong state school (UC Berkeley, UI-Urbana/Champaign, UT-Austin, UMass-AnnArbor, wherever else I'm forgetting) for 90% of the classes you'd take. A top school (I'm getting a bit sloppy here; some top schools are strong state schools) will emphasize a lot more theory which may or may not end up being helpful for you. Some top schools (and it varies widely even among top schools) may allow/encourage working with top/name-brand professors on research projects which could give you a leg up if you wanted to do grad school in CS.
Going to a top-name school, when it comes up, also causes people to mentally put you in a different category socially. Overall I consider this a wash; as positive as it is negative. YMMV.
I pretty much went the expensive route because, once financial aid made the choice between the high-priced option at least possible, it was like "go for it! who wants to wonder 'what if...' later?" Ironically, I still wonder what if...:-) (Besides the fact that an easier college would have been nicer, there are other what-ifs... most notably I could have ended up in classes/friends? with Marc Andreesen if I had chosen to go to the University of Illinois! So you never know.)
--LP, writing a bit hurriedly
The market isn't truly free, but is mostly free...
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USAF Studies Teleportation
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I totally agree with you that the market isn't truly free.
A company or industry that's doing well can try to extract concessions from politicians (DMCA, antitrust wrist-slaps, telcom regulation, etc) and a company that's not doing well can generate political pressure to save jobs. And the former annoys me greatly, as I can tell it annoys you.
But I find it hard to dismiss the sense that there is a "mostly free" market out there, having watched closely billion-dollar companies fall (SGI), and from a distance seen others just get lost (Kodak) or shift their core activity to avoid a lingering death (IBM). The market may not be truly free, but it is a harsh mistress.
I can't find a full list of companies kicked off the Dow Jones (just 1999, 2004, 1895), but big companies even with their vast political influence cannot succeed when the market says "no thanks" to paying the hoped-for-nicely-profitable amount for their products.
The "Gift Trust Agreement" the Cheney's signed two days before he took office turns over power of attorney to a trust administrator to sell the options at some future time and to give the after-tax profits to three charities. The agreement specifies that 40% will go to the University of Wyoming (Cheney's home state), 40% will go to George Washington University's medical faculty to be used for tax-exempt charitable purposes, and 20% will go to Capital Partners for Education , a charity that provides financial aid for low-income students in Washington, DC to attend private and religious schools.
The agreement states that it is "irrevocable and may not be terminated, waived or amended," so the Cheney's can't take back their options later.
The actual PDF of the agreement can be found here.
Thank you for respecting my culture enough to accept that a bare breast may seem sexual. I hope you will also accept that there is a mountain of scientific evidence that a breast is an organ that is part of human sexual response and arousal. Now that we've dispensed with that petty argument, let's get on to your questions about harm, etc.
I do not claim any harm to the one or two kids who noticed a five-pixel breast on their TV screens for a period of under 1 second. My main objection, as I've stated in another reply, was that our current regulatory and cultural environment conditioned me not to expect a strip show in the middle of the superbowl. If our church knew that tits were on the menu, we would not have had a Superbowl party. I hope you can appreciate, despite our differing premises, this point.
While I do not expect a rational skeptic such as you seem to be to adhere to that particular moral choice that we wish to make, I hope you will grant us the freedom to pursue our choices, and some respect for our desire to have a shared understanding of what is going to appear on the TV.
I call it "truth in advertising" or "good product labeling." I recognize a concerned more liberal friend would caution me that labeling content leads to censorship, and being a good reader of 1984 I am not ignorant of those perils, although I think they are overblown if applied in this case. More information about the content, more metadata is good. It's really a matter of courtesy and good expectation-setting within any medium.
Let me explain this in a slashdot metaphor. Just as I do not want to see the goatse guy without adequate warning, despite the fact that I do not find it particularly titilating, sexual or "deeply offensive", I'd just rather not see it while in the middle of reading slashdot without a little warning first.
So it is with tits at the superbowl at church parties.
I am asking for courtesy, not for the world to adopt my sexual ethics.
Your point 4 is, in fact false, and your point 3) is strange.
Regarding point 3), a list of people interested in buying Iraqi oil is sort of a "duh". I mean, you know the US was already buying almost half of the oil sold by Iraq through the oil for food program, right?
And regarding point 4) you need to show that Cheney A) was making "mad cash" from i) "salary" and ii) "stock options". I suspect you'll have a hard time because B) Halliburton stock is actually down since Cheney took office, and C) Cheney sold all his stock and options during the 2000 campaign just so critics wouldn't carp on it. Foolish guy, eh? It didn't stop people like you from either lying or being uninformed, did it?
I'll be charitable though and proactively admit Cheney *is* getting money from Halliburton. In fact, he's continues to receive annual payments of "deferred compensation" of about $150,000 per year through 2005. This may offend your income-disparity sensibilities but I submit that it's not that unusual for a CEO of a Fortune 200 company. And you still haven't shown how the swings in Halliburton stock would affect that or otherwise get him "mad cash". I'm sure it's his evil buddies all cashing in, isn't it?
If you want a more accurate picture, I'd suggest putting together more than 4 dots next time. It's more than "1. X 2. Y. 3. ??? 4. Profit" you agree, right? And I'm not even a conservative!
--LP (who listens to both right-wing talk radio and Air America and that Liberals are so stupid when it comes to Halliburton... see this old post on this topic for supporting evidence)
Like you, I wish (at least in hindsight) that Congress should have checked Bush. And I agree that Congress has that role and responsibility.
But let's be realistic about what happened. A) There *was* token dissent. The problem was that it didn't go beyond being token. B) Congress can't be trusted with highly secret info because they leak it to satisfy their own political agendas or due to their own incompetence. It's happened over and over. C) Because of B, both citizens and Congress presume that the Executive branch has info they do not release to Congress. D) Because of C, when there is a really critical, intelligence-driven decision to be made, the US citizens and the Congress will tend to trust the president due to the additional information available to him but not to us. Plus for a congressperson there is the following pragmatic logic. For a congressperson to buck the tide, they risk a career-ending looking-foolish moment if the intel turns out to prove the Executive correct. And if the congressperson goes along with the ride, the worst they suffer is having to claim the Executive duped them and they run on the issue in the next election.
This is a structural problem with Congress. While you might claim its a moral or ethical failure of many many congresspeople, it's tough to argue they are not acting in a perfectly rational way.
The solution for this problem it to vote out your local duped congresspeople, Republican or Democrat. If they face getting voted out in either case, maybe they'll start taking responsibility for knowing what's going on and they'll start taking keeping confidential info secret more seriously.
It's an interesting observation that there's a certain similarity to the Rather memo situation in terms of proceeding with conclusions based on thin evidence.
I'd add that in both cases, there was supporting evidence that fueled both parties acceptance of certain central arguments/documents. Rather seemed to take the White House's quiet "neither confirm nor deny" stance as a confirmation. And the Bush Administration took Saddam's hiding from inspectors as a sign he had something to hide. Rather had other, new, second-hand testimony from parties who were at least somewhat close to the situation. And the Bush administration was looking at other information about Saddam seeking uranium through various channels (and I'm talking about more than just the famous bogus Niger yellowcake documents, but the other less-discussed supporting streams of evidence).
The parallels to my mind aren't 100% there though; Rather presented the memos as being legit with no caveats and no public acknowledgement about ambiguities in sourcing or documents. The administration was pretty open during the run-up that there weren't smoking guns, but that they felt a strong need to act given Saddam's past behavior and continued recalcitrance.
It is true that towards the end of the run-up, in Jan-March though, they started giving more definitive statements that Iraq definitely had WMD on certain occassions, but without really attributing to any particular piece of evidence their certainty. At the time, some people thought they were just blowing smoke. Some thought they had intel that they weren't revealing to protect 'sources and methods'. Some accepted it on faith and some on fear. Now, having found little evidence on the ground, the administration's certainty now rests more on pragmatic grounds (certainty helps our troops, fuels our will to fight the enemy at the necessary level of intensity) than on evidentiary ones. Perhaps it's true that that's where their original certainty stemmed from as well.
Kudos to you for drawing the connection, but I wouldn't rest too much analysis or "hypocrite"-namecalling on it.
Like flashing a tit at the Superbowl. Oh, the humanity!
As someone who invited a bunch of teenagers from church watch the Superbowl together at a youth group superbowl party, I found the whole halftime "tit show" disappointing.
And rather disinginuous on the part of the stars involved who had been promising "a big surprise" for weeks. There's enough sexual cr*p on TV... does it have to even be on during the Superbowl? Showing the tit was only the culmination of a build up of various gyrating actors wearing leather S&M-type outfits...
Don't get me wrong... the Superbowl broadcasters can do whatever they want to get an audience. Us people who think sexuality matters and should be encouraged to be channeled into a bonding experience between monogamous partners for the benefit of both those partners' emotional security and the emotional security of their offspring will adjust our viewing accordingly. But the broadcasters can't ultimately have it both ways; either the Superbowl broadcast is family-friendly or it's an MTV pseudo-veiled sex-fest. They've tried to stretch to catch both audiences, and last year was merely the breaking point.
In hindsight, the Britney Spears shakeathon at the prior year's halftime show should have been a warning of what was coming. Oh well, live and learn. Dunno if we'll be having a church Superbowl party next year. We'll see. Maybe we'll all just watch it at home. Or not watch it. The ads are half the reason I watch the game, and I can catch those on the Internet advertising agency websites the next day anyway.
--LP, who apologizes for letting a one-line off-topic post spur an additional lengthy off-topic alternate-perspective-posting.
(original post: "Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.")
(reply post: Sounds like exactly what the United States ended up doing. It decided it was right and it had the power to make sure it got what it wanted out of the deal. Notice the reference to oil... Not to the safety of the United States' populace. Oil. Cute.)
Dude, the problem is that if you have $2-10 billion a year free and clear in guaranteed oil income, even the U.S. can't stop you from getting nukes sooner or later. Especially if you've had 10 years practice hiding stuff from us, catching us even when we sent spy equipment in with UN inspectors. The most we can do is discourage you from using them. And if you're the type of guy who has demonstrated A) you have the willpower to use them when needed (vs. Kurds, Iranians), and B) you have the willpower to invade your neighbors to ensure your glorious future, then it's just quite possible that we might want to take you out. To ensure that, while someone else besides us (hint: we don't need it) may get that $2-10 billion a year, it damn well won't be you.
It's called "regime change". And in a nutshell I think that's why we *really* went into Iraq.
--LP
P.S. This post should not be taken as an endorsement of the above policy one way or another. It is an assessment stating that the above seemed to be the policy.
If by "Flip-Flop" you mean "Being able to change his opinions based on new information", sure.
Yeah the difference between Kerry and Bush is that Kerry can admit Bush's mistakes since he is running against him... but he agrees we have to see those mistakes through. Bush thinks we have to see those mistakes through and it's of no practical value given our soldiers and enemies to admit mistakes were made.
I somehow suspect that if Kerry made the exact same mistake, he would take Bush's position. And vice-versa.
Color me annoyed. Although I can't say disillusioned... at the end of the day I think it's fairly rational albeit a bit ideologically inconsistent... and signs of rationality are always better than foolishly consistent ideology. On both sides.
Ugh, the spin on this article, both the headline and the editorial comment by Michael, is annoying. (The actual NYTimes piece is worth reading.)
1) Old news. All this analysis that the tubes could have, or even were fairly likely to have been used for rockets, not centrifuges was known and public in Dec2002-Mar 2003. If you don't remember it, you just weren't paying attention. It's even old news that the Energy Department and State Department experts were the ones disagreeing. (What *is* news is that the caliber of experts that said the tubes were likely not for centrifuges was not made public at that time to the best of my knowledge.)
2) Michael grossly mischaracterizes the Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld position at the time as saying the "tubes were slam-dunk evidence".
That was *not* the way the White House or the administration presented the case at the time. The tone of 95% of their statements was basically... well, we're not sure but it doesn't look good. There is evidence that Saddam is reconstituting his nuclear program, etc. What are we going to do about it?
In fact, the "slam dunk" comment was made *in private* by CIA director Tenet to George Bush when Bush told the director that the case seemed weak and was that the best info he had? At least that's the story documented by Bob Woodward's book that came out a year after the war, "Plan of Attack" (WSJ opinion, a longer CBS News summary.)
Now why Tenet said it was a slam dunk is a bit of a mystery to me. And it presumably is the basis for the 2-3 statemtents pre-war made to various obscure audiences but reported in the mainstream press where Bush or Cheney said things like "we *know* Iraq has WMD"... statements that were remarkable and notable precisely because the administration was generally not so definitive in saying that Iraq had WMD... most of their statements centered around Saddam's recalcitrance in the light of various UN resolutions and inspectors.
Hey, I'll go so far as to say Bush misled the American people and/or made a poor decision to go to war, knowing that the evidence was thin. And I think that is a #1 reason not to vote for him. But I don't think a Slashdot article heading "White House Lied About Iraq Nuclear Programs" or a editorial comment that the administration was announcing that the tubes were "slam-dunk evidence" is right. It's really sad to see such misrepresentation of what happened.
... who wrote the comparator tool which was one of the two tools used in the analysis.
ESR deserves three cheers for 'scratching his itch', making a tool to compare copyrighted code. To have it actually used in the SCO case which was the annoying impetus for its creation (AFAICT) has to be a nice feeling.
I'm not an ESR fanboy, but I'll give him props when I think he deserves it and in this case I think he does.
It's kind of sad to me actually. If customers *are* talking (to Microsoft) about indemnification issues, then any of Microsoft's allegedly behind-the-scenes investments in SCO's legal actions have paid off for... for Microsoft at least. Another FUD issue successfully on the table.
And notice how the TCO issue is spun... "oh the real Linux TCO issue is versus Unix"... so one might overlook the savings one would have using Linux rather than Microsoft. Why do I run Samba rather than paying $1000 for Windows Server? Or Apache rather than $1000 for IIS+Windows Server? Why does Microsoft cripple their software so that "Software Update Services" (which allows me to check from a central workstation if the PCs running on our network are patched to fix *Microsoft's* security holes) so it only works with Windows XP Professional? In a small/medium business, I now have to run around to all the PCs to doublecheck them because Windows XP Professional on every desktop is one more expense we don't need. And one has to take care that all the laptops which come and go at the end of the day get checked. Compare that to remote administration of Linux systems where it's super-simple to login remotely in the middle of the day or scan programmatically...
Linux isn't strategic for businesses because it lets them reduce a few Unix expenses (although any shrewd businessperson will take what they can get)... it's worth pursuing so you don't end up beholden to one big vendor for all your software. Microsoft's prices *do* keep rising over the years you know...
Sybase is great at replication and has had it for a long time. It can replicate data from non-Sybase databases too. I've used it in production. (Ironically, my company is moving to MS SQL Server to take advantage of better support from our hosting provider, but frankly, I'm not religious about it.)
Thinking you are able to get a "fair and balanced" coverage anywhere is simply wrong. If you want different opinions and political diversity you need to read more than one newssource.
I read multiple sources of information precisely for the reasons you mention. Still, I think there is definitely a market for, and the technical possibility of creating, a news source or opinion forum that attempts to be evenhanded. Gathering and synthesizing multiple viewpoints takes work that not every consumer wishes to undertake.
In the UK, papers have explicit biases and the consumer is expected to pick one or weigh multiple ones. In the US, papers are expected to give straight news (and/or both sides of any story), with editorial and opinion coverage being quite separate. (In practice there is bias, but the ideal is valued and approximated to a degree that we could quibble about depending on the paper.)
From what I can tell, the US approach seems to have started shifting over the last decade to a more UK-like system and frankly, I'm not sure whether that's just "acknowledging reality" (consistent with your view that fair and balanced coverage is impossible), or whether it's an ultimately unhealthy abandonment of the "fair and balanced" ideal that imposes an unncessary searching+synthesis cost for all readers on even the most basic news.
There's a difference between being "fair and balanced" and being "diverse".
I think politics.slashdot.org will be fine on the "diverse" score. I've read your journal for quite a while Pudge and it stands out as a reasoned conservative perspective. I've seen some diversity amongst other editors but not enough to know whether its my imagination or not.
I guess the navel-gazing question in my mind is whether the diversity that I take for granted will result in "fair and balanced".
To illustrate what I mean, Alan Colmes is a liberal on the Fox News Network, but I don't consider the overall channel to be exactly "fair and balanced" (despite their tagline). ("Somewhat fair and balanced" or "more fair and balanced" maybe... but anyway ignoring my views on Fox I presume you get my point.)
Your presence guarantees some diversity, I'd agree; but it does not guarantee "fair and balanced" coverage or editorial viewpoint presentation.
That outcome will rest in the integrity and decision-making process of the Slashdot leadership. I should add that I'm generally a big fan of Slashdot and those who started/run it (pioneers of distributed moderation), so I'm not casting FUD on the whole enterprise. I'm just remarking that you all haven't been tested in quite this way. And probably the user response will shape the results a fair bit. As someone who downloaded the first version of Slash in an attempt to create a political forum but didn't put forth the requisite effort to drive its success, I wish you all the best.
It is a pretty typical dot-com in this regard: check out how many coders they had!
Adam Wern, CEO Eric Wahlforss, CIO Friedrich-Wilhelm Graf, Chief Designer Nadia Gisler, Design Consultant Joni Braun, Photographer Tav, CTO Stephan Karpischek, COO David Thunman, Logistics Fubbi Minister of desinfo Antje Taiga, Businesswoman t, Chief Strategic Officer enki Chief, Security Officer Ben Pohl, Documentation
No wonder they got only to Milestone 2 of 4! (Not unlike other firms we know.) And like dot-coms, they had no problem raising the initial investment. And they got good buzz. Not a bad parallel!
Now if only they can figure out how to string the story along some more, maybe they can make some real money!
A brilliant fun idea. Oh, and like dot-coms I bet it started fun and got really damn stressful at the end.
It's true that Linux is an imitation of prior Unixes.
But remember folks,
Linux copying the behavior of various UNIXes is stealing, but Microsoft copying the behavior of the Mac or Xerox Star is not. And Compaq's reverse engineering of IBM PC BIOS is what caused the death of the PC industry!
Oh wait.
--LP
P.S. I'd be nervous if the press release said AdTI president and pundit Kenneth Brown was tracing the code... but it says he "traces the free software movement over three decades". Hrm, good luck there, Ken!
Economic espionage has caused serious harm to European companies in the past, Monyk said. "With this project we will be making an essential contribution to the economic independence of Europe."
Translated: "with this project, we can bribe third-parties without getting caught."
Or: "with this project, we will re-enable our large European multinational corporations to bribe rich but corrupt third-world governments without having to worry about Echelon-based 'allies' catching us."
(OK OK, don't take my cynical remarks too seriously. But if you haven't read about this angle, it is pretty close to the US position as outlined in this ex-CIA director's remarks on it here and here. Don't forget the ever-needed grain of salt with all things Echelon.)
My private theory is that the bubble collapse is actually a side-effect of Y2K.
In two ways:
1) Tech spending boomed before Y2K as companies spent huge amounts on both hardware and software efforts to make sure they were ready for Y2K, had backup systems, etc. There was a huge drop in IT spending right after Y2K since companies already had all the equipment they needed. This hammered Q1 earnings for tech stocks in March/April and boom, the Internet bubble burst. This fact (reduced revenue and profits of tech firms) is well-documented in earnings reports of that time frame. I'm very surprised this hasn't gotten more press, other than that nobody wants to give the naysayers any credit for maybe have been, in some way they never anticipated, right.
2) The Federal Reserve had flooded the money supply right around Y2K to ensure there were no financial liquidity crises. When they re-tightened up (or at least stopped increasing the money supply) post-Y2K... boom, instant fiscal tightening contributing to a recession. I've never seen this documented, at least the re-tightened part, so take it with a grain of salt.
And - most of all - Steve Case is a big, fat loser. This was always more familiar territory for me, since that was exactly how most of the world regarded Case throughout his career. For most of it, he had always and forever been a loser."
Watching Steve Case from a distance, he always looked like one of those underestimated but really really shrewd guys to me.
I never paid for AOL (though I did use a free trial once), and I never owned the stock, but in my book, Steve Case is a big winner.
A) I give him credit for being able to, on at least one occassion which I was familiar with, bring innovative technology to market. I loved his the Commmodore 64 BBS service, QuantumLink, which he later turned into AOL. It had some of the same "least common denominator" aspects as AOL, but it also could do streaming download+playing of MIDI sound files at the same time I was typing and reading in chat rooms over a 1200 baud modem. Pretty fancy for 1987 in the DOS PC era.
B) The AOL service may have been lame and its customers clueless, but hey, Steve Case stayed focused on the customers and making stuff easy to use for them. Props for that. Even if it wasn't perfect, it was a lot better than most of the alternatives-- I could safely recommend it to friends/acquaintances for many years without having to go to their house and/or do maintenance on their PCs to get/keep it working.
C) He managed to grow his company like a madman for well over a decade, continued to hold onto and grow the business for 6+ years despite it being wildly overvalued, and then sold it out for a huge premium 3 months before the Internet stock market bubble burst. To me that is just an incredible feat of timing and business acumen, and one that was almost totally optimal for his shareholders (albeit not Time Warner's shareholders... but hey, he was the seller, not the buyer!) That wasn't just dumb luck. He knew what he was doing. He probably didn't know the bubble would be over in 3 months, but he knew his stock was way overvalued (and not just due to some sales shenanigans.) Hey, *I* knew in 1996-1999 that AOL was overvalued, but if I were CEO, could I have picked a better time to sell out and maximize the bubble-value for my shareholders? No way!
D) And I appreciate any money they poured into Mozilla.
As an ex-analyst who moved back to software development, I would add a few other things for my fellow Slashdotters:
1) If you want to be an good analyst, you need to be able to write English; preferrably fairly easily and fairly well. Speaking skills can be learned on the job. Overcoming writers block probably can't.
2) Tech skills can give an analyst an important filter and BS detector which can be a competitive advantage versus other analysts. However, ability to communicate with techies does not pay off. Techies aren't spending thousands of dollars for insight. Managers are. Ability to communicate with management and market the value of the service you provide is the paramount skill for an analyst.
3) In my view, the important milestones that lie ahead for Linux all have to do with success as a database server. That's where the most critical business data is, that's where the money is, and if a company trusts their data to Linux, what will they not trust Linux for? It's also a technology space that's complementary to Linux's existing strengths in webservers and web services, and it plays well to Linux's developer (not end-user)-orientation while avoiding the desktop usability and UI-training issues where Linux continues to play catch-up. In terms of specific milestones, I would track the percentage of applications being deployed in Fortune 500 with Linux hosting the database. And I would track the growth of applications employing open source databases. A Linux firmly entrenched as a database platform is a Linux not easily dislodged by Microsoft-induced desktop trendiness. Witness the billions upon billions continually invested in mainframes and AS/400 if you doubt me.
4) I'm personally agnostic about whether Linux will ever make headway on the desktop. If pressed for a conclusion, I confess that I doubt it, although if I was afraid of the Linux advocate hordes, I might couch it like Stacy did: "potential for a lot of innovation"... "a lot of potential for Linux to become a much stronger play there"... "next milestone to look for is when Linux takes 10% of the market"... "In that time we'll see tremendous growth"...'"Tremendous" means that we're going to see it move from being a fringe market..." I suppose I agree with Stacy about her actual conclusions, but the phrasing struck me as being about as optimistically phrased as one could expect given the underlying statements about Linux on the desktop.
More constructively, in terms of adding to that 'desktop milestone' analysis, another milestone to watch for is when Linux desktop developers spend more time trying to understand how the Mac OS X guys tackle the usability problem than they spend trying to copy the Windows approach blindly in the techy details while missing the bigger picture.
I used to get paid 20k... now I'll settle for 2 karma. Ah the price of doing what you love...;-)
Nah, I respect you. I pretty much agree with your last statement "Sometimes stored procedures are a win." and even "MySQL is an adequate job for most tasks"...
I just disagree with your earlier statement that "Stored procedures and other similar features are just bloat, and gain you no real advantage".
I think there is some advantage, in situations where you have a transaction that wraps together a bunch of sql statements. That sort of transactional locking normally requires a decent scalability hit, particularly since you are holding that database transactional lock open waiting for all the milliseconds of both network latency and, for complicated queries, network bandwidth. Stored proceedures give you a straightforward way of avoiding all network latency and traffic, reducing the overhead of the transactional integrity substantially.
Seeing as you've worked with Sybase stored proceedures on your resume, perhaps I'm belaboring the obvious. It wasn't obvious to me that you had that experience when I read your first post (and I imagine it wasn't obvious to the AC either.) And having myself coded sybase stored proceedures, I'd have to say that it's such a constraining experience that I can appreciate the "it sucks" attitude...;)
Maybe you should pay attention to the logical parts of his argument rather than the rhetorical ones? Like:
Stored procedures provide a higher level of performance, and provide *MUCH* more scalability. It's just common sense - moving *all* of the data away from the DB, passing across the network, and to business logic in the application will always be slower than having the logic in the DB itself (where it can be processed without having to move it across the slowest link in the chain.)
I don't have mod points but I do have database experience with enterprise databases as well as with MySQL and I think I'd side with ajs on the subject of stored procedures.
Two businesses in completely different lines of work don't usually make good merger partners. They're neither competitors nor in a supplier/customer relationship.
If they're doing two totally different things, then there's no product overlap (and thus need to reconcile drop otherwise valuable product lines). So that's usually *good* for a merger. Particularly if the two companies sell to the same sort of customers in a reasonable number of cases. If that's true there might be some sales savings from calling on the customer with one sales call from a combined entity rather than two sales calls if run totally independently. Likewise there would be ability for product tie-ins, bundling, marketing, advertising, etc.
Google sells keywords to online businesses, while Akamai sells DNS and video hosting. I think you could have a business that does all of the above and benefits from having them all under the same roof. So I'm not as pessimistic as you.
Also, GE does pretty well at buying companies that are totally different. I think where things go wrong is if the management of the acquiring company doesn't have the expertise to even understand/manage the acquired company business; e.g. Vivendi buying SGI or something. I think the Google management would be able to manage a business like Akamai's; it's reasonably similar in many respects.
I'd consider it if I were Google. Whether I'd pursue it or not would depend on Akamai's valuation and how much money they're losing, as well as whether the distraction is worth the synergy and whether Google couldn't build it for cheaper than they could buy it (with opportunity costs factored in).
Slashdot Mirror
I went to a school ranked in the top 10 for their CS program(Ivy League) for a CS degree.
:-) (Besides the fact that an easier college would have been nicer, there are other what-ifs... most notably I could have ended up in classes/friends? with Marc Andreesen if I had chosen to go to the University of Illinois! So you never know.)
Since it costs big bucks, the question is: is it worth it? While it might be in my interests to say "yes", I'm not sure.
While top-20 school graduates earn more than others, there does not mean that the degree got them the money. There also exists the possibility that the qualities that got them into the top-20 school (but not the education or the degree itself) got them the money. In fact, I have heard of a study that analyzed students who got into the Ivy League but didn't go. Their earnings were the same as Ivy League graduates on average.
So I'm not sure the name buys you much, empirically speaking, based on that study. (Sorry I don't have a better pointer; I haven't scanned Google.) Maybe a CS degree is different from the general "Ivy League-or-not" question but I doubt it. If anything, CS is more meritocratic.
From personal-- albeit anecdotal-- experience, I would say that my salary isn't appreciably different due to the degree. It makes it easier to bargain with employers but at the end of the day, my salary isn't super-high or anything.
Also from personal experience, I'd say that the top-10-CS degree has had the following benefits: 1) I met a couple world-class professors and had a couple world-class classmates. Using one of the former as a reference acted like an 'oh-hes-good-no-need-to-check' flag. 2) Almost everybody in my classes was smart and most worked hard. (Hrm, is this an advantage or disadvantage in school?) While I have yet to take advantage of my relationships with them (hiring, getting hired, etc), perhaps that could pay off at some point. 3) When interviewing for a job, the employers (save a standard Microsoft interview) generally don't even bother to try to figure out if I'm smart enough; they assume it and focus on other issues in the interview (experience, skills, personality, etc.)
The quality of the teaching can probably be matched at a very strong state school (UC Berkeley, UI-Urbana/Champaign, UT-Austin, UMass-AnnArbor, wherever else I'm forgetting) for 90% of the classes you'd take. A top school (I'm getting a bit sloppy here; some top schools are strong state schools) will emphasize a lot more theory which may or may not end up being helpful for you. Some top schools (and it varies widely even among top schools) may allow/encourage working with top/name-brand professors on research projects which could give you a leg up if you wanted to do grad school in CS.
Going to a top-name school, when it comes up, also causes people to mentally put you in a different category socially. Overall I consider this a wash; as positive as it is negative. YMMV.
I pretty much went the expensive route because, once financial aid made the choice between the high-priced option at least possible, it was like "go for it! who wants to wonder 'what if...' later?" Ironically, I still wonder what if...
--LP, writing a bit hurriedly
I totally agree with you that the market isn't truly free.
A company or industry that's doing well can try to extract concessions from politicians (DMCA, antitrust wrist-slaps, telcom regulation, etc) and a company that's not doing well can generate political pressure to save jobs. And the former annoys me greatly, as I can tell it annoys you.
But I find it hard to dismiss the sense that there is a "mostly free" market out there, having watched closely billion-dollar companies fall (SGI), and from a distance seen others just get lost (Kodak) or shift their core activity to avoid a lingering death (IBM). The market may not be truly free, but it is a harsh mistress.
I can't find a full list of companies kicked off the Dow Jones (just 1999, 2004, 1895), but big companies even with their vast political influence cannot succeed when the market says "no thanks" to paying the hoped-for-nicely-profitable amount for their products.
--LP
To quote from a nice paragraph at factcheck.org:
The "Gift Trust Agreement" the Cheney's signed two days before he took office turns over power of attorney to a trust administrator to sell the options at some future time and to give the after-tax profits to three charities. The agreement specifies that 40% will go to the University of Wyoming (Cheney's home state), 40% will go to George Washington University's medical faculty to be used for tax-exempt charitable purposes, and 20% will go to Capital Partners for Education , a charity that provides financial aid for low-income students in Washington, DC to attend private and religious schools.
The agreement states that it is "irrevocable and may not be terminated, waived or amended," so the Cheney's can't take back their options later.
The actual PDF of the agreement can be found here.
That's what you're talking about, right?
--LP
Thank you for respecting my culture enough to accept that a bare breast may seem sexual. I hope you will also accept that there is a mountain of scientific evidence that a breast is an organ that is part of human sexual response and arousal. Now that we've dispensed with that petty argument, let's get on to your questions about harm, etc.
I do not claim any harm to the one or two kids who noticed a five-pixel breast on their TV screens for a period of under 1 second. My main objection, as I've stated in another reply, was that our current regulatory and cultural environment conditioned me not to expect a strip show in the middle of the superbowl. If our church knew that tits were on the menu, we would not have had a Superbowl party. I hope you can appreciate, despite our differing premises, this point.
While I do not expect a rational skeptic such as you seem to be to adhere to that particular moral choice that we wish to make, I hope you will grant us the freedom to pursue our choices, and some respect for our desire to have a shared understanding of what is going to appear on the TV.
I call it "truth in advertising" or "good product labeling." I recognize a concerned more liberal friend would caution me that labeling content leads to censorship, and being a good reader of 1984 I am not ignorant of those perils, although I think they are overblown if applied in this case. More information about the content, more metadata is good. It's really a matter of courtesy and good expectation-setting within any medium.
Let me explain this in a slashdot metaphor. Just as I do not want to see the goatse guy without adequate warning, despite the fact that I do not find it particularly titilating, sexual or "deeply offensive", I'd just rather not see it while in the middle of reading slashdot without a little warning first.
So it is with tits at the superbowl at church parties.
I am asking for courtesy, not for the world to adopt my sexual ethics.
--LP, who has also lived in Austin btw
Your point 4 is, in fact false, and your point 3) is strange.
Regarding point 3), a list of people interested in buying Iraqi oil is sort of a "duh". I mean, you know the US was already buying almost half of the oil sold by Iraq through the oil for food program, right?
And regarding point 4) you need to show that Cheney A) was making "mad cash" from i) "salary" and ii) "stock options". I suspect you'll have a hard time because B) Halliburton stock is actually down since Cheney took office, and C) Cheney sold all his stock and options during the 2000 campaign just so critics wouldn't carp on it. Foolish guy, eh? It didn't stop people like you from either lying or being uninformed, did it?
I'll be charitable though and proactively admit Cheney *is* getting money from Halliburton. In fact, he's continues to receive annual payments of "deferred compensation" of about $150,000 per year through 2005. This may offend your income-disparity sensibilities but I submit that it's not that unusual for a CEO of a Fortune 200 company. And you still haven't shown how the swings in Halliburton stock would affect that or otherwise get him "mad cash". I'm sure it's his evil buddies all cashing in, isn't it?
If you want a more accurate picture, I'd suggest putting together more than 4 dots next time. It's more than "1. X 2. Y. 3. ??? 4. Profit" you agree, right? And I'm not even a conservative!
--LP (who listens to both right-wing talk radio and Air America and that Liberals are so stupid when it comes to Halliburton... see this old post on this topic for supporting evidence)
Like you, I wish (at least in hindsight) that Congress should have checked Bush. And I agree that Congress has that role and responsibility.
But let's be realistic about what happened. A) There *was* token dissent. The problem was that it didn't go beyond being token. B) Congress can't be trusted with highly secret info because they leak it to satisfy their own political agendas or due to their own incompetence. It's happened over and over. C) Because of B, both citizens and Congress presume that the Executive branch has info they do not release to Congress. D) Because of C, when there is a really critical, intelligence-driven decision to be made, the US citizens and the Congress will tend to trust the president due to the additional information available to him but not to us. Plus for a congressperson there is the following pragmatic logic. For a congressperson to buck the tide, they risk a career-ending looking-foolish moment if the intel turns out to prove the Executive correct. And if the congressperson goes along with the ride, the worst they suffer is having to claim the Executive duped them and they run on the issue in the next election.
This is a structural problem with Congress. While you might claim its a moral or ethical failure of many many congresspeople, it's tough to argue they are not acting in a perfectly rational way.
The solution for this problem it to vote out your local duped congresspeople, Republican or Democrat. If they face getting voted out in either case, maybe they'll start taking responsibility for knowing what's going on and they'll start taking keeping confidential info secret more seriously.
--LP
It's an interesting observation that there's a certain similarity to the Rather memo situation in terms of proceeding with conclusions based on thin evidence.
I'd add that in both cases, there was supporting evidence that fueled both parties acceptance of certain central arguments/documents. Rather seemed to take the White House's quiet "neither confirm nor deny" stance as a confirmation. And the Bush Administration took Saddam's hiding from inspectors as a sign he had something to hide. Rather had other, new, second-hand testimony from parties who were at least somewhat close to the situation. And the Bush administration was looking at other information about Saddam seeking uranium through various channels (and I'm talking about more than just the famous bogus Niger yellowcake documents, but the other less-discussed supporting streams of evidence).
The parallels to my mind aren't 100% there though; Rather presented the memos as being legit with no caveats and no public acknowledgement about ambiguities in sourcing or documents. The administration was pretty open during the run-up that there weren't smoking guns, but that they felt a strong need to act given Saddam's past behavior and continued recalcitrance.
It is true that towards the end of the run-up, in Jan-March though, they started giving more definitive statements that Iraq definitely had WMD on certain occassions, but without really attributing to any particular piece of evidence their certainty. At the time, some people thought they were just blowing smoke. Some thought they had intel that they weren't revealing to protect 'sources and methods'. Some accepted it on faith and some on fear. Now, having found little evidence on the ground, the administration's certainty now rests more on pragmatic grounds (certainty helps our troops, fuels our will to fight the enemy at the necessary level of intensity) than on evidentiary ones. Perhaps it's true that that's where their original certainty stemmed from as well.
Kudos to you for drawing the connection, but I wouldn't rest too much analysis or "hypocrite"-namecalling on it.
--LP
Like flashing a tit at the Superbowl. Oh, the humanity!
As someone who invited a bunch of teenagers from church watch the Superbowl together at a youth group superbowl party, I found the whole halftime "tit show" disappointing.
And rather disinginuous on the part of the stars involved who had been promising "a big surprise" for weeks. There's enough sexual cr*p on TV... does it have to even be on during the Superbowl? Showing the tit was only the culmination of a build up of various gyrating actors wearing leather S&M-type outfits...
Don't get me wrong... the Superbowl broadcasters can do whatever they want to get an audience. Us people who think sexuality matters and should be encouraged to be channeled into a bonding experience between monogamous partners for the benefit of both those partners' emotional security and the emotional security of their offspring will adjust our viewing accordingly. But the broadcasters can't ultimately have it both ways; either the Superbowl broadcast is family-friendly or it's an MTV pseudo-veiled sex-fest. They've tried to stretch to catch both audiences, and last year was merely the breaking point.
In hindsight, the Britney Spears shakeathon at the prior year's halftime show should have been a warning of what was coming. Oh well, live and learn. Dunno if we'll be having a church Superbowl party next year. We'll see. Maybe we'll all just watch it at home. Or not watch it. The ads are half the reason I watch the game, and I can catch those on the Internet advertising agency websites the next day anyway.
--LP, who apologizes for letting a one-line off-topic post spur an additional lengthy off-topic alternate-perspective-posting.
(original post: "Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.")
(reply post: Sounds like exactly what the United States ended up doing. It decided it was right and it had the power to make sure it got what it wanted out of the deal. Notice the reference to oil... Not to the safety of the United States' populace. Oil. Cute.)
Dude, the problem is that if you have $2-10 billion a year free and clear in guaranteed oil income, even the U.S. can't stop you from getting nukes sooner or later. Especially if you've had 10 years practice hiding stuff from us, catching us even when we sent spy equipment in with UN inspectors. The most we can do is discourage you from using them. And if you're the type of guy who has demonstrated A) you have the willpower to use them when needed (vs. Kurds, Iranians), and B) you have the willpower to invade your neighbors to ensure your glorious future, then it's just quite possible that we might want to take you out. To ensure that, while someone else besides us (hint: we don't need it) may get that $2-10 billion a year, it damn well won't be you.
It's called "regime change". And in a nutshell I think that's why we *really* went into Iraq.
--LP
P.S. This post should not be taken as an endorsement of the above policy one way or another. It is an assessment stating that the above seemed to be the policy.
If by "Flip-Flop" you mean "Being able to change his opinions based on new information", sure.
Yeah the difference between Kerry and Bush is that Kerry can admit Bush's mistakes since he is running against him... but he agrees we have to see those mistakes through. Bush thinks we have to see those mistakes through and it's of no practical value given our soldiers and enemies to admit mistakes were made.
I somehow suspect that if Kerry made the exact same mistake, he would take Bush's position. And vice-versa.
Color me annoyed. Although I can't say disillusioned... at the end of the day I think it's fairly rational albeit a bit ideologically inconsistent... and signs of rationality are always better than foolishly consistent ideology. On both sides.
Ugh, the spin on this article, both the headline and the editorial comment by Michael, is annoying. (The actual NYTimes piece is worth reading.)
1) Old news. All this analysis that the tubes could have, or even
were fairly likely to have been used for rockets, not centrifuges
was known and public in Dec2002-Mar 2003. If you don't remember
it, you just weren't paying attention. It's even old news that
the Energy Department and State Department experts were the
ones disagreeing. (What *is* news is that the caliber of experts
that said the tubes were likely not for centrifuges was not
made public at that time to the best of my knowledge.)
2) Michael grossly mischaracterizes the Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld
position at the time as saying the "tubes were slam-dunk evidence".
That was *not* the way the White House or the administration
presented the case at the time. The tone of 95% of their statements
was basically... well, we're not sure but it doesn't look good.
There is evidence that Saddam is reconstituting his nuclear program, etc.
What are we going to do about it?
In fact, the "slam dunk" comment was made *in private* by CIA director
Tenet to George Bush when Bush told the director that the case seemed
weak and was that the best info he had? At least that's the
story documented by Bob Woodward's book that came out a year after
the war, "Plan of Attack" (WSJ opinion,
a longer CBS News summary.)
Now why Tenet said it was a slam dunk is a bit of a mystery to me.
And it presumably is the basis for the 2-3 statemtents pre-war
made to various obscure audiences but reported in the mainstream
press where Bush or Cheney said things like "we *know* Iraq
has WMD"... statements that were remarkable and notable precisely
because the administration was generally not so definitive in
saying that Iraq had WMD... most of their statements centered
around Saddam's recalcitrance in the light of various UN resolutions
and inspectors.
Hey, I'll go so far as to say Bush misled the American people
and/or made a poor decision to go to war, knowing that the evidence
was thin. And I think that is a #1 reason not to vote for him.
But I don't think a Slashdot article heading "White House Lied
About Iraq Nuclear Programs" or a editorial comment that the
administration was announcing that the tubes were "slam-dunk evidence"
is right. It's really sad to see such misrepresentation of what happened.
--LP
... who wrote the comparator tool which was one of the two tools used in the analysis.
ESR deserves three cheers for 'scratching his itch', making a tool to compare copyrighted code. To have it actually used in the SCO case which was the annoying impetus for its creation (AFAICT) has to be a nice feeling.
I'm not an ESR fanboy, but I'll give him props when I think he deserves it and in this case I think he does.
--LP
It's kind of sad to me actually. If customers *are* talking (to Microsoft) about indemnification issues, then any of Microsoft's allegedly behind-the-scenes investments in SCO's legal actions have paid off for... for Microsoft at least. Another FUD issue successfully on the table.
And notice how the TCO issue is spun... "oh the real Linux TCO issue is versus Unix"... so one might overlook the savings one would have using Linux rather than Microsoft. Why do I run Samba rather than paying $1000 for Windows Server? Or Apache rather than $1000 for IIS+Windows Server? Why does Microsoft cripple their software so that "Software Update Services" (which allows me to check from a central workstation if the PCs running on our network are patched to fix *Microsoft's* security holes) so it only works with Windows XP Professional? In a small/medium business, I now have to run around to all the PCs to doublecheck them because Windows XP Professional on every desktop is one more expense we don't need. And one has to take care that all the laptops which come and go at the end of the day get checked. Compare that to remote administration of Linux systems where it's super-simple to login remotely in the middle of the day or scan programmatically...
Linux isn't strategic for businesses because it lets them reduce a few Unix expenses (although any shrewd businessperson will take what they can get)... it's worth pursuing so you don't end up beholden to one big vendor for all your software. Microsoft's prices *do* keep rising over the years you know...
--LP
Sybase is great at replication and has had it for a long time. It can replicate data from non-Sybase databases too. I've used it in production. (Ironically, my company is moving to MS SQL Server to take advantage of better support from our hosting provider, but frankly, I'm not religious about it.)
Here's the product sheet, a white paper from Sybase, a quick intro, a slightly old quick reference guide, and a performance and tuning guide.
Note that Sybase isn't giving away the replication server for free though. So I'm not sure it'll solve your MySQL problem.
--LP
Thinking you are able to get a "fair and balanced" coverage anywhere is simply wrong. If you want different opinions and political diversity you need to read more than one newssource.
I read multiple sources of information precisely for the reasons you mention. Still, I think there is definitely a market for, and the technical possibility of creating, a news source or opinion forum that attempts to be evenhanded. Gathering and synthesizing multiple viewpoints takes work that not every consumer wishes to undertake.
In the UK, papers have explicit biases and the consumer is expected to pick one or weigh multiple ones. In the US, papers are expected to give straight news (and/or both sides of any story), with editorial and opinion coverage being quite separate. (In practice there is bias, but the ideal is valued and approximated to a degree that we could quibble about depending on the paper.)
From what I can tell, the US approach seems to have started shifting over the last decade to a more UK-like system and frankly, I'm not sure whether that's just "acknowledging reality" (consistent with your view that fair and balanced coverage is impossible), or whether it's an ultimately unhealthy abandonment of the "fair and balanced" ideal that imposes an unncessary searching+synthesis cost for all readers on even the most basic news.
--LP
There's a difference between being "fair and balanced" and being "diverse".
I think politics.slashdot.org will be fine on the "diverse" score. I've read your journal for quite a while Pudge and it stands out as a reasoned conservative perspective. I've seen some diversity amongst other editors but not enough to know whether its my imagination or not.
I guess the navel-gazing question in my mind is whether the diversity that I take for granted will result in "fair and balanced".
To illustrate what I mean, Alan Colmes is a liberal on the Fox News Network, but I don't consider the overall channel to be exactly "fair and balanced" (despite their tagline). ("Somewhat fair and balanced" or "more fair and balanced" maybe... but anyway ignoring my views on Fox I presume you get my point.)
Your presence guarantees some diversity, I'd agree; but it does not guarantee "fair and balanced" coverage or editorial viewpoint presentation.
That outcome will rest in the integrity and decision-making process of the Slashdot leadership. I should add that I'm generally a big fan of Slashdot and those who started/run it (pioneers of distributed moderation), so I'm not casting FUD on the whole enterprise. I'm just remarking that you all haven't been tested in quite this way. And probably the user response will shape the results a fair bit. As someone who downloaded the first version of Slash in an attempt to create a political forum but didn't put forth the requisite effort to drive its success, I wish you all the best.
--LP
It is a pretty typical dot-com in this regard: check out how many coders they had!
Adam Wern, CEO
Eric Wahlforss, CIO
Friedrich-Wilhelm Graf, Chief Designer
Nadia Gisler, Design Consultant
Joni Braun, Photographer
Tav, CTO
Stephan Karpischek, COO
David Thunman, Logistics
Fubbi Minister of desinfo
Antje Taiga, Businesswoman
t, Chief Strategic Officer
enki Chief, Security Officer
Ben Pohl, Documentation
No wonder they got only to Milestone 2 of 4! (Not unlike other firms we know.) And like dot-coms, they had no problem raising the initial investment. And they got good buzz. Not a bad parallel!
Now if only they can figure out how to string the story along some more, maybe they can make some real money!
A brilliant fun idea. Oh, and like dot-coms I bet it started fun and got really damn stressful at the end.
--LP
It's true that Linux is an imitation of prior Unixes.
But remember folks,
Linux copying the behavior of various UNIXes is stealing, but Microsoft copying the behavior of the Mac or Xerox Star is not. And Compaq's reverse engineering of IBM PC BIOS is what caused the death of the PC industry!
Oh wait.
--LP
P.S. I'd be nervous if the press release said AdTI president and pundit Kenneth Brown was tracing the code... but it says he "traces the free software movement over three decades". Hrm, good luck there, Ken!
Economic espionage has caused serious harm to European companies in the past, Monyk said. "With this project we will be making an essential contribution to the economic independence of Europe."
Translated: "with this project, we can bribe third-parties without getting caught."
Or: "with this project, we will re-enable our large European multinational corporations to bribe rich but corrupt third-world governments without having to worry about Echelon-based 'allies' catching us."
(OK OK, don't take my cynical remarks too seriously. But if you haven't read about this angle, it is pretty close to the US position as outlined in this ex-CIA director's remarks on it here and here. Don't forget the ever-needed grain of salt with all things Echelon.)
--LP
My private theory is that the bubble collapse is actually a side-effect of Y2K.
In two ways:
1) Tech spending boomed before Y2K as companies spent huge amounts on both hardware and software efforts to make sure they were ready for Y2K, had backup systems, etc. There was a huge drop in IT spending right after Y2K since companies already had all the equipment they needed. This hammered Q1 earnings for tech stocks in March/April and boom, the Internet bubble burst. This fact (reduced revenue and profits of tech firms) is well-documented in earnings reports of that time frame. I'm very surprised this hasn't gotten more press, other than that nobody wants to give the naysayers any credit for maybe have been, in some way they never anticipated, right.
2) The Federal Reserve had flooded the money supply right around Y2K to ensure there were no financial liquidity crises. When they re-tightened up (or at least stopped increasing the money supply) post-Y2K... boom, instant fiscal tightening contributing to a recession. I've never seen this documented, at least the re-tightened part, so take it with a grain of salt.
--LP
And - most of all - Steve Case is a big, fat loser. This was always more familiar territory for me, since that was exactly how most of the world regarded Case throughout his career. For most of it, he had always and forever been a loser."
Watching Steve Case from a distance, he always looked like one of those underestimated but really really shrewd guys to me.
I never paid for AOL (though I did use a free trial once), and I never owned the stock, but in my book, Steve Case is a big winner.
A) I give him credit for being able to, on at least one occassion which I was familiar with, bring innovative technology to market. I loved his the Commmodore 64 BBS service, QuantumLink, which he later turned into AOL. It had some of the same "least common denominator" aspects as AOL, but it also could do streaming download+playing of MIDI sound files at the same time I was typing and reading in chat rooms over a 1200 baud modem. Pretty fancy for 1987 in the DOS PC era.
B) The AOL service may have been lame and its customers clueless, but hey, Steve Case stayed focused on the customers and making stuff easy to use for them. Props for that. Even if it wasn't perfect, it was a lot better than most of the alternatives-- I could safely recommend it to friends/acquaintances for many years without having to go to their house and/or do maintenance on their PCs to get/keep it working.
C) He managed to grow his company like a madman for well over a decade, continued to hold onto and grow the business for 6+ years despite it being wildly overvalued, and then sold it out for a huge premium 3 months before the Internet stock market bubble burst. To me that is just an incredible feat of timing and business acumen, and one that was almost totally optimal for his shareholders (albeit not Time Warner's shareholders... but hey, he was the seller, not the buyer!) That wasn't just dumb luck. He knew what he was doing. He probably didn't know the bubble would be over in 3 months, but he knew his stock was way overvalued (and not just due to some sales shenanigans.) Hey, *I* knew in 1996-1999 that AOL was overvalued, but if I were CEO, could I have picked a better time to sell out and maximize the bubble-value for my shareholders? No way!
D) And I appreciate any money they poured into Mozilla.
So no, I don't think Steve Case is a loser.
--LP
As an ex-analyst who moved back to software development, I would add a few other things for my fellow Slashdotters:
... "In that time we'll see tremendous growth" ...'"Tremendous" means that we're going to see it move from being a fringe market..." I suppose I agree with Stacy about her actual conclusions, but the phrasing struck me as being about as optimistically phrased as one could expect given the underlying statements about Linux on the desktop.
;-)
1) If you want to be an good analyst, you need to be able to write English; preferrably fairly easily and fairly well. Speaking skills can be learned on the job. Overcoming writers block probably can't.
2) Tech skills can give an analyst an important filter and BS detector which can be a competitive advantage versus other analysts. However, ability to communicate with techies does not pay off. Techies aren't spending thousands of dollars for insight. Managers are. Ability to communicate with management and market the value of the service you provide is the paramount skill for an analyst.
3) In my view, the important milestones that lie ahead for Linux all have to do with success as a database server. That's where the most critical business data is, that's where the money is, and if a company trusts their data to Linux, what will they not trust Linux for? It's also a technology space that's complementary to Linux's existing strengths in webservers and web services, and it plays well to Linux's developer (not end-user)-orientation while avoiding the desktop usability and UI-training issues where Linux continues to play catch-up. In terms of specific milestones, I would track the percentage of applications being deployed in Fortune 500 with Linux hosting the database. And I would track the growth of applications employing open source databases. A Linux firmly entrenched as a database platform is a Linux not easily dislodged by Microsoft-induced desktop trendiness. Witness the billions upon billions continually invested in mainframes and AS/400 if you doubt me.
4) I'm personally agnostic about whether Linux will ever make headway on the desktop. If pressed for a conclusion, I confess that I doubt it, although if I was afraid of the Linux advocate hordes, I might couch it like Stacy did: "potential for a lot of innovation"... "a lot of potential for Linux to become a much stronger play there"... "next milestone to look for is when Linux takes 10% of the market"
More constructively, in terms of adding to that 'desktop milestone' analysis, another milestone to watch for is when Linux desktop developers spend more time trying to understand how the Mac OS X guys tackle the usability problem than they spend trying to copy the Windows approach blindly in the techy details while missing the bigger picture.
I used to get paid 20k... now I'll settle for 2 karma. Ah the price of doing what you love...
--LP
Nah, I respect you. I pretty much agree with your last statement "Sometimes stored procedures are a win." and even "MySQL is an adequate job for most tasks"...
;)
I just disagree with your earlier statement that "Stored procedures and other similar features are just bloat, and gain you no real advantage".
I think there is some advantage, in situations where you have a transaction that wraps together a bunch of sql statements. That sort of transactional locking normally requires a decent scalability hit, particularly since you are holding that database transactional lock open waiting for all the milliseconds of both network latency and, for complicated queries, network bandwidth. Stored proceedures give you a straightforward way of avoiding all network latency and traffic, reducing the overhead of the transactional integrity substantially.
Seeing as you've worked with Sybase stored proceedures on your resume, perhaps I'm belaboring the obvious. It wasn't obvious to me that you had that experience when I read your first post (and I imagine it wasn't obvious to the AC either.) And having myself coded sybase stored proceedures, I'd have to say that it's such a constraining experience that I can appreciate the "it sucks" attitude...
Cheers,
--LP
Maybe you should pay attention to the logical parts of his argument rather than the rhetorical ones? Like:
Stored procedures provide a higher level of performance, and provide *MUCH* more scalability. It's just common sense - moving *all* of the data away from the DB, passing across the network, and to business logic in the application will always be slower than having the logic in the DB itself (where it can be processed without having to move it across the slowest link in the chain.)
I don't have mod points but I do have database experience with enterprise databases as well as with MySQL and I think I'd side with ajs on the subject of stored procedures.
--LP
Two businesses in completely different lines of work don't usually make good merger partners. They're neither competitors nor in a supplier/customer relationship.
If they're doing two totally different things, then there's no product overlap (and thus need to reconcile drop otherwise valuable product lines). So that's usually *good* for a merger. Particularly if the two companies sell to the same sort of customers in a reasonable number of cases. If that's true there might be some sales savings from calling on the customer with one sales call from a combined entity rather than two sales calls if run totally independently. Likewise there would be ability for product tie-ins, bundling, marketing, advertising, etc.
Google sells keywords to online businesses, while Akamai sells DNS and video hosting. I think you could have a business that does all of the above and benefits from having them all under the same roof. So I'm not as pessimistic as you.
Also, GE does pretty well at buying companies that are totally different. I think where things go wrong is if the management of the acquiring company doesn't have the expertise to even understand/manage the acquired company business; e.g. Vivendi buying SGI or something. I think the Google management would be able to manage a business like Akamai's; it's reasonably similar in many respects.
I'd consider it if I were Google. Whether I'd pursue it or not would depend on Akamai's valuation and how much money they're losing, as well as whether the distraction is worth the synergy and whether Google couldn't build it for cheaper than they could buy it (with opportunity costs factored in).
--LP