Well guys, I guess it's been, what, 15 years, give or take? I can't say I was the first or second slashdot reader, but I might have been the thousandth. A lot has changed in that time, and there are a lot of tech news aggregators with comments these days. Many have advertising-driven business models, a brave few try other models from time to time. But virtually all of them are far less offensive than this crap, in that they have ads at the top of the page which are obviously paid content separate from the editorial function of posting, well, tech news of one sort or another. Each of us has a certain threshold, be it qualitative or quantitative, beyond which we clearly recognise that something has become intolerable. Often it's difficult to articulate that threshold's location until it's been crossed, or at least to imagine each and every possible fashion in which it could be crossed. But here we are, way the fuck on the wrong side of that threshold, and you've lost another reader. I'm not sure how you plan to make up for the inevitable loss of other readers like me; maybe you're not even planning to or thinking that far ahead. Maybe you figure advertisers are so stupid that they'll gladly pay vastly higher sums for these sore thumbs that they think your apparently even more retarded readers won't know are ads. Maybe they're right. Maybe you're right. I hope not, but I'm certainly a lot wiser than I was 15 years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised by anything at this point. So, please, take it to its logical conclusion. More ads. Less pretense of editorial independence. I'd suggest you do what the bottom-feeding Chinese link vendors do and just fill your entire page with paid links, graphics, and videos. Maybe throw in some real American know-how like real-time auctions, and tie it into Facebook so that you already know everything you could ever want to about people who like to be products. After all, many of our country's best and brightest now spend most of their time and energy finding more ways to sell other people as advertising viewers. I'm sure you'll think of something, and I hope for irony's sake that you make a mint. But you'll be doing it without me. Given the choices you're making, I don't think you'll miss me, as I'm no longer part of your target audience.
Nobody laughed at Kennedy when he stated the US would put a man on the moon in ten years (and the US had not yet sent a human into orbit). He was met with applause.
It's sad that "big" ideas like a moon base are now ridiculed.
Considering that most people had probably resigned themselves to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, a ridiculously expensive, minimally valuable moon race probably sounded pretty damned good as an alternative way to beat the Russkies.
The moon isn't going anywhere. There's plenty of time for us to put things right at home before going back there, and in the meantime if there's really any great profit to be had there, private enterprise will be all too happy to go claim it. Times have changed; our biggest problems today are internal and of our own making, not some external enemies. A mad dash from nothing to a useless lunar base makes very little sense right now, even if it were technically feasible.
Put another way, if you feel so strongly about it, go finance your own expedition. In all seriousness, I'm looking forward to seeing stuff like this happen. Once someone has a foothold away from Earth, we'll have a new frontier to expand, on which existing governments will be largely powerless. It will be a wonderful new opportunity for those of us who are highly dissatisfied with the way this planet is being governed to set out and try something different. Most human generations have had that opportunity; only in the last century or so has the entire planet been claimed by effective governments. Forget the 1960s and think instead about what might make sense in the future.
If they "really, really, really need you" then you should make them "really, really, really pay you" for work done instead of a long-scheduled, already paid-for wedding and vacation. A reasonable offer is something like "Look, I've gone out of my way to schedule this in advance and make sure you were aware I'd need to be away. And I've already paid for everything and invited a lot of people. If you haven't found someone to cover for me, I can cancel, but if it's that important you will need to make me whole, too. I think it would be fair to add two more weeks to my vacation time, cover my expenses and my guests' for canceling and rescheduling, append a rider to my employment contract to the effect that my next vacation, once scheduled, is guaranteed for the agreed dates, and increase my salary by 10%. Considering how important my work must be to the company, that seems like the least you could do. And please, so that neither of us has to go through this again, make sure that there are people on staff who can cover for one another and let me know how I can help make that happen."
Then you'll find out just how important your work really is.
Of course we're going to have an impact on our environment. The difference between us and the first cyanobacteria (that caused massive climatic upheaval when the oxygen levels on earth reached a tipping point where other first generation single celled entities died off en masse) is that we have the ability to reason, if we use it, and chose options that will not be as destructive to the ecosystem that we are a part of, and upon which we rely for our lives.
What we have in common with the cyanobacteria, however, is that we don't understand the consequences of the various choices we could make. The ability to reason should not be confused with sufficiently good understanding to predict those consequences. The best we can say is probably that if we "do less", in the sense of creating less delta relative to the world as it would be without us, conditions will probably be more like they've been in the past. Unfortunately, that's an exceedingly weak and almost useless statement, as "the past" includes an extremely wide range of conditions including many that would make our current existence completely impossible.
The questions before us in this area are whether we should attempt to "do less" in an attempt to avoid irreversibly bad outcomes (certainly no guarantee of a happy outcome anyway), and, if not, whether we should apply our profoundly imperfect understanding of our impact in one way or another to attempt to control our environment in unprecedented ways. The only thing I'm sure of is that anyone who pretends to have the "correct" answers to these questions is either intellectually dishonest or a self-serving piece of shit. The rest of this "debate" is a waste of time, money, and electrons. Give it up already. Everything goes to hell a billion years from now anyway.
It looks like the niche player, whatever it ends up being, will be built around WebOS. It has open source cachet
That only matters to geeks, and besides, plenty of people who deride Microsoft for being proprietary have been happy to use iOS.
Please don't truncate my sentences when you quote them. If you had preserved the whole thing, it would be obvious that I offered three positives about webOS, only one of which is that it is open source. And we are talking about niche products here, so having a couple of attributes each of which is interesting to a tiny slice of the possible customer universe is EXACTLY what matters. I never claimed that webOS would take over the mobile device world because it's open source. Perhaps I need to spell it out for you since you're probably accustomed to reading wild, unsubstantiated claims in unintelligible rants written by 14-year-olds: WebOS has a few attributes that may help it occupy one or two small niches in the mobile device space that iOS and Android cannot or will not fill effectively. That gives it a very limited future that may nevertheless constitute commercial viability for a few small players.... Based on that landscape, I do not see Windows Phone being successful for Microsoft or its partners, including Nokia, since they need WinPho to be a major competitor and it does not even seem that it would be viable as a niche offering.
Does that help any or do I need to use shorter words?
Ellison will rock up to court, invite the judge and jury to party hard on one of his many yachts and justice will be served.
He is just that awesome.
Surely you jest. The jurors?! Those are commoners; they have no place anywhere near His Larryness. And they're unnecessary. Larry already plays golf with the judge every month, so he's already won the case. He'll make sure to pick up the tab in the clubhouse next time, but he's probably already doing that anyway. Don't you know anything about how Oracle operates?
Right. Just like how the universities tell everyone how much better their lives will be, if we all just go $60,000 in debt and sign up for classes.
I find it ironic that the institutions that aggressively market themselves, seem to be highly susceptible to the marketing of like institutions.
That said, if Oracle did indeed promise, under contract, to complete project X for Y amount of money, and it's not complete, then good for Montclair. Get the funds back, or make Oracle finish the job. Otherwise, it'll be the students or the taxpayers paying for it, at some point, after the risk transfer process trickles down.
No university offers a fixed-price guarantee of a better life. The cost of courses is almost never fixed, nor is the cost of books, lab fees, supplies, etc. that are specific to your course of study. And of course nothing about the results is guaranteed at all; you may or may not get a degree, depending on whether you choose to pursue one and how well you demonstrate mastery, and of course a degree is no guarantee of a better life in any tangible way. The university is offering to teach you something and provide a structure and environment in which you're more likely to learn it well. That's all. Your attempt to draw similarities here and tar both parties with the same brush is laughably weak. If you had a contract from a university that said for $60k we guarantee you will have a job that pays at least $X for at least Y% of your life between now and age 65, you would have a case. No one is that stupid.
Here, however, there was a contract in place that specified the requirements and expected results and the fixed price the university was willing to pay Oracle. Oracle signed the contract, then, apparently, failed to deliver on those specific performance expectations laid out in the contract. No one can say whether they'll win it, but they do have a case. Marketing and sales is what is *said*, a contract is what is *put in writing and signed*. It's not at all unusual for the two to be very different, and in general a company can't be held liable for the claims it makes in marketing materials and sales pitches unless they meet strict criteria for deceptiveness. The UK seems to have the broadest powers to police deceptive claims; it's rare in the US. But a contract, well, that's a different story. And it's the story here.
It's not at all surprising that Oracle overpromised, underdelivered, and then failed to disclose that more money would have to be spent to achieve the customer's goals. While many vendors engage in the occasional unscrupulous practice, Oracle is at the very bottom of the heap when it comes to sleaze. The company has repeatedly shown that it cares nothing for its customers, employees, or shareholders (except for Larry), and has complete disregard for the laws of the countries in which it operates. Its corporate culture is built entirely on backstabbing, deception, and ass-kissing. Montclair State's experience is far more typical than atypical when it comes to doing business with Oracle; a similar series of events involving the State of California received national publicity recently as well. But what is surprising here is that these cases are being litigated; Oracle's lawyers are numerous, effective, and almost completely in control of everything the company does. As an Oracle employee, you can't take a dump in the men's room shitter without getting approval from Legal and Rev Rec. It will be interesting to see how this plays out; Oracle will almost certainly come up with something they put in the contract that gives them an escape. It won't be something technical, because the people in charge over there don't know anything about technology, so it'll probably be some kind of loophole or exception clause. So while I have no doubt that the university was wronged, I expect that their lawyers will have been outlawyered by Oracle's legal army. It seems to be the way these cases go; that is after all Oracle's entire business model. The company could not exist on the merits of its products, the ability of its engineers, or the integrity with which it treats its customers. Why anyone does business with them is beyond me.
He's right though. It's a wise point of insight. iPhone and Android are ripe for played-out cultural saturation, just like Facebook.
Maybe if Nokia doesn't drop the ball, they can parlay this natural social rhythm into success, unlike SOME people (I'm looking at YOU BlackBerry)....hate to imagine any Microsoft involvement though. I wish they and their shitty Windows Phone would just die.
And this for me really highlights how Microsoft especially but also its partners have really dropped the ball. If you can't be the saturation player (Apple), and you can't directly challenge the saturation player (Google and its partners), then you have to offer a compelling niche product. That approach can succeed, especially for smaller companies for whom even a niche product produces meaningful revenue. But there are two big problems here: First, neither Nokia nor Microsoft is a small company; Nokia needs to be a major challenger for its business model to work, and Microsoft is investing a lot of money in mobile and needs more than just one or two partners with niche products to generate a return. Second, the Windows brand has plenty of value, but is a handicap to anyone trying this approach in developing a new niche product. Windows is hardly the brand people associate with innovative, hip new products or being off the beaten path; many if not most people interact with it every day and for them it is background noise, the default, the standard, something that is so bland and ordinary as not to even occasion comment. Is that really the brand that Nokia, or Microsoft for that matter, thinks will excite people who are tired of iOS or Android, or people looking for a less-common status symbol?
If Microsoft were smarter they would have recognised this and invested the time and energy into coming up with an alternative brand for their mobile products, perhaps leveraging the successful Xbox brand. But in a sense that would also have been an acknowledgement up front that their approach was unlikely to pay off big; a new brand might generate a niche following, but only the Windows brand is likely to be able to take on Apple and Google... most likely by eating RIM's lunch in the corporate space. In other words, either Microsoft has badly misjudged the cachet of Windows among ordinary individuals or its intent all along was to sell Windows Mobile into places where corporate IT makes the decisions rather than end users. That strategy looked decent a few years ago, but we have really seen a lot of changes recently in how employers handle supporting their employees' personal mobile devices. Recognising that it's cheaper to support their existing iOS and Android devices than to issue their own fleet of business-only devices, and that most people prefer to have at most only one phone and one tablet anyway, almost no one is still handing out a single device and refusing to support anything else. In the absence of products that are compelling on their own, RIM is finding that the decay of the corporate mobile device mandate is very bad for business. Microsoft, and therefore their partners as well, seem to be in the same spot.
It looks like the niche player, whatever it ends up being, will be built around WebOS. It has open source cachet, underdog cachet ("back from the dead"), and it's not a terrible technology. With two dominant players duking it out for the mass market and a potential family of niche alternatives brewing, where does this leave Microsoft? With a lacklustre brand, tiny market share, an apparently outdated strategy, and no compelling products on the market, it's hard to imagine Windows Mobile going anywhere. Too late to market to be where Android is today, and too stodgy a brand to be what Nokia wishes it were (not that a niche business is what Microsoft wants anyway), Windows Mobile looks like a dead end. If anyone knows the value of getting in early, it should be Microsoft; the entire company exists today solely because of its first mover advantage all those years ago. Nokia was happy to get a backer, but it appears to have picked the wrong one. They could be doomed as well.
It's time to recognise that the West is in another Cold War with China. The steps taken to keep industrial information out of Soviet hands crimped trade and imposed costly burdens on US business, but they were at least somewhat effective. Let's try to do better, but for fuck's sake let's do something! How about starting by dropping all packets from China at the border? If nothing else it ought to get their attention.
You should collect data from your own organisation or others within your company that have used either Red Hat or CentOS in the past few years. You are looking for statistics like downtime (and impact/cost), number of cases opened and how they were resolved, and general information -- facts -- about their respective experiences. If your company has no experience with either, try to gather this kind of data from your professional network if you can. Then evaluate the data and produce slides showing both the raw data and its applicability (of lack thereof) to this particular project. Be sure to make the connection clear by showing how the risks and costs apply to this specific situation. You should also be able to clearly show the total costs in each year of each solution along with your projections -- again, based on applicable HARD DATA -- for how well each solution will work for your project. In the process of doing all this, you should have an open mind yourself about the outcome; that is, you should not enter it intending to justify one solution over another but rather you should be looking to see what the data justifies and supports. While your gut instinct has value, it is not a compelling argument, especially if the data don't support it. If that's the case, look harder: what are you missing about the situation? What information can you gather that addresses the missing pieces? Or maybe you changed your own mind by doing rigorous research.
If your company's CIO is a good manager, then this kind of data, compiled correctly and presented well, will sway him. At minimum, it will provide a clear focal point for discussion: he can argue about your assumptions, point you to other people to talk with to adjust them, or direct you to find ways to lower the costs you present. All of these are victories for you, because they give you an opportunity to change the outcome. You may not get your RHEL licenses, but you may get another head, or help from another department, a meeting with Red Hat to negotiate lower pricing, or something else that you can come up with to mitigate the risks and costs you identify. Worst case, you've made a clear presentation of the options that will be remembered if things don't turn out well; again, a good manager will at that point be honest enough to acknowledge that he made the call, and will admit to you privately that you were right. At that point, you should be ready with a set of recommendations for fixing the problem going forward not just for other projects, but also to salvage this one. If it's 2 years on and the underlying business need will be changing or going away soon, does it make sense to switch to RHEL at that point? Is there another option you've been researching to mitigate the problems you're having? Be ready with recommendations that show you understand not only the technical situation but also the business impact and the full gamut of possible solutions. Show that you are focused on solving the problem; don't miss that opportunity by gloating or showing him that you don't have answers!
Bad managers are difficult to convince of anything, especially if they are biased for some reason other than a desire to see the business succeed. If you're stuck working for such a person, there may be little you can do. In that case, you have to ask yourself whether you want to try to get a larger audience, preferably including the CEO, when you make your presentation. That path is fraught with career risk, but if your data is very solid and you are a good communicator who understands the business, the project, and the people involved, it may be worth it. You don't have a lot of other options. Frankly, the best thing you can do is find another job. It's usually not worth waiting for these people to hang themselves because bad managers tend to be hired or promoted by other bad managers; his boss probably isn't going to hold him accountable either, and will let him make you the scapegoat if things do go south. The middle and upper management ranks of most larger companies are full of people like these and your best bet is to look elsewhere if that's the situation you're in.
What is unfortunate, Facebook might be willing to sell this data to 3rd parties without your consent... as your friends/coworkers/family have already consented to releasing the contact information for you. Even without Facebook selling it, it's only a data breach away from some the unscrupulous hands.
I don't know that there's anyone more unscrupulous than facebook. The mobsters and fraud rings out there really just want to use your identity to take money from banks. They're annoying but not really that dangerous to ordinary people (nor to the banks, who treat low-level activity as a cost of doing business). The law is also firmly entrenched against them, and they are occasionally caught and punished. Facebook and their ilk, however, sell humans as products to thousands of corporations around the world, and they do so with impunity. They are a direct and real threat to every individual person alive today and countless unborn yet to come. If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to give all my personal information to either Mark Zuckerberg or a Russian gangster, I'd give it to the gangster every time. Then I can go file a police report, close all my accounts, and start over with no loss but a few hours of my time. Eventually the gangsters will be caught and imprisoned or perhaps killed in a war with other gangsters. There's no such happy ending possible if facebook gets its hands on my data; even if I change my name, move to a different state, and start a new career, sooner or later facebook will get my new data too. There's apparently nothing I can do about it, and the law won't help me.
Bottom line: a "facebook data breach" would mean nothing to us, since everything in their database was already for sale; it would only harm facebook, who will have given away what they were previously selling.
Who uses adblock/noscript yet doesn't block those pointless facebook and twitter buttons? Even if you don't care about the privacy angle, it really cuts down on useless traffic.
Here's a new one you may not have got around to adding yet: apis.google.com/js/plusone.js
I don't really think adblockers are sufficient in light of how devious facebook and others are known to be. Using those techniques amounts to participating in an arms war between these companies and other software engineers. Instead, or in addition, one should redirect their entire domains to localhost and blackhole all known netblocks they use. You can't do enough to keep yourself safe from these thieves and predators; they are the modern-day slavers and you, once again, are their product. While there may be no measure strong enough to prevent the kind of theft this article highlights, that serves only to point out that no available measure should be overlooked in the effort to shut down the flow of data into their systems.
You know what's even more annoying than Linux's "me too" projects? All the stuff they COULD imitate but don't. I have no idea why Linux admins still have to grovel through logs or use stuff like splunk to guess at what's wrong with their hardware, but they do. Even a lousy knockoff is better than pretending the problem doesn't exist and leaving people to cobble together inferior workarounds.
Actually, there is absolutely something "they can do to eliminate your commute" - they can pay him (her?) more money to make up for the (likely) difference in rent or inconvenience of relocation expenses.
This argument in general is highly unreasonable and perpetuates the "fuck everyone" attitude. Meanwhile, even in very big cities individual industries in IT have a relatively small pool of people, and a good % of jobs are found via former coworkers. So while the company might not think twice before fucking you, you should think twice before fucking your colleagues - in a few months, when you interview in some other company, your resume might be on their desks.
Unless you worked for Sun in 2010, I don't really care about your uninformed opinion. As for fucking your colleagues, give me a break; they'd kill their own mothers to get the knife to stab you in the back if it meant they get to keep their miserable jobs through the next redundancy. It's not unreasonable at all; it's the way things work. You can look out for number one or you can take it up the ass; I don't really give a damn either way but I do think these young kids should hear the advice once so they can regret not heeding it later.
Do what you think is right but make sure you don't hurt yourself.
Actually, I don't like this thinking. You're trying to say the right thing but can't bring yourself to do it. I'll help.
Do what you think is wrong.
There, I said it. Many of us were raised with a very outdated set of values. If, like me, you're one of them, you need to invert your moral compass when making decisions about relationships with people or corporate entities. What you think is wrong is most likely going to be best for you, and it's most likely what everyone expects you to do anyway. Think of it like driving a car: you want to do what everyone around you expects because that's how you avoid becoming a grease smear on the pavement. Throw in the fact that people who act in the ways we were taught are "wrong" are the people who get what they want. I'm sorry to say it, but you need to start doing all the wrong things if you want to get ahead.
You think that your management is inside your circle of friends, but they would do anything for money. Maybe they wouldn't kill your grandmother, not sure. In business, this is called "making the hard decisions." You have to do it to manage people. In business, this is called "playing with the big boys."
You must quit your job now, because you have an unhealthy relationship with your coworkers and bosses. You will be badly hurt if they ever have to let you go, and it will take a long time to recover from it at a time when you will have to search for a job.
Best advice I've ever read on Slashdot. Maybe that's not saying much, but I would give anything to have had this implanted in my brain 5 years ago.
I notice from the problem you pose that you haven't been fucked yet. That's ok; a lot of people manage to go through most of their careers without ever getting fucked; in our grandparents' era, a lot of people worked for only one or two companies, never got fucked at all, and retired without ever knowing what it's like. Today, though, it's very easy to find someone who will fuck you. In fact, it's all but impossible to avoid; sooner or later you're going to get fucked whether you want to or not. If it's not your own company's rapacious or incompetent management, your company will be bought out and you and your colleagues fucked repeatedly by the acquiring company.
In case I'm not being clear, my point is that no one gives a flying fuck about you. They don't care about your personal happiness, your career advancement, or whether your compensation is commensurate with your contribution. You may think that they're your friends; maybe they are, maybe not. Save it for the football game or the pub after work; while they're in the office they are in it for themselves, not you. At the office, they are the corporation, which is a pathological entity that rewards cruel and selfish behaviour and accumulates managers who behave that way regardless of whether the shareholders, directors, or senior managers themselves hold those values. They will gladly fuck you without a second thought if circumstances encourage doing so, and most of them would be stunned to learn that you took offense at your fucking; to them it's just part of running the business. Trust me: you're not even human to them when you're at the office; you're a cog in their machine.
Don't for one nanosecond consider being "loyal" to a corporation, nor to individuals within that corporation acting in its context. A lot of people here have advised you to "negotiate". Don't listen to them. If someone is offering you more money and an hour and a half of your life back every day, TAKE IT. If you attempt to negotiate, you may be given a counteroffer, but you will be let go as soon as they can find a cheaper alternative to paying you more money (not to mention that there is nothing they can do to eliminate your commute). When that happens, your other offer will be a distant memory and you will be stuck looking for whatever you can find.
You need to stop feeling anything for the people you work with. They see you as a cog, and you should see them the same way. It really helps to stop thinking of them as human at all. Oh, and welcome to the workforce, son! Savour the opportunity you have right now to be on the giving end; it won't always be that way.
Does this remind anyone of the South Seas tribes who, after WW2, made wooden radios and beacons in the expectation that they would cause aircraft bearing advanced goods to land?
The studies you cite were all conducted by the government or by people working under government contracts. Those are the same people who would benefit from selling the casks and waste management services to the government, so they all have an interest in making it look like Yucca Mountain is a safe and effective place to store high-level waste. Maybe it is, but they spent so much time and energy trying to convince us that their credibility is nil. After all, if they're so good at managing the transportation and storage of high-level waste, surely there's no reason they couldn't just fill a few empty warehouses in Detroit or Omaha or Baltimore with the casks, right? Because it's all so safe, right?
You even hint at another reason for skepticism. At best, Yucca Mountain might have a few hundred years of safe and effective storage before there's an accident in transport, a geological event, a leak, or some other event that we've all been told is simply impossible or has a 0.00001% chance of happening in 10,000 years. By that time, all the people responsible for designing and implementing the storage and transport system will be long gone. So there is zero accountability in the process: the people involved could know the waste will be in the groundwater in 100 years and no one responsible would live long enough to stand trial for it. Similarly, they could provide even wholly independent testing labs with cask "samples" that are engineered and manufactured to far higher standards than the production casks would be. By the time anyone discovers this, they're all dead and there are thousands of tonnes of extremely hazardous toxic waste in transport or underground with containment less than called for in the design. Of course, we're told that the government has ways of detecting and preventing these kinds of things from happening, which is why every few years you read about that same government giving its soldiers and sailors defective weapons and armour made by those same government contractors and tested using those same government protocols.
Maybe none of these things is true. Maybe Yucca Mountain really is a great choice, and maybe the casks really will last thousands of years and really can survive being smashed by a train or tossed off the Empire State Building by King Kong. It's a stretch, but it's not impossible. But I don't really believe the people who told us all that, I don't trust them, and no one else who would have had to bear the consequences of failure did, either. Hopefully somewhere there is a town full of people who, like you, have more trust in the government and their contractors and would welcome the opportunity to show the world how a skilled labour force can partner with the federal government and its major contracting corporations to deliver a safe and reliable system for transporting waste to their storage facility and keeping it there without leaks for at least 10,000 years (it really needs to be 100,000, but I'll give you credit for a length of time no greater than that of human history to this point). And after 10,000 years of that skilled labour force and those honest government employees -- I should say governmentS employees, since no government has ever lasted longer than a thousand years or so -- and contracting corporations providing a flawless safety record, your town's water supply, genetic health, and agricultural output will all be every bit as good as they are today. Then our descendents can all agree that the people of Nevada way back in the day sure were a bunch of Nervous Nellies who turned away a golden opportunity to employ a few people for no good reason (and that would really be the only benefit, since the state would get no tax revenue from the facility or its construction as it would all be on government land with government labour and contractors domiciled out of state). That's assuming that anyone 10,000 years from now even knows what Nevada or Yucca Mountain or the United States of America were, or for that matter that there's thousands of tonnes
I guess my point was that there are particular reasons Nevada was and remains a highly inappropriate choice. NIMBY sounds a lot less compelling when you're living next to a reactor and running your gear on its juice.
I lived in Las Vegas for 12 years. There was absolutely no way we wanted that stuff stored at Yucca Mountain; it is a geologically active area and every proposed transport route for the waste went through the city. All that would be mere hypocrisy if not for the fact that Nevada has no nuclear power plants and derives virtually none of its electricity from nuclear sources outside the state. This is completely orthogonal to whether nuclear power is a good idea, whether it can be made safe, whether fast reactors are better, whether waste should instead be reprocessed or turned into glass or shot into space, and just how bad coal or hydro or other sources are for us and the rest of earth's inhabitants. It's nothing more complicated than the fact that Yucca Mountain is at best a mediocre site, the local residents don't want it, and the waste is generated elsewhere for the primary benefit of people who do not live in Nevada. That should have been sufficient to make the feds look elsewhere 15 years ago, but for some reason it wasn't. That the state won the fight is cheering; that a fight was even necessary is an appalling violation of states' rights. Finding a geologically suitable site in a state with nuclear power plants and residents who trust the government to transport and store the waste safely in their vicinity is an excellent idea. If they'd done that in the first place, we'd all have billions of dollars back -- and we'd probably have a nuke dump, too. But it certainly wouldn't be at Yucca Mountain; the federal government has abused and betrayed Nevadans from the day the state was admitted to the union, and there is absolutely no way its residents will ever trust it with their lives and property. That they gain little or nothing from nuclear power serves only to reinforce their already compelling case. Let those who like the federal government and think it's full of good, kind, well-meaning and competent public servants take the waste from their own power plants instead. It's the right thing for everyone.
And where do YOU live, sir? In a state with nuclear power plants? Far away from Nevada? Right. It's just as meaningful for me to say that your basement is the best choice.
While everyone else is looking for bars packed with women, I'll be able to see which places with good beer selections have open seats at the bar. There's nothing better than a quiet bar with good beer and a friendly barkeep.
Different skills take differing amounts of time and experience to master. In general, professional musicians start playing in or even before high school. No one shows up at a university with no experience and expects to become a concert pianist or cellist. The expectation is that it takes at least 5-10 years of experience to become a top-notch musician. The counterexample offered of a surgeon having been expected to operate on his pets in high school is also silly; while the expectation is that experience with musical instruments is gained starting in the early teens, that same ten years of experience for surgeons begins in college and extends well beyond, into medical school, internship, and then residency. So it's incorrect to compare the three fields.
Part of the difficulty these academics are having is that "computer science" encompasses many different fields. Some academics are really borderline mathematicians. Some students really belong in a vocational school, because the general knowledge of computer science most university programs teach is not needed nor useful if your plan is to go write business logic in Java for some megacorporation. Those students would be much better served by a 1- or 2-year program that focuses on the specific technologies they'll be using. And there are other students who plan to make programming a career in any of several different fields, each involving its own specialised tools, terminology, and mixture of theory and practical knowledge. All of this lives under one roof in most universities. Complicating matters further, students show up with many different levels of experience; some may have grown up with little access to computers, while others may already be accomplished programmers in the open source community looking for a degree and the opportunity to gain advanced knowledge of theory. It will never be possible to come up with a plan for the first two semesters that works for all of these cases. In that sense, the one-size-fits-all approach is indeed broken. But that is completely different from insisting that "up-or-out" is wrong, or that the basics need to be introduced even more slowly or in even more courses.
Students in most programs get 2 semesters of extremely basic instruction. This covers things like what variables, expressions, and functions are, the concepts of sequence, decision, and iteration, the basics of syntax in one or two languages, what memory is, and maybe some simple data structures like arrays and structures. Anyone who comes in with any programming experience at all, in any language or context, already knows at least 90% of everything taught in these courses. Forcing everyone to take them constitutes a tax. Value is given in the form of tuition and time spent but none is received in the form of increased knowledge. Students with no experience may well benefit from these courses, however. To suggest that they're "too fast" is ridiculous, however. In those two semesters, students will receive about 80 hours of lecture instruction, 2 300-page textbooks, usually at least 1 textbook with practical exercises in it, at least 15 hours of structured practical instruction from teaching assistants, generally unlimited access to computers, compilers, interpreters, and other tools as needed, unlimited access to a library with thousands of relevant documents ranging from trivial to cutting-edge research, access to a peer group, and dozens of office hours with the instructor and teaching assistants. It's silly to suggest that in 8 months a committed student with access to all those resources cannot pick up the basics of computer use and programming in at least one high-level language. And that's really all that's expected; there are separate courses for computer architecture, advanced data structures, operating systems, compilers, graphics, linear algebra, logic, calculus, programming language theory and features, algorithms, networking, databases, and so on. No one is expecting a student completing those two courses to be a maste
Slashdot Mirror
Well guys, I guess it's been, what, 15 years, give or take? I can't say I was the first or second slashdot reader, but I might have been the thousandth. A lot has changed in that time, and there are a lot of tech news aggregators with comments these days. Many have advertising-driven business models, a brave few try other models from time to time. But virtually all of them are far less offensive than this crap, in that they have ads at the top of the page which are obviously paid content separate from the editorial function of posting, well, tech news of one sort or another. Each of us has a certain threshold, be it qualitative or quantitative, beyond which we clearly recognise that something has become intolerable. Often it's difficult to articulate that threshold's location until it's been crossed, or at least to imagine each and every possible fashion in which it could be crossed. But here we are, way the fuck on the wrong side of that threshold, and you've lost another reader. I'm not sure how you plan to make up for the inevitable loss of other readers like me; maybe you're not even planning to or thinking that far ahead. Maybe you figure advertisers are so stupid that they'll gladly pay vastly higher sums for these sore thumbs that they think your apparently even more retarded readers won't know are ads. Maybe they're right. Maybe you're right. I hope not, but I'm certainly a lot wiser than I was 15 years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised by anything at this point. So, please, take it to its logical conclusion. More ads. Less pretense of editorial independence. I'd suggest you do what the bottom-feeding Chinese link vendors do and just fill your entire page with paid links, graphics, and videos. Maybe throw in some real American know-how like real-time auctions, and tie it into Facebook so that you already know everything you could ever want to about people who like to be products. After all, many of our country's best and brightest now spend most of their time and energy finding more ways to sell other people as advertising viewers. I'm sure you'll think of something, and I hope for irony's sake that you make a mint. But you'll be doing it without me. Given the choices you're making, I don't think you'll miss me, as I'm no longer part of your target audience.
Nobody laughed at Kennedy when he stated the US would put a man on the moon in ten years (and the US had not yet sent a human into orbit). He was met with applause.
It's sad that "big" ideas like a moon base are now ridiculed.
Considering that most people had probably resigned themselves to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, a ridiculously expensive, minimally valuable moon race probably sounded pretty damned good as an alternative way to beat the Russkies.
The moon isn't going anywhere. There's plenty of time for us to put things right at home before going back there, and in the meantime if there's really any great profit to be had there, private enterprise will be all too happy to go claim it. Times have changed; our biggest problems today are internal and of our own making, not some external enemies. A mad dash from nothing to a useless lunar base makes very little sense right now, even if it were technically feasible.
Put another way, if you feel so strongly about it, go finance your own expedition. In all seriousness, I'm looking forward to seeing stuff like this happen. Once someone has a foothold away from Earth, we'll have a new frontier to expand, on which existing governments will be largely powerless. It will be a wonderful new opportunity for those of us who are highly dissatisfied with the way this planet is being governed to set out and try something different. Most human generations have had that opportunity; only in the last century or so has the entire planet been claimed by effective governments. Forget the 1960s and think instead about what might make sense in the future.
I think Gary Powers would disagree with your assessment of the need to improve the U-2 platform.
I don't think Capt. Powers is in a position to agree or disagree with much of anything. He's been dead for over 30 years.
If they "really, really, really need you" then you should make them "really, really, really pay you" for work done instead of a long-scheduled, already paid-for wedding and vacation. A reasonable offer is something like "Look, I've gone out of my way to schedule this in advance and make sure you were aware I'd need to be away. And I've already paid for everything and invited a lot of people. If you haven't found someone to cover for me, I can cancel, but if it's that important you will need to make me whole, too. I think it would be fair to add two more weeks to my vacation time, cover my expenses and my guests' for canceling and rescheduling, append a rider to my employment contract to the effect that my next vacation, once scheduled, is guaranteed for the agreed dates, and increase my salary by 10%. Considering how important my work must be to the company, that seems like the least you could do. And please, so that neither of us has to go through this again, make sure that there are people on staff who can cover for one another and let me know how I can help make that happen."
Then you'll find out just how important your work really is.
Of course we're going to have an impact on our environment. The difference between us and the first cyanobacteria (that caused massive climatic upheaval when the oxygen levels on earth reached a tipping point where other first generation single celled entities died off en masse) is that we have the ability to reason, if we use it, and chose options that will not be as destructive to the ecosystem that we are a part of, and upon which we rely for our lives.
What we have in common with the cyanobacteria, however, is that we don't understand the consequences of the various choices we could make. The ability to reason should not be confused with sufficiently good understanding to predict those consequences. The best we can say is probably that if we "do less", in the sense of creating less delta relative to the world as it would be without us, conditions will probably be more like they've been in the past. Unfortunately, that's an exceedingly weak and almost useless statement, as "the past" includes an extremely wide range of conditions including many that would make our current existence completely impossible.
The questions before us in this area are whether we should attempt to "do less" in an attempt to avoid irreversibly bad outcomes (certainly no guarantee of a happy outcome anyway), and, if not, whether we should apply our profoundly imperfect understanding of our impact in one way or another to attempt to control our environment in unprecedented ways. The only thing I'm sure of is that anyone who pretends to have the "correct" answers to these questions is either intellectually dishonest or a self-serving piece of shit. The rest of this "debate" is a waste of time, money, and electrons. Give it up already. Everything goes to hell a billion years from now anyway.
It looks like the niche player, whatever it ends up being, will be built around WebOS. It has open source cachet
That only matters to geeks, and besides, plenty of people who deride Microsoft for being proprietary have been happy to use iOS.
Please don't truncate my sentences when you quote them. If you had preserved the whole thing, it would be obvious that I offered three positives about webOS, only one of which is that it is open source. And we are talking about niche products here, so having a couple of attributes each of which is interesting to a tiny slice of the possible customer universe is EXACTLY what matters. I never claimed that webOS would take over the mobile device world because it's open source. Perhaps I need to spell it out for you since you're probably accustomed to reading wild, unsubstantiated claims in unintelligible rants written by 14-year-olds: WebOS has a few attributes that may help it occupy one or two small niches in the mobile device space that iOS and Android cannot or will not fill effectively. That gives it a very limited future that may nevertheless constitute commercial viability for a few small players. ... Based on that landscape, I do not see Windows Phone being successful for Microsoft or its partners, including Nokia, since they need WinPho to be a major competitor and it does not even seem that it would be viable as a niche offering.
Does that help any or do I need to use shorter words?
Ellison will rock up to court, invite the judge and jury to party hard on one of his many yachts and justice will be served.
He is just that awesome.
Surely you jest. The jurors?! Those are commoners; they have no place anywhere near His Larryness. And they're unnecessary. Larry already plays golf with the judge every month, so he's already won the case. He'll make sure to pick up the tab in the clubhouse next time, but he's probably already doing that anyway. Don't you know anything about how Oracle operates?
Right. Just like how the universities tell everyone how much better their lives will be, if we all just go $60,000 in debt and sign up for classes.
I find it ironic that the institutions that aggressively market themselves, seem to be highly susceptible to the marketing of like institutions.
That said, if Oracle did indeed promise, under contract, to complete project X for Y amount of money, and it's not complete, then good for Montclair. Get the funds back, or make Oracle finish the job. Otherwise, it'll be the students or the taxpayers paying for it, at some point, after the risk transfer process trickles down.
No university offers a fixed-price guarantee of a better life. The cost of courses is almost never fixed, nor is the cost of books, lab fees, supplies, etc. that are specific to your course of study. And of course nothing about the results is guaranteed at all; you may or may not get a degree, depending on whether you choose to pursue one and how well you demonstrate mastery, and of course a degree is no guarantee of a better life in any tangible way. The university is offering to teach you something and provide a structure and environment in which you're more likely to learn it well. That's all. Your attempt to draw similarities here and tar both parties with the same brush is laughably weak. If you had a contract from a university that said for $60k we guarantee you will have a job that pays at least $X for at least Y% of your life between now and age 65, you would have a case. No one is that stupid.
Here, however, there was a contract in place that specified the requirements and expected results and the fixed price the university was willing to pay Oracle. Oracle signed the contract, then, apparently, failed to deliver on those specific performance expectations laid out in the contract. No one can say whether they'll win it, but they do have a case. Marketing and sales is what is *said*, a contract is what is *put in writing and signed*. It's not at all unusual for the two to be very different, and in general a company can't be held liable for the claims it makes in marketing materials and sales pitches unless they meet strict criteria for deceptiveness. The UK seems to have the broadest powers to police deceptive claims; it's rare in the US. But a contract, well, that's a different story. And it's the story here.
It's not at all surprising that Oracle overpromised, underdelivered, and then failed to disclose that more money would have to be spent to achieve the customer's goals. While many vendors engage in the occasional unscrupulous practice, Oracle is at the very bottom of the heap when it comes to sleaze. The company has repeatedly shown that it cares nothing for its customers, employees, or shareholders (except for Larry), and has complete disregard for the laws of the countries in which it operates. Its corporate culture is built entirely on backstabbing, deception, and ass-kissing. Montclair State's experience is far more typical than atypical when it comes to doing business with Oracle; a similar series of events involving the State of California received national publicity recently as well. But what is surprising here is that these cases are being litigated; Oracle's lawyers are numerous, effective, and almost completely in control of everything the company does. As an Oracle employee, you can't take a dump in the men's room shitter without getting approval from Legal and Rev Rec. It will be interesting to see how this plays out; Oracle will almost certainly come up with something they put in the contract that gives them an escape. It won't be something technical, because the people in charge over there don't know anything about technology, so it'll probably be some kind of loophole or exception clause. So while I have no doubt that the university was wronged, I expect that their lawyers will have been outlawyered by Oracle's legal army. It seems to be the way these cases go; that is after all Oracle's entire business model. The company could not exist on the merits of its products, the ability of its engineers, or the integrity with which it treats its customers. Why anyone does business with them is beyond me.
He's right though. It's a wise point of insight. iPhone and Android are ripe for played-out cultural saturation, just like Facebook.
Maybe if Nokia doesn't drop the ball, they can parlay this natural social rhythm into success, unlike SOME people (I'm looking at YOU BlackBerry). ...hate to imagine any Microsoft involvement though. I wish they and their shitty Windows Phone would just die.
And this for me really highlights how Microsoft especially but also its partners have really dropped the ball. If you can't be the saturation player (Apple), and you can't directly challenge the saturation player (Google and its partners), then you have to offer a compelling niche product. That approach can succeed, especially for smaller companies for whom even a niche product produces meaningful revenue. But there are two big problems here: First, neither Nokia nor Microsoft is a small company; Nokia needs to be a major challenger for its business model to work, and Microsoft is investing a lot of money in mobile and needs more than just one or two partners with niche products to generate a return. Second, the Windows brand has plenty of value, but is a handicap to anyone trying this approach in developing a new niche product. Windows is hardly the brand people associate with innovative, hip new products or being off the beaten path; many if not most people interact with it every day and for them it is background noise, the default, the standard, something that is so bland and ordinary as not to even occasion comment. Is that really the brand that Nokia, or Microsoft for that matter, thinks will excite people who are tired of iOS or Android, or people looking for a less-common status symbol?
If Microsoft were smarter they would have recognised this and invested the time and energy into coming up with an alternative brand for their mobile products, perhaps leveraging the successful Xbox brand. But in a sense that would also have been an acknowledgement up front that their approach was unlikely to pay off big; a new brand might generate a niche following, but only the Windows brand is likely to be able to take on Apple and Google... most likely by eating RIM's lunch in the corporate space. In other words, either Microsoft has badly misjudged the cachet of Windows among ordinary individuals or its intent all along was to sell Windows Mobile into places where corporate IT makes the decisions rather than end users. That strategy looked decent a few years ago, but we have really seen a lot of changes recently in how employers handle supporting their employees' personal mobile devices. Recognising that it's cheaper to support their existing iOS and Android devices than to issue their own fleet of business-only devices, and that most people prefer to have at most only one phone and one tablet anyway, almost no one is still handing out a single device and refusing to support anything else. In the absence of products that are compelling on their own, RIM is finding that the decay of the corporate mobile device mandate is very bad for business. Microsoft, and therefore their partners as well, seem to be in the same spot.
It looks like the niche player, whatever it ends up being, will be built around WebOS. It has open source cachet, underdog cachet ("back from the dead"), and it's not a terrible technology. With two dominant players duking it out for the mass market and a potential family of niche alternatives brewing, where does this leave Microsoft? With a lacklustre brand, tiny market share, an apparently outdated strategy, and no compelling products on the market, it's hard to imagine Windows Mobile going anywhere. Too late to market to be where Android is today, and too stodgy a brand to be what Nokia wishes it were (not that a niche business is what Microsoft wants anyway), Windows Mobile looks like a dead end. If anyone knows the value of getting in early, it should be Microsoft; the entire company exists today solely because of its first mover advantage all those years ago. Nokia was happy to get a backer, but it appears to have picked the wrong one. They could be doomed as well.
It's time to recognise that the West is in another Cold War with China. The steps taken to keep industrial information out of Soviet hands crimped trade and imposed costly burdens on US business, but they were at least somewhat effective. Let's try to do better, but for fuck's sake let's do something! How about starting by dropping all packets from China at the border? If nothing else it ought to get their attention.
You should collect data from your own organisation or others within your company that have used either Red Hat or CentOS in the past few years. You are looking for statistics like downtime (and impact/cost), number of cases opened and how they were resolved, and general information -- facts -- about their respective experiences. If your company has no experience with either, try to gather this kind of data from your professional network if you can. Then evaluate the data and produce slides showing both the raw data and its applicability (of lack thereof) to this particular project. Be sure to make the connection clear by showing how the risks and costs apply to this specific situation. You should also be able to clearly show the total costs in each year of each solution along with your projections -- again, based on applicable HARD DATA -- for how well each solution will work for your project. In the process of doing all this, you should have an open mind yourself about the outcome; that is, you should not enter it intending to justify one solution over another but rather you should be looking to see what the data justifies and supports. While your gut instinct has value, it is not a compelling argument, especially if the data don't support it. If that's the case, look harder: what are you missing about the situation? What information can you gather that addresses the missing pieces? Or maybe you changed your own mind by doing rigorous research.
If your company's CIO is a good manager, then this kind of data, compiled correctly and presented well, will sway him. At minimum, it will provide a clear focal point for discussion: he can argue about your assumptions, point you to other people to talk with to adjust them, or direct you to find ways to lower the costs you present. All of these are victories for you, because they give you an opportunity to change the outcome. You may not get your RHEL licenses, but you may get another head, or help from another department, a meeting with Red Hat to negotiate lower pricing, or something else that you can come up with to mitigate the risks and costs you identify. Worst case, you've made a clear presentation of the options that will be remembered if things don't turn out well; again, a good manager will at that point be honest enough to acknowledge that he made the call, and will admit to you privately that you were right. At that point, you should be ready with a set of recommendations for fixing the problem going forward not just for other projects, but also to salvage this one. If it's 2 years on and the underlying business need will be changing or going away soon, does it make sense to switch to RHEL at that point? Is there another option you've been researching to mitigate the problems you're having? Be ready with recommendations that show you understand not only the technical situation but also the business impact and the full gamut of possible solutions. Show that you are focused on solving the problem; don't miss that opportunity by gloating or showing him that you don't have answers!
Bad managers are difficult to convince of anything, especially if they are biased for some reason other than a desire to see the business succeed. If you're stuck working for such a person, there may be little you can do. In that case, you have to ask yourself whether you want to try to get a larger audience, preferably including the CEO, when you make your presentation. That path is fraught with career risk, but if your data is very solid and you are a good communicator who understands the business, the project, and the people involved, it may be worth it. You don't have a lot of other options. Frankly, the best thing you can do is find another job. It's usually not worth waiting for these people to hang themselves because bad managers tend to be hired or promoted by other bad managers; his boss probably isn't going to hold him accountable either, and will let him make you the scapegoat if things do go south. The middle and upper management ranks of most larger companies are full of people like these and your best bet is to look elsewhere if that's the situation you're in.
What is unfortunate, Facebook might be willing to sell this data to 3rd parties without your consent... as your friends/coworkers/family have already consented to releasing the contact information for you. Even without Facebook selling it, it's only a data breach away from some the unscrupulous hands.
I don't know that there's anyone more unscrupulous than facebook. The mobsters and fraud rings out there really just want to use your identity to take money from banks. They're annoying but not really that dangerous to ordinary people (nor to the banks, who treat low-level activity as a cost of doing business). The law is also firmly entrenched against them, and they are occasionally caught and punished. Facebook and their ilk, however, sell humans as products to thousands of corporations around the world, and they do so with impunity. They are a direct and real threat to every individual person alive today and countless unborn yet to come. If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to give all my personal information to either Mark Zuckerberg or a Russian gangster, I'd give it to the gangster every time. Then I can go file a police report, close all my accounts, and start over with no loss but a few hours of my time. Eventually the gangsters will be caught and imprisoned or perhaps killed in a war with other gangsters. There's no such happy ending possible if facebook gets its hands on my data; even if I change my name, move to a different state, and start a new career, sooner or later facebook will get my new data too. There's apparently nothing I can do about it, and the law won't help me.
Bottom line: a "facebook data breach" would mean nothing to us, since everything in their database was already for sale; it would only harm facebook, who will have given away what they were previously selling.
Who uses adblock/noscript yet doesn't block those pointless facebook and twitter buttons?
Even if you don't care about the privacy angle, it really cuts down on useless traffic.
Here's a new one you may not have got around to adding yet: apis.google.com/js/plusone.js
I don't really think adblockers are sufficient in light of how devious facebook and others are known to be. Using those techniques amounts to participating in an arms war between these companies and other software engineers. Instead, or in addition, one should redirect their entire domains to localhost and blackhole all known netblocks they use. You can't do enough to keep yourself safe from these thieves and predators; they are the modern-day slavers and you, once again, are their product. While there may be no measure strong enough to prevent the kind of theft this article highlights, that serves only to point out that no available measure should be overlooked in the effort to shut down the flow of data into their systems.
You know what's even more annoying than Linux's "me too" projects? All the stuff they COULD imitate but don't. I have no idea why Linux admins still have to grovel through logs or use stuff like splunk to guess at what's wrong with their hardware, but they do. Even a lousy knockoff is better than pretending the problem doesn't exist and leaving people to cobble together inferior workarounds.
Actually, there is absolutely something "they can do to eliminate your commute" - they can pay him (her?) more money to make up for the (likely) difference in rent or inconvenience of relocation expenses.
This argument in general is highly unreasonable and perpetuates the "fuck everyone" attitude. Meanwhile, even in very big cities individual industries in IT have a relatively small pool of people, and a good % of jobs are found via former coworkers. So while the company might not think twice before fucking you, you should think twice before fucking your colleagues - in a few months, when you interview in some other company, your resume might be on their desks.
Unless you worked for Sun in 2010, I don't really care about your uninformed opinion. As for fucking your colleagues, give me a break; they'd kill their own mothers to get the knife to stab you in the back if it meant they get to keep their miserable jobs through the next redundancy. It's not unreasonable at all; it's the way things work. You can look out for number one or you can take it up the ass; I don't really give a damn either way but I do think these young kids should hear the advice once so they can regret not heeding it later.
Do what you think is right but make sure you don't hurt yourself.
Actually, I don't like this thinking. You're trying to say the right thing but can't bring yourself to do it. I'll help.
Do what you think is wrong.
There, I said it. Many of us were raised with a very outdated set of values. If, like me, you're one of them, you need to invert your moral compass when making decisions about relationships with people or corporate entities. What you think is wrong is most likely going to be best for you, and it's most likely what everyone expects you to do anyway. Think of it like driving a car: you want to do what everyone around you expects because that's how you avoid becoming a grease smear on the pavement. Throw in the fact that people who act in the ways we were taught are "wrong" are the people who get what they want. I'm sorry to say it, but you need to start doing all the wrong things if you want to get ahead.
You think that your management is inside your circle of friends, but they would do anything for money. Maybe they wouldn't kill your grandmother, not sure. In business, this is called "making the hard decisions." You have to do it to manage people. In business, this is called "playing with the big boys."
You must quit your job now, because you have an unhealthy relationship with your coworkers and bosses. You will be badly hurt if they ever have to let you go, and it will take a long time to recover from it at a time when you will have to search for a job.
Best advice I've ever read on Slashdot. Maybe that's not saying much, but I would give anything to have had this implanted in my brain 5 years ago.
I notice from the problem you pose that you haven't been fucked yet. That's ok; a lot of people manage to go through most of their careers without ever getting fucked; in our grandparents' era, a lot of people worked for only one or two companies, never got fucked at all, and retired without ever knowing what it's like. Today, though, it's very easy to find someone who will fuck you. In fact, it's all but impossible to avoid; sooner or later you're going to get fucked whether you want to or not. If it's not your own company's rapacious or incompetent management, your company will be bought out and you and your colleagues fucked repeatedly by the acquiring company.
In case I'm not being clear, my point is that no one gives a flying fuck about you. They don't care about your personal happiness, your career advancement, or whether your compensation is commensurate with your contribution. You may think that they're your friends; maybe they are, maybe not. Save it for the football game or the pub after work; while they're in the office they are in it for themselves, not you. At the office, they are the corporation, which is a pathological entity that rewards cruel and selfish behaviour and accumulates managers who behave that way regardless of whether the shareholders, directors, or senior managers themselves hold those values. They will gladly fuck you without a second thought if circumstances encourage doing so, and most of them would be stunned to learn that you took offense at your fucking; to them it's just part of running the business. Trust me: you're not even human to them when you're at the office; you're a cog in their machine.
Don't for one nanosecond consider being "loyal" to a corporation, nor to individuals within that corporation acting in its context. A lot of people here have advised you to "negotiate". Don't listen to them. If someone is offering you more money and an hour and a half of your life back every day, TAKE IT. If you attempt to negotiate, you may be given a counteroffer, but you will be let go as soon as they can find a cheaper alternative to paying you more money (not to mention that there is nothing they can do to eliminate your commute). When that happens, your other offer will be a distant memory and you will be stuck looking for whatever you can find.
You need to stop feeling anything for the people you work with. They see you as a cog, and you should see them the same way. It really helps to stop thinking of them as human at all. Oh, and welcome to the workforce, son! Savour the opportunity you have right now to be on the giving end; it won't always be that way.
Does this remind anyone of the South Seas tribes who, after WW2, made wooden radios and beacons in the expectation that they would cause aircraft bearing advanced goods to land?
The studies you cite were all conducted by the government or by people working under government contracts. Those are the same people who would benefit from selling the casks and waste management services to the government, so they all have an interest in making it look like Yucca Mountain is a safe and effective place to store high-level waste. Maybe it is, but they spent so much time and energy trying to convince us that their credibility is nil. After all, if they're so good at managing the transportation and storage of high-level waste, surely there's no reason they couldn't just fill a few empty warehouses in Detroit or Omaha or Baltimore with the casks, right? Because it's all so safe, right?
You even hint at another reason for skepticism. At best, Yucca Mountain might have a few hundred years of safe and effective storage before there's an accident in transport, a geological event, a leak, or some other event that we've all been told is simply impossible or has a 0.00001% chance of happening in 10,000 years. By that time, all the people responsible for designing and implementing the storage and transport system will be long gone. So there is zero accountability in the process: the people involved could know the waste will be in the groundwater in 100 years and no one responsible would live long enough to stand trial for it. Similarly, they could provide even wholly independent testing labs with cask "samples" that are engineered and manufactured to far higher standards than the production casks would be. By the time anyone discovers this, they're all dead and there are thousands of tonnes of extremely hazardous toxic waste in transport or underground with containment less than called for in the design. Of course, we're told that the government has ways of detecting and preventing these kinds of things from happening, which is why every few years you read about that same government giving its soldiers and sailors defective weapons and armour made by those same government contractors and tested using those same government protocols.
Maybe none of these things is true. Maybe Yucca Mountain really is a great choice, and maybe the casks really will last thousands of years and really can survive being smashed by a train or tossed off the Empire State Building by King Kong. It's a stretch, but it's not impossible. But I don't really believe the people who told us all that, I don't trust them, and no one else who would have had to bear the consequences of failure did, either. Hopefully somewhere there is a town full of people who, like you, have more trust in the government and their contractors and would welcome the opportunity to show the world how a skilled labour force can partner with the federal government and its major contracting corporations to deliver a safe and reliable system for transporting waste to their storage facility and keeping it there without leaks for at least 10,000 years (it really needs to be 100,000, but I'll give you credit for a length of time no greater than that of human history to this point). And after 10,000 years of that skilled labour force and those honest government employees -- I should say governmentS employees, since no government has ever lasted longer than a thousand years or so -- and contracting corporations providing a flawless safety record, your town's water supply, genetic health, and agricultural output will all be every bit as good as they are today. Then our descendents can all agree that the people of Nevada way back in the day sure were a bunch of Nervous Nellies who turned away a golden opportunity to employ a few people for no good reason (and that would really be the only benefit, since the state would get no tax revenue from the facility or its construction as it would all be on government land with government labour and contractors domiciled out of state). That's assuming that anyone 10,000 years from now even knows what Nevada or Yucca Mountain or the United States of America were, or for that matter that there's thousands of tonnes
I guess my point was that there are particular reasons Nevada was and remains a highly inappropriate choice. NIMBY sounds a lot less compelling when you're living next to a reactor and running your gear on its juice.
I lived in Las Vegas for 12 years. There was absolutely no way we wanted that stuff stored at Yucca Mountain; it is a geologically active area and every proposed transport route for the waste went through the city. All that would be mere hypocrisy if not for the fact that Nevada has no nuclear power plants and derives virtually none of its electricity from nuclear sources outside the state. This is completely orthogonal to whether nuclear power is a good idea, whether it can be made safe, whether fast reactors are better, whether waste should instead be reprocessed or turned into glass or shot into space, and just how bad coal or hydro or other sources are for us and the rest of earth's inhabitants. It's nothing more complicated than the fact that Yucca Mountain is at best a mediocre site, the local residents don't want it, and the waste is generated elsewhere for the primary benefit of people who do not live in Nevada. That should have been sufficient to make the feds look elsewhere 15 years ago, but for some reason it wasn't. That the state won the fight is cheering; that a fight was even necessary is an appalling violation of states' rights. Finding a geologically suitable site in a state with nuclear power plants and residents who trust the government to transport and store the waste safely in their vicinity is an excellent idea. If they'd done that in the first place, we'd all have billions of dollars back -- and we'd probably have a nuke dump, too. But it certainly wouldn't be at Yucca Mountain; the federal government has abused and betrayed Nevadans from the day the state was admitted to the union, and there is absolutely no way its residents will ever trust it with their lives and property. That they gain little or nothing from nuclear power serves only to reinforce their already compelling case. Let those who like the federal government and think it's full of good, kind, well-meaning and competent public servants take the waste from their own power plants instead. It's the right thing for everyone.
And where do YOU live, sir? In a state with nuclear power plants? Far away from Nevada? Right. It's just as meaningful for me to say that your basement is the best choice.
While everyone else is looking for bars packed with women, I'll be able to see which places with good beer selections have open seats at the bar. There's nothing better than a quiet bar with good beer and a friendly barkeep.
Different skills take differing amounts of time and experience to master. In general, professional musicians start playing in or even before high school. No one shows up at a university with no experience and expects to become a concert pianist or cellist. The expectation is that it takes at least 5-10 years of experience to become a top-notch musician. The counterexample offered of a surgeon having been expected to operate on his pets in high school is also silly; while the expectation is that experience with musical instruments is gained starting in the early teens, that same ten years of experience for surgeons begins in college and extends well beyond, into medical school, internship, and then residency. So it's incorrect to compare the three fields.
Part of the difficulty these academics are having is that "computer science" encompasses many different fields. Some academics are really borderline mathematicians. Some students really belong in a vocational school, because the general knowledge of computer science most university programs teach is not needed nor useful if your plan is to go write business logic in Java for some megacorporation. Those students would be much better served by a 1- or 2-year program that focuses on the specific technologies they'll be using. And there are other students who plan to make programming a career in any of several different fields, each involving its own specialised tools, terminology, and mixture of theory and practical knowledge. All of this lives under one roof in most universities. Complicating matters further, students show up with many different levels of experience; some may have grown up with little access to computers, while others may already be accomplished programmers in the open source community looking for a degree and the opportunity to gain advanced knowledge of theory. It will never be possible to come up with a plan for the first two semesters that works for all of these cases. In that sense, the one-size-fits-all approach is indeed broken. But that is completely different from insisting that "up-or-out" is wrong, or that the basics need to be introduced even more slowly or in even more courses.
Students in most programs get 2 semesters of extremely basic instruction. This covers things like what variables, expressions, and functions are, the concepts of sequence, decision, and iteration, the basics of syntax in one or two languages, what memory is, and maybe some simple data structures like arrays and structures. Anyone who comes in with any programming experience at all, in any language or context, already knows at least 90% of everything taught in these courses. Forcing everyone to take them constitutes a tax. Value is given in the form of tuition and time spent but none is received in the form of increased knowledge. Students with no experience may well benefit from these courses, however. To suggest that they're "too fast" is ridiculous, however. In those two semesters, students will receive about 80 hours of lecture instruction, 2 300-page textbooks, usually at least 1 textbook with practical exercises in it, at least 15 hours of structured practical instruction from teaching assistants, generally unlimited access to computers, compilers, interpreters, and other tools as needed, unlimited access to a library with thousands of relevant documents ranging from trivial to cutting-edge research, access to a peer group, and dozens of office hours with the instructor and teaching assistants. It's silly to suggest that in 8 months a committed student with access to all those resources cannot pick up the basics of computer use and programming in at least one high-level language. And that's really all that's expected; there are separate courses for computer architecture, advanced data structures, operating systems, compilers, graphics, linear algebra, logic, calculus, programming language theory and features, algorithms, networking, databases, and so on. No one is expecting a student completing those two courses to be a maste