You have it wrong. They have to document a semi-detailed, lets say, one page income statement listing classes of income, and it gets stamped with the approval of a corrupt auditing agency (recall recent scandals where it was all faked).
Trust me, Wisconsin Energy does not give me a copy of individual bills in each quarterly statement. You get lines like "$1B revenue from electric"
In the real estate biz FB means "f*cked buyer" like a guy who bought at a multigenerational top of a housing bubble, or a guy trying to do landlording from another coast, or a guy stuck paying two mortgages because the old house won't sell, guy who bought without contingencies/no inspection and got screwed, guy who believed the lying commissioned real estate agent when she said there were multiple offers so he should raise his bid but there were no offers (she tried that on me and my wife, I laughed at her) etc. Basically a loanowner who didn't get the house he was expecting. Makes all the comments "FB this" and "FB that" sound much funnier.
If they'll accept the same level of software "quality", and if they'll accept made up resume stuffing and imaginary degrees, and if they'd accept everything taking 5 times as long as having a $60K local do it, I'd take that offer. Heck I'd take three or four of those jobs simultaneously. Now we're talkin...
Ohh another real world example, happened to a friend and coworker of mine.
Multimillion dollar service contract (maybe low 9 figures total?) depends on department being ready to hit ground running to even submit a qualified bid, much less to win. Department also needs regulatory approval for the tariff (yes, this was telecom). Regulatory approval and contract negotiations took over 3 years after my buddy was hired. Much solitaire played for full salary. Wish I was there! They literally did Nothing business related for years. Department wide LAN parties, salaried guys only showed up for an hour or two per day, 3 hour lunches each day (described as like a roman feast, except no togas). Read books, do homework for night school classes... Some weird story about a guy painting plastic dnd miniatures or maybe it was warhammer miniatures for weeks at a time, donno. RC car races around the cubes... nap time after lunch. Watching downloaded movies on the projector in the meeting room. My buddy finished most of a CS degree in night school... helps if you have about 7.5 hours free time to study and do homework each "working" day. He didn't feel bad about it, he considered it like winning a scholarship.
The legal costs of defending someone filing a lawsuit, even a completely frivolous one, are so high compared to the cost of some salary that its cheaper to collect a folder of signed disciplinary actions and formal gathered evidence than to just toss them out on the street like a bouncer in an old western movie tossing a guy outta bar.
There are also numerous legal issues with your exaggerated example of firing 90% of your company... here we have "at will" theoretically, but the company has to pay a rather substantial fine to the state if they fire more than 50 people with less than 60 days warning. I really have no idea why. Technically its not "at will", in the same way that our financial system is not a "free market" but we pretend it more or less is.
Never forget than 50% of management is below median. You might think they would want to dispose of the deadweight, but they may be idiots.
Finally, or they may realize if they get rid of the peons they won't be able to justify their empire based on # of direct reports. One place I worked at, the manager really wanted to be a director, and he's not getting that promotion unless he has the minimum of X front line employees, so lots of solitaire was played. Out of business now, of course, but it was a rational strategy for that boss at that time. I'm sure he's a VP (if not higher) somewhere now.
Keep 5% extra on staff if you're expecting 5% growth next year and it takes weeks to years to get up to speed.
Dump people if you predict permanent long term economic decline.
Hmm, which future outcome are they apparently publicly predicting, and should I therefore buy or sell IBM stock?
Its not so much a current or historical thing as a future prediction.
Say it costs on average half a years pay in severance and half a year's pay in recruiting costs. You're betting that you won't need to hire people for expansion at least a year, or in IBM's case, frankly probably forever.
There are other hidden costs... only a madman or a desperate man would take a job at IBM knowing its only a matter of time until they randomly get the axe. In fact anyone with the ability to get a job elsewhere should hurry the F up and get out to any job, any where, especially IBMs competitors, because when IBM dies, their competitors will boom with all the new revenue. That has a HUGE medium to long term impact on productivity and corporate survival. IBM's only hope is to try and destroy their competition in the short term... watch for it.
putting all engineer eggs in one corporation basket
it's old geezers anyways, people who are nearly able to retire anyways. this way they would know exactly how their retirement would go and when they would move to it.
Those quotes don't go together.
Prevailing wisdom is IBM is a tech company, this plan applies to people who are retiring next year so they're about 64, right? However the prevailing belief is pro football quarterbacks, heck, pro football linemen have longer professional careers than techies, so you'll never be hired after age 40 ever again. This would seem to imply the only people getting this offer are in finance, accounting, HR, receptionists, blah blah. Cant apply to anyone in tech because everyone in tech gets the solyent green career path around age 40.
That being said, the onsite IBM mainframe CE at a finance corp job 20 years ago was so freaking old he could have been there since the unit record equipment days (1930s), so its hard to say how it is now. Another datapoint is they were firing experienced people around that era and replacing them with recent college grads like a buddy of mine. In summary its unclear whats going on "inside" WRT to techs, unless we get someone "inside" to comment here.
If IBM were not closing in the US and moving completely to China and India as fast as they can, just like GE and a zillion other companies, lets figure out the crossover point: Assume one months pay per year of employment. This is guarantee of 70% of 18 months or about one years pay. Along with 18 months of health insurance, I'd assume. So if you have more than 12 years in, you should risk it, you'll probably come out ahead. Less than 12 years in, you'd be better off taking the offer.
Most likely they're going to downsize every american citizen in their corporation, so you do appear to be better off taking the offer because its not a random distribution.
I'm also curious in salaried positions if you're expected to put in 50 hours per week for a "40 hour schedule", then what does 60% of schedule even mean, like you no longer work Monday and Friday at all, or you're still expected to put in 50 hours per week, except now on a imaginary "24 hour schedule"?
And a message for the last F500 employee in america, please remember to shut off the lights on your way out of the office...
Smarter than an oscilloscope, dumber than a protocol analyzer.
Scope + more channels - speed = logic analyzer
Protocol analyzer + more channels (usually) + lots more speed - fancy protocol software = logic analyzer
Of course these are real world practical technical definitions. Your local marketing department might be trying to poison the well to make them mean something else.... And the logic shrimp is from the same guy as the bus pirate, which is a really nice entry level protocol analyzer. I would assume the Shrimp also rocks.
Another area of mystification "here be dragons" is why we only hear about online classes and video lecture series for top tier research universities. Unsurprisingly the best instructors are at teaching colleges, like state-U, little local private U, or voc tech 2 year establishments.
Best math instructor ever, taught calc at a local HS and moonlighted teaching calc at a small private U. I swear to god that dude could teach an armadillo how to integrate by parts. Best chemistry teacher ever, ancient guy teaching quantitative chemical analysis at UWM, if he were still alive he'd be 120 years old now.. If video of him were available, it would be beyond epic. He lived thru, and worked in, most of the development of the field. Best EE instructor weirdly enough at the local vo-tech, teaching transistor ckts, equations, characteristics, and analysis. Better than any U lecturer I ever saw.
The worlds best theoretical quantum physics researcher belongs at the worlds best research institution doing cutting edge research; unfortunately his "intro physics 101" is probably gonna suck unless the foreign TAs can rescue it for him. Whoops. Been there seen that. Once in a lifetime you might get a "Feynman" type who can do both research and teach at the same time. Yeah... Once in a lifetime...
Also the old programmer estimation where the top 1% of programmers are 100x more productive than the median programmer unfortunately applies to teachers. There's lots of "baby sitters where you might learn something", but the cream of the crop is epic / legendary. That is what I want in video lectures over the internet. Understandably the other 99% of teachers don't want to be unemployed, so... This is the big problem to be fixed. Good luck!
Unfortunately, in our society, you will be labeled as "wishy washy" or a "flip flopper". Politicians are excluded because they are panderers to their voters.
Have to pander to the people who purchased them via election campaign contributions. Standard/. car analogy: you hire your car mechanic to fix your brakes, he shrugs shoulders and rotates your tires instead. You're going to let everyone know you're pissed off at that wishy washy flip flopper of a mechanic.
Which is a curse of a democratic style of Government - and it is more than offset by the benefits.
Still open for debate. The US would probably be in better shape if we kept the English monarchy at the top but attained more local autonomy. You know, like Canada. Which does seem to be a better place in a better position with better economic numbers and better health care and better international relations. Also its more a curse of a two party system rather than democracy. Especially since we have a aristocratic republic not a democracy.
This is a software interface between a Logic Analyzer and a computer. There are standalone devices that need no computer...
furthermore there are stand alone open source devices that need little more than a terminal.
Ian lesnet's, dangerous prototypes, seeed studio manufactured, "bus pirate" under continuous development for, what, 3 years now? I have a v3 and that thing rocks.
Go to OCW or itunesU or ed section of archive.org and there's about 20 first semester calculus video lecture series. Some are even pretty good. Then there is a steady decline until "junior year" classes where the distribution drops to approximately Zero. I'd like to watch a modern compiler class. How about a modern database design class (I was brought up in the Codd Normal Form era, it would be interesting to listen to some nosql rants).
A complete list of "interesting video lecture series I know about" : there is a decent crystallography/stereochemistry series. There is a decent thermodynamics series. There is a decent digital communications series. That's about all I've found for technical "non-freshmen level" video lecture series.
Its like a video game stuffed with noobness to get good immediate reviews, then ignore the longer term players, after all you've already got their interest/money.
offering certificates that are not even worth the paper they're printed on.
This is not a new development in the educational-industrial complex.
I could probably fill this/. text box with telecom "certificates" that no body cares about, and thats before I get started on weekend/night vo-tech certificate programs.
The only paperwork HR cares about is bachelors degrees. Masters, maybe, but you're probably overqualified. Phd, go away you're overqualified.
My collection of ham radio contest and participation certs is probably more relevant to most employers, and frankly more work to achieve.
What could be interesting is an apprenticeship program where the "book learning" is done online. Before you laugh at higher ed and apprenticeships, noobs fresh outta college pretty much are apprentices, just not formally. Journeymen are pretty much the jobhopper wage slaves and low level consultants, and masters are pretty much the guys who are high up enough in the consulting world to be hiring subs to work for them. Try to avoid it and paper over it, but the design pattern still shines thru.
I would aggressively extend my idea and propose that even right now, becoming a "real programmer or real sysadmin" pretty much always has required an informal apprenticeship phase.
Diaspora... theres a name I haven't heard recently. I checked the github and its certainly alive and kicking. Do many/.ers use Diaspora and could therefore use the Goblin?
I wondered about the license and had to LOL at the commit comment:
GNU-AGPL-3.0 2 years ago added license to every single goddamn file. also, put one in the root [Daniel Vincent Grippi]
Yes, that answers the licensing question quite firmly
Many institutions are partnering in this space. Is the MIT/Harvard partnership exclusive? Will other institutions be able to collaborate with edX? It is our intention that over time other universities will join MIT and Harvard in offering courses on the edX platform.
Hmmm how about MIT OCW? Can they partner with edX?
OCW has some excellent class lectures to watch. I hope this doesn't mean OCW is going away, or going to fee-only.
How's life in 2011? I ask because June 6th will be the 1 year anniversary of the iCloud announcement.
Whoops you got me there. I thought the iCloud was a marketing rebranding of the iDisk, same thing different ad copy. Badge engineering, like the ten companies that all sell sprinter vans, or Taurus/Sable, or Expedition/Navigator.
Don't they basically do the same thing, perhaps with somewhat renamed APIs? I can see why they'd toss the old service after some cutover time if its the same product.
Of course, you pay for it in labor (your own, unless you buy used), utility (you can't use homebuilts for commercial purposes), and risk (which varies by design and the builder).
And resale value. Inevitably a 32 year old Cessna sells for about the same as a 30 year old Cessna, so your depreciation cost was pretty low. Used homebuilts usually don't sell that well, the regs are very complicated to prevent "amateur airplane builder" industry from forming. Its been a long time since I studied the regs before giving up on flying, but at least a long time ago it was something weird, like the only people who can do maint on an experimental are the builder and a licensed A/P mech so unless your sale contract includes lifetime maint, a A/P needs to do all further maint work, and in practice relatively few would sign off on someone elses construction, so it was... an issue. Like you were better off pulling out everything that can be pulled (instruments, avionics, engine, etc) and build a new experimental airframe with new registration number using old parts. I believe this was the 51% rule at work, the new owner obviously didn't do 51% of the construction, so...
For small Cessnas, etc, years ago, last time I looked, no one seemed to care much about airframe age in years, it was all about the TSMOH or TSOH or whatever the abbreviation is for hours since major overhaul. A "newer" airframe 100 hours from major sold for less than a "older" airframe that just got major'd.
My auto mechanic tells me that his hybrid customers refuse to spend $5000 to replace the battery pack when it goes tits-up and just run on gasoline.
I cry bogus on that. My wife has a seven year old prius and as far as I know that's the most expensive hybrid pack out there, and brand new from the dealer its $2200. Note this is the same dealer that sells an oil filter for $30, or an interior rearview mirror for $35, everyone knows a "fair price" is 1/2 to 2/3 dealer cost for everything including batteries. I know online you can get used pulls from crashes for around $1K and remanufactured (supposedly) for about $1500. Also most battery failure modes the car simply will not run at all, fails the automotive equivalent of POST BIOS boot checks. Can't even blame labor, its not like replacing a heater core, you just pop the back seat and remove about 50 screws (I was thinking of running an inverter off the traction battery... see ham radio QST magazine some years back for details from people who've done this... this is NOT for the faint of heart or pocketbook so I did not do it, but I thought about it). The final nail in the straw is the feds made the battery part of the emissions control parts, mandatory 10/150 if sold in CA or 8/100 guarantee if sold anywhere else in the USA. I would not pay a mechanic $5K either, especially not for a 2002 model, thats probably not worth $5K if sold, and $5K is not a fair price for a new battery at all. I would question the wisdom of putting a brand new "200K battery" in a car that is probably near its end, just like I'd question putting a brand new engine in an ancient old fashioned car.
I also know for a fact from a buddy that the Insight pack is cheaper than the Prius pack, but labor is way way higher due to some peculiarity of the design, so it ends up costing about the same, although supposedly only 200 Insight packs have ever been replaced worldwide, so its all kind of fuzzy math there.
Short of a life-or-death emergency, the big planes don't land with full tanks. They'll either fly around in circles to burn off fuel, or dump it -- and deal with a nightmare of EPA paperwork.
We're well into anecote land, but a former coworker who was a copilot at a major airline before 9-11 had some commentary about during a crash landing you can't be burned by fuel you dumped minutes ago, so if you've got time you dump fuel. Also your landing speed and maneuverability depend on weight, so there seems little point in landing with full tanks if you can avoid it.
It's a distro for newbies. The best one out there.
OK you've convinced me. Admittedly just one posters anecdotes, but it seems believable and you tell a coherent and realistic story. That is probably a profitable survivable niche. Good luck competing against Ubuntu, but they can probably both profitably compete in that sector, keep each other honest so to speak. Their problem is I finally figured out their market position from a guy named Urza9814 on Slashdot instead of from Wikipedia or their own self promotional website. That is a big problem for them.
Assuming this isn't like theology where a bunch of peons theorize about the intentions of the big guys without any feedback, and often get it wrong. Maybe they actually tell themselves they are a scientific/educational distro, or maybe they really believe they are the only distro out there with FF and libreoffice packages. I donno, their marketing, and possibly biz plan, appears to need work.
I disgree. That's like saying a nation where all children are a standard model clone is diverse, because they have different parents.
The fact that a boot up screen momentarily says Debian or Mandriva before the user runs the identical firefox app is NOT the problem with linux on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
You have it wrong. They have to document a semi-detailed, lets say, one page income statement listing classes of income, and it gets stamped with the approval of a corrupt auditing agency (recall recent scandals where it was all faked).
Trust me, Wisconsin Energy does not give me a copy of individual bills in each quarterly statement. You get lines like "$1B revenue from electric"
In the real estate biz FB means "f*cked buyer" like a guy who bought at a multigenerational top of a housing bubble, or a guy trying to do landlording from another coast, or a guy stuck paying two mortgages because the old house won't sell, guy who bought without contingencies/no inspection and got screwed, guy who believed the lying commissioned real estate agent when she said there were multiple offers so he should raise his bid but there were no offers (she tried that on me and my wife, I laughed at her) etc. Basically a loanowner who didn't get the house he was expecting. Makes all the comments "FB this" and "FB that" sound much funnier.
If they'll accept the same level of software "quality", and if they'll accept made up resume stuffing and imaginary degrees, and if they'd accept everything taking 5 times as long as having a $60K local do it, I'd take that offer. Heck I'd take three or four of those jobs simultaneously. Now we're talkin...
Ohh another real world example, happened to a friend and coworker of mine.
Multimillion dollar service contract (maybe low 9 figures total?) depends on department being ready to hit ground running to even submit a qualified bid, much less to win. Department also needs regulatory approval for the tariff (yes, this was telecom). Regulatory approval and contract negotiations took over 3 years after my buddy was hired. Much solitaire played for full salary. Wish I was there! They literally did Nothing business related for years. Department wide LAN parties, salaried guys only showed up for an hour or two per day, 3 hour lunches each day (described as like a roman feast, except no togas). Read books, do homework for night school classes... Some weird story about a guy painting plastic dnd miniatures or maybe it was warhammer miniatures for weeks at a time, donno. RC car races around the cubes... nap time after lunch. Watching downloaded movies on the projector in the meeting room. My buddy finished most of a CS degree in night school... helps if you have about 7.5 hours free time to study and do homework each "working" day. He didn't feel bad about it, he considered it like winning a scholarship.
A prime example of theoretical vs practical.
The legal costs of defending someone filing a lawsuit, even a completely frivolous one, are so high compared to the cost of some salary that its cheaper to collect a folder of signed disciplinary actions and formal gathered evidence than to just toss them out on the street like a bouncer in an old western movie tossing a guy outta bar.
There are also numerous legal issues with your exaggerated example of firing 90% of your company... here we have "at will" theoretically, but the company has to pay a rather substantial fine to the state if they fire more than 50 people with less than 60 days warning. I really have no idea why. Technically its not "at will", in the same way that our financial system is not a "free market" but we pretend it more or less is.
Never forget than 50% of management is below median. You might think they would want to dispose of the deadweight, but they may be idiots.
Finally, or they may realize if they get rid of the peons they won't be able to justify their empire based on # of direct reports. One place I worked at, the manager really wanted to be a director, and he's not getting that promotion unless he has the minimum of X front line employees, so lots of solitaire was played. Out of business now, of course, but it was a rational strategy for that boss at that time. I'm sure he's a VP (if not higher) somewhere now.
Difference between education and training:
Educated guy has stuff to think about and do; hobbies; lasts a lifetime.
Trained guy has nothing to do but go to work, nothing to do at home but watch TV, maybe drink.
I've seen both types retire... uneducated retirement isn't pretty and they don't live long, educated guys have a freaking blast after retirement.
Keep 5% extra on staff if you're expecting 5% growth next year and it takes weeks to years to get up to speed.
Dump people if you predict permanent long term economic decline.
Hmm, which future outcome are they apparently publicly predicting, and should I therefore buy or sell IBM stock?
Its not so much a current or historical thing as a future prediction.
Say it costs on average half a years pay in severance and half a year's pay in recruiting costs. You're betting that you won't need to hire people for expansion at least a year, or in IBM's case, frankly probably forever.
There are other hidden costs... only a madman or a desperate man would take a job at IBM knowing its only a matter of time until they randomly get the axe. In fact anyone with the ability to get a job elsewhere should hurry the F up and get out to any job, any where, especially IBMs competitors, because when IBM dies, their competitors will boom with all the new revenue. That has a HUGE medium to long term impact on productivity and corporate survival. IBM's only hope is to try and destroy their competition in the short term... watch for it.
putting all engineer eggs in one corporation basket
it's old geezers anyways, people who are nearly able to retire anyways. this way they would know exactly how their retirement would go and when they would move to it.
Those quotes don't go together.
Prevailing wisdom is IBM is a tech company, this plan applies to people who are retiring next year so they're about 64, right? However the prevailing belief is pro football quarterbacks, heck, pro football linemen have longer professional careers than techies, so you'll never be hired after age 40 ever again. This would seem to imply the only people getting this offer are in finance, accounting, HR, receptionists, blah blah. Cant apply to anyone in tech because everyone in tech gets the solyent green career path around age 40.
That being said, the onsite IBM mainframe CE at a finance corp job 20 years ago was so freaking old he could have been there since the unit record equipment days (1930s), so its hard to say how it is now. Another datapoint is they were firing experienced people around that era and replacing them with recent college grads like a buddy of mine. In summary its unclear whats going on "inside" WRT to techs, unless we get someone "inside" to comment here.
If IBM were not closing in the US and moving completely to China and India as fast as they can, just like GE and a zillion other companies, lets figure out the crossover point:
Assume one months pay per year of employment.
This is guarantee of 70% of 18 months or about one years pay. Along with 18 months of health insurance, I'd assume.
So if you have more than 12 years in, you should risk it, you'll probably come out ahead. Less than 12 years in, you'd be better off taking the offer.
Most likely they're going to downsize every american citizen in their corporation, so you do appear to be better off taking the offer because its not a random distribution.
I'm also curious in salaried positions if you're expected to put in 50 hours per week for a "40 hour schedule", then what does 60% of schedule even mean, like you no longer work Monday and Friday at all, or you're still expected to put in 50 hours per week, except now on a imaginary "24 hour schedule"?
And a message for the last F500 employee in america, please remember to shut off the lights on your way out of the office...
I have no idea wtf a logic analyzer is
Smarter than an oscilloscope, dumber than a protocol analyzer.
Scope + more channels - speed = logic analyzer
Protocol analyzer + more channels (usually) + lots more speed - fancy protocol software = logic analyzer
Of course these are real world practical technical definitions. Your local marketing department might be trying to poison the well to make them mean something else. ... And the logic shrimp is from the same guy as the bus pirate, which is a really nice entry level protocol analyzer. I would assume the Shrimp also rocks.
Another area of mystification "here be dragons" is why we only hear about online classes and video lecture series for top tier research universities.
Unsurprisingly the best instructors are at teaching colleges, like state-U, little local private U, or voc tech 2 year establishments.
Best math instructor ever, taught calc at a local HS and moonlighted teaching calc at a small private U. I swear to god that dude could teach an armadillo how to integrate by parts.
Best chemistry teacher ever, ancient guy teaching quantitative chemical analysis at UWM, if he were still alive he'd be 120 years old now.. If video of him were available, it would be beyond epic. He lived thru, and worked in, most of the development of the field.
Best EE instructor weirdly enough at the local vo-tech, teaching transistor ckts, equations, characteristics, and analysis. Better than any U lecturer I ever saw.
The worlds best theoretical quantum physics researcher belongs at the worlds best research institution doing cutting edge research; unfortunately his "intro physics 101" is probably gonna suck unless the foreign TAs can rescue it for him. Whoops. Been there seen that. Once in a lifetime you might get a "Feynman" type who can do both research and teach at the same time. Yeah... Once in a lifetime...
Also the old programmer estimation where the top 1% of programmers are 100x more productive than the median programmer unfortunately applies to teachers. There's lots of "baby sitters where you might learn something", but the cream of the crop is epic / legendary. That is what I want in video lectures over the internet. Understandably the other 99% of teachers don't want to be unemployed, so... This is the big problem to be fixed. Good luck!
Unfortunately, in our society, you will be labeled as "wishy washy" or a "flip flopper". Politicians are excluded because they are panderers to their voters.
Have to pander to the people who purchased them via election campaign contributions. Standard /. car analogy: you hire your car mechanic to fix your brakes, he shrugs shoulders and rotates your tires instead. You're going to let everyone know you're pissed off at that wishy washy flip flopper of a mechanic.
Which is a curse of a democratic style of Government - and it is more than offset by the benefits.
Still open for debate. The US would probably be in better shape if we kept the English monarchy at the top but attained more local autonomy. You know, like Canada. Which does seem to be a better place in a better position with better economic numbers and better health care and better international relations. Also its more a curse of a two party system rather than democracy. Especially since we have a aristocratic republic not a democracy.
This is a software interface between a Logic Analyzer and a computer. There are standalone devices that need no computer...
furthermore there are stand alone open source devices that need little more than a terminal.
Ian lesnet's, dangerous prototypes, seeed studio manufactured, "bus pirate" under continuous development for, what, 3 years now? I have a v3 and that thing rocks.
humongous propane forklift engine
Jumbo shrimp?
I wonder about level distribution.
Go to OCW or itunesU or ed section of archive.org and there's about 20 first semester calculus video lecture series. Some are even pretty good. Then there is a steady decline until "junior year" classes where the distribution drops to approximately Zero. I'd like to watch a modern compiler class. How about a modern database design class (I was brought up in the Codd Normal Form era, it would be interesting to listen to some nosql rants).
A complete list of "interesting video lecture series I know about" : there is a decent crystallography/stereochemistry series. There is a decent thermodynamics series. There is a decent digital communications series. That's about all I've found for technical "non-freshmen level" video lecture series.
Its like a video game stuffed with noobness to get good immediate reviews, then ignore the longer term players, after all you've already got their interest/money.
offering certificates that are not even worth the paper they're printed on.
This is not a new development in the educational-industrial complex.
I could probably fill this /. text box with telecom "certificates" that no body cares about, and thats before I get started on weekend/night vo-tech certificate programs.
The only paperwork HR cares about is bachelors degrees. Masters, maybe, but you're probably overqualified. Phd, go away you're overqualified.
My collection of ham radio contest and participation certs is probably more relevant to most employers, and frankly more work to achieve.
What could be interesting is an apprenticeship program where the "book learning" is done online. Before you laugh at higher ed and apprenticeships, noobs fresh outta college pretty much are apprentices, just not formally. Journeymen are pretty much the jobhopper wage slaves and low level consultants, and masters are pretty much the guys who are high up enough in the consulting world to be hiring subs to work for them. Try to avoid it and paper over it, but the design pattern still shines thru.
I would aggressively extend my idea and propose that even right now, becoming a "real programmer or real sysadmin" pretty much always has required an informal apprenticeship phase.
Diaspora... theres a name I haven't heard recently. I checked the github and its certainly alive and kicking. Do many /.ers use Diaspora and could therefore use the Goblin?
I wondered about the license and had to LOL at the commit comment:
GNU-AGPL-3.0 2 years ago added license to every single goddamn file. also, put one in the root [Daniel Vincent Grippi]
Yes, that answers the licensing question quite firmly
Other than the open format thing, sounds a lot like itunesU
Is there anything like itunesU for android?
From the FAQ
Many institutions are partnering in this space. Is the MIT/Harvard partnership exclusive? Will other institutions be able to collaborate with edX?
It is our intention that over time other universities will join MIT and Harvard in offering courses on the edX platform.
Hmmm how about MIT OCW? Can they partner with edX?
OCW has some excellent class lectures to watch. I hope this doesn't mean OCW is going away, or going to fee-only.
How's life in 2011? I ask because June 6th will be the 1 year anniversary of the iCloud announcement.
Whoops you got me there. I thought the iCloud was a marketing rebranding of the iDisk, same thing different ad copy. Badge engineering, like the ten companies that all sell sprinter vans, or Taurus/Sable, or Expedition/Navigator.
Don't they basically do the same thing, perhaps with somewhat renamed APIs? I can see why they'd toss the old service after some cutover time if its the same product.
Of course, you pay for it in labor (your own, unless you buy used), utility (you can't use homebuilts for commercial purposes), and risk (which varies by design and the builder).
And resale value. Inevitably a 32 year old Cessna sells for about the same as a 30 year old Cessna, so your depreciation cost was pretty low. Used homebuilts usually don't sell that well, the regs are very complicated to prevent "amateur airplane builder" industry from forming. Its been a long time since I studied the regs before giving up on flying, but at least a long time ago it was something weird, like the only people who can do maint on an experimental are the builder and a licensed A/P mech so unless your sale contract includes lifetime maint, a A/P needs to do all further maint work, and in practice relatively few would sign off on someone elses construction, so it was... an issue. Like you were better off pulling out everything that can be pulled (instruments, avionics, engine, etc) and build a new experimental airframe with new registration number using old parts. I believe this was the 51% rule at work, the new owner obviously didn't do 51% of the construction, so...
For small Cessnas, etc, years ago, last time I looked, no one seemed to care much about airframe age in years, it was all about the TSMOH or TSOH or whatever the abbreviation is for hours since major overhaul. A "newer" airframe 100 hours from major sold for less than a "older" airframe that just got major'd.
My auto mechanic tells me that his hybrid customers refuse to spend $5000 to replace the battery pack when it goes tits-up and just run on gasoline.
I cry bogus on that. My wife has a seven year old prius and as far as I know that's the most expensive hybrid pack out there, and brand new from the dealer its $2200. Note this is the same dealer that sells an oil filter for $30, or an interior rearview mirror for $35, everyone knows a "fair price" is 1/2 to 2/3 dealer cost for everything including batteries. I know online you can get used pulls from crashes for around $1K and remanufactured (supposedly) for about $1500. Also most battery failure modes the car simply will not run at all, fails the automotive equivalent of POST BIOS boot checks. Can't even blame labor, its not like replacing a heater core, you just pop the back seat and remove about 50 screws (I was thinking of running an inverter off the traction battery... see ham radio QST magazine some years back for details from people who've done this... this is NOT for the faint of heart or pocketbook so I did not do it, but I thought about it). The final nail in the straw is the feds made the battery part of the emissions control parts, mandatory 10/150 if sold in CA or 8/100 guarantee if sold anywhere else in the USA. I would not pay a mechanic $5K either, especially not for a 2002 model, thats probably not worth $5K if sold, and $5K is not a fair price for a new battery at all. I would question the wisdom of putting a brand new "200K battery" in a car that is probably near its end, just like I'd question putting a brand new engine in an ancient old fashioned car.
I also know for a fact from a buddy that the Insight pack is cheaper than the Prius pack, but labor is way way higher due to some peculiarity of the design, so it ends up costing about the same, although supposedly only 200 Insight packs have ever been replaced worldwide, so its all kind of fuzzy math there.
Short of a life-or-death emergency, the big planes don't land with full tanks. They'll either fly around in circles to burn off fuel, or dump it -- and deal with a nightmare of EPA paperwork.
We're well into anecote land, but a former coworker who was a copilot at a major airline before 9-11 had some commentary about during a crash landing you can't be burned by fuel you dumped minutes ago, so if you've got time you dump fuel. Also your landing speed and maneuverability depend on weight, so there seems little point in landing with full tanks if you can avoid it.
Maybe they're advertising it wrong.
Maybe?
It's a distro for newbies. The best one out there.
OK you've convinced me. Admittedly just one posters anecdotes, but it seems believable and you tell a coherent and realistic story. That is probably a profitable survivable niche. Good luck competing against Ubuntu, but they can probably both profitably compete in that sector, keep each other honest so to speak. Their problem is I finally figured out their market position from a guy named Urza9814 on Slashdot instead of from Wikipedia or their own self promotional website. That is a big problem for them.
Assuming this isn't like theology where a bunch of peons theorize about the intentions of the big guys without any feedback, and often get it wrong. Maybe they actually tell themselves they are a scientific/educational distro, or maybe they really believe they are the only distro out there with FF and libreoffice packages. I donno, their marketing, and possibly biz plan, appears to need work.
I disgree. That's like saying a nation where all children are a standard model clone is diverse, because they have different parents.
The fact that a boot up screen momentarily says Debian or Mandriva before the user runs the identical firefox app is NOT the problem with linux on the desktop.