the only stores for thousands of miles in any direction sold only alcohol, Mormon cookbooks, and knives.
Sounds like a bad day for the Mormons if you're hungry.
Recipe from the Mormon Cookbook:
Mormon Flambé
- 1 Cup 80 Proof Liquor (Cognac is a good choice) - 3 Slices Mormon Bacon, Diced - 2 8-Ounce Mormon Steaks
1. Fry Bacon until fat renders out 2. Cook Mormon steaks 4-5 minutes on each side, on Medium heat 3. Remove pan from heat 4. Add in warm Liquor (heated in a small saucepan until bubble start to form) 5. Using a long match, ignite Liquor 6. Serve immediately after flames die down.
Wikipedia says:Hubble was designed in the 1970s. It cost about US$ 2 billion ($2,000,000,000) to build and launch.
Using an inflation calculator, that's supposedly $9.5 billion in in todays money.
But you have to also factor in the fact that the technology should have gotten a whole lot cheaper by now, plus many other side benefits of building a new one.
I don't see why people have to bring so much bullshit to every discussion. This morning I had a class on Distributed Systems, and what it essentially came down to was Peer to Peer is great, but for some applications Client/Server is even better. Well, of course Client/Server is better for most things.
People just seem to be in a mad rush to embrace new technique and technology, that they forget that most of the time, simple dedication and practicality will suffice.
So I encourage you and your fellow programmers to get a life and realize that math professors who use FORTRAN are not harming anybody. In fact they are probably more productive and doing more interesting work than you are. There, I said it!
Oh, great. You actually came on here.
What a useless comment.
I don't see why people have to bring so much bullshit to every discussion. This morning I read an comment on article topics, and what it essentially came down to was some article topics are great to some people, but for some people those articles aren't. Well, of course some articles aren't great for most people.
People just seem to be in a mad rush to make comments about every new slashdot article, that they forget that most of the time, their opinion is both unimportant and expressed in a multitude of previous comments.
So I encourage you and your fellow commenters to get a life and realize that article writers are not harming anybody. In fact they are probably more productive and doing more interesting work than you are. There, I said it!
So a game created "a couple of years" before 1984 is twenty years old today?
That's the difference between creation date and release date. It's common to focus more on the release date.
For a real world example: Many americans believe that people are created sometime before they are born. But still the birth date (somewhat equivalent to a software release date) is used for most purposes.
After thanksgiving, I got 100 CD-Rs for free. I didn't even have to pay for the stamp for the rebate since I was able to submit it on the web.
So the cost, based on your numbers is $0.20 + $0.40 = $0.60. Which is less than the cost per video via netflix from the parent poster.
I would also question both of your other numbers. I would pay for a fast connection, regardless of downloading movies (which I don't, by the way, I'm willing to go see a movie in the theater if its good, which is maybe a few times a year).
The Debian "stable" vs. unstable seems to match the new RedHat "Enteprise" releases vs. the new "FEdora". Maybe Debian can shorten their transfer time and testing enough to use "stable" for production servers? I know a bunch of people who'd like that.
We [beware of the Marketing people's use of shockwave and flash] already do that. I'm sure many others do to. We count on stable being secure and reliable. We're ok with it being relatively slow moving, if that's what it takes. A few select applications, such as X11VNC are brought in from testing or unstable, or made into custom packages internally. It works great.
We would like to see some newer software make it's way into stable, such as subversion. Right now I run a mixed testing/unstable at work, and a mixed unstable/experimental at home. I've never had a problem, though I do take time to understand what the effects of an update will be on the unstable and especially the experimental applications.
That is without exception, the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.
Let's take Firefox - known for it's security - and have you enable ActiveX, the mack-daddy of all virus vectors. And then for an encore, have it run the mother-of-all virus vectors, IE - inside it!
This is AOL you are talking about. AOL. Who the hell cares what they do. AOL is more closely associated with crap than Charmin Toilet Paper. Screw 'em. They are not going to use the 'Firefox' brand. The Netscape name is already worthless, and completely unimportant to the OSS community. What's the harm to anyone that matters?
You know, that reminds me of the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Give me five bees for a quarter", you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah - the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
In the episode "Secrets", Col. O'Neill tells a reporter "That's O'Neill, with two L's. There's another Colonel O'Neil with one L. He has no sense of humor." In the feature film Stargate (1994), the lead character, whose name was spelled with one L, was played by 'Kurt Russel' and was a much more humorless character. [link]
While not as difficult to integrate, nor as important as those that you mention, supporting these tools as plugins instead of via ant is a great benefit and shouldn't be considered insignificant.
In case anyone reading this doesn't know what I'm talking about: Checkstyle (ensures your code conforms to the defined coding standards) and findbugs (attempts to find common bug patterns in your code) have plugins that cause your code to be analyzed when you change your source (they are additional "builders", it is somewhat customizable). The result is that in your "Problems" view, you see these problems with your code.
Eclipse can already do much of the functionality of checkstyle, but my company tries to avoid forcing everyone to use one IDE.
The bugzilla plugin (based off of the current development branch, unfortunately) shows your bugzilla bugs in the "Tasks" view.
Obviously none of those plugins are essential features. Taken as a sum, what you get is a much more pleasant working environment in your IDE. Also, support for these relatively cutting edge tools is an indication that you can stay ahead of the curve with Eclipse, while using other IDEs (not picking on NetBeans, I don't know what it supports) you're stuck with a less smooth process, having to switch back to the command line or a web page to access important information.
Look at it this way, if a particular IDE can't even manage to support popular simple tools, how can you expect them to support more complex ones (that aren't backed by a deep-pocketed corporation)
From the interview, it seems that they are saying that Sun's NetBeans came up with the great ideas first, but had a bad implementation. So bad, that many who tried NetBeans until after 3.5 (there on 4.0 right now) had such a bad user experience that they wouldn't consider using it again.
Meanwhile, IBM properly funded eclipse, properly marketed it, attracted a strong user base that provides many plugins, and as a result has become the winner of the two.
Trying not to sound like flamebait, but this sounds like a few other things Sun has done. For instance, Swing is not a bad idea, but long standing bugs, missing components and an initially buggy and slow product have led many to never consider Java for desktop development.
So, a question for those that have used a recent version of NetBeans: Despite all of the flaws that were mentioned in the interview (many/most of them were mentioned only to say "it's been fixed in 4.0"), is NetBeans more useful than Eclipse?
Are there plugins for Ant, Checkstyle, FindBugs, Bugzilla, etc, like there are for Eclipse? What about subversion support?
Without that support, NetBeans will not be useful to me, unfortunately.
| This is the guy who went to war because a certain | country had WMDs, and now we know they don't and | didn't.
You need to realize that Bush didn't go to war because of WMDs. He had his own personal reasons for the war. The WMD issue was just their idea at the best way to justify the war to the US population.
Your logic is incorrect. You deliberately use exclusive or, indicating that what you linked to ought to make things either clear or clearer but not both. This effectively means that what you linked to will not make things clear, unless it was already clear to begin with (since moving from unclear to clear is the excluded 'clearer' action).
You probably should stick with something like "that ought to make things clear, or at least clearer".
The Jakarta project is Apache's Java efforts. commons.apache.org used to hold common libraries such as APR for Apache HTTPD. These were mostly C libraries, I believe.
Apache Jakarta Commons (ok, so Apache needs to clean up and simplify there project namespace), rocks.
Here's there summary for commons-collections
* Bag interface for collections that have a number of copies of each object
* Buffer interface for collections that have a well defined removal order, like FIFOs
* BidiMap interface for maps that can be looked up from value to key as well and key to value
* MapIterator interface to provide simple and quick iteration over maps
* Type checking decorators to ensure that only instances of a certain type can be added
* Transforming decorators that alter each object as it is added to the collection
* Composite collections that make multiple collections look like one
* Ordered maps and sets that retain the order elements are added in, including an LRU based map
* Identity map that compares objects based on their identity (==) instead of the equals method
* Reference map that allows keys and/or values to be garbage collected under close control
* Many comparator implementations
* Many iterator implementations
* Adapter classes from array and enumerations to collections
* Utilities to test or create typical set-theory properties of collections such as union, intersection, and closure
For those doing Swing programming, also check out Java Desktop Network Components (JDNC) project (this isn't from Apache, unfortunately). The documentation isn't that great yet, but the API is all you need.
I'd prefer to use the more common definition (mw.com):
investment Function: noun Etymology: 2invest : the outlay of money usually for income or profit : capital outlay; also : the sum invested or the property purchased
All of those items mentioned are investments by your definition. A computer is an investment into your education, for instance. And any material posessions could be an investment into your personal well being or happiness.
Y'know, I thought about getting one of those for a while. But throughout my life, it seemed like any time I bought an analog watch, it'd get busted inside of a year.
You probably mean mechanical watch. From mw.com: analog c : being a timepiece having hour and minute hands
Obviously, they make quartz analog watches. There should be no difference in the quality, since there isn't a great deal of difference in the construction versus a "digital" watch.
Granted, they were relatively cheap things, but I was a bit scared to spend real money on something that'd just get dropped or put through the wash in my pocket or otherwise get scratched ugly because I was careless about brushing against the wall one day. Unfortunately, you have to spend quite a bit of money, but you can get a mechanical watch that is quite resistant to wear and tear. Rolex and Omega both make pretty good heavy duty watches. Avoid companies like Patek and JLC who make more delicate pieces. There are quite a few lower end watches like from Swatch, Hamilton, Tissot, etc that are pretty good for the price. Again, a $25 watch will likely you last longer and keep time more acurately, so you should only by an expensive timepiece for other reasons than ariving at a meeting at exactly 3:00:00. I suppose I'm too practical for my own good. Seemed like a better investment, is all.
Watches are far from an investment. Same goes for engagement rings, cars, and computers.
Omegas, which the grandparent poster has such a distaste for run from $1,500 to $3,000 for the average models. Omegas are an ok mid-grade mechanical timepiece. They're owned by Swatch Group, so you could just buy a Swatch for $500 and be happy. For that matter the majority of mechanical timepieces all have their internals made by Swatch Group.
A few that don't are Jaeger LeCoultre (JLC), Patek Phillipe, A Lange & Soehne, Rolex, Ulysse Nardin, and I think a few IWC watches.
The low end of those watches run from around $3,000 up to $10,000-$20,000 for the average watch. They go up to a few hundred thousand.
So, perhaps, if dollars spent is all that mattered, he's spending a lot less than he could. None of this matters, I should say, if you want a Quartz watch. The above all are mostly/entirely mechanical watches.
If interested in watches, a good resource is www.timezone.com.
There's one major and obvious benefit of Binary Packages: they're quick to install.
You mention the optimization and control benfits that come from building from source. Have these benefits been quantified? Is the optimization it provides noticeable? Do you really need the extra control?
For most systems, a hybrid approach where you build from source only when needed works great. It doesn't have to be a "this way only or that way only" situation. Don't like the configuration of a certain binary package, then just grab the source package and build it yourself. Using a source package instead of "./configure; make install" also helps with maintenance (easier to upgrade and easier to keep track of./configure parameters)
Low Pay, but usually Low Stress and Good Benefits. I get decent health care, and an extra week of vacation time. My pay is about 3/4 to 2/3 of what I would get in industry, but I'm not expected to work overtime, have flexible hours, no dress code and a great deal of control over what I do.
Your exact work environment can vary greatly, not only from university to unversity but from department to department. Universities are good about keeping their employees. If you are unhappy or need more money, see about getting transfered to another department.
It greatly depends on your department for a number of things. You asked about how structured it is.. My department is very flexible and casual. We've got a small group, and things flow well. Other departments (Engineering IT support or User Services, things like that) can be fairly strict. If things you are doing involve the University as a whole, you may have to go through a great deal of hierarchy as policies need to be implemented correctly.
Politics seems to be high, from my experience. This is especially true when funding from Grants are involved. There are a lot of people at universities that have been there a long time. These people don't like others impeding with the things that they view themselves as controlling. When it comes to funding you could be competing with a professor next door, or a department down the hall.
You've probably gotten accustomed to good travel perks. If your university sends you to conferences, don't expect these as much. It depends on the department/university, but you likely won't have a company credit card to charge things on, and you likely could be sharing a hotel room with others from your department. Expect to pay all of the bills yourself, in advance, and get a refund later.
Because of the Low Stress and relatively High Politics, you'll likely find that things move slowly. It's hard to get new ideas and solutions implemented. If you are going to a Windows only department, don't think you'll be able to switch them to linux quickly. A lot of people will (a) not want to do more work than they have to (b) not want to learn or do anything new and/or (c) will require any change but pushed through high viscosity red-tape.
You'll need to understand how you get paid and how your department gets paid. It may be simple for you and your department. Or your department may get portions of funding from grants and portions from the unversity or other departments to carry out certain obligations. This is important to your success -- you need to know who the customer is (could be students, researchers, staff, the vicepresident of IT, the NSF or DOD, or some other unversity as part of a collaboration...).
Slashdot Mirror
the only stores for thousands of miles in any direction sold only alcohol, Mormon cookbooks, and knives.
Sounds like a bad day for the Mormons if you're hungry.
Recipe from the Mormon Cookbook:
Mormon Flambé
- 1 Cup 80 Proof Liquor (Cognac is a good choice)
- 3 Slices Mormon Bacon, Diced
- 2 8-Ounce Mormon Steaks
1. Fry Bacon until fat renders out
2. Cook Mormon steaks 4-5 minutes on each side, on Medium heat
3. Remove pan from heat
4. Add in warm Liquor (heated in a small saucepan until bubble start to form)
5. Using a long match, ignite Liquor
6. Serve immediately after flames die down.
Yum!
Wikipedia says:Hubble was designed in the 1970s. It cost about US$ 2 billion ($2,000,000,000) to build and launch.
Using an inflation calculator, that's supposedly $9.5 billion in in todays money.
But you have to also factor in the fact that the technology should have gotten a whole lot cheaper by now, plus many other side benefits of building a new one.
Oh, great. You actually came on here.
What a useless article.
I don't see why people have to bring so much bullshit to every discussion. This morning I had a class on Distributed Systems, and what it essentially came down to was Peer to Peer is great, but for some applications Client/Server is even better. Well, of course Client/Server is better for most things.
People just seem to be in a mad rush to embrace new technique and technology, that they forget that most of the time, simple dedication and practicality will suffice.
So I encourage you and your fellow programmers to get a life and realize that math professors who use FORTRAN are not harming anybody. In fact they are probably more productive and doing more interesting work than you are. There, I said it!
Oh, great. You actually came on here.
What a useless comment.
I don't see why people have to bring so much bullshit to every discussion. This morning I read an comment on article topics, and what it essentially came down to was some article topics are great to some people, but for some people those articles aren't. Well, of course some articles aren't great for most people.
People just seem to be in a mad rush to make comments about every new slashdot article, that they forget that most of the time, their opinion is both unimportant and expressed in a multitude of previous comments.
So I encourage you and your fellow commenters to get a life and realize that article writers are not harming anybody. In fact they are probably more productive and doing more interesting work than you are. There, I said it!
Next On Ask Slashdot:
How do you go to the bathroom?
For help answering that question, I direct you to episode 3, season 4 of Beavis and Butthead: Trouble Urinating.
So a game created "a couple of years" before 1984 is twenty years old today?
That's the difference between creation date and release date. It's common to focus more on the release date.
For a real world example: Many americans believe that people are created sometime before they are born. But still the birth date (somewhat equivalent to a software release date) is used for most purposes.
After thanksgiving, I got 100 CD-Rs for free. I didn't even have to pay for the stamp for the rebate since I was able to submit it on the web.
So the cost, based on your numbers is $0.20 + $0.40 = $0.60. Which is less than the cost per video via netflix from the parent poster.
I would also question both of your other numbers. I would pay for a fast connection, regardless of downloading movies (which I don't, by the way, I'm willing to go see a movie in the theater if its good, which is maybe a few times a year).
C'mon, Garner, who are we trying to fool here?
What the hell did I do now? Oh.. Gartner.. typo...
The Debian "stable" vs. unstable seems to match the new RedHat "Enteprise" releases vs. the new "FEdora". Maybe Debian can shorten their transfer time and testing enough to use "stable" for production servers? I know a bunch of people who'd like that.
We [beware of the Marketing people's use of shockwave and flash] already do that. I'm sure many others do to. We count on stable being secure and reliable. We're ok with it being relatively slow moving, if that's what it takes. A few select applications, such as X11VNC are brought in from testing or unstable, or made into custom packages internally. It works great.
We would like to see some newer software make it's way into stable, such as subversion. Right now I run a mixed testing/unstable at work, and a mixed unstable/experimental at home. I've never had a problem, though I do take time to understand what the effects of an update will be on the unstable and especially the experimental applications.
That is without exception, the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.
Let's take Firefox - known for it's security - and have you enable ActiveX, the mack-daddy of all virus vectors. And then for an encore, have it run the mother-of-all virus vectors, IE - inside it!
This is AOL you are talking about. AOL. Who the hell cares what they do. AOL is more closely associated with crap than Charmin Toilet Paper. Screw 'em. They are not going to use the 'Firefox' brand. The Netscape name is already worthless, and completely unimportant to the OSS community. What's the harm to anyone that matters?
You know, that reminds me of the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Give me five bees for a quarter", you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah - the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
In the episode "Secrets", Col. O'Neill tells a reporter "That's O'Neill, with two L's. There's another Colonel O'Neil with one L. He has no sense of humor." In the feature film Stargate (1994), the lead character, whose name was spelled with one L, was played by 'Kurt Russel' and was a much more humorless character. [link]
While not as difficult to integrate, nor as important as those that you mention, supporting these tools as plugins instead of via ant is a great benefit and shouldn't be considered insignificant.
In case anyone reading this doesn't know what I'm talking about: Checkstyle (ensures your code conforms to the defined coding standards) and findbugs (attempts to find common bug patterns in your code) have plugins that cause your code to be analyzed when you change your source (they are additional "builders", it is somewhat customizable). The result is that in your "Problems" view, you see these problems with your code.
Eclipse can already do much of the functionality of checkstyle, but my company tries to avoid forcing everyone to use one IDE.
The bugzilla plugin (based off of the current development branch, unfortunately) shows your bugzilla bugs in the "Tasks" view.
Obviously none of those plugins are essential features. Taken as a sum, what you get is a much more pleasant working environment in your IDE. Also, support for these relatively cutting edge tools is an indication that you can stay ahead of the curve with Eclipse, while using other IDEs (not picking on NetBeans, I don't know what it supports) you're stuck with a less smooth process, having to switch back to the command line or a web page to access important information.
Look at it this way, if a particular IDE can't even manage to support popular simple tools, how can you expect them to support more complex ones (that aren't backed by a deep-pocketed corporation)
From the interview, it seems that they are saying that Sun's NetBeans came up with the great ideas first, but had a bad implementation. So bad, that many who tried NetBeans until after 3.5 (there on 4.0 right now) had such a bad user experience that they wouldn't consider using it again.
Meanwhile, IBM properly funded eclipse, properly marketed it, attracted a strong user base that provides many plugins, and as a result has become the winner of the two.
Trying not to sound like flamebait, but this sounds like a few other things Sun has done. For instance, Swing is not a bad idea, but long standing bugs, missing components and an initially buggy and slow product have led many to never consider Java for desktop development.
So, a question for those that have used a recent version of NetBeans: Despite all of the flaws that were mentioned in the interview (many/most of them were mentioned only to say "it's been fixed in 4.0"), is NetBeans more useful than Eclipse?
Are there plugins for Ant, Checkstyle, FindBugs, Bugzilla, etc, like there are for Eclipse? What about subversion support?
Without that support, NetBeans will not be useful to me, unfortunately.
| This is the guy who went to war because a certain
| country had WMDs, and now we know they don't and
| didn't.
You need to realize that Bush didn't go to war because of WMDs. He had his own personal reasons for the war. The WMD issue was just their idea at the best way to justify the war to the US population.
Google is Better
That ought to make clear xor clearer a few things
Your logic is incorrect. You deliberately use exclusive or, indicating that what you linked to ought to make things either clear or clearer but not both. This effectively means that what you linked to will not make things clear, unless it was already clear to begin with (since moving from unclear to clear is the excluded 'clearer' action).
You probably should stick with something like "that ought to make things clear, or at least clearer".
(btw, there's no space between a sentence and a question mark :)
Your parentheses are unbalanced.
I think the whole of Jade should be living in commons.apache.org somewhere
You mean: http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/
The Jakarta project is Apache's Java efforts. commons.apache.org used to hold common libraries such as APR for Apache HTTPD. These were mostly C libraries, I believe.
Apache Jakarta Commons (ok, so Apache needs to clean up and simplify there project namespace), rocks.
Here's there summary for commons-collections
* Bag interface for collections that have a number of copies of each object
* Buffer interface for collections that have a well defined removal order, like FIFOs
* BidiMap interface for maps that can be looked up from value to key as well and key to value
* MapIterator interface to provide simple and quick iteration over maps
* Type checking decorators to ensure that only instances of a certain type can be added
* Transforming decorators that alter each object as it is added to the collection
* Composite collections that make multiple collections look like one
* Ordered maps and sets that retain the order elements are added in, including an LRU based map
* Identity map that compares objects based on their identity (==) instead of the equals method
* Reference map that allows keys and/or values to be garbage collected under close control
* Many comparator implementations
* Many iterator implementations
* Adapter classes from array and enumerations to collections
* Utilities to test or create typical set-theory properties of collections such as union, intersection, and closure
For those doing Swing programming, also check out Java Desktop Network Components (JDNC) project (this isn't from Apache, unfortunately). The documentation isn't that great yet, but the API is all you need.
I'd prefer to use the more common definition (mw.com):
investment
Function: noun
Etymology: 2invest
: the outlay of money usually for income or profit : capital outlay; also : the sum invested or the property purchased
All of those items mentioned are investments by your definition. A computer is an investment into your education, for instance. And any material posessions could be an investment into your personal well being or happiness.
Or you could get a watch to wear to your next interview: A. Lange & Soehne. Depending on how well-paying that first job is.
Y'know, I thought about getting one of those for a while. But throughout my life, it seemed like any time I bought an analog watch, it'd get busted inside of a year.
You probably mean mechanical watch. From mw.com:
analog
c : being a timepiece having hour and minute hands
Obviously, they make quartz analog watches. There should be no difference in the quality, since there isn't a great deal of difference in the construction versus a "digital" watch.
Granted, they were relatively cheap things, but I was a bit scared to spend real money on something that'd just get dropped or put through the wash in my pocket or otherwise get scratched ugly because I was careless about brushing against the wall one day.
Unfortunately, you have to spend quite a bit of money, but you can get a mechanical watch that is quite resistant to wear and tear. Rolex and Omega both make pretty good heavy duty watches. Avoid companies like Patek and JLC who make more delicate pieces. There are quite a few lower end watches like from Swatch, Hamilton, Tissot, etc that are pretty good for the price. Again, a $25 watch will likely you last longer and keep time more acurately, so you should only by an expensive timepiece for other reasons than ariving at a meeting at exactly 3:00:00.
I suppose I'm too practical for my own good. Seemed like a better investment, is all.
Watches are far from an investment. Same goes for engagement rings, cars, and computers.
Omegas, which the grandparent poster has such a distaste for run from $1,500 to $3,000 for the average models. Omegas are an ok mid-grade mechanical timepiece. They're owned by Swatch Group, so you could just buy a Swatch for $500 and be happy. For that matter the majority of mechanical timepieces all have their internals made by Swatch Group.
A few that don't are Jaeger LeCoultre (JLC), Patek Phillipe, A Lange & Soehne, Rolex, Ulysse Nardin, and I think a few IWC watches.
The low end of those watches run from around $3,000 up to $10,000-$20,000 for the average watch. They go up to a few hundred thousand.
So, perhaps, if dollars spent is all that mattered, he's spending a lot less than he could. None of this matters, I should say, if you want a Quartz watch. The above all are mostly/entirely mechanical watches.
If interested in watches, a good resource is www.timezone.com.
This is why the GNU people use "Free Software" not "Open Source"
There's one major and obvious benefit of Binary Packages: they're quick to install.
./configure parameters)
You mention the optimization and control benfits that come from building from source. Have these benefits been quantified? Is the optimization it provides noticeable? Do you really need the extra control?
For most systems, a hybrid approach where you build from source only when needed works great. It doesn't have to be a "this way only or that way only" situation. Don't like the configuration of a certain binary package, then just grab the source package and build it yourself. Using a source package instead of "./configure; make install" also helps with maintenance (easier to upgrade and easier to keep track of
Low Pay, but usually Low Stress and Good Benefits. I get decent health care, and an extra week of vacation time. My pay is about 3/4 to 2/3 of what I would get in industry, but I'm not expected to work overtime, have flexible hours, no dress code and a great deal of control over what I do.
Your exact work environment can vary greatly, not only from university to unversity but from department to department. Universities are good about keeping their employees. If you are unhappy or need more money, see about getting transfered to another department.
It greatly depends on your department for a number of things. You asked about how structured it is.. My department is very flexible and casual. We've got a small group, and things flow well. Other departments (Engineering IT support or User Services, things like that) can be fairly strict. If things you are doing involve the University as a whole, you may have to go through a great deal of hierarchy as policies need to be implemented correctly.
Politics seems to be high, from my experience. This is especially true when funding from Grants are involved. There are a lot of people at universities that have been there a long time. These people don't like others impeding with the things that they view themselves as controlling. When it comes to funding you could be competing with a professor next door, or a department down the hall.
You've probably gotten accustomed to good travel perks. If your university sends you to conferences, don't expect these as much. It depends on the department/university, but you likely won't have a company credit card to charge things on, and you likely could be sharing a hotel room with others from your department. Expect to pay all of the bills yourself, in advance, and get a refund later.
Because of the Low Stress and relatively High Politics, you'll likely find that things move slowly. It's hard to get new ideas and solutions implemented. If you are going to a Windows only department, don't think you'll be able to switch them to linux quickly. A lot of people will (a) not want to do more work than they have to (b) not want to learn or do anything new and/or (c) will require any change but pushed through high viscosity red-tape.
You'll need to understand how you get paid and how your department gets paid. It may be simple for you and your department. Or your department may get portions of funding from grants and portions from the unversity or other departments to carry out certain obligations. This is important to your success -- you need to know who the customer is (could be students, researchers, staff, the vicepresident of IT, the NSF or DOD, or some other unversity as part of a collaboration...).