I thought it was pretty well advertised -- you have to read a decent paper to find out, but that's probably because most people don't really care, anyhow.
On their website, they've got video/audio, and transcripts of the more important speakers. The C. Powell one is pretty decent.
I know it's a hassle, but there's been more than a few times where I didn't really understand what was going on, and was able to look up stuff in the source code. Granted, this isn't the most user-friendly form of documentation, but it is a nice feature to have available.
If you believe in legalisation, then do promote that guy -- he was doing the right thing (and perhaps breaking the law, the two aren't always the same).
Although the circumstances/topics are different, the logic is akin to Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., and many other people who try to do what is right.
Henry David Thoreau talks about this type of stuff in Civil Disobedience (quoted below)
Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?
One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offense never contemplated by its government; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate, penalty? If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who put him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
I'm a recent first-time apple buyer -- and since I don't know that many people who have ibooks, I relied on an apple demonstration at a expensive location (Canary Wharf in London) and a few non Apple Store outlets for testing. I ended up buying the machine online (amazon was giving free palm pilots w/ purchase).
When it comes to spending $1,500, people (at least me) don't enter the decision lightly -- I had to be sure that I knew what I was getting, and retail outlets are a good way for a non-dominant product to get its name out/make people feel more comfortable with the entire idea.
Frankly, I thought the iMacs (lamp-looking macs) looked pretty damn stupid online, but when I actually saw one, I was quite impressed.
Also, although I don't live in the states, the switch ads had a positive impact on my decision, as well -- reading the stories online encouraged me to give it a shot. (I program Solaris/Linux for a living).
Lastly, I'm pretty impressed with the system so far -- I haven't spent much time under the hood, but that's because I haven't really had to.
I'd be curious to see what the stats are for apple stories -- I'd bet there's been a huge uptake in interest in the last few months. If people weren't clicking, I'd doubt they'd post it...
Damn straight -- I'm tired of lazy people that don't consider the impact of their actions.
Making a fuss and planting trees on the weekend is great, you should also carry that presence of mind into your everyday actions.
Turn off your monitor when you leave for the day.
Don't not running hot water if you're not using it.
Thinking twice about having ten old computers on 24x7 in your house. It might be cool, but maybe DNS doesn't need it's own server (whoa, really?). Two one 24x7 is probably more than enough, unless you have some special need.
Sure there may be exceptions to these things -- that's fine. Just be conscious of your actions. Decide to leave the monitor on, don't just be lazy about it. (same thing goes for speeding, yelling at people, getting drunk, etc. They may or may not be bad, but decide to do them -- don't just fall into it.)
Maybe I'm some Berkeley nut-case, but usually when I leave work at night, I go by and turn off all of the monitors on my way out. People sometimes talk to me about it and I give them my shpeel, but when they leave the next day, it's more of the same. Is it too much for people to think about these things?
I'd be more interested to see Darwin/x86 go against Linux for web serving, especially if you throw in the Tux kernel module web server (good for performance).
If anything, wouldn't running tux be a bad idea? I doubt many people run Tux in production environments... so the results would be meaningles ("a highly tuned web server unrealistic in production on hardware that is known to be faster is better than a full-service web server running a different OS, etc") Apache v. apache is definitely a better comparison of how the two systems compete.
Also, since the OS is the most interesting part (not the hardware - most people think x86 is faster than ppc for a given amount of money), it makes sense to compare to ppc versions of both OSs. (so we can say "Linux does IO better than OSX." or whatever).
From what I've seen/heard, VBA, etc is good for getting the job done quickly, and may work well for a few guys, but it quickly grows unmanageable (different versions on different computers, no way of ensuring the quality of the model, etc). I've heard guys complaining about having to convert a bunch of excel macros to a better engineered environment -- it's supposed to be a well-known pain.
The boring but stable frameworks that I mentioned don't deal with pricing at all (this is a bank's speciality, no way outsourcers can compete, and no way we'd want the knowledge to flow out). I'm talking more about trade reporting/completion or other crusty mainframe programs that have been written and working for many, many years, and that have strong specs and stable release schedules.
Lastly, I help write the frameworks that deal with pricing models -- if you'd like to ask some more questions, you can drop me a line at shoney at alum dot calberkeley dot org. Might take a while to get back to you, but I will.
Usually every time Slashdot has a story anything related to China, communist bashing usually follows
Yeah, Slashdot is full of people who know little about China, and speak of this little bit with lots of conviction. I'm not really sure why this is, but it has been like this for a long while. Same thing with making fun about accents -- I'd like to see them speak Chinese.
First, think about should you classify China as a third-world country. Frankly it's kind of hazy to classify it between developed country and developing country.
I agree with most of what you say, except this (and I'd rather not debate the US).
Shanghai, Beijing, and maybe Shenzhen don't look like 3rd world counries at first glance (i.e. nanjinglu, wangfujing, jianguomen, etc), but let's not joke -- just around the corner are some 3rd world-ish scenes. Last time I was in Beijing, I went to visit a friend in Tongxian (east of Beijing by 10km? not too far, anyhow), and I saw semi-decent apartment blocks with mud roads leading to them. In Shanghai, off of Nanjinglu by 1k or so, there are people in construction yard shanty-towns living with little light and showering in the street. Both of those are developed-ish cities.
What about Chongqing (China's biggest 'city')? Guizhou? Gansu? Even places like the fringes of Guangdong and Zhejiang are really poor/undeveloped. Not just "we're building big buildings, come back soon" undeveloped, we're talking poverty, collapsing schools, real 3rd world shit.
From my view, there's a lot more Chongqing, Guizhou, Heilongjiang, Hunan, etc, in China than there is Beijing or Shanghai. I agree that China's moving really fast, but there's a _lot_ of ground to cover, esp. away from the coast.
I work for an big bank, and we outsource some of our stuff...
It's nice - all of the sexy applications (pricing, front-office, etc) get done at major offices (I work in London). When you've got a mature, stable, un-exciting project that's in a maintainance cycle, it might get shipped overseas. We had a bunch of crappy perl scripts for this hack of a webpage that some traders were using -- it broke every once-in-a-while, and the author was long gone. Just recently we had a guy from overseas take over it (no more maintainance for me!).
Seriously, developing an business specific application should probably be done at the home office, where the users/money/bosses/company programmers are. Once something is well designed and in a patch+fix mode with a stable release cycle, why not ship it overseas and let the kids at home work on new and interesting stuff?
Why don't you tell us what you studied/did your thesis paper on? Instead of having us try to figure out every possible thread that links the three, give us the thread and perhaps we can come up with a name for it.
re: resumes
You should probably quote the name of your thesis in your resume, and also have a brief "courses included" section that mentions the higher-level courses you feel particularly represent the different facets of your education.
I've found XML to be quite handy for config files, etc.
* You can validate/verify them with DTDs, etc. This is for free once you write the schema/DTD. If it's your own config file, you've got to make that stuff yourself.
* You can view them pretty easily (although I dev. on linux/solaris, sometimes I use IE or xmlt2html to view the config files).
* You can change things quite easily, and not harm existing applications. Adding another field to a song record won't mess up other applications that aren't using those XPaths,etc. Similarly, you cna have an element, say, called NetworkConfig, with all sorts of unknown stuff in it that you pass to a library routine, and it'll just read the stuff for you. You don't need to make it into any fancy structure.
* You can transform documents from one type to another type with XSLT, etc.
* The weight difference really isn't that bad. What's another 10k to a config file? Esp. if it's readable? Would you prefer XML-RPC/SOAP, or some random Corba stuff/compiling stubs? Even if it's 10 times as big, is the cost that bad on a 40G hd? Only data that a human wouldn't be able to understand (i.e. raw image data, compressed) has to be binary formatted.
I guess I find it hard to believe that people would prefer countless different types of config files, writing their own parsing code and validation routines, binary formats for non time-critical data, and the general chaos that used to exist.
Sure, there is a plethora of XML libraries out now, but I'm sure the numbers will continue to drop down as the best/easiest implementations make themselves known... In the mean time, people are developing a very capable set of tools to deal with a very expressive document structure. Sounds nice to me.
Wassup -- I used to work on an IM project (jabber based) at an investment bank. There's a couple things floating around here that I don't think people are getting::
1. the messages
It's not about just messaging "wassup" and other time-wasters back and forth to people. It's often two traders on different sides of the floor communicating prices back and forth, being able to IM clients from some research tool, broadcasting large market events/news to everyone at once, tech support getting IMed when systems start going through the death throes (followed by pages, etc). It might be getting IM'd and having the message go to a pager if you're away from your desk, or to email if your pager is down.
2. productivity
Working on multinational teams, or in different buildings, or using chatrooms to say stuff like "I'm taking down the test system" when you don't want to disrupt the guy next to you (and let 10 other developers descretely know what the story is) enhance productivity. Sure, there may be some bullshit floating around on IM, as well, but investment bank IT people are pretty industrious as a whole (at least from what I've seen), and a good number of employees over the entire firm take desk lunches -- implying they'll stay on task pretty well.
3. logging/external service providers
A big advantage to running an IM through your firm is that you can log everything (good for SEC, etc). I sincerely doubt that the banks are looking at having all of their internal stuff go through MSN/external or AOL/external. Anything that happens is going to be kept local unless it HAS to go outside.
4. The current mess
My company runs an proprietary chat server, jabber, sametime, and some yahoo gateway, and probably more crap that I don't know about. It'd be BRILLIANT if everybody (including clients) could standardize on one message format -- it could save all of us loads of trouble.
5. jabber
As good as jabber is in theory, the open source server components used to be pretty rough (last fall). The commercial stuff might be nice, but I remember spending loads of time hacking at the XDB/XML database and thinking "Damn, this is really not flexible for enterprise-level usage" (i.e. 20-80,000 users, multiple continents/offices/divisions). It would be nice if everyone standardized on it and everything was made bank-reliable (a system going down can literally mean millions of dollars lost). Maybe all the banks should devote a few good programmers each to fixing it up, or donate a mil to the jabber foundation or something.
I personally think that the QUERTY keyboard layout is the "best" one because I'm stupid. I think that a CLUI it the "best" way of interacting with a server OS because I'm stupid.
QUERTY? Damn, that's a new one. I use QWERTY. Funny how you can have a spelling error on something that should be as simple as looking at the keys. Out of curiousity, did you type this on a QWERTY keyboard?
At my company (US/multinational bank in the UK), all employees are offered a chance to sign away our WTD rights. In fact, most people do. Knowing how our legal department checks things out, I'm pretty sure that it's enforcable...
Also, a few more facts about WTD:
1. The 48/week excludes all breaks/lunches,etc.
2. The 48/week is an average over 10-18 weeks (not sure which).
It's a nice idea, but I don't think it buys most people that much.
I studied abroad for a yea (China)r, and took the following semester off for travel...
My language skills improved a lot, but the overall benefit is much more than just learning a language... Studying abroad gives you a much better perspective on the complexities of the real world. You might have seen some poor folks before, but talking to farmers in the 3rd countryside will definatly widen your mind. Similarly, when you see people selling bottles of water for HOURS in the hot sun, or rich officials, or how pride may distort plans to do "what's best" for the country.
For what it's worth, I'm currently working abroad (England), and I can say that I'm very glad I didn't study abroad in a western, developed country. The UK/Europe is different from the US, but not nearly as much as, say, Russia or China. England has been relatively easy to adapt to, but that ease means that there's less things that are really different/entirely new to learn about/experience. Go for the third world -- it's probably cheaper, too. (I think getting a good job in a 1st world country is a good way to understand the culture, and you'll have cash to see the shows, enjoy local specialities, take trips, etc)
2 more things
1) I've found that travelling/being a tourist isn't as rewarding as living in a place. It's cool to go tromping around, but when you can speak the langauge and you have a local role (i.e. student at a univerisity that everyone knows about), you get insight into the country that you won't get from going to the big musuems and climbing the great wall.
2) Perhaps more important than the high probability of dating while overseas, you'll probably come back with some very good friends. Friends that were around when you had that 5 day period of food posioning, that were there when you were frusterated at communicating with locals, and that will be able to understand your experience when you get back.
Sorry if this sounds like a bunch of propoganda, but most people I know gained from their study abroad experiences -- even those that hated it learned a bit about themselves/others.
For the sake of example, your crontab is pretty illustrative. If I were you, though, I'd stick that thing in a shell script, and call it from the cron entry -- a lot easier to test, debug, and maintain.
Well spoken -- it's good for just about everyone. I've been programming for several years (on and off), and I look to the book frequently for suggestions, or just to stir the coals in my head.
Once people have learnt a bit of code, and are starting to deal with the troubles of working with large projects, documenting, and getting their head around what consitutes decent code... I'd recommend Code Complete from the Microsoft Press. Say what you will about their software, but MS hardware, and some MS books are quite nice. In this one, Steve McConnell gives newbies many tips he's learned over the years. It doesn't have much to do with OO (, and the languages are old, but many of the ideas provide a good founding for the process of development.
I'm not sure what constitutes a "serious java developer", but at my workplace (with "serious developers"), we're taking a damn good look at.Net. Our backend is almost always unix/linux, and we need something fast that plays well with existing infrastructure (i.e. unix backends pumping data into Excel, etc). C# looks like it'll help this a lot -- it looks to be faster than java for gui code, about as easy to program in, and it works with other products decently well (you going to try and embed java into ms office apps for front ends? yeah right).
In any case, my company is listening (and the linux processes that I write in Java/C++ will supply the data to these C# front ends).
People upgrade their computers? Sounds like news to me -- I know lots of "computer people" upgrade their computers, but I doubt my brother and sister would... (unless it's a new printer, etc.), and my parents do only because I do it for them.
I doubt the average user ever opens the box, let alone realizes that they need a new video card (as opposed to a faster CPU, more ram, etc). Not only do people not posess the knowledge to upgrade, but with crappy PCs, it's pretty hard to upgrade, anyhow (few slots, etc). I assume that most people who buy HPs/Gateways/etc just buy a new computer every few years, and give the old one to their kids or to their grandma.
It always amazes me how out of touch/. people are with the non-geek reality that a large number of people live in.
Excellent post -- lots of accurate comments...
Here's a few other sites...
I see The Economist occasionally linked from Slashdot -- the Economist is partially owned by FT, and provides deep articles about a broad array of news items. Lots of it is economics/foreign policy, but they've got a lengthy tech survey every few months, and cover tech news occasionally. No reg required, but to view all of the articles you need to subscribe/pay money (free with print subscription -- excellent value). The Economist and the New York Times are the best news sources that I know.
Thankfully, Slashdot posts few time/newsweek/usnwr drivel -- this falls into the same catagory as ABC, CBS, NBC -- for people that don't really like to read hard news/want to be entertained more than informed.
The SF Chronicle used to have some good local/silicon valley stories from time to time. The web version is more infotainment than the print one, though. I haven't seen a slashdot link to there in a while either -- maybe it has gone downhill (haven't read it since I moved away).
You might want to check out Kodak's digital frames -- they sound like they're what you're talking about. I think Ebay usually has them for less than 200 -- computer geeks had refurbs for 100 for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
On their website, they've got video/audio, and transcripts of the more important speakers. The C. Powell one is pretty decent.
If you believe in legalisation, then do promote that guy -- he was doing the right thing (and perhaps breaking the law, the two aren't always the same).
Although the circumstances/topics are different, the logic is akin to Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., and many other people who try to do what is right.
Henry David Thoreau talks about this type of stuff in Civil Disobedience (quoted below)
Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?
One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offense never contemplated by its government; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate, penalty? If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who put him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
When it comes to spending $1,500, people (at least me) don't enter the decision lightly -- I had to be sure that I knew what I was getting, and retail outlets are a good way for a non-dominant product to get its name out/make people feel more comfortable with the entire idea.
Frankly, I thought the iMacs (lamp-looking macs) looked pretty damn stupid online, but when I actually saw one, I was quite impressed.
Also, although I don't live in the states, the switch ads had a positive impact on my decision, as well -- reading the stories online encouraged me to give it a shot. (I program Solaris/Linux for a living).
Lastly, I'm pretty impressed with the system so far -- I haven't spent much time under the hood, but that's because I haven't really had to.
Making a fuss and planting trees on the weekend is great, you should also carry that presence of mind into your everyday actions.
Turn off your monitor when you leave for the day.
Don't not running hot water if you're not using it.
Thinking twice about having ten old computers on 24x7 in your house. It might be cool, but maybe DNS doesn't need it's own server (whoa, really?). Two one 24x7 is probably more than enough, unless you have some special need.
Sure there may be exceptions to these things -- that's fine. Just be conscious of your actions. Decide to leave the monitor on, don't just be lazy about it. (same thing goes for speeding, yelling at people, getting drunk, etc. They may or may not be bad, but decide to do them -- don't just fall into it.)
Maybe I'm some Berkeley nut-case, but usually when I leave work at night, I go by and turn off all of the monitors on my way out. People sometimes talk to me about it and I give them my shpeel, but when they leave the next day, it's more of the same. Is it too much for people to think about these things?
If anything, wouldn't running tux be a bad idea? I doubt many people run Tux in production environments... so the results would be meaningles ("a highly tuned web server unrealistic in production on hardware that is known to be faster is better than a full-service web server running a different OS, etc") Apache v. apache is definitely a better comparison of how the two systems compete.
Also, since the OS is the most interesting part (not the hardware - most people think x86 is faster than ppc for a given amount of money), it makes sense to compare to ppc versions of both OSs. (so we can say "Linux does IO better than OSX." or whatever).
From what I've seen/heard, VBA, etc is good for getting the job done quickly, and may work well for a few guys, but it quickly grows unmanageable (different versions on different computers, no way of ensuring the quality of the model, etc). I've heard guys complaining about having to convert a bunch of excel macros to a better engineered environment -- it's supposed to be a well-known pain.
The boring but stable frameworks that I mentioned don't deal with pricing at all (this is a bank's speciality, no way outsourcers can compete, and no way we'd want the knowledge to flow out). I'm talking more about trade reporting/completion or other crusty mainframe programs that have been written and working for many, many years, and that have strong specs and stable release schedules.
Lastly, I help write the frameworks that deal with pricing models -- if you'd like to ask some more questions, you can drop me a line at shoney at alum dot calberkeley dot org. Might take a while to get back to you, but I will.
Yeah, Slashdot is full of people who know little about China, and speak of this little bit with lots of conviction. I'm not really sure why this is, but it has been like this for a long while. Same thing with making fun about accents -- I'd like to see them speak Chinese.
I agree with most of what you say, except this (and I'd rather not debate the US).
Shanghai, Beijing, and maybe Shenzhen don't look like 3rd world counries at first glance (i.e. nanjinglu, wangfujing, jianguomen, etc), but let's not joke -- just around the corner are some 3rd world-ish scenes. Last time I was in Beijing, I went to visit a friend in Tongxian (east of Beijing by 10km? not too far, anyhow), and I saw semi-decent apartment blocks with mud roads leading to them. In Shanghai, off of Nanjinglu by 1k or so, there are people in construction yard shanty-towns living with little light and showering in the street. Both of those are developed-ish cities.
What about Chongqing (China's biggest 'city')? Guizhou? Gansu? Even places like the fringes of Guangdong and Zhejiang are really poor/undeveloped. Not just "we're building big buildings, come back soon" undeveloped, we're talking poverty, collapsing schools, real 3rd world shit.
From my view, there's a lot more Chongqing, Guizhou, Heilongjiang, Hunan, etc, in China than there is Beijing or Shanghai. I agree that China's moving really fast, but there's a _lot_ of ground to cover, esp. away from the coast.
It's nice - all of the sexy applications (pricing, front-office, etc) get done at major offices (I work in London). When you've got a mature, stable, un-exciting project that's in a maintainance cycle, it might get shipped overseas. We had a bunch of crappy perl scripts for this hack of a webpage that some traders were using -- it broke every once-in-a-while, and the author was long gone. Just recently we had a guy from overseas take over it (no more maintainance for me!).
Seriously, developing an business specific application should probably be done at the home office, where the users/money/bosses/company programmers are. Once something is well designed and in a patch+fix mode with a stable release cycle, why not ship it overseas and let the kids at home work on new and interesting stuff?
Why don't you tell us what you studied/did your thesis paper on? Instead of having us try to figure out every possible thread that links the three, give us the thread and perhaps we can come up with a name for it.
re: resumes
You should probably quote the name of your thesis in your resume, and also have a brief "courses included" section that mentions the higher-level courses you feel particularly represent the different facets of your education.
* You can validate/verify them with DTDs, etc. This is for free once you write the schema/DTD. If it's your own config file, you've got to make that stuff yourself.
* You can view them pretty easily (although I dev. on linux/solaris, sometimes I use IE or xmlt2html to view the config files).
* You can change things quite easily, and not harm existing applications. Adding another field to a song record won't mess up other applications that aren't using those XPaths,etc. Similarly, you cna have an element, say, called NetworkConfig, with all sorts of unknown stuff in it that you pass to a library routine, and it'll just read the stuff for you. You don't need to make it into any fancy structure.
* You can transform documents from one type to another type with XSLT, etc.
* The weight difference really isn't that bad. What's another 10k to a config file? Esp. if it's readable? Would you prefer XML-RPC/SOAP, or some random Corba stuff/compiling stubs? Even if it's 10 times as big, is the cost that bad on a 40G hd? Only data that a human wouldn't be able to understand (i.e. raw image data, compressed) has to be binary formatted.
I guess I find it hard to believe that people would prefer countless different types of config files, writing their own parsing code and validation routines, binary formats for non time-critical data, and the general chaos that used to exist.
Sure, there is a plethora of XML libraries out now, but I'm sure the numbers will continue to drop down as the best/easiest implementations make themselves known... In the mean time, people are developing a very capable set of tools to deal with a very expressive document structure. Sounds nice to me.
1. the messages
It's not about just messaging "wassup" and other time-wasters back and forth to people. It's often two traders on different sides of the floor communicating prices back and forth, being able to IM clients from some research tool, broadcasting large market events/news to everyone at once, tech support getting IMed when systems start going through the death throes (followed by pages, etc). It might be getting IM'd and having the message go to a pager if you're away from your desk, or to email if your pager is down.
2. productivity
Working on multinational teams, or in different buildings, or using chatrooms to say stuff like "I'm taking down the test system" when you don't want to disrupt the guy next to you (and let 10 other developers descretely know what the story is) enhance productivity. Sure, there may be some bullshit floating around on IM, as well, but investment bank IT people are pretty industrious as a whole (at least from what I've seen), and a good number of employees over the entire firm take desk lunches -- implying they'll stay on task pretty well.
3. logging/external service providers
A big advantage to running an IM through your firm is that you can log everything (good for SEC, etc). I sincerely doubt that the banks are looking at having all of their internal stuff go through MSN/external or AOL/external. Anything that happens is going to be kept local unless it HAS to go outside.
4. The current mess
My company runs an proprietary chat server, jabber, sametime, and some yahoo gateway, and probably more crap that I don't know about. It'd be BRILLIANT if everybody (including clients) could standardize on one message format -- it could save all of us loads of trouble.
5. jabber
As good as jabber is in theory, the open source server components used to be pretty rough (last fall). The commercial stuff might be nice, but I remember spending loads of time hacking at the XDB/XML database and thinking "Damn, this is really not flexible for enterprise-level usage" (i.e. 20-80,000 users, multiple continents/offices/divisions). It would be nice if everyone standardized on it and everything was made bank-reliable (a system going down can literally mean millions of dollars lost). Maybe all the banks should devote a few good programmers each to fixing it up, or donate a mil to the jabber foundation or something.
Just a few random points (I'm in a hurry)
QUERTY? Damn, that's a new one. I use QWERTY. Funny how you can have a spelling error on something that should be as simple as looking at the keys. Out of curiousity, did you type this on a QWERTY keyboard?
Also, a few more facts about WTD:
1. The 48/week excludes all breaks/lunches,etc.
2. The 48/week is an average over 10-18 weeks (not sure which).
It's a nice idea, but I don't think it buys most people that much.
My language skills improved a lot, but the overall benefit is much more than just learning a language... Studying abroad gives you a much better perspective on the complexities of the real world. You might have seen some poor folks before, but talking to farmers in the 3rd countryside will definatly widen your mind. Similarly, when you see people selling bottles of water for HOURS in the hot sun, or rich officials, or how pride may distort plans to do "what's best" for the country.
For what it's worth, I'm currently working abroad (England), and I can say that I'm very glad I didn't study abroad in a western, developed country. The UK/Europe is different from the US, but not nearly as much as, say, Russia or China. England has been relatively easy to adapt to, but that ease means that there's less things that are really different/entirely new to learn about/experience. Go for the third world -- it's probably cheaper, too. (I think getting a good job in a 1st world country is a good way to understand the culture, and you'll have cash to see the shows, enjoy local specialities, take trips, etc)
2 more things
1) I've found that travelling/being a tourist isn't as rewarding as living in a place. It's cool to go tromping around, but when you can speak the langauge and you have a local role (i.e. student at a univerisity that everyone knows about), you get insight into the country that you won't get from going to the big musuems and climbing the great wall.
2) Perhaps more important than the high probability of dating while overseas, you'll probably come back with some very good friends. Friends that were around when you had that 5 day period of food posioning, that were there when you were frusterated at communicating with locals, and that will be able to understand your experience when you get back.
Sorry if this sounds like a bunch of propoganda, but most people I know gained from their study abroad experiences -- even those that hated it learned a bit about themselves/others.
I've been programming for several years (on and off), and I look to the book frequently for suggestions, or just to stir the coals in my head.
In any case, my company is listening (and the linux processes that I write in Java/C++ will supply the data to these C# front ends).
I doubt the average user ever opens the box, let alone realizes that they need a new video card (as opposed to a faster CPU, more ram, etc). Not only do people not posess the knowledge to upgrade, but with crappy PCs, it's pretty hard to upgrade, anyhow (few slots, etc). I assume that most people who buy HPs/Gateways/etc just buy a new computer every few years, and give the old one to their kids or to their grandma.
It always amazes me how out of touch /. people are with the non-geek reality that a large number of people live in.
Here's a few other sites...
I see The Economist occasionally linked from Slashdot -- the Economist is partially owned by FT, and provides deep articles about a broad array of news items. Lots of it is economics/foreign policy, but they've got a lengthy tech survey every few months, and cover tech news occasionally. No reg required, but to view all of the articles you need to subscribe/pay money (free with print subscription -- excellent value). The Economist and the New York Times are the best news sources that I know.
Thankfully, Slashdot posts few time/newsweek/usnwr drivel -- this falls into the same catagory as ABC, CBS, NBC -- for people that don't really like to read hard news/want to be entertained more than informed.
The SF Chronicle used to have some good local/silicon valley stories from time to time. The web version is more infotainment than the print one, though. I haven't seen a slashdot link to there in a while either -- maybe it has gone downhill (haven't read it since I moved away).
The Christian Science Monitor used to be OK as well -- haven't looked at it in years...