I've never seen a company with penalties for failing to make BMI or any other measurement. The HR department usually runs a wellness initiative, and the insurance companies push that because healthier people cost them less money, but I have never felt overly pressured to do anything like that.
Now, if this Dutch company was forcing compliance and holding that information and using it. That's a big no-no. I'd never tolerate that in a place I worked. I would quite literally tell them to go fuck themselves.
I don't think most people oppose single payer by suggesting that health care will get worse. Although if you look at the VA hospital system, I'm not really enthusiastic about how the government runs health care in the US on even a more limited level.
Ultimately, its about where you want to see your country going. I can't argue that health insurance in the US leaves something to be desired, but does that mean that government single payer health care is the only other option? I understand why it is the *default* answer, but if you look at most of the countries on that list, they're at most the size of a large US state. Some of them are very culturally homogeneous. And some of them have actually had problems with their systems. You can't take Denmark, for instance, and suggest it's policies are a model for the United States just because they are successful, to some degree, for their own specific situation.
I really have little interest in the government becoming involved in my choices and eventually that's what it is doing more and more.
All I can say is, if we did go down that path, I hope someone came up with the best plan possible, because it will literally require an armed revolution to seriously reform a health care system like this once it is in place. Just look at what kind of failure that Social Security is. Yet, no one dares restructure it because it is untouchable. I am very uncomfortable with the government controlling more and more untouchable programs.
The keyword nazis are out there but that tends to be recruiters who have been given bad reqs or HR people who just look for keywords. If you do meet an actual manager who pulls that on you... well you didn't want that job anyway. The government is annoying in that regard with their constant desire for credentials and degrees. College isn't really all that hard if you skated through it and got your piece of paper, but it doesn't mean fuckall in IT if you don't have the skills.
I'm not telling anyone to lie, but I will say this. As a manager, I fight a constant battle to make sure I can get the recruiters and HR people to bring in the people to interview I think I need. So, I don't mind it too much if you add some keywords on your resume if it is not totally deceptive. Just like if you know something like chef or puppet like the back of your hand from your free time experience, put it on your skills list even if your last job wasn't in that. Get in the door and if you are confident in your skills, you have a real shot. Just keep it close to the target and don't embroider too much.
For instance, if you know CentOS, you know almost all of Red Hat that is worth knowing. I might want you to know what makes the two different and it would be great if you knew how the RHEL satellites work and all of that, but if you know CentOS, I won't turn you away. Setting up the updates isn't exactly a job requiring a rocket scientist.
If you impress me with what you know, I don't care if you were a storage tape robot operator at your last job, I can probably find a place for you. It *does* help to have IT experience. As much as I would love to see a farmer come in and ace an interview, some experience in the field is useful just so you know how to navigate the everyday shit.
What part of, "I am totally okay with someone branding themselves a "Cloud" or "DevOps" person if they can demonstrate their knowledge of the tools and the methodology" reads to you like I like people manipulating their resumes? In fact, that's pretty much what I came out against.
Actually, I think I understand why you thought that. You think that people can only learn skills on a job that has that job description. You're totally wrong and that's the core of the problem.
Not only do I hire people who have no previous "cloud" experience, I almost have to, with the way the market is. What I want from people is that they come to the interview able to answer the questions that I ask about it. You can do that by reading a book or keeping up your skills on your free time. I mean, I didn't walk into IT 20 years ago by knowing the "Cloud". Do you think I got a fancy training course or a job description on it? No one did. That's like saying you have 30 years of Java programming experience. It didn't exist, you can't.
Get the skills, know what you're talking about, and I don't care what you did in IT before you walk in the door, you're going to fit. And if you do get hired, you'll continue to get trained.
However, don't tell me that you want $100k for me to have you be useless for the next six months while my small team has to hold your hand while you take training courses to get you to the point where you can actually do the job you're hired for, but you refuse to do any work whatsoever to build your own skills. No... fucking... way.
It's the politician way. Please don't tell me that you think only the Republicans have been bought and sold. We're about to elect one of those to be our first female president.
Many businesses do not have cloud computing at their heart, and people who happen to be in IT do not necessarily have the skills for the Cloud computing world.
Don't get me wrong, Cloud computing is not particularly hard, but it does require you to become up to date on the tools and mindset.
It took me weeks, even months to find people for our positions. Now, it is important to point out that I'm in an area where there is very high demand, so that doesn't mean that they aren't out there. They're just not *here*. Or rather, they're somewhere around here, but already gainfully employed.
However, in the midst of all of those interviews, I got plenty of candidates. The problem is that they had left or been laid off from $100k+ jobs where the government or some big company paid them to sit there and write policies or run some script that some "architect" wrote for them. In a smaller business, people like that are not needed and certainly not for that pricetag. I can run scripts myself, or use cron. Thanks.
I'll pay someone good money if they have the skills and the interest in continuing to learn. I will not spend that sort of money for people who I have to write out a step by step process for everything they do.
I am totally okay with someone branding themselves a "Cloud" or "DevOps" person if they can demonstrate their knowledge of the tools and the methodology, as well as showing that they are able to take the reins and not expect someone else to teach them. I don't care if you have a fancy CS degree, or even a college degree at all. I studied CS in college and I have worked with people who didn't spend a day in a CS class. I don't need a CS degree holder for everything. What I do need are people who can keep their skills up and know what they're there to interview for. The people who just want to point at some certificate or put jargon on their resume are welcome to go talk to the government. I hear they pay pretty well, if you can avoid committing suicide from the institutionalization.
Are people leaving the industry? Maybe. However, I think there is a certain number of people who have left the industry before they even lost their jobs. The industry had already moved on, they were just continuing to collect a paycheck and hold on to their red stapler. And I totally understand how that can happen. I have to constantly overcome my curmudgeonly desire to not change what works for me right now. I looked at Cloud computing when it first came out as an interesting toy, but I watched it closely and realized that it stopped being a toy and soon the buzzwords were the reality. Someday, "the Cloud" will either be so obvious that no one pays top dollar for it anymore, or we'll have moved to the next buzzword. If you want to stay in IT forever, that is the price you pay.
They did have the option to try and get a license for the IP. No idea if Konami would have gone along with it, or they might have wanted to charge them for it, thus creating a rather large hurdle for a free game.
You can easily show you're defending your IP if you give out a license, even one that allows a free remake. So, I'm not sure why the developers started this effort if they weren't willing to talk to Konami first. The only thing I can think of is that they hoped to have it done enough for a good demo before making the attempt, thus drumming up support that would make Konami more likely to take them seriously.
However, that's walking a tightrope of hoping that the Konami legal department doesn't notice you before you're ready for someone else at Konami to see your project and hopefully chain the legal folks to the porch. Looks like they fell off the rope and there was no net.
Yes, to some degree, but usually your options are Oracle, or if you are slumming it, they'll let you run on SQL Server.
Oracle is horrendously expensive, so SQL Server often wins because developers want a big name DB that they support in case the customer doesn't want to pay 2 million dollars for a rather small cluster of Oracle hosts, or the customer already has a big Windows Server presence for some reason.
Usually your Postgres or MySQL is an option, but only under the Other SQL... category. They won't code their stuff to make use of the advantages of those platforms, so you're basically getting a free SQL engine that is completely un-optimized and barely supported.
You're under the impression that businesses only care about a free pricetag.
Businesses care about the lowest price that gets you the best support. I spent months trying to find a DBA who knew anything about Postgres, but if you have an opening for SQL server, you need a frontloader to get through the crowd of them.
Yeah, few, if any of them are what you'd call geniuses, but I really only need one or two geniuses at a time to tell the data monkeys what to do. And if I have to pay genius rates for a data monkey, then perhaps I'm willing to pay for a database something that has higher adoption and high integration.
SQL Server is no slouch for features and while it is not free, you have a better pool for support and integration.
Note, aside from being unable to find a Postgres data monkey, that isn't my story. I don't use SQL Server, but I have the luxury of knowing how to operate a SQL database myself, so I just sucked it up. For businesses where that isn't really an option, I can see why they might want SQL Server. And indeed, many, many businesses do use it.
SQL Server fits in a very neat niche between your MySQLs and your Oracle type servers. It was once explained to me that while SQL Server can't do what Oracle does, it has features that allow it to hit the mid-range for enterprises very well, better than many of the favorite lower end DBs like MySQL, PostgresSQL and now MariaDB. And of course, its integration with Windows Server boxes didn't hurt with adoption either.
And yes, I know that the PostgresDBs of the world can be quite powerful and do heavy lifting when they are set up correctly. I'm not a fan of SQL server by any stretch of the imagination, and I've only rarely found a reason why I'd want to use it, but mid to large sized businesses do seem to like it a lot.
So, there will be a demand for SQL Server in the Cloud, and if Cloud services is really what MS is trying to move towards, it will pay for them to get it on Linux. If they do a good job with the port, they could still own that niche without having to deal with the problems you get with Windows in the Cloud.
The government is a big place, and some groups have needs you just can't support with a Windows server, but even so, the government comfort level with Windows is pretty absurd for what it is. Unless they have particular needs like a NASA or DoD secure network, its hard to go wrong with Windows and the security teams for some reason.
Again, credited to Microsoft getting their stuff in there and churning out "qualified" engineers who work for cheap. Enough cheap engineers and even Windows-level insecurity is less of an issue.
You don't want to be a government and a net creditor. That means that *you* are left holding the bag when everyone else defaults.
It sounds nice to be the country that "owns" other countries, but the thing to remember is that sovereign states can't be forced to pay up at bankruptcy court. If they default, they go into the shitter and all, but they were probably already in serious trouble to begin with. So holding the now worthless IOUs when that happens is not a plus.
Yes, I understand how one might rebel against the idea of buying more things than we have money to pay for, as it seems irresponsible. However, there's nothing wrong with being in debt as a country, especially US dollar denominated debt if you're the US government. As long as you can pay the bills in dollars, you pretty much can't go into default. You can trash your currency by printing money to pay it off, but you won't go into default.
There is one thing that people forget about a country like China "owning" the US debt. They aren't holding US debt because they want to buy the USA. It doesn't work that way. The US isn't a publicly traded stock corporation, it is a government. What they want is to be able to make money on safe decent yield US bonds as a hedge against all that fucking with their own currency not being enough. They get nothing from forcing the US into default since their investment is just that, an investment. They want to make nice safe interest and preserve the value of their reserves with US bonds.
I see no problem with US debt being held by other countries. I do agree that it can get out of control, but the biggest threat to our current economy is not the size of the debt, but rather Congress continuing to fuck with *payment* on the debt when we have the means to do so. That is when we run into trouble for no reason.
Don't get me wrong, I want a smaller government, but that's not because I care much about the debt situation. We ran a lower proportion of debt to GDP during the Great Depression than we have today, and it didn't help us for shit.
Saying "I do not recall" is quite possibly a dodge and could be a boldfaced lie, although it seems like the people who don't like Reagan can't seem to decide whether to bash him for being senile or bash him for lying. Not being able to recall things seems to be about the right place for a senile person to be, albeit a very convenient place to be if he had been doing bad things.
Clinton saying that he didn't have sexual relations with Monica was a flat out lie, by a definitely non-senile person.
Since I was no fan of the whole Clinton impeachment thing, I really don't want to lend too much gravitas to that fishing expedition, but there is a difference to those two statements. Of course, saying that he could not recall diddling an intern would probably not work very well, unless he did that so often that it was a normal Tuesday for him.
That would have been nice. I got out when they were still running Solaris 8. Which dates me pretty well at that job.
I didn't mind Solaris too much as a server, it had its little annoyances, but had some good things too. I just didn't want to have to see it as anything other than a command prompt on my desktop which would not be a Sun workstation.
Good luck with that. The government loves its Windows boxes.
They are so much more comfortable with Windows security, for instance, than UNIX security, that it is extremely noticeable when you are doing business with them.
This is probably because they hired a bunch of MCSE bootcamp button pushers back when that was the big thing.
One of the many reasons that I refuse to work for the government. I had to sit in front of a Sun workstation for years as my desktop computer. It's amazing that I didn't stab my own eyes out after about six months of it. It's enough to make you want to leave tech and become a farmer.
Don't get me wrong, you can theoretically put a decent desktop on top of a UNIX-like, but CDE was not an example of that.
I don't think I was ever so happy to see a Windows box as I was the day that I was given one at that job. That's another reason I won't work for the government, they made me happy to see Windows on my desk.
I agree totally. Or if I am doing a very long drive and I start getting really tired. It would be nice to simply turn it on auto and rest for a bit before resuming control without having to park. Also, for night driving, I'd probably be happy to let the computer with the radar take over.
That doesn't mean I want to be a mere passenger in my own car all the time, but it seems to me that there are plenty of good uses for autonomous cars while not completely removing the ability to drive them yourself.
I don't know why it is always only the people who want to remove self-driving cars from the road entirely, or the people who don't want self-driving cars at all. It would seem to me that the middle course makes a lot more sense in reality.
I could agree that on certain crowded commuter roads, they may demand that you turn over control to the car for driving, because the shit I have seen that some idiots do in rush hour traffic is truly breathtaking. Also, perhaps they could allow the cars to drive at much higher speeds while on automatic, for roads engineered for those speeds, because the car reaction times are much better on auto.
I presume in the case of a stadium attack, they'd use the prediction as probable cause as a search warrant justification or something on the terrorists. You might not be able to obtain a conviction for terrorism, but you might effectively break up the attempt by locating them and any weapons, which they could then be convicted for.
It wasn't meant to be a Ponzi scheme in the pejorative sense, but it is very much a pyramid scheme, with all of the the attendant problems of such.
Social security relies on someone providing extra money to add interest to the withholding of payroll taxes so that at the end, you actually have more than you put in.
In an investment scheme like stock or fund buys, you are relying and betting on growth of the market to add money to your investments. The difference between that and an entitlement is that at the end of the day, you could end up with less money on an investment, and there is no guarantee that you will get a return or even not lose money.
In an entitlement scheme, you invest your money, the economic bet fails, but the government is still on the hook for you to make a certain return. The only way to ensure that this is possible is via adding something at the base of the pyramid, either more contributors or higher payroll taxes to make up the shortfall, or printing more money to *technically* meet the obligation, but fail to do so because the resulting inflation has driven up prices.
Realistically, there was *no way* to properly fund Social Security so that you could guarantee a certain return. There are years that you can make your investments, but also going to be years that you can't. In the end, you will always have a shortfall eventually. And since the shortfall can't be passed to the investor, you have a Ponzi scheme because sooner or later, you will fail to be able to fund Social Security but you have promised that you always will.
It certainly doesn't help that it got raided for general expenditures, but all that did was move up the date of insolvency.
Well, you'd definitely have a different reaction because Social Security is supposed to be withholding based on what you paid into. So I can imagine people would be upset with losing it, after having paid into it their entire working lives. That does not mean that they understand what the problem with SS really is.
One problem with SS is that it is mismanaged and has been used as a general fund for Congress. So instead of simply being enforced savings, it is losing money.
More to the point things like social security and retirement plans and health care plans are pyramid schemes. You need to keep the base levels of the pyramids wide or you can't deliver to the people at the top who are supposed to be collecting.
Look at the "Affordable Health Care" program. They are making healthy people pay into it who have no need for insurance. While this may save the ass of some younger people who end up with unexpected illnesses, the great balance of this is to simply remove the money from the younger people to pay for the people who are using the health care. This only works while the wider base of the pyramid can pay to maintain those who are ill. It absolutely requires population and more importantly economic growth. With a big helping of hope that medical technology somehow makes certain things cheaper.
So yeah, SS isn't welfare, but it works the same way in practice, except for the fact that the people getting it were supposed to have "earned it". In reality, to get the promised returns from SS, they're actually fleecing the younger generations to get a retirement. They want to have a retirement the government promised them, and it isn't their problem how the government does that.
But, in a very real sense, they are as responsible for that situation as much as people who voted for Obamacare will be for their own health care plans fleecing the younger folks. They could have voted to reform SS in their time, but failed to do so. Now that have no choice but to maintain a death grip on whatever they can eke out of it.
And the retirement age keeps getting higher... I'll probably have to retire at 90 at this rate. At least Obamacare will be keeping me on life support, so I can enjoy my retirement, I suppose.
This is why people fight health care and entitlement programs. They don't hate old people or the sick or the poor, they just see that it will become an increasing burden that we will just be throwing down the road to our children. If we ever end up in a real depression, the increasing social programs of the West are going to completely fail those people who will have come to rely on it. The only thing that has a prayer of stopping that eventuality is technological and economic growth. That is a very rickety hope, because there are periods in history where science can hit a plateau and then you're stuck with a standard of living that requires growth, and no way to get it.
The US also can't convict people based on methods where they violate your rights. The usual path for abuse is parallel construction of a case, once the illegal tip-off let's them know about a target.
In China, however, you don't need to worry about that. They'll just arrest you and use the method that was illegal in the US to gather the evidence to convict you. In China, all of that surveillance is perfectly legal.
For pre-crime, the real problem with pre-crime in the US is that you will never be able to convict someone "beyond a reasonable doubt" unless you have absolutely ironclad scientific proof that the events would have happened the exactly same way as in the prediction, no matter what, every time with perfect accuracy. And then, you will need to explain why you are convicting someone for a crime you could have prevented by simply calling up the victim and telling them to go to a safe location at such and such a time.
Now, with China... they wouldn't have a bit of a problem convicting you of a crime that you had a high, but not perfect probability of committing. That is because to them, stability is more important than individual rights. If the occasional innocent person is thrown in jail, it is totally worth it to them having prevented a large number of crimes. They might even let that person out after a short period of re-education and recheck him for future crimes or seditious thoughts.
It's an awesome idea that won't get traction because:
a) It will increase the complexity of the design (which may or may not be a problem for expensive gaming laptops) b) It will increase the life of the laptop before a new one is purchased, and thus reduce return business and profit. Gaming laptops are a niche where you get more turnover since they have to follow the leading edge more closely. c) The external connector will definitely need the standardization, or the laptop might find itself compatible with too few external cards to make it worth the effort. d) I doubt that even most gamers would use it. If you're buying a gaming laptop, portability becomes one of the concerns that doesn't exist with a desktop. Lugging an external GPU around with you is definitely going to add to carry weight and set up. It will also take up considerably more desk or lap space.
That said, I would be happy if someone provided that, but then, I generally build a desktop for gaming. A lot easier to keep it up to date and I don't need to make any compromises for a box that I'm not going to take out of my office at home anyway.
Well it can still be good, without being the complete solution.
Let's face it, Apple was always free to sell us out. What kept it from doing so is that people might not buy their phones as often if Apple was selling your data to the highest bidder (or the guy with the gun). What this says is that the government can't force Apple to go against its own self-interest by limiting its speech or putting words in its proverbial mouth.
You are right, Apple then becomes responsible and capable of turning around and handing it over. So this defense only solves half the problem, but half a problem is better than no progress at all. If this is sustained, we have the ability to use boycotts and the reputation of Apple as a knob we can turn to keep them mostly honest. With the government able to just force them to provide that data, we would have zero recourse because no matter of pressure we could put on Apple could prevent the handover of the needed code and the related data.
So, the war isn't over, but you win wars by fighting battles and winning them one at a time. The next battle may be the harder one of obtaining a constitutional protection for this data for individuals.
Much funding for Sunni groups comes from the very rich denizens of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni countries. ISIS would not have gotten anywhere, for instance, without Sunni support. Even though the CIA money may well have contributed, I think you're vastly underestimating the support groups like ISIS get from sources more close to home. The CIA has definitely done some things in its history, but it hasn't been supporting these fighters since Reagan.
Remember, the support for the Afghan mujahadeen dried up after the Soviets left. While the impact of this money didn't go away, and indeed provided a base for groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the stream dried up at the end of the 1980s, almost 20 years ago.
The problem with just going cold turkey with any involvement is that there is a reason we are in the Mideast, and it is not because we're trying to fund holy wars. While we're not trying to "steal" oil, we are definitely trying to keep the area stable enough so that no one can grab it and hold it for ransom. That is why we need forces in the region and why we need to remain interested.
However, that by itself, is not fueling the issue, it is merely a glaring example that the Middle East can't police itself without help. Some people there hate that, and still more people there want us gone so they can fight their wars.
The people in the Middle East hate each other in a way that few people elsewhere can appreciate. Sunnis hate Shiites, Shiites hate Sunnis, Turks hate Kurds, and then there are tribes out there that hate each other. I'd hazard to say that if the West hadn't been there with the mandates and protectorates, this would have all ended with a gigantic regional war which would have led to either a new Persian empire, or two regional Sunni and Shiite superstates. As much as the West didn't help, I see no evidence that they would have made it any better on their own.
Look at Iran. The shah was more than a little bit of a dick, but under his regime, Iran was relatively peaceful, prosperous, and Westernized. Women could and did go to school and participate in daily life. But there was always that religious group in the hinterlands who wanted to go back to what Iran is today. Even if the shah wasn't something of a tyrant, sponsored by the USA, you'd still have that dynamic.
Complaints about the CIA are honestly like complaining about the conquistadors now. They're a part of history. They had their impact, but their active involvement in the events of today pales in comparison to the forces now at work. Your Middle East trials and tribulations today are fueled mostly by their own money and anger. Whether it is directed at the West is irrelevant. You can see this today where ISIS is about Caliphate first, attack the West second. This violence is fueled directly by the profits on oil which are being spent by the regional actors themselves and it won't stop until they can be convinced to stop, or more likely, they run out of money.
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I've never seen a company with penalties for failing to make BMI or any other measurement. The HR department usually runs a wellness initiative, and the insurance companies push that because healthier people cost them less money, but I have never felt overly pressured to do anything like that.
Now, if this Dutch company was forcing compliance and holding that information and using it. That's a big no-no. I'd never tolerate that in a place I worked. I would quite literally tell them to go fuck themselves.
I don't think most people oppose single payer by suggesting that health care will get worse. Although if you look at the VA hospital system, I'm not really enthusiastic about how the government runs health care in the US on even a more limited level.
Ultimately, its about where you want to see your country going. I can't argue that health insurance in the US leaves something to be desired, but does that mean that government single payer health care is the only other option? I understand why it is the *default* answer, but if you look at most of the countries on that list, they're at most the size of a large US state. Some of them are very culturally homogeneous. And some of them have actually had problems with their systems. You can't take Denmark, for instance, and suggest it's policies are a model for the United States just because they are successful, to some degree, for their own specific situation.
I really have little interest in the government becoming involved in my choices and eventually that's what it is doing more and more.
All I can say is, if we did go down that path, I hope someone came up with the best plan possible, because it will literally require an armed revolution to seriously reform a health care system like this once it is in place. Just look at what kind of failure that Social Security is. Yet, no one dares restructure it because it is untouchable. I am very uncomfortable with the government controlling more and more untouchable programs.
I hear you.
The keyword nazis are out there but that tends to be recruiters who have been given bad reqs or HR people who just look for keywords. If you do meet an actual manager who pulls that on you... well you didn't want that job anyway. The government is annoying in that regard with their constant desire for credentials and degrees. College isn't really all that hard if you skated through it and got your piece of paper, but it doesn't mean fuckall in IT if you don't have the skills.
I'm not telling anyone to lie, but I will say this. As a manager, I fight a constant battle to make sure I can get the recruiters and HR people to bring in the people to interview I think I need. So, I don't mind it too much if you add some keywords on your resume if it is not totally deceptive. Just like if you know something like chef or puppet like the back of your hand from your free time experience, put it on your skills list even if your last job wasn't in that. Get in the door and if you are confident in your skills, you have a real shot. Just keep it close to the target and don't embroider too much.
For instance, if you know CentOS, you know almost all of Red Hat that is worth knowing. I might want you to know what makes the two different and it would be great if you knew how the RHEL satellites work and all of that, but if you know CentOS, I won't turn you away. Setting up the updates isn't exactly a job requiring a rocket scientist.
If you impress me with what you know, I don't care if you were a storage tape robot operator at your last job, I can probably find a place for you. It *does* help to have IT experience. As much as I would love to see a farmer come in and ace an interview, some experience in the field is useful just so you know how to navigate the everyday shit.
You are wrong on just about every account.
What part of, "I am totally okay with someone branding themselves a "Cloud" or "DevOps" person if they can demonstrate their knowledge of the tools and the methodology" reads to you like I like people manipulating their resumes? In fact, that's pretty much what I came out against.
Actually, I think I understand why you thought that. You think that people can only learn skills on a job that has that job description. You're totally wrong and that's the core of the problem.
Not only do I hire people who have no previous "cloud" experience, I almost have to, with the way the market is. What I want from people is that they come to the interview able to answer the questions that I ask about it. You can do that by reading a book or keeping up your skills on your free time. I mean, I didn't walk into IT 20 years ago by knowing the "Cloud". Do you think I got a fancy training course or a job description on it? No one did. That's like saying you have 30 years of Java programming experience. It didn't exist, you can't.
Get the skills, know what you're talking about, and I don't care what you did in IT before you walk in the door, you're going to fit. And if you do get hired, you'll continue to get trained.
However, don't tell me that you want $100k for me to have you be useless for the next six months while my small team has to hold your hand while you take training courses to get you to the point where you can actually do the job you're hired for, but you refuse to do any work whatsoever to build your own skills. No... fucking... way.
It's the politician way. Please don't tell me that you think only the Republicans have been bought and sold. We're about to elect one of those to be our first female president.
Many businesses do not have cloud computing at their heart, and people who happen to be in IT do not necessarily have the skills for the Cloud computing world.
Don't get me wrong, Cloud computing is not particularly hard, but it does require you to become up to date on the tools and mindset.
It took me weeks, even months to find people for our positions. Now, it is important to point out that I'm in an area where there is very high demand, so that doesn't mean that they aren't out there. They're just not *here*. Or rather, they're somewhere around here, but already gainfully employed.
However, in the midst of all of those interviews, I got plenty of candidates. The problem is that they had left or been laid off from $100k+ jobs where the government or some big company paid them to sit there and write policies or run some script that some "architect" wrote for them. In a smaller business, people like that are not needed and certainly not for that pricetag. I can run scripts myself, or use cron. Thanks.
I'll pay someone good money if they have the skills and the interest in continuing to learn. I will not spend that sort of money for people who I have to write out a step by step process for everything they do.
I am totally okay with someone branding themselves a "Cloud" or "DevOps" person if they can demonstrate their knowledge of the tools and the methodology, as well as showing that they are able to take the reins and not expect someone else to teach them. I don't care if you have a fancy CS degree, or even a college degree at all. I studied CS in college and I have worked with people who didn't spend a day in a CS class. I don't need a CS degree holder for everything. What I do need are people who can keep their skills up and know what they're there to interview for. The people who just want to point at some certificate or put jargon on their resume are welcome to go talk to the government. I hear they pay pretty well, if you can avoid committing suicide from the institutionalization.
Are people leaving the industry? Maybe. However, I think there is a certain number of people who have left the industry before they even lost their jobs. The industry had already moved on, they were just continuing to collect a paycheck and hold on to their red stapler. And I totally understand how that can happen. I have to constantly overcome my curmudgeonly desire to not change what works for me right now. I looked at Cloud computing when it first came out as an interesting toy, but I watched it closely and realized that it stopped being a toy and soon the buzzwords were the reality. Someday, "the Cloud" will either be so obvious that no one pays top dollar for it anymore, or we'll have moved to the next buzzword. If you want to stay in IT forever, that is the price you pay.
They did have the option to try and get a license for the IP. No idea if Konami would have gone along with it, or they might have wanted to charge them for it, thus creating a rather large hurdle for a free game.
You can easily show you're defending your IP if you give out a license, even one that allows a free remake. So, I'm not sure why the developers started this effort if they weren't willing to talk to Konami first. The only thing I can think of is that they hoped to have it done enough for a good demo before making the attempt, thus drumming up support that would make Konami more likely to take them seriously.
However, that's walking a tightrope of hoping that the Konami legal department doesn't notice you before you're ready for someone else at Konami to see your project and hopefully chain the legal folks to the porch. Looks like they fell off the rope and there was no net.
Yes, to some degree, but usually your options are Oracle, or if you are slumming it, they'll let you run on SQL Server.
Oracle is horrendously expensive, so SQL Server often wins because developers want a big name DB that they support in case the customer doesn't want to pay 2 million dollars for a rather small cluster of Oracle hosts, or the customer already has a big Windows Server presence for some reason.
Usually your Postgres or MySQL is an option, but only under the Other SQL... category. They won't code their stuff to make use of the advantages of those platforms, so you're basically getting a free SQL engine that is completely un-optimized and barely supported.
You're under the impression that businesses only care about a free pricetag.
Businesses care about the lowest price that gets you the best support. I spent months trying to find a DBA who knew anything about Postgres, but if you have an opening for SQL server, you need a frontloader to get through the crowd of them.
Yeah, few, if any of them are what you'd call geniuses, but I really only need one or two geniuses at a time to tell the data monkeys what to do. And if I have to pay genius rates for a data monkey, then perhaps I'm willing to pay for a database something that has higher adoption and high integration.
SQL Server is no slouch for features and while it is not free, you have a better pool for support and integration.
Note, aside from being unable to find a Postgres data monkey, that isn't my story. I don't use SQL Server, but I have the luxury of knowing how to operate a SQL database myself, so I just sucked it up. For businesses where that isn't really an option, I can see why they might want SQL Server. And indeed, many, many businesses do use it.
SQL Server fits in a very neat niche between your MySQLs and your Oracle type servers. It was once explained to me that while SQL Server can't do what Oracle does, it has features that allow it to hit the mid-range for enterprises very well, better than many of the favorite lower end DBs like MySQL, PostgresSQL and now MariaDB. And of course, its integration with Windows Server boxes didn't hurt with adoption either.
And yes, I know that the PostgresDBs of the world can be quite powerful and do heavy lifting when they are set up correctly. I'm not a fan of SQL server by any stretch of the imagination, and I've only rarely found a reason why I'd want to use it, but mid to large sized businesses do seem to like it a lot.
So, there will be a demand for SQL Server in the Cloud, and if Cloud services is really what MS is trying to move towards, it will pay for them to get it on Linux. If they do a good job with the port, they could still own that niche without having to deal with the problems you get with Windows in the Cloud.
The government is a big place, and some groups have needs you just can't support with a Windows server, but even so, the government comfort level with Windows is pretty absurd for what it is. Unless they have particular needs like a NASA or DoD secure network, its hard to go wrong with Windows and the security teams for some reason.
Again, credited to Microsoft getting their stuff in there and churning out "qualified" engineers who work for cheap. Enough cheap engineers and even Windows-level insecurity is less of an issue.
You don't want to be a government and a net creditor. That means that *you* are left holding the bag when everyone else defaults.
It sounds nice to be the country that "owns" other countries, but the thing to remember is that sovereign states can't be forced to pay up at bankruptcy court. If they default, they go into the shitter and all, but they were probably already in serious trouble to begin with. So holding the now worthless IOUs when that happens is not a plus.
Yes, I understand how one might rebel against the idea of buying more things than we have money to pay for, as it seems irresponsible. However, there's nothing wrong with being in debt as a country, especially US dollar denominated debt if you're the US government. As long as you can pay the bills in dollars, you pretty much can't go into default. You can trash your currency by printing money to pay it off, but you won't go into default.
There is one thing that people forget about a country like China "owning" the US debt. They aren't holding US debt because they want to buy the USA. It doesn't work that way. The US isn't a publicly traded stock corporation, it is a government. What they want is to be able to make money on safe decent yield US bonds as a hedge against all that fucking with their own currency not being enough. They get nothing from forcing the US into default since their investment is just that, an investment. They want to make nice safe interest and preserve the value of their reserves with US bonds.
I see no problem with US debt being held by other countries. I do agree that it can get out of control, but the biggest threat to our current economy is not the size of the debt, but rather Congress continuing to fuck with *payment* on the debt when we have the means to do so. That is when we run into trouble for no reason.
Don't get me wrong, I want a smaller government, but that's not because I care much about the debt situation. We ran a lower proportion of debt to GDP during the Great Depression than we have today, and it didn't help us for shit.
Saying "I do not recall" is quite possibly a dodge and could be a boldfaced lie, although it seems like the people who don't like Reagan can't seem to decide whether to bash him for being senile or bash him for lying. Not being able to recall things seems to be about the right place for a senile person to be, albeit a very convenient place to be if he had been doing bad things.
Clinton saying that he didn't have sexual relations with Monica was a flat out lie, by a definitely non-senile person.
Since I was no fan of the whole Clinton impeachment thing, I really don't want to lend too much gravitas to that fishing expedition, but there is a difference to those two statements. Of course, saying that he could not recall diddling an intern would probably not work very well, unless he did that so often that it was a normal Tuesday for him.
That would have been nice. I got out when they were still running Solaris 8. Which dates me pretty well at that job.
I didn't mind Solaris too much as a server, it had its little annoyances, but had some good things too. I just didn't want to have to see it as anything other than a command prompt on my desktop which would not be a Sun workstation.
Good luck with that. The government loves its Windows boxes.
They are so much more comfortable with Windows security, for instance, than UNIX security, that it is extremely noticeable when you are doing business with them.
This is probably because they hired a bunch of MCSE bootcamp button pushers back when that was the big thing.
One of the many reasons that I refuse to work for the government. I had to sit in front of a Sun workstation for years as my desktop computer. It's amazing that I didn't stab my own eyes out after about six months of it. It's enough to make you want to leave tech and become a farmer.
Don't get me wrong, you can theoretically put a decent desktop on top of a UNIX-like, but CDE was not an example of that.
I don't think I was ever so happy to see a Windows box as I was the day that I was given one at that job. That's another reason I won't work for the government, they made me happy to see Windows on my desk.
I agree totally. Or if I am doing a very long drive and I start getting really tired. It would be nice to simply turn it on auto and rest for a bit before resuming control without having to park. Also, for night driving, I'd probably be happy to let the computer with the radar take over.
That doesn't mean I want to be a mere passenger in my own car all the time, but it seems to me that there are plenty of good uses for autonomous cars while not completely removing the ability to drive them yourself.
I don't know why it is always only the people who want to remove self-driving cars from the road entirely, or the people who don't want self-driving cars at all. It would seem to me that the middle course makes a lot more sense in reality.
I could agree that on certain crowded commuter roads, they may demand that you turn over control to the car for driving, because the shit I have seen that some idiots do in rush hour traffic is truly breathtaking. Also, perhaps they could allow the cars to drive at much higher speeds while on automatic, for roads engineered for those speeds, because the car reaction times are much better on auto.
I presume in the case of a stadium attack, they'd use the prediction as probable cause as a search warrant justification or something on the terrorists. You might not be able to obtain a conviction for terrorism, but you might effectively break up the attempt by locating them and any weapons, which they could then be convicted for.
Guantanamo Bay does not hold US Citizens.
They also aren't convicts. If they were, they'd be in a prison.
I'm not 100% happy about Guantanamo, but let's not suggest it is something it is not.
It wasn't meant to be a Ponzi scheme in the pejorative sense, but it is very much a pyramid scheme, with all of the the attendant problems of such.
Social security relies on someone providing extra money to add interest to the withholding of payroll taxes so that at the end, you actually have more than you put in.
In an investment scheme like stock or fund buys, you are relying and betting on growth of the market to add money to your investments. The difference between that and an entitlement is that at the end of the day, you could end up with less money on an investment, and there is no guarantee that you will get a return or even not lose money.
In an entitlement scheme, you invest your money, the economic bet fails, but the government is still on the hook for you to make a certain return. The only way to ensure that this is possible is via adding something at the base of the pyramid, either more contributors or higher payroll taxes to make up the shortfall, or printing more money to *technically* meet the obligation, but fail to do so because the resulting inflation has driven up prices.
Realistically, there was *no way* to properly fund Social Security so that you could guarantee a certain return. There are years that you can make your investments, but also going to be years that you can't. In the end, you will always have a shortfall eventually. And since the shortfall can't be passed to the investor, you have a Ponzi scheme because sooner or later, you will fail to be able to fund Social Security but you have promised that you always will.
It certainly doesn't help that it got raided for general expenditures, but all that did was move up the date of insolvency.
Well, you'd definitely have a different reaction because Social Security is supposed to be withholding based on what you paid into. So I can imagine people would be upset with losing it, after having paid into it their entire working lives. That does not mean that they understand what the problem with SS really is.
One problem with SS is that it is mismanaged and has been used as a general fund for Congress. So instead of simply being enforced savings, it is losing money.
More to the point things like social security and retirement plans and health care plans are pyramid schemes. You need to keep the base levels of the pyramids wide or you can't deliver to the people at the top who are supposed to be collecting.
Look at the "Affordable Health Care" program. They are making healthy people pay into it who have no need for insurance. While this may save the ass of some younger people who end up with unexpected illnesses, the great balance of this is to simply remove the money from the younger people to pay for the people who are using the health care. This only works while the wider base of the pyramid can pay to maintain those who are ill. It absolutely requires population and more importantly economic growth. With a big helping of hope that medical technology somehow makes certain things cheaper.
So yeah, SS isn't welfare, but it works the same way in practice, except for the fact that the people getting it were supposed to have "earned it". In reality, to get the promised returns from SS, they're actually fleecing the younger generations to get a retirement. They want to have a retirement the government promised them, and it isn't their problem how the government does that.
But, in a very real sense, they are as responsible for that situation as much as people who voted for Obamacare will be for their own health care plans fleecing the younger folks. They could have voted to reform SS in their time, but failed to do so. Now that have no choice but to maintain a death grip on whatever they can eke out of it.
And the retirement age keeps getting higher... I'll probably have to retire at 90 at this rate. At least Obamacare will be keeping me on life support, so I can enjoy my retirement, I suppose.
This is why people fight health care and entitlement programs. They don't hate old people or the sick or the poor, they just see that it will become an increasing burden that we will just be throwing down the road to our children. If we ever end up in a real depression, the increasing social programs of the West are going to completely fail those people who will have come to rely on it. The only thing that has a prayer of stopping that eventuality is technological and economic growth. That is a very rickety hope, because there are periods in history where science can hit a plateau and then you're stuck with a standard of living that requires growth, and no way to get it.
The US also can't convict people based on methods where they violate your rights. The usual path for abuse is parallel construction of a case, once the illegal tip-off let's them know about a target.
In China, however, you don't need to worry about that. They'll just arrest you and use the method that was illegal in the US to gather the evidence to convict you. In China, all of that surveillance is perfectly legal.
For pre-crime, the real problem with pre-crime in the US is that you will never be able to convict someone "beyond a reasonable doubt" unless you have absolutely ironclad scientific proof that the events would have happened the exactly same way as in the prediction, no matter what, every time with perfect accuracy. And then, you will need to explain why you are convicting someone for a crime you could have prevented by simply calling up the victim and telling them to go to a safe location at such and such a time.
Now, with China... they wouldn't have a bit of a problem convicting you of a crime that you had a high, but not perfect probability of committing. That is because to them, stability is more important than individual rights. If the occasional innocent person is thrown in jail, it is totally worth it to them having prevented a large number of crimes. They might even let that person out after a short period of re-education and recheck him for future crimes or seditious thoughts.
It's an awesome idea that won't get traction because:
a) It will increase the complexity of the design (which may or may not be a problem for expensive gaming laptops)
b) It will increase the life of the laptop before a new one is purchased, and thus reduce return business and profit. Gaming laptops are a niche where you get more turnover since they have to follow the leading edge more closely.
c) The external connector will definitely need the standardization, or the laptop might find itself compatible with too few external cards to make it worth the effort.
d) I doubt that even most gamers would use it. If you're buying a gaming laptop, portability becomes one of the concerns that doesn't exist with a desktop. Lugging an external GPU around with you is definitely going to add to carry weight and set up. It will also take up considerably more desk or lap space.
That said, I would be happy if someone provided that, but then, I generally build a desktop for gaming. A lot easier to keep it up to date and I don't need to make any compromises for a box that I'm not going to take out of my office at home anyway.
Well it can still be good, without being the complete solution.
Let's face it, Apple was always free to sell us out. What kept it from doing so is that people might not buy their phones as often if Apple was selling your data to the highest bidder (or the guy with the gun). What this says is that the government can't force Apple to go against its own self-interest by limiting its speech or putting words in its proverbial mouth.
You are right, Apple then becomes responsible and capable of turning around and handing it over. So this defense only solves half the problem, but half a problem is better than no progress at all. If this is sustained, we have the ability to use boycotts and the reputation of Apple as a knob we can turn to keep them mostly honest. With the government able to just force them to provide that data, we would have zero recourse because no matter of pressure we could put on Apple could prevent the handover of the needed code and the related data.
So, the war isn't over, but you win wars by fighting battles and winning them one at a time. The next battle may be the harder one of obtaining a constitutional protection for this data for individuals.
Much funding for Sunni groups comes from the very rich denizens of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni countries. ISIS would not have gotten anywhere, for instance, without Sunni support. Even though the CIA money may well have contributed, I think you're vastly underestimating the support groups like ISIS get from sources more close to home. The CIA has definitely done some things in its history, but it hasn't been supporting these fighters since Reagan.
Remember, the support for the Afghan mujahadeen dried up after the Soviets left. While the impact of this money didn't go away, and indeed provided a base for groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the stream dried up at the end of the 1980s, almost 20 years ago.
The problem with just going cold turkey with any involvement is that there is a reason we are in the Mideast, and it is not because we're trying to fund holy wars. While we're not trying to "steal" oil, we are definitely trying to keep the area stable enough so that no one can grab it and hold it for ransom. That is why we need forces in the region and why we need to remain interested.
However, that by itself, is not fueling the issue, it is merely a glaring example that the Middle East can't police itself without help. Some people there hate that, and still more people there want us gone so they can fight their wars.
The people in the Middle East hate each other in a way that few people elsewhere can appreciate. Sunnis hate Shiites, Shiites hate Sunnis, Turks hate Kurds, and then there are tribes out there that hate each other. I'd hazard to say that if the West hadn't been there with the mandates and protectorates, this would have all ended with a gigantic regional war which would have led to either a new Persian empire, or two regional Sunni and Shiite superstates. As much as the West didn't help, I see no evidence that they would have made it any better on their own.
Look at Iran. The shah was more than a little bit of a dick, but under his regime, Iran was relatively peaceful, prosperous, and Westernized. Women could and did go to school and participate in daily life. But there was always that religious group in the hinterlands who wanted to go back to what Iran is today. Even if the shah wasn't something of a tyrant, sponsored by the USA, you'd still have that dynamic.
Complaints about the CIA are honestly like complaining about the conquistadors now. They're a part of history. They had their impact, but their active involvement in the events of today pales in comparison to the forces now at work. Your Middle East trials and tribulations today are fueled mostly by their own money and anger. Whether it is directed at the West is irrelevant. You can see this today where ISIS is about Caliphate first, attack the West second. This violence is fueled directly by the profits on oil which are being spent by the regional actors themselves and it won't stop until they can be convinced to stop, or more likely, they run out of money.